TBPN Live - Ellison's Counter Offer, Chinese H200s, Data Centers in Space | Aaron Ginn, Matt Kalish, Emil Michael, Blake Scholl, Naveen Rao, Ofir Ehrlich, Gorkem Yurtseven, Pedro Franceschi

Starting point is 00:00:00 You're watching TVPN. Today is Tuesday, December 9th, 2025. Just a few days until Christmas. We're so excited. We're live from the TVPN Ultraderm. The Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the capital, capital. No travel until Christmas, baby. No travel until the new year.

Starting point is 00:00:18 We're in the Ultradome hanging out. We're monitoring the situation. We're monitoring the Paramount Netflix, Warner Brothers situation. Because this is one of the most fascinating deals. the deal has gone hostile. Paramount has launched a hostile bid to acquire Warner Brothers. It's an all-cash offer.

Starting point is 00:00:36 77.9 billion. Really, really. And it's a fun one because I feel like it's obviously tech-adjacent, but it's not the story that people have been monitoring all year. We've been talking about foundation models. That whole story has just gotten a little bit stagnant.

Starting point is 00:00:51 Like the media said, they got tired of not getting enough attention. Exactly. Let's spice it up a little bit. Let's spice it up. Here's something new to learn about. So everyone's having fun. everyone's learning new things. And I could tell because when I came in today, I had a bunch of

Starting point is 00:01:04 questions that people were throwing at me about how all of this works. Why isn't Warner Brothers just going with the highest price? Like when I sell a stock, I don't care if Citadel or Jane Street's buying it. If I'm selling 80 bucks of stock, just give me the best price. But when you're selling an $80 billion company, there are other considerations. And it goes beyond just maximizing shareholder value. And so I wanted to break down a few of those. So I did that in today's newsletter. We can run through that and then we can run through some of the news. Perfect. But first, let me tell you about ramp. Time is money. Save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bell payments, accounting, and a whole lot more, all in one place. So this question,

Starting point is 00:01:48 you know, it seems obvious. The board has a fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder value. That's legal requirement to take the higher offer. And yet, that's a, you know, that's a that's not what's happening. Like yesterday we saw that, uh, that Ellison and Paramount came in with over a hundred billion. Of course, that included the CNN, the TV assets. But even when you broke it out, it seemed like it was very clear that Ellison was willing to pay more money and make a higher offer. So under what circumstances can a board whose job it is to maximize shareholder value not take the higher offer. They can't just, it can't just be whoever we had the better dinner with, right? Which is part of the news, of course. Uh, they, they went out to

Starting point is 00:02:28 dinner and Paramount CEO David Ellison sent a text to David Zazlov, who's run in Warner Brothers, after they made a hostile bid today to buy Warner Brothers. And David text the other David and says, David, but I guess he misspelled his name, even though that's his name, which is just funny. But anyway, he says, I appreciate your underwater today. So I wanted to send you a quick text. Know that despite the noise of the last 24 hours, I have nothing but respect and admiration for you and the company. It would be the honor of a lifetime to be your partner and to work

Starting point is 00:03:02 and to be the owner of these iconic assets. He's talking about Foghorn, Leghorn. He's talking about Porky Pig. He's also talking about Batman and Superman, obviously, and Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings and a million other iconic assets, which is true. If we have the privilege to work together, you will see that my father and I are the people

Starting point is 00:03:20 you had dinner with, which I like that. I think that's cool. They had dinner. It's a fantastic text. Yes, yes, yes. It's a great one. So, quickly, let me tell you about Julius, AI, the AI data analyst that works for you, join millions who use Julius to connect their data, ask questions, and get insights in seconds.

Starting point is 00:03:40 So there are two main reasons why you don't just take, why your size might not be size. Directors at a company like Warner Brothers, they have to maximize shareholder value, but maximizing shareholder value is an expected value calculation. if you come in with a $100 billion offer, and I think there's a 75% chance that you're going to deliver that, and someone else comes in with an $80 billion offer, and I think there's a 100% chance that they're going to deliver that, well, the expected value of your bid is $75 billion. The expected value of their bid is 80 billion. I go with the $80, even though it's like a lower headline number, it has a higher... How much of the calculus do you think is just a deal that will actually get done, right? A deal that is going to get... Yeah. So a deal that doesn't get done could still have value because of a breakup fee. So you could, you could, in theory, go into a deal that you know is impossible. And the example that I gave is, what if Bight Dance came in? And they were like, hey, you know, we're a $400 billion

Starting point is 00:04:43 media company. We'd love to own porky pig. We'd love to own these iconic assets. Let's, uh, let's pick up Warner Brothers. We'd love to own CNN too, you know? Who knows what we'd put on the TV? You already own TikTok. We already own TikTok. We already own TikTok. Why not CNN also? Why not Shark Week? No, not Shark Week. Not Shark Week. They'd have to carve out Shark Week in my book.

Starting point is 00:05:01 But obviously the government would block that. And we have Siphyas, which is an organization in the U.S. government, that determines whether or not an international buyer can take an American company because of intellectual property, all sorts of geopolitical considerations. We don't want another country cornering a market on a really key piece of the supply chain, like the NVIDIA H-200, for example. which we might be talking about later in the show with Aaron Ginn, co-founder of Hydrohost, repeat guest on the TBPN show.

Starting point is 00:05:31 But then there's also just the FTC. So certain deals, like I gave you the example yesterday, like Disney, Disney would be so blocked, I think, that that deal doesn't even get kicked around. No one even talks about it. And because it would get blocked by the FTC, so it doesn't even happen. But it would maximize shareholder value if Disney came

Starting point is 00:05:54 and say, yeah, we'll give you a $10 billion breakup fee, and we want to try and buy you for $200 billion or a trillion or $200 million. You would immediately say yes because you just want the breakup fee. But being in this turmoil and being in this limbo and not being able to sign deals with other, that has an opportunity cost, right?

Starting point is 00:06:11 And so you might want to back off of that. And so basically the... Yeah, you look back at the Figma acquisition. Adobe paid a billion dollar breakup fee. So that's effectively like non-dilutive financing for Figma. That has a happy ending because they were able to re-accelerate, get out into the public markets. But there was another situation where they went through a rough patch and actually really needed that capital to get through. Yeah. So there's basically two buckets of risk that I think

Starting point is 00:06:44 most deal makers would be considering in this situation. First is financing risk. So will they come through with the money and what money are they paying with? Because the initial offer, this is the history, there's actually been six offers put forward by Paramount. David Ellison is putting on a clinic of just not taking no for an answer. Because all the way back on September 14th, he offered $19 a share and 60% of that was cash. So 60% cash offer. Then September 30th, two weeks later, he comes back, $22 a share and ups the amount of cash to 66.7%. Zazlov is doing a master class in making your opponent negotiate against themselves. 100%.

Starting point is 00:07:27 It's actually great. And so October 3rd, 2350 a share, 80% cash. Then November 20th, 2550 a share, 85% cash. Then finally December 1st, 2650 per share, 100% cash. December 4th, $30 a share, 100% cash. Now, why does this matter? Well, it's because you get locked into owning the shares of 40% of the shares is paramount. And then while it's closing, the stock trades down, you wind up getting less value.

Starting point is 00:07:56 And so the $80 billion today might wind up being $70 billion later. And that doesn't maximize shareholder value. And so there's also just the question of like, can you actually marshal the cash? Just like if somebody comes to you and you're about to sell your house to them and they say, yeah, I'm definitely going to get a loan for this. Well, that's a financing risk. Maybe they don't. Maybe they back out of the deal.

Starting point is 00:08:15 It's why cash offers oftentimes. Exactly. If you can just prove that you have the cash, that makes a difference. And, I mean, he's effectively gone and done that because he's teamed up with Jerry Kushner, reportedly, and gone around the world, got a whole bunch of different sovereign funds and just really people, any one of big deep pockets has kind of, you know, said, yes, I'm down to come along on this ride and put up a bunch of the capital. The capital has been marshaled. It seems like it's ready to go. And then also you have Larry Ellison, who has three times as much money, I think, than the whole deal value. something like that, $275 billion to his name.

Starting point is 00:08:53 And he's only trying to put together. Assets, not cash. Assets, not cash. But he should not just, I know they want it, but do not market sell your Oracle position, please. Yeah, but he's like, I'm actually going all cash now. But, but he's effectively acted as backstop. And so, and so everyone who's come in and said, okay, who, I guess I'm good for 10 billion of that 80 billion, but only if everyone else is in, Larry Ellison, reportedly, has come in and said, well, you know, if there's one person in the bunch that

Starting point is 00:09:25 backs out of their slug at the last second, I'll jump in and get that. He's not saying he's going to put up the whole 80. He's just saying he's backstopping it. Yeah. And that's the term that's been thrown around. So, so David Ellison feels very, you know, good because he's done what Zazlov wanted him to. He said, hey, they wanted an all cash offer. I brought them an all cash offer. I brought them an offer that's higher, and we believe that it's, there's no reason why factor number two should come into play, and factor number two is regulatory approval. And so there's been this question about, will Netflix get approved? If there was a different buyer, it would have even more regulatory risk. And so you don't want to, even if the price

Starting point is 00:10:08 is higher, you don't want to accept a higher price with a lower chance of actual conversion, right? Bobby thinks NLE CHAPA might up his offer to 100K of cash and get back in the minute. In that scenario, at least you know that the 100K cash is real, and it's going to be delivered on the day of close. Maybe in actual cash, too. Probably. I think that was the – that is funny because that was the joke of that meme was that he was giving, like, actual cash. When we're saying cash offer here, of course, we are not talking about physical cash. Hey, you never know. Are you kind of money spread over there?

Starting point is 00:10:44 Is Tyler doing money spread? What does he got? Did Christmas come early for you? So I had a question, though. What makes the Paramount offer, like, hostile? Is it that it's, like, reacting to the Netflix offer? Is that the Netflix board, or sorry, the Warner Brothers board went with Netflix, and they're coming, it's hostile because they're saying,

Starting point is 00:11:03 screw the board decision, we want to go to the shareholders? Okay, yeah, because it sounds like they had a nice dinner and the text were, like, kind. Yes, yes, yes. No, no, no, no, hostile in the sense of, like, of, like, not accepting the final, like the final decision there. And then, and then also there is a, there is a point where you can appeal directly to the shareholders and make the, you can actually make the legal case that the board is not acting in, in their fiduciary duty and in their, in the interest of shareholders. Because, but again, these things need to be argued in shareholder lawsuits because

Starting point is 00:11:35 it is fuzzy. Because like, if I say, I'm offering you a hundred billion and someone else is offering 80 billion, and the board says, yeah, but that hundred billion has only a 75% chance of going through. You have to discount that. Now the board says it's worth 75. But whoever made that offer can say, no, we're actually good for it. You should apply a 10% discount rate and treat our offer as if it's 90% or 100% good, right? And so all of those arguments, those can be made in the court and the shareholders can, you know, react to that. And if the shareholders align and say, yeah, actually, we think we'd be getting more money here with this deal, then they can push back against the board at a certain point.

Starting point is 00:12:20 But, yeah. Friend of the show, high-powered media exec says, Zazlov has been architecting the situation for the last 12 months, sitting pretty, and he's a wily old fox and has what he has been shooting for. Two heavy hitters fighting over a deal. Don't doubt there will be a couple more turns here with the price. or even another bidder coming in sideways, don't quote me. Which is remarkable because the price is so high already compared to where it was six months ago. Zazlov, it really feels like it's coming together that he will be remembered as like an incredible business executive for this deal.

Starting point is 00:13:01 I want to know more. I'm still learning about this particular industry and so I've been having fun digging in. Possible deal guy at the year? He's in the conversation. He's definitely in the... Sam was... Sam looked like he was running away with it over the summer. That's true.

Starting point is 00:13:17 Early fall. And he lost ball control. He lost ball control, yeah. Well, quickly, let me tell you about fin.a.i, the number one, AI agent for customer service. Automate the most complex customer service queries on every channel. But there is a wrinkle that people haven't really been considering, which is the fact that Warner Brothers Discovery holds a massive, often underrated vault of masculine cinema. And if this falls into the wrong hands, it could be... What is masculine cinema? Masculine... Masculine cinema would be...

Starting point is 00:13:54 Okay, so they own, they own a bunch of Clint Eastwood films, Dirty Harry, Magnum Force, the enforcer, Heartbreak Ridge, American Sniper, letters from Iwo Jima, Unforgiven, Grand Torino. They also own the classic Stephen Seagal run. Basically every movie where Steven Seagal was a massive theatrical star before going to direct a video. We're talking about above the law, hard to kill, marked for death, out for justice, under siege, which is die hard on a boat, under siege two, on deadly ground, fire down below, exit wounds. They also own Rambo, the whole service to loan the Cobra wing. Cobra, Demolition Man, the Specialist, Tango and Cash, Bullet to the Head, Get Carter, the 2000 remake. They also own Mad Max, lethal weapons, all of the lethal weapons, The Matrix, Blade, Mortal Kombat, 300 Rush Hour, Pacific Rim, and a number of dad and military shows, Band of Brothers, the Pacific Generation Kill, there's a whole host.

Starting point is 00:15:00 They should release the full DVD set, just called Guys Being Dudes. Yes, they also own some Jason Statham properties, the Meg franchise, where Jason Statham fights a big shark. Whoa. Wrath of Man. I guess most of the Guy Ritchie films are actually with Lionsgate or MGM. But there are a variety. And I think this could be a big political hot button of what happens to the Rambo franchises, the Hollywood hunks. No one's talking about the Hollywood hunks.

Starting point is 00:15:29 Everyone's focused on the Looney Tunes characters. But if the Hollywood hunks fall into the wrong hands, it could be. it could swing our entire culture, potentially. Anyway, let me tell you about Danta. Apparently, Michael on our team, worked on Rath of Man. Oh, really? No way. First job. Very cool.

Starting point is 00:15:44 Very cool. Danta, automate compliance and security, AI, that powers everything from evidence collection and continuous monitoring to security reviews and vendor risks. You're hiding in-ordered amounts of Middle Eastern funding sources in your takeover bid. Are you not, says boring business. And not hiding it, it's out in the open. like this is this is uh this is like the playbook for these big deals double double that of the amount of equity that the allisons are putting in putting it around yeah i mean i think everyone

Starting point is 00:16:14 assumes that there'd be a lot of middle eastern funding in this um that has become the standard funding instrument these days i don't know uh like ea games we just followed that story a little bit uh that was obviously it's like 93% of saudi money um and that is part of the modern deal-making playbook these days. Every, I'm pretty sure most of the, a lot of venture funds have raised money over there. A lot of the big AI companies have raised money over there. Like, that seems like a foregone conclusion that if you need money,

Starting point is 00:16:45 you go where the money is. Why do bank robbers rob banks? Because that's where the money is. Right. Well, Dylan Byers says, David, I appreciate your underwater today. So sent you a quint, quick text. He's talking about the dinner. Oh, so that was the, that was the misspelling.

Starting point is 00:17:02 D-A-I-V-D. He must have been texting very quickly. It does give you a little bit of order. Let's turn this into a copy pasta. Yes, I enjoyed the dinner. So, uh, exec sum has an overview of who, who's actually putting in the money here. Filing's reveal that Paramount's bid for Warner Brothers is backed by equity commitments, including 11.8 billion from the Ellison family, 24 billion from Saudi Arabia's, Qatar's, and Abu Dhabi's sovereign wealth funds, one billion from China's Tencent. Additional commitments from Redbird Capital Partners and Jared Kushner's Affinity Partners, that doesn't add up to $100 billion. So there must be cash coming from somewhere else. This is maybe there needs to be some more reporting until, oh, they did give an updated version of this post, but it doesn't quite add up.

Starting point is 00:17:55 So we'll be interesting to follow where, you know, how the deal comes together. And we have a few more people joining this week to help us break down the deal. Ben Smith from Semaphore tomorrow and then Dylan Byers. Oh, Dylan's coming on? That's great. I'm excited. Oh, he's coming in person. Yes.

Starting point is 00:18:14 That's great. Well, let me tell you about numeral compliance handled. Numeral worries about sales tax and VAT compliance. So you can focus on growth. Trump says that the United States will allow NVIDIA H-200 chip sales to China. and get a 25% cut. This is a pretty big change. I mean, we were talking about not selling.

Starting point is 00:18:38 I mean, I guess it's not Blackwell, right? It's Hopper, so we're still a generation behind. But was this, it was like a pretty nerfed chip before. We're getting less nerfed. We seem to move, we seem to be moving in a more thumbs up direction, more let's actually get the chips over to China. at the same time, AI is fake, so it doesn't matter, right? That's the take.

Starting point is 00:19:04 The pro-China take is that it's like, it's SaaS. It's SaaS, or it's not, it's not like this nuclear bomb that's going to destroy everyone. So it's getting harder to make the Manhattan Project argument, right? And it feels impossible to make the argument that we're going to get them addicted to the U.S. AI supply chain. and they'll never develop their own capabilities, and so we want them. Oh, I disagree with that. I think that that argument actually holds.

Starting point is 00:19:36 That argument holds for sure. If we can... In the next... I mean, I totally disagree. I think China's smart enough to know. They don't want to be dependent on any foreign country to produce any critical good period. Yes, but I still think there's enough of like a market force within China

Starting point is 00:19:53 that if we flood the market with cheap Nvidia chips, like they will, it'll just be expensive for them to keep propping up their local industry. Even if they are aware of it, even if they know that they have to, it's a cost and it's something that a lot of AI researchers over there will just say, you know what, I'm already, it's so much easier, the Nvidia ecosystem is so great, I'm just going to stick with that. I don't know. I'm a little bit, I'm a little bit skeptical that like there isn't, there's no advantage to selling Nvidia chips there. I'd become more. I've become more receptive to that argument in particular, even though you have not.

Starting point is 00:20:33 But that's fine. Tyler, what were you going to say about this? Yeah, I was just going to say, I mean, we kind of joke about this. But it is kind of crazy the extent to which you can basically bake down all, like, AI policy questions to like if you are aGI-pilled. Yeah, because like if you are, if you're Dario, I mean, you shouldn't be giving stuff to China. You also shouldn't, like, if you are a GI-I-pilled, you should be thinking about safety, all these things, like we had Keith R Boye on. He doesn't seem super AGI Pilled.

Starting point is 00:21:00 He's also like, oh, safety's a hoax, et cetera, stuff like this. I think basically all these questions you can just, you know. Well, it depends because if you're super fast takeoff pill and you're super like ASI, it's like, but you think that it can somehow be contained and whoever gets it first, you actually don't mind if China's six months behind you because as soon as you hit that inflection point, you're a thousand years ahead. And so you might as well just do whatever it takes, fund, whatever, make as much money as possible, as long as it accelerates you to be the first one to hit that inflection point. So there is an argument where you can be extremely a GI-I felt, even superintendents.

Starting point is 00:21:39 Well, truth social is creating a prediction market's product within the app. I thought you were going to say AI product. Did they launch an AI thing last week? I think that was fake news. Oh, that was fake. Okay. But it's possible Trump is going to use the prediction markets on truth social. in order to kind of set AI policy going forward.

Starting point is 00:21:59 Say H-200s to China, good or bad. That's wild. I mean, that's not that. Robin Hansen says that that's like a good idea. That was the whole, that was the whole pitch originally. There is definitely a bullcase, you could say, like a steelman for that. Yeah. There's always a steel man.

Starting point is 00:22:16 Yeah, I mean, it's basically... Where's your helmet, John? Yeah, yeah, yeah. You need to put on the helmet. Well, let's read through this Wall Street Journal article on the details of the new NVIDIA deal. but first let me tell you about Figma, think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. So, notable that this seems to have been completely priced in already, because NVIDA is actually down half a point today. Yes, it's been such a

Starting point is 00:22:43 dramatic story all year, and yet it's always felt like a complete footnote in the overall financial performance of NVIDIA. It's never felt like, okay, yeah, if this goes NVIDIA's way, they're going to double their, double their revenue or double their profits. They're like, you know, really move the needle. They're growing so fast that, you know, I don't know how many, we're going to get into figuring out how many H-200s they sell, but they would need to sell a lot to actually move the needle on this behemoth of a business, what is the world's largest company in the world. So, President Trump said he would let NVIDIA export its H-200 chip to China and that the U.S. would receive a 25% cut his latest bid to make money for the government in an unusual agreement with a

Starting point is 00:23:27 private company. I have informed President Xi Jinping of China that the United States will allow Nvidia to ship H-200 products to approve customers in China and other countries under conditions that allow for strong national security. 25% will be paid to the US of A. The move is a boon for Nvidia, which has fought for months to maintain access to the world's second largest economy. The company had agreed earlier this year to give the U.S. 15% of China's sales from a lower performing chip only for the Chinese to scuttle those plans as part of continuing trade talks between the two sides. Chips from the world's most valuable company have become a prize geopolitical tool. The H-200 has higher performance than the H-20 that NVIDIA was previously allowed to sell.

Starting point is 00:24:13 But this isn't as powerful as the company's top Blackwell products released this year, nor the Rubin generation of chips coming next year. The move follows a meeting between Trump and Jensen Wong last week where the pair discussed H-200 exports. People familiar with the matter said, NVIDIA shares at nearly 2% after hours. That's not too bad. Even with the U.S. government taking a cut,

Starting point is 00:24:35 the decision could be worth billions of dollars in sales to NVIDIA, which enjoys comfortable margins on its AI chips. In the most recent fiscal quarter, NVIDIA reported gross margins of 703.4%. on $57 billion in sales. That is crazy. They can totally afford 25% for the big guy. I have no idea if it'll be legal.

Starting point is 00:24:57 We'll have to figure out if this gets approved because in general, the United States does not enforce export duties. That's not something America's done. Historically, we had some folks on the show to contextualize that and give us some background when this was first floated. It feels like it is happening now.

Starting point is 00:25:16 but we'll see where it lands. In August, NVIDIA CFO collect Kras said that if geopolitical issues subside, the company could ship between $2 billion and $5 billion of chips to China per quarter, which could increase if orders pick up. So they're doing $50 billion a quarter. Lutnik was on CNBC, and this was the quote that originally ticked off the Chinese. He said, we don't sell them our best stuff, not our second best stuff, not even our third best.

Starting point is 00:25:47 And he said, you want to sell the Chinese enough that their developers get addicted to the American technology stack. That's the thinking. And of course, CCP basically immediately said, we don't want any of them now

Starting point is 00:25:59 because we're offended. But it does seem like, yeah, I don't know. We will have to have Bill Bishop or someone on the show to contextualize how China is receiving this information, whether or not they will actually buy it. Of course,

Starting point is 00:26:13 we're going to be joined by Aaron Ginn in just 30 minutes, so stay tuned for that. Also, let me tell you about linear. Meet the system for modern software development. Linear streamlines work across the entire development cycle from roadmap to release. So the exports could help Chinese tech giants that have struggled to get top chips to train their models.

Starting point is 00:26:33 Wong has argued NVIDIA should be allowed to compete in the Chinese market because China has many of the world's top AI researchers and the U.S. should want them using American technology. if you are not going to replace China, Wong said, at an event at a think tank event. Trump said that the government would take a similar approach to exports from Nvidia competitor, AMD, as well as Intel, in which the government now has a 10% stake. The approval comes just weeks after administration officials, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, torpedoed a push from Nvidia to sell a slim-down Blackwell chip to China

Starting point is 00:27:04 before a recent trade meeting between Trump and Xi Jinping. some officials, including AI czar David Sacks and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnik, have backed exporting the H-200 because it could be a good compromise that allows Nvidia to compete with China's Huawei technologies without vaulting China past the U.S. in AI. People familiar with the discussion said. I don't know. It's such an interesting question that I still wrestle with. Like, we exported a ton of Teslas to China, and B-YD and Huawei have now... But arguably, completely leapfrogged. Completely leapfrogged was...

Starting point is 00:27:46 So they did not become addicted to the American electric bar stack. That was the point I was making earlier. Yeah. You can make the art, like, almost with every single product, they've said, we'll work with you to make this thing that you want to make. We're really good at making things. Yes. And then they ultimately just make a better version of said product and they make it for cheaper. Yes.

Starting point is 00:28:09 And in the case of cars, right now we're obviously not allowing these cars to be imported into the U.S. But, you know, they can simultaneously say, we're happy to keep making you these things. We're also going to compete with you directly and constantly try to be better than what you do. I just wonder, like, if you play it. back, and you don't allow Tesla to export the amazing Model S or Model 3. Does that slow down B-YD's development of their car or or Huawei's or Shaomys? My understanding is they were able to basically get a paid education making Teslas and they were able to leverage that into making but that's about making the car there. If you don't make the car there, which is because

Starting point is 00:29:01 Because the invidia has a Shanghai. But that's research. That's not made there. That's not made there. Like, it's very different when you're saying, okay, we're going to go and produce this product there. And like, you are going to get educated there. And the workforce there. I think it's different. But you remember we've gone through this before China's like five year plans to create a domestic chip industry. They've been doing five year plans for 60 years. I know. They're building. That's what I'm saying. And I would argue that it's working. They're not caught up. But they're certainly. made, you know, massive amount of progress. It made more progress than any other country on Earth. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:29:36 I don't know. What do you think, Tyler? I think if you want to think about, like, getting the Chinese addicted to our chips, it's like how addictive are the chips. Yeah. Because if you can make a comparison between, like, you have the Nvidia chips and then you have the Chinese or, like, TPU, right? Because the TPU is, like, in some ways it's harder to use.

Starting point is 00:29:54 The open source is not as good. But if it's just more economical, like, if the actual hardware is just, like, a little bit cheaper, then it doesn't really matter how worse the software is, people will eventually move to it. So it's like, I don't think there is actually that much, like, soft power in the kind of general open source stuff, like, that in regards to, like, NVIDIA. It doesn't seem very addictive outside of it just being cheaper. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, at the same time, like, we are, America is very much, like, addicted to Chinese solar panels right now. Like, the Chinese solar panels come here. They're cheap. And so we don't,

Starting point is 00:30:30 wind up buying or building a domestic solar panel industry because just to get anything off the ground, you have to go in and say, okay, we're going to deal with having no margin forever and no venture capitalist can underwrite it and no private equity firm can underwrite it. And so it just doesn't really happen. Yeah, but the Chinese, they do do that. I guess they do, they do bear the cost more. So it doesn't matter. But it's like they wouldn't have to bear the costs so we're imposing a little bit of a cost on them. It's like they actually have to pay it, whereas like they don't. Whereas like they wouldn't if we didn't do that, right? Because if we if we don't go in and we don't really and we don't sell them in video chips,

Starting point is 00:31:14 then they're like, okay, well it makes economic sense to back Huawei and fund them. Whereas now they're like it it's not economically logical to back Huawei, but we have to because there's so much pressure from better chips flooding the market, like Nvidia chips, that if we don't fund Huawei un-economically, if we don't lose money on Huawei, like we will never get to, we'll never get, we will never be competitive. Yeah, I think it seems to me that like either way they're going to fund it, the government, the Chinese government. I think it's like really, I don't think it actually matters that much. Yeah, I don't know. Well, let's, let's move on. But let's also tell you about Adio, the AI Native CRM,

Starting point is 00:31:56 Adio builds scales and grows your company to the next level. The United States will allow NVIDIA's H-200 processors. It's second best. So this is a change from what Lutnik said, right? Lutnik said, we're not selling the best, we're not selling the second best.

Starting point is 00:32:13 Turns out we are selling the second best now. Maybe we'll sell the first best soon. Who knows? Well, we should play this clip from Patrick O'Shaughnessy's fantastic interview Gavin Baker on Invest like the best. He's talking about space data centers. We had Dallion on the show yesterday talking about space data centers. Delian still thinks it's pretty far up. Gavin knew we needed a new narrative. He said after the fateful BG2 episode ended the AI trade. Yeah. We needed a new

Starting point is 00:32:44 trade. And now we're getting the space data center trade. Okay. Let's hear the space data center. I think the most important thing that's going to happen in the world in the next three to four years is data centers in space. If you think about it from first principles, data centers should be in space. What are the fundamental inputs to running a data center? They're power and they're cooling. And then there are the chips. The inputs to making the tokens come out of the magic machines. So in space, you can keep a satellite in the sun 24 hours a day. Pretty cool. And the sun is 30% more intense. And this results in six times more irradiance in outer space than on planet Earth. you're getting a lot of solar energy.

Starting point is 00:33:25 Point number two, because you're in the sun 24 hours a day, you don't need a battery. This is a giant percentage of the cost. So the lowest cost energy available in our solar system is solar energy and space. Second, for cooling. In one of these racks, a majority of the mass in the weight is cooling.

Starting point is 00:33:47 And the cooling in these data citrus is incredibly complicated. You know, I mean, the HVAC, the CDUs, liquid cooling. In space, cooling is free. You just put a radiator on the dark side of the satellite. It's fucking gold. And it's as close to absolute zero as you can get. So all that goes away. And that is a vast amount of cost. And then let's think about how each satellite is a bit more complicated than that. The dissipating heat in space. This is what everyone's fighting about. I'm not exactly sure how it plays out like the physics of it. But a lot of people are saying like, yes, it's in a vacuum, but because it's in a vacuum, you can't just, you can't, like,

Starting point is 00:34:29 it's not as passive of cooling. It's more of a material science problem. Like, there's more physics problems there. Also, like, I don't know. I feel like you might need some, I feel like you might need some batteries because I think there are, there are orbits that are effectively in the sun all the day. but I think that the Earth's shadow, like, hits them, not like every day, but like every once in a while, you'll be, you'll be caught in a shadow, almost in like a, in a, what's it called? I don't know, some sort of, you know, you just get caught in the shadow, not every day, but like, every 12 days or every 30 days or something like that. And so in that scenario, I mean, maybe you, maybe it'd be fine if you're doing inference and you don't, and you can just turn it off the whole system. for a little bit, and there's some redundancy.

Starting point is 00:35:22 I just texted our resident spaceman Dallion. Yeah. I said. Answer this. I just said quick take. Yeah, on this. It's urgent. It's urgent. Well, we'll get back from him. There's more to that clip, though,

Starting point is 00:35:35 we should play this, because there's a funny part in here. What are you're going to connect those racks? Well, it's funny. In the data center, the racks are over a certain distance connected with fiber optics, and that just means a laser going through a cable. The only thing faster than a laser going through a fiber optic cable is a laser going through absolute vacuum. So if you can link

Starting point is 00:35:55 these satellites in space together using lasers, you actually have a faster and more coherent network than in a data center on Earth. Okay. For training, that's going to take a long time. It's just because it's so big. But for inference, let's think about the user experience. You know, when I asked Grock about you and it gave the nice answer. This is crazy, though. They've done a podcast together five times. Why is he asking Rock about Patrick? I was like, what is going on? Went to some sort of metro aggregation facility in New York, probably within, you know, 10 blocks here. There's a small little metro router that's routed those packets to a big XAI data center somewhere. Okay. And then the computation was done, and it came back over the

Starting point is 00:36:45 same path. If the satellites can communicate directly with the phone, and Starlink has demonstrated direct-to-sell capability, this whole thing, I would like to, I would like to know how much SpaceX exposure Gavin has, because if this does become a dominant, at least narrative over the next few years, a lot of the people that we know that have computers in space are not exactly bullish on data centers in space on a short time horizon. We have not, we had the founder of Star Cloud on. He's obviously bullish, but I don't believe

Starting point is 00:37:21 he has any satellites in orbit. We've had Delian on. He puts things into orbit. He brings him back down. He's talked about having. He technically has computers. I mean, Delian's a hilarious position because Founders Fund has a huge position in SpaceX obviously, but also Delian has

Starting point is 00:37:37 had to do the hard work of like getting something in space and probably understands like how much of a grunt work it is and how much of a grind it is to get even just, like, something as small as, like, the pod into space. And then he's also seen at Crusoe, like, what a real data center looks like. And the idea of putting something so massive into space,

Starting point is 00:37:58 like, it's bigger than the Hubble, it'd be bigger than the ISS. Like, what do you think about this space data center thing? Have you evolved on this? Yeah, I mean, I don't know. To me, it seems just kind of impractical. Like, if you think about, if you're doing inference or something,

Starting point is 00:38:12 like how much of the cost of the token is actually in the energy, right? Because like I feel like one of the main benefits of having the data center in space is that energy is basically free, right? It's right there. Sure. But if you think about like, I think Casey Hanmer has talked about this. Like if you think about an inference, when you're doing inference, the portion of the cost that's actually the energy, it's like very tiny.

Starting point is 00:38:35 Yeah. Because it's like the chip is expensive or doing it like, it's like not that expensive. So it's like, okay, the cost gains overall are like not that great. And then it's like, well, what if you want to change the chip to the next generation or what if you need to do some kind of like mechanical work? Yeah, you want to change the... Are we ignoring how broken cluster would take some sort of intervention to fix as well as the cost per kilogram in fuel costs?

Starting point is 00:39:01 Yeah, just for context. So Gavin was at Fidelity and led a $900 million investment in SpaceX at a $12 billion post-money valuation. That's amazing. Wow. What a goat. That's incredible. Okay, actually,

Starting point is 00:39:20 yeah, so maybe they didn't do the full $900 million. GROC isn't sure. Sure, sure, sure. But, I mean, either way, like, you can be pro or con on space data centers. And GROC also says SpaceX has been a tradee's largest venture capital position as of 2022, comprising an estimated 30 to 40% of its VC portfolio. Yeah. deals wild. So anyways, Gavin is set to, on one hand, Gavin could know things about space data

Starting point is 00:39:46 centers that the rest of us don't know because of his position and proximity to SpaceX. At the same time, SpaceX, if they go public next year, would benefit a lot from having a space data center kind of like narrative as part of this. It's crazy because the business is so solid. I feel like you don't need a fourth act or whatever. Okay, wait, so what about this? So if a lot of the gains of space data center are just because the energy is free, why don't we just, but then there's this hard part about having like different satellites everywhere, put the data center on the moon.

Starting point is 00:40:18 There's no atmosphere, so you don't get the 30% reduction in energy from the sun and just put data center on the moon. Well, don't you get a 50% reduction because there's, like, there's a dark side of the moon? Like the moon. You wouldn't put it on the dark side of the sun. No, I know, I know. I mean, is that our dark side sometimes gets light from when it's not facing us, right? And so, so you only, if you're on the moon, you only get light 50% of the time.

Starting point is 00:40:53 Whereas, whereas if you're a satellite and you're flying out in space and you're kind of orbiting the earth, like, but at a weird axis so that you're not constantly in shadow all the time, you're getting sun, he says 24 hours a day, I think it's, I think it's like 99. percent of the time. But regardless, it's like almost always. Whereas if you're, if you're actually like on the moon, you don't get sunlight 100 percent of the time. You get it 50 percent of the time. I'm pretty sure. I don't think it's because. All right, maybe there's some. Yeah, the sun's not, the sun's not like, uh, or the moon's not sunlocked. It's, it's earth locked. Put up this post, uh, pull up this post. I put at the bottom of the sack from Joe Morrison. He's over at Umbra. Well, we pull that up. Let me tell you about re-stream. One live stream, 30 plus destinations.

Starting point is 00:41:37 If you want to multi-stream, go to re-stream.com, and we will pull up this next post. Joe says, you just put a radiator on the dark side of the satellite. And he says thermal engineers in absolute shambles right now. Yeah, people are not, I don't know, people are so splitting. Casey Hammer says, to be fair, this is a big satellite. Joe says many big satellites. Big satellite? Makes it easier?

Starting point is 00:42:02 I don't know. Yeah, I think you need, I think you need like, Like a lot of, like you need basically a lot of mass in order to dissipate enough heat. From a, from a GB 300 or something, C, B 200. Somehow, AST, Space Mobile, Inc. is up 27% in the last five days. So, people are, people are quite excited. Yeah. Well, should we head over to Gulfstream news?

Starting point is 00:42:35 There's some massive news from Gulfstream Aerospace. The G400 introduces next-gen Gulfstream tech to its class. Sound on to learn more with Gulfstream president, Mark Burns. How has Mark Burns not been on the show yet? Here we go. Clearly don't have a no-render policy over here. They're render-reacting.

Starting point is 00:42:58 You think they're just not at... You think they could just be adding special effects? What do you mean? This is the most rendered video I've ever seen. This looks like it was rendered in 2010. You think this is real, though? No, this is not a green screen. Damn.

Starting point is 00:43:15 Filling our customers' needs for a product line to see every trip. Look at this. You're like, this is real. This is what it looks like. It's far away. It does look like an ace plane, though. With Gulfstream's signature combination of range, speed, and cabin comfort. The G400 will provide unrivaled officials.

Starting point is 00:43:34 unrivaled efficiency. Thanks to the combination of the advanced This is going to be a hot Christmas gift this year. Absolutely. People have been wondering. I think this will be top of, this will be under the tree for a lot of people. It's not ideal to do like a pre-order as a gift, you know? It's nice to have

Starting point is 00:43:51 something under the tree, but I think people would make an exception here. It's so funny I was talking, I was talking with a mutual friend of ours, a guest who's been on the show many times and they're planning to purchase a jet, at some point in the relatively near future.

Starting point is 00:44:08 And he was so fixated on, like, needing to be able to, it's his first, it will be his first jet. And he was so fixated on, like, I need to be able to stand up at, like, it can't have, like, the cabin needs to be big enough that I can, like, walk around freely. Like, come on, for your first jet, and you're not just, like, you know, tolerate, like, slightly lower height in the cabin. He was like, no, I got to be able to, I got to be able to, I got to be able to be able to move freely.

Starting point is 00:44:36 Go straight for the 747, the BBJ. Yeah. Get the VIP, VVIP package, the one that only the Qataris have for some reason. Well, Casey Hanmer. Okay, I got a text back from Delian. I won't read all of it. Okay. There's a line here.

Starting point is 00:44:57 This is from someone else. Dude, all this data centers in space stuff. Also, I'm not going to read that. You need 1,100 kilowatt sats to generate 100 gigawatts in orbit, 100 kilowatts sats, wang, 1,000 kilogram, including payload would mean a 5x increase in power density, and you can't just not have batteries and slap a radiator on the back, L.O.L. And then there was some choice words exchange that I won't read on the show. But anyways, I think we should host the data center in space debate. That sounds good. We should get a few people on here, somebody to be bullish, somebody to be bearish.

Starting point is 00:45:39 I think we want somebody to be bullish that has put things into orbit and taken them down many times. I think it's hard to lean on somebody's kind of take or opinion if they're not actually participating in space. They're just sort of speculating. Yeah. Let's read through a little bit of what Casey Hammer had to say. He said, here's one idea about SpaceX's next big thing, AI computing inference, again, not training, on orbit. But how the hell can SpaceX do this cheaper than just building more data centers on the ground? From first principles, it's an attractive proposition because the GPUs have extremely high value per kilogram and extreme revenue per kilowatt, both of which are relatively expensive.

Starting point is 00:46:25 That is, the value prop somewhat washes out the pain of operating in space. So I took a closer look. If anyone can make this work, it is a Starlink derived system. So I started with the Starlink V3 satellites with some high fidelity CEO CAD below. Orbital parameters pick a sun-synchronous orbit. So we're in full kilowatt, 1,400 kilowatt per meter squared sunlight at all times, no need for batteries.

Starting point is 00:46:50 Deploy the solar array in sun slicer mode facing full sun, but the edge is pointing in the orbital direction. bottom right in these images to minimize drag, but the inference starlink, star thought, satellites don't have to scrape the atmosphere. Being in sunsynchronous orbit, they'll need to use the rest of the starlink constellation for backhaul via laser links anyway,

Starting point is 00:47:17 and higher orbits actually improve worst-case latency. Very slightly, too high, though. And SSO is relatively full of debris. Let's pick 560 kilometers. A Starlink satellite in this, orbit has full sun. So the back half is always shaded and relatively cool. The next hottest thing in the sky is the earth taking up almost half the sky to the bottom left in these images. And so what does he conclude? He says, I've seen a bunch of high inclination starlink launches

Starting point is 00:47:44 from the Vanderberg recently, but I don't think any of them were going to sun-synchronous orbit. In any case, a ring of inference satellites visible at dawn and dusk running north and south will be awesome. If one starship can launch 100 tons to Leo, then And that gets close to 30 megawatts of inference per launch. A thousand watts is 300 gigawatts. Now we're talking real scale. We're doing one launch of Falcon 9 per day. There was Delians loosely.

Starting point is 00:48:14 You know, we're now one a day. So 300 in a year. So you get to, you know, 1,000 over three years. If you're on a one-a-day cadence or if you can wind up getting more, the math is not that crazy. but it does seem like Delian was pushing more towards like, hey, this is maybe 10 or 20 years, not the next three years. But it certainly will be fun to follow the story.

Starting point is 00:48:38 In the meantime, let me tell you about cognition. The team behind the AI software engineer, Devin, crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. Jordy has survived. I keep like getting the podcast in a can. Like down the wrong. They should really make a drink specifically for podcasters. that has no carbonation, that cannot be choked on in any way.

Starting point is 00:49:01 Mark Benioff says, LLMs are the new disc drives, commodity infrastructure, you hot swap for whoever's cheapest plus best. The fantasy that the model is the moat just expired. Mark Benioff having fun on the timeline. I love that he's having fun. I love that he's taking shots.

Starting point is 00:49:20 Don't they have an AI lab, to be clear? They were working on Einstein for a while, but I think that they are very much happy to be a rapper, happy to be a buyer of LLMs at this point. It certainly has penciled out that way. We can talk more to Mark about that. It's feeling good. Stocks up 10% in the last five days.

Starting point is 00:49:40 Let's hear it for best salesman history. What do you think about Michael Burry saying the whole industry needs a $500 billion IPO ASAP. So everyone that knows anything knows this. Opening eyes the next Netscape, doomed and hemorrhaging cash. Microsoft is still trying to keep it afloat while keeping it off balance sheet and sucking out the IP. So why do they keep getting funded?

Starting point is 00:50:13 The whole industry needs a $500 billion IPO ASAP. The whole industry needs to go away and sit in a corner for a couple of centuries. Think about what's done. This is Jeffrey Miller. Wow. I don't know. This is, people want extreme takes.

Starting point is 00:50:28 This post would go super hard if you don't understand the Microsoft Open AI relationship. Yeah. But, yeah, it's just, it's just,

Starting point is 00:50:39 what was Netscape's peak revenue? What was Netscape? I remember correctly, they IPOed with like $15 million of revenue. That feels a little bit different. Netscape's peak revenue, 1997 was $500 million. I mean,

Starting point is 00:50:54 net we're up at 20 billion this year for open AI yeah their total revenue before IPO for the first two operating quarters net escape reported total revenue of 16.6 million just odd I mean did netscape have like an enterprise business like um that's smart yeah I don't know I mean even even if there's a yeah yeah like even if there's more commoditization like it's going to take it's going to take time and I don't know the the dynamics of the of the, of the competition here feels like there will still be a lot of value, even if, even if there are, even if it is somewhat commodity infrastructure, it's like, you know what else is commodity infrastructure?

Starting point is 00:51:35 Like, AWS, GCP, Azure. Like, you get, you get, you know, like a server with some hard disk on it. Like, that is commodity, and yet they all have 30% margins, and they're all massive businesses. And when AWS, when Amazon broke out AWS as its own line, it was like an eye. IPO of its own company because it was so big. It was such a massive business. And it should be completely commodity because it's just servers in a data center. And yet, it's, it's interesting.

Starting point is 00:52:04 Yeah, it's interesting, too. I mean, Burry has, has, you know, positioned himself of just hating any company that's overheated. But chat GPT having close to a billion weekly actives. And ultimately, even if they just compete in. search, right? At least it's a, you know, multi-trillion dollar opportunity, whether or not they, you know, fully execute against that is another thing. Are you buying, are you buying the IPO timeline of cohere, then anthropic, then open AI? Or do you think they will be sorted in a different, in a different pattern? What was the order? Cohere first. That's Aiden

Starting point is 00:52:50 Gomez's foundation model lab. He's. of course on the transformer paper also a dripped out technology brother that's right with a fantastic set of outfits then then anthropic and then open a i open a i third that's the that's the rumor yeah i have no idea how the market will react to cohere yeah cohere has has shifted more into like the business the enterprise market wholly enterprise not in the timeline at all That could very well be intentional, but it would be, it'll be interesting how much excitement they can build around the IPO, assuming they're losing a lot of money, assuming the enterprise is really competitive, and they're competing with Anthropic and Open AI and open source models.

Starting point is 00:53:41 If the narrative changes to the point where, you know, this idea of every enterprise is going to need a basically a custom LLM that's fine-tuned or pre-trained on their data, like what, ADBS CEO Matt Garman was talking to us about, about these pre-training checkpoints where you can go in and say, okay, I have a business and I absolutely do not want to upload my data to Anthropic. I don't want to update it, I don't want to upload it to Open AI,

Starting point is 00:54:10 but I want a model that understands my business's data at a core level in the pre-training step and cohere can offer that and show traction there. That feels like that could be the next wave we've talked to like a number of founders that are building those sort of like custom pipelines and there's not really a public company that is even anywhere in that narrative and that narrative does feel very nascent it feels like it has not percolated through the public markets yet so um i don't know it could be it could be uh you know exciting for for them um well let me tell you raised they've only

Starting point is 00:54:48 raised 1.4 billion i did not really sorry 1.5 billion 1.5 billion 1.5 for billion, very modest amount, especially when you have seed stage companies raising half a billion. We got one of those on the show today. We're excited. Joining later, he kicked the hornet's nest on the timeline. What do you do? A little bit. People were pushing back. Because of his racing history? No, no, no, no. Oh, people show respect. I love that to show massive respect. No, but I think, I think Jack had slow was saying that Nvidia was value. at 500 million when they IPOed, of course, that was a very long time

Starting point is 00:55:28 ago. But anyways, people were just saying like feels pretty potentially overheated, but we have Nevin coming on the show today, and I'm excited to hear about the opportunity from him directly. I'm ready to say it's overvalued unless

Starting point is 00:55:44 he's built a company previously and sold it. Twice, maybe. Yeah, twice. If he's done that, then he's off the hook, but he's got to prove it to us. Because if he's just some new grad, some dropout. Like a Waterloo. Yeah. If he's just like, if he shows up on the show and he's just like, yeah, I had this

Starting point is 00:56:01 idea in my garage. I didn't go to school. I've never done in business before. And now I'm, then I'm going to call him out. And I'm going to say, you're overvalued. You raise too much money. But if he can prove to us that he's done it once or twice before, then I'll let him off the hook.

Starting point is 00:56:18 Yeah. I'll let him off the hook. Anyway, I think that's fair. Let me tell you about Privy. Privy makes it easy to build on crypto. Rail securely spin up white label wallets, sign transactions, and integrate on-chain infrastructure, all through one simple API. Let's read the semi-analysis post.

Starting point is 00:56:33 It says, important, a common misconception about OpenAI's upcoming custom chip is that since it's a custom chip, it won't be flexible and will be a data flow machine. Open AI has recognized that the 100x efficiency gains for training and inference happen at the algorithm layer, and the hardware chip needs to be flexible enough to accommodate these algorithm changes. We went from just pre-training transformers to now doing RL post-training on transformers. We went from dense transformers to mixture of expert transformers and soon ultra-sparse transformers that will have four active experts per token out of 2,048 total experts. We went from casual MHA attention to MQA and GQA to attention-sync sliding attention to now even learn sparse attention despite the AI tourists think.

Starting point is 00:57:19 The chip open AI is building with Broadcom. be far more flexible than TPU's interesting, despite most of AOP's chip team being poached from Google's TPU team. Hmm. The semiconductor horse race continues to fascinate me, and I'm so glad that we have the good folks over at semi-analysis coming on the show regularly to help us understand it. I always enjoy talking to them, and we have two folks from semi-analysis joining the show next week, so we will be having a great time. Let me talk about Turbo Puffer. this vector in full tech search built from first principles and object storage fast 10x cheaper and extremely scalable of course that's right it's scalable a hedge fund was ordered to pay a bonus

Starting point is 00:58:02 to a trader who made 97% of its revenues this is hilarious because when I read this at first I thought it was he had made he like his target bonus was let's say 10 million and he brought in 9.7 million and so he was 97% out of the way to his bonus and they were like you didn't hit your bonus, buddy. You don't get the bonus at all. And I was like, oh, that sucks, but like that's kind of the deal that kind of makes sense. But evolution capital management has to pay him because... Yeah, so a hedge fund that was sued by a trader for refusing to pay a performance-related bonus,

Starting point is 00:58:38 despite him making 97% of its revenue, has been ordered to pay him 5.4 million plus interest by the high court in London. When I read the headline of the story, I expected it to not be... in the mid seven figures, but... Would you expect? I mean, I was hoping at least eight. He's not getting a G-400 off of this. Come on.

Starting point is 00:59:03 Not even close. Not even close. Robert Gagliardi sued his former employer, evolution capital management in London, alleging that it acted in bad faith by denying him a $7.5 million discretionary bonus after he had generated more than $60 million for the firm. Wow.

Starting point is 00:59:20 Wait, does this mean that every other... Trader. Lost money. It was just. Something like that. I don't know. He heavily. So he was at the fund, brief stint. He made $12 million. He was already paid $7 million, including a $625,000 signing bonus.

Starting point is 00:59:36 Base salary was $425K and a $6 million new issue bonus. So he needs to get out of this. He needs to go into AI research ASAP if he wants to be putting up real numbers. This is rough. But there are some harsh words. here, he said. Gagliardi, a block trading specialist, alleged that he was told in early 2021 that a return of $10 million over the rest of the year would be an excellent result. When Gagliardi asked the fund's founder, Michael Lurch, for the payout in 2022, he responded, I'm not going to pay you

Starting point is 01:00:13 the bonus. F, you sue me. So Gagli already did. And he won. He did, he did. Although evolution did not dispute his extraordinary returns, the fund argued that the damage done to its reputation as a result of dealing with a U.S. SEC probe into some of Gagliardi's trades, at his previous employer outweighed his performance and that the bonus did not need to be paid because it was discretionary. There's no question that Mr. Gagliardi made exceptional profits for the funds, and Mr. Lurch frequently praised his performance in that respect. Had Evolution properly performed the contract, Mr. Gagliardi would have received a discretionary. bonus of $5.3 million.

Starting point is 01:00:53 The judge also said that Gagliardi was Lurch's prize asset at evolution. That's a good goal for everyone that is, you know, maybe working at a company, become the prize asset. Hopefully that doesn't result in a lawsuit like this. But they're feeling, they're feeling gagliardi and his lawyer feeling very vindicated. Well, we have our next guest here in the Restream waiting room. Let me tell you about Gemini 3 Pro first. Google's most intelligent.

Starting point is 01:01:21 knowledge and model yet, state-of-the-art reasoning, next-level vibe coding, and deep multimodal understanding. We have Aaron Ginn, the CEO and co-founder of Hydrohost. Good to see you. It's been too long. How are you doing? Welcome back. Been all right. Yeah. Yeah, I just got back from Southeast Asia. Oh, yeah? Yeah. And despite some of the critics we're saying, I wasn't smuggling anything, I should have been smuggling. So, you can't accuse of smuggling. That is wild. Well, give us the give us the update on your interpretation of the H200 deal, where things landed, where you think the next debate points will be. I'd love to hear that. Yeah, like the, I mean, as you know,

Starting point is 01:02:05 I said a number of times that the, even though I am a China Hawk, that we have to realize that Trump fundamentally is a pragmatist. And he is not interested in the ideological warfare. And I think that him taking over the Republican Party proves that. And the orientation of reshoring to America, which you all know, like I wrote one of the first arguments for Newman-Roe Doctrine. So now you saw that the Department of War has been putting that out. The White House has been very clear that it's trying to reshore its emphasis back to Latam in South America and to build up the Ring of Fire from, you know, South Korea down to Singapore, essentially to be more sovereign. Essentially, NATO, as we've approached ourselves with having them spend their own money to just support their own military,

Starting point is 01:02:53 that the expectation is that Asia would do the same thing. So a deal with China on trade was always on the table and was very likely because both parties actually want this to happen. And I do believe that with Huawei that, yes, it is the national champion, and they do want to proliferate it, but they're more interested in selling it to other people. and are moating themselves as a means of trade like they did with their Belt and Road Initiative, than they are for internal uses. Like that's just kind of my estimation talking to people in the region. And I mean, they just came back from there.

Starting point is 01:03:31 So, so Nvidia being in that region and being sold, particularly China, I think is important for American interests. Whether it's an H20 or B30 or H200, I'm kind of less opinionated on, I just think that we need to to be there because half of all AI engineers are Chinese, and we can go through any list of anyone scrolling at the bottom of this broadcast, and you can see that probably the majority or Asian descent minimally. And as America, we just have to realize that, like, we're good at certain things and we're not good at certain things. So we're very good at commerce. We're very good at free markets. We're very good at enterprise. We're very good at creating the default framework, the rules of the road for the role to transact.

Starting point is 01:04:17 I think when it comes to trying to do these other strategies, I think we're not very good at it. And we just kind of have to realize that also that the president of the United States is interested in making deals. He's not interested in trying to get involved in other people's business. Yeah. Let's, I mean, there's like a million different pieces here. But let's start with the fact that there are so many fantastic genius AI researchers in China.

Starting point is 01:04:43 why is it in the interest of the United States to help them? Is it that if they start developing on NVIDIA chips, it gets the Kudo ecosystem stronger and we will actually get more open source software, basically for free from China that will come back to America and make our AI efforts stronger? Or is it we want them to be familiar with NVIDIA

Starting point is 01:05:08 when ultimately they come over here on 01 visas and start working for American companies. I think that's too narrow focus. It's sort of like Boeing. Do you want Boeing in China? I mean, yes, because I want Boeing to be a thriving American business. I want Boeing to maximize profits. And I don't see the 747 as a piece of, I don't see the 747 as a nuclear bomb.

Starting point is 01:05:37 Yeah, I mean, I think that that's the key prior on the second one. Like, do you think that an H-200 is a, I don't know, like a, like a, like a, some form of missile technology? Yes, yes, yes. Increasingly, I, increasingly, I have backed off the idea that, that these chips should be viewed as, as weapons. Like a defense technology. Yes, yes, yes, yes. I've backed off of that. Yeah, because I view it much more like telco technology.

Starting point is 01:06:06 I agree. And, and we're like, and we did not win at that. We lost that. And that's because we didn't offer the world an alternative. We just were like, hey, don't use ETE, don't use Huawei. And then they were like, okay, we'll give us something else. And we're like, well, I don't have anything to give you. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:06:20 Well, I mean, we're sort of separating things out here because on the one hand, like there's give the rest of the world something. And then there's other, which is like give China something, which is like there is a different way, right? Yeah, no, no, that's true. Because I'm totally down to go belt for belt and road for road all over the, all over the globe, right? But the question of, like, can, like, is there any world where we could get a different cell phone tower deployed in Beijing that's not a Wal-A tower? Like, no way, right?

Starting point is 01:06:51 This is impossible. But then you go back to the fact of, like, you're right, like, you know, all metaphors fail. That's why they're metaphors. So the other exogenous factors, I think, that's different from telcos is the fact of, like, the level of AI engineering talent, And the fact that, like, it's funding in, isn't like, you know, propelling for American AI. That's just the reality of where we are. The second is the fact of, like, they do not have the founder capacity or the foundry skill set to produce similarly level at scale. Scale absolutely is true. They could be at some point of the approaching some form of, like, five nanometer process.

Starting point is 01:07:30 And there's, like, rumors around that. So, and that's a little bit of obsession because it is a barrier of technology that, like, we've, I should say the West has been still that, not particularly America, Japan and the Dutch, but that's there, we don't want to fund that enterprise. And I think that that's where the practice isn't comes into play. It's like if we don't offer them something, they'll just do it themselves. And I'd rather take money from them and build our own sort of reshoring in America. But to be clear, they're still going to do everything themselves, right?

Starting point is 01:08:01 No, I don't think so. How does it? No, I don't think so. you think that China will happily be dependent on foreign powers. I mean, last time there were rumors of this sale, they, they were putting out press releases saying, like, hey, if you're going to buy Nvidia, you've got to prove it. You got to prove that you need it. You got to prove that Huawei won't work. It felt like there was a lot of pushback from the CCB.

Starting point is 01:08:23 I don't believe, I don't believe, I don't believe, I don't believe at all that they're just going to be like, thank you for the H200s. We're going to stop investment in our domestic chip manufacturing. yeah so but but the the problem is like in that flow one you assume a level of CCB control that's just not realistic sure that that it's it's a country of like 1.3 billion people with very successful entrepreneurs yeah but they've been ripping five year they've been ripping five year plans for over and over and over and over to I mean like yeah but that stuff doesn't matter like you have to understand that like there's lots of propaganda that think that they say that they actually never happens in real world go look at Africa go look at all the airports and

Starting point is 01:09:02 see actually what actually happened. Go look at the ports. Yes, there are a certain example of ports that should be transferred, like the Sri Lanka port, but go look at the rest of the ones, like they didn't happen. So they say lots of things, but the question is, like, what matters in terms of the national security orientation of America? And I would much rather take money from their economy and put it back into our economy than trying to give them both the demand side and the supply side argument. You're making a supply side argument, which I think is very much how the CCP thinks about the world, which is like, oh, we need to build their own chip supply. But in the orientation, I think that Jordy are more biased stores, which is like,

Starting point is 01:09:36 well, it's also given the demand argument. I'm like, no, I don't want to give them the demand argument. Like, I would rather mitigate that as much as possible to say the guess, like, they have probably like five or six multi-billion dollar operations that like want to have these types of chips that are not military oriented. And by applying these export controls that are overly extreme, you're basically giving them a demand argument as well. And I'm saying, I don't want the demand argument. Like, if they're still going to have a supply argument, that's fine. Like, go buy a B-YD, you know, car and hopefully doesn't catch on fire. Like, so, like, you know, like, just because B-Y-D... Are you bearish on B-Y-D? You're there catching strays right now.

Starting point is 01:10:15 I saw one of them on fire in Hong Kong, no joke. Yeah, I have a video of it. Well, I text you. Yeah, let's go, let's go to the cars and talk about what we were debating earlier. If we're just talking about cars instead of chips, of course there's going to be a metaphor here, but if we're just talking about cars and we want, and the frame is like we're all China Hawks and we're putting on like rah-rah, we want America to win the electric car race, should Tesla have sold Tesla's into China because it feels like they did and then China was able to make. the whole bunch of cars that compete directly with Tesla and are, it feels like maybe better, maybe cheaper, maybe better and cheaper on some sort of Pareto Frontier. If, if we run that experiment, we try and think through the counterfactual, if Tesla had never sold a car in China, where would the, the Sue 7 be, the jumping Huawei car, the Shaoomi car, the B.YD. Han, the one that has the karaoke machine in it. Like, there's some crazy cars. Would those exist? Would they be

Starting point is 01:11:25 delayed would they be would they happen faster how do you think about that yeah so so i i think this is where there is a reality right which is that they they're going to copy and i don't think that that is something we can change yeah speaking as a half chinese american so so that it's just the nature of what what is the way they think about competition it's just competition you're going to want to compete yeah and and and and and importantly like like there's one world where you know they need the industrial power of like like 1 million H-200s. And there's another one where if you give them

Starting point is 01:11:59 a single H-200, they can tear it down and try and reverse engineer it as much as possible. And then they can also do all the learning curve stuff on their, on their companies, on their national champions on Wallway. I think it is reasonable in terms of an argument against expert controls if you view this as a means of trying to slow down their own model level progress. Like I can at least cogently understand what's

Starting point is 01:12:25 presented. I do not agree with this from the perspective of hardware engineering. Because, again, if you don't have the ability to make a car, then what's the risk? Right? Like mitigate their ability to make a car, which is generally even my position. I want to mitigate their ability to make chips. And so in a world where there's the demand and supply, right, they're in SCCP, because they're communists. So they love focusing on supply solutions to everything, which, by the way, doesn't work as I mean we're all free marketers here we're all a bias towards Austrian like we know that their philosophy of the world doesn't work so so they can talk about supply side engineer and all they want but again they don't have the

Starting point is 01:13:08 ability right now to aggressively address their lefokery programs and so in that world I want to just win because if they can't if we remove the demand stuff because all other companies want to use in video if we remove the demand stuff we're removing one of the biggest parts that would give them justification to accelerate on the Smick side. But if they're just going to go and play around and be like, hey, we're going to dump money into Smick because we want to use local, but we're everywhere. It's like the fast food thing of like, sure, they have local fast food, but McDonald's and Starbucks rush.

Starting point is 01:13:41 And so like that's more how I think about it. They're still going to try to copy. But if you don't give them the ability to actually have the toolkit, then it's a much safer transaction. And I think, I think John, what you said is. is important is that the debate is highly mixed up between you think in H-200 is an F-35. If you remove that as an A-Priar, then the world becomes significantly simpler to understand. But if you view the H-200, Black War, or whatever, as a Patriot missile, then, like, there's no real place to, like, have a conversation to be rational.

Starting point is 01:14:18 Yeah. Because my view is like, you know, I don't have as much of an opinion on, you know, G.B. or B, that kind of, like, debate. I just, I think American companies need to be in China because we want the ability to not only address the second largest economy in the world and, like, have access to, like, that is the Trump position and that's my position. Like, we should sell to the world. It should be an export nation. But the other is, like, China is going to copy, and it's just part of the equation. Flip, flip around for me and give me the, sorry, I wanted to hear, I wanted to hear shifting to domestic semiconductor supply chains.

Starting point is 01:14:59 What is your theory of the current horse race between Traneum, TPU, and NVIDIA? It felt like NVIDIA was dominant last year, the year before. Then we were hearing rumblings of like, hey, maybe AMD is getting it together on the software side. Hey, maybe this TPU thing could be used to train a decent model. The DeepMind team seems to have been able to do that. Are we moving towards more of an oligopoly? What are you thinking about how the American semiconductor AI accelerator horse race is playing out? My view from the on the TPU side, I don't really know who would buy that as just like a product.

Starting point is 01:15:47 I think meta is the closest one that kind of makes sense, but why would any of the clock companies do it? Because they are in a position right now trying to build their own, and they're trying to de-lever why they're building their own. They're trying to de-leverge on a video. So why would they want to mingle themselves with an actual direct competitor, like a direct competitor and sell their stuff? And then there was a mocked. Yeah. Like there's also this like weird zealotry around TPUs that I made me because we had Thanksgiving. that's not going to happen.

Starting point is 01:16:17 But to say that there's minimal switching costs is absolutely absurd and insane. There's significant switching costs. And so if you're of the mindset of like, hey, well, we have all this CAPEX and it kind of makes sense. That's justifiable. Like, I can understand that. But that's like the same reasoning that you could apply

Starting point is 01:16:36 to the multi-cloud argument. And we didn't really see that happen at all. Basically until GPUs. Now you're seeing much more multi-cloud products because GPUs made everyone multi-cloud. And if you were multi-cloud before GPUs, as a function of an acquisition,

Starting point is 01:16:54 it was not generally intentional. So I think QBUs makes sense for Google just as a like vertically integrated strategy because that's what they like to do. And there are probably some other companies that maybe like maybe Apple, I could maybe see that because they love low-cost chips just in general.

Starting point is 01:17:10 But I don't really see it breaking beyond Google because I just don't know who is really incentivized to buy that. And then I agree with you on AMD side. Their software is getting better. I think that's just the natural orientation of just the, like, Lyssu is the most reasonable because a competitor to NVIDIA's general purpose computing dominance. I'm pretty bearish on Trinium.

Starting point is 01:17:33 And TPU is just from a chip perspective. I'm bearish on, but as an integrated strategy, it makes sense for them as a company. Okay. The Nvidia does not really get as company. We're running out of time, but I wanted to ask you about one. other thing. There seems to be a number of people trying to manufacture a space data center pump. Oh, yeah. As somebody, and even NVIDIA was posting from their corporate account, some renders of a company called StarCloud, some space data centers that they're working on.

Starting point is 01:18:05 As somebody that has spent a lot of time in data centers or around data centers all over the world, what are your timelines? Are we talking? Gavin Baker was saying, The most important thing in the next three to four years is data centers in space. I've had plenty of people on the show that believe that it's an exciting possibility or opportunity, but maybe their timelines are more like 10 to 20 years. How do you think about it? Most of the stuff that has been announced will not happen. Ever?

Starting point is 01:18:35 No, like then think of it as like a 50%. So if they announce like five gigawatts, probably going to be like two. and because the stuff's really building the stuff is actually quite hard and America has not really behaved in a manner to me that believes it's that series of a thing like this is a very niche issue and one reason why the going by the H-200 the reason why it's making less noise now is because it is a niche issue it is something that maybe a couple hundred thousand people really care about

Starting point is 01:19:09 and in the data center it affects even though it does bring jobs, it does bring these types of opportunities to cities that previously never had a position to support a data center, which is great. It is really kind of a narrow set of people that are really benefiting. And if you go look at, you can go read the bills that are in consideration across America. America is not acting like it's very serious about building data centers. The power profiles, the approvals that are happening, like, it's just not happening versus the other countries they're generally more serious.

Starting point is 01:19:41 about it. And many of these announcements that you, as, as Jensen disclosed, they're, they're, fundraising announcements. They're actually not actual projects yet. So, so they're trying to, let's say they have an equity already lined up, but the equity generally is like 10 to 15% of these projects. So you've got to go raise the other portion of it. And in the offshake side, outside of the hypers, there's not a lot of confidence the credit side has outside of the, those, those hypers. So the debt side of the world actually has been quite conservative on these and the private credit.

Starting point is 01:20:18 So that's why I never really thought, like, you know, the clinical bubble talk and bursting. We know we're really there if you go talk to lenders. Like, we're nowhere even close. The type of capital being deployed is actually been very conservative, has been aligned with contracts, has been associated with high paying, you know, top tier customers. We're not seeing, you know, the Jordy credit union in the middle. of, you know, SoCal doing, you know, B-300 loans. And what happens?

Starting point is 01:20:46 And I'll be like, you know. Yeah. We're working on it. Yeah. Like with the, so, so, so that's, that's where, if you look at the legal side, if you look at the power profiles, if you look at what's happening and the political nature of it, I don't think many of these projects actually scale to what they need to. But I do agree with Gavin that, like, when you actually do need to get serious about it,

Starting point is 01:21:07 because it's not like the world would be worse off with my. more power, more compute capacity. If everything, of all those things get cheaper, our entire life gets better. And just as it's cheaper today to get a banana that it was a hundred years ago, and that means there's more bananas. That means people consume more bananas. So the logic will still apply for power. Let's give it up for bananas. I'll give you a layup for that. I love banana. Great to see you, Aaron. Software is eating the world. Software is eating bananas. Thank you for. Thank you so much for coming on the show. We shouldn't have booked 15 minutes. He should have booked two hours

Starting point is 01:21:44 because it's always a fun chat. Thank you so much for taking the time. We'll talk to you soon. Great to see you. Merry Christmas. Merry Christmas to graphite.dev. Code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub, ship higher quality, software, faster. What's under the tree this Christmas? It's graphite.com. Dev, baby.

Starting point is 01:22:06 Put it in your... It's a great stocking stuffer. Up next, we have Matt Cowell. The co-founder of Draft Kings, he's a board member at Draft Kings. He's also a board member of Faze Media. And he's the founder of Hardscope, which launches today. Let's bring him in to the TBP and Ultradome. How are you doing, Matt? Great to meet you.

Starting point is 01:22:28 Thanks so much for taking the time. Hey, guys. How's it going today? It's going fantastic. Merry Christmas. Merry Christmas. Please, for those who don't know you already, I'd love to kick off since this is the first time on your show. with a little bit of your background, you have one of the more interesting backgrounds with

Starting point is 01:22:44 Draft Kings. How do you tell a story in, you know, in just a few minutes? Well, I had a couple of friends from some early corporate jobs in my career. You know, I came up through analytics, technology, and then over the years moved more into marketing. And, you know, I met some of, you know, my two partners, Jason and Paul, really, at those jobs. You know, Jason And that Capital One, we were early stage business analysts. And then went to a company called VistaPrint. That's where we learned direct marketing. And, you know, we all had this entrepreneurial bug

Starting point is 01:23:22 and we're really looking for the right opportunity to go and spin off and do something kind of in the startup world, which, you know, we had no experience doing. But, you know, we had that drive. So we looked at a million ideas and then Draft Kings kind of stumbled along. We just felt like there was a lot of people that liked predicting things in sports but didn't really have a great way to do it. So that was back in 2012. We launched the Daily Fantasy Sports Platform over the course of a few years grew that to over 10 million registered users and it became just kind of a big cultural phenomenon.

Starting point is 01:24:02 And then come 2017, that's really when sports betting started opening up in the U.S. So Draft Kings was in a really great position to extend our product. Launched a sports betting platform first in the U.S. outside of Nevada and became a market leader in that space. And then over the years, just kept developing out the product, went public in 2020. And, you know, it's been a really amazing ride. I mean, a growth story that, you know, I'm really proud of. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:24:35 Take me through. I'm sure there's a ton of questions that we can. kick around around prediction markets and sports betting and what's going on there. But first, take us through the launch today, take us through Hard Scope. How are you positioning that? Yeah, I had a 14-year run at Draft Kings that, you know, we've seen it all, the ups and downs and, you know, built a really amazing team over the years. I have, you know, the type of team at Draft Kings where if I don't come to work for a week,

Starting point is 01:25:05 things are amazing and fine. I'm telling you like the caliber, the people, the leadership there, the team has been built out just so well. And, you know, I'm a builder at heart. I like starting things. I like participating in industries that are disruptive, you know, that are in the middle of a lot of displacement change. And a couple years back, I worked with one of the original founders, a phase to buy the company off the public market and bring it back private. it. And it's kind of a space that I'm just super intrigued by the massive amount of disruption in media, moving from traditional forums into creator-led to community, this sort of

Starting point is 01:25:53 decentralized media through social channels. And I've also found it really intriguing how content discovery has changed so much, like short form clipping and, you know, the TikTok, the shorts. That's how people are really finding. in content these days and phase is really one of the best in the world at that so just kind of jumping in rebuilding the business side of that team

Starting point is 01:26:17 and kind of relaunching and bringing phase back to number one in creator media that was an initial focus and I decided to leave draft kings and transition out to do this full time to launch HeartScope which is

Starting point is 01:26:32 kind of the platform that phase operates on it's a talent and brand platform to access the creator economy at scale. And it's a space, I just think, is tremendously underserved and a really massive market opportunity. So, you know, I felt like it was the right time for me to go all in on that. And I'm really excited to be doing it. So what's the, like, walk me through how to actually use the product. If you're a brand, does it feel like just an autonomous marketplaces where brands are meeting creators?

Starting point is 01:27:06 Are there... Yeah, I guess a better question is like, there's probably been... How much handholding is going on? There's been maybe hundreds of attempts at building these sort of like brand creator marketplaces. A lot of them haven't. Some have turned into great businesses.

Starting point is 01:27:24 There's been... Well, we were just talking about... Little to know, like, venture... Last Friday. Shopmise is like sort of in the same space, correct? Yeah, a creator commerce tool. But this is more... advertising focus is that is that correct what's special about hard gop is the the impossible part is building the actual valuable content assets that you know brands want to be a part of and

Starting point is 01:27:52 reach the audience and that's what our team for talent does really well it's a full stack operating platform like you literally don't need any other resources we do in all in-house production socials, clipping, all the distribution side into commercialization like brand partnerships, e-commerce, access to capital and venture for initiatives, and the reputation really of phase as the number one creator collective in the world is the proof. I mean, that's a group that operates with this team on this capability set. And so Hardscope is really bringing that to new creator collectives and more verticals, really high potential talent and platforming them to really make the most of, you know,

Starting point is 01:28:40 the opportunity that they have, which is really unprecedented, like the level of power and control over the content, their community, and how to commercialize it that talent have today, it's a totally new age, really. And some creators have built out great teams, but most really have underrepresented teams in particularly the commercial side. You know, like, how do I take my great content and then maximize the opportunity as basically the CEO of a media business? And so, so, so yeah, let me, yeah, I think I was a little bit confused. So you're effectively like a back office for personality, personalities, content creators,

Starting point is 01:29:24 whatever you want to call them to help manage everything from ad, ad sales to, editing to clipping, content distribution, effectively social media management, like kind of, am I saying that correctly? Yeah, I mean, the landscape is laid in with middlemen, let's just say. Like the LA ecosystem is unbelievably brutal. There's middlemen for everything, and we're trying to provide really a full-stack solution where you don't need all of this noise to run a really successful business. You need a great business partner, a great team, and we've proven that with the

Starting point is 01:30:06 operations of Face Clan and how that's come back into, you know, prominence as the number one creator collective. I mean, you're talking about a group that had the top seven accounts on Twitch last month that's growing in an unprecedented rate, and people thought it was dead two years ago. So, like, we came in, relaunch the brand and totally turned that around. And that is the proof, you know, that's the proof of concept, really, that I, I think is attracting so much interest from other talent and other verticals. And, you know, you had asked about the brand side. That's more my background.

Starting point is 01:30:41 You know, I was a large media buyer at Draft Kings. We have, you know, as you've probably seen, a lot of advertising out there in the world, probably bought every channel you can think of. And the one channel that's hard for everyone is creator direct partnerships. Nobody does this well. And unless you are a peer player, specialist where your number one marketing strategy is through creator, you probably are doing this not so well right now. And traditional agencies who try to tack on things like YouTube buying

Starting point is 01:31:14 or other, you know, creator products tend to not do that very well at all. So we're seeing a lot of opportunity on the brand front to be almost like a new kind of agency of record, right, where we can focus just on creator-direct partnership, help bifurcate that channel out from a lot of people just lump it in with audio or other kind of traditional definitions of channels. The opportunity is really breaking out creator-direct into its own lane, and maybe it's 2 or 3% of media mix today, but the landscape is changing.

Starting point is 01:31:51 This channel might be 20, 30% of people's media mix in the future. the Unilever said it's over half of their media mix in the next year they're planning. So, like, a lot of companies are seeing, like, we are just not reaching Gen Z. Audiences that are diverse under 30 are just not watching traditional media, and this is the way to reach them. Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. How are you, like, financing hard scope? Do you have outside investors?

Starting point is 01:32:20 Was it, am I hearing it correctly? was you effectively took phase private and is it the same entity or I'm curious how like how you're planning to scale is this something that you want to just operate profitably uh indefinitely or is this you know something that uh you'd one one day want to you know take public again yeah look i mean I've been funding it I led the acquisition initially and the biggest reason was it was a kind of a mess. I mean, the public company of phase was in really rough shape and it needed a lot of work and putting in the two years to really rebuild the entire operation. And also to relaunch the brand of phase, have that, you know, in such a great place today. That was the upfront investment I viewed as

Starting point is 01:33:12 getting the ball rolling, kind of building the initial momentum. And I didn't think it made a lot of sense to, you know, involve a ton of people in that. I thought it was something we had to prove as a team here. So there's no noise in the company. There's no outside, you know, investors funding. I do think in this next stage now that we've launched as we scale up, there's a lot of interest I have and the team has in certain strategic partners. So I think including people that can be helpful to us. Absolutely. I mean, that's something that we're going to be looking to do in the next year. Makes sense. A little bit of a connection issue, by the way. Sorry, sorry if there's a lag. We have to ask you about your kind of personal views on the state of both traditional sports books, online sports books, gambling platforms, as well as prediction markets. It's absolutely bloodbath on the timeline right now. Everybody involved seems to hate each other, even the investors on every side of it. and it's an absolutely wild time right now.

Starting point is 01:34:23 How do you think this kind of category evolves over the next 12 to 24 months? I mean, I love it. This is one of the most competitive spaces in the world, right? Like you had mentioned with the crater economy, it's very competitive, all these different companies doing this or that. Like, great. I love that. Like, there is nothing better than having a super vibrant competitive marketplace for products, having to compete and win for customer engagement, for loyalty.

Starting point is 01:34:57 There's always some curveball in gaming, in gambling, in sports betting, whatever. Something new every year, some new competitor, some new kind of product variant. And I think the exchange, like how fast that's kind of come in since the election. and evolved into a sports product. You know, it's a fascinating thing, and I think it'll be very competitive. You know, Draft Kings obviously announced their launching in exchange.

Starting point is 01:35:28 Pretty much everybody, I think, in the sports betting space has some plan here. And then there's the Kalshi, Polymarket, you know, that rivalry. And we just look forward to competing. You know, I feel like Draft Kings has proven world class technology team. We deliver leading products. We have the best customer satisfaction in the market. We pride ourselves on that. So competitions are favorite. It's like some that

Starting point is 01:35:56 drives us. That makes sense. What percentage of content targeting men online do you think is entirely dependent on either gaming, ad revenue? It feels like there's huge swaths of the internet that honestly wouldn't really exist or creators who I'm curious if you have any kind of internal estimates even like creator media well yeah it just feels like I can think of a lot of soccer was on the show talking about like he was saying like there's a bubble in sports podcasting specifically because of all the sponsorships that come from sports books it's actually made it's made a lot of people in the creator economy be able to go full time because they've been able to have a lot of creators where you look at their business and you're like okay

Starting point is 01:36:46 90% of your revenue sure uh is from uh you know either yeah some type of you know online casinos or sports books etc yeah yeah it's such a valuable category that you know going back to hard scope and expanding beyond just phase clan which is a sort of mass market super mainstream media business you know going into verse Like sports really aggressively, you know, sports, food, like the content verticals that have a lot of really attractive partnerships is that's kind of the whole purpose here is to represent the creator economy across all of the verticals at scale for brands. And in sports, you can build out entire content properties and invest in them knowing that it's going to be supported through some kind of deal, some kind of partnership. it's one of the sure things. So I feel like as a company that builds assets that makes content from scratch,

Starting point is 01:37:47 puts together creator collectives from scratch and scales them. Like we can invent these things knowing that the sports landscape, it's so vibrant that there's going to be deals there. That makes a lot of sense. You said that you're working on food channels. And I think that that's one area of the creator economy. this has not been financialized yet, and that feels like fertile ground to me. Obviously, business channels. Don't threaten me with a good time. Exactly. Exactly. I don't know.

Starting point is 01:38:18 I don't know exactly how it works. It's like I'm going to bake this cake. We're going to do a blind taste test. Whoever likes this more, they win. But I'm sure there will be an attempt at financializing baking channels in the future. The Great British Bake Off. I mean, there's probably a prediction market on it already. Will I burn the cookies or not? Will you burn the cookies or not? That's a good question. I don't know. Anyway, thank you so much for coming on this show. show. This is a lot of fun. Congratulations on the launch, and we will talk to you soon. Have a great rest of you day. Merry Christmas. Hey, thanks for having me. Merry Christmas. And, you know, love to come on again in a year and give you some updates on all the great stuff we're up to.

Starting point is 01:38:53 That'd be fantastic. That'd be great. Anytime you have hot takes, too, on anything gaming or prediction markets related. I know it's a little tough since you're still on the draft king's board. You've got to keep that in mind. But we appreciate the insight. And congrats to the team on the launch. Thanks so much. All right, guys. We'll talk to you. soon. Cheers. Goodbye. And let me tell you about public.com investing for those to take it seriously. They got multi-asset investing. They're trusted by millions. Public.com. In a groundbreaking endeavor, the University of Utah Athletics is entering into what could be a $500 million equity partnership with Oatro Capital featuring the creation and shared ownership of a for-profit entity to operate athletics.

Starting point is 01:39:37 sources tell Yahoo Sports. So college football is going to the big leagues. They're going to the private equity leagues. Private equity is now going to own your local college football team. Oh, people absolutely hate this. The problem, I know, I hate it too, because why are they stopping with college football? Please, high school football, middle school, lower school, little league. Preschool.

Starting point is 01:40:04 Preschool. Preschool. Let's financialize that. Let's roll them up. We actually, this is happening. We talked about the hockey rinks that have been sold to private equity rolled up, and then you can't film your own children without paying for the... Somebody out there that really hates private equity just yesterday was saying,

Starting point is 01:40:21 you know, private equity has come for everything, but at least you can still go to a college football game. I don't know. And again, so how do we think they're going to, you know, so it sounds like they effectively sold for half a billion dollars. just sold. You remember it was Chicago, I think, sold all their streets or their parking meter. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Back in the day, it was like for like 75 years. Yeah. So, I mean, the big thing is that you got to get the money correct. You got to get the deal right.

Starting point is 01:40:49 Yeah. So, so they, they basically buy a college team. Yeah. You can say that it's some more sophisticated structure than that, but effectively that's what happened. Yeah. They'll have to immediately put draft kings or prediction market logos all over the helmet and all over the jersey. So that's probably, that's probably, that's probably like a $50 million new, new revenue line that the college could never do. Yeah. What else? They could. So the current mascot for the University of Utah is swoop, a red-tailed hawk. That's pretty cool. They could change as a draftee. Drafting off the air. Okay. So another thing they could, they could increase if you want season tickets to the game you're a student they could of course they're going to jack up

Starting point is 01:41:36 the prices they're probably going to make it like 20,000 dollars a year let me steal man this you're being too negative here 20,000 dollars a year and they're going to offer the private equity firm can bring a private credit partner into the mix and help finance the season tickets so you don't just graduate with student debt you actually graduate with a game day debt that will stay with you for decades ridiculous I mean there are so many reasonable ways to monetize a football team over, you know, the entire life of, of ownership for this farm. Also, they could sell the windshield. They could sell. Yes, yes. It's very funny to sell everything. But, uh, I mean, there is something that actually could be very good for academics at this

Starting point is 01:42:13 school because if you have $500 million in cash, you can go and build a new library, a new science lab. You can go build like actual academic buildings. Yes, you don't really need to, and you don't need to worry about like, okay, we got this donor. Somebody went to the University of Utah. They hit it big. They're billionaire. They want to donate $500 million, but you know what? They just like football, so they're going to build this new stadium. And you're like, but wait, wasn't the point of this whole thing, you know, unrestricted gifts? Wasn't it wasn't the point academics?

Starting point is 01:42:41 And that might not, that might be less of an issue now. So they might be able to fund more great academic activities and endeavors with this money. So I don't know. It's very funny to make fun of. It's very funny to riff on. But there are some potentially really good outcomes that could. happen. Anyway, we have our next guest in the Restream waiting room. We have Emil Michael, the Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering of the United States. Amil, good to see you.

Starting point is 01:43:12 Merry Christmas. How are you doing? Welcome to the show. I'm doing great. Thanks for having me. Thank you so much for taking the time. You look fantastic. Yeah, I would say thank you for wearing the suit. But unlike a lot of our guests, this is a daily driver, I'm sure. Yes, yes. Well, we're buying a high school football team today, so I had to dress up. Oh, nice. That would be a real treat. Well, you're not, is it fair to say that you're buying Gemini? Are you buying tokens?

Starting point is 01:43:40 Or is this one of those deals where the partnership is structured so that it's not really, you know, a major cash infusion for Google or it's not a burden on the taxpayer? It's a little bit more of just two great American institutions working together. How are you framing the deal? It's making to 3 million Department of War employees that includes military members and civilians, access to Google, Gemini, on our network, which is a private network, right? So you actually have to port it over. And they gave us a great deal for the first year. It's like 47 cents.

Starting point is 01:44:21 So they're very patriotic. I'm super excited to have that at the hands of everyone at the Department of War. It's never happened before. Yeah. Were there historical examples that you were pulling from? Because I imagine that service members have been Googling things for a long time. I've heard stories about, I mean, even during the war in the Middle East, the War on Terror, they were using Google Maps just to see satellite imagery.

Starting point is 01:44:49 And there are a whole host of reasons why a warfighter might want to use a Google product. Is this a new structure? Are you building on the shoulders of giants? Do you feel like when you came in there, the Department of War, had a good reference point for how to

Starting point is 01:45:05 work with a big tech company like Google? Or was it sort of new territory? How did you think about actually interfacing with Google? I mean, it's entirely new territory, right? Because you could get those apps off the app store or on a redbrow So to get AI in, there's a lot of sort of fear about AI, what it could do, and then you have to, remember, when you're doing a Google search, like, yeah, it kind of records where you're searching, but if you're putting stuff in AI, you don't want that to leak back into the model. So you have to architect it in a unique way. So it's kind of new territory. And we did it all in like three months.

Starting point is 01:45:41 That's amazing. Yeah, what did the team on the Google side look like? I mean, I imagine that they have a, you know, a large team just for working with the government. You mentioned a few, it was a few weeks of work. But what did they bring to bear to actually deliver this on their side? I mean, they had a ton of engineers because you've got to put it, you know, in our networks, which are not simple, right? And you have 3,000, 3 million people all over the world, all kinds of devices and so on. So they really brought the heat, right?

Starting point is 01:46:19 And they had a, you know, for today for lunch, they had a room or the, you know, war room, if you will. No pun intended. And as a way, to make sure that it launched correct. I mean, we got a lot of flack on Twitter today. So, yeah, I saw these comments, but it was very obvious if you used one brain cell that you needed to be on an actual approving. device on a military network if you wanted to access the service. So I didn't I didn't I didn't I didn't get the flack yeah well people want to give flack just to give flack right well I think some people wanted to they wanted to try it out themselves and it's like well if you want to do that

Starting point is 01:46:56 you can join become a service member yeah we put it we'll put a we put a link on the error message a few hours ago for job openings at Department of War if they want to join so they get access to Gemini from government we're open for business. Yeah, what else has, uh, have been the highlights of the year? As you look back on the year, uh, obviously confirmation took time, but then, uh, there was this big, uh, White House AI action plan. Uh, what are some key moments that you feel like, uh, have been maybe under discussed or under, didn't get enough appreciation at the time? I mean, and you know, there have been like three AI executive orders, which is a big deal, right? And Jensen's

Starting point is 01:47:40 said the other day that no other administration has ever done this much for the AI companies. So we're really championing like these four national champions, right? Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, and XAI, and giving them, like, we're talking about, you know, data centers on military land. We're talking about how do we get more power these companies? Because it's a race. And I think we're the first group in the last six months to really realize that we better get great. We better get better and stay great and ahead of everyone else on this because

Starting point is 01:48:15 it's really the next generation of tech. On the subject of data centers on military bases or land, what kind of comps have you looked at on that side? I know there's like a historically in weapons manufacturing, you have like gocos, which seem like, you know, they would provide some framework. But how have you thought about that? We haven't thought about that yet. We haven't broken ground yet or to the business models. We just said, the executive order said, we're going to do it. And then we got to figure out how do you prioritize who gets what, right? And we may reserve some of that data center capacity just for the government to use for our own purposes. But the point was to send a message that we're all in on AI companies, all in on the data center, power chip needs of these

Starting point is 01:49:02 companies in a way that the last administration we think was just trying to constrain everything with these orders to really have one company win and that's it so they can control sort of the outputs. We're not, we're going the other way. We're not going to have all the national champions. We're going to support them all the way. You know, David Sachs is out there making sure the American tech stacks and all other, you know, as many other countries as it can be. And that's a big deal, right? It's, you know, if anyone's going to be using AI, we want to be on our stack. Yeah. How do you think about the, the fact that all of the big tech companies seemed to be working with the United States government effectively for free.

Starting point is 01:49:40 47 cents, I've heard of deals of a dollar, as high as a dollar. But then I think back to, you know, a few decades ago where Microsoft had a deal to develop virtual reality headsets, augmented reality headsets for the U.S. government. And I think it was like a $10 billion deal. And I was really excited when that project went over to Anderl because it's a lot, you know, younger, faster-moving company. Now, I love Microsoft. I love them as a infrastructure provider.

Starting point is 01:50:06 and the fact that they have open AI's IP is amazing. There's a ton of great things that Microsoft does. But developing an AR headset, that always felt like it was going to be a rough go. It was such a big burden on the taxpayer at $10 billion. Much better to see it in a different land in a different company. How are you thinking about how the government is working with big tech, when to open up the pocketbook and write a billion dollar deal, or when to ask for, you know, $0.47. Yeah, I think, you know, we want these companies to be successful.

Starting point is 01:50:41 So we're going to pay the market rates eventually. It's just how do you get out out of the gate? And you get out of the gate by, like, giving 3 million people access and not having to worry about, like, a token count every day, right? And then that's exciting to them because now they get 3 million more customers, right? And they get to learn use cases and so on. So it kind of works for them. for us, but we need to pay them fair rates, but they're going to be commercial. Yeah. And I imagine that when a new technology comes up like, you know, Gemini, there's just a lot of service members that are just, you know, not, by no fault of their own, just like accidentally using it a little bit too cavalierly. And this is an initiative to actually refocus on security,

Starting point is 01:51:29 refocus on privacy, but can you take me through some of the, you know, I'm not particularly worried about Google having, you know, information from the American Warfighter, but I am worried about some of the international chatbots having access to the American warfighters' prompts. Can you take me through how the Department of War is thinking about LLMs like Deepseek, Ali Baba, these other AI models, are those just banned everywhere? you'd think about actually, you know, banning different, different, you know, vectors of attacks from a security perspective. Yeah. Well, I mean, first of all, we're going to train, you know, everyone is going to train if they want to use it for, like, you know, higher risk use cases, right?

Starting point is 01:52:16 But it's going to be on their devices just like the web browser is and they can still search Google. But when it comes to the foreign companies, like Deep Seek and Chinese, like in the bill that was just released by Congress, I think, yesterday, we're going to be. going to ban, you know, Deep Seek and all these foreign models from use by DOW members and contractors and anyone who touches it, because last thing we want is for those models to get data on how we're using AI, right? That would be a tragic mistake. So I think we're already there, but we're going to, it's going to be in law pretty soon. Yeah. What's your, what's your pitch to, uh, talent to come work with the Department of War? specifically in AI.

Starting point is 01:53:02 It's like the craziest talent or of our lifetimes, most likely. You know, you're trying to recruit people that can go get a, I don't know, anything from a million dollars a year to $100 million a year to a billion, even up to more. Literally a billion dollars. And so I imagine you have to have a, you know, pretty dialed in pitch to recruit people. And it's, and maybe that pitch is you're going to be able to work on, I mean, And the H200 news today says that, you know, we aren't the, you know, the H200 is not like

Starting point is 01:53:32 a F-35. It's not military technology yet, but I'm sure there's a pitch to work with you and your team on actually applied AI in a military context. But what do those, how do those conversations go? Yeah, so I call them recruiting Tuesdays, right? I spend all afternoon Tuesdays calling, dialing for dollars, emailing, referencing, interviewing, and my whole team does that. And, like, the pitches, you know, okay, you have to have some patriotic instinct, obviously.

Starting point is 01:54:04 But then maybe you're in between companies or you're just motivated. I mean, Elon has five companies and he still worked through the government for like seven months and brought a ton of those people who are motivated by the mission. So I'm trying to motivate people by, hey, this is the biggest technology deployment in the world. There is no bigger organization than Department of War. There's no more exquisite, crazy, interesting use cases. whether they're intelligence or fighting, you know, even corporate use cases, and you get to be a part of creating that.

Starting point is 01:54:33 It's never been done before. That's a pretty good pitch. And then when you leave the Department of War and you've done that, I think you get more valuable in the private sector, right? All these big AI companies now have big federal businesses. They all have sort of cooperating with, like, the government in different ways, and you have another notch on your belt of good stuff that you've done and been an innovator on, which is pretty rare in government.

Starting point is 01:54:57 like literally innovate while you're sitting in the job on something that's never been done before that's that big. Yeah. How do you how do you think about the the different levels of AI diffusion, AI integration, where AI can actually help the warfighter in the American context? I mean, a lot of people kind of watched the Palantir story evolve over the last few decades, this idea of analytics, just putting dots on a map sometimes, that being enough to identify where an enemy threat might be, for example. How do you think about integrating AI from the most mundane use cases of just speeding up a little bit of paperwork here and there to some of the bigger questions that will ultimately face the warfighters of today?

Starting point is 01:55:47 Yeah. I mean, imagine, like, the most simple use cases, just like any big an employee in any big organization, right? It's writing PowerPoints for you, writing job descriptions, like making spreadsheets, the basics. Then there's like the cool intelligence use cases. Imagine that we've got decades of satellite imagery. Decades of that or sensors that we've had or all kinds of things. And now you could, instead of one human analyst having to go like, I think I see that there, you can go back through 50 years train a model and say, look for things you've never seen

Starting point is 01:56:20 before, right? And then on war fighting, logistics, planning, you know, all kinds of simulations, if you want to simulate a war game and a really incredible way with all the data and all the stuff in there. So it's like pretty, pretty compelling, you know, and exquisite to mundane that you could do with this stuff when you deploy it the right way. Yeah. How do you think about the, I mean, this partnership with Google, it feels very much like giving, you know, the almost the consumer product of Gemini to everyone in the military. How are you thinking about larger projects that might require bringing together custom code, multiple systems, multiple pieces?

Starting point is 01:57:02 I mean, just as a consumer, we're running into things where Anthropic might be better for coding and one day and the nanobanhas better for this and chatypD is good for deep research. And if you want to build a business, we see a lot of startups pull three different models off the shelf. Is that something you're starting to look at as like a phase two of AI integration into the military? Yeah, I mean, so ideally we'll have all four models and all four of the newest versions, like all the time at every classification level.

Starting point is 01:57:34 Wow. And the reason you want to go up through the classification levels is so you can do more exquisite work, right? More complicated stuff. And then the reason you want all models is just what you said. If you're trying to write code, maybe you want to use Claude, if you're trying to do these other things. So as they compete, we want to benefit from it. And we've never had that here before. So it's trying to consumerize it, give choice, but then give more and more capabilities as you go up the chain of security classification.

Starting point is 01:58:02 Yeah. Who owns the data? Does the taxpayer own the data? Does the government on the day? I see a lot of stuff where it's like, oh, this company now owns you. Google's going to have your government data. Google's going to have the data. It seems like they might be storing the data in some points, but they don't have authority

Starting point is 01:58:20 over it. How do you frame to like the American who's maybe worried about government overreach or wants to understand where important critical military data is living? Who has control? Who has final say? Yeah. So taxpayers own the government. Government owns the data on behalf of the taxpayers.

Starting point is 01:58:39 Google does not own it. We control it. It doesn't leave our control. And that's why it was complicated to actually launch, right? Because, like, AI models are built so that they learn as you continue to query them, right? And to make it such that the model, we got the latest model, and it took in queries, but then the learnings from that don't go back into the general model is a form of making sure that the American taxpayer's data doesn't leak anywhere else and just used for the purpose of it was intended.

Starting point is 01:59:09 How many other organizations globally, you know, allies, things like that, need to take on, like, a project like this? Like, it feels like you clearly is very important to move quickly because if three million people can't use the latest AI models in a secure way, you know, that it's not super sustainable. They'll eventually, you know, go elsewhere to get these products. Do you think a lot of other kind of groups need to, you know, pursue a project like this? And are you guys trying to help create kind of a framework so others can benefit? Yeah, I mean, any of the – well, so we all know, and you guys know, any large organization needs to be using AI just for efficiency purposes, right? And just, you know, dollars and cents, if your competitors, you know, showing more profit in Q1 relative to you because they have too much overhead that it could be solved with AI, you're going to be in trouble. So when you talk about governmental organizations, should every government be using it in some degree?

Starting point is 02:00:10 Yeah. I mean, it's sort of like an economic imperative, but it's like a strength imperative to. It's sort of like the way I describe it to people is you're opening the human context window. So we're not replacing a warfighter, but allowing the warfighter to do more with the same amount of time, right? To analyze more intelligence, to do more scenario planning and all that. So I can't imagine any other organization like ours that wouldn't be thinking about this. But hopefully, I think we are setting the pace here. We're going to be the pace setter here for the U.S. government and for governments around the world.

Starting point is 02:00:44 I love it. Well, thank you for setting the pace. Thank you also for coming on the show today. This is fantastic to have you. And thank you for all the work that you're doing. Yes. On behalf of every citizen. Come back on anytime.

Starting point is 02:00:57 Anytime. All right. Thanks a lot, guys. Have a good one. Goodbye. Let me tell you about profound. Get your brand mentioned in chat, GPT, reach millions of consumers. who use AI to discover new products and brands.

Starting point is 02:01:10 Patrick Collison had a post that hit the timeline, rocked the timeline with 1.3 million views. He says, two conversations this weekend make me think that there's a vibe shift, a foot in Silicon Valley around what one should work on and what is worthwhile. Culturally, it feels like the moment is ripe for new frameworks. One, Davos expert morality is stale and discredited.

Starting point is 02:01:32 Hold up, John. Let's give it up for the experts. Joe Rogan, Andrew Mood. Lex Freedman, Tim Ferriss. They don't, they're not Davos guys. It's very possible the next Davos could just be a roundtable between Joe Rogan, Andrew Huberman. Yes. The real X. Chris Williams and Lex Friedman, we love that. That would be fantastic. It's also apparent that the quote, Just Be Super-based counter-enlightenment is not really an answer. Yes, woke went too far, but simply inverting it does not work. Good point. Effective altruism is longer the automatic default for smart people. They pushed it too far. They tried to save too many

Starting point is 02:02:11 shrimp from their farming fates. And now they are cooked. Sorry, shrimp. There is increasing skepticism of slot and slop machine dynamics. People don't want to work on a slot machine. They don't want to work on a slop machine. They want to work on something worthy and valuable. The question is, overall, what is worthy and valuable? It feels like this question is becoming more central. What do you think is worthy and valuable? I think it's worthy and valuable that OpenAI hired Slack CEO, Denise Dresser, as Chief Revenue Officer. It's a scoop. It's happening right now. What? What? OpenAI has hired Slack CEO, Denise Dresser. No what? That's, that really flipped me for a second because they have a CFO. They have a CEO of applications. I don't know where CRO fits.

Starting point is 02:03:06 it's in, but they got someone and that's very exciting. Is that gongworthy? I think it's very gongworthy. And in other news, we got some new SpaceX news from Bloomberg. The chat had it first. Thank you guys. We were in the middle of chatting with Emil. But SpaceX plans to go public at a $1.5 trillion valuation

Starting point is 02:03:29 up from the rumored $800 billion just last week. They plan to raise $30 billion, raising, I guess, far above $30 billion. Anyways, so this is reporting. SpaceX is moving ahead with plans for an IPO that would seek to raise significantly more than $30 billion in a transaction that would make it the biggest listing of all time. I'll hit this. The Elon-led company is targeting valuation of above $1.5 trillion for the entire company, which would leave SpaceX near the market value that Saudi. Ramco established during its record 2019 listing. The oil major raised 29 billion at the time. Space X's management and advisors are pursuing a listing as soon as mid to late 2026. The timing

Starting point is 02:04:18 of the IPO could change based on market conditions. Let's hope the window stays open, folks. We will do our best to hold it open. I hate when the IPO window is closed. But anyways, There's no comments from the SpaceX team, but they, junk bond analyst says, of course, congratulations on saying the biggest number. Always great when you can say the biggest number. Yeah. Do you think the timing here with Gavin going on about space data centers

Starting point is 02:04:50 is just a coincidence, or is this part of an allocator conspiracy? I still believe the pretext. Krimack take that Elon has run the A-B test on public companies. Tesla was miserable. SpaceX was great. And so you want to stay private as long as possible. There's no funding is not drying up for SpaceX by any means.

Starting point is 02:05:17 There's no real requirement to go public. There's no reason why he has to take that company public. I don't know why stuff is leaking right now. It might just be some sort of head fake. It doesn't seem critical to me. I don't know. Certainly doesn't seem critical that they go public. I would just say you have two major leaks

Starting point is 02:05:39 in the span of a week. It's just very different than the Open AI thing where Open AI, like, in order to win, they need to like marshal all this capital. They need to, you know, become GPU rich. They need the GPU prices to fall. They need energy to get cheaper. They need everyone to do everything.

Starting point is 02:05:56 They need everyone to get in line. Whereas SpaceX is very much like established, they have their supply chain set up. They've been in this business for 20 years. They're just like cooking and compounding, and I just don't see a need for them to, you know, marshal more capital or do anything really special. It does seem like there's something going on with like,

Starting point is 02:06:18 okay, we're talking about a second, third act here. But at the same time, it's not like Elon needs to take this company public. I don't know. Do you think he does? No, a lot of great companies don't need to go. public, but there's still a lot of reasons to go public. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 02:06:34 So what do you put the odds? It would certainly be exciting. And I think it would be a good, like, it would just be a, like, there's a lot of people that are, you know, into space and can't get, can't get any, like, allocation into us, into space generally, you know, they just can't, they can't participate in the economic up. AST mobile. That's it.

Starting point is 02:06:51 That's it. But you can't, you can't, you can't, yeah, Echo Star is the hold Cubs. I wonder, I wonder, this is, the market's closed now, but I wonder, echo star, which Jones, I think it's 10, 12 billion of SpaceX stock. Yeah, I wonder what that's doing. Up 6% today, but it's been fluctuating. So, I mean, back to the Patrick Collison. A lot at the close.

Starting point is 02:07:11 Back to the Patrick Collison post, like, what is worthy and what's valuable, like, I still honestly feel like SpaceX is one of the worthiest and most valuable missions. And in terms of just, it has no slot machine dynamic. It does not create slop. It is, I don't know, it seems above enlightenment, counter-alightenment, woke, super base. Like, yes, Elon runs it, but just as a company, just the idea of like, let's go to the moon, let's go to space. That should be apolitical.

Starting point is 02:07:42 It doesn't even have the Davos expert morality impact on the environment. It's just like one of the, it's one of the purest missions, in my opinion. And I feel like it, the reason I think there's, there's not. I'd like, there's something interesting about what Patrick is saying here where there is this highly worthy, highly valuable mission, but it's only, there's only 5,000 people that can really play in that game. Maybe like 10,000 or something. Like, it's just not, it's just not a career path in America. It's not like I'm going into real estate. I'm going into lawyer, legal. I'm going into medicine. I'm going into a big oil. You can't, you can't just say, I'm going into the orbital economy. I'm studying and I'm going to, you know, maybe I'll work at SpaceX, but there's a whole, there's a whole host and, like, you can go into tech. It's very, it's very accessible.

Starting point is 02:08:38 You can just, like, go and get a job in tech. It's very hard to do that in space and make it, make a career. I don't know. It's nowhere, it's nowhere near as easy as it is for tech. Because tech broadly is probably a thousand times bigger. You go into aerospace engineering and then you have a number, you have optionality. It's very hard. Try to land a job at a, at a true space.

Starting point is 02:08:58 company or you can so yes but what if you're not what if you're not what if you're not cut out to actually go do aerospace what if you're what if your actual skill set is marketing well you can go and be a marketer in tech you can't go and be a marketer in space it just doesn't happen they hire like two marketers okay there's no there's no why is that what I'm saying is that like is that like this question you're saying we need a federal backstop on marketing jobs in the or no no no I just don't see what the problem is no no no no no no what I'm saying is that there's a vibe shift because, like, so Patrick Carlson is asking the

Starting point is 02:09:33 question, what is worthy, what is valuable, what is a valuable mission? And I'm saying, I know what a valuable mission is, going to Mars, going to the moon. SpaceX is a valuable mission. But 99% of people can't participate in that. They can't make that their life's work because if they're not cut out to be aerospace engineers, aerospace designers, you know, if they're not, if that's not what they're great at, they just can't participate. Whereas when previously, in previous areas, like tech was organizing the world's information, don't be evil. It was just cool. Tech was the mission. Tech was the thing that was worthy and valuable. And so you could show up and say, I'm a finance guy. I got a job in tech. I'm a lawyer. I work in tech. I'm a marketer.

Starting point is 02:10:16 I work in tech. No matter what your actual skill set was, you could come to technology, the technology industry and have a career. And you can't do that in the orbital economy yet. You can't do that in space because there just aren't that many jobs. And so I think there is something that's worthy and valuable. It's just not able to absorb the actual demand for worthy and valuable career paths. And so for a lot of the marketers, for a lot of the lawyers, for a lot of the financiers, they wind up being forced to work in slot machine companies or slop machine companies because those are the ones that have the jobs. They have 10,000 jobs available. I don't know. That's my, that's sort of a hot take. Yeah, I think that's fair. I just would, I think you could

Starting point is 02:11:03 add, you could, you could also make the argument that many people are looking at jobs that say like a boom supersonic and they're choosing, they're just making the choice to work at the infinite slot machine company. That's fair. That's fair. Well, hopefully they'll read Patrick Collison's post. They'll say what's worthy and valuable. I got to work for Boom Supersonic. I got to work for Blake Scholl. Who's our next guest? So while we bring him in from the stream waiting room, let me tell you about getbezzle.com. Shop over $26,000 luxury watches, fully authenticated in-house by Bezels team of experts. We have Blake Shoal. Look at Blake Scholl. Wow. He is in a jet. Oh, yeah, he can fly. I forgot. You can fly. Right? Hang on, guys, I got to shut the engines down. This is crazy. What is going on here? Wow, look at this. My captain. It's been a complete rat race to try and put on the most insane performance during a TBPN interview.

Starting point is 02:11:59 I think this is going to take the cake. Blake, how are you doing? Introduce yourself. What's going on today? Hey, guys, it's good to see you. Thank you for having me. It's a big day at boom. This is a huge day at boom.

Starting point is 02:12:09 I'm so, I'm so happy. Look at this. Okay, where are we? Take us through this. So we are in the boom supersonic factory. This, of course, is the XB1 Aerospace. This is the airplane that broke the speed of sound in January. Wow.

Starting point is 02:12:23 The airplane that resulted in supersonic flight being legal again in the U.S. Amazing. So it's blown wide open. But, you know, a year ago, a year ago we were joking that it would be way easier to fund this company if we were an AI company. We were laughing. Yes. I didn't talk about that on the show.

Starting point is 02:12:43 That's right. Yes. It turns out we are. So the engine that we're being. building, we've been building for almost four years now to power our overture supersonic aeroliner makes the perfect ground power turbine for AI. And so that's today's news. We've got a product called superpower, 42 megawatts, natural gas. It's going into data centers. Crusoe is our launch customer. We're going to be generating tokens and quiet sonic booms.

Starting point is 02:13:11 That's amazing. That's amazing. So you guys want to see the factory? Absolutely. Give us a tour. Give us a tour. So one of the, one of the things, things that anybody building in hard tech learns quickly is that the legacy aerospace supply chain is just really screwed up. And so we are building this factory to go from raw materials in one side of the building and completed jet engines up the other side. So this is some of the raw material that's just come in. This is 17 pH hardened stainless steel. It's heat treated. This is what they call the hot stuff. And, you know, I don't, I find the gem this morning.

Starting point is 02:13:50 So we're going to do a little bit here. But this is going to turn into stage five stater veins that go inside the sentencing engine and the superpower gas turbine. So one of the most amazing, surprising things is the technology that is ideal for a supersonic passenger flight is actually the same thing you need to power a data center.

Starting point is 02:14:13 So this is Elon Pryor, near this a Colossus. Sam's doing the same thing. at Stargate, these large arrays of what are called error-derivative jet engines. And it's like the, they're like the blade servers of the energy world. I put a lot of them in array, and just the same way blade servers beat mainframes,

Starting point is 02:14:33 error-derivative turbines could beat mainframe gas turbines. So let's talk about how they work. This is a one-third scale model of our engine. It works on a complicated principle. Stuck, squeeze, bang, blow. All right, so let's break that down. Air comes in this way. This thing spins, super high RPM, compresses.

Starting point is 02:14:53 As you can see, the blades get smaller as you go in, getting the air down to about a 20-to-1 compression ratio. Burners in here, this can run on jet fuel, and also run on natural gas, just for the different fuel nozzle. And it goes out the back here. So the model you're looking at here is what powers the airplane. The model that powers AI is very similar. We basically take the fan off the front.

Starting point is 02:15:12 We lose these two turbine stages, and then we add what's called a free power turbine on the back, three stages that extract energy, spin a second shift, second shaft, and that powers a 14-1-Govet generator. Yeah. So, like I said, the vision here is we're going from raw materials in one side of the building,

Starting point is 02:15:29 completed engines at the other side. The facility we're standing in now is going to do the first 200 megawatts over the next about 18 months. That's pretty significant. And they're building a much larger factor that's to be able to do two gigawatts a year, and we're just going to scale from there.

Starting point is 02:15:43 Wow. So let's go inside the shop. Yeah. Yeah. And this is all on the back of, it was seen as controversial that Boom did not just white label another engine from another company, correct? And now it's sort of come back to benefit you. Is that their correct narrative? I think that's correct. I mean, people called us crazy to not outsource our engine. Frankly, I was a little bit nervous about it. I was just really good to go. It's the best decision we ever made. We're getting a fully custom engine for about a quarter of the development cost. It enables things like boomless crews, could not do boomless without our own engine. It enables a totally new passenger experience.

Starting point is 02:16:22 I haven't revealed it yet. And then I think the most important thing is we can now take that same engine core, put a power turbine on it, and get to profitability years faster than otherwise we could happen. This makes, basically, superpower makes not just electricity, it makes capital, and it makes the capital

Starting point is 02:16:39 that finances the capital-dispensive development of the overture passenger airliner. So let me walk you around the shop here. So this is basically the first unit of what we will copy paste into the facility that will do 2 gigawatts per year. What are Jedgians made up? Well, you've got big round things. And actually, if you look inside this machine here, this is called a turn mill. This machine weighs 65,000 pounds.

Starting point is 02:17:07 And spinning on it right now is a 4,000 pound donut of cast, and that's a nickel alloy. So this is a relatively hard alloy. This is going to be the turbine center exhaust frame. This is the first very large part that we're machining in-house. So big roundtangs. Then you've also got discs with blades all around them. That's called blisks.

Starting point is 02:17:31 These are some of the hardest to make parts. And so we have started what we call the Blisk Krieg. And this machine here is actually a more than five-axis mill. So this will hold a disk of forged titanium or forged powder metal super alloy. And then the disc will kind of rotate in and out like this while another cutter head comes down and basically sculpts each individual compressor blade out of metal. So ultimately we're going to have a whole bunch of these machines cracking out disks. Over here on the other side, this is part of an automated production line for compressor blades.

Starting point is 02:18:13 So to give you an example of this, this is the what's called the Stage 1 variable guide veins. This goes in the front part of the compressor section of the engine. These actually move as the engine changes power settings to have the optimal airflow. And this machine here starts with that bar stock, those kind of heavy beams I was showing you outside in the hangar floor, comes in on this feeder in one side, gets held in the machine. The cutter head comes over, cuts it away. another gripper comes over, grabs it, machines the back side,

Starting point is 02:18:46 a robotic arm comes and grabs it, puts it on the table, which starts with that choice. So this thing is ultimately going to be able to run 24-7 building engine parts. Quick questions about the factory. Where are we? Where is this factory?

Starting point is 02:18:57 And how big is it overall, square footage, roughly? Yeah, so this building is about 70,000 square feet. It is five minutes from our engineering HQ in South Denver. And we are, We're about to open early next year, another factory that is three times the size of this one. And that's what's going to be able to do two gigawatts a year.

Starting point is 02:19:19 Yeah. So what are the key challenges now? This feels hard, but maybe more straightforward than a supersonic commercial flight. Like what are you guys? Maybe less approvals. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And have like massive, massive demand. Yeah, what are kind of like the key challenges

Starting point is 02:19:42 that you and the team are looking out for or to be able to deliver on the timeline that you were talking about? Yeah, so after having done a boomless supersonic jet that was safety critical with a pilot on board, this feels like doing it on an easy mode. Literally, XB1 had 68,000 parts. 68,000 parts, and they're all safety critical.

Starting point is 02:20:00 The turbine has less than 2,000. And so there's going to be a lot of challenge and getting that to work, getting to work reliably, getting manufacturing up to scale. but after having done XB1, it feels like easy mode. We've got customers that are going to take as much as we can possibly make as fast as we can make it. Today we've got the capital to go do that.

Starting point is 02:20:20 How much capital? 300 million. Congratulations. Thank you. Thank you. After basically continuously fundraising for about a decade, I can't tell you how good it feels to have raised the round that lets us ship the revenue,

Starting point is 02:20:39 new product that then produces the cash to fund the rest of the stuff. So we're done fundraising. This is the last equity around we ever have to deal. Let's go. That's incredible. How was the first night's sleep after you close around? Did you? Did you? I imagine that was a pretty surreal moment, even though the, you know, you're still just getting started. I would say people are going to be like a natural concern is like, is this mean we're not getting, we're not to get the supersonic commercial aircraft you obviously i don't i don't i haven't lost any faith uh this feels like an intelligent uh move in order to enable that future basically by by the company time to get us to that point but uh what do you what do you have to say to uh anybody that might be

Starting point is 02:21:28 wavering yeah no this if you want superphetic passenger flight to exist you should be very very excited about this is that the single biggest challenges we had were how do we prove that we have a reliable engine, and where do we get all the money to do it? And running the sting on the ground proves the engine is reliable, and it literally prints the cash that we need to go develop the airplane. So I think this takes us from, you know, less than 50% chance of success to a far greater chance of success. I think overture supersonic flight is basically inevitable at this point.

Starting point is 02:21:58 And, you know, some people are saying, like, oh, you know, Blake got lost. I'm going to be, you know, I'm just going to become an energy guy. And it's like, guys, I didn't bust my ass for 10 years in order to, like, only make power turbines. I'm very excited with the power turbine business. America needs it. Like we're losing to China. We really need this. But this is absolutely our bridge to the even bigger opportunity to just reinvent all commercial aviation. It's awesome. Makes a lot of sense. From looking at the existing sort of like turbine landscape, a lot of them have supply chain challenges is part of Boom's edge that you guys are so used to making all of your own componentry

Starting point is 02:22:41 and parts that you basically effectively just need the raw materials and you can make stuff happen. How are you kind of avoiding maybe some of the other delays that legacy manufacturers are experiencing? Yeah. Well, I think you named it. Being able to build our own parts is huge. And the room I'm standing in here does not exist at GE, does not exist at Rolls-Royce. In this sort of Jack Welch era of everyone getting focused on return on net assets, by the way, what a random metric. They all sold off their supply chains and they can't make anything anymore.

Starting point is 02:23:18 And now we hire like disaffected engineers out of Tratt, out of GE, and they were like, holy Toledo, we can resolve in an hour what used to take us three weeks or three months to do at our last companies because they didn't have access to hardware. And if they ever wanted to change anything, it's really hard to change. That's actually one of the biggest innovations here is what we're doing is we're trying to make the world of atoms,

Starting point is 02:23:42 more like the world's bits, and you can iterate, you can evolve, you can change. And part of that is about taking software engineers, putting them on hardware engineering teams, and automating design workflow. So that means we can change digital designs really quickly when we learn. The other piece is how quickly you turn it apart. Like if we take a

Starting point is 02:24:00 turbine blade and we send it to a traditional supplier to be made, it's going to take six, maybe nine months for us to get that part back, going from digital design to hardware. What that means is if you're the engineer designing it and you get it wrong, like it's really bad. You've set the whole company back, six, nine months.

Starting point is 02:24:16 So now there's a lot of hand-wringing. Now there's analysis, paralysis. Now you've got to have layers of managers, double-checking everything. Now you're really slow. But if you build that part in house, you can actually turn a turbine blade in 24 hours with a 3D print process, heat, treat, praise, get it out into the engine. So what we can do is iterate really quickly.

Starting point is 02:24:35 So we're liberating engineers to move really fast because if they make a mistake, if they want to do an iteration, we can turn it in days or hours in the same building that they work in. That's super powerful. I see what you did there. That was good. It was accidental. I don't know. I love it.

Starting point is 02:24:55 I love it. Is there anything that you've been tracking on the regulation side that you think needs to change? We were talking about making boomless crews legal, removing speed limits or high-speed travel. If you were to wave a magic wand, is there anything that you'd change around energy production in America today to accelerate re-industrialization and everything? It's much bigger than energy production. We have a huge problem that I think not enough people are talking about, which was we have a permission-based approach to building, not a freedom to innovate approach to building.

Starting point is 02:25:34 So if we drove to work the way we build buildings or permit energy plants, you'd have to go file a plan. You have to list out exactly what turns you're going to take. You're going to promise that you're going to stop at every stop sign, so I'm not run through any red lights, always drive the speed limit. And then some bureaucrats are going to sign off on that, and then finally you can drive for work. It's insane.

Starting point is 02:25:54 That's the way we build a building. That's the way we build a power plant. I think we need to go from permission-based, which is such huge delays and huge costs to, hey, we're going to have a rule book. We're going to have commonplace rules. And then you can pledge to follow them. And if you break them, then you know,

Starting point is 02:26:13 then you get fined or you get in trouble. You get your permits taken away. But I think we have to really get rid of the entire concept of market pre-approvals if we want to move fast. It's really holding America up right now. It's the biggest problem with building anything physical. Yeah, yeah. Are you guys hiring it all right now?

Starting point is 02:26:30 We're hiring as fast as we can find great people. So in fact... I figured. In fact, I'll plug this if you'll let me. If you go to Boomshipersonic.com slash referral, and you send us somebody great. We're looking for great engineers, hardware, software, mechanical, propulsion, everything, technicians,

Starting point is 02:26:50 CNC machinists. It's hard to find enough great CNC machinist. Send us somebody. We will send you a free overture desktop model if we end up hiring that person. I love it. That's very cool. That's very cool.

Starting point is 02:27:02 Well, this has been the best hard tech tour we've ever gotten. We've had a number of people attempt what you just did. It always goes poorly. Yeah. There was no high stakes. It's very high stakes because anything can go wrong with like your Wi-Fi or anything. I'm very impressed. This is amazing.

Starting point is 02:27:19 And honestly, it was just like chilling. watching learning. This is really awesome. Normally have to ask way more questions to get information, but this was really informative. I'm so excited for you and the team put together a great group of investors. What a crazy story. I mean, I'm sure like the, you know, the job's not finished. The book has not been written, but I mean, you know, I've followed your career for a long time. And it's, it's, you're on an amazing run doing an amazing thing. So we appreciate you taking the time to come talk to us. Appreciate you're having me and making this so much fun. Thank you guys.

Starting point is 02:27:52 rest of your day. And Merry Christmas. Cheers to the whole team. Talk to you soon. Merry Christmas. Over and out. Goodbye. Eightsleep.com.

Starting point is 02:27:59 Exceptional sleep without exception. You close the $300 million round. You need to sleep on an eight sleep. Fall asleep faster. Sleep deeper. Wake up energized. If you're trying to build a 42 megawatt natural gas turbine while working on a supersonic jet, you definitely need a good night sleep.

Starting point is 02:28:18 I want my eight sleep to be powered by a natural gas turbine. I want to, just give me a mini boom turbine for my bedroom, please. Just a small one. It doesn't have to be full scale. Yeah. But just something small that I can really rely on. Yeah. Because.

Starting point is 02:28:36 Yeah, it is weird. The eight sleeps, you plug it into the wall, it's electric. You could get a diesel. A diesel version. You just fill it up with a little bit of diesel. And then you pull start at like a lawnmower. And just leave the window open. So there's some air change.

Starting point is 02:28:55 Yeah, I mean the exhaust needs to like kind of flow out of the house. Or you could wear a mask and just run a, like a... Well, that could be diesel powered too. Exactly. You have a diesel powered sleep apnea house. That's pulling air out from outside. That's fresh. Exactly. Exactly.

Starting point is 02:29:11 Yeah. But then you have a diesel motor running in. You can put your whole house on diesel. Your face is potentially kind of vibrating, but it can see it. Well, people are starting to talk some. trash about the old meta-superintelligence lab. Who? 0.005 seconds says it's now painfully obvious that meta-superintelligence lab went on a massive

Starting point is 02:29:35 hiring spree, promised the world, and delivered absolutely nothing. There has been a mass exodus. I feel like Alex Wang was a colossal mishire. When is Zuck going to clean house and admit his mistake? Let him cook. Let him cook. I was the first one. It was the first one to say that Meta vibes, like, should never have been released or at least advertised publicly.

Starting point is 02:30:01 I think it was definitively just not a good product. But let them cook. Let them cook. Yeah, again, the mistake is, like, people are going to judge the first thing that your new organization releases. It felt rushed. It looked bad in comparison to Sora. Uh, but, uh, we need to see the next version of Lama. I'm sure they'll call it something else.

Starting point is 02:30:28 Uh, but, uh, give them, give them more than, what should they actually give them more than six months? Like, Google has been able, Gemini, I feel like has been able to carve out a really unique position with nanobanana. And, and like, it went viral and this was Anjne's at, uh, in Drescent at the time, Archene Midhaz, like, take about like, the Empire Strikes Back. And I have found that, like, you know, having the best, having the best video model, is a reason for people to go to your app.

Starting point is 02:30:54 Having the best audio model, the best photo model, the best deep research product. Nano banana is what the rotissory chicken is to Costco. This is a great analogy. Great analogy. Right? It's a loss leader. It's like come and make a bunch of images.

Starting point is 02:31:10 We're going to lose a lot of money, but we're going to get you hooked on our bread and butter, our language model. And so, yeah, I mean, open AI has obviously developed just a great back-and-forth chat experience. chat experience. The voice mode is really dominant there. The deep research product is it's possible that Zuck wanted his true believers to be able to accumulate meta shares at around the one and a half trillion dollar mark because he wants to reward his most loyal soldiers. Potentially.

Starting point is 02:31:40 Stammie here says, Limitless is acquired by meta today and to a lovely journey with Rewind and Limitless. And Ryan Jones says Zuck is going on a generational run of Max, paranoid, missing mobile, really, really, really scared him because he just bought an AI wearable startup. He's still spending on the Metaverse. I think it's obvious that Meta's just going to keep shipping hardware. I think that this, the limitless acquisition looked like, you know, a soft landing for a team that had proven that they can ship products. Again, they did, I know they had customers because some of the customers were mad that Meta acquired them. And they were talking about it. So, yeah, I shouldn't be a surprise. I don't think you can, I think it's hard to, hard to argue

Starting point is 02:32:24 that meta should just ignore any forward-thinking product lines and just do. Yeah. Well, speaking of the metaverse, we should watch this video of a robot that was clearly being teleoperated, absolutely destroying a water model. It's one of the craziest videos ever seen. this is like so insane so the operator clearly takes up it feels like it should be AI or something so that Daniel says the hand coming down with enough force to slow to water bottle

Starting point is 02:32:57 which is not easy to do if you just have a water bottle and you're you can't just rip that thing open but the the robot the robot teleoperator takes the VR glasses off and then the robot just falls backwards see is this real imagine having one of these hanging out

Starting point is 02:33:14 comedic genius. Imagine having one of these hang out in your office and it's just running bits all the time. Like its whole goal, I have kind of class clown energy in the office.

Starting point is 02:33:24 But if I could outsource that to Optimus and just be able to focus more on my work and he's, optimist is just going around running, running bits. I mean,

Starting point is 02:33:32 that, you know what we have to do. We have to get one of these robots that, you know how so many of the robots are claiming like, we're going to do your dishes. We're going to do your dishes.

Starting point is 02:33:40 I just, I want to just have, okay, we're going to all have a nice glass of wine. We're going to put 50 different glasses, wine glasses of all slightly different shapes on the table and just tell the robot, hey, clean up the wine glasses. Just load them all in the dishwasher. Nothing's, I can barely do that.

Starting point is 02:33:58 I can barely do that without breaking. Oh, yeah, all the time I'm smashing these things. And you imagine one of these robots just completely decimating the... Sure, I'll unload the dishwasher, just in there. Oh, no, no, no, please. Allow me. Allow me to unload your finest crystal stemway. Allow me to unload your stemware. You discover an edge case where the robot thinks,

Starting point is 02:34:23 well, to unload the dishwasher, I should break every glass and use a vacuum and just vacuum it out way easier than just taking them all out at once. Oh, sorry, sir. Would you like me to polish your fine stemware? I'll polish it into dust. Polishes it into dust. Anyway, our next guest is in the Restream Waiting Room. First, let me tell you about adquick.com. Out of home advertising, made easy and measurable. Plan, buy, and measure out of home with precision.

Starting point is 02:34:50 We have Neveen Rao from Unconventional, CEO of Unconventional AI in the Restream waiting room. Neveen, how are you doing? Thank you. Thanks for having me. Let's jump right into an introduction on yourself, companies you built in the past, and then we'll get into unconventional. Yeah, so I was, the first thing I built in the AI space was, called Nirvana. It was actually the first AI chip company. It was back in 2014 before most people knew what machine learning was. Yeah, just a little too early. But you're back.

Starting point is 02:35:24 I think it was actually a decent timing, to be honest with you. But, you know, I think I sold too early, to be honest. The second company was actually moving more toward the software and algorithmic side called Mosaic ML. Sold that to Databricks back in 2023. And I went AI at Databricks up until just a couple of months ago where I left to start unconventional. Incredible. So, yeah, jump right into it, talk about, you know, the vision. I feel like you guys, the perfect amount of controversy yesterday because people were latching on to not a seed round at a $500 million valuation, but a $500 million of capital invested at the seed round. It was honestly perfect. You want a little bit of spice on the timeline to get

Starting point is 02:36:09 attention and I'm sure there's been, you know, a ton of inbound interests, both from the candidate side and future customers. Yeah, I mean, you know, obviously that was somewhat intentional. We wanted to have a big shocking moment. You know, but I think it's actually pretty rational when you think about the opportunity ahead of us. So what we're doing at unconventional is rethinking how a computer works. You know, the computers that we use today, the fundamental distractions have been around for nearly 80 years. And, you know, it's kind of weird to think about. industry, something being around for 80 years, but it really is true. And now we've come to the point where we've pushed that paradigm as far as we can push it. You know, fundamental constraints

Starting point is 02:36:50 around energy are now hitting us at the global level. Like, if we keep scaling AI like we're doing, I mean, I think AI is amazing. I use it all the time, and I think the rest of the world is going to do that, too. We can't get there. We're going to run out of energy to scale these things up because it requires very power-hungry chips. So really, we're saying, can we, rethink the paradigm actually from the circuit level up and build something that's vastly more efficient, like a thousand times more efficient than what we've been building. And focus only on AI. We don't need to do accounting software and artillery calculations and all the things that traditional computers do. We'll let that be in the realm of digital machines. But can we build

Starting point is 02:37:30 something that's much more efficient for the substrate of AI? And so the opportunity ahead of us, I think, is nearly infinite. And that's why evaluation actually can make some rational sense. So what does your supply chain look like or what do you think it will look like in the in the near future? Yeah, I mean, when we started this project, there were two fundamental constraints I put on it. One is that we have to solve the problem within five years because this problem is going to hit us in three or four years and we need to have a solution ready. Then at that point, when we have a solution, you can't have something. It's like, I've solved a science problem. Now what? We have to be able to manufacture it. So we have to have scalable manufacturing. So we

Starting point is 02:38:07 believe we can solve this problem in a big way within five years that actually leverages the silicon ecosystem so we do want to manufacture it on standard lithography techniques now interesting yeah some of the asml could potentially be a partner in the next five years like they're not off the table yeah tsmc we we're talking with already you know i was out in taiwan just a few weeks ago for this purpose and um you know it doesn't mean that's the be all end all what we're doing is really building a new set of abstractions like a computer is built on digital abstraction. Can we move away from that and actually move to something that is more amenable to using fundamental dynamics of the substrates? And if we can do that, we can actually open up the world to a whole new set of potential substrates. Silicon is one of them. And maybe there'll be more exotic things. I've talked to folks who are building 3D printed circuits and all kinds of crazy stuff. And so I think the world is going to be very rich in the next 20 years in terms of new capabilities. Right now we've got to leverage what we have. Yeah. I mean, in terms of leveraging what we have, I feel like there's been, you know, movement from, okay, NVIDIA GPUs are bust. Everyone's just doing that.

Starting point is 02:39:18 Then we got some serious movement this year from AMD stepping it up. We got TPU. Traneum's looking pretty good. There's like these A6 are doing well. There's a whole crop of A6 startups that are saying, hey, we're going to bake the transformer right on to the silicon. They're going with TSM. Can you help me understand how you are. thinking about, like, creating something that's higher performance, but still leaving enough, like, flexibility to be able to actually work with whatever the next algorithmic paradigm looks like. Yeah. I mean, one part of what we're doing is a very deep code design.

Starting point is 02:40:00 So we're not saying, here's a transformer and it's immutable. We're not looking at it like that. The way you define the neural network itself is something that we're going to change and actually link to the hardware. And if you look at biology, there is no difference between the definition of the neural network and the physical substrate. They're one and the same. So the dynamics, the physics of those neurons actually gives you the algorithmic richness that you have. So we want to move more than that direction. It's not this abstraction on a digital machine, which is built out of numerics.

Starting point is 02:40:29 All the machines that you highlighted just then, which all have a wonderful purpose, by the way, all work on the same fundamental abstraction. They all use bits to represent numbers, and those numbers represent weights that then are manipulated in some way to build a neural network. We're actually talking about building those sort of effective numerics on the physics,

Starting point is 02:40:52 on the fundamental properties. Do you have a view on, you know, we were reflecting on this Mark Benioff post earlier in the show. He was kind of making the argument that LLMs are going to commoditize, that, you know, it's like hard disks and you're going to be able to move them around. There's not a lot of value or not a lot of lock in at the, okay, I got this bag of weights layer.

Starting point is 02:41:12 And I'm wondering if you have a view on how the, you know, foundation model landscape will evolve over the next five years. Because I want to know what your customer mix looks like, but you can kind of tie that together however you like. Yeah, I mean, Transformers are something that works really well today. We're able to scale it up. we're able to prove out that we can build synthetic systems that learn. I think that was enormous in the last several years, right? And actually, not just that can learn, but can be useful. So now it's about, okay, well, we can define what useful is.

Starting point is 02:41:45 Now we have these quality metrics for what a token is. That actually has opened up a whole new world to me in a sense where I can say, well, as long as I can supply that quality, I don't really care if it's a transformer. I don't really care what it looks like. And if I can do so very cheaply and very fast, that's all I care. about. So now we're really getting to this almost pure play supply of intelligence. That's what we want. So now if that's the abstraction, it's not about a transformer. It's about intelligence and I can define that with some metrics. Okay, now I can supply that in new ways. And so that's the way we're

Starting point is 02:42:17 looking at it. Like, I'm not looking at the world today. I'm looking at the world in four or five years in terms of a product. Yeah, can, like, what do you, what do you, can you break down more specifically what you expect your, like, kind of first initial customer cohorts to look like? Yeah, I mean, the way we're going to see all of the stuff expressed is really much cheaper per token cost, like one $500 a cost per token or something like that. And I think our cohort is really, at first, we're going to go out for Data Center as the fundamental rollout. But anyone who's using intelligence for an application at that point, they're going to

Starting point is 02:42:59 actually have probably strict requirements on what the capabilities of the models are, what the token quality is defined as. So when we have that metric, we can build toward it. We can say, okay, well, GPT8 or whatever it is at that point, gives me this. And is there a way I can recapitulate that in the kind of neural network we're defining? And the answer should be yes. And so we will have kind of strict specs in a way to build toward in terms of what that intelligence token really means.

Starting point is 02:43:28 And so it's really our customer cohort will be anyone who's using AI as part of their application and we want to supply that faster, cheaper and eventually in a more ubiquitous way. I mean, personally, if I really want to look out there like 10 years, I think robotics are going to be huge and I think robotics require us to solve this problem

Starting point is 02:43:47 of bringing energy down drastically to actually have more processing on the bot itself. That's how we're really going to open up this world of autonomy. And so personally, I think that's where I'm really excited. maybe that's just the kid and me excited about seeing that future. But I think that's where we're going to go. Yeah, I mean, I know you talked a little bit about the size of the seed round, but can you help me understand a little bit more?

Starting point is 02:44:10 $475 million is a ton of money. Is there like a bill that you see yourself paying where you're like, yeah, I'm going to spend $200 million on this? Or is it more like you're just going to be operating at the level of like, okay, we're burning $100 million. a year on a lot of top engineers and AI scientists, and, like, it's just a big organization early, and you're just kind of jumping to growth stage company scale as fast as possible? Not really that.

Starting point is 02:44:42 So I don't anticipate the company becoming huge in terms of people, probably 80 to 100 people, a steady state for a while. But much like a Frontier Lab, like a Frontier Lab spends a bunch of money on GPUs to iterate. Like training GPT5, maybe 30 million bucks, but you guys. got to follow a bunch of dead ends, right? And you do that with GPU compute. Our version of that is actually building hardware. Okay. So we're going to be fabricating chips. We're going to be trying different things. It's very hard to model some of this stuff, actually numerically. And, you know, we're going to do our best to model it, scale up that modeling actually on

Starting point is 02:45:13 GPUs. But at the end of the day, you've got to build it, you've got to test it, and you got to see if the whole thing works end to end. And we're going to do that a whole bunch of times. Yeah. How are you planning to actually use existing Gen. I kind of the existing Gen.A.I. stack to accelerate your own development of an alternative to traditional GPUs. Yeah, actually, that's a great question. It's really interesting. As we start clicking into the tools for designing hardware, they're still pretty far behind. You know, automation of digital logic has been done to some degree as much like coding tools. But on the analog side, this is still relatively new. And we are seeing now companies,

Starting point is 02:45:57 that are saying, hey, I can explore the design space of different circuit architectures for you using AI. And, you know, we said, great. So we want to either work with them or buy them. I don't know, whatever it is. Whatever makes sense for us. But yeah, we are trying everything to use the latest techniques to accelerate our exploration of the space. That's the way we're looking at this is how fast can I iterate? How fast can I find working solutions? That's our main goal right now. Makes sense. What have you learned from racing that you've applied to company building? And what have you learned from company building that you apply to racing? Oh, boy.

Starting point is 02:46:34 I think racing, when you start getting into like truly competitive events, you start to see that every like 10th of a second matters. When you're coming into the pit lane, for instance, you have a pit lane speed limiter, right? So I don't think people even know this, but when you come in, you hit this pit lane speed limiter. And when you drop below the pit lane speed limit, you hit the throttle and it pegs it at the speed limit.

Starting point is 02:46:57 You basically want to optimize that so you don't even lose a 10th when you come into the pit lane. You basically hit the brakes at a certain point, slow down and are at this pit lane speed. You don't want to slow down ahead of time and kind of ease your way in. Every 10th of a second matters. And that may be even a 24-hour race. And I think that's true with the company. Like, don't waste time. Every moment matters.

Starting point is 02:47:17 You may make bad decisions. That's okay. Figure out how to back them out. Move as fast as you can. If you hired the wrong person, fix it. And so I think the main thing I learned is that time is your biggest thing. enemy always love it well we normally ring the gong for 475 million dollars but we should also ring the gong for 265 points in the Ferrari challenge there you go yes I'll take it

Starting point is 02:47:41 they're both massive accomplishments but we're big fans of the Ferrari challenge around here so it's a big deal for us thank you so much emsa is where it's at really that's okay oh cool cool yeah yeah we we were out in thermal uh a couple weeks ago and it was a first time for both of us on the track, and it was, it was life-changing. It was like a new, like, okay, this is the hobby. This is somebody that you've probably shared a track with here and there. Awesome. Anyways, congrats on the announcement and everything, and the whole team.

Starting point is 02:48:11 Sounds like an incredible place to go work right now. Yeah. I'm sure I can't wait to have you back on. And what a murderer's row. You got Andreessen, Lightspeed Sequoia, Lux, DCVC, Future Ventures, Jeff Bezos, Databricks, and many others. Uh, what a fantastic way to kick off a new business. Very cool. Congratulations.

Starting point is 02:48:31 Awesome. Thanks so much. Appreciate it. We'll talk to you soon. Cheers. Go bye. Uh, let me tell you about wander.com. Book of Wander with inspiring views.

Starting point is 02:48:41 Hotel Grated Many's Dreamy Beds, top tier cleaning and 24-7 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better folks. That's right. Our next guest is already in the Restream waiting room. We have the founder of Eon. Welcome to the stream. How are you doing? I'm doing great. Thank you very much for having me. I'm very excited to be here.

Starting point is 02:49:01 Thanks for very excited as well. We wanted to get you on last week. We were on the road. And yeah, very excited to chat. Thank you very much. Introduce yourself. Introduce the company. We'd love to get, you know, how you're positioning it. And then I want to go into the funding round and some of the implications of this. But kick it off with a little bit of an introduction for us. So sounds great. As always, I always start by saying my name is Sophia. I'm married to wonderful Julie and father to Rome, objectively, cutest baby ever born.

Starting point is 02:49:30 Wow, that's a great intro. I love it. These are the important stuff. Less important stuff. I started a few companies before. Actually, four companies, to be exact. Wow. Most recent one was a company called Cloud and Do,

Starting point is 02:49:42 which we sold to Amazon on January of 2019, grew the business to a billion-dollar business doing migration and disaster recovery to the cloud. Let's get it up for migration and disaster recovery in the cloud. Absolutely. It doesn't get enough credit. It does not get enough credit. That's right.

Starting point is 02:50:00 I agree. I'm actually this, I was saying this crazy guy who really love data, data regression, data protection. Yeah. We live this all so long.

Starting point is 02:50:10 And both me and my co-founders, and while we were there, it was so an opportunity that we just couldn't resist, all those companies really moving to the cloud, especially around COVID and later on. And all the incumbents in our space

Starting point is 02:50:23 were born on premises. So we decided to start. a company in cloud backup. Yeah. You could say cloud backup, isn't it sovereign like in 1981? Yeah. Well, we figure out that as companies

Starting point is 02:50:36 move to the cloud become very significant, they have a very big problem actually managing their data. Imagine the secondary storage. Backups like tapes. These are companies storing their most precious data

Starting point is 02:50:48 for a very long time, and they can't access that. So we started as a backup company. I said, I'm this crazy person starting a non-A- company in an AI world. But then you know what? It hit me.

Starting point is 02:51:01 AI is such a strong compelling event, which are strong tailwinds that we just had... I mean, look at the C-Ga-Nustern digital stocks. They're through the roof this year. It's crazy. Exactly. It makes sense because everyone's going to need to store a lot more data. Everyone's creating so much more data.

Starting point is 02:51:17 So much data is great all the time. And you always need the data. And I don't know who's going to win the computer wars. Yeah, yeah. Open AI, Anthropic. A data brick, snowflake, in any area, what they do know, no matter what's going to happen, data is going to be the enterprise mode. And we are here to help them unlock this data.

Starting point is 02:51:38 We're automating cloud backups, sounds boring, right? Making it into useful, accessible assets, data leaks. So you can backup all your data in a very seamless, easy way, but then you use it, for example, to train models. That's all the hype, right? and analytics, NBI. Wait, so no tapes? It's on drives? No tapes.

Starting point is 02:52:00 As it seems, we're software-only solution. Only in the cloud, cloud-borne. This is what we've been doing. Yeah. We're able to build us. On a public cloud or on your own cloud? Because I imagine that one of the benefits of backups and one of the key things that people want to buy

Starting point is 02:52:18 when they're backing up data is, hey, I'm already tied to AWS. I don't want everything on AWS. I want, I want security. In case AWS goes down, I want to back up somewhere else. How are you thinking about that? Perfect. And we've seen quite a few outages in the last few weeks, right? And what we're saying with democratizing your data, it's your data.

Starting point is 02:52:35 What is AWS, Azure and GCP, great clouds or other clouds, we're making sure you can extract the data, make it portable between clouds, making accessible, performance, browsable, and searchable. You can search and browse all of your data and all of your history immediately. and because we're building our own software stack, software only, it's not going to cost you a dime. It's actually cheaper than building it on your own or using existing cloud technologies to do that.

Starting point is 02:53:04 So we're trying to make sure that we give you an easy button as a customer to just enable the use of all of your data, making accessible to if you want to run Snowflake or Databricks or Redshift or BigQuery or anything that you want on your data, that's great. we are here to make sure that you're unable to do it on all of the data that you have and all of the data that you had in the past.

Starting point is 02:53:28 But how can you possibly be cheaper than the big hyperscalers, the big public clouds? I imagine that, you know, Microsoft, GCP, Azure, AWS, like they're buying so many CGA drive, so many Western digital drives. How can you possibly compete on price?

Starting point is 02:53:46 That's an unbelievable question. Actually, I don't want to just win on price. I just want to make it easy for you. So what we're doing, even though we're still in the cloud, using cloud building blocks, object storage, GCS, S3, Azure Blobs, et cetera. Got it. We're building in a very different way. Sure.

Starting point is 02:54:02 And actually building a more efficient, it's called a version of cloud snapshots. Got it. That purposely built for backup and data retrieval. Okay. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Take us through the news. What's the funding news? I want to ring the gong for a data storage company.

Starting point is 02:54:19 Thank you very much. I'm also very excited. So we raised 500 million dollars in total, $300 million just in this round, really excited, led by Elad Gil, who is not only an amazing investor, he's also an amazing human being. And we got...

Starting point is 02:54:36 What's it like being a fly on the wall when you and Alad get together and talk about data? Well, El Ad is simply unbelievable. You know, he's one of the most humphab. humble people I've met, and at the same time, brilliant, brilliant, and so well connected. I don't think I've ever seen an investor that everyone likes so much. And I have the privilege to choose amazing investor.

Starting point is 02:55:03 I have Sequoia and Lightspe and Greenox and Bond Capital and the likes of Omri Kaspie, who are just amazing, amazing investors. And Elad Gill is very unique. Actually, we got preempted by 16 VCs. and I so wanted it to be a lad really and when a lad when a lad wanted to I'm going to lead my round

Starting point is 02:55:28 I was in New York he flew from San Francisco he came to my office he basically wouldn't live until I signed and to be honest I really really want to do that because I got to know the person not just the investor in the last few months in a year he put a small chicken in a previous round and honestly we just fell in love

Starting point is 02:55:46 not just myself my other co-founders as well. So when we had the chance, we had to do it. And I'm really, really happy, excited about it. You wrote the book on high growth. I know, I know.

Starting point is 02:56:01 And definitely. Absolutely, absolutely. And I'm really thrilled. We have now a lot of capital in a time when we can now plan ahead. We don't need to think about the metro. We don't need to think whether everything's going to continue to be.

Starting point is 02:56:17 rainbows and unicorns, do we going to have a downturn soon? Who knows? But we know we can build a strong fundamental business that's going to be here for a long time. This is hilarious, but it's a great take. It's a great way to build your company

Starting point is 02:56:33 and your business so that you can take advantage of these tailwinds, but also survive the headwinds, and congratulations to you. That's great. This is what we need. Exactly. We're here for a long time.

Starting point is 02:56:45 Yeah. Forever. forever. Is this your, you want this to be, you've done four companies prior to this. You want this to be the last one. You just want to just, last one, last one, all the way to the IPO and beyond. Yes. That's my goal. Fantastic. Incredible. You have incredible energy. I'm excited to follow your journey and you're welcome on the show anytime. Thank you so much. Thank you very much. I'm really excited. I love your show. Amazing. Thank you very much. I'm going to get back and tune to that. Thank you. Thank you. We'll talk to you soon. Have a great rest of you.

Starting point is 02:57:16 day. Cheers. That is worthy and valuable. We were debating. What is worthy and valuable? That feels like a company. That's the worthy and valuable company of San Francisco. He's keeping...

Starting point is 02:57:28 That's what you need to do. I don't even... I'm glad he's keeping all of our data backed up. Yeah, yeah, it seems extremely valuable. He's that guy. Well, we have Gorkham from Fall in the stream waiting room with some massive news. He's back. He's back on the show.

Starting point is 02:57:46 You know him. You love him. He makes all of this possible. Every time you're on, I'm like, he's going to be back on. He's going to be back on. You guys, how you doing? On a tear. Merry Christmas. Merry Christmas. Thank you so much. Good to be back in the Temple of Technology. Yes. Yes. There was one more. What is the other one? The fortress. The fortress of finance. The fortress of finance. Yes. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Give us the news. What happened? Yeah. Today, we announced our 140. 40 million dollar series D It's led by Sequoia

Starting point is 02:58:20 And meaningful participation From Kleiner Perkins and Nvidia It's the Sequoia The Sequoia of venture capital firms We had an incredible year this year We have some of the biggest advertisers Retail platforms Yeah

Starting point is 02:58:36 Design and Product Duty apps and movie studios generating images and videos on the platform And we AXRRREVRVine in the whole year. So it was, this is our third fundraise of the year. We announced our series of year this year in the beginning.

Starting point is 02:58:55 You got one more? You're going for the four Pete, one a quarter. Come on, come on, we got two weeks. A couple, it's remarkable.

Starting point is 02:59:04 What's been, what's been the biggest driver of revenue growth? Has it been uptime, you know, being a one-stop shop? Like, what messaging has really resonated the most and driven the most growth for you this year.

Starting point is 02:59:19 Yeah. So beginning of this year, we thought we were going to ride the AI video wave for the whole year. That was accurate. It was an incredible year for AI video. But what was surprising to us is actually rise of image editing. Like image models existed a couple years ago. Like that's how we started our business. But image editing, one of the first good.

Starting point is 02:59:45 models came out around May, and now it's a bigger part of our business than AI video. That was surprising to us. So we thought we were going to ride a big wave, but another even bigger wave, you know, collided with it and our business group group with it. I mean, when you think if it's very, it's very common place now to like one shot a great image output, and it's so much harder to one shot or even get a great. video output you can get a decent video output so I feel like it makes sense everybody's making images all the time it's like it has it's like when you think about in the

Starting point is 03:00:26 workplace there's just so many different use cases even even you know for consumers so I think it makes sense and it really is just exciting because that's the image models feel like they're so good now everybody's so used to seeing it and getting kind of like faked out by an image now because you can't tell the different video you can still usually tell but it feels like maybe in a year from now it'll be the same situation where it's like i just don't know what's real i don't know what's what's fake it's it's all confusing 100% video video models are still very hard to work with still some really talented AI creative people create great content with it but it hasn't really reached mainstream i would say it it takes even more effort to create

Starting point is 03:01:10 an ad with a video if it's like high quality then actually shooting it your But what happened with image models is going to happen with video and the user experience of video models are going to get much, much better. And you'll have even more mainstream adoption of these models. I'm pretty sure of this. And that's what makes me really excited because we went so far. It's a lot of image models, a lot of image editing, just a glimpse of video models. And this is all going to get better and better. and it's going to reach complete mainstream.

Starting point is 03:01:45 All the studios, all the retailers are going to make use of this technology. How? Oh, sorry. Yeah, just what are you seeing? Like, how are you thinking about 2026 from a model progress standpoint? You know, Nano Banana was obviously, you know, massive leap. I'm expecting we'll see even more activity in 2026, but I'm sure you have somewhat of a preview just.

Starting point is 03:02:12 given your guys's position in the market. Yeah, exactly. So usually one of the frontier labs pushes the boundaries. In this case, it was Nana Banana twice this year. It was like their first release and now this very recent Nana Banana Pro release. But very quickly, either the open source community or labs from China, people catch up. There are a couple reasons for it, to be honest. Once they see there's demand for it, once people know exactly what to build for, it's usually easier for them to get motivated and catch up, but also some of the tricks, some of the research tricks leak, and people use them and train these models.

Starting point is 03:02:57 The model market for generative media is a lot more fragmented than LLMs. There's so much choice. There's so many models that are different and that are better at different things, that the, the best model keeps changing. Even Nano Banana was dethroned a couple times throughout the year. Right now, it's considered the best image editing model, but I don't know how long that's going to last. What are you excited for, in terms of capabilities for next year?

Starting point is 03:03:30 Do you have specific benchmarks that you're tracking or even like functionality? Like I've noticed, I have one that's the where's wall. test where I will ask you to generate a full wears Waldo and even Nanobanana Pro still can't quite do it. It'll either put Waldo right at the center or it'll make two Waldo's and those images in the children's book are really complicated. It's not just a portrait and there's maybe not enough training data on the internet, but that's one test that I've been tracking. Do you have your own internal benchmark or whatever you think is like next? The thing it can't do right now.

Starting point is 03:04:09 Yeah, I have some of my favorite prompts that I try with every single model, but I rely on our team. We have great creative people in the team. They spend all their living hours working on these models. They are usually ones coming up with very creative ways to utilize. One thing that changed with Nana Banana is you can actually feel the model has more world knowledge than other models, and that opens up other door. I don't know, have you seen people are now adding some web search and creating, like, newspaper articles on the fly, things like that,

Starting point is 03:04:48 that are very creative uses of these models. And on the video side, people really want more controllability. They want character consistency. They want scene-to-scene consistency. And some of the releases that happened recently, Kling, for example, is one of the better video models out there. They've announced some editing capabilities, which are pretty remarkable. And all of that is going to get easier to use.

Starting point is 03:05:17 And once people have more consistency with the scenes that are creating with video models, I think that's going to make a big difference. Yeah, I always see those videos of it's a little yachty walkout. That is character swapping. And it's always really obvious what's going on. It's rough around the edges. But it's still hilarious because it's a great meme. and I definitely would predict

Starting point is 03:05:38 2026 is the year that that that little yachty walkout just looks 100% real next fundraise announcement I can't wait yeah yeah yeah yeah we need to do that for you you need to get your body scan a little bit you know you've never asked this question

Starting point is 03:05:56 but you might know the answer you know why it's called nanobanana pro where do you have any idea what the origin is of the names So they had a codename Nana-Banana. Usually when they put these models into the benchmarking websites, they usually had a codename. Like there were blueberry was one code name, Red Panda was another. And this was Nana-Banana, and people recognized the model like that, and they kept it. That's the story I know.

Starting point is 03:06:26 I don't know if there's another version of the story. But I guess the other question is obviously it is a code name, but where does it? the codename come from. Google has a long history of using fruit, although so does opening eye with strawberry, but all the Android iterations were like ice creams and desserts for a long time. But the question is, yeah, is what's the nano doing there? Because I want the full banana.

Starting point is 03:06:55 Give me the, don't give me the nano banana. Give me the gigab banana. I want the gigab banana, the biggest, the XA banana. The mega banana. the biggest banana model. Don't give me the shrunken down Nano one. I want the, I want the gigabana. Yeah, I think it's using the smaller

Starting point is 03:07:12 Gemini model as the as the LLAMP. That's why it's nano, but again, but it's funny. It's funny to have fun with. Anyway, thank you so much for coming on the show. Congratulations in the massive news and thank you for supporting us all year long. And you got

Starting point is 03:07:28 if you 8X again next year, you got to 8X the number of fundraisers too. That put you at like Two fundraisers a month, two fundraisers a month, 24 for 2026. We'll see. That'd be great. But congratulations to the whole team, and we're very excited for you guys. Have a good one. Great to see you. Cheers. Bye. Well, we have our next guest already in the Restream waiting room.

Starting point is 03:07:52 We have Pedro from Brax, the founder and CEO of Brax, announcing a massive partnership. We're very excited to welcome him to the TBPN Ultrodome. welcome the show to see you Pedro how are you doing how's your day merry Christmas I'm great how are you guys thanks for having us we're great we're in the we're in the Christmas spirit we are in the Christmas spirit we got bells very very holiday themed holiday themed shows for the rest of the year yes but uh but it's great to it's great to meet and yeah and take us yeah please take us through the news today uh oddly I'm actually a fifth third customer so I want to I want to know how this

Starting point is 03:08:29 this applies to me yeah you get a In all serious, thanks for having me. So today we're announcing a pretty big partnership between Brax and Fifth Third Bank. It's a $5.6 billion commercial card partnerships where effectively, wow, massive. So good. I heard a big number. I had to tell. We love big numbers.

Starting point is 03:08:52 Fantastic. And we're really excited just because when you look into across all the US and we just see, you know, tens of thousands of businesses out there, there are still 98% of business that are still using legacy corporate cards. And there's so many, there's so much opportunity in just automating how these teams run their finances. And Fifth Third just has this massive distribution and trust. And of course, Brax has the financial services and the software and the AI that just helps these businesses automate so much of their manual work and better allocate capital. And they're really exciting part. Yes, sorry to interrupt. I'm curious when you guys started working on embedded products,

Starting point is 03:09:29 because if you go back to 2021 and 2022, I'm sure there was a bunch of companies that, or at least a few, that got created to go and pitch some of these same banks and say, hey, you're corporate, I don't know if people remember, anybody that remembers SVB, like, corporate cards back in the day. I had a few of those.

Starting point is 03:09:45 Their UI was truly insane. It was like, how is this Silicon Valley Bank? You had like a different login, too. It was crazy. It was truly the most heinous product experience of all time. And it was like, this is Silicon Valley Bank. We're supposed to be the tech. Come, not to talk, but, but yeah. To beat a dead horse there.

Starting point is 03:10:02 Yeah. At some point, you said like, hey, like, we'll go compete here as well. Yeah. Yeah. So for us, it's really been driven by, by a lot of just customer demand. So we saw, we started this with Navon and Zip, where they really saw a lot of the value in bringing financial services and card workflows into their software. Sure.

Starting point is 03:10:22 And we're really excited about it because it's just a one plus one equals five situation. Both products are coming better together. Yeah. And then as we thought about the rest of the U.S., and, you know, there's, you know, 8% of businesses are now, you know, accessible through his partnership, for example, in the U.S., which is a really exciting thing in the commercial space. And the really big thing is how do we make the bank's product mater really better? And when we bring the technology and, you know, what we've done on the card side, and especially the financial infrastructure that we build from scratch, like we don't run on Stripe issuing or Marquetta, we just build our own rails from the ground up that enables a partnership to actually take place. So it's how does it actually work? Is it fully white labeled or does somebody in First Third get kicked out?

Starting point is 03:11:04 No, no, no. It's actually a fully Brex branded card. And the reason is because Fifth Third wants to have someone that's actually responsible for delivering this great customer experience on the card and implementing the software and rolling that out to their customers. And what they do really well is the banking side, right? It's the lending side. Is the banking?

Starting point is 03:11:24 It's the relationships and, you know, the thousands of branches and just the thousands of distribution partners that they have on their side and the tens of thousands of the customers they serve are all effectively relying on that and already have that relationship and now they get a Brex card

Starting point is 03:11:39 which you're really excited. Yeah. Sorry, you mentioned you're not you're not using Stripe for what was it? Issuing. Issuing. Does Stripe or are there other fintechs that do play a role in

Starting point is 03:11:52 like your supply chain or are you like down at like an ACH layer? Like just like what what's kind of going on under the hood yeah so what we've done since uh 2018 on brex is we actually build our own financial infrastructure from scratch okay so we actually went straight to the metal master card and built everything from the ground up and because we've vertically integrated the whole thing sure this created this pretty big advantage uh on everything that requires like their metal capabilities on financial services so for example global right

Starting point is 03:12:22 we operate in over 200 countries today with local cards local issuance because for us it's just a of saying, hey, MasterCard, we're going to issue in Europe or Brazil or India or Mexico and just flipping a switch for them because we are our own issuer, we run our own stack. And then Fifth Third was another example where we said, Fifth Third wanted to issue a fifth third issued card. They wanted to be their name on the card. It has to be under their license on MasterCard and all of that. And for us, it's just effectively, you know, bringing in a new bank live, which, you know, we have a few banks on the back end and including Fifth Third, of course. So for us, it was sort of pegging back on this advantage that we've had over many years

Starting point is 03:12:59 by building our own rails from the ground up, which is really – How are you thinking about – we've had a bunch of different teams and companies on the show building, like, new Layer 1 blockchains for payments. They're touting, like, speed, default global, all these things. We've had a bunch of stable coin issuers and business. I'm sure in conversations that you have, you know, you're being pitched these companies to be an infrastructure provider. I'm sure your investors are like maybe asking you sometimes,

Starting point is 03:13:30 should there be a Brex stable? Who knows, right? I'm sure these questions are coming up. How do you think about kind of the layer one landscape and you're operating a global business today? And so I would, you know, your opinion on some of this stuff in terms of the real value of it, I feel like would carry a lot of weight. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:13:50 So the way we think about it is maybe a little bit different, which is we think, that first, like, stable coins and blockchain in general have a, you know, tremendous application, and we're really excited about a lot of the work there. We, you know, we announced support for stable coins this year when it comes to our banking product and you can pay the car to stable coins. We've done a lot of that. But when we can't, when it comes to global, right, and just supporting customers in a wide variety of countries, really the, the challenge there is the on-ramp and off-ramp, right? And specifically, you know, the Fiat last layer for, you know,

Starting point is 03:14:23 an employee to reimburse you in, you know, Indian rupees or Brazilian Reyes, and then for you to settle the card in that currency and do all that locally. And unfortunately, Stables don't help you that much on that last layer. And the whole actually a misconception about the way a global product works is a lot of the value comes from remaining in local currency because what you're trying to do is minimize FX, right? Even on Stables, like FX has a cost just intrinsic to it. Sure. And a lot of what we're trying to do is keep you entirely in rei. So your revenue in RIAs in Brazil are settling your expenses in Rai's or in euros or in GbP or whatever currency you're in. So a lot of the infrastructure we build is to enable this multi-currency and multi-entity operations versus having to do the effects and a lot of the benefits that they will typically bring to the table.

Starting point is 03:15:10 So our use case is a little bit different. I'm sure that's disappointing to people building global payments at L-1s. And they're like, wait, you're supposed to need this. I mean, we do use it internally for some stuff, but, you know, I would say the value prop for our customers is we stay in local currency as much as possible because it just minimize so much savings and effects, yeah. What are the other, like, keys to success? Obviously, you, you know, you have experience internationally, but you're like a YC company.

Starting point is 03:15:40 I think of Brex very much as like an American company. But then in terms of winning internationally, what does it take? What did the lessons been? And what are the interesting insights or what were some surprises that cropped up on the journey? Yeah. So I would say the biggest one is that when you go into like true global, like true enterprise, the amount of requirements and specifically on both the card and expense management site is unbelievable. So you have these rules, for example, local per diem's. So when you are in Europe, there's these rules that if you have a German employee traveling to London,

Starting point is 03:16:18 is one set of rules. If you have a London employee traveling to Germany, completely different set of rules. And then if they rent a car, there's different mileage requirements, and then all this information is something you have to be aware of. And, you know, of course, we use a lot of the car data to make that easier

Starting point is 03:16:31 and we can solve it automatically. But probably the biggest challenge overall is just building the core financial infrastructure because this is something that, you know, we're literally the only issue in the U.S. that actually had done this from scratch. And just the amount of time and energy that we dedicated into building these, you know,

Starting point is 03:16:48 core financial services infrastructure is pretty tremendous, but it gave us a pretty big advantage when it comes to these enterprise customers. And today we have maybe three or four years ago, I think we've had five or maybe 10 public companies in Brax, and now we have 250 and growing. So that's a good exciting thing. That's amazing. Awesome. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:17:06 Well, congrats to the whole team on the deal. Congrats to Art. Yes. And, uh, chief business officer, correct? CBO. CBO. CBO. He was coming in to defend, uh, Keith Rboy.

Starting point is 03:17:17 last week was talking some smack about the BD people of the world. Does Open AI have a chief business officer? Because they just got a CRO. They have a CFO and they have two CEOs. I think they're missing a CBO. It's an unrated title. You got a locked down art. He's going to get poached.

Starting point is 03:17:34 Arge Staken. Don't listen to that. Awesome. Well, yeah, congrats to the whole team. Congratulations. And great to have me on the show. Yeah. Thanks for having me.

Starting point is 03:17:44 I appreciate it. We'll see you soon. Have a good one. Merry Christmas. Goodbye. Thank you, Merry Christmas. The ho-ho-ho-ho really gets me every time. I've been thoroughly enjoying it.

Starting point is 03:17:55 I love the idea of country-specific per diems, because if I had a German employee, I would want them to know that they are not an American employee, and they are second-class citizen in this organization, and they will not be dining out on the company dime at a nice five-star restaurant. They will be eating sauerkraut in the gutter for $5. That's brutal.

Starting point is 03:18:22 The most American American, the most American American, John Coogan, everyone. Yes, yes. Well, speaking of travel to international countries, if you go to Saudi Arabia, you can now booze it up, I guess. You can drink alcohol. Saudi Arabia is loosening alcohol rules, letting non-Muslim foreign residents earning over $13,000, you can buy alcohol. So you have to check, you have to do a whole checklist. Daniel's line is great. He says, this is such a galaxy-brained idea.

Starting point is 03:18:51 It could only come from a mind totally disconnected from normal material reality. It's hilarious. It is, it is interesting. It's like, hey, if you want to do, you know, drugs, if you want to consume alcohol, that's fine, but you have to be putting up numbers. Yes, yes, exactly. You have to be putting up numbers, right? And so, you know, if you're underage. I think potentially cannabis should be like $10 million a year on your W-2.

Starting point is 03:19:14 I was about to say, but you know what happens then? So you have everyone in America, you know, you turn 17, 18, 19, you're not 21 yet. You get a fake ID to try and buy some booze. You're going to need a fake W2 as well. You're going to fake your income statement. And you're going to need to do all these crazy things where you have all these like circular deals. Bringing your your fake W2 to the corner liquor store just being, and just like looking through every line. In Saudi Arabia. So you're in Saudi Arabia. And let's say you're making. a thousand dollars a year USD or you know you're making 10,000 royals you need to go and set up a circular contract where you're a 17 year old somebody else is 17 I pay you 10,000 you pay me 10,000

Starting point is 03:19:57 and then we get our couple times exactly we do that a couple times then we're earning enough to go by alcohol you can go get drunk together that is crazy that is truly galaxy brained we're out galaxy braining them we're gonna we're gonna galaxy brain all the way

Starting point is 03:20:12 to the top we do have to hop on with Riyadh soon. Let's close out with anything else that's on the timeline. Jordy, why don't you take a pass? Let me know if there's anything that we mix, that we... Fluid stack, raising apparently 700 million out of a $7 billion dollar valuation. Okay. Built on Google Back leases for new AI data centers, according to Rohan Paul.

Starting point is 03:20:38 Fluid stack, a real player on the semi-analysis. what's it called? Cluster Max. Cluster Max. And so not surprising here. Interesting that potentially you've got Leopold looking to lead the financing. So dipping his toes into privates. Well, I mean, they have Cluster Max over at Semi Analysis. They have inference max.

Starting point is 03:21:06 Are they going to do looks max? Potentially. They could. It looks like, you know, looking at some of our officials that Looks like we might be developing a strategic looks-maxing reserve. I mean, there are lots of people that would comment on looks-maxing and try and rank like the hottest men in tech. I personally would only, I would only regard semi-analysis's opinion as credible on that,

Starting point is 03:21:28 on that issue specifically. It must come from them. Post here from Bucco, he says, Hawk Tan acquired VMware, had coffee chats with the employees where he made fun of them, inspired half the business. So a little excerpt here. Earlier last year, Broadcom CEO Hawk Tan decided to host what he likes to call a coffee chat

Starting point is 03:21:46 with employees of VMware, the software giant that Broadcom CEO had recently purchased for $84 billion. The company-wide meeting was Tan's effort to introduce himself and answer questions from those employees about life at the semiconductor firm. At the time, VMware's Palo Alto campus sprawled over 18 buildings and 100 acres of delicately pruned gardens,

Starting point is 03:22:05 an outdoor amphitheater, and a turtle pond. Employees enjoyed nice HR perks, including child care, marital counseling, and an annual $1,000 well-being allowance for anything from dumbbells to Xboxes. A thousand dollars on Xboxes? That's like one Xbox every three months. That's so many Xboxes.

Starting point is 03:22:24 You can actually only spend this on Xbox. When Tan opened the discussion up to questions, a VMware employee asked if Broadcom provided such benefits. Tan seemed surprised. Why would I do any of that? I'm not your dad. He replied according to three people. We need a trading card.

Starting point is 03:22:42 I'm not your dad. Over the next few months, Tan fired about half of VMware's 38,000 employees. That is wild. He also stripped down the campus, selling all but five of the buildings. At the remaining offices,

Starting point is 03:22:54 Tan had the espresso machines removed. Okay, well, that is a question because they need to stay caffeinated. I got to hold the line here. What are they doing? I mean, I'm okay removing espresso machines. Do you think they're doing white monsters instead? If they're doing white monsters,

Starting point is 03:23:07 then I approve of it. But if you're going to have a decaffinating workforce, that just makes no sense. That's just not elite performance. He says, the article says, somewhat against the odds the turtles were allowed to stay. So do you think he's putting

Starting point is 03:23:22 espresso in the turtle pond? I imagine he had like a massive broadsword and was above the turtle ready to let it all go. They're like, Hawk, no. I can't do it, and he drops the blade and it falls to the ground, clanks him, and he says,

Starting point is 03:23:38 you live to fight another day turtle you're too important here it's got to make in uh tPU completely different vibe from when pat gelsinger was getting a vmware tattoo on his arm or temporary tattoo at least showing his love for the company that he just bought while he was at intel uh hawk tan clearly cut from a different cloth but clearly also putting up big numbers broadcom's been on an absolute run lexas o'hanion says been worn in y'all ai everywhere dead internet real is increasingly scarce online and thus increasingly a valuable.

Starting point is 03:24:13 Wired article called AI Slop is ruining Reddit for everyone. This is my this has always been, there's such an incentive for companies and people to just like create narratives on Reddit because AI is training on Reddit and the natural end state is you know it's 99.9%

Starting point is 03:24:29 bots and just a handful of humans so stick to the group chats I guess yeah in other news Netflix has launched Best Guess Live, a new Netflix mobile game show

Starting point is 03:24:42 where guessing the right answer based on five clues could win you thousands. Dillon Aberscott on our team. Thousands in this economy? Come on. Let's get those. Oh, they're willing to spend $80 billion

Starting point is 03:24:55 to get $40 billion per Warner Brothers. They should give you some IEP. You should be able to win Porky Pig. I get Foghorn, Leghorn. Or some of the masculine films. I want the Stephen Seagall rights. I want the rights to hard to kill

Starting point is 03:25:10 for sure Dylan Albert Scott on our team says can I copy your homework yeah just change it up a bit so it doesn't look

Starting point is 03:25:16 obvious you copied of course he worked at you know a competitor to this or the precursor to this

Starting point is 03:25:24 he created game shows he created game shoes with HQ trivia which you should know Rune says a lot of people think CEOs are on coke or stimulants

Starting point is 03:25:31 because of how hyper they look in interviews but I think the unfortunate truth is a natural amount of energy is extremely unequally distributed.

Starting point is 03:25:39 I was going back, yeah, I was going back and forth on this one. Obviously, it's a subtweet of carp, but I, I think he's, I think he's just like that. I think he's just, I think he's just high energy. And I think that, so the carp clip looks crazy as a single clip. But I actually watched the full interview. And there is a flip on it, which is maybe more negative, which is like, that was a question he was squirming on. Like, that was an uncomfortable question. And I notice it on this show all the time. If we ask someone a question, and they're like not that happy that

Starting point is 03:26:16 we ask that question, you'll see on their body language, they'll cross their arms. And crossed arms is a, is like a well-established body language for like, I'm closing myself off. Versus like, if I'm hanging out here with you, I'm just having a good time. If I'm sitting up and Yeah. Yeah. And so there's a world where, where you're literally, they call it being in the hot seat. camera, they just needed a better camera tracking. Yeah, they call it being in the hot seat. And when you're in the hot seat, you're kind of bouncing around. And yes, it could look like you're on a lot of stimulants.

Starting point is 03:26:46 Maybe you're on some caffeine. Maybe you're a little wired. But also, maybe you're dealing with a serious interviewer, Sorkin, across from you, on a stage. There's nothing to help you at Deal Book. The crazy thing is you keep seeing people's legs all funny. And it's like, because you're just in a chair, there's no desk there. So there's nothing covering you up. So it's like you're very vulnerable.

Starting point is 03:27:09 There's this big wall. Has somebody done like a- Everyone's looking at you. And also, it's not just a private conversation where it's like you and Sorkin are just hanging out here, having a normal conversation. Like there's a couple people. All of our friends are here, right?

Starting point is 03:27:20 Imagine it's like all of your rivals are in the, all of your rivals are in. All your haters are watching online. And all your rivals are in the building, in the seats right there, looking at you, answer, tough questions. I don't know. It just feels like this is not that crazy of a reaction.

Starting point is 03:27:36 for a high-energy guy who's kind of quirky, who's in that position, and is asking, is answering some tough questions? I don't know. Well, Tyler, figure out how to use AI to run an analysis on every guest we've ever had to see who, and just rank their body language from most trustworthy to least trustworthy. Yeah. I did like Gabriel here. He says, he's quote-tweeting someone who's like, there's zero chance that these hyper-animated

Starting point is 03:28:03 CEOs are just naturally that way. kind of the counter to what I was just laying out as an argument. And Gabe says, uh, cocaine expert here, these CEOs do a lot of cocaine, feels like a very 2025 moment somehow. And I agree with that. I agree with that. Uh, it is a very weird, weird thing. Well, in less weird headlines, uh, we have some fantastic news from Lulu, who has raised a $40 million.

Starting point is 03:28:27 Give me the mallet. Give me the mallet. All right. You go for it. Too late. Too late. Congratulations to Lou. This photo.

Starting point is 03:28:35 goes hard. It's a good, it's a good photo. It's proper paparazzi. She got caught by the Papps. The Paps got her. This is a throwback photo from when she was working on the Microsoft Blizzard deal. I mean, the fact that she's a board member at Activision is just crazy at the time, a $80 billion company. You know, people talk about Lulu like she's some like, you know, small time PR advisor for startups, but it's like she is on the board of a $80 billion she also intentionally

Starting point is 03:29:07 flies under the radar yeah well we're blown up here now sorry sorry about it anyway at least it's at the end of the show Lisan Al-Gaibe says the Normies are waking up on TikTok

Starting point is 03:29:20 they're saying chat CPD is washed John says perplexity is goaded hard to say they're ranking them they're all over the place Claude, greater than Gemini, greater than... Never be washed. You don't want to be cooked either.

Starting point is 03:29:35 Yes, we've learned this. They'll be washed, cooked, or chopped. From our... If you're a language model that wants Gen Z adoption. From our Genzi employee who is currently both chopped and cooked. He's not here. We hope he gets... Not you.

Starting point is 03:29:50 The one who's sick. Who we hope gets better soon. But we didn't learn any lingo from you, Tyler. Bucco says, what people get wrong, Open AIs Code Red is bullish, not bearish. It's an admission. and they were overeating, getting beat, and needed to focus. That's what great teams do.

Starting point is 03:30:04 Now, here's the challenge. Code Reds are really hard. It's easy to say, yes, hard to say, not right now. All lies on how they execute Code Red. I'm skeptical. Overeating seems to be embedded in the culture. Same obviously likes to dabble in a lot of things. Every Code Red is followed by a Baja Blast.

Starting point is 03:30:21 That's right. I think the next model should be. Baja Blast. Go back to the crazy names that make no sense. Stop it with the 5.2 tomorrow. Wait, wasn't 5.2 just supposed to come out today? That was, if you looked at Polly Market, that's what it looked like. It's now moved to, I think, by December 13th.

Starting point is 03:30:39 It's like 90%. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyway. But also, this is a separate topic, but I need to put you in the truth zone. There actually are spots on the moon that are perpetually in sunlight. Oh, really? You figured out. The rims of certain craters.

Starting point is 03:30:51 Oh. The inside of them are always in darkness. The rims are sometimes... The rim on the crater is always in the sun. Yeah. So that's where we need the data center. Okay. Okay. Well, how much crater rim is there? Is there enough crater rim to actually build a lot of data centers?

Starting point is 03:31:07 If there's not, you could probably nuke the moon. Make more craters? Yeah. I don't know. I still have trouble visualizing this. Doing like the celestial body physics math in your head is very, very difficult. In other news, this person on X. Kino, Nazari says they got their hands on some North Korean cigarettes. They got them in a DPRK State-owned restaurant from a waitress who was from Pyongyang Basically impossible to find any background info on them online They taste and look 100%

Starting point is 03:31:42 What is that? Jouche I have no idea But I like the packaging The packaging goes pretty hard It feels It does But I can't support it

Starting point is 03:31:53 Because I don't support North Korea And this is a good place to end the show Sag Harbor Capital says if this niche Scandinavian brand doesn't ship my overcoat in the next 24 hours, I'm going to blow up the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. That's really funny.

Starting point is 03:32:10 He tags the brand too. He does wear? Oh, wait, Bergen-Bur. I need an overcoat. I was trying to just go around to York last week. Just my suit. And I was kind of cocky going into it.

Starting point is 03:32:22 I was like, oh, John, nice coat. We're going to be outside for the total of 20 seconds. Yeah, you were like, in succession, Kendall Roy doesn't need a coat because he's so rich, he's always inside. I didn't say that. I didn't say that. I think Dylan said that. Dylan said that. But I was like, yeah, like, we're not

Starting point is 03:32:38 that rich yet. Whatever's going on in succession. We went for a half mile walk, and I was devastated. We did. But it's nice when you're in a coat. It's fun to walk around New York City. Also, it wasn't that cold, but you were getting destroyed. We got to pull up last post of the day. Skook says the concept of getting sent to rehab by the Taliban because you and your cousins wanted to LARP as the Piki Blinders in Afghanistan. And the account here that says reportedly four people in the Harat province were detained and sent to rehab by the Taliban's virtue ministry for imitating characters from British crime series Peaky Blinders and parading around the city resembling the vintage gangsters, an act seen as violating local values. this it's i have no idea how to process if this is real at all

Starting point is 03:33:27 hope says rare taliban l this is crazy i mean they look they look fantastic they do look fantastic i feel like this would encourage potentially they could open up a tourism market for people kind of like the disneyland for peaky blinders enthusiasts such a weird phenomenon to happen here also like what is being sent to rehab look like in Afghanistan, they're just like... No more piqui... Is it like Alcoholics Anonymous?

Starting point is 03:33:55 You're like, first step, I am powerless to peeky blinders. I'm a peeky blinders impersonator. You have to come... You know, alcohol is anonymous. You have to say, I'm an alcoholic. You know, I'm a peeky blinders impersonator. And I am powerless. And I, you need to say the...

Starting point is 03:34:14 What is the Lord's Prayer? Something like that. Anyway. Anyways, thank you for being with us today, folks. we love you dearly and we will see you tomorrow we hope you have a fantastic evening goodbye cheers

TBPN Live - Ellison's Counter Offer, Chinese H200s, Data Centers in Space | Aaron Ginn, Matt Kalish, Emil Michael, Blake Scholl, Naveen Rao, Ofir Ehrlich, Gorkem Yurtseven, Pedro Franceschi

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