WWDC, Jobs Up, Stocks Down, VC Horror Stories, Cars and Planes

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We're back at the capital of capital. >> It's so good to be back. >> So good to be back. And it's also so good to tell you about ramp.com. Time is money. Say both. These use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. Oh, the soundboard with the stinger with the ad read. Chef's kiss. >> Chef's kiss. >> WWDC. Also, chef's kiss. long overdue. Two years, two WWC's ago, we were talking about Apple Intelligence and it's all finally coming together. The package is finally uh being delivered. I think the response has been really good. Some of the guys on the team have been watching WWC already. We have a bunch of folks calling in to discuss WWC throughout the week. But let's give you the high level first. Go through some of the immediate reactions and of course we'll be covering that throughout this week. So, Apple's annual Worldwide Developers Conference started today and it runs through Friday. Tim Cook just kicked it off with an opening keynote. The theme for this year's conference is all systems glow. All systems glow little interesting. Anyway, um we're finally getting answers about what the next version of Siri will look like. I think expectations expectations are in a weird place. Like they're high. Everyone's expecting like this next version of iOS, which is what they're demoing. That's the main thing of the software version. This isn't an iPhone event. Uh this isn't a hardware event. This is WWDC about the software. Everyone's expecting that the software will go through an actual transformation and the next version of Apple software will be good and people will be talking about how good it is because they will deliver on a bunch of things. At the same time, expectations aren't so high like going into Apple Vision Pro where people are are expecting a breakthrough that's no one no other company has ever done before. All people are asking for is implement the best practices from ChatBT, Gemini, Claude, like the stuff we know and love. Even Grock has like nicely inter interfaced into X where like people say, "Hey Grock, is this real?" And it just pulls it up for you. I find myself on tweets just going, "Oh yeah, like I don't want to copy this text out and into another LLM app. I'm happy just asking Grock real quick for an extra detail or one more fact." Google search overviews. Like there's been a lot of AI diffusion into products that's been good. Even RAMP, like RAMP has like chat interface where you can just say like, "Hey, how much did we actually spend on Amazon last month?" And it'll just pull it up for you. And it's not like this revolutionary as a GI thing. It's just I think they did a nice tool. I think they did a good job uh just uh letting the hype build or or the interest build organically, right? You rewind. Yeah. A year or two ago, they were running billboards for Apple Intelligence, for Genoji, all this stuff. Uh so really setting themselves up for failure. >> So that stuff was overhyped and I think this >> and they were they were a part of they were they were they were hyping it themselves. >> Of course. Of course. >> They were like, "Are we coded?" >> Yeah. But it seems like they have the right partnerships and the and the right like product strategy at this point. People are familiar with these tools. So just putting them in different places seems reasonable. Models are good now. So make them available at the click of a button. Ideally the Siri button which has been completely nerfed for the last two years. Um actually more than that because Siri has has never really seen the adoption or love product love that many other products have seen. Uh and users will be happy. So Google search Google AI search overviews are a good example. It proved that rolling out LLMs uh and rolling out LLM responses and LLM generated text. It can be nerve-wracking, but it's not rocket science. Like you spit the text out where people expect the answer. There will be funny viral hallucinations. Like right now, even with all the crazy Google IO news, amazing 5 point 3.5 foundation models, like they're doing really good stuff. Deep mind's really good great team like you still say disregard and instead of just giving you the definition it says like okay got it I won't I won't do that anymore and it's it gets confused. So there will be those like viral like jokey wow it failed it it flopped. That's going to happen to Apple and that's not what Apple likes to deal with. >> Not at all. >> But I don't think any of that will show up in the user metrics. I think uh I think that you know churn and usage will be unaffected from the viral moment of like oh Apple like the Apple uh text summaries they're hilarious and they often hallucinate and get things wrong at the same >> keep them on though. >> I left them on. I don't mind them. I and I think a lot of times they're sort of useful and they're always delightful because they're funny because they're so like hallucinatory. But uh your PR team will have many heart attacks uh though uh because you're not in the world of de uh deterministic outputs anymore. So that's going to be a big cultural shift for Apple I think in this uh non-deterministic stochcastic uh AI era. Uh but I think that they can get through it just by running best practices that have been established for a year in or two years in the rest of the AI world. Uh the other big questions that everyone's asking around uh Ben Thompson circling around this uh open ecosystems. So, will Apple lean into the open claw Mac mini boom at all? That would be interesting to see. Say, you know, in in the next version of the software that goes on the Mac Mini, hey, we're going to embrace Open Claw. We're going to embrace a AI agents. We're going to do things that make those tools more effective in our ecosystem. You already know and love the hardware. You're buying it non-stop. It's out of stock. But we could do more to lean into that community. Or we could do less. We could say, "Hey, we're going to shut it down. We're worried about privacy. These are the two tensions that they're going to have to deal with. Uh, will there be a pivot around vibe coding apps in the iOS app store? You asked John Gruber from Daring Fireball this when he joined the show on May 29th. Fantastic interview. Had a ton of fun with the groupator. >> Um, but uh, it's a big question and it's something that Apple is maybe they don't really have to respond yet. They're pretty quiet when things happen. They usually go and solve the problem and >> Oh, they really don't want to talk about it. Uh yeah, but eventually they start like they didn't want to talk about climate change, but then they did a bunch of things to get to like net zero and eco-friendly buildings and solar panels on the roof and stuff and then once they did they were really noisy about it because they were like we are carbon neutral or we will be by a certain date >> and I think once they figure out how to make money on it then they'll start >> which they should >> which which yeah I fully I will say I fully support. >> Exactly. >> Um >> uh so there's others there's other questions. Will the will will native iOS apps from other AI labs have more access to iPhone functionality? What's the pathway for Chatbt interfacing? Claude, Gemini, if you're using those apps, how how how many hooks are there? Will they be able to siphon in your text messages if you click, yeah, I want to share my text messages, my iMessage with my app of choice, or will you need to will you need to say yes every single time? Which will be a huge burden to having that integration happen. Uh there's a lot of there's a lot of social media apps that say, "Hey, we want access to your whole camera roll, all of it, forever." And that's kind of somewhat intimidating. Uh you get a number of different options. You can say I want to temporary access. Just take this photo. You can't see my whole library. Now people trust many people, maybe they just don't know, but they they feel like they trust a lot of these maps. So they just say, "Yeah, yeah, take the whole camera roll." Sort of a crazy thing to do that they can just download your entire camera roll if you press that button. But people have and so what will the what will the AI version of that be? and how deep will it be and how much will it build on top of the uh Siri app intents functionality versus other APIs that are deeper in the iOS ecosystem. Um so lots to dig into and excited to talk to some guests. There's one last thing which is we I mean we talked about how Apple doesn't want to address eco stuff until it's like okay we got it solved and I'm wondering if in the coming years there's going to be pressure for some sort of response on the whole like phones are reducing the fertility rate stats because I don't know if you saw but there was another research paper that was posted and Derek Thompson basically uh zoomed out and said that I wasn't convinced and now he he is convinced that it's like up to 30% of the reason for the recent decline below two. Um, and I don't know where you sit on it. >> Below the replacement rate, >> below the replacement rate. Not good if you're a fan of humanity and having a high population. But, uh, that is something that you could see bubbling up to being something that big tech companies, social media companies, device manufacturers have to answer to when they're in like free form podcasts basically. But you know that these companies that you're not going to want to address as opposed to the AICOS that are like, "Oh, you want to talk about killing everyone?" Absolutely. I'd love to talk about that for an hour. >> The the PM of Denmark or what what country was saying it's time to return. I'd rather my >> No, she specifically said, "I would I would rather let my kids smoke cigarettes than use an iPhone, which is crazy." Um, but I don't know, maybe there's something there. Maybe the cure for cancer is right around the corner, but the cure for brain rod is not. It's possible. >> Yeah. It's such a different debate because like clearly a single drag on a heater >> Yeah. >> is no good, right? You're ingesting poison. >> Yeah. >> A single look, a single look at a screen, right, is not what is, you know, reducing uh the the fertility rate. >> Uh so anyways, >> it's interesting. I don't know. I I do wonder if how that pressure would bubble up like the way we have dealt as a society in America with those big questions before before the era where every AI lab CEO goes on podcast and just talks about everything constantly was in the hearings. So like a social media addiction trial or there is a uh a privacy uh you know hearing on on Capitol Hill and the senators all ask the they bring in the leaders from all the different companies and they say uh we we've heard that there's this problem and we want you to answer our questions directly and it's streamed on C-SPAN and you can see that uh and and so you know that's where the famous senator we sell ads quote comes from from Mark Zuckerberg and you could imagine that if there as an you know an administration and a group of senators that were worried about the birth rate thing and they believed that the phones were rel related. They could bring in device manufacturer social media executives and actually ask them about so so millions of people build software on top of the iPhone designed to addict people capture as much of their attention as possible. >> The Wall Street Journal app my screen time on the Wall Street Journal is through the roof. >> It's crazy. It's crazy John. Um, but Apple can kind of sit back and just saying like we're not trying to make the device addictive. We're trying to make it simple, easy to use. You It's a utility. >> And truthfully, like Apple, I think all of the native apps, none of them are brain rotty or addictive. They're very much like this is the maps app. It helps you get there. Close it when you're done. And we're our business relationship. >> Say you're not addicted. >> They have ads to the calculator app. >> Yeah. They have some, but in general, their business model is not really aligned with like screen time necessarily. Although it should it is in the broader sense because if you're using this thing all the time you're like h 2,000 bucks I use it 40 hours a week you know I I I can underwrite it like you know people buy an expensive bed and they're like I spend half my life on it or whatever you know. >> Yeah I always did think it was funny that there there never ended up being the you know the $20,000 phone which there would be a pretty big market for. A lot of it's just the technology. Like $20,000 gets you like 5% more battery life because like you need a 10 trillion dollar manufacturing facility to actually deliver any bump there. It's not like 10x the price gets you 10x the performance or 10x the like you can't put a GB200 in here. You can't put a Tesla battery in here. It just doesn't work. Uh anyway, let's go to some reactions from WWDC. But first, I'm going to tell you about Console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. So, on Apple, >> iPhone, I'm going to update your software tonight while you sleep. Next morning, iPhone says, I couldn't do it, bro. Just didn't feel right. Vibe was off. >> This is something that I didn't know was so common, but I think everyone's been in this position, which is like a funny thing. I think it has to do with how how much the batteries charged. Um, but lots of lowhanging fruit hopefully resolved in WWC. I did see a whole bunch of stats about uh just just little performance gains. 30% faster opening of the lock screen, 30% faster on opening this app and just little optimizations that I think will go a lot further. When we talk to Mark German, uh he talks about how like the AI features are too abstract. People want battery life, cameras, beautiful screens, fast, like they want the basics most of the time. And so I think this is uh time to chop. >> It would be funny if they they effectively threw up a model card >> and they're comparing. It's like the Bento box is the original model card. >> 2% better on >> that's sort of what they do. The you know the Bento box, right? the Bento box with like how many cameras megapixels flops and how powerful the GPU is, how many cores are over here, how much storage it has, like that graphic is their model card. We we we were riffing on this earlier like when a product ceases to be sold on brand and in and is instead sold on performance, uh that's usually >> margin compression. Usually margin compression, like you comp it to cars, like if you're purely buying on like range and price and speed and uh horsepower and seating arrangements, that feels much more commoditized than you got to have a Ferrari because it's a Ferrari. Don't ask about the specs. And I think for for the luch, this is the first time that people were talking about like, oh, 0 to 60 and 2.5 for that price isn't actually that good. It's like that's not the conversation you should be having about Ferrari. You should just be like, "It's a Ferrari. Stop. Ne next next question." Like, "Do you want one or not?" Right. Yeah. Anyway, uh speaking of Mark German, uh hilarious post from Sam Henry Gold here. Of course, in justest, but they put up a Apple press release in the newsroom. Apple announces the death of Mark German. >> It is done. >> It is done. Apple today announced the completion of Operation One More Thing, a multi-year initiative to permanently end the unauthorized disclosure of Apple's pre-release product information by Bloomberg intelligence reporter Mark German. German who had for 16 consecutive years obtained and published accurate details about Apple's products before their announcement has been neutralized. Operation One More Thing was completed on schedule, on budget, and without complication. They're not that aggressive towards Mark Kerman, but he is probably a thorn in their side. And here he is. He has a live blog up, live blog for WWDC. Go check it out at bloomberg.com. Uh, Eric Seurt is leaning in. Why is he leaning in? Because Mark German says something about WWC. Says, "In addition to the focus on AI, Siri, and major quality and performance improvements across the operating systems. I'd expect two other focal points today. Privacy and safety features. I imagine sufort is leaning in because privacy safety features not great for ad monetization. Usually you're hiding more information. Tyler, what what's been your reaction generally? Take me through whatever. >> Yeah, I' I've been watching the live stream. It's still going on. So there's they're still releasing stuff. But I I would say just on that point, they've been like >> Have you been watching or have you been studying? >> I was studying >> like every time they talk about a new feature with AI, they always say like this is on a private cloud. >> Uh this is like not public. this is like extremely secure. So they're they're really pushing on that point, I think. >> What does private cloud mean? >> I don't know. They're talking about like their own foundation models, I think. So they're trying to emphasize that. >> It seems like they have >> Have they said the word Gemini? >> Uh I don't know if they said it, but it was on screen. So, so it's it seems like they have the ability with their deal with Gemini to >> basically white label, fine-tune, mid-train, do whatever they need to, and then resell that with their own branding. That's a great deal. My question is like, who's inferencing that? Because there's a there's a billion iPhone users and if they're all pushing the Siri button all day long and they're anywhere near the frontier, that's a significant amount of inference. And has Apple built some sort of secret data center that can serve that? Are they are they are they saying private cloud and really it's like a corner of GCP? Like where is it a bunch of Mac minis wired together? Like what did they do to actually build that private cloud? because even even if they did it even if they did it and it didn't show up in the capex numbers didn't show up in the in the any of the uh SEC filings like it would show up in the emissions data and the and the ESG numbers because unless they have some crazy solar nuclearpowered facility where is that inference coming from I imagine some of it can be done on device that's exciting >> yeah Jonah says on device >> can it all be done on device like >> Tyler >> I don't Oh, >> Groxen says they brought up rate limits and a subscription plan. >> Huh? >> Did you see that? >> Yeah, >> I'll look for that. >> I mean, you don't have rate limits or subscription plan if it's on device because why would you? Uh, and then also, um, you would never say private cloud if you're doing it on device. You would just say it's on device. Of course, it's private. So, private cloud, cloud means not on device. It's in the cloud. And so, I obviously Apple has a lot of data centers. have a lot of cloud capacity across their their productivity suite. Where are the where are the photos stored in photos? Like obviously those are stored in the cloud. They have a lot of storage. Like everyone gets two terabytes when they get a phone. So they clearly have a lot of data center capacity and they've done a lot to make that ESG compliant. But I'm very curious about where that goes over time. Anyway, we should move on to the uh to the the the news from Friday. The stocks are already back up. But first, I'm gonna tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. Crowd Strike secures AI and stops breaches. So, >> uh, one more thing. Apparently, >> one more thing. >> One more thing. >> We got one more take from Jordan about Apple. >> Jane says, uh, Apple conceds on liquid glass design, compromising for usability, and shares a couple screenshots here. Uh, and so >> wait, so they're going deeper in liquid glass or pulling back from pulling back? I I saw the new uh the new Apple Maps icon and uh it looked pretty good. It it had a little feature of liquid glass in there. I thought it looked cool as a design element. Um people I I did hear people complaining about the new Mac uh operating system being like too too bright or too dark or something like some contrast issue. I haven't noticed it, but it was something I saw people complaining about. Anyway, Friday Friday was a big day in the market. We were off, but uh the news kept moving, so we're covering it today. Uh the labor department reported that the US added a seasonally adjusted 172,000 jobs and that the unemployment rate remained unchanged at 4.3%. So on the cover of the Wall Street Journal, US hiring gathers steam, third straight monthly increase. uh slight decrease from the previous month which was slight down from the previous month but still in adding territory in the hundreds of thousands. So uh the bubble popped the bubble popped um Friday was the worst day for the NASDAQ in more than a year. 4.2% down. It's over. But good news is that today we're back. We're up 1.5% now. Uh it's officially 2003. People ask what year it is >> reinflating. >> It's No, no, it's not reinflating. We're building back. The bubble popped. It's 2003 now. It's not 99. It's not 2000. It's 2003. We're well past the bubble popping. Got it. >> Right. >> So, uh, but actually quick explanation what happened. So, uh, the US labor market is really picking up. 172,000 seasonally adjusted jobs added in May. Third month in a row, >> decent amount. >> Lot of healthare stuff. >> World Cup. >> Yes. And a lot of travel and uh and and workers related to the World Cup stuff that's going on. Tourism. So, uh, this is terrible news for all those blackpilled AI leaders that have been praying, manifesting job losses, despite their herculan efforts. They can't get the unemployment rate to go up at all. It's crazy. They've been saying 10%, 20%, 50%, 100% of all jobs are going away. Good luck. Yeah, you're going to have to work harder because the US economy is undefeated and the American worker is undefeated as evidenced by this latest jobs report. No. Um, the AI job apocalypse is canceled at least for the month of May. We will see where things go. Of course. Of course. But it is good news. We want hiring. We want jobs to be abundant in our society. Uh, and so in general, it's good news. I I I believe the jobs report. I don't think the numbers are going to be massively revised down. I think that uh they're they're they're generally accurate and track with the ADP numbers and a lot of other numbers. So, um, I think the jobs are are really being added. They're not in all the most critical industries. There's a lot of nuance there. How long will it go on? But in general, the economy is healthy. Uh but inflation is rising. The closing of the straight hormuz has spiked the cost of gas and overall prices have been increasing more quickly than the Fed would like. For some time, even before the straight of her muse, inflation was running a little hot. >> Yeah. Well above the 2% target. Yes. For basically as long as I've been an adult. >> Yeah. And so uh this makes the likelihood of a rate cut more unlikely. In fact, it looks like we might be in rate hike territory soon, which is of course not good for tech companies that have earning forecasts that stretch out into the next decade. So the silver lining in high rates, if you want some copium, is that at least the Fed has something useful in the tool chest in case the economy does slow down. you know, like we're running hot. We have eye rates. At least there's room to cut to 3%, 2%, 1%, zero. If the market's selling off, if the unemployment rates going up, you have something in the tank. Whereas, uh, in during COVID, like the rates were already so low, there was a lot of unemployment all of a sudden, and it was just like stimulus, spend a bunch of money, uh, you know, send mail everyone a check. There wasn't that much that the Fed could do. >> Yeah. There was a time that we couldn't imagine this level of speculation in the markets at something like a at at where rates are right now, right? Uh >> people that were sort of born in the ZER era uh with with all the speculation right now is by itself an argument to raise rates even further. >> Totally. Well, yeah. Once the rates spiked uh off of like uh like that 3% jump like the end of Zerp, it was like okay like like there will never be froth again. Certainly >> certainly like tech stocks will never see a friend of mine Blake made bumper stickers that just said please God just one more bubble >> and god delivered. Okay so the other story VC horror stories this uh this was kicked off by Greg Eisenberg. I didn't realize that he was the one that started this whole thing and kicked the hornets nest and everyone came out of the woodwork with their VC horror stories. Um, so he said uh he had a big discussion about founders bad experience with venture capital and a number of high-profile firms VCs caught strays. Merkor CEO Brendan Foody detailed what he calls the Sequoia scam. Uh, which is something interesting we should actually dig into. Uh, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince accused Venode Kosla of offering to invest in his series C only if he would fire a few of of the people at the pitch meeting who had just left the room momentarily to go to the bathroom. See, there was a separate So, Greg Eisenberg, I I was really crossing wires here because Greg Eisenberg is the one who says uh he says, "I was once pitching in a boardroom at a top three VC firm for a $15 million series A." That's pretty easy to narrow down, but anyway, he says 12 people in the meeting. One of the GPS fully fell asleep because some of the top like you know FF doesn't have 12 GPS. They don't really do partner meetings like this. uh for $15 million series A. So even if you put him in the top three, you got can't catch a stray here. Anyway, one of the GPS fully fell asleep out cold for 30 plus minutes. Nobody acknowledged it. Everyone kept going. Then separately, Matthew Prince, >> okay, founder or or an operator falls asleep in the office because they're so tired because they're grinding so hard and they're a hero. >> Yeah, this is what PY said. When Elon falls asleep in the in the factory, it's no big deal. But when a VC falls asleep, it's uh it's the end of the world. >> We're aware of some static in the Ultradome. >> Yeah, I think we got a new new uh new mic line, but we I'll try not to touch it and we'll see what happens. But um so there's lots of chatter about the VC horror stories. Certainly certainly a discussion worth having. You know, you got to keep them in check. But uh Silicon Valley has always been so high growth and positive sum that relatively good behavior is usually the equilibrium. Uh it's pretty rare that you get a really a really bad VC uh because even when a startup fails, investors can't write off the founder entirely because they might start the next generational company. And so they might wind up giving on a on a nonVC friendly sort of aqua hire because they're like and help or like help them land a paycheck somewhere, get a job, serve as a good reference, maybe even fund the next product in the next company because they're just like this is an iterated game and we don't want to have you on our bad side forever. Now that doesn't mean don't like they can't pass. And so there's basically this wide gap that I'm seeing in these discussions where there's VC pitch horror stories and then VC board horror stories. And I have much less sympathy for the former. Like I don't really care about VC pitch horror stories all that much. Um because you can just >> because because a lot of founders will have 50 meetings for financing. You would expect at least a couple to just be terrible, right? the person didn't know who you were, didn't read the materials ahead of time, was rude, >> and you might want that person show up. >> You might want a checked out VC who's just going to let you cook. And they're like, "Yeah, I see this purely financially. My my my team crunched the numbers. I'm in, but like don't count on me to value ad. Like, I'm not going to be in the weeds with you every day." And then there's a different there's a different VC who's like, "I'm going to be in the office. I'm going to be your back." Best VCs will not even tell you, "Oh, I'm going to be grinding for you every day. I'm going to be helping you get on." Yeah. They'll just tell you, "One of my favorite VCs in the world just says like, I >> give you money and then I will help you raise more money and that's the only thing I'm going to do and I'm going to be your friend. We'll get dinner now and then, but that that's what you can expect from me." And that's exactly what he gives founders. And so, everyone is like, "This guy's great." >> Yeah. >> And then there's other there's other firms that say, "Uh, we'll help you with go to market." and they will. There's other people that say we will help you with marketing and they don't. And you just want to be transparent and accurate there. Uh and so like as a founder, your job is to sell equity from time to time. Your job is to find buyers for that equity. Investors actually only do that. >> That's true. They don't stock the product occasionally. >> Uh so your job is to find investors who want to purchase that that equity with cash. VCs, you need to reference check them beforehand. Make sure they're fit through think through their competitive investments. keep them entertained and awake during the pitch. VCs shouldn't be disrespectful. Like literally falling asleep is uh but this is the far this is far from the worst thing that regularly happens in the course of growing a business. >> Yeah. >> Well, yeah. And it's it's it's just interesting because one a bad VC pitch meeting like you said really doesn't matter. >> I don't remember any of them. I'm sure they've happened. >> No company has died because a VC was like rude to them or fell asleep or any of these things. And it also happens with customers, right? Sometimes a customer will just did oh sorry I didn't see the zoom link you no show the call right you're not like all customers are evil or like or like a candidate will be like hey I like took another role yeah right and you're like that doesn't mean the person's evil it means like they're making >> the right decision >> you win some loss for themselves so I have a tip I have a tip for all the entrepreneurs in the audience who are pitching VCs particularly sleepy VCs you got to analogize your business to an air horn So you you go to the VCs, the partnership, and you say, "Like this air horn here." Do we have any You have an air horn. Like this air horn here. >> Tyler, grab the air horn >> with one simple button press. >> You can do it. You can do it over there. >> Okay. So like this air horn. My business is like this air horn. My business is like this air horn. Venture capitalist. >> Don't put it in the mic. >> Like my business is like this air horn. One simple press. I'll amplify your business 100x. Everyone's going to be paying attention because at any moment you might push this button and let out the loudest noise so they're not going to be falling asleep. And if you and if they do, you give them a little bit of this. So loud. It's really so loud. So you got to bring the air horn to the VC pitch meeting. You got to fire it off every once in a while. If you see some sleeves, some droopy eyes, let them know my business is like an air horn. I could push it at any time. 10x your business. 10x the revenue was being this morning. >> My customers love it. >> My customers love it. Uh yeah, the air horn. You can go get >> You think I might press it. See, you're not falling asleep at any moment. At any moment, I I might need I might need to drive home the point that business is like an air horn. And at any moment, it could blast off like a rocket ship. So, you got to buy the stock now. You got to invest. You got to get me a term sheet because at any moment, at any moment, I could do it. The team's so distracted they can't even get the right camera on me. Anyway, uh that's enough of the air horn. Uh we use that randomly from time to time. >> I love Dylan coming in. We pitched for Figma's seed round in 2013. Most folks didn't get it, but everyone I met was super nice to me. >> Uh yeah, it's so funny when you when you compare when you compare VCs to the other, like I said, the other kinds of calls you have. Yeah. VCs are probably like generally nice way way nicer, right? like a a customer is less likely to like be overly friendly if they're not interested in what you're selling, right? They're like, "Yeah, this like >> doesn't really seem like a, you know, it doesn't really seem like a fit." Yeah. >> Um >> but uh >> or a regulator, >> talk to any VC, talk to any founder who's dealt with a regulator, like look at like Brian Armstrong, has he had any problems with VCs that match up with what he's dealt with on the regulatory side? those meetings, everyone's asleep and they're like, "Oh yeah, like we'll get you approval in the next decade >> and we're trying to we're actually trying to shut your whole company." >> Exactly. Like >> they're falling asleep, but as they're falling asleep, they're like, "It's over for you." >> It's very rare that a VC is in a meeting with you and actively trying to trying to kill your business. Every once in a while, they're like, "Okay, I'm going to go fund a competitor because I don't like this founder." And that's just like the competitive dynamic. You're in the arena. Uh but anyway, >> um Brendan from her core, former guest and friend of the show, uh is has a bone to pick with uh everyone. >> Yeah. >> Uh he's coming after YC. He's coming after Sequoia. >> He is. >> Uh he says, "In the last six months, I've seen half a dozen rounds where Sequoia invests in two tranches. Everyone pretends they only did the higher valuation. Founders misrepresent this to their employees and then shop it to angels, too. Sequoa's blended price is blatantly deceptive. 50 uh uh less than 50% of the one projected to the market. >> So they'll invest at half a billion and a billion at two tanches and then the founder will go out and say we raised 100 million at a billion when really Sequoia got in at the blended price, right? Um now that's not illegal. There's nothing wrong with that and that can make sense for both sides for a variety of reasons. Uh you don't want to misrepresent that though. If you go and misrepresent that to another investor and you don't tell them the actual structure of the deal, that can be securities fraud. So that is a major risk. But that's not on the VC. Like the VC should not go to another investor and say, "Oh yeah, we just did the full deal at a billion." They should give that context. Um but that doesn't seem like it's on the same quite a unique thing. This is like classic like all the crossover funds were doing this. Tons of funds have done this. this I mean also this isn't some secret like you go back to the original Sequoia YouTube investment memo and it's trunched and structured like they've been doing this for 25 years and it's just like nobody read nobody read the manual or something because like if you actually study and no ball like you would know that structured investments exist but >> at the same time I don't put it on every employee who's getting stock options and thinking about the heat on a company and every journalist to understand that structure so there is there is an impetus and a responsibility. >> Yeah. Very aggressive and unnecessary to call this aam >> the quote sequoia scam because Brendan also replied to his own tweet saying just 30 minutes ago after the post had gone viral in fairness to Sequoia this is common practice in the industry across top 1,000 likes on the other one. >> Brutal. >> Yeah. >> Uh yeah not super fair to Seoia at all. I do think it's I I think uh >> yeah employees employees should be aware of this and you know maybe ask the companies. Yeah. It doesn't mean that it's not a great company to join. >> Yeah. >> Um >> that's tough. Anyway, uh Travis Kalanick said in 2001 I intercepted a partner at a VC was trying to escape his office before our meeting was supposed to start. I ended up pitching him in his parked Lexus uh from the passenger seat. At one point he grabbed my laptop, placed it on his large belly, which was pressed against the steering wheel and rapidly flipped through the slides himself. 2001 fundraising hit different. >> I want to know how the story ended. >> Did he invest or not? >> Did he pull out his checkbook? >> Cuz maybe he was like, "You got me, Travis." You know? Anyway, uh there's a lot of people that are going back and forth. I really the the worst part of this is that over the weekend I was convinced because Matthew Prince talked about Venode Kosla who's coming on the show by the way and Matthew Prince is coming on the show. We're very excited to have them both same day. Um the I was convinced that it was Venode who fell asleep >> but it wasn't that's a different thing. Greg Eisenberg's uh found VC at one of the top three firms could be anybody fell asleep. Venode. Uh what Matthew Prince is is is upset about is that uh there's something about he wanted to, you know, uh redo redo the team, the founding team. He was like, do you need all these founders? Maybe you need a different team. Which is like it's a bold statement from a VC. Like it's like would you switch up on your day ones? First question. And you're like no. Okay. >> Not even your day ones, your current business partners. >> Yeah, your current business partners >> for a new partner. >> It's sort of a crazy thing. Uh at the same time, sometimes founding teams do go through changes. Sometimes it's the right move. Uh I don't know. It's uh it's a little it's a little it's a little iffy, but uh Venode, you know, stands uh not guilty on the charges of falling asleep. Although I was getting ready to steal man it because I think as much as I love Cloudflare and Matthew Prince, some details of content delivery networks might be a little boring. And so it's possible that an older man who's a legend and has done very well investing might fall asleep when he's hearing about the intricacies of delivering content across the internet. And we actually we actually had a plan to test this theory. Tyler, do you want to take us through it? >> Yeah. Well, so I I was just looking at this. I found a study. Um basically it was you they took a bunch of of older men 66 to 83. >> This actually they put them in a room where it was kind of a slightly dim room. Okay. >> There's not a lot of like >> a lot of VC offices. They're very >> they just sat in there. They read them Cloud Flares S1 >> and and they basically tested to see how long would it take them to fall asleep. And so the median was uh 36.9 minutes. >> I feel like Okay. So >> So if you and here's the thing, a pitch usually an hour. >> Well, sometimes I mean if it's an early pitch, early conversation, maybe it's 30 minutes. If it's going well, it starts to drift over. But that's the danger zone. danger zone. So, this is the lesson. This is the lesson for founders. If you have a boring business, if you have a boring business >> and you're pitching a VC who's an older gentleman, you got to keep the pitch meeting to less than 30 minutes. You got to bring the air horn. >> I think in that story, it also said uh the older gentleman was in a Herman Miller chair, which we know are quite comfortable. >> Those are quite popular in Silicon Valley, too. >> Certainly compounds the fact. >> Okay. >> Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's an elite >> spot for a nap. >> That's an elite spot for a nap. >> The chair was arguably designed for office naps. No one's getting like real work done in a Herman Miller, >> I think. So, so uh yeah, I I this one's tough because it's easy to just jump right a Matthew Prince's camp. Oh, I'm in Venode Coast camp. Also, uh Venode didn't fall asleep, so it's all moot. But, uh we know we know the secret. It's the air horn. Bring the air horn. No one's falling asleep. Problem solved. Problem solved. >> Tyler had a good story. Uh when when they were building Divvy, oh yeah, they pitched Rajie Misra in the Soft Bank Redwood City HQ. >> Uh and then Masa in Tokyo soon after. It was absolute cinema popping zins smoking a vape. Loud coughing is crazy to throw us off. >> Wait, what? Intentional coughing >> assistance whispering in Rajie's ear. That's a power move. That's a power move. >> You got to respect that. Sure. >> See, that's a post singularity job right there. >> For sure. Come in, whisper into the person's ear. It's good. >> Yum. >> Some of the most asine questions ever asked in Tokyo. Masa starts the meeting with you have 10 minutes. We flew like 20 hours. >> See, that's just a great way to get >> He's got a power play, Tyler. Sorry, buddy. You got I think you just >> I think that's just a great way to get like really get to the meat right quickly. >> I think so. What did TJ have to say? He said, "The VC meme is very funny. If someone's falling asleep not liking your idea or ghosting you gets you bent out of shape, NGMI. Go spend a day in private equity or try competing with an incumbent. Venture is arguably the most pleasant form of dealmaking in the world. And I agree. And I agree. So, uh >> I do I do like that Venode says, "Not only did we not fire them, we did not give them an offer to invest based on our assessment of the team." And then Matthew just responds with the term sheet. >> That's actually crazy. Cloudflare up to $100 million. 50 will come from KV series C pre- money 700. >> I like the node running the calculation. All right. >> I give it a 5% chance that he posts a term sheet. That would be absolutely insane. Only only a post IPO founder that's trying to buy a ski resort would ever do something as crazy as that. >> He forgot to he forgot to to to check in. >> Yeah. >> Um and of course Matthew Prince doesn't really have anything to lose at this point. >> Yeah. Well, having some fun. >> Fortunately, we're joined by another public company CEO, Will Marshall from Planet Labs Planet. Now, he's a co-founder and CEO. First, I'm going to tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market, your business on MongoDB, don't just build AI, own the data platform that powers it. And without further ado, let's bring in Will Marshall. Oo, new graphic. >> New graphic. How you doing, Will? Good to see you. >> Great to see you, too, guys. >> It's been too long. I I feel like we barely got to talk when we met a couple weeks ago, but uh it's great to have you on the show. I'm a huge fan of the company and uh uh but I want to go so much deeper, but since it's your first time on the show, why don't you kick us off with a little bit of the backstory on yourself and the company and then we can get up to speed with uh where Planet is going in the future. >> Yeah, sure. Well, for those of you that new to Planet, basically, uh, we help make change visible, accessible, and actionable. Help people make smarter decisions around the planet by having a fleet of over 200 satellites, the largest satellite fleet doing Earth imaging. They take pictures as they're going across the Earth's surface. >> We end up imaging the entire Earth land mass every day at about 3 m resolution. It's a huge amount of data, but we track everything across the planet. So, we liken it to Google that indexed the internet to make it searchable. We're indexing the Earth to make it searchable. With a combination of these satellites and AI on top, um, we're enabling people to make smarter decisions about what's going on on planet Earth. >> Walk me through the actual roll out of those 200 satellites. Obviously, you had partners on the launch side, but do you make your own cameras, your own lenses, satellite buses? like the company is been in business long enough that you're sort of like pre-space economy boom where there was a small startup for every piece of the stack. Um, but what was it like actually rolling all of those rolling those satellites out? >> Yeah. Well, it's very we're very vertically integrated. So, we build the radios, we build the computers, and everything that works together. We buy chips, but all of our boards are custom, our telescopes are custom, our radios are custom, and uh yeah, so basically, think of it a bit like assembling a smartphone. It's that sort of complexity, a spacecraft. Um we're not building millions of them like uh iPhones or what have you, but we're building uh dozens at a time. We typ we've launched on 40 rockets to get all of our satellites up to space. Um, we've launched over 600 or 700 la satellites at this point on 40 rockets. Typically, we're launching 20 or so per rocket. Most of the time we're secondary payload on on on another a billion dollar satellite that's going to launch or a set of other satellites that was going up. A couple of times, I think three times we bought our own rocket, but roughly speaking, we're we're we're hitchhiking at the launch site trying to get a ride to orbit. Um it's a little bit more complicated than that but not much. So the launch has become a little bit more routine now. Um especially with SpaceX which is really cool. Um but um but all the complexity is in the integration of all these satellites. the satellites working together, having to put ground stations all around the world that that collect all that data, send it back, and then we have a software company, if you like, that sits on top of all that data, doing all the analysis to make it usable for all of our uh clients. >> Yeah, it's really crazy as you say that stuff. I'm thinking of like Bridget Mendler's company that does ground stations now. And there's so many different pieces that you could like subcontract out in the modern era, but you had to do it all with like grit and figure it out yourself, I'm sure. >> Yeah. and you can contact them out. But I mean, we have looked at those because we don't want to do ground stations. The only reason we're doing them is that we're far cheaper and it wasn't possible at all to buy those services. >> But even now, it's, you know, we're so much cheaper infrastructure than anything you can buy online. Yeah. Or commercially. >> Uh, talk about the decision for altitude and the orbit. What tradeoffs are there? Where do you sit? Why is that the sweet spot that you landed with? >> We basically try and go as low as possible where you don't re-enter Yeah. >> the Earth's atmosphere. I mean, because you want the cameras as close to the Earth's surface, so you can take high resolution pictures. I mean, what's amazing with our imagery, if you you look at our satellites, they're about this big. Um, some of them weigh 7 kg. They're only um the size of a loaf of bread, basically, a bit heavier than that. Um and and we can see from San Francisco to Los Angeles, we can see things three meters across. >> Yeah. >> 500 miles away, you know, we're seeing things. It's crazy, right? And with our bigger satellites, you can see things 30 cm across now. >> Wow. >> I mean, just imagine the the it's it's incredible the power of these telescopes that we put up there. Um and all the camera systems that take all the imagery. And of course, we take a gob gobb amount a huge amount of it. We take 4 million 47 megapixel images per day. So each satellite is taking eight pictures per second and there's 200 satellites. It's just huge. >> What was it like finding that? What was it like finding that sweet spot? Did you just onehot it? You never, you know, >> never burned. Never burned anything up. >> Exactly. Actually, recently the sun's got angry for some reason at us and it's got a little bit more bright and the upper atmosphere went much denser and a couple of satellite fleets lost half or more of their satellites cuz they got the calculus slightly wrong. So, it's not uh it's not messing around, especially when you spent millions of dollars on the satellites. >> On the on the camera, do you have the ability to translate your specs into something that would feel like a consumer camera? like is it a 50 megapixel sensor with a 4,000 m millimeter focal length or something like that? Is there some >> Well, actually, if you have a really powerful telephoto lens, it's not so dissimilar from the main power you for a telescope is the size of the optic. So, the primary optic for our Dove satellites is about this big. The primary optic for our um uh bigger satellites is around 50 cm. So, a little bit bigger like that. uh look and um they're they're you know actually the design of the telescopes is not that hard but getting them to work through the launch which is 15 gs uh shaking of the of the telescope and then explosive bolts as the upper stage and the and the lower stage separate which sends a 200g shock load through the satellite. >> Those sort of things are really gnarly. Uh so you have to design all of this to survive that launch environment. Uh that's where the tricks come in for for space engineering. >> Can you >> um talk about uh talk about what you guys have uh one of the the use cases when when we met I guess it was maybe a month ago at this point. You talked about uh how you were able to track gas leaks ahead of time and help get them shut off. I I would love for you to talk about that because I thought it was fascinating. >> Yeah. Yeah, I mean we help people do all sorts of uh things around the world. I mean even though we're having uh the satellites are all in space, all of our applications are in the real world here down on the Earth's surface. Um we are helping farmers, we're helping energy companies, we're helping civil governments, we're helping security. Um, but you asked about methane and we we track methane leaks using a special hyperspectral camera that we got on one of our satellites and we're launching a couple more of those this year. Basically, this this gas methane um absorbs in a particular spectral line. So, if you have lots of color bands, lots of spectra bands. So, this one has 400 spectral bands. So, it's like we have three RGB in our eyes. Um, this has 400. And with those narrow bands that you can detect these absorption lines and um we can tell actually the amount of methane in each leak as well. So uh we can then go along the gas pipelines of major oil and gas facilities, find leaks, tell them about it and shut help them to shut them off. And no one, not the energy company, nor the environment, nor anything else wants all these gas leaks. Um it's bad for business and it's bad for the planet. So we have detected um thousands and thousands of these and often these companies just go out and fix them. Um another example, we track deforestation across the whole Brazilian Amazon, 8 million square km every day. It's almost the size of the United States, a forest the size of the United States. and we look across the entire thing for any tree that has been cut down, illegal mining operation, illegal narcotics, and we send those alerts to GPS lo coordinates to the Brazil federal police. They go and stop the illegal action and we've helped to them to reduce deforestation rates 60% in the last 3 years because of that AI enabled satellite data to uh uh work. Um, another example in in in um in in Ukraine, we've been helping them track Russian uh movements. Um, in in in in Asia, we've been helping with Indo Pacific Command, the commander of the US forces over in that region to monitor China, the South China Sea. We monitor huge areas, give them alerts because what what you want is to try and get advanced warning of anything rather than having to go into war. So we're trying to help them have the data that stops wars rather than getting that. >> Does the government not have spy satellites? >> They do. Uh but their their spy satellites are better and worse at the same time. They're much much higher resolution >> but much much smaller coverage. Got it. >> So they can they can see things that are much better. Uh reading number plates is the canonical thing. Whether exactly they can do that is a classified matter. But what they can see is much smaller than what we can do. at least 10 times better. Um what but what they can't do is image all of China or all of Africa or all of Brazil every day. They because necessarily if you look more focus you look at a smaller area and so there's a trade-off there. We're the only system that images the whole earth land mass every day. >> So what is the the pie chart of customers for you or revenue? Is it uh I imagine you hear about like hedge funds uh you mentioned a bunch of examples of the government and uh it seems like even non-governmental organizations nonprofits would be interesting. They probably pay different rates but uh like where are the key drivers of the business? What are the different customers that are buying from you >> today? Our biggest segment is defense and intelligence. security um countries that need to understand their threats on their horizon be warned of things um that's the US government that's European countries Japan other countries like that um and we've just started a new program where if a country asks we'll launch them dedicated satellites um for that country and these we've done three deals where a couple hundred million dollars and we launch a set of satellites for them they take over the joystick over their area of interest and if you like they get ensure that it's just for them in that area. Um but but most of our uh uh business is data sales and I think the future is mainly commercial uh applications and civil government. So floods and fires and helping people you know in the LA fires we were not just the the first image but we could actually use AI on top that could analyze which house in the Palisades fire and know was damaged or not um and help the relief operators the American Red Cross go used our data to plan their operations in the aftermath of the fire and so on. But if we could get that data even sooner um that's even better. So we're working on trying to get the data ever sooner. But disaster response is an application but most of all are the commercial ones. So yes hedge funds you mentioned um in principle we have more alpha than any other company on the planet I think because we can track all those soy yields um um all you know or any other type of crop. We can track output from all the uh mines of all the different uh major commodities around the planet, all the shipping networks, all the other transportation networks. Um we if you like have an overview of all the different economic activity going on around the globe. And so we do have some hedge fun clients uh that do stuff. they they can't be named because they they want to keep it private. But uh yeah, that's a then and there's lots of other commercial applications, energy, infrastructure, agriculture, you know, we help with a lot of we just announced last week that we're working with John Deere helping them uh drive their tractors so they know when to slow down and speed up in the field um uh based on the amount of crop in each 3x3 m box. I mean, it's all terribly practical applications of our satellite data. So it sounds far away like going to space but actually it's having an impact here on the ground. >> Uh there are uh apparently some Koreans in our chat that uh that are that are uh investors. It sounds like uh uh have some questions around uh the new the new capital raise. Wanted to give you a chance to talk about that, why why you're pursuing it and uh what it means for the future. I can't read their messages, but I'm just sort of guessing. >> Yeah. Well, we we just had our earnings last week and we have plenty of capital over $700 million on the balance sheet. Um, and we're grew growing very nicely, 42% growth, which is the answer to life, the universe, and everything if any hitchhikers guide the galaxy fans out there. So, we felt very good about that. But um yeah, we did decide to raise some more capital um one of these ATM approaches which basically enables us to raise um at the market and uh when we want um and it it you know it's good to have more capital. It's good to have a secure balance sheet. It's dry powder if we wanted to do M&A later. We haven't got an immediate need for it, but it's good to do that. We think that then maybe there's other data sets, maybe there's other uh capabilities that we want. um shoring up our supply chain. There's all sorts of things in this crazy world it'd be good to do to reduce risks. So, we're trying to use the moment of a lot of excitement about planet and space generally. Um space is hot right now uh to to get capital uh um that that can help us secure the long term. >> That makes sense. >> Makes sense. Uh last thing uh any any uh insights on on what the uh the the latest Blue Origin explosion will do to the launch market over the next call it 2 3 four 5 years is that uh obviously it's a disappointment for everyone. Uh but uh there's been some debate around just how much of a setback it'll be. I think every company like Planet wants more competition in the launch market. Uh but how are you looking at it? >> Yeah. Well, I mean firstly it's a real tragic event for the industry and um and not just for blue uh and it set back some of the lunar plans that the US government is I'm wearing my Arteimus uh two pin that was such an amazing mission but some of the later missions that actually landing humans on the lunar surface are going to need blue origin in their their vehicle actually. So, it's a tricky situation. I was just uh messaging with the mass administrator about this and I hope we can come together to um uh to still do those really critical missions that uh are some of the most hopeful things that we do as a society when we send humans on things like that uh mission. So, u but I I think I think they'll get back to to business relatively uh um uh straightforward that you know by the end of this year they've already said that they should be able to be back on the launch site. I think that timeline is about right what we've seen historically uh companies getting back to the launch pad. >> It's not quite as damaged as people initially thought. So I I really wish them luck in doing it. And there is a booming uh array of other companies that are building uh launch uh capabilities uh that so I think competition really is coming over the next couple of years and it's exciting and obviously we're cheering it on. We're cheering all of those guys on. >> Yeah, >> we are too. >> Makes sense. >> Well, we're cheering you on to catch up. >> Thank you so much for coming. >> Welcome on anytime. >> We'll talk to you soon. >> Great updates. >> Hey, nice to see you. >> Goodbye. Before we bring in our next guest, let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. We are very uh fortunate to be joined by Disa Moyo. Hi. Welcome to the show. How are you doing? >> I'm so great to very glad to be here. >> Thank you so much for taking the time. Um I would love to uh go back in time first and start with a little bit about your journey to where you are now. How how do you introduce yourself? you have uh you're a multihyenate, an author, an economist, a investor. What else am I missing? Take me through it. >> Well, first of all, everybody uh it calls me Dambisa, so that's the easiest thing to do. I'm I'm a member of the House of Lords in the United Kingdom, so that's my sort of day job. Um I also serve on the boards. Yeah, it's not bad actually. Um and then I u I serve on a number of boards. I'm on the board of Chevron, on the board of Starbucks, and Condi Nast. I know you had Roger Lynch here a few weeks ago. um as well as on the Oxford University endowment. Um but my also my other day job, multiple hats here, is uh I u I'm co-principal of a family office um which is techbased actually proceeds from a sale of a SAS company in 2018. Yeah, Qualrix. Yeah, fantastic. Exactly. Quick. Um let's stick with the board uh dynamics first because we've been having a whole bunch of conversations about corporate governance in the modern era. It's at the top of everyone's mind because of uh governance of AI companies. And I'm interested in your lessons from working with these these very important boards, very established companies you mentioned. Um they've certainly had decades if not centuries to work out any of the kinks. Yes. Um and I'm wondering about your thesis on on high-erforming board management generally. uh because we've had uh Eric Reese from Long-Term Stock Exchange talking about different structures that have been the triple bottom line. There's so many different uh options and I feel like a lot of founders when their companies explode in value, they say, "Oh, maybe I'm different. Maybe I should do things differently." I want to know how you weigh in on all this. >> Yeah. So, um I the longest uh sort of company board that I've been on uh was a company that was over 360 years old. That was Barclay's Bank. And I think um yeah when you think about um you know multiple centuries most of these companies have already experienced a pandemic um probably in the 1918 to 1920 pandemic they've gone through economic recessions obviously peak 1929 you have a crash for 25 years the Dow Jones industry doesn't clearly >> not many people going through COVID being like here we go again here twice before. Yeah, exactly. So I think history is a great lesson. I think the other thing is um advice that I received when I joined my first board about 15 years ago which is um anything can happen and I think u that's it sounds very flippant and sort of obvious but in a way it's uh it has a lot of kernels of important truths for how we manage organizations not just thinking about risk mitigation but where the opportunities are and how to invest because ultimately we're taking punts we're taking bets but we want to make sure these companies last for another 300 plus years. So I think that's the really most important thing. Um I've had the privilege of being on boards um that have been bookended by the financial crisis, the pandemic, but also um companies which were trading close to $60 a share and they collapse down to seven. You know, all of a sudden, you know, it's the Mike Tyson quote, all of a sudden your plan and your strategy gets punched in the face. Um but also you know we've had a CEO die in office uh which is very traumatic in terms of resetting but um company one of the my favorites is a company that we were absolutely certain would not get purchased. Um we were told that we were number two in the sector this was SAB Miller uh Anheiser Bush was number one and people said there's no way they'll buy you um and they ended up buying us by issuing the the biggest bond um that year in 2016 and and they bought the company outright. So anything can happen and I think um you know when you think about where we are today um with the market valuations and you think about where rates are and even just this year coming into 2026 thinking that oil would be around $50 a barrel. Well, it's not. And you know how did your balance sheet play out in that environment? >> So help me help me square that idea of of anything can happen. uh the job of the board if I'm telling it back to you this is obviously a con condensation of what you said but uh the job of the board is to sort of set the level of risktaking in the organization and I can imagine that instantiated in two ways one is um we are going to the management team and saying that uh AI is real we need to be taking more risk to put ourselves in a strong position or the risk of oil going up this year is is high so we need to offset and hedge that and you're you're issuing sort of a prescriptive uh strategy notes versus we need to our job is only to hire the management team and if we have a CEO who's not taking the right level of risk, too much risk or not enough risk, we need a new management team. How do you square those two? >> Yeah, so I would say um you know fundamentally there are three roles of the of the board. Um one is strategic oversight. Um and so you know we meet obviously on a quarterly basis. We have strategic meetings. I think our job is to be additive to management in thinking about these longerterm risks and we can talk about how those horizons have collapsed um just because of the the spate and information more technology more information so there is definitely a shrinking in in that delta um but the second thing is hiring and in some instances firing the CEO um and that's a very important piece as you've suggested because the CEO's job is to bring in the team make sure the team um actually can execute on not just again risk mitigation but you know leading into investments thinking about longer term opportunities for the business and then the third thing which I think tends to be discounted but sort of es and flows over time is how do great businesses um partner with communities with society with government um especially something like AI and it's going to be so transformative beyond just what's the SpaceX IPO going to generate for my portfolio I think we need to think about what does this mean strategically and so that's where I think those three things are very important I love that third point and it ties to my next question. People say data is the new oil. What can AI companies learn from oil companies? >> Well, I think um there tends to be in general and I've been on um boards of tech companies. I think um we just have to make sure that people don't poo poo a lot of the governance and the structural uh sort of muscle that we now know exists from 300 plus years of companies existing. So there's a lot of good governance, having an audit committee, okay, thinking about strategy, having regular meetings, that balance between what management does in terms of tactics and a day-to-day basis versus strategic thinking and overlay from the board. I think those are things that people can very easily dismiss um when you know your your returns are so high or your you know 30% of the uh of the stock exchange the stock market. uh but um I think really understanding what the purpose of the board is um especially for publicly traded companies where the board is really there on behalf of shareholders uh and again even that is has changed um it's more stakeholders including what the regulators care about and what does society care about more generally. So with the regulators, I have this I have this interesting it feels like we're in an entirely new era with the AI companies where if you go back to the previous big big organizations like before we had big tech, we had big pharma and big oil and big tobacco, right? And each one of those companies went through a process of figuring out how they interface with regulators. In the case of uh environmentalism and emissions and also in the big tobacco era, there was a there was a a feeling that those organizations were brought to knee by the regulators and that the executives at those firms sort of denied, denied, denied until it was staring them at the face in a congressional hearing and then they had to admit that there was a negative externality and they figured out how to internalize that. And I still think that especially when it comes to oil, a lot of great things have come from that technology. It needs to be balanced, of course, but we're in a new era in that it feels like the AI labs CEOs, the big tech leaders are doing the opposite. They're they're going on podcasts saying AI is going to kill everyone's going to destroy all the jobs. They're saying all the bad stuff before and the regulators are like what? Like you're I'm learning this from you. It would be like if in 1910, you know, an oil executive came out and said, "We really got to worry about carbon emissions." Like that that just didn't happen. And so what is going on and and how should things change? Is this a positive development? Well, I think um most companies that have existed over a hundred years or plus 300 years um have figured out that uh they have to be more partner a partner not just to government in thinking about what dislocations might happen to jobs or to productivity gains. What does it mean for more concentration in one sector versus another? Um and it's not just a capital markets question. It's also about what does this actually mean for our pensions? What does it mean for taxes? What does it mean? And I I you know, you can tell that I I sit at the intersection of not just corporations and investment, but also public policy. This is absolutely a debate in the House of Lords trying to think what should we be doing? Should we be aggressively uh you know uh uh sort of imposing uh risks. I personally that's not my my uh my view and I argue very uh compellingly. I hope that we need to be leaning into uh what AI can do. It can improve productivity, but that would be naive to just say it's all upside and having government as partners. It doesn't matter if you're an energy company, a tech company or a bank or even pharma. You you want to bring them on side so they can understand what the second order implications of a technology might be and how we can get ahead of some of the downside risks. >> What is cultural or consumer sentiment around AI uh like right now in the United Kingdom? >> Um very similar to what you have in the United States. I'm I worry a lot that it it's sort of seeped into the narrative in policym. So I do hear a lot of my my colleagues in the House of Lords who are sort of um you know reciting uh you know sort of tropes about AI which um you know can can be very compelling. Um you know obviously in the United States people are very attuned with the the difference between how the Chinese population views AI versus uh the United States population. And I think that just means there's a lot more work to be done not just by the AI companies but by regulators also and say this is the first super cycle um you know re real positive uh sort of push for economic growth um for and you know you know that we've had since globalization since women came into the workplace and this is enormous and we need it growth has been flatlining. >> Yeah. Is it showing up in is it showing up in the in in GDP in the UK? >> Um I think it's early early indications of it. I think the, you know, the sort of sky is falling down scenarios always, oh, what's going to happen to jobs? Um, but, you know, I personally think from my experience in >> the job market in the UK, from what I've, from what I've heard for going back to my college years >> is, you know, you're lucky if you graduate from a great university and get a job for like >> 50, you know, 50,000 USD equivalent. >> Yeah. I mean look the um you know unemployment numbers uh for not just the average in the population but for the youth is particularly problematic. There's no doubt about it. Even the current government which tends to lean left um has just put out a report talking about youth unemployment. It's very similar to sort of double uh unemployment rates that you see for entrance levels in the United States. But in some places it's even worse because it's permanent structural unemployment where people literally um are not coming back into the workplace. And so there's absolutely a real issue that needs to be uh thought through and I have my views on what needs to be done but you know ultimately I'm just one voice and public policy needs to really change the narrative about what AI can do. It will have dislocations as all technologies does do but >> is there any type of uh reindustrialization movement or or energy happening in the UK? >> Um do you mean energy as a pun or you mean energy literally? >> Like uh as Yeah, as a as a pun. Yeah. Um or or >> a lot of reindustrialization projects are linked to power generation. So I guess both. >> Well, don't don't get me started on the power situation. I mean again um I' I've I've spoken about this in the in the lords. Um the the UK as an example since we're talking about that is on average about 40 cents a kilowatt hour. Um the US is somewhere between 12 and 16 cents a kilowatt hour depending on which state you're in. And then China some of the estimates around 8 to 9 cents a kilowatt hour. Um there's no country that has achieved levels of per capita income without cheap energy. Um and so of course there's not a single person I know um you know whether it's in my boardrooms or my colleagues in investing um who doesn't appreciate the the sort of second order concerns around carbon emissions etc. But I think you can strangle economic growth um by doing some of the things that I'm afraid of are happening around the world banning um you know energy sources. Uh I think that kind of uh approach is is probably too aggressive and and doesn't really work for the long term. We need the energy. So >> have you have you wrestled with this question of the source of China's optimism about new technologies? I I I I sort of think about two possible and they might both be contributing but one is that uh it's easier to grow from a lower baseline 6,000 GDP per capita. uh there's a lot of room to go up and so uh like the the tide is so low that if it goes up it will raise a lot of boats. Uh but then there's the other side which is the actual not just the economic standing of the country but the actual political structure and the jobs guarantees, the works projects, the the trains to nowhere and the empty buildings. Like those are rough but they can create a lot of jobs. And so I think that there's maybe less fear-mongering about job loss because at the very least the CCP will put you to say, "Hey, go build a building over there and maybe it's empty, but you don't really care because at least you had a paycheck and you showed up and you had a sense of purpose." Have you wrestled with either of those? >> I have. And I think maybe I'd add a third aspect which is probably related to this the role of the state. Um which is to say that a lot of the public goods issues, health care, education are areas even in the United States that have not benefited from technological advances. Um partly because of regulation but there are a whole host of vested interests etc. Um and so if you take that hat and you think about um how uh sort of AI is permeating through the Chinese uh population, a lot of it is through those same public goods through health care and necessity uh um sort of calculations thinking about uh education etc. And so yes, it can be some viewed as somewhat heavy-handed but at the same time I think people can more easily see a direct impact of benefit whereas you know in the United States when you think of AI I think a lot of it is still disconnected from the average day user. People may maybe will see it more in um show show up in terms of their social media or consumer. Exactly. And so I think that's an area of opportunity if you think about it in the west where um a lot of the public goods costs um social costs that um are we know are coming um could actually be I think a net positive not just for the GDP numbers but also for just for people thinking about more positively about what AI can do. >> Yeah. uh how are you how are conversations going on the boards that you sit on around AI adoption and particularly we've been we've been grappling with a lot of you know you CEOs need to experiment they need to move quickly at the same time costs can get out of control the risks the benefits not getting left behind and then also just like does your business I is your business even technology like Chevron Starbucks I'm thinking like AI could be a useful tool for some back office stuff, but uh you know the robots aren't going to drill oil or make pour coffee yet. Uh maybe that's coming, but uh certainly uh that's not what's being sold right now by the AI lab. So what are those conversations like? How what is the mature way to think about testing and evaluating and rolling out AI at a large company? >> Yeah. So it's all of the above. everything that you've listed out there and I think um any company worth its salt um will be looking at these issues in a very broad way. Um it's a learning curve obviously to state the obvious and I think that um what the best companies are doing is is trying to figure out uh not only what does this mean for our bottom line is this going to increase revenue and cut costs and you know think about new metrics of of how we compare ourselves what are our new KPIs and the financial metrics comparing ourselves to other competitors other you know peers but also other sectors um but I think they're also thinking about what does this mean for society is this a complete reshape shaping of how governments tax um if it's just going to be a handful of companies that are thinking about uh you know generating revenue and concentrated uh success returns you know how do we then think about where our role is in that um of course also thinking about the job market I mean I think it's Henry Ford's quip about you know you can't you know you have to pay uh people a reasonable wage for the work um because ultimately in a very cynical way but I think it's something that I think about a lot is you need you still need to think about consumers and >> he said that he needed to pay his workers enough that they could buy a car. >> Correct. >> The ultimate circular deal. >> Yeah. No, exactly. >> But but but in doing so, it wasn't that every Model T was sold to a Ford employee. It was that he set the market wages at a certain level and that created a sustainable ecosystem. >> Yeah. I mean, I think I think corporations get short shrift because people just think that they're these sort of 12 people on a board and a corporation that's sort of greedy shareholders that are just simply going and trying to gouge um you know consumers. I think what I would say about AI is that the breadth of its potential impact is now bringing about a level of sophistication and discussions that goes beyond just narrow metrics. What's the shareholder return going to be? I mean of course if you want to compete in a capitalist society those things are important but I think the most sophisticated companies are understanding that their role and the role of the state but also the role of the consumer is going to change the demands of the consumer are going to change. >> Yeah. >> Uh please >> can we talk about the family office? >> I was I was going to ask the same thing. >> Good timing. Uh yeah I I want to your your overall market outlook how you think about uh uh you know what an insane year it's been. And I think everyone, you know, was watching set of geopolitical events play out and assume uh now would be a good time to bet against uh bet against the the the global economy. Uh at least that hasn't been reflected in in um in the markets uh just yet. Uh but I'm curious your overall view and then I want to get into more specifics around kind of managing uh the family office itself. Yeah, look, I think um I would say that the global economy you we need to be growing at 3% per year in order to double per capita incomes in a generation. So a generation is about 24 25 years. Uh in order to double per capita incomes, you got to be growing at 3% per year. The reality is most countries are not growing at that rate. both developed countries across Europe um you know um you know Japan until recently has started to see some interesting story coming from there but but also large emerging market economies where have that have at least 50 million people they're stalling I was just in Peru uh 10 days ago and there everybody's concerned about growth um and you can add to that other structural issues the debt story the fiscus being challenged here in the United States etc etc we know about these issues um but you know as I I pointed out earlier. Um we're also at the early endings of a super cycle which could really power the productivity contribution to growth, could really change the narrative about uh growth. I mean PWC thinks growth it could add um about 16 trillion dollars worth of of GDP by 2030. That's four years away. So that's really constructive story. I mean my concern uh would be that it's quite skewed. I think this is very much a US story. You can't bet against the United States. Yeah, I think the uh changes and uh and roll out of this new era um are quite choppy in places like China. I mean there's some elements of it that are quite interesting, but China does have a lot of you know debt drag. It has uh you know demographic drag. I mean they're thinking now by some forecasts that it'll be at 800 million population by the close of this century. So structural challenges remain there. Um Europe uh has been quite a disappointment in many respects. a lot of the larger economies growing somewhere between 0.5 to 1 1.2% 2% um a lot of the structural things we've touched on already debt um but also now in the near- term real risk of inflation. So I think the picture is very much don't bet against the United States but understanding that it's quite concentrated is quite skewed um and thinking about how to play that uh is uh is obviously top of mind. >> How do you how do you wrestle with uh international efforts in AI? So when when the whole sovereign AI uh theme started maybe last year really getting talked about uh I was deeply skeptical because I said well you know England doesn't need their own Google they can just use Google and it can and it can be localized into Spanish and French and it's pretty easy for the core technology to live in one country and it's hard to compete with something that's compounded like a Facebook or an Instagram or consumer uh app or even in the enterprise you Salesforce, like I don't know that Salesforce has a has a a native French competitor that's really eating their lunch there. Um, but as I've gone deeper into the supply chain, I'm starting to see a lot of opportunity for like France generates a ton of nuclear power. That's clean energy. uh they if they have the right permitting and the right place for it and the right community, they could potentially build something that they sell to American AI companies that winds up generating a ton of return. And you sort of have a new a new energy story about let's go around and find all the cheap wind energy, cheap solar energy, where can nuclear be built? Because the nature of AI is that it doesn't need to be on premise because you're waiting 20 minutes for something to come back. It doesn't need to be down the street. It can be halfway across the world. >> Yeah. The story doesn't need to be my conflict with Mcronone. >> Yes. Yes. Yes. >> We we went we went back and forth uh >> over France potentially underinvesting. We want them to to to go forward. Soft Bank. I was just with Alex last week and he was talking about the new data center that they're thinking about building there precisely because of some of these costs advantages on the energy side. Um, look, I would say as a as a sort of uh sort of shorthand um I Europe generally thinks about things as glass half empty. The United States tends to think about things as glass half full. Um, and you can flowing sometimes. Exactly. And you can think you can think about a whole range. >> Yeah. shame, but you can think about whether it's energy or AI, climate transition, like there's many different themes that have occurred where Europe's uh, you know, again, shorthanding it. Uh, the response has always been, oh my gosh, you know, we need to regulate this thing. We need to put, you know, curb emissions. And I'm not saying it's all bad. I'm just saying that they tend to heir on the side of risk mitigation as opposed to investing through to figure out, well, we don't like X, so why don't we try and think about how to do that better? And I think that's part of the culture. Um I will say you know since with 2008 the United States and Europe were about the same GDP um as you know and now you know the United States has just run with it. And so I I would hope that a lot of the I wouldn't count Europe out. I mean the United Kingdom is the home of the industrial revolution. There's some kernels of uh of goodness that remain in terms of rule of law the stuff that everybody talks about. But if you do look at the the top uh sort of uh top footsie companies, the stock market there, they they tend to be pretty old and stodgy. >> Yeah, it might not be a Europe story, maybe more of a global story. I'm just thinking about, you know, a certain region in in India or Japan or Greece or Egypt might have some piece of the puzzle that they can now bring to bear because there is more demand for that. Like you could imagine a French company that's an expert in nuclear. Maybe they don't build another data center nuclear power plant there, but they expand. They build the nuclear power plant somewhere else. There's another place that has a lot of land, a lot of solar. >> I think it's comparative advantage what you're alluding to. And so, yeah, in principle, yes. But, you know, we're in a world of deglobalization broadly speaking. So, we can't uh you know, we can't dismiss the fact that the policy world has >> is there are there is there is there a bullish narrative outside of AI and robotics? I've been trying to I've been trying >> defense and dlobalization. >> Are you talking about Europe or >> No, no, no. Just just just generally in the world uh because you see like you know lots of lots of debt, inflation, low growth, population on the side. Yeah. >> Uh you know, employment um there's so many you know ongoing conflicts. There's so many stories and negative stories. >> Uh and it feels like AI is is uh you know the only the only thing really happening and basically almost every country in the world saying like like we got we >> trillion dollar GLP1 market would like a work. >> Okay. Biotech. >> No biotech is biotech is another one. So much so that so much so that that people on X I think last week were saying we're going to see the first hundred trillion dollar biotech company. >> So very American to see to see something working and and assume >> and if the and if the replacement rate fertility rate declines, you got to live longer. That's where biotech comes in solves that problem. >> The other thing I would say is that what what does history tell us about this is that kind of things just repeat themselves. So, you know, if you think about us being in a period post uh World War I, post the pandemic 1918 to 1920 and post 1929 crash, you could argue we're kind of in this period of of you know, smooth holly, a larger government, more tariffs, you know, protectionism. And so the question is will there be this new era that came uh you know post World War II which is where you get more globalization um you know governments uh start to work more more cooperation and I think we have to be optimistic. I mean the you know there are a lot of good things that are happening. I was just in India um I had been in India 15 years prior to that. I it's a changed society and people are yeah it's not is it is it rich? No. Um, but is it on a path of of growth that's quite diversified and it's got an intriguing story of being part of the service sector but also technology? Yes, absolutely. As I said, I was just in Peru. There are plenty of places and I was just in Silicon Valley. It's hard to sort of be negative about the world and I think it is beyond >> and I never I never get I I we have the the blessing of having a job where we talk to people all day long about what they're building uh for the future. And so it's it's hard to ever get uh I never get completely blackpilled even though there's so many different sort of negative negative stories >> because I do believe that a small you know small relatively small number of people can can have you know massive outside impact on on the fate of uh you know humanity and economies and all these things. >> Yeah. >> Well that's a great place to leave it for a message of optimism. I completely >> Thank you. And go Nick Knicks. >> Oh yes. >> Go Nicks. >> Thank you so much. Thanks. Uh I was uh I was just I was in New York. I was in New York over the weekend and uh there was some enterprising young kids that were doing a lemonade stand. Really? >> But and they were giving discounts to Knicks fans. No way. >> Um and >> how do you prove that? >> Yeah. Yeah. I was like it'd be kind of crazy to be the whole >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. >> Well, thank you for having me. It's a pleasure being here. Pleasure. Thank you so much. >> Cheers. >> Thank you so much. Uh, our next guest is Samuel Hom, who's going to completely debunk Jord's blackpilling about biotech because we got him on to talk about all the advanc I'm not blackpilling on biotech. >> Oh. Oh, there's nothing else going on outside of AI. This is what you said. Don't deny it. We can roll the tape. >> Well, is he not applying AI? >> I'm sure there's I'm sure there's I'm sure there's a little bit of technology. No, no, he actually uses just pencil and paper. Pencil. pencil and paper, no computers at all. Anyway, first I'm going to tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. And now we have Samuel from Statatic Labs. He's the co-founder, and I'm very excited to have him join the show. How you doing? >> Hello, good. How are you guys? Good to see you. >> We're good. So Jordy was making the claim that there is nothing good happening anywhere outside of artificial intelligence and I said we have the perfect guest to debunk that. So uh could you please introduce yourself first and then maybe take us through some of the exciting things >> when there's a protein shortage. John, it's hard to be optimistic. It's hard to be optimistic. >> I'm gonna blast you with the air horn. Uh anyway, thank you so much for joining. >> No problem. Good to see you. Um good to hear you talk about biotech as well. So yeah, I'm a medical doctor, a scientist, and um yeah, co-founder at Sematic Labs and just fascinated really by the um trying to figure out what's going on at the frontier of medicine, the frontier of science. um which is what I use Twitter for, what I use X for um and also what brought me to the conference the other day to uh Chicago to ASCO to the big cancer conference um where I was lucky enough to see the >> uh Drax Rasid um study >> standing ovation presented live >> standing ovation. Yeah. Yeah. >> I love to it though. What does it take for a hundred trillion? Since you since you brought up X, there was some there was some discussion among investors around we'll see the first 10 trillion. >> I thought you said company and then 100 trillion. >> Somebody went first. >> So, they're already I mean I mean it's I mean >> I mean hyperinflation >> I'm never a guy to say that a 100 bagger is impossible. >> Yeah, >> it's always possible. How do we get there? And what is the tech? >> So Lily today is Lily today is a $1 trillion company, right? >> Or just about. >> But I I think the issue really in biotech with gain to 100 trillion would be the patent cliff, >> right? So in like um in big tech, Apple and so on, these guys don't have to deal with patent cliffs, but um big farmers certainly do. So the the other day for example you guys had a guest on the show talking about AI versus biotech and it's perfectly true but >> just to be clear that like if if companies could actually enforce patents where it's like no one else can create a login button. You cannot log into an account >> of a software product to refresh is technically patented but uninformed. >> Yeah. So there is patents but yeah they just don't get uh don't get enforced and there's an argument that that's a probably a great thing. >> Yeah. >> Um yeah I guess I guess in in biotech in pharma the so the the drugs can only be sold for for a big price at for about 20 years at which point they go off pattern and then the price drops by 90 95%. M >> um so if you have like so the biggest drug in the world uh today is tepatide which did about $51 billion of sales already this year which is insane right more than the big AI labs but as it goes off patent then the generics come through and it will dwindle those uh revenues away for Lily and I think 100 trillion in farmer is going to be very difficult. Is there any world where the capex required to actually compete with a $50 billion drug becomes a market dynamic like cost prohibitive? Any analogy there? Or will you just get a ton of small compounding firms and and a ton of generics companies that underwrite smaller investments and just sort of like eat away? Because I I've always heard about the patent cliff and you lose 95% of your gross profit on day two. Um, but I I've also heard that Eli Liy and other Novo are actually struggling to stand up just the manufacturing equipment required because at a certain point when you're shipping 50 billion dollars worth of a drug, you're talking about, you know, not just a little lab that's making like one rare cancer. >> Doesn't that already just just getting a drug actually through trials? >> Yeah. And I guess like Tylenol sold in by the by the billions of pills probably. I don't know. Is there anything there? >> I mean, so the the trials themselves are very expensive, right? So to run a clinical trial, each patient in the trial costs about $50,000 >> and the so the big trials cost over $und00 million. So it's that is kind of a mode in itself, but um yeah, I'm not I'm not too sure about that. >> Is is that speeding up or slowing down? like we generally have like the oification of governments. Governments are getting bigger. It feels like it takes longer to get things at the DMV and whatever. It feels like things are slowing down. We're certainly building less houses. Permitting reform is top of mind on the right and the left. And I'm wondering uh but at the same time, you have AI, you have all these tools that should speed up review. Um do you have a feel for where we're going over the next couple years? Uh so I think it's still very slow right so um so so from target identification to to phase three takes >> takes about 9 10 years and then even after phase three it then takes a long time for it to get kind of >> adop >> get like adopted in the clinic right >> um but can AI speed these things up yeah absolutely from from kind of every step I think AI can speed it up even like the some of the paperwork is very slow, right? >> Yeah. >> Um >> what is what has China done on this this front? Uh the chat is >> steal everything. >> Sorry. >> Um no no I mean like a lot of the a lot of trials are are are happening there now and just overall development because of the cost advantage but I don't know about the speed advantage. >> Uh yes it's definitely it's definitely cheaper in China. So I I spent the last week I was in this big conference ASCO at the cancer conference and lots it's very interesting lots of the most innovative stuff >> is actually happening out of China. So they've got for example >> some fascinating bspecific antibodies which is the kind of new cancer drug or new modes of action for these different cancer drugs. So they're doing not only are they doing fast following which they they certainly are um but they're also doing some very innovative stuff as well. What people are kind of worried a little bit about in US biotech is the big farmers doing deals with um Chinese biotech. >> But I I think if we have China and the US kind of competing with each with each other, if you're on the side of medicines, if you're on the side of patients, I would say more competition is better. >> Yeah. Tell us about your company. Tell us about what you're working on. >> So I'm Yes. So I'm a um medical doctor but so we we started a company called Stmatic Labs which is actually aiming to speed up this process of of uh drug development and getting drugs to the to patients faster. >> Um so one of the reasons that drug development is so slow is because of so one of the essential steps in the regulatory process is something called a a systematic review which is basically a big boring literature review. It takes years. Currently, it's done manually. Um, we used AI. We have a little team. We used AI to automate many of the steps and do it in more like four hours rather than like two years. >> Mhm. I know a guy who does something similar. He gets around the whole system systematic review. You just like you text him on like uh Signal or Telegram and he doesn't doesn't interface with the FDA at all. He'll just send you exactly the drug like whether or not it's approved. It works perfectly. I'm kidding. >> Joking. What has progress been like? Uh h how far are you in like the R&D phase? How are you scaling up? Like have you raised money? Give us a flavor of the business at this point. >> So it's early. It's early. Um so pre preede cool. >> Um so we have a product. It's on the market. Um it's being used by thousands of people. >> Okay. >> Um >> working on working on raising a a preede round. We have some customers in big farmer, in academia, in biotech as well. Um, but it's early. It's early. We're still just kind of rolling it rolling it out and ramping it up. >> How like is there a market to sell software to the FDA? Like because my my dream might be like I I'm excited about speeding up things for biotech and and biioarma. Like I feel like they will figure that out and you'll be a piece of that. But what I really want is like an API from the FDA where you can submit something and then it like programmatically runs or automatically runs like as many of the tests that it can possibly delegate to just tell you, okay, this is going to get flagged or like you have a typo here or you forgot to attach this document. And so you're getting like this red, yellow, green response from a robot. And then at a certain point, you say, "Okay, I'm passing all of the programmatic like computer-based checks. Let's actually call in a scientist from the FDA who's in short supply and have them review it." But I have no idea how you would actually go about getting that into the FDA. >> Uh, not ne not. Yeah, it's a good idea. I one one thing one thing the one thing the FD has has said recently they're doing they're going to run these things called real time trials right so at the moment what we do when we run clinical trials >> um the data are kind of blinded and locked until the end and then they open it up and have a look >> but if you could run a real time trial you can see if there's an efficacy signal or a safety signal early and then um stop the trial if it's working or not and then get the drug either stopped or moved into patients faster. >> Yeah. >> Um, so that's one of the kind of things that the FDA is doing. As for selling into the FDA, I'm not sure. >> Good luck. Hopefully you get there. I don't know. I feel like you should be speeding up both sides of the equation eventually. Um, but obviously it's early. Amazing traction, though. Thank you so much for coming. >> Wait, did we didn't get to talk about the >> talk about whatever >> pancreatic drug was was that was that part of the impetus for >> Is it fair to say that pancreatic cancer is cured? like like is that how far we can go or is this just because standing ovation I have high expectations? I'm like okay it's cured. >> So standing ovation definitely high expectations is not cured. Okay. So the the reason it's such a big deal and the reason everyone was so quite so excited the other day and you know it's not an easy crowd to excite because everyone's kind of oncologists and scientists and so on. >> There's a good point. >> So the reason it's quite so important is is really two reasons. So pancreatic cancer is a cancer with miserable survival rates. So 5year survival is >> Steve Jobs famous >> yes it's about 3% for for metastatic disease and most disease is metastatic at diagnosis and that number hasn't progressed in in decades. >> That's the the first reason. And the second reason is because ma mainly this disease pancreatic cancer is driven by this one protein called Raz >> and for ever really this protein was considered undruggable totally undruggable >> because it's this kind of small little compact protein you can't get a drug into. You can't design a drug to kind of fit in there slot into a pocket. Um so what this company Revolution Medicines did is they used a very kind of innovative creative approach to to drug the the molecule using a a molecular glue. And if you do that and you put it in pancreatic cancer patients, they were able to double the median overall survival versus the standard of care chemotherapy uh as well as improve quality of life as well as so the the new drug has actually fewer serious adverse events than chemotherapy. So it's kind of um creating a totally new >> double it that's taking taking the survival rate from 3% to 6%. So yes, so in the trial it is so it's uh the details are it's second line metastatic pancreatic cancer and the overall survival with the chemotherapy is about 7 months and with the drug is about uh 13 months >> significant. I'll take those ads any day, >> but not uh not cured. >> Not cured, unfortunately. But but it unlocks a path to a cure that it it's like the door was open to the mountain to the hike and now we're going on the hike. And that's amazing because before we weren't even on the trail, >> right? And and there was it's it's a good day to talk about this as well because there was a new kind of update breakthrough today. >> So this new drug is called Daxib. Yeah. It's going to kind of lay I think it's going to lay the kind of baseline of therapy in pancreatic cancer and we're now going to be able to add new drugs on top of it in order to improve its benefit and we saw exactly that today. So there's a new drug from a company called Tango Therapeutics um and they they added their drug on top of Daram Daramrazib and um even improved the survival even further. >> Wow. >> I think exactly we're going to see that. >> Very very cool. Amazing. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. >> Great to meet you Sam. Great to meet you. >> Good luck with the round. >> We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. >> Cheers. >> Let me tell you about Figma. Agents, meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with design system context. I'm pulling for a cure for liver psoriasis because I'm trying to go hard this summer. Just kidding. >> That's your That's your favorite. >> Yeah. Uh we were in the Wall Street Journal. The Wall Street Journal wrote an article about TBPN reacting to Leupold's 13F. They said they put a screenshot of me and Jordy and a meme from the Truman Show and Leap Trader. If you're LeapTrader onx, you're in the Wall Street Journal today. Now, as they needed to come up with some sort of excuse for putting us in the journal, so they wrapped it in a profile of Leopold Ashenbrunner, I guess. But, uh, no, it's a it's an interesting article. the 24-year-old AI whiz who counts Jane Street as an investor. You probably saw the highlight stats showing up on the timeline. 24 years old, 20 billion under management now up 270% after fees this year. Fantastic work. One of the best to ever do it. Investors now include Jane Street. Uh Jane Street is an investment investment and situation awareness is particularly notable because the firm rarely allocates capital to outside money managers. Um and so >> game recogniz they put a a quote from me in the journal. I said, "We have not seen this level of attention on a hedge fund's filings in a very long time." And I agree with that. Uh was a fun fun uh thing. Little bit of backstory on the fund. Uh later that year, Ashen Brener launched his hedge fund firm, which he described as a brain trust on AI with Carl Schulman, another AI intellectual who once worked at Peter Teal's macro hedge fund, Teal Macro. Uh early backers included Stripe co-founders Patrick and John Collison. Good to see them getting a win. As well as Daniel Gross and Natt Freriedman. Good to seeing them getting a win. >> Uh Dwar also >> Dwar backer >> uh who are both currently helping lead Meta's AI platform uh efforts. And so um situational awareness, they actually lost money once in early 2025 after DeepS, but they've been on an absolute run. Uh they ended 2025 up about 200%. When most hedge funds are like we'd like to do 13%, 15%, 20% would be amazing. Yeah. >> 200%. Absolutely legendary. >> Impressive. Call this shot. >> Very impressive. Yes. Um well, we have our next guest here in the waiting room. Let's bring in >> Goldley Street should do a mafia episode. >> They should. That would be a lot of fun. or uh or poker match. They should do a they should do a world series of poker because uh poker is very popular over there. Anyway, we have David Curtley from Helion Energy. He's the founder and CEO. David, how are you doing? Welcome to the show. >> Hi there. Thank you for having me today. >> Thank you so much for taking the time. Um first time on the show, long overdue. I think most people will be familiar, but how are you describing the the shape of the business these days? How you got here, how long it's taken, what the current milestones are. Take us through the intro. Awesome. Thank you. So, uh I am Dave Gerley, CEO of Helion Energy and we build Fusion. So, uh what we're announcing actually last week was that we raised a series G a $465 million round. >> Sorry to interrupt. >> Fantastic. >> Awesome. Yeah. And that's the key building. So, uh, we've built now our seventh generation system called Polaris that does fusion here in Washington state. Um, and then this allows us to keep moving, uh, beginning construction of our eighth generation system. This is for a power plant for Microsoft that uses fusion energy. Um, and then expand manufacturing. We want to, uh, the the key to how do you build fusion fast is you is you got to build the hardware. Um, and so we spent a lot of time focusing on manufacturing and investing in that. And so we're 60xing our manufacturing line that produces the electronics and the com the capacitors and the modules for fusion right now. >> Uh give us the fusion 101, the different paths that you could have gone down and then the technology that you chose because it is different than I think what some people have seen other fusion companies working on. You have a particular strategy. So walk us through it. >> For sure. So uh fusion energy is what powers the universe. That's what happens in stars and supernova. Um, and but we don't really use it here on Earth except more really in academic and national lab settings for the most part. Uh, so our goal at Helon and my personal goal is I wanted to solve the energy crisis, bring that universe power to Earth. Um, and in fusion what you're doing is you're taking lightweight isotopes, hydrogen's and heliums, things that are found everywhere. Um, and then at pretty extreme conditions, literally thousands of atmospheres and hundreds of millions of degrees, you force those together, they fuse, form heavier elements and electricity. The problem is is that what we see most folks in fusion, in fact, earlier in my career do is do all that to generate heat, to run steam turbines, to run cooling cycles, and all the other things that we we normally do for power. And at Alon, our goal was, can we do something a little bit different? Can we directly harness the magnetic and electric energy from that reaction at really high efficiencies to to get and extract electricity and then sell it? And so that's what we set out to do. We built now seven generation of machines that do that direct electricity extraction um and then show that you can do fusion. So talk about the road to Q greater than one, Q engineering greater than one, all the all the different milestones that it's interesting you have a you have such a in fusion you have such a solid like ground truth for your KPI that is very different from other businesses. It really is like there's there's scientific milestones and it's very measurable. The energy that goes into the system must be less than the energy that comes out. But talk about that path, where you are today, where you need to be in 2030 to meet your goals. >> Yeah. And I think that that there is actually some room to to talk about that ground truth in terms of what it what you need for the business because our goal in at Helion anyway is not to focus only on those scientific milestones, but to do it in a way that makes electricity. And so that's actually something we sent out that's different about Helon from the beginning is extracting electricity directly. uh getting that out to the grid and then showing that you could do that at really high efficiency. If you can extract electricity at 95% electricity, now the fusion just has to do that little bit. And so the systems can be smaller, faster, and easier. And so that's what we've proved to do, what we we've set out to do. So we built now seven generations of system of systems, set world records for plasma temperatures, plasma plas plasma pressure, plasma energy. Um and then and then also showed we could do some of the electricity piece of extracting electricity from it. So, we're running our seventh generation system, Polaris, right now. Its goal is to show you can make that electricity and make electricity from fusion so you can go out and build those power plants with it. >> How big is the system? >> I was going to ask about size. Yeah, I I mean, we've seen small fusion reactor companies that are making effectively like a battery that could go in a vehicle or spacecraft. Obviously, there's, you know, the Chernobyl nuclear reactor that everyone knows. Um, but where do you sit? Why did you wind up in that pos particular position? And then what's the strategy if if demand winds up being you know one megawatt I want I come to you and I say I want 10 megawws in one facility. How do you how do you meet that demand or do you just sit it out? >> Yeah. So our goal for Microsoft the PPA the power purchase agreement we have with them is to build a 50 megawatt facility. So that's industrial scale power. It's not your house. Uh but it is not large scale data centers. >> It's actually my house. I I I I need 50 megawws personally, but speak for yourself. No. >> What are you doing? >> I'm training I'm training models for myself. I got to do it. >> Sovereign household a sovereign AI was very, you know, 2025 2026 household AI >> is the new wave. >> So 50 megawatts at one. >> You're going to need juice to do that. >> Yeah. >> You're going to need some helon. So uh so is it one system, a a series of systems, racks? like h how do you how do you think about industrializing that capacity? >> It gets to the thesis of the business. >> Um what I tell the team is that if we're the first to build a fusion power plant and that's all we do, then we've totally failed as a business. Yeah. That our goal is to build systems that are deployed globally at scale. >> Fusion can do it and we need to make that happen. And so part of that is building systems that are modular and scalable and deployable. And so so the vision is that you're building a 50 megawatt scale generator each one on that scale at our facility gigafactories of fusion production that then can be put on a truck delivered to the site plugged in and run. And if you need 500 megawatts you built you put in 10 of them or 12 of them so you have some redundancy um and then and then you can scale from there. And so you think about that in that modular building piece a lot like how we think about data centers and breaking those into those modular pieces that you can then massproduce and then deploy at scale and deploy them quickly. And so that that's what we focused on doing uh even to the point of being annoying where uh even for our seventh generation system. We built it at our f parts in our factory put them on a truck drove them down the street and well really in the parking lot and then plugged them in to go get Polaris assembled. And so keeping that same philosophy of mass production and reliability and and scale so you can lower costs and timelines uh is really important. >> So what is the what is the capacity of a single system these days? >> 50 megawatts and then you and then you uh >> uh we'll we'll chain them together to get to bigger numbers for particular projects. Got it. >> Um >> yeah sorry please. I was going to say with the technology we have now there's some fundamental physics limitations for fusion of trying to scale it down and scale. Yeah. Um and so so our goal is is is smaller scale if we can get there but fusion scales to the big scale easy. >> Yeah that's great. uh what what are your timelines around the uh number eight the the the PPA with Microsoft all that all that kind of thing cuz we a lot of the um you know uh the the uh nuclear founders that we've had on uh everything's really exciting. it feels like it's happening. And then you ask about the timeline and it's 20, you know, 2034. Um, and you guys have been making, you know, very incremental progress and um, but I'm curious how you think about it. >> Yeah. So, our goal for the Microsoft program is is to have uh, our power plant out there built in 2028 and start early operations um, and then scale that up from there. The uh the key to that is a couple of key things is is getting started early. It was it's been now a couple of years that we've been working on that that power plant facility. Um and I think you point to some of the the the challenges in in nuclear industry around regulatory and permitting. And so that's one thing that fusion shines is that we've been able to get out go out and actually get all the permits. The environmental permits were granted last year. We broke ground on the actual power plant last year. Um, and now built two buildings on the site and are building the third. Uh, and starting this year on that that power infrastructure. And so that's really exciting to be able to go get that hardware in the ground, get built, uh, and then and then here in Everett behind me actually in the factory, start building some of those early prototypes and components for Orion itself. And so that's what we're working on. All of that in parallel. It's a little crazy. Um, but the world needs it and we got to get it out there quick. >> It's happening. >> What's the regulatory side of the business look like? >> Do you need to go We tested a dome. Like we we were more familiar with like the the the the fision side of the business, which makes a ton of sense when someone's creating a new nuclear reactor. Uh I'd like them to test it in a remote location under a dome in case it explodes, but there's a very different set of risks here. I don't know that there's anywhere near as many. Um but there's still probably some oversight. So what does that look like? So when we founded Helon, it was something I was really worried about because there wasn't a really a clear regulatory framework. Um and whites space is is good in a lot of engineering and science, but it's not great in regulatory and policy. And so um we spent a lot of work on that. But uh the good news is a year and a half ago we got a law passed called the advance act which very solidly by going through the real technical rigor of what are the ri the risks of fusion. The nuclear regulatory agency made the determination and then and then we got a law passed to support that that the nuclear regulatory agency does not need to regulate fusion. In fact it's regulated by the states by the department of health. >> So we're regulated like a particle accelerator in a hospital. It's still it's still serious and it's still industrial scale with with lots of licensing and regulatory work, but the timeline is now on the order of a year or less rather than a decade. And so that's that's the big difference. And it comes to a lot of the safety cases of why fusion is just fundamentally different. >> And in general, if I tour helon's facilities, there's probably no radioactive material anywhere on site. Is that roughly correct? because you're not using plutonium or uranium. >> So, we're definitely not using plutonium or uranium. The systems can't melt down, go critical or any of those kinds of things. Um, but it is still an atomic process what happens in the sun and what what we build here on Earth. And so, we do have to consider just like in a hospital and a particle accelerator in a hospital the radioactive materials and there are some created and we spend a lot of work uh making sure we can handle those. And so we've been licensed and regulated by the state to be able to handle those uh in that similar similar way um for a number of years now. And so we spent a lot of time and and have a big team that does it um to make sure that we're handling this safely in a way that that you know the public can can believe in and trust and it's really important that you do that and you talk about those things. >> Well, I'm glad you have more funding to work on it and I'm very I'm very >> and the timeline is very exciting. >> Yeah, I am >> there. I'm now thinking about the opportunity to do the first Fusionpowered podcast >> on on site on site when you when you guys when you and Microsoft we might have to call in a favor with Satia say hey can we siphon off can we borrow a little a little juice >> um but uh no really uh impressive progress and and excited to follow along. >> Have a great rest of your day. >> Congrats to the team. >> Thank you. >> Talk to you soon. Goodbye. >> Let me tell you about public.com investing for those that take it seriously. stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service. Uh, let's go over to the retail corner, presented by public, of course. Uh, Matthew Zeland says, "The idea that SpaceX is being quote dumped on retail is a little silly. Retail almost certainly wants to buy like 10x of whatever is possible." He said, "I'm just not moved by the index fund stuff. The index funds own the stock markets. Basics is part of the stock market. What are you going to do? go find a way to neutralize your exposure if you're so mad about it. That's a good point. With public, you could create the S&P 499 if you want. But um >> well, SpaceX isn't going to be in the S&P. No, they're the one uh they're the one index that pushed back. >> I think that that the profitability hurdle has been uh has been met because of the new Google deal. I think that SpaceX when they go public will be I think this is new >> and I think that Google is now buying about a billion dollars a month of compute from SpaceX and between that between the Google deal and the anthropic deal um and probably lower burn from just things generally because you're going out and you want to make sure that you're in the fighting in fighting form uh I would expect to see a profitable quarter very quickly to that will lead to index Not like 5 days. >> Yeah, probably not 5 days, but I would probably say within the first year it's possible. And S&P 499 is just is just an idea. There's other indices that it matters. >> Can't can't the S&P just look at Goldman's estimate that they're going to have 470 billion in 2030. >> Good point. >> Can't they just lean on that? >> They could. No, they actually can't because it's in their rules that you have to be actually gap profitable. But Elon is marshalling the profits from a variety of companies that have money to pay. Um, but I but I take issue with this this question of uh retail almost certainly wants to buy like 10x of whatever is available. There's so much available. It's not some lowflat, oh, it's GameStop and like a bunch of meme traders can fire it up. Like this is $60 billion. Like I don't know that retail can deploy what 10x that $600 billion dollar is coming out of retail like Robin Hood accounts. Are you kidding me? Like no. I like like I don't know that that's the I don't think that the like maybe m maybe what happens is the indexes come in and they anchor and then there's employee lockups and then Elon's not selling. So the effective float is low enough that retail is actually fighting for shares and moving the price and they are the marginal trader which would be the biggest win ever because then you can move the retail army off of talking about the moon and Mars and all the long-term stuff as opposed to having a bunch of financial investors that are like, "What have you done for me lately? What's going on this quarter?" Which is not where that business wants to be. So I don't know. Chat's predicting a blood bath for retail. We'll see. I don't know. Yeah, subtract my $135 from 60 billion. Uh, it it's a lot. I I still don't I'm not putting in the dumping on retail. I'm just saying that like I don't I I think that Matthew, friend of the show, love him, but I don't fully buy that if the retail allocation is 10 billion that there's a hundred billion of demand just because it's such a big number. Uh, that will I don't know. >> We'll see. >> Hard to find a bear that's actually willing to short it. That's a great point. That is a fantastic point. Uh it is uh it is a very very dangerous proposition. Um wait, is this true? No, this is a joke. Morgan Barrett is joking around. Has a screenshot of Arowan advertising the SpaceX IPO. SpaceX IPO access is in the Arowan rewards. I know this is a joke because Jordy would have told me if it was real because he's in that app five times a day. his screen time. It's like Arowan and then X and then text messages. Yeah, but Arowan's at the top. No, >> pull up this post from Cosmos. >> And then we'll go to our next guest. >> Yes. >> Uh Cosmos is saying, "Hey Siri, find me a trademark lawyer." >> And this is Andy Mun's company. If you zoom in, you can see that it's the exact same logo. And I do know that Andy does in fact have trademark on this design. >> Oh, interesting. Wait, so so that is the new Siri loading icon or is that just this app is loading actively? I don't know. This is this is an odd odd demo. At the same time, it's six dots. >> I don't know. >> It's six dots. Like it's >> your honor. It's six dots. >> It's six dots. Like can you just can you also potentially trademark a square? I can I'm the only one that can use a circle. >> Cosmos is like a more more from my understanding more like a Pinterest uh competitor. It could be a different enough category that >> Well, Apple also used a Pinterest style dual feed layout in one of their app designs. So, you know, maybe they're ruffling feathers all over the tech industry today, but probably giving consumers what they want. So, we'll see. Juror comes on says, "I like the six dots on my Siri. I'm happy. I was upset about Apple intelligence. I thought they underdelivered, but now they're back, so I'm voting Apple. Yeah. The most biased jury in the world. Oh, imagine. Well, we have Pete Florence from Generalist. He's the co-founder and CEO. Pete, how you doing? >> Hey, John. I'm doing great. Thanks for having me on. >> Thanks so much for hopping on. First time on the show. Introduce yourself. Tell us about the company. >> Awesome. So, um, really the backstory of the company is, uh, you know, goes back to kind of the story of the founders. And so for myself, I've been working on robotics and AI for over a decade now. I started my PhD at MIT >> success. >> There you go. Yeah. 2014. Um, and it was in in grad school at MIT. I met one of my co-founders, Andy Barry. Uh, just an amazing overall roboticist. He was at Boston Dynamics for five and a half years. Then after grad school for me, I was at Google DeepMind. Uh, and there I worked super closely with another Andy, Andy Zang. Uh we published a ton of research papers together and um you know eventually it just kind of there was this overwhelming sensation that to like really match the the shape of this challenge to just go build general intelligence for the physical world that we just needed like you know to get the get the dream team together, get all the right folks and um and have like a really focused plan on on how we actually build and scale this whole thing. And that's what we've been doing for the last couple years. >> Why haven't you said the word humanoid yet? What's going on? Is there more to this than that? >> I I you know, we we think humanoids are are awesome. A lot of people on the team have been working on humanoids for for over a decade. Like back when I when I mentioned when I started uh grad school, that was the era of the DARPA Grand Challenge, you know, back like one of the first sort of big humanoid things. >> This is Roco's Basos. He doesn't want to say anything bad about humanoids. >> Yeah. Yeah. >> He's like He's like, "They're great. They're great. I'm not really working on them right now, but they're great. I don't want to say anything." >> There was those two kids because when they rise up, you don't want to be on the record. You saw those two kids in China. >> Yes. >> That got kicked by humanoids. >> You know what those kids were doing right before the performance? >> Talking trash. >> They were talking some smack. >> Probably talking smack. Saying that there's a different path to robotic to our robotic future. But take us through it. Like what is the future? How do you see this all rolling out? Because I think I think everyone agrees with you. >> Uh I don't I don't know if everyone agrees. I mean, otherwise people wouldn't be spending billions of dollars bu building only humanoids. But I I do think that humanoids are are really of course like a a form factor that makes a lot of sense for a lot of things. But we we just think the the future is is much bigger than than only humanoids and you know there'll be billions of robots and and some of them will be humanoids but there'll be a lot of other form factors too. >> Yeah. Humanoids are the cars and you're building the motorcycle. I like it. I don't >> um I I would say we're more like building like in that analogy more more like building fundamental like engine technology that could be used in motors or could be used in cars or could be used in planes or you know whatever you want. So I mean that feels like it gives you potentially a larger TAM in the near term because like as much as everyone says like oh is humano what is the what is the ramp for humanoid robots to actually get into the home there's so many edge cases I in the factory you have polished floors why don't you just have wheels like there's all these reasons why humanoids the supply chain it could take five years it could take 10 years but at the same time like Amazon actively has a million robots like they just do they're KA systems. They're rolling around. You don't they're nowhere near humanoid, but they're incredibly economically valuable. And if you could be part of that supply chain, you probably have a great business. But what supply chains that we would broadly define as robotic do you see as being like the most near-term consequential to your business? >> Yeah, great question. So, you know, overall there's like robotics and and automation has been deployed in a ton of different industries doing a lot of different things and um you know, we this has been kind of obvious over time to learn from me, but like we don't want to be doing anything that previous robotics and automations has already solved. We really really want to be focused on the things that haven't been solved so far today. Um, so in a lot of cases, this is like industries that already have a lot of robots, but there's a lot of different types of applications in these that just uh, you know, have not been possible to address with with robots before. So things like logistics, manufacturing, the supply chains for those or or the um, you know, really just like the the roll out of you know operations of those at scale, those are really um, two really obvious areas. But then you know the name of the company is generalist and uh you know very much like having these models power robots in a ton of different industries, ton of different applications. That's that's really what what we're doing. >> Okay. So I have a calculator app. It's written in Python on the back end. It works fine. I could replace that with an LLM and just ask the LLM to guess the answer to every math question I give it. Uh that would be inefficient and not really an upgrade. Uh, it's possible. Um, my question is, let's say I have a factory and I have a bunch of CNC machines with robotic arms that are on deterministic paths. I have some cucka robotic arms that are all pre-programmed. They take the glass and they put it the on the windshield of the car as it rolls along. I have a bunch of robots that are programmed that and they're doing their job. They break down. There's all the usual things. But why do I want to go from deterministic control and operation of my robotic fleet to something that's stochastic AIdriven? >> Yeah, it's a great question. Um, so some some things John like yes and those types of applications that you mentioned those are those are already solved by robots today like we already have welding robots, right? >> But there's a lot of stuff that um even in like very structured roboticized environments like it it's still very challenging for previous generation like programmed robots to solve. The easiest example in auto manufacturing is like wire harnessing. The reality is like things like wires or lots of different like finicky uh like easy for people to deal with types of um objects and applications. These these are just out of scope for like traditional you program the robot to do those things. But that's just that's just auto like really like the the variety of different like industries that are set to benefit from these models that can just you know u really pick up anything you want them to do in terms of um especially what what we focus on is is dexterity is we really think is like the holy grail and this is I think not even that hot of a take within robotics. Everybody in robotics knows that like dexterity has really been the bottleneck and that's the one where we are just like really focused on pushing is making it so robots can use their hands to do um you know really a massive variety of different applications. So is the biggest opportunity taking something that doesn't have a robot in the loop at all and creating a new robot or a system that can you know use existing robots to do that task or is there still opportunity in look I have a cucka robot arm and 80% of the time it does it right but we have someone there that's taking over and getting on the Xbox controller or something like once or twice a day and that's where we want to ing AI to bear to deal with those edge cases or is it more the wire harnessing like you're not you're not doing that with a cucka robot arm at all and so we're going to unlock that for the first time. >> It's much more of the latter much much more of the unlock, right? Um and I think even from what we've seen so far and just like you know starting to announce these these models that that we've been announcing and starting to see people that have been coming us coming to us for what they want them to use them for. um like we just have this like you know there's this general sensation of like this explosion of interest of like oh I've never thought about using a robot at all for this entire application and now okay I see we we can start to get these robots to very quickly and very reliably and with good speed and all all these other things that are needed to really deploy these things uh that this is this is coming online and yeah it's really much more of this unlock for all these different things that we haven't really been able to use robots thoughts for before. >> Uh, it feels like the way that robotics are naturally diffusing, which is, you know, kind of behind the scenes. >> Sorry, I'm watching the I didn't see the video of this. This robot slapping a kid is so bad. >> So bad. We'll play him after you jump off, but um uh >> you can stay on. So, so the way that robotics are diffusing is naturally in industrial settings behind the scenes and it feels like there could be massive amounts of progress being made and like relatively little hype around it because the people that are experiencing these products in real time aren't necessarily on X just being like this model changes everything. I no longer write, you know, I no longer write code. I just prompt etc etc. Is is that feel at all accurate? >> I I I think um you know what I think about there is that the industrial uh applications we think are are are likely to be the ones that really start to ramp um even more quickly than more like consumer type uh or you know like home type applications. Um, you know, of of course there'll be like more and more robots in people's homes, but in terms of these things like really starting to scale, we do think that, you know, industrial is is is more likely to take off there. But we're also like super excited about everything that will be happening in in more like consumer and home type applications. Um so uh you know that that's you know one of the you know just fundamental strategies of focusing on the model intelligence and it can be used in in all these different cases is uh we do think industrial is more likely to take off soon but yeah we're we're super excited about supporting you know more consumer in and home type things as well >> data benchmarks eval what's the current thinking the simtoreal gap uh puppeteering I mean there's so many different pieces of but but I want to get up to speed on like your philosophy on each of these like tradeoffs. Like how much do you believe that uh that you know the scaling laws apply versus uh just you know we we we've seen all these crazy companies of doing like uh you'll wear a camera to collect training data for humanoid robots like the data collection thesis house cleaning. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. What's your data collection thesis? What's your eval benchmarking thesis? like how do you know you're getting better? How is how much of it is qualitative versus quantitative? Like take me through that side of the business. >> Totally. The these are all uh you know very very good and very core questions. So >> I know it's like five questions that we could spend an hour on each of them. >> Exactly. Tell me everything. So, uh, um, you know, we think, uh, what I would point to here, right, is like we we've started to, to share a fair bit on like what we kind of think is is really core and and what drives like all the decisions that we put into our models. So, you know, going back to um, you know, you mentioned scaling laws, we announced our our Gen Zero model back in November. Um and I I think um you know it it really was the the first time in robotics that anybody had shown like general scaling laws, right? Where we can predictably advance performance with more and more compute and data. And of course this is something that for for all the AI researchers that have known what has been happening in all the other domains like this is of course something that that that we we we were expecting to happen. Um and Gen Zero back in November really was the first time that anybody had showed shown this. That was back in November. uh you know fast forward just five months uh April pretty recently we announced the Gen one model um and it's it's quite a bit better model um in and like you know the biggest point I Nice you're just we've shown some videos here which I I can give some color on but um >> it's really we have a whiteboard and this is a job in our in our studio >> so Tyler I'm sorry you're >> and it needs to be erased >> it actually needs to be erased >> everything on the board is irrelevant No, >> we we'll see if we can get a robot to the studio before too long. Um but um >> that you know the the Gen One model like it it really is starting to cross into like these levels of performance that that we think for certain types of applications and we we tried you know to always underpromise and overd deliver. So uh there's plenty that that we still have more to go. we feel very early overall in like the general journey of general intelligence for the physical world, but um starting to cross over into levels of performance where these things are are are commercially viable for for a good number of applications and and we think that this is really like a crossover point where we have like a general model starting to be able to hit levels of reliability and speed and improvisational intelligence where we can start to get these things out there. um very much like you know uh I think the kind of like you take a GPD2 level model you scale it to a GPT3 level model and you start to tick over into certain types of applications become commercially viable right if you remember GP3 started with like >> copy AI and Jasper AI you know copywriting for ads that was kind of the first things to take off few others um and we we feel like that's starting to be where we're at with these models for the physical world >> okay question is it possible that for certain robotics form factors. Let's say humanoids. They get to the point where they can do economically valuable work as in the robot can make something but the process overall is not commercially viable because of the >> the the capex needed to to or to say purchase the so like I've been looking at humanoids do some work >> and they're able to do some type of process let's say and I can say like okay maybe right now there's a bunch of humans out there that do that kind of work and you could put a humanoid there. Problem is like a humanoid has all these different, you know, actuators and motors and batteries and all these different things. And I'm looking at it and thinking, okay, is it possible that the robot sort of just starts like breaking down where let's say you spend $50,000 on a robot and it replaces a human, but it starts degrading over time and, you know, many of the parts need to be uh replaced frequently enough that you're effectively having to just buy uh replace parts or buy a new robot so frequently that you're better off just having a human in that in that role. Well, I I I actually hired a Quinn Emanuel lawyer to do my dishes and so like even if it's $600 an hour, I'm going to be saving money. >> Nice. Yeah. I I whether it's the things whether it's the things breaking down or whatever it is like Yeah. any any factor that makes it so that um you know like what what you need to get done is not getting done. Um, and you need to like have somebody looking over their shoulder the whole time. Like, yeah, that that that makes it, you know, not really uh uh at the level of of viability that that I think is really needed for for these things to really scale and be useful. But, um, >> we're running long. Do you have another minute? >> Uh, yeah, I'm good. >> Perfect. Uh, tier list of data sources. I want you you know tier list S tier's the best. A B C. Uh uh I want I want to throw some some data sources at you and you can sort of rank them. So uh the first one would be YouTube videos or like internet video like transfer learning from there's a video of somebody skateboarding or walking around. Is that a valuable data source? Put aside the cost to license it. Just think about the quality. >> Yeah, this this is great. Yeah. Uh with I don't know the whole set yet, so I have to >> Yeah. Yeah. It's tough. This is also live. So, it's time the whole is live. Good. No, no, I'll give you an answer, but it's it's not S tier. >> It's not A tier. >> Okay. >> I maybe I give it a B. >> B. Okay. Uh, next one. What else is coming? >> Uh, world models. World models. I've heard a lot of hype about transfer learning from world models. Seems a little bit early, but where's that? >> Um, so world models as a right that your question up front was as a data source, right? >> Data source specifically. >> Yeah. So, so, so you can generate infinite worlds. You can generate a world of that whiteboard and use that as training data even though it's synthetic. >> Yeah, I think synthetic data in general in robotics is still a very kind of um >> uh you know o open frontier and there's not like there's not a huge amount of proof points here in terms of it really enabling uh >> it it's an area I would think is promising but but there hasn't been a ton of proof points here. So, I would just like >> I would put world models like not as a source of data. F t I'm going to wait is radical ventures in any in any world model companies. I'm going to give Rob Taves a call and tell him that you are talking trash and Rocco's vassel is not going to like this when Fe Lee achieves ASI and has a bone to pick with you. >> It's it's it's a complicated question. I I think that um >> it's okay. We can move on. >> The data that behind the data that is behind these world models, that's sort of like the source of data, I would say. >> Okay. Third data source, mocap data. You got a bunch of people in mocap suits. You got them doing things. It's a 3D representation, maybe a point cloud, something like that. >> This is this is a good uh good list of questions. So for for me, it's not a data source I'm super excited about because u well let me explain. >> We we we you know, we really care especially about dexterity, right? And and mo cap suits of people running around, you know. Yeah, >> studio is not the main place where you get dexterity. It is good for like, you know, full body, you know, whole body motions. I would say first issue is >> in my own list, I put it tier. Ctier. Next, I I get a lot of Instagram reels from this community. It's the gloving community. I don't know if you've heard of the glovers, but they Okay, so they so they put up LEDs on the end of their fingers. They wear gloves and they do light shows for each other. It's like a Burning Man Coachella type thing. Anyway, they exemplify remarkable dexterity. Is that going to be an important source of data? >> Um, we love remarkable dexterity data. I don't know how much of this this this source of data exists. Um, it depends on what what type of data, not just like what people are doing, but what type of data can you extract while people are doing it. So, I don't know what sensors the the gloves have, but >> in general, the more dextrous the data, the the more valuable. So, >> okay, >> without knowing more about it, maybe I'll put it B or A. >> John will start a a gloving data labeling. >> Next one. uh just the general general like uh open crawl internet data. I talked to uh a very thoughtprovoking AI thinker at one point and he said that like like with enough scale uh you could like learn to walk as a humanoid robot just from reading. >> By the way, by the way, a pretty heavyhitter robotics founder texted me live and says Pete is trying to figure out how not how to not say world models suck. And he says there there it is. Okay, put aside the world. >> We wrote a blog post on this. We think they have five years and it'll be great. But uh but specifically just this idea that like to start your foundation model to do like the earliest pre-training. It might be it might be helpful to just start with like general understanding of the world. So you bake in like all the Reddit data or all the internet common crawl like all of that stuff. Where does that rank on the on the on the tier list? >> So here let me say on this right. So like exactly this like you know idea of like oh let's use all the data from the internet we possibly can and bake that into the robot brain and then and then that's like a source of knowledge that the robot brain has and then we also have the robot learn all the other things like that that is exactly uh like a core that that was like really the core of my work back when I was at at Google de mind like like and you know a lot of the research in there was like things that myself and my co-founder Andy Zen uh you know that that's what we did this is an area I'm very passionate about it well >> talk me off not S tier. >> It's It's great. It's It's very It's very helpful. Um I I would like it it's it's what it's something you definitely want, right? But then I would just think of it this way. Like what's the best way to learn how to ski? >> Is it read a book on skiing? >> No, it's to read. >> It's to read. That's right. No, >> no. It's to watch a bunch of Instagram hype reels edited to SDK kid. That's what you got to watch. You got to get the video training data, not the r/ rashking. I think I had another one. I think I had another one. Okay. Okay. The the last one. >> You want to go the point is you want to go skiing, right? That's the point. >> The last one is uh is simulation. I gave you let's call it Unreal Engine and I have a onetoone representation of a particular robot and I can vary the terrain and I can vary the motions and it can sort of goalsek over a inverse kinematics model and you can use that to train off of. Where's that fit in? I'd say C >> C tier. Okay. Is there anything that's S tier or A tier? Like what Wait, am I missing something or is this the secret sauce? Is this why I got to give you $400 million? >> Um I mean you you can you can take a look at some of the data that we have. You know, we we've shared a little bit about what we have. Um you know, I I certainly think that our our data is is very very good. It's but it's the things that create S tier data is not just like oh what's the overall like um uh you know uh data capture methodology but it's also about like what you know what are people actually doing like what's the quality of the data and that's the type of thing that's like >> very hard uh to in a short conversation to put your finger on but as you sort of like live and experience this stuff all the time you really you you you know you you develop this appreciation for what really drives quality and this is one of the things that really drives you know like you know what makes the best language models the best language models. Quality of data is an is an incredibly important part. >> The lived experience is S tier. >> Lived experience of the physical world is wearing a full ski outfit with ski boots and skis, but sitting at my desk reading r/k. >> Okay, you said it right though. Lived experience of the physical world is is S tier. That is exactly what it is. >> Getting the reps. I love it. That's a great That's a great philosophy. Well, we got to hit the gun. $400 million, $2 billion valuation. Thank you so much for coming on the show. >> Great stuff. Thanks for hanging out. This is fantastic. >> Let's do it again soon. I appreciate the live like uh the proof of work in the background, too. Robots cooking. >> They're cooking. It's just every day here. Well, thanks for having me on you guys. >> Talk to you soon. Cheers. Goodbye. >> Let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. You use your favorite agent to deploy web apps, servers, databases, and more. Well, railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security. And our next guest is here with us live in the TBP and Ultra Dome. How you doing >> well? How to show >> in the Ultradome. >> Thanks for having me. >> Jordan Bramble, CEO and founder of Entries. >> Welcome back. >> Got some gifts for you guys. >> Hats. Fantastic. I went golfing yesterday. >> These are good looking hats. I like any You take any hat and you put the this flag on it. >> I like it better automatically. >> This is good. Uh what's the occasion for the hat? >> Well, um See, it's got a 53 on the side of your hat. So, that's um Idaho National Labs 53rd reactor. >> We just built it, turned it on last week. >> Fantastic. How'd it go? >> So, uh incredible. Okay. >> Um did everything we set out to do. So, >> uh about a year ago, you guys probably remember this, the president signed a series of executive orders >> trying to speed up nuclear. >> Trying to speed up nuclear. Um one of the provisions in those orders called for >> three reactors to be turned on on American soil um by America's 250th birthday, July 4th. Um, we just turned on the first a month ahead of schedule. >> Okay. So, you so you took your reactor to INL and you turn it on. What is that process like? How long did you turn it on for? What were you monitoring for? Were there any Oh, we're going super critical. It's melting down. Were there any moments? >> Did any you had some uh I think one of your investors or at least multiple were out there. >> Yes. >> Like Jamie was >> Jamie Clint was there close. >> Did he fall asleep? >> No. During the because there's a lot of debate on VCs falling asleep falling asleep. But I feel like turning on a nuclear reac having a nuclear reactor go critical sounds really sounds really exciting but I feel like in practice you might be sitting there for like you know hours and hours and hours. >> Yeah. It sounds thrilling. It's like inside of a box and you can't really see anything. You're just >> start Exactly. You're streaming you know with the same thing the control room operators are seeing. So you you watch your approach to critical every step of the way. It's intentionally kind of a slow dull moment to get there. >> It's kind of just a number on a screen. >> Yeah. But the exciting thing is I mean this is something that >> um you know we as a country have not done with a with a um with a new design with a non-lightwater cooled reactor um in I think like 40 years, right? This is this is the first privately >> water. What do you have against light? >> I have nothing against them. I think we should build a lot more lightwater reactors as well. Um so we're focused on micro reactors, right? So very very small scale systems kind of one megawatt and below. And the idea is you put multiple of these systems. >> Micro water. >> Um well, what about what about if you want to put a reactor places where you don't have access to water, right? Um so like you're not near >> water. Bring some water with you. Wait, do they really go through a lot of water? Yeah. >> Oh, light water reactors go through a lot of water. Interesting. If you look at where lightwater reactors typically are, they're by the ocean. The the notable the notable example uh the notable exception to this is um uh I think it's uh Palo Verde in Arizona. So they actually use the wastewater stream from from the city of Phoenix. Oh, interesting. As a cooling source for the reactor. >> Okay, cool. So obviously there's lots of applications where you're in the desert, you're in space, you're somewhere on the moon or something and a bunch of other places where you don't have access to water. That's an advantage. So, >> and you got to save the water for the almonds. >> Yeah, exactly. Like if we if if he's using a bunch of water to make energy, what are the almonds going to drink? >> But there's other benefits too, right? So, so you know, very very small scale reactors, what you want to do is you want to be able to shrink uh the plant size. >> Um for thermal efficiency reasons, you typically want to operate at very high temperatures. Um in order to keep water from boiling at very high temperatures, you have to go to higher and higher pressures. Yep. Which that creates materials issues and other challenges. And so, you know, in our specific design, um, we're relying on liquid metal heat pipes as the primary coolant. >> Liquid metal heat pipes. Okay. >> So, small amounts of sodium that vaporize inside of a pipe. >> Okay? >> When they condense on the on the cool end of the pipe, they condense into a metal like a wick structure. Think like wire mesh. Okay? >> That through surface tension pulls the fluid back. And so, you have this totally passive process of cooling the reactor that just relies on phase change in a in a very small amount of metal. Um but the other advantage of that is we operate at near atmospheric pressure. Right? So these are low pressure systems. Um from a safety perspective, if something were to happen to the reactor, you don't have a coolant that's going to vaporize and travel over large distances. When you have pressurized water, >> if you lose that coolant, you run the risk of it traveling steam everywhere. Exactly. Transporting fision products, right? >> Okay. >> So this how do you actually generate electricity once you get the heat? >> So uh it's called a nitrogen closed brake cycle. So there's a heat exchanger. think a tube tube and fin on the condenser section of the pipe >> and gaseous nitrogen is removing heat. >> Um and then it it turns a turbo machine like an automotive style turbocharger um that turns an alternator and that's ultimately how you're making electricity. >> Interesting. >> Um so this test does not produce electricity. >> Our goal is is to be there in 2027 and then on customer sites in 2028. So you know I like to say neutrons 26, electrons 27, dollars 28. >> Love it. >> Great. Sorry. Yeah. uh are you standing on the shoulders of giants? Like is this more of a uh like h how much how much of this is obviously you're innovating in a bunch of different ways along the way? >> But had somebody said 30 years ago, hey, this is possible and then just nobody did it >> or like what is what is kind of the balance between like execution? Yeah, >> I think um the 1980s was really the last, you know, roughly the 1980s into maybe the the early '90s when the Cold War ended was kind of the last time we had the capability to to to do this as a country. And um you know, I love this question, you know, do we stand on the the shoulder of giants? Because the answer to that is absolutely. So the regulatory process that that we used for this was um DOE authorization and you know even that was was was informed by a program that was started roughly eight years ago called project payway in the department of defense. A lot of the lessons learned from that >> informed this regulatory streamlining. Um when the president signed these executive orders, I think one of the reasons why ourselves and others were able to jump you kind of jump to action so quickly and and be successful on this was you know we as industry were ready to do this. Um the infrastructure had been built developed really the people had been developed at the national labs and in the DOE to support this over the course of eight years. Um >> there were already people reactors megawatt rate. >> Um you know anywhere I mean tens of kilowatts up to multiple megawatts. >> Um so you know I think uh some of the military solicitations they just say 20 megawatts and below. Okay. >> So all the way down to tens of kilowatts even >> um >> but um you know our sweet spot is anywhere 100 kilowatts to like a megawatt potentially even a little more than that. >> And then you string them together if you need a big >> Yep. And so most of the military's critical infrastructure um you know those assets are hundreds of kilowatts to low numbers of megawatts. And so you want that flexibility and ultimately that's what's going to get you the highest capacity factor energy anyways is to have some redundancies built into the model. >> But um >> yeah I mean >> so for example the fuel that we used um it's called trico fuel the exact specification that we used was the supply chain for it was developed and funded by the department of defense under project pay. So that that production line already existed. BWXD made the fuel. >> But even that was built upon 20 years worth of funded work by the DOE um called the AGR program, advanced gas reactor program. And that's really what developed that fuel. >> So you know what it meant was >> um so much of our safety basis, you know, the reason we know that fision products will be retained even at high high temperatures because of how much qualification work had been done on this fuel. We could point to that in our regulatory engagement and that really speeds things up a lot, right? you get to delete some of the extra safety systems. It actually saves you a lot of analysis work because you're relying on the fuel fundamentals itself. So, you know, that's one thing, right? If we tried to do this 10 years ago, I don't know if it would be possible because, you know, that data just didn't exist to the degree that it does now. >> Um, you know, the the regulator in DOE Idaho, um, you know, gentleman, uh, came out of retirement to do this. This is something he'd been waiting his entire career to do. and on our joint test group. So there's this thing called a joint test group. That's representatives from Antar's Idaho National Lab, Department of Energy, all in one room driving decisions. Um the the the person representing INL's operations and that uh had known the DOE regulator since 1979. I just found out that last week that they've been and this is the first reactor they've done together since before 1979. >> Wow. >> So um >> came out of retirement. >> Absolutely. Stand on the shoulder of >> one last tour. The whole narrative around no new nuclear reactor since 1979 >> is somewhat of a good rallying cry for the nuclear industry. >> But I I wonder if there's actually a benefit to sort of reframing messaging around nuclear to acknowledge the fact that I believe the United States generates more nuclear power than any other country including China and France. >> It's about 20% of our base power. >> Yeah. And so France has a higher percentage of their base load power. Yeah. But they produce way less electricity just generally. Smaller country, lower population, less industrial. >> And so there's a different take right now that the the the whole messaging path for nuclear is like we're so behind we can't make anything. And I feel like there's a more inspirational tone which is like no, we're literally number one. Let's not lose it. Like we actually make the most nuclear power of anyone. So, let's just continue doing what we're great at. Sure, we have some problems with approving new stuff. Yes, we need to modernize, but this we're we already have the crown. Let's just defend it. >> Well, that's that's again what I think is the beauty of this program that the DOE developed in response to the president's executive orders, the reactor pilot program, >> is on a very tight schedule, we just got to show the world like we can continue to do these things. >> And, you know, I I kind of retroactively look at it. I would say, you know, the design work is difficult. Mhm. >> Um regulatory work actually, you know, comparatively easy. You My take on this is if you integrate safety into the design process itself, if you lead with engineering rigor, um the regulatory stuff can kind of take care of itself, especially when you have a bought in regulator like this. >> Um the hardest part of all was, you know, when we actually got through operational readiness with the DOE and started operating a nuclear facility, right? So like really the last two weeks of getting this thing turned on was the hardest part of all. Um the uh you know you asked kind of about oh moments definitely no oh moments when it comes to safety you you design up front to ensure that that's not the case. Yeah. But >> uh from the build and integration side and actually operating this this facility and this reactor um huge learning opportunities. Right. So one of the first things this was the first time that we had set up our control system all of our nuclear instrumentation with neutron detectors with a startup source right because it's a nuclear facility. You don't just do this in a in a warehouse in California, right? >> Yeah. >> And so, um, you know, we started seeing >> I do worry sometimes that there's a warehouse in Elsa Gundo that's, you know, stretching the limits of >> Yeah. >> But, uh, yeah, I'm glad going about it this way. Yeah, we we don't you know we we comply with our regulator, but um you know we um our reactivity control system, we rely on rotating drums with a boron carbide insert layer to absorb neutrons. So we can close those shut or rotate them out to modulate reactivity. And when the actuator motors themselves are operating, we were seeing electromagnetic interference with our neutron detectors. And >> so we went through this like >> five six day process to go figure that out and troubleshoot it. And it's really these kind of like integration activities being incremental being iterative. That's how you ultimately mature the techn technology quickly so that you can get to a true commercial product. >> What uh what's the next step? >> So >> hitting the gong. >> Hitting the gong. >> You hit it or do I hit it? Go for it. We're >> turning the reactor on. Um, so, you know, we put a couple million dollars into this facility getting it ready to be a be a be a nuclear nuclear reactor test bed. Um, we're going to take the same fuel, same facility, um, scale up to produce electricity there. And what that means for our customers, right, so we've announced um, an agreement with the Air Force to do um, several megawatts of power for Joint Base San Antonio in Texas. >> Cool. >> Uh, we expect to announce more military installations by end of this year. Yep. >> Um what that means for them is the first reactors that are going to their sites have operational heritage. They're not true first of a kind systems, right? Because we spent our own capital >> in testing these. So that's really next for us is um and in the leadup to that we're actually going to test the power conversion system itself um in our own facility. So >> you know generally our our our approach to technology development is we start with the subsystems. So we rigorously qualify those. We've got 322,000 ft of manufacturing space in Torrance. Then we do um integrated what we call electrically heated test. So instead of having to go through the regulatory process >> uh and do a nuclear test. We replace the nuclear fuel with cartridge heaters um and can test the system or some snapshot of the system with electrical heat which also then means you can take it take it apart afterwards, see what some of the thermal effects are. So we've already tested our system at full thermal power for for six months. And we're going to repeat that test again this year with some design iterations. >> Then we'll test the power conversion system. Then we're going to put it all together and do it in a nuclear reactor. So, $140 million raised. Congratulations. Thank you. Uh I don't know what you spent last year, but I want to know a little bit about like where the uses of funds goes have gone so far. Is it all like >> kind of a white pill that you it took I mean obviously there's more cost but something like $2 million to set up this this test facility and >> but is there is there like an ingredient or or a piece in the supply chain that's really expensive and you need millions of dollars for or is it like nuclear scientists are really expensive like AI researchers because a lot of these folks like there aren't a ton of jobs because the industry is contracted so I imagine it's not like this crazy bidding war um but like what is What is the binding constraint on the financial side? >> Well, you know, to to me that's another reason why these tests are so important because >> um you know, not only are we validating some of the reactor physics, but we just exercised our entire supply chain. And so we walked out of this test >> knowing you know the lead times we were quoted, the cost we were quoted, >> um you know, tolerances, quality expectations, does that actually match up >> with what we see in reality? In some cases, the answer is no, right? Um and and you know, we're going to iterate and improve on that. That informs some of the things that we're going to vertically integrate in-house versus areas where we're going to continue to double down with some of the same suppliers. Um fuel is by far the most expensive thing in a micro reactor. Um the total life cycle of the fuel itself, >> but the other thing a lot of people have talked about >> spending like millions of dollars on fuel. >> Yes. >> Really? Yeah. Absolutely. So it is like a significant cost. Got >> um Yeah. I mean, it's the largest single line item in the bomb of the reactor itself. Not a big surprise, but >> not boom. Boom. >> Boom. Bill of materials. Yeah. >> Nuclear energy. >> You got to you got to figure out the new new term for that one. >> Yeah. I'll just No acronyms. I just say bill of materials. >> But >> I was like the what now? >> The what now? What do you you have a secret project going on? >> Yeah. So, but what I think you you'd be surprised by that's also really expensive is all the nuclear instrumentation. So, how do you count neutrons? So >> yeah, you need, >> you know, things that if you really break them down into their constituents are probably like $50,000 worth of hardware >> only made by one company, very expensive >> and because we don't build a lot of reactors, you do it so infrequently, it ends up being being just, you know, to keep the lights on, you have to charge a really high price. >> For sure. That makes a ton of sense. >> You know, those are things that you learn from these tests. What is the stuff really I mean, a lot of times in these industries, pricing is proprietary, right? So you you learn that from doing these things. Um, and that informs where you're >> doing this for the first time that I'm gonna have to spend a million dollars on this thing. Yeah. Because you can't Yeah. It's got to be hard when you're pitching too to sort of forecast out like, okay, what's every thing going to cost? But if you hire the right people, I'm sure they have like >> We've been able to refine a lot of that at this point and just from from doing and testing. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we know exactly what our fuel is going to cost. We know how long it takes to transport it. >> You know, we know what our um all of our nuclear instrumentation costs. Um, and that's what really drives most of the cost of these systems at the end of the day. >> And also, I mean, like there's uh there's like I don't know like I can probably name like four or five promising nuclear projects at the early stage. Obviously, there is some competition, but it feels like such a such a uh like everyone can win market >> competing competing for infinite demand. >> Yeah. Infinite demand. And then and then also that that that has the benefit of like deeper in the supply chain that you can justify a company like General Matter because there's three startups that are growing and five scaleups and 10 public companies or governments that might buy and so all of a sudden you get another company deeper in the supply chain creating more competition creating more supply y and so more problems are getting solved. >> Exciting. >> Uh why military bases? I'm going to guess that uh secure setting uh strong willingness to pay for like a secondary source >> trucking all the diesel fuel. >> So I mean we believe and this was this is I think obvious at this point but this was really foundational to us back in 2023. >> Um the military is the best first customer for advanced nuclear. And so um you know I think first piece of evidence for that is um the army alone has a $2 billion budget for its Janice program to buy micro reactors for military installations. Um that's money that's going to be committed to buy and deliver reactors between now and 29 2030. Um so huge market for data centers and hyperscalers but what they're signaling is you know they're willing to make small equity investments loss but um until this technology is mature and proven um you know they're not really spending the big dollars yet whereas the military is saying we need this technology we're going to invest alongside of ventureback companies through programs like Janice and A&PI >> um sorry for the acronyms but uh that's the approach that they're taking. The other thing is regulatory expertise. So between the Navy and the Army, you have regulatory licensing authorities that already exist and they're leveraging uh the DOE license licensing pathway, you know, alongside of the DOE in an inter agency process. So this reactor that we just built, we had Army reactors, regulators in the room for that every step of the way, getting to, you know, in partnership with the Army um >> getting familiar getting familiarity with with our design. They're going to take all of that back into their next licensing activities for their programs as they try to put this technology on their bases. Right. We had naval reactors in the room. We had the NRC in the room. >> So, yeah, the Navy is really the best place for a long time, for decades if you want to be in nuclear engineering. Like, some of the best come out of there. >> So, I mean, the Navy builds multiple reactors a year. They've built four and a half times the number of reactors as the entire civilian sector in the >> operate a ton of them and in extreme conditions on aircraft carri, >> most extreme of all. and and they never stagnated in the 70s the way that the civilian sector did in nuclear >> crazy. >> So the last thing I would say is there's a mission capability need here with with the military right so it's about resilient power >> you know over the last decade more and more of let's call it warf fighting effects are generated from assets that exist on our installations here inside of the US. So whether that's command and control, satcom, cyber warfare, um our strategic deterrence like our nuclear weapons assets, um space superiority, how do you affect other people's assets in space, >> much more of that is generated from here inside of the continent, continental US. >> Yeah. >> And you contrast that with the old world of war fighting where you just ship troops across the world and and go invade other countries. Yeah. And fuel. >> And at the same time, we've got adversaries that are capable of disrupting the civilian grid. Yeah. >> And so how do we sustain these assets? How do we continue to operate them without access to a liquid fuel supply chain, without access to a commercial grid? >> Nuclear fision is is is the, you know, highest up time, highest capacity factor form of energy we have that's available to us today. >> And that's what drives that willingness to pay. So we believe, >> you know, long-term we'll go after data centers, you know, we'll do like remote industrials. We want to do everything in nuclear, but the companies that win those are going to emerge from military work first, right? Because our work with the military, we're going to come out of this with more reps for our operators, more reps, regulatory reps, more operational proof points of the technology at scale. This is a customer that will Yes, this is a customer that will invest equity and debt in your supply chain to lower your input. >> Yeah. the private market is is or or sorry like a hyperscaler is going to be much more commercial much more short-term what can you do for me tomorrow because otherwise I'm going to allocate these dollars to gas turbines or something >> exactly and and many complex technologies work this way GPS right you know if we didn't have nuclear weapons >> driving the need for GPS when would we have gotten door dash right >> um >> or yeah when would we have the internet the internet right >> yeah yeah uh the internet. Um, rocket propulsion, another great example, like born from the military first and then scale commercially. >> All this stuff >> prediction markets. >> Yeah, maybe. No, Tyler knows the truth about the prediction market. Genesis, >> you know, there was a big prediction market around >> Hans. >> Really? Really? around you around the the July 4th deadline. >> Which reactors would turn on by August or July 4th? Yes. >> Wow. >> So, >> wild. Well, thank you so much. >> Thank you very much for having me. >> This was fantastic. Congratulations. Last question. Are you Uh any any buzzer beers? We got less than a month. Do you think there'll be others though? >> Oh yeah. >> Are you trying to make it better? >> Actually, don't even comment because I don't want >> people are going you're going to move the market. So just say I wish them all well. >> Just say I wish all of them luck. Um I I mean like you said like you said >> the country needs a lot more nuclear energy. >> We're all going to be production Yeah. We're all going to be production constrained before it's competitive constrained. >> For sure. Um, you know, I think the advice I would offer to any anybody working at it is, uh, start operating a nuclear facility as quickly as you can because that's when all your challenges start. >> Just do it. >> And we've got Yeah, we've got just under a month left on the >> Stop making excuses. Start operating a nuclear facility. >> Yeah, >> it's good advice. >> Good advice. >> Thank you so much for coming. >> Of course. >> Yes. >> Thank you so much for having me. >> We'll talk to you soon. Appreciate it. >> Awesome stuff. We'll we'll talk soon. >> Let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless real-time experiences and new value with Cisco. I got an idea. A lot of people are trying to closing out on the nuclear thing. A lot of people are trying to unblock the nuclear regulatory thing. You got to deal with lobbying. You got to deal with getting approvals. MLM for regulatory. So, you employ a ton of people. You promise them financial freedom. You get them on Facebook and they're all of a sudden they're DMing their high their high school friends. Hey man, trying to catch up. Turns out I'm a lobbyist for the nuclear industry now. Would love to get a beer, you know. And then hosting an event and look. Oh. Oh, you don't actually work at the Idaho National Lab. Well, you should join me, be under me, and then you go find someone from INL, start lobbying them, create multiple layers, become sort of a pyramid structure. >> And this is the way we bring abundant energy to America. >> Could be powerful. We got to pull up these videos. We have to watch these videos. I knew you were going there. I'm ready. >> Let's pull this up. >> The latest and greatest in humanoid robots. You asked if we were ready. We're ready. Look at this. Boom. Boom. >> That is brutal. It is such a crazy hit. It's really spinning around and he sees it coming. >> It's It's bad to laugh. >> No, that's >> This is America's Funniest Home Videos. >> What was the parent doing? >> What was the parent doing? What was the robotics company doing? And what is that scarf? >> That looks so part of the problem. >> I'm sorry. That's intentional. >> You think this is intentional? You think this is viral marketing? You think this is Wait, but do you actually think this is a stunt? Like how can we go viral for our company? >> You don't know what brand it is. You can kind of see the logo on it. >> Well, if you're human, right? >> Yeah. You think so? >> No, it's not definitely. There's >> This is why this is why in America we keep the we keep the humanoid robots in the cages for cage matches for that robot fighting league that Tyler went to. >> No, that we need Do we know if there was a a human pilot >> or is this is this >> How much of this is AI versus just random? Uh, wild. Well, there's another crazy crazy humanoid robot video. We can pull up this one next. Uh, a robot wearing a clown head. Stop putting accessories. Oh my god, >> this one is just crazy. >> This one I would act like >> I'd press charges. >> I hope the >> This is a legal liability. >> I hope the child is okay because that looks like like >> it's a really crazy serious internal damage. >> It's not a soft leather shoe. It's not a foot. Like this is a steel metal bar that's hitting you >> with a lot of energy. >> This is Why is this happening so often? Like once is not is too much. Once is too much. Stop. We need a pause. >> Or or just some type of barrier between the children and the robots. >> Have we not invented fences? Have we not invented >> and watch it like sort of like stagger? realizes it knows it did something wrong. >> All right, but pull up this picture. I mean, this is starting to make sense. The um it looks like >> uh Have you seen the the picture of the robot's face close up? >> Average mosh pit experience. This is wild. >> Um >> this is absolutely >> sending. Also, if you if a robot comes at you swinging like this, you have Did you see its face, John? >> That does not look good. I don't like that at all. I mean, no surprise. >> No surprise. No surprise. >> This is not This is not helping the Terminator narrative. Um, yeah. If a if a humanoid is swinging at you like this, you have >> a child. >> I'm shocked. I'm shocked. I'm shocked. >> You have full uh you full approval to just drop kick it back. Like it's war at this point. If you come out swinging, you got to put your >> Where were the parents there to put that robot in a headlock? Take it down. >> You try that thing in America. Good luck. a dad is gonna you've seen those videos of like the dad saves. Have you ever seen these hype reels? It's like a dad and like the kid is about to fall off the swing and the dad like dives and like catches the kid with one hand or the famous one where a baseball's coming in. He's at a baseball game. The dad has the kid drops the kid has a beer catches the ball and then catches the kid. We got to find this video. It's one of the best. Uh anyway, someone can someone can hunt around for >> We can close out here. >> Air horse one. Airhorse one. >> Let's do it. Air one. >> Tell if these are AI generated. >> No, no, no. Horses fly and when they fly, they fly in stables on planes. And it looks like this. And they call it Airhorse One. And they're And this is because horses from all over the world are going to the Olympics for equestrian events. Uh and the event is called Airhorse One. But uh this is from 2024. And this image is older from previous Olympics or from a previous equestrian event. It's one of the most expensive parts of being into equestrianism is that you you rise the ranks, you become a great uh show jumper and then you have to pay to fly your horse on a plane around the world to compete. It's absolutely crazy. Anyway, thank you so much for tuning in. You don't want to go through cars. There's there's so much news in the car world. This is a crazy one. So, both the Jaguar O and the Audi Novalari, which we talked about at Palunteer AIPCON on Thursday, both of these cars were designed under the same design director, Masimo Friscala, Fresca, Frisa, I don't know, Masimo. Masimo designed both of these and they look sort of similar. And I think a lot of people are coming around to this design style. And I think this design style might be so widely adopted sort of light like Cybertruck might have been a little bit too aggressive, had some baggage with the Elon thing. I think when you start seeing the Jaguars, if they make this in different colors, obviously pink and light blue are very bold colors. Not everyone wants this. I think the reception to the Audi was much better purely because it's gray. But I think if you see a Jag in black, matte black, even white or gray or dark green, like you're going to like that vehicle. >> Producer looks like an R8 purist says looks like a >> Minecraft R8. I like it. I think it's cool. >> I think that it, you know, it just it it screams uh, you know, supercar version of the Cybert truck. >> Yeah. >> To me, >> which I think people have been waiting for. People want a roadster and it's been delayed for a decade. And I think with the Roadster, we're going to get something that looks more like a Model S. Like I would assume all the cars kind of just like morph together. >> Do you remember the original pitch for the Roadster? >> It was. >> So 0 to 60 under two seconds doable. Uh the price was crazy. >> Flying. >> Flying potentially. But the really crazy one is that the range was like 600 plus miles of range. So you just have this tension of like how do you make a lightweight car with that big of a battery that can deliver 0 to 60 in under two while also doing so usually there's a trade-off there. And so the whole the whole thing that broke everyone's minds was that it was just it was just uh tradeoff defying in so many ways on price range and >> aren't they adding some type of like SpaceX jet engine to try to overcome that? I think I think >> I think that's I think I think it's starting to leak out that that's maybe this the secret is like there's an additional propulsion. >> Yeah. Like a like a natural gas turbine that then acts as a range extender. Like if they put a naturally aspirated V12 range extender that just gets you a little So then you have 600 miles of range because you fill it up with like 40 gallons of gas. >> And if you put 40 gallons of gas >> just for launch. Just for launch. >> Yes. >> A little little boost. >> That'd be crazy >> from a jet engine. I mean there are very interesting other techniques. The fan car apparently works. Did you know this? >> So there are cars >> fan on the bottom >> fan on the bottom that creates more downforce. And I believe it's been tried a few times. It's very cumbersome to build, very expensive, but it but that technology was banned in F1. And I believe that the fan car actually does create more downforce. and the tradeoff between the extra weight from the fans and all that is actually outweighed by the downforce that you get. So you do if you were to build around that philosophy and so you could do something like that. There's a whole bunch of interesting things you could do. I'm optimistic. >> Well, going back to Masimo, yes, the designer of the new Jaguar and the new Audi. >> Yes. >> Uh so Audi's rebrand, I was just looking it up, was in late November or mid November in 2024. Masimo left in 2024, but he left it right at the beginning in January. >> And so he basically was like, "All right, my work. >> I designed it. Just put a normal color on the car. We'll be good." >> Kind of a normal launch campaign. >> James Bond dark green. You're good to go. I've done all the hard work for you. All the cat files I sent over. >> This is a billion dollar car. >> This is a billion dollar car. >> Can't mess it up. You're not going to be able to mess it up. >> Just put Yeah. George Clooney in it instead. They went crazy with No, but I'm glad I'm glad he's uh uh >> I think he's doing good work. >> Someone in the chat said the the the future should look like the future. I agree. >> This is a good example of that and I still think the Cybertruck it look it looks like the future. It is a very opinionated car but yes. So Nick Cruz Patain says all the VW group does is rebadge their cars Audi, Porsche, Lamborghini and upsell them to double the price or more. It's so obvious. So it does look a lot like a Tamario. Uh that's cool. That's fine. >> Terrari is a great car and the new design looks very different and it looks like an Audi. It looks like where Audi is going and the Tamari looks like where Lamborghini is going. So, I think that's cool. The crazy thing is $686,000 for an Audi. That is well above where the R8 priced when it came in as the halo car. Like the R8 was what 130 150 and a and a nice Audi at that time was maybe 60 70. And so you're looking at like a two to threex bump. No one's buying $200,000 Audi's right now. >> The good news is people with, you know, $600,000 burning a hole in their pocket, >> they'll have the option of choosing between a luch Yeah. or this new Audi. >> What do you think of my my anti- Halo car take? So, everyone knows a halo car. Classically, the Audi R8 is a halo car. Expensive supercar, V10, $150,000 as we mentioned, but it creates a halo effect around the brand. Everyone sees the R8. Oh, it's so cool. Maybe I'll get an A4. Maybe I'll get a Q5, a Q7, something like that. Because I it it it has the aura of the R8 on it. Some of the design language comes over and the RS6 Avant. It's not an R8. I need something more practical, but it has the aura of the R8. That's the way the halo car works. The same thing happens in Ferrari with the SP3 Daytona, the F80. Even if you get a 296, you're wearing the badge that's worn by the most elite, the F40, right? Luche potentially anti- Halo car because as soon as as soon as everyone started dunking on the luche, I noticed that people started feeling way more positively around the SF90 and the Puros, which for a long time people have been saying the SF90 is too expensive, the price is dropping, I don't even like it, I can't tell the difference between it and a 296. Now people can now people have opinions. Same thing with the Peron way. Oh, it's oh, they shouldn't be doing an SUV at all. I don't care that it has naturally aspirated V12. Now people are like, oh, it has a V12. That's amazing. The person is a steal. This is a great And so it feels like you could have this effect that by by diversifying the portfolio, you wind up with way more people saying, "Yeah, I will get a Pro way. Yeah, I will get an SF90." Because it is true. No one's complaining about SF90's hybrid system anymore cuz at least it's not full electric, right? >> This is the new meta. Horn cars. You got Halo cars. >> Devil horn cars. >> Yeah, just horn cars. >> Put the devil put the horns on another car and then you will sell the rest of the portfolio potentially. Everyone's everyone's projecting that like this is the way Ferrari is going to go and it's going to be all luches and and everyone's going to be buying luches and like I don't know how fast that can happen. I think I think there's going to be a lot of demand for the for the classic Ferraris for a long time. Anyway, anything else you want to talk about today? There's another >> uh There's always more stuff to talk about. It is crazy. You can get a two 2023 R8 has a V10 for $39,000. >> They're 300 now. >> No way. That's not right. >> This is a Yeah, I think this is a low mileage >> Audi R8 prices range from 60K to 250. Yeah, but this is a low mileage V10 >> with a lot of options. >> I'm going with the beater. I'm going with the one with three accidents. No, >> no car facts. >> Three accidents. >> Three accidents. Floridaowned aftermarket wheels. >> Florida with three accidents. It's crazy. >> Uh yeah, wrapped. Sign me up. I'm ready to spend 60k. Here we go. D used 2011 used 2011 R8. Uh $80,000, 32,000 miles. Minor to moderate damage. Yes, it is currently damaged, but it's an $80,000 supercar. What's not to like? It has a 10-cylinder, so that's good. >> Well, I just thought it was notable because you get top-of-the-line spec from 2023 for 300 with a V10 or >> they're now they now want 600. And I do think I do think there's enough enough fans of the R8 from from from the past that I do think this this car quickly trades probably at least 700 maybe beyond that. >> Yeah. Well, if you're a true fan, you'll go for the one with a little bit of damage because you don't care. This is a crazy one. Okay, now we're just shopping for R8s. Anyway, thank you for tuning in. Thank you for watching TBPN today. We'll see you tomorrow at 11 a.m. Sharp. Give us five stars on our podcast, Spotify. 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