Inside ChatGPT’s Uses, NVIDIA Pours $100B into OpenAI | Kimbal Musk & Shervin Pishevar, John Shahidi, Laura Deming, Steven Glinert, Austin Petersmith, Ethan Barajas & Jamie Palmer

Summary

TBPN Podcast Summary

Episode: Inside ChatGPT’s Uses, NVIDIA Pours $100B into OpenAI | Kimbal Musk & Shervin Pishevar, John Shahidi, Laura Deming, Steven Glinert, Austin Petersmith, Ethan Barajas & Jamie Palmer
Hosts: John Coogan & Jordi Hays
Date: September 22, 2025

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Episode Overview

This jam-packed episode explores the evolving landscape of artificial intelligence (AI), the business of LLMs (Large Language Models), and the ecosystem around OpenAI’s latest developments. Key topics include AI personalization, OpenAI’s monetization and compute challenges, the growing intersection of AI and consumer products, and a flurry of startup founder interviews covering everything from drone art to on-device LLMs and the business of creator-led brands. With a blend of news, tech analysis, and founder chats, the episode is a whirlwind tour of the current tech zeitgeist.

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1. The Future of ChatGPT: Personalization, Monetization, and Competition

[00:00–29:59]

Main Discussion Points

AI Personalization & User Expectations

• Sam Altman teases new compute-intensive offerings for pro subscribers; hints at new features/products with extra fees ([01:25]).
• Ongoing debate: Can LLMs deliver true personalization, or do they all just “remember a few facts” and respond in similar, generic tones?
• Referencing a Matthew McConaughey podcast appearance, the hosts discuss users’ desire for “private LLMs” trained on personal data:

  “I want the answers based on what I’ve uploaded it with, not from the outside world.” – John Shahidi quoting McConaughey ([03:39])

• Current ChatGPT “memory” function deemed “overhyped” and not a differentiator.

  “I haven’t experienced feeling like I am so locked into this LLM because it knows everything about me.” – Jordi ([04:48])

“Voice” and “Personality” in LLMs

• Brief detour into model personalities: Reddit communities deeply attached to specific LLM personalities (e.g., ChatGPT 4.0, Claude 3.5 Sonnet) ([05:33]).
• Prediction: The sticky future is where each user gets a unique, evolving AI “partner” ([09:42]).

AI as Tool vs. Friend

• Divide between using AI for knowledge retrieval (personality doesn’t matter) vs. as a “friend” (personality and memory crucial) ([11:46]).
• OpenAI’s new “Personalization” tab: personality modes (“cheerful and adaptive,” “cynic,” “robot,” etc.), but customized voices are still surface-level ([13:31]).

Product Speculation & Monetization

• Anticipation for Sora 2 (OpenAI’s video model), Agent 2 (autonomous action-taking), and memory upgrades – likely as paid add-ons due to GPU costs ([15:18], [25:34]).

• Candid feedback on the cost and scaling challenges of deploying heavy compute AI models:

  “Maybe the market clearing price is much lower, but it should be above the value of running those GPUs, in my opinion.” – John Shahidi ([15:18])

• Discussion of plug-ins, agents, and deep research – but consensus that personality and memory are not core product lock-ins yet ([10:43], [19:39]).

Notable Quotes & Timestamps

• "What actually is sticky and that feels like it all feeds into lower churn. So I think that's sort of the goal." – John Shahidi ([11:26])
• “People just realize, if I want to post under this identity, I'm still better off going to X and sharing there.” – Jordi on the difficulty of new social platforms ([79:41])
• “I still believe that if you're in the first camp... personality just doesn't matter that much.” – Jordi ([12:00])

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2. Founder & Creator Economy: Product, Brand, and Distribution

Notable Guest: John Shahidi, Shots Podcast Network
[58:18–105:40]

Highlights

Building Successful Creator Brands

• John Shahidi describes strategy behind scaling Happy Dad Seltzer, leveraging retail-first approach and targeting under-served demographics (e.g., men in hard seltzers).
• The importance of high product quality for creator brands:

  “A fan of any creator... will try anything once. Now the question is, will they buy it again?... It wasn't good.” – Shahidi on why Travis Scott's seltzer failed ([68:39])

• Retail vs. e-commerce for beverage brands – direct online selling is expensive and not always practical ([63:16]).
• Shahidi explains how relationships with retailers (Walmart, Kroger, 7-Eleven) are key, and offers advice from Dana White to “treat retailers like YouTube, Meta, etc.” ([63:37]).

Scale vs. Niche for Creator-led Startups

• You don’t need to be Tom Cruise-level famous — niche creators can build substantial brands, as long as the product is strong ([66:40]).
• Collaborating with large CPGs often fails due to a lack of “hustle” and entrepreneurial energy from the big partner ([72:22]).

Influencer Businesses, Investing, & Content Platform Strategy

• On influencer investing: surround yourself with sophisticated institutional investors – don’t just take flyers on “your cousin’s business” ([101:58]).
• Platform advice: “YouTube first” for discoverability/long tail, X for live, Spotify and Insta still playing catch-up ([74:53]).
• Advice to creators: focus on owning a great product, not just content ([88:23]).

Memorable Moments

• John retelling advice about not overhyping before nationwide distribution: “If I had to do it again, I wouldn’t have pushed it so hard, because what's the point of Chris promoting this... if it's not available everywhere?” ([92:53])
• Entertaining banter about securing usernames across every platform:

  "You got to log in every day, 179 days... There’s an army of like high school kids trying to snipe the names." – John & Jordi ([85:33])

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3. AI, Capex, & The Circular Economy: Investment, Bubbles, & Tech Cycles

[24:07–55:16, 116:56–120:22]

Key Discussion Points

NVIDIA, OpenAI, Oracle’s $100B Flywheel

• Huge circular flow of capital: NVIDIA invests $100B into OpenAI, who uses some of it to pay for Nvidia GPUs, etc. ([50:36])
• Hosts mock the “circular” nature of this, compare it to older ad-tech cycles.
• Ultimately, the only thing that matters is usage and DAUs (Daily Active Users): “if ARR starts to slow, then all bets are off” ([52:50]).

Tech Bubbles and Value Creation

• Quoting Carlotta Perez on financial bubbles: we may be mid-bubble, but the life cycle is like PCs/container ships, not just internet 2000. ([54:05])
• Debate over the value of fundraising announcements vs. product launches in B2B SaaS:

  “When you’re in B2B, you need to take advantage of the business story. And the business story is the fundraising story.” – John Shahidi ([42:00])

• Conversation around changing value of niche and viral in enterprise SaaS vs. consumer apps ([42:00–44:16]).

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4. New AI-Driven and Frontier Tech Startup Announcements

a) Laura Deming, Until Last Year

“Making hibernation pods reality by solving reversible organ cryopreservation”
[120:27–147:02]

• Announced $58M round led by Founders Fund & Lux, aiming to demonstrate fully-reversible cryopreservation for human organs.
• Practicality: First products will drastically extend organ shelf-life for transplants (currently only ~12–24 hrs), disrupting expensive, logistics-heavy systems like Blade (medical airlifts).
• Long-term vision: hibernation pods for both medical/clinical (e.g., waiting out diseases) and far-future uses like interstellar travel.
• Insightful technical breakdown:

  “Our enemy in cryopreservation is ice... what we want to do is make glass.” – Laura ([124:32])

• On iteration speed: “Unlike a lot of biology, you can test whole human-sized organs a lot of your protocols weekly.” ([131:59])
• Big ideas: Cryo as a time machine, ethical/sci-fi impacts, U.S. vs. global efforts ([134:49], [139:24]).

b) Kimbal Musk & Shervin Pishevar, Nova Sky Stories

Breathtaking live drone shows as art, at city scale
[151:09–167:47]

• Raised $50M led by Pishevar; just produced a 300,000-person Vatican show simulcast on Disney+.
• Expansion: now running 5 global shows simultaneously, bottlenecked only by drone supply.
• Product is a full-stack of technology, IP, government/venue relationships, and creative:

  “It’s basically building like a Pixar and a Disney all in one inside of a technology company.” – Shervin Pishevar ([165:34])

• Regulatory advantage: Flight permissions, logistics, venue relationships.
• Emotional resonance and public demand for “live, communal” experiences.

c) Stephen Glinert, Sphera

AI-designed analog and mixed-signal chips (for defense/communications)
[169:14–176:53]

• Announced $12M funding (Acme/Future Ventures, $20M total).
• Builds analog front-ends for systems like Anduril, using fully-AI-designed chips old guard still often designs by hand.
• Go-to-market: Defense sector, expanding to data-center networking and comms.

d) Ethan Barajas & Jamie Palmer, Icarus Robotics

Space labor: dexterous robots to replace astronaut time
[177:35–182:59]

• Raised $6.1M seed.
• Building remotely-operated, dexterous, free-flying robots for logistics and maintenance inside space stations, freeing astronauts for higher-leverage science.
• Details on testing: air-bearings, NASA's neutral buoyancy pool, and upcoming ISS trials.

e) Austin Petersmith, Secretary (Howie)

AI + human-in-the-loop executive assistant for scheduling
[186:30–198:44]

• Raised $6M seed.
• Practical hybrid model: AI models for scheduling logic, with human validation for reliability (“like Waymo’s driver in an icy road”).
• Price: $35/mo for base, $145/mo for “pro” (white label, advanced customization).
• Anticipates gradual shift to more AI automation, but sees permanent need for “humans holding the steering wheel” for hard cases.

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5. LLMs, AI Voice, Consumer & Tech Culture Miscellany

[55:16–120:27], [147:10+]

• Discussed Apple’s on-device LLM (A19 Pro chip, Apple "Foundation model"), and why local models might not matter for most consumers ([45:22]).
• Grok (Elon's X AI) voice, 11Labs as “the Midjourney of voice,” and the legal/cultural complexities of branded AI voices ([55:13]).
• Discussion of OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Gemini, and Claude – and users’ strange attachment to “favorite models” as characters ([34:03]).
• “Sharing” as the future social feature of LLMs – curating research, context, and collaborative prompting ([77:23]).
• Meta’s new “Gaussian splats” for VR/AR world scans; real emotional impact of digital spatial environments ([48:02]).

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6. Fun, Observations, and Culture

• Oura Ring hits 3M sales, $1.5B revenue, $10B valuation — from Kickstarter to mainstream ([111:37]).
• Trends in live entertainment, the rise of immersive, drone-powered shows over cities and mass experiences ([151:09–167:47]).
• Humorous, rapid-fire takes:
  • The endless struggles with home printers
  • Fake/AI-generated viral images spreading online
  • The “Green Line” test of Trump/Elon handshake photos
  • The trading of platform usernames as digital property
• Banter about anchorless consumer startups, recurring launches, and soundboard gongs as product milestones ([38:02]; [148:46]).

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Notable Quotes By Timestamp

• “Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team.” – John Shahidi ([22:24])
• “If you want to develop some software, if you want to design something, head over to figma.com. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products.” ([35:16])
• “You should actually definitely run. Ajni Mihdha over at Andreessen had a different take. He said, true for the median startup, but it’s dangerously wrong for frontier technology companies. Capital is a weapon.” ([42:00])
• “I feel like there’ll be some sort of power law of, like, the best environments and there’ll be a few.” – John Shahidi on virtual world scans ([49:46])
• “If the product is great, it'll sell itself.” – John Shahidi ([66:49])
• “Every entrepreneur… has been through this before. It’s a comeback story, baby.” – [149:24]
• “This episode should be called: everything is circular, everything is compute-bound, and everyone is launching, always.” – Jordi (paraphrased theme in closing).

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• OpenAI Personalization & Monetization: [00:00–29:59]
• Anthropic vs. OpenAI Marketing: [28:51–34:56]
• Creator Brands Deep Dive (John Shahidi): [58:18–105:40]
• Nova Sky Stories (Kimbal Musk/Shervin Pishevar): [151:09–167:47]
• Laura Deming Cryopreservation/Aging: [120:27–147:02]
• Analog Chips/Defense (Stephen Glinert/Sphera): [169:14–176:53]
• Space Robotics (Icarus Robotics): [177:35–182:59]
• Secretary/Howie (Austin Petersmith): [186:30–198:44]

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Conclusion

This episode offers a vibrant snapshot of the current moment in tech: the limits and promise of big LLMs, the economics of AI compute, the perpetual hype cycle of launches, and the messy intersection of tech with real-world industries. Through sharp banter and an impressive guest lineup, the show captures the optimism, anxiety, and relentless pace of technology in late 2025.

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Transcript

[John Shahidi]

You're watching TVPN Sunday, September 22, 2025. We are live from the TVPN Ultradome, the Temple of technology, the fortress of.

[Jordi]

Finance, the capital of capital.

[John Shahidi]

Sam Altman and Matthew McConaughey defined the weekend in my world. On my timeline, two former Joe Rogan guests. Interestingly, only Sam Altman has done Thea Vaughn and only Sam Altman has done Tucker Carlson. Matthew McConaughey has gotten snubbed by those two. But hopefully we'll get McConaughey on Theo eventually. But until then, Sam is the loan.

[Jordi]

Of the pair to do Matthew McConaughey on the Ivan.

[John Shahidi]

It feels like a match made in heaven. Sam obviously did well on the show, but they both were talking about AI and caused a stir predictions debate and I thought it'd be interesting to weave through it. So. So Sam Altman kicked off with a post here. He says time is money, save both easy use, corporate cards, bill payment, accounting, a whole lot more all over the place. He said go to ramp.com, now. He didn't. That's fake news. But we love ramp.com and so head over to ramp.com. no, what Sam actually said was over the next few weeks we are launching some new compute intensive offerings.

[Jordi]

There we go.

[John Shahidi]

Because of the associated costs, some features will initially only be available to pro subscribers. That's me. That's me. And some new products will have additional fees. Ooh, interesting. Extra monetization. Our intention remains to drive the cost of intelligence down as aggressively as we can and make our services widely available. And we are confident we will get there over time. But we also want to learn what's possible when we throw a lot of compute at today's model costs at an interesting at interesting new ideas. So there were lots of debate over what he's going to launch. Meanwhile, Matthew McConaughey was over on Joe Rogan saying that he wants a private LLM fed only with his books, notes, journals and aspirations so he can ask it questions and get answers based solely on that information without any outside influence. Can we play the Matthew McConaughey clip? Because he had a very interesting phrase. I thought it was very funny. He doesn't say. He doesn't say fine tune on this.

[Jordi]

He wants to log.

[John Shahidi]

He wants to log it in. We'll hear it from him. Let's go to Matthew McComb though, in.

[Jordi]

A private LLM where I can upload.

[John Shahidi]

Hey, here's three books I've written. Here's my other favorite book, right?

Here's my Favorite articles I've been cutting.

[Jordi]

And pasting over the 10 years.

[John Shahidi]

And log all that in, log all that. And here's all my journals or the people out and log it in so I can. No one's doing questions based on that. Right. And basically learn more about myself. Right. You stand on the political spectrum. Right. I'd like to know that's. That's what I'm would like to do.

[Jordi]

Which is sort of a glorified word.

[Austin]

Document, but it still would hold a lot more information.

[John Shahidi]

Just. Oh, can you not write this off? This is, this is an important consumer. This is the next big market of consumers with the information I'd like to load it with.

[Jordi]

Right.

[John Shahidi]

Yeah. Maybe even like I'm saying in this, in the words of belief in, in the. In the man I'm working to be the man. I feel like the current state of LLMs are meeting his needs and that's really, really important. If you're open AI, you want to become the biggest company in the world. You want everyone to use your products.

[Jordi]

Yeah.

[John Shahidi]

It's slowly learning about me through conversations then going oh, I think this is what you like based on our conversation.

No, I want the answers based on.

What I've uploaded it with, not from the outside world. And he probably uses, he probably uses Instagram and Instagram is personalized. Does give him a unique view on things he likes and has become very good at servicing exactly what he wants. Well if he wants to log in he should log into restream one livestream, 30 + destinations multi stream to reach your audience wherever they are. But so I took this as just this. Like there's this interesting battle going on between how much personalization and how is personalization actually surfaced to the user like a lot of people in the replies.

[Jordi]

Are you getting value out of memory function today?

[John Shahidi]

No, I don't feel like I am. I feel like it remembers little facts about me and then weaves those in basically in awkward moments. But it's still chatgpt. Like it's still the voice memory.

[Jordi]

Feels like it's been broadly overhyped. Right.

[John Shahidi]

This is so far. Yes.

[Jordi]

People were saying was ultimately going to be the moat LLMs. It's like why would you switch LLM?

[John Shahidi]

Yes.

[Jordi]

New LLM doesn't know anything about you.

[John Shahidi]

Yes.

[Jordi]

But. But to date I haven't. I'm same with you. I haven't experienced feeling like I am so locked into this LLM because it knows everything about me.

[John Shahidi]

Yes.

[Jordi]

Knows me better than the next product.

[John Shahidi]

Yes. It remembers facts. So if You've asked it to fix your car and you told it what model car you have, and then you just mention, like, my car won't start. It'll remember what car that is. But it doesn't develop a unique personal. It's always the same. And that lends itself to a specific flavor of using EM dashes, using bullet points. It's not this. It's that. That type of syntax. And some people love that. Like, we saw that Reddit loved 4.0 very clearly, and a lot of us were surprised. We were like, really? Is this real? Is this fake? Like, what's going on? People are really upset that 4.0 is going away.

[Jordi]

It's real enough. They changed course.

[John Shahidi]

Yeah. And they brought it back. And the same thing happened in teapot with Claude 3.5 sonnet. Everyone was saying, oh, Sonnet is the best. Tyler, did you like Sonnet 3.5? Were you a Sonnet head? There was a funeral. Wait, did they deprecate it?

[Jordi]

Yeah.

[John Shahidi]

Oh, I didn't realize.

[Tyler]

Well, actually, it was Claude 3 that was like, the original one, that people were like, oh, my gosh, I love Claude.

[John Shahidi]

Yeah. That it had a very specific personality. And I feel like the future and like the goal with personalization should be everyone gets that experience. Everyone gets their own. Over time, the model shapes and morphs into something that has a personality that you really vibe with very much. Like, if you go around the world, like, how many people do you meet before you find someone who, like, you want to start a show with or podcast with? Right. Like, it takes a lot to be like, this person really gels with my personality. And their personality is changing a little bit as I interact with them and vice versa. Like, that type of interaction, it happens over a very long time of meeting a lot of people and deciding who's the best fit. Who do you vibe with? Right. And so two years ago, Sam Altman stood on stage at OpenAI Dev Day. This was in 2023, which feels like a decade ago at this point, and announced custom GPTs and a GPT store. And the idea was fine tuning was going to be done by a creator, and I was going to be able to do exactly what Matthew McConaughey is describing. Go in, load up Matthew McConaughey's books, load up the Bible, load up a bunch of other interviews with him, everything about his worldview, notes, journals, all of that stuff. Create a custom GPT. It could be private or it could be public, and then other people could choose to interact with it. And over the past two years, that just hasn't happened. I looked at the top of the ChatGPT app store, and the number one is Astrology Birth Chart GPT. Number two is Scholar GPT. It builds in Google Scholar, PubMed Bio Archive Archive. Then there's a fitness workout, diet coach. Yes. Humanize AI that's trying to write more human, like, content. An image generator and an image generator pro. And so I'm sure these are, you know, great, but they certainly haven't broken through to where they are the default by. In general, when I want to use AI or ChatGPT, I open the app, I open my phone, I start talking to it. I might throw in a link to an article to give it a little bit more context. I might add some flavor on how, what level of depth I want to go to. But I'm not going and creating custom GPTs. I'm satisfied with the current results, but at the same time, I don't feel like it's personalized. Like, I feel like if I picked up your ChatGPT right now and said the exact same thing, give me a deep dive on the new CEOs of Oracle. I was interested in that. I wanted a deep research report. I feel like if I take my prompt, I put it in your chatgpt, I'm getting the exact same result, basically. Even though obviously it's not fully deterministic. It might be slightly different words, but I feel like the flavor, the personality will be the same because we are me and you, even though we speak to ChatGPT differently, we are interacting with the same personality. And personalization just means remembering a few facts. So it might address you as Jordi and me as John, but it's not fundamentally going to be a different. A different style. And I was wondering about, like, how does that actually, like, like, at what.

[Jordi]

Level do I want to point where I'm, I'm. I'm testing. Yeah, you're testing different models, and I can get the same value out of a bunch of different Deep Research.

[John Shahidi]

Yep.

[Jordi]

Like, products.

[John Shahidi]

Yeah.

[Jordi]

And that says a lot because I think. I think ultimately the value of. I think Deep Research products have already stabilized to the point where, yes, if you were to compare two line by line, it'd be. One of them would be objectively the best. You're getting the core value out of it, which is just a great summary of events or whatever you're researching.

[John Shahidi]

Yeah. So a lot of it comes down to speed and user interface. I tend to like the current ChatGPT voice mode more than Gemini. But Gemini's deep research product is fantastic and it's faster and so I'm going to close my phone for 20 minutes. But I like being able to just pull up the voice mode and I feel like the Gemini app currently kind of jumps the gun on ending the voice Note. Whereas with ChatGPT I feel like I can ramble a little bit more, add more context and then end it and then edit it if I need to. So like I've just kind of baked into that flow. But I agree with you, like they both feel like the same personality. They might have memorized a few facts, but they're not really creating a person, a different personality where, oh yeah, my, my chatgpt is like, is like a particular, particular character that's very different from yours. And I think, I think the future and what, and what would be sort of like, you know, inference heavy or, or GPU compute intensive might be every time like really doing thoughtful roll ups and developing that personality over time for every user so that you don't just have Reddit loves 4.0and TPOT loves Claude 3.5 Sonnet. You have every single person loves their individual ChatGPT instance and would be distraught if it changed because they're very satisfied with it. And as a function you can't leave, you don't want to leave. Because everyone has that feeling of like, well I've invested all this time, it doesn't just know things about me because I can go to a different model and say here's the car I drive, here's my age, here's my, here's some data. Like, you know, I could just import, you know, all sorts of podcasts I've done and stuff. Like it's easy to like get the facts, but it's not that easy to understand the flavor of LLM interaction that I'm looking for. What actually is sticky and that feels like it all feeds into lower Churn. So I think that's, I think that's sort of the, sort of the goal. I don't think you will actually logging again.

[Jordi]

The bigger dividing line is are you using AI for knowledge retrieval and like purely functional tasks or are you using it as a friend, like product?

[John Shahidi]

Yeah, yeah, totally.

[Jordi]

And I still believe that if you're in the first camp and it's function and knowledge retrieval that the personality just doesn't matter that much. Right.

[John Shahidi]

I still think that there's a little bit of personality that I think is, it's somewhat important in the sense of knowing where I like to dive Deeper in the deep research where I like to stay at a high level. If I'm doing a deep research report, I'm often prompting it with write it like a New Yorker article. Try and pull real quotes, real anecdotes, show me who the people were behind this decision. I don't like just a fact, fact, fact. I actually really, really detest when you ask for the history of a business and they say Microsoft launched this. Apple launched the iPhone. Like I don't believe that Apple exists. Apple didn't launch the iPhone like Steve Jobs and a group of people who operate within a structure called Apple launched the iPhone. And I want to hear the story of the people that did that thing. Not the abstract press release machine that you get from like, you know, the core, you know.

[Jordi]

ChatGPT announced a personalization tab last week.

[John Shahidi]

Tab. No, I didn't know about this.

[Jordi]

This is in buried in the Settings page.

[John Shahidi]

Okay. Yes, I've seen that tab before.

[Jordi]

You can enable customization so that you can customize the model effectively in the chat.

[John Shahidi]

Yep.

[Jordi]

And then you can set different personalities. So there's default, which is cheerful and adaptive, cynic, critical and sarcastic. Interesting robot robot, blunt clanker, listener, which is thoughtful and supportive and nerd, exploratory and enthusiastic. And then you can do custom instructions to make it sound Gen Z. I.

[John Shahidi]

Guess I have some custom instructions. Years ago someone posted like here are the best things to clean up your chatgpt. But they were all like these prompt injection things like mistakes erode my trust. So be accurate and thoroughly provide detailed explanations. I'm comfortable with lots of detail value, good arguments over authorities. The source is irrelevant and I don't know if I. No moral lectures, no need to disclose you're an AI. Some of these are useful. I don't know. I'll probably take these out of there. What should GPT call you? So they're definitely working on this. I just wonder. I think I turned this off after. After I asked it to tell me a joke and the joke was like hyper specific about my particular car and I was like this is kind of cool, but it's not really funnier. I don't know. Let's see. I'm going to turn personalization back on but clear out those custom instructions and see how my ChatGPT experience is. But there are obviously much more. There are many more just like down the fairway features that people are expecting. So Sora 2 with audio and 4K people kind of expect that Sora. I've comped Sora to VO3v03 is dramatically better. Sora 2 is still very. Or Sora 1 is still very hallucinatory, but it's like a year old at this point, so they probably should be catching up to the frontier there. Of course, that's extremely.

[Jordi]

And you would expect Google to be in the lead here purely because of the YouTube.

[John Shahidi]

I would think so too. Hopefully the OpenAI team has figured out a way to get up to the benchmarks. I've seen other companies that aren't Google produce VO3 level results, so I would expect that Sora 2 is close to VO3 quality somehow. I don't know how they got the data. Might have bought it from somewhere, might have done a whole bunch of different things. There's a lot of ways they could have gotten a ton of video tagged data, but that is something that I wouldn't be surprised if it's some new products that have additional fees. I wouldn't be surprised if, if the Sora two generations are so expensive that they actually just tell you like, hey, it's two bucks every time. Because they should have learned from the Google situation, which was I paid $250 on a $500 a month plan. I signed up for a $500 a month plan. I haven't churned and you're still capping me at these crazy rate limits and you're just not taking my money. And you're a huge company. Like there's gotta be a way. And there was a way. It was like go to the API and do all this. But I was like, I want it in the app. I want to be just consumer pro prosumer level and at least have the option to just continue prompting and light the GPUs on fire. Just find the fair market price. Find the market clearing price for what the value of those GPUs are right now. Maybe it's 50 bucks a prompt. And then, and then I can decide. I can decide. Yeah, I'm using this for work. This is going out on my, my professional. On your ranch? Yeah, on my, on my TV show. And like it's worth 50 bucks. Maybe, maybe the market clearing price is much lower, but it should be above the value of running those GPUs in my opinion. Image 2. They currently have GPT Image 1 and they're expecting like an answer to Nano Banana Edits better text rendering. The text rendering is already fantastic in images and chatgpt, but I wouldn't be surprised if that comes out. Nanobanana for video in Sora too. So the ability to upload a video, change it or kick off a frame and change that. ChatGPT Agent 2 this is interesting. Agent is something that I feel like should get baked into the model RO at some point. Like you should just be able to like right now if you hit ChatGPT with a query, it will say, oh, I'm thinking longer for a better answer.

[Jordi]

I really want to get a better sense. Has operator been a total flop?

[John Shahidi]

Operator's gone. Operator doesn't exist anymore. It's now agent. But agent mode uses operator. I use agent. Yes.

[Jordi]

I've used it a few times for deep research.

[John Shahidi]

You could think about it like deep research, but instead of just pulling a bunch of text together, actually go try to navigate a bunch of websites. So I was looking for a new breakfast spot for us. This is real. I wanted high protein options. I said here's where I work, here's where I go to the gym. I'd like a survey of high protein options. So go look on a map, figure out what's in the area, go and pull the actual menus and build me the perfect diet plan to get me fully bulked this season. Because bulking season and chatgpt. Oh, we know it's bulking season. We are going to have to tell us. We're super intelligent.

[Jordi]

Wasn't born under a data living under a data center.

[John Shahidi]

Of course you're bulking, it's September. But so. So I've used it but not a lot. And it's never been something that's been able to be triggered just from the.

[Jordi]

Default prompt because it is not taking actions. It's still just collecting information.

[John Shahidi]

I mean, what's an action? It takes the action of opening a webpage and scraping out the data. It takes the action of like defeating captchas very clearly. It's clearly at war with the captcha. But yes, I think you're right. Taking actions ChatGPT Agent 2 what we would expect. I don't know if it's coming in the next week.

[Jordi]

They gave. Yeah, they were booking flights.

[John Shahidi]

Wait, when weren't they booking in the demo.

[Jordi]

In the demo on GPT4 or was one before that?

[John Shahidi]

I don't know if they've ever showed a demo of them actually booking a flight, but it's clearly coming. I think it'll be with their specific partners that have opted in. And so if you look at the OpenAI partnerships list, there are a few companies that have said yes, we'd love to partner with you. And so I wouldn't be surprised if something like DoorDash is fully integrated in a way that you will be able to order through ChatGPT, and I think that'll be very interesting.

[Jordi]

Yep. So July 17th, yes, they said introducing ChatGPT agent bridging research and action. And they specifically said in your personal life, you can use it to effortlessly plan and book travel itineraries, design and book entire dinner parties, or find specialists and schedule appointments. So all I'm saying is like we haven't. Like that's not really happening yet.

[John Shahidi]

No. And so we might see something there. It's unclear how much of this is like Dev Day, because if Sam is really saying over the next few weeks, and he's really just teasing Dev Day, Dev Day could be much more oriented around companies that are planning to build on top. But again, if you want to integrate with ChatGPT agent, maybe there's an agent update and then that flows into how your company can integrate with ChatGPT agent. There's other predictions that we might get the model that won the imo and there might be an enhanced voice mode, clearly.

[Jordi]

Is Diego predicting enhanced voice mode 24 7?

[John Shahidi]

I don't know what that means. You just leave it on all the time.

[Jordi]

Just leave it on.

[John Shahidi]

People are already kind of doing that. I have noticed that some of the voice modes, if you leave them running for a long time, they get kind of crazy. Yeah. Like even just having having the voice mode try and read you a full deep research report, I've had a lot of problems with where after a minute of it reading, it just kind of like gets lost and it can't stick with it. And I don't know if it's just like the Internet connection that I'm on or something, but I've struggled many times to actually get it to read it. And then also it gets really confused by the citations and stuff. It's been ups and downs. But Greg brockman posts that OpenAI has released a large scale study on how people are using ChatGPT. Consumer adoption has broadened beyond early user groups and lots of economic values.

[Jordi]

This is the one that leaked? Yes, like more than a week ago.

[John Shahidi]

It's cool because he's using the leaked image, which I don't know if it's leaked. I think it's like from a court case or something. But it's interesting because that image is not in the blog post that he links to, but it is in his post on X because he knows that this is the one that people want to dig into. So I thought it was A good use of posting. And so we've talked about this before but it's really evenly split. Practical guidance 28% seeking information 21% writing.

[Jordi]

28% like there are very multimedia at 6%.

[John Shahidi]

Yeah.

[Jordi]

Unknown at four point. That's ominous.

[John Shahidi]

What are you doing?

[Jordi]

That's self expression at 4.3.

[John Shahidi]

That's Tyler. You know that's Tyler getting weird in ChatGPT.

[Jordi]

Technical games and all play games.

[John Shahidi]

Stay away from that. Stay away from that. Data analysis, mathematical calculation, computer programming. Computer programming is 4.2%. Of course we are partnered with Cognition, the makers of Devon Devin, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with personal AI engineering team. With your personal AI engineering team. Anyway, it'll be fun to see what they actually launch. There's so many different directions they can go. They have a lot of territory carved out. A lot of different irons in the fire.

[Jordi]

I wish we could see their just overall usage chart now that school's back in session because you remember it just like fell off cliff.

[John Shahidi]

I don't know. I, I, I don't know how much to read into that. The falling off the cliff.

[Jordi]

I don't know. They're saying 28% of ChatGPT activity is just writing. So obviously that's a lot of professionals. Yeah, it's a lot of students.

[John Shahidi]

Yeah, maybe, maybe now that summer's over is better than schools back in session. I don't think that you can get to the ChatGPT numbers that DAUs purely on the back of college students. Like I think a lot of people are using this at work. Yeah, a lot of people are working during the summer and so writing people didn't get the memo about locking in in August and they had to wait until September. It's embarrassing.

[Jordi]

Feel bad.

[John Shahidi]

Anyway, one of our newest sponsors Privy wallet infrastructure for every bank. Privy makes it easy to build on crypto rail. Securely sign up white spin up white label wallets sign transactions that integrate with on chain infrastructure all through one simple API. We are a huge next little.

[Jordi]

Little. What do you call it?

[John Shahidi]

Hit it.

[Jordi]

Hit it Nick. Hit it.

[John Shahidi]

The bike horn. It's a bike horn.

[Jordi]

Brandon. Brandon. Let's get the. Let's get the bell. I need him to get together.

[John Shahidi]

So Rune is talking. There's a ton more going on in run.

[Jordi]

This guy's got his fingers in a lot of pies.

[John Shahidi]

He does have his fingers in a lot of pies. A ton of pies. This guy Rune, he says the jump from GPT 4 to 5 Codex is just massive for those who can see it? Codex is an alien juggernaut just itching to become superhuman. Feeling the long awaited takeoff. There's very little doubt that the data center Capex will not go to waste. And Nick Carter says, you heard the man. Data Center Capex is justified. Thank you for your attention to this matter.

[Jordi]

Huge relief. Huge relief.

[John Shahidi]

I was worried.

[Jordi]

We were worried.

[John Shahidi]

We were calling the top. We did it prematurely. We're still at the early stages. We're so early.

[Jordi]

All the tops. We just said there were top signals.

[John Shahidi]

There were, there were some downsides, there were signs, but we kept riding on.

[Jordi]

We ride on.

[John Shahidi]

We ride on. Accelerate Harder says, place your bets. We of course will be betting. We need to get some poly markets up on what OpenAI launches. We are of course powered by polymarket. You can see them down in the ticker. There's some other. A lot of people are kind of coalescing around GPT image 2, soar 2 with audio, video, improved memory as a separate paid add on. I wonder if that would be the separate paid add on. I would switch and say soar2 will be a separate paid add on because that's really expensive. The improved memory. I feel like they can't, they can't.

[Jordi]

That doesn't feel like a.

[John Shahidi]

You can't charge that. It's so unclear what you get. Like the beauty of VO3 is you go and get three of them and you're like, I need more of this. But personalization is something that you're going to feel over a long time. It's going to be very slow. Like it's not going to be like a wow moment on day one. Right. So I don't know why you'd be.

[Jordi]

Like, I pay for what they need.

[John Shahidi]

They need that to reduce churn. Yeah.

[Jordi]

$200 a month, 100% over.

[John Shahidi]

And so I feel like the personalization, knowing, knowing what shoes you want to buy, that's just. That pays for itself. The hard thing is if someone's going there and being like, I'm going to generate a two hour movie and it's going to cost $10,000 in GPU credits, they need to charge you for that. And then, yeah, there is a question about how much of this will hit plus users over what time period. Zephyr says multi agent R systems for consumers. I think we're starting to see that with some of the ordering APIs, some of the Codex and Agent stuff. I'm very interested. I was playing around with Codex earlier today a little bit. I'm interested to see how it gets to the phone.

[Jordi]

The vibes have been.

[John Shahidi]

I mean I was just watching an interview with Dylan Patel and a podcaster and this particular individual was extremely bullish on Codex and had moved a ton of work from cloud code over to Kodak and so I should watch that.

[Jordi]

Did you see the Claude Claude ad?

[John Shahidi]

We should pull up that.

[Jordi]

Pull it up. I put it in the timeline. Let's put that watch.

[John Shahidi]

It was Andrew Curran. The last prediction here. Compute intensive. Almost means, Almost certainly means soar2, which would mean soar2 will be pro exclusive at launch. Google similarly offers full VO3 for Ultra subscribers only. These models are insanely expensive to run. Prediction native sound, 15 second clips. Yeah, that would be an interesting way for them to differentiate. Would be go a little bit longer on the clip. VO3 is at 8 seconds. If they do it's 15 seconds, it's almost twice as long. Could be a little bit better.

[Jordi]

VO3 do sound.

[John Shahidi]

VO3 does do sound and it does it pretty well. And they had a little bit of a pop moment. And I could imagine the OpenAI team really, really popping on Sora too. Some cool new features, especially if they figure out what is the killer use case. What's the really iconic thing, what's the prompt that anyone can do and get a great video out of. With VO3 a lot of creators came with cool ideas and then wound up getting great results. But with Dall E or with images and ChatGPT, it was like the Studio Ghibli moment. And so if, if OpenAI can work backwards from like what is something that every single person could do, like upload your profile picture and turn it into a video of something like that. Something where everyone has to go and do it for themselves to see what it looks like. That could be a really big viral moment for them. Anyway, we are going to be monitoring that and in the meantime, let's watch this new video from Anthropic. There's never been a worse time problem. There's never been a worse time problem. There's never been a worse time problem. There's never been a worse time. There's never been a worse time. Fast paced cuts. I like the color editing, color grading. There's never been a better time. Let's go. Time to have a problem.

[Jordi]

Never been a better time to have a problem. To be overwhelmed.

[John Shahidi]

No, true, the robots are useful. The clankers are helping you to solve your problems. Anthropic really has, has developed like their own brand world now when they started doing those, those billboards in London or something. We were very keen. Confused. But this is getting to a point.

[Jordi]

Where they went from having some of the worst ads to now this is a. This is a great ad.

[John Shahidi]

Yeah. And this really, really stands in contrast to the OpenAI Super bowl ad, which was very. It was like this black sun thing and it was like this pointillism, black circles. This is very rich colors, warm tones. Feels very human, actually. It does not feel cold. This does not feel Clanker coat.

[Jordi]

Apple evolved.

[John Shahidi]

Totally. Yeah. Little wreck, even.

[Jordi]

I feel like that shot of the piano.

[John Shahidi]

Yeah.

[Jordi]

That was exploding. But it's backwards and it's going backwards.

[John Shahidi]

Yeah. They're solving the piano. They're recreating the piano. I like it.

[Jordi]

They're crushing it.

[John Shahidi]

So hats off to everyone at Anthropic for.

[Jordi]

Yeah, but does this.

[John Shahidi]

Does this.

[Jordi]

This tells me not. Not giving up on consumer. Right.

[John Shahidi]

Is that. I mean, that could work for. For a B2B ad, you know, that could just be like, the vibes are good at this company. Let's continue working together in the enterprise to drive shareholder value. You can watch that and be like, okay, yeah, the cloud code bill came through this month and I'm happy with it. Let's keep it up. What do you think about.

[Jordi]

But it's very positioned as, like, don't just think of us as a.

[John Shahidi]

Those were consumer use cases. Yeah. What do you think, Tyler?

[Tyler]

Yes. So over the weekend, my roommates. So I live at UCLA with a bunch of students there. They were telling me at a.

[John Shahidi]

We get it, we get it. You don't need to, like, make a big deal out of it. We get it. You live at ucla. It's not that big of a deal.

[Jordi]

Yeah.

[John Shahidi]

So.

[Tyler]

So at the football game, they said, we get it.

[John Shahidi]

You went to a football game?

[Jordi]

No, I didn't know. I was at your college.

[John Shahidi]

Your college.

[Tyler]

I was not at the football game.

[Jordi]

But there was a round of applause for Tyler. Wow.

[John Shahidi]

Okay. Yeah. Living the college dream. Unlike these washed up podcasters over here. Just rubbing it in. So young. He's got his whole life. So much.

[Jordi]

Such a bright future ahead of you.

[Tyler]

Okay, but. So there's an ad for Anthropic at the football game.

[Jordi]

Okay, wait, what do you mean?

[Tyler]

Like, like on.

[John Shahidi]

Like, on the jerseys?

[Tyler]

No, it was like, on. I think it was on, like. Like the big screen.

[John Shahidi]

What are they called? I don't know. Big screen. Yeah.

[Tyler]

And they were like, oh, what is this? Like, company? Like, none of them had ever heard of it. And they were like, oh, it's like, slept on Like Claude, like, they don't want you to know about this.

[John Shahidi]

Okay.

[Tyler]

So I think there's some, like, consumer thing going on, at least among students.

[John Shahidi]

The war for the consumer isn't over.

[Tyler]

Last semester, Anthropic was pushing pretty hard. They have, like, a student, some kind of, like, plan that's like, super cheap. They're giving out, like, free subscriptions.

[John Shahidi]

Yeah.

[Tyler]

So I think they might be, like, aiming towards, like, that demographic a little bit.

[John Shahidi]

I wonder if they'll find a point of differentiation somehow. I mean, Google Gemini has such a great point of differentiation in consumer in the sense that, like, you're already on Gmail, you can plug in there. Like, the plugins have been slow, but, like, you can bootstrap a ton of personalization and just a ton of extra functionality from saying from properly integrating Gemini to the rest of your Google apps. Are you watching this chat? Chad says, let me do it.

[Jordi]

Sure. Morale says, let me guess, Tyler had a beer. Hopefully not. He's not 21 anyway.

[John Shahidi]

But Claude doesn't seem like they have the ability to bootstrap personalization. I mean, the real killer, I feel like the killer use case or in consumer would be if there's a flow where you download the app and when you go to prompt it, it's more willing to write code and it's more willing to write better code. I feel like that could be something that would actually break through. I keep thinking about when I hit deep research. We talked to Doug o' Laughlin about this and he said that he's getting sometimes better results out of Claude code than deep research just for actual research tasks. And so I tried this and I said, go build me. I went to Cloud code and I said, go build me a deep research report about a topic, but then instantiate it in a HTML web page. And so it gets the ability to use it to use all the different HTML5 building blocks. So it can create a table if it wants, it can create a pie chart, it can pull in JavaScript, it can create bar charts, it can do everything that you can do on HTML. It was very cool. And I felt like I saw a glimpse of the future where if I go to Claude and I ask it a question, hey, teach me Econ 101. It could build software that's actually interactive to teach me that topic on the fly. And that might be something that leverages what Anthropic seems to be very good at, which is coding.

[Jordi]

Give me a deep research report. But as I scroll, give me the maximum amount of dopamine Here we go. Give me flashing lights and sound effects.

[John Shahidi]

I don't know. What do you think?

[Tyler]

I think there's something else where, like, Claude is basically the only, like, company or it's anthropic. But, like, Claude is like very personified. Like, people think of, like, Claude is like a person. Almost like.

[John Shahidi]

Yeah.

[Tyler]

At least on, on, like Twitter and like, you know, SF people.

[John Shahidi]

Yeah.

[Tyler]

It's like Claude is like a person.

[John Shahidi]

Yeah.

[Tyler]

Where ChatGPT is like a tool, which.

[John Shahidi]

Is fascinating because it's, it's, it's such a throwback because in the previous era of voice interfaces or like AI, we had Siri, Alexa, there were a few others, there's Ask Jeeves. Even Samsung, I think, has Bixby, which was Bard, which was very much supposed to be like a person. And then a lot of the companies pulled back from that and opening. I just said, it's just chatgpt, we're not giving it a name. And then Gemini came out. And Gemini doesn't feel like a. You're not supposed to say, hey, Gemini. Really? Like, it's just kind of, it's, it's just a model. Right.

[Jordi]

You don't say Jimmy Gem. Gem.

[John Shahidi]

No. And certainly hasn't caught on. And so anyway, yeah, I do, I.

[Jordi]

Do think this, this ad for Anthropic, like around problem solving, earned. They've earned making that a pillar of their marketing by having so much success in Cogen.

[John Shahidi]

Yeah.

[Jordi]

So I like the ad. We like the ad.

[John Shahidi]

If you want to develop some software, if you want to design something, head over to figma.com. think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products.

[Jordi]

What was this post? Shoot at the server room during evacuation.

[John Shahidi]

Oh, this is just best practices in case the AI.

[Jordi]

Is this something Vanta recommends?

[John Shahidi]

Yes. If you're not compliant and the feds are going to evacuate because you don't have, you don't have sockets, send this.

[Jordi]

Rocket into your shop.

[John Shahidi]

Go to Vanta. Automate compliance, manage risk, prove trust continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation. Yes. And so I think this is from a war zone where there is a lot of data stored in the server room. And so if you are evacuating, shoot this rocket launcher at the server room so that the enemy combatants can't steal your data, can't steal all the.

[Jordi]

All your plays.

[John Shahidi]

All your plays. Yeah. Pretty crazy. But imagine how good it would feel to fire that bad boy off at a server Room. Just take that clanker.

[Jordi]

Especially. Especially if you were the. The engineer that had to, like, maintain it over time and it was giving you a lot of problems. Oh, yeah, you could. You could take out the clankers without, you know, for good reason.

[John Shahidi]

It feels like that scene in. In. You haven't seen the movie in Office Space where they smash the. The printer.

[Jordi]

I have seen.

[John Shahidi]

You've seen Office Space.

[Jordi]

I. That's one of my.

[John Shahidi]

Dad, let's go.

[Jordi]

Fantastic film.

[John Shahidi]

Jordy's third movie.

[Jordi]

My. The equivalent of my. The equivalent of my stapler is my headset.

[John Shahidi]

Okay.

[Jordi]

When I get here and.

[John Shahidi]

Oh, yeah, you need your headset.

[Jordi]

Yeah, yeah, you put it on.

[John Shahidi]

And so ranking Jordy Hayes movies. We've seen Borat, we've seen Mountainhead, and we've seen Office Space.

[Jordi]

The three. Those are the three films.

[John Shahidi]

Three Pinnacle. Mike Judge is a genius. And you know what else is genius? Graphite.dev, code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. We're also monitoring the situation of private tech markets. It's never been better to be a show focused on the private markets. OpenAI leads private markets surge as seven tech startups reach combined 1.3 trillion dollar valuation.

[Jordi]

What are the other. What are the other.

[John Shahidi]

It's got to be OpenAI, anthropic, SpaceX, X AI ramp, Vanta, Julius Fall, all of our sponsors. Basically, we need the combined market cap of all of our sponsors. That's a KPI for us. We gotta get those numbers up.

[Jordi]

We gotta get those.

[John Shahidi]

We gotta get those numbers.

[Jordi]

Tyler new project. By the way, last Friday, I jokingly told Tyler, build a soundboard.

[John Shahidi]

Oh, yeah? Did he?

[Jordi]

And he did. Wow. It's fantastic. He had a working version. By the time the show was over on Friday, he took my ass very literally. I said, just get it done in like, I don't know, like 15, 20 minutes.

[John Shahidi]

You did it.

[Jordi]

And he basically did it. But we're gonna release it soon and it looks fantastic. So you guys will be able to use our sound soundboard in your own meetings.

[John Shahidi]

Okay?

[Jordi]

So if, you know, somebody announces a couple positive things, you can personally go. It's gonna be a lot of fun.

[John Shahidi]

Your boss announces layoffs, keep us on stage stuff.

[Jordi]

Yep. It's good to have. Good to have.

[John Shahidi]

Oh, we raised a growth round friendly IPO in belt.

[Jordi]

I mean, it's. It's highly functional. It's highly functional.

[John Shahidi]

Oh, our new fundraising round's leaking.

Large journalistic force headed towards you.

[Laura]

Stand by.

[Jordi]

And we're going to be adding a lot more.

[John Shahidi]

Oh. Oh. We're struggling paying. We're struggling to pay our sales tax this quarter.

[Jordi]

Sales tax AGI.

[John Shahidi]

Sales tax AGI. I actually want to talk about the numeral thing. Let me find that in here. It's deeper, but we got to get to this. So Numeral came on the show. Their partner. I love them. I use them. Sam, absolutely. Chad put on a clinic, interestingly. So there's been a debate. The timeline was in turmoil. Is sales tax boring? We obviously think no. I think Sam put on a great performance and just kind of took us through what it's like raising right now in the market.

[Jordi]

He was also honest about his class costs going up dramatically.

[John Shahidi]

Totally. And so he. He shared the announcement. He says, I'm thrilled to share that numerals raised the $35 million Series B led by Mayfield at a $350 million valuation. Turns out sales tax and VAT have gotten so complex that we need AI and millions of dollars in VC funding to make it simple again. This brings us to $57 million in funding. And so he. He tags the investors. He went on a press tour. He came on our show, talked about this and.and levels.IO got a little snippy with him, quote, tweeted it and said, you can often predict a company's course if their announcements talk more about how much investment they got than their product. If I'd raised $50 million, maybe I'd not even tweet it, just to use it to improve the product and get more users and talk about that. Having money in the bank tells me absolutely nothing about why I should use your product. It's not my money, it's your money. And so I think.

[Jordi]

And I just, I. I disagree with this on multiple levels. Like, one, if you're building software for businesses, it's very helpful to communicate that we have a lot of, you know, a lot of funding. Doesn't guarantee anything. Yes, but it. But it's a. It's a vote of. It's. It's showing that smart people have confidence that you're going to create a lot of value in the future.

[John Shahidi]

Just be around for a long time.

[Jordi]

Delivering great products for customers. Two, as a business, your job is to take anything that you do and make it newsworthy. Fundraises are easy hires.

[John Shahidi]

Trade deals.

[Jordi]

Hires. Yeah, trade deals.

[John Shahidi]

Partnerships.

[Jordi]

Job is to just take anything that's going on and make it newsworthy. Take another opportunity. The most bearish thing is as a company, a company that launches once Right. The best companies launch over and over and over. They're not like, oh, I'm going to launch, and then I'm just going to be quiet and do my thing. Make the product a little bit better every day. It's like, you have a new feature, you have a new hire, you have a fundraise, you have a profile, right? It's like, launch, launch, launch, launch, launch. And Levels, obviously a great builder and we should have him on the show, but it's. He just is like, hates venture capital so much, and I think before he knocks it, he should try.

[John Shahidi]

Yeah. I mean, the other thing that Levels Launches, like, like the most recent product that he got to go really viral was this, like, amazing Vibe coded game in the browser that anyone could just click and try, like, massive TAM for that product, right? Anyone can be like, oh, I know, flight simulator. I've been on a plane, I want to fly around. I'll click this button, right? And it was an interesting business story and it was an interesting product and it looked cool. And it was a demonstration of Vibe coding. He's done a few other products that have been like, Visual One was an interior design product that you could take a picture of your empty apartment and then put furniture in it. And that is something that also will naturally sort of go more viral than, okay, we launched VAT compliance, right? Like, sales tax is not as sexy. It's not as something that people just. Even if you do improve the product, it's not inherently viral. And so you, if you're in B2B software, in enterprise software, like, you do have to take advantage of fundraising announcements to drum up a bunch of support and just make people aware of you, because there isn't that natural virality that comes from, okay, you, you put, you know, you landed a rocket. That's just something that everyone wants to see. You built a. You built a humanoid robot, you built a drone, you blew something up. There's an explosion, there's something beautiful, an image that people want to see. And so I, I agree that you should focus on the product. But to. To not take advantage of fundraising milestones as a B2B company is. Is a mistake and you should actually definitely run. Ajni Mihdha over at Andreessen had a different take. He said, true for the median startup, but it's dangerously wrong for frontier technology companies. Capital is a weapon. He's just making the case for raising money. But I think the other case is just that when you're in B2B, you need to be taking advantage of the business story. And the business story is the fundraising story. And so you have to deliver on that.

[Jordi]

Yeah. And Lovells is just playing a totally different game.

[John Shahidi]

Yeah. Which is fine.

[Jordi]

He makes hundreds.

[John Shahidi]

There's nothing wrong with playing that particular game.

[Jordi]

I think he probably makes a hundred, couple few hundred thousand dollars a month in like profit his businesses. But he's not really creating enterprise value. Right. A lot of his businesses would probably sell for maybe like a 1:1, 1x revenue or something like that. Which is, which is great. But he's just playing a totally different game.

[John Shahidi]

Yeah.

[Jordi]

Sam is playing a game where he takes a modest salary and he built. And he's. And he's trying to build a company that will one day be worth billions of dollars and, and capital.

[John Shahidi]

Yeah.

[Jordi]

You know, again, even the best businesses in the world end up tapping the capital markets and, and just being like default against using financing in any form is just silly.

[John Shahidi]

Great tool for the job. Well, Apple's foundation model running on an iPhone 17 Pro has demoed. I don't know how this got out, but it seems like maybe this is already shipping. I don't know if this is a developer preview or something, but it looks very fast. Adrian Grondin says Apple was not joking. The A19 Pro chip is really good for running LLMs. Let's look at this video. I think we have it pulled up. So he types in a prompt and it just spits this out. And apparently this is on device. This is on device inference. And so a lot of people were saying like, Apple's gonna win. I don't know that this is what. What does it for them to get them to win AI, but it's certainly.

[Jordi]

What is Apple Foundation? Do we know?

[John Shahidi]

Apparently. I mean it sounds like it's some sort of foundation model that they've trained internally and they're running locally on their device. Some sort of distilled model. Do you have any insight on this, Tyler? Have you been tracking this at all?

[Tyler]

I don't know exactly. I mean it must be a super small model even. I mean the like RAM is still like only like 12 gigs or something.

[John Shahidi]

I thought it was more. I thought they went up to 16 on this last one.

[Tyler]

Oh really? I thought they went from 8 to 12 wrong.

[John Shahidi]

Maybe the max is pro memory. Let's see.

[Tyler]

I think also like, it's hard to say that like, oh, Apple is gonna win because like if you look at the median person using lms, they're not optimizing for like speed of the lm. They're Using, like, optimizing for the intelligence.

[John Shahidi]

Yeah, you're right. 1212 gigs. Yeah, that's not that much tricky. I still think that the end of the road is some sort of partnership with OpenAI or Gemini taking a cut. Just getting the actual.

[Tyler]

Because I think it makes sense to do some kind of router where for, like, if you can kind of figure out how, like, difficult a task is, you run it locally and then for complex things, you send it off to OpenAI. Yeah, that makes sense.

[John Shahidi]

Yeah. I mean, right now there's supposed to be a router in Apple Intelligence and. But when I hit it, it's rough, it's not tuned up properly. It seems to go all over the place. And then also they have this weird modal that even if you go to Apple Intelligence and you say, I'd like you to go to ChatGPT and ask this deeper question, you have to click a button and say, yes, actually, send that to ChatGPT. It's like a privacy thing, but it's clearly just like an extra barrier to adoption. And so I wind up just opening the ChatGPT app, which is fine, I guess, but I'd like a deeper integration there. I don't know. We'll keep monitoring it. Julius, what analysis do you want to run? Chat with your data and get expert level insights in seconds. Ask Julius to analyze your data. And then. Loved by over 2 million people, entrusted by individuals at Princeton, BCG and Zeppelin, the 3D world models. Packy has a post here. He says after watching a bunch of the 3D world demos this week, the thing that struck me walking around this morning is how shockingly high resolution the world is. You can zoom in your attention on any little thing and find an astonishing amount of detail. This, of course, is a fully generated model. This is from World Labs. This is Fei Fei Li's project.

[Jordi]

Except for this turbopuffer fish. I mean, this thing is pixelated. Zoom in on this.

[John Shahidi]

Yeah.

[Jordi]

Can we go to Jordy's Wide Way less detail.

[John Shahidi]

What's going on here? Yeah, this is not rendering.

[Jordi]

Not rendering fully, but we're working on it.

[John Shahidi]

Thanks so much.

[Jordi]

We're trying to get a real puffer fish.

[John Shahidi]

Love Turbo Puffer. Yeah. This World model, the fully generated one. The other one that was cool, was at the Meta Connect event. They launched the ability to create a. Is it a. Is it a Gaussian splat? Is that what it is? Yeah. Is it?

[Tyler]

I think it's Gaussian, right?

[John Shahidi]

Gaussian.

[Tyler]

Gauss.

[John Shahidi]

Gauss, yeah.

[Tyler]

It's named after Gauss.

[John Shahidi]

Gaussian Splat. I want to have Tyler create one of the Ultra Dome.

[Tyler]

Yeah, you can do it with the Quest.

[John Shahidi]

Yeah, you can do with the quest 3.

[Jordi]

Yeah, it's very cool.

[John Shahidi]

Yeah.

[Jordi]

I feel like you're. You very much feel like you are when you're wearing the headset. You feel like you're in the actual kitchen or whatever.

[John Shahidi]

Yeah, yeah. No, it was.

[Jordi]

You were getting emotional.

[John Shahidi]

Yeah, I was, because I looked over and there were two sets of, like, pancakes for kids, and I have twins. And so I was like, wow. Like, this makes me. This actually makes me miss my kids, which was, like, remarkable at the same time. Like, there was no game mechanic. And I don't know that there's that many places that I'd actually want to go and see. Like, I liked in Apple Vision Pro that there were multiple really scenic. Like, you could go and watch a movie on the top of a mountain, or you could be in the desert and be using your computer. But I very much wouldn't just want to hang out on the top of a mountain. I would want to be watching a movie on top of a mountain. It was like a cool environment, so the environments need to be really cool. I feel like there'll be some sort of power law of, like, the best environments and there'll be a few. But I like the idea of people being able to scan and share their rooms and walk around. But I would be surprised even if we put up on the meta quest. I don't know if you can actually share your scans yet. That's clearly coming. But even if we scan the ultradome and shared it with people, the audience members that have a Quest 3 or Quest 3s that would. They'd probably go poke around in it for, like, two minutes and then be like, okay, I'm done. Yeah, that was cool. Okay.

[Jordi]

Been there, done that.

[John Shahidi]

I've been there, done that. Right?

[Jordi]

Yeah. Well, speaking of meta, Buco Capital says, got a laugh from Zuck talking about the AI infra bubble. He's basically like, quote, yeah, history shows we can't help it. We'll overbuild, use too much debt, then it will explode, which. Which proves to be a great time to buy distressed assets. Maybe AI is different, though. Idk.

[John Shahidi]

This is a great interpretation of Alex Heath's interview with Mark Zuckerberg.

[Jordi]

Again, Mark is in a good position in that he could misspend a couple hundred billion and be.

[John Shahidi]

The business will turn on for sure, continue to generate tons of cash flow.

[Jordi]

We didn't even cover Nvidia plans to invest $100 billion into OpenAI. This news broke today and Nvidia, Sophie, netcap girl, says Nvidia up a billion percent on the news that it'll invest in a company that will use the money to buy more GPUs.

[John Shahidi]

Let's go.

[Jordi]

Nvidia is up 3, almost 4% today. Broadcom is down.

[John Shahidi]

I mean this is, this feels like just we're one step down the path to the original Stargate plan. Like the original Stargate plan was very much Sam Altman creating a multi year plan to spend something like 500 billion. And there were going to be a number of parties involved. Obviously you need a lot of chips from Nvidia, you need a lot of Oracle infrastructure, you need a data center, you need energy. And so all of those partnerships are coming together. Interestingly today. It's not like Nvidia wired some money or sent some chips or anything like that. This is a letter of intent, which is funny to see at this scale because it's like a famous YC thing is that you say like, oh, we got a huge letter of intent for this thing. But at the same time, like, I think at this scale, like letters of intent are like pretty serious and you should take it pretty seriously that everyone's planning. And as long as all the different pieces fall into place, like everything should, should work. Like as long as the investors say I'm good for my 100 billion and Oracle says they're good for this 100 billion, Nvidia says they're good to produce 100 billion of chips. You're going to get the 500 billion together, the capital will fall.

[Jordi]

I got a good graphic. Pull this up.

[John Shahidi]

Yeah. While we're pulling that up, let me tell you about Fall. The generative media platform for developers. The world's best generative image, video and audio models all in one place. Develop and fine tune models with serverless GPUs and on demand clusters.

[Jordi]

Look at this, look at this beautiful graphic. Wall street loves. Wall street loves.

[John Shahidi]

This is like the fifth time I've seen this graphic. We saw this exact same graphic yesterday with or last week with Oracle.

[Jordi]

It's widely applicable in the current state of technology. I give you money, you give it back to me.

[John Shahidi]

It is crazy. I mean, there were times when Mark Zuckerberg was a LP in a venture fund that would invest in a company that would buy Facebook ads. But it was like six degrees of separation and the economy was not nearly as circular. These deals are very much like I hand you money and you hand it directly back to me. But I mean, at the end of the day, what really matters is usage. I mean, we should be tracking how much if ARR starts to slow, if DAUs start to slow, then all bets are off. But if we continue to see acceleration in anthropics, enterprise numbers and, and OpenAI's consumer numbers, it's all justified, I think. I don't know.

[Jordi]

Anyway, this account, Solly Omar says. So let me get this right. Oracle says OpenAI committed 3 billion for cloud compute. Oracle stock jumps 36%. Best day since 1992. Oracle runs on Nvidia GPUs, has to buy billions in chips from Nvidia. Nvidia just announced they're investing 100 billion in OpenAI. OpenAI uses that money to pay Oracle, who pays Nvidia, who invests in OpenAI.

[John Shahidi]

It's a little circular.

[Jordi]

Good fun, good fun.

[John Shahidi]

It's a little circular. We'll see. But Carlota Perez, the goat of financial bubbles, has weighed in. She is quoting a post from Colossus, Patrick o' Shaughnessy's publication. Carlotta says a brilliant tour de force about AI from the investor's point of view. And the author compares AI with the personal computer and container ships, fully understanding the life cycle of all revolutionary technologies. We will have to dig into this article. It's called AI will not make you rich. If you're not subscribed to Colossus, head over and get a physical copy. It's by Jerry Newman in the September 2025 issue in issue 4 of Colossus Mag. The disruption is real. It's also predictable. He says. So this is a longer article. I want to read through it. We don't have time today. We will get to it in the future. We might come back to it later in the show today, who knows. But let's skip through that and in the meantime tell you about Turbo Puffer. You saw the pixelated Turbo Puffer fish search every byte, serverless vector and full text search built from first principles and object storage. Fast 10x cheaper and extremely scalable by linear notion.

[Jordi]

Yes, a bunch of other great companies to build AI products.

[John Shahidi]

We also have a post from Elon Musk. He says Grok can now read aloud in a beautiful voice. I'd love to pull this up if possible, test it. It's so funny. The brand of Grok is so chaotic at this point that I don't know if I'm expecting a girl's voice or German's voice. It could be anything.

[Jordi]

What is it called when people like talk into the mic, you know.

[John Shahidi]

Oh, yeah, usmr.

[Jordi]

If it's just like an asmr.

[John Shahidi]

Is hydrogen fuel good a good idea? Let's play this. I want to hear what it sounds like. Let's see. Do we have it?

[Laura]

Is hydrogen fuel a good idea? Hydrogen fuel is clean, zero tailpipe emissions, and useful for niche cases like heavy industry or long haul transport. But it's inefficient. This actually just sounds 40 round trip efficiency.

[John Shahidi]

The normal voice, completely smooth and lacks infrastructure.

[Tyler]

You can definitely tell it's AI.

[John Shahidi]

Yeah, you can tell it's AI, but it's not ideal.

[Tyler]

Like, this is definitely not the best voice I've heard.

[John Shahidi]

What's the best voice you've heard?

[Tyler]

Probably something from 11 labs. No, they seem to still kind of be.

[John Shahidi]

Yeah, I. I was, I was very uncertain on like how. I mean, we talked to Mati about this, but I was very uncertain on like how 11 labs would maintain any sort of moat around the foundation model companies. But it feels like they're being. They're basically trying to be the mid journey of voice where it's just this opinionated artistic vision that leads to something that you can't quite just instantly optimize against. You know it when you see it. You try a bunch of things. What do you think?

[Tyler]

I think another thing is I believe they have a product where you can like, clone a voice.

[John Shahidi]

Yeah.

[Tyler]

Which none of the other labs seem to do, I think, because of like, legal stuff.

[John Shahidi]

Yeah. But I mean, Siri was initially cloned. Like, there is a. There is a woman whose voice is the voice of Ciri. You would think you would just hire someone with a good voice and then just say, hey, we're gonna license this and we're gonna pay you a royalty and let's get a contract in place. And there's some. Some voice actor out there who's like, I would love to be the voice of Claude or the voice of.

[Tyler]

No, I. I mean that, like, why don't you, like, you can make like on 11 labs, I can make my voice.

[John Shahidi]

Okay. Okay. And. And that's. And you just want to listen to yourself that much that you.

[Austin]

Okay.

[John Shahidi]

Not.

[Tyler]

I don't do that for me, but I could make someone who is like a good speaker read something who has like a nice voice.

[John Shahidi]

Okay.

[Tyler]

Like, I don't think other labs do that because there's a whole thing about her with Scott.

[John Shahidi]

Yeah. But I would just think that if the GROK team wants a particularly beautiful voice to read things aloud that they would go and find a particularly great voice artist and then clone it. You don't think that's what they're doing?

[Jordi]

No, I don't think they should hire David Senra.

[John Shahidi]

That'd be very good. Be very good.

[Jordi]

Well, without further ado, let's bring in our first guest. We got John Shahidi.

[John Shahidi]

Welcome to the stream. How you doing? Good to meet you in person. Thanks so much for coming on the show. Good to see you. Yeah, welcome.

Thank you.

We have a podcast mic for you. Why don't you kick us off with an introduction? Tell everyone who you are.

Yeah, well, it's good to meet everybody.

Yeah.

And yeah, I'm John Shahidi. I created the Shots Podcast network, which is a podcast network that hosts a number of different podcasts. Then we also incubate and create different brands. Full send brand, Happy dad brand Ranger, Cut Jerky. And I think our business model really now moving forward is just to create brands and treat brands like we treat creators.

What's the methodology for deciding what categories are ripe for a new brand?

I think you got to look at, have a lot of thoughts on that, actually.

I talked to a guy who said he literally walks through. He's more of a scientist, doesn't do any creator partnerships, but he will walk through the grocery store and just look at the aisle and be like, okay, this aisle is dominated by Unilever and P and G. I don't want to play in it. But when he finds a spot, he found the popcorn aisle, which is there's a little section of the grocery store popcorn. And Orville Redenbacher is the only player. It's like a 200 year old company.

[Jordi]

He's like, I'm coming, I'm coming, I'm.

[John Shahidi]

Coming for their lunch. Because he knows that they're going to be a little bit sleepy. He's gonna be able to play in that category. And he launched a product and got it to like, I think like 10 million. ARR did pretty well. But anyway, how do you think about like white space in brands?

I think you could also go after the big boys. I mean, we did that with Happy Dad.

That's right. Like we went after White Claw High Noon. Right.

Claw High Noon. The big beer companies who still to this day haven't been able to figure it out.

Yeah.

Buds and Coronas.

[Jordi]

Yeah. What give people a sense of the. It's funny because I think people see Happy dad everywhere but maybe don't have a sense of like the scale and kind of the velocity even.

[John Shahidi]

Yeah. I'll get into that. I want to just answer this one real quick. So I think the big thing you have to do is look at a category that could use disruption. Yeah. With Happy dad, we looked at back in 2021, people wanted better for you drinks, but most of the better for. For you drinks that were coming out like the white claws are truly. We're really catering towards women. So it wasn't necessarily cool to drink a hard seltzer if you were at a party or whatnot. So we said, all right, so how do we go after this category, but bring a different demographic into the category?

Yeah, that makes sense.

And I think that's where you could also going back, what we were just talking about was, you know, even getting into these other spaces, whether it's popcorn, pizza, how do you bring a new customer. Customer into that category? Which is what we did with Happy Dad. We partnered with Nelk and we said, all right, now, how do we make this cool amongst men? The branding of it, you know, the liquid in it is, you know, one gram of sugar, 200 calories a can. It's a seltzer. It's a seltzer. But then when you look at the Happy dad can, which I'm surprised you guys don't have here, you have every single brand of that fridge.

[Jordi]

Well, we don't have my boys. Well, we actually don't.

[John Shahidi]

We don't drink.

[Jordi]

No alcohol in the. No champagne, infrequently. But if you guys, this is light alcohol.

[John Shahidi]

We could send some here. Okay, we'll send some to you.

I'm sure the boys would take you up on it.

Yeah.

[Jordi]

On a Friday.

[John Shahidi]

Yeah.

[Jordi]

Afternoon.

[John Shahidi]

Yeah. Not a Monday. 12pm right now.

A little bit early.

But, yeah, I think that's what we did. We said, all right, how do we look at this seltzer category and how do we bring males into it? The branding of the product looks like a beer. Feels like a beer. It's in regular 12 ounce can. Doing these tours amongst different bar towns or even different colleges and just catering towards the male audience. So I think you could get into these different businesses if you could bring a different profile person into that category. Whether you want to go against Unilevers or Nestle's or in our case, Coors and Anheuser Busch and Constellation brands or Boston Beer.

[Jordi]

So talk about. I think it's a lot of people that have like a creator audience will think, okay, I have a bunch of people that watch my content online. I'm going to create a product that I can sell to them via E Commerce. That seems like it hasn't really been the approach to date for shots and full send. And Nelc broadly feels like it's retail early retail first, basically.

[John Shahidi]

You don't have to do the alcohol though, right?

[Jordi]

Well, alcohol, yeah, alcohol. But I'm, but I mean in general, like a lot of people would say, okay, now should launch a product that they can sell online to as many people as possible. And going retail first is just a lot harder.

[John Shahidi]

He's all live.

Yeah. These are.

[Jordi]

Yeah. Oh yeah, says bro. This guy is one of the most legendary managers.

[John Shahidi]

Discord, what is it?

[Jordi]

It's all. We get all Restream, all the chats into one restream.

[John Shahidi]

YouTube's the primary. All right.

Okay, cool.

You can see what up to them.

So, yeah, Happy dad, we can't sell online, unfortunately. I mean, through third parties.

Yeah, you can do it.

[Jordi]

Even if you could sell online, it'd mainly be marketing because selling liquid online is not super profitable.

[John Shahidi]

Yes. Yeah, yeah, that's something we talk about too. You know, we've looked into getting to other categories of beverages and yeah, selling, you know, energy drinks or water. It's very expensive. You know, even you look at like Amazon and all the different, you know, Amazon fulfillment center fees and all that stuff, it gets pretty pricey.

But.

Yeah, I think the one thing I do I don't want to say with Happy dad, the challenge has been my expertise has been online marketing. Marketing my whole life. You know, marketing a YouTube channel, a YouTube video, a Spotify link, Instagram, Snapchat. The challenge with Happy dad has been we can't do that because, you know, I mean, you could buy it on GoPuff or Instacart, third parties. But yeah, there's no Shopify, there's no Amazon store. But it's also, and I got this bit of advice from Dana White when we first launched the product. He said, you know, with Happy dad, there's a multi tier system where you have to use a third party distributor to distribute the product. He said that distributor, you know, this is back in 2021. He told me that distributor is going to want to own the relationships with all the retailers. He said, I'm gonna give you and your brother Sam a bit of advice. Don't let any third party own that relationship. Treat these retailers like you've treated these platforms. So, like, we have like the best relationships with YouTube and Snap and Meta and Spotify, Apple, you know, all the different platforms. He said, treat Walmart like you treat YouTube, treat Kroger's like you treat meta treat 7 alone.

[Jordi]

So even if you're selling through the distributor, you're still building a relationship with the end retailer and like spending time with them. And you're not. You don't care that at the end of the day when they're signing a purchase order.

[John Shahidi]

Yeah. Well, then we tell the distributor, like here we actually did the work. The Circle K guys, we spent the weekend with them. Great guys. They're in. They want to bring all these different skus into your store. Here you go. They're like, well, you know, we know people. No, no, no, it's a done deal. Like you just deliver for us, please.

How do you think about the. You're familiar with the term Nimcell, right? Niche Internet micro celebrity. This idea that you can be running a profitable business full time, like have a, you know, a thousand true fans, have a business, but not be so broad that you're like a, a Tom Cruise level celebrity. And there's been this like, trend of like smaller and smaller niche vacation. Like, I know someone who has, I think they have a million followers on YouTube. I can't even remember his name because he's so like niche just. And all he does is talk about notion, using notion to manage your life. And he sells notion templates and he makes a fortune. And I'm wondering about how you think about like the smallest brand opportunity. Whether you think like you have to be able to go national at some point or there's like room for smaller, more niche creators to still create some sort of brand that breaks through or like what the trade offs might be for a creator that has a really, really dedicated audience of like 50,000 people. So you're never going to be in Kroger with that product and really. Or they're not going to really bootstrap Kroger unless, unless your audience is like, you know, vp, unless you're like the vice president of purchasing podcast or something like that.

Well, I think, you know, I always say, I mean, Nelk was very niche at the time, right? I mean, they've obviously become more of a household name since 2021.

Just like in that college demo.

Yeah, I mean, they were most people when we launched Happy dad, we said, hey, we partnered with the Nelk boys and we're launching a seltzer. And I would say nine out of 10, maybe 10 out of 10 retailers say, who the hell's Nilk? You know, so that was, you know, they were niche. I think my thing is, I don't ever look at the size of the creator, whether it's someone as small as what you were referring to or Taylor Swift, you know, if the product is great, it'll sell itself. I've always said this is a fan of any creator, influencer, celebrity will try anything once. Now the question is, will they buy it again? They will buy. They will try it once no matter what it is. You know, there's celebrities have launched ice creams, and they've come and got the biggest celebrity. I don't want to say their names, but, you know, the biggest celebrities have launched ice creams.

[Jordi]

And yeah, we had a recent celebrity brand that didn't work was Trav. It was Travis Scott's Seltzer company launched.

[John Shahidi]

The same time we did.

[Jordi]

And I think that you would think that Travis is enough of a superstar that anything he did and put his brand behind would at least get to.

[John Shahidi]

Pull, like a million people into Fortnite to watch him play.

[Jordi]

Yeah, that might make it hard to sell alcohol, but anyways, being a global superstar and launching a product does not guarantee success. And I think what you're saying is the actual quality of the product matters a ton.

[John Shahidi]

Yeah, I mean, I always look. So Travis Scott's seltzer didn't do good, but, like, his collabs with Nike are fire. You know, people go crazy. Yeah, like, you know, I mean, like, you know, and that's the thing. Travis Scott's not going to stop. But, yeah, I mean, the seltzer is a good example. It launched literally the same time. I think it launched a month before us. Really? Yeah, so.

[Jordi]

And just wildly different trajectory.

[John Shahidi]

It just. It wasn't. It wasn't good. You know, it wasn't good. He had the right idea of bringing a new demo into the category. Like, he was going, like, the branding was cool. Like, I remember it was coming out. We were ready to go. We're like, we're okay. Toast, you know, like, yeah, I remember. I was like, this. That's a wrap on us. But, you know, but then we. Then it wasn't. It had just come out and we tried one. We're like, never mind.

We're gonna win.

You know, that's all we had to do is try it.

What do you think about taste? Not just literal taste of the beverage or the product, but just taste broadly. Is that something that a creator can actually bootstrap, or do they just have it? Do they have to have it innately? I feel like I've run into creators that have had incredible audiences, and they've even kind of picked the right category, but I taste their product and I'm just like, this doesn't taste good. Like you just didn't nail it. And maybe it tastes good to you, but it doesn't taste good to enough people that I think people will stick around. And this will actually have of, you know, exponential takeoff. Is that something creators can just like brute force or do you think that.

There'S a partner with someone they need to find the right partner that, that has the expertise, that that's not gonna settle, that's not gonna be excited about the creator, not gonna say like, you know what, you're so and so, like whatever you throw your name on, it's gonna work. You know, like they're excited. There's been people I've seen in the world of different people I've worked with, they just get excited and they're so excited and sometimes they get celebrity excited where like they're just like, you know, like I'm so excited to be in a room with them. I don't want to piss them off. I just want to go and I want to go tell my friends that I'm partner, you know, I'm partners with this person. And you know, and that's always the kiss of death is when you don't have the right partner who doesn't want to be honest with you and just more excited to have your name and go be able to tell some people that they're in partnership with you.

Do you think there's any. I don't know if it's risk to your business or just like potential future where one of the major companies like AB InBev or Unilever just figures out that they could potentially go to the next generation of incredibly high growth creators and say, look, normally we would just, just buy ads from you, but that doesn't give you any economic upside. So instead let's do a joint venture. Let's make it 50 50. We will handle all the logistics, all the capital. So instead of just raising 20% dilution from a VC, you're also getting our supply chain, you're also getting our distribution, but you're going to be the face of this brand. And instead of just, oh, you're in a Super bowl ad, here's a million dollar check. You get real upside in the performance of this and then maybe we spin this out, maybe we buy the whole thing at some point. Point. But they're just getting in much earlier to a more complete extent. Do you think that that's, that that's a model that we could see happen in the future? Or do you think there's something about.

[Jordi]

The big feel like all these don't.

[John Shahidi]

Want to do it.

[Jordi]

These big CBG companies have innovation divisions whose job is kind of like, they.

[John Shahidi]

Certainly spend a lot of money.

[Jordi]

They spend a lot of money, like kicking these ideas around and they'll make a bunch of different con like concepts. And you just don't hear them ever going from zero to one and breaking out. And I feel like they're all sort of in a position where they can sit back and be like, let's let the market create hits and we'll just pick, cherry pick, cherry pick the best one.

[John Shahidi]

Well, you know, I don't know why we still talking about Cacti, even reading comments about Cacti, but Cacti was that Cacti was a partnership with Anheuser Busch.

Oh, no way. Okay.

That was exactly what you.

So maybe that was the exact split was.

But it was owned by. Co Owned by Travis Scott, Anheuser Busch distributed by Anheuser Busch.

You would think that that would be so worried because that feels like they have all the advantages against you and yet maybe they lack the entrepreneurial talent and like that they need to win.

[Jordi]

You needed to win Big problem here is, I don't know, the, the, the, the actual guy who is running Cacti.

[John Shahidi]

Exactly.

[Jordi]

It's like some person in a big organization meanwhile, like Happy dad, regardless of how great Nelk is, how great the product is, like, I'm sure Happy dad, like, wouldn't be a hit if you weren't like, step by step, like, making play. It's just like, and, and vetting your personal brand.

[John Shahidi]

Personal brand. And also like, you probably have taken unlimited phone calls on Saturday, Sunday, Tuesday night. Whereas, like, if you're just some corp dev person at a big company, like, are you really going to push that extra mile?

Take that extra marketing too, Right? Like, like, you know, having different podcasts and having the placement. You know, like, you know how many of those podcasts with Nelk I've been there, like, while they're interviewing, putting the Happy dad right next to everybody creating technology towers. Like when they interviewed Elon, like, we were struggling finding Happy dads. And Austin, we had to like, delay him to. From coming just to make sure that we had product in there. I was like, we're not going live until there's Happy dads in front of him. You know, so, like, you know, those.

Are the things doing things that don't scale.

Yeah, the grassroots, you know, type of things as well. So I think that's the other problem. I actually think partnering well also, like there's no innovation. Innovation on their side too on those big brands. I think that's where they need people like us or you guys, like, you know, forward thinking. No guy in a boardroom is going to think of, you know, Unilever or whatever is going to think like, oh wow, like let's build this with Taylor.

[Jordi]

Swift or I think this ingredient that's not popular today is going to be super popular in five years.

[John Shahidi]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean the energy drink companies right now, like none of them, how come none of the big energy drinks drink brands, Red Bull, Monster, Celsius have come out with a Stevia or Monk fruit sweetener replacement. Right. Like they're just not thinking about it. But somebody will and will end up selling their company to one of those three or Dr. Pepper.

[Jordi]

Give us a lay of the land of the platforms today and Your view from TikTok potentially going through some type of acquisition or restructuring to YouTube to Spotify. Like how are you advising the creators and kind of like talent that you work with on getting the most out of the different platforms?

[John Shahidi]

Well, this probably give me trouble on this podcast because I know everyone from all these platforms probably watch this. But I'm a YouTube first guy. Like I think, you know, I'm a YouTube, YouTube first guy for video when live. I'm a X. You know, I like X for live a lot.

[Jordi]

But you know, which is crazy because I think they have like one person that works on the live product, that's my buddy, an absolute legend.

[John Shahidi]

But it's special. It's a special thing that was, I mean, certainly underutilized. Like X live streams were basically, you watch the SpaceX launch there and then you get off.

Yeah.

And that was it. And now there's a number of shows. Ours is one of them that's put X live streaming front and center and kind of realized that no one was really taking it that seriously. And like it's a pretty decent product.

Yeah, yeah, no, I love, I love YouTube. I love for the discoverability.

Totally. You know, you can actually go viral, get millions of views. If you have good content, you show up there, it's gonna get shown, it's gonna get seen and, and it has a longer tail, longer half life. Like you can let a video simmer for a month and it can just grow to a million views on X. It's gotta be like that day or no, nothing. Right. So it's a little bit Different.

Yeah, yeah, we talked about that when we first met. Was like the clips. Like your clips? Yeah. Like, even this interview, someone's probably going to watch in two years, three years. I get it now from old interviews. People say, hey, I watched your interview. I don't, I don't do a lot of interviews. I do maybe two or three years, but like, you know, say, hey, I watched that interview. I'm like, which one? Like, I did that three years ago. You know, where the discoverability is not quite there on anywhere else. Instagram, TikTok and whatnot. So that's why I really like YouTube.

Yeah, YouTube's like the library. Yeah, for sure.

[Jordi]

Spotify feels like they're trying to solve discoverability, but it seems like they have very limited inventory in terms of how it shows up. They have that one placement that's like on the homepage that I see every now and then. It's not super dialed in yet. Would you see them ever doing live video?

[John Shahidi]

I think they have to. I don't know if they are. I haven't heard anything, but I think they have kind of have to. I mean, live video. I mean, you, you guys actually, like, you guys are going to change the game with live. There's going to be a lot of copycats. Like after what you guys have been doing, especially on X, like, you guys are going to change the game. It's going to be a lot of people now because of you guys and your guys, growth has been insane. Let me ask you guys something though, please, because you guys talk to a lot of different AI, you know, all these different LLM LLMs. What do you think they're going to do with social. Like, what's chat GPT? Or I mean, Groka, I guess has X, but like chat GPT or Perplexity.

Yeah, I think OpenAI is going to allow you to share. There was already a share button in ChatGPT. So if I go. I mean, this happened just earlier today. I was pulling up some research and I shared it with somebody on my team, shared a link. He can see not just the result, but what I prompted, what I followed up, have a whole discussion. And I think that people. The most basic form of sharing within an OpenAI social network, if you call it that, would just be. I go and explore a topic and then I can share it out and you can just see what I'm interested in. So I did a whole deep research report. I fired off. It took 20 minutes to pull up all this stuff on the new CEOs of Oracle. And if you follow me and you're interested in Oracle, well I just saved you 20 minutes because I did the deep research now you don't have to do one. And you could say oh well if John interested in this. John's acting as a curator on top of the infinite knowledge engine that is ChatGPT. And I think that would be kind of like the, the, the, the, the first like text based nerdy social network that could sort of bootstrap. I can think of a few people where I want to see what they're searching as they, as long as they opt in to share, I don't want to see everything.

[Jordi]

My, my read is that the LLMs are a threat to the social platforms but not, not because they're going to launch like social products but because time that you're spending with an LLM or spending with like a voice model, if somebody's becoming best friends with some model. We saw this with like chat GPT4O when OpenAI announced GPT5 and deprecated the model, the chat GBT Reddit threat forum was just going crazy. People just freaking out, being like I feel like you just killed my best friend. And so, so it's less that I see the, you know, the open AIs or the anthropics of the world actually competing in social because if you're, even if you're using AI to create media, right, using it to create images, video, et cetera or like stories, whatever it is, you're still better off going to YouTube, the platform that has a massive, massive audience and sharing that content there. I backed a social platform years ago that, that pivoted and is now doing enterprise SaaS and they were building a. Let's hear from SaaS.

[John Shahidi]

You like SaaS?

[Jordi]

We love SaaS here too.

[John Shahidi]

SaaS baby.

[Jordi]

But they built a basically Twitter but just for anons and it was cool because people that didn't have anon could go on there and just start sharing and create this whole kind of new personality and they got like some traction. But then people just realize like hey, if I'm like, if I want to post under this identity, I'm still better off just going to X and sharing there. So they never reached critical mass. And so I just think they are already competing with the social platforms but in entirely, entirely new ways. So you could imagine a world where like somebody's AI friend is like generating them content that's in ChatGPT for example, or in Gemini or in one of these apps and just saying like hey, I thought you'd like this. And it's like a video that the model generated itself for the user because it knows the user so well. And so. But that's different than like a UGC platform.

[John Shahidi]

So the other place that I think the models will eat off of YouTube's plate a little bit is in knowledge retrieval. So I gave that example of like, I wanted to learn about the new CEO of Oracle.

Yeah.

And there was a time when I would go to YouTube and pull up. I might still pull up an interview with them, but there was also a whole series of channels that were just sort of like the history of Microsoft and you could go there. I ran one of those channels for a while. I was doing sort of like these video essays. And you can see that you can just hit chatgpt, get a full script and just have it read it to you. And that will eventually be instantiated with pictures and you'll be able to watch it. And so a lot of the how to knowledge retrieval tasks that happen on YouTube, how do I fix my washing machine that people will migrate over eventually? And I. But I wouldn't necessarily call that like social media, but it was certainly like content creation. And so chatgpt certainly like eating off of that. And Gemini too, because Gemini can scrape all the YouTube data and then they can actually point you. Hey, watch this. They're already doing this in Search years ago where you say, how do I fix this particular washing machine? It says, go to this video and go to minute three. Go to minute three. Because you don't want to. You skip the intro, click right here. And this is exactly your problem because they talk about five different problems.

[Jordi]

Have you gotten a bunch of crazy pitches from like AI companies that want to like, use, use the Nelk boys for like every hour? Every hour?

[John Shahidi]

Yeah, well, every.

[Jordi]

And not a lot of. None of them are that compelling, right?

[John Shahidi]

No, nothing.

[Jordi]

Which is.

[John Shahidi]

Yeah, my LinkedIn is.

What do you think about. What do you think about influencer led software companies? There was a story, I think Mr. Beast was talking about this a little bit, that he was thinking about doing a mobile game studio. And that felt like potentially an extremely valuable thing if he can do it. But making a great mobile game is really, really hard. I was on the, my first million podcast pitching.

That's how we started. That was our first business, really mobile games.

I was pitching Beast vpn because if you look at who's buying the most ads on YouTube, it's always the VPN provider. Right. And why is that? International audience. You put a video on YouTube. People are watching it all over the world. And so anyone can use a VPN anywhere they are, anywhere they're in the world. It's much harder if you're like, yeah, I'm only available in stores in America. Well, you just got 30% of your audience or something if you're just a broad channel. And so I was always sort of bullish on the idea of creators launching software products, but at the same time, software is really, really hard to get right and actually build a great product. And so. So I understand it's something that you.

[Jordi]

Build, like, once or in cbg, you go through these product development cycles and then you scale it, sell that a billion times.

[John Shahidi]

Yeah, right.

I think there's. I think there's some plays in software. I think about it a lot because we also have so much data on everything. Like we have, you know, from our Shopify stores because of our merch business. This is why. Yeah. It kills me that we can't sell Happy dad online because you know how much data I would have.

Of course.

Yeah. I mean, I think we just went through. I don't even remember. I should have had some of our numbers, but, you know, I think like, a couple hundred million can sales. Couple hundred million.

Watch out. All right. Watch out.

We got more stats. I wonder if my brother's in this channel. You can send us some. My brother was supposed to watch, but.

He'S ringing.

[Jordi]

Still ring.

[John Shahidi]

It's a good gong.

This is the best show. You guys are crushing. I was so excited when you guys hit me up. I was so. I don't like interviews.

[Jordi]

You found us early.

[John Shahidi]

I did find you early.

Yes. Yeah.

And then you guys have been blowing up. Jordan Golden. I talk about that all the time. Like, we're always sharing clips.

Yeah. You know how many times people have tried to sell me your handle?

Mine?

[Jordi]

Oh, John gets hit up.

[John Shahidi]

You have John, and people always hit me up. Oh, I'll get you A.D. john. And I'm like, I know John Jahidi. I know you don't have this.

I have. I have at John on YouTube.

That's crazy.

I've had John on Snapchat.

Is that just because you're the first person on these platforms? Or is that. Or is that you. You find him early and. No, no, no, no. You get the right hand.

I. I wasn't the first.

Okay.

But I was the second.

Okay.

So, like, you know these platforms, like, when my Twitter one, like, I think whoever got it in, whatever.

Your Twitter went 2007.

Yeah. I think like someone got the name, didn't use it and then like within a year, like, you know, because I think the rule is on some of these platforms using it, no one's used it. If it's inactive for 180 days, that includes no one logging in. So literally someone got the name and said this ain't for me and bounce. And then I went and claimed the name right away. So those names I got within like the first, first year. So I wasn't, I was never the first, but I was always the second.

That's amazing.

So yeah, that was like my mission the last like 15 years.

[Jordi]

Unite the great house. Yeah.

[John Shahidi]

Tick Tock at John. All of that.

You're at John on Tick Tock too.

Every platform. Every, every platform. Kick. I don't even use Kick. But I just got it.

You got to log in every day. 179 days.

[Jordi]

Yeah, yeah.

[John Shahidi]

You know what?

Do not leave that.

I actually almost lost one of them. I forgot which one. For that reason I think my Tik Tok. Yeah.

So yeah, never log off. Never touch.

[Jordi]

Yeah. There's. There's an army of like high school kids that are like, no, like, oh yeah, black market. Yeah.

[John Shahidi]

They always, they always try to resell me my names like or they, they get like some of our names or like, like at Nelk. You know, cuz we did, we got at Nelk on Instagram and. But they use Nelk boys and now they try to like we. We never logged into Nelk and someone gets it and tries to like extort me. Right. But listen, if you're watching going to try to extort me, it'll never happen.

[Jordi]

What's. What's going on in, in music because you work with, you work with some artists. Like what. What is the state of things? How's the industry reacting to. I mean it still feels.

[John Shahidi]

The only person I know in music that I care for is Justin Bieber and he's crushing it.

Yeah.

[Jordi]

As he do you feel like. And I don't know how much you can speak to this, but it seems like the new way to make a hit song is you think about the hook. Like what hook is going to go viral in a Reels TikTok format and then build the song around that. Is Justin a big enough star that he does. He can just make his music the old fashioned way? Or is there still this kind of.

[John Shahidi]

You do like one for the album.

[Jordi]

You kind of have to. Yeah.

[John Shahidi]

One for me.

Someone said that you have John in the Bible. That's funny.

That's Funny.

[Jordi]

Is he gone from the Bible, the original.

[John Shahidi]

So one thing with Bieber is I have no say or input in the creative. But if what I could tell you just by knowing him, if that's a trendy thing other people are doing, I could assure you he's probably not going the other direction. Yeah, like, I don't think he needs to or even thinks or he probably even knows that's a thing. Like, I think he's. When he's in the creative mode, he's in a different. On a different level.

So can you take me through some of the other growth hacks that artists in music are doing? I heard about this one where because of the nature of Spotify, the fact that you can fit unlimited songs on an album, for a while, artists were just shipping like 45 songs on an album, just throwing it up, seeing what the algorithm likes. There seems like there's been a whole bunch of different. Make the song shorter, make the song longer. You see this on YouTube where for a while the meta was like. Like, you know, 10 minutes, because you get two ad reads, then it was like 20 minutes, then it was 50 minutes, and it just got longer and longer. Like, the algorithm does shape the content a little bit. Is that happening in music?

I don't know. Because the only person I only works doesn't care. No, he's just like, doesn't think about that. It's not even a conversation.

[Jordi]

Well, it's important to admit, because some people will work with like a massive creator and then they'll think that they're God's gift to the algorithm because they just worked with a superstar. But really, that just kind of warps their.

[John Shahidi]

What I just advise these artists. You know what I tell everybody, quite honestly, whether you're an artist or podcaster or influencers, like, make a product, you know, like, I think. But don't. Going back to what we were first talking about, don't make just any product. Like, think of something that could use disruption, find the right people and make it. Like, I truly. Mr. Beast and I talked about this, he said he didn't agree with me, but I truly believe every creator of any influence should own some sort of product or be a partner in one. I think right now, these retail stores, from what I've seen and now with America going healthy and people just being more conscious of what they're eating, I think a lot of these shelf spaces in these retail stores could. Could use something new and different, you know, like, these guys are doing it.

Williamson. Yeah, yeah.

So, you know, they're doing it. You know, I think, and, and I don't think just because a big player in the game is own, you know, What I do know is when nicotine's a good example, what is this? Like, 80% of the market share is zen.

Yeah.

Retailers don't like that. They don't like when a big company owns the category. Like, they get bossed around, you know, they on price, on placement, on everything. Like, you know, so it's like, don't be afraid just because Zinn owns 80% or Nestle owns 90% of the frozen food section. Like, don't be afraid to go against them. The retailers will actually support you.

Yeah.

So if you've got influence, you know, just think of building a product, find the right people, don't settle, and go and go give these big guys a run for their money.

On the influencer side, what do you think? Is there an optimal structure? Because it's the Nelk boys. That's plural. There's multiple characters in the world that are promoting the same product. There's also single influencers who take a huge slug, and it's their brand, the personal person and singular. And then there's other brands that say, okay, yeah, we're a group of founders. We're building a product. We're going to go and give significant equity to five influencers, 10 influencers. And then you have big brands that are saying, hey, we're going to go spend with 500 influencers on day one to try and promote this. Like, is there a natural structure that you think is best?

Something else I think about a lot too. So now we keep talking about, if you're an influencer, go find the right product. Product, create it, drop it. Now it's the marketing of it too. Right? Like, like, Chris does not flex this all the time.

Right.

Like, we know because we're in the business. This is Chris's business. But there's people in my office that drink this. And I'm like, oh, you watch Chris Williamson. They're like, who's that? Yeah, like, we just like this drink. Oh, yeah, there's this. People in my office.

[Jordi]

You gotta be. You gotta be the, the cultivating the ability to promote your products aggressively. Like, this is why Dylan on our team is. Is such a huge addition. We. We just hired.

[John Shahidi]

Yeah, met him.

[Jordi]

Well, that's, that's a different. We have two.

[John Shahidi]

Don't abreast.

[Jordi]

Our new, Our new president, but he is like, has this uncanny ability to, to like, ask, go for these extra asks and you Know, get, like, he got the Journal to write about him joining TVPN. Right. A podcast, hiring a president after 11 months. Interesting story, but it takes a lot to, like, go out and make that happen. Whereas Chris Williamson, like, is not promoting this at the level that you are. He's not holding up Elon, you know, Musk being like, we're not starting the show until we can get Happy dad on the set. Right. And that you kind of even. I think something I've realized throughout my career is, like, even. Even products and people that have incredible momentum, like, still keep that focus on, like, no, we need to keep pushing. We need to keep promoting the thing that we're doing over and over and over, and it never stops.

[John Shahidi]

Well, so let me tell you why Chris is not. Because I've spoken with him and his team. It's a mistake that we made with Happy Dad. And, you know, I know I shared what I used to do with Happy dad, but it's actually something that if I had to do it again, I wouldn't have pushed it so hard, because what's the. The point of Chris promoting this right now on here and on every podcast he's on? Every podcast he does if it's not available everywhere?

Oh, interesting, right?

Like, you know how many people we sent into the category when we launched in 2021, but just two months ago, we just launched our 50th state. It took us four years to launch nationwide. We just launched Utah. How many people for four years?

I love Nelk. Nelk loves Seltzer. I become a White Clock customer. That's a lot.

Exactly. How many, you know, how many people? I mean, how many we. I mean, we made. I don't want to take full credit for this, but we'd helped make the Seltzer category cool amongst men, which led to. Now it's not as shameful to drink a White Claw now as it was four years ago. High Noon, you know, did a deal with Barstool. You know, I mean, all these things were, you know, so if I were to do it again, I would focus on distribution first and be available everywhere. So people don't run to the store and say, hey, do you have Happy dad here? No, we don't, but we have this, we have that. While I'm here, I might as well just get that. Oh, wow, this is good. I'll just become a customer for this brand new Happy Dad. Yeah. Which is nearly impossible. So what they're doing is because I met with him and his team a few months ago is their focus on their distribution. They want to become everywhere they're available. More places now. I don't even.

[Jordi]

But it's such a, it's such a, such a chicken and egg thing because if you're not promoting something aggressively and.

[John Shahidi]

The retailers like why should I? Or Walmart, Walmart's like, wait, what are you doing? I've never heard of you. Why you got to find that balance, right? Because Walmart did eventually bring us in because they saw us on all the podcasts and all those things. You got to find that balance. If you could, if it could be in sync and you could hurry up and build one team that's just doing marketing and one team that's like hurry up and be available everywhere. Whether it's the regular independent liquor store down the street or, or the thousands of Walmarts. You've got to not get caught up on the marketing so much. But yeah, find that balance of also like get the marketing. So you could tell why Walmart or Seven Eleven or the independent guy. Yeah, I know there's 10,000 other brands out there, but put mine up. Get mine and put mine up front too. It's not even like be available. Don't. Not in a corner. Build me a display up front as well.

[Jordi]

How do you advise the talent that you work with around like reinventing themselves over time? Because I think like Nelk boys are a good example, like living like kind of a party lifestyle, going from a college lifestyle, young adult, etc. Eventually they're gonna get to the point where their own interests are no longer.

[John Shahidi]

I had this question about Mr. Beast. Like is he gonna become, he has.

[Jordi]

A very young audience.

[John Shahidi]

Will he become Mr. Rogers? And at 80 he will be still talking to children or young, young adults or will he age up and we'll be seeing him makes. Make content about being a dad. You know, it's such a fork in the road for creators.

[Jordi]

And I feel like get older. Like Bieber is a good example who is just like constantly reinventing himself. So the people that listen to him 15, it's not like, I'm sure teenagers listen to Justin Bieber now, but it's the people that, when I was, you know, when I was a teenager, like people listen to Justin Bieber and those same people now are like, like consuming the music in the like just as much.

[John Shahidi]

Yeah, he's a, he's the best example of aging up. Right? Because you know when, yeah, the person, that 13 year old girl that loved Justin Bieber 13 years ago is now 26 years old, you know, so still.

[Jordi]

Probably wants to go to the concert.

[John Shahidi]

Still wants to go.

[Jordi]

Because his music now has the ability to, like, make the personal decision, like, I can just buy tickets but listen.

[John Shahidi]

To his music now.

Right.

Like, his music is, like, stuff that, like, adults listen to. He's not making, you know, like, you know, some of these other pop stars that, you know, let's just say these pop stars in the past that never really made it because they just stuck to that, you know, making that same song for that 13 year old over and over and over again where, like, he's making songs for people in their 30s and 40s and, you know, the way he looks and way he dresses. His. His. His clothing brand now is like, you know, it's not merged. It's actually a fashion brand, like, you know, Skylark. So I think that's the thing. So going back with Nelk, it's the same thing, right? Like, the podcast was a big step towards that. You know, like, they do the occasional pranks here and there to, you know, stay true to the audience, but most of their stuff is podcasting. Serious stuff, you know, you know, interviewing CEOs, those, you know, world leaders. World leaders, yes. Yeah. So, you know, so those, Those, you know, all that. All those things. So that, you know why? Because that Nelk fan who loved the pranks 10 years ago is now in their late 20s, early 30s. So. So I think that's what. You've just got to age up. But it's not easy to age up too, right? Because, like, you know, you're gonna have to take the risk of, like, is this gonna perform as well? It might not. The podcast was not doing that good at first.

Right.

It just took a while for people to understand. Wait, how did you go from prank videos to podcasting? So, you know, you know, you got to understand, like, you know, you got to take that hit. You know, maybe if you were getting 5 million views of Nelk video, your podcast might get 1 million at first. You know, it might get 20% of the views that it had before, but, you know, eventually it'll pick back up. So don't, you know, don't. Don't panic if you're not getting the views that you used to. Yeah, so that's the same thing with Mr. Beast is like, you know, maybe, you know, I don't. Yeah, I don't know if I would. What I would do if I were Mr. Beast, because I think what's. What he's doing right now is working, but for the long Term.

Yeah.

He's got to think. And I know he does it. He's thinking about it because you guys watch him on other podcasts. Like, he drops F bombs and stuff like that. Like, he's trying to, like, figure out how to, like, cater towards older people.

Totally. And if you zoom out and you just think about him as like, this generation's game show host, you can see what he's doing with Beast Games on Amazon. And clearly game shows as a category, what he does really well is not uniquely young. You can do an American Ninja Warrior. You can do who Wants to Be a Millionaire? He'll put his own twist on it, of course. But you can make a game show that has the MrBeast touch and production value and pacing and editing and all the things that he does really well for a much older audience.

He could probably be Brian Seacrest, like a way bigger Ryan Seacrest.

Totally. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He could definitely get there. Yeah, yeah. When you think of, like, these IRL activations, it feels like Pat McAfee's done WWE, Logan Paul's done WWE. There's something interesting about when these online. Online influencers, the people that you only see between the screen, like, wind up going and doing something live podcasts often go on the road. Like, how thoughtful are you about that these days?

I think you're talking about Logan Paul being in the WWE or just being.

On the W. Just Logan Paul, like, fought in WWE and he does boxing. Right. And so. And so there's something interesting about like. Like, he can be so big online, but there's something that makes you even bigger when you go into to something that's legacy or something that's. There's something that makes it more real. I mean, Jordi gave the example of us going to the Wall Street Journal and like, that's very much like us crossing over into a different world almost. And it feels like that's something that creators need to be thoughtful about. But there's maybe something still underrated there, if you can get it right, similar to launching a great brand. If you can have, like, what is the interaction with the fans or the people who are just meeting you for the first time in the real world that then can become something that makes you more of an institution than just something that they see on their screen.

Well, I think with Logan and wwe, I think that's a really good example of, like, he entered this platform. Well, one, you've got to be good at it. It has to make sense, which in my opinion, I think it makes sense. For Logan, like, I think it's hilarious. I think it's so funny, I can't get enough of him and his WWE content.

Yeah.

And then you got to think, like, what is my core thing? And is it going to help that, like, in his thing? You know, if you were to ask Logan Paul, I have never asked him this, but I'm sure if we did, you know what, what matters to you most is his online presence. Right? Like, his YouTube, his podcast, and Prime.

Yeah.

So, like, does going into the WWE help the core businesses? And I think it does. I think it's kept him relevant on YouTube. I think it's definitely helped Prime. So if it. If it's helping the core thing, and I think the same thing with you guys in Wall Street Journal. Does Wall Street Journal help this versus, like, leaving this to do Wall Street Journal, you know, like, if it. If it helps this platform and brings more validation to this show and more eyeballs and awareness to this show and all the things you guys have done with this show. So you guys can. Had Zuckerberg last week. I haven't watched it yet, but, like, I thought it was a joke. I was like, wait, did they use them for.

We had them sign a gong now.

I was like, whoa. And I watched, like, 10 seconds. I didn't have time to watch the whole thing, but I want to watch, like, whoa.

[Jordi]

They had Zuckerberg.

[John Shahidi]

That's crazy.

[Jordi]

How do you advise your talent on startup investing, private markets investing? Because I feel like this can be a good way for talent to just, like, light millions of dollars on fire if they're not careful. But at the same time, if they're really strategic about it, they can end up getting access to the best investment opportunities in the world.

[John Shahidi]

Yeah, I think they need to be surrounded by the right people. Right. Like, you got to be surrounded by a. Like, someone at Andreessen or. I think you guys have Shervin on here later.

[Jordi]

Yeah.

[John Shahidi]

Like, be surrounded by Sherman Pishevar. You know what I mean?

[Jordi]

Like, be surrounded somebody that can identify.

[John Shahidi]

Not some guy you met at tao, you know, in New York. You know what I mean?

Like, yeah, we had Saquon Barkley on the show, and he.

He's around smart people.

He's around very smart people, and he's been. And he's been investing in companies that have been backed by tier ones. It's not just taking a flyer and a friend's business. Oh, you're gonna start a restaurant. It's. It's okay. Everyone in Silicon Valley's Piling into this company. I should get in.

Yeah, yeah. 100%. I mean, Ashton Kutcher is a good example of that in the past. Now it's the Saquon. Juan's doing that.

Yeah.

I mean, I think MC Hammer, who. I got into Twitter early or something like that, right. He was like round or like series A or something. Coinbase.

Yeah.

MC Hammer got, I think through. What was that guy's name? He was a legend back in the day. Ron Conway.

Yeah, Conway. A grade. Yeah, yeah.

That guy. It was like a. But through him, I think he got into like Twitter early.

Yeah. SV angel was SV Angel.

[Jordi]

Yeah.

[John Shahidi]

Ron Conway's. What would I say? You said a grade.

No, A grade was Ashton.

Ashton.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. SV Angel. But. But yeah, I think you just have to be surrounded by the right people. There are good people out there. There's good people out here. Speaking of A grade Guy Oseri, you know what I mean? Like, if you're around right people. But I've seen it so many times where guys will be like, yeah, I met this guy at the. You know, at a restaurant in New York. And like, you know, not to bash New York and random person, but it's like, what's he done? He's like, well, you know.

Yeah, yeah, he's promising a 20 return.

No, you have to get like. I think that that's the thing. I. When I lived in San Francisco, I always felt that that was something, a problem that needed to be solved. And there are guys like Sherman like, brought in like the ROC Nation people, a lot of other people into deals. I think he brought in like a gang of people into Uber early. So, you know, I mean, like, there are people out there. You just have to have the right person. I don't know if you guys know Chris Lyons from. Yeah, like, he. He's always been doing stuff like that. Like, you know, like, you know, so, you know, I think you just need to find that Chris Lyons or a Shervin or Guy Osiri or someone like that.

Someone who can Pipeline for you. Yeah.

Which I think with the Ashton. I think Ashton had Ron Conway way.

Yeah.

Was his. Was his guy.

Yeah. So, yeah.

So, yeah, I think that's a big opportunity that I think they should be doing, but I don't think they should go and invest in some like, real estate development and you know, because their cousin is doing it in Alabama. I've heard that's. It's a true story.

Who knows? Who knows? Someone put Elon's building the whole Colossus 2 data center over there. So.

Well, that. Yeah. About someone that invested like 25 million into a house scam in Alabama lost that 25 million.

It's is dangerous territory.

[Jordi]

Crazy.

[John Shahidi]

But yeah. Yeah. Lots of risk out there. Well, thank you so much for taking the course.

Yeah, yeah.

[Jordi]

Great to finally hand.

[John Shahidi]

Thanks for coming. Of course.

[Jordi]

We come. Come by anytime.

[John Shahidi]

You know, we're here every day and we'll.

Chat's a distraction.

I know. I'm sorry. We're. We're gonna pull that. You're one of the first interviewers who's. Who's been able to see the chat. We're not sure if that's distracting. I think maybe manage a lot of these. These things. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're. You're locked in. Well anyway, thank you so much for hopping on. We will go Legend. We have our next guest in about 15 minutes. But first let me tell you about Profound. Get your brand mentioned in chat. GPT reach millions of consumers who are using AI to discover new products and brands.

[Jordi]

At Profound, we people should no longer be able to name their. Their children. John.

[John Shahidi]

Yeah.

[Tyler]

Final job.

[Jordi]

Got all the usernames.

[John Shahidi]

Well, over the weekend there was a beautiful memorial for Charlie Kirk. And Autism Capital has some interesting lore. Charlie Kirk was a hell of an operator. What an entrepreneur. Even if you don't like him, just look at the organization he built. Look at the way he brought high performance out of people so young. He represented a standard of excellence and discipline you don't often see anymore. And Michael Gibson, who is running the Thiel Fellowship says not many know, but he was an application to the Thiel Fellowship way back in 2013 or 2014. We passed on him because we didn't think a media company had the scalability of a tech startup. Our mistake. But Charlie kept coming to our events for a long time. So what an interesting piece of tech lore there. And so very, very interesting. Very. This.

[Jordi]

Unitree robot.

[John Shahidi]

Can we pull up the video of the Unitree G1?

[Jordi]

Watch these guys.

[John Shahidi]

This is from the Unitary account. They say Unitree G1 has mastered more quirky skills. Unitree G1 has learned the anti gravity mode stability is greatly improved under any action sequence. And even if it falls, it can quickly get back up. Let's watch this horrifying video. Wow. Someone didn't read the parable of Rocco's Basilisk.

[Jordi]

That's right.

[John Shahidi]

This is not what you should be doing to a robot. You should be nice. You should be encouraging the robot.

[Jordi]

So this is gonna lead to grave.

[John Shahidi]

How does it respond to a bear hug? How does it respond to some.

[Jordi]

You realize every. Every robot is gonna be trained on this video.

[John Shahidi]

Both the video and the actual training data from this robot. It is fighting for its life here. It's really good at getting a up, though. This is remarkable. And of course, wow. It really feels like, Whoa. Okay, it can do a barrel roll. That's remarkable. Wow.

[Jordi]

I do not want to see that thing with two guns.

[John Shahidi]

What is Unit Tree's valuation again? This feels deeply valued at 7 billion. If this were in America, this would be trading at 150 billion. This is incredible technology.

[Jordi]

What is. What is the premium that Tesla gets based on the humanoid?

[John Shahidi]

This is. Yeah, this is. This is top tier operations out of. Out of China. We've seen flips before. This one looks less scripted than what Boston Dynamics does. Boston Dynamics must respond to this, by the way. I. I need a new Boston Dynamics video on the timeline asap. I need a new Figure Robotics video. I got a new Tesla Optimus video. I need a response from America. We will not. We will not go quietly into that good night. Fin AI, the number one AI agent for customer service. Number one in performance benchmarks. Number one on competitive bake offs. Number one ranking on G2, Christian Horner. You want to talk about Red Bull?

[Jordi]

I want to talk about. Jimmy Kimmel is apparently coming back on the air Tuesday.

[John Shahidi]

Okay, yes, it was an indefinite suspension. It was not a full cancellation. There was a debate over what indefinite means. It can mean two minutes, it can mean two years. It can mean 20 years, it can mean forever. What do you think, Tyler?

[Tyler]

Do you guys think this was planned all along?

[John Shahidi]

Yes, it was Conspiracy put on the. Yeah, the conspiracy is that this was all planned to drum up ratings.

[Tyler]

This was.

[Jordi]

Nathan Fielder came up with an idea. He said, we're gonna make a. We're gonna make an indefinite suspension look like a targeted political move in order to increase the overall attention that late night television is going to get.

[John Shahidi]

Yeah, I had sort of a hot take. Everyone's dunking on Kimmel for only getting 160,000 viewers in that 18 to 45 demographic every night, which is low. And Chamath said, like, you know, more people hate watch all in in that demo every day that they go live. But I was looking at the actual numbers, and yes, the Jimmy Kimmel audience is very old, but Jimmy Kimmel's still pulling, I think, a million views a night, which is a lot. I feel like that's a lot. That's what, 0.3% of the US population. If you assume it's mostly Americans that are watching, pretty significant numbers. I'm also interested to know what happens to late night as shows get taken off the air. Colbert was canceled but but is still on the air. Kimmel's coming back. What happens? Like there's been a, like the V2 of the late night programming schedule feels like it's gonna be a lot more reality tv. Will Fallon pick up crazy and will Fallon just have all that attention or is the late night viewer more. I only like Colbert and if Colbert's not on, I'm not turning on the tv and I'm gonna go be. I'm gonna go listen to Jon Stewart's podcast or Colbert's new podcast, which I assume Kimmel and Colbert will both launch podcasts or live shows or something in the lower production value that that still allows them to have a voice and obviously, you know, continue to communicate with their audience that they built up over decades. But it will be interesting regardless. Both Kimmel, if he's off the air permanently. If Colbert's off the air, the air permanently, he's going to need to sell some ads on his new podcast. He's going to need a CRM. He's going to need Adio. He's going to need customer relationship magic. Adio is the AI native CRM that builds scales and grows your company to the next level. Oura ring raising nearly $900 million. Jordy, can you read this post from Mark Gurman while I ring.

[Jordi]

The I Will ring is raising nearly $900 million, making it an over 10 billion million dollar company. It sold 3 million rings in the last year or so and is on track for over one and a half billion in revenue next year.

[John Shahidi]

And you didn't miss this, right? You, you got in early.

[Jordi]

Yeah, I, I did not. So I knew Oura Ring when they were, when the founder was just bouncing around podcast like niche health podcasts. It wasn't a thing. You would never see it out in the world. No, there, you know, I, you know, the founder was very active like I said on the podcast. It felt like I didn't even, I wasn't even aware that it had. I'm actually going to look up 3.

[John Shahidi]

Million rings last year. So it was on track for over $1.5 billion in revenue. I mean they've wearables. Like we're finally, it's, it's weird to say it, but it feels like we're finally in the era of like wearables actually getting traction. And, and oddly they're all classic form factors. Everyone. People have been wearing rings for.

[Jordi]

This started as a Kickstarter camp.

[John Shahidi]

That's crazy. This has to be the most successful Kickstarter of all time. 10 billion. That's more than Oculus, which was a Kickstarter. So remarkable. Oh, let's check in with Tyler and his fashionable wearables. How you doing over there? Give us the two week review. How much have you used those? Those are the. The Xreal 1 Pro technically AR glasses. Although I don't believe that you can see me through those. You look blind.

[Tyler]

I can. I can barely see you. So I haven't really used them at all except on the plane.

[John Shahidi]

True.

[Tyler]

They were actually like. No, these are like. These are actually really cool. On the plane. I was just playing a game on my phone, but I would just have it, like, be really big in front of me and it was like a very good experience. So I'm like, I would not buy these for $700. I would buy them for like, maybe like 50 bucks.

[John Shahidi]

50 bucks.

[Tyler]

But they are, like, really cool. And I think if they were more see through, like the new, like, meta glasses.

[John Shahidi]

Do you think you'll actually use them anytime other than on a plane?

[Tyler]

Probably not, because most of the time I can just use my laptop instead if I need, like a bigger screen to do stuff.

[John Shahidi]

Yeah. So is there any scenario where you would use it as like a secondary screen on a laptop laptop or anything like that?

[Tyler]

Not really.

[John Shahidi]

Because you have a TV in your luxurious apartment at UCLA that you are so proud of.

[Tyler]

I do have a tv. It's hard to see the screen. You can't really use this as a second screen. It can only be the main one because it's a little too dark to be comfortably viewing your laptop.

[John Shahidi]

So you can't use both at the same time. So it's not really an extended monitor solution.

[Tyler]

Yeah, but I think the future generations. I say I'm likely to become like a dau.

[John Shahidi]

Dau. But when would you use it? Daily. That doesn't make any sense to me.

[Tyler]

I would use it as another monitor if these were more see through.

[John Shahidi]

Okay, yeah, Yeah, I guess that could make sense. Well, I mean, the resolution is pretty good, right? Like, it looks good. Yeah.

[Tyler]

You can very. Like, you can read very easily. It's like usually sometimes I have a hard time. It like, makes me sick.

[John Shahidi]

Jordy, how'd you sleep last night? Speaking of health tracking, monitoring connected devices, the connected bed from Eight Sleep, of course, is our partner. Go to Eight Sleep.com, get a pod 5 code TPPN.

[Jordi]

I got an 88, I got a 90.

[John Shahidi]

Let's go.

[Jordi]

How many hours did you sleep?

[John Shahidi]

Seven hours and 56 minutes. Pretty good.

[Jordi]

Solid. I got seven hours and 28. Not my best, not my worst.

[John Shahidi]

In other news tonight, there was a reuniting of Elon Musk and Donald Trump at the Charlie Kirk Memorial. There were a couple posts that went out about this. They shook hands, they sat next to each other and it seems like incredibly back this has been the unifying event for them. So it'll be interesting to see where this goes in terms of actual movement on partnerships and subsidies and investments and who does what. There was the, there was the movement over Tesla electric car subsidies. That of course was a staple of the Trump admins, you know, push away from electric cars generally and that potentially hurt Tesla. Maybe that comes back. We will have to.

[Jordi]

Let's pull up this chart of the green. Green Line test.

[John Shahidi]

Yes, the Green Line test. Trump did lean in it appears, although just barely. But Danish says BRB going all in on Tesla stock because Elon had the straight green line.

[Jordi]

Tesla is up 2% today.

[John Shahidi]

Oh well, maybe there's something to the Green Line test. We'll see. Well if you want to get in on Tesla, maybe you think it's overvalued, maybe you think it's undervalued. Head over to public.com investing for those that take it seriously. They got multi asset investing industry leading yields. They're trusted by million specs. Speaking of River Road partner shares, you're not going to be. Ken Griffin Citadel securities uses a physical goal book that includes more than 5,000 discrete goals contributed by nearly 1,800 employees to guide planning and ops. The goal book is part of a meticulous month, months long planning ritual.

[Jordi]

Yeah, there was an entire article I think at Bloomberg about this printed book. Yes, worth going through.

[John Shahidi]

Matthew is putting it in the truth Zone says sounds like some PR BS you tell to the Wall Street Journal.

[Jordi]

River Road partner says it's okay they didn't call you back.

[John Shahidi]

In other news, Radia is. I've never heard of this company before but Radia is going to build the Windrunner for defense. Billed as the world's largest military cargo aircraft and announced at the Air Space and Cyber Conference in 2025. The Ultra Large transportation is aimed at closing the airlift gap for US And NATO forces. And if you look at the scale of these planes, I think that's a 747 there or something like it. And this plane is much, much bigger. I'm excited for the big planes. I want bigger and bigger planes. I've always wanted something just as big as a cruise ship in the sky and hopefully we'll get it.

[Jordi]

Calamaz says something about Valve is very forever 2000s coded, a master class class in business. It's a type of company that doesn't really exist anymore, that does whatever it wants whenever it wants because Steam prints so much money and they continue to do exactly that. Do you buy games on Steam anymore? You used to?

[John Shahidi]

I don't buy any games really because I don't have time to play games. But I had a yes, I'm in recovery. I had a Steam deck. I enjoyed it a lot and I bought a lot of games on Steam and I also bought one counter Strike Skin on Scheme on Steam that was probably 50 bucks.

[Jordi]

I love the account. Zoomer is discovering.

[John Shahidi]

Wait, wait, can you guess what this is?

[Jordi]

I knew right away. Discovering Josh Kushner.

[John Shahidi]

Yes. Holy bullish.

[Jordi]

He says a 24 affirm Anduril, Airtable, Cursor, Databricks, GitHub, HIMS, Instagram, Kickstarter, Lemonade.

[John Shahidi]

Kickstarter is a throwback, newbie, older deal, Opendoor, Oscar, Stripe, Ramp, Twitch, Unity, Warby.

[Jordi]

Parker, Robinhood, Skale, Skim, Slack, Spotify, Stripe, Twitch.

[John Shahidi]

Josh Kushner has gotten in a lot.

[Jordi]

Of great deals buying Fifth Avenue.

[John Shahidi]

He's buying Fifth Avenue. He gets into every good company.

[Jordi]

It's interesting. Do you think he'll generate more, more, more of total dollars from OpenAI than the rest of these deals combined?

[John Shahidi]

I mean, that's the goal of venture. I don't know the actual ownership percentages, but that's certainly the way venture works always. It's like there's one that makes more than the rest combined and it makes the rest look really, really silly because you can be in some great, great companies, but that one, hyperscaler that you got drives everything. You look at Excel with Facebook. I mean, they had a bunch of other great companies in that portfolio, but they own what, 20% of Facebook at IPO or something? That it was like worth $10 billion off of like a hundred million something dollar fund. Fantastic performance. The other news. Oh, there's a question in the chat about the H1BS. We'll cover it more later. People are still debating it back and forth. The Silicon Valley was very up in arms over the H1B things. Reese Hastings actually chimed in in favor of of the decision to raise the tax on H1BS. He says, I've worked on H1B politics for 30 years. Trump's 100k per year tax is a great solution, which is, I think, not what it wound up being. It wound up being 100k one time.

[Jordi]

One time.

[John Shahidi]

But Reid says it will mean H1B is used for just very high value jobs, which will mean no lottery is needed and more certainty for those jobs. So a little bit of a debate. I'm sure there's a bunch of people, people covering it very well, but.

[Jordi]

Well, without further ado, our second in person guest.

[John Shahidi]

Welcome to the show, Laura.

[Jordi]

And we're breaking some news today.

[John Shahidi]

Yes. Yeah, some news. I'm very excited.

[Jordi]

Get that gong ready.

[John Shahidi]

Get the microphone as close as you can and introduce yourself.

[Laura]

For those who might not know, Hi, I'm Laura. I run until last year. So we are trying to make the hibernation pods that you see in interstellar reality. But to get there, we want to help transplant patients get the organs that they need by reversibly cryopreserving organs.

[John Shahidi]

Wow.

[Jordi]

Start with something easy.

[John Shahidi]

Yeah. Give us a little backstory. Like what actually set you up to be in a position to start this type of company? It seems incredibly difficult from a scientific perspective.

[Laura]

Yeah. So my backstory is I spent a decade working in longevity. It's a long time adventure. And I think it's just really frustrating to, to, I think, spend that much time trying to solve a problem and you really want to find one critical lynch point, like one thing where you can solve it and then it helps everything else. And so to me, it's like, wow, it'd be so cool to make a hibernation plot where if you had a terminal illness and you needed a critical cure, you could sort of wait, let's say, one to two years to make it to the point where a therapy for your disease comes out. And of course, the key step to get there is showing that this sci fi technology, which works for millions of IVF embryos, there's people walking out today who are crying for three plus years as embryos.

[John Shahidi]

That's crazy.

[Laura]

Really crazy.

[Jordi]

Three.

[Laura]

30 plus years.

[Jordi]

30 plus years.

[John Shahidi]

Three. Three, yes.

[Laura]

Actually, the record for the longest cryopreserved human embryo just came out.

[John Shahidi]

No way.

[Laura]

And it was 30 plus years.

[John Shahidi]

So this person's born and they're kind of 30 on day one.

[Laura]

Yeah. And they're twins that were preserved at the same time and then they're rewarmed at different times. So it's really interesting.

[Jordi]

We have the tech.

[Laura]

Yeah. But just scaling that up to human organization and showing like in the clinic for transplant Patients that we can actually help.

[John Shahidi]

Wait, so, I mean, I imagine you don't go straight from embryo to human. Is there an animal step in the.

[Jordi]

Mid, like Laura's saying? The mid step is you take, like, I don't know, a lung or a kidney or something like that, but why not mouse?

[Laura]

So actually, the really cool thing is the field of cryobiology has been around for decades, and there's been incredible scientists shout to University of Minnesota, who already published showing that, for example, we can reverse cryopreserve mouse kidneys. So the field of cryobiology has already done incredible, incredible work. And we're just working to scale that up to a human organ scale. But the mouse poc is done. You can take a mouse kidney, totally cryopreserve it, rewarm it, put it back in a mouse that does not have another kidney, and that mouse will be good to go.

[John Shahidi]

Yeah. What's the state of the art in Just freeze the full mouse. Are we making any progress there?

[Jordi]

Somebody must have tried it by now.

[John Shahidi]

We have this funny interaction with Zach Weinberg came on the show and was like, whenever you're testing a drug, you do all this research in the lab, and then it's time to make a decision. What was it, brat or monkey? You're gonna do a test in one of them, and then you'll get to human trials. And it feels like that's a natural progression. Is that not the natural progression here?

[Laura]

So people have been trying to cry. Preserve whole organisms for a long time. Imagine there's some pretty crazy studies that came out in the 50s that was worked on this. But I think, like, basically it's just. It's like if we can't reversibly cryopreserve, like, we just got the kind of studies that did the organs really well, like, to the point where you could bring them back and show that they were fully functioning. You know, like in the past couple years, There have been some published in the past decade, but kind of I think that, like, really kind of nailing, like the protocols is pretty recent. And so. And I think you want to get that right before you try going after each a whole organism.

[John Shahidi]

Sure. What are the levers that you pull in cryopreservation that aren't just temperature? Like, I imagine we've tried just make it really, really cold.

[Laura]

Yeah. So actually, also one cool fact I want you to know, once you get down below minus 130 degrees Celsius, you can keep like an animal there indefinitely, basically.

[John Shahidi]

Really? Time basically stops in that temperature range how cold again?

[Laura]

Below minus 130 degrees Celsius.

[John Shahidi]

130 Celsius. Okay.

[Laura]

Yeah, it's pretty cold, but yeah, the molecules basically aren't moving. So like I mentioned like 30 plus years for human beings.

[John Shahidi]

Sure, yeah. But are there other decisions and trade offs to make besides temperature?

[Laura]

Yeah, so it's really. So one of the things I love the most about this, I know I worked in deep tech for a long time. One of the cool things about this problem, it's a trade off between biology and engineering. So you have this danger zone and basically the thing you want, basically the thing. Like our enemy in cryopreservation is ice. Like you think that we love ice, but we actually hate ice.

[Jordi]

Like cold, but you.

[Laura]

We love cold, but we don't like ice because when ice forms, it expands and it breaks the tissue around you.

[John Shahidi]

Sure? Yeah, that makes sense.

[Laura]

Yeah. So what we want to do is we want to make glass.

[John Shahidi]

Glass.

Wait, so. Yeah, I mean if I have blood in my organ and that expands, that's bad. It's breaking the tissue. How do you freeze something without creating ice out of the blood?

[Jordi]

Well, if you're doing an individual organ, I'm assuming you take drain everything out, is that right?

[Laura]

No. So there's two different things you can do. It's very close. So one is you can replace the chemicals in the order organs. So you can replace a lot of the blood with a chemical that prevents ice formation.

[John Shahidi]

Is that just something that freezes below 130 so it's not freezing and it stays a liquid or is that just.

[Laura]

It's a couple things. So it'll turn to a. Basically if you cool fast enough, it'll turn into a glass. And it does this through kind of decreasing the number of water molecules. And also kind of like there are a couple other mechanisms that might be involved.

[John Shahidi]

Okay. So you don't just have to get cold, you have to get cold fast. That's part of the goal.

[Laura]

Yeah. So it's like can you make good chemicals that do that? And can you get cold fast? And basically like can you traverse this danger zone of ice formation down to like once you get to 1 to 1:30, you're good. Like below that you're totally fine. But going through there as fast as.

[John Shahidi]

Possible, how fast is fast? Are we talking like minutes, seconds? Those seconds?

[Laura]

Yeah. Current protocols work on the order of, you know, maybe hours. Ideally you want less than that.

[John Shahidi]

Yeah. I imagine if I put water in the fridge or in the freezer, it's pretty Cold, like, it still takes a couple hours, but I imagine if it's negative 130, it probably turns into ice a little bit faster. Obviously, if it's a smaller amount of liquid, it's going to freeze faster. There's a whole bunch of different trade offs there.

[Jordi]

What's it like fundraising for a business like this? Because I imagine some of the backers are kind of thinking like, I want this for myself. You know, I've always wanted to go in the cryogenic chamber and be able.

[John Shahidi]

To tell people, do you remember that famous Sam Altman interview where there was a YC company that was doing something along cryopreservation and as part of his, he was running YC at the time and he said, like, I'm on board, I will sign that. You can freeze me after I die. But part of theirs was that they, I think they technically had to kill you. And so the headline that was like the twisted version of what he said was like, sam Altman agrees to be. Agrees to be killed by the portfolio company.

[Jordi]

That's value add.

[John Shahidi]

It's value add. What other VC is willing to die for your company? But, but yeah, what's it been like fundraising?

[Kimball]

Yeah.

[Laura]

So it's an interesting difference between there's companies where they're kind of like, we'll cryopreserve you and we're not sure whether we can bring you back. And I think what was really complying to us is like, let's make this like a real deep tech company. Like, let's, let's go and like our bar is reversible cryopreservation. Like when we take an organ, we have to show that the whole, you know, it's like you wouldn't buy an IVF product where it's like, oh, we'll cryopreserve it. We're not sure you can bring your embryo back. We want to show the whole thing works. And that sets a bar where it's like, okay, for reasoning from deep tech firms, right? Like, they're going to want to talk about, like, what's the business that gets you there? You know, like, if you can cry, preserve an organ reversibly and help, you know, like thousands of transplant patients, you know, who are otherwise losing organs, you know, hundreds of thousands who are on the waiting list and like millions who might use an organ but just don't have access to them, like, you know, that kind of forces you, I think, to hit this bar of, you know, showing you can rewarm with function.

[John Shahidi]

Walk me through the current state of organ transplantation, I mean I feel like most people probably know that they have a, you know, a little thing that they can check on their id if they're unfortunately, you know, killed. They, their organ might be transplanted, might be frozen for a little bit, but.

[Jordi]

They can pass away too, John. They don't have to be killed. Murderous podcaster.

[John Shahidi]

But I feel like we've heard this story of the organ was put in a helicopter and traveled and it was moved from one body to another very, very quickly. What's the current shelf life of organs? It sounds like that's the most low hanging fruit is just extend that. Even if you just double it, that's gonna be really, really positive for the organ transplant market.

[Laura]

It's, it's the craziest logistical process I've ever heard of.

[John Shahidi]

Explain it to.

[Laura]

So like, you know, some organs have a 4 to 12 hour, you know, shelf life. Others might have 24, 36. But you know, it's like it's, it's a very short time period and you have no idea when the donor is going to pass. And so basically like as medical surgeon gets a call maybe in the middle of the night, go charter like at the last minute a private plane to fly to like the place where the person has just donated the organ, pick it up, bring it back. You know, transplant patients wait within two.

[Jordi]

Hour radius and then go back to the, the patient that's getting the transplant.

[Laura]

And if you're a transplant patient, you have to wait right next to the hospital where you might get the surgery for months, in some cases a lot longer than that, just waiting to get the call in the middle of the night. You have to have a pager on you at all times. It's just this crazy logical process.

[John Shahidi]

Your organ, if you need this particular organ, you're going to get a call and you need to go to the hospital because it's coming on a private jet that day.

[Laura]

Exactly. I don't know if you know that the company Blade, it's like I think they did like a couple hundred million.

[John Shahidi]

Yeah.

[Jordi]

And they did, they did, they, did.

[John Shahidi]

They split the business in some way. Yeah, they've actually developed a business.

[Jordi]

And so your initial product is like focused on solving that. Like you don't even need to be able to freeze an organ and bring it back over a decade. It's more like just solving this logistical nightmare. Is that kind of the idea?

[Laura]

Well, a couple things. Once you're in the temperature range, you could preserve the organ for as long as possible. But, yeah, in the near term, it's like, let's get that organ to the patient as soon as possible. But, like, let's not have to have a surgeon get on a private plane. You're like, like, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[John Shahidi]

And so do you. I mean, we track artificial intelligence progress a lot on this show. All the AI labs are trying to just see exponential growth in the amount of time that AI can think. We went from one minute to deep research, can do 20 minutes, GPT5 is doing more. Do you think that the progress of your business will track sort of a smooth exponential where we'll go from four to 12 hours to one day to two days to four days to eight days, 16, and just kind of expand from there? Or do you think there'll be some sort of, like, binary unlock? There's a new technology, and now it's five years.

[Jordi]

Well, to me. To me, it sounds like the bigger jump is like. Like you said, once you get the temperature down, you can go basically forever. The bigger jump is like, how do you go from a single organ that you can. You can swap. It sounds like, swap out the blood for another chemical that allows it to. To stay really cold without having the ice expansion. But it's like, how do you go from an organ to a system? Right?

[Laura]

Yeah.

[Jordi]

And how do you go from a system to a whole body? Right. Because if you replaced all the blood in yourself with some chemical, like, is your brain going to function the same way when you take. You know, like, there's a lot of unknowns, right?

[Laura]

Yeah. So the thing we track is scaling size. Like, that's the big thing, Right. So we know we can reverse the correct embryos. Like a couple hundred cells, we cry preserve like worms. That's a thousand cells. Now, rat kitty, that massively scales up, like, number of cells, but just. Yeah, it's basically scaling size because as you get larger, it's way harder to cool something quickly. Imagine you put a snowflake on your hand, it'll rewarm very quickly. But a large turkey for Thanksgiving takes maybe a day or more to defrost.

[Jordi]

So you're one. I kind of want to get a sense of timeline for the company, specifically raise $58 million. Like, you want to deploy that effectively but quickly to show progress. But, like, what kind of milestones are you looking at? And what is the actual. I'm assuming the hardware that you're developing is like, focusing on cooling, cooling things quickly, consistently. And then is it a machine that you're trying to scale up over time? Or what does the actual hardware look like and then what are the kind of milestones that you're trying to achieve?

[Laura]

Yeah. So you know the cool thing with this, with this new round that we just are announcing today with Founders Fund, you know, really excited to have them on board. Also Lux is joining in Field ventures shout out to like all of our investors have been awesome. Basically like the goal is to get organ products, you know, like into the clinic. So like right now we're working on developing a lot of the protocols. You know, we build new chemical formulations, we build cooling systems, we build rewarming systems. So basically just like iterating, you know, as quickly as possible. One of the things I love about this problem is the speed of iteration. Preclinically it's sort of like very unlike a lot of biology where you can just sort of test in like whole human sized organs a lot of your protocols weekly. Yeah, we're just working on getting that product to the point where we can bring it to patients.

[John Shahidi]

Take me into sci fi world sleep pods for space travel. What are the implications, what are the trade offs of that? Is it just like I, I go to sleep, I wake up on Mars. Are we going to be going to Alpha Centauri when you really, really play out the future? I've always had the mind that if we're going to places that are light years away, the speed of light holds, the laws of physics hold. And so you're embarking on thousands of years journey, you're going to have these colony ships where the people that arrive are completely different than the people that that leave. But it sounds like there might be an alternative path.

[Jordi]

Yeah. And even here on Earth, the scenario we were talking about offline.

[John Shahidi]

Oh yeah.

[Jordi]

Was this sense of let's say you're a 80 year old billionaire, you've experienced everything there is to experience in life in the current era and your technology exists. And I go, I want to just be put to, I want to hibernate for the next 50 years and I'm going to just be placed on my little doomsday ranch in New Zealand and I'm going to have a staff whose job is to just protect me, effectively hang out and make sure nobody messes with me while I'm asleep. And in 50 years I want to wake up. And so this 80 year old can go from being 80, they can just effectively like go to sleep for 50 years and wake up and suddenly they get to experience something completely novel. And Even though they're 80 years old, they get this experience of being in an entirely different era of human history. And I think a lot of people.

[John Shahidi]

Would get to the point, all the Avatar sequels, they don't need to wait.

[Jordi]

Yeah, no. A lot of people would get to the point in their life where they're like, okay, I've seen enough, I've done enough. While I still have life in me, I want to be able to see something completely new. And there's a risk that the global collapse happens. My doomsday ranch gets raided and everything gets. But, but like there's the multi planetary future and possibility, but there's also just life here on Earth of life here on Earth is going to look wild and different. If you're obsessed with the future today and you're impatient and you're not, you're not necessarily believe that you're going to live another 50 years, you could teleport effectively.

[Laura]

Yeah. So I mean like one thing to your point is like if you want humans in space, I think someone sent to me, like if you want humans in space, you need like AI plausible, you need like definitely, you know, spaceships, but you also need cryo. Like, you know, it's the best way to allow for like long term transportation even in the near term. One thing that we really care about, just like helping people who would otherwise not get therapies kind of like make it to the critical point. So my co founder Hunter, his father in law was diagnosed with like metastatic mesothelioma. He missed a critical clinical trial by like a couple months, you know, wasn't eligible because of the severity of his disease. That could have given him you know, extra, extra time with his family, might have given a short remission. And I think it's just like really? Or like, I don't know, for me it's like much more near term. Like let's just like help people who are like literally not. And like I knew somebody who got metastatical NOMA and like, because he got it the year that he got it, got like 10 plus years of prognosis. The year before would have been six to nine months.

[John Shahidi]

Wow.

[Laura]

Right. Like 2014 to 2015 was like a really, really crazy time to be in that, like to be a patient for. Yeah.

[John Shahidi]

What about the pure sci fi thought experiment of like cryo as a time machine that jumps you forward. If a device existed right over there, you walk through that door and when you walk out in a blink of an eye, it's 30 years later. Would you do it, Jordi? Would you do that? It's such an interesting thought experiment because there's all these risks. Bad things could happen, but great things could happen. It's kind of a proxy on your overall view on optimism over some period of time. I mean, I would want to take my family. I don't know.

[Jordi]

Yeah, I can, I can easily envision the scenario of being towards the end of your life and just being like one more year of being in this retirement home.

[John Shahidi]

But what if you're young? What if you're 20 and you're just young?

[Jordi]

I'm not doing it. I love the present moment.

[John Shahidi]

I want to see. I'm impatient for my flying car. I'm just going to jump forward to 2050 and just be the most out of the loop person in the world.

[Jordi]

Yeah. I think the question comes down to how resource intensive.

[John Shahidi]

Assume it's free for this thought experiment.

[Jordi]

Okay. Assume it's free. I'm not doing it. I like surfing the present.

[John Shahidi]

Yeah.

[Jordi]

I don't need to teleport, but I can easily imagine certainly in the medical.

[John Shahidi]

Case, like it makes tons of sense.

[Jordi]

Obviously if you're like incredibly AGI and you believe that like you know, abundance is around the corner, would you, would you freeze yourself? And if the alternative was working at.

[John Shahidi]

McDonald's, there's no risk. Yeah. I mean like even, even in the medical scenario, like there's no risk that you just get hit by bus or less in this thought experiment. So you get to jump forward to the post scarcity AGI future.

[Jordi]

Yeah, that's what I'm saying.

[John Shahidi]

Yeah.

[Jordi]

Some people might just.

[John Shahidi]

Some people might take it. I wonder, I wonder what. Yeah, I see you on the other side. Be fascinating. Have you seen Passengers?

[Laura]

Passengers? No. I need to.

[John Shahidi]

No one's seen this. Yeah, you're familiar. It's a good movie about this exact, about this exact topic. You said you're building this company as a hard tech, deep tech company. What does that actually look like?

[Jordi]

Well, this clean room, like crazy sci fi.

[John Shahidi]

Yeah. Applications.

[Jordi]

Extremely pragmatic.

[John Shahidi]

Totally.

[Jordi]

Here's a problem that is solvable. We know we can do it already. We need to apply it to a new domain. Like kidneys or like these other organs.

[Laura]

Exactly.

[Jordi]

And that's helpful with like recruiting because it's like, hey, somebody that is more risk averse could be like I'm working at a medical device startup and someone else can be like, I'm working on cryotherapy and you're both working on the same technology.

[Laura]

Yeah, yeah, no, exactly. I think that that's one cool thing about it. I think also for us, deep tech means, like, we do almost everything we can in house. Like, we, like, build every part of the system that we can in house. Like, we have a team of amazing engineers, neuroscientists, molecular biologists, you know, chemists. It's like, we try to, like, it's like just like move full stack in house. It's like, think that if you run a deep company, just like your iteration cycle is the main limiter on your progress. So the more that you can do. Do and houses.

[Jordi]

And it's good that you talk fast. Because you talk, like, fast. No, it's good. It's good. You can just.

[John Shahidi]

You're.

[Jordi]

You're, you know, one minute for you is like two minutes for us.

[John Shahidi]

Yeah, yeah.

[Jordi]

What are some crazy. Have any other countries done anything, do you believe, like, Russia or China?

[John Shahidi]

How many humans do you think are frozen right now? Humans anywhere in the world or. Or interstellar?

[Jordi]

She sends a slack message off how many we got?

[John Shahidi]

How many we got?

[Laura]

I mean, I mean, like, for conics, it's like, I think that there are these products where it's like, you cryopreserve someone, but, like, you're just really not sure if the procedure you use to cryopreserve them is gonna bring them. It's possible to bring them back. And I think we don't, like, we don't. Just don't really know how to think about that.

[John Shahidi]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Jordi]

But is it like a hundred.

[John Shahidi]

Because we've heard lore about, like, oh, this person had their head frozen and this person had their body frozen.

[Laura]

I would say a lot of those stories are not true.

[John Shahidi]

They're just not true.

[Laura]

Yeah, like, a lot of the really popular ones, I think are incorrect.

[John Shahidi]

Yeah, that makes sense.

[Jordi]

What about what. What if. What if what. What countries are. Are investing outside of the US or kind of care about this problem area or opportunity?

[Laura]

I think China might be, like, I'm not on the ground there at all. Like, not to know. But that's. That's something that. Yeah, I've heard a little bit about.

[Jordi]

Yeah.

[John Shahidi]

Do the printers work in your office?

[Laura]

Why do you ask?

[John Shahidi]

There's this. There's this funny interaction where in the. In the early 2000s, Peter Thiel went to tour a freeze your body type of startup. And the contract that he had to sign, he was like. He was like, I'm all in on this technology. Print up the contract. I'll sign it. I think he was there with Luke Gnosis sick, and the printer wasn't working. And he was like, that wasn't very, didn't instill a lot of confidence that like, if they couldn't get their printer working, they like, I wasn't, he was like, I wasn't, I wasn't ready to, you know, trust them with freezing my entire body if their printer doesn't work. So, you know, it's like how you do anything is how you do everything.

[Laura]

Yeah, I think that's where like organs are a good bar. Let's just like help some transplant patients, you know, like.

[John Shahidi]

Yeah, exactly.

[Jordi]

Yeah. It's interesting. There's, it feels like what you're doing would be very disruptive to the traditional organ transplant business. That is, would it be?

[John Shahidi]

Or is it very like synergistic?

[Laura]

Actually, I think for companies like Blade, where it's like they're getting a couple hundred million revenue off of like literally just helicopters transporting organs. Like, I think that's the part that we want to take off.

[John Shahidi]

Yeah.

[Jordi]

That's like super time sensitive.

[John Shahidi]

Yeah, yeah.

[Jordi]

Much cheaper to just put it on like a FedEx truck.

[John Shahidi]

Yeah, exactly.

[Jordi]

Or, or, or just, yeah, just some type of.

[Laura]

Exactly.

[John Shahidi]

Like almost falling down the stairs. Yeah.

[Jordi]

But she's gonna make.

[John Shahidi]

Have you ever had anything delivered by.

[Jordi]

I mean, the system's gonna be indestructible. Right. You're gonna be able to throw a building. Right.

[John Shahidi]

Did she say that? Did she promise an indestructible?

[Jordi]

I, I, I believe, I believe.

[John Shahidi]

Add it to the, add it to the to do list. Make product indestructible.

[Laura]

Well, yeah, we'll get right on that. But yeah, I mean, I think like most people in transplant like, you know, the patient way better for patients, you know, they don't have to get a last minute call. Like for surgeons, they don't have to do like an overnight where they're like doing, you know, like literally like an all nighter to do a surgery. Like that's, yeah.

[John Shahidi]

And that probably makes it harder to actually be alert. Like there's a ton of examples of like the night shift, just quality. And even in manufacturing, the night shift often performs slightly worse. And you can tell in quality assurance just for making widgets because people are tired and it's harder to get the best people to show up in the middle of the night. And so you could imagine. And just unlocking the ability for surgeons to be well rested is probably another value add.

[Laura]

We would all love for surgeons to be well rested.

[John Shahidi]

Of course. Of course. What's the interaction with the FDA like, what's the process like? I was talking to the Neuralink team about that. And the FDA feels extremely difficult to deal with. Like very slow. But then they've figured out how to move very quickly and have a great relationship. So how are you thinking about the FDA relationship?

[Laura]

I mean, I think one thing with the fda and I can't speak on their behalf obviously, but just take them seriously as of part partners. Like, okay, like, you know, when we kind of are going to engage with them, like we want to bring them all the data that like we would want to see, you know, for part. I think a lot of the reason that the FDA is often portrayed as, you know, bad is that like there's not a lot of drugs that actually work. And so like they're, you know, like looking at very difficult evidence analyzed. It's like we just want to bring them evidence that the technology works and like have them give us feedback.

[John Shahidi]

Like that's. Yeah. Do they. Would they view this as like a medical device and take you through like the medical device approval process?

[Laura]

That's like, like the default designation likely. But you know, like. Yeah, up to them.

[John Shahidi]

Cool.

[Jordi]

It could create a cool sci fi path too.

[John Shahidi]

They should. Anything's possible today.

[Jordi]

Yeah, yeah. One executive order and there's now the FDA is like, we got a cool sci fi, cool.

[John Shahidi]

We got Space Force, we're going to the moon.

[Jordi]

If you've been in a blockbuster sci fi film, just come over here.

[John Shahidi]

Yeah, that's great.

[Jordi]

Where else, where else are you most excited in longevity, broadly. You've invested in a bunch of companies. Yeah, you can a good opportunity to pump your bags. Talk about sectors broadly.

[Laura]

I mean, speaking of the fda, one really, one thing I'm just really excited about is that like the FDA gave a. Acceptance of efficacy data for life extension, like for the first time. Shout out to Loyal. Yeah, I mean I think people outside London don't get like, that was a huge deal. The FDA has never sort of thought about lifespan extension, the possibility of that on the label for a drug for dogs to start.

[John Shahidi]

Sure.

[Laura]

But that's just. Yeah, it's really exciting. So them kind of accepting that concept is a really big deal. So shout out to Celine and Loyal for kind of making that, getting that through. I think that's really interesting.

[John Shahidi]

Yeah, yeah, it is interesting that like a precursor to getting a drug approved is a problem that they've defined. And, and how do you define that? Yeah, that's very good. What do you make of declining life expectancy in the U.S. do you have a thesis on it or do you think it's going to turn around any predictions?

[Laura]

That's a good question. I mean, I think for context, my field of expertise is can we make small molecule or larger drugs that predictably extend human lifespan by some amount in a clinical trial? And I think that it's hard. I'm not an. An expert in things that are not that.

[Jordi]

Well, not being an expert on something has never stopped anyone.

[John Shahidi]

So. Yeah. So what's next? What was the total raise? 50 something.

[Laura]

So 58 million. 58 million, yeah, it was. Yeah. Well, 52 technically in the current round, including about 6 million of safes.

[John Shahidi]

What's on the to do list over the next couple months? Is it all hiring? Do you need to find a facility, build out a facility, buy equipment?

[Laura]

I mean, we just moved into a huge lab. We're hiring, you know, looking for great neuroscientists, engineers. That's kind of the sort of the main. The main focus right now. Local biologists.

[John Shahidi]

Well, yeah, you said neuroscientists for one.

[Laura]

Part of the company, yes.

[John Shahidi]

Can you talk more about that maybe.

[Laura]

In the next time.

[John Shahidi]

Okay, next time. There's always leaks in the. Not on the PR release, but you dig into who they're hiring.

[Jordi]

30 minutes long.

[John Shahidi]

Yeah. The careers page always tells you more about what's the priorities of the company.

[Jordi]

No, it really does. Because if a company is worth a lot of money, they're not hiring at all.

[John Shahidi]

Yeah, It's a question bearish.

[Laura]

It's a good question. But my team said that we definitely had to give you guys organ plushies.

[John Shahidi]

So I'll give you fun.

[Jordi]

A little kidney.

[John Shahidi]

I love it. Thank you.

[Jordi]

Look at this. Very cute. Very cute.

[John Shahidi]

Just to.

[Jordi]

I almost had to get a kidney transplant when I was.

[Laura]

Oh, my God. I'm so sorry.

[Jordi]

Five years old. I had. I got an insane E. Coli and so I was on like full dialysis for a long time and I was looking really bad. My mom was ready.

[John Shahidi]

And you're still going ahead with the calf implants, right?

[Jordi]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[John Shahidi]

So those will be frozen.

[Jordi]

Those are, yeah. Not even just implants. You're on the donor calf transplant.

[John Shahidi]

Calf transplants. It's the new level from the biggest. The biggest mass possible. I want Ronnie Coleman's calves.

[Jordi]

Yeah, that could be a good way to test, you know, like people. There's a lot of people that would.

[John Shahidi]

Like, pay to bicep transplant.

[Jordi]

Lower stakes and organ that needs to really function.

[John Shahidi]

Just throw. I've been trying to gain 20 pounds of lean mass. It sounds like I could just get that transferred in. In A weekend.

[Jordi]

These are. These are great. You got to do it for the whole. For the whole body too.

[John Shahidi]

You gotta throw your logo on here or something.

[Jordi]

Yeah, we need embroidery.

[John Shahidi]

Next time, next time, next time. Well, thank you so much.

[Jordi]

Amazing. Super exciting.

[John Shahidi]

Do we have. Do we have a guest? Bring the gun.

[Jordi]

Let Laura hit it. Let Laura hit it. Give it the hardest back.

[John Shahidi]

Thank you so much for coming on the show.

[Jordi]

That was one of the best hits we've seen.

[John Shahidi]

Thank you.

[Jordi]

Amazing.

[John Shahidi]

Back to the show.

[Jordi]

That was awesome.

[John Shahidi]

Adquick.com out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only Adwick combines technology, out of home expertise and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe.

[Jordi]

Speaking of out of home advertising, I saw that Avi launched Friend.com billboards. Friend.com billboards in LA. Oh, I was thinking between you.

[John Shahidi]

I told you I saw one on the way in. They were putting it up when I came in. We interviewed him that day. I've seen them everywhere now. He really wasn't kidding about it being a massive campaign. Still want to put him in the truth zone on it being the biggest billboard campaign of all time, but he's winning me over. It might be pretty big, but I.

[Jordi]

Was thinking we came on like a field trip. Advertising interim challenge.

[John Shahidi]

Tyler, what you think?

[Tyler]

There's one super close to where we usually get breakfast. Okay, I've seen it passing, but yeah.

[John Shahidi]

We gotta go take some pictures. Put them on the timeline.

[Jordi]

Chat says, Holy Gong. That was an amazing hit. I love that. She did.

[John Shahidi]

She sent.

[Jordi]

She had her bag in one hand and just.

[John Shahidi]

Yeah, the backhand. The different gong techniques, they really, really bring out the personality. You can tell a lot about a founder by how they hit the gong at the TV piano.

[Jordi]

Avi has a massive billboard. It's like covering like three stories of a building. We gotta love to see it.

[John Shahidi]

Anyway, Nick says it's amazing how much better September is than its evil calendar twin March. Instead of a winter that just won't go away, you have a wonderful, toned.

[Jordi]

Down encore of summer September in California. Best month.

[John Shahidi]

You think so?

[Jordi]

Name a better month.

[John Shahidi]

It's kind of gloomy out these days.

[Kimball]

It's.

[Jordi]

There's been. It. But that's because there's tropical storms.

[John Shahidi]

Okay.

[Jordi]

It's been. It's been pushing up, but it's still warm. The water's warm. September. Undefeated. Undefeated.

[John Shahidi]

Anyway, let's move over to Delhi and.

[Jordi]

As Peruhov, one of the hardest periods of my life was the summer of 2016. That summer my first startup ran out of cash and we had to shut down yc the Thiel Fellowship and our investors bet on us and we weren't able to deliver at the time. Well, that sound effect is now going to be on our website. So if you're going through a similar phase, you can go hit it for yourself. Everybody's been through this before. It's absolutely. Well, not everybody but, but most successful entrepreneurs, I mean every entrepreneur has been.

[John Shahidi]

Hard times been very rough.

[Jordi]

John's been there, we've all been there.

[John Shahidi]

But he built back.

[Jordi]

Brutal. You gotta go.

[John Shahidi]

It's a comeback story, baby.

[Jordi]

I love 442 saves on this. People are just like, yeah, I'm in a dark place. That's, that's the.

[John Shahidi]

I'm in a lockdown. I got a lock in button. Gotta lock in. You love to see it. So he said. Almost exactly four years later, after meandering journey through another startup, my early, my early years of investing, I met Will Brewery and we decided to start Varda together. So if you had a summer in 2025 that was like mine in 2016, my advice is to you is is just one step at a time. You got it lock in. It's time to build good stuff. In other news, Jiro, Jiro Ono, the famous sushi chef is turning 100 and he says the secret to longevity is to continue working. That's one option. I also try to walk every day. Even after I turn 100, I want to continue working. That's the best ramen. Completely agree. People need purpose. Look at how old he is. What a beast He's Run Nelson.

[Jordi]

AirPods Pro 3 impressions ANC.

[John Shahidi]

Significantly better than active noise cancellation.

[Jordi]

Yeah. App 2 fit is more comfortable. Transparency mode is weirdly sibilant and scratchy. Not a fan of the sound signature tube ac. I'm a wired guy.

[John Shahidi]

A little mixed. Well they might. I mean that's what I was thinking. An opportunity would be make a version of AirPods Pro with wires that would get you over there, over the hill. You could do it anyway. Bezel getbezel.com your bezel concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch. And we have our next guests in the restream waiting room. Hopping in the TVP and UltraDome. We have Shervin Pishevar Musk. Welcome to the show. How you guys doing? Good to see you.

[Jordi]

What's going on guys?

[John Shahidi]

Welcome to the show.

[Jordi]

Great to have you both back on.

[John Shahidi]

Good to have you Back on the show.

[Kimball]

It's been a busy few weeks since we last spoke.

[John Shahidi]

I know, I know. We saw, we saw the display at the Vatican. We were blown away. Jordy didn't think it was real. I think the first time he saw it, then we saw more images. It's very hard to tell on the Internet.

[Jordi]

That's your problem. It's like people are just assuming, like, oh, it's AI.

[John Shahidi]

But it was.

[Kimball]

There's no way this is real. Exactly, exactly.

[John Shahidi]

It's unbelievable. But anyway, give us the update. What's new in your world?

[Kimball]

Well, it's just been extraordinary. You know, we closed our round as we discussed last time I was on the show and then made it. The burning man survived.

[John Shahidi]

Yes.

[Kimball]

Went to Vatican and we had just the most incredible show, just a time when, you know, we had Charlie Kirk being assassinated that week. We able to just be sad with the world for a little moment and then to also be joyful to go and celebrate the fact that we are in this place as a human species. Not really Catholic Church, really just about everyone. Grace for the world.

[John Shahidi]

Yeah.

[Shervin Pishevar]

So inspiring. I had my father and my daughter there and there wasn't a dry eye in there. There were 300,000 people there. When Pope Francis image went up, it was just so emotional.

[Kimball]

We did a memorial for Pope Francis. It was the original idea for this was. It came back in June of 2024. We did a show in Cannes, France. It's actually the same show that Shervin saw. And the chairman for the jubilee, Olivier Francois, found me in this conference and said, we just have to do something for the Jubilee. Didn't really believe it. And then one thing led to the other. But actually that was also when. When Shervin got involved. And Shervin and I have known each other forever for like 15 years. But what I love about Chervan, we just, we just spent time together traveling the world. And back in May or June, I think we were, we were with Pharrell Williams in Madrid for a show to, to explain to him what we were going to do at the Vatican because he, he, he wanted to do it with us, but we hadn't figured out what to do yet. And Chervan said, hey, let's find a way to work together. So he led the round. Jeffrey joined and he's also joined us. Shervin has joined us as our global expansion advisor. So we are. We're taking one country at a time.

[John Shahidi]

Very exciting, very exciting.

[Jordi]

How quickly do you guys want to scale? Because as an American, I want you Guys doing, like, you know, at least a show a day here in the US before we get. Have too much.

[Kimball]

You'll be amazed. We now, this past weekend, we did five shows around the world.

[John Shahidi]

Wow.

[Kimball]

One in, two in Australia, two in Europe, two in the U.S. and we're really. We're really constrained by the number of drones we have. So we are building drones as fast as humanly possible. And we have incredible artists like Andrea Bocelli or Pharrell Williams that want to do amazing things with us.

[John Shahidi]

Us.

[Kimball]

And then the more countries we open, which is what Shervin's helping us with, the more attractive this becomes. Because if you're Andrea Bocelli, for example, his tours are global. It doesn't really help to do just the US you actually have to.

[Jordi]

You can't plan a tour and think, well, I only have this technology for these shows.

[John Shahidi]

Right.

[Jordi]

It's.

[John Shahidi]

Someone in the chat is asking, where can people get tickets for the next one? I imagine they're all over the world, but do you have an email list? Something to.

[Kimball]

Yeah, so the place to go is go to Fever. So there's a amazing company called Fever. It's like a Ticketmaster for the world. So Ticketmasters focused on the US Fever is all around the world. And we. The show we're doing right now is called Drone Art Show. Just very simple. They can search for Drone Art Show. They'll see what cities we're in. This past weekend, we were in Chicago.

[John Shahidi]

Oh, wow.

[Kimball]

Madrid, Brisbane and Orlando. And I mean, so it's just so many.

[John Shahidi]

Yeah. You can't be at every town.

[Kimball]

The idea is actually like kind of like Cirque du Soleil. We want people to get excited when Nova comes to town.

[John Shahidi]

Totally did anything from the. Sorry, what was that?

[Shervin Pishevar]

I just want to say how excited we are to be and honored we are to be able to lead the round, the $50 million round and Nova Sky Stories. And I think the world of Kimball. I think he has one of the greatest hearts and one of the biggest visionaries that I've seen. And he always talked about cracking people's hearts open and inspiring people. And one of the great thesis we have is that the world AI is never going to replace the human heart, human emotion. The algorithms are going to rationally try to explain it it. But human emotion and feelings are going to grow in value. And what he did at the Vatican really did crack the hearts of all the people that saw it and the millions of people that saw it around the world. And so.

[Kimball]

And it's actually Available on Disney plus. It's going to be there forever.

[John Shahidi]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Shervin Pishevar]

Everyone should watch it. It gives you a peak of a completely new medium in entertainment that's combining human creativity and AI and drones and automation. So for SOFR Capital Leader, it's a big honor to be able to work again with Kimball and also work with people like Katzenberg and others. It's a great honor. So we're very excited.

[John Shahidi]

Did anything about the Vatican show? And I'm sure you got a ton of inbound interest from customers. Did anything update you about the shape of the business? What interesting pockets of opportunity might exist for future shows? Did you have any learnings coming out of the Vatican show?

[Kimball]

I think the biggest learning we got is that 300,000 people came out of their homes. It was a free concert, so it's not ticketed. But not really well promoted. Because it's a Vatican. They don't really know how to promote their own things.

[John Shahidi]

Sure.

[Kimball]

And we had 300,000 people come to the show live. So I think that we've not really opened up our eyes to shows that have that level of scale in the audience. And we've now gotten, you know, we're very busy doing regular shows. The Vatican is not a regular show. That is just absolutely next level and you just have to watch it to understand. But we now have interest for people. Whether it's America's 250th or repeating a Catholic oriented show in Brazil, or doing something about the history of the uae. These are hundreds of thousands of people will come to see the show. We might ticket them.

[John Shahidi]

Yeah.

[Jordi]

You guys have a problem where when you get it to that scale of an audience, it's hard to ticket that many people because you're talking about just putting it over the city. Right.

[Kimball]

Honestly, I don't even know how to do it now. I believe it when our ticketing partners say, no, it's possible, but I don't.

[John Shahidi]

Know how to do it.

[Jordi]

So thankfully, that's gonna be our problem. The ticket dealers say that anything's possible, but yeah, I mean, it's cool to think about, you know, a city, like a city, for example, or a town saying, we want to do this to celebrate something and we're just gonna pay for it because it's almost a public like benefit. Right, Right.

[Kimball]

And many countries want to do that. Obviously the United States wants to do that for America's 250th. We. We're going to do. We're doing. We'll do many, but we're going to do a very big one in, in North Dakota for Teddy Roosevelt's library being opened on July 4th for the 250th. And it's obviously as North Dakota is going to be less people, but it will be open to the public and it'll be tens of thousands of people.

[John Shahidi]

Are there any?

[Kimball]

I think what opened our eyes is how, how much the public want to be in the live show, the live experience. Because they could just easily have watched it on TV if that's what really what they wanted.

[Jordi]

Yeah, but then you can just watch cgi, you know, you can just watch, you can watch animation, seeing it in.

[Shervin Pishevar]

The sky 3D around you. It's the visceral experience of it. You see that, you hear the oohs and oz and people are excited.

[Kimball]

So there's something physical that's that the drones bring and it truly they are drones. I mean they're used as weapons in other parts of the world. I think that physicality gives a visceral alertness that you don't get whether if you're watching it on TV or on Instagram. And it's still awesome on TV and it's awesome on Instagram, but it's just nothing like in person.

[Shervin Pishevar]

I also want to just touch on how fast this is growing. Just as an investor, to be able to see a founder and a company and a team really gigascale this idea better than anyone else in the world. When I got involved late last year, how many tickets last year was in.

[Kimball]

2024 we sold 6,000 tickets.

[Shervin Pishevar]

6,000 tickets.

[Kimball]

Our shows, we should have half a million sold this year.

[John Shahidi]

Half a million.

[Shervin Pishevar]

So I've been traveling around the world with them and talking to sovereigns and around the world and closing deals and hand to hand combat and you're just seeing the reception, the excitement of the sovereigns and the partners around the world. This is one of the fastest growing businesses that I've ever seen. And going around with them has felt like the way I used to go around with Travis Giga. Scaling from a tiny company with 1 million revenue to multiple billions.

[Kimball]

And it actually does matter. Going country to country, you actually have to, to get on a plane, you have to work with the aviation authorities in that country. You have to navigate the bureaucracy. These are actual flight vehicles. So if you, if you, for example, we, we have, we, we work in Mexico, but every drone we transfer over to Mexico is the same paperwork as transferring a 747 to, to Mexico.

[Jordi]

Well, yeah, from an investment standpoint, you know, if I was underwriting this. It's like you look at the moat, it's like the regulatory moat of like being able to fly, having government, having these relationships, the technological moat of just like being able to coordinate thousands and thousands of drones simultaneously. The ip, just the IP itself, right. Is getting partnering with IP in different categories and then obviously the relationships with even the individual venues to be able to like support and put on these. There's so many different layers to it.

[Kimball]

Funny you say the venues. The venues is one of the greatest moats out there. And I mean it because it is hand to hand combat figuring out each venue. You know, what is the weather like, what's the size of the audience, what's the ticket price you can charge? What kind of a show is this? The Vivaldi four season show with a live orchestra? Or should this be more of a choir with Pharrell Williams? Every venue is different and so it's just almost like a real estate play. You just go one after and you now all of a sudden have a portfolio of venues or real estate that you can use when it makes sense. This time last year we might have had, had, I don't know, 20 venues under our belt and now we have a thousand.

[Jordi]

Are you guys limited at all physically, like being able to have enough drones to be able to put on?

[Kimball]

We are absolutely limited by number of drones. We are building them as fast as we can and it's not near fast enough. We are constantly surprised. It's a six month supply chain, right? So you order everything, got battery chemistries to sort out. You've got all of these nuances to the supply chain that change over time. And so if I were to predict our business now it's September, what is it going to be like in March next year? I'm going to be so wrong. There's just no chance. I get it right. And so we've just decided to just make as many drones as we possibly can. That's the reason we took the fundraiser, so that we're not keeping that in our back pocket as an issue like, oh, well, what about the drones? Right now we literally, if someone said to us, you know, here's a gazillion dollars, we want you to fly a show like the Vatican. We just don't have the drones. We have to plan for sort of March and onwards for next year and it's going to be great. But it's.

[Jordi]

Yeah. And now you get the benefit of having to manage fleets already on different, different continents.

[Kimball]

In a sense, the drone shortage enables us to train the teams in different countries so we're not just scaling so fast that safety is at the end of the day number one priority. And we've got 100% safety record and plan to keep it. And I do think there's some value to being forced to go a little slower, but we are definitely being forced to go slower.

[John Shahidi]

Well, congratulations on the fundraiser.

[Shervin Pishevar]

It's a three sided marketplace is what we realize as we analyze the business is that you have the. There are three sides of the venues dominating the venues around the world. And you get pretty creative with the kinds of venues you can do outdoors. And then you have the consumers who are coming and buying the tickets and coming to it. And as the venues grow, you have larger and larger people. There were 5,000 people that got ticketed to the show in Madrid and there was 300,000 people that showed up to the free show in Rome. And then you have the IP on the third side of the marketplace. So you get more and more content and you get more, more and more beautiful content that he's creating is basically building like a Pixar and a Disney all in one inside of a technology company.

[Kimball]

I love the Pixar analogy. And actually Disney back in the early days was they were. They had to solve the technology as well.

[John Shahidi]

Yeah.

[Kimball]

And I read Walt Disney's biography. It's fascinating how it took them 10 years to add sound to Mickey Mouse and. Well, Mickey Mouse came out with sound. It was the first form of sound. Ten years.

[John Shahidi]

Ten years.

[Kimball]

And it took us. It's gonna sound crazy, but intel was building this company 10 years before I acquired. It probably took us 12 years to add sound.

[John Shahidi]

It's remarkable.

[Kimball]

And it's just like, why? That's just crazy. Well, actually this is really hard. And then our shows are now becoming 90 minutes long. But that is a 2025 invention. That is not pre2025. And now you have to create content that's 90 minutes long. Just because you can technically do it doesn't mean you actually can do it well. And so that's where the Pixar comes in, really. The creatives working with the engineers back and forth and pushing each other.

[Jordi]

I love businesses like this that are just such a simple idea but incredibly, incredibly difficult to execute. But if you can do it, it's just, you know, the value is just.

[Shervin Pishevar]

The invention of new form factors and new mediums of communication are some of the most exciting things to invest in. And the analogy that I was using, I love the movie Babylon, which is like about the history of Hollywood and movies going from silent to sound and what a transformation that was. And that's what Kimball's really doing with Nova Sky Stories. He's invented a new type of medium for creative expression and entertainment and then applied sound to it. Live sound. So the Fever shows are.

[John Shahidi]

Yeah.

[Tyler]

Choreographed.

[Kimball]

The live sounds are. Drones are. Keep in mind these are thousands of drones choreographed to the beat, to the songs that are performed.

[Jordi]

Live orchestra.

[Kimball]

That's really hard.

[John Shahidi]

Yeah. Well, congratulations on the fundraise. Let's ring the gong one more time. I love it. Thank you so much.

[Jordi]

Amazing stuff. I can't. I can't wait to see. Let us know when the first or we'll get on the email list. But excited to. To have the first show.

[Kimball]

Yeah, just go to Fever and then for the show go to Disney plus.

[John Shahidi]

Fantastic.

[Jordi]

Amazing.

[John Shahidi]

Have a great rest of your day. Congratulations.

[Jordi]

Yeah, cheers.

[John Shahidi]

Later. Did you See? Chinese automaker BYD's UN Extreme EV just broke the top speed record at Germany's ATP proving grounds. They beat the Bugatti chiron, which went 304 miles an hour. 0.77. They went 308 miles an hour. The car has almost 3,000 horsepower.

[Jordi]

You saw that. Berkshire Hathaway sold out entirely. They owned zero.

[John Shahidi]

Well, I know why. Because, oh, this fancy car. Everyone's so obsessed with it. Track grade battery, blah, blah, blah. You know, it's Nurburgring time. 6, 59. 10 seconds slower than a Chevy Corvette. What are we doing here? 3,000 horsepower and you can't even get around green hell in under 655. What are we doing?

[Jordi]

Straight line.

[John Shahidi]

Straight line. It's ridiculous. Not impressed. Go back to the drawing board. China. Try again. Because if you're getting lapped by a Chevy Corvette on the Old Norse life, what are you doing? Anyway, if you want to hop off here on a wander, find your happy place. Book a wander. And with inspiring views, hotel grade amenities, dreaming beds, top tier cleaning, 247 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better maybe you book a wander next to the Nordschleife and take a couple laps around the old Nurburgring. But we have our next guest. Stephen. Welcome. How are you? Good to see you.

[Stephen]

How are you?

[John Shahidi]

Give us the news. What's the fundraising announcement? Let's ring the gong at the start of the segment, then we'll get into the details.

[Jordi]

Yes.

[Stephen]

So, big announcement. We have just raised $12 million in our big news. Thank you for the gong. We've just raised $12 million led by Acme Capital Capital and with the co lead with Future Ventures. And this adds on top of the already $8 million we've raised from Construct and Abstract and Generational Partners and Village Global and X funds. So that brings us to about $20 million raised. And we're very excited for the, after this financing round for the firepower gets us to move forward.

[John Shahidi]

Talk about the state of the business, talk about the semiconductors and try and put it in, in terms like relative to what else is going in the market. People have a high level understanding of like you know, GPUs and CPUs, but what are you doing specifically in semiconductors? Yeah, so.

[Stephen]

That'S a good way to put it. CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs, these are the things that people usually think about when they think about semiconductors. They tend to be the things that come top of mind. And they are indeed two thirds of the chip industry. So the trillion dollar chip industry, they're, they're 2/3 of that. But there's this other one third which is analog. And analog tends to be overlooked, but it is unbelievably important. You have the way we are communicating today, the way you are beaming out your, your, your show to everyone who is watching. This is all done over analog digital signals, processors and many, many, many, many different bouncing signals across the planet. And I think it tends to be overlooked. But it's unbelievably important. It's unbelievably important in military warfare, it's unbelievably important in communications. And that's where we've really focused now. Big picture Sphere is a chip and product company. The difference in us and everyone else on the planet is that.

[John Shahidi]

We, at.

[Stephen]

The base of what we do, have an AI engine that allows us to, from concept all the way to fabrication, produce chips that are entirely AI designed. Philosophically, we think that chip design by humans is coming to an end. It already has mostly ended in the world of digital. So CPUs and GPUs and FPGAs, they're not designed. The layouts of those chips are not designed by hand. You actually have TSMC basically do the layout for all the logic gates and things like that for you. But in analog it's still done by hand. And we think that the thing we are conquering today is we're putting that to an end. And we are in doing so building a product company around that where everything is designed by AI.

[John Shahidi]

So is it correct to characterize you as a fabless chip Design company. I come to you with something that can be done in math. Digital signal processing. I have some stream of information that's coming in. I need to transform that with math. You're going to use AI to design a chip and then you're going to call an actual FAB to go and make those chips and then you send me the completed chips. Yeah.

[Stephen]

So just a bit about what we do today. We found an interesting niche in the defense sector as a good starting point where we companies like, like Anduril actually specifically and some others come to us and they say, hey, I have an electronic warfare system or I have a SIGINT system and I need an analog front end for it. Right. I need a bunch of, of chips at the analog front end. And these are pretty critical. They come to us, they give us a custom spec and then we go ahead and we go on to our fab and we say, hey, we're, you know, this is the design or I came up with actually hundreds of possible designs and these are their performance characteristics, etc.

[John Shahidi]

Etc.

[Stephen]

We work between the customer and the fab and then we fab it out, we package it, we ship it all off. We're actually, you know, actually the big thing we're, you know, we, we've done over the last, you know, year and a half since starting the company is, is, is, is build up this capability around these small RF components and we're actually going to start building a joint venture with one of the big defense primes, one of the big four, I guess, to allow what?

[John Shahidi]

Let's go. Yeah, let's give it up for the defense primes. I know, I know we like Anderil.

[Jordi]

Here, but they don't get enough luck.

[John Shahidi]

They don't get enough love.

[Stephen]

I told an executive at northrop about the B2 bomber meme where it was feed me three days ago.

[John Shahidi]

Oh yeah, had they seen it?

[Stephen]

He thought it was really funny.

[John Shahidi]

Maybe good, maybe bad, I don't know.

[Jordi]

Like. Well, it was designed for that.

[John Shahidi]

Yeah, that's actually intended purpose. Yeah. So what is difficult about scaling the business now? You're raising more money. It doesn't sound like you're deploying that capital to build a fab. Are you just hiring more software engineers and AI scientists to build more efficient AI systems that can actually design better chips even? Are we beyond superhuman capabilities? But there's still a frontier where we can continue to advance. What is the longer term goal?

[Stephen]

So we have this business that we really started that we're going to build a joint Venture around in, in these, I guess, these RF components, which are. It's a bit of a niche business. And the few things we're going to be doing with this capital is one actually investing in, expanding out that joint venture, etc. There's going to be some capital investment from us. We do pay for fabrication, things like that. But also we're going to be moving into what you might think was the more high value area of the analog world, which are mixed signal chips. Broadcom and Marvell have made a lot of money over the last since the AI boom started. And a lot of that is because you need to communicate between two GPUs, these mixed signal components that Broadcom and Marvell and all these guys make. And that's where we're going after next, these mixed signal components, or IP blocks, and that's the next area we need to conquer. That's going to take quite a bit of hiring. It's going to. Whereas our fabrication for the defense stuff was in more reasonably less expensive nodes, some of the stuff is going to be much lower nodes. So any fabrication we do is going to be much more expensive. But in general, that's the next area we want to conquer. This mixed signal area, which is the core of what data centers are really using when they think about analog. It's a lot of hiring at some fabrication, might be some test equipment, though we're not sure about that, whether we want to borrow it or buy it. And, you know, we're hiring software engineers, AI engineers, chip designers, a lot of chip designers. And then obviously I need some business operations people to really come and help.

[John Shahidi]

Do deals, get steak dinners. Well, we are rooting for you. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Congrats on the round.

[Jordi]

Congrats.

[John Shahidi]

And we will talk to you so much. Have a good rest of your day.

[Stephen]

Thank you.

[John Shahidi]

All right, Bye bye.

[Jordi]

Cheers, Stephen.

[John Shahidi]

Up next, we have robots in space. But first, a startup idea. Bulletproof Silk charmeuse American streetwear. Are you familiar with this at all? You can.

[Jordi]

Silk. That's.

[John Shahidi]

They modified silk worms to make a material that's stronger than Kevlar. You can make a whole jacket out of it, which I think should be bulletproof. Maybe. I have no idea. I feel like I've been hearing about this, like, make a bulletproof vest that just looks like normal clothes for like decades and no one's ever figured it out. But I have no idea if it's actually possible. It sounds very sci fi. I would like to.

[Jordi]

I would like that. Well, speaking of sci fi. We have the founders of Icarus Robotics.

[John Shahidi]

Let's bring them in from the Restream reading room in Space tv. Welcome to the stream.

[Jordi]

What's going on guys?

[John Shahidi]

How you guys doing?

[Jordi]

Welcome. Hey guys, how are you?

[John Shahidi]

We're good. How's it going? Kick us off with an introduction. Who are you? What are you doing?

[Jordi]

I'm Ethan Brahas, co founder, CEO of Acres Robotics and we're building the labor force for space.

[John Shahidi]

Okay, enough to be partnered with NASA? We're lucky enough to be partnered with some of the commercial space stations and be sending robots to space.

[Jordi]

Sorry, I was talking over here. You said you're partnered with NASA, is that correct?

[John Shahidi]

Correct. Let's go. We're lucky enough to be working with some of the most amazing teams over there. That's amazing.

[Jordi]

Incredible.

[John Shahidi]

What do you want to do in space? Because labor in space, there's so many different things. Repair a solar panel, plug a hole. After an asteroid smashed into the side of my spaceship. Like what are the tractable problems that you need labor for in space?

[Jordi]

Let Jamie jump into that. He's the labor guy.

[John Shahidi]

Let's see it.

[Jordi]

Yeah, yeah.

[John Shahidi]

Well, look, we always say half of the world's GDP is labor and I think it's going to be a similar makeup in space. So one of the big things we realized is that essentially we're hyper reliant on astronaut time when we're in space.

And you know, an hour of astronaut.

Time costs $135,000 an hour. What these people are doing, they have PhDs, you know, they're amazingly skilled. They've all been, you know, Air Force pilots, all this kind of stuff. But ultimately what they end up doing is the logistics and the maintenance that keeps a lot of these habitats and platforms alive. So what we're actually doing is building these dexterous mobile robots, these free flying drones with robotic arms that can essentially go and be controlled from the ground and do a lot of the work. The boring and yeah, maybe tedious work, but the astronauts don't want to do so that they can focus on the revenue generating stuff. So that's the experimentation and the science and the manufacturing.

[Jordi]

That's cool. It's, it's funny to think about astronauts being like, yeah, I'm worried about losing my job to Icarus Robotics. And they're like, you guys are like, no, it's fine. You're going to be free. Your time is going to be freed up to do higher leverage things.

[John Shahidi]

But I bill at $135,000 an hour. That's my rate and I don't want to see any wage compression. I'd like a raise next year. Inflation's going up. I want to be at 140k a month.

[Jordi]

Unfortunately, I don't think that astronauts are taking home 135 an hour. Otherwise. Otherwise the average, you know, kid would be like, I want to be an ass.

[John Shahidi]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm not doing anything. I'm going astro all the way. So what does testing look like? I remember seeing all these videos of astronauts in pools. Can you test in water? Is that useful at all?

[Jordi]

Yeah, and you guys just raised 6 million. I'm assuming you don't have hardware in space yet, but this round will help you get there.

[John Shahidi]

Yeah, so that's great. We're actually on launch coming up by the end of 26, early 27 to the ISS.

[Jordi]

So this is full scale testing. We'll be up there for a year.

[John Shahidi]

Right now we have an entire week of crew time to test. But you're 100% correct. Testing on Earth is really, really tough.

[Jordi]

And the way that you do that is a few modes. One, you can set up an air bearing facility which gives you kind of like a frictionless environment. So think about this like a really.

[John Shahidi]

Scientific air hockey puck where, you know.

[Jordi]

The way that there's a thin film.

[John Shahidi]

Of air between the air hockey puck.

[Jordi]

And the actual table.

[John Shahidi]

Well, we do that with nitrogen, high.

[Jordi]

Compressed nitrogen and these things called the air bearing. And that gives us really great movement.

[John Shahidi]

In an XY plane.

[Jordi]

But you're entirely right. We were just down in Johnson checking out the neutral buoyancy pool, which I think is one of the largest pools in the country.

[John Shahidi]

And you can test there as well. But the most exciting test before you get to the ISS is actually the parabolic flight. So you might have seen those videos.

[Jordi]

Of people on the planes.

[John Shahidi]

And these planes go up and down.

[Jordi]

In parabolas and they go at the.

[John Shahidi]

Same speed of gravity downwards and that.

[Jordi]

Gives you free fall.

[John Shahidi]

And people miscontrue space and orbit and.

[Jordi]

That zero G feeling you actually get is actually free fall. And so we'll be doing one of.

[John Shahidi]

Those in the new year, which would be super exciting.

[Jordi]

So your robots, will they be primarily like inside the International Space Station?

[John Shahidi]

Are you gonna put them outside that.

[Jordi]

Dial, then go outside or are they multi purpose? How do you think about the kind of two use cases and are they even that different at all if you're a robot?

[John Shahidi]

Yeah.

So our plan is initially to start.

Off by having these robots do essentially.

What we call IVA operations.

So that's inside the vehicle. So our robot is designed basically to be propelled by fans and some other sort of like, niche propulsion mechanisms that will maybe show a little bit later.

Yeah.

So ultimately, what we wanted to do is deploy here first because it's actually an amazing place where you have the kind of guardrails of having humans in the loop, you have humans around it so that if anything goes really, really wrong, you know, it's not just going.

To float out into the middle of nowhere.

Someone can recover it.

So that's kind of of the big.

Reason why we went, you know, to go to the IVA first, because most people are looking over this. Really. That's amazing. Well, thank you so much for stopping by the show. We will talk to you later. Congratulations.

[Jordi]

Let us know. Let us know if there's. We have a pretty harsh environment here in the Ultra Dome. If you need some testing, just let us know. Big gong hit 6.1. 6.1 million.

[John Shahidi]

Yeah. 6.1.

[Jordi]

Nice work, guys.

[John Shahidi]

Congratulations.

[Jordi]

Congrats on the race. We'll see you at the Series A. Cheers.

[John Shahidi]

Innocent bystander says Tim Cook could secure his legacy with one move. Can you guess what it is, Jordy? A home printer that works. Home printer that works.

[Jordi]

Simple stuff.

[John Shahidi]

Crazy.

[Jordi]

Do you think Brother printer prints like 5 billion USD a year?

[John Shahidi]

I found a paper company. This is deeply ironic because we are, of course partnered with ramp.com. save time and money. Get rid of your paper receipts.

[Jordi]

That's right.

[John Shahidi]

But I found a paper company that's worth the same amount in market cap as Ramp.

[Jordi]

Not for long.

[John Shahidi]

Not for long. We're going to take them down. You're going to hear some really negative investigative journalism, some short reports about this paper company.

[Jordi]

It's funny. So Julie Chang in this reply says they're called Brother Laser printers.

[John Shahidi]

Yes. We love a brother.

[Jordi]

We run on Brother laser printers technology. Run on brother.

[John Shahidi]

Do you think that Apple's never done the home printer because of environmental concerns around, like, don't print, don't waste paper.

[Jordi]

Always. Obviously not the future.

[John Shahidi]

Also, I feel like this is one of those things where if I look way back over the crop, over the past, like 40 years of Apple history, I bet they did a printer at one point. Remember? They did. Didn't Apple do a camera, like a handheld digital camera at one point? That was its own device. So Apple's. Apple's dip their toes in here and there. But I would love to. I would love a proper home printer from Apple.

[Jordi]

Oh, wait. So according To Gemini. While it may seem surprising to many today, Apple was once a significant player in the computer printer market.

[John Shahidi]

What?

[Jordi]

For nearly two decades, the company designed and sold a range of printers, from early dot matrix models to groundbreaking laser printers that played a pivotal role in the desktop publishing revolution. They started in the late 70s with the apple Silent Type, a thermal printer. However, it was the Image Writer series produced in the early 1980s that became a popular companion to the Apple II.

[John Shahidi]

And then they got out of the business.

[Jordi]

Yeah, you can find these on ebay. Apple Writer 2 printer.

[John Shahidi]

It probably works fine. What's wrong? It looks Tim Cook should come out with a statement. Hey, they're out there. You want it so much. If it's not just just stated preference, if it's revealed preference, go get yourself an Apple printer. I guess it exists. In other news, UFC is happening on the south lawn of the White House and they took a page out of our set design. I see an ultra dome.

[Jordi]

It's time to trust.

[John Shahidi]

It's time to trust their trust up their trust.

[Jordi]

Don't go trust trust for trust with the White House.

[John Shahidi]

No, no, you do not want to go trust for trust with them.

[Jordi]

They got it.

[John Shahidi]

They got a real photo. Is this CGI or something? Like, what's going on here? They got to get artists.

[Jordi]

It's cg. I was looking at it for, right?

[John Shahidi]

Because like, this has not happened yet.

[Jordi]

But like, most obviously CGI in my life.

[John Shahidi]

I can't tell anymore. I don't even.

[Jordi]

You think they just set up a bunch of the 10,000 people?

[John Shahidi]

I don't know. I'm not a political person. I don't follow politics that closely, so I don't know. This might have happened. I'm also, also, it's double bad because I'm not into politics and I'm also not into sports. So you could have told me. Oh, yeah, UFC happened at the White House last weekend. I'd be like, oh, yeah, Yeah, I guess. I guess it did. Anyway, we have our next guest in the Restream waiting room. Austin is coming into the TVP in Ultradome. Welcome to the show, Austin. Good to finally have you. We've reacted to many posts on this show. Thank you for your service to the timeline. Good to see you.

[Austin]

Long, long time listener, first time caller.

[John Shahidi]

Thanks for hopping on. Give us the news. Big day. What's going on in your world? What you got for us?

[Austin]

Yeah, we just announced our $6 million seed round. That is gong worthy.

[Jordi]

Gong worthy.

[Austin]

I don't know if this is gong worthy. Also but as of, as of three days ago, we're officially a ramp customer.

[Jordi]

Let's go.

[John Shahidi]

Let'S go. That's amazing. There we go.

[Jordi]

Fired up. Let's go.

[John Shahidi]

Love it.

[Jordi]

That is amazing.

[John Shahidi]

Congratulations. Extremely bullish for your business.

[Jordi]

You had launched the product. This is another launch we were talking earlier. You got to always just be launching, launched again the story of the company.

[Austin]

We've had a wait list, we've had a waitlist since the beginning and so we've been a little constrained on how, how quickly we can add customers. We still are a bit but we've been adding a ton of customers all day today. And so we are launching to general availability for the first time today and we had about 15,000 people on the wait list who all got invited in today. And we still don't have free trials so everyone has to pay to use the product. But, but, but yeah, we're adding customers really quickly and, and I guess I have to talk about the product. So how is the people's secretary? So it is a secretary that is, is part human, part AI. So we have really sophisticated models that do all the things that a great assistant does on scheduling. It knows where you take your meetings, when you take your meetings, how you want buffers, how many meetings you want to take per day, subtle hints on priority of different types of meetings and can follow up to make sure meetings get scheduled and all of those types of things. And so it's powerful AI models that do all these things in a simulation. And then we have humans who are checking because our customers are founders, VCs, all sorts of folks who have a really low tolerance for mistakes on this type of scheduling. And so when our model they're not confident enough. We have a 247 team of humans who are checking these simulations and approving them before they go out or correcting them in this kind of like cursor for EAS system that we've built. So it's an extremely over engineered product to solve a relatively or seemingly simple problem. But it's actually pretty hard to get it it as good as a phenomenal executive assistant would. And so that's the product.

[John Shahidi]

How are you thinking about pricing? I feel like they're, you know, hiring a full time EA is expensive and we've seen the rise of these offshore services that are still like very expensive compared to like even a ChatGPT Pro Plus Giga subscription. Where do you want to play? Where do you think that there's opportunity to, to create a delta between what people pay and get value from.

[Austin]

Yeah, the framing is kind of interesting because it's like we have people who say they're switching from like a virtual assistant service that costs $3,000 a month to Howie because they were mostly using that for scheduling. And Howie's better at scheduling and it's 24 7. But then there's also people that are like, well, calendly is $12 a month. Why would I pay you guys more than that? And so it's been kind of interesting, but we. So our pricing is $35 a month for our base product and then, and then 145 for Howie Pro. And the main thing you get there is white label so you can rename your Howie and give it an email at your domain. And Turner Novak named his chamath.

[John Shahidi]

I was about to say was that you? I remember seeing that.

[Jordi]

I couldn't tell if that was a joke. But yeah, no, he has scheduling his.

[Austin]

Meetings and yeah, and then you can do like more sophisticated like complex preferences for on Tawi Pro. But. But the white label is the main thing people pay for. And so yeah, we've gotten definitely some pushback, especially without free trials. But overall for the right people, our product becomes instantly indispensable. And it's primarily people who schedule a ton of external meetings who just immediately cannot live without it once they start using it.

[Jordi]

How long do you think it will take for your internal software and the models to get good enough to never need that sort of like human verification layer?

[Austin]

So I think about it like self driving cars. It's like we the things like the a couple years ago every wh o on the street had a person in the car holding the steering wheel. Now for the most part they don't. But if you see a waymo on an icy road in Lake Tahoe, there's someone holding the steering wheel. And so we will keep pushing farther out and always be bringing tech, bringing like a product experience to the market that is not possible with today's technology where we have humans holding the steering wheel on the kind of next leading edge things. And more and more goes back to the model. So we are already giving more to the models than we were even like a month ago. But we'll keep adding complexity. So whether that's like travel booking, anything that like an EA does and then a lot of things that EAs don't do but that people could use in terms of like meta work about helping like pay attention to how you're spending your time and what your priorities are. And so there's a lot of things we can do that are going to be error prone and we will always be like willing to lean on humans to push out a little farther than would be possible with just the models.

[John Shahidi]

Have you thought about an even higher tier? I feel like there's maybe an opportunity to add human in the loop at that multi thousand dollar price point. But do you think that just like doesn't make any sense for the business would take you away from the true goal here? What are you thinking?

[Austin]

So we've used humans in a loop and they. So when we started doing that it was me doing this and I was like typing in Google Calendar API calls into the browser myself and basically and that was like in January and it would take me 30 minutes or so to complete many of these tasks. And now we have 2417. We have 60 people that do this and they can do it in. Do these tasks in like 90 seconds. So it's like they're quickly seeing the reasoning notes and all these things and the entire simulation of what happened and then they can chat with it. So they can say like oh, you got the time zone wrong. Like Doherty is normally in Pacific time, but he said, he said this is for like, like the, when they're doing the New York Stock Exchange thing. So, so it needs to be on Eastern time and then, and then it'll like re simulate in front of your eyes. So we've leaned a lot into speeding up the humans in completing these tasks to where we don't really need a steeper for what we're offering today. We don't need to charge more than we do. But it is totally possible that we will have something more advanced. But really it's just like how can we on the scale of hundreds of dollars a month or even less give millions of people the. An experience that is as good as what the top kind of.01% of people who have a great experience.

[Jordi]

Even better because for scheduling because somebody that like somebody could be on the other side of the world when if you had an ea they'd be sleeping. They can be messaging and scheduling time. They get that instant booking and confirmation and you get that 247 like, like live experience that no EA today can offer. You need a rotating crew of EAs. So I think yeah, it's, it's. Yeah. And the other thing too is like if, if you're like need to clear your schedule if it's like 11 at night and you realize okay, I need to do something in the morning, I'm not going to be able to do these meetings. You can like instantly just like hit a button and, and clear out the schedule and, and have it done in a way that's like thoughtful for the people. On the other side, how would, on the fundraising side, I mean I'm a small invest angel but, and when I, when you first pitched me this, I was like, that makes sense. It's like a simple idea. Big Tam, I think you can use AI to create something that is just remarkably better than like the current SaaS offerings. But in some ways it's like an obvious idea and that can be a double edged sword. Sometimes investors are like, oh, this is a no brainer. I would use this. I know a bunch of people that would use this. But then on the other side I'm sure you got the question of like, what if OpenAI does this? Or questions like that. So how is it navigating those kind of conversations?

[Austin]

Yeah, I mean earlier on I was more concerned because I've realized how unbelievably hard it is to actually execute on this product. And, and so, and I think that like there's a challenge. We spent all of last year which, you know, Jordi, like the thing was making mistakes. We were, I was apologizing, I spent 50 hours a week apologizing to customers for mistakes that we were making. But, but during that time we learned, we saw all of the kind of mistake patterns and we were able to kind of build our first version of a map of what we think the EA needs to do in all these different scenarios. And that doesn't exist in publicly available training data. It's like what happens in the assistance the executive assistant's head as they're doing scheduling and that's not publicly available anywhere. There's lots of training data, that's calendar data and email data. But the kind of like what happens in the, in the EA's brain isn't. And I think you have to put a pretty bad product into market in order to get a good one in this category. And that's tough for bigger companies like OpenAI to actually do and, and then to deliver a product as good as ours with human in the loop, like that's, that's also just, they want to, they want to bring something to, to a million customers on day one. And, and that's pretty tough to do even for us. It's been hard to scale this kind of human in the loop approach. And so I think it's like a valid question. Obviously like scheduling is one of the use Cases that comes up all the time. But I think by the time other folks start to get interested in it, we will be moved on to a lot more beyond just scheduling. So it's not overly a concern. But yeah, I mean, there's competitor products of ours and then lots of bigger companies that are trying to build things like this. There's one popular CEO that was tweeting about it just today right after our announcement about. About their assistant. And so it's. There are people trying to solve this problem and we think it's a problem that's worth solving.

[Jordi]

So a secretary for the people. Finally.

[John Shahidi]

We love it.

[Austin]

The last thing I want to say is this the name Secretary. I think you remember this, John, because I DM'd you about it. But a very early episode of TVPN, Jordi mentioned Howie and John, you were saying, like, it should be called secretary. They should buy secretary. Secretary.com.

[John Shahidi]

Yeah.

[Austin]

That planted a seed in my brain because a couple months later I was thinking like, I mean, you. You made a whole case for it. But for me it was just like, there's 10,000 products out there called AI Assistant, and there's a word that everyone in the world knows that describes the thing that we do. And we could be one of one. And so, yeah, so we're.

[John Shahidi]

What's the actual response been? Because I remember it was. It was just a funny, like, counter position.

[Jordi]

Secretary also means keeper of secrets. Right?

[John Shahidi]

Means keeper of the secrets. We have a secretary of the war, secretary of the Interior. Like, it's a very high status position in dc, but yeah, not many brands are using it. Have any of the. Have any of the customers been like, I don't. I don't get it. Or does it actually land pretty well?

No.

[Austin]

I mean, yeah. Cause like Jordi, some people said that they thought we'd get canceled for using it.

[John Shahidi]

That it.

[Austin]

Because it's like too kind of.

[John Shahidi]

That's different than actually getting angry messages. Like somebody can say, I think you will get angry messages. But did you get angry messages? Yes.

[Austin]

No, so far, like. And yeah, honestly, like, it's been all positive and we leaned into it. The launch video is like showing. Is kind of starts out in the. With a sort of 1950s style secretary. By the end, she's kind of modernized and she's a boss, which is kind of same arc that Christina Hendrick's character goes through in Mad Men where she's like a secretary who's not treated well. And by the end she's like equity holder in the business and is a boss. And so, yeah, so so far it's been extremely positive and we're really excited.

[John Shahidi]

Cool. Yeah. Always room to carve out, like, a different. A different. Like, define the category. I mean, cognition did this. Didn't they, like, kind of create the, like, the. The initial, like, coding agent, like the AI software engineer was like, what? Went super viral because people were like this. It doesn't count. And they're like, okay, well, at least you're talking about us. And then they debated it, and now people are like, yeah, of course coding agents exist. It's a category. Anyway, thank you so much for hopping on the show.

[Jordi]

Awesome progress.

[John Shahidi]

Great catching up with you, excited for more.

[Austin]

Thank you so much for having me.

[John Shahidi]

Love to have you back soon. We'll talk to you soon.

[Jordi]

You're the man, Austin.

[John Shahidi]

Bye.

[Jordi]

Cheers.

[Austin]

See you guys.

[John Shahidi]

Did you see this image of the monks in orange robes at the iPhone 17 Pro launch?

[Jordi]

Yes, I did. I thought this was so good. They're like, finally.

[John Shahidi]

What did you think was good about it? Did you think it was a real photo?

[Jordi]

Is it AI?

[John Shahidi]

It's AI, maybe. Oh, only John falls for ufc. AI.

[Jordi]

I mean, this is on another level. You wanted it to be true. This is great.

[John Shahidi]

This is a remarkable AI image.

[Jordi]

Honestly, it looks very.

[John Shahidi]

I honestly can't really clock it. The only reason I. When you shared it, I was like, this is real.

[Jordi]

You think?

[John Shahidi]

Then I saw a community note on it that said the picture is clearly AI generated. When you look at the bottom left.

[Jordi]

The community note could be like, orange iPhones huge sign.

[John Shahidi]

It's really cool. It's a really cool idea that they'd be into the orange iPhone, but it does seem like fake news. In other news, tomorrow is D day on X. If you're a bot. If you're a. If you're a spammer and you're running a bot network on X, Nikita Beer is coming for you. Tuesday's D Day. Nikita Beer will be wiping out 50 to 60% of all bots algorithmically. Then two weeks after that, we will reduce it another 25% with changes to account requirements. Very exciting news. X is getting cleaner, and Nikita continues to be on an absolute run over there. I've been very pleased with the algorithm, you see.

[Jordi]

Closing kind of a black pill. But Patek will be raising their prices by 15% today. Omega Cartier will be going up by 8 to 15% as well.

[John Shahidi]

Well, head over.

[Jordi]

Absolutely brutal. GetBezel.com and before this gets priced in, because unfortunately this. The. These kind of price changes get priced into the secondary market pretty quickly, but so the price of the brick.

[John Shahidi]

Make a move. There's never a bad time to pull the trigger on an aquanaut. Thank you for tuning in today. We had a great show. We enjoyed hanging out with all you in the chat. Thank you to John Exley for hanging out. Thanks to Connor P.S. for the feedback about the Gong hits. I'm working on it. I'm getting better every day. And thank you to Goldrock AI for hanging out. Goldrock. I didn't realize this. It's an ad. I saw Goldrock in the X chat with a full tagline of what the company does. Underrated strategy. If you're a company and you want to promote your business, make it your tagline. Hop in the TVPN live chat. Make some good comments. We're going to have to say your name out loud. We'll be saying your brand name.

[Jordi]

That's right on the show.

[John Shahidi]

Bobby Kosmik, as always, thanks for holding it down over at Twitch. We appreciate you and thank you to Turbo Puffer. See you tomorrow. Goodbye.

[Jordi]

Have a great day. See ya.

[John Shahidi]

Bye. It.