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Trust the experts here. Five. We are experts. Founder mode.
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Marky clearing order inbound. Come on, get up. We are surrounded by journalists. Hold your position. Strike one. Strike two. Activate golden retriever mode. Marky clearing order inbound. Five good. Founder.
You're watching TVPN. Today is Tuesday, May 19th, 2026. We are live from the team panel trail, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. Google IO starts today, and the stock is ripping. I think people might have missed this if you haven't been watching closely, but Google is up 140% in the last year. Absolute ripper. It's almost a $5 trillion company now, 46.
I was really confused what chart you're reading because it's down 1.3% today.
Today, okay, no, it is up. It is up massive. Think in years, sometimes decades.
Yes. Yes. And yeah, they pulled in just shy of $110 billion revenue last quarter. And they're in a great position for the next era of the AI story. So GCP is growing faster than AWS and Azure. Wall Street has basically fully repriced the company as a full stack AI winner. That's the new narrative across Google Cloud, Google Search, Gemini, the models, DeepMind, everything that they're doing. So long gone are the concerns about Google's search weakness. Because even core Google search is showing resiliency. Google search, the business continues to grow. Queries are at an all-time high. They're not reporting exact numbers of queries, but Sundar said that on the last call that it's at an all-time high. Certainly not going down. And search and other revenue, which is their bucket there, is up 19% year-over-year, so holding up well. And Google IO generally offers consumers launches or previews of tons of new products. I'm getting called previews of tons of new products and features. And The Verge was saying that there might be some like AI fatigue, which is maybe an understatement given that, you know, people are getting booed. Actually, the former CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, was booed off stage at a commencement speech. And so that is a good point. But, you know, the people that watch Google IO, the Google core consumers, they are fans of this stuff. I think they're generally pro AI, excited about new features. Some of the new features that we'll show are very, very cool. But there is this like goal of being ambient and useful instead of pushy and desperate. Many Google experiences now have duplicative Gemini panels. And I was writing this update in a Google Doc and I noticed that I had two Gemini stars basically, one Gemini star in my Google Doc and then another in the Chrome browser that I'm using to load Google Docs. And it's a really hilarious outcome because I was writing this in sort of like a half window to the side of the screen and if I open both Gemini panels, the Google Doc disappears entirely and I'm just left with two chat boxes to interface with a Google Doc, which I don't really use AI in the actual Google Doc. I just kind of write it. But there's, you know, there's stuff everywhere and then actually make it useful, make it ambient, make it delightful. And so that is, I think, what consumers are looking for, more than just an AI button in a new place. But they're certainly showing that already. And so the new Gemini video model looks incredible. We'll play some videos of that. And there will be tons of delightful experiments that may turn out to be blockbuster products or they may get shelved by year end. That's kind of the beauty of Google's culture is that they have plenty of opportunity for experimentation. We sort of, some people remember all the things that are in the Google graveyard. But most people just remember Gemini and whatnot. So yeah, we can play this video with sound because the sound...
V8 engine features eight cylinders arranged in a V-shape driving a single crankshaft. They take turns firing to deliver smooth massive. That's pure mechanical genius at work. A V8 engine features eight cylinders.
So I feel like this got rid... I mean, the video fidelity is incredibly high quality. There's no six fingers. It looks HD. The motion looks good. The lips are synced. And I feel like they got rid of that like hollow sound that you used to hear in AI video where the audio was generated, but it's a lot more subtle.
It's really subtle. There is one weird thing in this where it says pure. He says deliver pure massive and then it just cuts to the next scene. If you... That's pure mechanical genius at work. A V8 engine features eight cylinders arranged in a V-shape driving a single crankshaft. They take turns firing to deliver smooth massive, that's pure mechanical genius at work, energy or smooth massive propulsion, something like that. So like it's crazy because you see these and you're like, ah, like this is it, like it's done. Like this is fully, fully done and then there's just like, ah, we're at 99.9% now and I want to be at 99.999%.
Also, like this is kind of a nitpick, but isn't that a V6? Right. There's...
Wait, play the video again. Let's see. I want to see if it's a V6 or V8. Because when I look at those graphics, I think... Okay, let's count the cylinders. Oh, yeah. No, no, it looks like an eight. It looks like eight cylinders in the back. Now, count them up.
I can't really tell, but yeah, it's odd. It's so passive, but I don't know. Is it good for video explainer channels on YouTube? Bad for video explainer channels on YouTube? Certainly commoditizing the production of video explainers. I've seen a lot of these video explainers that will show you like inside of a rocket or inside of an RPG or an AK-47 or Glock. And those get like tens of millions of views. They can be viewed in any language. But they're very intense from a CGI perspective. Maybe you have to go and model every little detail, every pin in the weapon or whatever the object is that's being visualized in this particular video explainer, close to being on command. And then the question is where does the value sit? If you prompt YouTube and you ask for a video explainer of, you know, a chair, break it down, explode it, show me the innards, will it just do it on demand for you? Will it just generate that or will this still sit below the creators?
Yeah, I've always had the question at what point do you go to YouTube and there's just a series of videos waiting for you that were generated based on your interests. Right. Sometimes, you know, you might be going to YouTube because your favorite sports team just played and you want some analysis on the game or, you know, your favorite fighter or something like that or some news is happening. And it doesn't seem like we're that far from a future where you land on YouTube and YouTube is just again fully generated a video based on what it knows about your interests. That said, that would cause potentially creator strike.
Yeah. Because it's YouTube starting to compete against their own, you know, content producers on the platform. Yeah.
Yeah. At least in the interim, it feels like the dawn of stock footage. YouTubers have been creating these, have been using these tools for a long time. They have been getting cheaper. Even the CGI world has become increasingly commoditized every year as you get more to templates and the tools become cheaper. You used to have to pay thousands and thousands of dollars for a license of Cinema 4D or 3ds Max to render anything. Now Blender is open source and free and there are tons of Blender artists out there with custom packs. But yes, this is a new capability and it'll be interesting to see how this gets integrated, what the pushback is like, how clockable it is once it's actually in the hands of creators and they are pushing it out. Let's watch this other science explainer from the timeline. Gemini Omni explains science with video. Thanks a lot for this, says Chattaslua. Now every student will get a custom video for the topic of science and math. I'm so happy like while typing, I want to see all your reaction to this. I don't know...
which looks white. This is about photosynthesis, I think.
every color of the rainbow. As this light enters our atmosphere, it crashes into molecules of nitrogen and oxygen. This triggers a phenomenon called scattering. Because gas molecules are tiny, they affect shorter wavelengths much more than longer ones. Blue light has a very short wavelength. So, it's scattered in every direction filling the sky with color. Meanwhile, longer red wavelengths pass.
There has been a big push on YouTube for like...
as people ask questions like they would go to Google and say like, how do I fix this particular washing machine? You type in the number of the washing machine and it would take you to not just a single video about someone fixing that washing machine, but the actual section in the video with the solution to the exact problem you had. And being able to read a manual and constitute a video on the fly of exactly that is pretty incredible.
And you could imagine satisfies that use case very, very quickly. And then of course there will just be entertainment and all sorts of different use cases. Logan Kilpatrick, friend of the show, says, 'Introducing Gemini Omni. Omni is our new model that can create anything from any input starting with video.' Starting with video. Think nanobanana but for video. Okay. Leah, let's play this because there's some amazing like different styles here going on.
I wonder if that motion graphic transition was created in Omni because that's something that you'd normally bump out to After Effects for, or like the edit here. I wonder if you'll be able to upload multiple clips and have it edited together to the beat of a song that you pick, or will it be able to AI generate a video and then match the footage to the beat of the video. So it says give it anything. So I think you could potentially give it a bunch of videos and it could edit it together into a vibe reel, something like that. Swap style, swap environment, swap angle. They've been having a lot of fun with this.
Everyone is very, very excited about this. The other news out of Google today is Gemini 3.5 Flash, our most powerful model to date. It pushes the frontier of intelligence, speed, and cost, putting 3.5 Flash in a class of its own. We spent the last six months making sure Flash is great for real-world use cases. It's the strongest agent coding model yet from Google. It delivers frontier-level performance at 4x the speed of comparable frontier models, often at less than half the cost. So dominating the Pareto frontier has been the goal for a long time. The speed is being heralded as a key feature. Google just showed a demo of Gemini Flash running between 600 and 1400 tokens per second on TPU8.
It peaked out around 1480 tokens per second with an average of around 800 tokens per second. So very, very, very fast. The flip side is it's more expensive than previous Flash models, but that's been the trend with smarter intelligence for a while. So investors are focused across three key areas. Not so much the consumer story, more the next Gemini model. So where this fits in and then what adoption and diffusion looks like, how Google through Google Cloud will be getting this out into enterprises, into coding agents. Obviously they have Antigravity, but Gemini CLI has not seen as much traction and so a better model might pull that forward, might wind up seeing more traction there. Overall, I think token generation at Google is up 7x year-over-year, which seems great. It's unclear how much of that is because there's more reasoning happening. But given the fact that the Gemini models are sort of stuffed all over the product surfaces, I'm not surprised that there's massive growth. That makes a lot of sense. On the core Gemini model, everyone was wondering, are we getting 3.5 launched? And there's a staged rollout with Flash going first. Andrew Curran had an interesting post here talking about the lack of vague posting. The DeepMind folks have not been vague posting about the new Gemini model. So he did some vague posting for them. He says, at this point everyone knows it's arriving tomorrow along with their personal agent named Spark. This reticence, of course, can be interpreted in many ways. I'm choosing to interpret it in accordance with my nature. I think they trained the largest model they've ever successfully trained. Probably possibly the largest one anyone ever has and something unexpected emerged at scale. They had their mythos moment but not in the same way Anthropic did. Gemini has always been a very different model from Claude. The benchmarks will go out today, tonight under embargo. They probably already are, but I don't think they will fully reflect what I'm talking about. I think they hit something even they weren't aiming for, something that surprised them. If I'm right, that surprise will be part of tomorrow's show.
We shall find out together in the morning. I don't think tomorrow's show because IO is a number of days and there's a whole host of different announcements that could happen in the interim. There's a lot of other things going on and yeah, has anyone been vague posting around will there be a 3.5 Pro? Yeah. This week?
Yeah, that's going to happen over the course of the next few days. They just started with Flash.
Okay. Starting with Flash. Cool. And then they also announced Spark.
Which is a personal agent that lives in Antigravity.
Oh, interesting. And so trying to make...
When I hear personal agent I think more like Gemini app, Google Search, like Gmail, like the very, like the consumer product services. I think, well I guess I just think personal and I think consumer, but given how much people are using Codex, Claude Code for like personal, like things, like just because writing code creates a more dynamic agentic surface. OpenClaw, we saw all of this. It's helpful to have something running on a MacBook Pro that can go around and find different stuff. What? What?
Yeah, just some additional context. 3.5 Pro is coming out next month.
A little bit of a delay there. I wonder what else is in the bag of like mythos, like surprises because the cybersecurity one was like sort of predicted by the AI 2027. I feel like bio is next. Like it feels like, okay, we tested a bunch of stuff and we talked to a bunch of scientists and like this thing can come up with like super viruses and it's really scary. So we got to give it to all the pharmaceutical companies in advance and like Moderna gets it and creates like antiviruses or something like that. I don't know what else. But I'm sure there will be surprises. There always are in the AI era.
So from an investor perspective, obviously I don't think Google IO is necessarily the correct forum for discussion of a mythos-level breakthrough or surprising new emerging capabilities. I would just be surprised if that's the where like you stand on stage and you say, 'Hey, we had this crazy breakthrough.' That's, it's a more serious thing if you're talking about new capabilities. But given the talent and resources of the DeepMind team, TPU, I think that there's just a lot of broad optimism about the next iteration of Gemini. They've hired a bunch of people. They have a bunch of surface area to deploy this into. So no one's expecting like the model to underperform. Agent commerce will also be top of mind for investors. Since messaging around the Google, the Gemini app has sort of strayed away from advertising as an immediate monetization engine. I think Demis said that at Davos. Google has a lot of capabilities when it comes to closing the consumer shopping loop. Like they have Google Shopping, they have a bunch of hooks into all sorts of different e-commerce services. They have massive product catalogs. People search for stuff on Google all the time to buy. But e-commerce customer behavior seems to be lagging expectations here generally. There's been a lot of announcements from companies around agentic shopping protocols and the numbers whenever we dig into them we're always like, is it going to get to 1% this year? Are we going to see... and everyone's talking about the growth which means we're growing from zero obviously because this didn't exist. But where is it going? Will Google have something to show here? Will they have some sort of demo of a new user experience, a new flow for agent commerce that results in, you know, a faster takeoff of that adoption of that behavior? Personally, I've done a ton of research about products through LLMs, but I pretty much always hesitate to have AI fully process the checkout. And there's a few reasons, like Apple Pay is pretty good, pretty seamless. Shopify saves all my annoying info. Autofill is also not that bad. It's usually pretty good in whatever native. If I'm in Chrome on Mac or I'm on Safari on iPhone, it's usually pretty good. And then I feel like I still like reality-checking carts before clicking pay. We talked to Joanna Stern about this too where she was talking about having an AI agent assemble a cart of even like something like groceries, but then she will be the one to actually go to the hydrated final link with the cookie and then go and like validate everything before clicking pay. The last focus area for investors generally is TPU. There's been a lot of back and forth around are too many of the TPUs going to Anthropic, are too many of them, are they sitting idle at DeepMind? What's going on with the TPU? And what are the margin structures? How is revenue booked around TPU? How is the backlog accounted for? These are questions that investors on Wall Street are asking. I don't think we'll get answers at IO. But investors will be watching for anything that sort of contextualizes the shape of Google's TPU business and their plans over the next few years.
And so as I mentioned yesterday on the show, we had a lovely conversation with Joanna Stern from thenewsthink.com and the author of 'I Am Not a Robot.' And we had lots of fun takes about like the AI tools that I think most of us have interacted with. Everyone's used agents. Everyone's sort of felt what it's like to talk to a chatbot. But one place where she went deeper than I think most consumers and like AI fans have is in the wearables because she was wearing that recording device consistently. And she maintains that like humanoids are farther away. You need a lot more training data. The AI chat apps are here. We already know they're diffused. Whimsy is now boring. But the next big wave she's sort of predicting is in the next few years wearables will have like a big moment and everyone will be sort of adopting these and contending with them. And it is interesting how, you know, we talk about a capability overhang in the enterprise with AI deployments and that's why the big labs are partnering with consulting firms and private equity groups to get AI installed into large corporations. There's even more of a capability overhang in consumer hardware. Apple iterates extremely methodically. You know, they made a big story about Apple Intelligence. Was that just one year ago? I guess that was one year ago because WWDC is in a few weeks.
Feels like longer than that. They had, I just remember they did a global billboard campaign for Apple Intelligence.
Yeah. But anyway, like the actually changing anything in hardware takes Apple a long time. They still haven't launched a folding phone. Like they take their time to deliver a great product at the right time. And then if you're a challenger and you just want to manufacture new devices at scale, that takes years to ramp up. And then you also have to, you know, distribute, sell, it's not one click away. It's go to the store or wait for the mail. And then hardware decisions that get made around certain AI workflows can potentially be obsolete in months as the underlying technology changes. So you could build a device that assumes that, you know, LLMs are the end state and then reasoning models come and you're not set up for that potentially. On-device compute could change. It's unclear. And so you don't want to get locked in these things. And you were talking about the Humane AI Pin, how that maybe could have been successful at Apple. Even the Rabbit R1, I think like...
Well, my main point was that if that was an internal project at a bigger company just showing like a potential future state for consumer hardware, it would have been an amazing demo and probably been able to receive more funding at, let's say, a hyperscaler, but as a standalone company...
Sales come in, people don't like the product and then nobody's willing to give them more money. Yeah, I mean you look at how many shots on goal Mark Zuckerberg has taken with the Meta Ray-Ban displays and the Meta Ray-Bans, like that was something that I would be surprised if you look back at the R&D cost, the manufacturing cost, the early sales figures of the version one of the Meta Ray-Bans and it's off to the races. Like he clearly said, you know what, I'm going to double down on this for years. We're going to continue to invest in this, get this to a place where it can actually become known, become a product that people consider. When I show them another ad, they'll consider it because they've seen it. Maybe they've tried it. Maybe they've... I went skiing with someone who had a pair and they were talking, they're sending text messages. And so it's just familiarity with the product takes time. And Google's had some fun swings at these like preview emerging hardware platforms. Google Glass, I mean, way ahead of its time. We're now there with the Meta Ray-Ban displays, but even those are not selling by the millions and millions. They're very early stage. Google Cardboard, I don't know if you remember that one. This is you put your phone in a cardboard box that they send you and then you can put it on your face and use it as a VR headset.
Yeah, it was a tiny little, I think it was open source, just like a fun preview of like how do we get more people to be able to watch 3D stereoscopic, you know, VR type content? Well...
Experiment of how can we strap someone's phone to their face.
Basically. And then they also did the Samsung Galaxy...
Which was, yeah, you'd slot it into like a piece of hardware, but much cheaper than buying an Oculus at the time. Fitbit also sort of fits in there. There were previews of the new Google Book and the Fitbit from last week. And I'm excited about the possibility of a new swing from Google like being like the wildcard headline that makes it out of IO this year. So anyway, are there any other Google IO posts? I mean like the actual conference is going on as we're doing the stream. So I wouldn't be surprised if there are announcements hitting the timeline right now.
Yeah, there's people are pulling some of the benchmarks comparing it on the AI Artificial Analysis coding index.
Lean Algib says 3.5 Flash scores kind of low on coding index due to rough Terminal Bench hard scores. So, I think the big question coming out of IO today is how do developers respond to the updates to Antigravity, to 3.5 Flash? The speed is amazing. We know how much people care about that in just like day-to-day coding. But the model has to be able to perform. So we'll see what people's reactions are and we'll see if Google can really start to ramp revenue on the codegen side or still get exposure to that through Anthropic. It did come out yesterday that Demis...
is an angel in Anthropic himself.
And not super surprising. Although less pushback.
When did they... Yeah. When did they meet? I wonder what the story is there. How early he got in because he might be sitting on a bag.
Well, who else is going to Anthropic? Andrej Karpathy has gone from OpenAI to Tesla to Anthropic. I think he went back to OpenAI at one point in there. And Andre, a different account, is pointing out this KMT general who defected and subsequently betrayed five different countries in Asia, ending in Japan. Jumping around. He's seen it all. Certainly the world tour of AI labs. I guess Andrej Karpathy was never inside of xAI because he was sort of the precursor at Tesla. But...
Yeah, Elon, he was poached by Elon.
Did he work at Google at a point? I feel like he might have been at Google before OpenAI. I don't know. I know that there were some people that got maybe...
He interned there. So he's PhD.
He's got the, he's got the Thanos rings.
Huge pickup and excited to see what they do together. He's apparently, according to Alex Heath, going to be working on basically RSI.
RSI's continuing on his like auto research project.
Oh yeah, he's been doing RSI basically in the open source world. Auto research is open source, right?
Yeah, it's, I think you can read into this that it was effectively an acqui-hire of the company he was working on. So...
Oh, interesting. I don't... Yeah, I'm assuming...
He said he was going to like get back to the education project that he was...
Did he... I thought he had raised for it.
But that was a cool idea and I wonder how that fits in. It was always interesting to think about like, you know, LLMs are really good at education. I mean we're seeing that today with Gemini Omni. Like it can generate a video for you. Now we haven't really pushed it to the limit. Like I wonder is it like if you give it a PhD-level problem, is it going to teach you as well as, you know, a great professor who has thought about all the different responses? Like maybe it's not fully there but it's like education certainly seems on like the core path of the models. Whereas there are plenty of things that sit outside the core path in things with network effects and things that touch the real world and physical world and all these different things. Just going to a computer and asking 'teach me something' felt like something most of the AI models would get very, very good at because there's a lot of training data, there's a lot of open-source educational materials, all the textbooks have been scanned, Wikipedia is in the models, there's so much information that's readily available, it isn't tightly held secrets that are hard to bring to bear in the pre-training data. But...
One more thing out of IO that we forgot to cover, Google's new SynthID framework that ElevenLabs, OpenAI and Nvidia are joining forces. This is to help identify AI-generated content basically creating a standard across platforms so that yeah, when you generate an asset, ElevenLabs, OpenAI...
Gemini Omni, it should be auto-detected by the different platforms.
Yeah, I've seen that on X recently. There's been a little tag that says like 'made with AI' but I feel like you can get around that if you screenshot it and stuff. Well, so I think the ones on X are just in the metadata. You can actually change it like fairly easily. I don't think it's actually using like on Nano Banana images, on GPT Image too, there are like watermarks. You've seen these like weird patterns people posted.
I think subtle changes to the saturation or...
I think they've just been, it's just been metadata so far, but I...
Yeah, the trick with all those is that like it's in theory pretty easy to like rip that out if you're running like an advanced AI, you know, slop avoidance detection system or something, but just to know, okay, you know, for the average poster, if this is an AI image, that's certainly helpful. But as you start bringing different assets in, you bring in some stock footage, you bring in some AI footage, you blend them together, you're doing a lot of different things, you'll probably lose a little bit of that AI detection ability, but hopefully people aren't too annoyed by it if it's used tastefully. I guess it shouldn't matter at the end of the day.
Anyway, do you think Spotify used AI to create their new disco ball icon? This was burning up the timeline this weekend. I was shocked at all the negative reactions to this icon.
What's wrong with you? What's wrong with you? Seriously, if you don't like this...
I will say at first it threw me off. I was like, where did my Spotify app go? Because it's too dark.
Genius. I think it was genius. I opened up my phone and I was drawn to it immediately. My eyes jumped because I was like, 'Something's wrong with my phone. Something's wrong with my home screen. Things don't look the way they normally look.' It drew my eye. I saw, oh, Spotify. Okay, look a little bit deeper. The icon looks a little bit different. The colors a little bit deeper. Oh, there's something else going on there. Peel back the onion. You see that there's a disco ball. And then, of course, there is a meaning behind it. They didn't just... there's a whole reason why they did this. It's the 20th anniversary of the company. And so lots of people complained, but party of the year. It's so funny because...
I don't know...
Prior to this were people sitting around being like, 'Wow, I really hope they never change the Spotify logo even for a few weeks. I just love it so much.'
Right. I think it's fun. I think it's a nice change from, you know, the flat minimalist logos that we've all grown accustomed to.
Keep it.
And so, yeah, let's go through some of the reactions. Dylan said, 'I thought this was fun. I'm sure the complainers thought so too, but when tapping an icon is second nature after being...
Citizen says, I told my wife to cancel our subscription.'
Oh no.
For so long, even the slightest change in appearance can make you double-take when searching for it. And that's annoying when trying to open an app. Mass says that it's too dark. And so Mass turned up the...
You're at the disco, John. Oh yeah.
A disco ball would never look that bright.
Okay. Yeah. I mean the black...
Disco ball knowers. Yeah. That's way too light.
I like Notion played along. This is like really a testament to the power of Gen AI imagery these days. Every brand could like jump on this meme very quickly and it's hard to create.
It's so funny that... Yeah. I guess, you know, this still went super viral but even five years ago if you could create an asset that was a 3D render you almost automatically got attention because...
But you needed to work with like a...
artist to do it and it's not something you can do instantly too. They have to figure, you know, actually render it.
I mean yeah, probably like a couple hours of work in Cinema 4D. I mean getting the lighting right too and making sure that you don't have the wrong reflections on there. There's a bunch of nuance to actually getting this to look good. I think it's fun when... I don't know, the other brands like joining in on like a meme can be done really poorly. This one seemed like it was fine.
Yeah, Andy Masley had the best take. He said, 'Everyone complains about minimalist design until the company tries something fun and everyone reveals why all the companies have been forced into minimalist.'
66,000 likes on this. People really, really agreed. This is how I feel when people complain about Cybertrucks being ugly. Like yes, but it's different. Of course, not everyone is going to like it. Trying to get everyone to like things is how we wind up with all cars converging on the same colors and designs. Interesting. Yeah, that's a good point. I like the disco ball. Someone, Nathan Halberstadt, had a very nice comment. He said this is TBPN-inspired, which I don't think it is, but the arc may be long but tech companies now appear to universally bend towards aping.
So we do have the globe and it was funny because so you can go a little bit further and I did this with our logo. I was like, 'Turn our logo into a disco ball.' And it looked kind of the same because we sort of have the globe in there already. And so for all of... like this meme sort of didn't work with us because I guess we have been taking that like 3D render aesthetic with the globe, although ours is pixelated, not squares like on a disco ball. But there is a little bit of TBPN in the disco ball. What do you think of the TBPN disco ball logo? Should we run this for a while or has the trend already moved on?
I like the globe. I like being global.
Yeah, I think keep the globe with the pixelation, the dots. I think it works. The era of discomorphism has arrived, says Fara. Fachara. And this individual disco-ballified all of their apps, including X, Claude, Slack, what's that one? The App Store, I guess. Google Calendar. I don't know if you ran this full... Do people know why Spotify was a disco ball?
This kind of loud maximalist design is coming back whether you like it or not.
These things go in waves.
Well, one story that we didn't get to yesterday that I want to discuss is the root cause of the fertility crisis. The Financial Times has a deep dive, 'Why birth rates are falling everywhere all at once.' And I was going back and forth with Tyler on this, trying to understand, and we'll see where you stand on this, Jordi. So the demographic landslide defining our era is gaining speed and...
terrain in more than two-thirds of the world's 195 countries. The average number of children born to each woman has fallen below the replacement rate of 2.1. That keeps population stable without immigration. In 66 countries, the average is closer to one than two. In some, the most common number of children born to each woman is zero. Both the pace and the breadth of the decline are defying expectations. Just 5 years ago, the UN predicted that there would be 350,000 births in South Korea in 2023. That was a 50% overestimate. The real figure was 230,000. Sorry, not 2300. While high and middle-income countries have been wrestling with demographic decline for more than half a century, the phenomenon has markedly accelerated in the past 10 years. Analysts of data ranging from population records to Google searches indicate that although many factors contribute to falling birth rates, the most recent plunge appears connected with our use of technology. And so this is the question that the Financial Times is trying to answer: should you put the blame for the recent decline in fertility on smartphones in particular? And so yeah, you can go through a whole bunch of the charts. It's a great article, but the final image is this image where they took a whole bunch of different countries and they adjusted the charts to show when did smartphones actually take off in that particular country because America had the iPhone moment in 2007. But different countries got wide smartphone adoption or 4G or actual rollout of cell phones or smartphones at different times and so they adjusted all the figures and when you look at this chart that Giancarlo is sharing, the screenshot from the Financial Times, you'll see all of the charts seem to be very, very closely aligned at the exact same time. And so Giancarlo says pushes back though. He says no smoking gun, but the preponderance of evidence points to smartphones, not economics as the culprit. Yeah, there's the chart. It looks like a smoking gun. He says it's not though. He says in the US and UK, births fell first and fastest in areas that got 4G earliest. Birth rates were stable in the United States, UK, Australia until 2007, in France and Poland until 2009, Mexico and Indonesia until 2011, and Ghana, Nigeria, and Senegal until 2013, 2015. Each of these inflection points matches local smartphone adoption. The younger the age group, the sharper the drop in-person socializing among young adults is dropping in South Korea by 50% in 20 years. Effect is largest in culturally traditional societies: Middle East, Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa. Decline holds across countries hit hard by GFC and those who were not hit by the global financial crisis. And so it teases out a bunch of the other possible explanations and puts the blame firmly on smartphones but people have been pushing back. So Ross Douthat says on the latest round of fertility discourse, friends don't let friends share chart one without the important context of chart two, which is the child survival adjustment. And so if you look at the total fertility rate, if you click on that left graph, you will see that the baby boom is remarkably pronounced there. But in fact, birth rates had been declining since the 1800s and had been falling steadily throughout the 19th, is it the 19th century? Yes. And then in the 20th century, there was a brief baby boom in the 40s, 50s, 60s, and then the rate starts declining. I asked 5.5 Pro a bunch of questions about this trying to dig in further and it had a bunch of funny answers about how children used to be economically valuable and so people would have a lot of them to like work the farm for them. And the economics of having a child flipped at a certain point where it became expensive and a net burden on the parent as opposed to before it would be you had a kid, you didn't have to pay for college, you didn't have to pay for education or really anything and they would work the fields for you and so it was advantageous to have as many children as possible. Ross Douthat also chimed in saying by the way another way to look at the second chart is that the baby boom was even more unexpected than generally understood and also if any major population repeated that kind of unexpectedness, now they would dominate the human future. Interesting opportunity for different societies out there.
Do you think children yearning for the mines is sort of like a survival mechanism? Right. They want to be economically valuable. They want to be productive, right? They're saying we can carry our own weight.
Yeah. I mean, I look at all these charts and I just think it's over. But then I remind myself to never black pill. Never black pill, even if it's down only. It's crazy. It's really crazy to look at these charts. I mean, if this were any animal in the wild, there would be huge amounts of fundraising happening to try to save the species. But when it's us, we just sort of see the chart and just keep scrolling. Yeah, I think it demands investigation to go a level deeper to understand, okay, so diffusion of smartphones appears correlated with declines in fertility, but within populations there are groups that have higher than average fertility and lower than average fertility, of course, as any distribution suggests. And the question is like, what are the high-fertility members of the population doing on their phones differently? Like, are they using social media less? Are they using dating apps less? Are they texting their friends to come and hang out? Because the smartphones have diffused so widely that you need to cut in and understand for the groups that are above fertility rate, what are they doing differently? Obviously, the Amish are an interesting case study because they do have a higher than replacement rate fertility.
And they're not technology.
They actually have adopted some cell phones, but not smartphones. So they will use a dumb phone, a flip phone to make phone calls occasionally. And I'm sure that these are all gradations. There's no smartphones whatsoever. But certainly the Amish have steered away from technology and the fertility rate has stayed high. But even within the more modern enclaves or high smartphone adopters, I do wonder what else is going on because there's a bunch of other interesting factors going on with child care and the relation with how people spend their time.
Yeah, specifically with also what else happened around the launch of the iPhone? Like massive economic disruption, right?
They controlled for that though. That's the point of the Financial Times article is to control for the economic gyrations of different countries. So there were some countries that were unaffected by the financial crisis. There were some countries that went through boom periods. There were some countries that went through economic contractions and they were all sort of affected equally. Like even China has the lowest replacement rate, one per family or something like that, whereas America's at like 1.8, many modern societies at 1.6, all below replacement rate. But China's the lowest, but China's going through an economic boom the entire time. Like GDP is up at six, seven, eight, sometimes 10% a year. Like they're not going through an economic contraction, certainly not from 2007 to today. And yet, although that is a little bit different because it's confounded by the one-child policy which obviously resulted in exactly one child. So they set their policy, then they got their result, and now they have to contend with the aging population. There's an article that Derek Thompson shared: 'Dad books', which this article and some publishing insiders use to describe serious non-fiction books across biography, current affairs, and business and economics, are reportedly in freefall with sales declining every year for the last years. 'The trend couldn't be clearer,' said Jonathan Karp, former chief executive at Simon & Schuster and publisher of the new Simon & Schuster imprint. 'When we have internal meetings to talk about this problem, it always comes around to podcasts.' Interesting, saying podcasts are eating the dad book, serious non-fiction show.
We got to figure out who's doing this.
We're all looking for the guy who did this. I do listen to a lot of podcasts. I still listen to audiobooks of serious non-fiction. But it is increasingly hard to find the time. FedSpeak says it's not podcasts, it's kids. Because the millennial generation, the Gen X generation is spending basically twice as much time with kids based on their age when you adjust for age. So this is a curve of time spent with children by...
Honestly, every time on the weekend, you know, when I'm holding one or two of my children and I just stare at the stack of books from Amazon that just pile up and I just look at them and think, okay, if I open one of those, I will get exactly three pages before I'm disrupted.
Yeah. What was the silent generation doing? What were the baby boomers doing? Were they just like, 'Kid, hit the mines, buddy. I got to read. I got to read some non-fiction.' I don't know. I mean, the podcasts creep in, but it's...
I listen to podcasts when I'm not at home, when I can't read. Yeah. Right. Maybe self-driving cars bullish for serious non-fiction because...
Oh, maybe people will get sick. Self-driving cars are bullish for the infinite scroll. They're bearish for the podcast and long-form medium, the book and the serious non-fiction, the dad book. Anyway, nothing can compete with the feed.
Yes. Sorry to black pill, but it's over. Well, it's not over for our next guest because Jim Belosic from SendCutSend is with us. He's in the waiting room and he has some exciting news about SendCutSend. Welcome back to the show, Jim. How you doing?
Good, good. Thanks for having me.
Thanks for hopping on short notice. Congratulations. Reintroduce the company and then I want to hear the news.
Yeah, SendCutSend is an on-demand manufacturer. Elastic capacity is what I was told. So we make stuff.
This guy has VCs now. Buzzwords come, they come in pairs. Buzzwords. They're good at both. Yes. But I like it. I like it. Elastic capacity.
Yeah, we do sheet metal and CNC and, you know, whatever. People need something made, we make it for them.
Yeah. And the news today, what happened?
I want to hit the gong. I finally raised some money.
Massive. Let's go. Let's go. It's a bittersweet moment because SendCutSend as a company, you know, we've interviewed thousands of founders now and you have been, out of all the conversations we've had, at the top of our list in terms of companies and cultures and teams that we're bullish on. And we always appreciated that you were doing it independently, but I'm sure you've raised for very good reasons and you have some excellent new partners and we're very excited for you. I want to talk about the use of funds, the reasoning, but first, take me through the pitch that you received. Who did the round? How did you meet them? Take us through the story of the deal.
So I just through X I got introduced to Patrick Collison, which was awesome. And he's like, 'Oh yeah, I've heard about your company. You guys sound really awesome. I'll invest.' And I was like, 'Oh, that's amazing. Thank you.' I was like, 'How does this work? I don't know how investment works.' And he was like, 'Oh, I'll just introduce you to a couple other people.' So he introduced...
We can just use standard YC terms.
No, I'm kidding. Yeah. No. Well, I was like, 'Hey, introduce me to someone who's super founder friendly. I'm a bootstrapper. I want to retain control of my company. But I do want to go faster. So I need a little bit more money than I got now.' So he introduced me to Sequoia. Andrew Reed over there is awesome. Shawn Maguire. And then Matt Huang from Paradigm as well. And so it became this kind of dream team. And I was like, if I don't do it now, I don't know if I'll ever be able to put this together again. So let's go for it. Let's see what happens.
Yeah. And I also think you guys have had such incredible organic momentum and growth and we need to make stuff in America and it's somewhat your responsibility to go faster just for the country basically. And so from that lens too, I think it makes a ton of sense to bring in some more firepower.
Yeah. We're always capacity constrained. We have more work than we can produce. And even if we had the right amount of machines, it's not fast enough. I want to go faster. You know, people are spoiled on Amazon. I want to do Amazon of manufacturing. You know, if you order today, you should have it in your hands tomorrow so that you can go do your project. And now that's on the horizon. We're getting really close.
Yeah. So what does the money actually go towards? Is it buying more machines, hiring more people, both? Like what are you pulling forward with this capital?
Yeah. So I'm trying to just use the capital towards stuff that I can't finance. So right now we've been able to grow, like I can buy machines and get a loan on them from JP Morgan or whatever. So I'll keep doing that with machines, but the capital is going to be used for stuff that I can't get a loan on. So, you know, tripling the size of my software team, computational geometry engineers, hiring two or three hundred people, just a down payment on a building. Like the first and last payment is like, I don't know, together it's like $600,000 on some of these big buildings. So that's where I'm going to light their money on fire, in a good way, and we're going to grow.
Yeah. Where's the current facility? Where do you see yourself expanding to? I want to talk about the actual footprint because if you're building elastic capacity, that feels like it needs to be distributed all over the United States at some point.
Yeah, a million percent. My goal is like, I love Home Depot. And without a Home Depot in your town, you got to go to a plumbing store and an electric tool store and a lumber yard and whatever. So if we could have a SendCutSend in a bunch of different metros that you can just walk into and get something made, that's the dream. So right now we're in Reno, Nevada, Arlington, Texas, and Paris, Kentucky. The next one up, I'm hoping for a lease here, is going to be somewhere in Pennsylvania, potentially in Ohio, but we're trying to pit those two states against each other and negotiate some good incentives. So I can't really say which way we're going. After that, probably Indiana, Las Vegas, and then Atlanta.
Okay. I had a hot take yesterday talking about the pushback to building data centers. And my point was that obviously data centers are the least popular. They're less popular than nuclear reactors. Nuclear reactors at their worst, I think we're polling at like 63% disapproval for let's not build those, and of course we stopped building them. Data centers are like 73%. So people really don't like them. But my point was that there's a lot of pushback against building anything, even housing, roads, trains. Like people are just like, I like the idea of it somewhere else, but I don't want it in my backyard. I don't want it over here. Like if it actually interfaces with me. And I'm wondering how local communities are actually receptive or skeptical about having what is essentially a factory and could be noisy or could have traffic or could have a bunch of different things. And I imagine that you've had like one millionth of the pushback, but you've still had to consider all these things. So how have you communicated to the local communities that you build in and you're planning to build in?
Yeah. I think some of the loudest pushback is from people in these big coastal cities and they're like, I don't want that in my backyard. What we find is, we're in a smaller city or a rural area, people love the jobs. They love the development. They love the taxable revenue that comes with us. We're also pretty damn quiet. We don't exhaust to sewer or air or anything. We're 50-state compliant. That's our goal. But what's really cool is we can come into a community and provide a lot of good high-paying jobs. It's a career path that they can grow into. There's more opportunities as we build more buildings. They can move out of their little town and go to a different metro or whatever. So we don't have any pushback. Also, we move so damn fast that we don't build our buildings. We go find a building that's already stood up and we just move in. That's the only way for us to go fast.
Yeah. And there's plenty of capacity there. As you look back on your career, how did you process the VC hype or just the memes around the 3D printing revolution? There was a moment where there was like, oh, there won't be any more factories because everyone will just 3D print everything at home. How'd you process it at the time? And I guess how do you see 3D printing fitting in, if at all, into the future of re-industrialization? Does that have a place whatsoever?
It does. It does. In the world of metals, we're still far away from that. It's so much easier to get something cast or stamped or laser cut or whatever. I mean, when we've experimented with 3D additive in-house, there's laws against how much of that aluminum powder you can have because it's explosive. So there's massive hurdles to clear for that. However, 3D printing, it's actually really competitive with injection molding. And that's something that we're looking at. Injection molding is incredibly expensive to get the molds made. Almost all the molds are made offshore, but if you can 3D print really, really rapidly, then it is competitive, especially for small runs or startups or prototypes or whatever. So that's an area that we're experimenting in.
What are some recent customers that you started working with that you're particularly excited about? They can be mom-and-pop hackers or big companies, but I wanted to give you a chance.
Yeah, we actually, my comms team that I have now just told me I have to be careful about who I name. We were pretty proud though. It is mom-and-pops, but then it's also what, 85% of the top five primes and the tier one defense people use. Anduril is a huge customer. Zipline is a huge customer. And then just guys in their garage making cool stuff and kids doing FIRST Robotics or whatever. They all use us. So very, very wide spectrum of customers.
Amazing. What does an entry-level job at SendCutSend look like these days?
Anything. You're a generalist. We are moving so fast and doing so many different things. Like we don't have a designated floor sweeper, but you might be sweeping floors. You know, we start somewhere between like 26 and 30 bucks an hour. And then it goes up from there. But yeah, you're going to be maybe a laser operator one day. You're going to be driving a forklift. You're going to be cleaning out a dust collector. Or you're going to be doing some intense CAD programming. Like it's who knows? We don't know what we're going to make that day. Things just come in and we have to do it. So everyone here is very, very flexible.
Yeah. With the crazy AI buildout and data center buildout going on, we've heard and seen prices of copper spiking. Like there's all these weird knock-on effects from data center construction. Are you feeling squeezes anywhere in your supply chain? Do you feel like America is industrialized enough in the rest of your supply chain or is there like a wish list of, oh, we got to reshore that?
We need as many aluminum foundries and smelters as we can possibly get. I mean, those are way more electricity intensive than data centers. Actually, if you tried to spin up a bunch of those, it would make a data center look really good in comparison. So if you want to build a data center, go pitch an aluminum foundry first. And then they'll want you to do like 10 data centers. So we need more of those.
Yeah, but we need... I saw that with the Strait of Hormuz closing that Diet Coke was at risk of going out of stock. Very, very harmful to my production function. But because there's some amount of aluminum smelting that happens in the Middle East and passes through the Strait of Hormuz and so delays happen. And I think a lot of people aren't... they think it's either we have the capacity in the US or maybe it went to China, but there's really nothing else. But we're in such a global economy that there's so much more going on.
Yeah. It affected us a little bit. You know, about 15% of aluminum comes from offshore. We actually source a lot of domestic aluminum or at least it comes from North America. But you know, even if prices go up 15, 20%, raw materials are a small fraction of the overall end price. So a 15 or 20% increase in raw materials is probably 3 or 4% to the customer. So our customers have been pretty cool about it.
Yeah. I mean, Jordi asked about the customers, like specific examples, but I'm interested in the broader funnel. Like, how much... do you have an outbound sales force at this point? Are you going to conferences? I imagine that you show up on Google results oftentimes, but is the customer funnel heavily diversified or is there a sweet spot that you're really doubling down on right now? What does acquisition look like these days?
We've always been inbound. Inbound. We have two or three sales guys right now, but they just answer the call and do special projects or whatever. We have no outbound sales guys. At one point early on, we were spending about 100 grand a month on Google ads and I think right now we're spending about 1,500 bucks.
Wow. So is that because if you were spending more or you hired more salespeople, you just wouldn't be able to fulfill the demand? So you need to scale capacity first.
Yeah. Yeah. My marketing team, usually I'm like, say nothing. Say don't say anything this week because we had a machine go down or whatever. So I'm like, stop and everyone go quiet. So yeah, it's always chasing capacity. But my message to anyone who wants to do something like this, like just have a kick-ass product. Just make it good and fast and get it in their hands within a couple days or whatever and people will come back and they'll tell their friends. So, but an overnight success takes 10 years. So we're in...
And when you guys are fast, your customers can build their products faster and have higher sales velocity themselves and generate more revenue and then they end up spending more and it's like this very, very virtuous flywheel. And I'm so glad you're well capitalized.
Yeah. I hope I don't have to do it again because fundraising is not fun. I hate finance.
Get ready. Get ready for many more in the future. It's your duty. If you want to go fast and far, it makes sense. Last question. We were talking about the fall-off of dad books because of podcasts and fertility and all this different stuff. And I'm interested if you have any examples or recommendations for father-son building activities that you've seen from the community or maybe you've done yourself even or employees have of a good first build for a parent and child to do that might use SendCutSend parts.
Yeah, there's a ton of little push go-kart plans available. We may even have a couple on marketplace. I'll have to check. But you have to do something that the kid can enjoy. And there's nothing better than getting pushed down a hill and scraping your knees or whatever. So to have those experiences, something that's usable, like a birdhouse or whatever, that's fine. A go-kart or a scooter or something like that is pretty cool for the kids.
So if I make a go-kart using SendCutSend parts and I want to throw a V12 in there, can you fabricate that for me, too?
Not yet. Okay, that's what the money's for. Go-kart is such a smart recommendation, too, for you running a business because a bird feeder, you make it once, you put it up, it's good. My dad built me a go-kart growing up and he would make it, I would drive the heck out of it, it would break, then he'd be fixing it. So it's a recurring revenue stream for you guys to get a father-son duo into go-karts.
That's smart. 100%. Yeah.
Never ending. Playing the long game. Well, congratulations and thank you so much for coming on the show today. Yeah, great to see you, Jim. Congrats to the whole team and excited to see you back on here soon. Have a good one. Legend. Fantastic. White pill. White pill of the show. Major white pill. We were black pilling. Now we're white pilling. Never black pill. Never black pill. Well, up next we have Aidan Dewar from Nourish. He's the co-founder and CEO. He's been on the show before, but we're welcoming him back with some huge news about the company that's growing faster than ever with a massive Series C to announce. Aidan, how are you doing? I think we might have some technical problems. Can you give us a hello? Can you say hello? We might need to come back to you. How are we doing? Are you using a potato as a webcam? It's not the potato, it's the Wi-Fi. It's for sure the Wi-Fi. Do a check one, two. Yeah, do a check one, two. We'll kill some time. We'll kill some time because Dan... killing time with Dan Sundheim. So, wait. Okay, so this is actually funny because I opened up the Wall Street Journal today and I had seen the news from Tay Kim who's coming on the show this week that in the Financial Times they had a report that Daniel Sundheim's D1 Capital Partners is another hedge fund that stands to make a killing when SpaceX goes public. D1 is sitting on paper gains of about 9 billion on SpaceX stock that it acquired over several years for about 600 million. What a run of 15x. Not bad. And so now the stake might be worth 20 billion if the rocket maker is valued at the expected 1.75 trillion, a figure that could still change according to people familiar with the matter. But I open up the Wall Street Journal and everyone's familiar with Dan Sundheim and D1. Dan Sundheim is not like someone who's obscure behind the scenes. He's done the best. People know D1. They invest in a lot of companies that we know. But I thought this Wall Street Journal article was also about D1 and the title is 'Obscure Fund Has a Lot Riding on SpaceX' and I was like, are they really painting D1 as an obscure fund? They weren't. They're talking about a different investment firm that's about to make a lot of money on the SpaceX investment. So SpaceX's planned initial public offering is expected to be a windfall for futurist investors and venture capitalists. If you got SpaceX shares and you don't want to say 'I'm not a VC,' say you're a futurist investor. A publicity shy hedge fund manager whose other investments... So you're a hedge fund, you're long SpaceX. What else are you buying to diversify your portfolio as a futurist investor? Dick's Sporting Goods and Wingstop are among the big positions at Darana Capital Partners, which first invested in SpaceX in 2019 when Elon Musk's rocket maker was valued at around 30 billion and made several subsequent investments since then. Should SpaceX go public at a valuation around 1.5 trillion, Darana's paper gains on the investment could top $10 billion. So, had you ever heard of Darana before?
No, I actually had not. But I have heard of Wingstop. It's a good stock.
Several billion of that would be gains since... stock is down 50% year to date. Rough. The founder, Anand Sundaram, launched New York-based Darana, which comes from a Sanskrit word that means 'seeing the true nature of reality'... chicken wings... and Dick's Sporting Goods in 2014, 1.4 billion under management. Let's bring in our guest. He is back on a new device. Hey, crystal clear. We're on mobile now, guys. Apologies. We're at our company offsite, so we got weak Wi-Fi. Makes sense. Well, you sound crystal clear now. Why don't you reintroduce the company? Tell us the news.
Yeah, thanks for having me on, guys. So I'm Aidan. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Nourish. Nourish is a dietitian-led metabolic clinic. So we pair the largest network of registered dietitians in the country, over 10,000 dietitians, with virtual medical care. So the ability for physicians to order and interpret labs, to prescribe and manage medications. And we've delivered some really amazing results for patients that we're excited to talk about today.
Walk me through dietitian, the different degrees that might be involved, the certifications. I know with a lot of telehealth there's state-by-state regulations. What was the process of building out that network of 10,000 dietitians?
Yeah, good question. So dietitian is a protected term. So you might hear some people use nutritionist or dietitian interchangeably, but nutritionist is actually not protected. So you or I could get on Instagram and call ourselves a nutritionist, but a dietitian requires a master's degree, certain number of hours and so on. And so we only employ dietitians. Those are the providers that are able to work with health insurance and get it covered, which is a big part of our model is expanding access to this type of care. And of course, working with health plans, get it covered by insurance is a big part of that.
Okay. What is the value add? I mean, there's so much of a boom in peptides, GLP-1s, metabolic health. It feels like there's a lot of these companies where the demand is already there. You're just the landing page that gives the customer what they already want. But I imagine that there's a lot more. I'll pitch it. Okay, pitch it, Jordi. It seems super important to combine diet with GLP-1. Just saying like, hey, we created this magical drug for weight loss and then just doing the drug versus actually fixing the underlying cause or maybe the original issue is sort of a temporary solution. And if you want lasting positive change with your health, you're going to have to factor that in. So if I go to a dietitian and say I've been blasting retatrutide, did I botch it? Is that roughly correct?
No. No. You said it well. I mean, I think the way we think about the root cause of the problem of explosion in chronic conditions and cost is that people are living unhealthy lifestyles in the modern world. It's very hard in the modern world to eat well, to sleep well, to move your body, to manage your stress. And maybe 75 years ago when these conditions were much rarer and costs were much lower, just kind of living your life day-to-day, it was much easier to be healthy. And so while these medications are a very useful tool in the toolkit, and with our network now we're able to prescribe and manage those medications, to your point, if you don't pair that with behavior change, you don't get sustainable results, which of course is worse for the patient, but it's also worse for the system because now we've spent all this money for medications and then had rebound weight gain or falling off medication or so on.
What's happening on the supply side of the market with GLP-1s and how is that impacting pricing? We know there's an incredible amount of demand, overwhelming demand, but what's happening on the other side?
Yeah. So it's nice to see. I mean, I think slowly but surely we'll see access increase, costs come down. I think over time as these drugs become generic, expect them to get much, much cheaper. You know, you mentioned retatrutide, I think that'll get approved in the coming years and that'll maybe start at a higher price and then these first-gen, second-gen meds will come down in price and eventually go generic, which I think is really exciting because ultimately, like I said, they are a valuable tool in the toolkit, but cost is prohibitive in many cases today. And so where I think we play and where I think the value will ultimately be created as the price of these medications comes down is exactly in that behavior and lifestyle change that we talked about. That's kind of that wraparound care of how do you have not just medication but integrated care team virtually covered by insurance as well as of course technology, especially AI, which can be...
kind of that 24/7 behavior change agent as part of the equation, and that's, you know, a big part of the round we just raised was to invest in all of that and accelerate that.
Raised 100 million Series C. Yes.
I love the gong. I love the gong. That's why I came on. We need a gong for our office. It really is.
Yeah, we should make TBPN branded gong something everyone.
Wraparound care. Does that also mean meal delivery at some point? I feel like there's a number of companies throughout history that have sort of vertically integrated to that degree. Incredibly operationally complex. Is it on the roadmap? Is it something you're interested in?
Yeah, great question. We get reached out by, you know, a number of kind of meal delivery companies, as you expect, about partnering. We haven't prioritized it yet, but I do think ultimately, you know, we'll do something there at some point. I mean, the way I think about kind of more broadly the problem of lifestyle change being difficult and therefore the mission of being how do you make lifestyle change easy is you're trying to remove as many barriers, and of course the food being kind of one of those. And so how do you, when you make a recommendation, make it very easy to act and fulfill that recommendation. And I think being able to prescribe and fulfill prescriptions of food in the same way you can of medication, I think will be something we do eventually. And I think there's a lot of movement among health plans to potentially even reimburse for that in some cases eventually, but haven't prioritized that yet, but I think at some point we will.
And then on the GLP-1 side, is there still an opportunity in compounding? I know some telehealth providers like went down that path, others partnered. Like, do you have a firm view? Are you flexible here? Or how have you been interpreting the different ways to vertically integrate on that side of the business?
Yeah, so we do not compound. We work with the name brand medications and have partnerships with the, you know, the big players that you all know and work to get those covered by insurance. You know, I think if you've probably seen, you know, in the last few years there's been kind of this cash pay and compounding market. We think that was a bit of kind of just a short-term solution for when there were access constraints and cost constraints that you were speaking about earlier, and where kind of the market heads is, you know, the inverse of cash pay compounding, which is insurance covered and name brand. And that's kind of, you know, bread and butter of the company, pun intended, is working with kind of those health plans to get things like that covered. And then again, because the drug as cost comes down, especially becomes a commodity, I think where the value is created is in that wraparound care we talked about, and that's kind of the hard work, but I think the important work that ultimately delivers, you know, lasting outcomes.
Okay, last question from the chat. Are you on a boat?
No, I mean, I'm in this random conference room at our company offsite. Like I said,
I think it's the phone. I think the phone is like rocking at just the right oscillation.
I'm pretty convinced it's
You're not feeding the boat allegations.
He denies. He denies the boat.
It does have kind of boat. It does have wood paneling and it looks nice.
It's that. It's that texture of wood.
No, we got a boring, boring conference room. Sorry. Huge boat. It's a super massive boat.
I don't have a problem with company offsite on the boat. That seems like a great strategy if that's what you did. I'm not going to critique it. Enjoy the boat.
Great, great to see you, Aidan. Congrats to the whole team on the milestone and keep up the great work.
We'll talk to you soon.
Thanks. I got to go talk to the captain to start this.
Have him reset the Starlink too for your computer.
Sorry about that, guys. Thanks for having me on.
Great to see you. See you. Goodbye.
I'm glad we got to the boat question.
The important question.
I don't think it was a boat. It looked a little bit too big. And things weren't like buckled down. You know, usually on a boat, even if you're in a palatial conference room, there's ways to, you know, bolt down certain items. Anyway, our next guest is from Status here raising a round. Welcome to the show.
Hey guys, nice to finally be on the show.
We got to kick it off with the first question. Are you on a boat?
No, unfortunately, I'm in a regular
Okay, our last, our last, a very nice conference room.
Fantastic. Our last guest denied the allegations of being on a boat. He looked like he was on a boat. We have to ask everyone now. But that's not what we're here. We're here to talk about. We're here to talk about you and your company. Please introduce yourself and the company.
