Robot Lifeguards, TapCheck's Payday Play & Thalamus's Wild Market Share | E2115

Today's show: Jason and Lon break down the biggest stories in tech and startups this week: OpenAI's new models are powerful but glitchy, Meta's internal docs hint that Zuck knows the Facebook friends graph is toast, and fintech startup TapCheck might actually be doing some good. Plus, robot lifeguards and humanoid races — the wildest videos of the week and what they mean. Then, Alex sits down with Jason Reminick, founder of Thalamus, the platform that helps match medical residents to hospitals (with 85% market share!). They talk about becoming a Public Benefit Corp and how Thalamus is tackling the doctor shortage in the U. S. * Timestamps: (0:00) Jason kicks off the show(1:43) OpenAI's new models and issues with Wikipedia as AI knowledge bases (8:27) FTC antitrust case around Meta; breaking up big tech (11:13) Squarespace - Use offer code TWIST to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain at https://www. Squarespace.com/TWIST (13:04) Tapcheck's impact on employee retention and minimum wage variations (19:56) Northwest Registered Agent. Form your entire business identity in just 10 clicks and 10 minutes. Get more privacy, more options, and more done—visit https://www.northwestregisteredagent.com/twist today!(24:31) New company Revel's safety software (27:14) Humanoid robot marathon in Beijing (30:15) Brex. Get the business account trusted by 1 in 3 US startups at ⁠https://brex.com/banking-solutions (35:46) New color discovery "Olo" (40:30) Blue Sky is Falling: Robots, delivery, surveillance, and privacy concerns(55:20) Alex sits down with Jason Reminick of Thalamus (56:01) Thalamus and the medical residency application process (59:42) AI in residency applications and standardizing medical school grades (1:03:30) Thalamus' market share and collaboration with medical associations (1:10:08) Impact of budget cuts on rural hospitals and business model expansion * Subscribe to the TWiST500 newsletter: https://ticker.thisweekinstartups.com Check out the TWIST500: https://www.twist500.com Subscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcp * Links from episode: Check out Thalamus: https://www.thalamusgme.com/ Check out the Robot Lifeguard: https://oceanalpha.com/product-item/dolphin1/ Check out TapCheck: https://www.tapcheck.com/ * Follow: Jason Reminick LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jason-reminick-md-mba-ms-bb251645/ Thalamus on X: https://x.com/ThalamusGME/status/1757812695787581485* Follow Lon: X: https://x.com/lons * Follow Alex: X: https://x.com/alex LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwilhelm * Follow Jason: X: https://twitter.com/Jason LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis * Thank you to our partners: (11:13) Squarespace - Use offer code TWIST to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain at https://www. Squarespace.com/TWIST (19:56) Northwest Registered Agent. Form your entire business identity in just 10 clicks and 10 minutes. Get more privacy, more options, and more done—visit https://www.northwestregisteredagent.com/twist today! (30:15) Brex. Get the business account trusted by 1 in 3 US startups at ⁠https://brex.com/banking-solutions * Great TWIST interviews: Will Guidara, Eoghan McCabe, Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Bob Moesta, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarland * Check out Jason's suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanis * Follow TWiST: Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartups YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekin Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisweekinstartups TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thisweekinstartups Substack: https://twistartups.substack.com * Subscribe to the Founder University Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@founderuniversity1916

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Jason Calacanis?

  This is going to be the future of emergency rescue. So here we're seeing the dolphin want. This is going to be a brave new world where people are going to be drowning. And these things are going to do such a better job because you can't drown one of these. One of the big problems is rescuers getting drowned by the person they're trying to save.

• 0:19Speaker 01

  When they drown and you panic and you just grab onto somebody.

• 0:22Jason Calacanis?

  So look at this. They're sending a little flotation device with motors in it. And it zips super fast on the top of the water. You go find the person. There's a remote control. The person just grabs onto it and gets taken in. Imagine this thing was just on the side of that oil rig. And if somebody splashed into the water.

• 0:39Speaker 01

  Just sensed them and zipped out.

• 0:41Jason Calacanis?

  It just sensed that they had fallen in, men overboard. Boom, it goes and gets them. Same thing for, you know, on a cruise ship. These things will be on the sides of cruise ships. There'll be cameras waiting for somebody to fall in. It will easily know the signature and then boom, go do it.

• 0:58Speaker 02

  This Week in Startups is brought to you by Squarespace. Turn your idea into a new website. Go to Squarespace.com/twist for a free trial. When you're ready to launch, use offer code TWIST to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Northwest Registered Agent. Starting your business should be simple. With Northwest Registered Agent, you can form your entire business identity in just 10 clicks in 10 minutes. From LLCs to trademarks, domains to custom websites, they've got you covered. Get more privacy, more options, and more done. Visit NorthwestRegisteredAgent.com/twist today. And Brex, the financial stack founders can bank on. Unlike traditional business banking solutions, Brex has no minimums and no transaction fees. And you get 20x the standard FDIC protection. Get the business account trusted by one in three US startups at Brex.com/banking-solutions.

• 1:43Jason Calacanis?

  Hey, everybody. Welcome back to This Week in Startups. Lon Harris is here. I'm Jason Calacanis. We've got a lot of great founder knowledge to share today, plus a lot of funny stuff going by. Where do we even begin, Lon? Where do we begin today?

• 1:58Speaker 01

  I do want to start off with a big tech story that I thought was really interesting. OpenAI, the new models that we've all been excitedly talking about, 03 and 04 mini, these cutting-edge reasoning models. Apparently hallucinating a lot more than they expected and a lot more than the previous models, you know, usually each successive generation of OpenAI models, they've been hallucinating less and less as they get more refined. That's the goal, obviously, but 03 and 04 mini, though, they are doing a lot of interesting, high-level reasoning work. They're also hallucinating a lot. I was surprised by some of these numbers. 03 hallucinated answers to around one-third of all queries on the person QA test. That's the one that gauges how well does the AI

• 2:42Speaker 01

  recognize real people's names. That's double the rate of the last generation of models. And 04 mini did even worse on that test. It hallucinated 48% of the time. That means half the time you ask it about a person, it's going to confidently make up an answer about them that is inaccurate.

• 3:00Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I mean, garbage in, garbage out is one issue. A lot of the knowledge bases that you'll get inside of any of these LLMs comes from the Wikipedia. The Wikipedia has a problem with the bios of living persons, BLPs, they call them. And these bios of living persons are very contentious. I remember Jimmy Wells and the other co-founder of Wikipedia having this issue where the people who would want to update your bio are people with an axe to grind. So

• 3:32Speaker 01

  Larry Sanger is the name.

• 3:34Jason Calacanis?

  Larry Sanger, yeah, the great Larry Sanger, who actually created the concept of the Wikipedia. He literally introduced Jimmy Wells, too. Jimmy Wells always tries to take credit as a sole founder. It's a little bit of a beef from back in the day. Putting it all aside, if you have one of these pages, I have one, it's very weird, like the stuff that winds up there. And then the goal of the page is you have to quote a news source and you're not allowed to edit your own page. So then you have to hire these underground editors who, over time, have built their reputations and all that garbage then gets fed into OpenAI, gets fed into Grok, gets fed into Claude. And it's very strange because what is the source of truth for you as a person, especially a high profile person? Is it the press that, you know, might be leaning slightly left?

• 4:20Jason Calacanis?

  On average, if you look at the number of, and this is a complaint, obviously, that you get from the right. Only five to 10% of people who are in journalism today in these major publications are on the right. It used to be about 35, 40%, just over time, it's atrophied for whatever reasons. Then you have people with an axe to grind, building your Wikipedia page, you know, et cetera. And then on top of that, the software is not perfect, right? And how it picks who it's talking about or what they did. And so this is a serious issue. And I think the disclaimers that they give, I think that we'll start to see some lawsuits of if somebody were to quote OpenAI or to use OpenAI. I don't think it's enough that OpenAI says, hey, this is experimental software.

• 5:04Speaker 01

  Right.

• 5:04Jason Calacanis?

  If it were to slander somebody. So the next wave of cases, and we should look into see if this happened. You know, has there been a case where somebody has sued a language model for slandering them? You start thinking about that, right?

• 5:16Speaker 01

  Any inaccurate information?

• 5:18Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, inaccurate information.

• 5:19Speaker 01

  Here's another interesting wrinkle on this. According to Transluse, which is a third-party AI testing company. They're claiming that sometimes O3 makes claims that it completed actions that it did not. Like in one example, it told the person testing it that it ran code on a 2021 MacBook Pro outside of ChatGPT, like to verify these results. And it technically can't have possibly done that.

• 5:46Jason Calacanis?

  Right.

• 5:47Speaker 01

  It's not just lying about results, it's lying about how it reached results. And OpenAI right now, they're saying they genuinely don't understand why this is happening. It's like a more research is needed situation.

• 6:00Jason Calacanis?

  This is going to be a major issue if we start getting into these being not on the road to reliability. There is also a competition going on right now. And I think there's a lot of pressure on each of these companies to go faster and to release new models. And there's a lot of money at stake. Obviously, these companies are becoming worth hundreds of billions of dollars in some cases. So there's a lot of pressure. And we're going to need as a society to determine, especially with. Agents coming out, this agentic you hear about fancy word for agents, fancy word for it goes and does an action on your behalf on the web. You know, hallucination where it thinks I'm the wrong age or political party or worked at a company I didn't work at.

• 6:45Jason Calacanis?

  Who cares? Like, we all know these things make mistakes and, you know, buyer beware kind of thing. But if you went and you hired somebody based on this, or you fired somebody based on this, or you made a trade of a stock based on this, like, or he bought a ticket to something, like you wanted a ticket to a concert and buys the wrong ticket to the wrong concert.

• 7:03Speaker 01

  You're like, I need to go to Helsinki next month and then it sends you to Copenhagen instead, you know, like, that's, yeah, that's a problem.

• 7:11Jason Calacanis?

  We got some serious problems here along the road. There might be a trial of despair we go through with AI soon because everybody expects the impressive progress we've seen to just be a straight line. And the messy middle concept is what we're kind of getting into now, which is it could be messy on the way to agentic, you know, you can fire every developer, you can fire every writer, you can fire every sales development rep, like, there's going to be some bumps in the road. I think we're going to keep needing to have humans checking the work. But the O3 model, I, I'll be honest, I've been using it hoping to be impressed and it

• 7:54Jason Calacanis?

  feels to me just like deep research from Gemini. It doesn't feel different than that, whereas if you watch it work, it's like, okay, I think this person is, I was, I put in a couple of cigar brands because I was going to explain to somebody the history of the cigar brand that I like, El Rey de Mundo. And I watched it and I was like, king of the world, right? It's like, okay, here we go. And it started giving me, and I watched it work. Okay, I said, El Rey de Mundo, Providence, history, whatever. And I was watching it work and I was like, this is something I saw like six months ago from deep research. I don't get what is so much better about this. So, I'll say.

• 8:27Speaker 01

  Maybe not. Yeah. One more big, big tech news story. This one, I could not resist. So, we got a bunch of documents shared by the FTC as part of the antitrust case around Meta. Which is ongoing right now. So some of these documents, you know, like journalists are just poring through these documents, looking for fun stuff. And we found this from April 2022, some insight into, you know, Facebook internal communication, Mark Zuckerberg's concerns about the product. He shared a long thread with employees about his concerns that Facebook's friends format was outdated. All the other platforms are chasing followers. It's all this endless scroll of here's everybody you follow. And Zuckerberg, I think very reasonably, has been

• 9:12Speaker 01

  worried about the Facebook's, hey, these are your actual IRL friends is like defeating that part of the social graph. Like, you may not want to see an endless speed of stuff shared by like, people you knew in high school. Like, it's not that there's no value to that.

• 9:28Jason Calacanis?

  But it's less valuable over time.

• 9:30Speaker 01

  Right.

• 9:31Jason Calacanis?

  Atrophies or something, yeah.

• 9:33Speaker 01

  Exactly. Like, here are all the TikTok people I like, and I just want to see all of their content go by.

• 9:38Jason Calacanis?

  Sure.

• 9:38Speaker 01

  So I just thought it was interesting that he's been keyed into that for three years now, at least, and.

• 9:43Jason Calacanis?

  People change. People change. And, you know, when I go back to Facebook, I feel like I'm going to my high school reunion. It's like an interesting analogy.

• 9:50Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 9:51Jason Calacanis?

  And it really is interesting to see his thinking. The bigger picture here is the Trump administration may not be falling for Zuckerberg's MAGA pivot. And this whole idea that, you know, okay, he's putting the Dana White from the MMA on his board of directors.

• 10:10Speaker 01

  Right.

• 10:11Jason Calacanis?

  He's donating money. He's showing up for the inauguration. He's saying maybe the organization culture got too feminine and we lost a little bit of the masculine approach.

• 10:21Speaker 01

  And all those Rogan appearances where he's like, I was wrong. And like, Trump's a great guy. And we shouldn't have ever, you know, blocked anything. Yeah.

• 10:29Jason Calacanis?

  Right. And so the cynicism there is like, oh, we have this FTC case going on where they want to split up companies. There was also, I saw in my feed, that he was commenting, you know, sometimes when you split companies up, they become worth more money. So I do think there is maybe people over index on, oh, my God, they're going to break these companies up. It's like, that the principles are so broken up by this concept.

• 10:53Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 10:53Jason Calacanis?

  If YouTube got spun out. If Instagram got spun out, there was some sort of penalty box for both of these companies getting so large and maybe we let them buy too many companies too quickly. Okay, uh, guess what? Zuckerberg now owns whatever percentage he owns in Facebook in the independent WhatsApp. So not a big deal. All right, founders, let's talk about your website, huh? It might be a little bit of a sensitive subject. You might be a little embarrassed about it. Let's fix that right now. If you're launching something new, give your brand the refresh it deserves. You're working so hard on your company and your website looks terrible. Do what I do. Use Squarespace. It's the all-in-one platform to make a stunning

• 11:35Jason Calacanis?

  professional website and it's ridiculously easy to use. It's gonna work for everything. If you're selling products, it's got all that e-commerce built in. If you're selling services, it works perfectly. And they have a new AI product called Blueprint. Want more control? Well, of course, you can choose one of the award-winning templates and use the intuitive drag-and-drop tools to make it your own. Easy peasy. Squarespace equals the most functional and beautiful website on planet Earth. Go ahead, Squarespace.com/twist to get a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, go to Squarespace.com/twist to get 10% off your first website or domain purchase. That's Squarespace.com/twist. I don't think it's impossible that we would see a settlement. I don't think it

• 12:18Jason Calacanis?

  will come down to the mat and where they say like, here's the judgment. I think there might be a settlement where these companies just say voluntarily, okay, we'll lop off two or three products and there'll be independent companies. And boy, what an interesting world it would be if WhatsApp all of a sudden was this independent $100 billion company. Yeah. Or YouTube was this independent $400 billion company that didn't have to worry about what was going on with Google search or the Google ad network. And they could be like, you know what? We're going to, I don't know, make original programming in a major way. Who knows? Yeah. I mean, there's a million things, interesting things that could happen if those two companies went their own way. But the sky's the limit, really. We've got some startup news as well. It's not all big tech all the time here. I wanted to talk about

• 13:03Jason Calacanis?

  Tap Check. This is in a huge trend lately.

• 13:05Speaker 01

  We've been talking a ton about all these like payday loan-esque buy now pay later ish like these these new kinds of fintech applications that are sort of exist on the bubble between like, you know, a regular bank and like a payday loan sort of thing. So tap checks thing, they were founded in 2019 and they allow employees to access their earned wages prior to payday. So it's like earnings you've already made through your job, but that you haven't, you haven't hit that payday yet, like in a week or whatever, but you want to get at it early. So they've, they've now serviced up to 112,000 employees.

• 13:46Speaker 01

  They're processing 160 million to date in wage advances and they're serving 12,000, what they call employer location. So that includes deals with Hilton, Planet Fitness, Taco Bell, McDonald's. And the way it works is employees pay nothing for the service. So employers, so like you're Taco Bell, you don't have to pay to put your employees on tap check. And if you're an employee, you can get the money in advance and it's not an interest loan thing. You're just paying a small fee per transfer, like a, like an ATM fee or whatever. According to the company, tap check boosts employee retention by over 50% and more than 70% of users report lower financial stress after using the service.

• 14:30Speaker 01

  So they just got a 225 million in fresh capital, a 25 million series A extension from Peakspan and a $200 million credit facility from Victory Park Cap.

• 14:41Jason Calacanis?

  It seems non predatory. I don't know what tap check charges. And if it's a percentage, when I was a kid and I was in my first jobs, people used to pay 4%, 5% to go cash their check for cash. There were check cashing plays. You start thinking about that 4% to, you know, whoever, you know, you're paying whatever that is $1,600 a year to like some storefront in lower Manhattan. I always found it very weird. I was like, well, why don't you just turn on direct deposit? But like many things, you know, some people never get onto email, you know, they never, they just sort of. Get frozen in one moment in time and people didn't never took the time to open checking accounts. I was like, this is incredible that a world, it was just incredible to me in 1989, 90 that people didn't have a checking account.

• 15:26Jason Calacanis?

  I had a checking account. My parents opened it for me very young, a savings account.

• 15:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, my parents did that too. It's like teach you how deposits work and yeah, yeah, I did that.

• 15:36Jason Calacanis?

  What about the tap check fee actually works out to on a percentage basis? Or if it's just like $25 to get your check in advance? And if you have $500 coming, it's one thing. If you have a thousand coming, it's another.

• 15:48Speaker 01

  I don't know. I'm here on the website and all they say is transfer money for one flat ATM life fee. Oh, here we go. $4.95 for instant transfers and $3.50 for next day transfers.

• 16:00Jason Calacanis?

  That's nothing. Five bucks.

• 16:02Speaker 01

  Five bucks.

• 16:03Jason Calacanis?

  Pretty good deal. I think also this might be in reaction to Uber and DoorDash giving people very quick same day fees. Uber has provided Lyft, DoorDash, the ability to very quickly get paid. So like if you did five rides today, you could get paid for your five rides.

• 16:22Speaker 01

  The, the instant pay feature, it's called, it's, uh, they charge a dollar 25 per cash out.

• 16:28Jason Calacanis?

  Which is nothing.

• 16:29Speaker 01

  Yeah. Dollar 25. You need the money now. Dollar 25 is not.

• 16:33Jason Calacanis?

  That actually, you know what? That's what this is. There has been a dogfight for employees from shift based versus gig economy. And let's just assume that because it's a free market and it's, uh, you know, pretty dynamic. All things being equal, working at McDonald's and Starbucks and the Apple store and Uber and DoorDash and Lyft and Amazon drivers. They all kind of wind up in the same amount of compensation, which I think is relatively true. Because you have minimums like 15, $20, you know, depending on the city now. I think the highest minimum wage might be, I think it might be Seattle or Oregon.

• 17:08Speaker 01

  You are correct. Seattle, number one, $20.76.

• 17:13Jason Calacanis?

  Is it $20? It broke 20, the minimum wage.

• 17:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:16Jason Calacanis?

  Wow.

• 17:17Speaker 01

  All the top four are all Washington. I think they're all in the Seattle Tacoma area.

• 17:23Jason Calacanis?

  Yep.

• 17:23Speaker 01

  California high contenders include West Hollywood, nineteen dollars and eight cents, Mountain View, eighteen seventy-five, and Sunnyvale, eighteen fifty-five.

• 17:33Jason Calacanis?

  Right. So you start looking at these wages, right? We're starting to get to, I'm sorry, dare I say livable wage? I'm not gonna say that, but you know, twenty times two thousand is forty thousand. You know, it's we, the minimum wage should be, you know, much higher than it is. I don't know why the federal minimum wage is so low. I guess in some places like Memphis or, you know, Tennessee or.

• 17:53Speaker 01

  I do sort of feel like, I mean, obviously the federal minimum wage should be a benchmark, but I do feel like it makes sense for states to do that because it varies so much how much you need to make in order to.

• 18:01Jason Calacanis?

  The cost of living is.

• 18:02Speaker 01

  Escape out of living. Yeah.

• 18:03Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. But it is interesting that you have states now that are three X than the federal. Federal seven and change, I think, still.

• 18:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, which is crazy.

• 18:12Jason Calacanis?

  Which is crazy, but I guess if you were living in a place where your apartment was.

• 18:17Speaker 01

  Seven, seven twenty-five an hour, federal minimum wage.

• 18:20Jason Calacanis?

  These services, the instant pay makes it really hard to justify going to work at McDonald's where you have to wait every week or two weeks to get paid.

• 18:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:31Jason Calacanis?

  Plus you have to drag your ass in there for a shift and, you know, if you've, if you're not feeling it that day, you can't leave.

• 18:40Speaker 01

  It's tough. I mean, I remember like being like a teen or twenties, you know, your first few jobs. That wait two weeks till payday is, it's brutal. Especially when you just started, like you got a new job, you really need the money and you gotta wait, you know, two full weeks before you get your check for a few hundred bucks. It's no fun.

• 19:00Jason Calacanis?

  And this is what competition does. If you look at competition between states with the minimum wage and you look at competition from the, what, what the, the competition gig workers and the gay economy did to, and even, you know, Airbnb, your extra bedroom or whatever, all these things put pressure on the shift labor.

• 19:19Speaker 01

  Right.

• 19:20Jason Calacanis?

  Which was, you know, really pernicious, like hated, like, oh, God, I gotta be a greeter and I gotta work 12 hour shifts, 10 hour shifts.

• 19:27Speaker 01

  It was the only gig in town. I mean, if you, when you were, you know, if you didn't have a degree, if you didn't have advanced skills and you just needed work tomorrow. When I was first entering the labor market, yeah, you just get a job at a store, get a job at a restaurant, get a job at a best boost play that. Though that was it. There was no other category of like, well, Julie, you know, drive for Uber, do deliveries or that didn't exist. Yeah.

• 19:49Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. So this, I think it like really makes Hilton or McDonald's treat their employees better. And that's how it's being pitched.

• 19:57Jason Calacanis?

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• 20:37Jason Calacanis?

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• 21:22Jason Calacanis?

  cost you your next funding. Go to northwestregisteredagent.com/twist and get your business investor ready today. For just $39 plus state fees, you can set up your company the right way, fast, private and compliant. Go to northwestregisteredagent.com/twist today. Now, the last piece to all of this is creating a third category of work, full-time versus contractor. There really needs to be a third, which is a consistent contractor, I'll just say, where a contractor who may work for two, three different companies and they each need to contribute into the benefits, etc. Or we just make healthcare, like a base level of healthcare and you then would not have

• 22:04Jason Calacanis?

  to worry about a gig worker not having healthcare, which is, you know, I'm not making the show politically here, but we do have companies lowering the cost of basic services. So getting your blood work done, getting like him's and hers for, you know, different type of pills you might be embarrassed to ask a doctor for. But those kind of telemedicine, go direct, that keeps growing and, you know, go direct for mental health with better health, better help?

• 22:38Speaker 01

  Better help, I think.

• 22:40Jason Calacanis?

  Better help, yeah. So like consumers are actually taking control. And if you think about free markets, again, those are putting downward pressure on prices from healthcare companies and insurance companies. If people can roll their own healthcare, hard to do for brain surgery, easy to do if you, you know, need to get, you know, some basic.

• 23:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, but not, again, not to get super political, but disentangling healthcare from like what you do as your job would benefit us in thousands of ways. I mean, think about just how much more freedom it would give people to make decisions about what they wanted to do for their career.

• 23:17Jason Calacanis?

  There's no entrepreneur against this. Every entrepreneur and CEO I've talked to, the most MAGA ones, the most left ones, everybody in between, they don't like the dysfunction and the That healthcare attached to employment causes because people will stay in a job they hate because they have the healthcare and they have no choice. And that's just creates weird dysfunction. That's a really interesting company, Tap Check. I like this idea. I don't know how it economically makes sense, but maybe the employers are like, you know what, in order to have employee retention, Tap Check probably gets to keep the five bucks and the company McDonald's actually does pay quicker. And they're willing to do that with some organized process.

• 24:00Jason Calacanis?

  And maybe they don't let certain people get this feature, you know, because they might skip town with an extra week's pay. But even if you skip town with an extra week's pay, who cares?

• 24:10Speaker 01

  It does say you can't take money for a shift you haven't worked yet. So it's only paying you for work you've already done.

• 24:17Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, okay. So there's no gaming of it.

• 24:19Speaker 01

  There's no, yeah, you can't like, if you've worked four days out of your 10 day pay period, you can cash out for those four days, but you can't cash out the six days you haven't worked yet.

• 24:29Jason Calacanis?

  All right, let's keep going.

• 24:31Speaker 01

  All right. And there was one more startup story I thought was interesting before we move on. This company Revel, it was founded by SpaceX vet Scott Morton. He was actually a guy for SpaceX who was working on like the software in the moments before launch, where he had to like verify things are going correctly on the launch pad. So the rocket doesn't explode. So he left SpaceX after nine years and now he's working on this new company that designs that kind of software that helps people like he used to be navigate these like incredibly complex, safety intensive, you know, situations that help them prevent disasters, explosions, other like really critical billion dollar mistakes that could be happening. So the company emerged from stealth just this week. They've got 30 million in funding.

• 25:16Jason Calacanis?

  Significant.

• 25:16Speaker 01

  They weren't even seeking more funds. They'd done a seed round that was led by Felis.

• 25:22Jason Calacanis?

  Felis, yeah.

• 25:23Speaker 01

  Felis and Abstract Ventures also included Figma's Dylan Field and a few others. They weren't seeking any more funds, but Thrive Capital went over the top and gave them 23.1 million Series A. Anyway, their first customer is Impulse Space. And my partner, Miles Grimshaw, was talking to Fortune about this. This is what I thought was so interesting. He says, ultimately, this company isn't just going to be about space. They're using space as like a experimental playground because space is so complicated and so dangerous and so potentially costly if your rocket explodes. But they're saying this could be any kind of high stakes software factories, wind turbines, shipping lanes, like you name it.

• 26:03Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I mean, there are mission critical situations where when you're firing up your factory or you've got a bunch of wind turbines in the field, if something goes wrong, you know, real time checking of is this nominal, I guess, is the term they use nominal, like normal, no problems. Yeah, great idea. And this is one of the interesting things that happens when the diaspora, am I pronouncing it correctly?

• 26:27Speaker 01

  You are.

• 26:28Jason Calacanis?

  Diaspora, you know, the SpaceX diaspora is pretty significant now when companies get past 10 years and they have liquidity events. You know, where they have regular secondary, so it's not public yet, but the diaspora then creates a lot of interesting things based on the problems they had there and that then abstracts it. So the next person doesn't need to build the software from scratch. They can whip through that just by plugging it in. Just like we can use Zoom to record this or Descript, you know, to, um,

• 27:00Speaker 01

  Right.

• 27:00Jason Calacanis?

  you know, do our transcripts or editing. Everything's getting faster, faster, faster and abstracted outside of the company where you don't have to recreate the wheel every time.

• 27:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:10Jason Calacanis?

  And that's really such an interesting technique. All right. What else we got on the docket?

• 27:14Speaker 01

  We've got, uh, I call this from the feed. We got a few videos, fun things that we saw from around the web that we just wanted to

• 27:20Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 27:20Speaker 01

  chat about, maybe not news, but human interest or notable anyway. So both of us, you and I both highlighted this one. There was a race this weekend in Beijing, China, where they had human runners facing off against 21 humanoid robots.

• 27:38Jason Calacanis?

  That is crazy.

• 27:39Speaker 01

  So they ran a 13 mile half marathon through the streets of Beijing with a bunch of different robots. And so there were competing robots from Different companies. There was UB, UB Tech had one, Noetics Robotics had one, Xiaomi, I'm assuming is how you pronounce that?

• 27:55Jason Calacanis?

  Xiaomi, yeah, Xiaomi, the phone maker, yeah.

• 27:57Speaker 01

  And so a bunch of these companies do work together with China's government through an organization known as the Beijing Humanoid Robot Innovation Center. So that's where a lot of these competitors came from. That group did design Tiankong Ultra, the five foot nine inch, one hundred fifteen pound robot that finished the race in first place among robots. This is them crossing the finish line.

• 28:21Jason Calacanis?

  Holy cow.

• 28:22Speaker 01

  Two hours and forty minutes total it took them, running an average of six miles per hour. That robot can navigate hills, grass and sand. Now-

• 28:31Jason Calacanis?

  Wait a second. So ten minute mile to do thirteen miles, one hundred thirty minutes, two hours and ten minutes, but maybe they had to stop and do things.

• 28:38Speaker 01

  Three times the robot's battery failed. They were allowed to, the teams could change the robot's battery and then keep them going. That was allowed. So at one point, the robot even actually fell over when its battery failed and they had to pick them up and change it out. So many of the competing robots were being directed by a remote control. Tiankong Ultra, it uses wireless tracking technology. So there was a human runner behind it, sort of guiding it along the way and keeping up with it. So China, they've set a goal of leading the world in humanoid robots by twenty twenty seven. And there are tons of subsidies, tax breaks, bonuses the government is putting behind, uh, reaching this goal. China's also making strides in the self-driving scooter.

• 29:22Jason Calacanis?

  I've been talking about this. This is gonna work with gyroscopes. There's a couple of companies in the US working on it.

• 29:28Speaker 01

  Here's a couple of clubs. These are Xiaomi's self-driving, self-standing electric scooter. And you can see even when they stop or they go very slowly, it's balanced. So it doesn't, it's not at risk of falling over.

• 29:40Jason Calacanis?

  Of course.

• 29:41Speaker 01

  These can drive with no driver, but you could also sit on top of it and go for a, a little bike ride. It works either way.

• 29:48Jason Calacanis?

  Wow. One of the interesting things we should talk about is incentives. Incentives matter. And, you know, we talk about this trade war, et cetera. One of the things the government of China can do uniquely, because they have so many resources and they have top-down control, is they can say, you know what, this is a priority. And if your company hits these goals, we're gonna give you a bonus. We're gonna lower your taxes. We're gonna give you money and grants to do this. When founders ask me which corporate card they should use, I just tell them Brex, B R E X. Why? Why Brex? Because it's built specifically for startups, not like all those old school banks that charge you crazy fees. You know, while your cash is just sitting there

• 30:31Jason Calacanis?

  idle, they're charging you fees. No, Brex has built you a killer banking experience that helps you take your dollars further and they protect your cash. You know, you raise some money from venture capitalists, you want to protect that cash and you want to extend your startup runway. Of course, how do they pull all that off? Well, they offer you the best parts of checking, treasury and FDIC insurance in a single powerhouse account. Knowing everything about your money is non-negotiable and nearly 40% of startups fail because they run out of cash and 100% of startups can't afford to make financial mistakes. So get the financial stack that founders

• 31:10Jason Calacanis?

  trust at brex.com slash banking dash solutions. That's right. B R E X.com slash banking dash solutions. I love Brex. We use it and we love it. And you know, we have free will and capitalism here. So there's an incentive and so they have to do these incentives to get people going and it'll be very interesting to see if Optimus and Figure and all the other robots that we're working on here can beat the fastest human without a battery change. Yeah. Or with a battery change. And what your mind should do as an entrepreneur is think about, well, what if you had a robot that could, that was humanoid,

• 31:50Jason Calacanis?

  that could run indefinitely, could do it at high speed with high dexterity. Are there things you could do with that that would make sense? Right? Like what business opportunity does that come with? And if the robot could run with your burrito, obviously is like DoorDash, like that little robot is, or like the ones on wheels. Now, I don't know why you would want it to run, but maybe there's a place where, you know, there's a lot of steps. Maybe you're in Italy in one of these small towns or Spain where you're doing a combination of steps and roads and back alleys and maybe the robot Is a better way to deliver your pasta or deliver your burrito.

• 32:29Speaker 01

  But I think that's interesting that it's not like this is one of those things where it's more like proof of concept. There isn't necessarily a specific job attached to making a robot run super fast. It's just like, can we, can we do it?

• 32:42Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, well, and then, you know, one of the things I think about is emergency rescue, having had some, spent some time as an EMT. If somebody is in the ocean and they're getting pulled out, there are people working on robotic lifeguards. Where the goal is for these robotic lifeguards is to throw a device, you know, you would throw a life preserver to somebody. Well, now think about this, you have some sort of device that you throw into the ocean and it's ferocious ocean. Instead of throwing us, you know, a lifeguard in there, what if you throw one of these devices in there? And you have a remote control, the lifeguard is on the pier and they send one of these like little torpedo things. And the person grabs it and then they bring them back to shore. Out risking a lifeguard without the person, you know, and this is going to be the future

• 33:27Jason Calacanis?

  of emergency rescue. So here we're seeing the dolphin want. This is going to be a brave new world where people are going to be drowning. And these things are going to do such a better job because you can't drown one of these. One of the big problems is rescuers getting drowned by the person they're trying to save.

• 33:45Speaker 01

  When you drown and you panic and you just grab onto somebody, yeah.

• 33:48Jason Calacanis?

  So look at this, they're sending a little flotation device with motors in it. And it zips super fast on the top of the water. You go find the person, there's a remote control. The person just grabs onto it and gets taken in. Now, these could be, these are currently operated by a person with a remote control. Imagine this thing was just on the side of that oil rig. And if somebody splashed into the water.

• 34:13Speaker 01

  Just sensed them and zipped out.

• 34:15Jason Calacanis?

  That they had fallen in, men overboard. Boom, it goes and gets them. Same thing for, you know, on a cruise ship. These things will be on the sides of cruise ships. There'll be cameras waiting for somebody to fall in. It will easily know the signature. And then boom, go do it. I looked at this because I was, at one point I had a thesis as an angel. Investor, where do most of the unnecessary deaths occur? And what can we create? And there are people who are making devices for swimming pools, public swimming pools where it monitors the pool. There's a company in Germany that does it. We watch a pool and it monitors everybody. If somebody's under the water for more than 30 seconds, their little signature on the video that the lifeguard is watching turns yellow.

• 35:00Jason Calacanis?

  Now, if they're under for a minute, it turns red. If they're under for 90 seconds, it starts blinking, you know, red. Like you should go check it out. And then they just know where to go in a pool with 200 kids in it. And that somebody either can hold their breath a long time or not. And then there are some people putting these cameras underwater in the pool. A lot of deaths, a lot of this robotics is going to be incredible for rescuing people. If you were lost in the mountain range, sending one of these like horses, like the little dogs. Yeah. Somebody's lost in the woods. You just send 10 of those out. Go look for them. And so when you start thinking about this, like this one seems like it has no purpose. But you know, this could be, you know, not just delivering food, but it could save some people's lives.

• 35:44Jason Calacanis?

  And that's what I'm super excited about.

• 35:46Speaker 01

  Keeping up with the, the science theme. A team of researchers from the University of California claimed they've discovered a new color, but green, blue and green, they're calling it OLO. Let's take a quick look at it.

• 35:59Jason Calacanis?

  I think they've discovered turquoise.

• 36:02Speaker 01

  Turquoise, like I did, to me, this is just teal.

• 36:04Jason Calacanis?

  I think they discovered the color of Charlie XCX's album, Brad.

• 36:09Speaker 01

  Brad, yeah. This is not OLO. This is the closest you and I can perceive to OLO. The actual OLO would be more saturated and different. But there are two schools of thought on this. Other scientists are saying they did not necessarily discover a new color. It's a whole debate. So five researchers took part in this experiment. They used a device they call Oz. It shined a laser beam into one of their eyes. It stimulated only a subset of the rods and cones in their retina. And of course, your rods and cones, that's how you perceive color. So by only stimulating. The M cones and not the neighboring L or S cones. It allowed those people to perceive. Oh, wow.

• 36:53Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, this is the promise of Neuralink as well. And some of these human brain interfaces, you know, there are limits to our perception. Some of those limits are in the cones and the eyes. Some of them are in the brain and you know, they're there for a reason. They're there to optimize humans for, you know, survival and procreation.

• 37:11Speaker 01

  We don't need to see every color. We see enough.

• 37:14Jason Calacanis?

  Right. It's enough. Enough already. And now, you know, you, you could literally flip some switches in your brain and be able to see, you know, like Daredevil sees too much or, you know, Batman or something. I mean, I'm kind of down with the extra sensory perception. Imagine as humans, if we could put on glasses and/or contacts or an implant and be able to perceive like this ability to see at night or to see, you know, other signatures. If it was like a biological change. Yeah, we're so enthusiastic about robots and all this kind of stuff. I think we're going to start getting pretty stoked about what we might be able to do to our own biohacking bodies.

• 37:53Speaker 01

  Right. Yeah. We were told by now by science fiction that we'd be augmenting ourselves. It'd be much more cyberpunk than it is. So I think we're all waiting on that.

• 38:01Jason Calacanis?

  A little overdue for some cyberpunk.

• 38:03Speaker 01

  Yeah. Where's my cyberpunk augmentation? So last one from the feed. This was being you sent us. So Tim Dillon, comedian, local Austin favorite. Tim Dillon was recently a guest on the All In Podcast.

• 38:16Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 38:16Speaker 01

  He's also, he had Andrew Scholes on his podcast recently. Another recent All In guest.

• 38:22Jason Calacanis?

  We're getting a bunch of comedians who like the pod. You know, there's a lot of people who like the pod. The Schwarzenegger's son who was on The White Lotus is a fan of the pod.

• 38:31Speaker 01

  Patrick Schwarzenegger.

• 38:32Jason Calacanis?

  And he, we've become micro celebrity friends and we now DM with each other and both of us being micro celebrity.

• 38:38Speaker 01

  He's a, I feel like Patrick Schwarzenegger at this point, he's a, he's a full-fledged celebrity.

• 38:42Jason Calacanis?

  Okay. Well, then I'm the micro in the relationship.

• 38:44Speaker 01

  You're, you're getting there. You're getting there.

• 38:46Jason Calacanis?

  I'm getting there. Sure.

• 38:47Speaker 01

  Dillon and Scholes, they had on, on a episode of Tim Dillon's podcast recently. They discussed their all-in experiences.

• 38:55Jason Calacanis?

  Hit me.

• 38:56Speaker 03

  Would you rebuild it? Would you build another $20 million house in an area where that could happen? Okay.

• 39:03Speaker 01

  This is so interesting that you're even saying this. I was talking to the All In guys earlier. And I think it was Chamath was saying this like this idea that there's like a home on like point four acres. That's worth a hundred million dollars.

• 39:15Speaker 03

  It's crazy.

• 39:15Speaker 01

  Like there's just these crazy ideas that we need to completely rethink.

• 39:19Speaker 03

  Get rid of. I agree with you.

• 39:20Speaker 01

  And they were, you know, speaking in economic terms that are like far beyond like my understanding of shit. But just this idea that like.

• 39:26Speaker 03

  It's far beyond their understanding.

• 39:27Speaker 01

  All right, fair enough.

• 39:28Speaker 03

  But I'm kidding. I like them. I like those criminals.

• 39:33Jason Calacanis?

  That's pretty great.

• 39:34Speaker 01

  It's funny.

• 39:34Jason Calacanis?

  Tim Dillon took the piss out of us multiple times. I loved it.

• 39:37Speaker 01

  That's what he does. That's his, that's, that's what kind of comedy he does.

• 39:41Jason Calacanis?

  Both of them. You saw both appearances on All In. Did you give one an edge? If you had to give one an edge, which one?

• 39:46Speaker 01

  I will say, and I think this, much love to Tim Dillon. I think he's a very funny guy. I enjoyed. He did that Jerry Springer-esque Netflix special where it's like an episode of the Jerry Springer show, but he's hosting it. I thought that was hilarious, but I do think Andrew Schultz, to me, was I think one of the better guests in maybe All In history.

• 40:04Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, wow. Okay. Did you give Schultz the edge?

• 40:07Speaker 01

  Schultz, I give the edge. I mean, I also, I like his comedy, I think, a little bit more than Tim Dillon's as well. I just think he's so sharp and he's so fast. It really is. It's just, it's just that guy who's just on camera all the time.

• 40:20Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 40:20Speaker 01

  Like you build up, you get so good at it.

• 40:22Jason Calacanis?

  I couldn't, it's a jump ball for me. It's a jump ball for me. I'd love to have them both back.

• 40:26Speaker 01

  They're both very, they're both very funny guys.

• 40:28Jason Calacanis?

  All right. What else we got? We got to wrap up here.

• 40:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, one more segment I want to do. I'm calling it Blue Sky is Falling. We talk a lot here about, and I like Blue Sky. I hang out on there every day.

• 40:39Jason Calacanis?

  You check it out.

• 40:39Speaker 01

  I check it out. I like to keep, I keep one foot in each. I'm still in X. I haven't left X, but I do also like to dabble in Blue Sky. I do notice that even by my liberal progressive standard.

• 40:53Jason Calacanis?

  You're a progressive.

• 40:54Speaker 01

  They're, but they're a little, they're a little on edge. They, they, they feel to me like.

• 40:58Jason Calacanis?

  They're lunatics.

• 40:59Speaker 01

  They're a little paranoid. They're a little on edge. It's a little intense over there.

• 41:03Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 41:04Speaker 01

  And I do sometimes worry about them a little bit. So, so Blue Sky is Falling is our, our opportunity to look at what they're worried about this week over on Blue Sky.

• 41:13Jason Calacanis?

  Got it.

• 41:14Speaker 01

  They're very worried about robots this week. 404 Media did a report that Serv Robotics, that's the company that runs those little delivery bots like Samo and Coco, who drive along the streets of Hollywood and bring people their Uber Eats. It turns out that Serv Robotics has been working with the LAPD and will sometimes send footage recorded by those robots to help in ongoing criminal investigations.

• 41:39Jason Calacanis?

  Fantastic. Great.

• 41:40Speaker 01

  In this particular case that 404 Media was talking about, suspects were attempting to steal a Coco robot. And so the company sent the police the footage that they captured of the suspects. They've since been arrested and convicted.

• 41:56Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 41:56Speaker 01

  So because, you know, these robots, they're driving around the streets, they're recording footage all the time. It is sort of like a roving surveillance camera.

• 42:04Jason Calacanis?

  There's a Night Scope. These are RoboCops. There's a company, Night Scope, that, you know, for over 10 years now, has little robots running around. Night Scope is the name of it. And that's awesome. Why would, what's the position on Blue Sky?

• 42:17Speaker 01

  These robots are, they're narcs. You can't trust, you can't trust your delivery robot because it's just gonna narc on you to the fuzz. That's what Blue Sky is upset.

• 42:26Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, I see. They're gonna narc on, yeah, I mean, but if they're in LA, they're probably delivering cannabis. These guys are probably, these robots are dealing anyway.

• 42:36Speaker 01

  I would imagine, yeah, if Ease is not working already with Serv Robotics, those two companies should absolutely get together. That's a no-brainer.

• 42:44Jason Calacanis?

  No-brainer. And you know what I like about this as well is Providence and knowing, this is one of the greatest gifts, you know, to returns. I had ordered something to the ranch. I never got it. I'm like, where are my hangers? I'm trying to get these nice wood hangers for my suits. We talked about this at the office.

• 43:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, you gotta have the wood hangers because it keeps the shoulders looking nice on your garments.

• 43:08Jason Calacanis?

  Looking great. You don't want to.

• 43:09Speaker 01

  The shoulders looking nice on your garments. Yeah.

• 43:11Jason Calacanis?

  You take care of your clothes, clothes take care of you. And I'm looking and I'm like, they didn't come. And it's like, it was delivered two days ago. I'm like, it did not come. And then I looked and it had a picture and it was a picture of some other doorstep. It is not my doorstep. I went through it and AI, I get dumped into AI customer support and it's like, your package was delivered. Is this not your package? Um, is this not your home? I'm like, that's not my home. They're like, did you check with your neighbors? I'm like, yes, my neighbors know to bring stuff over here. They're like, okay, issuing a full refund.

• 43:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:40Jason Calacanis?

  Done. I never had to talk to a person and that's one of the great things about these delivery bots. Is it can take a picture when it gives you the burrito, when you take it out, it can videotape it. So if somebody stole your burrito, great. And if you have a video of me taking my burrito and whatever, you know, like, it's not the end of the world for me, but you do need to think about surveillance writ large.

• 44:00Speaker 01

  Right.

• 44:01Jason Calacanis?

  And if you don't like it, go drive your 1973 Camaro with no tracking in it. With cash down to a burrito stand and buy your burrito.

• 44:11Speaker 01

  I think people are worried like, what, what if there was a protest going on and a Samo was driving by? Could it, could it capture the photo of everybody and send it to the cops or whatever?

• 44:21Jason Calacanis?

  Much easier. So like they're already using drones for that and they automatically, when there's a protest going on, send somebody with a, you know, DSLR and they take every picture anyway. So that, that's like, not how they're going to do it.

• 44:35Speaker 01

  I mean, I feel like inevitably all of our big cities are going to become London with just surveillance cameras anywhere anyway. Like that's the future, like it or lump it really.

• 44:43Jason Calacanis?

  I think the best thing to do is to have a limit on how long they can keep the data in there. And then what type of data? So I would say, if you want to get more granular about this, should they be able to keep faces in a database indefinitely? There's a big controversy with the Madison Square Garden collection of properties where when somebody gets out of line, they have their picture, the person can get identified and when they're scanning their ticket, the person who's getting their ticket scanned, you know, a little bit of an alarm goes off, hey, the person in this seat, because they know your seat number when you come into the garden or wherever the beacon, hey, that person got in a fight or that person spit on a play, we had a person spit on a player. Um, in a basketball game in New York.

• 45:26Speaker 01

  Don't do that.

• 45:27Jason Calacanis?

  Atlanta Hawks, um, Trey Young, somebody in the front row, and these are $25,000 tickets. Now I'll take a spit on them. That person should never come back. But I do get a little concerned that like, hey, we knew you were at every event. So how long do you keep it for? Is the really the question the blue sky hand wringer should be thinking about is how long is this kept? Right? Do you need a subpoena to get it? Right? And what serve robotics?

• 45:52Speaker 01

  I think that's the people are concerned about like, what are the rules about when like serve robotics seems a little happy to turn anything over to the LAPD? And like, should there be some sort of a private stipulation or regulation here? So they can't just like record you and then send it to the police as a matter of cause.

• 46:09Jason Calacanis?

  You know, you definitely will learn as the founder of a company that you're going to want to listen. If there's something that happened and it's very clear, you have like definitive evidence of like somebody being beat up. You could make the judgment call as a founder, right? You don't need to like wait for a subpoena. Because it's obvious what's happening here, right? Like if you had the video of George Floyd and you were the server robotics, like you want to give that immediately over to internal affairs. There's no discussion, you know, if it's something that's a borderline case, you probably say, hey, just for hygiene, would you file? Go to a judge and file this and we'll give it, we're happy to give it to you when we get that, which is what happened with eventually Google and Facebook.

• 46:52Jason Calacanis?

  They were happy if like a terrorist, a known terrorist shot up a school to be like, yes, we have their account. This is San Bernardino people. If the person's on the lam, we'll give you their Facebook data, right? You can make a judgment. But if it was like, we can't understand why you're asking this. It's not explicit, then you gotta like, yeah.

• 47:09Speaker 01

  There's a, there's a big gray area there.

• 47:11Jason Calacanis?

  Big gray area there. Use your, use your judgment, folks.

• 47:13Speaker 01

  One more. You want to do one more blue sky story?

• 47:16Jason Calacanis?

  One more blue.

• 47:16Speaker 01

  They're very upset about Katy Perry going to space. I gotta be honest with you. There's a huge.

• 47:21Jason Calacanis?

  There's a lot of reasons to be upset about this if you are extremely left wing.

• 47:27Speaker 01

  That's what's happening. So a big theme was Katy Perry's wrong to go to space because it's wasteful. People are starving. Uh, there's all these other problems facing our country. Why are we sending Katy Perry to space? And I will say estimated cost to send, uh, these ladies on this blue. Blue Origin flight that went to space, $28 million per person was the cost.

• 47:48Jason Calacanis?

  What?

• 47:49Speaker 01

  That's what they're estimating Blue Origin sent to spend, send these ladies to space.

• 47:53Jason Calacanis?

  No, no, no, no, that can't be possible. Maybe that's if the whole history of the company, six people, 28, 120 million, that couldn't possibly have spent that much in gas.

• 48:02Speaker 01

  Well, I think it's that it's that they auctioned off seats for their crewed space flights at a cost of 28 million per ticket.

• 48:10Jason Calacanis?

  Previously, got it.

• 48:11Speaker 01

  That's how much, right. That's how much.

• 48:13Jason Calacanis?

  These things are coming down to, I would say that rocket used enough fuel that would probably be a couple of low millions per person. But okay, I get it. It's, there were definitely millions of dollars spent, tens of millions.

• 48:25Speaker 01

  Tens of millions of dollars on this, on this entire, so we also had a, a TikTok from Justin Schmidu that sums up a lot of the, the issues here. We can play that.

• 48:41Speaker 01

  They're just pointing out wasteful, all this, all this CO2, you know, and, and the, right, and the rest of the world, we're going through all of this environmental devastation.

• 48:51Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, that's a big jump there, but.

• 48:55Speaker 01

  Here's the comment from Elizabeth DeLorean, Blue Strike, Katy Perry went to space, cried feminism while NASA forced to remove women's achievements from their history, caused an enormous amount of environmental damage and contributed nothing to art or culture while she was up there. She released a setlist for a tour that can't even give away tickets.

• 49:12Jason Calacanis?

  Okay. Wow. There's a lot in there.

• 49:14Speaker 01

  A lot going on.

• 49:16Jason Calacanis?

  People hate Katy Perry. There's something about Katy Perry people now hate.

• 49:19Speaker 01

  Yes. I think, to me, I think that's most of the, I think if you picked a more popular at this moment pop star, like if Ariana Grande had gone to space, I don't think you would have gotten this kind of blowback.

• 49:30Jason Calacanis?

  If Chapel Rohn had gone to space. I think the other piece of this is, we're going to have to get used to space tourism. This was presented as an achievement in science and technology for these individuals who did nothing but strap themselves in and maybe take Xanax or something. I don't know.

• 49:49Speaker 01

  Oh, I would have had. I feel like Gayle King definitely took a Xanax.

• 49:52Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, that's gotta be nerve wracking to be on the tip of that thing and it's a lot of noise and a lot of force.

• 49:58Speaker 01

  No, I'd give them a lot of credit. I would not. We've said this before. I would not go to space.

• 50:02Jason Calacanis?

  No, of course not. It's too risky.

• 50:04Speaker 01

  I would never do that.

• 50:05Jason Calacanis?

  I would give them the credit for being brave to sit on the tip of the rocket, but they presented it as if they did something for women, which they did not. There was nothing. This had nothing to do with gender, had nothing to do with science. This is like, if a bunch of women, if Katy Perry bungee jumped and you were like, oh my God, she's so brave. She's just set women forward. This was like an achievement for women because it's like, no, that's weird. Now, if a woman who was an astronaut who went to school for 20 years was the first woman from Japan to go to space or whatever, you know, like that is an achievement in some ways because they.

• 50:46Speaker 01

  We very recently had a notable female astronaut. Boeing stranded her on the International Space Station for months.

• 50:52Jason Calacanis?

  Nobody knows her name.

• 50:54Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 50:55Jason Calacanis?

  Now, to make the jump, I always think making the jump between using fuel and.

• 51:00Speaker 01

  It was Sunny Williams, by the way.

• 51:01Jason Calacanis?

  A monsoon. Yeah, Sunny Williams. Shout out. Now, if you're gonna make the jump between, okay, we use some fuel and therefore there was a flood in Thailand, like there's a little too much butterfly effect going on here. Almost universally, people who do these kind of things buy carbon credits. I'm sure they bought carbon credits. I know Bezos does carbon credit. Any billionaire with a plane buys carbon credits so they can just be like, listen, I know I'm burning a lot of fuel getting from point A to B. So does, I mean, Taylor Swift, right? Like, but if you wanna see Taylor Swift do 200 shows in a year, she's not flying Southwest. I'm sorry. And we'll be fine. We'll be fine. It's not that big of a deal. They could go buy carbon credits and then that goes to putting discounts on Teslas and

• 51:46Jason Calacanis?

  other EVs. So

• 51:48Speaker 01

  That's a whole separate issue. There's a lot of concern about the carbon credit system and how corrupt it is and how

• 51:53Jason Calacanis?

  Does it work or not is the question, of course, but it is something done in good faith that a lot of countries are working on. That kind of works. I'm sure there's some on the margins. I'm sure scamming going on.

• 52:04Speaker 01

  I think it's better than nothing. I think we can all agree. It's better than not trying.

• 52:08Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, it's a we're trying here. The good news is, based on what I know about technology and the rate of innovation, everything we're worried about with global warming, I think we're going to outrun it with tech.

• 52:20Speaker 01

  I hope you're right.

• 52:21Jason Calacanis?

  And listen, when you watch the number of nuclear power plants that are being built, it's pretty amazing. And if you look at the cost of solar, it has plummeted faster than anybody could have ever imagined. It's so cheap. I'm looking at putting solar on my ranch. I got a quote for 60 grand to be off grid. And I was like, man, that's still a little expensive for the average homeowner, but not for me. And I'll do it for shits and giggles just to be off grid and, you know, for the zombie apocalypse.

• 52:50Speaker 01

  Well, you already have a bunker on your property as well. So you're like, you're like

• 52:54Jason Calacanis?

  I'm ready.

• 52:55Speaker 01

  Two thirds of the way there.

• 52:56Jason Calacanis?

  The whole I'm all in. I got three water sources. I'm good.

• 53:00Speaker 01

  Big creamed corn tins in your set.

• 53:02Jason Calacanis?

  I haven't gotten Alex. I haven't bought those from Alex Jones yet, but we'll see. Maybe you can drop them off if we're both in Austin.

• 53:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, those big buckets.

• 53:07Jason Calacanis?

  Buckets of food. No, I mean, I, I think it's becoming so cheap to go off grid that people are now like I, just like I 10 years ago or whatever, 14 years ago bought one of the first roadsters number 16. I was the tip of the spear on that. It's like, this doesn't make economic sense, but if it, if Tesla survives, maybe it will help and maybe other companies will start making AVs. Sure enough, that's what happened. Same thing happening with solar, carbon credits, all this stuff. It's all going in the right direction, folks. I don't think you have to worry about it. Like people, the fact that people are on blue sky, thinking the blue sky is falling, the blue sky is not falling. Energy sustainability is a certainty. There are 15 different paths to being energy efficient. There were two

• 53:51Jason Calacanis?

  or three days in the past year where Australia and Germany, which isn't exactly known for sunny days, had more coming from renewables than from other sources. Texas is the number one. Solar installation place in the world.

• 54:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, you see them all over the place out here.

• 54:10Jason Calacanis?

  Well, it literally is like the, the people here understand like sun, it's pretty hot here. Sun and energy. They understand the energy business. They're really investing in. You know what other places doing it? Middle East. They get it as well. They're putting huge solar farms all across UAE and other places. So like, yeah, we're pulling oil, but we do know like it's going to run out and there'll be peak oil at some point. So, uh, this is all good stuff. I love, if they're worrying about it on Blue Sky, Blue Sky's falling, it probably means we're going in the right direction. That's what, that's what I take from the two stories we've made. All right. This has been amazing. We will see you all, uh, on Wednesday. Uh, and thank you for tuning in. He's x.com slash lawns. I'm, uh, x.com slash Jason. I am on Blue Sky and I'm using microblog.

• 54:53Jason Calacanis?

  It's a very cool federated service app. You should try it. It lets me post to threads.

• 54:58Speaker 01

  Ah.

• 54:59Jason Calacanis?

  Blue Sky and Medium.

• 55:01Speaker 01

  All of them.

• 55:02Jason Calacanis?

  But it, well, not Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and others. So I'm, I would very much like a piece of software that did that. I think what I'm going to do for now is use my Athena assistant and say, I'm going to post on microblog. You post it on these other services for me, like these kind of official things. All right, everybody. We'll see you next time. Bye-bye.

• 55:20Speaker 04

  Hey everybody. Welcome back to Twist. This is Alex. Now, if you watch the show a lot, you know, we talk about AI, we talk about startups, we talk about big markets, regulated, unregulated. One thing we don't talk about is the world of getting into a medical residency. But as it turns out, that is a very interesting place to build a company. One such company is Thalamus. They've built software tools to help schools find the right people to bring into the residency programs, to make the process smoother, more intelligent and more efficient. When I first heard about this, I thought to myself, isn't that kind of a niche? Well, I wanted to learn more. So joining me on the program now is Jason Reminick, the co-founder and CEO of Thalamus. Jason, hello. I know you're in a hotel room. Thank you for making the time. Thanks, Alex.

• 56:00Speaker 05

  Good to be here.

• 56:01Speaker 04

  So I, because my spouse is a doctor that's gone through the medical residency track. That was a fun five years. I'm pretty aware of the space you're working in, but I feel like a lot of folks may not have had direct experience with it. So can you just break down exactly what market you're going after and then briefly how you're helping people get through that process?

• 56:20Speaker 05

  Where we started and kind of our niche, our beachhead is helping medical students apply to residency programs all throughout the country and have those residency programs help them find the right residence. And so this is right after you finish medical school in your fourth year, you apply to residency, they receive your application, they interview you over a three to six month period. And then you're selected into residency through a process called the match, which is a mathematical algorithm. Yeah. Which takes into account your preferences and the program's preferences. And we could do a whole talk just on that, but eventually on the third Friday of March, you open an envelope or now an email, which tells you where you're going for your residency. It's a binding contract and then you start in that residency program in that specialty on July 1st. So.

• 57:04Speaker 04

  So let's go back to the three to six months of applying to places. I think this is pretty clutch to what you guys are building. You will get offers for interviews at different schools during COVID. I presume that went mostly remote, but candidates have often flown out to these interviews. And so it's a pretty extensive time consuming and costly effort, I believe.

• 57:22Speaker 05

  Very. So I went through the process myself and that was kind of what was the catalyst for the creation of Thalamus. Got stuck in New York City during Hurricane Sandy. Many of my interviews were canceled and that was what started all of this. My co-founder, Suzy, is a residency program director at the University of Rochester where I went to medical school. And so, yeah, we were, we were really trying to make this process better for everyone. And so prior to COVID, yeah, applicants were spending between $5,000 and $25,000 on travel costs and other fees. Virtual interviews helped with a lot of that cost, still pretty costly overall. But yeah, it's really streamlined a lot of the process.

• 57:57Speaker 04

  So let's talk about Thalamus, the product. Essentially, as far as I can tell, it's a series of digital tools that help medical residency programs handle applications coming in, organizing and scheduling all the important things that they need to do, because it's a lot of logistics, let's be honest. Then you have a thing called cerebellum that lets you compare your program's metrics, which I presume is number of applicants, quality thereof and matriculation rates and so forth. And essentially you just want to make sure that every process of. Post-medical school into residency has become digitized and smoother is my read of things, but correct me where I'm wrong.

• 58:34Speaker 05

  Yeah, for sure. So I mean, back in my day, when you had to apply to residency, I appealed both ways in the snow. It was lots of emails and phone calls. And so we've built software as a service that we sell to hospitals, be they individual programs like pediatrics or internal medicine, or now more likely entire health-wide systems. It integrates with the application systems everyone's using. They import their data. They invite the applicants to interview. The applicant creates a profile on our platform. It takes about five seconds. And then they're scheduling their interview in real time, kind of like open table, but instead of booking a restaurant, they're booking a residency interview. Back on the hospital side, it's a process-specific applicant tracking system that allows them to score candidates, write notes, and do everything they need to do to hire everyone through the match. With COVID, we accommodate virtual interviewing on our platform. We have our

• 59:17Speaker 05

  own homegrown solution, but also connect to all of the major video conferencing providers, API. And then, as you mentioned, yeah, we have cerebellum, which measures all of the outcomes related to geography, which is a major driver for people to practice and other KPIs. And then we also have Cortex, which is an AI and machine learning tool that screens and aggregates key application data to help hospitals identify key data that they're looking for and streamline those selection processes as well.

• 59:42Speaker 04

  I want to get back to the electronic residency application service in a second, but on the point of using the Cortex service to apply AI and ML to screening applications, I'm completely torn about this. On one hand, efficiency, good. Looking at more candidates, lovely. Being faster, huzzah. But then I worry about candidates that might not, you know, coloring the lines for what that program is looking for and therefore might get overlooked. So I presume you guys have good thoughts about this, but how do you avoid the AI ML systems perhaps cutting out certain people that may have been good candidates?

• 1:00:13Speaker 05

  Yes, it's a great question, and we talk about this a lot. And I've had entire talks on AI at various medical education conferences as well. The process today and historically has always been very, very biased. And so we tried to start with the most objective way possible. And so the first kind of AI feature we rolled out is using AI and LLMs to pull out grades from medical school transcripts to try and essentially level the playing field with regards to grades. This is a whole sub talking itself as well.

• 1:00:44Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:00:44Speaker 05

  Medical schools have very different grading. They have what they call core clerkships and core clerkships are what you do in your third year of medical school as you get out into the hospital to learn about internal medicine and surgery and pediatrics and OB GYN, et cetera. Every medical school defines core clerkships differently. They have different grading skills. Some are A, B, C, D, E, F. Some are pass fail. Some are honors, high pass, pass fail, or some combination thereof. And so what we've done and on top of that, the distributions of the grades that they give out very, very widely. Some medical schools give 99% of their class honors. Others give 10% of their class honors. And so to understand even how someone performs in a medical school, you need a Rosetta Stone to know that this particular medical school grades in this way.

• 1:01:28Speaker 05

  So the first foray of AI that we did was taking the grades out of these transcripts. We did that for what's called USMD or allopathic schools as well as USDO or osteopathic schools. And then IMGs, which are international medical graduates who go to schools outside the US. For the DOs and IMGs, they're, I'm sorry, for the DOs and MDs, they're similar curricula, although DOs have internal medicine one and an internal medicine two and surgery one and surgery two. So there are all these different nuances. And then IMGs in international schools have medical school that's seven years and have five different internal medicine clerkships and have transcripts in other languages that are translated.

• 1:02:07Speaker 04

  So you But you guys took all that and you, I presume, harmonized and standardized it so that way schools looking at internal medicine, five high honors versus a C from this school and a similar thing can say, okay, well, they give out 90%. They give out 10%. So like you gotta level it out. So essentially, instead of AI and ML possibly bringing bias into the system, in fact, you're using it to rip bias out of the system.

• 1:02:29Speaker 05

  Well, we're trying. We're trying. And so this was a very objective way to do it. There are ethical AI principles that were put out by the Association of American Medical Colleges. We abide by those. We also think about this an awful lot. Yeah, we have questions like, can you use AI to screen letters of recommendation and personal statements to pull out key themes? And that's something we're looking into also. So but then we get the question, well, can you use AI to determine if someone wrote their personal statement using AI, which is a more common practice as it is in in in in most industries now. And the short answer is yes, you can use AI to check for AI. But the the much more complicated answer is individuals as an example who can be considered neurodivergent

• 1:03:11Speaker 05

  have a much more higher likelihood of having their writing picked up as being written by AI when it's actually written by a human. So these false positives. And so, yeah, we think about this an awful lot. We're trying to move through this in a very calculated way to bring more objectivity and objective data to the process without increasing and in many ways trying to reduce bias as well.

• 1:03:30Speaker 04

  Okay, no, I really appreciate that. Now, getting back to the the state of the market, you mentioned that you guys work with the Electronic Residency Application Service or the E A E R A S as I read from my notes, sorry.

• 1:03:41Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:03:42Speaker 04

  Not my usual set of acronyms. I'm not going to lie, Jason.

• 1:03:44Speaker 05

  Absolutely. Yeah, yeah.

• 1:03:45Speaker 04

  Yeah. But you also have a a collaboration with the Association of American Medical Colleges. And you guys say that you have 8,000 residency and fellowship programs that currently use your software. I pulled some data from the N R M P. Sorry, everybody, that's the National Residency Matching Program. And they had roughly, I think it was like 6,000 or so fellowship residencies that were part of that. All this is to say, have you cornered the American market for your software niche? Because it feels to me like you've done it. Congratulations.

• 1:04:17Speaker 05

  Well, thank you.

• 1:04:17Speaker 04

  Is there that much more for you guys to eat in this first, you know, niche that you're going after?

• 1:04:22Speaker 05

  Uh, yeah, so I'm right now we have about 80, 85% market share, depending on how you measure. And that includes about 90% of residency programs. Thank you. It's it's pretty surreal.

• 1:04:31Speaker 04

  That's nuts.

• 1:04:32Speaker 05

  And and, yeah, there are there are very small fellowships that we don't have using the platform in very subspecialized fields. So there's there's a bit more ways to grow there. We've been focusing kind of on enterprise-wide institutional growth, land and expand overall. Uh, but yeah, with this this collaboration with the A A M C who runs ARRIS um, and and the alphabet soup in in academic medicine.

• 1:04:54Speaker 04

  That's how you pronounce those acronyms. Okay, so it's double A N C, not A A N C. And that's how you catch noobs. It's like that movie. Yeah, yeah.

• 1:05:01Speaker 05

  You could do you can do both. There's there's no standardized way, but we have a we have a lot of acronyms. But it's it's really helped us grow and and allowed the company to accelerate to the growth we have to, so.

• 1:05:10Speaker 04

  Okay, so the obvious question then becomes, what are you going to do next? Because 85% market share is at once an absolute triumph and also doesn't leave a lot more of the world to conquer.

• 1:05:20Speaker 05

  Correct.

• 1:05:21Speaker 04

  Just thinking out loud, when I was prepping for our chat today, I was thinking going international. There's a lot of doctors around the world, other similar programs. I was thinking like maybe law and B school internships have some overlap to kind of what you're doing with placements and complicated applying processes.

• 1:05:36Speaker 05

  Yeah, no, I mean, they're both great thoughts and we have dabbled in kind of both of those. We've worked with some of the largest law firms recruiting law students out of law school for their first associate's positions. We've worked with pharmacy programs, dental programs, physical therapy programs, kind of the medicine adjacent programs within hospitals and health systems. There's definitely challenges, especially post-COVID with regards to just doctors in all countries. The thing we're focused on right now and where we see the most opportunity is as challenging as it was to recruit a resident or a fellow to a hospital, recruiting doctors post-training is even more challenging. The average hospital spending a quarter of a million dollars to recruit a doctor, it takes them six months to find that doctor.

• 1:06:19Speaker 05

  In those six months, they lose $2 million in clinical revenue and they're doing about 130 physician searches a year on average, which is a quarter of a billion dollars per hospital. And the best math I can do, it's about a $300 billion problem, accounting for 7.5% of the $4 trillion healthcare costs annually in the US.

• 1:06:38Speaker 04

  Other than that, though, what's the big deal?

• 1:06:40Speaker 05

  Yeah, exactly. The big deal is not many people are talking about it, but we're, many people are feeling it right now and trying to find a doctor.

• 1:06:47Speaker 04

  It's kind of a hidden friction, a hidden loss inside the system today.

• 1:06:51Speaker 05

  Well, I think just very few people understand how doctors train and then get jobs. They know how to go to the doctor, but, but you really need a passion and expertise to get into this.

• 1:07:02Speaker 04

  Oh, my Lord, yes.

• 1:07:03Speaker 05

  It is complicated.

• 1:07:04Speaker 04

  It is complicated. It's hard to get through. It's expensive and so forth. But one problem that we have at a national level, as far as I can tell, is that there's not quite enough doctors. And I know that the people behind the match residency have been trying to increase the number of slots recently in the last couple of years. And so that's good. But I wonder if part of the problem you just described about how hard it is to find a doctor to hire into your hospital is strictly a supply issue. And I know that Thalamus is working through your foundation, I think thalamus.org, to help people finance their relatively expensive residency application process. But is there more work that you might be able to help with in terms of expanding the total supply of residency spots or slots? So that way, we can get more butts in seats and therefore more doctors on the wards?

• 1:07:47Speaker 05

  Yeah, no, it's a great question. Essentially, the constraint is the number of residency positions, which is actually funded by the federal government through Medicare.

• 1:07:57Speaker 04

  Oh, no, we're doomed!

• 1:07:59Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's about $16 billion a year through Medicare to incentivize hospitals to train residents. And the number of spots that are funded has not increased significantly since the 1980s. The largest increase recently coming out of COVID was through the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2021, where they added 1,000 positions. I wouldn't say we're doomed. We're having discussions at the national level as well. I think this is a very, it's a very challenging thing. To your point, it's not just a supply issue. It's a supply and demand issue. It's a very interesting kind of economics markets issue. And so we're trying to work with legislators, and this is a very bipartisan issue on both sides of the aisle, to help provide more real time data to measure these markets overall to assign these positions.

• 1:08:42Speaker 05

  Because you can put a dermatology spot on the moon, and it will fill. If you wanted to put a family medicine spot in, let's say, rural Arkansas, you have to be a lot more strategic as to where you put that and when, and kind of measure these markets as you would measure the stock market and understand whose stock is high and whose stock is low and such as well. And so thalamus.org came about because, well, many reasons, but essentially, if someone looks like their doctor, speaks the same language, reminds them of a close friend or family member, people get better healthcare outcomes. That's been proven in the medical literature time and time Again, also individuals who are from rural and underserved communities are the most likely to practice there. But you really need resources to become a doctor. The average medical school debt is about a quarter of a million dollars and increasing.

• 1:09:26Speaker 05

  And even applying to residency prior to COVID was between ten and twenty five thousand dollars on top of that debt. And just that process itself accounted for three percent of all medical education debt in the U.S. Now, post-COVID, it's still several thousand dollars. And if you need to do a away rotation for competitive specialties, you have to pay double rent and all these other hidden costs that are there as well. And so we really saw a need and so created a foundation on top of for thalamus as well.

• 1:09:53Speaker 04

  I mean, I mean, just to be clear, when I said we're doomed, I wasn't trying to say we're doomed doomed. I'm just

• 1:09:57Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:09:58Speaker 04

  Right, right now, not to get political, but I don't think there's an enormous appetite amongst the leading political parties to expand government healthcare outlays. So that was my

• 1:10:07Speaker 05

  No.

• 1:10:08Speaker 04

  Oh, crap.

• 1:10:08Speaker 05

  Moment. And we saw HHS is going to have some cuts, cutting about a third of its budget. And so that's going to touch these rural hospitals as well. So yeah, we may be, we may be doomed in some ways, but I do think we have opportunities in, in that to, to create hope and optimism and actually work to solve the problem as well.

• 1:10:27Speaker 04

  All right. Now, going back to the, the thing you want to solve of actually getting doctors into hospitals post-residency. That to me sounds like a place that is ripe for something in addition to SaaS revenues, perhaps like success fees or something along those lines. How are you thinking about that expansion in terms of kind of business model fundamentals?

• 1:10:45Speaker 05

  Yeah, so it's a, it's a major challenge for hospitals and it's existential in many ways. And where the hospitals struggle is with sourcing and retention sourcing in terms of who has a geographic connection and whether that's the Bay Area, inner city, Boston, rural Tennessee. Everyone's having challenges identifying those doctors that may want to work there. Most recruitment is done through Excel spreadsheets. Call text messages back of the operating room, one-off conversations, just personal networks, et cetera. Whereas most of the other positions in the health system are recruited using some form of technology. Question always is why? And a lot of it has to do with recruiting a doctor as a very, very specialized. It's different than recruiting nurses and physical therapists, or even support staff at the

• 1:11:28Speaker 05

  hospital, et cetera. And so it's lagged behind in terms of technology. A lot is done through online job fairs, job boards. There are some more now technology moving companies, but the real competitive advantage that we see is we're working with essentially the entire upstream market now to become a doctor in the United States. It's very surreal. You essentially have to use Thalamus now. And we're having early intros to doctors in a spot where they're not the high performing, high earning individuals yet. They're very much at the beginning of their career and there are only so many companies serving this space. And so we've really tried

• 1:12:10Speaker 05

  to be there for the physician or the new physicians trying to navigate this process with the hopes that we can then also help them find their jobs in the future.

• 1:12:17Speaker 04

  If you're curious why it's so hard to do this, well, people out there who are listening, and you want to just get a taste of the difficulty that, just to pick one example, residency programs deal with, trying to figure out what to do with a married couple graduating from the same medical school with two different specialties, and try to find them one hospital chain or group that will take them both at the same time. And you'll see part of the myriad issues that come up here. So Jason, I'm really glad you're working on this, but it would be remiss if I didn't bring up something very interesting. So last year, early, I think it was the first couple of months of the year, you guys swapped over to a public benefit corporation. And, you know, I've been talking to founders for a long time. I've talked to a very few who have that tag. I know you are a venture backed company, so I'm just curious

• 1:13:01Speaker 04

  how you balance having a public interest as part of your overall remit, and also, you know, having standard kind of ventureonomics breathing down your neck to ensure that growth and gross margins stay high?

• 1:13:13Speaker 05

  Yeah, no, it's a great question. And we had a lot of discussion with our board and our team and our customers. And so I learned about this as a structure because K-4 Capital was one of our early investors as well, and several of their portfolio companies, public benefit corporations. For us, it was kind of always within our core DNA, but this provided us a more intentional way of talking about it. And so we- We say we're very mission driven because we are. Our mission is to ensure the right doctor ends up at the right hospital to treat the right patients. What that means to me is it's three o'clock in the morning. Someone's rolling up to an emergency room, having the worst healthcare event of their life. What is Thalamus doing upstream to ensure that that right doctor is there for them? Right could mean so many things.

• 1:13:55Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:13:55Speaker 05

  But what we saw was that mission and our ability and our profitability, our revenue, et cetera, are very aligned. And so as the mission is more successful, the company continues to grow. The revenue grows, the profitability grows as well. And so we had a long talk about this amongst our board. And we really wanted to look at and did a lot of research, like would this impact our exit? Would this impact our ability to raise in the future? And all the research that we found, well, not so much. Additionally, as this collaboration formed with the AMC, like that mission alignment actually was one of the main things that pushed us to really getting this partnership in place,

• 1:14:39Speaker 05

  which has in many ways been a company, a company changing relationship in many ways. And so it's also made it easier for us to talk about our talent and what we do with our team and our workforce. And so we talk about this with candidates and engineers who are looking to provide impact. Like, impact is very much a currency at Thalamus. And it also just drives that continued growth of the company. And so it's kind of funny, like people ask me like, well, what did your customers think about it? I got more positive emails from customers. Once we did that than any feature we've ever released, any product. This is a message that very much resonates within healthcare, within the healthcare space and with physicians.

• 1:15:24Speaker 05

  And it's been kind of a very, very interesting journey.

• 1:15:27Speaker 04

  If you're a doctor working at a hospital group, you're more at the behest of the bean counters than leading them, if that makes sense. So that all tracks very well with me. Jason, just before I let you go, you mentioned the second act of the company, helping doctors get placed into hospitals. To me, that seems like an even bigger market than the one you're attacking today. So I'm presuming that there's still lots of growth to come.

• 1:15:49Speaker 05

  Lots of growth. The best estimate we can make is it's a total addressable market of about $30 billion.

• 1:15:55Speaker 04

  Oh, that'll do.

• 1:15:56Speaker 05

  Yeah, the fastest growing recruitment industry in the country. So we're really excited about the position that we're in. We're very fortunate in many ways. Sometimes, some days it still feels quite surreal, but yeah, really building to that next step and that next phase and solving a very acute problem that we're all feeling and needing to go to the doctor.

• 1:16:13Speaker 04

  And it's thalamus G N E dot com. And what is a role that you are having a hard time hiring for? Just so we can throw that out into the air for you.

• 1:16:21Speaker 05

  Uh, we're hiring. I don't know if it's a hard time, but we're hiring a lot into product and engineering. Um, so software engineers, front end, back end, um, data. Uh, we're really looking to bring in some really great data scientists as well as, uh, those folks helping us to build this next product. We have some ideas of where we want to go. We're looking to work with really smart folks to help us get there. So, yeah.

• 1:16:42Speaker 04

  All right. Well, Jason, thank you so much. When you launched that next product, come back on the show. I want to hear about how it goes. And if you get an even bigger reaction to that than you did with going to be a public benefit corporation, we shall see. Jason, thank you very much.

• 1:16:53Speaker 05

  Thanks, Alex. Thanks so much. Great to be here.