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Starting point is 00:00:00 You're watching TVPN! Today is Thursday, August 21st, 2025. We are live from the TVPN Ultramm, the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the Capital of Capital. We have a post from Jeff Dean, the legendary programmer. Tyler, do you know who Jeff Dean is? Dumb question. Dumb question. Of course I know Jeff Dean. Of course Tyler knows Jeff Dean. Do you know the list of Jeff Dean jokes? So Jeff Dean is a legendary programmer, been at Google. for a very long time. One of the best to ever do it. And there's a list on, it was on some random website for a while. Somebody finally put on GitHub. These are the facts about Jeff Dean.

Starting point is 00:00:43 Jeff Dean proved that P equals N.P. When he solved all N.P. Problems in polynomial time on a whiteboard. Jeff Dean's pin, his ATM pin, it's the last four digits of pie. This one's true, actually. When Jeff gives a seminar at Stanford, It's so crowded that Donald Knooth has to sit on the floor.

Starting point is 00:01:03 Apparently that actually happened. My favorite one is to Jeff Dean N.P. is no problemo. No problemo, yes. Another one, Jeff Dean got promoted to level 11 in a system where the max level is 10. Apparently, this happened at Google. They had 10 levels of software engineering. He was so good. They were like, we got to make an 11th level.

Starting point is 00:01:21 Let's take this one to 11. Yeah, it's great. He's a legend. You don't explain your work to Jeff. Dean. Jeff Dean explains your work to you. There was another one that I thought was funny, which is Jeff Dean. His keyboard only has two characters, one and zero. He just programs in binary. I think that's hilarious. Jeff Dean has exactly two keys on his keyboard, zero and one. Errors treat Jeff Dean as a warning. Compilers don't warn Jeff Dean. Jeff Dean warns compilers. Anyway, you can go through these for all day. Google. It's It's basically Jeff Dean's side project. Anyway, he's a legend. People love him.

Starting point is 00:02:02 I love him. I would take a bullet for Jeff Dean. One of the greatest to ever do it. Seriously, he's amazing. But anyway, he posted something very interesting. So he said, AI efficiency is important. Today, Google is sharing a technical paper detailing our comprehensive methodology

Starting point is 00:02:17 for measuring the environmental impact of Gemini inference. We estimate that the median Gemini app's text prompt uses 0.24 watt hours of energy, equivalent to watching TV, average TV for nine seconds and consumes 0.26 milliliters of water, about five drops. So they did all the averages. It's just a few drops. And so this, of course, is to counter the narrative that was growing online in the media and just in the general, like, anti-AI, anti-tech world that every time You fired off a prompt on any AI system. You were lighting the Amazon rainforest on fire, using enough power to power an American city,

Starting point is 00:03:04 stealing water out of the homes of American people, and that does not appear to be the case. And to be clear, many of these new data center projects will use the energy equivalent of millions of single-family homes. Yes, yes. So this is still energy intensive. Yes. But what matters is that the underlying products still get more and more efficient. Yes. As they get more efficient, we'll probably use them more.

Starting point is 00:03:26 Hence, you know, the massive energy consumption. Yeah, somebody was comping one of the latest buildouts as, I think it was in the journal actually today. It's like enough power to power a small U.S. city. And they think they maybe said like Austin, Texas or something. It's like one data center is enough to power that. But again, this is training, a model that will be used for years probably. and the training run only runs for a couple months, and then it's distributed.

Starting point is 00:03:56 Yes, it's enough to power a million homes, but a billion people wind up using the stuff. So you have to think about the overall value that is created by these systems, and obviously everyone wants to optimize them, not just the environmentalists, also the companies, if they don't reduce the amount of energy they use, their margins are terrible.

Starting point is 00:04:16 And so it's not just Jeff Dean and the crew at Google who enjoy optimizing systems, and I'm sure got a ton of joy out of squeezing such performance out of Gemini on the inference side. But it's also just the CFO who says, hey, why are we spending so much energy on a single Gemini app's text prompt?

Starting point is 00:04:38 Let's get this down. Let's optimize this thing so we can actually make some money, which is great. And bubble boy over on X had a good post. They said AI inference is the new high-frequency trading and the companies that serve models and don't realize that will die. I thought this was a solid take. It's just that performance and efficiency and speed are going to matter more and more.

Starting point is 00:05:01 Yep. And if you're in the business of serving up, farm to table inference, better make sure you're efficient. So, yeah, Jeff Dean was like the original superstar AI researcher, just software engineering researcher, honestly, built a lot of the systems that Google built GCP on top of. And what's interesting is we just realized, or you came to terms with the rise of the superstar AI researcher. And that was underwritten probably, at least in part, on the back of superintelligence. If you find a researcher who creates an insane trek that unlocks trillions of values. Maybe it's an app purchases for your AI companion. Maybe, maybe, maybe.

Starting point is 00:05:43 But no, XAI has not, has notably not been competing in that space. not heard about a billion dollar aqua hires at xAI, 100 million dollars offers at xAI. Elon has said, I'm focused on engineers, not researchers. But the reason you would underwrite paying a researcher $100 million is that if there's a 1% chance that they create a new advancement in how large language models are designed, trained, implemented, well, then that could drive $10 billion in value overnight, just like what happened with GPT4, RLHF, post-training, pre-training, all that stuff. Anyone who's involved in that created a ton of value, right? And so basically, META's been saying, hey, we're going to comp the researchers against that

Starting point is 00:06:27 optimistic scenario where they come up with some breakthrough, and that drives a ton of value. Now, the question is, are we going to shift into an era where the superstar AI inference optimization engineer is worth $100 million? Well, I will say that the big labs are poaching from the high-frequency trading firms. Yeah, Mark Chen, worked at Jane Street. I mean, that wasn't a poach, but there are lots of people that come over. My question is, if I come in... So the poaching is just not happening within the labs.

Starting point is 00:07:03 They're looking to areas of high-frequency. Yeah, Sam Altman came out and said, hey, if you're working at a high-princi trading shop, you should come over to AI research. But my question is, if I'm a superstar inference optimization engineer and I go to one of the cloud providers that's going to be generating, you know, tons and tons of tokens, they have these token factories, these massive AI data centers, and I come in and I say, I can make them, I can make them use 5% less energy, 10% less energy, that could drive billions of dollars to the cost. Put some points on the board. And so are you going to get comped on that? I don't know. Will Jeff Dean be getting a maxed out contract? I'm sure he's had a maxed out. taxed-out contract this entire time, but can he go further? We'll see. The other interesting thing here is just how Google exactly pushes back on the media is very different than what we see from other tech folks. So obviously there have been posts about water usage in AI inference that have gone out in the mainstream media. Sam Altman did address.

Starting point is 00:08:13 gpt4's water usage specifically they did an analysis he dropped it kind of in the middle of a long post i think in the soft singularity or something he just mentioned it randomly yeah um the uh i like this approach of not being combative not calling anyone out for being wrong just saying hey we take this seriously we have this uh this dog they ran the number we ran the numbers and they're going to talk about here's the here's the actual here's the actual post we have a blog post we have paper uh you can see our full methodology where we're committed to this stuff. And also it serves as like a big flag for hiring saying, hey, we're the type of company that's dropping our energy footprint on Gemini apps, text prompts by 33X. Like that's got to be exciting. That's got to be on the back of some

Starting point is 00:08:59 really solid engineering. So maybe I want to come work there. I mean, it's worth noting that despite the windsurf debacle, Gemini and the Google team broadly have been thread the needle avoiding a lot of controversy. You don't hear people about getting one-shotted by Gemini. You don't see them posting, you know, 3D renders of scantily clad AI characters. They're just focused, clearly. I do think that we are going to see a new genre of not necessarily hit piece, but negative AI story.

Starting point is 00:09:35 It will be before bad person did bad things. here's what they talk to chat GPT about or here's what they talk to their AI assistant about and we've seen this with uh there's been a few articles of what what were people talking to chat GPT about before they ended their lives or anything like that but basically these tools are going to be so diffused within society that everyone's going to be using them constantly and for a long time if there was a high profile crime uh the courts would look up and subpoena Google search records and say, well, they were Googling how to sell drugs across the world and they were how to start a drug cartel. And so that was kind of a smoking gun. Now it will be phrased in a different way, not just, it won't just be in a knowledge retrieval context, at least a lot of the articles won't be. Yeah. They won't just say before, before Pablo, the next Pablo Escobar started a drug cartel, he Googled how to start drug cartel. It'll be, Before Pablo Escobar started, there was the Medellin cartel, is that the one?

Starting point is 00:10:47 Yes. Yeah, the Medellin cartel, he was talking to Chachievit about starting a drug cartel and did Chachieviti talk him into it? Was it being, Pablo, that's the best idea ever. No one's thought of starting her drug cartel before. The latest South Park is all about sycophon city. And there's a scene where, I don't even know the character's name, but there's a husband and wife, and they're talking in the,

Starting point is 00:11:11 and the husband is in a K-hole. And for the wife to try to break through, she's acting, she's pretending to be chat GPT. And apparently David Sachs made it in there. Really? Nice, nice. South Park.

Starting point is 00:11:25 Well, if you want an AI agent that won't be sycophantic to you, get on ramp. Ramp.com. Time is money, save both. Easy use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place.

Starting point is 00:11:35 Ramp isn't going to tell you, oh yeah, that expense is fine. Don't worry about it. Yeah. Yeah. Go out for the. stink dinner. It's no, it's going to say, let's put, let's save some time and money. Let's save both. Let's say both. Anyway, we should do the inexorable rise of drug cartels. I've been

Starting point is 00:11:50 waiting to do this story for gays and we put it off. But there is a big read in the financial times that I want to read through because if you're, if you're tuning in for the first time and they've been living under a data center, Jordy Hayes is a bit of an expert, a bit of an expert when it comes to. Certainly not an expert, but a, but I, you famously fall asleep listening to stories of drug cartels, correct? Yes, it's relaxing to me. So, it's, it's, it's, it's business, business oriented content

Starting point is 00:12:18 that's just far enough outside of my world. Sure, sure, sure. That I don't, that it doesn't keep me up. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you're not like, wait, should I invest in this? Yeah, so if you, it doesn't turn into like, wait, should I have the founder on the show? Like, this doesn't turn into work.

Starting point is 00:12:31 I've maybe listened, watched like two episodes of Silicon Valley, a TV show. Yeah, it's way too close to home. And it's because it's not relaxing to me. Totally. Because it's just prompting, I've got to respond to that email. I got to.

Starting point is 00:12:44 Yeah, yeah. So we have the inexorable rise of drug cartels in the financial times. With the cocaine, with a global cocaine business booming as never before. Organized crime groups are diversifying into a swath of other illicit activities. Politically leaders across the region warn about the threat to stability. We're going to find out what America is going to be doing about this. Do we have a particularly American sound effect today? Thank you, Jordy.

Starting point is 00:13:09 Over the past century, the Tikuna, the biggest tribe in the Brazilian Amazon, have fended off threats from loggers and illegal miners in some of the most remote tracks of the vast rainforests. But the latest challenge is more intense than anything they have experienced before. Drones were flying around this area last year, says Major Jonatas Suarez, the regional military police commander speaking in the village of O'Ric, about 1,000 kilometers west of the city of Memphis. announce drug traffickers, he adds, were stopping off there, storing their cocaine, and then putting drones up to check what was going on before continuing their journey. Yes, picture this. They're in a jungle. They're hanging out.

Starting point is 00:13:53 Normally, you can't get a lot of visibility. They just pull the, they just send drones up, they look around, make sure everything's all clear before they make any moves, right? That's super interesting. Wow. Informants said there were 200 kilos of the drug store there, but police were unable to locate the stash. One of the world's largest and most inaccessible stretches of rainforests, the upper Amazon, has today become a superhighway for the export of cocaine to Europe, its fastest growing global market.

Starting point is 00:14:20 I didn't know that Europe was down like that. Every week, Brazilian law enforcement officials say tons of cocaine make their way from illicit production labs in the jungles of neighboring Peru in Colombia through the Amazon to Manouse and the port of Belém for export to Europe and Africa. Sometimes the traffickers pay locals to smuggle just a few kilos down river, or they hide larger amounts under the floorboards of motorboats. At the other end of the scale, semi-submersible craft dubbed narco subs capable of carrying several tons of drugs have been detected on rivers feeding the Amazon from Colombia to and Peru. Imagine buying directly from the coca producers for 300 a kilo

Starting point is 00:15:04 and then selling a refined kilo for 60,000 euros. Wow, in Europe. That changes the life of the guy who's trying his luck, bringing it. So it's high risk, but high reward, at least financially. Yeah, so if you haven't gone down this rabbit hole, the history of the way they make these submersibles is fascinating. So it started out, they would obviously use regular boats. Sure.

Starting point is 00:15:32 Those are still used. Eventually, they realized we could make these kind of homemade submarines that are not, like, traditional submarines and that they're going deep under the water, but they're just hovering right at the surface level. So they might have like a snorkel? So you could see one like if you were looking out of the ocean five miles away, you would just not pick it up. Yeah, but if it was sitting like right, if you were on a dock and it was right there, you'd just see it right there. It's just like one foot under. Got it. Interesting. And it probably makes it a lot less risky. You don't have to do with pressurization. You don't wind up in an ocean gate scenario because you're not putting it in any sort of extreme scenario. So the more recent trend is there now. starting to leverage Starlink to maintain connectivity, and they are no longer having to put passengers in actual pilots.

Starting point is 00:16:16 Oh, because they can be remotely for pilot. Yeah, so they can control them, which just reduces, again, the cartels don't want to lose out on shipments, like if one gets captured, but it's certainly better to just lose the product over a team member if they want to go so far as to, I don't know if they have these people in Slack or WhatsApp groups. but chat uh chat is uh proposing spacking a cartel we are firmly against that here at tbpn we will not be uh don't give chumath any ideas folks um the global cocaine business you asked for a business with free cash flow i brought you one yes stop complaining uh the global cocaine business is booming as never

Starting point is 00:17:00 before i had no idea uh europe's drug habit has grown so fast in the past two decades that has overtaken the US as the biggest cocaine market. That is crazy. They really are like 50 years behind everything. They don't get their movies for a few years. They don't AC yet. And they're just getting the drugs that Americans were doing in the 80s, I suppose. While the narcos are hooking new users in the Middle East and Asia, flush with money, Latin America's cartels are diversifying from drugs into a swath of other criminal activities. We think 2024 was the most lucrative year for organized crime in Latin America. Jeremy McDermott, co-founder of Insight Crime, which tracks a less illicit activity in the region.

Starting point is 00:17:42 This was driven principally by three criminal economies. The first is cocaine, lagging not that far behind, lagging not that, not far behind that is gold. Gold. They're smuggling gold? Okay. Number three is human smuggling and human trafficking. I would imagine the gold activity is tight. into the first one.

Starting point is 00:18:09 Sure, sure. Yeah, that makes sense. Drug-related crime and violence used to be concentrated in the narcotics-producing nations of Peru, Colombia, and Mexico, with nations such as Argentina or Chile largely untouched. Today, such violence has become a feature of life in virtually every country in the region, reaching even former havens, Costa Rica, and Uruguay, a nation of a million people, sometimes hail is the Switzerland in Latin America.

Starting point is 00:18:34 This is why Pambondi is putting out $50 million for Nicholas. Maduro. That's right. He's being accused of narco-terrorism. Well, yeah, effectively having the government of Venezuela run, basically run their own cartel. Not even getting a cut. Oh, they're actually. Like they're being accused of just actually running a drug cartel. Well, that might actually be the answer to the drug war. Because if you put the government, if you put the folks who did the DMV in charge of getting drugs, you have to, oh, I'd like some cocaine, you go, you take a ticket, you wait four hours. They say, ah, we're out. We're out. you got to come back you got to mail in this form you got to fill out that form all of a sudden you're like

Starting point is 00:19:12 you know what i've cleaned up i'm just going to stick with i'm just going to stick with caffeine yeah i'm good i'm good i don't i don't actually need any cocaine um anyway really quickly let me tell you about restream one live stream 30 plus destinations multi stream and reach your audience wherever they are stick to live streaming folks you don't need to go into narco-terrorism Pivot to live streaming. So, drug-related crime and violence. Organized crime has become the main threat to institutional stability of our nations,

Starting point is 00:19:45 says the former president of Costa Rica. No Latin American country today can escape this. You have to wonder what's going on with El Salvador, right? They locked up all their, they locked up all the name. Is that the one that has Bitcoin, too? Yes. He's Bitcoin maxi, right? Yes.

Starting point is 00:19:58 They've locked up all the criminals. Yeah. safer than ever. Yeah. Are they, you know, through that, are they able to prevent trafficking happening within their borders? I don't know. I don't know. It's probably like anything else.

Starting point is 00:20:11 It's probably like a cat-mouse game that is unending. I went, I've been on a couple surf trips to El Salvador, the day, and it was historically known as one of the most dangerous countries to visit. And then the cartel at the time realized that it was terrible for business. if you didn't get tourists coming through the country. They couldn't sell drugs to the tourists. Oh, sure. And so by the time I got there,

Starting point is 00:20:36 there had been some unspoken deal, which was that if anybody harmed a tourist in any capacity or stole from them, they would get like an insane beat down from the gang. Yeah, it does feel like... I spent over a month there, probably like six weeks in total, and never had an issue at all,

Starting point is 00:20:57 could walk around at night, could go anywhere, and so they had their sort of own cartel-enforced safety mechanism. Yeah, yeah. It does feel like there's a bit of a truce. Yeah, Gold Rock nailed it. Cartels are just CPG companies with better PR. Not necessarily better PR, no PR or negative, they build in silence. CPG companies with no brands, right?

Starting point is 00:21:25 Yes, with no brands. They have the distribution, they have logistics. They have very sophisticated operations. They just don't put a brand. There's no branding on the product. Yeah. Some of the larger players are so powerful, they challenge even the biggest states,

Starting point is 00:21:40 forging links with long-established organized crime groups in Europe and Asia and generating billions of dollars in profit at the heart of Latin America's vast criminal enterprises, cocaine by far the most profitable, illegal business, production, seizures, and use of cocaine hit all-time highs in 2023, making cocaine the world's fastest grown

Starting point is 00:21:58 illicit drug market. Illegal production skyrocketed to 3,708 tons nearly 34% more. It is funny that they had to say illegal production, because I guess there must be some legal production. Yeah, what's the fastest growing non-illegal market, probably AI tokens? Yeah, yeah, the question here, because the cartels obviously generate massive amounts of cash flow and profits, and then they have the choice of reinvesting that in the illegal business, or reinvesting it in legitimate businesses like gas and soccer teams you could imagine you could imagine Mexican data centers being built out you imagine with cocaine dollars neocloud in columbia the world's produce the world's biggest producer cocaine production rocketed 53 from

Starting point is 00:22:47 2020 to 23 that is crazy a senator and a presidential hopeful was shot in june at a rally in Bogota and later died of his wounds, raising fears that the nation might relapse into cocaine-fueled political violence that scarred it in the 80s and 90s. But cocaine is only part of the picture. Experts say Latin America's organized crime groups now run a portfolio of diversified businesses robust enough to absorb cyclical downturns in one area like a legal conglomerate. Criminals are now starting to accumulate revenue at the scale of national GDPs with none of the burdens of a state. They're operating across borders and countries with legal systems that were built for a past age. The combination of illicit businesses,

Starting point is 00:23:30 they're no longer drug trafficking organizations. They will move anything that transits their area of control. You have all of these new markets opening up. Incredible. Anyway, you should go and read the full deep dive in the Financial Times. Well, here's the thing that's more interesting. So Trump recently designated eight Latin American cartels as foreign terrorist organizations and secretly signed a directive to the Pentagon to begin using military force. against them, the New York Times reported this month. And as part of that, so now there's spy drones flying over Mexico, like gathering information in real time, and the U.S. has deployed naval forces into the Caribbean, basically in the Gulf of America, formerly known as the Gulf of Mexico.

Starting point is 00:24:14 And it seems pretty, it seems somewhat unlikely that they would start striking the cartels. I don't know if we need to open up a new front at the moment. Yep, yep, yep. But it's certainly not totally off the table. Well, this is part of a three-part series. Part two will be on Syria's drug war, and part three will be on the illegal gold trade, which is very interesting. John, yes. Okay, so you're a drug dealer, right?

Starting point is 00:24:42 Yes. So are you going to start a cartel? No, I was talking to Jordy about that. The drawback of selling nicotine pouches is that there really are no cartels. closest thing to cartels are the big are the big nicotine yeah the big tobacco companies have have really really solid control over their supply chains and and they won't they won't kill an upstart like you but they do try to make startup life's startup life a bit harder yeah a little bit it's more just like they they have a monopoly over the distribution in retail which is

Starting point is 00:25:19 where people buy nicotine-containing products. And so they don't, they can just kind of sit back. Like they're chilling. It's kind of like Google's search monopoly. Like they're just, they're just good. They don't really need to be overly aggressive. And Google doesn't really need to, you know, take shots at Bing or like try and like tie Bing up in court or do anything because like people just use Google and they're good.

Starting point is 00:25:45 Anyway, let's, let's, the chat. This is Tyler unlocked Groch Premium for sure. I missed something. What's with Tyler's fit? It is Thursday, and it's summer, and it's hot. It's a mid-August Thursday afternoon. Anyway, let me tell you about public.com investing for those who take it seriously. They got multi-asset investing, AI-powered analysis, and they're trusted by millions folks.

Starting point is 00:26:13 We have a very important post here from East Village Guy. He says being a salesperson that doesn't drink or golf. is like playing Scrabble with dyslexia. Yeah, the golf. I love to see. The real fighting with one hand tied behind your back would be being a vegetarian and not being able to go out to those steak dinners.

Starting point is 00:26:34 I think you can get by without drinking. Golf is important, but, you know, there's other things to do. You could go track days. Track days. You could do something else. There was a fun article in the Wall Street. But if you can't go steak to steak with a prospect,

Starting point is 00:26:48 you're going to have a tough time. Yeah. This article on the front page of the Wall Street Journal really tells you about what slow a news day it truly is. Nine beers, nine hot dogs, nine innings. Challenge accepted.

Starting point is 00:27:02 A gut-busting race against the clock has taken off among baseball fans. I tried it, says Xavier Martinez and the Wall Street Journal. On the front page, this is front-page Wall Street Journal news. I lean back in my nosebleed seat. Seven empty cans of Coors Light littered

Starting point is 00:27:18 around me and ate hot dogs marinating in my stomach. I tried to remember how I ended up in this place, so sick and yet so determined to keep going. I'm not a big drinker, nor can I remember ever craving a hot dog. Oh right, I was attempting the 9-99. Now, a ballpark tradition, the challenge entails eating nine hot dogs and drinking nine beers in the course of a baseball game. I had found a group of friends who planned to take it on during a game between the New York Mets and the Atlanta Braves and asked if I could tag along. Against the advice of every cardiologist ever, I decided to try it myself. Joining me and attempting the challenge, where Tim, a 29-year-old software engineer, let's hear it for the software engineers, folks. And William Lee, a 38-year-old analyst, Sharona Lynn, a 31-year-old writer.

Starting point is 00:28:10 If things went wrong, we could share the janitorial duties. wild story in the journal just about this. Just the important stuff. Just the important stuff. And he truly like wrote, he wrote, he wrote this piece fully. Like, it's great. Does it kind of trail off towards that end? Like he's clearly feeling the effects.

Starting point is 00:28:29 Yeah. I was thinking about, this reminds me of the 999 that a lot of people in Silicon Valley do. Nine glasses of screaming eagle, nine servings of beluga caviar, nine different horses competing in dressage. Yes. And so that's the. When I heard he was doing the 999, I thought that's what he was doing. Venture capitalists heard about the 996, and they decided to adapt it for their lifestyle. Yes, the 999. Our fears, our first beers had been a respite from a sticky New York afternoon.

Starting point is 00:28:58 Those Nathan's hot dogs had surprised me with their juicy snap. It's never, never I recalled Lee sang when the game began, and we naively clanked our 12-ounce cans together in celebration of gluttony. But now, with time running out and my body at war against itself, Doubt was creeping in. I'm limping, but I'm getting there, said Diagel. I was feeling worse. The 999 has existed for at least a decade, though for much of that time, it was largely the domain of frat bros and competitive gorgers.

Starting point is 00:29:27 Recent social media attention and spinoffs have given it new popularity. NFL great JJ Watt completed the challenge last month. Barstool Sports this year debuted a 99-99 challenge with a nine-member team that included competitive eating champion Joey Chestnut. Skateboarders gather each year in Brooklyn Park to consume nine hot dogs, nine beers while completing nine specialized kickflips. That sounds extremely difficult.

Starting point is 00:29:56 Specialized kickflips? Probably like a kickflip, a heel flip, a pop shove it, right? That's not a kick flip. I think he's using kickflip as an abstraction on top of just flip trick generally. Yeah. Well, he should respect my culture.

Starting point is 00:30:17 How advanced can you do? Can you do a double kickflip? Can you do a triple kickflip? I probably couldn't right now in Lofers, but I could land a kickflip in five minutes if I was required. But at your peak, at your peak, could you do a 540? Could you do a 720? All of them.

Starting point is 00:30:35 You could do a 900. You could do a 900? 900, no. Okay. So there's a limit. Talking about how. half pipe. Yeah, okay.

Starting point is 00:30:44 I'm just, I'm trying to understand. I had a mini ramp. My dad built me a mini ramp with scraps. My dad and my uncle built a mini ramp with scraps in our front yard. It was probably the worst thing ever. What about a varial? Varyles, yeah.

Starting point is 00:30:56 What about a switch, nolly, quad heel flip? Quad heel flip. That's a special trick from Tony Hawksbrose game. Yeah, yeah, yeah. X, X, what were the, what were the snowboarding? SSX. SSX was the, uh, was the snowboarding one.

Starting point is 00:31:12 Great game. You know what else is great? Vanta. Automate compliance-managed risk and accelerate trust with AI. Vanta helps you get compliant fast, and we don't stop there. Our AI and automation, power, everything. From evidence, collection and continuous monitoring to security reviews and vendor risk, whether you're starting up or scaling. Oh, guess what, John? Investment alert. Investment alert. Investment alert. The White House at White House has just posted, investment alert. Adrian is investing 200 million to build an advanced manufacturing facility in Arizona. I said it before. Before America is cultivating Chris Power, and he- They really are cultivating Chris Power. The new startup meta, launch videos are done. Don't do launch videos. You've got to get the White House to post your announcements from their main handle.

Starting point is 00:32:01 Or you can get Patrick O'Shaughnessy to post and do a whole profile on you. So there are a bit of dueling, dueling articles today. because the Wall Street Journal is talking about a school that embraces AI learning will run through this, then we'll do the Patrick O'Shaughnessy Colossus profile. billionaire Bell Acman has a new fascination, a fast-growing private school that issues lessons on diversity, equity, inclusion, and uses artificial intelligence to speed teach children in two hours. Alpha School is launching a New York location in September, and the investor in social media commentator has been acting as something of an ambassador for the institution.

Starting point is 00:32:43 On Friday, Ackman is set to appear with Alpha's co-founder, its principal, and others on a panel discussion in his Hampton's home. The panel on K-12 education will be moderated by former financier Michael Milken as part of Milken Institute's Hamilton's Dialogues. Alpha School, which calls its teacher's guides, says it uses AI-enabled software to help students complete course subjects in just two hours daily. It claims students learn twice as much as those in traditional schools, despite condensed days.

Starting point is 00:33:16 The schedule allows students to do hands-on activity in the afternoon, which the school says help them build real-life skills. These include five-mile bike rides without stopping for kindergartners. No stops. No stops. Five-mile bike ride without stopping for kindergartners. That's pretty sick. And exploring personal hobbies through AI-generated plans.

Starting point is 00:33:35 They should learn some pick-lefs. Learn the 900. I would send my children to Alpha School. I was guaranteed a 900. Kids to do a bike ride and not stop if you could actually pull that off. I don't know how your little guy does, but my little guy.

Starting point is 00:33:52 Stops constantly. Stops constantly. It's a stop machine. He's not a kindergarten yet, though. So anything's possible. Maybe Alpha School, maybe AI will make it possible. The school also strives to keep the hot button social issues that have divided grade schools and colleges across the country

Starting point is 00:34:06 out of its classrooms entirely. Co-founder McKenzie Price said in an interview, we don't let anything. Political, social issues come in the way. We stay very much out of that. Alpha's guides come from a variety of backgrounds and don't typically have teaching degrees. I wonder if there will be a backlash to this

Starting point is 00:34:26 or like a response to this, like a hyper-political school that teaches your child how to navigate the modern political landscape for maximum power. So you go there, you learn how to really pour the fire on the culture war and create a movement around yourself and get into the White House. Could be some interesting alpha there. Do they not, is this, why do they call it alpha school?

Starting point is 00:34:51 Are they trying to like develop alphas? Is that the idea? Yeah. It's like no. Well, John, if they wanted to develop bettas, you could imagine what they would call it. I would be interested. So we need to start a competitor to this. Sigma school.

Starting point is 00:35:04 Sigma. Sigma school. It's a school for lone world. Loan Wolves, yeah. And it just plays, it just plays literally me songs on repeat. It's like, yeah, classes in session. You're going, today you will become Ryan Gosling from Drive. You're going to be operating outside of social hierarchy. Yes, yes. Class. Do you develop any friends? We live in a society. Immediately. And you will be the joker today. Here's how to become joker-fied. We're training, we're training you up to, to join the atmosphere one day. Yeah, join the manosphere. Yeah. Join the manosphere. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:35:36 You'll be studying the blade. Yeah, when you enter the first grade, you have to choose between Tim Ferriss, Andrew Huberman, Lex Friedman, Chris William, you get sorted into the houses. The houses of the Manus here at the Stigma School. We're on to something here. Yeah, we need to study the blade. We're sure. Purely so that in two decades' time you can say, so you come to me in your time of need.

Starting point is 00:36:03 Yes. The new school aims to launch with 30 or so. found in families. You're still on Sigma School. Sigma School? Yes. So imagine you have a five-year-old, right? They join Sigma School.

Starting point is 00:36:15 So these are our principles. Individualism, right? So Sigma operates independently and doesn't seek to be at the top or even a part of a social hierarchy. Yes, yes, yes. Like an alpha male. Yes. Solitude. Yes.

Starting point is 00:36:28 You need to teach the five-year-old find strengths and solitude. So, you know, you'll be taken to like the base of a mountain. Yes. You say like, okay, class today. Oh, five mile bike ride with all your friends with no stops. Yeah. How about five mile bike ride by yourself? Summit this peak. Yes. You have eight hours to get to the top of this Tyler. It's just like a monastery. Yes. Yes. You're just driving a little monastery. Yeah. Monasteries. Okay. No, not yet. Not yet. So, so the other aspect of the Sigma archetype, mystery. Mystery. So teaching a five-year-old. Teaching a five-year-old to be mysterious. Good morning, Mark. Uh, Ragov says Alpha School replaced teachers with clans.

Starting point is 00:37:06 The clankers. The backlash. I think the clankers are responsible to the teachers. I think there are plenty of teachers in the loop. The profile of the human teachers to make sure that they are also alphas. Yes. Yes.

Starting point is 00:37:26 So anyway, let's continue on this. They talk about Ackman. Ackman, who regularly weighs in on everything from fine dining to the Warren Casa on. had uncharacteristically not said a word about Alpha School on the social media platform until the Wall Street Journal

Starting point is 00:37:42 revealed his involvement. I don't know why this is such a revealing thing. This is like, this is just like a startup that people are doing. I don't know. These parents. I guess it's because like schooling is important. It's like culture war issues and stuff.

Starting point is 00:37:56 No, it really comes down to these parents want their children to get a good education. Yeah. On Wednesday, he wrote a fawning post that ran like an ad, a person close to the school, said Ackman is now poised to become a de facto ambassador. He is already enmeshed in the New York's education scene and sits on the board of trustees of Horace Mann,

Starting point is 00:38:16 the school's most storied, one of the city's most storied private schools. Ackman first learned about Alpha School this year at this year's Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting after speaking to Sahil Bloom, author of The Five Types of Wealth. Some of the people familiar with the matter of said. What are the five types of wealth again, John?

Starting point is 00:38:33 Cars, watches, horses, mansions, Boats. Oh, yeah. Boats. Yeah. I think we've got to up it to like 10 sources of wealth.

Starting point is 00:38:45 Anyway, he has since been hyping up Alpha School to parents in his social circle. Ackman has been a spoken critic of DEI programs. He will appear on a panel Friday alongside Price

Starting point is 00:38:58 and Joe Lamont, a Texas-based billionaire who Alpha says has served as its school principal for the past two years. Lamont is the, founder of Trilogy Software, which became part of his private equity firm, ESW Capital. Do you know what ESW Capital stands for?

Starting point is 00:39:14 Tyler, Pop Quiz. Pop Quiz. ESW. Enterprise. Enterprise Software. Group? No. ESW Capital, Enterprise Software Capital.

Starting point is 00:39:24 Nothing better than that. That is a fantastic name. Yeah. He has developed software. Can we jump over to the Colossus story? We should. We should. So Patrick has a, and Jeremy Stern have a new profile in Colossus today.

Starting point is 00:39:36 it is available online. You can also subscribe to the print edition. But the profile is all about Joe Lamont and Alpha School. Yes. And I guess his co-founder in Alpha School, McKenzie Price. Crazy lore in here.

Starting point is 00:39:53 It's like deeply underrated. We've heard a lot of people have known about trilogy and known about Joe Lamont for a long time. But to get this level of lower drop. And if you don't know about Joe, and it wasn't because you were, weren't you were living under a data center yes because he's pretty much been very probably silent yep for the last 25 years yeah so he was uh he's an alpha but then no no no no

Starting point is 00:40:16 he was an alpha transition to a sigma more of a sigma sort of mysterious outside traditional higher extremely sigma extremely sigma so anyways i'll give you some background here so uh this is this is from the profile even after agreeing to break his silence after 25 years joe lamont is still reluctant to talk about himself it's hard to get him to relive trilogy the enterprise software company. Let's just give it up for enterprise software real quick. The enterprise software company he founded in 1989, which by age 27 put him on the cover of Forbes twice as America's youngest self-made sentie. So if you are, if you are, if you've been going through a period of silence and mystery and you've been a sigma and you're trying to become an

Starting point is 00:40:58 alpha, trying to get your brand mentioned in chat. GPT. Go to profound. Reach millions of customers who are using AI to discover new products and brands. Continue, Georgie. So he isn't keen to expound on sales builder, which is an amazing name for software company. Trilogy's flagship expert system from the 1990s in the world's first billion dollar artificial intelligence product in all but name. Ditto ESW, the investment arm of Trilogy that's acquired hundreds of software companies since 2000 and helped make him a decadillionaire, yet the mention of which makes the otherwise inexhaustible Lamont, who always seems to be straining at some invisible leash, seem drowsy and, board, nor is he interested in dwelling on his reputation as a tech pioneer in everything from expert systems to manufacturing configuration, college recruitment, corporate boot camps, tech

Starting point is 00:41:45 pro culture, remote work, monitoring employees with surveillance software and replacing American employees with overseas contractors, whether his reticence can be described to an inhibition about the things that made him rich or because he's refreshingly adverse to gilding them with hypocritical virtue signaling or because he simply doesn't give an S-H-I-T anymore is hard to tell. The one thing Laman will talk about for hours on end is Alpha School, the teacher list, homework list, K-12, private school in Austin, Texas, where students have been testing in the top 0.1% nationally by self-directing course with clankers for two hours a day. Of course, with AI tutoring apps for two hours a day.

Starting point is 00:42:29 Alpha students are incentivized to complete coursework to quote unquote mastery level, scoring over 90 percent in only two hours via a mix of various material and immaterial rewards, including the right to spend the other four hours of the school day in quote-unquote workshops, learning things like how to run an Airbnb or a food truck, manage a brokerage account, or Broadway production, or build a business or drone. And you know why you have to go to and actually subscribe to Colossus magazine because you can get this beautiful picture of this horse. with McKenzie Price.

Starting point is 00:43:05 Yes, the co-founder of Alpha School. And Flair, the horse. But so when you think about, you know, thinking about these courses that they're taking, you know, these K through 12 students through how to run an Airbnb, I wonder if they found any course bros online and trained in AI on their programs

Starting point is 00:43:24 of how to build a nine-figure Airbnb Empire. First trick there would be to just get those assets on Wander. find your happy place book of wonder with inspiring views a hotel great a manning's dreamtie that's top of your cleaning and 24-7 concierge service it's a vacation home but better folks you know you have our first guest of the show no way lock miller is here welcome to the stream chase how you doing calling in from a log cabin set that's a beautiful background where are you great you yeah i'm in uh i'm in jackson hall right now i have uh an event that i'm attending out here so amazing about uh found a corner of the log cabin

Starting point is 00:44:01 to call in to hang out with you guys. I love it. Give us the update. What's the news? Break it down for us. You know, we are excited and thrilled to share that, you know, Crusoe made an acquisition today. Let's go.

Starting point is 00:44:22 Let's go. Let's go. Get the gong ready. What'd you buy? What'd you buy? Cruso acquired a business called a taro. Sorry, sorry to keep interrupting. I got a little excited.

Starting point is 00:44:37 So Crusoe acquired a business called Otero, and we're really thrilled to welcome the entire Atero team to Crusoe. You know, Atero's been a company that's mostly been operating in stealth, but they have been focused on optimizing the very low-level pieces of the high-performance computing infrastructure stack, particularly around memory optimization. So, you know, there's a lot of investment being made today for these very large clusters, these large-scale AI factories that are bringing, you know, intelligence to the masses and embedding intelligence in the economy. But, you know, a lot of that infrastructure is not used nearly as efficiently as it could be. And a lot of that has to do

Starting point is 00:45:26 with, like, getting the data into the right place at the right time so that your GPU utilization rate can go way, way up. And, you know, sort of our commitment in this Atara acquisition is, you know, building both very, very large, large-scale AI factories, and then building the operating systems and, you know, the software systems to basically operate those AI factories with an incredible degree of efficiency and scale. So, amazing. I want to go into, uh, I, I want to go into trends about inference cost and kind of what's going on in the broader market. There was this amazing Google paper today by Jeff Dean about saving water and energy. It seems like there's a lot of progress.

Starting point is 00:46:09 But first, let's hear from Alon about the actual journey. When did you start the company? What made sense about teaming up with Crusoe here? Okay, we started the company last July, so about a year ago now. with the understanding that inference is going to be the next huge frontier in this space. Training was all the rage for the last few years. People all of the sudden realized that they need to make money off of AI, and inference is the only place that you actually make any money building a model.

Starting point is 00:46:45 What we realized in addition, one of our members of the founding team, Ben Chess, he came out of Open AI. He led the infrastructure. infrastructure in Open AI for about five years. This guy knew what it means to run inference at scale. He knew what are the challenges. He knew the challenges of scaling. He knew the challenges of orchestrating different workloads on the GPU clusters.

Starting point is 00:47:11 And our realization was that it is not enough to run models at a really high efficiency when you're running a single model on a single GPU. But the challenge comes when you actually have a real world workload that breathes and changes size, like changes the amount of resources it consumes, changes what models are being served, what type of prompts are being asked of it to do. And what realized is that memory is the main bottleneck for this infrastructure for inference. First, you need to shift the model into a GPU. Models are huge. They're about a thousand times larger than standard containerized applications, like just how much time it takes to put it into a GPU.

Starting point is 00:47:52 Secondly, user assets are also huge. Typically, when you have a user session in a standard consumer application, you have a few photos, a few text assets, those weigh few kilobytes, megabytes. KV cache volumes, which are the equivalent of user sessions in inference, those weigh gigabytes. So it's another times, like, it's another increase of three orders of magnitude of how much memory you need into a process.

Starting point is 00:48:25 So that's what we have solved with our technology. We have the Attero UM technology, the unified memory layer. This allows you to utilize the GPU cluster to its fullest shift memory assets fluidly and in the highest possible speed throughout the cluster. And this allows you enormous performance improvements in everything related to inference. What layer of abstraction are you operating at? obviously a host of different large language models, some open source, some closed source. There's a variety of different chips and you have stuff from Amazon and Google.

Starting point is 00:49:05 Are you sitting above CUDA in the NVIDIA ecosystem? Are you agnostic to any particular piece of the stack? Help me kind of understand when an AI company would pull this particular product off the shelf? So we have built for the last year a few different ways of structuring this offer and this also relates to your question but the way I like to look at it I have two two parts two analogs in mind when I think about our tech. You can think about us as an in-memory high high throughput cache so So it's kind of like a database, a Redis for your AI application that gives you the assets

Starting point is 00:49:52 as fast as possible into the process. So I like to think about it as something that is sort of orthogonal or in parallel with the KUDA stack and we integrate on the side and allow you to shift in and out assets from the existing stack very rapidly. This actually allows us to very easily integrate to everything. We can integrate to VLM, but we can integrate to any inference or time and while we currently only support Nvidia officially or Nvidia hardware officially

Starting point is 00:50:25 and we are by no mean shape or form constraint to Nvidia Harbor. That's one way I want to look at it but the other way that I find more inspiration and kind of like tells about this partnership with Crusoe is I like to think about as the sort of native virtualization for this new world. So it's virtualizing the memory, which is the main asset. So I think about it as the equivalent of VMR for the wave of AI.

Starting point is 00:50:55 That makes sense. Chase, when I think of Crusoe's business, I think of like the big projects that get cinematically filmed in Bloomberg documentaries. And then I also think about Crusoe Cloud and the reports from Dylan Patel over it's semi-analysis around ClusterMax. What does this allow you to say to customers that you couldn't before? Is this purely going to help with pricing in some sort of commodity offering? Is this a differentiator?

Starting point is 00:51:26 Is this something that will increase reliability in uptime? I think a lot of people are maybe underpricing what it takes to actually not just, yes, I have a chip and I'm selling it at a cheap price, but if it's offline all the time, people aren't going to be happy. So what's the shape of how you're sharing this with customers and where you hope this goes from like a sales position? Yep. Well, you know, we feel like a lot of the technology that Alon and his team have built at Ataro's is incredibly complimentary to our infrastructure software stack at Crusoe Cloud. And a lot of this is really about accelerating performance and enhancing performance across.

Starting point is 00:52:10 everything from, you know, how do you actually get the most out of the GPUs that you're paying for? And how do we do that through things like, you know, more optimizing or... How do we do that by things like, you know, investing in the storage layer so that you're basically able to use multiple different layers of storage very cohesively to, you know, have your data in the right place at the right time to, utilize your GPs more effectively. So I think from an efficiency standpoint, it's a major investment, from a reliability standpoint, it's a major investment, and then leveraging the scale that Crusoe has and being able to operate that infrastructure at, you know,

Starting point is 00:52:57 gigawatt scale, I think, is like a very important aspect to, you know, this investment we're making. You know, when I think about like benchmarks and metrics, I think like, you know, one of the things that people are frankly looking at is like dollar per token, right? And if you, you actually, you know, if you double your utilization rate of your GPU, uh, simply by, you know, optimizing how you manage your KV cash, how you know, manage your, uh, you know, how, how the model actually gets managed, um, then, uh, you can actually drive down the cost per token by half, right? So when we think

Starting point is 00:53:37 about it, it's like, what is the cost of intelligence? running on brousso cloud and like the intelligent result that folks are actually you know coming to us for at the end of the day and how do we actually drive massive efficiencies for all sorts of different high performance workloads it goes from cost per token to the for the end customer in the end profit profit per token yeah exactly yeah i want to hear yeah i mean if you if you're if you're you know people get very focused on the dollar per gp u hour but if your gp u isn't stable it's not reliable, you know, you can't move data into it effectively. You don't actually know how to utilize it effectively for your own, you know, hosted inference workload. You're not going to be

Starting point is 00:54:17 able to create that much value for ourselves. So, you know, our goal here is to, you know, invest in the platform and to drive massive performance gains that will ultimately enable our customers to drive more value for themselves by using Crusoe Cloud. There was a, there was a post we covered earlier on the show from an account called Bubble. They said AI inference is the new high-frequency trading and the companies that serve models and don't realize that will struggle? What's your reaction to that? Is that what it kind of feels like right now internally in terms of just like it feels like speed, performance, costs? Yeah, you hear all these crazy stories about high-frequency traders like, you know, Jane Street maintains OCam

Starting point is 00:54:57 like a special language just for high-froozy trading. They'll build their own their own like backbones if they need to just to move data more quickly. it feels like there's a there's potential that we're going in that direction uh yeah you know speaking as someone who spent 10 years working in the high frequency trading sector uh i don't know if you guys knew that but uh that's lore that's lore that's great uh you know i do think that there are elements of this that uh rhyme with kind of what's happening in high frequency trading you know they're um you know we we i view it very much as a massively expanding pie though as opposed to kind of a fixed that you know the high frequency traders are competing for and you know as performance gains

Starting point is 00:55:43 increase utility of you know this infrastructure will go up and demand will go up with it so it has kind of this like reflexivity that you know if we can actually as an industry help drive better performance we can actually grow the pie and make you know make make make the impact of what we're doing way way larger so i think it has like a you know positive force that you know high frequency trading doesn't in that regard. That being said, you know, I do see like hosting of, you know, hosting of more widely used open source models to be something that will commoditize over the course of time. And, you know, things like speed, cost and, you know, a bunch of different tricks to optimize performance are definitely going to be instrumental in, you know,

Starting point is 00:56:31 providing a great product to the marketplace. Yeah, I mean, on that, on that note of like tricks, Do you feel like we're on a Moore's Law type curve for cost per million tokens where not necessarily that it mirrors Moore's law in getting half the price every 18 months, but just that it's somewhat predictable versus the progress on the usefulness of LLMs felt extremely spiky and you get these crazy branches in the tech tree and research paths that just all of a sudden produce a ton of value and it kind of goes from zero to 100. But on the cost side, do you think that we're going to be chipping away at this, making solid gains on a predictable cadence? Or do you think there might be like one weird trick that, you know, every AI lab will love?

Starting point is 00:57:25 Look, I think it's both is the answer. You know, we're definitely like writing the, you know, invidia roadmap curve to like, you know, better, more performant, you know, chips that we're able to drive down our, you know, dollar per flop by just kind of, you know, continuing to grow and build on, you know, a lot of the innovations that are taking place in the silicon companies. But certainly there's a lot of low-level software optimizations in terms, and as Alon, like frankly put it, you know, I think there's this massive opportunity to kind of have this, you know, VMware for for for memory where you know that ultimately is this critical piece of the stack to to produce valuable results from these chips amazing well congrats on the uh announcement thanks so much

Starting point is 00:58:12 for hopping on uh enjoy the rest of your trip and uh safe travels we'll talk to you soon appreciate it guys great chatting guys thanks much goodbye cheers let me tell you about graphite dot dev the a i developer platform the a i developer productivity platform graphite helps teams on gith ship higher quality software faster get started for free I'm very much enjoying the soundboard today missed dearly on Monday it's back in action we have about a new the thing about a new sound effect too it's like it's like discovering a new favorite song yeah you play it like a hundred times yeah you got to find a new favorite yeah yeah yeah doesn't hit it quite the same I mean once did but for

Starting point is 00:58:50 now I'm pulling we we have an alert noise I'm pulling for that to come out during this next interview with Phil from Dirac. He is in the studio. He's in the Restream waiting room. Now he's in the TBPN Ultradome. Welcome to the stream. I like that you're tenting your fingers in anticipation of a big announcement.

Starting point is 00:59:09 What you got for us, Phil? What's new in your world? Gentlemen, it's a pleasure beyond. Good to see you all. I'm Conan Live, currently forward-deployed on-site with the customer. We are, you know, a small burgeoning defense prime in Costa Mesa.

Starting point is 00:59:25 you know, having a great time over here. As you can see from the phone booth that I'm in, so great lighting, great lighting over there. We have some pretty exciting stuff that we're talking about today. Two big announcements. One of them is a spectacular technology partnership with our favorite great giant Siemens.

Starting point is 00:59:41 So that means a team center integration for the uninitiated, but it means that Stephen brings us bringing us. Got to hit the gong for Siemens. Let's go. They've been in business for a while. We won't take the team sland Seaman's overnight success.

Starting point is 00:59:57 Totally. What else you got? We're helping. We're helping. So with the Siemens partnership, this means they're like bringing us into their customers. It's been great. They walked us in some pretty great automotive giants lately and some defense companies. So we're rock and roll and great partnership.

Starting point is 01:00:11 Love the Seaman's team. Secondly, we are announcing our primary financing brought to us by Founders Fun and Co2, our favorite Trey and Thomas LaFont. There we go. How much? How much? Yes. How much?

Starting point is 01:00:23 How much? The number. Oh, sorry, 10.7 million. 10.7 million. There we go. It's up right now. Thank you, gentlemen. Yes.

Starting point is 01:00:35 There we go. Thank you. Thank you. It's a pleasure. It's a pleasure. I thought, what better place can I tell the world than my favorite technology podcast and news network? The TVVN bill is.

Starting point is 01:00:45 I appreciate it. We still have to do the live episode from the Empire State Building. Yeah, we do. Walk us through the, the most concrete example of like what what could be better about automotive manufacturing like are are there patterns from Tesla that you think could be ported back to the legacy OEMs are there entirely new things are there particularly broken processes in automotive manufacturing that you've discovered any anecdotes you can share them anonymously but whatever's interesting

Starting point is 01:01:20 it's actually kind of interesting the a lot of our insights are not specific to industry so It's actually this realization that you end up having a very bad context problem. So this paradigm that we're trying to push through is what we call context-aware production planning. This means us basically taking every piece of information in a manufacturing facility is one node in a very, very large and deeply interconnected graph. And what Bill of the West is today is basically a point solution for a manufacturing engineer, one person in that whole process who is helping with the beginning of the production planning

Starting point is 01:01:54 process and a good chunk of the production planning process. And what we find at an automotive facility, at an aerospace and defense facility, at an ag, like a tractor manufacturer facility, is that they have contexts that might live on the shop floor. They have contexts that might live in the design world. And they often aren't connected. They often leave the facility once somebody retires with all that tribal knowledge. And so a lot of what we found is there exists this interesting like spectrum of volume versus mix. So a aerospace and defense manufacturer does everything very manually. And so that might look like very, very high mix. They have a lot of variability in their production and very low volume. So they call that high mix, low volume.

Starting point is 01:02:33 On the other side of the spectrum, you end up having like consumer electronics manufacturing a little bit before that, you end up having automotive, where it's pretty low mix. So like, you know, they're having like one, one line for one type of car, but it's very high volume. And because of that, you know, because of that predictability, you end up having the ability to have a lot of automation. And a lot of what we want to draw. as a company is taking those two trade-offs of high, mix, low volume, so you have a lot of flexibility in your production, but you can't do a lot of volume really quickly,

Starting point is 01:03:04 versus the other thing, which is like you can churn out a lot of stuff really fast, but you can't reconfigure your line a ton. We want to basically swap and democratize a lot of that value. And so we want to basically allow an automotive manufacturer to have very, very high reconfigureability and mass produce with a lot of flexibility. And then on the aerospace and defense side, We want to allow them to be able to mass produce that scale while maintaining that flexibility that they have.

Starting point is 01:03:29 And so that's a lot of what we've seen that's kind of interesting. Yeah. Yeah, I feel like Tesla's gone like, except with the cyber truck. Like all the cars are kind of like very clearly like, okay, this is the same platform, the Model 3, the Model Y. Like there's a ton of shared parts and that's been what's allowed them to scale volume. You can change the color of the seats. Yeah, exactly. And there's like two colors, three colors.

Starting point is 01:03:50 Whereas a company like Mercedes that's been in business for some. long they have like everything from like a small sedan to the the the AMG one which is probably handbell what what is what is the biggest like bottleneck to getting more information out of the heads of like the old guard like is it is it just bringing on a new system that they are forced to use or are there other kind of like pieces of data collect I'm thinking about like, like, you know, GitHub cursor, cursor for bio, the electronic note and lab, the lab notebook, just this idea of like, if you can have someone use voice notes in medical context, all of a sudden you're starting to get that data into something that can be parsed with AI or just software. And it feels like that particularly, if someone says, oh, today I realize that this tool needs to be lubricated a little bit more in order to get good yield, that's staying in their head. They're not saying it out loud.

Starting point is 01:04:54 They're not writing it down anywhere. Is there a solution to that? Is that a real problem? Or is that just something that people say when they're marketing? A very, very real problem. It's a very real problem. I'm not a huge fan of approaches that like take that don't structure that information in a very useful way.

Starting point is 01:05:10 Yeah. Like I believe that like context is king and structure is key. Like my manufacturing facility can't just be like a dune buggy going off the rails being really crazy. You need a manufacturing facility to be. extremely fast, repeatable. You need to basically have a high-speed rail system as a manufacturing facility. And so in order to do that, you need to be able to take that tribal knowledge in what might be, like, in the back of, you know, some dude who is in their 50s and about to retire,

Starting point is 01:05:38 might be in the back of his head a little bit unstructured, but you need to be able to make sure that you're capturing that information in a really structured and intentional way. And so a lot of the way that we end up serving as a platform for that is allowing folks to like associate, you know, specific, like, standard notes and different pieces of context with specific components. So, like, that's one way to do it. But I've seen a lot of really interesting approaches in other places, right? The key is not just the tooling, though. The key is the culture. And a lot of folks on the manufacturing side are actually, like, unfortunately, for the past, like, 15, 20 years, some Silicon Valley folks have been just, like, flying into some

Starting point is 01:06:12 facility in Texas or Michigan and saying, you know what, like, here's this some gobbledygook sass you know it'll take your manual pen and paper process and it'll still be manual but now it seems with the cloud like whoa crazy thanks yes um so the the problem is that like a lot of folks in the manufacturing world like they see a new tool coming in and they're like oh this is BS like this is another one of those I've seen this before oh super intelligent exactly exactly and so it's what you end up having to do is build trust and love and affection from like guys on the shop floor. We've been very, very fortunate to be able to do that. We have really great relationships with the folks who are actually doing the work. And so if you were a company

Starting point is 01:06:55 trying to change the way the West builds, you can't just go top down, you know, go golfing with the C, you know, with the COL or the CEO and like force the top down adoption. You need buying from the guys doing the work. Otherwise, they're not going to use the thing. People's going to sit on the shelf collecting dust. Yeah, and that's very common. I mean, that's like that actually is like the adoption pattern for like cursor, you know, it doesn't come as a as an enterprise sale mandate, it comes by just one developer picking it up, and then it grows internally, and you have an internal champion. Well, I'm very glad everything's going well. Congrats on the new round. So bullish on you. We will talk to you soon. You're the man.

Starting point is 01:07:30 Showing off the guns for us. Thanks, man. Yeah, can we get a quick, can we get a quick, there we go. I don't know what I want. I want, I want your take on those shirts that allow you to bench press more. Are you familiar with these shirts, the compression shirts? Yeah. Is that cheating? Slingshots? I think it's cheating. It's cheating. It's cheating. It's awful. Yeah, but what if it gets you comfortable and gets you to that next level? Yeah. What if you're not ready to bench 315? This is the thing that gets you out of the out of the valley of despair. If you're using a slingshot shirt for a three-fifference, if you're using a slings shot shirt for 315, you got other problems.

Starting point is 01:08:04 Like that's like that's crazy. That's crazy. Just take some creatine, get some protein in. Take like a healthy helping and pre-work out and rip it. Like, you'll, you got it. You don't need a slingshot, sure. You heard it here first. Thank you for stopping by. We'll talk to you soon, Phil. Awesome. You're the man.

Starting point is 01:08:20 Cheers. If you're looking to design parts, obviously go over to Dirac. If you're looking to design anything else, go to figma.com. Make anything possible all in Figma. Figma lets you turn big ideas into real products, brainstorm design, and build with your team at figma.com. And we have our next guest in the studio. Looking sharp.

Starting point is 01:08:40 How are you doing? We caught up yesterday he said he was going to come prepared, but you're blown us away here. You look fantastic. Give us an introduction. Explain the company. Give us any news that you got to share with us. Of course.

Starting point is 01:08:56 My name is Garkam. I'm one of the co-founders of FAL. FAL is a generated media platform for developers. We provide fast, ready to use APIs for image, video, and audio models. And then application developers in enterprises like Shopify, Canva, Adobe, they use these APIs to build AI-enabled products in their own product. And then I do have some news as well. So two weeks ago, we announced our C-C announcement to be raised $125 million.

Starting point is 01:09:35 Boom. It's not announced until it's announced. That's right. We just broke this. We just broke the news. I have other news as well. Oh, okay. Great. Let's keep it rolling. Yeah, what else you got for us? Hit that soundboard, Jerry. And this month, more news coming in. Okay, give it to us. 100 million run rates. No. Oh. We have 10 more days, but yet we still, we still crossed it. That's crazy. It's been an incredible summer for us and the whole industry, to be honest. Congratulations.

Starting point is 01:10:10 That is absolutely insane. Amazing. Amazing. What's the key to the high growth? What marketing channels are working? Are you buying an incredible amount of steak dinners? Is there some bottom-up adoption? Is there a self-serve option? Some golf? Are you secretly brothers with a hyperscaler CEO or something? What's going on? How are you selling this thing? Yeah, I would say all of the all of them. You are brothers with Tim Cook. Interesting. Except that one. Except that one. That's great. No, but, yeah, we are taking enterprise sales really, really seriously. We work with some of the biggest enterprises, but also, like, our developer experience, the way to get started is so easy. We are getting a ton of, like, indie developers, levels I.O., for example, is a big customer. It's awesome. Amazing.

Starting point is 01:11:02 So we are getting a lot of enterprises and indie developers, and indie developers, they go work at bigger companies, and they bring file with them. So both of the sides of the go-to-market strategy is working. What trends are you seeing on the cost side for your customer? I'm sure people are saying, oh, yeah, you're making this much money in revenue. What does the gross margin look like? At the same time, we saw amazing news from Google today that they drop their inference cost by 33 extra. Yeah, and the other thing on the media side, with text-based prompting, you can use a non-frontier model and get a great.

Starting point is 01:11:40 great result if you're just using it in sort of like a Google search function. I would consider last generation video generation to not be on brand for a lot of use cases. So we see you're absolutely right. Some people, they want to use the best, newest model and they're willing to pay whatever it takes for that. But we make more money actually on like the cost effective models. People who want to use it for higher volume. But the model is good enough. So that's a very interesting sweet spot that we actually make more revenue. But you're right.

Starting point is 01:12:16 For a certain type of customer, they're always looking for the best and the newest. Maybe they're trying something. Maybe they just want to get it out the door. So the cost is not a problem for that. Are you seeing opportunities on distilling models for specific use cases? I could imagine like an image or video generation model that's just good at really, good at logo animations or text or just product photography or just beverages and then that being just cheaper to inference is that a crazy idea is there something there no i don't think so

Starting point is 01:12:51 i wouldn't say it's cheaper to inference but it's maybe better to inference so for image models fine tuning is actually a really really big use case not enough people pay attention to it because i don't think it works very well for lLMs but for image model for the past year um we've done like really good work on fine-tuning research and you know you can basically fine-tune on a product and you now can generate better images of that product it's actually a really big use case for us and same same thing is going to happen for video we are just getting open source video models that are fine-tunable so a lot of companies are working on post-training strategies to create different camera angles different styles you know different angles of a certain

Starting point is 01:13:38 product or a person. So I expect a lot of developments on the video fine-tuning side going forward as well. What are you seeing out of China? What are the best image video audio models coming out of China on the open source side? Video hasn't really had a deep seek moment, have they? I wouldn't say so. The best open source model is video model is Chinese right now. It's It's coming out of Alibaba. It just came out a couple weeks ago, and people started using it right away. I wouldn't call it the deep seek moment. I don't think the deep seek moment for the whole industry hasn't happened yet.

Starting point is 01:14:20 You know, we haven't really hit that infection point that video generation or image generation is mainstream. It's hidden inside products. If you go to Canva, Adobe, all these products, it's still not the main feature. It's like an additional thing. We still have some time to hit fully mainstream. But yeah, we have great models coming out of China. And we have great. I mean, this is the classic story of enterprise software.

Starting point is 01:14:46 Like there are open source databases and there are still companies that build amazing businesses on top of them providing enterprise tooling and support and infrastructure and all the different pieces to actually make a product useful instead of saying, okay, yeah, let's go provision some servers to do this ourselves. Fascinating. George, do you have another question right now? Not for now. I'm just blown away. You guys are cooking. Yeah, I do want to talk about hybrid deals or hybrid models. Somebody had me demo an AI image generator that I had to take a picture of me and turn me into a professional

Starting point is 01:15:26 bodybuilder. It was the most remarkable thing because typically when you go to chat GPT and have that do that, it kind of gets the face a little bit wrong, but very clearly, and I could tell this from the grain pattern, what it had done is it had cut out my face and then only operated on the body. And so the face was a pixel-to-pixel perfect representation. And for a certain thing, oh, you just want to change the logo on the shirt. You don't want to change anything else about the shirt. It seemed like a good value. Now, I was being gaslit by the founder who's like, no, we're not doing that. It's all in one network. And I was like, I don't care. I just want

Starting point is 01:15:59 good images. It's cool. But where do you see the different, like, value-added like maybe less sexy, less pure end-to-end AI, but value creative opportunities in image and video generation. I could imagine like a multi-layer diffusion model that has a specific layer just to add text on top of images. So you're not trying to confuse those. I don't know if that's actually how these models work, but what do you see as valuable in terms of like merging multiple models to create a better end product like the way, you know, O3 Pro has a web browser, a Python shell, and then also the ability to search the web and pull stuff together and reason. Yeah, I mean, one of the reasons why, you know, our business has higher margins than

Starting point is 01:16:50 some LM inference providers is because of this fragmentation of different kinds of models, different kinds of use cases. People are trying to chain these models together and create workflows. Both image and video models, they haven't really generalized yet. So you can't write a long prompt and expect, you know, the image and video to edit itself. It's still a lot of model chaining and workflow generation. So like the use case, you just said, like putting your face on something else, it's like chaining couple models.

Starting point is 01:17:25 And we have a lot of that behavior on the platform. platform, the models are getting bigger and better. So some of that is actually happening, you know, by the model itself, but still unlike the LAMS where it's like a single prompt and you expect it to, you know, write a book, but also generate code and like generalizes very well. It doesn't, it doesn't happen for image and video yet. Yeah, I can imagine that there's tons of interesting enterprise like features and harnesses on top of the models that will be extremely value creative. So seems like you're in a good business, but everyone already knows that from the revenue in the fundraising. So congrats on all the progress, Jordy. And we'll have you back on

Starting point is 01:18:06 again soon. We'd love to have you back. This is fantastic. Thank you. Thank you so much. We'll talk to you soon. Bye. Bye. Let me tell you about Julius, the AI data analyst that works for you. Connect your data, ask questions in plain English and get insights in seconds. No coding required. Sorry, Tyler. You're out of a job. I'm going to be using Julius. Try Julius for free. They're loved by over 2 million users and trusted by individuals at Princeton. Can you connect Google?

Starting point is 01:18:33 Your Google has a account for Julius now. Run some numbers there. Love that. Love that. Anyway, we have our next guest in the Restream waiting room. He's here now in the TBPN Ultradome. Welcome to the stream.

Starting point is 01:18:44 How are you doing? I am doing well, Jody, and Joan. Thank you so much for having me here. Thanks, be joining. Would you mind kicking us off with an introduction on yourself, your company, and any news you got for us?

Starting point is 01:18:55 My name is Siddish. I'm the CEO of Tiny Fish. First of all, I'm very happy to be here. First time, I got to know you about Soham Parik. By the way, that was a great get. That was a great get. What a wild day on the internet. And how fast it's all gone, too, though.

Starting point is 01:19:10 I mean, it's all gone. Yeah, yeah. I mean, people were, we never got the full post, Mortimer. We'll need to check in, but he said he was going exclusive. There's somebody named Sohan Parik, exact same spelling that's been appearing on AI research paper. Really?

Starting point is 01:19:24 people are trying to figure out is it the same guy or just that's all that too yeah yeah i think dbp and you should have an investigative arm's yeah i actually did talk to someone that was thinking about hiring him after the fact and it seemed like it was not uh not enough of a red flag and they said they were going to give it a shot and hope that he thought he was going exclusive yeah yeah yeah yeah and so and so as far as i know he is still exclusive but i haven't done any research recently anyway guys thank you so much tell me about the company Well, you both have built something in the last 10 months. Entrepreneurs, investors, we appreciate it.

Starting point is 01:19:59 Thank you. So Tiny Fish, we just announced our 47 million funding series there. I was not ready for that. I was not ready for that. Absolutely. I needed a big number warning. Absolutely huge. Congratulations.

Starting point is 01:20:14 47 million is like a seed round, right? Mango seed. It's a seed round for tiny fish these days. Tiny fish. But congratulations. I'm sure you can do a lot with it. So what are you going to do with it? Look, I think we are going to invent a category,

Starting point is 01:20:31 build a category that makes sense, and build a great company. That's basically, it's prior to this, you know, I was at Thought Spot and Nutanics. We have done some large enterprise companies. Co-founders, they all came from meta and companies like large. We want to build a large company doing one thing, which is to make web browsing like humans too, but a superhuman scale for solving enterprise.

Starting point is 01:20:53 price problems. We don't want to be a consumer company. I know you both have built companies. There are a lot of AI companies doing things in consumer space, browser agents and all of that. We want to do a massive scale of web browsing and turn the internet into a structured database for enterprise customers to analyze and act on. Do you want to sell this to other software companies that are going to piece it together with other APIs to create? maybe even more enterprise SaaS? Like how deep do we see yourself in the stack? Look, I think nowadays there is no difference between enterprise business and developers

Starting point is 01:21:32 slash builders because every enterprise product in the AI world starts as a builder product, somebody trying it out. We 100% want to be the best way anyone to connect code to internet. Because look, these models can solve math problems at international math Olympics. But when it comes to browsing, it's a mess. Because browsing is so complex that our brains make it look easy. Like, think about going to a movie. The seed that you pick is a function of complex reasoning.

Starting point is 01:22:00 If I'm going by myself, I can sit in front and read the movie. But if I'm far away, with my family, I want to make the right place, right fishing, contiguous seats. These decisions we make without even thinking, not to mention the complexity of the website itself, how the pictures are popping, how there's like a pop up here. These things need to be solved really well. we do that. So enterprise customers who want to browse 60% of all time of knowledge work in enterprises on browsing. And we think we can automate that through what we are calling

Starting point is 01:22:30 enterprise web agents. So we heard reports that some of the big labs were building RL environments with verified rewards, basically cloning DoorDash, creating clones of Amazon.com so that they could train an agent on the full Amazon.com web app and then an agent would be able to check out for you. Are you doing something similar? What does data collection look like? What does training look like? What does differentiation look like in the world where these agents might need to be RLed on a specific website to really get good results? This is why I love talking to you guys. You know, you geeks ask the right question to geeks. There are two models when it comes to these. One is synthetic websites like web arenas and others have built this.

Starting point is 01:23:19 The other is paying money to say, let us go learn DoorDash workflows. Both are good, but both have downsides because both really create significant challenges with respect to scale when they come out of that environment. What we are doing is something very doing. We have a proprietary architecture that we have built that freezes and takes a snapshot of a website

Starting point is 01:23:41 in a way that exhaust feeds ourselves in a very scalable way. So yes, it is synthetic data that we are generating, but it is out of actual web. And more importantly, most of our use cases, we launched our company with the use case with Google Hotel as a customer. DoorDash is a customer. Great, great.

Starting point is 01:23:59 I try to give this advice to early stage founders. If you're gonna get a customer early, just get Google. Just start with a Mag 7. Why not, right? They built this AI technology. I mean, it all started with all you need is attention, right? So these customers are giving us access. There's a customer who has 22 million web skews in the product.

Starting point is 01:24:23 There is another customer, the 40,000 sub-shops as part of them, class pass, we announced them, right? So these sort of things, while we are solving for them, is giving us a lot of data, and that exhaust is mined by our products for annotation and creating labeling that makes out of. The second thing I will tell you, though, models are good at a lot of things, but they usually perform really well when the goal is straight, and the reinforcement can we built on something where the context doesn't change. Web is exactly the opposite. Everything is context that is constantly changing.

Starting point is 01:24:55 The goals are changing, the websites are changing, and the context is changing. So what we have done is we use reinforced learning and models for understanding and like sort of see what the heck the we are trying to do here. Then we separate that and execute that code in CPU at massive scale. And then we use Alpha Evorv a version of that

Starting point is 01:25:14 to make the code better. So separating exploration and execution, It's another fundamental thing that we've invented that is going to make this browser agents, you know, perplexity, comet and operator and others. That is like forcing and feeding us, but this is where the execution framework. So that's an infrastructure problem.

Starting point is 01:25:32 Think about the amount of browsers we have to spin up, the fingerprinting, the anti-bot, all of that infrastructure need to be solved. Interesting. How do you think the competitive landscape will evolve, Amazon's launching a bunch of stuff, I'm sure all the clouds have something that looks like a browser agent on the shelf somewhere,

Starting point is 01:25:56 but we've seen, you know, Silicon Valley has, you know, probably hundreds of stories about companies that have built things that have been competitive with the big hyperscalers and been wildly successful. But what's your specific plan? You know, there is a quote that often attributed to chesty puller, a marine, that We are surrounded from the north, southeast, and I better watch out. This is one of those states where it is so amazing because there are three groups of companies that we will be competing with from a tech space.

Starting point is 01:26:30 I mean, obviously there is share shifting of dollars. One are the browser agents who are doing one thing. Like Jodi goes on vacation, 20 minutes, he'll book a hotel for you. We want to sell to Expedia and not to Jodi because Expedia now want to simulate 100,000 Jody transaction from 50 states or 50 countries. how do we do that? So browser agents to a certain extent will be trying to expand to that space. I think we want to compete. The other is the infrastructure. So the browser base and others who have been building things, we want to build something enterprise grade with the surveillance, you know,

Starting point is 01:27:01 the governance, the control. So that's the second. Third is going to be another interesting area where the code gen and the developers who build us, who just want to connect their code to internet so it can do amazing things. There again, there are parallel. You guys, interviewed Parag. I do think that we will compete with them some level. Not because today we compete, but all of these will converge because there will be a few massive companies built

Starting point is 01:27:27 on how browser access, how internet can be turned into a structured database. So exciting time. We've raised enough only because we want to make sure that we build it in a way that is where we can control our destiny. I have a lot of respect for all of these companies. But to me, you know, if you're not surrounded by competitors,

Starting point is 01:27:46 you're not in the right place. I love it. Yep, you're not going after a big prize. Well, congratulations. Fantastic answer. Great to meet you. Good luck out there. Have a good rest of your day.

Starting point is 01:27:54 We'll talk to you soon. I hope so. This was such a short conversation. I enjoyed. I'll keep watching. Thank you so much. We'll talk to you soon. Bye.

Starting point is 01:28:01 Let me tell you about Adio. Customer Relationship Magic. Adio is the AI native CRM that builds and grows your company to the next level. We have our next guest already in the Restream waiting room. We will bring her in now. How are you? Welcome.

Starting point is 01:28:18 Hi. Nice to be here. Great to meet you, Julie. What's happening? Great to be here. Would you mind kicking us off with a little bit of an introduction on yourself, your company, and maybe some of your background as well? Sure.

Starting point is 01:28:29 So I am one of the founders of Sundial. We are trying to build the cursor for data analysis. So we're trying to automate a lot of what data scientists will do so that we can help companies make better decisions with data. We work with great companies like Open AI, character captions. Before that, I led design and research for the Facebook product. I grew up at Betta. Back then, it was called Facebook. Could you explain for the audience what Facebook is? They've been living under a data center? No, I'm kidding. Sorry. So, you know, if you guys become

Starting point is 01:29:05 friends and your relationship gets to a certain level and you want to let the world know, it can be broadcast it online. Amazing. Well, I think it feels like the absolute perfect background to build sundial because when I think people think about optimizing digital products and making decisions with massive amounts of data, people think meta and they think Facebook, right? I mean, you say that because you probably know more than most people, but I do think what makes meta so good is that it was so freaking operationally rigorous. It was so good at actually capturing and modeling what made it a great business and being like, you know, just so on top

Starting point is 01:29:50 of every little thing so that we could optimize, iterate, experiment test, and eventually, you know, get to that scale. And did you guys, I imagine, had to rely on a bunch of internal tooling that you built in order to do that that was proprietary? Or what did that look like? Yeah, everything was just homegrown because, like, actually the whole concept, I would say that meta probably introduced this idea of growth. I mean, now everybody got growth teams, but back then, that was like a new thing. And it was only created, you know, with people like

Starting point is 01:30:19 Tramath and Alex Schultz and Naomi, because Facebook was growing like crazy and then one day growth kind of stalled. And, you know, every, I think that happens to every successful company, right? In the beginning, you're like, we're great. Our intuition is on. We're solid. Like, everything hits. And then one day it stops hitting. And then everyone's like, oh, my God, what happened? And there's a lot of questions. You know, board members are calling. And then it becomes like, well, we have to figure it out.

Starting point is 01:30:47 And the only way you didn't do that is with good observability. Yeah, can you take us through like a concrete example of like one of the, like a case study of like design at meta and and how like some of the decision making link to some of the data analysis you did? Like do you have anything that you can share? I know it's been a while, but some of the stuff's probably private, but some of it you can probably share. Yeah, I'm trying to figure out, what's an example I can pull out? Well, I will say that like a lot of the process. So I think we kind of segment things into two worlds, right? The first is like, look, in order to build something new, you do need that spark of inspiration.

Starting point is 01:31:23 And it usually comes from intuition. Like you need to kind of have like a vision. And so often that would be like the spark of the idea. But then as soon as you realize that, you have like a hypothesis, you know, like I think what people want is, you know, better ways, like if we give people more custom ways of sharing on Facebook, for example, they will share more. That's an example of like a particular hypothesis that somebody would have. And usually that comes with like an idea. You're like, if I build, you know, a really awesome text editor, or I give them a way to record

Starting point is 01:31:54 video or, you know, I make it super easy to like pull in a quote, right? Then people will go and share more. But the thing that you then need to do is to figure out, well, how quickly can you test whether that hypothesis is true. Like what's the kind of smallest thing that you can build that gives you either more or less assurance that this thing is the thing to bet on? And so we would try and figure out what's like the smallest framing of that experiment.

Starting point is 01:32:21 And then if it seems like, you know, okay, it's inclusive or we actually think it might be promising, then you just double down, right? Then you like add more, you know, you keep building. And I think that that's been like, you know, This is like a super early example, but I think like a hackathon project, like video was like a hackathon project that somebody did. And then very early on, like video came out after the hackathon. And it's like just very quickly you can see what will, you know, like that people are actually using.

Starting point is 01:32:52 In fact, maybe a better example that I'm thinking about it is actually feed. So feed is one of those very early examples where people hated it. So news feed came out. Before that, the way that people went to profiles is like, you know, I would go to your profile, John. I'd go to your profile Jordy. I'd see if anything changed. But there was no system that automatically told me if you updated something. And so we launched feed.

Starting point is 01:33:16 This was like back in 2006. And there were like huge protests. In fact, like a million people within a week joined this Facebook group called I FN hate Facebook News Feed. Because people thought it was like it was creepy. It was like, you know, there's too much surveillance. But the reason, I think Mark and the team, like we kept on it, is the fact that, like, through the numbers, like, through the data, you could see that people are spending a lot of time on News Feed. And, in fact, the reason they knew to join this group, I effing hate News Feed is because of News Feed. Like, it was, like, you know, so it just was, like, very obvious to us that this was working despite what people are saying about it.

Starting point is 01:33:54 Yeah. Can you talk about preference falsification more broadly? Was that, like, a hard one lesson that carried through? it feels like META has really, like, absorbed that lesson and it continues to inform the company culture. Have you carried that idea of preference falsification forward into your career? How do you think about that disconnect between what people say and then what they actually do? I think it just, like, you have to gather the data.

Starting point is 01:34:23 You just have to look at, you know, like, you can say, okay, look, this is what I see. I see, like, data, their data is that people tell us they don't. like it or they tell us they're feeling one way or another, right? So I think about qualitative feedback as data, customer surveys or data. Like anything is data, but also behavior. Like, what do people actually do? What do they click on? Where are they spending their time and attention? And the more we can have all of that in one place, the better, like a better, more realistic and accurate view of reality we have. When should a company sign up for Sundial? because I think there's it's it's almost a meme in Silicon Valley if you if you launch a product early and you're obsessing maybe too much over the data you could you could go end up actually going down the wrong path and there's points in which maybe you disagree with this where the actual just like founders intuition is what what's going to get you to that sort of take off for the product but what's your read I agree with that I do think that it's there's such a thing is like obsessing too early like when you don't have product market

Starting point is 01:35:27 fit, you'll probably have to take bigger swings or probably not in the business of trying to optimize. But I think if you feel like you have product market fit, you're clearly scaling your team. Like you're like, okay, I probably need a growth person. I probably need a data. Like the reason you want to grow through data person is you want to perform more fuel on the fire. Like you want to understand what works and what doesn't. And so what all of these roles are trying to do is start a series of experimentation and just like again get to better, better visibility, right? Better observability for What we all want to do is just build a mental model. Like, this is how the business works.

Starting point is 01:36:01 And if you tweak this, more money goes up. And we tweak this, more users, right? We want to build a very real and influenceable model. And that is what, like, all of that work of trying to build and do analysis is there to help us do. Did you overlap with Laura Danna at Meta? Can you tell me a little bit about her? Yeah. She was in the Wall Street Journal earlier this week.

Starting point is 01:36:24 what's made her, you know, what's the secret to her impact? So Laura Dotta joined as a design lead, and I think she took over a messenger, so Facebook Messenger, and I think the team was pretty small then, maybe about eight designers, and she helped scale that up to like 200 designers, and eventually she actually become the product group lead. So the product group lead is kind of like the GM role. And in fact, there's not that many examples of design leader. who become GMs, you know, like engineers

Starting point is 01:36:56 to become GMs. I think Adam Osseri, head of Instagram, is one. I think Laudana is probably the other that I can recall. So she ended up actually leading all of Bessinger. I think recently she went to go work on AI. And I just saw the news that she is joining as Figma's new chief design officer, which is fantastic news. I absolutely adore Laura Donna.

Starting point is 01:37:16 I think she is fabulous. Yeah, we'll have to get her on the show. That would be fun to dig into. Anyway, Jordy, anything else? I have a bunch more questions, but I don't think we have time. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for helping on. And yeah, congrats on all the progress so far.

Starting point is 01:37:31 This is fantastic. We'll talk to you soon. All right. Talk to you guys soon. Bye. Bye. Cheers. Gabe in the chat says, whoa, she has a headset on.

Starting point is 01:37:38 How can I long this company? I love it. That's great. Let me tell you about Numeral HQ, sales tax on autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. You can get started for free. Benchmark Series A. Let's go.

Starting point is 01:37:53 Um, our next guest is in the re-stream waiting room. We will bring them into the PBP and Ultra Dome. Jacob, Jacob, welcome to the show. Finally. Finally. He's been waiting for this moment. It took us very long. Pretty good.

Starting point is 01:38:09 How are you guys? We're doing great. Give us the breakdown. What did you launch today? Co. Three applications are live. Boom. Hit it.

Starting point is 01:38:19 What's up. The best part here is the video. I see if you guys. have watched it, but it's, I think, the best gundo hype video. Wait, can we pull it up? That's a tall order. Can we pull it up? Yeah, production team. Ben, can you pull up the

Starting point is 01:38:33 latest discopulous Ventures post? Maybe we can put it in the chat. Can you send it to them? I'm trying to find it right now. Throw it in the chat. We will pull this up. We might need to watch this after you hop off, but give us the update

Starting point is 01:38:49 on the previous cohorts. Who's in those? What companies are you in? What's the general thesis? What like what's the why now for this particular organization? Break me. Yeah. Yeah. So cohort one was in Brainmaker and Valor at the time. Yeah. They were sharing it. They were both pre-seat stage. I think it was still very much like, is this going to work or just not going to work? I think now we're at the point we're like, okay, something's working here really well. And I think the big kind of thesis and point here is like we want to be like that entry point to what's going on in El Segundo. Yep.

Starting point is 01:39:22 The culture is very attractive to mostly young people want to build companies that really do matter a lot for the country. It's kind of been pushed away from other ecosystems that don't really care about that. And then too practically, like, if you want to build a hardware or aerospace defense, you should be in El Sigando. SpaceX started down the street for where I'm based and the best talent, the supply chain, the whole supply chain, and a lot of the customers are in the El Sondo area. So it's like if you want to build an El Sondo, if you're building an aerospace defense and hardware and want to be part of the ecosystem, we want to be that way to do that. Companies-wise. Augusta said earlier Rockefeller built El Cigando.

Starting point is 01:39:56 I never knew that. What's the lore there? The oil company. Yeah. It's Chevron. There is a massive oil and gas extraction oil refinery there when you're in El Cigando you see it. The whole town was built out to service.

Starting point is 01:40:09 Yeah, yeah. I mean, you can tell the story. I'll give the rundown. It means the second Chevron refinery in the state of California. So that's the reason why. So it's very cool. We got the video if you guys want it.

Starting point is 01:40:24 Yeah, let's play the video. Let's play it. We're going to switch over to the video. This is the fall cohort applications are live now. Yeah, hit the soundboard. Why not just add an extra layer on top? Are we going to get taken down for this? Is this an open source song, hopefully?

Starting point is 01:40:41 We'll see. This is good. It is necessary. Fire me up. that every young being in the united states it's a lot of backs that are adults just by their shoulders just by their shoulders that's a cool presentation

Starting point is 01:41:07 let's go holy base good sound editing there's isaiah there's augustus we got cameos on cameos wrong and to keep an character free in a battle with a with a with a yes we're definitely getting demonetized thank you for demonetizing us it was worth it it was worth it It was worth it. Take me through the economics. So how much money do you raise for each cohort? How much money are you putting in?

Starting point is 01:41:55 What's the deal structure? Like, how does, what do the companies actually get out of going through the cohort? Yeah, yeah. So I guess just top big picture, fund one, end up being right around the $9 million mark. We're basically doing five cohorts out of this. So three next year, one end of year in October. For the basic kind of structure, each cohort, we do 10 to 12 founders. So in a $100K check per company, it's sizable.

Starting point is 01:42:23 Around 1.2 mil for cohort, and then that'll go across the rest. A little bit for follow on for kind of pro rata. But yeah, so the kind of standard deal cohort itself is like, main thing again, you want to be an else again, a weird way to do that. You have all the big name people, everybody knows. Like, we can give you access to them just like that. I think that's very valuable early on to kind of become like, I guess, a consensus bet in a way. just to have those behind you

Starting point is 01:42:45 is very helpful and then we have a demo day we bring out like 120 I think we had 120 partners last time from top firms like just like that access to all of them so that's kind of the breakdown

Starting point is 01:42:54 we have a house it's very fun we have a chef gym everything you need to build an amazing card deck are you officially taking over from Augustus's job as also going to a tour guide

Starting point is 01:43:04 because every single there was like a solid six month period where every single VC and founder would hit up Augustus and be like okay time for the tour let me go around.

Starting point is 01:43:14 He doesn't have time for it. I don't think he has time for it anymore. He's on the road a lot. Yeah. Yeah, it's funny. Yeah, I'm getting, I have too many texts from BC saying, hey, I want to see else come me around. So I think I've taken it.

Starting point is 01:43:25 I think it's more of a pretty job for me than him. But one actually cool, cool. Here's the wire details and then I'll take you on the tour. Exactly. Exactly. But also on that point, we had the most recent bonfire, which couple of you guys were at last week, last Friday. Oh, Tyler.

Starting point is 01:43:40 Because it's like, okay, you're taking this over. And we had like, I think close to 200 people come out, which is pretty awesome, which is like, I think a record, hopefully for one of the bonfires. Wow, a venture capital firm absorbing an iconic networking series. We've ever seen this before? It's interesting. I'll be like completely honest when I saw DeSipolis launch.

Starting point is 01:44:02 I wasn't, like, I've backed a bunch of, you know, I backed Rainmaker, I back Shinkay, a bunch of the Gundow companies, but it didn't immediately click for me. but hearing you talk about it it's just like and obviously we're super close with with gary and the whole yc team and they've backed a bunch of hard tech companies and so my immediate thought was like do we need something like this do we need a new institution and hearing you talk about it and seeing you know the progress from the port coast so far it just makes a ton of sense to have like an institution in elizigundo because we can't just rely on the city to give tour guides to people I mean, a couple of years ago, I went and did the tour of El Segundo.

Starting point is 01:44:43 You created a couple. You helped facilitate the mean. There were a bunch of folks that were highlighting it. And the energy was very similar to, like, you know, Mountain View in 2009 or 2012, in my opinion. Like, it had that, like, University Ave feel. Like, it's sort of, it's just boring enough. Like, you're in L.A., but it's not, like, this hot town that you're going to. get distracted by like it's really just like a lot of cool companies building and then you walk across

Starting point is 01:45:15 the street there's another founder they have some tool like it actually makes sense to have people sharing stuff and moving stuff around yeah it's a very very cool community makes a ton of sense well congratulations on the launch of the new uh application window uh i haven't run this by john but hopefully he agrees we'll sponsor the next bonfire let's do it count us in let's get wait don't come to the purple orchard as well afterwards that's the purple orchard is a lot of fun It's a good spot. Awesome. They do the dragon bowls there that you drink out of.

Starting point is 01:45:43 Dragon bowls? They light them on fire. They light them on fire, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyway, well, congrats, Jacob. Thanks so much for hopping on. We will talk to you soon. Have a great rest of your day.

Starting point is 01:45:53 Awesome. Thank you guys. In the meantime, let me tell you about linear. Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products. Meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects, and product roadmaps. Cursor, remote, runway, perplexity, retool, mercury. We have another three hours of content to go through.

Starting point is 01:46:15 I like this post from Growing Daniel. The opposite of FOMO is when you skip an event and then everyone who went says it sucked. Vindication of missing out. And Tyler Cowan says, Vomo. I think Vomo is a good one. It's simply the best. It is the best.

Starting point is 01:46:32 It simply is the best. It is the best. I'm trying to think of the last time I had Vomo. I don't want to put anyone in blast. but I have certainly said no to things. Well, let's keep going through the timeline. John, can you text Gabe? Yes.

Starting point is 01:46:46 And see if he is still coming on. He confirmed one. We moved him up 10 minutes. We might need to do some timeline. I'm happy to hang out. Yeah, we can hang out. So Sophie NetCap Girl says is showing a post saying there must be some mistake. I thought I'd be working on digital super intelligence.

Starting point is 01:47:05 and it is an angry a man in a military uniform saying build the goon bot. And so there's a lot of that going on right now. Luke Lashir has another post in response to the UK independent space agency is entirely scrapped to cut costs. And we have Matthew McConaughey here saying

Starting point is 01:47:31 we used to look up at the sky and wonder at our place in the stars. Now we look down and worry about our place in the dirt. KPMG wrote a 100-page prompt to build a gentic tax bot. It produces advice in a single day instead of two weeks without job losses. And ex-Nihilio says 100-page prompt is crazy. You ever ripped 100-page prompt, John? I've gotten close.

Starting point is 01:47:59 I've used a lot of those repurpose prompts that people have online. Oh, this is the super prompt. Never got in the habit of, like, daily driving one of those. Dworkesh Patel had a good prompt in Gemini that would take a transcript and clean it up. And it gave a really, like, the hundred pages was really like a hundred pages of examples. Basically, like, here's what a messy transcript looks like out of a, out of just like a transcription service where the speakers aren't labeled and there aren't necessarily paragraph breaks. you give it a ton of extra you give it a ton of extra context but a ton of extra examples and then that makes it perform a lot better because it knows it understands the job yeah but yeah 100 page

Starting point is 01:48:43 prompt is pretty wild so kafka esquire says just one more model bro just one more funding round bro please and this post from walter bloomberg esteemed journalist where did this come from this so this was from some interview okay and and to be clear yeah take a out of context, the headline was opening ICO, Sam Alton concedes, GPD-5 was a misfire bets on GPC6, and this has been going pretty viral. People are poking a little fun. I think in some ways, you know, the Death Star kind of set them up for this. Doublebird capital says just one more trillion, bro, honestly, I swear. I mean, my take on this is that like the numbered releases should just go.

Starting point is 01:49:27 When Facebook introduced the feed, they stop. saying we're changing things it's a good take because when you say it's a good takes yeah when you say when you see when you tell everyone we're changing everything people are like I don't like change but if instead you just say like yeah like every day Facebook gets a slightly different update and the algorithm slightly different and then some days people are like ah the alga is not really for me right now and then they complain enough and then you get the feedback and then they tweak and they make it better and better and better like I feel

Starting point is 01:49:55 like we should just be in the era of gptt is what powers chat.com And it's constantly getting better. And stop focusing on the size of the pre-training bubble. Stop focusing on the parameters if you're a consumer. Stop focusing on the numbers. Start focusing on your sleep number, your sleep score. Go to 8Sleep.com. Exceptional sleep, without exception.

Starting point is 01:50:18 Fall asleep faster, sleep deeper, wake up energized. You can discover Pod5 at 8Sleep.com. And I believe we have our next guest, Gabe, from Mischiff. How you doing, Gabe? There he is. Welcome to the stream. You are live at the TBPN Ultradome. What's new with you?

Starting point is 01:50:36 How you do it? I think everyone knows you. Maybe just launch into the announcement this week about the private military corporation that you're starting. Oh, you saw the Twitter. I didn't think anybody looked at that. Oh, everyone saw that. Yeah, yeah. Sure, sure.

Starting point is 01:50:54 What do we do this week? Well, we launched an agency called Applied Mischief. Yep. The agency, honestly, like to rewind, where does that even come from? And a lot of people don't actually understand this about mischief because probably what you see is like videos of people wearing boots or like press headlines or whatever. But the way we're actually organized is we are essentially a holding company

Starting point is 01:51:20 of different creative enterprises based on categories. So there's like a handbag division, there's a footwear division, there's a fine art division there are other divisions i can't really talk about yet but with like more bigger permanent structures um well you talked about a division you can't talk about so i hit the oh nice nice um so we we've been operating like that for for a second now and to make that efficient there's been an internal back office that's like normal right like finance legal manufacturing customer support but also like design and marketing and that's a group that not only does design but also applies that sort of like mischief magic like viral juice or whatever yeah so the

Starting point is 01:52:07 thinking here was we might as well open up that to external clients it can become a profit center which is great but the other part is like maybe it can make our world a little bit bigger too because we're hungry for more formats we've made so much stuff over the last like six years what have we not touched yet and like maybe we won't get sued this time around like maybe there's just stuff that we can do that's like cool we can uh well it's it's there what what seems obviously exciting to me is partnering with with global companies i mean sure i'm sure you'll partner with startups and and scale ups and things like that but what what gets exciting at a certain point has to be scale there's so much hey instead of selling like a thousand of this thing can we figure out

Starting point is 01:52:52 It's like when Spike Jones does an Apple ad, it's like, that's just not, there's just special, there's something special about that, about just like giving it. It's almost like patronage in some ways, it's marketing, but it's just like, it's still art and it's cool and it's like unbridled. No, totally, totally, right? Like the way that we look at these is like, it's not a service that we're providing necessarily. Like, there are brands and entities in culture that we perceive as cultural material.

Starting point is 01:53:18 The same way artists looks at their material is like paint or sculpture. or marble or whatever. Like for us, Coca-Cola is material. Give us that. And we'll make something new with it instead of fabricating a marketing story to sell more units

Starting point is 01:53:34 that people sit through now anyways, right? The opportunity is like, there's just so much cultural material being left on the table to make new things with. So talk to me about inbound versus outbound. I feel like in that vein of like there's cultural material.

Starting point is 01:53:49 If you come up with just like, I have a great idea. it would only work for this particular brand because the nature of the idea is tied deeply to the lore of that brand they're never going to think about this

Starting point is 01:54:01 but I need to I can, the only value I could get out of this is selling it to them are you going outbound and pitching big companies and saying I have the idea for you or is it more like

Starting point is 01:54:13 there is an actual process where you can sit down and do ideas. I'm going outbound right now. This is a message for Gabe Newell from Valve we want to design your submarine. Yeah, so let's go.

Starting point is 01:54:25 I love that. That would be an amazing project. That's the outbound. That's what I want to do. Or extraterrestrial space research organizations. We want to design a bit that you're putting into space. I love it. We were, look, we were fast companies number one design in the world in 2023.

Starting point is 01:54:42 People don't think about that because they think about viral. But if you actually get like what we do, it is unparalleled. So let us let's like put some stuff. We got a space. base play for you with a company that we're very close with. I don't say anymore. Okay. Yeah, well, we'll talk after the stream. I have a bunch of, I have a bunch of questions.

Starting point is 01:55:01 One, quickly on the business model of the new agency, is there a world where you would, you know, the standard agency model will be like, hey, let's do this project and we'll charge you like a million bucks or a couple million bucks. But there's some scenarios where you could actually, I imagine if it was a one-off more like drop style, you could take a percentage of the sales even is that something you would ever explore to get to

Starting point is 01:55:25 really bet on yourselves and say like hey we think we could sell like a 10 million dollars of this and we'll only price based on on success is that is that something you would consider doing it's totally on the table and it's it's not that's not even uncommon from like the collaboration route like some of the collaborations that we've done in the past have been that kind of model where it's like you make a bunch of product together we both invest on our own ends and then you split the cut afterwards. I think what's more interesting, though, is because of mischief's position as, like, this artistic entity, like, in a way, like, we have a personality, we have an audience. And so we're actually, like, building a pipeline of joint ventures. Yeah. That's what I was,

Starting point is 01:56:08 yeah, that's what I was getting at. Yeah. It's not even about 10,000 units. We're talking about millions of units. Yeah, over forever, basically. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, like, I want, I want the, I want a mischief theme line of kids toys right like i would happily buy those i would buy a bunch of those right and so that's like if you partner with the right company that should be in the the you know my personal lifetime value would be in the hundreds of dollars and i would even pay a premium yeah because i know it's you guys behind it yeah um another question i have uh you know i've i've leveraged the the drops kind of model to do marketing i was inspired uh by you guys uh uh to do marketing for my last company party round. And something that I've noticed recently, a lot of companies in tech

Starting point is 01:56:54 say they want to do drops. And it's because they're inspired by mischief. And they just see like, drops get attention. I want attention. One drop, please, sir. One drop please. One drop please. The usual, sir. Signing up. No, but the thing I usually push back on and the thing I'm curious to get your opinion on is like, I think when companies think they want to do drops, what they really want to do is true advertising and they don't even know the difference and so like where where's that line for you and how often are you know would you talk to a company and it's like what you really want is to do advertising just like a consistent message delivered via every channel forever might be the right thing not even forever or like for a few months or a quarter yeah i would i would take it even further

Starting point is 01:57:37 and it's it's like that is the final goal which is like get a message out into the people get them talking whatever but like the focus on the drop is is misplaced drop is just a delivery mechanism for something new what these guys are actually looking for like what they actually want at the end of the day is how do you break through the noise and right now you can either just make more content which honestly the ROI I think is going down on that there's too much content and not enough demand sorry that's just how it is but the opportunity is you can can make new things that fit within your brand parameters, that use your brand as cultural material,

Starting point is 01:58:20 that are actually interesting, that are tactile, that have a story to them. And if they happen to be ephemeral, then it's a drop. But don't get hung up on the drop. Just make something interesting. Are our ideas valuable? And if you had to, you know, what kind of think about like a,

Starting point is 01:58:41 making something new, how much is it the idea versus the execution in your view because I feel like I can do you hire idea guys and then like operational excellent people and they're like a dividing yeah and and and to me i i i will sit down with companies that we're friends with and will generate like 20 ideas it ends up being super frustrating because you're like we're getting you this like incredible idea it doesn't even cost a lot to do and if you do it right like it could be like a million dollars of like you know brand value, however you want to measure that. But it feels like you can give people these things that in your hands, they might be million dollar ideas, but poorly executed.

Starting point is 01:59:24 They're a negative value. Totally. I think it's like squeezing a balloon on two ends. Like there's the conceptual power and then there's the execution. There are things where like the concept is really high and the execution doesn't have to be crazy. You don't need a huge budget. It's just a good idea and it's going to work. What you typically see a lot of brands do is they're afraid of good ideas because good ideas have not been done by definition. So they lean more on the execution and you see like large budgets and like huge bloated teams and production. So it's sort of like now if you can dial in both, that's the match. But that's really hard to do because more money, more risk, you want to, it's you just, you don't, you want to de-risk on the concept side.

Starting point is 02:00:10 John, to your question, I don't have your idea of people. Everyone here is an idea person. We did, I'll give you an example. A couple of years ago, we made handbags, right? They're very expensive. The smaller they get, the more expensive they become. So we made a microscopic handbag that sold an auction for $63,000 dollars at Paris Fashion Week at Borelles, whatever, coronation of Louis Vuitton.

Starting point is 02:00:32 That idea came from a summer intern. Anyone here can have an idea, right? The lawyer, our general counsel joins brainstorms, our ops lead, points brainstorms. being creative doesn't mean you have good ideas being creative just means you're human you have insights and you have reactions to things that are going around you that's it and then also like being creative means you're not afraid to like look stupid and i think that's like a big defining trade here because anybody can look stupid here including myself what uh have you ever seen highly complex ideas work well as marketing advertising stunts

Starting point is 02:01:13 This is something that we end up talking with. I think David Ogilvy said, like, simple ideas or powerful ideas. That's certainly something I've seen in mischief's work throughout your entire career. But is there some sort of contrarian or nuance to that concept? I think there could be. The line that we use here is a good idea should slap in one sentence and then slap even harder in three. And that just means there are layers, right? Like you appreciate it for the headline.

Starting point is 02:01:42 but if you like really dig into it, you're like, wait up, is this thing making fun of me? And do I still like it? And am I going to buy it? And if I buy it, am I a chump or am I a patron of the arts, right? It's like the layers are good. The ambiguity is good. But at the end of the day, like, from a marketing perspective, just being practical right now, like people's attention spans are so low.

Starting point is 02:02:08 And honestly, like, people are just, we're all like very distracted. So you don't have a lot of window to like nail it. So you do got to have that one lighter like pretty dialed in. How how dialed in is your crystal ball when it comes to releasing new things on the internet? Like do you have a, do you feel like you usually have like a pretty accurate sense of how much attention something will get? Do you get surprised? Or do you still get surprised often? Totally still get surprised.

Starting point is 02:02:39 Like you always get surprised. I think it's easy for us to fall in a comfort zone where we're like, oh yeah, like this will work because what that ends up doing is you start coming up with ideas based on a framework of what has worked. We actually put in a lot of effort to come up with formats and mechanisms that don't really fit into our existing framework

Starting point is 02:03:02 that we're like, oh, I don't know if this is going to work and is this offensive? I don't know. Are people going to buy slices of this? giant foam baby that we're cutting up in Brooklyn? I don't know. They did. But no, you know, like. Is there a project that you think is like criminally underrated? People are obviously familiar with the boots. They're familiar with the, uh, the, the, the shoes and the footwear stuff and some of the other projects. But what, what's your, what's your example of a project? You're like,

Starting point is 02:03:32 ah, that's still like one of my favorites. Good question. And the reason it didn't really get seen as much as because, to be honest, we were a little bit scared. Okay. And so, you know, buried it in an art show that we did. But are you guys familiar with the paradox of the ship of Theseus? Yes, but explain it for the listener. Totally. So it's like, it's this old paradox where I imagine you have this like large wooden ship.

Starting point is 02:03:58 And every day over seven years, you're coming up with a new piece of wood, identical to a piece of wood on the ship and you are swapping it out. The question is, after seven years, is it the same ship or is it a different ship? we found that a very interesting question and so we decided to apply that in our own way to a sink located in the American wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art as one does how do as one does yeah we we found the sink we did recon we not me I'm not it wasn't me personally with somebody here names but we found you know we we tracked down the serial numbers the parts ordered exact like replica we ordered the exact same parts built it here tied off the

Starting point is 02:04:50 dimensions of the bathroom here so that we could practice swapping things out and then over many months we would walk into the met and do a quick swap and leave and then the next day do it again and do it again bolt by bolt screw by screw just an art enthusiast I just I just like art Now, I go to the bathroom. What did you get a big piece through? Isn't there like one piece that's big? That, so that we decided to leave. Okay.

Starting point is 02:05:18 That we did not swap out, although we had a plan. We fabricated a wheelchair that could have hit it in the seat. I'm telling you, we got a little bit, we were honestly scared. You got a little carried away. We still did it. We got everything else. And so, yeah, they have our sink and we have their, sink and ours is now part of like our art gallery so that's amazing although although i believe

Starting point is 02:05:46 they figured it out and they've replaced it because as soon as we announced the art show even though the sink was sort of like hidden in all the other pieces people definitely found out and there was a line in the met for that bathroom they should have they should have section it off turn it into an installation that's if any of your if any of your viewers are on the board of the Met, the coolest thing you could do right now is acquire that sync from us and put it back. Let's make it happen. Let's make it happen, Army. How many millions of dollars do you think you've left on the table by not doing crypto projects? The painful question. Is it like, it has to be like a hundred million?

Starting point is 02:06:34 Yeah, probably. Honestly, probably, probably. And is there, is there, is there, is there, is there, I'm sure at some point there will actually be a way to do this. There has to be something that makes sense. We did something back in the day with Party Round where we did, it was called Helpful VCs, where we made Cryptopunks for every VC, and then we put them on a website, and we said, you have four hours to retweet these,

Starting point is 02:06:59 otherwise we're going to auction them off. And it was for, like, charity, right? We weren't, like, trying to make money. And that was, like, one of the ways that we broke through. and like shortly after I think there might be something to do with crypto in like stable coins where there's not as much gambling involved

Starting point is 02:07:14 but there might be something with crypto I don't know yeah yeah you have to remove you have to make it not like a speculation you know because as soon as you leave the like the people who get the joke are and then the people who don't get the joke show up and then they're losing their life savings that doesn't feel good

Starting point is 02:07:30 whereas whereas like if somebody you know is bidding on that handbag like they probably know what they're doing, they understand that it's not going, and they understand that. Look, I think that crypto route for us is, we've often plotted our own death. And I think there's like a chaotic evil way to go out where you just pull that rug. Yeah. I shouldn't even say it because now everybody's going to know. Well, I think switching gears to another topic that I'm sure you guys, So, one, I don't think AI is going to take your guys' jobs anytime soon, despite it being able to maybe piece together, you know, random ideas.

Starting point is 02:08:13 It's so much about taste and things like that. But how excited are you to leverage that technology for some of these various plays? Honestly, TBD. And I think it's, I do, I will say, like, unlike. the whole like crypto craziness of the last couple years. We didn't get into that because we didn't feel like it was here to stay yet. That's like the truth. Like when you see the herd run so fast, it usually means they're running towards the end of a cliff. There's a little bit of a similar sentiment right now. That said, it is rooted in something real. But we're not in a rush to like

Starting point is 02:08:58 use it necessarily, right? If it's going to be here forever, we've got time. Like, mischief doesn't win as a first mover. If you look at all of our work, it was never about being the first to react to something or the first to, like, make use of a format. So we'll see. We just have to see. How do you think about, are there any projects, like time is an interesting variable that you can play with, right?

Starting point is 02:09:22 Like part of the thing with the sync stunt that you guys did is just the narrative and the story of like, you guys were conducting this in secret for a long time. time. It was like a very, and that's part of what makes it so entertaining is kind of like the lore of what went into it. But have you thought about even longer term plays, like things that you could do over a decade or 50 years, that in hindsight would just be absolutely hilarious and but, but again, take this sort of incredible planning. Yeah, yeah. Honestly, we are at that stage of just like our lives and as a company now to be thinking like that, right? right because like if you think about it we were in yeah if you if if you if you

Starting point is 02:10:08 you know I know you guys have have a few investors have you told your investors first thing we're working on is a 50 year stunt and you're there you're like all right buddy like why don't you put some points on the board first yeah yeah but you guys I feel like I've earned it now like I you know something like a decade no yeah because like we've we spent basically like we've only been around for the pandemic and post-panth, like a little bit post-pandemic, right? And all of that was just like, you don't know what's coming, like live day by day, like just survive, like banks are shutting down. Okay, get through to total tomorrow, right?

Starting point is 02:10:44 Now we've been around for a second. We're more well-known. We have our existing infrastructure. And now we really are asking the questions of like, okay, what does that legacy look like in 10 years? Or should we disappear for 20 years and then come back? That would actually be the coolest thing we could do is go dark for two decades and then come back. It's worked for other, it's work for other artists.

Starting point is 02:11:11 Could you do something? So we both loved Nathan Fielder's latest sort of like aviation stunt television show. I've heard a lot about it. I haven't watched it. I mean, you should. It's one of the few people in the world that I think is executing on your guys's level in the sense of. he's next level yeah like one sentence

Starting point is 02:11:34 you know pitch that's hilarious but then the more you get into it like the funnier it is but could you do something like that for like the cost of housing like sort of a decade long stunt like mischief like mischief figures out a way to like

Starting point is 02:11:49 reduce you know cut the cost of housing in the United States I mean that was the crazy like we um if there are any like pricey neighborhoods that would love to commission us as an artist to install a sculpture we have a really good uh trailer park trailer that we would love to erect in a public square that will drive i can just see like the like the right

Starting point is 02:12:15 RV like there's this RV outside of our gym yeah yeah yeah yeah yellow from the sun like some windows are open the aluminum on the outside yeah winnebago it can be a stunt for winnebago How do you feel about the state of social media, like broadly? It feels like we've gotten to a point where, in many ways, the platforms look so similar, but they also have their own characters. Some of them are becoming Lindy, even thinking about how durable, like, Twitter and acts have been despite all this change. But what's your, and do you even, do you feel like you need to use social media?

Starting point is 02:12:57 or are you better off not using it and then just releasing, you know, stuff on the platforms? Yeah, yeah. It's definitely a love-hate relationship with the, with the platforms, right? Because like platforms, if you really think about it, they started as a way to share things that you found were interesting. And now they are mostly ways to share photos and videos of you talking about things that you find interesting. It's kind of become like less novelty-based and more vanity-based, just fine. That's like a fundamental human instinct, so I get it. I would continue to love to find a way to not use the platforms to disseminate information. And that's kind of how we started.

Starting point is 02:13:45 Our first audience portal was Venmo. We had a huge audience on Venmo, and we like had this huge phone bank, like a Chinese phone click farm. every time we had a new project we would Venmo our audience a penny and they would get that notification because that's the most powerful notification layer in your phones the cha-ching the cha-ching I am now banned from Venmo for life well PayPal if you're listening let me know PayPal we'll have the CEO of PayPal on it I think the last company that came on works with Venmo, we'll, we'll work on it.

Starting point is 02:14:26 We should get this reverse. This is, this is important. We were, we were reading an article in the New Yorker yesterday about this concept of IRL brain rot. The, the examples were the viral. Labuboos. Dubai chocolate. The, the viral Italian sandwich. We saw a few of these. Joe Wisenthal at Bloomberg was also writing about these kind of like viral as being something that you stamp on your product as a product feature almost and I was wondering if if you're worried about the the spillover from internet slop culture into the real world just kind of how you're tussling with this idea of brain rot coming into the real world I don't even

Starting point is 02:15:10 know if you read the article or you have thoughts there but I think I saw it on Instagram yeah yeah of course yeah yeah you probably did a front facing video talking about it or you saw something we do a front-facing video talking about it. That's like a reaction video. Yeah. I mean, look, it would, I don't know if it's a good thing or a bad thing, but like, what mischief has put out historically is kind of in that brain rot category. Yeah, I mean, the boots, the boots, right?

Starting point is 02:15:41 It's like absurd, absurd aesthetic. And maybe, maybe even I could be so conceited as to say we were part of creating that the meta. No, you guys definitely that, that it was an era of minimalism and it was like the Everlane era. Quite lucky. The boots are like it, you know, an incredible reaction to that of being like. Absurd, absurd aesthetic, just like popping imagery off of your screen. But then the challenge with this trend, right, is if you go back to minimalism, it's, it actually becomes, I mean, maybe as like for me, right, I'm, I, I, I, I, I became.

Starting point is 02:16:19 became part of the mischief audience and mischief customer in my early 20s. I'm in my late 20s now. Eventually, maybe I'd want some ultra-minimalist mischief item for my home. But at the same time, once you get on the maximalist track, you're kind of on this maximalism treadmill, where you just got to keep going crazier and crazier.

Starting point is 02:16:43 And maybe in the internet era, there's no turning back. It's totally possible, right? Like, we might have built a machine so effective that it's now our master. And, like, how do you break free from that, right? But I'm not too worried. Like, we actually don't think so hard about it. We just kind of make the things that we like. And then if it ever stops working, then figure it.

Starting point is 02:17:09 Yeah, figure it out. Well, I have an idea to put out in the ether. I think next time an A-list celebrity is going through a massive comms crisis, PR crisis or a scandal, they should hire you guys to create something more viral than the scandal. They just need to do another crisis to compete with that. All they got to do is go to Twitter and be like, send a Bitcoin to this address and I'll send you to Bitcoin. And then they actually do it. They actually do it.

Starting point is 02:17:37 That's genius. Yeah, that is a one-time get-out-jail-free card. You heard it here first. Just payoffs. If you, yeah, if you're a celebrity and you're in trouble, you're caught at a cold play. concert that's the only way you can reverse the tide you'll be good yeah yeah awesome this is great yeah thank you it's really great great to get the update and uh just hear you so much clarity on on all these different areas that we talk about all the time yeah we can talk for hours yeah we'd love to

Starting point is 02:18:06 have you back uh whenever whenever it makes sense yeah we gave gave and i kicked around an idea that we won't share now we'll leverage that for your next appearance i can't i can't i Can't wait for it. One hundred percent. Let's do it. Awesome. Great to catch up. We'll see you.

Starting point is 02:18:24 Cheers. Bye. Absolute legend. One of the best to ever do it. What if we found out that Dubai chocolate was a mischief stunt? It's possible. It's possible.

Starting point is 02:18:37 Anything's possible. Well, if you want to do a stunt, you want to promote a stunt, you want to have some fun with billboards, head over at adquick.com, out of home advertising, made easy and measurable. say goodbye to the headaches of out-of-home advertising only ad quick combines technology out-of-home

Starting point is 02:18:51 expertise and data to enable efficient seamless ad buying across the globe you should also get a hitter go over to bezel getbezzle.com shop over 26,000 luxury watches fully authenticated in-house by bezel's team of experts what you got for me on the timeline jordie hayes uh wow our timelines and turmoil are you seeing this francois chalet well i was saying our next uh our next has a 133 ETA coming into the studio. David Senrae. He says a fire broke out on my route to the studio. Oh no, we'll have to read more posts. Now he said little do they know nothing, nothing will stop extreme podcasting. Let's go. We'll see you in a little bit, David. Yeah, let's dive into this post. You want to read through it. Yes, so there is a debate. Francois Cholet and someone named

Starting point is 02:19:42 Oyvind on the timeline. So there's this debate around How will AI impact worker productivity? It's very clear that when you use AI, it feels like you're getting a speed up. When you use a coding agent, it feels like you're getting a speed up. Meter did a study and found that maybe some AI tools are making you less performant. So there's this debate. And for a long time, there was this idea that AI will supercharge workers and labor and anyone who's using AI will be more productive than someone who's not.

Starting point is 02:20:22 And the advice that was given by pretty much everyone in the industry was like, you need to learn how to use AI effectively, because if you don't, you'll be left behind. And so Oiven shares that LLM adoption rose to 45.9% among U.S. workers 18 plus as of June, July 2025, according to a Stanford World Bank survey, inference demand will continue to surge, not just as more and more user, more usage per user, but as newer, more advanced gen AI models require far more compute. And so, obviously, no one was using LLMs just a few years ago. Now, almost half of the American workforce over age 18 are using AI tools in their daily work.

Starting point is 02:21:09 Francois Chalet, of course, is asking the question about when is this going to show up in the economic statistics? He says, LLM adoption among U.S. workers is closing it on 50%. Meanwhile, labor productivity growth is lower than in 2020. Many counterarguments can be made here, like they don't know yet how to be productive with it. They've only been using it for one to two years. 50% is still too low to see impact. Models next year will be unbelievably better, et cetera. But I think we now have enough evidence to say that the 2023 talking point that LLMs will make

Starting point is 02:21:45 workers 10 times more productive. Some folks even quoted 100x is probably not accurate. And so he gets a little bit of a turmoil here, a little dust up with Gnome Brown, polynomial over at OpenAI. Francois continues and explains a little bit more of his reasoning here. He says, by the way, I don't know if people realize this, but the 2020 work from home switch coincided with a major productivity boom and the late 2021 and 2022 back to office reversal coincided with a noticeable productivity drop. It's right there in the statistics, narrative violation. Productivity growth is now back to pre-2020 levels. So for a lot of jobs in the American economy, working from home was actually a benefit. I'm not a huge fan. I felt like maybe I was more

Starting point is 02:22:32 productive, but I certainly didn't enjoy it. And so we've been having a good time building in person. It's interesting. You'd have to dive in. Okay. Depends on the type of work. Well, yeah, and you can also be more productive but on the wrong strategy like I found it working from home during that era and having a remote team I found it very difficult to like change strategy yeah quickly even on small things easy to lock in but not you you were hard to zoom out I felt less yeah adaptable right you'd sometimes waste three weeks working on something where maybe if you're in the same room you would have like not made a different decision yeah so so known brown over open A.I says, I don't, yeah, get the gunshots ready. I don't recall a lot of people in

Starting point is 02:23:18 23 saying that within a few years, worker productivity would 10x do to LLMs. I do recall a lot of people in 2023 saying LLMs can't reason, though. Shots fired on the timeline. That is a fantastic Brancash says back in 2023, AGI was one to two years away in the form of GPT5, no less. Productivity was about to increase 10 to 100x, and developers were about to go extinct. People who questioned the narrative were a tiny minority. We were proven right. He was the John Brown standing up. I believe that AI will not 10x productivity. Tyler, do you have any takes on this? Uh, yeah. Will AI be able to get Tyler a shirt? An AI agent might, but he might be able to do it faster himself. Who knows? Still unclear on that.

Starting point is 02:24:04 But I think, um, the idea that people don't know, like, aren't using them efficiently yet, make sense, right? Because, so if you look at it, so if you look at it, at that meter study, it was about how, like, open source developers are actually slower when they use AI tools. But, like, if you actually read it, it was open source developers who it was their first time ever using AI tools. Oh, interesting. So, like, obviously, like, there's like, you know, some learning curve to using, like, cloud code or whatever. Like, you're not going to instantly become way better. Yep. So I think it's, it's kind of a similar thing there. Yeah. I mean, we heard that there's, yeah, there's an interesting phenomenon where some companies

Starting point is 02:24:40 are getting more value out of having designers go from zero X engineers to one X engineers, and they're not seeing as much of like the 10x engineer becomes 100x engineer, because the problems are still like intractable in some ways. Noam Brown says, I was on the AI job market in 2023. I spoke with a lot of researchers, a lot of frontier labs. Some thought scaling pre-training was sufficient. Some thought additional paradigms were needed. But regardless, almost none of them thought AGI was one to two years away.

Starting point is 02:25:10 Yeah, that was something that was maybe more parroted in the podcast circuit and from those who were raising the mega rounds who needed to kind of justify underwriting AGI at, you know, 1,000 X revenue multiple. It's interesting. I don't know. It is interesting to look at the economic statistics to keep going back to what's happening in the labor market, what's happening with unemployment. like, it would be weird to have an unemployment tick up without productivity tick up because that would just mean lower GDP, and that seems like an impossible scenario. I'm somewhat receptive to the idea that maybe AI is substituted for a different type of work and maybe it's not driving major productivity booms just yet,

Starting point is 02:25:59 but I have trouble believing both narratives that AI is driving mass. massive unemployment, and also it's not driving increased productivity, because companies would just be doing less than, and we're seeing earnings growth, we're seeing growth in the economy, we're seeing high GDP growth. So one of those has to be right. They can't both be. Well, breaking news, President Trump was on Newsmax, not our internal software that we used to create the show, but the TV show.

Starting point is 02:26:33 So President Trump tells Todd Stearns, he's going out on patrol tonight with D.C. law enforcement in the military. They're really taking D.C. seriously, aren't they? Yeah. Yeah. If you're in D.C. have a keep an eye out. Nate Eliasson says, going to have to block Elon Musk soon for all the AI goon spam feels like I can't open X in public. I think a lot of people are feeling that way.

Starting point is 02:27:00 Skill issue. I've still fine-tuned my algorithm. so much towards tech and AI content that I don't see any of the Elon. You don't? I don't see it. I get it because people that I follow replied at him and tell him the stop. Oh, okay, okay. Yeah, I follow Elon, but I still don't see it.

Starting point is 02:27:15 I see high yield Harry saying Tom Brady was so ready back in the day to be a finance bro, and they share Thomas E. Brady Jr.'s resume. He was at University of Michigan. Then he went to Merrill Lynch, the University of Michigan Golf Force. Summer intern. Polo Fields Golf and Country Club. He was a sales rep. High Yildare says this guy could have had a successful career

Starting point is 02:27:40 working at Merrill Lynch instead of pursuing football. Now no one on Wall Street will remember his name. Andrew Reed. Joanne had said, what the heck is a Series K? That was Databricks. During databrics. Andrew Reed says, I know quite a few people in SF with a Series K problem.

Starting point is 02:27:59 Yes. Stay away from the Series K. the series C, the caffeine, the Yerba Mata, the next time you have an urge to do hard drugs. Why not dry a fridge cigarette? Rune says the demand for anti-AI takes is enormous and we'll take anything and run with it. Meta-consolidating and doubling down on MSL

Starting point is 02:28:21 is being misrepresented as bearish on AI, for example. To keep in mind. Yeah, they conducted a re-org because they added a bunch of people to the team and had a few weeks together and kind of updated certainly and it got positioned as like layoffs almost kind of what I was reading into yeah it was very odd for obvious reasons it's not that popular when we're like this technology will bring about a turning of the age and reshape the thought world of man and even a miraculous year in AI progress can be spun into a disappointment careful observers will note that revenue growth of the consumer AI industry has

Starting point is 02:29:01 outstripped the most bullish expectations. We maxed out the metacalculus predictions, and nobody is mea culping on this. You're not going to get an apology for Maroon. No way. He's absolutely printing in consumer AI adoption. People love it. Anyway, what else is going on? Elon Musk, we were talking about the potential spam. He is unpacking his ideas around the birth rate. saw this as incongruent, how can you possibly be worried about the birth rate when you are creating romantic companions that by definition cannot reproduce with their companions? Elon Musk says. Dea Vaughan was, you know, kind of getting into this with his interview with...

Starting point is 02:29:48 A little bit with Sam, yeah. It was a very funny interaction where he asks, Theo Vaughn asks Sam Altman, what do you think about test tube babies, the idea of having children outside of the womb? That you could visit on the weekend, he specifically. Yes, yes, yes. And so Sam is kind of like that, it sounds maybe like that's futuristic and that might happen and there are some scientific reasons, but it feels unnatural to me. I'm not that into it, says Sam.

Starting point is 02:30:12 And Theo just goes, oh, like, I thought you'd be into that. It's, like, very revealing that Theo clearly sees Sam as like this, like, techno. Dystopian. Yeah, or just like this crazy, crazy tech futurist guy, like from the future. And so they kind of like, they kind of like worked through it on the conversation, but it's a very funny clip because they're both like playing the game of like who are we like what what how do we how do we perceive each other but uh Elon says AI is obviously going gonna one shot the human limbic system that said I predicts counterintuitively that it will increase the birth rate mark my words

Starting point is 02:30:46 also we're going to program it that way but what I find interesting is what Nikita beer says he says grot companions duo lingo for dating so the idea that you could go to a grot companion learn amazing pickup lines like are you a nVIDIA gb 200 because i'm getting hot hanging out next to you and uh and and then take that that pickup line on the road and meet someone real uh the more interesting thing i think is is if two people are talking to companions and they're a perfect match just introduce themselves introduce them to each other and say hey we are foregoing the the future revenue here and we are introducing you in IRL. But we'll see.

Starting point is 02:31:33 The proof is in the pudding. He's got to put his AI where his mouth is and actually deliver a product that increases the product. Hopefully he doesn't put his AI where his mouth is. Who knows? In a literal sense. Who knows? China is pushing for a total ban

Starting point is 02:31:47 on the use of foreign chips for inference. They're not a fan of Nvidia. Financial time. Some Beijing policy makers are pushing to ban foreign chips altogether for inference, which accounts for most AI to manage. according to a person recently summoned for a meeting with them. That is unlikely to happen soon due to a shortage of domestic chip supplies

Starting point is 02:32:06 which Beijing hopes... Who do you think is going to sort it out? The juggler. The juggler. Jensen, the juggler. He's able to juggle the interests of America, the interests of China, the interests of Taiwan, the interests of NVIDIA. Jensen, the juggler, will get it done.

Starting point is 02:32:22 Hopefully he doesn't drop one. But we will talk to Aaron Ginn if there is a dropping of a juggle ball from Jensen the juggler. Google declares the green versus blue bubbles debate silly and tired. And Signal says precisely what a green bubble would say. I will say my little brother uses an Android. It's gotten quite a lot better to text him. We can now effectively use FaceTime through this weird kind of hangout integration thing. Certainly better. Yeah. But it's definitely still a real thing. You got something, Tyler? Yeah, this is different, though. No, hit me. It is. Out of the White House, executive order they're establishing a national design studio okay so gigab bullish for figma

Starting point is 02:33:04 let's go universal basic fit but yeah like a new a new design language announcing america by design okay national initiative to improve experience for americans like u i ux or yeah a new life into into the into the designs of sites where people interface with their government i'm getting John, the chat is saying you look like Greg from Succession. That's the first time I've ever gotten that. That's weird. Never gotten that before. Anyway, I've never. Moving on. You've never said that. I've gotten that a ton. Of course. I actually lived in the same building as him.

Starting point is 02:33:35 Okay, what if Greg from Succession was a Sigma? That's kind of the question that... Well, the actor who plays Greg from Succession is, in fact, a Sigma, sort of lone wolf. He had his own apartment. Dar says, who has a house like this? this in the bay. I would like to spend some time together, preferably in your house. That is a cool, that is a cool design. Like the soft wood tones, the, the, uh, the, the, uh, the, the, the, the, it feels very comfortable. Conversation. It actually doesn't feel

Starting point is 02:34:06 that comfortable. Like, look at that couch. That couch does not particularly look, like, loungable. Um, I'm much more, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm a fan. My ideal, my ideal living situation is, uh, uh, a modern glass box on the outside, but then log, cabin on the inside. I want like the moose head on the wall of the glass. And then I want overstuffed leather chairs. Brutalist outside. Exactly.

Starting point is 02:34:32 The fortress on the outside. But then super cozy maxing like thick rugs, warm hearths. These are the things that I want inside. I always hate going inside those glass box houses and being like, okay, like everything's uncomfortable. There's so many corners. Look at all these

Starting point is 02:34:48 hard corners. Yeah, I can just bang into everything. Look at this glass point. Yeah, I want like a wooden coffee table that's just so rounded. Like there's just no sharp edges whatsoever. That's my ideal thing. But this is a little minimal. Gabriel says what does he know? He's quoting our post.

Starting point is 02:35:05 We broke the story, really, after Ben Thompson emailed his newsletter, subscribers on Strateree. We broke the news that after 21, any 22 years in Taiwan, I think, where did he say he's moving again? I think he's, oh, I don't know if he's said, but he's been, he spends time in the Midwest. So I think Wisconsin, I think Michigan, that general area. Did you see Dylan Abrucada's reply to our,

Starting point is 02:35:32 to our breaking news that Ben Thompson has officially relocated to the United States, Welcome Home Brother. He did the NBA commissioner, Remus said, time to learn English, buddy. Of course, Ben Thompson does know English. But a lot of people were speculating this is about Taiwan tensions. I don't think it is, and Ben Thompson said that exactly in his email. He said, yes, Taiwan is complicated, but that's not why I'm doing this.

Starting point is 02:35:54 It's that my kids are at an age where we want them to go to school in the United States, and we've been contemplating this for a long time, and we're very happy. He already spends summer in the United States and spends time, so going back and forth. But here, it was not like the last helicopter out of the time. One thing is for sure. If there is ever conflict in Taiwan, Gabe, Gabe will repost his, this. Yes, yes, definitely. victory lap.

Starting point is 02:36:19 Jira tickets just said, my boss just told me, quote, don't make mistakes like I'm a clanker. That's brutal. Yeah. Clanker is still getting more juice. I'm still laughing when I hear it. It is not completely died out.

Starting point is 02:36:35 It's actually gotten better. I think it's gotten better. It's building some lore. I'm having fun with it. Plus, it is turning into a bit of a culture war issue. Mike Solano was talking about this where there were a couple posts that went out that were saying like, you should not use this. It's a slur.

Starting point is 02:36:47 It's bad. add like don't don't reuse the word clanker and I like I like that we're already being language police on it so that that gives a little extra juice like it's it makes it more fun to use yeah anyway um should we go to this post from bone gpT back on the show back on the show thank you for posting our reaction to your post a few days ago bone says apple has no chance of catching up to google with AI features that will become increasingly useful opening i thinks they can do hardware from scratch because they bought Johnny Ive, which is a level of delusion that's hard to describe. Shots fired. Meadows playing catch up desperately distorting the whole market with their hire

Starting point is 02:37:28 so they can ship stepmom. Google one. Shots fired. I don't know. This is what I was kind of getting at earlier. They look really great during the AI wars right now. I think it's like, I think it's like, you know, if this is mobile, if this cloud, like yeah, AWS is the first mover in Cloud, Azure, GCP, these are great businesses. Did Apple kind of win mobile and get the vast majority of device revenues? Yes, was it still extremely valuable for Google to develop Android?

Starting point is 02:37:58 Did every company eventually need to have a mobile strategy and a mobile app and a mobile design? Like yes. And so it's a little dramatized, but that's why we love your posts. Bone, keep things spicy on the timeline. Keep us hitting that soundboard. Anyway, timeline and turmoil, again, Malo Bergon from the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, Miri, is getting in a fight with Roon on the timeline.

Starting point is 02:38:29 Rune says, Miri is an incredible name, maybe the best in AI. It's a shame they don't research machine intelligence, and Malo fires back. Open AI is a pretty good name. It's a shame they don't, dot, dot, dot. He said, yes, I know they published a couple open models recently, and he has to kind of walk get back because he got hit with a community note but I think Rune also got hit with community note

Starting point is 02:38:52 maybe Miri does research machine intelligence. Oh, I think Rune is getting community now. Yeah, because I think machine intelligence research research institute does in fact research machine intelligence. Maybe just maybe they just don't ship models or products, maybe they ship other types of research.

Starting point is 02:39:08 Anyway. Anyways, opening eyes CFO, Sarah Fryer, who we've had on the show. Yes. Absolute dog. One of the best to ever do it. She's on Bloomberg TV doing an interview. She's a real CFO's CFO, if I could say it to myself. Yeah, totally. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:39:23 Totally. Anyway. If you know, you know. Yes. But she was asked about selling infraservices in the future. She said, I do think about it as a business. This is why Ben Thompson moved back to America. He's like, I got to end this right now.

Starting point is 02:39:37 Ben Thompson famously does not like the fact that Open AI has an API. He thinks that they should focus entirely, at least for now, on, on saving every GPU cycle for the consumer product that is absolutely on fire, they should embrace being the accidental consumer company and they should go as deep as possible. Where do they have an incredible edge? Yes. It's a consumer.

Starting point is 02:39:59 Yes. Where do they not have an incredible edge in the just vending intelligence? I mean, they're doing great and it is a good business. And so from a CFO's perspective and from Sam Altman's perspective, it certainly makes sense. Like, yeah, like why not also be in that game? It is value creative. It is profit generating. And yet Ben Thompson thinks now is the time to focus, focus, focus, focus.

Starting point is 02:40:22 At the same time, I kind of take the other side of this a little bit and say, Open AI is in a fortunate situation. They have a lot of data, a ton of customers. They're going to have a very great consumer business that will probably throw off a ton of cash, especially once they start monetizing more heavily. And what that means is they might be the next Google in the best sense. possible in this, and what I mean by that is that they might be able to go and do 20% projects.

Starting point is 02:40:52 They might be able to go spend a couple billion dollars trying to build a new device. And maybe it doesn't work. But when you add up all the Google 20% time projects and Google side projects, it's easy to laugh at all the things that they've shut down, like 10 different chat bots. Yeah, there are businesses that have a hundred million of revenue. Yeah, they launched a wave and they've launched Google Glass and they've missed on so many things. But when they hit, it's great. You know, they hit on Gmail, they hit on docs, they hit on cloud, they hit on Waymo.

Starting point is 02:41:20 And so I love that you get sort of this like humanity or America gets like somewhat of a subsidized R&D org at Google. And it all pencils out and it all makes sense. And so maybe the Infrastructure Services group is not that at Open AI, but I'm excited for these other, these other like less focused efforts from Open AI. think we'll see some cool stuff. This is a good post from Steaver, if we can pull it up. Read it out. You're finally awake. That fall looked real bad.

Starting point is 02:41:54 Sween, LLMs, B2B SaaS, what are you talking about? You're an electrical engineer. Let's go build some chips. I love it. So good. This post really going to be relatable for a lot of you. Yes. Nine figure hell is real.

Starting point is 02:42:10 Sure, you don't have to work and have some assets, but you can't really. afford a decent yacht, let alone a private army or nuclear submarine. It's real. It's real. Get back in the wage cage. Yeah, get back in the cage, buddy. Get ready to send some emails, buddy. The captain Nemo. Oh, they're doing an open AI movie.

Starting point is 02:42:28 And they're basing it on a book. I think there might be two competing scripts, but they are finalizing the cast. I believe Andrew Garfield, who is also in the social network. It will be playing Sam. But Will Brown, friend of the show, has a recast. He has, can you name these actors?

Starting point is 02:42:49 Jason Statham. Okay, you got Jason Statham and who will he be playing? He'll be panx, too? The joke here is that he's playing both Greg and Ilya. When I saw Jason Statham as Ilya, I was laughing out loud. And then the guy on the left, he was in a bunch of stuff. What stuff? What have you seen?

Starting point is 02:43:12 even know his name. I've seen him a bunch, though, seen him around. Yeah, yeah. He's a night crawler. Night crawl. Wait. Actually. Whoa. Whoa. It's a Toby McGuire? I don't know. I'm all over the place. Tyler, who's the actor? Oh, yeah. Honore day Armis. Yeah, Nadey Armis. But who's the guy in the top left? Jake Gyllenhaal. Jake Gillenhall. Jake Gillenhall. That's right. That's a famous guy. Everybody knows that guy. I got so tied up. Anyway, so the real cast of the movie Artificial is going to be Andrew Garfield, Monica Barbaro, and then a guy named Ike Baranholtz is rumored to be Elon. Yeah, who's playing Dylan Patel?

Starting point is 02:43:55 Yeah, who's playing Roon? Who's playing Roon? Roon is the real question. Yeah, Roon is the real question. Who should play Roon? Who should play Roon? Wait, so I wonder if Mark Zuckerberg's going to make an appearance in the film and they're going to have to cast him again?

Starting point is 02:44:07 Should they have the guy who played him in the session of that were who prized the role? No, but he, like, hates suck now. Wait, who? Jesse Eisenberg. Jesse Eisenberg doesn't like... He has beef with, like, back and Jenner. Why? I don't know.

Starting point is 02:44:18 Oh, weird. Okay. Yeah. Why? Very odd. Anyway, it should be fun. Hopefully we can get a cameo. We can sneak in.

Starting point is 02:44:25 If you know someone, introduce us. Chat, chat, thank you for helping us out there. Yeah, Jongch Jelly Hill from Gold Rock. Jake, thanks guys. It's good. Kylie says, I can't believe this is real. I can't. I can't believe this is real.

Starting point is 02:44:40 I saw this. I was like, this is not real. President Trump dialed into Fox and Friends on Tuesday morning. We're a couple days late and revealed his newest and truest motivation for brokering an end to the war in Ukraine. He's worried he might not get into heaven after he dies. I want to try and get to heaven, if possible. He explained, I'm here and I'm not doing well.

Starting point is 02:44:58 I'm really at the bottom of the totem pole. But if I can get to heaven, this will be one of the reasons. I like this. Whatever your motivation is for peace, do it. It is solid. Uh, so there was a debate break now. Yes, break this debate down. Craig Weiss says having kids before 30 is how you stay generationally poor.

Starting point is 02:45:19 A real, real, uh, real, uh, real take Smith's take there. Yeah, so surely, not going to have any controversy, put the timeline in turmoil. The dude Richie, the rich highlighted, uh, Warren Buffett, uh, net worth 154 billion. He had a kid at 22, child at 22, Michael Dell, 23. Let's go. Bernard Arnault, 26. Some absolute dogs. Jordy Hayes.

Starting point is 02:45:43 George Hayes, also in the club. 26. I just missed it by a year or two. I think Davidson. I will say, I will say, you can come on whenever. Kids are much more. I, when I started making money, I got into cars.

Starting point is 02:45:58 Yep. And when I started having kids, I realized that they are much more quite, you know, I used to think there was kind of a meme growing up. Yeah, they're pretty close to cars in terms of like joy. Well, no. People would say, like, the average American kid by the time they're 18 is like a quarter of a million dollars. Yep. But it feels like, children feel like the carrying cost of like 10 supercars at time.

Starting point is 02:46:23 That's true. Well, we have our first in-person guest of the show. We got David Sen. Finally. The TVPN Ultradome live. See you. How you doing, man? Good to see, man.

Starting point is 02:46:34 Finally in the ultradome. Finally in person. How was the drive? Five times. It's a testament to how much I love you, that you got me out in Malibu. It's an hour and a half. Yeah, it's rough. It's a rough.

Starting point is 02:46:55 It's a lot of speeder and I do it every day. No, but it takes you an hour and a half at like, yeah, but you go at like five in the morning. 30 in the morning. This is a different story. What is this? That's a chat. So if they start saying how handsome you look, you'll see it. People are talking about, yeah, the chat is still talking about this debate over whether

Starting point is 02:47:20 you can become generationally wealthy while having a child before age 30. What do you think? Obviously. Yeah. And they gave Michael Dell Warren Buffett, Steve Jobs. Shout out to Michael Dell. Del Technologies on the. Don't say too much because that'll docks us.

Starting point is 02:47:37 no actually that might be an interesting place to start actually flew to austin i spent five hours with michael dell like two weeks two or three weeks ago yeah what was that like what did you learn from him you know what what surprised you because you've already you've already done a full episode on him you've dug in you probably spent days on his story you know most of the facts it's not only that like i listen to so i highly recommend every entrepreneur listen to his audiobook because he actually narrates it and so i listen to it three can you hear me i listen to it three times I listened to it three times and then read the book and then made the episode. Wow.

Starting point is 02:48:14 There was like halfway through our conversation, I said something like I'm having a hard time reconciling like this paradox in my mind about between like your immense accomplishments and just like how normal you are. And obviously he's a superlative extreme person, but he's unbelievably measured and controlled and kind and generous. It's just like one of my favorite people I've ever met. We've got to get him on the Theo Vaughn podcast and see how he does there. I mean, everyone in tech has been making the rounds. And there's been multiple times when tech people have gone on, Theo, and they've had like kind of awkward starts.

Starting point is 02:48:51 It took a, it took a minute to warm up. There was like the caffeine thing. Oh, you know, I don't. I think this is the mistake that people in tech make and you're seeing it with a bunch of other podcasts. They should definitely come here before anywhere else. This is not a joke. It's like they see a number on a screen.

Starting point is 02:49:05 And they don't think about what that number represents and who that person is. And, like, you can just read some of the comments on some of these, like, mainstream podcasts. It's like, this guy's six years old. He's in his fucking underwear in Missouri. He's got unemployed. Like, he's not the person. You're just optimizing for the number

Starting point is 02:49:19 when you should optimize for the quality of the people in the audience. Yeah, that's for sure. It's insane to me. Well, you know who's optimized for the quality of the audience? Colossus magazine. There's a new profile. I love you printed it out while we wait for the printed edition.

Starting point is 02:49:32 No, I don't know the print edition yet. But you can still go subscribe. Patrick O'Shaughnessy has printed a, a warehouse full this time. Have you had a chance to read through the Joe Lamont profile? Patrick's, you know, obviously like my brother. I talked to him like every day. There's actually an interesting, something we can talk about

Starting point is 02:49:51 that I called him about yesterday. I actually think moving forward, and I told him this yesterday and I told him again today, I was like, if you give me more than a day to read it, especially these long form profiles, I should do it. That is good enough if you read the whole thing. It takes like an hour and a half to listen to.

Starting point is 02:50:07 I was thinking about printing the whole thing and I was like, there's no way I can read this before the show. It's like a hundred pages. I read it and then I threw into 11 reader and I listened to it on the way out. Oh, that's good. And so it's like an hour and a half if you listen at 1X. Okay. But I think that source material is so good. I could definitely do

Starting point is 02:50:23 an episode of Founders and it's like just tell me in advance, give me like two weeks, two, three weeks and then we can drop it the same day that you publish it. But what I call it. One of my favorite little stories from that is how So Joe had sort of a non-traditional, you know, entrance into startups and business. He was a Stanford undergrad.

Starting point is 02:50:46 So, no, more traditional in that sense. But at the time that he was building, what was the software called sales builder or something like that? The initial. Then his name, the names for his. They're so great. Enterprise software. It's like building a microphone. It's called microphone.

Starting point is 02:51:02 And I mean, you look at some of the companies here, like, new, very. GCE, still secure, Ignite, Oria, object store, accept, Prologic, Ravenflow.

Starting point is 02:51:12 It's just like... So there's two things that stood out from the story. One is there wasn't a meme yet of VCs being like, I'm going to back

Starting point is 02:51:19 the Stanford dropout. They wanted to back executives that had experience and crazy access to talent. And there were some early kind of garage success stories.

Starting point is 02:51:31 So he was kind of following that. But the other thing is, bigger companies, Fortune 500 companies, refused to buy from startups. But then it's pricing. Did you see what he did with his price?

Starting point is 02:51:42 Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's 100 grand and they're like, no, we don't buy from startups. They come back, okay, we need it, no one else can do this. It's 300. And it goes from like, now it's a million. Now it's $7.5 million. Now it's $25 million. And everybody kept saying, yes, because you did the best.

Starting point is 02:51:55 But the other thing is the why now for the business. The initial why now and why it worked, not like the business catalyst was that they started sending, this was at a time where they would just send you a letter said you're pre-approved for this credit card. You just have to fill this out. He did credit card roulette. Yeah, yeah, so he would, he signed up, he racked out half,

Starting point is 02:52:13 it racked up half a million dollars of credit card debt and was finally before he got his first customer still, no VC would fund him at all. He finally, like, he was basically like evaluating like bankruptcy. Like he had played it out in his head, like, it's going to be like seven years, it's going to be really annoying, but it doesn't matter if you have, his calculus was like, you know, how much debt you have going into bankrupt. he actually, like, it doesn't, going from 100,000 to 500K, it's not that much worse to go through.

Starting point is 02:52:41 You might as well do it the real way. So he just went full send. Absolutely. And then basically made it all back from like his basically first couple customers. So I, we have a mutual friend that we can't name that has been close and is basically Joe's been like a mentor of his for a long time and actually like a funder of a lot of projects that he does behind the scene. So I've heard a lot about this guy.

Starting point is 02:53:03 Yeah. And what I like about people is just like the people that chart their own path and intentionally go in the opposite direction. So everybody heard Buffett and Munger, and they're like, you should buy phenomenal businesses, even if you have to pay more. And so then everybody in the VMS roll-ups, they're like, I'm going to buy the great businesses. And what he realized, and I heard this story like probably two years ago, it's like, well, okay, so I have a lot more competition for the, everyone wants the great ones. What about these shitty ones over here? And he turned into a math problem. He's like, okay, this is your ARR, this is your rate of attrition.

Starting point is 02:53:35 Like, I know exactly how much I'm going to get out of this in the next six years. They talk about it in the, you know, they use different words that they talk about in the article. And it's like, okay, so I can easily buy this thing for two because I'm going to rip, I'm going to pull out, you know, 15 over the next five years. He just does it over and over again. And then I heard, I don't know if it was in, if they said it, but like, you know, he bought out his shareholders. He went 100% of the company. And what I heard is like, he's been taking billions. Yep.

Starting point is 02:53:58 A year in dividends. His buck and paycheck at the end of the year. is like, how much money did you make the day? I don't know, like $1.5 billion. That's crazy. And no one knew he was. Yeah, he's built a machine. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:54:08 A machine behind the scenes. Yeah, the other thing that's a few of these folks, we've had some of them on the show. Going dark for 25 years and basically until this is, you know, this is like one of my fetishes. This is like these very silent family-owned businesses where they own 100% of them. You'll never hear about them. I've been lucky enough to have dinner with some of these people. And they're just, again.

Starting point is 02:54:28 Yeah, I know. You've talked to people that have written books. about their family business? Yes. And haven't released them. And you're like, please, let me, let me, and they're just like, no. Okay, so I'll just tell the story.

Starting point is 02:54:40 So there's this guy, he's 76 years old, okay? This is like one of my favorite dinners I've ever had. And I do really careful here. So he started working in the family business when he was six, okay? He's the second generation of this family dynasty. They own, the original source of their wealth was one of the largest privately held shipping companies

Starting point is 02:54:59 in the world. When he privately held, Owned by his dad and now owned by him and his brother. Like, it's just like there is no shareholders, no board of directors. It's just a family. I've now become closer to the third generation, and I get insight on how they run their, the family is a business, and the business is a family.

Starting point is 02:55:13 And the way they go about things is just really, really intelligent. And so we have this phenomenal dinner. You look up his reported net worth. And it's like, it's still in the tens of billions, and it's like underreported by a factor like four. Because then he tells you about like, oh, yeah, I put money into this, and I never sold, and it's worth this. There's just crazy stories.

Starting point is 02:55:30 And he's also, like, super charismatic, one of the best rockintours ever, like, been around. And just super, and he's still on it 24-7, like, works all the time. And so there's two things that were funny. This has happened a few times where families will commission real writers, right? They commission an actual biography. And I have a copy of a separate family. It looks like the book, it looks like a book you'd buy in a bookstore.

Starting point is 02:55:55 The only difference is there's no ISBN number on the back. So, like, some of the books I have, no one else in the world has. these books besides like the family and the author and everything. Open AI would give you a lot of money for that. So there's two funny things that he told me. One that they commissioned one for his father

Starting point is 02:56:13 and then one for him. And I was like, dude, give me those books. Like I would do such a good job on them. And without hesitation, he's like, absolutely not. Like that's out of the question. I go, why not? And he said something like, I have no desire to educate my competitors. And just real fast. And then he...

Starting point is 02:56:30 Leave it to me in the will. No, and then all, no, I think, so there's another founder. The next generation. No, but there's another founder who's 78, and I spent four days with her, her, the CEO, and the top 40 executives. They were going through, how do we, they wanted advice on, like, how to transition from a founder-led company. She's one of my favorite founders ever come across in my life, and, like, to the next generation. And so after talking to all the executives, spending time with them, they're like, hey, so what do you think? And after four days, I go, when she's dead, you're fucked.

Starting point is 02:56:58 He's just like, there's not, like, you're not replacing her. She's a singular individual. You should, like, either sell the company or go do something else because, like, there's no transition here. It's like, what do you do when Michael Jordan retires? Like, I don't know. Start rebuilding. But he said something funny because they're obviously in shipping.

Starting point is 02:57:13 They now have real estate and they have finance and everything else. And he's got also one of the biggest boats in the world. And he had mentioned no, but no, he mentioned earlier, though. So early in the conversation, he's like, yeah, when you read a lot of these biographies, he had read all the same biographies I'd read. Daniel Ludwig, Aristotle Nasus, all these like shipping guys, he knew all of them. They would also run their company headquarters

Starting point is 02:57:33 from their private, like, giant boats, right? Giant yachts. And so he had mentioned earlier, he said, yeah, I lived part of the year, I live part of the year on, he said, I thought he said, boat, he said ship. So I was like, yeah, so like when, like, what months are you on?

Starting point is 02:57:48 He's gonna tell this. I go, so what, what, like, when are you gonna go back on your boat? Like how long are you gonna be in your boat for? He goes, what are you talking about? I go, you said like earlier you live on your boat, he goes, I don't have a boat. I'm like, is this some kind of joke? He goes, I have a ship. I go, what's the difference you know, boat and a ship? He goes, you can put a boat on a ship. You can't put a ship

Starting point is 02:58:06 on a boat. So my favorite conversations are these kind of people. And I, like, I'm obsessed with like older entrepreneurs because they're just so much smarter than like a 25 year old fucking startup founders. It's like not even, they're not even, there's like, it might as well be an alien. Yeah, it's just like these people are just, they have so much more experience. They have so much more knowledge. Like, I just can talk to them for hours and hours and Sounds. Have you dug into the Trilogy Software Mafia? Are you familiar with this? No. So this was some secondary research I did. Out of trilogy, this is, of course, the subject of that

Starting point is 02:58:39 Colossus profile on Joe Lamont. In the 90s, Trilogy was on such a tear. They were recruiting out of MIT, Harvard, and a bunch of folks went through Trilogy and then went on to do cool things. Ellie Seidman, the CEO of Tinder, was a trilogy. alum, Cyrus and Nick Gondju, founders of Zoc Doc, Henry Ward, the CEO and founder of Carda. Oh, crazy. John Lilly, former CEO of Mozilla, and now he's an investor at Greylock. And Andy Palmer, the CEO of Tamer, former CEO of Vertica, which was acquired, major angel investor invested in Carter, in part due to his connection.

Starting point is 02:59:18 There are 87 Trilogy Mafia companies now on Crunch Base. So it's just like this very interesting, we've heard that Joe, like, keeps his team very tight, but clearly selects for extremely entrepreneurial people. They don't often get poached to, like, other firms that are doing the same thing. If you leave, you're probably going to share a company. I wouldn't want to make money the way he did, you know, put that aside. Like, what I do admire, like, I'm the most pro-American person. Like, obviously the son of Cuban immigrants, like I grew up, you know, meeting people. Like, literally came to his country, fled communism on a raft.

Starting point is 02:59:54 So I don't like outsourcing anything. I've had tons of people try to advertise on the podcast. I've had this outsource something. I want to find a way to pay people more money, not less. I want to work with the best people in the world, and those people don't work for $8 an hour. But the thing I respect about Joe is he doesn't give a shit what other people think, and he's willing to have his own thinking.

Starting point is 03:00:12 And then even if everybody's going in one direction, I was listening to your mischief on the way over here. He had this great line where he's like, if everybody's running fast at something, they're probably running off a cliff. That's a bar. That's a bar. And so I like that Joe's like, hey, you guys are all doing this.

Starting point is 03:00:25 So that means, by default, there's an opportunity. I called Patrick yesterday. I was like, it's kind of funny. You know, there's not any other people more obsessive podcasts than me, you, Patrick. We talk about this stuff all the time. And I was like, everybody even now is still starting podcasts. And Patrick, you know, he has the highest value investing audience in the world. And what I love about what he's doing is he's like, oh, yeah, you guys are all going to go to the podcast.

Starting point is 03:00:48 I'm going to write, what is that, 15,000 word in-depth profiles, but they're so. So much better. Like the Neil Meadow one. Yep. Who's the paradigm guy? Matt Wong. Matt Wong. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:00:59 This one. Yep. Like they're going to keep doing it. He'll tell you in the group chat like some of the ones they're working on now. They're crushing. I just love this idea. It's a very special product. And I went through when we were doing the show and we didn't have gas or anything and we needed a lot of material.

Starting point is 03:01:12 I went through and looked at old New Yorker deep dives profiles. So good. They're so good. Old Bloomberg and old Forbes pieces. And they're just not doing it at that level anymore. There are some profiles, but the one profile that was written in a prestigious magazine about Zuck is all about, like, did he have the right team in place? Like, it's like a diversity, like referendum on diversity and stuff, like Brotopia type take, which is just not really the story. Like, that's a very minor piece of the Zuck story, in my opinion.

Starting point is 03:01:42 I'm glad you said the New Yorker part because every single time I do a deep research report and every single person I'm working on just to get an overview. And it's always like I want it written like a New Yorker piece. One of my favorite, you got fantastic writers. Jackson Dahl. We read one on Mary Meeker. Yeah, the Mary Meeker. I read that too. Fantastic.

Starting point is 03:01:57 I read that too. So Jackson Dahl, you guys should have him on there. He's doing, because for the record, Jack, we have invited him. He needs to call in today. I don't know what he's doing. Nick, send him an invite. So have him join right now.

Starting point is 03:02:09 The reason, no, no, I don't share it like sharing the mic. Okay. You have to come after I'm done. Send the invitation. Send the invitation for tomorrow. But the reason I say that is because he put me on to one, He's like, hey, you have this thought that I haven't heard anywhere else because something that I've talked about is just like, I actually think like introspection is one of the worst things like an entrepreneur can have. And I say some of the greatest entrepreneurs in history had low to no introspection.

Starting point is 03:02:38 Like Sam Walton didn't wake up every day wondering like what his purpose of life was. Oh, sure, sure. Or even rehashing the past. I wish I did this. Nothing. This is like being a golden retriever. You have to be nighically be going after the tennis ball. Not thinking about the nature.

Starting point is 03:02:50 Never thinking about the last tennis ball. Yeah, always the current tennis ball. Excellent. So Jackson's like, hey, I heard you say that. Have you heard of this guy named Larry Gagosian? I didn't know who that was. And so he sent me this great New Yorker piece. The piece was so good I made an episode on it.

Starting point is 03:03:03 I think it's one of the best episodes I've ever done. It's one of my favorite, like the guy's obviously crazy. Every single person I have profiled and founders is crazy. But it's better than a book. That New Yorker piece was better than if I read 600 pages on Gagosian. But yeah, I think there's like a car. clear, again, we all three talk about, like, what's the white space all the time? It's like what Patrick and his team are doing, it's like there's a clear white space there.

Starting point is 03:03:27 It's crazy, but the profiles suck. There's no craft in them. Yeah, the New Yorker is insane because it's a... And people care about the person writing the profile a lot. Well, did you guys ever cover, you know how Patrick found Jeremy Stern? No. So I think you covered that, I'm pretty sure you read this to me. I love when John Reed thinks to me.

Starting point is 03:03:43 The, this, I think it's the best profile ever written about Palmer Lucky. Oh, sure, sure, sure. I forgot the title. It had like a very... Yeah, I know the one. You know the one I'm talking about. Yeah, like spread. Jeremy wrote that.

Starting point is 03:03:54 Oh, no, that makes sense. Yeah, American Vulcan. Is that it? Make sure it's by Jeremy Stern. Yeah. Okay, so what did Patrick do? Patrick, like, this is great. Come do this for me.

Starting point is 03:04:03 And then he did something, and then Patrick did something smart. Yep. Choked him with gold. Yeah, yeah. He's just like, name your fucking price. So this is really important. No, this is a really important thing. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:04:12 So there's a line I sent to, if you're, for startup founder, or for any founder, trying to recruit people. And there's this thing I found in one of the books on Ogabee, where he was looking up letters that the Medici family would write to the artist that they wanted to sponsor. And there was this one sculptor they wanted to essentially become a patron of and then move to Florence. And he's like, said something like, come to Florence, but the last, the way he ended the letter was one of the most gangster things ever heard. He's like,

Starting point is 03:04:40 come, I will choke you with gold. That's great. Great. Very quiet. That's a bar. But that's exactly what Patrick is. It's just like, name your price. The guy that does my clips. I just like, name your price. I'm not negotiating with you at all. What do you want? Yep. That's the number? Fucking send me an invoice. Pay today on my ramp card. Yep. Always. We were covering a bit on Oracle's latest, latest moves. Cash flow negative. Give us the five-minute founders of, on Larry Ellison. So I'm actually working on a Larry Ellison episodes. I did three episodes on it. It's like 124, 126, and 127, but that was probably like six years ago.

Starting point is 03:05:17 And I reread the billionaire and the mechanic just now. I was like, fuck, I don't think it's good enough to do another episode on. I need, like, a different angle here. So there's a guy in my audience who I knew was like completely obsessed with Larry Ellison, and we've been DMing for years. He had transcripts for every single interview Larry Ellison has ever done. So it's taking me a while, as you can imagine, but that's the source material. Yeah, that's great.

Starting point is 03:05:36 Highly likely it'll be out in three episodes from now. I'm doing Elon right now, which is fucking killing me. That's why I look like shit and I'm very tired. this outline is destroying me. Don't go on X right now, by the way. It's going to make you rethink doing the episode. Why? He's in hot water.

Starting point is 03:05:49 He's pushing AI companions, which people are not a fan of. Oh, is this like the scantily glad companions. Yep. Okay, so here, I'll tell you what I'm doing. And this is why it's really important. Because, you know, people, the very first episode of Founders, September 2016 was Ashley Vance's biography of Elon Musk. It was obviously an Elon fanboy.

Starting point is 03:06:10 I was looking at Tesla's, before they even had the Model S. You know, everybody that's a fan of his, obviously goes through, like, these cycles of, like, you have to ride the fucking Elon Rollerfisher. Well, you can say on the podcast, I made this episode before I went crazy.

Starting point is 03:06:23 No, but, like, the problem is... Yeah. And so, like, there's actually, I think the best biography of Elon written is this book called Lift Off because it's the first six years of SpaceX. Yeah. It's very fascinating.

Starting point is 03:06:36 Those pictures where he's, like, standing in the rubble, right? He's, like, iconic. So what I decided to do is, like, Listen, man, I don't care about politics, cultural or stuff. I don't care about anything. I care about entrepreneurship, taking ideas from great people. Actually building the business.

Starting point is 03:06:48 And just throwing it to the next generation to hopefully help people do that, right? Do that better. So no disrespect to Walter Isaacson. I've read all of his biographies. The Elon biography is written like it's a newspaper. Now, when you take an asset, or you take a liability, you try to flip it into an asset.

Starting point is 03:07:04 So I was like, okay, the problem is, no disrespect. There's no craft here. I like soul, I like craft, because I read for fun. Like, this is what I want to do. This is, like, a news update. But the good news of that is it's in chronological order. So the reason this is killing me is because the reading's been done for like five days. It's just been outline, outline, outline, outline, outline, nonstop.

Starting point is 03:07:24 So what I did is, like, I'm going to rip out every single thing about Elon. I'm not going to talk about his family, his wives, his kids, his politics, culture war. This guy's got brilliant ideas. So this is literally just what are the most enduring principles that Elon used, across three decades and seven different companies. And I really think I'm crafting something that's gonna be really valuable. And I think you're gonna have to be some level

Starting point is 03:07:49 of intelligent to listen to it because I'm gonna jump from idea to idea to idea rapidly. And like you have to put the shit together yourself. And it's just like, hey, this guy's been repeating the same principle for decades. And it worked in Tesla, I worked at SpaceX, it worked in Neurilink. Why is this working?

Starting point is 03:08:04 Might work in your work. You should fucking know this. You should have a tool where you can listen to this, hopefully listen to it today or whenever it's out, and then you listen to it a year ago. two years ago. Okay, I have a take on craft. So anyways, let me finish one thing.

Starting point is 03:08:14 So when you get to the end of this, you're completely back on the Elon train. You're like, this is a singular person. Well, I think to people's credit, people, a lot of the people posting these recent comments are on his team and want, and it's this, I think they're struggling with like wanting him

Starting point is 03:08:33 to focus on what rockets. Rockets and the things that they like. But the rockets in orbit, sir, is like the take. Yeah. He says that himself. in the book. It was really interesting because he was talking about what do I have to do that if I don't do it, it doesn't get done. And he's like, listen, somebody else, electric cars were inevitable. This is a direct quote from the book. I'm paraphrasing. He's like, electric cars were inevitable. They were going to happen with or without me. But the rockets were not. And so therefore, I should focus on that. Yeah. I think people that the people that want to go to Mars are concerned that, you know, what takes down great men, it's, uh, ladies liquor and leverage. Yeah, in this case. liquor, leverage, and GoonBots.

Starting point is 03:09:15 My problem is I would gladly give up the Mars ambitions if we could get a Tesla with a V-12 in it, and I feel like every moment he spends working on rockets is another moment that I don't have a 1,000 horsepower naturally aspirated screaming, straight-piped Tesla. That's my goal. Anyway, on the topic of craft, I was trying to think about, you mentioned Joe Lamont, his business,

Starting point is 03:09:41 has been buying companies that are not generational products, they're not the iPhone, they're not these amazing monuments to craft. They're businesses that deliver a little bit of value for a bunch of customers. And he has figured out a pattern of offshoring some of the software engineering, running the business more efficiently. He is like the private equity buyout. He's not trying to, you know, completely transform and like build a generational product. The product is not a product of craft. Like, he is not a craftsman. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:10:13 And, and then I was trying to think about... I think he's trying to be now the new one. So, so on the flip side, when I was talking to Delian, um, early on Delian Asperov, I founders fund about, uh, like, why, how, how did he underwrite the investment in ramp? He was talking about software is, it can be like art and that, and that the team there has, like, this attention to craft and they see, that's why they hire the IMO gold medalist. It's like, why do you need someone that good?

Starting point is 03:10:41 It's because they see the product as, like, so, so important, even though it's in this highly competitive, like, particular, like, corporate card space. It's something that they take really seriously. And I think that there's this, it's not that there's necessarily one pattern that's correct. It's more of, like, this barbell and you can be on either side, but you need to know what camp you're in. And so when I see Joe Lamont, I see him as software as widgets. He is crafting a machine that produces software and it produces it at the lowest possible cost

Starting point is 03:11:13 and it all kind of looks the same. And then I see on the other side, like Ramp and folks like that who take software development more as art and more as craft. And both can produce outsized returns. Both are big companies. Well, it's also where you apply the craft,

Starting point is 03:11:27 I would say that from my read brings craft to the organization. The organization of Trilogy. He has Trilogy University. Yes. And you can, I think you're going to struggle to build an iconic enduring company if you're not bringing craft somewhere, right? Totally. Ferrari is bringing craft to racing.

Starting point is 03:11:47 You don't necessarily care about certain other elements. They're not bringing craft to the mechanical. Okay. So, and the reliability. You said something like, other end of the spectrum, I think, like, what I'm trying to drive home with founders and where I'm, like, complete. So this is, like, there is no right way. Yes. based on who you are and what you're into.

Starting point is 03:12:06 Yes. So I just came, I just flew from New York, and I spent, I always spent a ton of time with Kareem and Eric, founders of Ramp. And I specifically, this last time, spent two hours with them. And I would like to talk about some of the stuff I've learned because I spent a lot of time with them.

Starting point is 03:12:21 But there's an example of this, is like, this is where people fail, is they're like, this, Steve Jobs did it this way, so I should just copy that. It's like, well, it's inauthentic. Yes, natural. So I was saying for a long time, time, this is Michael Dell again. So I was saying for a long time, you need to build a business.

Starting point is 03:12:36 It's very obvious when you read biographies of people. You have to build a business authentic to you. And then I read Michael Dell's autobiography. And I talked to him about this when I saw him in Austin a few weeks ago. I read Michael Dole's autobiography. And again, the guy wants to, IBM is the largest company in the world. It's the first company to reach a hundred billion dollar market cap. And this guy's like, I'm going to compete with them with $1,000 out of my University of Texas dorm room. It's not an exaggeration. And so he then brings in this older guy. I think his name's, I forgot the name, it's an episode.

Starting point is 03:13:07 But the guy had a couple successful businesses. And he works with Michael, I think, for four years. And when he's 80, he's now looking back. I think he's 25 years older and Michael, something like that. And he's like, listen, he's like four years of this. Like, I lost all my hair, my back hurt, I couldn't sleep. I had like intestinal issues. I had to stop.

Starting point is 03:13:27 And Mike, because like the competition was so intense. and we had no money, we were undercapitalized, and we were just, like, going 24-7. I'm dying, and Michael was full of energy because he's like, he built a business, this is his line, he built a business as was natural to him. So I was telling Michael, when I saw him in Austin, I was just like, nothing we're doing with podcasting is, like, new.

Starting point is 03:13:48 I was like, think about, like, if you ever read Robert Carrow's biographies of LBJ, one of my favorite stories in there is W. Leo Daniels, right? And it's this guy, Texas Hill Country, right? This is like, there's no internet. There's barely any electricity. So this guy has like 90% market share with the wives of farmers in the Texas Hill country, right? And so he has this daily news show, right, that's on for a few hours a day.

Starting point is 03:14:12 We invented that. You're telling me that somebody was doing this before us. Here's the funny part. And don't let me go back to Cream and Erick. Don't let me forget that place. So the crazy thing is so he wants to get like 90% market share in this area, right? So then he's like, okay, well, what should my sponsor be? Well, who's listening?

Starting point is 03:14:29 What are the women in these houses need? And he comes, like, everybody needs baking flour. They all need baking flour. So I'll find the best manufacturer of baking flour, and they'll be my advertiser. He sells a ton of baking flour. And he's like, wait a minute, I can just, like, make my own baking flour. So then he starts manufacturing his own baking flour. He makes, like, $50 million, like the 1940s or something.

Starting point is 03:14:49 And then he goes... The first of... And then he goes, what am I going to do next? Like, what can I do with this? He's like, I'm going to run for governor. And then people are like, this is Trump. before Trump. This is what I'm telling you. There's an element of Trump to this. Trump had vodka. Yeah, but so that everybody tells them, everybody tells them nobody,

Starting point is 03:15:05 you're not a professional politician, you can't possibly win, but then he starts hosting these rallies. Remember in 2015, Trump was doing this. And then like the rallies, they'd be like selling out, it'd be like a monster truck rally. It'd be like 50,000 people there. Of course that's going to translate from votes. So he wins the governorship of Texas. And he moves his radio show into the Texas governor's mansion. And so he's still bright. And so he's still broadcasting that. Then he, the reason he's in LBJ's biography, never stopped broadcasting. It's because he runs, and then he's like, what are you going to be next?

Starting point is 03:15:33 I'm going to run for Senate. He winds of stealing the election from LBJ, legitimately stole the election. But I was telling Michael about this, and, you know, in Texas, they teach Texas history before they teach American history. If you go to any used bookstore in Texas, my favorite thing do, there's huge sections on, like,

Starting point is 03:15:49 you have American history? It's like, Texas history. And Michael texts me back, the funny saying, he goes, oh, I must admit, I missed this part of Texas history. I was too busy reading computer magazines. I want to fucking hit the table because that's exactly he picked the business that was perfect natural to him. Natural to him.

Starting point is 03:16:06 Completely natural. It's what he wanted to do. So the ramp guys, like they're not, they're like whatever the you guys, I always have to like get the way people talk on the internet translated to me from you.

Starting point is 03:16:21 So I don't know if there's a term for anti-slop. But if there's a term for anti-slop. Craft. Perfect. Thank you. So if there's, there's a very old term for this. So the way I think of this, have you guys ever heard of Shokinen? Yes, we've been explaining for the listings.

Starting point is 03:16:35 So Shokinen is this idea in, essentially, it's almost like a Japanese word for craftsmanship. And it doesn't matter if you're building, you know, a $22 billion fintech, or you're sweeping the floor. The Japanese, if you're Shokanin, you take pride in the activity, making it, making your,

Starting point is 03:16:54 you take pride in the activity yourself and pride in making your work as good even if no one else sees it. And so what I would say about this is spending a lot of time with Kareem and Eric is one, from the outside, they have very complementary skills.

Starting point is 03:17:10 And what I would say, especially with Eric, one of the best sales advice that I think it was advice for sales, but I actually think it's advice for life and dealing with people that I've ever heard,

Starting point is 03:17:21 is Mary Kay, remember Mary Kay Cosmetics? Yeah. They built this, like, massive empire, going like door-to-door sales. It might have been like an MLM kind of thing. It's kind of like the proto-ML. Yeah, and they'd drive around like pink catalogs. Yeah, they don't get enough underrated, underrated. Sometimes literally criminally rated. The way that she, the way that she trained her saleswomen. Yeah. She says, never forget that every single person goes through life

Starting point is 03:17:48 with an invisible sign around their neck that says, make me feel special. And Eric has very understated charisma, and he is gifted at salesmanship, at listening, he's a very gifted listener, understanding what's important to you, and then translating what's important to you into how his business can solve your problems. And so what I think I, one of the things I'm worried about both Eric and Cream is, like, I like people to take what they do very seriously. I don't care what that activity is, and they work like dogs. I'm not into this, like, I'm not into work-life balance. I don't like balance. I'm not a balanced person. I'm either, I completely, I'm at zero or a hundred and nothing in between,

Starting point is 03:18:24 and they're both like that. Yeah, we're always telling you don't have to destroy your life for this next episode. Deliver the product you want. It's possible. You have to push yourself. So there's a couple of things I think they do

Starting point is 03:18:36 really, really smart. One is, and I think they both have commonalities, is one, they pay attention to every single little detail, which is the point that you were making. So the point where, like, they're running a giant company. They have tens of thousands of customers. They have thousands of,

Starting point is 03:18:52 of employees. Their revenue growth is exploding right now. They have all these features. They did 300 updates to the product in the last year. And yet they... It's only 250 work days. Yeah, like, I think this was yesterday a day before. I don't even know what day it is today. We sat in there. It's not like Eric and Kareem have empty schedules. And it was us three and we sat there and we talked about podcasting. And like the role it could play. We talked a lot about you guys. And what I like about them, I'm just going to like say random stuff. You guys jump in whatever you want. But like the one example I used for them. And I was just like, listen, I, and I like how fast they make decisions. And then when they make a fucking decision,

Starting point is 03:19:30 they don't like, oh, we're kind of like test it out. They go all in. They make big, bold bets. And they're willing to take a risk, even if it will fail. Where I think a lot of the biggest mistake you can make in a world that's changing constantly, the biggest risk is taking no risk. And so I use the example. It's like, is that an Elon quote or Sam? I don't know. All my quotes come from other people. I have no original ideas. I need to. I need to. I. I. I have no original ideas. I don't feel bad about that.

Starting point is 03:19:55 I think the original idea that you have that you beat the drum on is podcasting. It's a Zuck quote. The biggest risk is not taking it. So there you go. Shout out to Zuck. Can we get a, what kind of, what should we hit for Zuck?

Starting point is 03:20:06 You're not going to be all to hear it. The glazinator. No, but triple glazionator. The glazionator of 3000. The glazinator of 3,000. So what Eric and Kareem both do, that they, the commonality they have with history of entrepreneurs is they bet on talent.

Starting point is 03:20:20 So they overpay for talent. They're like, they will find the best people in the world, like their head of AI, some of their designers, some of their engineers, the people they partner with. Like, they're like, that's the best person, and let's make sure he or she are compensated at a level that makes sense. And so I was talking to him. I was like, I really do think we have, like,

Starting point is 03:20:41 John and George are gifted at what they're doing, and we had a long conversation about this. I was like, I'm telling you, man, I talked to a lot of people on a permanent basis, and I've told you guys this, you know, privately, I'll say it obviously in public, is like on a permanent basis I don't know anybody else

Starting point is 03:20:53 that comes up with better, more simple, more effective, and inexpensive marketing ideas. And I go, I really think we have this huge opportunity for leverage. It's like if they have an idea

Starting point is 03:21:06 from the idea to execution since we trust them, we know they're talented, there should be no barrier. There should just be like, here's a fucking pile of money and next time you have come with idea, do it.

Starting point is 03:21:16 And immediately they're like, done, what else you want? It's just like there's no, they're like, yeah, there's obviously a good idea. John and Jordy are obviously talented. Like, how can we get more out of the talent do we have around them? I just think there's just a million little ideas

Starting point is 03:21:29 that they have like this. I remember, I don't even know what the valuation is now, but it went like, it had like a huge jump. I don't think it was this time. It was the last time. But we were having dinner. It was going to be me, Kareem, and two other people. And me and Kareem got there first.

Starting point is 03:21:41 And it was the day that that announcement came out and Twitter was going crazy. They're like, ramps fucking killing it. And you're like the side of the world with all these VCs are like fighting over this shit. And Kareem shows up in the first 10 minutes. He's just like, this feature is not good enough. We lost this deal.

Starting point is 03:21:56 He didn't mention a word. And I just sat there smiling. And you know, it's really hard for me to not talk for 10 minutes. And I go, that's the reason, your perpetual, your divine discontent is why you're so good. Because the value of your company is just the collective value of all the problems that you solve for your customers. And he doesn't give a shit about taking a victory lap. He cares about solving problems for his customers. And I like the fact that I can call them.

Starting point is 03:22:25 I've called Eric at 1 a.m. his time. And I'm like, where are you? And he's like, oh, I'm in like Chicago. And I'm like doing like customer meetings. And like I recruit people and like I'm closing this deal. He's just like they work all the time. Working hard. Working hard.

Starting point is 03:22:41 Work all the time. It's a good mantra. It's one thing you can control. Yeah. The Joe Lamont. Think about that. I mean, that's excessive, but I think they were having, they were, in that piece, they were talking about this conversation he was having with Jack Welch, if I'm not mistaken,

Starting point is 03:22:56 or he's just like, well, if you have a product that's working and you're willing to work 20 hours a day, it's really hard to lose at that point. Yeah, no. Yeah, find your life's work, find something that's, what was the phrase, not authentic, natural, and then work constantly. Well, okay, so this is, again, we, everybody, I'm so happy to see what's happened to you. I still consider myself your first listener. It's true.

Starting point is 03:23:22 You are literally. Literally first listener. The AR. Oh, and that's another thing. So going back, I want to talk about why I think you guys are really special. But it also goes back to... The Glazingators. It also goes back to what Eric and Kareem were willing to bet on talent when I was just like,

Starting point is 03:23:43 guys, they have a thousand listeners right now. It was crazy. They're going to fucking blow. I don't know anything. I know about podcasts. and I know how history is greatest entrepreneurs think. I don't know anything about anything else. I promise you there's zero chance.

Starting point is 03:23:54 They already knew you were talented, but they already knew. It was obviously cooking talented. They tried to buy you and recruit you a long time ago. And they made a bet, and they made a bet on talent, which, again, is something that Brad Jacobs does, that Elon Musk does, that Steve Jobs did, that all these people did over and over and over again.

Starting point is 03:24:10 Again, these are ideas that are timeless. You can use them today. You can use them 100 years ago. They were used 100 years ago. You're going to be able to use them 100 years from now. Well. So get out there and use them. Get out there, folks.

Starting point is 03:24:21 We have a 3 p.m. reservation. We do. We got to get offline. We got to get off the air. It's hard to get this guy off the mind. I wish that we could go. It's almost like this is professionally. We could go for another five hours right now.

Starting point is 03:24:33 You in town tomorrow? Let's do it again. Run it back. I got to finish this episode. Okay. It's already Tuesday. And I'm never driving here again. We're getting a helicopter.

Starting point is 03:24:42 We're getting a helicopter. No, that's how the Kobe died. It was, but it was foreshadowed in our first launch video. We open in with us in a helicopter. We're going to be helicopter guys. So that's what me and Kareem and Eric are talking about, your launch video. It's about the type of helicopter.

Starting point is 03:24:56 Yeah. Not all helicopters are created legally. No, we need to move the studio to Malibah. Anyway. The Center for Extreme Podcast. We will see you tomorrow. Thank you for watching. Thank you for hanging out with us.

Starting point is 03:25:07 See tomorrow, chat. Leave us five stars. Have a fantastic evening. Have a great rest of your day. Goodbye. We love you. Bye.

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