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Market clearing order inbound. Five.
I see multiple journalists on the horizon. Founder.
You're watching TVPN. Today is Monday, April 6th, 2026. We are live from the TVP Montreal, the Temple of Technology, the fortress of finance, the capital capital.
Happy Easter to everyone who celebrated yesterday.
How was your weekend, Jordy?
Yeah, I did. I finally saw it. Did you see it, Tyler?
I did not see it. How was it, Ben? You saw it, right?
It was great. I was telling you, I think it was uh it was fresh. It was fun.
People put it on a few did not like it.
He didn't like it. He said it was Interstellar for Chuds, right?
Isn't that what he said? He said something. You liked it, right?
I thought it was great. It was very enjoyable watch. I don't know.
Yes, I think you should see it in theater.
In theater, for sure. It's definitely a good It's not too long. It's like two and a half hours, but it's uh it's an Andy Weir. It's Have you seen The Martian?
It's brutal. It's basically just like endless stream of problems and then like quick solutions. So, there's some sort of problem, they need to figure it out. Problem, they need to figure it out. All of it's I don't know, like loosely like hard sci-fi, like somewhat believable. It does have aliens in it and stuff, but it's a fun time. Uh anyway,
well, speaking of real space, what's going on with Artemis 2? Artemis 2 is uh is live streaming right now to almost a million people on YouTube on the NASA YouTube channel. I believe it's also on Netflix. Um and the stream title is just we are about to fly around the moon with authority from from NASA. Uh we can actually pull this up and see. I would love to hear what is going on right now. Uh because I think it's happening like as we speak like they are they are up. Um, I also uh wrote a little bit of a retrospective on the
Can we get some sound company? I have a spider on my
Yeah. Okay. So, one minute ago, NASA posted that the crew uh are now the farthest any human has ever traveled.
250,000 miles from the Earth.
Let me see if I can get this.
Sean is dealing with a
I have a little spider here on his microphone. Here we go.
There we go. There we go. Solved.
Um, still living, too.
Yeah, still living. We'll We'll take it out later.
Uh, what do we got going on here?
Yeah. Can we get the audio on that?
There's no
Oh, there's no audio.
Oh, weird. I think there's there is audio on YouTube, but uh I it might not be letting us like stream it through. I don't know. Sometimes there's like DRM stuff. Anyway, um Matthew Gallagher, he's the founder of Medv and we were supposed to have him on the show today. He unfortunately cannot make it. We do have uh uh John Slottkin coming on, the chief medical officer from Gellzinger to or Geisinger to uh talk about claims around oral GLP-1 drugs. Uh we read the New York Times story on Thursday and then over the weekend there was a whole m a whole bunch more analysis about the company and uh they were
it's so interesting because you would think that someone else would write the the 1 billion one the one person$1 billion company totally
and then the New York Times would take it down but in this case it happened in reverse.
So uh last week the New York Times broke down the story of Medv, a telehealth provider of GLP1 weight loss drugs. Uh and the framing was basically that uh this was the first time in history a single person had built quote a billion-doll company. And um that's what went viral. Digging in there were some small caveats and some big caveats. The the small caveats were that uh you know the founder Matthew Gallagher had hired his younger brother. So technically it was a twoperson startup. Most people were like yeah okay we'll count that. It doesn't matter. It's a it's a family member, right? And then also uh the other one
it's only twice as many people as the original challenge
I guess but but they had almost twice the revenue 1.8 billion. So but the question was the the valuation. So the headline stat in the article was that they are on track to do 1.8 billion in sales this year and that the on track is doing a lot of work of course because that's clearly an ARR number that's that's extrapolated out and the GLP1 market's moving very quickly. It's not like Row and HIMS and all the other providers are going to be, you know, just sitting down and letting this company run away with whatever secret sauce they've discovered around customer acquisition, although they might not go into this, which we'll go into. Um, and it was insane scale, but uh, companies don't unilaterally trade at 1x revenue. Like that's that that's sort of a given in this article. It's sort of presupposed that if you're doing 1.8 billion in revenue, uh, you would trade above a billion dollars. And so this counts as a billion dollar company. I always thought that the billion dollar company would be on market cap, not valuation, not on revenue
because you could do, you know, if you're if you're going to say, you know, okay, any any any just try and say the biggest number, you would want to set up some sort of like payment network where basically you could report GMV really really high and you actually have a very very small business because you're taking like 1% as your true net revenue. Um and so so there was always a question about the margins and then also revenue durability matters like the the the the ongoing question around building um these you know uh oneperson high growth companies is is there durability because if you can do it and then I can do it and then Tyler can do it and then and then anyone with you know access to a coding model can build it very quickly we're going to erode each other's markets and trade market cap very quickly. And I think any VC that would look at this uh they might get to a point where they're like, "Yeah, this is a unicorn company. Look at the growth. I think there's something here." But at the same time, you could see someone like a private equity guy valuing this and saying, "Uh, well, I I need to seekis. I need to see durability.
There's some lawsuits.
Exactly. And we'll get into that. So, uh, Medb uses, uh, two companies, Care Validate and Openluth Health, Open Loop Health to handle the doctor's pharmacies, shipping, and compliance. And we'll get into the compliance thing, but uh that's a lot of outsourcing. And of course that outsourcing uh takes a toll on margin because you have to pay the doctors, you have to pay the pharmacies, you have to pay the shipping, you have to pay the compliance and they're paying care validate and open loop health to flow that value through to those you know individual stakeholders. Um so it's still it's still a
I started asking what does this company actually do itself? just marketing and maybe they're too aggressive about it. We'll get into it. So, uh these GLP1 drugs are so also aren't cheap and when you sell them even when you sell them legally, uh even as a tellaalth rapper, a lot of the value is going to acrue to the pharmaceutical companies that own the intellectual property. At least that's how it should flow when things are functioning properly. Um so you can you can effectively build a teleaalth company on top of a pharmaceutical company like Novo. uh that uh you where you are taking a thin margin on top. You can get to big numbers, but the the pharmaceutical companies are going to want to be paid because they did all of the expensive FDA trials, all the expensive R&D and they need to recoup that. So, um then the other question is you you add in the CAC from digital ads. Uh they were apparently spending a lot on Facebook uh to acquire customers and you quickly get uh you quickly wind up an estimate of pretty thin margins. I think the estimate uh shield shared shield monot shared was like 15% or something like that. Um but uh uh it's it's totally possible to get to a valuation that's lower than a billion dollars um depending on how everything flows.
At the same time though if they're outsourcing all of the kind of key areas of the business to these other players, open loop, yeah, etc. It's possible that of that th those very thin margins, right? The 15-ish percent,
the margins on that are very very extreme, right?
Sure. Yeah.
So, you could still get to a number that was in the hundreds of millions of dollars of
of uh of IBIDA.
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the 15% margin looks like 150 million, maybe 200 million in like basically profit. That is crazy. Um, but we'll see what the FDA has to say long term about that, whether there will be lawsuits or settlements. there was already a warning letter uh and this turned into a big drama about the company. Um the the the drama
and was was there any mention of this in the original story?
I don't think so. Uh and so there were a lot of people that were and and I I believe I pulled up the the New York Times piece and there was no like correction or anything yet. Maybe there will be more follow on. I feel like the uh the founder does need to, you know, respond and have their opportunity to kind of correct the record because these things can kind of run away in either direction. Um but, uh even with all the drama, uh there were a ton of, you know, super legitimate questions about how valuable the company really is and how long they'll be able to continue their current business model without pretty serious changes. And that's around the marketing stuff. So, Medvy received an FDA warning letter uh just two months ago for misbranding violations. So, warning letter, if you're not familiar with the FDA's language, uh it can be pretty wide ranging. Like, sometimes it requires just a small a small change to marketing materials uh to remain compliant and sometimes it's basically like a shut down the company moment. This happened a lot with the nicotine category with uh illegal uh vape vapor products,
right? Um, and sometimes like the warning letter would be like you are warned in that if you continue to sell these like we will put you out of business. And some of them are okay, we're warning you about this particular claim on your website. You need to change this language and it's pretty pretty minimal. Uh, I went through this 10 years ago. We started Lucy 2016 and uh while I was there, we were extremely nervous about warning letters because if we got a warning letter, we thought it would mess up the FDA applications that we had in progress. It would mess up distributors. Like anyone who you're partnering with would say, "Well, I don't want to work with somebody that has a warning letter. Have you dealt with this?" Um, we were able to avoid all this, but uh one one kind of concrete example is that um
we like Lucy cannot make quit claims about the nicotine gum product. So, uh, even though most people think, oh, this is like nicer, it's actually regulated in a different category. It's regulated as tobacco product, not as a pharmaceutical product. And so, uh, you can't run a digital ad that says like, hey, you're a smoker, quit smoking with Lucy. That's a violation because it's not regulated as a pharmaceutical, as a smoking sessation aid is the term.
And so, in the nicotine category, you would have companies create a product. Yep. Usually there would be no founder associated with said product because people didn't want to put their face on it. Yeah. And they would do a lot of things that would that would uh make sales grow incredibly quickly. Yep. Like you know making marketing claims just where and how they decided to sell etc etc that the ad channels that they used. And so they would they would go from zero to hundreds of millions or billions of revenue very very quickly. But the enterprise value of the company would be
near zero, right? because no nobody would want to buy a company that had all that kind of baggage. Uh and so if you were going to value it, it' be like what is the like very very very near-term, you know, uh sort of like revenue opportunity.
Yeah. Yeah. I mean the famous the famous comparison is Juul versus Puff Bar. Uh so Juul uh went, you know, raised a bunch of money, got very big, uh put in FDA applications, got those applications denied, uh marketing denial orders, then got them stayed in the courts. They set up a I think their whole headquarters was in DC. They were working very closely with the FDA truly engaging to sort of clean up the you know all of the problems around marketing and sales and formulation just really try and get to a clean bill of health with regard to the government relations. Uh they were successful and they got approved as not as a smoking sessation aid. So they still can't make the claim that Juul will help you quit smoking. Um they they but they did get approved as a tobacco product uh you know which I think the FDA says it has to be suitable for the protection of public health which is a very vague way of saying like it's a net benefit net good that that that that it's on the market which is you know people can debate that back and forth but um but back in the Juel days they also could not say quit smoking with Juul. they wanted to put say they wanted like a lot of people that were you know were smoking cigarettes did switch to Juul and they were pushing for that uh but they couldn't actually make quick claims so they used the word switch they said switch to Juul uh instead of quit with Juul and that seemed fine for a long time I think they they they eventually trademarked it and then I think they had to pull away from it at at various points in time but there's clearly like this gray area in your marketing um can you say you want smokers to upgrade to nicotine gum. You know, all of these things need to be sort of litigated with the FDA. Um,
and what has Medv been up to?
We wound up playing it very safe. Uh, and, uh, that probably kept us from mooning in revenue to 1.8 billion overnight, but I still think it was the right decision for Lucy. Uh, now Medvy appears to have taken a much more aggressive approach. Um, they are apparently running uh, 800 fake doctor accounts on Facebook to sell compounded GLP1. Shonot verified that the accounts are not actually doctors. Some even have cartoonishly fake names like
Dr. Tucker Carl Zen MD.
If you
like I feel this is one of those things where like I feel bad for someone who clicked on an ad that was deceptive
from Dr. Tucker Carlson MD.
But if you're getting your GLP1s from Dr. Carl Tucker's in
like you probably are in on the joke to some extent. I don't know. Uh is clearly not above board and they have to clean this up and deal with this. Uh they were also sued in a class action lawsuit last month for violating California's anti-PAM law. That stuff can be crazy expensive because a lot of the fines are on like a per instance basis. So it'll be like, okay, yeah, $10 fine for every text message you sent. And it could be like you sent like you know 50 million text messages or something. So you could have some massive massive liability. Of course uh that will be litigated in the court of law and there might be a settlement and they can figure out what what the right damage is. Uh if they are even guilty they're still early in the process. Uh and so the end result is more of a story of pushing over aggressive marketing tactics.
Yeah. I mean, so so pull up pull up the actual picture uh of of Shield's post because I think that
you can just see how confusing this would be to somebody maybe uh a little bit a little bit older one of those.
Yeah. Zoom in. You can just see you see somebody that looks like a doctor. Oh, yeah. They got the stuff.
If you're 70 years old on Facebook,
you're not necessarily putting it together. It's doc Dr. Tucker Carlson MB. So my co-founder Lucy is uh uh he he has a PhD from Caltech but it's in biopysics and so he's not a medical doctor but he is a doctor of science from Caltech like he has a really good uh you know background but he's not a medical doctor and I would always joke with him like we got to put you in a stethoscope we got to take some photos of you in a stethoscope like the aura is so high and he was like no that's like such bad practice like we can't do that like doctor is associ with medical doctor even if you have a doctorate in something it's like the famous like I'm dying does anyone have a doctorate it's like yeah I have a doctor in a jurist doctor or whatever
the other interesting thing Medv uses theorg
what
domain
isn't that for nonprofits typically that's very
I would think so
there's going to be
I don't I don't know if it's technically illegal to use it as a forprofit but uh certainly when you add that to all the other
Yeah because you land on that site and then you think
it looks like oh a doctor advertised Now I'm on a nonprofit
medical website.
Yes. Um so uh yeah in general I think the story is uh pushing over aggressive marketing tactics to the limit more than AI allowing low headcount scaling. Uh but and this has happened for a long time. Back in the old days, I want to say like 2014 Facebook era, uh, but the early days of online marketing, uh, there were countless stories of questionable supplement sales or tellahalth operations scaling uh, on the back of insane ads. The classic formula for for like mega scale was if you could get an ad approved uh, if you could get it like sort of like whitelisted or or through the approval process, it wouldn't automatically get reviewed that often. So once you were approved, you could say you could spend $1,000 or you could spend $50 million. And there w there wasn't early on there wasn't a natural trigger to like re, you know, uh like react check. It was like if you could get approved for a small ad, you could scale it up. And so people would do all these crazy things to try and get the ads approved. There were all these uh tricky things where they would route to one website and then after the ad was approved they would change the website and then you know all the ad platforms had to eventually figure out like okay we need to be scraping scraping a layer deeper like consistently or like every day. Um, but the canonical example of the uh health supplement or tellaalth operation that would uh always go viral and always just print was if you could get an ad approved that had Harvard scientists brain pill and Johnny Depp all in one call to action. I'm not kidding about this. This is real. So it was like always this picture of Johnny Depp coming out of the ocean. That was the one that was like really scrolling
of pirates of the
No, no. It was like a paparazzi photo which they didn't have the rights to use. They would not partner with Johnny Dab. They should not be running that ad at all. Um
and then something about brain boosting or like making like Limitless pill make you a genius that type of marketing would like it's very general like who doesn't want to be smarter? So everyone would click on that and then like Harvard scientists would like lend its like credibility because oh if it's from Harvard like it's good. Uh, and so if you could get those three terms approved, uh, there were a whole bunch of like sketchy operations that would get ads approved and then just pump like a hundred million dollars of sales behind them. And it seems like maybe there's a little bit of that going on here where a lot of these uh, a lot of these ads should not have been approved. Maybe there needs to be a validation. I know that a lot of companies that partner with uh doctors, even just to sell like skin care, supplements, sunscreens, really anything, uh the the rate to uh to advertise with an influencer who's a who actually has some sort of medical credential is like way higher. Yeah.
Because it's way more effective
and that Yeah. And it's way more effective. But if you can just like fake that, then uh you're basically arbitrageing that. But you shouldn't be. So
we have we have two employees but 800 fake doctors. Not not
on Facebook.
Not great.
Um so so we'll we'll see how this works out. I I think the press tour is probably
uh ended for for the near term.
Okay. Well, welcome to I I think people have a lot of questions for uh the founder uh Matthew Gallagher. We'd love to have him on the show and uh dig into all this because maybe there are some good uh good context that is missing from all of the all of the criticism that's been uh levied over the weekend. But uh we'll see. So I was reflecting on like like we're still in pursuit broadly of this one person $1 billion company. It's still an interesting question. Will it happen? Why might it happen? Why might it not?
Yeah. In my in my head it was always new startup is created.
Yeah.
In like solo founder creates a hit product raises a hundred on a billion and that is the mo that is like the cleanest path because for so many other paths
you just run into
Yeah. Maybe I want to be the one one person$ one billion dollar company, but I want to win more. Yeah. And so if adding incremental people helps me build a better company,
there's point. Yeah. Why would I not add add at least a handful of people, right?
Yeah. Totally. Um, so yeah, I mean I think I think software is an interesting category, especially if it was open-source software somehow where there was some sort of flywheel where you could verify what was actually built and then you could verify what the sales were because it was done on some, you know, sort of open platform or some sort of, you know, uh, some uh some sort of uh thing where uh the the actual reporting and the analytics. I mean, apparently the the New York Times did verify the run rate that they that they use. So there their money was flowing through the business. Um, but having having a much cleaner representation of what the financial picture is, I think would would help. Uh, I was personally excited about the prospect of a video game um and and just more video game developers seeing breakout success. So, um, a couple years ago, uh, in the in the olden days when I had free time, uh, I got woefully addicted to a poker themed roguelike deck building game called Bolatro, which I don't think anyone here has played, but this game is amazing. So much fun. Uh, so it's you're basically playing poker, but there's no financial stakes, there's no money, there's no microtransactions at all. Interestingly, the game actually got banned, I think, in Japan or some other country for being like poker and being
banned for being anti-gambling.
No, no. For
no, no, banned for for being like gambling aesthetics because you are playing with cards. There's no real money. You pay like 10 $15 for the game and then you can just play unlimited. Um,
but it's done extremely well. So, uh, it sold over 5 million units. I saw some reporting that it might be 7 million and maybe even more now because they've gone multiplatform. Uh and I think at 15 $20 uh a download that might be close to a hund00 million in revenue and it was made by a solo solo developer who goes by local thunk uh over a two and a half year period. He originally wanted the game to be a side project that he could put on his resume. Uh but it wound up being a massive success. And so depending on your valuation methodology, you could probably underwrite Bellatro close to a billion dollars if it's generated a hund00 million of basically free cash flow. You know, there was obviously two and a half years of R&D, but that was just this developer's time, the future revenue streams, the offshoots, the merch. Like you you get to a number that's close. and uh and you have to imagine that that his two and a half year development uh like life cycle would have been pulled forward by the help of AI. So he basically developed the the game in entirely in the preAI period. So it came out
does it still have momentum? I think it's probably trailed off a little bit because people sort of you get to the end of the game after I don't know 10 20 50 hours or something and then there are some people on YouTube that will do like tons and tons of like like try and break the game because you can get really really crazy with like combinations of different things. Um but at a certain point like you do kind of finish the game and then you're like okay I'm moving on. Uh and he never added microtransactions. he never added like any sort of live service model subscription anything like that. It was sort of just like it did really well and then we'll see. Um and so uh yeah this came out as a demo in 2023 and officially launched in January 2024. So fully like preAI development and there's lots of there there is lots of hesitation in the video game community around AI specifically around the the art generation like pixel art generation all of that. But if you think about AI as a tool for writing game logic and particularly like replplatforming, it took him I want to say like a full year and I think he partnered with a developer or a publisher to actually distribute the game because it was originally a PC game and then it went to Nintendo Switch and then PlayStation and then Xbox and it's a perfect game to be everywhere but that takes a lot of time and you sort of have to rewrite a bunch of the software and that's something where uh AI should be able to pull that forward or make it even easier to launch everywhere on day
Um, and so, uh, the interesting thing is that Bellatro broke through because it paired like this familiar design language with this wildly engagement engaging progression system. And so, bringing fun ideas like that to market faster is something that like I'm really looking forward to. And we heard Schulto from Enthropic talking about like building his own RTS game and obviously he has a full-time job so this would be certainly uh something that would be like extra. We're we we've been working on a bunch of simulators that are sort of feeling like games. Some of the mechanics are getting pretty good now. Um
game like
but but you have to imagine that uh that in the future there'll be more and more game developers.
Yeah. I mean some of the stuff that I've seen internally at TPN it's like going to blow
already vague post.
Are you the vague post king? Uh have you stared into the abyss the abyss yet? Because everyone talks about at the AI labs, they they all have abysses and I feel like I feel like abyss 101 is like don't do not stare into it. Yeah. Like maybe glance at onboarding.
Yeah. There's the abyss.
I think a glance is okay and or maybe like like saddling up to the abyss and just kind of peeking your head in is fine, but I would not stare into it. I I I think that's something
Let's go over to the app store.
Yeah,
the app store saw an 85% increase in new apps this past quarter. Let's uh pour one out. poor one out for the app store review team in most recent quarters. New app count has grown less than 10%. So, uh it was just ticking up uh quarter over quarter and then jumped massively. Uh no surprises here uh feel like everybody everybody that I know outside of tech has uh has an app now. They're unconstrained. They have an app, but at the same time, I have yet to find an app that's on my home screen that was solo developer vibe coded, something like that. So, I'm waiting for the Flappy Bird moment or the Bellatro moment, this like solo thing. Even if it's uh like a productivity tool, um there's clearly more apps, but uh actually going viral, like what is the Harry Potter Balenciaga moment? what is the, you know, the viral moment that uh breaks through and actually makes it to the top of the app charts because right now it just feels like the the long tail of the app store is getting potentially fatter because there's more singleuse apps, there's more small apps, but will we see one of those break out and become, you know, fantastically successful? That's sort of like the next the next uh you know critical moment that I'm I'm you know eagerly awaiting but we'll see.
Uh what's going on in China, John?
Uh the pork industry is a victim of its own success. This story is incredible. They got swine scrapers over there. Skyscrapers filled with swine. I'm not kidding about this. Uh so this is from the the Economist and I read this yesterday and really enjoyed it. Pork holds a unique place in the Chinese diet. It was once a symbol of good the good life. The Chinese character for home is a pictogram of a pig under a roof. It is so important that the government has a strategic frozen pork reserve and the news media are always full of the ups and downs of the pork industry. It's like you they got to cover it like it's a horse race. Like what's going on? Yeah, it's a pork race.
No, serious. Uh TBPN for the pork industry in China. That's the real That's the real opportunity. Uh there have been plenty of peaks and troughs in the past decade. The trough is active over there, literally. Uh, in 2018 to 2019, when African swine fever ravaged pig herds, many smaller backyard farms were wiped out. Prices went through the roof. Before long, the industry came trotting back. The big worry now is that is doing too well. More efficient farming methods producing ever more pork are colliding with slow consumption of the meat. Now all the news is about over capacity. uh uh she who uh sells cuts of pork at a market in Beijing says she only got to eat the meat on special occasions with a child. These days, she says it's so cheap people can have it whenever they fancy. The over supply pushed live pig prices to a 15-year low in March. Some farmers are losing over $40 per animal. Part of the problem is that some pig farmers have been aggressively expand have aggressively expanded production in an attempt to gain a bigger share of of a shrinking market. On top of that, big companies saved their bacon in the downturn by concentrating their pigs into mechanized modern facilities where they could be kept isolated from the swine fever. Modern farms are a marvel of industrial agriculture, though not of animal welfare. Tens of thousands of pigs are packed into multi-story concrete buildings. One in Hube province has 26 floors. It's a swine scraper. It's 26 floors of pigs. That's
Do we know why consumption is declining?
just over supply. So, they got hit with this uh they got hit with the swine flu and they were worried about all the pigs getting sick and dying. And so, they instead of having them cross-pollinate in like open fields, they push them into these literal skyscrapers that are 26 floors tall. And
but I would assume over over over consump over production you have over supply prices come down but
they're saying that just overall consumption is dropping too. Well, yes. So, people are uh moving to chicken and seafood. Increasingly middle class, the middle class Chinese see uh pork is less healthy than chicken and seafood. But it's really like a supply a supply side story. Uh that may be more pork than even China can eat. The average Chinese person guzzled 28 kg of it in 2024, but that was 2 kg less than in 2023. Uh to boost prices, officials have slashed subsidies, ordered farms to callull droves, and told the pork reserve to buy more meat to little effect. Some big firms are looking elsewhere.
That is wild.
Uh China's biggest pig producer hopes to export its business model instead. Last year, it said it would bring the first high-rise uh it would build the first high-rise in Vietnam uh capable of rearing 1.6 million swine a year. Pig farms are going vertical as profits flatline. And so they are moving the pigs inside which is what which is, you know, winding up with with like increased yields because uh the the pigs aren't getting sick. Anyway, um
America's new best new weapon in Iran is a drone inspired by Iran. Uh you had asked about this on one interview we did with someone. Yeah, I forget who it was with, but I was I was, you know, I was surprised to see the US copying the Shahed because it feels like
you were surprised to see them copying it or not copying it.
No, it it feels like entirely the smart move. It's battle tested. They're cheap. Uh we we have a good understanding of their capability because American allies have faced off against them. So there's a lot of reasons that that it makes sense, but uh I I feel like America had to swallow its pride to some degree uh to to copy, you know, something that uh you know, the the enemy uh made. So
yeah, they're calling it the Toyota Corolla of drones. Uh the powerful lowcost attack drone the US is using in its war with Iran doesn't come from one of America's more than 400 venture-backed drone startups, and it isn't the product of Silicon Valley ingenuity. Instead, the drone having its moment in the Middle East conflict was designed by the US military itself using reverse engineered Iranian technology. From the earliest days of the war, the FLM136
or Lucas as it is known has been wiping out Iranian military targets while better funded hardware systems and drones from defense startups have had little involvement. It is a victory for the US military, which went from blueprint to battle ready drone in less than two years, jettisoning its tradition of slowly buying very expensive equipment. The creation of Lucas is an early proof point.
That's a narrative violation.
A new strategy of making cheap drones quickly and a sign that the Pentagon can change the way it does business to better prepare for modern conflict. So, I I want to know so much more about like So, they're not subcontracting this at all? Is this all like is the entire supply chain uh the the US military itself? Are they milling the parts in factories that they've built?
During the Biden administration, a small group in the defense department seized on the idea of America building its own version of the Iranian shahed a fearsome attack drone that militaries and proxy militias across the globe have sought to duplicate Russia which is lobbing about 4,000 modified shaheds at Ukraine every month according to Ukrainian government data did more than any other country to demonstrate the drone's capabilities. A small team in the US military's research and engineering office put together plans to build an attack drone based on deconstructing a shahedad the military had recovered from Ukraine. It was the first known occasion in around half a century that the US had reverse engineered another country's military technology for its own use. Former defense officials said the last time it was a Sovietmade pontoon bridge. That's interesting. A former senior defense official described Lucas, which stands for lowcost unmanned combat attack system as the Toyota Corolla of drones. It may not have all the features or top-end components, but it was built to be affordable and plentiful. The cost of Lucas ranges from 10,000 to 55,000. Uh, that's a big range. According to a Pentagon spokesman, in line with the Iranian model, Tomahawk longrange cruise missiles, several hundred of which have been used in the war with Iran, cut at least 2 million, cost at least 2 million a piece. M um
the defense department is committed to scaling coste effective autonomous solutions for the joint force and Lucas continues to be a prime example. The spokesman said former senior Pentagon official Michael Horowitz who is one of the leaders of the teams that developed Lucas said that other militaries had the ability to make their own lowcost long-range precision strike weapons. The issue was the US was spending nothing zero dollars on that kind of system. Uh who now who he's now on the Council of Foreign Relations. Lucas was given a spot in uh a in 2024 in a Biden era initiative to field thousands of autonomous weapons by last August. Its inclusion was controversial, said mo former military officials. Lucas just wasn't just a mockup, but it beat out more mature systems on the offering. Interesting. Uh because the government owns Lucas's intellectual property, it is using the same approach it employed in building ships during World War II, enlisting a cross-section of second and third tier manufacturers. Okay. who crank out the drones on demand during wartime. Little known Scottsdale, Arizona based Spectre Works in Huntsville, Alabama, Alabama based integration innovation were tapped to build the drones. So they are partnering with um uh with private companies to actually do uh build an assembly of these drones. Uh a total of five manufacturers will be selected, each set up to produce 300 drones a month. former senior defense official familiar with the plan said Spectre works in integration innovation didn't respond to requests for comment. The Marine Corps was first to use the drones and then ordered around 6,000 dusted for the Indoacific. Uh but then the war with Iran began. The drones were handed over to US ScentCom in February and made their first appearance in combat. The Trump administration has enacted sweeping reforms in defense procurement, making it easier for the military to quickly buy weapons and emphasizing commercial technology to modernize the US arsenal. uh in particular an August decision by defense secretary Pete Hegsath to rescend longheld requirements processes for acquiring technology made the rapid deployment of Lucas possible current and former defense officials say still other changes will take longer to trickle through the Pentagon's bureaucracy and it will take time to reorient America's to a new way of fighting wars even as China is developing advanced ways to strike the US. While Lucas has been a success against Iran's degraded air defenses, that isn't a guarantee. It will be a battlefield star in more complex environments, uh, an electronic warfare expert said. Um, in the Middle East, there is no meaningful jamming of GPS, which can cause drones to crash or fly off course. Every technology gets defeated at some point, he said. There's still a worrisome There's still There's also still a worrisome lack of cheap US counter drone technology which has allowed Iranianbacked militias to continue using small drones to menace US military bases in the Middle East. Uh the small number of unmanned surface vessels in the region are still years away from being uh the autonomous fighting machines their manufacturers have promised. The absence of a broader supply of modern US cheap US systems in the Iran war has served as a wakeup call. We're not ready, said Julie Bush, co-founder of the defense tech firm Valinor Enterprises and a former Palunteer Technologies executive, uh, who's been on the show. Uh, the government doesn't have what it needs to scale that they, uh,
what it needs at the scale that they need.
They need it.
Yeah. Uh, did you see that, uh, AGM post Antonio Garcia Martinez said about uh, how maybe there are actually ships that are going through the straight of Hormuz right now, but they just turn off all of their transponders. Yeah. I I mean I think the the estimate is around 10 10 ships a day are going through down from a hundred pre war.
Yeah.
Uh but there could be more that just aren't that that again have their transponder turned off.
Yeah. He was saying something about like people will turn off their transponders even when they find like good fishing spots because they don't want other people to find their good fishing spots. And so it's done more than uh more than people think I guess. Uh but uh Satrini is over there. Satrini research analyst made it over to the street of Hormuz in an absolutely insane move and some real crazy investigative journalism going on. I'm hoping to have Catrini on. I obviously want to be uh uh secure about whatever is shared because it does seem like a risky proposition to be over there right now. Um but uh love seeing them uh love seeing the reporting so far. Uh, in other tech news, uh, Enthropic is making its own splash with an acquisition. This was on Thursday, April 2nd. Uh, $400 million for coefficient bio started last fall, developing an AI drug R&D uh, platform. The startup's team will be joining anthropics healthcare life sciences group, which is aimed at developing tools for biotech workflows ranging from drug discovery to clinical tests. Uh, very exciting. Uh, Dimension Capital owned over 50%. Who is Dimension Capital? Have we had them on the show?
I don't think so. We probably should.
Capital, that feels like a multi-stage, research-oriented investment firm partnering with companies across the frontiers of science and compute. Well, huge win for them. Congrats to the...
Not bad. Not bad at all for six months.
There's also an article in the Wall Street Journal about OpenAI and Anthropic's finances revealing a challenge, from Berber Jin, Scoop God. OpenAI and Anthropic are racing toward potentially record-breaking IPOs by the end of the year. An inside look at the financials of both companies prior to funding rounds completed earlier this year show their Achilles heel: the soaring costs needed to train new AI models. OpenAI expects to spend $121 billion on computing power for AI research in 2028. That means the company anticipates burning $85 billion that year, even after almost doubling sales from the years prior. Such losses would dwarf that of virtually any other public company in history. Anthropic doesn't expect to spend nearly as much, but its rosiest forecasts tell a similar story of mounting computing costs. Both companies are releasing new versions of their AI models at a faster cadence than ever before while pouring more resources into the training runs that create them. The arms race is showing no signs of slowing.
Yeah. So pull up this chart from Andrew Curran. This is from the Wall Street Journal piece. Projected OpenAI and Anthropic model training spend for the remainder of this decade in billions. The Wall Street Journal says they got the data from financial documents shared with investors. So yeah, I think, I mean, obviously, absolutely wild numbers here. I think this is for training specifically, which is a cost that can be adjusted.
Yeah, this is a question of like, yeah, like each model by itself is profitable, but you keep having to spend more on the bigger model. Tyler, anything about this?
This is like emblematic of the Dwarkesh critique of Dario, right? Where he's like, if you basically compare OpenAI and Anthropic, Dario is being way more conservative about spending. Like he's like, oh well, we don't want to, you know, go broke or whatever. But yeah, I mean, when you see the chart like this, it's like pretty crazy.
What was it, the YOLO philosophy? It does seem like there's a debate internal at OpenAI, according to The Information, around IPO timing. This is from The Information, from Ana Gardis and Amamira Arai: OpenAI CEO and CFO diverge on IPO timing. Sam Altman has committed OpenAI to spend $600 billion in the next five years and privately said he wants to go public as soon as the fourth quarter, despite expectations his company will burn more than $200 billion before it starts generating cash. Behind the scenes, according to The Information, Sarah Frier, his chief financial officer, has voiced concerns that reflect the tensions and risk inherent in the CEO's extraordinarily ambitious plans. OpenAI is committing billions of dollars a year in advance to help finance data centers. Frier last year began reporting to the head of applications instead of Altman. Altman has excluded her from some conversations related to financial plans. And so you can go to The Information to read more about that story, but it is extremely high stakes. There's, in general, the AI companies have like, are they railroads? Are they SaaS companies? There's this incredible amount of capex. Are they both electricity?
Yeah. No one really has consensus here yet. And it feels like there's an ongoing divergence in how do you model these financially? How much risk should you take? There's also this question of like the end of the curve, the end of this exponential. We're seeing this exponential growth in model capability relative to investment dollars. The scaling laws have held for a long time, but at the same time, you can't just throw endless money because at a certain point, you don't want to spend a trillion dollars to get like one more IQ point out of the model. Like there is a limit to this. And so if you're thinking about like hiring an employee, it's like, okay, so this one individual is, you know, their base salary is going to be 200k a year. Or you could hire this other person, and they're one IQ point smarter, but it's going to cost you $5 million a year. The choice is obvious. So we'll see when we get to that point. Overall, I think tensions between, this is not the first time there's been tension between a CFO and an ambitious CEO.
Have you ever hired a CFO at any of your companies?
We hired a CFO at my first company and it was an awesome experience actually. But the tension was insane. But I was not the CEO, and so the CFO came in and she had taken multiple companies public and was like, this is just a widgets business, this is so simple, like we should just be running this sufficiently. And of course there was a big debate about that, but she was very, very formative in my early business career.
Yeah, it's interesting because that was, you know, a consumer packaged goods company but with a lot of Silicon Valley venture capital jammed into it. So the pressure from the board was one thing, and then you have the CFO who's saying, hey, we're selling... and so much organic growth. But the nature of like Soylent and consumer packaged goods, it's not a fundamentally different business at the end of the day. Like it does just become a marketing, manufacturing, margin game and you eventually trade on EBITDA. And so the, what do they call it, the reality distortion field doesn't quite apply, but when you're dealing with an entirely new technology, it's a whole different discussion.
Anyway, there's another article in the Wall Street Journal about the new jobs that are being created by AI. Let's go through this. So AI is raising big fears about employment losses, but it's also giving rise to new engineering and training jobs. And we're going to have Liz Hoffman from Semafor on the show later to talk about the March jobs data. There was a massive jobs beat and a whole bunch more jobs added to the economy, but the chart is crazy. It's like up and down every quarter.
Yeah. The tough thing, you know, every single jobs report has been revised downward so massively that it's hard to look at a new jobs report and actually get excited when you have a print like that and say, 'Yeah, this time it's different. This time it's different.'
The last 12 have been revised downward. And then now you have a war and major geopolitical tensions and this weird dynamic where the oil prices are driving gas prices, which is driving inflation, which is maybe going to cause less driving-based vacations over the summer, less tourism. Like you could see inflation plus some economic weakness regardless of what the technology industry is doing. And so you could wind up with a situation where rates have to stay high, and so that creates unemployment, and it's a rough time to be a Fed governor, I'm sure. But let's dig into what the Wall Street Journal is talking about, where different jobs are playing a part here. So artificial intelligence has sparked fears it will become a job killer. There's also a research paper, I don't know, a PDF from OpenAI today around the social contract and how the government should be thinking about redistribution and the safety net in the age of AGI. It's a long document and honestly I haven't had a chance to read it yet, but we will go through some of it later this...
I saw one response, someone just said, just put the tokens in the bag, bro.
But we'll read it and we'll cover it.
Oh yeah, we'll figure it out. And yeah, it'll be interesting to see how it maps onto like previous political platforms. Like who picks it up, because like there's obviously a collection of political ideas and various politicians might say, 'Hey, I've been saying that for a long time. I like that.' Or, 'Hey, I completely disagree with that. I have a different philosophy.' But we'll work through it. So AI is also fueling a crop of new careers. AI created 640,000 jobs between 2023 and 2025 in the US, according to an analysis by LinkedIn of job posting data, including new white-collar positions such as head of AI and AI engineer. That tally doesn't include the huge number of temporary construction jobs tied to building the mammoth data centers AI relies on. And I'm wondering how temporary will they be if the capex ramp continues and you know you're going to build 10 times as many data centers, you would imagine there's 10 times as many construction jobs.
Many construction jobs are temporary, right? You build a house, job is over, you move and build the next one.
Yeah. So LinkedIn's head of economics, Corey Kantena, says we're not talking about enough jobs to change the direction of the labor market, but for AI roles, growth has been pretty much straight up. And Citadel had something.
Yeah. And for roles like AI engineer, to me, that was just you were going to hire an engineer and you're slapping AI on the front of it because you want somebody that's excited about AI.
Yeah. Just somebody that's excited about AI. And maybe more greenfield projects. Maybe something that's, you know, it's like the new full stack. Like no longer are you hiring like a back-end engineer, front-end engineer necessarily. Like you might be hiring someone who's more flexible. What do you laugh at?
I love how the first example, this guy, Zach, who they're profiling in this, the first picture of him is just him with a surfboard running into the ocean.
Hey, surfing after work. He's got good work-life balance. Let's read.
That looks like the middle of the day to me. Look at the, you know, just look at where the light is, John. That's not after work.
Another word about surfing. I don't want you getting cancelled again for being anti-surfing post. What were you, you were anti-surfing before work?
Surfing in really cold water before work.
Oh, he's bad. It has not worked well for me. Okay. For you, apparently there's people out there really mad at you.
Yeah. Did you get death threats? No, you just got dunked on. It's fine. It happens. Zach Kinsler, who's 25 years old, got his master's degree in business analytics less than two years ago. In February he assumed the title of head of human AI solutions at Boodlebach, an AI education startup based in Colorado Springs, Colorado. His job involves client training and using AI to speed up tasks for co-workers. That is a good gig. Kinsler works remotely from San Diego, wanted to work with AI and says he feels lucky to land in a growing field. The conversation about whether artificial intelligence is good or bad needs to go away because it's not going to go away, he said. One of the biggest questions facing a shaky US labor market that has been especially hard on white-collar workers is whether AI's ability to mimic human skills like research, writing, and coding will cause significant layoffs. Big cuts at Oracle this week while the company invests heavily in AI data centers underscored some of these worries. Corporate leaders, including some in the tech world, have issued grim forecasts about AI's potential to replace white-collar workers at a massive scale. According to a recent Goldman Sachs research report, AI could automate tasks that account for a quarter of all working hours in the United States, especially in fields such as administrative support, legal work, and architecture and engineering. One interesting pitch I was hearing, I think it was from the OpenAI doc, was like, you know, I think it was during the industrial revolution the unions lobbied for the weekend, the idea of the weekend, and that just became a thing and stuck around forever, basically. And so there's a question about like, you know, do we pitch a four-day work week somehow nationally, some like, you know, bigger thing? I don't know. There's all these interesting like competitive dynamics and obviously people wind up working on the weekends because they're like, I want to outcompete.
David Sacks is like, I want all my enemies to move to a four-day work week immediately so they can properly relax and recover.
That actually mandate that for everybody except me. Still, analysts say it's hard to judge how many job cuts thus far are genuinely attributable to AI and which are being made for financial or operational reasons. This is something we've been going back and forth on forever. A new survey of 750 chief financial officers found that AI had essentially no negative employment effect in 2025. But data show employers are increasingly hiring for AI talent. In 2023, AI-related roles made up only 1.6% of all job postings according to an AI job tracker co-led by Anil Gupta, professor at the University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business and job market company Linkup. Never heard of that before. Two years later, that figure had more than doubled to 3.4% of all job postings being AI-related. One rising job is head of AI. That's a good gig. In the three years from 2023 to 2025, companies sought to fill 225,000 such jobs. There are now 225,000 heads of AI. You need 20 years of experience prior for most of these jobs, which is maybe tough to put that together. No, I'm joking. We should talk about China's, what's happening in the Chinese AI talent race over in The Economist.
Yes, Dave Freeberg was talking about this on stage at Hill and Valley about how there's been this big flipping from where research is coming from. The headline stat is something like 50% of, where is it, 50% where... Okay, this was from Jensen Huang at Nvidia. He said, is it possible that the United States falls behind China? He asked himself a question during a question and answer session about artificial intelligence late last year. He says the answer is absolutely yes. That may seem surprising. For much of the last decade, America has been comfortably ahead in the AI race. Home to the most advanced companies producing frontier models, its engineers have access to deep pools of capital as well as a regular supply of Nvidia's cutting-edge chips. But Mr. Huang's concern related to an equally important ingredient of innovation: human talent. Until recently, most leading AI research was produced by experts based in the West. That is changing. In 2025, for the first time, more studies presented at the world's top AI conference had lead authors based in China. Tyler, you have more comments?
Yeah, I think it's just misleading, right? Because a lot of the best researchers in the US are studying, but they're not putting that work... right? You can see if you scroll down on that article a little bit more, you can see a chart where the US, like between 2015 and 2020, it looks like it's starting to go exponential and then basically plateaus, right? Because all the best researchers basically go to the labs and you don't publish anymore.
Wait, so which chart are you referring to? The one in... Is it called active AI researchers in the thousands? Student early career. And so in the United States, it's growing up until 2021 and then it stagnates because all the labs went closed because they... and all the Chinese labs are still open source.
Are still open source. Yeah. So yeah, I think that's a very reasonable mitigating point here. There is just the question of like, do you still need a pipeline of open-source researchers, of robust research practice? Also like if you're in the Ilya Sutskever camp of like the age of research, maybe you do need a bunch of bizarre ideas that are happening and you get like more...
But I mean Ilya is like definitely not publishing, right?
Oh true. He's like even more secretive. Yeah. But I think you could expand from that into like, there might be interesting knock-on research that gets pulled from random places and like the cross-pollination is valuable. And even if he's not a practitioner of that, you can still make the argument that research is valuable and cross-pollination is also valuable and China does have that advantage.
Yeah. I just think like if you look at China, like there's the anecdotal evidence of like what happened to the Qwen researchers, right? Like you know the people running that company are just like not...
Do we ever find out what's going on? I don't think we know yet.
We don't know yet. But like clearly like something is like different about how they're thinking about researchers than in the US, right? Because those guys are like extremely good. And somehow there was some reorg happening.
The chat is demanding an ad break. We'll figure it out. A lot of people were saying that, you know, the ads were part of the program. We will figure out a way to do something ad related. Until now, you have to put up with some random soundboard. And that's the best I can do for you. But there is a different article in The Economist. People were just watching for the ads, I guess. China's new master plan for its tech economy in 2030 and beyond. And so they have, this is the 15th five-year plan for China's economic development. This was adopted in March and The Economist is breaking it down. It talks of industrial upgrading, new quality productive forces and the like. Yet in plain language, it translates into Elon Musk's fever dream. So, China wants to build skies dotted with flying taxis, fusion power fueling factories manned by humanoid robots, unstoppable quantum computers, 6G mobile devices plugged directly into people's brains. It's a dream come true for you, Jordy. Are you going to renounce your citizenship?
What? Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. Sign me up. Sign me up.
No, but obviously they're taking frontier sci-fi development very, very seriously and it has a lot of knock-on effects. So past plans also displayed gumption. In 2015, the most high-profile plan in years, dubbed Made in China 2025, set the goal of catching up with America and ending reliance on foreign technology. But catching up, which China has pulled off in areas like electric cars, clean energy and even artificial intelligence, is one thing. Dominating technologies of the future is another. Can they do it? One reason for this breathtaking ambition is the desire of Xi Jinping, China's leader, to rush to usher in a modernized socialist state by 2035. Remember he thinks he's going to live to, I think, 150, he was caught on maybe some hot mic saying. So he's thinking in centuries still. A modernized Chinese socialist is generating...
It's possible he knew he was miked up and he wanted to kind of downplay how he's thinking, right? He thought in his head he's like, oh, I'm easily a thousand... easily a thousand... if I don't hit 1k. Yeah, but I don't want to sound crazy. But I don't want to sound crazy, got to give him something. Ballparking, ballparking.
So currently a modernized Chinese socialist is generating between 20,000 and 30,000 USD in economic value per year. That's up from less than $14,000 today. So in 2035 they want to be more than double what they are today of 14,000. Sorry, I had that backwards. To meet that goal, itself a step towards China becoming a modernized socialist world power by 2049, the centennial of communist rule. GDP per person must grow four to eight percent a year in the next decade. With Chinese consumers in a dour mood and exporters facing geopolitical uncertainty, the party believes only world-beating technology and resulting productivity gains can ensure success. So that requires picking up the pace, says The Economist. Whereas earlier plans set distinct objectives for strategic industries and for scientific innovation, industrial policy is now being extended to out-there tech, notes Camille of Rhodium, a research firm. The latest plan ordains the commercialization of fledgling fields like AI robots, hydrogen power, and brain-computer interfaces all in the next five years. Within another five, the party wants breakthroughs and...
Hate to interrupt you, John, but the chat is saying Ryan and Jeff are saying put a scroller of the guest schedule.
Oh, that's good. Put the guest schedule on the scroller, which I think is good. And then, next, where should we go to save both time and money?
Baby answer to that. Time is money. Save both. Easier. Corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, a whole lot more, all in one place. You know, I'm not gonna forget the ad reads. I still haven't...
John rattled off a lot to me over the weekend. Yeah, it was just for the two of us. Yes, subliminal ad reads. This will happen. The point of the plan is to signal to officials and investors which initiatives to back. This unlocks funds from central and local governments. Private capital follows on the assumption state involvement reduces risk. Research clusters attract not just technologists and money but also marketers, lawyers and other professionals needed to take tech from the lab into markets. Host cities enlist armies of bureaucrats who develop domain expertise. Proponents of Chinese techno-planning point to AI as proof that it works for cutting-edge innovation. When in 2017 China declared its intention to enter the global high-end value chain for AI by 2025, foreigners scoffed. Have they succeeded in entering the global high-end value chain for AI by 2025?
No. Global, I mean the... when I think global high-end value chain I think semiconductors. Yeah. Not global. I think like the actual end product.
I mean the video model is really good. Seance... totally. But that's maybe not the, maybe that doesn't count as the high-end value chain. I don't know. Anyway, let's see what The Economist has to say. In January last year, Western markets shuddered when DeepSeek, an AI lab, released a model that rivaled top American ones. No one is scoffing at the new goal of turning China into, quote, 'the world's primary AI innovation center.' I'm scoffing. Are you scoffing?
Scoffed up. Scoffed up. What do you think? Yeah, I'm scoffing. You're scoffing. The whole reason that Chinese AI is good is because they're just distilling on American models. Like we know this. This is like true now. Like we know this for sure. And the reason that the video models are good is because they don't follow IP. Yes. Yeah. This is not cope. Yeah. I don't think this is cope. I think The Economist is coping.
Oh well. They are doing a lot of other things though. So early results in several other areas look encouraging too. The low-altitude economy. Ooh, new buzzword, new coinage. We got the orbital economy up in space. We got the low-altitude economy of delivery drones and flying cabs born of private sector ingenuity took off after capturing the attention of officialdom around 2021. State imprimatur for brain-computer interfaces, first named a future industry in 2024 and a subject of its own plan in late 2025, has led universities to set up research projects and startups to launch products. Cities host specialist industrial zones and hospitals have published pricing guidelines for brain implants. That's, they're moving quick. I would expect that the low-altitude economy does very, very well. I mean DJI is super legit. Of course, they're going to have to compete with all of the different... I mean not really compete because I doubt that...
Does DJI have any delivery-focused products?
Um, I don't know. But I mean Zipline just raised more money. They're doing very well. Google has a project and there's a whole bunch of...
DJI has DJI FlyCart 100. Specifically for it's a 85 kg max payload capacity. 12 kilometer max flight.
But again that's something that doesn't, I mean it requires like innovation but really it's like a lot of manufacturing and regulatory, like it's not necessarily frontier.
Yeah. When I looked at the top of their plan, it's like they wanted to do electric cars, clean energy, and AI. They have absolutely crushed it for the most part. So, for sure, skepticism is warranted. However, thank you Economist. We will be skeptics here. Earlier plans, including Made in China 2025, missed many goals. It doesn't feel like it. It feels like they crushed that one. They made everything. China beats the world in renewables tech and electric cars and matches it in AI. Debatable, but lags behind in critical areas like advanced chips. Capital ends up wasted if it flows to places in which local officials duplicate efforts elsewhere, chase industries despite a lack of tech talent, or are loathed to abandon failures. China's apparent desire to dominate every emerging industry may spread resources too thinly. Making a hoo-ha about the plans does not help. Uh-oh, we're in trouble. Made in China 2025 spooked America, which saw it as a challenge to its techno-economic dominance. It hobbled Chinese efforts in areas like chipmaking by restricting exports of crucial American inputs, the ASML lithography machines. Of course, there is now talk of Made in China 2035. But any technology named in the latest plan can still expect a target on its back. Talk of using undefined unconventional measures to achieve the plan's goals will not put Americans' minds at ease. The biggest challenge for Chinese planners is a function of their catch-up success. Those occurred in fields where the technology, like photovoltaic cells or lithium-ion batteries, had been around for decades and the market for electricity or cars was mature. Moving to tech bleeding edge involves a lot more unknowns. Is there a business case for hydrogen power? How many people will want brain implants? This guy. This guy over here. Sign me up. Can quantum computers and fusion even be made to work outside the lab? China's plan implies it knows the answer. Market forces may have other ideas. Interesting. Well, we have some advice for young men in China who are trying to unseat America's techno-capitalist dominance. This comes from Sean Frank. He gives 25 practical tips to improve your life. Let's run through them. He says he's about to have his first son. So, congratulations to Sean Frank over at Ridge. Here's what he wished he learned earlier in life, and I want your agree or disagree. So, a $40 to $90 water flosser can save you a minimum of $4,000 on dental work. Use it every day. Are you a water pick guy?
Does Sean have... Sean investor in Waterpik? I guess cordless advanced 2.0 water.
I don't know. I've heard really good things. I've never done... Have you ever used a water pick?
Uh, when I had braces, I used it like...
I do the analog. I actually floss, but I use the physical floss. But maybe I should get one of these. I don't know. He speaks highly of it.
Are you a big cavity guy?
Have you ever got a cavity?
Maybe once or something, but very... No, I do pretty well. I like brushing my teeth. I feel it's refreshing. Two, learn something people will pay you for. Sports are awesome. College will be fun, but you need to learn a skill that the market values. It can be anything. A locksmith will have a better life than a master's in archaeology. Taking shots. Didn't you take a dinosaur class?
I did. I did. I studied for at least one semester for a specific requirement.
You're basically an archaeologist. You should get a master's in archaeology. It is interesting because if you want to make, you know, $40,000 a year and spend all your time thinking about dinosaurs, and that is what you qualify as a great life, then you're probably going to have a much better life than, you know, being a locksmith. So, and I think we were predicting that, like, you know, everyone's wondering like where will Jordy, where will John go as influencers? And I think like the logical place was that you'd become a member of the datosphere, sort of like the manosphere but for fatherhood. And a true knowledge of dinosaurs is pretty key to rearing a child, especially a young boy.
Yeah. I would say when I became a dad, I struggled intensely early on with pronouncing names of the different dinosaurs, right? There's hundreds. They have these names that are all just kind of like mashed together. It seems like they're always making new dinosaurs. And they renamed a bunch of... They probably have like over 50 different dinosaur books. They were lied to in Jurassic Park. The velociraptor is the size of a chicken. I know that that's one of the biggest... That's one of the biggest kind of like... Yeah. There's I think they refer to it as like the red pill. It's like the red pill moment where you realize like everything you learned in school was a lie. Like when you learn velociraptor being the size of a chicken with, you know, a bunch of feathers. Question everything. Yeah. Makes you question everything. It starts a lot of conspiratorial thinking. For sure. Sure does.
Okay. What about this one? Number three. Just buy timeless brands. Head to toe. Ralph Lauren looks good in 1990, 2000, 2010, 2020, and it will look good in 2030. You have no idea when this photo was taken. Could be this week, last year, 2004. It was 2004. What do you think? Timeless brands, bullish, bearish?
Yeah, I think a millennial, late millennial early Gen Z forgot about the timeless brands because there were so many new DTC brands for every possible category. But I think Ralph Lauren and some of the other classics have just continued to cook. Yeah. So, if it doesn't matter, buy secondhand. My best friend spends less than 500 per year on clothes and shoes. Gets by just fine. This applies to most things. Oh, buy secondhand clothes, but your wedding suit, let's just buy new, dude. Be funny. Being funny is a skill. You can get funnier. You can learn to be funnier. People will like you more if you have a sense of humor. You will get dates by being funny. Those dates will go better if you are funny. In 180 days, you will be top 5% funny and your life will be 60% better. How is that possible? You're selling a course on humor. This is a crazy thing to learn. I don't even know days. I can guarantee you'll be in the top 5% funny or your money back. Funny mastermind. Is he on intro.com? I want to sign up. We need to get him to coach us. This is... He's certainly funny with this post. Be the friend you wish you had. Everyone is lonely. Everyone is sitting at home more than they want. Just do things and invite people. It isn't weird or cringe. If they feel that, it's on them. Text people out of nowhere and wish them well. Don't wait around for someone to invite you on their adventure. Time for a side quest. You have to make the life you want. It's okay to leave everyone behind and go do something cool. Don't feel obligations to people who are trying to hold you back. Forget about... Whoa, whoa, whoa. He's taking insane shots of it. But before, I think I've figured out why Sean's doing this. He's a very busy guy, right? To have a kid, running a business with hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue. He's launching new brands, all this stuff. So I think this entire list is trying to... He sees some of the young guns kind of nipping at his heels a little bit and he's like, I need to distract them. I need to distract him. I need to throw him off the scent. I believe it. Well, he's taking shots at me with number eight. He says being tall doesn't matter. Being lean does. Yeah, this is a good point, though. He says, 'You have no control over your height.' And honestly, it's just cope to care. I'm 5'8 or 5'9 and height has never been a factor in anything I do, but you do need to be physically strong. Everyone needs to be able to do a pull-up. That's a good point. But with inserts, he could be 6'1, 6'2, cowboy boots, cowboy hats. He could be up 6'3, 6'4. No problem. Sounds like cope from Sean. He says, 'No one is thinking about you.' Well, I'm thinking about you, Sean. He says, 'How often do you think about your old co-workers? Maybe once a year in passing. They aren't thinking about you either. Don't do things for the opinions of other people because those opinions are fleeting.' That's a great point. It's okay to fail because only people remember the wins. You can be a loser for 10 years in a row. Failure after failure, bankrupt, but as soon as you hit a big win, everyone loves you. This is a common theme here. But other people's validation is worthless. Money is very important. Speedrun making as much money as possible. Leave jobs, move states, change careers, get equity, and build leverage in your field. Be an expert. Be vocal. Share your learnings. Life gets easier. Don't choose a profession that is someone's passion. If you are competing with someone who would do it for free, get out of the field. You want to be one of one. Your profession has to be your passion. These are good, good missions. And then he goes back to sunscreen. He's just giving like life wisdom. And then he's just like, and here's two more screenshots from direct-to-consumer company. Face moisturizer and better screen UV serum. Is he holding KES? He says, 'I use KE sunscreen and Wild Roman.' I do love Wild Roman. Carol Sill Bloom, but anything is better than nothing. The cheapest $1 tube will put you in the 1% of men. Are you a daily sunscreen guy? No, but you, lotion, anything. Moisturizer. Yeah, I'll use a moisturizer. But yeah, sunscreen. I got kind of cooked this weekend. Oh, yeah. A lot of times... Find your cohort. This is a group of people around your age in your chosen field. Most often not school friends. He says drinking is bad. You should still try it and do it, but the risk-reward is pretty low. It would be good to stop drinking by the time you're 25. Weed is bad and you should skip that. Agree. Maybe old school weed was fun and free, but now this new stuff is too strong and will make you crazy. That is a good point. Find your relationship with God. God is real and cool and great and everywhere, but someone can't just tell you that. You got to find it. This will take your whole life. Never shame someone for doing what they have to do to survive. You don't know how easy you have it. You aren't better than anyone. The world is built brick by brick by every single person doing their part. I don't know how my microwave works or water treatment works, but I love a burrito in a shower. If someone earns less in a different way, that they are important. Just tip well. So much fighting and discourse about tipping getting out of hand. Just forget it and tip well. We had this discussion earlier about when they turn the iPad around. You got to just tip. Be generous but logical. I'll give anyone in my life money once. It's a gift. I'm never being paid back. But when they ask again, they think you are a piggy bank. You are. Who you marry will be the most important decision of your life. My wife is my best friend. We are perfect partners. And you better find that because you are with this person 12 plus hours a day forever. Act with honesty in everything you do. You can be cutthroat, you can be swift and decisive, but never steal and don't lie. If you are going to beat someone, you tell them how and why ahead of time. And number 25, no one is coming to save you. You are a man. No one cares if you are wronged. No one cares if something is unfair. You have to save yourself. Well, Sean saved threads. He saved threads. I mean, we haven't seen a thread like this in a long time. This could have been an article, but he went back to the thread meta. I wonder if the thread meta is permanently back in vogue. I don't know. Anyway, we have our first guest of the show in the waiting room. Let's bring in Sam Broner from Better Money. Sam, how you doing?
I'm doing great, guys. First guest of the day. This is fantastic. Starting the week off strong.
And kick us off. The whole problem we're facing is there's not enough noise. There's not enough soundboard. So, kick us off with your news so I can slam the gong as hard as possible.
Well, look, we raised $10 million to build a stablecoin clearing house. We're... Yeah, hit that gong. Yeah, we're here to solve the problem of doing payments with stablecoins and making stablecoins really work for payments companies.
Okay, but back up and explain what is a clearing house broadly? Give me like the...
Yeah. Well, you use clearing houses all the time. Like when you do an ACH, you're sending money from one bank to another bank. Yeah. A clearing house is just how you connect financial institutions. There's a bunch of them. They're used frequently in payments. Today, just so you guys know, for stablecoins, when you want to go from one stablecoin to another, it's the equivalent of if you had to sell Wells Fargo dollars to buy Bank of America dollars. And we know that's not how payments work. You probably have an intuitive understanding for that. And if you're a trad company, you're confused by this. And so we solve that problem. We make stablecoins sort of work how trad payments companies expect them to work.
And okay. And is that going from USDT to USDC or there are a bunch of other pairs? What pairs actually matter?
Yeah, there's a bunch of pairs. So we support the GENIUS Act compliant stablecoins and we work with a bunch of the stablecoin issuance platforms like Bridge, like Braille. We can work with Agora, M0, and FRA. And so we have a bunch of great partners that we support their stablecoins.
And walk me through the background, how you got to this moment, launching the company, all that.
Yeah. So I worked at the Boston Fed on their stablecoin initiative. Pretty trad institution and loved that experience. And then I was an investor at Andreessen Horowitz crypto for three years. Priced off 300...
Andre... Explain Andreessen Horowitz. Wait, what was the Boston Fed project technically, like a CBDC?
Yeah, it was. It's kind of controversial, by the way. Real stablecoin land, they don't love CBDCs, but it was very interesting.
Have... it feels like the CBDC movement has very much lost momentum. Is that your read or do you think there will be a resurgence and central banks will actually play a role in the stablecoin ecosystem maybe a few years down the line?
Yeah. I think that stablecoins work well now and the fact that you can send any amount of money anywhere for a fraction of a penny is a good thing. And so the need might have dried up. Like private stablecoins that are well regulated are working.
Are there people in government who are still like, oh, we got to get, you know, the Fed to control this? Like we just, like as a matter of political ideology, the Fed must have control over the issuance of something that looks like US dollars. I don't think that's a huge narrative right now. Mostly because when...
You go to a bank like you're relying on their balance sheet to do your banking. So the Fed doesn't really get involved with everyday consumer payments anyway. They like to work through these institutions. There's this big bill called the Genius Act that came out in July of 2025 that sets the regulatory tone for stablecoins, and it builds into that meta like the Fed expects to work with other institutions to make payments happen.
Yeah. Yeah. Walk through the Genius Act. You said it's still being implemented. Like we've covered it a few times, but like where are we in the rollout and like the calcification of the actual law and rules that will all be downstream that like wind up getting implemented into stablecoin platforms?
Okay. Yeah. So July, the legislation comes out and it has really widespread bipartisan support. Over the last few months, the rules are now getting made more specifically, like you know, literally how do you do the accounting? What is the compliance obligation? Where's the money have to sit? The more interesting thing though is that big companies now feel very ready to adopt stablecoins. We hear about multiple RFPs for stablecoin projects a week. You get to work with smart people. And that's actually sort of breakneck pace for these big orgs. Like they're not a big payments company is not accustomed to shipping a whole new product line on a whole new payment rail in seven months. But that's what's happening right now.
So what, yeah, so a big institution is like, okay, stablecoins seem to be sticking around. I kind of need to create a strategy here. What are the things going through their head that they care about in terms of actually, you know, integrating them into their product suite? I'm assuming they want to figure out how to make money from them. I'm assuming they are very risk-averse early on, but how are they thinking about, you know, setting up a project?
Yeah, I mean, the first conversation probably is what should we do about stablecoins, and then you know that's not the right time to really launch into a new stablecoin product. You got to identify a real need. And the real need is typically we can improve the quality of our treasury management or we have a product that involves payments that we could do much better. So that might be remittances, it might be agentic payments, it might be streaming payments, it could be trade finance. And you know that's often the thing that they're excited to improve on.
At what level of abstraction is integration actually happening? Because I imagine if I'm a big company, can I just go to my bank and say, 'Okay, I'm sick of these ACH fees. I want you to figure out how to use stablecoins and then I want to pay less or whatever platform they're using to move money.' The platform probably jumps on it. At what point is a company that's not a financial institution integrating stablecoins?
So, first I just want to give a little context on this. There's been a long history of big enterprises getting deeper into the payment stack. Airbnb, Shopify, Square, these companies kind of own banks now because they want that additional level of control to make their product better. And they can do all of this interesting next-generation stuff once they get that integrated. And so we see a similar thing where for many companies going to your bank or your payments provider is the right place to start. But there's a ton of ambitious tech and fintech payments and banking companies that want to get even closer to the rails so they can optimize the quality of their product. We'll see all things happen. I mean, there's always been retailers to simplify the stack.
I remember it might have been Uber or maybe it was Airbnb, but there were a few companies that sort of launched like instant payouts. It happened a lot on like gig work platforms and it felt like the platform was basically just eating two days of working capital by paying for the service that's rendered immediately even though they weren't going to get money from their customer for two days because of like the transfer. Is that the main motivation, like speed?
I love that you brought that up by the way. That's like a pretty deep cut. So that whole thing is unlocked by Durbin-exempt debit cards. This is the ability to charge a higher fee on cards. Totally a wonk thing. But there's this rule in the US where if a bank has under a certain amount of assets, they can issue a debit card that takes a higher fee on the swipes. That's how they pay for the working capital in that example. Like they don't just front the two days.
I thought they were just like raising debt or doing some financial engineering and just being like, 'Look, it's going to be so valuable for our customers to pay on Monday and then the gig worker that delivered the food or delivered the car on that day to get paid the same day.' That they were just like, 'Yeah, and we'll just have this massive two-day growing working capital bill.' But it's interesting that they've already found a workaround. So then does that make the stablecoin argument like weaker because they already figured out a hack or will stablecoins allow them to like drop the cost of doing that project?
Okay. So I think it's both. Like, okay, it's often about cross-selling. The Durbin-exempt card pays for part of that working capital bill but not all of it. Yes, it makes for a more compelling product, but probably the most interesting part is to build that product takes a ton of engineers and a ton of money. And there's many businesses who can't afford that and would like to still offer that kind of compelling product. And mind you, like that's a pretty limited product. We've only figured out instant payout for that one category, gig workers, debit cards. There's a ton of other places. Maybe it's buying groceries, maybe it's payments where you might want that similar instant payout facility.
Yeah. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So, yeah. What has like the launch of the company looked like? Is it like are you dealing with regulatory filings and getting like banking licenses? Is it writing code? Like what's the shape of the business?
Yeah. Well, we write a lot of code. I'm an engineer. Like that's one of my favorite things to do. We rely on great partners for the regs like that, you know, they help us with that. So we build on their infrastructure. But the shape of the company is really figuring out how we can build better products for payments companies, fintechs, money apps generally where they get this one-to-one guarantee. One stablecoin equals $1 and they know when the money will arrive. Those are two things that don't exist right now for a lot of stablecoin offerings. Might be surprising, but that's something that payments companies really do require for them to run their business.
How are you thinking about the strength of the dollar broadly? Is that like an important thing to track? I mean, we saw the news about Tether buying like an insane amount of gold and then there was this sort of narrative violation around the war causing actually a flight to the dollar and the dollar strengthening even though obviously it's a very tumultuous time. Like how have you been processing just the demand for the dollar generally because that's like the entire stablecoin boom is sort of predicated on it?
Yeah. I mean, I'm unabashedly pro-dollar, but that's kind of sort of besides the point. There's no product in the world that has more product-market fit than the dollar. You could get there's like nothing you could give anyone in the world that everyone agrees is valuable more than a dollar. And so, look, we could talk all day about whether that changes a little bit, but for now, people want dollars.
Yeah. And then in terms of your sort of go-to-market growth, are you focused on those big companies, Fortune 500 companies, are you selling deeper in the stack, B2B or B2B2T? Like how are you actually sourcing customers, growing the business?
Yeah, it's a little bit of all of that. We see big companies who really want to be on stablecoins now because they can simplify a global treasury or build a new product, and we see a ton of very fast-moving, very savvy fintechs who want the same. Luckily for us, it's the same platform, it's the clearinghouse, and that's similar to how JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo all use it, but so does Ridgewood Savings Bank and Seattle First Chemical Bank, you know, all types of money apps.
Sorry, we just had somebody fall in the studio. Just a chair or something. I want to talk about particularly other movements to like stable-ish things on chain. There was talk like a few years ago about like mortgages on chain, real estate on chain. Have you been tracking any of that? Is there progress?
There's a ton of progress. I mean, certainly we're, I think today there's a big announcement about another large trading venue trying to do on-chain securities. I think that's likely to happen because people want access to 24/7 trading. There's events that happen outside of trading hours where it's helpful to have deep liquidity to react to it. Certainly at ETHGlobal, you know, saw so many of these stablecoin companies and so many of the RWA companies that were bringing the rest of finance on chain. In the recent months I've been pretty narrowly focused on payments, but they touch RWA because often you're paying into a trading venue in order to do trading there. We'll see a slow drip over months. This is not the kind of infrastructure that gets built in a day, but I think it will surprise people by being the type of infrastructure that gets built in a year or in 18 months and you start to see a lot more access soon.
Yeah. Why is it slow? Is it because I understand with like Bitcoin, you know, you have this consensus of all these different developers. It takes a long time to get agreement. But at some point it feels like the pace of acceleration in software needs to catch up. Are you feeling that at all?
Yeah, it's definitely happening right now. I'll give you one little example. You own some public equity and you once a quarter get this thick booklet of paperwork from them that tells you all about their quarterly. This is a requirement. Like when you own a stock, you are getting that paper in the mail with their quarterly earnings. And so you got to bring all of that infrastructure to interact with on-chain ownership. And there's these little pieces that all need to be solved well in order to bring all these assets on chain. A lot of financial assets still involve paperwork and they just aren't situated for a digital world yet, but I think we're all going to enjoy it when they are.
Yeah. Another way to think about it, like bringing real estate on chain, right? It sounds like cool and futuristic, but then like for transactions like somebody buying their own home, if somebody comes to them and says, 'Hey, I can help you buy your home on chain and you'll save, you know, a couple thousand dollars on this part of the process,' that's not a very compelling pitch. Whereas, you know, Sam over here, if you're saying like, hey, you're moving, you know, millions, hundreds of millions, billions of dollars annually, you can save a very meaningful amount by adopting stables. It's just a very different kind of trade.
I agree with that. And I think there's still home ownership records that are in some basement underneath a municipality's building. That's going to take years to digitize those files. So these are the kinds of things where you really got to think through the weeds of how you bring things on chain. I will say if you're using the same technology every day, people get accustomed to it much faster. I think that's likely to happen with the payment scenario where you're saving a couple bucks on a daily transaction and it starts to feel like part of your life and something you can really rely on.
Last question from the chat. Do you see prediction markets driving stablecoin adoption? Oh man. Easy one. What was that reaction?
Yeah. Well, the truth is that as the on-chain world gets more active, it's a positive feedback loop because more people have wallets, more people have identities, and people get more comfortable with the UX. So, there's sort of this general network effect similar to what the internet had where actually one more popular website begets the next popular website because you're accustomed to going into the search bar and googling the next thing. And so, yes, I do think that will draw more folks into stablecoins.
Yeah. But probably like less important than the Genius Act, but still like, you know, one link in the chain metaphorically. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Congrats on the round. We'll talk to you soon.
Thank you, Sam. See you guys.
Have a good one. Goodbye. Up next, we have John Slotkin from Geisinger to revisit the story of the $1 billion one-person startup. We're getting to the bottom of it. Let's see if he's here. I think he is. John, how are you doing?
Good. How are you guys doing? And first of all, congratulations on everything. Great to see you again.
Thank you. Yeah, great to see you again. So, I mean, how did you process this story? Where do you think is good to start? Do you want to maybe set the table with sort of a little bit of your background and then some of the understanding of what the claims were made and then we can kind of go through them one at a time.
Yeah, sure. Sounds good. So, I'm a neurosurgeon. I practice. I'm also an investor over at Scrub Capital and I invest in digital health quite a bit. And when I saw this story, just like I think a lot of us, I wanted this story to be true. So we have an extraordinary reporter and a great venue and I think what happened is we ended up with a tech story when what we needed was a health story. So we needed different questions asked of different people to really go a layer deeper before we anointed this as this great example of where we should go. And look, I think part of it is we're all guilty of having wanted this to be exactly what it seemed to be. I think investors were guilty of it, writers, founders, and honestly guys, probably patients too because tech stories, they feel consumable, they feel easy, but look, revenue when it's absent, probably some of the needed regulatory context, that's where we need to go deeper. So that's where I came from at this.
So yeah, unpack that idea. Revenue, you know, free of the context or it needs more context because there are like several different pieces to that. The marketing claims, but also the margins, all these different things. Like what popped out to you first where you were like, hmm, this seems maybe too good to be true.
Yeah. So, for me, the biggest thing about the article, and this is a great reporter, a decorated reporter, was what wasn't in the article. So, six weeks before the article came out, FDA sent a warning letter to this company. Now, to be clear, they sent them to many. And that's fair, but those weren't featured and anointed in the New York Times. Those other companies that received those letters. They are also, some of their supply chain partners named in the article are subject of a RICO lawsuit right now. There are multiple class action lawsuits. And look, some of those look like they're coming from these volume firms to be fair. But to me, it's that constellation. One of those things alone may be one thing. And look, Maggie Harrison reported over a year ago fake patients, fake testimonials, and AI-generated photos. She actually put out a piece this morning that was a great piece. But that's a year old. So to me, that contingency pattern in telemedicine of people saying like, well, real patients don't want their face on a website. Oh yeah, I'll use AI name or a fake picture. But then it just keeps coming up as again an issue. There were also though, as you saw, there were fake doctors. So there was Dr. Albus Dongor. There was Dr. Tucker Carl Zinn spelled with a D. Like that's another layer. And it's just that I'm saying when that constellation comes together, I think there's now almost like a burden of why are we telling this story in this way? And that's where, you know, I think we needed a lot more of, well, wait a second, is work that we're talking about. And I want to make a point here. The day before this article ran, the day before Lilly's oral got approved, it was not tirzepatide. In fact, it wasn't even a peptide. So, it's often been said the last thing that a weatherman needs to do before going on any air is look out the window. Well, so we have this company selling and others too selling an oral version of the medication that has no biological plausibility of working. And to me, the best witness of that is that the day before Lilly announced an entirely different medication despite the fact that it would cause market confusion potentially.
So, you think there'll be, you're expecting there to be sort of issues with the actual product assortment that the company has been selling as well?
Well, some of what they sell and others are products that work. And let's be clear, a lot of these work really well, okay? But the problem when we sell ones that don't work is it sets those people back. It sets back their metabolic time. But also, if this administration, and I love that they're doing this, is being so pro-innovation in this regard, then we need to be particularly harsh when people are bringing things that are completely irrational and have zero evidence base. And when I say that oral tirzepatide has zero evidence base, somebody email me if they find otherwise, but Lilly is quoted as saying it's true. There are zero, no published studies on oral tirzepatide in humans. None. Okay. And so when that's the subject of the RICO lawsuit. So what we can get into there is in order for there to be innovation, we have to punish snake oil. And we do want innovation in peptides.
How do you think about the broader boom in peptide prescription telehealth? Because I'm familiar with the warning letter process. It's usually violation of like marketing language, but it can also be used for a variety of other sort of regulatory actions. Do you think that there needs to be like more clarification from the FDA or is it pretty easy for the companies that you've talked to and interacted with to steer clear of FDA warning letters in this particular category?
You've really nailed it there. And let me be clear, not only am I pro-development in this area, I myself have had peptides as part of my own health journey. That's been great for me over the last couple of years. And let's start here. The demand is real. And part of what leads to this is the supply constraints are also real. So that's true. And these drugs when done right, they're some of the most powerful agents we've ever seen. Look, I don't want to put too fine a point on it, but this is true. In a subset of people, and before everybody messages me, I said a subset. We have cured obesity in a subset of people. And yes, they need to continue on the medications, but all three of us live long enough to see that happen in some people, and that's real. And so I'm thrilled that this administration is encouraging development here, but that's why we need to police better. So what do I, you had pointed an important space, a gap that's allowing this to occur and it's a little bit inside baseball, but it's important. FDA regulates substances and devices largely. And as you know, they cannot regulate the practice of medicine. That's key. Only the states can. So that's one of the spreads here that's leading to this daylight for operators like this to come in, which is FDA approves, you know, subcutaneous tirzepatide, Mounjaro formulations that gets into the practice of medicine and compounding. FDA is statutorily forbidden from getting involved in the practice of medicine. So I'm looking to and over in HHS between Abe and some of these other guys and Marty, there are some extremely smart people that I think we need to now think about. This is an issue of regulatory lag but also regulatory gap between federal, we get to control the substances but states, we control the practice of medicine. It's allowing too much daylight.
That's interesting. What about the gap within the pharma companies themselves around e-commerce? It feels crazy to say, but like the pharma companies, Novo, Eli Lilly, they market a lot. They run Super Bowl ads and they somehow are getting beat on e-commerce or something. Or it's not like the average customer's journey starts at elilly.com, right? And I would imagine of course there's this compounding loophole because of the supply constraints, but is there something else going on where they don't feel like because of their business relationships with other distributors and doctors and other networks that they can just be their own Amazon.com and just put their own website up and say, hey look, no one else can buy it because Apple did this right, they were a distributor. Right, yeah, there's plenty of other companies that have said like we want to be the sole supplier of our product online. There's going to be fake sites that pop up, but our URL is the only destination where you can go to get the real thing. Everything else is fake. Instead, we've lived in this hybrid where there, I mean even just among the two venture-backed telehealth companies, one's doing compounding, one appears to have a partnership, very different regulatory structures. That's a lot for consumers to wrap their minds around. I'm wondering like do you think that the actual formulators, the drug companies with the intellectual property should just be going deeper into e-commerce?
Well, I think we caught them where there was their own internal friction and inertia, right? Where these venture-backed entities that can stand up and move quickly on mobile, that was the lead time here that they had. But I will tell you and I hear this from a bunch of my patients, they have gotten better. So right now, for example, Lilly, if you want to go cash pay, you get an order from your doctor. They send the prescription, and I'm not associated with Lilly. I'm sure Novo has the same exact thing, so I'm not picking sides here, but your doctor goes in and sends the prescription just like it's to a pharmacy. You receive a text message the next day. You click it, you pay, easy, it shows up the next day at your house in a cooler. So that is where they are now. Now, they were way behind in getting there. But we also made a point, and I'm sure you've heard friends, where the Lilly price for Zepbound is getting pretty darn close to what the compoundings can charge. And the compoundings are starting to not be able to charge, you know, even less. But what we really need here in my view to make this work right where we want to reward innovation and punish snake oil is come up with a structural way and it may need to be regulated because of this regulation gap where the right thing to do is the easiest thing to do and the right thing to do is the profitable thing to do. Right now I don't think we're structured that way and it gets to this federal and state gap. Amongst other reasons.
Last question from my experience with the FDA in the tobacco industry, they would send warning letters, but a big problem was that there were distributors abroad usually that would manufacture illegal unapproved vape devices, basically e-cigarettes, bring them in and then push them through a whole bunch of corner stores and gas stations. And the FDA just didn't really have the enforcement team to go store by store. Do you think that they will face a similar challenge in regulating peptides online? It feels like it can be done a little bit more behind a computer. You don't need as many people going door-to-door. So maybe they're more equipped for it. But I'm wondering if you have any thoughts on like what it actually takes to play the game of whack-a-mole here.
I think Marty and team are the right team to think this through because there's this permissive lens above them that wasn't there in prior groups on as to these medicines. So once there's a permissive lens now you can get positively innovative instead of thinking like this all needs to happen in shadow where Jordi walks up to me with it below a jacket and kind of like hands it to me. This needs to be done right. And look, FTC teaming up with FDA, that's going to be, I think, some of the power here because some of the enforcement we're seeing is already coming from FTC as to the way these things are marketed. But let's get clarity and start collecting evidence, folks. So, if you say, 'I'm giving this thing orally, and I know it works,' well, write that up and share that news with the rest of us because right now, we think we have no evidence that it does. Let's get there and let's realize these are extraordinarily powerful medications and let's not let a couple of bad actors ruin what could be great progress for us.
No, I think it's a great message. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Have a great rest of your day and great week.
