327: Cameron Porter On Apple Becoming A Healthcare Company

Cameron Porter is a Venture Architect at Alley Corp, an organization in New York that originates a startup idea, hires the team, funds the initial 6-12 months and launches the company. Occasionally, they invest in very early stage companies as the first seed investors as well. In this conversation, we discuss Apple as a services company, the rise of the quantitative self, why Apple will need to get into healthcare, how switching costs get higher over time, and why Cameron thinks Apple may prescribe you LSD one day. =============================== BlockFi allows you to keep your crypto, put it up as collateral, and receive a USD loan funded directly to your bank account. They do loans ranging from $2,000 to $10,000,000, and they're perfect for helping you reach your financial goals of all sizes. Visit BlockFi.com/Pomp to learn more about putting your crypto to work without having to sell it. https://www.blockfi.com/pomp =============================== Our second sponsor is choice, a new self-directed IRA product that I'm really excited about. If you are listening to this, you are likely part of the 7.1 million bitcoin owners who have retirement accounts with dollars in them, but not bitcoin. I was in that situation too. Now you can actually buy real Bitcoin in your retirement account. I'm talking about owning your private keys and using tax-advantaged dollars to do it too. Absolute game changer. https://www.retirewithchoice.com/pomp =============================== Pomp writes a daily letter to over 50,000 investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy to understand language, while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://www.pompletter.com

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

• 0:00Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone, this is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Let's kick this thing off. Cameron Porter is a venture architect at Ally Corp, an organization in New York that originates a startup idea, hires the team, funds the initial six to 12 months, and launches the company. Occasionally, they invest in very early-stage companies as the first seed investors as well. In this conversation, we discuss Apple as a services company, the rise of the quantitative self, why Apple will need to get into healthcare, how switching costs get higher over time, and why Cameron thinks Apple may prescribe you LSD one day. I really enjoyed this conversation with Cameron, and I hope you guys do as well.

• 0:46Anthony Pompliano?

  Before we get into the episode, though, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors. The first is BlockFi. You know that I'm a huge fan, a user, and an investor. They've got three products. The first allows you to buy and sell cryptocurrencies with no fees. The second is you can deposit crypto and take out a US dollar loan. Or the third, which is my favorite product, is their interest-bearing account. You deposit crypto or stablecoin, and they'll pay you up to 8.6% APY in that interest-bearing account. They're also will be launching a Bitcoin Rewards credit card later this year. So go check them out at blockfi.com/pomp. Again, blockfi.com/pomp, and tell me what you think.

• 1:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Our next sponsor is Choice. Their new self-directed IRA product I'm really excited about. If you're listening to this, you are likely part of the 7.1 million Bitcoin owners who have retirement accounts with dollars in them, but not Bitcoin. I was in that situation too, but not any longer, thanks to Choice. Now you can actually buy real Bitcoin in your retirement account. I'm talking about owning your private keys and using tax-advantaged dollars to do it, too. It's an absolute game changer. Remember, a new self-directed IRA product that allows you to buy Bitcoin, hold your private keys, and use tax-advantaged dollars to do it. Go check them out at retirewithchoice.com/pomp. Again, retirewithchoice.com/pomp.

• 2:16Anthony Pompliano?

  And then I also don't forget that I write a daily letter to over 50,000 investors about business, technology and finance. I break down complex topics into easy to understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at pompletter.com. Again, pompletter.com. All right, let's get into this episode with Cameron. I hope you guys enjoy it.

• 2:37Speaker 01

  Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek Digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

• 3:04Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, everyone. Bang, bang. We've got Cameron here. I'm super excited about this conversation. Thanks for doing this, man.

• 3:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, no problem. I'm excited to be chiming in from a nicer setting than where I'm usually at in New York.

• 3:17Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely. We were just talking. Cameron is on a month-long road trip and is currently with some friends in North Carolina and they took all of the, the prime real estate to do real work. So him and I are going to the chat while he sits outside with a, with a beautiful backdrop there.

• 3:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think they're, I think they're deceived in terms of what prime real estate is, but that's okay.

• 3:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely. Let's start with just your background. For those that don't know you, kind of what, what'd you do before you got to Alley Corp?

• 3:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I guess a little bit of a divergent background in terms of the traditional path, if there is one, into the venture capital side of things. Studied, studied computer science in school. Thought I was going to go down the entrepreneurial path, had worked on kind of launching a consulting firm in college. Ended up dropping out though my senior year and got drafted into the MLS. So played for a couple of years in, in Montreal and then in Kansas City, working on the side as, as an engineer with actually MLS front office at the same time, doing some of the data engineering stuff there. Had my body just completely fall apart, blew out a knee, broke a leg. And once you kind of break both of your, your legs, you really need to find something to do sitting down. So decided VC was a natural fit. So ended up back in New York, met Kevin Ryan, the founder of Alley

• 4:32Speaker 02

  Corp. And kind of have helped him and Wendy build this, this institution and venture studio slash capital fund in New York City.

• 4:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Cool. And so how does AlleyCorp actually work? I think people hear they fund, they found, you know, there's all these terminology that's thrown around, but just kind of like what goes on there every day?

• 4:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, so it's definitely a unique institution, especially in terms of how it operates now as an evergreen fund. So we don't, we don't have LPs anymore, but the, a bit of the backstory can help contextualize it. So it was started by Kevin Ryan and Dwight Merriman after DoubleClick was sold to Google. And they started it initially as a way for them to gain what, what they called entrepreneurial leverage. So they, they wanted to be able to start a series of companies without committing to any one of them. And this was around 2007, 2008. And I think they were probably at the cutting edge of what would be called the venture studio movement. So over the course of those first few years, they started what have now become fairly brand name companies, the MongoDB, Gilt Groups, Business Insiders, Zola's are part of that earlier batch. And

• 5:31Speaker 02

  as those companies have exited, the, the fund has grown and expanded from just being a place where we start two to three companies every year to one where we also are doing seed and series A investing primarily in the New York ecosystem. Our real goal is to kind of continue to grow and foster that, that environment and hopefully get to the point where it's, it's really competitive with San Francisco. But it's a, it's definitely a unique place where we, we try to develop concepts across verticals. We have no specific area we want to be doing. A lot of it's curiosity driven. And we come up with the idea, and if we can develop a narrative that's compelling enough, bring on a founding team and fund it for the first year or two to really get it going.

• 6:07Anthony Pompliano?

  It's very cool. And any specific projects that you're more excited than, than others? Or was it you've been spending more time on in terms of like what you guys are building?

• 6:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. So I can give you kind of a sneak peek in some of the stuff that's coming out of the pipeline. I mean, we've been, it's been fascinating to see over the last, especially quarantine, being kind of isolated. I think this like deep thinking has actually been much more productive for us and not being distracted by the whole city. But is some of the areas where we're really excited to start launching companies and as one, we're getting involved in the digital therapeutics movement. I think that people who are familiar with the FDA and what they're doing in terms of software-only medical devices, some of the canonical examples being the omadas, levongos, the paratherapeutics. We think there's kind of a lot of regulatory arbitrage there and also a lot of opportunities to help in behavioral management, especially for various types of addiction therapy. So we're going to start

• 6:59Speaker 02

  pushing that forward. We're also doing stuff, and like I said, we're incredibly generous in what we do. We're working on a concept essentially in the mobile food space. We're trying to take what we think works in cloud kitchens and bring it to a platform that is cheaper and more flexible and is capable of moving where demand is, essentially using a version of food trucks and creating essentially a platform for companies, large food brands to launch fleets of them, manage them, integrate them with online order systems. So we're really all over the place, hardware and software, and are incredibly opportunistic. And it's what makes it so fun is kind of applying horizontal thinking to different areas and seeing where crossover is, where can we cross pollinate? And when we can't get to an idea

• 7:44Speaker 02

  ourselves, who are the right founders to be backing and helping build it out?

• 7:49Anthony Pompliano?

  It's super cool. And it feels like, once you have people who have done it once or twice, I mean, that's really is what made Silicon Valley Silicon Valley, right? It was kind of the institutional knowledge and the ability for everyone not to have to solve every problem for the first time and just, hey, look, I've done this six times. Here's what you should do. Here's what you should avoid. Keep going. It sounds like you guys have kind of tried to institutionalize that or at least kind of wrap yourselves around these companies. Is that fair?

• 8:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. And I think that's a great way to put it. I mean, a lot of the ways in which I like to think about venture studios and why I think maybe some of them go into certain failure modes. I think one of the common ones is right around this institutional knowledge and that the key problem you're solving as a venture studio is one, finding an idea that's a compelling enough narrative that you attract talented people, but then also making sure you're attracting talented people who skill set you can complement. I think that it's very common for venture studios to go after. Go after people who are experienced entrepreneurs or just post MBAs as opposed to someone who's been operating in an industry for the last 10 years, has never hired an engineering team, never raised venture capital, never been exposed to it. And when you go after those people and say, look, like, bring your knowledge, bring your relationships, bring your expertise, will complement with that institutional called, quote unquote, Silicon Valley-esque knowledge

• 8:56Speaker 02

  of fundraising, hiring technical talent, all of these things. I think you end up in a place that's incredibly symbiotic and you're really capable of, like, one, pulling new talent who may have been more risk averse into an area where they can really thrive and you provide the capital and expertise to help them grow. And so it's really exciting because I think it's still an underrated opportunity. And I think venture studios, once they start to build this muscle, are going to be able to do more and more of it.

• 9:23Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure. A lot of people don't know this, but I think it was Sequoia's very first fund. I think they had like nine investments. So don't hold me to the exact numbers, but this is directionally correct. They had like nine investments in it, two of which they incubated internally. And it was like 80% of the returns that they drove in that first fund, which had like a, you know, 50% IRR or whatever it was, came from the two companies that they incubated internally. And so everyone knows them as kind of, hey, we go find companies and invest capital. But actually, I think it was Sequoia, their start was all around. Really, they had the two big hits were things that they had incubated internally, along with funding.

• 9:59Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, I think people like, they underestimate just how much value there is in the creation phase, even though it's so obvious that when a founder owns a large amount of equity upfront and they're able to scale a company, like, almost regardless of where it exits post the 100 million phase, they're making reasonable amounts. And if you're able to conceptualize the idea, capture some of that common stock, the returns are incredible. And you're not dealing with some of the challenges of operating as a traditional VC investor. You're not dealing with the challenges of operating in auction mechanisms, where if it's a really good idea, you're kind of competing on price with any other fund out there.

• 10:33Speaker 02

  And I think that like one of it's interesting because I think this is something that another thing that people haven't really internalized as much in terms of cap tables. But traditionally, when you look at a cap table, there's a huge difference between founder equity positions and first employees. And I think that people intuitively understand that there's diminishing marginal returns to the value of like the marginal dollar well. That actually happens on a cap table, too. And I think people don't realize that you could have a founder with 40%, you could bring them down to 20% and they still feel fully incentivized and a part of that company. If you bring it down to 10%, that's actually a bigger change, even though the percentage of equity change is less. And so that leaves room and opportunity for for funds or people who are building these

• 11:18Speaker 02

  type of venture studios to capture some of that equity that is undervalued by the founders and not going to the first employees and still create room for for top quality people to build really incredible companies. And I think that I think this is the stuff where venture capitalists figured out a lot of the funding side of things. And this knowledge will sort of start getting out there on the venture studio side as more and more founders exit, they start doing their own version of this, want to scale their entrepreneurial leverage, have diversified vets, moving from concentrated wealth building to diversified wealth preservation in a skill that they know how to do.

• 11:46Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure. Makes makes a ton of sense. So we got connected because you were tweeting all kinds of things that when I first saw it sounded ridiculous. And then I read kind of your explanation behind it. And I said, wait a minute, that guy's actually got a ton of really interesting ideas and maybe on to something here. It sounds like you read Nathan Bishaw's Health OS write up, which was talking about kind of the intersection of Apple, the technology company and all the things they could do in healthcare, et cetera. And then you had this thread about like Apple's going to basically solve the longevity problem, right? So again, kind of at the onset, it's like, well, that sounds crazy. But then you got into it. So maybe let's just start with like Apple as a business and kind of what some of the

• 12:30Anthony Pompliano?

  it's weird calling them structural issues, given how how successful Apple is, but just the things that are kind of on the horizon in terms of why they would be incentivized to pursue other things than what they're doing today.

• 12:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. So I guess to start kind of laying the groundwork, we can we'll go to like the highest level and look at Apple kind of over the last 20 years in terms of how they've developed from a hardware company. Services company and then get into the Tim Cook Health Company thesis. So early on, Apple's developing incredible hardware, first in PCs and now in mobile phones. And they were able to kind of create this solution that was successful, both in the US and then iteratively in market after market after market. And if you watch their growth, essentially, it was incredibly predictable over a very long period of time where each quarter they're breaking record after record after record. And that essentially, that cadence was they were expanding to country after country after country.

• 13:26Speaker 02

  And if you've looked at the earth, you quickly realize that the earth is in fact finite and they're going to run out of countries at some point. And once you saturated all those countries and the people in those countries have all bought iPhones, all of a sudden you have to think, okay, where are we going next? And the next place to naturally monetize that is like, okay, we're not, we're not just a hardware company, we're a services company. So you have our devices, now we're going to monetize you ever more and more and more and more on those devices. Now, I think like, I don't think I put this in the thread, but the way I conceptualize what's kind of been going on in terms of like the broad tech ecosystem is that Apple, Google, Facebook, Netflix, every other social media company, TikTok, every product is essentially going after what I'm going to call like vertical time.

• 14:11Speaker 02

  So there's 24 hours in a day, how much of that can your company capture and monetize? And that's like a really finite game that they're playing. And this is the whole Apple services narrative is that we provide you with the hardware, we're going to be most effective at providing you with high quality services and products that you want to spend money on and pay your attention to.

• 14:29Speaker 02

  Okay, there's only a finite amount of that. Again, how do you kind of get out of this trap? Once you've locked people into the services and into your hardware products, there's another axis which is horizontal, which is every single day you have 24 hours to monetize people's attention and have them pay for services. And as it gets ever harder to compete for the marginal service or marginal amount of attention, there's room to say, okay, if our customers are really locked in, which they feel like they are, I'm, I'm looking at an iPad, a Mac product, AirPods, I have an Apple Watch on, I don't think I'm going anywhere anytime soon. Then you're like, okay, is it easier to compete for the marginal attention within the day or to extend the number of days that we can monetize this customer for?

• 15:14Speaker 02

  Now, how do you do that? Well, this is kind of like the whole crux of Apple solving the human longevity problem is that if they are the ones that are building out the ecosystem of products like the Apple Watches, the health apps, all these things that are collecting data from ancillary devices, your Peloton bike, your Oura ring, your eight-seat mattress, all the things that the quote-unquote tech bro is using nowadays, then all of a sudden you have a country, or sorry, a company that is capable of kind of collecting the data that is necessary for being a very effective R and D biotech company. And I think you naturally start getting to the conclusion that if they do have all this

• 15:55Speaker 02

  data, if they are the company that's best positioned to flex a massive R and D budget and a massive amount of like short-term assets, I think they have $100 billion as of today, what would you do with it? What is the biggest bet you can make? And I think Amazon is saying, "Go to space," and I think Apple is saying, "Extend life." And I think this is like the incredibly interesting, high-level narrative of the massive tech companies at this point.

• 16:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, what's super interesting about this is I completely agree that at some point you kind of run out of countries to expand to. Your point about you've got to extend that LTV, you're basically chasing growth, right? And I think that they've, although they may not have explicitly said it, they understand that the hardware game is going to be very hard and also going to get commoditized over time. So that's been kind of the shift into services. So they do less talking about the like, "What we're not going to do," and they do much more talk about like, "Hey, look at this new shiny thing that we're presenting." And if you look in the health space, there's two key things that I think are really interesting. So I've got Apple Watch, absolute game changer in terms of you start caring about things that you never cared about. Like all of a sudden, I started looking at like, "Damn, I only slept seven hours and 30 minutes.

• 17:05Anthony Pompliano?

  I didn't sleep eight hours," right? Like, you know, stupid that I think everyone before you are actually tracking it, you don't care, you don't know why anyone would care. But then you do start to realize like, "Wait a minute, I feel a little bit more, you know, cranky today, right? Or I'm a little bit more on edge. Like, oh, I only slept seven hours and 10 minutes last night. I probably should sleep more." And so I think that's like, just by having the piece of hardware on your wrist, there's the like tracking. So you get sleep, you get heart rate, you get steps, you know, all that kind of stuff. But then the first time that I started to think of Apple as potentially being like a real player in the healthcare space... Is when I started to see that you can go in and actually change one of the settings to give you notifications, I think it's for like a heart, for like

• 17:50Speaker 02

  Heart arrhythmia?

• 17:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, exactly. And there was like somebody who turned it on and next you know they got the alert right, they went to the hospital and they're like, basically if you hadn't had this alert go off, like you could have died. Right? And you start to realize like, I think the, the kind of over generalized tech bro world, like everybody just wants to count their steps, know what their heart rate is, you know, maybe brag to their friends who slept more hours, you know, whatever. But if you start to actually use that data to your point and actually create true healthcare benefit, that is a whole other sector of a business that I think previously people just didn't even realize was possible to access for a hardware company like Apple. Is that fair?

• 18:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, it's absolutely fair. And I think like what, what's incredibly interesting about Apple is just like you just, you start to see from a strategic level, the value of their whole privacy, safety and security narrative and that healthcare data is the most sensitive data. And sitting at the center of this kind of integration layer with, with, with your Apple Watch, your Oura Ring, even like the 23andMe's like genetic data, all of these things are going to get started funnelled, funnelled, funnelled into this kind of centralized repository. And just because you have it there, Apple's going to be able to surface these insights to you. They're going to be able to nudge you in the right direction. And it's kind of like, it reminds me of like languages, like once you learn a new word, all of a sudden you see it everywhere and you start using it everywhere.

• 19:14Speaker 02

  And right now we're, we're getting a new language for healthcare and it's called, it's like the quantitative self and it's not something that is just limited to the biohackers. This is something that we're all going to be able to use. You're, you're not going to go to your doctor's appointment if you're doing it at all in person, but you're maybe virtually. You're not going to say, I feel this way. I think I have an ache in my knee. You're going to say, I did 1,000 steps this Monday that was abnormal. I had a slight heart arrhythmia that was at this rate. What's going on? And they're going to look at your past history. They're going to contextualize it based on your genetics. You may be wearing a glucose monitor and saying, okay, your dietary consumption was a little bit off. You've moved out of ketosis or whatever it is.

• 19:54Speaker 02

  And all of a sudden it's a, it's a very different place. And I think Apple is one of the few, if not the only large, large tech company that we trust enough to give all this information to because they keep on telling us this is going nowhere.

• 20:07Speaker 02

  And that's incredibly powerful. And I think that, I mean, I, I just, I, I think it's, it's really interesting when you just think about how much stagnation it feels like there's been in human longevity. And I think it's because we've maxed out the point at which our just pure knowledge of health can go. And now we need to help bring people and bring just more information and data to bear. So that you can take this knowledge and understanding and actually apply it. Because we have, we don't have to sit in a hospital or a lab or a sleep center in order to gather the necessary information for any individual to get the insights to improve their life.

• 20:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, this idea of the quantitative self is, uh, is super interesting to me because I think there's a piece of this that is definitely like the obsessive person, right? They want to know everything about everything. But when you put it in the context of, hey, you're a machine. If you're able to give the doctor the diagnosis, right? But the diagnosis isn't kind of a point in time and it depends on what's your blood pressure today? And did you have coffee beforehand or did you eat a donut or, you know, whatever? Instead, they could say, listen, over the last six months, when I didn't see you, here is your average resting heart rate. Here is, you know, the, uh, the kind of variability to that. Hey, when you work out, your, you know, sleep improves. Like all of those things now just become a math equation, right? And kind of a, a data problem.

• 21:26Anthony Pompliano?

  On top of that though, it, there's actually a mindset shift. Cause now all of a sudden, if my doctor says to me, hey, you need an Apple watch because your Apple watch is going to give me the information I need to be able to take care of you. Everyone's going to go buy Apple watches, right? Or, you know, if you kind of go a step further, whatever other diagnostic type thing, it just feels like the healthcare kind of perspective. People are much more willing to make consumer decisions if their doctor tells them to do it versus if they see a cool ad on television.

• 21:54Speaker 02

  Yeah. I, I mean, like, if you think Apple lock-in is, is big now because you want to have the blue bubbles on iMessage. Now imagine you want to be able to live longer and like, you're like, oh yeah. I think I'm probably going to keep on buying the Apple product and I'm not going to midlife, give up all my data to switch to another system. It's like, and I think like, this is the crazy part is that I think that we're going to get to the point where you don't, you don't choose Android or iOS or between any of these kind of like dichotomies of systems. You're just going to be born into it. My mom was an iPhone user. I need her genetic information. I need her health stuff because that's relevant to me. Therefore, I'm going to continue using it. And there's no reason for Apple to not integrate all these things. Now, Apple's notoriously bad at figuring out that people have more than one kind of significant other and things like that on their products. But maybe they can sort that out.

• 22:39Speaker 02

  And all of a sudden, you see like, OK, yeah, there's actually even values in like a lineage of people using iOS or Apple for their health information. Because what do your doctors say like the first time you go in and fill out the intake form? Did your grandpa have diabetes? Does he have Alzheimer's? Apple's going to know all of that for the entire history of your family. And that is like incredibly important because you essentially have the blueprint for what's going to happen to you. They're going to be able to overlay what's going on in any individual incident with what's happened to people in your kind of past, also people kind of across their data set using differential privacy to see like, oh, yeah, you're similar to this person. They took these actions. You should do this. And because they can do it in the privacy preserving nature, I think that is like incredibly profound.

• 23:22Speaker 02

  And I think this is like where, I mean, the Tim Cook quote that like what Apple is going to be remembered for for mankind as a health company starts to really, really make sense.

• 23:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, they obviously have a ton of cash. Does this mean that they start to deploy that cash in acquisitions and go get the, you know, Oura ring or eight-sleep mattress or something like that? Or is it more the Apple way to look at those products, say, we can do it better and try to do everything internally?

• 23:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, so it's interesting because I think, I think this is potentially where Nathan's and I's opinion diverged in terms of the piece he wrote is that he kind of explores the idea that Apple is only going to sit at this, this data layer and that people are going to be developing the ancillary hardware products and feeding data into it or the primary care physician, all these things. And that's where they're just really going to play and sit. I think that's, that's largely true. But in terms of the cash deployment, I don't think they ultimately get into developing all of the ancillary hardware. I think they actually go into the hard biotech questions. So like, OK, how, how do I make a glucose monitor that doesn't have to penetrate the epidermal layer? So it doesn't have to go through your skin? I think they're going to like, if you look at the structure of like an Apple versus

• 24:32Speaker 02

  a Google, Google's incredibly good at taking data and doing incremental development cycles. What Apple's incredibly good at is taking information and intuition, putting a bunch of money into it and producing the thing people need and want. That sounds much more similar to how biotech companies operate or drug development companies. You have to pour tons of R and D data in or money in. You have to kind of use data and there's no incremental progress really. Like you just need to get to the step function change. And so I think where Apple's gonna gonna spend that money potentially is on on those hard healthcare challenges of like, how do you, how do you develop these, these sensors and devices that are really doing the, the challenging monitoring that is impossible now? How do you kind of deliver those insights and do the analytics and correlate that data to, to help people live longer?

• 25:18Speaker 02

  I think that's where they're gonna start deploying it. I think that you may see them like, I don't know why there wouldn't be Apple healthcare clinics. Like if you're, you're going in there, you have all your data, you want to trust them, you don't want Apple giving it to a third party. They already make it abundantly clear they, they don't want you doing that, given all the, the, the terms and services things you have to do with an application now. I think that's only gonna increase. And we all love the experience of what Apple provides and we trust them. So I think that they are gonna build out the care delivery and hard kind of tech research or biotech research. That'd be my guess in, in terms of where a lot of this capital may go. Because those are the harder problems and the big step function changes in value that I think they can, they uniquely have a muscle to flex against.

• 26:00Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, and I guess what Apple bought Nest, if I remember correctly, right?

• 26:04Speaker 02

  Mm hmm. Or, yeah, yeah.

• 26:07Anthony Pompliano?

  It was them, right?

• 26:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, it might have been Google. Yeah, yeah, you might be right. I have no idea.

• 26:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, I actually don't know either. Uh, we, I should have looked that up beforehand. But let, let's just say that they had done that. I guess part of it then becomes, do you, as you go through these acquisitions, so Eight Sleep or Ring, whatever, there's also this question of like the Apple culture, right? May, maybe in contrast to some of these companies, especially companies that are using physical hardware to also gather data. And so I, I, I wonder if integration is one of the most important aspects of a acquisition. Do you get in a world where Apple basically says, hey, I'm gonna buy these companies. Uh, I'm gonna take their products and I'm going to install like a leader from Apple to, to run them moving forward.

• 26:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Uh, or do you actually start to acquire these companies and say, we're going to, uh, help these CEOs continue to run the companies as divisions of Apple? But we're going to instill, you know, kind of the, the nuances of Apple's culture around data privacy and things like that. I, I don't, I don't know. Do you have any thoughts there?

• 27:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's interesting because it's kind of the question of what like what is on the inside versus the outside of of the Apple world and like what is the line and I think I think there's like a very interesting kind of train of thought there in terms of how how can they how can they play in this hardware game without necessarily needing to to acquire and integrate companies which definitely hasn't been clearly something they're they're good at or they've done a lot of obviously because they're sitting on so much cash. But I think like what's interesting and this is this is a totally raw thought that I'm just kind of thinking about, but they're now going into the whole Apple silicon movement, right? And could there be a world where as opposed to just using Apple silicon to only power Apple devices, whether that's your Apple Watch, your iPad or your your MacBook?

• 27:50Speaker 02

  Could they start allowing companies to use Apple silicon in their products and that Apple silicon would run in a certain way, it would have all the privacy preserving properties, it would do all these things. They could have the sensing mechanisms that do certain things and those become commoditized and and they're essentially enabling a hardware ecosystem using some of their knowledge and doing what? What I guess Intel was doing for the last kind of thirty years, but in a way that integrates directly into the Apple ecosystem in a way that they they control. I think that that's potentially interesting.

• 28:22Speaker 02

  But yeah, I think my I think I still my my gut lies with the idea that they're going to be going after the things that are that take billions of dollars to invest in and pull off. And it's not clear that like like the Oura Ring is something that is a very cool product, but you don't need billions of dollars to figure out how to put those sensors on. It's largely a design problem of making it look good. Whereas like if they're going to build glasses like that, that's an incredibly hard problem. These these new Bluetooth headphones with spatial audio. I think that those are the areas where Apple's going to focus. And I think it's like honestly, to bring it back to, I guess, one of my favorite kind of VCisms from from Josh Wolfe, but I think Apple is going to play really seriously on the

• 29:01Speaker 02

  kind of the idea of like the the half-life of technological intimacy. So I think they are going to be the ones that try and bring the technology closer and closer and closer to you. And anything that is doing that is something that's in Apple's purview, especially as it relates to health. So. I don't see the ordering as being any closer to you than the Apple Watch or the AirPods. They're going to cover like your senses with your eyes and Apple glasses. Do they get to the point where they're measuring things internally like glucose monitoring? That seems like a natural next step in terms of technological intimacy. But that's where I'd imagine that they go next. And I think that's where the most value is and the hardest problems are.

• 29:39Anthony Pompliano?

  To avoid any confusion, I looked it up, Google bought Nest. So anyone listening, just completely forget that we thought that maybe Apple had done that. So you're talking a lot about technology becoming more intimate. I think that's a foregone conclusion at this point. We're watching it happen in real time. That then leads to two questions. One, do we get embeddables from Apple? Whether it's like the Neuralink style that the super sexy like let's put something in our brains. Does it look maybe something more like, I know Google's got like the glucose monitoring and the contact lens that they can put. Do we get something in the bloodstream, whatever? And I'm thinking more of like actual silicon or hardware technology. But then also, do you look at something like biotech, right? Is where it's like a drug.

• 30:24Anthony Pompliano?

  Yes, technically that is technology. It's a different type of technology, but do they ever enter into that field? So kind of how do you think about things actually go in the body and what Apple could do there?

• 30:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think that's like the next big barrier. And I think it's, I think it's what surprised me as I would have said yes. But seeing kind of companies like Control Labs kind of being able to pull off some kind of direct brain interface just through your arm is, is pretty promising. And I think there will always be a reticence to install technology directly in an area where you can't remove it without a third party being involved. I think that's like a new level of trust that we haven't necessarily got to. Obviously, going back to biohackers, there's some people doing things like this. I consider myself kind of someone who definitely is super into the quantified self. I would be pretty reticent to put something into my brain at this point. It would have to be very proven out.

• 31:14Speaker 02

  And it's just like, it's one of those things where we haven't done enough of it for me to necessarily feel confident in it. Now, I think that like. I think that in terms of where Apple will go is I think they'll stay on the periphery of the senses and kind of covering with like the apple glasses. I think that I think that we'll get better and better at providing sensing mechanisms that can can sit above the skin. And I think that I think that we still have so far to go in that, that it's not necessary at this point to think that you need to be able to do something embeddable. Now, I think what people often think about embeddable stuff, they go directly to the brain and the brain-computer interface. I think if I were to say where is it most

• 31:58Speaker 02

  likely that that'll go first is actually in the microbiome and the gut. I think it's incredible just what a lack of knowledge we have in in terms of how food affects us. glucose monitoring is like kind of step one in that. We have no idea, like you and I could eat an apple and respond entirely differently. You could eat an apple after an avocado and I do it after an orange and it's just like totally different results. And we have what I think are kind of poor heuristics for optimal diet, which is like, I'm gonna follow keto, I'm gonna follow paleo, I'm gonna follow whatever. And to me, that's just people saying, I don't know what works. I need something to follow and I'm gonna pick one that's kind of good. You would, I I think like to kind of give it a comparison, you would never say like, I'm going to pick like this theme for my room and use only the prepicked out things for my room. Because those, it just doesn't make sense. You're

• 32:41Speaker 02

  gonna pick the things that you enjoy because you know this is what you like and you walk in there and you like this picture and that lamp and you kind of pick this customized experience that makes you feel good. And I think people kind of are intuitively doing with that with food. They want to correlate it to health. So then they're going to a proximal solution of just let's like apply like a bucket heuristic of keto or whatever. But ultimately, like these sensing devices are things you could like ingest as a pill that can measure what's in your microbiome. I think are gonna allow you to say, what are the things you like taste-wise that make you feel good? What are the things you respond well to? And then using the data you gather from the ancillary devices, how does that actually make you feel and perform and all those things? So I'd say the blood, the brain aspect, I think is very far off. Microbiome aspect, I think is much, much closer and

• 33:26Speaker 02

  potentially where where it would go first if you're internally ingesting things.

• 33:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Out of all of the major tech companies, is Apple the the leader in terms of who you would trust first to put something inside your body?

• 33:40Speaker 02

  I think so. I think so. I think I would trust Apple more than anyone. Definitely not Netflix because I don't want to get addicted to TV. And for sure not Facebook. Google is great. I mean, maybe they give me a free thing and I might fall for the trick. But yeah, I think Apple would definitely be the one I'd trust. And then I think there's an argument for like, I don't think they're there yet, but I mean SpaceX in my mind has the opportunity to be like the biggest company ever. And I think they have a clear intention and invest and ability to invest in really hard problems. And as they explore space and figure out what's necessary to keep and monitor a human body in that environment. I think they also have some incentives to do like deep investing in research here.

• 34:23Speaker 02

  And so I think it's possible that they also produce products that are in this vein. And that might be someone I would trust too, because they essentially have to design high performance devices for people who aren't going to be able to access traditional systems. So that would be maybe the other one that's not traditionally a FAANG company, but in my mind could potentially produce something interesting.

• 34:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it's also really interesting to think about similar what we're seeing with predictive analytics. If Apple could get into that world, right? So this whole idea of you're talking about food and how it affects us. Like I can almost imagine this weird feels somewhat kind of big brotherish world. But if you trust Apple to make your life better, if Apple was able to, essentially when you go to sleep, it wakes you up when you're ready based on your calendar and the sleep you need. It tells you, hey, here are certain types of food that you should eat today based on, you know, all these different metrics they've looked at. They tell you what to do from an exercise standpoint, whether it's, you know, hey, look, go for a two mile walk. Or it's something where it's like, hey, look, do an exercise that keeps your, you know, heart rate above 100

• 35:24Anthony Pompliano?

  for 30 minutes or more today, like that type of stuff. And if you can almost get in this world where not so much like Apple's running your life, but they are doing things that move towards the optimization for what you've chosen. So some people may say, hey, look, I want to lose weight. Apple can help you. Some people may want to say, hey, I want to extend my life, right? Or some people may literally say, hey, I want to optimize for efficiency. And so tell me the least amount of things I need to do to hit some bare minimum from a food and exercise standpoint to like not make myself worse by the end of the day, right? But like that feels like it's not short term, but it's definitely could be on the roadmap far enough out.

• 36:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, and honestly, I think you saw this at the most recent WWDC conference that they are, they're starting to really touch on that. I mean, the activity app was was kind of the closest, but like if you kind of like go and try and zoom out, squint the eyes a little bit, they're doing these kind of now the widgets, they're now embeddable. They have smart widgets that show you information that is contextual to where you are in the day, the the news in the morning, the calendar at lunch and your fitness stuff at the end of the day to say, oh, maybe you should work out. Then you have their movement into sleep where they're going to start silencing your notifications, dimming things. I think naturally it's it's it would make sense for them to do what you're saying and like say like, here's when you should wake up, like, don't even set an alarm. Like, why do I like you have both my calendar and everything else?

• 36:44Speaker 02

  Like, why do I need to set the alarm to say I need to wake up at this time? Apple could very clearly be doing that. And and I think this is where you kind of get into like, we're talking a lot about the quantitative stuff, but the there's so many soft metrics and data points that they have. Like, I think the calendar is something that's totally under leverage. Like theoretically, you could look at my calendar and be like, what are the days Cameron reads, meditates, hangs out with friends, sees family, travels, has a bunch of work meetings, all these things? And how do those correlate to like how I end up feeling, how I end up sleeping? And I think I think this has been like the impossible layer that we've had to drive. Like, are you just use our intuition and feeling to to judge? That Apple may be able to delve into is like, look, like when you have a full work calendar and you don't work out, you're in an incredibly worse place.

• 37:27Speaker 02

  And I think that that that is really exciting and interesting to me. And I wish I was enough of a data scientist to to do that on my own right now, but I'm I'm just not.

• 37:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, the one of the other pieces of this that we're seeing other companies do, so Twitter, for example, now is doing this thing where like if you're going to send some, you know, crazy tweet that they detect, whether it's through language or or kind of intention, they will basically put an interstitial that says, hey, like, hey, are you sure you want to send this? Like, you know, basically be nice to people. And it just, again, you can click through and send it, but it just makes people stop and think for a second. I almost wonder if Apple could get to the place where it doesn't have to like proactively tell me what to put on my calendar, but if it knows that I'm about to schedule the, you know, ninth meeting for the day and there's no workout planned on the calendar, it says like, are you sure you want to schedule this? On days where you don't work out and you have, you know, more than X number of hours or meetings, then you feel like shit and don't sleep well.

• 38:18Anthony Pompliano?

  You know, maybe you want to switch this meeting out for a workout. Like that type of, again, it's somewhat predictive, but also somewhat like the experience, the user experience. That feels like that is a inflection point on the individual's life. It may not create, you know, billions of dollars in market cap for Apple in the short term. But it just feels like that would change my relationship with Apple and further deepen it because I just can't get that anywhere else.

• 38:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, and this goes into like another broader thing that I've been, I've been thinking about. But like, when you start going into these software things, like should you work or should you relax? Should you see your family? Should you go to sleep? Should you work out? There is like the health component of that, but there's also like a value system component of like, what should Apple be telling you to do? What should Twitter be telling you to say? And I think this is where you get into the, this is partially where my thinking had gone after the Apple stuff. But like, what gets, what happens when you start having these companies that look like countries? In terms of you're choosing to be a part of them for your lifetime. And, and how are, if you're opting into their value system and Apple chooses to prefer that you should be spending more time with family than, than working.

• 39:29Speaker 02

  That's a value system choice more than, than anything else. And I think we start ending up in a really, really interesting and weird place. I forget who wrote the piece, but someone came out with something, I think it was in Ford Policy Review about, about, it was really focused on Zoom. But the idea that when you have companies that operate internationally and across, especially like China and the US. They're essentially one company that has to deal with two value systems. And that expression of the two value systems is oftentimes in massive conflict.

• 39:58Speaker 02

  I don't know where it goes, but like Apple's going to have to, if they're going to play this game, they're going to have to choose and codify their value system. They're essentially going to have to have a constitution for what it means to be a citizen of Apple. Is a citizen of Apple someone who only maximizes GDP? Are they purely like a Protestant type person? Is it someone that is purely focused like a Sweden on on happiness or something like that? Those are, these are like, these are more value choices. And that's where you say like, oh, my gosh, like these companies like, like, I guess we'll stick with Apple. But like, Apple, I think, did $260 billion in revenue. I'm, I'm, I'm pretty sure if you look at like the OECD countries, the only ones like above. I think Sweden is just on the barrier, honestly, of like, they did $260 billion in tax revenue last year.

• 40:42Speaker 02

  And like, that, that is the scale at which Apple is operating. And so you're just starting to like blur the line of what is possible? What goods should they be providing? What value should they be pushing? And which of these are you're going to opt into as an individual? Because it really is a lifetime decision.

• 40:58Anthony Pompliano?

  What is your biggest, uh, what seems like the least obvious thing that Apple will do? But you believe they will in the next 10 years. But like, what's that one thing where you're like, people aren't thinking about this enough? But you think it's a foregone conclusion?

• 41:13Speaker 02

  Um, I think, I think it's a, a foregone conclusion. I mean, man, I, I guess, I mean, it's honestly the, the health thing. I think it's a foregone conclusion that your primary care provider will be Apple at some point in the future. I think like pre-COVID, there was a, a big narrative that I think people have forgotten about where Apple was moving their stores from stores to town squares. Like, they were literally calling that. Like, if this is, this is like Apple's colonialism of like the US. Like, every city is going to have like an Apple town square. And if you're telling me, what do you put in a town square? You have a store for buying the things. You also have a place for getting the health things and you have a place for educating yourself. Like, this was their whole narrative, I think, a year ago. And their like big announcements was like, we are manifesting Google in the physical world beyond just a transactional place.

• 41:57Speaker 02

  We're a place where you get educated, we're a place where you get the things you need. And if I think about the stuff that government provides in a system like that or a country, it's, it's, it's, it's education, healthcare and then protection. And I think they are clearly doing education and providing the products. I think healthcare is next. And the question is like, do they actually get into the, the game of violence? Like, do you protect these values that you created? That's the ultimate government move.

• 42:21Anthony Pompliano?

  They definitely have a monopoly on violence right now. Last question for you before we get into a rapid fire round to finish up is competition. Do you think that maybe Google and Amazon are the only two who even have the balance sheet? And are crazy and ambitious enough to even try to compete down this path? Like, do you think anyone's got a shot? Or is that, is it pretty much Apple or we won't see kind of consolidation like this?

• 42:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I think I'd write off Google and a lot of my write offs is based on like short term data. I just think they've done such a poor job with Fitbit. Like, if you told me like, oh, what would be a signal that Apple's gonna or Google's gonna do this? Well, it'd be like, oh, they bought Fitbit. They have like probably the top wearable at this point in time, other than the Apple Watch. Like, have they been able to do anything meaningful of that? Feels like no. Then I think the, the, the Amazon question I think is, is more interesting. Cause I think that Amazon kind of has this ability to sneak underneath the surface. And you see what they're doing with Berkshire Hathaway in terms of working to create a healthcare system. And I think they're slowly gonna, they're, they're, they're the like best bundler. Like, they're gonna start bundling things into Prime. Like, once a year, you get to bid on our healthcare system for free. Great, I get a free checkup.

• 43:32Speaker 02

  You can buy our knockoff app, Amazon wearable, that's $20. And we'll give it to you free if you sign up your kids for your new Prime subscription. All of a sudden, you start seeing like, if the technology becomes commoditized and you don't need to get the high end Apple Watch, you could just opt for the Amazon Basic. They're gonna provide a lot of those things. As long as you're using the Amazon Basic, you walk into their stores, which already just recognize you facially, handle the transactions. They're incredibly good at creating a seamless experience around things. And so I think it's possible this, they're, they're probably the ones that I would guess could compete on next. That being said, it seems like Bezos, he wants to play in the space game and not as much in the healthcare game, at least from outward narratives. And I think those, those are the two big things is like, it's like space and health.

• 44:17Speaker 02

  And those are the big problems these companies should be going after.

• 44:20Anthony Pompliano?

  So this is a whole nother episode, so I don't want to even go down this, down the rabbit hole. But one of the things that's really amazed me by Amazon is they're basically taking Costco's model. So if you look at Costco, Costco basically sells everything at cost and they've got a $60 a year membership fee. And if you look at their bottom line, like basically if you take the number of members they have, multiply it by 60, that's how much profit they make, right? And it's just this, it's this incredible business that's built on $60 a year per customer. Amazon obviously has many profitable lines of business, but Prime looks and feels very similar, right? It's basically you pay a hundred bucks a year or whatever it is now, and you get everything else kind of behind the wall and they keep building out value. And at what point do you

• 45:03Anthony Pompliano?

  get, you know, 80% penetration in the US of members of Prime? We're not there yet, but like, you know, that, that doesn't seem like it's impossible.

• 45:12Speaker 02

  No, no, by no means at all. And I, I think like this whole bundling narrative is set to continue. Right now, we assume you bundle certain things with government and just given the size of these companies, I think a lot of that will shift to, to the, the companies, the Apples, the Amazons of the worlds. And because they have such a clear KPI, which is shareholder returns, they're going to be able to more, be more efficient at delivering those, those bundles, I think in a lot of ways. I mean, this is some of the argument for, for capitalism, but that's like a more, that's a bigger conversation.

• 45:43Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely. I finish up each episode asking two questions. The first one is, what is the most important book that you've ever read?

• 45:51Speaker 02

  So, most important book. So the one that I think that I've read that is definitely important to me that I don't think many other people have read would be Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned, The Myth of the Objective by Joel Lehman and Kenneth Stanley. They're computer scientists and essentially they did, they did a project exploring like what, what happens when you give people a set of pictures, just randomly generated pictures and you let them kind of choose this one that, that kind of looks like a circle with like a square thing and you click that and then it generates off of that some permutations that look similar. And what they found is that through this random exploration, people would take seemingly random permutations and without intending to do something, turn it into an image of a car.

• 46:34Speaker 02

  They would then try and say like, hey, someone go build an image of a car from like clicking random things and no one could ever get there. And they said, okay, what if intelligence as opposed to being some like explicit search for with a certain heuristic? It's actually something that is a search for for novelty, like all you do is try and do things that others haven't done before. And that's actually the only way to end or end up somewhere quote unquote great. Because if there were a heuristic for greatness, then you or I would just be like, oh, yeah, great, like follow the heuristics. But if we both follow the same heuristic and we end up in the same place, then it's not great. And so they kind of have, I think this kind of goes back to the Keith Roy boy, like personal anomaly, thinking all this stuff is like, how are you going through life, kind of jumping from stone to stone in a way that puts you in a place that others aren't aren't at?

• 47:18Speaker 02

  Because those are the places where you at least have the potential to end up somewhere quote unquote great, however you want to define that. And I think it does a really good job of exploring it. I'm not sure if their applications or of algorithms actually work in any real way, but the the concept itself is something that's that's really stuck with me.

• 47:34Anthony Pompliano?

  I've never even heard of that book. That's an awesome suggestion. Second question is a little bit more fun. Aliens believer or non believer?

• 47:44Speaker 02

  Hmm, believer and non believer. I guess like there's, I guess there's the whole like fair me like approximation answer this question, which I'm sure there's people who can articulate that much better, but I'll try and go. One thing I've been thinking a lot about recently, more on the spiritual side of things is is the idea, and I don't, I forget who was who was popular is popularized by, I believe it was like someone, a French person, but that that consciousness is not something emergent from our minds, but rather consciousness exists outside of us. And that our minds are just something that experiences consciousness or is a receiver of it. Kind of like your fingers feel like they're separate, but they're all connected to something bigger. And if you say like, okay, like, let's take that as true, that I am

• 48:27Speaker 02

  just touching in or tapping into the same consciousness that you're tapping into. Then why does it feel, does it feel intuitive that there should be other places in the universe that also tap into this like consciousness in some form, even if we individually feel separate like our fingers, but are in fact connected in some larger way? I find something kind of like intellectually attractive about that. And I'll say that's a reason to to believe, believe aliens. And I'll, I'll define aliens as people that also are things that also experience consciousness may exist. Beast beyond earth.

• 48:58Anthony Pompliano?

  I tend to think that the consciousness debate is one of these things that, once you go down that rabbit hole, there's all kinds of things that you start thinking about that you're like, "Look, I gotta take a break."

• 49:13Anthony Pompliano?

  And I had a professor in college that kind of led, you know, with somewhat structured exploration of like, "What is consciousness?" in a class. And I remember kids were literally like, you know, half the class was like, "This guy's literally nuts." And then the other half of the class was like, "Wow, you know, you changed my life" type stuff. And you're like, "Look, I think that everyone's gonna..." There's a guy came on the podcast named Bruce Fenton, and he's like an ancient alien researcher. And he basically said, "Every human will ask the same two questions at some point in their life. They'll ask, 'What happens after death?' And the second question they'll ask is, 'Are we here alone?'" And I thought that that was like, he nailed it, right? Like, yes, those two questions will absolutely enter everyone's

• 49:55Anthony Pompliano?

  mind. Could happen at different times in their life, but those are the two questions, man.

• 50:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, no, I totally agree. And I love the distillations like that. It's, yeah, just really, really cool. And it's fun to think about. That's the whole game.

• 50:08Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely. Ted, wrap up. You could ask me one question. What is the one question you have for me?

• 50:17Speaker 02

  Um, one question. Let's see, let's go for one that I've been asking people, right, or more recently, but feeling on the psychedelic movement and the potential for it to go mainstream.

• 50:30Anthony Pompliano?

  What do I, oh, how do I feel about it?

• 50:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. How do you feel about it? Do you think like, we're going to be in another 60s, 70s type movement? Or do you think it's going to be relegated to the large drug companies trying to figure out how to kind of produce monetary returns with it? Will it lead to kind of a spiritual revolution of any kind? Basically, very open-ended, but curious for your heads up.

• 50:50Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, so first of all, caveat, I'm not an expert on this at all. I've done what I'll call kind of very elementary research, both in, you know, Googling around and things like that. I've got two or three friends that are like much more into it, so I've kind of been fortunate enough to hear them talk about it, but not really contributing to myself. And then my wife got me to to watch this Gwyneth Paltrow Goop documentary thing, where they literally send some of their employees, I can't, I don't think it was ayahuasca, I think it was something else that they did. I forget what it was, but they did some kind of psychedelic and they kind of filmed it in the, you know, the way you would expect a Netflix-type documentary to be filmed.

• 51:36Anthony Pompliano?

  And so that was interesting to kind of see. What I'll say is, I think that there is no doubt that it will happen, and happen being like there will be an industry there.

• 51:48Anthony Pompliano?

  It seems like it's pretty obvious that like any medical kind of applications that are run through like traditional processes, you know, in terms of testing and approvals and all that kind of stuff, like that's pretty much table stakes. You just got to actually do the test and get it approved, but that that seems pretty viable. In terms of like what I'll call the more recreational stuff, I personally am of the belief that like, look, if you do things in your life and you don't hurt other people, like knock yourself out, right? If that makes you happy, like literally knock yourself out.

• 52:22Anthony Pompliano?

  And this feels like, it kind of falls in the debate of like, hey, I've never heard of anyone overdosing on marijuana, but like there's a lot of people who die from drinking too much, right? And so like, yeah, it's a little bit of overgeneralization and the kind of quip when people want to talk about drugs, but it's like coffee's a drug, alcohol's a drug, right? So don't tell me that we can't have drugs in our life. And then when you think about it like from a psychedelic standpoint, like there's a lot of things that you could put in your body that change your mental state that aren't called psychedelics, right? And so I think that when you get into that world, it's just the kind of open mindedness as a society to some of this takes time.

• 53:05Anthony Pompliano?

  And so actually, one of the things that I personally look at for in areas like this is like, how does culture change around it? So if, for example, do we start to see more people putting it in rap songs or music? Do we see more of it on television or in movies? Like those types of things almost then it's kind of like marijuana at this point. Like, everyone knows it's going to be legal on the federal level at some point. I can't tell you if that's this year, five years, or literally it takes 20 years to happen. But like, you have cities decriminalizing possession of small amounts of marijuana. Like, okay, like, that's going to continue. That's a trend that's going to be hard to fight. It feels like we're at the very, very early stages of the psychedelic stuff.

• 53:47Anthony Pompliano?

  The part that I don't think I understand enough is like, from an outsider looking in with just a very elementary understanding, there's a lot of words that get thrown around that are super scary, right? Like, you start, you start like talking about the names of things or what they do. And people are just like, oh, like, this sounds crazy. But then when you actually understand it, you know, a little bit deeper, you're like, oh, this is actually could be one beneficial from medical standpoint and two, is no different than other things. So I do think that there's like this, I don't know, the cultural piece is one. And the other piece is you kind of got to make a concerted effort to like, explain why to people who aren't necessarily like the self starters to go check it out.

• 54:30Anthony Pompliano?

  But, but I would say that I definitely think it's something that is a foregone conclusion. I'm probably just a little bit more muddy on how do we get from where we are to that? Like, what do you think? It sounds like you probably thought about it a little bit more.

• 54:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I'll, I'll give you my, my ultimate hot take to tie in all the things we talked about. But I know I gave you the answer that the inevitability that people don't believe is that Apple is going to build out the, the primary care facilities. But we'll all throw it out there that in the next 30 years, Apple will be the one prescribing you LSD. And it's the ultimate manifestation of Steve Jobs having started the company after doing LSD in college and building this whole thing. So we'll leave it at that.

• 55:06Anthony Pompliano?

  You gotta give us like another minute on how we get there.

• 55:10Speaker 02

  I mean, basically, the general idea being like if, if a lot of these things coming out of maps and Johns Hopkins and the various research institutions prove true, and it's incredibly profound way to affect addiction and mental health and all these other things. And you have a company that's capable of providing health care and services, and if mental health is a core part of longevity, then it seems inevitable that your main health care provider will provide you with these psychedelics at some point, and they'll go down the path of marijuana from, from illegal to legal to recognizing the health benefits, potentially, I don't know. But if those things are true, then if everything we've talked about in this podcast is something we really believe, then, then if you kind of caveat with, we believe psychedelics have the potential to do good for certain people, then it seems

• 55:51Speaker 02

  inevitable that Apple or could be the one prescribing them to you in some form in the next 30 years.

• 55:59Anthony Pompliano?

  When you say it that way, it doesn't sound too crazy.

• 56:02Speaker 02

  And that's the fun of really amorphous ideas.

• 56:06Anthony Pompliano?

  I love it, man. All right. Where can people find you on the internet and, and find out more about Ally Corp?

• 56:11Speaker 02

  So, simple things. I'm at Cam39Porter on Twitter, and then it's just AllyCorp.com. So, real, real easy.

• 56:17Anthony Pompliano?

  What's the 39 in Cam39Porter?

• 56:20Speaker 02

  So, that's, so I had the pleasure of getting verified while I was playing professional soccer in the MLS. And if you change your name and remove the 39, then you lose your verification. And so for the rest of my life, I am forever number 39 in all endeavors. It's a very philosophical number, in no way just randomly chosen and assigned to me as a rookie on a team. So, yeah, it's very important, but I can't talk about it.

• 56:44Anthony Pompliano?

  I love that. I love that. All right, man. Listen, thank you so much for doing this, and we'll have to get in the future.

• 56:50Speaker 02

  Awesome. Really enjoyed it.