TBPN Live - Ferrari Goes Electric, The Return of Nonsense Metrics, 𝕏 Timeline Reactions | John Quinn, Martin Casado, Preston Zhou, Scott Stevenson, George Kurdin, Zachary Townsend

Episode Date: October 9, 2025

(01:20) - The Return of Nonsense Metrics (11:33) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (26:33) - John Quinn, founder of Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, discusses the firm's unique focus on litigation and arbitration, emphasizing the advantages of specializing solely in disputes work. He highlights the firm's reputation as the "most feared law firm," attributing it to their commitment to taking on challenging cases and achieving favorable outcomes. Quinn also addresses the impact of AI on the legal profession, noting its potential to streamline case resolution while anticipating an increase in litigation due to AI-related disputes. (57:07) - Martin Casado, a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz and co-founder of Nicira, discusses the impact of AI on software infrastructure, emphasizing the need to revamp networking, compute, and development tools to keep pace with AI advancements. He highlights the resilience of startups against cloud giants, noting that dedicated focus often leads to success despite competition from major players. Casado also addresses the strategic importance of reducing reliance on Chinese hardware in critical infrastructure, advocating for local capability development to enhance national security. (01:31:06) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (02:02:09) - Ferrari Takes on EVs (02:16:12) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (02:28:59) - Preston Zhou, co-founder of Relace, transitioned from a physics PhD program at Harvard to establish the company with Eitan Borgna, a machine learning PhD student from UChicago. They recently secured $23 million in funding to enhance AI agent infrastructure, focusing on auxiliary models that improve agent reliability. Their tools, such as the fast supply model and embedding and re-rank models, are already utilized by over 40 companies, including Lovable and Figma. (02:36:41) - Scott Stevenson, co-founder and CEO of Spellbook, an AI contract review tool for legal professionals, discusses the company's rapid growth, including a recent $50 million funding round led by Keith Rabois, and their mission to make contracts move at the speed of commerce. (02:44:18) - George Kurdin, founder of Monk.com, discusses how his company assists businesses in saving time and increasing revenue by streamlining invoice and collections processes, addressing common issues like ineffective emails and errors that contribute to payment delays. He highlights the evolving role of CFOs, noting a shift towards greater financial rigor and openness to experimentation, which has facilitated Monk.com's go-to-market strategy. Additionally, Kurdin emphasizes the integration of large language models into their workflow, leveraging advancements from industry leaders to enhance their services. (02:49:54) - Zachary Townsend, CEO and co-founder of Meanwhile, the world's first Bitcoin-denominated life insurance company, discusses how Meanwhile integrates Bitcoin into life insurance by accepting premiums and paying claims entirely in Bitcoin, offering a hedge against inflation and currency depreciation. He explains that their whole life insurance policies involve paying one Bitcoin annually for ten years, with a guaranteed payout of 1.5 Bitcoins, ensuring beneficiaries receive a fixed amount regardless of Bitcoin's market fluctuations. Townsend also highlights that Meanwhile operates like a traditional life insurance company, being regulated and licensed in Bermuda, and emphasizes their conservative investment strategies and robust risk management framework to mitigate risks associated with Bitcoin's volatility. (02:58:33) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.comFigma - https://figma.comVanta - https://vanta.comLinear - https://linear.appEight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpnWander - https://wander.com/tbpnPublic - https://public.comAdQuick - https://adquick.comBezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.comPolymarket - https://polymarket.comAttio - https://attio.com/tbpnFin - https://fin.ai/tbpnGraphite - https://graphite.devRestream - https://restream.ioProfound - https://tryprofound.comJulius AI - https://julius.aiturbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.comfal - https://fal.aiPrivy - https://www.privy.ioCognition - https://cognition.aiGemini - https://gemini.google.comFollow TBPN: https://TBPN.comhttps://x.com/tbpnhttps://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

You're watching TBPN. George's in front of the horse. Today is Thursday, October 9th, 2025. We are live from the TBPN Ultronome, the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the Capitol of Capital. Today, I want to tell you about ramp.com. Time is money, save both.

Easy use, corporate cards, bell payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. That's why the horse is wearing the yellow hat. Also, the show is made possible by re-stream. One live stream, 30-plus destinations. Multi-stream, reach your audience, wherever they are. Dylan Patel took to the timeline to say, He's going to be dropping something huge in 24 hours.

This was, what? This was 19 hours ago. We have five hours left to go. 4 p.m. Pacific on October 9th. He will drop something that will reshape how everyone thinks about chips, inference, and infrastructure. It's directly supported by Nvidia, AMD, Microsoft, Open AI, Together AI, CoreWeep, Neviess, High Torch, Super Micro, Crusoe, HPE, Tensorwave, VLLLLL. Who's who? S.G. Lang, et cetera.

If you are press, I went to this. I'm very excited for him to drop it. I got the whole briefing, and it is very cool, and I do think it will be huge. And it's in classic semi-analysis fashion, it is very rigorous and detailed, and I think will be very, very interesting to dig into. When it drops, in the meantime, I have something that's the opposite of rigorous. It's completely, it's the other side of the midwit curve. It's just complete slop analysis.

but I think it's a useful. It's a good thought exercise. Yes. So I said token adjusted EBITDA, of course, a nod to WeWorks, community adjusted EBITDA. To be clear, no one's doing this. This is something you should not do. You should not value AI companies as a multiple of the total amount of tokens they're generating. But as soon as I saw that open AI news, they're generating six billion tokens a minute.

They're worth $500 billion. I see $500. I see six. I start dividing those. I got to know what the valuation multiple is. How much am I paying if I'm buying a dollar of Open AI stock for a stream of tokens? Of course, this is nonsense analysis because tokens have various values, different growth to produce, different profit streams, different costs, exactly.

There's a whole bunch of things, a whole bunch of reasons why you shouldn't do this. But I thought it was interesting to do it anyway, because I like silly things. And so I think of this more as like, like, there's a lot of bubble talk. we aren't yet in the eyeballs phase of this.com boom, but if we start seeing this, yeah, if we start seeing this type. We say bubbles so much. We just call it bub talk. Bub talk, exactly.

But I wanted to give a little bit of history on the 1999 bubble and how valuations were processed then. It's pretty fascinating. So back in the late 1999, in the late 1990s, eyeballs became a hilarious but deeply important KPI for tech companies. It's a very funny name. But it was basically just audience size. Unique visitors, page views, time spent on site.

These were all non-financial, non-gap metrics. They were meant to service proxies for eventual earnings and value creations. Revenues were tiny and earnings were always negative. So eyeballs were the best metric that folks had to understand who was growing, at least relative to other companies. Imagine the dropout posts back then. Somebody sends around physical mail. They're like, I'm dropping it. out of college, I have 10 eyeballs. I raised $100,000. I mean, we see the charts now

fastest to $100 million in revenue. Obviously, that's a very good, very strong business metric. That assumes that you will be around for a while if you're generating a lot of revenue very quickly. Time to 102 is also very old news. Obviously, everyone's focused on time to a billion. A billion in right now. It was recorded, reported that cursor will be somewhere around there by the end of this year. Yeah. And so that's like, what, two years, maybe three from? was it 2022? They were technically any sphere before, but really you should start it as like the launch of cursor, the product probably. But they've been on a tear. But it's way different to look at the size of a business as if I'm buying a dollar of stock, it's tied to a stream of revenues, which could be very profitable, the versus just eyeballs. But this is, audience size has, you know, been around for decades, even in the 90s at that point in the marketing world. And so it was just kind of pulled over. And a lot of this came from Mary Meeker. She's now at Bond Capital.

She was the hot shot analyst of the day at Morgan Stanley. And this is what's interesting. So we think of eyeballs in the dot-com bubble. We think of it as a 1999 phenomenon. In 1996, she wrote, what's the value of an eyeball or an ear? Three years before the 99 bubble got crazy. You can read her whole Internet Trends report on Scribd, which is pretty cool. And then three years later, she was profiled in The New Yorker.

We actually read the whole profile on this show about a year ago. And that was a really interesting piece. And the name of the piece in the New Yorker was called The Woman in the Bubble. So the New Yorker, like the Bubble Talk was not, like, you think about the bubble talk right now on X, and it's like it's bubbling up really quickly. But like the New Yorker's not writing profiles on the AI bubble yet. They'll probably get there a few months, just like what we saw with French TV. Like the legacy media takes a little bit longer because they do. a lot more research to write a profile.

It just takes months to write a profile. Yeah, it's interesting how, I mean, social feeds just are perpetually months ahead of headlines. Exactly. Right? And so we're seeing every single day I see somebody outside of X or outside of teapot or the tech community on X calling it a, calling it a bubble saying, you know, when this thing blows up and you guys crash the global economy, like it's all going to be so obvious. Yeah.

just starting on the most bleeding edge. It's still not in the pages of the New Yorker yet. It was in 1999. The title of the article about Mary Meeker was the woman in the bubble. And this is what's extra interesting to me. It took 11 months more after that article for the stock market to actually peak. And so in that article, in that profile of her, of Mary Meeker, in the New Yorker, she's saying it's a bubble it's crazy i've never been seen anything like this in my career and she's kind of grappling with the fact that it's her job to analyze these dot com companies but everyone can tell even her she can tell that it's a bubble and so you're in this weird dynamic where people can can say we're in a bubble but they don't know exactly you can't stop it

because it's a it's animal spirits and it's a force greater than any one person so in 1999 eyeballs were highly valued let's get into some number the market was pricing traffic at around $700 per monthly unique visitor. So if you got a million unique visitors on your website, you could sell that company for $700 million. And I know people that did, and they're venture capitalists now, and they're retired, and they got extremely lucky by some concerns. They sold the top, basically, and they did very well. $700 per visitor. $700 per monthly unique visitor. And that's not even somebody that has an account.

Yeah. That's just somebody that visits. Chuses to go to the website. I mean, you can do the math for honest. It's probably around there. No, it's worth noting that we haven't gotten there yet at all. No, not at all. Now, to be fair, that's $700 per monthly user.

That analysis was heavily weighted by Yahoo, which was by far, like, the largest platform that was driving this metric. If you pull Yahoo out, you get a much lower number around 400 per unique visitor, but that's still a high. And then for M&A, for smaller companies, it's not like everyone is actually comping to the Yahoo number. It was more around, it was closer to $150 per monthly unique visitor. But still, you know, you get a million unique monthly visitors and you sell the company for $150 million in 1998. That's pretty good. Yeah, and it's worth noting how much harder it would have been to get a visitor back then. it's not like you could just run, if you were getting value,

if your business was being valued at just getting somebody to your site and they were putting a value on that, today you could just run traffic to it like crazy through all of, you know, search engines through social media, organic content, through TikTok. So it was much harder to get somebody to your site. I don't know. There were a lot of crazy, like there's a toolbar that's installed

that automatically routes traffic. Sure, I'm just saying it wasn't quite as programmatic. A lot of people would pay Yahoo for a higher ranking because it was a portal. not necessarily a search engine. But I'm just saying everybody didn't have a mobile device in their pocket. I agree. I agree.

Where now they're probably visiting an order of magnitude, you know, multiple orders of magnitude, more websites on a daily basis. Yeah, you're 100% right. If you apply this metric to Open AI, I had to. Open AI has 800 million weekly active users and is worth 500 billion. So that's $650 per. People that have created an account. For sure.

Not just a website. visitor. Wildly different. Way stronger audience. And that's still at $650 per eyeball. That's way lower than what the Yahoo number and the average number was in the dot-com bubble. And you could also use the estimated six billion estimated visits for Open AI and get $83 per visit if you're trying to get a little bit closer to the comp. So you're still off by an order of magnitude there. Again, these are all nonsense estimates. I did want to flip them around and go towards token generation, instead of a, like, if you thought about a dollar of open AI equity as buying a stream of token generation instead of a stream of discounted future cash flow, which you should

not do, you could estimate something like a 22x ratio between valuation dollars and tokens generated per minute. You could also flip this around and estimate that for $100 of equity, you're the owner of an annual stream of 2.3 million tokens that then need to be sold and eventually drive profit from. That doesn't seem that crazy to me. I don't know. A lot of it depends. 2.3 million tokens right now would sell for, what, is it, 10, 20 bucks or something? It's $10 per million tokens for the higher end. Somewhere around there, yeah. So, and of course, like, this is extremely silly because tokens are sold for a variety of prices. Token volumes are growing exponentially. Token generation cost is falling. This is funny math,

but I like funny things. And so I hope this doesn't show, the most important thing is that I hope this doesn't show up in sell side analysis. And also, I also hope that I don't hear whatever the equipment. That said, there's a founder that I saw posting in the last 24 hours that was trying to get people to focus on site visits, which I don't think is.

And I'm not going to name the person, but, but again, sophisticated investors today, or even not so sophisticated investors today are not going to put a lot of value on just pure site visits. Yeah. Well, before we move on, let me tell you about Privy,

wallet infrastructure for every bank. 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. In other data point about the incredible growth of these properties,

Bill Peebles, who's coming on the show tomorrow, from OpenAI, said, SORA hit 1 million app downloads in less than five days, even faster than ChachypT did, despite the invite flow and only targeting North America. Team working hard to keep up with surging growth, more features and fixes to over moderation. It's worth noting, so if you look at the charts on the app store, in the top free apps, you have Sora, Chachapit, Gemini, T, dating, threads, and McDonald's. McDonald's. And the top paid apps are Shadow Rocket. Hot schedules, Anki Mobile Flashcards, Procreate Pocket, tonal energy tuner, and auto sleep, track sleep.

Wow. I feel like the paid app rankings. Six apps you've never heard of. Yep. And then again, it's still worth noting T dating, just still in the top five is actually insane. I see them as like wildly different markets. I almost see them as the free apps are venture-backed, hyper-scaler, multi-billion-dollar, multi-trillion dollar, multi-trillion dollar company efforts. And the paid apps are much more like lifestyle businesses.

They're probably generating cash flow. I feel like all of those founders, they might be part of a roll-up or something, but they're thinking about it in much more financial terms than just go operate in some winner-take-all market. Seems like there's alpha right now being a venture-back business and just making a paid app. Just gets to the charge.

It just seems way easier, 10 times easier to. I wonder how cheap you can make your app. Can you make it a dollar? Can you make it one cent? $2.99, I think, is what the, A few of these are. Anki Mobile must be printing. Their app is $25, and it's top three paid apps in the world.

If you're looking for an app that you can get started for free with, get Figma. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. Greg Brockman was talking about Move 37. This is the big question in AI. When will we see a Lisa Dahl Move 37, a truly novel strategy in Go, that deep mind was able to achieve. When will we see that in text? When will we see that in image? When will we see that in scientific research done by LLMs? And Greg Brockman, I was on a podcast and said on Move 37, I do think next year we will have some incredible models. The milestone I am most excited about is having models that can solve hard problems. And the analogy that I like to make is think back to AlphaGo. You know, Move 37, that changes people's understanding of the game. Imagine that in coding. Imagine that. In coding. Imagine that in material science. Imagine that in medicine. Having real breakthroughs that are either potentially

the AI by itself or the AI assisted with top humans, I think we'll start seeing that. And so we've seen a few examples of now, you know, top tier mathematicians kind of going to GPT5 and saying that there's breakthroughs. Tyler, what's your read on how close we are to a Move 37 like breakthrough in a non, you know, perfectly simulated environment, like, go. Yeah, I mean, it's hard to say. I think first, what we'll see before we see, like, completely novel breakthroughs is just, like, being more helpful to the top people. So, like, you saw Scott Aronson talking about this a couple weeks ago.

He said, GPT5, like, helped him get past some roadblock. He said, you know, he would have figured it out if he spent another hour or two, or maybe that's one of his grad students, but it's just, like, help speed him up. So it's always hard to figure out, especially with these novel breakthroughs, because people want to, like, take credit for them, right? If you're going to, if it's something that's worth a Nobel Prize, someone is going to want to, like, take credit. So they might try to, like, hide the impact of the AI. Yeah, maybe. So I think it's hard to see, hard to figure out the exact, like, attribution that you can do to LLMs.

Yeah, yeah. It's interesting that he's kind of not drawing a super clear line between AI by itself versus AI assisted. with top humans, because you have to imagine that a vast majority of modern Nobel prizes are computer-aided, just in the sense that the lab notebook was digital and the pipetting machine was automatic and, like, anything that you're doing to win a Nobel Prize, you're going to be leveraging computers now just to speed up your workflow. That's very different than just prompt. I did get a... Figure out a novel science. I got a lunch with a physical professor right after the GPT-5 launch and he was able to one-shot a problem that he felt

he estimated would have taken him three months to complete if he was just doing it yourself which yeah yeah yeah like that's interesting it's just it's not move 37 because move 37 was something that Lisa doll felt that he would never have come up with not in three months it was not something that was even on his radar totally so I'm not putting it the same bucket, and neither was he, but it was, again, it was, it wasn't doing anything especially novel. It was just doing a massive amount of work in, you know, 20 minutes. Yeah, but the impact is still massive. Like, even if you're just like, okay, we're going to speed up the level of scientific discovery by 2%, like that's just massive. So we don't necessarily

need Move 37 to justify all the work that's going into AI. I'd be super excited about AI. like it's fine if it's just if it's if for a long long time it's just an assistant because why not why not speed things up yeah anyway if you want to speed up your development workflow head over to cognition they're the makers of devon devon is the AI software engineer crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team spike is sharing there's nothing happening in america besides AI and there's an article that says without data centers GDP growth was 0.1% in the first half of 2025 harvard economist says, that is brutal and not super surprising. At least we're able to admit that here that AI CAPEX is driving GDP growth. And there's, again, that just massive disconnect

between the real economy and our little bubble. Yeah, I wonder, I would love to know more about breaking down how they're counting, like, data centers in this GDP growth number. Is it specifically, like, the data center construction? Is it chip production? Is it energy production? Is, are any of the, like, revenue streams from the foundation models actually moving GDP at this point? It seems like maybe not.

I don't know. This does seem like a higher level analysis. But certainly, I don't know. know it'll be interesting to see um well ludwig says uh had a had a great uh post that we got a chuckle out of this morning he said wearing my tbpn jacket and thinking cap from anthropic look at my open a i coin i'm such a good boy did you know i got an open a i coin it's because i gave them lots of money anyways i'm a 15 year old dropout and i'm building the first one billion dollar evaluation evaluation solo company in the world

Evaluation. Anyways, having a lot of fun here. The anthropic cap and TBPN jacket combo is pretty on the nose. Ludwig is a master of the WoJack. He really is. This reply to you. It's remarkable. Not like the rest, part one.

Where did you find that yellow token? Where did you find that jacket? Thinking cap. The cap with the helicopter wheel on top is underutilized. Yeah, underutilized. We don't know how to make it. make these hats in America. Yeah, that was kind of the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the most iconic tell of, like, the, I don't know, 2005 nerd is very, uh, I don't know, just kind of like, uh, you're hanging out on some sort of corporate campus, like a Google, it's multi-colored, it's very, it's very sophomoric. No one's brought that back

and reappropriated it. So maybe someone should. Maybe someone should make it, make it trendy. Yep. The spinning wheel cap. Well, in other news, Francois Chalet is very impressed by the new tiny recursive model from Samsung, a tiny 7 million parameter model, just beat deepseek R1, Gemini 2.5 Pro, and 03 Mini at reasoning on both ARG. AGI 1 and ARC AGI 2, and the model is 10,000. I think it's ARC AGI 1. Oh, okay, okay. I was like I'm not familiar with that.

Yeah, it is odd because I felt like at the end of this, it looked very AI generated because this isn't just scaling down. It's a completely different, more deliberate way of solving problems. So it feels like AI generated text, but the typo there is a little bit odd. But it's cool to see Samsung getting in the game here. Yeah, it is unexpected. I feel like a lot of the labs are, are pretty excited about Arc AGI.

Obviously, XAI did very well with GROC. And it seems like the level of respect for performance on Arc AGI is pretty high right now. Tyler had a chance. Are you still at the top of the leaderboard or have you been unseated on Arc AGI? If you're just tuning in for the first time, Arch AGI is a benchmark for AI systems. But we put Tyler on the task and he was able to defeat. All of the systems, actually. One of the top humans.

And I think he was in the top 10 at the time, but he probably should have fallen at this point because so many people had done. Liquidity says Prime might need to rebrand to subprime. Apparently in 2020, they sold $1.3 billion in product. It's on pace to do only $300 million in 2025. I don't know how that's possible. Does this happen? I mean, I do know, so what Prime did, which was genius,

because they created a sports drink. And then they also created an energy drink. They look exactly the same. And so I think that children were buying the energy drink. Their parents think they're just buying like a Gatorade alternative. And meanwhile, the kid is getting ramped up on hundreds of milligrams of caffeine, which, I don't know. Back in my day when I was a kid, my parents were like, don't do caffeine.

And pretty much abide by it until I was probably, you know, 18 and started. Yeah. I didn't really have caffeine until I was in college, but I remember being maybe a freshman or a sophomore in high school and a friend's older brother had access to Red Bull and was talking about the experience of drinking Red Bull like it was hard drugs. It was remarkable. But yeah, I don't know. I mean, it's still $300 million is more than respectable. Insane. But I've never seen a brand go. I don't as we should actually. Actually, look at the history. Brands going to north of a billion dollars in sales and then retracing down to this level. I mean, I worked in consumer package goods for a long time.

And with my first company, like, it was a rough go. But the pattern of that rough go was very fast revenue ramp and then plateauing. S-curve. It was not a falling off the cliff. Because once you have a customer on board and they're subscribed. Well, it's also about distribution. So I think in this case, they basically, when, when you have these influencer brands,

it's when you have KSI and Logan Paul, they effectively probably put like $200 million worth of like marketing firepower into growing the brand initially. And even the biggest influencers in the world are not typically enough to sustain a brand. You need to branch out, right? Yeah. Because eventually the, the ad just become less effective. And so again,

I think this was a number of factors contributing here. So you think it might have been a lot of trial that was driven where somebody sees Logan Paul viral video explaining that he launched the brand. They try it and they're like, ah, like it's not available in my local store, so I'm going to churn. They just try it and they don't love it and they don't stick around. I mean, the number one more so than like influencer partnerships, CPG brands work for the most simple reason because the product is great and people love the product and they come back and they buy. it again and again and again and it becomes a part of their life. I'm not like a DAU or a weekly active user of Red Bull, but I probably have consistently had like 10 Red Bulls a year for my entire adult life randomly. How real do you think that 1.3 billion number is? Because you could

imagine that this was like in 2023 Logan or KSI like leaked a number that was crazy as like a stunt and it was taken out of contact. Or they took one month of revenue and multiplied it by Or even someone leaked a number and then they multiplied it. And it wasn't even on Logan and KSI. It was, in fact, on someone downstream. Some, you know, somebody who wanted to go viral just said, oh, well, I saw that my Shopify order number was this, multiply it by that and come up with some crazy number that was never really what they actually did that year. Because I am shocked because typically it's like, we talked about this with Create, once you get the target distribution. Like, you should be able, you wouldn't necessarily just see a massive spike.

You might see some trial and then some drop off. It's like Bloomberg. Bloomberg is who reported. Four X. They reported it? Wow. 1.2 billion. In sales.

Not valuation. Yep. That's a lot. That's crazy. Well, I mean, still, if you're, if you're, you know, just thinking about this from like an influencer perspective, launching a brand, winding up with something that does $300 million a year is nothing to laugh at. So, still impressive.

run for the folks over at prime. In other news, Delta had blowout earnings and guided up. Oh, really? While highlighting bookings have actually accelerated the last six weeks to Elliott Capital, this is confusing because if we're, if, you know, usually you would see a recession in the real economy impacting bookings, right? Yeah. But, you know, Delta's not seeing it.

Well, let me tell you about Vanta, automate compliance, manage risk, improved trust, continuously Vantage trust management platform, takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation. Well, I think, I think it's time. I think it's time. We have an absolute legend. We have John Quinn from Quintradome in the Ultrardome. Very excited for this one. We're very excited to bring him onto the show. And I have here printed out, good to meet you.

Welcome to the show. John, welcome to the show. so much for joining. I have here printed out one of the greatest out-of-home advertisements in the history of California Burbank Airport, I believe, is where I saw this one for the first time. It says Quinn Emanuel Trial Lawyers, Justice may be blind, but she still sees it our way, 88.4% of the time. Did you think of this marketing copy? Was this some genius on your team? How did this come about?

It was within our firm. It wasn't some outside PR. That's great. But, you know, we came up with the copy. Yeah, it's amazing. Talk to me about a little bit of the journey. How are you defining the firm now? Has anything changed over your career? I mean, it's not exactly a non-traditional path.

You know, you went to law school, built the firm. But what were the key decisions along the way? Well, I started out at a big firm in New York. That's very well known, Kravast, Swain, and Moore. But, you know, I'm from the West. I grew up in Utah, went to college here in L.A., really liked L.A. I liked New York. But I decided I wanted to come back to L.A. Came back here, bounced around a little bit.

And we started this firm in January of 1986. And we started with four lawyers, downtown L.A., not too far from here. And along the way, we decided to focus just on disputes work, litigation work. So most large firms were now 1,300 lawyers almost. There we go. In 34 locations around the world. Most firms of that size are so-called full-service firms. So they'll have some deal lawyers.

Corporate. Yeah, they'll have some tax lawyers, trust in the states, and somewhere they'll have some litigators. And we thought, we got, we came to realize that this model of only doing litigation, arbitration, disputes work, government-facing, kind of dealing with legal risks in all its different forms was a very powerful model. And so we decided just to stick with that.

We're not going to try to be. And historically, people would diversify because they wanted the stability of a variety of different businesses, or they wanted to be able to add kind of contract, effectively, like, add hours to existing relationships. Because I'm sure you would have had pressure over time from people that say, I love working with you. Can you do more for me?

You know, I think the thought is you want to be able to service all the client's needs. So a client may want to do some M&A work. They may want to raise some capital. They may, and then they may have need tax advice. From time to time, they'll have a litigation. So the thought is to cover all those. And by the way, that's how our industry is organized. We're one of one.

I mean, there is no firm. I don't know what the next largest litigation-only firm in the world is. But it's probably not more than 50 lawyers, wherever it is. Yeah. And we're almost... So you started in 86. How long did it take you to become the most feared lawyer in the world? Well, so what you're alluding to is there's a consulting firm, BTI consulting.

We had nothing to do with this. They called us up one day and told us they were doing this survey, that they survey the general counsel at like 350 large corporations around the world. And they asked them, what law firm do you least want to see on the other side in the dispute? And they were publishing a list, and we've always been on that. list of the top four they call the fearsome for some and a few years ago we got them to tell us okay of the four which one actually got the most votes and they told us and for five years running now we have been we say we characterize it as the most feared law firm in the world it's good to be

feared well in our business we don't find clients very often they're looking for shrinking violets to represent them to stand between them and trouble yeah they're looking for lawyers that will cause the other side to think twice. Yeah. You know, there's a settlement here. This can go away for this amount. Or you can you see what's behind door number two. Yeah.

And so, you know, we think we can get resolutions that other firms can't because of our reputation and our record. What's the secret to 90% win rate? Is it, is it case selection? Walk me through all the decisions that make sure that you're... No, we don't just select winners. Yeah. We don't select just winners.

I mean, we're in for the hard cases, the tough cases to win. And what's behind that is, frankly, there aren't shortcuts. Doing what we do at the highest level is labor intensive. And it requires people who are not just smart, but truly dedicated. What's the hardest case? What's the long shot that you actually wound up winning? Well, early in my career, I mean, I'd be embarrassed to kind of tell you the facts. was an employment case and it was we were defending a discrimination case where there were two

plaintiffs. They were both African American. They were both, you know, over 55 years old, I think, and they were both let go. And there was evidence, I mean, the plaintiff had some evidence that the motivation behind the, they had both been terminated from their jobs, that the motivation, you could argue that age entered into it, maybe race entered into it. And it was a very, very tough case. And I'm kind of embarrassed to tell you almost 30 years later. I mean, we won the case. What about in tech?

You've been a part of some of the biggest tech cases. Is that something that took you a while to get up to speed on? Is there anything different about working with a big tech company? from any of the other work that you do? So we noticed 25 plus years ago what was going on up in the Bay Area and in Silicon Valley. And we made a decision that we wanted to be part of that and start doing some intellectual property work, patent litigation work, tech work. So we're there for the conflicts.

We're not raising money. We're not doing the M&A work. It's primarily patent litigation. We now have the largest patent litigation. practice in the world. But we sent a lawyer up there to start an office. And frankly, it was a little bit difficult to get traction in the beginning because there was then, I think it's diluted somewhat now, kind of a Silicon Valley culture.

And people wanted to know how much time did you, how much Valley experience did you have? And we were kind of outsiders. We did some recruit some people locally, but it took us a while, frankly, to get some traction. What's different about Silicon Valley? I you know there's so much about Silicon Valley that is weird around IP it's like in software you would have there's a there's a world where if somebody developed a unique user experience you would have been able to really enforce that and in the scale of time if a big platform creates some incredible feature it's going to get copied by every big company that that it's relevant to how did

that kind of evolve because I think early on you maybe would have expected that you could have if somebody like a Snapchat creates a stories feature that they that could have been there's another world where that could have been IP but it didn't play out that way there is kind of a culture there's a feeling in many circles especially among the biggest companies the hypers and the like that you should compete based on your business don't compete on IP yeah I mean there is a reluctance which is completely different than like almost every other industry in the world Biotech would never say that. Well, I mean, you don't, you don't see the big automobile companies suing each other either.

You don't see the big airplane companies. There'll be trade disputes between Airbus and Boeing, but not so much technology disputes. Interesting. And there is kind of a feeling, and, you know, Elon Musk has been outspoken about this, that, you know, anybody, we're not going to, anybody can use our inventions. He said things, he has said things like that in the past. So you don't see the big players going after each other so much. They will, there are examples, but there's kind of an ethos that you compete on the business,

you compete on your offering, and you don't compete with IP lawsuits. What lessons did you take away from working with Elon? Is he different than other clients? Is there something that you were coaching or advising at various points in time? Well, we've represented Elon in a number of cases, including cases, that have gone to trial here in California. There was that defamation case, the British cave driver, diver,

where there was a tweet about whether this was a pedo guy. And the case about wanting to take Tesla private for $120 a share, funding secured. We tried both those cases. I was not on either one of those trial teams. So I have not, we have a team of people that work very, very closely with Elon. So what I know about him and our experience working with him

is secondhand. I do know he values his time. He closely guards how he spends his time. I don't, I think it's fair to say that based on what I've heard that spending time with lawyers preparing for depositions and trial at the like is not the top of his list of things that he likes to do. Not a priority, I can imagine. So he's a busy guy, and obviously he's got great instincts himself.

Yeah. What about? I can say just one kind of, one story. So in that defamation case, he had tweeted that I show you this British guy as a pedo guy. And he came into, Elon then lived in Los Angeles, sued him for defamation here. We didn't have a lot of time to prepare him for trial. And when the trial started in federal courthouse downtown, the plaintiff called him as their first witness. You can do that. You can call the adverse party, put him on the witness stand, and immediately start cross-examining him.

So the jury, the first witness they see is your adversary being cross-examined. And the question to Elon was, when they put him up there, was, this is a defamation case. You're Elon Musk. So the world really cares about what you say. Not a bad question. What's he going to say? Yeah, it's hard to deny. And there's kind of a beat.

And he says, well, I'm not so sure. I don't know. I've been talking about our need to get away from fossil fuels for so long now, and it just doesn't seem to be happening. I'm not sure people aren't listening to me at all. People listen to me at all. It was like, genius. That's remarkable.

Yeah, that's a good argument. That's very funny. We, I mean, we're tracking like a crazy AI boom, crazy tech boom right now, mostly from the financial markets. We have founders on. I'm sure we have seven people on today that are raising a lot of money. um is there a boom in tech litigation well maybe even before that talking about kind of the dot com era you saw this craziness we opened the show talking about how people were just valuing eyeballs

right and there was uh aside from that there was like you know these round trip uh you know effective uh you know commercial agreements that uh ended up getting litigated in the years following after the after the crash what kind of stood out from that era what was what was just right you know I guess what were the takeaways from that era? Did you ever think we would repeat that kind of that kind of cycle? Because I'm sure that you were in the, your job, even after the crash, just got busier and busier. Yes. Whenever there's a crash, as in the financial crisis, for example, 2008, which we were very involved in. That plays out in the courts, of course. There'll be people who've lost a lot of money. There'll be claims of fraud and misrepresentation. You know,

In the dot-com boom, there were down rounds, there were class actions of all kinds, securities class actions. So every deal gets scrutinized in retrospect. In AI, where we are, look, I'm not an economist and I'm not a prognosticator about where we are in terms of whether this is a bubble or not. I can tell you, in our world, the disputes world litigation,

we're seeing a lot of AI-related disputes. It's heated up. There's no question. And is that around primarily? today, I can imagine the trajectory is like right now it's a lot around IP, right? We saw case against Anthropic around their usage of, I forget. Reddit. Well, there's Reddit getting litigated, but then the books where they had potentially, it was a big settlement. And so right now it feels like we could be in the era of like litigating around IP and what

even is IP in the world of generative AI. But then, but then it feels like the next wave could be around just rehashing and litigating. It's going to be a lot of lawyers looking over. You know, this announcement that went out, it's like, yes, in the fine print, it said that it wasn't an actual deal yet. It was just a kind of a general sentiment from the two companies. But, but yeah, where do you think, do you think we're at all close to having some like precedent around AI and IP, or is this going to take years? I mean, AI is throwing up so many novel legal issues. I mean, IP for

sure, everybody's heard about the cases that have been brought relating to music, literary works, visual works, using copyrighted materials to train large language models. And whether that's copyright infringement or what's called fair use. Yeah. So we have dozens of those cases. We finally have a couple of decisions now out of the federal court

in San Francisco where the judges in those two cases, one case involving Meta, another case involving Anthropic, decided that it was fair use, that it was not copyrighted infringement to use copyrighted materials to train large language models, although both decisions were kind of qualified, and there were some unique facts in both cases. But yeah, we're starting to have those decisions on various issues but there's so many things all this money is going into large language models and AI and you think you think a lot of founders are just running the calculus of I know that I'm going to have to eventually pay out something for what I'm doing but I'm just

going to run with it because I'll be able to eat the eat the cost later and if I wait then my competitors will well I don't know losing one of these cases the copyright cases, there's so much involved. The price tag could be very, very big. So I don't know that people are sitting back saying it's just the cost of doing business. Yeah, but at the same time, if your competitor is like willing to take the risk and they can ramp their market up, market cap up into the hundreds of billions, they know that, and the alternative is, you know, being safer around IP and then you just lose the race, then you're a zero anyways. So I think a lot of people are, it feels like a lot of people are willing to just

roll the dice and say, we'll figure it out later. Well, Apple in its early years had a reputation for not being very careful with its IP. They launched the iPhone knowing they did not own the name iPhone. Oh, yeah. It was owned by, I think, Oracle. Oracle or Cisco. And so as soon as they launched it, there was a lawsuit filed, Cisco versus Apple, and it was immediately settled. I've never heard what it settled for. But, you know, that was Steve Jobs, you know, driving ahead and kind of doing what you're saying. I think they've gotten, I think they've gotten a lot more careful.

But there's just a host of issues. Like, you have all this money going into AI and AI inventions. How are you going to protect it? You cannot patent an algorithm. You cannot patent a mathematical application. You know, it's these come under the rubic of general ideas. Yeah. And again, again.

of nature yeah yeah and then you and then in the talent the talent wars are a whole other thing i'm curious if what what you're kind of uh view on you know over the summer we saw all the labs kind of poaching pulling talent from different places and people realizing that in this person's brain is like potentially a hundred million you think that's they're not being hired for what is in their they know yeah of course they are which and that's an example of what i was referring to earlier where the major players are very reluctant to sue each other. I'm kind of surprised there hasn't been more litigation over this poaching, but I think it's this phenomenon that. Yeah, our view is that they were very much like aqua hires, just unauthorized aqua hires, where it's like

this team knows how to do something really well that they've learned through spending tens of millions or hundreds of millions or sometimes even billions of dollars, and we want what they know how to do. We want the, we want the process that's in their head, basically. Yeah. You know, there's no doubt. I mean, some of the, what you're referring to is trade secrets. Trade secret law, which is another area of intellectual property. And that's an awful lot in the AI world, what we're talking about, mathematical applications,

algorithms and the like, that can't be patented. They can be trade secrets, and they can be protected as trade secrets. And if somebody has access to those and goes to work for a competitor, it's not lawful for them to be using that information when they go to work for the competitor. But then proving that actual use is another thing altogether. How often would an issue pop up

and you have multiple, let's say it's Mag 7 on Mag 7 and you're getting calls and texts from both of them, racing to work with you guys? And then have you ever had to make a call in the moment? In that world, we never encountered that because we always and forever have been adverse. to Apple, Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft. We've always represented Google,

Nvidia, Qualcomm, Salesforce, and some others. In our world, it seems like you come to a fork in the road and you decide we're going to go this way, and you never come back, because people know you will, you're the firm that will be adverse to Apple. It's like being the firm in Seattle. Yeah. They'll be adverse to Boeing.

Yeah. I mean, that's kind of a job in itself. Yeah, that makes sense. What about, I mean, it does happen in other areas of practice. Like in private equity, I mean, we have a situation just within the last couple of days where two global private equity firms who are opposite each other with respect to a particular transaction, both of us called us, and we accepted the engagement from the one that called us first. So that does happen.

Is being litigation only an advantage in being able to create this patchwork? of clients that you don't have conflicts because you're also already doing their contracts or anything, so you can be a little bit more. You know, I think as a litigation-only firm, we have fewer conflicts. Yeah. So for us, the world is divided into companies and individuals we represent and those we don't. And sometimes a company or an individual moves from one category to the other. But we don't have, we have very few sort of lasting conflicts.

vis-a-vis the business world in principle, where deal lawyers, you know, there might be some industries that they know, well, we just can't be on the other side of this issue or represent a competitor or the like, because it's a little bit different in the deal world. Where is your firm getting leverage from AI today? We're using it, we're using it a lot. We're using it to, you know, not only to manage documents, the things that are produced in discovery because we've been able to do that for a long time. But to be, if you can imagine, we tried a case in Delaware a few months ago, and we had loaded into the database, all the deposition testimony, all the documents,

and the trial testimony as the trial's going down. And as somebody's on the stand, I mean, you can imagine, you can query this database. What is the best evidence that so-and-so just lied about that? Yeah, yeah. In real time. Yeah, you know, you press a button and it'll give you a list of things in rank order.

Now, if you had the... Before, back in the day, in 90s, early 2000s, you had to be... Go back to the filing cabinet. Yeah, that or just... You rely on your memory and what you know and what you know about the case, and still that's the most important thing, I think.

And mostly it's kind of a backstop. You know, it's a check, things you would have thought of anyway. But it'll also come up with things that you wouldn't have thought of. Or maybe you would have thought of if you just had more time. What are your thoughts on resolving co-founder conflicts?

There's been a number of really high-profile cases around a group of people came together, started a company, the company grows and grows and grows. Some people leave, and then there's... Vingelblast twins. That was one example. We settled that case. And we didn't file the case. We were brought in to settle it.

Snap. Yeah. There was a third guy in the garage. Yes, yes, yes. Who got kicked out. Yes. And he brought a claim. Are there any, like, common pitfalls that you see on the incorporation documents or the safe note or specific?

People start working on these projects, sorry, all the time. And they're not thinking about this might become super valuable someday. Maybe they're more sensitive now in the tech world. It's easier than ever to create. You can create a C-Corp in a few clicks, you can see exactly. And they don't think to lay out, okay, who owns what? what's my share? What's your share? We're friends, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So they don't think to document it.

Yeah. And it's not till later that, and suddenly it's super valuable. Yeah. And they're getting all these views and followers. And I realize, wow, this is super. Now remember, this is one-third, one-third, one-third, right? Yeah, no, no, no, no. That was not my understanding. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. How much, in a case like this, is it worth pursuing a settlement, taking it to trial? Like, what are the, what are the key decision points where you realize, okay, this is going to trial? I mean, usually, so there's a stage called summary judgment, where a party can go to the court and basically say, look, on the undisputed evidence that's been developed in the course of discovery, I'm entitled to judgment as a matter of law.

Sure. It's basically, you're arguing to the court, no reasonable juror could find for the other side. They could only find for me. And there has to be no disputed evidence. The judge has to find, okay, on the law, and yes, the evidence is undisputed, you will. win. If it gets, and a lot of cases are dismissed at that level, if it gets past that, then there's the prospect this case is going to go to trial. There's nothing really going to stop it because that's kind of the last court off-ramp. A lot of cases are resolved in

mediation. In any significant case these days, the courts will expect you to go through a mediation. That is to say, engage a neutral professional mediator, spend some time with the mediator, and see if you can resolve the case. And that happens, sometimes it happens right at the beginning of the case, or even where there's a dispute and no case has been filed. You get a mediator together. Sometimes it happens on the eve of trial, but a lot of times it happens in the course of a mediation.

So, you know, if it's gone past summary judgment, if you've gone through a mediation and that hasn't been successful, then that looks like a case that may go to trial. And is that a function of total settlement, how much is at stake relative to the legal bills? Am I more likely to settle a case if it's $1 million at stake, but $500,000 in legal bills that I'm looking at versus there's a billion dollars at stake? I would certainly think so.

If the legal bills are more than what you would get out of winning the case. Sometimes there's other things at stake, whether ego or whatever or reputation. But it's usually a calculus. I think most clients, it's pretty much an equal. economic calculus. What, you know, what are my chances of prevailing at trial? What do I get if I, what does prevailing mean? What will I get if I prevail? And obviously, what's the cost to get me there, including primarily attorney's fees? Do you think that AI will speed up cases, or is there some element to litigation that just because maybe one side realizes the longer

this goes on, the better for me, I'm just going to drag it out. Will it actually, even though a lawyer could now do two weeks of work in an hour, maybe, if they're properly using some of these AI tools, it might still just take the full, however many two

weeks in order to file. Because the other side's going to be using AI, right? Yeah, look, I mean, cases settle when parties realize the strengths and weaknesses of their case and the strengths and weaknesses of the other party's case. And they assess that.

In the discovery process, everybody's cards are basically put on the table. And you have a basis then to make a judgment about, am I going to win? What is winning mean? What am I likely to get in damages? I think AI will accelerate that process. There will be more disclosure and more ability to handicap the potential outcome sooner. So I do think there's a potential for resolving cases sooner. However, I think AI is going to result in much more litigation.

More cases. Yeah. More cases. Why? There are already early stage companies out there who are putting cases together. They have put into databases, all records about permits, licenses, advertising, what parties claim is in their product, what they say their product can do, all this information, and information about what is actually in the real world, what's the experience there. They'll put that together, and they will serve up to lawyers. You can subscribe to these services, and they'll come to you to say, I've got these great class action lawsuits for you.

And so they're finding cases. So I think there will be more cases, but I think there's a potential that will be resolved sooner. Do you think the legal profession is a mentorship business? When you bring on, do you see young lawyers needing to find a mentor to establish a full career? is that how you think about it or? I really think the best way to learn is working with more experienced people. That was certainly true in my case,

whether you call them mentors or just senior people in the firm who you work with and go to court with and see how they examine witnesses and the like. So I do think that's really important in terms of learning what it means to practice law. What advice are you giving to young lawyers today that want to be where you are in 30 years or so? Well, as I said earlier, I tell people, you know, this is practicing law,

litigating high-value cases at the highest level is there's no shortcuts. So you have to be prepared to sacrifice and work super hard. It's an hour's commitment. There really are no shortcuts. Is it thrilling, though? Do you love it? I do love it. I do love it.

Is the case more thrilling or is it who you're working on behalf of? Is it the partnership between you and the client? No, the partnership with the client can be very, very, very satisfying. This is a team sport, right? Exactly. It's definitely a team sport. The team within the firm, the team with the client. What I love most about it is we're constantly learning.

We have to be able to cross-examine experts, whether it's on biotech, steel manufacturer, AI. I mean, you name it. We have to get to the point where there's an expert on the stand, somebody maybe has a PhD in something, and we're going to cross-examine them. We have to learn. That's what I love about my job. We're always learning something new.

Yeah, an expert can make something, you sound really silly. What do you mean by that? Like, I don't understand what you're even asking. And then they could just be, you know. You sound like an evasive expert here. That's not going to be great for your credibility. There you go. What about how the media characterizes law?

Is there a book or movie that stands out to you as kind of telling the story, the correct way that resonates with you? That's something that you don't feel like it's a movie. mischaracterization of how you work? You know, there are a number of good books about trial lawyers, and perhaps my favorite, it was written by a trial lawyer who recently passed away, Jerry Spence. I don't know if that's a name you know. A famous trial lawyer from Wyoming.

He did the Karen Silkwood case, that uranium case, she claimed that she was injured by exposure to radiation. He represented Amilda Marcos in a trial in New York City. I mean, he, but he was always kind of this Wyoming buckskin-clad country lawyer. A character. And he, yeah, and he wrote a book called Gunning for Justice. Yeah. That was about his own life.

Okay. And it's a very, very moving book. That's one that I really like. I will have to pick it up. Well, thank you so much for coming by and doing this interview. This was fantastic. Enjoyed it very much. Thank you so much.

Thank you very much. I'm back on. Thank you. Yeah, you're welcome any time. What a legend. That was a lot of fun. We have our next guest in the re-stream waiting room. Let's first tell you about graphite.dev.

Code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. You can get started for free. And our next guest is Martin Casado from Andresen Horowitz. We have a bunch of breaking news. We're excited to talk to you. how are you doing? Welcome, Martin. Good to see you. Can we adjust the levels, make sure that we're hearing him okay? How is your day? Just tell us how you're doing. I'm doing very well,

thank you. It's great. Pretty chill morning because I had a couple meetings canceled, which is kind of the best gift you can give me. There we go. Paradise. Canceled meetings, hop on TVPN. What more could you want in the Silicon Valley life? How's your, how's your Q4 been? Pretty mellow? Well? Most of my companies are still in Q3 because we shift by a month, but pretty good. Thank you. There you go. Why do you shift by a month? Is that standard now? Is this something ties to? Well, it is very standard. I mean, listen, so I did enterprise sales for my company for 10 years, and I don't remember a Christmas or a New Year's where I could be home because we were like deep enterprise sales. So 50% of the year came in in the last month. And so everybody realized that, you know, if you're pushing to the end of the quarter, it's probably better to.

to do it when people are still working. And so most will use the end of January. And so that's the majority of the companies I work with which is to buy a month. How often are you investing in a company and they haven't made the shift yet? Are you going that early? Honestly, if they don't, I recommend them to. Yeah, I imagine that's the first. You like the holidays at the end of the year?

You like spend the time of your family? I would say 2008 to 2012 of my life, maybe 2016 was me on the phone, like in a beach somewhere, trying to close the deal. And it paid off, and here you are, leading the infrastructure practice. I want to get to robotics in China. But first, I'd love just an update on how you're thinking about infrastructure at And Druson. You have $1.25 billion under management for that fund.

And infrastructure, I mean, we're seeing deals for energy. Sam Altman's doing stuff with S.K. Hynix and HBM, HBM, there's, you know, the neoclouds, there's the hyperscalers. There's so much in infrastructure. And then there's also just like dev tools, which I think could maybe be in there. So how do you define it? What's interesting? Where are the key themes these days?

Yeah, so we do primarily software infrastructure and things that directly relate to software infrastructure. So everything from like, let's say, chips to AI models to your point, dev tools, to the traditional compute network and storage. A very interesting thing about this AI wave is like it's very hard to distinguish between like a deep infrastructure model company and like, say, an application company. And so we're having kind of a renaissance in the field where everything has. has to be redone, like you have to redo networking,

you have to redo compute, and you have to build new dev tools. And so, you know, we're just trying to keep up with all of this change that is coming from AI. How are you thinking about competition from the hyperscalers when you're looking at a startup? We've talked to a bunch of founders who they're going up against AWS and Andy Jassy's not asleep at the wheel. But at the same time, there's this meme of like,

you know, a VC would always tell you, what if Google does this? And then we have, you know, Cloudflare and like, you know, GitLab, and there's like a million companies that we could name off that are, you know, Decacorns, public companies that successfully went up against the, you know, the public clouds and won, or at least saw, you know, massive businesses built. So is there, is it all about the founder? Is it about the particular market or the technology or lock-in or being program record or being, you know, some sort of system of record? Like, how are you thinking about it?

So listen, I've been an infrastructure investor for 10 years. And, listen, in that entire time, public cloud has been incredibly dominant, right? And so I would say after reinvent, which is the AWS show, I have to, like, move into therapy mode. I'm actually on the other side of this. I'm never the one that actually worries about the public clouds. I'm always telling, like, the founders. I have this line. My line is, is like, can you name one company that AWS has put out of business? One, just one. It's a good point. Yeah. Like, they literally have copied everything. They've hosted everything. And like, and so the reality is, is that if you have an entire, if the market is large enough. And you have an entire company focused on it, you're going to win. And that's just

the reality. And AI in particular is a new behavior, which, you know, companies, like, incumbent companies are terrible at new behavior. So, like, this is definitely an advantage to startups. Like, it's like a new buyer. It's a new use case. It's a new way of thinking about things. So they don't have the incumbent institutional momentum. And so I think that, like, you know, we're free of a lot of the trappings of the cloud. And I think the future is very bright for startup. So I don't spend a lot of time thinking about the incumbents. That said, I have to say one thing is, listen, Anthropic and Open AI are startups, really, in the classic sense, and they are incredibly dominant. And so I would say I'll put them in a different class. There is a class of these

new types of incumbents, think like Stripe, Figma, where the founders are still there, they're still hungry, they're executing very well. I think those are much more dangerous than, you know, Google or Microsoft. Yeah, I was talking to a founder. who is going up against an AWS point solution that was rolled into stuff. And I was like, you are going up against Angie Jassy, but you're really going up against the particular product manager who's on that particular product. And that product manager might not be taking calls on a beach on December 25th.

You know, like they might be taking a vacation. And so if you're going to work them, it's possible you can beat them. Totally. And like this is a company that, you know, is famous for bragging about two pizza box teams, right? Okay, yeah, so fine, you've got, you know, the 12 people on this product that's dying on the vine. Like, if you can't beat that, you kind of deserve to lose. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's a great point.

Well, well, I'd love to go into robotics in China. You recently published a Wall Street Journal op-ed, which I love. I read the journal every day. Wait, before we dive in there, one question around when you're evaluating how you think about, how you think about revenue ramps, specifically, you know, there's always this question, if a company's ramping revenue just at an ungodly rate, there's a question of like how durable that revenue is? Is it going to be possible for another company to come into the category and sort of pull off the same type of growth? What are you evaluating for these software infrastructure companies on whether they have actually done the hard work

to figure out, develop something that's unique and proprietary, or they're just capital, or they're just like a, we did talk about it's like a barnacle on the side of a whale, like opening eye. Yeah, we're into the barnacle economy. Yeah. We love the barnacle economy where you just naturally grow at the growth rate of enthropic, and you're like, it's a miracle. Yeah, yeah.

I mean, listen, so there's always this concern of easy come, easy go, which is kind of like what you're asking about. Like, you know, you got this revenue so quickly, how hard could it be? but you know listen we're three years into this and we've got a lot of data points that this stuff is actually pretty durable right i mean mid journey bootstrapped to actual scale and it still is very much a leader in image um you know open ai um roared into context and it's still the leader anthropic roared into this i mean cursor roared into this and i think that these revenue ramps are much more of an indication of the size and the growth of the market which i mean these things have just been so large and growing so fast. And of course, like, the leader that becomes the brand monopoly will follow brand effects and then people will know the name and then they'll go ahead and adopt it. So I think that, you know, like there is no indication just because the revenue ramp was quick that it's not durable. That said, I don't know of any endemic defensibility in

AI. I think companies have to figure out traditional modes. And there's a lot of traditional the moats we know about, right? Integration modes, two-sided marketplace, brand modes. Like, whatever the moat is, they've got to get to that. So when we evaluate the company, just because it grew quickly, we're not like, oh, easy come, easy go, right? I mean, that's kind of like intellectually lazy. On the other hand, we do look for, like, what actually is the moat, right? If you're basically just, you know, reselling TPM, you know, tokens per minute from Anthropic, that's probably not as durable, is if you've got a workflow and a bunch of users that use it, and, you know, they save configuration in this and you've got good retention numbers, et cetera. So we do kind of full-fledged

investment like we always do, but I don't think it's correct to just say just because the growth is high, it must not be durable. How quickly can a brand moat emerge in infrastructure? Yeah, I mean, it's a good question. The last time I remember brand modes like this was the internet. I think when markets grow incredibly quickly, like education is always kind of out of date. And so you default to brand. Remember, Netscape was largely a consumer phenomenon and very quickly everybody was talking about Netscape very early on and we're seeing a very similar thing. So I think it's been probably 25 years since we've seen brand effects dominate adoption, especially for highly technical projects. I think the last time was probably the internet and before that

like maybe the PC like Windows 95 again was very much kind of a brand name. And so I think it's more again an indication of the market's very large, it's going very fast. There's so much confusion in the market so that a few leaders end up becoming brand monopolies. And then the adoption is literally because people can't keep up. So they just kind of adopt the one that they know about. Yeah, speaking of brand, there's actually a comment in the chat, A16Z blows my mind, how can they be a venture fund and a brand at the same time? And I feel like there's, like, Andresen really is focused on brand in many ways, both the Andreessen brand, but also partnering with brands on the consumer side or, you know, internet consumer side. But do you have thoughts or

advice for infrastructure founders on brand? Is there, is there, is there an equivalent of like, make sure you have your dot com or make sure that you have, you know, a specific brand package? Like, do you spend any time thinking on that? Or is, is that at all relevant? Or is it just something that, you know, kind of check the box, make sure it's converting customers and think about it in more quantitative terms? Yeah, no, so quite frankly, this is a pretty new phenomenon. Like, I am part of the nerdiest part of Endries. We don't really think about brand. It's like, that's not the conversation we have. Normally, it's either talking about, like, the mechanics of

you know inbound bottoms up growth or the mechanics of enterprise sales or something like that that said we've all had to all of us that the founders and the investors had to become students of this because like you'll have model companies that'll be consumer companies and those are very much

brand led you'll have I mean you know I mentioned cursor before like you know cursor is a DevTools company but it's got so many users like brand effects are at play brand is really important and in X now because this stuff is proliferating so quickly has become a primary distribution channel. Like, X is its own way of propagating information that's a very, very different than going

to like traditional press or doing like a press release or writing content marketing or whatever, like we're in a very different world. And so I would say, you know, historically I personally, while the firm has, I personally have not been very focused on brand, like the opposite. But no, I've had to learn a lot more about it. It used to just be make the docs dark mode. Do you think some of the... Yeah, yeah.

But now, yeah, now we are emerging. Sell the thing and be technically correct. Exactly. That was kind of my, yeah. Exactly. Do you think public SaaS is generally oversold for people too bearish? Or is the conversation we keep coming back to Brett Taylor was on the show talking about how it's easier to change your tech stack than your business model?

And he was referencing, you know, the dynamic between, you know, seat-based. But that's kind of not as relevant in public company, infrastructure companies that might be disrupted by... Because the public, I imagine that most of the infrastructure competitors, the incumbents, are already on consumption-based models. And so you're not seeing a dramatic shift in the business model of the companies you back. It's more of a technology shift, or am I mischaracterizing that? Okay, so I definitely think we're seeing a pricing shift from seat-based to usage base.

And listen, we saw that. Listen, when I was doing my company, we saw the shift from perpetual to recurring, right? To SaaS recurring, right? And so we're seeing that type of shift, and that's being accelerated by AI. It was started by the cloud, but it's being accelerated by AI because, you know, the tokens are so expensive. I don't think that alone is depositioning anybody, right? I think that the SaaS companies are very good at adopting that and using that. I really think a lot of the story of AI is actually kind of new capabilities and new use cases.

And, like, that's kind of like the untold story. I mean, these things now speak English, right? They develop an emotional connection. They can create something from nothing. Like, that's cool. That's net new behavior. That's net new budget. And you can see this in this dramatic growth.

Now, of course, budget has to shift to cover that, right? And so I think we are seeing a slowing down of traditional SaaS spent, as you would expect, when you have something super cool in you and whatever. But I don't think that this spells the demise of the traditional sector. I mean, it's actually not even good at things. like systems of record yet. Now, over time, that will change, and maybe it'll change the consumption layer, and once you have the consumption layer,

you can change the back end. But I really think the story we should all be talking about is, like, what are these net new use cases? Like, what is it enabling? Where does that budget come from? As opposed to, like, who is this necessarily going to kill? Because there's zero-sum thinking, I think, is the biggest mistake we all make in this AI wave.

Totally. All right, well, let's switch gears to robotics? Yes. There is a... What's the major robotics conference? out of China? Unitary. There's a unitary for sale on walmart.com for like $20,000.

I'm hovering over the buy button. How un-American am I if I pull the trigger? Take me through the landscape. I think we're maybe going to try and hack it and do something weird. But yeah, yeah, take me through the current understanding. In general, it feels like maybe I'm wildly wrong, but it feels like tension between China and America is calming down almost? I don't know.

Maybe that's just the news cycle and people have shifted to other geopolitical topics. But, I mean, Pollymarket has the chance that China invades Taiwan by end of 2026, down at 14% from 25%. And we're doing more trade deals. There's crazy news today. But walk me through how you're understanding

the geopolitical landscape. So listen, I'm not an expert on geopolitics. I will say today, China put expert controls on rare earth metals that are useful in things like lithography. So that's clearly like I would say not a detente. I mean that clearly is kind of more of an aggressive

fosher. Probably this is because Trump is meeting with Xi Jinping. Probably this is just kind of for negotiation. I don't know, right? But I would, you know, again, I am not an expert on these things from my perspective, which is through the lens of technology. Like there is not a detaunt. I think that things tend to be escalating.

Now, that said, you know, the the technical collaboration between China and the U.S. is the strongest has ever been. I mean, you know, half the founders I work with are Chinese, half the teams I work with, half the papers I read, half the models I use, half the models, the companies I work with use. I mean, like, I think from a technical academic standpoint, it's the strongest I've ever seen in the industry.

And so in that way, there's very much a positive. But politically, there's clearly some jockeying, and I think we're trying to all understand what that means. And I'll just tell you my very quick. view is like, I don't think anybody wants a generational struggle with China, right? I mean, like the, like the, you know, the hope is, is that both of us collaborate together and take over the solar system, right? These are two just phenomenally great countries with a tremendous amount of talent, but there is some level of polyana in that belief. And so then the question is,

is to what extent do we want to depend on China? It's not about being aggressive. It's not about being proactive. It's like, you know, do we want to depend on them for critical infrastructure? And I would say my position is the answer is no, we don't want to depend on them, in which case it's important to understand what they're capable of, what we're capable of, and what we can do to develop local capabilities. Do you read anything into the fact that Xiaomi was able to be a phone company that launched a car, and Apple was maybe rumored to be working on a car and never got it out?

Is that just a market structure thing? I'm interested in understanding, like, where is China behind? Where are they ahead? It feels like Tesla was way ahead in electric cars, and China's catching up there. But now Tesla's playing catch-up in humanoid robots. And I'm interested in the landscape of what each country does best. Yeah, okay. So this is going to be very polarizing topics.

I just want to say up front that I'll send some opinions. These are not rooted in fact. There is no agenda here. Just, you know, as far as your first question on the structure of companies like Xiaomi and the car and Apple, you know, Asian companies tend to do more, right? I mean, think about the Korean Che-Balls. There was, like, for a long time, there was five companies that did everything, like, everything from the cone to the car.

And so, like, I don't think that that is, like, a China versus U.S. thing. I think that's something quite a bit different. You know, that said, we've seen China be, like, you know, very, very effective at a number of areas in recent memory, right? I mean, 5G, China basically won, which is critical infrastructure communications, right? I mean, for solar, they've been dramatically good. And then I wrote this post on robotics, they're very, very good. And so it's clearly a country with a ton of capability.

On the other hand, like, listen, like the United States continues to, like, do two things that I think are pretty distinct from China. One, they're very good of complex software systems, right? Like, you know, not building a model, but building kind of like the opening eyes and the anthropics and, you know, and everything around. very, very good at complex soft pacifism. And, too, this is going to sound funny, but the U.S. is actually really good at building stuff people like. That's good. No, but I think there's a specific reason for that,

which is we're more like the rest of the world than China is. Like, China caters to a local market, and the local market is just different behaviors, a different buying behaviors, different political behaviors, different economic behaviors. And so, like, the stuff that they produce is just weirder. And so in some way, I would think, like, you know, there's two areas where they're just not as strong.

It's very complex software systems, which we historically have just not seen come out, especially for B2B, but also, like, software that the rest of us can, like, use and adopt. Outside of, like, these viral consumer-y things. Labu-boo. I was about to say, yeah. Labu-bu, right?

This consumer thing, but I'm not a consumer guy, man. I'm a, I'm, like... There's these cars that have, like, LED front dashboards and karaoke machines inside, and they float, and they're all very cool, but I don't know The American consumer actually wants that necessarily. Well, but I think you can reduce it to, like, you know, listen, people are people and whatever,

but, like, enterprise buyers are very different in China than they are in the United States. And, like, can you name one large Chinese enterprise software company? No. Software. Yeah. It's impossible. I mean, we, we like, we know a hard one.

Does Byte's get into Enterprise in China? Does Alibaba Quinn, like, count? Or, like, does Deep Seek count? I know Deep Seek's getting inferenced a lot. I mean, I'm like, well, listen, data breaks, Snowflake sales for it is Microsoft. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We have more than the U.S.

enterprise companies. And then in China, you're like, well, you're kind of trying to like, well, it's a consumer company, but maybe they do enterprise. Like, there's kind of these weird telco companies that people will mention. Sure, sure. It just, you know, listen, I, you know, I built a team. You know, I ran a team in Beijing. I ran a team of Shanghai when I was working at VMware after they acquired my

company, and we sold software in China. It's just different. It's totally different. Like, the consumption pattern is different. How you sell it's different. What they expect from the software is different. And the market is large. enough and localized enough that any local company is going to focus on that.

And if they focus on that, they're just like through Darwinistic forces of acceptance are not going to build something the rest of the world really understands. And so I do think this is an area that the United States has a tremendous advantage. Do you think, you know, yeah. Based on your experience selling software, enterprise software in China, do you think in our lifetimes we will go back to American companies trying to sell enterprise software into China or is that ship sale? Because I briefly lived in China. I studied abroad there. I worked out of the China Accelerator office in Shanghai. And there was a lot of international

companies that were trying to sell into China. This was the 2016 era. And there was a sense that the Chinese market sort of wanted to learn about what was being sold, but they didn't actually want to adopt it and it was more like how do we learn about this so that we can just build this ourselves and utilize our networks locally to just kind of out-compete here yeah so listen I think behavior follows business I think that there are some systems that are pretty straightforward to reverse engineer like a like a actual hardware system where you can pull out the embedded software and you can look at the chip like what like you know like let's say network routers like you know classically you know wask it uh Huawei copied Cisco um routers early on I think for very

complex software. It's just, you know, it's like all the operational, like, know-how is just a very tough thing to copy. You can look at the code all you want, but what you want to know is what it does when it's actually running, and that's just not something. Like, the state space is too large. And so, no, I think behavior follows business. I think there's a lot of business between the two countries. I think they're both commercial countries. They're full of commercial entities. I do think we're going to go back to, like, having a market between the two. But I do think, like, the landscape is shifting. Like, I do think, like, listen, And like right now, you know, we buy, you know, the majority of, you know,

our kind of hardware parts for robotics from China. And I would, you know, assume, you know, we sold a lot of software in China that a lot of the business software, like they're adopting from us. And, you know, what that looks like may shift over time, but I don't think it's going to go to zero. Do you think humanoid robots are going to start as an enterprise product or consumer product? And how confident are you that it will start, where you think it will start.

I mean, listen, I'm not an expert. Sure. Can I tell, maybe can I just talk about the piece that I wrote very quickly? Yeah, please. Yeah, please. Yeah. Because I want to show, like, the area where I am expert versus not expert. So like, you're a VC, you're an expert in everything.

Give yourself some credit. I know politics. Yeah. I know human noise. I know super. No, it's not. So, listen, the area I'm expert is, is infrastructure software, right? I mean, that's what my Ph.D. is in.

That's what my company is in. That's what I, you know. And so in order to, you know, know, know what is impacting enterprise software and software infrastructure, we do these market studies, right? We'll study, like, what's going on with energy. We'll study what's going on with microchips.

We'll study what's going on with robotics. And we did this study on robotics, and it was in service to our software investing, which we do. Even though, like, a lot of, you know, the groups in Andreessen Hordes do hardware investing, right? Like, I've sat on the board of hardware companies. Like, we do it, but, like, the purpose of this study

was software investing. And we got the result of this and we're like, oh, damn. Like, China's kicking ass, right? They're like, wow, they got the supply chain locked up. They're doing incredibly sophisticated stuff. I think something like 50% of all deployments for the last three years were done in China for the globally.

And so the purpose of the piece that we wrote was just to say, listen, you know, we do these studies normal. We do tons of studies like this. But like this was so dramatic. Like maybe we should kind of make it a little bit more apparent to everybody, like, you know, how China is doing. And so I don't, listen, I am not an expert on any given robotics market.

Like, if it's an enterprise industrial thing, I'll have more of a sense to it. Where, like, from a humanoid standpoint, I think there's huge expert on that. But I will say that, like, when it comes to China and the United States, I mean, they're a very, very real contender when it comes to, you know, the full supply chain all the way up to the hardware.

It's the software where I think, you know, things start to differentiate. Like, how do you characterize the opportunity for America to catch up? Should we be more bullish on the hyperscalers, the mature companies, the Tesla's of the world, stepping up and taking it seriously, or completely new startups from scratch, building solutions, and then kind of integrating, creating their own kretsu, if you will. So here, let's talk about the areas where I think that, like, the U.S. has an advantage, right? I mean, like I mentioned, like, complex software, the United States does a great job of.

when it comes to, like, building products that people want, I think the United States does a great job of. And so I think that right now, when it comes to, you know, Chinese hardware, I think we have to really look at ourselves and say, you know, do we want to, like, start putting, like, import restrictions and tariffs on those, not to penalize China, but to kind of incur local capability building for these things. And I think that would be an important thing for us to consider as a nation doing.

And there's another very interesting area, which is, you know, for a lot of AI, you want big GPUs, right? And so you can do a lot of robotics and smaller microcontrollers, but you kind of want the big GPUs for the heavy processing, like certainly for AV. And it's pretty well known that China doesn't do anything below 9 nanometer very well. You know, like 7 and 5 they can do it, but the yields are pretty low. And, of course, they'll be subsidized by China, but they're well behind.

So I think at some level, like we should continue our export restrictions on SME, like, you know, ASML lithography machines. Like, I think we should do that just because it does slow them down. I think we should, you know, do import controls, you know, and tariffs so that, like, we can do local capability building. But, again, like, I have no interest in a generational struggle with China. I just think that we need to understand where we're weak and then we need to, you know, put in the controls necessary so the United States can catch up. And these are the areas I would say. So I would say it's not, it's not, you know, the big chips.

I think we're pretty good about that. It's not the software. I think we're pretty good about that. But I think actually a lot of the harbor supply chain, I do think that we should put our finger on the scale. Yeah, to me, the interesting thing, seeing unitary robots selling on Walmart.com when everyone in the tech community realized,

probably starting about a couple years ago, that letting DJI flood the American market with cheap drones. Just killed the GoPro. Yeah, killed our internal, you know, they were willing to sell products out of loss in order to, you know, subsidize. subsidize these products in order to make it impossible for American companies to compete. And now we have millions of drones here in America that are flying around that we don't own,

and they're going to continue that. And allowing them to do the same thing with humanoid feels like an even bigger national security risk to me and would, again, just set us back on an entirely new tech. Yet it's crickets. It's crickets. I haven't heard anyone. I mean, the implications enormous, right? It's like health care. It's like, it's like, economics. It's like industrial capacity. It's defense. I mean, it's like basically as broad basis offer

if you take the generalized form of robotics. And so it's incredibly critical that we get on top of this. So we have a geopolitical rival and we're going to allow them to put a human-sized robot that can presumably do human things. Like Wait, I saw a movie about this once.

Yeah, yeah. They can do laundry. If they could do laundry, they can do a lot of other things that maybe we don't want them. So anyways, I think this is something that I hope it gets more attention before it's too light because they're already selling again on Walmart.com. I will say one last thing too is like we kind of sometimes hope that

oh like listen this is an issue of scale and like we want to work with our partners and our allies and so like what about EU can they help out here but like if you actually look at some of their dominant robotics companies like Kukos I think it's a hundred year old company like that's now owned by China as well and so I mean even on the global footprint

of industrial robots China is incredibly dominant and so I think now is the time for us to map it out and figure out what we do to enable local capability building. And again, the point is not to penalize anybody or to have a lifelong struggle. The point is to not depend on them. What's happening in India on the robotics side? Obviously, Apple is trying to shift a lot of iPhone production to India? Is that an area that you're...

I don't have any expertise on that now. Yeah. What about open source LLMs? Have you changed your thinking at all? that you are pro open source generally. We had the deep seek moment. Now OpenAI has GPTOSS. Meta Lama is sort of declining in favor,

but there might be a new generation of models from meta. They're certainly staffing them up for it. And so do you think that that market has resolved? Is it calcified in any ways? Is it heating up? Is it something that people should be paying attention to? Yeah, so I, you know, I definitely think AI is following open source as we've historically seen it, which is the close source models get 80% of the market, and open source mops up the remaining, you know, 20%, and like that's happening now.

I think open source is incredibly important to the broader dynamics of markets, you know, like kind of anti-monopoly stuff, it's good for startups, it's good for pricing, it's good for academia, it's good for research. So I maintain that position. I think the Chinese models are phenomenal. I think they're leaders. I think we should keep having the academic partnership. I feel very strong about that. I think any sort of import or export restrictions

on software is stupid. Like, it just doesn't really work to begin with. And so my view is software kind of, you know, let it all play out. The U.S. is dramatically ahead. I would say end to end when it comes to capabilities and capacities for OSS. The Chinese models are fantastic.

You know, we use them. It kind of will keep us honest. I think that's great. Where I think that we should be more serious as import and export restrictions on hardware. I mean, we've done them in the past. We've done them incredibly effective. I mean, you know, especially when it comes to critical infrastructure.

I don't say this from an economic or even from a job standpoint. I literally say from a national security standpoint. Like, you know, do we want to run Chinese hardware infrastructure for our internet backbone? Probably not. And if you know what has happened in the last few years with the telcos in China, you can see why this is the case. And so I do think that having like an aggressive posture when it comes to like what we run nationally and what our capabilities are. So are you not worried about the national security? risks of running an open source model from a near-peer competitor. There's this idea of the

the Manchurian candidate hiding inside of the weights of an LLM. It all seems fine when you benchmark it, but once it realizes that it's inside of the NSA or something, it phones home, Red Star Linux from North Korea does that at phones home. And there's rumors that TikTok and, you know, there's rumors that TikTok and Yeah, I think what Bart is, like, having our physical infrastructure, whether it's in manufacturing, like robotics in a manufacturing context or even a humanoid in somebody's home, having that not be something that is a... No, I get that the hardware... Yeah, yeah, I'm asking a specific question about software.

Like, like, if hardware is like a 10 out of 10 risk, where is running an open source model from a near peer competitor that might want to sneak something in? I don't know if technically they can, but... But is it a one? Is it two, a five? How would you think about it? Super legit question. So first of all, I'd say, like, I'm much more sympathetic to, like, import restrictions and export restrictions.

I think it's just a net good for the rest of the world to use U.S. technology and to have that footprint, right? And so, like, when you talk about export restrictions, I think that, like, when it comes to software, like, we should never have any. When it comes to import restrictions, I think that you should differentiate between what we use for, like, the government and critical infrastructure versus, like, what you have access to academia. I think, for example, if we did import restrictions of, like, the latest greatest models, we would be handicapped our researches in a very significant way. And I don't think that that would justify whatever gains we might have, given the fact that, like, half of what we get is from China. Yeah.

There's also, like, a free speech, like math should be legal argument here, where, yeah, like the government and critical systems and maybe our Fortune 500 companies should be very careful with what they run if they're running a Chinese open source model. but if you're just as a libertarian, you know, you could think, like, yeah, if you want to go and run this on your local hardware in the cabin in the woods, like that's pretty American, in my opinion. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm very, very much about never-do kind of export restrictions and import restrictions when it comes to software. Sure, sure. And listen, I used to work for the intelligence community back in 2001 to 2003, and like this is kind of the hide of, like, concerns around Huawei.

And so maybe I'm just a little bit more sympathetic to arguments of not having, you know, these components in our critical infrastructure. That was the height of the concern around Huawei, and it took us how many years to actually act on it? That makes me concerned about... It was one of the many peaks of... That makes me concerned about it. By 2045, we'll get around banning Unitri in the United States. After they get a robot in every home of America. We'll finally be like, you have to pay us 10% tax on this.

That'll be the resolution. As long as we're making money from it, maybe we'll be fine with the result. Anyway, thank you so much for coming on the show. this is fantastic. It's always good time. Good to see you, Mark. We'll talk to you soon. Have a great rest of your day.

And let me tell you about fall. Generative media platform for developers. The world's best generative image, video, and audio models all in one place. Develop and fine-tuned models with serverless GPUs and on-demand infrastructure. Backed by A16Z. Oh, really? Used by Adobe, Kamba. Probably is going to be.

Core, shopped by complexity. Did you see this post? by Jacob Rintamaki. He said, truth nuke, what are you scared of? Oracle being 500% leopard and not 1,000% because Larry isn't aged, I peeled enough and tell us something tangible you want. Portia 9-11 that comes with a signed copy

of the new Dorcasia Stripe Press book. We should be able to make this. Those are fantastic answers. I believe that's a screenshot of the Teal Fellowship application, maybe, something like that. That's hilarious. Yeah, Jacob, just post more. post your way to being able to cover the 9-11.

You can get it. You can get a 997 for like 40 grant. Yeah, what's the, yeah, yeah, will the monthly payment be on that? My first 9-11 was like $32,000, bought it on bring a trailer. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you finance that, you pay for it with the ex-post. I think he's harder to finance a 997. But yeah, just post your heart out for 12 months and you'll be a business. Oh, we, of course, have a subject.

Now you can go to tbpn.com, drop your email, and you can get a summary of the show, some posts that we like, some important links, the run of show, and sort of my take, my current thinking on whatever the current topic of the day is. I'm also posting those on my personal X account. And yesterday we got a quote post from Zephyr, who kind of answered the question that I was asking, which was, you know, we have to trust the Sam Altman plan. What is the Sam Altman plan? Are they building their own chip, their own data center, their own everything? Like, how mature will this be? Zephyr says, is Open AI building its own chip? Yes, they are in collaboration with AVGO. FAB by TSMC will be available in the second half of 2026. That's forever in singularity terms, in my opinion. The second half of 2026 feels like it's a decade away,

but obviously it takes time to actually design and fab these chips. But I want to know more. I want to know more about the plan. What were you doing on August 7th, 2009? August 7th, 2009. I was in college. I was, where was I, 2007? Well, instead of having a couple beers, you could have bought Broadcom at the IPO.

It was a $1.64 a share. It's now sitting at $345. There we go. That would have been good. Go back in time, John, and figure it out. Indeed. And I could have gone back in time and signed up for Turbo Puffer and been searching every bite.

But you can do it today with the power of the internet. Serverless vector and full-tech search built from first principles and object storage. Fast, ten-ex cheaper and extremely scalable. A word-old game show

is in the works at NBC. Jimmy Fallon is set to produce it. Get that size gong ready. Harvester Salon says, well, you know what they say? Strike when the iron's cold and has been stored in the cupboard for several years.

Yeah, wordle. That was a, was that a COVID phenomenon? I believe it was. 2020, everyone was doing wordles. I still hit them up every once in a while. I like a good word game. I like a puzzle. The New York Times has been on a terror.

I like, it is not true, but I like the meme that people will. The New York Times makes a lot of money from their games. And they have a separate subscription for games. And everyone kind of says, oh, the New York Times is journalism on life support by games. And it's kind of evolved to the point where they make 99. percent of their revenue from games and it's like that's not true they got to get into gambling they should get into gambling i mean you have an insane user base yes and you know they're they're an eight they're a nine billion dollar company yep so uh basically about the new york times

value the same as polymarket yeah and uh what you know what what what what could the new york times do with uh they could do mail order gambling i would love that mail order prediction markets i would love, I would love a daily gambling, a daily, the daily gamble, the daily gamble. Imagine the New York Times betting podcast. Yes. I have another idea for them, since they're into games, they're into Wirtle. They should do a first person shooter. There you go. Don't you think it'd be good? You know, we have Call of Duty. We have Battlefield. Yeah, team death match. You go to New York Times.com. It just preloads a vibe code. You get to play as the legend of Mike Isaac. Yes, exactly. Yeah. You get Mike Isaac. Love it.

Russell Paulson quoted our post. We were talking about the Anthropic ad campaign. He added some insight. He says, this is all about values-based marketing. It's not about the hat or what Claude does technically. It's about how it makes us feel and how it elevates our inherent humanity. It's a breath of fresh air to feel like an AI tool makes us better rather than replaceable. Yes.

Very well said. I like that a lot. And it does feel like a pivot from the early rhetoric. This feels a little bit written like Claude. It's not about the hat. You can't, like, when I write now, I actively think, like, okay, if I'm going to, if I'm going to try and put something in a, it's this, not that, I'll just completely rephrase the sentence to just be, you know, just wildly different structure, because it can just, it just has a tinge to it these days. Yeah. But anyway.

All says opening eye plans to detect underage users and give them a model with more safeguards. This may clash with Colorado's SB 205, which prohibits algorithmic discrimination. based on age. What is Colorado doing? One of literally millions of pro-social AI uses plausibly rendered illegal by that stupid law. Very, yeah, very interesting that a single state is going to be able to potentially create policy,

nationwide policy around AI. I think David Sachs has been kind of ringing the alarm bells about this. And there's been a number of folks we've talked to on the show who have said that like the state by state stuff is going to make it really it sort of turns us into Europe where you have like one cookie policy that then cascades all over the place at the same time I feel like is it not possible to just like geo-fence a feature still I mean you have 50 states if they all have different laws Colorado only has six million people yeah I'm not worried about the technical burden should be able to

one shot that with Codex. Come on. We're in the future. But I am worried about some weird situation where one of those Coloradoans is on the border and the cell phone tower that they connect to says that they're in a neighboring state and then that creates a liability and there's a class action lawsuit or they're using a VPN and the VPN doesn't count as actually leaving Colorado. And so there's a lawsuit there. And if it just becomes a legal precedent that requires you to treat the entire United States populace like the folks in Colorado, that could be very, very annoying

and kind of just dampen everyone's experience because when I think about, you know, we have kids, when I think about if they're using AI tools, like I like the idea of more safeguards. I like that if you open up the Disney app on Apple TV, you can choose, don't show anything R-rated or PG-13. and just, you know, content filtering, adult parental controls. Like, these are good tools that should be in the hands of parents,

and they should be surfaced by the tech companies. Also, I don't really want, if, you know, my son's very into dinosaurs. And if he's someday talking with chat GPT about dinosaurs, I don't really want, I don't feel like it's necessarily fully appropriate for him to feel like he's becoming friends with the dinosaur machine. Yes, I would also. I think we're probably years and years and years away from him using Ptolems. I would also just be worried about annoying syntax leaking into his vocabulary.

He's like, dad, this isn't a Tyrannosaurus. It's not bed time. It's the king of the jungle. He's like, come on, dude. It's not bedtime. It's playtime. It's playtime. Which is basically the constant debate.

Anyway, did you, do we mention profound? Get your, get your brand mention in chat, GPT, reach millions. of consumers who are using AI to discover new products and brands. He always got to mention them. P.E. Cooper. Hit the timeline, built his own TBPN. Meme template. And he's putting it to use.

What is this picture? Is this just how he sees himself as a royal lord? I love the, I love the enthusiasm to just hardline that you're an 18th century or 15th century king or something. I like it. It's very royal. You can go check out. He has a meme maker. You can make your own.

People have been adopting the TVPN trading card aesthetic. Thank you to Tyler Cosgrove for, I believe, inventing that whole strategy or something like that. I think you made the first one of the AI researcher that got 5 million views on X and then we shared all over the internet. And wound up getting us on French TV. Did you wind up talking to the French journalist, by the way? I talked to them, but I don't think they wanted to know. me as like an actual interviewing. Okay.

They didn't film you? I think they want people that work out. They're not real fans of the show, clearly. Yeah, they don't understand. They've said that you're, yeah, a heavyweight in the industry. We tried to pitch them this idea that Tyler was beyond the meta's list, the zero-eth AI researcher, since, of course, lists are indexed zero. Bill Ackman says in one week, Jared Kushner pulled off the biggest LBO of all time,

that is EA, and then negotiated one of the biggest peace deal. of all time, a pretty good week. That's wild. Really just running the art of the deal playbook. We have been so behind on our EA coverage. We'd love to have Jared on the show. In the meantime, you can listen to his interview on Invest Like the Best, if you want to understand more of his investing philosophy.

The EA take private is fascinating. It's a massive deal. EA has so many interesting properties from Battlefield to... They have Madden, right? In FIFA, they have all the sports. Got a lot. And it's just a very interesting business. We've talked for a long time about what it takes to pivot a business model in the public markets,

how difficult that is. Will they be pivoting the business model? To what? If so, will they be doing that? Is that the point? Or is there some other restructuring that will happen while the company's private? That's fascinating to me. Ben Thompson had an article in Stretecery today, which of course you should go subscribe to,

all about the basic, basically the failure. of Xbox Game Pass because Microsoft paid something like $70 billion for Activision. They got Call of Duty. And the idea was they would put people on a Netflix-like subscription and you'd be able to play any game you want. And according to some, you know, rumors

and talking to some Microsoft employees and some leaked data, it seems like the LTV went out. So it seems like it was actually better to get people to shell out 60, 70 bucks a couple times a year for the big games that they want as opposed to putting them on a $10 a month plan and then they're playing all these games for much cheaper and so it's been you know the conclusion is that it's it still isn't working we'll have to keep checking it on it

but it'll be interesting to see does EA go private and then find land with Sony or something like land with another another you know gaming platform does it create its own store or, you know, pivot into, you know, buying other companies and getting into mobile gaming? Is there some sort of other monetization micro-transactions? Like, what are they going to ramp up? They've tried a lot of stuff, but it'll be interesting to see where it goes. So we'd love to talk to the folks over at Silver Lake and Jared Kushner's firm. Will, I understand that. Manitis says, it's genuinely nuts that if you get good enough at New York City real estate, that the only other place where those skills are useful is negotiating world peace.

I didn't realize that these two were connected, but of course it's about Jared Kushner. Yeah, and Trump, of course. Yes. Oh, yeah, Trump. That's very funny. Should we cover the China news today? So, Dimitri Alperovich says, huge escalation by China. Mofcom announces new export controls, taking effect after December 1st of rare earths to anyone anywhere in the world, producing chips,

equipment to make chips below 14 nanometer and 256 layer memory due to military applications. And so Dean Ball had a big take on this that we should probably read through to get up to speed. I'm not an expert on this, but I hope to be after talking to Dean. We're hoping to have him on the show soon. Dean says, this is a very big deal. China has asserted sweeping control over the entire global semiconductor supply chain, putting export license requirements on all rare earths used to.

to manufacture advanced chips. So we have the design firms with NVIDIA, we have TSM kind of on our side, we have ASML, there's a whole bunch of American IP that goes into the Western semiconductor supply chain, but China's upstream of all of that with their rare earth supply chain. There was a comment in the chat earlier about

about what, like does China control all of the rare earths. I think the common cited metrics are that they control, control a huge portion of the of the rare earth supply today, but they don't actually have all of the rare earths in, we're processing than supply. Exactly. Air earths aren't as rare. We just call them earths. Yeah. And around here we call them earths. Because they are in fact all over the place and you hear about these rare earth deposits being found in Ukraine and in various parts of the United States. We have them. We just haven't actually gone and built the mine and processing. And that takes years. And so in the short term,

putting an export restriction on the actual processed rare earths is very geopolitically significant. So, Dean Ball continues. He says, if enforced aggressively, this policy could mean lights out for the U.S. AI boom and likely lead to a recession slash economic crisis in the U.S. in the short term. Remember, this wouldn't be the first time they tried to, I mean, the deep seek moment felt at the time very calculated. let's ramp this app up the charts that I still didn't know a single person that was using Deep Seek.

It felt entirely that the chart run felt entirely manufactured and the immediate effect on markets was insane. Counterpoint, maybe they were just trying to take a little bit of air out of the bubble to create a bull catalyst. I mean, everybody knows if markets go down, that's a bullish catalyst.

Yes, it also inspires us to grind harder. Yeah. Tyler, do you know Ball? Dean Ball? Oh, I know of. Yeah. Oh, you do. Okay, cool. Oh, he knows, okay. Good. Do you know linear? That's why we hired you.

It's purpose belt tool for planning and building products. Meet the system for modern software development. Streamline issues, projects, and product roadmacks. You can start building. Some thoughts and recommendations from Dean Ball. Many things are unclear, including how intensively they will enforce this. This is a costly decision for them, too, and not without risk. These controls are being imposed on the whole world, not just the United States.

My current assumption is that China is doing this to gain leverage over the U.S. in advance of the president's upcoming meeting with Xi Jinping at APEC. It would be very funny if they just put the controls in the United States, and then you had a bunch of startups that were like, I'm going to do diversion, and I'm going to go set up a rare earth, you know, buying and selling on. operation in, you know, Dubai or Malaysia or somewhere. That would be very interesting. Number three, I do not think they are doing this to get the U.S. to relax its export controls on Nvidia Blackwell chips. In fact, my guess is that they want us to think that's their goal. We buckle by relaxing

Blackwell controls, and then the PRC shrugs and says, no thanks. We're very confident in our domestic chip industry. That is a message I'd want to be delivering to APEC if I were advising the PRC. Four, further relaxation of export controls is therefore unlikely to be a useful policy lever here. Instead, it is time for the U.S. to get serious about export controls on semiconductor manufacturing equipment. Five, because we have been mostly unserious about this issue, China has stockpiled most durable equipment needed to make semiconductors.

So most controls will not have an immediate effect. Six, he really ran through this. This is great. six. However, there are some, there are some consumable materials needed for semiconductor manufacturing that China cannot make domestically even better. Those consumables are often degradable, meaning one can only stockpile so much. These would be on the top of my list if I worked at BIS. I would strongly, I would retaliate strongly, but in a targeted manner, the ultimate route to de-escalation here is tariffs and broader trade war policy moves, not AI compute. This only underscores the urgency for the U.S.

plus allies and partners to accelerate domestic efforts to mine and refine rare earths. Let's hear it for that. The Trump administration has been especially strong here, and Congress allocated serious money to this goal in 03B. But all options must be on the table, including the Defense Production Act. Policy will be important here, but remember that these rare earths are essential to the functioning of the global economy. It has heretofore been hard to solve with markets alone because China already supplies

these commodities in abundance and at low cost. but they are fundamentally just commodities. We can make them. And 10, to the extent China enforces this policy, they will have made the price of these essential goods infinitely high. Remember, most of all, that supply is elastic, not on arbitrarily short time cycles, but faster than most people think. So if the prices is infinitely high, there will be a huge incentive to go start mining rare earth elements in the United States. Interesting MP materials is actually down 0.6 of a percent in the last five days, which is, of course, the company that the Trump admin took roughly a 15 percent stake in in rare earths.

Well, Peter Hague says, sir, a second whispering to the president meme has hit the timeline. Is this a real photo? This feels like something that someone would have AI generated, but it looks real to me. It's from Reuters. And, sir, a second ad read has hit the timeline with numeralh.com, sales tax, and autopilot, spend less in five minutes on sales tax compliance. I screenshot of that one twice. It was so good.

Andy Jassy says Joseph Carlson. The current CEO of Amazon has been with the company for 28 years. Wow. Andy Jassy, what a run. In 2003, he played a pivotal role in creating and scaling AWS, which is the most valuable part of Amazon.

A significant portion of the modern internet is powered by AWS. Amazon today is worth $2.4 trillion and is one of the most critical companies to the United States and the world. Yet, the CEO makes less money than many YouTubers, comedians, podcasters, professional athletes, and actors that don't manage or guide anything nearly as important or critical to the U.S. or have millions of employees. We need to stop pretending that the CEOs of Fortune 10 companies who have helped build trillions of dollars worth of value

for investors should have their salary compared with the delivery drivers working their way through through college. This trope is old and should be retired. Yeah, Josh Hawley, Senator for Missouri, says, is firing shots at Jassy saying why, how is it pro worker or pro American that he makes at least 40 million a year while the average American, Amazon worker makes less than 38K a year. Well, he needs to go on a campaign. Bobby in the chat says Andy Jassy doesn't even have 200,000 Twitter followers. That's rough. He's also never streaming on Twitch.

Get on Twitch, Andy Jassy. We'd love to see you there. I know. They own it. Amazon owns Twitch. And so that's where he should give his press releases. This is wild. Chip Wilson, Lulu Lemon founder, takes out a full page ad in the Wall Street Journal to roast the brand that he started.

When was this in the journal? Lulu Lemon in a nosedive. He says, when I founded Lulu Lemon in 1998, it was built on a relentless focus. on innovation, product culture, and customer experience. We invented a quote-unquote technical product, business model, created a new apparel category, pioneered community marketing and developed system processes so simple a refrigerator could manage them. By its 25th anniversary, Lou Lemon should have been a hundred billion dollar market cap company. Instead, its trajectory has declined. Why? Lou Lemon directors have systematically dismantled the business model and lost

employees who held the institutional knowledge that made the company great like a plane crash decline rarely happens because of a single failure it's a series of mistakes he's adding some different sections here one the founder leaves when a founder leaves boards tend to fill committees with operators or finance focus directors who are beholden to quarterly commitments a company bereft of a visionary loses its singular voice for product and long-term strategy a strategy that builds a mode around success. An operation slash finance-driven board lacks the moxie to understand the market pulse, gap-gapization loss of creative to the merchants. Every few years, a design team will stumble. When that happens, merchants and MBA swoop in claiming to be the adults who can deliver

consistent quarterly projections for Wall Street. To meet those projections, merchants follow algorithms and double down on what sold the year before. This kills risk-taking and prevents new innovative product from emerging. As a result, innovation dies. The brand, becomes predictable. Customers drift and the best creative people leave. The domino effect. As top talent leaves, short-term results often look strong. The board harvest brand value by rapidly growing store count,

while margins expand through economies of scale. Wall Street is ecstatic, and the egos of directors and management soar. Meanwhile, owner-operated competitors seize the opportunity producing better product. Lulu Lemon's institutional knowledge walks out the door, often to competitors and is replaced by Nike executive shots fired. who import a failed business model. Desperate for growth, Lou Lemon squandered $1 billion on mirror and wiped out $10 billion in market cap with a wildly, wildly inappropriate Disney collaboration.

To squeeze margins further, directors cheapen store design and shifted to non-technical fabrics eroding the brand's premium positioning. Cultural erosion. New executives from old school companies chase short-term margin growth and resume building. Directors unwilling to confront their own role in the decline an attempt to replace the CEO, only to realize for the third time that they've failed to develop an internal successor, with the brand faltering no capable candidate wants a CEO job. The nominating committee struggles to attract directors because no great leader wants to join a sinking ship loss of cool. The board insists on operator finance CEOs who can speak Wall Street rejecting the idea of a product-driven CEO.

These types of finance-focused CEOs don't know how to attract or motivate creative talent, or even worse, they think they understand how great product when they don't. Without an eye for outstanding design, the company dies a slow death. Lulu Lemon forgot its muse. The woman who inspires culture, not just follows it. By drifting toward the mainstream and trying to appease everyone, Lulu Lemon lost 50% of its market cap earned from brand power. It lost its edge and with it the ability to hire the best people.

The result, on paper, Lulu Lemon still looks good, but it's losing its soul. It's still a $20 billion company. That is getting absolutely smoked by Allo in their. core segment, which is the muse that he described above. And founders back at Outdoor Forces, too. Yeah. So he says, the deeper issue is not just management. It's a disengaged nominating and governance committee that has failed to safeguard the

company's long-term vision. The path forward, I believe Lula Lemon can recover, but survival requires courage. Put product and brand back at the center. Rebuild the knowledge and systems that deliver product in nine months, not two years. Bring entrepreneurial ownership back onto the board. Three, empower creative leadership over merchants. Four, stop chasing Wall Street at the expense of customers. Five, recommit to the muse, the woman who inspires the brand.

The world doesn't need another bland, quarterly driven apparel company. It needs bold vision. It needs Lulu Lemon to fly again. Lulu Lemon can keep growing, but growth alone is not a healthy measure of success. The true measure must be innovation and brand reputation. When those are strong, growth comes naturally when they're not. Growth halts. The path is clear, but only with a revitalized board of directors with diverse capabilities.

sincerely, Chip Wilson, founder, Lula Lemon. Chad Wilson. When did he actually... Step off the board? When did this actual article come out? It feels like... It's not in today's paper. I checked every page, so...

But it must be recently. I think it came out. I'm on the journals. Yeah. I think it came out yesterday. What's interesting is, like, I'm surprised he had to pay for this. Like, this would just be a good op-ad to throw in there, but it does hit... It's kind of a hits harder that he's pang out of his own pocket.

And the layout also just feels very, I don't know, iconic. It looks a lot different. We should get Chip on the show. I'd love to talk to him about that. Yeah, I mean, they're just being competed from every possible angle. There's new brands popping up all the time that are more catered to the early kind of core, you know, lemon customer. You have aloe, you have Vori, you have skims from Kim Kardashian, right?

and all of these brands are just better serving that initial cohort. So, yeah. Well, let's get him on the show. Let's pitch him thin. com. The number one AI agent for customer service. More SaaS chip. Number one in performance benchmarks.

Number one in competitive bigoffs, number one ranking on cheat too. Did you see wagey capital taking a shot at Samuel Gibson? we'll hold our judgments until we actually meet him. So wagey capital says, incredible things are happening in the nuclear grift space. Meet Samuel Gibson, Zumer, who graduated from college in 2023. Let's give it up for Zimmers. Yes.

And is now co-founder and CEO of Hadron Energy, a nuclear vaporware company going public via SPAC at a $1.2 billion dollar valuation. They have, according to LinkedIn, between two and ten employees. Okay. But 11,000 followers. It's not bad. Everybody starts somewhere.

I don't know. I mean, you got to get the money to build a nuclear reactor at some point. And they raised a $900,000 precede according to CrunchBase, but that's also. You went from 900K precede to $1.2 billion SPAC? I mean, built different. Gen Z really on a tear. He had a 3.4 GPA at Union. University of Nebraska, Lincoln.

Not bad at all. I don't know. Get the, get the bag, get the cash, build the thing, hopefully. Got to build. Yeah. You can't purely cash out and then write it down. You got to turn it. You can spack it, but you got to deliver the actual energy. On the website, they just have, they have like a bunch of renders.

Yes. And one of the renders just says data center one on it. Okay. They got, so they got data centers. They got data centers. Yeah, but they're saying the world's smallest, lightest, most versatile micro-modular reactors. This, yeah. And the design is awesome.

The renders are awesome. Yeah, a lot of work. I mean, I feel like. And they have a Tesla cyber truck render, pulling a render of their micro-render reactor. So it's looking, it almost looks kind of like Fortnite. Huge question on who's actually underwriting the SPAC. who's running this thing? How did the capital go into the pipe?

Like what actually happened here? You know, there's, the SPACs are not inherently bad. You can raise money in a variety of ways. And if you go and actually deliver and generate a lot of cash flow, at some point you'll be worth way more than what you spacked at.

So good luck to him, but it does seem like a tall order to be building in one of the most heavily regulated. Gig Capital Global is, putting up how much? Some of the cash here. And they also,

you might remember, they are investors in Big Bear AI. I don't know Big Bear AI. I didn't think you were. Okay. But anyways, we'll see here. I think we should withhold judgment. Yes.

The renders look cool. Plug it in. Plug it in. Plug it in. Just plug it in. It's time to plug. It's time to plug. It's time to plug.

It's time to plug. It's time to blog. Tyler, you should talk to him and see how real it is. I mean, I've been thinking about getting to the SPAC game. Oh, yeah. What are you going to SPAC? I think I'll probably figure it out later on when I kind of started the motions already. Just empty shelf for now.

Self SPAC. Tabaluraza. Self SPAC. Could go any direction. Yeah. I'm surprised somebody hasn't tried to SPAC themselves with some type of income share agreement yet. During the NFT boom, someone did. Wasn't it Alex token?

Am I getting that wrong? Yeah, but a lot of, he definitely, I think, started a trend of people. Isn't this the Ben Pasternak thesis as well? Everyone will have a coin attached to them or their project. Nathan Summers in the X-Chat. Are you guys hiring for a narrator intern? I have great cadence. He's a drummer and tonal variety for an exciting viewer experience.

I also would hate to see a vocal cord strain cut down on your ability to run the live show DM. Imagine being able to say. Tyler, reach out to Nathan. We've got to talk to this guy. Okay, yeah, he's just sitting here and we say, read me this Wall Street Journal article. Yeah, a narrate. And we will just do the reaction,

but we want you in person live to read us this story from the Wall Street Journal on Can Ferrari Persuade the Super Rich to buy an EV sports car that won't rev? We're going to read this article, but first I'm going to tell you about Adio, customer relationship magic. Adio is the AI Native CRM

that builds and grows your companies to the next level. So the brand Ferrari is playing, planning to unveil its first all-electric model next year. And it's a bold move. It's a bad time, probably something that was greenlit years ago. But we will dive into it in this Wall Street Journal article. And some backstory here. For our just updated guidance, they had a Capital Markets Day.

Wall Street was not excited about it. The stock is down 18% in the last five days. Okay. So let's get into their next vehicle, which I think is something no one wants. We will see. Extravagantly powerful and noisy engines helped make Ferrari the ultimate sports car brand. Now the company wants to persuade the super rich to buy a model with no engine at all. The Italian car maker this week started lifting the hood on its first electric vehicle,

a years-long project that has cost the brand hundreds of millions of dollars and promises to set a benchmark for how battery-powered sports cars should look and look sound and drive. At a glitzy launch event at its headquarters in Maranello, Italy, Ferrari showed off the technology that will power the EV, including a new electric axle motor and battery packs set to be made in-house at its factory. Wow, going vertically integrated all the way down to the battery on day one. That's bold. Which is wild because Ferraris have always been known to have electrical issues, including the furrow. that I owned, that I think I replaced the battery. I forgot exactly how many times,

but I had to replace the battery multiple times in a single quarter. Skill issue. It said the vehicle called the Ferrari Electrica. What do we think of that name? It's not quite there. The Dolje Trilindy hits, you know, the Electrica, maybe. It feels like a name that somebody

that was like trying to come off as an Italian. brand would use? Well, it'll be able to go from zero to 62 miles an hour in 2.5 seconds, which is fast, but not as fast as a model S plaid that you can get on Bring a Trailer for 50K now. So it has a top speed of 193 miles an hour. The range on a single charge will be at least 329 miles.

That's not bad. The company won't reveal what the model looks like until next spring with deliveries slated to start later. Apparently, the Model S Plaid does 1.99 seconds, although I wouldn't want to try that out, to be honest. You wouldn't, or you would? Maybe on a, maybe on like a runway. Yeah. But on a normal road, I wouldn't want to, I wouldn't.

You wouldn't want to go that fast? I just, uh, maybe when you're an adult, when you're, when you're, when you're a man. Yeah. Then you can do it. When I finish growing. Yes. Uh, the debut. comes as the global auto industry adjusts to a slower transition to EVs than expected when Ferrari

announced the project. So when Ferrari started working on this, everyone was saying everything's going to be EV, EV is going to dominate. It's not just going to be some like subcategory of the market. It's going to be everything. So you've got to get in on it. And of course, other sports car makers such as Porsche Lab Brigini and McLaren have delayed plans to build electric models citing weak demand. While Ferrari is committed to launching its first EV on schedule, it has scaled back its wider bet on the technology. At an Investor Day Thursday, which you mentioned, the company said EVs would account for 20% of its vehicle lineup in 2030, half the share previously indicated. We know that this path is not easy, Ferrari chief executive Benedetto Vigna said in an interview,

but we also know that we as a leader need to show the entire world that we can harness this technology. At the same time, the company plans to release many new vehicles with traditional engines, according to its latest product roadmap, the Ferrari Electrica, is one of 20 models set to launch through 2030, more than previously planned. Despite the new models, Ferrari issued a cautious sales forecast, 5% annual revenue growth through 2030, and the stock fell 12%. Since being spun out of fiat a decade ago, Ferrari has become Europe's most valuable carmaker by persuading Uber wealthy gearheads to splurge. Hundreds of thousands of dollars on meticulously crafted sports cars,

EVs pose a particular challenge for luxury sports car brands, which say roar and rumble are central to their identity's appeal. Ferrari, perhaps more than any other automaker... Imagine Nathan in the chat narrating this right now. I know. It could be so much better. The brand is known for its noise. The Dolce Trilindri is naturally aspirated, meaning it doesn't rely on a turbocharger to push air into the cylinders.

An old-school approach credited with a more natural oeuvre. and roar. Ferrari said its EV wouldn't mimic engine sounds as some competitors have like the Kia EV6 GT, I forget what it's called, but Yeah, that was an engineer from the M series, right?

That's Hyundai actually. So the engineer who created the M division at BMW went over to Hyundai and created the N division because N comes after M and tuned up a bunch of the Hyundai's to be performing.

cars, and one of them is the Hyundai EV6 or something. I'm getting the exact model name wrong, but it has not only engine noise that comes through the speakers, but a simulated dual-clutch transmission that you can operate via paddle shifters that are entirely digital. And so you can essentially be rev-limited and be redlining the car, even though it doesn't have a real red line. And a lot of the super old school car lovers tried it. Doug DeMiro and a bunch of other folks, Matt Farrah from smoking tire, all tried it. And they were like, this is amazing. Like, I forgot that I was driving an electric vehicle after just a few minutes of the car. And so the prediction at the time was that every electric vehicle car maker would adopt that same

simulation technology because it was popular. And it's a pretty easy feature to add. Seems like Ferrari won't, though. They're going natural EV. Instead, it will pick up the sound of what it calls the electric engine and amplify it into the cabin to give the driver feedback when required, so you'll hear the electric engine, whirring. The company compared the difference between its conventional sports cars and the EV to the difference between an acoustic and electric guitar.

Ferrari also faces the risk of EVs losing value faster than traditional models as the battery degrades. The promise of timelessness is a selling point for Ferrari buyers, company leans into the economics of the luxury industry, carefully limiting supply to ensure that its top models retain their value over time, like Rolex watches or Arames handbags. And if you want a Rolex, head over to getbezzled.com, your bezel concierge is available to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch. So, Elkan also recruited Johnny Ive to work on the brand's first electric model. Oh, interesting. I didn't realize this. We talked about

this with love from having a Ferrari partnership. This is the car that was designed by Johnny Ive. That's fun. To make its electric cars, Ferrari built a state-of-the-art factory, which became known as the E-building after heavy investment. The question now is whether Ferrari's wealthy clients will want to drive the new model. Imagine, you know, spending your whole life as, you know, being obsessed with the Ferrari brand, learning to work on these engines and then getting the tap on the shoulder and saying you're actually going over to the e-building yeah and i think there's there's also this factor that um the it feels like the really highly engaged Ferrari buyer maybe doesn't care about straight line speed that much it's never been a muscle car uh the more exciting number that folks

track is like the nerberg ring time and the gas cars are still performing extremely well also just the feeling yeah that the factors Really is important for sure. Yeah, just the feeling of driving the car, what the ownership experience, right? Yeah. The main critique of Ferrari from some of the more, I would say, casual clientele is like the depreciation recently. The cars are just losing value far more quickly than they historically did. Part of that is already because the hybrids, right, the SF90s, the 296 is also a hybrid.

Is that depreciating? I thought that one was kind of holding its value a little bit more. A little bit better, but I mean, you can buy them for less than sticker with like three, you know, way less than sticker for like 300 miles on them. I would have expected Ferrari to try to go more towards something like a Nissan cross cabriolet. I would love that. Take the perisangue, give it a drop top. Yeah, iconic silhouette.

A ragtop perisangue might be the move for them. This is interesting, though, Canadian collector, Luke. Poirier, who owns 38 Ferraris, said he was open to the idea of buying the EV, having found the company's hybrids engaging and emotional to drive. I see that SF90 is a wild driving experience. I was in Dubai and rented an SF90 and took it out. It's pretty funny. They give you tickets in the UAE based on you'll get, they have cameras. They'll, they'll, they'll, they'll, they'll give you tickets without you even having any sense of it. So you can actually go out on a drive and get multiple tickets if you're not safe. I was, so the rental service was, they keep like a

deposit, like long after you've returned the car and ensure that they're like, okay, the car is good, but you might have gotten like five tickets. And so we need to hold this. But Luke, Luke says, my only hesitation is reliability, since it will involve so much new technology. For I started dabbling in hybrid technology on the racetrack in 2009, and hybrids now account for almost half its output. Vignis at Ferrari would apply lessons. It is learned from hybrids to its EV. We will not sell an electric car without considering the expiration date of the battery. Many EVs and hybrids haven't performed well in the second-hand market, a problem typical of fast-moving technologies. SF-90 and SF-90 Spider, for example, have depreciated faster than comparable models with conventional

power trains, according to Haggerty. Again, there was a lot of people that bought SF-9. He's at the top for way over Sticker. It also came out during like the zero interest rate sort of bubble. So the auto loan rates were really low and a lot of people were flush from various crypto schemes and all sorts of froth in the market. Oh, yeah, everywhere. It was easy to buy it over Sticker. Do you know David Lee, the Ferrari collector?

He has over 40 Ferraris, I think are all in red. He has all the supercars, the F40, F50, the Law Ferrari, the Enzo. So he says to be a top client of Ferrari, you buy every car that they introduce, and he says he's planning to buy the EV. But I wonder how many of those collectors will stick around if they just took a bath on an SF-90. They're not doing well in their 296. Yeah, but the, I mean, so city analyst Harold Hendriski says it is somewhat surprising that

Ferrari is going ahead. Overall demand for those cars is minimal. we were talking earlier off the air just saying they had such an amazing opportunity to let the rest of the automotive industry go have you know Porsche went heavy into EVs is now pulling back Ferrari could have said

we never wanted to go into EVs we like you know naturally aspirated V12s we're going to continue to focus here if they were the one that never did the EV it would have been crazy it would have been a very special thing to the brand and now they're still they're still like in the same conversation

Porsche and Lamborghini and McLaren. But again, if you're a client and you want access to the F-80, you better believe that you are going to be fine. Go into your dealer, get pre-order a few of the Ferrari Electricas. Yeah. At the same time, like, I feel like if you're David Lee, you own 40, like you definitely want to own the first EV just because it's going to be interesting to see what Ferrari does with an EV.

Like, it will be a different experience. It will be, there will be a Ferrari twist or 10. take on even though that's I'm still so interested to see what happens with the poor sangue from a depreciation standpoint they're holding up well now it's a naturally aspirated V12 I think it looks uh you know people debate

the looks all the time but yeah you can always put a monster body kit on it and get the Puginator and then you're good but uh yeah we'll see how these hold up make it off road edition having a I don't know that the Uris has held up incredibly well because it still looks exactly the same as it did in 2019.

Yeah, hasn't been refreshed. So people will happily buy, happily, you know, continue to purchase a older Uris and use it to sell courses or whatever they do. But I don't know about the, it's hard for me to imagine people paying half a million dollars for a Ferrari SUV or even $400,000 in a few years, right? So, well, if you want a Ferrari for your bedroom, get an eight sleep, pod five, five-year warranty, third-day arrest retrial, free return, free shipping. I'm back on a roll.

I got a 93, eight hours, 23 minutes. Let's read this post from SMB attorney who says, wait, would you get? I got a 93. Oh, I got 99. Two 90s back to back. SMB attorney says, people keep telling me the American dream is dead, but every day I meet entrepreneurs who know more about SEC football than accounting, drive truck. and think getting dressed up means a good pair of jeans

who've made millions running businesses that clear, land, trim trees, and install equipment. The American Dream is alive and well. It's just hidden behind hard work and a little bit of sweat. We have to get a plumber or an electrician on the show that's cashing in on the data center boom. There has to be some guys that are on their way to at least getting a PC-12, you know,

turbo prop. I wouldn't be surprised. But I think that this post is more just about like you don't need to be a janitor at a data center to experience a boom. If you're just running a well-run operation and have scaled it. There's a reason, you know, the meme is the private equity guys will come and buy these companies. But the reason they do is because they're good companies. And so maybe there's still, still an opportunity there. And there's also opportunity in the public markets on public.com investing for those who take it seriously. They got multi-ass investing. industry-leading yields. They're trusted by millions. They now have direct indexing.

Yes. I am playing around with. Well, um, what do you got? Wilmanitis on the timeline. Back with a longer post. Take us a minute to read through this, but should be fun. Get started. I'll be right back. He says, you can leave the kingdom, but you're still paying tax. Incumbents realize their industry is too regulated or, and to consumer, unfriendly for growth.

So they build a parallel, less regulated, often cash pay alternative next door. parallel system is easier, but causes massive consumer harm. I've seen this myself. The prime example of this over the last five years is the rise of telemedicine pill mills in health care. Think of the healthcare industry as defined by two factors. One, extremely limited supply. Medical doctors are scarce and costly. And two, a principal agent problem with payments. Your insurance pays and you don't. This has allowed the industry to behave in incredibly weird ways. costs can constantly grow, patient experience can constantly degrade, and clinics will still fill up with wait lists because patients trust it, need it, aren't paying for it, and have no choice. As a result of this, we saw a world where patients replaced their primary care doctor with a fleet of telemedicine pill mills for lifestyle drugs.

Further, lax regulations during the 2021 era allowed for these telemedicine services to offer things the traditional system could never offer. lifestyle drugs with limited medical supervision. Sure, it was a better experience, but that patient went from having 75% of their care subsidized by insurance to having 0% of their care and drugs subsidized. The parallel system passed costs onto the consumer. Furthermore, the consumer is likely harmed in the form of lower coordination and regulation, opening the door to all kinds of harm, bad drugs, conflicting drugs, etc. How many people do you know that are now on four, five, six, or seven drugs of dubious medical need. I actually don't know that many people that are on that,

but I certainly hear stories about it. Flip a coin. Either way, the percent of your income spent on health care is going up. That seems true. We see this playbook across industries. When the kingdom was built, the merchants paid taxes, coordination, regulation. They hated paying taxes and boxed themselves in via regulatory capture,

so they pushed it onto the consumer. Unable to conduct business, both the merchant and the consumer, leave the kingdom. Things are easier outside of the kingdom walls, but the merchant gets richer, faster, and the consumer gets harmed. You see this in options markets today. You see this in defense procurement, which I don't know what he's talking about. I've never heard of defense procurement happening outside of a regulated environment. I do see it in healthcare. You see it in crypto. That seems like a great example. You see this everywhere. I would love to know what he's

thinking on defense procurement specifically. We build palaces of regulation to prevent consumer harm and force consumers into unregulated legal gray area systems in order to conduct business. It's easy to see why. This is a durable economic effect we see across economies. You can simply squeeze more growth out of an unregulated market. Look at rising Asia. And the U.S. has allowed for a continuously developing set of emerging economies by its glacial

pace of gray market regulation. We should view this as an incredible indictment of a regulatory state. The solution is to overregulation of essential industries isn't to allow. the progressive construction and delayed regulation of legal gray areas. The solution to over-regulation is to remove regulation on existing industries, parallel construction of regulated system harms consumers. And I have a great example of this that I've lived for years, but I can take you through it. At me. So, Jewell, started 10 years ago, got immensely popular and was so regulated by the FDA that at one point they were banned and then they finally got approved and all of this

was justifiable in the micro but during the time that they were banned and going through all this guess what happened there was an entire massive gray market of illegal vapes that weren't even trying to be approved by the FDA they weren't participating in the regulated structure they were not in the kingdom they were just out in the gray market and they became so big of like a of a child testing the vape. Yeah, it's crazy. Like they were coming off the line of child in China's hitting them all to make sure they're working and then before they ship them out to America.

Yep. So crazy. So the market moved to gray market. And I don't know what the stats are most recently, but at one point, illegal vapes, mostly imported from China were the second largest category of nicotine consumption after cigarettes. So it was much, much bigger than Jewel and the companies that were trying to be regulated. There's obviously regulation that needs to happen in this. category. But if it takes 10 years, yes, there is a gray market that's going to develop. And so

I firmly agree with Will. I've seen it in the business that I know best. And he's obviously seen it in the medical space. I have no idea what he's talking about in the defense space. But do you have any thoughts on Will's latest long post? The Yuga, as he puts it. The Yuga. I don't know. I think it's interesting that we haven't seen more about the pill mills and all the telemedicine shops from the 2021. We were hearing rumors. Working through the courts. Yeah, yeah, we were hearing rumors of like ATF getting involved or the government getting involved.

Some of these companies going bust. A lot of them, they kind of had legal problems, and then they just kind of melted away, and they just became quiet, and I haven't heard from these companies. Maybe they still exist. Maybe they just kind of quietly stopped doing the bad thing. Yeah, I'm sure they're all doing it again, or they're being reborn to do various peptides and semaglutide and all those. Well, we heard about a fantastic company,

biotechpeptides.com or so. Do not go there. I don't know that that's the website. Yeah. We saw someone. A friend of the show shopping for Chinese peptides offline. And the website was just called biotech peptides. Doesn't seem like the most legit company.

It seems extremely legit. I love biotech. It's the most important technology, you know. It's like reliable medicine.com. No, it's called medicinemedicine.com. Yeah, basically. We haven't talked about this first brands bankruptcy. Did you see this?

I don't know anything about this. I'll read through a piece in the journal from yesterday. So first brands, auto parts supplier first brands crashed into bankruptcy last month. Now banks are sifting through their exposure to the company and its chain of customers and suppliers. Jeffries on Wednesday said funds run. by an asset management unit point bonita capital are owed seven hundred and fifteen million from companies that bought first brands parts ubs in bankruptcy court filing said funds it operates including through its o'connor hedge fund unit which the bank agreed to sell earlier this year have

around 500 million of exposure the exposure is also mainly to customers that owe first brands money a person familiar with the matter said the twin disclosures from the banks illustrate the tangible the tangle of financing that flowed through first brands which collapsed in late September owing more than 10 billion in a messy and sudden unraveling. Newly appointed directors have said they're probing irregularities in its financing arrangements. Jeffrey said it doesn't have any information yet on what the probe has found, and it would also act to enforce investors' rights. UBS also said in a statement that it was working to protect investors' interests. Of course they are. Neither firm indicated any significant direct exposure. Analysts at Morgan

Stanley calculated Jeffrey's possible total exposure as an investor in the funds. at $44 million. So the timeline is getting into a junk bond analyst on X says, Jeffries is in the crosshair as the main investment bank behind First Brands with a history of bringing risky capital markets deals. New facts are coming to light. The unraveling of First Brands comes just one month

after Jeffries was pitching investors on a $6 billion debt refinancing deal. Investor concerns caused the refinancing efforts to fail as Jeffrey struggled to get diligence information from First Brands. Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing followed weeks later. New information about Jeffrey's level of involvement. First Brands set up a so-called side letter with Jefferies for an additional trade financing facility, which enabled First Brands to raise funds at an interest rate above the limits permitted

by its loan documents. The workaround, First Brands paid Jeffries a supplemental incentive fee instead. This new disclosure caught investors by surprise. increasing financing costs and breaching rules on existing loans, which Jeffrey's helped arrange and syndicate. On their website, they have a list of brands. I don't know that many of them, but I do see the Michelin logo. They don't actually own Michelin.

I was thinking that they might also on the Michelin Guide, but they do license Michelin in tires, I suppose. Or wipers, actually, Michelin wipers. They sell. They don't sell the tires. Interesting. I was not familiar with this company before we pulled it. Well, anyways, still sort of unraveling.

There's a bunch of different groups that there's other reporting that says 2.3 billion is simply vanished from First Brand's accounts. So, again, people, there's an email here from someone at Oric that says, wheel team. Thank you for your help yesterday in respect of the. orders and our client's comments. We would like to set up a call with you today to ask two question which our clients needs for informational purposes. First, do we know whether FBG actually received $1.9 billion, no matter what happened to it? We got almost $2 billion just missing. Second, would you tell us how much is in the aggregated accounts and respect of the factored

receivables as of today? And they answer, one, we don't know, two, zero dollars. in their accounts. So big multi-billion dollar mystery here. And yeah, we'll see how this turns out. Well, Clark in the chat says, is talking about the example I gave about vapes. He highlights that something similar happened in THC with Delta 8 and THCAA. I completely agree. It was the same thing. that there was for a decade or longer, like people were saying, oh, there's going to be like a federal bill on, you know, where does America stand on THC? And it just kept being kicked to the states and legal and medicine in some areas and the recreational and others. And in that time, basically you go to one of these trade shows and every gas station owner is there buying like

basically whatever they want. And it's just like a complete failure to just have clarity around what the market structure should be. So lots of work to be done on the regulatory side, unfortunately. Well, without further ado, I think we have our first guest in the mainstream waiting room. Let's bring them in. Let's bring in Preston. Here we go. Welcome to the show, Preston from Relays.

Great to have you. Give us a quick introduction on yourself and the company, and then we'll get into the news. Yeah, of course. My name is Preston. I've been working on Relays with my co-founder Aton Borgnia, and we've recently raised $23 million to say it. There we go. When John gets back, we'll hit the gong. But how did you get into building Relase? When did you start it? What were you doing before? Yeah, that's a great question. Before this, we were both PhD students. So I was doing my PhD in physics. I'm a co-founder, Atomis students, PhD in machine learning. same college no I was at

Harvard and he was at you Chicago but we went to Caltech as undergrad together very cool very cool so straight from PhD program into Relase did you drop out or did you guys actually get your degrees

yeah we dropped out there you go there you go chat GPDHS come out and we were like this is the time to do it amazing what obviously hyper competitive category tons of activity. What's been your guys's initial edge and focus? Yeah, so we've been really

focused on approaching the developer experience, but from the experience of the agent itself. And so we don't consider ourselves like competitors with like cursor or cognition or anything like that. We're building the infrastructure that someone would want to use when they're building AI agents. And so what we've focused on to start are all these auxiliary models that make these AI agents more reliable. As an example, if I'm a human, I love my auto complete. I love my tab auto complete. If I'm an agent, I have a different set of models that are really useful to me. So this is like what we've started out with. This is like our fast supply model, which applies diffs, and our embedding and rerank models, which is able to find the relevant code in your code base. in less than a second. And this is used by 40 companies, including Loveable and Figma, et cetera. How do you think Open AI's Agent Builder product is going to play out?

It seemed like a cool, like new capability, but I'm not sure. I haven't had the poll like the other products that they've released in the last couple weeks to just like jump in, try it, play around. What's been your read on Agent Builder from Open AI? Yeah. I've heard good things. I mean, it looks very beautiful. It's definitely a different category than what we've built in. But I think the launch went really well. What does success look like over the next 12 months? Yeah, for us, we really want to now, with this race, optimize the infrastructure along with the models itself. I think as an example, like Hursa has done such a great.

job of optimizing the product with the models. And so all the models that you have within your IDE, the PIE model, and the tab autocomplete make this product work very seamlessly. We want to do the same thing for the infrastructure. And so we recently also released Relase Repos, along with our Series A announcement. It means that you can now have retrieval embedded directly into your source control. And we're really trying to reimagine, like, hey, like, what does source control look like when you have access to models to make it better and when you're like exclusively focused on building it for the agent's what's the biggest company that you've pitched or talked to in customer development I'd love to know the mood and the receptivity we've seen

some some news about like the Fortune 500 trying a bunch of AI stuff and then kind of pulling back from it have you talked to any big companies and can you share any context on how bigger companies are thinking about adopting AI broader. Yeah, and have you been focused there? Or you focused on scale-ups, like lovable and sort of founder-mode companies like Figma? Yeah. I mean, we're talking to all of the big vibe coding companies. You know, Lovable, Figma, are some of the examples. I think the way we think about this is that

these LOMs are going to continue to increase in capability. We're seeing kind of what dominoes fall in the first say like year year and a half of like models that are like reasonably good at coding and so already if I need a marketing website or or a simple presentation I can actually like vibe code that on like replica or lovable I think over the next year two years three years as we continue to see the capabilities increase more and more things that are now traditionally software will be able to express in code. And this is like what we're very interested in.

This is why we're saying that we're building the rails for software on demand. It's because things, we've seen people build like PowerPoints and decks in typescript and React instead of using PowerPoint anymore. We've seen people use like consumer TikTok filters that are entirely expressed in code. It's one of our customers, Gizmo. and we think that a lot of what we might not consider software today will end up being software and the thing that runs and creates it is going to be a coding agent. Well, congratulations on the round.

Hit that gong. Boom. Awesome. Congratulations on the raise. I'm sure we'll have you back on again soon for the B. Yeah. The way things are going currently and congrats on all the initial traction. Have a great rest of your day.

talk to you soon. Cheers. We have a review from Tripp Carolyn that we got to read through. He says, and of course, as a reminder, if you leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, put an ad for your business in that review. We'll read it on the show. Golf streams, wrist hitters, impeccable ad reads, the daily coverage of technology news. What more could one ask for between John and Jordy?

They have the height and the hair to revolutionize technology and private capital commentary. putting the TB in capital of German journalism. I have been an avid fan from the inception and will be for life. Cannot recommend more to anyone interested in business technology or loud opulence. Wow, he really does. And I'll take over now. He says TBPN is 100% electric, just like Flux Marines, 100% electric outboards. Great transition.

That's a true fan. Escape the noise, fumes, and maintenance of traditional gas engines with a flux outboard. now offering our high performance 115 horsepower outboards as well as complete boat packages with industry leading whole partners. We got to get a boat. The only outboards suitable for recording podcasts at full throttle. Visit fluxmarine.com and tell them the Technology Brothers sent you. Thank you.

We love you, Tripp. Fantastic. Trip truly has been a day one. A fan of Technology Brothers since the very beginning. Thank you for riding with us. And excited to get the update on. flux, you guys have been cooking over the last nine months or so. And without further ado, our next guest is in the re-stream waiting room.

We'll bring Scott in to the TBPN Ultramm. How are you doing, Scott? We go. See you. Fantastic. Thanks for having me. Give us an introduction on yourself and the company, and then we'll get into the news. Sure.

I'm Scott Stevenson, co-founder and CEO here at Spellbook. We launched one of the first Gen. AI products for lawyers back in the summer of 2022, a little before chat to BT, we're an AI contract review tool. So we allow 4,000 law firm and in-house council teams to draft and review contracts with AI. My background is in engineering. My co-founder, Daniel, is the lawyer of the team. And yeah, we're based in Canada. Give us the news today. We've raised 50 million, led by Keith Rboy. Yeah, Keith, he's a lawyer, right? Yeah, he was a lawyer.

He was a former lawyer, yeah. He doesn't love to admit it. Yes. What's it like building a point solution these days? I feel like this month that there's just been so many different announcements for different legal AI tools. Some are legacy platforms that are launching AI features and have a bunch of different workflows across the law firm. We had Crosby on yesterday, who's taking a different approach, obviously, building the entire firm. And then we talked to other, we had someone on the show last week who was building, you know, AI legal, but just in ambulance chaser agents, basically.

Personal injury, which is a very small niche. So when I hear cursive contracts, that makes sense. But it's like a different slice in the market. How do you settle there? Why are you confident about that slice? Yeah, sure. So I guess there's a couple questions there. Like one, yeah, we like being a point solution.

So we think of our product often as like a toaster. Like there's a lot of broad AI solutions for enterprise right now. For the beginning, we're like, we're going to be a toaster for contract review. So really easy to use, really easy to adopt. You know, we don't even do a sales call most of the time. It's just like welcome aboard. Let's get you using Spellbook in five minutes. I think there's a bunch of advantages.

And I think there's a lot of opportunity to build these kind of, I would say, like point solutions. products. And there's a lot of very, like, broad AI solutions out there. Why we chose contracts specifically, yeah, I mean, the story of how I started the company is I had a small business before this. And then one day, I had a legal bill that took, like, half the cash out of our bank account to do some, like, very minor things. Now, I didn't have much cash. I was, like, a new grad. But, you know, I thought that it was hugely painful to just do, like, simple transactional work as a small business. And I thought, you know, we could do it much more efficiently. But then the reason we settle on contracts is because the contract market size and the contract

pain goes way beyond just lawyers. That $30 trillion is estimated to flow through contracts in the U.S. loan every year. It's happening very inefficiently. There's a lot of risks. There's a lot of litigation from bad contracting, which, you know, Keith used to clean up as a litigator. And, um, You know, when you look at the actual overall size of contract pain in not just for lawyers, but in procurement, in HR and sales, that market size ends up being really, really big. Whereas if you just look at the market size of, you know, X number of lawyers times Y dollars per month, it's actually a much smaller market than when you look at, like, the overall pain of contracting. And, you know, I see like the millions of transactions that happen around the globe every day.

and contracts often being the bottleneck and what is it worth if we could speed up all those transactions if we could remove that bottleneck I think so much of commerce of the last 20 years has sped up like we have credit card networks we have stripe

we have digital payroll but contracts have largely remained the same except for Microsoft Word and so they've become a bottleneck so our mission is to make contracts move at the speed of commerce so we can all transact and work together much more efficiently. How often is a lawyer or firm signing up for Spellbook when they have

like, when they're bringing basically like, hey, we have this contract that we're working through right now. We're trying to create or provide feedback on we want to use Spellbook like this afternoon. Are you, what's like the time to value between signing up and actually being able to leverage the product? Yeah, I mean, it's, it's close to zero. And that was our design philosophy from day one is that a lawyer should be able to adopt this almost instantaneously. So, yeah, I mean, they can adopt it in almost five minutes without having to do a big rollout or a ton of training. And we've optimized almost the whole company with that in mind. And do lawyers, I'm not, nowadays engineers at every software company have the ability to just

sign up for tools themselves. Are law firms at that point? yet, where they have some amount of discretionary software budget that they can allocate as they see fit, or are they still, or is it still maybe, like, you know, Silicon Valley engineers in the 2000s? It depends on the segment. So 70% of lawyers work for small and mid-sized law firms. So when you envision lawyers, you usually think of big law, but actually 70% of lawyers are working at these much smaller firms, where they actually have a lot of autonomy, they have access to a credit card. they might be one of the founding partners of the firm. So in that segment, yeah, it's very much you can do self-signup.

And then we also serve in-house council teams. On in-house council teams, like we have customers like Nestle and eBay, you know, the decision-making power is still very concentrated. I think, like, with WIS, one of the reasons why they cited it was such a great motion is because, you know, the buying, the decision-making power was like with the CIO or security officer. And, you know, they're sort of the technical buyer. They're also the user. They're also the check signer. Similar thing happens in these in-house legal teams where there's often a GC who's the user. They're the check signer. They're like the sort of the domain expert.

And they're the champion all in one. So you still get these, I think, really fast buying cycles in these large enterprise in-house legal teams as well. What does growth look like? We were growing very quickly, yeah. So we launched. Let's give it up for very quick. Quickly. Put in your Excel money.

Yeah, we launched in 2022. We have 4,000 customers today. We're tripling this year. We're over tripling this year for sure. You know, hopefully even more. That's got. Yeah, it's been pretty well. Yeah, I think, yeah, over the last two and a half years,

I think we did something like 7,000 for some. growth, something like that. So yeah, it's been, it's been fast. Up into the right. Up into the right. Well, congratulations. Well, I'm sure we'll have you back on again soon for the sea. Have fun out there. Thanks for much. Thanks for me on the show. We'll talk to you soon. Scott. Bye. If you're looking for cursor for billboards, head over to ad quick.com. Out of advertising made easy and measurable say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only ad quick combines technology, out of home expertise and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. We are joined by George from Monk next. The Monk himself. Welcome to the show. George, what's

happening? Hey guys. For you. Thanks for having me. Good to have you. Kick us off with an introduction. You launched the company. How are you positioning the value proposition, the business? How are you explaining the business these days? Yep. We're at Monk.com. We held businesses save time and make money by solving invoices and collections, which now that I say this in the show kind of sounds like a cramp. What is the typical collection process? Is this like just automated emails? Is that an important part of getting paid as a business? Yeah, it's a huge part.

It's a huge part. I mean, most of it is email. And up until now, it's all been like these very boring done in emails that get sent and then get ignored. And then like statistically, a big piece of delays is just an error in these emails. It's like a tiny thing that we accept, but it's like a $3 trillion problem, right? Yep. What were the legacy solutions in the category, why start this business now? What was kind of the key unlock?

When I saw the launch made a lot of sense, but at the same time, you know, you look at a business like this. I think every business owner can go to monk.com and think, okay, I'm having these problems. This feels like an elegant solution for it. But why was this not a solved problem yet? yeah it's a good question and it's it's a red ocean like there's a ton of players before o'em and now every person with a Wi-Fi connection is going to rip a competitor um it's just diving into it takes a real shark to dive into a red ocean i like the honesty i appreciate this this is much it's true we're the only person that thought of this cap you know capitalism is inevitable you know

a few things a uh the selling into the office of the cfo changed twice since the ZERP. So like A, there was a ZERP and like it was super frothy. And then and then and so and then and then and then there's a lot more financial rigor. And then now with postal LEM, there's just a lot more appetite to experiment. So like I think the, the, the GTM motion got easier. And then the onus on the CFO or like the business leader, even the founder, the solo founder, get like a lot harder. Like they have to do a lot more with less.

And then B, like when Sam Altman and Satya compete and they poor billion. and CAPEX and OPEX and R&D, we at the app player just get to rip that into advantages. And so, like, we are applying LMs and three parts of this workflow, and it just works. And, like, every week that they improve, we improve before, obviously, not possible.

How'd you get Monk.com? That's a great domain. What's the story? Wanted a poker game. You wanted a poker game. You're a pro poker player, right? No, I'm kidding. I'm kidding.

I bought it. I bought it. Okay. But you made money in poker, and then so you paid for it. So you kind of wanted it. a poker game. I like that. Kind of wanted a poker game, kind of shield.

BTV gave me some money. We used to be called Atlas because I think Greek philosophy is cool and I thought, you know, a finance function holds up the world. But then there's like 50 Atlases. Oh, sure, sure. Yeah, Stripe Atlas. There's a bunch of other ideas. What makes poker players so elite

at the sport of business? Yeah. I know a buddy of mine still plays like pro pro-am, pro poker. Businesses basically degenerate gambling. Professionalized. Just kidding. I mean, don't you think you can sort of like cross-supply from, I mean, you run a business and now you're on a very popular issue.

You just cross-supply, like a lot of the same principles govern all these domains, right? Yeah, totally. Totally. Is this founder bluffing or will they come on the show? Will they come answer hard questions in the TBP Ultrodome? Will they have a poker face on? Expect the value of thinking, you know, risk, discipline, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Totally, totally.

Awesome. Take us through the round real quick. What happened? You mean like the money? Yeah. The money. The money. The money.

The money. The money. How much is? From who? Greenbacks. Four, led by Sheila and I-Hara MBTV. Yes. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. We love, Sheila. Is this from his new fund? He came on the show just like a week ago. He's already deploying, ripping checks. Or maybe you were the last one in fun, too. I don't know.

I think I'm the last one on the fun, too. Okay. GTM fund and V-Rail also helped, but yeah, Sheila and Yeharr led. Very cool. And tell us about the last company, super interested. The last company. Stream labs? Oh, stream labs.

Yeah, yeah. It's a big business. It's a creator economy business. We're a big developer for Twitch and YouTube. So, like, if you're a content creator and you live stream on Twitch YouTube, or like back then when Facebook was Facebook, you're using a. our tools. So live streaming, patronage, moderation, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And we sold because we're a developer and, like, Twitch was just ripping our roadmap, which is fine.

Yeah. Yeah. Who'd you sell to? Logitech. Okay. Logitech. There you go. Awesome. Well, yeah, congratulations on the raise. And yeah, it seems like there's quite a lot of demand, so good luck keeping up with it. Yeah, thanks for the support. We'll talk to you soon. Our next guest is in the Restream waiting room. But first, let me tell you about Wander. Find your happy place. Book of Wander with inspiring views, Hotel Grated Menis, Dreamy Beds, Top Gear Cleaning, and 24-7 concierge service. It's a vacation home but better.

We have Zach from Meanwhile, coming in to the TVPN Ultrodrome. Zach, how are you doing? There is. Welcome. Great. Happy to be here. Great to have you. Please kick us off with an introduction on yourself and the company.

We'd love to learn something. Yeah, my name is Zach. I'm a long-time FinTech entrepreneur. I've built. Meanwhile, meanwhile is the world's first Bitcoin life insurance company. But our intention is to build the world's largest life insurance company. How does Bitcoin life insurance fit together? How's the normal life insurance market work? How is this different? Walk me through just the like one step deeper in the thesis or the product. Yeah. So the normal life insurance market, this is about 3% of global GDP. You've probably never talked about it once on the show.

this gigantic. It is not just life insurance. It's about retirement savings. It's about protecting your family when you die. But what also happens to your family when you live longer than you're supposed to? That's deferred annuities. It's insurance bonds. It's all sorts of saving products. It's a huge, huge market that is completely untouched by technology. And the reason it's untouched by technology is because you need to be big for technology to matter. So that is why you have a bunch of companies who have like built marketing engines on top of the global life insurance ecosystem. What we've done is we have built a full stack, vertically integrated life insurance company in Bermuda. It just happens to be entirely be denominated in Bitcoin.

And what that means practically is if you want to save for the long term, you can now do it in Bitcoin. and there are tax advantages and there's a state and tax planning reasons to do that. But fundamentally, what we see is that if I bought a life insurance policy in 2018 when my son was born, I've seen the purchasing power of that dollar policy go down 25, 30%, whereas if I had done that in Bitcoin, I've seen the purchasing power go up hundreds of percent. And we want to bring that not just to everyone in America, but if you're a middle class person in Argentina, you don't save for your retirement because you were going to live longer than the Argentinian base so. So that person should save in Bitcoin. Okay, so you want a million dollar life insurance plan

to run your life actual 10 bitcoins by paying in Bitcoin? Because most people think about their life insurance policy is, okay, it's going to be $100 a month. I have a job. I can pay that. If it's in Bitcoin, it goes up and then all of a sudden I can't make the payments. How does all that flow? Yeah. So the current product that we do direct to consumer, but this round's actually about all this other stuff we do, is it's called Whole Life, so it lasts your whole life. It's very well named.

In our case, you might pay, I'm going to use big round numbers, you might pay one Bitcoin a year for 10 years. So you've paid us 10 Bitcoin, and then whenever you die, you get 15 Bitcoin. But yes, you're absolutely right. In a way, you're short Bitcoin. So I suggest do not buy a policy

bigger than your existing amount of Bitcoin. Interesting. What you mentioned some, You've just raised $82 million, so we should acknowledge that. $82 million. From Bain, Apollo, Northwestern Mutual, that's big. Han Ventures, and Pantera, a couple others. What was the catalyst for this round?

What are you working on outside of the direct-to-consumer product that you just mentioned? Yeah, so actually, we raised a Series A in February that was $40 million from Framework and Folger. and Wences. And what happened after that round is that a ton of the largest life insurance and retirement companies in the world approached us and asked us if we could work with them to bring these products to their markets, if we could help them do indexed annuities, index life insurance that had exposure to Bitcoin. And that is how this $82 million round came about, is that Han and Baincap crypto in particular,

Um, they had sort of been hovering around. They reached out to us in the summer. They said, you're one of the most important companies and going to be one of the most important companies in crypto. Can we invest? And I said, for a large enough check, you can do it. I love the, uh, love the honesty. What, uh, what is it about, uh, give us the law, Bermuda lore. I've only been there on vacation, but, uh, it sounds un-American to me, but I'll let you defend it. Well, it's, it's, it's, it's long been a sort of, you know, financial hub and it has like some deep history and ties between, you know, traditional, you know, Wall Street and, and Bermuda. You're not winning me over. It's not in America.

Yeah. So the fundamental history is that Bermuda used to be a tourist destination when you had to get on a boat to go to your vacation spot. And once there was an airplane, you're like, I'm going to go to the Bahamas or I'm going to go to Jamaica. Bermuda is actually like way out in the middle of nowhere in the ocean and it's just not as hot as you'd like, right? So, And it's the Burbunas, the Bermuda Triangle out there. Bermuda Triangle, not a great history on boats. So basically they had some really enterprising people in the 1950s and 60s who decided to make it an offshore financial hub.

And now it is like the insurance capital of the world. So I'm surprised you went there on vacation because there is about as many actuaries, lawyers, and accountants on Bermuda as there are Bermudians. You walk around and it's like Munich, Chubb, Swisserie. It's like huge financial institutions. I guess the next huge financial institution there is going to be meanwhile. Congratulations.

That's amazing. Is the Bermuda Triangle fake news? Are you taking a wild route when you go there? Are you avoiding that? I'm going to call it fake news, but they're actually, Bermuda has this really crazy history. They did a lot of things. They ran a ruthless salt monopoly over the Caribbean.

They were, like, gun runners in the Civil War. They had ran a penal colony. They're like, why not finance? They have found ways to be innovative for hundreds of years. So if me and you are flying in a Cessna to Bermuda, you're not telling me to fly around the triangle. You say fly right through the triangle? That's right. I've only been there on commercial jets.

So I'm not prepared to support the Cessna plan. Sure. But you're fearless, generally, around the triangle. generally fearless. That's great to hear. That's what it takes to take on a $3 trillion industry. I like it. I like it. You shouldn't be afraid of the triangle. You shouldn't be afraid of financial markets. How are you innovating on the direct, like the actual experience? I got a, uh, I got life insurance through my neighbor who happened to be an agent. It was kind of this weird, uh, you know, it's, it's not a, um, it's not a, didn't feel like the most seamless digitally native process. So there's also, I think a lot that you can do on, on the actual... Yeah, fundamentally, look, we want to do with 1,000 people, what Alianz says with 100,000 people.

We didn't mention it, but Sam Altman actually led our seed round. And our pitch to Sam was this is a once-in-a-century opportunity that we can use digital money in the form of Bitcoin and stable coins to reach billions of people with these savings products, and then we can use AI and automation to serve them profitably. So we have built everything from the ground up. We are a fully vertically integrated life insurer. So, yeah, the experience of filling out the application is quite seamless.

People can get underwritten and we can close policies in a single day. We do all our actual... We close our books. This sounds so boring. But we close our books in like two and a half hours at the corner end. Most insurance companies, we're talking like 45 days. But we do all of that. We have a chief risk officer.

we have an enterprise risk manager we have all this boring stuff but because we built it you know feature by feature step by step system by system uh we are building a durable advantage in the life insurance space fantastic well congratulations on the progress fascinating thanks to see that in bermuda one day uh have a great rest of your day yeah thanks for going to host a show there sometime if you'd like gentlemen i would love that awesome i'll get my bermuda shorts thanks for joining have a great rest of your progress uh speaking of life insurance. Dylan Patel over at Semi-analysis says life insurance in Taiwan is delaying NVIDIA's expansion in Taiwan. Remember, Sam Olin was talking to Ben Thompson just earlier this

week about wanting TSM to ramp up. He obviously wants more chip production. And so Semi-analysis tells the story. They say, at Computex this May, NVIDIA announced plans to establish its constellation headquarters in Taiwan. However, the project now faces uncertainty. The proposed site for the Taiwan headquarters was the T-17 and T-18 plots in the Baitu Shilin Technology Park. NVIDIA had signed a memorandum of understanding an MOU with this life insurance company, a Taiwanese company, with total assets exceeding $100 billion USD, but the MOU expired on September 30th and is no longer valid. The key obstacles are as follows. Shin Kong Life completed the registration of building rights for the T-17 and T-18 plots in February of 2022, securing a 50-year leasehold.

Shin-Kong expressed willingness to directly transfer the rights of T-17 and T-18 to NVIDIA. However, the Taipei city government opposed this, arguing that Shin-Kong must first construct the buildings and obtain an occupancy permit before transferring the rights. The government is concerned that if Shin-Kong gains additional benefits from NVIDIA through a direct transfer. that may be seen as favoritism. So furthermore, NVIDIA requested that the road between the two plots be incorporated into the site. They want the road as well,

not just the buildings. And that would require changes to the urban planning regulations and it would increase the value of the land rights and again, the concern of favoritism. So Shinkong proposed constructing the headquarters for NVIDia and transferring it afterwards, but NVIDia said no.

NVIDia wants full control over the design and construction of its headquarters. You've got to get a nice corner office for the big man who knows. what Shinkong is going to do if you let them build it. And a closet for leather jackets. Yes. A massive walking closet that makes a...

Entirely the same leather jackets. Lots of leather jackets and the jackets come flying out of every possible closet. The Taipei city government suggested terminating the existing contract and sending a new one directly with NVIDIA. Shin Kong opposed this, citing its 50-year leasehold and expected rental income. The city's proposal did not account for Shinkong's anticipated future revenue. regarding rumors that NVIDIA may abandon its Taiwan HQ plans and move to India, semi-analysis has the following view.

Taiwan's supply chain remains more concentrated and efficient than any of the other countries, and with the MOU expired, NVIDIA is free to seek alternative locations or quit the site entirely. Therefore, we believe NVIDIA will not give up on establishing its headquarters in Taiwan. That's where they want to be. The city government is reportedly leaping toward persuading NVIDIA to give up sites T-17 and 8. instead, and instead accept a different site, T12, along with surrounding private land. Discussions with NVIDIA are expected soon. They believe the likelihood of NVIDIA accepting the T12 proposal is low as the site is similar,

and surrounding private land involves many owners, which would drive up costs. So, NVIDIA is duking it out with life insurance provider in Taiwan. In other news, RIEI announced it's shuddering its Soho flagship. It's also closing flagships in Paramus, New Jersey, and Boston. These shores will shut down in late 2026. Also, apparently, Open AI is opening an office in the same building. Wait, really? Soho flagship.

I think Michael Mirafloor was saying that on X, something about that being very symbolic, right? I have a lot of happy memories of being and visiting REIs as a kid. It was a wonderful, wonderful place. So hopefully this isn't a sign that it's so over and hopefully someday soon we can be so back. I did want to close out. There's the figure three robots at least today. We have a video of that.

I'd also like to pull up the video. I'd also like to pull up the video of Mark Zuckerberg talking about the barbecue because isn't it the anniversary of that video at some point? Let's watch those two videos. and then we'll get out of here. But first... Well, you pull it up.

Yeah. Apparently, so Mark Cuban went in Sora and said free for all with his likeness. I went free for all as well. But he did something that was even smarter than you, which you prompted it to always depict you as a bodybuilder. Cuban added a tag somehow that says brought to you by cost plus drugs. I was going to do that with the ramp logo on my forehead.

He did that? That's amazing. And it works? Yeah, it works. beautifully, Dylan posted a couple different screenshots. Very clever. Okay, let's watch this video. Thank you for pulling this up.

We were just talking about humanoid robots with Martin Casado from A16Z. Nobody does. Nobody does videos like figure. Got to give them credit for that. Fantastic launch videos. This is the third. So this is version three, but they're still in alpha and they haven't shipped these? Or they installed some into a demo plant with BMW, right?

So what's notable here is they're not, I scan the video. I don't think there's any, they're not just depicting it in a factory setting at all. Okay. It seems like this is a pivot away from going more consumer commercial. Which was one of my questions for Martine. What do you think, Tyler? Right at the end of the video, it's in a factory. Oh, it's in a factory at the end?

And the other thing here that's notable, they followed 1X robots. That's right. Doing the fabric covering. Fabric looks way better, I think, than the hard metal. It just looks, yeah, it looks... I can see why... Oh, there's a house, okay. I can see why the retail army just loves figure.

It's not a retail army. We're seeing the emergence of a new army. Private market retail army. Yeah, we need a new word for it. It's not retail necessarily if it's private, but people have been pumping figure on the timeline. It's a special purpose vehicle army. People have been asking questions about how much pumping... is going on on the timeline and whether it's too much but uh i mean it's a great video it's a

39 billion dollar company john is it still wow still yes that's remarkable hey look that dog that was an opportunity to make that a robotic dog it is interesting that they're not they're only focused you know straight shot to humanoid robot no boston dynamics uh project no no four-legged friend first. A lot of the other robotics companies have kind of taken a more incremental progress.

Do you think they trained on Biden's? It does seem like the walk of an elderly man. But it's a start. It's not. It's not. I mean, the Boston Dynamics demos are always way more agile. And same with the unitary demos.

So the question here for the in-home for the in-home use case, is going to come down to, one, how effective is it, right? If we both have kids, kids tend to, like, destroy the living room. Create a lot of chaos. You've got to clean it up and stuff. The human should be able to clean it up, you'd think. The question is, how effective and what's the cost, right?

Are people going to buy, can they come in anywhere near Unitary at 20K for a comparable robot? Yeah. Seems unlikely. I mean, the big debate here is just how much does this stuff generalize? Because, I mean, we've seen in all sorts of other AI applications, like it's simple to RL on one certain, you know, one certain problem and get really good at it. But then does that learning generalize? And so you can have a model that's fantastic at IMO level math, but can't complete ARCAGI, which is so simple that a 10-year-old can do it. It's doing dishes.

And so, you know, if it's trained to be really good at this one dish with this one, with this one faucet system, can it generalize to your faucet system or when will that generalization happen? It certainly happened in LLMs, so you would hope that it happens in humanoid robotics very quickly. It's an interesting time.

Brett shared that none of this is teleoperated. Okay, yeah, none of this is teleoperated. Which I still think even a teleoperated humanoid would be very cool. Yeah, I mean, you're still paying by the hour more than just power. there is something that's very important economically about getting away from teleoperation over the long term. But I don't see a problem with teleoperation as a data flywheel as a way to actually get these into people's homes.

You're teleoperating them. You're collecting more feedback and data and you can train that and roll that into reinforcement learning. I do, yeah. The question is like, did he comment on whether or not this is scripted? because it could be recorded motion, right? Because that would not be teleoperated. It would be running on the robot locally, but it could have been, you know,

teleoperated at one point and then memorized and then, you know, played back effectively. Like, is this, there's a big question about, like, how long has this robot spent in this particular environment? Yeah, for figure to develop, like, legitimacy within, like, our bubble, Like, people are going to need to be able to do some type of live demo setting where they can be in the house with it and they can task it with doing things that aren't necessarily pre-planned, right? Yeah, there's something about, like, with the other AI companies and the LLM world, like the models go out, the APIs are available, the benchmarks are independent. Because if you can just walk into a room with a figure robot, dump a bunch of laundry on the bed, and it just folds it and puts it away, that is going to be mind-blum.

but I don't know how... I mean, to be fair, Nome Brown, I think at Opening Eye, was saying, like, okay, this is a nice example of the robot folding laundry at a table. What happens if you raise the height of the table six inches, and Brett Adcock raised the height of the table six inches and posted another video and said it still works.

It still works. So he is duking it out on the timeline. There it is more commercial setting, delivery robot. they had it at the opening of a hotel. I wonder what makes it so much slower than the Boston Dynamics example. Like, it feels in some ways more advanced than what Boston Dynamics does.

Certainly, the demos here are more generalizable. Like, I haven't seen a video of a Boston Dynamics robot doing any of these, like, useful tasks. It's always just, like, dancing and doing parkour, which doesn't seem very commercially viable. but the boss dynamics like the actual motion just feel so much smoother

and so much more fluid and same thing with the unitary robots the unitry robots you kick them over and it does a 360 to jump back up that doesn't feel very economically useful like folding laundry

or delivering packages but it's certainly impressive responded and said I have so many questions I wonder how long do you think until MKBHD can can do a review.

He did a huge review of the Boston Dynamics dog that he got one. I think he might have even paid for himself and been able to really play around with it and really put it through its spaces. And I love that. I would love for him to do a proper review on a figure robot.

That would be very cool. There was something else that was top of mind on the, on the MKBHD thing. Oh, yeah. Did you see that? Somebody posted their product and MKBHD responded with a meme that said like interesting and it was like a funny just GIF or image and the company took the text out of the, out of the meme and put it in quotes on their website and attributed to MKBHD.

It was like, he said it looks interesting and it was like a meme that he sent. And then MKBHD was like, this is ridiculous. Like I didn't give you a quote. Like you can't just use me on your website. and the founder of the company was like, oh, well, we also emailed with your team and they said, like, it looks interesting. Like, we'd love to, you know, like,

like, hear more about it. And then they took that as an example. It's like, that's not quite the same as like... We'd love to hear more about it. Yeah, yeah. It's like, they were just being nice. The chat right now, it's... A.V. says it's slow for dramatic effect.

Yeah, it's actually moving at five times the speed. But they filmed it with a slow motion camera. They filmed a little. with a slow motion camera to make it look more sci-fi and cinematic, for sure. Yeah. But anyway, it's a long run. No more information on when it'll be available for sale. But I'm sure somebody at the right point will pit the, I mean, the first thing somebody's

going to do is pit the Unitri G1 against a figure and just make them compete in a variety of contests. Yeah. Looking forward to that. I mean, Christopher Mims has a whole deep dive on America's manufacturing resurgence and the robots that are doing that more focused on co-bots which we've talked to some companies around less on the humanoid side but uh it's a it's a fascinating deep dive if you want to go check that out maybe we'll cover it on the show at some point um is there anything else you want to react to

that's it okay that's it's we can react to this iconic video let's head out let's head out on this day friend of the show mark Zuckerberg tv p. hey everyone we are live from my backyard where i am smoking imagine andy jassy doing this on twitch It would be so much better than another conference call for earnings. It's smoking. Is this the edit where they just show the smoking meats? Yeah, someone asked me, do I smoke meat? Smoking meat.

This is the least shared body. You can edit, yeah, I saw Lesz. You can edit any video. You could edit us to look like idiots do if you took our 15 hours a week of content and dialed it down to all the times we say something silly. He's smoking. He's smoking. And he went so much farther.

He has his own cattle ranch. He vertically integrated his meat smoking operation. So, cheers to Mark Zuckerberg. Thank you for tuning in today. We hope you have a fantastic afternoon and evening wherever you are in the world. And we will see you tomorrow. You can't wait. You're in my garage code.

Sam Alton live on TBPN, noon Pacific. Tune in. We'll see them. See you tomorrow. Goodbye.