The Great Peptide Debate, SpaceX's Lunar Mass Driver, AI Coming for Zuck's Job | Martin Shkreli & Max Marchione, Mitchell Green, Shane Hegde, Dr. Adam Oskowitz, Robin Vince, David Senra

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Very barnyard themed this morning.

Very barnyard themed. Let me pull up the linear lineup. Linear, of course, is the system for modern software development. 70% of enterprise workspaces are using agents if they're on Linear.

Very fun day today. We got Martin Shkreli coming on with Max over at Superpower to debate peptides. Two very different stances on these compounds, and we will see how it goes. Bring the popcorn.

Is there a peptide that helps with debating?

I'm sure there is.

Is there like a DBT-1, DBT-157 that you can take and then you become—

Hopefully Max can make one before—

We'll see. Then we have Mitchell Green, Lead Edge Capital, coming on 12:30. Shane from AIR. We're going into a lightning round. And then David Senner is coming on at 1:15, hanging out in person.

Don't forget. We're going to ask him what the meaning of life is. Rob from BNY. Of course. And Matt from Doctronic.

Yeah.

It's a very fun day.

Anyway. Over the weekend, you watched this live, right? Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, the CEO of SpaceX, got some folks together, gave a big keynote presentation about his vision for the future.

Basically something that looked like an Ultradome.

It did look like an Ultradome. And so you watched this, right?

I did watch it.

I watched a little bit of it and overall—

And if you were taking a shot every time Elon said, Epic. You were hammered by the guy. Not in any state to drive after about 3 minutes.

Yeah, he's got so much going on at this point. I mean, he's doing sports cars, Cybertrucks, Model 3, Model Y, just consumer cars.

Model Y XL.

Space internet, space data centers, space launch capacity, point to point. He's gonna take us on a rocket from New York New York to Tokyo in an hour or 30 minutes. Neuralink brain chips, tunnels, these Elon projects have just gotten bigger and bigger and bigger. Of course, he owns X and Twitter, xAI training foundation models, trying to make a consumer app where you chat with it as well as, you know, solve math and physics. So the big—

Yeah, this was super rough.

It was, I listened to it and it was a rough delivery. Like he seemed like, he seemed a little like, just like, whoa, okay, I got another thing to present. And so the cadence wasn't quite there, and he wasn't able to get the crowd going. There was a lot of like waiting a little bit for the audience to like realize that that was a sponsored line.

Key disclaimer, never bet against Elon. I'm not dumb enough to bet against Elon. I'm not dumb enough to try to short any of his companies. And I'm not, you know, by now you should have, learned not to doubt what his organizations can do. And even though this TerraFab concept, you know, there's a lot of reasons that you would wanna bet against it. There's a lot of, I don't know that many people that are genuinely sold on the space data centers in the near term. It still is not clocking for me, John. It's not clocking for me.

That he's standing on business? He's standing on business and it's not clocking for you.

It's not clocking to me that he's standing on space data centers. And so this entire pitch, notable, seemingly the first time he's put the Tesla XAI SpaceX logos together.

Sure. No, the tunnel project Hyperloop was a blog post that he wrote and it appeared both on the Tesla blog and the SpaceX blog at the same time. And everyone was like, Who's gonna be involved in this? And it turned out it was like a couple people from both sides. It became its own company at some point.

I'm not saying it's the first time.

No, no, but it does feel like Elon Megacorp.

But it's gearing up for the Elon Megacorp. And yeah, so just overall, the pitch is he's basically saying like, okay, we're gonna do TeraFab. It's this really hard project. And the evidence for why you should believe that it's gonna work well, he's like, we've done a lot of hard things in the past. And then talks a little bit about space data centers. And then he talks about needing something in the order of 1,000 times more compute than we have.

He says to reach a petawatt, we'll build an electromagnetic mass driver on the moon with robots like Optimus and humans.

No, but, but, but— Before the mass driver, he's talking about how—

Oh, we're chip constrained, which is true.

Elon, he gets it. Chip constrained by 1,000x.

Sure.

And so we have to do this.

Yeah, we have to build more fab capacity.

But he doesn't lay out like a super compelling case of what all the chips will be used for, right? Are they gonna be, is SpaceX gonna be a NeoCloud? Is it just for their own internal products? Self-driving, humanoids. Again, my criticism is not of any individual company as much as the presentation. I just came away, he kept saying, if we can do this, it's going to be epic.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And there wasn't a really strong justification. There wasn't a strong justification other than it's going to be epic. And then he just closes out with this render of the mass driver, which is, again, it's tight. But I didn't— what was the takeaway on what we're even going to use the mass driver for other than to get to a Kardashev 3 civilization? Which, again, all this stuff just feels so, so, so, so far in the future. Far out.

But when I—

He did drop the line turning science fiction into science Science fact? Science fact.

No way.

Which is, I think it's a—

It's a Josh Wolfe line. I mean, I don't know if Josh Wolfe was the first one to ever say it, but it's a good line.

Yeah, I think of it as a Wolfeism.

I do too.

And it's funny because Josh Wolfe was like the hardest critic of Elon.

Oh, that's right, yeah.

And he was— That's right. Like he basically had to stop at some point.

Yeah, of course.

But yeah, he kept saying these lines that he was like expecting like, kind of laughter involved.

Yeah, it was really hard. I mean, doing the actual delivery of a speech on stage— I mean, Jensen just went through this with a keynote at GTC where he didn't have a teleprompter. And he was able to deliver moments and get the crowd going. And the crowd size at GTC is really big. And so even if you just have a couple hardcore fans that really get you and have listened to every Jensen keynote, they know. Yeah, they start clapping. And then everyone starts clapping because it's infectious. And then pretty soon everyone's clapping. This is how it works. So yeah, yeah, I mean the comedic timing, the delivery timing of like when to clap, when to be, whoa, you know, that was a little tough. I don't know, I actually know who was in the audience. It might've just been employees. It had a certain aesthetic to it. But interestingly about the TeraFab, this is something I was advocating for back in 2022. So when the Biden CHIPS Act happened, there was this question about like what's gonna happen with Intel. Intel should be at the like the center of the CHIPS Act because the whole pitch for the CHIPS Act was that America is not Taiwan is on the leading edge of semiconductor fabrication. And so we need to sort of pull our weight with our intellectual property laws to stop Taiwan from exporting them. Remember, Taiwan is its own country. They should, in theory, be able to sell their products anywhere. Like what say do we have over, you know, if Japan wants to sell PlayStations to China or anywhere, why do we have authority over them? Well, it comes down to the intellectual property. There's a lot of patents that have been licensed to ASML, to TSMC. And so we do have the ability to pull levers and strings to sort of limit those, especially if they're packaged by Nvidia, an American company. We have export rules, but it's a stretch. But the whole thesis was America's gonna lose to China unless we do this. And so Intel was a very logical one. And I remember there was like $60 billion or something up for grabs around the CHIPS Act. At the same time, Elon was marshaling around $60 billion for, to buy out Twitter or something like that, $40-something billion. And then Intel's market cap, what, they're a $220 billion company now. I think that they were lower back in 2022. They were maybe $150 billion. And so it would've been a stretch, but between the CHIPS Act money, all the private equity dollars that came in, all the venture capital dollars that came in to buy Twitter, there was a world where Elon just bought Twitter. And there was also that rumor that he was maybe meeting with GlobalFoundries, that there were a number of different like, oh, like what is Elon really great at? He's great at engineering efficiency. What does Intel need? It needs engineering efficiency. There was a world where, you know, they teamed up and Intel, you know, like really delivered on building new facilities much quicker. Yeah.

But yeah, so here we are. I think it makes total sense for, makes sense for Elon to make chips. I think it will make sense over time for xAI to start offering cloud services to other companies.

Having compute is valuable.

But still, this seems like a kind of, just kind of a blatant sci-fi pump going into the IPO.

Maybe. I will take the other side of that. But first, let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI, their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI. AI and stops breaches. And let me also tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange.

And we have— BNY was the first— Bank of New York was the first company to go public on the New York Stock Exchange.

We have them joining later today. So the other side of this is that it is good to have a long-term vision, even if it is decades away. And that's what mass driver on the moon is. It's not going to be realized this quarter. It's not gonna be realized this year. Probably not even this decade. Elon interestingly didn't really put a date on it. Like he's, yeah, did he say something specific?

He said, "I hope to see it in my lifetime." Yeah, in his lifetime. Which is like, I mean, he's 54. He's got a while, right?

Yeah, if he's a radical life extension guy, he could be like 300 years from now, who knows? That's a very vague timeline. Whereas in the past with point-to-point with roads with Cybertruck, with space data centers, all the other Elon pitches have been very focused on, we think we can do this in 5 years. We think we can do this in 2 years. And he always gets criticized for being Elon math, too aggressive, but then history's shown that, you know, he overpromises, underdelivers, but he typically does deliver eventually. And if the technology is completely new, no one else was gonna build it and he's the first one to build it, Like, it's fine because Starlink works. It was the first LEO constellation for satellite internet, had turned into a huge business, wound up being a great technology. And so even if it was late, I don't even remember the Starlink predictions, but even if that was late, it's fine. It was still good business. Now the mass driver's a lot crazier. I was going back and forth with Tyler about this, trying to get him to nail down a prediction. We started with 100 years. Do you think it's possible to put a mass driver on the Moon in the next 100 years?

Yeah, but—

And you said yes. So it's possible.

Yes, there's all sorts of qualifications. I think the thing, it was like 300 metric tons.

Okay, we will go through my conditions. We will also go through my timeline, and then we will get everyone's predictions for how, long this will actually take. So first, there was this interesting moment last year when everyone sort of like came around to the same AGI predictions or the same superintelligent predictions saying 8, 10 years. George Hotz, Dwarkesh Karpathy, Sam Altman. There were a number of people that were all saying in various words, like Sam said, a few thousand days. Dwarkesh had this probability distribution that said 2032. And so everyone was sort of in the, in the 7 to 10-year range. And it was just this interesting moment in the AI industry, at least, where everyone had a clear definition of like what superintelligence would be. And then simultaneously everyone was like, yeah, it's not this year, it's more like 10. And so it was a cool set of discussions and I enjoyed that moment from last year, sort of around November last year, fall. But there's way, like we are so far away from consensus around mass driver timelines. I thought it'd be interesting to start developing a thought process around what is a mass driver, what does success look like, and what are reasonable timelines here? Even though I agree with everyone, with what you're thinking, which is that it's really far away, because it is. So first, we have to define what a mass driver actually is. In simple terms, it's an electromagnetic launch system fixed on the lunar surface that converts energy So you put down some solar panels, you take energy, that's the electromagnetic. So you're not putting up fuel and then, because that's extra cost, you, once you're there, you can just repeatedly get sunlight, turn that into energy, and you, it's fixed to the lunar surface, and it's going to successfully accelerate a payload to lunar escape velocity, which is 1/5 of Earth's escape velocity. You gotta be going 5,000 miles an hour to escape the moon's gravity well, you have to be going 25,000 miles per hour to escape Earth's. So from an efficiency, an energy efficiency standpoint, it's much better to leave from the moon than to leave from Earth. So then the payload needs to go somewhere useful. Like you make this thing, in this video, he's talking about making satellites on the moon. That's even farther away, but those have to go somewhere. So you can't just launch them into deep space, I mean, unless that's where you're going. Usually you would go to a lunar orbit or an Earth orbit or some point in between the Moon and Earth. And there are more intermediate steps. You don't need to go straight to satellite with a chip on it from the Moon to wherever it's going. You can start just by launching rocks, which sounds crazy, or water or hydrogen. If there's ice on the Moon, you can split that into hydrogen that can be used used as fuel with electricity. Electrolysis is the technique for that. Even just moon rocks can be used as radiation shielding.

Gabe says, "What is this mass driver you speak of? SpaceX is getting in the supplements game." That's a great name for us. They should make a—

They've done the Tesla Tequila.

Yeah, exactly. They should make a mass gainer that they release now and say, "Hey, you'll get, if you buy this, you'll get priority access to the mass driver." on the Moon.

I like this. I like this a lot. I would definitely be a daily driver of the mass driver. And so, yeah, there's this question of like, you set up this thing that's gonna take forever, be really expensive. What are you actually pushing into space? You probably start with basic materials. So rock, literally rocks, metal, oxygen, water, a lot of useful space infrastructure needs.

What if the asteroids that we get into our atmosphere is just an advanced civilization somewhere else just hurling—

Mass driving?

Mass driving.

I saw, I saw—

Yeah, we're downrange, guys, relax.

I saw a hilarious take that the first UFO that will arrive on Earth will just be a car guy from another galaxy who like got into building a crazy supercar effectively.

Taking it out on the Earth.

And somebody was like, you can't get to Earth in that thing. That's too modded. That's too crazy. You're gonna break down. There's no way. And he's like, I'll show you.

You're gonna be too old by the time you get there.

I'll show you. I've modded this thing. A lot of useful space infrastructure needs heavy shielding. That means water, regolith, other dense materials are good for shielding humans and sensitive equipment to radiation. There's been a lot of fear around the radiation around affecting different instruments or humans in space. So you wrap them in moon dust or water, and then that reflects the, or diffuses the radiation. You can also potentially get propellant from the moon. If you can extract water, from ice from the Moon, especially near the poles. That water can support people, 'cause you can drink it. Or you can split it into hydrogen and oxygen for rocket propellant. So here are the 4 conditions I think need to be met in order to say, yes, we have a working mass driver on the Moon. This is how I'd formulate this bet with Tyler Cosgrove over there. 1, you need a permanently installed electromagnetic launcher, and it has to be on the lunar surface. This should be obvious too. It has to launch at least 300 metric tons over a 12-month period. This means it's driving significant mass, not just test payloads. Let's aim for 95% mission success and at least 200 launches per year. Failures are gonna happen, but we wanna get this reliable and at commercial scale, and that means that it can't be breaking down all the time. Lastly, the mass launched from the moon has to actually be put to use. You can't just have this demo unit that's just blasting rocks into the sun. It's gotta go to something useful. And that could just be water that's going somewhere else or, you know, rocks that are going somewhere else, but it needs to be like we're catching them somewhere. There's a reason that it's going there.

How do you adjust the direction?

I think at the last second, if you have the trajectory right, it's like how much do you go up? How much do you go over? How much do you go left? And it's just like—

And then of course, once whatever's launched is— floating in space and you can use propulsion to kind of move around.

But yeah, so I mean, with that, it seems like it's a pretty, like, it's a pretty basic satellite that doesn't have any propulsion on it, but you could potentially put some, you know, like even just a gas canister.

Yeah, I was more asking, 'cause it's like, okay, do we need every possible angle of mass driver? How many mass drivers do we need? 'Cause I'm assuming we don't wanna send every single thing that we wanna send into space.

The exact same angle.

The exact same direction.

Okay, we're gonna sell that one later. That's a 2065 issue. We'll get there. Quickly, let me tell you about public.com, investing for those that take it seriously. Stocks, options, bonds, cryptos, treasuries, and more with great customer service. And let me also tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in-store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. So once all four of those conditions are met, it will be hard to argue that we're in some sort of demo phase or publicity stunt. We know we love a publicity stunt. But this needs to be actually commercial. I'm looking for Model 3 level success, not Tesla Semi level success. I want to see this actually working, reviews, economics. I want other companies being like, "Yes, I benefit. I'm a buyer of mass from the driver." So how long will this take? My like, best case—

You should put the goalposts on the mass driver because the way that you keep moving them is—

Okay, I'm moving the goalposts on this?

I feel like I'm just trying to dial in Oh, it needs to be economically viable.

I mean, what Elon showed was extremely economically viable. If you're just up on the moon and the moon's just producing satellites with chips that are fabbed and they just go into space, like that's extremely economically valuable as long as he can get the cost down.

Yeah.

And build it in some reasonable amount of time. And it's gonna take a long time. So how long will it take? I put the over-under at like 15 to 20 years, which is about as aggressive as I could get. I think Tyler's gonna take the other side of this.

Well, I'm gonna take the over.

You're gonna take over 20?

15 years is, I think, kind of crazy.

15 years is a blink of an eye. It really is.

Well, personally, you know, I think I have a bit more AGI pill than you, Tyler.

Okay.

So.

Okay. Well, let's go through the 6 steps.

Just say you've lost faith.

The 6 steps. 6 steps. Okay, so first off, we gotta get to the moon. We can't really get to the moon right now. We're like, we're pretty close. With like really small payloads. We need reliable, heavy lunar launch capacity, and that's gonna take some time. So Starship needs to be refueling in orbit, landing on the Moon with and without crews, 'cause you're probably gonna need some humans up there, some robots, and we need to start routine cargo flights to the Moon. So this is straight up like 3 to 5 years away, like minimum. Then you need to build the power infrastructure. So mass driving hogs electricity. You need to deploy a 100-kilowatt solar array, then build out energy storage systems so you can burst power during launches and ultimately scale to multi-megawatt continuous power generation plant. So that's another couple of years, 'cause once you're actually going up and back, you have to put down a bunch of solar panels, store it in batteries, and then the batteries need to be able to deliver a lot of power all of a sudden. Now this is what the Tesla does, right? You can charge your Tesla Model S Plaid off of solar panels. It'll take, you know, a couple days. And then when you're ready to go 0 to 60 in 2 seconds, like it can deliver that energy very, very quickly. And that's what you need for an electromagnetic mass driver because it's a railgun basically. So.

Yeah, and to SpaceX team's credit, this stuff can, a lot of this stuff can be done in parallel, right? By the time, like I would hope that 5 years from now Optimus is quite good, functional, valuable. At that point in time, maybe we can get to the moon and back.

And I've talked to SpaceX folks who have been working on on putting solar panels out on Mars. The problem with Mars is it's farther away from the sun, so you have to put out a lot of solar panels. And that's why maybe they're thinking nuclear on Mars. But it's not like they've never thought about how do you deploy solar once you get to another celestial body. They've been thinking about this for at least over a decade that I know of. So robotic construction capacity, you got to get autonomous construction rovers at least up and running to lay the electromagnetic track. You have to solve for all the insane forces during high acceleration, deal with thermal expansion. So you're basically laying train tracks that have electromagnetic coils in them. So they're way more particular than just like railroad tracks. But then those coils, all that infrastructure has to deal with being -280°F during the night and then +260°F during the day. I think. So like massive, massive temperature fluctuations. And that means everything expands, contracts. If you have metal there, it gets brittle during the night, it gets warmer during the day. That's maybe 3 years of work, maybe a lot more, who knows? Then you actually have to build the mass driver on Earth, like you, 'cause you don't have the infrastructure to build anything up there yet. So you have to build most of it on Earth. You need to ship hundreds of tons of superconduction coils to the moon. The physics behind all this stuff actually comes from a Navy scientist back in the 1970s. And so, we know that this is possible.

Wait, isn't his pitch, we're just gonna just drop a bunch of robots on the moon and they're gonna just like mine and refine rare earths and then build out the manufacturing facility with those rare earths and like just kind of become a self-replicating civilization, fully autonomous civilization? Like I thought the whole pitch was that we didn't have to send I think we definitely have to send like close to finished goods.

I would be very surprised if you can go and just scoop up some lunar regolith and be like, okay, step one, make a wrench, make a hammer. Okay, now I have a hammer and a wrench. Now let's make some rebar. Let's make some cement. All of that is very, you would just logically, you would pull it forward by delivering some of that. Premade because it's just one extra SpaceX launch to get up there and then have a CNC machine or something. I don't know, whatever you put up there. You're not going to go with nothing. You're looking at another 5 years here at least. You'll need dozens of dedicated cargo flights just to get the several hundred-ton system up there. Then you need to assemble the track sections with humans or more likely robotic crews, integrate the supply, the power supply and cooling systems, test everything rigorously. Integration hell can take years, but should overlap with some of the other milestones. Lastly, you need to shift into operational launches. Your first payload needs to achieve escape velocity. And at no point can a catastrophic failure result in permanent damage to the mass driver or the energy infrastructure. And obviously we've seen test failures at SpaceX where things blow up and it can hurt other support infrastructure and that can delay things.

And so you know how long the mass driver is roughly?

I think like, 1 kilometer is about enough, but I'm not 100% sure on where that is, but that's a long way to go.

If the California government thinking about 1 kilometer of track.

That's 50 years right there. So, you know, just testing all that, not damaging things, any unforeseen setbacks, that's another 5 years with lots of variability. The good news is that once you build it, once you've built it, like the benefits are really good. Like, you don't have an atmosphere. There's no drag, no weather, no air resistance. And of course gravity is a lot less. So you still need a plan for where the mass goes after it's driven. You gotta catch it, kind of. And that's a whole other problem. But, and when you add all these projects up, you start easily getting into the decades. But—

And what— and the render just kind of played. Yeah. Everyone clapped. And then the presentation was over. But the idea is to put more space data centers on these?

Yeah. I mean, if you think about this in like the most grand project you can imagine, which is like the Dyson Sphere, basically solar panels directly around the sun, all the way around the sun to capture all of its energy, you're gonna need to send a lot of solar panels to the sun. Making those on the moon is lower cost potentially. Than making them on Earth. That's the theory. But then in the meantime, Elon's clearly thinking about making at least part of the satellite up there. And then, I mean, you could ship up the chips and just make the housing up there if that's the heaviest part. You could make the more economically precise valuable piece up here, drop off a bunch of chips, drop them into the actual, little, you know, housing that's been made and then launch those into orbit. There's a whole bunch of others.

Yeah, but then you're sending chips from here to the Moon and then they're being sent back, right?

No, they're not being sent back. They're being sent into various orbits.

Okay, so these are not the—

Yeah, and then again, my concern, and again, I'm not a mass driver expert, I'm just kind of thinking through this, is like, what if the, like, you got like one shot basically?

Well, I mean, the Moon's like movements are pretty predictable. Predictable. And it's not like the Moon's just up there going crazy, right? Like the Moon is like rotating on its—

It's like extremely predictable.

It's perfectly predictable.

You predicted hundreds of years.

Yeah. And so if you have it lined up so that every day at least it lines up to be the perfect angle, like then you just launch right then.

I know, but you're saying we're launching them back into like just into Earth's orbit.

Earth's orbit, yeah.

Toward where the SpaceX—

Yeah, yeah, you are kind of round-tripping. But it's the equivalent of like dropping a ball versus throwing it up. Like you're dropping stuff. The whole point is that more mass starts up there.

It seems clear that it's gonna require like the vast majority of the components for these satellites being made entirely on the Moon. Otherwise it could very well not make sense.

Yeah, yeah, no, totally. Like there is no benefit to bring a fully complete Starlink satellite up there and then driving it from the moon down to low Earth orbit. That makes no sense. The only thing that makes sense is if you're able to get something like the vast majority of the mass, ideally 100% of the mass from what's already on the moon, 'cause that's already been driven up there. It's already at low gravity. Like the energy is stored effectively.

I'm seeing a tourism angle when the mass driver's pointed back at the Earth. To be in a little like bobsled type thing, a little pod to be launched at the Earth, and then you kind of break through the atmosphere and then you parachute. Yeah, that could be good for like gender reveal birthday parties, you know.

Potentially.

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Okay, predictions. Tyler, you're going over 20 years.

You're going over 20 years.

Are you going under 70 years?

Yeah, it's just so hard because like right now I don't, it's hard to see like a real economic incentive to do this. Like, because even space data centers, it's like still pretty hard to like figure out how, like why that like really makes sense.

Yeah, yeah.

But then like for this to work, you need maybe space data centers, but you also need them to somehow be built on the moon for them to make sense, right?

Yeah.

So I think, yeah, maybe I'll like median is like something like 70 years.

70 years. Okay. Median, 70.

Give me 50, 50 years.

50 years. Okay. 50 years. Getting more techno optimist over here. Jordi, if I'm at 20 and Tyler's at 50, where are you? And while you think about it, let me tell everyone about Apple of profitable advertising made easy with Axon.ai. Get access to over 1 billion daily active users and grow your business today.

Okay.

You got it?

My concern is that an Elon, like Elon is—

I didn't specify Elon.

Okay.

It could be anybody.

But I'm just saying there's a lot of, there's—

I'm just saying mass driver on the moon.

This needs an Elon-esque figure to accomplish. And yeah, I'm thinking more in that 50, 50-year rate.

Over 50 or under 50? We gave Tyler exactly.

I changed, I'm going 30.

30?

What?

Oh, I think what changed?

Well, I was just like, you know, AGI is like basically here. There's no way it's going to take that long.

There we go. There we go.

It's like everything will be so cheap.

Okay, so you want to know, I mean, I was thinking 5 years. 5 years? I was thinking months, specifically 50,000 months.

I mean, when, you know, OpenAI Codex 6 comes out.

Yeah, totally possible. One-shot it. Yeah, no, no, no, no, even in the software-only singularity, there is just amount of time that takes to build things.

I have a pull to mid-curve this one.

Okay.

And just think, okay, this is just a big pump.

Yes.

This is just a big pump. You're mid-curve, no big curve. We need the semiconductor pump, we need the space pump, the mass driver pump to get there. To the $2 trillion valuation. We need a lot of pumps going on, right? Space data centers, mass drivers, semis, like it's the final pump basically. That is the mid curve.

That's the mid curve.

That's the mid curve.

Okay, okay. What's the left curve? The left curve is Elon good. Elon good businessman.

Elon good AI accelerate.

Yeah, Elon good businessman.

5 years.

Elon make thing. Elon put a thing in space.

Elon do hard thing.

Elon do hard thing.

And then the right would be just like insane AI acceleration. What does Elon know?

Yeah. And who else is gonna do it? He has all the infrastructure. He's cornered the launch market. He's shown a big track record. Yeah.

The politics thing.

Yeah.

It's hard to see how real it is. Yeah, right. I don't know, because these data centers on land do generate a lot of local revenues.

Yeah.

And there are going to be plenty of places that want them. Yeah, but, uh, so hard not to make curry.

Well, while you think of your final estimate, knowing that I'm at 20, Tyler's at 30, and you are undecided, let me tell everyone about Gusto, the unified platform for payroll benefits and HR built to evolve with modern small and medium-sized businesses. What's your final answer?

10 years.

10 years? 10 years.

Until we have—

10 years.

Until we have—

You lost Jordi. That's too aggressive. I never said 10. Don't hold me to that.

No, I said maybe his lifetime.

10 years to an MVP.

No, no, no, no. It needs to specifically be launching 300 metric tons, 95% mission success, 200 launches a year. It needs to be pumping mass. —needs to be driving. Never? Never? I think—

No, I think— I think pumping mass? Driving mass. Driving mass. It's got to be— I'm thinking 2100.

Okay. Based on just average life expectancy, he's got another 20 years. 54, average life expectancy is 75, 76. He has access to all sorts of stuff, you know, could go for 30, could go for 40 plus. Like you forget that like Apple introduced products after Steve Jobs passed away. Like companies continue to exist, company and projects will be picked up. There will be other competitors. This isn't even specifically an Elon thing. This is a humanity thing.

I think there actually is like a— What about China?

Like China could do it.

Maybe if there's some economic incentive found on Mars or like asteroid mining, like it actually does make sense to do, to launch from the moon, right? Because it's like so much easier. It requires way less energy. Yeah. So.

2100. 75 years. 75 years. There is another mass driver idea which is you build this You take a shuttle to the moon, and then if you want to go to Mars, you are mass-driven from the moon to Mars.

Ryan says, "Roadster has been 10 years since they sold out pre-orders. This isn't gonna happen." The Roadster is happening.

Ryan, is it never going to happen? Like you would say Roadster's not gonna have, I mean, Roadster could just get completely canceled, but no one does it. I'm not even saying Elon, I'm saying humanity, mass driver, moon, over-under 2,100? 75 years, you got 74 years. It seems possible, I don't know.

Okay, which one do you think is the best? What about mass driver on the moon? So here's the thing. You have to make so many, you have to come to terms with so many incredible technological leaps to get to the point where the mass driver on the moon is mass driving. If, assume we get all those leaps, can we not just mass drive from, let's say, the Earth?

I don't think so. I mean, there's a company that's doing this.

It's 25,000 miles per hour.

There's a company that's doing this called like Spin Launch.

The fastest plane has been, is like that NASA plane. It's like 7,000 miles an hour.

7,000? I thought it was like a couple thousand. I don't know. Fastest plane. Yeah, look up the fastest plane. We'll tell you about the McCallip default, which Andrew McCallip, friend of the show over at Varda Space, was in The Economist. The cost of a 1 gigawatt data center in space, he pegged it at $50 billion. Star Cloud is aiming for $16 billion. Star Cloud at $200 a kilogram is around $10, $11 billion per gigawatt. Okay.

Fastest aircraft speed ever recorded is Mach 9.6 by an unmanned NASA X-43 scramjet on November 16th, 2004. How fast is that? It's nearly 7,000 miles per hour. Okay.

So, we got to 5x that or something? To get to 4x that to get to escape velocity, to escape the, to just like do the thing from Interstellar and just drive the plane into the atmosphere and just go to space. Maybe, maybe. Do you think we will have mass driver on the Moon first or mass driver on the Moon first or?

ZIT says the mid curve is definitely right. Okay, go ahead.

Total victory. Mass driver on the moon first or Atlantis first? Atlantis. Full society of people living underwater in like some sort of glass dome where it's fully sustained. You can go, you can move there and be like, yeah, I got a buddy who moved to the new Atlantis and I haven't seen him in 3 years. He's just been down there happy living life. Which one do you think happens first?

I've been very bullish on Atlantis data centers.

Yeah, Atlantis data centers. Atlantis data centers actually make a ton of sense, right? Don't you get a ton of cooling for free? Yeah, there's like all sorts of stuff that—

You get no energy. No, the vents. The vents? Geothermal vents. Geothermal, okay. No one's talking about underwater data centers. No one's doing this.

Call up James Cameron. He'll be on this. Let me tell you about vibe.co, where D2C brands, B2B startups, and AI companies advertise on streaming TV, pick channels, target audiences, and measure sales just like on Meta. And let me also tell you about Phantom Cash. Fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen and spend with the Phantom card. Okay, so we have—

It's so hard to be bearish on the technology business programming network. I'm sorry, everyone. I'm sorry. We got a decel over here. Yeah, we got a decel over here.

True decel with a crazy IP doom over here.

No, I mean, 2100 is pretty acceleration pilled if you look at the fact that going to the moon is now a lost art that we're trying to establish.

I've talked to a lot of people in tech that say, the 2100 milestone is Dyson Sphere. And so like you probably get the mass driver before you get the Dyson Sphere.

Like full Dyson Sphere?

Full, maybe over 50% coverage. Yeah, 2100, because like this is based on superintelligence. Yeah, well this is like, you know, every AI company is a Dyson Sphere company. At the end of the day, potentially, yeah. And then the question of what is it? Kardashev 1 is all the sunlight falls on the Earth. Kardashev 2 is solar panels all the way around the entire Sun, so we get the sunlight that doesn't just hit Earth, it also hits Mars, also hits the backside. You get all of that power. So much more power than just Kardashev 1. But then I think Kardashev 3 is every— you're harvesting energy from every Sun in your, not your solar system, but your galaxy or something like that. Like everything in the Milky Way, it gets really crazy. In the galaxy. In the galaxy. And that's a lot of power. That's a lot of power. By then it's totally possible that like you won't be able to tell the difference between like AI-generated imagery and like real imagery. With that much power, it's entirely possible that it could be funny.

It'll be able to—

It'll be able to automate workflows.

Yeah. It'll be able to do high school level Yeah, homework for sure.

Reliably for sure. Well, we have a related prediction from Kelsey about, uh, Tesla. Will the Tesla Optimus be released this year? It's sitting at a 25.4% chance, and it jumped a little bit just over the past week. It was down at 19%, it's pumped to almost 30%, now it's down at 25% based on, uh, the more recent announcements from from Elon Musk.

Anyways, to end on some positivity, I am glad that Tesla and Elon Inc. are going to be focused on chip manufacturing. I think we'll get some very, uh, I think we'll get some real progress there. And, uh, it is good for America, it's good for the world that they are choosing to work on this very hard problem.

I agree with that. I had a different positive conclusion as well, which is I think it's fine to think in decades and share a vision that is decades away. The last thing I want is for technologists to be devoid of long-term vision. I really don't want there to be like an end of the tunnel. Oh, we're just working towards superintelligence and then we can all become complacent. I'd much rather get excited about projects many years away or decades away that only have a slight chance of working rather than the alternative which is just stagnation. And so I'm cheering for the mass driver and there's that old phrase, "Shoot for the moon, if you miss, you'll land among the stars." And I couldn't agree more with that.

I think it's the other, "Shoot for the stars, you'll land on the moon," right?

No, it's not that. It's, "Shoot for the moon, if you miss, you'll land amongst the stars." If you shoot for the stars, you're just gonna randomly land anywhere. The chance that you land on the moon—

But the moon is closer than the stars.

No, no, no, no, you shoot for the moon, which is this narrow target, and if you miss, you go off into the stars.

Okay, you're talking about directions, I'm talking about like distance, right? Yeah. If you're shooting for the stars, you don't get all the way there, you're still, you see the moon.

Once you've reached escape velocity, if you miss the moon, you'll just keep going until you hit a star. It might take you a long time, but you will land there. I think I'm right about that. I don't think, look it up, look it up.

So, let's head over to— Take us somewhere else, Jordi.

Let's head over to suspense.

Suspended Cap. What do they have to say? Are they bullish on— is Suspended Cap bullish on the presentation?

Suspended Cap says, "TeraFab is a blatant pump. It actually disgusts me. There will never be leading-edge chips from them. There will never be data centers in space. It's such a blatant effort to IPO SpaceX on the back of some pie-in-the-sky BS and then merge with Tesla, do humongous raise, and keep blah, blah, blah, blah, blah for 5 years." Anyway, Suspended Cap's not a fan. D-Cell. SysMedic has a D-Cell. Anyway, let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web app servers and databases and more while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security. Should we go over to the mall king? Where should we go next, Jordi?

Oh, the mall king.

I said we're going to mall king. OK, so there was an obituary in the Wall Street Journal for David Simon. He was a mall king who was both feared and admired He had ruthless negotiation tactics, an obsession with details, and a sheer force of will that turned his family's real estate business into the largest mall owner in the country. He passed away on Sunday after a cancer diagnosis in 2024. He was diagnosed with cancer in 2024. He was 64 years old. During his more than 3 decades as Simon Property Group's chief executive, the inveterate dealmaker gobbled up competitors and defied critics who said malls were obsolete. Over a decades-long buying spree, he cobbled together an empire that spanned 250 properties and 2,000— or 206 million square feet, giving Simon control of more retail space than anyone in the world. His success helped propel the family to the wealthiest echelons with an estimated net worth of $11.6 billion, ranking number 38 on Forbes magazine's list of the richest American families. The Simon family, through a charitable The Triple Ten Nation donates to many causes, including a $5 million gift to Columbia University. At a time when malls were failing and retailers were filing for bankruptcy, Simon invested in his properties, beefed up their luxury offerings, and added non-shopping tenants such as high-end fitness centers, high-tech mini golf courses, and upscale residence. I feel like that has been the secret to success with the modern mall. There's a lot of malls that have sort mid-tier or low-end retailers where it is actually pretty comparable to shopping online. You go in, there's no one that's really going to talk to you. The stuff's just there. It might be on the floor. It's messy. But then there are certain malls that have leaned into the higher-end experience. And they're, oh, would you like a drink? Let's talk about what you're thinking. Let's show you all this stuff. Try this on. And it's much more— it's just in a completely different tier than e-commerce shopping. Shopping. And so, I feel like those properties and those chains have done very well. So, along with partners, he snapped up ailing retailers, including Aeropostale, Nautica, Eddie Bauer, JCPenney, Forever 21, Lucky Brand, and Brooks Brothers. The arrangement propped up the chains, prevented large vacancies in Simon malls, and turned out to be moneymakers for the company. Effective Monday, Simon's board appointed Eli Simon, one of David Simon's 5 children, as as its CEO and president. The mall king was both feared and admired and could be both charming and terrifying. Simon unleashed a tirade at Coach executive Todd Kahn during their first meeting in the decade of the 2000s after the handbag maker tried to renege on deals to open stores in Simon malls. There was no shortage of profanity, Kahn said. The two came to an agreement and became friends. Nothing like a screaming match to kick off a lifelong friendship. David's word was his bond. You could have bang-out meetings, but if you came to a resolution and you shook hands, it was golden. That's a good way of doing business.

Well, RIP to the mall king. To the mall king. And hopefully we'll get a chance to meet Eli at some point.

Yes. OpenAI is offering private equity firms a guaranteed minimum return of 17.5%, as well as early access to models not yet in public release. There was a lot of chatter on the timeline going back and forth like, is this some sort of weird guarantee? Is this not normal for private equity dealing? Market Participant had to break it all down to take you through it. So why don't you read through some of this? But first I will tell everyone about MongoDB. What is the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI, own the data platform that powers it.

Many are saying OpenAI's $10 billion private equity joint venture is giving a desperate feeling. A lot of people are throwing up the red flag emoji, saying vendor financing dressed up as venture capital, guaranteed returns that smell like a Ponzi, a company burning $14 billion this year buying distribution it can't earn organically. I'd push back. TPG Bain Capital, Advent, and Brookfield put up $4 billion. They get preferred equity with a 17.5% minimum return, board seats. And early access to OpenAI's newest model. OpenAI gets instant distribution into hundreds of portfolio companies. No traditional enterprise sales cycles, no selling company by company. The part people are missing: a huge number of software companies are privately held. Thoma Bravo alone owns 75 software companies generating $30 billion of annual revenue. PE firms collectively did $1.8 trillion in buyouts last year. These companies are shifting to heavy token consumption. AWS knows this. They run a dedicated its PE sales function. Talk about a dream job.

That, oh, I would kill for that.

Yeah. Yeah, if you love private equity. Yes. Hard to imagine anything better. Advisory programs, transformation consultants, the whole apparatus. Azure and GCP do the same. OpenAI is running the cloud distribution playbook. Wholesale tokens to PE portfolios at scale. The difference is exclusivity. AWS doesn't ask PE firms to put up $4 billion to take board seats. They give the advisory away. OpenAI is asking for, for capital commitment, which buys preferential access, dedicated forward-deployed engineers, and a financial incentive for the firm to actually push adoption across its portfolio. A firm that invested $4 billion in this JV isn't running a parallel RFP with Anthropic. That's the point. The 17.5% return looks like a red flag until you look at it closely. It's preferred equity hurdle, not a coupon on debt. This is the main thing that the hundreds of posts I saw are missing. Priority on returns before common shareholders. So it's preferred equity plus a return on top of that. Mm-hmm. OpenAI is buying captive distribution channel into enterprises they'd otherwise spend years trying to reach. Anthropic is running a parallel deal with Blackstone, Hellman Friedman, and Permira. It's $1 billion common equity, no guaranteed return, more of a Palantir-style consulting venture. Both companies doing this simultaneously tells you where enterprise AI is heading. The bear case is real. 95% of enterprise AI pilots fail to deliver ROI. I've already gone— Yeah, that's not true anymore, but— Yeah, that was one study. And again, it was every— Agent decoding.

Yeah.

14 billion in projected losses this year. Profitability not expected until 2029. All True and OpenAI's enterprise business is already $10 billion of $25 billion in revenue, 40% and growing to 50% by year end. The distribution problem is what's left to solve. Um, and anyways, goes, goes on and on. But, uh, yeah, overall I think like people are taking one data point out of context, kind of spinning it into something that, that that looks quite extreme and concerning when in reality is just giving them a preferred return, which is somewhat normal.

Yeah. Good takes here. Let me tell you about Cognition. They're the makers of Devin the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. And let me also tell you about Okta. Okta helps you assign every AI agent a trusted identity so you get the power of AI without the risk. Risk secure every agent, secure any agent.

Financial Times had some reporting Saturday: OpenAI to double workforce as business push intensifies. I love a business push, so this is fantastic news. Matt Slotnick says, TBH, the biggest risk to incumbents may be that labs absorb all the top talent. Labs already get great engineering talent, but this will spread to product, sales, marketing, etc., when they become the optimal destination to solve the problems of your customers, it's going to get ugly. Yeah, basically, you know, you have a big enterprise instead of going and doing and trying to figure out like the right SaaS solution for a specific problem. You can go to a lab and get something similar. As part of that workforce push, OpenAI tapped former Meta executive to lead their ad push.

Yeah. Why is no one talking about Dave Duke?

The Duganator. It's, it's crazy. Dave Dugan, a former top advertising executive at Meta, is going to lead sales, ad sales. Dugan, who announced earlier this month he was stepping down from his role as vice president of global clients and agencies at Meta, has been named vice president of global ad solutions for OpenAI. He will report to Brad Lightcap. The Lightcapinator. The high-profile hire underscores OpenAI's urgent push to generate new revenue streams. To support its enormous funding requirements for its computing needs.

Yeah, Eric Suford had some good, good commentary around like the ad sales strategy. People were complaining that like the advertisers that bought the first ad campaigns on ChatGPT said the process was low tech and that they haven't received much data showing if their ads worked. Two executives at agencies working with early ChatGPT advertisers said they haven't yet been able to prove the ads have driven any measurable business outcomes for their clients. Eric Sufert over at Mobile Dev Memo shared two thoughts on reporting that early ChatGPT ad campaigns lacked performance data. One, this is to be expected. Any early offering will feature limited functionality. Early adopters should be prepared to fill measurement gaps themselves with polling, you know, or any other sort of pixels or tracking you should be able to to work this together. There's been plenty of times— this was the early podcast ads. You know, you'd run a bunch of podcast ads and be like, okay, some people use the coupon code, but a lot of people don't. What multiplier should I apply to that? And then you'd wind up surveying your customer base and being like, wait, we spent 10% of our marketing budget on podcast ads, but 20% of our customers said they found out about us from a podcast. Like, maybe we should spend more there, right? And that's the role of a good ad agency. Measuring incredibly at asserting performance is precisely what ad agencies are paid to do, says Eric Sufert. He says, if an ad agency says it can't provide performance data because the channel doesn't provide it, it is merely a media buying intermediary. If you're an ad agency, you've got to figure out whether or not the ads that you pitch to your clients are actually working. Quickly, let me tell you about 11Labs. Intelligent real-time conversational agents reimagine human technology interaction with 11 labs. Mark Zuckerberg.

Big scoop. Huge from Megan over at the Journal. Mark Zuckerberg is building a CEO agent to help him do his job. Employees are also adopting AI agents and AI tools internally, namely MyClaw. MyClaw. MyClaw. My dude.

And Second Brain. In a bid to speed up work as they get graded on AI use.

And so, Tyler, where's our MyClaw and our second brain? I think in our co-host, um, yeah, I don't know.

I'm so interested to know what, uh, what most are doing.

Prompting Revenge says ZStack. Yeah, it is. Honestly, Zuck's ZStack is like, it's like God now.

I mean, it does make sense in his position to have a model that's fine-tuned on the internal KPIs, the internal org chart, all this information that's private. And he probably doesn't wanna hand that off to another lab that's just gonna maybe look at the data and be like, oh, okay, so Mark Zuckerberg just asked, how do I poach from all the other labs? Maybe we should go on the defense. But there's gotta be so many other questions that he's asking all the time. When you're walking into a meeting with executives, you want to know, well, how is this division performing? How much money am I spending on Meta Ray-Ban displays? What's the turn rate? Who are our biggest partners? There's a million questions.

Yeah, we're joking around, but ZStack does make sense. It does make sense. You should be able to have God mode.

Yeah, and I mean, this has the, There are companies that are starting to do this where they're pitching their agent stacks for CEOs. Bordy is sort of one version of that, right? But there's more and more people that are like, okay, we will come in and fine-tune something for your organization specifically and maybe do that on the fly. Maybe that's just ChatGPT Enterprise or Anthropic Enterprise or whatever. Zuck clearly wants something built from the ground up. And it's also a great product demo because if it works really well for him, then it can probably— the lessons and the learnings from there will probably apply to other people in the ecosystem. So the agent, which is still in development, is currently helping Zuckerberg get information faster, for instance, by retrieving answers for him that he would typically have to go through layers of people to get. Zuckerberg's agent project reflects a drive across the 7 78,000-person company to accelerate the pace of work, eliminate layers from its organizational structure, and change the day-to-day jobs of its employees to remain competitive with AI-native startups with much smaller staffs. The company views AI adoption as critical to the future of success. Zuckerberg has been spending more time coding recently. He previewed some of the efforts at the company's earnings call in January. Quote, we are investing in AI-native tooling so individuals at Meta can get more done. We're elevating individual contributors and flattening teams, he said. If we do this, then I think we're going to get a lot more done and I think it'll be a lot more fun. I love that. We have our guests in the Restream waiting room, I believe. First, let me tell you about Plaid. Plaid powers the apps you use to spend, save, borrow, and invest, securely connecting bank accounts to improve money, fight fraud, and improve lending. Now with AI, Gemini. And let me also tell you about Gemini 3.1 Pro with a more capable baseline. It's great for super complex tasks like visualizing difficult concepts, synthesizing data into a single view, or bringing creative projects to life. And without further ado, let's kick off the peptide debate. Welcome to the stream, guys. How are you guys?

Hey, how's it going, guys?

Thank you so much for taking the time. Uh, why don't you both start with an introduction on yourself and maybe your core thesis around peptides. Martin, why don't you go first? Max, please. Oh, Max. OK, sure.

Let's start with Martin. Yeah, so I'm the pharma bro. I represent the interests and the— Of the pharmaceutical industry. I guess viewpoint of the pharmaceutical industry, including but not limited to Pfizer, Merck, Eli Lilly, et cetera. I'm sure those guys love that.

And you're the face of pharma, whether they like it or not.

There you go. Sort of a self-trained biopharmaceutical expert. I think I can speak at a pretty high level about every inch of the pharmaceutical industry. I've discovered brand new drugs, I've acquired drugs, I've commercialized drugs. I've just about anything you can do in the drug industry, I've done it. And so I'm very concerned about the peptide craze. I think it comes mostly out of psychological issues, which we'll discuss. The need for identity control, distrust of institutions, all kinds of things like that are leading to what we're seeing today.

Great. And Max?

Hi, I'm Max, former peptide skeptic turned peptide believer. I run a healthcare company called Superpower, and our thesis is that the health system today does a good job when you're sick. It doesn't do a fantastic job at preventing things and actually allowing people to be their best selves. I say a former peptide skeptic because they seem scary, and I say a converted believer because I spoke to dozens of doctors and heard hundreds of clinical vignettes from people who had their lives changed. Now, I don't believe all peptides are safe. I do believe we need more research, but I think there are a subset of things that have improved people's lives. I also think as a modality, peptides are one that are more interesting than before. Now that injecting is normal, now that wellness and optimization is normal, not just treating disease, and now that we have AI for things like computational discovery. So we're early. We need more research. But I think peptides are exciting.

Martin, I'll let you just respond. Yes, it seems like you have something on your mind. But it would be useful to at least define the, the conversation a little bit more, because when we say peptides, we could mean Ozempic prescribed by a doctor for someone who has diabetes and is very overweight. It could also mean the Wolverine stack taken by a a 15-year-old in a gym in Miami, right? And like, there's a wide gap here. So let's maybe narrow it down a little bit to probably off-label use. I don't know exactly where things start to get fuzzy for you guys, but defining a little bit more of where the actual point of debate, because I imagine that there's agreement with the extremes.

Yeah, I mean, isn't there a problem when we have to redefine semantics that have been defined forever? You know, isn't this like somebody saying, you know, I'm using, you know, GPT instead of using AI or something like that? Like, there's a specific meaning. Like peptide has this very specific meaning and they're not new. They're 80 years old. People have been using peptides forever. And in fact, in pharma, you try to avoid peptides because of their inherent weaknesses. You go for small molecules or really large molecules like antibodies. Peptides are sort of the worst of both worlds. So the idea that we've taken this kind of like last place drug class and then turned that into like the standard bearer for do-it-yourself medicine is kind of humorous to anybody who actually understands pharma.

Except that the last, the last drug class has the potentially most impactful drug of all time or set of drugs of all time, the GLP-1 receptor agonists. So I'm not saying we only have peptides in the toolkit, I'm saying the genie's out of the bottle and we cannot ignore peptides as a tool in the toolkit. Small molecules, just like I guess framing, framing it for people who don't understand the difference between these things. Small molecules are made synthetically. Peptides tend to be derived from what already is happening in the body. DNA is the building block of the body and encodes for RNA, which produces proteins and peptides. So these peptides naturally occur. Now, it can sometimes be hard to patent a naturally occurring thing. You can, but it's a little bit harder. Small molecules, on the other hand, are things that humans design to block biology, to block— typically block something that is happening in the body. And again, I'm not saying small molecules are bad, but they're kind of the two different modalities we're talking about here. And we've seen one category of peptides, GLP-1, has already changed the world. And my contention is that there are other categories of peptides that are under-researched but have really interesting kind of clinical vignettes that might change the world going forward. Martin?

Well, there's a bunch. But I think like why we're having this conversation is because people are just, you know, injecting a number of them into themselves now. And you're saying they might change the world, but people are going through the process of self-experimentation. And there's a bunch of companies, private companies that are happily facilitating this and profiting off of it. It when it seems to be a large number of risks that are still unknown. At least that's my point of view.

Yeah, exactly. So I think that's right.

So maybe let's start with stuff that's not fully FDA approved. I think the canonical example would be like the Chinese peptides, the Retas, the stuff you buy online and inject and it's based on some interesting scientific literature, but it hasn't actually been through the full FDA process yet. Where do both of you stand on that?

Yeah, I mean, why do you have a right to pirate somebody's intellectual property? You know, this, this is, this is the property of Eli Lilly. They discovered it, they spent billions of dollars on it. You want to steal it? You want to work with a Chinese company stealing it? I mean, that's not good for America, that's not good for the drug industry. And guess where these Where do these drugs come from? They come from American R&D labs. And if you keep stealing them and pirating them in this like weird Twilight, like, you know, DIY drug system, which is not very large, at least compared to pharma, you know, I don't know if you make a big impact, but if it went very large scale, you would. I mean, you would stop having drugs the same way pirating music would, you know, have huge ramifications for the music ecosystem. You have to respect intellectual property to some extent. And then taking the Retrutiide, which is just sort of a GLP plus, if you will, instead of just waiting for it to be FDA approved or like using Ozempic, I think this is like the worst risk-reward decision you could possibly make. It's like some of the decisions I used to make in the past. You know, what is your upside to taking illegally manufactured Retrutiide from some other place and you can't verify it, etc.? Versus just taking Ozempic. The people that take peptides and have these peptide stacks are mostly people in SF, maybe New York. They're very wealthy people. They don't know what the rest of the world looks like. Nobody else in middle America is excited to do this. It's not normal, Max, to inject yourself with things. You know, this isn't like a thing everyone should be doing. And so to me, the retatrutide case is really insane because this is a drug that Eli Lilly is going to get approved eventually. Especially. And the fact that, you know, there are people dying of certain terrible diseases and they need compassionate use, they need to get on extension programs, but nobody needs retatrutide now, right now, before FDA approval.

So I think the things we agree on are that the existing FDA-approved GLP-1 receptor agonists are an interesting category of drug and they're a peptide and they're impactful. I think we also agree that companies should not do things illegally and infringe on the patent for RETA. I do think the patent system incentivizes innovation. I think the crux of where we disagree is not— and just quickly on the, this is an SF thing, that is not true. I know dozens of people who own these research use companies. If you speak to them, the majority of their audience is middle America, not SF tech bros, despite the tech bros being noisy on Twitter. I think the crux of where we probably disagree is the 14 or so peptides that RFK has said they might move from category 1 to 2, meaning they cannot be compounded back to category 1, meaning they can be compounded. And I guess my, like, general statement here, um, is that people are taking these compounds, right? They're already using them at scale, right? And the way to minimize risk— the way to minimize risk is to move them from category 2 to category 1, right? To legalize them. Because the risky thing is the dodgy supply chain we have today.

The risky thing— well, isn't that— isn't the risk— isn't, isn't the risky thing just doing like massive sort of unofficial, you know, human trials when we don't?

I, I don't think so. So I think, I think that is true, um, for peptides that we do not have longitudinal clinical experience and patient experience with. But let's take something like BPC-157, which is one of the most controversial ones. So let's, let's go right to the meat of things. Let's take something like BPC-157. My contention is that thousands of doctors prescribe this. They do and have prescribed this. You can't prescribe this drug. Uh, they give it to their patients, right? You can prescribe it, give it to their patients. It's not a drug. Thousands do that. Again, my statement is not the semantics of prescribing. My statement is thousands do this. Okay, my other statement is that millions of patients have taken this, at least hundreds of thousands, I believe millions. Americans have taken this. Yeah. That clinical experience, again, is not an RCT, but we cannot ignore it. Yes, you can.

Yes, you can. Okay. Wait, wait, wait. It sounds like there's some sort of fundamental disagreement here about, like, the way BPC-157 is being distributed right now, because I know people that have told me that they've taken it. I thought that they were getting it prescribed or recommended to them. Like, Martin, what is your—

We can agree that it's being being given to them.

I think, I think they're getting it. They're getting it. But what's actually, what's actually happening?

It's being— how is this happening? Out in the back alley? Is that what's happening? In the back alley? It doesn't seem like that.

It seems like, it seems like there are doctors that do have the ability to—

best doctors in the world. So when I was first introduced to peptides, uh, one of the most esteemed doctors in the US said to me, Max, you take so many supplements, have you explored peptides? Because I think they're a really interesting modality with a few decades of clinical use. Sure, right. 'And when he said that to me, I was like, no way, this is bullshit. I'm not injecting myself with something. That was weird.' So, what I did is I went around to around 20 different doctors whose— you should have trusted your gut— whose opinions I respect. And I asked them about peptides. And normally when you ask these doctors about anything, you ask them about red meat, you ask them about spinach, they're all divided. They're all like one view, another view, punches. With peptides, just about all of them accept except one said these are really interesting. I have used these in my patients. Okay. I believe the endogenous molecules, peptides that exist in our body, are going to be the future of medicine. And those doctors have the incentive to not be wrong. If they're wrong, they could go to jail. If they're wrong, they can have their license stripped. If they're wrong, patients don't come back to them. So they have the maximum incentive. And for 10 to 20 years, they still give this to their patients, and their patients say, my life changed. Now you might say it's placebo. My statement is the patient says their life changes and the doctor sees that.

Okay, Martin, I want you to react, but, but I also want you to, to sort of set aside the intellectual property argument. I, I like that argument, but let's focus on the, the what doctors are doing, how BPC-157 is being delivered, that type of thing.

So, so I'm a drug hunter, right? People like me, Vivek Ramaswamy, we look all around the world for medicine to buy and medicine to put into companies that that great firms like a16z and Founders Fund and other more healthcare maybe focused firms will fund, take it to the IPO, which I've done before, and get paid huge amounts of money. That's what I do. That's what I'm good at. That's why I'm the Pharma Bro. BPC-157 is the biggest scam I've ever seen. It does absolutely nothing. There is no redeemable value to this. Do you know the story about it? Do you guys know? No. Please tell us. This guy in Croatia made it. Sitchic, my, my Hinterland brother. And, you know, the only publications about this drug are by him. Nobody else has published about this drug. It's not a drug, in fact. Nobody has even confirmed that it's a peptide from the gastric juice, as he claimed. Nobody can find a sequence that matches that, and the gastric juice of human beings has been thoroughly profiled. It's a 15-mer peptide, so it's 15 amino acids. Half-life is minutes. There's no plausible physiological basis for it to work. And it's been in clinical trials. Plevo was a local drug company in the Balkans, very well respected, might I add. Plevo actually licensed BPC and tried to do clinical trials for it. And guess what? They failed. So this like weird, like, I want to be adopted too thing is—

Do you think it's placebo effect? Because yeah, I talk to people that say, Hey, it's good for recovery. And I can imagine if you're sticking yourself with something, you might feel like, ah, I'm less sore today because it's just—

While you are recovering, you think that the drug is helping you. Of course it isn't. It's the recovery process you're going through. And there's an app for this. If you want to make real money, go make BPC in CGMP conditions and go do a clinical trial. And you can be a trillion-dollar company like Eli Lilly. Instead, you can putz around, you know, buying fake Chinese stuff and then injecting yourself and dreaming that you're doing well. I have a drug here that if I take might also aid my recovery. No, no, no, no. Get out of here. Should I try this?

Should I tell you that it worked for me?

It's an N of 1. Oh my God, I did so great with this N of 1. You know, it healed my recovery. Like, this is nonsense. This is not science. Science is controlled experiments that are well done, very, very carefully documented and so forth. Why are we going backwards? Why do we go forwards in civilization and society? What is this urge by the Valley? And I blame the Valley to go backwards in time and space.

I hear your view and I think other people have it. And we don't know whether these are placebo or not yet. We can't make a definitive statement and we don't have the RCTs.

But I thought you, I thought you said there was studies done on BBC 157.

No, there aren't human, there are no human studies done. Uh, there was one done by Plevo and it failed. There are dozens of studies of drugs that become commercialized that previously fail. Anyway, my view is we don't know whether it's placebo or not yet. That is true. And some people say it's placebo, some will say it's not. My statement is really simple, which is you can have Martin's view, or you can have the view of thousands of doctors who have used this for 10 to 20 years and have their license on the line, the view of millions of patients who talk about their lives changing. You can have that view. My dad's visiting from Australia and he's been taking painkillers for the past 4 months and can't walk upstairs because his back is bad. He took BPC-157 for 3 days and he said to me, Max, this is the first time in 4 months I haven't taken a painkiller. Again, I'm not saying this isn't placebo. I'm saying we don't know. What I'm saying is I am God. I'm really happy my dad's not on a painkiller. Yeah, right. My co-founder, he lost 3 organs in hospital. He had an autoimmune disease. They put him on biologics. He took BPC-157. He's off biologics and he doesn't have an autoimmune disease anymore. Again, we need to study. We will put out money and fund the studies.

Um, put your money where your mouth is.

Exactly. But we can't ignore the real-world evidence.

Again, you are ignoring it if you're not putting your money where your mouth is. If you believe that's true—

oh yeah, no, no, no, we are.

Do what? Do a clinical trial.

We are. Tell me about it. We're, we're in the process of chatting with the people required to set up a clinical trial for this because we will put our money where our mouth is to Because I've seen thousands of doctors, millions of patients, and even the FDA, right, who has said they're going to start legalizing. Even the FDA. Okay, but Max, you can have your view and I don't— that's okay. People will have that view. I will have an option and I'll put my money where my mouth is.

Max, you've never done a clinical trial before, right? You, you've never invested in drug companies before, but you want to do your first clinical trial on, on this drug, which you did in an event, you know, you see— you've heard anecdotal evidence about.

Why? Because I have seen thousands of doctors, millions of patients over 1 to 2 decades, right? Go say to my friend, um, go back on biologics, go back to hospital, lose another organ. Go say, go say to my dad, go back on painkillers every single day. I don't want my dad on painkillers every single day. Now you might say that's placebo. I say I don't know, but I say with the evidence that we currently have, I believe there is more.

You should see, you should see what this galaxy gas does for me. It's amazing. Okay. It's really good.

Is your question, Martin, more that like, okay, you take—

No pharma guy in their right mind would do this.

Well, hold on, hold on. So no pharma guy would do it. Max clearly believes in this, and what is the intersection of these two things? Is it possible to do the type of study that you're talking about with Silicon Valley backing? Is a $30 million Series A enough to get started, or do you need to go to Wall Street, IPO, do the biotech thing?

I mean, plenty of private, plenty of private companies do this. Okay. Hundreds, if not— actually, I would say there's thousands of private biotechs. Okay. Generally, they would pass on something like this.

Well, yeah, yeah. So why? So, so there's this body of, body of anecdotal evidence. Yeah, unpublished. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, so certainly a, a drug, certainly a drug hunter would have looked at this already, right?

Martin, as you're saying, the only admissible evidence is an RCT. Yes. And what about all of the examples of when something works before anything works with an RCT? There's a time when it works pre-RCT. Do you know that? In animals? No, in humans. There are times in animals when before there's an RCT, it does happen sometimes.

Yes. Yes. Look, they're intelligently— because they're intelligently designed drugs that were designed to do a specific thing. and they do the specific thing, and then they work.

Yep. This is not that. And you think your statement, your singular statement of placebo, outweighs the— again, we don't know, but I'm saying on the facts we have today, there is more to support the fact this is more likely than not placebo than the other.

I would, I would bet anything, I would, I would bet anything no trial of BPC would work. Okay, I guess we'll see.

Uh, what else? So, so Max, are you— is superpower facilitating people getting BPC-157 today?

No, we won't sell anything that is not legal to compound. But I believe the FDA will make it legal to compound soon and then you can sell it. And I believe the FDA should make it legal to compound because the genie's out of the bottle. People have seen their lives change and they're getting it anyway. What else?

What else are— what else are you excited about? Because when people say— when people say peptides with an S, so BPC-157.

Thymosin Alpha-1 is fascinating. Approved in 35 countries. I take it, I never get sick. I used to get sick 4 or 5 times a year. I had the most elaborate immune stacks. None of those elaborate immune stacks, 100 things, placeboed me. Thymosin Alpha-1— everyone around me had COVID a few months back and I didn't get it. A bunch of people around me had influenza, I didn't get it. Every time I get a sore throat, I take Thymosin Alpha-1 and the sore throat disappears. And this is a drug that is approved in 35 countries, right? Has some human data. Now, pharma in the US hasn't brought it through trials because they can't patent something that existed for several years. So I think thymosin alpha-1 is a really interesting one as well.

OK, Martin, your reaction? Yeah.

Well, drug companies can and do patent things that have existed before. I agree with that.

I did not say that. I said thymosin alpha-1 in the form that is approved in other countries, they cannot patent.

Yeah, I mean, you don't even have to patent a drug, right? You can get 7 years orphan exclusivity, 5 years of NCE exclusivity. There's a lot of ways to make money in pharma. And pharma, if you haven't noticed— I agree with that.

I agree that they could find some rare disease indication and use thymosin alpha 1 against them, get a patent. My statement is that they could not get a composition of matter patent for thymosin alpha 1 in the way that doctors and patients are using it today.

Sure, I mean, you, you can change molecules too. I mean, there's a lot of ways.

I know. Why would they do medicine? And so we're saying the machinery of the FDA requires something works. We see in 35 countries, the only way to get a patent is to change the molecule and spend $300 million to $3 billion. What is that like? What is that for a system? I mean, regulatory capture by pharma to me. I wouldn't say that necessarily.

I think that there are benefits to making drugs stronger. Like I said earlier, drugs— peptides are the weakest form of drug.

They're not the best, but maybe the best drug of all time is a peptide.

Yeah, but it's very— it's, it's one of very few. I would say 5% of drugs by revenue today.

Today, right? 5 years ago, we didn't even have GLP-1. 10 years ago, we didn't— we, we didn't have GLP-1s.

Peptides were, were, and probably always will be a backwater just because they're, they're very weak. They have no pharmacological properties that are beneficial, like, like a good half-life. And in fact, the naked peptide GLPs don't work either. They have to be heavily modified by pharmaceutical chemistry.

We know this is not true. There's an FDA-approved peptide with a very short half-life, Semirelin. Thymosin alpha-1 has a very short half-life. Yeah, there are drugs that can have an effect. We know this. We know this. The FDA knows. 35 other countries know this.

There are some drugs that, that can work with short half-life, but almost every drug guy will tell you that you want to have a long half-life so you don't have to keep taking the drug. There are some drugs—

correct, and that is fine. And we, we have methods now with science to extend the half-life of these compounds, and that's part of where the research is going. This is called pharmaceuticals.

That's correct. Correct. That's what the industry is. We have an FDA for it, we have all those rules for it, and I don't think we should change that. I mean, these are the, the things that have made American pharmaceuticals one of the greatest industries ever. To start to move away from evidence-based medicine is a, you know, potentially very risky and scary thing.

I think the riskier thing is there being a gray market because the genie's out of the bottle and people are getting these regardless. I think it's far safer to get them through GMP-certified compounding pharmacies in the way that the FDA has oversight over rather than the state we're in today. Get, which is the gray market. And this isn't a debate between no peptide and legal. It's a debate between gray market or white market. And I contend white market is net less harm, net higher benefit for the US people.

I think we should treat them like we treat controlled substances, right? I mean, why— that there's a very specific set of laws that states what you're allowed to traffic on interstate commerce or not. And you need a BLA or an NDA or 505(b)(2) to traffic a drug across interstate commerce in the United States of America. And that changing that, I don't think is useful or helpful. No matter how many people on Reddit think that they want to play Dr. House today, that's not something that, you know, they should be engaged in.

So this is why I think they need to be legalized, because I don't think what we have today is safe. I don't think people going to gray market pharmacies and injecting anything into their body is safe. What I do think is far safer and net lower harm and higher benefit for the American people is these things being regulated in Category 1 and produced in GMP-certified facilities and prescribed by doctors. That is safer. So the net harm-reducing case is making these Category 1 and legal to be prescribed by doctors— not all of them, but the ones where we have a sufficient safety signal and a sufficient effectiveness signal.

Well, yeah, there is an arbitrator for that already. It's called the FDA. I mean, why would you want a second I guess, special, like, special ed version of the FDA for drugs that didn't quite make it so clearly efficacious?

What I'm saying is many of these things the FDA might not ever want to research because the patent is hard, because they target wellness and prevention and human optimization rather than disease. And the FDA loves their cancer therapeutics. And My statement is, if we have sufficient safety and efficacy signals, we reduce net harm by making them legal today. Um, we reduce net harm. And try saying to the person who used to be on biologics with an autoimmune disease, you have to wait 20 years for something that might never be researched by, by big pharma, right? Try saying to my dad, he was on painkillers the past 4 months every single day, that, you know what, this compound you took for 3 days that has been used for 2 decades "Go back to your painkillers." Try saying that to them. And maybe, maybe one day, pharma, maybe in 10, 15 years, we'll research this. We don't even know. Say that to them.

[Speaker:JOSH_FARLEY] Martin, it sounds like there's a sort of a mischaracterization of your argument that I'll let you push back on, that you're arguing that the FDA has no problems, that the FDA is perfectly efficient. That seems crazy. I feel like everyone's upset with every aspect of the government all the time. Is it— are you saying that the FDA is anywhere near approving— anywhere near to the speed required to approve new drugs, new research as quickly as they could?

I'd say they're pretty good. Really? You know, I hate almost every part of the US government. Okay. But that's one I do like. And I advise the US government, and I feel like I think this is something that could not be further from our collective benefit. Companies love making money. It's capitalism.

You prefer the gray market? You think the gray market—

I prefer no market.

You don't have a choice of no market. No, we do. The genie is out of the bottle. What does that mean? It's out of the bottle. What does that mean? What does that mean?

We can arrest the genie.

We can give the genie cocaine in the '80s.

Doctors have prescribed these compounds and they're doing everything they possibly can to get their hands on them. And that can be very risky. And what I'm saying is we have safety and efficacy signals in millions of patients with thousands of doctors in 10 to 20 years.

So Max is arguing that like a war on drugs will not work. It hasn't worked in the past. It is impossible to— No, no, no, no, no. Because if it's gray market, that means illegal. Like Martin is arguing that we can arrest the genie, But can we, Martin? Can we actually arrest the genie? Because it seems like there's a lot of genies, and you had a product behind you that I think might be not legal either, and that was probably available in a corner store. And I know that there are dozens of illegal flavored e-cigarettes and vaporizers that come over and they make their way into bodegas all over the United States. And like, this just happens.

And those are provably harmful. And they still have provably harmful things to it. I'm saying these things, doctors have their license on the line. I don't think they do recommend—

I don't think doctors want to recommend peptides. I don't think doctors like recommending non-FDA-approved drugs. I, I've never met one that did.

Well, I know thousands of doctors who do, and I'm saying thousands of doctors.

I spent my whole thousands— is such a big number.

So many doctors. And what I'm saying is, I agree they shouldn't recommend things gray market. What I'm saying is, let's legalize because that is net safer for the American people. Yes, yes.

And Martin, you're saying that you can win? You're saying that if we hang out in the gray market, you think it's actually possible to shut down gray market activity? Is that true? I think you can shut it down.

And then I also think that we have a perfectly great system, which is the normal regulatory body we've had for 60 years. Yes. And creating, like I said, a new special ed version of it for drugs that couldn't quite get on the school bus, you know, is not something that we should do because we have a rigorous way to determine if drugs work or not.

Let's get rid of all gray market and my friend can go back on biologics, go back on painkillers. You should. All of the pharma can continue making hundreds of thousands of dollars from these biologics. Let's do that. Sure. And you know what, we're not going to shut them. You get what I'm saying? Closing arguments.

One more thing. So Martin, your stance is generally that these drugs just haven't proven to be that good. They've been around for long enough that a bunch of smart pharma bros and sisters would have like, you know, taken them through trials already if they really should.

We take a lot of bad stuff through trials. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, BPC doesn't even come close to the muster of a pharma bro.

Yeah, okay. Okay, and so it's weak. You're saying there's a placebo that you think is probably real, but then what is the risk, right? Because if somebody's saying like, okay, it's a weak drug, I maybe get a placebo effect, maybe it just helps, but why should somebody avoid it entirely regardless of if they're available on the gray market or on this like, you know, new version of LSD?

I just think we shouldn't normalize making drugs in your bathtub. I think that, you know, there's no evidence that any of these things are well made. I think we should leave medicine to the experts. I think that's something SV is very reluctant to do. Many people want to feel— in a world where maybe they feel like they're losing control, they want to control this thing. Or the world where we're losing confidence in government, we want to take this into our own hands. And it's just not the way to do things. Medicine has progressed dramatically thanks to the capitalist system and the biopharmaceutical system in league with with the FDA, which doesn't always get it right but is quite good. And, you know, thanks to that, we have drugs for cystic fibrosis. We have a cure for cystic fibrosis. We have drugs for SMA. We have these terrible diseases. And one last thing is that a lot of these people in SV, you're perfectly healthy. You know, you're talking about two sick people there a second ago, but most of the people I know on these peptides, they're taking a modafinil, they're taking drugs for diseases they don't have. And this is not, you know, a great use of people's time or great for their health. And in some— to some extent, the government does exist to help protect people from themselves and their own stupidity.

And then, Max, you're planning to take BPC-157 through clinical trials. Are you planning to take any of these other peptides through? Yes. What is the— where does that ultimately— where does that ultimately go?

Yeah, so we're working with a handful of different biotech companies that are taking these through clinical trials. Um, we're in the early days of, of setting that up. Um, and, uh, my, my statement is not anti-FDA or anti-the machinery we have. I think it solves a lot of purposes. I just think it doesn't solve all purposes. And my statement is not that the current system is always perfectly right. I think when you when new data comes along, when new science comes along, when there's a dangerous gray market, we need to accept that the times have changed and adapt the regulation. It has served a lot of purposes. There are many parts of it that are exceptional, but it is not complete. And I'm saying that we should do what the FDA has said they're doing, which is legalize several of the category 2 peptides that have the strongest safety and efficacy, efficacy signals, because that reduces net harm for patients and increases net benefit, even if pharma doesn't necessarily like it because they're not making money from their $100,000 biologic drug anymore. Sure.

Martin, any closing statements? It's been great.

Yeah, I just want to say pharma did try to develop BPC and failed.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. We went through that. It's a good point. Well, thank you so much for joining today. Thank you to you both. Everyone had a great time.

Good job keeping it civil, boys. Yeah, very civil. Very professional.

Let's do this again. Again, next time a new peptide goes viral, we'd love to have you both on the show independently or together. Uh, have a great rest of your day, have a great week, and we will talk to you soon. Great. Goodbye. Cheers. Let me tell you about console.com. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access service requests and password resets. And let me also tell you about Vanta, automate compliance and security. Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform. Up next, we have Mitchell Green, the founder and managing partner at Lead Edge Capital. The news, Lead Edge has closed a $3.5 billion 7 fund. What's going on, Mitchell?

Great to see you. How's life?

By the way, somebody likes Diet Coke. I like Coke Zero. I got Coke Zero better.

Coke Zero guy. Coke Zero. Did you go through a diet Coke phase?

I did back in the day, and then Coke Zero came out and I started drinking that. I'm pretty sure both of them are going to kill us, but that's fine.

Well, you and John are running the A/B test. I'm having the podcast in a can from Andrew Huberman. Congrats on the new fund. Big, big number. Take us through it.

Yeah, so no, it's good. So it's just a continuation of Fund 6, uh, you know, Fund 7, $3.5 billion. We really raised it late last fall, raised it, raised it late last fall. But no, it was, it was good. Look, I, we really didn't know what to expect about the fundraising market. Everybody had said it'd been really, really hard. But then you see these big giant funds get raised. And so, no, we had, we had a lot of interest from existing LPs and some new LPs and things like that.

What is contrarian about LeadEdge's stance as a fund or messaging to LPs? You know, this is a software-focused fund. Some people, at least on X, would, would say you guys are crazy to have that positioning. But certainly the results have been fantastic.

Yeah, look, prior history means nothing about the future as well. I think the things that make us contrarian and different in the world— one, our LP base and how unique it is. We have all these— well, we do have big institutions. 95% of our capital comes from people that are world-class execs and entrepreneurs. You guys probably had a bunch of our LPs on the show. You can look at our website and see examples of a bunch of these people, and then how we leverage these people throughout the investment lifecycle, whether they help with diligence whether they help with, you know, helping customers with customer intros, recruiting, advisory for companies. I think that makes us different than most people. What we invest in is, you know, look, we just take a very focused approach and we're just like, listen, you have to meet X number of our 8 criteria, 5 criteria. And it's like, are you $25 million in revenue? Are you $10 million plus in revenue? Are you growing 25% a year? Are you profitable? You know, are your revenues greater than your historical cash burn cumulatively? Like, and again, you have to meet 5 of the 8. And that just, that kills a lot of companies we might otherwise, you know, see. And again, we just find companies that meet those criteria. And so, you know, the first couple of deals in the fund, you know, without naming the companies, you know, one is a $500 million you know, last year did $500 million of ARR software business, growing 50-plus percent a year. We funded another private equity fund that owned it. They're like continuation vehicle because what makes us contrarian is we're very unique in that way. We're like, we'll buy 10% of a company in a minority deal, put money on the balance sheet. We'll buy, you know, secondary from an early investor. We'll buy 80% of the company We'll do everything. It's really just we just want to get into the best businesses. And look, we invest in businesses that grow, that have super high gross margin, have 70%+ gross margins, that are hopefully capital efficient, that have really happy customers with high gross dollar retention. Software is one of those buckets, as well as financial information technology companies, information services companies. Payments businesses, internet marketplaces. We've invested in logistics businesses. If it meets the criteria, we'll invest. There are still— the whole idea that software is all going to zero is a bunch of complete utter nonsense.

We were talking to Carl Eschenbach on the day he rejoined Sequoia last Thursday about the SaaSpocalypse, and he was just stressing the the fact of how sticky these relationships are, and the fact that people buy things from other people. They're not just gonna overnight switch everything and how they do their business. What are you actually seeing? How have you processed the SaaS-pocalypse? Have you processed this idea of all these legacy systems just being upended overnight?

I mean, it's like complete utter nonsense. Carl's a buddy of mine.

I'll see him tomorrow at a board meeting, actually. Awesome. That's great.

I think we're fine. I think I'm literally gonna go back with him from the war being— no, he's fantastic. I mean, let's not forget that the US government still runs— I think, like, I think we think the huge opportunity— we do some public stuff as well. So we actually own Workday. And by the way, I think a 99% gross dollar retention business. The US government still runs on PeopleSoft. And most banks that people use in America run off of mainframe computers. So, you know, open source— when people say the apocalypse, SPOC, like all software is going to zero, I think what people fundamentally get wrong is, is that they think like R&D is the— is like the most important thing in these companies, like writing the code. Yeah, it hasn't been for decades. Like open source software is a big industry. Yeah, companies like Grafana, Databricks, Elastic, HashiCorp, Red Hat, there's 20 more of them. You can get that stuff for free. The reason that enterprises pay for it is they need somebody to deal with customer support, security patches, user authentication. This stuff's very complicated to do. I think what software companies are going to become— and by the way, there's going to be ones that survive, and there's going to be ones that don't. All that we see, you see in periods of technological change is like things can happen really fast. And it's not only software companies, but if you like automotive companies, if you're Stellantis and you have tons of debt, and you're— I'm totally making this up— and you're Ford and you have no debt, well, if you believe AI and robotics are going to come to manufacturing, well, like Ford can invest, Stellantis cannot. And like they very well may disrupt, you know, Ford may completely disrupt Stellantis. It's going to happen across industries here. You saw it in '99 and 2000 with e-commerce companies. Some traditional retailers like Walmart and Home Depot did great. Some people did not. The same thing is going to happen with software companies. By the way, the same thing is going to happen with accounting firms. The same thing is going to happen with banks. This stuff is going to completely revolutionize the world. It won't do it as fast as people think. It was funny, I asked Claude yesterday to try to like book me like an appointment, like to get a haircut and I could do it online. It had no idea how to do it. Like I literally could have just picked up the phone and made a phone call and saved myself 15 minutes. Yeah.

What has your interaction been with private credit throughout your career? There's a lot of headlines around the debt load for some of these software companies and if the business model changes, if that retention does shift. Shift that those private credit funds could be in trouble? Have you been processing the stories around that?

So, look, about a third of what we do is control buyouts. A buyout tends to have debt on it. Um, you know, that be— you know, what I would say is, now again, the buyouts we're doing are not big enough, and they tend to be growth buyouts. Like, our average portfolio company grows 50% a year. So we might just happen to find a company It's $25 million of revenue owned by one guy that wants to sell 60% of his company, but still wants to run it. So, our deals are not big enough for we need to go to the private credit funds. I agree with Jamie Dimon though. It's a canary in a coal mine, but it's not software. This is what people are getting wrong. You don't think the private equity firms overpaid for industrial companies, or services companies, or anything? Disruptive. Where AI is going to be disruptive is if a private equity firm bought a company, put a ton of leverage on it, and it's been running it for margin because they need to drive margins to pay the debt load because they put too much debt on it. They won't be able to innovate. So their competitor that doesn't have a lot of debt is going to, you know, could win. I think that is— that doesn't apply to software companies. That applies to everything. Yeah. I suspect that we're in any unregulated industry where you take a bunch of people to Wall Street, a bunch of people have done probably stupid things. It's probably not the people getting— it's probably not the people getting blamed for it. It's probably the ones doing the blaming. Yeah, frankly, if you've got to learn, you know, from, from history on Wall Street. Yeah. Yeah. But again, it's— if the private credit guys get paid, like they're going to get— they'll get paid before the private equity funds. Like, I think we're going to sit here in 2030, and there's going to be a ton of these deals that were done in 2019, 2018, 2020, 2021. That— Scrooge's software— it's like everybody at all the industries where, like, you're going to be looking at, like, very low single-digit, you know, low single-digit IRRs.

What's the oldest company you've ever bought or, or invested in? Have you ever looked at anything that's, like, over 50 years old, or I mean, I've just seen some of these like vending machines acquisitions that are like, you know, oh, you'll see like AOL is transacting now. And we're here and I'm like, oh, we haven't heard that name in a long time. We can hear you. That's only 30.

Well, I'm actually, I'm looking to see what company. Okay. Yeah. So we own a business called Growth Zone that makes like Chamber of Commerce Association management software. It's a good business, nicely profitable. The company was founded in 1996. 1996. Okay. So we own another— we own another business that it's like that business started in '96, a different name. Yeah. In 2019, it was bought by like a small private equity fund. We then bought that. But we own a business that we bought through an interest in a fund called Work Human. And this is a huge business, super profitable, big company.

That's an anti-AGI bet. Yeah.

And so WorkHuman used to be called GlobalForce. It's a big HR software company and employee benefits company based up in Boston. But I think the venture fund we bought out, it was like a 2002 vintage venture fund. Wow. And the investment was made in 2004. And the company has never raised capital since. And it's a very large, you know, 9-figure type like prop business.

That's remarkable. Well, thanks so much for taking the time to come and hang out. Congratulations. We gotta hit the gong. Did it. Congratulations.

Congrats to the whole team. See you guys.

Great to see you. We'll see you soon. Cheers. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Labelbox. RL Environments voice robotics evals and expert human data. Labelbox is the first the data factory behind the world's leading AI teams. And let me also tell you about Sentry. Sentry shows developers what's broken and helps them fix it fast. That's why 150,000 organizations use it to keep their apps working. And let's kick off our Lambda lightning round. And we are going to be bringing in— we nailed it, we nailed it. The cloud is active. We are now in the Lambda lightning round. Let's bring in Shane from Airflow.

Shane, how you doing? How you doing, guys? Thanks so much for having me.

Of course. Of course. Great to— great to see you. Give us an update on what's going on in your world.

We just released a new ad campaign yesterday in The New York Times. Yes. And have our biggest product release we've ever pulled together here launching tomorrow.

Amazing. Give us the pitch. What's the tagline for the ad? For the ad?

The tagline for the ad is, is AI will never smoke a cigarette with you.

And as someone who started a company that directly competes with cigarettes, I have to boo. But as someone who loves a good ad, I have to cheer.

I want to be clear, I'm not endorsing smoking in any way, shape, or form. No, I get it. I think, you know, look, I feel like this is a Good Will Hunting crowd, isn't it? I feel like you guys watch Jordi Hays. Definitely seen Good Will Hunting.

No, he's never seen a movie in his life. He's only seen Borat. It's the only movie he's ever seen.

Well, I think the inspiration for The Campaign came from a scene between Matt Damon, who's this cocky, overconfident sort of orphan, and his therapist, Robin Williams. And they're sitting on a park bench. And Matt Damon is just going off. He's doing his thing, preaching the gospel of where the world is going. And Robin Williams looks at him and he says, look, if I asked you about art, you would give me every history of every artist. You would talk to me about Michelangelo, but you have no idea of what it smells like below the Sistine Chapel. And if I asked you about love, you would probably send me a sonnet, but you have no idea what it feels like to be desperately vulnerable in front of someone else. And then he looks at Matt Damon and he says, look, if I needed to learn what it was like to be an orphan, do you think I would just read Oliver Twist? And I think, I think the reality is today that there's so many of these generative AI companies right now emerging through YC or starting to raise money, and they're projecting what's going to happen with creative work. And, and let me be clear, I believe everything from Nano to Banana and Seed Dance. These models are so powerful in what they can do today. But the reality is that creative work is deeply illogical. It is two things. It is both extremely subjective and it starves for perfection all at the same time. And so, you know, the belief that we have at Air fundamentally is that AI will never replace creative work. And we're saying this as a technology company that's on the precipice of launching its most AI-centric feature set ever tomorrow. So I mean, I completely agree with you.

Like AI is a tool. I've loved using creative tools from the first version of Photoshop that I probably downloaded illegally all the way to After Effects and Cinema 4D, Houdini, and now generative AI tools. And I feel like there's, every time there's a new tool, you just increase the amount of art, the amount of creativity, And things, we usually get the good ending. It feels like it. It feels like we're not, oh yeah, like we wish we could go back to the time before Photoshop, get rid of Figma. Like, no, no one wants to move backwards. Everyone's happy with the tools. Everyone's adapted. But it feels like there's still a lot of anxiety. Like, what do you think it takes to get people into the mindset of, hey, as an artist, your job's just going to get more interesting, more creative. You're going to be able to do so much more. And yes, that will mean putting food on your plate and earning recognition for your work and being all the things that you, why you do what you do will still be there in a decade, two decades, a century.

Yeah, well, I think the first thing, John, is that as an industry within the tech industry or as technologists, we can't keep pontificating, you know, a narrative about like, about this reality that like creative work is the CMO killer. If I see one more billboard on the 101 about the CMO killer.

You're going to become a killer yourself.

I'm going to lose my mind. And, and I think that, you know, you—

in what way, shape, or form is it a good idea to tell your customer that they're irrelevant?

Yeah.

Um, and, and, and, you know, look, the fundamental belief that we have here at Air is that the work is changing. It's going to be less humans and more machines. That's a— that's an acknowledgement. I will be the first to admit. But we have to stop imagining that these machines, this, this AGI concept we have for the future will get to a state where everything is automated and you don't need anybody in the loop. And instead, if we built both products and brands in this industry that meet humans where they are and start to actually attack jobs to be done with automation, then great. You know, at Air, we talk about giving creatives space to breathe, space to actually work on the stuff that they think matters and to deploy technology into areas of their work that they think should be automated.

Yeah. What's the launch tomorrow? What's the exact product?

Tell all the exact product. All right, so 5 things. I'm gonna be plain vanilla here. 5 things. Mm-hmm. One is, uh, access to 50 models inside of our product. Mm-hmm. Everything from Nano Banana to Seedance, you can now access that directly on Air. Two, you can access those models through a canvas editor. So you can grab your assets which are already on air. You can create variants of ad units. You can change out the text in something. You can take an image and turn it into a GIF for a quick video, whatever you need. Three is agents who can go out and make those edits for you should you want to, you know, communicate with a machine instead of doing it yourself. Four is a context layer. This is the sort of biggest differentiator for us. We You know, today organizations store and manage all of their assets inside of our product. We're their memory. And so we're taking that memory and allowing your creative team to deploy that. Deploying the context means that the agents can start saying no to edits, or that when an agent makes an edit, it can do something that's actually on brand and uses your font or your styling or your photography style. So this context layer is where creatives can actually add instructions so that non-creatives can create and compound assets from what they already have. And then the fifth one is what every organization, you know, like us is going through right now, which is we're transforming pricing, going fully to usage-based pricing across our product. So all of that hits tomorrow.

What about search? I feel like there's, you know, I've watched my iPhone camera roll push the search bar bigger and bigger. They really want me to search. Yeah. And it's okay. But if I, if I know that there's a I screen recorded a video and it has Arnold Schwarzenegger in it, but he's not in the still frame, he's not in the thumbnail, he's deeper in there. And I search Arnold Schwarzenegger, it's probably not going to go inside the video, understand the context. And I feel like Air has all this like tagging infrastructure. There's an opportunity for just the best-in-class search. You see people complaining about Gmail search. Same thing is true for Google Drive. At one point I had had every file name for every video in Google Drive was just like 75 keywords all the way out so I could actually search through videos. Is AI accelerating you there?

It's a good question. You know, my co-founder Tyler and I have been building this business for 8 years and we've been very thoughtful. You know, our approach is to try to build a system of record for creative work. So a Salesforce or GitHub specifically for visual data. You know, our AI journey began, to your point, with search, natural language search, and the enrichment of assets. And from our perspective, the models got to a point over the last 2 years— products like BDA as an example from AWS— where you can do a lot of really powerful things: facial recognition, scene detection for videos, custom object detection. And then you can power that through really elegant natural language search experience. That functionality exists in the product out today. And we've been leaning into that work for the last 2 years. The shift for us into generative editing and variant creation really began in October as these models started to progress in the quality of the output. And we realized that the quality of the output was going to be decided by the quality of the context around it. So, you know, starting tomorrow on air, we'll marry both of those things. Both the amazing world-class search experience you can now have enabled by AI and the variant creation that can stem from it so that, you know, a year from now, if you want to look up Martin Shkreli rage bait, you know, you can go and find that.

I'm glad you're in the audience. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Congratulations on the launch. And that campaign. Yeah, great. Absolutely beautiful. We'll talk to you soon.

Thank you very much. Goodbye. Cheers.

Let me tell you about Turbopuffer, serverless vectoring full-text search built from first principles and object storage. Fast, 10x cheaper, and extremely scalable. And let me also tell you about Figma. No matter where your idea starts, Figma may— cloud, code, codex, or a sketch— the Figma canvas is where ideas take shape and products connect. Build in the right direction with Figma. Without further ado, we have Doctronic.

How are you doing, Dr. Doctronic? How are you?

How are you? We're doing great. Please introduce yourself and the company a bit for us.

Yeah, so Adam, I am one of the co-founders of Doctronic. Doctronic is an AI doctor. We call it that because it's easy for people to understand. Yeah. We have an AI-native care platform. You can come to it, chat with it 24/7. It's always free. Yeah. And then when you're ready, you can press a button and the AI conversation, the summary, and a doctor's note is sent off to one of our doctors Okay, so yeah, primary care, anything you need.

So yeah, I mean, WebMD has existed for a long time. ChatGPT has a health functionality. But the key insight here is that you're actually linking to a network of licensed doctors throughout America. Are there particular states that you're starting with? How does it actually work to onboard these doctors?

Yeah, so we're actually live in all 50 states. 50+1, and we have a network of 50 doctors that are employed by Doctronic, and that includes both primary care, urgent care, women's health, mental health.

What does it look like if somebody already has their own doctor and they want to bring them to the platform? I imagine that the same way someone might show like, oh, here's my Eight Sleep sleep data, doctor. What do you think this says about the other symptom I'm having? Somebody might share, hey, I had this conversation with ChatGPT, can we use this as a jumping off point? What does it look like to bring your own doctor to the platform?

Yeah, so our, our AI system's always free and at the end of it you get a doctor's note that you can take to your own doctor if you want.

Oh, okay, cool. So there are some people that do that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's amazing. And then in terms of the, the actual business model, who's paying? How would— how do you see that evolving? Where do you think that goes?

Right. So right now we make money by providing care. And so when you see one of our doctors, you can either pay out of pocket, it's $39, or you can use your insurance. And we take almost every insurance out there, including Medicare. Yeah. In addition, we're in the process of building out a number of different partnerships with other businesses that will both license our technology and use our physicians as Yeah.

How do you think about the opportunity for prescription management? It feels like there's been a boom in telehealth. A lot of work has been done, some controversial, but some very by the book where they're partnered with, with a pharmaceutical company and there's licensed doctors in all 50 states that can prescribe. Is that in the path or is that tangential to your work?

Directly in the path. So we launched a program in Utah, first of its kind, where we actually are able to renew prescriptions without a doctor. Our AI makes a clinical decision. That's great. That was launched 8 weeks ago. I think it was a big first step and we're hoping to build upon that.

That's awesome. Jordi?

What is, yeah, so I'm trying to understand, like, are you guys kind of limited from a growth standpoint due to, like, how do you scale basically? You have these 50 doctors that are employed by Doctronic. Do you need to scale that or is the idea you can make them 100 times more efficient? How are you thinking about it?

Yeah, our physicians are, I would say, an order of magnitude more efficient than a traditional telehealth practice. And so instead of a doctor being able to see 4 patients in an hour, they can all of a sudden see 15 or more. And that allows us to scale much faster than a traditional telehealth platform.

And then you mentioned partnerships. Partnerships with other companies, would that be with like major LLM providers? Is, is that, is that where this is going?

Or what kind of partnerships come in 3 different flavors? The first one would be with payers, TPAs, or large employers that want to utilize our services because we're going to be cheaper than most other telehealth practices. There are large health systems that we're in discussions with that want to utilize our technology because we can make their doctors more efficient. And then there's a whole slew of digital health companies, hardware companies out there that are also interested in leveraging our technology to extend what they can do do on their service potentially providing care.

I was listening to Terence Tao, the mathematician, on Dorkesh Patel, and Dorkesh was asking him about the impact of AI on his job, which is mathematical research, and was trying to say like, how much more efficient are you? And Terence Tao was saying, well, I use AI a lot, but I don't I don't, it's not like it's helping me with the core work. It's more like in a paper, I would like to put a chart. Normally that chart would take me 10 hours or 5 hours to put together. So normally I just wouldn't put it in. Now I can just put it in. And so he was like, I'm doing 5 times the work, but it's not replacing work that I was doing before. And it was this very like Jevons paradox type of answer, and I'm wondering about the amount of medical advice that's being dispelled. How much of it is displacing conversations with existing doctors versus just purely additive conversations where someone would have said, you know what, I do have that, I do have some symptom, but I'm just gonna go to work today and I'm not gonna go take the time to schedule an appointment and meet with a doctor. How much of what you're doing is seen as additive versus replacing replacing labor?

I think it's almost all additive, to be quite honest. And when you think about medicine, it's always had this fundamental supply-demand mismatch. Yeah. Think about how many times you've wanted to go see a doctor and you just didn't do it because it was too hard, right? I think there's probably 10, 100 times more care that could occur if there's zero friction in the system. And a lot of what we're seeing today is it's just so easy to utilize our system that you're going to come in and ask questions that you would never ask a doctor. We have people who use our system 10 times a day they'll come in and say, "Hey, I have high cholesterol. What should I eat for breakfast?" You would never ask that of a doctor. But when there's no friction in the system, you can do that.

Okay, we gotta fire up Doctronic and ask whether or not we should take BPC-157 because it's been hotly debated on this show today and I want a real doctor or an AI doctor to get to the bottom of it.

I think that they would probably fall for it. Yeah, we can throw that to our system. I actually don't know what that is.

So it's a very controversial peptide that some people claim works very well. Other people claim it's a placebo effect. But hopefully people are referring to real medical advice for this particular question. But you raised some money. Tell us, how much did you raise? I want to hit the gong for you.

We have— we raised $40 million for our Series B. Congratulations.

Thank you so much. Fantastic work to come give us the update and have a hope. I hope you have a fantastic rest of your day.

Yeah, great to meet you as well.

We'll talk to you soon.

Soon. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Finn.ai, the number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to handle your customer support, go to Finn.ai. And we are in the Lambda Lightning Round. This concludes our Lambda Lightning Round, but let me tell you about Lambda. Lambda is the superintelligence cloud, building AI supercomputers for training inference that scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands. And without further ado, we have Robin Vince from the Bank of New York Mellon. Robin, how are you doing? Going on. What a wonderful backdrop. I think we are struggling. Really, really remarkable. Oh, how are you doing? Uh, sorry, we, we missed you on that intro because of the audio. Uh, can you introduce yourself and the company, I suppose? Sure.

Well, it's great to be with you. Congrats on the show, uh, and everything you've been achieving. It's been, uh, been fun to watch your progress. BNY. We are the world's real looking after the wiring and financial security of the financial system. We also are America's oldest bank. So we've been around for a while. We've seen a few cycles over time. There were just 25 people in New York.

Yeah, who started the bank again?

Alexander Hamilton, the now famous dude. That's incredible.

Incredible. So obviously, a lot has changed over the— 250 roughly year history of the firm. What is your day-to-day like? What is on the top of your list of goals for 2026? What are the challenges to running an institution as old as BNY?

Well, we've been really reimagining the company over the course of the past 3 years. We've been a strong and safe part of the financial services system and the U.S. financial financial system, as you say, for 250 years. We were the first stock ever traded on the New York Stock Exchange. That's fantastic. Exactly, that's right. There's some— there's value to longevity. But to get old means that you learn how to adapt, and this is a world full of change. And so we've been laser-focused on really bringing ourselves truly into the modern age. AI, very focused on AI and everything we're doing with our platform. We can get to that. Yeah, but taking the company and making it be the performer that it can be. We do all these great things, these different businesses that we have. Living up to our potential has really been the motto of the past 3 years for us. Yeah.

As, as you've witnessed progress over the last couple of years, what do you think the biggest opportunities for, for AI within, I would say, like just legacy financial institutions overall? You know, we had someone on earlier that was talking about, you know, a lot of some of this code still running on mainframe computers and how much modernization that I'm sure you've been working on that's not even related to AI. And then how can AI kind of continue to serve that?

I think for us there are 3 vectors. And to be fair, I think they're probably the same for most firms these days. And I think that's true for technology software firms. I think it's true in the financial services sector. In the financial services sector as well. One is just doing what we do, but just doing it in a better, more efficient way. So that could be modernizing code, you're right, COBOL, we have some mainframes. Mainframes are actually pretty good, super high volume use cases, but we don't want them to run on old code. So having the opportunity to make that change and frankly just make it easier to be able to make the change, we've been putting it off for a while, now we've got great tech, it's cheaper and easier and quicker to be able to do it. But also reimagining processes and, and being able to essentially take multi-step things and collapse them down to be just more efficient, quicker. So running the company better using AI is number one. Second vector of change is actually the products and services, just enriching what we do and actually what we offer to clients with AI so that they perform better, provide additional insights, can actually be executing quicker for clients. So we just become better as an institution in our actual delivery of our products and services. And then the third one, I think, is actually expanding the perimeter of the firm. We're not trying to turn ourselves into fundamentally a different company, but we are interested in taking inspiration from other things that have happened in the world. Like Amazon is a good example. Amazon Web Services, once upon a time, it just served Amazon. Then they externalized it as a service and it essentially became their cloud service. We've got lots of things that we do at super scale for ourselves that we could also do for our clients. We are the number one custodian in the world. We custody $60 trillion of assets. We have payment rails. Yeah, it's, it's It's fun to have scale.

You just said the biggest number ever of any company, any CEO on the show, and that's hard to do.

$3 trillion a day moves through BNY.

We touch 20% of all investable assets in the world. So that is mega scale. You could sound it again if you want.

There we go. I love it.

Throughput, the data from that throughput allows us to be able to deploy AI into really making the company kind of different. So this third one, spanning the perimeter, doing for other people things that we currently can only do for ourselves, is kind of an interesting thing too.

There was an interesting story in the Wall Street Journal today about Mark Zuckerberg looking to build a custom AI or use AI to answer questions in his role as the CEO of Meta Platforms. And I'm interested in how you, as the CEO of BNY, could either are currently using AI or, or think in the future you might be using AI as a copilot for what you do, answering questions about the business. What's on the top of your wish list if someone were to build an AI system that knew everything about your business and could help you do your job as CEO better?

Well, we have the beginning of that right now inside our company. So we have our our own AI platform that we built. We started the journey 3 years ago. It's called Eliza. Yeah, homage to Alexander Hamilton again. And Eliza connected to all of the LLMs, but is really a multi-agent platform that our people build agents. And we have live agents, multi-agent solutions in production doing work today. We also have digital employees that are essentially multi-agent solutions wrapped with a user ID, a login, a persona, a name that actually make them addressable and deployable in the company to work alongside our human employees as teammates. And Eliza's an app, and I do exactly what you just asked basically multiple times a day. Okay. So I— the client earlier on, Hey, I'm going to be seeing this client. Could you please tell me what are the additional things that I should be talking to them about? Give me the top 3 ideas that are meant to be my pitch to the client. It goes through, looks through every call report that we've interacted with the client, what I did last time I met with them, what's happened in the news so far, what's pertinent and news to their business, and actually just advises me on how to be a better kind of extension to the client my sales rep team when I'm meeting with them. So I do that today.

Yeah, wow. Very cool. I mean, can you explain to us a little bit about what you're standing in front of? Is this some situation room to understand the global economy, your business particularly? It looks amazing, but I'd love to know more.

So you can just see a glimpse of it behind me, but yes, it is exactly all of what you just said. It is a situation room. It's our cyber technology command center. Is AI-powered. So AI is kind of the first line in actually looking at it, triaging it. So we're watching $3 trillion of money every day. We're watching $25 to $30 trillion worth of US Treasury settlements every day. We're watching our $3 trillion worth of wealth assets. And we're basically helping our clients to be able to get insights into their business that's running through our technology because We're kind of a platforms company these days. We're a bit of a non-traditional bank in terms of what we actually do. So this is a virtualization. So it's all real data, real time. That is actually— and we have this in 3 places in the world that runs off private and public cloud that actually allows us to get the insight into what's happening in our business all the time, real time.

I'm sure clients are asking you about disruption from artificial intelligence, geopolitical instability. What else is at the top of the minds of your clients as we go into 2026? It's a, it's an uncertain time. Where are people searching for certainty right now?

Well, you know, it's a, it's an important question, John. And so AI is for sure, right? You're right about the geopolitics. The world's a complicated place. Digital assets is another example. Oh, sure. We've positioned our investment in digital assets, tokenization, tokenized deposits, stablecoins, tokenization of other security types, and frankly, other financial assets, or maybe welcoming new financial assets into the system. That is something that our clients are super interested in because they want us to help them manage that transition from the old or traditional rails into the new ones. And we can be a part enough for them with that.

What do you think is next? There was a lot of talk years ago about tokenizing assets, bringing assets that we know and trade every day onto digital rails, cryptocurrency, on-chain. It feels like that happened with the dollar. It feels like stablecoins are here. They've arrived. Real estate has been slower. Stocks have been slower. What do you think? Oil's ticked up. Is oil on-chain now? I was not familiar with that.

People are trading oil on-chain. But I'm sure you have some questions around how that's actually being done.

Yeah, well, look, remember with oil as well, it's a physical commodity at the end of the day. The whole concept of on-chain, the mirror world, is like if ever there was an example of just a reminder that it's a physical asset, today's the day. But look, let me give you my Gen 1, Gen 2, Gen 3 view of that. And even before I do, let's just acknowledge where we are in Gen 1. So tokenization, yes, we're underway. We're beginning. You mentioned stablecoins. They have market share this big right now. And so it's early days. It's a little bit like AI. You can see the promise of the tech, you can see the opportunity. But at the end of the day, adoption, full integration into the system is very different than just having the tech. And we talk all the time about in our company about AI. Great, great, exciting. But it's got to be deeper. It's got to be everywhere. It's got to be for everything, for everyone. So I'd say digital assets, similar situation. Even in Gen 1, we're beginning. It's early days, a lot of promise, opportunity. But just taking an existing asset or even a physical asset that exists that isn't really part of the financial system, putting it on That'll be the beginning. Then how do we actually make things work better and differently? Because for some existing assets, they're not necessarily better just because we tokenize them. We take a share of Microsoft and we declare victory because it's a token. We haven't really changed much in the world. If you take a bond, the question is not only can you tokenize the security, but what can you do with the indenture? How can you have the if and therefore statements that are all part of that piece piece of documentation and actually encode them in a chain in a way that it actually is going to add additional value. That's a different thing than just tokenizing the security itself. And then Gen 3, you actually think about financial securities as ultimately being a cash flow and terms and conditions, then maybe you can just re-render financial assets in entirely different ways because of the fact that you now actually have the blockchain and you actually have capabilities that didn't exist today in the traditional rails. Now, today's L1s aren't really up to that task. So there's innovation that's required at the L1 layer level as well as in the L2s and then for participant firms. But that's how I see the world. We're early. This is a 5-year, 10-year journey. It'll happen. I think it'll happen more slowly than AI, but that's another example of an innovation inflation right now.

Earlier in the show, we were talking to Mitchell Green from Lead Edge Capital about private credit, and there's been some reporting around just how big that non-bank lending industry is. How should average investors who aren't maybe specifically in a private credit fund, but just, you know, your average American trying to make sure that their portfolio goes up every year, how should they think about private credit, the risk in the system, how they can protect themselves or potentially benefit. Where is America when it comes to the private credit industry right now?

So first of all, just a reminder that private credit is first of all credit. Yeah. And so we've got private credit, we've got public credit, and they're essentially two different markets, different investor types potentially go in, but at the end of the day they're trying to solve for the same which is leaning in to being able to lend money into the financial markets and capital system, give entrepreneurs and other business builders or business runners access to more capital. And so, there are some types of borrowers who are more suited to the private markets and some who are suited to the public markets and some who do both. There's a lot of drama at the moment in private credit. And there are some good reasons for it because there have been some exposures that are a bit— been a bit idiosyncratic to private credit. And also, there are always liquidity issues when people see headlines and they say, oh my gosh, is my money safe? And then they want their money back. And then you have the old elevator, elevator door problem. More people want to get out, but there's not necessarily enough space and there's a bit of a rush for the exit. So that's exactly the problem that we're seeing right now. But the market, I would observe, is today still pretty strong because the credit credit market strong. And ultimately the economy drives the credit market. Now we have high energy prices for a long period of time or we have a real weakness in the economy and we're going to have problems in the credit market and then we're gonna have real problems in the private credit market and public credit market. So I think today we're in this spot where there's a lot of focus. It's a large but not huge market compared to the scale of the public credit market. But the underlying fundamentals are mostly pretty good. But there's a huge watch out with energy. And as a result, a huge watch out into the readout to the real economy. And if we have high energy prices or other cracks and they persist, it is a different story. Yeah.

With the health of the underlying economy, I feel like people track inflation, they track GDP, they track the stock market. If someone's trying to, you know, now today they're an oil expert. If someone's just trying to get an understanding of how the US economy is growing, what are the signals that you would recommend that they actually look through or try and understand?

Well, there's, first of all, when you're really looking to the economy, you're looking at employment is super important. People who have jobs feel more comfortable and People who feel more comfortable go about their lives and they spend and they pull back and they help the economy to grow. So it's really important to watch employment and also to watch sentiment and then consumer sales and spending and kind of credit card health. And are people being overleveraged and how they're going about their spending? Those things are important. What is that? What is the profitability ultimately of companies and are they growing? Are they, are they investing? People capital deploying. Energy is a huge input. High energy prices have a very negative impact on the United States. We sit here and we feel very good about the fact that we've got a lot of security in energy supply. And so actually having the molecules that can flow because we have access to supply is a really big deal. But we're an export market. So at the end of the day, the world prices sort of set the price domestically here as well. And if we You have high energy prices, it ripples through into food, it ripples through into all of the different things that are energy dependent. And these days everything is energy dependent.

Yeah. Well, I guess the good news is that oil's down 10% today. I feel odd saying that, but it was very nerve-wracking when oil seemed to be going up and up. And as you mentioned, high energy prices can really put a drag on the economy. So hopefully, I think we're all hoping for stability in financial markets. Stability in energy markets and all of the above. But thank you so much for taking the time. Yeah, really enjoyed your perspective.

To break it down. And come back on soon.

Yeah, we'd love to talk to you more. Have a great rest of your day. Cheers, Robin. We'll talk to you too soon, Robin. Let me tell you about Graphite, code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. Our next guest is live in person in New York City. The one and only David Senter.

How you doing? Miss you, man. Nice watch.

Good to see you. Tell us, how are you feeling? What is this? How are you feeling? That's just the Yahoo button. Does that reflect your inner feelings? I want to talk about your inner monologue. I want you to introspect. I want you to introspect. How are you feeling?

You're doing well? Yeah. Like, unbelievable.

And do you feel aligned? Do you feel like you're reaching your goals in life? Life? Do you feel like you're doing what you're meant to be doing?

Oh, I mean, you don't answer that question. What kind of question is that?

I'm just messing with you. These are introspection questions. Yeah, it was— Do you wanna give the background to what you're— Sure, sure. So David Senra, host of David Senra and host of Founders, went viral last week after an interview with Marc Andreessen, where you were both in discussion, in agreement, around this idea of maybe you don't need to be constantly introspecting. You need to have some forward motion in your life. You need to just know what to do.

Certainly, you shouldn't be ruminating. It wasn't advice for other people. Oh, yeah. At all. That's funny. So it was an observation. I wanted to talk to Mark for a long time. And I actually had dinner with him last year in Miami. And it took him a while to warm up. But then once he gets going, the same person you see on the podcast podcast is like the same person in person, right? And I've like consumed everything. I told him before, I was like, "I think you and Palmer Luckey are probably like the two best podcast guests on the planet." He's great. Right? Yeah. And, you know, 'cause he doesn't have any notes in front of him. I spent 8 hours knee to knee with Palmer and I couldn't— he was inexhaustible. I've never come across a mind like that before. Yeah. And Mark's the same way. It's like you can ask him anything and he'll just— he has this crazy recall. And the difference between like me and most people that talk to Mark is like I've read I read all the same books that Mark has done. I read his blog archive like 8 years ago, which was excellent. Long before he was like tweeting.

Did you do an episode about his blog archive? Yes.

I think it's episode 50 of Founders. That's great.

I think it was in 2018. Episode 50, wow.

Yeah, exactly. I should redo it, because there's a lot of really good advice for founders in there. And so I was just excited to talk to him. It was by far— I think we've done like 13 or 14 of these that we've released so far. Now we're recording like mad. We have a ton banked. But it's like one of the people I was most excited to talk about just because like we have the same passions. And he was the only person I've come across in today that came to the same conclusion that like I would read all these biographies and these people that went on to build great companies, invent new technology, everything else, they talk about this all the time. They actively avoid introspection. And so, the reason I brought up, I was not trying to be provocative. I'm not in like— I have a 10-year fucking history of not being provocative.

But, so, I mean, I understand the pushback, which is that there's so many examples of history's greatest entrepreneurs introspecting. I think that maybe the nuance here is when does the introspection happen? I always go back to that Disney chart, you know, the Disney napkin map of how Disneyland fits into Disney films, fits into the radio business, fits into the merchandise business. Is crystal clear right now. And a lot of founders, a lot of content creators, a lot of people like us will look at that and be like, I need 7 things that all piece together. But Disney drew that map and then died like 2 years later. It was a reflection on his life. He was introspecting about what made his business successful, but he did it after he had done all the things.

I think people are confusing thinking with introspection. So I was actually thinking about you. —where, again, I went back and listened to the first 10 minutes of that episode. There's nothing remotely controversial about this. And I guess one part, you're like, yeah, there should be more nuance. Yeah, no shit.

Well, that's the point of the internet. No one needs the context. They're not going to watch the 10 minutes. They're just going to see the caption and then disagree with the caption.

So what I would say is this is the difference between pre- and post-life's work. And so you're a perfect example. We've talked about this a few times on the show. There was a huge prehistory with me and you, pre-TPBN, and where you're the AIR at Founders Fund. You're making these fucking incredible docu— I can't cuss, right? You guys got on me last time about that. You can. You can.

It's up to you. OK. Depends on how you want to—

if our kids start swearing, we're going to be mad at you.

Yeah, I'm going to take the stand that none of history's greatest entrepreneurs have ever sworn. Yeah.

You'll go far with that. —So, what I would say is like, the prehistory here is like, you were EIR at Founders Fund. You were making these incredible long-form documentaries on a lot of the same interests that you and I have. I found you, I started talking to you, I was like, "You're gifted at this. Like, you're a generational media talent." 'Cause I was like, the first thing I saw of you was your History of Silicon Valley documentary, which I've read at least 40 books on the same topic, and I'm learning stuff I didn't even know. So I was like, "Oh, this guy's like, this is incredible." And if you remember at the time, you were trying to figure out, what's that? Goats. You were trying to figure out, it sounds like a sheep. You were trying to figure out, okay, do I start another company? Do I become a VC?

So you were trying to figure out, do I start another company?

Do I become a VC, God forbid? Do I, and I was like trying to push you to podcast. Yeah, yeah. And then you went through—

I knew it was a good business.

And then you went through multiple different variations. Goddammit, Jordi, stop it. Stop. This is your show, and I'm— so you went through multiple different variations, right, of different forms of podcasts. You even tried something like this with like a co-host a few different times. I saw all of them.

Lulu and Jason Karman. And then I also had a solo show that was sort of a copy of yours, but about live people instead of dead people.

And we were— I remember, because we were walking in Miami. We were walking to dinner. We actually ran into Keith Raboi on the way there randomly. And we had this dinner and you're like, this show just doesn't feel right.

You didn't like the power law. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, yeah. The power law was not like— it wasn't getting me out of bed because I would make a— I would make an episode and then somebody would be like, I'm alive and I'm going to debate you about this. Like, you got this wrong. And I was like, oh, okay, I don't want to do it. You're like, this is—

no, no, no. Rockefeller's not coming from the grave yelling at me. Exactly. Exactly.

Yeah. You can say whatever you can say. You know, Steve Jobs never introspected and then he's not going to hit you up and be like, I did.

And again, we're not saying like never. Yeah. But even like Elon commented on this. Yeah. I sent it to our group chat. We should pull up the tweet that he even commented on.

Yeah. He said reinforcing negative neural pathways via therapy or introspection is a recipe for misery. Don't cut a rut in the road. But isn't this just like don't ruminate?

Some people were saying, oh, you guys are using the term wrong. Whatever. Yeah. Let me finish.

But it was like negative introspection. Action.

Let me finish. We have friends that all they do is introspect. One of them has still not done his first deal. We will not name him. He thinks too much and not enough action. That is the point. It's just like, yeah, people that built— this is not controversial. People that built great shit turned out to do a lot of action. They take a lot of action, as opposed to just sitting there thinking about how to do it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And so even the— isn't it Blackstone whose first deal, Steve's first deal, was like a total flop, if I remember correctly? I don't know.

I remember that, but let me go back to John. I wasn't sitting there thinking about, like, what's the perfect media product. I was trying things, being very forward motion, being very aggressive about these different things.

The important part is you were trying to figure out a business that fits for you. And then this is why, when I immediately saw you guys, you were in, like, the wrinkled t-shirts. You were filming at the Jonathan Club. I was like, this is it. You found it. The reason I bring that up for you is because I think it's a great illustration of the point. It's like, I talk to you guys every day. You don't wake up. Up thinking about like, how do I feel today? Or like, what should I do? You guys just are unbelievably dedicated to— because you found your life's work. And I know this because like, how many people have tried to buy the show? How many people have tried to invest in the show? How many people try to get you to do other things? And you're like, no, like, we just want to do this, and we just want to do this forever. And the example I used on the episode was Sam Walton. Like, Sam Walton was figuring retail out. He had one store for the first 5 years of his life, right? But then you fast forward 25 years into his life, he wasn't waking up I'm like, what should I do today? He's like, no, I like Walmart. I like building Walmart. I'm going to make more Walmarts and just keep doing this until I die. That's the point we were making. And then I love that Mark just refused to back down.

Double down. You were like 10x down.

Oh, day after day after day after day of just not fighting this back. He did very well. And then what I would say about this is like— Perfect. We hit on this weird unintended political divide where a lot of my liberal friends were texting me and saying, this is wrong. This is evil. Oh, interesting. I think you know I'm not a real person. And then more of my conservative friends are like, yeah, no shit. And again, that was unintentional. So a lot of the hate comments came from the socialist side of Twitter, which, OK, fuck them, people. I hate socialists. Good. I'm glad I upset you.

I'm happy about the socialists. Good. Good. More inspiration to grind harder. Tell us more about the show. What's coming down the pike? How are you thinking about it? How much are you on the road these days?

A lot of people— so Jordi has seen the new studio, which you got to come out and see.

It's crazy. Yeah, yeah. It's crazy? Yeah. It's probably actually the craziest podcast studio ever in history. Wow. Just like the actual dirt that it's on.

OK. Yeah. Love it. We just had Evan Spiegel out there. Thank you for making that connection. But he started watching the show, and he's like, can I be on the show? And then he had known, because he's like, I love these guys. Yeah, yeah. So, the answer is just like, I'm not— I mean, we will travel if we have to. I'm trying to push as many people as possible to Malibu. We're having a lot of success with that. And, you know, you— we're all really friends of my— good friends of my co-founder Rob Moore. And like every time, like the Andreessen one we did, I probably did that like 3 weeks before he came out. And I was like, again, I don't do any drugs, but I was like high as a kite. I was just like shaking Rob. I was like, just put a founder in front of me every single day. Like that's the biggest thing. So, yeah, I definitely feel like I'm not waking up thinking, What should I do today? It's like I'm completely—

What's the pipeline of people that are coming on the new show that have never done a podcast?

OK, so we all know— Because that's the real alphas.

Like, there's 1,000— I'm saying all of it, but I'm just saying there's 1,000 people out there that would break the internet if they did a show, and they just, for one reason or another—

Who's your set? Their pain. OK.

So there's two things here. One, there's a lot of other podcasters. A few have tweeted this publicly. And I don't really respond to anybody on Twitter. But I've said, hey, I think of this differently. They're like, I don't like doing people that have the podcast circuit. Sure. And when you say that, you're just admitting that you have no differentiation. You have no unique perspective. So I really wanted to do Marc because—

We would never interview someone here if they had done a different podcast.

Yeah, exactly. But I wanted to interview— What?

This is your sixth show today? OK, let's ring the gong.

I wanted to have conversation with Mark because of all the things that I knew about him that I had never heard anybody else talk about.

Of course. Of course. We went on Jim Clark.

So if you listen to episode 3—

And the virality is evidence that you had a new conversation. You got to a different place.

Well, not only that, but that was the stuff that was controversial. But there's stuff in there like, OK, the fact that when Mark was 20 years old, he was mentored by the Elon of his day. Jim Clark was the first person to ever— in history in history to ever found 3 separate billion-dollar technology companies. And he didn't start his first company until he was 38 years old. At 38, he started his first company. And then— and check this out— and then there was this book from like 2001 that was published that I read by Michael Lewis.

And before he was 38, was he just like introspecting?

No, no, no.

He was an academic. The moment he stopped—

He was an academic, but— Straight to the top. He describes himself in the book, he just said, as a self-described loser because he was smart, he had papers written, and he was teaching, but he had no money. And then I think his second or third divorce, the guy's like, he was literally just—

who is this again? Jim Clark. Jim Clark. Yeah, founder Silicon Graphics. Yes.

Netscape, the company that turns into WebMD.

And Marc Andreessen was really young when he co-founded Netflix, but he had Jim Clark— or sorry, Netscape. Uh, but, but he had Jim Clark as like this older mentor. Mentor. It'd be like a wild thing because normally if You walk into Andreessen's office, and you say, like, I'm 20, and I have a 40-year-old co-founder, people will be like, this is odd. Like, normally we fund, like, 2 Stanford grads.

So I read an entire book on this. Very interesting. He talks about it in his blog archive. And I did 2 other episodes on the same book, like 2 or 3 years apart. I don't know how no one ever brought that up to Marc. But it was so fascinating. And he tells 3 different stories on the podcast, spread by, like, 30 minutes in between each story, about how formative this was. The reason he is the way he is is because he He was mentored by Jim Clark at 20. How is that not interesting? So I want to have my own spin on people that do other podcasts. There is another one coming out. We're actually flying to New York to do this one, because it's going to be one of the craziest locations that you could possibly film in. This was suggested by somebody I can't name on the show. He's a good friend of us three. He's probably the smartest person that we all know. And he's like, hey, we were at dinner in Miami, and he's like— He who shall not be named. Exactly. And so basically, he's like, what are you talking about this guy? I can't tell you who it is yet, but this guy's product, if you are wealthy in the world, you will know and probably have frequented this guy's product. And it's outside of tech. It's nothing to do with technology. And so he's never— what did you say? Chrome Hearts. No. No, but he's never done a podcast. He doesn't even have any— this guy doesn't even have any social media.

Wraps that go on Huracans.

The chat is saying you're bringing vague posting to the podcast. Who?

You are. You're vague posting.

Who? You're vague posting on a pod, which is innovative.

Let's be less vague. What do you think about the AI podcast that's at the top of the charts right now? It is— It's coming for all of us. It's putting us all out of a job. Is this the Epstein one?

Yes. Yeah. But I think they're transitioning to— They're going to do more More.

They're going to do a bunch of stuff. Everything that you want, like if it's a hot topic, they're going to have a podcast that's single narrator, like very fact-based, deep research. Yeah.

And the reason that it's interesting is like, it's not an AI app. It is like somebody used AI to make the media product and then just uploaded it to traditional channels. Yeah.

Kareem from Ramp showed me this like a month ago. Yeah. Yeah. Obviously, there's going to be great AI-generated podcasts. Of course. Now, I think they got to the top of the charts not because they have a large listenership, if I'm not mistaken, but the frequency in which you produce. And so that's a way to actually manipulate that, where you see this with some other media companies doing this, where they essentially record for 3 hours, and they just break up— all the episodes are like 15 minutes long, and they upload 15 a day or whatever. And they're like, look, we're on top of the charts. I think an overall listenership is like really low. But yeah, like there's obviously like, I mean, I got to spend, I think I can talk about this, pretty sure. I got to spend some time with Demis from DeepMind, and just like, you know, that is the most AGI-pilled fucking person I've ever come across in my life. So he thinks it's coming for everything. So yeah, obviously there's gonna be great AI-generated podcasts.

I think the people making AI, podcasts would stop if they knew they were competing against you?

I found this hilarious. I was looking back.

Like, this is the Chuck Norris of podcasting.

You guys are hilarious because I went through our, look at this here. You guys texted me this when I did the new show and you didn't like the profile picture that I originally picked.

Yeah, 'cause you were smiling. Do I read it? Yeah, I said, you created a new account for the new show and I just immediately texted it to you. And I said, I think no smile in profile picture. John says, agree. And I says, I said, you look good. It just doesn't seem on brand. You're more serious than 99% of people. And then John said, unless it's a deliberate ploy to make enemies underestimate how seriously you take podcasting. And I said, you look like you should look like you're going to kill someone.

Yeah. So anything like I think like being the best in the world, like trying to dominate whatever niche you like. You guys are dominating your niche right now. Yeah. I'm amazed. I listen to every single interview you guys do, and just your relentless focus of, like, this is what we do. You don't even want to travel, which I heard you changed something, plans recently. Yeah, I think the key for us, and anybody, is just whatever your core competency is, focus in on that. Try to get as far down that line as possible, and then just say no to everything else. And again, is that even new?

Yeah, it's interesting. On the AI topic, the speed with which AI can produce an audio deep dive on a hot topic like the Epstein Files, which drops, it has thousands of thousands of pages of documents. Like a human team's not gonna be able to read through that. And people want to consume that media through audio. That makes a lot of sense. At the same time, it does feel like interviews, you know, with particular people that everyone knows is not AI, like Marc Andreessen, and then they can react to that and feel something emotionally. Because it's a real person with a real impact on the world. That feels very, very sticky. So I would debate Demis on that.

We just had this conversation. So some of the stuff, like how we're using AI for the new show, like I'm not going to talk about publicly. I'll obviously tell you guys, because we share information. But it's just like, I'm not giving an edge to competitors. It's not going to happen. What I would say is— So you have a course. No, never do that. Never. So what I would say is like, I had dinner like a month ago. And this is exactly— it was with Kareem and the guy that we can't mention. —and they're just like, you're moving way too fucking slow. These are close friends, so it's like they're not being mean to me. You're moving way too slow. You're not using AI enough. Like, Founders is more susceptible to being overtaken by AI than the new one, and you should drastically ramp up production on the new one. And they made the exact same point that you did. But I do think, again, like, the world is run on power parallels. And I think podcasting is the same way. And it's just like, yeah, you guys are making media, you're delivering news and commentary, but your audience has a relationship with you. Yeah. Like, I see when they come up to you, like, how they act. They act like you're— Jordi and John are my best friends. Like, that's what I've been saying. This— you can go— I've been going on podcasts for half a decade. Like, I'm not making media, I'm creating relationships at scale.

And that's why your, your shows are not just like you ask one— like, it would be very different to, like, use AI and walk into an interview Mark Andreessen just with like 10 questions and be like, Mark, how did you start your career? I didn't have—

AI will be able to put up an insane podcast just with that format where the guests could say like a total of 1,000 words. He just like goes off.

But no, you're having—

yours are more like, you know, all of your— I think a lot of your episodes will end up being like 50/50. I'm trying to like—

I didn't have anything. I think they're better if I don't have anything in front of me. Like I I prepared for the last decade. Like, I can just sit down and talk to you. We do have one. So I met Tony from DoorDash here. Remember, he came on your show. And we had this crazy conversation. You were writing the newsletter, but me, you, Patrick, and Tony had this crazy conversation for like 45 minutes. And then 15 minutes in, I was like, hold up, dude. You got to do more podcasts, because he's so impressive. That one, I think, is coming out next weekend. That one, I had maybe too much in front of me, just because like— The way I think about Tony is just he's like— again, not financial advice, but he just gives me— out of anybody I've ever spoken to, I think he's 41— he just gives me like young Jeff Bezos vibes. Like, I have no idea the quality of DoorDash. I don't look into the stock, anything like that. All I know is if you think that guy's going to stop being a food delivery—

Yeah, the other thing that's notable there is all 3 of the original co-founders are still working in the business. And it's, what are they, 15 years in or something? It's a crazy thing. Maybe a little bit less. But it's so rare to have that much success, all the founders.

Normally, somebody steps back, normally.

Somebody's got to start a venture fund.

Think about how humble he is, though, right? And I even said this on the episode. I was like, you're not going to like what I'm about to say, Tony, but I'm going to say it anyways. It's just like, your competitors are afraid of you. Like, I had a dinner Dinner in Stockholm with the guy that sold his company for like $8 billion to Tony. His name's Mickey. The company's called Volt or something like that.

It was like DoorDash.

Oh, yeah. European. And he told this crazy story. I tell it on the episode with Tony. He still reports directly to Tony to this day. And he's like, I thought of myself as an entrepreneur my entire life. I thought there's no way in hell I'd ever work for anybody else. We had a term sheet right in front of me. We could raise a fresh billion dollars of capital to fight them. And I'm looking at it thinking about this, and something involuntarily came out of my mouth that I never thought I would admit. And he's looking at it, and he goes, I can't beat him. Whoa.

You can't beat him, Jordi?

I can't beat him. So I either could sell for life-changing money and then learn from him, or I could fight this ego and maybe light this billion dollars on fire. And he did the difficult decision. He's like, I'm going to go and sell.

He's still going to get stock in the new company and be able to grow that. Yeah.

But I would say that out of all the conversations I've had so far, the one that— they're all— I've all enjoyed them. But what I would say is Toby Luque was— if the people listening to this have not listened to any of the new show yet, if you want to go in tech, go Toby Luque. If you want to find these crazy people that are not in tech, go Todd Graves.

Todd Graves.

But Toby Luque was very fascinating to me, was he's your favorite founder's favorite founder, so everybody that you admire, you ask who they admire, and they'll bring up Tobi. And what they like about him is that he thinks through every single thing independently, so therefore he has all these beliefs that are not correlated with one another, which means when you have a conversation with him, you are unable to predict what his response to your question or your statement is going to be. And that— we talked for 4 hours. So we talked for a half hour before we recorded, then we recorded for 3 hours, we edited down to whatever whatever it was. Then we recorded for another 30 minutes, or talked for another 30 minutes after. And I could have kept talking. I was like, dude, I gotta catch a flight. I'm gonna have dinner with Charlie Rose that night. Like, I had to, like, fly down there. I was like, we would have kept talking. Like, he just blew my mind. And one thing he said I think would be interesting to your audience is he believes— and I think he said this on the episode— that we're gonna look back on the year 2026 as the year that every single business in the world was up for grabs, that AI is coming for everything. Every single other business will have to be reimagined. And you're gonna look back at, this is the year where it should have been obvious to you that you can rebuild the AI-native version of whatever exists out there.

Interesting.

Meta has scaled back their metaverse plans, kind of refocused the company. A lot of people over the last couple weeks have been kind of dunking on, Zuck for that. Anything stand out in history where great entrepreneurs, CEOs made like massive, massive bets and they didn't pan out? I would say as a Meta shareholder, I think it's great that Zuck is willing to like bet heavy, heavy, heavy on trends that he really believes in. And also it's great It's okay if you kind of run it down and then realize you're hitting a dead end or need to refocus, but what's your view on, you know, swinging for the absolute fences and missing sometimes?

I mean, it's obviously inevitable. Jeff Bezos has this great line in shareholder letters where it's like, the size of your failure has to scale with the size of your company. So he's like, I can't make a $300 million mistake anymore. I need to be making— I think the Fire Phone was like a $3 billion. Oh, yeah. Yeah, that's good. Like, okay. 'Cause I'm going to somewhere. Like, I have to. Like, it's just inevitable. What I will say is I've spent some time with Zuck. I don't think he has a peer. Like, I told him this. It's like, who else is his age? And he's still somewhat of a puzzle and mystery to me, and that's why I'm interested in to continue to talk to him. 'Cause it's just like, I've read every single book on Facebook. They're all bad. There's no good books on Facebook. They're— some of his— most of his interviews, like, they just— There's just certain things I want to talk to him about, because I'm just naturally curious about. I think this is the whole point where people are like, you guys are having this immoral conversation about introspection.

It's funny, because yeah, you actually want him to introspect. The interview that you would do with Zuck would be very reflective. It would not be, tell me how you're thinking about MSL's product roadmap.

No, I don't even think it would be introspective. —like, the reason I singled out the Toby Luque episode is because when I sat down with Toby, and I did this with Bryan Armstrong too, who was awesome, it's just like, I want to make, like, a "How Toby Luque Works" episode. Like, and this is where I just want to know— there's no gotcha here. It's just like, how do you think about building businesses? How do you think about retaining talent? Why did you do this product? Like, just tell me the stuff that— you have 25 years, in his case, I think 20 years experience as an entrepreneur. Like, that's And that's one very rare, especially one in a single company. Like, you've learned all kinds of crazy stuff. Like, just like, let's get some of this on record. Let's talk about this. So same thing with Zuck. I'd just be very interested. What I like about him is, like, he has this just, like, inner clock where, you know, he's going to make these massive bets. And, you know, so obviously he knows. He's obviously not stupid. Like, some of them are going to fail, of course.

What do you think about retired interviews? People that are out of the game. The risk with a live player, someone who's actively running a public company, is that the SEC is listening to what they're saying, that they want to stay on talking points, that they have a bunch of different incentives. Well, if they say, oh, well, you know, the easiest thing I ever did was cut back my marketing spend because none of that stuff was working "Well, then their head of marketing's gonna be upset." There's internal politics. Whereas when you do an interview with somebody who's retired and no longer in the game, sometimes they can speak a little bit more freely about their industry, their life's work, their career, et cetera.

Yeah. I would— if I could have a show of just 80-year-old billionaires that would talk— like, I got to spend time with Sam Zell before he died. The fact that I was never able to record a podcast with him —like, now that I have this new vehicle, it's like, man. Because he just, like, doesn't care. He's dying of cancer. He's going to say whatever. So my friend Sam Hinkie, I just saw him, like, 2 weeks ago. And he actually gave me advice. He's like, you should organize your guest list in reverse chronological order. Oh, sure. Because there's one guy we're working on right now who's one of the most successful people. We already had to reschedule with him. He's 87. 87, yeah. And he is, like, unfiltered and incredible.

What about the tension between a name brand live player? Like Toby Lutke is somebody who has done other podcasts. People know Shopify. Maybe they built a business on Shopify. It is not fully a consumer brand, but it will draw a certain level of attention versus 80-year-old billionaire who owns half the farmland in Montana might have had had a fantastically rich life, but one behind the scenes. Is there still an interview to be done there? Yeah.

Like, how do you guys choose the people you want to talk to? Like—

Well, a lot of it's news-driven. So a lot of it's about what's happening right now in the world. Who can we talk to to contextualize that? And so I enjoy those reflective moments when they come up, but they aren't as much of a driving course at all.

So I went on a walk yesterday, or maybe yesterday. I don't even know where I was yesterday. Yeah, it was yesterday morning. And a really good friend, really smart person, he was just like, one of your gifts is distilling everything down to what is actually essential. And he's like, you help me talk through all these issues I'm having with my business this way, but you do it for yourself, where it's like, I'm I'm just going after things I'm intensely interested in. Especially in the age of AI, if you're not following what you're obsessed with, I think you're doing it wrong. So Founders is just the books that I'm intensely interested in reading, and the new show is just people I'm intensely interested in speaking to. Some of the stuff, the people we have recorded, they might be known as small niche thing. I'm not going after just big names. That's not interesting to me. like, the decision-making here is very simple. It's like, "Am I intensely interested to sit down and talk to this person?" Like, um, Evan Spiegel. I showed him, too, this. It's like, I did an episode of Founders on him. I think it's episode, like, 25 or 24. It's like a long time ago. And what I— there was, like, one thing that happened with Evan, because I talk about Edwin Land all the time, founder of Polaroid, Steve Jobs' hero. Steve Jobs copied a lot of Edwin— how Edwin Land built Polaroid and used those Sightings and building Apple. Jobs of mentoring technologists. Yeah, and he's the patron saint of founders. And so I read this book about Evan. And Evan is 21 years old. And he's talking about that he's got two heroes. And it happens to be Steve Jobs, which makes sense. Every 21-year-old kid trying to be an entrepreneur at the time had Steve Jobs. And then Edwin Land. I was like, how the hell does a 21-year-old even know? We got nothing Land had. Yeah, we had an incredible conversation about that.

No, different Land.

Yeah, and so you see what I mean? I'm just like, we have the same interest. This is a guy that has influenced my thinking, he influenced your thinking, and of course you wind up with a camera company. Like, it makes perfect sense to me.

Oh, that makes sense.

And I don't care, anybody's like, oh, market cap, I don't care about that.

The iPhone is also—

But people are like, what about if the stock price is down on the market cap? So I don't give a shit. I want him to win. He's like a very interesting person to me.

Yeah, totally, totally.

Okay, Saturday I watched Elon's kind of new pitch for Tesla, xAI, and SpaceX. And one of the products that he was kind of presenting was a mass driver. Did you follow this at all? Do you think I did? I know you didn't. Hold on, we have two episodes coming out tomorrow, by the way. Yeah, yeah, so we were having a debate on the show at the beginning around the timeline for the products, and we were pretty John, where did we actually land? You were saying under 20 years?

I said under 20, Tyler said under 30, and you said 75 or something like that. Or you said 10, but then also 75.

But also 5. Also 5. No, I have literally no idea. I'm not gonna pretend that I think I have like an accurate read on it. But has there any entrepreneurs throughout throughout history that were kind of pitching their business overall on timelines where the market was like, I don't know if this is— like, going back to, like, inventing flight. People telling the Wright brothers, like, you're never going to be able to fly. It's impossible. People were saying that.

Yeah, no, I know, I know, I know.

But then they did it on, like, a—

They weren't being like, this chain of events will lead to the 747, 50 years from now.

Yeah, exactly, exactly.

So get ready for the 747. This is like the right brothers question. So invest in my bicycle plane because the 747's coming. It was coming in 50 years, right?

Yeah. So I would say about Elon in particular, I did this episode of Founders, which I'm really proud of. It's probably the most downloaded episode ever. It's called How Elon Works. And it strips away all the biographical details and just talks about him speaking about the way he runs his company. Companies. And in that episode, I said, like, usually there's some kind of, like, historical equivalent for everybody operating today. And, you know, you could name a person, I could find somebody in history that, you know— but for him, I do think he is, like, a singular character. I can't think of anybody living or dead that is like him. Yeah. Um, there's—

weird, because he's an industrialist, but he's also incredibly promotional and, like, very good at the marketing side as well as the building.

The best in the world at that. That's very— might be the best salesperson. Yeah, that was why the week—

the weekend presentation was tough because I didn't think the— all the technology was cool, and I have zero doubt that Elon can do hard things that no other set of companies can do.

And you see it today because a decade ago people were like, Roadster's coming next year, everyone's talking about Roadster, and no one's really talking about Mass Driver. It didn't break through in the same way.

Probably because of the name, like, they got to get a new name.

Yeah, they should call it—

I didn't see it, so I don't know what that means, but that's fine. Hold on, there is— to answer your question, Jordi, there is tons of examples from history of somebody having an idea, saying that they're going to dedicate their life to making that idea come to fruition, and taking multiple decades to actually do that. So, like, the thing that comes to mind, just because I'm rereading about him now, and I'm probably going to do another episode on him, I've done like 6 episodes on Henry Ford, and Henry Ford had one idea. He would tell you, I had one idea in my entire life, and that was to figure out a way to make the car for an everyman, meaning at the time when you made less than $1 a day, cars were like $6,000. You can't afford— the people making them cannot afford them. How can we learn to mass-produce that? And it took him, you know, 20 years of pounding on that idea till he actually accomplished that goal. So he probably thought it was gonna be done in 3 or 5 or 10, and it took 20. But yeah, you're gonna find a ton of examples like that. It always takes longer.

And that's why the Raptor R exists. It's the car for the everyman.

Henry Ford would have loved the Model Y. Well, the thing that— that example doesn't quite satisfy this example, because this pitch is like, these 8 things need to happen perfectly synced together in order for this other thing to be possible. But again, betting against Elon has not worked. Mid-curve alert! Mid-curve alert!

There is a book by our mutual friend Eric Jorgensen that's coming out tomorrow.

Mid-curve! Mid-curve! Uh, we, yeah, I think we, I mean, we can show the COVID can't we?

You can read the whole thing right now live.

You guys want to see me read for 7 hours? Let's do a table reading.

This is the book Wheelon with a foreword by Naval Ravikant by none other than Eric Jorgensen, and the visuals are by Jack Butcher. Ooh, that's great.

So in the book, Elon talks about the fact that he gets a lot of shit on the fact that his timelines are usually off. And he explains why and everything else. But I think what Eric— we're actually doing something. Eric was actually the first American to ever put me on a podcast. Really? And so the first podcast I ever did of somebody else's podcast was this one that only went in China. And so it was really popular on WeChat. He just gave me a shot when no one really knew who I was. And they wound up being important, because one of the listeners of that episode— there's only like 1,000 people that listened to it— was Patrick. And Matt Russell, who was running Colossus. And there's a comment in the Colossus Slack, the Colossus Podcast Network Slack, which Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the founder of, talking about the episode. This is before I was signed to them. And they said, this guy sounds like he's going to bite the microphone. And so they're like, oh, he's actually I was like, might be good at this. But I think what Eric is— the reason what I'm doing is I'm dropping an episode of Founders on this book tomorrow, which is a normal solo episode. Then I did something different for the new show, which I think could be another, like, not just having conversations with great founders, but conversations with charismatic authors who are writing about great founders. Eric, because he's a friend, he's also very articulate and charismatic. And so we essentially— that episode's coming on the David Center feed tomorrow.

Did you say because he's a friend he's articulate and charismatic? No, no.

We spent a lot of time talking to him. We were like, you guys have interviewed authors.

Yeah, you know.

Some of them was like—

Authors are almost universally fun to talk to in the moment that they're launching their book, because they've spent more time than anyone else on Earth just thinking about that one.

So when you see the shot tomorrow, it's like, we have, like, I don't know, 1,000 pages of Elon documents in front of us. And a lot of it is just me going through, asking my notes and highlights with Eric. And then you essentially can prompt him, and then he can tell you crazy Elon stories. Yeah.

Do you think that a lot of the CEOs that you're talking to, the ones that are kind of in their prime, let's say, you know, 5 to 10 years or 20 years into their company, do you think they are more AGI-pilled than they let on on the internet? Because a lot of them will like talk about how they're using AI and talk about how they're excited about it. But I feel like you've given me some examples where behind the scenes they're actually like much stronger believers. I mean, you guys had—

I think Lulu, I think, has been on here talking about that AI has like a communication, like a branding problem. It's like very unpopular with the general population. Yep. Um, actually talking— I spent over an hour with Kareem yesterday talking about this topic, um, and about ways to actually get good information. What I would say is like, yeah, like most of the stuff they're talking about, they're not going to talk on a podcasts. They're not going to talk about— you'll see this in group chats, some of the ones that like you and I are in, but even that, like, yeah, most of them is like whispers and like private conversations and completely off-the-record stuff.

Do you think you'll ever write a book?

Do you think I'll ever write a book? The things that we three share— no, man, the thing that we three—

no, the thing that we— it's a narrative violation.

What we share is like, do you want to do anything else than the Show. Why haven't you raised the fund yet? Why aren't you starting a new company? Why aren't you on a plane right now traveling?

I'm just thinking, like, I don't know, like the book of David Senra with Erik Jorgensen. He's writing it. Could make sense. But basically—

Erik's already writing it. He is? Yeah, he tried to work on it with me. And he's just like, you don't answer my phone. And I talk to you, because I can't get a hold of you. Then I talk to you, your idea changes all the time. I was like, I can't be the bottleneck of anything. This is why I have to I run my own shit.

Yeah, that's fair. I'm just thinking about in terms of like just— Are you trying to sabotage me?

You're trying to get me to not focus on podcasting?

I thought we were friends. I've just seen more and more— like, Jordi Hays wrote that book with Stripe Press that was heavily based upon the interviews that he did. It had a bunch of interesting graphics. It was clearly a collaborative project. And I feel like there's an aura effect to writing that can work very well. We've had a number of people on that have been able to stick the landing.

No, I think, again, just focus is more important than ever in this age. And focus on things that you think about all the time, and that you're obsessed with. And the reason I could do a new episode every day is because I never get tired of talking about how people build their business, or think about their products. I find that shit infinitely fascinating. Because you could do it— this is what I loved about Toby. And it's just like, he's like, the reason he thinks, he said this on the episode, the reason he thinks through every single thing, because he's like, there's not one right way to do it, there's probably 100, and I'm looking for the right way for me. And so like, talk about AGI pill, he said something that was shocking on that episode, where, you know, 'cause he's like, I started Shopify in my, he had no money, he was living in his like, mother-in-law's house, at a small desk in a bedroom there.

[Speaker] It was inside of a cave. Dave, right?

No, I don't think so.

With scraps. With scraps. No, he built the company with scraps.

And then what was interesting about that, right before all the new innovation in AI happened, he said that he was like, he thought like, I'm not the right person to run this company anymore. Oh, interesting. I shouldn't be CEO anymore. And then he stayed. And then he's like, if it wasn't for AI, I wouldn't be running the company anymore.

So many stories like that where someone had a really good business growing, and it's just stable growth, 20% top line. They're doing fine, but they're just lost for purpose or energy. And then AI happens and they're like, I'm back in gear. I love seeing it, especially with the folks who are at that like multi-billion-dollar phase. It's just been, it's been a remarkable, remarkable moment in tech.

Yeah, you want those people to be playing as long as possible. He's still relatively young. He's probably what, in his 40s, 45 or something like that?

Like that's way too early. But it's so easy. To step back and think about something else, get distracted, or do a fund or something, or just retire.

Like, there's a lot of people who've knocked out. And also, he went public really early. I think he said on the episode that they went public at a $1.5 billion valuation, or it was like some crazy number like that.

IPO for ants. It's high for Canada.

There's a lot of stuff on the TSX that's like tiny.

Yeah, but I think at one point he was at $200 billion. I don't know what he's at now. Yeah, and so it had to feel like he was sprinting, you know, for 20 years. Totally. Fantastic. But no, I'm glad those people are like that. And I do think that the point— somebody was making this point to me yesterday, where it's just like these technical founders just have a massive advantage over everybody else. And you see this with Toby constantly writing more code. Brian Armstrong is doing the same thing. You just see this over and over again.

There's a lot of folks.

If there was a peptide you could take that would allow you to podcast for 25 hours a day, would you take it?

Okay, here's the thing. I keep hearing about peptides. I think I accidentally took one one time.

What happened? Justin, I think, had some.

Oh no, that was, yeah, Justin gave, Justin had like, I don't even know if we could talk about this.

Yeah, it was afters.

He gave me and you, that's right. Justin Mares. It was some sleep peptide, but it was like something you get on Amazon.

Okay, right. But I thought his friend, he said his friend made it, —his own compound pharmacy. We might get Justin arrested for this. But us, we were hanging out, and then you texted— or maybe we hung out the next day, and you texted him. He's like, I didn't feel anything about this. No. One of the benefits of partnering with Andrew Huberman is you get access to, like, weird health shit. And so I was, like, over— like, I remember recording with, like, John Mackey. It was the day I recorded with John Mackey. I felt fine. We stopped at, like, 1:00 PM. By, like, 5:00 PM, I feel like I'm going to die. Unbelievably important thing to do, like 36 hours later, I could not mess around, and so I just texted the group, and they sent like this IV guy, and it was like a 4-hour IV, and I was like, listen, and I don't know anything about it, so I was like telling Rob, I was like, I trust you, so like, you don't give me, like I don't wanna, this has to be good, would you take this? And it's something they do to make sure that like, when they're on the edge of getting sick.

[Speaker] Well, the next meta, Or goat.

One of them, there was some kind of peptide in there. One of them, by the next morning, I woke up feeling 100%. Like I went from deadly sick to I feel like a completely normal person.

Well, the next meta is leeches. No. You're going to be purifying. What happened? No. I walked in and all the guys— You can get medical leeches. This is every podcaster. Stop, stop. Oh yeah, you don't like snakes.

What happened? Because I walked in and all the guys were talking about— you guys had some kind of debate?

Yeah, we had a debate. Martin Shkreli.

What happened? From Superpower. Yeah, they just—

They were just debating whether or not the more out-there peptides that are not fully FDA approved yet, maybe there's some data, should those be sold? What's the correct path to bring the next generation peptides to market? Martin Shkreli's position was that the FDA has the path laid down. These companies should be— these products should be developed by biotech companies, approved by the FDA. And sold in the pharmaceutical context prescribed by a doctor. And Max from Superpower had a more liberal view.

Does one of the guys sell peptides?

I don't know if Superpower does, but a lot of Silicon Valley companies are getting into that market. And a lot of people in San Francisco and Silicon Valley broadly are like taking Chinese peptides, quote unquote, meaning that they're like going to a gray market marketplace that then manufactures these drugs that are not FDA approved and not made in FDA-approved facilities and certainly are not to the economic benefit of the pharmaceutical companies that spent a lot of money developing these drugs. So, there's some company out there that's been working on something. They developed the intellectual property. They're hoping to recoup 100% of that because they have patent on it and so that they should be able to sell it and get all the value. And there are a whole bunch of third parties that are going around copying the homework, maybe changing it a little bit, maybe making it worse, maybe making it less effective, maybe making it less safe, and then selling it. And so, there's a big debate in Silicon Valley right now about like the—

Are you taking any of this stuff? Nope. You like protect your body like a temple. Yeah. I'm surprised you took what Justin gave you.

I trust Justin. Justin and I I have a very similar ethos around health.

Anyway, this has been a fantastic conversation.

I'm excited to continue this podcast as soon as we go off the air. For sure, for sure. The podcast never stops.

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