Davos Reactions, Waymo Safety, New Neo Labs, Martin Shkreli Joins, Czinger 21C Car Tour

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Today is Tuesday, January 20th, 2026. We are live from the TVPN Ultra, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. Ramp. Time is money. Save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place.

Davos, not the best way to save money. Apparently very expensive if you go, but a lot of people have been and for good reason because there's a lot of news happening in Davos. Uh, mainly a lot of it's focused on Trump, a lot of it's focused on Greenland. I'll give you a little tour of the Wall Street Journal. Trump's amped up rhetoric on Greenland puts issue center stage at Davos.

Why don't you pull up the cover of the Financial Times, too?

The Financial Times. Yo, you want me to do this bit? Here we go.

Uh, well, uh, you know, the markets are in turmoil. The Dow slid 800 points. Treasury prices are dropping. Uh, you know that if you're investing, you got to do it on public.com. Investing for those who take it seriously. Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with damn great customer service.

That's right.

So, uh, the front of the Financial Times, it says, "Trump keeps seizure of Greenland by force on table as trade tensions mount." And so, um, this is one of the most aggressive images that I can imagine running on the front of an international newspaper. Now, the Financial Times, of course, is uh, is a British paper, so much less uh, just different dynamics with the current American administration. Uh, you know, Trump, I think, has a lawsuit going with the Wall Street Journal. There's a whole bunch of things that are going on with the American media. Um, but over in the Financial Times, they print some wild stuff. And they printed this image of a Danish soldier pointing a gun at the camera. So, Danish soldiers exercising.

Anybody that's been around guns knows that you don't want to be looking down a gun at anyone.

Crazy.

Even a photographer to get a cool picture is typically just completely off limits.

Yeah. Yeah. And so, uh, what this says to me is that, uh, you know, the Danes, uh, said, "Hey, the head of the army has been flown out to the autonomous territory. Uh, Danish troops are on the ground in Greenland and we're doing a photo shoot. We're getting a soldier with a sniper rifle or an assault rifle. Uh, we're going to point that at a camera person. We're going to take that photo and then we're going to send that to the editor of the Financial Times."

We're gonna run it on the front page.

We're gonna run on the front page." Of course, the Danes don't have the authority to just put anything on the front page, but they pitched it and clearly they sent the photo and the Financial Times editor enjoyed it, so he put it on the front page. But it kind of gives you a little bit of a taste of what's going on. The Wall Street Journal is also covering it. Uh, Trump threats on Greenland, mobilize allies. Uh, that is taking center stage at Davos, but this is a technology show. This is a business show, and we're focused on what Dario Amodei said at Davos. We will pull this up. First, let me tell you about Railway. Railway simplifies software deployment, web apps, servers, and databases. They run in one place with scaling, monitoring, and security built in. So, um, let's pull up the clip of Dario Amodei on stage. He's the co-founder and CEO of Anthropic. He calls out Trump's policy around Nvidia and China. Let's play the clip.

Go out into the world, right? When we're competing against other companies for enterprise contracts, we see just honestly and candidly, we see Google and we see OpenAI. Every once in a while we see a couple other US players. Um, I have almost never lost a deal, lost a contract to a Chinese model.

But now you have the Trump administration, and I think you've already protested about this, giving high-speed chips, Nvidia chips to the Chinese. That's right. That's right. The thing that is holding them back and they've said it themselves. The CEOs of these companies say it's the embargo on chips that's holding us back. They explicitly say this and now indeed, you know, there are some policies and I hope they change their mind to, uh, you know, to explicitly send not quite our latest generation of chips although it was reported that even that was being considered. Um, but you know, the generation of chips that's just one back that's still extremely powerful. Um, and we are many years ahead of China in terms of our ability to make chips. So I think it would be a big mistake to ship these chips. Um, you know, the analogy I thought of, if you think about the incredible national security implications of building models that are essentially cognition, that are essentially intelligence, right? I've called where we're going with this a country of geniuses in a data center, right? So imagine 100 million people smarter than any Nobel Prize winner and it's going to be under the control of one country or another. Um, so I think this is crazy. I think it's, you know, it's a bit like, you know, I don't know, like selling nuclear weapons to North Korea and, you know, bragging, oh yeah, Boeing made the case.

Your friend, your friend David Sacks is basically arming the Chinese.

No, I wouldn't refer to anything... trying to put words in his mouth. I think is akin to... Yeah. Not... Well...

Okay. I want Jordi's reaction. And I want Tyler's reaction, but first I want to tell you about Labelbox. Reinforcement learning environments, voice, robotics, eval, and expert human data. Labelbox is the data labeling factory behind the world's leading labs.

Uh, Tyler,

Tyler, what's your reaction to that? How do you interpret that? How big of an issue is the China question right now? What are you reading into Dario's rhetoric there?

Yeah, I mean I think it's uh, like fairly reasonable if you basically think that AI is going to be AGI. It's going to be this massive, we're going to get 10% GDP growth.

Um, because at some point it's like... uh, if it's just like economy versus economy, like we got to be better.

Yeah, that's something that's sort of lost... worried about doom because there's also the point where... it's competition.

Yeah. Like if you're worried about safety also. So there's like two ways, right? If you think Asia is going to be massive, uh, you know, economically speaking, and then also on the safety issue, right? Because if you think, um, like maybe China is going to be less concerned about safety, they're not going to be as worried about alignment, that's like obviously a massive danger. You don't want to give the technology to people who don't, uh, you know, worry about the safety aspect.

The funny thing about in America, we're like, AI could lead to 10% GDP growth, and China's like, oh, you mean what we did in 2007 when we were growing at 14% GDP growth? Or should we go back to 1970 when we grew at 19%? Or should we go back to 2004 when we were 10.1, uh, or 1992 when we were growing at 14.3%? Or even in 2021 they had an 8.6 GDP growth. They know 10% GDP growth over there. They felt it.

They'll do it with or without AI chips. But obviously are big.

One dynamic that's interesting is China has obviously a massive advantage in robotics.

Yes. And right now we have an advantage in the models.

Yes.

And uh, if that kind of continues, but also used like the data center, like we are rich.

So I'm saying like, I guess like robotic stack, AI stack.

And it'll be interesting to see how, obviously if you have an advantage in one area that might help you gain an advantage in another area, right? But uh, we'll see which one ends up being more uh...

More impactful.

Let me tell you about Cisco. It's critical infrastructure for the AI era. We love Cisco. We're happy to be partnered with them. And let me also take you through the lineup today because we have some great guests on the show. We have Martin Shkreli joining at noon. Bradley Tusk at 12.

If you're not familiar with Martin Shkreli, he's an American businessman and investor.

Lukas Czinger is coming in. We have a surprise for everyone. Uh, we're going to be taking a look at his car. We're very excited about that. And then we have the lightning round. Uh, Linear of course is the system for modern software development. 70% of enterprise workspaces on Linear are using agents. Now we're very excited to share that fact with you. Uh, let's click it over to uh, Palantir CEO Alex Karp who shared some commercial lessons of AI on the battlefield. Uh, there's a clip from him uh, from Davos. And there's a little Easter egg in this video for the true TBPN knowers, for the video, for the TBPN fans.

I know, I know what you're about to say. So uh, watch this clip and uh, you can tell me if you identify... a former guest.

Enterprises in general, not all enterprises, tend to want to over time become like every other enterprise. So if you take five, you know, A enterprise and B enterprise and C enterprise, they're in the same market, their tech infrastructure is trying to make them into the same enterprise. Uh, they have the same org chart.

Sure.

They have presumably roughly the same... they don't have the same data infrastructure. And what you learn on the battlefield is that, and in life is that's not particularly valuable. What is very valuable is an enterprise can do something no enterprise in the world can do.

And so that is the goal of every single military intelligence service. In fact, all these intelligence services and militaries have their own specialization. And so when we went to commerce, like what we're saying is how can we make your insurance company, the way you underwrite, how can we make that to your tribal knowledge about underwriting, how can we transform this to knowledge everyone...

Okay, go back one second.

Go back one second.

Transform this to knowledge.

Okay, it's very hard to see, but behind the guy to the right... there's Alex Karp.

Behind Alex Karp, there's another man, and behind that man next to the WEF logo is a man who has been on the show.

Philip Johnston, this is co-founder and CEO.

I thought you were talking about Satya Nadella.

Wait, what?

I think that's Satya on the...

Wait. Oh, you think it's Satya? No, I'm talking about the guy right there that you can see. That's Philip from StarCloud. I saw him go to Davos and I was like, "This guy's on a generational run."

Wait, is it not? Maybe it's not. I think it is. I'm really sorry, Philip, if I got this wrong, but that looks... it looks a lot like...

I might be getting it wrong, too.

That looks a lot like you.

We might just be seeing things.

We might be seeing things. We might be hallucinating, but the one thing we're not hallucinating is Lambda. Lambda is the super intelligence cloud building AI supercomputers for training inference that scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands. Anyway, uh, enough with the Easter. The whole time I thought... I really was thinking the guy in the back...

No, no, no. Hard to... I don't think that's Satya. I think that's Philip Johnson from StarCloud. Uh, I did see him go to Davos, so it's not crazy, but he'll probably correct me if that's not him. Uh, anyway, uh, I would love an explainer from Regov around the recession indicator YoungBoy Never Broke Again. I'm familiar with NBA YoungBoy, but I'm not familiar with the uh, recession indicator. So, I would love to get some more information from you folks on this. Let's uh, dive in and dig into what Dr. Karp actually said on the stage at Davos, but first let me tell you about Fin, the number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to handle your customer support, go to Fin.ai. So, um, it's an interesting pitch. It's particularly interesting talking about just more and more custom systems and this idea of, you know, software gets built, a whole bunch of companies are doing things a manual way. One company extracts that and sort of factors out that business process, turns it into enterprise SaaS, is sold to all the different companies. Now, what Karp is really saying, it sounds like, is that every company will have some sort of custom implementation that will be way more flexible and way more tuned to their specific businesses. And this is sort of the Palantir pitch. They'll come in and build something that's semi-custom, semi on top of their systems that they've already built. And it's an interesting like blurring of the lines from you want something that checks all your boxes, but in the future, will you really want, if you're a large enterprise, will you really want to be vibe coding your own solutions to everything? Maybe, but...

You're going to need a... you probably want some sort of foundational elements and that's like the pitch for the ontology stack, understanding how the data links together. Then as you build on top of that, you have a more solid foundation. Um, seems like a good pitch. Um, would be interesting to see how this is like where the rubber meets the road and at what level. The big question with Palantir right now is uh, you know, that they work with the largest companies and organizations in the world. Obviously the military among them. Um, but will they go down the stack and have more, you know, they have uh, AIP, they're bringing more startups onto the platform. Will there be a world where more sort of mid-market enterprises, sub-10 billion companies are thriving with a Palantir-backed system? Um, certainly would be good for the business to just have more customers on board, but uh, we'll be, you know, a dynamic that grows. Uh, anyway, ElevenLabs, build intelligent real-time conversational agents, reimagine human-technology interaction with ElevenLabs. And I got to give ElevenLabs a shout out because uh, yesterday when we spent 45 minutes talking about X articles, I know everyone loved that uh, because I did summarize it in a newsletter piece that you could have read in two minutes. Uh, but it was fun talking for 45 minutes. One of the things that I brought up was that maybe ElevenLabs should do an article reader that would allow you, since there's articles all over X now uh, to just click a button and have ElevenLabs read it to you. Well, they built it and uh, it's already live. So, very very exciting. Uh, Eleven Reader is the account here. It says articles everywhere. You can save them with the Chrome extension. Listen on the web or sync to your phone in under 10 seconds. For the bookmarkers out there, for the people that are finding those articles and saying, "I'm going to bookmark those." Probably a pretty reasonable way to actually get through your stack of articles that you've been meaning to read, but you were busy and you just saw it and you saw that it got a lot of likes and a lot of engagement and you want to dig in, but you don't have the time. So, you're going to head over and do that. Anyway, 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. Head over to Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng over at Davos.

Okay. What did he say? China never seeks a trade surplus. On top of being the world's factory, China hopes to become the world's market. Let's watch the Chinese vice premier.

Economy and trade. We never seek trade surplus. On top of being the world's factory, we hope to be the world's market, too.

Economy and...

Mhm. It was an accident. We didn't mean to do this. It was an accident. It was not our intention to develop a massive trade surplus. Yeah.

With the world.

I feel like... I mean not to go back to ElevenLabs, but you have a lot of flexibility with the translator that you choose at one of these events. How are you not going with an Arnold Schwarzenegger, you know?

Totally.

Yeah. Like you could have anyone be your translator. So why not throw in a Morgan Freeman or, you know, uh...

Just any type of really like incredible...

Yeah, Joe Rogan. He already is announcing the UFC. Get him on the microphone, translate it for him, and then he reads it out to the audience and it sounds like your Joe Rogan voice is out there. I like this. I like it. Anyway, uh, I mean it just... I think this is positive. You know, we were just talking to Matt Grim yesterday about uh, you know, the West versus China and global competition and like I think all of that stuff is important. And I think what Dario is saying is important, but I still come back to this idea that like no one wants war, no one wants, you know, everyone wants positive relationships. And so it is good to see, you know, global leaders coming together better than everyone just being holed up and posting at each other on Redbook and Truth Social. I like an economic forum. I think Davos is back. That's the real lesson from this year. I think the fact that Trump was going was a big pull. There was a lot of coverage, a lot of interesting discussion around it and uh, Davos really pulled together a fantastic group this year and uh, is definitely breaking through in the tech community, in the business community, in the political community uh, in a way that I don't remember it being as important last year and so a little bit of a comeback. You love to see it. 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, Lisan Algaib is quoting Dario at Davos, who also said, "We don't need to maximize engagement for a billion users." Of course,

Taking shots.

Taking shots, folks over at OpenAI.

I threw this question to both of you earlier today. Uh, what is the problem? It's funny that this is a shot, too, cuz it's like he is acknowledging that they've developed a...

Is he anti-ads? Yeah, Anthropic is against slop.

He said he's anti-ads.

Wow. Boo. This is hard. I was falling in love with Dario. I love so much about his rhetoric. Obviously, the models are fantastic, but he has to come and stab me in the back like that with a shot on my favorite piece of the global economy, the advertising industry. Uh, very brutal, but hopefully we...

What other notes did you have from the session?

Yeah. Yeah. So, um, there's a bunch I took. So, um, yeah, these ones were from... he did a Wall Street Journal Q&A this morning.

Okay.

Um,

Okay. So, I'll just read some quotes.

Yeah.

Um,

He thinks we're going to have very high GDP and very high unemployment and inequality.

So when we've kind of ballparked this at like 10% GDP growth for America, that would be unprecedented, massive. We're typically at like 2 to 3%. 10% would be a significant acceleration.

Yeah. And then for the unemployment was like 10 to 20%.

That's a lot. That's a lot. And we can debate this more and I'm sure we will. Uh, we'll eventually formulate an entire structural presentation around this at some point. But for...

And then he said um, there's going to have to be some role for like a uh, for the government to intervene on some macro level to like uh, you know, help with this displacement of labor.

Yeah.

Um, he says um, ideology will not survive this technology. Ideology will not survive.

Kind of vague. Bit of a vague post.

Except his ideology. He's like, "Actually, mine is like kind of got a straight shot here."

Yeah. What could be more ideological than being against advertising?

He said uh...

He's a zealot. He's an anti-advertising zealot.

He said uh, AI is uniquely well suited uh, to autocracy.

Autocracy. Okay. Yeah. This is a spicy take as well.

Yeah. This was in the context of like why he's kind of anti-giving chips to China.

Okay. Yeah. AI is communist, crypto is libertarian, that take. Yeah.

Yeah. And then he kind of uh, he said like Google and OpenAI are like firmly in consumer. It's kind of this existential like battle between them.

Uh, and Anthropic is firmly in enterprise. He's very happy with that decision.

He doesn't have to, you know, monetize the billion users or whatever or monetize free users. He can just sell like...

Things that have value.

I'm so happy I don't have to worry about monetizing a billion users.

Uh, he said um, on the question of like are they going to do uh, generative stuff, he said uh, they probably won't ever do it. I think Shelto said this too. Yeah. But if...

There are enough models out there that uh, Claude Code can go and sign you up for the Nano Banana API, like maybe there's a use case for images and like you know, presentations or something, but then they can just kind of vend in some API they can contract. So my big question is uh, I think we all agree that ads in the Claude iOS app are a very low priority. Something we will likely not see this year. That's fine. Um, thank you. Uh, something we likely won't see this year just because they have such a good business going on the enterprise side and the user base for the Claude iOS app is not necessarily big enough to support a really healthy ad business and they're sort of ideologically against it. But on the slop question, you can use Claude Code to generate slop, like you can...

Article slop.

Well, article slop, but also imagery. You can wire it up to the Sora API, to the Nano Banana API, and you can go create a whole bunch of generative video and people... But that is the Shelto promise of like it should be able to go and use other models, right? The question for me is when will that functionality come to the Claude iOS app because Claude can write...

It's very natural to like co-work. So I think when that comes to iOS...

Exactly. But so what will the co-work iOS product look like? How much flexibility will it have? Because it won't have all the same APIs to go into your folders, like the whole cleaning up your desktop uh, like meme on your MacBook Pro with Claude Code. Uh, that's something that would just be sort of inaccessible to the iOS ecosystem because the APIs aren't there. So even if they tried to build it, uh, Apple just say no, no, no, you're not rearranging icons on the desktop because that could be used maliciously and this is a privacy issue and this is a security issue and so we're not giving you the hooks to do that. The question is like how much can they do in the cloud and then vend back to you? Because if you have a virtual machine that's running Python and has you know, Claude Code running and you're interfacing with it from the Claude iOS app, you could do a bunch of crazy stuff including generate images and go and sign up for a Nano Banana account. What if we have an AI safety incident this year where somebody leaves like a Claude Code terminal kind of open and on and just creates billions of social media accounts and just flooding the internet with...

I thought you were going to say just like some kid, you know how like kids will download uh, like Fortnite and then like spend too much on V-Bucks or they'll like get their parents' credit cards and like run up a bill. It'd be funny if someone like downloaded Claude on the iOS app and like accidentally kicked off something that like provisioned a ton of AWS servers and they just get a bill for like $400,000 and they go bankrupt. That'd be a sort of AI safety incident. That'd be funny. Anyway, Figma. Figma Make isn't your average vibe coding tool. It lives in Figma so outputs look good, feel real, and stay connected to how teams build. Create code-backed prototypes and apps fast. So, what else did Lisan Algaib say about Davos? Uh, some companies are essentially led by people who have a scientific background. That's my background. That's Demis' background. Uh, we had some love for Demis in the chat. Uh, shout out to Demis over at DeepMind. Uh, some of them are led by a generation of entrepreneurs that did social media. Taking shots. Dario is like, he's on one.

Yeah. I mean,

Wildly entertaining.

Incredibly entertaining, too, because it's like bold statement jab, bold statement jab. And then also people will hit him with the hard questions and he'll kind of be like, he'll acknowledge, he'll very quickly tell the interviewer, "I know where you're going with that and I'm not going there," but in like a fun way that's not really adversarial and he never flips it around like takes shots at them and is like, "Why are you asking me that question? I'm not here to answer that question." He's like, "No, no, no. I know what you're trying to get me to do, but I'm not going to do it. I'm not gonna take the bait." But he like knows that it's bait. It's very entertaining.

Interviewer trying to bait him into saying that David Sacks was arming the Chinese.

That's crazy. That is crazy. He says, "There's a long tradition of scientists thinking about the effects of the technology that they built, of thinking of themselves as having responsibility for the technology they built, not ducking responsibility. They are motivated in the first place by creating something for the world. So they worry in the cases that something can go wrong. I think the motivation of entrepreneurs, particularly the generation of social media entrepreneurs, are very different. The way they interacted, you could say, manipulated consumers is very different. I think that leads to different attitudes." He's taken some shots potentially at Sam Altman. Although Sam Altman not really a social media entrepreneur, but I get that he's in that generation. Obviously, this is more directed.

Is he saying Loopt? Mark Zuckerberg?

Is that a reference to Loopt? I mean, Loopt was technically social media, but I think of Sam Altman much more of YC, enterprise software, startups, Stripe, like there he's never really been in-house at a major social media company that I'm aware of. I don't know. But I take Dario's point and uh, you know, he's just trying to reinforce this idea that he does think talking about responsibility for the technology he's building is important. That's the Anthropic vibe and brand and it's served them very well. Uh, anyway, Plaid. Plaid powers the apps you use to spend, save, borrow, and invest securely connecting bank accounts to move money, fight fraud, and improve lending now with AI.

Let's talk about Waymo.

Let's do it. So, today I wrote uh, a quick piece. It was a reaction to a reaction because uh, David Zipper went in Bloomberg and he wrote a piece said we still don't know if robo taxis are safer than human drivers. Then Kelsey Piper went over to The Argument and wrote a response to that saying yes we do know. Uh, and her interesting point was that um, what David Zipper is doing is he's lumping all of the different robo taxis together. So Waymo and Cruise and Tesla and Comma and Zoox and there's a whole bunch of other data that can go into this bucket and they're not all created equal. Waymo's been doing it for decades at this point. They have insane capex, insane opex. There's, you know, uh, humans in the loop a lot of times and it's just like the most advanced team. It seems like it's, you know, the most advanced technology stack. There's a lot of advantages and that's actually showing up in the data. And so, uh, her main dispute with Zipper is over what data, you know, she's including, uh, he's including in making this claim that, you know, hey, we don't know if robo taxis are actually safer than human drivers. And she gives this great analogy that I really really enjoyed. So, she says, imagine someone uh, writes a piece and they say, we don't know if airplanes are safe. Some people say that crashes are extremely rare and others say that crashes happen every week. Um, and when you investigate this claim further, you learn what's going on is that commercial aviation crashes are extremely rare. This is true. Uh, while general aviation crashes, small personal planes, including ones that you can build in your own garage, are quite common. And so, yes, if you lump that together, you're going to get this muddy picture of aviation. But you shouldn't use that to sort of fear-monger about getting on a 747 because 747s just so rarely crash. But yeah, if you build your own Cessna and you're modding it and you're taking it through the canyons, like you got to watch out.

Ask any recreational pilot if they've ever gotten into any hairy incidents, they'll tell you like, "Oh yeah, well this time I was flying and the wind came on super strong and I landed and I was basically, you know, 90°." And a lot of times that counts as a crash. Like I mean like Harrison Ford has crash landed on a golf course and no, I believe no one was injured. I think this happened multiple times actually. Um,

By Harrison Ford.

Harrison Ford. Yeah, he flies his own planes but he flies like old planes and stuff like he's like a true enthusiast. Like he's uh, he's like a...

How many on simpleflying.com? How many plane crashes has Harrison Ford had in the last 25 years? The actor has been involved in several incidents involving emergency landings, rescues, and runway incursions.

Yeah, exactly. Like, it happens. It sounds crazy. It is crazy. I would never want to be in any sort of plane crash, but uh, there's just way more planes flying around when you include those Cessnas. And it's not really fair to put that on United Airlines or American Airlines.

13th of February, 2017, Santa Ana, California. Single engine Aviat Husky flown by Harrison Ford was cleared to land on runway 20L. Ford's aircraft reportedly landed on a parallel taxiway overflying American Airlines 737 was holding short of runway 20.

Uh, 5th of March 2015, Santa Monica. Ford was a pilot and sole occupant of Ryan ST3KR, a two-seat open cockpit aircraft that had that...

Open cockpit. Open cockpit. Think about that. Flying and the winds in your hair. Like that's not a normal experience. That's not coach on American Airlines.

Used extensively as a training aircraft by the US military in World War II. According to a preliminary report, Ford reported a loss of engine power shortly after taking off and was attempting to return to runway three. So, he ended up crashing into like a field. Looks like...

Exactly. Yeah.

Ford chose to land on a nearby golf course, clipping the top of a tree before landing.

Like if you just took Harrison Ford, he's probably more dangerous than June 2000. While landing in Lincoln, Nebraska, Ford's plane departed the runway due to a gust of wind. The aircraft sustained minor damage. Oh, 23rd of October.

Wait, there's a fourth one. I...

Was on a training flight in a Bell 206 helicopter when he and the instructor made an emergency landing in a dry riverbed near Santa Clarita.

Crazy.

Although the helicopter rolled over on its left side, neither Ford nor the instructor were injured.

Yeah.

That's all that I can find.

Okay, I have another plane story.

I mean, imagine four major incidents like make it into the record. He's got to have at least like 10 more that he just like sketchy situations. Wrote a piece about it. Let's not talk about that. Let's agree that you know, hey, calls his PR person. Hey, let's clean this up. Uh, how about you take a picture of me outside? We give call the paps. I'm willing to give smoothie. We need a new story.

We need a different story. I want to be on the front of the New York Post. I'll take the bad picture on the beach of me falling off or something. Anyway, Cognition, they're the makers of Devin, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. So, I actually have a friend uh, who's been on the show. I'm not going to dox him, but uh, we have two friends, both in flying. One of them is extremely serious, has uh, you know, uh, IFR rating. So, there's VFR, which is visual flight rules. That's like you take the plane up, it has to be clear because if you get into clouds, you're not trained for that. You can't at night. Exactly. Uh, IFR is you're flying on the instruments in instrument flight rules. Uh, and so, um, uh, we have one friend who's like super by the book, super safe, and then we have another buddy who's a little bit wilder, VFR, and he will rent like the cheaper planes. And one time like the dial lights went out and he was landing at night, shouldn't be flying at night at all, just like botched the schedule and didn't check sunset. And he has to use his phone flashlight while he's landing to look at the dials as he's coming in on this rickety like old plane that he's flying. People get crazy out there. They get confident. Uh, it is very dangerous. Uh, but just like if you're getting into uh, personal aviation, flying your own planes, uh, the jump in safety from VFR to IFR is significant. Like the IFR guys like crash way way less. So, highly recommend that if you are getting into flying your own planes. Anyway, Restream, one live stream, 30 plus destinations. If you want to multistream, go to restream.com. So, Waymo is funny to write about because uh, there's still a class of people that are writing the stories about like, hey, Waymo is actually safe. And I'm like, I completely buy it. I'm in. Roll the Waymos out everywhere. I've been in them. I feel safe in them. I've seen the data. I think they're safe. Like I'm just like my eyes glaze over when someone's like, "I'm gonna blow your mind." Like, "Yeah,

Waymos are safe."

I'm like, "Yeah, I'm in. I'm totally in." Um, but uh, there's still this debate and most people in tech are debating about just Waymo's unit economics and like can they beat Tesla? What happens there? Uh, and so typically I don't really wade into the safety thing because I think it's very safe. Um, but this Piper piece, this piece by Kelsey Piper uh, did make me wonder about what happens if you further segment the human driver population. So we need to segment robo taxis into Waymo and everyone else because Waymo is so good, but how does Waymo compare against the best human drivers? And I wasn't thinking like the Lewis Hamiltons of the world. I'm sure Lewis Hamilton could be superhuman at driving if he needed to. Uh, I wanted to think about it more as like if I'm an insurance agent and I'm underwriting a class, a group of people, what would I be going for? And are they better than Waymo? And uh, you can't look at fatal crashes per 100 million miles because there have been so few fatal crashes in Waymos and there's just not enough data yet to look at that. So what you can look at is any injury crashes per million miles. And the Kelsey Piper piece is really good. It goes into a bunch of different methodologies for data collection looking at uh, incidents where Waymo's airbags released because that's a very binary moment where there's a question about like, well what's an injury? Like if somebody like got motion sick and then they had to go to the hospital, like does that count as an injury? Or like what if they were getting out of the car and then they fall, like does that count? So there's all these things where it's like does it count? So anyway, the best data that we have on Waymo is all any injury crashes per million miles. For the average human, it's about four any injury crashes. So any injury that counts, four per million miles. Waymo is way better, way better, 0.75, so about five times safer uh, than humans broadly. But there's one very specific case where humans I believe are safer. Now there's debate about the data. I just had uh, Claude like crunch it all together and try and pull a bunch of stuff together, but I think this holds. So, uh, a married 60-year-old woman who's college educated and is driving a large luxury SUV in Massachusetts on a Tuesday morning is closer to 0.5 injury crashes per million miles.

Is the Tuesday morning part real?

Yes. So, the most dangerous time to drive, and uh, I'll flip it around. The most dangerous time to drive is midnight on a Saturday because that's when people are at the bars, they leave, they're drinking, and so there's a... it's dark, it's the weekend, there's a lot more people on the road, they're driving much faster, they're getting places, they might be inebriated or under the influence of something. And so, uh, Tuesday morning is the safest time to drive. Uh, and so basically I looked at all the uh, it's the government NHTSA data. It's the transportation authority. I'm getting the acronym wrong, but uh, you look at all the different segments and then you add all those together and you get kind of like the synthetic safest driver cohort. It's a little loose, but uh, it does seem like if you looked at that cohort, they're still beating Waymo. Humans still got it. Uh, at least like kind of it's pretty close. It's honestly neck and neck. Uh, but um, so none of this should take away uh, anything. None of this should take away Nathan Fielder episode in the making of like studying the women in Massachusetts. Yeah. Like drivers on the planet and he's just interviewing all of them to like...

Married 60-year-old college women come to like the exact wrong conclusion. Yeah. We need to get everyone married and college educated.

No, the conclusion is everyone needs to move to Massachusetts.

Yes. And...

Well, it's the married 60-year-old women that need to be the taxi drivers everywhere in the world. They need to be... It's like instead of Waymo,

He starts like a competitor to Waymo.

Right. That's just them.

Yeah, that's just them.

Yeah. But it only works in Massachusetts. Um, so, uh, clearly Waymos are very safe. Uh, rolling them out nationally would be a huge safety upgrade uh, for our society broadly. But it's worth noting that the Massachusetts married women still got it. Uh, but if you want to know, if you want to flip this around and find the hypothetically riskiest driver profile, it's very funny. It's an 18-year-old single male with a DUI driving a Dodge Challenger at midnight on a Saturday in rural Mississippi. That's as risky as you can get. Uh, and that's, you know, an order of magnitude or 40 times as dangerous as the Massachusetts driver.

Yeah. The interesting takeaway is that uh, yeah,

That you said earlier off the show was like who is actually not a superhuman level driver.

Yes. Yes. Because in order to be that you actually have to be better than the best human, right?

Exactly. Exactly. So we need a word for not above average and in the top cohort of humans but not better than any human ever because a lot of AI tools are getting there.

Well, I guess okay. So I actually looked up uh, like top definition. So superhuman means having powers, abilities or qualities beyond normal human capacity. So it's potentially these women in Massachusetts superhuman.

And uh, as well as Waymo. So maybe we do need to give Waymo a little more credit.

Well, if you're looking for superhuman payroll, head over to Gusto, the unified platform for payroll, benefits, and HR built to evolve with modern small and medium-sized businesses.

The backbone of this show.

It is. Uh, Max Hodak had a post about Waymo. He said, "Interesting benefit of Waymo. It always matches instantly since it knows exactly what cars are available and that they will always accept. And it can also provide accurate wait times before requesting." And so, um, lots of love for Waymo. Interesting to see where they'll roll out. The really interesting thing is that we've had a number of people on the show advocate that rolling out Waymo is a societal good. It will reduce the number of traffic fatalities. That's all true, but if you really want to accelerate the impact that Waymo will have on safety, you got to deploy it in Mississippi before you bring it to Massachusetts, which... and I just feel like Waymo's coming to Boston before it comes to Vicksburg. But, uh, I don't know. Uh, it was fun. There's other love for Waymo on the timeline. First, let me tell you about Okta. Okta helps you assign every AI agent a trusted identity so you get the power of AI without the risk. Secure every agent. Secure any agent. Um, Mike, he said, "I have to say I love that Waymo operates from San Francisco to the South Bay. So great. Some folks say the freeway driving is so-so." I hadn't heard that. Uh, the antidote to that is I get uh, into an Uber and do the same drive. It's literally life-threatening.

I was driving uh, with Paul the other day and I heard uh, he was telling me about the different modes that Tesla has. I've never owned a Tesla, so I wasn't familiar. But did you know that Tesla actually has something called Mad Max mode for the autopilot where it'll drive roughly around 85 on the freeways and it will uh, if you're in the fast lane and you come up to somebody, it will merge over into the lane to the right, make a pass and go back to 85.

That's insane.

Somehow feels slightly illegal, but uh, I like it.

Okay. Uh, MongoDB, choose a database built for flexibility and scale with the best-in-class embedding models and re-rankers. MongoDB has what you need to build what's next. Uh, we have an update in the Warner Brothers Netflix deal. Netflix, they're going all cash. All cash deal. Uh, Netflix had said to Paramount, "Hey, what we want is an all cash deal." David Ellison and the Paramount crew, they brought Warner an all-cash deal. And Warner was still saying, "Hey, we're going with Netflix." Now Netflix has upgraded. So, we can read through a little bit of this in the Wall Street Journal.

So, Warner Brothers Discovery and Netflix said Tuesday they struck a new all-cash deal for Netflix to buy Warner Brothers Studios and HBO Max. Warner also released financial details on the cable network's business. It plans to...

Spin off. The all-cash deal of $27.75 per share replaces Netflix's previous cash and stock deal. The sweetened offer comes as rival bidder Paramount continues pushing its all-cash offer for all of Warner Discovery. The value of Netflix's offer remains 72 billion. Warner and Netflix said they expect the new structure to enable Warner shareholders to vote on the deal by April. The change could also help sway some shareholders who might be weighing its bid against Paramount's. Netflix co-CEO Greg Peters said in a statement that the revised agreement demonstrates our commitment to the transaction and accelerates the process for Warner shareholders. The new Netflix agreement reduces by 260 million the amount of Warner debt being placed on Discovery Global, the company that will house cable channels including CNN, TNT, and Food Network.

Um, there's also another, uh, the next kind of thing that I was going to get to.

Uh, CNN is doing, uh, 600 million in profit on revenue of 1.8 billion. So, what are we doing?

Uh, they, they are truly newsmaxing. Quick size for, uh, for CNN.

Congratulations to everyone at CNN.

Not bad at all.

Absolute dog.

Of course. Of course. A ton of debt strapped to, uh, the, the broader group.

Peter Kofka is saying that private equity should pick it up. It's a shrinking business that throws off cash. It's perfect for private equity. Let's give it up for private equity.

Give it up for... I know you're a big fan. I'm a big fan. Uh, somebody, somebody, uh, you know, I was saying yesterday that maybe, maybe AI could save Hollywood. Somebody, somebody would, uh, I knew, I knew that was going to piss a lot of people off for a lot of reasons.

I wasn't really clocking what you were saying either and so we should talk about it more, but continue.

Well, well, one of the critiques was like, you know, interesting to say that LA is dying as you're building a media business from LA. Yep.

And my response is that we are in a huge complex. We were recording the show from a huge complex and every other building in the complex is empty pretty much every single day. Yeah.

Like there's no, there's nothing going... there's the, when I, when I said LA is like dying, I was specifically talking about the context of the entertainment.

Yeah. I mean there's, there's a Wall Street Journal report that just shows soundstages were, you know, typically leased 90% of the time and it's just way off, off peak down to like 60%. And so there is like a, like a broad trend. Uh, and then just in general like I don't think we're necessarily at a phase in our life where we're like, okay, tabula rasa, where's the best place to build this business, let's go find that. It's like we live here, things... We're not like, okay, we should go to Atlanta or something or go to New York.

Yeah, we certainly didn't say like, let's start a media company because we live in LA. It's like the, the, the current struggles that LA is having are not going to hold us back. If anything, it's going to be easier because we can get space rents in, in 10, 10 years ago. This space would have been like two, three times the price to rent.

The bigger, the bigger question is, uh, you know, there, there are these blips in industry towns that have happened many times. New York famously in the, what, 70s and 80s went through a really rough patch. San Francisco during COVID, everyone was moving out and there was a real, there was a real vibe of like, oh, is San Francisco going to be less relevant in tech, and then it came roaring back with the AI labs. Uh, and I, I think most people don't, you know, debate that, that, you know, cities go through rough patches, uh, and then can come back. So, we certainly, we certainly hope that LA comes back. It'd be fantastic. Um, but there are, there are a lot of changes that need to be made. And this has been said by a number of, uh, a number of famous people in Hollywood and Hollywood actors who have talked about, uh, different tax regimes, different incentives, different changes structurally to the way content is made and distributed. There's a lot of different, uh, elements that are contributing to LA having a rough go. At the same time, it's a fantastic city. It's where I was born and raised. I love it. I'm not going anywhere. You're going to have to pull me out of here.

He's not leaving.

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Uh, in its Tuesday filing, Warner projected 17 billion of revenue in 2026, adjusted... uh, I won't explain EBITDA, but, uh, 5, 5.4 billion of EBITDA. Uh, those figures are expected to decline to 15.6 and 3.8 billion respectively in 2030. The only individual network projections were CNN, which I just, uh, shared. They're increasing, they plan, they're, they're expecting to increase revenue to 2.2 billion in 2030.

Um, and, uh, expecting to, uh, yeah, continue to grow. Yeah.

EBITDA as well.

Well, Netflix seems to be doing everything right. Um, as much as I enjoyed the David Ellison profile and learning more about how seriously he takes his business, it does feel like Netflix is just willing to pull out all the stops to get this across the finish line. And if they were able to match Paramount on the cash deal nature and the, all the different consideration, deal with the regulatory hurdles, it might take a long time, but it does, it does still feel like they will land on it.

Yeah.

And again, I mean, it just feels like... Yeah. I, I'm so curious to see how this works out because it felt like, uh, the Ellisons were, were just putting on this absolute master class and then, and then this one, uh, and then kind of ran, ran into a brick wall with this, right? You could argue they overpaid by a ton for the UFC, which made sense if you had this again, like if you have all these assets under one roof, it is going to be a really compelling, uh, consumer product. Yeah. Uh, consumer subscription. But, uh, currently kind of unclear who, who, who the, um, yeah, who this pro, who this kind of platform is really going to be for.

Yeah. It was also surprising to me because Netflix for 20 years has been pure play tech company, right? And many of the previous tech companies when they come out, like, uh, they haven't done a lot of acquisitions of legacy assets that I'm aware of maybe, but, uh, I'm just thinking like social media sort of like disrupted the news business. They didn't, Meta didn't go out and acquire the New York Times. They could have done some sort of hostile takeover. They have the money, but that never really figured into the, into the business and they wound up just working together synergistically. And now the New York Times has been growing across social media very effectively and they have, they've adapted their business model. Both businesses are doing well. Um, they're sort of disruptive to each other, but ultimately they never decided to, uh, to, to buy the legacy player. Uh, so it was always, uh, something that was never on my bingo card of, oh, Netflix is going to buy, you know, a, a TV channel or, you know, a movie studio or a traditional, uh, Hollywood player. That just, uh, didn't seem like something that was going to be, you know, logically happening anytime soon. And yet here we are and it makes a lot of sense when, uh, you think about the assets and the IP specifically and the longevity that that will bring when it comes, when you get Batman and Superman on Netflix. That's going to be exciting.

Anyway, 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. Uh, we got a deal. We got a pact. It's not just a deal. It's a pact. OpenAI and ServiceNow, they struck a deal to put AI agents into business software. Uh, ServiceNow, one of the greatest software companies in history, one of the few to reach, uh, revenues at their scale. Uh, the line from the Wall Street Journal is the AI model maker and business software provider. They signed a three-year pact. I like the word pact. Uh, that underscores how the partnership is... economy is over. Yes, you got to be... press release economy is over. Yeah, this is the pact economy. You, no more deal guys, no more deal titans, deal makers. Pact makers, pact guys. That's what's next. Uh, this is going to underscore how AI agents are increasingly being embedded in corporate software. You heard Dario talk about where he's potentially going up against other labs on corporate B2B deals. He said OpenAI, he said DeepMind, he didn't really say. He said no China labs have ever competed. Well, ServiceNow went with OpenAI on this one. So, uh, they signed a three-year deal that will integrate the, the AI models, ChatGPT's models into ServiceNow's business software. The deal, deal depends on customers using OpenAI's models within ServiceNow and also includes a revenue commitment from ServiceNow to OpenAI. "Enterprises want OpenAI's intelligence applied directly into ServiceNow workflow," said Brad Lightcap, OpenAI's chief operating officer. "Look ahead, customers are especially interested in agentic and multimodal experiences so they can work with AI like a true teammate inside of ServiceNow." Uh, we've seen a lot of other companies add, we've talked to Marc Benioff about Slackbot, we've talked to Satya Nadella about Copilot. Like if you have one of these massive software suites, enterprise software suites with just so much surface area, you're going to want to vend LLM and agents into every little nook and cranny and you probably don't want to build your own lab, uh, because it's going to be incredibly expensive when OpenAI will go and marshal the capital and build the data centers and train the models and then you can just focus on the implementation and delivering value for your customers. So Salesforce has already folded AI agents into its flagship sales and marketing tools. SAP and Workday have, have been similarly pitching businesses on the idea that their embedded AI agents are essentially getting, are essentially getting the value out of AI. The deal comes as OpenAI looks to build its enterprise business both by selling direct access to its models and AI agents and through business software collaborations like with ServiceNow. It faces competition not just from rival AI model maker Anthropic, but also Google and Microsoft's suite of enterprise AI tools.

For ServiceNow, I want to find, I want to find a company that is using the agents at ServiceNow or Salesforce or, or a company like that and saying, "I can't live without these agents. I love these agents." We got to find, we got to find one person.

Yeah. Um, I, I wouldn't, I wouldn't be surprised if it's, uh, if it's just like really sort of like maybe a year or two behind on the actual implementation, but it's just like, oh, I get like daily summaries of what's going on in the system and it's a little bit nicer and neater and I, I, yeah, I could probably extract all the data and write an agent that does that, but you know, it was just one click of a button to add it to my installation and I did and it's adding a little bit of value. I don't think you're going to see anyone who's like, it's transformational. I, it just works on its own. I don't do anything. It's more, it's much more incremental than that. It's, it's, it's still in like an autocomplete phase. Little helper tools there. It's Clippy. Clippy's going into every piece of enterprise software. Um, and so people are having fun. ServiceNow increased revenue 22% in the third quarter as AI demand from both existing customers and new customers grew, particularly in its customer relationship management business. Uh, the software company will report its fourth quarter earnings and full 2025 financial results on January 28th. We got to do a deep dive that day.

Anyway, AppLovin profitable advertising made easy with Axon.ai. Get access to over 1 billion daily active users and grow your business today.

Uh, what's, uh, what SaaS founders should know about entering the Japanese market.

Yeah, I found this on HackerNews and I just thought it was interesting because we've talked to a few folks about expanding into Japan. It's not been on the top of the roadmap for many founders that we talked to, but I thought this was interesting. I thought we could go through just a, just a little bit of it and then you can read the article if you want. So, uh, this is from embedworkflow.com. In one sentence, what's the difference between selling SaaS in Japan versus other countries? Uh, and the answer is the process is different. You can't, you just can't treat sales and go-to-market as a whole in Japan the same way you would in North America or Europe. The SaaS sales process in Japan is structurally different from the United States and other Western markets, primarily in terms of pace, decision-making style, and buyer behavior. It's not that Japanese companies are unwilling to try new software, but rather that they prefer to do significant research before engaging directly with a vendor. So many successful SaaS companies in Japan structure their websites with two primary calls to action. So one is just for downloading product documentation and then the second is for booking a demo and starting, or starting a free trial. And most Japanese leads enter through the documentation path first. In America, we just want to get on the phone. We want to head straight.

I'm not reading the instructions.

I'm not reading the instructions.

No way. I don't have time to understand how this thing works.

I need to go straight to a steak dinner. Steak dinner first. Then I'll figure out what your company does. But let's talk about golf first. Let's talk about track day first and then you can give me the pitch for your company. But that would, that would honestly, the, the steak dinner button on a SaaS website. It's like you can try the product now or there's a button that's just like a steak emoji and if you click that you can get steak today on demand with somebody on the team.

Yes. No matter where you are, no matter... aentically books a steak restaurant.

I'm tired, I'm tired of all these people that are like, oh, oh, you know, just take, just take a demo and we'll give you some AirPods. Spend the money on steak. Take the AirPods budget and put a steak button on your website. Steak button and have the steak flow.

Stakeholders, stakeholders need steak. Uh, so in the US, the typical flow is that a prospect visits a website, books a demo on their own or drops off and is followed up aggressively by sales. A conversion happens quickly. A proof of concept or trial begins and the deal either closes or the buyer moves to a competitor. The cycle is fast and transactional. Buyers are comfortable testing tools, replacing them, and switching vendors if something doesn't work. In Japan, the process is slower and more deliberate. A company will usually download product materials first. The vendor then reaches out and begins a longer engagement process focused on education and relationship building. Rather than pushing for an immediate demo or trial, the goal is to support the buyer's internal evaluation process. The lead will take the information back to their organization and begin internal discussion about whether or and how to proceed. So, I just thought that was pretty interesting. How do you gain trust from the Japanese market? Part of it is showing your commitment to the Japanese market where things, where simple things matter. Is your product localized? Is your documentation localized? Do you have a support person that I can speak Japanese with? That's one layer. And the other layer, which is harder to potentially navigate at first, is the social proof aspect. So, you need to get some social proof.

Anyway, yeah, I'd be so, I'd be so curious to know how like a company like Notion has done in Japan, right? It's product-led. They do have enterprise, uh, uh, as well, but again, it's a product that just, you know, kind of scales naturally. But, uh, but yeah, for, for so many different kind of like vertical SaaS players, it would feel like unless, unless the Japanese startup ecosystem is asleep at the wheel and not paying attention to what's working outside, like can you imagine as a vertical SaaS player going and trying to compete in Japan against a local, like a talented local team? It feels like it'd be... it feels like you just get smoked. Yeah.

Anyway, Vanta automate compliance and security. Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform. Um, Max Hodak is... We got to do this one before we bring in our guest.

Fun fact, rather than asking Claude to double-check its own work, you can lie to it and say codex went romping through the code and left bugs and it should find them. I like the idea that, that somewhere in the weights, all the drama of the AI lab battles are being encoded and creating bitter deep rivalries. Uh, it's, uh, yeah, it's, it's very funny. I saw, I saw something else about, uh, Claude just rejecting a, a prompt, uh, whole cloth. Did you see this? Somebody was like, rewrite this entire app in jQuery and Claude was just like, no, that's a bad decision, bad use of resources. I'm not doing it. I don't know if that's real, but I thought it was very, very funny. Uh, anyway, uh, we have our first guest of the show, Martin Shkreli in the StreamYard waiting room. We will bring him in the TVP Ultra. Martin, how you doing?

Great to see you.

What's up, guys?

Good to see you. Happy New Year. How is your year going so far?

Great. I'm a new dad, so that's, uh...

Congratulations.

They're pretty wild. Yeah.

Congratulations. It's fantastic.

Is it, has it, has it been wild or is it, uh...

Where does it... is quite a bit more normal. Like, to, to me, to me parenting is, it does feel natural. And so there, some pe, some people have this idea of like, oh, it's so, it's so insane and, you know, it's so complicated and, and I have to read 20 books. And other people is like kind of follow, just follow kind of your own nature and just like take, take care of your child. It, it is straightforward.

I'm following my nature. I mean, I'm following my nature. The kid's got to produce at some point. He's starting to come into work like once a month.

There we go.

You know, comes in, you know, entertains the troops here.

Perfect.

But at some point, you know, some trades, something, do something.

Yep.

You know, put some trades on.

Yeah. You got to find some, have some, have some conviction.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Uh, how big, how, uh, what, what's the environment like in your office? You guys, uh, uh, have remote component? You anti-remote?

Remote, remote is, is evil. You know, I think that if you're going to war together, you can't go to war remotely. You know, it's, uh, you know, my, my people fought the Ottoman Empire and, you know, one, one man, you know, famous general, you know, stopped the Ottoman Empire largely by himself and, uh, at least that's a legend, you know. And if we're going to take on Bloomberg or whoever we're fighting, um, you know, I just don't think you could do it with some guy sitting in, you know, at home with his...

What's the current, what's the current battle that you guys are fighting and how is the war going overall?

War's going great. We just closed the seed round. We raised five...

Congratulations.

We raised two like a year ago.

Okay.

To get the ball rolling or a year and a half ago. We raised five as a seed round and then we'll probably do like a 10, 20, 30, something like that. This year it is an A. We have a lot of revenue. We're almost profitable.

That's great.

Um, it's, you know, the interesting thing about financial software is traders want to try everything. Like they just, you know, it's the greatest business in the world. And, you know, you do have to have domain expertise, which nobody has. So I think that's a lot of fun. We also might get...

You mean nobody in, nobody in tech has...

Yeah. Yeah. That... the people with, yeah, the, yeah, our customers are brilliant. Um, the people who are in finance have financial expertise, uh, or at least many of them, you know, believe they do. Obviously to some extent it's like a casino and, and you're, you're sort of arming them with tools. A lot of the tools haven't changed. I do have this thing I want to show you guys when I'm, when I'm ready. I think we're going to call like sit or sit, sit rep or sitch. It's going to be like the situation monitoring suite that's just like... Bloomberg has these like fake, um, systems that are, they're pretty awful, but there's something where you could like see a map and you can kind of see different things happening like earthquakes or whatever. But like take that and actually make it really good. I think people would, would truly want to monitor situations. I think that's a new, like there's no situ... it's a new hobby.

I mean new.

Yeah. No, it's a new, it's a new category. It's, it's, and it's a prosumer category because, because, because, because people I think actually enjoy it so much that it's like camping where there, I, I think people will be willing to spend money like...

Oh, totally. So think, think about the revenue of Bloomberg with 8 billion, 10 billion, whatever, a satellite constellation, maybe it's 100 mil. And imagine if you're sitting at Citadel or Millennium or some hedge fund or Fidelity or something and you, and you're literally tasking a satellite, like, no, actually I want satellite to point here, you know, and what margin of difference would it make? You could probably pass through, you know, probably be a creative to have your own constellations, like, uh, satellite constellation. And then things like, um, drones or maybe, you know, there's, you know, Bloomberg right now, I think they have like ships and shipping routes and flights and like kind of fairly boring stuff, but you, you can make it a hundred times better. So that'll be fun when it's ready. And, and again, this is all inspired, this whole sector started with the Bezos kind of...

That's right.

Everyone really, really did.

What's your take on prediction markets? Do you enjoy them? Do you think that they're valuable uses of information? Do you think it all just winds up being sports betting? Like where, where does all this go?

And we will be, we will be trading on what you said here. So, do you guys get, do you guys get paid, uh, by...

No, no, no. I, yeah, I'm super, uh... I have a thousand-x long on you saying biotech at some point during this show.

All $3 on it.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. No, no, but yeah. What, what are you thinking on, on, uh, on prediction markets? Valuable, useful? Do you use them? Do you trade?

Yeah, it's great. It's a great question. I mean, I think, I think the, it's probably like social media, like the first social media companies, if you like go back into like that Steve Levy book about Facebook, which I think is just fantastic, like almost documenting, you know, every part of it. There were a couple of very random, even before Friendster, you know, a couple of these really proto social media companies, yeah. And the sector exploded. I think that's where we're at. I don't think... I mean, I wish the companies the best of luck except for Kalshi. But the, uh, two companies, but, um, the, I do think that, you know, markets have been around for, you know, hundreds of years if not longer and ICE and CBOE and these other companies are publicly traded. They don't sit there and twiddle their thumbs and say, gee, you know, I hope, I hope some creative new market comes along. They make financial products all the time that fail. You know, they, they, they innovate, they add new things and then they, they actually take them down because they don't catch fire in Wall Street. So if you want to be like that micro, kind of, uh, you know, micro markets sort of pioneer, it's interesting, but it's sort of still like you get into scale problems with like who actually arbitrates some of these bets. Obviously sports is easy and some of these other things, but, you know, how much are you just financializing for financializing sake. And is that sustainable when you actually need people with tons of money to fight the arbitrage gradient? You know, if you're betting. So, full disclosure, I've been running the spot on Polymarket that, that makes a market in the Bitcoin 15-minute markets, which are somewhat inefficient. And nobody needs to trade this, right? There's no actual, you know, benefit to trading this other than you, you can, you can take two to the N bets. So, you get around, I guess, 96 bets a day. And if you somehow, you know, the money velocity of getting wild was right, you can compound insanely well. Of course, it's random, but, you know, people hope springs eternal that you could somehow get the rhythm of the market every 15 minutes and you can, you can... I think somebody posted on Polymarket they took a very small amount of money and very large amount of money. So, you know, it is, it is kind of a, I think it's a bit of a waste of ingenuity and engineering and we're working on trying to sort of make a prediction market that might be more relevant, say, private companies. Um, you know, right now the binary outcomes of prediction markets have forced you into this box of like, will OpenAI go public this year? Will SpaceX hit a trillion valuation? Why can't it just be dollar for dollar? Why not like this? This is just a market that pays you N dollars per, you know, like a swap. So, and I'm sure that might be being worked on by other companies, but yeah, I think that's like an economically rational thing. So, the spirit is there, like we should have our own markets. We should be able to deploy whatever we want, but actually make it make sense.

What, at least they're still... what is the state of tracking large private companies' valuations? We have a ticker at the bottom with, uh, you know, Mag 7 big tech companies with market caps. I would love to add in Anthropic, OpenAI. Uh, but I, I saw some debate over, you know, how you actually get the data, how reliable it is.

I got into, I got into it, I got into it though. I unfollowed him. I unfollowed him for five minutes because of it. I was so mad.

Brutal. Worst five minutes of his life.

Worst five minutes.

I'm not even, I might have made it a few days. Um, but eventually I, I relented, but... capitulated.

I think, yeah, I think that what Lonsdale is saying is right in that if he gets invited to a deal per se, Ramp or whoever, you know, he was complaining that my Ramp number was too low and okay, fine, that's, that's fine. But it's the same thing as insider info in the stock market. So you have insider info. Great. You know, Ramp's going to trade up 50% higher than my number. He's like, "Your number's wrong." Well, it's no different from me saying, "Well, you know, the, um, you know, the Nvidia number's wrong, but I know they're going to have a blowout quarter." Well, you know, how am I supposed to know that? You know, my market only reflects the people trading on it, not, you know, um, the news, you know, before everyone else knows it, which is in private, as you know, guys know very well, in private world, that's, that's to be expected, otherwise you won't part with your money. But in the, in the public world, you're not supposed to have that information edge. So he's so used to having the information edge because he, I'm sure he gets invited to many, many great deals that, you know, he knows, oh, the price is about to change. And so SpaceX is a really funny example. And our platform, SpaceX prices... because, you know, Elon sort of dropped this bomb that like, oh, we're going to do a, uh, you know, do a buyback at this crazy price. Yeah. Obviously not crazy to him, but to the marketplace, they're like, what? WTF? It's like more than doubled over the last few months. Um, you know, just... well, and, and a lot of the stuff late stage, if, if somebody, you know, there's so much demand and there's so little supply that if somebody comes to you and they're like, hey, I've got SpaceX at 1 and a half trillion and somebody's like, do I, I'm really... if I believe Elon can get this thing out at 1 and a half trillion, sure, I'm going to be flat over until they get out or whatever, but at least I'm in, right? So I don't know, it, uh, people will start to be able to justify almost any, any price up until that point.

Sure. And I know Matt, Matt Grim is on this, you know, war path against these, um... Yeah. SPAC hustlers. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, I feel like the only solution is we have to have a private, we have to be able to trade like just like Polymarket, private, private companies. And there's, there's a big battle brewing behind the scenes over this. We'll see where, we'll see what comes of it. Okay, speaking of Elon, speaking of xAI, SpaceX, uh, walk me through all of the internal secrets that you learned from the infamous.

First of all, if, if your most junior employee went on a, on a, on a cinematic podcast for, for 90 minutes and just told all about God and everything, would you, uh... Yeah. How would you react? How would you react? I, I think, you know, the first, my first like week in hedge funds, I thought this was a good idea and I, I, the, my sense for asking the boss just like kicked in at the last second. Yeah. Like... wait, so you were going to call up Bloomberg and say like, I got to tell you we're working on some exciting stuff. I got to tell you about some of our... new, this specific market is wildly mispriced and we're going to make a killing. We're printing. I was long this stock and the company told me, "Oh, we're doing this newspaper piece. Do you mind giving a quote for it since you're our investor?" And I, I told our CFO, I said, I'm going to be doing this just so you know. And he's like, no, no, you will not be doing that.

Okay. So, what did you actually learn from, from the xAI deep dive?

I think it's less about learnings and more about like just the gumption of like the way he was questioned. I can understand like, look, you're an engineer, you should be able to go on a podcast. Questions come up about xAI, you probably say, look, I can't really talk about it. You might drop a things, but, you know, he was really like, people asked, the, the interviewer asked him how is Optimus going to roll out and he was like, just let me tell you... that's Elon's job, you know, it's not yours. And so the real reason I kind of came after this guy in a not so, like, kind of an oblique way is he had, I looked, I looked up this guy, a lot of friends had xAI, who is this guy, and he had blocked me. I said, oh, no, no, no, this is a big thing. So I could amplify, you know, that you did this. And again, I mean, I think the guy was fired, you know, okay, at least the second he went on the show. I doubt that I had any part to do with it, but I, I definitely didn't mind amplifying the, the insane kind of decision he made. And, you know, if he blocked me, that's, that's, I mean...

Ro Khanna blocked you too.

No, he came at me for absolutely no reason. I said, you know, I, I, I replied to his tweet like 80 million other people like, "This is a bad move." Yeah. And it wasn't a day out. I was like, look, I think that the problem is that it's not the billionaires that... it's the billionaires and their teams, right? So, if Peter leaves, uh, California, if, if Palmer leaves California, if Elon leaves California, it's not just them who leave. Yeah. Works for, and that's, and it's every florist that works for those guys. I'm trying to find florists, every, you have, you have the, the highly productive, high agency team members that are like, I want to be in the same building as my boss every single day because I don't want to go to war remotely like you said. And if I'm going to be a serious player at this company, I need to be, have proximity to the person. I mean, yeah, the average billionaire family office has got to be 50 employees, their families, like it gets pretty big when you think about the footprint easily companies they're running, right? I mean, just the companies they're running. If it's... there has to be a ton of new employment in Texas because of this and I'm sure it'll only continue.

Our friend Jordan was just saying that, that, uh, he's like, Ro Khanna is just rage baiting you guys and you just completely, you know, played into it. And, and I, I think that's, I'm, I'm sure Ro will use this to set up, you know, his next, uh, his next play. But it's still, it doesn't take away from the fact that you're going to leave. I don't care if you like, if you're just using this as a, as a stepping stone to like, you know, go to the national stage being like, I stood up against the California billionaires that weren't playing their fair share. Well, like I live in California and I have, we still have to live with the consequences of like your political ambitions, right? And pushing something that, that's so obviously, you know, I said like, what do you want California to become? Like an agrarian society, you know, where it's just like agriculture and, and vineyards and tourism. Like there's a lot of like, every other state will be happy to take, take these jobs and, and, uh, you know, host these companies. Um, and I don't think we should just, you know, hand them all over. What's really crazy is my, my partner's at one of the big AI labs and, you know, if she leaves California and then sells her stock, California will, you know, kind of come after you. And someone just posted this, um, really almost like fascist letter that the California Tax Department sent them. I don't know if you guys saw this.

Yeah, I saw it. I saw it.

Yeah. Yeah. It was insane. Basically, the, the, the letter was like, "We want to understand the narrative of why you left California." It's like, "Tell, spin us a yarn. Give us, tell us a story. That's great. On how you decided to, on how you had the audacity to leave this state." Yeah. Uh, I'm shocked by it.

On, on xAI, did the, uh, did the podcast make you more bullish on the strategy at Open, at, at xAI specifically? Were there things that you thought were particularly exciting about what was, what was laid out or things that you, uh, thought were maybe misunderstood or mispriced? It's hard to tell from the junior engineer, you know, it's, I think like, you know, you get a window, which is great, but it's also... it's Elon's show and like the risk of, of overindexing to something like that is like, okay, this guy saw it, he worked there. Yeah, that's cool, but what is Elon really thinking? And I think that there's this new thing coming from the AI companies that nobody's expecting. And, you know, I wanted to see if he was going to drop sort of that. And I think all of the labs are gearing up to think about this. Uh, and it's sort of this new, um, derivative of, of kind of the outcomes of AGI. And I think almost nobody in the market's talking about it. Um, so it's going to be very interesting to see how the next, I'll just, you know, leave a teaser there. See how the next, uh... no teasers. Unpack it for us. Break it down.

Five to 10 years. I can't... you can't. Okay. Next five to 10 years comes. I, I, I think that the question is really what, what can AI really do? Yeah. And I think that we've, we very much overindex to chatbots and LLMs and like... a good, a good new direction, you know, people have talked about endlessly is robotics. Yeah. But imagine there's 50 new directions, you know, and I think that, you know, I hate to say something like this changes everything, but like there, there's a couple of clever ones I think coming that are just haven't been seen yet. And I think the smaller, like the non-Google, non-Meta, I'm sorry, non-Google, non-Microsoft type of players, you know, including xAI, is kind of what I'm thinking about, are, are, are actually thinking about this very, very heavily and macro hard, I guess macro hard is kind of, you know, an example of like what is that really. And what's really going to be macro hard as we see, you know, macro hard be revealed more and more. I think there's a lot more to that than, you know, in some ways I think macro hard is going to be bigger than xAI. It's all one entity if I'm not mistaken, but it, macro hard is probably worth more than xAI and I think that we just don't know what's coming out of that. We also know about Elon's gaming, AI gaming ambition, which I think... Yeah. And I don't know if you guys have seen Martin Casado's... Yeah. Uh, coding. It's very cool stuff. Um, and, uh, you know, it's amazing that guy can invest and, uh, do that stuff. And I think one leads to the other. I sort of do the same thing for, for my end. I want to talk to you about really fast. Uh, this idea of photonic computing. Okay. Which I think is time is coming. Okay. Explain. So... yeah. So photonic computing is, is what it sounds like. It's using light instead of electrons to compute. It's, it's been around for 50 years. It's sort of like quantum's ugly stepsister. But I think it's actually the belle of the ball because... and there are very few companies working on this. You probably know all about it from interconnects where, you know, and... silicon photonics as well, but recently in Nature and a few other like preeminent sort of journals, especially Chinese companies have shown that you can do matmuls with light. And it's actually pretty remarkable. Light goes to 100 terahertz, but it's more important than that. It actually is, you can do 3D matmuls and they're all of one complexity. So it's a pretty insane speed up versus GPU. GPUs are great, but they're almost too general, which is why TPUs have sort of been there. But if you throw out the need for, you know, lots of different instructions, you just need to do a matmul, which as you guys know is 95, 90, 95% of what a GPU chip is doing all the time. A matmul is done with light very naturally through constructive and destructive interference. It's, it just nature does it. So, I think this could be an interesting new space and I'm, I'm spending a lot of time on it and, you know, very curious about, you know, uh, could there be a chip? There's a couple of private companies. Um, and I'm starting to dig around and, you know, see what, what's, what here. I think most people stop short of actually making the full photonic computer because they need revenue, they need earnings, they need something. And Celestial AI got bought out by Marvell, you know, they, there's some, or Marvell, there's some attempt to sort of push more and more of like, we used to use copper wires to transmit information. Now we use photonics and fiber and more and more of the chip and more and more of the entire global kind of computer infrastructure is going photonic and maybe the whole thing goes photonic someday and that electricity is actually the odd man out. Um, it, photons don't have some properties that are perfect for, you know, computing, but others like in the case of matmuls, which is now like most of the compute we need in the world, they're actually kind of perfect. So, you know, it's, it'll be interesting to see if there's one, uh, one private Chinese company called Light Intelligence, and it sort of has a foot in the rest of the world. They're in Singapore, but they're also a foot in China. They started out at MIT, so they're privately held. Uh, there's Lightmatter, which it's not really clear that they're still pursuing kind of all optical photonics. And Microsoft's done, done a little bit in space too. So I'm, I'm really interested this, this as the potential next, like as we think as Groq, the acquisition of Groq has sort of and the quantum insanity. This is kind of why I care about this in the first place as a biotech guy. You know, this is very weird for me to think about this, but, um, the Groq acquisition for 20 billion, the quantum crap that's trading for 10 or 20 billion. People really want to think about what's next in compute and of course the, the unconventional and their raise at 5 billion just for a new co. Um, that's, it's, it's all sort of clear that anything that can beat Nvidia matmul in my opinion could be worth trillions.

Uh, what's the state of the quantum computing market? Seems like the companies have not sold off, but you went viral on a podcast sort of breaking down your overall thesis. Is the market sort of waking up to your way of seeing the timelines around quantum computing or the impact of quantum computing or, uh, is there still more work to be done on your end?

Yeah. So I, I think there's no more thinking that needs to be done. I think this is a war of attrition where both sides are right and this is why I kind of started to look for, for other kinds of compute. And as you know, our great friend Bezos has, has his own kind of compute. So like the point is you got a 5 trillion market cap and if you, if you bought a stock at 5 billion, which is not a small cap, that's a big company. Yeah. Most of us would be very happy to exit at 5 billion. You can still get a thousand-x right if it's the next Nvidia. So if you even have a 0.1% chance that one of these quantum stupid companies is the next Nvidia, I mean, take a flyer, you get a 1000x. So I feel like there, there kind of is a rational thinking there even if it's impossible. You know, who's to think what's the difference between 0.1 and 0.0? It's, it's the kind of difference I think about, but most other people don't care. And so any chance to get, it's like the menu problem. What's on the menu for the average Joe versus what's on the menu for you and me. We might get in a Groq round. We might get in an unconventional round. The average person can't. But they can buy $2,000 Rigetti or D-Wave on their Robinhood and maybe they'll get the same kind of, you know, self-manifesting in some ways, you know, um, uh, beta. Yeah. But I'm also curious if you guys want to talk at some point expand this and talk about biotech more.

Yeah, sure. Yeah, we'd love, I mean, I'm like, give it, give us a lay of the land currently, how you're thinking about the year broadly, what's exciting, uh, what, what's maybe, uh, being oversold about AI's potential impact in biotech versus being underappreciated.

Yeah, I think that this, that the Nvidia Lilly have announced this big partnership. Yep. Um, and I've been thinking about drugs and AI more and more and more. And I feel like there is something to do here, but it's not the stuff that everyone thinks about like drug discovery itself or, or small molecules or even proteins. I'm not sure AI is, is very useful. We have great forcing functions for that whether they're physical chemists or software. You don't need a 10x or 100x improvement of that. The actual part of drug discovery, and I can say this as a, you know, very, uh, worn out drug company CEO, the biggest problem of drug companies is the people. And there's fantastic people that work at drug companies. It's just that you have 10, 15, 20 different departments that have to talk to each other. Whether it's toxicology, you know, preclinical, PK, you know, there's all these little subsections. They all have to talk to each other and everything gets lost in...

The translation. Project management is supposed to sit on top of all that. It just often makes it worse. And so you have this like impossible... You talk to anybody that works in big pharma, they'll tell you how ugly it is.

And so if you had a machine doing it, it probably would work better. And I think that more and more companies are going to, whether it's a drug company or law firm or anything else, there's going to be these sort of self-organizing, you know, more decision-making gets pushed down. You know, sometimes I ask ChatGPT about, you know, what would be a better marketing strategy or how do I get more users? What should I do with it? It's like, oh, have you thought about, you know, this? And, you know, sometimes you'll get something surprising. So I think that's sort of the angle I play for drug companies.

There's so much inertia. Oftentimes a CEO will like kill a drug for no reason. He'll promote another drug for no reason. The data says no. The chief scientist, you know, has a personal vendetta with another company, so really wants to push that drug. Like, there's all these irrational decisions that get made over what's basically hundreds of millions of dollars spent, and it's remarkably inefficient. So when Vake came in to try to really upset the apple cart here, as I did too, we sort of did the same thing. It was a little tricky because it's just not an industry that moves fast and breaks things. And for all the occasional luck you get on a drug, a lot of that luck is distributed as well. So Vake got a lot of bad luck sometimes with Roy Vant. He got a couple of things of good luck. It's done fine. But like it's very hard to get the compounding effects that you get. So Lilly has somehow been able to do it because that drug is not going to go generic. But again, the problem is you make a great drug, you have a good hit, you have 10 years to make money and that's it. And so, you know, none of these AI companies would be worth anything if in 10 years they all had to give up their assets because there was a generic AI company. So I feel like drugs still are in this perilous situation. The whole industry is sort of cooked because there's fewer and fewer drug targets to go after. Yeah. So we keep fighting over the smallest number of patients in these random diseases. Sometimes like the skinniest slice of cancer where there's like 600 people have it and there's like 12 drug companies that are developing a drug for it, and so there's overcapacity in the industry. I mean, the same thing happened in steel and some other places, and we arguably have too much going on. And the real fear right now is China. The China drug development capability has gotten so good that there's really no...

Who was it that was saying like, yeah, I would hate, we all want to cure cancer, but I would hate if China cured it before us, which is a wild quote.

It's wild. But on the AI impact in pharma drug discovery, what is the lever that we should be watching between, you know, more frontier models basically raising the IQ, making them smarter, more knowledgeable, versus just speeding them up, getting the state-of-the-art models running on Grok or Cerebras so it's faster so you can do more? Or is it more of like an adoption, diffusion, training? You need to just get the CEO to actually turn AI loose in the organization. It's like a change management problem.

Well, I think, I mean, I think you mentioned HR, and one thing I think xAI should do is take a little bit of macro hard and build an HR function that when an employee says, hey, can I go on a podcast, it just says no quickly, you know.

I think it'd just be an if statement, and it's like, yeah, if Elon, yes. If podcast mentioned, say no anyway. Is keys to success in AI and bio...

I think that pharma is a misunderstood business. So there was this sort of drug god, this guy named Paul Janssen. So he created Janssen, and Janssen was acquired by J&J, but Janssen himself just personally invented, you know, I think half a dozen to a dozen critical medicines, not like methos or anything like that, but like he personally discovered, you know, I think the first antipsychotic, Thorazine, like several massive, massive...

From the creator of Thorazine, we have anti...

It wasn't that back then, right? No, it was good. It's very useful. Yeah. In many cases...

What are you, how are you processing the peptide boom?

Well, that whole thing is another story, but I want to get back to Paul. So sure, there's statues of this guy, etc. We need more Paul Janssens, whether they're digital, synthetic, synthetic sort of intelligence or not. The drug industry is an idea industry.

It is not an industrial process. It's some guy sitting down saying, you know what I think would stop cancer? If we made a hack inhibitor, well, actually, try that, it doesn't work. So, and then somebody saying, I wrote a paper about this, and you know, actually maybe this would do it.

It's the same thing as like getting a digital Ilya who can just go and try a bunch of AI research ideas. You get the AI researcher in a box, turn that loose, and then that unfurls into progress. Certainly a challenge. Is that constrained by hardware compute scale? Are you still scaling pill, or is there an idea that will lead to that?

It's a great question because in the old days, if you wanted to run computer experiments, you didn't need much cost. In fact, that was the attraction, is I sit there and write code, and now it's like, no, no, I need a cluster.

For drugs, you know, it sort of has always been an expensive capital, you know, thing, but in the scheme of things, you know, it's cheaper than AI, and you know, it's kind of like...

You know, you could probably get some proof of concept in animals and people for, you know, less than you might imagine, and then from there, you know, you can develop a portfolio of drugs. So I think that, you know, getting the idea part of the drug discovery industry more sort of capable is one thing AI can help a lot with, and that downstream makes less expenses in clinical trial development and also the decision-making. Somebody looking at the data and saying, look, this drug is a dog, let's not do a phase two, let's not do a phase three. And oftentimes the scientists and the companies have like, I don't know, Wall Street wants us to see us in phase three, we can't really fall behind our rival, and they'll often push...

I mean, I'd say up to a half of all drugs in clinical trials shouldn't be in clinical trials. And you know, that's a lot of money wasted. It's a lot of patient time wasted, and a lot of it is pushed by other incentives and other things like that. So I think AI has a lot of potential for drug discovery. But every time I talk to somebody that wants to talk about AI and drug discovery, they've never been at a drug company. They've never actually done it. And when you do it, you realize it's much more about who's Paul Janssen discovering the next bunch of hits, and who was lucky and got a one-hit wonder, and then who just sucks in general, like Pfizer or something. And so you sort of have to generate those ideas. It's almost like an investor in a hedge fund.

It's interesting because I feel like I can't remember who exactly, but there was somebody on the show that was saying we don't need, it's not that we don't need more ideas, we need a cost reduction across everything from that point.

Yeah. But most of the cost is clinical trials. So...

Yeah. So what you were saying is like if you have these 15 departments and if you can somehow make it so that...

You know, you can have, is it a headcount? Like how much is a headcount reduction actually going to impact the overall cost?

I think it's all clinical trials. Like so once you've invented a drug, say that costs 10 to 50 million, the next 450 million is going to find a bunch of people to try it and compare it to placebo because you have to monitor those people so carefully and so closely that it ends up being this massive cost across, you know, tons of clinical trials. That's the hard part. If you could just take shots and go for 50 million, 20 million left and right, you know, you'd have a really productive drug industry. But unfortunately, getting 10,000 people to take a new diabetes drug is pulling teeth, and you have to really incentivize doctors and patients, meaning you have to pay them. And once they do that, you have to pay the company that collects the data. You have to pay the company that puts it together, sends it to FDA. All that stuff is like just massive paperwork. And it's a lot of it's done.

How is China's process for running clinical trials different than ours?

Very similar, but I think the wages that they pay the people that collect all the stuff is less, and I think that they sort of have it a little more streamlined. I mean, it's amazing what they can do. Like so one of the things that confused me about China the first time I looked at it in biotech was like the average mid-sized American biotech is like 100 people, 200 people, maybe 300, but in China it's like 6,000 people work the same market. Wow, what are they doing? You know, it's like, no, we have like 800 chemists sitting here. What are they doing?

Is that just because of the structure in America? We have more like labs and consultants, and we still employ 6,000 people, but it's all at secondary and third-tier supply chain companies.

Maybe. I think it might be more capital markets where it's like...

They raise the same amount we raise in the Hong Kong market. They raise 300 million.

What does 300 million buy you in China? A lot more people. 800 chemists. 500 chemists, about 40 chemists in San Diego. So...

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's crazy.

Wanted your take on the peptides boom.

Yeah. Peptides are, you know, every time somebody asks me about it, I have to laugh because peptide is defined as a small protein.

And so what you're really asking is what is my take on the unapproved self-medication boost? And you know, when you phrase it that way, it sounds insane.

No, no, no, no. And that's like to me, I tried a peptide cycle probably five years ago, and I was like, okay, this is like cool, and I noticed like a moderate effect.

But I also acknowledge that like this is, I'm like administering effectively an experiment, like an experimental drug is not the right framing, but it's not like the same as like walking into a rowan and getting some vitamin D and having a daily supplement. It's like you're doing an injection. The source matters a ton.

And it is far closer to, you know, taking a round of anabolic steroids than it is, you know, adding some creatine to your smoothie.

I just think it's nuts. I mean, if you think it's a good idea to do your own research on medicine, self-medicate on uncontrolled substances that are manufactured, god knows where, that have never been in clinical trials. And I mean, I'm as libertarian as it gets, but I just don't understand what the impetus is to take foreign substances without some emergency need. And it just boggles my mind because, you know, people, there's some psychological phenomenon where people need to feel in control or they need something in their life that they feel like they're taking a risk on, or, you know, it's nuts. I mean, why would you do it?

Well, and explain why there probably will never be clinical trials for these drugs, right? There's this edge case where, you know, you have a cosmeceutical in essence or kind of like something that doesn't quite fit what's a disease to the FDA. So a good example is premature ejaculation. So the FDA does not consider that an illness.

European drug regulators do, and so you can get approved for impotence in America because it's actually sort of a medical problem where it's like, oh, if I can't copulate and produce, it's a big medical kind of emergency in a sense. Premature ejaculation is sort of like, well, you have it, it is what it is. And you know, so the FDA's never been willing to approve. A company a long time ago tried to get an old J&J drug called epoxitine approved for premature ejaculation, and the FDA basically said there's no set of circumstances where we will approve this.

And you know what's weird about that is, okay, well, what if you actually do suffer from this and it's a severe psychological detriment? As much as we joke about it, people joked about erectile dysfunction a long time ago, and it's a serious illness to many. So you sort of live in this twilight of like, well, I know what drug works. This drug, deoxyine, actually does work.

But I also know it'll never be FDA approved. So what do I do? And in some ways, you know, you're sort of like, I'm taking an unapproved, technically illegal substance, and I'm buying it off some shady third-party market. So eventually, I think we need to find a way, just like almost like what we just talked about, prediction markets. You have these third markets where it's like, yeah, you can bet on, you know, what Trump's going to say in a speech.

And it's not a registered stock exchange, but it's also more than just you and me making a side bet. And it's the same thing with this, where it's like deoxyine is not a peptide, but you know, deoxyine is medically useful for that disease if you call the disease. FDA won't say no. So it's not like I'm taking some random goop, you know, it's a real medicine, but it's in this middle of like, what do you do with this thing? And so much of what we do as investors or whatever is in that middle. Uber, you could sort of define Uber as in that weird middle as well. So I think eventually, you know, we need to address like, it's not as insane as maybe I'm making it out to be. I think some of it is, but eventually you need to address this like, how do we...

Well, even like BPC-157, like there's no incentive to spend the tens of millions of dollars on trials because you would need some type of trade group or something in order to fund that, because if one company did it, then every company would get the benefit of it. So why would one company spend the tens of millions of dollars?

We have an app for that. In drug development, we have an app for that. We can take that drug, twist it, change it, figure out, make it better, you know, and then you get a new patent, and then you have an incentive. So there is sort of a way to do that. And that's not uncommon. I mean, you know, trolling around PubMed looking for, oh, this drug actually does something. I'll take it to my boss at Merck. Boss says no patent. Come back the next day and say, here's the same drug with a nitrogen atom coming out of here. It's going to work the same way. And he says, all right, you know, maybe we should run with that.

Run it. Yeah. Run it.

Well, thank you so much for always showing up. Yeah, come back on again soon. I have a bunch more questions I want to ask about God and everything, but good to see you and happy...

Congrats on the progress and congrats on becoming a father.

Yeah, fatherhood. Massive, massive news.

Great stuff. We'll talk to you soon. Have a good one. Goodbye.

Phantom Cash, fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen and spend with the Phantom Card. Our next guest is Bradley Tusk, the founder and CEO of Tusk Ventures. You might know him from his work with Uber. Thank you so much for waiting. Welcome to the show. How are you doing?

Fantastic. I am upset that it took us over a thousand guests on...

I know. So you just hired a friend of mine named Jackson Foris. Do you guys know him?

So, and he, I literally had the call with him a few weeks ago where he's like, what do I do with my life? And I said, take the job. Those guys have never had me on. And so those two things came together, but he could do it.

That's great news. Tell us about the bookstore. I heard that you have a bookstore.

That's very cool. What's it going to take to get it profitable?

Yeah. Yeah. Oh, well. Well, yeah, let's get back to business.

I want to talk about specifically these businesses that you've been involved with where you've been so helpful to founders on the local and state regulation level, how companies position themselves. It feels like every company right now is focused on what's happening in DC, the federal level. How do you think about what's different when you're working with a company at the local level? What's the playbook? What works if you have a problem and you need to change local laws? What are you recommending to new founders?

How confident were you that you guys could get a deal like the one you got done in Utah with Doctronic? Like when you invested?

Yeah. Yeah. Because I was...

I know. We even, we literally, the people who do this for a living, right? I think I'm the only fund that does this. And even we were like, wow, that one was pretty cool.

A little bit.

Well, you have the two, it's both participants fighting for it too. You have the drivers and the users, which is the most powerful dynamic.

You said FanDuel. So like, are there people out there that will stand up and protest their state government if they try to ban sports betting?

Not for the good of the world.

That's incredibly depressing, admittedly, but it's also kind of a useful place to work from because then you have to understand what can I do to make said politician feel like doing what I want will either help them win the next election or if they don't do...

So the tech industry should tell Roana, we won't trash you in the next election cycle if you don't put our industry in the dirt.

Interesting.

What's your current outlook on the venture landscape broadly? We've been talking a lot about the K-shaped dynamic. There's a whole bunch of headlines around lower total venture funding, more SPV activity. What are you seeing?

Or certainly no revenue. That's crazy.

If you wanted to start a fund with the lowest chances of success, what would it be?

Sure.

How do you, what's your framework? Because there's times where I've invested in a company where I'm like, okay, this founding team is fantastic and they don't understand, but they're good at all this stuff, but they don't understand marketing. I'm very good at marketing.

I can invest and I can help. The problem is I'm going to be in the room with them like less than 1% of the time, right? Like I'll do a handful of calls. I'll make intros. I'll help however I can, but I'm not actually on the team. And so I've ended up getting burned because I'm just like, 1% of my time is not enough to take them from bad at marketing to even good. Right.

Talk to me about mobile voting. We've heard about it for a long time. Do you think it's ever going to happen? What are you doing in this space? Why is it important? Okay, explain.

Hit the gong. Hit the gong for mobile voting.

Citizens, I can imagine, are super excited about this. Who's not excited?

Yeah. Yeah. Because you're just like, oh, no. I love going to the poll. I love taking, you know, an hour out of my day to go do this thing that... Right.

Well, yeah. You look at who's actually turning out for the primaries, and you can concentrate budget on influencing that subgroup, which is much better than having to appeal to an entire region or a huge age range. So...

Amazing. Really quick, I know we're mostly out of time. How do you think, what do you think the dialogue will be around AI in the midterm elections?

Yeah.

And is this the kind of thing that certain politicians are going to make their entire brand anti-AI?

People were like, I want Uber in my area around where I live. Nobody's like, if I don't get a data center in my backyard, I can't use ChatGPT. It's going to work no matter where the data center is.

Yeah. No, that makes a ton of sense.

Yeah. It's going to be a really important story to follow this year. We'd love to have you back on the show to talk.

Thank you so much for taking the time.

You got it. Come on.

And thanks for pushing Jackson over the line.

Have a great rest of your day.

Make you make it up with volume.

There we go. There we go. I just have to, you know, just make it... I need...

Another Uber to be able to afford that. We're working on it. So, thank you so much. Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it. Goodbye.

Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. And we have a very special segment on TBPN today. We have Lukas Czinger from Divergent in the Ultradome. He's actually outside the Ultradome. So, we're gonna take a walk and we're gonna... Let's do a little walk and talk.

We're gonna do a walk and talk for I think this is the first time we've ever done this. So, I should be able to click over to the lav mic. Do you have the lav?

Yeah, I think it's live.

Let's go see what's waiting for us outside of the ultra... audio from outside. I think we have audio outside. Let's go and see.

Okay, we are ready. Look at this. Thank you so much for coming. Yes. Uh, look at this. Uh, walk us through what we're looking at. Reintroduce yourself for those who might not remember.