NEWSMAX

Is now still early at base power. You gave an amazing answer. I wanted to ask you live so everyone else could hear it. Well, you know, we are in the middle of a paradigm shift in the energy industry. And the last 50 years of energy have really been defined by coal and natural gas. And we believe the next 50 years are going to be defined by solar and storage. And the existing companies in the space are not necessarily technology focus, engineering led or R and D driven. And we are exactly that. Right. So we are the modern technology company oriented around this new paradigm. And we think the opportunity is to become the largest energy technology company in the world built on this new paradigm of solar and storage, built around this strategy of engineering led, technology driven and R and D focus. So we're going to deploy hundreds of gigawatts, hopefully over the next couple of years in Texas, in the US across the globe, in other countries as well. It's a really exciting time to be at the company and it's really exciting time to be building in power. What does the supply chain look like today?

But I think it has to be a combination of these things. And I would say even if, you know, reskilling is something we should clearly do and make a huge investment in from both the public and the private front, it's not enough, Right. When you think about the demand in this race where as Congressman Moliner said, like we cannot lose because it represents the future productivity of the global economy, it is happening very quickly. Right. And so even if we invest in upskilling, which we should do with startups, with universities, with government programs, we need like 10 times as many electricians like next year, Right. If you just think about the capacity growth. And so there are some very real limits to how quickly you can move capability in humans. And so I think we need to go to automation for parts of this. Yeah. Jordy, I'm curious if you've picked up on.

That would be amazing. Yeah, the, the, the experimentation on the moon seems super important because NASA's great at doing science and the uneconomical things. And if we can go get some data on what makes sense on the moon, then industry can flow. Elon put out this presentation about a mass driver on the moon. I think you've been talking about this for a while and it feels like this is years away. But anything we can do to de. Risk that, to understand is that the thing that we should be doing with Starship and Optimus, then there will be more excitement. But I want to know from your persp, there is a new, like, crazy thing going on in space. The mass driver on the moon. Does that make your job easier in Varda because you're like, just doing biopharmaceuticals in space now? Yeah, it does make it a lot easier in that if you think about what it takes to like, make a drug in space. Yeah. There's for sure some super complicated ingredients that we kind of have to bring from the ground. There's a lot that we do up there, though, that like, requires like, water just to, like, flush out the bioreactor after each run. Sure. Right now we just bring the water from Earth. As you can imagine, bringing water from Earth up on a rocket into a satellite, pretty damn expensive mining water on the surface of the moon, sending that for free via, like a mass driver directly to our station in low Earth orbit. That's a heck of a lot cheaper. And so I get really excited by some of these, like, lunar things in that it's not a place where you can do microgravity manufacturing because there is gravity on the moon, so it kind of destroys the whole point. But there's a bunch of these, like, you know, sort of simpler precursor things. Like, you know, the area that I think will take a long time is like, not going to be making, I think, like solar panels or chips, you know, anytime soon on the Moon. Like, that stuff's pretty complicated, but like basic metal structures, water, you know, propellant, things like that, that'll actually, I think, like, happen relatively near term. Like, I don't think it'd be crazy to imagine that in like 2027, there's going to be like a rover that has a little like, ice melting operation that then like, turns that ice potentially into like, you know, liquid hydrogen that a future starship might use for fuel. Right. Like, that is actually like, doable literally next year. Which, by the way, is like, an insane thing to say. It's like, literally actually possible to make, like, hydrogen fuel on the moon with, like, what we are currently doing today. That is not sci fi. Yeah, yeah, that's crazy. Talk to me about.

But I think that, yeah, we will see. Anyone that was an energy company is becoming an AI company. But I think that's naturally. I think that's natural. I think that it's not like a hard pivot. I would frame it the other way that AI is becoming an energy industry. I think that in Silicon Valley it's almost this Copernican principle where people used to believe that the world revolved around the sun. Sorry, revolved around the Earth and then realized that it revolves around the sun, at least our solar system. I think that there's a Silicon Valley parallel where people think that all of technology, all of industry revolves around Silicon Valley, but it's actually kind of the opposite. Silicon Valley is Earth and there's these much bigger forces and bodies, which includes energy and chemicals industry, these giant supply chains, semiconductor industry, which has been around for a very long time. It was pretty advanced and people in Silicon Valley forgot about it. Even though we played a big role in building it, producing mirrors for the lithography machines. That's something that you're never going to see talked about in Silicon Valley until now. Yeah, or making chemicals to make ultra pure wafers. And anyways, I don't like the language of other industries pivoting into AI. I actually think it's the opposite. I think it's like Silicon Valley is waking up from its toddlerhood and realizing that there were these giant industries that we underestimated and they're actually really freaking good at what they do. And we can all benefit by working together. And so I just. It's a different twist on how you even ask the question. But yes, there are many industries merging together and hardware is coming back just to the root of every. The way you think about every business in the Valley. Last question for me.

Amazing. Sorry, I was cutting you off. What is the, what else should people be tracking in space? Everyone's interested in space data centers, everyone's interested in, you know, manufacturing stuff in space. Is there like a next. Next thing that you're starting to hear rumblings of either in the academic community or in the early stage startup? I've seen some stuff about like put solar panels up there, beam down the energy. It feels like it's pretty useful. If you have the energy up there, just do stuff up there. But what else are you interested in? In exploring or at least like hearing a pitch for? I think one macro trend that I point out and then I'll describe some pitches. The macro trend is like, look, when you look at the like market caps of all space companies before today that were like publicly traded. Yeah. You're talking about maybe like, you know, 15, 20, 25 billion, like total. Yeah. SpaceX is about to go out at anywhere from like a 1 to $2 trillion valuation. Just the amount of capital flows that are about to happen that are both people obviously buying into Space X, folks that are rotating from their Space X position to potentially next gen sort of application areas that they're interested in, this entire field is just going to have a like, huge amount of attention, you know, basically brought to it. Yeah. And so, yeah, we're definitely paying attention to the next application areas. I like to think of space in some ways like a highway where it's like, you know, when you first only had a handful of cars there, everybody kind of had to bring their own gas tank. Once you got thousands of cars up there, well now all of a sudden you can start to invest into a gas station. Right. And start to have supply chains around it. Heck, even like, you know, there's people starting to think about not just beaming solar power down to the earth, but also beaming solar power to other satellites. And so you think about like, what do power utilities look like? You know, folks like Bridget Mendler at Northwood that are thinking about, okay, Starlink provides Internet to everybody on the ground, but like at Varda, we don't have Internet on our satellite. We get to talk to it like for, you know, 15, 30 minutes, once every three and a half hours. Bridget Mendeler is hopefully going to make it so that I have 24,7 Internet basically in space and can talk to my satellite whenever. And so I think we think about these things as sort of like there's like layers of infrastructure and as you build up each layer of reusable rockets, space factories, gas stations, ground stations. Now you start to get to do the application layers on top of those. And so I look forward to, I think one day you'll see founders lead around in a lunar ice mining operation. I don't think, you know, we're quite ready for that in terms of all the infrastructure. But like, I also don't think that's like 10 years away. Like, I would bet that in the next five years we lead a like ten plus million dollar financing round into a lunar ice mining operation. I can't wait for it. There's also a satellite bus company that you.

Education. How have you been talking to founders in your portfolio, founders you work with, about the SaaS apocalypse if they're in tech, but they're not a foundation lab, a neo lab, and they're watching maybe the dinosaur that they were eating one bite at a time, the multiples compressing over there. And they're sort of thinking about their strategy, how AI native they should be, what, what they should do, how they should think about their valuation. What type of conversations are you having around that? One of the most useful things a board member can do is provide market context and like actually sound the, the red alarm once in a very long while. Right. And so here I think if, if people have not dramatically changed their strategy according to what's happening in the market with capability in software over the last three or four years, like the vast majority of them have a real problem. And so I would like to think that the companies that we work with know that and a lot of really Smart founders and CEOs know that. But one thing, one distinction I would draw is I don't think the entire world collapses into a few labs. I think the world is very big in terms of capabilities we need to go work on from getting people their, you know, prescription drug treatments. With companies like in health to work in AI or contact center like Harvey and C era. It is not clear at all to me that that is in the pathway of the research work that the labs want to do and the largely productivity and code focused products that they've built. Yeah.

Well, we are in the middle of a paradigm shift in the energy industry. And the last 50 years of energy have really been defined by coal and natural gas. And we believe the next 50 years are going to be defined by solar and storage. The existing companies in this space are not necessarily technology focused, engineering led or R and D driven. And we are exactly that. We are the modern technology company oriented around this new paradigm. And we think the opportunity is to become the largest energy technology company in the world built on this new paradigm of solar and storage, built around this strategy of engineering led, technology driven and R and D focus. So we're going to deploy hundreds of gigawatts, hopefully over the next couple of years in Texas, in the US across the globe, and other in other countries as well. It's a really exciting time to be at the company, and it's really exciting time to be building in power.

So anyway, sorry, I just had to make that point in terms of where we are. I wrote a hardware manifesto about three and a half years ago that I sent internally at Sequoia and I sent it probably to like 100 people in Silicon Valley, you know, around then. But I never posted it publicly because felt like there was too much alpha in it and kind of the, it was kind of like a personal thing, you know, it's like trying to make money for my firm and my friends. Sure, any. Anyways, the core argument I made was a few things, but like I was trying to argue that in the case of Sequoia, 50 year old firm at the time, now 54 years old, for the first 25 years of the firm we made almost all of our money in hardware. For the last 25 years we made almost all of our money in software. I was trying to argue that. I think the next 25 years we're going to make our money in hardware again. Like something like AI is unbelievable. One of the biggest revolutions ever. Like literally in this essay I said that I think a lot of the money in the I will be made at the hardware layer. And as we, as we enter kind of a world where digital intelligence is abundance before physical intelligence, like my personal forecast is, I think the abundance of digital intelligence is about 10 years ahead of physical intelligence. Not in terms of the state of the art of what it can do, but in terms of the full rollout, like the total deployment or as Daria would say, the diffusion rate. I think there's this 10 year moment where hardware is not commodified at all and software will be. And a couple of the other points I made, one is that if you just think logically, every software revolution is preceded by a hardware revolution. Like to have the iOS app store that enabled Uber and Doordash and all these great companies, you needed to have the iPhone. The iPhone took 20 years of, you know, you needed Qualcomm, you needed Broadcom, you needed fiber layouts, you needed 4G, you needed, you know, CPU is getting smaller and you know, battery, touchscreen, you need battery density getting better, etc. This true for any software revolution, literally by definition is preceded by a hardware revolution. And this AI revolution, like we're seeing what it can do from the software layer, but it's still limited by hardware. I think that's like at least 10 more years. And then when you go beyond that, I think we're kind of. Next point is I think we're entering like a phase transition where the hardware we were doing for a long time was kind of all following Moore's Law. It was all like the branching out of this decision in the mid-1950s to go all in on the silicon supply chain. And that has created magic. There's still a couple orders of magnitude of juice to squeeze, but, you know, we hit fundamental physics law, like, limits Dennard scaling, things like that, that I think this tech tree is kind of branching into humanoid robots, into silicon photonics, into orbital data centers, you know, all these new hardware areas where there's going to be 20 plus years of progress we get to make, and there's going to be, you know, just incredible businesses built on the back of this. And a lot of dumpster fires. Yeah. Are you seeing hardware companies pivot into AI? We've about talked.

You know, we, we're building a vertically integrated technology company and we genuinely believe it can be one of the largest companies in the world. And to do that, we're going to have, you know, a really compelling consumer brand, a manufacturing organization, a design engineering organization, a deployments organization. So, yes, we're hiring tons of electricians, we're hiring warehouse technicians. It's going to take a village. And it's really, you know, one of the most fun parts of the job. We've got, I think, you know, one of the best teams in technology and, you know, it's a lot of fun to work with them. Yeah. I can't wait to visit. Yeah. What has be our first stop building a company in Texas? That's my last question. It's, it's an incredibly good place to build. Texas is very pro business. And I, you know, note to all you founders out there on the coast. Come on down to Texas. We'd love to have you. I picked up a lot of interesting neighbors in the last couple of weeks and months and we hope more people come down and come build with us in Austin. Fantastic. Well, have a great rest of Hill and Valley and we will talk to you soon. Great to see you. Thanks, everyone. Always a pleasure. Goodbye. Cheers. Bye. Well, that concludes our Hill and Valley coverage for today. I got a great, I got a great post from Gary Tan we can cap the show off with. He says, I guess the amazing thing that my haters don't understand is you have no idea how much I eat your hate for breakfast. I am uniquely a person who is driven by all the energy you give me in particular. Love it. Love it. Primejun says, I like funny G Stack Gary better than Eminem. Gary, this is fantastic. And congrats to Gary Tan on another YC Demo day which happened today. We're going to be recapping it with him and some other folks from YC over the coming days. In reviewing the companies that come out of that batch, I saw some news from some folks who were writing checks and investing in some companies. There's a lot of exciting stuff coming out of YC Demo Day 2026. And we'll end the show with a note from Naval. It says a lot of software is about to get a lot better right before it becomes unnecessary. Interesting. What does he mean by this? Who knows? Who knows? But it's provocative. We'll let you figure it out. Well, thank you for tuning in. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter tvpn.com and we will see you tomorrow. Tomorrow at 11aM Sharp, Pacific time. Throw some flashbangs. We love you. Get ready tomorrow.

A muscle that the west has largely lost in the last few years. Really, you have to find it again, I think. Interesting. I love that tour of your office. There was something interesting about your company culture. You had something pinned to the wall or a pole. Can you talk a little bit about the company culture? You might have to be more specific. We do have a sign on the wall that says we do this not because it's easy, but because we thought it was easy. Didn't you have, like, hundred dollar bills? Oh, yeah. Explain that. Yeah. Okay. So, I mean, from the perspective of a business owner and operator, we have basically fixed costs, and then we have variable costs. And the fixed costs are things like payroll and rent and all the rest. And then the variable costs are when my engineers spend a lot of money buying a machine, which I actually like, because at the end of the day, we're trying to maximize output per input, and the fixed costs buy you zero output. They're just all costs. And so I have this ability to kind of increase people's salary on a kind of biweekly basis, much the same way that the Nucor, the steel. American Steel company does, by agreeing to a series of milestones in advance. And then if we hit them, which we do about a third of the time, everyone gets. Basically, the person who hit them gets to hand out the fake money to everyone. We write on it what it was for, and then the cash lands in your account and you go and spend it and feel good about yourself. But then the. The money, you stick up by your computer and it reminds you that even though we're kind of in this interminable grind to try and make this technology work, and sometimes you have weeks and even months of really banging your head against the wall, in the past, you were able to succeed doing almost impossible things on impossible timelines and budgets. And you can do it again, and you will do it again. It's really important to internalize that. You just got to keep on grinding away until you solve the problem mentality. Yeah, I love it. It's such a great visual representation of progress. Well, conc.

Mouth, I suppose. Anyway, there's plenty of other news while we wait for our next guest to join. Let's see what else is in the news. Have you heard, speaking of manufacturing, can we pull up this video of this gentleman who runs a bowling alley? Because this is a fascinating case study in the American manufacturing and industrial capabilities. Listen to this video. Jordi, I don't think you've seen this. People always ask me, what's the hardest part about owning a bowling alley. It's not managing a bar or even the crazy property taxes on a building this big. It's actually these machines. These are Brunswick's A2 pinsetters built in the 1960s. 1960s, running here for almost a decade. Each machine has over 2,000 moving parts. That's the problem. Just like anything their age, they start breaking down. And while the parts are becoming hard to find, the mechanics who grew up servicing these are even more rare. Which is why we're starting to see more and more houses convert to the string pin machine. But just like any industry, innovation is often met with skepticism. Bowlers claim. So they're going to potentially switch to pin setters that have strings which bowlers don't like are much more fun to bow on. The crash and the free fall. We don't know how to make bowling machines. We actually don't know how to make bowling machines in this country anymore. Only American dynamism category I care about. Yeah, move over general. Sorry, General matters. Yeah, sorry, Andre. This needs. This needs to come. We need the Boeing Company of America. That's the only category that I approve of. A new name in that style. But it does tell a very interesting story because these niche long tail manufacturing organizations are very difficult. There's a whole bunch of bespoke gears and switches and electronics and all sorts of different machinery in there that's been difficult to make. And it is a victim of the deindustrialization process that we've been suffering through for the last few decades. But it was just interesting to see it in like a viral Instagram reel. Anyway, we have our next guest, Sarah Guo from Conviction in the Restream waiting room. Let's bring her in.

With modern technology, you can synthesize as much synthetic fuel as you could possibly want using nothing but sunlight and air. And that's what we're working on. And so obviously there's like a pretty sizable R and D effort because this capacity does not exist at scale in America yet. Where are you in the research and development cycle versus deployment cycle versus testing scaling? How are you thinking about the next few years of the business? Yeah, that's a great question. Technology has actually been around in one form or another for more than a century. But the real challenge is innovating on cost because America's frac has got really good at making oil and gas quite cheap, which is great for all of us. But if we want to participate in that market, we've got to match them on price as far as participation goes. We've been hard at work for more than four years now on R and D and we've really basically managed to solve all the major technical problems. We're right now in the process of building and integrating full scale system on our test site in, in Burbank. And actually this is breaking news here on tvpn. As far as the wide world is concerned, we're in the. We've broken ground on a test site in the desert as well. So we'll be. That's great news. Yes. What they tell you about permitting California is mostly true, but it is, you can prevail and get through. Which we've been able to do with help of our, of our friends and partners over at Kern County. Permitting, which is super helpful of them, really appreciate it. It's very, very exciting. We get to go out in the desert and kind of do the vision quest and actually build this thing and have real honest to God, synthetic methane and methanol in our hands from sunlight. Kind of the whole process, end to end. It's a really exciting thing. It's amazing.

Not going to go into that whole thing, but I think that, yeah, we will see. Anyone that was an energy company is becoming an AI company. But I think that's naturally, I think that's natural. I think that this, it's not like a hard pivot. I would frame it the other way that AI is becoming an energy industry. I think that in Silicon Valley, like it's almost this Copernican principle where people used to believe that the world revolved around the sun, or, sorry, revolved around the Earth, and then, you know, realize that it revolves around the sun, at least our solar system. I think that there's a Silicon Valley parallel where people think that all of technology, all of industry revolves around Silicon Valley, but it's actually kind of the opposite. Silicon Valley is Earth and there's these much bigger things, forces and bodies, which includes energy and chemicals industry, these giant supply chains, semiconductor industry, which has been around for a very long time. It was pretty advanced and people in Silicon Valley forgot about it. Even though we played a big role in building it, producing mirrors for the lithography machines. That's something that you're never going to see talked about in Silicon Valley until now. Yeah, or making chemicals to make ultra pure wafers. And anyways, I don't like the language of other industries pivoting into AI. I actually think it's the opposite. I think it's like Silicon Valley is waking up from its toddlerhood and realizing that there were these giant industries that we underestimated and they're actually really freaking good at what they do. And we can all benefit by working together. And so I just. It's a different twist on how you even ask the question. But yes, there are many industries merging together and hardware is coming back just to the root of every, the way you think about every business in the Valley.

How do you. How do you think about this scaling to just like the founders that you work with? Broadly, as you guys know, I jump around a lot just going back to the mass driver. Sure. I'll just say one thing that I think people don't understand about it, that I was. I was trying to make this point. I didn't make it very clearly. I think the single hardest thing we're about to have done, which is Starship and Optimus. Yeah. I think that what you actually build on the moon is not very hard. Like the mass driver itself is not very hard. Building fabs and the entire supply chain to do that is a lot of work. But we've done it on Earth and so it's like I think we're about to having all the raw ingredients put together and then it's just going to take a lot of time and effort to do it. But I think people are probably overestimating how much future difficulty is required and underestimating how much past difficulty we've already kind of surpassed. Yeah. So anyway, sorry, I just had to make that point in terms of where we are. I wrote a hardware man, I.

To what's happening in your industry. And if you're that fast, I think it'll be a long time before our competitors have anything comparable. Are Flexboard employees allowed to buy tariff refunds? I don't know if our employees are, but Flexport is. We will be announcing. No, I can't announce it right now, but we will be announcing a program to buy people's refunds at a discount and get them cash up front. Yeah. Makes sense for businesses. So that's something we're actively working on. It's a very hot market right now, but I think we can build something unique because, you know, the secondary market for this is very interesting. It was trading in the $0.20 on the dollar range. 20, $0.25. And then the day of the Supreme Court ruling, it went to 50 cents. And it's now in the 60s and even I'm hearing some trades in the 70s, if your claim is big enough, 70 cents on the dollar to get paid now. But I think those guys are going to run into real problems because they have an agency problem. Like if you're a hedge fund, you bought someone's tariff refund. How hard is that guy going to work to actually go get the refund? When push comes to shove, like, you're going to have to file paperwork and the government's going to reject your claim, and then you got to file more paperwork. Oh. Because the original owner of the refund still has to go fight for it, but they've already sold it, so they're not incentivized to go work. Whereas, like, it's not like you're trading the claim and the hedge fund can go fight it. Because I feel like the hedge fund would be very motivated to get that claim, but they don't have the right to it anymore. Ultimately, it's the original importer that still has to go get the claim. And so we're going to be there to hold your, you know, hold the hand and make sure we actually go get the claim. So I think we're uniquely positioned to help with that. And that's very kind of create the trust across the market. So, yeah, we're going to try to launch that soon. We're very active right now. Yeah. Talk to me about the other AI initiatives. Yeah. What's your approach? Is it to just tell every employee, like, buy as many AI products as you can do?

Go to. Back to the timeline. There was a very important post in here that we need to see. A gentleman got a tattoo that we need to investigate. So someone got a 20, 20, 20, 26 Louis Vuitton glasses as a tattoo. And we will have to pull up this video because a lot of people have been wondering what tattoo they should get as a first tattoo. And Louis Vuitton glasses looks great. It looks great. And. And I like the monogram across the forehead, too. This is AD space that has previously been unconsidered. No one's. No one's thought about this before. NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman announced a $20 billion plan to build a permanent US base on the moon. We can move on from the Louis Vuitton glasses. Thank you. Over the next seven years, NASA is canceling plans to deploy a space station into lunar orbit. The quote here is NASA is committed to achieving the near impossible once again to return to the moon before the end of President Trump's term, build a moon base, establish an enduring presence, and do the other things needed to ensure American leadership in space. Did he say anything about making it a state? Not yet, but there are some very interesting. The moon is sort of up for grabs. Whoever lands there first. Whenever you land, you kick up a bunch of dust. And you, by default, in international space law, you sort of claim, like, a number of miles in every direction that you land. And so you can sort of just rush the moon. This is a controversial strategy, but let's see how it plays out for us. No, no, no. So you can't claim the moon according to space law, which is sort of flimsy, but you can't just say, hey, we planted the flag, it's ours, or reclaim this part of the territory. But when you land, by law, I can't just land on top of you because I would just destroy whatever you built. And so if I build up a bunch of stuff, then I sort of claimed it. And so there is a new space race afoot.

What happened to the hoverboards, by the way? They just disappeared. Yeah, it came and went so fast, you can't commute on them. If there's any cracks in the street, you fall on your face. It's not good. You need. You need to be in a warehouse. Basically, there's the only. Only use case. Were you a hoverboard user, John? We had a hoverboard. You know, Rob. He actually injured himself on one. It was very dramatic at the office. Rob from Soyle. Yes. And then we had a ban issued on hoverboards in the office because we were like. I don't know if our we. You have a photo of Rob on a. I think I do. Text me that, please. Yes.

We have a. Yeah, we're in this incredible moment. I declared Code Red a few months ago around AI, because what we saw, we built this product for AI audit of customs back in October. We launched it in October of last year. And basically what we do, we're a customs brokerage. We help people clear customs. So we built this. And as a customs brokerage, you have to review. We review about 5% of all customs entries a second time. With a human compliance team. Yeah. And our error rate in that process was 1.8%. It doesn't mean that we violated customs law 1.8% of the time. Just to clarify. It's like, oh, maybe we didn't declare like some free trade agreement that it was eligible for. Sure. Etc. Those types of things. So we then built. In October we launched this AI auditor. So now we audit 100% of entries before we transmit it to the government. Yeah. And then by November, we started to see the data. We were, we had gotten our error rate down to 0.2%. So it's 10 times better than the humans are. That's crazy. And that was like the first giant wake up call. You're like, oh my God. And there's a lot of work at our company that looks like a customs audit. Totally. Like, you're like wrangling unstructured data, doing some reasoning about it, submitting, moving documents around, submitting data to a government or some other party. So by early Q1, as you're like, oh, it's Code Red. We have to be the company that takes AI and automates and does everything with AI and with AI agents in particular in this industry. And we have massive, like, if we don't do it, it's only because of ourselves. Like, I'm paranoid as hell, sure that we're like a boomer company that can't get this done. Because we've got a lot of people who don't have these skill set and like a lot of people who are set in their ways. And so I've been just like leading from the front on this. We've got small teams that are kind of really cracked and building stuff and some proofs of concept where the AI agents can do most of the work that people do. And we're telling everyone at Flexport like, yo, this is the new reality of our business. And if you're not at the head of the curve in learning how to use AI, how to automate work, how to make yourself more productive. Yeah, like, let's just live in reality. Everybody's job's at risk, including mine. Like, if I'm not able to lead from the front and be the best at this, then someone else needs to be the CEO.

AI. I'm just gonna. We gotta apply AI everywhere in our business. And then since then, we had the tariffs get overturned, and now this straight of Hormuz. And I've been asked to do press, like, more than in my whole life ever combined, almost. So. But I, you know, impact. The. The impact on container shipping, which is what a lot of people think about Flexboard, is relatively negligible. Like, prices have gone up, but other than that, it's not that big of a deal. Yes. The reality is that Strait of Hormuz and the Persian Gulf is a cul de sac. It's. It's really not that important that you go in there. Yeah. For container shipping, it's a huge deal for oil. And so the price increases due to fuel costs. Fuel costs. And, like, people get away with what they can get away with in logistics. So some of it is just like, you know, disruption. Let's raise the prices. Sure, sure. The bigger impact is actually on the air freight market. Okay. Where the Middle Eastern airlines own an up about 18% of the world's air cargo capacity. So airfreight prices have doubled. And we're a big air freight provider too, so that's been helping companies navigate that, especially air freight. Asia to Europe is really disrupted. A lot of that would fly into Dubai and kind of get. Planes would refuel, get transshipped, and then sent on. So we've actually built, like, a new product that's actually working really well, where we ship cargo via ocean from Asia to Los Angeles, and then hotshot truck it to LAX and put it on a plane to Europe, which is very strange, but apparently it saves people a lot of money and time versus air freight. Direct formation. What does hotshot mean? It's like, it's this concept where the truck doesn't make any stops. It just goes directly to the. Okay, I love it. I might have made that up. I know. It sounds good to me. Talk to me about.

To blame. Who did it. In the Aftermath, a senior AirPods executive was reassigned the. I'm laughing because I. So I asked Jordy this morning. I said, okay. I gave him, like, the overall broad strokes of what happened. And what was your first recommendation for? Shut down both product lines. Shut down both product lines. Shut down both product lines. Just shut down both entirely. And then I would have focused on coming out with a pair of wired headsets made of wood, using horse hair for the actual connectivity. Yeah, yeah. And then no wires at all. Yeah. And then sort of like with a leather. Certainly no plastics. No macro plastics or microplastics. Yeah. Probably creating some, like. Some type of, like, tallow to make. To make it more comfortable. You don't want the wood to get splinter, so you lubricate your ear canal with beef talon. Just go back to basic. Introducing AirPod. Caveman. Caveman. Yeah. Yeah. That's what you. That's where I would have started. That's where you would have started. Okay. But then I went to Jordan and I said,

April 1st. Wow. Apple was founded on April Fool's Day. That's amazing. That's a great date. Apple stock made everyone at the top of its org chart fabulously wealthy. And many are entering the stage of life that often inspires people to prioritize family spending some time, finally spending some time with their families instead of the next generation of iPhones. In his response to the employee's question, Tim Cook, the company's 65 year old CEO, struck an atypically reflective tone. He said, when people get to a certain age, some, he said, are going to retire. Letting the word some hang out there in a way that suggested he wasn't talking about himself, drawing laughter from the audience. It's like some people, they can't hang. But look at Warren Buffett, 65 to 95, most productive era of his career. Tim Cook generational run starts now. I like the idea of Cook for the next 30 years. I'm still bullish Tim Cook. I mean, I love John Ternus, but I think, I think the 30 year run from Tim Cook going 65 to 95 would be particularly fun to watch. Anyway, Tim Cook was going to retire. Then he started experimenting with some Chinese peps. Oh, you think that's what's going on? He's always looked good. Now he's like, I actually got another few decades in me. I hope so. He's like, actually, it's BBC 157 having remarkable effects on me. So he said, the thing we have to do is to make sure that Apple moves on, reaches the next level and the next level and the next level. Cook added. And he said he spends a lot of time thinking about who's in the room in 5, 10, 15 years. I'm obsessed with this. This is Tim Cook at his best. This guy can't leave it, can't leave. He's firing me up here. I'm just listening to senra. Yes, it's amazing. So Cook, who's run Apple since taking over from co founder Steve Jobs in 2011, probably doesn't expect to be in the room himself for another 15 years. But I do. I'm betting on him. While he's given no indication of an imminent transition, he's made it clear he wants his heir to come from within the company so he can serve as a mentor. The central candidate is John Ternus, senior vice president for hardware engineering, who oversees development of the devices that generate roughly 80% of Apple's revenue. At 50, Ternus is also younger than many of the company's other senior leaders. Meaning he could be in the top job longer. Ternus has spent about half of his life at Apple, half of his life generational run. He cut his teeth developing computer monitors, oversaw product design for the original iPad, and eventually took over development of the Mac, getting the top hardware engineering role in 2021. He's overseen an expansion in Apple's product lineup, improving quality and focusing on functional improvements around battery life, performance and connectivity. Earlier this month, when Apple held an event in New York to announce the MacBook Neo, a $599 laptop, it was Turnus, not.

I mean, if it has a motor. You've seen those motor, those robots that are on the bikes. And it's just a big battery pack with, like, a robotic arm that's attached to it. Have you seen this? Oh, this is amazing. Apple comes out with a smart iPad device that's just called a bicycle for the iPad. It's just a little bicycle. No, no, no. If you have a weight up here and you have a robotic arm that can hinge down, if you. If you pull that up really quickly, you can actually jump up. And so there's these crazy videos of these robot bikes, like, jumping up onto tables and stuff.

So there is a whole bunch of other news. We are in fast company. We are part of the fast company. It's hard to see, but that is John on the COVID This is Steve Huffman, who came on our show last week. We had a very fun conversation with him, but we were featured in the world's 50 most innovative, the definitive guide to the future of business. We're up there with Tubi, Google, Walmart, byd. These are some big companies. Ramp got a nod and TVPN got a nod right next to Ramp. And they sent us a very nice letter. And we are sitting here with a nice little mural of a bunch of requests. Who'd we get? We got Brian, architect. Tell me who we got beat out. We were the number two media company. We were the number two most innovative media company. We got beat out by a cdn. Matthew Prince over at Cloudflare smoked us, smoked us, smoked us. We didn't stand a chance. Just look at the scale of Cloudflare. They distribute so much media. That's what. It's a content delivery network. They deliver content. We try and deliver content. We. We deliver three hours a day. They deliver probably billions of hours a second. I can't even imagine the scale of that business. It's everywhere. But Matthew Prince is a very innovative leader and I completely agree with the ranking that he. We're coming for you next. We're coming next year, Matthew. It's on. It's on.

There's misinformation. Clearing order in. Let's just roll. We are surrounded by journal position. Come on, get. Trust the experts five Co. Founder Mel. Fine code. I see multiple journalists on the horizon. Stand by. Uav online. Glaze. Double blades. Triple blaze. Double kill. Five kill. Wrong. Win. Team death match. We are experts. Triple blaze. Let's just roll. Right. Market clearing order inbound. We are surrounded by journalists. All due. Strike 1. Strike 2. Activate. Go. Golden retriever mode. Trust. Market clearing order inbound. 5 p. Journalists on the horizon. You're watching TVPN. Today's Tuesday, March 24th. We are live from the TVP Ultradome. The temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. Do you know how I got here today? I drove through the Hollywood Hills, drove through the San Fernando Valley because we're covering Hill and Valley today. But we're doing it from the TVPN ultradome. We have a whole bunch of meetings. Who doesn't like it anyway? What do you think about this, Jordy? Ramped up time is money save. Both easy use corporate cards, bill pay accounting and a whole lot more all in one place. Now, we are covering Hill and Valley today. We are unfortunately unable to make it in person, so we will be covering it remotely. But we have amazing setup there with a whole bunch of folks on the ground. So if you're watching this from dc, go say hello to Tyler Cosgrove live in person at Hill and Valley. Let's pull up the linear lineup. Linear, of course, is the system for modern software development. 70% of enterprise workspaces on linear are using agents. We have Chase Lockemiller, Ryan Peterson, Scott Nolan, Sarah Guo, Sean McGuire, Dalian Asprujov, Zach Dell. We have an amazing lineup and we're very excited to talk to all of them starting at 11:45 today. But first we have to recap some things. There's been a whole bunch of news. First, we had the great peptide debate of 2026. Brandon Gorell on our team wrote about this in the newsletter today. TPPN.com youm can go. Subscribe. Who do you think won? I was talking to a lot of people. Very interesting because you had scheduled this. I wasn't even really aware that there was a peptide debate going on. We talked to some other folks on the show about peptides and how there was a debate rating. And I was aware of the meme, like the Chinese peptides in Silicon Valley, all of that stuff. But I wasn't aware of like, that the debate was boiling to a particular point. And that there were a lot of people that were discussing it. So it was great timing. So thank you for organizing that and thank you to our guests Max and Martin who took the time to come and talk to us and I thought did a really good job of being simultaneously entertaining and also very cordial. Like they weren't actually going at each other's throats, they were scoring points. But I don't think that either of them crossed any lines. Yeah, there was some, there was some discussion over like should we have done more fact checking? I genuine, I generally think that the chat is good for fact checking or the experts. Yeah, it's kind of like your view, but I don't know. Yeah, there was a bunch of, there was a bunch of people that made very fair points pointing out, you know, a study here or patent here. Yeah. And you know, I don't, I don't think we actually got. We don't think we. It would have been great if we got to a conclusion yesterday and yeah, yeah, this is all bad and I'll be banned or. No, they're all good or figured it out. But that's where we started. That's where we started like with like yeah, everyone there agrees that GLP1s that are owned by pharmaceutical companies are probably net beneficial, blah blah blah. And then the really far out stuff that hasn't been studied that's made in a basement is probably risky. And we actually had a good friend of the show sum it up. Creatine Cycle Atlas of course said the peptide debate is as follows. Against. I would be worried about unknown unknowns. Pro. While there isn't much human data, the anecdotal evidence is pretty strong. Against. Anecdotes are not enough for me. Pro. Fair. It is for me. Against. Okay, fair. And I think that's a good, I think that's a good point. And truthfully people can make their own decisions here. I do think interjecting with a ton of fact checking during the debate would be disruptive. I'm not a fan of that. I sort of dislike having one person like the guest, the debater, fact check the other person because if they know the fact and they, the other person who they're debating against drops something that's not factual, that's their opportunity to come in and say no, that's not accurate. Throw that canister, whatever Martin had, throw it. Throw the flashbang, throw the smoker in it. But I do. So I like leaving some of the fact checking up to them and then just trying to recenter the debate as a moderator. But I don't know, should we do more of these? Let us know. It seemed like a lot of people had a lot of fun with it and were entertained. It's hard to come up with, you know, if we were going to try and do this weekly, it'd be very hard to come up with like 52 really hot topics that everyone cares about. And there are two opposing experts who are willing to hash it out and be entertaining on a live show. Probably not going to happen all that much. But when the time is right, I think there's an opportunity for us to do another debate because it was a lot of fun and it wasn't our first one. We've done the slob versus Steel debate between EV Randall and Delian Asproo have former colleagues turned bitter rivals. And that was fun just because it was like the most insider of insider topics around like you know, rapper multiples and AI companies versus hard tech. And we're going to be talking to Delian later today. But it was. That was really fun. That was very cordial. I think that one was less viral because there aren't that many people who are in the chair of. I need you. I need you to decide how so personal too. So it becomes hyper political. Hyper political. How dare you try to ban something that I benefited from. Totally, totally. I totally see that side of it. But yeah, and there's the other side which is there just aren't that many people that are in the seat of how will I allocate capital between hard tech companies in the private markets and AI software companies and SaaS companies in the private markets. It's just a little bit more niche. But it was really fun and I hope we can do more there. Someone was saying we should do an accelerationist versus decelerationist accelerationist debate. I think Beff Jesus was proposing that. I think that would be sort of interesting. I think I could maybe sit in the middle of that and have some interesting discussions there. Kind of like 60 miles per hour, stay under the speed limit. Acceleration. Yes, yes, yes. On that vector. I am an extreme accelerationist. Let's see what else Brandon Guerrell wrote in the newsletter today. So leading up to the debate yesterday, we had several guests on the show discuss peptides. In February, Andrew Huberman came on and predicted that ReTA, essentially a more aggressive Ozempic, would become a trillion dollar drug. That same day we had longevity entrepreneur Brian Johnson on the show. He encouraged people thinking about taking peptides to be cautious because we don't know what the negative effects of these drugs are. And last week, Maximus CEO Cameron Maximus, which I don't think is his real name, is his last name Maximus? No, it's not. But I mean, I like to think of him as Dr. Cameron Maximus. That is his name on X. Oh, okay, okay, that makes sense. He argued that there's no real reason to be taking reta. Not FDA approved, only available in the gray market. When they could be taking. When people who are, you know, in the market or, or, you know, their doctor recommends something they could be taking, Tirzepatide, which is essentially has the same benefits, can be bought legally, and it's FDA approved. So yesterday, Shkreli argued, Martin Shkreli argued that the current peptide craze is more psychology driven than science driven and is essentially a passing fad among Silicon Valley elites who aren't really. What is that? Who aren't among Silicon Valley elites who aren't really expert trusters. In his view, there is no rational reason to experiment with compounds like Reta when proven regulated drugs like Ozempic already exist. He thinks gray markets should be shut down entirely. And there was a big debate over how feasible is it to actually try and shut down the gray markets. Gray markets have existed in a whole bunch of other categories. I'm very familiar with the gray market for illegal flavored vaporizers because they have been the bane of the legitimate industry, the nicotine industries. It's been the bane of their existence. And so Martin argued that the FDA's rigorous approval process exists for a reason. Now we had Max arguing the peptide bull case. He argued that he doesn't believe all peptides are safe and effective, but that a subset of them likely have real therapeutic value. He said that since people are already using peptides, a regulated white market would reduce harm compared to the current gray market. So lots to debate there. We'll let you make your own decisions. You can go listen to the the full debate and you can see where you weigh in. Before we move on to our next story, let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. And let's also tell you about Vibe Co, where D2C brands, B2B startups and AI companies advertise on streaming TV, pick channels, target audiences, and measure sales. Just like on Meta. And man, not having Tyler Cosgrove in the TVP and Ultra Dome is. It's a death knell. For our clapping during the ad read strategy. We need to get some soundboard going. We need to show these supporters, these sponsors some love because we're fighting two men down right now, maybe three men down. We're on our last leg over here in the TVPN ultradump. Anyway, Apple is in a completely different situation. They have their heir, apparently John Ternus, the nice guy potentially taking the reins. Maybe this year, maybe next year. It could happen any day now. Tim Cook doesn't want to talk about retirement, but John Ternus is emerging as his most likely successor. This is from friend of the show Mark Gurman in Bloomberg. Go subscribe. And there's an interesting, this is an interesting profile of John Ternus from March 22, 2026. Just two days ago this was published 5pm Eastern and it tells an interesting story of John Ternus and I think Gurman does a great job of going deeper than some of the other reporting that had like one quote from an employee that left Apple a decade ago and was sort of vague and that person doesn't have like any sort of profile and it was very hard to read into who is John Ternus as a person. I think we're getting a clearer picture now. So thank you to Mark Gurman for this reporting. So let's read through some of this and then I want you to cosplay as John Ternus and let me know, would you do things differently? Do you agree with his management style? Because this might be the management style of all of Apple soon if he takes the reins. We're basically recreating a live version of the Turnus Sim. Yeah, we're getting into an armchair and we're going to be quarterbacking. We're going to be armchair quarterbacking Apple. So during our all hands meeting at Apple in January, an employee asked about a spate of executive moves. The company's chief operating officer recently retired. The CFO and general counsel took smaller roles as a way to prepare for their own retirement. And in a single week in December, its heads of artificial intelligence, user interfaces and environmental initiatives all announced their departures. While part of the exodus was related to Apple Apple's well documented struggles in AI, it also reflected a logical transition at a company that turns 50 on April 1st. Wow. Apple was founded on April Fool's Day. That's amazing. That's a great date. Apple stock made everyone at the top of its org chart, fabulously wealthy. And many are entering the stage of life that often inspires people to prioritize family. Spending some time, finally spending some time with their families instead of the next generation of iPhones. In his response to the employee's question, Tim Cook, the company's 65 year old CEO, struck an atypically reflective tone. He said, when people get to a certain age, some, he said, are going to retire. Letting the word some hang out there in a way that suggested he wasn't talking about himself, drawing laughter from the audience. It's like some people, they can't hang. But look at Warren Buffett. 65 to 95. Most productive era of his Tim Cook generational run starts now. I like the idea of Cook for the next 30 years. I'm still bullish Tim Cook. I mean, I love John Ternus, but I think, I think the 30 year run from Tim Cook going 65 to 95 would be particularly fun to watch. Anyway, Tim Cook was going to retire. Then he started experimenting with some Chinese peps. Oh, you think that's what's going. He's always looked good. Now he's like, I. I actually got another few decades in me. I hope so. He's like, actually, it's BBC 157 having remarkable effects on me. So he said, the thing we have to do is to make sure that Apple moves on, reaches the next level and the next level and the next level. Cook added. And he said he spends a lot of time thinking about who's in the room in 5, 10, 15 years. I'm obsessed with this. This is Tim Cook at his best. This guy can't leave, they can't leave. He's firing me up here. Somebody's been listening to Senra. Yes, it's amazing. So Cook, who's run Apple since taking over from co founder Steve Jobs in 2011, probably doesn't expect to be in the room himself for another 15 years, but I do. I'm betting on him. While he's given no indication of an imminent transition, he's made it clear he wants his heir to come from within the company so he can serve as a mentor. The central candidate is John Ternus, senior vice president for hardware engineering, who oversees development of the devices that generate roughly 80% of Apple's revenue. At 50, Turnus is also younger than many of the company's other senior leaders, meaning he could be in the top job longer. Ternus has spent about half of his life at Apple, half of his life generational run. He cut his teeth developing computer monitors, oversaw product design for the original iPad, and eventually took over development of the Mac, getting the top hardware engineering role in 2021. He's overseen an expansion in Apple's product lineup, improving quality and focusing on functional improvements around battery life, performance, and connectivity. Earlier this month, when Apple held an event in New York to announce the MacBook Neo, a $599 laptop, it was Turnus, not Cook, who did the big reveal. Little foreshadowing there, little trial run. The next day, Ternus also appeared on Good Morning America to talk up the device, the type of media appearance Cook has generally done himself. Such public signs of confidence in Ternus have been accompanied by steady expansion of his portfolio. Last year, he took control of a secretive unit developing robots, including a tabletop device with a screen that swirls to focus on a speaker moving around the room. The smart lamp. Is this what it is? No, it's not a smart lamp. No. It's the iPad that. On a swivel arm. Yeah, the iPad that follows you around so that you can ask IT questions and FaceTime with your friends. I think there's a rumor that it can do kickflips, but I'd be super into that. I mean, if it has a motor. You've seen those motor, those robots that are on the bikes, and it's just a big battery pack with, like, a robotic arm that's attached to it. Have you seen this? Oh, this is amazing. Apple comes out with a. With a. With a smart iPad device that's. That's just called a bicycle for the iPad. It's just a little bicycle. No, no, no. If you. If you have a weight up here and you have. And you have a robotic arm that can hinge down, if you pull that up really quickly, you can actually jump up. And so there's these crazy videos of these robot bikes, like jumping up onto tables and stuff. It's very fun. So Ternus has taken a bigger role in Apple's product marketing, sometimes personally editing copy for the website and even product event materials. And he has become central to the company's work to make its devices more environmentally sustainable. Ternus has has also assumed oversight of the hardware and software design teams, making him a key liaison between Apple's vaunted design organization and senior management, meaning he's already one of the most influential people in the company's history. Current and former executives who've worked closely with Ternus, most of whom requested anonymity, say he has made a mark on Apple's hardware portfolio, reversing a trend of declining product quality as the company prioritizes thinness and sleekness over performance. Quote, he is a very meticulous Engineer and a judicious executive, says Tony Blevins, the company's chief procurement officer until 2022, who described Turnus as an outstanding and obvious choice to succeed Cook. So this is sort of the other side of the Turner story from that random quote that went into the Wall Street Journal that I was sort of like, I don't know if this person is like, it doesn't feel, it didn't feel like they were operating on like the more recent run that he's been on. Like, yeah, he's been there for 25 years. If you go back a decade, like he could be a completely different executive. So anyway, he's a car. He's a car racing enthusiast. He's a cycling enthusiast. I assume cycling means performance enhancing drugs. Yeah. Trend. Trend. Testosterone. No, he is a bicyclist and a car racing enthusiast. Ternus is known to take his colleagues to upstate Washington for off road rally car racing. Let's go. Excellent choice. Tim Cook. I see why you picked up so bullish. His love of motorsports notwithstanding, Ternus, like Cook, is risk averse and reluctant to, as one person close to him puts it, upset the apple cart. Good pun. As one longtime executive says, if you think Tim's Tim Cook is doing a good job, then you'll think John Ternus is doing a good job too. That also feels like an underhanded. This may be a dig. I have have been a staunch defender of Tim Cook. Did well on the supply chain, did well on the tariffs, did well negotiating all sorts of tough things, wound up with a great partnership with Gemini. Like wound up in like always looks bad as you're like investigating one feature on a one month timeline. But when you zoom out over a decade, incredible amount of value created, incredible performance and very few weaknesses in the business from my perspective. But you can take the other side of that because I know you're frustrated by every app that they release lately, but who knows? Not just the apps, not just the operating system itself. Also, I mean the new material is rough. Like I drop this phone a lot and it's very scratched. Whereas the old one, battle scars. The old one I think was titanium and really like held up well. Also the blue. This is what German was saying. He was saying that like with this new material, I think it's aluminum. Now I went back to aluminum. Getting the paint to actually stick on is much harder than the titanium, which couldn't have been as rich. They never could have done that bright orange phone on the titanium. But the way they like you should just take Sandpaper to yours and turn it into silver like mine. Yeah, Maybe like the Casey Neistat style on the, on the Ray Bans. You know what he does where he spray paints them white and then like scratches off the white so that it has. Oh, it's really, really cool design. He's very popular. Popular for this. All right, let's maybe skip forward and talk about kind of the Vision Pro, the debate that's been raging internally about some of his recent decision making. Okay, before we do this, I'm going to tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. And I'm also going to talk to you about Fin AI, the number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to handle your customer support, go to Fin AI. So despite his reputation for personable management, so he's known as a very nice manager, nice guy. He's the nice guy at Apple. Ternus has at times broken with that style in ways that raised eyebrows internally. Late in the lead up to the release of the Vision Pro headset, my favorite Apple device ever. Unironically, for instance, engineers uncovered a flaw that threatened one of the device's marquee features. Which is odd because this is not one of the marquee features for me, but it's the ability to stream. Well, you're not the average user, John. You use. I'm a power user. I'm a power user. What? Well, no, the average user doesn't use. Yeah, yeah, I'm like five standard deviations above on the usage. So the ability to stream ultra low latency audio from the headset to AirPods. This apparently was a capability central to Apple's pitch of a seamless experience for immersive video and gaming. And this is the real thing. So you just bought this, this $3,500. $3,500 face computer and $3,500 was the heck. And they're telling you. And they're telling you. When I bought one, it was close to five grand because I upgraded the storage and there were taxes and stuff. And I think I threw in a case. And so like I was up in the. A high four something. I took it back. But I thought you still had one. I got a new one. I got a new one later, but I took like two years off. I'm a fake fan, fair weather fan. They did one good Red Bull video and I was like, I gotta get back in. Okay. I just think it's so funny that they Ship this, you know, three to $5,000 computer for your head that's super heavy and they're like. And you're gonna need to grab some AirPods. Yeah, yeah. Well, you're not. That's the thing, you're not. Because the audio quality that comes out of the act on the headset is fantastic. It sounds great, but other people can hear it kind of like barely. Like you can turn the volume down and it's so close. It's like the headphones are telling me if you turn the volume down a lot and keep it really quiet, the other people can't hear pretty much unless you are truly in like a library context. In any normal scenario, the speaker, although it is exposed and if someone were to put their ear up next to yours, they could hear what you were listening to. It's just not loud enough for anyone to hear it. So. So I never really used the AirPods linked to the headphones because. Or the headset because it's just like a separate thing. It's just extra stuff to put on anyway. It was clearly important to Apple. Apple's always prided itself on device integration, hardware integration, and they are great at that. Like you put in the AirPods and you switch over to a YouTube video on your MacBook and it just plays right there. You switch over to your phone, you take a call, it switches right back. Lets you like the connectivity with their Bluetooth strategy and their wireless strategy has always been fantastic. But apparently it wasn't going well with the development of the Vision Pro headset. So the ability to stream ultra low latency audio from the headset to AirPods this was a capability central to Apple's pitch of a seamless experience for immersive video and gaming. The problem stemmed from a missing wireless frequency in the then newest AirPods Pro. The only practical fix was to ship a revised version of the earbuds, which the company did at the end of 2023. So normally the AirPod Pros were on like AirPod Pro 1, AirPod Pro 2, AirPod Pro 3, like a normal revision cycle. But that year they had to do like a half step and it was like AirPod Pro 2.5 and all it like they only updated this one little frequency thing in the wireless connection. And so it was sort of a weird move. Probably cost them some extra money to do. It was a mistake that was, you know, caused by a particular hardware engineer on this team. So when they launched the Apple Vision Pro In February of 2024, that meant that anyone who wanted this feature. They just paid $3,500. They had to spend another $250 on new AirPods that added the ultra low latency support and not much else. So it wasn't like, oh, you also got translation or some AI features or better audio quality or better noise canceling. It was like the exact same thing that you had. You just have to pay an extra 250 for this. And so this was a debacle. And the debacle reverberated through multiple teams, including hardware, software testing, and the Vision Pro group. People involved said Ternus alienated some people on staff by focusing initially on finding out whom to blame, who did it. In the Aftermath, a senior AirPods executive was reassigned. The. And I'm laughing because I. So I asked Jordi this morning, I said, okay. I gave him, like, the overall broad strokes of what happened and what was your first recommendation for shut down both product lines. Shut down both. Shut down both product lines. Just shut down both entirely. And then I would have focused on coming out with a pair of wired headsets made of wood, using horse hair for the actual connectivity. Yeah. And then no wires at all. Yeah. And then sort of like with a leather. Certainly no plastics. No macro plastics or microplastics. Yeah. Probably creating some, like, towel, like some type of, like, tallow to make. To make it more comfortable. You don't want the wood to get splintered your ears like a beef. So you. So you lubricate your ear canal with beef tallow. Just go back to basic. This is the. Introducing airpod Caveman. Caveman. Yeah. Yeah. That's what you. That's where I would have started. That's where you would have started. Okay. But then I went to Jordan and I said, okay, but, like, assuming that Ternus, you know, had the mandate of Apple, like, you gotta ship this product. It's gotta be good. You have to continue this product line. You can't pivot to beef tallow and sandalwood ear pods. What would you do? A touch grass product. So basically, you know, say, hey, we're shutting down the Vision Pro, but we're going to sell you a little patch of grass. Okay. So if you want to be immersed in something, you can just go to your desk and maybe they could become like a. Like a tour guide, a vacation guide. So if you want to go see a beautiful vista, you can just go see it in person. That would be more of your idea. But I was trying to get at. I was trying to get at what should Turnus have done? Should he have been should he have gone softer? Because it appears that he reassigned a senior AirPods executive. Yeah. And so. And so this issue comes down to, from my understanding, yeah, this senior executive who is responsible for. Yeah, it was the AirPod, right? Yeah. He did not process that the Apple Vision Pro was coming out and they were selling again against this feature. Yeah. And Apple, the thing that I think they still do really well to this day, even though almost all their other software on the iPhone is a total disaster, is connectivity between the devices and syncing them and things like that. So they still do that well. And so to come out with this, and in just a blatant sort of unforced error, didn't communicate properly with the other teams creating Apple products for the airpods which are just designed to sync perfectly with all the other. It would be like if one of the cameras was blurry or something like that. It's like, well, the iPhone, like, yeah, it's not dominating AI crazy features yet, but everyone counts on the iPhone for having a good set of cameras. They're always good. And so if you mess up something that is the basis of the strategy, that is risky. And there's been. And there's been this debate over, you know, is he a nice guy or is he too hard? Turnis looks at mistakes as systemic problems that could be solved with better leadership instead of by putting the onus on the engineer. Someone said who worked for him. And this person adds, ternus is a nice guy. And I think it is the nice guy thing to just reassign someone instead of like this super cutthroat culture. It also is sort of a throwback. This is what Ben Thompson was talking about today. It's a throwback to the Steve Jobs era. Like Steve Jobs would have said, hey, I demanded this. Like, you made a mistake. Like, heads must roll. And that was a bit of the company culture, at least in the lore. And who knows how true that is. But this doesn't seem like it goes too far into like ruthless business behavior. But that's sort of where the discussion is around. Ternus is like, is he pure nice guy? Does he have a harder edge? I don't know. At a certain point, the buck has to stop with someone. Yeah. The fact, the fact that this executive just got reassigned. They weren't like effectively terminated to me shows that. Well, it depends on what Apple. Like, what would Steve have done? What if they got reassigned to assembly iPhones by hand? The first American. You're gonna make the first American iPhone. Hey, it's been done. It won't be the first because we did it here first by Apple. Anyway, let's move on. So anyways, I'm. I think Ternus didn't go hard enough. Didn't go hard enough. Yeah. Yeah. Should have gone after him personally. Yeah. Should have said you caused 50 million damages. AirPods is a $20 billion business and we had to give people refunds and create a new product line for this, the AirPods 2.5. You owe us $200 million and we're coming after your 401k. No, do not do that. That is far too. That is far too aggressive. And Turner's didn't do that. You know, he reassigned the person, put a new leader in place to make sure that mistakes don't like that don't happen like that. This is the nature of running a big company that's high stakes like Apple. And overall this profile, it still continues to give me confidence in Ternus and honestly. Agreed, Tim Cook. Really quickly, let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world. Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Friendly IPO inbound. And let me also tell you about Turbo Puffer, Serverless vector and full text search built from first principles and object storage. Fast 10x cheaper and extremely scalable. So there is a whole bunch of other news. We are in fast company. We are part of the fast company. It's hard to see, but that is John on the COVID This is Steve Huffman who came on our show last week. We had a very fun conversation with him. But we were featured in the world's 50 most innovative companies. The definitive guide to the future of business. We're up there with Tubi, Google, Walmart, byd. These are some big companies. Ramp got a nod and TVPN got a nod right next to Ramp. And they sent us a very nice letter. And we are sitting here with a nice little mural of a bunch of our guests. Who'd we get? We got Brian Archer. Tell me who we got beat out. We were the number two media company. We were the number two most innovative media company. We got beat out by a cdn. Then Matthew Prince over at Cloudflare smoked us. Smoked, smoked us. Didn't stand a chance. Just look at the scale of Cloudflare. They distribute so much media. That's what it's a content delivery network. They deliver content. We try and deliver content. We deliver three hours a day. They deliver probably billions of hours a second. I can't even imagine the scale of that business. It's everywhere. But Matthew Prince is a very innovative leader and I completely agree with the ranking that he should. But we're coming for you next year. We're coming next year, Matthew. It's on, on. It's on. But this is a fun, fun, fun article. We gave them some quotes Producers at CNBC wake up in the morning to look at the public markets in order to plan the day's lineup. John Coogan and Jordy Hayes, co hosts of tppn, a daily talk show devoted to the business of technology, wake up and look at what's trending on X. That's true. And then they gab. That's us. Quote says Hayes. We cover something like 50 to 100 topics. Rapid fire, 55 days a week. In bespoke suits, the duo riff on the news for three interrupted hours, accompanied by a revolving cast of venture investors, startup founders, and the occasional single name elite like Zuck. On good days, the live stream draws more than 130,000 simultaneous viewers. Millions more watch the highlighted clips and listen to the podcast. We basically leverage the algorithms, howie Hayes says of TBPN's programming strategy. Love them or hate them, they do a really good job of sorting what people are interested in anyway. You can go check it out. They did. Yeah. This was a cool moment. That's fun. I as as a boy I subscribed to the print edition of Fast Company and always looked forward to getting it in the physical mailbox at home and reading through it. Unwell Alex Cooper's network is 23. So how she must be media. She must be higher than us. What's the category though? Oh, I don't know because if Cloudflare is a media company, call it Unwell. Might be. It might be a cdn. Who knows? Let's see. Unwell was ranked. Oh, Unwell is in the advertising and marketing category, but not media news. Cloudflare is media news and we are second behind Cloudflare. That is interesting. I would say Unwell beat us fair and scoring. All I have to say is, in the words of the Canadian Olympic team, John Silver shines just as bright. We've been on a bit of a silver tear lately. We're the second highest ranked technology show on Spotify. Thank you to everyone who's been subscribing and leaving us five star reviews over there. And yeah, thank you to Team Canada for pioneering making it a little bit more pioneering COPE strategy. It's a marketing strategy. Walmart Databricks is in here. Adidas is in here. Of course. Ramp is in here. 50 plus business ramp is in the lemonade category. Yes, definitely. It actually does look like the Lemon Lemon category because the accompanying image has some like, yellow circles. But that's not Ramp related. This is of course related to Mackenzie Bezos who's been donating money for funding American colleges and universities. So very, very fun. Sundar Pichai got a nice photo spread. Is doing, done a ton of good stuff at Google. But it leads with Sundar Pichai blindsided by Chad Matic. Was number three most innovative company in consumer electronics. Yeah, there's some other good. There's some other good stuff. This is innovative too. Lists inside of lists. Oh yeah, there's lists inside of lists. Oh, wait. Oh, the category. Category rank. Yeah. Unitree robotics is at 39. I'm really disappointed that we couldn't beat Unitree, but I love that IMAX beat Unitree American excellence right there. We're going to do it. Diplo's Run club is at 50. The Onion. We beat the Onion. That's crazy. I love the Onion. The Onion was foundational to me. Anyway, lots of, lots of fun in the Fast Company. In the Fast Company rankings. To the Fast Company team. Let me tell you about console consul builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT HR and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. And let me also tell you about public.com, investing for those who take it seriously. Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries and more with great customer service. I love those sound effects. Thank you. OpenAI's new nonprofit foundation announces plans to spend 1 billion this year and has appointed OpenAI co founder Wachek. Am I saying that correctly? And Jacob of Coefficient giving to leadership positions still searching for an executive director. Sam says AI will help discover new science such as cures for diseases which. Which is perhaps the most important way to increase quality of life long term. AI will also present new threats to society that we have to address. No company can sufficiently mitigate these on their own. We will need a society wide response to things like novel bio threats, a massive and fast change to the economy, extremely capable models causing complex emergent effects across society and more. So it's great that this has gotten set up. I know you can imagine just how much has gone into this. I would, I would love to see them. I mean, they have a lot of money here. They're going to be donating a lot of money. I think it's going to be the best funded nonprofit in the history of humanity. That's very exciting. I would love Just a little carve out for developing like consumer apps or consumer technology. Just a little or at least foundational technology technology that could be spun out. Yeah, I would, I would like, I would like this. I mean they've had so many much success spinning things out. It's funded the nonprofit so effectively. Why not keep it going? Yeah. Why change horses in the middle of a stream? If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Right. So I'd like to see a little bit there and then also some high frequency trading. Probably because you got to do something with a balance sheet. So why not get some Jane street folks in there and start eking out fractions of a penny on every trade trade. In other news, what else? Andrew Bosworth is taking over supervision of the company's efforts to become AI native that's going to be overseeing Meta's AI for work initiative that was previously led by another exec. He is, he has been, he's been with Trusted General. Yeah, he's been there for so long. Yes. He upgraded AI for work is their internal initiatives. These are going to be, we think, like internal products that help the company operate more efficiently. And of course this signals a shift, a deprioritization of the Metaverse, which has been obviously in the works in different ways for quite a while. But I love Baz. I think he's great fit to lead this internally. In other news, Ares and Apollo cap private credit fund withdrawals as exodus grows. This is in the news like every day now. We've been sort of nibbling at the edges of this story because it's intriguing. I mean a lot of people aren't familiar with these names because they're of course private or they invest in private credit. But. But it's increasingly more and more. Yeah, it's a big enough story. If you have any personal exposure to private credit, you probably are thinking, hey, I'd like to reduce some of that exposure. Yeah, totally. So two of the biggest names in private credit, Ares Management and Apollo Global, blocked investors from getting even half of the money they wanted out of their funds, a sign of the mounting strain on the $1.8 trillion market. The the 10 billion Aries Strategic Income Fund Limited withdrawals to 5% of shares after clients sought to redeem 11.6. So that's not total like run. Some of this has been framed like people are trying to withdraw 50%, they're trying to withdraw 11.6 and Ares limited that to 5. There's 15.1 billion business development company Apollo Debt Solutions which said it was implemented imposing the same cap after requests to pull 11.2%. So very similar numbers. The redemption request, larger on a percentage basis than those earlier this month at Blackstone and Blackrock, suggests that investors are growing anxious about a liquidity squeeze in the illiquid private credit market. The world's largest alternative asset managers, which for years have fueled the private credit boom, are suddenly grappling with investors skittish about the industry's lending practices and exposure to businesses vulnerable to artificial intelligence. It was very interesting talking to the CEO of BNY yesterday where he I asked him a pretty broad question about private credit exposure and risks and he gave a little bit of backstory and history which was helpful but sort of agreed with the Jamie Dimon Take that. You know when a lot of people are talking about cockroaches and jitters that like there's probably where there's smoke, there's fire, was how I interpreted his answer. Money managers are handling the surge of negative sentiment in a variety of ways. Funds from Blue Owl Capital moved to sell assets and Blackstone injected employee cash to help meet redemption requests. For the most part, however, managers have limited redemptions and emphasize the benefits of doing so. At one point Tuesday, the latest wave of investor jitters wiped out 10 billion of market market cap from the likes of Ares, Apollo and rivals Blackstone and KKR as shares of all four asset managers fell more than 2%. At the same time, inflows into the asset class have slowed, weakening demand and more investors looking to cash out could constrain liquidity further for the fund, making it harder to underwrite new loans. Limiting redemptions could also increase negative sentiment. Investment in non traded business development companies was down around 43% last month compared to prior the year. Prior areas, for its part, emphasize that only a small portion of shareholders sought to redeem. Notably, the majority of repurchase requests were made by a limited number of family offices and smaller institutions in select geographies that represent less than 1% of our over 200 or our 20,000 shareholders. What do you think they mean by select geographies? Is that the Middle east that they're trying to like sort of gesture towards that there's more liquidity demands amongst wealthy families and family offices in the Middle east and so that it might be more of a geopolitical issue than I don't know, select geographies just feels like choice language deliberately meant to point the finger or the arrow somewhere. But it's unclear. I don't know. I wonder if we will see more reporting from what the sovereign wealth funds are doing, what the family offices in the Middle east are doing, because certainly there's new requirements and money needs to flow all over the place. The firm expects the granted redemptions to amount to roughly 524.5 million. Aries said the fund had around 5 billion in undrawn capacity including debt facilities, repayments from existing advisors, investors inflows and a performing liquidity liquid credit sleeve. Some money managers are already indicating that they're ready for the strain to continue. Apollo Debt Solutions and Ares Strategic Income Fund both said they will offer withdrawals of up to 5% of shares again next quarter. Anyway, Let me tell you about Figma Agents Meet the Canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with Myth Design System Context. It's in beta starting today. Go check it out. And let me also tell you about Restream 1 livestream 30 plus destinations. If you want to multi stream go to restream.com so Dreamer, what's going on? Is joining Meta Superintelligence Labs Interesting. David Singleton shared, excited to announce that his co founders and the entire team over at Dreamer are joining Meta. The last few months have been extraordinary. We built Dreamer, put the beta in the world just a month ago and saw magic come to life for real people. People. Since then, thousands of people have used Dreamer to build personal intelligence software with our Sidekick in the world's newest and most popular programming language. English. Huh? They're building and sharing agents to manage email, calendar to do's, create learning tools for their kids, learn new languages, plan trips with friends, become better cooks, help them with work, achieve their health goals, or simply to creatively express themselves all sorts of surprising and unique personal needs. These agents are as are these are agents as unique as the people building them because they're built exactly the way people each person wants them to meet. We've captured some of our favorites and let's go over here. They yeah, people are building timers, receipt scanners, citation assistant. This is great. If you're using ChatGPT to do your homework, you can build a little citation assistant. People are building personal financial apps. Yeah. I'm curious again with with any of these sort of Meta MSL acquisitions, you know you have to wonder is this, is this can you read into their product direction at all with the acquisition? Are they is Meta going to be making is Meta AI going to have the ability to make your own agents? That is still to be seen, but congratulations to the whole team. Well let me tell you about 11 labs build intelligent real time conversational agents. Reimagine human technology with 11 labs. And let me also tell you about Vanta Automate compliance and Security. Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform. So I mean, I think with that most people will think like Aqui hire rolled into Manus, rolled into other products. At the same time, there is an interesting diffusion in consumer question that's going on that I think might be a little bit underrated. Just the question of what will adoption and retention be like when you don't have to buy a MacBook or a Mac Mini, when you don't have to get any API keys at all, versus it's an app on your phone, versus it's in ChatGPT or it's in Instagram. Like bundling those things together. Actually we never really got firm data on how much Llama's been using. I really want to build an agent that can predict which videos, funny videos that I would send to you. Just have it do it automatically because I think our feeds are pretty synced up right now. Sometimes John will send me a video and then 10 minutes later I'll send him the same video. But I. I didn't see that he sent it. Then you look and then we could both log off forever. Well, let's. Let's go over to the Chinese billionaire who says America's EV market is doomed without him. Not a problem. Because we're building V8s and V12s over here, baby. We're going back. We're going back. No, this is serious bad timing for all of this. Bad timing for our desires to get the Tesla Roadster, to have a naturally aspirated V12. Maybe good timing given energy prices. Yeah, yeah, that's rough. Anyway, Robin Zhang of Catl. Catl can't build a factory in America. But Tesla, Ford and GM rely on its technology inside a headquarters that's shaped like a giant battery cell. You gotta give it to them. That's design. That's what we need to be seeing from our tech leaders. Apple did it well with the UFO campus. I want to see more headquarters that are shaped like the product that you sell. The billionaire who runs the world's largest battery company is confident that Americans will come calling eventually. We will return to the story later in the show, but without further ado, we have Chase Lochmiller from Crusoe in the Restream waiting room. Chase, how are you doing? What's up guys? How you doing? We're doing great. Great to see you. Great. Is Hill And Valley, you're the first person that we've talked to today. Give us a read on what's happening on the ground. How are you feeling? You know, it's great. It's great to see the partnership between Silicon Valley and D.C. really come together. I think you can really feel that there's a very pro business climate here and a lot of members of the administration here helping support a lot of the big technology initiatives across everything from AI to defense tech to other software businesses. So I think it's very, very good vibes here. How are you introducing Crusoe when you meet new folks in Capitol Hill today? I mean, the company has been. How many years have you been working on this? It's been a number of years, correct? Yeah. So the company's about eight years old. Overnight success? Overnight success. But yes. How are you up into the right. Yeah, it's it. You know, I really introduce the company as a vertically integrated AI infrastructure business where, you know, we focus on both the physical aspects of bringing AI infrastructure to life. Land power, data center development, design, engineering and deployment of large scale clusters of GPUs as well as the software aspects of bringing AI to life. Between orchestration of.

And we had to give people refunds and create a new product line for this, the AirPods 2.5. You owe us $200 million and we're coming after your 401k. No, do not do that. That is far too aggressive. And Ternus didn't do that. He reassigned the person, put a new leader in place to make sure that mistakes don't happen like that. This is the nature of running a big company that's high stakes like Apple and overall this profile, it still continues to give me confidence. Internists and honestly. Agreed Tim Cook. Really quickly let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world. Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Friendly IPO inbound. And let me also tell you about Turbo Puffer, serverless vector and full text search built from first principles and object storage. Fast 10x cheaper and extremely scalable. So there is a whole bunch of other news. We are in Fast Company. We are on the COVID of the Fast Company. It's hard to see, but that is John on the COVID This is Steve Huffman who came on our show last week. We had a very fun conversation with him. But we were featured in the world's 50 most innovative, the definitive guide to the future of business. We're up there with Tubi, Google, Walmart, byd. These are some big companies. Ramp got a nod and TVPN got a nod right next to Ramp. And they sent us a very nice letter and we are sitting here with a nice little mural of a bunch of. Who do we get? We got Brian. Okay. And tell me, tell me who we got. We were the number two media. We were the number two most innovative media company. We got beat out by a cdn. Matthew Prince over at Cloudflare smoked us. Smoked, smoked us. Didn't stand a chance. Just look at the scale of Cloudflare. They distribute so much media. That's what it's a content delivery network. They deliver content. We try and deliver content. We, we deliver three hours a day. They deliver probably billions of hours. A I can't even imagine the scale of that business. It's everywhere. But Matthew Prince is a very innovative leader and I completely agree with the ranking that he. We're coming for you next. We're coming next year, Matthew. It's on. It's on. But this is a fun, fun, fun article. We gave them some quotes. Producers at CNBC wake up in the morning to look at the public markets in order to plan the day's lineup. John Coogan and Jordy Hayes, co host of tvpn, a daily talk show devoted to the business of technology. Wake up and look at what's trending on X. That's true. And then they Gabe, that's us. Quote, says Hayes. We cover something like 50 to 100 topics. Rapid fire 55 days a week. In bespoke suits, the duo riff on the news for three interrupted hours, accompanied by a revolving cast of venture investors, startup founders, and the occasional single name elite like Zuck. On good days, the live stream draws more than 130,000 simultaneous viewers. Millions more watch the highlighted clips and listen to the podcast. We basically leverage the algorithm, howie Hayes says of TBPN's programming strategy. Love them or hate them, they do a really good job of sorting what people are interested in anyway. You can go check it out. They did. Yeah. This was a cool moment. That's fun. I as as a boy I subscribed to the print edition of Fast Company and always looked forward to getting it in the physical mailbox at home and reading through it. Unwell Alex Cooper's network is 23. So how she must be media. She must be higher than us. What's the category though? Oh, I don't know because if Cloudflare is a media company, call it Unwell. Might be. It might be a cdn. Who knows? Let's see, Unwell was ranked. Oh, Unwell is in the advertising and marketing category, but not media news. Cloudflare is media news and we are second behind Cloudflare. That is interesting. I would say Unwell beat us fair and strong. All I have to say is in the words of the Canadian Olympic team, John Silver shines just as bright. We've been on a bit of a silver tear lately. We're the second highest ranked technology show on Spotify. Thank you to everyone who's been subscribing and leaving us five star reviews over there. And yeah, thank you to Team Canada for pioneering, making it a little bit more pioneering. Cope as a strategy, as a marketing strategy. Walmart's here. Databricks is in here. Adidas is in here. Of course, Ramp is in here. 50 plus business. Ramp is in the Lemonade category. Yes, definitely. It actually does look like the lemon category because the accompanying image has some like yellow circles. But that's not Ramp related. This is of course related to Mackenzie Bezos, who's been donating money for funding American colleges and universities. So very, very fun. Sonar Pichai got a nice photo spread, is doing a ton of good stuff at Google, but it leads with Sundar Pichai blindsided by Chad Matic was number three most innovative company in consumer electromagnetics. Yeah, there's some other good stuff. This is innovative, too. Lists inside of lists. Oh, yeah. There's lists inside of lists. Oh, wait. Oh, the category rank. Based on the category rank. Yeah. Unitree robotics is at 39. I'm really disappointed that we couldn't beat Unitree, but I love that IMAX beat Unitree. American excellence right there. We're going to do it. Diplo's Run club is at 50. The Onion. We beat the Onion. That's crazy. I love the Onion. The Onion was foundational to me. Anyway, lots of, lots of fun in the Fast Company. And the Fast Company rankings to the Fast Company team. Let me tell you about console consul builds AI agents that automate 70% of it. HR and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. And let me also tell you about public.com investing for those who take it seriously. Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries and more with great customer service. I love those sound effects. Thank you. OpenAI's new nonprofit foundation announces plans to spend 1 billion this year and has appointed OpenAI co founder Wajak. Am I saying that correctly? Waj. Waj. Waj. And Jacob of Coefficient Giving to leadership positions. Still searching for an executive director. Sam says AI.