Siri Needs an App, Who is John Ternus, Shervin Pishevar's Iran Deep Dive, Scott Nolan Truth Nuke

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YOU'RE WATCHING TVPN.

Today is Tuesday, January 13th, 2026. We are live from the TVPN Ultra Dome Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the capital.

Uh that's correct, Bobby Cosmic. There are eight guests today. We might actually have nine. Let's pull up the linear lineup. Uh we got Shervin Pishavar coming on the show uh to give us an update on what's happening around the world. Uh Glenn Fogle Horesio from Booze Allen's coming on the show. We're talking about AI in the enterprise, in the in the consulting world. JD Ross is coming back for with coverage. We got some news there. Uh, Sandstone has some fundraising news. Our Land of Lightning round is going to be popping off. And then we're capping it off with Scott Nolan in person breaking down, dropping a truth nuke on the state of nuclear power.

Don't forget about Bob Slaughter.

Bob Slaughter. That's a good name. We're excited to talk about Lightning round as well. Looking forward to that.

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Everyone wants to know, did John get a haircut?

He did. Yeah, I did yesterday.

Cleaned it up a little bit.

A little getting wild.

There's some some some length still. We'll see. We'll see if we like it. Um anyway, uh I think Siri needs an app. I think that that's under discussed. The news is that Apple and Google have a deal. We talked to Ben Thompson about it yesterday. A billion dollars going from Apple to Google. Now, my real hot take is that I think it's going to flip at some point. And I think Google or someone else is going to pay Apple to route LLM queries to them because with the universal commerce protocol, a gentic commerce protocol, uh with ads and LLM responses, there's going to be a whole bunch of moments where a an LLM query is actually profitable. And on average, I think they will be profitable. I think the price of inference will continue to decline and the value of each query, the monetization of each query will increase until there's a flipping and then all of a sudden every LLM query that's generated is on net across the entire um across the entire category uh generating profit instead of generating losses which is what's happening right now. Of course, just like with Google, when you search for, you know, how old is Leonardo DiCaprio or something, they're not making a lot of money on that. They're not running a lot of ads on that. Um, but when you go to search for insurance or something like that, they they charge a pretty penny for those ads. And I think the same thing will be true for LLMs broadly.

It is kind of interesting. They don't I just looked it up. They don't run ads on how old is Leonardo DiCaprio. You'd think that they could figure out some type of ad to serve a

Yeah. You think Brian Johnson would be buying an ad peptide

cuz you're like, "Oh, he looks great." And what's he doing? Oh, and then there's look like Leo. He's 51.

Leo was born in the 70s,

which is crazy when you say it like that.

Yeah.

Um

Well, he's looking great. He was at the He was at the Golden Globes having fun celebrating his movie,

goofing around

and Yeah. Yeah, he was goofing around. He was caught on like some mic looking at somebody. I don't know. I saw some random clips. Um, anyway, but the real the real thing I wanted to debate with Tyler was uh I was arguing that Siri needs an app. Uh, it's crazy. Siri came out in 2010. Uh, hasn't had an app for its entire life. I mean, I it actually started as an app back in the day. It was Siri is the from the Stanford Institute of Research and Intelligence or something like that.

Yeah. It was like a $200 million acquisition.

Yeah. Yeah. And uh I don't know. Seems like good value. Uh before we keep digging into Siri, let me tell you about Vanta, automate compliance and security. Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform. So uh it was an app that you needed to install on your iPhone. There were a few of these speech recognition apps that you could go and you'd open up the app, click a button. Siri because I think the fact that they were on the on the west coast was able to get the deepest integration in Apple sort of win the home button over time, win the Siri button and eventually they they teamed up and actually Oh, I have triggered Siri on my Mac. Thank you. Fantastic. Um

and so um eventually you know Siri gets baked into the in the operating system level and uh the rest is history. The first couple years are pretty good. People are excited. you know, you can it was somewhat magical to be able to just press a button, ask for the weather, ask for a stock chart, ask for, you know, what's on your calendar, uh, dictate a text message. A lot of that was pretty great. Uh, the user numbers are interesting. The the I don't know how much they disclosed. This is sort of a rumored number, but there's the the the estimates are around 500 million active Siri users globally, which is huge, like absolutely massive. Um, but there's 1.5 billion iPhone users, so having only a third of your user base use your AI feature seems a little bit low if that's the case.

Ian Mackey says in the X chat Siri was born out of Sri.

Yeah, SRRI, which I believe is Stanford, the Stanford Research Init Institute or something like that. Uh, I think that's where SRRI comes from. Um, but uh they're clearly not getting enough out of it. People aren't using it. Everyone in Texas says, "I never use Siri." Uh, obviously some people do use.

Well, some people are using it now because we're saying Siri

said we triggered it for we triggered it. I figured it too. Anyway, um, so, uh, obviously juicing it up with an LLM like Gemini makes a ton of sense. Of course, Gemini is a sponsor of this show. Gemini 3 Pro, it's Google's most intelligent model yet. They got state-of-the-art reasoning, next level vibe coding, and deep multimodal understanding. Um but uh this deal between Google and Apple makes a ton of sense uh for a few reasons. Uh Google's actually profitable, has the money, they don't need to take a huge amount of cash from Apple. Uh they can give them sort of a deal on it because

Ben kept throwing around big numbers yesterday like let's be honest, we're in tax. That's not a lot of money.

Yeah. It's actually true. It ramped up because at first it was uh the $30,000 uh Da Vinci Resolve, the Blackmagic Ursa immersive camera. That's $30,000. He's like, "That's nothing. You just put those up." And that's true for a tech company. And he was like uh you know, Apple's paying Google a billion dollars. That's nothing. It's like they're both nothing.

Yeah. The whole thing with the

Apple Alphabet's a four trillion dollar company now. the live the the infrastructure, the hardware to do a live Apple Vision Pro broadcast being $30,000 or something in that range is like the fact that they could copy and paste that around every stadium and suddenly have like a probably a a a I imagine they could scale that to hundreds of millions of dollars of like

You'd think so pay-per-view and stuff. Yeah.

Yeah. Not not even pay-per-view, but just a subscription. It's like the

even just selling headsets. I mean, the headsets $3,500. Yeah,

you only need to sell 10 headsets to offset the price of the of one immersive camera. Like you should be able to do that. Uh anyway, uh we we we covered the Apple Vision Pro in detail yesterday. Ben Thompson joined the stream. You should go check out the the video if uh if you haven't watched that. And uh he actually gave us a shout out. He mentioned his appearance in the strategy daily update today, which is very fun. Um but uh so so my my take is that I think over time this will flip and I think over time Google will be paying Apple for all of the LLM routing that happens because Google will be monetizing those queries. You will go to Siri and you will say what's the weather and Gemini under the hood will tell you the weather and they probably won't monetize that very well but then every once in a while you'll say hey Gemini order me a new TV and it'll say what size do you want and it'll just

order rain maker. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Change the weather. Uh and and they will get either an affiliate fee or a transaction fee or there will be an ad that's placed in the stream of content that comes back. And I would imagine that right now Apple's saying don't do any of those ads. Don't monetize these queries. But over time, I imagine that they will. Um but the big thing that I wanted to discuss with Tyler, he was fighting me on this. He says that app says that Siri does not need an app. I think that Siri will need an app. I think that the the LLM chat interface is so dominant at this point that uh everyone has the experience of going back and forth uh asynchronously like it's chatting to a helpful assistant like you're texting with a friend. You want to be able to scroll up and see.

Yeah. If you think about it be very annoying if you had a real life assistant and they were like you can only call me.

Well,

I won't.

Tyler, explain explain your position.

So, it's not not that

Oh, no. You flashed him.

Hit him with a flashbang. So, he's trying to help you out, John. Uh, opinion denied, Tyler. Flashbang.

We have a flashbang now on the stream. What good timing. So, Tyler, uh, what's the flashbang wears off? Please tell us.

Okay, so it's not that I disagree. I'm not like anti-app. It's just like the fifth most important thing that they need to like do.

Okay. Like I don't care like okay would you rather have the same Siri but there's also an app or a new Siri there's no app but it's it's a better model. Like obviously you're picking the ladder.

Yeah you're picking the better model but what I'm saying is that as soon as you integrate a better model that has more Jord's going to flashbang again. Um

I'm too powerful.

I'm watching this.

Uh so so as soon as you as soon as you have deeper responses and more back and forth and more uh knowledge retrieval Siri has they they had wolf from alpha integration. I think they had a Wikipedia integration for a little bit but it was more just like pulling up a Wikipedia snippet and then you would either open that if you want to go deeper you would open that web page in Safari and look at the actual Wikipedia. Now there's new context and new content that's being created on the fly by these models because you can ask questions that don't exist in a single Wikipedia page. Uh Gemini under the hood in Siri will instantiate that for you, give you those paragraphs, and you might not be able to read through all of that in one screen time session. You might get a text message, need to answer it. You might get a phone call, you might have to put your phone down to, you know, keep doing what you're whatever you're doing, and you want to come back to it. And so yes, you could just say your prompt again and reinstantiate it all, but that takes time. These models are slow, especially if you're firing off a deep research report.

Yeah, I mean like yes, like these are I I agree that these are important things, but these are like far from the most important thing. I could just say, okay, if I'm asking about chips yesterday, we have this long conversation and then I I say, okay, yesterday we're talking about chips. Let's continue that conversation. That's that whole thing solves now.

Yes. So So that is a that would be amazing. But the current chat apps don't even have that functionality. If you go to a new

but you could very easily implement that. There are on all the okay on cloud on chate you can search through your past chats.

Do you know how bad the search is? The search is not LM power. It's not the search. It's not that good. It's not that good.

Okay. But they can it's not actually an LLM query. It's not it's not just you're talking about something like you're talking with a friend. You have to use keywords again. You're back in like traditional search world. you you don't just go to the same empty box and say, "Hey, remember when we were talking about the the fall of the Roman Empire? Uh, repull that pull all that up." It doesn't do that.

Okay, sure. But that's I don't think that's that hard to implement. You just put them in bedding models.

But we're talking about Siri here. It can barely pull up the weather. Like we're going from we're going from like a D tier product to now we're baking in a new model, Gemini. It's going to take it to like B.

The implementation of the metal of the model is way more important than if the app works. If if I can like search through it correctly.

Yeah.

The implementation of the model is like not a trivial thing. Like you have to get a lot of things correct.

What do you mean?

What about it?

Um like I if you uh

you mean like the APIs and the hooks and like the tools that it will be able to use within the iOS ecosystem.

Yeah. For it to be like smooth for it to be like a good product like you has to be like fast things that are more important than being able to search through yesterday's

Yes. Yes. And I think that's why the the the language is like is Gemini derived models. Gemini distilled models because they do want to be able to run something that's like Gemini but on device and obviously they have great hardware for that Apple silicon. And then also they've actually built out really solid APIs across the entire iOS stack since they have that shortcut functionality which is woefully underutilized but that was initially designed to be working with uh uh it was initially designed to plug into Siri. So, you should be able to order an Uber with Siri or order Door Dash with Siri. Uh, all of that didn't really take off in terms of Siri usage, but the APIs are there. So, I think the implementation should be fairly simple or do you think they need some sort of RL environment?

Uh, I don't know. I mean, it's just like So, okay, if you're doing a deep research,

are you even like, are we even sure that that is do you want to be using Siri for that? Like, maybe it's just better do it whenever I do deep research. Yeah, I never do it on the app. I'm always on like my laptop. nerd nerd alert

because it's just like way more information dense. There's a bunch of link links that I want to click on to do that on the

people definitely fire off deep research reports on their phone. Maybe they go read them later on their laptop but uh we live in a mobile first world and Apple and that's the Apple customer base. Apple Siri customers are going to ask long questions that get long answers and they're going to want to come back to those from time to time. And where else will they do that other than an app with the neatly organized? Also, you can't even remember. Like part of what's cool about these apps is that if I pull out the sidebar, I can scroll through and I can remember, oh wow, I was looking at, you know, uh the the NBA's history and, you know, their attendance over different I I don't even remember firing this off. When did I ask about this? Um, but like I I did and now I can go back and enjoy the fruits of its labor and I can enjoy that.

Yeah. But I I just think there's so many more things that are important. Like okay, even if um Okay, so they're using Gemini. Yeah. Like what would you rather have? Would you rather have Gemini 2.5 and an app or Gemini 3 and no app?

It's not a trade-off. They're getting the best Gemini obviously. And then also the the app is coming. That's what I'm saying.

Apple is bad at implementing AI.

Yes.

Do you agree with that?

They have been to date. Yes. Yeah. No one debates that Apple intelligence was sort of botched.

So I I think there's definitely a case made that they need to prioritize certain things and the implementation of the actual model like them using the best model that's going to be fast. It's going to like maybe on on Siri people are used to having fairly short responses. You don't want paragraphs and paragraphs unless you ask for it.

Okay.

Stuff like this is I think much more important than having best specific app.

Yes. And I wouldn't be surprised. I mean, truthfully, developing the type of app that I'm discussing about Siri, like it should be able to be oneshot by cloud code like a day. Like, it's super simple, right? Let's pull up.

But, but but but what are the probability that you think an app comes out this year

for Siri?

Yes.

Uh, I think it's probably pretty high.

So, what's wrong with my logic then?

No, you agree with me.

I'm not disagreeing with you. Someone in the chat said they already have a Siri app internally testing. We're getting no idea if that's true.

Okay, wait. I want to move on to whatever you want to say, but first I want to say tell you about Finn.ai, the number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to handle your customer support, go to Finn.ai.

Okay, let me say one more thing. Okay, so I'm just saying like I'm about to flashbang you.

Okay, if you're like writing this, who's the audience? Like Apple, right? You want to make a change maybe? Right. Okay, so it's like

Ben Thompson comes on yesterday. All I'm saying is that is that is that I'm excited for to I'm excited to be able to access Gemini with a button. I feel like that's what this deal is giving me.

Yeah. Nothing to do with an app,

but but also after I access Gemini with this button that that triggers trigger flashbang, then I want to be able to see my list.

Oh, Lambda. Lambda is the super intelligence cloud building AI supercomputers for training and inference that scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands. Wait, you have a you have a sound cue for Lambda now.

Yes, I do. Uh, pull up this clip from Gary Tan testifying in the Senate.

Okay. Okay. Let's see about uh who here actually uses Siri? I personally do not because I know that it does not have the cutting edge technology that

I don't get along well with her. So

yeah, exactly that uh Anthropic or OpenAI or many other American labs could provide and uh imagine if

uh Apple opened it up so that similar to when you open Windows you have to choose a browser. What if you could choose your AI agent? And there are a billion consumers in the world who would suddenly have access to

not just one self-preferenced Siri but a variety of American labs and that would open up investment. That would open up prosperity.

That's a good pitch. I like this. The Trupo with the end card. Uh when is that from? Is that recent?

Ian is on an absolute tear.

Let's see over here.

Thank you, Ian. Hi. Uh, he says current Apple's currently hiring 300 Siri focused roles.

Oh, they're going big. They're they're gonna do everything. You don't think one of those is an app developer?

Okay. No, let me just finish it. Okay. You think that's intentional? You think that's intentional? Like B, you know, kind of a reference to the movie 300.

Their last stand against against the 10,000 Chad GBT employees. Uh, I will let you respond, but first I'm going to tell you about graphite.dev. Code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub hit ship higher quality software faster.

That's right.

Continue.

Okay. Okay. So, Ben Thompson came on yesterday and he said

he wants one thing. Okay. He doesn't to to change the Apple Vision Pro. He doesn't want oh, a new productivity feature or oh, I want to be able to FaceTime my friend while watching the NBA game. All he wants is to edit to remove all the edits from the NBA game.

You have to choose one thing. You have to prioritize one thing.

Yeah. Okay. Yeah.

So, if the audience is Apple, like what I want them to know is like you guys need to pick the right model. you need to implement. Well, it's not I don't care about the app. That's like way later.

Sure. Sure. Sure. Sure. Yeah. I I I I hear you. I I I think that makes some sense, but I I don't think it's as it's as much of a trade-off as you think it is. I mean, they did just for Apple intelligence, they did like six different things. They had like the the the gener

intelligence, they've had a variety of products. Uh none of them really hit

exactly. Is there one that was good? They need to choose one thing that's good.

One that was good. I don't know. But I'm ready to move the goalposts.

Ready to move the goalpost. We have the goalpost. So my new definition for Apple AGI Apple in Apple intelligence. Apple super intelligence. Apple super intelligence.

It's just a functioning search function feature in iMessage.

That would be very good.

That's AGI for Apple.

That's ASI. Um, no. My my definition is I want to be able to go to the new Siri and so I I got an iPad and the iPad uh just accidentally installed like every app that I've ever installed on my phone on the iPad which wouldn't be that bad because on my phone I have one home screen and then I have a second screen and then the third screen is just the app library and it just has a search box and then the app library actually very intelligently organizes things into productivity, utilities, entertainment. It does all that for me. I don't need to organize it. I don't choose where things go. It knows if it's a creativity app or a travel app or a news app. It puts it in its correct category. I don't need to manage that. So, it's great. I have a whole bunch of apps on my phone and they're all organized. For some reason, the iPad was just like, let's do pages and pages and pages of all these apps on actual screens. And there's no rhyme or reason to them. And I want to organize them all into a logical format, but I think I'd have to go and, you know, at least remove all of them from home screen one at a time. It would be like thousands of taps to get rid of all of them. Probably take me like 10 to 20 minutes. It's annoying. It's not going to happen. I just won't do it. Um, but it's a good test of a gentic AI to be able to with a single prompt, one shot. Hey, clean up the whole desktop because we're seeing that today with Claude Co-work. Co-work is the name. Co, not co-worker. Claude Co-work. Okay, Claude Co-work. A lot of people are having fun installing Claude Co-work and then um and then saying, "Hey, go clean up my desktop. Organize it." Now, who knows if this is valuable? I don't think you care about clean desktops. Are you a mess?

I really don't. I did see a post. Somebody was like, "Wow, Claude Cole cleaned up all the files on my desktop. This is going to change everything. game changing.

And I was thinking, you know, every once in a while I'll clean up the files on my desktop, but it's never once changed any everything.

No. No. Usually I just make a folder with like archive.

And in fact, I don't even find it. And I do that again and again and again.

Like if it was really important, we'd probably have somebody on the team that was like just really good at organizing desktops.

Sure.

And now we do cloud co-work.

Yeah. I guess

organizing. But I want to be able to but I do think as trivial as that example is I think it's a good example of what an agentic system should be able to do if it has the proper hooks into the OS layer. Cloud co-work can do it on desktop. What's the iOS equivalent of that? It's got to be Apple intelligence. They have their walled garden. The walls are staying up. They're not letting cloud co-work go around your your iOS installation and hook into all your different uh local APIs. That's the domain of Apple intelligence. That's the domain of series. Siri now powered by Gemini. it should be able to do this. Let's see if that's what they launch. And that's the model implementation that you're talking about. And that's what I agree with you on. I just think there'll also be an app.

Okay. Yeah. But I like the former than the letter.

Yes, I agree.

We're moving on. The Germinator called all this back in November. So anyways, this isn't even new news, but

we should.

It's now official.

We got to give it up for Mark German, though.

The scoop athlete scoop.

The Germinator's back on the calendar. We're going to have him on. Can't wait to catch up because John Turnis is in the news too. We'll get to that. First, let me tell you about Sentry. Sentry shows developers what's broken and helps them fix it fast. That's why 150,000 organizations use it to keep their apps working.

150K.

That's a lot. Apple ran a blind test of Frontier models and picked Gemini. Interesting. And there's this old photo of the uh the Tim Cook meeting with Sundar Pachai from Google in a dimly lit uh cafe or restaurant probably in Certino or Menllo Park somewhere. Uh I was hoping they would do a jersey swap at this event because of course uh Mark Zuckerberg and Jensen Wong swapped jerseys at one point.

Tim Cook very clearly mewing here. I think they're both mewing at each other. I think they're both mewing at each other. They're just having a mu off.

Yes, that that's how they really or not. They want to do business together. Anyway,

let's go over to the New York Times. Uh the New York Times has a new profile. Fantastic. Uh specifically, Calli Huang and Trip Mickel. Uh John Turnis, a low profile but influential executive at Apple, could be next in line to replace the company's longtime chief executive Tim Cook if he steps aside. Uh they say around 2018, Apple considered adding a tiny laser to its iPhones. The part would allow consumers to take better photos, more accurately map their surroundings, and use new augmented reality features. But it would also cost Apple about $40 per device, cutting into the company's profits. John Turnis, Apple's head of hardware engineering, suggested adding the component to only the more expensive Pro models of the iPhone, said two people familiar with the discussions. Uh the those devices, Mr. Turnis reason, tended to be purchased by Apple's most loyal soldiers. uh

hostages hostages who would be excited about new technology. Average consumers, on the other hand, probably wouldn't care. Threading the needle between adding new bells and whistles. Let's give it up for bells and whistles to Apple's products while watching the bottom line has defined the careful lowprofile style of Mr. Turn us. And we have to take a minute to talk about the nominative determinism of turn us uh turn us around. Mr. Turn us around. uh our AI strategy is uh failing. We need somebody to turn us around. Mr. Turnis could be the man for the job. He joined Apple in 2001. He is now considered by some company insiders to be the front runner to replace Tim Cook. Apple's longtime CEO. Uh Apple last year began accelerating its planning for Mr. Cook's succession. According to three people, uh Mr. Cook, 65, has told senior leaders that he is tired and would like to reduce his workload. Should he step down, Mr. Cook is likely to become the chairman of Apple's board.

Oh, interesting. Look at this. They're also doing some numerology. Turnis is 50 and that's the same age that Cook that Tim Cook was when he took over for Steve Jobs in 2011.

I we see you.

We see you. New York Times

interesting

doing the the hard-hitting analysis.

Like Mr. Cook, Mr. Turnis is known for his attention to detail and his knowledge of Apple's vast supply network. Both men are also considered eventempered collaborators, capable of navigating the bureaucracy of one of the world's wealthiest companies without ruffling feathers. His rising profile caused debate amongst Apple alumni and rank and file employees about whether he would lead like Tim Cook who succeeded by making the company more predictable and incremental or Mr. Jobs who laid the foundation for the company's success with risky bets and visionary.

Ventur in the chat says Apple needs a social network. Do they have it already? I feel like iMessage is social network.

Ping, if you remember Ping, they had a social network that they acquired, I believe, from Jeff Ralston, the former YC partner. But, uh, it was you, it was like Spotify where you could see where other people are playing. You go on Apple Music and or it wasn't called Apple Music back then. It was ping, which was linked to iTunes. You could see what other people are listening to. And then every artist would have a profile where they could share content. It was a very musicdriven social network.

Follow me on ping.

Follow me on ping.

Ping me.

Ping me. Never never never really took off though. Um, other than that, I think iMessage is a very very strong social network and uh I mean certainly if if if Meta owns WhatsApp and includes that in the family of apps and messaging is obviously a huge driver of social networking activity these days. People sharing content through there. Snapchat is a messenger. Instagram is, you know, you look and you see there's more shares on this reel than likes because people are sending it to each other. That's what people do. That's how people

Yeah. And I think I think the people have long had the idea to build a family focused social network and I don't think they'll ever be successful because group chats on iMessage function.

Oh yeah, totally.

Do that very well.

You just can't keep up with Apple on that.

Uh before we move on, Figma.

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Mr. Turnis' rising profile. Uh, sorry, you got that. Uh, if you uh,

if you want to make an iPhone every year, Turnis is your guy, says Cameron Rogers.

But, but, but how much should we read into this? Because

they already do make an iPhone every year. But

yeah, but it's but but it says something. I mean, obviously this is we don't have the context here, but

what he didn't say was if you want to build the next crazy Yeah. the futuristic, you know, if you want to get the Apple car project off the ground, Turnis is your guy. He said, "If you want to make an Apple an iPhone every year like clockwork, keep the trains running on time at Apple, Turnis is your guy." Yeah. People, we we read that other quote about Turnis where uh they were saying like, "Has he has he done any hard has he made any hard decisions?" No. And someone was clearly taking shots at him. It feels like there's a little bit of like politics going on over at Apple. uh people jockeying for the next role, but whatever's happening with John Turnis clearly is working because it's one profile after another and he's the name I keep hearing more and more certainly above Craig Federigi, Eddie Q, some of the other folks who are sort of household names in the Apple ecosystem. They're not getting profiles like this written. Everyone needs to meet and learn about John Turnis. So Apple's plans for artificial intelligence are also a big question. Is he AGI pilled? Is he ASI pled? What are his timelines? Is he a doomer? We got to get to the bottom of this. Hopefully the hopefully the New York Times is asking the hard questions. We will find out. Um while other giant technology companies have spent tens of billions of dollars developing AI, Apple has largely been on the sidelines and it pushed off making major changes to its products with new AI technology. It'll be up to Apple's board of directors to decide who will eventually replace Mr. Cook, who also sits on the board. The rest of the company's eight board members did not respond to requests for comments, and Apple declined to make uh Mr. Turnis available for an interview. They couldn't get the New York Times uh in the room with Turnis. The Financial Times and Bloomberg previously reported on aspects of this. So, he's the youngest member of Apple's executive leadership team.

Success.

Getting some young blood in there. Sort of a Doge situation, I guess, the the the boys the the Turnis child at the at the helm. No, he's 50. Uh it would be Apple's first chief executive in three decades to have spent his career working in hardware. Unlike some of the other candidates to replace Mr. Cook, Mr. Turnis has worked on many of Apple's devices as well as the global operations that manufacture those products. Uh he would take over as a relative unknown outside of Apple. Inside the company, he's known more for maintaining products than developing new ones, according to six former employees. Uh and Mr. turnist who has been an engineer in Silicon Valley for all of his adult life has limited exposure to the policy issues and political responsibility. It's interesting that that can that can be viewed uh that can be viewed as as a knock right like he's not uh just given Apple's history as an innovator but

like where you know what's the highest leverage place that he can spend his time probably you know focusing on the products that are already hits that have real product market

fit the political responsibilities can't be that complicated I mean he knows the supply chain all he has to do is make a solid gold iPhone send one to600 and call it a Okay. Uh, make sure it's very ornate and you will be you'll be good to go. Uh, he's a California native. He received a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering from Penn where he was on the varsity swim team. For a senior project, he designed a device that allowed quadripolgitics to use head motions to control a mechanical feeding arm. Wow. It's like Neurolink back in the day. Uh, in the four years after his graduation from Penn, he designed headsets and other products at a virtual reality startup. Wow. Throwback. Uh then he joined Apple first working on screens for Macs as the company transitioned away from the colorful iMacs of late 1990s.

I'm I'm sure we'll get a chance to uh talk talk to Mr. Turnis at some point, but I would love to know uh what people's VR timelines were when he was working on VR in the '90s.

They were like 10 years max.

10 years max

in the next decade for sure. Uh he was a man of the people. Uh adding that the decision to sit with his team likely helped Mr. Turnis manage and motivate his staff. uh when he was working at Apple their team the team he was on moved office floors switching from a closed office plan to a mostly open seating with few office few offices when he was promoted Mr. Turnis had the option to move into one of those fancy offices but he said no I'm sitting with the crew I'm riding with my boys I'm hanging out in the open plant which is uh you know tells you a lot about who he is as a person in 2005 Mr. Mr. Turnis had been promoted to lead Apple's hardware engineering team for the IMAX as it made the G5 series uh which helped inspire helped uh um uh Michael Hillman hired Mr. Turnis and worked with him at Apple for more than a decade. That team was working on using magnets to hold the computer's glass screen in place. Interesting. The technique was unusual for its time and face skepticism, but Mr. Turnis still pushed for it. When presented with such an out-of- the- box idea, he would champion it, said Mr. Seaffort. Uh, Mr. Turnis spent extended periods of time working with manufacturers in Asia. Uh, he traveled between the continent and Silicon Valley and learned how difficult it could be to have a manufacturing supplier deliver on Apple's design expectations. Apple also paired Mr. Turnis with an external consultant to advise him on leadership. He got a leadership coach. Um, he became a key lieutenant of Dan Richio, his predecessor as Apple's head of hardware. By 2013, his role had expanded to include overseeing the Mac and iPad teams. In recent years, he has shouldered more responsibility for updates to Apple's products, spearheaded the iPhone Air, which was released last year with a new slim design and was a key leader in Apple's transition from using Intel chips to silicon to Apple silicon. And of course, the iPhone Air uh not a really hot seller apparently, not doing that well financially necessarily, but from an engineering perspective, people are very excited. Apple employee uh friend of mine said he got the iPhone Air was the worst iPhone he's ever bought.

Really? Wow. Roasted.

Absolutely brutal.

Uh well, before we talk more about the iPhone Air, let me tell you about Label Box. Delivering you the highest quality data for Frontier AI. Get in the box. The label box. Apple. You know you need some training data. You know you need some high quality training data for your Frontier AI. You need some data to train on Siri, get on label box.

Get in the box.

Uh so the iPhone Air obviously it even might, you know, reviews are mixed. Reviews are not great. Some people complain about different things. Some people love it, but uh it hasn't been flying off the shelves. But when you see the X-ray

of the founder who said, "This is the strongest iPhone ever made. Nobody can possibly break this. It's impossible."

What happened next?

And then it was quickly broken in half by a Gundo founder. That was an iPhone air.

Smashed. smashed. Um, but you can imagine the innovation that went into making the iPhone Air so small, could be used for a foldable phone, which was probably coming, could be used for more miniaturization if they do some sort of lapel pin or something else. They they clearly have packed a lot of power into such a small form factor. So, is he a nice guy? Yes, says Mr. Rogers. He is a nice guy. He's someone you want to hang out with. Everyone loves him because he's great. And here's the quote that that lives in infamy. Has he made any hard decisions? No. Are there hard problems he's solved in hardware? No.

Rogers,

how can you say how can you say he's

he's never made a hard decision? Says Cameron Rogers, who worked on product and software engineering management at Apple from 2005 to 2022. Cameron Rogers, hater of the year right here. Dude, who is this person? But Cameron Rogers uh is not a fan clearly. Not not pulling out the glazator for Turnos. It's absolutely brutal to say.

Yeah. Remember the same guy who said earlier in the article, if you want to make an iPhone every year, Turnis is your guy.

Yeah, you got

which again I read that and I was like, "Okay, that sounds good." Surface level

does make an iPhone

every year.

We should have Cameron on the show.

The hater and chief chief hating officer. It's crazy. I mean, certainly you cannot be at Apple for two decades and never have made a single hard decision or solved a hard problem in hardware. Like that seems impossible.

It's funny there's there is a hardware engineer at Apple today named Cameron Rogers, but it is

different person.

Different.

Okay. Okay. Well, uh, in a 2024 commencement speech at Penn's engineering school, Mr. Turners told graduating students that in the future they would be proudest not of specific projects but of the journey to make them all happen. Quote, "Now, while you're on that journey, there's going to be many times in your career when where you have to take on something new," he said. And sometimes you might wonder whether or not you can actually do it. Giving a little inspirational talk at Penn's engineering school commencement speech. Uh, very fun. Well, good luck to him. I don't know. I think he can figure it out. I would be shocked if he's really never solved a hard problem. Seems like he has some beef with this Cameron fellow. And uh well, I don't know. We'll we'll see. Cameron Rogers. Uh maybe Turnis needs to respond.

Drop a diss track.

I don't know. Um

I would love to see that.

Public.com investing for those who take it seriously. They got stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more. All with amazing customer service. Uh, OpenAI, they've acquired Torch. It's a healthcare startup that unifies lab results, medications, and visit recordings, bringing this together with Chachi PT Health opens up a new way to understand and manage your health, says Open AI. The

whole founders of Torch. Torch was a uh fourperson company.

Oh, small.

They uh the co-founder of Torch uh Ilia, I believe, one of the other founders uh previously built Forward.

Yeah. Uh Ilia was also an early Uber GM. So trained at the Travis Kalanick uh school of mogging. Anyways, forward a little backstory. Uh healthcare startup founded in 2016.

They wanted to rebuild the health care system from the ground up. Sounds uh sounds cool. uh they originally were trying to do this kind of like um uh the the the general belief was that health care was uh too reactive instead of proactive, right? You go to the doctor when you're sick, not uh to just kind of generally be uh healthy. Uh they had an app they wanted the the sort of physical spaces to feel like Apple stores, right? They wanted this Apple-like um experience for health. Uh subscription only model. uh they didn't accept insurance initially. Uh bunch of folks, Founders Fund, Kla, Eric Schmidt, bunch of legends were were in the round. Uh 2018 to 2022, they expanded to dozens of locations.

Uh they had uh body scanners, real-time blood work, a bunch of different software that they had built out. 2021 reached a valuation of over 1 billion, raised a quarter billion dollarish uh series D round. Uh at this point uh from that point on they uh they sort of pivoted to focusing on this thing called care pods.

Uh and these were like trying to be autonomous

like AIdriven medical kiosk. So honestly probably uh right idea maybe a little bit too early. Um eventually in 2024 they shut down uh very abruptly.

Uh it sounds like they basically just ran ran out of money. Uh came back very quickly.

uh with Torch and uh now they are uh of course being rolled into OpenAI. So uh you can I think the the right way to read into this OpenAI just launched OpenAI health. They're now acquiring uh Torch. I would assume that they want all they want all of your they want all of your health data. Like they really want to help you with your health.

They want your blood. They're out for blood.

They want your blood.

They want your blood work. Maybe maybe they could say like, "Hey, this month

You instead of uh instead of paying, you could be a blood boy for us.

Give us blood. Our researchers are working really hard and they um we need your blood. Uh I'm ready to upload. Upload me. Just let me know. Let me know what.

Uh I'm going to read the the message that Torch wrote. Uh Torch says, "Everyone deserves the best answers modern medicine can give them. And yet we've all had people close to our hearts who didn't get the answers they needed about their health. We have more data about our bodies than ever before, but it's never been harder to bring it all together. Patients see only a fraction of their own records, while clinicians have too little time to parse the growing stream of data patients bringing in from wearables and consumer health companies, uh, you know, like Function, etc."

AI is the most important new tool we've had in decades for turning the chaos into clarity.

But AI can't help you if your health data is scattered across four hospitals, two labs, seven apps, and three web portals. We started Torch to build a medical memory for AI, unifying scattered records into a context engine that helps you see the full picture, connect the dots, and make sure nothing important gets lost in the noise again. So,

Mike has a little life hack here. If you're an early-stage AI founder, rename yourself to Ilya and get an M&A offer.

Just crazy enough to work. I like it. Uh, let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. Um, every time I see one of these uh one of these new features drop from Claude Cowork or OpenAI, ChatGPT Health, um it just feels like the Siri thing is like bigger and bigger. Back to what Tyler was saying about implementation uh of the model. Uh because Apple has Apple Health, there's a whole promise there of what Apple Health as an app can do. You want that to be AI enabled. They so they need to update that as well. And there's there's so many different okay shopping agent commerce like like there's Apple Pay is Apple Pay integrated with with Siri and the new AI function. So they really do need to go around and update all over the place if they want to stay um you know they have some dominant positions carved out but every AI company is trying to eat off Apple's plate and as much as they can but there's really really strong lock-in to most of the Apple ecosystem. Uh so they they it's not over if they don't move right now and get the app out and get updates out. But it's very clear that if if you know Apple or or ChatGPT Health is rolling out, you know it's going to take time for people to ramp up, start integrating things, start using it. But if that behavior develops and it's another two, three years until Apple responds, like yeah, they are going to be a laggard in that category. Um there's a uh Claude Cowork reaction thread going on from uh Z Mushawitz. Uh lots of people kind of mixed reviews. Eleanor Burgerer says, "Research preview. This is the future, not the present. For now, if you want a local agent, Claude Code is still the best you can recommend, even if it's for non-coding tasks." Some people are saying it's buggy. Um have you had a chance to try it out, Tyler? Can you install Claude Cowork today? And

Yeah, I mean, so I downloaded it yesterday. Um, but it's kind of, we talked about this earlier in the gym, like I actually don't know what to do with it because I'm like already technical. I already have Claude Code.

Yeah. My sense is that this is basically just a... We get it. My sense is it's basically just a UI. Actually, we get it. We get it. You're technical. Hit him with a flashbang. It's too powerful. No. Okay. But it's like a UI wrapper around Claude Code. So, um, it's like not providing maybe an insane amount of like brand new functionality.

I mean there is a there's a huge swath of consumers who are just never going to really open the terminal even if it's even if it's even if you go to Claude and say how do I install Claude Code I heard it's hot and Claude Code says literally just hit command spacebar type term hit enter it'll open the terminal and then copy and paste this line and then tell it what you want just like it's ChatGPT or Claude people still won't do that because it's like oh what's this weird... you need like 15 gigs for it. Yeah, you do need some space on your hard drive, but that's not a huge issue for most people. It's... Yeah, but but it's it's not fully frictionless, whereas Yeah. Whereas an app might uh might sort of hold your hand through that a little bit more. Uh, and so I I I'm I'm optimistic about this, but I do think that the marketing and the messaging and actually like the the thread boy influencers are going to be pretty important here where if you see someone demo something cool with Claude Cowork, that's going to be a key to open it up.

A lot of people, you know, in the early days of ChatGPT rolling out, a lot of people were sharing prompts. What's a good prompt? you know, prompt engineering, like, oh, you take this prompt and you do this because a lot of people need inspiration. It's the same thing with Midjourney. Like, if you just give someone a blank box and tell them, uh, it can, this is an image generator. They'll just say like dog and then you just give them a picture of a dog and they're like, "Yeah, it looks like a dog. I could go to Google Images." What's special about it is like I want it to be my dog and I want it to be fighting Darth Vader and I want it to be on in downtown LA and then it creates something that you can't just find on Google Images. The same thing will be true on uh on Claude Cowork. There are tools for just cleaning up your desktop. There's I think Alfred is one of them. There's a few others that just do automated uh sort of deterministic uh cleanup of desktops. Uh but people will eventually be sharing Claude Cowork workflows, prompts, best practices, and just giving people the idea. As simple as that sounds, the capability is there, but there's this capability application overhang where you need to actually tell people, hey, this is something that you could use Claude Cowork for.

Mike says, think the position as Cowork is actually really sharp. I agree. Uh I I think that uh it's kind of a mouthful Claude Cowork, but uh going back to what I was saying last week, when when people uh when when some lab leaders have been talking about the potential of AI, they just say, "Oh, AI is going to do this, AI is going to do that." Obviously, the the at least near-term reality is humans are going to use AI to do things and I think Anthropic trying to be more human about it and saying like, "Hey, you're working with this thing. It's not uh it's not replacing you away."

There are people having fun with the Claude posts, the portmanteaus. First, before we read through these, let me tell you about Railway. Railway simplifies software development. Web apps, servers, and databases run in one place with scaling, monitoring, and security built in. Uh Near friend of the show says his job. Oh, it got Claude-ated away. No one has no one I can't believe no one has said this. Not even a single answer. 1,000 likes. People are into this.

Paula says he hates AI. Oh, he's uh claustrophobic. Claudstrophobic. Okay, these are getting a lot of likes, but not exactly belly laughing for me. Uh oh, yeah, not quite. I'm glad people have fun. I do think Claude's a funny name and you know it's it's it's... John John Palmer was really pushing like hey now's the time to rebrand to rebrand rename. I mean a naming exercise can be you know a very expansive project uh but uh I do think it's probably too late where Claude is going all the way. Yeah, they've all sort of worked out. I don't know ChatGPT... Bard in hindsight Bard was kind of under... I do like having a digital bard. Bard. Yeah, Bard was funny. Uh, but Gemini works. They're building up the brand there. And Claude works as well. ChatGPT, such a mouthful. So, so such an insane name. So clearly, you know, named by a developer, but you know, it just broke through in such a way. And then they did buy chat.com. So, you know, it it winds up working.

Uh, Claude Code for the rest of your work. American middle-class desk jockeys watching the asteroid hit the dinosaurs. Uh, we will see. We we we'll see how much uh this moves productivity, how much this moves GDP. Uh that's the big question for this year is uh how much will people actually be able to, you know, use this to do the work they do every day. Um I've been in jobs where organizing desktop files was actually a one trillion dollar industry. Yeah. And

I mean I I I have I have been I was I was an intern once and my job was basically to open up an Excel template every day, copy paste some some numbers. Uh sort of make sure all the formulas held and over the internship over the couple months I wrote more and more Visual Basic so that my job went from eight hours on the first day to four hours to eventually it was like 15 minutes. I would just like get there and just hit a script. I would just click a button and it would just do everything. And that was just with like normal software. Um, now you probably have to you have to, you know, reality check. So make there's make sure there's no hallucinations. But in general, like some of these jobs can be automated. The question is like if someone uses this to automate their own job, will they just be sitting there, you know, watching reels in the small corner and when their boss comes by, they alt tab so they're looking, oh, I'm still working really hard. Nothing's been automated. These my models are slop. I I definitely still need my job. You know, where where does the value accrue? Who who's who's reclaiming the value is uh I mean we we did talk to a friend who was saying that like he knows someone who's a uh uh has some sort of desk job has been effectively automated by ChatGPT but just spends all day golfing now. And the boss doesn't know that the job's been automated because the boss...

We might see a bull market in water cooler talk. Yeah, that's possible as people automate more and more of their work and just decide to yap.

Well, speaking of water, let's go over to Augustus Dico, the Rain Maker himself. But first, let me tell you about AppLovin. Profitable advertising made easy with Axon.ai. Get access to over 1 billion daily active users and grow your business today. Augustus says, "I'm AI pilled after seeing what the new grad philosophy major I hired to fly drones from a mountaintop has automated at Rain Maker with Claude." He's very happy.

Yeah, we keep asking Tyler, "Hey, can you automate this?" And he says, "Uh, sorry, sir. It's it's it's not it's not possible yet. It's not possible yet. I don't I don't believe it." I never said that. You basically say everything. Um so uh Boris Cherny who is...

Runs Claude Code. Run Claude runs Claude Code. Remember he popped over to OpenAI for like two weeks right? Um no that was Cursor. Oh he popped over to Cursor. Wait so he went to Cursor he churned and went back to Open uh went back to Anthropic. Yeah so he's literally... crazy moment last night. Turning his churning in terms of his jobs. Yes. Churning through jobs. Interesting. Interesting. Good nominative determinism.

Well, how much code did he write to develop Claude Cowork? He apparently used Claude Code entirely and did none of the coding himself. Fantastic. Uh, very, very cool. So, he said, "Since we launched Claude Code, we saw people using for all sorts of non-coding work, doing vacation research, building slide decks, cleaning up your email, canceling subscriptions, recovering wedding photos from hard drive, monitoring plant growth, uh, controlling your oven. These use cases are diverse and surprising. The reason is that the underlying Claude agent is the best agent and Opus 4.5 is the best model. Today we're uh so excited to introduce Cowork, making Claude Code work for all your non-coding work. Uh the product is early and raw similar to what Claude Code felt like when it first launched." And that's the big question Tyler is uh is Claude Code was very bare bones, rough around the edges when it launched. It's now so full functioning that everyone loves it and it's building whole new products. Uh what do they need to add to Cowork to make it uh an even better product?

I don't know. I I I feel like in the in the uh app ecosystem, in the chat app ecosystem, the level of value that comes from product design, UI, UX is still underrated. Obviously, no one doubts that the models are great. Uh, but if you use the Claude app and you have it play have you have it you generate a deep research report or something like that. You click the play button to have it read it to you. You can't fast forward or rewind. You can't change the speed and you also if you close your phone it just stops playing. So you need to be sort of like touching the phone to keep it working to keep it open while you listen to this report. And that just feels like oh that's like not a good user experience and Chat has solved that and has some more they can do background audio and these are all sort of simple APIs in iOS but it takes time and consideration you have to decide where the buttons go and what they look like and Claude Code can do a lot of that but it takes time and someone has to make the decision. My my neighbor Murph in the X chat says, "I'm interested in No-No Work." Claude go...

No-No Work. I like that. Something there. That's great. Anyway, uh MongoDB, choose a database built with for flexibility and scale with best-in-class embedding models and rerankers. MongoDB has what you need to build what's next. Uh, Netcap girl Sophie says, "Okay, Claude, take this unstructured data and turn it into dashboards that will give executives deeper insights into critical business functions. Make no mistakes."

Jer Ticket says, "All reliable?" Because Sophie posts some version of this. Uh, really once a day. No, once a day. Basically, he's gone viral with the same concept. Wait, but like has it always been about Claude? No, no, no. Just constantly being repurposed. Playing the hits. You got to play the hits. Critical business functions. Uh Atlas says, "Claude, here is a picture of my crush. Claude, here is her phone number. Make her my GF. Make no mistake." That's also his him playing. It's everyone has their role to play in the post-singularity hangout session.

Turbo Puffer serverless vector and full-text search built from first principles and object storage. Fast, 10x cheaper, and extremely scalable. Um, there's a billion dollars inside Opus 4.5 model weights and you just need to type the right Claude Code prompts to get them out, says Frankie. Very true. Lots of opportunity. Actually knowing how to code is no longer... Jawan says there's no point in learning or doing anything anymore. Just learn English and acquire a good mental model of things and just type, bro. Just type.

Yeah, lot. We'll see. I mean, you have to actually be inspired to come up with something that people want. Talk to users or something like that. Uh Claude Code is so successful they had to make Claude Code not for code instead of just Claude. Claude Code not for code instead of just Claude. It is it is funny that there's these opportunities to you know retool the brand around uh because we're now three levels deep. There's Anthropic, there's Claude, and there's Claude Code and Claude Cowork. And you could have just said Claude Code and Claude Cowork now just Claude. It's one thing. It works in the terminal. It also works on your desktop. It's it's one thing. But it's interesting that they that Anthropic clearly sees some sort of divide between technical and non-technical users that they that they assume that will persist at least for a reasonable amount of time.

Um uh let's see. Introducing Claude Cowork. It's giving an AK-47 to a monkey, which is uh one of my favorite favorite meme images ever. If you scroll up, you'll see the best formats. It's one of the best of all times. Yes. Uh you could definitely do some damage on a computer or uh in a in a in a in a corporate environment if uh if you really turn it loose on the network. We will see. Uh I'm sure there will be more uh you know, total just ridiculous mistakes than than malicious intent, but uh it will be interesting.

So uh Deja Vu Coder goes on to say initially I thought it's computer use but looks like it's Claude Code shaped with more UI/UX focused towards non-technical people especially those who terminal... Gold Rock in the chat is headed to an interview with Goldman Sachs. One, let's give it up for Goldman Sachs and two, let's all send some good luck towards our boy. Yes. Uh oh. Uh Shalto also posted of course because he's involved in... What else is going on?

Yes. Uh oh. Uh RAMP also has a coding agent. Uh they built their own. Fax Herbert shared this. The Ramp engineering team built a coding agent last month called Inspect and it's now dominating our internal use cases. I can't tell you how fun it is to continually have my mind blown by our technical folks. Uh very very interesting uh to actually uh people are very confused by this but uh I you know it's a very special team very special company and so um makes sense in this in this particular context to build something special and uh they also have an agentic spreadsheet product at this point and they've been having a lot of fun developing new software very very quickly all over the place.

Uh before we move on, CrowdStrike. Your business is AI, their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. Uh, and Rune is back to vague posting. He says that the elves have left for Valinor. Please, sir, can I have a crumb of context? Just a crumb. The I require context hat goes on. Elves, we need one. We need a hat here. I require context hat. Yes. I I don't know exactly what he's referring to. It is a vague post, but we'll have to dig into it. Maybe we'll have to have him back on the show.

Well, QT Cash is speculating, saying, "Given that Rune is likely referencing his own Quinn comment talking about the downfall of OpenAI, what does this mean for the future?" Uh, Quinn says, "Apropos of Sutskever now having left OpenAI for good, I've gone back to my thinking about the long-term consequences of Altman's coup." And something I began to wonder in 2021 when the news about Anthropic broke, what if the elves have left Middle Earth? What if OpenAI has lost its mojo? If so, what would that look like and how would we know? What's the rot narrative? Interesting. Interesting. Oh, wait. So, Zoomer also says he's talking about the California tax proposal, Fed shenanigans. You're misreading the tweet. So, the elves could just be our our most loyal. And this is the power of egg posting. Interpret it a bunch of different ways. It's like sprinkling, you know, some tea leaves. People find their own. Yes. I mean, regardless, uh, you know, OpenAI, have they lost their mojo? Certainly not when it comes to vague posting. Tyler, what do you think?

Okay. Yeah. So, so there's like the two different ways to look at it, right? It's either about California or OpenAI. Yes. Um but so I think he probably meant it as like, okay, this is about California billionaire tax, but like all the news about that has broken like earlier this week, like all the everyone's leaving, right? It's it's kind of late to post that. Yeah. But it's a perfect time to post uh as you kind of see at least the vibes on X like really hard going against OpenAI Prothik. Sure. So I think it's like if someone asked him about it, he's like, "Oh, it's about the billionaire tax, but you know, subtly." Maybe it could also it could also be so the elves could also be Shalto and Daresh and Valinor could be the gym because they did a workout together with Atlas creatine cycle. Uh, and they're looking in fighting form.

Well, let me tell you about Gusto, the unified platform for payroll, benefits, and HR built to evolve with modern small and medium-sized businesses and the backbone of TBPN. Yes, it is. Uh, so there's... there's some Oh, we do. Yes, let's do it. Uh, in the Restream waiting room, we have Shervin Pishevar. Uh, and we will welcome him to the TVP Ultradome. Shervin, how are you doing? Good to see you. How are you? Thank you so much. We're good. Good to see you again. Thank you so much for taking the time to hop on the show. Uh maybe you could start uh with just give us the highest level of what's going on in your world, what's going on around the world. Uh how are you interpreting the news of the last few weeks? This has been going on for more than I can't imagine what a roller coaster it's been. Um how are you introducing this at the highest level possible?

At the highest level possible. This is uh one of the greatest displays of courage by by humans uh young Iranians and Iranians of every age. Uh by the millions are in the street the last couple weeks. Uh you know demanding their their freedom. They've been living in an open-air prison for the last 47 years. Um the the work that uh you know the crown prince Reza Pahlavi has been doing uh has succeeded in having millions of people calling out for him to return uh for for there to be a process towards a democracy uh towards a transition process. Uh the people are demanding their freedom uh and just in the last 48 uh hours uh the numbers are staggering. That 12,000 people have been killed uh by the army uh the military. The supreme leader uh who is one of the most evil humans on the planet uh has ordered uh the the the mass killing of people. So you have an open-air prison uh where people have no freedoms and now you have an an extermination uh camp uh happening. Uh so you have horrific videos coming out. Um uh these people are are defenseless. They have nothing to protect themselves except their hopes and dreams and their demands for freedom. They're calling out for Reza Pahlavi to return and uh he's the son of the last king. Uh he's a big believer in uh freedom and democracy uh and has a plan for reconstruction. And many of us including myself uh have uh joined uh you know his efforts and his movement. Um and now the difference is you have President Trump uh you know uh outwardly saying to the Iranian people we have your back uh we're locked and loaded. That gave the people the courage to come out uh and protest for the last couple weeks. Uh and uh this is not a protest movement anymore. This is a revolution. They want a complete change uh in the government uh when what we're you know working on is essentially a process to have an interim government led by Reza Pahlavi who millions of people are asking for um and uh the time to act is now. Uh President Trump said that that he has their back uh and at any minute uh that can be he reaffirmed that today. Uh you know uh Prime Minister Netanyahu has said the same things of uh and that you know the connection by the way um is very biblical between the Jewish people and the Persian people. Cyrus the Great uh uh 2500 years ago earned a spot in the Bible uh by freeing the Jews uh from slavery in Babylon, returning them to their homeland in in Jerusalem and rebuilding their temple. He's celebrated by the Jews. He's celebrated by the by the Persians. He's celebrated by the Christians. He had the first declaration of human rights. Uh and then biblical symmetry 2500 years later. Uh it's the Jewish people who are helping uh the Persian people uh free themselves from the shackles of slavery from these uh terrorists that have held them in open-air prison for the last 47 years. Just the whole world has been reshaped um by the huge mistake of 1979 of allowing uh these extreme extremist Marxist Islamist uh coalition to take over. Uh and we've seen the effect they've had. They funded all of the terrorist organizations throughout the Middle East including Hamas and Hezbollah. Um and uh now we see the invasion of Europe and the UK and and uh you know potentially America as well uh by by extremist ideologies. Uh and that that that that needs to end uh it needs to end now. Uh you see...

What's the next domino? What's the next domino to fall? Like what what what does forward movement look like for the revolution? Do you want to get to like tens of millions of protesters? Is it just growing the protest movement? Is there an election process? Is there some specific mechanic that we're waiting to to look for?

We're beyond the tens of millions. The tens of millions were in the streets in the last couple weeks. It's the biggest uh biggest numbers ever. They've uh the crown prince Reza has been calling for people to come in the streets at certain times and they've been listening. Uh we have an open uh channel of communications uh because of Starlink uh these freedom technologies as I call it. I've been working on that since 2010. I had a dinner with the secretary of state back then and I said the last bastion of dictatorship is the router. Uh and we need to be able to use satellites to bring beam internet communications to people so that dictators and tyrants can't block the internet.

So, so the regime is making efforts to neutralize Starlink. Is that correct?

That's right. I I actually when I started uh this project with a band of rebels, uh we uh in 2022, we I went to uh SpaceX Starlink uh bought uh you know, tons of uh of of Starlinks and we figured out three different routes to smuggle it into the country to get it to the protesters. Uh at the time there were only nine uh Starlinks in the country and now there's thousands. Uh those Starlinks are the way that these videos that we're all seeing from the protest are are reaching the world. Otherwise now now they're using military jammers to block uh and jam the Starlink connections. And luckily, you know, Elon and his team are some of the smartest humans on the planet. So they've figured out how to how to uh you know uh get around that. Uh Ukraine was a great laboratory for uh that as well. And when the Starlinks went there, it changed the whole dynamic of the war. Um and um I had played a a role in making some introductions there. And uh and now what we're seeing is is uh is is the same dynamic in in Iran. Now there's tens of thousands of Starlinks. Uh they're getting around the jamming. President Trump reached out to Elon. It's in the news yesterday uh for more help uh with Starlink. So, you know, this is something as an industry as Silicon Valley and tech that we should be very proud of. Uh these technologies that we work on are are what I call freedom technologies. Um, and they're they're part of the arsenal of taking down really these criminal and terrorist organizations and tyrants that have taken over sovereign nations with nuclear bombs or attempting to get the nuclear bombs. So, um, you know, the the these are the technologies that can be used uh increasingly so to let humans uh have the freedoms and the democracies that we're so blessed to have in America. Um, you know, I I escaped uh Iran uh during uh the Iran-Iraq war. I had bombs following me on me as a kid. Um my father had to escape Iran because he was a journalist radio television for the the last shah and he put bravely put the foreign language broadcast to let people know how to get out of a country. He saved a lot of lives and the supreme leader then Khomeini put him on the execution list. So I didn't see my dad for two years. Bombs were falling every night. And uh I remember as an 8-year-old kid, all my drawings were of war uh of, you know, tanks and and guns. Um and I had this fantasy as an 8-year-old. I was really into remote control planes. And I and I thought, uh what if I could use uh these RC planes to bomb Khomeini's house? And now 47 years later under the 47th president um that possibility is very real.

Yeah. Uh what is the dynamic between the uh armed forces that are killing protesters and like how do you wake up and you know put on a uniform and then go gun down you know your countrymen? Like how do like how is that how is that sustainable? At what point uh at what point do those people start to turn?

We've seen this in other revolutions. Um you know, people you can't you can't kill 50 million people. Um at some point uh people begin to uh defect. Uh and uh I was with the crown prince uh just a couple days ago. Um and uh you know one of the stories was that um there's you know thousands of people are calling in sick uh from the military and the police. Uh that's a form of a labor strike. Um and um and you know they don't want to kill innocent people. Um they they've been uh shipping in mercenaries uh who don't even speak Farsi or Persian. Um and uh they they've been using mercenaries as well to to to kill innocent people. Uh these are occupiers. They're not Iranian. They their their their souls are not Iranian. Uh they're Islamic extremists that took over a country. We should have never allowed it to happen. Um and a free democratic Iran going back to the roots of who we are. Uh would be the greatest peace and economic dividend in the world. We've been working on something called the Cyrus Accords uh which we want to basically uh join the Abraham Accords uh and have in Iran and in Israel that are at peace uh in Iran and the Middle East that are at peace together. Uh a new digital silk road where all these economies are working together, jobs are being created and some of the greatest engineers in the world uh are Iranian as we all know. Silicon Valley is full of incredible Iranian uh American entrepreneurs. The calculations I have, if you add up Uber, Google, eBay, all the different companies that were, you know, uh either founded or uh early on built by by Iranian Americans. Uh it's it's in the trillions of dollars of of contributions to the American economy. And that's only with a million Iranians. Imagine with 92 million brilliant Iranians what could be unleashed in the world instead of exporting terror will export hope and innovation.

How how have economics uh played a role or or the the local economy uh played a role in uh in this current revolution? Uh I know that's part of what's the the just frustration with the state of things. I think the was the regime offering like some uh effectively like stimulus checks or or something of that sort? I saw something like that. But uh what's going on that uh I'm I'm sure that's kind of feeding into uh the movement.

Well, the currency has collapsed as of yesterday. Uh the conversion rate to the dollar was zero. Uh the the the the currency has collapsed. Inflation has gone out has gone out of control. Um, and...

I don't think this is the interview for soundboard. Yeah. I mean, um, we're coping, but the...

It's okay. Um, but the, uh, the water system has collapsed. Um, uh, the the power system has collapsed. Uh, this is a perfect storm and, uh, we're we're days away. If action is taken and the the head of the snake is cut off, um, I I I predict there'll be 50 million Iranians in the street celebrating. Um and uh you know Reza Pahlavi returning uh interim government that would be recognized by by uh all the governments in the world um that are aligned with freedom and democracy and the Iranian people. This is a this is a moral uh cause of our time. These are the brave hearts of our time. These these young people by the millions are sacrificing their lives for a freedom that they might not live to see. Think about that for a second. You know that you know that that is the the kind of spirit that started America and started the the western democracies of the world. Uh my great-grandfather uh started the first uh constitutional revolution uh from Tabriz in 1906 and recruited an American named Morgan Schuster. If you read the book um The Strangling of Persia by Morgan Schuster is a Midwest uh American uh brilliant man who has a statue in Iran uh in his honor from back then and they tried they were inspired by Jeffersonian democracy to to to bring uh democracy to Iran. Um and that paved the way for all the modern rebuilding the Pahlavi the original Pahlavi Reza Pahlavi and then his his father um Mohammad Reza Pahlavi continued and in by 1978 Iran had the fourth largest uh army in the world. Uh it had one of the greatest economies in the world. Uh everyone was coming there Sinatra and uh it was a beautiful beautiful place and uh you know there was a coalition of Islamic extremists uh and the beginning of the woke Marxist socialist era that we're now seeing in places like New York and Manhattan and uh the they've exported this strategy uh because it was so successful for them to take a major strategic asset and and and country with major resources like Iran and and own it and then use that ass those assets uh that that God blessed Iran with to export that ideology and that terror. So this is the fight of our times. If we defeat the Islamic regime, we will unleash an era of peace and prosperity for the world.

What's the what's the history of protests in Iran? Uh it feels like there's been small moments 2009 with disputed elections, 2017, 2019, 2022 feels like every few years there's uh a moment that could grow. It hasn't in the past. Uh walk me through some of the history and then help me understand why this time might be different.

That's a great question and also a good framework to think about what's happening exactly at this moment. Like the next 48 hours I think is do or die. Um each time those protests got to a moment where it could have turned into um a change uh a significant change in the government like like uh 2009 the green revolution of 2009 and 10 um you know the president uh at the time President Obama uh made a major major critical mistake and he didn't back the protesters the way President Trump is backing the protesters and and when you don't back them when you don't give them the courage that they will have the support of America and other other uh democracies in the world that care about freedom and care about uh you know destroying terrorism that is a threat to our way of life. Um uh it it fizzles out and then they learn the Islamic regime learns uh and they become even more uh extremist and uh abusive and you know causing uh you know the hangings by the by the thousands and imprisonments and rapes and to scare people and terrify people. They keep power through through fear. And the thing I learned uh when I went to try to spread um satellite communications in those revolutions in Libya, uh I went there um two weeks before Gaddafi was killed. Um and uh went to Benghazi, went to Tripoli a month after it was it was freed. Went to Tahrir Square. Uh I wrote something called uh fear is finite and hope is infinite. When the people lose their fear is when uh freedom movements actually succeed and the and the people as you can see by the millions in the streets even with all the killings they're still coming out last night they all they still came out uh they've lost their fear and that's when these types of tyrants fall. So if there is support from the air from the skies like Starlink that uh we we began that project patiently in order so this when this day aim that there would be uh open communications with the world and coordination. Um but also uh support from the sky in terms of taking out some of these tyrants. Um you know and uh we took out the nuclear capability before because that was an existential threat. But uh but these these uh evil leaders are are as as bad as a nuclear bomb. They're just a nuclear bomb in a b in a human form.

I feel like a lot of people who grew up and came of age during the war on terror don't have a lot of optimism about regime change. They tend to think that uh even if there's someone some interesting person a lot of energy to come in and lead uh there like the infrastructure is so important because a government's just not just one person. There's, you know, ministers and leaders and all sorts of a chain that that needs to form. And if you don't have a full government ready to go, how can you just rip and replace, drop in someone new? Their their minds go to the debaathification in Iraq and all the chaos that happened there. Um, how how do you think Americans who who've, you know, sort of been blackpilled on regime change in the Middle East should be thinking about uh a positive outcome here?

Well, one experience in Iraq, first of all, Iran is not Iraq. It's 92 million people. Um, you know, 87% uh are don't even consider themselves religious. Um, you know, and uh so it's a very different nation uh that is yearning for freedom, loves America, uh loves uh you know, western culture, wants their freedom. Uh and let us not forget America saved the world uh in World War II. Uh then the Marshall Plan rebuilt uh uh all of Europe. Uh look at Japan's success. Um and and uh and and so um you know and then you look at Reagan and tear down this wall uh and the pressure that he put on in the Soviet Union and then all of the clandestine efforts to that happened to weaken the Soviet Union. Are are are is Germany today a bad place to to to live? No. It wasn't until uh you know potentially extremist Islam invaded invaded Europe. Is Poland a bad place? I was just in Poland multiple times for for my work and my investments. Um it's a thriving economy. Uh so you know uh we have to look at the positive examples of what's possible when you unleash freedom. You have economic boom and you have uh humans that are thriving and contributing to our world.

Well, thank you so much for coming and giving us the update. Uh best of luck to you and everyone involved and uh stay safe and uh best of luck. We'll talk to you soon, Shervin. Thanks so much. We'll talk to you soon. Cheers. Goodbye.

Console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. Uh, we got to go over to the OpenAI device. There's new leaks, alleged leaks. We'll see. Uh, it's a new audio wearable meant to replace AirPods. So, aligns with what The Information has been leaking. Uh, the code name Sweet Pea. Interesting. Uh, it looks like a metal metal egg stone with two little capsules behind the ear. Aiming for a two-nanometer chip, maybe a custom chip for phone-like actions. Big ambition, 50 million units in year one. That's a lot of devices.

So, Foxconn has been told to prepare for five total devices by Q4 of 2028. All not known, but a home-style device and a pen are still considered. I wonder how serious going to Foxconn, if you're OpenAI, you go to Foxconn and you say, "Prepare for five devices." What does that really mean? Does it mean, okay, help me prototype, do some demo runs, build me one or two, and and maybe we'll do one of the five, maybe we'll do two of the five. Uh, is Foxconn really reorienting everything around this? Are they totally prepared to make five? How serious that serious is that? I don't know. All All I know is that it's exciting. I like I like hardware. It's fun. It's a I'm We're seeing it. We're seeing glimpse of this with the kids with with the board and with the the what was what was it called? Camera box. No. Uh sticker box. Yeah, sticker box. Yeah.

I think I mean OpenAI it sounds like uh Johnny's team are the ones that are kind of pushing uh for this form factor according to obviously this is a rumor uh but picking a form factor similar to AirPods which have insane product-market fit which last time I checked are like a $20 billion revenue line for Apple. Very it could be a standalone business by itself and again if you look back to uh the infamous interview uh with Gerson, Sam was saying like, "We have a device coming." Hey, we have a device coming. Don't worry about units. That's a lot of revenue potentially. I mean, I I don't know if they sell them. What do you think the price point for a for a OpenAI device would be? $300, $1,000, $9.99, $3,500 like the Apple.

I feel like I feel like they have to I I feel like they have to stay in the range of AirPods, right? AirPods and AirPods are between $100 and $300 basically. So, low single-digit hundreds. Um, well, Andrew Curran has a projection for what it'll look like if they ship this. I think they got an absolute blockbuster on their hands. Uh, I would rock that. We're already wearing in-ear monitors. You I don't know if you can see over here. Just upgrade it to this. This goes so hard. The reason I like it is because the the computer part is actually on the back. So, it frees you up to just stay totally locked in. Super cool. And also, I love that there's a display that you can't see, but everyone else can, so everyone else knows. Oh, he's doing a deep research report right now. Oh, he's he's locked in. Let's check in on John. John, can you turn around for a second? Yeah. Oh, okay. Three green lights. He's he's printing. He's making money now. Says, "This will be as successful as Humane, Friend, Rabbit, etc." Oh, no. Yeah. Let us know in the chat if you're bullish or bearish on the OpenAI device. Uh, a lot of risk, but a lot of resources. A lot of good people over there.

Uh anyway, whatever whenever they announce it, you know that they're going to live stream it. They're going to get on Restream. One live stream, 30 plus destinations. If you want to multistream, go to restream.com. Uh in other news, we got to go to Apple Creator Studio. Tyler, can you break this down for us? What are they doing? Who's who are they taking shots at? Apple Creator Studio. So, it it seems they're basically just rolling all of their like software. I don't know if there's actually any new software, but they're just like rolling it together into some subscription. And it's kind of like a creative, right? Yeah. Same. Yeah. Okay. So, cuz I mean they already have the the kind of uh same like there's Final Cut and Premiere. It's... So, Jaws Jaws here says uh uh meet Apple Creator Studio. It's giving creators every kind of every kind easy access to powerful intuitive tools for video, music, imaging, and productivity. All supercharged by intelligent features that that speed up and elevate their work. Were they previously selling Final Cut Pro separately? I think they were. Right. Yeah. Usually. Yeah. I remember as a kid paying two I was like, "Wow, I'm going to spend $200 on a piece of software and that felt like $200,000." And you got some for free. Like you get iMovie for free, but then Apple uh but then Final Cut is an upgrade. And I I was actually thinking about purchasing a a Mac Mini or something and I was going through the checkout flow and one of the options that they put right there is, do you want to buy Final Cut Pro for an extra 200 something bucks? And so it seems like they're maybe doing away with that. Let's dig in.

Uh, Apple has just introduced Apple Creator Studio, says Aaron here, analyst at MacRumors. Uh, Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, Pixelmator Pro, Motion Compressor, and MainStage, plus new AI features and premium content in Keynote, Pages, and Numbers come together in a single subscription. They have the games subscription. They have a Did Don't they have a health subscription as well? There's music. There's news. Apple has like seven different subscriptions now that I think about it. Yeah, you can. I would love to know what the average iPhone uh customer spends on software monthly like and and what uh what Apple's take is on it. Both both they're printing their services businesses is everything at this point. Um yeah, I guess you could just divide services revenue. Well, services revenue, they don't really break it all out. Whenever they talk about services, they talk about Apple TV, all the wonderful TV shows and movies that they're producing. Uh but then a lot of the services revenue comes from the App Store. 30% cut. You're laughing. What's funny? Gabe says, "Jordie, you dork. You didn't pirate. You didn't pirate it." Honestly, I think my father was very much like, "You wouldn't you wouldn't you wouldn't steal from the grocery...

Store. Don't, don't steal from... You wouldn't pirate a car, big computer, big Apple.

Yeah. Respect, respect big tech from day one.

Uh, respect Cognition. They're the makers of Devin, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. Uh, I mentioned it earlier, but uh, Dev Patel and Cheteshwar Pujara did a gym workout with Cognition. There's a new series. He's going to hit the gym with AI researchers. This is what the modern media landscape needs for sure. Uh, I love it. Very, very fun. Um, and Doresh says in his defense, Cheteshwar was almost an Olympian. Very, very good. Um, Quant

Atlas looking absolutely diced in this.

It's insane. It's insane. Uh, oh, quick shout out to Donnie Honeg who says, 'TVPN is the only show I like hearing the ad reads on. They just make it so fun.' Well, you're welcome, Donnie. Here's another ad read. ElevenLabs. Build intelligent real-time conversational agents. Reimagine human-technology interaction with ElevenLabs. Thank you for the...

We got to talk about, we got to talk about ElevenLabs growth. Uh, Matty highlighted... Oh yeah, he highlighted it yesterday. He said 0 to 100 million ARR was 20 months. 100 to 200, 10 months. 200 to, uh, 200 to 330 was just 5 months. So, little, uh, quite the acceleration.

Really, really good. Uh, and he is looking sharp here on Bloomberg. And, and also just, it's such an interesting story because when this came out, I, it was, it was the textbook critique of like, the other labs are going to steamroll you. Like, they have all the researchers, they have all the compute, they have all the money. Uh, oh, it doesn't matter what you raise, they raised a hundred times that. This is a side project. They're going to be able to whip this up, uh, in a cave with scraps. You're going to get steamrolled. And that just hasn't happened. And I think it goes back to the focus on, you know, pure-play focus. We've seen Anthropic with the focus on code do really well. This focus on voice and the focus on taste. Sort of the Midjourney of audio is, is my new frame, like, frame of mind here, that it's less of a commodity, more opinionated than I think people realize when it seems like just put the weights in the bag and you're good to go. Um, anyway, uh, do we have our next guest here? Um, let's, let's read through this, uh, back and forth between Tim Sweeney and Palmer Luckey because they're going back and forth. Uh, PC Gamer reported that Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney argues banning Twitter over its ability to, uh, AI-generate adult images of minors is just gatekeepers attempting to censor all of their political opponents. Tim Sweeney fired back and said this is a vile lie by PC Gamer, criticized a government official for pressuring Apple and Google to block a speech app owned by their political opponent, deplatforming 500 million users on the pretense of stopping a small number of users from distributing disgusting content. And Palmer Luckey chimed in and said PC Gamer loves to make things up about people they don't like. Uh, and he's, uh, going back to, uh, a report that PC Gamer put out about... this is an insane headline: 'Tech billionaires, including Palmer Luckey, set up dumb new bank for those who didn't get burned enough in the 2022 crypto crash.' You could write a headline like that? That's insane.

Why? Why does PC Gamer... just so hard? They literally use the word dumb. I mean, I guess this is an opinion piece or something, but it's all about the stablecoins and they call him a Bond villain. Wow, they really don't like him. This is crazy. Palmer replied. He said, quote, 'The point of SVB and thus Arbor is risky bets on fledgling startups that are unlikely to be backed by traditional finance which has all these pesky rules and regulations. Why are you lying?' The point is literally the opposite. Um, yeah, you don't want to, you don't want to recreate SVB. It didn't turn out.

We don't want to keep our next guest waiting. We don't. So, before we bring them in, let me tell you about Vibe.co, where DTC brands, B2B startups, and AI companies advertise on streaming TV. Pick channels, target audiences, and measure sales just like on Meta. Well, we have the president and CEO of Booz Allen Hamilton here. Welcome to the show. Thank you so much for joining.

Hey guys, good to see you.

Good to see you, too. Uh, I, I love your... I want to talk about the partnership with Andreessen Horowitz, but first I want you to introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your journey because it's a classic overnight success that we love here on the show.

Overnight success. I love it. Thank you for the special effects. I was wondering if you were going to use some. Of course.

I'll use a lot. As much as you want.

So, uh, born and raised in Argentina. Came here to go to school. Found my way to Wisconsin, Eau Claire of all places. Loved it there. I went to grad school, joined Booz Allen. Uh, this summer will be 35 years. I was a summer intern with Booz Allen. Wow. And, and here I am, you know, and, um, thought I was going to be here for two years, but fell in love with the people, with the work, with the culture, and I kept getting challenged and... uh, every time I wanted to leave, they promoted me, so I stayed.

That's amazing. That's a virtuous cycle for you. Were there any breaks? I know that, uh, a lot of my friends who were interns in consulting or banking would leave for a couple years, do an MBA, and then maybe come back. Was there any of that, or were you just there the whole time?

No. Right through. I'm a, I'm truly a lifer.

It's amazing. What, what advice are you giving to the next generation of folks who might be interns right now at Booz Allen? Uh, is that opportunity still there? Do you see the, the, the lifer path as being one that you recommend to the new intern?

100%. 100%. And look, I mean, I, I think you, first of all, I, I tell everybody, you got to find an organization that, where your personal values and what you want to do matches the organizational values and what they want to do. And when you find one, grab on with both hands because that alignment is what keeps you going. Uh, and then I say to people, look, I mean, I, early in my career, I wanted to get promoted and this and that and the other thing, and then I, at some point, I, I said, you know what, I just want to learn stuff.

And then they were like, you got to be a CEO. Yeah. What? Uh, it's kind of...

I started getting promoted faster.

Yeah, that's great. Well, yeah, it's kind of rough if you're really good at getting promoted. It's kind of rough to, to kind of, you've kind of capped out a little bit here, but, uh...

Not many, not many promotions left. Um, I, you know, I, I, I come to work because I, I love what I do. I mean, and this has been true for the last 35 years. And yeah, at the beginning, you know, I, I was in a bit of the rat race. I got off of that and literally I just said, 'Let's go learn stuff.' You know, what do I not know about? Let me try and go learn how to do that. How have the last few years... keeps me here.

How have the last few years of the AI boom been? Has it turned it more into a rat race? Has there been more greenfield projects that have been less of a rat race? Uh, how's the, how has the AI boom transformed your business? What you're working on, how you're spending your time?

So, this has been awesome. No, first of all, you should know I have a background in statistics. So, I was like doing early work on neural networks, and if I'd been born 20 years later, I would have been a data scientist, but we didn't have cool titles like that. Uh, but I was a big data guy when big data was tiny compared to what it is now.

Let's give it up for big data. We love big data here.

Yeah. You know, about a dozen years ago, um, I, I, I took the strong-form view that said, you know, AI really is going to revolutionize everything. We need to get Booz Allen at the, at the leading edge of that. Uh, we built essentially the largest, uh, we're the largest AI provider to the federal government. Uh, most of our business is with the government. We've been the largest cyber player, uh, in the federal space going back now maybe 20-plus years. And, uh, I, I've always thought about it as AI and, right, it's this intersection of AI and cyber, AI and space, AI and autonomy, and that, that's what we've been trying to build. And, and, you know, Booz Allen, really, people think of us as a consulting firm because we, we were one once, uh, that's the company that I joined. Sure. But if you look at us now, uh, our business is, we're in the business of taking leading-edge technology and bringing it to government missions. Uh, everything from military missions to space to, uh, payment systems to public health. Uh, we're bringing tech into all of that, which is why we build these amazing partnerships.

How, uh, you know, because, yeah, how has the last year changed your relationship with the government? That, that, you know, if you start 2025, I think about DOGE and, and a bunch of political energy around reducing cost and maybe reducing budgets and doing more with less, which of course software and technology can help with. Uh, at the same time, I saw a headline that the, that President Trump thinks the defense budget's to be 1.5 trillion, and that feels like, okay, expand, and we're in a different mode. So has that been whiplash, or have, how have you processed setting up your business to deliver what you need to, to the government across those sorts of narrative arcs that have, uh, rolled out over the last, you know, 12 months?

So if you think about our business, there's two pieces to it. There's work that we do for, for national security. That's about three-quarters of our business. And then there's work that we do for, uh, more of the civilian agencies. Um, think about things like the VA, uh, Human Health Services, uh, uh, Treasury, IRS, th-those kinds of agencies. Um, the, uh, the administration has been pretty consistent on, on, on the more of the civilian side. They've been looking very hard for ways to reduce cost. On the, on the national security side, they've been looking to reprogram against top priorities. And so this idea that, that we're going to spend more on defense going forward, uh, if, if, you know, that obviously needs to be approved by Congress and all of that. But the president has been pretty consistent about wanting to rebuild the military, uh, ensure that, that our military continues to be the preeminent one in the world. And, and we view bringing technology into that and working with the commercial technology providers to make their technology useful into those missions, which is not a straight translation by any means, as a big part of what we do. So we develop tech that sits on top or together with their tech, and together we build things that then neither one of us could do.

So what does that mean for hiring? I imagine that you're, you're partnering with the foundation lab companies, not necessarily trying to go up against Mark Zuckerberg and pay a billion dollars for some fancy AI researcher. Let Google DeepMind, let OpenAI, let Anthropic and other labs build the foundation models, and then you can go and implement them. So what type of person is really excelling? How technical are they? Are you hiring computer scientists, MBAs, both? Uh, who, who's thriving?

We're hiring, uh, largely, uh, think of it as AI researchers. We have a very large quantum team, uh, where we hire astrophysicists. Uh, you know, and, and, and so we're, we're really at the leading edge of these technologies, working side by side with, with all of our partners. Uh, I, I joke about the fact that I knew Jensen back when he was only worth a couple billion dollars. Uh, and he and our companies have been working together on some of these things since like 2017. So we, we've been at this for a while. I mean, you talk about that, Mark and, and Meta. Uh, we took Llama. And working with them, uh, translated into something that could be ported onto the International Space Station. Uh, so it became Space Llama, which is, it made for some pretty cool memes. But now on the, on the research side of the International Space Station, there is a, for the first time, a large language model there, so that instead of going through all of these paper manuals every time they need to fix something, they can actually do natural language queries and, and, and do all of that. So that's the type of work that we're doing. If you think about it, most commercial tech is oriented towards the idea that you're going to be in a data center that has perfect access to energy, perfect access to fiber. Um, you know, it's 24/7 uptime. When you start dealing with some of the missions that we support, you're at the edge, you're in the desert, you're in space, you're underwater, you have no connectivity, uh, form factor matters, power matters, and we need to take all of this amazing technology and these trillions of dollars in investment and make it useful in those settings. And for that, we build additional tech that is proprietary to us that, that combined with theirs, uh, really does wonderful things.

And we started working with some of the, uh, companies that are, uh, A16Z... Porcos... uh, and, and discovered that, you know, there's a lot we were doing there for the, with the companies that were already oriented towards our market. But I know you had Ben on the show on, on Friday. Uh, you know, they have 1,100 companies or more in their portfolio. The vast majority of them are not thinking about these missions, but they're building, many are building technologies that are highly applicable. So if we grab their tech and our tech and put it together in a different way, we expand markets, create differentiation, uh, it's all sorts of good stuff that happens.

Yeah. You mentioned you knew, uh, you knew Jensen when he was just worth a few billion dollars. When did you meet, uh, the Andreessen team? How long has this partnership been in the works? And then, uh, I'd love to know more about the nature of the exclusivity of the partnership, how that all takes shape, uh, and anything else you can tell us about it.

Uh, sure. So, um, we've been working with, with, uh, companies that are in their portfolio for years without actually engaging at the, you know, with A16Z directly. So, uh, Booz Allen and Databricks, for example, have done a number of things together in the Department of Defense. Uh, we, we do things with Anduril. We, you know, we, we have a partnership with Shield AI. That makes a ton of sense because we're building our tech and our cybersecurity tech on top of Hivemind, which is their core, uh, autonomy product. Uh, and then we, about a year plus ago, uh, I started talking to, to Ben and to Mark, and we started shaping this idea that there's more we could do together, uh, at their level, that, that, you know, we could begin to think about not just the companies that are obviously playing in this market, but the broader ecosystem and thinking about, okay, how we create a way to even do that. What's that discovery process look like? How do we create opportunities? How do we vet them? Uh, how do we manage our tech? So that, you know, and, and that's been the, the, over the course of the last year, we've done a bunch of stuff that has gotten us all super excited leading up to this announcement on Monday.

Great. What are some of the earliest-stage companies that, that, uh, would qualify for this program? Are you working with, uh, like Series A stage? They have, they have an accelerator. So companies that come in with just one or two co-founders and they get a $100,000 check, and then you have a Databricks, which is a hundred-billion-dollar business. Uh, how do you size the partnerships?

Uh, so, so we're working, you know, we're almost working problem-back. So what is the problem we're trying to solve, and who has a piece of this puzzle? So we even have our own little corporate VC fund, and there's companies in there. Uh, Seek is a great quantum company. Elydo is, is doing, uh, very low-Earth-orbit satellites. Um, let's see. Scout AI, uh, is doing autonomy on the ground. Firestorm is doing, uh, uh, essentially 3D-printed drones. And, and we think about, okay, so what's, what is Firestorm doing? What's Shield doing? What are we doing? If we bring all of this together, can we solve a unique problem that, that we know exists that doesn't have a solution today? Uh, so, so, you know, we're not so interested in the size of the company so much as we're interested in problem-back: what can we solve and how do we scale it. So we're working with Mistral, for example, uh, which is in their portfolio, uh, on, on NATO-type problems and, and European ally problems. As you know, Europe is, is beginning to spend their fair share on, on the defense, on their defense budgets. Well, they got a series of issues that we can tackle together that weren't on anybody's radar screen. Uh, so, so that's the kind of stuff that, frankly, super excites me, and I think this is where there's a ton of energy and, and, and some really cool stuff coming along.

Sure. Sure. Jordi, anything else? No, very cool. Yeah. Thank you so much for taking the time to come talk with us. Uh, congratulations on the partnership, and we're excited to, to hear more. I'm sure a bunch of, uh, portfolio founders will be on the show. Uh, and yeah, join us again as you guys have more announcements. Yeah, we'd love to keep... Absolutely. Thank you guys. Have a great rest of your day. Cheers. Goodbye.

Let me tell you about Phantom Cash. Fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen and spend with a Phantom Card. Uh, Parker Conrad, the founder and CEO of Rippling, chimed in on the one-time California billionaire tax. He says, 'Leave before the Series B.' Uh, I don't think of Parker as outspoken against the, the, the California Democrats very often. Uh, but he's, uh, quoting Jason Calacanis here, who has more context.

I can read through this. So Jason says, 'My take on California's one-time billionaire tax: it's much worse than it looks. Will it pass? Yes, likely. It only needs, uh, 50% plus one voter approval. Uh, CI, you and CTA have done this before. Prop 55, 63% in 2016. Will it get tied up in litigation? Almost certainly. Retroactive wealth tax on a tax type California has never had equals, uh, due process challenges. Billionaires have the legal budgets for years of fights. But it's clearly only the start, that the goal is an annual tax, not a one-time, and the target is 25 to 50 million net worth folks, including illiquid holdings. I.e., early-stage founders raising a Series B. And the one-time framing is strategic. Same coalition already has AB 259 written, an annual 1% wealth tax at a greater than $50 million threshold with plans to go to 25 million. It's been introduced three years running. The one-time tax removes the constitutional barrier. Once that's gone, the annual version becomes a much easier ballot measure. California Policy Center said if SEIU hopes to keep medical spending growing, it may need to place repeated wealth taxes on the ballot, potentially lowering the threshold as billionaires flee.' The risk for founders: at 1 billion, you're taxing, uh, 200 people. At 50 million, you're taxing 23,000, uh, households, including the most successful founders on paper, before any liquidity event. So imagine, uh, you raise a Series B, suddenly you have 50 million of, of paper gains, and suddenly the government's coming over and saying like, 'Yeah, we, we need you to, uh, come up with a piece of that or get on a payment plan.' And so then you're effectively like, you know, just like building up a debt to the California government that as of right now seems like it just doesn't go away. Even if your company fails, it's like you owe that to the state. So what'll happen here is people might, uh, if this goes through as is, uh, people will start companies, like, uh, like Parker's saying, they'll start the company and maybe they raise like a pre-seed round, seed round, something like that, and then they'll be like, okay, I, I literally have to move the company, or maybe they won't even start it in California in the first place. And, uh, and Newsom has come out in the last 24 hours and, and, uh, is against the tax, so he is, uh, on, siding with the, the tech billionaires. Interesting. Yeah. Um, but yeah, when I see names like Parker Conrad, Vinod Khosla, like, I don't think of these as like the tech, right? I just think of these as like tech people. And so to see them pushing back against this is, uh, it's less of a political issue and more, more of a practical issue about where, uh, companies will be led from. I saw a different angle that, uh, potentially the super-voting, like, control could be used to determine how much, uh, you have to pay, and so you could have a founder who, uh, has super-voting shares. They have 90% of the voting shares, but they take on... $100 million company. The bill, as the, the, the way it's written today, they'd be taxed as if they have a $90 million position in the company. Which is just insane. And they might have a, by that point, they might have a 25%, you know, they might have less depending if they're, you know, multiple founders. So, uh, Pirate Wires has a great, uh, piece on this. I'd encourage everybody to read it. 'California's tech industry kill switch' from Mike Solana. Uh, he says it's not a tax on wealth. The union's ballot prop is designed to target the very concept of founder-controlled companies. Yeah. And it will force the technology industry out of the state. Yeah. It would be very, very weird to see a situation where, uh, a company gets started. They still go to San Francisco because that's a fun place to be. That's an exciting place to be. But then, uh, slowly the executive ranks are just relocating to Incline Village or Las Vegas or Texas. Eventually you pull every... surprised that Jensen, Jensen was like, 'Yeah, I don't, I don't mind it.' It's like, 'Were you just trying to earn points right with the, with the general population?' And like, at what point, like, so many of his employees would be, uh, subject to this, right? At, at a certain point, yes. And I don't know, it could be very complicated. Um, it certainly seems like a, like a, yeah, just very, very complicated, uh, uh, position. Uh, Austin says, 'I wonder how many founders in California know that if you are making 250k a year and move to Texas or Florida, you pay $2,500 a month less in taxes. Switching state of residence will save enough to cover rent.' And of course, Austin, I believe he doesn't, he believe, doesn't he live in Utah? I don't think he lives in California, although he is part of the Silicon Valley community. Uh, and Newsom did chime in. He vows to stop the tax. Uh, where are the prediction markets on the tax? Will this happen? While we look that up, let's pull up Gary Tan. He says it's time for Silicon Valley to actually get involved and organize in California. One, financially tough times are ahead for California. California's government will almost certainly try to loot Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley will flee. Four, this will create a severe loss for the Bay Area and California and for the United States. Five, the only way out is for successful technologists to run and win for office at every level in the 2026 midterm elections, especially for governor. Um, so, uh, quotes from Newsom says, 'This will be defeated. There's no question in my mind. I'll do what I have to do to protect the state.' Uh, the governor has long opposed a wealth tax because of concerns it would... say, all of that is, uh, just very, very complicated. But there's really good news because now you can book a hotel on the moon. A new startup backed by Nvidia and Y Combinator is planning to develop the first hotel on the moon by 2032. I'm going. I'm going. It's starting at $416,000 per night. We'll see where that actually lands. You can book on their website, but we have the perfect guest to discuss because we have Glenn Fogel, the president and CEO of Booking Holdings. Hopefully, we'll be able to book a hotel on the moon. We can ask him about it. He's in the ream waiting room. Let's bring him in to the TVPN Ultradome. Glenn, how are you doing?

Uh, but yeah, but, but, but, but here's the thing. Do you remember the TV series? Like, I think it was... Oh god, was it AMC? It was Mad Men. Do you remember that? Yeah. There was an episode where the person who was supposed to be the head of Hilton, Conrad Hilton. Yeah. And he'd hired, he'd hired the guy, and he wanted to have the ad be about putting a hotel on the moon. Ahead of, ahead of their time. Ahead of their time. They, uh, this company should, should go back and reference it. I'm sure there's, I'm sure there's some great, uh, copy buried in there. Uh, but fantastic to have you on the show. Would love, uh, would love a, just an introduction on yourself and the journey on, on how you got here.

Where did, where were you before, uh, before you joined?

Amazing. Amazing timing to leave, but then you're sitting there being like, is, am I going to, am I going to have a job? Uh, totally. Well, what, yeah, what matters is you, you, uh, you saw it through. Uh, did you ever, was there any, was there ever a point that you, uh, or, or any of your peers were like, 'Okay, maybe the internet is just over,' or was it like, hey, we just, we really, we, it's just like we need to just really hunker down and we got ahead of our skis and, uh, this is all inevitable, but, uh, it's just not, you know, like most things, it's not always up and to the right, uh, forever.

Yeah. Never lost. How have you been, uh, processing all of the agentic commerce news? We had, uh, Harley from Shopify on the store talk on the show yesterday talking about, uh, what Google's doing. Obviously, ChatGPT is interested in, uh, agentic commerce, being able to, uh, you know, complete transactions in the LLMs, in the chatbots, and the apps. Uh, how are you thinking about your strategy in a world where people want to purchase things through text and chat?

Hit the gong, John. We got a gong here. We'd love to, we'd love to hit it on your behalf.

Yeah. Yep. So, uh, obviously it feels like it's advantageous to have as much experience as you have at the company for another tech transition. Uh, how are you thinking? We were talking to Harley about this. Like, is this the, is this similar to the mobile moment or social moment? Obviously with Shopify, they think a lot about brands, which were very much transformed by influencers showing off some leggings or some product that you want to buy. And so you go right there. And there was a debate, will it, would that transaction happen on Instagram or on Facebook? It ultimately wound up happening on Shopify, but the ads platform was very valuable and there was an integration there. Um, how are you tracking previous lessons from previous technology shifts in purchasing behavior to kind of prepare for the, the agentic transition if it happens this year or next year or whenever it happens?

How difficult is it to, uh, for an AI to act as a travel agent? Yeah, that's what I was going to ask. We, we, we, we've had this question where, uh, the AI models seem so powerful. They can build whole websites. They can write more complex code than I could write in a month. They can do it in just an hour. And yet I actually can't just say, 'Hey, I need to get to New York. Book me a flight.' Because I wind up having all these weird preferences. I don't want to lay over. I'm okay flying early, but I don't really want to fly late. Yeah. When people talk, every, every lab wants to build the best, you know, super assistant. And when I think about the moments where, uh, and like a real EA in my life has delivered the most value, it's when I'm like, okay, this meeting's running late. I'm going to miss my flight. I need to re-, you know, and I'm just firing off a text being like, you know, I need to, uh, switch the car to pick me up like in an extra hour and I'm going to miss my flight. Find me the best flight. I don't want to lay over. Like, I want to lay flat. Like, all, all these details that today that still takes, you know, that still takes real time. And so I'm curious for you, like, where do these experience, where do you see these experiences actually sitting? Is it, is it in, you know, ChatGPT or Gemini, or it's, it's going to be sitting in Siri, or will it be sitting on Booking.com and you guys want to own that experience, or both?

How are you, uh, how are you processing the rise of voice agents? I get really excited about, uh, you know, there's so many moments still, even with the internet, where you, if you're traveling, you end up having to like call a hotel or talk to somebody in person. Uh, never really want to do that, right? It's just like, give me the information, etc. Uh, but it feels like we're moving to a world where, uh, eventually it could just be agent-to-agent directly, no voice. But feels like we're gonna, there's some middle ground where you have agent-to-human, uh, or voice agent-to-voice agent, and they're just having a conversation. Voice agent to like legacy phone tree, which is all recordings, but it's a deterministic system. And just having an agent be able to run through that speeds things up.

What's the key to a great celebrity partnership? Hiring a spokesperson. Yeah. The great thing is that it ends up with more business than what you paid them. Yeah. There we go. What are the keys to success? Uh, what would you recommend? We've been, we noticed, uh, we were watching, uh, the Xbox launch at CES, and Bill Gates is standing on stage, and he's next to Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson, and he refers to him just as Rock. It's very funny. It's awkward in funny ways, but it's cool. It's interesting. Obviously, everyone knows the Priceline Negotiator. Uh, but what's the key to success? What would you recommend? When is the right time to bring in a celebrity? Like, do you have a mental model for this, or have you just delegated it to someone else on your team? Like, how do you...

Yeah. Uh, what's your workout routine? You're looking absolutely jacked. I got to ask.

Uh, what do you, uh, have you ever, we, we've joked on the show before, we, we get frustrated at gyms having a, a dumbbell, a weight limit. We think it's because of the insurance, but most gyms, the, the weights, the dumbbells start, stop at 40 lb, 50 lbs. They don't... I think that could be a Booking, Booking.com feature is like, I want, I want hotels...

I know. But you have a small but, but, uh, you know, very passionate audience.

I love it. Sometimes you just want to stack a couple 45s on the bar and move a big number. How are you...

But you look, that's why, that's why I asked. Yeah. Quick recommendations. What's on the shelf behind you? What would you give to somebody, uh, the next generation? What do you think is worth reading?

not having used that time more efficiently and more effectively. That's possible. That's one outcome. But it's also possible that I'm on my deathbed being like, I wish I watched a few more Instagram reels. I wish I scrolled TikTok just for a couple more minutes.

No, I think I think uh I I think that the the what you're saying there's a very real scenario in the future where people uh you know are are towards the end of their life and they're just looking at their lifetime screen time on their iPhone just saying like don't do this, don't do this. Um I one more one more uh more serious question. How are you guys thinking about the live events category broadly? There's a lot of people talking about uh excited about live events specifically because they feel

screen time like like from AI.

One of the challenges of scale. You're like, we are the market. We're just shifting pieces around.

I have one last question.

We'll let you go. Uh, you travel a lot. You run a travel company. What's the secret to avoiding jet lag? And

This is good. I like that.

That's essentially just man up. Just suck it up and just just disregard it. Just ignore it. I love that. That's the best advice I've heard. People will tell you all sorts of take your shoes off, do this, do that. I like that one. That's great.

Breaking. We need to put this on a headline. Breaking.

It doesn't exist. It's just a figment of your A figment of your imagination.

Okay. Yeah, there we go. Makes sense. Well, I hope hopefully uh the rockets can get fast enough that uh when we're booking we're booking a hotel on the moon on Booking.com.

Well, thank you so much. This was super fun. Come back on again soon. Really enjoyed it.

Cheers. Goodbye.

Do you want to change the world? Go to the New York Stock Exchange and raise capital. Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Just do it. No more excuses.

Yeah, it's our number one piece of advice this year to to anyone who asks. What What advice would you give me? That's going to be our advice for our next Just raise money. Hey, uh, next round JD, do it at the New York Stock Exchange. Just Just raise capital. Do a little road show. Just do it. Stop making excuses. Yeah, really. Stop making excuses.

Uh, JD JD here. He is the co-founder of with coverage. An absolute dog. An absolute dog. We got some breaking news from him. JD, how you doing? Good to see you. He's back. Good to see you guys. Welcome back to the show.

Glenn has energy for 60 whatever. Oh yeah, that's why I was like, I need to know this guy's workout routine. He's like, jet lag doesn't exist.

There's a couple of these corporate athletes. Strauss Zelnik, the CEO of Take 2, maker of GTA, is uh absolutely diced. He's in his 60s. He's on the cover of Men's Fitness every once in a while. There's a couple people that figure out how to just keep that motor going. I'm a big believer in the 65 to 95 era of a business person's career. Warren Buffett testosterone. Everything Everything before that was a warm-up.

Everything else is a warm-up. 65 is where the real game starts. That's where the compounding begins. But you're much younger than 65. But you have some breaking news for us. Give it to us.

It's all peptides. You would peptides.

Okay. I guess that's the news. But no, tell us about the business. Tell us what's going on in your world.

Yeah. So, uh, we are arguably in the most boring of the enterprise businesses you could possibly be in. I think enterprise businesses.

It's not boring to us.

Not boring to us. That's why we're here every day. That's why we have a gong. And I know we're going to ring it.

Yeah. So, we run insurance. We're We're modernizing insurance brokerage. Basically, we replace the traditional insurance broker with a ramp for risk management. Oh, wrong side. Rampage.

There we go.

And uh we just raised $42 million series B from founder No.

Great stuff. Can't even get a word in. We're just having too much fun. Hit him with the flashbang. That was American Eagle. Watch out. Watch out, JD. Watch out.

Anyways, once you uh once you get your bearings, you can continue. who did the deal.

It's been awesome. Um, I'm teaming back up with Keith Boy, who is my co-founder at Open Door, and we brought on uh Sequoia as a new investor.

Amazing. The PayPal mafia coming together. You're a made man.

Yeah. You know, it's uh I think it's the first time Keith and Ruof have co-led a deal together. Uh so, it's the first time they coled something since uh since since PayPal. Yeah.

You're you're you're a wise guy bringing getting the getting the band getting the band back together. That's fantastic. Um well, uh walk me through $42 million series B. What does that actually mean? Because insurance like at some point you have to have reserves. There's is there like are are you acting as an intermediary and there's a different financial institution that's dealing with uh the actual uh the capital that goes towards that. Is this capital going towards the operations, the hiring, building of the product or is it actually like if there's a insurance claim, you're paying it out of this $42 million. How how does that all work?

So, what's cool about our business is everyone else in the industry gets paid more the more money that you spend on insurance, right? They're they're brokers. Um, we don't bear risk. We're just helping you be placed with the right insurance carriers. Yeah. And so what we've done which is actually like shockingly innovative and say hey instead of charging you based on how much you spend we're going to charge you based on how complex you are and how much you know servicing you need and how much you know product you need. Uh and so we replace that with a flat fee and then say hey we're going to net out all the commissions from your from your policies. You're not going to pay commission um as much as legally possible and it's just one fee for us for service. And what that does is it aligns incentives and as a result you know over 700 companies now have moved over from you know Gou Puff and Eight Sleep uh to you Chomps Bombas tons of these incredible businesses.

I thought you were saying I when you first said that I was like wait go had a had a had a enterprise insurance product.

No no no so so we don't do the insurance.

Yeah. So so almost like asset light. I don't know exactly the term but more of like meteor platform technology company but uh at the same time I feel like I've heard so many amazing stories about it's really hard but once you get the insurance business actually up and running you wind up with Berkshire Hathway or what's happening with Apollo like you just have this this float and this cash machine that can go towards other things. Is that enticing to you even if it's going to happen when you're on when you're in your 65 to 95 year old run? Is that something that might happen decades from now or is that just like never in the picture because it's fundamentally incompatible with what you're doing?

I I think you have to start with your customer, right? Like when you go from like the like, oh wow, that's really enticing. You start like twisting upside down to find a way to make a bad business like decision. And this is kind of what I think some of our earlier competitors did in the last round of insure tax is they said, "Well, let's that looks really nice. Let's go after that." and then they were fundamentally misaligned with their customers. Our job is never to our job is to get you the cheapest insurance possible for the best coverage, right? As soon as we start selling our own book, there's no way for us to be able to do that job. And so, we don't do reserves. The 42 million we've raised is for product development and sales and growth. Um, unfortunately, we haven't found a way to spend money yet as a company. We didn't we haven't touched a penny of our series A when we raised this. It was kind of more to say we were profitable last year, which is crazy. That's um Wow. But I'm confident we will solve that problem this year. Yeah.

How do how does the how does this actual sales cycle uh work? People are you know signing up uh with you know for a specific insurance plan and then there's like you know it's cyclical like h how how does that motion working for you guys?

Yeah. So usually it starts with an introduction or like you know someone saying hey you got to talk to these guys they're awesome. Um, and our first conversation is they're already on board on the product. It's get them on, we'll show them exactly how it works. Instead of like going through PDFs and everything else, you see everything in one place. And we're going to do this very strong like in detail risk analysis saying top to bottom. Here's your company. Here's like the opportunity for someone to get hurt slipping and falling in your restaurant. Here's what happens when someone in your manufacturing facility, you know, might get injured or if a product injures a customer. All the different cases if you might need a product recall. Yeah. and running through those scenarios and saying this isn't is where you are currently covered and not covered and how we can fix it and also here's how you benchmark against everyone else just like you. So instead of working with that sort of generalist insurance broker, we bring on this specialized team almost like the Navy Seals of you know product recall and say here's exactly what you need to do to deal with this when it happens. And for us risk management doesn't end with insurance products. It goes through like what do you actually do when that happens? What's your playbook for dealing with a product recall? Who what lawyers do you need to talk to? How do you actually like file this with, you know, the relevant regulatory bodies? There's a whole bunch of stuff and we do this for customers in kind of every single uh industry that we work with from, you know, aerospace and defense to healthcare to construction to consumer brands.

How do you think uh is insurance playing a factor in like these legal cases with the big AI labs? I saw Enthropic paid like a billion dollar fine for scraping some books and it's just something that if I'm underwriting Anthropic at seed it's like how am I going to predict that they're going to scrape books that they shouldn't and this lawsuit's going to happen it's going to be this huge settlement and that feels like something that would be way out of coverage but are people even thinking about insuring for these like entirely new dynamics that can happen only in the AI age?

Absolutely. And there's really cool um new carriers who are kind of stepping in. And we've seen whenever there's a new innovation in kind of business, some new insurance company that becomes a giant leader is the first one to come in and step in and say, "Hey, I'm willing to take a understand like really understand this and take a bat." Interesting. And so Coalition did this with cyber insurance. It's now a five plus billion dollar company where no one else really understood what cyber insurance meant. Yeah. They came and did that. Now they're doing, you know, really well across DNO and a number of other spaces. Interesting. Same thing with crypto that's been more kind of broadly adopted, but you know, sure is like relevant and amazing there.

Oh, interesting. And in that in Walk me through the that that cyber insurance example, like do they have to raise money? Are they raising debt? Like how do you if you weren't doing what you're doing and you were just building a pool of capital to insure uh companies directly, what does the what does the buildout of a company like that actually look like? I've never really

Yeah. You you literally need to raise tens to hundreds of millions of dollars of equity and then yeah to collateralize the issue and then partner with so you start by partnering with existing insurance companies if you can. Yeah. But if they don't understand it and unwilling to underwrite it, you have to just raise huge pools of capital.

Mhm. Wow.

I mean this is the oldest business of all time. It's is basically Lloyds of London is a syndicate of people who were just pooling capital for these literally pooling capital for risk for ships. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Traces all the way back to the dawn adventure, the whailing and whatnot. Fascinating. Fascinating. Well, these crazy things in insurance, too, where like the words that are used don't make any sense. You're like, why would trucking be called marine?

Well, it's because it's you're shipping you're literally shipping things, you know, on ships over water. They just adopted it.

Wait, so marine insurance refers to trucking like physically?

Yeah, like it's called inland inland marine. Inland marine.

Interesting. Wow. Wow. What an awesome industry. Uh well, congratulations on all the progress.

Where where are you guys uh where are you guys seeing the benefits from AI in the business, not on the product side, outside of coding?

I think what's really cool is um like we we we can measure this stuff, right? And like I think last year I would have said, "Oh, we get rid of data entry. We get rid of whatever." Now I can say each person in our team is writing three times as many emails today as they were 6 months ago. Wow. Like we've scaled the business. We're breaking the scaling laws of financial services through AI where we're pulling in all the context and it's becoming much less human reliant on the day-to-day operation of the business. So that people are actually just focusing on like high-end problem solving uh strategy the things that you know people are good at but I have no idea how sort of the you know entry level kind of paper pushing jobs are going to keep doing this because we just don't need them.

Interesting. Where are you building the business?

So the company's based in New York. Um I'm the odd man out in Austin.

Okay.

And I think in San Francisco if you're building a like model company Yeah. you got to be an SSF. Yeah, if you're building applied AI uh in financial services, it's just much easier to do that in New York. Like the people actually understand what that means. Yeah.

And so for us, we're we don't sell software, right? Like we're building a competitor to Marsh Aon locked in these kind of 50 to$100 billion brokers and we're coming in and saying look like we can't sell software to you. You can't buy software. You have no idea how to even deploy this. You have like 10 different factions in your org to do this. Mhm. If we were to do that, we would do that maybe in San Francisco. In New York, you get to go headtohead and say, "Look, I'm just going to go after your clients, and we're just going to do your job better.

Your lunch. Yeah. Your lunch is for Martines.

Yes. Uh that's amazing. Well, thank you so much for stopping by and giving us the It just makes so much sense going in and uh you know, talking with coverage and having them not just be incentivized for you to spend the most amount of money, but for to get the best plan and actually get the most out of it. Uh it's just uh I love I love the alignment. I appreciate I'm waiting for you guys to do your first like events so I can show you. You know, we'll cover all your like awesome giant conferences with the fireworks and stuff you're inevitably going to want in there.

Yes. If I catch on fire, well, we need we're trying to get our intern catches on fire. We want to get a fog machine. We want like a CO2 cannons in here.

That could be very risky. Suck all the air out of here.

We're insured for We're not doing that yet without good insurance. So, we'll talk.

I actually own two industrial snow machines, so if you ever need to rent one, just take these out.

Well, we needed that during Christmas. Where were you when we were dressed up as Santa Claus? We needed We We had the fake snow going over the show. Uh but the next year, real snow for real snow. I'm shipping it out. Thank you so much. Have a rest of your week, JD. Talk soon. Goodbye.

Let's kick it over to this video by Storm Crew on YouTube. The boss asked me to take on 10 robots by myself. An individual has assembled a set of 10 unitry or humanoid robots, got in the boxing ring, and fought them. And the results are very very interesting. We'll have to sort of click through a little bit of this video, but he fights incremental amounts of somebody to do this forever. I've wanted to do this personally. I want to fight the humanoids. Look at this. So, it's one-on-one and it's not too bad. He can just hold it off. He's just he's just holding. Can't do anything. Now, keep in mind this is the unit tree. I believe it's the G1, the the cheaper, smaller version. Now, he's one on three. Let's see what happens. He's kick. They're kicking. Oh, he does the pull rush. That's a I had not thought of that strategy. Oh, he's pushing them over. And with these small unitry guys, once you get them down, they can get up, but they're pretty easy to pin. He starts He starts fighting five. This is one on five now. He needs a flash. It is. They are hitting him. They are hitting him. He's taking some blows. Oh, he knocks one down. That's a good hit. Their movement looks surprising. Oh, he picks it up. Oh, we're going WWE mode. He picks it up and slams it down. Oh, he gets back up. He's got to throw it back. They really They need bigger robots because it looks like he's just bullying when they when they pop up. That is That is a scary animation. Okay. Picking up and throwing it out of the ring. Oh my god. Slammed onto the ground. Yeah. Slammed onto the ground. Well, he finally Okay. He's fighting like six or seven here. They're really closing in at this point. This This is where it starts to get intimidating. I feel like seven, you know, you can't keep your eyes on all of them at the same time, but if you use them against each other. Yeah. Creating the pile, the pile method, that's what you want to go for. You want to create a heap of of humanoid robots, benchmark, the Terminator benchmark. Terminator bench. This is the only benchmark I really care about. Who wins, AI or humans? But then he adds the G2, which is the newer unitry robot. And this one is a little bit more athletic, and things start to get a little bit riskier. Do we think they're I imagine all of this is tea operated. Uh I this seems like some sort of ad integration or some AIL. We're ad appreciator. I don't know what's going on. Let's skip to the final bit. I think we can skip ahead. I think it starts at 208 maybe. Uh we can see robot 10x. That was a clean Yeah. So So he's boxing the big guy and he hits. Yeah. It's it's pretty he gets knocked on the ground. It's not looking good for humanity. very very rough. Uh if we skip to I think he's getting a little fatigued. Oh yeah, he is. He's running out of gas. It's tiring. I think he I think I think the conclusion of this headbutt from Look at that. That looks very dangerous. Uh I think the conclusion of this video is that he loses. You know, who knows how scripted this is. It's a lot of fun. Yeah. A lot of cuts. A lot of cuts. You know, it's mostly entertainment, but uh it's good entertainment. Challenge yourself to fight robots with difficulty levels ranging from one to 10 robots. See how many you can ultimately KO. That could be a good uh that could be a good sort of you know those VR centers where you go and do VR in person. Yeah. You could go and do this in your local put that next to your CrossFit gym. Anyway, next up we have our Lambda Lightning round.

Nick from Sandstone is the co-founder and CEO. He's in the reream waiting room. Get that gong ready. And now he's in the TVP and Ultra. Nick, how are you doing? What's happening? Let's get the gong going. How much did you raise? What's going on?

We're announcing our $10 million seed round.

There you go. A humble 10 a humble humble mango seed. We love to see it. Million. Real question. 10. You versus 10 humanoid robots. Do you think you could beat them up?

I I don't think so.

Okay. Um but you're the same young. We all we we all need those robots in our in our life. We're going to get them in the office as soon as we can. And I think that's your first round to to come work at Sandstone is you actually have to fight off the robots to get into the office. There you go. That's a good qualifier. You're you're you're building AI for in-house legal teams. I imagine if the humanoid robots get deployed and they start harassing people, the in-house legal teams will be it's deploying our market. Huge for our market. Yeah. Uh but this is something we've actually been excited about. We've been we've been wondering uh where legal AI will land. There's obviously companies they're selling to large firms. You can do some stuff in the apps by yourself, but that feels a little bit risky. Sometimes the the the the chat apps will push back on you. Hey, I'm not a lawyer. I don't want to give you this type of advice. And maybe you don't want to upload your employment agreement to an app that will ultimately train on it, maybe leak your information at some point. So, how are you thinking about building the product, the go to market, um the the the value prop in a world where the other platforms exist and there are some DIY options?

Yeah, I mean the first of all, thanks for having me, guys. It's great to be here. I think the the the way that we've thought about approaching the in-house market is really from sort of two pain points that we saw and I saw this when I was serving legal teams at McKenzie and as an engineer. in-house teams have a ton of requests that come in from the business, from external users. They're basically getting bombarded with emails and Slacks and Teams messages, right? And they don't have a single platform in the same way that you know we have Linear or Jira um if you were an engineer 10 years ago um to to manage your work and who's doing what. Um and so that that's not even yet an AI problem, but rather a data problem. And so that was the first thing that we wanted to solve which was like can we sit across all these systems that lawyers have to deal with and pull in all the requests into one place so that when the AI you know goes to redline the agreement or answer the question or draft the contract it already has context on you know the entire thread that you're working on as well as all your other business systems. So, one of the issues with, you know, whether it's Claude or or ChatGBT or even some of the legal solutions out there is, you know, I open a contract and I ask for it to be reviewed, but if it's a sales agreement, I need to know like, you know, have we worked with this company before? Is it high ACV? How does it compare to our other deals in Salesforce? Does the seller have a good relationship? Right? These kinds of things are like what the lawyer actually goes and like they spend admin time doing to go gather that information. We want to be the context layer that pulls that all in. So when you go open that ticket in your system in sandstone which has the sales agreement all that context is there and ready for you.

So how do you pull in all that data? Are you a big like Zappier customer and you're integrating with everything on day one? Are you writing MCP integrations, API integrations? Is it client by client and it's more hightouch because you're going with really big companies as starting uh customers and you go to their in-house legal team and if they're using some custom CRM, you'll build a custom CRM integration uh because it's important to them. Uh how do you go down the stack of integrations to get that full context?

Yeah. So mostly API integrations. I think there's some MCP that that we're working with. Um the the way that we think about it is being pretty opinionated about what data from your CRM or your ERP is important for legal workflows. And so we're able to, you know, on day one have the team come in, set up an integration, and then essentially tell us what are the, you know, according to these critical fields that we need, where can we find them in your system? Right? Salesforce systems are very complex. And so we asked them, hey, here's, you know, the 10 things that we're going to need. where do these live within your salesforce so that we can much more easily query that going forward. This has allowed us to you know even for some you know 5 to 10 person legal teams we can onboard them within a week with multiple integrations and I think one of the things that's important is like this isn't going to be an overnight problem right no legal team is going to solve their data issue in in one night but if you can integrate even Google drive and maybe your contract management tool and Slack and that's 50 to 60% of your data that's going to change your you know ability to answer questions and get legal work done by you know several fold and then we can continue to integrate over time.

Yeah. What are uh what's the mindset of your buyers? I think you know if you're if you're Harvey or one of these other legal AI players and you're selling into a law firm they're doing this dance right now where they're like we're going to make you way more efficient but uh we're all you know that there's this kind of the elephant in the room is like okay is this going to impact billables? But if I'm an in-house uh legal team uh that's not really on my mind. and I just want to deliver great work and and and protect the company and and uh keep the company compliant uh across a bunch of different dimensions. Uh I imagine there could be like more pull, more excitement, more kind of urgency uh to adopt than maybe some big law firm that's like, "Hey, we've done it this way for a long time and our business is doing great right now. Uh we don't need too much AI."

Yeah. Before I started Sandstone, the most of my work was at McKenzie helping big law firms think about AI and tech strategy. And we would actually go out and deploy AI solutions for some of these big firms. And I think the hardest thing was you have to go to every partner in every practice area as if it's its own business and kind of sell, you know, a one-off solution to them and get them on board with the fact that, hey, this might have some implications on your billable hour model going forward. Withinhouse, it's completely different, right? when when they see AI solutions that can take a lot of the admin work off their plate, generally the GC thinks, hey, now my team can go focus on being in more of the business strategy conversations and become more, you know, proactive around potential risks and issues within our company rather than, you know, reactive and trying to play catch-up on all the requests that we have coming in. I think this is like one of the bigger paradox, you know, paradoxes within legal and within AI more broadly, is like as legal teams get more efficient on the admin side and collecting the context, which we're working on, they're going to be able to be in more business discussions, protect the company from more risk, but also have more work ultimately. And so, you know, a lot of our legal teams, I anticipate they'll continue to grow as they adopt more AI, but they'll just do it in a more effective way for the business. And we'll see a world where like you know the top law firms in the future need to be AI native and AI enabled but I think the top legal teams in the future and even the top companies will have to have like these AI native legal teams. Um similar to how you know ramp I think if you're using ramp as a smaller company and your finance team is using it you're probably spending a little bit less on you know services that you typically might have on the the financial and accounting side. Um and it's also helping your business move faster. I think historically we didn't see that in finance. You see the same in HR with workday and so I think legal will will get there over time.

How's growth been?

Growth has been has been great. So we started working on this you know five months ago. Um we've got you know dozens of companies using it today. We got we got dozens of companies using it today. You know a mix of earlier smaller in-house teams all the way up to Fortune 500s. Um our team is let's go. Let's give it up for the for the Fortune 500 for sure. Um our team is uh you know a team of 15 engineers and lawyers in in New York and Brooklyn. Um one of our mantras is that everyone ships. So we have four lawyers on our team. Every single one of them codes. Um three of them are actual full-time engineers. My my co-founder was a lawyer. He became an engineer. We have a general counsel who became a software engineer for 5 years. Um and you know they're shipping every day. And and so that's sort of how we want to build this. We want to build this like a tech company would build today. Um and everyone has some sort of a legal background or engineering background. Um and whether you you have that from your experience or it's it's something that you've learned by by being at Sandstone.

Well, congratulations on the round. Congratulations on the progress so much such a short amount of time. Congratulations. Fantastic. Yeah. Very very cool. I'm sure I'm sure you'll be back on this quarter. That's my That's my bet. That's my bet. and uh great great to meet you and uh good luck out there. We'll talk to you soon. Talk to you soon. The rest of your day. Goodbye.

Up next, we have Rob Slaughter of Defense Unicorns. You got to check his website out. It's fantastic. Intense name, very cute uh for himself. Very cute name for his business and then intense business because he's getting software to war fighters. He's in the reream waiting room. Let's bring him in to the TVP Ultra Dome. How are you doing, Rob? Look at that. Look at that. Look at that. Look at that friendly unicorn. Friendly unicorn. Uh please uh introduce yourself. Introduce the company. Tell us what you're building and how it's going.

Yeah. Rob Slaughter. Uh you know, uh spent my career uh in the military. I spent about 13 years active duty. Uh got out with some co-founders about 5 years ago. Uh like to joke around that I spent first half of my career uh struggling with with software and the back half of my career trying to solve the software delivery challenges. uh started this company cuz uh you know we saw a real huge problem. Uh you know it's hard to tell cuz the the most most of the ecosystem most of the industry especially on the defense or especially on the tech side doesn't have a ton of exposure to defense. Uh you obviously read the big headlines. So you get the the the big news. Um everybody understands we have the best military in the world. Uh you know the recent operation uh in South America obviously highlights this stuff. Um, but there's real significant tech challenges uh that, you know, as a company we we really strive to solve. Uh, so we're super excited to to talk about the series B and uh, you know, announce uh, a lot of the good stuff that we're doing.

How much did you raise? How much?

Uh, we have officially raised 136. Uh, so it's quite, you know, uh, been fantastic. Uh, you know, we're we're obviously excited to get back to building. Uh, obviously love what we do.

And you're a unicorn now, which is amazing because we got we got we got to do a a capital allocator acknowledgement. Bane Capital is is the uh leading the round. Yeah. It feels like if you put unicorn in the name of your startup, you're really asking for like you're you're calling your shots so aggressively that everyone's going to be like, "Oh, they they'll never do it." And you did it. So, congratulations. I do I do wonder if there was ever, you know, during the the the deal process they were like, "Well, we want to do nine." Yeah, like I'm sorry. I can't possibly it will destroy the brand. Uh where where does the name come from?

Yeah. So, a couple things. Uh first and more first and foremost, uh we hire unicorns. Uh and so it's hard to find those people uh that are mission focused. They, you know, typically have clearances. Uh uh they typically have like clearances. They're based in the US. Sure. That's the other thing. So, one of the biggest things is that we hire defense unicorns. Uh the other thing is if we're successful as a company, yeah, uh one of the biggest things we'd like to see in the ecosystem is like it's not going to be just, you know, 1, 10, 20 defense unicorns in the ecosystem. There's actually going to be hundreds or thousands. So just like, you know, quick back of the envelope numbers, you know, for folks, you know, you look at somebody like Nvidia, uh and they do, you know, 200 billionish uh a year revenue. You know, you have a department of war that spends a trillion a year. Uh that's five fivex that. And you know, as you guys mentioned earlier on the show, you know, Trump's talking about increasing that to to 1.5 trillion. Uh, and so when you think about this from like a market opportunity perspective, um, what you actually find out is that there's most most likely probably several, you know, multi-trillion dollar companies. And then when you cascade that down, what you're actually going to find is that there's not just dozens, but hundreds of defense unicorns um, that should be entering the ecosystem.