Trump-Xi Summit, Inflation Bad, Space Data Centers, Malaysian Fugitive

I see a large IPO on the horizon. You're surrounded by journalists. Hold your position. There's misinformation clearing order inbound. >> Let's just roll. We are surrounded by general. Hold your position. Come on. Get up. Trust the experts here by we are experts found. I see multiple journalists on the horizon. Standby. >> UAV online. >> Blaze. >> Double blaze. Triple blaze. Double kill. Five is wins. Team deathmatch. We are experts. Triple blade. Let's just roll. Right. >> Hockey clearing order inbound. Come on, get up. We are surrounded by journalists. Hold your position. >> Strike one. >> Strike two. Activate golden retriever mode. >> Market clearing order inbound. >> Five. You're watching TVPN. Today is Wednesday, May 13th, 2026. We are live from the temple of technology, >> the fortress of finance, >> the capital of capital. Uh, bunch of news going on today. Huge show. Max Lebanon's coming on the show. Delian's coming in person from Varta. Uh, Recursive is coming out of Stealth. Brandon Hill from Borie. Nate Ter from True Short. Very excited to talk about uh vertical video. The trough the the trough is cooking. Some of the trough is >> economy. uh Juben Mzadagon from Roadrunner and Roman Churn from Nebus. Absolutely destroying earnings. Very excited to talk to the co-founder and chief business officer over at Nebas. Uh but the big news this week and I I'm sure what uh you know everyone will be focused on is of course on the cover of the Wall Street Journal. That's the Trump Cunin Ping summit that's happening in Beijing. Uh Trump and Cunping Vifer wins at summit. They're duking it out. And uh Trump brought they both brought uh a big uh a big crew with them, a team. U yeah Trump brought >> geopolitics, >> a couple couple >> team sport, >> 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. Uh little flex there because Boeing has been able to maintain the lead in manufacturing large planes for a very long time. Uh DJI has not been able to scale up and make a 747. What's going on over there? Um David Solomon from Goldman Sachs, Steven Schwarzman from Blackstone, Larry Frink from Black Rockck, Jane Fraser from City, and Dena Pal McCormack from Meta. Uh so we should read through the stakes of the Trump Cun Ping summit in the Wall Street Journal from the Wall Street. Let's get let's get into the more important stuff which is >> do you think Jensen was always coming on the trip? Right. There's been some speculation he got on uh 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 edition? I don't I don't know. It seems like >> well because there was there was reporting earlier this week he runs the largest company in the in America. >> I know but but there had 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 Hang of Nvidia was not invited >> but then he he corrected it. He said he didn't invite him personally. >> I don't know. These schedules move around. But it's got to be really really difficult if you're the leader of the biggest company in the world to uh move things around and and commit to this. I don't know. >> I know. But what's more important for Jensen and his objectives? >> No, of course it's critical importance. But uh at the same time, there might have just been other moving pieces of like, okay, when can he go, where will he arrive from? Where will he get picked up from? I don't know. These things always like shift. Uh I I I don't have a good thesis. I mean other than the fact that like there that is the company that has maybe the most tension between the trade deals with China like Apple obviously does a ton of business in China but uh 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 but but yeah but Meta I think has like some conflict right because I mean Manis 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 say in the in the context of Silicon Valley it's like a $2 billion deal or a company that's doing 40 billion in revenue. Uh and then you get over there and the stakes are like, you know, a trillion dollar oil market or like all the rare earths in the world and uh and it's your, you know, geopolitical conflict which is obviously a much bigger deal. And so um I don't know, we we we we can speculate it on more. There might be more reporting that comes out about uh Jensen's goals there, what actually happened, uh how he found his way onto uh Air Force One, but that was confirmed by Elon Musk, right? You said that uh Elon, Jensen, and Trump were all on Air Force One together flying over. Um I certainly want wouldn't want to get there. I would want to arrive on the cool plane. Can we play the video of the uh the arrival? Trump arrives in Beijing with Elon Musk and Jensen in tow. I guess the rest of the business leaders came separately. But uh here is their arrival with uh are those cheerleaders or something? I don't know what >> that they they seem to be waving Oh, flags. They're waving flags. That makes sense. Um well, there they go walking down the red carpet. Uh Air Force One is truly stately. There's It's so It's so uh 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. Uh because they do have such a presence and they're spacious inside. Uh but we we we have been ref uh you know cramped down into the 730 videos pretty much everything >> where they 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 isn't there are several Air Force ones I believe that are uh 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 uh I'm pretty sure you can go walk around old ones. I wouldn't be surprised if they keep the the the the current spec like somewhat secretive. Uh there we go. This is very grainy footage. It looks like Oh, maybe it's just uh the middle. >> Kind of reminds me of uh Dune. >> Dune my Iraqis. That's Taiwan, though. Um 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 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 of the pants as well as the shoes and uh the whole Jensen uniform will be out in full force. >> Yeah, the clothing industry doesn't want you to know this, but um wearing just 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 >> uh it's pretty funny. Uh I I tend to wear almost the exact same thing. Yep. >> 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. Um there's obviously a personal brand benefit to adopting a uniform. We've seen it with Jensen. Steve Jobs with the black turtleneck. Palmer Lucky with the uh with the Hawaiian shirt. Big news from Anderald today. New round series, Are they running out of letters? Series H >> H >> series H 51 61 billion something like that. Uh fantastic progress. But uh 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, uh, 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, um, so this is 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. If he was saying some crazy stuff back when he was building Amazon in the 90s and he's changed his opinion, uh it will be very evident from new clips that oh that's an old one because it's very it's very iconic his older look. Now his new look, he looks transformed. He looks very different. >> I I don't think J has to go bald, but he can do the the Bezos playbook which is just get like get really jacked. >> Get really jacked. >> So as he gets more jacked, you'll just see Oh yeah, there's I mean he's looking like 320 lean right there. >> There you go. >> Like that must be pretty basic. 320. >> Jensen at 320 would be electric. Uh well, he's >> uh we have a video of the Air Force One Golden Palace. Okay. Pull it up. >> What is the Golden Palace? >> That's the >> Is that what they call the interior these days? >> The 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 uh 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 uh there's a big swing in in uh fuel efficiency based on the color of the plane. If you paint your plane black cuz 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. Uh Spirit Airlines went yellow. I don't know if that had anything to do with their downfall, but uh 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. >> Unfortunately, the exterior is not >> so you should wrap your plane in like a mirror like >> Yeah, maybe. But yeah, I don't know if that actually that probably reflect the most, right? Mirrored plane. There are some silver There are some silver bombers and 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? I >> 4D chess. >> Yeah, the whole plane is actually used for 4D chess, John. >> 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 Cunping, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Tim Cook having a beer and I guess a cigarette as well in uh in China somewhere. Um, 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. Uh, and people are really having fun with this. It it turned into a a little chain letter. Um, anyway, um, what uh let's go through the Wall Street Journal's report and the what the editorial board had to say about the stakes of this summit. What what's actually at stake? So the United States wants stability uh but Chinese communist leader has larger ambitions says the Wall Street Journal Journal's editorial board. Uh President Trump visits visits Chinese President Cinping in Beijing on Thursday and the premeating US spin is a search for stability in quotes. Uh it's a nice idea as long as Mr. Trump doesn't think personal rapport can overcome Mr. Cinping's anti-American purposes says the Wall Street Journal. Uh the agenda ranges from trade to technology to Iran. Uh 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 for a long time >> 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. I want calmness. Yes. I don't I don't want any conflict. >> Yes. Didn't he famously call himself a stable genius? That he stability has been part of his brand for a long time. >> Uh at least the one that he projects. Uh Mr. Xihinping on the other on the other hand uh China's weak economy is an incentive for him to cooperate and he'll hope to plate Mr. Trump with promises of buying more farm goods. Uh we talked about this previously, more aircraft and uh other things. Uh so that's maybe why Boeing is there. Although there is not, it doesn't look like there's representation from a an agricultural leader, although I I can't name one off the top of my head, but maybe they should be in uh maybe they should be represented. Uh but Mr. Cinping has made that promise before and US farmers have never regained their lost market share in China. Uh Rare Earth's ransom offer uh the rare earth's m ransom offer may be more US advanced chip exports to China. Uh Cinping views artificial intelligence as a decisive theater in Beijing's competition with the United States and he is trailing though not by much maybe six months by most people's estimates. Uh the administration wants to talk with Beijing about AI guard rails and by all means keep the phone lines open. Uh but don't expect much from AI arms control. Uh 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. Uh Beijing is is engaging in quote industrialcale 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 uh >> super micro. >> Super micro. Yeah, they were doing the the the heater. What was it? The haird dryer. >> Haird. >> Yeah, they were putting the the fake shipping labels on there. >> Fake shipping labels. Yeah. Um, noticeably absent from this trip are the key leaders of the top AI labs. Um, I mean Elon Musk is there. Yes. And Jensen is there obviously deeply involved in AI as as are many of the other folks. Uh, Dina Pal McCormack at Meta, but you don't have Demis from Google. You don't have Sundar from Google uh, DeepMind. Uh, you don't have Daario from Enthropic or Sam Alman from OpenAI. And each one of those leaders has their own complicated relationships with the federal government and the Trump administration. Uh so it's not shocking that they aren't there, but uh 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, uh, if you were looking for answers to some of the biggest questions, uh, posed about how super intelligence will play out in the global stage, the AI 2027 scenario, the China wakes up scenario, uh, you're going to have to keep waiting because uh, that's not really what this this uh this is about. It's about uh maybe a little bit of semiconductor supply chain details and export restrictions, but not answering the big questions about uh what a USChina relationship looks like in a post AGI world, a post ASI world, a post uh 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. I don't think they have this man. I would 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. >> Um but uh >> but it is a big question for both economies. Not not only can American companies acquire Chinese companies that have relocated to Singapore and have sort of moved out like how how strict will China be around maintaining talent and restricting exports of whole companies and technologies uh there even like a single sentence on it from this talk will clearly resound throughout the industry. Um and so uh the Venus fly trap that Cinping is setting for Mr. Trump is on Taiwan. CJ Ping wants veto power over arm 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. Uh Cinping will argue the tweak is of no great consequence to Americans and stoke uh 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 se uh Cinping fiction that opposing indiv independence would indulge. Mr. Trump might may not care about Taiwan's freedom or its example that a prosperous Chinese democracy is possible. Uh 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. >> Uh Cinping will be looking to see if Mr. Trump suggests he won't defend Taiwan in the clutch. Uh 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 stop not stopping in Tokyo to advance Beijing in in advance of Beijing as a signal of solidarity with Japan. Uh Trump has said he'll bring up the case of political prisoner Jimmy Lie. Uh but Cinping 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 US 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 Cinping directly if he's helping Iran with intelligence. And the Wall Street Journal goes on to say the larger context for the summit is that the CCP continues to be the main financeier 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 detent. The And Mr. Trump is the chief dove. Uh, 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. Um anyway, >> yeah, and a lot of people are speculating that uh there's already been significant deals that have been made and that this whole thing is ceremonial because if if you bring if you make this, you know, 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 a even bigger outp Um, and uh, and it's good to it's good to uh, it's good to see I I every time we talk to a ch to an expert on on China like like Bill >> or Jordan Schneider, >> it's always shocking like how little like direct comms there actually is between these groups like >> and so um, the more the better. Mhm. Well, uh, in somewhat related news, uh, Anthropic has granted Mythos access to three major Japanese banks. Uh, Japan's three mega banks 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. Uh, the banks MUFG Bank, Sumitomo, Mitsui Banking Corp, and Mizuo Bank were likely informed of the move by the US Treasury Secretary Scott Besson 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 laws 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 Sanane Takichi had instructed cabinet members to ramp up efforts to find cyber security weaknesses in Japan's infrastructure and minimize risks posed by cuttingedge AI models like Mythos. Access to Mythos was likely mentioned in her meeting with Bessant on Tuesday. And so, uh, Chris Maguire says, "Tonight, the, uh, secretary of the Treasury is personally vetting and approving, uh, 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 Wong 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, incoherent. it is impossible to justify these two approaches simultaneously. And um yeah, I I'm I'm still sympathetic to the the 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 uh the interesting question that I've been noodling on that I haven't fully gotten to the bottom of is uh you know, Daario has said that, uh you know, the the open-source community, China, is maybe six months behind Mythos. uh 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 uh mythos moment look like in China? Because in America there was a showdown with the department of war and Daario going back and forth and a meal Michael and there was threat of a supply chain designation which it doesn't feel like ever really went anywhere uh because the business is still cooking and it's available on all the hyperscaler clouds and uh the the model's being granted to Japan and so uh it feels like the the the administration has backed off of that. Um but it was a really tense moment and it did call into question all these all these debates around what rules and what authority should rest with the private sector versus the government. Uh and America handled it in sort of a democratic way loosely uh sort of evaluating the technology uh having the option to sort of nationalize and there's this bigger discussion around that. Um, but in China, we've seen many times where tech companies have gotten really big and it feels like the the CCP is applying pressure to the CEOs and Highflyer is uh the the company behind DeepSeek is in a very unique position where the founder has an immense amount of control and uh you know no matter what you think of >> two billion of his own money, really low dilution round. >> Yeah. And I'm pretty sure he's a solo founder who like owns probably like majority control, at least majority voting control, if not majority economic control. And that's wildly different than Anthropic where Daario had like 15 co-founders, tons of dilution from uh from different uh 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 uh 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 security bugf finding at the same time while having full control and not being a public company like like there are like it feels like the stakes are much higher uh for when deepseek if deepseek is able to catch up. you know, there's some there's some some evidence that like China's on a on a slightly uh shallower growth trajectory, but still, you know, if you take Daario's claim of six 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 I think is going to be dramatic and interesting. And also it's just 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 going to be you know talks over like you guys want to buy more apples basically or like like you know what uh I mean obviously there's going to be more highstakes discussion around geopolitical conflicts and rare earth but uh we are talking about like tariff rates at a time when there 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 for the government and like what does that mean and how does the government control the AI technology as it diffuses. So, uh 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 Cinping 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 yeah well where does that go? Uh >> Tyler, do you have any uh any thoughts on on this? Am I directionally correct on the timeline or you know this concept >> like there's the graph that shows that uh open source is increasingly getting like further and further away from frontier models. >> Um 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 is it actually yeah >> like what what happens when the CCP starts to to have you know more control over a company like what does it actually look like? Yeah. >> In in instantiation. >> Yeah. I mean it it's 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 want to review it. We want to take a look at it. We want to take it for a spin and throw some prompts in there before we let you send it to Japan for example. Um and in China it's a very it's a much more industrial process where you know if the 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 going to the way we're going to 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. >> Uh 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 center, this network together that can actually train a mythos level model, right? That's uh that's that's a big question. Uh, but people are having huge FOMO over the uh over the summit. Uh, dude, I wish I was in Beijing with Elon Musk, Trumpets, Cunping, 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, uh, speaking of Elon Musk, uh, >> SpaceX and 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 a 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. Um, they got to 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 got to put some GPUs on the blimps. We got to start ma mass manufacturing the blimps. This could be the thing. I mean, no, no, there's no nimiism 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 map. Yeah. Like I feel like none of the ocean guys that are working on ocean robotics are thinking about like putting at the bottom of the ocean. >> Yeah. I mean, it feels easier than than uh space data center instruments. 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 there's there's oil and natural gas reserves >> on the oxygen there because how do you burn the oil in the natural gas water? >> Big big uh >> diving bell tube. Yeah. Scuba 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, >> to build those satellites. We're working on getting Will Marshall from Planet Labs on the show in the next week or so. Uh, 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 will be viewing it as a more normal way to build data centers. Uh, a little bit of an interesting timeline there. >> Like, I thought we doubt to me 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 own 6.1% of the company. >> Not bad. Um, the other the other funny dynamic from SpaceX is deal making recently is given that the OpenAI startup fund was uh an early investor in I believe Curser's seed round. True. The $8 million round. Um, 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 IP. >> 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 on 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 what was the original Starlink approval? I thought it was like tens of thousands, maybe a hundred thousand satellites. I'm starting to think like like looking ahead there's going to be a backlash to like they're blocking out the sun. Like we've seen the Matrix. This happened in the Matrix but for like chemical reasons, but like if there's like no like light pollution from this at all. It's going to be a absolutely massive Oh yeah. Panthalosa ocean data centers. You don't need to sink them to the bottom of the of the of the Mariana Trench. Just do them on the on the ocean. Uh do did you look up how many uh satellites SpaceX currently has in orbit? Because I think I mean it's a huge number. It's over 10,000 I believe. But uh a million is a huge jump. Um 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 uh like just over 10,000. Is that >> just over 10,000? Okay. But I think they're approved for maybe up to a h 100,000 or something. And so they go and get the huge the huge allocation and then they start launching. Uh very very excited to see uh the progress on Starship. What isn't there a launch that happened or is happening this week? Like what? >> Yeah. When's the next time when the next launches? I'll keep reading. >> The other the other story, this was back in March. Uh Blue Origin has a play in in space data centers 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 like, "Hey, if we're going to be a real player here, we need to we'll probably need to work with >> StarCloud finally probably finds a dance partner, if not multiple." Uh, 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, uh, which require swaths of land and power. These data centers are designed to be powered by solar panels, emitting uh, 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 pro 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. Uh and SpaceX also announced a deal with Cursor as we have talked about on the show. Um Star Starship, what's the update? >> 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 >> do you have any idea what success looks like? >> I think this is the first orbital test of the V3. >> Okay. Um, >> so they got to get it to orbit and then get it back and probably land it. But are they going to land on land or water? Because I it the last didn't the last one make it up and back but exploded in the water or was that the Blue Origin New Gladen? I don't know. Anyway, uh 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. Uh, 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 if you're orbiting the earth vertically essentially uh the the sun is constantly hitting the satellites so you you're not out of power for half the day. Um but they say these radiator the radiators for data centers will likely be very large. I like that phase change materials. Materials that can absorb uh 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 suns synchronous orbit. That's on the low end of low earth orbit. low earth orbit around 1,000 miles, mid orbit 1 to 10,000 miles, high orbit over 22,000 miles. Um, and so, uh, we we we we covered a decent amount of this, so we can we can move on. Um, >> do you want to talk about >> Shanu Matthew? >> Yeah. >> Was adding to the conversation we had with Doomberg. >> Duneberg was fine. Duneberg was saying the only way the data center buildout will be successful is by either breaking all the rules or going off-rid and Seanu 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 XI funded plus contractual obligations to curtail during periods of grid stress. That is a grid tide architecture with supplemental on-site generation, not an islanded power system. I think I think Duneberg 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. Um and now there is push back like there wasn't push back when Colossus was built originally because data centers were not a hot topic. And it's the same thing with uh launching rockets like uh we were talking to someone who lives up in Santa Barbara. They're launching a lot of rockets from Vandenberg. Uh it's getting to be a lot of traffic. Uh it hasn't risen to the level of, you know, protest, but you can imagine that building 10 more Vandenbergs would be difficult because you go to the local community and you say, "Hey, we're going to build a a a space launch station, a spaceport." And they say, "Oh, that sounds good." Like you mean because we're going to go to the moon once a decade and you're like no we're going to launch rockets 10 times a day or a hundred times a day and people if they have an example that they can draw from and say oh well like that community doesn't like it so I shouldn't like it. Uh that's some of the push back. But anyway we can keep reading uh Shanu Matthews post. >> Yeah let's see. >> Turbines solved a time to power problem. So it it accelerated the deployment while substations and transmission infrastructure were being built. That's very different from do all of this off-rid 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 hypers scale is expensive and operationally complex. Fuel logistics maintenance N plus1 redundancy permitting emissions compliance balancing load and supply continuously. uh multi-year equipment lead times. You don't just figure that out or want to do that overnight. Uh Amin, the chief technology officer at or the chief technologist at Google AI. Uh does that mean Deepmind or um straight up confirmed this on a podcast and they literally bought a hybrid power island uh hybrid island power developer. Uh 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 steadystate future is fully off-rid hypers scale campuses. The industry is converging towards hybrid architectures. Grid inter interconnect plus captive generation plus storage plus demand response. They're throwing the whole kitchen sink at it. Anyway, >> um related >> yes, >> uh More Perfect Union had a post earlier >> uh and >> they're turning off >> nearly 50,000 people in Lake 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, Envy Energy, the Nevada utility that supplied most of Lake Taho's electricity for decades, says that next year we'll 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 noticed. Okay. >> Uh, 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. >> Um, 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 home >> 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, Envy Energy in Nevada and generates the other 25% itself from solar farms it owns. M >> Liberty sells then sells that 49,000 to 49,000 customers. >> Envy Energy has told Liberty it will stop selling them wholesale power after May 2027. It's kind of like Liberty is a coffee shop that buys beans and sells coffee to customers. The customers are the homes and the beans have the electricity it buys from Envy 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 Envy? Uh why is their contract ending with Envy Energy? Envy Energy selling to Liberty was understood as trans transitional since it started in 2009. Long story short, Envy 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 Envy 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 uh wakeboard because I I I somehow >> he would hit the streets. He'd be protesting. >> I think he'd be protesting. I think he would get something done if uh if power was lost to Tahoe. I mean, a lot of uh influential people are out there. So, um um anyway, all right, we got to talk about set record straight on that. >> We got to talk about Unit Tree GD1. >> They build they build a new robot and you're going to 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 they use a racing bucket seat. >> It is cool. Uh it does feel very hacker culture like it feels like this was like a crack team a little skunk works project. Uh this is it doesn't look like as polished or ready for you know sale but uh remarkable results. They're like, "You got to put this out so that the Americans cancel all of their technology ambition and just go back to the dark age." >> It is intimidating. Is it a coincidence that it was launched the same day that the uh 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. Uh that one hasn't really been considered because if you're laying back while you're driving it in horse mode. Uh you're going to be uh maybe maybe you'll just nap. Maybe you're like, "Oh, I want to commute." Uh you know, Henry Ford said if I asked people what they wanted, they would ask for a better horse. This looks like a better horse to me. >> Uh you get to work, you pop up into vertical mode. Um I'm fascinated by how they're controlling it. Is 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 uh in the Avatar films like the the operator of the mech has full like uh the input is the actual arms. So if they want to 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 Mecca replace horses for >> police use cases. >> I don't know. There's going to be pretty crazy push back if that's rolling around during a ride. >> I know. But the benefit here is that the I don't think the Mecca will um you know go go to the bathroom on the ground. >> Obviously this is going to happen at some point. A lot of these developments are very early. Uh I bet you if you give that thing a strong kick, it falls over and sort of gets stuck at this point. Um >> uh SA over on X Yeah. Uh had pulled out the funniest part. >> Yep. >> Uh which is that Uni Tree unveils the world's first Mecca 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. Uh, egocentric data collector versus the mecha mounted tea op Chad. Uh, absolutely wild. Uh, are 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 into what you could imagine as the battlefield with uh, four FC 2004 drone formation. Max payload of 600 kg. Unit's new transformer Mecca 500 kg of weight. That's probably without a human inside. So, you might need six drones. But, uh, 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 there are so many steps on the humanoid robot uh path where you know the deployment in a flat surface in a warehouse makes so much more sense than like standing on a ladder straddling a a chimney in the rain and there's a little bit of mud and you use a power tool and dust kicks up. Like 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 robots. >> Yeah. >> Um, I do wonder how they're, again, I'm sure the comments are all, "How do we know this is actually live, right?" >> Like, how do you how do we know? >> So, is this the actual live stream right now? It's continuing going because I I 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. Uh 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 eight hour shift. >> Okay. >> Oh, okay. So, they might have swapped it out at some point for a different >> interesting. It looks like a lot of progress. Um, >> it's extremely fast. >> It is fast. Like the movement's very natural. Uh, I wonder what what is the goal here exactly? Because the 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 uh 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 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 and tilts them all upwards. Uh obviously the the humanoid use case is much more unstructured and that is beneficial for so many things. Um I don't know if if this is your >> apparently they're just going to have the robot go until it taps out. >> Okay. I like that. That's great. >> Very cool. Uh well in other video news that we need to play, uh General Catalyst launched an ad on X that might be making it into TV ads or ads at some point. What? >> G-Cat. >> GCAT. What's GCAT? Oh, General Catalyst. >> Maybe that's the new ad campaign, but uh the 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. BC. >> 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. >> Wolf AI. Okay. >> Of course, he's fine. >> Oh, sorry, buddy. >> Easy. Easy. >> Stay. Stay. No. No. Stop. Stop. Stop. Stop. >> I'm sure it'll be fine. >> Interesting symmetry to the podcast set that Reggie's doing, right? >> Well, Reggie directed. >> Yeah. But it's cool that like the brand L like you could wind up doing two very different designs, but there's like a there's a through line there even though it's obviously a nod to the Mac versus PC ads from the 2000s. Uh 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 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 a dog >> this is a big moment because you have been wanting a VC firm to just commit to paid advertising for a long time. >> I wouldn't say this is a commitment yet we got to actually spend behind it. Yeah, of course. Of course. Yeah. No, no. I magazine ads. >> Great. >> Yeah. In the right. I mean, certainly in like the Wall Street Journal and Forbes and like the places that people uh that entrepreneurs go for information, it makes so much sense to to uh actually spend on advertising to build a brand, especially when you're at the scale of General Catalyst. Uh can we pull up the Mac versus PC ads? We're not going to 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 uh we retain a lot of what makes us us. >> You should see what this guy can do with a spreadsheet. It's insane. >> Yeah. And he knows that I'm better at life stuff like music, pictures, movies, stuff like that. >> Whoa. Whoa. What? 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 I was thinking of the other kind. >> What other kind? Um, hello. We can switch away because the he you've seen all these. Uh, Mark Hane quote tweeted it dunked. He said, "Stay tuned for our upcoming ad campaign. We're the VC who doesn't sneer at your idea." Interesting. Getting spicy. Um, yeah, red alert over there. Red alert. Um, it's a lot of red alert going on. U, it's a long thing. Well, both companies are invested in uh robotics company Anderil. >> Oh, yeah. I mean, I'm sure there's a ton of portfolio overlap. >> Oh, no. I I I just think I I just think like in another world that that that's an andal product, that dog thing, >> probably. >> Uh I'm sure they've experimented with that form factor and some fresh funds to build a Mecca. I It is >> I mean, if there's ever someone to build the Mecca, it would be Palmer Lucky. He has talked about this stuff. I I even asked him on stage once like walk me through the Pacific Rim vision like how do we build that? Uh and we had a fun back and forth about it. Um well we >> do you remember >> do you remember much about his response? >> Yes. So uh his response to stuff like that >> pick a form factor is just like hey I'm a I'm a sitting duck on a platform. >> Yeah. Exactly. So, so his his point is always like uh the technology to build the Mecca is way behind the technology to like remote control something or put an AI on board or something like that. So, uh you actually don't want to build the Iron Man suit because you can just build the drone, the submarine, the >> 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. Um, clearly Bruce Wayne just >> the parking. He's obsessed with he's obsessed with building Batmobiles. Very funny. Um, >> I don't know. Uh, that is a very cool demonstration though. But, uh, uh, yeah, he Andrew always says, "Don't build the Batmobile and focus on like is there an actual like urgent need from the military? Is there support from Congress to actually appropriate the funds and unit? I don't actually know. That feels like just like an R that's like a marketing project at this point. >> Yeah. I mean, I think their their IPO is like very soon, right? Because I think the the original application was like late March. >> 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 It doesn't really seem that practical. Um, 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. Um, 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 you're forklift maxing and you think the the forklift will always defeat that. But there's got to 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 Mecca to the to the to the rescue. >> Yeah. I mean I it's just like pretty hard to justify this. Like I I think yes, for certain like emergency scenarios, >> it makes sense to have some like super weird uh form factor. >> Emergency. I need a really cool thing, piece of tech. I need something that looks really cool before my IPO emergency. Uh well, um we can we can flip over to the other financial news that's making headlines on the cover of the Wall Street Journal. Inflation accelerated 3.8% last month. Not good news. Uh Joe Weisenthal has a couple posts, but uh one is just man and he says uh the headline US April producer prices rose 6% year-over-year. The estimate was 4.8%. So obviously the closure of the straight of Hermuz is having an effect. We were talking about Diet Cokes. Uh you would think that the uh the caffeine doesn't come from the Middle East. The the the delicious caramel flavor, whatever else they put in this uh 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 straight of Hormuz and so uh Diet Coke is rapidly going out of stock and so you need to load up if you're prepared. >> How many you got? Four or five 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 Lechin from a firm. So surging enterp energy prices have pushed investors inflation expectations to multi-year highs. Uh Tuesday's hot readout on consumer prices is intensifying Wall Street's anxiety about inflation. Uh 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 uh treasury inflation protected securities. The gaps between the yields of those two types of bonds, known as the break even 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. Uh a very rough thing for any economy to go through and something that uh the market and the economy and the politicians should be focused on. So the 10-year break even rate has also climbed hitting 2.5% this month. its highest level since 2023 driven largely by the warfueled 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 index's 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 uh there was even the whole debate or the the fight with Powell and lawsuits which were eventually dropped. But uh Powell and Trump were at each other's necks and issuing statements about uh their vision for the future of the American economy. And on the flip side, you have Kevin Walsh coming in uh maybe more friendly, maybe more receptive to a rate cut, but the data makes that very very hard to justify. And so we are in >> Yeah. And some in some ways in some ways you know who who knows how how history will view Powell but like he landed he landed the plane >> and then you know we get >> war in the Middle East and uh and now Kevin Wars in some ways looks like he'll have >> just as tough of a job >> potentially. Potentially. >> So well our next guest Max Lechin from a firm he's the co-founder and CEO. He's returning to the show and 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 the charm. >> Third time. >> What have you learned? >> Third time can't be the charm. I want 25th time to be Let's keep it going. I love these. >> I enjoy this. >> What have you learned about making coffee since the last the important update? >> Because I'm assuming you're never like, "Oh, I'm I'm pretty good at this." >> Or are you resting on your laurels? Are you Are you 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 espresso group heads. Uh and uh >> I wanted to learn how the mushroom valve works cuz I thought mine was clogged and 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 really boned up on how espresso machines worked in 1961 and and 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 got to 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. Uh you have to set up your own mind. >> You're you're putting all kinds of wrong ideas into my mind. Check. Check. Ooh, not yet. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Did Did you smelt the metal that went into the espresso machine? >> I've not smelt anything lately. I'm a novice. A real novice. >> Anyway, we're not here. >> Next time I'll tell you about my smelting experiences. >> Fantastic. I imagine that the smelting process is as intricate and as as rewarding as the coffee making process in some ways for I expect you to be able to try a coffee and understand >> the alloy of the machine. Yes, >> 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 as a 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 outdepth your competitors that they just can't beat you. So, I'm I'm I'm very pro smelting. I'm very pro going ultra deep. >> Yeah. Yeah. That's interesting. Is there is there a uh a a translation or or uh 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 we we 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 uh oh when you grow up you will be a live streamer who at an AI lab. It's like none of those words existed back in the '9s and here I am. Also, a lot of 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, you know, strong, you know, maybe it's the opposite. And and when I when I look at people that are that are maybe sort of midway through their career, >> the highest earning, you know, the most respected are almost always >> the ones with extreme depth where they can simply out compete 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, >> you are like everyone's going to 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 like if you're smelting your own code, I'm just going to go with the smelting analogy forever. But if you're that good, you're going to be 10,000x engineer and like you will be worth your weight in smelted gold. Who knows? But it it it's very very powerful to be a deep expert. Like you are the one AI 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 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 world. >> 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 and I've done quite well but really I'm interested in space. I I want to work on that. uh you've done >> you're interested in in space and you're not working on it like what are you doing with this the very best time in history to do that. >> Yeah. But but 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 a three four other 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 climb 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 payment 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 deeper and deep deeper and deeper into payments into how to make payments more expedient more transparent in the case of a firm and payments are a lot of things and access to credit is a totally new idea like I've never touched credit until a firm and now I you know maybe with 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. just announced yesterday, we've built an entire new model family loosely inspired by the attention mechanism that is powering all of your LMS out there, including >> your your parent company. Now, some some ideas we borrowed from the uh from from all all these really amazing discoveries in sort of cure, 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 there's so much to do. Like there there's absolutely >> no chance I I'll get to rest. You know, I'm not sure I'll get to 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 the deeper you dig. >> Okay. So, uh yeah, we we we sort of mentioned we we referred to it a little bit, the 2026 investor forum. uh who attended, what was the goal of that? Take us through uh that event, and then I have a whole bunch of follow-up questions about how you're communicating the the the the at the current time. >> Yeah. Uh it it was amazing. I'm still kind of slightly high on the whole thing, but the the thing that was really fascinating. So, we did this event three years ago, or similar event three years ago, 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. Uh 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 three years worth of growth targets going to look like? And so the the the main act, I was the warm-up act. I try 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 hundred billion dollars of GMV. We're 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%." And 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 gonna be more profitable and grow faster. And it's like faster. We're a bigger company now. Like what are we doing? Wait a second. Last time we did this three years ago, we said we're going to compound to 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 I knew all these numbers like I obviously improved and worked the team to make sure we feel great about him, but when you sort of say that out loud like compare that to the last time we told you the same thing. We're going to accelerate. >> Yeah. >> Like wow that is like so cool. So anyway, so I'm I'm I'm still very high from like being able to say that out loud is very fun. >> So there's a flywheel. I imagine with a lot of uh financial companies there's economies of scale uh and so that seems doable. Are you also talking about TAM at this point because the company's so large or is 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 hundred billion dollars of amens in this country is but a drop in the bucket. >> Okay that's of even a larger bucket. We're in no danger. The US revolving credit which is obviously a fraction of total >> uh to total economic rotation is like a trillion three right now and 100 billion is like then we're taking shares. So I I like to compare to that number people are not using revolving credit they're using a firm which is good for them non-revolving no fees all that and so we're not yet at the sort of town by the way this these are all US numbers and we're already live in the UK and Canada and we've announced a bunch of other countries. Okay. So, speaking of the investors, obviously it's very important to communicate with investors right now, both from your growth plans and also what's going on in the market. Uh a as you think back to the March time period, the SAS apocalypse, every company got sort of beaten up. You came back really quickly. Uh 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, you know, continuing to deliver on the actual metrics? Like like what as you're confronted with one of these like, oh, there's a new narrative. How do you 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 the Well, and I'm I'm I'm hugely honest, so I might as well tell the truth every time. Um, so this particular time we said nothing. We basically said, "Okay, I I I guess the sky is 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." No, 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 we're going to guide. So we're we're going to reveal that we're having a pretty good quarter, too. >> And so that that's what we did this time. and we just didn't spend too much time communicating >> Mhm. >> how the 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, you know, the the most recent time when I thought we need to speak was when the rates were rising very quickly. We we were screaming into the void of like 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 point too 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. like, "Yeah, yeah, but but the rates are up, so you're obviously." And so the the dip in return of our stock is like, "Oh, you 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. Uh I think we've talked about the history of uh the the the effect of interest rates on a firm. Uh 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 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? It's like a I can imagine it's somewhat of a double-edged sword in that like you know uh higher prices means people are more likely to want to use credit but maybe this there's a drop in some purchasing activity of some items you know >> also just like if you're getting $10 in two years and it's worth less that that that should have an effect but how how is it actually playing out? >> So a little too early to tell but you are exactly right in a sense that we 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 I have the cash." Like, "Ah, I kind of want my cash to go a bit longer cuz I don't know exactly which way the price 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 at every investor event is credit is job number zero. As a computer science major, I count from zero >> and it it is the most important job. We 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 change in 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 were obviously not blind to the macro reality >> 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. Uh and and that is the ca in fact the case. Yeah. >> How uh is is uh AI changing how you think about international expansion? Does it 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 uh is international is your like international GTM just like 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 going to change the strategy. I think the one a 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 you know what it's like to make code. You've done it in my case for the last 40 years. And I I know how much easier it is, how much more effective teams can be, how you can have three 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 and it's not like a slow rise 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. It's 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. Anything that's textheavy, you have just, you know, a great helping hand. But the sort of night and day moment is writing code like that. That's 1/8 through or maybe like one P on on the list of things that 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. Uh but at the same time, if you get hit with like a billion dollar token bill in a year, uh that might be material. And so you 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 going to tell your team to use a lot of AI because obviously there's stories coming out of Amazon and Meta where teams are basically just like I I want to I want opt I want the optics to be that I'm using more AI than anyone else on my team. going to run things overnight >> for no reason. >> Yeah, >> we are extremely extremely metrics driven company. Like we some might >> take issue with just how completely obsessed we are with like you but you know you improve what you can measure like if you if you're going on fields you're going to you know 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 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 on two tokens and return to shareholders at the limit >> right now. It's like undoubtedly a very very accreative thing >> but we're also not assuming that you know like infinite budgets are just great and we also expect by the way prices of tokens will probably increase over time like I think there's plenty of subsidies taking place. You're now inside one of those places so you probably know the true uh the true price. Um I if we can circle back to specialization from AI creating effectively more generalists I'm I'm interested in uh in sort of computer science history your your career history uh how how have you processed like the there was a point where front end and backend engineering were two very separate disciplines uh at the point where you could do JavaScript on the front end and the back end you see more full stack engineers Now you have engineers that are designers, designers that are engineers, uh 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 the the 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 a hundred experts to do one thing. and that there's got to be a tension there. So, I'm wondering how you're 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 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 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 is very high. Like an even better example actually in my world would be an underwriting model. So somebody who designs underwriting models like hey AI go 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, so you know, fun examples, we just had a product hack hackathon. So only product managers can attend. A lot of our product managers have CS degrees. So we're we're cheating here a little bit. But but these people were like, "Hey, I love writing code, but I want to make it into things as opposed to code and like I 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 it's and we we graded it not just on so the winners and the whole grading like 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 if we're allowed to ship it tomorrow we will so that is like an extreme generalist who like has a vision >> and a few tokens and a feature in 27 hours with like two 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 cuz famously two pizza team. You only need one pizza teams now. >> 50% reduction. >> 50% reduction. Short dominoes. This is a disaster. I hadn't thought about this. We we uh we we we sprung for a somewhat higher quality over >> Oh, yes. Okay. So, revenue is flat, margins potentially going up in the pizza industry. Okay. >> Last last question for you. How are you how are you uh what's your framework for evaluating the the all the different AI products being pitched to you across the rest of the organization? You have the benefit of being a technical, you know, CEO. uh a lot of other CEOs in your role are just like I just want to buy AI everywhere. Just give me every part of my company. Just give me give me give me three pilots. I'll I'll pilot anything. Um whereas I think you're probably looking at some of this more non you know non-deterministic work saying like hey um you know you can play around with it but maybe you don't have budget. >> So I have a I have a great uristic this this will be uh potentially worth worth the rest of my drill. Um, 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 at does it work? Does it pass a unit test? So the feedback loop of I gave you a thing like codeex 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 is 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. >> Like 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. >> Satisfaction rate. >> Is there sat 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. That's a great thing to buy. We're not a specialist. We are excited to buy it from the specialists. >> Somebody tells you, "Oh, it's AI. It's going to be a tool. was going to make you a better writer of fiction. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. Or even pitch deck. Pitch decks are pitch decks are an example because like you could have the worst formatted pitch deck and 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. I would not would not buy hitch deck AI assistant even if somebody paid me to do it >> because it's 95% the talk track >> so far and the company and the idea and the market and the t and all all those things and so but most importantly a 100 companies pitch their decks good old and made by AI >> seven out of 100 get funded 93% failure rate sucks should never raise money like is that the conclusion So, I I I would I would stay away from the non-objective or very slow feedback loop systems before I 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 week on the progress from the guide. >> Thank you. And I'll come back with smelting news. >> We'll talk to you soon. Have a good one. >> Goodbye. >> Um we have Delian Aspa from Founders Fun and Barta 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 dollars. And uh he's in the news today because he asked Donald Trump for a pardon uh while on the run, I believe. So uh Joe Lo, the alleged mastermind of one of the greatest financial frauds in history. You got to read this book. The I like that you're just the camera's following around. Uh >> that's the new that's the new meta. >> New meta. Go on the run until you can get the >> on the run. And you're just just popping up to say, "I'd like a pardon, please." >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, uh, yeah, you got to read this book, Billiondollar Whale. Fantastic book. I thought it was going to be turned into a movie at some point. It should be. It's It's a fascinating story, but we'll just give you the high level and we'll do a whole deep dive later. Uh, Jolo, the alleged mastermind. >> I think we should we should take matters into our own hands. Let's move into a play. >> A play. Okay. A stage play. I like a stage play. >> We have we haven't done a play yet on set. >> No, not yet. Although a lot of the a lot of the red string uh poster board sessions, they feel like plays. They they're very well acted. >> I'm talking reading off. >> Yeah. Yeah. We don't have lines for those. >> Joe Joe lie one pardon the room billionairely. >> Yeah. So Joe Low, 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 US criminal charges against the fugitive Malaysian financeier. A justice department website lists a pending request for pardon for completion of sentence under Joe Lowe. Uh the move represents the latest gambit in the extraordinary saga of Lo, a once littleknown businessman who prosecutors prove prosecutors say used uh subtrafuge fake documents and payoffs to engineer the heist of billions of dollars from one MDB, which was a Malaysian government-owned investment vehicle set up to promote economic growth. He's known for his lavish lifestyle, partying partying with h Hollywood stars and political rulers. He was involved in there were a bunch of other people that went to jail for this. Uh, 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 that the budget was really flying with that one because they they crashed a Lamborghini Countach, which is maybe $500,000 car, and they just I think they just destroyed it and they destroyed maybe the actual I don't know that might be not real, but very fun movie. Anyway, we have Delhi and Espir from Varta and Founders Fund in the TVP and Ultradome. Hit that gong. >> There he goes. >> There we go. The self audience. >> There we go. 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. Uh for anyone who's been living under a data center, introduce yourself. >> Hi, my name is Delen. Uh co-founder and president of Varta. Have a couple other side gigs, but you know, that's the main game. >> Let's focus on Varta today. Oh yeah, >> we're talking space data centers, right? You got something in space, it's got to be that we do have some chips up there, so in theory 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. >> 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, yeah, pharmaceuticals, they focus on pulmonary disease. So, you know, lung, blood, etc. >> 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, you know, you know, photos of the Earth, etc. 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 >> for real business. >> Is that that that's happening or is about to be happening? >> Yeah. So, we um signed this deal, you know, called like, you know, >> stop you right there because there's an opportunity for someone else to put a race >> in a balloon. We should we should race. We should race a big balloon. >> Balloons can't go to space. >> Balloons can't go to space. You got to go. You got to go on the rock. >> A balloon and then once you're up there, jetack 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 balloon complexity that you're just better off building a rocket to get the rocket up there. >> Tyler space ride. They would they would take the balloon up and then 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 that rockets are big and like satellites are big. A little little harder to get up there. Um 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 going to 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't increase it. And so, alongside the customer, we're 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. You know, we're still working with United on the ground. so far getting those drugs ready for flight, but we'd expect basically or next year to fly the first United. >> And how are they making this drug on Earth today? >> Um, today you're using traditional techniques. So there's a whole set of companies >> much less efficient. >> Uh, you're just getting a different result. So as an example, you know, uh, the, you know, sort of 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, Skyab, Space Shuttle. Um but in 2019 Merc basically showed their blockbuster cancer drug Kruda. They crystallized it up in space. They showed they could shift the administration from what was previously an IV drip um 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 um can now access this drug. Um 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 Martin Rothblat to uh solve a rare pulmonary disorder for her daughter. Built that up into a huge platform. Um they've really leaned into the frontier over the course of the last year. So 20 30 years um 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. um you know a lot better than waiting on like a you know whatever 24-y old kid to die on a motorcycle get your kidney instead just get it from a pig farm. >> Um 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 um easier for the patient because you have to take the drug less often. It's things like that that we're looking to you do with them. >> Dumb question. You you 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 gyating as it's re-entering. 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 um uh 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. Okay. >> Where things matter is when that phase change is happening. Okay. >> In that particular moment is where you don't want the sedimentation, convection, etc. So we do in some ways we like load up all the liquids ahead of time. Y >> those liquids for sure on the rocket lighter up get shaken etc. But it doesn't matter cuz the liquid's still saying a liquid. >> 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. 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. >> 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 a hundred years at you know a thousand gs it's still going to be table salt where those like vibrations heat more. >> You do need to manage heat. If you melt the salt you're cuz then it's back to a liquid. >> Um but you know this is what you know convinced United that we would be capable as a partner is we actually had data sets from our very first mission where um the surface of the heat shield was hotter than the temperature of the surface of the sun. So like extremely hot >> um on board I think it was like something like 14° centigrade plus or minus.1° and so we had extremely precise temperature control on board and so a lot of what has brought you know people to the table for this you know 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 lowcost 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 sort of six seven eight and nine will be you know sort of launching later this Um, but it was also, hey, not only are they launching and landing these things, but on board they've got the right process control so I can see, hey, they can go work on my drug. Um, and by next year when we fly seven times in a year, that's going to be higher cadence than everything that the like ISS, space shuttle, etc. have done in all of 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? Um I imagine that you know there's like all these different >> like just the space mission or like get the drug into the clinic cuz the drug in the clinic is more >> complex. Space 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. Um first on the ground we got to 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, um, spec relative to most satellites because we don't need super high power to communicate with, you know, internet terminals, radio waves of photos, etc. >> Oh, that makes sense. >> 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 >> it is like basic telemetry. >> Yeah, basic telemetry, but we don't need like super high pointing accuracy while it's just floating up there because 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 under spec sort of satellite. Um 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. Um but otherwise under spec satellite so we do those on the ground. We've now built a handful of those. Um then we have to build the second part of the spacecraft which is the re-entry 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 etc. around that. Um, 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 kind of 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. Kind of depends on the drug manufacturing process. Some 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 like Apollo films in mission control? We literally have like think like Amgen scientists, but like they're in mission control talking to the viral out there. >> I can imagine you you love hanging out in there. >> Um Brewie always makes fun of me. He's like uh you know, 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. Um 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. We're like, "Yeah, I like hanging out there. Obviously, I like am completely useless and mostly a distraction. So, I try mostly just listen into the live stream." Now, >> every team needs a class clown. >> Yeah, exactly. >> Can you uh unpack a little bit more about the orbit? Uh there's a piece in the journal today, space data centers face a lot of challenges. They all got to go to sun-synchronous orbit. I imagine you don't, but I want to know about the knock-on effects of like what can you tell me about sunsynchronous 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 suns synchronous orbit is you're basically like always um uh uh like uh facing towards the sun and have sunshine. Um we are not dependent on that. As I mentioned earlier, we're not super power constrained. Um 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, um we can basically just drain those batteries, recharge them basically on like the next orbit. Um 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. Um, you know, as an example, later this year, for the first time, we'll be actually launching, historically, we've only launched to synchronous orbit because that's where all the transporter uh missions, which are the SpaceX ride share missions. >> That's what I was going to ask. >> Um, they now have what are called bandwagon missions, which go up to they're also rid share, but they go to polar orbit. Um, we'll actually be flying on our first bandwagon mission uh later this year. So, now we have launch flexibility. There's a bunch of companies that can't go on bandwagon or basically there. We're actually probably one of the only companies that can go on both. >> Either. Yeah, that's what I was going to ask because what happens if everything winds up being sun-synchronous orbit because I think there's 10,000 or so Starling satellites. Elon's asking for a million for space data centers. That means like 90% of the launches are going to be sun-synchronous, but that's okay for you. >> Yeah, we're okay going to sunsynchronous. We can quickly get out of the orbit if we like need to try and go, you know, sort of slightly off of it. um or we can just go to polar and be totally you know sort of happy there and that gives us um some benefits on the like launch economic side of things where now we're basically able to go on any rocket >> so I was going to ask uh uh it seems like every hyperscaler some startups are you know and some of the labs are thinking about space uh are you expecting like launch to could you know theoretically could be like bottleneck launch price >> it's been falling for so long but yeah what do you expect >> yeah how are you planning because you have to buy capacity, launch capacity years out, right? >> Yeah. To date, launch prices have only gone up. Um, so they have not gone down since we started the company. Launch costs for SpaceX, I'm sure, have, but there has not yet been pricing competition, so why would they necessarily pass on those savings to viewers of us, you know, and they haven't, I think, seen that much price elasticity in the market. When they've like lowered prices, it's not like they've seen like 10x greater demand. And so for them, it's like capture as many margin dollars basically as possible. Um I do think what we're going to start to see is more competition in the launch market over the course of the next five years rather than the prior five. Right? Blue Origin I think it was today or yesterday announced they're you know going to be doing their first external you know sort of fundraising which speaks to you know I think them taking themselves much more seriously as a company that is going to like regularly show shareholder you know you know value and launch very 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. Um, 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. Um, 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 we've 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 >> yeah because no one's making anything in space >> totally nobody's making and that's why they were able to be so successful with Starlink was because they had the residual capability right >> it's so it's it's it's like a tealism right it's like we we created space we created the space economy and then it's just more internet more apps >> and now it's just gonna be or more AI. Um, how are you thinking about other drug categories? I can imagine >> space redda would be a pretty hot drug if if people could smoke space rea. >> Yeah. >> One one thing that I didn't realize is soic today one kilo of ampic retails for a million dollars. It's what people don't realize when people ask me like oh space drugs economics etc. Does this stuff work? I have to like tell them like yeah for you like you know it might be like a thousand buxo basically per shot but like it's because there's very very little ompic basically on board. >> A lot of them are like powders that then get diluted and then injected and so like yeah the actual core ingredients so tiny. >> Exactly. And what we do up there is we just make the powder. Yeah. Exactly. >> Um United has United Therapeutics, you know, our partner that we're announcing today. They have a ton of expertise in all things like you know rare pulmonary, you know, certain disorders. >> They're for sure going to be the person that we work with on that indication area. But microgravity has a wide set of pharmaceutical applications, neurological, immunology, yoncology, etc. And so for sure, we'll start to, you know, I think in the success case of Sivarta, it's not going to be like we have like 50 different partners. It's probably going to be like five to seven that we go really deep with. We kind of choose sort of one partner per you sort of indication area that we go as deep as possible. You know, opthalmology is another area that we're looking, you know, so deeply at, you know, partially because 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. Um, and so, yeah, we're starting to explore who are the partners for the other indication areas. >> What about beyond bio? I remember uh ZBLAND being something that people were talking about potentially being able to uh manufacture microgravity. uh 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 going to be pharmaceuticals. So vast majority is going to be, you know, sort of there and that's where our core focus area is. 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. Um, you know, when we were looking at that like high-end, you know, sort of zland, you know, fiber market back in 2021 when we started the company, >> there was clearly some level of like, you know, interest and capabilities there, but just like relative to what we were seeing on hypersonic pharma, not as large. >> Interestingly, that market has matured a lot. There's sort of two sort of call three areas where it has applications. Uh one is um it is the lowest um basically uh uh you know think of it as like interference inside the optical fiber for infrared. Um near infrared is now used in a lot of the high energy weapon systems. So 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 like the anti- drone stuff that's 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 um eye uh surgery relative to where it was you know 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. Um quantum comms has also grown a lot over the last 5 years. And then the other area is oddly um data centers. Um you know >> I was going to say as soon as there's a data center story there's going to be 25 companies funding IPOs and stuff. >> So ground data centers not space ones. Uh but they are actually >> No, no, no, no, no. You make the ZB land there. You bring it back and then you >> Dude, Zblane is now being used in terrestrial data centers. That was not a use case at all 5 years ago. So all these things and optical in >> Yeah, they're still like early, I would say. Um but and like you know what's happening though is also like the VA economics keep improving on a flightbyflight basis. The Zlane market keeps growing. We're like for the first time I would say we're like dedicating resources or anything, but like around the office for the first time in 5 years, somebody was like >> the Zbl stuff is like almost starting to pencil out again. It's probably like four 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 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 three and a half 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 furthest 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 the target but again you're doing that on the ground. with semis it's like oh my god that product equipment is like so so sensitive right if you look at like the like um you know stuff that they use for EUV basically like you know 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 um you variation you 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 precise that it's just like >> and the cost is so high even during the experimentation process you could The famous quote from uh TSMC is that if there's an earthquake, they don't have like a pager duty. Like they don't slack everyone, hey, you got to come in, there's 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. 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. Uh will it ever make sense to have a permanent like ISS style structure that you are transporting supplies to and then sending you know finished product down cuz I 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 VAR is to go build that, but go do it step by step, right? So when you look at like generation one of basically what we're building, it's this two-part spacecraft, right? Satellite, pod, >> satellite has all the process equipment, etc. 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. >> Mhm. >> Generation two, that'll be flying in like call 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 kind of how you can think about it. So space plane has the solar panels, the propulsion, it's got the 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 etc. It'll dock with that like satellite up in orbit exchange for the fabricated goods. >> But then we'll have like 10 of those satellites. We start to stitch them 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, a 100, a thousand. And so like yeah, we for sure we want to build the first industrial city in low Earth orbit. But we're taking it like 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 like I'm thinking like docking. Is there a startup that's just just working on docking? >> Yeah, I mean uh you know, sort of credit to them. Um, there's a company in Seattle called Starfish, you know, sort of space that is hyperfocused just on like the like docking, maneuvering the software for that. The >> that feels like something that like 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 uh process for the rest of the space economy. >> Totally. It's like um, you know, back in the day, we would have had to make our own solar panels, our own thrusters, propulsion tanks, etc. 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 m mature supply chain. As we start to get to this like space station world, I think there will 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 like 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 have like been able to buy that. We would have absolutely had to build it. And so, yeah, I think on a, you know, ongoing basis, we'll always be doing that, you know, sort of build by trade. Um 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 like as obviously VA is developing the general space economy and all these use cases are developing and heck when you said like you know sort of warehouse in space there are companies like you know 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 want to focus on is like we're going to 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 going to make microgravity bioreactors. We got to make those space planes basically ourselves because like nobody else is going to 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? Uh 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. Uh and a lot of biotech companies, they go out earlier. Pharmaceutical companies go out earlier. Uh 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. Uh 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 plus billion dollar and market cap like pharmaceutical companies. They basically all go, you know, public before that. It's like I mean there's so many deals like every day a big biotech company is buying uh something for 1 billion 2 billion all day long. >> Totally. That's basically like the default. >> Now I think like GLPs have shown that like in the therapeutics world you can build a like you know you know business that can effectively be like a trillion dollar outcome one therapeutics business. Um you know we're definitely thinking about that from the you know founders fund hat side of things. How do we back things that aren't just that one to5 billion dollar therapeutics outcome? Ed, I think we'll look at it like at a roundby round basis where like I think about it as like cost of capital. The public markets are offering me a lower cost of capital because they have more expertise because there's a bunch of hedge hedge funds that have like MD, PhDs and tons of them on staff to deeply understand pulmonary diseases, opthalmology, etc. >> 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 or not similar, you know, we'll study 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 Andreal or things like that, I think we will have much lower cost of capital early on, you know, sort of being public rather than not because the public markets have so much appreciation for the types of clinical data sets that we'll be putting out. >> What about on the other side? I've heard uh there's a like a really way to really great way to make a lot of money really quickly as like an unlicensed broker dealer of like SPVS. Like would you recommend that? What's your take? you know, >> get into that game like find go to some employee there's no securityities some random person. Oh, there we go. >> He can't find me there. >> Uh, but like how you've been processing the SPV boom, all of these questions around brokering and what's going on there. >> Yeah, I mean I think um I do think that one lady's like anthropic tweet basically led to anthropics like policy on this. >> Part of why that you know sort of is happening is um 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 a thousand, 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 you sort of lock down um on it because >> and employees typically own options and they don't show up on the cap table until the exercise. >> Exactly. Exactly. Um so yeah, I mean we're we're you obviously tracking that in terms of how many entities we have. We're not seeing some like exponential growth where like we're too worried about it. Um, you know, I don't know that we've been like as stringent to date, but as I look at our future rounds, yeah, like you need to start to think about like, okay, how many more rounds am I gonna stay private? And at some point, like I need to keep the entity count managed. So, totally get the anthropics of the world, it's like they've just raised so many good bajillion of dollars in the private markets that like they have to be >> I did get some more backstory on that one uh one deal. Allegedly, 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 um anyways uh why uh uh 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. um 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, um that could change potentially the the need or the economics like when would you change your mind and uh capitulate? Um, 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 want to focus on like where I think we have the right to win and can you sort of build up something that has like, you know, sort of durable margins. >> Yeah. Not not a great situation like you being in a situation where you're like this like deeply entrenched partner with five, you know, massive uh pharmaceutical companies that are dependent on you for a specific part of their supply chain. that is much better business to me than like competing with SpaceX on like you know putting GPUs in space when they just are naturally going to have a lot of advantages and so it feels like yeah you could pull forward like around 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, etc., 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, product. I think the thing that we've done well at Varta is we've stayed hyperfocused on just like our particular W series vehicle getting that up to you know to 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 topline etc >> 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 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 two 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 I like are there areas where it's like yeah ZLand 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, you know, sort of play. Um, 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 want to play in, you know, competition is for losers. >> There you go. >> Yeah. Yeah. Uh I mean it also like you're so far from realizing like the TAM of what you're building like 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 >> for 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 like tech people misunderstand is just like the like size of the TAM in pharma. Oh yeah. So you know anthropic is what I think like a $60 billion run rate or something like that. I forget like the you know sort of latest numbers. Kichuda that drug that I mentioned um that Merc did in 2019. That one drugs topline last year for Merc $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 out of 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 going to 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 going to want to live for forever. Where do you think all that capital is going to rotate into? It's going to rotate into longevity, therapeutics, manufacturing, and so I'm, you know, sort of happy to stay on the sidelines and, you know, 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. Uh, we'll talk to you soon, Dallas. Have a great >> say hi to the team. >> Today we have Richard Socher from Recursive in the waiting room. We've been keeping him waiting. So we will bring him in to the TBP and Ultra Dome. >> I love when companies emerge from stealth. Nothing makes me more frustrated than we talked to Richard before. So >> yes, welcome back. >> But we're very excited. >> We've talked to you before. >> Yes. >> Wasn't it Am I That was a bad joke. You.com, right? >> Oh, that's right. That's right. Yes. Um, great to see you, Richard. >> Um, let's uh but but even though you've been on the show before, let's reintroduce the the the the company and uh and uh and sort of set the table for us on what you're building. >> Happy to. Yeah. So, uh still uh happily running you.com and AX Ventures. Uh but now very excited to start Recursive with seven incredible co-founders. At Recursive, we're looking to build recursive self-improving super intelligence to automate knowledge discovery. Yeah, >> there's a lot to unpack there. You know, we're getting closer and closer to AGI. I think we have to set our sights uh set our goals now to to super intelligence. >> Uh I think AI is code and AI can code. So now we can actually put uh those uh two together uh and allow in an open-ended fashion to uh let AI actually improve itself. >> Yeah. Uh are there any other uh I is 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 uh research on cyber security or research on bio or science? There's a whole bunch of different initiatives. How focused do you want to be on AI research specifically? >> Yeah. is it is part of that part of that focus just if you can get RSI actually going then everything else you can enter seemingly very easily. >> There you go. >> You 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 and validation of ideas right and once it's gotten really really good at 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 uh and you know broadly constru digital work eventually even physical work and I saw your previous uh show just now. I'm very excited about preclinical biology and the impact that I can have uh on that. >> Talk about the round the structure who's in how much did you raise? >> We raised north of uh 650 million. >> Thank you. >> There we go. >> Uh what uh walk us through the pitch that you gave investors. what's your what's your right to win uh this uh you're one of you know many uh many teams working on this problem including all the existing labs um 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 great some amazing participation also from Nvidia uh AMD and and many other incredible funds uh that we're very grateful for angels strategic and so on. Uh our right to win is essentially four-fold. It's the focus. Yes, we know that everyone works a little bit um on self-improvement, auto research, things like that. Um but no one is fully focused on this. Uh we have the team we have incredible co-founders Tim Rockeshel who uh invented rude augmented generation with others and rainbow teaming and prompt breeder and Genie 3 which is like the most sophisticated world model that Google deep mind had recently launched like incredible talent. We got Jeff Cloon who's worked together with Tim R on many things. He's done incredible papers like the Daring Girdle machine hyper agents with some of his students who are also with us. Uh we got Tim Shei who built Cresta into a unicorn AI for uh for service centers. Uh we got Josh Tobin who's one of the earliest people at OpenAI and eventually led uh some of their work on chat agents codeex deep research. We got Samiong co-inventor of prompt engineering. We got Alexi Dositzki the co-inventor of the vision transformer. We got Yandong Chen who used to lead RL uh at Meta. I mean it's just such an incredible team. >> It's great. Uh yeah, that's that's pretty compelling. >> Then then how are you thinking about uh scale being all you need or not? I is is there a capital war or is $650 million enough to do the level of uh training or inference that you need to actually reach RSI? Because if uh a lot of the labs at least are are sort of uh you know putting the the AGI ASI terms in 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 it's a great question. Certainly uh 650 in this league that we're now in uh is step one. uh if you want to compete at that level uh you want to build massive frontier uh AI uh you have to eventually raise more at the same time you know this will last us for quite some time unless we're seeing enough progress that makes us want to accelerate this right and then we prove a new kind of scaling law >> where more compute results and 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 eye to make its own inventions and so we're really excited about the progress and like they will accelerate. >> Yeah. >> Do do you view uh today's coding agents as somewhat of a form of RSI or is that the wrong uh you know kind of wrong category? >> I'm glad you asked that question. uh the current models are great for auto research which is a step towards RSI but 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- trainin all of these things uh and so there 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 data sets or or distilling or integrating existing open source projects? I would love to know just your thesis on on leveraging open source and and and tweaking and fine-tuning and iterating on versus uh 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 uh to more and more things and 100% you want to stand on the shoulders of giants uh both uh like closed open source open source has done an incredible job uh bringing in uh and and more capabilities to you know the the community. Uh, and so we will we'll use anything and everything that we can, but we also know that long term you're going to want to uh own and be knowledgeable and able to build the entire stack. >> Yeah. >> Uh, now that you have your own funded Neolab, do we need more new Neolabs or do we have enough? >> Uh, I'd like to think so. One, we want to build a real company, right? We're not we're not just a lab. Um, 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. Um we have folks that also build unicorn companies from scratch with revenue and and so on. Uh have launched amazing project products like an opening codeex with Josh and others. So we're we're excited. Uh 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 uh maybe memory and all of these other aspects. I believe those are all important aspects. I believe that if we're successful, those are all just special cases and outputs of this machinery that we're building. So, do you Yeah. I mean, uh, how close are you? I imagine that this is a whole process, but how close are you to thinking about, uh, a product for businesses or a product for consumers, an API, a, you know, a web playground, a demo? Uh, is that something that by design you want to be super fast about and get something out into the world? Uh, have some impact in the interim or do you want to keep everything closely held uh, for potentially a really long time? I don't know, forever potentially if you're just going to invest. >> Yeah. When I hear the Eureka machine, I'm not I'm keeping that to myself personally. >> Yeah. Yeah. What's >> so initially 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 uh and so we may accelerate uh some of the productization of this research um uh to to come out earlier. I don't want to commit yet to to specific uh date or anything but like I think you know we want to build a viable company here uh that brings super intelligence and allows it to have massive impact uh to help humanity flourish and that won't happen in just a research. >> I love it. Could you ever see a scenario where uh you create something that would make more sense to like spin off into another company uh to to productize or do you do you expect to to you know basically use all of your creations internally and productize them yourself? I I can see how our customers will use this uh 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 uh that that have used AI and code generation to enable others to build their own businesses. You know, Replet, Lovable and so on are great examples of that. uh and I can see our technology doing something similar at an even more uh foundational level. >> Amazing. Uh thank you so much for coming on the show. Congratulations in the prize. >> Great to get the update and uh come back on when for your uh first uh release. >> Yeah, >> great to see you. >> We'll talk to you soon. >> Cheers, Richard. >> Have a good one. Goodbye. Uh 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 used to speak into. Yes, but apparently >> 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, uh Molly started to hold down the function key and talk in hush tones to her computer. Uh she runs her own AI business in Seattle and is hooked on Whisper Flow, company you might have heard of, a dictation app that uses her pairing with coding tools like Codeex 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. Uh 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 den. 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 going to be screaming at the AI agents. >> Oh, I like that. Like, yeah, stock trading. >> Yeah, we're bringing back the New York Stock Exchange. Um, there is a way to combat this. I've seen a couple masks that the bane mask. It's the bane mask basically. But people do put it over and it has a headphone jack and a uh USBC 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. Um but uh I think I I I think I'm pro this. What do you think, Jordy? I I I think I'm in favor of a noisier, louder I 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 where do you stand on it, Jordy? >> Uh, I like it. I bring Bring the energy. >> Yeah. What about you, Tyler? >> Yeah, I like the aesthetics of people yelling. Although the the kind of the muzzle holding 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 >> So, you say 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 vibe coding. >> That that is true. I revealed preference. I >> I find I 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. Uh 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 chatbt with more context. >> Yeah, you you you're doing that like once a day, and it and it's incredibly powerful. I I actually don't think many people realize that you can just ramble >> once a day in front of you, like 50 times a day. >> Um there's some uh controversy has hit the timeline. >> Okay, what's going on? Uh, Socks has pulled a screenshot of the uh, uh, figure live stream where the robot appears to be doing something like adjusting a a headset. >> Okay. >> And so he's he's alleging >> Oh, he thinks it's teleoperation. >> It's tea operation. >> Okay. >> And uh, the the robot is actually just being controlled by someone in a VR headset. >> Well, >> uh, 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 all the vestigial behaviors of human behavior that might exist in training data for humanoid robots. Like, it might just go and pick up the a phantom diet coke and take a sip because it's had a long day and it knows that's what humans do. So, it re recreates that. Uh, we'll let Brad adcock uh respond to this. Dunk on it. Set the record. >> The main thing is the speed. The speed up is insane. this sorry I don't know >> just the the robot how yeah from the because the the last version he was he was talking about the Biden walk going away and it was still a little like jerky and this doesn't look jerky at all this looks uh this looks very polished and uh and I don't think we've seen anything at this level like Optimus is still a little jerky and even the unitry stuff is pretty jerky that crazy huge unitry was pretty jerky and we're all sort of used to that because it doesn't really matter if jerky getting the done. >> 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 there's a bunch of ways. But this 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 Vory the CEO. I kind of like that. How you doing Brandon? What's going on? >> Welcome to the show. >> Guys, thanks for having me. >> We got to ask you, uh, 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 cloud code and codecs. 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? Whether you're closing PRs, whether you're closing deals, we want Kinesis on. >> I love it. I love it. >> I love it. We Yeah, I I agree with you. I think every we It's unanimous. Get used to it. >> But we're not here to talk about whispering to your computer or screaming at it. We're here to talk about your company. So, please give us an introduction on yourself and Vory. >> Yeah, absolutely. Guys, thanks for having me. My name is Brandon Hill. I am uh the CEO and co-founder of Vory. I'm actually a third generation groceryer, just to give you my story. >> That's amazing. >> Yeah. My grandparents ran grocery. My parents met and fell in love in a grocery store >> and have been in the industry for over 40 years. >> That's amazing. >> Um, >> I went to Stanford University. It's where I met my two co-founders who are two of my best friends. Worked at Google with Trey. Rob was a aerospace engineer at >> uh SpaceX under Elon and 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 one and a half trillion dollars of the American economy. >> Yeah. So are you starting with uh back office ERP inventory management accounting or are you going to 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 want to focus? Well, you know what's interesting is we found that the alpha is really in automating everything before checkout. Okay. 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 actually turns out building inventory, automating pricing, >> Sure. uh 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 a sleek modern checkout on the front end. Yeah. >> Um but it's about connecting everything in the store end to end. >> Okay. Automating pricing in a store. Uh 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 dayto day. Uh you mentioned a pencil and p uh paper and pencil industry. I imagine that at some point a store manager gets 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 a supermarket which has 100,000 products. >> Whereas a grocery store, you know, a restaurant might have 50 100 menu items. Grocery store has 50 100,000 SKs. >> They're accepting dozens of payment types. >> Yeah. >> Right. They have hundreds of employees and they might do more in sales than a restaurant or like a doughnut shop or a coffee shop might do in a month or a year. >> Yeah. >> In terms of overall volume. >> 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 bif focals 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. >> It's 12step process. >> Vory 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 uh a lot of the prices are printed and they're and they're labeled right on the shelves. Is there a move towards uh like e- in displays or LCD displays that could be uh updated in the cloud in the future? Is that an important uh like like step along the road to uh like automating the price setting of u of grocery stores? >> Oh, it's critical. In fact, I got a couple right here. Yeah. Electronic shelf labels, right? So, this is the future. Okay, >> so Walmart actually just spent a billion dollars rolling out electronic shelf labels across every single item across every single of their 4600 stores. >> That makes so much sense. >> But the thesis behind Bori is we're 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 half dollar food and be retail market. >> I didn't realize it was that fractured. I would have guessed grocery stores are doing like 70% of all grocery or something. Do do some of these uh 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 is that a thing? It >> 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 Mil Valley Market. Okay. Up in Mil Valley. Um love that store. It's beautiful. That's powered by Lori. 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 five 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 automated. Take it out of Dylan's pockets and put it in the store owners pocket. I like those. >> Hey, I'm pro competition. I'm pro America. That means I'm pro small business, right? Just trying to help them succeed. >> No, no, doing fine. But yeah, it's it's just funny to frame it that way. >> The price of bok choy is going up. >> Yeah. Good luck, D getting ready to get ready to pay through the nose for your bok choy. Uh tell us about the round. How much did you raise? What happened? >> Yes. So, we raised $22 million uh 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. >> Um, which is where 60% of our revenue comes from. We're investing behind that. Um, advancing our product, releasing more agents for the store to do more work to help them be more competitive against big big box stores >> 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. Uh, >> seems very very unique uh market, too. Very unique. hard to compete with you having probably done all of these different jobs at 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 Brandon. >> Thank you so much for coming. >> Come back on soon. >> Yeah, we'll talk to you soon. >> Have a good one. >> Up next, we have Nate Ter from True Short. He's the founder and CEO here to talk about funding from Coastal Ventures Wonderco. bunch of Hollywood investors for AI generated vertical films for mobile. The Teenator, >> welcome to the show. >> What's going on, dude? >> How you doing, Nate? >> Guys, good to see you. Let's go. >> Let's go. >> Uh, first time on the show. Introduce yourself. Tell us about the company. Tell us about the product. >> Uh, Nate Ter, 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 m movies them full stack creative company >> vertically integrated. Uh what is the like how how do customers experience this 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 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 Tik Tok. People are consuming this on their phone vertically short form. So, we kind of took that exact same approach, but not necessarily >> we had that realization probably a year ago, too. We were looking at some of the 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? Uh is this uh and someone else had a realization like this years ago, >> one of your investors, a good good friend of ours, uh Jeffrey Katzenberg. Uh you got him into the round. Why uh what did he see in kind of your approach that would um you know make uh 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. >> We just took a very strategic like Amazon launch with books. We took a niche wedge approach and within six months were the number one true crime map three million in annualized revenue. 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? >> Who makes James Cameron? >> Yeah, let's go. I like that. Um, we uh we actually just opened an office in LA. And so the we 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 of 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 uh 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 sharable? One of the critiques of Quibby was that you couldn't screenshot or 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 Tik Tok and Instagram and like let me steal the ad revenue. That's not going to work. So, how are you 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. Um, and like grow growth is in our DNA. Jord knows this, but our last app was number one in the app store for health and fitness. I think it had close to a billion views on Tik Tok. Let's go. Um, and we I mean, look, we run like kind of similar playbooks. We're super growth hacky. running many different Tik Tok accounts. Like we know how to do all that stuff. Okay. Um >> steal it yourself. >> You steal the content yourself. That's probably the right move. Yeah. Clip. 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. But uh but I do want to be straight up too like the micro drama 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. >> Yeah. 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 the YouTubes of the world, the Tik Toks to actually roll out dedicated micro drama features? I >> Tik Tok did. >> Okay. So, Tik Tok 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 are going. It feels like it feels like this business to me will >> over time probably look more like a A24 that owns its own distribution and actually sells the product because you're going to get like competition from all the >> platforms. 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, they keep coming back. YouTube YouTube had uh >> Is that is that is that 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 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 maintain just pure platform. Uh Netflix obviously does productions and 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 uh approach. >> Yeah. I think I think the key will be creating a setup where a pod can make more money like building on True Short 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? M like is it YouTube? Is it Netflix? Is it true short? I think there we we're gonna see emerging films which is already happening that are actually high quality that people want to watch. Where are people going to watch them? I don't I don't know yet. Um 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 base case is like a two-minute episode, maybe 10 episodes per story. Uh is that roughly correct? And then like do you think there'll be wide variation like we see a 90minute movie and then a three-hour epic from Nolan every once in a while? Like where do you see the dials turning? >> Yeah, I mean I actually view this micro drama 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. >> Mhm. >> Right. And so it's actually if you still want to go watch a full twohour length movie, you're going to 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, one to two 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 I do intuitively. We're launching it later this month. Um 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 we're making now is real IP people that will have fans. So, so true crime, true short. There's obviously a linkage there, but the the name True Short 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 road map? >> Um, I don't want to say too much yet about exactly what direction because like it's we're still discussing Yeah. it. What I will say is like there are a lot of opportunities now around niche genres. >> Yeah. What about um >> I think that's interesting. >> What about like pseudo or semi uh usergenerated content? Uh HBO, you need an agent. It's incredibly high bar to get your your your media product, your movie or show on HBO. Uh Amazon Prime sort of has a self-publishing like route if you're really creative. Uh and Kindle self-publishing. you can publish a book uh without any sort like I think it needs to meet standards but it doesn't uh necessar it's like an app store review not it's maybe just one notch above YouTube to publish on uh the Amazon suite of products how are you thinking about uh engaging like that random the next James Cameron who isn't in LA and 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 for these million filmmakers that are coming and curation and taste is going to be really important things like that. Um 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 micro dramas 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 it we could 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? >> Dude, I knew you were going to ask me to do that. Not me. But but I will plug I will plug uh check out my band Pink Roses on Spotify. If you know Dave Fontinaut, my band mate. What's >> amazing? Yeah, we had Dave on the show. >> Yeah, they've had this crazy side quest of being rock stars. >> Amazing. >> It's amazing. >> Actually, it actually has millions of streams. You like it? >> Well, congratulations on the round. I don't know if we hit the gong. >> Hit it again. Boom. >> Thanks. >> Great to see you, Nate. >> We'll talk to you soon. Make a micro make a micro drama about Tyler the intern's life at TVPN. >> Should we use his likeness? >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> Oh, this is not recorded. >> There's a lot of training data, too. So, >> I'm at it. >> Well, later. >> See you, Nate. >> Thank you so much. Uh, our next guest is the co-founder and CEO of Run Roadrunner, a new company for AI native revenue infrastructure. Jub, >> I like the sound of that, John. that again. Welcome to the show. How you doing? >> Hey guys, >> thanks so much for joining. How you doing? >> It's happening. Revenue infrastructure. >> I love revenue and I love infrastructure. >> Yeah, we we we we talked a couple years ago, but uh for those who don't know you, please introduce yourself and the company. >> Uh I'm Juben. You guys pronounced my name right, both first and last, which I was I was impressed by. >> Uh I am uh one of the co-founders and the CEO of Roadrunner. Thanks for having me. Yeah, nice to meet you. Uh, I mean, introduce the product, introduce the problem, uh, 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 uh, 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. Mhm. >> And I actually didn't believe them cuz 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, so I've been the consumer of this problem. 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. >> Uh, so you said that the the existing solutions were low NPS. Was the market also highly fragmented? That's often like the Keith Ra boy lens that he likes to look at both low NPS and because if it's low NPS but there's just a 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 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 uh 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 SAS. Uh that became a subscriptionbased billing. Then we went from SAS 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 on 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, uh, 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, uh, 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 the decision of what what platform to use but then the end user is different. So can you sort of walk through the 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 CRO's 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. 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. And so um 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 um 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. >> Jordy. >> Yeah. Just you're like, I'm pretty good at sales. Why don't I sell something that requires buyin from every part of the organization? No, it's a great it's a great challenge, but it seemingly will be incredibly sticky once >> you get everyone bought in. Where 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 SAS on top of it or get some of your own data and fine-tune it. Like where are we on the frontier of like this problem being solved end to end by AI? >> Yeah. So, uh, during the the series A fund raise, the the hottest question was why won't Anthropic EU, 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. Um I think the the unique thing about this is you know at 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 at the header that on the y-axis you have a bunch of policy engines uh 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. Uh, tell us about the round. How much did you raise? I want to hit the gong. >> We, uh, we raised 27 million in total. There you go. There you go. And uh, uh, we announced the seed from KP, 5.2 mil, and then, uh, 22 million from, uh, with Founders Funding and KP doubling down. >> Any familial conflicts going on over there? Just kidding. Trey Stevens led the round. Don't worry, he's brothers with a mean. Uh, thank you so much for coming. >> Oh, I didn't I didn't even put that together. Yeah. Amazing. >> Anyway, >> family business. Love it. Love it. >> Have a good one. We'll talk to you soon. >> Thanks, guys. >> Goodbye. >> Thanks, guys. Talk soon. >> Uh, up next we have Roman Churn from Nebus. He's the co-founder and chief business officer. If you've been living under a data center, >> and Nebius is only up 15% today. So, we'll ask him. >> The AI cloud division posted 841% year-over-year revenue growth. Uh earnings per share beat expectations significantly. Uh 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? >> Great. Thank you for inviting. Uh I must say that uh I think three meetings ago, >> yes, >> someone said me that I need to take a nap. >> So don't be surprised. I just fell >> fell apart here. I can imagine you're working nonstop right now. Uh how long have you been working on this? I feel like Nebius is in the news every day, but can you take us back a little bit on your journey uh with this company? >> Yeah, so I I I'm with Nebios from the very beginning and uh Nebios uh officially uh in the current shape of the company exist from summer 2024. So less than 2 years. >> Yeah. Uh but we as a team had experience longer than that. Yeah. >> Uh um you you maybe know that core team came out from Yandex which was a large Russian internet company. >> Yeah. >> And uh yeah we started with quite a unique mix of talent that helped us to start like really fast. Uh >> so uh I mean people know Nebius Neocloud but that can mean a lot of things. How are you describing the shape of the business? How are you describing the >> Before Before we get into that, what's the other what's the other spin out that's also on a tear >> from Yandex? >> Yandex. >> Yeah. Yeah. You maybe know Click House. >> Click House. >> Click House. That's right. >> The Yandex. >> Yeah. The talent bash at Yandex seems to have been just like genuinely insane. So yeah, >> you you can find a lot of uh other startups that uh or companies that created with uh Xandex people. >> Yeah. Uh not really mafia. uh uh talking about how we describe our business uh I don't really like the word new cloud because uh I think it's too broad definition of too many companies that do different things like uh uh 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 uh we like to say about us that we build vertically integrated full stack AI specialized cloud AI specialized cloud so that's that's what we think we do and u I think that the difference of like Neo cloud or bare metal compute and cloud is quite significant because it's completely different developer experience right so uh if you need to come and rent a large cluster and wait like 6 months it to be delivered and then sign it for 3 years and run it. Probably it's not really real cloud experience, right? Uh uh in the cloud you expect more flexibility, faster time to value, more uh tools that you can use as a developer, more layers of the value. So yeah, >> how do you think about uh 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. Uh, and then at a certain point, open source catches up, different models uh, sort of commoditize. But if you're an enterprise and you found that, you know, GPT4 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 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. Um, how are you how are you trying to understand what's happening with those workloads that have been sort of baked into the economy already? Like the the AI diffusion story is is done because that capability has has been adopted fully. >> Uh, 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 uh differentier models quite >> quite fast probably >> I mean I think that like there is 3 6 months gap >> like that we see for the most of the tasks uh and we see that a lot of people a lot of customers when they come to the scale The uh uh so the journey is you start with the frontier model. You 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 the economics uh 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 uh like same or close to same uh performance and quality for times uh lower cost. uh you need you you're actually switching and it's not easy to switch because you need to cook those models. Nobody uses obviously vanilla models. Uh you need to like you need to figure out your data and so on so forth. But again if you scaled you you you have a lot of value there. And then what you need from infrastructure where 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 uh that's like the layer uh the next layers of the offering that we'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, uh, but but on on on the near and midterm, how are you thinking about uh semiconductor bottlenecks versus energy bottlenecks? We've been going back and forth on this. Both are in short supply. What's keeping you up at night? >> I'm lucky person. I'm more on the product and demand side and it's a lot of fun. So I I really I >> Yeah. Being the being the demand guy during the explosion demand has got to be great. >> Yeah. The the best worker. Yeah. The best work in the world. Yeah. So people hug you and uh but uh but no I I think that now uh obviously the physical kind of the physical infrastructure the the even not the energy itself but like getting from green field to having data center that works and full of GPUs is actually the big uh the big the big challenge and I like the the bottlenecks like like along the 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 uh all the uh all the complexity. So uh I really kind of take my head off uh from like uh in front of the people who uh who who are bringing those like gigawatt capacity online and uh that's challenging work. >> Can you uh so how do you there there's such overwhelming uh 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 they'll work with uh like a third tier supplier just because it's their only option. Uh you guys have shown, you know, tremendous uh capability. Um and so but but but then again, it's like how do you know if you're actually doing an exceptional job? >> It's a good question. Uh I I think the race is uh is so that you never know are you good enough or not. So you look like oh you're growing like whatever you're growing like seven times a year or so. Uh uh 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 seven times in the last four months and you're like okay probably we need to move. >> I got to grind harder. Uh yeah and but you you there is another component that I think is uh people speak less about which is uh how you finance all that. So uh um it you ask about like the bottlenecks in the chips, you ask 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 uh that you need to do efficient like and fun like financing like finance enough and finance smart to not eat all your margins. It's it's a part of the uh the science here. >> Uh what is a job at Nebius that is sort of the unsung hero of the business? Besides besides you, but we're singing for you now. No, >> we get sung for. All the customers are sing. >> They're hugging. They're hugging you, you said. >> Yeah. Yeah. Like >> But but is it like somebody that's like perfect? >> Yeah. Boots boots on the ground. >> I Yeah. No, I I think that our business is very much like it's any cloud business to be honest. It's post sales. Uh 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. Uh 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 uh underappreciated but uh in general uh uh delivery in this and I started with that it's execution business it's it's a it's it's not not that it's not it's it's it's it's less magic it's A lot of a lot of boring execution in each layer starting from finance like physical infrastructure, software, uh customer kind of facing engineering, support like every piece and then only magically everything comes together from supply chain to customerf 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 Nebia? I'd love to know the philosophy and uh and strategy there. >> Yeah. Uh this 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 always looking for people who can accelerate us >> and it's uh it should be exceptional talent and it should and or it should be uh something that uh had a great adoption. our two recent acquisitions that we announced just like with a two two weeks pose uh uh two teams that two two teams that work on uh uh infrance optimization. So you can think uh again our part of big part of our business is how efficient we convert GPUs into tokens and like uh value for for the customers and these are two teams one of them uh AEN AI another clarify AI. Uh one is very much focused on model optimization like the the engine of inference how how you run specific model and uh uh uh all the techniques around spec decoding quantization and so on and another is more like system optimization all the routing k 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 And 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 uh uh every every 3 months you can lose the uh the pay like so so big pie so big piece of the pie. >> Uh >> and it's going to show up in your in your margins and your earnings obviously which are important. Now if you if you don't if you have unoptimized chips you're not going to get the yields that you want. the the results and the tokconomics are going to flip. >> Yeah, that's true. And and also what is important that uh 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 uh serve all these fast growing uh vertical AI companies and enterprise adoption. Yeah. >> Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. Uh 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 you'll sleep uh in a few years? Um, I will take a nap now. >> Fantastic. >> Just a nap. It's I know you're you're uh 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. >> Well, thank you so much for coming on the show, Roman. We'll talk to you soon. >> Have a good one. Goodbye. Uh, the last post I want to talk about today uh is about video games. Of course, there's a individual who beat uh is this a Dark Souls boss or uh 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 he's playing on a green screen or something because uh 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 very well might very well produce some of the fittest people. >> Yeah. >> I don't like the aesthetics of of of this. >> You don't? >> Uh, not at all. >> You think you should You're more in >> But I shouldn't knock it till we try it. >> You're more a fan of I've seen it. Let's get >> You're more a fan of of unironic laring like live action role playing where you get the like uh the SD Kid concert. You You're a fan of that. Put on the actual armor. Do the real battle. Yes. >> Don't play the video game version of that. That's a poor lock room. >> Yeah. Hit the park. >> Hit the park. >> Or find a multiplayer version of that. Just get another human to stand next to you and you can learn defense. >> Uh before we go, what >> there's some there's more of a scuffle on the timeline around meet the meet GC campaign. 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 with that. >> Really interesting. I did notice that the actor that plays the uh the General Catalyst character is like overthe-top handsome in the sense that like the original Apple, Mac, and PC ad uh Justin Long, he's sort of like an everyman and uh and the uh and the car and and the 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 all I'm all I'm saying is I think uh I think we got a Drake Kendrick situation on our hands. I think the new media team at Andre needs to respond. They need to try to dunk on uh >> General Catalyst >> GC. Okay. >> I want to see a war. I want to see a It should be a blood battle. >> Um anyways, >> demanding acrimony in the tech industry sewing descent. >> Yeah. No, no, they they need to get >> What about peace? What about >> they need to get revenge? Mark says, "This is a clear inversion, clever inversion of the original Mac vers PC commercials. This time in 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 war now because of this. Because >> we're going to get a VC content wrapping up. >> No one would know what General Catalyst is until now. Now there's a fight and it's working. No, just kidding. Uh, it is entertaining though. >> Very fun. >> Well, duke it out. >> Duke it out. >> Good campaign. >> It's time. >> I I do I do >> Eric Torberg Reggie the first. Oh yeah, that's a matchup there. Uh, it is just I I mean to, you know, put aside the the war. Uh, it is just interesting seeing a produced 30 seconds, 60-cond ad for a venture capital firm. It is sort of a first. I can't >> I just to see a a nonviol meta that was sort of played >> loud at this point. >> So we got we got to go a different direction and we're going to TV ads. We're going to television full 30 seconds highly produced ads running on the Super Bowl on Saturday and live. I don't know when would VC advertise. >> Uh >> Bloomberg CNBC I don't know. We got to get on with London. >> Yes. >> So, we will see you tomorrow. >> Leave us five stars on Apple Podcast and Spotify. Sign up for the newsletter at tbn.com. And we will see you tomorrow at 11 11:00 a.m. Pacific. Sharp. >> We love you. Goodbye. >> Goodbye.