OpenAI Acquires TBPN

You're watching TBPN! Today is Thursday, April 2nd, 2026. We are alive... It is 364 days until April Fool's. Yes, that's right. We are alive from the TBPN Ultra Dome, the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the Capital of Capital. We have some huge news. This is from the OpenAI blog. OpenAI acquires TBPN, accelerating the global conversation about AI. This is not an April Fool's joke. April Fool's was yesterday. We didn't do anything for April Fool's Day. This is real. This is a very interesting deal. I think a lot of people will be interested in this. We're very excited about this. We have a bunch of context and information to share about how this changes things, what changes, what doesn't. I'm sure there's a million questions. We're going to try and get to them all. But then we also have a huge, normal show. Normal show. We got Mark Lohr coming on. That's the first thing that's not changing. TBPN's not going away. We're going to be live every day, three hours, as long as we want. We have a lot of flexibility. We're going to do a lot of interesting things. We got Mark Lohr, the LeBron James of eCommerce. This is from his Wikipedia page. We can pull up the... If you are calling me right now, I can't pick up because I'm live. And I think you know... Yeah, I think it might be time to turn off the phone. I think, yes. It might be time to turn off the phone. Yeah, very, very strange. I think this is maybe the first time in history there's been a deal like this. And then two people that are a part of it have to go and talk for three hours straight. But it's technology, business as usual over here. Yes. We have a fun show for you today. We'll get into the news in a second. But we have Adam Meyers coming on from CrowdStrike to talk about all the recent hack. The Axios hack and... More. We have Jeremy from Circle coming on. In person. In person, which is exciting to talk about. I was third time on the show. Justin from Shepherd, Garav from Mirage, and then Phillip from Star Cloud. Lots of space news a week. We're very excited about the Artemis II mission going successfully. Hopefully you all watched it. It was a lot of fun. We were watching it here on the screen and we were gripped as the rocket took off because... Yeah, we were so locked in. We were joking around that it felt like it should have been a pay-per-view. Yeah. Like, could we turn space into a profit center for the government? Somebody was saying that it was not entertaining. I was extremely entertained. I don't know. Yeah. Maybe they could do more. But I thought... NASA has a decent e-commerce business too. We were watching. They were selling like 10,000 patches a minute. Yeah. Or something like that. Yeah. Yeah. I think we were doing the back of the envelope just from the main call to action at the bottom of the YouTube stream. They were selling a patch for, I don't know, tens of dollars and they'd sold like hundreds of thousands of them. So as we were watching, they were selling like something like $10 million worth of merch. So maybe go get some for yourself. Anyway, let's go over to Fiji Seimos post on the OpenAI blog. She shared this message with the company earlier today. She says, I'm excited to share that we've acquired TBPN. This acquisition brings a team of strong editorial instincts, deep audience understanding and proven ability to convene influential voices across tech, business, and culture. That's what we're going to do. I'm still going to be hitting the sound board. Yeah. Yeah, you are. TBPN has built something pretty special. It's one of the places where the conversations about AI and builders is actually happening day to day. A lot of you already watch it and rely on it to stay close to what's going on. As I've been thinking about the future of how we communicate in OpenAI, one thing that's become clear is that the standard communications playbook just doesn't apply to us. We're not a typical company. We're driving a really big technological shift. And the mission of bringing, and with the mission of bringing AGI to the world comes a responsibility to help create a space for real constructive conversation about the changes AI creates with builders and people using the technology at the center. And that's exactly what TBPN has built, which is what I was going to say. This is the next line. That is a huge part of the show is making sense of what's going on, how these tools are actually being used, all of the implications we've gone all over the place and we will continue to go all over the place. Yeah, and over the last year, like, you know, multiple years there's just been so much uncertainty about AI. I don't think we can change that. Yeah. But there's also a lot of fear in just talking through it with the people that are actually helping diffuse AI through the economy across every single industry is something that we've enjoyed a tremendous amount and is exactly what we're going to continue to do. Yeah, if you want to continue. Yeah, so she says so rather than trying to recreate that ourselves, it made a lot of sense just to bring them in support what they're doing and help them scale while keeping what makes them special. A core part of this is editorial independence. We can say whatever we want because we're live and we don't need to run anything through anyone. It's not possible. It is. It would be very difficult to have somebody here. Can we say this? I'm about to say a sentence. TPP and will continue to run their programming, choose their own guests and make their own editorial decisions. That's foundational to their credibility and it's something we're explicitly protecting as part of this agreement. And also we were never in the scoop industry. People were kind of asking like, is this journalism? Is it commentary? I think we've always been like, hey, we, you know, like to talk to a lot of people, have a conversation, bring in people. Yeah, and even even when companies have approached us and said we'll give you the exclusive. We don't give it to somebody else. It's like, hey, you can come on the show. We've got a golden scoop. We actually want you to go talk to the journal or the Times or Bloomberg, wherever Bloomberg, et cetera, wherever you want to go. And then come and contextualize it with us and let us dig in and understand more about the strategy. And so TPP and will continue running their programming, choose their guests and make their own editorial decisions. That's foundational to their credibility and something we're explicitly protecting as part of this agreement. I'm also excited to bring their amazing comms and marketing instincts to the team. We got lots of ideas and we're very excited for this. They're, they've helped many brands market online and because they have a strong pulse on where the industry is going, their comms and marketing ideas have really impressed. Did you see about me? I can't wait to leverage their talent outside of the show to innovate on how we bring AI to the world in a way that helps people understand the full impact of this technology on their daily lives. TPP and will sit within our strategy organization. We're pointing to Chris LeHaine. Really excited to welcome Jordy, John, Dylan and the broader team. And here's a statement from you. Do you want to read this? What did you say? Over the past year, we've had a front row seat, not just open AI, but to the entire ecosystem covering the daily news announcements and launches in real time while we've been critical of the industry at times after getting to know Sam, Fiji and the open AI team. What stood out the most was their openness to feedback and commitment to getting this right. Moving from commentary to real impact and how this technology is distributed and understood globally is incredibly important to us. So I contextualize it a little bit more shared. You know, a lot of people are like, is this an April Fools joke? I've been saying expect the unexpected. This is a plot twist. I'll give you that. It was unexpected. It was unexpected to me. And but I'm really happy about it. And when I reflect on my career, it's I think it makes a lot of sense and I can walk you through some of my career and my experience with open AI and with Sam Altman. The I've known Sam for maybe 13 years. He invested in my first company in 2013 and then we got in a really serious log jam during a financing and I wrote him an email. I told the story in Bloomberg a couple of years ago. I wrote him an email and said like, hey, like this is getting really rough. I'm first time founder. I don't know if we're going to be able to get this done. And he called me and we hopped on the phone for like five minutes and he was able to completely resolve everything and everyone walked out of the deal feeling pretty good. And so that always left this impression on me that like he was founder friendly. Obviously he didn't in this particular case. It was to my benefit not particularly to his benefit the way the deals the way the deal like wound out and and he was just a great at a great addition to the to the negotiation really. And you were very young at the time. Yeah, we were just a wee lad. I was 2324 something like that. Yeah. And then when I took my second company through YC, he was president at the time and then when I joined Founders Fund, the very first deal that I saw in motion at Founders Fund was the post chat GPT round in open AI in late 2022 early 2023. And so I sort of had this like front row seat to all of this and then once we actually started growing TBPN, he was one of the first people that I texted to, you know, say, hey, do you want to come on the show? And he was the first lab lead to come on the show and we're excited to continue having him on the show. Hopefully have other lab leads on the show have other people from all over the industry and just generally I think that when I was at Founders Fund, I was not particularly in the weeds of intra venture capital fights. I was much more interested in the conversation around technological stagnation, not funding companies, not making great companies happen. I never was in a situation where I was like, oh, like if a different VC firm backs a great company, that's bad, you know, and I think that's the same philosophy that I have always taken forward and will continue to believe in, which is that like the American AI industry is the most important thing and that will continue to be the case. And I'm excited for all the different competition and everything that's happening in the industry to continue and yeah, push further. Jordy, did you have anything else to say? You just wanted to say some thank yous because a lot of people have been a part of this journey to date. It's been I think something like, let me do the math here. 496 days, roughly 16 months since we put out the first episode. It was just the two of us and Ben sitting in a room, couple cameras, couple microphones and I will just say I didn't know this special of a business relationship was possible. Yeah, between you and me. Yeah, like I think like if you look back on that almost 500 days, we've had disagreements around strategy or approaches or things like that, but we have like almost universally stayed perfectly aligned on everything that matters every single day, every step of the way. And I think that's somewhat of a miracle given that we went into this, not really knowing what it would become and we did like one side project together and it took like eight months and it was like not, it was like successful, but it was not like, oh yeah, like okay, we were working together daily for months, you know. Yeah. It was a lot of just jumping and leap of faith, right? Yeah, and I think we've got this question so many times like do you guys get sick of each other? You know, you just have to talk to each other for three hours a day and like I've said this before, I'll say it again. And it is actually hilarious. The second that we leave the office where we both get in the car, we call each other, we end up talking for like another hour on the way home and so it's just been, it's been the privilege of a lifetime to just build this business with you and the whole team, the team has been absolutely incredible. You guys are all truly amazing and this very much is a, this very much is a team, like a team sport, like business is a team sport, but this is like a live team sport. We come in here every single day and the show doesn't happen if we don't all come in and make it happen. And so the consistency of the team has been just incredible and watching everyone's individual talents just flourish has been incredible. A lot of people came into this, you know, having done a thing or two in the past, but learning new things. Brandon has been absolutely incredible. Just an absolute rock in the organization. Brandon, if you're not familiar, writes, writes our newsletter every day and is just remarkably consistent and has like, you know, helped us shape our editorial approach and it's been incredible. Dylan, who joined us, I guess, technically Q4 of last year. You know, I'd worked with him at my last company, but is truly, truly one of a kind, remarkable. I never want to, I never want to do business without him. And he has just done such an exceptional job working off air. It's like, you know, challenging when you're building a company and you're also having to put on a live performance for three hours every day. He wrote the newsletter yesterday. So that's true. That's true. He wrote the op-ed. Ben, who's been here since before TBPN. He was working with me on my YouTube channel. When did we start working? I was here before Jordy. Yeah. Maybe like mid 2024, maybe something like that. Sounds right. Yeah. I just want videos. Yeah. Yeah. We traveled a lot. A lot of Pelican case. No, but it's been absolutely incredible to watch you grow from from an extremely talented individual and to very capable and talented manager and building out a team of people that are so hardworking and wonderful and you know, Michael Scott Jackson, you guys, you know, are so, you know, such a joy to work with even though what we do is is not easy and it's changing, you know, day to day. Yeah. To all the guests. Seriously, it's been it's been so much fun. Like if you went back and rewind to the beginning of the show to we started with no guests. We did something like 50 episodes without any guests. We thought that there was a time that we thought we would just do that forever. Yeah. That was the only thing that was, you know, really unique about the show. Like that's the reason I started creating content in 2020 because it was during COVID. There were no events. There were no places to meet other founders, meet other business people. I wasn't thinking of it as like a media business. I was thinking of it as like a way to just have conversations and meet other people who are building companies and now we get to do that all day long, which is just true. Yeah. So so many so many guests have turned into dear friends. Yeah. You know, the Joe Wysenthal, the Dylan Patel. Yeah. There's there's really too many to list, but we will have you all back on the show. So I can't wait to everybody that's tuned in whether you've watched, you know, the RSS feed. Yeah. The live show, the clips, the newsletter, and the laugh card. You know, we've strived to create the right product regardless of how much time you have. If you have two minutes a day to read the newsletter, great. You've got five minutes to watch some clips. If you want to watch the entire podcast, if you want to watch Diet, TBPN, the Daily Cut Down. Thank you. Thank you for tuning in. And fortunately, pretty much everything is going to stay exactly the same to our to our one and only Tyler. Tyler, you are truly, truly incredible. One of the brightest young people I've ever I've ever worked with and you have such a bright future. You know, we always we always we always knew that I've felt from the very beginning that you would go on to start your own company and we cherish every single minute that we have with you. And we're going to do our very best to retain you for for decades. But thank you for everything you've brought to the show. Everything you've built, Tyler, if you're just tuning in now has built all of the internal software that we use to run the show. It is a fully custom, you know, content management system, CRM. It helps us edit all of our videos is the backbone of the show. It's a it's a tool that the entire team uses on a daily basis and truly the show would not be possible without it. And yeah, your your contributions on air as well. It's it's so much fun to be able to cut over cut over to you. And so it is with great honor that I give you this soundboard. And our sponsors, yeah, we can start with with the ramp team, Eric Eric Kareem and the whole the whole team over there has just been incredible. They allowed us, you know, at the at the beginning at sorry, the end of 2024 when we had started doing the show, we really loved it. They were they committed to sponsoring the show for a year and that allowed us to do to do so much in terms of investing in all and all the equipment that we use hiring people. They they made it possible and have been truly, truly exceptional partners and and you know, watching ramps growth over the last over the last couple years has just been phenomenal and they deserve all the all the success and every other sponsor that is that has been a part of this. Yeah, truly shut out Nick as well. Oh, did he not get one? Oh, we got to get a direct shout out for Nick. We got a direct shout out for Nick. We don't know. We don't know what to call Nick. He's a we can't give his name on air because it'll get 10 times more emails. He he managed the lineup every day is is crafted by Nick. He is our liaison to 99% of the guests that come on the show. Sometimes it starts with an interaction over X or a text message or there's other intermediaries involved. There's a lot that goes into actually getting someone into the waiting room into the show, making sure that they understand how the show will work. It's sort of like, you know, you're hot dropping into this live show. That's new for a lot of people and Nick does a great job communicating and parsing all the noise to understand what the best news of the day is. How we can contextualize it best with the with the optimal guests and he's done a fantastic job and we'll continue. It's an honor. David, Sandra. Yeah. One of a kind. He literally inspired us to find out. Yeah, David was our very first listener that I'm aware of. Yeah, he gets sent a lot of we send him a link in a Google Drive and he listened and from that first episode, even though it was very scrappy, he said, take this, take this, you know, a hundred times more seriously than than you are right now. And we did and it's it's the best advice that I've ever gotten. And he has been and we have a picture and we have a picture picture of him here. We couldn't print it full size and it appears that it was printed on a black and white photo printer, but it's a black and white photo and he's a black and white brand. So thank you to David, Sandra, who's been the podcast Godfather truly and the gong, but you have the gong. The chat is asking us to hit the gong. We have to we have to. The gong will remain. Will Miniatis has already chimed in with his take. He says many guy many people are saying we're in the deal guy. You got many are saying and it means a lot that will Miniatis the only he is the only guest who has co-hosted a full show from start to finish with us. And if you want to go back in the archives, you can you can watch that episode. It's a wild one. It was in a hotel room. We had yet to figure out the remote shows fully. The team worked really hard to make that one happen and very chaotic. Good time. Very chaotic. And yeah, where else should we go? Should we go to is there anything else to say about opening up? I mean, of course, we'll be in conversation with you forever. You know, anytime on the show, you're welcome to leave a comment or chat in the chat is asking where's will Miniatis right now. I don't know. Probably sailing a boat. I don't know. Yeah. And yeah, it's it's an it's an honor. Yeah. To to partner with open AI and every single person on the team that we've had the pleasure of meeting. We've been impressed by they are ridiculously talented and every single person is committed to getting getting this AI thing right. So very excited. We're incredibly excited. Great. Well, let's move on to the Artemis 2 pictures and images and news. Very, very exciting. We made the front of the Wall Street Journal and NASA aims to orbit moon for first for first time since 72 to boldly go. The crew of now is asking is that three Diet Cokes? Yes, I got you got to think you got to think Diet Coke. Thank you to the Coca Cola Corporation for making this possible. Thank you to the human team. The motto for the for the Mata Yuna Yuba Mates the podcast and a can. Yes, wouldn't be possible without you guys. And thank you to tailors and suit makers. There's a lot of people that make this possible. The horse, the prop department. There's a million things here. It's been it's been a great time. So the crew of NASA Artemis 2 head to Cape Canaveral launch when launchpad Wednesday for the first human space flight to the moon in half a century. John Krause posted a incredible photo. Is he is he someone who actually? Yeah, he he special comms assistant special comms assistant. He actually goes to the launches and brings a special photography gear to get the best possible photos and man, he did he deliver with this one. What an incredible moment. We talked about a little bit. There's an article on the watches of NASA Artemis 2. John, we have to thank our lovely wives. Of course. How could we not our families? Did you get a text? Maybe. We we we don't talk about them a lot on the show. Yes, this is a show about technology and business, but they have been they are the back. They are the truly the backbones of the show and have put up with a lot of travel like a lot of travel nights, a lot of phone hours, a lot of early mornings. Yeah, a lot of early mornings. I think out of the last out of every single day that we've done the show, I haven't I've left the house past six a.m. Maybe twice right. It's been it's been a long it's been a long road and and the good news ladies is it's nothing's going to change. No, thank you. To both of you for supporting us and allowing us to do what we do. Can we pull up this picture, Ben, of in the production chat of the first episode that we recorded in the Jonathan Club in downtown showing a little bit earlier. Oh, you did? Yeah, behind the scenes. This is a yeah, such a such a wild time. Remember that? Yeah, remember that short? Suitless. Suitless. We had the flag. Yeah, but no suits. It looked it looked it looked pretty good on camera. I was I was happy with the way it came out, but. Ben can cook. Ben can cook. Well, where should we go next? Artemis 2. Let's do it. Yesterday, the long awaited Artemis 2 mission took to the stars and route to the moon for the first such manned mission since 1972. It's not. It's not. The chat asked for a flashbang. You have to do a blight. Flash out. Okay, that's good. Yes. The flashbang has been a highlight for sure. Both literally. Yeah, the sound the soundboard. It's truly it's truly a character on the show. I have some too now. It's members all had Omega Speedmaster X 33 model strapped to their flight suits. Danny Milton just wrote a full article on the site now detailing the watches worn on the wrist of the four astronauts throughout their time as part of this mission. Watches have a long standing history with spaceflight most notably through the Omega Speedmaster Moonwatch, but there are countless others that have cemented their place in the cosmos. Head to the site to learn more about the watches of Artemis 2 from the Speedmaster X 33 to a surprising Breitling. You won't want to miss it. And this is from Teddy Baldessar, who's a great watch creator. So we can pull up this video now of the astronauts working on it on what looks like some type of tablet. This was do you think this is an iPad? I don't think so. I don't think it's an iPad. Looks like it's running. It looks like it's running some windows. They seem very committed to the. Oh, yeah, they running outlook or something. Yeah. Yeah. So here he is. Typing in most secure password. Known to man. What is that 9393 or something? 3 9399 3 9393 powerful powerful. Well, we're going back to the moon. Apparently that video we played yesterday was a little bit of fake news. The young man, the adolescent who swears and says we're going to the F and moon. He was he the real line. I believe in the community note is that he says we're going to the frickin. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it had been altered to add the actual F word. But the but the sentiment is still the same. Yeah, it's very exciting. Very inspirational and Jared Isaacman on launch day says, oh, this kid is definitely getting it back in NASA gear. That's great. Very cool. There is some there are some wrinkles with the launch just a. Fortunately, nothing like disasters or catastrophic or anything. But the good news is that we're on our way back to the moon. The bad news is that the toilets broken apparently. And I believe this is from the live blog from the New York Times. The NASA associate minister said there is a controller issue with a toilet on the Orion capsule and it would take a few hours to troubleshoot. We're just getting started. He said when addressing that some that and some other glitches with the space clock spacecraft, the spirit of Apollo 10 lives on. They said 135. They told us that here's another. It seems like this is not the first time that this has happened. But we're hoping for the best here. Sounds like there were some other issues with outlook as well. We can pull up this video from Tom Warren. Yes. So there's audio with this too. We can remote in and take a look directly. Yeah, go for it. And then I also see that I have to Microsoft outlooks and either one of those are working if you want to remote in and check to why do you have to like web and desktop or you think it's like two separate desktop installations. Join in on your PCD and we'll let you know when we're done. Honestly, this is the best possible failure scenario is outlook. Yeah, not the rocket itself. So can they buy I think it's a good outcome. There were so many amazing images coming out yesterday. Yeah, Payton Alexander says this is the real reward for Artemis. This is who we're actually doing this for. They will grow up knowing they can one day work in their country's bases on the moon and Mars. We are not just abstractly hoping for a better world for them. We are going there and two kids here watching the launch from Orlando. Just beautiful. Yeah, my five year old said it was boring, which is not what you want to hear. But we'll have to give some more context to him about how big of a deal it is. He was like, yeah, maybe maybe he wants more more flashing lights on the screen. We were we were driving for the actual launch. Yeah. And it was so funny listening to the audio feed and sitting in traffic and just looking at it everyone. Yeah. And and realizing that it felt like the majority of the world still wasn't paying attention or or or didn't care. Yeah, I mean, like rockets do launch like every day now. I know SpaceX has normalized it to such a degree. Isn't there isn't there some sort of subplot on the Apollo missions that by the by the third or fourth Apollo mission, there was no like the actual viewership had dropped off and like the American population had gotten to 3.6 has put subway surfers on it. Yeah, on the NASA feed. Crazy. You actually need to maybe need to do this. Adler was was at the launch. But yes, he was. Let's pull up this this video of legendary tech anchor. I mean, it's an emotional moment. So I guess it makes sense to capture his result, but everyone's saying you should turn around and actually watch it. But it's very funny to do this selfie video. I mean, it contextualized the moment perfectly. But it is. Oh, he was live on the air. He was alive on the air. Okay. So I mean, if you're live, like you, you don't want to necessarily turn around. I guess I don't know. There's that famous clip of what? It's a while video. There's that amazing clip of from that documentary where the host is giving this monologue and then the monologue ends right as the launch happens. Like he timed it up perfectly and it's very cinematic anyway. I don't know. Delian shared the coolest orbital animation he's seen of Artemis too. It looks a lot less fishy when you see it this way. It's fascinating how close they have to be. That's his point. Fishy John means one of the other animation actually was shaped like a fish, but this one is a little bit more of a straight shot. But it really emphasizes how short that window is where you're actually next to the moon. It really, Delian says really just really shows you how far away they're flying today and how precise they need to be to go to the moon. Yeah, remarkable. I'm very excited to take all right following this New York Times article how I helped one man and his brother build a $1.8 billion company who needs more than two employees when AI can do so many corporate tasks. It's super efficient and a little bit lonely. Aaron Griffith has the story. People are calling this the prophecy, the one man, one billion dollar company. Yeah, if you're in tech and you're in the business of making predictions, no one wants predictions. We want prophecies. Prophecies. You need to be prophesizing for sure. So the article how AI helped one man and his brother build a $1.8 billion company who needs more than two employees that when artificial intelligence can do so many corporate tasks, it's super efficient and a little bit lonely. So Aaron Griffith tells the story of Matthew Gallagher to took just two months, $20,000 and a more than a dozen artificial intelligence tools to get his startup off the ground from his house in Los Angeles. Mr. Gallagher 41 used AI to write the code for the software that powers his company, produce the website copy, generate the images and videos for ads and handle customer service. He created AI systems to analyze his business's performance and he outsourced the other stuff he couldn't do himself. His startup MedV, a telehealth provider of GLP one weight loss drugs, got 300 customers in its first month, in its second month and gained more than 1,000 more. In 2025 MedV's first year in business, the company general year, the first full year in business, the company generated $401 million in sales. Mr. Gallagher then hired. This is absolutely insane because I as GLP ones were starting to take off. I had, I remember distinctly talking with somebody that was like, I want to start a telehealth company for GLP ones. And at that time I was like, okay, there's a lot of telehealth companies that are at scale and they're well aware of this. They will immediately introduce this product and other similar products to their customer base and it's going to be incredibly difficult to be, to be competitive. And it turns out there's just such overwhelming demand for these products that you could come in as a new company and scale. You know, I'm sure this guy, Mr. Gallagher is incredibly talented, but the market overall is just growing so quickly that it didn't matter that every other telehealth company was also getting into the game. There was just such an incredible volume of sales coming in. Yeah. Yeah. So like one year in maybe he hires his only employee, his younger brother, Elliott. This year they're on track to do $1.8 billion in sales. A $1.8 billion company with just two employees in the age of AI. It's increasingly possible, says Aaron Griffith in the New York Times. Sam Altman, the chief executive open AI predicted the rise of a new breed of super efficient company in 2024. A one person business worth $1 billion would have been unimaginable without AI, he said on a podcast, and now it will happen. Now as AI tools spread, entrepreneurs are harnessing the technology to expand their startups to an enormous scale at breathtaking speed with very few humans. Big companies, especially in tech, are getting in on the disruption to Pinterest, Block and others have cut thousands of workers in recent months, citing efficiencies enabled by AI. Mr. Gallagher, who formerly, formerly ran a startup that sold wrist watches, said he thought Mr. Altman's prophecy of a one billion, one person, one billion dollar company would be a firm that built AI. He was excited when he realized he may have done it, taking the old, taking an old idea, being a middleman for weight loss drugs and using AI to turbo charge it. I am interested to know, and we're going to try and get him on the show, like what the margins are on this. I imagine that the revenue is, you know, like a lot of this needs to accrue, a lot of the value needs to accrue to the companies that actually designed and Yeah, and the one person, one billion dollar company has had a billion dollar valuation. Yeah, at the same time, at a billion dollar run rate. I would imagine that even a reseller would trade around like one X revenue. Maybe. Yeah, I have no idea. Maybe way more. I imagine. I do. Does this count? Does this count yet though? Like I feel like to be the one person, one billion dollar company. You got to be able to log into your payroll tool and you're the only person there. And he's got his brother in there. Sorry, bro. Take a walk. He's got he's got to let his brother, let his brother go. In an email, Mr. Altman said that it appeared he had won a bet with his tech CEO friends over when such a company would appear and said that he would like to meet the guy who had done it. Yeah. MedV is technically not a one person, one billion dollar company since he hired his brother and some contractors. The startup, which is not raised outside funding also has no official valuation, but many highly valued tech companies can only dream of hitting one billion in revenue with so few workers. MedV is also profitable. It is great and important if you're bootstrapped. Yeah. Can't can't. Is this a wrapper company? It's like a GLP one wrapper is but it's AI enabled, but it's not wrapping the AI foundation model. It's like using the tool to wrap another industry and just create the efficiency between the manufacturer and the actual distribution. It's it really is remarkable that they were able to Hoover up so much revenue in such a competitive space because you would assume that that the other telehealth providers would have significant ad operations and that the margins on customer acquisition would be very, very tricky to crack, but you must have found some unique insight into how to distribute the product, get actual people to the website because like the the the AI certainly can build the website and write the copy, but it not it can't necessarily get people to show up and actually put down their hard earned cash for the product. Yeah, just to put it into context, Hems did 2.3 billion in full year 2025 revenue Wow for 2025. Yeah, this guy started in 2024 and got to 401 million in sales. I want to know more about the strategy here, how this built up so quickly. As a teenager, Mr. Gallagher began building websites for local businesses. He always had a hustle, including selling candles and samurai swords on eBay. This is the classic founder journey, selling something on eBay. He studied the blade. That's how I was selling DJ equipment on eBay back when I was a teenager at 18. After building a web hosting business, he sold that business for $6,000. He briefly attended the University of Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky University, but did not graduate in 2010. He moved to Los Angeles to become an actor. He eventually returned to coding, bouncing between tech jobs. In 2016, he built Watch Gang, a startup that sold Ritz watches via subscription. Interesting. Is that like a by now pay later for watches or I would get a lot of people renting them. You're like, you got another watch? Yeah, you're just subscribed to like I didn't realize I was getting a subscription. Oops, it came in the mail again. It had fans, but never turned to profit. Watch Gang, even as Mr. Gallagher chased revenue growth and hired 60 people. So wildly different business outcome here. Wow. He's like, I'm not doing that again. Open AI has released some chat. GPT 2022 inspired Mr. Gallagher to start tinkering with AI. Two years later, he met Jitun Chabra, a co-founder of Care Validate, a medical startup in Atlanta. Care Validate offers what is essentially telehealth in a box kits. Companies, employers and retailers who that want to sell customers prescription drugs can use Care Validate's technology and network of online doctors to set up a business. The company software connects patients with doctors and pharmacies which right fulfill and ship the prescriptions. Care Validate charges fees for its software. So you have to imagine that there's that there's like a fairly decent cost structure here, but it's not to diminish it. It's incredible amount of revenue. Like you look at the comps and you're blown away. But yeah, it's just interesting to understand the other big question here. Like how much are you spending on ads? Yeah, like it's very possible that you know, the company is profitable. Yeah. But if you're spending 60% of every dollar you bring in on paid acquisition plus cogs and then any other expenses that actually go into fulfilling and you imagine if you take subscription public by himself, he's like, I don't need an investment bank. I'm just gonna like vibe code. The road show and 100% retail allocation. I don't know. I mean, I think I think like taking a company public is just technically a bunch of SEC filings and if the investors sign up and the emails are sent and everyone agrees it can happen. So who knows? Maybe he takes his company public with with two people. That would be a while. Like it's just the the New York Stock Exchange bell ringing and normally it's like 20 people and it's like only the executive team and bankers and all the employees are you know, outside or on the trading floor and he's just standing there being like, oh yeah, I did it like by myself. Wow. Gallagher saw an opportunity for his own tell health business. He could use AI to do the branding and marketing and let care validate and a similar platform open loop health health, which is another interesting company and someone was posting about handle the doctors, pharmacies, shipping and compliance. He planned to start with GLP ones. He was entering an established market for nearly a decade. Hems and hers health row and other companies have sold drugs for erectile dysfunction and hair loss online using an online network of doctors to write prescriptions. Hems, which went public in 2021 has 2442 employees and generated 2.4 billion in revenue. Yeah, this is what I this was what I was explaining to my friend who wanted to do something in this space. Yeah, like, hey, you're you're going to be going up against a company that has billions of revenue already. Yeah, thousands of employees that already has all the infrastructure to prescribe these drugs. Yeah. But again, the market is just growing so quickly. Yeah, he he really used everything. Chat, GPT, Claude, Grock, 11 Labs, mid journey runway to create media assets for his website and ads. He spent $20,000. That's definitely a notable something quite notable out of any any time we're seeing these stories where, you know, the guy who is making a cancer drug for his dog. Yeah. A lot of people are picking. If you can think of LLMs as like digital, digital guys or girls, like people are working with multiple digital guys to do to like complete these projects. And so one model is better at writing, one model is better at coding, one model is better at marketing or strategy or anything else. Interesting. He said from the beginning growth was insane. He became he quickly became one of Care Validates and Open Loops top clients. The companies were blown away by the start of speed scale. You're like, do you have an army of people behind you somewhere? And he's like, Nope. Wow. Well, you can go read the full of the full article on the New York Times at New York Times dot com. It's Aaron Griffith's latest piece. You can also listen to it. There's an audio version. There is some commentary on this. Just a lot of people having fun with it. Who Clayton Petty says who has two thumbs and wants to know what the ad spend is this guy. Yeah, I'm very interested in now. I mean, I would still be shocked if this is not a fantastic business. Yeah, at that scale, you can have truly terrible EBITDA margins and still be printing. Yeah. And it's like even if even if like it's impossible that it's negative margin because he hasn't raised money. And so like where would the losses come from? So you can't be losing money. And if you're going to lever it up, I don't think so though. I think everyone's going to be shocked by how much cash flow this business is producing. But it is it is a very exciting, exciting moment in story. Let's let's go over to Tyler Cowan at Marjole Revolution. The yeah, yeah, he just shares this. Sam said one person running a billion dollar company, but if two are closely genetically related, Tyler Cowan still counting this as as a correct prediction and some people in the comments huge opportunities for for other siblings to fulfill the prophecy. Yeah. So people are moving the goalposts already because technically he had agencies that had humans that worked there. And if he works with a marketing agency and then there's a bunch of people there, it's more just like the disaggregation of the of the different institutions and the different organizations. What do you take? I think the real goalpost we got to move is just you can't talk to anyone the entire time you can't talk to a human at all. You can't say you can only be on the command line basically and prompt box. Yeah. But you can tell the agent or the LLM to go and and and call someone. I do that. That's fine. Yeah. Okay. Then you're not interfacing with someone. Right. Do you have to be truly a shut in that? That's the prediction now. Absolutely ridiculous. Chad is asking for John. Actually, John. Yes. Get in the ultra down back here. We did not unplug actually. We got to get him back here. He's he's somewhere. Well, we'll we'll get him back in. Jonathan Ross is talking about the petrodollar. There was a story about how there has been an interesting flight to the dollar. The dollar is very strong even amid all of the geopolitical uncertainty. Jonathan Ross, the founder of grok, now the chief software architect at Nvidia said the petrodollar defined the last 50 years of American economic dominance. The token dollar, the currency AI compute is bought in and sold in will define the next 50 oil is priced in the in US dollars. That means every country on earth needs dollars to fuel their economy. That single fact has been the foundation of American financial power since the 1970s. Now consider AI. Training runs cost tens of billions. Inference is scaling to hundreds of billions. The companies sell that are selling compute are American. The currency it's priced in is dollars. The petrodollar, the petrodollar had oil. The token dollar has compute same structure, same leverage, new resource. Countries aren't just competing over AI talent and chips. They're competing over whether AI remains a dollar denominated economy. That's the game nobody's naming yet. And so he is coining it. He says the token dollar is the is the concept. Yeah, it's a cool position. Yeah. So I mean, it'll be interesting to talk about circle with Jeremy about how stable coins fit into all of this. Also yesterday talking to Corweave about compute backed credit lines and all the different financial products that are popping up related to debt issued against GPUs that have essentially a flow of business that will be expected to come in against them. Very interesting watching the larger economy, you know, mature. Brexiton says compute backed credit lines are the next frontier for fixed income and will quickly turn into one of the largest asset classes on the planet. People are going back and forth. No shade trying to learn isn't compute as an asset depreciating quickly due to innovation scale economies. Hence bad collateral. Brexiton Brexiton says no shade taken. You're right. But it's still a couple of notes. Supply constraints on chips right now makes older chips still valuable in secondary markets because of the above. Capital markets care more about revenue produced from chips rather than resale value and chips are only a subset of the total cost of compute, heterogeneous builds, the rack, power shell, interconnect, cooling. It was interesting when we were talking with Corweave about the, the, that I was, I was really expecting the answer to be chip constraints and he was saying powered shells powered shells, which is what we've heard from Sachin Adelaide. Yeah, and I, and I think it makes sense given their business. It's like it's, it's, it's hard to get chips, but think about all of the logistical complexity to actually get the location, the energy, the shell, everything built together. And navigating all those regulations. It's just like one of the, it's an incredibly complex infrastructure project that you're trying to compress onto timelines that America has generally not done infrastructure projects at in a long, long time. Right. And so this was, this was always some of the, you know, one of the exciting things about the data center build out among, among the fear has been that. Amir, like a bunch of people are learning how to build complex things fast. Right. So. Well, the year is off to the strongest start for big deals ever. Corporate mega deals flourish despite turmoil. This is in the Wall Street Journal. Large corporate deals had their best quarterly showing ever as companies forged ahead with tie ups and investments despite the Iran war rattling markets. So far in 2026, 22 transactions valued at 10 billion or more have been announced globally. A record quarterly number, according to LSEG data. The next closest quarter was the fourth quarter of 2015 when 21 such deals were announced in that year. This week alone, Unilever unveiled a more than $65 billion deal, including debt to combine its food business with Spicemaker McCormick and Cisco, which we talked about a few days ago. Agree to buy Jettro restaurant Depot for over $29 billion, including debt. Uncertainty due to oil growth rate growth and rates isn't going away, but major deals are still getting done. Said Ben Goodchild, a partners in the M&A group at law firm, Paul Weiss. The M&A market is focused on the long term fundamentals, right deal, right price and right strategic rationale. There's more. The total value of all deals announced globally jumped roughly 29% in the first quarter from a year ago, but the number of deals is down more than 17% as smaller deal activities slowed. The mega deal tally includes a handful of big equity investments in AI companies such as Amazon's $50 billion investment in open AI announced in February. A number of other big transactions are in the works. Estee Lauder has been in discussions to acquire Spanish beauty group PIEG brands, a deal that would combine two of the world's biggest beauty companies. And there is a number of others. Absolute is buying Jack Daniels. Tillman Ferreta is buying Caesars Entertainment. There's another heist on the Caesars Casino referencing Apollo. Many companies see a moment to pounce on bigger deals that would normally face prolonged antitrust scrutiny. The Justice Department's top antitrust official departed in February after clashing with Trump allies who at times favored more lenient oversight of big deals. This all comes as US stocks deliver their worst quarter in nearly four years led by a 7% drop in the tech heavy Nasdaq composite index. That makes it harder for buyers and sellers to agree on prices. The Iran War has sent crude prices above $100 a barrel which could keep interest rates higher for longer to combat rising prices and make funding deals more expensive. There's a very interesting chart. I don't know if we can pull it up in the journal. Big deals have big first quarter number of global deals valued at 10 billion or more. There we go. And it's just look at 2020 2021. If you 2021, what was this is another chart nine. Oh, if you want to scroll down, you can look at the smaller deals. These are deals valued between 1 billion and 5 billion and 2021 was huge. What was going on then? It was Zerp era, right? Post COVID. Lots of I mean, if when interest rates are near zero, you may as well lever up. I guess that's yeah. I guess that's why some assets bankers and lawyers say smaller deals are less of a must have buyers are more willing to put them on hold. But the big deals, they have to have it happen regardless of what's going on in the economy. Also private equity firms are sitting on a record number of portfolio companies. They need to eventually sell or take public, including many software firms threatened by the rise of AI. But many are hesitant to strike deals at today's depressed prices while deal making activity in the software industry is stalled. There has been plenty in other sectors, including financial services and healthcare. Eli Lilly struck a deal for Cantessa and Biogen bought a palace deal makers have high hopes going on. A couple, couple questions in the chat and a special arrival. John Exley has entered the chat. Let's go. Welcome. The original chat room general. Yes. Hit the gong for actually. John Exley. John is missing episode. And it's an honor to podcast with you, John. Thank you. So another question. Who is blacklisted from TBPN now? No one. We've never, there's never been any anyone blacklisted from the show. In fact, the evidence of this is every single one of our sponsors ever. We've had the competitors on the show and all of that will continue. We want this to be a place where. Conversion is going to happen about anything. Yeah. So. And there's also just a broader trend of this. I don't know if you, if you want to get into the industry, you can go to the internet. There's a broader trend of this. I don't know if you, if you watch like the broader podcast landscape, people from like, you know, quote unquote, like rival firms or different firms going on each other shows all the time, not, not uncommon these days for crossover content to happen all over the place. Jim Cramer says if private credit is so horrendous, how is KKR over subscribed so easily on its $20 billion fund, they raised $23 billion. Some kind of disconnect here. Boy, are these firms ill advised and how to tell their story. This was the, this was the early confusion about private credit. People were seeing a whole bunch of private credit deals during the AI boom. And, and then when the, when the, the, the, the nervousness matured, it was much more when we talked to carry no interest, for example, the, the, the worry was much more around software companies, not hard assets. It was not, oh, in this private credit fund, there's a data center that Meta is going to pay their bill on. It's some other company that maybe is not going to have as high of dollar retention going forward. And so I think that the, the different private credit firms have a messaging problem of like, what is in the fund because it can be a lot of different stuff. And KKR clearly did a great job explaining why their particular strategy will endure for the long haul. There's other news about, uh, let's pull up, let's pull up this video quickly. Kramer talking about our friends at semi-analysis. Oh yeah, this is great. There is a company that I regard as the, it's the absolute, it's the gospel semi-analysis. And I've got this guy, Dylan Patel, and I don't think people realize that semi-analysis is the arbiter. They're like God and semis. God and semis. When they do, when they bless something, it means that it's the benchmark at the best. They are the most honest guys I've come across. And I, I've always been reading them, but Jensen plays really praise them at GTC. So I reached out to this guy who my regard is, is genius. That's good. I can't wait to talk to him. That's, that's, that's a promo. Yeah. We'll see you tonight. That was a good promo. Add money, 6 PM down. It's awesome. Dylan says, can I short myself? I think Kramer's trying to say. And some people, some people were saying like, yeah, come on dude. Like he's complimenting you and Dylan and Kramer. This is the meme. Everyone knows the meme. And I've always said that Kramer having this saying where no matter what he says, people say like, they'll take the inverse. It is the best engagement hack ever for a content creator personality because it just means anything you say, you get a million impressions from people saying the opposite. And the fact is like Jim Kramer is, he's an entertainer. He is incredibly, you know, fun to listen to. And we'll be, we'll be having another conversation with him in the next, in the next month or so, which I'm excited about. Let's head over to Cliff, Cliff water and Steven Nespit. He brought private credit to the masses. Now the masses are fleeing. This is more context around the private credit story. Cliff water is racing to calm investors after steep withdrawals. So Steven Nespit is private credit chief evangelist. His investors and industry are having a crisis of faith. Nick says, hope this still means my invite is open. We'd love to have you Nick. Your family. Yeah, we're always positive. As long as we keep it positive, we can say it's and we keep the camera roll smiling and we, and we maintain that occasionally we are back. It's not always over. Very frequently we're back. Nick, Nick will admit that. That's true. No, we have a great conversation with him when he came on for more than a decade. The 72 year old champion, the hottest asset class on Wall Street, his farm, Cliff water, went from managing no money to nearly 50 billion on the back of impressive fundraising and big gains turning Nespit into a billionaire. Now many of the wealthy individuals who powered Cliff waters rise are itching to leave as investors rethink their views on private credit. After a handful of high profile defaults, investors are pulling so much money out of industry funds that managers are restricting withdrawals. We've talked about this many times on the show. Shares of big firms are dropping. Few are like Cliff water, which until recently was an investor darling, but now finds itself in the hot seat. Its top executives aren't lending specialists themselves. Instead, the firm invested alongside and sometimes in other funds. So it's a fund to fund strategy, a feature that is now being treated as a vulnerability. Investors asked to pull the equivalent of 14% of its biggest fund in the first quarter. Wall Street skeptics who long questioned Cliff waters growth are now calling it a canary in the coal mine and a turducken of problems. Turducken of problems. That is such a weird phrase. Nespit's ability to call the fears will be a test of his funds and the industry's future. Are they calling it a blue owl in the coal mine? Something like that. No, I'm just joking. Of course, blue owl capped private credit fund redemptions at 5% after steep request levels. This was the other news from this morning. I think they got something like 21% redemption request outstanding during the first quarter. So they had to cap it at 5%. Well, you know what this guy did before he started a what $50 billion private credit fund? He was a grave digger. I'm not kidding. Yeah, he grew up near Rochester, New York. He worked as a grave digger in high school. He spent a quarter century at Wilshire Associates consulting for pension funds on private equity and hedge funds. Nespit was a soft spoken presence in a big business of outsized egos, says Greg Williamson, a longtime pension fund executive. He didn't preach like others. Williamson, he spoke about his clients needs. In 2004, Nespit started Cliffwater after the 2008-2009 financial crisis. He began recommending private credit. Just as banks were pulling back from lending to riskier companies, giving Blackstone Aries and others the opportunity to make high interest rate loans. Nespit became a private credit advocate. Cliffwater launched an index tracking performance. The firm shared research and Nespit wrote two books on the topic. In 2019, he shifted to Managing Money, launching Cliffwater Corporate Lending Fund, or CCLFX, with Blake and Phil Hasbrook, a then 30-year-old executive. They marketed to wealthy individuals through independent financial advisors the kind of clients Hasbrook worked with. It was built as an interval fund offering to buy back 5% of its assets each quarter from investors and provide daily updates on its value. It charged lower fees than some rivals and allowed clients to avoid the messy tax filing requirements of traditional private funds. By February, the net assets totaled about 33 billion. Cliffwater made 375 million in fees from the fund in the first 18 months that ended in September. A 54-person crew researched and managed the portfolio of 4,100 or so underlying loans. Along the way, Cliffwater wrangled with rivals when an executive bond powerhouse PIMCO, when an executive at bond powerhouse PIMCO said the returns of private debt didn't compensate investors for its growing dangers. Nespit sent investors a letter saying PIMCO had had a failed track record of predicting market changes. After JB Dimon used a cockroach analogy to warn about looming defaults, Nespits declared there were no cockroaches in private debt. Others criticized Cliffwater's marketing, especially when it boasted of hedge fund-like returns with minimal risk, citing industry metrics like sharp ratios and standard deviation. Critics said private loans rarely change hands, so they lack the volatility that funds face. It goes into the transaction problem. Speaking of JB Dimon, the Axios show. JB Dimon eyes post JPMorgan media venture. He's potentially launching a podcast? Is that what this is? Matthew Zeitland, friend of the show, former guest says, The Post is the only force in the universe that holds a candle to compound interest. It's actually true. Everyone needs a pod. People have been talking about him running for president, a lot of presidents, and media people have podcasts. They're acting very presidential. Well, there isn't all that much news here, but Dimon said that if he were to start a media venture, it would be something different about policy. He said, I think media is critical. Media teaches everybody. Media is the great influencer. A lot of bad policy, he believes, stems from people in the media doing a bad job of explaining issues. And so we talked about this yesterday or the day before in the Wall Street Journal. He has the new plan, the Dimon plan for the American dream, wanting to lend to more small businesses. That seems more important than ever in the world where you have a one person, one billion-dollar business. More people should have shots on goal. And if you think about the $20,000 that that gentleman was able to marshal to get the business off the ground, if you have more people that have the opportunity, that's probably a good thing. But we'll be tuning in when Jamie Dimon launches his show. Should we go over to Apple? Should we? I think it's time. They really dominated this entire week. I mean, it's spring break, which is perfect timing. This must happen all the time. I think they probably planned that 50 years ago. They knew the 50th would be during spring break in 2026. And so it would be a good time to really celebrate the anniversary. We had a great, great conversation with Eddie Q yesterday. You can go listen to it on Apple podcasts, which he created. But there's more reflections and stories about Apple from all over the place. Ben Thompson wrote a great retrospective. The Wall Street Journal got access to rare Apple archives that even Tim Cook hadn't seen before. It's very cool because, and you think about it, it's like, that's crazy. He's the CEO. Should know all the archives. But then you think about like how busy his day is. And he probably doesn't have that much time to just like go reminisce. Obsess over every small decision or prototype. Yeah, there's like so much work to be done. He doesn't have that much time to go look at like the original patent for the Apple II or whatever he, you know, is in that archive. So the Wall Street Journal took the viewers through that in a video. We have a big read from the Financial Times here. That's very interesting. Talking about the roots of a tech revolution. So Winston Churchill called it, quote, the most daring and courageous act of the entire war. On August 30th, 1945, General Douglas MacArthur landed in Atsugi, Southwest of Tokyo. He wore aviator sunglasses, a corn cob pipe dangled from his lips, and he was unarmed. A man of war was arriving to make peace. Over the next six years of Allied occupation, MacArthur would demilitarize Japan and franchise women. And by the way, you know, you guys know AGI will be very close when Tyler is smoking a corn cob pipe himself because AGI, of course, should be able to one shot, you know, any sort of long issues that might come from using a corn cob pipe. Yeah. So some people skip sunscreen. Other people, you know, indulge in a cup of coffee. In 2012, I lived in a hacker house in Sunnyvale and the best engineer, I still, one of the best engineers I've met in my entire life, the best engineer in the house was completely straight edge, would not drink or use caffeine or anything, but he would smoke a literal pipe. It was a very odd thing. So Lindy. I don't know. He was like, I just enjoy this. I would actually expect it to make a comeback, right? People are, you know, a little nostalgic. It's clear that vapes are maybe not something that people should be using, but the corn cob pipe. Yeah. Who knows? There's a chance, Tyler. What do you think about corn cob pipes? Yeah, super Lindy. I think I'm. You're in? Yeah, I think we're probably like one or two models away and then start ripping pipe. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. So over the next six years, he enfranchised women, oversaw the writing of a new constitution and a decree of democracy. But first he faced a more prosaic problem. Japan's communication industry was in such shambles that he could barely issue commands. This is MacArthur solving this challenge turned out to have enormous consequences, not only reshaping Japan in the 1940s, but upending global manufacturing in the 1980s. And by the 2000s, revolutionizing the way products as Gandalf Maxon. Thank you. Revolutionizing the way products would be built at Apple, a company that did not exist at the time. So Apple, which turns 50 years old on Wednesday is arguably the world's most iconic company. It is also notoriously opaque and secretive in virtually all accounts of how Steve Jobs transformed Apple from near bankruptcy in 1997, which we talked about yesterday. With that EQ, to the world's most valuable company by his death in 2011, product, vision and design all get the credit. But what actually makes a $1,200 iPhone possible at global scale with vanishingly few defects is a manufacturing philosophy that traces back not to Silicon Valley or Southern China, but to war devastated Japan. And it took all my energy yesterday to not use the 20 minutes we had with that EQ for kind of like a tech support session. Yeah. And I think that's a weird issue where you seem to be having like particularly I'm actually I think I need to like return the iPhone. I think you are having some weird issue because there are weird UX UI issues that you can learn and adapt and change. And I would say that they are skill issues. Like if you can't use the camera roll effectively by now, you are needing to your loss. Yeah, you should just throw off some. My issue. My issue. I don't know if any anyone in the chat has experienced this, but when I open the messages app or the phone app, I just get a blank white screen and then the app crashes like a bunch of times. You have something weird. And then I just doesn't matter what I do, I can do a hard reset or anything like that. I wonder if we were pushing it to the limit too hard yesterday because we were on a FaceTime call together and then also watching the Artemis 2 launch on YouTube. And then I was I was watching it on my phone and I was streaming Jordy my screen via SharePlay. And I think that might have the phone was really hot. I can tell you that much. I don't know. Anyway, by and large, the products are flawless and I have enjoyed my Apple journey the whole way. So in the in the decades after the Second World War, Japan's economy grew rapidly. This is a story of how ideas travel across oceans and factory floors and sometimes through a single person changing jobs. It is a story about how America invented a manufacturing philosophy exported to Japan, forgot it, re-learned fragments of it through a handful of companies and then re-exported the whole synthesis to Asia. The story leads us to the present moment with the U.S. spending vast sums to bring it all back. Southern India investing to be the next global tech hub and China fighting to hold on to its manufacturing dominance. It is above all a story underscoring that what Apple started to build in Shenzhen, China, a quarter century ago is not merely an assembly line. It is the endpoint of a multi-decade chain of civilizational trans knowledge transfer, a feat of enormous complexity that cannot be replicated with tax breaks or ribbon cutting in Texas. Tax breaks aren't going to be enough. You need civilizational knowledge transfer. The whole chain begins with the question. In occupied Tokyo, a 33-year-old engineer named Homer Sarason stood before a group of Japanese executives asked, why does any company exist? Powerful. When the telegram arrived from General MacArthur, Sarason initially thought it was a prank. A physicist by training, the paratrooper turned radar engineer was working on a transcontinental microwave relay system. This is Tyler. A physicist by training. The podcaster slash vibe coder. That's true. He dismissed it only realizing his error when an indignant colonel called him back a few weeks later. Then he was dutifully off to Tokyo for what was supposed to be a nine-month stint. Sarason's mission was to reestablish and rehabilitate the communications industry, but he found there was nobody to work with. American bombers had devastated industry and MacArthur had abolished the Zybotsu, the powerful pre-war corporate cartels. We had to start from scratch, he recounted in 1988, when we looked around, not only did we see no facilities, but we could find no managers. We had to find lower-level people, second-level managers. And I said, as of today, you're going to start up this new company and you're going to run it. The quality of manufacturing in Japan was shoddy even before the war, but as Sarason began learning the language and immersing himself in Japanese culture, he realized the root of the problem was not technical, it was managerial. When he asked a group of employees how they might improve quality, they murmured among themselves about what an answer would please him rather than answering directly. Sort of the opposite of the Elon walking the floor and like, I'd want to get to first principles. They're literally like, what do you think he wants to hear? When will this plant be online? I think he's expecting it in June. Tell him June. Why? Yeah, this is not good. Everyone understands this now, but that was not the case in Japan in the 40s and 50s, I suppose. They had been taught to be deferential, he concluded, to not question authority. So Sarason set out to teach them a philosophy of management. Despite initial opposition from MacArthur, the need for economic stabilization meant that Sarason got his wish. He and another engineer Charles Protsman went off to an Osaka hotel for a month to write a textbook on industrial management. They designed a rigorous eight-week course and made it compulsory for top managers. The seminar began on the importance of quality as, quote, a guiding state of mind, a devotion and dedication. After asking, why does any company exist, Sarason encouraged his disciples to draft a mission statement by invoking a motto from a shipyard in Newport, Rhode Island. We shall build good ships here, at a profit if we can, at a loss if we must, but always good ships. That's a good line. That's a good line. Manufacturing, he taught, had to be considered a total system. It's disparate parts orchestrated with such repetitive precision that defects could approach zero. He inculcated his students, in his students, a sense that quality was foundational to the whole enterprise, empowering workers close to production and telling managers they needed to understand the details. Quality control is not a band-aid, Sarason later recounted, to be effective as a control, the total process to which it is applied must be well designed to begin with. So when Sarason left Japan in 1950, he recommended his successor be the academic, W. Edwards Deming, an advocate of statistical process controls. Let's give it up for Statistical. Let's also give it up for using the first initial of your first name and then your middle name. That's sort of a lost art. You don't meet a lot of people that produce themselves that way, but J. Alexander Kugen. I think that sounds pretty cool. Maybe I'll rip that at some point. That sounds very regal. Yeah, it sounds good. What would you be typing? That'd be J. Tyler Cosgrove. That's good. Yeah, because Tyler's the middle name. So J. Tyler, that's good. Okay. Well, W. Edwards Deming would prove so influential that the Union of Japanese Scientists and Engineers would. And it says, sometimes I get emotional about manufacturing. It's true. Yeah, that is the... That is their good ship, sir. That quote, the ship's quote is so good. I'm sure it's already been printed and hung on many of the new defense tech and American manufacturing companies, but it is a good reminder to always build what is of high quality and aim for profit. Justin says, chat is on fire today, of course. That's great. It's great to see all of you. We love having you all here. Someone asked how are we going to celebrate? I think we're going to have lunch with the team later. Yeah. Excited about that. Yeah! We're excited for that. But I think the funny thing is just really our lives aren't changing. Yeah. It's business as usual. Chopwood. We're going to go hang out with our families. And I'm already excited for next week. We do have a holiday tomorrow. It's Good Friday, so the New York Stock Exchange is closed, the market is closed, and so we will not be streaming tomorrow, but we will be back on Monday. But just so you're aware, don't be shocked, oh, this opening idea happened, and then they stop streaming. That's not what's going on. This has been on the calendar for a long time. We haven't been booking guests for months because we know that this is a holiday coming up, which we are very excited about, and everyone will be enjoying the long weekend. So, Sarah Sohn recommended the work of Joseph Jaron, a consultant who during the war had managed a program shipping war materials to Allied nations. Jaron's work in Japan would go on to earn him the highest honor from Emperor Hirohito. We don't have a ton of time. Yeah. We want to tie this into Apple. Yeah, let's go on this insane tangent. We used to do crazy long reads where we'd spend like two hours on one New Yorker article, and then of course the show got much more complex. We talk about a lot more topics, but I like going through a long read, but of course you can pick this up in the Financial Times, which you should go and subscribe to. Alex asks, how long did the acquisition take from start to finish? I don't remember having the exact number of days, but it was incredibly quick. It was incredibly quick. And part of what enabled that was we had been having people from OpenAI on the show, having interactions with them. We had spent 100 hours talking about OpenAI. We didn't have a lot of questions. Yeah, and just given how much time we've spent, and so that enabled a quick process. Also, your long history with Sam. Yeah, just like you meet your inquirer years before. Yeah, in this case, 13 years before. That's crazy. Okay, where do we go to close this? It was the early 1990s. We were flashing forward. Jobs was a half a decade into leading next, the startup that he had founded after being ousted from Apple. Next-first product, a Cube-staped workstation from costing $6,500, had already been a much-hyped flop. The team's goal had been to make a computer their friends could afford to buy it, and the time it chipped, the joke goes, the only friends that could afford to buy it were Steve's. Japanese quality ideas had been all the rage for a decade. The superiority already of Japanese production had become clear in March 1980 when Richard W. Anderson, a Hewlett-Packard executive, famously discovered that the best Japanese memory chips performed 1,000% better than their American equivalents at initial inspection, and 50% better over time. But Anderson Bombshell made HP start to obsess over quality. Its Japanese joint venture, Hewlett-Packard, Yokogawa, won the Deming Prize in 1982 and became the foundation for rigorous standards applied across the whole company. HP aspired to improve quality tenfold within a decade, and when that looked to be failing, it adopted a Japanese step-by-step approach to quality known as Plan-Do-Check Act. Let's see where else. Jobs was clearly taken by the ideas of quality. Silicon Valley was beginning to import from Japan, having set out to build a computer company that would create better products. He commissioned an automated factory in Fremont, inspired by the plans of Japanese electronics manufacturer Alps Electric. Anyways, we can continue, but... We have our next guest, Mark Lord, joining in just a few minutes. Let's run through some of the timeline posts. This was cool. Taylor Johnson said, Nothing gets me hyped like a re-accelerating top line. Is it the definition of AI company, right? Sharing, or just a founder mode company. But really both, you can see... This is data from Sakura. Sakura shared. It's so funny people calling me right now. I know, I know. If you have called me, if you have sent me a text message... I'm sorry, I will get back to you after the show. But anyways, incredible chart here. You can see Platt had ended in 2023. They went from 308 to 390 million of ARR, and then jumped up to over half a billion in 2025. So, Zach and the team are on an absolute tear. You know who else is on an absolute tear? Taylor Lorenz. Apparently she spends 17 hours a day. In screen time. I guess that means phone, but maybe phone and computer. She has to spend a lot of time because she's defending big technology. Exactly. There's some incredible quotes in the story. I think she said if she could put the screen in her brain, she would. That's wild. Very unexpected. I mean, she's got to get set up with the Neuralink team. A true timeline merchant. Yes, yes. Well, yeah, extremely online. This is the name of her book, and she certainly lives her brand. Eleazar Yudikowski had an interesting post here. He said, today I learned that Gemini Claude and Chatchi B.T., but not Grock, are told that today he was referring to March 1st, April Fool's Day yesterday. Is March 32nd? Because if you tell LLMs it's April 1st, the conditional text predictions downstream become less reliable for obvious training data set reasoning. The model's like, okay, understanding April 1st. How do I understand? It would be very, very confusing. I mean, we were confused all yesterday because you see so many news announcements go out, and you're like, is this a joke? There is news. Yeah, but if you're told it's April 32nd, or March 32nd, you should be more confused. You're going to be like, that's clearly wrong. Yeah, I wonder how real this is. I'm going to just keep it March 30th or something. Yeah, I don't know. We'll see. We'll have to ask some people. Ruin says, the AI doc reminded me mostly of Coney 2012 documentary, Slacktivism, selling the feeling of we need to do something as a product, oddly centering the filmmaker. When is the embargo lifting for the AI doc? Because I did see it with Tyler and a bunch of other folks from the team, and enjoyed it, but I would love to talk about it. I think it already came out. Yeah, March 27th. Yeah, it was interesting. The biggest gap between the AI doc and his press tour that the creator is on now is that he seems like he doesn't believe AI is real at all, I guess. He was very worried about doom in the movie, comes away sort of like, oh, there's an optimistic scenario here. It's a very nice ending, but then he came away being like, ah, this stuff is not real, which is a very funny conclusion, because he's not really asking about any of the financials or economics or business applications. He's having a much more philosophical debate, and then came away with a financial conclusion. I don't know, is it interesting? Yeah. What is this? Google has released Gemma 4, the best overmodels in the world for their respective sizes. DEMIS has excited to launch Gemma 4, available in four sizes that can be fine-tuned for your specific tasks. 31 billion dents for great raw performance, 26B MOE for low latency and effective 2B and 4B for edge device use, happy building, excited to see what people do with it. They're available now under the Apache license in Google AI Studio or on Hugging Face and some other platforms. So massive launch. Very exciting. What else do we got? There's more on the Mercor leak. Very unfortunate. Gary Tan says incredible amount of state-of-the-art training data is now just available to China thanks to the Mercor leak. Every major lab, billions and billions of value and a major national security issue. I'm just feeling, I'm feeling, you know, that the national security issue is one thing. I'm feeling really concerned for individuals that not only gave PII as part of onboarding, but maybe now there's like live video of them tied to that PII, so it feels like there's some real deep fake risk. I'm very glad that we have Adam Myers from CrowdStrike coming on today to explain the surface area, what the trends are in cybersecurity because things do feel like they are ramping up significantly. Very, also just very odd that there's now a leak of data that could be used to RL models. There's new open source models. There's also the leak of the Clod Code harness. And so if you piece all these together, you get pretty close to the frontier. And that's something that we're certainly going to have to contend with the fact that every time that there's a leak, you probably shrink the gap between the frontier and the open source community by maybe a few months or something as they catch up, even if they're doing it sort of above board. Anyway, Lewis says... He found a public company with 99% of revenue coming from one customer. You've heard of the one employee, one billion dollar company. Now we found the one customer, one billion dollar company. I actually don't know how big this company is, but we need to figure out what company this is. This is TSS Inc. Okay. The ticker's TSSI. And they said, we derive a substantial majority of our revenues from a single OEM customer. Revenues from this customer comprised approximately 99, 99, and 96% of our total revenues for the year ending December 31st, 2025, 2024, and 2023. So they actually had more revenue diversity in 2023. And then the revenue concentration increased over the last two years. Although we provide services across multiple business units and divisions of this OEM and have entered into a long-term AI RAC integration agreement that includes minimum monthly payments, our overall financial performance remains highly dependent on the continuation and scope of this relationship. Well, you know... Yeah, and they're trading very reasonably. They're at something like a $240 million run rate as of Q4, at a market cap of like $366 million. Okay. Yeah, it seems to be priced in... Yes. Buko says, imagine being a software company with like 250,000 customers, $1 billion of revenue growing 20% and the market sets you're worth $3.5 billion. And then Rigatoni Computing has generously five customers and basically no revenue is worth $4.5 billion. It's a cold world. I don't know. Yeah. I mean, this is the reality of working on a sci-fi technology. Sci-fi technology is that if it works, the value is really, really big. Yeah. Essentially. Preparate remark says, but those five customers might go to six, so you have to get in before that. What is going on with Scott Weiner's based act? Did you see this? Probably the most radical bill ever to degrade tech products. It bans Amazon Prime, stops iPhones from having FaceTime, strips travel, shopping local and AI results out of Google search results. This feels like a stunt almost. I don't know. It must be a commentary. Yeah. So Adam's... This feels like something that's like sort of being misinterpreted almost. Adam sent out an update to the chamber, progressed his group. He said the based act is likely the most radical proposal to regulate and direct technology product design ever advanced in California. Legislature that bill dictates how core products must function from search results to app stores, to e-commerce, marketplaces. Well, we have our next guest in the waiting room. Let's bring in Mark Lohr from Wonder. How are you doing, Mark? Good to meet you. How you doing, guys? Thank you so much for taking the time. Great to be here. Sorry we couldn't give you much warning or our news. It's kind of a wild, wild day over here. I just saw it. Congratulations. Thank you. I'm sure we can get into M&A war stories and whatnot, whatever you want to talk about. But why don't you, since it's the first time in the show, sort of take us back in history and give us a little background on yourself for the viewers. Yeah, sure. You know, starting back here in investment banking and then in the late 90s, did a first startup, sold it to top's Debate for our card company. Then started at diapers.com. Okay. And then sold that to Amazon in 2011. Yeah. It's $550 million. And then worked inside Amazon for a couple of years. Started Jet.com, which is another e-commerce site. Okay. And two years later sold that to Walmart for $3 million. And then became the CEO. That's why they call him the LeBron James of e-commerce. It's on the wiki. Became the CEO of Walmart's e-commerce business and did that for about four and a half years. Yeah. Yeah. Now I'm the founder and CEO of Wonder FoodTech startup. Maybe take us back to diapers.com. I'd love to know like how you were thinking about that business when you started it. Was there a thesis that sort of vertical focused e-commerce was going to be a trend? What was the ecosystem like? What was the competitive landscape? Were VC saying like... Or did you just snap up a great domain and think I got to make some money with this thing? Yeah. Yeah. How much was this organic versus... The way it started, I was just searching on Google what search terms people were searching for a lot and doing it at night, searching, searching, searching. You would tell you how many times it was searched and I saw... Oh, so they didn't even have... So did they even have like Google Trends at that point or you just had to search and they would show you... There's Alexa. I think it was called Alexa maybe or something. You can type in a search term and it would tell you how many times it was searched on Google. Yeah. And diapers I remember was 200,000 times a month. And so I went online and I saw the price of diapers was like $10 more expensive. And I thought, I mean, I had a baby at the time. It was a pain to go get diapers. Why aren't diapers delivered like everything else like books and all this other stuff? And I thought, yeah, diapers.com. And that was actually 1-800-DIAPERS started because I couldn't afford the diapers.com domain. Yeah. So the 1-800... There must have been a moment where like the 1-800 was like more expensive than the.com though. And then it flipped at some point. Oh, yeah. It was very... When I was there, it was very cheap. It was like, I don't know, just tens of thousands. Whereas the diapers.com was like a half a million or something. What was it like building an e-commerce website back then? Like we just read a story about a one person or I guess two people company, two person company that's at a billion dollars in revenue. And that feels unthinkable. But like, what was the team like? Were you racking servers? Was there a cloud? We were racking servers. Yeah, it wasn't... Nothing was in the cloud. It was just, you know, eventually transitioned to it. But yeah, no, it was servers in the server closet. And yeah, we had, you know, designers, you know, designing the website and building it out. And like it was, yeah, old school. And then, I mean, how are you thinking about fulfillment, vertical integration? What you want to do, what you don't want to do early on with that journey? I mean, we had very little capital. So everything was, you know, hand to mouth. We would sell diaper online, a box of diapers online for let's say $40. And then we'd go to the wholesale club and buy it for $42 and ship it to the customer. No way. So it was like that kind of thing. So we're actually losing money on every box we sold. Yeah. And then what was the integration with Amazon like at the time? Where was Amazon as a business? Where was the vision? What was the thesis and like what you saw was going on at Amazon? Like why was it an exciting opportunity? Yeah. So I mean, it's not really the Amazon was actually crushing it in 2005 when we started diapers.com, but they were mass. They weren't focused. Any one category wasn't a great experience. Like if you're like me, a new parent going on to Amazon and wanting to buy like your stuff for your baby, you're like all over the place. It wasn't a great experience. The diapers were actually more expensive on Amazon than in the store. They just weren't, they weren't getting the sort of whole diaper thing. And saw an angle to create a specialty site that focused just on that vertical. Everything the parents want, everything they need on one spot. And it was really working. You know, we also were able to ship the diapers and all this stuff out of the same fulfillment center with two day delivery, which wasn't being done on Amazon at the time in that category. Yeah. And is that more important? Is that more important in that particular category because parents need diapers for the kids? It's a more urgent. Like it's a fast, like you might wait for a book or you might wait for a TV or something. Yeah, yeah, exactly. You realize I'm going to add a diapers. I need them tomorrow. You know, that sort of thing. So definitely I also think there's a lot of you buying like a lot of different things and it's expensive to ship them from multiple warehouses. So wanting to get them all in the same box. Yeah. Like getting the wipes, the diapers, the baby formula, you know, bottles and things like everything in the same box because they're low margin. Yeah. And so it's too expensive to ship them separately. But we were also the first ones to bring in Kiva robotics into the warehouse. Oh, no way. And then Amazon ultimately bought Kiva robotics. We were the first ones to use robotics in the warehouse. And again, all in the name of the margins alone, we have to we have to figure out how to automate. We create this software that told the people in the warehouse exactly how to put everything in the box so we can get all the things in the smallest box possible. Sure. Because FedEx a lot of times would charge you for the box size. Yeah. And so we tried to like we had 23 different box sizes. So like we were very advanced when it came to the logistics and and trying to pull costs out of the system. Yeah. And what what what elements of the Internet boom, like what are the ways in which we can Internet boom, like what are the ways in which the Internet boom feels similar to the AI boom and and how does it feel different? I think it feels very, I think it feels very similar. I mean, certainly, you know, just just people on both sides of the fence. This is good. This is bad. What's going to do like a lot of uncertainty. Yeah, we were looking back on on how people all the fears people that had about the Internet are almost are almost mirrored one to one with AI. Like every single one kind of matches up. You know, the job displacement. Y2K. Y2K. You know, Y2K things like that. It's pretty remarkable how how humans fear the Internet in the exact same way as humans fear everything. You go back to when they trains. OK. I don't know if you guys know. I wasn't alive. When trains when trains were a thing, they strongly advise people not to go on trains because at that speed, they don't know the long term effects it'll have on your brain. Whoa. And they told pregnant women to not go on a train if you're pregnant because of the same reason like any industrial. Yeah. That's ever taking place in history. There's always an incredible amount of fear. Yeah. Yeah, it's fascinating. Can you tell me about the process of the idea for Jet.com? It when I remember that process happening and it felt like, OK, at this point, you know, with diapers.com, like there's a niche. There's a landing zone. Like it makes so much sense. It's complimentary to Amazon. Jet.com felt much more like, OK, this is like a direct competitor. Was that the correct framing? Were you thinking about that? Were you just thinking there needed to be more options in the market that you could differentiate? What was your thought process going into launching Jet.com? Yeah, I think there's just a massive market and there was no number two to Amazon and we had an angle. You know, Amazon at the time was shipping stuff from multiple warehouses. It was very inefficient from a logistics standpoint. They were burning a lot of money, but they had no competition. So they could do it. And the idea was very simple. Let's empower people and teach them how to shop smarter so that they can save money. And so we built this smart card technology where, you know, when you started adding items into your basket, it would reduce the prices of the items that could be fulfilled from the same warehouse in the same box. As an incentive to get people to save money, because if you shipped an item from two different warehouses, you had to pay, you know, at least $5 per shipment. And if you shipped it in the from the same warehouse, the marginal cost to ship might be 15 cents. And so that was the idea of teaching people how to shop smarter to save money. Yeah, what was the fundraising environment like throughout that, throughout that journey? I doubt you've had a hard fundraise. At the same time, it's like, you know, you're going up against Amazon during this time. I mean, I tried to raise money in 2001, 2008, 15, some really tough years. I've been through it all, been raising money. I've done for 30 years, done probably as many venture capital picks as many one, you know, probably over over 1000 pitches easily now over over the career. But the fundraising has changed in the early days of diverse.com. If you were to raise $100 million, that was like a huge deal. Yeah. And then today, you know, it's raising billions, tens of billions, you know, it's very different environment today. But back then it was as much harder to get private capital. What drew you to food? We had Travis Kalanick on a few weeks ago and we're sort of joking around is like you do if you've done food feels like the hardest possible, you know, massive opportunity, but it's like probably the hardest food tech, probably one of the hardest categories. And so if you've mastered, you know, at scale logistics and these, you know, incredibly, you know, capital intensive things like e-commerce or ride share, it feels like the final frontier and incredible challenge. But what what brought you what drew you into it? I mean, first of all, I think the margins in food is so much better than e-commerce. And I felt like it is a restaurant sector was ripe for technological disruption. And restaurants haven't changed fundamentally in 100 years is still capital intensive, labor heavy, difficult to scale and their places. And we wanted to challenge that and ask the question, what if restaurants weren't placed? What if restaurants were just ideas? What if you can build a restaurant and scale it across a network like software without any incremental capital or incremental labor with robotics in the back end? And if we're able to do that, then we're able to bring, you know, make great food more accessible. We can bring restaurants to places that currently don't have access a ton to the day that don't have access and at price points that are really unfathomable today. That was really the sort of the thinking there. And, you know, we managed to today in 2500 square feet, have 25 unique restaurants across 20 different types of cuisines, everything from a high end Bobby Flay steak, the Jose Andreas to barbecue burgers, Chinese, Mexican, Italian, Middle Eastern fried chicken pizza, all in one 2500 square foot kitchen with no gas, all electric, no open flames with very lightly trained labor. So it's very systematized. Yeah. And we see a future where we'll have a thousand or more unique restaurants operating out of the same 2500 square foot kitchen. And so wild. Have you read any of those like old stories about the automats in 1950s? Have you heard of this? It's like this it's like this restaurant. I think it was in New York. And basically there was like a wall of cubbies where the food would be prepared in the back and then you would just sort of open the cubby and take your food. And there was no interaction. And they were like, see, they were herald is like the future in sci-fi. But they never really took off in like the 50s, I guess. And I've always wondered about like how important is the the the online interaction, like the delivery point, because there's been a number of attempts to make like robotic restaurants work. But it feels like if people are going to a restaurant, they want a particular experience. But if they're ordering food online, they want they're okay with a different experience. And I'm wondering how how separate those are, even though we think of them as like it's the same name. It's, you know, this pizza place in person or this piece of place in in on delivery, they're actually maybe much more different experiences and like and like experiences delivery, like what the value prop is. Yeah, we're not. I mean, we're focused. It's primarily delivery first. 70% of revenues delivery about 25% is pickup. Okay. And then less than 5% is sit down. So we have 10 to 20 seats in the front. So it's like it looks like a high and fast casual in the front, but it's a pretty small front of house. Yeah. But being vertically integrated, so we bought the rubhub. So we own the delivery. Okay. We own and we also own all the restaurants. Yeah. We own all the restaurants. We do the cooking. We built all the technology. And so the vertical integration combined with a very tight delivery radius. Yeah. Allows us to offer an incredible experience like faster, more on time, hotter food, great quality. And of course, everyone in the family could order from a, from a different restaurant and it all gets cooked and delivered at the same time. Yeah. And we can do that in ex urban and even rural areas where restaurants can't typically go. And that's one of the advantages of the model. And then recently we just added drone delivery. Oh, well, Jersey. And that'll be a big part of the next year's flying or road going with wheels. Oh, sorry, flying. Flying. And who did you guys partner? Did you fully verticalize? Uh, yes. No, no, we're partnered with a couple of different drone companies to do it. But we're live. You can order from drone. That's amazing. In New Jersey in this one location and what are the next year? What are the challenges with doing prepared food delivery via drone? Like I've seen some of these videos where a package will fall, you know, 10 feet out of the sky. And obviously that's not going to work. If you're ordering ordering a nice meal, certainly. It comes down to tether and very gently puts it on the ground. But the advantage is no tips. It's more on time. You can service a bigger area. And then you could also deliver to if you're on a boat on a lake on a beach, a field, you could be camping. So the idea of being able to deliver it to the point as opposed to somebody's residence is really cool. And, uh, we're going to be able to do that. And, uh, it's really at an inflection point now. I know we've been talking drones for 10 years, but when we go to Texas next year, we fully expect half of our deliveries to be done via drone. Wow. But just to come put that in perspective. We've had, we've had Keller from Zipline on a number of times and it, it, you, we've been feeling the acceleration with every, every interview we have. How do you, one of the things that go for it. Oh, sorry. Go ahead. Um, how have you approached everything on the supply chain side actually because I imagine some of that is out of your control, but that, you know, you need, uh, you're, you're heavily relying on those inputs, no matter how good your whole technology stack and processes, the foods got to arrive, uh, at, at each of these kitchens. Um, what is that? That is, that is absolute most important. I'm glad you called it out. We have, you know, 40 culinary engineers on staff. Uh, we just hired a Victoria who's the head of, uh, global supply chain at Cisco Foods. So we have a 700 ingredient library. We source everything from a number of different, uh, purveyors. It brings it to our distribution center and then from distribution center every day, we replenish every location. Uh, um, today we have a hundred and 18 locations open next year. We'll have 400. So growing, growing very fast. Wow. Um, but the food quality is the most important. I'm assuming it would never have worked to work with third party, like food distributors, like you need to control it. You can have them come into the central hub, but you need to actually understand. We want to have specialists. So if you have everything from pizza dough to barbecue to sous vide steaks to vet, like everything comes from a different, uh, supplier in some cases, co-manufacturer. Um, but yeah, the food quality is, is most important. But the 700 ingredient library is fixed. All the equipment is fixed. Think of that as like a data center. Once you have the data center and piping in the ground, anybody can create a restaurant using the platform and launch it across instantaneously across all locations. So at the end of this year, we're launching one to create where anybody in the world with just an AI prompt can create their own restaurant and launch it across all wonder locations for $10 a month. We think it's going to fundamentally change how people think about restaurant creation. So yeah, walk, walk, walk me through this. I come in, I want to prompt, I start prompting or even just typing out what I want to make. And then your guys is our base using robotics are you can just make it on the fly. Like what is the lead time? Yeah, so this is actually like open up the floodgates here. Like how limited in December, yeah, in December, you'll be able to go to wonder, create homepage and say, create me a fast casual Mexican concept for Gen Z. And that's it. Hit create. Then AI will brand your restaurant name it, give your couple options, do all the images, do all the recipes, write the descriptions, price everything, do all the health information, create your entire restaurant and under a minute, you can decide to publish it in all wonder locations for $10 a month instantaneously. And now you're live to potentially 20 million people next year. You can push it on door to edge Uber and Grubbub if you want as well. And you own the restaurant, you price it, you own it, it's live. And if you're an influencer, you have. So are you doing a rev share back with the creator or how does that work? Yeah, you just basically the creator would pay us for food and pay us for robotic time. So we're plugging. Let's say you created a fast casual Mexican concept. It would plug into our infinite bowl machine that we acquired from sweet cream. The infinite bowl machine would make your bowl a code of your recipe. Yeah. And then we would actually print your packaging on demand to match your logo. So you're fully in business. You don't need to do anything. You can be live in a matter of minutes with your new restaurant. And then we're next year launching an automated sauce machine, the infinite sauce machine, which has 130 raw ingredients and can make 80% of all sauce recipes on the internet on demand. 500 sauces an hour. So you can also create your own sauce recipe, your own dressing, your own whatever sauce you want on these on these bowls that are made from the infinite bowl machine. So that's that's sort of all it's all going to be at the end of this year. I mean, like you're describing a very, very broad vision for the type of food that can be delivered. And made. Walk me through the like the level of robotic automation because you walk into a place that toast bagels and they have a machine. It's sort of robotic that will like move the bagels down and toast it or the pizza goes through the oven. And then you and then we see pitches all the time from humanoid robotics companies where it's operating a toaster that's not automated at all. But the but the robot is moving and it's fully humanoid. What is actually useful? Where are we in the deployment of this? What what like what robotic form factors are actually moving the needle and driving value? No, so okay. So where we are today, we have conveyors in every location. We have again, no open flames, all electric cooking platform. Sure. When the item gets onto the conveyor goes down to the expo area, it gets auto scanned, no human robotic arm picks it off and puts it into the right bagging lane. So like that is that is the extent of the robotics today. Yeah. But the robotic machine, the infinite bowl machine we bought from sweet green is live in 32 sweet greens. It makes all the salads and all the bowls without any human intervention. The only thing you have to do is put the ingredients in the machine, but the bowl is beautifully made. It turns the bowl neatly puts the ingredients in the bowl and there's no human labor. You're pulling out 25 points of labor on making those bowls. And the bowl machine can do 500 bowls an hour. It can do 13 million in revenue and 300 square feet. Incredible piece of machinery. This great team from Spice Robotics, the 34 MIT engineers up in Boston are now working for us and they're building the sauce machine. The sauce machine will go live early next year. We're working on an infinite beverage machine that could make basically any drink, you know, in a coffee shop or a cold brew concept. All the foaming, layering, blending, that machine will also go live next year. So we're layering on the automation. And then in the middle of next year, we're launching an automatic retrieval system where all has a cold storage of frozen and ambient and everything stored in there. And so if you order wings, it will robotically pick the wings and send them to the fryer. And then the person just puts them in the fryer in the future of the fryer and will be automated. But that's kind of like where we are today where we're going next year. But we envision, we envision in the not too distant future, being able to generate 20 million of revenue at a 2,500 square feet with only 15 people operating that 20 million in revenue. So your labor cost is a small percentage. Your rent is a tiny percentage. And we're able to make a 50% four wall margin, which we're going to take that extra margin and put a lot of it back into price. So we'd expect prices to come down and be deflationary over time. And it's consistent with our mission of just making great food more accessible. Price point. Yeah, food has food ever been deflationary. It just feels like it all forever. It just goes up and up and up. I wanted to get your thoughts on humanoid robotics, specifically in a restaurant context. I'm guessing I already know what you think, but what's your take? Yeah, so we don't use any humanoid robots. So I think you like to think that. No, I understand now. I mean, more like diffusion. Do you think that do you think a humanoid form factor will ever be productive in a commercial kitchen? Or are these kind of like bespoke systems like you've created going to dominate? I mean, I think definitely a short term. What we're doing is sort of like first principle thinking on this stuff. Like the humanoid robots going into a kitchen that exists as oh, there's the fryer. This is what you do. You put the fries in the basket, the basket down the basket up the basket over. We like to rethink and think why do you need to do that that way? And you just create a fryer that has a conveyor and the conveyor goes through the fryer and fries it along the way. So you don't need to put anything in a basket and take it out of a basket. Like that sort of that sort of thinking. I do think there's some things that can't be automated and be a long time before we could ever automate it like assembling a burger or rolling a burrito. If a humanoid is able to roll burrito or assemble a burger, we'd be very interested in that and we would look at it. It doesn't seem like anything that's going to happen in the very short term, but I'm always open to know that everything you think is not possible today. You know, could be possible. Yeah, we were asking a humanoid founder about what we're calling diet coke bench. How effectively can a humanoid open a diet coke if it's simple but probably not too easy? Yeah, we really like this. Sorry. Okay, good. My last question is I wondering about your vision for the future of like restaurant brands generally because if like, will we get to a point where I can go and prompt or design a specific meal and if I want buffalo wings put on pizza and fold into a calzone deep fry. Like all as long as I'm using the tools that are within one facility, will I be able to just create something that's essentially a one of one meal that is to my exact specifications and actually be direct to consumer? Yes, you'll be able to create your own restaurant recipes. I guess the way you want and go direct to consumer. So we envision a future where there are not only influences creating restaurants, but every college student can have their own cold brew concept, a high school student can have their own salad or Mexican concept. We envision in the not too distant future, there are tens of thousands of salad concepts in the US, tens of thousands of fast casual and the market will be very long tail, very fragmented. It won't be consolidated the way it is today. It's fascinating, but you're basically taking franchising and bringing it online and franchising in a way has been so successful because you're giving people a system and a proven product. But in this case, you're not asking for them to take on hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars of debt to set up these... $10 a month. That's all it is. It's $10 a month. Well, thank you. Incredible. This is fantastic. Are you guys... what are you hiring for right now? I'm in across the board, but we're got a big open business, a lot of open positions in robotics and engineering. So we've got over a thousand engineers on staff, but we can't seem to get enough. So if you're listening, reach out. Amazing. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us. Nice to meet you guys too. I've been a follower of your career since... I was building the e-commerce company in 2012 and I was like, yeah, this guy's the liberal James. So thank you for everything you've done for the... Yeah, great to see you guys. We'll have to create a TVPN kitchen. Yeah, I'd love it. Goodbye. There was something that you wanted to pull up, Jordy. What should we pull up? Post here from Rat King, our friend over at the New York Times, a tech reporter. What does he say? He wrote a profile on us. He was able to get a screenshot actually from our contract with OpenAI. And he says, interesting, as part of negotiations with OpenAI, TVPN has a commitment to editorial independence written into the contract, which states the following. TVPN retains full control over its daily programming, editorial decisions, guest selection and production schedule. TVPN will continue to host a broad range of voices and perspectives, which we shared earlier. Yep. Yeah, open stage to talk about whatever you're building in technology and AI. TVPN independently determines its external appearances and commentary. OpenAI will not control TVPN's planning materials or working documents. OpenAI will not provide direction on TVPN's editorial calendar. OpenAI will not influence who TVPN books or what topics it covers. Again, we just talk about so many things. Oftentimes we're talking about topics like on the fly, there's breaking news. This was incredibly important to us. It's also just more fun to have the directors be the hosts as well. So that we're not talking at, so we just say whatever we want. Yeah, people have always asked us how do you guys decide who comes on the show or decide what to talk about. And the honest truth is we, you know, it's whatever we're interested in. It's always been that way. It's super important. It's always been important because we have to sit here and talk for three hours every day. It's got to be interesting to us. It's got to be interesting to us. Or else it's brutal. And yeah, OpenAI will not materially alter discontinuer. Reaver on TVPN, OpenAI does not have rights to TVPN host likeness. Yeah, we specifically have it set up where they can't even train models on TVPN. Can't train it on the chat. They can't train on anything TVPN related. I'm sure other companies train on TVPN already in one way or another. But yeah, this was incredibly important to both teams. And I think we got it to a really good place. And thanks to Mike Isaac for covering it. Will, let's bring in our next guest, Adam Myers from CrowdStrike. He is the head of Counter-Adversary Operations at CrowdStrike and the host of the Adversary Universe podcast. Adam, welcome to the show. How are you doing? Adversary's worst nightmare. The adversary's worst nightmare. Yeah, thanks for having me. Congrats on the acquisition too. I was reading about that earlier. Amazing. Awesome. Yeah, and thanks for hopping on. Crazy week. I imagine it's an extremely crazy week for you. Can you sort of level set for us? Is this a really, really weird week generally? Yeah, it's interesting because last time we had George on or maybe the time before I was talking, it's like we haven't had big AI related security breaches to date and not everything that's happened this week has been directly tied to AI, but it feels like everything is heating up. We're seeing more of it. There's been a couple in the last two weeks of these supply chain attacks. And I think what's clear is that, especially with the use of quad code and some of the different agentic solutions that are out there, people don't know necessarily what these things are downloading, what they're loading on their systems. I know you guys have talked about open quad before and things like that. And it's just, the supply chain for software has been an issue for a while. And I think it's just escalating, right? We've seen so many of these over the last week. We've seen Team PCP doing a few of these. And then this most recent one, which was a big one, tied back to North Korea. North Korea. Yeah, it's two things are happening. People aren't reading code. They don't understand the ways in which they're actually building products. And then there's also, feels like a hundred or a thousand times more software just being created doing the combination of those things is what's driving this. Maybe. I've been doing a plan with it a lot. And it's great. You can't even see it as it's running. And it's just pulling down MPM libraries and God knows what else from Pipey and stuff like that. So it's just, who knows what's out there. And the other thing is you install these libraries one day and then they become evil overnight. And you have to go back and review everything that you're using. Yeah. Can you give us a supply chain attack one on one? Some people might be familiar with SolarWinds. That was the last one that really broke through to the mainstream. But just how does this work? What's the anatomy of a supply chain attack? And then we'll go into how to fight it and how, why they're on the rise in particular. Sure. Generally supply chain attacks are going to impact the software supply chain. And so in SolarWinds, I actually worked that one. So I can tell you that one was pretty special because they got into the CI CD environment and were able to actually affect the building of the software so that it was done in a way that nobody really could tell that that had happened. What we're seeing in these new supply chain attacks is that they're targeting the developers themselves, many of whom probably listen to the show. And so it's important they pay attention that they go after your credentials, they fish you, they get access to your logins to things like MPM and Pipee, and then abuse that. And there's a number of ways they can do this with Git tags where they can actually hide the code and then redirect Git to a Git tag. But effectively what happens for the layman is that you have software that is depended on by enterprise applications, by open source stacks, and Axios was downloaded something like 100,000 times per week. So that gives you a sense that these things are being used extremely frequently. And people don't look at them. They don't analyze that code, they don't analyze that library, they trust it came from MPM, it must be good, the communities looked at it, but those things can be updated in a moment's notice and you don't know what that latest update is unless you review the code yourself. Yeah, okay, so on reviewing the code yourself, we were debating this. The two sides that we were kicking around was maybe the reaction to this is that, sure, we're not going to write as much code going forward. We know that the models are good at writing code, but there will be a lot more code reading that goes on and people will just demand that if you're hired as a software engineer that you read every line, you work through the dependencies, you are in charge of the code that you ship regardless of whether or not it was generated by an LLM or not. The other side of it was sort of like maybe the answer to bad AI code is more good AI code and that we will be doing more AI code reviews and that we can actually throw more AI at this problem. I imagine the solution is somewhere in the middle, but how are you wrestling with those two paths forward? Well, I think what we're looking at is how do we secure it, absent of if somebody reviewing the code or not. There's things that you can look for at the endpoint, at the security fabric. We kind of see ourselves as the operating system of security at CrowdStrike. So being able to see that the AI agent is writing code and it loads a library and inside that library, use this Axios example, there's a chunk of it that's base 64 encoded and it's being decoded and instantiated. That's suspicious behavior. If I say that out loud, I'm like, hey, you guys are going to pull that a bunch of base 64 code and then decode it and run it. You'd be like, no, we're not. So I think those things that we can see at the endpoint, at the build time, we can actually look for that and say, okay, this is suspicious behavior. Let's flag this and pay attention to what's happening with this particular thing because to your point, you could demand everybody read all the AI slop that they're generating, but the reality is that even if they do that, they're not looking at all the libraries that they're using. How many libraries does a standard build have? I mean, I've been vibe coding for a while and who knows what libraries... You run it and that's the beauty of it. You run it, it spits out a bunch of stuff and then it works. The reality is nobody's looking at those code bases until something like this happens. Yeah, what does the future of security products crowd strike? I can just imagine a world where more people need security products for open source projects, for their personal projects, for their personal life. If you have someone whose day job is important, but then they're vibe coding their family calendar at home, but all of a sudden that creates a vulnerability where you can get their phone number and then... Yeah, one thing that's interesting is people have had relatively high trust with software for the last 10 years. It's like, oh, it's a Google login and only this year have I started to be really question different apps and things like that that people are making because there's a tendency, if you're working in tech, to want to try the new thing. And now when something pops up, it's actually kind of a headwind for startups because I think we're probably headed into a lower trust era. Yeah, I think that's part of it. I also would point to the people that are building these libraries. We've seen this with Chrome plugins too and browser plugins. You need to have MFA, multi-factor authentication on all of your authentication for pushing code out to these library bases because somebody comes along, fishes the developer, convinces them to enter password for Drive or some sort of cloud storage or something like that. They take those credentials and then they use that to log in and change the code base. So the developers really need to be focused on securing their own accounts and identity. And we've seen, we released this Global Threat report a few weeks ago. Identity, for a long time endpoint. And when CrowdStrike, I've been with CrowdStrike since we started back in 2011, endpoint was kind of where the bad stuff happens. He makes success. What a good run. What advice are you giving to developers today that are, I think everyone, that my advice would not be freak out and slam your computer into the table. We're going back to the pen and paper. Yeah, we're going back to the pen and paper. But what are the two factors, an obvious one, any other advice that somebody should basically implement immediately? If everybody secured their identities, my job would be a lot easier. The number one thing that we've seen is identity attacks. I mean, two years ago, we saw the voice-based phishing. So threat actors calling up the help desk and being like, hey, this is Jordy and I can't log into my account. Sorry, Jordy, I'm just picking on you there. But hey, I can't log into my account. And they're like, all right, well, who's your supervisor? What's your work location? You answer those two questions and they reset the cred for you. And that happens to the point where hundreds of percentages of increase that we've seen that occurring from threat actors. So one of the ways to get around that from a defense perspective, multi-factor authentication. Don't use SMS, by the way, for multi-factor authentication because that's a whole other thing because I can sim swap you or I can... And if you have a backup for your multi-factor authentication as your Gmail, well, I'll target your Gmail. And then I'll intercept that key. So having smart secondary factors and using pass key and things like that really important. And then using different... I tell this to everybody and even if I'm talking to a bunch of school kids, like, hey, use different passwords for everything. And I love nothing more than going into a room with people. I'm like, all right, raise your hand if you don't use the same password for every account. And they all raise their hands. And I'm like, look around. If your hand is up, you're a liar because everybody does password reuse. Yeah, of course. Give us the pitch for the podcast. Give us a summary to help people where to find it. Yeah, it's the adversary universe podcast. It's myself and Christian Rodriguez, who's our field CTO of the Americas. And just like you guys, we like to have a good time just kind of back and forth banter bringing guests occasionally. But we really dive into the adversary. So in this case, with the Axios incident, we're attributing that to Stardust Chalima, which is a North Korean group. We've been tracking them since 2015. And one of the things that they... So, and then Lapsis, I don't know if I'm saying that correctly, was connected to the light LLM attack. But do I have that correct? That was a different group. Well, yeah, that's kind of team PCP, I think, claimed credit for that. But they're actually fighting. You can watch this in some of their channels. The two groups are kind of talking back and forth. They're like, I did it. No, I did it. Well, I think the Lapsis guys or shiny hunters was like, this is why we hack them. So, they hacked team PCP. So there's a lot of back and forth there. But this one was North Korea, who has been doing... They stole last year $1.46 billion in just one attack against a cryptocurrency company. So, they've been stealing cryptocurrencies since 2016 at billions of dollars is kind of the current total. And when they do a supply chain attack like this, they want to go after developers who are doing blockchain and kind of DAOs and stuff like that, because they know that if they can get into there, then they can actually steal cryptocurrency and use that to buy things for their weapons program. Wow. Yeah, a lot more straightforward than acquiring data and then trying to auction it off. Yeah, totally. Or the ransom. Or incident. If you get the coins. Well, yeah, some of those are interesting because they actually... They were deploying Steelers to steal credentials to then go after other targets. And there's a whole ecosystem on the underground where you can go in, you can buy creds to an organization. And if you have creds to an organization and you log in, you can go straight into their single sign-on, you can get into Microsoft SharePoint or any of their data stores, and you're off and running. And there's really very little that organizations can do to prevent that. It's a legitimate user logging in with a legitimate credential, so it becomes very difficult for them. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come break it down for us. Have a great weekend. Yeah, this was insightful. Come on, come on more often. Yeah, this would be great. Anytime, guys. My pleasure. How have you? Good. Our next guest is Jeremy Allaire from Circle. He's alive in person in the TVP and UltraDome with us. We're very excited to talk to him. Jeremy, good to see you. Good to see you. How are you doing? I'm good. Take us through the announcement. We were covering it over the past few days around maybe reset on where the business is today, and then we'll go into the quantum story. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, look, obviously we went public last year. Yeah. And as we went public, we talked. Thank you. There's a sound board in person too. Can I hit that now? Yeah. And at that time, we were talking a lot about our stablecoin network, which is rooted in USDC. But really, over the last year, we've really widened out. Yeah. So we are a broader platform company now, and we have an operating system that we've been building called ARC, and that's getting ready to go mainnet, as we say. And then we've been kind of building out abstractions around kind of payments and sort of making payments more simple and mainstream, and then just building a lot of infrastructure and tools for developers and stuff. So the platform is really broadened. But I mean, if you look at where we are now, like USDC has become the most widely transacted digital currency in the world, bigger than anything else basically, and has overtaken Tether in terms of transaction volume. Interesting. And we're seeing new uptake from major companies now, whether it's like a fintech like Ramp that just launched whole treasury management with it, or it's a global bank like JPMorgan now has used it to sell digital bonds. And so it's all over the place, which is pretty cool. And then one of the things that we saw really start to pick up, and we'll talk about, I think, hopefully today, too, is effectively like this explosion in people building agents and agents consuming services and needing ways to kind of pay for all of that, and the technology and standards to kind of do agent to agent economic transactions, financial transactions. And USDC has played a big role in that, and that's emerging. And to me is like one of the most interesting things happening in the agent economy. And yeah, USDC and our statement from the network is like 99% of the transactions happening now at that layer. Yeah. So how are you tracking adoption? What kinds of use cases are you expecting to be the first to really, kind of go more mainstream? This is something that people have been talking about for years now, and as agents have become massively more popular, it feels like now could really be the moment. But what are you tracking most closely? Yeah, I mean, look, there are a bunch of things. I think if you think about the agent stack as it's emerging, right, you're clearly seeing a lot of companies that have services, have software, have other things, and they're basically like, okay, I need to kind of convert what I do into an agent-consumable system. So I want to have an MCP server, I want to have, you know, CLI interface. So you're all these kinds of things and this sort of discoverability. And then you need ways to basically enable agents to like onboard and transact really, really quickly and go through the kind of onboarding that you would typically deal with. And so that's where we see this first wave is basically agents consuming services that are now kind of agent ready and have been kind of structured that way. And so there's like a registry of now, you know, you know, thousands of services that are basically becoming what's called X402 enabled, which is a key standard we're involved with. There's a big announcement actually today about that. And so that's like the first, it's sort of like getting that connected. But to me, the really interesting and more explosive kind of growth potential is really, you know, agents that are providing services to other agents themselves. And so if you think about like, I'm building an agent that's, you know, extremely good at a particular form of, let's say, medical analysis, or I'm building an agent that's extremely good at reviewing resumes or whatever that is, this sort of agent as a service is again, the way that people are talking about this is like in those models, you're basically paying for, you know, intelligence and intelligence is going to be priced in dollars, but also as consumable tokens. And you need at that point, like, if you look at like, what's the cost for, cost of intelligence for X number of tokens with a given model, it could be five cents, it could be a dollar, it could be 35 cents, it could be more, it could be something long running, it could be, you know, $100 or whatever. And so once you start having agents contracting with each other and needing that medium of exchange to settle that, that's where I see this as explosive, because you get this compounding effect of agents. Yeah, we were talking earlier, there's a guy in the New York Times today that built, you know, $1.8 billion. Yeah, I know, I read around and watched your show before I came in here. And what's notable is like he's using a bunch of different intelligence providers, but if you're just hopping between different LMS all the time, it's not great, you're like copy and pasting, and it's not like unified, and so you would imagine that over time you get to actual aggregators and you're like, hey, we need to tap into a different model for this. And you know, like an agent marketplace and these registries of agents, and obviously like, because it's all machine to machine, like it's super discoverable, and what's behind any given agent, which is just kind of consumed through, you know, some kind of underlying CLI or whatever API, right? Like, it doesn't matter what the underlying model is behind it, it's just like, there's a function I need and it's here. And so, yeah, I think it's also, you know, the kind of compensation fees, transactions around agent to agent stuff is obviously has that like huge exponential potential. I think what gets more interesting is when you really start to think about structured economic relationships, like most economic relationships are not just like, you have a thing, I'm paying you for the thing, right? It's like a labor contract, there might be a lot involved in it or a service contract, there may be many, many stipulations that are part of it, and like a trade agreement between two companies, there's like all kinds of stuff, and so you can imagine like more elaborate forms of contracts, and those need to be machine written contracts, machine enforced contracts, and machine validated and audited and kind of have dispute resolution against all of those. And like economic operating systems that are built on blockchain tech stacks are like the way that will happen, and that's more of a view of like, what is the agent economy, what is the economic system, and actually these new companies that are, you know, the one person billion dollar startups, etc., like all of that phenomenon, in some ways like these are emergent corporate forms, right, that are using a lot of AI labor, and but over time, like I think even the nature of corporate forms will change, and will have more digitally native corporate forms that most of the substance is actually just software execution, and like there's humans involved, and maybe the legal system will always require there's a person that's there, but I think we're going to face a lot of very hard legal questions around, you know, sort of entity substance, like what is the substance of the entity, what is the entity, and but I think a lot of this, there's a lot of material here that we have to work with to ultimately create these sort of fully digitally native forms that are, you know, composing and interacting with contracts and economic systems. How are you guys working with companies today? The beauty of USCC is anybody can kind of get the power of it by just tap in, just tap in, but I know you guys have invested in companies in the past, partner with, you know, a ton of them directly, like the power people, I'm sure you're getting, you know, an insane amount of real pitches and then also, you know, people pitching you with open claw, things like that. Oh my God, yeah. I mean, look, I think like, so a couple things, I think within this AI space, right, we're, yeah, we're making investments, like venture investments in different types of startups that are doing interesting things. We have, we have builder programs, so we have, you know, with funding and stuff like that, so we have builder programs in this space. But a lot of what we're doing is just basically like making sure everything that we have, like all of the infrastructure for wallets, the infrastructure for money, the infrastructure for creating smart contracts, like all the stuff that goes into this, that all of that is just consumable and discoverable by either AI development tools or by AI agents themselves. And, and then letting, letting things happen. But like, I got a stepping back and a little bit away from the AI specific side of it. Yeah, I mean, the range of the range of companies now, like getting involved and plugging into this is really broad. And that's exciting. You know, this is definitely kind of going into a mainstream phase. Can you imagine AI companies are ahead of the curve there in terms of adoption and turning on agentic payments because you go to an agent and it needs to use some resource. That's the logical, the logical pattern versus. There's something there was a post, I forget, who, who put it out earlier this week, something to the effect of people, AI people are more excited about crypto right now than crypto people. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, you know, I've always thought of these as sort of highly complimentary and even going back 13 years when we were kind of starting circle. The thing, the thing that got me really excited was this idea of programmable money that we were going to have like self running software machines that would intermediate economic stuff on the internet. And that was the promise of the tech 13 years ago. You couldn't do it. It wasn't possible. It didn't exist. But it was like, as an internet technologist, that was really exciting to me. I'm like, wow, like if you can actually have, you know, these sort of self running software machines that are audible and can run. Now, I didn't have a concept of generative AI. Yeah, but definitely was like, okay, programmable money that is going to be like a completely new form of utility for money that's never existed. And so that that was very exciting. And so I think in many ways, like, you know, a crypto infrastructure crypto as a tech stack is very, very purpose built for the the the agentic world, like they really are hand and glove and will work very, very closely together. And so, you know, trustless intermediation is like what what what happens in AI, right, you know, whether it's of data or of, of, yeah, it's interesting to think about how many business transactions, like even if there's a contract, they're so trust dependent. Yes. And and stables can can play a role in helping that evolve, because you can say, you know, it you know, basically, if you know, you can you can escrow funds, you can make it programmable contracts. Yeah. And these can be very, very loud. Yeah, that's always been the thing will people like people like to buy from people. But part of that is because you want to know, okay, who's my counterparty? Yeah, do they have a good reputation? Yeah, I trust that even if we have a contract, they'll they'll follow it right to get into some, you know, legal. Yeah. Yeah, I remember the pitch for machine to machine payments. Yes. Yeah, I think it was around like a theory of maybe 2015. Yeah, yeah. So this is like an early thing. Yeah, and it's sort of made sense. But it was very hard to imagine writing all the code. But now, but now it's just ready itself. Exactly. Yeah, it makes sense. I'm wondering what you think holds about the the current economic philosophies or the economic rules of the road just in business and what might be different as we move towards a world of decentralized agentic payments, like, I imagine network effects still hold I imagine that if you create value you create the network, you can capture value through some transaction percentage and everyone will be happy in the ecosystem. How do you think about the economics? Yeah, I mean, look, I think I think there there are a bunch of different pieces here, right? So so circle is a is a money issuer like issue digital dollars. Yeah, we issue digital euros. EURC is the largest digital euro stablecoin. We issue digital treasury products. We have the largest tokenized money market basically. So we're a money issuer. And so if we can build networks that have wide utility and protocols for that those those monies that we issue that are super super widely used and provide a great, you know, utility, you can permissionlessly plug in, etc. And we can grow that the monetary base alone can be massive, right? So we can we can we can we can imagine that, you know, these these kinds of digital dollars running on these networks, there will be trillions of dollars of these, as opposed to hundreds of billions of them now. And so that itself is is significant. And, you know, the economics are very significant from that. But I think, you know, ultimately, I think, you know, as as the infrastructure becomes kind of more widely utilized for real world transactions, I mean, whatever that means, right? Yeah, we absolutely have an opportunity to participate in the the the velocity of those transactions and economics around that. But, you know, we had this philosophy when we started circle that, you know, over the long run, that the marginal cost of storing and moving value would go to zero, and that the business model of charging fees for payments would collapse. And, and, you know, I think over the long run, that is still going to be true. Like, actually zero or like zero, I mean, zero, zero, zero, one percent. So, so, so big. Yeah, I mean, almost. Yeah, I mean, actually zero to most of the consumers of it, because the costs underneath it are going to be so low. Like, like, you know, you don't get charged for your WhatsApp audio call, right? They're like, you know, we're going to we're going to deal with it. We'll make it up the other way. Yes, to keep to me. But like, we've we've we just announced something called Circle Nano payments. It's a it's a module for agents to basically be able to like have a stored balance of digital dollars of tokenized dollars and be able to transact them to like different wallets on different blockchains. And, and we've gotten it to the point where we can actually have transactions priced at one one millionth of a penny per transaction. And, you know, you're like, well, who would ever need that? Well, if there's like, yeah, if you're so here's an example. So yesterday we had Eddie Q on from Apple. Yeah, talking about the early days of the app store and how when you when you bought a song, they would effectively kind of open a cart. And they would hope that you would buy multiple. Oh, yeah, I remember they would they would hope you'd buy multiple songs in a 24 hour period before they actually like process the payment because otherwise you're giving a quarter. Action. Yeah, quarter of a sense. Yeah. Yeah. And so like that right there is insane, like the fact that the Apple, one of the, you know, biggest consumer tech companies in the world had to use this kind of weird work around to not give 25% of every transaction, taking money away from, of course, like the creators and the record labels and Apple just like pure kind of rent extraction. And it's like, payment systems, like, were never designed, were not designed for a machine and an economy. They weren't. And we even see this now where because the cost to transact us DC on has gone to, you know, sort of fractions of ascent in general, you can do that. Like the velocity of transactions has exploded. And you see that in the growth in the year over year growth, it's like, tens of trillions of dollars of transactions on a monetary base of around, you know, trillions. Yeah. Congrats on saying the biggest number. On scale. What are you tracking right now to understand where we are in the adoption of agentic payments? Because I imagine like it is happening. Yeah, it's small. It is. Is it, are you doing like a percentage of GDP thing percentage of your transaction base, like just growth month over month? Yeah. Like what's the what's the correct internal KPI? There's there's there's a couple ways to look at it. Okay. Right now. Yeah. So one is like, there are specifically standards for agentic payments. Okay. And so we are a co developer of the X 402 standard. Yep. Actually, the X 402 foundation just got merged into the Linux foundation. Yeah. A lot of great companies, Stripe, Coinbase, who's a pioneer in this circle. This has been a proposal in HTTP for like 25 years. It's this whole thing. It's so crazy. It's like payment request model. And so but now if you look at like X 402 version two, it's like building out into a pretty rich vernacular. It's needed for the needs of agentic payments. So one way to look at it is like what's X 402 traffic and like you can you can look at X 402 traffic. You can track it. Okay. Look at the payloads. You can see what the transactions are. And that's in the like it's been growing. It's in the hundreds of millions. Okay. Okay. So quite small from a starting base. But I think the if you look at a leading indicator, which is the number of these like agents or services or endpoints that are X 402 enabled has been growing very rapidly. Yeah. And we as as well as like companies like Stripe and Coinbase and others are we're basically like shipping stuff so that it's like super but simple to like have X 402 in front of whatever it is you're doing or in front and behind. So you could be a consumer and a service provider. And so I think that like 2026 we're going to see this huge growth in that and then the consumption models. The leaked anthropic code actually had all of these references to X 402 in it. So you know it's clearly like even in foundation models becoming something that they're going like hey this is going to be like a common pattern. Yeah. But you know so that's that's one way to look and then the other is like it's hard to measure which is like people are using AI to create bots like these poly market. Trading bots or these hyper liquid trading bots or like all kinds of stuff and those aren't using X 402 and so that's like other traffic but it's AI driven transaction volume. Yeah. And so it's hard to measure quantum. Yeah. Quantum when I mean I'm assuming you were aware of the risk of quantum to get a hit overall flash. No it didn't. So very aware. And I'm saying like aware predating starting circle right like because this is just a risk for overall. And this has been you know crypto is cryptography which is math and and you know all this is about who can compute these you know keys and ciphers and all that stuff. So of course it's always been a background debate always been a theoretical background debate as we've been building up our own operating system our own crypto based operating system arc. We have been saying OK we're doing this kind of clean room from the start it's a new infrastructure. We have a chance to do post quantum readiness from the start. Whereas you know existing networks and there's this Google paper and all that jazz and so on like there's a migration and there's risk and all that kind of stuff. And so we basically massive coordination problem huge coordination problem. So we basically said look we have phenomenal you know PhD crypto people you know in the company. And so we made this a key priority. And so we actually just announced today our whole post quantum roadmap. And and one of the one of the most powerful things is that you know when arc goes main net in the not too distant future right. It will have post quantum signatures there from the start. If you're issuing assets and you're you're doing transactions you can actually use post quantum methods from the start. I think we'll be the very first blockchain network in the world to have that there which is key. Now there's like multiple layers of this and so the roadmap also details like OK you know how how do the you know validators on the network get themselves to be quantum resilient and resistant. So there's multiple layers that have to happen over time. The base layer which is the most important which is the fundamental mechanism for how you sign transactions how transactions are are published to the network and how assets get defined like that's that's post quantum. There's a lot of detail we put it out in our documentation today. But you know we we've been thinking about a long time and you know it's sort of interesting because we were gearing up to launch this and then this Google deep mind. It was incredible came out. We're like OK well time to launch. Well it's an interesting challenge for the industry because everyone needs to get their house in order and like create a plan. But that's also like the entire industry needs to rally because even if you guys have your. Oh yeah. No it cascades across all these ecosystems and like USDC runs on 32 blockchain networks. Right. And and so like you know we we are part of the whole ecosystem obviously. And then you know of course like if from a de novo perspective people building new stuff. I mean one thing to remember is like basically like crypto infrastructure blockchains have been an early adopter phenomenon until very very recently. And like the actual usage at a global scale in the real economy like 98 percent of that's still ahead of us. So we're still very early in all this. Less question for me. How did you process the 2028 intelligence crisis. That paper. Oh yeah. The trinity because some of it was spec you're basically making the argument there's a lot of kind of rent seeking in the economy. Yes. And I can potentially make a lot of transactions a lot more efficient. That's kind of what you're betting betting the company on. They had specific bunch of specific stuff about stable coins and USDC and like you know all that. I mean look we are. So I read that and there's a lot of really interesting things in there and and broadly like you know even circle itself. The interesting criticism too is like the criticism was like OK this is like sci-fi. Yeah. But when you look back at sci-fi throughout history. Yeah. There's a lot of sci-fi that that that is like you know kind of come come. Yeah. And look I mean the fundamentals of like of like like completely restructuring like what what transaction costs are and and and basically models. Where you know much of the work that's conducted in the real economy is work conducted by AI or by intelligences. And that that that work is economically going to be measured out and metered out and executed using these new digital currency forms. Like I believe that very very deeply. And I don't think anyone knows how big that will be. But it certainly you know again like total processed volume which is like this number that like the card network system. And others use like these numbers are going to be look so small in comparison. Sure. The union economics are going to be very very different. So I'm I agree with you know a number of those conclusions. I'm not a hedge fund. I don't know positions in any of these companies and all that. But like I think it's it's it's real and it's happening. And yeah we're we're we're trying to build for that future. Amazing. I'm glad we have you working on it. Thank you so much for taking the time. Thank you guys. To come on down to the TV. Thank you. I really appreciate you. Our next guest is in the waiting room and we will bring in Justin Levine from Shepherd into the TV PN Ultra Dome kicks off our lightning round. Jeremy how you doing? Oh, sorry. I'm still up traveling. Time. Congrats big day. Thank you. Thank you. It's an honor honor to have you here. Sorry we couldn't give you a heads up. But it's all good. Well, we are not here to talk about us. We're here to talk about you. Please introduce yourself in the company. Yeah. Justin Levine co-founder and CEO of Shepherd. We're a AI native insurance business. We focus on large scale industries like construction and real renewable energy. Yeah. How how are you thinking about the growth of the construction data center industry broadly? Like what's the headline number that you're quoting? Because I imagine you have a TAM and it's growing, but how do you actually sense make about the what to expect over the next couple of years as you build the business? I mean, we're in a massive construction super cycle specific to the AI infrastructure layer. I think this year alone there's something like $400 billion of infrastructure spend just related to either data center assets or the energy assets that need to support those data centers. There's not enough energy on the grid. So we now have to build the energy assets next to the data centers in order to make it all operational. So, you know, from a TAM perspective, we are we're seeing a massive inflection in terms of construction this year alone. $80 billion of data centers were started. So $80 billion of new data center starts just happened in in the last 12 months. So we're just seeing a massive wave and it's kind of ironic for us. We we built Sheppard on this thesis that AI was really ripe to productize this service of underwriting and doing underwriting differently. And then ironically, a lot of these companies became our customers because this industry is is really, you know, the driving force of construction right now. Okay, so who are all the different parties that you guys are helping ensure? It's it's AI companies, you know, labs, private credit funds, who? Yeah, who who calls you? Yeah, it's a mix of all the above. So everything from hyperscalers to the labs companies to, you know, contractors that are building, obviously these these assets are portfolio is actually more diverse than just AI specific companies. But so, you know, our typical business is a large scale developer of assets that are either energy assets or healthcare assets, hospitals, things of, you know, all sorts of different, I'd say, large commercial physical assets. And then we ensure the contractors as well. So a big portion of what we do is is identifying the best contractors for using the best technologies on the field and then rewarding them with innovative pricing. Yeah, so what what what are what are they ensuring? Weather inclement weather, fire damage, labor, there's so many different factors. What can you what can you ensure versus like what is just to what could you ensure but it's just too hard to price to go to, you know, too high to make it feasible. There's there's a lot of different hazards, obviously, like related to the construction cycle. So there's obviously like the just the the cost of the building during the construction phase. So the property risk that is associated with, you know, again, a large data center campus might be $20 billion of both construction material as well as equipment that's being installed. So there's an enormous property component and just ensuring the actual property during the construction phase is a huge strain on the insurance ecosystem. Then there's a liability perspective. So, you know, the builders that are creating these assets are they are on the hook for mistakes for defects for potential injuries to people or buildings and other other assets that are around these jobsites. So depending on sort of like the the product offering, you're obviously focused on it on a specific hazard. We really focus on like the driving hazard. So casualty is our key, our key product offering. And again, that's going to be like property damage or bodily injury to people in and around the building of these large scale assets. But then we also do property. So we also do the the the materials and the cost of construction while it's being built. What what are your relationships like on the actual insurance side? Who are you? Who are you actually who's putting up all of the capital and taking on the risk? Yeah, so we we partner with large scale insurance balance sheets, almost similar to like a neobank that's going to have, you know, sort of a traditional bank behind it, you know, providing all the financial stability and and rating and the necessary requirements to fulfill whatever the contractual risk that is there between a lender and a in a builder. So we kind of we stand up under what's called an MGA model, which is that shepherd really owns all of the upfront marketing sales, underwriting policy servicing, everything from a submission coming in the door, the underwriting that happens, the making the decision making around what risks we want to we want to ensure and then ultimately servicing those accounts once they become policyholders underneath our brand. Take us through the rays. We got a $42 million round. And yeah, what came in special about this, like the actual investors on this round? Yeah, so so this is our series B. It was led by one of the largest insurance companies in the world. So intact private capital read led the round. That's the venture arm of intact insurance. In tax of $30 billion global insurer. I would say what's special about it is the signal. You know, I think a lot of the things that we're trying to do differently, specific to the automation of underwriting making underwriting significantly faster and more efficient. A large insurer large commercial insurer like intact pairing with us and partnering on this, I think signals that they see that the world of underwriting is is about to change dramatically just like other large industries, whether it's legal or accounting or all these other areas where we've seen a huge impact from AI and brokerage and underwriting are kind of, you know, right in that that wheelhouse of where services businesses can change dramatically. So intact and partnered with us at the A they were a capacity provider for us. So they are one of those balance sheets that sits behind us. They've seen what we've been doing. They see the innovation that we're bringing the industry. And so they actually preempted the round and then double down into the into the B. Last question for me. How how human is the process of underwriting because I feel like you could probably build the models where footage what are the assets where is it, you know, you probably have underwriting models, but there's probably still like who are you hiring how do how would how will the how will the human capital side of the business scale. Yeah, totally. So I, you know, commercial insurance, you know, differently from personal lines is definitely more complex. It's more more data heavy, more intensive. And there's a lot more sort of decision nuance and decision making that happens at the underwriter level. So we actually we equate what we're doing on the underwriting side to a little bit of a similar view of the self driving kind of autonomous vehicles type of road map. So we've mapped our own level one through level five. And the idea is like today, most commercial insurance companies have underwriters with two hands on the wheel. And they're, you know, literally doing every single thing. What we're trying to do is get to a place where the underwriter at Shepherd is much more of an orchestrator. They are managing a portfolio of 200 accounts rather than just 20 or 15 on a monthly basis. And so underwriters do play a significant role. We hire underwriters who think of themselves as as entrepreneurs who want to build a portfolio. They want to orchestrate and manage that portfolio. What they don't want to do is data entry and some of the I'd say like process heavy and high friction elements of traditional insurance underwriting today. Well, thank you so much for coming on and for us. Congratulations all around and good luck. Thank you guys. We'll talk soon. Ripping. Have a great stuff. Congrats. See you guys. Talk soon. Our next guest is Rob Mishra. Meraj formerly captions app. I found out about the company throughout Randall previous round. Bring in the Ralph. The TBVN. Altered Elm throughout. How are you doing? What's happening? Good. Thanks for having me. Excited to be here. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah, it's crazy. Almost a year. Crazy. Yeah, you were how we must have been in the first. How many guests? I'm a huge user of this app. I love this app. I've used it for everything that I send you every time there's a video with captions over it. I'm always downloading on my phone, screen recording, putting it in captions. And then I'll even use it to transcribe videos. John is a magician. Like he can make basically feature length memes that usually just get sent to the team chat. Yeah. But yeah, for those who don't know the apps, but also just where the business is broadly and where you're expanding to, sort of give us the lay of the land. Yeah. So I mean, as you mentioned, you know, we transitioned our name. So we kind of went from captions to Mirage, but you know, the app remains to be captions the company that we renamed quickly. And part of that is like we're building out a product suite. So, you know, it makes sense to sort of have a different company name for that. Now we obviously we raised about $75 million recently. We announced that, which is exciting. Thank you. I love it. Love it. Love that. And so, so, you know, with that funding, a lot of what we're going to do is expansion, you know, market expansion. So, you know, we are very excited about the magic moment the product already has. And you talked about it a little bit, right? And when we can bring the product in front of a new customer, they're very likely to convert, very likely to pay and very likely to retain. And that's kind of what our investors saw. That's kind of why this new investment came in. Now, we want to bring this to as many people as possible around the world as quickly as possible, you know, historically, we've been sort of marketing in like five to seven countries. That's kind of where we've been. U.S. centric, like a little bit Europe and stuff. But now we want to go really broad, you know, especially Asia is a big focus region. So, that's kind of the plan where we're going. How do you think about just feature requests and all like the scope of what you can do with video plus AI? I don't want to narrow you down to mobile, but like I think you've executed very well on mobile. But there's so many different features and a lot of them get broken up into different models, different APIs. I feel like there's so much opportunity to bring all that together at the same time you're going up against Meta and edits and Cap cut and divide dance. Like there are some big players, but there's also a lot of opportunity. So, how do you see the landscape of things that you can do? I'll scroll reels all the time and see some crazy edit and be like, I know that they jumped to Blender for that or they used a particular AI model for that or there are an after effects for that. And I want to recreate it, but I don't want to necessarily sit down for five hours and remember how to use Blender. I mean, it's you actually hit the nail on the head because this is exactly kind of what we're the way we're thinking about how our proper map goes, right? I think if you look at the AI video space, there's tons of companies. There's a lot of activity happening right now, right? But our approach is a bit different than everybody else. Like we're not only about generating video, even though that's a big component of what we do, right? We use all kinds of models out there. We have our own models as well, right? For audio and video generation, but it's really about the assembly of the video into something that actually makes sense, right? Something that a narrative that ultimately can work for you, whether you're a small business, you're selling something, whatever it is, you can tell your story, sell your product, market your yourself or your business using our product because we can assemble the right video for you. Now, here's the interesting part. What we've noticed is that a lot of our customers, especially the ones that are retaining for long periods of time, it's not just about fully generated video. Like that's like, it's a thing. If you're making Super Bowl commercial short, like go and generate the entire thing, like it's going to look awesome, right? But there's actually a much, much larger market for like a mix of content. Like think about like our average customer, like they're like a plumber, right? Or maybe electrician or like a nail salon, right? Yeah. They want to actually show like their actual nail salon, right? What does it actually look like as opposed to a generated nail salon of some sort, right? And they want to merge that with some generated footage, some cool shots. So like maybe, you know, a founder video, like talking, you know, perfectly about whatever they want to do and put it all together into something that they can give to customers, market on their website, wherever they're putting it out there, social media, right? So it's really about the connection of generated and non-generated together and then, you know, putting the narrative together. That's the intelligence there, right? So like that's really our focus. How do you think about entry points into video creativity? There's something that can be sort of intimidating about an empty text box at the same time. It is like the universal interface. It's the most broad possible UI. When do you want a user to start with an existing video or an image versus start with a blank text box? Yeah. So I actually, so even today, over 50% of our users start with some sort of media, an image, a video, you know, a set of images, a set of videos, audio, music, all kinds of things, right? So over 50% of people start with media, which actually is like very different than most other apps. Like a lot of like pure video generators, people start with text. They start with a prompt and ours is flipped. It's like media first prompt is attached to it, right? Now, I think the way we think that's going to evolve for us is that, you know, it's going to go more and more media first. That's the crazy part, right? Like I think people expected to go more prompt first, but I think our angle is a little bit more media first using real footage. You know, I actually think that, you know, there's another extreme here. Think about like, let's say you want to make a documentary, right? Yeah. You want like zero generated footage in a documentary, right? Like it's like all documented reality, right? Yeah, I've been seeing that. I've been lately like, I'll try to pull the video on YouTube with my son of like a cheetah. But I have to find videos that are older than like four years because I don't want a bunch of AI cheetahs. I want the real thing. So you like documentary footage. So you got to find like the vintage national geographic stuff. Wow. Yeah. Soon that's going to be lost. We may never find it again. No, we will always have the archives. We'll be going deep into the vintage. Exactly. Yeah, it's real. What do you, what are the plans to scale the business over the next year or two with the new fundraising? Yeah, I mean, so a lot of it is going to be market expansion, right? We talked about that. I think it's secondarily is use case expansion, right? So like you talked about like we started off with something really simple, adding captions to videos. Like we, that was the first thing we ever did, right? Straightforward, but quite useful, right? And then from there, you realize that it's about, it's really about like automatically editing your video, right? Like automatically adding edits, automatically doing stuff that people do manually normally, right? And that's kind of how we built our roadmap, right? So the future for us is expanding use cases and what can we automatically edit, right? Today it might be, okay, it's talking head videos, it's real estate videos, things like that. Right? Tomorrow it could be product launch videos, right? Tomorrow it could be like all kinds of other things that we don't do today, maybe perfectly, right? So that's kind of where things are going. And with that comes like new sets of users, you know, expanded use cases obviously is like expanding the talent for product, right? So that's kind of where we're going, both on, you know, product expansion, geo expansion, you know, that's really the focus. Well, thank you so much for coming on and breaking it down for us. Congratulations. And we'll talk to you soon. Great to have you back on. Let's not let it keep you a year. Always a great time. Yes. And by the way, congrats to you guys. Thank you. Have a great weekend. Yeah, great to you. We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. All right. And without further ado, we have our last guest at the show, Phillip from Star Cloud. Put more and more data centers in space. We're very excited to talk to Phillip. He is, I believe, in the waiting room. We'll bring him in to the TV panel, which we're going to do. And he's ready. Google released a feature called inbox zero. They say inbox zero is a thing of the past introducing inbox cut through email clutter with smart prioritization and daily personalized briefings. Isaac says brand sending five emails a day to drive higher and higher. Our why won't work anymore. RIP email. Yeah, be interesting to see how this channel does that sent us a bunch of a bunch of emails that he's been getting. And they look like spam recruiter emails, but they all come from newly set up Gmail accounts. And they're not quite human sounding. So we can clock them. But basically he's getting like an ever increasing amount of poaching emails. And, you know, the usually like you'll need another filter on the other side. Reprime are going to have to start going standing outside offices and just waiting for people to leave. Yeah. Well, we have, I believe we have Phillip from Star Cloud in the waiting room. We got some vertical video. We'll make it work. We are going to have a quick chat about this in space. How you doing? What's going on? Hey, you guys, the budget is for the medical video. We're all good. It's great. We got back to back sounds. Okay. So I can't turn this off. Second time on the show. Kick us off with the fundraising. Tell us what happened. Yeah. So we just raised $170 million at a $1.1 billion valuation. That is a massive round. So the video is vertical because the valuation is going. Yes. But yeah, yeah. This works great. So yeah, talk to us about what you'll be building with that new round. Is this hiring? Are you going to be in the R&D phase? Do you have manufacturing partners lined up? Are you going to be buying heavy equipment to make stuff? What does the next couple of years look like for you? Yeah. So we're building the third satellite. That's very similar to, it's going to fit on the Starship, has the Spencer form factor. So it's this constellation. We've just filed with the FCC for 88,000 satellites. And so what this allows us to do is build a manufacturing line for that. 88,000 satellites, by the way, would allow us to deploy about 20 gigawatts of Compuque Fasty, which is only over $100 billion worth of CapExPend. So yeah, we're ramping up. Too low. Too low. We're swinging our hands. Yeah. Absolutely wild. What kind of partners are you working with? I can imagine basically every chip company wants to have some exposure to what is an emerging category. How are you approaching that side? Yeah, 100%. So we're working with NVIDIA on, we just announced, and a GTC Jensen announced it, this space Rubenship. So it's like a slightly mass optimized, slightly radiation tolerant, and then slightly thermally optimized chip, which can be used for space inference. And we've been working with them on that for a while, because we've got an enormous amount of data now from the Star Cloud One satellite, which has the first NVIDIA H100 on board. And so we're using all of that telemetry to form the design choices, both on the Rubenship and also on our second and third satellite. Are you running workloads, like mini workloads on the first satellite? What is testing look like? Yeah, exactly. So we ran, we trained a model, so we trained at Andre Carpathy's Nano GPT on there. We did the first hype out inference. So we're running a version of Gemini called Gemini on the spacecraft. And then we're now also doing some more like military kind of useful workloads, which is running inference on SAR data, so synthetic aperture radar, which is basically where companies, where satellites collect a 3D image of the world underneath them, and then they can use that to detect things like a vessel entering, you know, entering your territory or other things. How is it, how is the discussion going? How is the research and development going around heat dissipation? That felt like key, will it work? What are the economics? Are we expecting to be like on track for some solution? Do you feel like the solutions in sight on some curve or maybe even already here, how is that going? Yeah, and by the way, I want to give you guys credit for shifting the average in window on this. Because I think you guys were the first to do a segment where you were like, do you remember the bit where you were like, imagine before they had cameras on spacecraft and people would be like, wow, that's so crazy. From then on people were like, okay, maybe, yeah, this is probably how she's good, I think. But yeah, so we've been working on this radiator for two years now. It's a solve problem in the sense of the physics of it. What remains to be done is the manufacturing challenge, so making this thing cheap and light. And also small enough to fit into that, what do you call it, like the PES dispenser? Exactly, the PES dispenser form factor. We've got a design that we've mocked up, so we fabricated it, and it's going through thermal and vacuum testing now. It's about 100 times less cost per watt of dissipation than the International Space Station radiator, and about 10 times less mass per watt of dissipation than the ISS radiator. And the main reason is we're not doing 3D additive manufacturing, we have a much simpler manufacturing technique, which, yeah, that's our core IP. Sure. And then just, can you give me a mental picture of what I'm visualizing? Because I feel like it can't just be a sale that just like there's no wind, so the wind doesn't expand the sale. Am I thinking about like hinges and little tiny motors to sort of like expand and unfurl? Yeah, exactly. So the deployment mechanism is what's called a pantograph. So it's like this scissor mechanism that if you've ever seen, like, when you walk past the building site, you sometimes see those like platforms that will raise up and down. They're lifted by this pantograph scissor mechanism that goes like this. It's exactly the same deployment mechanism, which by the way, all Starlink solar is deployed using a pantograph. So what we've done is we've just added, you might have say 20 sections of solar panel that unfold in the Z-fold, and then we've just added five segments of radiator at the beginning, which also unfold in the Z-fold, and then they're connected with tubing. And then we're pumping coolant past the chips directly and then out to this Z-fold five segment radiator. Oh, interesting. You're at one GPU in space. You filed for... Five GPUs. Oh, you're at five. Okay. I had you short. So you have five, but you're going to 88,000 or something like that. What will the curve look like? Are you trying to do 50 and then 500 and then 5,000 and then 50,000? Are we going by orders of magnitude or is it like a lot of work and then they all start flying up really fast? So we are very heavily dependent on Starship before we will be flying frequently. So we're expecting Starship to deploy the first Starlink V3 payloads either end of this year or early next year. And then from there, we're expecting 18 to 24 months before the first commercial payloads, so customers like us flying. So we're looking at end of 2028 before we're launching on Starship. But our own deployment schedule is later this year, we'll be launching Starcard 2 and that will be a 10 kilowatt spacecraft, about 100 times the power generation of the first one we flew. And that has this, the first one to have this deployable radiator will be by far the largest commercial radiator in space. And then next year we launch a very similar version of that. And then we launch on Starship this PES dispenser. And actually we may even launch on Falcon 9, the first one just to test it, which will be about 200 kilowatts. So 20 times again, the Starcard 2. And then we can launch 50 of those per Starship. So then you're talking about 10 megawatts of compute per Starship launch. And once Starship is flying frequently, we're expecting to be launching hundreds of times per month. So that's 100 Starship launches, about a gigawatt of new capacity. So we're talking on the order of tens of gigawatts of new capacity per year being deployed at that point. Do you have any insight into how space compute might in the short term be better for a particular AI workload? Like it's going to be better at diffusion or worse at diffusion or better. You know, we've seen some bifurcation just in the data center around ASICs, GROC chips, Cerebrus, etc. Is there a world where we're like, oh, there's this one small use case that's going to really, really work well. And then maybe over time it'll do everything. But in the short term, we're confident about this. So at a high level, it's not going to be any training workload. And at a low level, it won't be anything that requires sub 50 millisecond latency. So there'll be a sweet spot in the middle, which in my mind is basically all back office business processing tasks and all cogeneration tasks. You know, you could even do voice agents for customer service or anything like that, video generation as well. But it won't be things that require extremely low latency or things that require very highly internally networked cluster like a training workload you could not do. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Well, thank you so much. Congratulations on the round. I'm very excited. Yeah, massive. Yeah, and you seem like you've even evolved yourself since the last time you're on the show. I'm sure you've just you and the whole team have been pushing it to the absolute limit. But yeah, it's fantastic to see someone like call their shot and then it becomes just one domino falls after another. And then it's being mentioned at GTC and Elon's talking about it. And it becomes, you know, much more like science fiction fully moves towards like science fact, which is very exciting. So thank you. Appreciate that. No, thank you. Have a great rest of your day. Have a great weekend and we'll talk to you soon. Hopefully, congrats on it. Congrats on opening. It's amazing. Thank you. We'll talk to you soon. Thank you. Goodbye. I texted my dad the news. He says congratulations. That's so exciting. Thanks for letting me know. Talk to you soon. Have a great day. Thank you. Thank you, dad. Oh, it's amazing. Well, if you've texted me or you've called me in the last three hours, there's a good chance that I might respond to you in the next couple hours because we are winding down the show. Please leave us five stars and Apple podcasts and Spotify. Subscribe to our newsletter at tvpid.com. Everything is the same. We will see you on Monday. The fun week next week, five shows, 15 hours. Let's be honest, it'll probably be more like 17 or 18 or 19. Who knows? The world is our oyster. And thank you for being with us along the journey. We appreciate your... Let's get one more gong hit, John. One more gong hit. It's been an honor. A gong hit. Flashbang. Goodbye, everyone. See you soon. We'll see you tomorrow.