Team death match. We are experts. Triple Blaze. Let's just roll. Right? Right. Market clearing order inbound. Surrounded by journalists. All due position. Strike 1. Strike 2. Activate. Go. Retriever mode. Trust. Market clearing order inbound. Founder, You're watching TVPN. Today is Monday, April 6th, 2026. We are live from the TVP Ultra Realm. The temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. Happy Easter. Good to be back to everyone celebrated yesterday. How was your weekend, Jordy? Good. A lot of egg. Hail Mary. Oh, you did? Yeah, I did. I finally saw it. Did you see. I did not see it. How was it? Ben? You saw it, right? What was your review? It was great. I was telling you, I think it was. It was fresh. It was fun. People put it on. Will DePugh didn't like it. He didn't like it. He said it was interstellar for chuds. Right? Isn't that what he said? He said something. You liked it, right? I thought it was. Is very enjoyable watch. I don't know. Should I see it? Yes, I think you should see it in theater. In theater for sure. Okay. It's definitely a good. Too long. It's like two and a half hours. But it's. It's an Andy Weir. Have you seen the Martian? Brutal. It's basically just like endless stream of problems and then like quick solutions. So there's some sort of problem they need to figure it out problem. They need to figure it out. All of it's. I don't know, like loosely, like hard sci fi. Like somewhat believable. It does have aliens in it and stuff. But it's a fun time. Anyway. Well, speaking of realspace, what's going on? Yes, with Artemis 2. Artemis 2 is live streaming right now to almost a million people on YouTube on the NASA YouTube channel, I believe. It's also on Netflix. And the stream title is just we are about to fly around the moon. With authority from NASA. We can actually pull this up and see. I would love to hear what is going on right now because I think it's happening like as we speak. Like, they are. They are up. I also wrote a little bit of a retrospective on the. Can we get some sound? I have a spider on my. Yeah, okay. So one minute ago, NASA posted that the crew are now the farthest any human has ever traveled. 252,000 miles from the Earth. John is dealing with a little spider here on his microphone. Here we go. There we go. There we go. Still living too. We'll take it out later. What do we got going on here? Yeah. Can we get the audio on that? Oh, there's no audio. Oh, weird. I think there is audio on YouTube but it might not be letting us like stream it through. I don't know. Sometimes there's like DRM stuff. Anyway, Matthew Gallagher, he's the founder of medv and we were supposed to have him on the show today. He unfortunately cannot make it. We do have John Slotkin coming on the chief medical officer from Gelsinger or Geisinger to talk about claims around oral GLP1 drugs. We read the New York Times story on Thursday and then over the weekend there was a whole bunch more analysis about the company. And there were so interesting because you would think that someone else would write the, the one billion one, the one person, $1 billion company. Totally. And then the New York Times would take it down. Yep. But in this case it happened in reverse. So last week the New York Times broke down the story of MEDV, a telehealth provider of GLP1 weight loss drugs. And the framing was basically that this was the first time in history a single person had built, quote, a billion dollar company. And that's what went viral. Digging in, there were some small caveats and some big caveats. The small caveats were that the founder Matthew Gallagher had hired his younger brother. So technically it was a two person startup. Most people were like, yeah, okay, we'll count that doesn't matter, it's a family member. Right. And then also the other one, it's only twice as many people as the original challenge, but they had almost twice the revenue. 1.8 billion. But the question was the valuation. So the headline stat in the article was that they are on track to do 1.8 billion in sales this year. And that the on track is doing a lot of work, of course, because that's clearly an ARR number that's, that's extrapolated out. And the GLP1 market's moving very quickly. It's not like RO and HIMS and all the other providers are going to be, you know, just sitting down and letting this company run away with whatever secret sauce they've discovered around customer acquisition. Although they might not go into this, which we'll go into, and it was insane scale. But companies don't unilaterally trade at 1x revenue. Like that's, that's sort of a given in this article. It's sort of presupposed that if you're doing 1.8 billion in revenue, you would trade above $1 billion. And so this counts As a billion dollar company, I always thought that the billion dollar company would be on market cap valuation, not on. Because you could do, if you're going to say, you know, okay, any, any, any just try and say the biggest number, you would want to set up some sort of like payment network where basically you could report GMV really, really high. And you actually have a very, very small business because you're taking like 1% as your true net revenue. And so, so there was always a question about the margins. And then also revenue durability matters. Like the, the, the, the ongoing question. These, you know, one person high growth companies is, is their durability. Because if you can do it and then I can do it and then Tyler can do it and then, and then anyone with, you know, access to a coding model can build it very quickly. We're going to erode each other's markets and trade market cap very quickly. And I think any VC that would look at this, they might get to a point where they're like, yeah, this is a unicorn company, look at the growth. I think there's something here. But at the same time you could see someone like a private equity valuing this and saying, well, I need a lot of risk, I need to see durability, some lawsuits. Exactly. And we'll get into that. So medb uses two companies, Care Validate and Open Loop Health. Open Loop Health to handle the doctors, pharmacies, shipping and compliance. And we'll get into the compliance thing, but that's a lot of outsourcing. And of course that outsourcing takes a toll on margin because you have to pay the doctors, you have to pay the pharmacies, you have to pay the shipping, you have to pay the compliance. And they're paying Care Validate and Open Loop Health to flow that value through to those individual stakeholders. So it's still. Yeah, I started asking what does this company actually do itself? Just marketing. And maybe they're too aggressive about it. We'll get into it. So these GLP1 drugs also aren't cheap. And when you sell them, even when you sell them legally, even as a telehealth wrapper, a lot of the value is going to accrue to the pharmaceutical companies that own the intellectual property. At least that's how it should flow when things are functioning properly. So you can, you can effectively build a telehealth company on top of a pharmaceutical company like Novo. That where you are taking a thin margin on top, you can get to big numbers. But the, the pharmaceutical companies are gonna wanna be paid because they did all of the expensive FDA trials, all the expensive R and D, and they need to recoup that. So then the other question is, you add in the CAC from digital ads, they were apparently spending a lot on Facebook to acquire customers, and you quickly get. You quickly wind up an estimate of pretty thin margins. I think the estimate Shiel shared, Shiel Monat shared was like 15% or something like that. But it's totally possible to get to a valuation that's lower than a billion dollars, depending on how everything flows through. At the same time, though, if they're outsourcing all of the kind of key areas of the business to these other players, open loop, et cetera, it's possible that of those very thin margins. Right, the 15ish percent, the margins on that are very, very extreme. Right, sure, yeah. So you could still get to a number that was in the hundreds of millions of dollars of EBITDA. Yeah, yeah. I mean, the 15% margin looks like 150 million, maybe 200 million in like basically profit. That is crazy. But we'll see what the FDA has to say long term about that. Whether there will be lawsuits or settlements. There was already a warning letter and this turned into a big drama about the company. The drama. And was there any mention of this in the original story? I don't think so. And so there were a lot of people that were. And I believe I pulled up the New York Times piece and there was no like correction or anything yet. Maybe there will be more. Follow on. I feel like the founder does need to respond and have their opportunity to kind of correct the record because these things can kind of run away in either direction. But even with all the drama, there were a ton of super legitimate questions about how valuable the company really is and how long they'll be able to continue their current business model without pretty serious changes. And that's around the marketing stuff. So medv received an FDA warning letter just two months ago for misbranding violations. So warning letter. If you're not familiar with the FDA's language, it can be pretty wide ranging. Like sometimes it requires just a small change to marketing materials to remain compliant, and sometimes it's basically like a shut down the company moment. This happened a lot with the nicotine category with illegal vapor products. And sometimes the warning letter would be like, you are warned in that if you continue to sell these, we will put you out of business. And some of them are, okay, we're warning you about this particular claim on your website. You need to change this language. And it's pretty minimal. I went through this 10 years ago. We started Lucy 2016, and while I was there, we were extremely nervous about warning letters, because if we got a warning letter, we thought it would mess up the FDA applications that we had in progress. It would mess up distributors. Like anyone who you're partnering with would say, well, I don't want to work with somebody that has a warning letter. Have you dealt with this? We were able to avoid all this, but one kind of concrete example is that we, like Lucy, cannot make quick claims about the nicotine gum product. So even though most people think, oh, this is like Nicorette, it's actually regulated in a different category. It's regulated as tobacco product, not as a pharmaceutical product. And so you can't run a digital ad that says, like, hey, you're a smoker. Quit smoking with Lucy. That's a violation because it's not regulated as a pharmaceutical, as a smoking cessation aid is the term. And so in the nicotine category, you would have companies create a product. Usually there would be no founder associated with said product because more people didn't want to put their face on it. Yeah. And they would do a lot of things that would. They would make sales grow incredibly quickly, like, you know, making marketing claims just where and how they decided to sell, etc. Etc. The ad channels that they use. So they would. They would go from zero to hundreds of millions or billions of revenue very, very quickly, but the enterprise value of the company would be near zero. Right. Because no, nobody would want to buy a company that had all that kind of baggage. And so if you were going to value it, it'd be like, what is the, like, very, very, very near term, you know, sort of like revenue opportunity. Yeah, yeah. I mean, the famous, the famous comparison is Juul versus Puff bar. So Juul went, you know, raised a bunch of money, got very big, put in FDA applications, got those applications, denied marketing denial orders, then got them, stayed in the courts. They set up a. I think their whole headquarters was in D.C. they were working very closely with the FDA. Truly engaging to sort of clean up the, you know, all of the problems around marketing and sales and formulation. Just really try and get to a clean bill of health. With regard to the government relationship, they were successful and they got approved as. Not as a smoking cessation aid. So they still can't make the claim that Juul will help you quit smoking. But they did get approved as a tobacco product, you know, which I think the FDA says It has to be suitable for the protection of public health, which is a very vague way of saying like it's a net benefit, net good, that it's on the market, which is, you know, people can debate that back and forth. But. But back in the Juul days, they also could not say quit smoking with Juul. They wanted to put say they wanted, like a lot of people that were, you know, were smoking cigarettes did switch to Juul and they were pushing for that, but they couldn't actually make quick claims. So they used the word switch. They said switch to Juul instead of quit with Juul. And that seemed fine for a long time. I think they eventually trademarked it and then I think they had to pull away from it at a various points time. But there's clearly like this gray area in your marketing. Can you say you want smokers to upgrade to nicotine gum? You know, all of these things need to be sort of litigated with the fda. And what has medvee been up to? We wound up playing it very safe and that probably kept us from mooning in revenue to 1.8 billion overnight. But I still think it was the right decision for Lucy. Now medv appears to have taken a much more aggressive approach. They are apparently running 800 fake doctor accounts on Facebook to sell compounded GLP1. Silmona verified that the accounts are not actually doctors. Some even have cartoonishly fake names. Dr. Tucker Carl Zinn, MD if you like. This is one of those things where I feel bad for someone who clicked on an ad that was deceptive. Dr. Tucker Carlson, MD. But if you're getting your GLP1s from Dr. Carl Tuckerzin, you probably are in on the joke to some extent. I don't know. It's clearly not above board and they have to clean this up and deal with this. They were also sued in a class action lawsuit last month for violating California's anti spam law. That stuff can be crazy expensive because a lot of the fines are on like a perfect instance basis. So it'll be like, okay, yeah, $10 fine for every text message you sent. And it could be like you sent like you know, 50 million text messages or something. So you could have some massive, massive liability. Of course that will be litigated in the court of law and there might be a settlement and they can figure out what, what the right damage is. If they are even guilty, they're still early in the process. And so the end result is more of a story of pushing over aggressive marketing tactics. Yeah, I mean so, so pull up, pull up the actual picture of Shields post because I think that you can just see how confusing this would be to somebody maybe a little bit older. Yeah. Zoom in. You can just see. You see somebody that looks like a doctor. Oh yeah, they get the stuff. You're 70 years old on Facebook. Yeah. You're not necessarily putting it together. It's Dr. Tucker Carlson MD. So my co founder, Lucy is. He has a PhD from Caltech, but it's in biophysics. And so he's not a medical doctor, but he is a doctor of science from Caltech. Like he has a really good background, but he's not a medical doctor. And I would always joke with him, like, we got to put you in a stethoscope. We got to take some photos of you in a stethoscope. The aura is so high. And he was like, no, that's like such bad practice. We can't do that. Doctor is associated with medical doctor. Even if you have a doctorate in something, it's like the famous, like, I'm dying. Does anyone have a doctorate? Yeah, it's like, yeah, I have a doctor and a juris doctor or whatever. The other interesting thing, medv uses the dot org. What domain isn't that for nonprofits? Typically? That's very. I would think. So there's going to be. I don't, I don't know that if it's technically illegal to use it as a for profit. But certainly when you add that to all the other. Yeah, because you land on that site and then you think it looks like, oh, a doctor advertised this to me and now I'm on a nonprofit medical website. Yes. So yeah, in general, I think the story is pushing over aggressive marketing tactics to the limit more than AI allowing low headcount scaling. And this has happened for a long time. Back in the old days, I want to say like 2014, Facebook era. But the early days of online marketing, there were countless stories of questionable supplement sales or telehealth operations, sales scaling on the back of insane ads. The classic formula for like mega scale was if you could get an ad approved, if you could get it like sort of like whitelisted or through the approval process, it wouldn't automatically get reviewed that often. So once you were approved, you could spend $1,000 or you could spend $50 million. And there wasn't. Early on, there wasn't a natural trigger to like re. You know, like refact check. It was like if you could get approved for a small ad, you could scale it up. And so People would do all these crazy things to try and get the ads approved. There were all these tricky things where they would route to one website and then after the ad was approved, they changed the website. And then, you know, all the ad platforms had to eventually figure out, like, okay, we need to be scraping a layer deeper, like consistently or like every day. But the canonical example of the health supplement or telehealth operation that would always go viral and always just print was if you could get an ad approved that had Harvard scientists, brain pill, and Johnny Depp all in one. Call to action. I'm not kidding about this. This is real. So it was like always this picture of Johnny Depp coming out of the ocean. That was the one that was really scroll stopping Pirates of the. No, no. It was like a paparazzi photo which they didn't have the rights to use. They would not partner with Johnny Depp. They should not be running that ad at all. And then something about brain boosting or like making like limitless pill make you a genius. That type of marketing would, like, it's very general, like, ever. Who doesn't want to be smarter? So everyone would click on that. And then like, Harvard scientists would, like, lend its, like, credibility because, oh, if it's from Harvard, like, it's good. And so if you could get those three terms approved, there were a whole bunch of like, sketchy operations that would get ads approved and then just pump like $100 million of sales behind them. And it seems like maybe there's a little bit of that going on here where a lot of these, A lot of these ads should not have been approved. Maybe there needs to be a validation. I know that a lot of companies that partner with doctors even just to sell like skin care supplements, sunscreens, really anything, the rate to, to advertise with an influencer who's a, who actually has some sort of medical credential is like way higher. Yeah, this is way more effective. And that. Yeah, it's way more effective. But if you can just like fake that, then you're basically arbitraging that, but you shouldn't be. So we have, we have two employees, but 800 fake doctors. Facebook, not great. Yeah, so we'll, we'll see how this works out. I think the press tour is probably cancel ended for the near term. Okay, well, founder's still welcome. I think people have a lot of questions for the founder, Matthew Gallagher. We'd love to have him on the show and dig into all this because maybe there are some good, good context that is missing from all of the, all of the criticism that's been levied over the weekend. But we'll see. So I was reflecting on like we're still in pursuit broadly of this one person, $1 billion company. It's still an interesting question. Will it happen? Why might it happen? Why might it not? Yeah, in my head it was always new startup is created like solo founder creates a hit product, raises 100 on a billion. And that is like the cleanest path because for so many other paths you just run into. Yeah, maybe I want to be the one, one person, $1 billion company, but I want to win more. So if adding incremental people helps me build a better company, there's rhymes. Yeah. Why would I not add at least a handful of people? Yeah, totally. So, yeah, I mean, I think software is an interesting category, especially if it's open source software somehow where there was some sort of flywheel where you could verify what was actually built and then you could verify what the sales were because it was done on some sort of open platform or some sort of thing where the actual reporting and the analytics, I mean, apparently the New York Times did verify the run rate that they used. So their money was flowing through the business. But having a much cleaner representation of what the financial picture is I think would help. I was personally excited about the prospect of a video game and just more video game developers seeing breakout success. So a couple years ago in the olden days when I had free time, I got woefully addicted to a poker themed roguelike deck building game called Balatro, which I don't think anyone here has played. But this game is amazing, so much fun. So it's. You're basically playing poker, but there's no financial stakes, there's no money, there's no microtransactions at all. Interestingly, the game actually got banned I think in Japan or some other country for being like poker and being banned for being anti gambling. No, no, no, no. Banned for being like gambling aesthetics because you are playing with cards, there's no real money. You pay like 10, $15 for the game and then you can just play unlimited. But it's done extremely well. So it sold over 5 million units. I saw some reporting that it might be 7 million and maybe even more now because they've gone multi platform and I think at 15, $20 a download that might be close to $100 million in revenue. And it was made by a solo developer who goes by local funk. Over a two and a half year period. He Originally wanted the game to be a side project that he could put on his resume, but it wound up being a massive success. And so depending on your valuation methodology, you could probably underwrite Balatro close to a billion dollars if it's generated $100 million of basically free cash flow. You know, there was obviously two and a half years of R and D, but that was just this developer's time, the future revenue streams, the offshoots, the merge. Like you get to a number that's close, and you have to imagine that his two and a half year development, like life cycle, would have been pulled forward by the help of AI. So he basically developed the game entirely in the pre AI period. So it came out. Does it still have momentum? I think it's probably trailed off a little bit because people sort of, you get to the end of the game after, I don't know, 10, 20, 50 hours or something, and then there are some people on YouTube that will do like tons and tons of try and break the game because you can get really, really crazy with, like, combinations of different things. But at a certain point, like, you do kind of finish the game and then you're like, okay, I'm moving on. And he never added microtransactions, he never added like any sort of live service model, subscription, anything like that. It was sort of just like it did really well and then we'll see. And so, yeah, this came out as a demo in 2023 and officially launched in January 2024, so fully like pre AI development. And there is lots of hesitation in the video game community around AI, specifically around the art generation, like pixel art generation, all of that. But if you think about AI as a tool for writing game logic and particularly re platforming, it took him, I want to say, like a full year. And I think he partnered with a developer or a publisher to actually distribute the game because it was originally a PC game and then it went to Nintendo Switch and then PlayStation and then Xbox. And it's a perfect game to be everywhere, but that takes a lot of time and you sort of have to rewrite a bunch of the software. And that's something where AI should be able to pull that forward or make it even easier to launch everywhere on day one. And so the interesting thing is that Balatro broke through because it paired, like this familiar design language with this wildly engagement, engaging progression system. And so bringing fun ideas like that to market faster is something that, like, I'm really looking forward to. And we heard Sholto from Anthropic talking about building his own RTS game and obviously he has a full time job. So this would be certainly something that would be extra. We've been working on a bunch of simulators that are sort of feeling like games. Some of the mechanics are getting pretty good now. Game like. But you have to imagine that in the future there'll be more and more game developers. Yeah. I mean, some of the stuff that I've seen internally at tvN, it's like going to blow already. Vague post. Are you the vague post king? Have you stared into the abyss yet? Because everyone talks about at the AI labs, they all have abysses. And I feel like abyss101 is like, do not stare into it. Yeah. Like maybe glance. Like a first day at onboarding. Yeah, I think a glance is okay. Or maybe like saddling up to the abyss and just kind of peeking your head in is fine. But I would not stare into it. I think that's something. Let's go over to the App Store. Yeah. The App store saw an 85% increase in new apps this past quarter. Let's pour one out. Pour one out for the App Store review team. Most recent quarters, new app count has grown less than 10%. So it was just ticking up quarter over quarter and then jumped massively. No surprises here. Feel like everybody, everybody that I know outside of tech has an app now. They're unconstrained, they have an app. But at the same time, I have yet to find an app that's on my home screen that was solo developer Vibe coded, something like that. So I'm waiting for the flappy bird moment or the Balatro moment, this solo thing. Even if it's like a productivity tool, there's clearly more apps, but actually going viral, like, what is the Harry Potter Balenciaga moment? What is the viral moment that breaks through and actually makes it to the top of the app charts? Because right now it just feels like the long tail of the App Store is getting potentially fatter because there's more single use apps, there's more small apps, but will we see one of those break out and become fantastically successful? That's sort of like the next critical moment that I'm eagerly awaiting. But we'll see what's going on in China, John. The pork industry is a victim of its own success. This story is incredible. They got swine scrapers over there. Skyscrapers filled with swine. I'm not kidding about this. So this is from the Economist, and I read this yesterday and really enjoyed it. Pork holds a unique place in The Chinese diet. It was once a symbol of the good life. The Chinese character for home is a pictogram of a pig under a roof. It is so important that the government has a strategic frozen pork reserve. And the news media are always full of the ups and downs of the pork industry. It's like they gotta cover it like it's a horse race. The pork race. Like what's going on? It's the pork race. No, it's serious TBPN for the pork industry in China. That's the real, that's the, the real opportunity. There have been plenty of peaks and troughs in the past decade. The trough is active over there, literally. In 2018-2019, when African swine fever ravaged pig herds, many smaller backyard farms were wiped out. Prices went through the roof. Before long, the industry came trotting back. The big worry now is that it is doing too well. More efficient farming methods producing ever more pork are colliding with slow consumption of the meat. Now all the news is about overcapacity. She, who sells cuts of pork at a market in Beijing, says she only got to eat the meat on special occasions with a child. These days, she says it's so cheap people can have it whenever they fancy. The oversupply pushed live pig prices to a 15 year low in March. Some farmers are losing over $40 per animal. Part of the problem is that some pig farmers have been aggressively expand, have aggressively expanded production in an attempt to gain a bigger share of a shrinking market. On top of that, big companies save their bacon in the downturn by concentrating their pigs into mechanized modern facilities where they could be kept isolated from the swine fever. Modern farms are a marvel at industrial agriculture, though not of animal welfare. Tens of thousands of pigs are packed into multi story concrete buildings. One in Hubei province has 26 floors. It's a swine scraper. It's 26 floors of pigs. Do we know why? Why consumption is declining? Just oversupply. So they got hit with this, they got hit with the swine flu and they were worried about all the pigs getting sick and dying. And so they, instead of having them cross pollinate in like open fields, they push them into these literal skyscrapers that are 26 floors tall and. But I would assume over, over, over consumption, overproduction, you have oversupply, prices come down. But they're saying that just overall consumption is dropping too. Well, yes. So people are moving to chicken and seafood, increasingly middle class. The middle class Chinese see pork as less healthy than chicken and seafood. But it's really like a supply, a supply side story that may be more pork than even China can eat. The average Chinese person guzzled 28kg of it in 2024, but that was 2kg less than in 2023. To boost prices, officials have slashed subsidies, ordered farms to cull droves and told the pork reserve to buy more meat to little effect. Some big firms are looking elsewhere. That is wild. China's biggest pig producer hopes to export its business model instead. Last year it said it would bring the first high rise, it would build the first high rise in Vietnam. Capable of rearing 1.6 million swine a year. Pig farms are going vertical as profits flatline. And so they are moving the pigs inside, which is what, which is, you know, winding up with, with like increased yields because the pigs aren't getting sick anyway. America's best new weapon in Iran is a drone inspired by Iran. You had asked about this on one interview. We did with some. Yeah, I forget who it was with, but I was, I was, you know, I was surprised to see the US copying the Shahed because it feels like you were surprised to see them copying it or not copying it. No, it feels like entirely the smart move. Yeah, it's battle tested, they're cheap. We, we have a good understanding of their capability because American allies have faced off against them. So there's a lot of reasons that it makes sense. But I feel like America had to swallow its pride to some degree to copy something that the enemy made. So yes, they're calling it the Toyota Corolla of drones. The powerful low cost attack drone the US is using in its war with Iran doesn't come from one of America's more than 400 venture backed drone startups. And it isn't the product of Silicon Valley ingenuity. Instead, the drone having its moment in the Middle east conflict was designed by the US military itself using reverse engineered Iranian technology. From the earliest days of the war, the FLM 136, or Lucas as it is known, has been wiping out Iranian military targets. While better funded hardware systems and drones from defense startups have had little involvement. It is a victory for the US military which went from blueprint to battle ready drone in less than two years, jettisoning its tradition of slowly buying very expensive equipment. The creation of Lucas is an early proof point that's a narrative violation new strategy of making cheap drones quickly and a sign that the Pentagon can change the way it does business to better prepare for modern conflict. So I want to know so much more about like, so they're not subcontracting this at all. This is all like is the entire supply chain the US military itself, are they milling the parts in factories? During the Biden administration, a small group in the department Defense Department seized on the idea of America building its own version of the Iranian shahed, a fearsome attack drone that militaries and proxy militias across the globe have sought to duplicate. Russia, which is lobbying about 4,000 modified Shaheds at Ukraine every month, according to Ukrainian government data, did more than any other country to demonstrate the drone's capabilities. A small team in the US military's research and engineering office put together plans to build an attack drone based on deconstructing a shahed the military had recovered from Ukraine. It was the first known occasion in around half a century that the US had reverse engineered another country's military technology for its own use. Former defense officials said the last time it was a Soviet made pontoon bridge. Interesting. A former senior defense official described Lucas, which stands for low cost Unmanned Combat Attack System, as the Toyota Corolla of drones. It may not have all the features or top end components, but it was built to be affordable and plentiful. The cost of Lucas ranges from 10,000 to 55,000. That's a big range according to a Pentagon spokesman. In line with the Iranian model Tomahawk long range cruise missiles, several hundred of which have been used in the war with Iran, cut at least 2 million cost at least 2 million apiece. The defense Department is committed to scaling cost effective autonomous solutions for the joint force and Lucas continues to be a prime example, the spokesman said. Former senior Pentagon official Michael Horowitz, who is one of the leaders of the team that developed Lucas, said that other militaries had the ability to make their own low cost long range precision strike weapons. The issue was the US was spending nothing $0 on that kind of system. He's now on the Council of Foreign Relations. Lucas was given a spot in a in 2024 in a Biden era initiative to field thousands of autonomous weapons. By last August, its inclusion was controversial, said former military officials. Lucas just wasn't just a mock up, but it beat out more mature systems on the offering. Interesting. Because the government owns Lucas's intellectual property, it is using the same approach it employed in building ships during World War II, enlisting a cross section of second and third tier manufacturers. Okay, who crank out the drones on demand during wartime. Little known Scottsdale, Arizona based Spectre Works and Huntsville, Alabama based integration Innovation were tapped into to build the drones so they are partnering with private companies to actually do build an assembly of these drones. A total of five manufacturers will be selected, each set up to produce 300 drones a month, a former senior defense official familiar with the plan said Spectre works in integration. Innovation didn't respond to requests for comment. The Marine Corps was first to use the drones and then ordered around 6,000 destined for the Indo Pacific. But then the war with Iran began. The drones were handed over to US CENTCOM in February and made their first appearance in combat. The Trump administration has enacted sweeping reforms in defense procurement, making it easier for the military to quickly buy weapons and emphasizing commercial technology to modernize the US Arsenal. In particular, an August decision by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to rescind long held requirements processes for acquiring technology made the rapid deployment of Lucas possible, current and and former defense officials say. Still other changes will take longer to trickle through the Pentagon's bureaucracy and it will take time to reorient America to a new way of fighting wars, even as China is developing advanced ways to strike the U.S. while Lucas has been a success against Iran's degraded air defenses, that isn't a guarantee it will be a battlefield star in more complex environments, an electronic warfare expert said. In the Middle east there is no meaningful jamming of gps, which can cause drones to crash or fly off course. Every technology gets defeated at some point, he said. There's still a worrisome. There's also still a worrisome lack of cheap US Counter drone technology, which has allowed Iranian backed militias to continue using small drones to menace US Military bases in the Middle East. The small number of unmanned surface vessels in the region are still years away from being the autonomous fighting machines their manufacturers have promised. The absence of a broader supply of modern US cheap US Systems in the Iran war has served as a wake up call. We're not ready, said Julie Bush, co founder of the defense tech firm Valenor Enterprises and a former Palantir Technologies executive who has been on the show. The government doesn't have what it needs to scale that they what it needs at the scale that they need. Yeah, did you see that AGM post? Antonio Garcia Martinez said about how maybe there are actually ships that are going through the Strait of Hormuz right now, but they just turn off all of their transponders. Yeah, I mean I think the estimate is around 10 ships a day are going through, down from 100 pre war, but there could be more that just aren't that again have their transponder turns off. Yeah, he was saying something about like people will turn off the transponders even when they find like good fishing spots because they don't want other people to find their good fishing spots. And so it's done more than more than people think, I guess. But Citrini is over there. Citrini Research Analyst made it over to the Strait of Hormuz in an absolutely insane move. And some real crazy investigations of journalism going on. I'm hoping to have Citrini on. I obviously want to be secure about whatever is shared because it does seem like a risky proposition to be over there right now. But love seeing them. Love seeing the reporting so far. In other tech news, Anthropic is making its own splash with an acquisition. This was on Thursday, April 2. $400 million for coefficient bio started last fall developing an AI drug R& D platform. The startups team will be joining Anthropic's Healthcare Life Sciences group which is aimed at developing tools for biotech workflows ranging from drug discovery to clinical tests. Very exciting. Dimension capital owned over 50% who is dimension Capital? Have we had them on the show? I don't think so. We probably should. That feels like a multi stage research oriented investment firm partnering with companies across the frontiers of science and compute well. Huge win for them. Congrats to the not bad. Not bad at all for six months. There's also an article in the Wall street journal about OpenAI Anthropic's finances reveal challenge from Berber gin scoop God OpenAI Anthropic are racing toward potentially record breaking IPOs by the end of the year. An inside look at the financials of both companies. Companies prior to funding rounds completed earlier this year show their Achilles heel the soaring costs needed to train new AI models. OpenAI expects to spend $121 billion on computing power for AI research in 2028. That means the company anticipates burning 85 billion that year, even even after almost doubling sales from the years prior. Such losses would dwarf that of virtually any other public company in history. Anthropic doesn't expect to spend nearly as much, but its rosiest forecast tell a similar story of mounting computing costs. Both companies are releasing new versions of their AI models at faster at a faster cadence than ever before, while pouring more resources into the training runs that create them. The arms race is showing no signs of slowing. Yeah, so pull up this chart from Andrew Curran. This is from the Wall street journal piece Projected OpenAI and Anthropic Model training spend for the remainder of this decade in billions. The Wall Street Journal Says they got the data from financial documents shared with investors. So, yeah, I think, I mean, obviously, absolutely wild numbers here. I think this is for training specifically, which is a cost that, that, that can be adjusted. Yeah, the question of, like, yeah, like, each model by itself is profitable, but you keep having to spend more on the bigger model. Tyler about this is like, emblematic of like, the Dwarakash critique of Dario, right, Where he's like, if you basically compare open anthropic, like, Dario is being way more conservative about spending. Like, he's like, oh, well, we don't want to, you know, go broke, whatever. But yeah, I mean, when you see the chart like this, it's like, pretty crazy. Was it the YOLO philosophy? It does seem like there's, there's a debate internal at OpenAI. According to the information around IPO timing. This is from the information from Anissa Gardizzi and Amir Afrati. OpenAI CEO and CFO diverge on IPO timing. Sam Altman has committed OpenAI to spend $600 billion in the next five years and privately said he wants to go public as soon as the fourth quarter, despite expectations his company will burn more than 200 billion before it starts generating cash behind the scenes, according to the information. Sarah Fryer, his chief financial officer, has voiced concerns that reflect the tensions and risk inherent in the CEO's extraordinarily ambitious plans. OpenAI is committing billions of dollars a year in advance to help finance data centers. Fryer last year began reporting to the head of applications instead of Altman. Altman has excluded her from some conversations related to financial plans. And so you can go to the Information to read more about that story. But it is, it is extremely high stakes. There's, in general, the AI companies have, like, are they railroads? Are they SaaS companies? There's this incredible capex. Are they both electricity? Yeah. No one really has consensus here yet. And it feels like there's an ongoing divergence in how do you model these financially? How much risk should you, should you take? There's also this question of, like, the end of the curve, the end of this, of this, of the exponential. We're seeing this exponential growth in model capability relative to investment dollars. The scaling laws have held for a long time, but at the same time, you can't just throw endless money because at a certain point you don't want to spend a trillion dollars to get like, one more IQ point out of the model. There is a limit to this. And so, yeah, if you think about, like, hiring, if you're thinking about, like, hiring an employee, it's like, okay, so this, this one individual is, you know, their, their base salary is going to be 200k a year. Or you could, you could, you could hire this other person and they're, they're one IQ point smarter. But you have to, you have, it's going to cost you $5 trillion, $5 million a year. The choices is obvious. So, yeah, we'll see, we'll see when we get to that. We'll see when we get to that point. Overall, I think, like, tensions between. This is not the first time there's been tension between a CFO and an ambitious CEO. Have you ever hired a CFO at any of your companies? No. Wow, goaded. No, we hired a CFO at my first company and it was an awesome experience, actually, but the tension was insane. But I was not the CEO. And so the CFO came in and she had taken multiple companies public and was like, this is just a widgets business. This is so simple. Like, we should just be like, running this sufficiently. And of course there was like a big debate about that. But she's, she was very, very formative in my early business career. Yeah, it's interesting because that was, that was, you know, consumer packaged goods company, but with a lot of Silicon Valley venture capital jammed into it. So the pressure from the board was one thing, and then you have the CFO who saying, hey, we're selling. Yeah, and so much organic growth. But the nature of, like, Soylent and consumer packaged goods, like, it's not a fundamentally different business at the end of the day. Like, it does just become a marketing manufacturing margin game and you eventually trade on ebitda. And so the, what do they call it, the reality distortion field doesn't quite apply. But when you're dealing with an entirely new technology, it's a whole different discussion. Anyway, there's another article in the Wall Street Journal about the new jobs that are being created by AI. Let's go through this. So AI is raising big fears about employment losses, but it's also giving rise to new engineering and training jobs. And we're going to have Liz Hoffman from Semaphore on the show later to talk about the March jobs data. There was a massive jobs beat and a whole bunch and more jobs added to the economy. But the chart is crazy. It's like up and down every quarter. There's. Yeah, the tough thing that, you know, every single jobs report has been revised downward so massively that it's hard to look at a new jobs report and actually get excited when you have a good one print like that, say, yeah, this time it's different. This time it's different. The last 12 have been revised downward and then now you have a war and major geopolitical tensions and this weird dynamic where the oil prices are driving gas prices, which is driving inflation, which is maybe going to cause less driving based vacations over the summer, less tourism. Like you could see inflation plus some economic weakness regardless of what the technology industry is doing. And so you could wind up with a situation where rates have to stay high and so that creates unemployment. And it's a rough time to be a Fed governor, I'm sure. But let's dig into what the Wall Street Journal is talking about. The where different jobs are playing a part here. So artificial intelligence has sparked fears it will become a job killer. There's also a research paper, I don't know PDF from OpenAI today, around the social contract and how the government should be thinking about redistribution and the safety net in the age of AGI. It's a long document and honestly I haven't had a chance to read it yet, but we will go through some of it later. This. I saw one response. Someone just said, just put the, just put the tokens in the bag, bro. But we'll read it and we'll cover it. Yeah, we'll figure it out. And yeah, it'll be interesting to see how it maps onto like previous political platforms, like who picks it up? Because like there's obviously a collection of political ideas and various politicians might say, hey, I've been saying that for a long time. I like that. Or hey, like I don't. I completely disagree with that. I have a different philosophy. But we'll work through it. So it's also. AI is also fueling a crop of new careers. AI created 640,000 jobs between 2023 and 2025 in the U.S. according to an analysis by LinkedIn of job posting data, including new white collar positions such as head of AI and AI engineer. That tally doesn't include the huge number of temporary construction jobs tied to building the mammoth data centers AI relies on. And I'm wondering how temporary will they be if they ramp. I mean, if the, if the CapEx ramp continues and you know you're going to build 10 times as many data centers you would imagine there's some ways, like construction jobs. Many construction jobs are temporary, right? You build, you build a house, job is over, you move and build the next one. Yeah. So LinkedIn's head of economics. Corey Can Tenga says we are not talking enough about, we're not talking about enough jobs to change the direction of the labor market. But for AI roles, growth has been pretty much straight up. And Citadel had something. Yeah. And for. And for roles like AI engineer. To me, that was just. You were going to hire an engineer and you're slapping AI on the front of it because you want somebody that excited about. Yeah. Just somebody that's. That's excited about AI. Yeah. And maybe more greenfield projects. Maybe something that's, you know, the, it's, it's like the new full stack. Like no longer are you hiring like a back end engineer, front end engineer, necessarily. Like you might be hiring someone who's more flexible. What do you laugh at? I love how that the first example, this guy Zach, who they're profiling in this, the first picture of him is just him with a surfboard running into the ocean. Hey, surfing after work. He's got a good work life balance. Let's read that. Looks like the middle of the day to me. Look at the. Just look at where the light is. John. That's not after work. You. Unless he's wrapping up another word about surfing, I don't want you getting canceled again for being anti surfing post. What were you. You were anti surfing before? I was saying surfing in really cold water before work. Oh, he's bad. Has not worked well for me. Okay. For you. Apparently there's people out there that. Yeah. Death threats. Yeah. Did you get death threats? No. You just got dunked on. It's fine. Zach Kinzler, who's 25 years old, got his master's degree in business analytics less than two years ago. In February, he assumed the title of head of Human AI solutions at Boodlebox, an AI education startup based in Colorado Springs, Colorado. His job involves client training and using AI to speed up tasks for coworkers. That is a good gig. Kinzler works remotely from San Diego, wanted to work with AI, and says he feels lucky to land in a growing field. The conversation about whether artificial intelligence is good or bad needs to go away because it's not going to go away, he said. One of the biggest questions facing a shaky US labor market has been that has been especially hard on white collar workers is whether AI's ability to mimic human skills like research, writing and coding will cause significant layoffs. Big cuts at Oracle this week while the company invests heavily in AI data centers, underscored some of the these worries. Corporate leaders, including some in the tech world, have issued grim forecasts about AI's potential to replace white collar workers at a massive scale. According to a recent Goldman Sachs research report, AI could automate tasks that account for a quarter of all working hours in the United States, especially in fields such as administrative support, legal work and architecture and engineering. One interesting pitch I was hearing, I think it was from the OpenAI doc was I think it was during the Industrial Revolution, the unions lobbied for the weekend. The idea of the weekend. And that just became a thing and stuck around forever basically. And so there's a question about like, do we pitch a four day work week somehow nationally some bigger thing? I don't know. There's all these interesting competitive dynamics and obviously people wind up working on the weekends because, because they're like, I want to out compete. David center is like, I want all my enemies to move to a four day work week immediately where they can properly relax and recover. Mandate that, actually mandate that for everyone except me. Still, analysts say it's hard to judge how many job cuts thus far genuinely attributable to AI and which are being made for financial or operational reasons. This is something we've been going back and forth on forever. A new survey of 750 chief financial officers found that AI had essentially no negative employment effect in 2025. But data show employers are increasingly hiring for AI talent. In 2023, AI related roles made up only 1.6% of all job postings, according to an AI job tracker co led by Anil Gupta, professor at the University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business and Job Market Company Data company Link Up. Never heard of that before. Two years later that figure had more than doubled to 3.4% of all AI. Of all job postings being AI related, one rising job is head of AI. That's a good gig. In the three years from 2023 to 2025, companies sought to fill 225,000 such jobs. There are now 225,000 heads of AI. You need 20 years of, of experience prior for most of these jobs, which is maybe tough. Tough to put that together. No, I'm joking. We should, we should talk about China's what's happening in the Chinese AI talent race. Over in the Economist. Yes. Dave Friedberg was talking about this on stage at Hill and Valley about how there's been this like big flipping flippening from where research is coming from. The headline stat is something like 50% of. Where is it 50%. Okay. This was from Jensen Huang at Nvidia. He said, is it possible that the United States falls behind China. He asked himself a question during a question and answer session about artificial intelligence late last year. He says the answer is absolutely yes. That may seem surprising. For much of the last decade, America has been comfortably ahead in the AI race, home to the most advanced companies producing frontier models. Its engineers have access to deep pools of capital as well as a regular supply of Nvidia's cutting edge chips. But Mr. Wong's concern related to an equally important ingredient of innovation. Human talent. Until recently, most leading AI research was produced by experts based in the West. That is changing. In 2025, for the first time, more studies presented at the world's top AI conference had lead authors based in China. Tyler, you have more? Yeah, I think it's just misleading. Right? Okay, explain. A lot of the best researchers in the US are studying, but they're not putting right. You can see if you scroll down on that article a little bit more, you can see a chart where the US like between 2015 and 2020, it like looks like it's starting to go exponential and then it basically plateaus. Right. Because all the best researchers basically go to the labs, then you don't publish anymore. Wait, so which chart are you referring to? The one in I'm looking in the Economist. Is it called active AI researchers in the thousands Student early career. And so in the United States it's growing and then up until 2021 and then it stagnates because all the labs went closed and all the Chinese labs are still open source. Are still open source. Yeah. So yeah, I think that's a. I don't know that that's a very reasonable mitigating point here. There is just the question of like, do you still need a pipeline of open source researchers of robust research practice? Also, like, if you're in the Ilya Sutskever camp of like the age of research, maybe you do need a bunch of bizarre ideas that are happening and you get like more. Yeah, but I mean, Ilya is like definitely not publishing, right? Oh, true. He's like even more secretive. Yeah, yeah, but I think you could like expand from that into. Into like the, like there might be interesting like, knock on research that gets pulled from random places and like the cross pollination is valuable. And even if he's not a practitioner. Practitioner of that, you can still make the argument that research is valuable and cross pollination is also valuable. And China does have that advantage. Yeah, I just think like, if you look at China, like there's the anecdotal evidence of like what happened to the Kwen researchers? Right? Like, you know, the people running that company are just like not. Do we ever find out did they go to Xai or what's going on? I don't think we know yet. We don't know yet. But like clearly like something is like different about how they think about researchers then in the U.S. right? Because those guys are like extremely good. And somehow there was some reorg happening. The chat is demanding an ad break. We'll figure it out. A lot of people were saying that the ads were part of the program. We will figure out a way to do something ad related. Until now you have to put up with some random soundboard and that's the best I can do for you. But there is a different article in the Economist. People who are just watching for the ads, I guess. China's new master plan for its tech economy in 2030 and beyond. And so they have. This is the 15th five year plan for China's economic development. This was adopted in March and the Economist is breaking it down. It talks of industrial upgrading, new quality productive forces and the like. Yet in plain language it translates into Elon Musk's fever dream. So China wants to build skies dotted with flying taxis, fusion power fueling factories manned by humanoid robots, unstoppable quantum computers, 6G mobile devices plugged directly into people's brains. It's a dream come true for you, Jordy. Are you going to, you're going to renounce your citizenship? What? Yeah. You're like, yeah, no count. Absolutely. Yeah. Sign me up. Sign me up. No, but there's, I mean obviously they're taking, they're taking like frontier sci fi development very, very seriously and it has a lot of knock on effects. So past plans also displayed gumption. In 2015, the most high profile plan in years dubbed china made in 20, made in China 2025 set the goal of catching up with America and ending reliance on foreign technology. But catching up, which China has pulled off in areas like electric cars, clean energy and even artificial intelligence is one thing. Dominating technology of the future is another. Can they do it? One reason for this breath.

I'll see multiple journalists on the horizon. You're watching TVPN. Today is Monday, April 6, 2020 26. We are live from the TVP Ultravelm. The temple of technology. The fortress of finance. The capital. The capital. Happy? Good to be back to everyone celebrated yesterday. How was your weekend, Jordy? Good. A lot of egg. Time to Hail Mary. Oh, you did? Yeah, I did. I finally saw it. Did you see the trailer? I did not see it. How was it? Ben? You saw it, right? What was your review? It was great. I was telling you. I think it was. It was fresh, it was fun. People put it on. Will Depew did not like it. Yeah, he didn't like it. He said it was interstellar for chuds, right? Isn't that what he said something? You liked it, right? I thought it was great. It was very enjoyable. Watch. I don't know. Should I see it? Yes, I think you should see it in theater. In theater for sure. It's definitely a good movie. That's a high bar. It's not too long. It's like two and a half hours. But it's an Andy Weir. Have you seen the Martian? Brutal. It's basically just like endless stream of problems and then quick solutions. So there's some sort of problem they need to figure it out Problem they need to figure it out. All of it's. I don't know, like loosely, like hard sci fi. Like somewhat believable. It does have aliens in it and stuff. But it's a fun time anyway. Well, speaking of real space, what's going on with Artemis 2? Artemis 2 is live streaming right now to almost a million people on YouTube on the NASA YouTube channel. I believe it's also on Netflix and the stream title is just we are about to fly around the moon. With authority from NASA, we can actually pull this up and see. I would love to hear. Hear what is going on right now because I think it's happening like as we speak. Like they are. They are up. I also wrote a little bit of a retrospective on the. Can we get some sound? I have a spider on my. Yeah, okay. So one minute ago, NASA posted that the crew are now the farthest any human has ever traveled. 250,000 miles from the Earth. John is dealing with a little spider here on his microphone. Here we go. There we go. There we go. Solved. Still living too. We'll take it out later. What do we got going on here? Yeah, can we get the audio on that? Oh, there's no audio. Oh, weird. I think there is audio on YouTube, but it might not be letting us like stream it through. I don't know. Sometimes there's like DRM stuff. Anyway, Matthew Gallagher, he's the founder of medv and we were supposed to have him on the show today. He unfortunately cannot make it. We do have John Slotkin coming on the chief medical officer from Gelsinger or Geisinger to talk about claims around oral GLP1 drugs. We read the New York Times story on Thursday and then over the weekend there was a whole bunch more analysis about the company and there were. It's so interesting because you would think that someone else would write the one billion one, the one person, $1 billion company totally, and then the New York Times would take it down. But in this case it happened in reverse. So last week the New York Times broke down the story of MEDV, a telehealth provider of GLP1 weight loss drugs. And the framing was basically that this was the first time in history a single person had built, quote, a billion dollar company. And that's what went viral. Digging in, there were some small caveats and some big caveats. The small caveats were that the founder, Matthew McGallagher had hired his younger brother. So technically it was a two person startup. Most people were like, yeah, okay, we'll count. That doesn't matter, it's a family member. Right? And then also the other one, it's only twice as many people as the original challenge, but they had almost twice the revenue. 1.8 billion. But the question was the valuation. So the headline stat in the article was that they are on track to do 1.8 billion in sales this year and that the on track is doing a lot of work. Of course, because that's clearly an ARR number that's, that's extrapolated out. And the GLP1 market's moving very quickly. It's not like RO and HIMSS and all the other providers are going to be, you know, just sitting down and letting this company run away with whatever secret sauce they've discovered around customer acquisition. Although they might not go into this, which we'll go into. And it was insane scale. But companies don't unilaterally trade at 1x revenue. Like that's sort of a given. In this article it's sort of presupposed that if you're doing 1.8 billion in revenue, you would trade above a billion dollars. And so this counts as a billion dollar company. I always thought that the billion dollar company would be on market cap valuation, not on Revenue. Because you could do, you know, if you're going to say, you know, okay, any, just try and say the biggest number, you would want to set up some sort of like payment network where basically you could report GMV really, really high. And you actually have a very, very small business because you're taking like 1% as your true net revenue. And so there was always a question about the margins. And then also revenue durability matters. Like the ongoing question around building these one person high growth companies is, is there durability? Because if you can do it and then I can do it and then Tyler can do it and then, and then anyone with, you know, access to a coding model can build it very quickly. We're going to erode each other's markets and trade market cap very quickly. And I think any VC that would look at this, they might get to a point where they're like, yeah, this is a unicorn company. Look at the growth. I think there's something here. But at the same time you could see someone like a private equity valuing this and saying, well, I need to see a lot of risk, I need to see durability. There's some lawsuits. Exactly. And we'll get into that. So medb uses two companies, Care Validate and Open Loop Health to handle the doctors, pharmacies, shipping and compliance. And we'll get into the compliance thing, but that's a lot of outsourcing. And of course that outsourcing takes a toll on margin because you have to pay the doctors, you have to pay the pharmacies, you have to pay the shipping, you have to pay the compliance. And they're paying Care Validate and Open Loop Health to flow that value through to those individual stakeholders. So it's still, it's still, yeah. I started asking what does this company actually do itself? Just marketing. And maybe they're too aggressive about it. We'll get into it. So these GLP1 drugs also aren't cheap. And when you sell them, even when you sell them legally, even as a telehealth wrapper, a lot of the value is going to accrue to the pharmaceutical companies that own the intellectual property. At least that's how it should flow when things are functioning properly. So you can effectively build a telehealth company on top of a pharmaceutical company like Novo, where you are taking a thin margin on top, you can get to big numbers. But the pharmaceutical companies are gonna want to be paid because they did all of the expensive FDA trials, all the expensive R and D and they need to recoup that. So then the other question is, you add in the CAC from digital ads, they were apparently spending a lot on Facebook to acquire customers, and you quickly wind up an estimate of pretty thin margins. I think the estimate Shiel shared. Shiel Monat shared was like 15% or something like that. But it's totally possible to get to a valuation that's lower than a billion dollars, depending on how everything flows through. Yeah. At the same time, though, if they're outsourcing all of the kind of key areas of the business to these other players, open loop, et cetera, it's possible that of that. Those very thin margins. Right. The 15ish percent, the margins on that are very, very extreme, Right? Sure. Yeah. So you could still get to a number that was in the hundreds of millions of dollars of EBITDA. Yeah, yeah. I mean, the 15% margin looks like 150 million, maybe 200 million in like, basically profit. That is crazy. But we'll see what the FDA has to say long term about that. Whether there will be lawsuits or settlements. There was already a warning letter and this turned into a big drama about the company. The drama. And was there any mention of this in the original story? I don't think so. And so there were a lot of people that were. And I believe I pulled up the New York Times piece and there was no, like, correction or anything yet. Maybe there will be more. Follow on. I feel like the founder does need to respond and have their opportunity to kind of correct the record because these things can kind of run away in either direction. But even with all the drama, there were a ton of super legitimate questions about how valuable the company really is and how long they'll be able to continue their current business model without pretty serious changes. And that's around the marketing stuff. So Bed V received an FDA warning letter just two months ago for misbranding violations. So, warning letter. If you're not familiar with the FDA's language, it can be pretty wide ranging. Like sometimes it requires just a small, a small change to marketing materials to remain compliant. And sometimes it's basically like a shut down the company moment. This happened a lot with the nicotine category with illegal vape vapor products. Right. And sometimes, like the warning letter would be like, you are warned in that if you continue to sell these, we will put you out of business. And some of them are, okay, we're warning you about this particular claim on your website. You need to change this language. And it's pretty minimal. I went through this 10 years ago, we started Lucy 2016. And while I was there, we were extremely nervous about warning letters because if we got a warning letter, we thought it would mess up the FDA applications that we had in progress. It would mess up distributors. Like anyone who you're partnering with would say, well, I don't want to work with somebody that has a warning letter. Have you dealt with this? We were able to avoid all this, but one, one kind of concrete example is that we, like Lucy, cannot make quick claims about the nicotine gum product. So even though most people think, oh, this is like Nicorette, it's actually regulated in a different category. It's regulated as tobacco products product, not as a pharmaceutical product. And so you can't run a digital ad that says, like, hey, you're a smoker. Quit smoking with Lucy, that's a violation because it's not regulated as a pharmaceutical, as a smoking cessation aid is the term. And so in the nicotine category, you would have companies create a product. Usually there would be no founder associated with said products because people didn't want to put their face on it. Yeah. And they would do a lot of things that would make sales grow incredibly quickly, like, you know, making marketing claims just where and how they decided to sell, etc. Etc. The ad channels that they use. And so they would, they would go from zero to hundreds of millions or billions of revenue very, very quickly, but the enterprise value of the company would be near zero. Right. Because no, nobody would want to buy a company that had all that kind of baggage. And so if you were going to value, it'd be like, what is the, like, very, very, very near term, you know, sort of like revenue opportunity. Yeah, yeah. I mean, the famous, the famous comparison is Juul versus Puff bar. So Juul went, you know, raised a bunch of money, got very big, put in FDA applications, got those applications, denied marketing denial orders, then got them, stayed in the courts. They set up a. I think their whole headquarters was in D.C. they were working very closely with the FDA, truly engaging to sort of clean up all of the problems around marketing and sales and formulation. Just really try and get to a clean bill of health. With regard to the government relations, they were successful and they got approved not as a smoking cessation aid. So they still can't make the claim that Juul will help you quit smoking. But they did get approved as a tobacco product, which I think the FDA says it has to be suitable for the protection of public health, which is a very vague way of saying, like, it's A net benefit, Net good that it's on the market, which is, you know, people can debate that back and forth, but back in the Juul days, they also could not say quit smoking with Juul. They wanted to put say they wanted, like a lot of people that were, you know, were smoking cigarettes did switch to Juul. And they were pushing for that, but they couldn't actually make quick claims. So they used the word switch. They said switch to Juul instead of quit with Juul. And that seemed fine for a long time. I think they eventually trademarked it and then I think they had to pull away from it at various points in time. But there's clearly like this gray area in your marketing. Can you say you want smokers to upgrade to nicotine gum? You know, all of these things need to be sort of litigated with the fda. And what has medvee been up to? We wound up playing it very safe, and that probably kept us from mooning in revenue to 1.8 billion overnight. But I still think it was the right decision for Lucy. Now medv appears to have taken a much more aggressive approach. They are apparently running 800 fake doctor accounts on Facebook to sell compounded GLP1. Sil Monot verified that the accounts are not actually doctors. Some even have cartoonishly fake names like Dr. Tucker Carl Zinn, M.D. if you like. I feel this is one of those things where I feel bad for someone who clicked on an ad that was deceptive. Dr. Tucker Carlson, MD. But if you're getting your GLP1s from Dr. Carl Tucker Zinn, you probably are in on the joke to some extent. I don't know. It's clearly not above board and they have to clean this up and deal with this. They were also sued in a class action lawsuit last month for violating California's anti spam law. That stuff can be crazy expensive because a lot of the fines are on like a per instance basis. So it'll be like, okay, yeah, $10 fine for every text message you send. And it could be like you sent like, you know, 50 million text messages or something. So you could have some massive, massive liability. Of course, that will be litigated in the court of law and there might be a settlement and they can figure out what the right damage is. If they are even guilty. They're still early in the process. And so the end result is more of a story of pushing over aggressive marketing tactics. Yeah, I mean, so pull up the actual picture of Shiel's post because I think that you can just see how confusing this would be to somebody maybe a little bit older. You want to on one of those. Yeah, zoom in. You can just see. You see somebody that looks like a doctor. Oh, yeah, they got the staff. If you're 70 years old on Facebook, you're not necessarily putting it together. It's Dr. Tucker Carlson MD. So my co founder, Lucy is. He has a PhD from Caltech, but it's in biophysics. And so he's not a medical doctor, but he is a doctor of science from Caltech. Like, he has a really good background, but he's not a medical doctor. And I would always joke with him, like, we got to put you in a stethoscopic. We got to take some photos of you in a stethoscope. Like, the aura is so high. And he was like, no, that's like such bad practice. Like, we can't do that. Like, doctor is associated with medical doctor. Even if you have a doctorate in something, it's like the famous, like, I'm dying. Does anyone have a doctorate? Yeah, it's like, yeah, I have a doctor and a jurist. Doctor or whatever. The other interesting thing, medv uses the dot org. What domain isn't that for nonprofits? Typically, that's. I would think so there's. I don't, I don't know that if it's technically illegal to use it as a for profit, but certainly when you add that to all the other. Yeah, because you land on that site and then you think it looks like, oh, a doctor advertised this to me and now I'm on a nonprofit. Yes, yes, yes. Medical website. Yes. So, yeah, in general, I think the story is pushing over aggressive marketing tactics to the limit more than AI allowing low headcount scaling. And this has happened for a long time. Back in the old days, I want to say like 2014, Facebook era. But the early days of online marketing, there were countless stories of questionable supplement sales or telehealth operations scaling on the back of insane ads. The classic formula for like mega scale was if you could get an ad approved, if you could get it sort of like whitelisted or through the approval process, it wouldn't automatically get reviewed that often. So once you were approved, you could spend $1,000 or you could spend $50 million. And there wasn't, early on, there wasn't a natural trigger to refact check. It was like if you could get approved for a small ad, you could scale it up and so people would do all these crazy things to try and get the ads approved. There were all these Tricky things where they would route to one website and then after the ad was approved, they changed the website. And then all the ad platforms had to eventually figure out, like, okay, we need to be scraping a layer deeper consistently, or, like, every day. But the canonical example of the health supplement or telehealth operation that would always go viral and always just print was if you could get an ad approved that had Harvard scientists, brain pill, and Johnny Depp all in one. Call to action. I'm not kidding about this. This is real. So it was, like, always this picture of Johnny Depp coming out of the ocean. That was the one that was like, really scroll stopping pirates. No, no, it was like a paparazzi photo, which they didn't have the rights to use. They would not partner with Johnny Depp. They should not be running that ad at all. And then something about brain boosting or, like, making, like, limitless pill make you a genius. That type of marketing would, like, it's very general, like, ever. Who doesn't want to be smarter? So everyone would click on that. And then, like, Harvard scientists would, like, lend it some, like, credibility because, oh, if it's from Harvard, like, it's good. And so if you could get those three terms approved, there were a whole bunch of, like, sketchy operations that would get ads approved and then just pump, like, $100 million of sales behind them. And it seems like maybe there's a little bit of that going on here where a lot of these ads should not have been approved. Maybe there needs to be a validation. I know that a lot of companies that partner with doctors, even just to sell, like, skin care supplements, sunscreens, really anything. The rate to advertise with an influencer who actually has some sort of medical credential is, like, way higher. Yeah. Because it's way more effective and that. Yeah, it's way more effective. But if you can just, like, fake that, then you're basically arbitraging that. But you shouldn't be. We have two employees, but 800 fake doctors on Facebook. Not great. So we'll see how this works out. I think the press tour is probably ended for the near term. Okay, well, founder's still welcome to come in. I think people have a lot of questions for the founder, Matthew Gallagher. We'd love to have him on the show and dig into all this because maybe there are some good context that is missing from all of the criticism that's been levied over the weekend, but we'll see. So I was reflecting on. We're still in pursuit broadly of this one person, $1 billion company, it's still an interesting question. Will it happen? Why might it happen? Why might it not? Yeah. In my head it was always new startup is created like solo founder creates a hit product, raises a hundred on a billion. And that is like the cleanest path because for so many other paths you just run into. Yeah, maybe I want to be the one, one person, $1 billion company, but I want to win more. So if adding incremental people helps me build a better company. Yeah, there's Ryan piece point. Yeah. Why would I not add at least a handful of people? Yeah, totally. So, yeah, I mean, I think software is an interesting category, especially if it's open source software somehow where there was some sort of flywheel where you could verify what was actually built and then you could verify what the sales were because it was done on some sort of open platform or some sort of thing where the actual reporting and the analytics, I mean, apparently the New York Times did verify the run rate that they used, so their money was flowing through the business. But having a much cleaner representation of what the financial picture is, I think would, would help. I was personally excited about the prospect of a video game and just more video game developers seeing breakout success. So a couple years ago in the olden days when I had free time, I got woefully addicted to a poker themed roguelike deck building game called Balatro, which I don't think anyone here has played. But this game is amazing, so much fun. So it's. You're basically playing poker, but there's no financial stakes, there's no money, there's no microtransactions at all. Interestingly, the game actually got banned, I think in Japan or some other country for being like poker. And being banned for being anti gambling? No, no, for, no, no. Banned for being like gambling Aesthetics because you are playing with cards, there's no real money. You pay like 10, $15 for the game and then you can just play unlimited. But it's done extremely well. So it sold over 5 million units. I saw some reporting that it might be 7 million and maybe even more now because they've gone multi platform and I think at 15 $20 a download, that might be close to $100 million in revenue. And it was made by a solo developer who goes by local thunk over a two and a half year period. He originally wanted the game to be a side project that he could put on his resume, but it wound up being a massive success. And so depending on your valuation methodology you could probably underwrite Balatro close to a billion dollars if it's generated $100 million of basically free cash flow. You know, there was obviously two and a half years of R and D, but that was just this developer's time. The future revenue streams, the offshoots, the merge. Like you get to a number that's close and you have to imagine that his two and a half year development, like life cycle, would have been pulled forward by the help of AI. So he basically developed the game entirely in the pre AI period. So it came out. Does it still have momentum? I think it's probably trailed off a little bit because people sort of, you get to the end of the game after, I don't know, 10, 20, 50 hours or something, and then there are some people on YouTube that will do like tons and tons of try and break the game because you can get really, really crazy with like combinations of different things. But at a certain point, like you do kind of finish the game and then you're like, okay, I'm moving on. And he never added microtransactions, he never added like any sort of live service model, subscription, anything like that. It was sort of just like it did really well and then we'll see. And so yeah, this came out as a demo in 2023 and officially launched in January 2024. So fully like pre AI development. And there is lots of hesitation in the video game community around AI, specifically around the art generation, like pixel art generation, all of that. But if you think about AI as a tool for writing game logic and particularly re platforming, it took him, I want to say, like a full year. And I think he partnered with a developer or a publisher to actually distribute the game because it was originally a PC game and then it went to Nintendo Switch and then PlayStation and then Xbox. And it's a perfect game to be everywhere, but that takes a lot of time and you sort of have to rewrite a bunch of the software. And that's something where AI should be able to pull that forward or make it even easier to launch everywhere on day one. And so the interesting thing is that Balatro broke through because it paired like this familiar design language with this wildly engaging progression system. And so bringing fun ideas like that to market faster is something that like, I'm really looking forward to. And we heard Sholto from Anthropic talking about building his own RTS game. And obviously he has a full time job, so this would be certainly something that would be extra. We've been working on a bunch of simulators that are sort of feeling like games. Some of the mechanics are getting pretty good now. Game like. But you have to imagine that in the future there'll be more and more game developers. Yeah. I mean, some of the stuff that I've seen internally at tvN, it's like going to blow already. Vague post. Are you the vague post king? Have you stared into the abyss yet? Because everyone talks about at the AI labs, they all have abysses. And I feel like abyss101 is like, do not stare into it. Maybe glance. Like a first day at onboarding. There's the abyss. I think a glance is okay. Or maybe saddling up to the abyss and just kind of peeking your head in is fine. But I would not stare into it. I think that's something. Let's go over to the App Store. Yeah. The App store saw an 85% increase in new apps this past quarter. Let's pour one out for the App Store review team. Most recent quarters, new app count has grown less than 10%. So it was just ticking up quarter over quarter and then jumped massively. No surprises here. Feel like everybody, everybody that I know outside of tech has an app now. They're unconstrained, they have an app. But at the same time, I have yet to find an app that's on my home screen that was solo developer Vibe coded, something like that. So I'm waiting for the Flappy Bird moment or the Balatro moment, this solo thing. Even if it's like a productivity tool, there's clearly more apps, but actually going viral, like, what is the Harry Potter Balenciaga moment? What is the viral.

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