TBPN Live - Charting The Media Landscape, WSJ Mansion Section, Emily Sundberg LIVE in The Ultradome | Jordan Schneider, Saagar Enjeti, Justine Moore, Glenn Solomon, Dion Harris & More

Starting point is 00:00:00 You're watching TVPN. Today is Friday, October 24, 2025. We are live from the TBPN Ultrodome, the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the capital of capital. And we're here. We have a special guest. Friend of the show. Happy to be here. Thanks for having me. Thanks for stopping by. We wanted to have you on the show for a few reasons. We are going to run through the mansion section and get your opinion on whether these homes are worth passing up or an absolute steep. at something like $50 million. So we'll be going through that in a minute. We also wanted to hear from you what's new in FeedMe World. Do you have any scoops for us? Do you have any breaking news? Do you have any exclusives? We invited you here.

Starting point is 00:00:43 Scoopaxing. We want some news. Well, I've been in L.A. for a few days, and I got some local L.A. news from some of my readers because I did a pop-up for a few days to sell these new hats, which L.A. readers got first. some of the people that came by had TBPN merch which was cool there we go they're fans so it's good to have crossover uh what news do we have I'm hiring an intern which you guys are saying not to say

Starting point is 00:01:09 breaking news you heard it here first that's why you come to us for scoops like this this has never been shared she did not post about this included in the newsletter it's not breaking news until tvPN covers it that's right that's right that's right um what else can I say Feed Me's first podcast is going live in two weeks. We get to push back the live date. And, wait, run through the thesis of the podcast. I thought it was getting to. Oh, it's like, it's a restaurant podcast.

Starting point is 00:01:38 It's hosted by my restaurant critic and it'll be fun. We have this idea that there's sort of a white space in kind of, wait, you guys don't curse or you do? We don't curse. You're welcome to. You're welcome to. If you want to be the first person to say a swear word on our show. Um, yeah, it's sort of, uh, any, everybody likes restaurants. Yes.

Starting point is 00:01:58 And anybody can talk about restaurants. So we have some interesting people coming on to talk about restaurants with our restaurant critic, which will be a blast. That'll go live in two weeks. Thanks substack for supporting that. Um, some other things might come up. That'd be fun. For the next few minutes.

Starting point is 00:02:14 Yeah, I, I like that it wasn't just like the feed me show. That was intentional, right? Because that would be the logical thing is just like. To do like Emily's show. Exactly. Or, I mean, it could be. would kind of be a good name for a restaurant. I know.

Starting point is 00:02:28 I know. I was talking to somebody the other day. Would you have a different brand for it? It's called expense account. Okay. Which is the same name as the restaurant column. Is Ramp sponsoring it? They need to.

Starting point is 00:02:37 They should. I'm having some... Be of their sponsoring us, Ramp.com. Time and money say, Boll. We love Ramp. Bill Pau counting and a whole lot more all in one place. Yeah, they should.

Starting point is 00:02:48 Where is my single, by the way? Is it over here? Where? Oh, which one am I on? There we go. Okay, now I found my single. Perfect. Thank you.

Starting point is 00:02:56 Oh, some people read my substack who watch this. That's so good. Yes. That's so great. Only David Senator can curse on the show. You're keeping it clear. Okay, well, we are about to understand the landscape of the restaurant world, thanks to your new podcast. Yeah, it's going to be great.

Starting point is 00:03:13 Which is called expense account. Expense account. Expense account. But the real reason that we wanted to have you on the show was to help us understand the media landscape. There's been a lot of debate, right? There's been a lot of talk. You have Paramount Skydance. You have, you know, the free press regarding a conversation. You have media people like to talk about media. So today we're going to talk about media. Also, I think people have just simplified things way too much. They try and break it down into a binary. Are you legacy media

Starting point is 00:03:44 or new media, right? Right. Legacy media or new media. We all know it's way more complicated than that. And people like to say if you can't explain something in simple terms, you don't understand it, but that doesn't apply here. Today, we will do it. So we have a, we have a market map. Yeah, sort of market map. I'm going to kind of walk us through a little bit of it, get feedback from Emily and Jordy and Tyler.

Starting point is 00:04:06 And if we get anything wrong, take it up with Tyler because he's the one that created this. He made this graphic. So if there are any errors on it, you know where to go. So we have to start with the mainstream media. What is the mainstream media? Arguably the best, I think it's the best stream. Because if you were to pick a stream to do media in, would you want to be in the main one or some alternative one?

Starting point is 00:04:28 You want to be in the mainstream. Ideally, I think everyone is on the march to become the mainstream media. Yes. But mainstream media is broken down into several subsections. You have the legacy media and the traditional media. And why don't you explain the difference? Because a lot of people would say they're the same thing. A lot of it comes down to the aesthetics.

Starting point is 00:04:48 The aesthetics of you're seeing serif fonts, the new. New York Times, the Washington Post, when you go over to Fox News, BBC, CNN, you're getting, you're getting something that feels like it is fighting for its life. It looks like TV. It looks like TV. I need a little more on my lab is really doing a number. Here we go. Is that better?

Starting point is 00:05:13 Can you guys hear me okay? I got really caught up. This is your Sam Hyde bit. Sam Hyde's that talk. Yeah. You know you know. Okay. So, so there is a continuum of, there's a gradient that exists between legacy and traditional. CNBC right in the middle, you have Forbes, you have the Financial Times, and you can kind of tell that as you get towards business insider CNN, you're more in the legacy world?

Starting point is 00:05:38 You're kind of in the danger zone. David Ellison might be kind of licking his chops, saying, oh, maybe I'll take you over at some point. David Ellison, he's not going to make a play for the Wall Street Journal, for the Washington, Post for the New York Times. These are traditional media outlets. Part of traditional means that you can actually get it via a newspaper, right? Yes, yes, that is key. That's a factor.

Starting point is 00:06:00 A lot of people will put the split divide of like your new media if you have a blog. Right. Or your legacy media if you printed it out. But we forget that there is a whole host of mainstream media outlets that do not print out their work. They do not ship a newspaper. And so most of the newspapers, you'll see the Wall Street Journal. the Washington Post, the New York Times. Those are in the traditional media.

Starting point is 00:06:24 Economist. Another one. Atlantic. Yes. So this is really the heart and soul, the beating polls of the mainstream media. But you also have offshoots from each of these areas. So you have the post-trade. Let's talk about post-trad and why I see this little number right here, Bloomberg.

Starting point is 00:06:41 Bloomberg is moving over into post-trad media. Obviously, that's on the back of Tracy Allaway, Joe Wisenthall with the Odd Lots podcast. You can think of that as the classic. Post-Trade media. What? And Tracy. Yeah, I said Tracy. Oh, you did?

Starting point is 00:06:55 Yeah, Tracy Aller and Joe Wisenthal at the Oddlocks, at the Oddlots podcast, are a great example of post-Trad media where they come from traditional media, but they have been so early to the podcasting game. They're, what, a decade in? Isn't it a decade? I think so. Yeah. They're a decade into that. And so they jumped on podcast early. And Bloomberg was really an experiment, you know, from Michael Bloomberg to, what if I could just be the news?

Starting point is 00:07:19 What if I could create the news? Maybe some frustrations with traditional media and, you know, saying, why not me? Yes, yes. And so you can see him like, he's slightly less traditional than the New York Times. But still, you know, some post-trade region. We also have proto-media. I'm not exactly sure why Dig and Hacker News wound up there. More just like early online efforts that weren't really trying to play in, these weren't trying to be

Starting point is 00:07:49 traditional media corporations, media organizations, they weren't telling a story about being new media in any way. They were sort of the program. But you could almost put Reddit here. We're missing Reddit in some ways, but Reddit was trying to be the front page of the internet to kind of curate stories. Yeah, I mean, you could probably go all the way up here and add social media and TikTok and stuff. But we want to stay on the media outlets, the folks who really proclaim that they are the media, right? And so over here we have the post-legacy media. And this is a crew of former legacy media folks who have now ventured out into Substack and YouTube. Substack and Substack.

Starting point is 00:08:28 Would you argue that a few years ago, Barry, like the free press would have been there too. Post-Legacy. Well, I think Barry's way down, if I remember correctly, she's in more of the legacy new media. So she was new media. Yes. But now she's in the legacy new media bucket. So, so you're, so if you're, wait, what are these guys? Post-Legacy.

Starting point is 00:08:49 So, post-Legacy is where you were up until recently, like in the 2020s. A part of the legacy or traditional media. If you worked for the legacy media in the 2020s, like Alex Heath at Verge, which isn't exactly legacy media, but at Forbes and obviously Bloomberg with Ashley Vance, if you were working with the legacy media, you didn't jump ship in the 90s, you didn't jump ship in the 20s, you didn't jump ship in the 2000s. You didn't jump ship in the 2010s. You rode it all out. The mid-2020s. And then

Starting point is 00:09:19 the mid-2020s, you were like, okay, this legacy media thing isn't working for me anymore. I got to go out. So that's where we got Ashley Vance and Bloomberg here. So this is kind of crossover. Yes, yes, yes. But the free press, the free press, Barry left to the New York Times famously, you know, crazy dust up.

Starting point is 00:09:36 And that was in the pre- post-legacy media era. Right before. Right before that started. Exactly. So she used to be the new media bucket. Yes. But current now she sits in the legacy new media. And that's because there's a whole new wave of new media. And so Andries and Horowitz is leading the charge here. They have a team that is just called new media, which of course asked the question, what were they doing before? Which was their marketing team. Yes. So they were doing media. It's not like they just

Starting point is 00:10:04 started doing media. No, they just started doing new media. Their old media is now known as legacy new media. And so legacy new media also includes the information, BuzzFeed, Wired, Vice, organizations that came out and said, we are going to be doing the new media thing, but they said that a decade ago, and so now it's a little bit legacy. Then you also have, of course, Alt Media Vice kind of bridges these two gaps. You have the trappings of a new media organization, but with a little sharper edge. Over here, you get into the darker media. You get the Sam Hyde, the Curtis Yarvins, the passage press, of course.

Starting point is 00:10:42 We still haven't figured out where FeedMe goes. We'll have to do this at the end. But we can move over to Neo-Ault media. You have the Adam Friedlands. Yes. So you still have some of the edginess, some of the rebel spirit of your vice magazines, your Redskirts,

Starting point is 00:10:58 but obviously newer products, newer media products launched more recently. Then you also have new media with the NU. That, of course, is media that covers new metal. So anyone who's, if you're writing a blog about Limp, biscuit or POD or Slipknot. That obviously goes in the new media category. If you were to build kind of like the free press for corn fans, you would go in new media and you, not an EW media. And of course we have to talk about the post corporate media category. Chopo Trap House,

Starting point is 00:11:31 obviously fitting in there. It's a very funny choice to put that there. But obviously anti-corporate, sometimes socialist, sometimes communist, sometimes communist, sometimes left wing, but distinctly anti-corporate. You're not going to run a lot of ads on a post-corporate media property. But you might curse some people. You might hire some people on it. That's possible. Now, we do have the post-neo-media. So, as you think, you think traditional media, legacy media, regular media, new media, neo-media is the newest. Neotrad, which we'll get to in a little. Most neo media, you can think of it as the most accelerated, the most aggressive, the final, the most cutting edge media properties that are out there. We have Martin Screlli. He just turns on a live stream.

Starting point is 00:12:20 He goes for hours and hours and hours and hours. It's not a media company. It's not a TV show. And he's moving markets, right? Exactly. Exactly. Then you have I Show Speed and Mr. Beast other examples of neo-meat, post-neo media creators. You, of course, have had the expert media sphere with Andrew Huberman, Lex Friedman. AI expert, Joe Rogan, UFO expert, and then Andrew Newman, of course. And then we have the neofactual media, more of the analysts focused on the actual truth,

Starting point is 00:12:50 one of the, really the only truth-seeking organizations on the map in general. Where are we? Let's move over to, so traditional media, we know, traditional media, you're printing things out, you're making traditional content, you're instantiating your ideas in traditional ways. And the neotraads are doing this in a new way. This is new media that cosplays as traditional media. Exactly. So that's TBPN, right?

Starting point is 00:13:19 It has some of the aesthetics of an ESPN. Yes. But it looks and feels. Good job, guys. Thank you. Thank you to the production team. I'm glad you guys like the show. Yes.

Starting point is 00:13:31 And so Colossus is another good example here. They're obviously, you know, if you look on this map, what is Colossus. There was debate last week, right? This is part of what started the bait. What is Colossus? Are they writing profiles? You know, is this journalism? And we just immediately thought this is obviously, you know, Neotrad media. There's no other way to look at it. This is traditional print media reborn for the modern era. Yes. And specifically, the, you wind up getting a lot of attention in Neotrad media from the old media, from the mainstream media, from the legacy media, because you are wearing traditional media clothing. So Arena Magazine, it's a physically printed out magazine. Kind of sitting squarely between post-trad and neotrad. And so if you are the editor of Forbes or Fortune Magazine, Fortune Magazine has done a cover story on Josh Kushner. Colossus Magazine just did a cover story on Josh Kushner, and they printed it out, and it's a physical magazine.

Starting point is 00:14:31 And so it feels much more like a direct attack and a comparable product, as opposed to if Colossus was just a substact, the editor of Forbes, the editor of Fortune, they would be able to say, well, that's just a substack. What makes us special is we print ours out and mail. Would you ever do a daily print newspaper? Daily print? I don't think so, but I would do weekly. Daily print, there's so many hands involved and like material getting into places. You just geofense it to New York, Manhattan. You could have little people and feed me outfits. Yeah, or I guess the other thing people do, I don't know if you guys remember this paper during COVID called The Drunken Canal, which was like a downtown gossip paper

Starting point is 00:15:12 that they put in the newspaper stand boxes around the city. But that was maybe four times a year or something. But that was really fun because you couldn't really find the content online that created some tension around discovery. What were they going to publish? Yeah. So then we have neocorporate media. These are like obviously from a corporation that does something that's not media.

Starting point is 00:15:34 You have the AWS Developer Tools blog. let's give it up for some of the greatest content. You have the Open AI podcast, Cheeky Pint, which sort of dresses up as Neo-Trad in many ways, but also is fully owned and operated by Stripe, a corporation. Then you have the Neo-Conglomerate media. This is whatever David Ellison is working on, we believe. David and Larry, I want you to take me through.

Starting point is 00:15:57 We forgot it. We could have added UFC as part of this new neoconglomerate. But then we also have the East Coast. You can always update it. Yeah, the East Coast Underground. you'll have to explain everything in this section. Yeah, we weren't familiar with this. What's going on?

Starting point is 00:16:11 You guys know New York Magazine, come on. Well, yeah, from the Andrew Huberman. Is that the New Yorker magazine? No. Is that the New York Times magazine? No. Is that the New York, New Yorker's New York Magazine? New Yorker is part of Fonday Nast.

Starting point is 00:16:25 Okay. New York Times Magazine is part of. The New York Times? Correct. And New York Magazine is something else? Who's it owned by? Is it supported by, like, the city? It's under, it's under Vox.

Starting point is 00:16:36 Wait, they should naturalize it. Mom, Ghani, let's do it. Yeah, I mean, that's a big one. You guys should probably know about that one. I feel like I love New York Magazine because to come out of a magazine, the New York Times already has a magazine, and the New Yorker has a magazine, and you're just like, you know what, New York needed a magazine. That's something that we would say.

Starting point is 00:16:53 It's the best one. That's the one where I worked. Yes. It does seem cool. And I feel like when you see a New Yorker, a New York MAG profile, it is great. Oh, my God. It's great. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:17:02 They have their own special flavor that's not quite the New Yorker. not quite the New York Times Magazine. Right. It's the New York, it's New York Magazine. It's New York Magazine. It's New York MAG. Okay, so why are these so underground? You guys have never heard, okay, you've heard of Puck because you've been on Dylan's podcast. Yes. But Tyler, our intern, has not heard of Puck. And he's heard of all of these other. You haven't heard of, Halegate, you wouldn't know about it. That's more of like a New York left-leaning politics.

Starting point is 00:17:27 Tyler, do you know some before? No. Okay. Do you know status? No. Status was started by Oliver Darcy. So I, and he came from CNN, I believe. So, like, we should move him maybe over there. But something that's interesting that's happening is some people are logos and some people are faces. Yeah. Like, you guys chose to put TBPN as your logo.

Starting point is 00:17:47 And I'm curious, I'm happy that FeedMe is not my face and it's my logo. You want the brand to grow. But Feed Me is starting to become more of a platform. Platform company. Bingo. Yeah. I would put you. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:18:00 We left off Punch Bowl. Punch Bowl. Oh, Punch Bowl. Yeah. I mean, they're ex-pop. Politico, right? Okay, so what I'm actually hearing is that East Coast Underground is really sort of a further post-trad, post-legacy.

Starting point is 00:18:16 Maybe they're post-legacy. Yeah, I think a lot of them are post-legacy. I think the difference between them and like an Alex is a lot of them have raised like tens of millions of dollars to get their things off the ground. But their newsletter businesses. But so they're thinking less independent media. We needed a category for heavily VC-backed. You really do.

Starting point is 00:18:34 You really do. because we're going to be watching how those play out in the next few years or months. Yes. Well, are there any major corrections that you think we should make? Do you think we got any of this wildly wrong? No. I mean, it's really interesting that you guys, the East Coast Underground thing, because those are the publications that people are like wringing their hands.

Starting point is 00:18:58 Is that like going crazy over in New York City? Sure. And maybe your audience is... I definitely think these folks need to be over here. Yeah, I think we can redistribute the underground. Yes. Because you can basically see it goes like... I mean, New York Magazine's not underground,

Starting point is 00:19:14 but less tech, more tech here. And then politics is kind of running through this way, but then over here you have some tech, and then over here you have some tech. Yeah, those can be sort of redistributed. Next to each other. Status I would call Post Legacy, but... Okay.

Starting point is 00:19:29 But it's almost like, there's... some difference because these were started five, ten years ago, correct? Like Puck is not this year. Puck didn't start this year. Puck started I think like three years ago. Oh, three years ago. Okay, that is pretty recent. And they've raised like 20 million. It's not quite as recent as well. It's not quite as recent as well. And they also just acquired air mail, which was Gray and Carter sort of luxury magazine. Can you hit the gong for Puck for raising 20 million? But but the big story with Puck right now, but, but the big story with Puck right now, is that they just acquired airmail.

Starting point is 00:20:04 Okay. What's airmail? Who's that? Graydon Carter, the great editor of Vanity Fair. Okay. There we go. So he's more, you know, you know about that? Was Airmail in the Post legacy media?

Starting point is 00:20:16 Airmail is something else. I mean, it still is, it's still in existence, but it's sort of like you go, it's very luxury. So it's like, this is what happened in this resort in Sweden. this is like the crazy like a thousand word story about it and every you know sort of 20 words there's a big Hermes ad so it's like

Starting point is 00:20:39 yeah but it's let's give it up for airmas Zach Meyer in the chat says I think this needs to be three dimensional to better illustrate the I agree I agree okay well that concludes well I'm glad we could clear up the media

Starting point is 00:20:55 landscape because there's been so much debate lately and sometimes you need to you know, expand in order to really help, uh, I mean, we were joking about this being completely schizo, but I think we have something. Yeah, we got to add barstool. Okay, let's make some notes. We'll do a V2 before we release the next, the next iteration, but we'll get something there. Let's go through the mansion section. I want some, uh, advice on what is a buy, what is a cell? Before we do, let me tell you about restream.com. One live stream 30 plus, 30 plus destinations, multi-stream to reach your audience, wherever they are. Um, well,

Starting point is 00:21:29 You said that you were interested to talk about Carl Icons, NYC Penthouse. Is that correct? Are you familiar with this? You know about the Carl Icon pasta at the restaurant? I think it's like two blocks from his house. Yeah. There's this restaurant called, I think it's called Iltinello. It's an Italian restaurant, and they have like a $20 Carl Icon pasta.

Starting point is 00:21:48 I looked at this up recently. Yeah, because it's not exciting. It's like, it's like a very simple pasta, but he ordered it a lot. So I think one of the. things if you buy there you can sort of like always take friends to that place and sort of get into well you know who used to own my apartment who carl icon like you can do that every time oh oh if you live there yeah yeah that's you know neighborhood you can have maybe rename the pasta if you learn if you move there you know icon has also entertained numerous corporate giants at the

Starting point is 00:22:22 apartment including computer titan michael dell apple CEO tim cook Netflix co-founder reed hastings He would extend. It is. He was hanging out with Dell. It was pretty fun. It's a $23 million property. How many square feet? People are liking the lifestyle news.

Starting point is 00:22:41 You guys should talk about restaurants more. We should. The apartment has views around the city, including Central Park. A dramatic double-height-forier has a circle staircase. 23, 250 units. I'm not sure how big this is. Oh, okay. it is 14,000 square feet and it's a combination why is that sad that's huge for manhattan that's massive 14,000 square feet is the combination of three apartments that were purchased over 40 years and so he slowly built this like larger and larger they're 53rd does that make a difference well is that material like would you know Manhattan that well to know I would hope so I would hope you know it that well I don't know the difference uh so

Starting point is 00:23:27 So it is on the apartment atop museum tower on Manhattan's West 53rd Street spans the 51st and 52nd floors. It has 14,000 square. That's a buy. You think that's a buy? It's a buy. So Carl Icon has said, Carl Icon has said the billionaire is unsure why his beautiful apartment on West 53rd Street hasn't found a buyer yet. You think you agree with that take. It doesn't make sense.

Starting point is 00:23:53 Somebody needs to step up. Yeah. Somebody will step up after that. this story, you know. Okay, so you could get 153rd Street, 14,000 square foot apartment, or you could get... I like that. They say in the story, I mean, so here's the thing. So he had a Hindenburg research report on him, on his empire, on his empire. And so I think, and Puck has an article here. I just searched Carl Icon fall off. And Puck pulls up, Carl, icon on how to lose 20 billion. So I think people don't want to buy the apartment because they're worried about

Starting point is 00:24:27 negative or a but you call priest you call you got some sage you just stage it up okay that's every apartment in new york so for 23 million it's it's fixable you can make it work okay what about this delmar beach house uh for 50 million dollars this one was actually sold uh i can hold it up here a beachfront compound with a ping pong pavilion are you pro ping pong um sure yeah rank these paddle sports ping pong paddell what's the other one called? I don't like sports that were invented in the last 10 years. And then tennis.

Starting point is 00:25:02 Yeah, tennis is top. So, rank those four. Tennis is the top. Yeah. And then ping pong? Yeah. And then Padel. And what's the other one?

Starting point is 00:25:09 And then pickle balls at the bottom. Yes. Pickle ball, it just has a terrible name. I know. The word doesn't sound good. Oh, here's the picture of the house. So 50 million. It has 6,000 square feet, seven bedrooms.

Starting point is 00:25:20 How would you rank this? I will keep, I will keep giving you extra information. Where is Delmar? Basically, Delmar is in San Diego County. That's really not my kind of place. No? Yeah, what's pulling people to live there? It's kind of a brutal view.

Starting point is 00:25:34 Don't say that. It's kind of a brutal. It's like a brutal. It's like a better Hamptons. Don't say that. If someone was like from first principles, let's just make the Hamptons better, they would come up with Delmar. But look how brutal the view is from the pool. I don't think this was the best photo they could have ran.

Starting point is 00:25:48 You can see the beach. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I can see the beach behind the staircase and like through this little sliver. Oh, so. So are you an infinity pool guy? You want the pool straight out to the ocean?

Starting point is 00:25:59 Okay, okay. Well, the seller is a limited liability company tied to Sandra Nathsker, whose family has been major cattle ranchers over a century in Arizona, California, and Oregon. Land family. Land maxing. Land is the most underrated asset. Completed last year, the oceanfront compound first came on the market for $75 million. But the price has been reduced.

Starting point is 00:26:25 induced, it finally sold for 50 million. The listing agent said it's a remarkable sale for San Diego coastal real estate agent. The property includes a 4,500 square foot main house. I agree with you. Somebody would have to pay you quite a lot to live there. It is crazy to get... That's not my kind of beach and that's not my kind of house. It's crazy to get to get half the space and you're in Del Marr, which is cool, but you're not in Manhattan. You would think that Manhattan would just be more expensive and you're paying twice as much for half the space. Yeah. I say take icons property. makes no sense to me. What else? What about Hawaii? What, what about Hawaii? What's your take on Hawaii? Ben once. It's the, it's the Hamptons of the Pacific. Do you agree? The only thing I'm

Starting point is 00:27:05 curious about with Hawaii is I really want to visit a Zuck's ranch and meet those cows. Okay. Meet those cows. You want to meet those cows specifically? Yes. You don't just want to see how big the property is. The cow specifically? I'm curious about what he's sort of doing there with the, he's obsessed with like breeding the perfect cow. Yeah. We missed, we, they had Zuck burgers. Yeah. at the MetaConnect event that we were live from, and we missed, we, we just got really busy podcast. It's basically impossible to eat while you're streaming, because you have to eat talk on the microphone. None of them could have put one aside.

Starting point is 00:27:37 Did you guys have any? Yeah, no, no, no one had any. Wow, missed opportunity. Missed opportunity. So, Catherine Conrad spent a decade perfecting the gardens at her Honolulu home, overlooking the ocean. The estate has granite pathways that wind around a Carrara marble fountain. I don't know what that is, actually.

Starting point is 00:27:57 An antique pergola cost about $40,000. Her favorite view of the garden is at night when the cypress monkey pod and flowering Tacoma trees are illuminated. She's trying to pitch the monkey pod as a feature, but it sounds like a bug. You have a monkey pod. I guess that's like, it's like a cat tree for a monkey. I have people to visit you in Hawaii, too. The time, the time zone is so brutal.

Starting point is 00:28:20 Yeah. Or you have neighbors you love maybe or you meet new friend. but if you're buying in California or New York, someone's always going to be in town. Totally, totally. I also feel like, as for the celebrities out there, it really puts a target on your back when any time there's,

Starting point is 00:28:34 every time there's been like a natural disaster, it's like, oh, the, you know, the rock didn't let. It's because you took all our water. Well, that, but there was the tsunami warning last year and they were getting really canceled for that. And then the fight. No, no, because apparently they had like private roads that every, you know, everyday citizens were backed up

Starting point is 00:28:53 in traffic, trying to escape the tsunami, and they were not inclined to open their private roads. Yeah, it's always going to be more controversial to buy in Hawaii. Yeah. Okay. So, 0.8 of an acre. It was the first lot was bought for $7.55 million, then $4 million for the adjacent parcel. So you put two properties together around $11 million in land value. Then $12 million in renovation.

Starting point is 00:29:19 They're asking $34. It's a four bedroom, $5,200. square foot house ocean views it also has a Pilates studio is that a feature for you i like to leave my house for Pilates you want to leave your house for Pilates so at 34 million are you buying or are you selling no you're not buying you're passing passing what about this house in uh Puerto Rico i haven't been to Puerto Rico in a very long time um before we move on we got to do another ad do you have the ads list i don't have it today let me pull it up Here we go.

Starting point is 00:29:56 Privy, wallet infrastructure for every bank. Privy helps it makes it easy to build on crypto rails, securely spin up white label wallets, sign transactions, and integrate on-chain infrastructure all through one simple API. So, yes, Puerto Rico was very much a thing during 2020. Whoa, that is crazy. See there invite, they're saying, come hang out. I have a friend who, yes, yes, they want people to come visit. I have a friend who would refer to that as a gulag Because you get all your boys to come and visit and hang out

Starting point is 00:30:28 And they all sleep in bunk beds But you really could sleep like with 12 people there or something So this mansion has a 17,000 square feet Eight bedrooms, a basketball court, a pool It is for sale for $65 million. Is it in that zone? I think I don't know if it's the four seasons Or there's another

Starting point is 00:30:48 There's another hotel company that has effectively set up a mini-city in Puerto Rico. You know about this? There is information about the Ritz Carlton in here. Oh, it's the Ritz. Let me read it. Simon said he and his wife had little intention to buy in Puerto Rico before stopping by the Ritz Carlton's sales office

Starting point is 00:31:06 in 2015. They quickly became enamored with the idea of building a house there buying a one acre parcel of land on one of the community's golf courses. The parcel overlooks the ocean. It was completely impulsive. There were a few false starts. The Falix got the keys to the new home in

Starting point is 00:31:22 2017, just before Hurricane Maria hit, closing down the resort community and resulting in minor damage, water damage to the home. Soon after the community recovered, COVID hit. In recent years, the phallics have spent long weekends and holidays of the property as well as several weeks in the summer. They are selling because their grandchildren are older and don't spend as much time on the property. Puerto Rico's luxury housing market has boomed in recent years, thanks to tax incentives and the rise of remote work. It's become very attractive. They undid a lot of those incentives or they, there's some people that are grandfathered in,

Starting point is 00:31:57 but now they're just sort of trapped in the Caribbean. Yes. And so this is a lot in the Dorado Beach. Yeah, Dorado. Which is a Ritz Carlton Reserve resort. 65 million. Buy or pass? Pass, but maybe try to get,

Starting point is 00:32:14 I don't know if those Disney posters are coming with the house, but I feel like the posters in the film room, you could flip those. Yeah, split them off. Oh, really? You know? Break it up. Break up.

Starting point is 00:32:25 Big Puerto Rico. Sell up for parts. We got to talk about J.P. Morgan's new headquarters. Michael Dell shared it. I have a post pulled up here. Oh, yes. This is peak performance.

Starting point is 00:32:35 And I wanted to get your reaction to this setup. Can we pull up this post in the timeline? It would be great to be able to pull up posts both in the timeline and there. That's the future. Well, that's what we're not pull it up there. While we're pulling that up, let me tell you about cognition. They're the makers of Devin. Devon is the AI software engineer.

Starting point is 00:32:54 Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. All right, pull up this post from Litquidity. And we'll put it on there. We don't need to put it on the back screen. We can actually just pull it on the... Yep. Yep. And while we're doing that, let me tell you about figma.com.

Starting point is 00:33:11 Think bigger. Build faster. Figma helps design and development teams. Build great products together. You can get started for free. Did you see the... what else is going on here would you guys buy anywhere besides California

Starting point is 00:33:27 no New York eventually California has so much I feel like I just want to like grow the map of places I go that are driving distance we're both excited Santa Barbara yeah the Monocito L.A. Marin is a little far but even Big Bear so you just want to buy houses close

Starting point is 00:33:47 to each other well houses that are less than an hour away from each other In California, in L.A. specifically, you can get in a car and in two hours be in a completely different biome. Right. You can be in the desert or you can be in the ocean. Or you can be on an island. So here's, they got video footage of the JPM analysts going to their new workstation. This is a post from liquidity. But pull up the post from Michael Dell that shows the actual setup here and we need to rate my office. Did you guys hear that employees have to pay for the gym? What?

Starting point is 00:34:20 At JPM? Why? There was a story about it. I mean, I guess that's just some incentive. People were not happy. I mean, employees were not happy about it. They were like, why do we have to pay to go to this? I guess it's just such a big organization that if you don't put some sort of limit,

Starting point is 00:34:34 people will like kind of all flood right on January 1st or something. And I'm sure that they have. It's just kind of like a flow limit. I'm sure that they have like a health account or something to use towards it. Yeah. So this is what peak performance looks like for sure. This is beautiful. I actually, I saw this setup and I was and I thought I want to recreate this here.

Starting point is 00:34:56 Oh, 100%. I'm down to be in the trenches. Yes, this is what the trenches look like. I like that they have the thing that new hotels have now where you just, you have the outlets right there. Yeah. And the desks. That's nice.

Starting point is 00:35:09 We're not seeing chairs. Imagine having chat, TBT add up numbers for you while sitting in that setup. So what I'm interested is like when was this taken? because I thought they worked hard. I don't think that's a real photo. That doesn't look like a real person. Michael Dell just posted this and said, congratulations JPMorgan on opening your new headquarters.

Starting point is 00:35:28 He sold them all the monitors because the monitors are Dell monitors. I think this is a rendering. No way. This is real. I think this is real. You don't think that jaw line is possible? That's pure JPM power. I don't know.

Starting point is 00:35:41 I don't know. I have to see it for myself. I emailed their team. Even Michael Dell replied to his own post and said we're monitoring the situation. Yeah. You don't do that on some slop. I think they finished building out the office. The office looks like slop.

Starting point is 00:35:56 Look at those beautiful Dell monitors. I will fight you on this. I need those. I want to go. Maybe that's where my shoot is. That is where you're shooting. That is where you're shooting. This is the spot.

Starting point is 00:36:06 We're a hopskiff and a jump from the people that will actually get this done. I need to go. I need to see it for myself. Yes, yes, yes. Okay. It's a beautiful building. Have you seen it? Last thing we have.

Starting point is 00:36:18 No. It's beautiful. Oh, it's a whole new building. And it has like crazy LED at the top, right? It has a crazy light show. There's like a rock. There's like a big story about like the rocks that they brought in to. Dwayne the Rock Johnson? I should bring him in, have him do it. I feel like when you set up a new, a new fortress of finance, you should have like an inaugural, an inaugural lock in. And you should bring in like a, like, Warren Buffett should come and like lock in and type the first row in a spreadsheet and be like, yes, like we've opened the office. Jamie Diamond himself has come and done and written the first sell of the spreadsheet. and now the office is open for business.

Starting point is 00:37:01 It's like smashing a bottle of wine across a boat. I love that. You need a christen a new office. Let's pull up this post from none other than the New York Post, which I don't think they made it on the media landscape, but mobsters ran rigged poker games at Kylie Jenner's Lux, NYC Pad, while she still owned it. Apparently, Travis Scott also was owned a piece of it too.

Starting point is 00:37:29 Uh, what, what's going on here? You, you think this all ties back into the, uh, to the, uh, to the holes. Isn't this part of the story that came out yesterday about? I just got an email from you 19 minutes ago. You're sitting right here. It's crazy, right? It's crazy. Um, isn't this part of this story with the NBA gambling?

Starting point is 00:37:46 Like, the, there, I haven't been following this too closely. Yeah, the, the, the headline yesterday on the Times about the NBA coach gambling, there was, in the headline, it also mentioned mafia. So unless there's two mafia poker rings going on, which is totally possible in a city like New York. I think they're connected. And I wrote about it yesterday, and one of my readers emailed me.

Starting point is 00:38:08 I'm not going to say who it was. But he was like, if you want to talk about this, I was there. The game was held at gunpoint. What? If you want to talk about it. And I said, sure. And then he said to be the neighborhood.

Starting point is 00:38:19 What is game held at gunpoint? Like someone's forcing you to play poker? Well, you guys don't play poker. Sometimes that happens. What do you mean that happens? Guns, drugs. But in what scenario? Mafia.

Starting point is 00:38:31 But under what conditions am I like? I'm really enjoying playing poker with you. So you will die if you don't continue playing? Oh, I think it's more like... They're just having so much fun? Yeah, you do a little... You have a little too much fun and somebody like pulls something out

Starting point is 00:38:44 that they're not supposed to pull out. And... Mm-hmm. Yeah. I've never had a gun at a poker game, but I've heard... This is why I'm not leaving California. This New Yorker seems crazy to me. There's none of this year, yeah.

Starting point is 00:38:55 This is not... There's a post here on the, on the, the sports gambling arrest, Mike over on X with 2 million views on this post. The NBA is very concerned about the multiple arrests made as a result of the FBI's sports gambling raid. Use code multiple arrests for a 30% profit boost on a three-leg parlay with draft kings, the official gambling partner of the NBA. I love it. I am glad that people are still playing poker in person as opposed to just only playing online. That's good. That's kind of a white pill, for sure. Touching grass.

Starting point is 00:39:27 Yeah. I used to have a poker podcast. Really? Yeah, it was called Chips and Dip, and it was about poker and chips. Like potato chips. Potato chips. Yeah. Were you like a good poker player?

Starting point is 00:39:37 I am, I was, uh, my ex was like a good poker player and then our friend, the third guy is also very good and he's borderline addict. Hmm. It was gambling addict. Cool. He's doing okay. He might start writing about poker. He should go work in a hedge fund or something.

Starting point is 00:39:53 Yeah. Put it to work. For sure. Uh, he should go. go lock in he should be he should do the inaugural gamble the first gamble at the new the new morgan stanley hq it's morgan stanley right uh no it's j p m okay jpm yes yes yes the the first the first fat fingered trade uh this is important uh anyway thank you so much for stopping by thanks for having you guys the blast we know we have to get you you have to get out of here really fun got to go to the hammer

Starting point is 00:40:20 museum breaking she will be the hammer museum i didn't know this is live you could go by and and say, oh, you play it. Don't say that. Be careful. Okay. Bye, guys. Bye. Great hanging. Great hang. Cheers.

Starting point is 00:40:34 Well, we rearranged the seats. Let me tell you about Vanta.com. Automate compliance, manage risk, prove trust continuously. Vantas Trust Management Platform takes the security and compliance process, manual work out of a security compliance process, and replaces it with continuous automation. Alex Heath says Snap is in talks to raise at least one billion for AR Glass. multiple investors involved, including Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund.

Starting point is 00:41:01 Plan is to move specs into a new independent subsidiary. Spinning it out. And structure similarly to Waymo and Alphabet. I want to get Evan on the show so badly. I think it would be a very much interesting conversation. We're working on it. It will happen soon. Samsung just launched a Vision Pro competitor, right?

Starting point is 00:41:21 Samsung Galaxy XR, the headset. So they're, and Google's announcing it today. This is 16 minutes ago. The Samsung Galaxy XR is powered by Android XR. And it's supposed to be basically at the Apple Vision Pro level in terms of fidelity, I think. But they obviously have a YouTube app because it's a Google partnership. And so on day one, they have a lot. more partners because Android's been kind of a better steward to the developer community than

Starting point is 00:42:02 Apple. And I think a lot of a lot of the obvious developer partners that would go and build apps for the Apple Vision Pro are taking a wait and see approach because they don't want to, they want to have more leverage over Apple instead of just showing up and being like, okay, I'm going to be paying the Apple tax on day one. They're saying, hey, like, Why don't you go get the audience first, Apple? Make sure that there's actually 100 million DAUs of this thing, like the iPhone, before I build an app for this. Speaking of smart devices, Kohler, the toilet manufacturer,

Starting point is 00:42:40 is making a new toilet camera that provides health insights based on your bathroom breaks, which is insane because... That's an insane. Throne, you know, the startup Throne is doing this, I really thought nobody would... Touch it? do no nobody would go and compete i thought it was like an insane idea yeah but at least no one else would go and compete and then coler you know obviously a major manufacturer decided uh i'm sure

Starting point is 00:43:07 they were somewhat inspired by throne yeah uh to go get into the game of uh toilet cameras health tracking so we'll see how this plays out that's very funny uh let me tell you about graphite dot dev code review for the age of a i graphite helps teams like gethub ship higher quality software faster and get started for free um uh gabriel is posting this is a wild one there was an article uh from the times that said female spies are waging sex warfare to steal silicon valley secrets this is this is a funny story from the times is this is the times of india i i think it's the times of india but um the this has been the meme of like the the cp spy girlfriend and and we we sort of the times of london okay so we we had a whole

Starting point is 00:43:54 there are a lot of different times. There are a whole bunch of different iterations of that viral concept of like is the girlfriend a spy and then the backlash to like well you shouldn't judge the girlfriend because she might be a spy

Starting point is 00:44:11 and going back and forth, back and forth on that. So it's interesting that the Times of London is this just something where Europe takes two months to get to the current thing on X? Because this is a this is an article that literally just says what Axe was talking about four months ago, right? Yeah, I think that, I mean, this has been an ongoing thing. I think maybe what they've discovered and, you know, we're not factual media, so we don't need to get into kind of the

Starting point is 00:44:41 truth here. But they're saying some of the spies are even marrying and having children with their targets, which is really, you know what a good, have you seen the Americans? That's a great TV show. The Americans is great. It's a... Atlas says, geez, I would sure hate for a beautiful Chinese spy to wage sex warfare against me for my production secrets. My production secrets are

Starting point is 00:45:05 super important. I would hate for this to happen. Did he go mega viral for this? Yeah, 15,000 likes. He got the Elon response. That's great. NIR has been going on its hair highlighting Andresen-backed companies. And there's definitely some

Starting point is 00:45:21 that are... Specifically speed run. These are A16 Z speed run companies, which is under Andrew, Andrew Chen. And it's more of a, it's more of an incubator or an accelerator. It doesn't have the same weight as like a David George came in with the growth team and like actually like did some analysis. It's like, they're ripping checks. But it's out of, you know, it's out of their speed run run by Andrew Chen.

Starting point is 00:45:41 Sure. And, yeah, so this one is cheddar. It's the TikTok of sports wagering. Okay. Unlike other platforms, they allow players under 21 and in 46 states. Is this from a deck or from their website or something? I think this is from the speed run. How did Neer find this?

Starting point is 00:45:59 I think this is from the speed run website. This is ridiculous. Okay, wait, there's another one. I need to talk about double speed. I need you to explain this to me. The founders in the chat going back and forth in the replies. So Neer says, A16Z back double speed lets you control thousands of social media accounts with AI, ensuring they look as human as possible, quote,

Starting point is 00:46:22 never pay a human again. Control is all you need. I can imagine some, I was about to steal this, but it's really hard. I can imagine that puppeteering a thousand devices might be useful for something or other

Starting point is 00:46:40 in like a data generation. So double speed, I think they're trying to position it as this is an alternative to influencer marketing, but it does look and feel more like an influence operation. So I would be, this is the kind of thing that nation states, nation states typically take this kind of thing on where they build, you know, a phone farm. This feels like bot farming. It feels like very much against the terms and conditions. The other one that was wild. Hold on,

Starting point is 00:47:09 but like NIR went through this whole flow where, where NIR is, is just quoting them, which is interesting because Neer's not really dunking here. Like Neer's just saying A16Z back double speed lets you control thousands of social media accounts with AI. It's basically just the same as what's on their website copy. One of the founders are the employees automating attention

Starting point is 00:47:30 at double speed. Zuhair Lacani chimes in and says, let me know when you sign up. We can help you grow your company Oren. And Neer says it wants to charge me 5K before I try it, it seems. Zuhair says, sorry we don't do free trials. Let me know if you have

Starting point is 00:47:46 budget to allocate and we'll get you onboarded. Dei says you can do 2000. Zuhair says, yes, join our Discord. But the founder, I believe, wait, is this, is this, this is this, this is a founder of speed run cohort five. I don't know if it's the founder. Bessert Copa says, uh, um, so people are calling this like morally lame and impoverished and Bessert Copa says, how so there are already a million bot farms around the

Starting point is 00:48:16 worlds, they wreaked havoc on our elections not so long ago. Shouldn't the best ones be built in America and pioneer the latest tech and rules to govern it? Wait, so he's saying they have wreaked havoc on the world, but so we should build it in America? Yes, yes. It's basically like, oh yeah, you know how fentanyl is bad, but we should make it in America. I think double speeds should pivot to being a defense tech company and just work with our government to run foreign operations. Yes, yeah, this is good. America has such a long history of running. you know, various influence operations in far-off regions of the world that... Spam from first principles.

Starting point is 00:48:53 Here's another one. Edgar is bringing real money engagement into free-to-play sweepstakes. America's number one social casino for slot lovers. These are insane. I can't believe this is real. I had to go check the speed. It is wild comparing these to the Nat Friedman cohort that he did, which Julius was a part of, Julius.AI. What analysis do you want

Starting point is 00:49:16 to run? Chat with your data and get expert level insights. What was that? So the last one we have to cover is covered, which is bet on your bills. Only fans... This is so dark.

Starting point is 00:49:31 I can't even... Bet on your bills with covered. Only fans, child support, and last night's Uber. Wipe them from your credit card by playing your favorite casino games all from the comfort of our app. VPN, no crypto deposits.

Starting point is 00:49:47 And so my only, my, my reaction here, I mean, John, you're going to be impressed by this, six million views on this post and only 292 likes. Oh, so bad. It means that someone, like, nuclear ratioed them. But I mean, such an insane missed opportunity to say bet on your debt, right? Like, they say bet on your bills. Yeah. Like, bet on your own debt.

Starting point is 00:50:15 Well, it's not debt. This is potentially the most American. Because you've already paid it. Or maybe you're in debt. No, but you're, you can wipe them. If you're, if you bet right, you get them wiped from your state. So bad. It's so funny that just a, just a quote tweet that's from, from hero thousand faces that just says societal breakdown gets more likes with 30,000 views.

Starting point is 00:50:39 Like, the like ratio is insane on this. Well. Trey says, this is incredible. Double your bills or nothing. What's funny is, like, there was a guy who was a really cool, like kind of funny designer who was designing stuff like this, little modals, and one of them was Apple Pay with a double or nothing button. And people were like, oh, this is really funny, but like to see it actually productized is like, oh, like, we were joking about that. Yeah, the interesting thing is, you know, a lot of these kinds of ideas, kinds of apps end up

Starting point is 00:51:10 being massive businesses, but you don't typically see, you know, venture funds backing them. They typically booted up. But this is one of the challenges of scaling a venture platform, right? It's like, you know, there's tons of partners at Andreessen that probably would have passed on these deals, but, you know, individual partners have autonomy and they can do what they want. Well, stick to the infrastructure, maybe. Go to Turbo Puffer. search every bite serverless vector and full tech search

Starting point is 00:51:43 bird from built built from first principles on object storage fast 10x cheaper extremely scalable did you see this a gummy bear basil says a gummy bear

Starting point is 00:51:51 company casually dropping revolutionary battery technology for $25 on Amazon the lightest ever of this capacity and pretending nothing happened

Starting point is 00:52:02 to sort of the funniest things of all time so this is Haribo I just actually think this is Haribo I think this is a Someone stealing the Herribeau brand? Well, they may, hopefully is the gummy bear company.

Starting point is 00:52:16 So, yeah, people are immediately wondering, like, is this real? Is this actually the best power storage per dollar possible or per weight? And so Michael went ahead and bought one and here's his findings. He says, its weight is 286 grams, just a little bit over what they claim. The capacity is 83 watt hours. The printed on the battery, it says capacity 20,000 milliamp hours or 77 watt hours. So I'm measuring in excess of what is claimed. I think they're stating the voltage pieces, what makes the battery capacity measurements nebulous.

Starting point is 00:52:55 But watt hours don't have that issue. And I'm getting better than claimed. Minimum charging current of 0.5 of an amp, less than this battery pack turns itself off. Not able to recharge the battery via the building cable. that's weird. So overall, my conclusion is this battery is the real deal. It meets the claimed capacity and pretty much hits the weight spec. Wow. So maybe you've got to go pick a one of these up. Very, very funny post. Oracle just secured a $38 billion debt deal to finance two new data centers. They said they

Starting point is 00:53:24 couldn't level it anymore. They shouldn't, but they are not listening. 23 billion will go toward a Texas site and nearly 15 billion towards one in Wisconsin. Ted Zhang says, here we go. The debt finance deals are kind of coming. We got Chase Lockmiller from Crusoe coming on the show in about an hour to break down his series E. The star, the godfather of Stargate. Yes. Star Lord. The Star Lord. Himself. Citrini put this out a bit ago, according to Ted, something that has been a relative comfort in being able to stay long despite calls for an AI bubble so far has been the fact that most of the CAPEX has come from cash, cash flow. You don't have a bubble really until the majority of the expansion

Starting point is 00:54:04 is done on debt. We have yet to see significant financing, but that absolutely should be something to watch. On one hand, that leaves another leg of the trade, leveraging up still results in more money being spent. On the other, it sets the stage for consequences of not realizing ROI that we haven't really had to contend with in the existing paradigm. With Microsoft 10-year bonds trading at a G-spread of three basis points, there's still a lot of room for the hyperscalers to issue debt or tap private credit to fund continued spending on AI. However, this also induces a lot more fragility. Going forward, monitoring the share of AI CAPEX that is financed rather than funded from cash flow is probably the most important aspect

Starting point is 00:54:42 of determining exactly where we are in the cycle. Again, there's been a number of players using debt. X-A-I has been using debt. Meta's already tapped the debt markets. I feel like Satya just generally is a lot less inclined to lean in and lever up too much. But there's a post here from Junk Bond investor. It says just offloaded some data center construction debt to his school teachers 401K.

Starting point is 00:55:14 My father is a retired school teacher, so hopefully... He didn't get burned here. He's going to be a little frustrated with me if that ends up being the case, but I'm sure that's happening. With Nexperia,

Starting point is 00:55:30 there's been a little chaos on that front. Nexperia, the semiconductor company out of the Netherlands. They notified its Japanese automotive customers that it may no longer

Starting point is 00:55:43 be able to guarantee supply, triggering renewed, concerned about upheaval at the chip maker. So some chaos over on the European front. Before we do the next post, let me tell you about Google AI Studio,

Starting point is 00:55:57 the fastest way from prompt production with Gemini, chat with models, Vodode, monitor usage. Do you think everyone's talking about the AI bubble. They never talk about the podcasting bubble. Maybe we should be getting some more attention. Everyone's saying like, wow, TBPN is feed me these businesses. If they don't work out,

Starting point is 00:56:15 if they don't deliver, the entire global economy will collapse. Well, no, on a more serious note, we did hear of a podcast raising it at a half a billion dollar valuation that has, that is burning money. So that could, that could be a sign. There might be. Packy has a post here, never change Masa. This guy rocks, and it's a post that says SoftBank hunts for humanoid robot startups. SoftBanks Masa Yoshi's son has long predicted a future where robots would outnumber people and take over many jobs from humans. But some of SoftBanks' bets and robotics over the past 10 years, such as Robot Company Pepper have not panned out. Now the company is renewing its robot ambitions, particularly in robots that resemble humans. Can you imagine Braddock reading this? He's got to be just like, oh, let's go.

Starting point is 00:57:08 Like, I want to be the one. SoftBank up 172% year-to-date. Does it feel like actually a bad time to invest in humanoid robots? I don't think it feels like a bad time at all. I think it's probably true that Masa and SoftBank were too early in some of their robotics bets, right?

Starting point is 00:57:26 They bet really heavily, you know, a decade ago. This feels like a great time. to be building in humanoid robots or robots generally. There's a ton of interesting startups, 1X, and there's smaller companies and there's supply chain stuff. And it's like, it's one of those things where it's like, are you more worried about being too early or being too late? Probably too early on the humanoid robot side

Starting point is 00:57:53 because they're not quite getting deployed profitably. They're very much like research tools. They get bought by researchers, you know, one-off stunts here and there. There isn't really, there's no customer that's just like, oh, yeah, they're buying these like every month. They're buying more and more and more because, like, they're actually, you know, seeing increasing returns to scale. Yeah, there was that story last week about Tesla buying actuators from a Chinese firm, right? Yeah. It was like a $675 million order, which to me signaled.

Starting point is 00:58:31 that's the kind of move you make if you're actually trying to get things into production like in real time or at least have a product that people can order my theory was that if they felt like they had more time

Starting point is 00:58:43 they might have done them themselves right well our first guest of the show is in the re-stream waiting room let me tell you about profound get your brand mentioned in chat GPT reach millions of consumers who are using AI to discover new products and brands

Starting point is 00:58:56 be like MongoDB indeed doci sign brand yeah we have Sagar and Jenny from breaking points. Sagar, how are you? Oh, it's great to see you guys. Thank you for having me. Great to see you. Finally. Only after a million text messages every morning back and forth on the AI apocalypse and political crises, have we actually just put it together that we should

Starting point is 00:59:17 just hang out on the stream. I really appreciate you taking the time. Oh, thank you. Give everyone like a quick shape of the actual flow of the content, like the proper funnel of your business. Some credit. He kind of created neotrad media, which is a new framework we're working on, which is new media that that sort of embodies or kind of looks and feels like the digital media. So your show looks like a proper TV show. You wear a suit. And so we call that neo-traditionalist media, neotrad media. And we're firmly trying to do that as well. I love it. And I will say one of the only reasons I am here is because both of you are bringing suits back to the bones of Silicon Valley. And I know many of you are watching. right now in your Lulu Lemon, your Viori, and you don't look cool. You don't look better than John or Jordi or myself. You all are billionaires, buy a suit. Stop. Just stop it. Stop it. That's

Starting point is 01:00:13 great. I couldn't agree more. I think we're starting to have a small effect, but it's taking hold of. A lot of people that visit the Ultradome wear suits. Well, I mean, pretty much, like there are going to be tons of AI folks, tons of tech people who are going to be dragged in front of Congress. over this data center buildout. I think you've clocked this correctly. But walk me through, is this a thesis that came from you see this coming or you're seeing smoke signals already? Walk me through your thesis of like how tech and the AI buildout runs on a collision course with the average American. Yeah, the thing is, guys, and I really want to hammer this home for people who are watching because I, you know, shocker, I think many people in Silicon Valley do live

Starting point is 01:00:59 in a bubble. One of the best parts of my job is I do genuinely is I interact and we'll return to bubble conversation by the way. But what I get to do is not only interact with a lot of people who are normal in politics, and I mean that at the very base level, not people who live in Northern Virginia. The vast majority of my audience don't live in Washington, D.C., many are Uber drivers, hotel clerks, et cetera. And I start to see bubbling stuff over the last five years over cost of living. At the same time, I'm tracking the electricity story, and it doesn't take a genius to pair that with data center buildout. So one of the things that I really want to flag, I think, here on the show, is that the coming data center collision, at the heart of that is about electricity. It doesn't have to be this way.

Starting point is 01:01:44 One of my favorite notes is there's an analyst I follow who was in China. He had a very different view of this in China, even though, of course, they don't have democratic politics, but of course they do have some little democratic input, is they said, nobody's concerned here because electricity is considered a solved problem. We don't have a solved problem of electricity here in the United States. And in fact, worse, you know, our grid is aging and actually things are getting worse. So with all of this capital expenditure in data centers, you are seeing a literal finite resource competition, especially in rural areas. So Virginia, the state where I live, 40 percent of all of our power is consumed by data centers. Oregon, for example, is some 33 percent. To be fair, to many of the

Starting point is 01:02:27 the AI people who are watching. It's not all AI. We are the hotbed, right, of servers and Amazon and much of the federal government. But the point is, is that this is bubbling up at a very organic township level. So from Arizona to Virginia, data centers actually had a mention in our more recent gubernatorial debate. Both the Republican and the Democratic candidate said that they wanted to do something about it. There's Prince William County here in Virginia where this is an active live issue and the public is overwhelmingly against it. The city of Tucson is moving. And so if we see this continued capital expenditure go up, and especially in more rural areas, we see headlines that like 267 percent power increases for power bills in rural areas,

Starting point is 01:03:10 which are built near data centers, not to mention environmental concerns, et cetera. Then it's when you're going to see people start to get dragged before Congress. So, yeah, go ahead. Yeah, I'm just curious what obviously every area, you know, people are not going to. to just watch a data center get built, you know, in their backyard and not, you know, talk to their mayor or talk to the governor and actually start a conversation in a debate and ultimately create policy around this. Is there not some type of solution that would allow, effectively allow data centers to pay a higher rate than everyday citizens and kind of make up

Starting point is 01:03:47 the difference? I think it's a great idea. Unfortunately, that's not how our power system works. The foundation of the United States is basically built on the fact that we're going to going to build this grid, this infrastructure, and we can all kind of consume the social benefits of it. There are pieces of legislation, Georgi, of what you're talking about on the table, I think in Oregon and in a few other states, but these are few and far between. I also think we've got to take everybody through the story of the last 25 years. Again, with great respect to the audience, I'm speaking to, you can't be Amazon and be the second largest employer in the United States. And then in your shareholder meeting, come out and say that we want to fire 600,000

Starting point is 01:04:25 people, or at the very least, not higher, 600,000 fewer people. These are people who watch their towns get decimated. Then they watched Amazon. I mean, Nomadland. It's an Oscar-winning film about this, you know, this population of people who move around, right? What's so challenging about this issue is that you have these massive infrastructure projects with massive spend and almost zero job creation. Exactly. Exactly. Like the plumbers and the electricians, are going to get paid and that's great. But we've even heard stories of the plumbers and electricians being flown around on private jets

Starting point is 01:05:01 because their skill set is going to and so that's not going to get people. But yes, if you're living in a little town and you're watching the mega project gets spun up and you're getting not only no real benefit, you know, maybe you get more sloping your trough every day.

Starting point is 01:05:23 Can you maybe take me That's the point. Yeah. Go ahead. Can you maybe take me a click forward into, let's assume the trend lines kind of continue. Electricity prices go up. There's more, it's more clearly attributable to data centers, et cetera, et cetera. Like, how do the different political coalitions frame, reframe themselves around this issue?

Starting point is 01:05:46 Like, I imagine that there's a right-wing version of tech backlash that looks one way. There's the abundance lib direction. there's going to be the actual socialist left, and maybe they just say, like, no AI at all? Yeah. So, like, how do you see the different coalitions, like, grappling with what the V2 of the messaging might be here? There's going to be a horseshoe element here.

Starting point is 01:06:10 I think that the socialist left and much of the right is going to actually come in the same place, enough. And so a lot of the socialists left is actually Bernie Sanders. I don't know if you guys saw this right before I came on the show, just called for a breakup of Open AI. So this is huge news. he's the first U.S. politician actually to do so.

Starting point is 01:06:26 Now, what is there to break up? They have chat GPT and then they have a bunch of other things that are sub-scale. How about the nonprofit, profit arm or whatever the hell? You guys can explain that to me. Yeah, yeah, I think Sam's like, I would love to break it up. I'm actually trying to break it up. I would love to just have a C-Corps again. Break me up, Bernie.

Starting point is 01:06:43 Yeah, is this some sort of like 40 chess and Sam's gotten to Bernie and told Bernie, hey, yeah, we need to break it up. That's really popular messaging. And he's like, yeah. You know, Bernie's probably, you know, he's picking from an old toolbook, so we shouldn't fault in too much. He's basically just saying, let's pressure them. Let's make sure we have more regulation, right? Exactly, more regulation. On the right, I mean, much of this is going to be about distrust of Sam and many of the tech guys themselves. I mean, when you have these people outwardly bragging about mass job loss, mass societal creation, there's a lot of us who are like, yeah, do I want this guy who's introducing AI porn to be the most powerful person?

Starting point is 01:07:22 person in the world. I mean, the challenge is that the job loss, like, vision is so good for fundraising because if, you know, people are like, hey, maybe I don't have a job in 10 years. It's like, well, I want, I want my money going into these companies. So at least I'll have a chance at escaping the permanent underclass. Question for you. Social media went through, you know, and continues to go. It's like a perpetual backlash at this point. people say they hate it, they don't like it, they say it's bad. Many of those people still use it. How do you think this AI development is different than that and that a generation will just log off? Or do you think it's, it will be the same type of dynamic where people say they hate it,

Starting point is 01:08:14 they're frustrated with the potential impacts of it, but they still line up? That's a very astute observation. And I think it's going to be. somewhere in between and so actually jordy this kind of gets to the point of what i reacted to you put out a tweet about aGI and pornography and what i reacted to that is i was like yeah a g i's not coming guys what's coming is porn and what that means is the internet is just coming again and so you know i downloaded the chat gpte browser it's it's fine you know it's fine uh it's a browser and so it's a browser that's going to serve me i mean literally the ad read before i came in was about putting ads into chat GPT.

Starting point is 01:08:53 Wow, what a business model. Somebody should have invented it already. They did. It's called AdWords in 2003. So are we just competing for the exact same type of unit economics, of screen time, of use, of pornography, of the very same things, which, as you said, Jory, are making us miserable, because that doesn't seem very cool to me. And it also doesn't necessarily justify, let's say, 80% gain of the entire S&P 500 over the last

Starting point is 01:09:18 2025. This is the stuff actually that I text John about literally every day when I'm like a bubble is coming. A bubble is coming. A bubble is coming. I think the steel man of like the medium, the medium case or I don't know how to put it, but it's like if I told you, it's just like, well, yes, like AI is not AGI. You're not going to lose your job over it. It's not going to kill anyone. But it will help you do research better. It's better auto complete. It's this nice tool that will help clean things up. better spell check, better grammar check, you know, spire it off. And if you're like, you're going to be, you're going to be a little bit more knowledgeable, a little bit more performant, a little bit more efficient.

Starting point is 01:09:58 And it's going to cost, we're going to need to build some data centers, but we're not going to build, you know, so many data centers that we all lose our light and heating and AC. I think that's a reasonable, like, abundance. I think that's what we're going to end up. That's where we should. The moment we are right now is that when somebody, you know, sees an AI video, of, you know, the one that went super viral a while back was like people on the roof of an apartment

Starting point is 01:10:21 building and it's a pool and the glass breaks and people flow off. It's like that video and videos like it are not worth for the average American an extra $100 a month, you know, an extra $1,000 a year added to their electrical bill, right? And so that's what, that's the political dynamic. And that's why, John, I go, hey, all of that sounds great. It's a little worrying to put my entire retirement portfolio based upon, you know, a very different message. And when that's the reality of where we're going to end up, a little bit better Microsoft Teams is just really not the anthropic vision, which is being sold to me, okay? About, I mean, I talked to a guy who works at Accenture. I said, how do you use AI? He's like, yeah, it's great. It does auto meeting

Starting point is 01:11:03 summaries for me. And I was like, wow. Listen, definitely great. I mean, it means you don't have to hire some entry level guy, although maybe that's not great. And what really ended up happening is that you end up using it for these extraordinarily mundane tasks. I have no issue with that as long as the attendant social fallout government policy, power bills and all of that is tied up into it, not to mention, and I really can't belie the social cost because what you said, Jordy, is a central thing. There is a mass elite revolution right now against social media. And between, I think Jonathan Haidt might be one of the most public, like important public

Starting point is 01:11:40 intellectuals in modern, in a long time, leading what I think is going to be at least a top middle discussion with all of these different school districts, states and others, which are banning phones. The recognition is that they are controlling us and we need to retake control of our life. AI is kind of supercharging that message. And if you talk to the vastly rich, which you do, and I've spoken to a few of them, how many of them really let unlimited screen time for their phones in the way that, you know, the income of, let's say, people making less than 100,000 do for their children. It's just completely different. You know, they're very aware of that dynamic. And that is permeating social culture at a way that I don't think people in tech are quite

Starting point is 01:12:23 realizing. Do you think we, it always takes a generation of guinea pigs to understand where technology winds up? Because I grew up with the panic around video games and the idea that if you played Counterstrike competitively at a very high level and became one of the greatest Counterstrike players of 2003. You were definitely going to be crazy. Well, I did it. I was great at Counterstrike. I wasn't maybe one of the best ever, but I was pretty good. And I don't have any violent impulses whatsoever. I was fine. I was not one shot by 360 no scoping people. I became a productive member of society. And I feel like we came up with the ESRB, E, you know, R, like teen rated games, M-rated games, and we kind of figured out, like, where the line is, parents adapted, kids adapted,

Starting point is 01:13:12 and we got through that. Social media feels like we're towards the tail end of getting through it where most parents know, hey, the young kids should not be on Instagram, like, constantly or TikTok constantly. And with AI, we're just starting to understand. But it feels like we'll kind of wind up in the same place, which is like, they're okay? You might be right, but let me challenge you a little bit on the video game front, because I think that John, you also know my crusade

Starting point is 01:13:38 against sports gambling. So Robin Hood, if you're listening, please don't allow sports betting. But one of the important things around gambling, you also know my crusade against marijuana. Here's the issue with video games with all of these vices and things that you're talking about. It's fine sometimes.

Starting point is 01:13:54 But there is an attendant part of society which actually does lose it when immersed in this culture. So, you know, I've pointed, unfortunately, part of my job, I cover a lot of mass shooting. We had two, or actually three, very recently, we had Minnesota, we had also the Charlie Kirk killer, and then we also had the ice shooter. All three were deep in these weird discord gamers.

Starting point is 01:14:16 The ice guy spent 20 hours a day gaming. But Discord is a social media thing. Discord the platform for, it's the Discord platform. Yeah, but you guys can locate his steam data. He was logging, I don't exactly remember the number off the top of my head, but an absurd number of hours playing video games. This is somebody who's 31 year old male. This is kind of a contrarian take. I feel like most people close the book on the video games as causing violence.

Starting point is 01:14:38 Brother, I never left, okay? I love it. Actually, no, I never left. I love it. And that's part of what I think is important to say is that people say it worked out. I just dispute that. I mean, we have millions of people now who are addicted to gambling, who are addicted to marijuana, who have gone psychotic, people who are wasting their lives in front of these screens.

Starting point is 01:14:57 And it's like, did it work out? I mean, yeah, it worked out for the S&P 500. Did it work out for the United States of America? I would say no. I mean, if you put all those neat things together. Yeah, it was interesting. Ryan, Ryan Cohen from GameStop came on the show on Monday. He was crazy. He was, he was, he didn't say this explicitly, but he was basically, he seemed generally in favor of just stopping all AI research. Well, I thought you were going to talk about his take on Call of Duty. He was like, I don't want. Oh, what did he say? He was basically like, I don't want people playing Call of Duty. Like, I don't want kids playing Call of Duty, which is crazy from like the GameStop guy. He's the CEO of the company. But he had sort of a similar, like, anti-video game take. Like, maybe it's not as safe as people think it is. Well, I mean, if you guys talk to teenagers and you're like, how do you guys hang out?

Starting point is 01:15:42 A lot of them will be like, oh, we don't hang out very much, but we play a lot of video games together. Sorry, that's bad. All right. I mean, it's just, it's weird. It's weird. Wait, but what about all the dudes? I'm sure you know some of the guys who have been like one shot by golf, where they're just golf is their whole personality. They just are, all they do it all day is think about golf.

Starting point is 01:15:58 And then on the weekend, they go golfing. It's similar. Is it not? No, it's not similar because, well, okay, when I said, video games. What I said is they're at home playing online with their friends. Now, you and guys, we're all relatively the same age. Online play was not around that time. So what you would do is you would gather at a friend's house. It was still pro-social. It was, it was, it was, couch co-op. It was a thing when I was a kid, but I lived somewhat in the country. And so

Starting point is 01:16:26 before anybody could drive, it was like your parent wasn't necessarily, it was, it was tough to get around basically. And so video games were a way that you could hang out with your friends and otherwise it would have just been hanging by yourself or whatever. Maybe that's maybe that's better. Maybe. I mean, I don't know. What would what would get you to what would get is is there any can you imagine any scenario that would get you to change your mind on on AI? Because I'm with you of right now it feels like AI is an expand like the current state of AI in terms of products that people use and are an everyday part of their life is just an extension of big technology, right? Open AI has the aesthetics now of a big tech company. They launch products like they're a big

Starting point is 01:17:15 tech company. They have a user base like they're a big tech company. They're very young, but that's what they look and feel like. They still have their nonprofit and they still have a research arm that is working on AGI, but it's hard for people to spend too much time thinking about AGI research when all the launches and the announcements are social media and new web browsers and erotica and things like that. And so, but I'm curious, you know, and this is something we are always trying to tease out on the show is people that come on the show to talk about AI typically have some AI to sell you or some, they have a startup equity to sell you that is that's sort of predicated on on on on these sort of more utopian visions of

Starting point is 01:18:00 of AI and it's hard to parcel out right and so you had the the Carpathie interview recently which was kind of throwing fantastic interview yeah and I that didn't necessarily like update my worldview a lot I think you put a lot of these ideas really well right this idea of you know agents are not you know are not the agents that we were promised maybe this year or not here yet and I think that's that's okay but I'm curious what would what would update your worldview because it's hard it's like if we get massive job loss you're not going to be sitting here like if we get like an ozempic level drug success that was designed from AI that probably

Starting point is 01:18:40 makes it all worth it right I think what John is correct is just show me like actually show it to me stop telling me because it's creeping me out to watch talk about UBI and you know oh where everyone's going to be, you know, extremely happy, even though I run the entire world. I mean, listen, this, I got to put my own cynicism and bias on the table. Like, I'm literally an anti-establishmentarian podcaster. When these guys open their mouths, I'm just like you're lying. And most of the time, that turns out to be true. So it's one of those where, so I would, I would take the other side of this argument and, and say that it is possible that we never get some sort of big binary moment where we're like, oh my God, yes. Like,

Starting point is 01:19:22 it did the thing that we wanted to do, but it's still like net good. I think about it like, you know, the invention of the credit card. It's like, it just like speeds up the economy every little, it takes a little bit of friction out so that the corner store can sell a couple more muffins and then the person can pay with the digital, you know, the digital cash, they stored in their bank account and they don't need to do the check writing and it sort of puts a couple check writers out of business. But people have new jobs because they can do more. will track your CO2 consumption.

Starting point is 01:19:57 Thank you for saying that, Jordan. But there are tons of, there are tons of examples of like. Not to put on the tinfoil hat, but do you think it's, do you think it's funny how for basically decades people were so against central bank digital currencies? And now they're like, let me, now, now everybody's like, I present to you stable coins. They're a little bit different, but they're sure, they're different. but the potential risks associated with digital money are still there. Yeah, I want to pick up on what John said.

Starting point is 01:20:31 I think it's such an important point, which is I think you are exactly correct. But this is why I react so negatively to the rhetoric. And, you know, guys, I mean, sure you have as well, one of my favorite books.com by Cassidy, I could go through the list. Michael Lewis has a book on dot com. I've read through. I even, I watched a few documentaries. CNN, and you'll never hear me say this,

Starting point is 01:20:53 actually has some decent documentaries about the decades, and they have a decent documentary about the 1990s. Yes, shout out to the old CNN. Shout out to the old CNN. They had a great documentary about the 90s, which I watched,

Starting point is 01:21:05 and the same level of enthusiasm they were talking about the information superhighway is quite literally matches much of the rhetoric of today. I'm too young to actually have experience much of it on the airways, but the same way

Starting point is 01:21:18 and the fervor, which was fueling so much of dot com, just seems, I mean, same thing. Like, ironically, I used ChatchyPT just before I came on here because I knew we were going to talk about this. That's what I was saying, though. It's one of those things, like people, like social media, they hate it, but they use it. Well, I don't hate ChachyPT. I just don't, my finding was that we are mirroring almost exactly the same levels of tech stock growth from the year 1999.

Starting point is 01:21:48 the entire S&P 500 of stock gains and similar ones in terms of our GDP. If anything, the GDP number is higher today. So the systemic risk, which matches their rhetoric and that the risk itself of the fact is, you know, John, what I've probably been texting you the most about is these round-tripping vendor finance deals. And you made a great point to me privately about ASML and how vendor finance itself is not necessarily a negative term in and of itself. But it's really hard not to go and read the story of Cisco and to say, hey, you know, if we have very similar type of downturn and reduction of expected revenue, I'm not saying Open AI itself will go bankrupt, but that itself is fueling the entire retirement portfolio of the whole country, not to mention GDP interest rates, everything is banking on this one sector.

Starting point is 01:22:40 I think that's really dangerous. And especially that background article, you guys are going to know a lot more. than me, but Sam's story about, you know, going back to Masayoshi-san, which, look, no offense to the viewers, you know, I read the We-Work book. I'm just saying, I'm not saying, I trust the guy,

Starting point is 01:22:56 on Masa, with WeWork, Masa never really got a markup, right? Or maybe you got one or two, but not a lot on the real dollar. No, he was buying the top. He topped ticked it. He top-lasted. The dialogue earlier this year was is Masa top-blasting opening eye. And then, of course, you know, opening eyes up,

Starting point is 01:23:14 you know, another one and a half. Listen, his deal worked out, but it was more just to the extent of, it's very similar kind of Adam Newman-esque to me about like, oh, Sam, you need to go bigger. And that's exactly what encourages him to start doing so many of these deals. I don't begrudge them necessarily to do it. But, you know, I really took to heart the too big to fail element of this. Because I'm thinking about this from a mass society. Just say you're not an investor in SoftBank Group Corp. Up a hundred, up 173 percent year to date. So we have Jordan Schneider from China Talk joining in just a minute, but the last question I want is the update on, you know,

Starting point is 01:23:51 obviously, you know, you believe there's an AI bubble. Is there a media bubble? Is David Allison trying to build one? Like, what's going on in the media landscape? We were trying to map it out earlier, taking you through new media, neo media, traditional media, the legacy media, the mainstream media. There's so many different phrases. Like, what's the most interesting story in media in 2025?

Starting point is 01:24:14 because we've already had the story about like, we're leaving the mainstream and going independent. Here's my counter take, which I really came home with the gambling story recently at NBA. There is a new media bubble, and it's in sports, and it's entirely because Fanduel and Draft Kings have propped up way too many people with opinions.

Starting point is 01:24:32 And when there is even a modest pushback on prop bets and the rest of the bullshit that these sports books are allowed to send you, pardon my take, and maybe two or three others are going to make it. everybody else is going to get wiped out. There are way too many sports podcasts if you're out there. And in my opinion, the biggest bubble is in sports media right now, entirely inflated by the gambling industry. Yeah, what do you have any sense what percentage of advertising revenues in sports podcasting is gambling? But it has to be like 70-80 percent. I would say 80 to 90 percent.

Starting point is 01:25:05 I would say 80 to 90 percent. I think the Pat McAfee deal was maybe 50 percent paid for by sports betting. Well, I have a startup to pitch you. There's a new startup. that launched that allows you to bet on your bills, only fans, child support, and last night Uber's wipe them from your credit card by playing your favorite casino games all from the comfort, all from the comfort of their app. Are you? So if you have a big only fans, Bill, you can gamble it away. You can gamble it away. You know, the investor in me. Yes. The investor in me wants to, the investor in me wants to buy that company. You need a vice clause on your own investments. Yeah, you're right. I mean, I've said, as much as I preach against this stuff,

Starting point is 01:25:44 if I actually had to open a business, it would be called game day loans, like instead of payday loans, and it would float sports betters who are out there who need like an 18 to 25% interest. So that's a free idea out there. Game day loans. I'm telling you it's a billion dollar company. It's going to happen. It's going to happen. If you want to sell it's a band duel, you're ready. What's your last thing? What's your kind of like timeline on this sort of tension bubbling up around data centers and slop and the buildout overall. I have a very clear idea of how like how bubbles built in the private markets. It can get more, it can get a lot more intense from here.

Starting point is 01:26:22 It'll go national in 2026. The Democrats are going to win a decent amount of elections. Anti-tech is already a small D democratic issue. They are going to start hearing a ton of it at town halls. It's already happening. And 2026, 2027 is when it's going to happen. And on the right, you're tracking like Marjorie Taylor-Greux. Green or Josh Holly?

Starting point is 01:26:41 Like who's going to be leading the front there on the right? It'll probably be Tucker Carlson at the top. And from that point, it will flow to the Marjorie Taylor Greens, the Josh Holley's. I'd be very curious to see where JD lands on this. Actually, where David, David, I mean, is a central figure in MAGA right now. Yes, David Sachs. Sachs' point, I think from earlier this week, was that without AI, you have basically zero GDP growth.

Starting point is 01:27:09 So I think he's taking the side of it. That's the problem. And listen, that's not his fault. He's the AI advisor. He should be making that point. But if I want to lead our country, that's not the sell I'm making because what we have learned over the last 25 years. We need to prop up the economy so you can lose your job.

Starting point is 01:27:25 Yeah. Exactly. There you go. That is the end all of this entire conversation. Okay. This is the final boss of the anti-tech wave. It really is the is the, is the, the, potentially, potentially the final battle.

Starting point is 01:27:42 Yeah. And it's going to be, it's going to be, it's going to be crazy. And I'm excited to have many more conversations. The singularity will be, oh, I would love to. Yeah, yeah, we'd love to have you back. This is so much fun. Thank you guys for having me. I really appreciate it.

Starting point is 01:27:54 Always welcome. And congratulations on all your success, obviously. Well, I've been doing this shit for seven years. Nobody gave me a Sunday New York Times profile. I think, I think it's not. I know what's going on here. We know, we know a guy. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:28:06 Yeah, we got to make it happen. Well, thank you so much. Have a great weekend. We'll talk to you soon. Cheers, Sager. You too. Before we bring in Jordan Schneider from China Talk,

Starting point is 01:28:14 let me tell you about linear. Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building projects and products. Meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects, and product roadmaps. Let's bring in Jordan Schneider from China Talk. Jordan, how are you doing?

Starting point is 01:28:28 I'm doing all right. You should have kept me on with that last guest. That was great. I know. Yeah, we started doing a little bit of that earlier this week. We had like Brian Armstrong and Brian Chesky kind of next to each other for a little bit? Call them back in because the answer is we will all be so distracted by our AI boyfriends and girlfriends that we won't be stressed out about losing our

Starting point is 01:28:49 jobs. I think I actually, it's very, it's very dark, but I think that the world is so entertained now that almost nothing matters. And it's sad, but no matter how dark certain futures could be, it's expected that everyone will have infinite entertainment constantly and it's so much harder for people to stand up and protest and try to create change if you know you can go back to your phone and oh here's another funny video yeah i just saw stephen hawkins of the x games and it was awesome and i'm going to send it to a friend and it actually is awesome it is sick it's really sick it's totally worth paying a lot for that. Totally worth the extra $2,000.

Starting point is 01:29:41 That clip is the duality of TVPN. I haven't even seen my dog do it yet. Just wait. Once I see my dog at the X games. No, I think it's important. I think like you can't, you know, I continue to be a firm believer that the technology is a massive net positive for the world, but it has a dark side.

Starting point is 01:30:01 And it's important to talk about it. And it will be important to continue to talk about it. and it's it's numbing there's like it there's like a taking antidepressants lens to it right where you just kind of feel less if you get these dopamine hits and we've you know we have not evolved to have the dopamine hits with you know within literally five seconds anytime you feel bad about yourself or bad about the world or something that happened around you or you know someone disappointed you in your life it's like oh okay like instead of like a addressing that or, you know, going to protest to Jordy's point, you know, we can be

Starting point is 01:30:41 consoled by these things that live in our pockets. And they're only going to get better at it, which is the sort of, I guess, awesome. This is the worst, this is the worst, the dopamine feedback loop will ever be. This is the worst, the infinite jest will ever be. Do you think China is less dopamine addled, like probably brain rotted? Because we hear these, a little bit, it feels, no, no, no, to, no brain raw TikToks or go video games. Their TikTok is just science videos. It's just, absolutely not. Yeah, right? Absolutely not. I mean, look, like, who needs, who needs opiates for the masses more? Like, a country with 20% youth unemployment? Or a country that has, like, what, 3.5% unemployment? I think that the, the party has successfully

Starting point is 01:31:31 kind of, like, numbed out. Wait, which country has 20% unemployment? China. Yeah, which country are you talking about? Well, yeah, give us, let a eye run for an extra year or two, I guess. But over the, those are rookie numbers. Like, if you told me that was America, I'm not that far off. I mean, I've heard that the numbers are going up. They might have spiked.

Starting point is 01:31:53 But, no, I think there is, I think this, or, you know, it's fun. You guys should have Jasmine and Son and I asked her this, like, we have to. Because she just came back from a trip to China. I was like, who walks around looking down at their phone more people in the Bay or China? And she couldn't really distinguish between the two. Is identical? I don't, just like, like, just like equally sort of like zoned in while like walking down the street, you are like simultaneously swiping. Ben Sand in our chat says iOS liquid glass is the best line of defense against phone addiction.

Starting point is 01:32:28 I totally agree. It's like the worst software Apple's released in so long. It just makes using your phone worse. I'm sure I hope my screen time is going down. Don't worry. Johnny Ive will come in to save the day, Jordy. We won't be safe. That won't save us for long.

Starting point is 01:32:43 Yeah. Okay, wait. Zoom out. The original reason we wanted to chat was because of the, it's always fun to have you on the show, but obviously about the rare earth. Like, just give us the high level update on like the trade war. This has been what, since the entire time, since your very first appearance?

Starting point is 01:32:59 Is it real? Is it real? Is it even worth, like, thinking? about like what the high level summary is of the of the status of the debate sure i mean i think like like look we've seen this administration swing from side to side on lots of different things you know we were yelling at selensky in the oval office and now we're finally doing the sanctions that biden couldn't bring himself to do around oil um you know we had trump trying to you know doing uh liberation day taking it off

Starting point is 01:33:33 you know, giving them H-20s, they don't want them. Now, we're trying, now they sort of tried to tighten the grip with a 50% rule from BIS, so sort of Huawei subsidiaries can't buy equipment, and China came back with rare arts. I think the sort of, the fundamental fact is that like both countries have the, you know, the sort of, both countries have the ability to do significant economic harm to each other. And it's a bit of, of, you know, there's an aspect of playing chicken and there's a, and there's this kind of question of escalation dominance, like which side can take more pain and which side really cares more.

Starting point is 01:34:16 And both of them have, have basically a ranked list of tools in the tool chest, chips on the poker table, and something like, we're not going to sell you rare earth is extremely painful to America, maybe not that painful to China. And then we're going to tax happy meal toys or whatever is maybe, you know, something in the American tool chest or and the invidia thing. And is the process that we should think about the lens of this year more thinking about just every, both sides are trying to actually understand the shape of how painful each tool in the tool chest is? because it feels like we're very much like turning these things on, turning them off to understand, okay, if rare earths are plus 60 points, Nvidia chips, we thought it was plus 20 points for the U.S. It's actually plus five. It feels like we're just trying to like map all these out

Starting point is 01:35:13 and then we will go to the meeting and actually say, okay, what's equal? Is that what's happened? Yeah. Well, the problem is I think the she has had a longstanding goal, which he's which he's repeated in speeches numerous times, that he wants to make China more self-reliant, and he wants to make the rest of the world more reliant on China. And the problem with what you're seeing out of the Trump administration's policy towards this is what they're optimizing for changes literally week to week. So, you know, tariffs are for revenue, tariffs are for, you know, this trade war is to bring manufacturing back. This trade war is to actually help. NVIDIA gain market chair in China.

Starting point is 01:35:59 The trade war is to crush the Chinese semiconductor companies. And the problem is it's like it would be easier to sort of get to some sort of equilibrium where each side is just going to run as fast as they can at their things. Like if this administration had a sort of grand vision that it was working towards consistently for. But I think the dance that we've seen now play out over how. they've met each other like 15 times is it seems like the negotiators every time they go are actually operating under kind of like different, a different incentive structure. So, and I think this just

Starting point is 01:36:38 plays to China's benefit because the fact of the matter is America has an enormous amount of power and leverage that it could bring to bear. But the first time that China bit back in the case of rare earths, that kind of really freaked out the Trump administration. And it shows, and sort of the... So what will be interesting. Sorry, yeah, please. Yeah, to make this more tangible, like, how is this netting out for China's AI industry?

Starting point is 01:37:09 The messaging has been, obviously, you know, you're not going to buy NVIDIA chips. Maybe we'll look the other way on Malaysia and Singapore data centers. We're going to invest as much as possible in catching up the leading edge in our own, you know, domestic semi-industry, we're going to dominate in power, and in five to ten years, like, we're going to be, you know, relatively, you know, in their view, hopefully, you know, relatively equal in terms of, like, overall computing power. And then I want to get a sense of,

Starting point is 01:37:43 like, on the rare earth side, how solvable that is for the U.S. in your view. Well, Chris Miller on China Talk had a good line. Like, we're just, we're about to see what's easier to do, building EUV machine or build a rare earth's mining, you know, rare earth mines and refining facilities. So from the Chinese AI perspective, I do think that their decision to sort of say, we don't even want your age 20s is fascinating. On the one hand, it may just be a ployed to get Blackwell to be like, oh, okay, like we don't want this. We'll sell you even harder drugs to use Latinx, like addiction.

Starting point is 01:38:25 phrase, but there also may be some sort of information mismatch because there obviously are lots and lots of sort of Chinese AI labs and hyperscalists who would love to buy Nvidia chips, but Huawei may have gotten into the ear of the state council saying, yo, like, we got this, don't worry, like, you know, we'll make you all the chips. Haven't, you know, hasn't like Singapore and Malaysia like spiked quite a bit? Like, can that demand not just flow there? Yeah, so it turns into a bit of a bridge. And this is something that the administration seems to be, well, look, if you're fine selling

Starting point is 01:39:04 the chips into China, yeah, why not just sell them into Malaysia and Singapore? I mean, I, for one, am more comfortable with that as a kind of intermediate step. But the problem with that is, like, what you're doing is providing this bridge for all these competitors of the U.S. AI stack to kind of like keep developing and staying on the frontier such that when Huawei really is able to scale, you know, potentially is able to scale to a level to compete with NVIDIA, you have these firms still running. And the question I really want to know is like, look, if we're, if we want to sell the AI stack to the world, why don't we just make, why aren't we selling like all of it? Like, why is it cool that we're just doing the

Starting point is 01:39:48 Nvidia stack and then like we're having where we're allowing Nvidia to do partnerships with like Alibaba cloud abroad and like sell that into into Malaysia. I mean, it would not be that hard to say, okay, like you want Nvidia chips. You should also be working with American hyperscalers and you should be buying from AI and buying Western models. That seems to me to be like a like a like there aren't too many like alternatives on the table. The US does have the the leverage there and I think it's a shame that that's not the line we're pushing where we're instead just sort of

Starting point is 01:40:21 like ending the monopoly of the AI stack at the chip layer and letting the clouds and models just you know go whichever way they will. So I think America needs a deep seek for energy, an American deep seek for energy, right? So what that would mean is like what did deep seek do? Like they

Starting point is 01:40:37 got, they jumped to our frontier. Yeah, so Jordan Schneider is the carcash is the cheap state. Yeah, really cheap really fast. But they stole like our fundamental thing. They're like, we need to steal how fast they can build energy over there and make it an American company. So however they build stuff. Or just like invent nuclear fusion.

Starting point is 01:40:57 Yes, John. Well, is that they're doing, right? Aren't they, aren't they installing? They're growing way more energy. So what is the company that's doing that over there? What's the organization over there? What do they have that's special? Let's, let's copy that.

Starting point is 01:41:12 Is that possible? I mean, the answer is like it would like the reason I went to nuclear fusion. is like it would be really nice to have a shortcut because the answer is like really boring and frustrating. But don't you think America will just get lucky like we always do discover, you know, some novel method of energy, but we always, anytime we need a resource, we just find some of it. I feel like we'll have.

Starting point is 01:41:37 Yeah. This is the whole Tyler Cowan thing. Like do not underestimate the elasticity of supply. It's not just finding it, right? It's like all of these, you know, global capitalism is now scared of their dependence on Chinese rare earths. And they kind of got a taste of that in April. You know, they should have learned their lesson in 2014 when China did this to Japan. But now it's really real.

Starting point is 01:42:03 And now, you know, all your VC friends that come on the show are going to understand that this is a much more investable, you know, finding, like, the solution to uterbium and, like, you know, manufacturing, like, lab grown. diamonds, like people are going to be willing to pay a premium for that stuff in a way that they maybe weren't even six months ago. Why are lab-grown diamonds important? There is actually a Sion Bannister company, Long Journey, is in something called Diamond Age. Amazing. But is that important in the rare earth context? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's an input to, I think, China. This is actually one of the ones that the world is doing okay on. China has like 70% of the market. But yeah, it's part of the sort of, you know, it's used in fabs as part of the sort of manufacturing process. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. How are you tracking the backlash to data center built out?

Starting point is 01:43:00 We were just talking to Sagar and Jetty about this. He thinks that like there's going to be a serious backlash. What's the deep state saying, Jordan? So here's the answer. You saw these, you may have seen these articles come out with the Secretary of the Army talking, to P.E. firms about how they're going to lease out land. It's like, all right, well, it's just like, let's just build this stuff on, yeah, just build this stuff on military bases. He's been on our show. No one's going to complain if it's just like in the middle of nowhere. Yeah. You think so. And, you know, you can pollute all you want on those. There are all these sort of regulatory exemptions for these places. I think the money's going to find a way.

Starting point is 01:43:41 The problem with this is like, sure, you know, the NIMBY stuff is, you know, the NIMBY stuff is, useful when it's like you're going when it's like one neighborhood right or two neighborhoods but like you can put this stuff almost anywhere and it is like 97% as useful as if you get to build it in in Virginia right so I'm not I'm not all that pessimistic I think okay maybe a few a few a few localities will be like loud enough to kick it out but America's pretty big there's a lot of places I like that? What do you think is going to happen on the humanoid front? We saw this really insane demo of a Unitree robot that was transitioning from walking to crawling like an insect, and now

Starting point is 01:44:26 Unitree is selling in Walmart, and it just feels like we're going to repeat the DJI thing, where we let every American have a humanoid in their home that, you know, a Chinese humanoid in their home, and I'm sort of surprised that we're running this back. It's interesting. I mean, there's there aren't real competitors at scale for the consumer market in the U.S. Yeah. I mean, there are very straightforward regulatory things that the Trump administration could do to ban them. There's also a handful of kind of dependencies that the Chinese robotics ecosystem still has on the U.S. Still has connected to the U.S.

Starting point is 01:45:06 So, you know, a lot of those chips come from TSMC. Like, there's a sort of like invidia software layer. maybe this is something that the Trump administration is thinking about when they're saying, oh, we're going to like ban critical software. So there are things that the U.S. can do to kind of slow down the system if they really want to. Humeroids are not, you know, even in Unitri's robots' current form, it's not like they're delivering incredible value to Americans. And by banning them, you're like, you know, reducing, you know, the productivity of businesses or anything like that. And so it feels like maybe in two years are actually providing some value across the economy. It'll be much

Starting point is 01:45:46 harder to go out and say, we're going to ban the cheap ones and you have to buy American. And it just feels, you know, I don't know. Well, what's really interesting is like in Ukraine, UGVs are a real thing now. So, you know, a lot of the like sort of resupplying infantry that's on the front line is an incredibly dangerous thing. And now they just have these little track robots that go back and forth. You've even seen videos. of like Casivac, so people who are injured, that they can't, you know, carry out in any other way being sort of like rolling themselves onto some, like, bed and having a drone drive them out. So I'm with you, Jory.

Starting point is 01:46:25 The stuff, like, they're kind of cute and fun for now, but we'll get, like, we'll get there pretty soon. It's not going, it's not impossible. Yeah, they're cute, they're cute, but at the same time, when it, when the humanoid starts crawling across your floor and you realize and your your human alarm you you know like a biological alarm going off that says like this thing like looks like it like from all the sci-fi movies i've seen this thing looks like it wants to kill me yeah it feels way more tractable to me like self-driving cars like you know you know OCRing text in an image it feels like something that we can just like

Starting point is 01:47:03 chip away at versus like the novel scientist scientific discovery thing that feels like very uniquely human, very complex, like much further out. This is just like make the motors work the right ways. It feels very simple. Like we're not trying to make someone superhuman at moving. Like it's just do the thing that any human can do. And we have tons of training data for us. Howard, what's happening in Chinese markets right now?

Starting point is 01:47:32 I don't know, man. I'm just the tech guy. I'm going to pass on that. Let me go back to the. You should spin up a small venture front on the side, then you'd be able to answer that question. Well, no, well, the thing that I am spinning up that I want your blessing from, actually, is so I've started a new series about war. I think it is actually just SportsCenter for war. We've been doing it once a week.

Starting point is 01:48:00 The current name is second breakfast, but I think WBPN would probably be a better thing. So I don't know what the licensing arrangement is here. This is a conversation for offline. I love the second breakfast concept. I love the topic selection. I would not recommend SportsCenter for war because there are just going to be episodes that are sensitive and it's hard to bring humor and levity to something that's really dark. Yeah, SportsCenter is about providing an entertainment layer over existing entertainment.

Starting point is 01:48:37 And I'm sure it's been a little dark this week with. all of the gambling ring action, but in general, most of the time, I don't think you want the, I don't think you want your face across the New York Times being like Jordan Schneider, the Sports Center for War guy.

Starting point is 01:48:54 Yeah, it is tricky. I mean, people have pitched us like, oh, are you going to do a trading card for the hostages being released or something in geopolitics and stuff? And it's like, it just feels like that's not our space. And when you re-contextextual is that even if it's a positive story, it still feels like, oh, there's like, there's real lives at stake

Starting point is 01:49:15 versus, like, you know, just money at stake, which is what we talk about, or just, or just points in the imaginary sports world, like, in the literal sports world, like, it is just a game. Yes, it's extremely high stakes at the Super Bowl, but it is just a game. And so you can have a lot of fun with that, and you can also have fun with just some VCs who are writing checks, but the war thing is a little bit, it requires a little bit more sensitivity, I think. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting because, like, this community is just chalk full of dark humor. So, you know, I've told this to a few people, and they just, like, think it's the funniest thing in the world. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:49:53 Even, like, going back and forth with like... I mean, like, the conversational element of talking about the war history, that makes so much sense, like, for sure. I don't know. But, all right, point, point... Where can people check it out? I know it's in the China Talk RSS feed. Do you have to hit substack? How are people getting into the ecosystem?

Starting point is 01:50:13 Yeah, it's just on the China Talk podcast feed for now. Maybe it'll end up metastasizing. But yes, second breakfast, if you need more Venezuela content in your life. I've been out of the loop on what do you think happens with Venezuela over the next month while we're here? You can give a little taster of your new show. well there's two there's two paths where well there I guess there's three paths they're on one he's just bluffing and we're going to move on to something else in a month but like having this many boats in the Caribbean sending a carrier makes me feel like it's a little more than that so then there's path number two where America fights like a covert war with a cartel um and then there's pass number three where we sort of like kill exfiltrate um end up intimidating out of the country, sort of Maduro and his like leadership team. And I don't think this administration is necessarily going to be that if you break it, you buy it mindset.

Starting point is 01:51:18 So, you know, then I guess the cartel takes over the country. I don't know. It is not clear to me that this has been entirely thought out. It just seems a lot like a Sicario cosplay at like a giant, horrific, on a giant and like really horrific scale. Maybe there's a better idea out there behind all of this. But the sort of head of Southcom for whom this operation would have been like the crowning achievement decided, like said he was going to retire one year into his three year tour of duty, which has basically like never happened in the past 40 years or so. So, I don't know, it's going to be really messy. The U.S. actually does have a kind of nice case study in what, in Columbia, and what we were able to do to sort of like

Starting point is 01:52:12 get the, you know, bring the, like, talk and fight the FARC out of existence over the course of the 2010. So that's the happy story that might manifest. But the thing there is, like, you were working with the central government. There were only 50 Americans on the ground doing the thing. And like now we're trying to get rid of a cartel that apparently the president is saying is like one in the same with the government itself. So I don't know. Big mess. Very far from like pivoting to China. But we'll get there eventually. You know, it's just, it's only a matter of time. I know. I think you got to maybe start with updating China talk. Maybe it's just, maybe it's just one. World talk. World talk. Just world talk.

Starting point is 01:52:57 world talk globe yeah globe world world globe radio no I think just Jordan Schneider I don't know I mean all these somebody in the chat said Saturday night live for human rights violations

Starting point is 01:53:06 so that's what you want to that's what you want to avoid with your whole sports center for war thing it could be rough although maybe if you just own it I mean like you listen to Tim Dillon he's like extremely candid

Starting point is 01:53:17 anyway we do have a guest waiting so thank you so much for coming on the show always good always good to catch let's do it again soon we'll talk to you later and have a great weekend good to see you guys

Starting point is 01:53:27 Cheers. Before we bring in Chase from Crusoe, let me tell you about numeralhq.com. Sales tax and autopilot, spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. We have Chase Locke Miller from Crusoe in the restroom waiting room. Now he's in the team you can Ultradone. Welcome to the show. You're looking fantastic. How are you, Chase?

Starting point is 01:53:46 Congratulations are in order. Give us the breakdown. What's the news today? You know, today we are announcing the closing of our Series Z round of funding, valuing the company at 10.4 billion. Gong. Gong. Another one.

Starting point is 01:54:02 Another one. 10.4 million. Two gong hits. I don't know. Fantastic. Fantastic. How are you describing where the company, what you do? It's such a fascinating.

Starting point is 01:54:18 What exactly do you do? Because, yeah, I mean, you've been doing somewhat of the same thing for a very long time. And yet there's been multiple eras in terms of what the, and customer has done, there's been where you sit in the stack, the type of size of project, scale of projects. So how are you describing the wheelhouse that, or the, the, the, yeah, where Crusoe fits. Yeah, I think putting it simply, you know, Cruceau is an AI factory company. So what that means, we're building, you know, these factories that produce intelligence. And this is both a hardware problem and a software problem. And we focus on,

Starting point is 01:54:56 on all of the things ranging from cultivating the energy and helping develop the energy resources needed to power AI infrastructure. We're building out the data centers themselves and redesigning them to fit these large-scale accelerated computing clusters. And then we also built out this whole software platform that operates these large-scale AI factories

Starting point is 01:55:17 so that they can actually be effective in producing intelligence and really enable our generation's greatest minds and entrepreneurs. to do their life's work and help build and scale their AI applications to impact people around the world. Is there a superlative that you're chasing in the neocloud market? Do you want to be the firm that can build bigger than anyone or else or faster than anyone else or more reliable? I mean, obviously you want to win on everything, but is there something that you're chasing that you think is like the true differentiator? Yeah, I think right now, I think right now,

Starting point is 01:55:56 speed is the biggest focus for the business in terms of being able to move very, very quickly. It's a very dynamic market. But certainly, you know, reliability, scale, cost, all these things really come into play. And ultimately, we want to deliver

Starting point is 01:56:12 for our customers what they need, what adds value to them. So, you know, being able to deliver, you know, to our cloud customers, the best price performance tradeoff for their infrastructure solutions along alongside a reliable, well-managed platform, I think, is ultimately our goal. But, you know, I think being able to do that very, very quickly right now is a major advantage. And it's something that's very difficult to replicate when you look at, you know, kind of what we did in Abilene, Texas, in terms of, you know, starting from from nothing into a large-scale AI factory that's, you know, managing, that's operating, you know, tens of thousands of GPUs at this point is, is a very, is a very,

Starting point is 01:56:56 important aspect to, um, you know, bringing this infrastructure to life. So Abilene's is up and running. Yes. We announced, uh, recently the first phases of, uh, uh, the 1.2 gigawat campus are, are up and operational today. Operational. That's incredible because I feel like there was like this whole press cycle about like, and oh, it's off track and it's like, this thing was announced like months ago. I expect these things to take years. I, I was, I feel like people aren't taking enough of victory lap there. Yeah, no, and I think there's been, you know, Stargate's been this like very overloaded term in terms of, you know, it's a company, it's a, you know, it's a site, it's a concept, it's a,

Starting point is 01:57:42 you know, it's like, what is Stargate? You know, I'm still not entirely sure, but, you know, there's, I think we got wrapped up a little bit in the, you know, rumors swirling that this thing's behind or, you know, that the company is behind. But, you know, the project has done extremely well. People took the most expensive, the most, the most ambitious vision and the shortest possible timeline. And that became what you were measured against, basically. And so it was like, unless, unless a trillion dollars is in the ground working in six months, like, it's over. It's like, wait, we never said that. Well, it's rightfully had a lot of pressure because the project got announced via

Starting point is 01:58:21 the president. That's not very standard for, you know, a launch. It's a good tip for startups. If you want a spokesperson, the president would be a great way. Tyler Cowen has a quote that's been going around quite a bit recently, which is like, don't underestimate the elasticity of supply in the context of, and it's been going around in the context of energy. It feels like Crusoe was started on this idea of like there actually is a lot of energy out there and there's real demand for it. You just got to go out and find it. How much is that ringing true as you kind of evaluate new sites and opportunities for your business? No, that's absolutely the case.

Starting point is 01:59:02 And I think that's one of the things that set us apart and enabled us to move quickly and build at scale is having this energy-first approach to developing the infrastructure. Part of our announcement today was announcing our energy pipeline, which is an excess of 45 gigawatts at this point. and, you know, putting into context, you know, the Abilene campus is 1.2 gigawatts. So, you know, it's, you know, orders magnitude larger, or an order and a half of magnitude and larger in terms of overall capacity there. I'm in New York City today, you know, it's something, you know, on the order of, you know, eight New York City's worth of power. So it's a very substantial amount of power that's going to be required fundamentally for AI to scale. and to really, really reach the ambitions and hopes of the industry. Last question, we'll let you go.

Starting point is 01:59:55 Last time you were on, we kind of walked through a little bit of a debunk of the, we're going to run out of water for data centers. What's your current thinking on the story that's emerging around like data centers are going to drive up my energy prices? Is that solvable on the short term? Is this going to be some short-term pain for long-term gain? Is it something that, you know, you need to rethink regulation or just speed up building of new energy? How are you thinking about that question?

Starting point is 02:00:26 Because it seems like it's going to get bigger and bigger. Yeah. So I actually found it fascinating. There was a report that came out recently that showed actually in markets with substantial data center investment. The overall cost to rate payers actually came down, you know, compared to other markets where, you know, There was less digital infrastructure being built where prices actually went up substantially. And, you know, I really see this trend playing out as a whole because what ends up happening is, you know, the digital infrastructure players, the folks building the data centers, at this point, you know, a lot of the energy market is saturated. And there isn't just, you know, a bunch of free power laying around, you know, underutilized, not doing much.

Starting point is 02:01:13 There's some of that, but it's becoming more and more scarce, which means that in order to realize all of these ambitions that are taking place in AI, we actually have to build out a lot of net new power. We need to build new power plants. We need to build new creative energy solutions to effectively energize this infrastructure. And when data centers are doing that, they're having to build out power capacity that meets their overall peak demands of the facility. and as a result, it ends up, you know, with some incremental power that is being underutilized and can become an asset to other participants in those energy markets and really actually bring down their overall cost of power because there's more abundant power. And that really goes in line with, you know, the Crusoe mission, which is accelerating the abundance

Starting point is 02:02:00 of energy and intelligence. We really view those two things as the key pillars of progress in this chapter for humanity. Yeah, I love it. I think it's definitely, I mean, there's a bunch of different political frameworks where you could use to understand where this is going, but it feels very solvable. One last question that probably would take 10 minutes to properly answer, but how much are you banking on nuclear on a shorter time horizon, if at all, talking, you know, five-year timeline? Yeah, so we're really excited with a lot of the advancements happening in the nuclear space.

Starting point is 02:02:39 You know, we have a number of partnerships across the SMR ecosystem, including a plan to energize the first SMR-powered AI factory in 2027. So, you know, that's going to be sort of a smaller scale deployment, but we think will be a great template for us to hopefully scale and bring new nuclear-powered AI infrastructure to life. It's also, you know, this has been a huge priority for Chris Wright. in terms of, you know, helping create a regulatory framework for nuclear and sort of reevaluating the NRC, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, in terms of, you know, how do we actually enable the private sector to build the energy necessary to power demands of society, data centers, you know, being a big, big component of that.

Starting point is 02:03:32 So, you know, very excited, and I think it's going to be a huge win. And then, you know, there's also the big nuclear plan. plants that, you know, I'm excited to see come to life again as well. You know, Westinghouse, you know, is announcing, you know, a number of very big APW 1,000 campuses that, you know, we think we'll play another big part in, in terms of getting the power we need for intelligence. I'm very excited about that. I hope that we get all those campuses online as fast as possible. Well, thank you so much for coming by the show. Sorry to get you late. We will talk to you soon. Congratulations on the Massachusetts. Congrats to the whole team.

Starting point is 02:04:07 guys always great to see you yeah fantastic progress we'll talk to you soon have a great weekend cheers up next we have Tucker from Orion Technologies we are running a little bit behind let me tell you about fin dot AI the number one AI agent for customer service number one in performance benchmarks number one in competitive bakeoffs number one ranking on G2 and let's bring in Tucker for a quick hit of the gong give us the news tell us what you're building we welcome to the show would love to ring the gong for you how are you doing i'm doing well i can't hear you really it sounds like you're speaking in slow motion oh odd check check check check one two uh orion technologies you're coming out of stealth would love to hear about the rays if you can take us through just the high

Starting point is 02:04:56 level we can ring the gong and maybe we can try and have you back on later do we have Tucker, let's see. We might need to move on if we have technical difficulties. We can always have you back on the show another day. Should we move on, All right? Can you guys hear me? We can hear you. We can hear you great. We can hear you great. Let's see. I can hear you guys, but it sounds very slow for some reason. Okay, we'll let you do. My name's Tucker. I'm the CEO of, So I'm the CEO of Orient Technologies, and we're coming out of stealth after a $3.5 million pre-seat. Let's go.

Starting point is 02:05:38 Jordy, ring that gong. Thank you very much. Take us one level deeper about the problem, the solution, what you're building. And then we do have to move on, but please give us a little bit more on the progress of the company, some of the decisions that you've made, how you're thinking about building the company. Yeah. So we are building essentially the interoperability layer for manned and unmanned aircraft. So what does that actually mean? We enable man and unmanned aircraft to communicate, coordinate, and deconflict. And we're starting with heterogeneous assets. So drones built from different vendors within cities and around airports today. Congratulations. We're going to have to have you back on. Later, we'll do a technical check next time. But have a great rest of your day. Have a good weekend. And congrats on the race. we'll talk to you soon while we bring in our next guest let me tell you about adio

Starting point is 02:06:32 customer relationship magic adio is the AI native CRM that builds scales and grows your company to the next level you can get started for free new technical difficulty unlocked we haven't seen that before we have Catherine from Valthos coming in to the tbPN ultradome she I believe is in the restream waiting room let's bring in Kathleen uh welcome back to the show we had you on the show I and it was a very fun conversation and And we, there were some things that we could talk about. There were some things that we couldn't talk about. I'm glad that we're here today, and we have plenty to talk about.

Starting point is 02:07:04 But please kick us off with an introduction on a little bit more on yourself and the company and what you're announcing today. Yeah, last time I was here, I was so stealthy. But now very excited to announce what we've been working on. I'm Kathleen. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Valthos, which is the next generation biodefense company. So we were trying to build infrastructure for American biodefense. Amazing. And when we had you on, there was some great, wasn't it?

Starting point is 02:07:31 There was some story in the news about like some Chinese like scientists that were bringing some type of bio weapon around or at least working on it. So good to have you back with some more happy news. Yeah, I'd love to know the state of like what are the case studies that you're latching on to, you know, in the early days of Anderol. there was this narrative around the rising power of China and our decrepit military systems. People would talk about the failure of the, or not the, the delays with the F-35 program. Do you have particular case studies and stories that you like to ground the story of your company with? Yeah, absolutely. So when we're talking about biodefense broadly, the big problem is asymmetry.

Starting point is 02:08:18 So it is just so much easier, cheaper, and faster to make a pathogen than it is to make any kind of cure. And that's just like at the heart of everything we're talking about. It was true before AI, but what's really changed is how some of these new AI capabilities are magnifying that type of asymmetry. It's two big ways that we're focused on in terms of the case studies you were saying. The first is more about uplift. So it's how many people, how much technical skill set does it take to actually engineer a pathogen? And that's just dropping week over week. So we used to be worried about these sophisticated state-sponsored programs.

Starting point is 02:08:50 You can read what our folks in defense are focused on. in Russia and North Korea. Now we can talk about like a couple students maybe at the grad level we have access to a lab and like that's probably going down to one or two

Starting point is 02:09:03 as these capabilities to expand. So like massive massively different landscape. The second side is just like how potentially lethal can these fits be. So we're getting I think we have more

Starting point is 02:09:18 technical difficulties. It's a technical difficulty day. Oh no. It's Friday. You're back. slow, but you're back. I'm back. Please. Maybe I can reframe the conversation, not to kind of just cut you off and restart, but people have been saying, we need an Anderil for bio for a while. Is that an appropriate moniker? And maybe we could use the Anderl example as understanding a little

Starting point is 02:09:43 bit deeper on what you want to build, because I think of Anderl as very much, you know, separate from Palantir. They're building hardware. They're building specific programs record for the DOD, competing against the primes? Are there companies that you're going to be competing with out of the gate? How do you think about the shape of the business as it grows? Is this on our side? Are we having technical difficulties on our side today? It might be a Zoom. It might be a Zoom thing. Is there a major attack? Let's flip over to the production team. What do you guys have to say for yourselves? What's going on? I don't know. Is it AWS? It could easily be us. I seem to be back now. Okay. Yeah, I think we have, I think we're back. One more chance

Starting point is 02:10:31 at talking about the Andrewle comparison. I would say probably much closer to Palantir than Angel. I mean, one of the obvious ones is like what does our product look like? And we're talking about software and how we bring like the best frontier capabilities to both understand what a threat is and then very quickly design a countermeasure to it. How do we take those things that are largely in academic labs emerging really quickly and put it into something that's operational? It could actually react in the time as real-time data flows in and you actually need to design a countermeasure. But in terms of the overall, do we need private sector innovation in the space? Absolutely. The people in defense and health that are absolutely the front lines of this keeping us safe

Starting point is 02:11:13 now. The pace of biotech innovation is so massively outpacing our ability to react to it that like we have to start bringing these types of tools to really augment the defenses that we have today. Yeah. Question from the chat, Trey asked. Moderna designed the C-19 vaccine in two days in a clinical dev today. The slow part is often validation, trials, manufacturing, and access distribution. Is Valthos solving for that for biodefense? Thanks, Trey.

Starting point is 02:11:44 Yes, I think a huge part of it is how accurate you can make predictions that are coming from computational models, how do this translate into clinical development, translational? Can you actually have a really precise understanding of what these therapeutics look like as soon as you start designing them in silico? So that's a huge part of our focus is as more and more generative methods for countermeasure design come online. How could we help the people that are designing those drugs really quickly understand whether it will be effective against whatever kind of evolution we're seeing in terms of

Starting point is 02:12:19 the pathogen landscape. I think on the manufacturing and supply chain side, another massive problem we think about overall biosecurity for America. It's not the first challenge we're taking on, but it's certainly something we'll partner on in the future. How do you think about, I don't know, there's like, like, ISR versus like actual bombs or something in the Anderol context. Like Palantir might make a map of like where all the bad guys are and then Anderol might be the one that builds the missile, how do you think about, like, does America have the ability to pull up a dashboard of every different strain of flu that is at LAX right now? Because I know LAX is like a famous petri dish of, you know, just like different flus and colds because everyone's traveling

Starting point is 02:13:08 from all over. Do we have the ability as a country to actually understand what's going on by a logically across the country? Largely, no, it's getting better. I think there's two dimensions to it. So a lot of the innovation we've seen in the last couple years is focused on, do we even have, like, the lens? Like, is the data even flowing in of what's circulating in LAX? I'm closer to JFK, so that's the one that really hits home that I get worried about.

Starting point is 02:13:37 The part that we're focused on and what I think has to be the next step is how do you take those data inputs and make them actionable so you can do something with it? So pathogens aren't static. It's not like there is something today and that's what we need to worry about. It's how is this changing, which means that in two weeks, what is the shape of this that we're going to have to hit. So a big part of what we're focused on is trying to understand these are the things that are emerging today. How quickly do we know that there are threats? And then what do we need to change in terms of the countermeasures that we have to be ready for what's ever coming. So really focused. And I think that's where a lot of the Palantir analogy comes in. It's not data for data sake. It's how do you actually pull that data. into the decision-making process so that you can start seeing changes in operations and that's what we're excited to do that makes sense give us the fundraising news what happened what's coming out of still well we are very proud to announce the re-raised 30 million congratulations incredible who are the backers a bunch of no names right you really had to scrape the bottom of the barrel you had to put together rag tag group of you can barely call these guys venture capitalists everyone wants to prevent bio weapons what can I say no it's a murder as well you got a bunch of great uh a bunch of great firms in ff we do we have founders fund and lux they've been with us from the beginning and then we just

Starting point is 02:15:02 hit open AI their startup friend join in helping the round they're like they have been ringing the alarm on what the bio the risk of some of these new frontier methods are for bio like way before anyone and we're super excited to partner with them to try to stop it. Well, congratulations. Incredible. We'd love to have you back on the show whenever the next announcement is, whenever the next progress point comes

Starting point is 02:15:24 or whenever, hopefully we don't have to be giving you a call when bad stuff happens. We can just talk about progress. And you'll be like a good cornerback in the NFL. We won't hear about you because you will be defending us and we won't be calling out. Oh, perfect. We'll prevent the headline.

Starting point is 02:15:41 Exactly. Thanks a lot. Thanks so much. Have a great regrets to the team. Let me tell you about 8Sleep.com. I put up a generational run last night, 98. I slept for like 10 hours. It was fantastic.

Starting point is 02:15:54 Jordy, how'd you do? 91. How many hours did you actually sleep? Let's pull it up while we bring in our next guest. I slept eight hours and 42 minutes. Wow. And I got to the gym. Get a pod five.

Starting point is 02:16:08 I got to the gym at least 30 years before you. My drive is twice as long. This whole week is going to last for me. I was slacking. But our next guest is from NVIDIA. Dionne Harris is here to break it down for us. How are you doing? And looking incredibly sharp.

Starting point is 02:16:23 You look fantastic. Thanks for having me. I didn't want to make you guys look bad. So I even threw on the jacket. You're a fan of the show, by the way. Thanks so much. So great to have you on. And great to meet.

Starting point is 02:16:33 We'd love to get a little bit of an introduction on yourself and where you sit in Nvidia. It's not the smallest company in the world. It is, in fact, the largest company in the world. But how do you position yourself within the firm? What's top of mind for you today? Sure. Thanks for having me again.

Starting point is 02:16:51 So Dionne Harris, I'm the senior director of our HBC AI and Cloud Solutions Group, so not a very imaginative marketing name, which means I run a lot of our HBC, scientific computing national labs. Obviously, we're here in D.C., so lots of engagements supporting a lot of our national labs, both here in the U.S. and across the world. And of course, AI and cloud is, it speaks for itself in terms of a lot of our

Starting point is 02:17:14 hyperscale clients, as well as the cloud, cloud providers who are building and delivering our platform. So engaging with a lot of those, those folks, partners, customers, and internally, obviously, to bring those solutions to market. Yeah. How big, do you have like a headline number that you're thinking about broadly for just AI infrastructure? It's the hottest topic these days. But how do you think about forecasting AI infrastructure and where we'll be in a few years? Well, you know, I think Jensen has been on record, and I think it's a pretty sound sort of estimate. We expect it to be about $3 to $4 trillion in AI infrastructure.

Starting point is 02:17:52 Yeah, yeah, that's a big number. It's with a T. So, and I think what's really driving that, and I've been listening to the show and here, you know, there's a ton of demand for how and where AI can be put to use. Of course, we're familiar with the chatbots that we, you know, use and to specify, beat up our email communications and to, you know, review and spell check, those are great use cases. But what's really exciting is when you see it being used to detect new drugs. And so there's new use cases that are happening in drug discovery all the time. I do a ton of work

Starting point is 02:18:24 with national labs and seeing how it's being applied to climate and weather, being able to replace a lot of our old numerical-based approaches. And so using AI to go and tackle really big problems that we all care about, even if we don't see and use those. applications every day, we're impacted by them, right? And so what's really driving that number is, like I said, also looking at how AI is being brought to industries. You're going to hear a lot about next week when we announced at GTC how we're helping industry adopt AI. And this is really important, not just in terms of the bottom line of U.S. companies, but really making the U.S. competitive in a global scale, right? Making sure that we can deploy and run and build and manufacture

Starting point is 02:19:06 at an efficiency that makes it competitive on a global scale. And so that's really going to be a lot of what we talk about here at GTC next week. Do you have one of the easier jobs in tech? Just because if I'm a data center operator, I have to answer questions about, well, am I using natural gas or clean energy? And if I'm an inference model creator, I have to answer questions about, are the answers truthful or are they fair? or am I generating something that's valuable or am I generating slop?

Starting point is 02:19:38 But Nvidia, I feel like has the perfect, it's just the perfect business because you're already optimizing for the most efficiency. So no one can say, oh, well, you're not taking energy efficiency seriously. Like, that's the entire point of business. And no one can say you're unprofitable. And no one can say you're a profitable. So like, are you feeling good right now? Are you feeling happy?

Starting point is 02:19:58 I don't know. Yeah, what's the energy like even internally at Nvidia? I'm curious. to be such a wild environment. It's definitely incredibly crazy right now. But what I would say is just because there's so much interesting excitement around not just AI, but accelerated computing. A lot of what we do, we're an accelerated computing company at heart.

Starting point is 02:20:20 And there's over a trillion dollars of infrastructure and still moving from CPU to GPUs. In fact, Oracle just last week announced that they're going to be accelerating their classic database. No way. Now, that's, most people don't think about databases. That's crazy on GE. And they're back-ending every major application. And so, you know, when we think about Nvidia, you know, obviously accelerated computing is how we've really got started. And now that we're in this era of AI, you know, we're really looking to help power every application across multiple industries.

Starting point is 02:20:52 But to answer your question, we wake up thinking about how can we make our platform better? Sure. And how can we make it more efficient? Because that's really at the core of the value for our customers. But we're actually doing a ton of work beyond just our core platforms. In fact, our solutions are shaping and redefining how the data center overall is built. And so a lot of the work that we're doing is building solutions and blueprints and reference architectures that help the entire ecosystem get ready for what we're building, which delivers more efficiency at the end state.

Starting point is 02:21:23 So again, I think our position is unique in the marketplace and that we totally see and understand all the new models that are being developed and coming to market. market. We obviously understand what our products are going to be able to do today and going forward. And we, therefore, are giving lots of insight into all the mechanical, electrical, and plumbing infrastructure providers. The power generation folks. Yeah. How do you think about balancing? We're giving lots of feedback all the way up and down the supply chain. Yeah, that Oracle database on GPU thing is, it feels massive to me. It feels like very significant, like, immediately, very tangible, you know, performance benefits, I can imagine. I haven't seen the actual stats, but I imagine it's extremely, it's going to be more efficient

Starting point is 02:22:06 or faster. But how do you balance marketing, like, sort of stories like that, stories about the AI build out with stuff that's more futuristic, more further out. There was a lot of debate on the timeline this week about... StarClap. Yeah, how fast GPUs will be in space and everyone saying, like, look, like, you know, We love this founder. We're having them on the show, actually, next week.

Starting point is 02:22:30 It's a really exciting project. But I think everyone kind of agrees that this is not going to happen tomorrow. And the rendering is more of a sci-fi movie than they put out. It shows like the whole truckloads of GPUs moving around in space. How do you think about balancing that from the NVIDIA brand perspective? Well, from our perspective, you know, we recognize that, like I said, there's a lot of interest and investment. Like we talked about that, three to four trillion dollars that's going to be invested. in AI infrastructure. And of course, that infrastructure is going to be deployed, you know, in lots

Starting point is 02:23:01 of different areas. Obviously, as we've talked about how a lot of the concentration historically has been around, you know, highly populated dense areas. But now we recognize, you know, AI factories can exist anywhere. They can exist anywhere there's where there's, you know, cheap, clean power. And so obviously space is someplace where there's lots of renewable energy. So, yeah, I suspect that will certainly be a place where data centers will land eventually. But right now, you know, we're really focused on how can we help build the infrastructure that's right in front of us and help really deploy that in most efficient performance way as possible. And of course, along the way, make sure that we're adding value

Starting point is 02:23:40 because that's really what we're here to do for not just ourselves, but the broader ecosystem. You would laugh. We were running the numbers on building a hearth or a woodpowered data center our server here at the studio. We think we think they're surprisingly doable. Like out of of like a normal fireplace, we believe you could potentially power eight H-100s and fine-tuned GPT-O-SS, however you want it, over the course of a day, basically. We haven't, we haven't, we want to be the first NVIDIA customer to be focused on the wood-powered data center. Yes.

Starting point is 02:24:16 It's our own part of the market map. It's very cozy to chop firewood and boil water as they did hundreds of years ago. Well, I'm super excited for GTC next week. Yeah, this is great. Thank you so much for giving us a little preview. For giving us the preview. And have a great weekend. We'll talk to you soon.

Starting point is 02:24:35 Great hanging. Appreciate it. Thanks a lot. Before we bring in our next guest, let me tell you about public.com investing for those to take it seriously. We have multi-ass investing industry that yields and are trusted by millions. Soon billions. I think we might actually have a one-minute break before our next guest comes in.

Starting point is 02:24:54 There's no one in the Restream waiting room. Or is there? No, not yet. So, give us a post, Jordy Hayes. If someone's smart, if someone is smart but has bad aesthetics,

Starting point is 02:25:04 Normies will not take them seriously. This is good. Aesthetic contains real information. This post is from Defender of Basic. That this category of smart people can't read, and if they gain power, these blind spots will lead to their undoing. I completely botched this reading.

Starting point is 02:25:22 This is a mess. Here's another one. Alex Danko. Sundar Pichai said yesterday, or a couple days ago, new breakthrough quantum algorithm published in nature today, our Willow chip has achieved the first ever verifiable quantum advantage. Willow ran the algorithm, which we've named Quantum Echoes, 13,000 times faster than the best classical algorithm on one of the world's fastest supercomputers. This new algo can explain interactions between atoms and a molecule using nuclear magnetic resonance, paving a path to. toward potential future uses in drug discovery and material science. The results is verifiable, meaning its outcome

Starting point is 02:26:02 can be repeated by other quantum computers or confirmed by experiments. This breakthrough is a significant step toward the first real world application of quantum computing, and we're excited to see where it leads. Again, see this positioning right? It's positioned as an internal science project. Of course, he's saying it's a step toward

Starting point is 02:26:21 the first real world application of quantum. Did you see what Martin Scully said? what do you say contrived results still not faster slash advantage he's like so bearish Alex Danko though says I'm

Starting point is 02:26:35 okay I'm sorry if this is a dumb question Elon said congrats and I think I when I see this and I see the algorithm and I see what like how they're talking about it it really does feel like yes over the next decade like there could be

Starting point is 02:26:45 some really really powerful niche use cases that are extremely it's a good it's a good quantum computer sir I agree I agree but one more post did you want to explain why quantum computers look like that

Starting point is 02:26:57 because that's what Alex Danko is asking and there is an answer it's because they're they need to be cooled they need to be really cold and so you have to hang it instead of attaching to the floor each layer of the chandelier

Starting point is 02:27:14 is colder down to the last one where the quantum computation is taking place and so you see this chandelier funneling smaller and smaller and colder and colder until you get to the very but very tip. I don't know. Interesting. Well, we have our next guest in the Restream waiting room. Let's bring him in to the TPPN Ultridone. How are you doing? Burké. Welcome. Good to see you. What's happening? Huge, huge day. Congratulations on all the news.

Starting point is 02:27:40 In the fall ecosystem. Thank you. Thank you. So today we are doing our inaugural generative media conference. I'm in the ferry building. Very cool. You can probably tell. A beautiful venue. Yeah, it's a big milestone for us. It's, you know, we thought that generative media really needs its space, and, you know, we need to talk about it because it's an extremely big deal. And, you know, we thought we would, we would honor this industry by, by, you know, throwing a big event where foundational models are coming here. People from the industry are here. Jeffrey Katzenberg, actually. no legend that was that was pretty awesome yeah yeah so what uh what what are what are attendees trying

Starting point is 02:28:31 to uh understand or or advance uh yeah what are people talking about yeah yeah um there is there is like i mean this is this is becoming a full industry right so it's it's many there's many kinds of people here so there's people from foundational model labs so they're trying to build these models compete against the big big giants Right. And it's a very diverse space. So unlike the language model market where you have a few big winners, here we're seeing like hundreds of companies building models, customizing models and using, you know, their customers are using in production. So there's foundational models. There's people from the industry. So media, we had a talk from an architecture firm that's using generative media and production. And yeah, like early stage founders. And, you know, even like even like. like some big Hollywood names, like big production studios. Yeah, are people focused now on benchmarks, e-vals, certain niche capabilities? Like, we're starting to see this, like, kind of refragmentation, I feel like,

Starting point is 02:29:41 where SORA can do cameos and V-O-3 could do audio and certain KREA can do lip-sinking well. And there's all these different sub-applications where it feels like, If you're a buyer of generative media of tokens or frames, I guess, you are really looking for the right tool for the job and you might have to kind of go through the haystack to find the needle that fits your use case specifically. Is that the general vibe? Yeah, absolutely. I think there is definitely alignment on how these models are getting more specialized. On one hand, there's, there's general models. Like, I think VO is, it's pretty general, right? Like, it can do many things. But on another hand, you need, you need more and, you know,

Starting point is 02:30:29 what we're hearing from people is you need more and more specific workflows. So workflows is a very big topic. And we are now in the like kind of usefulness, utility phase of, of this whole space where like, there we go. Let's give it up for utility and usefulness. Love it. So, so we're, what we're seeing is, you know, people are building these, building this tooling, right? So they're building the application layer such that, you know, these downstream users from marketing, you know, architecture, gaming, movies, so that like creatives can start using this technology. Yeah. How is, what's your view on how Hollywood has most recently been kind of navigating Gen AI? We've heard from folks in the industry that people are experimenting with it, but they're

Starting point is 02:31:18 hesitant to even talk about it too much because they get so much blowback from, you know, we're here down in L.A. There's a lot of people that aren't excited about Gen A.I. For a number of reasons. But how do you see Hollywood navigating this current moment? Yeah. I mean, we're definitely feeling like a shift in the vibes. So they're definitely, they're definitely turning towards the side of like experimentation. I know that there's like a few good projects in the pipeline that are going to come out. I think we're going to see this shift happening towards the end of the year, early next year. And yeah, we see, we see very big players actually embracing this tech. And, yeah, it's going to be. Somebody in the chat just said, you guys should get Hollywood on

Starting point is 02:32:04 as a guess. We'll work on that. Another question I had is, I don't know how much you can share, but what sort of adoption been like so far, how quickly are a number of different application layer companies kind of turning it on and and and uh burning up the GPUs yeah um it's been we don't have like full visibility into soros adoption but from what we know is it is a very good model for like a very certain um aesthetic right like you probably tell that it is extremely fine tuned on you know social content so so yeah it is getting it is getting uh amazing adoption, but, you know, this space is virtually infinite. Like, there's literally all sorts of things you can do. That's, that's why we believe, like, this, we're just in the

Starting point is 02:32:58 beginning. And yeah, it's just, it's just a form factor, right? And, and it's just one kind of model. We think there's going to be many, many versions. Totally. Can you walk me through? My immediate reaction to Sores, like, I could see this being used for, like, very specific, if you wanted to generate UGC style ads, it could probably do a decent job at that. But that same application would also want to generate ads in a bunch of different styles, right? Cinematic styles, things like that. Exactly. And yeah, like, don't get me wrong, I think, you know, that model, like, it's the, it's the pre-training versus post-training. Like, it's, you know, I would speculate that it is really fine-tuned on this, like, social use

Starting point is 02:33:40 case, but that doesn't mean that there is no, you know, amazing model in, in the back of it. So, so technically that they can crank out different things for different use cases. Totally. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I could go so much deeper on all this and all the comparisons of all the models.

Starting point is 02:33:57 We'll have to have you back because I know you're at your conference and obviously need to get back and meet customers and whatnot. But thank you so much for taking the time to stop out. Thanks for having. Excited to have a bunch more folks

Starting point is 02:34:08 on in the next 30 minutes or so. Yeah, this would be great. We'll talk to you soon. Happy great weekend. Jeez, guys. Let me tell you about adquick.com. out-of-home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye headaches of out-of-home advertising, only ad-quick combines technology, out-of-home expertise, and data to enable efficient,

Starting point is 02:34:23 seamless ad buying across the globe. Our next guest is Glenn Solomon from Notable. We'll bring him in to the TV pin Ultrodome. What's going on? Can you hear me? I cannot hear you. We don't have audio yet. No audio. I'm sure the production team is working on it. I will tell you when i can hear you so just uh i guess keep chatting i guess still still nothing how we doing folks we got nothing we got nothing coming through aGI is just days away and uh we need a GI to put some resources towards uh technical difficulties for for podcast live streamers um anyways we will i'll kill time uh here's a here's a post yesterday sounds good okay i think we got some we got something coming

Starting point is 02:35:21 you i can hear you ah jordy great this is glen it's so great to see you glen uh an amazing amazing setup here are you uh did you already give a talk or you are you are you going to give a talk or are you just uh i've been in the i've been i've been enjoying the uh the amazing uh talk so far and i'm excited to talk to you about them amazing uh why don't you give a quick intro on on yourself and your firm, and then we can get into reactions from the event. Sure, yeah. So I'm Glenn Solomon, managing partner at Notable Capital. We've been in business for 25 years. We're a global venture capital firm focused on software infrastructure. And one of the key personas we focus on as a software developer, we backed companies over the

Starting point is 02:36:09 years like Versel recently, HashiCorp, some great businesses that we've been. been very fortunate to work with the year. What was the exact moment that you've founded the firm? 25 years ago, 2000. No, I know, but like what was it 2000? Was it March? Was it during the crash? Like when, when, do you remember the month specifically? It was February. So early in the year. So you basically went on a roller coaster. You started up here and then just that's a little known fact, though. It's actually good to found a firm right about then because you don't get it. You can deploy, you can deploy in the Valley of Despair. Wow.

Starting point is 02:36:51 Exactly. That is a great, great timing. Amazing. So, yeah, walk us through some reactions to the event so far. So, you know, it's been really cool to be here. It's the first generative media conference that Fowles put on, really their first user conference. And there's about 300 people here. And you can just feel the energy amongst the developers who are building all kinds of amazing

Starting point is 02:37:15 applications using general media. It kind of reminds me I was lucky enough to invest early in HashiCorp in 2016. I was at their first user conference up in Portland. And there was 150 people in the room. Basically, anybody who wanted to attend could. And it was a bunch of very intrepid DevOps professionals who saw the future somewhat similar to HashiCorp. And the reason I mentioned is because four or five years later at their user conference in San Francisco, there was 5,000 people. And I think this is the start of something very similar. We're going to see this industry grow dramatically over the next several years, and it would

Starting point is 02:37:52 not surprise me if, you know, a dream force lookout. This general media conferences could be really big over the next several years. I believe it. What Burk-Ka was saying there's an architecture firm talking at the event on how they're using, what are some of the other maybe more like edge cases, niche use, cases that you're seeing? Well, definitely advertising, marketing, you know, your feed on social media, entertainment, education, all of these things are, people spend dramatic amounts of money today, hundreds of billions of dollars on content production for traditional media.

Starting point is 02:38:33 I think that's all going to shift over time. And we're just starting to see the early early days of that, but clearly there's going to be a shift because using generative media, you can move much quicker, it's less expensive, you could be much more targeted in what you do. So I think all those industries are in experimentation mode, maybe for second inning, but it's early. But one of the things I heard about today that I thought was really interesting is really the net new applications that I think are going to come as well, things that don't exist yet today. A good maybe a harbinger of that would be, like if you've ever been to the sphere, in Las Vegas, you know, you look at the geometry there and the just sheer size of the place,

Starting point is 02:39:14 traditional media couldn't really solve that problem and create an immersive experience. And so that's a great area where genera of media is doing something that couldn't be done in the past. So I think you're going to see both replacement and over time net new. And I think that's why people are so excited about what's going on here today. Makes a lot of sense. Yeah, that's amazing. Well, thank you so much for stopping by the show. We'd love to talk to you more, but

Starting point is 02:39:38 Yeah, the first guest appearance from a podium. Yeah. I'm a long time listener, first time caller. This has been awesome. Thank you guys. Amazing.

Starting point is 02:39:50 Well, come back on again soon and have fun out there. Give our best to everybody at the event. We will. Thanks. Good, man. Cheers. We'll talk to you soon. Let me tell you about Bezell.

Starting point is 02:40:01 You got to go to get Bezell.com. Just do it. Get a hitter. They're available now to source you any watching on the planet. I'm really pushing John to get the cubitist. I think it's time. Green dial. I wish I had more time to give you the full, my full case for it.

Starting point is 02:40:22 But we will move on to our next guest. We have Diego Rodriguez from Kraya in the restroom waiting room. Welcome to the show, Diego. How are you doing? Welcome. What's happening? Talk to me about the AI suite for creatives. I was particularly interested in this debate between like chopping wood and creating new workflows for specific video generation or AI use versus like trying to instantiate some things on the fly.

Starting point is 02:40:48 I always see these like I made this amazing AI video. Here's how I did it and it's piecing together like three different steps where they fine tuned on their face and they did a special model that had a beginning and an ending frame and then they did some sort of control net on top of it. and then they upresed it. And how are you thinking about actually piecing all the different tools together in a way that someone, it's like a, the final UI effectively? I mean, like, I mean, I'm here like at the Falc Conference and I talk actually exactly about that. Okay, perfect.

Starting point is 02:41:23 I don't know. It's kind of frustrating to see people being like this, the I generated, this is not. Dude, it's a new medium. Yeah. Like, it's just a new medium. So like whenever I see a frame by say now, how. Hollywood is starting to toy around with these tools, like, the best people tell you like, like you, you don't ask them, like, is they use Photoshop or After Effects or Houdini or AI?

Starting point is 02:41:46 He's like, do it all of them. Like this was, even a dialogue. When we were discussing about a certain idea, that's also part of the process of making things. I think we're far from automating, like true storytelling, which is why we need tools. Where's the pencil for the latent space? That's what we need. yeah um what how do you think about um uh what the actual product looks like that people want at each level of scale like enterprise is fine with APIs and they will have a team of software engineers like

Starting point is 02:42:20 build the tools exactly that they need then the prosumer might be fine with a node based workflow or something that's a little bit more you know fine tuning parameters under the hood but then they want something that's maybe repeatable that they can jump in and out of. And then the final consumer wants, like, you know how you see those, like, dedicated app just for, it's like just the face swapping app. And like face swapping is obviously a feature that should exist in the node-based workflow in Crea, in a pro sumer, in a professional tool. So how do you think about, like, checking the box on all the features out of the, out of the

Starting point is 02:42:56 gate versus leaving enough flexibility that your users might get lost? because you don't handhold as much. I think that these barriers are, let's call them, vestigial concepts from our culture. We think those barriers are there because of where we come from, which is like, okay, we used to have their professional who goes to Photoshop and everyone that maybe doesn't need as much control goes to something like Canva.

Starting point is 02:43:29 And then if you're just a random person that is towing around with making stuff, then you use a certain iOS app or whatever. But the reality is that a lot of these barriers used to just be APIs, like a certain plugin or a certain API call or whatever. And with ViveCoding, they are blurring out now. So I actually see consumers who ask me, can you get an API? Because I bifcoded some things. And then I actually get enterprises being like, oh, your UI is actually one of the best ones.

Starting point is 02:43:56 And that's why we are doing these things. So I think that this is a time full of uncertainty. And when you have uncertainty, the only thing that can ground you is first principle. So you have to kind of like go back to one key. Go back to the beginning. Like think about what is truly true and what is your marketing fluff. So the way I'm thinking is. Do you think images and video are two separate products long term?

Starting point is 02:44:20 Like Premiere Pro is a different product than Photoshop. They are different. And even Lightroom is another product in the Adobe ecosystem. I can imagine you can, I mean, it's just pixels. You can clearly put all the tools in one bucket, one app. Adobe didn't. Is that vestigial? Or will we see another separation?

Starting point is 02:44:43 I think separation will be here in the short term and midterm. Because you can argue that, like, as we advance, there's actually even more separation, right? Like at first, books were only in a certain way, and now there's a myriad of formats and images. and like, can you even do books for, like, you know, for kids where they even have things inside that they, like, animations even. So I feel like as we push the medium, and by medium, I mean, the latent space forward, we will actually realize that we need way more tools than we thought we need it. And that's why we're starting, like we're seeking out like this Cambrian explosion of like,

Starting point is 02:45:23 okay, we have control net, we have ConfuI, we have Crea, but then in Korea, you can, like, jump in between tools and then you can use, say, an image model within many, tools. And that's the key part, which is you said, it's just pixels. And he's like, yeah, but guess what? A song can be represented as pixels if you have a, like, a certain frequency diagram. It's just pixels too. So at the end of the day, when you scan sheet music, that's pixels. Yeah. So what we have at the end of the day is a technology that can understand like information in almost its more distilled form. That technology can move around products, but the product will be different. However, they will all use that same technology. And

Starting point is 02:46:01 what we're seeing. Note-based tool, image tool, iOS app all connect to our image model, for instance, with Crea 1 or Flux context or whatever, but it's different applications. Yeah. Fascinating. We like to hit the gong for guests. How many, how many users does Korea have? What's the latest? What's the latest number? Give us some numbers. What did you got? The big numbers. Last time I checked sign-ups. It was like over 30 million. Oh. Congratulations. that's wild

Starting point is 02:46:32 yeah and and then but like I'm actually more interested on participating in like the enterprise because I'm starting to see true business adoption and that's where it starts to be like still being a fad very auspicious gong ringing I don't know if you can hear it but the gong is still ringing for you yeah something about how I hit it it's very good it was a very good omen it was a bullish hit it was very good omen

Starting point is 02:46:55 for your company 30 million you know we I just want to take a second because we get lost in like the AI boom or whatever that 30 million is so many that is such a huge that is such a huge impact to have on a product that you've built so sincerely like massive congratulations that's very very big and I'm and I feel like uh you know Sam Allman's out there throwing around trillions and stuff and we lose track of the fact that uh that 30 million 30 million is a lot of users and congratulations that's very great uh thank you so much for coming on the show at the event yep we'll talk to you soon.

Starting point is 02:47:29 Cheers. Have a good one. Up next we have Justin Moore from A16Z. Is there a second time on the show? Dylan in the chat

Starting point is 02:47:37 because I felt that gong hit in my soul. That gong hit was wild. Justine, Moore, can you hear us? We're back on the podium. Hopefully we have audio. Fantastic.

Starting point is 02:47:47 Here we go. Loud and clear. Welcome back. It's great to be back, guys. Fantastic. What is new from you? Wait, wait, wait. Open screen time.

Starting point is 02:47:58 I want to know. how much SORA. This is a good question. Let's see it. Let's see it. We know she loves Slop. This is not going to be super impressive because I mostly use Sora on desktop. Oh, okay.

Starting point is 02:48:11 Okay. Your desktop user. I would guess if I had to guess, it's probably like 15 minutes a day. 15 minutes on my phone. In the feed or making? Making stuff, right? I think I like the phone. Okay.

Starting point is 02:48:25 When I do it on the phone, I like to scroll through the feed and see what other people are making on desktop, there's a lot more controllability with like the storyboard and stuff like that. Yeah. And you can do landscape as well. Oh, yeah. Do you feel like you've, you've given Sora, the app, enough data that you're actually getting fine-tuned recommendations? Or are you just seeing the cream of the crop because there isn't enough to give you specific things that you like? What's the temperature? Take the temperature on the feed. You know what I'm talking about, right? I think it is not yet enough content to be able to have a very personal. personalize feed for everyone, but I'm not sure because I haven't seen anyone else's feed.

Starting point is 02:49:04 Sure, so they might be super different. Yeah, because like if I go on TikTok and I say I like car videos and you go on TikTok and you say you like boat videos, like pretty quickly, we're both going to just get unlimited cars and no boats and vice versa. Interesting. How are you thinking about we were just talking to Crea about this, like winning in the application layer for creativity. Like, SORA is a creative tool you can create on desktop with the storyboard. There's this world where we wind up with one app that instantiates UI on the fly, lets you do everything. There's another one where we see even more bifurcation, just like we have Lightroom and Photoshop

Starting point is 02:49:42 and Premiere and After Effects. We could wind up with 20 apps for individual little fine tune of face, up res over here. How do you think it's going to play out? Yeah, it's a great question. I think, honestly, at the beginning of the wave, we thought maybe there'd be a little bit more concentration than there has been. The market just keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and we keep seeing more specialized apps. I think because these creative AI tools are enabling all of these people who couldn't create content before to make content for the first time. And so that unlocks a bunch of different verticals who weren't using creative tools much before.

Starting point is 02:50:21 So my guess is like there'll be some kind of horizontal tooling layers, whether they're for developers, like what the folks that fall are doing, which is awesome, or for consumers, prosumers. And then I think we're also going to start seeing more vertical-specific applications, just like we've seen with LLMs, honestly. Like we've seen a lot of for accounting, for law, for finance, like different industries and different personas have different use cases and workflows. Yeah, it's interesting. I haven't thought about it that way because when I think of like an AI law firm, I don't think them, I don't think about them as like fine-tuning tokens or like running a specific, but it is, it is, it is very much the same. How are you thinking about the mobile versus desktop divide? You're obviously experiencing it on SORA, but are you seeing a bifurcation where you might

Starting point is 02:51:15 actually back a company that's saying, we're going after mobile, gen AI, this particular niche or we're going desktop and is that a meaningful designation or companies with vibe coding able to kind of go multi-platform on day one obviously open AI was but they have a lot of resources i think sort of the mobile versus desktop speaks a lot to sort of the user persona and use case what we've seen so far is that stuff that blows up on mobile tends to be consumer products where you don't have to put a ton of work into editing the output and to having super long prompts, things like SORA 2 or like Lenza, if you guys remember, which blew up a couple years ago now to make these like AI profile pictures of you.

Starting point is 02:51:59 I think like true creative workflows and really detailed editing tend to require bigger screens. We've actually seen more companies start looking at iPad apps too, which is crazy to say. It's not just like four-year-olds on iPad. It's like real creative professionals because people love to kind of draw on them. And it's a larger screen that enables kind of more knobs and dials. Yeah. What are you seeing on the monetization side for pure AI content creators? I know you track a lot of these accounts.

Starting point is 02:52:34 I'm interested to see if some of these, again, like not just a content creator that might use AI here or there, but like a new content creator that only makes AI content. Will they monetize via influencer style marketing? will they go straight to doing deals with the Netflix's or other streaming platforms? But I'm curious what you think there. Yeah, it's so early. It's hard to say.

Starting point is 02:52:58 I think how it started was people started growing these sort of AI-only accounts and monetizing in the traditional ways, which was like ad revenue or kind of some share of the views you got on your video, things like that on platforms like X and TikTok and Instagram. I've also seen, honestly, a ton of the ways that AI creators monetize is by selling like prompts or courses or teaching other people

Starting point is 02:53:24 how to make the same things just because there's so much demand and most people are not experts at these tools. I think it's going to be really interesting to see like when we start to see more AI native IP or characters that can like appear in a Netflix show or have a song that they release on Spotify and they kind of get a cut of the streaming revenue. We've already started to see some of that, like that AI actress. And we've seen some in music, too, especially in Asia, but I think we're just at the very early stages of that. Yeah. Are you losing the ability to actually define a particular AI virality moment? Like the Lenza era was definitely a thing. Everyone had the magic avatars. The studio Ghibli moment

Starting point is 02:54:11 was a moment. Then maybe it was like the Sam Altman stealing GPUs era with SORA, but I feel like we're just now in like the SORA moment and maybe it just becomes an era. But, uh, and the Italian brain rot, like, are, are we accelerating? Are you feeling acceleration where you can't start, you can't even track all the memes because they just happen so fast? Yes. I used to keep, um, basically the spreadsheet where I tracked like the number of impressions as far as I could guess from like certain trends or launches or announcements or things that would happen. And I gave up on it probably like six or so months ago. because there were so many things happening at once.

Starting point is 02:54:48 It was like nanobanana and V-O-3 and SORA and like two new Chinese models that were amazing. And like the World Labs launch, like there were just 20 things happening like every day. And I think the interesting thing about that too is like different people are excited by different things. Like sometimes I talk to people who are really deep in AI creativity, but they're really into one part of it.

Starting point is 02:55:11 And so they don't even know about the other launches because it's so hard to keep up with everything. right now. What was the Nanobanana? They're using the Meta vibes app too much. I'm sorry, I don't have time for anything else. What was the, what was the nanobanana like viral, like,

Starting point is 02:55:24 moment or driver? Like, what was the canonical, like, thing that you would prompt that nanobanana did so well that made it really popular? I mean, the, the interesting thing about nanobanana was I think it wasn't just one prompt.

Starting point is 02:55:38 Yeah. It was a series of them. There was, like, the Polaroids, putting yourself in a different era. And then there was making yourself an action figure. And then one I've been following this week on TikTok is, like, college kids are making videos of them, like, hugging their younger selves from an image that they create. Yeah, like with them and their younger self on nano banana.

Starting point is 02:56:00 What do you think of that? I'm not a fan. I think it's not. I mean, don't we all want to hug our younger self? No, not at all. I'd say, toughen up. Toughen up. Pull up the boots, pick yourself up by your bootstrap.

Starting point is 02:56:14 I would make an AI video of my younger me picking myself up by my bootstraff. There you go. Okay. So, you know, we're close there. We will be participating in like the next slight iteration of the viral sensation. But no, I won't be hugging myself. That feels very odd to me. You can do a new one of you yelling at your younger self if you want.

Starting point is 02:56:35 Yeah. This is a free idea to start this. But yeah, I mean, a lot of these are odd. Stephen Hawking at the X games is odd. A cat steam rolling. its way through a house is odd, but, uh, I love, I love, I love most of those, but it's important. It is important. Humanity needs these videos. I think we do. I think we do. I think we do. Laffat it. Laughing is important. Yeah. L Laughing is creativity. It is, it is creativity. Whoever

Starting point is 02:57:00 prompted it was creative. I would not have thought to put Stephen Hawking at the X games and someone did. Me neither. Uh, what else is, are people talking about what are the key, uh, like stress points? Are people worried about, like, AI bubble generally? Is it all just about, like, let me find the the most efficient inference arbitrage or inference provider, the best AI factory? Like, what are the current discussions? I imagine it's not Doom anymore. That one's kind of moved on. What are people talking about at this particular conference? Yeah, we actually had an investor panel earlier with a bunch of great folks kind of talking about those sorts of things. I think, like, the bubble question is an interesting one.

Starting point is 02:57:43 I personally don't think we're in a bubble. I think just the true demand for the products is massive. And we're seeing companies grow faster than ever before and also retain users higher than ever before. A lot of folks, like I'm sure you guys do, have questions about kind of gross margin. I think, like, we find that margins tend to improve over time, as you've seen in many areas of consumer software,

Starting point is 02:58:09 like Amazon and Uber and DoorDash, like a lot of these companies were gross margin negative or neutral at the beginning and then kind of become more efficient over time as they scale and unlock various network effects. I think where I would be worried we were in a bubble is if the margins were all negative and the retention sucked because then it's like you're not actually building products that people want and you're raising a lot of money for it. Or if there was only like 100,000 real users or something like that. Totally.

Starting point is 02:58:37 Exactly. Which we've seen before in different tech trends. Yeah. Yeah, no, totally, totally. I mean, yeah, we just talked to Korea. Like 30 million users is like very significant. Like, and Chachapit, close to a billion users. Like, it's just, it's just accelerating much faster and the distribution is there.

Starting point is 02:58:56 And it's a lot because, like, Stripe exists. Like, you can just actually get 20 bucks a month out of someone pretty easily. And you couldn't do that in 1999. It was just no way. And so you had to say, well, we'll monetize the eyeballs later and we'll do ads and people will pay, and it became this kind of weird circular economy. But now you can just be like, how much value am I delivering to your business? Put down your card and we'll pay for it or churn, which is great.

Starting point is 02:59:21 Well, thank you so much for taking the time to stop by during a busy conference. Second ever podium, gas. Time chatting with you. I'm honored. Thanks, guys. Yes, we'd love to have you back. Have fun at the event and give our best to everybody there. Yes.

Starting point is 02:59:33 Thanks for coming on. And just so you know, we're coming for your lunch. We dropped our first market map. I don't know if we saw. But we dropped a media market map. So now we're in direct. It's not schizo at all. It's not schizzo at all.

Starting point is 02:59:46 You know, the competition fuels me. So I'm excited. Yeah, fire back. Fire back. Yeah, with your own market map. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is like a rap battle for people.

Starting point is 02:59:57 It's a map battle. It's a map. A rap battle that like five people are interested in. Yeah, a rap battle for people who know how to read a term sheet or something. Anyway, thank you so much for stopping by. We will talk to you soon. Have a great rest of you day. Thanks, guys.

Starting point is 03:00:10 Good-bye. We've got to go over to this post from Marvin von Hagen, which is one of the most royal names ever. This man is destined for greatness. He quoted the essay that I published yesterday, and just with two excerpts from my piece, he said, The Interaction Company of California has managed to really break through the noise

Starting point is 03:00:35 and deliver a truly novel consumer AI product experience. Dot, dot, dot, dot, nothing important. don't worry about it. Pokea.com itself is a fantastic domain and a name for their business and audience. I just skipped over, of course. Oh, there's a little bit of criticism in there? No, yeah.

Starting point is 03:00:51 I was like, I was criticizing the general sort of like name convention, but this was an absolutely perfect response, and I really want to have Marvin on the show. So Marvin, let's get you on the schedule next week. This is, yeah, yeah, this is the nature of working with me. Chef's Kiss, a perfect response. what's going on here.

Starting point is 03:01:11 Austin says you should never use an M-Dash and you're writing anymore. You will be 100% be accused of using AI, especially if it's on social. That is true. I actually recently, like, today in the newsletter, I used just a minus sign instead of an M-Dash. And Brandon was like, certainly we can use the M-Dash here.

Starting point is 03:01:30 Like, you intended to use an M-Dash, and I was like, no, we're using the minus sign. We're using the wrong thing. because I don't want to deal with it's an m-dash, you used AI or whatever. So I have completely sacrificed it, but what is Alyssa Pumpkin Queen's set? She says that's what the clanker, dropping the M-Dash, that's what the clankers want you to do, surrender the M-Dash, but by the grace of God, we will out-maneuver the clanker. Sink our hands into their motherboards and remind them what mankind can do.

Starting point is 03:01:59 Let the clanker hold their position. We won't. We won't. Oh, so good. By the way, the chat wants us to do a conference. And Ben Sand says, I'd go to the conference, but we needed a TBPN cruise. I'm not joking. We've talked about getting a yacht to park in the San Francisco Bay and do a conference there.

Starting point is 03:02:25 So I would like to pull that off at some point. And the chat will be the first to know. Ohio has a new bill that goes far beyond. The bank of her marriage. Far beyond banning human-AI marriage, the measure would define AI systems as non-sentient entities, strip them of any claim to legal personhood,

Starting point is 03:02:46 forbid them from owning property, holding financial accounts, controlling IP, or acting as company directors. So it's basically game on if we get a humanoid. Like, we can, it has no rights in Ohio. So if we take it to Ohio, like the unit tree is going to be sitting there being like, hey guys, why are we going to Ohio?

Starting point is 03:03:05 You know, I'd love to stay. in a different state, because I would hate for you to, like, destroy me and then face no legal consequences because I have no rights in Ohio. Yeah, this, this, this, this Ohio clearly hasn't read, uh, less wrong. It's not, it's not, uh, familiar with Rocco's basilisk. Um, Ohio might be the first place that the clankers descend on and, and Skynet goes on. Yeah, they really put themselves in the crosshair, the clanker crosshair on the aggress, uh, Daniel Tenrero has finally...

Starting point is 03:03:39 Before we read this, let me tell you about Wander.com. Find your happy place. Book of Wander with Inspiring News. Hotel Great Amenities, Dreamy Veds, Top 2,4-7 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better. What did Daniel say? He says, finally some good news, which is that hedge fund assets hit $5 trillion with most inflows since before the financial crisis.

Starting point is 03:03:58 Great hit, John. Assets in the global hedge fund industry have surged to a record $5 trillion as investors poured money into alternatives and funds posted solid gains. song is gifted today. You hear this, right? It's still going. It's still going. Still going.

Starting point is 03:04:13 Is it me or is it gone? Is it me or is it? It saw net inflows of nearly 34 billion in the first three months through September, with total returns across all strategies, averaging 5.4% over the quarter. So underperforming the average terminally online zoomer that is just massively levered into the MAG7. Yeah. But still, still, not so bad as a whole. Cryptocurrency hedge funds posted.

Starting point is 03:04:37 solid double-digit gains in the third quarter recovering from sharp losses in early 2025 to bring year-to-date performance to 6.7 percent. Can we play this clip of, it's probably too long to react to? Bucco Capital, the legend says, I'm always so confused when Tesla goes down on earnings as the business performance is completely irrelevant to the price of the stock. They put up over $1.4 billion, I think, of free cash flow as a trillion-dollar company. So that's good. They beat earnings.

Starting point is 03:05:07 Yes. The stock went down? Is that what happened? No, no, no, no. I think they missed earnings and the stock went up. I don't know. I agree. No, he's saying they missed, but he's, and the stock traded down.

Starting point is 03:05:18 And he's like, why is it traded down? It shouldn't even matter. It shouldn't even matter. Never bet against. Let's skip the Dorsey reaction. We got to get out of here. It's Friday. We got to start our weekend.

Starting point is 03:05:32 Apparently, the sale of TikTok was a pawn sacrifice. to open up the diplomatic chess board. And Roon says it's pretty bad that Siegien Ping models TikTok as spiritual opium and feels okay selling it to the West in a revenge opium war set up. For Trump, facing the sale of the high-profile app was a populist victory framed around national security. For Siegian Ping, however, the app was a low-cost bargaining chip. He had privately dismissed it as spiritual opium, according to the people close to the

Starting point is 03:06:06 Beijing and viewed it as easy sacrifice to secure the continued dialogue on China that China needed. That makes a ton of sense. In a more important geopolitical news, Justin Bieber is on Twitch. Michael Siebel says almost 19 years after we got started, we finally got Bieber. So never give up. And this was, I think, my favorite post of the week, it's now been deleted. I won't read the user's name, but I think it's funny. It was a post. that said, I honestly don't care if I get fired. I was part of the illegal gambling ring with Chauncey Billups and Terry Rosier.

Starting point is 03:06:44 My name is Andy Jassy, and I work at Amazon. These, like, fake framing someone who did something is so funny. Shareholders are... I didn't realize that, like, there was a retail army for Andy Jassy that cared about Andy Jassy and Amazon. Yeah, it's tough when your stock goes up 20% year-to-date, and people are still, like, calling for you to be fired. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:07:12 But I think that's a good place to call it. We've had a fantastic... You know where we're going to call it? Where are we going to call it? We're going to call it with Gabe over at Sora. Sora was dethroned in the app store by Dave's Hot Chicken. Play the Want-Wan-W-W-W-W-R-Sora. And an eagle sound effect for Dave.

Starting point is 03:07:33 because something, their team, I think, is just really cracked because I don't think this is the first time they've, like, charted number one. I think most people think that the Dave's hot chicken team is, like, one notch above the Open AI team. In terms of just, you know, product design, growth. Yeah, just IQ and strategy. AI research. Research. Yeah, these types of things. I think most people think it's sort of like, you know, a hotbed of the best talent in the world.

Starting point is 03:08:03 Absolutely. I'm unsurprised. No, seriously, the Dave's Hot Chicken team must be cooking because something crazy happened in their marketing, because to go to the top of the charts, even if it's momentum-based, that means that they had some campaign that just hit. And it's not like it's the Super Bowl right now. Like, they must have had some crazy call to action to get that app to the top of the store. But congratulations to everyone at Dave's Hot Chicken.

Starting point is 03:08:26 I'm a huge fan. I order Dave's Hot Chicken all the time. Maybe I should get the app. I usually use DoorJess. Never ordered it to the Ultram. No, I haven't. More of a weekend thing. More of a weekend thing.

Starting point is 03:08:36 More of a weekend thing. But Dave's Hot Chicken is awesome. Highly recommend. It is almost a weekend for our East Coast audience. If you're on the West Coast, we're going to continue to lock in. Please stay locked in at least until five. Hopefully you're not leaving the office at five because it just looks bad. It's like you just were hanging out.

Starting point is 03:08:56 Trying to get the optics in. But we had a really fun week. Next week is going to be wild. as well. I think it's going to be a magnificent week. I think so, too. It's going to be absolutely magnificent. I think you will be magnificent. And I can't wait to be back. So have a wonderful Friday. Have a wonderful Saturday. Have a wonderful Sunday. We will be counting down the hours until we are going live again on Monday. And thank you for tuning in. Goodbye. Cheers.

TBPN Live - Charting The Media Landscape, WSJ Mansion Section, Emily Sundberg LIVE in The Ultradome | Jordan Schneider, Saagar Enjeti, Justine Moore, Glenn Solomon, Dion Harris & More

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