Apple & Palantir Earnings, Elon Caps Grok Bot Usage, SpaceX’s Starfall | Diet TBPN

Diet TBPN delivers the best of today’s TBPN episode in 30 minutes. TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with each episode posted to podcast platforms right after. Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” the show has recently featured Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella. TBPN is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Public - https://public.com Cisco - https://www.cisco.com Console - https://www.console.com CrowdStrike - https://www.crowdstrike.com Figma - https://www.figma.com MongoDB - https://www.mongodb.com NYSE - https://www.nyse.com Railway - https://railway.com Shopify - https://www.shopify.com/ Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

• 0:02Speaker 00

  Let's let this San Francisco Halloween goer tell you about Ramp as well because we got a video from

• 0:08Speaker 01

  Pull it up.

• 0:09Speaker 00

  How, let's pull up this video of someone with their Halloween costume.

• 0:14Speaker 01

  You're watching TVP on ramp.com.

• 0:16Speaker 00

  Time is money, say both.

• 0:20Speaker 00

  Like the SDP, the temple of technology.

• 0:22Speaker 01

  The fortress of finance.

• 0:24Speaker 00

  The capital of capital.

• 0:27Speaker 01

  With the flashbang.

• 0:29Speaker 00

  The flashbang, great. Some sort of combination Halloween costume plus Vibrio really got the full experience out of that costume, not just showing up hoping somebody else takes a picture.

• 0:41Speaker 01

  So good. He's getting, he's getting a pack of real merch. John, how do you think the delay is right now? Can you think, you think it's like five seconds, 10 seconds? Probably hard to say.

• 0:52Speaker 00

  Couple of seconds. I'm talking right after you end. How does it feel on your side?

• 0:57Speaker 01

  It feels okay.

• 0:58Speaker 00

  Okay, okay.

• 0:59Speaker 01

  Would you look at that?

• 1:00Speaker 00

  Yeah. How, how was, how was your trip home? You got home late last night?

• 1:04Speaker 01

  Uh, I, I, I slept, uh, five hours.

• 1:08Speaker 00

  On the plane?

• 1:09Speaker 01

  On the plane.

• 1:10Speaker 00

  Wow, very nice. I slept on the plane too. And then that kind of threw me off when I got home. I couldn't sleep and I woke up and slept a little bit.

• 1:17Speaker 01

  Skill issue.

• 1:18Speaker 00

  Skill issue, okay. Well, um, let's, let's move on to the news. The, the, the, the big news, Apple and Palantir had earnings. We are in the midst of tech earnings season. Apple and Palantir, they both beat on earnings. There's a lot of this happening where, uh, the market is in such, in such turmoil that even though, uh, earnings are coming back positive, uh, analysts are reading into, uh, margin compression that may or may not happen in the future. And that's driving stocks, uh, to be a little bit weaker, sometimes sell off, kind of depends on the stock. But Apple reported record September quarter revenue while Palantir nearly doubled its revenue from a year ago. Both stocks are down around 2% this morning. The Financial Times reported today that even though Apple beat earnings, the company is

• 2:03Speaker 00

  warning that rising memory chip prices and the cost of running its AI tools could cut profit margins.

• 2:10Speaker 01

  You don't say.

• 2:11Speaker 00

  What?

• 2:12Speaker 01

  You don't say.

• 2:13Speaker 00

  Yeah. I mean, stuff's going to get expensive and Apple's had a long history of holding the line on pricing as much as they can. Like they love to put up a big clean number and then stick to it for a little bit. And so it can be, uh, they're, they're going to be in a jam as, uh, as memory prices go up mid-cycle when they don't want to change prices. It's never been a company where they change prices every month, every quarter. It's been, you know, every, every year or two, or even, even every three years, they'll, they'll hold the price, hold the line in the price for a really long time. Palantir, uh, Q3 revenue came in at 2.3 billion, annualized at 9.25 billion. It's a $400 billion company, uh, and Karp had a, had a, uh, he, he, he had a big moment on the earnings call.

• 2:57Speaker 00

  Uh, US commercial revenue surpassed its US government revenue for the first time, reaching 984 million versus 953 million. This is sort of the, the, the, the dual buckets of are you betting on the foundation labs, the OpenAI, Anthropic combination, or the Microsoft, Palantir, the diffusion, the enablers, the cognitions? And, uh, Palantir has, has certainly been growing. Like they, their messaging is very similar to Microsoft now around, uh, you know, own your data, let's work with you to implement AI, we'll help you transform your organization. Uh, and so, uh, I mean, it's been, been receptive and that's why they're, uh, that's why their commercial revenue is growing. Were you laughing at, Jordi?

• 3:41Speaker 01

  Just you, just laughing at you. No, uh, no, no, I was, I was sort of smiling because it's like, you know, putting, putting Karp and Satya in the same bucket. It's like, you know, uh, they're very different personalities, but ultimately have a very similar sort of, you know, sort of pitch, uh, which is cool.

• 3:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, is asking about merch timing, merch store, wanted to jump in quickly because we do have a date, uh, November 12th, the TVP and merch store is going to be going live. It will be released first into the YouTube chat, uh, and it will sit there. I'm, I'm assuming we'll, we'll, we'll leave it there for like 10 minutes so the chat can, uh, can feast and then we'll post it publicly over on X and everywhere else.

• 4:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, a lot of work, a lot of work man in that. Um, let's go over to Buco Capital Bloke breaking down Reddit. Uh, says Reddit call was absolutely fascinating. Everyone should listen to it as it's a bellwether for where the internet is going. AI mode is increasingly the default Google experience. AI mode provides rich info and data in line, less insensitive to leave search, or less incentive to leave search. AI mode incentivizes dialogue. Google wants to keep, wants to keep you engaged to serve more ads at turn of the conversation. Google will milk that for as much revenue as they possibly can and transition from a search company to a cloud service and chip company. As traffic from humans becomes more scarce, this will put Google in an increasingly adversarial position to the rest of the internet. That's interesting.

• 5:12Speaker 00

  This is a massive headwind to all media type companies who are not destinations. This is a massive headwind to all content driven, go to market motions, especially in the SMB. You have seen companies like HubSpot and Monday.com get crushed by this funnel collapse. We are entering the end game, a knife fight for the remaining and dwindling volume of human traffic on the internet. Interesting. Um, they say people still want Reddit. This is from Steve Huffman, the CEO on the call. People still want Reddit, it's just Google's not sending them to Reddit the way they used to. What's interesting is like Google Zero has been, you know, coined by Neelai Patel at the verge like years ago, I, I don't know, five years ago, 10 years ago, something. He's been talking about that for a long time. Uh, when Roger from Cadenas came on the show, he talked about, uh, they had embraced it

• 5:55Speaker 00

  there and that was sort of, uh, a bombshell to hear, uh, you know, someone in that position kind of admit it publicly that that's no longer a growth engine for them. It's interesting to hear that it's spreading to Reddit, but, uh, it's certainly, it's certainly, uh, uh, crazy times for Google because they, they, it's the innovator's dilemma. They have to meet the customer where they want to be with the new product. But at the same time, a lot of people sort of hate AI mode, or at least publicly hate on AI mode. Like the long history of just Google stuffing more and more ads in the search results never really broke through, but now people are publicly saying, oh, I don't like the AI mode.

• 6:38Speaker 00

  I want to go back to the, the one that monetizes better, which is kind of this funny dichotomy of, well, um, for the first time, just like, just randomly, anecdotally, if you talk to people, they'll, they'll be like, oh, I'm like frustrated. And it can be kind of an annoying funnel because you, you wind up in AI mode and then you're like, kind of trying to click somewhere and it can be sort of jarring and it just requires like a new, a new flow to like get into. I don't know. What's your overall thinking on Google these days, Jordi?

• 7:07Speaker 00

  Dylan Patel's.

• 7:08Speaker 01

  I just think if, if you think AI, I, I think if you think, uh, AI is real and going to be big, like it's, it's very, very hard to make a super coherent bear case, right? Even if search revenues, even if search revenues decline, um, you know, every year and we're sort of at peak search, they just have so many other assets and they can use that, you know, search cash flow to finance so much other infrastructure and M and A and things like that. So, um,

• 7:36Speaker 00

  I mean, people are nervous about it, but it's still $200 billion. So effectively, I mean, that's revenue, but it's high margin revenue that they can deploy elsewhere. And, uh, I mean, the take him, uh, take is that in the race to win AI builders, Anthropic and OpenAI now account for 86% of enterprise LLM API spend up from 67%. So the duopoly is consolidating around the frontier leaders and Google's market share went down more than 50% in terms of, not in terms of LLM usage for consumer, but, but for builders in the enterprise.

• 8:09Speaker 01

  Yeah. But, but that revenue is flowing through GCP. It's, it's, it's paying for TPUs, right? So it's like, Google's getting their, Google's getting their cut, right?

• 8:21Speaker 00

  A hundred percent.

• 8:21Speaker 01

  And, um, when, when you look at the sort of collective, you know, the collection of assets, the exposure to everything from, you know, SpaceX to, to Anthropic, to the TPU business, to the cloud business. It's like, you know, this is still one of the greatest businesses, uh, in history.

• 8:39Speaker 00

  Where do you sit on the question of like, is Google in founder mode or not? Because like, we always get these headlines of like, oh, Larry and Sergey came back in, they're, they're digging in. And then you'll see like they bought another estate in Florida and, and it's like going back and forth on like, who's actually, and I know they have the voting control, so they could at any point come in and be like, we're doing some huge M and A deal, or we're completely reorging this organization. We're going to completely, we're going to go Mark Zuckerberg mode and completely rework the organization. Um, but at the same time, they have been out and had a real CEO in place, unlike Meta. So they're kind of this hybrid, like they're not quite.

• 9:19Speaker 01

  It doesn't feel like, it doesn't, it certainly doesn't come across like the company is in founder mode in the way that you, in, in the way that you feel it with, uh, a Meta.

• 9:28Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 9:29Speaker 01

  And so, and I, and I think that's what matters, right? I think, um, the big, obviously, you know, the headwinds for Google is like losing, you know, people almost forget about the massive talent exodus from like, what, a few months ago, right?

• 9:43Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 9:44Speaker 01

  And, um, but, but again, it's like, as long as they can stay competitive around the cloud and, and chip business, you know, there's a lot of upside.

• 9:53Speaker 00

  What is going on with this New York Times headline? Google will turn off search for schools that reject AI? Andrew Curran is sort of correcting the record here, but it sounds really aggressive. It's like the carrot of the stick.

• 10:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're effectively saying like if you, we are every, all of our products are AI. So if you tell us not to use AI, then none of you can't use any of our products. Right. But it sounds much more aggressive to be like, you can no longer Google search. But I think their point is that AI is everywhere across every product surface area. And so it's unavoidable.

• 10:28Speaker 00

  So Andrew Curran says this article is getting posted everywhere this morning. I can see why, very, very controversial. But this decision is being incorrectly framed as punitive. There's no such thing as search without Gemini. Even if you don't turn AI mode on, you're still talking to Gemini in the search box. The old Google search is gone. Yeah, that's, it's a good point. Like I, I'll give Google some points for, you know, this is just the way things are now. But it does sort of, yeah, necessitate like a Google search classic or something. I mean, I guess schools can do DuckDuckGo or some search engine that hasn't embraced, you know, LLM search if they want to offer that, that more classic, uh, old school experience. But I don't know, it might be time to learn the Dewey Desina system, hit the library.

• 11:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think, I think so.

• 11:16Speaker 00

  Google is not going to save you at this point. If you're trying to learn, you gotta, you gotta hit the books. Uh, I don't think we're gonna do that. What's going on with GrokBot?

• 11:24Speaker 01

  I don't know.

• 11:26Speaker 00

  The GrokBot thing was very weird. So Elon chimes in on November 1st, which was what, Sunday morning, I guess, or Sunday afternoon? Says the cost of serving GrokBot was unsustainably high relative to revenue. Sheel says Elon says GrokBot costs are unsustainable relative to revenue. Computer use is expensive, but AI companies are racing to make it cheaper while giving it away for free. Thank capitalism, we get free digital labor before they figured out how to profit for it. Um, I'm, I'm, I was so surprised by this. I think everyone was surprised by that. What was your take?

• 11:56Speaker 01

  I think the current read is that they were using Opus 5.5 under the hood.

• 12:02Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah, they're, yeah, they're a big Anthropic customer too.

• 12:05Speaker 01

  And so, um, but still, like, you would think that they would just eat the losses for some amount of time, given that, uh, given that they, you know, they're a $2 trillion company. They're like, I think somewhere around a million, you know, uh, weekly actives. Like it's not a, it's not a massive product at this point. And so this whole thing was just like very, I, I still don't know what the read is. Like I'm just very confused.

• 12:32Speaker 00

  I mean, I'm just doing a back of the envelope, like.

• 12:34Speaker 01

  Like, like he's, he's going and publicly saying that I believe that in the future, GrokBot will consume the majority of our compute. Now you're saying like the cost of serving our product is unsustainably high relative to revenue?

• 12:48Speaker 00

  I mean, I guess the steel man would be like the next version of GrokBot. People will be paying more for, so even though it's consuming all the new data center compute capacity.

• 12:57Speaker 01

  No, but, but, but like assume, assume the sort of continuous decline in the actual cost to serve your users. Why are you, what, like, maybe he was having a big night out?

• 13:09Speaker 00

  I don't know. Also, it seems like, I mean, it's not like he turned GrokBot off. He just, I, this is just, he just denied someone a reset, right? Wasn't that what happened?

• 13:20Speaker 01

  I know. I think people were complaining that, um,

• 13:23Speaker 00

  There's none.

• 13:23Speaker 01

  Their usage just like rocketed to a hundred percent and then it doesn't.

• 13:28Speaker 00

  So they kind of right sized the, the, the tokenomics internally. Yeah, it, it is odd because even if they're like 10% of Anthropic's revenue, that's less than a billion dollars of cost. And if they have, you know, a million people paying a hundred a month, that's a hundred. Like they're, they're, they'd be losing a lot, but they have a lot of money. But I guess, uh, they just, you know, Elon's definitely wanted to rip the Band-Aid off and kind of right size things and maybe just wait. Also, I, I've just been surprised at the, uh, the level of adoption, at least the level of, uh, maybe it's just on X, but people talking about actually using it. Uh, it, it precursor, the enterprise, the power user go to market motion was a little confusing.

• 14:13Speaker 00

  It made a lot of sense to stuff Grok in X as like this helpful little answer bot for community notes and questions on facts and stuff like that. When you're seeing, when you're reading a news article, having Grok summarized it, that, that seemed like a good use case. But, um, the idea of like bridging that, bridging from that, like the X, the everything app, that's like mostly for fun and mostly for like gossip to like, it's in my Slack now, uh, was always a little bit of a stretch, uh, versus like a Palantir or Microsoft or, you know, any of these other enterprise products that have more mature go to market motions. Anyway.

• 14:48Speaker 01

  How's Wiz Khalifa responding to the situation?

• 14:51Speaker 00

  Wiz Khalifa had some insights, some, he had some wisdom.

• 14:54Speaker 01

  He's sort of fired back.

• 14:58Speaker 01

  The work is the, the work is the reward.

• 15:01Speaker 00

  The work is the reward.

• 15:02Speaker 01

  I think that's because he, he, he ran out of usage. He hit his usage limit on GrokBot and so he's sort of reminding himself, the work is the reward.

• 15:10Speaker 00

  I gotta do the work now.

• 15:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:11Speaker 00

  My GrokBot can't handle it, but the work is the reward.

• 15:14Speaker 01

  But it should feel rewarding.

• 15:16Speaker 00

  I like, I like a pithy quote every once in a while. I, I haven't seen him take over the timeline for a while, but.

• 15:23Speaker 01

  Naval's been awfully silent since Wiz Khalifa posted this.

• 15:27Speaker 00

  True. Uh, here's an exercise for the viewer. Figure out where I am because apparently you can listen to my audio and you can run it through some analysis and, and hear the various planes with their Doppler signatures, their Doppler curves, nearby airplanes, and you can triangulate where I am. I already gave you a clue. Um, but, but I, I do wonder how detailed this needs to be. I've heard that it's like 15 minutes of, of, of clean audio. If we're passing this through this call and there's noise on your side a little bit.

• 16:07Speaker 01

  And I'm assuming you're on a Zoom call, so there's some noise cancelling happening naturally.

• 16:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. It's not like a clean, like a file that's continuous on my side coming through to you. Yeah, yeah. We're gonna need a lot of soundboard to keep me anonymous. This is the new cybersecurity.

• 16:23Speaker 01

  I'll just keep spamming it.

• 16:24Speaker 00

  Just spam that cat because we gotta confuse the people that are trying to track me down using the latest, no, this is, this is a crazy example of like, uh, AI enabled surveillance.

• 16:36Speaker 01

  This is like, yeah, everyone is gonna have access to super intelligence. So you get to do things like this.

• 16:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 16:43Speaker 01

  You know?

• 16:44Speaker 00

  Yeah. I mean, they genuinely, for, for people that have recorded like long form vlogs outside at their house, unedited, there's no cuts in the audio. Like this definitely could dox your location, but GeoGuessr, GeoRainbolt has been able to guess locations for the, the old way, analog way, just by looking at the photos and looking at Google Maps for a long time. So, uh, security was always a layered, a layered problem. But, uh, this is, this is a fascinating, just mathematical, uh, breakthrough or, or, or situation.

• 17:19Speaker 01

  Let's check out this, uh, ad from Oolol Capital. It's just, um, just a picture of this guy.

• 17:28Speaker 00

  I love it.

• 17:29Speaker 01

  Then learn more, learn more. I'm curious now. I'm curious. Um, Thomas says, hey Meta, waste my money. Cause they'll, you know, they'll, they'll of course offer you the ability to kind of just promote any, any kind of content. Um, they make it really, really easy. You can do it with a credit card in the app.

• 17:46Speaker 00

  No, not as easy as X. X has a finger that pops up.

• 17:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:52Speaker 00

  And points to the promote button, which is going to be bigger than the post button soon. The, I, I had to set up X again and the Nikita-ification of the app is remarkable. Like if you don't enable notifications, it has this like, this, the slider bar that's like notifications on or off. And if you say, no, I don't want notifications, it slides into a state that looks like it's broken and looks like you have an error in the app. Like it's, it's genius to get you to like, be like, oh, I gotta correct this. It really, there's so many different patterns to get the, uh, the, the, the retention up for sure. They're, they're, they're working on it.

• 18:32Speaker 01

  Peter Rahal.

• 18:33Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 18:34Speaker 01

  Back with a new brand called Rowdy. It's a absolutely fantastic name. He's coming after Doritos. Uh, it's his holding company's, uh, Andrea shares, it's his holding company, Medici's first savory EPG snack, and it's pretty addictive. Their tangy ranch is the closest thing to reverse engineering Doritos Cool Ranch. It's going to be interesting to see how Frito Lay reacts. Really, really good execution on this. Um, you can just tell already that it's going to be a hit. I mean, this is Doritos, a Cool Ranch was literally created in a lab to be the most, uh, the most addictive, uh, product, uh, snack in the world.

• 19:17Speaker 01

  And, uh, I'm, I'm almost certain that, that Peter would have replicated it pretty perfectly. Yeah, you are, you are, you, you're, you are a Doritos guy. This is, this is things that, you know, something that people don't really know about you. But, um, clearly we'll be in a situation where like the only food available is Doritos and you're like, twist my arm, twist my arm. And you'll grab like three bags and then you'll just go.

• 19:41Speaker 00

  I would go further. I, I would say I live sort of a Doritos coded lifestyle. I, I would say that my entire life is Doritos coded.

• 19:50Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Let's pull up this video of, uh, LeBron's newest sponsor.

• 19:56Speaker 02

  LeBron just went to the 76ers in Philadelphia. Did you see the new sponsors of the 76ers?

• 20:01Speaker 03

  Wait.

• 20:01Speaker 02

  It's on LeBron.

• 20:02Speaker 03

  Wait.

• 20:02Speaker 02

  Left breast.

• 20:03Speaker 03

  Don't you, or is it, you were Bloom Energy?

• 20:05Speaker 02

  I am Bloom Energy, but that is a different Bloom Energy. There is an AI company, I think they paid like $30 million to sponsor the 76ers. No one other than you finance nerds know what Bloom Energy is. The amount of messages I got that thought I just signed the 76ers is the funniest thing that's ever happened to me.

• 20:23Speaker 01

  So good.

• 20:24Speaker 00

  So lucky. Yeah. It's better to be lucky than good. I don't know. Greg is very good as well, but, uh, it's just like setting himself.

• 20:32Speaker 01

  Mandate of heaven.

• 20:33Speaker 00

  Mandate of heaven moment for sure, for sure.

• 20:36Speaker 01

  Let's see if there's anything else we want to cover. I think we got John. Coming back on.

• 20:42Speaker 00

  Bring me back here. I got the flashbang, the, the, the weather changed outside my hotel room. So it's full, much brighter than before. But you can do a three up if you want. We gotta go through a couple, a couple more news items. We gotta talk CrowdStrike. No, I like this. So CrowdStrike's acquiring two AI security startups for a combined $495 million. Fiddler AI and Dread Node, such different names. One is like the most whimsical, we're just fiddler.

• 21:13Speaker 01

  A person who plays the violin, particularly in folk, bluegrass, country, or traditional rural dance music. The fiddler.

• 21:20Speaker 00

  I love it. I love it. Yeah. It's, it's, it's funny. They're, they're taking security so seriously that they're just doing bulk acquisitions, announcing them simultaneously. But George Kurtz had a great post as well, saying that he's creating the, the, the emergency button. What? I forget, I forget exactly how.

• 21:37Speaker 01

  The kill switch.

• 21:39Speaker 00

  The kill switch, which is something like every, I think like Bernie Sanders has literally asked for that. And like many other people have been like, we need an AI kill switch. And, and the labs have said that there is like effectively a nuclear football, that there's a device that can, you know, take everything offline. But I think every company wants an AI kill switch. So good, good market positioning, good branding. You know, people are rebranding compute, data centers to compute campuses. Our buddy over at now the Atlantic, Mike Isaac, wants to use the term, doesn't want to use data centers. He doesn't want to use compute campuses. He wants to call them databases, the base for all the data. I like that. I'm still supercomputer camp, but.

• 22:23Speaker 01

  Yeah. We, we, we've had the perfect name for decades, the supercomputer.

• 22:28Speaker 00

  I know. The supercomputer, it just sounds so good. And it even fits with like the new, the new superintelligence push. There's a bunch of OpenAI news here. They hired Dan Driscoll, former TVPN guest. We got him, US Army Secretary.

• 22:42Speaker 01

  This goes deeper than I thought.

• 22:44Speaker 00

  I really enjoyed talking to Dan Driscoll when he came on the show. It was a very funny moment for us because it was like, we were just having fun on our show. There was like, now we're talking to the Secretary of the Navy. Or the Army, or the Army. And yeah, the reactions that day, there were some quotes, being like, TVPN's talking to the head of the Army?

• 23:05Speaker 00

  Because it, it had turned from like us just purely joking around to like us joking around with like our friends. And obviously we had some very successful founders and venture capitalists on, but it was still like very, very, very lighthearted and pretty low stakes interviews. Just people yapping about their, their takes on the market business. And then this one was like, so, so good to see him hopping in.

• 23:27Speaker 01

  SpaceX has introduced Starfall, which enables affordable routine access to a microgravity environment, providing unique opportunities for manufacturing, scientific research and testing in low earth orbit. SpaceX says Starfall is for biomedical research, developing advanced biomaterials, medical implants, stem cell organoids and replacement tissues. Tyler, you would want to, you were looking at developing some stem cell organoids.

• 23:56Speaker 01

  So I'm sure that's exciting for you. Pharmaceutical discovery, growing more uniform protein and drug crystals and microgravity to accelerate drug development and materials, science, manufacturing, next gen materials and semiconductors using the vacuum and microgravity environment of space. So I always thought with Varda, like the, the, the, the, the sort of like debate around Varda since the very beginning was that like, okay, incredible, incredible team, like very, very unique sort of like market that they're going after. Always questions, or it was like so difficult for people to even believe that like this was super necessary. And, and next, like what would the end market even be?

• 24:35Speaker 01

  It just seemed so like experimental and sci-fi that it was almost, it was much harder to get behind than like the typical like manufacturing startup, which is just like, we make widgets and we're going to sell this many this year. And we're going to hopefully sell more next year and many, many more in, you know, a decade, right? And I always in the back of my mind was like, well, I don't know what this market turns into, but at least like this feels like very complimentary to SpaceX. And it doesn't seem like something SpaceX is going to do. And turns out, turns out they are going to go compete in this category.

• 25:11Speaker 01

  But if anything, it just feels like incredibly validating to Varda because SpaceX just wouldn't do this unless it was like, they saw it as like a, a massive, you know, opportunity, right? That was going to be a very important part of the overall space economy. So although Varda now has some real competition, again, this just feels like a huge like vote of confidence in the business and the, and the overall market opportunities. So pretty, pretty cool to see.

• 25:38Speaker 00

  Two questions that come out of it, like one is, is this something that can be somewhat complimentary to Varda in the sense that I, I, it's unclear if SpaceX is building just the launch trajectory, the launch capacity to send something up and bring it back. Like that is a different workflow that Varda's had to build. And then Varda's also had to build a capsule for doing the biomedical research and has a bunch of deep partnerships with bio companies. So there is a world where they wind up working together in some capacity. And then also we've just seen time and time again, companies not wanting to dual source or, or single source.

• 26:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:12Speaker 00

  Intelligence frontier labs or launch capacity. And so Rocket, Rocket Labs going and ASTS is still, you know, trading really high. Because there's just this expectation that not, not everyone is going to be signing up for Starlink because some of them are going to say, I want an alternative. I want to be able to dual source. I want to have some negotiating leverage. So overall, exciting to see it, the whole market like really heat up. And, and yeah, total validation that the thesis was something that was, that was interesting and viable. And that there would be real demand behind because SpaceX wouldn't be going after it unless there was serious demand.

• 26:50Speaker 01

  Something going on in, in politics today, John?

• 26:55Speaker 00

  What's that?

• 26:56Speaker 01

  I don't know. I just, I keep seeing random posts about, I don't know, a lot of, a lot of blue and red.

• 27:03Speaker 00

  No, I, I meant what, what's politics?

• 27:05Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. I mean, that might, we might need to save that for another episode, the TVPN deep dive.

• 27:12Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 27:13Speaker 01

  On politics, not, not on any policy or politicians, but just the history of politics.

• 27:21Speaker 00

  Where does it come from? Oh yeah. OpenAI also partnered with Cathedral Systems. Everyone's ramping up cybersecurity stuff, but this was cool because Cathedral was the one that was able to break into the Anthropic Slack. And there was a lot of debate over that. But in general, it seems like the folks at Cathedral are, are good at penetration testing and, and everyone wants the agents to be ultra secure since they be, they're quickly becoming like the master key. Everyone's giving Muse all their passwords, Claude all their passwords, ChatGPT all their passwords. And if you break into that, you're kind of in the email, you're in all the services, you're in the bank accounts pretty quickly. And you can imagine wreaking havoc pretty quickly.

• 28:00Speaker 00

  So cybersecurity is of the utmost importance frontier labs, not just because people want to steal the weights, but also the actual. User experience for sure.

• 28:10Speaker 01

  We'll close out with the largest domain sale ever from our friends at Shopify. They spent $99 million on shop.com and I think they stole, I think they stole it.

• 28:24Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 28:24Speaker 01

  I think they stole it.

• 28:26Speaker 00

  That's a great deal for them.

• 28:28Speaker 01

  Amazing, amazing domain. And I'm sure they have big plans for it. Anyways, folks, that is our show.

• 28:40Speaker 00

  Thanks for tuning in.

• 28:41Speaker 01

  John, let's, we made this work. We made this work. I thought you were here right next to me the whole time. You tricked me.

• 28:48Speaker 00

  No one noticed.

• 28:48Speaker 01

  No one, no one.

• 28:51Speaker 00

  The empty chairs.

• 28:52Speaker 01

  Oh, it's so brutal. There's a reason that we could do remote shows every day and we don't because it's not the same, but we still had fun.

• 29:03Speaker 00

  Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts, sign up for newsletter, TVPN.com. Goodbye.