Calley Means, Delian Asparouhov, Leif Abraham & Jannick Malling, Alfred Wahlforss & Florian Juengermann, Saman Farid, Erik Palitsch, Netflix's Growth Plans Post Earnings, AMD's Plan to Beat NVIDIA

You're watching TVPN. Today is Thursday, April 24, 2025. We are live from the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital.

We got some new sound effects today.

We do so very excited.

Expect the unexpected.

Expect the unexpected. We got a lot of great breaking news. Netflix had earnings and they recorded record profits. Let's hear it for Netflix, folks. It's fantastic. From Bloomberg, Netflix Inc. Reported record profit to start the year, allaying concerns of a slowdown or fears the streaming leader might be hurt by growing economic uncertainty. First quarter earnings rose 25% to $6.61 a share, the company said Thursday, easily beating analysts estimates. It's bad day to be a Netflix analyst. You're just getting beaten up by the corporate results. Sales grew to 10.5 billion in line with projections. The the results were boosted by a recent price increase and strong slate of programming across the globe, like the UK hit series Adolescence. Investors have come to see Netflix as a safe bet during a great time of economic uncertainty and challenges for conventional movie and TV business. With global audiences of more than 700 million viewers, the company said it has seen no impact on its business from President Donald Trump's tariffs or the market volatility that has followed. And so this is interesting. Congratulations to all the Netflix shareholders. Congratulations to everyone at Netflix. But I thought it was interesting because, you know, we've been, we were talking earlier about, like, we saw the stats on all the different tech companies, how much they're off peak from the start of the year, and even Meta's down 25% and we were kind of working.

28% over there over the last 12 months.

Yeah, and we were kind of working through it. We were like, okay, how did we get to this point? How. How is Meta affected by tariffs? Like, they don't make stuff. I mean, I guess they do make the Oculus, but they're not selling that many of them. But in general, you know, the question was, why is Meta hurt by tariff uncertainty or the chaos of the last few months? And, you know, you can kind of talk to Sean Frank over at Ridge Wallet and say, okay, well, you know, if DTC advertising that's happening on Meta is impaired by tariffs, they could pull back on advertising. And so you could get there. But with Netflix, like, there truly is nothing that affects them on the tariff side. Like, they truly are just a digital content farm, basically.

Yeah, the, the economy would have to be pretty bad for people to start thinking, I want to be less entertained.

Yes, exactly. And historically, things like Netflix have Done very well during economic downturns.

Yep.

Because things are rough, but you want to kill some time. And on a dollar per hour basis, Netflix is probably the best.

Bank usage metrics are still insane. People say tbpn, you guys put out three hours of content a day.

Well, Netflix puts out three hours of content every minute.

Yeah, well, well. And if you look at, I think some of their usage numbers, I think it's like the average users using it for like two hours a day.

Yep, yep.

It's just insane.

Yeah, it's crazy. It's crazy. I actually think we should distribute on Netflix. Probably. Yeah, give us a call. Netflix. Reed Reed Hastings, if you're listening.

Come on, we'll fly up to Los Gatos.

Yes. Yeah, I'd love to partner with them. Anyway, interesting development. A couple years ago there was this customer segmentation push. They went for higher tiers. They will charge you an ARM and a leg for 4K streaming across a bunch of devices. If you're sharing the passwords, they crack down on the password sharing. And they also introduced the ad supported tier which isn't free. You still have to pay for it, but it's working basically. And that's driving platform growth. Higher engagement beyond raw subscriber counts. And really they're price discriminating. Right. It used to just be, oh, Netflix is like 10 bucks a month for everyone. Well, there are some people that are willing to pay more for 4K and more screens and whatnot and no ads. And then there's other people that you know, are more price sensitive and so they've done a great job at this. And they basically. So their, their, their target for 2029 is to double revenue and expand margins. We love doubling revenue and expanding margins for folks. It's fantastic. Double kill overnight success. Yeah, 2029, I mean it's 30 year old business at this point. At that point. Pretty wild.

30 year old overnight success.

It will be, it will. And so they're, they're pivoting the strategy. The company is moving beyond simply adding subscribers to maximizing revenue per user via segmentation. By introducing ad supported tier and multiple price points, Netflix can capture price sensitive users and retain them with a cheaper ad backed option while raising prices on standard and premium plans. For those who value an ad free experience, that would be a lot of folks.

This segmentation, I would expect our.

I want to pay more and get more community to.

Yeah, want to pay more and get more ads. So hopefully they, they recognize they have that start.

They have that here as well. That tier as well. So let's break it down. Ben Thompson's analysis of Netflix's Q1 2025 results underlines the robust financial performance and ambitious growth paths. Record quarterly profits, $10.5 billion. Revenue beat expectations aided by recent price hikes and popular content releases. Notably, Netflix ceased reporting subscriber additions this quarter. That'll frustrate a lot of analysts because everyone always likes to have as much data as possible to project these things.

And a company that was adding a ton of users would probably want to include that data.

Yes, but there was also a very like, when you dig into the subscriber editions, you would see weird things like, oh, they're growing a ton of subscriber editions, so maybe the stock should go way up. But then you'd find out that they were in lower priced markets. And so there was, there were all these anomalies where they were doing okay in the US but they were growing a lot in Middle East, North Africa and Asia. And all of those have very different economic impacts on the business. And so Netflix is saying like, hey, we're a mature company, we're like 20 years old at this point. Why don't you guys just focus on revenue, profit and cash flow, which we love. And so internal forecast. Oh, and this was interesting. There was actually a leak to, to the Wall Street Journal show that Netflix is aiming to double revenue to 78 billion by 2029 and even target a $1 trillion market cap. And now there was a recording of, I believe the CEO on the earnings call saying, like, you know, we have a very high trust environment here at Netflix. You know, we, we, we share a lot of information with our entire team. Sometimes that gets leaked to the press. We don't like when it gets leaked to the press. But you have to wonder if it's an intentional leak. Right, because it's like, you know, like we have that internal forecast of our, our streaming hours going to 40 hours, 24 hours a day, trillion dollar market cap, you know, $100 billion in ad deals. And it would be terrible if that leaked. But, but at the same time, you could imagine a situation where we would, you know, accidentally intentionally leak that just to make us look better. And so maybe that's what's going on here. I don't know it's possible to ask them, but you know, it could be, it could be bad to have.

Yeah, that Jamie, Jamie Dimon audio leak, Remember we talked about. Sounds like a great leader. I love a good leader, you know, ambitious and wants to, you know, push his team to be their best and work hard. Yep, what a terrible leak.

And so they're going to. They're going to roll out more new monetization streams, grow their advertising business. That's projected to be 9 billion a year by 2029. And continued price increases alongside a moderate rise in subscribers. So they basically hit saturation. Like, everyone has Netflix that is interested. They're not really interested in. In bringing new people on. And that's probably what's going on with that, with the app one deal that we discussed earlier. And so they're basically saying that, like, we are confident in economics of scale and we're going to just, you know, focus on monetizing. Our audience more significantly has kind of dropped out of the big tech narrative. You know, it used to be Fang the N stood for Netflix. Now we're on. We've moved on from fang. We're on mag seven. Tesla's in.

Well, it's hard to call a $500 billion company big technology, right?

Yeah, it's not.

It's quaint.

It's quaint.

Quaint tech.

A quaint lifestyle business.

Yeah, more. Much more of a lifestyle business anyway. And it's amazing that a business like this can, you know, have reached sort of full market saturation and still trade at almost a 50x PE ratio. Yeah, like, got to give them credit for that.

They got destroyed during. Didn't they get destroyed during COVID or something at some point? Like they had some major, major drawdown in the stock. But I actually remember back in high school, I got in a kind of a drunken fight with a high school friend late night once about whether or not Netflix was a good stock. Not very funny.

Not super on brand for you, I'm sure.

Well, this is high school, you know.

Oh, okay. It was in high school. I thought you were saying it was recently.

No. Oh, no, no, no. This was back. This is back.

You were 21 when you were in high school?

Yeah.

Got held back a little bit.

Yeah. But this was. This is probably, you know, around 2007, something like that.

Okay. And so you were feeling the heat from. From the financial crisis?

Yeah. Oh, for sure, for sure. But my basically, my friend was like. Was like, Netflix is, like, overvalued. Like, it's not a good stock. And I was just like. And I laid out like, no, like, I think in the future, like, you will have Netflix, like, maybe even on your phone. Maybe you'd have it on multiple screens. And he was like, no, like, this is like a terrible stock. Like, it's not going anywhere. And then it became like the, the best stock of all time and I should have bought it instead of just like, you know, arguing with him. But yeah, it's fun.

Well, you also should have angel invested in Coinbase, a bunch of other companies in your YC batch.

Yeah, if they, if they accepted credit card debt as collateral for angel investments, I would be doing very, very well. I had negative net income or negative net worth anyway. So they're trying to aim for 36% subscriber growth. They're trying to hit 410 million users by 2029. And ARPU should rise significantly through segmentation ads, higher pricing. They're going for that 1 trillion market cap. You love to hear it.

Just an easy 2x right?

Yep. They're only. Yeah, I mean it actually isn't that crazy on a five year plan to double. Like that doesn't seem that crazy. But they got to get more people. And so yeah, the takeaway from Ben Thompson is that, you know, he was advocating for an ads tier for a long time. He's called it a success. Even if the ads aren't material yet, it is putting them on the path. And there was a lot of, of work that they needed to do. At one point they were, I don't know if they actually landed with Microsoft, but they were thinking about partnering with Microsoft to do kind of the back end ad exchange.

Yeah.

And there was a lot of the bull.

The bull case for Netflix's ad product as far as I know, is just the targeting potential and Netflix's ability to like basically verticalize from the content to the user to the, to the user's interest.

It certainly should be more targetable than just linear TV ads. Or not over the top, but like over the air TV ads. But I don't know that they have that much data. I mean, if it's like this person, it's nowhere near as much as an Instagram where you know, you're following all these things. They know where you are on the web, they know what you're. Oh, you're clearly shopping for, you know, suitcase this week because you've been, you've been hovering over the suitcase content that we've been sending you randomly. Much harder to do that. So I think that's why there might be a benefit to partnering with an ad exchange that has a little bit more tracking information. But still, I mean, you can probably tell just, you can probably do more segmentation than in a normal, in a normal linear TV context. But it doesn't seem Anywhere as efficient as Metta, but sure.

But that's not the point. Right. These are going to be brand marketing dollars.

I think so.

And that's okay.

And there was a big. There was a big debate over, like, when Netflix first opened the floodgates of ads, they were going to get a lot of experimental budget because it's very interesting, oh, I could put my brand next to some prestige tv, potentially on Netflix or something. That seems interesting. But ultimately the ad buyers were going to just want to see results. And it's hard, probably harder to track if you're just showing someone an ad and then they're not necessarily clicking through. It's more brand advertising. So all that attribution could be difficult. But it seems like even though, even in the face of all of that, like, ads are just such a great business that it's working. Yep, Very interesting.

It's interesting to think about mobile watch time too. Right. It's not. It doesn't feel as common for people to be watching television.

Yeah. For that you could actually put the link right there. And you could actually put the link instead of like the QR code on the screen, which I don't think many people are doing if they're watching Netflix like on their TV late night. But a lot of people are just like going around with their phone, doing their chores and then watching Netflix in the background. Interesting. Anyway, Dylan Patel over at Semianlysis has a great breakdown on AMD's transformation and how they are trying to beat Nvidia. This is AMD 2.0, a new sense of urgency. And it's a very interesting deep dive into how these big companies are interacting with the next generation of analysts like Ben Thompson and Dylan Patel. And so Ben Thompson's been, you know, advocating for different strategies at intel and many other companies. But there's always been a question of, like, oh, he's like an armchair quarterback. Like, does he really? Could he possibly know better than, like, the entire intel executive team? And seems like maybe now it's yes. But with AMD like, and semianalysis, the answer is like, absolutely, because semi analysis. Back In December of 2024, about four months ago, they published an article detailing mediocre AMD software and lack of usability. This was something that had been flagged by George Hotz before, basically saying that, like, the chips themselves, on a flop per dollar basis, are quite competitive with Nvidia. But the software infrastructure on top, like, the middleware that goes in between, like, the model that you're trying to train and the actual Silicon is bad basically. I don't know how to put it nicely so. But Dylan is saying that AMD has turned it around, kicked it into high gear and they've made rapid progress in the last four months on many items semi analysis laid out. They view AMD's new sense of urgency as a massive positive in its journey to catch up to Nvidia. AMD is now in wartime mode, but there are still many battles ahead. And so founder mode for sure. Switch your business to ramp.com are those connected somehow? They are. The RAM bad just plays every time we play founder mode now we have two versions. So basically, I mean everyone knows that Nvidia has like completely run away with the data center game for AI training, especially on the, on the pre training side there's some stuff that you can do on the inference side once you've trained the model and distilled it. But when you need a huge cluster of 100,000 GPUs, the game is Nvidia to Gen 7. And yeah, and you've seen, you've heard these stories about like Elon and Larry Ellison getting dinner with Jensen and being like give us the, give us all the chips. And then obviously every other big tech company wants the Nvidia chips. Nvidia stock has been mooning and all of that is because of the CUDA ecosystem that sits on top of Nvidia and how reliable those chips have been. Because when you're running a really big, really big and expensive training run, one little flaw could cost you a lot. It could throw the training runoff. And so AMD has an equivalent of cuda, I believe, rocm ROCM software and developer tools. But there's still a bunch of software gaps, scaling challenges and a need for community driven breakthroughs. That's what has made Nvidia so strong. They have an ecosystem of developers who build software and test suites and all sorts of open source stuff. And there's a bunch of interesting anecdotes here about what made Nvidia really so dominant that we should go through. So basically the takeaway is that AMD is in wartime mode and it's very cool. Like Lisa Su actually met with Semi analysis after they published the December AMD article and acknowledged many of the gaps in the software stack. And they've done a bunch of other things. They hired a developer relations czar. This is the dev rel function to actually interact with external developers and they do this on tech Twitter and at real life events. Like this is actually where it's happening. And in January AMD recognized that external developer community are what made CUDA great. And so it's a very big pivot from the previous COMM strategy which was never admit that there are any flaws.

In the software public always claim victory.

Always claim victory. Now they are coming from it with, coming to the, to the market with a much more humble approach and I think it's been very well received. And so AMD has shifted into high gear to compete in AI. They know that there's a lot of money at stake. They're overhauling the culture and software stack with a focus on developers. I've already rolled out massive improvements to their software stack and they have this new developer first strategy. They're addressing long standing issues from poor Python tooling to slow multi GPU communication. So there were actual points in the software stack where there was no Python library. Like you could not, you could not write Python to do something, you had to go to a different language. And that's obviously a point of friction for developers. If you have a developer who loves writing Python and then you're like actually to do this thing you have to write something else, maybe C or something.

Yeah. The key here is all the big potential customers and existing customers value speed above, you know, pretty much anything.

Totally, totally. If people are getting paid a million dollars like you want them just to move as fast as possible.

Totally, yeah, totally. And Elon doing the new data center and whatever it was, was it a year that they pulled it off?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's like they're not going to wait around for an inferior solution.

Yes. Dylan actually highlights the X AI team catching up to the frontier so quickly as an example for what, how, how AMD should be thinking. Like, like they should think, hey, we are behind, but if we are realistic about that and we sprint and we change the culture, we could potentially catch up to the frontier very quickly, which is very cool. And so the, there's plans for a community GPU cloud which anyone could use to train. Google had a great example of this where there was this open source GPTJ moment which I wasn't, I heard about a long time ago, but I didn't know the full story. Basically there was like a high school kid who got access for free to a cluster of TPUs on Google's Cloud. So they're free, but it was a very powerful cloud. And he trained a language model, an LLM that was roughly equivalent to GPT2. And everyone was like this is incredible. If some random kid can just build something that's at the same level as OpenAI. This is a testament to how awesome Google Is with their TPUs. And, and, and same with, with Nvidia does the same thing. Nvidia actually gives out servers to universities and some of them, I don't know if this is actually important at all, but they're gold plated. It's just like, it's just like, I think it's just to make a statement. I think it's just to make a statement just to be like we're delivering this thing. It's awesome. Like we want you to be excited to build on Nvidia, so we're delivering.

You probably spend your annual tuition as a college student just on energy for that free, on that free Nvidia GPU rack if you were aggressive enough. So put it to use.

Yeah. And so basically it's all, it all comes down to like this cultural transformation. But Lisa Su has acknowledged the company's software shortcomings and AMD is now in wartime mode, fixing bugs and engaging developers. The company has launched Developer Relations Initiative and they're increasing the R and D budget, boosting AI engineering compensation and scaling internal GPU clusters. And so there's a couple other interesting things in here. They're focusing on continuous integration and whatnot, catching up on tools and libraries, more Python support and really focusing on cluster scaling, which has been a big problem. Where is the, I need to find the, the story about George Hotz because that was interesting. Geo, Let me see. Geo Hots. Let's see. Okay, so let me see.

Found a post on Hacker News from four months ago from somebody saying is there no hope for AMD anymore After George Hotz gave up on amd? I feel like there's no realistic chance of using their chips to break CUDA dominance.

Yeah, so, so here's, here's some from the actual semianalysis article. Although George Hotz could have settled for AMD's earlier offer of cloud hosted Mi 300X systems with full BMC access, he insisted on physical hardware so he could hack the metal directly. And so George Hotz was saying like, like we need an alternative to Nvidia, we need to break the Nvidia monopoly. This was something that he was, he was pushing for and he wanted to develop a new like Pytorch competitor basically for training machine learning models on, on AMD hardware. But he was running into tons and tons of problems with the software stack and he was posting about these and he said like hey, if you guys just send me the latest and greatest, I want to be able to hack them, but I don't want to pay because I'm doing your job for you, basically. And AMD initially balked, even though Hotz's goal was to help open source tooling on their GPUs, which is exactly something like Jensen would jump at. Jensen knows the value of the open source community on top of Cuda and Nvidia, and so he's, he's given stuff out all over the place. But amd, that wasn't in their culture. And so the stalemate turned into a public spectacle when the widely respected Pytorch co creator tweeted in support of George Hotz receiving the physical boxes. Which is interesting because like Pytorch, obviously it's a, it's an open source library. But like he's kind of creating this competitor with Tiny Grad. But obviously the Pytorch creator just wants cool and efficient AI training software to go out there. And so he says. Sumit Chintala says, for what it's worth, if George Hotz was offering to work on my stuff for free and wanted two boxes, I drive them out to him myself. Tiny Grad is a beautiful, phenomenal piece of software in my opinion. Tiny Grad has some sort of limitation, I think. I think George Haas is trying to keep it under a thousand lines of code or something. And so it's this like remarkably, you know, optimized and interpretable program for training AI models on GPU hardware. But he ran into a bunch of problems with AMD and started pushing them. And so semianalysis says we believe that this nudge worked. And a George Hot's March 8 blog revealed that AMD had relented, sending him to Mi300X boxes. With this, AMD finally passed the GeoHots cultural test. For AMD, this is arguably a bigger reputational coup than a technical one. Shipping real silicon to a high profile hacker signals a newfound developer first ethos that marketing dollars alone can't buy. And it finally turns a bruising Twitter saga into a story demonstrating AMD's new Developer first ethos. In addition to sending GeoHot's boxes, we believe that AMD can also score another easy reputation and marketing win by donating physical AMG AMD GPU boxes to academic labs. Jensen and Ian and Ian Buck has had a long history of donating GPUs to academic labs, going back as far as 2014. This year, this year, Jensen continues to support academic labs such as Carnegie Mellon, Berkeley, UCSD and others for some time by donating physical gold plated B, 200 boxes to them in addition to providing free cloud access to Nvidia GPUs. So he's just like, you can use the cloud for free, you can have the boxes for free. We just want you anything. Yes, 100%. It's amazing. Yeah. So interesting to follow what's like the, the, the change in management. Like this is something like, you know, a going direct type of change. Like this is a big change for the, for the company culture. But I think that they finally realized that like it had to be done because they'd done, they'd done so much right on the actual. They'd done their job on the chip side and they built a great product but it was not getting adopted. And it was because of the lack of focus on nurturing the open source community building developer relations and actually making it easy to work with their product that they made. But it's different, you know. Yeah, I don't think overall the same dynamic with, I don't think it was the same dynamic in gaming. Yeah, I think gaming was much more simple and much lower stakes. And so if you have a shader that doesn't run perfectly, the gaming company will just kind of figure it out. It's not that big. Whereas if, if a training run goes wrong, that's you know, potentially like a billion dollars download drain.

It's just fascinating that Lisa and Jensen could be cousins and she wouldn't pick up at least a little bit of what her, of her cousins moves.

So I invited Dylan Patel on the show. He's traveling, he should be joining us in a week or two, hopefully. And I definitely want to know, you know, this is great. I love this. Let's go for amd. I'm super happy for them and congratulations to Semianalysis for like making this happen at the same time, like why did it take so long? Like this feels like this was foreseeable.

Potentially missed out on a part of the bubble.

Right? Totally.

We're in a bubble.

Yep.

We love Bubbles on the show, but they were pretty much asleep at the wheel for at least the initial run, which cost them a massive amount. They could have raised tens of billions of dollars of cheap equity through that process. And I'm sure they conducted a bunch of different fundraises over that period, but they didn't really get much of a. You know, the Stock's up like 60% over the last like five years, so it's not like they haven't really been a winner in the, in the boom.

Yeah, well, let's put up the guest lineup for today. And we have Delian coming into the studio first. And we have a bunch more folks.

We got co founders of Public coming in. They announced a partnership with Aston Martin today. Very excited, very excited about Got Listen Labs, Freeform, Formic, and of course, Kali coming in from True Med to talk about the food, dye bands and a bunch of other stuff. So very excited for that.

But next up, we have Delian. Welcome to the stream. How you doing? Welcome. Delta V with Delian.

What is up?

Let's go.

I think I lost a button.

I think I. I think you just got excited when you saw me. It's okay.

It happens.

I did.

It happens.

It's not every day you get to hang out with one of the most cutthroat venture capitalists in Silicon Valley.

Now one of the top spacemen in.

The world, the Bulgarian bruiser in the building. How you doing?

What is it like being down to one job? I fantasize about, you know, only having one job all the time, but I'm somehow stuck with, like, five jobs.

Yeah.

Has anyone told you about, like, the value of focus? Maybe you should just focus on one thing. I know.

I wish I was a little less add.

Yeah. Anyway, what is on your mind? I'm sure you're thinking about Hill and Valley. I want to pull up the.

Wait first. I have a question.

You said.

You said your. Your Zoom. You're doing a lot less Zoom since moving to la. Is that just a lot? You're just meeting with the Varda team in person or is it founder meetings as well? Are you taking more meetings in person now that you're Gundo adjacent?

Oh, God. You know, let's not use that word. It's a dirty word. I am El Segundo, not adjacent. Within. I'm currently located within those city boundaries. I think it's honestly basically everything, like, everything from the portfolio companies to FF meetings to Varda meetings. And it's one of these things that it kind of feels like recursive, where it's like when you have less zooms than when somebody, like, I had this VC asking me for a zoom this week and I was like, cool, you're an sf. Just let me know next time you're la, if it's so important. Just like, take the five minute flight. And they're like, I don't have any plans to be in LA anytime soon. I was like, cool, then. I don't have any plans to talk to you.

Mogged.

It's ridiculous. Well, we appreciate you Joining this zoom and this show. You guys are worth it. Yeah. Thank you. We appreciate it. Let's run through Hill and Valley. Over a few short years, we've made it into the preeminent forum for the top technology leaders and elected officials to gather. You barely scrap together a single notable name, but somehow Jensen Wong, Alex Carve. You got a ton of people here. Maybe walk me through, you know, who you're excited about. Give me the. Give me a little bit of history and then I want to talk through some of what, what message tech is trying to send to D.C. these days.

Yeah, I mean, the history of Hill and Valley is it started off with like an intention of being like a 30, 40 person dinner that like ballooned up into 100. And like, the first one, I think had like 12, 13 elected officials. And then it just kept gaining steam from there where just like the sort of dinner got bigger. And then eventually the dinner was so big, they were like, man, we got a lot of really great people here and we're doing a private dinner. I think the public would be very interested in some of these people and conversations happening in the public sphere too. So we expanded, including a more public daytime forum, and then that just sort of gained momentum. And this year it's like, I just, in some ways, I can't imagine how much of a better lineup one could have. I think, like, the sort of main message is like, look, you know, if we like go back in time to like 2018, you had everything from like Google bailing on the maven project, like VC saying that, like, you know, investing in weapons was just as bad as investing in, like, porn and gambling. And so there was just so much hesitation and there was like a real rift, I feel like, between Silicon Valley and, you know, you know, Washington, D.C. that is kind of counterintuitive. Like, if you look at the Obama era, like, part of why Obama108, 2012 was like a deep integration with Silicon Valley and tech. And it was like the first social media, you know, sort of driven campaign. But it felt like, you know, partially in Trump era, there was just like this huge rift because, like, Silicon Valley was so left. Trump was seen as so radical that, like, people didn't want to work together. And so honestly, a part of the message is like, look, we're all on the same team and we're working together to make the United States better. And so one of my, like, favorite examples of this is I'm moderating a panel that's with Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum. Kevin Wheel, who's the chief product officer of OpenAI and then reeth Peratt, who's the chief investment officer and president of Alphabet. And look like in theory, Alphabet and OpenAI are like hugely competitive. On the flip side, OpenAI has the best sort of consumer application in AI that's ever existed. And Alphabet was just awarded a Nobel Prize last year for alphafold predicting protein sort of folding and the protein structures based off amino acid sequences. And so the goal of that panel to be like, look, yes, these companies are competing, but also we're all way better off if these companies can build as many fucking data centers and have as cheap of energy as possible so that we don't have Deepseek becoming the default open source model that the rest of the world uses. They can't afford the ChatGPT and can't afford AlphaFold. And there's a lot of soft power that comes from that. Do you want the thing that the random person in Bulgaria is using as their AI to be willing to talk about Tiananmen Square or not? I prefer the version where it can talk about Tiananmen Square. And the best way that we do that is make sure that we are the best at AI, have the best energy, and the best way of doing that is tech needs to collaborate with D.C. and Secretary Interior Burgum needs to unleash a wave of, you know, you know, you know, streamline permitting and you know, nuclear energy, you know, in the United States. And what better place to talk about that than literally in the Capitol, you know, sort of Hill Visitor Center.

Yeah. Do you know how the, the pre, the, the Obama era collaboration between Silicon Valley and D.C. happened? Like was there an instantiation of Hill and Valley that was just like the old big tech companies talking to the Democratic administration in the same way. Because Hillen Valley is bipartisan. Right. Like when I was there last year I was hanging out with Chuck Schumer and stuff. So like it's not like you guys are like explicitly conservative, although obviously there is like a pushback against the previous tone in Silicon Valley. But walk me through some of the history there.

Yeah, I don't know like what the history was of the Obama campaign and how it got so social media centric. I remember they had this like, was it like the CTO guy that was like an ex, early Google guy or.

Something like that crazy stat that, that so the president, like whenever the President goes to visit a, an organization that's non governmental, it gets logged. And the number one organization that Obama met with was Google during his eight years. And it was, and it was just a very, very close tie, I think. And, and I think that there was maybe, maybe I'm thinking like the precursor to this is more like ted, like you, you know, the TED Talk era is kind of where like all the elites would come together and there would be some crossover. Maybe that's not a perfect match. But. But anyway, we, we can move on. I want to hear the goal here.

Was like, hopefully make it like sort of more immune from administration changes, basically where it's like, you know. Yeah, so, yeah, Obama visited Google all the time. Google basically like, you know, would ban Trump from ever going on campus. And so we started Hill and Valley under the Biden administration and we've tried to keep it as close as we can to bipartisan as possible throughout all of the years. Right now, look, obviously right now Republicans are in control of, you know, sort of both Congress and senate and presidency, etc. As they're obviously a little bit more represented this year. But the goal is like, how do we make sure that that like, channel of communication between the top technology leaders and elected officials stays there irrespective of who happens to be in the White House at that current time? Because they don't think. What you want is this thing where like the only time that Silicon Valley and, you know, DC talk to each other is when like DC happens to be crazy left leaning because it happens to align with like a significant portion of Silicon Valley. Not everybody. I mean, thankfully the tech right is willing to be a little more, you know, sort of vocal. But look, you know, even in this last election when, you know, you had David Sack screaming from the rooftops about, you know, you know, you know, being willing to vote for Trump. If you look at like, you know, donations, Silicon Valley across Silicon Valley was still like 85%, you know, Democrat, you know, by, on a dollars basis.

And so, yeah, interesting dynamic where the dollars were telling a very different story than the timeline.

I actually wrote a piece in Power Wires about that. It was right before Andreessen went full maga. So it was a little bit like, like I had the data all crunched and I was like, oh, it's actually like very purple, very split. It was almost like 5050. But it was also like almost entirely driven by power law donors. Like between Peter and Greylock. Yeah, Reid Hoffman, like, like those two were like at the biggest, in terms of, in terms of it wasn't for this cycle. It was like over the last four years or something like that. But then And Mark and Andreessen was actually like perfectly 50, 50 split. Like they were perfectly bipartisan because a lot of what they were donating to was like crypto stuff. And then when they came to partisan stuff, they typically donated to both sides Anyway. So walk me through some of the what do you think Silicon Valley is asking for or pitching in D.C. these days? It feels like there's a bit of a narrative, at least on X, that oh, all these like tech people supported Trump. They're the dog who caught the car and it's not going their way or they don't even know what to ask for or what they're asking for isn't getting done. What do you think the message will be to DC from Tech next week?

Yeah, I'll go through honestly, just like some of the panels that I'm moderating and the message on each, I kind of gave you the AI panel where it's like, look, there are a bunch of EPA and permitting restrictions that are preventing us from setting up as much energy and data centers that we need. And Secretary Burgum is the person that oversees some chunk of that, not all of it. He doesn't oversee the epa, but that's the request there is. Let's make some policy changes so that OpenAI and Google are not restricted by regulations as the primary, you know, bottleneck to their growth of data centers and energy. I love my Delta V portion on tvpn. So I'll talk about the sort of space side of things. I'm going to be moderating between Tim Hughes, who's the SVP of all sort of business basically at SpaceX, Representative George Whitesides, who's the former sort of virgin CEO now turned congressional representative, sort of junior congressman, and then Major General Bucky who's head of all things space at the Defense Innovation Unit. It's a little bit of both civil plus dod I think there the request is, look, there's some pretty ambitious goals that Trump has set forth. Basically wants boots on Mars and moon, wants to simulate low Earth orbit economy, wants more of the academic community to engage in aerospace. And I think the message there is, look, NASA needs to lean on commercial space for the things that it provides and sort of stick to what it does best for the truly out there things. And so Jared Isaacman made some comments in his congressional hearing around SLS is a big rocket and maybe gets us to the moon soon, but it's probably not the long term solution. And so that's a perfect example of I think everybody in commercial space largely Agrees with the fact that the commercial industry has better, cheaper, you know, more effective rockets than, you know, anything that NASA is building in house. At this point, we should probably reallocate that budget to just those commercial companies or to other NASA priorities rather than spending a bunch, you know, sort of on sls. So that's a tactical thing. You know, I'm doing this fireside chat with Vinod Khosla. One of his big things is just like the integration of more and more AI. You know, basically the health care. We have this mutual portfolio company, sort of Sword Health that has gotten really deep. They're now like, you know, $4 billion company. They provide like they're basically the largest physical therapy provider, largely done via. And it's not just like AI where it's like, like a chat screen. It's like they've got sensors that they put on you, like gamifies it, et cetera. How do you get more and more of like, you know, Medicaid and Medicare to yes, use humans when like you've got some super delicate operation, et cetera. But there's so much of like that care that's provided that at this point, you know, it could be exported to a bunch of basically like commercial health companies that are largely, you know, integrated into AI and get more aggressive on that, which satisfies honestly a bunch of the current administration's priorities. As much of a node. Yeah, is not a huge fan of Trump. He is a fan of basically using AI to improve health care. And then that matches Trump's goals of improved government efficiency where you can cut out a bunch of the Medicare and Medicaid cost, where it's like, look, we can all talk about defense budgets and this and this. Entitlements are the vast majority of the federal government's budget. And so if you want to go look at efficiencies, you're going to have way more juice to squeeze improving Medicare than you can cut out all the DEI programs in the world. And that's barely a blip relatively to Medicare.

Yeah.

How, how much do you expect the conversation to veer towards Doge and then specifically Trump had promised earlier this month trillion dollar defense budget, which would be a 12% increase over this year. And yeah. Do you expect that to be a major top talking point as part of some of these conversations or is that, you know, just, just businesses?

Yeah. And also, I mean we were talking about the defense budget earlier. It seemed like you were like lightly black pilled on it for a little bit. Have you updated your view Well, I.

Mean a part of why it's always fun with Hill and Valley where we can't decide on the date until Congress publishes its schedule because we are dependent on the elected officials, you know, sort of being there. Otherwise it's not a very interesting event. And so anyways, a part of why it's next week is because Congress is in session basically next week and everybody's flying into town on Monday, both whether you're Yunsen Huang or you're Senator Banks, both are flying in town on Monday. And next week is when they're both discussing the reconciliation bill where they're basically going to be increasing defense budget beyond the continuing resolution to match some of the February bills that we talked about last time around when we chatted about this as well as starting to talk about next year's basically defense budget. You know, I think yeah, there's sort of clear signaling from the top that there's going to be an increase and in particular around the President's top priorities which were nuclear weapons modernization, golden dome, hypersonic boost glide vehicles, sort of ship building and then general re industrialization. And so there's been talk of that reconciliation bill being 150 to 200 billion which obviously gets the total last year bill pretty close to that trillion dollar mark. And then obviously sort of next year's budget sort of being at that trillion dollar mark. And so yeah, there's a bunch of people that are literally on the House Appropriations and Senate House Armed Services Committee and Senate Armed Services Committee that will be there. And I'm sure that there will be sort of the talk of the town. But it's always interesting with this stuff where like Hill and Valley we've heard from some of the elected officials is actually one of the few times where even the elected officials gather at that level of density because most of the time they're like, even in these weeks where they're in session, man, it's like staff running around doing papers. They might briefly all go to the floor together but they barely have a chance to talk on the floor. Like we've actually heard that like some of the like bills end up getting negotiated like during the cocktail hour and like reception of Hill and Valley. Because it's just like one of the few times where it's like, oh, we like have the entire House Armed Services Committee here and we're not like in a like session where we're like grilling somebody. We're actually like here like casually chat for a while about like what we joke.

It's like if you, you know, if you can't put a deal on a napkin, like, it's probably too complicated. Adventure. It's like, if you can't put a bill or a budget on a napkin, like, it's just too complicated. So we're just running the federal government on napkins. And it's actually good, right?

Yeah, it's great.

It's funny. Like the last couple of cocktail receptions, it's so funny where you're like, oh, it's like everybody's mingling, etc. It's like literally all the tech dudes are sitting over there and then like, all the elected officials are, like, scrambling, like, trying to figure out, like, okay, you know, what is our sort of stance, et cetera. And then it's so funny because it's like, it's bipartisan, but also some of these people fucking hate each other. And so it's just like last year, like, you know, you got Chuck Schumer giving, like, the opening remarks, but then you've got his, like, Republican counterparts, like, all, like, rolling their eyes and scoffing and everything. And I'm like, ah, dc, what a wonderful place.

The swamp. The swamp.

The swamp, baby.

That's funny. We're gonna see you in a suit, right?

You know, I have finally been given approval by my government relations team that when I go do one on one brief briefings with Congressman, I can now wear a T shirt with a blazer. But at Hill and Valley, that is a time where if I'm on stage with a senator, I'm definitely wearing a fucking suit and wearing matching shoes.

What does it take to get a ticket to Hill and Valley these days?

You know, I'm not, I don't think it's a, you know, sort of perfect process. But, you know, between Jacob, Christian and I would do our best to, you know, to curate a phenomenal, you sort of dinner list in daytime. I think with daytime. Last year we weren't sure how many people to bring, and then like, the, you know, audience wasn't always fully filled. And so this year we maybe swung a little, you know, too hard, too soon. And I think now it's going to be a fucking mob. So anyways, we're learning each year on how to, you know, sort of balance and what the proper process should be. But at this point, we are very at capacity on both. But in future years, you know, just hit up. Yeah. Dallian foundersfund.com jacobatedepartment.gov Christian137-ventures.com and beg for forgiveness or beg for Hope. And we'll figure out whether or not we can get you in there.

That's awesome.

What do you expect the dialogue to be around? Big tech is such a charged word, but at the same time, in the sort of AI race, if you ignore upstart labs, even though they have billions of dollars, they're still young companies, which means big tech is critical to national security. Do you expect there to be a conversation around? You know, right now, you're seeing Facebook. Sorry, Metta. Just being sort of, like, dragged by the ftc.

Collaborating.

Yeah, collaborating. Which is. Which is crazy. And it's very. A lot of that feels like rehashing an acquisition that was approved, you know, that went through over a decade ago, feels like such a massive distraction at a time when we don't want our big. We want our big technology companies, you know, focused on winning this very important race. Right?

Yes. But they made such big enemies where it's just like, both sides. Like, look, Zucker's done his best to cozy up to Trump, White House, etc. He's wearing his chains, he's tan, he's looking again, Joe Rogan. But also, the Dems hate him because they feel like they lost the 2016 election because of him. And so Trump hates him because he feels like he lost the 2020 election because of him. And so I don't think he made a lot of friends, and I don't see any politician balking at the FTC going and dredging that stuff up. And even Kevin Systrom has a sort of bone to pick with him. And so I definitely sort of buy into the distraction sort of narrative. I also kind of buy into the, like. Yeah, I mean, like, look, we maybe are in a parallel to the Gilded Era. You know, are we in the Roaring Twenties? Are we in the, like, you know, sort of depression, 30s, you know? You know? You know, do these, you know, sort of. What were they? Not oligarchs. What was the name that they use for, like, the Gilded Era Robber Barons. Yeah, yeah, the barons. The barons. The robber barons, exactly. So, like, you know, maybe there is a little bit of, you know, sort of robber baron mentality, you know, right now with some of these big tech companies, man.

I mean. I mean, who's been advocating for monopolies? I mean, it's a crazy idea.

I don't know. Crazy concepts.

It's almost like someone wrote a book on it and then everyone was like, that's exactly what we should do.

We don't believe in the M word over here at Founders side.

Yeah, yeah.

We want to invest where there's lots of competition and it's really hard to gain market share.

Exactly. Just power law outcomes. For whatever reason. It could be any. What do you think about the. The idea that RAMP should get a government contract? The government should run on ramp. We were joking about it months ago. It seems to be getting more and more serious. Do you like the idea?

You know, look, I think the current smart card system within the GSA is a pretty antiquated and old school system. You know, Trump and Doge want to root out a bunch of fraud, you know. You know, RAMP is seen, you know, even with some of the, you know, neoprimes, traditional defense contractors, people that work with the government that even on like the commercial contractor side of things, they're able to root out things that are inefficiencies, etc. Man, can you imagine what happens when they, you know, sort of get implemented within the government? So, you know, not a done deal or anything. A lot of work to be done there. But I think it's pretty damn good for, for the country if we managed to get them in there. And apologies on that note, boys, I gotta run, but great having a little mini Delta V. Mini Hill and Valley.

Yeah, I'm looking, I'm looking forward to next week. It's going to be very great.

See you guys in D.C. see you in the.

See you soon.

We'll talk. Bye. Let's go to an ad. We got Ad Quick out of home Advertising made boom and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home. Go my trailer road. Don't know how that ties to Ad Quick but I'm sure they'll love it.

Golden Retriever mode is running a billboard for your series A.

Yes. And it's also not overthinking it. Like it's so easy to get into the math of like, oh, I need to be able to measure every single performance metric. I mean Adquick makes out of Home more measurable. But there still is a brand element to running ads. And this is something that you see in every company. As they mature, they eventually realize that it is worthwhile to do marketing that is not necessarily perfectly trackable. Case in point, Jensen Huang, who will be at Hill and Valley dropping off gold plated GB200 servers to the future AI builders, you know, and endearing that community to him. And that's. And a great billboard stunt can do that. So head over to adquick.com I'm interested.

To see next week at Hill Valley what Issues are truly bipartisan. Right. Energy production. Right. As societies produce more energy, prosperity tends to go up. You could imagine that being somewhat bipartisan.

I was working on a. People have been saying, oh, John, are you gonna run for president? I was thinking about if I did, what my political platform would be. Cause I wanna be bipartisan. And I was thinking my platform would be pretty simple. It'd just be GDP up, unemployment down, boom, GDP per capita up.

That's right.

Productivity up and government waste down.

Hard to argue with any of this.

Exactly. I feel like. I feel like every American could be behind a platform or a presidential candidate who just said, my goal is GDP maximization. That seems pretty simple. Yeah, that seems like something.

Security. Right. Access to the Jane Street.

Speaking of Jane street, the trading revenues nearly doubled in 2024 to more than $20 billion. Let's hear it for Jane street, folks. I know a lot of you were worried that they weren't making enough money, but they're back. Packy McCormick says, Man, SBF would be so rich if he stayed in Jane Street. Funny take. Very interesting. I'm always interested to see how these, how these details looked. The bowl all twisted up.

Very, very funny. Whoa.

Yeah. What is going on there? But very fun. On the flip side, the information is reporting that lots of tech companies have had their hiring plans impacted. 19% in the survey said we cut staff, 33% said we plan to hire less. 30% said no impact, but we are evaluating the situation. 13% said our hiring plans stay the same and 5% said we plan to hire more. Now I wonder how much of that is driven just by the fact that only 5% of venture backed companies are on the upswing because it's kind of a long shot game and so they're not all scaling up.

Yeah.

But it is interesting that people could be cutting staff for a variety of reasons. Could be tariff related, but it also could be AI related. Could be a bunch of.

Or we plan to hire less. Could be.

Or it could just be. If you have the time to fill out an information survey, your business is struggling, you'd be focusing on your business. Maybe. I don't know.

That's possible.

Are the best companies really answering the survey? I don't know.

I do think these, I do think these types of anonymous surveys are very interesting. I would, it would be great to see them more breaking it broken out. Right.

There's a bit of game theory to it because like if, if I get this and I am hiring, I'm going to want to psyop my competition into firing everyone. So I'm going to respond, say we're cutting staff, then everyone. Then it becomes a meme. Everyone's like, oh, everyone's got to cut staff. Everyone fires everyone. You're the last person. You have to pick up the litter.

You can hire all the people.

That's the way you win the game. Tyler asked for a dedicated supplement rundown from Jordy Hayes. Looking to outsource my thinking.

So I gave a comment.

Oh, you did.

Pull it up.

Nice picture of Tony Soprano in a stained glass window. For some reason, I think.

Beautiful. Ghibli. Ghibli. It's not quite Gibb.

Not Ghibli stained glass window, but I like it. It's beautiful.

My current stack electrolytes heavily weighted towards magnesium.

Okay.

Magnesium is an electrolyte.

Okay.

So it usually comes in in various electrolyte products, but taking a lot more magnesium over.

Is the magnesium a metal? I feel like it's a metal. I don't know any.

That would be pretty metal. We need a metal sound effect.

Yeah. I mean, iron is important.

It's a mineral.

Do you need iron at all?

No. Most people, to my knowledge, have too much iron. And donating blood is a way to.

Oh, pull the iron out.

Interesting. And I'm on creatine. Of course. I take zinc and vitamin C in a combination. Thiamine, which is a B vitamin. Your body can become thiamine deficient if you use nicotine. I do use nicotine.

Thiamine to boost it back up.

Yes, exactly. And then taurine.

That's in Red Bull.

Which is in Red Bull. They were smart to do that. And then I'll cycle peptides from time to time. We got to get on a peptide.

You heard peptides.

Not the second, but historically I've indulged.

But those are performance sensing drugs.

They're not legal for most professional athletes.

They're not natty.

I wouldn't. I think trying claiming natty is like claiming you're not doing what it takes to win. I agree.

I'm very pro abusing steroids.

Yeah. But we should get on a peptide cycle together.

Okay.

And I want to be on the Wolverine thing.

I want to be on.

Yeah. BPC157.

Yeah. I want to take whatever the LD50 is. Give me just a hair under that.

Yeah.

Under that. Anyway, dudes will buy a billboard and SF on the 101 to announce getting a bed frame. That would actually go viral. You should do that if you're trying to raise money.

I Have acquired a bed frame, folks.

Somebody should do it. Reach out to ad quick. They will set you up. But let's bring in public. We got guys.

Welcome to the show, guys. I can't. We can't hear you.

What's that sound? What's that sound? What's that sound? It's so loud. Oh, is that the sound of the Aston Martin F. It's happening. Oh, I'm at the box of Miami GP at Las Vegas GP. Oh, is that public advertising on the Aster Martin F1?

How did you get my voicemail to.

Run on the show?

That's.

Sounded like the sound effects of like Pacific Rim or something.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

We got it from that influencer, Ashton hall, the guy who has the. The viral morning routine. He drops that sound effect. So we had to pull that over to our show. But how you guys doing?

Great to see you guys.

Can you introduce yourselves a little, a little bit and explain what the news is today? Absolutely.

So I'm Yannick coo. That's live. Other coo, co founders of Public. We announced today, as you could tell.

From your last little picture, we are.

The new sponsors of the Aston Martin Formula one team.

Amazing, Amazing. So amazing.

Fantastic. Storied. Storied team. Storied brand.

And they're going to write books about.

This partnership, I think.

So we get a gong for that or no?

Yeah, yeah, of course.

Yeah.

We're also going to pull up some video of. Of Aston Martin's driving around, entertain the viewers.

Can you break down, can you break down the process? I imagine we know this has been in the works for a while, but what was the process and when did you even start thinking about doing something like this?

Well, so, I mean, let's talk about first, why it makes sense for us first at the beginning of the process. So we started six years ago mainly as a fractional shares platform. We were like the first to do the whole first trading platform to do fractional shares. Then it obviously became a big thing. But since then, I'd argue that the platform has matured a lot.

I think now we have one of.

The most powerful investing sort of suite of tools in America. Multi asset investing, multiple account types, embedded, deep AI research and customers have evolved kind of with us. So now folks are coming in with hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars in their accounts. But to be honest, not everyone knows that we're there. And so this partnership was a great opportunity for us to sort of raise some awareness around that and kind of get that message across. Obviously to the right demographic as well.

Can you talk about anatomy of the deal? How did you meet the folks over there? Did this all start with is there an agency involved? I know you guys do a lot of stuff internally. Is it just an email? Did you meet someone at an F1 race? Like, how do you even meet these folks?

To full founder mode, no agencies.

I love it.

We have an investor on the Captain that happens to be involved with the team as well. And so through that we got introduced to them. And this is also a deal where the ASMR for launching actually took part equity in public as well. And it's kind of like, I think it's the first time they've really done this. And so it's also a little bit of like experiment for them as well as well. And what was interesting is that the way they also think about it is that they have a platform, they have also sponsors that pay them ridiculous amounts.

Of money and whatnot.

So they don't necessarily need another million bucks from another startup or something. But they like the idea of finding opportunities that they feel they understand themselves as well. In our case like world wealth transfer, their audience being the type of audience that has money to invest. US Markets being one of the fastest growing markets for Formula One, generally speaking, it's the only country with three races and so on. And so for them, the viewers focus and the focus of the audience that we had was like a good match. And so that's why, you know, for them it was a also just a good idea to be a little bit closer involved and actually join the captable as well.

How do you guys think about international long term? Do you see a world in the future where you have millions of users outside of the country? I know US has obviously been the focus to date.

Absolutely. But the way that starts is we actually launched an app called Alpha, which is a little bit of a spin out of our AI product. Launched that in international markets late last year as a separate kind of product. So that's all live and growing well in a bunch of European markets and a few other places around the world. And so that's basically like Apple stocks with AI powers. That's how you think of it. You literally come in, you take a photo of your watch list, wherever you have it. And the AI, the auto, follows everything and tells you why things are moving in real time, not just they're moving and by how much. And then you can directly ask questions and do research and all that stuff. So that's like, I would say the first Step in our international strategy in building that audience sort of abroad. And then obviously, as you can imagine, investing services can come later because that's the aspect that has a regulatory component to it, which.

Totally, totally. Yeah.

Can you talk about how you actually envision the partnership manifesting in advertisements, obviously, like logo on the car. But there are 21 races. There are so many different places to put logos, integrate, throw, have a box, have a party, have an after show, pre show digital. There's so many different things that can package up into these actual partnerships. What did that process look like and where did you land?

Yeah, I want to call out. I want to see Alonzo executing trades during the pit lane.

It's that fast, by the way, that you can actually.

Totally.

Yeah, but yeah, totally. I mean, there's always, whenever you do these deals, there's this massive laundry list of stuff that you have access to and can do and whatnot.

Right.

That falls into pedal club passes at the events. And it falls into, like, you know, we will have the logo and the halo and the logo tiny on the side of the car as well, but also during the US Races, for example, and things like that. But one specific thing that we thought about is in our space of like, kind of like new broker investing apps, things like referral have been this, like, mainstream thing of get a free fractional stock and so on. And as we move more up market, the less that stuff worked. Because if you have a little bit of money, let's be honest, you don't really give a shit about five bucks of free stock.

Yeah.

And so for us to be a sense of, like, okay, what do people that, you know, have a bit of money care about? And it's most cases, experiences you might not, say, have access to otherwise. And so the sense of this partnership is one of the first ways for us to have the ability to give exclusive experiences to our customers through certain giveaways in the app, through referral in the app, and so on, to, for example, win things like access to the paddock, meet and greets with the drivers, and all that kind of stuff. And in the future, obviously, we'll figure out what are other ways to execute on that strategy as well. But the sense of what does referral for a more affluent audience actually look like? And falls much more into things like experiences, but this specifically also just to finish the ramp quick, is starting today, you can actually, in the app, win access to the paddock in the Vegas race later this year and essentially find, like, if you find the three little F1 cars in the app that is hidden in different places in the app. And you find all three of them, then you essentially enter, you know, and.

They'Re not easy to find, by the way either. So it's not like a. It's not like a thing that everybody.

Will stop until someone tweets out where they are.

Of course.

Of course. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I'm gonna. I'm gonna give the app to my 3 year old and say, you got. You got 14 hours.

Make sure to load it with a couple hundred keys before you do it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you can do a little day trading along the way.

How do you think about the evolution of the way brands integrate with F1? Obviously, Red Bull doesn't make cars, or I guess they made that one car once, but in general they don't make cars. But they're a huge F1 sponsor with the whole team. Haas Automation's kind of in a similar. Similar boat, but then Aston Martin's more of a car brand. How do you think that that's evolved? And is there a world where we see a public.comF1 team at some point?

Well, not in the next couple of years because now we have this deal. No, look, I think what's interesting about the Formula one is it is the only sport that I can really think of that has scale and has this sort of thing where whenever Formula one comes into town, it's the whole show.

Right?

Yeah.

Super bowl, eventually. Twenty times in a year, basically.

Right.

Because like, yeah, you go to a Premier League match, two hours, you knock down a couple pints, it's over, and you go about. About your day. This is like the whole weekend the circus comes into town. They talk about there's a lot of drive to his wife, obviously. And so therefore it just lends itself very well to like a very intense focus type of exposure.

Yeah, yeah.

Which I think is really great.

And I think you've seen that in, around the super bowl and a few other places, but in the Formula one, it just kind of happens many, many times throughout the course of a year. And I think that's what makes it interesting for B2B companies as well as for consumer companies.

Actually did drive to survive. Factor into your calculations, I imagine there will be public.com branding that makes it into drive to survive just by nature of being on the car.

Yeah, but that's the funny thing. It's like, so with Formula one, you either sponsor a team or you sponsor, you know, a race, the league itself. And these are two separate things. Right.

Yeah, yeah.

And drives to survive is more with the, with the league itself and so on. And so the trick really for folks like us is what can you do that has the chance to make it into the storyline of the show? Right. So like, you know, what kind of beef can we create with, I don't know, some other training app that, you know, sponsors another team or something or like, you know, like. But like what could a drama be part of essentially? So you get any idea, something shout.

Yeah, we'd love to help. No, but I mean, I can imagine, you know, just naturally the. You'll get placement in the show. Just as Alonzo and Lance have their moments in the show. Right. So very natural.

But generally you always have a multiplier thing. There's a great Formula one game. Right. Lego right now has a Formula one kind of thing going on. And so there's always kind of these, these multipliers kind of happening in and around the sport.

Yeah. What about other multipliers more on like a GEO location basis? I mean, I'm sure you could run Geo fenced ads in Vegas that weekend by billboards. Like, what are you thinking to get the most squeeze out of the event when it kind of comes together?

I mean there's a long like, like that. There's a long list of stuff you can do. It's a multi year deal. So we also have a little bit. It's starting in the Miami race in a couple of weeks, so that will be the first one we've kicked off. Now this essentially scavenger hunt in the app where you can get access to Vegas Paddock, etc. By finding these kind of cars around the app. And so I think there's a lot of stuff we can experiment with. I think relative to, you know, we're not quite as big as Aramco yet they still have us a little bit on the market cap and so. But, you know, but we might be one of the more nimble folks that can get a little bit more creative. And so I would say expect to see a bunch more kind of stunt.

How. How did Lawrence Stroll's kind of leadership factor into the decision? Like, he's obviously has a, you know, like running the team, but then simultaneously like, you know, has the manufacturer side too. With Aston Martin. He's like, seems like extremely convicted to winning and making a statement. And you know, as a, as a car enthusiast, like I've watched what Aston is doing. Again, really, really committed to winning. They've like massively improved their. Did that give you guys Extra confidence in going and making a partnership, knowing that, hey, the team by itself is not. When you look at other teams like Haas and things like that, who's had a sort of history of, of economic challenges, that's not exactly, you know, the team that you want to attach yourself to, even though they have.

But also, like, like, generally speaking, there's a lot of like, change happening in F1 right now. Right? You have a bunch of mix ups and some drivers that switch teams. You have, you know, behind the scenes, you know, the, the, you know, one of the guys who, you know, builds engines, the engineers from the Red Bull team was hired now at Aston Martin and so on. And so that's like, right now there's a lot of change happening. And it's not just, you know, seeing Verstappen win every time and, you know, having like the joke of just like putting a piece of tape on your tv, so the race becomes more fun to watch like over his name. So. And, you know, and so there's so much change happening right now. And I think that is why I think this season and the next season and the wing after, I think are going to be super exciting. Right? There's a new US Team coming in with Cadillac next year. There's a movie with Pip coming out in June or July this year. And so there's just like a lot happening around it, which is quite awesome.

But I think you're totally right. Like, where Aston Martin sits right now is kind of perfect for us, right? Because it's not like.

It'S a team.

That is still a little bit on the up and up, but I think will be very competitive over the next couple of years.

Yeah, you're already Leaf. You're already wearing dark green. Are we going to see you guys driving around in some Aston Martin streetcars? Do you have any favorite picks or historical Aston Martins that you've been thinking about? Are you a James Bond fan?

It's James Bond's car, right? They literally say something in one of the Aston monster movies. From royalty to double agents, you know, cover everything in between. And so obviously now in New York City doesn't make a ton of sense to be.

No, no. In. In New York, you need to get the Valkyrie. Clearly the roads are a little bumpy. I'm sure the, you know, the clearance on that thing isn't great, but it is street legal, so why not be whipping around fifth Avenue?

You need to basically change your. Yeah, you probably need to change your tires like every 200 miles or something like that. But I'm curious, did you guys get any messages this morning from friends back in Europe? Like, hey, I saw the news. Like, that's. That's awesome. You know, Then you're like, hey, guys, we've been a billion dollar company for a while. Like, you know, this is like, you know, the first time, like, we were, we were in like Business Insider like two weeks ago and some people were messaging John and I like, oh, congratulations. And we're like, I think we get more views than Business Insider, but thank you. I can imagine a lot of, A.

Lot of people asking for tickets, that's for sure.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You guys are going to be extra.

All the people that had like a 25k angel investment then are coming, like.

So they're like, yeah, I'll be in the paddock, right?

Yeah, you can get me tickets to the whole season, right? Like, what does that cost? Quarter.

Well. Well, I'm extremely excited. I'm going to be even more excited to watch have another reason to, you know, turn it on at like 4am or whatever. Pacific whenever, you know, the international races happen. And we should be signing a lease for our new studio and we're gonna have a lot more space, so we should figure out how to get a car in the background one way or another.

You'd be surprised how cheap it actually is.

I know, I know. I remember. I remember our conversation.

I'm not sure if I'm allowed to like, say these numbers on here, but it is actually not that bad.

Yeah. Cheaper than a real, you know, a regular Aston Martin.

Like, it won't drive, it doesn't have an engine or anything, but like, like show pieces. And you like, find a civil to a lobby or something sometimes, you know.

No, I want the, I want it like on like on the back, on the back wall of the studio.

I mean, I went and toured Red Bull, Red Bull's headquarters in Santa Monica a couple years ago, and they had the full F1 car there on the half pipe. And it just made the vibe in the office, like, fantastic, fantastic. And so, yeah, I highly Recommend Getting an F1 car. Everyone should really. It's part of the ideal 3 car garage. You know, you need the family hauler, you need the weekender, and you need the F1 car. Of course. Why doesn't everyone just do this?

Yeah, I don't know why we're the first to think of this. Awesome, guys. Well, congratulations and congrats to the whole team. It's going to be, you know, very excited for, for Miami and everything. To come.

Awesome.

All right, cheers. Great to see you later. We're getting an F1 car.

We need to. Oh, I, I think we should daily it. You, you know, just it, you know, it's going to be a little rough, going to be a little bumpy, but you pull up in an F1 car, you pull up with a fantastic Patek Philippe on your wrist like the guy in that picture that you picked up on. Bezel. Go to getbezel.com, your bezel concierge is available now to source any watch on the planet. You don't want to be get caught on race weekend with a bare wrist.

That's right.

That's. That's unacceptable.

Yeah, it's.

It's laughable. You can't.

RM would be a good option for race weekend. It is a race racing machine on the wrist.

Yeah. We've been looking at some RMS and.

I can see Bezel going over and, and you know, maybe, you know, getting their own team at some point.

I would love that.

With the trajectory that they're on.

I would love that. Anyway, our next guest is in the studio. Let's bring him in. We got Alfred from Listen Labs announcing and we got his co founder. Boom.

And they got the jackets. They're not quite color coordinated.

I love color coordinator dressing up for the show. We always appreciate people dress up when they coordinate their outfits.

I have.

How are you guys doing?

Doing well. Yeah. Exciting.

Can you give us a little overview of the history of the company, introduce yourselves, tell us about the round, give us the basics?

For sure.

So Listen is an AI customer researcher that can find and interview thousands of users and tell you what they want. And today or yesterday we announced our series A and 27 million in total raised, led by Sequoia Conviction and Pair. And yeah, we work with some amazing customers like Microsoft, Canva and Chubby's. And the core concept of what we do is every company wants to be customer obsessed. So imagine you wanted to take that to the most fullest extent and that's basically you would talk to every customer you could and you talk to them, try to understand exactly who they are and what they think about and you'd find a way to synthesize all of those conversations into a clear understanding of their behavior. And you wouldn't do this just once. You do it all the time, every time you make a change to your product or service or marketing. And that's what we do.

Cool. I can imagine a ton of different ways to get customer insights out of all the data Just using Microsoft as an example, like there's probably 1 million tickets in some database that's just a bunch of text that hasn't been processed. You run an LLM over that. That makes sense. It sounds like you're doing something more advanced where you're actually calling people up. Maybe there's a. The screen recording and interaction and some questions back and forth. Is that all AI driven? Walk me through the case study. I guess with Microsoft or anyone else you want to chat about.

Yeah, yeah, for sure. So it's an AI that can have a one on one conversation and then it can have hundreds of those conversations in parallel. And what we found is that you have to reach enough people to really understand what people want. So if you speak to 10 of them, most of them won't have much interesting things to say. And the second thing is the synthesis. If you have like hundreds of conversations, finding the signal over the noise is, you know, AI is amazing. Is amazing at that.

Sure.

And you know, AI is also the ultimate listener. It's more empathetic than myself. And as a case study, like one of my favorite ones is Chubby's. So they recently launched a new product based on learnings that they made from Listen that is growing really, really fast. And it's a little bit weird, but it was an AI or it was interviewing kids using Listen.

Interesting.

And they were much more honest to our AI versus speaking to a stranger. And it enabled them to learn a lot about how to make their shorts more comfortable and basically created a new product with a new liner in the shorts that just felt much better for the kids. And now that product's growing really fast.

Do you believe there's sort of a customer love Flywheel in a sense where the more someone likes a product, the more inclined they are to want to talk about how to make it better. And is part of what you guys are doing helping to like accelerate that where a product could have some customers but. But it's hard to really get scaled feedback because nobody really loves the product enough. I get emails all the time. I'll try a SaaS product and I'll churn and then they'll reach out to me being like, hey, can we get feedback? And usually I'm not super inclined to provide feedback. Sometimes I do if I feel like it's just off. But how do you think about sort of like building that sort of customer feedback Flywheel and converting it into customer love?

Yeah, I mean I think what is interesting is the, you know, we have this at bigger companies Right. What you actually, you know, you have a lot of feedback, as you said before. But actually talking to real customers is actually pretty complex.

Right.

It's at the bigger companies, they typically outsource it to external agencies because there's a lot of hoops they have to go through. And they charge 100k and then they schedule 20 interviews and do that. And what we enable them to do is instead of using these external agencies, they can just use us. It's cheaper, it's faster, it's better because you can reach way more people. And, yeah, I think that's an exciting opportunity also for, in general, for AI founders to. If you can replace one of those external partners, basically you just flip a switch and you sell an outcome instead of just the software.

When you talk to maybe bigger older companies, are you surprised at how they sometimes don't have a process in place to talk to customers? I feel like it's part of Silicon Valley, like, ethos lore. PG is just sort of like banging founders over the head, saying, like, talk to your customers, talk to your customers. And so it's a part of the culture here. But I imagine there's some companies that you're maybe in a sales process with that don't have any infrastructure or very little infrastructure in place relative to how sort of, like, scaled they are.

Yeah, I mean, a lot of the products and services out there are kind of. They suck, you know, and it's so often that you use a product and you think, like, okay, what were they even thinking? Like, clearly, they're not keeping us in mind here. And for some of these large companies, they do want to invest in talking to users, but it's just so complex because there's a lot of bureaucracy even to reach out to a user. You kind of have to go through legal, and it becomes too complicated. And that's why they have to use these consulting firms to kind of go through it. But we've been able to kind of streamline that process.

Can you talk about how these interviews happen today and how they'll evolve? I can imagine chatbot interaction to begin with, but the voice interfaces are pretty close. Virtual avatars are getting pretty close. What's the product like today? Where do you see it going?

Yeah, so Florian and I, we actually started a company by virtue of trying to solve the problem for ourselves. And we had this AI consumer app that had 20,000 downloads in one day. And it really blew up out of nowhere. We were running with expensive GPUs, spending like $1,000 per hour. And it was our personal credit cards attached and the users were turning really fast. So we were like, okay, how do we actually solve this problem? And then we built a very simple prototype. It was a chatbot that could just talk to all the users and summarize what they wanted. And we found things that were really useful, like which templates should we add, how should we fix our onboarding? And now we have built out this kind of entire stack where it's essentially three steps. It's first interviewing, and we do that over video. And the video understanding both of the emotional experience and what they do on the screen. And then it's finding the people. So we actually allow you to kind of find all the customers through a database of millions of users. And then, of course, analysis. And the ceiling for analysis is really high. You can hire McKinsey and they'll charge you a million bucks to give a PowerPoint deck. And yeah, we're working on that.

That makes a ton of sense. What are some kind of edge cases or companies that you would expect to start using, listen. That maybe are non traditional? My immediate thought is that we should throw up basically a number that you can just call and give feedback on the show, which we're live 15 hours a week, so it's hard to find time for phone calls. But it would be awesome if people could call in and be like, hey, like, talk more about this, or, you know, things like that. But how. Yeah. Do you. Do you see this type of user research expanding into industries that maybe just aren't customers of these different consulting firms today just because of the costs?

Yeah, exactly. I think that's a huge new market you can open up for smaller companies or companies that couldn't traditionally afford or couldn't even honestly wait for 12 weeks until you get this report back. I think that's very exciting. But if you take a step back and think about what makes a great company, and you can even go back to YC of what they think is, like you mentioned it before, write code and talk to users. And that's really the core. But those two parts we have the writing the code, which now AI agents are doing more and more. It's getting easier to build things. So what becomes more important is actually building the right thing and kind of having the feedback, talking to the customers. So that's what we are building.

And.

It'S almost scary. But maybe in the future that's what we're going to do. That's maybe the last thing that humans will do. Kind of telling the AI what To do what? To build. Being the tastemakers.

Which podcast to listen to.

Yeah, just wire it directly into Cursor or Devin and then it just takes the feedback and immediately implements the change.

And no, it is. It is an interesting scenario to think about where listen is directly integrated into the agent, into the basically developer tools where somebody can say like, hey, I want a feature to do this. And then it just immediately gets built.

Pretty awesome.

I'm sure you guys are thinking about.

On the post interview analysis side. I can imagine that AI is very good at aggregating sentiment and tagging things, essentially creating the top 10 requests, the word clouds. But have you found LLMs or any of the modern AI tooling being useful in finding the diamonds in the rough? Everyone's telling you to build a faster horse. There's one person who's clocked it and says, no, you got to go into the automobile for your product product. And you're able to dig that out with modern technology.

Yeah. So we have a module that finds surprising statements and outliers sentiment. And I think there's also interesting things around kind of building a profile of understanding who this user is and if they give good advice or not. And we actually have like a quality score of each participant, so you shouldn't listen to all feedback. And as we've done more interviews, we've done now more than 300,000. We can kind of build a elite set of tastemakers essentially that you can reach out to that tend to give great advice.

That makes sense. How did the round come together? Obviously got basically the who's who of venture in. Was anything surprising? Was it? Did you guys go out to run a process or did people come to you?

Well, it's a very competitive fundraising market for the vs today. We're very lucky to work with exceptional partners. Brian Schreier at Sequoia, he also led the first investment in Qualtrics, which is the biggest outcome in the customer feedback world. And then it's amazing working with Mike Vernal at Conviction who's done the best deals.

When listen has as big an outcome as Qualtrics. What pro sports dealers?

Yeah, I actually spoke to. I'm from Sweden. I spoke to Ryan Smith at Qualtrics and the first thing he said like, oh, yeah, I just bought a hockey team. You guys, you guys love hockey, right? I think table tennis.

Table tennis.

What is the most popular sport in Sweden right now?

Yeah, maybe chess. Boxing. No, table tennis, bro.

I don't know. Table tennis.

It is very popular. We almost won the Olympics. China There you go.

Yeah. Oh, that's rough.

It happens.

It happens.

Awesome, guys. Well, congratulations. Very exciting. And let us know when we. When it's ready for, for podcasting. Yes, we'll roll it out. Take care.

We'll talk to you soon. Bye. Bye.

See ya.

Great. And we got an ad for Eight Sleep. Go to Eight Sleep.comtbpn Get a Pod 4 Ultra. They got a 30 night free trial, a 5 year warranty, free returns, free shipping. Go check it out. Oh, 100, 100 close.

I don't know how this is possible. I think autopilot was doing the work. My little one was throwing up last night. It's rough, but so credit to my wife. Real, real MVP for getting her taken care of. But who we got next?

We got Eric from Freeform coming into the studio talking about manufacturing, going back into hard tech. Thursday tends to be a little bit leaning heavy on the hard tech every once in a while. We got Delian kicking it off and then we try and bring in some robotics and manufacturing founders. Always an interesting discussion to have with those folks. We are talking to Formic as well. They're doing robotics and I'm sure we'll talk to many more. Although we've hit a ton of the companies at this point. When you do 20 interviews a week, you can create a market map pretty quickly. You can churn three.

We are the market map.

We are the market map.

America is our market map.

Well, let's bring them in. Eric, how you doing? Welcome to the stream.

Doing great.

Thanks for having me, guys.

Yeah, thanks for, thanks for hopping on. Would you mind kicking us off with a little introduction on yourself and the company?

Absolutely. So, Eric Balitsch, CEO, founder of Freeform. We do, you know, really, we're bringing AI to Metal 3D printing. My background was early employee at SpaceX. Worked there for over 10 years. I ran the Merlin engine program for Falcon 9 and the Raptor program for Starship and kind of saw the potential of 3D printing, metal 3D printing firsthand and then left to go and actually drive it into industrial commercial use.

So I'm assuming you were a key player in transitioning the sort of engine from this crazy blob. We'll try to pull the image up on the screen. Was 3D? I imagine. Was 3D printing a part of how you guys were iterating or were you not able to leverage the tech that you guys have now?

Yeah, no, it was. I think the thing that I saw was the enabling potential of 3D printing. But how slow and crappy. It was, to be honest, we were doing things with Raptor that, you know, we were invented. We were, we were, you know, innovating in the rocket space for the first time in decades. Truly, people think rockets are super complicated, but really the technology hasn't changed much in a long time. Then this manufacturing technology comes along that allows you to control physics in a different way. I mean, true, true. If you look at the way you make metal things, really there haven't been these new disruptive technologies in a really, really long time. So, you know, printing enable Raptor, which I would argue is the one of the most amazing and high performing rocket engines ever in the history of humanity.

Yeah.

Can you talk about how metal 3D printing actually works? I think I'm familiar with like kind of consumer level 3D printing and that makes sense to me. You melt some filament and it's basically melted plastic through a metal nozzle. If you're melting metal, doesn't that melt the nozzle? How does this all work?

So we use lasers to melt metal powder layer by layer.

Okay.

And so you think of it, you're just slowly building, you know, layer upon layer upon layer of you put a layer of metal powder out and use a laser to kind of selectively melt where you want and then do that again and again and again.

Yep. And then how do you think about the decision to manufacture a part using Subtractive Manufacturing vs Additive Manufacturing? And I'm sure you're obviously very bullish on 3D printing, but there must be limits and things that you say, hey, we're not just going to go 3D print a whole bunch of rebar because we can 100%, we can just mold that or something. I don't know.

That's exactly right. I mean, I think one of the things that sets freeform apart from I think really every other 3D printing Metal printing company out there is we aren't developing the technology because we think it's cool. We're not pushing for 3D printing because it's cool. We don't print pencil holder, you know, bottle openers, pens and pencils. We just don't do that stuff because frankly, like, people don't care to get to your question specifically, it's like, what is it actually good at? What is the value proposition of the technology? And it's truthfully today amazing for very complex geometries, very complicated things. And we're very candid with customers about should you machine it, you know, subtractively make it, or should you print it. You know, what we're doing is enabling the next. You know, we've built the f, fastest, highest volume metal printing platform on the planet. We have it here in Hawthorne. We're about a quarter mile from SpaceX. You know, I would then say we, we, you know, our primary customers are some of the, you know, most exciting and innovative aerospace and defense companies out there. Without, without naming any specific ones. And you know, we're right down the street. And you know, our, our take on it was to commercialize the technology we need to be able to do high volume, you know, and then by doing high volume then we can bring the price down, you know, and, and that was the thesis actually was got to do a lot of volume and bring the price.

Can you, can you talk about your business model? Are you selling the finished product or are you selling the machine? Are you thinking about that in kind of different stages? Because I imagine in the future like an end customer would just have one of your devices and, and they could operate it themselves. Is that where you're going?

Yeah.

No. So that's a great question. The business model is we just provide turnkey parts. So we actually handle everything. We print them. If it needs post machining, it needs holes reamed, it needs surfaces turned. We do all of that in house. All the metrology, you know, we'll do CMM inspections, high res, 3D scanning, anything the customer needs. We, you know, the whole thing, the industry is really complicated and fractured. And so when we went out, you know, six, seven years ago and started figuring out, hey, what is the right business model in the space, I kept my head, my brain kept going back to. And by the way, I worked directly with Elon for my entire career at SpaceX. So this first principles kind of thinking that everybody says they do, I feel like I was indoctrinated in the actual school of it, you know, by him, you know, but I kept thinking like, man, you know, we're melting stuff with a laser and it, you know, we care about single digit microns of, of precision. This isn't, you know, traditional metal manufacturing. Like this isn't a CNC machine. So customers, you know, why are they so unhappy with the space and, and when they buy a machine, why are they disappointed because they don't know how to use it. It's so, it's more akin to like semiconductor fabrication than like subtractive manu, you know, metal manufacturing. So we said we need to own all of it to answer the question.

Yeah, that makes sense. What it is you don't have to go into super explicit detail. But I'm curious how you think about margins. A lot of traditional software VCs have been chirping on X over the last couple years. Hey, you're putting hundreds of millions of dollars into these manufacturing businesses assuming they're going to have software margins. And that hasn't been the case historically. Are you guys getting so efficient that you can achieve kind of greater margin profiles or is it just about sort of scale?

Absolutely. I mean, that's exactly where we're at today. Our margins are fantastic and the technology is fundamentally new and enabling, which means. I get that question a lot. It's like, well, even if you can charge higher margins now, isn't this a race to the bottom? The answer is that is true over a long time scale for any industry. Right. Anything that gets commoditized over 50 or 100 years and highly optimized, it ultimately becomes a race to the bottom. The question is how long? And the technology that we've developed and the capabilities that we have are enabling new products, new, they're enabling innovation in industries that are, you know, we're providing the tools that people are truly like innovating on the design and integration fronts, so, and performance and so, you know, I think as long as we continue to stay at the front of that and the technology is getting better every day, when I say, you know, I don't love to use AI buzzwords, but we, that is what we're doing, we're bringing like AI to 3D printing such that the next part coming off the platform is even better than the last one. And so, you know, because of that and the process is constantly getting better and we're coming up with new materials and new features and new functionality, then, you know, I think I can make the argument that the margins will stay high for a very long time. And especially when you start looking at the places where, you know, we've developed technology that fundamentally unlocks the ability to develop new materials. You know, so now we own the material, we have the technology to actually leverage it and then it enables something important. You know, maybe in the semiconductor space or in the, in, you know, the rocket space or even the automotive space.

Yeah, yeah. In that, in that new materials. I mean, I've talked to some people who do the subtractive manufacturing with cnc and there's like different types of aluminum, different alloys. Like, is that something you're already doing? And do you just handle that for your customer? Are you testing different like alloys? Is that how you think about that or, or what do you mean when you mean new materials?

Yeah. Our business model today is not yet truly development of new materials that we've done some of that. We work with another very large, well known customer that I would say is in the general broad family of customers that we won't mention specifically that we've been working with them on development of some new alloys that enable I think some pretty cool things for them. But that's more of a one off today. The reason why they're interested in working with us on this is because we've developed the sensing and compute platform and have the data data sets and the, the sensors to actually engineer and develop the materials at the metallurgical level that no other printing company has. I mean, you know, freeform is really, it's, it's in the 3D printing space. You know, we're, we're like SpaceX, you know, the, the mindset of, of those organizations and talent of those organizations. You know, the metal manufacturing market has generally been viewed as this kind of like stagnant, dimly lit, rock, rusty, oily machine shop. So we had to go out and find rocket scientists to develop the technology to be able to do this. And that's one of the reasons why Nvidia made a substantial investment in us recently as they saw what we were doing on the compute and data side and they want to be a part of it.

What are the different vectors of optimization in metallurgy? I imagine cost and weight and strength are important in space, but is electrical conductivity important? What else is important to think about when you're thinking about the material, either that you're selecting or eventually kind of building from first principles.

Absolutely, it depends on the application. For example, heat exchangers. Metal printing is very good today, even at high cost for conventional, other shops or if you're buying a conventional machine, it's very good at very, very complicated geometries that you either can't make any other way or they're prohibitively expensive or difficult to make any other way. And those do generally fall in a couple categories. They're like fluid components or heat exchangers, things that thermal devices. And so in an application like that you care a lot about the thermal performance of the material. In other cases you might be putting parts inside a gas turbine engine. This is another typical application for 3D printed parts. And in that case you something that's like strong when it gets hot, you know. So there are, it really does depend on, you know, the application and I think the Thing for us is we actually have the platform and the feedback and the analytics to be able to close the loop on whatever the particular, you know, feature of the material or application that you need.

Yeah. I mean you mentioned putting a 3D printed part in a gas turbine engine. We've been hearing that, that China has been having a lot of trouble manufacturing planes to compete with Boeing.

Specifically jet engines.

Yeah. Why is a jet engine so hard? Can you just 3D print it at some point? I mean I imagine that like China is.

Yeah. Why is it so hard, Eric? Why did it take you 10 years? Yeah, exactly.

How to do it?

Exactly.

Can you just like put this like scan the 747 and then print the 747? It's like it's a copy machine. That's what you're.

Exactly, exactly. Someday. Yes. I mean, you know, the vision for us at Freeform has always been to take the, you know, the complexity out of it and to provide a, you know, a lights out, A truly. Everybody says automated factories, you know, to provide a lights out factory that is truly automated. The unique thing about metal printing is this is actually possible CNC machining and other subtractive methods that there's no way to do, to truly do that. There's just, they're just. Today there is not printing. We're already entirely digital. It's like take a digital file. The machine doesn't care what you're printing, it just prints it and then automating the rest of that. And then you mentioned China. So obviously the joke about why are gas turbines hard? I don't think gas turbines are hard. I think rocket engines are harder. Gas turbines are easier in a lot of ways. But China is a good example where I get quite frustrated that we are a manufacturing technology company that is developing capability that is not only going to affect and improve the lives of people in general, but also is critically important to our national security as a country. And China is investing in the 3D printing space. They are building huge factories full of these conventional machines. They don't have our technology. They don't have the ability to. They can go make 100 laser, whatever number laser machines. Those parts are still junk. And we are developing this in the US for the US we obviously do quite a bit of defense work. And it does get frustrating. You mentioned China and it's like I had to put my plug in of. It's frustrating that I do feel companies like ours. There was a question earlier about software, margins and businesses and VC stuff. Yeah, we're not A software business. But the interesting thing about Freeform is it's where the bits and the atoms are combined, which I think makes us even more interesting. You know, you want your 5000x, 10000x, 20000x company, you get it at a company like this. At Freeform, you know, you're not going to get that.

Can you talk about some of the stress of working with space companies? I imagine like, you know, you guys aren't doing launches yourselves anymore. You're probably more relaxed than you were when you were at SpaceX. But at the same time, I'm sure you get a call or an email now and then being like, hey, we need this by Sunday night at this specific time because we're going to space. What's it like kind of like working with end customers around that type of business?

No, that's also a great question. Truthfully, I'm probably more stressed now than I was when I was sitting face to face with Elon three times a week. Because. Because I feel like the scope of what I focus on today is. I don't know. Actually, I don't. The scope of what I focused on there was like I kind of knew, you know, where I was here. It's like all over the, you know, top to bottom, you know, everything kind of ultimately falls on me in some capacity.

The.

But it is stressful. We get this with exactly what you just said all the time. You know, we get a call from customer X that says, hey, guess what? We tried to get these somewhere else. This supplier let us down. You know, can you guys hook us up and get these done by Sunday? That can definitely be stressful. I think also, you know, the nature of a startup, especially one with as many moving parts as we have, you know, I think you'd be hard pressed to find a company that's more vertically integrated than us, truly, and does as much as we do in house. You know, with such a small number of people actually today still. Yeah, you know, we're building the plane while we're flying it so, you know, at the end of the day we deliver on time and we've started to build a reputation and you know, if you will, like a brand with these important customers that they come to us when they want their problem solved, you know, they come to us with the hard stuff and, and when they, they can rely on us and we do everything we can to make sure we deliver on, you know, before promise and better be, you know, exceed expectations.

Yeah.

Do you, do you, do you feel like you have an edge I imagine a lot of your competitors are you know, family kind of multi generational companies and, or private equity owned. And like I just feel like you're clearly in a very different, you know, mindset right, of like you know to say the meme but like founder mode. Like we need to over deliver, we need to constantly be faster. Like it's not, not enough to respond to a customer in two hours, we need to respond in 30 minutes max. Like that kind of thing is that, you know, I think we've heard about from various founders on the show that you know, when they email somebody in China, Even if it's 2am for them, they respond instantly. In America they might get a response two weeks later and it's like, hey, fill out this form. So talk about kind of like bringing that sort of like, like mentality that you have to this industry 100%.

So I feel that we have an unfair advantage for a bunch of reasons. I think I was raised in the school of SpaceX, you know, 2005, you know, early on there were 50 people, 60 people. I was there until there were 10,000 people. And you know, I think that, that the things that I learned that are just second nature to me of immediate, you do it now people on the phone. This is something that's been lost, you know, over the last several years. And I, and I, and I do see it, you know, we hire, you know, we're hiring, we interview all the time. This has gotten lost. But that is something that we have that I don't think the rest of the 3D printing space, you know, the industry has, you know, we don't advertise a lot. In fact we very intentionally do not align ourselves with the traditional metal printing. You know, I'm not trying to alienate anyone but you know, we're just, just, I don't even want to be compared because it's not even fair. We have done so much more and moved so much faster with so much less money than the rest of the whole industry and there, there's just so much noise and I just don't, I don't, I don't play that game. I'm like come see it for yourself. If you want to see us printing parts super fast, you're welcome to come over and actually see it. I'm not going to put put together security marketing stuff and you know, like just do it. So I do think you're entirely right. Like, like the mentality is everything, culture of the company and the way that you enforce that culture and reinforce that culture is very important.

Can we zoom out a little bit and talk about the 3D printing industry broadly and where you think it's going even at a consumer level? I feel like 10 years ago there was this sense, or at least 3D printing companies were promising, hey, you're not even going to have to order that toy because you're just going to have a 3D printer in your home that just sort of like prints it on the fly. And that clearly hasn't happened and it was a good fundraising narrative. But I'm curious as somebody who's doing this all day long again in a specific niche, but I'm curious how you think about the industry evolving over time and consumer use cases.

Yeah, 100%. I mean, I think like I had plastic printers too, you know, before I even, I was never a guy, you know, I saw the potential of printing when I was designing and architecting like Raptor and Starship. And you know, there were three of us sitting talking to Elon about how we're going to colonize Mars. And I'm like, we're going to have to make, you know, we're not going to carry like bar stock and machine it on Mars. You know, we're going to have to use what's there and turn it into, you know, the minimum material we need and then make it. So the conceptually, the idea of, of, of additive manufacturing, which I don't even like that name but is, is seems legit, you know, like use what you need and just make the shapes you need and you can grow it organically like nature. Nature is usually a good model for things. That all makes sense to me. The, the, I do agree, like the overhype by others in the space. In hindsight, you look back and you're like, yeah, of course that wasn't going to be what happened. You know, plastic printer prices dropped. People started buying them with this promise that they were going to be able to print all these things. You bought the thing, you built it, you printed a pencil holder that you downloaded off the Internet. You realize I don't know how to do CAD or have access to CAD tools, so I'm downloading models from others. It's just a novelty space, you know, and I think has been for a while. Metal printing at least had its roots in something more real that I think there was potential there. But we were clearly so far away from, you know, where we needed to be because the behind the scenes customers are buying these million dollar machines and then having to hire PhDs to operate them to get maybe one out of every five parts over the course of a month. That might be good. You know, it's just so far away. And one of, one of the reasons for that by the way, I do believe is because they tried to monetize on the machine itself. They were like we need to make this million dollar box and then sell this, this to customers. And I think that was one of the mistakes was that's why we rewound and said hey, if I can unwrap the box, if I don't have to sell a box to a customer, as dumb as this sounds, if I don't have to sell them this self contained box now what can I do? I can rethink how the process is done. I don't have to have put my powder on in a little spot in the corner anymore. I could use half the room if I need to. You know, what is the right first principles way to do what I'm trying to do as efficient and fast as possible and then let's engineer a solution for that. So yeah, you know, yeah, Such a.

Better B2B experience is just paying for the end state versus you know, trying to. But I'm curious to push you a little bit further. Do you think that end state of you know, like just like people today might have a printer in their home, you know, every home in America has a 3D printer. You think that's a reality 10, 15 years from now? I can imagine AI you can now generate a CAD file or is it just kind of like still going to be unnecessary and inefficient?

You know, that's a great question. Part of me wants to feel, you know, the future is. These are always interesting things to think about. You know, my gut tells me that.

That.

We should centralize and it's a service. I feel like the world is going to. The direction is you own less and less. Look at your cars. It's like you got people now that literally don't own cars anymore and they just rent the service. Why? Because it's easier. It's not because they don't know how to drive, it's just easier. So ultimately if you make it easier and you make it cheaper and you can take advantage of economies and of scale, I think that that probably makes more, more sense. And then you know, to be clear, like we, the vision for Freeform was always to be more than just a metal printing company. You know, I think the, the concept at least at the beginning in my head was let's dominate the Enabling manufacturing technology. Then let's, let's solve the. How do I go from the printed part to the end to the end use part that can just be plugged in the. Make the printing process better, post machine it, you know, heat treat, whatever. Let's solve that problem end to end and then let's vertically integrate on some products. Because at the end of the day, why would I, you know, there are, there are some specific areas that we're starting to do some things in that are quite interesting, that our technology, our approach uniquely enables that. I think ultimately that's where the money is to be made up and down the stack. But the progression kind of makes sense.

Yeah, that makes sense. Last question on my side. Have you seen any interesting upticks in demand or interest from the tariff, the trade war, or just given the nature of your existing customer base focusing on aerospace and defense, I can imagine a lot of your customers just aren't too impacted given they were already focused on sort of having U.S. supply chains.

Yeah, no, we actually have seen quite a bit of uptick since the tariff stuff is happening. It seemed like there were a lot more companies out there, you know, relatively big name ones that were doing a lot of business with China specifically, more than I was aware. You know, given some of the reason.

Why they try to advertise that, you know, they're not yelling at from a rooftop.

Yeah, they don't. Yeah. Yes. Which is interesting. But yeah, to answer your question directly, we have definitely seen an uptick and I think it's also as word has started to get out about us in the space, I think because we have kind of flown under the radar for quite a while. I think people are now starting to hear about us and I feel like they should be worried about what we're doing and our pace and ability to disrupt. They should be so good.

I have a couple more questions. Yeah, but first, 3D printing for a long time had this stigma around it as it's great for prototypes. But at a certain point you're going to want to switch to a different manufacturing strategy. Are you seeing customers come in and say, hey, we just want to work with you for a little bit on the menu on the prototyping side and then maybe we'll do something different. And then do you have to kind of walk them through the vision or is it very clear upfront that, hey, this is about scale? The part that we're making for your rocket or your plane, in 20 years, it's still going to be coming off of a freeform machine, because that's the business model.

Yeah, absolutely. So we do also, our business is not exclusively aerospace and defense, it's a large portion of it, but we do do automotive work. We work with several semiconductor companies. There's some other kind of energy, you know, up in the energy sector kind of companies we work with that are interesting. And, and yeah, so I guess the, I just completely blanked on the question.

So the question is, is, is prototyping versus scaled manufacturing? I imagine at a certain point, like automotive, if I would, you know, if I'm a car manufacturer, I'd love to come to you and say, hey, hey, let's prototype a bunch of parts. But then once I get it dialed in, the historical example would be, oh, then I'm gonna go get it, you know, subtractive machine or cast. Right. But at a certain point it sounds like, hey, I want to make 100,000 cars this year and you're gonna say, yeah, I'm along for the ride and I'm gonna be cost competitive. But have you had to, is that the right thesis? And have you had to walk customers through the. That.

Yep, exactly. Yes. So we generally turn down today, depending on the company and the potential, we turn down a lot of the prototyping stuff. That makes sense because it, it just doesn't make sense for us to, to, to focus on that unless it's coming from a huge company that there's something interesting project.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, exactly. We generally turn that stuff down. We have the upfront talk with customers about the scale and that that's the target, that's what we're interested in. That's how we're going to get economies of scale and the costs down to where everybody needs it to be. And ultimately I think one of the interesting things about the space, so I will say from my time at SpaceX, I always liked solving these extremely complex interdisciplinary system level problems and these very, very, how do we colonize Mars? And it's like a lot of people, people's brains will short circuit. I don't even know where to start. And weirdly enough, like I was always like, well, I'm just not smart enough to figure this out. So I'm just going to like assume that doesn't matter and assume that doesn't matter until I get to something that I'm, I'm like, well, I can calculate this. So I'm going to start here, you know, and then just go from there. The interesting thing about printing, as we've started, we have started to demonstrate the feasibility of truly scaling it up is that it starts to, you start to think about the disruption of even the product life cycles. Like a lot of the product life cycle stuff today is centered around these very long manufacturing timelines. So meaning, like, you know, it's just, and I don't have a conclusion here other than, you know, how much more often would products get updated or customized if you didn't have to wind up 12 months of tooling in a casting facility? Right, yeah.

Well, speaking of that product update, I imagine that you're building the machine and then you're also scaling up the machine and once you have a really solid contract, I imagine that then it's like, okay, well we're going to want to. This machine is capable of doing this part and we want to do that at volume. So what is your product release cycle on the actual machine side? Because are you freezing and then doing a V2, V3 or are you upgrading the machines iteratively? What does that look like?

We do a little bit of both actually. We do some level of upgrading on the. So there's a roadmap that was like the first thing we ever built was just can we put a bunch of lasers on a thing and melt stuff pretty fast? You know, it was not designed to be a throughput maximizer or it was small, the platform wasn't big. It was just like, like can I put a bunch of lasers in a small area and, and melt stuff quickly? The second thing was then can I take that and scale it up to something that's actually useful in size and start to demonstrate this some of the architectural elements of the system that enable the lights out factory. Like how do I, you know, unpack and get the parts out and get them off the plate and get them ready for, you know, the next steps or whatever it needs to do. The third step of that has been to go even bigger. That's what we're building actually right now. So we went from, I don't remember the exact number of throughput capability from gen 1 to 2. It was something like 20x from 1 to 2 and then 2 to 3. I came from SpaceX, so everything starts at 0, so 0 to 1, 1 to 2. What we're building now is basically the third generation of the technology and this is the one that is the platform is quite large. Like the size of this platform for what it can do, it's tiny compared to the industry, but it's pretty large. And make these huge parts and it's like 10 to 20x higher throughput than even the system we're using for production today. So we've basically taken these huge steps every generation. And then there's the, the, the, the inter. Incremental improvements which are predominantly around software generally because we're implementing better models, faster compute, faster sensors, and we're rolling those out in real time. Luckily, I came from the aerospace industry. You know, I led certification of Falcon 9 and Merlin for, for the Air Force and NASA. It's like I, you know, so I can talk to the aerospace folks, I can talk to the defense folks. I know what they're looking for in terms of product release, you know, that hardware in the loop, testing and then releasing software versions, locking certain things down for production and having control of that. So that's been helpful too to kind of grease the wheels of that with customers that are like, oh wait, you're changing stuff all the time. Like, no, not exactly. But yeah.

Last question. I'll let you go. I don't know if Jordy, you have anything or you're good?

I'm good.

I'd love to know a few, few pieces of advice or lessons that you took away from working with Elon that folks might be able to apply even if they don't have a decade of experience at an actual Elon company. What do you think is actually actionable?

Oh man. Boy, there's quite a bit. Surround yourself with the smartest, most accomplished people you can in general and then listen to them. Secondly, there's no problem that we can't solve together. People are their biggest. This is easy to say too, right? And hard to put into practice. But you're your biggest enemy. If you think you can't do it, you definitely can't do it. And then question everything. Question everything. Elon is an extremely smart man. I feel obviously very fortunate to have had the opportunity to work at SpaceX for so long and sit in the room and see how he makes decisions and the good and the bad. Bad, you know, I mean all of it. I, I just, I had a good experience at SpaceX and, and learned a lot and, and a lot of, you know, even Freeform. Today there are a bunch of current and former execs at SpaceX that are investors in Freeform and among obviously Founders Fund and you know, eight VC and Valor and a bunch of, you know, top tier investment firms, Threshold and Two Sigma. They'll all get mad at me if I don't list them all out.

Of course. Just keep listening.

You know, I gotta get the, we.

Need to get all the Credit. I gotta say Eric, you make me believe in onshoring manufacturing.

Yes.

When I talk to you I believe that it's possible, it's easy to be blackpilled and say no, we're never going to make it in America. But I feel like if we just give you like another 20 years we'll be able to make anything here.

It sounds chaotic day to day when you read the headlines but when you actually talk to someone who's working on this and he's clearly going to be working on it for, for decades more, it feels tractable.

Yeah.

Yes, totally tractable.

Anyway, thank you so much for stopping by. This is fantastic. We have to have you back. This is really, really enjoyable.

Thank you would be a pleasure guys. Absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.

Thank you. We'll talk to you soon. Bye.

Cheers.

Sounds good.

And if you're trying to sell some 3D printed metal parts all across the United States, you gotta get on numeral. Numeral hq Sales tax on autopilot. Pilot and I have some breaking news. Breaking news, my company Lucy is now on numeral. Let's go double kill. One hand washes the other. They pay me, I pay them. The money goes into my pocket and back into numerals. Pocket.

There we go.

It's great. But we have been keeping our next guest waiting. We will bring him in. We're talking about robots with format. Formic Co is the website. Let's pull it up. Full service robotic automation for $0 capex. That's what we like to hear. We love when Capex is free. Welcome to the stream. How you doing today?

Welcome to the Anti Capex club. Good to meet you guys. Thanks so much for having me on.

It's a great club.

Yeah, fantastic. Can you introduce yourself? Give us a breakdown of the company, where you're at and what your business building.

Sounds good. Yeah. My name is Salman. I'm the CEO of Formic. We're building the robot army that is helping American manufacturers automate. You can see some of them on the screen behind me. These are our robot babies as we affectionately call them. We have hundreds of them across more than 100 factories now in the US that are using our robots to produce all kinds of products. We're making everything from metal parts for aircraft and automotive plastic parts for lawnmowers and golf carts as well as things like food and beverage. We make all the, all the nachos for chipotle and dog food and cat food and laundry detergent, you name it. Our robots are helping to make it.

You make Chipotle nachos robotically.

Let's go. We are indeed. Yeah.

The last guy I heard Eric was on you guys were talking about bring manufacturing back. It's real, it's happening. We're really excited to be part of it.

Yeah. What do you have to say to the naysayers that say we'll never make it in America? The haters.

The haters.

Look, I lived in China for 25 years and I saw the industrialization of that country and it's like it's not a two year process. Right. Like industrializing is a 20 year journey at the minimum and probably much more. And you know, we do have 250,000 factories in America that are making all kinds of products. So they exist. The problem is we don't have labor force to support them.

Them.

Right. It's not just about cost of labor. There are millions of unfilled jobs in factories today. The typical utilization rate of a factory in America is less than 2,000 hours a year. The comparable number in China is 7,500 hours a year. Right. Like there's 8,700 possible production hours in a given year. The vast majority of American factories are sitting around collecting dust 75% of the time. And it's not because like there isn't demand for their products products. It isn't because there isn't raw materials available. Right. Like it basically just boils down to the fact that there aren't people who want to work in these factories and do these back breaking jobs day in, day out. And so until we automate a bunch of them, we're going to have a really hard time re industrializing. So you know, I'm optimistic, Jordy. I think there is a lot of opportunity to re industrialize and bring more manufacturing back. But it's not going to be in a year or two.

Right.

Like we're helping make that happen faster but it's going to take some time.

Like a really dumb criticism that I don't agree with of this company. It might be completely wrong would be like hey, this is just, this is just financial innovation. You're just, you're, you're, you're, you're swapping Capex to opex. That allows you to grow really fast. I think that could be good for industrialization. But how much of that is key to the business? And then what else are you doing? I imagine that you're not, not mining the metal to make the robots. You might even be purchasing the robots from other people and then designing software Suites and integrating. But Palantir goes, oh, it's just a consulting shop or whatever. What is the criticism of your company of where you're starting and then why is that the right path to start and then grow out from?

Yeah, I think it's a really good question. I think it starts from the basic premise that people, most roboticists, are working on the wrong problem. I was a VC for 10 years. I was investing in robotics companies. I funded 50 different robotics companies, companies and saw all the different ways in which they had challenges. And what I realized is like, look, any roboticist will tell you getting a robot to do a job is 10% of the work. 90% of the work is like, how do you do error handling? And how do you solve all of the shit that happens after you deploy that robot? And I think that's the part that's generally underappreciated, which is like, we'll see a robot doing a backflip in a cool YouTube video. But once, once you try to get that robot to do that reliably for know, 99.8% uptime, you start to encounter all kinds of issues, right? Joint failures, maintenance challenges, programming issues, your infeed, like your product just has a lot more variation than you expected. And I think it's generally underappreciated. And so the reason that factories in America don't automate today is not because you can't get a robot to do this job. The problem is like, all the surrounding infrastructure doesn't exist. And so if you're the factory that focuses on making chocolate chip cookies and you're really good at the best chocolate chip cookie recipe and baking, like you're not also super good at deploying robots and managing them. And so what happens is they're just kind of overwhelmed. They don't know what to get, they don't know how to get it, they don't know how to manage it, they don't know how to maintain it. And so what we realized, you have to build all the surrounding infrastructure. Robotics has this last mile problem where if you can make it easy to scope, scope, deploy, manage and maintain the robot, then you can drive mass adoption. And so we built a bunch of software that does that. We use computer vision and LIDAR scans to do kind of full site evaluation in an automated way. This used to take months to walk through the facility and measure every single thing to figure out what you can automate and what kind of robot you need. We do that in minutes. Then you need to figure out what robot to build and deploy. So you need to basically simulate different robot arms doing that job with different grippers, different conveyors, different safety scanners, different fencing. Like, you need all of this stuff to make a robot useful. Then you need to actually program the robot to do the job. And so we basically built AI that automates the process of programming the robot. And then lastly, once that robot's deployed, you have kind of all the ongoing management of that robot. Right. So how do you do teleoperation? How do you do error handling? How do you preventative maintenance? How do you gracefully recover from all the different types of errors that you're going to counter? There's a ton of infrastructure that needs to be built. And so like 90% of roboticists that I meet are working on how do I make the robot a little bit smarter. And nobody is working on this giant problem, which is the reason that robots aren't deployed. Right. I can tell you from the hundreds of robots that we've deployed Today, less than 5% of my deployment cost is programming the robot to do the thing that's like, it's like, it's, it's completely, you know, delusional. How many people are spending their time trying to make a robot a little bit easier to program program? Like that's inconsequential to me. Like, I need to focus on solving the other 95% of the, of the cost of deploying robots.

I don't know if that's.

Can you talk about landing on cpg, food and beverage broadly? You had, you said you invested in 50 plus different robotics companies. I'm assuming you saw a bunch of success and failure. And I'm assuming that was super intentional to land here. And then I want to ask potentially other categories that you're excited about.

Yeah, I'll be honest, it wasn't that intentional. We started out going really broad. We were doing things in metal fabrication, we were doing things in plastic injection molding, we were doing things in CPG and a bunch of other industries. Ultimately, we narrowed back into CPG for a couple of reasons. Number one, it's the industry where there's the most amount of utilization.

Right.

So the typical CPG factory actually runs 20 to 24 hours a day. A day in things like metal fabrication. Like, like parts factories that make metal parts for aerospace and automotive. They typically run, you know, eight hours a day of, of production, but actually only like six hours a day of actual parts being made. There's like two hours a day where people are setting up and tearing down. So, so High utilization means automation has a much, much bigger short term impact. Number two, it's the industry where there's actually a lot more of it happening domestically in metal and plastic manufacturing and other stuff. Like a lot of it is still being imported today from, from, from China, from Mexico, from Canada, from other places. But because CPG products are generally low value and low margin, it's not worth it to ship them across the ocean. So a lot of that is actually happening domestically. So there are a lot of factories that can use automation. And third, those are the jobs that are the most backbreaking, painful jobs. Right. Like you can afford to pay a machinist 50 bucks an hour or 60 bucks an hour because that's like a high value, high margin product. You can't afford to pay somebody who's packing boxes more than 15 bucks an hour and so.

And they're still picking up super heavy, you know, cases of drinks and things like that.

Exactly, yeah. It's back breaking.

Can you take me through kind of a market map or like the, the, the, the topography of robotics? Because I've watched how it's made. I've seen, you know, a little scooper. I don't even know if I'd call it a robot. It's more just like a machine. Then there's two axis gantries. I'm seeing a lot of robotic arms, a lot of six axis stuff. And then you get into the humanoid world, where's the biggest opportunity in terms of, or where's the most need to deploy and like what type of robot is the most important to just roll out in America right now?

Yeah, I think articulated six axis robot arms are still the vast majority of use cases. I think if you look at what humans are doing in these factories, they're typically using their arms, not other parts of their body. So I think it's just an indicator of, that's the most common task. Whether you're talking about assembly, whether you're talking about quality control, you need vision, obviously. Whether you're talking about packaging, whether you're talking about, about even kind of primary food handling and sorting. In the metal fabrication world, you need a lot of machine tending which is picking up a blank part and putting it into a CNC machine. We have a bunch of robots that are doing that. All of those are just kind of articulated arms that can do it. So I think there are use cases for the humanoid form factor to do new types of tasks. We also have some gantry robots that we've deployed that do certain types of applications where it's very high payload work. But to be honest, like the form factor is kind of irrelevant because in all these types of robots that you're talking about, you have a couple of motors and some motion control, right? Like it's actually, if you can abstract away the software enough, like all of those things are essentially different variations on the same, on the same problem.

I want to talk about the Capex thing. What's the damage for a company if they're not working with you to, to buy a bunch of six axis robot arms these days? Can you give me like an order of magnitude for how much these, these robots even cost? I've seen a couple, yeah, or maybe.

Even some of the history. Some of the history. I mean we've seen so many companies try to automate, you know, bring in robotics, right. Like Nike has a history of, of trying to do this in, in Latin America and just failing miserably despite having seemingly completely competent partners. So yeah, I'd love some additional context there.

Yeah, yeah. So I'll start with the second question first and then I'll move to the first question. So the vast majority of robots in America today are deployed in very, very big companies. So General Motors, Proctor and Gamble are two examples of like the biggest buyers of robots in America. They buy like a couple hundred robots a year and they have very large in house engineering teams who can use those robots to do different kinds of tasks. The problem is 99% of factories in America are small, medium sized businesses. And the logic follows, like if you take a single General Motors plant that makes cars, there's 4,000 small factories that make the components that go to General Motors that get assembled into a car. So there's one guy who makes the windshield and one guy who makes the screws and another guy who makes, makes, you know, the tires.

Right.

Like every single one of those smaller factories is not automated at all today. Like 95% of them don't have any robots. So the, the cost is a part of the question, right? Which is, yeah, it costs between a couple hundred thousand dollars to a couple million dollars to build a fully automated robot work cell. The, the interesting thing though is if you break down that cost, about 30% of that cost is the hardware itself, like the robot arm and the conveyors and that kind of stuff. 70% of the cost is all the custom engineering that you typically have to pay for, for integrators and consultants and this and that to come in and try to customize it to your process. And if you're a Small factory, you don't have the capacity to kind of get rid of that 70% custom engineering cost because you don't really know anything about robotics. And so the reason that we built all of this kind of infrastructure tooling around it is that we're cutting out that 70%. It costs us significantly less to go and buy and build and deploy those robots than it would be for them to try to do it on their own.

Can you walk me through who the best robot builders are in the world right now? What does the supply chain look like in terms of constructing, building R D ing new robots? Who are the major players globally? Who are the up and comers? I don't even know if I could name a single robot maker, but I'm interested to hear kind of like what the landscape looks like, who the major players are.

Yeah, so the, the biggest robot companies in the world are all not American.

Right?

So Fanuc is Japanese. They're one of the biggest ones. Kuka used to be a German company. It got acquired by a Chinese company.

ABB.

Yaskawa, you know, Mitsubishi. You know, there's a bunch of these kind of very, very large industrial companies that make robot arms. The thing to note though is that like buying a robot arms is effectively kind of useless on its own. You need a full robot work cell to make that work. So you need PLCs that often come from like Siemens or Rockwell. You need sensors that come from companies like Kian Ago, a programmable logic controller. So it's like the, it's the thing that controls all the peripherals and safety equipment.

Got it.

Yeah. And then you need like conveyors, you need safety scanners that are often made by like Kognics and a much other company. You need grippers, which is the end of arm tool. So today like the vast majority of people who deploy robots basically hire a consultant that goes and buys all these different components for them and then assembles it and then deploys it for them.

Yeah, I saw this at Hadrian. They have a, they have a six axis robot arm and they have this like invisible wall that if you put your hand.

A light curtain.

Yeah, light curtain. That's what it's called.

That's right.

How. Why has automating 3 pls proven to be such a challenge? You know, there's been a bunch of, you know, Amazon had their internal efforts. I think there's like six river systems which, which it was. Maybe Shopify acquired them. But it just seemingly is such a difficult task. And you would think that, you know, grabbing Items and putting labels on them and you know, shipping them should be. It seems straightforward, but clearly not.

Yeah, I mean, I'll note that like we don't know a ton about 3pls because almost all of our work is in manufacturing. Logistics is a much, much smaller industry and like we're not in it today. I will say, right, like logistics has to deal with a lot more variability than manufacturing because if you're, if you're running a 3 PL, any kind of product could come into your warehouse anytime. And so you need systems that can deal with all of them. And there's just, there's just like physics based constraints on that, right? Like if you're picking up, you know, a 1 ounce bag of something versus a 50, 50, 50 pound box, like you just need fundamentally different physical hardware. And that's why I think a lot of this kind of humanoid stuff is, is very strange because like if you're picking up a 50 pound box with, with one of those robots, like it's, it's very likely to tip over pretty easily. Like you need. And if you want to move at any kind of speed, right, because if you take a 50 pound box and you move it at, you know, five miles an hour, your effective load during that acceleration is like double or triple that, right? So it's like 100 pounds of load that you have to be able to handle, which is just kind of impossible if you move to manufacturing. Like you have a lot more consistency because every production line is kind of making the same part or the same product at relatively higher rate. And so the, the technical complexity is lower, but the operational complexity is higher.

Interesting. On the note of humanoids, are you worried about depreciation with humanoids? I think this is a concern if, if humanoids end up, you know, working well, but then following the same path as like evs, because there's like high, you know, there's high wear and tear on cars, right? They're just like going down a road all the time. And that's challenging. And you can imagine humanoids are walking around with these heavy loads and then simultaneously like all of that interaction just feels like. I worry about the economics of humanoids. If you buy a robot for 50k and the next year it's worth 10k, it's like, well, you almost could have hired a human for that kind of cost. But I'm curious what your point of view is.

Yeah, I think it depends on what the task is. If you're using that humanoid to do an occasional task, pick up your laundry and put into the basket, for example, you don't worry so much about wear and tear because it's low frequency. If you're talking about manufacturing use case. Right. Like these robots behind me, all of them operate 24 hours a day. And so at that cycle rate, like you're doing maybe 50,000 cycles a day at that rate, like the wear and tear you get on all the components is very, very high. And like a six axis robot has six motors, a humanoid. Most of these humanoids that we've seen have something like 30 to 50 motors.

Right.

And so just, you're just talking about like the wear on the motor. Like we have to go out and lubricate these joints and replace motors on a pretty regular basis. I can't imagine if I had to do that for 50 motors instead of three.

Right, yeah.

Speaking of motors, I saw that in the latest Boston Dynamics demo they said that they switched to electric motors. Is that a meaningful shift in robotics or, or is that something that's unique to their approach to building humanoids?

Yeah, so most of the robots that we use use servo motors. So they're all kind of electric motors. It's pretty standard. Some of the new humanoids are using linear actuators, which is a newer technology and I think the Tesla humanoid is doing that. It's like the exact kind of wear and tear profile on that is not, not clear. And a lot of them are actually building their own, their own motors from scratch. So like, like the Chinese, like I think this is a place where China has a huge advantage compared to like a lot of the American startups, like Unitree for example, which I'm sure you guys have seen those videos, like they have built an entire team to build actuators and a whole team that's building their own custom lidar and a whole team that's building their own kind of custom sensing across. You know, for most of these American companies it's kind of inconceivable to go and try to invent your own motor and try to figure out how to build a humanoid. But in China it's possible to be much more vertically integrated.

That's so odd because you have to imagine back in the dawn of the automotive revolution, like Ford was certainly building motors and wheels and tires and seats and the frames and stuff. Like we did have the ability to have a vertically integrated supply chain at one point in America, and then we just decomposed it so much that it's been, it's been a struggle to get back to vertical integration. Very, very tricky.

The management consultants got hold of us.

They did, they did, yeah. On, on, on Humanoids. I don't know if you've been following what physical intelligence has been doing with some of the end to end models. This idea of generalization. Are there any. Are you looking at any software approaches that are more, I don't know, big data or deep learning driven to handle more of those edge cases to automate the last 90% of the work that you're doing? And what are you following on the AI side of things these days?

Yeah, so I think these vision language action models, like what physical intelligence is doing, are, are very promising. We're running trials on some of those vision language action models for some of our use cases. The problem today is that they're just generally too slow for us to be able to use them in a kind of commercial setting. But I think that'll get better in the next few years. So there are like, you know, in the common trajectory for us is like we'll start out in a factory with one or two robots and then the factory will come to us and say, hey, can you help me like automate all these other tasks, tasks on my production line? And today some of those are solved and some of them are not. And so as we go, you know, as these vision language action models get better and other kinds of techniques around deep learning get better, we'll start to go and address more and more of those tasks.

Yeah, I mean, this is great.

Continue.

I was just going to say, I think that the thing to note here is we're just at a very different place compared to more established automation economies in China right now. Last year there were about 400,000 robots deployed in the entire US we had about 30,000 robots deployed. So less than a tenth of the amount of robots deployed in a place where the labor cost is so much higher that you could theoretically justify a much higher use case of robots. And I think a big part of the reason is China just has so many more engineers that they can put towards the problem of design and deployment. Plus they subsidize a lot of the kind of robotics industry to be able to go and make it easy for people to deploy. I think in the US we have this challenge where there's a lot more small and medium sized businesses and we don't have the historical infrastructure or the engineering capability for all these plants to figure out how to automate on their own. And so building this set of tooling and helping them figure out what are the latest things that are happening in AI and machine learning and computer vision that we can apply to the different use cases in your facility is, is I think the only way that we can move faster than China in the long run.

Is there anything that you want to see from the US government to speed up the deployment of robotics in America?

Trillion dollar contract?

I mean, yeah, I mean you could imagine subsidies or incentives or a strategic reserve of robots, but you could also just look at deregulation. But I don't know what your take is.

Yeah, I mean, so I'm excited to go to the Hill and Valley forum next week and talk about that a little bit. But I like, frankly I don't think there's much that's necessary. Right. Like I think the incentive is there. Right. There's plenty of financial incentive for these small medium sized factories to do it. To be honest, like the biggest barrier to adoption of robotics in America is like it's a cultural change. Right. Like these factory owners, a lot of these are third generation businesses, right. They've been passed down down or they're kind of private equity owned. And like in both cases you end up with these businesses that are very risk averse, they're afraid to adopt new technology, they don't have the internal capabilities to do it. I think from the government side like things that are being done around educating that, that group of manufacturers and helping them to deploy automation is, will have a very big impact like similar to what China does. Actually in the US we've had subsidies for small medium sized factories for the last last 10 years to buy automation equipment right there, there's accelerated depreciation. A lot of states have matching grants where if you buy a $500,000 piece of machinery the state will grant grant up to 50% of that cost. And so like we've had plenty of these incentives in place but adoption is super low. Like when we talk to the states, most of them say like we can't give out these grants. Like nobody's using it it because people don't know what to buy, they don't know how to buy it. And once they buy it they're like they can't handle the responsibility of this new piece of equipment. And so there's tons of grant dollars just sitting around not getting deployed because there's this kind of, there's this, there's this barrier at the last mile.

Makes sense. Very informative. Thank you. We'll see you at Hill and Valley.

Yeah, we'll see you next week.

Awesome. Look forward to it. Appreciate you guys having me on.

Have a great night.

Cheers.

And we want to tell you about Polymarket. Go to polymarket.com to get the real news, get the information.

Figure we got a new market up there, 1 billion chat GPT users in 2025.

That's great.

It is currently at a 64% chance and feels likely to me. The way that they're pacing is generational.

We have some posts in there. Cali's here. I'll let you take the intro. I'll be right back.

Welcome in Cali. I'm gonna play a sound effect here. Boom. What's going on? Looking good in the suit. You've been wearing those a lot these days.

A lot of. A lot of the tech folks have been brushing off the suits these days and coming to dc. Nice to.

Nice to.

Nice to go down the closet.

How do you stay healthy when you're in dc? Do you have a good, do you have a workout routine? A couple favorite restaurants? Are you just, you know, five coffees a day, no breakfast or lunch?

I would love to say I'm on the True Med good energy program, but the sleep has been lacking. I will say try and try and trying to find good food but not eating much. Just a lot of caffeine.

Yeah, I bet. Let's jump right into this food dye ban. I'd love to get your high level take on Seems, you know the big question. We're a technology and business. There you go. We focus on business. And my big question is how manufacturers will respond to the ban, given that it's hard enough to even just deliver on the existing demand that they have, much less make fundamental changes. To be clear, I'm very much in favor of the ban. But I'm curious what you think this looks like in practice.

Yeah, I'll back up a little bit. I think there's a lot of lessons for business in this environment we're in right now.

But.

But I never expected to be here. I'm at the White House now. I'm a special government employee as well as running True Med with Justin Mares. And Justin and I started this company on the mission of. I think a lot of founders do this. We just wanted to impact the world and change health incentives. And just through the advocacy, Justin and I going on podcasts and talking about this, something started resonating on this idea that our healthcare and food systems are broken. In the past year, got to know Bobby Kennedy, got to know President Trump, helped connect them for the endorsement. Now coming on and helping to advise the next couple of Months. But I think the big lesson of this food dye ban, I don't even know. I really like the word ban. I like phase out because ban implies over regulation. And I think what people are waking up to is there's mass distrust of legacy industry right now. I mean I talk a lot about the food industry was run by the cigarette industry in the 1990s. Few people remember this, but 50% of the US food supply was controlled by Philip Morris and RJ Reynolds. In the early 1990s they consolidated the food industry when smoking rates were going down. They were actually some of the largest companies in the world in the 80s, like highest market caps and some of the biggest balance sheets in history of capitalism. Tobacco companies, it's a good business. Nicotine and they consolidated Kraft US Food, Nabisco and very deliberately bought off the USDA to recommend the food pyramid which is basically a recommendation for ultra processed food. And they, they shifted very strategically thousands of scientists from the tobacco department to the food department and really added all these chemicals in our food to make them hyper addictive. So through that corporate capture and what I would call the weaponization of food today in America a child's diet is 70% ultra processed food and in Japan or Italy it's 15%. So my big argument is that we don't really have a free market with these outcomes where of course the disease rates are just skyrocketing. I mean the stats are crazy. We're digging into this for a report for the administration. We spend five times more per capita on healthcare than Spain, but live six years less. I mean Spain doesn't even have a good healthcare program. So these are common sense actions. And I think there's really a moment. I'm meeting with a lot of folks, food companies, a lot of pharma companies, you know, and they're running scared because Americans have lost trust. I mean we all know this. I think it's why there's such a robust, you know, tech ecosystem building a startup ecosystem. You know, it's because these large companies have really lost trust with the American consumer and the American public. I think often for good reason. So, so I would call this not as much a ban. It's a correcting of corrupt incentives where these food dies. I mean just total no brainer. They're petroleum based, they're literally crude oil. They add a molecule to crude oil, make that bright neon color and they're phased out of essentially every other country. So it's an example of common sense actions that I think are quite needed.

That that phase out in other countries. Does that mean that a lot of these manufacturers fully have the ability to sell these products and make, you know, these products to sell into the US market and they're just choosing not to for the most part.

Oh, it's, it's even more shocking than that. They actually often make the product in the United States. So Kellogg's makes fruit loop with carrot juice and watermelon juice and ships them across the border to Canada and ships them over to Europe. They make the same product with petroleum based dyes here in the US So a lot of our food can actually be exported to Europe based on just, just the chemicals in them right now. So, so action. The US are. Yeah.

What is the, is it a margin thing? You know, is it, is it, is.

It just economic incentives?

Yeah. Is it purely economics or, or is there something else else?

Yeah, the food dice. Again, I think this is one of the most no brainer, unimpeachable things they could start with because it's actually not a cost thing. We've done a lot of engagement with the food industry on this actually. They've done a lot of research and they actually cite this as a reason for why they should keep it. They say, well, the kids in focus groups lunge for the neon bright colors and it's like, well, I'm sure they do, but you're feeding them crude oil. So. So it's really actually, they say it's consumer preference. And actually when pushed before, the food industry said, well, we believe in consumer choice and kids prefer these bright colors. So that's one reason I think the administration and secretary.

Yeah, my three, my three year old would love to eat cake for dinner every single night. But that doesn't mean that he should have, you know, the, you know, autonomy to just make that decision himself as a 3 year old.

Yeah. How do you think about the history here with like corn subsidies? Is there a risk of like playing whack a mole as the government decides what, what to push or what to incentivize? What do you take away from not just what the food companies have done historically, but what the government has done, done historically to kind of like steer the food supply in one direction or another?

Yeah, so, so, so I been an entrepreneur for more than 10 years, but I grew up in D.C. starting my career, you know, early on as a lobbyist for the food industry. And we used to weaponize this nanny state argument and say, you know, you don't want to be nanny state. But what, what, what I really have Been trying to communicate, you know, and particularly to frankly, a rightward audience, you know, going on Tucker and Joe Rogan, things like that. What I've really been trying to do do is articulate that this is not a nanny state regulation issue. It's a correction of corruption. When you look at agriculture subsidies, more than 90% go to corn, soy and meat, which are essentially the components of ultra processed food. And the grocery lobbyists, and the food lobbyists push for that because at a supermarket, when you can put something in a box and it lasts forever and it's bright neon colors, the profit margins are much higher, higher, whereas natural food is low. So there's a huge incentive to shove ultra processed food down our throats, which has led to agriculture incentives that make a Coke at a supermarket cheaper than water because the Coke has so much subsidized ingredients in it. So that's not a free market. That's totally rigged. 90% to corn, soy, wheat, point 4% of subsidies go to fruits and vegetables. Then you get to something like snap, the food stamp program. Now Elon's looking at this. This is the, the fourth largest entitlement program. It's $140 billion a year. The number one item on food stamps is soda. And more than 60% go to ultra processed food. We're the only country in the world where a low income nutrition assistance program goes to soda and Twinkies. So, so you have, you know, go down the list. School lunch is the largest source of calories for kids, federally funded, no nutrition guidelines whatsoever, no sugar, no sugar limits. So, so you've actually just very deliberately, you know, from the history of the tobacco companies really weaponizing these regulations. By my calculations, it's been a trillion dollars over the last 10 years of, of subsidies to ultra processed food. So we're trying to take step by step common sense actions to kind of unwind that. Where I also, quite frankly, think there's a cultural awakening happening where people realize the system is pretty screwed. And, you know, hopefully, you know, we were talking about it more, we're talking about it on a tech podcast. So the fact that people are trying to be healthier, reading labels more. Justin's talking a lot about this. Obviously, I think that's a good thing too. And very unexpectedly, I do think President Trump, Bobby Kennedy, you wouldn't expect that this coalition, they're leading to an awakening where 24 states right now are passing legislation on food ingredients, school lunches. So I think it's very positive what's happening.

Yeah, I always thought it was fascinating that the food issue is. It. It's secretly very bipartisan because. Yeah, that's because you get like the right wing, like trad folks who want to, you know, clean up the food supply, but then you also get like the left wing hippie who's hanging out at the farmer's market, and it's just like, yeah, I grew these vegetables myself. They're way better than the processed foods.

Yeah. I'm curious.

There should be a coalition there is.

Food and Health, as political as it seems in the news, I feel like if you talk to people individually, you know, it's. It's like John said, it's bipartisan, partisan, like every. We want everybody to be healthier. And then you get into Washington and it feels like you mentioned you started your career in the lobbying space. So I'm curious, like, where, where you think it's, you know, if it's actually a political issue for the average citizen or it's just sort of manufactured by special interest groups.

Oh, there's zero reason food and poisoning our kids should be political. And frankly, these things about reform, forming food stamps, you know, and taking the dyes out of our food were leftward issues, you know, five to 10 years ago. You know, digging into the health issue, I think one of the most pernicious and chronic conditions in America is, is Trump derangement syndrome. And I think TDS has led many people on the left to reflexively be opposed to these common sense policies. You know, probably a lot of the tech folks listening, I know politics is complicated. There's a lot going on, a lot of change happening. My hope is that we can all come together on these MAHA policies. I mean, these are absolute no brainer. It's taking on incentives of the pharmaceutical industry, which is something the left used to talk a lot about. It's taking on the interest of, you know, processed food makers that are really doing some harmful things for kids. But you've had a wild situation where you've had Democrats now passionately arguing to keep food dyes in the food. You've had Democrats passionately arguing that we need to continue to have a $10 billion subsidy from the federal government to soda companies on SNAP just reflexively, because, you know, the Trump administration happens to be talking about this. You've had almost no support from Democrats. I called out Cory Booker, a senator from New Jersey who I've worked with before. I've met. I know he cares about these issues. Where the hell is Cory Booker? Why wasn't he at the Health and Human Services Department on Tuesday, when Secretary Kennedy was announced this policy on food dies. Where is he helping on these issues? I mean, this is as bipartisan as it gets.

How much, how much does pharma's position end up influencing media narratives? They obviously spend an exceptional amount advertising with different media companies. This has been maybe a big issue in mainstream television, where a television network is not going to, you know, bring somebody on to talk poorly about a company that, you know, is a big sponsor. If you wanted to come here and talk negatively about ramp, we'd probably change the conversation.

Nothing negative.

I have nothing negative to say about ramp.

We love ramp.

Fantastic.

Of course, of course. But how, you know, is that a. Is that a focal point at all? Do you think we need to.

Some.

Some reform there is or just the sort of free market doing the free market.

Yeah, this, this is how this framework I have and, you know, so privileged to be fighting this fight with Justin and with Truman and trying to help the administration. But I think what we're doing with the strategy is we're putting a stake in the ground that everyone can agree with where that in 10 years, our incentives of our system are changed. And the way I define those incentives is that nobody wants this. But, but the fact is, the health care system, you know, a lot of health startups, quite frankly, still their business model is predicated on more people being sick. The pharmaceutical industry makes more money when people are sicker for longer periods of time. Hospitals make more money when the meds are full, not when they're empty. You know, insurance companies actually make more money when people are sicker because of this horrible medical loss ratio issue where they actually have an incentive to raise premiums. So, so, so you actually have every single lever of the healthcare system predicated on sickness. Now, that same system, the pharma industry particularly, is the lifeblood of news advertising. Over 50% for most news channels. So that creates. Not a direct. You know, there's not a direct edict going down. But you have a zero lack of curiosity from the media about why people are getting sick. It's really just referees about, you know, hey, you need to take this drug. Ozempic is the standard of care for kids. You know, with COVID I mean, Covid was a metabolic health crisis. We were 16% of COVID deaths, deaths and 4% of the world's population. And the CDC said at the time, it's because our immune systems are so weak, we're dying very quickly when we get this disease. Yet the media was, it was just about The COVID vaccine for six month old. So you do have a very, very damaging situation where there's self censorship. And you know what I, the strategy is to get to that long term world where new startups are thinking about how to make people healthy, not how to take advantage of a system and you know, deliver direct to consumer Ozempic or you know, a better UX on medical records. A better UX on medical records is putting lipstick on a pig. The problem is the underlying incentives of the system. You know, shipping pills in a millennial pink packaging is an innovation. You know, a lot of healthcare startups are just wrappers on the existing broken health incentives that are destroying the country and going to bankrupt us. So that's the stake we have. The way we get there is let's do unimpeachable things. So this food diet thing is one. Obviously there's been a lot of talk about pharmaceutical ads. Secretary Kennedy, Marty Makary, the amazing new FDA commissioner have talked about that. No announcements right now, but that's, you know, something they've said they're clearly looking at. So it's, it's just getting these things that are 90% support issues, bipartisan issues and I think you'll be seeing them in rapid succession, these announcements.

Yeah. Does, does the meaty, incredible growth of drugs like Ozempic scare you? Obviously being overweight is unhealthy. That's not a political point. But when I hear people saying that they're sort of like losing more muscle than fat, that personally is, you know, can be concerning. And then I'm curious if you have a general, you know, just personal, personal opinion only on this sort of balance between like compounding and getting drugs that are benefiting people out quickly and affordably versus like you know, protecting the intellectual property of the companies that, you know, develop these drugs.

Great question. So on the first one I'd say the MAHA stance of Ozempic, as best I can define it for my personal opinion, is there's nothing wrong with GLP1,0 zempic per say. Actually, I think something the administration is talking a lot about is it's not an anti drug stance. I think with the dawn of AI and very exciting things quite frankly in therapeutics, there should be robust innovation and frankly deregulation at the fda. The problem is that with the existence of Ozempic it's two problems. One is that the drug costs 10 times more than it does in Germany or Sweden. So and that's, that's going to come from US taxpayers. So, so There's a real corruption in the pricing and then number two, corruption in the standard of care, what I call it. So there was a Medicare ruling from Biden that said that Ozempic should be the frontline defense for anyone who's obese or overweight on Medicare. So you know, a 15 minute appointment.

You get your Ozempic and then that diet or exercise. Right, right.

No, it didn't even mention. And there's no funding for diet. So we spent 5 trillion on healthcare. Right. And then they were gonna push this through where Ozempic's over $1,000 a month, which would come from, from taxpayers.

Yeah.

Not with no other option or no other route for an American to get, you know, the blood testing to understand their nutrient deficiencies or talk to a dietary coach. You know, this is what Truman did. Why would you put that flag in the ground? It's like there should be flexibility with, with where healthcare dollars can go. So the problem, you know, is not that OZ exists, it's that that Medicare ruling would have gone to Medicaid and would have gone to kids because now it's being being essentially pushed on six year olds in the American Academy of Pediatric. So you're getting to a world where, you know, stag rates, metformin rates, antidepressant rates have exploded among teens. 35% of teens are on some kind of chronic disease drug. You know, Zimpic would just be added to that repertoire. And of course that's just not from our medical system, incentivizing the root cause. I mean, maybe somebody that's 75 year old on Medicaid, Medicare, who is, you know, 400 pounds and extremely diabetic and set in their ways. Sure. I mean, probably Oz, epic. I'd be fine with Medicare funding for that. But, but for the vast majority of American people, that shouldn't be the first line defense that that's the problem with our healthcare system right now. There's not flexibility for patients to maybe work with a functional medicine doctor or figure out a more root cause intervention because obviously obesity is not an Ozempic deficiency.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. What, what countries do you look at as models? The, the tech industry loves to poke fun at Europe. You know, they don't tend to make trillion dollar companies very often or ever in the last.

Don't win a lot of bodybuilding competitions. We are the most obese country. But we also, America also wins a lot of bodybuilding competitions.

John's point of view. But, but what can we, you know, what are you looking at in Terms of like this is a functioning government in the context of personal health.

I don't like giving Europe any credit whatsoever and they don't deserve much. And I will just say this is a key point. Europe's healthcare systems are total basket case systems. They're terrible socialist systems. So I think one of the things.

We can learn, just to be clear. Yeah they get right is like saying like hey, we don't want this dye, we don't want glyphosates.

Exactly. Actually what they get right is that the health, the healthcare system is less important, is that people are healthier to begin with. The problem with the US healthcare system is not that we have the wrong Medicare, Medicaid, reimbursement rates. It's the fact that we're the sickest country in the world and that's actually because we rely too much on the health care system. So what I like about some other countries in Japan, and I think we need more of this and Bobby Kennedy is pushing this more. I mean if your kid is obese, you are shamed as a parent. Like it is totally societally unacceptable. Like you are stunned. Like you're like yelled at by the school. Like I think we need that same type of energy in America. Like children should not be fat and diabetic like period. Like, like we have totally lost our way right now. There's a whole tick tock craze where they're shaming doctors for weighing patients or even talking about weight. Obesity is a blaring warning sign that our cells aren't working. And it is not. I do not blame the individuals when 80% of American adults are overweight or obese. We have a systemic, systemic problem. But from the culture we shouldn't accept that. We should absolutely be declaring that we do not want to have childhood obesity or diabetes and have that culture. Additionally in Japan and Italy and some of the European countries there is like total bipartisan, just consensus. This sounds so obvious. But, but it's not the case in the US that we shouldn't be poisoning kids. I mean this, school lunches in America are an absolute dumpster fire. And you know, in, in Japan and Italy and France has mandated a daycare, a four course meal including a cheese course, cigarette and wine afterwards. I mean, but that'd be healthier than what they serve in America. I mean it's absolute disaster. So there is just this cultural thing around food. One thing I look at Europe, they spend three times less on average per capita on healthcare there, but two times more per capita on food. In Europe, they do have a lot more respect for their agriculture system and their farmers and the consumption of whole food. There is much lower thoughts about pesticides and what's going on the food. So you always hear you go to Italy, the posse, the gelato, you lose weight. I mean, that's really true. So I think what needs to happen and what I hope culturally happens with these step by step wins is we move culturally to a system that puts less emphasis on getting sick and then getting drugged and more emphasis on what I really think is a spiritual issue of having more curiosity and awe about what we're putting in our body, our environment, how that impacts the soil, how that impacts the food and then just getting back to basics on, you know, not poisoning kids.

Is there anything that the government can do or even America could do about on the fitness side?

Yeah. What happened to the presidential fitness test? Yeah, phased out.

That's part of the battle here. We're addressing a lot of the diet and the food supply stuff, but fitness is extremely important. But it's harder to incentivize or subsidize maybe, I don't know. What is your take on fitness?

Well, I was just with Secretary Kennedy in Miami at a UFC fight and you know, Shaq was there and a bunch of a list celebrities talking about how they can help, you know, encourage youth fitness and rejuvenate. So I don't want to get in front of any announcements here, but I think that that type of education and inspiration among kids for more fitness to not be, I mean a boy in America, you know, a teenager boy in America has less testosterone than a 68 year old man. Like, like there's been a depletion of testosterone among kids. Obviously because of our food or sedentary lifestyle. We're soft. I mean, you know, 77% of of military aged youth cannot join the military in America right now. It's a national security crisis. So my 1, 2 kind of framework in my head is let's get the wins like the food dies but you can't undercount the cultural education elements to this. Bringing what Justin Mares and Mark Hyman and a lot of people have been talking about this for a long time, bringing that to the forefront, these common sense solutions. So, so you're going to see a lot of initiatives and one thing I'm excited about is when Secretary Kennedy was sworn in by President Trump, he signed an executive order and on May 22, in about a month they're releasing a 100 day report on the chronic disease crisis why kids are getting so sick. It's going to say things that the US Government's never said before about environmental toxins, about our water quality, about our food quality, about our sedentary lifestyle. So getting the facts down and having the conversation on a factual basis and not letting industry, and I'll say this, a lot of people in industry lobby not on policies, but actually to prevent transparency about what's happening. You know, there's pressure, you know, to not talk about pesticides. There's pressure to, you know, not talk about certain topics because it's going to scare consumers or it's going to confuse consumers. There is a good trend right now where the government is going to talk about anything they want to and they're going to give Americans information, not infantilize the American people as we often do. And I think that's the necessary precondition for a long term conversation about policy change to systems that are going to bankrupt the country and cause us to cease to exist. Which is, I think is true given the trajectory of our healthcare budget, which will bankrupt us and the decimation to American competitiveness. When you have 50% of teens overweight or obese and 38% of teens pre.

Diabetic, those kind of numbers are so shocking. Living in California or any, you know, if you live in California, New York, it's just, you would never believe those numbers. You have to go to places that don't, where wellness is not, you know, the number one trend. I'm curious, do you think this movement around making America healthy would have been possible before decentralized media? It feels like we kind of needed podcasts, we needed social media, we needed people, we needed like a mom, some random place to discover that when she removed red dye from her kids food that this thing happened and then she shared it and people start collaborating. So I feel like, you know, a lot of this movement just would have been impossible when you only could get your news from magazines or newspapers or radios that are all captured in some way by, you know, large corporates.

No, the independent media ecosystem is an absolutely necessary condition to the opportunity we have right now. It can't be overstated how destructive it is that our core information source has been co opted by an industry that profits from Americans being sick. And that's had devastating consequences. I think what's happened with independent media is one of the major historical events in American history. Like when you read about the American Revolution, it was really propagated by the ability to easily print pamphlets and Ben Franklin and others you know, getting ideas out that have never been able to get out before in a mass way. I think this is a huge shift. I mean, for, you know, Since World War II, we've had a corporate owned, essentially media, and now we're able, you know, you guys, and people at a microphone are able to get more distribution than cnn. The, you know, Secretary Kennedy, you know, was called a whack job by everyone. Actually, him and President Trump are the two most popular political figures in America still. He was able to get through on independent media podcasts like Joe Rogan. And actually Americans determined a lot of them that he actually makes a lot of sense with what he's talking about, really about these overarching incentives of health care. I can't stress that enough in this building, in the White House, there's a shift happening where we are of course, talking about healthcare policy, like what to do on Medicare and Medicaid, but it's more about the foundational incentive where. What is the logic of where the $2 trillion we spend on Medicare and Medicaid going? Is that straight to drugs or is it more root cause interventions? How are we incentivizing our food system? Are we really incentivizing ultra processed food for kids? Is there enough transparency for Americans to make the best decisions? There's more foundational topics being asked, and those are very disruptive topics to the legacy industry. That's all because of independent media, I'll say. The independent media also rightfully has led to record distrust of our major institutions from, you know, frankly, the education system, you know, lots happening with Harvard right now, to the pharmaceutical industry, you know, to others. That's warranted. And one of the leverages I think there is for change is that these industries, when I meet with them, you know, really acknowledge that they have to make some major changes. Changes really partner, frankly with Secretary Kennedy, you know, not to do any Secretary Kennedy or President Trump any favors because they actually have to make changes to maintain their legitimacy with the American people. I mean, it's not working right now. I mean, some of the tech pros on Twitter are saying how incredible, you know, recent American healthcare innovation, how it's how it's been. I'd love to see what they're talking about. I mean, we're literally have life expectancy declining. You know, we spend four to five times more than other countries. Chronic disease rates, every single one is at a record high this year in America with the highest rate of crime, disease than any country and human civilization. I don't know what they're looking at, but we're not in a good situation right now.

How do you think about timelines? You're, you know, special government employee for a limited period of time. This is obviously a monumental task. It's not something that can be solved even in a single admin. How do you think about making sure that obviously we were headed to a really bad place from a nationwide health standpoint, from an economic standpoint, due to the consequences of those health issues. But what's the strategy to make sure that this sort of movement becomes bipartisan and kind of can live, live on after you guys are no longer in the White House?

I personally think we need to think about it as a 12 year strategy. We're not going to reorient the incentives of the largest industry in America, the fastest growing industry in America, because we're getting sick, the most employed industry in America. We're not going to change those incentives overnight or even in the next four years. I think what we need to do, what I'm focused on, is maintain the political coalition, what you call this Maha coalition. The reason we're able to drive change is because millions of women, quite frankly, moms, voted for Trump for the first time. People who would have never considered voting for Trump years ago. This issue has galvanized voters into a coalition. President Trump was 50, 50among young people, 50, 50among independents. We couldn't have imagined that four years ago. So multiple factors for that. But clearly this MAHA kind of energy led to that, that. So the reason we have an opportunity for change is because voters have really galvanized around this issue. So to me, if we can solidify that coalition, that coalition is going to continue to drive change. We need to deliver wins for the next two years. I mean, I'd love for Democrats to compete for those voters. They've had their head in the sand. If those voters can help Republicans, which is my hope in the midterms, I think you have 20, 28 where both sides are basically arguing who's more maha, which I think is a positive thing. I think we've shifted to the paradigm of health. You know, before last year, health care was about how to add more people to the existing broken system. That's insane. You had Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren just a couple months ago during the confirmation hearings with Bobby Kennedy, eviscerating him for taking on pharma companies. Elizabeth Warren actually said, you know, you're going to hurt their profit margins. These poor companies like, like people have lost their minds when it comes to healthcare somehow arguing that More resources, more spending to this broken system is how we solve it. Instead of actual core reform of the system system. I want to get political victories and change the overall bipartisan way we talk about health. And I will say everyone talks about the special interest, the money. The one thing that counteracts that is voters really voting on this issue. And now you have maha moms and people waking up caring about this issue as a voting topic. So as long as that solidified, you'll have momentum that changes the incentives of health care where we can look back in 12 years and we have a thriving pharmaceutical industry.

Industry.

But they are incentivized to promote longevity. They're incentivized to cure diseases, not just manage them. All pharmaceuticals right now are managing and you know, we, we have an overall healthcare ecosystem that's more value based, that's more, that's more geared towards keeping people healthy, which can happen.

Yeah, that makes sense.

Yeah. There does feel like a way to flip the incentive where the pharmaceutical companies are like if we can just keep this person alive for another hundred years, imagine how much, you know, how many drugs we can sell them.

They should make a lot of money for that. Like, like, like imagine the impact the economy if they could do that. Like they should make a ton of money for that. And they tell you off the record, right. They'd love to do that but the incentives are all about disease management. So, so, so this isn't a free market right now and there's a real opportunity to nudge these incentives to a different direction.

Yeah, that makes a ton of sense.

Well, thank you for the work that you're doing.

Yeah.

And making the time.

Thanks guys.

I think you're doing very important work.

Yeah, we'll talk to you soon. Thanks guys.

Bye.

Bye. Let's tell you about Public. You heard the founders on the show earlier, but Public is investing for those who take it seriously. They got multi asset investing industry leading yields and they're trusted by millions. We got some personnel news today. Jason Citroen is out as CEO of Discord. He's bringing on Humam Sakanini. Building Discord has been one of the most meaningful and rewarding experiences of his life. What started as a simple idea to help friends talk while playing games has grown into something far bigger than I ever imagined. I'll be transitioning to a new member as board member and advisor and continuing to support Discord through this next chapter. I'm incredibly proud of what we've built together and even more excited for what's ahead. Very Interesting.

Very cool.

Will be interesting to see Crazy Run Discord gets Out at some point there's been rumors about IPO and so yeah, maybe. Maybe that's the maybe this is a move to prepare for the public markets. Being a public market CEO is a different job and maybe Jason wants to step back, but we'd love to have him on the show, do a little gaming day, talk about everything in Discord's world. Fascinating Founder, total outlier, not from the typical Silicon Valley elite pipelines, not Stanford or Harvard. Built one mobile game at some point, sold one company, ran it back, built up Discord into a really, really powerful company. So congrats to him on the transition and good luck to the new CEO of Discord. We got some list listener feedback. We got some posts about the show. Midwest Tech Bro says after list after switching to tbpn I got my entire life back. No more deciding what podcast to listen to, trying to write down important points, or worrying that I missed some key news today. TVPN changed the way I consume media and in turn changed my family's life. Thank you.

Thank you, thank you Midwest Tech Bro he says from my wife the palace of pump has rocked our world. World.

Yes, we're happy to have you as a listener. There's more TVPN news Austin Peter Smith says people will say it isn't scalable to bring on each new podcast listener via direct sales reps, but here's a counterfactual. I got cold emailed by a TVPN rep, ended up doing six calls with them over eight weeks before deciding to become a listener. And then I went on to spend $11 million on eight sleep mattresses with my tri ramp card providing enough measurements measurable ROI to cover that sales rep for the quarter. Thank you Austin.

Oh so good.

How to Van Goon based Alexander says you should get a notification if your tweet was featured on tvpn. Well this is your notification.

We you have you have been notified.

On TVPN you're featured on tvps. Let's go tweet this. We do to want to build an automation something around this maybe reply to this post with this clip. We'll figure it out. We're hiring folks every day. Just if you apply make sure you have at least one of the following.

Yeah you have an option.

We want Navy Seals GP at a tier 1 VC these types of things. 10 years CUDA experience, 20 years high frequency trading experience. If you have something like that you might be a fit for the team.

Still an opportunity to get in under a hundred. Hundred people.

Exactly. Being in the first hundred is at.

Least you join in the next couple weeks.

Yeah, exactly. Janan account says would be insane if there were one company with John Strollman, Dario, Alec Redford, Ilia Sama, Greg, Andre Karpathy, Mira and Paul Cristiano. Very, very funny.

And the only person left at this company after six months is Sam Altman.

No, I think Greg still there. Yeah, Greg came back. But it is, it is crazy how there's been this, you know, there was insane concentration of talent there and then as they, as they transitioned out of a. Becoming a research institute into becoming a product company, there was a turnover in the team and people scattered to the wind to do all sorts of different projects. But, you know, I'm excited. More competition, better products for consumers. Specifically in AI. Ryan Peterson shares the Wall Street Journal talking about flexport. It's a staggeringly tedious job that would be of little interest to anyone in normal times. Absolutely. They call this tariff pencil pushers. So rude. Founder mode. He is in founder mode. He's getting. He's getting quoted in the Wall Street Journal. Whenever something happens in logistics, shipping, he's.

The person that many people, many people love to say that Ryan actually created global trade.

He did.

And so he gets quoted. Yeah, he invented the ship, basically.

Verticalized the ship. Yeah, it's the ship.

This post from Tyler Cosgrove, just fantastic design. Close friend of the show. He adds the softweeting shield softbank treatment to OpenAI's charge. I agree, it looks much better with the unicorns galloping upwards.

And so the winter projection for winter 2025 projection for chat for OpenAI. Revenue is going from 1 billion in 2023 to 4 billion in 2024 to 13 billion in 2025 to 29 billion, then 54 billion, then 86 billion, then 125 billion.

We're going higher.

It's fantastic. I mean, they're on their way and, you know, yeah, you throw the unicorns on there, you throw the big PowerPoint arrow and it looks a lot better. But I mean, the business is ripping. I use the product every day. I think most people do. And so good luck to them on their path to $125 billion in revenue in 2029. Hopefully. I think that they might blow that out. Who knows? We'll be tracking it here. We'll be breaking it down, we'll be tracking polymarkets to see where. Where their DAUs end up, their MAUs. Sean Frank coming on the show tomorrow, but Had a, had a good post we wanted to highlight he said or a bigger third thing. Trend lines don't continue forever. Hard work built this business Covid scaled it for 24 months. Every single person in America suddenly loved the outdoors. They went out and bought gear to enjoy them. This is the story of solo brands. Nasdaq, NYSE suspended solo brands. Are they a casualty of tariffs or mismanagement? Sean Frank's breaking it down. He says that gear had negative network effect. Every solo stole, every solo stove stove sold increases the CAC of the next one because the next buyer is less incremental, less interested, more taking more promos or ad impressions to buy. And instead of launching a second bigger sku they bought non adjacent brands. Chubby's is great but solo stove buyers aren't guaranteed to be Chubby's customers and vice versa. There's no flywheel, no cross sell, no advantage. Just a hard good company and a hard goods company and an apparel brand trying to be managed by the same team.

Yeah, I think that the idea of consumer holding companies is very appealing but consumer products are a full contact sport and the best companies that I'm aware of have you know, management teams that are 110% and trying to then if you're not and you're trying to manage multiple brands while you're competing in the same categories with you know, founder led or just exceptional management teams.

So yeah, well, Happy birthday to YouTube. YouTube turned 20 yesterday and Colin Samir remade the very first YouTube video ever there at the zoo. And I hadn't really watched the original YouTube video. I mean I probably watched it at some point. This is the first video ever uploaded to YouTube us at the zoo. Colin Samir recreated it and it's 20, 21 seconds and it's kind of a funny watch. If we can pull it up. Let's see. In other news, Erewhon raised a $2 billion valuation. Let's go. I is this is down here.

I mean we, we spend.

What happened? I feel like if they have just like a few customers like you that should be up at like 20, 40, 100, 200 billion.

Yeah. The fact that I get to track my LTV in the app is wild. Wild. Yeah. Somebody was breaking down the math here. I don't know how accurate this is. They have 10 stores. You know, I don't know, I've heard a bunch of rumors just being around LA over the years of just how much money they make but you have to think of it as a grocery store, a high margin grocery Store, which is non traditional groceries, typically low margin. They've turned grocery into a high margin business, plus adding on a high margin restaurant, plus they sell home products and beauty products and skin care and things like that. So you can't look at it as a purely monolithic. You know, it's not a. It's not a typical grocery store. And then they also have this like cafe business. And I think when you combine all of those, they're just cash machines.

Andrea here says she's been told by multiple sources that they claim to make $50 million per store. So 10 stores, that's $500 million in revenue. And they also make more money from the smoothie collabs, which is very fun. One of our goals for this year is to get a TVPN smoothie at erewhile1. So if you're listening hard on it, give us a ring. Let's watch the Colin smear YouTube video.

All right, so here we are in.

Front of the elephants.

Cool thing about these guys is that.

That they have really, really, really long trunks. And that's.

That's cool.

And that's pretty much all there is to say.

All right, so can you believe that?

That.

That was the first.

Let's go.

That was the first YouTube video ever. Masterpiece.

A masterpiece.

A masterpiece. Yeah. Chad Hurley, the YouTube team, they threw that up. And YouTube was originally.

We gotta. We gotta pull up one of those videos sometime. Not today, but of the early YouTube team. When they're just like, you know, talking like they look like they're in like a. Like a. Like a dungeon, basically. Like they're just talking about how hard it is, how. How things are working, how they're not working, but they cooked.

They did. Let's close out with a post from Sean Frank, who's coming on the show tomorrow. He says he's opening a speakeasy just for red dye 40 and microplastics. Don't let Cali means find out about that, Sean. But I like the way you're thinking. Government can't hold you back.

Poison, resist.

You're just gonna get stronger. It can only make you stronger. Sean. I think you're in good shape. I think you can handle all of the microplastics and the red dyes. Good luck to you though, and we'll ask you more about it tomorrow when we see you on the show. But anyway, thank you for watching, everyone.

Thank you, folks.

We will see you tomorrow. Have a great rest of your day. Goodbye.

Cheers.