Trump-Xi Summit, Inflation Fears, Space Data Centers | Max Levchin, Delian Asparouhov, Richard Socher, Brandon Hill, Nate Tepper, Joubin Mirzadegan, Roman Chernin

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Today is Wednesday, May 13th, 2026. We are live from the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. A bunch of news going on today. Huge show. Max Levchin's coming on the show. Deleon's coming in person from Varda. Recursive is coming out of stealth. Brandon Hill from Boree. Nate Tepper from TruShort. Very excited to talk about Vertical video, the trough, the trough is cooking. Some of the trough is delicious.

Trough economy.

Juben Mirzadegan from Roadrunner and Roman Chernin from Nebbius, absolutely destroying earnings. Very excited to talk to the co-founder and chief business officer over at Nebbius. But the big news this week, and I'm sure what everyone will be focused on, is of course on the COVID of The Wall Street Journal. That's the Trump-Seijun Ping summit that's happening in Beijing. Trump and Xi Jinping vie for wins at summit. They're duking it out. And Trump brought— they both brought a big crew with them.

A team.

Yeah. Trump brought—

Geopolitics.

A couple—

Team sport.

A couple political people that we won't even care about, but the business leaders are what is particularly interesting. So we got Elon Musk from Tesla, Tim Cook from Apple, Jensen from Nvidia, Kelly Ortberg from Boeing. A little flex there. Because Boeing has been able to maintain the lead in manufacturing large planes for a very long time. DJI has not been able to scale up and make a 747. What's going on over there? David Solomon from Goldman Sachs, Stephen Schwarzman from Blackstone, Larry Fink from BlackRock, Jane Fraser from Citi, and Dina Powell McCormick from Meta. So we should read through the stakes of the Trump-Xi Jinping summit in The Wall Street Journal.

From the Wall Street Journal editorial board.

Before we get into that, let's get into the more important stuff. Yeah, please.

Do you think Jensen was always coming on the trip? Right? There's been some speculation he got on the plane in Alaska.

Oh, yeah.

Was that just the most convenient place for him to get on, or was he a late addition?

I don't know. Why would he have been a late addition? I don't know. It seems like he's a positive person.

Well, because there was reporting earlier this week—

He runs the largest company in America. I know.

There have been statements made from what I saw that he wasn't going.

I don't know. Yes. Well, so Trump had a Truth Social post that said CNBC incorrectly reported that the great Jensen Huang of Nvidia was not invited. But then he corrected it. He said he did invite him.

I don't know. These schedules move around. It's got to be really, really difficult if you're the leader of the biggest company in the world to move things around and commit to this.

I know, but What's more important for Jensen and his objectives?

No, of course, it's critical importance. But at the same time, there might have just been other moving pieces of like, OK, when can he go? Where will he arrive from? Where will he get picked up from?

I don't know.

These things always shift. I don't have a good thesis, other than the fact that that is the company that has maybe the most tension between the trade deals with China. Apple obviously does a ton of business in China, but has been much less of a focus in the chip sanctions. And so having Jensen there is a little bit more of a discussion point. What do you think?

I mean, I think on China, like, the NVIDIA stuff seems like pretty, like, fine now.

Stable.

But yeah, but Meta, I think, has like some conflict, right? Because I mean, Manus, yeah, maybe it's like not that big of an acquisition on like market cap-wise, but they're blocking it.

A lot of these things, you know, we always say in the context of Silicon Valley, it's like a $2 billion deal or a company that's doing $40 billion in revenue. And then you get over there and the stakes are like— a trillion-dollar oil market or like all the rare earths in the world. And it's your geopolitical conflict, which is obviously a much bigger deal. And so, I don't know, we can speculate it on more. There might be more reporting that comes out about Jensen's goals there, what actually happened, how he found his way onto Air Force One. But that was confirmed by Elon Musk, right? He said that, Elon, Jensen, and Trump were all on Air Force One together flying over. I certainly wouldn't wanna get there. I would wanna arrive on the cool plane. Can we play the video of the arrival? Trump arrives in Beijing with Elon Musk and Jensen in tow. I guess the rest of the business leaders came separately, but here is their arrival with, are those—

Can we get some—

Your leaders or something?

I don't know what.

They seem to be waving— oh, flags. They're waving flags. That makes sense. Well, there they go walking down the red carpet. Air Force One is truly stately. There's— it's so disappointing that the economics of the airline industry didn't just get bigger and bigger. And so you find yourself very rarely on 747s unless you're flying across the world. Because they do have such a presence and they're spacious inside. But we have been, you know, cramped down into the 737 for pretty much everything.

Are there videos where they give a proper tour of Air Force One, or is it kind of locked down?

I think they've done tours. I mean, there is an— there are several Air Force Ones, I believe, that are on display at presidential libraries. And so you can go and tour them. There might be one at the Smithsonian. I'm not exactly sure, but I'm pretty sure you can go walk around old ones.

Take note.

I wouldn't— I wouldn't be surprised if they keep the current spec like somewhat secretive. There we go. This is very grainy footage. It looks like, oh, maybe it's just the middle of the night or something.

And it reminds me of Dune.

Dune. Arrakis. That's Taiwan though. Anyway, let's go through Jensen's pack list. He was having trouble thinking of what was he going to bring. Of course, he landed on just a ton of leather jackets. The back—

And even the sneakers I feel like are pretty iconic.

Yeah.

Like, the uniform is really starting to compound where it used to just be the jacket. Soon we will know the exact brand and specs of the pants as well as the shoes, and the whole Jensen uniform will be out in full force.

Yeah, the clothing industry doesn't want you to know this, but wearing— just getting a few pieces of clothes that you like and then wearing them until they fall apart is incredibly underrated. Not saying that's what Jensen's doing, but— It's pretty funny. I tend to wear almost the exact same thing every day. And so sometimes people on the team will come in and be like, oh, we're matching today. Like, every day you dress like this, you will match with me.

Yeah, that's right. That's right. There's obviously a personal brand benefit to adopting a uniform. We've seen it with Jensen, Steve Jobs with the black turtleneck, Palmer Luckey with the with the Hawaiian shirt. Big news from Anduril today. New round series. Are they running out of letters? Series H? H. Series H. 51, 61 billion, something like that. Fantastic progress. But you adopt the uniform, you become more iconic, you become more recognizable outside of your face, and that builds your personal brand, your lore, and it helps you sort of differentiate and stand out, right? The flip side, the thing you got to watch out for is that if you are always dressed exactly the same and you never switch your wardrobe, clips of you saying something a decade ago can go viral. And if you're not, if you're aging gracefully, it will look like you said them just yesterday. And that can be a big problem if, say, you're an AI CEO who a decade ago was reading some sci-fi and thinking like, "Man, there's something to this Terminator thing." And then maybe in the past decade, you've done a lot of work, you've investigated the systems, you have a more informed position and opinion. Well, the old video of you still looks like you today.

And so there might be something to leveling up the wardrobe and changing the wardrobe over time that actually creates more distance between, "Oh, well, clearly that was—" So this is an indirect way of saying you want Jensen to be in a leather sort of like, you know, sort of trench coat eventually, like flowing robes?

Well, the easiest thing to do is go bald. That's what Jeff Bezos did. He was saying some crazy stuff back when he was building Amazon in the '90s, and he's changed his opinion. It will be very evident from new clips that, "Oh, that's an old one," because it's very iconic, his older look. Now his new look, he looks transformed. He looks very different.

I don't think Jensen has to go bald, but he can do the Bezos playbook, which is just get really jacked.

Get really jacked.

So as he gets more jacked, you'll just see, oh yeah, I mean, he's looking like 320 lean right there. There you go. Like, that must be pretty decent.

320. Jensen at 320 would be electric. Well, he's—

We have a video of the Air Force One Golden Palace.

OK. Pull it up. What is the Golden Palace? Is that what they call the interior these days?

The Air Force One that was gifted by Qatar. Okay.

And that one is never going to be in use, but going to go straight to the library, I think. Is that the idea or is it going to get flown around? Well, let's, let's watch the— Presumably it's going to be used. Golden Palace. Really particular aesthetics here. It looks like a normal 747 on the outside. Looks like a yacht. I feel like, isn't there a big, there's a big swing in fuel efficiency based on the color of the plane. If you paint your plane black, cause you think it looks cool, it will attract more heat and you will burn a lot more fuel. And so most companies go with white. Spirit Airlines went yellow. I don't know if that had anything to do with their downfall, but you would think, is there a chance, is there some weird economic logic where if you paint it gold, the gold will reflect the sunlight and increase fuel efficiency?

Well, unfortunately the exterior is not going to reflect the sun.

Well, so you should wrap your plane in like a mirror-like surface.

Yeah, maybe. But yeah, I don't know if that actually—

That would reflect the most.

That would probably reflect the most, right? Mirrored plane. There are some silver bombers and jets that are in service across the United States Air Force.

I can't call upon it right now. This really is a sky yacht.

Chessboard. You think anybody's played chess on there?

Jordi Hays. Yeah, the whole plane is actually used for Jordi Hays, Sean.

4D chess. Chess is already 3D by default. It's a 2D playing board, but time is the third dimension because the turn that you're on is a dimension as well. This goes deeper than I thought. So 4D chess is merely a 3D representation of 2D chess that's played over time. That is the fourth dimension. Anyway, uh, AI is being put to good use visualizing Xi Jinping Donald Trump. Elon Musk and Tim Cook having a beer and I guess a cigarette as well in China somewhere. And then look who pulled up. If you scroll down, Jensen coming in from the back, looking pretty good, looking pretty good. Maybe not 320 lean, but he's certainly up there. He's scrolling up and people are really having fun with this. It turned into a little chain letter. Anyway. Let's go through the Wall Street Journal's report and what the editorial board had to say about the stakes of this summit. What's actually at stake? So, "The United States wants stability, but Chinese communist leader has larger ambitions," says the Wall Street Journal's editorial board. President Trump visits Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing on Thursday, and the pre-meeting US spin is a search for stability, in quotes. It's a nice idea as long as Mr. Trump doesn't think personal rapport can overcome Mr. Xi Jinping's anti-American purposes, says the Wall Street Journal. The agenda ranges from trade to technology to Iran. On trade, the best outcome may be ratifying the status quo, a truce on tariffs with a promise from Beijing not to hold the world's rare earth supply hostage again. The markets, business leaders, No one wants chaos. Everyone can sort of work around a tariff plan if it's going to stay in place for a long time.

It is really funny for Trump to be coming in being like, look guys, all I'm asking for is a little stability here. Yes. I just want stability. Yeah. I want calmness. Yes.

I don't want any conflict. Yes. Didn't he famously call himself a stable genius? Stability has been part of his brand for a long time, at least the one that he projects. Mr. Xi Jinping, on the other hand, China's weak economy is incentive for him to cooperate, and he'll hope to placate Mr. Trump with promises of buying more farm goods. We talked about this previously. More aircraft and other things. So that's maybe why Boeing is there, although there is not, it doesn't look like there's representation from an agricultural leader. Though I can't name one off the top of my head, but maybe they should be in Maybe they should be represented. But Mr. Xi Jinping has made that promise before, and US farmers have never regained their lost market share in China. Rare earths ransom offer. The rare earths ransom offer may be more US advanced chip exports to China. Xi Jinping views artificial intelligence as a decisive theater in Beijing's competition with the United States, and he is trailing, though not by much, maybe 6 months by most people's estimates. The administration wants to talk with Beijing about AI guardrails and by all means, keep the phone lines open, but don't expect much from AI arms control. And the best deterrent is US dominance on models and computing power. Beijing will be happy to make pronouncements about responsible stewardship and then pursue its own interests with little regard for norms or laws. Beijing is engaging in, quote, industrial-scale theft of American AI models. The Trump administration warned this year. And don't forget the Justice Department's indictment this year of a technology executive and associates allegedly running a sophisticated operation to divert high-end chips to China. That was Supermicro. Supermicro. Yeah, they were doing the heater. What was it?

The hair dryer? Yeah, they were putting the fake shipping labels on there.

Fake shipping labels. Yeah. Noticeably absent from this trip are the key leaders of the top AI labs. I mean, Elon Musk is there. Yes. And Jensen is there, obviously deeply involved in AI, as are many of the other folks. Dina Powell McCormick at Meta. But you don't have Demis from Google. You don't have Sundar from Google DeepMind. You don't have Dario from Anthropic or Sam Altman from OpenAI. And each one of those leaders has their own complicated relationships with the the federal government and the Trump administration. So it's not shocking that they aren't there, but it does feel like there's a little bit of a disconnect between the conversation that's happening in Silicon Valley and the conversation that's happening on the global geopolitical stage at the highest levels. And so if you were looking for answers to some of the biggest questions posed about how superintelligence will play out in the global stage, the AI 2027 scenario, the China wakes up scenario, you're gonna have to keep waiting because that's not really what this is about. It's about maybe a little bit of semiconductor supply chain details and export restrictions, but not answering the big questions about what a US-China relationship looks like in a post-AGI world, a post-ASI world, a post, you know, a fast takeoff scenario.

OTP says, why is Meta there at all? Good question. All Meta platform products have been banned for quite a long time. Yeah, I don't think that will change. But they have this Manis thing. I think it might just be to show some friendliness. Yeah, some presence there. I again, I'd be shocked if there's any time between Xi and Trump that gets dedicated to Manis because like $2 billion is really a rounding error when you look at all of these other issues. But—

But it is a big question for both economies. Not only can American companies acquire Chinese companies that have relocated to Singapore and have moved out, like how strict will China be around maintaining talent and restricting exports of whole companies and technologies? Single sentence on it from this talk will clearly resound throughout the industry. And so the Venus flytrap that Xi Jinping is setting for Mr. Trump is on Taiwan. Xi Jinping wants veto power over arms sales from the United States to Taiwan, and he is pressing for the United States to formally oppose Taiwanese independence as opposed to the current posture of not supporting it. Xi Jinping will argue the tweak is of no great consequence to Americans and stoke, and stroke Mr. Trump's ego that he can bring peace to one more troubled region. Yet that change would disrupt decades of US policy that for all its delicate diplomatic wording has held the peace. Taiwan is not the aggressor in the Taiwan Strait, a Xi Jinping fiction. That opposing independence would indulge. Mr. Trump may not care about Taiwan's freedom or its example that a prosperous Chinese democracy is possible, but the president doesn't want a crisis on his watch, which would be an economic and geopolitical catastrophe. That's 100% accurate. He would never want an economic geopolitical catastrophe.

No.

On his watch. Xi Jinping will be looking to see if Mr. Trump suggests He won't defend Taiwan in the clutch. Trump's diplomacy is above all personal, and no one can predict what he'll do in the room. Japan and others in the region are watching with anxiety, a reminder that US support for Taipei is an interest that informs America's alliances around the world. One mistake would be not stopping in Tokyo to advance Beijing— in advance of Beijing as a signal of solidarity with Japan. Hand. Uh, Trump has said he'll bring up the case of political prisoner Jimmy Lai, uh, but Xi Jinping won't move to release the 78-year-old publisher who was convicted of bogus charges in Hong Kong unless he believes Trump's request is more than a token gesture. Uh, the U.S. wants China's help on Iran, and it would be an improvement if China at least stopped actively helping the enemy. Uh, retired Navy Rear Admiral Mark Montgomery suggested last week that Mr. Trump should ask Xi Jinping directly if he's helping Iran with intelligence. And the Wall Street Journal goes on to say, the larger context for this summit is that the CCP continues to be the main financier and industrial base for the world's bad actors, from Russia to Iran to North Korea. The first Trump administration understood China as a strategic adversary— military, economic, and ideological. The second Trump admin is searching for detente. The— and Mr. Trump is the chief Dove. This has some merit if America spends the interlude diversifying its rare earth supply chain and passing a $1.5 trillion defense budget to rearm, says the Wall Street Journal editorial board. Anyway.

Yeah, a lot of people are speculating that there's already been significant deals that have been made and that this whole thing is ceremonial. Because if you bring, if you make this huge trip and you bring all these leaders of industry, and then you don't come away with some significant progress, like, it just feels like an even bigger L. So I'm expecting some real progress out of this. And it's good to see— every time we talk to an expert on China, Bill or Jordan Schneider, it's always shocking, like how little like direct comms there actually is between these groups. Like, and so the more the better.

Well, in somewhat related news, Anthropic has granted Mythos access to 3 major Japanese banks. Japan's 3 megabanks are set to gain access to Claude Mythos, the powerful artificial intelligence model developed by US startup Anthropic, as soon as the end of May. The banks MUFG Bank, Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corp., and Mizuho Bank were likely informed of the move by the US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessen in a meeting in Japan on Tuesday. This will mark the first time that a company from the East Asian nation has been granted access to Mythos. The AI model, which can discover and exploit software security flaws far faster than earlier tech, had been restricted to just 50 or so corporates and organizations worldwide, including US firms, US banks, and UK government organizations. So this isn't the first international expansion since the UK did have access, but now Japan does. Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takeuchi had instructed cabinet members to ramp up efforts to find cybersecurity weaknesses in Japan's infrastructure and minimize risks posed by cutting-edge AI models like Mythos. Access to Mythos was likely mentioned in her meeting with Besant on Tuesday. And so Chris McGuire says tonight the Secretary of the Treasury is personally vetting and approving each company that gets access to the most advanced US AI model because the risks of the model being misused to hurt US national security are so high. Also tonight, Jensen Huang is flying on Air Force One with President Trump to Beijing to sell China the AI chips it will use to develop its own Mythos-level AI model as soon as possible. The administration The administration's AI policy remains inconsistent and incoherent. It is impossible to justify these two approaches simultaneously. And yeah, I'm still sympathetic to the export control take. At the same time, I feel like there's a larger negotiation that's going on, so I can sort of see both sides. But the interesting question that I've been noodling on that I haven't fully gotten to the bottom of is, you know, Dario has said that, the open source community China is maybe 6 months behind Mythos, and that seems to fall in line with the progress that we're seeing from all the American labs. And so the interesting question is, what would the Mythos moment look like in China? Because in America, there was a showdown with the Department of War and Dario going back and forth and Emil Michael, and there was threat of a supply chain designation, which it doesn't feel like ever really went anywhere because the business is still cooking and it's available on all the hyperscaler clouds and the model's being granted to Japan. And so it feels like the administration has backed off of that. But it was a really tense moment and it did call into question all these debates around, what rules and what authority should rest with the private sector versus the government. And America handled it in sort of a democratic way, loosely, sort of evaluating the technology, having the option to sort of nationalize. And there's this bigger discussion around that. But in China, we've seen many times where tech companies have gotten really big and it feels like they, the CCP is applying pressure to the CEOs. And Highflyer, the company behind Deepseek, is in a very unique position where the founder has an immense amount of control. And no matter what you think of the—

He invested $2 billion of his own money in a really low dilution round. Yeah.

And I'm pretty sure he's a solo founder who owns probably majority control, at least majority voting control, if not majority economic control. Control, and that's wildly different than Anthropic, where Dario had like 15 co-founders, tons of dilution from different funding rounds. And, you know, we had talked about the SPV thing yesterday. Like, there are lots of people on the cap table. Like, Anthropic is going the way of like a typical American company where there are lots of different stakeholders. They might be a public company soon, which means the government has more oversight as the SEC controls a lot of what they will do. And so you're in this odd scenario where you, you could have a similar level of technology deployed in China from a very closely held private company that is up against a much more aggressive government.

And so what that looks like, yeah, what that looks like functionally.

Yeah. Like if you can't do e-commerce without disappearing for a week or something, like, do you think you can do Mythos-level AI cyber cybersecurity bug finding at the same time while having full control and not being a public company. Like, there are, like, it feels like the stakes are much higher for when Deepseek, if Deepseek is able to catch up. You know, there's some evidence that like China's on a slightly shallower growth trajectory, but still, you know, if you take Dario's claim of 6 months, even if you extend that to a year, like something is going to happen there where China is going to have their own mythos moment. And what that looks like and what we learn about it, I think is going to be dramatic and interesting. And also it's just odd that like this moment, there's this backdrop of all this stuff that's happening in AI in America. And then there's gonna be, you know, talks over like, you guys wanna buy more Apples basically? Or like, you know what, I mean, obviously there's gonna be more high stakes discussion around geopolitical conflicts and rare earths. But we are talking about like tariff rates at a time when they're like just a couple months ago in America, we were talking about like, you know, is AI going to like be able to take over the government and like what does that mean and how does the government control the AI technology as it diffuses? So very, very interesting things coming at some point. A lot of this will probably be pre-negotiated behind the scenes since the Mythos moment happened. In America, and Xi Jinping obviously saw it and can get ahead of it. But you do see this consolidation of control at Deepseek, and there's a question about, well, where does that go? Tyler, do you have any thoughts on this? Am I directionally correct on the timeline or, you know, this concept of something's going to happen here?

Yeah, I mean, it seems like there's the graph that shows that open source is increasingly getting like further and further away from frontier models. But yeah, I don't know. It's just like so hard to tell like what's actually going on in China, like what, What does it actually, like what happens when the CCP starts to have, you know, more control over a company? Like what does it actually look like in instantiation? Yeah, I mean, it's interesting.

Like so much of the way the US government exercises control over the development of AI is on like the FDA regulatory, we wanna review it, we wanna take a look at it, we wanna take it for a spin and throw some prompts in there before we let you, 'cause you send it to Japan, for example. And in China, it's a very, it's a much more industrial process where, you know, if the chips are coming in and it's a whole negotiation at the government level, there's just the question of like, okay, can you even get the data center to, and it's much earlier stage, whereas that's not happening in America at all. Like there hasn't been any movement on the government saying, okay, well, we're gonna, the way we're gonna control AI is that we will be the— we will decide if you can have a gigawatt, we will decide if you can have 10 gigawatts, whereas in China that's sort of the de facto status quo.

Yeah, they, they still are very pro-competition. Yeah, at least until you get these, you know, breakout winners. So yeah, we'll see how that—

and, and can they continue to be pro-competition if they need to consolidate all of the black wells that are coming into the country into one data can actually train a Mythos-level model, right? That's a big question. But people are having huge FOMO over the summit. "Dude, I wish I was in Beijing with Elon Musk, Trump, and Xi Jinping talking business, discussing AI. Real boss moves. Must be a movie," says someone who we're not going to read because it's a bad name in the thing. Anyway, speaking of Elon Musk, Uh, SpaceX, SpaceX, Google are in talks to launch data centers in orbit.

Deal between the two tech titans would give a boost to SpaceX business ahead of a historic public listing. Uh, Google is in talks for a rocket launch deal as the search giant expands its own efforts to put orbital data centers in space. Launch deal would put the two companies in partnership as they gear up to compete on orbital data centers, an unproven technology that SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has said is the next frontier for his rocket company. Google is also in discussions about a potential deal with other rocket launch companies. They gotta at least have a stocking horse.

How are we not talking about blimp data centers yet? I know. Sergey Brin has a blimp company. You know, Bezos has a rocket launch company. So there's a very logical line from AWS to space data centers. Through Blue Origin, but we gotta put some GPUs on the blimps. We gotta start mass manufacturing the blimps. This could be the thing. I mean, there's no nimbyism in the middle of the Pacific Ocean if there's just a bunch of blimp data centers floating around in a circle.

Well, I think if you're already in the ocean, you should go down as well. You know, Atlantis mapping. Cooling. Yeah, like I feel like none of the ocean guys that are working on ocean robotics are thinking about like, Putting your data center at the bottom of the ocean.

Yeah, I mean, it feels easier than space data center. The space is free, the land is free, you don't run into the regulatory stuff, cooling potentially free. Energy, a little bit tricky down there.

Geothermal?

Geothermal maybe? I don't know. No, there's oil and natural gas reserves.

Do you have to bring oxygen there? Because how do you burn the oil in the natural gas and water. Big, big, big— Diving bell tube, yeah, scuba tanks or something. Anyway, let's continue. Where are we in this? SpaceX and Google.

Speculative technology has been at the center of SpaceX's pitch to investors ahead of its planned IPO this summer, which is anticipated to be the largest IPO of all time. Last year, Google announced its own plans to launch prototype satellites by 2027 as part of a moonshot initiative called Project Suncatcher. It's working with another company, Planet Labs—

That's a cool name.

—to build those satellites. We're working on getting Will Marshall from Planet Labs on the show in the next week or so. We'll send tiny racks of machines and have them in satellites, test them out, and then start scaling from there, says Sundar. There's no doubt to me that a decade or so away, we'll be viewing it as a more normal way to build data centers. "A little bit of an interesting timeline there." Elon's like, "I thought we were just saying 10 days." "There's no doubt to me that a decade or so away, we'll be viewing it as a more normal way." Yeah. "A decade or so away." He's being a little cautious in his language on his timelines, but— "Google was an early investor in SpaceX and owns 6.1% of the company." Yeah. Not bad. The other, the other funny dynamic from SpaceX's dealmaking recently is given that the OpenAI Startup Fund was an early investor in, I believe, Cursor's seed round. True. $8 million round. OpenAI, at least the Startup Fund, will have some meaningful exposure to SpaceX.

Yeah, SpaceX, an OpenAI-backed company. That's the way people will introduce it. OpenAI-backed SpaceX IPO.

Yeah, I thought it was, it was quite interesting having that happen while the whole trial was going on.

Everyone owns everything. Everyone has diversified into every, every company at this point, basically. Uh, let's see. Uh, the company last week announced a deal to sell earthbound computing resources to the AI company Anthropic. As part of the agreement, Anthropic expressed interest in working with SpaceX orbital data centers. Earlier this year, SpaceX filed an application with federal regulator to launch up to a million satellites for its orbital data center ambitions. That's crazy. I remember, didn't they get, what was the original Starlink approval? I thought it was like tens of thousands, maybe 100,000 satellites. I'm starting to think like, like looking ahead, there's going to be a backlash to like they're blacking out the sky the sun. Like, we've seen The Matrix. This happened in The Matrix, but for like chemical reasons. But like, if there's like light pollution from this at all, it's going to be an absolutely massive— oh yeah, Pantalassa ocean data centers. You don't need to sink them to the bottom of the Mariana Trench. How could we forget? Just do them on the ocean. Did you look up how many satellites SpaceX currently has? In orbit. 'Cause I think, I mean, it's a huge number. It's over 10,000, I believe. But a million is a huge jump. But that should be, that actually should math out. I think we did the math. That should math out to gigawatts in space, which is definitely meaningful.

So right now they have like just over 10,000 satellites.

Just over 10,000. Okay. But I think they're approved for maybe up to 100,000 or something. And so they go and get the huge allocation and then they start launching. Very, very excited to see the progress on Starship. Isn't there a launch that happened or is happening this week?

Like what? Yeah, when's the next? Can you look at the latest launches? I'll keep reading. The other story, this was back in March. Blue Origin has a play in space data center as well. So I would kind of, you could imagine them and Amazon teaming up in some capacity. But you could also imagine Amazon saying, okay, if we're gonna be a real player here, we need to, we'll probably need to work with them.

And then Star Cloud finally probably finds a dance partner, if not multiple. Many industry leaders see orbital computing as a solution to the limitations of earthbound data centers. Earthbound is capitalized. It's a proper term now, which requires swaths of land and power. These data centers are designed to be powered by solar panels, emitting, eliminating the major power constraint faced by data centers on Earth and one of the major ecological issues with emerging technologies. Uh, but there are also major engineering challenges. Uh, SpaceX made its name as the world's leading, uh, private launch provider, sending NASA astronauts to the space station and launching thousands of satellites as part of its Starlink internet constellation. Over 10,000, apparently. Uh, as it prepares to go public, SpaceX has struck a number of deals that have rewritten its balance sheet, helped Musk consolidate his companies, including its acquisition of xAI. And SpaceX also announced a deal with Cursor, as we have talked about on the show. Starship, what's the update on Starship?

So the next launch, the 12th one, is next Tuesday, the 19th. Next Tuesday? That's when they're targeting, so.

Okay, yeah, yeah. And what's the goal?

But they were like moving it down the runway, sort of getting ready to stack.

Do you have any idea what success looks like?

I think—

So this is the first orbital test of the V3. Okay.

So they gotta get it to orbit and then get it back and probably land it, but are they gonna land on land or water? 'Cause the last, didn't the last one make it up and back but exploded in the water? Or was that the Blue Origin New Glenn? I don't know. Anyway, there's a whole deep dive on space data centers in the Wall Street Journal. They say, is it a pipe dream or AI's next big thing? They're pointing out some of the challenges. You're going to need thermal louvers, opening and closing shutters to block or allow heat, thermal contact, special bolts to separate items with different heat requirements, deployable radiators. Heat is transferred to special surfaces that unfold in orbit. It looks like a big—

Pull up this graphic showing— Sun synchronous orbit.

Yeah, this is cool. So when— if you're orbiting the Earth vertically, essentially, the Sun is constantly hitting the satellite, so you're not out of power for half the day. But they say these radiators for data centers will likely be very large. I like that. Phase change materials, materials that can absorb, that can change phase to absorb heat like wax or salicylic acid, usually from solid to liquid, when returned to normal when temperature is reduced. Sun-synchronous orbit, 373 miles to 497 miles up. So about 400 miles up is when you get into sun-synchronous orbit. That's on the low end of low Earth orbit. Low Earth orbit around 1,000 miles up. 1,000 miles mid-orbit, 1,000 to 10,000 miles high orbit, over 22,000 miles. And so we covered a decent amount of this, so we can move on. Do you wanna talk about—

Matthew was adding to the conversation we had with Doomberg. Doomberg was fun. Doomberg was saying the only way the data center buildout will be successful is by either they're breaking all the rules or going off-grid. And Sean, who said, "The tech crowd keeps leaning into this off-grid is the only way thesis, and I disagree with this notion. The exhibit A example of XAI Colossus even overstates what's actually happening at Colossus." Okay. XAI did not build a permanently off-grid AI campus because the grid was unusable. Colossus already has 300 megawatts of TVA interconnect approved across two substations XAI funded. Plus contractual obligations to curtail during periods of grid stress. That is a grid-tied architecture with supplemental onsite generation, not an islanded power system.

I think, I think Doomberg was like the other side of this that Doomberg did highlight was like Colossus is the exception that proves the rule because it moved so quickly and, and took advantage of so many different grids and there were power generation from multiple states. At one point. And now there is pushback. Like there wasn't pushback when Colossus was built originally because data centers were not a hot topic. And it's the same thing with launching rockets. Like we were talking to someone who lives up in Santa Barbara. They're launching a lot of rockets from Vandenberg. It's getting to be a lot of traffic. It hasn't risen to the level of, you know, protest. But you can imagine that building 10 more Vandenburgs would be difficult, because you go to the local community and you say, "Hey, we're gonna build a space launch station, a spaceport." And they say, "Oh, that sounds good. Like, you mean because we're gonna go to the moon once a decade?" And you're like, "No, we're gonna launch rockets 10 times a day or 100 times a day." And people, if they have an example that they can draw from, and and say, oh well, like, that community doesn't like it, so I shouldn't like it. Uh, that's some of the pushback. But anyway, we can keep reading, uh, Sean Matthews' post. Yeah, let's see. Turbines solved a time-to-power problem, so it accelerated the deployment while substations and transmission infrastructure were being built. That's very different from do all of this off-grid. And economically, most large-scale AI load will still want to be grid-tied long-term. Interesting. I have made this point several times, but running your own generation fleet at hyperscale is expensive and operationally complex. Fuel logistics, maintenance, N+1 redundancy, permitting, emissions compliance, balancing load and supply continuously, multi-year equipment lead times. You don't just figure that out or want to do that overnight. Amin, the Chief Technology Officer at, or the chief technologist at Google AI, does that mean DeepMind or? Straight up confirmed this on a podcast and they literally bought a hybrid power island, hybrid island power developer. BTM generation absolutely matters. It's becoming a critical bridge solution during a period where utility interconnect timelines are badly lagging demand growth. But I'd strongly push back on the idea that the steady state future is fully off off-grid hyperscale campuses. The industry is converging towards hybrid architectures, grid interconnect plus captive generation plus storage plus demand response. They're throwing the whole kitchen sink at it. Anyway. Related.

Yes. More Perfect Union had a post earlier and— They're turning off— They're turning off Arkansas power. Nearly 50,000 people in the Lake Tahoe area have been told their utility will stop providing power to them because it's redirecting that power to data centers. Uh, NV Energy, the Nevada utility that supplied most of Lake Tahoe's electricity for decades, says that next year will stop servicing homes in the area and instead direct that electricity to the growing demand from Nevada data centers. Northern Nevada is one of the fastest growing data center corridors in the country. I read this, I was like, this is completely insane.

It's so stupid. Like you read it and you're like, this is such an L in the making for the data center industry. What were they thinking?

And then it's immediately getting community notice. And a quote from the president of Liberty Utilities in Lake Tahoe says, this does not mean the power is shutting off. Energy companies, utilities, and large customers change energy supply frequently. So there's a supplier of energy that is saying like, hey, we're not going to renew our contract. We're going to divert the energy elsewhere. But there's a bunch of suppliers —of energy. And so Andy Masley says, everything MPU posts about data centers is complete garbage. They have zero respect for their audience. Literally no one here is losing power. This tweet is a complete lie. What's actually happening is that a supply contract between two utilities is ending, and the small one is just buying power from elsewhere. And this was all expected to happen since 2009. No way. Wow. The company that serves power—

I thought you were going to say like 2 years ago.

The company that serves homes on the California side of Lake Tahoe is a small utility called Liberty. Liberty buys about 75% of its electricity from a much larger utility, NV Energy in Nevada, and generates the other 25% itself from solar farms it owns. Liberty sells, then sells that 49,000 to 49,000 customers. NV Energy has told Liberty it will stop selling them wholesale power after May 2027. It's kind of like Liberty's coffee shop that buys beans and sells coffee to customers. The customers are the homes and the beans are the electricity it buys from NV Storage and/or makes itself. This is like your local coffee shop ending a contract with a specific bean company and started buying beans from somewhere else. It doesn't stop you from buying coffee. Why is their contract with NV— why is their contract ending with NV Energy? NV Energy selling to Liberty was understood as transitional since it started in 2009. Long story short, NV Energy was basically Liberty's only wholesale option. But a new transmission line opening in May 2027 gives Liberty access to a much wider Western market and, among other things, a much larger share of solar and wind and hydro. That's the whole story here. Ending the contract with NV Energy and opening up this much wider pool with much more renewable energy was the plan here, completely separate from data center demand. Interesting.

Well, anyways, it would be remarkable if all of Tahoe lost energy and Mark Zuckerberg couldn't charge his electric wakeboard, because I somehow feel like—

He would hit the streets. He'd be protesting. I think he'd be protesting.

I think he would get something done if power was lost to Tahoe. I mean, a lot of influential people are out there.

So anyway, we gotta talk about— on that. We got to talk about Unitree GD-01.

They built, they built a new robot and you're gonna love it. It's not scary at all and it looks very fun and safe. This is from Avatar. They just built the mech from Avatar. This has been pictured many times in science fiction and will strike fear into many people. Uh, coincidence, racing buckets It is cool. It does feel very hacker culture. Like, it feels like this was like a crack team, a little skunkworks project. This is— it doesn't look like as polished or ready for, you know, sale, but remarkable results.

They're like, "Fasten me." They gotta put this out so that the Americans cancel all of their technology ambition and just go back to the dark ages.

It is intimidating. Is it a coincidence that it was located launched the same day that the, or the same week that the summit is happening in China? I don't know. It is amazing that it turns into a horse of some sort, a four-legged creature. Although, how do you drive it at that point if you're laying backwards? It needs some sort of gyroscopic seat. That one hasn't really been considered because if you're laying back while you're driving it in horse mode, you're going to be— maybe you'll just nap. Maybe you're like, "Oh, I want to commute." You know, Henry Ford said, "If I ask people what they wanted, they would ask for a better horse." This looks like a better horse to me. You get to work, you pop up into vertical mode. I'm fascinated by how they're controlling it. Is it just like a video game controller? Because some of this seems like it would require you to telegraph like in In the Avatar films, like, the operator of the mech has full, like, the input is the actual arms. So if they wanna swing a sword, they swing the sword or they swing the machete physically with their arm, and then the robot does the bigger version of that.

Timeline until these mechas replace horses for police use cases.

I don't know, there's gonna be pretty crazy pushback if that's rolling around during a ride.

I know, but the benefit here is that the, I don't think the mecha will go to the bathroom on the ground.

Obviously this is gonna happen at some point. A lot of these developments are very early. I bet you if you give that thing a strong kick, it falls over and sort of gets stuck at this point.

Sela over on X had pulled out the funniest part, which is that Unitree unveils the world's first mecha, show it breaking down a brick wall. And then in the launch announcement, they say, "Please everyone, be sure to use the robot in a friendly and safe manner." Yeah.

Wild. Egocentric data collector versus the mecha-mounted teleop Chad. Absolutely wild. Wild. Is there another video of this? Oh yes. This is an AI video, but we have to play the version of this getting hot dropped in into what you could imagine as the battlefield with 4 FC-200, 4-drone formation, max payload of 600 kilograms. Unitree's new Transformer mecha, 500 kilograms of weight. That's probably without a human inside. So you might need 6 drones, but this is something that feels not that far away, not that far away. Although you drop that thing in the ocean, I feel like there are so many, steps on the humanoid robot path where the deployment in a flat surface in a warehouse makes so much more sense than standing on a ladder, straddling a chimney in the rain, and there's a little bit of mud and you use a power tool and dust kicks up. Actually, ruggedizing all of this is probably a whole second step in this process where you're adding more weight. That means more battery. You need better battery technology. I don't think you'll be dropping this into the Taiwan Strait anytime soon, but it certainly strikes fear into the hearts of many.

Uh, well, uh, there's more humanoid news. Brett Adcock has a live stream going. That's right, of their robot. Yeah, um, I do wonder how they're— again, I'm sure the comments are all, how do we know this is this is actually live, right? Like, how do we know?

So is this the actual livestream right now? It's continuing going? 'Cause I pulled this up an hour ago and it looked, I mean, I guess exactly the same because it's the robot and they've been sorting for an hour. Battery pack or plugged into the wall? What do we think?

What's the battery life? He says, watch a team of humanoid robots running a full 8-hour shift. Okay. Oh, okay.

So they might have swapped it out at some point for a different one. Yeah, they could just trade. Interesting. It looks like a lot of progress. It's extremely fast. It is fast. Like the movement's very natural. I wonder what is the goal here exactly? Because is the robot sorting these? What does it do with the blue one?

I think it's putting it so the shipping label is visible.

Or the shipping labels down. Oh, okay, okay, okay. Yeah, that makes sense. That feels like— because some of the robot applications are things that you could do with a two-axis gantry or a sorter. Like, if you watch How It's Made, there are industrial machines, not robots, that can do all sorts of sorting. Like, you watch, like, how Diet Coke gets filled and and the cans roll down and at some point they all need to be facing upwards and so there's a machine that sorts them and tilts them all upwards. Obviously, the humanoid use case is much more unstructured and that is beneficial for so many things. I don't know. If this is your job—

Apparently, they're just going to have the robot go until it taps out. Ooh, okay.

I like that. That's cool. That's great. Very cool. Well, Well, in other video news that we need to play, General Catalyst launched an ad on X that might be making it into TV ads or G-CAT ads at some point. What? G-CAT? G-CAT? What's G-CAT? Oh, General Catalyst. Maybe that's the new ad campaign. But the campaign is called Meet GC, and it's a clear reference. Hi, I'm GC. And I'm VC.

Who's your friend here, VC?

This is Woof AI, an AI-native companion platform that combines robotics and machine learning. You'll never want a real dog after this.

Well, I think people like dogs as they already are though, VC.

You don't need to walk it.

You never need to tell the kids you sent Milo to the farm.

We're leading the seed and could probably make room for you. Well, I'd love to hear more, but we actually have a really high bar around responsibility for these things. Is Wolf AI okay? Of course he's fine.

Oh, sorry, buddy. Easy, easy. Stay, stay.

No, no, stop, stop, stop, stop.

I'm sure he'll be fine.

Interesting symmetry to the podcast set that Reggie's doing, right? Well, I think Reggie directed. Yeah, but it's cool that the brand— you could wind up doing two very different designs, but there's a through line there, even though it's obviously a nod to the Mac versus PC ads from the 2000s. Which we can pull up to watch one of those. I think we've watched these before, uh, and they have, uh, a very similar, you know, stiff PC versus Mac look. But I think that's— I think that was a good message of like, okay, like, we're not like the other—

that—

but also like, let's not fund the stuff that like is pointless and useless. And if you already have a dog, and keep it up.

This is a big moment because you have been wanting a VC firm to just commit to paid advertising for a long time.

Well, I wouldn't say this is a commitment yet. We gotta actually see some spend behind it.

But like through, like, clients, spend.

Yeah, of course, of course. Yeah. Magazine ads. Yeah, in the right, I mean, certainly in like the Wall Street Journal and Forbes and like the places that people, that entrepreneurs go for information, it makes so much sense to, actually spend on advertising to build a brand, especially when you're at the scale of General Catalyst. Can we pull up the Mac versus PC ads? We're not gonna watch all of them. There's 66 of them. Talk about a generational run.

A lot of the same kinds of programs.

Yeah, like Microsoft Office. But we retain a lot of what makes us us. You should see what this guy can do with a spreadsheet.

It's insane. Bogged.

Yeah, and he knows that I'm better at life stuff like music, pictures, movies, stuff like that.

Whoa, whoa, whoa. What exactly?

What exactly do you mean by better?

By better, I mean making a website or photo book is easy for me, and for you it's not. Oh, oh, that kind of better. Yeah. I was thinking of the other kind. What other kind? Hello? We can switch away, because you've seen all these. Mark Andreessen quote tweeted at Dunked. He said, stay tuned for our upcoming ad campaign. We're the VC who doesn't sneer at your idea. Interesting. Getting spicy. Yeah, red alert over there. Red alert. It's a lot of red alert going on. It's a long thing. Well, both companies are invested in robotics company Anduril. Oh yeah. I mean, I'm sure there's a ton of portfolio overlap.

Oh no, I just think like in another world that That's an Anduril product, that dog thing. Probably. I'm sure they've experimented with that form factor. Anduril's got some fresh funds.

They need to build a mecha. It is— I mean, if there's ever someone to build the mecha, it would be Palmer Luckey. He has talked about this stuff. I even asked him on stage once, like, walk me through the Pacific Rim vision. Like, how do we build that? And we had a fun back and forth about it.

Do you remember much about his response? Yeah, so his response to stuff like that— Because that mecha form factor is just like, hey, I'm a sitting duck on a platform. Yeah, exactly.

So his point is always like, the technology to build the mecha is way behind the technology to remote control something or put an AI on board or something like that. So you actually you don't want to build the Iron Man suit because you can just build the drone, the submarine, the autonomous—

Or he'll use the example of like the Batmobile. It's like if you need a vehicle for the city, like, do you really need this like massive vehicle, right? No. Clearly Bruce Wayne just bought one.

The parking car, he's obsessed with building Batmobiles. It's very funny. I don't know. That is a very cool demonstration though, but Yeah, Andrew always says, "Don't build the Batmobile," and focus on like, is there an actual urgent need from the military? Is there support from Congress to actually appropriate the funds? And Unitree, I don't actually know. That feels like just like an R&D, that's like a marketing project at this point.

Yeah, I mean, I think their IPO is like very soon, right? 'Cause I think the original application was like last year.

Late March. Yeah, that would probably pump it. And then also, uh, you know, they're, they're showing it like break down a brick wall, but like when I was thinking about what that's actually valuable for, we were talking about like, could you deploy that and like sneak through a forest and then attack the enemy or something? It's so big, it's so visible, like a single drone with a, you know, fiber cable coming out of the back is going to blow that up. It doesn't really seem that practical. Maybe if you're going over really rough terrain, you want the legs instead of a tank tread, but you can sort of just put a huge tank tread on something and just crush everything in your way. But if you're building and you need to get a bunch of 2x4s onto the roof, like there's a theory that that might be a little bit better. You were saying you're forklift maxing and you think the forklift will always defeat that, but there's gotta be certain, Areas where you can't necessarily bring a forklift because there's a narrow— it's an uneven ground, a narrow entryway into the back of a house. You have all the 2x4s, you need to get them on the roof, you would otherwise be going up and down a ladder. And so, MECHA to the rescue.

Yeah, I mean, it's just like pretty hard to justify this. Like, I think, yes, for certain like emergency scenarios, it makes sense to have some like super weird Form.

Emergency. I need a really cool thing, piece of tech. I need something that looks really cool before my IPO. Emergency. Well, we can, we can flip over to the other financial news that's making headlines on the COVID of The Wall Street Journal. Inflation accelerated 3.8% last month. Not good news. Joe Weisenthal has a couple posts, but One is just man. And he says the headline, US April producer prices rose 6% year over year. The estimate was 4.8%. So obviously the closure of the Strait of Hormuz is having an effect. We were talking about Diet Cokes. You would think that the caffeine doesn't come from the Middle East, the delicious caramel flavor or whatever else they put in this. It does not come from the Middle East, but aluminum Actually, there are smelters in the Middle East. Aluminum is in shorter supply because of the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. And so Diet Coke is rapidly going out of stock. And so you need to load up if you want to prepare.

How many you got? 4 or 5 pallets?

I have not actually gotten any. I'm not stockpiling Diet Coke yet, but who knows? Maybe prices go up. That's what inflation represents. And Wall Street is getting more anxious about it. So we can read through this quickly before we are joined by Max Levchin from Affirm. So surging energy, energy prices have pushed investors' inflation expectations to multi-year highs. Tuesday's hot readout on consumer prices is intensifying Wall Street's anxiety about inflation. Even before the latest release of the Consumer Price Index, inflation expectations had been climbing. A potential trouble spot in the market where stocks have largely shrugged off the US-Iran conflict and the resulting energy shock. And so investors bet on inflation by buying and selling both ordinary US Treasuries and those that hedge the risk of inflation called TIPS, Treasury Inflation Protected Securities. The gaps between the yields of those two types of bonds known as the breakeven rate recently hit the highest level since October of 2022, according to Federal Reserve data suggesting that investors expect annual inflation to average around 2.7% over the next 5 years. Now that's not entirely doom and gloom, but the risk here is that the AI boom, the, the GDP numbers are sort of concentrated in AI, CapEx, and data centers. It's not evenly distributed. The real economy is only growing at 0.1%. While the real economy is suffering from 2.7% inflation over the next 5 years. That's a recipe for stagflation, stagnation plus inflation, a very rough thing for any economy to go through and something that the market and the economy and the politicians should be focused on. So, the 10-year breakeven rate has also climbed, hitting 2.5% this month, its highest level since 2023, driven largely by the war-fueled surge in oil prices. The rise in inflation expectation worries investors because of the challenges it poses for the Fed interest rates policy and major indexes' latest run to records. And so for a while, everyone was thinking about maybe interest rates will come down, maybe mortgages will become more affordable. But there was even the whole debate or the fight with Powell and lawsuits, which were eventually dropped, but Powell and Trump were at each other's necks and issuing statements about their vision for the future of the American economy. On the flip side, you have Kevin Warsh coming in, maybe more friendly, maybe more receptive to a rate cut, but the data makes that very, very hard to justify.

Yeah, in some ways, in some ways, you know, who knows how history will view Powell, but like he landed, he landed the plane. He did. And then, you know, we get war in the Middle East and now Kevin Warsh in some ways looks like he'll have just as tough of a job. Potentially, potentially.

Well, our next guest, Max Levchin from Affirm, is the co-founder and CEO. He's returning to the show. We've been keeping him waiting far too long.

Max, how are you doing? I'm great. Thanks for having me again.

Third time's a charm. Third time— what have you learned?

Third time can't be the charm. I want 25th time. What have you learned? Keep it going. I love these. I enjoy this. Of course.

What have you learned about making coffee since the last— oh yes, the important update, because I'm assuming you're never like, oh, I'm pretty good at this, or are you resting on your laurels?

Are you, are the final boss?

I'm absolutely not. Okay. I, uh, took apart E61 Group, which is the, uh, classic 1961 sort of— that, that's the granddaddy of all the espresso group heads. Uh, and, uh, I wanted to learn how the mushroom valve works because I thought mine was clogged. It turned out not to be clogged, but I went down an extremely deep rabbit hole of taking apart an E61, which I've actually never done before. So I'm, I'm now I've really boned up on how espresso machines worked in 1961 and since, but—

Yeah, yeah, people always talk about like when you get into coffee, you go, you effectively vertically integrate or go deeper in the supply chain. You start roasting the own beans, you gotta grow your own coffee. At a certain point, you have to be smelting the metals that go into the machines, understanding the alloys, coming up with new chemical processes. You have to set up your own mine.

You're putting all kinds of wrong ideas into my mind.

Jack, Jack, ooh, not yet, ooh.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Did you smelt the metal that went into the espresso machine?

I've not smelt anything lately. Wow. I'm gonna— A novice.

A real novice. Anyway, we're not here to talk about smelting.

Next time I'll tell you about my smelting experiences.

Fantastic. I imagine that the smelting process is as intricate and as rewarding as the coffee-making process in some ways.

Yeah, I expect you to be able to try a coffee and understand the alloy of the machine.

Yeah. Possibly, uh, but I, I'm, I'm very, very long depth. Anything that you can go very deep into, like, this is the time in general, but like depth of the competitive advantage is like a profound strength. So the reason I'm so into whatever things I'm into is I found over the years that if you out-depth your competitors, that they just can't beat you. So I, I'm very pro smelting.

I'm very pro going over Yeah, yeah, that's interesting. Is there a translation or if you transpose that to sort of like advice for young people who might have anxiety about traditional career paths? I was sort of, you know, we look at like job numbers all the time and layoffs. And at the same time, I think about when I was a kid, if I said, oh, when you grow up, you will be a live streamer who at an AI lab, it's like none of those words words existed back in the '90s, and here I am.

Yeah, also a lot of— there's so much advice out there. It's like, you want to be a generalist. This is the age of being strong. Maybe it's the opposite. And when I look at people that are maybe sort of midway through their career, the highest earning, the most respected, are almost always the ones with extreme depth, where they can— simply outcompete anyone else in that role because they know more about it. They put in more hours.

Yeah, but yeah, but what are you thinking for young people?

I, I'm, I'm definitely big on depth. I think, uh, I'll be, uh, these are like entirely non-contrarian opinions, but maybe they're contrarian right now. But I think it's a great time to get a computer science degree. I think if you're like ultra deep into really understanding how software is made good, you are— like, everyone's gonna be 10x engineer. If you're 1x engineer yesterday, you better be a 10x engineer tomorrow. That's the new baseline. But if you really, really get it, if you're like— if you're smelting your own code— I'm just gonna go with the smelting analogy forever— but if you're that good, you're gonna be 10,000x engineer. And like, you will be worth your weight in smelted gold. Who knows? But it's very, very powerful to be a deep expert. Like, you are the one AIs want to learn from. And like, that, that is, that is the unattainable Mount Olympus of value. And so I, I would strongly suggest that being deep is great. Majoring in computer science is great if you love computer science. Like, this is the time to major in whatever it is you see yourself being as deep as possible, because then you will become absolutely valuable.

What about, uh, industry-specific depth? Like, if a founder comes to you and they're like, oh, I've been building I've been building an e-commerce, but really, and I've done quite well, but really I'm interested in space. I wanna work on that. You've done— You're interested in space and you're not working on it?

Like, what are you doing? This is the very best time in history to do that. Yeah.

But generally, like you've done quite well by just focusing on something, a category that you know better than, maybe there's maybe like 3, 4 other people people in the world that understand the intersection of, like, money and technology the way that you do. And, uh, and I feel like a lot of founders oftentimes will do one thing, feel like they kind of, like, climbed the mountain, and then some, some will just go back and climb a very similar mountain and do quite well again. Others want to jump ship and do something completely different. So I tried both.

My last startup in between the other payments startup was not in payments. And it turns out that I'm very good at climbing this one mountain. I'm just going to keep climbing it because— but also the reason I'm good at it is because I love depth and I love getting deep and deep, deeper and deeper into payments, into how to make payments more expedient, more transparent in the case of Affirm. And payments are a lot of things. And access to credit is a totally new idea. Like, I've never touched credit until Affirm. And now, you know, maybe without false humility, I think we are definitely one of the very best credit underwriters in the world and are just getting better and better. We just announced yesterday we built an entire new model family loosely inspired by the attention mechanism that is powering all of your LLMs out there, including your, your parent company now. Some, some ideas we borrowed from the, uh, from, from all these really amazing discoveries in sort of pure, you know, language, um, AI. And, uh, yet it feels like we're just getting started. Like, every time I look at the sort of corpus of things that we can try to do, things we can build, the products we can launch, it's like, oh my God, like, we have so much to do. Like, there's absolutely no chance I'll get to rest soon. I'm not sure I'll get to sleep after all. It's the greatest time to build stuff because everything is faster and more exciting and easier to start. Yeah. But the depth reveals itself the deeper you dig. Okay.

So, uh, yeah, we, we sort of mentioned, we we referred to it a little bit, the 2026 Investor Forum. Who attended? What was the goal of that? Take us through that event. And then I have a whole bunch of follow-up questions about how you're communicating at the current time.

Yeah, it was amazing. I'm still kind of slightly high on the whole thing. But the thing that was really fascinating, so we did this event 3 years ago, or similar event 3 years ago, and And it's like a blink of an eye. Like, I remember it was in the same building. A lot of the same people attended. So these are mostly buy and sell side analysts, a bunch of our shareholders, a couple of our board members actually flew in for it, which was like a nice surprise to me. And the entire management team gets on stage and like, here's what I work on, here's what the company is. And but like the reason analysts are there, they're like, okay, tell us about your vision, Max, yada yada yada. Really, what will the next 3 years worth of gross target is going to look like? And so the main act— I was the warm-up act. I tried to be funny, but the main act was our CFO, Rob, who got on stage and said, all right, so we're going to grow to $100 billion of GMV. We're just in the range of touching $50. We're going to double. And we're going to do this by compounding at 25% every year. And we're going to move our profitability target from 3% to 4%, which is our current range, to 3.75% up. And so we're going to up the floor. We're going to be more profitable and grow faster. And it's like, faster? We're a bigger company now. Like, what are we doing? Like, wait a second. Last time we did this 3 years ago, we said we're going to compound at 20%. But instead, we did it like 30-plus. And so just like this out-of-body experience of like, we're getting bigger. The room was significantly larger. Same building, different floor, different room. Many more people, many more shareholders. And yet, we're telling people like, hey, we're going to compound that much faster than the last time. It's like, I guess it's like a flywheel, this network we've built that keeps on spinning and spinning faster. And so it was amazing in a sense that like, I knew all these numbers, like I obviously approved and worked with the team to make sure we feel great about them. But when you sort of say it out loud, like compare that to the last time we told you the same thing, we're going to accelerate. Yeah. It's like, wow, that is like so cool. So anyway, so I'm still very high from like being able to say that out loud. It was very fun.

So there's a flywheel. I imagine with a lot of financial companies, there's economies of scale. And so that seems doable. Are you also talking about TAM at this point because the company is so large, or is it still early enough that that's not something that investors are coming to you asking to sort of justify, well, you know, the global economy is only this big, and if you take 50% of it.

Well, there's nothing else. The good news is that $100 billion of payments in this country is but a drop in the bucket. Okay, even larger bucket. We're in no danger. The US revolving credit, which is obviously a fraction of total, uh, total economic rotation, is like a trillion three right now. Okay, $100 billion is like— then we're taking share. So I'd like to compare that number. So people are not using revolving credit. They're using Affirm. Good for them. Non-revolving, no fees, all that. And so we're not yet at the sort of time— by the way, these are all US numbers, and we're already live in the UK and Canada, and we've announced a bunch of other countries.

OK, so speaking of the investors, obviously, it's very important to communicate with investors right now, both for your growth plans and also what's going on in the market. As you think back to the March time period, SaaS-pocalypse, every company got sort of beaten up. You came back really quickly. How much of that was show versus tell? How did you think about communicating to investors through that? How important was the investor communication versus just continuing to deliver on the actual metrics? Like, as you're confronted with one of these, like, oh, there's a new narrative, what's your playbook for actually working with investors to get them comfortable?

You know, to be completely honest, I don't know. I think— well, and I'm usually honest, so I might as well tell the truth every time. So this particular time, we said nothing. We basically said, okay, I guess the sky's falling. Doesn't feel like it's falling on us.

We're printing a really, really good quarter.

Yeah, we're about to report it. We could like wave our hands and then like, you got it all wrong, we're fine. Or just wait a few more weeks and be like, hey, here's what we printed, how about that? And by the way, we're gonna guide, so we're gonna reveal that by the way, we're having a pretty good quarter too. Yeah. And so that, that's what we did this time. And we just didn't spend too much time communicating how the story isn't true. Yeah. I don't know if that's like the best response. Like we've definitely in the past, we would read I mean, you know, the most recent time when I thought we need to speak was when the rates were rising very quickly. We were screaming into the void of like, no, no, no, this business is fantastic at zerp. It is fantastic at 5% Fed funds rate. It is just fine at a number that's higher than that. We love our value creation opportunities more or less at any rate. Like, obviously, you know, it breaks at some point, but US economy breaks at some 2022, for all possible values of the federal funds rate, we're going to be just fine. And a long explanation why. And I don't think anybody heard it. People are like, yeah, yeah, but the rates are up, so you're obviously— yeah. And so the dip in return of our stock is like, oh, a great turnaround. But it basically amounts to people saying, wait a second, this thing is in just as much demand, does just as well, grows just as fast, just as profitably through whatever rate cycle.

Yeah, I think we've talked about the history of the effect of interest rates on a firm. But we're now in a new regime, and the fear is not higher rates, it's higher inflation. And so are you— do you already have an intuitive sense of how a different inflation regime or different inflation environment will affect a firm? Are you confident? How do you think about the relationship between—

Yeah, it's like a— I can imagine it's somewhat of a double-edged sword in that higher prices means people are more likely to want to use credit, but maybe there's a drop in some purchasing activity of some items.

Yeah. Also, just like if you're getting $10 in 2 years and it's worth less, that should have an effect. But how is it actually playing out?

So a little too early to tell, but you are exactly right in a sense that we saw this game play out in the last inflation spike just a few years ago. We absolutely saw an increase in demand because as things became a little bit more expensive, people felt that it would be better if they weren't paying for them upfront. People who initially would say, yeah, it doesn't really make sense for me to finance this thing, I have the cash, like, ah, I kind of want my cash to go a little bit longer because I don't know exactly which way the prices are going to go. So we expect more demand. We have to be— we're always very careful. The number one line I give at every investor event is credit is job number zero. As a computer science major, I count from zero. And it is the most important job. We grow as fast as credit performance will allow us to grow, full stop. We have to print consistent credit returns, otherwise we lose credibility with our debt investors. And that, that's the most important thing. So we will grow fast, no faster than credit results will allow us to. We expect more demand. We don't yet see literally anything related to changing credit performance. We just printed our results and they were just as we expected them. Yeah. And so TBD whether we see some deterioration of consumer credit due to prices. We really didn't see much of it at all through the last inflation cycle, which was quite dramatic, if you remember. And so we feel pretty great about our ability to underwrite kind of all eventualities. We are obviously not blind to the macro reality. Yeah. The minute before I got on stage and promised people 25% growth with an increased profit margin. So, you know, we must think we're going to be okay. And that is, in fact, the case.

Yeah. How is AI changing how you think about international expansion? Does it make teams more efficient in terms of adapting the product for different markets, everything from language to just simply being able to ship more code? Or is your international GTM just much more like, we know what it takes to launch a new market, If AI makes it slightly more efficient, great, but it's not gonna change the strategy.

I think the 1A of every list of things that have really changed thanks to AI is shipping code. Like, I think it's, this is the best time to be a CEO with a computer science degree because like, you feel what this means. Like, you know what it's like to make code. You've done it, you know, in my case for the last 40 years. I know how much easier it is, how much more effective teams can be, how you can have 3 people in a room build a product over the weekend, which is kind of an amazing thing that didn't exist 6 months ago. And so shipping code is absolutely— we're seeing that in my latest shareholder letter, actually showed an illustration of percentage of code written by AI at a firm. And it's like, and it's not like a slow rise. You're like, okay, we're trying, we're trying. We're convinced 60% to start, 75% last month. So it's just, you know, rocketing. It's not like people are writing less code or reviewing less code. They're just that much more productive. So that helps us internationally, helps us domestically, helps us with, with everything. I think other parts of the business are much better with AI. So translation, obviously services are fantastically effective with AI. You can do a lot of interesting things with legal and anything that's text heavy. You have just, you know, a great helping hand. But But the sort of night and day moment is writing code. That's 1/8 or maybe like 1p on the list of things that are just stunningly effective.

Are you expecting token cost to be like an important line item in the P&L going forward? Like we've seen, because there's so many stories of a lot of code written by AI, sometimes that moves the needle, sometimes you're just sort of doing what you needed to do and doing it more efficiently or faster. At the same time, if you get hit with like a billion-dollar token bill in a year, that might be material. And so you start having to do, and it feels like we're at the early innings of ROI calculations. We're more in like the feeling of like, oh, everyone loves this, we're seeing good results.

Max doesn't strike me as someone who's just gonna tell your team to— Slop it up. Use a lot of AI because obviously there's stories coming out of Amazon and Meta where, teams are basically just like, I want the optics to be that I'm using more AI than anyone else on my team, so I'm just gonna run things overnight for no reason.

Yeah. We are extremely, extremely metrics-driven company. Like, some might take issue with just how completely obsessed we are with like, you know, you improve what you can measure. Like, if you're going on fields, you're gonna, feel great until you don't. So we measure everything obsessively. We have, at the moment at least, fantastic ROI on our token spend. We are— I would say, you know, it's real numbers. So it's not like, oh, you know, don't care, don't look. We have a weekly report that's generated thanks to AI and some very smart humans who are monitoring our token use and tell us how each team is producing value and what it's costing us in tokens and all the sort of various conclusions downstream. So we are already very mindful of what it means in terms of return on investment to tokens, return to shareholders at the limit. Right now, it's undoubtedly a very, very accretive thing. But we're also not assuming that infinite budgets are just great. And we also expect, by the way, prices of tokens will probably increase over time. I think there's plenty of subsidies taking place. You're now inside one of those places, so you probably know the true— No surprise.

If we can circle back to specialization from AI creating effectively more generalists, I'm interested in sort of computer science history, your career history. How have you processed, like, there was a point where frontend and backend engineering were two very separate disciplines. At the point where you could do JavaScript on the frontend and the backend, you see more full-stack engineers. Now you have engineers that are designers, designers that are engineers, designers that might be pushing server code and stuff. So I'm wondering how you're thinking about maintaining that idea of you want the specialized genius, the artisan, the true expert in your organization versus you also want to empower someone to move really fast with a small team And so you might not need to staff 100 experts to do one thing, and that there's gotta be a tension there. So I'm wondering how you're grappling with that.

It's a great, great question, and you're totally right. So there are definitely pockets of today's software engineering that accrete profoundly to specialists. So if you are an extraordinary infrastructure engineer, You, you're, you're far from being replaced by some mindless drone because it's as much art as it is science, intuition, experience. Like, I've seen this kind of a failure before, and AI is good at it, but AI is a great tool. Like, you're, you're in no danger of being supplanted just because it— so much depth goes into that. And by the way, AI making a slight mistake could cost you a massive outage in the case of— and so the, the cost of error very high. Like, an even better example, actually, in my world, would be an underwriting model. So somebody who designs underwriting models, it's like, hey, AI, go build me a great underwriting model. Come back when you're done. Like, here it is, I hallucinated one for you. Like, uh, that's like real money lost that we will never see again if it in fact didn't hallucinate the right thing. And so many of these sort of ultra-specialist roles, they are absolutely benefiting from AI, but that human is not just in control. They're, they're not just steering, they're like reviewing every line of code. They have another human making sure that there's absolutely nothing that could go wrong. So that's sort of one thing. The— on the completely other spectrum of this, which is I think what you're alluding to, to, you know, fun examples, we just had a product hackathon. So only product managers can attend. A lot of our product managers have CS degrees, so we're cheating here a little bit. But these people are like, hey, I love writing code, but I want to make it into things as opposed to code. And like, I, I want to ship a full product. So Most of those folks haven't written code professionally in quite some time, maybe since college. They're like really good with Figma. They know how to design things. They have a sense for taste, but they like, they don't remember anymore what it's like to sort of go deep into some, you know, SQL query debugging. We had 100 people, 37 projects in 27 hours went from a whiteboard plan to a shippable feature that was presented to the entire company. Like, hey, we have this thing. and we graded it not just on— so the winners and the whole grading of who won first through whatever, 10th, were all people that had to report not just like, here's my idea, here's what it looks like, here's my prototype. How close are we to shipping it? Like, are you ready? And the winner was absolutely probably the best idea, but also the ones that said, we're ready. Like, if we're allowed to ship it tomorrow, we will. So that is like an extreme generalist who has a vision and few tokens. And a feature in 27 hours with like 2 of their co-conspirators and like a pizza box. So that is new and different and it's totally a new phenomenon.

This AI thing is going to be terrible for the pizza industry because famously, 2 pizza team, you only need 1 pizza teams now. 50% reduction. 50% reduction. Short Domino's. This is a disaster. I hadn't thought about this.

We, we, we sprung for a somewhat But higher quality local food.

Oh, yeah, okay, so revenue's flat, margins potentially going up in the pizza industry, okay.

Last question for you. How are you, what's your framework for evaluating all the different AI products being pitched to you across the rest of the organization? You have the benefit of being a technical CEO. A lot of other CEOs in your role are just like, I just wanna buy AI everywhere. Just gimme every part of my company, just gimme, gimme. Give me 3 pilots, I'll pilot anything. Whereas I think you're probably looking at some of this more non-deterministic work saying like, hey, you know, you can play around with it, but maybe you don't have budget.

So I have a great heuristic. This will be potentially worth the rest of my drill. If you know how to describe the evaluation criteria being used by the maker of the tool you're buying, it's probably worth piloting. If you can't, it is slop and you're being sold a story. So if— so we know CodeGen works and is amazing, and it's only getting more amazing because we know how to validate code. And you can use another AI to validate code, but you can also just like, look, it doesn't work. Does it pass the unit test? So the feedback loop of I gave you a thing, like Codex was okay, and then it was better, and then it was great, and now it's really pretty damn good. It's not because someone was coding faster. It's because it has really objective eval criteria, and it just loops on making itself better with some degree of human influence. The same can be said for a bunch of industries. It cannot be said for others. I'm not going to dig into examples too quickly, given we're short on time. But if you can say, oh, yeah, I know exactly what these guys are doing— customer service centers. Is the consumer happy after they hung up the phone with an agent? Can we ask them? Yes, we can. What is their satisfaction rate? Is there a way to say, "That was good, that was bad, AI, do more of the good kind"? Yeah. Fast feedback loop, high-quality eval criteria. Yeah. It's a great, so we use a ton of Agentic customer service because we know it'll just get better and better and better. Yeah. That's a great thing to buy. We're not a specialist. We are excited to buy it from the specialist. Somebody tells you, "Oh, it's AI, it's gonna be a tool that's gonna make you a better writer of fiction." Yeah.

Yeah, or even pitch deck, pitch decks are an example because like you could have the worst formatted pitch deck and have it—

Kind of 30-year plan.

Having tremendous success with it, but it didn't have anything to do with the deck. It had to do with your delivery and who you are and the company you're building.

So I would not, would not buy Pitch Deck AI assistant even if somebody paid me to do it because it's 95% the talk track.

And the company.

So far, and the company and the idea and the market and the TAM and all those things. And so, but most importantly, 100 companies pitch, their decks could all have been made by AI. 7 out of 100 get funded, 93% failure rate, sucks, should never raise money. Like, is that the conclusion? So I would stay away from the non-objective or very slow feedback loop systems before I consider buying tools there.

I love it. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Great to catch up. Have a great rest of your week.

Congratulations on the progress. I'll come—

Thank you, and I'll come back with smelting news. We'll talk to you soon.

Have a good one. Goodbye. We have jelly in our face. Chris Bruhoff from Founders Fund and Varda joining in just a few minutes. Uh, while we wait for him to get here, he's coming in person, uh, we will talk about Joe Low, who, uh, I thought was a household name, but apparently is not. He is the fugitive behind the 1MDB scandal. It reads like IMDb, it's not 1MDB. Uh, it was a Malaysian financial fraud that, uh, led to the disappearance of $4.5 billion. And he's in the news today because he asked Donald Trump for a pardon while on the run, I believe. So Joe Low, the alleged mastermind of one of the greatest financial frauds in history. You got to read this book. The— I like that the camera's following you around.

That's the new meta. New meta.

Go on the run until you can get the pardon.

You're on the run. —and you're just popping up to say, "I'd like a pardon, please." Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So, yeah, you gotta read this book, "Billion Dollar Whale." Fantastic book. I thought it was gonna be turned into a movie at some point. It should be. It's a fascinating story. But we'll just give you the high level, and we'll do a whole deep dive later. Joe Low, the alleged mastermind—

I think we should take matters into our own hands.

Make the movie.

Let's turn it into a play.

A play. OK, a stage play. I like a stage play.

We haven't done a play yet on set.

No, no, not yet. Although, a lot of the red string poster board sessions, they feel like plays. They're very well acted. But I'm telling you, when we're reading off—

Yeah, yeah, we don't have lines for those. Joe Lai walked into the room, billionaire-ly.

Yeah, so Joe Lai, the alleged mastermind, alleged, mastermind of one of the greatest financial frauds in history is asking President Trump for a pardon. The request was filed in recent weeks, according to people familiar with the matter, and if granted, would remove U.S. criminal charges against the fugitive Malaysian financier. A Justice Department website lists a pending request for pardon for completion of sentence under Joe Low. The move represents the latest gambit in the extraordinary saga of Low, a once little-known businessman who prosecutors say used subterfuge, fake documents, and payoffs to engineer the heist of billions of dollars from 1MDB, which was a Malaysian government-owned investment vehicle set up to promote economic growth. He's known for his lavish lifestyle, partying with Hollywood stars and political rulers. He was involved in, there were a bunch of other people that went to jail for this, but he financed The Wolf of Wall Street, in potentially the most ironic thing you could do as a fraud, finance a movie about a fraud.

So it's illegal to make awesome movies now? I guess.

It is a great movie. And you can tell the budget was really flying with that one, because they crashed a Lamborghini Countach, which is maybe a $500,000 car. And I think they just destroyed it. And they destroyed maybe the actual one. I don't know. That might be not real. But very fun movie. Anyway, we have Delian Asparouhov from Varda and Founders Fund. In the TVPN UltraDome. Here you go. Here we go. The self-fog, man. Grab a seat. Oh, he's doing a victory lap.

He's doing a victory lap.

We love a victory lap. Running around the table. For anyone who's been living under a data center, introduce yourself.

Hi, my name's Dallin, co-founder and president of Varda. Have a couple other side gigs, but that's the main gig.

Let's focus on Varda today. Oh yeah, we're talking space data centers, right? You got to be— please, no.

We do have some chips up there, so in theory you could do, but we do more valuable things than just some inference. We make some drugs up there. And there's a big announcement today. Yeah. Um, so, uh, for the first time in human history, um, there is a large publicly traded company, United Therapeutics, $25 billion in market cap, traded on the NASDAQ. They're using their own balance sheet to go produce a product, physical product, in low Earth orbit. Wow. With us, pharmaceuticals. They focus on pulmonary disease, so think lung, blood, et cetera. We're working on those products together, crystallizing them into a better formulation, bringing them back down. That's the only company that makes physical products in space. Everybody else, it's all radio waves. It's internet, it's inference, it's photos of the Earth, et cetera. This is literally the first time in human history where there is physical products being moved in space as a way to generate revenue up there.

Is that happening or is about to be happening?

Yeah, so we signed this deal, you know, called like, you know—

Stop you right there, 'cause there's an opportunity for someone else to put a satellite in a balloon. Oh, it's a race! We should race, we should race a big weather balloon.

No, no, wait, wait, wait, balloons can't go to space.

Balloons can't go to space, you gotta go on the rocket.

Yeah, but I could get a balloon, and then once you're up there, jetpack type thing to—

Yeah, people have talked about the like, you know, could you go float a rocket up there, but it turns out the like size of balloons balloon and complexity that you're just better off building a rocket to get the rocket up there.

Yeah, I talked to them, it's like a space ride.

They would take the balloon up and this was actually used back in like the '30s, I think.

I think they did some like very early tests when rockets were small. Yeah, yeah, now the rockets are big and like satellites are big, a little harder to get up there. But yeah, we signed the deal a little while ago. We've been working on the products with them for a period of time. In order to get ready to go to space, we do do some work on the ground. To understand, hey, what is the thing that we're gonna go do in space, and let's make sure we figure out all the other process parameters. When you're like crystallizing a drug, there's a particular temperature, a mixing rate, a solvent. We just bring one extra knob, the gravity knob. Now here on Earth, we can't decrease gravity, but we can increase it. And so alongside the customer, we look at basically adjusting that gravity knob down here on Earth, figure out kind of how to tune all the other things so we're tuning the right knob. Once we get that all set, load that up into a spacecraft, send it up to space, obviously there the gravity knob goes to zero, get a different result, land it in Australia, and then send it off to the clinic. We're still working with United on the ground so far, getting those drugs ready for flight, but we'd expect basically next year to fly the first United patient.

And how are they making this drug on Earth today?

Today you're using traditional techniques, so there's a whole set of companies.

Which is much less efficient.

You're just getting a different result, so as an example, use case or paper that the company was in some ways predicated on. Obviously, there's been 40 to 50 years of work on protein crystallization up on the International Space Station, Skylab, space shuttle. But in 2019, Merck basically showed their blockbuster cancer drug Keytruda. They crystallized it up in space. They showed that they could shift the administration from what was previously an IV drip to now a subcutaneous syringe. So you don't have to go to an IV clinic. A rural patient that can't access IV clinics can now access this drug. And so that's what we're doing up there with United Therapeutics is we're looking for basically changes in performance of the drug because of those different results that allows them to shift administration. United Therapeutics is famous for, you know, a variety of different things. So the company was originally started by Martine Rothblatt to solve a rare pulmonary disorder for her daughter, built that up into a huge platform. They've really leaned into the frontier over the course of last year, so 20, 30 years, including they like, you know, make, you know, gene modifications for pigs to create human organs inside of pigs. But one of the things that they're known for is for one of their pulmonary compounds, they shifted the administration from a— nice pig sound, well done, well done, I like it. You know, a lot better than waiting on like a, you know, whatever, 24-year-old kid to die on a motorcycle to get your kidney, instead just get it from a pig farm. But one of the other things that they're known for is they actually shifted one of their, you know, sort of primary drugs from an oral pill to instead an inhalable, and made it much more efficacious, easier for the patient 'cause you had to take the drug less often. It's things like that that we're looking to, you know, sort of do with them.

Dumb question. You have the gravity knob, you're able to turn that off, but aren't you adding a knob for like vibrations and basically dialing it to 10? Like does that ever affect, because you imagine you're sort of centrifuging it, like it's gyrating as it's reentering, so is that a problem? Do you have to, is that like for the selection criteria? Do you have mitigation strategies?

What you can think of is like in a pharmaceutical process where you're crystallizing something, you're basically going through like a phase change. You're going through from like a liquid to a solid. Where things matter is when that phase change is happening. Okay. In that particular moment is where you don't want the sedimentation, convection, et cetera. So what we do in some ways, we like load up all the liquids ahead of time. Yep. Those liquids for sure on the rocket light it up, get shaken, et cetera, but it doesn't matter 'cause the liquid's still staying a liquid. Yeah. Then up in space what we do is we go through that phase change. We go from basically like a liquid to a solid. Okay. That needs to happen in a very pure environment. Sure. We shut down all the reaction wheels. We make sure that like everything on the spacecraft that would vibrate, is totally silent, so it is as pure of microgravity basically as possible. Got it. It then becomes a solid, and at the end of it, it kind of looks like a salt basically. Like think of it like table salt. Now on the way back, that table salt for sure is shaking a bunch, but the table salt, if you think about like a, you know, some, you know, table salt that we put and we go put it in like a centrifuge for 100 years at a, you know, 1,000 Gs, it's still gonna be table salt. Sure. Where those like vibrations matter.

You need to manage heat more.

You do need to manage heat. If you melt the salt, you're fucked 'cause then it's back to a liquid. But you know, —what convinced United that we would be capable as a partner is we actually had datasets from our very first mission where the surface of the heat shield was hotter than the temperature of the surface of the sun, so like extremely hot. Onboard, I think it was like something like 14°C plus or minus 0.1°C. Wow. And so we had extremely precise temperature control onboard. And so a lot of what has brought people to the table for this sort of first commercial deal is while there's been this historical work on the ISS, nobody had showed how do you go do this on a purely private platform fully autonomous, low-cost, high-cadence, and a part of what convinced them was yes, both the regular flights we've been doing, right? We are now on W, you know, sort of 6, 7, 8, and 9 will be, you know, sort of launching later this year. But it was also, hey, not only are they launching and landing these things, but onboard they've got the right process control so I can see, hey, they can go work on my drug. And by next year when we fly 7 times in a year, that's gonna be higher cadence than everything that the like ISS, Space Shuttle, et cetera, have done in all of history. Human history, let alone in 2028, 2029 as we continue to go higher and higher cadence.

So how many things need to go right in a row to have a successful mission? I imagine that, you know, there's like all these different—

Like just the space mission or like get the drug into the clinic? 'Cause the drug in the clinic is more complex.

Well, yeah, just the space mission.

The space mission at this point we've like kind of shown we can do pretty safely, but I'll walk you through it. First on the ground, we gotta go build, basically effectively think of it as like a two-part spacecraft. One is sort of looks like a traditional satellite system, It's a little bit lower power and under, you know, spec'd relative to most satellites because we don't need super high power to communicate with, you know, internet terminals, radio waves of photos, et cetera.

Oh, that makes sense, yeah.

The only power we need is just to run the bioreactor, and the bioreactor doesn't consume that much power. So think of it as like a—

So the only thing we need is like basic telemetry.

Yeah, basic telemetry, but we don't need like super high pointing accuracy while it's just floating up there, 'cause again, we're not pointing at a particular place on the ground to basically try and like take a photo of it. And so think of it as like we build an underspec'd sort of satellite, Now the one thing that it is big on is like it's got a lot of thrust and propulsion on board because we need to come back, unlike every other satellite. Sure. But otherwise, underspec satellite. So we do those on the ground. We've now built a handful of those. Then we have to build the second part of the spacecraft, which is the reentry pod. All this does have a relatively complex supply chain. Think like the solar panels, the GPS chip, the flight computer. That type of stuff we buy out of house. Some things you have to do in-house. You can't buy a capsule like off the shelf, so we have to build the heat shield, the structure, et cetera, around that. Those have to get integrated. We have to do a bunch of ground tests to make sure that works. Then you ship it off to SpaceX's facility a couple months before launch, make sure that everything's still working over there, install it onto the rocket. Once we're on the rocket, we kinda look like any other satellite that goes up there, whether it's like, you know, asteroid mining satellites or comm satellites or spy satellites. SpaceX takes us up to orbit. They then drop us off, again, like any other satellite. We spend between, call it like 4 to 12 weeks up there, kinda depends on the drug manufacturing process. Go pretty quick, some take quite a bit of time. While we're up there, we have basically pharmaceutical scientists on the ground in mission control. So you remember those Apollo films in mission control? We literally have like, think like Amgen scientists, but like they're in mission control talking to the virus up there.

I can imagine you love hanging out in there.

Brewi always makes fun of me. He's like, I don't quite know the American idiom, or don't get it, but hopefully you guys will, but he's like, he calls me like the gentleman's mission control. Where like there's like the gentleman's farmer. It's like the guy that stands around the farm, but is like obviously not really doing anything. I'm like the gentleman's mission control where like, yeah, I like hanging out there. Obviously I like am completely useless and mostly a distraction. So I try and mostly just listen into the livestream now.

Every team needs a class clown. Yeah, exactly.

Can you unpack a little bit more about the orbit? There's a piece in the Journal today, space data centers face a lot of challenges. They all gotta go to sun-synchronous orbit. I imagine you don't, but orbit, I wanna know about the knock-on effects of like, what can you tell me about sun-synchronous orbit? What orbit do you use and why? And then how might this change what happens in the future?

Yeah, part of what's beneficial about sun-synchronous orbit is you're basically like always like facing towards the sun and have sunshine. We are not as dependent on that. As I mentioned earlier, we're not super power constrained. And so we can just charge up, you know, basically our batteries on board. And while we're on the dark side of the Earth, we can basically just drain those batteries, recharge them, on like the next orbit. We're up there just for the microgravity, and so we can be in almost any orbit. That gives us a ton of benefits. One, when you're in space, you don't have to worry as much about traffic. We just go where other people aren't. But two, it actually helps a ton with launch. You know, as an example, later this year for the first time, we'll be actually launching— historically we've only launched to sun-synchronous orbit, 'cause that's where all the Transporter missions, which are the SpaceX rideshare missions have been going.

That's what I was gonna ask.

They now have what are called Bandwagon missions, which go up to, they're also rideshare, but they go to polar orbit. Yeah. We'll actually be flying on our first Bandwagon mission later this year. Okay. So now we have launch flexibility. I was gonna ask you. There's a bunch of companies that can't go on Bandwagon or basically we're actually probably one of the only companies that can go on both.

Either. Yeah, that's what I was gonna ask because what happens if everything winds up being sun-synchronous orbit? Because I think there's 10,000 or so Starlink satellites. Elon's asking for a million for space data centers. That means like 90% of the launches are gonna be sun-synchronous, but that's okay for you?

Yeah, we're okay going to sun synchronous and we can quickly get out of the orbit if we like need to, or try and go, you know, sort of slightly off of it. Or we can just go to polar and be totally, you know, sort of happy there. And that gives us some benefits on the like launch economic side of things where now we're basically able to go on any rocket.

Yeah, so I was gonna ask, it seems like every hyperscaler, some startups are, you know, and some of the labs are thinking about space. Are you expecting, like launch to, could, you know, theoretically increase, could be like bottleneck launch pricing?

It's been falling for so long, but yeah, what do you expect?

Yeah, how are you planning? 'Cause you have to buy capacity, launch capacity years out. Yeah.

Yeah, to date, launch prices have only gone up. So they have not gone down since we started the company. Launch costs for SpaceX, I'm sure have. Yeah. But there has not yet been pricing competition. So why would they necessarily pass on those savings to Bezos and us? They haven't, I think, seen that much price elasticity in the market when they've lowered prices. It's not like they've seen 10x greater demand. And so for them, it's like capture as many margin dollars, basically, as possible. I do think what we're going to start to see is more competition in the launch market over the course of the next 5 years rather than the prior 5, right? Blue Origin, I think it was today or yesterday, announced that they're going to be doing their first external fundraising, which speaks to, I think, them taking themselves much more seriously as a company that is going to regularly You've got Rocket Lab now. It's like a, I think, $65 billion company. Yeah, wow. Definitely have enough resources to go tackle Neutron, and they've got shareholder expectations for them to get that medium lift, you know, sort of rocket up. You've got Stoke Space, and so there's a few others basically playing in it. We are booking out, you know, sort of rocket launches now all the way through 2029. So we do have the capacity that we need for the next, you know, sort of many years. And I think by the time we're getting into booking late 2029 flights, Yeah, there's a world where there start to be, you know, basically more providers online. SpaceX at least basically to date has been like, you know, for us at least, as many times as we've wanted to launch, that capacity has been available. Like they are not capacity constrained, they are still more demand constrained. I do think that—

Yeah, 'cause no one's making anything in space. Totally, nobody's making anything.

And that's why they were able to be so successful with Starlink was because they had the residual capability, right?

It's like a tealism, right? It's like we created the space economy and then it's just more internet, more apps. And now it's just gonna be more AI. How are you thinking about other drug categories? I can imagine space Redda would be a pretty hot drug if people would smoke space Redda.

Yeah, one thing that I didn't realize is, so Ozempic today, 1 kilo of Ozempic retails for $1 million. Oh wow. What people don't realize, when people ask me like, "Oh, space drugs, economics, et cetera, does this stuff work?" I have to like tell them like, "Yeah, for you, like, you know, it might be like $1,000, you know, basically per shot." But like, it's because there's very, very little ozempic basically on board.

A lot of them are like powders that then get diluted and then injected, and so like, yeah, the actual core ingredient's so tiny.

Exactly, and what we do up there is we just make the powder. Yeah, exactly. United has, United Therapeutics, you know, our partner that we're announcing today, they have a ton of expertise expertise in all things like, you know, rare pulmonary disorders, they're for sure gonna be the person that we work with on that indication scenario. But microgravity has a wide set of pharmaceutical applications, neurological, immunology, oncology, et cetera. And so for sure, we'll start to, you know, I think in the success case of Civarda, it's not gonna be like we have like 50 different partners. It's probably gonna be like 5 to 7 that we go really deep with. We kind of choose sort of one partner per sort of indication area that we go as deep as possible. Ophthalmology is another area that we're looking sort of deeply at, partially 'cause like the eye, smallest organ, again, smallest amount of powder that you need. Also an area where some of the other changes of administration technologies don't really work as well. And so yeah, we're starting to explore who are the partners for the other indication areas.

What about beyond bio? I remember ZB Land being something that people were talking about potentially being able to manufacture microgravity. Wildly different economic trade-off there, but are there other, when you imagine like the industrial city in LEO, like are there other categories that extend maybe 10 years out, 20 years out where it might be logical?

Yeah, I think like if we look at the next decade, you know, call it like if there's 200 products that are manufactured in orbit, I think 195 of those are gonna be pharmaceuticals. Really? So vast majority is gonna be, you know, sort of there and that's where our core focus area is. Yeah. If I had to, you know, sort of peer into the crystal ball and look at what comes next, I do actually think probably fiber before semis is probably, you know, sort of my rough guess. Yeah, when we were looking at that like high-end, you know, sort of Z-Blend, you know, sort of fiber market back in 2021 when we started the company. There was clearly some level of like, you know, sort of interest and capabilities there, but just like relative to what we were seeing on hypersonics and pharma, not as large. Interestingly, that market has matured a lot. There's sort of two, sort of call it three areas where it has applications. One is it is the lowest, basically, you know, think of it as like interference inside the optical fiber for infrared. Near-infrared is now used in a lot of the high-energy weapon systems. Oh, if you think about having to pump that laser through a fiber, you basically want as little basically resistance as possible. There's just like a lot more being spent on those types of near-infrared weapon systems, especially with some of the like the anti-drone stuff that's, you know, sort of coming down the pipe. So that's sort of expanded. It's also used now a lot more in like metal cutting and like organ, like eye surgery, relative to where it was sort of 5 years ago. So that's expanded. The other area is quantum communications, so quantum-entangled photons are much more sensitive to those types of impurities in fiber. Quantum comms has also grown a lot over the last 5 years. And then the other area is, oddly, data centers.

I was going to say, as soon as there's a data center story, there's going to be 25 companies that are going to get funding, IPOs, and stuff.

So ground data centers, not space ones, but they are actually— No, no, no, no, no.

You make the ZB-LAN there, you bring it back, and then you—

Dude, ZB-LAN is now being used in terrestrial data centers. That was not a use case at all 5 years ago. So anyway, all these things, photonics and optical in here. Yeah, they're still like early, I would say. Um, but, and like, you know, what's happening though is also like the VART economics keep improving on a flight-by-flight basis. The Z-Blend market keeps growing. We're like, for the first time, I would say we're like dedicating resources to anything. But like around the office for the first time in 5 years, somebody was like, the Z-Blend stuff is like almost starting to pencil out again. It's probably like 4 years till we like, you know, sort of do anything. But like you're starting to see those lines start to get closer together. That's very cool. That's what I love about a platform like ours is, like, if you had told me, like, predict where your revenues would be 5 years ago, really hard. Even this year, like, things that are landing are probably not what I would have underwritten a year ago. Like, I think pharma has, like, way exceeded expectations. Like, it's pulled in probably, like, 3.5 years relative to, like, you know, our Series C that we announced last year. Our financial projections on that on pharma were just, like, totally, you know, sort of wrong. And so I'm excited by the idea that, like, yeah, there might be other areas that are wrong. Semis, I think, is just going to be, like, you know, the to further this out, partially just like the process equipment and the sensitivities. Like if you think about a bioreactor, it's like hard, but it's kind of like mixing like liquids together. The hard thing is like which liquids, that's what's hard. The mixing of it, not so hard.

Yeah, but you're making those decisions.

Down here on the ground. Fiber, same thing. It's like, you know, it's like once you like make that like precursor like rod, then drawing it is not like a crazy complex process. It's making that rod that's hard, but again, you're doing that on the ground. With semis, it's like, oh my God, that process equipment is like so, so sensitive, right? If you look at like the like, Stuff that they use for EUV, basically like lithography, the mirrors for that. If you were to lay out a lithography mirror over the course of the size of Germany, the amount of variation you'd see in terms of like mountains would still be less than 0.1 millimeters. And so this stuff just has to be like so, so, so, so, so, so, so precise that it's just like—

And the cost is so high. Yeah. Even during the experimentation process, you could—

Yeah, the famous quote from TSMC is that if there's an earthquake, they don't have like like a pager duty. Like they don't slack everyone, "Hey, you gotta come in, there was an earthquake." Everyone knows if there's an earthquake, just go to the factory. Exactly, exactly. And the employees just know because it's just so, so important.

And so just that like microgravity process equipment is just so much more complex than semi. So it'll get there one day, but like bioreactors, the fiber draw things are like orders and orders of magnitude simpler to make like microgravity bioreactors, microgravity fiber draw towers. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Will it ever make sense to have a permanent like ISS-style structure that you are transporting supplies to and then sending, you know, sort of finished product down? 'Cause like knowing you, like you would like to have a proper like dedicated space factory, but does it actually make sense?

It's always been the somewhat secret, somewhat not secret like ambition of Varda is to go build that, but go do it step by step, right? So when you look at like generation 1 of basically what we're building, it's this 2-part spacecraft, right? Satellite, Satellite has all the process equipment, et cetera. Pod just has the finished good. When we're done, pod survives. All that process equipment, everything on board, we basically just burn it up. Generation 2, that'll be flying in like, call it 2029. Think of it as just like, we make it so that that heat shield material just envelops everything. And so now the satellite plus the pod, they both survive. And that'll probably look like a little mini space plane is kinda how you can think about it. So space plane has the solar panels, the propulsion, it's got the process equipment, process equipment, it's also got the finished good, that goes up and down. And so now that full system is reusable, improves the economics, we'll have more payload on board too. Now at some point, like, it doesn't make economic sense to keep moving that process equipment up, down, up, down every time. Call by the end of the decade, the goal will be we'll start to invest into those like fixed pieces of infrastructure in orbit. Early on, they'll probably just look like a satellite, just with a little docking port basically. The like space plane will come with the raw ingredients basically, the liquids, et cetera. Dock with that like satellite up in orbit, exchange for the fabricated goods. But then we'll have like 10 of those satellites. We'll start to stitch 'em together. Basically looks like a station. One day there'll be so many of those pieces of equipment on board that we'll be able to economically justify, hey, probably need a dude with a wrench every once in a while to go like fix some stuff up there. But like once we can economically justify like one person with a wrench, 10, 100, 1,000. And so like, yeah, we for sure, we want to build the first industrial city in low Earth orbit. But we're taking it one step at a time, building out the business, getting great unit economics, proving out one use case at a time.

What about the other parts of the stack that you actually need for that? So I'm thinking docking. Is there a startup that's just working on docking?

Yeah, I mean, so credit to them. There's a company in Seattle called Starfish Space that is hyperfocused just on the docking, maneuvering, the software for that.

Yeah, because that feels like something that if that's not your core competency, like seems like you could have a series of nightmares around just trying to figure out docking. And that is a probably, you know, super widely applicable process for the rest of the space economy.

Totally. It's like, you know, back in the day we would've had to make our own solar panels, our own thrusters, propulsion tanks, et cetera, for like the stuff that we build on the ground. That stuff, you know, over the course of the last decade has become a much more mature supply chain. As we start to get to this like space station world, I think there'll be some of these things where like Starfish, Starfish, I believe basically makes this like camera that you can basically attach to your satellite. They take over the controls for your propulsion and they'll dock you to wherever you're needing to go. Yeah, 5, 10 years ago, there's no way that we would've been able to buy that. We would've absolutely had to build it. And so, yeah, I think on an ongoing basis, we'll always be doing that sort of build-buy trade. And ideally, obviously, if there's an off-the-shelf solution, integrating that, and that only accelerates basically our progress. And so, yeah, it's cool to see that as obviously Varda's developing, the general space economy and all these these use cases are developing. And heck, when you said like, you know, sort of warehouse in space, there are companies like Gravitics that are trying to do like dedicated warehouse vehicles. Maybe there's some world where like, yeah, we like buy the warehouse and we just install some docking ports, fill it up with process equipment, but we don't have to like build the warehouse. I'm not like opposed to that. What we really wanna focus on is like we're gonna have the best lab down here on Earth to like assess how to make these formulations. We definitely have to make the bioreactors ourselves. Nobody else is gonna make microgravity bioreactors. We gotta make those space planes basically ourselves 'cause like nobody else is gonna be bringing those up and down all the time, but the rest of it, pretty open to like, you know, buying where we can.

How are you thinking about the public markets? SpaceX is going out at like in the trillions, a lot of bio companies, I'm sure United Therapeutics went out in the billions probably. And a lot of biotech companies, they go out earlier, pharmaceutical companies go out earlier, the public markets, sometimes they like really stable projections Do we understand the quarterly forecast? Sometimes they like a big vision, and you get out there with a Tesla or something, and it does really well. What is your take on how you might fit into the public markets in the future?

Yeah, I mean, there's not a lot of private, like, $10+ billion market cap pharmaceutical companies. They basically all go public before that.

I mean, there's so many deals. Like, every day, a big biotech company is buying something for $1 billion, $2 billion.

All day long. Totally. That's basically the default. Yeah. Now I think like GLPs have shown that like in the therapeutics world you can build a like, you know, a business that can effectively be like a trillion-dollar outcome, just one therapeutics business. You know, we're definitely thinking about that from the, you know, Founders Fund side of things, how we back things that aren't just that $1 to $5 billion therapeutics outcome. Yeah. Advarta, I think we'll look at it like on a round-by-round basis where like I think about it as like cost of capital. Yeah. The public markets are offering me a lower cost of capital because they have more expertise, 'cause there's a bunch of hedge funds that have like MD, PhDs, and tons of them on staff to deeply understand pulmonary diseases, ophthalmology, et cetera. Yeah, we'll go to the public markets if that's the case. If we're still seeing tons of support in the private market and we think it's like relatively, you know, sort of net similar, you know, we'll stay private for a period of time. If I had to, again, peer into the crystal ball, my guess is like, yes, relative to a SpaceX or an Anduril or things like that, I think we will have much lower cost of capital early on, sort of being public rather than not, because the public markets have so much appreciation for the types of clinical datasets that we'll be putting out.

What about on the other side? I've heard there's a really great way to make a lot of money really quickly is like an unlicensed broker-dealer of SPVs. Would you recommend that? What's your take? You know— Get into that game?

Like, go to some employee program. There's no securities laws in space.

Find some random person.

Oh, there we go. You can't find me there, PD.

But how have you been processing the SPV boom, all of these questions around brokering, and what's going on there?

Yeah, I mean, I think— I do think that one lady's, like, Anthropic tweet basically led to Anthropic's, like, policy on this. Part of why that, you know, sort of is happening is, you know, there's this SEC regulation on the number of entities you can have on your cap table while staying a private company. I forget the exact number. I think it used to be 1,000. Now it's 6,000. These private companies, as they stay private so long and have this number of SPVs, and especially as these SPVs get warehoused out, it increases your entity count. And so I do think there's a significant sort of lockdown on it because—

And employees typically own options, and they don't show up on the cap table until they exercise.

Exactly. Exactly. So yeah, I mean, we're obviously tracking that at Varda in terms of how many entities we have. I'm not seeing some exponential growth where we're too worried about it. I don't know that we've been as stringent to date, but as I look at our future rounds, yeah, you need to start to think about, OK, how many more rounds am I going to stay private? And at some point, at that point, like, I need to keep the entity count managed. So I totally get the Anthropics of the world. It's like, they've just raised so many gubajillion dollars in the private markets that like, they have to—

I did get some more backstory on that one deal. Yeah, it was— Allegedly, it was a much more like, complicated structure that wasn't as like, bad sounding as the original post said. Like, there was like, an SPV involved and like, some other stuff, but anyways. Yeah. Why, every single person that you know that has invested in the company has probably come to you saying, like, what are you doing with data centers? And all the biggest companies in the world are now, like, dedicating resources to it. You guys are seemingly staying, like, extremely focused. You've had conviction around, timelines around space data centers being longer, but now that the sort of regulatory environment on Earth is changing things, that could change potentially the need or the economics. Like, when would you change your mind and capitulate?

I mean, I'm definitely, you know, sort of open to changing my mind as like a shareholder of companies that may take advantage of these technologies. As somebody that's going and building a space company, I really wanna focus on like where I think we have the right to win and can, you know, sort of build up something that has like, you know, sort of durable margins.

Yeah, not a great situation. Like you being in a situation where you're like this like deeply entrenched partner with 5, you know, massive pharmaceutical companies that are dependent on you for a specific part of their supply chain, that is a much better business to me than like competing with SpaceX on like, you know, putting GPUs in space when they just are naturally gonna have a lot of advantages. And so it feels like, yeah, you could pull forward like a round, but do you shoot yourself in the foot in the process of that?

Yeah, I just think there are a lot of companies in the space industry that will raise off of contracts, renders, et cetera. But ultimately these things aren't durable unless you are regularly flying spacecraft, building up a production line, right? You know, the Elon quote that I love is like, the factory is the, you know, sort of product. I think the thing that we've done well at Varda is we've stayed hyper-focused on just like our particular W Series vehicle, getting that up to, you know, sort of production rate, flying it regularly, making sure that it's succeeding, and serving, you know, customers across a wide variety of verticals versus distracting ourselves with like— there have been a lot of opportunities that we've said no to. I'm sure some of those things in the short term would have inflated our valuation and top line, et cetera.

But wearing your investor hat, you're like, I don't care about what my valuation is today. I care about—

I care about where it is in like 10, 20 years. And so like, I don't need to like listen to the noise of the market. And so I think that is the benefit of like having somebody like me on the, you know, sort of cap table or as a, you know, sort of co-founder versus like, there are plenty of companies that had XYZ vision 2 years ago and are now fully pivoting to space data centers because like, that's where investors are deploying capital. And at some point it's like, if you're like changing your company vision and product off of the basis of like where investors are like cycling capital into versus like what customers are demanding, And this is where it's like, look, are there areas where it's like, yeah, Z-Plan might get affected, and there I think we have much more of like a right to win, and that affects terrestrial data centers and things like that? Yeah, like there might be areas that we sort of play, but like go launch a bunch of NVIDIA Jetsons up into orbit and do that at economics that aren't competitive relative to SpaceX, and even then, I think the SpaceX economics, while promising, still have a long ways to go. That's not a game that I wanna play in. Competition is for losers.

There you go. Yeah, yeah. I mean, also, like, you're so far from realizing, like, the TAM of what you're building. Like, it makes sense for Google to, like, jump into AI. Like, search is saturated, and they needed the next thing.

Yeah, it's possible we'll look back on this moment and be like, okay, every viable competitor to actually go and compete in pharma, like, went and did this other thing, and maybe some did well, but then that still left an opportunity to just kind of, like, verticalize, own the category.

And I think what tech people misunderstand is just the size of the TAM in pharma. Oh, yeah. So Anthropic is what, I think, like a $60 billion run rate or something like that, if we get the latest numbers. Keytruda, that drug that I mentioned that Merck did in 2019, that one drug's top line last year for Merck, $25 billion in revenue. Just that one drug. Yeah. They obviously have many other drugs. There are many other cancer drugs. There are many other immunology drugs And so it is a massive TAM. If you're able to actually significantly improve the performance on these things, capture some upside, start to go more full-stack yourself in pharma, I'm not concerned. And especially, by the way, once there's AGI, what do you think everybody's gonna be focused on afterwards when like there's no more like, you know, white-collar, you know, sort of, you know, labor that is needed? Everybody's just gonna wanna live forever. Where do you think all that capital's gonna rotate into? It's gonna rotate into longevity, therapeutics, manufacturing. And so I'm, you know, sort of happy to stay on the sidelines and sort of accept that capital once, you know, sort of all the AGI people rotate out. I love it.

I love it. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Oh yeah, excited to finally come in person. Good to see you boys.

So good to have you in person. We'll talk to you soon, darling.

Have a great day. Say hi to the team.

We have Richard Socher from Recursive in the waiting room. We've been keeping him waiting, so we will bring him in to the TVP and AltruDome. I love when companies emerge from stealth Delph, nothing makes me more frustrated than when there's stuff we need. What's going on? We've talked to Richard before, so.

Yes, welcome back. But we're very excited to have him on. We've talked to you before. Yes. Was that, am I, that was a bad joke. You.com, right? Oh, that's right, that's right, yes.

Great to see you, Richard. Let's, but even though you've been on the show before, let's reintroduce the company and sort of set the table for us on what you're building.

Happy to. Yeah. So still happily running u.com and AIX Ventures, but now very excited to start Recursiv with 7 incredible co-founders. At Recursiv, we're looking to build recursive self-improving superintelligence to automate knowledge discovery. It's a lot to unpack there. We're getting closer and closer to AGI. I think we have to set our sights, set our goals now to superintelligence. I think AI is code and AI can code. So now we can actually put those two together and allow in an open-ended fashion to let AI actually improve itself.

Yeah. Are there any other— is the entire focus on AI research or are there any other areas of research that you're interested in? You see a lot of labs do research on that. Cybersecurity or research on bio or science. There's a whole bunch of different initiatives. How focused do you want to be on AI research?

Yeah, it is part of that, part of that focus. Just if you can get RSI actually going, then everything else you can enter potentially seemingly very easily.

There you go.

You kind of answered the question. That's exactly right. I think for now as a company, you want to have a very strong laser focus and that laser focus for us is on enabling AI to automate the scientific method on itself. The ideation, implementation, validation of ideas, right? And once it's gotten really, really good at that, that means it can be fully recursive self-improving. Then we're going to apply it to a whole host of other applications, first in software and broadly construed digital work, eventually even physical work. I saw your previous show just now. I'm very excited about preclinical biology and the impact AI can have on that.

Talk about the round, the structure, who's in, how much did you raise? We raised north of $650 million. Woo! Thank you.

There we go. Walk us through the pitch. That you gave investors? What's your right to win this? You're one of many, many teams working on this problem, including all the existing labs, but I'm sure that the pitch was compelling, otherwise you wouldn't have gotten the $650 million. That's right, yeah.

At a $4 billion pre, as led by Google Ventures and Greycroft, some amazing participation also from NVIDIA. AMD and many other incredible funds that we're very grateful for, angels, strategics and so on. Our right to win is essentially fourfold. It's the focus. Yes, we know that everyone works a little bit on self-improvement, auto research, things like that, but no one is fully focused on this. We have the team, we have incredible co-founders, Tim Rockteschel, who invented retrieval augmented generation with others and Rainbow Teaming and Prompt Reader and Genie-3, which is like the most sophisticated world model that Google DeepMind had recently launched. Like, it's incredible talent. We got Jeff Klune, who's worked together with Tim on many things. He's done incredible papers like the Darwin Goedel Machine, Hyperagents, with some of his students who are also with us. We got Tim Shi, who built Cresta into a unicorn, AI for self— for service centers. We got Josh Tobin, who's one of the earliest people at OpenAI and eventually led some of their work on ChatGPT agents, Codex, Deep Research. We got Samming Xiong, co-inventor of prompt engineering. We got Alexei Dostoevsky, the co-inventor of the Vision Transformer. We got Yuan Dongqian, who used to lead RL at Meta. I mean, it's just such an incredible team.

It's great. Yeah, that's, that's pretty compelling.

Then, then how are you thinking about scale being all you need or not. Is there a capital war or is $650 million enough to do the level of training or inference that you need to actually reach RSI? Because if a lot of the labs at least are sort of, you know, putting the AGI, ASI terms orders of magnitude of compute or orders of magnitude of dollars. And so is there some sort of race condition or do you think that there's a more like elegant solution? We need new algorithms, I guess. It's a great question.

Certainly 650 in this league that we're now in is step one. Yeah. If you want to compete at that level, you want to build massive frontier AI, you have to, eventually raise more. At the same time, you know, this will last us for quite some time. Yeah. Unless we're seeing enough progress that makes us want to accelerate this, right? And then we prove a new kind of scaling law. Sure. Where more compute results in more inventions, more capabilities in AI, more automation in the process of AI research itself, then we're probably going to accelerate that. And to be honest, the team has already made some incredible meta inventions that led the AI to make its own inventions. And so we're really excited about the progress and likely will accelerate.

Yeah. Do you view today's coding agents as somewhat of a form of RSI, or is that the wrong, you know, kind of wrong category?

I'm glad you asked that question. The current models are great for auto research, which is a step towards RSI, but you're you're not doing true recursive self-improvement if you don't have full control over the entire self, namely the model, the architecture, the infrastructure, its entire harness, and all of the things that go into the training, pre-, mid-, post-training, all of these things. And so they are— it's a useful step to use coding agents for auto research, but it's just a step towards the true RSI vision.

Got it. How are you thinking about standing on the shoulders of giants broadly? I mean, you mentioned a bunch of researchers who have published a bunch of papers and obviously you're integrating that, but is there a way to pull forward progress or, or like catch up to the frontier faster based on open source models, open source research, open source datasets, or, or distilling or integrating existing open source projects I would love to know just your thesis on leveraging open source and tweaking and fine-tuning and iterating on versus start from a completely blank sheet.

Great question. Yeah, I think as with many things and similar to the applications of RSI, you want to start with a laser focus and then open up the aperture to more and more things and 100% you want to stand on the shoulders of giants, both closed, open source. Open source has done an incredible job bringing in more capabilities to the community. And so we will use anything and everything that we can, but we also know that long term, you're going to want to own and be knowledgeable and able to build the entire stack.

Yeah. Now that you have your own funded Neo Lab, Do we need more new Neo Labs or do we have enough?

I'd like to think so. One, we want to build a real company, right? We're not just a lab. I sometimes struggle a little bit with that terminology. I think there are a couple of labs that are truly just labs and it's a little bit unclear where they're going to go long term. We have folks that also build unicorn companies from scratch with revenue and so on, have launched amazing products like an OpenAI Codex with Josh and others. So we're excited. But at the same time, this machine we're building is almost like a Eureka machine in the sense of like it'll keep making inventions for you. And so a lot of labs that are focused on like continual learning and world models and maybe memory and all of these other aspects, I believe those are all important aspects. I believe that if we are successful, those are all just special cases and outputs of this machinery that we're building.

So do you— yeah, I mean, how close are you— I imagine that this is a whole process, but how close are you to thinking about a product for businesses or a product for consumers, an API, a web playground, a demo? Is that something that by design you want to be super fast about and get something out into the world? To have some impact in the interim, or do you wanna keep everything closely held for potentially a really long time? I don't know, forever potentially, if you're just gonna invest—

Yeah, when I hear the Eureka machine, I'm keeping that to myself personally. Yeah, what's the plan?

So initially, we thought about like really giving ourselves like a year or more of time. In the last few months, The team has already made some incredible breakthroughs. And so we may accelerate some of the productization of this research to come out earlier. I don't want to commit yet to a specific date or anything, but like, I think, you know, we want to build a viable company here that brings superintelligence and allows it to have massive impact to help humanity flourish. And that won't happen in just a research lab.

I love it.

Could you ever see a scenario where you create something that would make more sense to spin off into another company to productize, or do you expect to, you know, basically use all of your creations internally and productize them yourself?

I can see how our customers will use this in incredible ways so that they can then use, like, create new kinds of products and new kinds of product categories. I think we've seen similarly incredible new companies like that that have used AI and code generation to enable others to build their own businesses. You know, Replit, Lovable, and so on are great examples of that. And I can see our technology doing something similar at an even more foundational level. Amazing.

Thank you so much for coming on the show. Congratulations on the product.

Great to get the update and come back on when for your first release.

Yeah, great to see you. We'll talk to you soon. Cheers, Richard. Have a good one. Goodbye. We have a debate. We have a debate. What's that? In the Wall Street Journal, they are reporting that typing is being replaced by whispering and it's way more annoying. This is a trend because programmers, startup founders, startup employees are starting to resemble high-end call centers, only these employees are talking to AI and people are saying it's a little awkward. Where do you stand on whispering, Tyler?

You have a take? Well, so I think this might be a play on words, right? Because Whisper is like the model that you used to speak into.

Yes, but apparently— Are they literally whispering? They are literally whispering. So Molly here, mumbling. Molly's mumbling was starting to get on her husband's nerves. What was once a sacred nightly routine, putting the toddler to bed, collapsing onto the couch, and opening their laptops to finish their work in peace, had become anything but peaceful. Instead of typing quietly, Molly started to hold down the function key and talk in hushed tones to her computer. She runs her own AI business in Seattle and is hooked on Whisper Flow, a company you might have heard of, a dictation app that users are pairing with coding tools like Codex from OpenAI and Claude Code to turn rambling stream-of-consciousness prompts into coherent usable texts in seconds. Efficient? The Wall Street Journal says yes, but annoying? You bet. It didn't take long before Molly's husband told her they needed to talk. The couple now often sit apart. If we need to get something done at night, 'One of us will stay in our office.' Across Silicon Valley, work is being remade as once mellow spaces become dens of din. And we got a mention of our friends over at Ramp. One venture capitalist said visiting AI startups today is like showing up at a high-end call center. Everyone is— except everyone is chatting with AI. Engineers at credit card startup Ramp sit at their desks wearing gaming headsets so they can talk loudly to their AI assistants. Gusto co-founder Edward Kim has encouraged employees at the human resources company to experiment with dictation technology, telling them the office of the future will sound more like a sales floor. People are gonna be screaming at the AI agents.

Oh, I like that. Like, yeah, stock trading.

Yeah, we're bringing back the New York Stock Exchange. There is a way to combat this. I've seen a couple masks, the Bain mask. The Bain mask. It's the Bain mask, basically. The Bain mask. People do put it over, and it has a headphone jack and a USB-C port, and then they can yell very aggressively if they're live streaming video games late at night and they don't want to wake up their partner or roommate. But I think I'm pro this. What do you think, Jordi Hays? I think I'm in favor of a noisier, louder— I do like a library environment. I like a calm environment, but there's something invigorating about everyone yelling at their computers all day long. Where do you stand on it, Jordi Hays?

I like it. You like it? I bring in the energy. Yeah.

What about you, Tyler?

Yeah, I like the aesthetics of people yelling. Although the kind of the muzzle, the coding muzzle, I think is a good—

You won't put on the Bane mask?

I don't want the muzzle. No, you don't want the muzzle. Yeah, you can't muzzle me. You're not going to stop me from screaming at my computer.

So you say you're a fan of this, but I don't feel like I've ever seen you talking to Whisper Flow while you are vibecoding. That is true. Reveal preference.

I find I usually only use the speaking when I'm like driving or something.

I do that all the time. I'm always on the dictation mode. I don't use the advanced voice mode that often. What I will do is I will go and press the little microphone button, ramble for a few minutes, and then fire off a more robust query to ChatGPT with more context.

Yeah, you're doing that like once a day and it's incredibly powerful. I actually don't think many people realize that you can just ramble.

Once a day in front of you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like 50 times a day.

There's some controversy has hit the timeline. Okay, what's going on? Socks has pulled a screenshot of the Figure livestream. No way. Where the robot appears to be doing something like adjusting a headset. Okay. And so he's alleging that— Oh, he thinks it's teleoperation. That it's teleoperation. Okay. and the robot is actually just being controlled by someone in a VR headset. Well— There's some comments that say, hey, maybe this could have been in the training data.

I was about to say, yeah, it could be in the training data. Interesting. So who knows? It's interesting to think about all the vestigial behaviors of human behavior that might exist in training data for humanoid robots. Like, it might just go and pick up a phantom Diet Coke can take a sip because it's had a long day and it knows that's what humans do. So it recreates that. We'll let Brad Adcock respond to this, dunk on it.

Yeah, the main thing is the speed. The speed up is insane. Oh, is this so? Sorry, I don't know. Just the robot, how quickly it moves.

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Because the last version, he was talking about the Biden walk going away and it was still a little like jerky and this doesn't do that. This doesn't look jerky at all. This looks very polished. And I don't think we've seen anything at this level. Like Optimus is still a little jerky. And even the Unitree stuff is pretty jerky. That crazy huge Unitree was pretty jerky. And we're all sort of used to that because it doesn't really matter if it looks jerky.

I do think they should have allowed some type of like actual live demo so people could go and see the robot saying, hey.

Or like a respected journalist. In the room or something. I don't know. There's a bunch of ways, but this debate will continue going back and forth with people understanding and debating the capabilities of this technology. But we can come back to that in the future because our next guest is in the waiting room. We have Brandon Hill from Vauri, the CEO. I kind of like that.

How you doing, Brandon? What's going on?

Hey. Welcome to the show. Hey, how you doing, guys? Thanks for having me. We gotta ask you, what's your stance on whispering in the office. Have you heard this? All the AI employees, all the startup employees are whispering into their computers to give commands to Claude Code and Codex. Are you in favor of having your office feel like a sales floor or would you like a quiet library-like environment? I mean, ABC, always be closing, right?

Like whether you're closing PRs, whether you're closing deals, we want Kinesis on the—

I love it. I love it. I love it. We, yeah, I, I agree with you. I think everyone— it's unanimous. Get used to it. But we're not here to talk about whispering your computer or screaming at it. We're here to talk about your company. So please give us an introduction on yourself and Vori. Yeah, absolutely, guys.

Thanks for having me. My name is Brandon Hill. I am the CEO and co-founder of Vori.

I'm actually a third-generation grocer, just to give you my story. That's amazing.

Yeah, my grandparents were in grocery. Cool. My parents met and fell in love in a grocery store and have been in the industry for over 40 years. That's Amazing. I went to Stanford University, is where I met my two co-founders who are two of my best friends. Yeah. Worked at Google with Trey. Rob was an aerospace engineer at SpaceX under Elon and then self-driving cars at Lyft. And we're building the operating system, a self-driving operating system for supermarkets. Okay. Right. To basically help them make more money. Yeah. And operate more autonomously because as you know, grocery is a paper and pencil industry.

Yeah.

But it's also $1.5 trillion of the American economy.

Yeah. So are you starting with back office, ERP, inventory management, accounting, or are you gonna try and replace those automated checkout machines that everyone knows barely work even though they've been around for decades? It feels like there's opportunity in both. How quickly do you wanna focus?

Well, you know what's interesting is we found that the alpha is really in automating everything before checkout. And after checkout. I can imagine. As you know, there's a bunch of companies that raised hundreds of millions of dollars trying to do the just walk out Amazon model. Yeah. The unintuitive thing is, what we were surprised by is it actually turns out building inventory, automating pricing, sure, helping grocery stores market their products to their customers, everything before and after is really where the— that's where the economics are and that's where the grocery stores have the most need and willing to spend money. Yeah. So that's what we do. We happen to have a sleek, modern checkout on the front end. Yeah. But it's about connecting everything in the store end to end. Okay.

Automating pricing in a store. There's, you know, the price of oil is going up. There's inflation. There's all sorts of different prices that are changing all day long. The price of milk fluctuates day to day. You mentioned a pencil and paper— paper and pencil industry. I imagine that at some point a store manager gets I assume that's a spreadsheet or an email or some sort of notification that a price needs to be changed and then they have to print out a new label. Is that how it works? And then how will it work in the future?

So there's the old way and the new way. Yeah. In the old world, imagine a supermarket which has 100,000 products. Whereas a grocery store, you know, a restaurant might have 50, 100 menu items.

Yeah, yeah.

Grocery store has 50, 100,000 SKUs. Yeah. They're accepting dozens of payment types. Yeah. Right? They have hundreds of employees. Yeah. And they might do more in sales than a restaurant or like a donut shop or a coffee shop might do in a month or a year. Yeah. In terms of overall volume. Yeah. So the complexity of solving the problem is really hard. Now today, what they're— the state of the art, if you could believe it, is you have a pricing coordinator, like named Judy. She has her bifocals on. She receives an invoice from the supplier. She's looking at it with her bare eyeballs. Going through line by line with a ruler and highlighter to figure out if milk and bok choy and ketchup and cereal have gotten more expensive today versus last week. She finds the price change and has to go type it into her ERP system, like the back office system, and hope that that reflects accurately at the POS. Yeah. It's a 12-step process. Vori does it in one click. So our pricing agent reads all the incoming invoices from all of the hundreds of wholesale suppliers that a supermarket is using. It detects when there's changes in cost, which of course there always are due to inflation and supply chain issues, and then automatically changes the price across 30,000, 50,000, 100,000 items in real time.

So I, I, the, the, the changing of the price at the checkout actually seems like the easy part because when I'm in a grocery store, I feel like a lot of the prices are printed and they're, and they're labeled right on the shelves. Is there a move move towards like E Ink displays or LCD displays that could be updated in the cloud in the future? Is that an important step along the road to automating the price setting of grocery stores?

Oh, it's critical. In fact, I got a couple right here. Oh, no way.

Yeah, electronic shelf labels, right? So this is the future.

Walmart actually just spent $1 billion $1 billion rolling out electronic shelf labels across every single item, across every single of their 4,600 stores.

That makes so much sense.

But the thesis behind Boree is we do that today for all of our customers. And we're taking like that Walmart and Amazon level technology and rolling it down market to other 75% of the trillion and a half dollar food and bev retail market.

I didn't realize it was that fractured. I would've guessed Walmart doing like 70% of all grocery or something.

Do some of these smaller grocery stores or I guess the full stack end up selling products at a loss accidentally sometimes because they get a price change and then—

It didn't get rolled out fast enough.

Yeah, they didn't roll it out and then they're just like losing money on an item. Is that a thing?

Well, it happens all the time. So Dylan, right? Dylan from TVPN. So Dylan, I was going back and forth with him on X yesterday. And so his favorite shop is Mill Valley Market. Okay, up in Mill Valley. Love that store. It's beautiful. That's powered by Lorie. Before we went in that store, and Ryan the owner will tell you, yes, they were mispricing items here and there and they were losing margin. We go in, we find 5 points of gross margin sitting on the table with our, uh, and give it back to them, put it back in their pockets with our automation.

Take it out of Dylan's pocket and put it in the store owner's pocket. I like this.

Hey, I'm pro-competition, I'm pro-America. That means I'm pro-small business, right? Just trying to help them succeed.

No, it's great. It was doing fine, but yeah, it's just funny to frame it that way.

The price of bok choy is going up.

Yeah, good luck, Dylan. Get ready to pay through the nose for your bok choy. Tell us about the round. How much did you raise? What happened?

Yes, so we raised $22 million to—

Thank you.

We raised $22 million to invest really in our go-to-market. We've been expanding rapidly. We've done over $500 million. Wow. In payments. Wow. Which is where 60% of our revenue comes from. We're investing behind that, advancing our product, releasing more agents for the store to do more work to help them be more competitive against big, big box stores. Yeah. And investing behind our deployment team to help install this hardware and software and complex payment system into more grocery stores across the country.

So we're super excited. That's amazing. Well, congrats. Seems really smart and very unique market too. Very unique.

Hard to compete with you having probably done all of these different jobs at different points yourself back in the day. Generational success.

I love to see it. There you go. Have a great rest of your day.

Great to meet you, Brandon.

Thank you so much for coming on the show.

Come back on soon.

Yeah, we'll talk to you soon. Have a good one. Up next, we have Nate Tepper from Truist. Andrew Short, he's the founder and CEO here to talk about funding from Coastal Ventures, Wonder Co., a bunch of Hollywood investors for AI-generated vertical films for mobile, the Tappinator. Welcome to the show.

What's going on, dude? How you doing, Nate?

Hey guys, good to see you.

Let's go. Let's go. First time on the show. Introduce yourself. Tell us about the company. Tell us about the product.

Nate Tepper. Founder, CEO of True Short. We're AI film studio and streaming platform. So on one side we have creatives and engineers that are making movies together. On the other side, we make the streaming platform too, like Netflix, distribute the movies, monetize them.

Yeah, full stack creative company, vertically integrated. Uh, what is the, like, how, how do customers experience this? A mobile first, web, desktop, like what is the watching behavior these days? Yeah, exactly.

So we were kind of inspired by the micro dramas. I don't know if any of you guys know about that, but basically saw that China was pumping these vertical soap operas that were making more money than the box office in China. Like some of these apps are doing 50 million a month in revenue. Yeah. And they're all shot vertically, minute-long episodes. And that kind of led us to this idea that like, wait, there's something in between Netflix and TikTok. People are consuming this on their phone vertically, short form. So we kind of took that exact same approach, but not—

yeah, we, we had that realization probably a year ago too. We were looking at some of the, the iPhone kind of charts and seeing like, what are all these companies I've never heard of that are in the top 25 that are, you know, printing money? Yeah. Uh, is this, uh, and someone else had a realization like this years ago. One of your investors, a good friend of ours, Jeffrey Katzenberg, you got him into the round. Why? What did he see in kind of your approach that would make this a great investment?

I mean, the next Hollywood is being built right now from the ground up, right? Like all these new creators are coming in. I think some kid in his bedroom is going to make the next Star Wars leveraging AI and maybe different formats, short form, etc. And I think he just sees that opportunity. And the approach that we took, we have this vision of like the next Netflix, but we launched with a true crime app. Yeah, we just took a very strategic, like Amazon launched with books. We took a niche wedge approach and within 6 months were the number one true crime app. $3 million in annualized revenue twice. I think he saw the vision, but that actually we know how to execute as well. Yeah. And so I, I think he was bought into that.

Uh, how are you working with, uh, creative talent? Are you hiring all over the world, or is this going to be like you want to get a big studio here in LA and hire a bunch of people?

The next James Cameron. Yeah, let's go!

I like that. Um, we, uh, we actually just opened an office in LA And so the— we call them creative pods is kind of the way we work. A pod is basically a showrunner who's like the visionary, the, the knows the story, the characters, the brand. Then there's an AI filmmaker who brings all the shots to life with AI, kind of like the DP, director of photography. And then you have the editor who strings it all together. And that pod basically produces content every week, a series a week. And so we want to keep building more and more these creative pods. And we're, we're testing a bit right now. We have remote pods, but we just opened our first office in LA with our in-person pods and just the speed that you can work collaboratively together there. So we're stoked about that.

Talk about the customer acquisition flywheel. You've been at the top of the app charts. I'm sure that that has a lot of energy. There's, there's news about the company, but, uh, How do you think about the content being shareable? One of the critiques of Quibi was that you couldn't screenshot or screen record the content. At the same time, if someone's just wiring up every time something goes out on True Short, just upload the full thing to YouTube and TikTok and Instagram and like, let me steal the ad revenue, that's not gonna work. So how are you dealing with getting attention for the company, having the flywheel, leveraging the content that you're creating? Without giving everything away and still giving customers a reason to subscribe and pay you?

Yeah, yeah, great question. And like, growth is in our DNA. Jordi knows this, but our last app was number 1 in the App Store for health and fitness. I think it had close to a billion views on TikTok. Let's go. And we, I mean, look, we run like kind of similar playbooks. We're super growth hacking. We're running many different TikTok accounts. Like, we know how to do all that stuff.

Okay. Steal it yourself. You steal the content yourself. That's probably the right move. Yeah. I mean, that's what we do here. We clip our own show. Yeah. I know we make content.

We might as well put it out there everywhere.

Yeah. But, uh, but I do want to be straight up too.

Like the microdrama space is run on paid acquisition right now. Very much so. And like, I won't deny that too. We, we definitely run paid acquisition. We just know how to do both. Yep. So it's, we have a growth advantage.

Yeah. And I feel like the, the, the, the cost of paid acquisition probably falls when there's already some organic content out there, there's more familiarity with the brand, all of that helps with the CPMs. Yeah.

Yeah, how quickly do you expect the YouTubes of the world, the TikToks, to actually roll out dedicated microdrama features? TikTok did.

Okay.

So TikTok has one called like Pine Dream, Pine something, I don't know. I don't know why it has like 200, ratings on the App Store. So I don't know what they did with it. Um, Netflix is creating kind of like vertical section in the app, but they haven't made vertical content in it yet. So it's, it's definitely happening.

Things are going— yeah, it feels like, it feels like this business to me will over time probably look more like A24 that owns its own distribution and actually sells the the product because you're gonna get like competition from all the platforms, all the platforms.

All the features.

And so your advantage is like, can you create a system that can reliably create hits and IP and deliver enough value to customers so that they subscribe? Yeah. They keep coming back.

'Cause YouTube had—

Is that right? Yeah.

Yeah, that's why we want to build the full stack here. Like it's almost like its own flywheel where we, create the content, put it in the app, funnel that data back into our own technology and creative teams and just keep making more. So the speed that we're going and the learning, the pace, pace of learning on the creative side too, I think we'll get to hits much faster. I don't honestly just don't see these companies keeping up in terms of speed and iteration, not of creative, actually.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, YouTube got into original content that they were producing, and they pulled back from that eventually, and they just maintained just pure platform. Netflix obviously does productions, but a lot of that is done with other studios, and then they just buy or license the, the actual end product. So yeah, the vertically integrated approach.

Yeah, I think, I think the key will be creating a setup where a pod can make more money, like building on TrueShort than they can by just going and setting up their own kind of YouTube account.

I'm, I'm curious in general, like, part of what I'm thinking about is like, there's about to be a million filmmakers. Like, some— like I said, some kid in his bedroom is going to make the next Star Wars. Where is that going to be distributed? Like, is it YouTube? Is it Netflix? Is it TrueShort? I think there— we, we're going to see emerging films, which is already happening, that are actually high high quality that people wanna watch. Where are people gonna watch them? I don't, I don't know yet. I think we'll see some stuff over there as well.

How are you thinking about episode length and number of episodes? What have you actually tested? It feels like the, the, the base case is like a 2-minute episode, maybe 10 episodes per story. Is that roughly correct? And then like, do you think there'll be wide variation? Like we see a 90-minute movie and then a 3-hour epic, from Nolan every once in a while. Like, where do you see the dials turning?

Yeah, I mean, I actually view this microdrama space and what we're doing as like separate from theatrical, even separate from Netflix. The way people consume it is different too. It's like they open this stuff when they're bored on the subway, right? And so it's actually— if you still want to go watch a full 2-hour length movie, you're gonna go watch that on Netflix or go to the theater. That will still exist until these become good enough that they're distributed there. But, and so for now, just for now though, we're focused on these like kind of niche genre, 1 to 2 minute long episodes, mini episodes per series, and like getting a flywheel going around that.

Uh, what is, what is the, do you feel like you have hit IP yet? Something that you'll invest you know, $20 million into a specific, like, series over time yet? Or are you still just like taking, taking shots, getting base hits, doubles, etc.?

So I do intuitively. We're launching it later this month. It's not true crime, so it's not on our true crime app. It's our next genre. And just seeing what we're creating there, I would honestly say our true crime stuff is just like that will be the lowest quality we'll ever put out stuff. Like, it's getting better and better. So intuitively, I think what we're making now is real IP.

People that will have fans. So, so true crime, TruShort, there's obviously a linkage there, but the name TruShort feels like it can hold anything. Like, it's not like— Yeah. Home Box Office, no one cares that they just think HBO. And it feels like you'll be there very quickly. But it sounds like you're considering multiple apps. Is that in the roadmap?

I don't wanna say too much yet about exactly what direction, 'cause like, we're still discussing it. But what I will say is like, there are a lot of opportunities now around niche genres. Yeah, what about— I think that's interesting.

What about like pseudo or semi-user-generated content, HBO, You need an agent. It's incredibly high bar to get your media product, your movie or show on HBO. Amazon Prime sort of has a self-publishing route if you're really creative. And Kindle self-publishing, you can publish a book without any— I think it needs to meet standards, but it doesn't necessarily— it's like an App Store review. It's maybe just one notch above YouTube. To publish on the Amazon suite of products. Yeah. How are you thinking about engaging like that random, the next James Cameron who isn't in LA and didn't, you know, have a great resume, but created a great product and you could monetize it for them? Have you thought about that?

Yeah, I mean, you nailed it. Like that was the original vision, was like, let's be the distribution. Yeah. For these million filmmakers that are coming and curation and taste It's going to be really important, things like that. But we quickly learned, like, and just realized that, like, out of those million filmmakers, a lot of it will be slop. And it's still the earliest days. And we also learned from the microdramas that, like, there's a formula, especially for winning in the beginning. So we're like, let's own it. Let's learn it ourselves. Let's build it right now. And we can take this— we can probably take this to a billion-dollar company just as our own. Team moving fast. But I do think the big, big vision, like I said, is like, how do you find the next James Cameron? Where is he putting his stuff? That's, that's really exciting.

Favorite song to play on the guitar?

Well, we have 30 seconds left. Do you want to use the opportunity to do a quick solo or, or your guitar sounds?

I knew you were going to ask me to do that. But, but I will plug, I will plug, uh, check out my band Pink Roses on Spotify. If you know Dave Fontenot, my bandmate, Oh, amazing.

Yeah, we had Dave on the show. Yeah, they've had this crazy side quest of being rock stars. Amazing. It's amazing.

Well, actually, it actually has millions of streams. You'll like it.

Well, congratulations on the round. I don't know if we hit the gong.

Hit it again. Boom. Thanks, guys.

Great to see you, Nate. We'll talk to you soon.

Make a micro drama about Tyler the intern's life at TVPN. Me?

Should we use his likeness?

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is recorded.

Yeah, there's a lot of training data too. So how about it? Well, later.

See you, Nate. Thank you so much. Our next guest is the co-founder and CEO of Run— Roadrunner, a new company for AI-native revenue infrastructure. Jubin— I like the sound of that, John. Merzadegan. Welcome to the show. How you doing? Hey, guys. Thanks so much for joining.

How you doing? It's happening. Good. Revenue infrastructure. Revenue. And I love infrastructure.

Yeah, we, we talked a couple of years ago, but for those who don't know you, please introduce yourself and the company.

I'm Jubin. You guys pronounced my name right, both first and last, which I was impressed by. I am one of the co-founders and the CEO of Roadrunner.

Thanks for having me.

Yeah, nice to meet you. I mean, introduce the product, introduce the problem, and sort of explain where you fit into the businesses that you're selling into these days.

Sure. So the backstory is that we incubated the company at Kleiner Perkins. The reason that we did it was because I run a group of CIOs here that meet twice a year, and over the course of several dinners, they basically told me it's the most broken problem inside their company. And I actually didn't believe them because I was like, there's no way this has not been a solved problem. And they were like, no, seriously. And in some cases, it was the number one negative NPS surveyed software inside of their business. I come from sales. Yeah. So I've been the consumer of this problem. Yeah. And I'm like, okay, I understand the problem. So, uh, we did a full market map, looked at every company, uh, ended up not finding anything. And so, uh, decided to do it ourselves.

So you said that the existing solutions were low NPS. Was the market also highly fragmented? That's often like the Keith Rabois lens that he likes to look at, both low NPS and— because if it's low NPS, but there's just one monopolist, it might not be a good business opportunity. But what was that market map? How dense was it?

Yeah, so I think the mother of all tailwinds for us right now, which is the challenge that every incumbent is going through, is that every 10 years there's a new CPQ vendor that, that, that comes alive. And the reason for that is because about every 10 years there's a new technology shift that happens. We went from software to SaaS, that became a subscription-based billing. Then we went from SaaS to AI. AI is very likely going to be a usage or consumption-based billing. Every time that happens and there's a new pricing pressure that comes onto a business or a pricing model, You need somebody that can actually price. Like if you're a rep trying to do a deal, you need to be able to price that deal. If you— if the data models with the incumbents were not built to be able to actually price those deals, you're screwed. So every 10 years we have a new technology shift. Every 10 years that puts a bunch of pressure on pricing models. And every 10 years you need to be able to actually get quotes out the door leveraging those new pricing models. And so I think in our case, we are the beneficiaries of that.

Who, uh, what is the sales process like? Because you mentioned the CIOs, the chief information officers, um, they feel like they have an incredible, uh, uh, amount of leverage over the decision of what platform to use, but then the end user is different. So can you sort of walk through the actual user journey a little bit?

Yeah, I would say the two primary personas are CIOs, who are the ones that are responsible for delivering software to an organization. and CROs who are the ones that are responsible for getting deals done inside of an organization. And the underlying software that they're using is just fundamentally broken. Yeah. So those are like the two people that really matter. The unique thing about this problem is that there's many hands in the cookie jar, which is why it's like a unique problem for a startup to go solve because you have deals desk and RevOps and finance and sales and IT. All of these folks touch this business process. Yeah. And so, it's actually quite difficult both to build because you have to build for all of these personas and sell because you have to get all of these people, kind of on board with you. Even if you can get all of that done, then you have to convince them that running one of their most important production systems onto an early stage startup makes sense. And so I think that's like kind of the, the, the hill that we, that we, I guess that we have the honor of climbing. Jordi Hays. Yeah.

Just, you're like, I'm pretty good at sales. Why don't I sell something that requires buy-in from every part of the organization. Yeah, no, it's a great, it's a great challenge, but it seemingly will be incredibly sticky once you get everyone bought in.

Where is AI good at this out of the box? Where are foundation models or open source useful versus like you got to go build a harness or you got to go write some SaaS on top of it or get some of your own data and fine-tune it? Like, where are we on the front tier of like this problem being solved end to end by AI? Yeah.

So, uh, during the, the Series A fundraise, the, the hottest question was, why won't Anthropic eat you, basically? And my general point of view is, if they go after this, we're all screwed. Like, we might as well put all of our money and all of our eggs inside of the Anthropic basket because this feels like the most esoteric problem that you could possibly go after. I think the, the unique thing about this is, you know, at least at KP, we invested early in companies like Windsurf and Harvey, and we saw what happened when you can point these models at structured and unstructured text in nature. And anytime you can do that, the models are very, very good at reasoning with them. And CPQ is a very similar problem. You have price books, approvals, volume-based discounting, All of these rules sit somewhere and the models are very good at reasoning with them. The challenge for us, I think, like where our kind of secret sauce is, is that you need to be able to have this agent architecture, call it the header. Then on the y-axis, you have a bunch of policy engines that are enforcing a probabilistic system through a deterministic engine that sits on top of a data model that has to be flexible enough for the pricing models of today and in the future. So the combination of those three things is really our secret sauce. And then obviously, I think the problems that many of these kind of bleeding-edge enterprise AI agent companies are running into is like, how do you get an agent to work predictably with the harness around it inside of a large enterprise doing something where if we go down, like, we get sued, like, you can't get quotes out the door. And so you can't not get it right. And so I think, you know, in many ways, um, we are tackling probably one of the more bleeding-edge agent problems in the enterprise. and that's really where we live, is in the enterprise.

Awesome. Tell us about the round. How much did you raise? I want to hit the gong.

We raised $27 million in total.

There you go. There you go. Powerful.

We announced the seed from KP, $5.2 mil, and then $22 million from— with Founders Fund leading, and KP doubling down.

Any familial conflicts going on over there? There? Just kidding. Trey Stephens led the round. Don't worry, he's brothers with a mean. Uh, thank you so much.

Oh, I didn't, I didn't even put that together. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Amazing. Anyway, family business. Love it.

Have a good one. We'll talk to you soon, guys. Goodbye. Thanks, guys. Talk soon. Uh, up next we have Roman Chernin from Nebbius. He's the co-founder and chief business officer. If you've been living under a data center, and Nebbius is only up 15% today.

So we'll ask him.

The AI cloud division posted 841% year-over-year revenue growth. Earnings per share beat expectations significantly. Shares are up, as you mentioned, and the business has been on an absolute tear. And we're excited to be joined by Roman to break it down for us.

How are you doing? I'm great. Thank you for inviting. I must say that I think 3 meetings ago, yes, someone said to me that I need to take a nap. So don't be surprised that I just fell apart here.

I can imagine you're working nonstop right now. How long have you been working on this? I feel like Nebbius is in the news every day, but can you take us back a little bit on your journey with this company?

Yeah, so I, I'm with NEMBIOS from the very beginning and NEMBIOS officially in the current shape of the company exists from summer 2024, so less than 2 years. Yeah. But we as a team had experience longer than that. Yeah. You maybe know that core team came out from Yandex, which was a large Russian internet company. Yeah. And Yeah, we started with quite a unique mix of talent that helped us to start like really fast.

So, I mean, people know Nebbius, NeoCloud, but that can mean a lot of things. How are you describing the shape of the business? How are you describing the differentiation?

Before we get into that, what's the other spinout that's also on a tear?

From Yandex? Yandex. Yeah, you maybe know ClickHouse.

ClickHouse. ClickHouse. That's right. Yeah.

The talent bench at Yandex seems to have been just, like, genuinely insane.

So, yeah. You can find a lot of other startups that, or companies that created with ex-Yandex people. The Yandex Mafia. Yeah. Not really Mafia. Talking about how we describe our business, I don't really like the word new cloud because I think it's too broad definition of too many companies that do different things. Like someone is doing just really data center business, someone is doing data center plus renting out hardware, someone don't own hardware and do kind of marketplace play. We like to say about us that we built vertically integrated full-stack AI-specialized cloud. AI-specialized cloud. So that's what we think we do. And I think that the difference of like NeoCloud or bare metal compute and cloud is quite significant because it's completely different developer experience, right? So if you need to come and rent a large cluster and wait like 6 months to be delivered and then sign it for 3 years and run it, probably it's not really real cloud experience, right? In the cloud, you expect more flexibility, faster time to value, more tools that you can use as a developer, more layers of the value. So, yeah.

How do you think about lagging edge model inference, like load over time? Because a new model comes out, there's an incredible amount of hype, everyone's looking at benchmarks and testing it. And then at a certain point, open source catches up, different models sort of commoditize. But if you're an enterprise and you found that, you know, GPT-4 is great for scanning your receipts or something, you might leave that capability, that functionality running forever, and you might never need to deploy a smarter model against that. That problem. And I'm wondering, as we see, you know, skyrocketing Frontier revenues, lots of, you know, debate over token maxing versus, you know, incredible results on the profitability side, how are you trying to understand what's happening with those workloads that have been sort of baked into the economy already? Like the AI diffusion story is done because that capability has been adopted fully?

Yeah. So I think there are, as we see, a few trends, let's say. So first, as you said, open source models are catching up, the frontier models quite fast, probably. I mean, I think that like there is 3-6 months gap that we see for the most of the tasks. And we see that a lot of people, a lot of customers, when they come to the scale, they— so the journey is you start with the frontier model. You want to have the best capabilities to unlock the use case, to see that things working, to start growing. But then when you grow, you may meet the limitations. And first of all, in economics, because at scale, you— the economics, the economics matter. And then if you have other capabilities from open source models that can deliver in a particular use case that you already understand, like same or close to same performance and quality for times lower cost, you need, you're actually switching. And it's not easy to switch because you need to cook those models. Nobody uses obviously vanilla models. You need to RL, like you need to figure out your data and so on and so forth. But again, if you scaled, you, you, you have a lot of value there. And then what you need from infrastructure, where we believe that like our value is created, is to help you with that, to lower the barrier to A, tune those models, and then B, run those models reliable and cost efficient. And that's like the layer, the next layers of the offering that they're building.

As you look out over the next couple years or even a decade into the future, which sounds like an infinite amount of time, but on the near and midterm, how are you thinking about semiconductor bottlenecks versus energy bottlenecks? So we've been going back and forth on this, both are in short supply. Supply, what's keeping you up at night?

I'm a lucky person. I'm more on the product and demand side and it's a lot of fun. So I really—

Yeah, being the demand guy during the explosion of demand has got to be great.

Yeah, the best work. Yeah, the best work in the world. Yeah. So people hug you. But no, I think that now, obviously, the physical kind of the physical infrastructure, the even not the energy itself, but like getting from greenfield to having data center that works and full of GPUs is actually the big, the big challenge. And like the bottlenecks are like along all the supply chain, starting from whatever, connecting to the grid or bringing local generation and all the way to like even human power and all the complexity. So I really kind of take my hat off from like in front of the people who are bringing those like gigawatt capacity online. And that's challenging work.

Can you— so how do you— there's such overwhelming demand and just energy to bring compute online. How do you measure yourself and the team's performance? How do you know whether or not you're doing a truly great job, right? Because people are so desperate that that they'll work with like a third-tier supplier just because it's their only option. You guys have shown tremendous capability. And so, but then again, it's like, how do you know if you're actually doing an exceptional job?

It's a good question. I think the race is so that you never know, are you good enough or not? So, you look like, oh, you're growing, like, whatever. We're growing like 7 times a year or so. Is it good enough? Like in any normal business? Yes, probably it's excellent growth. And you meet your customer and they say, oh, you know what? I grew 7 times in the last 4 months. And you're like, okay, probably, probably we did too much faster.

I got to grind harder.

Yeah, yeah. But there is another component that I think is people speak think less about, which is how you finance all that. So, uh, um, you asked about like the bottlenecks in the chips, you asked about like the bottleneck to bring, uh, physical infrastructure online, but then, uh, uh, there is another part, uh, you need to finance all that. So I think that now If you would have unlimited capital, we would be able to, on technical execution, on operational execution, we could even move faster. So there are like, there are so many components in this business of AI infrastructure that you need to do efficient, like, and fund, like financing, like finance enough and finance smart to not eat all your margins. It's a part of the science here.

What is a job at Nebbius that is sort of the unsung hero of the business? Besides you. But we're singing for you now.

No, he gets sung for. All the customers are singing.

They're hugging you, he said. Yeah, yeah. But is it like somebody that's like— My customer service is perfect. Yeah, boots on the ground.

Yeah, no, I think that our business is very much like any cloud business, to be honest. It's post-sales, it's post-sales business. So like when you sell, you give a promise, people hug you that you allocated capacity to them and like they happy to start working with you and so on. But then how you make sure that the customers are happy and things are working. And again, everything is moving so fast. We We've got new chips every 3 months. We got new physical data centers every month. We got new customers that— of the scale that we never saw before every month. And the workloads are changing so fast. And I think that it's not like one role, I think, that underappreciated, but in general delivery in this. And I started with that. Execution business. It's not that— it's less magic. It's a lot of boring execution on each layer, starting from finance, like physical infrastructure, software, customer-facing engineering, support, like every piece. And then only if magically everything comes together from supply chain to customer-facing, uh, person that, uh, um, make sure they don't waste their money with us. Uh, then, then, then things start working. So yeah, I think delivery is the key. Uh, delivery chain is, is the key in this business.

Post-sales. Last question. Uh, can you talk about some of the recent acquisitions and talent moves at Nebbius. I'd love to know the philosophy and strategy there.

Yeah, the philosophy is very simple. We need to build so many things that we need to move and we need to move so fast that we are always looking for people who can accelerate us. And it should be exceptional talent and it should and/or it should be something that has a great adoption. Our two recent acquisitions that we announced just like with a two weeks pause, two teams that work on inference optimization. So you can think again, a big part of our business is how efficient we convert GPUs into tokens and like value for the customers. And these are two teams. One of them, again, AI, another Clarify AI. One is very much focused on model optimization, like the engine of inference, how you run specific model and all the techniques around spell decoding, quantization and so. And another is more like system optimization. All the routing, TV caching, orchestration across the big cluster of compute and so on. And we had a very strong internal team also working on inference, but we felt that we need to move fast. Like we need to move faster, we need to bring more capabilities there because the market is so fast that every 3 months you can lose the pay, like so big pie, so big piece of the pie.

And it's going to show up in your margins and your earnings, obviously, which are important now. If you have unoptimized chips, you're not going to get the yields that you want, the results and the tokenomics are going to flip.

Yeah, that's true. And also what's important that it unlocks the new types of the customers, the new types of the workloads that we can serve, like not just again sell raw compute, but serve all this fast-growing vertical AI companies and enterprise adoption.

Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to join us on a busy day.

Yeah. Are you going to get some sleep or you'll sleep in a few years?

I will take a nap now. Fantastic. Just a nap.

I know you're across the pond, right? So you should be just going to sleep for 8 hours.

But he said a nap. I love it. True speech. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show, Roman. We'll talk to you soon. Have a good one. Goodbye. The last post I want to talk about today is about video games, of course. There's an individual who beat— is this a Dark Souls boss? Or— but they built a controller that uses their full body. It's not a VR game. It's not a VR simulation, but if you want to attack, you strike the dummy with a physical stick and that presses the button in the game to trigger your character to attack in the game. And then it appears that he's playing on a green screen or something because you can see the game actually playing behind him. And he also is wearing glasses of some sort. You don't like this? What's not to like? You need to get a workout while you're gaming. The future of gaming just don't very well— might very well produce some of the fittest people.

Yeah, I don't like the aesthetics of this. You don't? No, I think you should—

you're more in—

I shouldn't knock it till we try it. You're more— you're more a fan of— I've seen it. Let's get—

you're more a fan of unironic LARPing, like live-action role-playing, where you get the— like the SD Kid concert. You're a fan of that. Put on the actual armor. Yeah, do the real battle. Yes, don't play the video game version of that. That's a poor simulacrum.

Yeah, you want—

yeah, hit the park. Or find a multiplayer version of that. Just get another human to stand next to you and you can learn defense.

Before we go, what— there's some— there's more of a scuffle on the timeline around Meet the Meet GC campaign. Okay, I realized why Mark is taking shots at it, and it's because I think they use an actor to try to look like him. Let's watch it again. Oh, really? Interesting.

I did notice that the actor that plays the General Catalyst character is like over-the-top handsome in the sense that like the original Apple Mac and PC ad, Justin Long, he's sort of like an everyman. and the actor who's playing the General Catalyst guy looks like a male model to me. I don't know, you can be the judge of it, but.

Yeah, all I'm saying is I think we got a Drake Kendrick situation on our hands. I think the new media team at Andreessen needs to respond. They need to try to dunk on General Catalyst. GC. Okay. I wanna see a war. I wanna see, it should be a bloodbath.

Um, anyways, demanding acrimony in the tech industry, sowing dissent.

Yeah, no, no, they, they need to get about peace. What about they need to get revenge? Mark says this is a clear inversion, clever inversion of the original Mac vs. PC commercials, this time and clearly intended to make the sponsor appear smarmy and judgmental. Fascinating. So you got rage-baited.

They rage-baited you. Uh, you could have just muted this, you could have blocked them, you could have not amplified it. Now it's on everyone's timeline. Now people It's a war now.

Because of this, we're gonna get a VC content rap battle.

No one would know what General Catalyst is until now. Now there's a fight and it's working now. Just kidding.

It is entertaining though. Very fun. But wait for the comments. Well, duke it out. Duke it out. It's a good campaign.

It's time. I do think that— Erik Thornberg, Reggie Jane. Just the first, ooh yeah, that's a matchup there. It is just, I mean, put aside the war. It is just interesting seeing a produced 30-second, 60-second ad for a venture capital firm. It is sort of a first. I can't think of another one.

I'm just happy to see a non-Vibereel video.

Yeah, the Vibereel meta, that was sort of played out at this point.

So we gotta go a different direction. And we're going to TV ads.

We're going to television, full 30 seconds, highly produced. Boost ads running on the Super Bowl on Saturday and live.

I don't know.

When would VC advertise? Bloomberg, CNBC? I don't know.

We got to get on with London. Yes. So we will see you tomorrow.

Leave us 5 stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for the newsletter at tbpm.com, and we will see you tomorrow at 11 AM Pacific sharp.

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Goodbye. Goodbye.