TBPN Live - Chime Climbs, Tech Titans Join Army Reserve, Meta Buys 49% of Scale AI | Joshua Steinman, Bernt Børnich, John Doyle, Emily Sundberg, Lennart Heim

Episode Date: June 13, 2025

(02:47) - Joshua Steinman, founder of Galvanick, discusses the recent Israeli airstrikes on Iran's nuclear and military facilities, highlighting the precision of modern targeting technologies and the deployment of next-generation asymmetric capabilities. He notes the significant impact on Iran's military leadership and infrastructure, emphasizing the strategic implications of such operations. Steinman also reflects on the historical context of Iran-Israel relations, tracing the shift from pre-1979 alliances to the current adversarial stance, and underscores the potential for further escalation given Iran's history of targeting U.S. interests and the presence of Iranian assets capable of asymmetric attacks. (55:51) - Bernt Bornich, CEO of 1X Technologies, discusses his lifelong passion for robotics, leading to the development of NEO, a humanoid robot designed to safely and affordably assist with everyday tasks in home environments. He emphasizes the importance of deploying robots in diverse, real-world settings to gather the necessary data for creating truly intelligent machines, highlighting that the variability of home environments provides the rich data needed for advanced AI learning. Bornich also addresses the challenges of scaling humanoid robot production, noting that while 1X has vertically integrated its manufacturing to maintain flexibility, sourcing materials like copper and aluminum in the U.S. presents logistical and cost challenges compared to China. (01:12:19) - John Doyle, founder and CEO of Cape, a privacy-first mobile network, discusses the critical vulnerabilities in global cellular networks, emphasizing their complete lack of security and the ease with which malicious actors can exploit them. He highlights the strategic decisions by China to infiltrate global telecom infrastructure through subsidized Huawei equipment, contrasting it with U.S. carriers' outsourcing practices that have led to significant security gaps. Doyle explains that Cape addresses these issues by owning all the software that runs the network, allowing for enhanced security without the need to build physical infrastructure. (01:25:54) - Emily Sundberg is a New York-based writer and director, best known for her daily business and internet culture newsletter, "Feed Me." In the conversation, she discusses her experience at Apple's WWDC, noting the enthusiasm of developers for the announced updates, and highlights the evolving fashion trends among attendees. She also shares insights into the competitive landscape of Substack, emphasizing the importance of quality content and active reader engagement for success. (01:47:01) - Lennart Heim, a researcher at the Centre for the Governance of AI, focuses on the role of computational resources in AI development and governance. He discusses the impact of China's DeepSeek model on the AI landscape, highlighting its open-source nature and cost-effectiveness, which have raised concerns about potential biases and security risks in widely accessible models. Heim also emphasizes the importance of compute governance in AI regulation, suggesting that controlling access to advanced computational resources could serve as a mechanism to enforce safety standards and prevent misuse of powerful AI systems. TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.comFigma - https://figma.comVanta - https://vanta.comLinear - https://linear.appEight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpnWander - https://wander.com/tbpnPublic - https://public.comAdQuick - https://adquick.comBezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.comPolymarket - https://polymarket.comAttio - https://attio.comFollow TBPN: https://TBPN.comhttps://x.com/tbpnhttps://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235https://youtube.com/@technologybrotherspod?si=lpk53xTE9WBEcIjV

You're watching TBPN. Today is Friday, June 13th, 2025. We are live from the TBPN Ultra Dome, the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the Capital of Capital. We have a great show for you today, folks. We're covering lots of stuff, taking you all over the world. We are going to touch on what's going on in Iran. You know we're not a political show, but obviously this is taking over the timeline and we do want to understand a little bit about what's going on. So we're gonna have our good friend Josh Steinman jump on, get us up to speed.

We're gonna run through a few posts before we bring him in. First one, apparently there's a G-Wagon angle here. Have you heard this? So Faraz Khan, friend of the show, says, "'I love my G-Wagons.'" The Mercedes-Benz G-Wagon G-Class will exist largely because of Iran Specifically due to the influence and initiative of Muhammad Reza Shah Pahlavi the Shah of Iran in the early 1970s

Yeah, so it was it was built for him. Oh, yes, that's right for the Shah purpose- built and became so popular that it became a global icon and arguably top five car. Fantastic car. Of all time. So hopefully we can move past the geopolitical conflict and get back to what matters, building cool cars together in a global community.

They probably have some insane vintage G wagons. Probably. Hopefully none of them were destroyed. Yes. Well, it's absolute chaos in the timeline. Walter Bloomberg has a quote from Trump to the Wall Street Journal. We'll see if this is a real quote.

I don't know. Attack would be great for the market because Iran will not have a nuclear weapon. The market was not responding to that right now. Michael Burry is confused. And Shane Copeland does have the market you should be tracking, Polymarket. The odds of an Israeli military strike against Iran were surging yesterday before the market started selling off. So Polymarket was once again

ahead. And so Shane says you knew this was coming if you were checking Polymarket. That's why we're proud to partner with Polymarket because they bring you the news before it happens. That's right. Well you the news before it happens. That's right. Well, we will kick it over. Yeah, there was some interesting activity. People were looking on chain. Pizza index.

Well, that too, but people were looking on Polychain, apparently a wallet, on a few different occasions during Israeli strikes. Strikes. Like 12 hours before, people were creating accounts potentially to trade against this stuff. So anyways, they're doing a service for other people to understand the world a little bit better. We're going to try and understand what's going on. So let's bring in Josh Steinman, the founder of Galvanic, to break it down for us.

Thanks so much for taking the time and hopping on. How are you doing? Doing great. Doing great. Explain to us, first off, let's start with what's going on right now. There's a lot of posts. It's really hard to make sense of all. What's AI slop? There's some really striking images. I saw one crazy photo of what appeared to be a drone that went directly into a single bedroom. Very, very precise. How precise are these targets? What's actually going on? What's the scale of this is this World War three? And then I want to get a little bit of history from you

Yeah, so first of all, I think precision targeting is not like a new thing I mean even as far back as like the The first Gulf War there were reports that American cruise missiles were able to target, you know, very specific locations like, you know, the thing that got leaked to the media was like, oh, we can we can hit a bedroom window with a cruise missile. And I can't speak to whether or not that's accurate. But, you know, that's over 30 years ago. So you can just think like things have gotten a lot better. I think the big takeaway right here is we're seeing actual like next generation asymmetric capabilities being deployed. And they're being deployed in a way in which we're literally seeing them.

Obviously, the footage is getting leaked. There's all this reports of like Iranian missiles failing at launch. So you have like possible next generation cyber weapons being deployed. Maybe it's RFPW, you don't know. But this is like really stuff that's happening. I mean, they built drone bases supposedly inside Iran, which is wild, although obviously we just saw the Ukrainians do the same thing against the Russians. Yeah, I heard some report that I think 100 suicide drones

left from Iran, none of them made it to Israel. And so some defense technology was clearly employed there to stop that. Or maybe it's just shoddy manufacturing, who knows? Yeah. Look, the point that I'd make here is like, you just have to hand it to the president of the United States because from his perspective,

this is all just a negotiation. Like this guy's the goat, you know? He's just like, hey, we're still open for negotiation. Like, yeah, we're going to kill half your leadership. And like, we'll see you at the table in three days. Yeah, I mean, this is the first time. What did you think about the people were sharing around 61 days ago?

I guess he gave like a 60 minute kind of deadline, or sorry, 60 day deadline. We're on day 61. Day 61, this happened. Were you reading into that at all? Were you expecting it? I wasn't personally expecting it, but it does make sense. Now the question of whether or not that was directed or agreed upon or just sort of like a shelling point,

like the Israelis looked at that date and they're like, okay, if we do it on this date, it'll seem coherent. You don't know. I think probably one of the few people who will know on the planet is the president. But it is nice because I mean, the president is very open about what he wants. And I think, you know, for the past 20 years, our foreign policy leaders, whether it's the president or Secretary of State, they sort of had this like very amateurish attitude to foreign policy, like, oh, we're just going to play nice with everybody. And Trump is just like, no, we don't want you

to have a nuclear weapon. We're 100% fine with all of these other things. We're negotiating on this. And like, yeah, there are going to be consequences, and you're literally going to see them right now. Okay, give me a little bit of the history. Is it, before we get into the history, is it too early?

People on the timeline are calling it the one day war. They're taking victory laps. And then there's the other side, which is it's World War III. I was seeing that a lot last night. Which one was it? It just feels a little too early for people to be claiming victory given we don't know the consequences. We've also had a pretty porous border for years.

So I think there should be concern even at home around. Yeah, Sun Tzu and Klaus was both right about how politics and war are essentially extensions of the same thing. How do you get other nations to do what you want them to do or to come to a negotiated agreement, et cetera? So I think, I don't know, I'm not even sure the degree to which, if at all, the United States is involved What I would say is it seems like Iranian air defense systems are essentially zeroed out

So the war will go on as long as the Israelis want it to go on Mm-hmm. And so at that point then you could create this like, you know interesting triangulation relationship where the president is still offering What remains of the Iranian leadership an olive branch. It is up to them to take it. If they don't, you know, they have to know that the Israelis essentially have the capability and intention and the willingness to essentially just do whatever they want, including high level leadership targets. And I think you have to imagine if you're the Iranians

that, you know, you're asking what else do they have in the toolbox? Give me a little bit of the history. I think most of us are familiar with the meme of like this is a picture of Iran before the revolution. Very modern. We used to be allies. Iran used to be a massive I think third largest GDP in the world. Used to be an ally of Israel by the way. You know just talk about like weird turnabouts. Crazy, so walk me through kind of the story of like how we got to this point.

Yeah, so obviously there's a lot here and I would encourage people to do their own research. Lots of great books and I'm by no means an expert's expert although I have been working, was working in this area for at this point, almost two decades. So yeah, there was a revolution in Iran to push back against leaders that the United States

and the UK supported and wanted to remain in power. And the main flip there was they went from essentially a capitalist democracy to a communist theocracy more or less I mean you know the the Shah of Iran is the scent was essentially and you know he he's still here you could say I think he lives in Los Angeles mm-hmm so more of a I'd say more of a like capitalist monarchy although you know you'd have to go into the full details of how the government was architected so it was very compatible with America.

It's interesting that he landed in the land of the G wagon. Is it a coincidence? The car that not a coincidence at all, I would imagine. He brought it in here. OK. So, you know, there was pushback. There were elections. There was a lot of, you know, foment.

The government essentially fell. And then there was sort of a second revolution that happened shortly thereafter, where the hardline Shia Islamic theocrats came to Bauer. So the first, you know, the first sort of situation happens where there's this, you know, not failed election, but an election where the government is not, um, reified, I guess you could say, I'm just trying to like compress all of us. Yeah. So, you know, a lot of unrest, um, and then the Islamic, uh, revolution comes to power in hostage crisis.

Obviously a lot of things happen for folks that don't know, you could check out how, uh, yes They took americans hostage that were at the embassy During this revolution that was in 1979 again a lot of dense history here four Yeah, uh law lay was long hostage christmas 400 days. Yeah, that's really long many and it happened alongside the The presidential election campaign for Jimmy Carter. He lost Reagan won famously. The the Iranians didn't let the hostages go.

At the same time, there was a failed hostage rescue attempt that has very interesting history into the architecture of the U.S. Department of Defense, U.S. Special Operations Command comes out of that failure, known as Desert One. So yeah, a lot of history there. I think for folks that are not really tuned in on this, the thing that I would say is, the Iranians were very active in the wars

in Iraq and Afghanistan. Their explosively formed penetrators, killed hundreds of Americans. They're individual operatives who are both Iranian nationals and Iraqi nationals also directly responsible for the deaths of a ton of folks. This is cause some money for a long time leading the Kud's force in, uh, in Iraq, right? So a lot of that. Um, and so, you know, there's,

there's a lot of bad blood and so I'm not saying that, you know, there's there's a lot of bad blood. And so I'm not saying that, you know, oh, we should go to war with Iran. I actually think let the Israelis handle it. I prefer we close the border. But at the same time, like they're not good guys. You know, they've been killing Americans for a very long time in a bunch of different places. And I think you've had a lot of U.S.

senior leaders, whether it's President Obama or others, try and find ways to build bridges to that government and essentially been rebuffed and then doubled down on. So it's just like, no heroes. Last question from me. Yesterday, the internet went down, CloudFlare, Google, you know the tinfoil hat crowd is saying maybe they're linked happened. I mean CloudFlare said this is not, we weren't attacked. We would say if we were attacked because it

would be a get out of jail free card like it seemed like it was an issue with their key value store. What's your take? I don't know obviously you always want to wait until more facts come out. Yeah the timing didn't see we don't need the hottest Yeah, sorry things sometimes happen boys. So yeah say lovey. Well, do you think we'll ever do you think we'll ever have? Clarity on on the outage yesterday. It was I think cloudflare did a pretty good job explaining, but I don't know It was I think CloudFlare did a pretty good job explaining, but I don't know Look, here's what I would say for folks that want to look to the future like what's the Iranian response gonna be? They absolutely have you know, how many foreign sabotage teams are operating on us?

Well, they they absolutely have assets here in the United States. Those assets absolutely have access to asymmetric capabilities This could be drones. It could be like hit squads, etc And I think that you'll be able to gauge the temperature by whether or not those assets start to get activated and start to then go after things here in the United States, especially because the president has been clear, like maybe he was aware of what was going to happen, but there was no official, you know, logistical US support for the Israeli operation. Like they did that themselves. You know, maybe there was some sort of like, sure, do whatever you want, you know, permission from the United States, but you have a statement from Marco Rubio.

And so I would just say, like, stay tuned. The asymmetric tools that were used against the Iranians are not, you know, unique to them. These are things that are out in the wild right now. So I'm certainly going to be paying a lot of attention to that. And for TVPN viewers, I say that's where I'd, you know, be looking. Well, thank you for monitoring the situation. Yes, on behalf of on behalf of us, there's no better place to monitor the situation than from the TVP and UltraGelms. That's essentially what we're doing at TVP. From the fortress.

We're constantly just monitoring the situation. That's what the show's all about. Thank you so much for hopping on, Josh. We'll talk to you soon. Thanks, Josh. Cheers. Enjoy your weekend. Well, in some good news, Chime went public. 12 years ago, Kristen Green writes,

the founders had a simple conviction, Americans deserve better from their banks. Chime went public with 8.6 million members, 121 billion in annual volume and an average of 54 transactions per member per month. So congratulations to the Chime team. They run the bell. Absolutely fantastic. Congratulations to Kirstarson Green on being their first institutional backer. Great outcome. How are they trading? Is the big question. Oh, it went way up. It did very well.

The company climbed 37% in debut after $864 million IPO. Very good news. We can go into the whole story. I'd love to know a little bit more about the backstory I'd love to so I actually guess it priced at 18.4 billion. It's great Originally or that's kind of how where they debuted and then and now it's trading at 11. It's down a little bit But still that that's in the range that that I think a lot of Analysts were anticipating or how they felt it would be fairly valued.

Well, if you love FinTech, you gotta get on Ramp. Ramp.com, time is money, save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more, all in one place. And we have, Ramp has, Andrew has a customer, we have a fun activity today in the studio. We have Tyler Cosgrove, our intern over there. He will be assembling a Fury drone made out of Legos

that was very nicely, courteously sent to us from the Anderil team. How you doing? Good, I'm very excited. Bring it down for us, what's the plan? The Fury Anderil drone, it's a group 5 autonomous air vehicle. So I think it's, I think, 1-24 scale.

So the real thing is, I believe, 20 feet long, which is like around half the length of a F-16. OK. But yeah, there's how many pieces are in here? When's the last time you put together a LEGO set? I was probably 12. OK. So like eight years.

So a few years ago. I'm feeling pretty good I don't know who has the current record on on the you know the speed run of this yes I think you can set the world record you could set it it might be like Palmer's kids but I believe they're pretty young yeah they are I think I should you're gonna smoke them okay so we're going for a world record we're not doing any percent here we're doing 100% we're doing glitchless I don't want to see any any cheats employed over there yeah we're doing 100%. We're doing glitchless. I don't want to see any cheats employed over there. We're going to be tracking the timer.

Production team is going to start a timer. I don't know if we're going to be able to put it on the screen, but we will be tracking him. So on your marks, get set. Wait, wait, wait. Do we want to have any consequences, like fantasy football style consequences? Oh, yes.

I have something for you. I think it's in my car. I have, you can do it under how long do you think it's gonna take him? I mean, I think if you can do it, the reward should be under under 30 minutes. 20 minutes 20 minutes. That's under 30 under 30. You can do it under 30. I have an anderal t shirtshirt in its shareholder worn it's a shareholder worn and ral jersey wow yeah yeah yeah Jersey worn by a shareholder that we could get it signed it's signed by the metro so it's extra large I don't know if it'll fit you but you will win an anderil t-shirt if you can do it in under 30 minutes on your marks get set set, go, start your engine. Send it. Send it.

He's gonna be working on that while the show goes on. We're gonna be bringing you the news. Break it down. It looks pretty complicated. 600 pieces. We will see how he does. Okay, we will be checking in with him over the next half hour, over the next hour,

letting you know how it goes. Anyway, let's read through some of this chime. tell you about figma first figma.com think bigger build faster figma helps design and development teams build great products together retrievers could design software they would use figma absolutely chime financial rose thirty-seven% in its trading debut after pricing its shares above the marketed range to raise $864 million in the year six biggest US IPO. That's great. The FinTech firm shares opened at $43

after selling for 27 in the IPO, and they've been kind of trading around since then. They're sitting at $34 a share. Okay. At this point, so down 6% today. Yeah, so still up from 27, which is great. Accounting for employee stock options and restricted stock units,

Chime has a fully diluted value of about 15.8 billion based on filings with the US SEC. That fully diluted value is a sharp drop from the $25 billion valuation in a 2021 funding round at the peak of the tech boom. And so we've seen a lot of these companies that had higher marks during the zero interest rate era. But of course, interest rates have gone up. That affects the value of future cash flows. It affects the value of tech companies in particular,

but it's still important to get out, get liquidity, even if it's not at the high mark. Your LPs, you can distribute, they can choose what to do with it. Maybe they hold, because we've seen a lot of companies that go out at below the previous peak, but then they grind up because they have a lot to build up. And this isn't a situation where it's a company that's sneaking out at a four billion SPAC or something.

This is a true IPO in the tens of billions still. Seems pretty solid. So it's a good solid base to. Yeah, and there are still so many private neobanks. This is a very important sort of reality check on the market to understand how the market, you know, the post-SERP era is really going to value these. There was another one that got out, I think there was called Dave. I'm actually curious to see how. Oh, I know Dave. I know the founder. You know the founder? We've had. Dave grinded up, at one point they were. So we had one of the founders on the show, he's working on that new, that was from Honey.

Honey worked with another guy at Dave. Two years ago, John. Name John Wallen. Dave was valued at $5 a share. Yes. Today it is valued at $200 a share. Wow. Today it is valued at $200 a share. Wow. Wait, what's the market cap?

So the market cap today is 2.78 billion. So it traded down. It was basically people were. Sorry, say the market cap again. 2.78 billion. 2.7 billion. Wow, yeah, it was down at like 30 million or something. And it was crazy because they had like 100 million in cash

on the balance sheet. And I know someone who's a significant shareholder in that company. And it was like a really rough roller coaster because at one point it was worth a ton and then it was worth nothing and then it was back up. Yeah, so it's still down 33% from its IPO. But it's in a solid place to actually build back up.

So wow, what a roller coaster. What a ride. And you had to been very, I mean, very, very different businesses. But ultimately, if you were a Chime investor, watching Dave in the public market was not very fun. So the CEO of Chime said, we don't focus on short-term fluctuation of the stock,

even if it goes up today. I'm sure there's going to be other days that won't be as great. Fact check, true. We remain focused on the long term. So the investors in Chime that are making money off this, DST Global, we know some folks over there. Crossland Capital, Access Industries, General Atlantic.

Menlo Ventures, Cathay Innovation, iconic, and it sounds like Kirsten Green as well. Over at Forerunner made a bad. Kirsten led the seed round of Chime. Sean Carolyn, a Menlo Ventures partner and chime board member said he's relieved there was a reprieve in the markets following the tariff induced volatility in April.

That IPO window closed, we did back open. The IPO window. I was thinking it would be very interesting to see a president run on a platform of just keeping the IPO window open permanently, mandating that it's open. Yeah, yeah. Just create, we should, you know, normally I'm sort of

against big government intervening with the market, but in this case, I think sort of mandating that the IPO window should just always be open. It should always be open. You're really onto something here, John. You've always been very presidential, but yes, but I Winning platform it'd be bipartisan. It's sort of like the opposite of the the freeze the rent guy. Yes. Yes, York Yes, freeze the IPO window open reads it open. Freeze it open All capital markets were like holy cow. What does this mean?

Carolyn said noting that chime delayed its IPO the company strong debut Thursday indicates how that now the markets are healthy. So a lot of people are very happy about that. They've never taken their eye off the mission. They've never attempted to chase the new shiny object. What are you surprised by? Yeah, oh, I was gonna say, we'll see if Chime, depending on what happens in Iran, market might see that positively if Ch could enter, you know bring neo banking

Iran Iran, that'd be amazing So I'm surprised by how an iconic yeah says They've never taken their eye off the mission They were never tempted to chase the shiny new object and yeah They've seemed to be just look at this murderers robe IPO underwriters. You got Morgan Stanley, you got Goldman Sachs, you got JP Morgan and 11 other banks worked on the offering. Let's hear it for investment banking. Let's hear it for the big investment banks.

They don't get enough credit, you know, investment banks. They just work tirelessly. If the stock pops, they're getting heats. Where are the ticker-tick parades for the analysts that stayed up all night working on this IPO. Anyway, Chimes Marketing includes a deal with the NBA's Dallas Mavericks for its logo to appear on the team's jerseys.

Pretty cool. Pretty cool. It's great. Anyway, let's tell you about Vanta. Vanta, automate compliance, manage risk, prove trust continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security

and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation, whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program anyway moving on big news all a whole bunch of tech leaders are now officially in the army so reserves the reserves Palantir Shamsankar joined the Army Reserves today. He broke it down in the free press. Also Baas from Metta jumped in, honored to accept a direct commission as a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army Reserve as part of the newly formed Detachment 201, the Army's Executive Innovation Corps, together with Shamsankar, Kevin Wheal, and Bob McGrew.

Our primary role will be to serve as technical experts advising the Army's modernization efforts. We've talked to the Secretary of the Army. They're very dedicated to bringing in technology and modernizing the entire fighting force. Very exciting, and it's awesome that these tech leaders and executives can get in there and start having an impact. So very, very accepting, very exciting.

Ba says, I have accepted this commission in a personal capacity because I am deeply invested in helping advance American technological innovation. NerdSnipe, anyone care to venture a guess on why we called our detachment 201? 201, that's gotta be an HTTP thing, right? HTTP 201. It's a personnel file in the Intel community

oh I think it's I think it's HTTP reference so HTTP 201 created to status code indicates that that the HTTP request has resulted in the creation of a new resource I don't know that's my guess let me know what HTTP status codes 201 means created according to at poker chess man. That's yeah that that sounds like what what it would be Well out with 404s in with the 201s Congratulations to everyone involved Bob McGrew says this evening I will become an officer in the army US Army Reserve as part of detachment 201 the army's executive innovation core I'm proud to have the opportunity to serve US Army Reserve as part of Detachment 201, the Army's Executive Innovation Corps.

I'm proud to have the opportunity to serve. Shamsankar also says, our mission is to help the Army transform for future missions and adopt bleeding edge tech. America wins when we unite the dynamism of American innovation with the military's vital mission. This was the key to our triumphs in the 20th century. It can help us win again.

Sham came on the show, he told us about the dollar a year men, you remember this? Yeah, talking about executives in business who could not, they could not be paid, they had to be paid a salary. They couldn't work for free, right? Armed forces, yeah. Yeah, to help with the war effort during World War II.

And some of them worked incredibly hard pivoting manufacturing lines to, you're making cars, now you're making jeeps and tanks. And they worked really hard, and they made a dollar a year, because they legally had to make money. You got to make something. Yeah, this is good. We live in an unstable world.

We want our brightest technologists to be allies and a part of our defense efforts. Maybe we should get the Army on linear. It's a purpose-built tool for planning and building products. Meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, product roadmaps. You get linear for agents. I don't think that was their original intention,

but anywhere you're building software, you should be using linear. Yeah, I should really join the Army Reserve and just be pitching SAS products the entire time. Just forward deployed BDR. Yeah. Yeah, you do a great job. I don't really know that much about implementing this stuff,

but I can sell it. Yeah. I'm just like, hey, we're trying to have a meeting about modernization. Not now, John. And I'm like, well, sales tax on Numeral? What about that? If you put it on autopilot.

Anyway, congrats to Polymarket. They're putting up massive numbers in terms of visits in May. Yeah, so they pulled data from SimilarWeb in May. Robinhood is sitting at 37.1 million hits, Coinbase at 34.7, Polymarket in third, so I think they're just pulling all the finance. Finance and like kind of new,

like these all lean like newer startup investing markets, but cracking at 7 million, pump fund at 5 million. I would have assumed pump fund would be massive. I mean, 5 million is nothing to laugh at. I think crypto is still niche. It's still niche. Price picks at 3 million, call she at one. I see this, you know,

the reason that we were originally excited to partner with Polymarket is that it's an alternative to traditional news. It's a way to understand the headlines of the future today, or at least get, you know, odds against them. And so I think this signals that a lot of people are just going to Polymarket to understand the world. So congratulations to the whole team. Yep.

This was an interesting post by a friend of the show, Casey Handmer. I had no idea, it's a little bit dark, but he's talking about the ISS's structural integrity, he's quoting post from Christian Davenport, who says, the Axiom 4 mission is postponed indefinitely while NASA and Roskommos investigate a leak on the Russian side of the International Space Station.

And so Casey says the ISS is structural integrity is far more marginal than is being publicly discussed. We are having multiple and increasingly frequent leaks from heavily fatigued node segments in the Russian section. John, yes this screams like the plot of a sci-fi movie. It really does. Leaks coming from the Russian section. It's crazy. Yikes. When aluminum gets flexed, it fatigues and gets harder, increasing its tendency to crack.

Cracks concentrate forces at their tips and spread over time. Multiple cracks have been discovered. There is no factor of safety associated with this failure mode. None of the structural pressure vessels are meant to crack. We are not even single fault tolerant on the structural integrity of the station. We could wake up tomorrow and find that with zero warning, it has failed catastrophically,

whether that means a leak slow enough to close some hatches, get the crew out, or at least into safer parts of the station. It's a roll of the dice. It could also depressurize in less than a minute. And Elon Musk says, there are potentially serious concerns about the long-term safety of the International Space Station. Some parts of it are simply getting too old,

and obviously that risk grows over time. Even though SpaceX earns billions of dollars from transporting astronauts and cargo to the ISS, I nonetheless would like to go on record recommending that it be deorbited within two years. Striking, very interesting. We got to put up a new one.

We got to put up 10 of these. I know that they don't have that much economic value, but this is what I love. Yes, yes, we need a dozen more ISS. I know that it's so expensive. I think it's one of the most expensive manmade objects ever built. Although maybe Stargate will beat it out. I seem to remember the ISS being costing a total of a hundred billion dollars.

I think with Stargate is it's a project that's happening across states. So it's hard to say that it's the most expensive object. Oh, much like the ISS's different modules put together. Oh, oh, kind of similar. We can fit the ISS in a large enough warehouse. Yes, yes, yes. And fit Stargate as a series of warehouses.

We have to have, we have to have a human rated space station. It's just, we have to have a space station. It's just so important. I would like to see an Elon mega project. I like that. There's that website. There's that website. How many humans are in space? Have you seen this? Humans are in space right now. Whoisinspace.com.

There are 13 humans in space right now. Who is in space? The ISS crew 10 launched March 14th, 2025. There's four people there. There's the Soyuz. There's crazy people on there. Johnny Kim's up there. You know, wait, no way. You know Johnny Kim, right? No. Oh, Johnny Kimuz. It's crazy on there. Johnny Kim's up there, you know, wait, no way

You know Johnny Kim, right? No. Oh, Johnny Kim is a legend. So John. Oh, yeah, this is a guy who's big go Yes, he's done everything. He's a skill. Yes. So he was a Navy SEAL He's a doctor and he's also an astronaut and the whole meme is like his parents are finally are finally like proud of it He did it. Yeah, but it's like And my parents are finally proud of it. Because he did everything. But it's like, it's incredible. Johnny Kim is the best. We should get him on the show from space.

And up there for 66 days. And then Tiangong space station, the Chinese space station has three astronauts on it. And then another three from a different mission. And so there's six over there. And then there's seven on the ISS. And so we got 13 over there and then there's seven on on the on the ISS and so we got 13 We need more we need like we need we need we need to be bringing this Exponentially, I want like to see them doing more like Kai snot like live streaming. Yes, totally

I'm sure they get a little content problem board. It's a content. They gotta be marketing. Everyone's like oh you're running some Some scientific experiment when we get a paper that's boring. No like thank you for running some space some scientific experiment when we're gonna lay the paper that's boring no like thank you for that thank you for the five dollars exactly again thank you the five dollars they're like doing impressions yes if you donate a hundred they'll squeeze the washcloth and show how the water you know sticks around let's check it out Tyler let's see how he's doing how we doing an update Let's see how he's doing. How we doing an update You start black and the tables black it's quite hard to see okay, I don't know how far I am

Okay, good luck. I'm a man, but he's at 15 minutes. Okay. Okay. I can do it. I can do it Okay, keep going keep going. He's working. He's working anyway, let's We are we're releasing recap videos now. Roughly a one hour recap video of everything that happened on TBPN this entire week. We know we put out a lot of content for you. This week, we'll be recapping WWDC. Apple released Liquid Glass.

It was a little bit controversial. We talked to people that were very optimistic about the new design direction. I think people settled down in their, I think they eventually settled down. They're thinking to themselves, all right, this thing might be pretty nice looking. It's probably, it will get pretty good

and we'll all move on. And it'll probably transition well to VR and other platforms. Yeah, it also tied really well to Apple's kind of retreat. Ben Thompson wrote about this. Apple is turning over the reins to developers to develop some new AI applications, so we're very optimistic about that We also had we had our intern Tyler Cosgrove. He's making Legos right now, but on Monday We had him assemble the first American iPhone from scratch and by scratch I mean seven pieces that he had to kind of glue together but he did it it was way more intense in credit it was

way more than seven maybe twelve but it was fantastic we have we had Andrew Huberman on the show that was fantastic great we got to talk to him about what's going on with NIH budgeting the proposal is that research funding will drop by forty percent we tried to dig into what to dig into what pieces of the research budget should we keep? What is the dynamic between the different types of research that are funded? And he really broke it down for us

on the back of his four-hour interview with Dr. J Bhattacharya, who is the current NIH director. That was a very fun interview. We also went to Y Combinator Demo Day 2025. We were live from San Francisco. We talked to dozens of teams, dozens of founders. We talked to high school dropouts, college dropouts, tons of AI agents.

About 90% of the new YC class is AI driven, but we had a bunch of interesting conversations. We also talked to some venture capitalists there, and we shot a lot of confetti. They were all the hard tech founders. We did not see many of them. There were a few, but we mostly got AI deep dives. They were there.

They were among us. And then we also discussed the meta and scale acquisition or investment. Meta is investing something like $15 billion. The deal actually just closed today. And so we had commentary from a number of founders and pundits and journalists and also venture capitalists talking about the nature of that deal and how it came together. And so we hope you enjoy this week's recap and it gives you a good overview. We're one away from being seven days a week.

Yes, we're very close. We also have a great show for you today. We already had Josh on the show, but we have 1X is coming on to talk about humanoid robots. We got Emily Sunberg coming on, the fantastic writer of the newsletter, Feed Me. We have John Doyle from CAPE building a new cellular network. There's a lot to talk about there.

And then we have someone from the Rand Corporation coming on, which will be very fun. And so we will go back to the timeline, back to what people are talking about in the news. More updates on what's going on in New York. Zoran Mamdani is surging, continues to surge in the polls, and seems to be doing very well in the debates, but is not popular on tech Twitter because

He says capitalism is theft The quote is taxation isn't theft capitalism is so Ron Mamdani could soon be mayor of the finance capital of the world incredible It is it is a very odd choice for a city that is known for capitalism and finance enhance finance and is a very odd choice for a city that is known for capitalism and finance. Enhance. Finance. And yeah, well, we will see how this one evolves.

It is already a case study in marketing. It is. Signal called this out earlier this week that he's just laser focused on a few key lines and it is resonating with some. Yes. Certainly not our corner or our audience of capital enthusiasts.

Well, if you're a capital enthusiast, head over to public.com investing for those who take it seriously. They got multi-asset investing, industry-leading yields, and they're trusted by millions. Let's go to Pavel. Pavel says, Pavel Asparuhov says, traditional company structure is falling apart.

Pretty much every organization should be structured in three parts. People who sell things, people who do things, people who automate things, everything else is just fat. Very interesting, sellers, doers, automators. This kind of maps to, yeah. I would, I think this is, I mean, great insight ultimately resonates, but people who make things, people who sell things, people who make things, people who make things,

people who sell things, people who make things, people who automate things, people do things. Do things is just doing things. Yeah, yeah, that is interesting that there's not, yeah, the doing things part of this is the most vague, but maybe that's management and strategy and deciding what to do in the organization. But I do like the reframing as like...

Some people make things, some people sell things. Yes. Yeah, yeah. Maybe making things is better. But again, the automation thing seems like an interesting twist on a traditional engineering organization. As the role of the software engineer changes, it becomes more about automating any type of business process. And I think the role of the software engineer changes, it becomes more about automating any type of business process. And I think the role of the software engineer is definitely growing in scope. It's vibe coding an internal tool using cursor, retool, or all the different softwares that are available.

It's also buying off the shelf or bringing in off the shelf software to automate processes and the leverage of the software engineer leads to just massive automation across the entire company. The selling things is very interesting because even though that is automated in some ways, it increasingly relies on- What's automated about a steak dinner. Exactly, on interpersonal relationships and communication.

And so that has definitely carved itself out as a unique function within the modern organization. But yes, I think the people who do things is could be build, could be make things, but could also be define the strategy and build the company. But if you wanna automate things, but could also be define the strategy and build the company. But if you want to automate things, put your sales tax on autopilot with numeralhq.com.

Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. Just get on there. And if you're one of those people that sells things. Yeah, and if you're one of those people that sells things, get on Adio, customer relationship magic. Adio is the AI native CRM that builds, scales, and grows your company to the next level.

It is the backbone of our high velocity guest program. It is. Get on there. Chamath had a hilarious post that I really enjoyed. He says, well, this is probably one of the funnier things I've done, but my friend and Somalia and I got a California liquor license and started a wine collective with our license It allows us to buy wine directly from Vintners get wholesale pricing buy and house entire collections of wine

We did we didn't do this just for us But created it to allow our friends to participate as well at some point We may open it up to the world as large at If you love wine, want access to the best wines and avoid retail markups, this may be a fit. The team charges for shipping and handling, but otherwise pass through the raw cost to our members. Right now we're saving 15 to 40% per bottle, depending on the winery slash vintage.

We call it Drink With Me. We also create quarterly capsules of the best wines Josh and I have drank and allow members to buy in quantity. The first box is below. So it seems like he's on the cusp of launching a D2C wine company. This is a wine membership wine club. There's thousands of these.

People love them. I think it makes sense for Chamath's creator evolution. I mean, in terms of his brand like he you know like always drinking wine I was really fantastic one all in alone and just casually dropping You know a little note about drink with me or whatever one. He's drinking probably you know drive this to 10,000 plus subscribers I completely agree the creator market fit here is fantastic powerful I completely agree. The creator market fit here is fantastic. Powerful.

Very fun. And if you zoom in and says, "'Drink with me, a curated wine collective "'by Chamath Pali-Hapitiya and Somali Joshua Plaque.'" Looks great. And congrats. I mean, he has a passion for wine. He's expressing it in a business.

You love to see it. That's great. We talked a little bit about this, but we didn't get back into this. Scott Belsky came on the show this week, talked about the data wars, and there's new reporting from the information. Salesforce is blocking enterprise AI rivals like Glean from using Slack data for their applications.

This was a big issue back in 2012 with this, that you had all this data in Facebook, you had all this data in Google, you had all this data with Apple, and you could not, even though every one of those companies would tell you, it's not our data, it's your data, you can take it with you, it's your horse, you own your data, people would say, okay, that's great. Google, I'd like to give all of my data to Facebook

because I want better, I want better ads on Facebook. And Facebook, I wanna give all my data to Google so that when I go in my Gmail, I can search my friends list. And both companies will be like, oh no, no, no, no, no. We don't trust the other company. It's your data. You can export it through this like CSV zip file

that you have to download every time. But we're not just gonna let an API link these two services. Absolutely not. Because the walled garden must be maintained. Yes. And it's like, oh, oh, oh. It's a beautiful garden. You have to appreciate the beauty of the garden.

Apple, it's my data. Then I can integrate my iMessage with my Android friends. Like, oh no, no, you couldn't possibly do that. And I mean, these big tech companies, they have reasonable arguments for it, but it always has been funny. And now it's more important than ever. And so Scott says, anticipated and referred to this

as the impending data wars and previous editions of implications. That's his newsletter that you should go subscribe to, but didn't expect to start this quickly. Data grab and protectionism underway, especially by those that don't own their own graphs or sophisticated permissioning layers. And so yeah, there's this big question.

OpenAI is launching deep research. It integrates with Gmail and Google Docs. That's gonna be fantastic. If they cut that off entirely and they get cut off, that might be something that actually drives enterprise adoption of Google's Gemini deep research project, right? Because if we have a whole bunch of documents in Google Drive and we want someone to be able to run a deep research report

around all of our internal documentation which obviously they would want to do and Google successfully cuts off open AI like you're just going to have to go there or else it's gonna be a hassle of like okay I guess download all of our PDFs from Google Drive and then feed them into ChatGPT one at a time. Like no one's gonna do that. The friction's gonna be so high. Even if you can download your data,

like it needs to be there over an API. And so Salesforce is taking the first shot in the data wars and we'll be tracking it here on the show. Shots fired. For the next forever. Yeah, I mean this was a very timely call out from Scott on the show. Yes, it was.

Well, if you're losing sleep over the Data Wars, you gotta get on 8 Sleep. Go to 8sleep.com slash TBPN, get an 8 Sleep. How'd you sleep last night, Jordy? I'm on a generational run, put up huge numbers last night. I think I got you beat this whole week across. I think it's tied up. Monday, 91.

Tuesday, 86. Wednesday was on the road, doesn't count. Thursday, 91. Friday, 95. Let's hear it for me. I got completely mugged. It's a tiny yesterday. Oh, soundboard not working.

I was expecting some clapping, but the soundboard must be broken. Oh, there we go. That's for you, John. That's my favorite, 95. Hey, I'm happy for you. I'm happy for you. Okay, yeah.

Just throw up an excuse. I'm sure you have a good excuse. It's fine, it's fine. Let me hear it. Let me hear the excuse. It actually was funny. I woke up a little late this morning because my son crawled into bed and

basically pushed me so far off the edge of the bed that the eight sleep alarm, the vibration alarm was waking him up. He didn't even wake up. He was just sleeping like a rock. But I was just feeling it like very faintly. Yeah, my son hops in the bed after I after I leave and and I use the warm-up alarm from it's like which is fantastic it really makes you get out of bed but he loves it because he's like it's so warm and cozy and he just gets like he gets he sleeps like an extra two hours because he likes it really warm yeah so he enjoys my post alarm side of the bed enjoys that very sweet anyway let's go back to the Army's newest recruits,

tech executives from Meta, OpenAI and more. The Wall Street Journal was covering it. Executives from Meta, Palantir and OpenAI are joining a new Army Innovation Corps, bringing tech upgrades to the military. The tech reservists will serve 120 hours a year, so two hours, a little over two hours a week as lieutenant colonels advising on AI

and commercial tech acquisition, very exciting. And so, I like this from Boz, Andrew Bozworth over at Meta, he says, it's possible I watched too much Top Gun. He's 43, standing more than six foot two. Happens to the best of us. It does, you can never watch too much Top Gun Come on boss

It's an amazing movie He was told he was too tall to realize his youthful ambitions of flying an f-16 fighter jet that happened to you, too It was never even in the conversation. I remember I remember seeing a movie in Like about the Vietnam War when I was like 13 and it was very obvious that I was never going to make it in the military. But there was someone from my high school and I do have a family member who's flying F-16s and it seems like it's a wonderful program

and still is incredibly special. You really have to be a very specific specimen to be a pilot. Yeah. I did flight lessons as a kid and I was in the civil, the civil, what's it called civil air patrol and They I was really worried as a kid I wanted to be a pilot and I was worried that my eyesight would degrade because you can't you can't have glasses you can't have

LASIK or anything like that. You just got to have perfect eyesight. You got to be very specific height and Anyways, yeah perfect eyesight, you gotta be very specific height. And anyways. Yeah. Bosworth went on to say, there's a lot of patriotism that has been under the covers that I think is coming to light in the Valley, I completely agree. They will be sworn in as uniformed officers in a public ceremony on Friday,

the day before the Army's 250th birthday. Happy birthday to the Army. Happy birthday. Less than a decade ago, even working on technology that might be used in defense, nevermind suiting up for service, was anathema in Silicon Valley. The new reserve program reflects how the relationship

between the Pentagon and the tech industry has deepened. Meta and OpenAI adjusted their policies to work more with the military last year, although Meta is not technically a defense contractor right now. They are a supplier to a defense contractor with their annual partnership. Little bit of confusion there. That story went out and it was so fast.

A lot of people didn't understand they're not of an official military contractor at this point. Although, I would love if they were. Palantir has been involved in national security work for two decades. It has an AI and data project with the Army worth potentially more than $1 billion. For the Army, the deepening ties can prepare

for wars of the future. They are expected to be waged in part with ground robots and drones and rely on networks of sensors and artificial intelligence to coordinate it all. I mean, looking at the conflict from yesterday in Iran, that feels like, in many ways, a future of warfare. Zero troops deployed and absolute devastation.

Well, speaking of robots, we're gonna have the founder of One X on the show in just five minutes. But in the meantime, let me tell you about AdQuick, out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only AdQuick combines technology, out of home expertise and data to enable efficient seamless ad buying

across the globe. Go to adquick.com. Anyway, Shamsankar took to the free press to write a little bit of a, I guess this is an op-ed or a little article about his experience He says I am the CTO of Palantir today I joined the army says my father grew up in a mud hut in India America gave him and me a life now technologists like me need to give back. Oh, this is heartwarming

Fantastic article. You have a giga Chad filter Fantastic article you have a giga Chad filter This is your new bit if you need a bit going into the weekend Yes, if you see a picture of your of your absolute boy absolute boy Yeah, they don't and they clearly you know casual filter accuse them of using a gig I mean it looks like he's in shape. Let's leave it at that, without bringing out the Glazonator 3000. Later today, Triple Glaze. Receiving their commissions on my side

will be some of the most impressive minds in the world of technology. Kevin Wheel, the Chief Product Officer at OpenAI, Andrew Bosworth, Boz, the Chief Technology Officer at Meta, and Bob McGrew, formerly the chief research officer at OpenAI and engineering director at Palantir. None of these men need to pad their resumes. None of them have free time between fatherhood

demanding day jobs and a dozen other demands. Are they all dads? Let's hear it for fatherhood, let's go. Let's go. I mean, we got 50% of this group on the show already. We got it We have finished it out or we were close to the boss. We almost overlapped at some event We're gonna we're gonna make it happen. We almost caught him at figma config. We're gonna get him on the show Let's make it happen a decade ago

It would have been unthinkable for so many tech heavyweights to openly align with the US military equally It would have been out of character for the military to enlist the support of the nation's business elite, much less create a special core that they could deploy their technical talents in service of the government. But a sea change has taken place. Wars in Europe and Middle East, and above all the threat of war in the Pacific,

have focused the national mind and initiated a scramble for mobilization. Exploding pagers and long distance drone strikes from shipping containers prove that technology has once again changed the battlefield. Our military has to change with it. The Army's Executive Innovation Corps,

under the direction of the Army's Chief of Staff, General Randy George, who has been on the show, is part of a larger effort by our military to transform the way it prepares for and fights wars in the 21st century. Marrying the nation's most innovative private companies with our most important military missions is fundamental to that effort.

That cooperation relies on reviving a sense of duty in an American elite that has become disconnected from our nation and its tradition of service. Let's check in with our intern and his tradition of service. How is it going, servicing? Let's play He's 75% of the way there this is much harder than I well pass there well past 30 minutes, okay, well Punishment prize for

Really I have a really good one. fantasy football punishment? I have a really good one. What is it? I have a really good one. I know what you're thinking of. And it's actually a bit... No, you actually don't. Oh, okay. Because I was going to give this to you as a gag.

Give it to me? The thing that I'm imagining would be a gag gift for you. Okay. But now I'm going to sort of... Flip it around? Convert it into a punishment for Tyler. Are you going to drop it right now? What is it? it's on the way here. It's on the way here It's an it's an it was in the car and okay, and Ben's gonna drop it here

Okay, a few minutes. We might have to wait till after the next guest but You can look forward to that. Yeah. Yeah, we didn't tell you but if you'd been able to get it done in ten minutes We would have gotten you a fantastic new watch on bezel We had our finger hovering over the five-minute n Nautilus but that's kind of out of the window. Would you have worked faster Tyler? You knew that there was a Nautilus on the board. Your bezel concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet. It'll have to be next time but in the meantime if you're listening you should go to getbezel.com. We should treat this Lego set as sort of something that he can kind of

iterate against you know like you don't just do a Rubik's Cube once yes once you try to do it faster and so I think we should give Tyler another crack at the nautilus yes and then he should be able to do a lot faster Dylan why don't you bring bring this up for a second? Okay? This is this is the potential punishment. What are we doing here? Okay, I was gonna give this to you John cuz you're a horse These are the Apple Dex Apple flavored electrolytes It's from It's from horse health products. Horse health products.

It's a 40 day supply for all classes of horses. Show it to the single. And I'm just going to go out, Tyler, your punishment is you have to finish this before your internship ends this summer. It's totally safe for humans. It is. It's a 40 day supply for a regular horse Long you get there anyway, so you you have this waiting for you after the show

And we could do something if you finish the next one the next iteration if you do it in 30 minutes Maybe maybe you don't have to have it, but you might try it and discover that you actually love it So we'll see okay Tyler still working on that. We'll check in with him. He does have two hours. We have another hour of guests coming into the studio We have one X coming up next talking about humanoid robots But and I'm excited for this. They've had a they've had a massive Week, I have a ton of questions about humanoid robots.

The biggest question is data. That's into real gap. There was something percolating in my mind related to the Alex Wang acquisition, the Scale AI acquisition at Meta, because robotics data is so difficult to get. Maybe Scale AI would play in that market. We'll see where that develops.

But in the meantime, let's bring in the founder of One X and start talking to him about humanoid robots. How you doing? There is what's happening? Welcome to the same good. Good. Thanks for having me. It's fantastic Yeah, give us some context on on your background on 1x and neo and then we'll just get into a bunch of different questions. I was about to tell John and Neo and then we'll just get into a bunch of different questions. I was about to tell John Neo was actually blessed by Lil B the base God I saw that a while ago much like Timothy Chalamet was before the generational run So it's very possible that that Neo is is on a similar run itself

I'm very excited. So anyways great to have you on burnt and yeah, give us give us some color awesome, no, and yeah, give us some color. Awesome. No, and I think like, let's see. Oh, hey, Nia. Hey, Nia. I'm over here. Wow. Wow.

OK. That's convenient. I do think there has to be something through it, right? It's been going pretty well lately. So we have been blessed. OK. You've clearly made one. How many have you made of these things?

It's about a hundred. A hundred. Wow, okay. Different versions though, right? They're not still all operational. Like we're very quickly cycling through hardware revisions to ensure we actually get to the launch by end of year. So we do quickly deprecate them as new ones come out.

Sure. What does launch mean? You want to be able to sell these to companies? Is this business to business, business to consumer? I've seen them on streams. They seem like kind of just like companions. It's less industrial, but what's your thesis for the early adopter here?

Yeah, let me just jump in straight into it. So like who am I, who's the company, what are we doing, why are we doing this? So I'm well, I'm Bernd, I'm the founder, CEO, come to this from a robotics background. I've been on this journey all my life. Picked apart all of my mom's kitchen appliances since they had motors when I was a kid. Always liked building stuff, programming. Started One X 10 years ago and like the mission stayed pretty constant. We want to create an abundance of artificial labor. And we're doing this through creating these intelligent machines that can live and learn among us. And the last part

is so important. I think what really differentiates Onex from the rest of the pack here is the focus on making robots that are safe among people and that are very affordable. But first principles engineering, how do you make something that's super lightweight, doesn't need very special raw materials, doesn't need that high tolerances in manufacturing, make something that's closer to a refrigerator than a car, but still as capable as a human. And when I say getting this out the door, what I mean is literally getting it into your homes. So we're going through in-home testing among employees now. I have one in my house in Redwood, and it's amazing to get to finally live with the product.

And there's gonna be some customers having them quite soon, but like under NDA, early testing. And then if we play our cards right, it should be in the main market by end of year. That's the goal. Wow, moving quick. How has the company evolved since 10 years ago? Humanoids have always been in people's minds to some degree, they haven't been in the headlines as much as they've been, let's say in the last couple years, but kind

of walk us through maybe those different stages, how your vision evolved, and then I have a bunch of other questions. Yeah, I mean, it's the kind of product that we all know will happen, right? And we've known it for like, I don't know, last 50 years. Like at some point this will happen and the impact is tremendous, right? So I think what's really changed the last couple of years, to be very blunt, that it works. For the first eight years, it was kind of a grind and it's the kind of a problem that's really worth just like doubling down on like grinding

and pushing on until it works. And I don't think the impact of this type of technology can be exaggregated, right? It's we're years, not decades now away. It's very hard to like, for a specific date, but we're years, not decades away from robots building robots, robots building out our data centers, our energy infrastructure, our chip manufacturing, like our mining. In general, it's this kind of hard takeoff moment, right? Where we can actually get to an abundance of artificial labor. And it doesn't really even matter if it's physical or digital, right?

Because once you have this engine running, you will just in general, like have extremely intelligent agents, whether they're in the digital or physical space. And kind of redefine what it means to be human. Like what do we value in humans? Like how do we see our own worth? And I'm just really freaking lucky to be alive, right?

To be part of that, it's been my dream all my life. And I think- Yeah, the timing's amazing. What about getting into more specifics? With Neo, do you have any sort of specific early use cases that you're focused on in all of the sort of marketing that I've seen so far? It hasn't seemed focused on certain use

cases like manufacturing or certainly not mining or things like that. It feels like you're maybe more focused on the home. Is that correct? Am I off? No, no, no. It is correct, but it's really important to point out that like, if you take a step back, right, it's like, we're years, not decades away from actual abundance of artificial labor. So as a company, the only thing that

makes sense there is to get there as quickly as possible. It's all we care about. What's the shortest path? So we're not a consumer company, we're shortest path to artificial labor. And it just happens to be that the shortest path is to consumer. Because you need to live and learn among people. Like if it's one thing that's incredibly clear in AI, it is that the diversity or like the variance in your data set basically equals your intelligence, right? That's where intelligence emerges from. And in a factory, there just

isn't enough diversity. Think about it. Like if you're in a factory all your life, moving something from A to B, and that's all you're doing, then like you could ask like, okay, how much do you actually learn, right? And we actually have the answer. You learn about, we need like 20 to 30 hours of data from that, and then we don't learn anything more. Interesting.

So like that's just like, that's not where to deploy robots. We want to deploy robots there, but we have to deploy them first where we actually get the data that gets you to a true truly intelligent machine. That doesn't just repeat emotion, it understands deeply the task it's doing. And this brings you into like something interesting that you said in your intro here, which is companionship, right? Because

everything we do is social, like work is social. Like, whenever you do something, usually it's because if someone wants something, and usually someone's next to you, or even like, communication, the social context of objects, like, hey, is this cup on the table? Someone using it? Is it yours? Like, is it is it half full, half empty? Is it dirty? Like, there's liquid in it. But if it's coffee, and it's called, it's probably like not in use anymore. It's actually dirty. Like everything has this like social context. And this is what creates this incredible variance and diversity in the home. Not only is every home

different, but like everything happening in the home is different every day and everything has a social context. So I think we're seeing pretty strong proof now that like a lot of model intelligence comes from this diversity. And we really want to double down on that. And then the other part is I think it's just going to be incredible to live with these companions in our life that can not only give us back time in our everyday life with like household chores, but actually be a trusted friend, right? And we're talking to our phones with chatbots and being like,

these are our new companions, but it's not the right interface, right? The right interface is something that you can really deeply connect with. And that gets you away from a screen. Bicentennial man, a movie I know you haven't seen, but is a fantastic story of a humanoid robot that stays with the family for 200 years and evolves and changes and Robin Williams, beautiful movie. I want to talk to you about kind of the progression of the software, teleoperation, super valuable in

a bunch of different ways, simulation, we're seeing lots of promising data, there's the sim to real gap. There's Deterministic algorithms for walk cycles. There's end-to-end systems What is your view on the path that we need to go down to get to something that's truly? Generalizable so that you can put a humanoid robot in a completely novel situation Just talk to it and say hey clean up this table and it will remove all of these cans one at a time. It knows exactly how to do it. And it's never actually been trained on that specific task, but it can generalize just like any other human can.

I think I learned there's two interesting answers. The first one is no one knows how to solve that yet. And then the second answer is we actually know really well how to solve that, which, which is it's going how to solve that yet. And then the second answer is we actually know really well how to solve that, which is it's gonna be some big transformer and you just need enough high quality data. So we kind of know like it's an engineering problem at this point because even though we don't know the exact solution, we know what we need, right? We just need an enormous amount of relevant data and this data is very different. All models that you see today

they're trained on what I call like only observations. If you think about the internet, whether it's video or pictures or text or whatever, it's static, right? So you're like, given that I saw or read this, what's the next thing? But what you're actually missing and where, in my opinion, like a lot of like our ability to reason comes from is that you have some hypothesis about what's going to happen. You have your own mental model of this conversation. So when you're saying something, if I'm training just on what you're saying, that's not the

same as if I'm training on what you were thinking and planning, and then what you said, and then what the result of that was, which was back to how I that. Yeah. And robots actually allow you to do this, right? Because you have what the robot is thinking and what it was planning to do, what it actually did, and what it resulted in. And this data is what is needed to get to this. And that's what we're gathering at scale. Yeah. There's no real like massive data set like the web that you can just scrape. Folks are using teleoperation to generate data, there's simulation data, like what are the richest sources of data for you? What do you see as being like the real trove that you're gonna be doubling down on over the next few years? I think it's all of them, but they're all just like a crutch. It's like you're

bootstrapping your way to where robots are learning in the real world. Yeah, and this is really the direction we're moving in because that operation does not scale. Right? It's super valuable and we need it, but it doesn't scale. simulated data, very useful for simple things like walking. Yeah, but for like peeling a shrimp or whatever, right? It's like, it's not nearly detailed enough, like it doesn't work. So you just, what you need is to use the internet data, some teleoperation, simulations, synthetic data,

all of these things to get to where your model is able to sometimes succeed. So when you say, get me a Coke in the fridge, maybe there's a 50% chance that a robot comes back with a Coke. Maybe it got stuck somewhere on the way it didn't manage to do so. But once this happens, then you can basically just tell it, hey, good job, or like, hey, weren't you supposed to get me a Coke if it's just staring

out the window instead. And that's the data loop that scales, right? And that's what we're deploying. So when we're saying like getting this into your home, what we mean is almost more like adopt a Neo to help us teach it. It's not going to do everything in your home day one. We're not there yet. But we're able to deliver a product that is really fun, very engaging, somewhat helpful and really the ability to be part of this generational journey from the beginning. That's the product. And that's how we gather that data.

And this comes back to how we design robots that are safe. Because if you want the robots to actually be learning in the real world, they need to be safe, not just with respect to you, but with respect to itself and your environment, right? You don't want your kitchen to look like a robot has been ravaging around there when it's done. You want your kitchen to look nice,

just like it did before the robot went there, even though the robot failed a few times. Yeah, the challenge is you don't have the luxury of hallucinations long-term. Like if the robot is unloading the dishwasher and puts a bunch of knives in the wrong cupboard, you know, that's like, that's not safe, right? Yeah, you have, you know, kids at home and, you know, so it's like the bar for acceptable is very high. I want to ask about the supply chain.

Dylan Patel was on the show saying that no matter what happens with humanoid robotics, all the parts are going to be made in China. There were some actuator startups in the comments saying, that's not true. We're going to build it here. We're going to fix the supply chain. What's your view on the short, medium, and long term

of the robotic supply chain. What's your view on the short, medium, and long term of the robotic supply chain? And you know how to ask the hard questions. Let's start by saying, to us, this has been all about how you don't over-constraint the system too early, right? So humanoid robots don't exist at scale yet. So like if we were making a car, my new startup was a car,

I would clearly utilize the existing supply chain. Of course. What we've done is we've made everything ourselves. I know I say literally here, like, I mean, we're undergoing some patenting process for a new type of die casting of aluminum at the same time that we're launching AI models. So we're like definition of vertical integrator,

including all the manufacturing technology. That puts us in a position where we can actually kind of manufacture anywhere. It just depends on access to raw materials, power and general like RFs and everything else. We are actually building a factory in the US right now. There are challenges because like sourcing simple things in quotes like copper, aluminum, steel, these kinds of things in the US, for example, is a lot more expensive than in China.

Logistically, it's also kind of like a nightmare because you don't have kind of like the economic zones with like basically your metal refineries, it's next to your forge. So there's like pros and cons, but I think there's a path. I think what's the most important here to realize is that when people talk about like things need to be built in China, we're not necessarily talking only about this, we're talking about actual access to knowledge about how to do manufacturing. And I think that that is the thing that takes the longest to kind of onshore, right? So sure, there

are things that needs to happen with rare earths, there are things that needs to happen with rare earths. There's things that need to happen with all these things. But I think the main thing to really work on also is just making sure that people understand how incredibly exciting manufacturing is and make sure that our new generation actually really wants to work on the hard problems in manufacturing. Yeah. I mean, we talked to the author of Apple in China, and he really reframed the conversation

about Apple's impact in China, not just as being a buyer, but actually being an educator in China and sending over massive teams of manufacturing designers to create a supply chain that didn't even exist, but was enabled by the scale of the population and the economic zones and everything you articulated. So yeah, I'm optimistic that in a new boom, you could potentially set up trade deals such that,

if your business is scaling, you would have the choice to create a new generation of manufacturing engineers in America or anywhere else that might be advantageous. But this has been fantastic. I'd love to have you back and go way deeper. Jordy, the last question. Congrats on all the new launches this week. Excited to follow you and the whole team's work.

It's been awesome to see. It was great talking to you guys and stay tuned. There's actually more coming. Amazing. Wow. Yeah. And we'll pull up another chair for Neo whenever you're ready. We'll adopt one.

Happy to adopt one. Yeah. Bring us another energy drink. Thank you so much for joining. We'll talk to you soon. Cheers, Bert. Have a good one. Thanks, John.

Next up, we have John Doyle from CAPE coming in the studio, talking to us about wireless networking, cellular technology. Very excited to talk to him, especially with the backdrop of what happened in Ukraine two weeks ago. Anyway, welcome to the studio, John. Good to have you here. How are you doing?

Hey guys, happy to be here. I'm doing great. Thanks so much for joining. Would you mind kicking us off with a little bit of introduction of yourself and the company maybe to get us started? Yeah, you bet. I, I'm John Doyle, founder and CEO of Cape is

America's privacy first mobile network. Two sentences on my background cause it explains how I came to start this company. I started my career in the army special forces. I was a communication sergeant on a special forces group, went to Palantir. I was there for nine years and at Palantir, I started in technical roles. I wound up running the national security business for five years. And that's where I learned about this whole, you know, PhD field of study worth of vulnerabilities that exist on the global cellular network. I'm really passionate about solving them. And so I started CAPE in 2022 to get after that problem.

What is the biggest like concrete risk to the cellular network? Is it like... Well, I would just start at a higher level. Is it how unsecure is the average cellular network. Completely. If you remember during the last campaign, the story came out about J.D. Vance's phone calls being listened to. Oh yeah. That kind of came and went as these stories do. But it snowballed into the story about salt typhoon, which the headline of that story is,

China has just explicitly and completely infiltrated all the major telcos in the United States. Wow. Which is pretty bad. But even before you get there, there are all these, there are really features that are baked into the protocols that run the network. They're there for good reason, but in the hands of malicious actors, some really bad effects can be drawn out of them. And so, you know, we can get deep in the technical weeds if you want to, but basically the whole thing is blown and it's problematic because we. Are entirely reliant and kind of fundamentally reliant on the cellular network. Yeah.

What's a bigger risk right now? Espionage or sabotage. That's a really good question. Um, I'm going to say espionage, it is being like, it's absolutely happening right now. The Vance story is a perfect example of that, right? Yeah. And just listening to the future vice president's phone calls. Although the sabotage question is interesting.

I know you guys want to talk about or have been talking about spider web a bunch and the drone attacks. One of the really interesting features of that story, of course, from our perspective is the fact that the drones were piloted on using cellular commercial cellular connection, which is really interesting to us in a bunch of ways. But importantly, and it came out a bunch in the reporting, when people start to think about countermeasures and how would we guard against these attacks in the future, one option that gets taken off the table almost immediately is turning off the cellular network. Yep.

Right? It has disastrous consequences. Right. Yeah. Because what if someone needs to call 911 and they can't? Something like that. You're going to wind up hurting people. Impact.

Yeah, totally. When there's an AT&T outage, stuff grinds. Right? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we saw yesterday with just like cloud flare outage and it was very disruptive. Talk to me about how you actually go about building a new network. Are you able to solve the problems that you're trying to solve just by piggybacking on the existing

physical hardware? Or is this a crazy capex problem that you're we're going to see you raising a trillion dollars in debt and stuff. You could probably do that based on your background. But I'm always interested to know where you think like the right problem to solve is. Yeah, it's a great question. And we didn't know the answer to it when we started the company. Thankfully, it turns out you don't need to build the towers, you don't need to own the

antennas or the spectrum. Our approach is we own all the software that runs the network. So we control application building, call routing, messaging, all of the important stuff. And we've done pretty extensive red teaming and testing, especially with government partners and proven out that if you own all the software, you can actually make a lot of progress against the problem. Very cool. So when I see one of those cell phone towers, that might not be a Verizon tower specifically. That might be owned by a different company that then is like leasing or running software

for Verizon and AT&T within the same kind of like, you could think of that almost like a multi-tenant data center. Is that the right mental model when I see a cell phone tower? Yeah, and that's a great, it's a really good observation and it turns out to be true. The carriers, you know, the carriers, what the carriers own is spectrum, right? Verizon owns is an amazing amount of spectrum that's super and they administer it. They don't, you're right, they don't even own the towers most of the time.

Like American Tower or some other company builds the tower, oftentimes puts the radio on there or the carriers will sign an agreement with Nokia Ericsson to put the antennas up there. And oftentimes the carriers don't actually run the radios. They outsource that to Nokia and Ericsson. And so they have sort of assumed this system integrator role. And I think my personal opinion is that that has serious security implications, has led to some of the problem that we find ourselves in. Sure. Can you get me up to speed on 5G?

I remember the drama around Huawei and they had built 5G towers that we were not going to buy. I also heard someone mentioned offhand that America doesn't really have 5G. We have like fake 5G or something. Is there, like I really- Is it all marketing? Yeah, is it marketing? Oh, you. Oh, don't talk about it.

Right. Yeah. Okay. So there's two things there. At first you're like, you're, you're teeing up one of my favorite history lessons, which is 20 years or so ago, 23 years ago, China made the strategic decision to capture as much footprint on the global cellular network as possible. And the way they achieve that was by pumping billions of dollars of subsidy into Huawei

so that Huawei could run around the world and sell antennas and also core software, the software that runs the network at half or less of the price of any of their competitors. And so it became really attractive and everyone went out and bought Huawei gear. And the result was that China now owns still not in the US so much anymore, but around the world, you know, a huge percentage of the footprint on the network. Almost exactly the same time, the US and it's not obviously a different kind of government. So it wasn't like a centrally made decision, but US telecom started outsourcing and offshoring all of the technical aspects of running the business. So, you know,

the core software now is built by Nokia Ericsson, which are Europe, and very little of that capacity exists within the United States. So while China's making all these really deep and recurring investments in the infrastructure, the US is really kind of divesting and just becoming the system integrator, spectrum managers. And that's how we find ourselves in this imbalance now. And when people talk about the race for 5G and how is the US positioned with respect to China, I think it's a little bit of a misnomer to say it's 5G because they're not talking about

when 5G first started to get buzzy, the use cases were always like a heart surgeon in Boston is gonna be doing surgery in Africa, right? Because of the low latency Protocols and that stuff is cool. But that's not like how we're behind China how we're really behind China It's just in how much footprint do we own how much access how much control do we have over the network? And that's actually agnostic of which generation or it's independent of what generation we're on Yeah, so and then are we really on 5g is such a good question

there's like I think about it mostly from a bandwidth perspective. Like I became able to stream HD video at like retina resolution. And I really don't have a daily use case that goes beyond that in terms of bandwidth needs. And so as long as but but every once in a while I notice if I'm about to take off on a plane, and I know I want to download a movie right before the difference between fast for downloading like a full gig in two minutes And and 20 minutes is material Uh, and so that's where I would think 5g would help but i've also heard about like streaming video games, obviously 4k stuff But I I I don't feel the pain that much that i'm not, you know, I'm not a single issue voter on the topic,

but I am curious. You're like, I mean, that observation is a threat to the entire like, like 3G to 4G was way better, right? Oh, totally. It was night and day. Yeah. Better, more secure.

And 4G to 5G was arguably better, although not entirely because like 5G connection drains the battery on your phone a lot faster. Interesting. There's some trade-offs there where LTE times 4G is actually like a better option in some cases. But beyond that, like the hurry up and download a movie use case, there's kind of nothing left. And so there's a big shrug in the industry.

People are kind of waving their hands at AI like, well, we're going to do AI and that'll change everything. But I don't know that that comes into it. Everything's an S-curve. It's all sigmoid. We saw mobile bandwidth growing exponentially. Everyone was like, you're gonna be able to download 10 exabytes in two seconds.

And in fact, it was a sigmoid function, like it always is. I think you can use Navel Music. It's like, as long as I can stream Netflix at maximum resolution, I'm done. I'm done. Who is the core customer that you're going after? Is it people in important positions, politicians, CEOs, et cetera?

It's just JD Vance. Just JD Vance. Just one massive client. One billion dollar contract. One billion dollar thing. You should be able to get a one billion dollar ARR contract. No, but I think when I think about the broad consumer market, people say they want privacy, but in reality.

A lot of people just want $20 instead of $30. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, both of those consumers exist in the market. There are a lot of people. Mint Mobile perfected the, like, how cheap can you offer a cell plan, right? And they nailed it. It's $20 turns out to be the answer. Ryan Reynolds, undefeated. like how cheap can you offer a cell My background is in special operations. I am deeply passionate about the fact that cellular phones have been a part of the battlefield

for as long as we've had cellular phones and they are increasingly not decreasingly so over time. We saw this in Ukraine, like everyone, the entire Ukraine wars fought on the mobile network and communications aspects of it. And I'm deeply passionate about building technology that keeps people doing that work safe, right? I think that's like a really important mission and I love it. And that is where we started

when we were thinking about the product and starting to like build early versions and build early features. That was the market, but we always had in mind and I in my early life, I was a special officer soldier in my later life, I'm a parent and like, and I even in my sort of relatively mundane parental, you know, mid forties existence, I have worries about how reliant I am on my

cell phone and the trade offs I'm making and things like SIM swaps. If you know what SIM swaps are, that's a huge problem. And you need, you have to build technical solutions to problems like that. And I have also a general sense of indignation that if I want to be a subscriber to any traditional telco, I give away all of my personal information. And then they lose it, like clockwork, four to five times a year.

They really do. They're giving it away. It doesn't have to be that way, and it shouldn't be that way. Well, thank you for your service, both in the military and as a father. It's very important. We gotta get you Ryan Gosling. I think, you know, Ryan Reynolds, when we're mobile, we get you Ryan Gosling.

This is to the moon. There's something there. This is fantastic. Well, now you're our chief mobile correspondent now. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, do you have anything else or should we let him go? No, this was great.

Thank you so much for hopping on. Seriously, I think there's gonna be, I'm sure there'll be more stories this year Yeah, yeah, we love you back on some some deeper insight, but we'll let you get back to it important work Have a great rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon Let's quickly tell you about wander find your happy place find your happy place Book a wander with I love that when I point hotel double amenities dreamy beds cleaning 24 seven yeah so good there we go top tier cleaning 24 seven concierge service it's a vacation home but better yesterday I got a little

spicy on the timeline said vacation I said traveling is overrated I wasn't talking about what are you running I love staycations I love getting to wander in my hometown. In something I can drive to. Load up the entire family, load up the dogs, drive out to a wander. Hit Cheshire Tree. Marathons and travel. Marathons and travel.

There's no reason you need to go outside the country to enjoy a beautiful wander. Although, if traveling is your ticket, go and go. Let's beauty wander. It is. Let's check in with our intern, Tyler Cosgrove's see how we doing well I'm very close okay but this has been kind of a disappointment I'm extremely slow right now are your hands aching are your fingers breaking I'm sweating oh sweating okay well you're

now if you're sweating a lot you should try these Apple decks apples like of course the lecture I let's get him let's get him a let's get him a cup If you're sweating a lot, you should try these Apple Dex Apple-flavored course electrolytes. I didn't tell. Let's get him a cup, at least. Let's get him a cup, get him some electrolytes, make sure he's hydrated. I didn't tell Tyler this, but I took a picture of the LEGO kit and I asked Chad GPT, how long will this take? It said between two and four hours.

And then he was like, I can do it in 30. And I was like, OK, good luck. Anyway, we have our next guest in the studio, Emily Sundberg, the writer of the fantastic Feed Me newsletter. The daily newsletter about the spirit of enterprise. Really? Isn't that an incredible line?

That's an incredible line. That feels like a line we would use. Welcome to the stream. How you doing, Emily? Welcome to the show. I'm so glad to have you. Welcome everyone, I'm happy to be here. Everyone, all two of you.

Yes. All of us. We have our intern Tyler over there. We have our intern here, we're gonna let you sit. You know, Emily being a guest, I've gotten more random texts about it. People being like, oh, you should ask her this, oh, you should ask her that.

People are paying attention. Is that a Google shirt? Exciting, that's scary. That's amazing. Well, what is your shirt? Let me see, could you stand up? I was at Apple. I was at WWDC on Monday. You were reporting on what the really old folks are thinking about Apple, I was at WWDC on Monday.

You were reporting on what the really old folks are thinking about Apple, right? Is that what they said? Yeah. I saw the backlash. The people over at Puck said that Apple should have invited younger people. Wow.

Wow. From the majority, I'm a little too old. Yeah, before we go to, is it true that Tim Cook begged for a selfie? Oh, yeah. Yeah, totally. No, that was really fun. That was cool.

I didn't expect that to happen. What was your reaction? It feels like a lot of the liquid glass hate has blown over by now. People like most. Yeah, I think sitting there in real time reading Twitter and seeing people's reactions, it seemed like people weren't excited

and wanted more Apple intelligence updates. But that night I went to, have you guys ever been to WWDC? No, no, never. I went to one of those ancillary engineer and developer barbecues an hour away in an Airbnb with 30 guys who build apps and they were all really excited.

So I think they're the people who it's for, and they're the people who are going to ultimately be using these updates, and they seemed thrilled about it. So yeah, it was a developer conference, and they actually announced a lot of exciting things around developers. And it also seemed like they seeded some territory in the AI world that could potentially enable more AI apps

to be owned by independent developers, which is a huge, huge boon for the ecosystem. Did you get to press Tim Cook on the Photos app at all? Are you a Photos app enjoyer? I had about 14 seconds with him and Will Welch was before me, so it was like... Not a lot of time. Yeah.

Next year, next year. Next year. Awesome, I have a bunch of time. Next year, next year. Next year. Awesome. I have a bunch of other random questions to go through. I want to ask about the state of Substack. But before we get into that, what is the state of the New York City election? This mayor, we've been kind of covering it.

Our corner of the internet is not super excited about the potential of a socialist mayor. Well, what's actually happening on the ground? Yeah That Photoshop beard job That felt more just like like a printing error. Honestly to me It didn't seem like they did a ton of pre printing ink dripping down I didn't see it as longer. I saw it more as just like when you reduce the resolution so much, like the gaps between the hairs

kind of blur altogether and it makes the beard look thicker. I wasn't fully like someone went in there and photoshopped. I'm a little superstitious with the mare stuff. Okay, explain that. Oh, I don't wanna talk about it, I'm just scared. Okay, okay. I don't wanna move the needle. You don't wanna jinx it.

Oh, yeah, yeah, your single endorsement could actually shift. Could just find the election. Decide it and then you would get. I interviewed four of them. I interviewed Cuomo, I interviewed Zoran, Lander and Stringer for the newsletter last week. It was really fun.

Oh, cool. Cool, well we'll see. What's the next question? Let's move on from politics. I want to talk about Substack, how you're seeing it evolve. It feels like it just continues to have a moment. You're dominating the platform. At least that's what it looks like. We're not super active there.

But what is the state of things? Yeah, I've been writing on Substack for five years now. So I definitely had a little bit of first thoughts Yeah, I've been writing on Substack for five years now. So I definitely had a little bit of first mover advantage there. Like I know the platform so well and I think even just understanding the tools and like what works well, the heat map of my own audience has been super helpful for me. And for anybody listening to this who doesn't know, like I write a newsletter every single day.

So the opportunities for people to discover me are a lot higher. But I think that's something that's interesting about Substack is that just because you have a large following somewhere else doesn't mean it's necessarily going to carry over to a newsletter. Like the inbox seems like such precious real estate to people and who they who?

Subscribers allow into that feels a little bit more intentional So it's not like you're gonna just follow a thousand people like you do on Instagram So you have to be really fucking good to make it and then you have to sorry. Can I curse on this? We don't but you can but you're welcome. I'm gonna not if you you have to be really excellent at content and something that I do. I have one of the more active chats on Substack, like across the whole platform. And I'm in conversation with my readers constantly, daily. And that's a lot of work as well. So the state of things on Substack, I would say it's getting pretty competitive.

You're seeing a lot of people jump over there and maybe try to make it, but aren't necessarily making money yet. They also don't have an advertising integration like Beehive or even Twitter or YouTube do. So if you're going to sell ads, you're on your own for that or you have to get an agency. Yeah, what specifically do you wanna know? What about this all day? I'm curious specifically how much some of the new social features are driving growth.

Is that a primary driver at this point or do you still think you'd be- Which features, audio and video? Well, all of the new social features, I just see like, It's really a lot of people are growing based on like recommendations in, like basically like cross promotions or collabs.

So, yeah. So for me, like, So yeah, I was in DC a few months ago and I met with somebody who's invests in this space and he was asking me like, why don't you consider doing your own thing off platform and building away from them? I used to think about that a lot more and I used to do that math a lot more and I showed him my analytics on my dashboard because you can see how many people are discovering you

from within the app and within their ecosystem and he was like, they have you, you can't leave, you're stuck there. And it's not a bad gig. Like they take 10% of what I make, which I think is totally fair considering how well the product is from me. They probably drive more than 10% of growth, right? Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Yeah, they're probably driving consistently 10% growth. And so that's totally, the math's out just fine. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, when I think about Substack, I think of peak Subst stack for me was like pre 2020 like that that era when I think about when I was like reading multiple sub stacks a day Yep and now

Feed me is the actually only newsletter that breaks into the important tab of my gmail and then you know There's a bunch of other sub stacks that are just kind of lost in the mix have you been trying to Get a read on it But if you are gonna be dependent on a social platform or any type of media platform Substack is the friendliest one take your newsletters. Yeah, take your stripe account if you ever need to Scriber list I get to sell my own ads. She's going well and When things break they fix them. That's great.

Talk about you had a fairly viral post. The tech guy in a hoodie stereotype is dead. Oh, yeah. You were at WWDC and seeing a bunch of different labels and brands being worn. Does that surprise you? Does it not surprise you? What was your reaction broadly?

There's right at this morning. I think Meg's Wear as a whole, well, Will Welch was there, so clearly there's something, Will Welch is the editor of GQ, there's something happening, you know, just with his spirit in the air at the conference. People always think of iOS developers

as being at the foremost of fashion. So you should always be there if you're running a YouTube. Yeah, I think I assumed more of them to look like the guys who work at the Apple store at my mall on Long Island or something. And it was impressive. I mean, like guys looked good. I wouldn't say capital S suiting, but like fits.

There were a lot of cool sneakers. I think that a few years ago would have been more New Balance. I think that like the Steve worshipers are sort of aging out a little bit. Now there's these younger guys who probably are seeing that moment as like one of their big trips of the year and probably wanted to break out some fun outfits. Saw a lot of good sneakers, saw a lot of big watches, saw like a nautilus on a guy. There we go. There we go. Was he, did he have an Apple watch on the other wrist or was that just fully committed? No, but a lot of Apple watches also, but a lot of nice watches.

Very cool. Which like, I don't know, a lot of people don't wear nice watches in their cities anymore. Well, you can't in New York because it will be taken from you very quickly. Right, exactly, but it's safe space on the Apple campus. Cupertino's different, yeah. Cupertino, yeah. At the donut.

Do you ever get tempted to angel invest? I'm sure you get asked constantly. Do I get tempted to angel invest? I get asked, but that's not something that tempts me, no. Why not? Stupid, stupid, you said money. My business is kind of my main focus right now. That's good. That's good. Are we post peak celeb brand?

Are we post peak celeb brand? Yeah, are we on the down slope? I think so, yeah, I think so. Yeah. So brands, like. What do you think the interaction between celebrities and consumer startups will be? I think everybody knows the formula too well now,

which is that the celebrity isn't actually going into the office every day, and like that illusion has broken, right? So you can wear the suit on the stage at the conference and do the Forbes thing, but people are sort of understanding that they're not the operators, and they're just sort of like a paid person to have their name on a brand, right?

Um, and I think the other thing happens all the time where like the founder becomes a celebrity after they start the company, which is more interesting to me than like a famous person hiring a bunch of people to do their work for them and getting paid for it. Yeah, do you think we move back to, so I think of the celeb corporation collaboration eras is like, you used to just pay a celebrity to appear in your Super Bowl ad and it would be like

a million dollars in cash. Then we got to the point all the way on the other side of the spectrum where celebrities were commanding 30, 40, 50 percent equity grants in businesses that were built entirely around their brands. To your point people are catching on that that means that yeah they have a huge economic stakes they're gonna be talking about all the time but they're not really driving the product forward in any meaningful way. We could go back to just pay for a celebrity appearance

in an ad, or we could move forward into something like what I've seen Saquon Barkley doing, where he is essentially just angel investing in these companies. And yes, he'll appear in the ads, but he's not saying he's building the company. He's very transparent about that. He will partner with them, but he's equity aligned,

but just like any other investor. And so I'm wondering if there will be a boom in that, in that kind of paradigm or that model, or if we'll just go back to, you know, companies and startups just being more comfortable writing a $400,000 check for a celebrity to appear in an ad it's cash and you know what it is. Yeah, I don't, I don't see the ladder like being becoming a big thing.

I just feel like it's such a specific kind of company that has that kind of marketing budget and it's also really risky to invest in celebrities and influencers now because people are so volatile. Um, in celebrities and influencers now because people are so volatile. I've definitely seen more of the angel investor in like hot girl Instagram bios, like model DJ angel investor. And I think it's like a flex, you know, it's like I'm also a business woman. So I think that's already happening.

Like there's like a soft boom of that, of people getting the opportunity to do that and basically only having one canned cocktail in their house and not because they're necessarily getting paid but because they quietly invested or not so quietly invested and they're able to sort of flex a portfolio of investing and that's something they do besides whatever other things they do. But there was that Alex Earl poppy deal last year where she was drinking it a lot. And I guess her dad, who sounds like a pretty savvy business guy, negotiated for her to get equity in the brand. So that's sort of like a prime example of that where she wasn't talking around,

talking, going around saying that she was an angel investor, but I guess she was. Well, yeah. And Poppy had a stacked cap table of various personalities, celebrities, athletes, et cetera. Mostly credit equity firms and gross equity firms. Yes. But yes. Where, give us a temp check on wellness right now. Are we past peak wellness in many ways? People are doing more wellness-y things, but at the same time being unwell feels popular?

I did a chat with my readers the other day about alcohol consumption. People are all over the map with that. There are people who are like, I'm 35, I haven't had a drink in 10 years. I'm perfectly happy. Life is great. Um, and then there's definitely a decent cohort of, Oh, somebody said, um, that people are who have been sober for years are kind of like strategically or strategically drinking now, which was interesting

to me. We strategically drink. We drink down pairing on. I think like what the king of wellness right now is GLP-1s. Like that's sort of the most exciting thing happening. Is that getting wrapped in different brands right now to appeal to different cohorts or personal agendas? Yeah, I just think it's changing people's

chemical composition and changing the way that they think and work out and eat and socialize and that's very interesting to me. What happens when... Do you think that brands... Yeah, do you think that brands are already being... The initial concern was that fast food brands were cooked because people just were gonna eat less.

But then there's a downstream effect if New York girlies are micro-dosing GLP-1s and then maybe they're like, I'm not gonna go to Pilates today because, I'm already happy with what I look, you know, whatever. Are you hearing about any kind of like downstream business impact?

Winners and losers post GLP one. I don't think the Pilates industrial complex is affected. They're sort of the new weed store to me. They're everywhere, the Pilates studios. It's like people are buying these cheap made in China reformer machines, setting them up and just like running crazy Pilates businesses. So I don't think that's going to be affected anytime soon. Because even if you get really thin, you still want to be shredded. Shredded. Got to be shredded.

But also with like fast food, I'm pretty sure people on GLP Ones are still eating it. They're just not eating a lot of it. They're getting full fast and throwing it away. There was a celebrity that said the other day that he was just eating through it. He was just basically. Powering through it.

He said he was powering through it. I think that would be me. I'm convinced that my hunger would overpower it. That's amazing. What about other downstream effects from GLP-1s? I was talking to somebody who was like, they wanted to start a protein water company because they felt like with the GLP-1 boom,

people would be eating less, they needed to supplement. Aside from the brands that have just wrapped GLP-1 in different landing pages, are there other kind of winners from the GLP- one boom that you've seen adjacent? Somebody told me the other day that, um, like, uh, all these protein foods are not healing foods and it,

it changed the way that I think about people eating all this protein. Um, any other trickle down things. I'm sure there will be some sort of like therapy blowback, like people needing more therapy, people, women being anxious. What's the state of Maha right now? Are people building new businesses around that or they're mostly just old line businesses that are beneficiaries of Maha? You guys follow ballerina farm?

Oh yeah. I have just opened a little store wherever she lives in the Midwest. She feels very Maha aligned. Oh yeah. I have to open the little store wherever she lives in the Midwest. She feels very Maha aligned. Yeah, they like raw milk, they like farm stuff. She's an interesting business person though. I like a lot of that. Is any of that breaking through in New York?

It feels like a lot of the actual products that are Maha aligned feel very New York aligned and yet the politics of the products could not be more disparate? You're right, it's so political. It's like there was a store in New York that was selling raw milk out of one fridge. It was like one of these.

And it probably wasn't a right wing store, right? I mean, I don't know. Yeah, but like, but he didn't present as like, oh yes. There wasn't an American flag. There wasn't an American flag, right? He presented as like rich women who buy 20 dollar smoothies. So they could fall all over the place on the spectrum, honestly. But I don't think they sell it anymore because that's like bad for business if enough people call you out on it. Even like there's this guy at the farmers market, this Amish guy who used to sell raw milk

and he's not there anymore. And I don't know where he went. Big milk took him out. Yeah, someone did. Brutal. What's the most significant part of your scoop machine? Is it readers giving you tips? Is it walking around New York?

Is it a combination? One of your readers asked me to ask you that. I'm sure people, of course, they want to know where that is. I have some really good readers who are super loyal with sending me scoops. And they could send them to New York Magazine or The New York Times or Puck or Semaphore or whatever. And they send them to me and I'm super grateful for that. And we have

a good thing going. I also have an anonymous tip line, which is oh, I think people get a little confused about what qualifies what your PR pitches PR pitches, press gossip aren't the bad stuff. It's like a politician walking out of a 3 PM screening of Baby Girl alone. I don't, that's, let them rock. That's not news.

Yeah, that's pretty funny though. And then I go out a lot. I go out four or five times a week. I go to parties, I go to dinners, I meet people, I meet readers. Yeah, so it's like my life, I feel sort of like a machine right now, but it's working really well, so I can't get too frustrated.

Keep oiling the machine then. Well, congratulations on building a fantastic machine. Last question, do copycats bother you? I'm sure you've had hundreds of people by now be like, I'm gonna make, feed me for'm gonna make feed me for X, Y, Z or feed me for that or just like blatant, do they get under your skin? They used to, but data is a very calming force in my life right now and especially in my business

and the numbers calm me down. Numbers don't lie. Yeah. It's fantastic. There we go, we're hitting the size gongs. Well, congratulations on everything and thanks for stopping by. Thanks for coming on.. Yeah. Fantastic. There we go. We're hitting the size guns. Well, congratulations on everything. And thanks for stopping by. Thanks for coming on. You're always welcome.

Thank you guys. Take it easy. Yeah, we'd love to have you back and talk more. Cheers. Talk to you soon. Up next, we have Leonard Heim calling in from the Rand Corporation. We're going to talk about AI models.

We're talking about sovereign AI. We've got crazy, crazy range today. Crazy range today. It's a whirlwind tour. Wait, let's check on Tyler. How's he doing? Tyler, how are you doing? I'm done. He's done. It's a whirlwind tour. Wait, let's check on Tyler. How's he doing? Tyler, how you doing? I'm done.

He's done. The fury has been assembled. I think my final time was somewhere around hour 15. So double hour 19. So yeah, I mean, pretty shameful profile. I think it looks good. I mean, yeah, send the electrolytes my way. OK.

I'll start challenging them. I think Dylan grabbed a cup and some water if you guys want to grab it. Let's get some electrolytes going up in here. Very beautiful model. It looks great. Yeah. It's really cool. Very cool.

I'm glad we have that in the studio now. Well, enjoy your horse electrolytes. Hope you have a good rest of the stream. We will hop on with our next guest now. We'll check back in for a taste review. Yeah. Yeah, when we finish this next interview. Anyway, welcome to the studio, Lennart. How are you doing today?

Let's bring in Lennart and chat about artificial intelligence and geopolitics. How are you doing? Hey, good to see you. I'm doing great, how are you guys? We're great. Would you mind kicking us off with a little introduction on yourself and what you do day to day? Sure. Yeah. Leonard Heim calling in from

Washington DC. I'm a, what do I call myself? Researcher working on AI policy, AI governance, background electric engineering. I think part of my mission is to bridge the technical world and the policy world. And that's what I've been doing before. Before I was cool the last four or five years actually. And now AI is cool and since then I've been ever busy. It is extremely cool. It's driving the news cycle. Every single day. Yeah. Pretty much the coolest technology. Do a little level setting for us.

What is the dominant story? How is the race between the US and China shaping up on the AI front? What are the interesting threads to pull on? What are the most threads to pull on? What are the most important companies to be tracking right now? Yeah, well, that's a tough question. Where to start?

I think it's like still the deep sea trauma. It's like still, still there, still dominant, right? I think that was like this initial story the US is like so far ahead. There is no Chinese model being closed and then deep sea came out and definitely had a big impact in DC, but I guess also in a broader world as we saw in the stock market.

And I think it's pretty dominant here still in DC. You know, like in DC you always talk about things which Silicon Valley did half a year ago, even a year ago. So it's still part of the dominant discussion. And then export controls, I guess is also a big topic right now, right? You've got the US-China trade talks going on right now where they're negotiating beyond Xpok and all switch impact AI, but Xpok and all famously had an impact, big impact on AI in China.

Yeah, so let's talk about DeepSeek. One of the narratives that came out of the DeepSeek story was all the American labs are completely cooked. And then we got Jevons Paradox and Nvidia pop back up and all the labs seem to be making tons of money open AI cross $10 billion in revenue run rate and things seem to be going well. But what are the wrong lessons from deep seek? What are people getting wrong about the deep seek story? How relevant is deep seek? We're still hearing about it as being important

geopolitically in some of these jump ball nations that aren't quite allies, aren't quite rivals, and they might be interested in building an open source stack on top of Huawei ascend, DeepSeek, Manus, that type of stack. What are the wrong lessons that people are learning from the DeepSeek story? I think DeepSeek made such a big noise because we're just lacking a good reference class. There just came out pretty impressive model. It was openly available and we had a paper attached to it, right? Yeah.

And then it came out also saying it cost us 6 million. Yeah. Does any one of us know how much it costs OpenAI or like Anthropic or any of these other companies to what to do? We don't, right? And I think this just really made headline news. We like sometimes get like Sam Altman going on stage saying, I think at some point he said it cost them $100 million to do GPT-4. But $100 million, what?

Just a training compute? Is it just buying the hardware? Probably not. Is it paying the staff engineers? So the reference class is pretty important here. Well, and it cost them $100 million, what? Like this not two years ago, even more. And now Deep Six, $6 million.

So I think people just were lacking. it's like, well, this sounds impressive, but like, they had just no reference class of what's actually going on within the companies. And I think a couple of weeks later, and for PIC CEO, Dario put out a blog post saying like, actually, we can train to the same efficiency. And I think this was like, for people monitoring the market, not surprising. We just like know the trend lines. I mean, know it gets like vastly cheaper every single got them day to train such a system. So to that extent surprising, but like you look at this, you don't have a reference class and then it just looks really impressive.

Right. I think a lot of the, a lot of the more technical analysts in the AI world, uh, we're excited to see the open source results. Uh, excited to hear about FPPA training, for example. Dr. Dylan Patel, he was telling us, oh, well, OpenAI was doing FPA training years ago. They just didn't tell anyone because it was kind of like their edge, I guess,

but all the labs had kind of figured that stuff out. They just hadn't told everyone exactly how they did. Deepsea came out there and told everyone and it sounded like they really had jumped ahead Instead it seemed like they just jumped to the frontier had not fully advanced beyond the frontier necessarily But then done in an open source way. What was the read on the strategy to open source? It felt like there was a very deliberate Like that launch if it had been closed source $20 a month, you know very difficult difficult to access rate limited, lots of safety harness

around it, that we would have been telling a very different story about deep sea give they had said, Oh, this is this cost a trillion dollars, it took us forever. Instead, it seemed like they were like a number of superlative and viral hooks that really captured the American news media and drove a big cycle. How much of that was intentional versus how much of that was just like a random byproduct? Yeah, I think as you're saying,

there were just like so many check boxes that ticked. It was didn't during the first week of time, it was an open release model eight, right? It was surprisingly so cheap. It's coming out of China. Oh, and it was like the first public reasoning model. Yeah. So it was like all of the things happening at the same time.

So like wherever you're coming from, DC excited because it's out of China, but we thought we fixed it, we did export controls, right? Silicon Valley, oh, it's an open source model, right? And everybody looking at like, actually how does this reasoning work? Because opening, I did it before, but it didn't tell us, right? So again, just ticking all of these boxes, how much of this was deliberate?

I don't think this is like a state coordinated effort that they said like, this is how we're gonna do it. I think DeepSeek had like a pretty open commitment to like releasing models publicly before, right? So they were just been following that. It just, it was just like to some degree, if there's a marketing strategy behind it, they did it right, I just expect most of the things are just like how the tech works, right?

And they were early on in reasoning, they were like one of the first companies doing it publicly, and then it just made a ton of noise. And again, justifying itself. And even though ChachiPT had a reasoning model available, it was only available at a premium tier. And so for a lot of AI consumers, I think their first interaction with a reasoning model

was DeepSeek or the DeepSeek app, which was just a very interesting kind of like go-to-market strategy essentially. And also seeing the chain of thought, right? Yeah. Like the reasoning, which we didn't see before, right? And even the cost thing. It's like this change of tongue.

Yeah, even a cost thing, a lot of financial folks, I mean, you mentioned that Silicon Valley was excited about open source. Washington was interested in the story because of the China angle, but also the financiers, the Nvidia investors were interested in the financial impact of this. So yeah, it was fascinating.

I got it wrong, right? Yeah, yeah, for sure. I said, it's my take. How much of the existence of DeepSe? Do you ascribe to China's positioning around high frequency trading? Oh, that's interesting one. I mean, like deep six fits in the hedge fund, right? Yes. And they were initially buying 10,000 a 100 or 5,000 a 100 in 2022, I think before the expo controls. Yes. And tons of GPUs always still go to hedge funds because they, well, we don't exactly

know what they're doing, but they definitely like accelerated computing. For sure. And partially machine learning, a bunch of other stuff. Are they all training language models? Probably not. And I think then one theory I've heard, I'm not sure how true it is, there

was like the crackdown and shine on the tech sector, right, including high frequency trading, hedge funds, and more. This made them then pivot to AI. It's like, well, if we can't shine on the tech sector, right, including high frequency trading hedge funds and more. This made them then pivot to AI. It's like, well, if we can't trade on the market anymore, what should we do with all of these GPUs or turn to AI as this new hot cool thing? And then I think the other thing which is important here, when you have these hedge funds, they do like really low-level optimizations like writing on kernels. They just they don't do like just high-level pytorch. They go down there and try to get like every single point of utilization out of the models, out of the hardware, and just have them,

right? DeepSec has pretty correct engineers. I think this was pretty obvious once we saw the code and just then help them to then train a pretty decent good model. Let's talk about Llama. The Llama 4 launch was a little rocky. Obviously there was allegations of some benchmark, just over optimization. It seems like a lot of the big frontier labs or the independent labs kind of just don't even care about benchmarks anymore. It's all about big model smell

and just the actual performance of the products. At the same time, I've been really interested in this narrative of llama as a very important American export, as a counter to the Huawei, Ascend, DeepSeek, Manas stack that other countries might be comping. Because yes, they might be interested in doing a deal with Stargate and buying a whole bunch of Nvidia chips, but what are they going to put on top of it?

Are they going to... Maybe they don't want wanna go all the way with OpenAI or Anthropic. Lama seems like an interesting wedge there. How important is that? What is your reaction to the meta-Lama strategy and how they're being perceived in Washington right now? I would be curious on your guys' takes on this.

I'm still unsure how I feel about this. I mean, let's just start with DeepSeek. I think it's an interesting moment in time when all of the leading US models are just behind closed doors, and the best open model is coming out of China. I'm worried about it because this model is partially biased and it lies about the CCP,

it has some Chinese propaganda in it, right? Or is this bad? Imagine you're like some developer in another country, you wanna build a new education app, you're using this model, and then you teach your kids Chinese propaganda. I think that's great, right? I think it's even worse if you think about sleep agents.

People know about this paper from a topic, right? You can basically have like sleep agents sitting in this model when you talk about a certain topic, it starts giving you a cold with vulnerabilities, but it's gonna apply to anything else. And it's like really hard to look for it because you don't know what to look for, right. So it is worrying. I don't think that's the case with DeepSeq right now. But going forward in the future, the case just like if you use an

open model, you don't really know what's in there, what's hiding in there. Right. This goes for all companies. But I think we've got more reason to mistrust certain other companies than for example, Meta. Yeah, it makes me think that it kind of makes me think that, it kind of makes me think that Anthropic might have a real business on their hands with AI safety. Obviously they branded it all around, oh, like, we want to prevent AGI doom and fast takeoffs. But if you just think about like, hey, we're gonna launch this model in our organization

and we want to make sure that the code that it writes doesn't have random vulnerabilities. That feels like a very important AI safety product almost to evaluate these models, test them and essentially root out sleeper agents. And so I've all of a sudden flipped to very excited about the work that Anthrobics doing on that front. Yeah. Jordy, do you have any questions? I think this could be like a real benefit to them.

Yeah, totally. And that's like, that's kind of how it started. Reinforcement learning from human feedback gave Chetchibiddy a rise. It was like some people trying to make the models more useful, but also less harmful. And turns out, they turn out to be a bunch more useful. And I guess like, we will see more about this going forward in particular for code, or even if government

wants to adopt these models. Yep. It just better be goddamn sure. My question was around news from the last 24 hours basically. And specifically people talk about the application of AI in warfare, but it's always in the sort of like very generalized high level of like, oh, using AI. And I can easily imagine, you know, simulation scenarios, data collection, processing, all that stuff, like kind of going up to the point of a conflict and then autonomous drones and things like that.

But what are the ways in which you've understood AI to be used in an actual conflict scenario? Sure. I mean, look, I don't do narrow AI or drones. To some extent, I expect a bunch like a bunch of just like computer vision applications and more. But if you look at like frontier, like if you look at large language models, I think one big application just intelligence, right? Literally my job on a day-to-day basis is like open source intelligence. I want to know what's going on around the world.

Nobody's telling me, well, except DeepSeek that sometimes publish a paper, but like, I don't know what the US companies are doing, I don't know what's going on in China and the semiconductor industry. So just a bunch of data I feed into my LLMs and ask them what's going on. And for intelligence operations, it's the same. We saw in the last 24 hours pretty targeted attacks. Israel is famously known for pretty good intelligence operations. And I think they exactly knew who they were hitting based on these types of operations, right? And if you

just have like a nice backdoor on a smartphone and you just like feed all of the chat transcript in an LLM can make sense out of this, right? You can do it at a larger, way bigger scale to identify the targets also identify patterns, which again, might be harder for humans to do at least you can like, oh, to like, well, no, like augment human. Yeah, I mean, they used to do that with like keyword search. Okay, like let's do we have a ton of data. Who's talking about bombs? Who's talking about attacks? And people would use

code words and LLMs are really good at deciphering that type of stuff. Fascinating. Give us a state of the union on export controls for AI chips. What is what's expected on the horizon? How has the landscape changed over the last, you know, couple months at least? Right. Um, I mean, when buying left the offers, there was like two, two big rules coming out. The one rule was, I think many people are tracking the Foundry to Diligence rule. It was a big hiccup where Huawei produced a bunch of ships over at TSMC in Taiwan, which they were not supposed to. They did it by a shell company.

Three million chips. That's quite a lot. That's way more than they produce. That's what they cut their hands on. And government reacted with a new rule basically telling TSMC, like, goddamn, you got to do better to diligence and check who your customer is and make sure they don't end up with Huawei. Because they broke two rules. No chips for Huawei at all,

and please no big AI chips for any entity in China. So this was a big move, that's still the case. I applaud that, I think that was a pretty sensible move to just make sure they can't, again, get their access to that many chips. And the other one was the diffusion framework, which I guess you probably discussed at some point before, right?

Like broader controls to some degree on all of the world deciding to some degree dealing with the Gulf States, dealing with a bunch of in-between countries, where people were worried about ship smuggling, but also data centers being built there. Malaysia is being such a country with a bunch of data centers being built there. Really interesting reporting today where I think the Wall Street Journal reported people were like going back and forth on an airplane with hard drives to train models over Malaysia. I saw that we were going to read that. Yeah.

Wow. Which again speaks to the efforts they're going to to get access to AI chips and how creative they get. And also from my point of view, I'm just getting surprised every single time of how creative they get to get access to AI chips. Anyway, that's what I did. But this one is not being enforced right now. It's not officially revoked yet. We're still waiting for it to officially be gone. But at least Commerce, Lutnik and Kessler put out a statement saying they're not enforcing it. They will come up with a replacement rule.

And this replacement rule that needs to deal with, well, yeah, basically all the countries except the clearly competitors, China, Russia, North Korea, they're all controlled. They will continue being controlled. But what about all the other countries like the Gulf competitors, China, Russia, North Korea, they're all controlled, they will continue being controlled. But what about all the other countries, like the Gulf states, like countries with a bunch of smuggling going on? And yeah, me as somebody from outside the government is waiting to see more moves there.

Yep, I have one last question, good Jordy. Yeah. Today, a bunch of technologists join the Army Reserve in the newly formed Detachment 201 Executive Innovation Corps. Can you tell me a little bit about how you're seeing technologists and the tech community plug in in DC? What is needed there?

What do you want to see on the horizon? This seems like a step in the right direction, but it feels like a jobs not finished moment. Yeah, I think that's the right audience. Like a call to all the techies to come to DC. The pay is not better here. It's also pretty damn hard. We're literally on a swamp here, but I think there's a strong case for impact. So as a techie, I think like when I talk to like young undergrads, like, oh, in DC, like, I just did like a bachelor's in machine learning. What do I know? It's like, it It's plausible you're the smartest person in the room and many times in DC, which is way harder

than in San Francisco. People don't know policy, but sometimes can be a benefit to be a bit ignorant about how the game's being played. Just like, look, here's just the math. Here's how it works out. Yeah, so I love techies coming to government, just crunching numbers.

I think there should sometimes be less opinionated just like look near the numbers We crunch them could suggest this could suggest that but just like grounding it like an analysis like an objective things When I think about China AI chips I can crunch the numbers and how fast the chips are how many they're producing and in contrast how fast American chips on how Many we're producing. Right. And this is just a good analysis to be run. How this then impacts the broader scheme of the AI ecosystem and who's winning the AI race and what?

It's a different question, but we can then take it from there. Right. So if I see stuff like this, be it in again, in the military, but also just generally in government, particularly anything around export controls, anything around just understanding of what the hell is going on. Just like having somebody explain like, hey, DeepSeek is a reasoning model. What is, everybody talked about distillation,

like, really just explaining the basics is like, yeah, things people should do. And I think people with a CS, like an undergrad degree in computer science, they can do it. And I would love to have them there. I'm hiring by the way. So if anybody's listening, please join me, apply.

Amazing. Yeah, in general, I think it's good that we don't just have these sort of high profile technologists only joining DOGE. There's other things that are important in the government besides just taking a sledgehammer or scalpel to different parts of the government. So it's positive. I don't discover them getting stuff wrong.

I think the most famous example is the initial expert controls 2022 were trying to control AI chips. Yeah, they use two parameters, technical parameters, which probably 99% of TCU will understand total processing performance, how many flops it got. And then also the interconnect band

before faster control chips. And they messed something up there. Then video could basically design a new chip sitting right at the threshold was still having high flops, which is basically as good as the other chips, and that's what DeepSec used. And then it took them a damn year to fix it. And I can confidently say they knew a month later

they should do better there. And that's just the thing with techies, and you didn't need to be the smartest person. I've never trained a really big model. You can just tell by the specs, like, guys, something's off here. And it makes a tremendous difference. Even just asking one of the foundation model labs,

OpenAI, I'm sure they could tell you, hey, do not restrict these three parameters. And it just seems like there was not enough back and forth. If they would answer. And Vidya doesn't answer these questions. But I think maybe you can. Vidya wouldn't. But I mean, you could imagine that plenty of the labs that

will compete with Chinese labs would love to answer that question. Yep. Because they have a huge incentive not to be out-competed by DeepSeek. Right? Yep. And so you've got to, but maybe they'd be talking their own book too much.

There's always dynamics. But at least having a technologist in the room would be beneficial. Anyway, this was fantastic. Thank you so much for hopping on. We'd love to have you back. Thanks for joining me. There's more news.

We will talk to you soon. Enjoy the rest of your Friday. Have a great weekend. Kiss. You too, guys. Bye. Closing out the news for the week. We have, let's take weekend. Cheers. You too, guys. Bye. Closing out the news for the week. Let's take it over to Tyler.

How are the horse electrolytes? OK, so I haven't tried it yet. I think so it says a scoop. One scoop is for light exercise. So for I think probably a medium sized horse, I assume. OK. I'm looking at the ingredients. There's an incredible amount.

It's like all salt. It's all salt. Of course. Of course. Yeah. Most important electrolyte. You have to at least chat GPT that you're not taking a deadly dose of salt right now.

I think it's probably fine. Probably fine. We'll go with probably fine. That's the horse mentality. It smells good. Does it have a lemon-lime taste to it, as apple? Oh. It's strong. It's like I'm smells smells good. Does it have like a lemon lime taste to it as apple? Oh Strong like I'm drinking salt water. Yeah, amazing. I think you might have to water lemon. There's lemon in there. There's some There's definitely some flavor. I mean it says apple flavor. I'm not really getting any apple notes. Yes

Okay, well Congratulations, you did it under an hour and a half. Did it. Well, you have a whole summer to finish the whole bucket. Yeah, yeah. What was the final time? An hour and 15 minutes? I think hour 19. Hour 19. That's still way faster than Chachi PT clocked it. I took a picture of that, of that Andral Lego set build time. I said, how long do you think it will take to put together this pretty simple 619 piece Lego set? a beginner would take three or four hours an Intermediate builder two to three hours and an experienced Lego fan

1.5 to 2 hours you did it better than they did so I think you were only wrong in Your own you overestimated yourself, but you should always do the average Lego builder so congrats for that okay? Enjoy the horse. I'm sweating a lot. I think this will help me you know me back to yeah yeah you're sweating out the electrolytes you need to refresh this makes a lot of sense this is great everybody in tech is always talking about going to the horse doctor but never talking about how getting horse electrolytes yes counter yes yes the horse electrolytes that's great that's what you want to be thinking well the scale the scale deal has officially closed

Metis paying fourteen point three billion to buy 49% of scale the industry's leading data dealer Alex Wang wrote us wrote a note to scale employees He said when I founded scale in 2016 it was amidst some of the early AI breakthroughs deep mind had just released alpha Go and Google had just released tensor. It was still incredibly early. It was clear even then that data was the lifeblood of AI systems and that was the inspiration behind StartingScale. Since then, the journey has been extraordinary. We've grown to over 1,500 people, become a trusted partner for model builders, enterprises

and governments building and deploying the smartest AI tools and applications. Scale is now one of the most impactful companies in the world. He closes by saying, today's investment also allows us to give back in recognition of your hard work and dedication to scale over the past several years. The proceeds from Meta's investment will be distributed to those of you who are shareholders invested equity holders while maintaining the opportunity to continue participating in our future growth as ongoing equity holders the Exceptional team here has been key to our success

So i'm thrilled to be able to return the favor with this meaningful liquidity distribution So congratulations to let's give it up hit the gong for liquidity events john Lee marie eric torenberg lots of winners lots of winners lots of friends of the show um Lee Marie, Eric Torenberg. Lots of winners, lots of winners, lots of friends of the show. Ben Thompson broke it down in a piece talking about Meta and Scale AI, the most obvious explanation for the structure is that Meta wants to avoid the sort of anti-trust scrutiny that would attend to an acquisition. This explanation applies broadly big tech generally and meta specifically are under massive scrutiny in terms of acquisitions including meta going to trial for acquisitions made over a decade ago and narrowly Scale AI is a supplier for not just meta but also met as competitors The problem is that it's it is is is that just meta isn't acquiring scale

AI doesn't mean the deal can't be scrutinized indeed section 7 of the Clayton Act is explicit about covering only partial acquisitions, so the FTC can still review this, but it'll probably be a little bit easier, and so that's what they're gunning for. These guidelines were reaffirmed by the Trump administration earlier this year, so a lot of people were expecting it to be complete game on, anyone can acquire anything. That hasn't been the case. We heard about this on the campaign trail. A lot of folks in the Trump administration were Signaling that Lena con made some good points and they were not going to completely reverse course Even if they were going to replace her

Even beyond that says Ben Thompson However, and and perhaps this makes the regulators point It seems likely that this will kill scale scale AI's business with the big labs in particular Who would be concerned about their data ending up in the hands of Meta, which is to say that this is a deal that would destroy the enterprise value of that Meta is theoretically investing in. And so that will be something that will be debated in these merger guidelines when the FTC ultimately reviews it. But it's looking pretty good because they close pretty quickly. As it is, many of the labs, particularly OpenAI, have been bringing in more of their data work in-house, which helped contribute to scale AI missing revenue targets last year.

From the information they reported this, I mean, they still put up amazing numbers. And so obviously a lot of stuff was working. But you could imagine that some of the labs were starting to bring these, if they really are believers in, hey, we gotta own our data collection and data processing forever,

let's build that function in-house. And I think they started to do that, or at least partner with other competitors in the space. And so Ben Thompson continues to write about Meta's reset. In fact, the more pertinent angle to discuss this deal is probably Llama. Llama 4 was widely viewed as a disappointing model, and a big portion of the original llama team

has since left Metta. And Ben Thompson thought that Mark Zuckerberg's media tour about AI seemed a bit forced and unfocused and had heard through the grapevine that Zuckerberg was considering a wholesale reset of the company's AI efforts, with the biggest priority being the search for a new AI chief to take firm control

over the company effort. In that, in the end, maybe the Occam's razor explanation for the deal. This is a very expensive AquaHire Alexander Wang, Scale AI's co-founder and CEO, with the price softened a bit by virtue of paying Scale AI for work that Meta was going to have the company do anyway. Wang isn't a researcher, but he's

an executive and leader who is familiar with the space. And Meta needs leadership in addition to talent. He's a deals guy. He's a deals guy. He's going to meta and continue to be deal making, which will be, I think a great asset to meta overall. And so Ben Thompson closes with a little bit on sustaining versus disruptive innovation. The other reason to believe meta versus Google comes down to the difference

between disruptive and sustaining innovations. The late professor Clayton Christensen described the difference and we're familiar with that. So the question of whether generative AI is sustaining or disruptive innovation for Google remains uncertain two years after Ben Thompson raised the question. Obviously Google has tremendous AI capabilities both in terms of infrastructure and research

and generative AI is a sustaining innovation for its display advertising business and its cloud business. At the same time, the long-term questions around search monetization remain as pertinent as ever. And this is the question I wanna debate with Ben when he comes on the show. There is this idea, so it came out earlier

that Sundar Pichai had not read the innovators dilemma and people were saying, oh, like he should have because this is the classic example of Google being disrupted by a new technology generative AI. Ben Thompson said, it doesn't matter. The whole point of disruptive innovation is that is structural and therefore it doesn't matter if you've read the book. There's nothing you can do about it. That's kind of the point of disruptive innovation.

You're being disrupted. Yeah. But my question is what if Google had chatbots before chatgbt? What if they had launched the Gemini app first and been the first to market and gained all of that like mimetic attention? Well, the disruptive innovation framework would say that Google would be in a tough spot

because they wouldn't be able to monetize Gemini as quickly as they were losing volume in search. And so search revenues would decline faster than they could make it back up on the new model. And so what we're seeing right now is ChatGPT is growing their 10 billion in revenue. But I don't think we're seeing a fall off in search. It seems additive.

And so the weirdest thing is that if you ran back the simulation and you did put Google in a position, like let's just say Google owned 100% of chat GPT, like the combined enterprise value would not be the stock would not be in the trash as they disrupted themselves. And so there's this interesting question of like, there's this fear that your earnings will drop as you pivot away from search based display advertising, search advertising to a subscription chat bot model. But I don't know if that's actually playing out

because the overall market, the combined revenues of Google and OpenAI seem to be not declining. Like we're not in this nadir, we're not in this trough of like disruption necessarily. So I don't know. Yeah, Meta and Facebook had the luxury of acquiring Instagram, starting to monetize Instagram, still being able to grow Facebook at that time.

I mean, maybe there's a little bit in deceleration. I remember when Meta was in the process of somewhat being disrupted by TikTok, they launched Reels. And there was questions about Reels monetization, because if people spend more time on Reels than the normal Instagram feed, and there aren't as many ads in Reels, then the normal Instagram feed, and there aren't as many ads in Reels as there are in the feed,

well then, even though the user time might be going up, your revenue might be going down. And so that was a fear, that was something that was weighing on the stock. Ultimately, it was not borne out. But I'm just not seeing the data, but I wanna dig into it more, I wanna talk to Ben about it,

because there's clearly, I think I'm wrong, but for reasons I'm unaware of. And so I've been dig into it more. I want to talk to Ben about it because there's clearly I, I, I think I'm wrong, but for different, for reasons I'm unaware of. And so I've been digging into that. So, um, uh, Ben goes on to write meta, however, does not have a search business to potentially disrupt and a whole host of ways to leverage generative AI across this business. This is what I was talking about with, uh, Joe Weisenthal talking about, even if meta doesn't get, uh, like a a banger AI first consumer product out into the market They just have so many AI generative AI workloads whether that's

Sorting ads generating ads internal profanity filtering, you know all all their different content moderation I think so I think It's easy to see how Metta will benefit from more, in 10 years from now, more content will be produced, which means better, the more good content will be produced, even if it looks like AI slop right now. And when you think about the business holistically and Metta as effectively an entertainment company,

will people want more and more entertainment? Yeah, this is what Ben Thompson was writing about. He said, Meta strategy is to commoditize your compliments. A generative AI is a compliment to Meta's platforms. And so, yes, if people are using generative AI to generate slop, that's still fine as long as people are enjoying it. But ultimately, people will use it as a different tool for video editing and sound generation

and drop out the background noise and replace my background with a cinematic, you know, Vista or something like that. So, for Zuckerberg and company, Ben Thompson thinks AI is absolutely a sustaining technology, which is why it ultimately makes sense to spend whatever is necessary to get the company moving in the right direction.

It's also worth noting that Meta doesn't really have any alternatives other than continuing to invest. Google is a competitor for advertising the most financially compelling use case today. OpenAI is a competitor for consumer attention. Meta's most important scarce resource. I suppose Anthropic would be a potential partner but per the point above, that seems like the ultimate culture clash. If anything, the most compatible partners for Meta

would be Microsoft and Apple, but the former is obviously tied up with OpenAI, and the latter, well, never say never forever, but definitely never for now. Great ending to Ben Thompson's update. That's right. Well, we have a video that we can pull up that hit the timeline earlier this morning. Let's review. I was able to confront PT. Oh, yeah. And I think

we should play on the street. Let's play it. Saw him on the street. Is it true that competition is for losers? Sir, is it true that you encourage young people to drop out of university? The background is really true. Mr. Teal, is it true that your funds have double-digit GP commits? Sir, how can you say you're contrarian when everyone is contrarian? Mr. Teal, is it possible for there to be too much venture capital? Never. Mr. Teal, have you been a victim of other VCs gaming the Midas

list? Absolutely. Sir why do you refuse to pick a favorite René Girard book? Mr. Teal what do you have to say to people that think they're a lottery ticket? Mr. Teal must all venture returns be power law distributed Sir why do you think why questions are over determined? Oh? Really asking the pressing important questions the questions that you know he clearly doesn't want to answer yeah, but I'm sure over time We'll have them on the show and we'll try to we'll try to pull some of those That's the fun. I mean the last story we should cover before we drop off Chinese AI companies dodge US chip curbs by flying suitcases of hard drives abroad Leonard on the show mentioned this engineers are carrying data to countries where Nvidia chips are available

Frustrating Washington's aims. No one really anticipated this but chips are available, frustrating Washington's aims. No one really anticipated this but apparently Chinese engineers are transporting hard drives with AI training data to Malaysia so they they they take all their training data, they load it onto a bunch of hard drives, throw others in suitcases, fly to Malaysia and then do the training run there and then take the weights back and so that's like the chips aren't even moving like the whole idea of exporting chips is now irrelevant If you can do the run locally in a different country, so this this AI diffusion story is going to become

So much more complex like it's just gonna be so complicated forever because there's gonna be shell companies And if people are willing to do this Anything's on the table the next deep-seek run is gonna be it's gonna be a movie. It's gonna be a movie Anyway, we will be following it here. We hope you have a fantastic weekend and we will see you on Monday. I cannot wait, John. Cannot wait for Monday.

I cannot wait to be back at this table. Two more sleeps. Two more sleeps. Two more sleeps. Or is it three? Three, yeah, we're not going live on Sunday. We might, we might. We might, if there's an emergency, we might go live. You never know. We might. We might.

We might. If there's an emergency, we might go live. You never know. But until then, enjoy the rest of your weekend. Thank you for tuning in, folks. Have a great rest of your Friday, and we'll see you Monday. We'll see you Monday.