TBPN Live - Google Doubles Down on Cloud AI, Hulk Hogan Passes Away at 71, Hill and Valley Forum Reactions | Casey Neistat, Chris Samra, Zak Kukoff, Vineeta Agarwala, Micky Malka, Alex Hawkinson

Episode Date: July 24, 2025

(00:14) - Timeline (05:16) - Google Doubles Down on Cloud AI (38:10) - Hulk Hogan Passes Away at 71 (49:49) - Timeline (57:44) - Zak Kukoff is a venture capitalist with over a decade of experience in the technology and venture capital sectors, focusing on early-stage investments and entrepreneurship. He currently serves as the Chair of the Tech and Venture Practice at Lewis-Burke Associates LLC and is a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation. ([lewis-burke.com]( [thefai.org]( In the conversation, Kukoff discusses the recent interview of Trevor Milton on Tucker Carlson's show, expressing that it was a poor choice of platform and suggesting that a more direct approach to questioning, such as confronting Milton about specific fraud allegations, would have been more effective. (01:14:37) - Timeline (01:29:04) - Vineeta Agarwala, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, discusses the transformative role of AI agents in healthcare, highlighting their potential to revolutionize drug development and patient care. She emphasizes the increasing adoption of AI-driven tools to address labor shortages and improve efficiency, noting that both startups and established companies are integrating these technologies to enhance operations. Agarwala also points out the growing interest in open-source models within the biotech sector, facilitating rapid innovation and collaboration among researchers and organizations. (01:51:11) - Micky Malka, a Venezuelan-born entrepreneur and founder of Ribbit Capital, has a history of pioneering financial services innovations, including co-founding Latin America's first online trading platform in 1998 and establishing the first online bank in Europe. In his conversation, he reflects on his journey of creating financial solutions that enhance accessibility and trust, emphasizing the importance of building brands that resonate with consumers. He also discusses the evolving landscape of fintech, highlighting the convergence of financial services with technologies like AI and crypto, and anticipates a future where tokenization plays a central role in transforming the industry. (02:18:47) - Casey Neistat, a renowned filmmaker and YouTube personality, discusses his involvement with ModRetro's M64, a modern reimagining of the Nintendo 64 console. He shares his passion for retro gaming and the importance of preserving the authenticity of classic gaming experiences. Neistat also reflects on the challenges of integrating modern technology while maintaining the original essence of beloved gaming hardware. (02:51:08) - Alex Hawkinson, Founder and CEO of BrightAI, leverages over 25 years of experience in IoT, AI, SaaS, and cloud-based technologies to transform critical infrastructure management. In the conversation, he discusses how BrightAI's platform integrates sensors, robots, and wearables to provide real-time monitoring and proactive solutions for essential services like energy grids and water systems, addressing challenges such as aging infrastructure and labor shortages. He also highlights the company's recent $51 million funding round led by Khosla Ventures and Inspired Capital, emphasizing the importance of achieving product-market fit before seeking external investment. (03:00:48) - Chris Samra is an engineer and founder of Symphonic Labs, where he develops AI-enabled consumer tools and gadgets. In the conversation, he discusses the launch of Waves, a new type of camera glasses designed for content creators, highlighting the positive response from creators and addressing privacy concerns by including an indicator light that can be disabled for capturing candid moments. He also shares plans to test the device with 100 creators, aiming for mass production in Q1 next year, and explores potential partnerships with prominent IRL streamers to showcase the product's capabilities. (03:15:10) - Timeline 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.ioFollow 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. Today is Thursday, July 24th, 2025. We are live from the TBPN Ultra Dome. The temple of technology. The fortress of finance. The capital of capital. It's Google earnings, earnings season baby. Big tech earnings are happening now.

Google reported earnings last night. Ben Thompson has a breakdown. It's in the Wall Street Journal. There's a bunch of good posts. We're gonna break it down for you today. So, Buko Capital Bloke says, many queries that moved to OpenAI will move back to Google. AI overviews are good now, less hallucinations.

I've experienced that. For some of those quick answers, Google's still really fast. Two, can move to AI mode for follow-up. I haven't really played around with that yet. Have you bounced into AI mode very much? Of course. You have. Of course.

In Google searches, you've actually done that. Yeah. Oh, interesting. And the main thing missing from Google search and the reason why chat GPT has been so good is you can search something, get information and then chat with that information. And that can do that. Before typical, you're going down a search query,

you click onto a page, you can't really chat with the page, or you could maybe search for information on that page. So that was the key innovation. Yeah. Type into toolbar, open new app, that is a huge advantage. A lot of people have, the primary app on their laptop that's open is a Chrome browser for most people. And so command T, and you're already searching,

that is a huge advantage. And that's probably why chat GPT is starting and open-ass thinking about a browser, because if they can replace that, they can get way more queries into chat GPT. For Google's models are better, they search the web better. I don't know that their models are that much better. I haven't noticed that specifically.

I know that they're better on some benchmarks and they're certainly dominating on that Pareto frontier graph that Swix puts out. It feels pretty comparable to me. But yeah, it makes sense that they would search the web better because they have, you know, what, two, three decades of search experience. They try to obfuscate it, but to my knowledge,

Chat GPT will leverage Google search in their own search functionality. It does feel like that's kind of happening. And then CloudFlare just gave them a massive structural advantage. That, of course, is because CloudFlare, by default now, they used to have the big, easy button for blocking all AI crawlers.

Previously, if you had a website and you didn't want to be crawled, you could put that in your robots.txt, so whatever your website was, slash robots.txt, crawler should go there. And out of the goodness of their own heart, they would respect that, but it was not legally binding. So you could still scrape a website legally if you were using it in a fair use context, transforming it, like for search. Now Google famously did respect robots.txt.

They did for a long time, they still do, but now CloudFlare has disabled AI crawlers by default. The problem is that Google has two crawlers. They have Googlebot, which crawls for Google Search, which you definitely want to be in for sure for the SEO. Who doesn't want to be findable in Google. Uh, and then they have Gemini crawler separate crawler that you can disable with cloud flare. But the,

there is still AI sort of crawling happening with the Google bot, because if the Google bot goes and crawls all your web pages for search that your data will show up in the, in the, uh, AI overviews, which feels like they're not maybe training the foundation model, but they're still summarizing it and they still might be reducing traffic. Now for publishers and content creators, that's harmful potentially, but for e-commerce people, it's great. So there's kind of two sides to that.

Yeah. So there was a post on rslash.seo five days ago ago titled chat GPT plus is secretly Google powered My hidden page experiment proves it so he Created a dummy page index only in Google and got it to show up in chat GPT plus results within hours the same query and Bing duck duck go etc still returned zero results interesting and He did this by coining a nonsense word, put it on a page that was not linked anywhere, forced Google to index it via the Search Console,

and then asked ChatGBT Plus to define the term, which he invented, and it quoted the hidden page for beta. Interesting. Yeah, I wonder what that relationship's like. I mean, OpenAI has, you know, I felt like there would always be some relationship with Microsoft because Bing has really solid search infrastructure.

For a while, people were saying, Bing has as robust of a crawling infrastructure as Google. Like, they built the technology, they just weren't able to actually transform customer behavior to the degree that people would by default go to Bing. They ran this big campaign, Bing it and go and all this. And it never really happened, but the tech was always good because they knew what to build and they went and built it.

They just couldn't change people's behaviors. So interesting, I wonder if Google will be bringing out the sharp help us anytime soon for OpenAI. Anyway, let me tell you about Ramp. Time is money, save both, easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. Go to ramp.com.

So Tane, who's been on the show before, says Sundar Pichai on Google CapEx, with this strong and growing demand for our cloud products and services, we are increasing our investment in capital expenditures in 2025 to approximately 85 billion and are excited by the opportunity. We gotta hit the gong. Hit the gong for Sundar. Well deserved.

Sundar Pitch AI. He's pitching AI and he's pitching it successfully. The Google earnings are staggering. So 14% jump in year over year revenue. Guess their ARR, their annualized revenue. Wow, I don't even, oh, run. Their run rating, 400 billion almost. Okay, not bad. They put up 96.4 billion in the second quarter and said CapEx, it's like, it would be a lot

if it was in millions. It's like it would be a lot if it was in millions. It's in billions. They said that CapEx would increase 13% to 85 billion and that compares with 52 billion last year. So that's a big, big increase even above expectations. Ben Thompson has a great analysis of this and it came away from my reading pretty excited about it. So Andrew Curran also has a post here,

says Sundar Pichai on the earnings call, the growth in usage has been incredible. At I.O. in May we announced that we processed 480 trillion monthly tokens across our surfaces. So that's both AI search features, and Google search, AI mode, Gemini, also API stuff. So overall tokens, we're gonna have Niki Malka on the show later.

He's gonna talk about token factories. The demand for tokens is immense. And it's really just weaving its way into all these different nooks and crannies. It's certainly going mainstream. If you just ask a friend who's not, you know, in the horse race of who's gonna win, just a normal friend, let's look at your screen time,

how much time are you looking on, chat, GPT? You're gonna see 10 minutes, you're gonna see 30 minutes a day, for sure. This was buried, not in the main post, but Andrew follows up and said, he said there would be over 70 million user videos made with VO3, which is impressive, especially considering that they massively

rate limit everyone. Yeah. You pay $500 a month and you get a measly couple of videos a day. It's hard. It's hard to actually use them all. Somebody made a great, very cool intro video using VO3. So they've doubled tokens since May. And then, yeah, totally.

The more interesting thing here is that safe super intelligence, Ilya's small $ billion dollar AI upstart is gonna exclusively use Google TPUs. That's exciting. That seems like a bombshell. Maybe. I mean you got to get big infrastructure somewhere and if everyone's optimizing against Nvidia maybe there's maybe there's like slack capacity in TPUs. I mean, you're certainly, like, if you are trying to bet on a hyperscaler to hit your horse too,

and you see that Google's increasing their CapEx pretty significantly to 85 billion, like, you know that they are going to have, like, enough capacity to service you to the tune of one gigawatt or something like that, if you wanna do some massive training run. I do wonder how compute constrained SSI is in the sense, like how much is Ilya feeling the scaling wall?

Because for a long time it was scale is all you need, just go bigger, bigger, bigger, and that's certainly the playbook that we've seen Sam Altman run with, with the Stargate project and with the bringing in Masayoshi Sone, bringing in Donald Trump and Crusoe and putting together this like team that can actually marshal half a quadrillion dollars. Is that right? It's 500. No, no, half a trillion. It's, it's 500 billion.

They want to spend. They haven't marshaled it yet, John. It's a lot of money. Yeah, it's working. It's half a trillion but but but SSI At least at least like the the the rumors or the memes around it have been very much have been more focused on Let's advance the research Let and maybe that next phase of research is not purely compute-bound. It's not it's not purely Hey, we're in this scaling race, we're gonna build a bigger transformer. That's honestly a little bit of what Elon's been doing. He's saying, we have the transformer architecture,

we're gonna scale this up a ton, and where we are great is building a massive cluster, the Colossus, 100,000 GPUs, we'll build it faster, and we'll get it up to speed and we'll train it, and in three months, when most people would think it would take a year, we haven't been seeing that from SSI. We haven't seen, oh SSI has 10ths with GPUs and that's their edge.

The edge with SSI as it's been pitched at least has always been foundational research progress, just making progress on the underlying research that might be an elegant solution that increases the efficiency and you get a better model with even less GPUs. But if they need a ton, Google will have them because they're investing more in CapEx,

more than ever before. While taking a question on agentic capabilities, it sounds like Sundar said this, when we built our series of 2.5 Pro models, it's the direction where we are investing the most. That's definitely exciting progress, including in the models. We haven't fully released yet. Long answer on agentic progress. The good news here is that we are making robust progress.

We think we are at the frontier here. He said that they, he said they have projects running internally, but now they are slow and expensive. They see the potential in our making progress on both. Gemini has a deep research product, which I would call an agentic product. The question is, are they going to try and match what ChatGPT launched with agent mode sooner than later?

Is there a security or a risk thing? Google's been a little bit more hesitant to just throw stuff out in the wild, but they're moving very quickly, and I think they will probably be able to get something up. There's certainly nothing on the CapEx or model capability side that would stop them. And Elon Musk just says, wow.

Well, Elon is playing the enemy of my enemy as my friend, Musk. It's like, I love these guys, yeah. Love to see it. It's not a knockout, drag out fight. So let's go over to, oh, this is interesting. So Moffat Nathanson, Michael Nathanson, who's been on Strutechery a few times in the Wall Street

Journal was quoted, what people worry about is just the math around search. Is an AI going to be negative to search? And they went out of the way many times on the call to say, that's not what we're seeing. And so there's this big question on, can Google avoid disruption by integrating the new disruptive technology, artificial intelligence,

in a way that doesn't destroy their core business, which is search ads. They're putting up $80 billion in revenue a year on it. My personal feeling is that Chrome specifically is just so unbelievably sticky. Yeah. And as long as it takes the average person to, you know, hitting two buttons to get to the point where they can do any type of search, Google will continue to dominate. Because right now I can hit Command T, search something quickly.

Yes, I'm sure I could update the default search to something else, but I haven't. Even though I love the model. There was a time when I bounced around. I remember having Opera installed and Firefox installed for a while. And then for the last decade, it's just been Chrome all the way.

There was a moment, like probably five years ago, that I was loving Safari. It was just so snappy and fast and simple. I believe it's also built on Chromium, but yes. But it's not a Google product, so they could in theory reroute. Safari is not built on Chromium. Oh it's not? Interesting.

Uses Apple's own WebKit rendering engine. Okay, I do like, so it's weird, I use Safari on my phone and Chrome on my desktop, which feels like it totally breaks the continuity, right? But I've just kind of stuck with that and it's been fine and I don't have tabs that float in between, they're kind of separate, but it's fine.

Really quickly, this show is brought to you by Restream, one stream, 30 destinations, multi-stream, and reach your audience wherever they are. We love Restream. One stream, 30 destinations, multi stream, and reach your audience wherever they are. We love Restream. You can sign up for free. So let's go over to Ben Thompson talking about Google earnings. He has said, I've repeatedly laid out

the theoretical case for why AI is potentially disruptive to Google. And we asked him about this when he came on the show. My question was like, is there a world where revenue and profit from generative AI products is actually not as counter-positioned against Google in the sense that if they had launched the Gemini app first and become the ChatGPT,

they'd probably be seeing a drop in search volume, but then also seeing revenue spike from an even more popular Gemini that's monetizing even better. And was it a question of them just not being able to take that pill, or was it more about the risk and PR nervousness than actual structural?

The thing that Ben said that stood out to most, the most to me, and I'll probably butcher it a little bit, but he effectively was saying, it's really hard for companies to change who they are. When you look at Google's mission statement to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful, that is so deeply aligned with AI.

It's like, what does ChatGBT do? Like, organizes information and makes it useful, right? Agents, like ChatGBT, Agent is making that information useful. And so it just feels like, again, like generative AI is like deeply aligned with the core mission. And so it's easy to see them continuing to win here. Yeah, I think the problem is like,

the disruption comes when you create a product that is not as good, but the financials are structurally different. So the idea of if AI disrupts a law firm, you look at this product or even, I don't know, what's the classic example of disruption that people go through? I don't know, but this idea of something-

Yeah, the big thing was innovator's dilemma. Right. Yeah, in the innovator's dilemma, the example is a new product comes to market that does something 90% as well, so it's unacceptable to the people that are buying the current product, but then over time, it gets better and better and people that are buying the current product, but then over time it gets better and better and better

until it replaces the current product. And so there is a world where if they had just changed the Google search bar to just be like, this is just an LLM now, people would have been really, really disappointed with that shift and they would have been like, I want to go back and ripping that bandaid off to the tune of what, $300 billion a year

in search revenue would be really painful. So they had to take a more iterative like step wise improvements, but it seems like they're doing well. And Ben Thompson is kind of echoing this. He says, once again, however, I have to come to Google's defense. All available metrics suggest

that the company is doing quite well indeed I would go further you can make the case that the company's biggest mistake is not going harder And so they flipped the switch on cloud their infrastructure spending is through the roof as we mentioned So in in after the q4 2024 earnings and their announcement that they were spending 75 billion on CapEx, then Google Cloud's revenue numbers disappointed. But this was because they didn't have enough GPUs and they were actually constrained. So they missed on top line,

like they didn't bring in enough revenue, but their margins actually improved. And so what that means is that there was so much demand that they had pricing power. And they could say, no, we're not giving you any discounts because everyone wants these GPUs right now or the TPUs they want our infrastructure so we don't need to we don't need to sell them at a discount and so their margins were really good and what that revealed was that they

were they were capacity constrained and that justifies the bigger capex spend that they're going into right now. And Google is still the polymarket, which company has the best AI model end of 2025. So December 31st, there's been one and a half million of volume and Google is still sitting comfortably at 46% chance of being at the top of LM arena at the end of the year. Yeah, this is such a crazy supply constraint metric.

So the Google CFO, Anat Ashkenazi, said on the earnings call, in cloud, as I mentioned, the demand for our products is high, as evidenced by the continued revenue growth and the cloud backlog, guess how big their cloud backlog is? Just the demand for Google Cloud products

that they can't fulfill because they haven't built the data centers. But if they had more capacity, they think that they could deliver this. $106 billion. That is so much money. That is so much money. Honestly, more businesses should try to put themselves

in the position where they have the $160 billion of demand that they can't fulfill. $106 billion. We try to not give business advice because it's so based on it. Well, it's just like every business is different. Every founder is different. But in general, if you can develop a demand backlog. It's a good call for a YCE company.

Like if you go on stage at Demo Day and you say, yeah, we have LOIs and we have some demand backlog to the tune of 106 billion. We have $106 billion of demand. There was actually a YC company yesterday or two days ago that was getting a little bit roasted, because they launched the product, and they were like, wow, today was insane.

Our servers went down immediately. And you could see the user chart, and they had like 250 users your entire product went down on 250 users anyways but happy happy for their success yeah well let me tell you about figma think bigger build faster figma helps design and development teams build great products together you can get started for free at figma comm and so And so this, so he keeps going into the CapEx. Wait, before we do that,

Figma Make is generally available today. You can go to figma.com slash make and just start building various products. Tyler has been using Figma Make to make a product that we'll be releasing very soon. Very excited for that. We will announce that soon. So from the earnings call,

given the strong demand for our cloud products and services, we now expect to invest 85 billion in CapEx from 2025, up from a previous estimate of 75 billion, just a 10 billion incremental investment. Absolutely massive. Our updated outlook reflects additional investment in servers, the timing of delivery of servers,

and an acceleration of the pace of data center construction primarily to meet cloud customer demand. The challenge Pichai cautioned in an answer to an analyst's question is that it takes a while for these investments to come on board. So of course the risk is like you overbuild, but there's certainly no evidence of that given the massive backlog.

So the other interesting thing that Ben dips his toe into, so Ben Thompson, Mr. Teckery, famously does not get caught up in trade deals and non-CEO employee shifts. They're below his line. They are below his line, They are below his line. They're below his line. But he had to chime in on the CFO change that happened at Google.

So he says, I'm always hesitant to delve too much. I like that he's thrown in a delve. You know it's not written by AI. But he's baiting. Yeah, he's baiting, for sure. He's like, how dare you accuse. He's like, you can go back and look at how many times. I've used delve a million times.

I created Dell. I coined that word. There's a YC company called Dell as well. It's doing well. So he says, but it's interesting that the earnings call was Ruth Peratt's last one as CFO. Peratt earned a lot of plaudits for getting Google's spending under control

in the late 2010s. But what seems clear in retrospect that is that 52.5 billion that Google spent on CapEx in 2024 was too little. And so he's kind of like, you know, noodling on this idea that maybe the CFO was too cautious going into An AI boom could lose your job over that called a maybe Ruth Perrot was calling top signals like us It looks terrible. Fortunately, we don't lose

Nothing wrong with calling top signals there. There's something wrong with Water if you're calling specifically calling the top. Yes, yes. Trying to identify top signals is more of a meta game. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So basically, Google, it does seem like Google under invested in CapEx in 2024 based on demand, wound up with that massive backlog, missed on top line,

couldn't make enough money, couldn't generate enough revenue, had higher margins, that's great, but didn't deliver on the cloud side on the actual scale. So Ashkenazi's calls, meanwhile, have repeatedly reiterated that Google Cloud is particularly supply constrained, they don't have enough servers,

and the company has now surprised investors twice in six months with the scale of its CapEx plans. Let's go. It says, this in my opinion is incredibly bullish for Google. Go back to the disruption lens, which we were kind of noodling on earlier. The exact avenue from which you would expect

management resistance to a disruptive innovation to flow is the CFO office. Like the CFO should be resistant to disruptive innovation. And when you look at the history of companies that got disrupted, the CFO is saying, we have a good business, let's just keep printing cash. Like this new thing, let's not worry about it. Let's not go with.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,

no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no companies that got disrupted, it's like they were printing cash, high dividends for decades, even after the disruption happened, the next the iPhone comes out. And in order to actually do something to compete, they have to completely go into startup mode. They have to burn a ton of cash, cut their dividend, stop stockpiling cash, issue debt, do a ton, raise more equity, maybe like they have to become a new

product development company. And it would be very very difficult usually But Blackberry's annual revenue in 2005 1.9 billion They like they completely blackberries annual revenue in 2024 580 million. It's a cybersecurity company now. They bought a couple cybersecurity assets while they were valuable, while they were, like, you know, while the stock was up, and then eventually they wound down the phone business

and just kind of became a cybersecurity company. Because obviously they had a ton of enterprise contracts because BlackBerrys were sold into, like, large enterprises as, you know, work phones. Very few people had BlackBerrys as everyday phones, but so they had all those, they had solid sales team, solid connections, bought a new asset, and were able to continue the business,

even though obviously it's not the company that it once was. So Ben Thompson goes on to say, there does seem to be a major shift in mindset in terms of the company's willingness to lean into AI, particularly for a segment, Google Cloud, that even in the best case scenarios, is significantly lower margin than the company's core business.

What's interesting about that margin point, however, is that it too is another reason to be bullish on Google's prospects. Google is the only company, we talked about the TPU thing, they're the only company with an at-scale ASIC alternative to NVIDIA's GPUs, which should give them a meaningful cost advantage to that end, to the extent that cloud computing

becomes common sense. At scale to a point where they're gonna be able to support SSI. Which is crazy. Not just their own needs. And then there's also another question. The dynamic that's interesting is like, OpenAI needs to massively scale infrastructure.

And as we covered earlier this week, commit to spending tens of billions of dollars with Oracle. And their revenue today doesn't support that. Obviously, their growth trajectory is absolutely insane. But OpenAI being in a position where they are competing head on with Google for this very, very critical

consumer use case, search, knowledge retrieval, and ultimately usefulness, it is a extremely tough position for OpenAI to be in. Yeah, so the other hyperscalers are working on ASICs that are alternative to Nvidia GPUs, but they all seem to be following the similar path, trying to get line time at TSMC, not fully at scale. Then there's also the question,

you know, I think a lot of people's mind is like, is this the end of history? Is there something that's coming down the pipe that could disrupt the NVIDIA GPU monopoly, the CUDA ecosystem, or even the Google TPU? And SemiAnalysis has a funny meme here, way down in the stack, about the next generation of chips that have been pitched from startups

like Etched and a few others. So Semi Analysis says, although baking transformers into silicon may sound cool, it's mostly just a marketing slogan. 90% of transformers' flops, are just GEMMs and 256 by 256 or 128 by 128 systolic arrays in TPU and in TPU tranium are already optimized for these. Even modern GPGPUs with tensor cores

are optimized well for GEMMs. Even if you bake transformers into silicon, AKA just create a giant systolic array, most of your die area will still be taken up with SRAM cells as the memory, and you will still face the memory wall since your HBM memory bandwidth will be the same as GPGPUs, TPUs, and tranium.

And so the meme is, transformers are just 90% matmols. George Hott's had a similar analysis or take just saying that if you look at the actual energy use of GPUs right now, there isn't that much opportunity to squeeze more value out of them. They're pretty efficient and most of the energy that goes in goes into these very, very specific

math calculations that are already pretty optimized. We did hear from someone something about the, this is from Martin Screlli, that Jane Street, or was it, was it Jane Street? One of the high frequency trading firms figured out how to run one of those very, very basic math model calculations on a GPU more efficiently, and I guess kind of open sourced it or something,

or got out into the research world. So it doesn't feel like at this moment, I still think that there's a interesting bull case for the Edge crew in some ways, in some niches or something, some specific models, but it doesn't seem like there's some new disruptive chip architecture that's gonna come out and obviate the need for both NVIDIA GPUs and Google TPUs.

And so Google's very well positioned, as Ben Thompson is writing. So he says, this should give them their position that they have an at-scale ASIC alternative to NVIDIA GPUs, should give them a meaningful cost advantage. To that end, to the extent that cloud compute becomes commoditized is the extent to which Google actually has a margin advantage because if all of the clouds are commoditized but all of them are on Nvidia and then Google is taking the Nvidia margin

basically from their TPU they should be in a very good spot. This is to be sure a bit weird. Perot gained these plaudits, those plaudits because there was so much waste in Google to cut which was downstream of the company's amazing monopoly and margins and search, which hardly seems like the recipe for a structural cost advantage. But here we are. Sundar is going to tell every employee we're cutting your daily massage allowance from three massages down to one. We're deeply sorry,

but we need to get fit. Got to get fit and you got to get on Vanta automate compliance, manage risk, improve trust continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation, whether you're pursuing your first framework

or managing a complex program. It was great talking with Christina yesterday. She's an absolute dog. Boardroom general. Boardroom general. She put the KPI as an orbit. She really has. She really has. Did you see that? No, she has it. She has general. She put the KPI as an orbit. She really has. She really has.

Did you see that? No, she has it. She has it. Reed shared. Yeah, this chart. She says, Andrew said, Christina often talks about stacking rice on the chessboard. And I didn't see this until after the show,

but I was like, it seems like you guys are just chopping wood. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just out there, like, putting in the work. Just a couple percent here, couple percent here, just very consistent growth, very consistent growth, very smooth growth curve into a monster of a business. So congrats to everyone over at Vanta on the new round. And we will go back to Google.

So more broadly, the way in which Google seems to have flipped the switch in terms of going all in on AI along with Meta spending on AI talent, really does strongly suggest that AI, in the end, is a sustaining technology that favors the incumbents most of all. Both see a line of sight to new revenue streams, and critically, both can fund AI from profits,

not speculative investment or debt. And of course, both have distribution, including search. Sometimes the Empire strikes back So there were other takes from from search You'll have to subscribe to Sir Techery to get the full analysis you got to go and subscribe to Sir Techery if you're not subscribed What are you doing? but the interesting takeaway from From search is that there it seems like Google's being a little

squishy about, hey, we don't want to report certain KPIs anymore. So they used to report paid clicks, and now the Chief Business Officer, Philip Schindler, is saying, and on your paid click question, look, to be very clear, I think we said this before, we manage the business to drive great outcomes for our users and attract our attractive ROI for our advertisers

We don't we actually don't manage to pay clicks or CPC targets Which is fair and good, but it's funny because Ben Thompson's like but I want that data that would be helpful to me I mean when a business has a metric that they tell you is important for a long time And then they suddenly tell you it's not important. Don't worry. You got a There are huge business. They've moved on to bigger, like higher levels of abstraction. Just look at the growth in tokens.

Yeah, yeah. Don't worry about anything else. What he says is that there are product changes and policy changes that actually drive better monetization, but at the expense of paid clicks, and that's probably AI searches and stuff like that, you'll see in the 10-Q paid clicks, we're up 4% year on year,

but a number of factors affecting these metrics from quarter to quarter, such as advertiser spending, product changes, policy changes, user engagement. So it's really important when it comes to pay clicks and CPC to avoid drawing overly broad conclusions solely based on these metrics. Don't put me in the truth zone on this, he says.

So, Ben Thompson, this is exactly what you said I don't even think you you pre-read this but you basically have Ben Thompson working in your head because this is what I said when Ben Thompson came on the show I was like I think your way of thinking has been so ingrained into my mind that I think that I have an original thought and you've already thought it okay so this is what he says the more it's literally what you just said. The more that management tells me not to pay attention to paid click rates, the more I want to pay attention, which is exactly what you just said. Regardless, once again, the fact that paid clips paid click pay clicks were up 4% and search revenue was up 12% makes it clear that search growth is primarily

being driven by higher prices. And so the actual number of clicks is up four percent, but revenue is up 12 percent. That means that they're monetizing each click better. But people are obviously going to read into opaque clicks aren't growing that fast. Like the actual pie isn't growing that fast. They're just getting like it's basically like, you know, once Instagram reels is popular Everyone's watching it then you just got to put more ads in the feed Right and that's kind of it seems like what they're doing and that's what's driving search revenue up 12%

AI overviews is another question. This is a funny one where basically the the chief business officer Philip Schindler Google says basically says that AI overviews are monetizing as well as other Google searches and Ben Thompson says given the fact that the vast majority of Google searches don't monetize at all because people just click On a link that's what I say the oftentimes the if you're searching for information That you can have very low purchase intent Yeah, how many times a day do I search for a specific fact? Yep, and

Never would have net you could show me the best ad in the world and I wouldn't click through because I'm just looking for a fact Yep So if you're looking for something like, you know, Hulk Hogan's age That's not a press on a purchase intent if that comes from an AI overview or it comes from an AI overview, or it comes from a, you know how they used to have those like knowledge boxes, or like it would pull from Wikipedia.

Or if you click on Wikipedia, none of that is making Google any money. So it really doesn't matter the UI or the actual underlying technology to get you that answer. And then Gemini is on absolute tear. Really remarkable. How many monthly active users do you think the Gemini app has?

These are MAUs, not DRUs. The mobile app, web app combined? The Gemini app, yeah. I think this is probably across mobile, web, and desktop, but I would assume mobile. 70 million? 450 million. Big, right? And it doubled., I guess I guess I mean, they

kind of get the it's kind of a cheat code because everybody already has a Google account that are like signed in. Yep. But in term, I don't know. They're monthly. And and what we know from semi analysis is that they're not taking share of queries that much. But 450 million downloads on an app and monthly active users is pretty, pretty high. And so if there's a world where Google can build business around, if they can bring in ads faster and keep the Gemini app cheaper

and offer better, better products and like you get deep research, you get agent, you get the $200 tier, the ad free, if OpenAI and you get agent you get the $200 tier The ad free if open AI and chat GPT has a $200 tier that's ad free And then Google's giving you the same product in the same experience, but with ads for free Like that feels like an Android iOS battle going on that feels like something that could actually Be pretty sustainable and kind of drive this like little bit of a duopoly. I don't know.

We'll have to see how it goes. But daily requests grew over 50% from Q1 to Q2. And I think everyone is pretty surprised by that. And I was also surprised when I went and pulled up the Gemini app, when I went to go download it, the number of five-star reviews is like hundreds of thousands. And I was like, okay, this is very serious. And that reflects the actual number that they shared,

450 million monthly active users. So still a lot of work to be done. I was very frustrated when I went to go get VO3, I got the Gemini app, and they were advertising VO, but I couldn't access it. And there was some frustrations. Is Gemini the default in Android yet? I don't know.

I imagine that it has to be pre-installed in the next round of Android phones that go out. Why would you not want that pre-installed and there? But I would be surprised if that's what's driving it, because, I mean, how many Samsung Galaxies have they sold in the last quarter? Probably not 200 million, right? I doubt that that's what's driving it because I mean, how many Samsung Galaxies have they sold in the last quarter? Probably not 200 million, right? I doubt that that's what's driving the growth.

But maybe that might be an interesting thing, how many of them are pre-installs, pre-loads. But even then, you have to open it to become an MAU. But yeah, maybe they're testing, maybe people will churn and go back to OpenAI and chat GPT. Android users have had access to Google Assistant for a long time. That's getting phased out.

It's just going to be Gemini. Yep. Well, let me 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 at graphite.dev. I don't know if people can hear, but any time

we do an ad read, the entire team breaks out in applause in the studio. So it's really let's hear it for some advertisements. There we go. In other very, very sad news, Hulk Hogan has passed away at age 71. Cardiac arrest was what you said, right, Jordy? I didn't actually get into that. I looked a little bit more into some of the history

I wanted to know a little bit more about his story. There's a whole bunch of different profiles. There was at one point going to be a biopic about him. In a recent interview with Variety, director Todd Phillips revealed that his long gestating Hulk Hogan biopic will not progress. Unfortunately, it got canned. This was back in about a year ago today. I love what we were trying to do but that's not going to come together for me. Chris Hemsworth had signed on to play

Hogan in early 2019 with the Joker writer and director duo Todd Phillips and Scott Silver attached to lead the charge. Films producers, you got Phillips, Hogan, Hemsworth, Bradley Cooper, Michael Sugar, Sugar, Sugar? I don't know. Sugar. Stacked. And Hogan's long time pal and New World Order stable mate Eric Bischoff. In a July, 2020 interview with Total Film,

Hemsworth described the training he'd have to undergo to transform into the 80s WWE icon. As you can imagine, the preparation for the role will be insanely physical. I will have to put on more size than I ever have before, even more than I put on for Thor. There is this accent as well as the physicality and the attitude, Helmsworth said. The Hogan biopic would explore his rise to stardom in the early 1980s. His WWF World Heavyweight Championship win over the Iron Sheik in 1984. It's a good role

You know that Hemsworth has a personal fitness training app called Center. I have heard of that. Is it good? Like well, I'm really gonna have to use my app a lot for this role. Maybe we should start using his app Get on the Hulk train Become Hulkamaniacs as they call them. Did you grow up watching wrestling at all? I didn't, but I was aware of Hulk Hogan just through the lore because it was so dominant. I feel like I would hear more about Hulk Hogan in the context of the Gawker saga. Oh yeah, we should go into that.

I wanna pull up this Hulk Hogan video, I'll send it to the team. There's some great rants, where is it? There's one where he's talking trash about something. Wow, everything's just like RIP. But he was legendary at Like I don't know. What do they call in UFC where you like our pre-show pump up talking about the competition? I guess it's like a promo. Is that what it is? That makes no. No. Yeah this one seek and destroy

We got to watch this I will put it in the tab so we can watch this And then yeah, we should talk about the Gawker fallout a little bit. Let me put that in there the best promos Hulk Hogan Seek and destroy Let's pull that up Hulk Hogan Has recently been a founder he has a real American beer Oh, yeah, he did with the Budweiser family This is what we need to channel. We need to bring this energy to the show every day They defending but there are those right now that are questioning whether you can withstand the big man

Well, you're about those people man. I don't care about those people that aren't star-crafting hulk of maniacs I could tell us what they think I don't care about those people that aren't star-craving hulking maniacs. I could care less what they think. I'm fighting for life, brother. I'm fighting for all those people that have remolded their lives, man. Monolith after hulking mania. Get their priorities in order, man. Walk around with a lot of pride.

As far as those people that are on Andre the Giant's side, I wish he'd come on down, too. I'd like to slap them around just for a warm-up. But I've already gone through my transformation, man. I'm ready for come on down too. I'd like to slap them around just for a warm-up, but I've already gone through my transformation, man I'm ready for Pontiac, Michigan. I'm not the Hulk anymore. I'm the Hulkster, man. Look into my eyes, man Hulk come on that mountain top back off little man I'm on that mountain top and I'm waiting for you Andre Yeah, I'm guarding that mountain and the Hulk's in its garden. He's got a 32 inch neck a

64 inch chest the largest arms in the world And I'm here to seek and destroy Seek and destroy the cancer of Andre the Giant seek and destroy the Weasels Empire And what you're gonna do Andre in Pont in Pontiac, Michigan, when hulking mania destroys you. He is indeed absolutely livid, going against the man that one time he looked up to and respected. Paul Kogan to defend us. That's the energy I want Sundar Pichai to bring to Google.

I got $85 billion of CapEx. I grew 50% top line. And I'm coming for Sam Altman. They're coming for me. I'm coming for I'm coming for I'm coming for 450 million MAUs on the Gemini app. The search overviews are going great they're monetizing just as well as regular search results. Come here to Mountain View. Get down to Mountain View. And if you're riding with if you're riding with the Andre the giant, like you got to be a Stargraven Hulkamaniac. I love it. Chris

Hemsworth signed on to play Thor from Thor signed on to play Hogan in early 2019. So you had to put on a lot of size. The biopic would have explored his rise to stardom in the early 1980s, and then Hulkamania takeover that ruled the wrestling world well into the 1990s. Phillip's take on Hulkamania was going to stay away from Hogan's recent controversies, instead focus solely on the early years.

Ben Affleck and Matt Damon are currently developing a film titled killing Gawker That will explore Hogan's campaign against the media empire in the wake of an explosive home video Hogan was six foot seven, which is why you'd be able to height magun pretty close to me He's crazy. I you on next to me he's crazy you on next for sure for sure and I think I will be staying away from his supplement stack hopefully hoping hoping to make it longer really sad though yeah very sad what a what a career and what a fantastic the Hulk the Hulk Hogan theme song I am a real American such a good song such a great rallying cry that's the name of his beer real american beer

Yeah fight for the rights of every man such a good song, um light crisp crushable, so there is a uh, there is a uh reflective piece in the new yorker about uh, hulk hogan's gawker lawsuit that we can go through but First let me tell you about Linear. Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products. Meet the system for modern software development,

streamline issues, projects, and product roadmaps. Go to Linear.app to get started. That is a powerful home page. And if Hogan's selling beer, you gotta get on numeralhq.com, sales tax on autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance friend of mine is was business partners with with Hogan on that that's crazy

So we have Zach Kukoff joining at noon to break down the AI day yesterday in Washington DC The besties met up with the Hill and Valley crew, honestly crushed it. We have a bunch of great posts that we can run through. First, let's go through a little bit of the Hulk Hogan loss, Gawker lawsuit. This is from 2016, well before we actually saw the results from all this. But on Monday afternoon, a Florida jury added $25 million in punitive damages to the $115 million it had awarded Hulk Hogan on Friday in his invasion of privacy case against Gawker Media.

Hogan sued Gawker for posting portions of a sex tape it received from an anonymous sender. It's a shocking amount, not least because it's $40 million more than Hogan, whose real name is Terry Gawker, had demanded. Verdicts of this size can pose an existential risk to media to a media company that's what happened to Gawker. Gawker has reported that it earned 44 million dollars in revenue in 2014. In January Gawker's owner Nick Denton announced that he had sold a portion of his company to investors in order to fund this case. Gawker will certainly appeal the verdict as it should,

after it pays a bond of up to $50 million, arguing that the jury was unreasonable in finding that Hogan's right to privacy outweighed Gawker's right to publish the material, which it believes was of public interest, which is a very, yeah, it's hard to- Strange defense. It is, it is, it is hard to argue.

He is a public figure, but this is a very personal thing. Yeah, I mean, if they had just posted that it existed and they had seen it. That's true. And that's kind of what's happening with the Wall Street Journal. They're not posting everything all the time with regards to the Trump, Epstein stuff,

but they're referencing that it exists, that they verified it. And that seems to be a safer path for media companies to kind of report that they've confirmed that something exists without actually putting everything out necessarily. So, the publication of the videotape of consensual sex between adults is not the most appealing place

to plant a First Amendment flag, but it is worth considering the possible effects on publishers if a judgment of this magnitude is allowed to stand. And so, the fallout from Gawker was certainly celebrated in tech because they also had Valleywag, which was very annoying to a lot of people in tech because it was basically like TMZ for tech.

I don't know if you were aware of Valleywag back in the day. Before my time. Before your time. But it did have like a chilling effect. I remember being at South by Southwest and a friend of mine who was a venture-backed founder at the time was really into doing handstand pushups

and was doing handstand pushups at a party that was being thrown, that where people were just kind of hanging out and he was just doing some handstand pushups. As one does. As one does. And there was a Valley-added reporter there and wrote about it as a characterization of like how bro he the situation was but

didn't include his name and he was like I dodged a bullet because like he could have been forever out it is I mean in many ways it could have built his aura I agree if he was named in the modern era it would have been incredibly bullish but at that time it did feel like something that could destroy you It was it was a very tense time very very tense time Roy Lee Would not have done well during that era Yeah, maybe he would have maybe he would have changed the meta though. He's making he's making shirtless posts on the timeline Yeah, bring them into the modern era yeah, it is it is it is an interesting

Yeah. Bring them into the modern era. Yeah, it is an interesting thing. Like, Valleywag would probably be writing about Cluely a lot and framing it in a different way. There's already probably folks out there who are framing Cluely as particularly bad on the other side of the aisle or in the anti-tech category, but it just doesn't seem to have the same effect. It certainly doesn't stop venture funding or customers or any of that.

It seems to be that we're in a different era where people in tech were, clearly it was controversial in tech. People were definitely divided. I think it would be good if there was some law that required, if a media company wanted to write about someone's physique, they should have to post physique.

Oh, their own physique, yes. So that should just be in the footnotes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's important context. Anyway, in other news, fin.ai, the number one customer, the number one AI agent for customer service, number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive bake-offs,

number one in ranking on G2, go check out fin.ai. And OWN is apparently helping launch a media company. And so if you wanna go work for OWN, or this new company, which I believe is called Cool Tech News, go check it out, they're looking for a producer. The founder of Nicola, the electric vehicle company that went bankrupt and landed its CEO founder in prison

for a brief time, he was in jail for life, then he got pardoned, just did a sit down interview with Tucker Carlson and Nate Anderson from Hindenburg Research had a lengthy rebuttal to this that I thought was pretty interesting. So Nate says, I am Nate Anderson, the founder of Hindenburg Research, reference repeatedly.

Okay, and just for context, if people haven't seen this yet, Tucker is basically positioning the take down of Nikola as a woke witch hunt. Is that an accurate summary? It's kind of unclear. I think he's more just really, really open and digging into like, hey, Trevor Milton,

like tell your side of the story. And it seemed like Tucker didn't come with really strong opinions, at least for the part that I saw, it didn't seem like he was taking a super strong stance on like, whether hydrogen is a good strategy or what happened. I haven't dug in, dug into, but a lot of it, a lot of those claims I think don't come from Tucker.

I think they come from, from Trevor Milton. And so the, the real debate it seems like is between Nate Anderson and Trevor Milton side of the story. I wouldn't say that in this podcast interview, Tucker has a particular thesis that he's advancing. He's more just asking Trevor Milton to tell his side of the story. And people are not liking it. People are not happy with this for sure.

People are saying pitiful. Someone else is saying Trevor Milton is a convicted fraudster and pathological liar Another guy's saying terrible take scam artists platformed. Mm-hmm Anyways, another person just says seriously question mark and even tick-tock investors is Meaning it just wow, this is Funny thing too is is He was wasn't he initially prosecuted during the Trump admin?

Yes. So Nate goes into this. He says, I'm the founder of Hindenburg Research referenced repeatedly in this bizarre and fantastical interview. During my career, I helped expose numerous financial scams,

including over a dozen Ponzi schemes and numerous instances of public companies lying to and stealing from investors. Of course, he's talking about Hindenburg Research, his firm. I am immensely proud of that career, including our work on Nicola Motors referenced in this interview. Trevor Milton is a convicted fraudster

held criminally responsible for the incineration of hundreds of millions of dollars in retail investors' hard-earned money, and as should be unsurprising, Milton in this interview seems just to fabricate key events and information out of thin air. Unfortunately with zero critical questioning or pushback from Tucker.

For starters, contrary to Trevor Milton's implications that his prosecution was some sort of Biden administration conspiracy, conveniently neither Milton nor Tucker share that the investigation into Milton was started and disclosed in September 2020 under the first Trump admin as well as before the 2020 election There were numerous inaccuracies throughout this interview the claim that Hindenburg paid employees for inside information is patently absurd

The key whistleblower discussed in the interview was only briefly a contractor for Milton He was so horrified by what he viewed as Milton's repeated false claims that he did a tremendous amount of research on his own, unraveling numerous additional suspected lies that Milton peddled to the investing public. Further, Hindenburg didn't coordinate anything with media or the DOJ. Such entities ran their own investigations

for their own purposes, unconnected to us. There was ample evidence that Milton misstated numerous aspects of his business, and as the company later itself acknowledged. What's interesting is like, I feel like when we talked about the Marques Brownlee Escobar phone, like MKBHD kind of broke that story and did some investigative journalism,

wound up getting his hands on the phone, and then the DOJ or the FBI came and said, hey, we want that phone as evidence. We'll give it back to you maybe in five years. And so it's interesting that it seems like the DOJ, according to Nate Anderson, did not coordinate with Hindenburg. Maybe that's just because Hindenburg

was doing public research, or just doing informational research and didn't have any like hard physical evidence but I certainly wouldn't be surprised if the DOJ reached out to Hindenburg but it seems like they didn't coordinate according to Nate Anderson. It would take hours to write out all the other observaties, have truth, innuendos and false statements in this interview but in the interest of correcting some of the record here's a handful. Milton waxes on about his pardon but no one mentions that Milton's lawyer was Brad Bondy,

the brother of AG Pam Bondy, nor did anyone mention that Milton donated $900,000 to Trump in October 2024, less than a month before the recent election, strategically timed well after his criminal conviction and immediately prior to the presidential election. What's interesting is like, you know,

you take a company to bankruptcy, you wind up in prison for life, you would think that you get zeroed pretty hard to the degree that you don't have $900,000 sitting around to make a political donation. So I'm very curious about how the money flowed around post bankruptcy, post indictment and conviction,

because I think that will change the calculus of people that are thinking about doing crazy stuff in the public markets. Because if you're like, okay, yes, I might get thrown in jail, but then I can scroll away some money, donate it, get pardoned, and then have half left over to hang out,

like that's a pretty good deal. So certainly not the functioning of the system that we want. Very, very odd. Yeah, the other thing that Nate calls out, he says, waxing poetic about hydrogen in the interview echoes Nicola's lies to retail investors that it successfully produced hydrogen at a cost 81% lower than anyone on earth, a feat that it would have upended the entire energy industry had it been remotely true.

Nikola's head of hydrogen production, presumably in charge of this world, world-changing scientific breakthrough turned out to be Milton's own brother who had no scientific background and previously did odd construction jobs in Hawaii. So I want to push back on that because last night I was like 7,000 prompts deep and I feel like I cracked the code to upending the energy market. Chats GPT had you pretty convinced that you could produce

hydrogen. It was like, John, you're onto something. You're onto something here. Go public. Doesn't matter that you're a podcaster. Go public. It does not matter that you're just a mere podcaster. You cracked it.

You cracked the code. Yeah, I mean, one thing Tucker could have pushed on was you rolled a truck downhill and you marketed it as though it was a functioning vehicle. Yep. That was a big one. And doesn't seem to be something that he pushed back on. Yeah.

Big questions about short selling. And he makes the case that short selling is good because it creates a financial incentive to expose companies that lie and engage in fraud. I think I agree with that. I think I'm pro short sellers. Although, of course, they can be very frustrating if you're on the other side and you're being shorted. Fortunately, TVPN is a privately held company,

so we don't have to deal with short attacks. At least we're not now, but who knows? Well, with that, let's bring in our Washington correspondent Zach Kukoff Zach what what was your reaction? What was your reaction to Trevor Milton going on on the tuck? Tuck radio. I just think terrible choice of network to go on first. The clear answer was TB PM. I Don't know if I'm ready just come we'd come with a fact sheet of just fact by fact and say did you roll the truck down the hill you wouldn't have coddled him the way that sucker did I don't know I don't

know when we had so hamper Econ people we went too easy but clearly we got him to just admit to having multiple jobs. Yeah, the key question was, are you working multiple jobs? That was my first question. He just said yes. And then, you know, from there it's like, okay, he's admitted it. Like, let's talk about redemption. Is there a possibility? What else did people want him to admit?

Like five other made up things he hadn't done? I think the critique that was fair was that he's clearly a pathological liar and yeah fairly Charismatic and we probably just should have said hey seems like you're still lying But at the same time we got to check in with the company. He just joined. He said he's going what did he say? He said he's going exclusive exclusive I'm going exclusive going exclusive. He said, I'm going exclusive, going exclusive. Just one job now. So I don't know. I still want to believe in redemption. Not many people believe in redemption.

That's where it was interesting. Um, but yeah, I mean, like, like the, I suppose that if I was interviewing Trevor Milton, the first question would be, did you roll the truck down the hill and did you, did you actually do that? Uh, because that is the fraud claim mainly and if it's like, okay, yeah, I did that, I made a mistake, now I'm on the redemption path as opposed to waffling around it. But I'm supposed to know, I didn't roll it downhill,

the truck was just built that way and the hill was just built that way. I mean, this has been a big, we gotta call out this has been a big week for podcasting. You have Sam Altman on The O'Va Yovon you have Netanyahu on the now Oh, yeah, you have Trevor Milton on Tucker Carlson. I mean, that's what a week what a week but Cucuff Equal stature, correct

I think higher stature and some yeah. Well higher than some lower than others. Correct What's going on in your world? How was yesterday? It looked like total I think higher stature than some of them. Yeah, well higher than some lower than others. Correct. Exactly. What's going on in your world? How was yesterday? It looked like total, total, also total podcast victory. Total podcast victory for sure. Yeah, yesterday I think somebody said All In is now state media, which I loved.

I was like yesterday literally was total podcast dominance, which was wild. It was very well done. Major props to frequent TBPN guest, Dalyan, who did an amazing job. And you know, they put the whole thing together. And like, Christian and Dalyan, yeah. They put the whole thing together in like 10 days.

You guys notice? The whole thing came from nothing. Yeah. 10 days. When you get a 20 minute block on the president's schedule, you gotta move quick. Yep. That is exactly, exactly true.

So, all right. They started Hill and Valley a couple of years ago, just as a dinner, but now there's like enough of an organization. I think it is like a company at this point that's doing these events and they have a playbook and every time they execute, it's better than the last one. So really-

My understanding is they have like 30 something people who help put these things together. It's a serious, it's a real operation that really staffs it up. Where was it? It was at the Mellon Auditorium, which funnily enough is like next door or maybe even part of the Environmental Protection Agency, the EPA. So it's a nice, it was very funny because I would not say it was a particularly environmentally focused group in the audience, but beautiful space nonetheless. Honestly, a highlight of the day for me and probably for everybody there, a very funny, very well done POTUS speech,

end of the day keynote, real red meat for us and for tech on a lot of the key questions on AI development. Also a lot of very funny crowd work, like really talented crowd work bits on Jensen and on Dutt Burgum. I was like, wow, it crowd work, like really talented crowd work bits on Jensen and on Doug Burgum. I was like, wow, it's gonna be a really talented

Netflix special and this all gets packaged up. And did he have a, did Trump have a good line on Jason too? Or I couldn't tell if that was fake news or it was real. No, it was real. Trump gets up, first thing he says is, thanks to the All In podcast, Chamath and David, and yes, even Jason. And there was a huge pause for laughter and he goes, yes, we're even thanking Jason today. A lot of Jason

Calcanis jokes. I will say one interesting dynamic at the thing that I don't know if, I don't know what was streamed online and what wasn't, but one interesting dynamic that I don't know if folks saw. The Jason was doing the voice of the liberal in the questioning. He was like trying to really put a little bit of the heats on some of the, uh, Trump admin guests. And it was an interesting departure from everybody else who was asking a question. That's good. People will find a way to hate that, but it's good.

Yeah. No, it's good to get the diversity of voices. I will say clearly some people that I don't think necessarily expected it, but yeah, it was good to get the, uh, the diversity of voices. That's fine diversity of voices up there. Yeah. Okay. What was the best line? The best line to me was somebody asked Jensen to talk about America's AI advantage. And he said, the one thing that no other country has is president Trump. That's right. That's why Jensen gets to, that's why Jensen gets to export H 20s. Cause he's had good lines like that.

It's wild. It was a well-done speech. Honestly, it was a well-done event. I would say highlights for me from like a serious way. The big one for me was a fair use training of the copyright material for AI. So this is the one we've been asking about for a while. And a lot of companies have been talking about it. In fact, there was a recent Anthropic court case that ruled on this, said, look,

if it's trained on legally procured, legally purchased copyright material, that's fair use, that's in scope. If it's stuff that you're pirating, which allegedly Anthropic and Meta and others have done to build their corpus of data, that's when you get into legal trouble. This was the first time that I've heard the admin come out and codify that.

It was really nice. So I love that. I love the energy permitting stuff. There was a lot of stuff for all the abundance boys on permitting. A lot of permitting reform questions, a lot of accelerating data center build outs, a lot of trying to streamline getting new sources of energy online. And then yes, there were some talk about how do you try to tighten even while we're still letting folks like China by age 20s,

some talk about things like location tracking for export controls too. So there was a lot to like in the speech. I actually thought it was a very, very well done speech. And it was funny because there was actually a live, I know is who's, who's your's your partner? Is it call? She or polymarket probably my market. Okay. So there was probably a polymarket. I saw it on call. She, there's probably a polymarket market going at the same time where people were betting on things like will Trump say David's XAXE name?

Yeah. Yeah. Before it gets resolved. So I thought it was really, really well done. Vance spoke super well, Bergham and Chris Wright had a very funny panel, the two of them together, where Chris Wright and Jason got into it mano a mano a little bit,

which was interesting to hear too. But great and really good energy in the space. A lot of good companies. Hadrian did a very good, almost like a sermon on the enthusiasm of re-industrialization. But I loved Chris from Hadrian did that. Yeah, he's been on the road show with that because he was probably giving some roadshow with that because he's

probably giving something some similar version of that at reindustrialized. Yeah, worked out the bit took the tight five to DC. We love to see it. It was a tight five. It was great. That's great. What? How should I think about this AI plan this documented website that's been floating around. Is this more of like, like laws aren't changing, but this is just these are this is the plan for the laws that we will eventually change. Is that the idea?

So think about it in two ways. One way is this is the White House using its bully pulpit to call for a series of changes that yes, would need Congress to enact them or would need agencies to change their policy. Right now, agencies changing their policy is something the White House can do. The other side is, look, there are two EOs that were signed live on stage yesterday that Trump did a very theatrical signing of, which is beautiful. And those are things that the admin can do directly.

So there are some things, for example, some of the energy permitting stuff, it's, you know, there's certain things like doing categorical exclusions from NEPA that are a little bit more within the realm of things that can be done, my understanding is via EO. But there are also things, as you guys know, a lot of permitting is done at the state and local level, right? So the White House can't necessarily say we're going to overrule what state and local government does on permitting as a fiat. They have to work with partners all up and down the stack of government to get what the AI action plan

calls for actually implemented. Yeah. So how big are those EOs? Like what were people tracking on those? And then I guess, yeah. What was the specifics? There was one of the EOs around making it so that states can't enact a safety laws for the next 10 years. Do you have specifics on that? That felt super significant.

So there were three AI EOs said two earlier I was on there three AI EOs. Sometimes why one was on bias free AI which is something I would instead frame as transparency. There was a lot of talk about woke AI and removing things like DEI from AI implementation. The actually specific version of that, the instantiated version of that, is that model providers that they wanna be used in government procurement have to attest to the values,

to be transparent about the values that go into their models. That's AIEO number one. AIEO number two is trying to fast track some of the development work we did. So fast tracking some of the data center permitting stuff that we did. And the third AIEO that we talked about is the export expansion.

It's funny, Jordy, the thing that you're asking about, which we talked about last time, right? This idea of a moratorium on AI regulation for 10 years. The big challenge is to actually get that done. That's something that has to be now done actually beyond my understanding, is beyond the scope of just what can be done in an EO, right? Something that can be started has to actually transcend that as well. And some of the challenge, like you saw today, California is already starting to push back on the idea that the federal government has preemption ability over

California's ability to regulate an AI. And the truth is there are powerful senators like Marsha Blackburn, who we discussed last time, whose job it is to protect their local industries like the music industry in Nashville, Tennessee, right? Her home state, who are not gonna be thrilled about what I think is a pretty reasonable, but ultimately controversial idea of trying to create a standard set of regulations

that aren't 50 patchwork states, because the default, and Trump mentioned this in his speech, is that in't 50 patchwork states, because the default, and Trump mentioned this in his speech, is that in 50 different states, whoever's the most restrictive is who people end up following. Yeah. One, one-

Because if you're a product company or a foundation model lab, you wanna be available everywhere. So the default is like basically be allowed under the most restrictive regulations. That's right. That's right. One kind of funny framing I was kicking around

was the idea of no paper clips. So this kind of marks a shift away from worrying about AI doom. We're not worried about getting paper clipped. We're not worried about fast takeoff, this crazy doom scenario. So we're pulling back on safety, pulling more, pushing more into geopolitics, let's actually scale up infrastructure, get these products out into the world because we think that by and large they're safe and now the game

is to win on more or less like industrial capacity, like if we're just producing way more tokens than every other country that will help our GDP We will grow that way the flip side of the no paper clips Is that there's no move to do a new operation paperclip where we where we pulled scientists from Germany to America to build the bomb and the and the and the the reference point there is that something like And the reference point there is that something like, something like 75% of AI researchers on Meta Super Intelligence team are, I think, on O1s, or they're not American citizens.

And we've seen the DeepSeek team and Manus, and there's some venture capital firms that are investing in Chinese AI, and kind of the bull case is like, okay, well, get them from China to Singapore, and then get them to Silicon Valley and then we have the team on our side. And so it feels like that's the one area

that wasn't really discussed. I know immigration's obviously just a broadly hot topic, but in terms of like brain drain of the ultimate top AI scientists, is there any movement or people thinking about that? Is there any nuance coming up between, okay, maybe that's a different Maybe that's a different problem set or different question than like dealing with like fentanyl dealers coming across the border

So I don't know that that was super within scope for the action plan I'll tell you personally there are definitely people who are thinking about an operation paperclip or how do we get the world's best and brightest? The truly truly elite right even above people who might qualify for O1s to come and build in America AI with their families. That's the first thing. Second thing is, listen, the question you're getting to, which is a question of soft power, is a question the admin is thinking about, right?

And so the reason that the AIO, sorry, the AI action plan is so supportive of open source and open weight models is because the admin views it as a national security imperative to get American soft power, i.e. American models, to become the most widely used in the world. So the soft power lever the admin's pulling, I would like to see more, and I'm hugely supportive of,

getting people here on a really targeted basis, ultra elite talent, to come here and build as opposed to building for adversaries. I mean, we're talking about like 50 people. It's like, it's super, super specific. Like 20 people. It should be a completely different discussion than like, border wall or anything like that.

No AI researcher has ever been impacted by a wall. Like that's not, maybe the pre-training scaling wall is their problem. Right, right, right. I know you have to run, uh. Yeah, sorry. There was a post yesterday going viral. Somebody realized you could Venmo the government to help reduce the national debt.

What's the right amount to start Venmoing Uncle Sam if you want to do your part? Listen, there's no tax on tips now. So we should all be tipping the government, help them. They should be tipping. We should be getting tips, paid in tips, no tax on that. And then we could turn around and tip the government and Venmo as well yeah I would say economy as much as you can do but every

day really quickly every day last question for me we'll let you go that point on open source is really interesting it feels like Mark Zuckerberg could be the national champion he could be the hero of American open source with the llama project we don't know if llama the hero of American open source with the llama project. We don't know if llama five is gonna be open source, but he met that trouble getting out. He hasn't really given clear guidance on how hard he's going into,

how hard he's gonna stay in open source. But how do you think the mood is around Mark Zuckerberg in DC? Is he a winner or loser? The Wall Street Journal had this article on you know, how much people have donated. Obviously, Jensen's feels ascendant. Elon feels like he was at the top and then kind of dial back a little bit, but is still doing okay. The other hyperscaler CEOs are

like, none of them are in bad, bad positions. But Zuck is like the interesting one where you could see a really interesting partnership form. But I don't know where we are on that. Zuck, I think is interesting because it took a big swing. I decided, listen, I want to go do the cultural work. I want to enmesh myself really deeply. And what we've learned is this is an admin that really respects power and success, right? Success is its own ability to attract more success, the virtuous cycle. Jensen does well in part because he's tremendously gifted interpersonally, but also because he's the CEO of the most valuable company in the world and the admin respects that, right? And when he comes to town, we know this is an

admin that loves talking about things are number one, things are the biggest and the best and most important and Jensen has that. Zuck tried to aura farm a little bit, you know what I mean? He tried to get in here and do a little bit of that and I don't know that it's fully landed for him. I agree. Listen, I hope he keeps llama five open source predominantly because I think it would be a great bite at the apple for him with national priority here. But part of that's going to also be his ability to invest and do some of the interpersonal retail stuff that Jensen's done so well. Yeah. Yeah. With, with open AI launching the open source model, you have to wonder if national open source champion of America is a title that Sam Altman is like, I'd like that.

Yeah, exactly. Even if it doesn't have direct economic value, if it comes with political power, that could be incredibly valuable. So, interesting to see how it breaks down. Thank you so much for joining. We'll let you get to your next meeting. Yeah, thanks for having me. Sorry for making you miss your next one.

Cheers. No worries. Talk to you soon. And we will tell'll let you get to your next meeting. Sorry. Sorry. After one. Thanks, guys. Making you miss your next one. Cheers. No worries. Talk to you soon. And we will tell you about Adio, customer relationship magic. Adio is the AI native CRM that builds, scales, and grows your company to the next level.

Get on Adio. It's the next gen of CRM. It's the next gen of CRM. And speaking of gens, Gen Z has a particular nihilism I call get my bag culture, says Jasmine Sun. The mentality of everyone's grifting so I better get my own this ties into the Trevor Milton debate that we were having earlier. They've never voted without Trump on the ballot all content

is sponsored content unless proved otherwise. Post-truth politics is all they know. The president's been scamming for the last 10 years so don't be meek and virtuous or else you're gonna lose. So no wonder why you end up with Cluley. Bit of a hot take, interesting but I do think that there's this there is this So don't be meek and virtuous or else you're gonna lose. So no wonder why you end up with Clueless. Bit of a hot take, interesting, but I do think that there is this world. The interesting thing though, just to call out, that the Clueless haters will be in shambles over this,

but Roy was posting yesterday that he set up a 20% employee option pool in Clueless. Whoa, okay. So he's paying a lot and people are pushing back and being like, your burn's gotta be crazy. And his pushback was basically, we're way more efficient to, you know, you can get to 10 million of ARR with a small team.

I pay people a lot, and I also, you can also give them a lot of equity, so. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, interesting. I do worry a little bit about, just as we see more meme stocks, it gets more tempting, so for like, ah, like, and that meme about like, you have five years to get the bag before the permanent underclass.

And if you're just seeing people get away with things that feel crazy and you're like, well, they, like everyone else got away with it, maybe I should get away with it too. It is sad we need Gen Z founders building permanent structures, institutions, products that will outlive them and there hasn't been a ton of those. Alex Wang was certainly the the leading candidate as kind of all-star Gen Z company. Yeah and people people were pissed when I mean a lot of

people were super happy when Ross Ulbricht was pardoned. A lot of people were upset. They're like he was dealing drugs on the internet and tried to kill someone. So I think there's allegedly, allegedly, is it alleged? No, I think I think he did order the hit, but it didn't work. OK, OK, like it didn't go through because he was talking with a with a undercover agent happens to the best of us. Sometimes sometimes you put something on the list. Like who has an order to hit? us sometimes sometimes you put something on

the list who has an order to hit yeah sometimes you put never order one hit sometimes you put something on an underlings to do list and they just forget about it it happens and you're like ah they drop the ball it happens anyway in other better news there's a profile in Colossus of Rompton, Naomi. My boy. Who you've worked with, you've met, and he says. It's your friend. We've been quietly building Abstract for nine years.

He's your friend, he hasn't been on the show? Well, he's never done any media, literally never. So this is like the first significant media that he's ever done. Interesting. He's been very, very under the radar. We don't have to list out his full portfolio but if you look at you can go to abstract.vc and check it out. He's backed a lot of incredible companies. He backed my last

company. He was was an incredible partner and has been a true friend throughout as long as I've known him. And I'm excited for him to talk about it. It's a crazy story. He had a fund, blew up, went bankrupt when he was 24, and he's 34 now, has 1.8 billion under management. Wow, that's impressive. And he's an absolute dog. I can't wait to see him at the top of the Midas list.

For sure. It's gonna happen. So that will be in the next edition of Colossus magazine, which you should, of course, subscribe to. Yeah, and you can read this article for free. And you can go read this article now. The man with the hot hand. And you can subscribe to get the print edition.

The man with the hot hand needs to link up with the man with the hot leather jacket, Jensen Wong, apparently dropping a bombshell at the AI summit that we were just talking to Zach Kukoff about. I have 60- plus leather jackets. My wife picks them. That is the scoop that I need to hear. Bef, thank you for reporting on the ground.

Jensen Wong says, I have 60 plus leather jackets. That's a lot. One for every week of the year, I love it. Anyway, another quote from, which you mentioned, Jensen Wong, America's unique advantage is that no country could possibly have is President Trump. He is happy to be partnering with the president, the commander in chief.

Also, a reconciliation of sorts between Delian Asperrujov and Chamath Palihapitiya. In DC, they're comparing anacondas and IRRs. Delian and Chamath, of course, to put the timeline in turmoil a couple weeks ago, talking trash to each other. All friendly, all's fair in love and war, all's fair on the timeline.

Taking a friendly picture together, you'll love to see it. I love a reculant saliation, even if the language is a little vulgar for my taste. But great to see two capital allocators hanging out in D.C. together. Christian Garrett also broke it down. The man behind the scenes pulling all the strings. Pulling all the strings.

The puppet master. Last night was truly something special. David Sacks and the All In Pod brought Jacob Helberg and Deleian and I in To something that we'll all never forget the business of America is business as Calvin Coolidge said It was never more important than last night Friedberg stressed the importance of showing how the everyday American and those who the system has not worked for are already Experiencing job creation and transformation due to AI

has not worked for are already experiencing job creation and transformation due to AI. Winning the AI race will be a bigger, will be part of a bigger story that benefits us all. There were members of Congress from both sides of the event showing how there is a unified front that's bipartisan around techno-industrial policy and the opportunity AI presents itself. Jacob Helberg and those in the admin now have to get to work. Amazing work, dude. Congrats as well, O'Brien. Bobby Goodlatte says, saw some of the post, looks absolutely epic.

So all three former guests, you'll have to see it. So President Trump said he had planned to break Nvidia up until he learned who Jensen Wong was. What's funny is I don't even know how you would break up Nvidia. Like it's just a fabless semiconductor company. It's not like the Intel thing where you have a fab and then you also have a design company.

I mean I guess you could break down like gaming and AI training or something. I just, I don't know where the dividing line would be. It's really just like, they haven't, the story of Nvidia isn't, they don't have an Instagram. They don't have a story of, oh, they acquired this company and it got really big and it saved them from disruption. Yeah, you could break it up and say,

okay, you're gonna have an AI division and a gaming. You know, just the gaming's like a rounding out. Yeah, I mean, they have some other stuff that's in there. I mean, I don't know, you break out Cuda or something? I don't know how you would do it. You could force Jensen to sell off the majority of his jackets. Yeah, yeah, break up the jackets.

To pay down the national debt. But anyway, Jensen's been in DC. We saw him there a couple weeks ago, a couple months ago, and he's been doing the work to get to know Donald Trump, and it has worked out spectacularly. And now Jensen is I have a We I this will go and mention but I had we have a friend of the show and Jensen walked up to us and

the friend introduced himself and his company and Jensen didn't know the company and he's like, oh So bearish for me. Wait, that was Jensen that he was? Oh, OK, I know the other side of that story. I didn't realize. I thought it was a random person. He really took it personally. But he's been on a generational run since.

You want to be known by the greats, the folks who only worked at Denny's and then started a generational company. Never work anywhere else. This is an interesting thread by Kevin Bryan talking about how the New York Times is reporting on the AI action plan. Kevin says, come on man there's no way you can read the AI action plan and think this is the first order thing that the first order thing the New York Times readers should know about it. Anthropic is positive, AI has huge implications for the national economy, defense, future of science. Half this article is about copyright. It is wild how

much tech journalism comes from a place of extreme hostility towards the technology. It often reads like AFRFK writing articles about new pharmaceutical breakthroughs. No wonder the Silicon Valley set completely ignores this. And then he closes with a post about 90% of mainstream writing on AI is one, encoded bias, two, theft of copyright, three, wasting water and electricity ad nauseum. Gangs, gang, folks in these labs think

they're curing cancer, honestly. Who gives anything about one, two, and three, given that even if those worries were true, they aren't. If you think those three things are the most important policy issues or even the biggest downside risks of AI, and I mean this in a let's be real, not a mean way.

Yeah, it's hard to argue that energy use by itself is a bad thing. Yeah. And it is true that data centers require an obscene amount of energy. We talked earlier this week about how Oracle's partnership with OpenAI, where OpenAI will be spending $30 billion a year with Oracle by 2027, at least how it was reported,

will require two Hoover dams worth of energy which is an exceptional amount but as Energy production has gone up so has human prosperity Production there's plenty of water for the data centers. There's plenty of water to fill your eight sleep You can go to eight sleep calm get a pot back five year back in the game Get a pod back five year back in the game Free trial free returns free shipping go get a pod five. I've been ill. I finally put up seven and a half Hours last night. I'm back in range. So HRV. I'm no longer looking dead and

I got over two hours of REM sleep last night So we have been doing a lot better from Andrews and Horowitz joining in just few minutes in the meantime. Let's do some time like I want to dig into this Financial Times I think we're gonna need more time do that later The headline of course just to keep you up to speed is that Nvidia chips worth 1 billion dollars were smuggled into China after Trump Export controls we've heard about this black market. we've heard about people stuffing suitcases full of them and flying around the country. They're not the biggest thing in the world, so it's easy to route them around. There's always a question, could the government

have done more, could Nvidia have done more? What are, who are the truly the bad actors? Is the blindfold with the- Crazy graphic right there. Good graphic, love it. But we will cover this later in the show. Danish is Throwing some shade at Ilya. He says how you got 32 billion

He doesn't have 32 billion And don't take the turkey flight to restore the hairline I would have Pavel Dura of it myself into a Greek God the instant it was financially feasible Dude does not give an F about anything but the mission incredibly bullish Okay, so think super intelligence is gonna be able to cure hair loss like that's gonna be the single prompt right before cancer Probably it does seem more tractable. It doesn't seem that crazy very rude Anyway, people having fun on the timeline. Oh, well we have Andreessen Horowitz, partner of Anita joining in just a few minutes,

and there's a post about Andreessen Horowitz. So James Lin says, A16Z and Sutter Hill Ventures. Well, so the context here. Oh yes. Avadon Rodonsky says, recently got asked which VC firm changed the game like Steph Curry did. Lots of sports metaphors in tech these days. You love to see it.

It's tough when you know nothing about sports. And so the two examples of VC firms that changed the game like Steph Curry did for the NBA, Andreessen Horowitz and Sutter Hill Ventures, but in completely different ways. James Lin here says, A16Z realized that everyone was undervaluing startups and massively overbid 10X what other people were offering.

I don't know if that's actually happened that often that you go get a term sheet and Andreessen in at 10 acts the price but they've certainly been aggressive on pricing and it's worked out in many cases. Yeah for early rounds. 50% higher but yeah. So we got them Twitter, Instagram, Coinbase, GitHub, Andoril, Airbnb, Slack, round sizes went up after that. Sutter Hillsaw Trends in cloud computing and incubated Snowflake from idea to IPO. They made Mike Spicer, a partner, the interim CEO,

hire the technical co-founders, funded the entire Series A. They had 20% stake in Snowflake at IPO at a $33 billion valuation. That was worth 12, it was a $12 billion position for that. So pretty much the best incubation of all time. So A16Z finds talent and makes several outsized bets. Sutter Hill sees a trend and operationalizes one to two companies completely in-house.

Now larger rounds are the norm, and the venture studio model is much more common. That makes a ton of sense. We'll have to ask Benita about that when she joins. What else do we have here in the timeline? I also think you can't leave YC out of that group, right? It's an entirely different model but highly, highly, highly effective.

Yeah. I think the initial YC, the way it changed the game was that it made it completely possible for college new grads to go and start a company without getting any experience in enterprise or in business and so that was the initial arb like Sand Hill Road existed Sequoia capital existed Kleiner Perkins existed but if the Airbnb guys had gone to family round to get a friends and family round done exactly so if the Airbnb guys had gone straight to Sequoia. Yeah, you didn't need a friends and family round to get a friends and family round done. Exactly, so if the Airbnb guys, I think, had showed up to Kleiner Perkins or Sequoia, who actually, I think, wound up doing the Airbnb deal later,

I think Sequoia did, pre-YC, that might have been like, this is a little weird company, this is a little bit out of our sweet spot, but then you go through YC, you get coached by Paul Graham at the time, and you polish things up such that you're ready to go And ready to talk to the big firms and Paul Graham I think famously told the Sequoia partner like you should do the Airbnb deal even as weird as it is like think about you know

eBay for space and it worked out Fantastic story. We have Vanita from Andrews and Horowitz in the studio. Welcome to the stream. How are you doing? Yes. Yeah. What's your, what's your take on this, on this a 16 Z change in the game by recognizing that everyone was undervaluing startups and massively overbidding for early rounds. What do you think that resonates? Do you feel like Andrews and Horowitz has changed the game in venture? Totally unbiased. Totally unbiased. I do believe my partners are changing the game. No, and part of what's amazing about A16Z is our willingness to bet in every sector, every vertical, every part of the economy, really every part of the economy, you know,

both locally, domestically and globally. So my corner of the world, it's a big corner of the world. It's a $5 trillion corner of the world is healthcare. And one of the things I love about our firm is that we've really established a dedicated strategy here too. And hopefully changing the game here too. Yeah. Has, uh, how has bio investing healthcare investing changed? Uh, we were talking about the Airbnb example. It feels like it's easy for a couple folks with just a hope and a dream. They don't need to do a friends and family round.

They can just go to Sand Hill Road. They can go to places like YC. They can go to Andreessen Horowitz directly and raise a seed round and have enough to actually pay the bills, hire a couple people, do a couple tests, launch a consumer app, launch an enterprise app. Has there been a meaningful change in the way healthcare and biocompanies get started? For a long time it felt like the only way

to do a company in that space was you're at MIT and you do some partnership with Flagship Pioneering and then you IPO and then you're living and dying by your FDA trials. The traditional venture path felt very just like a completely separate track, but how has it evolved from your experience? Yeah, great question. I mean, I think we're absolutely we're absolutely part of the agentic wave. I've never seen so much interest in in the role of AI agents in transforming how science is done,

how research is done, how discoveries are made, how drugs could be developed. The FDA launched an AI agent called Elsa, cute name, but potentially signaling a transformative role for AI even in the regulatory agency, which is kind of a mind blowing thing to think about, right? You would have thought that it would have been the innovators and the startups kind of pushing AI first and then waiting for the regulator to say, yes, we believe these predictive tools are going to help us make drugs.

So I think we are seeing a really different market pull than ever before. At the same time, the business models in healthcare, are still similar and the core products that drive value are still similar. So we're in the business of making new medicines. So are the startups that we back in large part, or making the practice of medicine way better and transforming the practice of medicine.

And both have some really established business models around them. Drugs that work that have an impact on patients get paid for. They get paid for because they save the system money. Services we pay for because people need services on time from the right specialist for the right disease. And so those are all great business models in which to invest and in which startups can run.

But certainly, startups are now running in a much more capital efficient way, in a much more AI powered way than they ever were before. We need agents in the game. Where is Silicon Valley's sweet spot or like strike zone in bio? Because I was reading the Wall Street Journal today about a company that does they're developing robotics for lab testing equipment. So basically like pipetting, you know, famously it's like a PhD student

just going like this all day long. Bunch of robots doing that, makes a ton of sense. That feels like Silicon Valley all the way. Same thing with- How many cursor for bio pitches have you got? Is it in the hundreds? But that feels like more in the sweet spot. When I think about like an ERP system for biotech companies,

that feels a lot easier than saying, I'm going to take a cancer drug through the FDA trials, and I'm never going to go public. I'm going to raise growth rounds at every stage. We haven't seen that that much, but maybe we're still just early in that trend changing. Yeah, and I think part of that, the trend is changing in part because of the same trends

we're seeing in other verticals that AI is getting paid for through labor budgets. And AI is not necessarily replacing but augmenting labor, right? 90%, 90 plus percent of all chemical screens for new drugs fail. No drug comes out of it. 10% of all nurse positions across the healthcare system are vacant. We can't find the nurses to fill the positions. So we're living in a world where actually we need agentic resources to come in as labor.

And that is different than the world we were living in before, where we were trying to squeeze out IT budget from, let's say, a large pharma company or, let's say, a hospital system to deploy the types of Silicon Valley technologies that could have been transformative for the industries. And so now that there's a lot more, you know, autonomous task completion, as well as augmentation well beyond what humans could do in those fields. I do think some of those Silicon Valley technologies, you know, obviously, yes, they are being formed. Yes, we are absolutely being pitched the cursor for bio right now. And we think it's very credible.

We think it absolutely is the case that if you have a lot of data, you're a company that's, let's say, run clinical trials before, managed many, many drugs through development. You should have agents crawling through that data, learning what humans might have missed, learning why things failed, why things succeeded, and then bringing that knowledge to your next set of endeavors. And so absolutely, you know, this kind of regime of a fully virtual, agentic lab that for every one human scientist, you know, has hundreds of agentic scientists is a really, really interesting vision. At the same time, making the drug is really valuable.

So we really do think that great innovation can take it all the way and can, you know, great startups can actually develop their own. How often a company comes to you that wants to be more on the picks and shovels side, kind of infrastructure, maybe more B2B, how often a company comes to you that wants to be more on the picks and shovels side kind of infrastructure Maybe more b2b. How often do you find yourself encouraging them to own? try to take it all the way and actually like use whatever innovation or insight they have to Not just make that product available to other bio or pharma companies, but actually deliver the end value?

I think it really depends on the founders and exactly where the innovation sits. We've backed both. We're long on both infrastructure for the industry and SaaS, forward deployed SaaS, SaaS plus agentic implementations. And I think we think a lot of that has a ton of value and will fundamentally change how every organization operates and not every organization is going to build their

own cursor-like tools for research. At the same time, sometimes the innovators who are closest, I'll give you a real example, autoimmune disease is horrible. 10% of people have an autoimmune disease and sounds like science fiction, but recently we tried CAR T therapy. Take my T cells out of my body, engineer them, and instead of attacking a tumor cell, attack bad autoimmune cells. Okay, well, that's interesting. And what if I could deliver it in the same type of vaccine type format that you got your COVID jab in, an LNP and an RNA that- I'm kind of surprised to hear you calling a vaccine.

I'm kind of surprised to hear you calling a vaccine a jab. But maybe that's just a comment. It's like reclaiming Tech Bro. Yeah, reclaim it. We reclaim Tech Bro, technology brothers. Yeah, the pharmaceutical industry definitely needs to reclaim a jab. The addition of this thing to tech nerds. What about to finish that story out to

make that requires a lot of engineering and a lot of optimization and a lot of so-called Silicon Valley style optimization and so we're seeing that a company in our portfolio called orbital therapeutics announced really exciting data in monkeys You know demonstrating that that might be possible for autoimmune disease So that's cool. I think it goes both ways Silicon Valley tech is gonna permeate every company whether they're based here or not and whether they're making drugs or not Do you do you think that these sort of early IPOs that that drug companies have done? early IPOs that drug companies have done historically is a feature or a bug?

Like if we have more developed private capital markets, do you think that, like is it even right that effectively retail, uneducated retail could just be taking these like gambling in the public markets on effectively FDA trials or is there a better way? There is a huge public market for biotech. The stage at which companies access those markets in the last few years was miscalibrated.

And so that's why you see the headlines you're seeing with respect to public biotech stock performance, with respect to public fundraisingotech stock performance, with respect to public fundraising challenges for companies because they were very far from the clinic, they were very far from generating commercial value, they were very far from demonstrating hard data that they were close to developing a product of value. So I do think the private markets continue to have massive pools of capital in them, and biotech companies will stay private for longer. But at the same time, we're seeing huge demand and appetite for technologies that work from

pharma companies that have a really rich ability to continue to back biotech companies, partner with biotech companies, fund biotech companies, buy biotech companies. So we partnered up with Eli Lilly on that front and started a whole dedicated fund focused on supporting the biotech ecosystem and that serves pharma and it serves the biotech ecosystem too, right? And so there are lots of ways for companies

to continue to make progress on those technologies while private until they have the metrics that justify going public. That makes sense. You said something earlier around nursing job vacancies. How do you, what's your thesis on how that market evolves in four years, are we still gonna see, you know, hospital systems unable and various groups unable

to get the nurses that they want? Or do you think that agent systems can can kind of backfill those roles and and they just there there will be more kind of balance in the market? Yeah I hope we also project needing fewer roles. I mean we are projecting that we're going to be short over three million health care workers just in the United States alone over the next year. Right. So it's a huge and the people. So and the people making those projections, are they a G.I. Pilled? Are they humanoid robot pilled?

Like I it's cool that the FDA has a chief AI officer that feels important. But any time I'm like reading into projections, you it's more interesting to get a projection or insight from you given that you're backing all of these companies that understand that reality and wanna- Right, that's a big number. That's based on the job count,

job health systems and providers are opening but unable to fill based on the projected increase in healthcare demand as our population ages. But absolutely, I hope it's not really that high, because there's only like 8 million total job vacancies in the US, that's like almost half our total job vacancies in healthcare alone. So we have to actually decrease our need for those jobs. And we could redirect some of our extremely skilled healthcare existing

workforce from answering phone calls, picking up drop balls, recommunicating the same information to patients, recommunicating the same information between providers who are trying to coordinate their million ways in which our system does not work today. And so I hope that number goes down. But the reality is that the willingness to try out the agentic solution, whether it's

for documentation, whether it's for getting prior auth from an insurance company, or whether it's for actually providing a clinical consult, has never been higher. Because the reality is today we don't have the humans to fill those jobs. Wait times are long. 30% of Americans skip care. Like they skip or delay prescribed care. We're a developed country in which that's happening. And 60, 70% of Americans say, I will see an AI doctor. Like just give, I will see one. Like at least I will engage with one. And in fact, I'm probably going to engage with one before I engage with a human doctor now, right? We've all changed our consumer behavior that way.

Almost overnight. So it's a pretty remarkable shift that's happening that will, I hope, make us need a lot fewer than than those that, you know, that number of open jobs. I remember what was in like 2008, there was a boom in electronic medical records startups, like Athena Health was one of them, and there was kind of like two waves going on that were kind of adding together and making those businesses work.

One is like a technological wave, obviously, like we had access to cloud databases and cloud infrastructure and better software, and so you could actually like put medical records securely in a cloud, and so that was obviously like a great business. But then there was also an EHR mandate from the Obamacare legislation, I believe. Are there any regulatory tailwinds that are adding on top of like the AI technology tailwinds right now in bio or healthcare broadly?

Yeah, absolutely. So there are first of all, I will say historically, historically a lot of health care software and technology was adopted because of regulatory incentives and payment incentives. But for the first time, we are seeing bottoms up adoption of tools and technologies and an extraordinary NPS of health care software with scribing tools

like those developed by companies like Ambience and Abridged, you know, evidence access tools like what OpenEvidence has built. And so for the first time, we're also seeing pull that's just like, hey, this is better. I don't need the government to give me a kickback to tell me it's better, but it is better. So that's a separate trend that we're very excited about. But huge regulations are also going to incentivize a better technology infrastructure. So price transparency is a good example.

There are clear incentives and penalties for not being able to share transparently your pricing cards as a provider, as a payer, and to create that type of open access for patients. And so building that infrastructure layer is gonna be super important. The administration's talked a lot about patient choice. That could be patient choice with respect

to how you use your benefit dollar, patient choice with respect to what plan coverage you select, and ICRA is a good example of a potentially big change in the employer-sponsored healthcare space. So these are all financial rails and incentives. CMMI continues to advance value-based initiatives that basically prioritize preventive care and say, hey, at the end of the year, if you save the government a dollar, if you save CMS money, DRSmart provider who's using technology,

you'll make money, right? So that's a clear financial incentive. It's good for patients. Generally being out of the healthcare system, preventing something before it costs a lot of money is good for patients. But the financial incentives and policy incentives do need to provide a huge accelerator in our space.

And that will continue to be the case. Can you give us the update on the drug pricing EO from, I don't know, is it six weeks ago, eight weeks ago? It feels like a year ago at this point. There's been a lot that happened. We had a bunch of people on the day of. And a lot of people were kind of saying that it wasn't going to be as impactful

as it kind of felt in the moment. But what's the update there? I don't think there's been a policy update. Like, you know, nothing has been enacted yet. That's still an EO. The concept of it, of course, was to say, was to use international trade as a backdrop for holistic negotiations inclusive of drug pricing to say, you know, as part of an overall tariff negotiation, why is it the case that the US pays two or three times or more for the same exact drug that another country pays? And so it is a logical question to ask. And we know that CMS is continuing to ask that question. But the actual policy is going to depend on quite a bit of, you know, there are a number of moving parts

in a holistic policy with respect to every other country. So it's important for us to retain huge incentives. And it's not going to be as simple as cut the price, get great drugs. That's not how the market works. But should the price be more equitably shared across countries, it's an absolutely reasonable perspective to have. How popular is open source in the bio world?

I feel like the cursor for bio thing is very interesting. But when I think about the electronic lab notebooks that folks are using, if it's not open source, you can't fork it. And it feels like part of cursor's ability to grow really fast is that they sit on top of your code base and you can change IDEs very quickly. But if a researcher is using a closed source lab notebook that has a database

built in, that company is going to be like, no, no, no, I do not want you just stealing all my customers or migrating off, but is open source popular? Are there opportunities? What's the VS code equivalent, I guess would be the question. Yeah, I think there's a lot, you know, in bio research, there's a lot more informatics and less organized software. I think that will change, but historically, um, historically there is a lot of bespoke informatics, which is why some of the agentic adoption,

like for exploratory informatics research is happening on its own and people are adopting open source agents for resources like that. You know, the structure, the protein structure models like Alpha Fold were followed by a number of models that were open sourced and within a period of weeks, thousands of scientists, thousands of companies adopted additional structure prediction models. Foltz 2 was a popular one, the Chai model, a number of startups put out open source models, and we saw really fast adoption, which is kind of cool, right? It's like,

it's a scientist sitting in a company who says, I want to try that, you know, and see if it would help my workflow. And actually, I want to benchmark it. And I want to try three at the same time. So we didn't have that many great open source resources like that before we had data sets, but not necessarily models and APIs to those models that made them easy to use. So I think that whole ecosystem is in its like square one infancy of growing and exploding,

but you're going to need a library of models. You want to be able to try all the models. You want your agents to be able to use the models without even a human interface. And so suddenly, the same thing that's happening in enterprise software in every vertical is going to happen here too. Agents on behalf of scientists will

be able to select which models to use, try five models at once, and then incorporate the results and predictions of those models into a workflow that is deeply integrated with other agentic automation. So none of that's built, I would say, for the vast majority of the industry. And so it's a huge, huge opportunity for startups to build.

Yeah. Last quick question. Maybe if you could answer in 60 seconds, that's the challenge. What's the vibe on the Stanford campus right now? Are people dropping out of PhD programs to start companies in bio? I'm sure we're seeing people dropping out of PhDs

to join Meta and other AI research orgs broadly, but I'm curious if that's happening in bio. There are a number of fast growing AI biotech startups that are bringing AI and computational tools to model trainings. We are seeing that. If you're asking, you know, is it a response to federal funding changes?

I think that's always been the case that a large fraction of trainees from university campuses end up in biotech and pharma companies, and that's great. It's a great outcome. I do think there's probably in the near term going to be continued exploration of industry alternatives to federally funded research. And I really hope that the federal grant funding is clarified and that there's more stability

on university campuses for federally funded research because some of that infrastructure is absolutely, has been behind a huge number of these of these innovations. Makes sense. Thank you so much for joining. Yeah, thank you so much. Great to chat. Talk to you soon. Cheers. Up next we have Mickey Malka, the founder of Ribbit Capital. Really quickly, I will tell you about AdQuick, out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only AdQuick combines technology, out of home expertise, and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying

across the globe. And we hopefully have Mickey Melka. How are you doing, Mickey? Good to meet you. Hi guys, good to see you, John and Jordy. How are you guys? Welcome to the stream. Great background.

Yeah, great background. What's going on there? What's the background? Break it down for us. Those are some NFTs One there we go from an artist called bright moments They did an exhibition all over the world and these are crypto citizens From the ten cities around the world where they had their exhibitions amazing amazing It's great to have you on the show. We've been excited for this

You guys have been on a absolutely crazy run and it's awesome that you're starting to talk about it a bit more. Yeah, I want to start with your background. I think that you might actually have a non-traditional path to venture or at least a very interesting entrepreneurial journey prior to launching a venture firm. So can you just give us a little bit of background

on your history and how you wound up running Ribbit? Of course. So I'm an entrepreneur and I'm still an entrepreneur. It just happens that I started when I was 17 years old and that's all I know how to do and I started in financial services. Growing up in Venezuela in the early 90s, it was inflation, crisis, bank failures, all the things that you need to learn in your life. I had them by the time I was 22 years old.

Speed run. Oh my God, yes. Light speed through all of that. So I started four different companies around the world before the word fintech or crypto even existed. Always trying to do something around the internet and making money better. Simply, that was the whole thing.

And what did some of those first companies look like? Were they specific to problems that you were having in Venezuela or were they global by nature? I would love some highlights. Well, the first one was, it was the first online trading platform for Latin America. A little bit what Robinhood is today. Yeah.

But imagine that in 1998, in the beginning of the internet, and you could trade online stocks of every local Latin American market. Mexico, Argentina, Venezuela, Chile, we had a, Brazil, we had a, we bought stock exchange seats in all of them, and we were able to allow people to trade. So that was one of the first ones. And then I-

And you were like 20 at this time? I was 23, 24 when I started, yes. Wow. That company. And there were no venture capitalists in Latin America. There was nobody. We had to convince some people in the US and New York to fund us and headquartered in Miami

to avoid any kind of problem with choosing a place in Latin America. And that company became the largest online broker dealer in South America. Wow. Insane. And then where did you go from there? I went to Spain because my first company was acquired by a big Spanier bank and the internet

had blown up. A little bit like when they think it was all hype. It will happen to AI eventually when people will think it was all wrong in eventually the future. And I started the first online bank in Europe. There was no online banks. It was a bank called OpenBank because it was supposed to be open 24 seven 365. It still runs in Spain.

And it was the fastest going bank. Was adding open to the start of a word, were you the first person to do that? You started the trend. Open AI, open store. Open store. Open Doors. We're taking over the open words these days.

Pay me my fee. I coined that. Yeah, that's wild. Who was the first LP to kick you off? What was the story? Well, first, I have to ask. I'm assuming there wasn't like 20 banking as a service platforms back then. How did you convince a bank in Europe to bank?

I had to become regulated. By the time I was 25 or 26, I was regulated by eight central banks to go through the whole KYC bank approval process myself. So very early. Is it more just like you filled out the forms perfectly, you sent the right messages or were you like kind of knocking on doors trying to grease palms to make it happen? All of the above. All of the above.

Depending on the country, you had to do a lot more, some were a lot more technical than others, but definitely you had to see, they had to see that I was not just this kid who didn't know anything about finance. And then I had to pretend I knew a lot about finance. So yeah, maybe you want to continue with that. No, from where did that go?

I don't want to leave a cliffhanger So that business grew to the fastest bank in Europe. I sold it back to them to them to the bank that We were partnered with and and I moved to Brazil started and I got approval by the president of Brazil Back then Lula was which is again president now to approve a new banking license back then Lula was, which is again president now, to approve a new banking license granted so we could start a bank to serve the on bank with financial services.

So I lived in Sao Paulo, did that for three years, became the largest retail bank in the country serving almost 15 million customers. That was not a good one. I'm seeing a trend, I'm seeing a trend. Bad day to be unbanked. Well no, no, I was gonna say, you seem to like being the fastest growing or the number

one in your category. You know, what I like is allowing people to, when people have access to better money, it makes their life better. It's not about having more money or less money. It's just making money better. And better money means you should be able to invest the same way I can anywhere in the

world. You should be able to get the best loan and not get your knees beaten up if you don't pay back a credit. You should be able to get a good insurance product no matter where you are or what you're trying to do. That's what I call better money. So I think the journey of my life has been one of pursuing that better money makes life better.

And moved to Silicon Valley 18 years ago to start a company in payments before the iPhone came out. I had a feeling people were going to tap and pay with their phones. So we were one of the first companies tapping on NFC stickers, putting them on back of the phones. You could pay for merchants and that when the App Store came out with the iPhone, we were the first wallet in the phone. So that moment was like an aha moment. When you saw mobile and you saw the App Store, this is like, this is what I had been waiting

for 20 years as an entrepreneur. That moment in time when suddenly you can compete with incumbents in a playing field that they were not looking at. So that's where Rivet Capital started. Instead of building one more company, because I always consider myself, even though we always move the ball forward, I was a failed entrepreneur

because the best entrepreneurs never sell their companies. So I decided to start Rivet as a way to say, this is the one I'm going to run until the last day I want to run it. That's fantastic. Sorry, now I'm going backwards. Can you talk to me about some of the wedges that you used in the previous companies to actually drive adoption of a new banking product or a new bank online. There's so many different points and solutions.

I have to imagine starting in markets like, Spain, Brazil, et cetera, helped you. The narrative violation over the last 20 years has been that developing countries adopted fintech faster. They adopted new methods of payments, much faster than developing countries in many ways because there just wasn't that legacy infrastructure. So I'm curious if you even think you would have been successful if you had just tried

to come and only crack the US market? No, I would have been a failure. I would not understand the world. I was never the best student at school, but I was a student of life. And walking through the streets of all these countries and seeing how people behave with money was the best class and the best master class I could have gotten.

Because at the end, everything you do is building a brand. And brand means trust. And it's very underrated to understand how long it takes to build trust and how fast can you make it shake or disappear or fracture. And then how long it takes to bring it back. So if you see a pattern in everything that we've done, is working with teams that we believe can build a brand.

And working with them, because that is the only mode that you can build that gives you the chance to succeed in financial services. Because every financial product at the end, it's a commodity. It can be copied. You can start with free commissions, it will be copied. You can start with free credit scores, it can be copied. You can start with free commissions, it will be copied. You can start with free credit scores, it will be copied. You can start with free interest rate lending or tipping, it will be copied. So it has to be the brand. And that's a special DNA that I got to understand from working in markets where people's level of trust was

even lower than in developed markets. Yeah. Yeah. How do you actually build that trust and build that brand in some of those markets? Is it different in Brazil than other countries? Are you talking about the feel of the product or actually just the marketing and telling people what your brand stands for or does it infuse through the interactions with a bank teller in the virtual environment probably? I think it's all of the above. It's the little things. It's really telling

a story in a way that people believe and consistently see that you're doing that. And everyone, every company does it in a different way So there was a story remember from new bank in Brazil When we back them super early, you know in Sao Paulo They are 18 million people but there's I think there's like 4 million dogs It's almost like one dog for and so whenever they saw that you you had a transaction on your credit card for a vet You you they will send you cookies to your helm. Because it meant that your dog was sick or something was happening. So imagine, but those are little things that you do that with consistency and if the message

is we care about you and we're paying attention to what's going on in your life, that's how you build that trust. It's a bunch of little details. There's never a big thing, but it has to be genuine. And you can see when CEOs or teams are not genuine, you can see it 10 miles away. How do you feel about, so you did the first institutional round

of Coinbase and Robinhood, correct? Yes. And did you think at the time that those companies, did you have a feeling that if they were successful, they would end up ultimately competing with each other? Because it's not exactly head to head yet, but you can imagine 10 years from today, these companies will just be going at it. And maybe that's just because of the trends

around bundling in fintech, right? If you can create one product, you can add a bunch of others. If you can earn someone's trust in one category, you can expand out. But I think we're at this really interesting moment where the last 10 years were about you had traditional fintech and you had crypto, and they were these distinct categories.

But it seems very obvious now that they will be you know, massively overlapped in Ultimately just one category which is money. Yes So we were the first to show around to coinbase and Robin Hood, but also to revolute which is the same camp And also to new bank. Yeah also, we were super early and we built with Mercado Libre and Mercado Pago, which is a competitor of Nubank now. So if you had told me back then that all these companies were gonna be competing for this,

we would have never guessed it, ever. And the reality is- Well, I'm surprised you say that because it seems like you have a bit of a, you got a secret crystal ball or something if you were gonna... Well, five years ago, we told our LPs, our investors in one of our investor day meetings, that the rails of crypto and financial services

were actually starting to blend. And it was gonna be indifferent. And then companies that didn't do both were gonna be completely spaced out or lost the window of chance to build. So five years ago, we started to see it, but it wasn't obvious before that because there were different geographies and all of that. But now they're competing globally to each other.

So the way I think about it is the first decade of all of this momentum was the few companies that will have the right to win. And they've earned it by building brand, by building teams, by delivering on services, by getting licenses, by doing all these things that they need to do. So now we have a call it 30 or 40 players worldwide that we call the compounders, the one that will deliver and compound for the next decade. Now, this second decade of those 40 names or 30 names is a decade where they steal market share from every single incumbent.

Because so far, they haven't done much. But this decade with AI, with crypto, with the way they're building new products, with the way they're using their own brands, with the trust they have, with the government regulators leverage they have today versus five years ago. Buckle up because what's coming is going to be really fun if you are an incumbent and really tough if you're an incumbent.

What lessons do you think the company, the Coinbase is, the Robinhoods, et cetera, of the world learned in 2020, in 2021 during that sort of chaotic market cycle that it feels good and that many of them learn various lessons. I was also told to ask you about. Are you talking about COVID era or? Yeah, just the whole like, you know, SVB crisis, like the FT you know, like, like Robin Robin hoods that felt like,

you know, the Robin Hood GameStop saga, those moments, it feels like there was a lot of hard ones lessons. And then we've started this new cycle, this new bubble, whatever you want to call it. And hopefully a lot of them have taken those taken learnings from that and are implementing it, whether it's around risk management or things like that. Yeah. So I think the lessons from that time was when COVID started, most of these companies were not ready to turbocharge and what happened during

COVID, if you look back, is that you probably fast track four or five years of customers and growth into 12 months. And none of these teams were prepared for it. Being at home, not being able to do much more, it just supercharged all of these companies. And they over hire and they were working remote and they didn't have capital, you know, frameworks in place because the growth was unexpected. And we remember getting a bunch of calls during that time, the beginning like this is amazing. And then like, this is getting tough.

And this is gonna be problematic. And it can crack here or there. And when we got the phone call at three and four or five in the morning from Robin Hood saying, the GameStop day and what needed to be done. And we funded them in four hours, almost half a billion dollars that we didn't have, that we asked a bank to lend us

to do it. We've all agreed on that. Called it a favor from an old friend. Yes, literally a favor from an old friend. And that's what it takes to build relationships in banking. You need decades of that so you can call in that favor when it's needed. And that day, and look at how long it took for the brand to

regain the trust of the market. It was almost two and a half years from that moment and you gotta be a special leader and a special team to go through that turf and come back out of it and now they're hitting their cylinders but they got their story right. So you can see it in the Brian Armstrongs, in the Nikolaj Zoronskis, in the Vlad Tenev, in the David Veles, they have that now. They went through that, and they're on the other side, and they're all between 38 and 41.

So they got the best decade of their life coming their way. Yeah. What does that mean for competition at the early stage? It feels like it's it was really it was in retrospect, it seems like a no brainer to back disruptive technologies in this huge market finance. But now you have if you're starting a company that's going to carve out a little slice of, oh, Robin Hood's not touching this yet, or Coinbase isn't touching

this yet. It's like, well, those companies are incredibly well capitalized, and they're run by founders who are not about to retire anytime soon. Seems kind of dangerous. So where are you seeing pockets of opportunity on the early stage? What are you seeing in the next generation of founders that might actually go and be able to carve out

enough of a slice to grow into a generational company? Yeah, I think what's coming for, I'm more excited for what's coming this next decade than the last decade, if you ask me. The last decade was just a setup for this decade. There will be a bunch of new teams and companies, and we have been spending time with the young generation, like kids who are between,

founders who are between 19 and 25, or 19 19 and 27 call it their brains are just faster. Their ways of thinking about how to build products is just different. They are they they spend the best years that the year of COVID learning and learning how to think really fast. And I've been blown away on how quick they are understanding and how quick they are to build. So we have these thesis that we've, we wrote, it took us almost a year to write,

which we call it token factories. And it's this world where, forget about crypto rails or FinTech or AI, all of these things are blending. If before it was Finech here and crypto here, and we said that they blended, now we have financial services with crypto rails with AIs. And the thing between all of them is that they're all tokens.

Everything is a token. So we call it the token revolutionary era. And tokenizing information, tokenizing money, and tokenizing power. And how those three things combine, it's where we're seeing some of the best entrepreneurs working. So that's what got us really excited.

So we found a bunch of young teams who are building what we call now token factories, companies that are building either access tokens that give you abilities to connect anywhere in the world to do anything. There's expert tokens. These are companies that are generating knowledge or expert information that is solely unique, that is going to change the way you manage wealth management, wealth advisory, the way you manage insurance product, insurance agents. And then you have what we call asset tokens. And stable coins is the first of the asset tokens.

Outside of Bitcoin, it's the first of the true asset tokens. Talk to me about real estate. I feel like that was something at the peak of the crypto boom 2022, we were starting to hear about mortgages on chain, physical assets on chain, we're now starting to see stocks get on chain and obviously US dollars, which are much more tangible than artworks, for example. But it feels like most of this generation's entrepreneurs probably learned a hard lesson during the global financial crisis of the risks of over-financialization in the real estate markets. But maybe, how do you see things developing

or real estate assets playing out generally over the next decade? So I think, John, you said something that was really important. If you look this wall behind me, artists always tell you where the future is going before we get there. Sure. And NFTs was, it wasn't about just about the beauty of the art and the tokenization and the provenance and the transferability and the democratic.

It was the first asset that was truly put on chain. That you trusted, that you knew there was only one of each, that you knew who had it, and you knew when it was minted, and you could find a nice, you can lend against it, you can pledge it, you can do whatever. So guess what? Artists did their job. They showed us where the world was going. So to me, I'm very grateful because that's how we learn what was going on.

And then we found companies like FIGUR, who's tokenized most of the mortgages that you get, HELOCs right now. They're the biggest HELOC tokenizer in America. Then you have the Circles of the Worlds and the TELERS tokenizing dollars, and there's like 10 more coming behind them. Then now you have Robinhood tokenizing stocks. So I think the problem with mortgages is that they don't move that much. Out of all the financial assets,

they probably transfer themselves 10 times in your lifetime, maybe five, maybe you buy a home, you have a four. So it's not the lowest hanging fruit need of a tokenized asset, even though it's a great asset to tokenize. But I think we're gonna get there there because right now the SEC and the other regulators have put the real rules in place to see tokenization. And the best organizations you're not going to see. You're not going to realize their

tokens. But suddenly you're going to be able to click, make two clicks and get a mortgage against this. And you're going to be able to do one more click and swap to another mortgage issuer and not miss a beep on your payments or in your servicing. That's what the consumer is going to see. That's what the consumer is going to see with Robinhood tokenized stocks. You're going to have the same UX experience

and just trade stocks anywhere in the world, not knowing that they're tokenized. And that's where we get super excited because we're just at the beginning of that ecosystem which is probably like growing up again in the 1970s when you're about to electronic payment transfers. How have you thought about the investability of stable coins as a category when it feels like a feature for so many of the companies that you've already backed? I know you guys did Privy, which recently sold to Stripe, but that bet-

We did both. What was the other one? Bridge. Oh, there you go. It sounds like we told the Stripe that we're shareholders. We love them. We're good friends with Patrick and John and the whole team. We told them that we felt that we were their core dev team because the two investors we

needed in this table going infrastructure, they took out of our plates in less than a year. Yeah. Wild. But yeah, so you made some infrastructure bets. Are there consumer bets that you see going forward? I know there's a bunch of different potential use cases, but again, it's so easy for an existing company to add stable coins, and they already have the distribution

and the customer network to quickly service. Yeah, so it's a great question, Joey. We've been trying to find, we've been looking worldwide for consumer applications that start with stablecoins first as a user experience. We haven't found one that will say, this is the way it's gonna work to scale globally at a scale that matters.

So that's why we have paid back in much more the infrastructure providers of all these schemes, because they feel like they have a lot more growth potential than the consumer side. But I think we're just starting. I think now we're starting to see the beginning of agentic experiences with crypto rails and AI with agents.

And I think in that intersection, we're gonna find native stable coin retail brands that are gonna provide services that you don't expect. So we've been investing a lot there in learning, we've been testing ourselves a lot there, we have our own thesis on how it's gonna work, so we're actually building some of them and learning. But we expect to see entrepreneurs worldwide working around them in the very near future. My guess is in the next year we will be surprised to find

a few already. Well, when you come back on and hopefully you'll come back on many more times between now and then, but I'm assuming in 2030, we'll have the same conversation again. You got every single new stable coin pure play that mattered. What about on the issuer side? I feel like now that stable coins have clear regulation, it seems like we'll see a lot more people start to issue them. Is that needed?

Do you see use cases? Or are the USDCs and the Tethers providing kind of enough value right now? I think people underestimate how important the Tether brand is worldwide. I think when you are in Argentina or in Venezuela or you're in Indonesia, they don't even say USDT, they just call it Tether. And I think Tether has a chance to be a really global brand that most people will under imagine the scale of it. Circle has a great reputation institutional side, but we're super early.

I mean, think about it, we're only $250 billion into stable coins. We should be in $2 trillion in the next year, or a year and a half or two and if we're not there Something's off. So for that we will probably need like five seven ten more names Now you're not gonna care as a user to be honest. You may have a preference. I remember growing up My parents and asked to save money from inflation in Venezuela every Friday we walked to the bank branch and we bought travel checks. And it was a way of saving, which is literally the same as stable coins today.

And those travel checks in the era, you could buy American Express travel checks, you can buy Thomas Cook, which were MasterCard travel checks, and there was another third run I forget. I didn't care which one we got All I care was getting the dollars and being able to save So I think but over time I remember my family's Q2 American Express travel checks for whatever reason it had like a better recognition run So I think we're still in the early days of that and that's gonna happen

And I think we're gonna see five to ten and we're gonna see the incumbents issuing their own token and stable coins and Now the bridges of the world are gonna be super important because they're gonna be the bridge to connect all of them no matter what what what you're doing and It's going to be very simple to solve. So my guess is five brands in the next five years Great. Great. Very exciting. This was awesome. Yeah.

Thanks so much. You're a legend. Up and on. Come back on again soon. You guys are doing an amazing job. We'll be following your show and congratulations. It's really fun and you bring super fresh content and news and people to the show. Thank you so much.

We appreciate it. Thank you, Mickey. Talk to you soon. We'll talk to you soon. Looking forward to it. Bye. Bye. Up next, we have Casey Neistat. Recently. The YouTuber.

Great deal. The creator that needs no introduction. He's over at Mod Retro now, working on the Chromatic, which we've been playing in the studio. Working on the M64. How you doing, Casey? There he is.

Edelman, good to see you. Welcome to the stream. What's new in your world? Are those the nothing year one? Give us a little review. Oh, yeah, these are fantastic. I had to take them off because the noise canceling on these is it's it's like too good. And I'm at home right now and my kids were screaming two seconds ago. But yeah, these things are fantastic. Yeah, we had Carl Pan the show a week ago and he put them down and I was like,

I was too afraid to ask like, oh, are those for me? Like, are you going to leave those for me? I kind of want those. I need a new pair. I'll have to pick one up. You know what it is? I'm not enough of an audiophile to know what, if something sounds good or not.

Like, if it's either good or it's not good. Yep, same. But physical switches, like buttons you can touch. Yeah. I really like, and the, like the Apple, I don't know what they're called. What are they AirPod Max? AirPod Max, yeah.

AirPod Max. There's no on off switch. Yeah. Like I can't. There's that digital crown. I needed, I need an on off switch. And you have that. I like that.

I like the tactile feel. It's key. Yeah. Are you, are you a big teenage engineering guy? It feels like kind of like that, that they're almost coining like a trend That's like becoming more mainstream now Teenage engineering is the only company whose products I buy religiously even though I have no idea how to use any of them

The same thing happened to me. I bought the little kids are like I'm a musician now couldn't figure out how to make a song I use it. I love it. It's amazing. It's so beautiful. It's so beautiful. Someone that cares that much about the craft. I want to be part of that. Support them unconditionally. Yeah, so tell me about mod retro. How'd that come together? What is the news in your world? You know, the mod retro thing is really funny because my video says all this, but like I'm a big retro gamer. I'm guilty of sometimes playing Call of Duty on my Xbox but that doesn't work out when

you got a wife and kids. You're not being guilty. Every man should have an allocation of time daily for Call of Duty. You know getting on rust with your boys. I'm so close to that W and then the door comes fly open the children come running in it's challenging but I'm 44 so like apex of video games for me was like

1989 I think getting a Gameboy the first year they came out for my grandmother for Christmas and like you guys are younger than me, but before that all we had were those like mother for Christmas. And like, you guys are younger than me. But before that, all we had were those like, L, L, ED LCD games that were like, really janky, like the tiger games, and they were terrible. And the first time I turned on the Game Boy and like saw the Nintendo come down, I was like, Holy, this is such a moment. And then Nintendo 64 came out when I was I was like, just getting into high school as a freshman. We used to sneak out of high school, get on the city bus, like the regular bus, and then drive two towns across and then walk a mile and a half to Toys R Us to sit in Toys R Us and play the demo of Mario 64 when that thing came out. I think it was in 94, so I was 12

or 13 years old. So I love that stuff. And Mod and Retro, when I first learned about it, when I first learned about the Chromatic, their Game Boy, I thought it was really stupid. I didn't understand, because you can get those like Chinese ones off of Amazon for 50 bucks. And a friend of mine was like, no, this is great. They're doing great things.

Do you wanna talk to Palmer about it? And I'm a huge Palmer Lucky fan. And I was like, I'd love to. And I don't know that I've ever been evangelized so much in my life. Like by the end of that call, he didn't just convince me, but I was like, I felt like an idiot for not seeing what Modretro was. And then as I got to know Torin, who is the CEO of Modretro

and understand the vision for the company, I was just so overwhelmed. I was like, this is the most beautiful vision ever. I don't understand the business of it. It makes no sense to me, but the fact that these guys have the guts to do this, can I be a part of it? And I think I pitched back to them what I understood

the company was. And they're like, that's it. That's what we want to say. And I was like, all right, give me a job. And my job will be to figure out how to communicate that. And we'll make videos and stuff. And they're like, sure, but we're not going to pay you. And I was like, great, I'll take a business card. It's been great working with it. I'm also an investor in Modretro. I have a vested interest in them succeeding, but that's not where the passion to be a part of what they're up to comes from for me. Yeah, so many places we could go with this.

This is fantastic. Do you think that there's a world, I love the handheld gaming stuff. My experience having kids was I stopped playing console games the n64 was actually my first console ever and But once I was your games Super Mario 64 for sure golden. I was big big head. Go man. You gotta do that And then a couple other Donkey Kong and Was never really into the Mario Kart racers But then Smash Brothers kind of took over and that was the real competition with everyone eventually

I think what I think what it what's exciting to me is like building new new heart consumer hardware That will still turn on and work and bring joy 20 years from now I had I had the game I have like my Game Boy Pikachu edition from growing up and when Mod Retro came out, I went and found it and I turned it on and it worked. And that was like such an amazing moment for me because like I haven't, I've got old iPhones lying around. I've never been like, one, I've never been like,

oh, I should turn that on, it's gonna be fun, right? Because it's like, it's not evergreen. It was of the moment, and you just move on. And so I think if ModRetro can do anything, which is make consumer hardware, which is so disposable today across all these different categories, and make it so that, yeah, you're going to get your ModRetro or your M64 this year, and then you're going to turn it on in 30 years

and bridge generations. Yeah, you know, it's I think there's there's it's easy to sort of shit on planned obsolescence because it is real. I think of that like we woke up my house woke up this morning at 730 a.m. because the refrigerator repairman finally showed up and was banging on our door at 730 in the morning the dog was freaking Out because our two-year-old refrigerator doesn't work. And this is a refrigerator that has Wi-Fi There and let's give it up for Wi-Fi And when I think about that it's like that Refrigerator that we had as kids with the one big heavy aluminum door, like it just worked.

It worked forever. But in order to keep selling shit, you have to keep coming out with new things. I think that's the negative of planned obsolescence. But I think when it comes to consumer technology, there is an argument for having to keep up with the rate of innovation. You know, like the new phones that come out, every time you get a new phone, it does do something that your other phone didn't. So there's maybe a reason for that.

But I think with that sort of tidal wave of innovation that feels faster now than it ever felt when I was young, I think we lose some great things. And, you know, my understanding of Modretro, at least what I want it to be, and I think what Palmer and what least what I want it to be and I think what what what Palmer and and what? Torn also want it to be is like let's identify consumer electronics that people just

Love like had an unbelievable relationship where they really liked the love I had for my game where I don't know that there was another thing that I owned through my adolescence that I treasured more than my Gameboy and Let's bring them back and let's do them justice. Let's build them so they last forever. I think Palmer's quote when I was interviewing was, we don't want to build another Game Boy. We want to build the last Game Boy, like the last one that ever needs to be built.

And that's the vision with M64 as well. Like you can get emulators that kind of work kind of work. But let's let's build the thing that that you know, you and I had John when we were kids, and let's have it last forever. And you know, I just think there's so much romance in that when you start digging deep, you can start to see products everywhere. And you know, moderate to tiny, a couple people working out of a small office, but the list of products that we want to build, the list of ideas that we have is endless. And that's a really exciting thing to take on. It's also such an interesting company because you're trying to recreate things

of the past that were good products and you want to improve on them but you need to stay true to the original product otherwise you know what do you do I mean it's not to say that that modretro couldn't one day create you know novel totally novel products but it is like an interesting constraint and challenge and you actually have to it's it's really it's in some ways it's easy because you know exactly what you need to build but in other ways it's harder because you're taking a product that was almost perfect in its original form and still like you need to make it. It needs it should be better. Otherwise, you know, what are you doing?

Yeah, you know, like one interesting challenge, and I'm not the right person to speak to this, I'm not the technical guy, but to make the screen match the old Gameboy screen was an exhaustive process. So when you buy one of those handheld emulators that looks like a Game Boy, the Chinese made ones, they have fairly high pixel density screens on them. So in order for them to give the look of an old Game Boy, you're using multiple pixels to emulate a single pixel. So it's inaccurate. And real psychopaths, I'm not one of them, but I appreciate it, real psychopaths on Twitter have done like the super zoom into a pixel and you realize that Mario is like jumping a half a pixel too low or a half a pixel too high within the frame because of the limitation of the screen. And Torin and Palmer's like religious obsession with matching that screen was one of the hardest things to overcome. So it was actually harder to build something that matched the quality of a product that's 20 years old than it would be to actually get the latest

and greatest screen and just plug it in there. Yeah, I remember Palmer saying something about like a couple of the companies, the screen is actually rotated 90 degrees. So instead of the scan lines coming down this way, they go across this way and then they just transform it at the last second. But it's like this bizarre thing that you would never really notice of, but it's this craftsmanship that actually you feel,

I feel like, and it feels like something that's just like been lost in this, like everything's disposable, everything's junk, everything's a knockoff culture. And it feels like I don't know, like, it just feels like it's worth it to have stuff that exhibits craft and taste. And even if I don't, even if I'm not the one that can tell that Mario is one pixel too low, when I do the jump, like the fact that the craftsman worked on the product means something. It's hard to put an exact like quantitative value on it, but you feel it, right?

That is the gamble. That is the company. I've said that in my video, but he's like, you know, maybe nobody cares about this, but, but weirdos like you and me, but that's enough. And I think it's like, there is an argument that's like, well, who cares if that's off by half a pixel. And if you're one of those people, totally cool. You're well, there's plenty of products in the market for you, but if you're someone who does care, if you're that weirdo that buys teenage engineering products because you just value

the integrity of the product so much, you wanna have it, then there's a place in this world for companies like Modretro. Yeah, what do you think about the temptation to just make one small change? The Chromatic has a USB-C port on it. That's a huge upgrade. But you could easily turn this into, well,

we have the technology to make the M64 handheld. And then you're in Switch territory, and all of a sudden it's a completely different product. I think I'd look that it's ever-present. And that's like a completely different product. Right. I think I looked at it ever present. And that's that's the problem with sort of limitless, you know, like when Nintendo was building this, what was for almost 40 years ago, 35 years ago now, they were so limited by what the technology enabled them to do.

Like when you think about the Sega Game Gear, I don't know if you ever had one of those great product. Yeah, this big. But it was the first one that had really great color screen on it. And it took six AA batteries instead of four, like the game boy, but the battery life on it was like 40 minutes. And do you remember the N64 like expansion pack that you'd put into like double the memory that was good. I remember that one about the rumble pack that she was like the greatest innovation ever. My mind exploded when the controller shook.

Yeah, dude, these like add-ons, because they couldn't bake it all into the first product and then upsell. That's indicative of the limitations of what tech can do. Totally. And when you look at like, I don't know, what Samsung announced last week, two weeks ago, with Unpacked, and you're looking at

what the limitations are today of like a folding screen that's as thick as 10 sheets of paper. You realize how far we've come. But when you go in the other direction, but there's kind of no limits and you're looking to make something that was made 30 years ago. The problem is like, where do you draw the line? And I think that's a really, uh, it's a really interesting thing to try to overcome and confront. Yeah. What can you teach me about the lore of in the video camera world? I was looking at a cool new music video and it had this fish eye lens and this grain and I was kind of digging in. It seemed like they shot it on like a Sony skate camera with mini DV tapes.

Like this feels like something that I was looking like maybe I could buy one on eBay, but it's probably broken and I want someone to go remake it but then of course you always have like oh you could just like throw the filter on there in Premiere or whatever but what are some of the iconic video cameras or just like creative tools that might be worth revisiting at some point? Yeah it's such an interesting examination. And your question's great because my family and I are out in Massachusetts for summer vacation. And there's a lot of kids around. Like we went and got ice cream last night, a lot of teenagers around.

And a lot of these kids come up and they ask me for selfies and the amount of teenagers that come up to me and ask me for selfies. And they're carrying the point and shoots that we had in like the 2010s, like before your phone camera was good enough. They all carry them. No one makes that camera anymore, which means if you have one, you have an old one. And every one of these kids has it. And when I asked them, because I'm curious, like, why do you carry that? They're like, I love the way it looks. And I think we've reached this point, like iPhone, cell phone, photography, it all looks so perfect in a way that it almost becomes artificial.

Like I think the iPhone five was the last iPhone where when you took a picture, just sort of took a picture. And then after that, every time you take a picture now on any modern smartphone, it takes a picture and then runs it through an algorithm to make the picture sweeter and cleaner and sharper and better for you. And I think there's sort of this yearning for something that feels more real and authentic. It's like you look at a, you're at a store,

looking at a picture, you know, a camera from a picture from 2010 or a camera or a picture from an iPhone today is like you're at the grocery store and there's the organic apples. And they look good, but like they're at the grocery store and there's the organic apples. And they look good, but they're a little fucked up and they may be like, whatever, part of it's kind of rotten. And then you look over and you see the perfect apple.

And intuitively, you know that it's a little bit too good to be true, that apple over there. And I think, I don't know, the other thing that's real is removing the camera, like adding the camera to the phone has been one of the greatest innovations of the century, right? In many ways. But now removing it, removing the camera from the phone and being able to leave your phone and just bring a camera around is also an innovation, right?

Going backwards. And I think that's the other thing that kids like and I've found that's nice. If I'm going to the beach with my kids, it's nice to be able to bring a camera but not have my phone. Yeah. My daughter is 10. This is the first summer she's allowed to like walk around with her friends without a parent. And she has a flip phone. And she had this whole argument for getting an iPhone that has nothing on it but the phone and messaging. And my wife and I had this discussion and the reason why we said no, it has to be the flip phone is because of the camera. Like it introduces a new level of sort of attention and why you're in purpose. And the

reason why we wanted to have a phone is simply to stay in touch with us, no other reason. But the minute you introduce this other sort of novel aspect of it, it becomes much more of a social dynamic and a social consideration in the way that you're trying to get away from that. But I think just going back to the camera things is such an obsession of mine. I think that we are quick to ignore or look past the relationship we have with the aesthetic that a camera yields.

And when you see those pictures off those old point-and-shoots, they look like something specific. Like when you were talking about that old skateboard fish IDV look, it looks like something specific. You have a relationship with that. When you see stuff that looks like it's VHS, we think of the 80s or the 90s. And I think now there's just sort of this generic aesthetic across the board, this like crispy flat 4k phone thing. And there's this desire to have something that has some sense of identity attached to it. And that's why we're seeing these sort of Gen Z types, you know, looking for older tech that's that reflects more of who they are more individuality. And I think that's a trend that we're going to see continue. Yes, this generation's vinyl. Yeah, I've joked that I want to film I want to film the first podcast on Panavision film or something. Just spend fortune developing the film. What other

what other what other consumer tech categories are you excited about? We're having the founder of Wave on in 20 minutes and they got like 12 million views yesterday for launching sunglasses that will just live stream constantly. Do you have a ratio of positive to negative mentions in those 12 million views? I mean, I think everybody, people had a viscerally negative reaction to it. That's my take on it as well. And it makes me think,

you know, my software development company, being my startup, we started that company in 2014, and a little known aspect of that company is, initially it was built around Google Glass. And we actually, you know, we rewrote the code, we rewrote the software that Google Glass ran. So that a singular function, which was you push a button like this, it captures 10 seconds and immediately shares it to your feed.

That's where we started with that. And I remember meeting with Google and they were excited about it. And they showed us what Google Glass 2 was gonna look like. And we're like, fuck yeah, we started raising money based on that. And then a week later, they announced they were killing the entire Google Glass program. And we backed off, we're like,

we'll just do it on the phone now. But I think when you ask about sort of the social impact of being able to live stream all the time with a negative reaction that we're seeing based on waves video they posted yesterday. I think the social dynamic is something that is often overlooked in the hardware startup world. I think of the Humane AI pin,

you know, a really good friend of my work for Humane and obviously super excited about new technology. Yeah, Sam. Which parenthetically, you joke about Panavision for a podcast. Sam Sheffer has in his studio for his live streaming set up a VHS camera hardwired into his deck so he can live stream from VHS. That's amazing.

But Sam would be around. We tried to, I tried to hire Sam, by the way. We worked with him on a project and I was like, he's way too hot. He's way too hot. He's got to be, he's got to be sold. He's way too big of a deal. Sam's the best, but when I'd be around him and he had his AI pin on, I was always sort of looking down at that or like thinking about what I'm saying and uncomfortable about, you know, speaking openly to him. And I think like that's what I mean by social implications. Like, you know, my phone is on my couch right here, but if we're sitting together and I'm holding my phone like this the whole time we're talking, you're uneasy about that.

And so when I think of a pair of glasses that are live streaming, or at least have the capability of live streaming the whole time, when I look at them, I'm uneasy. And I think of this, you know, maybe the most extreme example of this is, um, Apple vision pro, this, you know, maybe the most extreme example of this is Apple vision pro Which you know blew my mind when I got that thing Like I made the most the most glowing video about it because it was the greatest technology I've ever used But later that night because I made the video the same day. I got them I'm at home using them and my wife is like Casey Take those fucking things off your face and pay attention to your kids.

And I was like, oh, you can't wear these around other people. And I was like, how did they not see that? And so I think about that because like, we're sort of accustomed to people using their phones and it's kind of okay. Like we're used to this. This is not okay. And so when I think about wearables, I think that that is going to be a gigantic used to this, this is not okay. And so when I think about wearables, I think that that is going to be a gigantic thing to overcome, which is sort of the- Well, the crazy, so Amazon acquired a company, it got announced this week called B,

which is a brace after everything they faced with Siri, Siri's listening to me, the B band just listens to you all day long, every single conversation. Everything, everything. And it's cool. I think all new tech, for the most part, is cool. Do I want my team to be wearing a B bracelet? Are we going to allow people to wear B bands?

This might be a B-free zone. This might be a B-free zone. I'm not going to have any friends that wear Bs. I don't have any friends anyways. But if you have a B, it just means we we can't hang out. Yeah. Because it makes it makes me uncomfortable. And look, I think there's an argument. It's like, get over it. Like you fucking Luddite. Like this is the direction everything's headed and you're being recorded all the time anyway. Sure. But in the interim, I do think like there is a there's a learning curve. I think

that Metta's decision to put wearable glasses with a camera on them in Ray-Bans, the most common sunglasses in the world, was brilliant because we're all familiar with this pair of sunglasses. Like there was no learning curve. There was no like, what's that thing on your face? We know what it is. I think how emphatic they are

about having the indicator light. There's no way you can turn it off. If you cover it, they don't record There's some degree at least that's important My question my question for the the wave founder in 20 minutes is Should your glasses be bright red and have like, you know a circle in the middle of your head Flashing that says I'm recording. Yeah I mean if people can someone shows up with a TV camera like I don don't feel like, oh, this is in violation of my privacy, I'm like, I know exactly what's going on.

The news is here. And if I step in front of the camera, I'm on the news. Like we have a social understanding of that. And we don't necessarily. You still might not wanna be around it. Yeah, and I might be like, actually, I'm gonna turn around and walk the other way because I don't wanna be seen on this camera or whatever.

I don't know. But there's an understanding there. Yeah, and look on Wave's website and the Q&A, there's a question like, is there an indicator light? And their answer is, yeah, but you can turn it off. And so like, I, you know, I don't know that I read that, that makes me a little bit queasy. As a guy who has a camera on him, you know, all the time. And so much of the videos that I've made is about filming everyone in the whole world around me. I still think there's something honest about having that camera on your shoulder,

pointing a camera at someone versus like, the glass hole movement of the Google Glass, which like by having this on your face, everyone was uneasy around you. I think it's even a big hurdle to overcome as we eventually like figure out what this hardware AI future is going to look like. Yeah, what do you think about airplane demos?

It feels like there's so much tech where the demo is like, you'll love this on an airplane. The Apple Vision Pro is a great example. A lot of the handheld devices. But it doesn't work when it's dark? It's not too dark on planes. It does work very well on planes. But it's this weird niche use case

that feels like killer application, and then you actually get out into most of your life is not spent on airplanes usually. And so, look, if that's the best you've got, like I travel more than most people I know. And we're still talking about, you know, maybe double digits, maybe, uh, maybe 10 hours a month tops. So, you know, 4,000 bucks for a face computer that I use 10 hours a month on an airplane, which by the way, it doesn't work for me on an airplane. Like I didn't like it at all.

It didn't work. Okay. No, it will work. Like, no, when you're on an airplane, you're surrounded by strangers. Yeah. So the idea that like, I'm just gonna go like that and watch Avatar with all these people around me. You know, I don't fly Spirit that often, but I have a flown Spirit. And I know it goes on and on those flights. Again, the social implication of it. I think if that's the best you've got, then maybe you're not thinking holistically enough about your hardware. How do you spot talent? You discovered Sam? Someone in the chat was asking it's a great question. You have a framework for it

It's a it's a it's a difficult question, but you know, it's the same I approach it the same way that I approach Investments and it's seldom the work and it's almost always the individual You know, like I think Sam is brilliant, but he's brilliant at everything that he does. He's brilliant with the work that he made He's brilliant the work that he did the verge before that. He's brilliant with his own YouTube channel You know, I've got a dear friend of mine a kid named Hunter who works in the building with me But I'm sure the hunters a friend and we invest together so hunters hunters fantastic and like I don't know what Hunter does because every time I have a conversation with him, he's starting some new business or some new endeavor.

Like the work is almost irrelevant, it's the individual. And I think it's like, it's that mentality that you have or you don't have, not everyone has it. I do think maybe you can get it if you don't have it. But when I see that in people, I have a tendency to sort of gravitate towards those people. And when I look around at the friends of mine that I have some sort of professional relationship

with a professional admiration for, they all have that thing, that sort of desire to see it through, whatever it may be. So, I guess the short answer is like, it's always the person, never the product. That's great. Hunter's in the chat, by the way.

He says, hello. Another question I have is, we've been thinking about AI generated images, video, et cetera, is getting so good. If it stays at this pace, you're going to be able to generate characters consistently. You're already seeing this on Instagram,

people just creating entire personalities for influencers and different verticals. Do you have any type of strong thesis around how that will play out if we're gonna have sort of organic influencers, regular humans, and then, you know, the synthetic. I've been thinking about in the context of, you know, an example is like, I don't want

the AI Andrew Huberman. I want Andrew Huberman to get health advice from because I know Andrew and I trust that he's making the best decisions and studying, and making these recommendations and understands the weight of that. And you have a synthetic Andrew Huberman in five years. Doesn't care if he convinces a million people to do something dumb with their health because he can just shut the account

down and turn a new one on. But I'm curious how you think. OK, my cynical take on it, which I believe is accurate, I'd wager that this is accurate, is that it's a tidal wave that none of us will be able to overcome. We can hold our breath for a while. It is a tidal wave.

And I wish I had a better analogy, but it's a little bit like when Toy Story came out in 1999. It was the first computer animated feature film. And it was great. I loved it. But then five, six years later, there was just this, you know, onslaught of computer animated films. And I was like, you know what, the hand drawn stuff is better. I miss that. When CGI first started getting introduced into films, I was like, no, practical is better. I like practical better. That's going to be the thing. And it's like, no,

you're going to lose. And I think AI is probably the most existential version of that. I think that it's just going to be so good that it's going to become irrelevant. And old people like us might appreciate, you know, real human things, and we might keep it alive. But the generation behind us, my children, when they see hand-drawn animation, they're like, what is this? They don't care. It means nothing to them. So I think it's just going to get so good that it really doesn't matter. And that tidal wave is going to consume everything.

And I think that we're... The progress that we've seen over the last couple years of how good it is and how quickly it's developing is incredible. But when you look at the capabilities of the latest rock and the latest GPT, you look at how smart these things are. You look at the sort of conversations you can have with any of these agents, and then you look at how good the images that can be spit out by Google's video or whichever AI you might be fond of. it's like they're just going to marry really, really quickly. And I think five or six years from now, we're going to start to see real sort of

erosion in the space because what they're delivering is going to be so good. You know, like another example is like we haven't had a number one song yet that's completely AI generated, but it's going to come out of nowhere. It's going to be like Gangnam style, which like the novelty of it allows us to dismiss the lack of humanity that this song has. The first AI song that's going to be a number one hit is not going to be a Bob Dylan-esque song that comes from the soul. It's going to be something fun and outrageous, and we're going to forgive that AI made it. And then slowly it's going to start to chip away. and made it. And then slowly it's gonna start to chip away. But I think it is a losing battle. And the optimistic take on that is I think

that there is going to be an extreme premium, but on the humans that are able to sustain because of what they represent uniquely. Maybe another bad analogy is it's like, I love Marvel movies, they're fucking fantastic. But as far as cinema goes, like, you know, there's an argument to say, it's like, those kind of artistry that we saw in the 70s or 80s, like the apex of cinema, where it comes from

one when you think of a Tarantino movie, you think of, you know, a truly great filmmaker with a voice. Marvel movies are something else. They're fucking great. We love them. We all show up We love them. We all show up to see them. We're all okay with that. And I think that's going to happen with AI, but it's gonna happen at a rate of acceleration that we've never encountered before.

And it's gonna be so good that we're willing to forgive it. And I think it's gonna leave a handful of people out there. Maybe Andrew Heumann will be one of them. I hope Selma Fanon is as well. But it will put an extreme premium on the sort of human voices that are distinctly human, that distinctly represents something that AI could never.

When you look at the landscape of media, a lot of that shit could be replaced by AI. So the power log gets steeper. Yeah, absolutely. Makes sense. Well, that's like a five hour conversation by the way. Well we'll have you back on again soon. This is awesome.

And congrats on your new fake but very real role at ModRetro. I appreciate it. Thanks for the time guys. Have fun in Massachusetts. We'll talk soon. We'll talk soon. Bye. Airhorn for Casey. Up next we have Alex from Bright AI coming in the studio. But let me tell you about public investing

for those who take it seriously. They got multi-asset investing, industry leading yields, and they're trusted by millions, folks. Interesting. What else do we need to cover today? There are a bunch of posts we've been through through but we have our next guest here in the studio Alex tapping us Yeah, thanks for hopping on give us an intro break down who you are what you do for everyone who's listening

Yeah, so I'm CEO and founder of Bright AI. We build physical AI solutions for all the sort of essential services that society can't live without. So things like energy grid, power supply, water infrastructure, HVAC, pest control, and all those things. So we have a platform that lets you kind of real time observe this distributed physical infrastructure in the world and

Solves a bunch of the problems that people have in those industries in terms of like labor shortages You know break down in the aging infrastructure Sustainability challenges all those things is the customer more government focused or private companies Their private companies now it sort of touches touches everything, you know, these these services have obviously every can everybody alive is a consumer of these things you know and as a result of that there's plenty of government involvement but they tend to be owned privately in the US so big utility companies service providers you know pass control operators like all different sorts of companies and then you've got this crossover interest with you know the national control operators, like all the different sorts of companies. And then you've got this crossover interest with, uh, you know, the national interest and so on as well.

Where's the strain the worst right now across those different areas or like, where are we seeing the most strain? What's the evidence of the strain? It's a, it's pretty severe everywhere. So like the U S has got a, you know, if you grade the infrastructure, it's like a C minus or a D. So most of the critical infrastructure was built, you know, just before and after World War II. And it's like, of course, like typical American plan with a 20 year lifespan,

and we'll figure it out afterwards. And now it's just, you know, in a lot of places, it's like really held together with duct tape and wire. And so if you look at all those industries, you have this aging infrastructure, and then you have labor force, like a systemic labor problems because older technicians are aging out

and sort of the bigger economy now, I guess, it's still cool work to do, but younger workers are just not signed up for the journey to be a 25 year time horizon to be a master technician in these spaces. So all of it's crushing, I mean, to give one example, it'd be like water infrastructure.

Like 30% of the water we clean up leaches back out into the environment due to leaks in the pipes everywhere. Like my town has wooden pipes, if you can believe that. It's crazy. I mean, I know about all the lead pipe that our country depends upon to deliver water to To homes which is concerning but woodpipes To a good thing it feels like an aqueduct. I'm down give me a win. It's probably safer. I don't know It's like something a beaver. No, but it's it's bad. It's like the first part is leaching out and the bad stuff is leaching in Yeah so so you're

stuff is leeching in. So you're active in a bunch of different industries. What is like, what does it go to market and what does even the sales cycle look like? Is this you coming to these owners of these various assets and saying like, we're going to help you leverage AI and it's looks like, you know, kind of Palantir's forward deployed model or something different? Yeah, it's in that zone. I mean, we bootstrapped through the first 100 million in revenue. So it was like, I was trying to figure out that,

that path through, path to customers. We need a word for bootstrapping to a hundred million dollar run rate and then raising some capital later, but it needs its own. Maybe it's Hawkinson's model, something like that. There you go. Well, I've raised too early a bunch of times before,

so I can give warning shots to other founders, but believe you should raise capital when you got the pattern figured out. But I had to figure out that go-to-market. All the beginning stuff was through private equity firms. It turns out that their private equity sits and basically owns all the service companies that service this infrastructure. And they're also very aligned with five to seven year cycles where they want to drive change, like big EBITDA growth and change in these industries. And so that's where all of our

first customers have come from. So we work with a lot of the biggest private equity firms that's sort of their, their secret weapon for physical AI. Yeah. Uh, what, yeah, what's the latest news on the fundraising side? Yeah. So we, uh, we just, uh, uh, raised a $51 million a, uh, congratulations. Thank you. Co-led by aal Adventures and Inspired Capital. We picked those guys because Coastal is super badass.

They were the first and earliest to check in OpenAI. They leaned forward into the future of abundance. They're there and then Inspired is a lot of people don't know about, but a New York-based firm. They're deep in infrastructure specifically and super great founder operators you know and all that so it's it's good. Do you see do you think the company will always be a software more of a software provider is there a world in the future where you guys would just actually buy the and operate the

underlying asset if you felt like you could do it better than other players in the market? It's a good question. We provide a lot of software and hardware today. So our platform combines. IoT devices. Yeah, we have sensors and robots and these wearables that you put on the frontline workers.

And it ties all this crazy distributed infrastructure into one big physical AI learning loop, if that makes sense. And, uh, we found some industries like are more efficient than others, but like the most efficient one we found, like give you an example is like 50% of the time they send a technician out. There's nothing to see. That's the most, the most efficient we found. A lot of them are like 90% of the time you send somebody out, there's nothing to,

there's nothing to do. But you still keep going in case it goes really bad. And so, you know, I think in some of those industries where you get, we're seeing 90 plus percent productivity gains, that might be so disruptive that we actually have to come in and just buy and operate assets directly to sort of make the value unlock happen in the biggest way. But you know, we'll see right now we play with these operators. It's a great, great way to go fast. I was actually a customer of your previous company, smart things. Um, what's the through line?

What are the lessons that you learned from the first IOT company to new IOT devices? Uh, what, what are the biggest lessons from that story? Man, uh, you all you're, you you're welcome and sorry, I guess, you know, that word landed for you, but SmartThings was amazing. It was, you know, we grew it to today, it's like 500 million households. It's, you know, more than two billion connected devices,

pretty big platform all over the world. I guess what I learned, so I learned a lot about scaling and sort of making IoT work. You know, it's matured a lot about scaling and stuff like she doesn't. Yeah, totally. I mean, that was my experience. It was like magical and then slowly like little like hiccups creep in and those like the expectations of software and hardware or modern technology are that it's perfect because it's a computer

and it's a robot. Yeah, I had my blog. It's like wrong market. Wrong market. You know, it's not a big enough one. Yeah, exactly. I'd love your take on Sonos. We've been talking about Sonos a ton. What do you think they need to do to make the app open faster? I opened the Sonos app, it takes

me 90 seconds to adjust the volume. And I'm like, I don't know how I haven't churned, maybe I should. I'm negative on Sonos, but I've gone through two like hopeful waves of buying it completely in my house and then Eventually, I think yeah, it's in the orphan stage right now. I think I just donated a bunch of like great gear It's the most they have like the best sound and all that stuff But talk about like missing the software opportunity like every stage in the company totally and you know, I just don't see You know, it's sort of

Alexis sort of faded out in a way. Apple home, it's not going anywhere. The Google home stuff hasn't really like Sonos has this opportunity to like own. They could be the thing that like unlocks things like chat GPT. Well, yeah, John's idea. My idea was Sonos is trading at what? Like one billion market cap or something. Yeah. My idea was openos is trading at what, like one billion market cap or something? Yeah. My idea was OpenAI literally buys them. And they shipped like five million devices last year. They shipped a ton of devices. And OpenAI has fantastic engineers.

Whatever the engineering problem is, they can fix it. I believe, I don't know, it's a wild theory. License Scarlett's voice this time and like, you know, let it rip and it'll be awesome. Yeah, it seems like. Do it properly. See, not the dumbest crackpot theory we've ever come up with. But we will leave the wild riffing to the next one.

Thank you so much for hopping on. Congratulations on the massive round. Congratulations to you and the team. Really tremendous progress. Great news. Good luck out there. Talk to you in the future. We'll talk to you soon.

Talk soon. Have a good one. And up next, we have Chris from Waves coming in the studio. Some fun and labs. He went viral yesterday. We should play his video maybe before he joins. Let's try and pull up the video that went viral yesterday about Waves, the glasses.

OK, I'm hearing it. Let's bring it up. Let's see it. This is a spy. The glasses, okay, I'm hearing it. Let's bring it up. Let's see it. The cinematography on the start up ads is getting insane. It feels like noise cancellation. It sounds like the audio is switching. A banana. Get the fuck out.

So when he's tapping it, is he starting a live stream or just taking a picture? Clipping. Clipping. Oh, clipping. I'm not late am I? Wait this is, this is beam. This is what Casey Neistat was describing. 10 seconds or? Yeah the bar for startup launch videos is concept 10x.

It's insane. Getting Project X vibes, You remember that movie? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Your average, like, the public company has trouble producing marketing videos at this level. Whoops. I mean, this is remarkable. There we go.

Whoa. Now we're getting into FPV, hardcore Henry. Somebody just pulled a gun at a house party, I guess. It's wild. Yeah, if you have a life like that, maybe you do need to be recording all the time. Does she have it on too? Is it recording?

Oh, there you go. Okay. Oh, record's in the center. Okay, cool. Well, let's bring him in. I'm excited to talk to them about waves. Welcome to the sweet night of grass. What's going on?

The man that kicked the hornet's nest. How's it going? How's the foot? How's the last 24 hours been? Has the foot stung? It's been wild, man. It's been amazing. It's really, really awesome just to be able to record this.

Wait, before we start, sorry, are you recording this? No, no, no, no. Okay. You can, you're live. We are recording this. We're recording this. We're recording this. wild man it's amazing it's really really wait before we start sorry are you recording this no no no okay you can you're live you're recording it yeah no these are cosmetic they okay they're not not not live so yeah this is a kind of like a typical hardware pre-launch

vision statement collect pre-orders and then start manufacturing I assume yep very cool what was the key takeaway? What was the good response? What was the stuff that you think you need to address? How has the overall response been? What have you like learned? What did you expect versus surprised you? So I'll talk about the good and the bad. I think, um, you know, we have hundreds of creators in our inbox right now. It is,

it is really popping off. I mean, I think, you know, Twitter is very much like a tech forward audience, but even with that, I think with the virality, we were really able to lock in our ICP here. We have some of the biggest names in IRL that want to work with us, I can't name names right now, but it is very exciting. The downside, I mean, like, I think we got a lot of feedback about privacy. And, you know, I think we're still pretty set on our stance here.

Like, we're going to ship with an indicator light, but in the conversations that we had with content creators, a lot of them emphasized the fact that, like, you know, they want something that allows them to capture candid authentic moments because those go the most viral. And if in certain situations that means them being able to disable the light, we wanna give that option to them. So, yeah. And that's distinctly,

we were just talking with Casey Neistat, he said that if you try to cover the indicator light on the Meta Ray Bands, it stops filming. Yeah. And so do you think part of your opportunity is that you're willing to go and do something that Zach Zach won't counter position? I think so. Like, I mean, I don't think Meta realizes where the puck is going. I think they're they're way too focused on like adding AI and wave guide displays and trying to go after a bigger market that we don't really know is going to fully adopt just yet. What we're seeing now is the most retentive Ray-Bans users

are content creators. And what are they doing? They're posting social content on Reels and TikTok. They're posting prank videos, Riz videos, social interactions, interviews, things like that. And all of them that we talk to are just like, we want to take this. We want to go live. Like instead of me, uh, flirting with somebody on a short clip,

I want to actually live stream a date and have chat tell me what to say and what to do. Right. Um, so we just want to be able to enable those kinds of content to, to exist. How is the actual live streaming infrastructure, I assume this pairs with your iPhone, somehow to pass to some sort of stream key to Twitch or whatever, yeah? Exactly, it's just RTMP.

So we stream to the phone, and then phone streams to either the streamer's backend, and then to Twitch or Kik, or just straight to the streaming service. Yeah, is there any like pushback from Apple on this type of thing? Are they pretty open with those particular APIs? It's effectively just a camera.

There are apps that exist already that let you do this. Just with your phone. Yeah, which is a different camera. Yeah. What about the, how do you evaluate like the technical risk? The glasses look great. Small. They're very, and they look really tiny.

You're trying to pack a lot in there. Maybe the actual quality of the video matters less early than just the ability to have that FPV view. So I'm pretty confident that, you know, we'll be able to hit a pretty similar quality to a Meta Ray Bands or a Meta Oakley. We have good connects in Shenzhen that have set us up with some really good suppliers. to a Metare bands or a Meta Oakley. We have good connects in Shenzhen

that have set us up with some really good suppliers. And I think if the issue is, can we fit it in these frames? The answer is yes. The way we've sized it is kind of unique in that I almost call these the hockey stick temples because we keep it thin in the front and then thicker in the back.

So PCB, internal battery, and then like thicker in the back. So PCB, uh, internal battery and then swappable battery at the end of the temples. So two different batteries. You can swap one and then swap the other and then swap the one and swap the other. So there's only one swappable battery, but we'll, we'll pack it with two. So like, while, while you're using one, the other one's charging. So you can just flip flop and it's hot swappable so you don't have to stop your stream

You don't have to stop your stream because there's enough battery juice in the actual Glasses that when you take the battery out you have a minute to swap the next one or something exactly that makes sense What were you doing before this? So I originally started this company with my co-founder to do sub vocal speech recognition we did a lot of stuff with like NeuroTech and just like ML research and I think we were caught in this loop where like we wanted to make a cool gadget but we were way too research focused and not market focused and we just decided to do a full 180 and just like you know I'm very inspired by what Roy Lee has done and what Avi has done with their products and I just think that like, you know,

really focusing on a retentive user, so IE a content creator, but then also making a gadget that's just cool and nice to wear. And it doesn't look like a super bulky thing. And just, I think that's, that's the goal for me. So. So vocals, so you were thinking like hardware device that I can whisper and it picks up what I'm saying? Or just mouth out words, yeah. Just mouth out words, that's pretty cool. Yeah, interesting.

How much did you spend on the launch video? It was very well produced. That thing looks amazing. So, I mean, we have the next Spielberg on our team, man. Donald is an amazing individual. We actually filmed it in Canada. So, for context, my co-founder and I were both Canadian. Donald is an amazing individual. We actually filmed it in Canada. So For context my co-founder and I were both Canadian. We filmed it in Vancouver. It was around I'd say USD

Like maybe 50 60. Okay solid. Yeah I mean, it looks like Super Bowl quality. Well, yeah, there's so many different actors I'm assuming you just like actually had to hire a bunch of people. Now, none of the footage is from the same sensor that will be in the actual camera. So there'll probably be some sort of disconnect there. But hopefully, people are happy with the final sensor. Do you have any goals?

Like, we shoot on FX3s. I like the full frame look. I like a 12 megapixel 4K. Obviously, can't stuff all that into, you know, something the size of a little smartphone camera. Where are the breakpoints in terms of quantitative metrics for a camera to get good enough that people will actually share it? Because even with the Meta Ray Bands, the pictures and images I was taking and videos, they weren't jumping out to me as like, yeah, these are really great to post right now.

Yeah. I think a big thing with, with the metas is just image stabilization. Like if you're like walking around, while, while you're taking the video, there's like almost like a bobbing effect. And I think there's a lot of work that needs to be done there. Um, low light is another thing. I mean, you're kind of working against, uh, the volume that you have to fit the sensor. So you you're kind of working against the volume that you have to fit the sensor So you you are already constrained with how much light that you can actually capture. Yeah, but You know, I think dark party scene you film that would be extremely rough

Kind of a wild choice not the sunny day, but it tells a better story So I get why you did it and obviously this stuff will get better But there are like laws of physics around like, you just can't fit a medium format sensor in a friend. Unless it's an eyepatch. Maybe maybe that's the future. Maybe put the full sensor right there. What? How do you expect the what do you expect the go to market to look like? I imagine you could partner with a bunch of

just big streamers and really focus on delivering value for them. And then if it's working well for them, then you would have like the next 100,000 people ready to go. Is that how you're thinking? That's exactly what we're doing. So we're already talking to big IRL streamers about partnerships. We're going to Shenzhen in a couple of weeks just to get the beta device ready. And then we're going to test it on 100 different creators

and just get their feedback, iterate, improve the user experience. And then, you know, we were trying to do mass production Q1 next year and I think like, you know, there's kind of just like an infinite marketing glitch here. It's like if we give these streamers early access to just show what this kind of content can look like, it'll just inspire other creators and want to be creators to buy this product. I feel like there's going to be a whole new, you could create a whole new class of IRL creators.

I can imagine somebody that's, they just do hiking, or they just ski, or they, you know, and I'm sure people do that already, but if you make it really, truly seamless, and I can imagine creators that Yeah, more like the like like these like ambient videos and music on YouTube where there's not really study with me Yeah, yeah kind of crossover. We'll get it set up. We'll get glasses on Ben our producer. We'll have a Ben cam feed Yeah for sure on on kind of like pricing and technology.

One thing that I thought was interesting about the Vision Pro was that it was like almost an order of magnitude more expensive than the Quest. But it was very clear that Apple was able to spare no expense, get the best screen. And they jumped forward a lot in terms of just quality. Didn't really hit the mark in terms of retention. But when I think about a streamer, most people who are doing it professionally spending $3,000 on a Sony camera is totally reasonable. Is there a world where instead of Metas Ray-Bans, which are in the couple hundred dollar mark,

you go to a couple thousand dollars and you're buying and you're providing a more prosumer, more professional level product and then actually acts as differentiation. And then maybe you go down the price ladder over time. Are you looking into that? Is that even something you could do? If you wanted to. Oh, absolutely. I think right now we're gonna stay

sort of in the mid market, but we would ideally want to find bigger creator groups. I could almost imagine having a super pro version that's like 1500, $ like, I mean like imagine like I could almost imagine having like a super pro version that's like 1500 $2,000 and like Mr. Beast uses it for beast games you get the POV of like every single Contestant in beast games dude that would go crazy. Yeah, like I I that's something I would really want to see. Yeah Yeah, yeah, I mean people do do that with the head-mounted GoPros. It's a little bit awkward and just doesn't land as well. But you can get great footage out of a GoPro mounted

to your forehead if you're racing around. Andrew, anything else, Jordy? No, this is great. Thanks for jumping on. Congrats on the launch. I think a lot of people's concerns are real, but I think there's ways around it. And it ultimately will just come down

to how individual people choose to use the technology. There's gonna be people that use this to live stream privately for their grandma. So the grandma can feel like they're hanging out with the grandkids and there's so many use cases that are really cool. There are people right now who use the cameras on their iPhones to violate people's privacy

at Coldplay concerts. Yeah. Like that happens. So we have to deal with that as a society. It's not a device problem. I think it's more of an actor problem. You have people that are gonna do weird shit and we don't condone that.

I think we're just gonna focus on creators that wanna make genuinely good content. I didn't get to see what Casey was saying cause I was in another call, but I would love to just pull up to New York this weekend and have a chat with him and show him the frames and get his thoughts. If that's something he's interested in,

if he still likes the original vision of Beam, I would be more than happy to have a conversation. Yeah, I'm sure he'd have a ton of interesting feedback that you could incorporate and twist around. It'd be a great meeting of the months. Real quick, John, just wanna say, loved your videos on startups. Like, I would always watch your like,

startup history videos while eating dinner. Like, I love a meal in YouTube. So just like, that was, you should go back to that at some point. I think it would be really cool. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But TPPN is awesome, man. I love this show. This is great. Yeah, we're having a lot

of fun. Thanks Chris. Well, awesome having you on and good luck with everything. I'm sure your round will be done by the end of the week. Knowing how the valley moves these days. Have fun out there. Okay, take care guys. Talk to you soon. Bye. Yeah, it all comes down to the device itself is not bad. It's how it gets used and I think there's a bunch of really cool use cases here. Awesome. If you want another wearable go to Bezel getbezel.com your bezel concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet seriously any watch You know why you

know who needs the original camera on their face and they can have a Patek Philippe Nautilus on the wrist. A condo on the wrist. An RM. For sure for sure dude. Brandon Jacoby we got some trade deal news he's starting a new decade today more focused and motivated than ever it's time to build I I'm an idiot. I I was like you're 30. He's like no, I'm 29. I'm starting the I'm starting the 30th Year, what's he texting me? Is his birthday? Yeah, no, this is this was him announcing his birthday. Okay. I thought he was going to a different job or something I was also very confused.

Everybody's confused about your post. Stick to Figma, Brandon. Stick to Figma. We got a post here from. Put the pixels in the bag. Just put the pixels in the bag, bro. We got a shout out. Amrita Block officially joined the S&P 500 yesterday

She says it's not the finish line. It's a signal that what we're building has staying power Inclusion brings broader exposure proud of our team focused on what's next hit the gong F o over at block awesome liquidity says incredible work fellas We just the COO's and CFO over at Block. Very cool. Awesome. Liquidity says, incredible work fellas. Sydney Sweeney had a campaign with American Eagle that went live yesterday. Of course, American Eagle was up 6% on the day

and then 17% after hours. Makes total sense. But aren't, I heard all the big LPs are pouring in Andreessen Horowitz right now, because just on the rumor that Sydney Sweeney might be joining Andreessen as a partner, is that true? Yeah, I mean, the fund has to be, the new raise will be massively oversubscribed

on that news. Sydney's in the partner meeting. I did have somebody smart text me and say, is this real? I heard the news and I was like, I think it's real. I think it's real. But to me, I thought it was that Andreessen was investing in a company that had done a marketing

deal with Sydney's. I didn't realize that the rumor was that she was joining as a partner. She kind of has the Midas touch right now. She did Dr. Squatch, $2 billion exit. We got a post here from Nat Eliason, a fantastic post Waymo is a godsend for working parents need to hand off the baby between meetings Put them in a Waymo and send them to your partner across town Impossible before now really grateful. We have this technology this went super viral

I'm sure Waymo was like trying to get a community noted because I don't think there's definitely not allowed Against the terms of use, probably illegal in multiple ways. But he was clearly joking. I was thinking about this, though. I do think it's a game changer that how much time do parents spend every day just like commuting their kids to and from school.

I think AVs are going to be great for families, for example. Like I remember like as a kid, my brother's school would start at a different time than mine and like one of us would have to wake up earlier than the other. I think we're gonna be living in a world where- You don't have to hang out with your kids at all. No, it's like more quality time and less, you know,

commuting for the whole family. Yeah, but who says the commute isn't quality time? It can be. It can be a moment to actually have a conversation kind of unplugged from all the toys and stuff. I've literally listened to hundreds of hours of dinosaur content, driving. You gotta give a lecture.

You gotta show up to the commute ready to give a sermon on the T-Rex. Today is the first day of the rest of first grade Pump up speech in the car just lock in buddy get in there. I want you to win I want you to win around build the biggest sandcastle. We have another post from tweet Davidson He says in your 20s you get sorted into one of these four houses like Harry Potter I got both of them here Celsius this else is out. I'm a big fan of three out of the four of these What's the green one? Are you joking? I don't know what that is. It's a matcha matcha. Yeah, you're definitely Probably oat milk with a bunch of canola oil

Masha has never been for me And never will be yeah, I clearly just like never been big into that world No diet coke for sure three out of the four Celsius Yeah, for sure. I'm not I'm not I'm not I'll have a Celsius That's mid I do drink one every day though, and we got to give it up for Satya Nadella I'm not I'll have a Celsius And we got to give it up for Satya Nadella Leasing github spark a tool and copilot that turns your ideas into full stack apps entirely in natural language They're getting into the game interesting

This is a Claude code competitor. More is like a Figma make, V0. Well, it's definitely not a Claude code competitor. This is more of like a, yeah, Figma make, lovable, V0. Lovable competitor, interesting. Bolt competitor. It's going to be a knockout, dragout fight. In the future, every SaaS company will have a little text box that lets you generate more SaaS. And this is how SaaS will live forever.

The SaaS Ouroboros. The Ouroboros of SAS. The SAS industrial. Big SAS wants you to think that you can get in the game, too. But on their infrastructure, you can. You can. We have a Vibe Coded project that was very handcrafted, as well, from Tyler Covenson.

I'm very excited about that Jack Wait, let's go to Tyler any news in your world before you're taking tomorrow off You're not I'm just you're just you're not singing off. Oh Sure. Oh, yeah the yeah, you're gonna work so hard remote I have some breaking news. I'll bring us up. Yeah, it's not working, but okay. Okay. Yeah bring up the breaking news We got some breaking news. We got we got a lot Gil scoop A lot Gil is raising a one and a half billion dollar fund which if closed would be one of the largest halls for a solo GP

Love to see it Natasha's got the scoop hit it Sure, this would be oversubscribed oh we got the wipe I like the wipe good job production team that's very very I would have I mean I could I could see a lot at some point with it with a ten billion dollar yeah the real the real story that's the investigative journalists have to dig into is there anyone else on his payroll Because if there's even one assistant, no there he's got a fantastic team. Jacob or Mackie. He's got a fantastic He's not a solo GP. I mean, I think he's not a solo investor. He's the only guy around

He's got other people on his team, but I but I he doesn't have another GP. It's probably I would But he has a management company. What if he had like 500 associates, 300 principals, 200 partners, and he's the only GP. He's like, I'm a solo GP, I'm a solo GP. I have a bigger infrastructure team, bigger back office than Andreessen. But I'm still, you call me a solo GP, I'm not a platform fund.

He's getting into platform fund territory. But congratulations, absolutely insane investor, amazing investor. Yeah, we covered his post yesterday basically saying these are the early winners. Been a fan of him for a long time. And of course he's in all the number one, he's in the number one company in all of those categories.

We got a post here from Jack. Yeah, just crazy run, entrepreneur for a long time, color this DNA company. His book too is. Oh yeah, high growth handbook, legend. He's fantastic. Everything he does, he hits out of the park Jack Corbett. Yeah Has opposed here went super viral. I was referencing this with Zach earlier

he says you can Venmo the United States to pay off the national debt and so they have a Website you can go to gifts to reduce the public debt And you can just make contributions. You can use ACH, PayPal, Venmo, debit, or credit card. So if you're really a patriot, go max out your credit card for Uncle Sam and make a gift to this country. Is it a tax write-off? That's a good question.

Does it count as taxes? Can I just Venmo my taxes now? If I'm like, I owe this much, I'll just send it in and then be like take that as a deduction if this is not tax deductible that would be the most annoying thing ever very funny Jamie cuff has Launched pace the agentic process outsourcer APO for the insurance industry. Jamie is an absolute dog

I think I met him in 2021. He was at Retool at the time. So excited to see him back in the game with his own startup. Brian Norgaard, he says a rating system for men in the dating marketplace was inevitable and so is one for women. That's interesting. Signal says there will never be one for women in his humble opinion. The market dynamics are skewed because every woman is going to, for the same guy, West Elm Calib effect. Oh, that's an old story.

I remember West Elm Calib. That was interesting. For dudes, it's an adverse effect. Yeah, I don't know. Reviewing women, that feels like that would get disapproved by the app store for some reason. It just feels odd. I don't know.

We'll see where it goes, but it is odd that I haven't heard rumblings about like there's a reddit out there that already exists because like the whole idea of like the rating system app what was it called T T that app like that like what was new about that wasn't that it was an app it's that it was a trend on reddit I think reddit or some sort of community some sort of web-based community beforehand. But anyway, weird times. I was talking to a friend of the show about tea,

and she said it's, what did she say? Something like it's a Stalinist ritual or something like that. And it kind of went over my head, but it was funny. Yeah, I don't know how I feel about it. We're trying to get the founder on. You can imagine he's been pretty busy at the top of the app store and getting a massive amount of hate constantly.

I don't think I would say that. But also probably doing a lot of project management. It's in his blog. It really is. Yeah. Product management. Let's go through this fun story from Charlie Munger. Very interesting to dig into.

In 1949, Charlie Munger was 25 years old. He was hired at the law firm Wright and Garrett for $3,300 per year or $29,851 in inflation adjusted dollars as of 2010. He had $1,500 in savings equal to about $13,570. Now, a few years later in 1953, Charlie was 29 years old when he and his wife divorced. He had been married since he was 21. Charlie lost everything in the divorce, his wife keeping the family home in South Pasadena.

Not far from where I live. Munger moved into dreadful conditions at the university club and drove a terrible yellow Pontiac, which his children said had a horrible paint job. According to the biography written by Janet Lowe, Molly Munger asked her father, daddy, this car is just awful, a mess. Why do you drive it? The broke Munger replied to discourage gold diggers. Shortly after the divorce, Charlie learned that his son, Teddy had leukemia heartbreaking. In those days,

there was no health insurance. You just paid everything out of pocket and the death rate was near 100% since there was nothing doctors could do. Rick Garen, Charlie's friend, said Munger would go to the hospital, hold his young son, and then walk the streets of Pasadena crying. One year after the diagnosis in 1955, Teddy Munger died.

Charlie was 31 years old, divorced, broke, bearing his nine-year-old son. Later in life, he faced a horrific operation that left him blind in one eye with pain so terrible that he eventually had his eye removed. Incredibly, incredibly rough, and then to go on an absolutely generational run after that, man, really speaks to resiliency and perseverance.

What a wild story. Anyway, we need something to cheer us up. We need to go to Howard Lutnick Investments. His investment bank, Cantor Fitzgerald, is offering to buy the right to businesses' tariff refunds, basically betting that the courts will overturn the tariffs from Ryan Peterson. What does Lutnick know?

They financialize everything. This is wild so let Nick now Yeah I mean if you're maybe if you if you have if you paid a bunch of tariffs and you're expecting some refunds or Thinking that there might be there you could get the cash flow now if your business is in trouble That's obviously relevant to flex ports customers in other news SpaceX direct to cell phone coverage is growing fast Elon posted a chart. That's not quite going hyperbolic, but certainly growing exponentially.

I didn't realize that direct-to-cell was growing as fast as it was. I didn't even realize it was that available. I see the generic satellite service show up on my phone every once in a while, and it's usually a harbinger of very bad connection, but Starlink should be much faster. Well, that is a great place to end the show today. This has been a fun one. Yeah lots of range

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