TBPN Live - Intel’s Tightrope Walk with Trump, Surprise Appearance From Dr. Drew | Darren Rovell, Dr. Drew Pinsky, Colin Anderson, Truman Sacks

Episode Date: August 25, 2025

(01:59) - Intel's Tricky Dance with Trump (41:09) - Is Trump's Intel Stock-Buy Socialism? (50:44) - Timeline Reactions (59:47) - Darren Rovell, a seasoned sports business journalist and avid memorabilia collector, discusses his transition from ESPN to founding Cllct, a media platform dedicated to the collectibles market. He highlights the platform's mission to provide serious journalism in the collectibles space, emphasizing its role as a comprehensive hub for collectors and investors. Rovell also shares insights into his personal collection, including unique items like the world's oldest Twinkie and significant sports tickets, reflecting his passion for preserving sports history. (01:26:14) - Dr. Drew Pinsky, an American internist and addiction medicine specialist, is renowned for hosting the radio show "Loveline" and the television series "Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew." In the conversation, he recounts his venture into the dot-com industry, detailing how a high school friend guided him through establishing an online business during the tech boom, securing significant venture capital, and navigating the challenges of early internet entrepreneurship. He reflects on the rapid rise and fall of his company, highlighting the lessons learned from the experience. (01:57:30) - Colin Anderson, former CFO of Palantir Technologies and co-founder of Friends & Family Capital, discusses his journey from an industrial engineering background to leading Palantir's finance team for eight years. He highlights the company's early challenges, including a period of significant expenses without revenue, and emphasizes the importance of mission-driven work and talent density in overcoming these obstacles. Anderson also shares insights on the forward-deployed engineering model, the complexities of enterprise sales within government sectors, and the critical role of finance in supporting rapid business growth. (02:21:26) - Timeline Reactions (02:27:01) - Truman Sacks, a 24-year-old entrepreneur and CEO of Cubby, discusses the launch of Cubby Law, the first AI teaching assistant for law students. He explains that the platform offers personalized study plans and unlimited practice exams tailored to individual courses and professors, aiming to help students excel in the highly competitive law school environment. Sacks also highlights the business model, targeting law students directly, and mentions the potential for future expansion into legal tech by building early relationships with future lawyers. (02:36:46) - Timeline Reactions TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.comFigma - https://figma.comVanta - https://vanta.comLinear - https://linear.appEight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpnWander - https://wander.com/tbpnPublic - https://public.comAdQuick - https://adquick.comBezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.comPolymarket - https://polymarket.comAttio - https://attio.com/tbpnFin - https://fin.ai/tbpnGraphite - https://graphite.devRestream - https://restream.ioProfound - https://tryprofound.comJulius AI - https://julius.aiFollow 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 TVPN! Today is Monday, August 25th, 2025. We are live from the TBPN Ultradone. The Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, and the newly, hotly contested capital of capital. Did you hear this? No. It's in the stack.

Abu Dhabi is claiming that they are the capital of capital. We have to go capital for capital with them. We will figure it out. We will be running through that. That one's in the Financial Times. But we are kicking it off with a Wall Street Journal article in a couple posts. We're also going to tell you about ramp.com. Time is money saved.

Both easy-use corporate cards, bill payments accounting, and a whole lot more, all in one place. So, Polly Market, also a sponsor. Breaking the U.S. government now officially owns a 10% stake in Intel, the Polly Market jumped to a 99% chance. This broke over the weekend. They didn't think Uncle Sam could get an allocation. They didn't.

You know, this is technically Intel Series A. They did a seed round of $2.5 million on convert. debt in 1967. Invertible debt. Inverte. Not the anonymous poster, not Arfer Rock, but Arthur Rock. The O.G. And then they raised 6.8 million in 1970, and that was their IPO.

So this is their Series A, in my opinion. Anyway. Back then, even if you would round down, right? Like if it was going to be 6.9 million, the very Elon Code to go with that number. go with that number. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Decided, hey, let's round down.

Yeah, let's keep it classy. Let's keep it classy. Yeah, so over the weekend, the Wall Street Journal reported, President says U.S. will take big stake in Intel. President Trump said the government is taking nearly 10% stake in Intel, capping a two-week frenzy in Washington over the future of the company and fueling speculation about what else might be done to help the trouble chipmaker. Trump said in the Oval Office Friday that the company has agreed to give the government

the stake is part of discussions about the company's future and billions of dollars in grants. It has received from the 2020 CHIPS Act. And to be clear, I don't think they've actually received it yet. They've received $2 billion already. But there was something like roughly $10 billion, maybe $11 billion in grants and then another equal amount in loans for an Ohio facility. And those are going to be rolling out and they should draw and Intel should be able to draw down on. them, but they could always be rolled back if something changes and the Chips Act kind of goes away. And so this is all the art of the deal. This is the pressure. And so it's very funny the way Trump

phrased it. He says, I said, I think you should pay us 10% of the company and they said yes, which is not typically how people discuss equity investments. Government grants too. Yeah, yeah. People just don't people don't say pay us 10% of the company. Like a VC will come to you and say, Hey, I want to invest, you know, $20 million, and I want a 15% stake in your company. In exchange. In exchange. And if anything, I, you know, I would ask for that stake, or I'm trying to build towards that stake.

I want to build a position in your company. Not, I want you to pay me, but that's the nature of this thing. So there's, I mean, we've all been tracking this. There's been a little bit of back and forth between Lipputon and Donald Trump. He originally called for the resignation. We can take you through the timeline. The Wall Street Journal laid it out really well. well in an article, a deep dive that we'll go through.

But let's kick it off with this Howard Lutnik video. Let's play it. The Art of the Deal, colon, Intel. And this is from Howard Lutnik sitting next to Lipputon in a beautifully appointed room. If we can go full screen here, that'd be great. I'm sitting with Lippoo in my office. And at 3 o'clock, we're going to sign a document together in the Oval Office where the United States of America will own 9.9% of the great American technology company Intel.

I can't be more excited for America and for Intel that we get to work together. First of all, thank you so much, Secretary. And this is a big, important historical agreement that we can work together. And then more important, I don't need the grant, but I really look forward to have the U.S. government be my shareholder, and we can work together. Have you ever heard Lib talk? So what happened is Lipu became the CEO of Intel.

And he came to see me. And he said, you know, the Biden administration gave this company a grant of $10 billion. And we don't need a grant. We're a great company. Maybe not with the best leadership. We lost $20 billion. This video is absolutely insane. He said, you know, and that was the conversation.

And then when we had the conversation with the president, he said, look, we don't want to take your money away from you. But shouldn't it be fair? And we agreed that it would be fair that the same money They're vlogging deals from the White House and your barrack. Because it's just fair. And we agreed together. And then you went to your board of directors.

Yes. And they agreed. Yes. It's a giant public company, so it had to be fair. Yes. It had to be fair. Had to be fair. There's no other way.

And so we did it fair for Intel and for the American people. And I think this is exactly what Donald Trump is all about. I'm really excited that today we get to do the deal together. Thank you so much for your support. What's that handshake? Is that a botched hand shake?

What happened there? Whoa. Wow. Lipu went for the Dap-up. Yeah. And Lutnik hit him with the power, the power shake, and it just was botched. Interesting.

Interesting. We should, Ben, can we put that in slow motion? Can we play that back? Well, the journal has a timeline here. Liputon was anxiously preparing for the biggest meeting of his life. Just five months into his tenure's chief executive of Intel, Tan, was already fighting for his job. A few days earlier, Donald Trump had demanded he stepped down

over his past ties to the Chinese military. The demand sent to Intel's leadership into a panic. They immediately contacted the White House for a meeting, and Tan flew to Washington huddling with advisors for hours on Sunday, August 10th. His team reassured him that the president would hear him out because, quote, Trump loves meeting with CEOs. Who doesn't? Even those whom he has attacked publicly, according to people with knowledge of the conversations. Yeah, yeah. This is WWE. This is WWE.

This is WWE. He understands. You call it your opponent. You hash it out. You leave it all in the field. Yeah, it's good. The next day Tan met with Trump, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnik, and Treasury Secretary Scott Besson in the Oval Office.

He sought to convince the president that he wasn't a Chinese spy and that the U.S. government has a long-term interest in bolstering Intel, one of the only homegrown manufacturers of the computer chips that power the modern economy. The CEO's argument proved persuasive. The president also took a liking to tan, a Malaysian-born Singapore-raised U.S. citizen who once considered a career as a professional basketball player and backed off his demand for the CEO's ouster.

Can we get a, Tyler, can you actually try to find a highlight reel of Lip-Bu-Tan? Can you generate an AI image of Lip-Butan dunking on LeBron James? But the truce came with a cost. In return for Trump support, the administration proposed taking an equity stake in the company. It's interesting in that video, they framed it as Lipp Bhutan was like, you know what, we don't need the money. Why don't you take a stake? Maybe, maybe, you know, it's kind of unclear who made the initial move. Both ways. So just for context, last year, Intel brought in 50 billion dollars in revenue, but they lost 18.8 billion. So they did not do well on earnings. They missed on

bottom line, essentially. Just a little bit. Just a little bit. And they switched CEOs, obviously. they've struggled on the foundry side. They're not making chips for, they can't find customers for their foundry stuff. So, you know, if that continued for a really long time, yeah, they would need the money, but they technically don't, and you can just look at the stock price.

Like, before any of this, like, it's not like Intel was trading as a penny stock. Like, it was still, it was too rich for Elon to buy with the, what was it, $40 billion that went into Twitter, something like that? Like, I remember thinking, like, oh, I would prefer, if he bought Intel, potentially, because that one seems important.

But it's always been around $80 billion company. And so, like, if it was truly on the brink of bankruptcy, the shares would be falling even more, in my opinion. So I think Lipu is not being disingenuous there. They actually could get by without the money. But they need to restructure, like, very seriously, and Liputon's, like, doing that. Like, he's cutting a ton, he's going to cut more.

And if you cut everything that's not additive to that 50 billion, and you just try and hold on to as much of that 50 billion in revenue as possible and you cut everything that's losing money, yeah, you should wind up with something that actually generates, I don't know, maybe $10 billion of free cash flow. Not a bad little business. No. Intel decided to convert nearly $9 billion in grants, promised Intel as part of the 2022 Chipsack into a 10% equity stake in the company, an unusual arrangement that makes the government

Intel's biggest shareholder. Meeting was a pivot point in a frenzied period for Intel once one of America's most venerated technology companies now stuck in a years long down. downward spiral. The companies scramble to control the fallout from the president's demand that Tan stepped down. Ton, triggered by a Fox Business Network segment underscores the unpredictable environment major corporations face under Trump. By the end of the two-week roller coaster ride, Ton's job appeared to be secure in the company's situation more stable. Japan's soft bank group agreed to invest two billion seeking to curry favor with Trump. On Friday, Intel in the White

House officially revealed the terms of the deal. He came in, he saw me, we talked for a while. I liked him a lot. I thought he was very good, Trump said of tan from the Oval Office. I said, you know what? I think the United States should be given 10% of intel, and he said, I would consider that. Yet a host of questions remain. I think this might be the gong of the day. This might be the true size gong moment. This is the biggest fundraising. Hit that gong. Clean first hit of the week. It is good to be back. We're calling it. 1600 Pennsylvania Ventures. Yep. White House Capital Group. White House Capital Group. Trump and Trump.

Tan must resolve core business challenges to get his company on track. Some analysts say Intel isn't in a much better position without new commitments from customers. Converting government grants to stock will only leave the company in a worse financial shape by diluting shareholders. Trump will likely need to find more ways to support Intel

not wanting it to fail on his watch. And that's why Liputon's genuinely excited. Yeah. Because he's like, now you're in. Trump is effectively the SPAC sponsor of Intel now. It's a new era. Yeah. He has bags.

And so he's aligned. And so if Liputon needs to come to him and say, hey, you know, we're trying to make this a facility in Ohio. It's not going well. We need you to put some pressure on those governments. We need to line up some customers. All sorts of things. Like in terms of, he's on the board.

He's value ad. Trump is value is a value added investor. He's got audience. Yeah. He's got business. He's got, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, He's got, I mean, he's got his own social media tech giant. True, true, could be a potential buyer.

You know, maybe truth social becomes a hyperscaler. Yeah. You know, it's happened before. Truth Cloud. Truth Cloud. Intel needs a lot of help, and the U.S. needs Intel, said Jimmy Goodrich, a senior advisor to the think tank, Rand, who focuses on tech issues. Hopefully, something good is going to come out of this.

We had Jimmy on the show like two days ago. Yeah, Jimmy. Jimmy, good work, Jimmy. Intel was founded in 1968 by semiconductor pioneers Robert Noyes, who co-created the modern computer ship, and Gordon Moore, originator of Moore's law, the idea that computing power and chip efficiency would likely double every year or two a guiding principle in the tech revolution. By the 90s, Intel dominated the market for processors used in personal computers. Its Pentium line and Intel inside marketing campaign with dancers and multicolored clean room suits

made the company a household name. Then came a series of tragic missteps. The company largely missed out on the mobile phone and artificial intelligence booms by over-emphasizing short-term financial targets, analysts say. Rivals and chip design like Nvidia and manufacturers such as Taiwan semiconductors surged ahead. It's interesting how you, if you're a huge tech company, you can miss maybe one platform shift and do fine, but you miss two. You're going to be out of the game. Even Microsoft said, you know, we miss mobile. Yeah. I get into social media. I mean, LinkedIn. Yeah, you could, I mean, it's a really, really stretched metaphor, but you could say that like Nvidia missed mobile more or less. Like the, like they weren't really switching into, okay,

let's be the design arm of, because the, the iPhone. You were buying enough chips for your gaming addition. Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, it was just a gaming company at that time, mostly in scientific computing a little bit, but there is a graphics processing unit on mobile phones. It's just part of the system on a chip that goes into the phone. And it was never, NVIDIA never really, like, figured out a way to get a piece of mobile. And there's a world where, like, the cloud rendering stuff happens, but, uh, the NVIDIA kind of sat that out, but it didn't matter. Yeah.

Because they, they crushed AI. So, company is still as keen to reviving U.S. manufacturing. Look at Indvita's sales, but this is sales by quarter. And it's just like, and this is what a 30-year-old company is just completely, completely It looks like a RACD demo day. Looks like a ramp. It's crazy. The company is still seen as key

to reviving U.S. manufacturing in his first term, Trump touted Intel's plans for a $7 billion manufacturing plant in Arizona. Trump advisors began discussing what became the Chipsack, wanting to attract companies such as TSM to the U.S. Has Arizona tried to brand, like, what they're doing? They have so many different chip manufacturers

coming into Arizona. They need, like, Silicon Desert or something. Chip City. Chip City. It really feels like, Like there is a significant movement there. Center of gravity. Yeah, that will ultimately become like a company town type vibe.

Chip City. As discussion on the Chipsax crescendoed during the Biden administration, Intel Pat, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger lobbied aggressively, hoping for some of the laws tens of billions of dollars in subsidies. In 2022, he sat in the first lady's box for the state of the union speech during which President Biden touted Intel's investment plans. While the bill was being negotiated, senators including Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren pushed unsuccessfully for a version that would see the government receiving equity in companies it backed. Very interesting. This is what Mark Cuban was saying last week. He was saying this is Sanders and Warren's dream. He said it in a little bit less PG language, if I remember correctly. But Intel became the law's biggest beneficiary, qualifying for roughly $11 billion in grants and about $11 billion in loans for a plant in Ohio. an expansion in Arizona and other projects.

It seemed like a boon at the time, but the law's slow rollout in Intel's core business challenges led to repeated delays. Talk about ROI there. Like, like, Liputon's saying, like, you know, we don't need these grants. And I think he's, like, technically correct. But it's an incredible nice to have. And the ROI on your CEO going to the state of a union and just sitting in a box and, like, taking some meetings.

And, you know, I don't know what Intel's lobbying budget was, but it probably was less than 10 billion. right? It was probably less than 10 million. It probably wasn't very much at all. And you get a huge, friend of the show, Andrew Ross Sorkin said yesterday, should the government start taking equity in every startup for the federal tax incentives we offer or Tesla? How about the banks? How about when a state government offers a tax incentive? Should they get an equity stake in exchange? Board representation? This is a super slippery slope. And Bill Gurley said, here's my take. If the government is a quote-unquote lender of last resort, they should take 100% take equity and arguably 100% of the equity.

Failed to do this with GM, Goldman Sachs, United, and other airlines. How do you know if they're the lender of last resort? Resort? The company takes the deal, which tracks. Because otherwise, the company would go with a financial investor who says, I only want 50% for the same price or whatever. And so it is a good, it's a good point. It's a good point by Bill. So in reference to the original Chips Act grants, the journal says it seemed like a boon at the time, but the law's slow rollout in Intel's core business challenges led to repeated delays. Late last year, Tan, who had been an Intel director since 2022, left the board in protest of Gelsinger strategy. The board also soured on Gelsinger and pushed him out. Trump's victory presented another curveball. He had bashed

Quitting in protest, deeply underrated. Deeply underrated strategy just in life. Yeah. Yeah. I respect TAN for quitting in protest and then ultimately getting a job. Coming back for the top spot. It's pretty sick. Pretty sick.

Underutilized strategy. Yeah. Just I'm out. He decided basically in the trough of disillusionment, he quit in protest. And then he said, yep, I'll pop back on the roller coaster for the slope of enlightenment. That's where Intel is. And we're really, yeah, I think we're, I think, I think we were. Who's on the slope of enlightenment?

I thought we were doing three colors, me, you, Tyler. I didn't get Tyler on there yet, but you're on, you're just, you're just, I'm still on innovation trigger. You're just coming up to the peak. I just went to San Francisco. I mean, this is talking to AI researchers. They told me deep learning is undefeated. They told me that pre-training scaling will continue.

And so I'm, I have yet to, my, my expectations can, continue to be inflated. I am looking at the trough. You're looking at the trough? Looking at the trough. You're going to get it straight for the trough. Tyler, where are you? I think I'm where Jordy is too. Okay. It's the red ones on the other side of the of the downslope. Wow. I thought you were so AGI-pilled, bro. I thought you're so AGI-I-pilled. But I mean, like, okay, even Dorcasch is extending his timelines. Like, how can you, I mean, it's hard to still be. Extending the timelines just means that the initial innovation trigger slope is just going like this, but he's still, he's still going up.

He's still going up and to the right. He's happy. Expectations are worse. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. YX's expectations. I don't know. I don't know. Let's just sprint to the plateau of productivity.

The real move is that I don't think we're in the trough of disillusionment. How about, I think we need to make the TVPN version of this for the AI hype cycle. Yes. And the slope of enlightenment, we need to just like. Another, another vertical line. Another vertical line. For the fast take-off scenario.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like we get a bubble, we get a crash, and then we get a fast take-off. That's the most likely for sure. No, our job is to recognize and diagnose when we are in the trough of disillusionment and re-illusionment such that we can get to the slope of the nightmare. I've never been in the trough of disillusionment that didn't one day get to the slope of enlightened. Exactly. So there's always hope.

There's always hope. Yes. But anyways. You know what could have made that video better? If it was streamed on re-stream, I know. That's right. Live. One live stream, 30-plus destinations, multi-stream, and reach your audience, wherever they are. Liputon.

Howard Lutnik, if you're listening, get on restream. Anyway, continue, Joey. Of course. So Trump's 2024 victory presented another curveball. He had bashed Biden's implementation of the Chipsack, fueling worries that he could try to change deals or cancel them altogether. Intel's financial condition worsened, and the incoming administration worried the company might fail, even with the recent share price rebound in August, followed by reports of the deal with

Trump. The company is now valued at $110 billion, a fraction of its dot-com bubble peak. The stock is down roughly 50 percent since the start of last year. Intel has been left behind, Trump said last Friday. So around Trump's inauguration in January, Lutnik and administration officials began evaluating Chips Act recipients and which tech companies generally could increase their U.S. investments in line with the president's goals. They asked semiconductor companies receiving Chips Act awards to increase their total U.S. investment, but they knew they might need to revamp Intel's deal or help the companies in other ways. What's interesting there is that when we talk to like all of this is like everyone's doing art of the deal on each other. And meanwhile, like

when we talk to Doug O'Loughlin at semi-analysis, he's like realistically like all this trailing edge capacity is going to be done in like South America. Like it doesn't make sense to do it in America. a lot of this stuff is just going to wind up getting offshoreed because it's easier to build some facility that's just copy-pasted down there. And so it's very unclear, like, how it can actually work in the long term. And then on the leading edge, like, it seems like it's TSM and Samsung, like Tesla's going with Samsung. And those will be in the United States. And those will be, like, cutting edge, like, Ph.D-level jobs, amazing researchers, like, really, really great, like, American innovation. But, like, we're kind of already on that path.

And Intel's not really the party that you need to be twisting the arm of. It feels like if you want America to be like the leading semiconductor country, you just need to make sure that you have leverage over TSM and Samsung. And maybe AMD Global Foundries a little bit. I mean, Global Foundries is part of Intel now. But a lot of the trailing edge, like it seems like it might not be a long-term thing that America is ever good at again because it's like it's commoditizing so rapidly. I don't know.

Anyway, clearly Trump cares about it and wants to keep it here. So that's what he's pushing for. The administration began early conversations with Intel's board about taking an equity stake. The talks didn't move forward, in part because the board, which has often been mired in disagreement, wanted more than the administration was willing to give. Did they want him to take a bigger position? No, they probably wanted like $40 billion in grants or something. Give us more for that. Former banker Letnik has had in recent months asked,

other tech executives, what can be done to help Intel, even asking other chip companies like TSM, AMD, and Micron, whether they would consider potential deals involved in the company. This is what Doug is just generally wanted people with semiconductor manufacturing experience to be involved with the company. And so it's very possible. This seems like a step in the wrong direction, according to his heuristic, because it's like more government people on the board.

But, I mean, to be clear, the U.S. government is not taking a board seat and not having a controlling state. It's a purely financial stake, which we'll get into. So in March, Intel's board named Tan 65 as CEO, one of the biggest decisions he faces is whether to keep the company as one of the few chip firms that does both design and manufacturing some analysts say Intel should consider splitting the business or doing other types of deals to cut costs. Tan has so far shied away from spinning off the manufacturing segment, which lost 3.2 billion in the second quarter. He has told confidence he has inherited a very bad hand in July. Intel said it would lay off 15% of its workers by year end, cancel billions in planned investments

and further delay work on the sprawling Ohio plant. The new rules of the road were no more blank checks, Tahan wrote in a memo to employees. TAN's early decisions at Intel were aimed at getting the company on more stable ground, but the CEO's past work at chip design software company, Cadence Design Systems, thrust the company into the spotlight in late July, July, Cadence agreed to pay $140 million for violating U.S. export restrictions by selling ban technology to a Chinese National Defense University. The sales happened while Tan was CEO, so it seems like he probably had to sign off on that in some way. Of course, it's like, is it a university? Is that like, I don't know. I don't know how

you like steel man this or dig into like, you know. Steel man it. You're a steelman champion of the world. Steel manning, it would probably be like the export restrictions are just like super complicated and it's unclear and it's one of those things where it's like there's the spirit of the law and the letter of the law and they made some case for you know in this particular in this particular technology did not fit within the export restrictions because the export restrictions might just be like you know oh chips of a certain size or scale and they had and they had a chip that was like slightly under and then they the government like you know reinterpreted the export restrictions to include that like this stuff happens all the time

um because when these when these export restrictions get get um get written it's easy to crazy you don't hear much about cadence design systems yeah by the way it's a 95 billion dollar public company yeah and and and let that's why people think lebuton so equipped to run intel because he took that company to like a hundred billion market cap basically from i think like five or 10 or something when he when he uh when he joined the company so he is uh he's a talented operator um so a week later, Senator Tom Cotton sent a letter to Intel's board raising concerns about tan's ties to China. Trump was watching, this is wild, Trump was watching Fox Business Network on August 7th when host Maria Bartaromo highlighted Cotton's criticism at 7.34 a.m. Eastern time.

Five minutes later, Trump fired off a message on his truth social platform. The CEO of Intel is highly conflicted and must resign immediately. It's crazy. He's just watching the news and then posting about it. Journal says it was one of the first times in modern history that the president publicly called for the leader of a major company to step down. Trump's demand was seen by some on both sides as an opening bid in negotiations with the CEO. The president had already grown intrigued by the idea of government stakes in key industrial companies during his May trip to the Middle East. A senior White House official said, though the official added that it wasn't what sparked Trump's post, the president wants to see more such deals in the future.

Well, if you're trying to maintain compliance, get on Vanta, automate compliance, manage, risk, group trust, continuously. Vantta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation, whether you're pursuing your first process. I imagine that will be, we know that Trump is not going to be on the board and not going to be sort of directly pulling the strings on the business, but I imagine one of the first things he wants LIP to do is implement Vanta, yeah, for sure. So, Intel stock price has been on a tear. shout out to Leopold Oshenbrenner at situational awareness.

They mocked him. They mocked him. They said, this guy's fun must have already blown up. Yep. Oh, he's the last 13-f. What a weird non-consensus bet. Oh, well, it paid off. So Trump called for TAN's resignation mid-August.

Then Trump met TAN. Softbank invested $2 billion, and the share price rose from under $20 to over $25 a share. And the deal has been announced. So anyway, sorry, I cut you off. No, I think people were speculating whether Leopold had some inside information or he just viewed Intel as a super strategic asset that the government wouldn't possibly let fail. There was some guy on X saying like, oh, this is like insider trading.

Everyone is insider trading. Even like Warren Buffett made his money on insider training, very blackpilled. And so he quotes just being like, there's no evidence of any of this happening at all. And, yeah, wait, what you got, Tyler? I think also, like, this trade, like, him being long Intel totally aligns with the thesis of the situational awareness. Totally. His whole thing is, they're going to maximize the lab. He's monitoring the situation.

Yeah, they're going to nationalize, like, AI. Oh, yeah. So, obviously, like, if the U.S. is going to nationalize, like, start a lab, start, like, building computing stuff, they're going to have, like, they're going to take the existing, you know, infrastructure. Yeah, yeah, I didn't even thought about it from that perspective. I was just thinking about it from the perspective of like, like, we, we talked to Ben Thompson about Intel, we talked to Doug O'Loughlin about Intel, like, we were kind of like noodling on it back and forth as like commentators. And I didn't come away with a super strong like Bull or Bear case. I didn't really look at the stock price of the valuation of the financials. But it didn't seem like crazy to come up with a like a, like an expression of your position in financial terms. And it's very clear that like Leopold and his team just like low. looked at Intel more deeply and saw that there was an opportunity there. You don't need, not every good trade needs to be inside of training people. It's like so ridiculous.

And, yeah, I mean, it's the same thing. It's like, what does he know about NVIDIA? Like, is it possible? He just, he just knows that like every, like he's not in NVIDIA. What does he know? Is he insider trading? Or is he just like looking at like, oh, well, invidia is like the obvious bet. So everyone piled into NVIDIA.

It's like the biggest company in the world. Like maybe not a lot of juice left there. Yeah. I'm going to go where... I'm going to go and bet on the things that have high upside potential. And, yeah, I don't know. Anyway, in the Oval Office, Tan told the president his ties to Chinese businesses were years in the past and he was loyal to the United States. He presented ideas for turning Intel around and investing more in the United States.

Lutnik told Tan that he thought it was dangerous to have so much the global chip making capacity controlled by foreign companies. Tan agreed and reiterated that he was dedicated to Trump's America's first manufacturing agenda by the end of. of the hour-long session, the president was convinced and agreed to lay off the criticism. I will no longer call for your immediate resignation on my social media app, Mr. Tan. That's great. Tan and Lutnik then moved quickly to hammer out a deal for the government to take a minority stake in Intel. It was complicated negotiation because it was unusual to convert government grants that had already been awarded into equity. While they were in talks, SoftBank, led by Masa,

suddenly agreed to put $2 billion into the company part of its campaign to bet on U.S. firms an appeal to Trump. If they were putting together like a pitch deck for SoftBank, I feel like they should have used Figma for that. Yeah. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helped design and development teams

build great products together. I would be shocked if SoftBank uses Figma for the design of their decks. Yeah. Because they seem to be very PowerPoint coded, but they still are powerful. Imagine how powerful they could be

if they would simply get on Figma slides. Let's see here. Did I tell you that my first internship ever was at a soft bank backed company? No way. Yeah, Dr. Drew.com. So Dr. Drew was a radio host with Adam Carolla on Kiss FM in 2005. Wait, that's crazy lore. Yes, this is insane lore.

So Dr. Drew was a board certified psychologist. psychiatrist, I think. Wait, we're pulling up this website, by the way. And so Dr. Drew, during the dot-com boom, wanted to start his own, like, live stream property, basically, and raised money from SoftBank and built a team of engineers and had their own data center racking servers. And one of my jobs was like to go to the...

Well, I mean, this is, like, what it is now because he has, like, a podcast and stuff. And you don't really need, like, necessarily, like, a venture back. startup to be an influencer but uh uh so dr through went to the same high school as me uh and uh every single famous person has gone to john's high school yeah it's wild um but yeah like one of my like pop by the summer office was like go in the data center and it was like super cold it was like not like a data center like people think today it was like a room with a couple racks of servers but there was no AWS so if you wanted to set up a website you had to like rack a server and like put

the code on the server and then run it just put the servers in the bag bro yeah the brand was a little bit different back then uh the first show that they were going to green light was this sort of like it was about a lot of his stuff was like relationship coaching so love line people would call in about their relationships and so i think i believe they were going to put two people like a like a man and woman who were maybe dating and they were going to go on a road trip and they were going to live stream it and it was going to be like some sort of like new new media well all I can see is I can see why Masa needed to be in that website it is it is incredible lore is that part of how you underwrote the internship too you're like look you know I wasn't really like technically

an intern I was I was so young I was just like stopping by the office basically but but it was it was cool it was like a true startup environment like a pool table like pretty big like very much like pool table yeah pool table amazing it was very it was very iconic of like you don't see pool tables in office no now it's like ping pong tables yeah they've taken over we should do you like pool I like pool okay we should get a pool table back here billiards billiards yeah yeah it was like the classic like kind of overfunded ventureback dot com bubble company where like huge staff for something that like would ultimately be small media like

So, yeah, yeah, a media company that should focus on, like, the media piece, and then, like, the YouTube should just be, like, a platform. And so it's like, it's like, it didn't make sense to be in, like, the middle. You either just wanted to be, like, the influencer or the, or the platform. Anyway, so soft bank had already pledged to spend at least $100 billion in the U.S. on AI and other tech investments, a move announced by Sun at Trump's Mara Lago Club last December. SoftBank had also earlier this year discussed a potential deal to acquire Intel's chip manufacturing business. Intel and the U.S. soon agreed to the government would use $8.9 billion in grants that had been committed, but not paid, to take a nearly 10% stake at a slight discount.

The U.S. won't have a say in governance. It already gave Intel $2.2 billion in CHIPS-AX grants. That was what we were talking about. Earlier, some had been given, but not all that was promised. David Shapiro, a former partner on the Wall Street firm, Watchdull, Lipton, and Rosen, and Katz, drew up the terms, including a provision that the government could acquire another 5% of Intel at a discount if the company sells the majority of its manufacturing business. It's an underrated naming scheme. I really wish startups would do this. The next AI startup should just be like, Coogan and Hayes and Cosgrove and. This could be totally a new meta. It can only be done once by a great team. If we did Coogan, Hayes, Cosgrove, and Kohler, it would be amazing. I mean, at some point, we should just add the whole team. The whole team. It's just the longest.

We could definitely get the dot-com. last names. Coogan and Hayes and Coggrove and just over and over and over. So the administration insisted on this provision is 5% at a discount as a type of poison pill meant to dissuade the company from fully exiting the manufacturing segment. And this is this is what people are really excited about, you know, government involvement in the decisions of highly technical projects. Highly technical, complicated businesses. Government famously good at a building, Yes, yes. So if Intel were to give the government another 5%, obviously dilute shareholders and complicate things. So despite the initial optimism, many analysts say the agreement will only be a boon for Intel if Trump can also find customers and attract more investment for the company. I think he's going to be able to do both, to be honest. I think he's going to be able to strongly encourage other companies. He's not going to be like a VC that just like sits back and like reads the investor updates. There's one thing. People can criticize Trump for a lot of things, but he is available the week.

week of August 25th. He's online. While many allocators, he's not a burning man. He's not a burning man, which is crazy. Interesting. Which is crazy. You'd think that he's starting to get into venture. Yeah. Investing that he would naturally set up a, an oval office camp. Yeah. But instead of being at Black Rock City, he might be at Black Rock. That's right. Doing deals. That was, uh, that was one of our good, uh, there's an early episode of 2bPN where John and I are riffing out Black Rock City, the home of Burning Man, and wondering if there's a connection to, there's almost certainly a connection. Obviously a connection to Black Rock, financial institution. SoftBanks, $2 billion and the $8.9 billion in government

funding that had already been promised aren't game changing for the chip manufacturing business. And the grand scheme of thing, it's not that much money. They lost $18 billion last year. We're not even covering last year's losses. But, Better to have and not need, I suppose. Yeah. So the agreement is fueling speculation that the president could lean on other tech companies to work with Intel. Lean, strongly encourage, demand that they are fired if they are not, if they do not. He's going to rip some posts.

Tan has met with potential customers, including Apple CEO, Tim Cook, trying to win support for Intel's next generation manufacturing process. This is not the kind of thing I see Tim being super interested in. He's, like, more expensive, less performant. Apple has spent, what, a decade getting off of Intel and Intel Macs and going to Apple Silicon, which are, like, so integrated, so perfect from the Apple ecosystem. Like, like, now, like, you can run iOS apps on Mac and vice versa. Like, it's like, there's a ton of, there's a ton of, like, they've been spinning up, like, the ecosystem on top of Apple Silicon for so long, like, the different graphics engines and

getting developers to go deeper into optimizing for Apple Silicon, and then they just like rug it, right, back on it. Yeah, so the journal says many executives say they would need big incentives to use Intel for manufacturing, given how badly it trails industry leaders like TSM. It is difficult to switch semiconductor manufacturers because the processes are specialized and have to be planned out years in advance. The government stake in Intel is the latest in a series of extraordinary interventions in the private sector. I mean, what's the craziest thing that they could do?

like Apple GPU for a cluster at Intel or something, like kind of fresh start. That seems like something way out of their wheelhouse of both companies. I have no idea how they would do that. But I mean, if Amazon can do Traneum and Google can do TPU at TSM, like maybe there's a world where that happens. I don't know. Anyway, Google Foundry is punching the air right now.

Anyway. way um the administration they highlight a couple of the other deals it's worth covering to the president when a quote unquote golden share of control over japan's nippin steel in return for allowing it to take over u.s steel yeah these golden shares are in reference to what the CCP oh i thought it was in reference to the president's toilet which is gold yes and many many of the fixtures in his in the oval office yes um but um and last month trump struck a deal with invidia and amd for the federal government to take 15% of their chip sales in China in return for allowing the exports. In early July, the Defense Department took a minority stake in MP materials,

a maker of rare earth magnets. Days later, Apple, which the Trump administration had long pressured to expand its U.S. supply chain, announced a $500 million deal to buy MP's products. Yeah, so that's an example of, like, Trump acting as, you know, bizdeaf, basically for the companies he likes. I mean, he's really going to make a lot of ECs look bad. that make big promises during the deal process when they're trying to win allocation and then kind of sit back. I'll help you ramp your revenue for sure.

Yeah, I'll help you hire founding engineers. I know a lot of the top guys. I know a ton of founding engineers. I don't have 50 other portfolio companies that also want to hire founding engineers. I got you. I got you. But the Intel stake is among the most notable,

given Trump called for Tand to resign, then quickly brought him to the negotiating table. There's this Darth Vader aspect of the whole thing. said Guantam Makunda, a lecturer at the Yale University School of Management, never heard of it, who studies innovation and leadership, referring to the Star Wars villain, who started as good, became evil, then redeemed himself. Anyways, do you want to read through this post from... The big question is, is this socialism?

Maga-socialism? Is this magas socialism? A lot of people have been saying this. And I mean, I think, like, my default take is that... I don't know that Intel is so critical that we need necessarily a backstop. I don't necessarily know that the government is the right board member. You don't trust Doug on this? Doug really doesn't want Doug from semi-analysis really does not want Intel to fail. Yeah, I don't know. I'm still like on the fence about it. But so the debate has been raging like is this is this socialism? And so we're going to the socialists who are self-proclaimed the people's line from Carl Beher and Carl says no but that hasn't stopped Democrats from complaining about it and this is

interesting because obviously the Trump camp is very pro this deal and they're saying this isn't socialism what are you talking about we're just doing art of the deal we're making good deals and we're this is an America first agenda project the Democrats are saying oh wow Trump is a hypocrite this is social The socialists are saying this isn't socialism. It doesn't go nearly far enough. It doesn't count as socialism because it's not a controlling stake. So Carl says former Obama Undersecretary of the state, Rick Stengel, is freaking out right now over the news that the Trump administration has taken a 10% equity stake in chip manufacturer Intel. This is a quote from Rick Stengel. Trump's strong arming intel for government equity is something Mao and Stalin would be proud of once the GOP believed in laissez-faire capitalism and government not interfering in the private sector. Look it up. The state owning the means of production is called Marxism.

So, Carl, continue. I couldn't find any evidence of Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders taking a victory lap on Trump's acquisition of Intel shares. Yes. Which was surprising, given that back in the Biden admin era, they were pushing for this. Yes, but the key discussion that's going to be. going on right now is financial, financial ownership versus true control over capital, and that's what Carl's going to get into here. So he says, anyone old enough to remember the phrase government motors, this is from the era of the takeover GM, should be able to appreciate what a

wild line of criticism this is to hear from a former Obama official. As part of his troubled asset relief program, TARP, Obama took for the U.S. government a 61% equity stake in General motors, and the right's backlash was entirely predictable. Rush Limbaugh called this a sterling example of the left's crusade for government control of business. That proved the left's enchantment with socialism. John Stossel complained that this was a move toward more government control of the economy, and in the end, that's pretty close to socialism, that so many liberals have adopted this line of criticism, Joe Scarborough took it up on Thursday, and Democratic consultant Jessica Tarlov ran with it on Friday, for example, should probably provoke some reflection among socialists who think

of liberals as fellow travelers. While socialists may share certain egalitarian values and other priorities with contemporary Democrats, American liberals are still reflexively ambivalent to hostile toward the basic socialist agenda of nationalization. They will opportunistically support it when it's time for Democrats to bail out the economy, but they will aggressively attack it if they think this will score points against Republicans. There are a few things that contemporary liberals enjoy more than catching a Republican doing something that they can rightly or wrongly construe as socialist. In this case, I would say wrongly, Stengel's definition of Marxism as state ownership of the means of production is confused for all kinds of reasons. But here are the

most salient that, but here the most salient is that ownership does not imply control. Even if this was ordinary equity, 10% would hardly give the government any kind of significant control over the company. But as Intel made clear in a statement, this deal doesn't even give the government 10% control, quote, the government's... But no, no, so there's more. The government's investment in intel will be a passive ownership with no board representation or other governance or information rights. The government also agrees to vote with the company's board of directors on matters

requiring shareholder approval with limited exceptions. So this notion of passive ownership perfectly illustrates why socialist would do well to talk about control rather than ownership of the means of production, a major function of modern finances to sever the relationship between those two. To identify control, you have to look past the legal and business terminology and figure out who actually has the final say over any given lot of capital. In that light, it isn't clear that 10% ownership stake even represents incremental progress towards control of intel, which is what the socialists want. Convincing a business to give you a 10% non-voting stake in their company is very different

thing from getting a 10% voting stake, let alone a 51% voting stake. Nevertheless, American partisans clearly aren't interested in litigating the fine details between ownership and control. And that's why socialists have an interest in this fight. If Democrats are going to vilify Trump as a socialist, the best response is to complain that he isn't even doing socialism. He's not doing enough. He's not doing enough.

And so my takeaway from this is that it's a good point. Like, it is not the goal of socialist, but at the same time, it reaffirmed that I do not want to do the socialist thing here because I don't want the government voting on what Intel should do. Like, I don't think the government's equipped to make the decision on how they should position against TSM, where they fit in Apple Silicon versus TPU versus Traneum. It just doesn't seem like government's set up to actually run this company more effectively than anyone else. And so I'm very hesitant about that. It sounds like something that's like very good in some abstract sense to the socialist, but I have no, I have no faith that if the government were to get a 51% voting stake in,

until we would get a better outcome here. Well, the better outcome people were talking about this on the timeline would be Trump answering questions on earnings calls. That would be fantastic. Maybe that's the good outcome. Yeah, but it'd be odd to have, like, I mean, if we went to pure direct democracy

and socialism, like, you go to the ballot box and you vote, like, are we going to do three nanometer? Like, decide, you decide, like, yes or no. Like, I think it's a waste of it. Or just have the, whoever's the Intel CEO, just have that as, you know, an elected official. Yeah. Like, let the people vote on who should be running. Yeah, I mean, the question is like, how much democracy do you want?

You can vote on everything. You can vote every single day. California is extremely democratic. We have ballot measures for all sorts of things. We tend to not do ballot measures for different things at the federal level. We have a representative democracy, not a direct democracy. And but if you really play out the direct democracy, socialism thing, it's like, yeah, you'll be voting on or not Intel launches a GPU or like Intel like hey we miss mobile what should we do

about that okay let's ask the American people broadly at the ballot box like that is the conclusion should Intel have should Intel launch energy drinks yeah it's not really in our wheelhouse today but you know yeah big potentially large opportunity yeah it just it does seem it does seem fraud it it doesn't seem like it seems like they're it's potentially one of the slipperiest slopes that we've ever been on as a country. Well, I don't know. This is saying that like we're, like his point is that this isn't,

this isn't a step towards real socialism because it's not real control. It's purely a financial instrument. Yeah, but the Intel board said the government also agrees to vote with a company's board of directors on matters requiring shareholder approval with limited exceptions. So what are the exceptions, right? I'm not sure, not sure that we know. But anyways, the timeline. says it's a bad idea we can vote against you that's the exception anyway first step i would

vote for if i was uh in in a democratic socialist society i would vote that intel gets on graphite dot dev code review for the age of a i graphite helps teams on gethub ship higher quality software faster you get started for free can or in the chat says i think intel needs to launch short form content well uh make sure your voter registration is up to date because uh president AOC might just make it happen. You never know. I could see it. I could see it.

I could see it. I mean, the real wild one is, yeah, Tesla, because Tesla's had a number of government incentives that they'd taken advantage of. You could make the same argument. You put the screws to them and you say, hey, we need voting shares for this. For the years and years. This is what Andrew Sorkin was saying. Yeah.

He was saying, like, yeah, like where do you stop? And I understand that, yeah, there is this, like, slippery slope. But to Bill Gurley's point, like, Intel could have said no. They could have said, like, yeah, we're actually going to be fine without the Chips Act money. And so we don't want, we don't want an equity stake. Although, let Bhutan is sitting there just on fire. And you should be like, you don't need to help, you don't need to help put it out. I'll be good.

I'll be good. Flames, you're just, just, it's like, no, I'm good, I'm good. I'm good. I'll cut more. He's like, I don't want to, I don't want to give the president the ick. I'm just going to act all like, hey, I mean, BlackBerry is a cybersecurity company now. Maybe Intel just like pivots all the way down to just like, yeah, we actually just own real estate at this point. Like all we own is, we're real estate and we just lease to TSMC.

And that's it. We're completely out of probably decent business. I don't know. Timeline was in turmoil earlier. Daniel Tenrero said the Emily's sunbergification of everything you love continues apace. I don't know what that means. Emily fires back and says, keep my name out of your mouth

if you came to the party I hosted with TVPN and you didn't say hello to me. He said hello to me. I don't know. There were a lot of people. There were a lot of people. But we got to get some sound effects for that. I'll see multiple journalists on the horizon.

Who's the term? Well, I mean, there were multiple journalists. In another life, Emily could have been a journalist. But anyways, you guys should you know, come on TV again and just debate. Oh, that'd be good. Yell.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's great. Andrew Reed is highlighting some small-caps cell side research notes under the, what company is this? I have no idea. CMRC. There are some things that just go better together. Austin and live music, Tex and Mex, smoked brisket and just about anything.

And perhaps commerce and the next wave of AI-driven agentic. discoverability. Oh, this is for big commerce, probably. Big Summit. Commerce is, oh, maybe they've just rebranded it as just commerce, but it used to be big, big commerce. Commerce.com. Yeah.

Big commerce. Big commerce. And it was a competitor to Shopify, I believe. Yeah. And they did not have a go. I have a buddy who was like, I think Shopify is overrated. I'm going long Shopify. I'm going short, Shopify long, big commerce because I think that there's like too much of a delta there.

Like, and I think that trade went very poorly. I'm not sure exactly what you executed it. Down 93%. But this went way down and Shopify went way up. Commerce.com, though, is a pretty hard domain. It is a good domain, but you need more than that. You need a goaded team. Yep.

Silicon Valley launches pro-AI PACs to defend industry in midterm elections. Andresen Horowitz and Open AI President Greg Brockman are among those helping launch and fund leading the future. Silicon Valley is putting more than $100 million into a network of political action committees and organizations to advocate against strict artificial intelligence regulations, a signal that tech executives will be active in next year's midterm elections. Well, if you want to analyze where all that $100 million will go, you've got to get on Julius. What analysis do you want to run, chat with your data, and get expert level insights in seconds. We love like 2 million users and counting. 2 billion soon.

2 billion soon. Many are saying this. So A16Z and Greg Brockman are among those helping launch and fund leading the future a new Super PAC network focused on AI. There's been a lot of rumblings around this idea, but no one's gotten it off the ground to the tune of $100 million yet. The head of government affairs, Colin McCune and Brockman and OpenAI chief global affairs officer Chris Lehane were involved in initial conversations earlier this year. about the need to help shape industry-friendly policies, leading the future hopes to use campaign donations and digital ads to advocate for select AI policies

and oppose candidates who the group believes will stifle the industry at large. One of its goals is to push back against a movement backed by some other tech titans that focuses on regulating AI models before they get too powerful and create catastrophic risks. This is Tech Titan on Tech Titan team death match.

This is. Absolutely love it. The organization said it isn't pushing for total deregulation. but wants sensible guardrails. So, I mean, the main debate is like, is like, is there going to be the AI FDA? I think this was a talking point that I heard on All In years ago, and I heard repeated in Washington from a someone in the House of Representatives, this idea that there should be a government

organization that, like, reviews and tests models before they get deployed, and very clearly that would that would slow down progress like significantly significantly because like I mean deep seek ships a model without even the updating the model card and they're just like yeah run your own benchmarks like we're not testing this thing we're just releasing we don't have time it's it's on hugging face and so it might be wildly dangerous imagine if you you can figure it out let us know in the comments of this is before you release to hugging face like you need to go through some sort of like fda style regulation that could take years that's going to really really slow things down, probably be bad for the industry overall. Maybe it creates a little bit more

monopoly power for companies that have the resources to get through that process, but would be very, very difficult. And it would certainly hurt the rollout of like small models, depending on how it was, because if you just say like any, you can't deploy any neural network of a certain scale or size, like how are you even defining that? All of a sudden, like, do you have to approve the latest reels algorithm before you before you like update that that's something that's updating all the time the the future of these models is like much much more iterative than like one big release so it seems like it seems sort of

equally important shiel is on the timeline right now highlighting that Greg Brockman married his wife Anna at the open AI office on a workday elia was the officiant that's amazing which is absolutely amazing I love to see it. If you are busy executive, consider marrying your wife in the office with your co-founder as the officiant. There's some good precedence here now. Absolutely dog. I really hope Ilya goes back to Open AI. That'd be such a fun twist. We'll see it. Anyway, if you're trying to get your brand mentioned in ChatGPT, go to profound. Which you could be. Reach millions of consumers who are using AI to discover new products and brands. Used by MongoDB, indeed.

DocuSign, Zapier, Ramp, Majury, Workable, AitSlee, U.S. Bank, Chime, Clay. It's a good crew. Good crew. Many tech executives worry that Congress won't pass AI rules, creating a patchwork of state laws that hurt their companies. Earlier this year, a push by some Republicans to ban state AI bills for 10 years was shot down after opposition from other conservatives who opposed a blanket prohibition on any state-AI legislation.

It does seem very difficult to deal with. state-by-state regulation when you're running an internet. The chat is adding some commentary. QSBS rollover says little language models are threatened. Yeah, yeah. We must defend the little language models. Taylor says USG doesn't realize the future of LLM proliferation looks more like the AK-47 and less like the bomb.

Well, yeah, I mean, maybe that's a bold case for state regulation since most of, I mean, there are some federal regulations, obviously, but a lot of it's state-by-state. The California compliant AR-15, the California compliant LLM will be severely nerved. It certainly cannot do physics. It certainly cannot do physics, yeah. It would be too dangerous. Anyway, Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products. Meet the system for modern software development.

Streamline issues, projects, and product roadmaps. Leading the future will generally align with the White House AI and CryptoZard, David Sachs. A frequent critic of AI Doomers, the organization plans to start working for, States seen as key AI policy battlegrounds, New York, California, Illinois, and Ohio. The group said it would support both Democrats and Republicans. It would include federal and state PACs and a 501C4 organization that advocates for policies. The network's AI campaign is expected to start later this year. One of the best-man venture capital firms, Andreessen Horowitz, is also a big backer of Fair Shake.

Billionaire co-founder Mark Andreessen was one of the most notable tech executives to support Donald Trump. year after previously boosting Democrats. Part of a swing in Silicon Valley towards conservatives, the shift is worried some Democrats who fear they may be hemorrhaging support without more positive messaging around AI. Brockman co-founded Chad GPT maker OpenAI along CEO Sam Altman and others and is now one of of Altman's top deputies. He is contributing to the new group with his wife, Anna Brockman, who he married.

And yes, this is the quote on a workday. Other backers include 8 BC managing partner and Palantir Technologies co-founder Joe Lonsdale, AI search engine perplexity, and veteran angel investor Ron Conway is in the deal. So certainly bipartisan. Well, it'll be fun to track that and see what kind of billboards they're buying, what kind of out-of-home advertising they're doing, what kind of, maybe they should have over to adquick.com. Out-of-home advertising made easy and measurable. I like, I was actually just talking about, you know, like a lot of these packs, they run like attack ads or they run, you know, policy ads. They put out policy papers. There's a variety of things that they can do.

Let's get a lead the futures packs spending, I would say like at least half, you know, the $100 million on ad quick. We'll work on making it happen. But without further ado, we have our first guest in the restream. Bell, Darren, how are you doing? Welcome to the show. How we doing? We're doing great. We're doing great. Excited to have you. What a fantastic backdrop. This is not a virtual background, correct? No, it is not. It's a one-of-one page. of Kobe Bryant called Unfinished Business and you know I was pretty close to Kobe and had them in my office staring at me

making me do my best every day that you know that's a good thing I over the weekend I rewatched the Kobe Bryant Wyden and Kennedy ad campaign

the Kobe system are you familiar with this Geordie? Are you familiar with this Kobe system ad campaign? It is remarkable. It's like this

bizarre blend of comedy all in promotion of the latest run of shoes, but we should watch and dig into that at some point because it is fantastic. Anyway, could you give us a little bit of background introduction on yourself just for those who might not be familiar? Sure. I was at ESPN for 13 years covering the business of sports, did that for six years at CNBC. Then went over to gambling, the quant kind of gambling side with the Action Network sold to a Danish company called Better Collective. And for the last year and a half

I've been running collect, which is on one side, pretty much the best journalism source proudly in covering collectibles. We also advise teams, leaks, and brands on what to do in collectibles, building their bespoke

collectibles, have 13 clients and excited about that side business. What's on the frontier of like collectibles? What's what's something where that you've seen like a team or league do that's kind of out of the typical path?

Well, we actually just helped the Washington Capitals do a piece that teams have never done before. So like our idea is if we're advising you, you're going to make something cool. We'll stand in the

background and be white label. So when Alexander Ovechkin broke 895 goals that the all-time NHL records, I literally was shoveling the ice that came off the Zamboni after the second period we got 125 gallons of ice we put them in these kind of like receptacles

that then looks like it's the real ice it's a mini rink and you get it in a cherry wood box and the 895 on the back has the shavings from the gold stick that Ovechkin was presented with by the NHL. So $1,500 range. These are high-end things

that teams have never done before. So those type of things we're working on. That's very cool. Let's talk about the $13 million card and the buyer that was just announced. Can you break down kind of the significance of that deal, how it came to be, and kind of what you expect out of? Yeah, so this is very non-traditional.

when you hear about cards, you think about the most valuable, and two cards come up, the T206 onus Wagner from 2009-1911, and of course the 1952 tops making mail. For the most part, for all time, that has been one and two alternating, with the small exception of Mike Trout for a little bit. And how often do those actually trade, like reprice effect? So it depends on what grades. So a PSA 8 out of 10 of a mantle will trade maybe twice a year. A PSA 9 will trade maybe once every two or three years.

And a PSA 10 mantle, there's three of them. They're probably, in order for someone to trade it at this point among those three guys, they'd probably have to get $40 million for it. so that hasn't traded in 10 years the honuses there's 60 of them they trade usually once a year and now you have these other cards these modern cards which in 2003

upper deck started coming out with these exquisite and logo man cards essentially gives you signed from a couple of players and then patches of that where upper deck says that it's been represented to them that this is a game-use patch. And these cards back then were $35,000 to $100,000. In the last

five years, they've become easy million-dollar cards. And, you know, there's not many of them. Most of them are one-of-ones. So the Kobe LeBron, the Kobe Jordan, whatever. And this one was seen as kind of the most coveted. A couple years ago, probably would have sold for $5 million, bucks and now there's a lot of interest um there's interests from the people that bought it uh kevin o'leary and matt allen started secure collectibles which is essentially we think um of funds to buy into these modern cards previously you've had like funds for like vintage and get into these vintage cards but the modern cards seem to be the ones that people are into um and uh it's hard for me i have about a 15 million dollar collection. I've been collecting for

20 years. It's hard for me to get into the modern cards. What is that? I dropped a... No, no. It's just a big number, so I had to hit the... We're just excited for it. That's a huge collection. Yeah, yeah. So, but I don't really... I collect real one-of-ones. To me, this is... I'm not trying to

shoot it down, but this is manufactured scarcity, right? The card company says it's one-of-one. I'm collecting something that's like really one-of-one. Like, you know... Well, this is played out somewhat in the in the car world as well like you know i think from from what i understand like the the sort of true classic Ferrari market has somewhat slowed in that uh the the younger generation the instagram

generation uh the millennials are probably more focused on some of these modern supercars like they might be more interested in a acquiring an SP3 that that that has happened that is definitely happened um you know it the question becomes obviously the 13 million dollar card so so so this card now has surpassed on the price alone the honus and the and the and the and the mantle you know the question is like there's there's a lot of people still collecting a lot of these modern cards and they rely on we're in a degenerate economy my my friend howard linds and that's his term that he loves um and uh you know my my son opens up pack and he's 11 years old and if it doesn't have a number on it if it's not out of 25

or have a gold little foil or whatever he literally throws it in the garbage it's in the garbage and you're having these businesses now that are we getting are we getting the youth hooked on on gambling at a young age is that is that is that I think everything is on tilt so so if they're not gambling straight up gambling there they they know about Bitcoin already they know about things that trade non-stop you know the stock market stops um and so they're always like these repacks have you seen these digital repacks basically what happens is you open up cards that they've scanned in the system okay so they've opened the packs they have cards they've

scanned in the system you open it it spins it opens it's like a slot and then if you And then if you don't get what you love, now you could take that, they could send it to you. If you don't get what you love, you could sell it back immediately at 80% of the value. Now, normally you'd say 80%, that's horrible. Like, I lost 20%, and, you know, that's so bad. However, if you come in from a gambling world, 80%'s great, because it's a zero-sum game, right? Like if you're gambling, when you lost, you lost, it's zero. them. And so if you compare it against the gambling world, so these companies are, you know,

this company courtyard, July, they did $60 million in repacks. And they're making the delta every time someone returns something back or if they're shipping it to them. And so, yeah, I mean, we're all on tilt right now. We can't go back. Yeah, that makes sense. Um, what is the, give us a read on the overall state of the collectibles market right now. On the, absolutely on. I mean, if you go to Fanatics Fest, if you go to the National Sports Collector's Convention, 125,000 people, kids walking around with briefcases with $30,000 worth of cards, it is not what it was when I was a kid. I think the energy is there, but the money and the, I mean, it's outrageous.

There are going to be things that will pop. I don't think the whole thing is a bubble, but there are a bunch of things that don't make sense. I think there's just a lot of very interesting markets, PSA, which grades everything, just starting grading magazines. You know, so what magazines do you want to grade? I say, okay, like, everyone finds their own niche. For me, it's Hollywood debuts the first time someone has come on a magazine, right? And so, hold on one second, hold on a second. No worries.

Let's bring this bin over here. We need PSA-graded arena mags and colossus bags. So, you know, we got, for sure. I mean, like, this is a beautiful. You know, you got the Claw Daddy, you know, Akroyd, Belushi. You know, that's an early, that's an early one. You got the first time John Candy appeared on a magazine in 1985, a Canadian only.

You know, you got the first Ralph Machio here. I just appreciate how, how I know, I know, I know, I know, like, two out of the 10 names. Yeah, right, exactly. But talk about the shape of the market and who the kind of key players are. I know that eBay, at some point or another, I think people were kind of writing them off,

but they seem to have... No, the issue is that live commerce is the thing, you know, and right now eBay Live is just not as great as whatnot, which is just doing tons of business, and so they're they're a little bit behind I think so to so the so live live is and live is is dominating the traditional auction live is dominating a lot of it has to do with breaking which is also gambling so I told you about repacks breaking breaking is

essentially I buy a team right so like let's say I spend $3,000 and I want to buy the Golden State Warriors and they open up a box and all these people are watching, do I get a Steph Curry or do I get? And if you don't get one, they have to give you kind of some sort of card because otherwise it's an illegal lottery. Again, these things are on the cost of will attorney general, you know, get into these and say these are, this is gambling, but yes, these are breaking is just another reason why, you know, live is just going crazy. strategy been to date? I know they've been acquisitive and they now have an advantage right in terms of actually originating. They have all the rights. They're about to take over the NBA rights.

They have the Major League Baseball rights through tops. They're about to take over the NFL rights. They have Fanatics Live, which is breaking. They, you know, clearly have a lot. They have Fanatics Collect, which is their auction house. So they're really, really involved in the game. to a point of, you know, almost or definitely monopoly power. Interesting. What do you think of Lubbubu? We got a question in the chat. I think it's hard to figure out, see, the key to PSA and the key to the growth of collectibles

has been population reports. Tell me exactly how many there are, right? So I can tell you there's only three. Mickey Mantle PSA 10s, right? On Lubbubu, it gives me the odds, but I feel like I need to know live how many have been opened. How many have, like, how do we figure out how to have population reports and grading these things? Because that's what gives you like the want and the wish to say, okay, I want to invest in these things, other than just have, again, that's just a, these mystery boxes are another way to gamble. Yeah, the degenerate economy. What about in the business collectible space? I know there's, there, there was this signed Steve Jobs business card that traded, but what are you tracking there?

I like jobs. I was worried about the number of checks that came out. I am one of two people who own a Steve Jobs signature that says, go change the world. I think that's a, that's a cool one that I'm holding on to. I own the largest Warren Buffett's signature in the world. It's two feet long on 18 uncut, uncirculated dollar bills. Wow. I think, you know, when Warren passes, I think someone's going to want that on their wall. I'm going to hold for now. Do you think there's a potential play to build a kind of vertical marketplace for just business collectibles, or is that not the way? Yeah, for sure.

I have every Berkshire Hathaway meeting pass from 1996 to 2025. That's incredible cool. The hardest one to get is 2000. I just got it, so I'm really excited about it. The business cards are tough, though, because unless they're signed, it's hard to figure out if they're real. Yeah, we're in a unique position. We were recently at the Figma IPO, and we brought a special gong and had the CEO, Dylan Field, ring the gong. We were thinking about how we should evolve that.

And we have a big studio here. We can hang them from the raft game hit gongs or something where they sign at the IPO. That would be pretty good. Okay. I don't know that we're doing it for, it's more just for lore at this point than ROI. Yeah, but if you had a hundred gongs, you know, that would be kind of cool. We'll work on them. I always tell, I always tell teams, you know, when you have a concert of an important figure in there,

you should give them some custom thing. and then you should have your own custom thing so that you get it signed. Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense. Yeah. But it's a, listen, it's a fun vertical. It's, you know, if you know what you're doing, I think like anything, you should have a take, right?

You should have a strong take and you shouldn't be a follower. You know, like, why do you think something should increase in value? And I jump all over the place in terms of trying to get into markets every day. I think the Beatles, costly, but still has a huge runoff. Yeah, right? There's two guys still alive. You know, how do you figure all that stuff out? Yeah. Is there, is there a cottage industry of people like specifically in music collectibles that are just focused on acquiring assets from artists that are emerging today? Yes. Or do people typically kind of wait too late to start taking an artist seriously? Well, again, it's like it's it's it's not too late, right? It's it's it's not too late in music because I think again, we're still so behind. um you know billy joel right like every you could see there's now there's there's a fur for

billy joel type stuff you could still get some good stuff now you can't get his own his first concert at msg because i own the only two of the world and i'll have to sell it to you but you know there you can get into these things it's not it really is not too late it's never too late you have to just say okay at the price it is now what type of upside does it have but in you Music in general, I think, Billy Joel, Bon Jovi, Springsteen, Madonna, all early, early days. How do you influencers play into the world of collectibles? I've followed the story of Ed Bolian and the Lamborghini Mercilago market where he kind of figured out that they were maybe less of a certain type. I think it was particularly manual transmission LP640s.

the market had estimated that maybe it was like, you know, 60% people went for automatic when that car came out. And when he actually put all the vins together, figured out all the numbers, it was more like 99% of people had selected automatic. And then he popularized that through a series of YouTube videos. And I believe the market really caught up because of that. Does that happen? Do you have any stories around that? Yeah. I mean, I controlled the ticket market.

So when PSA said they were coming out with grading. tickets. I said, okay, I got to find the 100 best tickets of all time. I've got to be really quiet about it. And then a year later, I got to say, hey, tickets are great. Now, this was not just a pump on me, because I should say that I've only sold about 1% of my collection. However, I bought Tiger Woods' first PGA tour event for $1,000, and then a year later sold it for $77,000. You know, so. Yeah, underwrite the entire collection. So some big, yeah, there were definitely some ridiculous. Pop's. I bought the

nicest full ticket of Marilyn Monroe singing happy birthday to JFK, bought it for $6,000, sold it for $105,000. You know, so like, there you can give me another one. There we go. So, so

yeah, you can influence markets, and I do, but again, it's genuine, right? I love, I love tickets. Yeah, yeah. I mean, at a certain point, like what Ed Bowleyon did with Lamborghini was like very much fact-finding. He wasn't manipulating the market.

He was just bringing extra... Sharing information. Yeah, I do. I do. Do you worry that... Do you worry that so many different things in our lives have gone digital, which just reduces the number of, like... Yeah, but is that a positive or negative?

Yeah. No, that's a good point. And I would say in collectibles, you can't appeal to every audience. The ticket market is going to really appeal to the 40 to 65-year-old. person right now and guess what those are the people that have the most money to spend so should I feel bad that I'm not that that that the 20 to 35 year old doesn't care about my market no I especially if you have one of ones right like you know I have the only 1899 silver certificate that was in the

pocket of a guy who died on the Titanic like okay my market isn't that liquid but I need two people I don't need 700 yeah right and that's That's really where, you know, for my philosophy, it's like the real one-of-ones, yes, if you collect cards, you immediately know how much that's worth, usually, if it's not a one-of-one because you go on eBay and it's sold yesterday. To me, that's not fun. I like to buy a real one-of-ones where someone says, hey, I'll pay, I'll pay you $20,000 for Disney paying his 1962 taxes, his check.

And I'd say, no, I want $130. you're not going to go and find it somewhere else. So you're going to pay me or whatever. So the real one-of-one markets are less liquid, but in a lot of ways they're more secure if you really believe in it. Yeah. We have some space here in the studio.

We would like to acquire a car that has some, like, you know, provenance with a great technology, CEO, I don't know that we were, we'd be in the market for Elon's F1 yet and crashed with, with PT. Yeah, yeah, yeah, but what, is there, is there a great, is there a great, uh, former vehicle of a, of a Silicon Valley CEO? There were a bunch of, there were a bunch of replica cars that were exact replica cars that sold, uh, on Saturday. Uh, there was a Ghostbusters replica Hearst. There was two Jurassic Park

Jeep vehicles which were kind of cool I'm trying to think of like what normally if someone drives Larry Ellison You know Larry Ellison's McLaren F1 just went to auction $23 million Yeah Yeah just out of the price range for us

But hopefully Which is interesting because often if you have houses owned by celebrities Or houses that were used in movies People think that it ups the value it actually decreases the value. Interesting. People who are buying these houses

at the $3 to $5 million level or the $20 million level, they don't care that a movie was filmed in there or a celebrity had it. They just care about what are the bones and how much do I have to redo? There's a, the house that was used in Hanna, Montana is near me in Malibu.

Okay. And if you owned it, it would actually be extremely frustrating because every single day typically European tourists are taking pictures in front of it so you'd just be constantly in the background of just random photos.

Yeah, that's kind of, that's like what happened with the Home Alone house in, you know, in Illinois. You know, it's, people just keep coming by, you become part of house tours. Yeah, do you think,

like, how do you think the internet and modern technology is changing, like, the creation of collectibles? Because when I think about tickets, I feel like almost everything's digital now, people don't really get the physical tickets. And so maybe,

some of your work and what you're doing consulting with folks like allow us for the creation of new unique collectibles that kind of fill that but are we seeing like net more inventory or less inventory there's just so I feel like so many products whether I used to give someone a DVD box set or a book and now it's yeah you probably have it on Spotify anyway just go yeah and and I was I asked generally about this a bit earlier but but also is there did you ever get excited about new technology like NFTs that I do so I think there's I think there's actually the shame of it is that blockchain got thrown out with and with the NFT decline and I don't think they should be together blockchain has great applications just really really

good for future for counterfeiting for everything in this space that we've been struggle for for for friction right you can move something frictionless you don't have to get it graded then put it on eBay and so I I do think that that I'm not the NFTs unfortunately I think a lot of it was just grift and garbage and it just it just is what it was and it and because bad actors gravitated to it I think it got a bad reputation yeah I don't think all them deserve that and I certainly think that blockchain has significant applications. I think we just need a little bit more time away, and it will emerge.

Yeah, we had a founder, a CEO of an NFT company called Pudgy Penguins on the show, and they've kind of gone backwards where they're focused on creating real products in the real world and kind of bootstrapping the community that way. They've already done the NFT launch, and that's kind of been... It's almost going back through typical licensing. Exactly. Exactly. And I think it's worked out really.

I just saw one gifted from a grandmother to a grandson. And I had no idea that there was any connection there. So certainly, at least that company has kind of figured out a way to... But I do think that the young population does like physical still. Yeah. When it's available. Totally. Perfect.

Well, thank you so much for hopping on. This is fantastic. Anytime there's something in the news, hit us up. I'd love to have you on to break it down. You got it. Thanks, guys. Cheers, Darren. Let me tell you about numeral sales tax and autopilot.

Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance in numeralHQ.com. And we have Dr. Drew in the waiting room. In the restream waiting room, we're bringing in Dr. Drew to hear the real story of Dr. Drew.com. I botched the story earlier on the stream if you're turning in in my defense. I believe I was nine years old at the time. But I'm glad to have Dr. Drew here on the show. Hopefully, let's bring in Dr. Drew Pinsky. How are we doing?

There we go. Can you hear us? Welcome to the stream. Hello? We are working on audio. Let's sort that out. And in the meantime, let me tell you about fin.a.I. The number one AI agent for customer service.

number one in performance bandsmarks, number one in competitive bakeoffs, number one ranking on G2, fin.a.I. Production team, tell me how we are doing. Hopefully we can get Dr. Drew in. Sounds like we're having audio issues. We will jump into the timeline. I can also just have him call my phone. I'm hearing something. Can you hear us? Oh, hello. Wow. Looking sharp. You really undersold this. You said you were just going to do a phone call, and now here you are. No, I thought I did a full warranty here.

This is amazing. Okay, so first off, I need to apologize. I completely botched the story of Dr. Drew.com. In my defense, I believe I was 10 years old when I stopped by the office as a kid. But please break it down for us. It's so funny. The only thing I found disturbing was how miserably you did with my credentials. Oh, I'm sorry.

Let me start with that. Okay, please. physician. I'm a board certified internist. I'm a board certified dictionalysis. I'm a fellow with the American Board of American College of Physicians. I've got multiple, I was an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry and practiced medicine my whole life. I'm not a psychologist. Okay, yes. We did do Love Line back in the day. I loved Loveline. I sincerely love Loveline. I wish I listened to it constantly. It was amazing. Well, it was very popular, and it served a function back in the day, but this business spun out of it. I thought you guys would really like to hear this history, because it is a piece of history.

Incredible. Good friend of mine from high school, Polytechnic High School. We went off to Amherst College, and then he went to Harvard Business School. I went to medical school. And I'm going along doing all these wild things, practicing medicine, and then doing radio. And he shows up and he goes, I want to show you how to form a business. We're going to do a dot-com company. And of course, I was hearing about all the dot-com stuff in the wind.

And he'd got some seed capital from a company in Orange County, like a million. dollars and then he put together a little board and we went he grabbed me by the arm and took me up to sandhill road and we sat at soft back soft bank rather and made it he just said follow me i go what are we doing what do we i had no idea what we were doing didn't know how to start a business i didn't had you had you bought your dot com by the way had you like gone out probably had done something it's like that at that point i don't think we're sitting there without that yeah exactly and uh and he just follow me. And I was like, okay, so I followed along. And they go, what do you want to do? And I'm like, I'm, uh, you know, well, I don't remember what I said, but, uh, the six or seven soft bank

VC representative marched out of the room. And, uh, my Harvard business school friend was anxious and like, I didn't even understand what was happening. Still, I did not. And they came back in and they go, okay, 10 million dollars. That was that. We went down and we built the company exactly as you described it and in fact drove my wife crazy. She goes, what are people doing here? Why aren't they working? It shouldn't be this nice and environment. But most of that was for the tech team and you pointed out how weird the tech situation was. You got that part exactly right.

The part you got wrong is, remember, people didn't have any idea what a website was. And so we had an editorial staff. we had a medical staff we had a marketing team and they envisioned i kept saying why do we need a magazine on my computer screen why you're you're building this really great magazine but with a chat room and with some feedback and they kept they all the all the all these sort of trigger words back now were interaction uh and and i didn't understand i saw no value in any of it i kept saying i i kept and we had 120 employees and we had a board of directors from from Northern California who were demanding we quote get big fast this is interesting

get big fast yeah this guy this I came to our first board meeting I said look I I I'm trying to decide if we should figure out how to make money how to make this profitable or or what we should be doing or how to you know did they tell you don't worry about that don't worry about that worse than that this one guy goes if he was manic as hell and he goes if I thought you were so stupid but I never would have been on this board. And he jumps up and he goes, here's how you make money a dot com company. And there was a giant whiteboard.

And he wrote in huge letters, get big fast. And they were demanding we burn through capital faster to try to get big fast. So that became the weird, it was the weirdest thing I ever seen in my life. But the one thing I got right, I kept saying it's going to be video.

Why else do we need this thing? It's going to be video. Look what we're doing right now, right? Yeah. And I just kept saying that. And we put together a one night a week television show that was really a high quality show. We still have some of the tapes from it. And everybody came in, Paul Rudd, Tommy Lee. Everybody came on that one night a week show because it was the cool thing to do. Because there's this new idea. This dot com company creates a TV show. And nobody could watch it. You know why? Because you couldn't stream it. Because nobody had stream. Nobody had broad. a band. Broadband. You needed broadband back then. That's how far ahead of the technology we were. Sounds like you weren't making a ton of money, but were you selling the show on a subscription? Like, what did that? Was there any business model? Or like any revenue model?

No. Just eyeballs. Just eyeballs. So Get Big Fast didn't mean revenue or profits. It meant eyeballs. Eyeballs. Get Big meant money, been a number of people. And they kept talking about how the you know, how the ascetic curve would develop around viewership and engagement and this kind of stuff. And we literally, this was a company, I mean, had lots of traction and engagement and stuff. People were kind of intrigued by it. So people were stopping by and looking at this thing. I'm not sure. We did lots of interviews with celebrity.

It was sort of like E meets, Teen B meets, you know, it was all these different things all together in one site. And we literally were sitting in Goldman Sachs on, I believe it was March 19th, 2010, when was that? I'm sorry, 1989 or 2000. The day the NASDAQ fell apart. Oh, sure. The day. We were sitting in Goldman Sachs and the woman across the table was contemplating giving us $30 million on a $110 million valuation for a company. that had never made a penny.

Wow. And I just thought it was the dumbest thing I ever saw, but I knew it was tulips the whole way, and one friend of mine finally goes, look, it's Amsterdam 1680, it's tulips. You're going to grow Brussels sprouts, or are you going to grow tulips? What are you going to do?

I thought, all right, I'm going to grow tulips. Well, it's interesting to think back, and if it was structured as an investment that was actually in you, in your name and likeness, it would have been a tremendous investment. but that wasn't a good dot-com story. It was why we got the money, though.

In fact, as an ink article on my wall here, I was going to actually pull down and wave in front of the camera, but it'd be almost impossible to do it. They were sort of saying that's what they were, you know, that's kind of what they were thinking they were doing. But it was not a clear thought, but they were looking for brands.

And I don't think they really knew that, that was not a fully developed thought at that time. Yeah. So what was the conclusion? It was like going to business school, I saw the entire, the entire, from seed to dissolve, I saw the entire business cycle in one year. So did you eventually take over the site again yourself? No, Dr. Coop bought the site.

Remember Dr. Coop? You wouldn't, you're too young. He was the attorney general, and then he had a website that actually did rather well for a minute. Did he just redirect the website, or was he still using Dr. Drew.com? No, no. Oh, he was a redirect. Okay, cool. Dwarbed everything.

And he went bankrupt, as everybody did. Yeah. And we got, we were able to weasel it back. I forget how we got it back, but we had to do some sleuthing or we finally got it back. So, yeah, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, like, how do you think about packaging everything that you do now? Um, you know, there, there is, there is, I was this. to you guys talk and i was thinking boy i don't have any framework this is all very interesting

to me but but i don't have a framework to sort of understand what i do my stuff is always an improvisation sure right when i started radio in 1983 i know designs on radio i just i was leave me alone so i can practice medicine i'll come here in the evenings on sunday and do community service that was my very little notion in 1983 when i started doing radio then there's some television guys came along i'm like how do you do a tv show i've never i don't even know what you're talking talking about. Well, this was the same thing with the dot com. My good friend comes to me and goes, we're going to do this. And I thought, I don't see it. I don't get it. But I think we might be able to do something with it. It would be interesting. It was a hell of an education.

And you're asking how I frame everything I do now. Now, yeah, I was wondering how it's just been interesting how many technology friends from the dot com to, you know, podcasting. But it all comes back to basically radio and TV. Yeah. Like what over, over the past, you know, more recent tech boom history, have you been hit with the, hey, let's do a crypto thing? Or let's do an AI, Dr. Drew. Is this coming, is it rearing its head again? That has been, that has been, I've had conversations like that. Yeah, of course. Exactly what to do with it. Nobody knows. Nobody, right? But it's part of the exploration. I'm doing streaming shows regularly. You guys blasted them up there. It looked like hell. Wait,

where you put it up there. I'm going to talk to my webmaster. I mean, it looks really good for conversion optimization. It made me want to click. I think your person is doing a good job. Not meant to be showing other people's shows, I guess. But, you know, that's been interesting. It happened.

That all happened just because I got canceled for daring to say people shouldn't panic about COVID. Oh, yeah. And that caused me to just stop doing everything. And I had somebody who said, hey, you should do a streaming show. I was like, what's that? Again, that's where I start every one of these projects. Yeah, you had a bad experience streaming the first time where you're like, if I make the show,

you're sure people are going to be able to watch it. A little more confidence this time. No, no, I knew it. I already knew that. I saw what was happening with videos. We just kept saying we were so early. We could have been, who knows what, we could have been, you, God knows we could have been YouTube or something

if we had sort of been the first to really advocate. for this kind of platform but we were way early and nobody else was quite as much of a believer as i was and uh so the streaming thing has been very interesting and you just i'm in my own my kids playroom doing this and it's the same thing everything here used to require me to go out to a satellite booth at cnn yeah and now i just do it from here so the efficiencies are fantastic and so i do television out of the studio i do podcasting out of the studio i do streaming shows and it all started because I got canceled and some of my webmaster said the streaming is probably going to happen pretty soon I said let's try that and I wanted to talk to all

the people other other physicians who have been canceled one of them happens to be the director of the NIH right now and so I just the sense that these people had something to say and the cancellation thing was some sort of bizarre aberration certainly in science and medicine had you have you gotten you know the opportunities that you may be lost due to the cancellation, have you gotten invited back in the last year or so? Or is it just a different set of opportunities? Or is it, yeah, are you looking at totally different?

Or do you not even want to go back to kind of the old? Those are great questions. I don't know that I want to go back, but I probably would because I've taken the position that my opinions have never changed. I'm happy to express them on any platform anywhere. What has happened in the meantime is, you know, what I used to do, say, all the news outlets,

all of them, all of a sudden, the only people that would have me on was Fox. Now, just last week, CNN called. So I thought, okay, good, this is a good sign. I couldn't make it, but I would have, had I been able to schedule. Nature's healing. Nature's healing, yeah.

We've been really obsessed with this idea that sort of a barbell is emerging in modern media where all the value either accrues to the platforms, like YouTube, Twitch, Instagram, or the individuals, the Joe Rogan, the Andrew Huberman, the Dr. 100%, and that it's very hard to actually build anything in the middle. Would you agree with that?

Would you, is this something that you've kind of experienced? It feels like something that... No, I absolutely concur with the, on the talent side. Yeah. Because it used to be, I would require to do what we're doing right now. Yep. There'd be an executive producer. There'd be a segment producer.

There would be a director in the studio in the satellite booth. There'd be somebody directing in the other end at the satellite booth. And then you got the union, the unions involved with it. There'd be unions, every sales forces, there'd be executive structure. Now it's me. Yeah. That's it. Yeah.

So it's so much more efficient and it drives that world crazy. Yeah. So when Colbert gets fired for losing $40 million a year, I just looked at that and I go, well, of course. Yeah. That's going to happen to all of them. This is just not a model. Yeah. And our reaction at that point was he could just go set up his own home studio and probably

We have a fantastic business just with his existing fan base and none of the overhead. 100%, but they are, they are, you got to know how that world thinks. They're very spoiled. They're very spoiled, and they're used to gigantic infrastructure and dozens of writers. And this is this, the world we're living in right as we have this interview. To them look sort of cheap and dumb and people who aren't talented to do that. The real people, people back us with infrastructure and money. That's just not, so this, the other side of the barbell, which I'm wondering how you see it,

I just see it as largely non-viable. So much of it has got to shrink dramatically, and it's resisting. Yeah. It's resisting like crazy. Yeah, I mean, I would almost put the traditional media corporations like in the center. When I think of the far big mega side of the barbell, I think of the platforms, Spotify, Facebook, meta, YouTube, Twitch, LinkedIn, the networks, and they actually accrue a ton of the value, and it is extremely hard to start one of those companies. If you do,

you're not talent at all. In fact, you're probably an engineer. And you probably at this point have the backing of like a state government because that's the only way TikTok got going was so much energy and capital flowing in to actually, you know, break through. The ship has sailed on starting like new platforms for the most part in my opinion. I think that's probably right. And they don't need to buy talent. No, not at all. It just comes to them naturally and they give 50% of the revenue or whatever. Yeah, we would rather just have you jump on our show from your studio. And you benefit because people are going to trickle over to you.

And X makes money on their ads. We just get to focus on making content and not focused on talent management. But the interesting thing is you have to wonder, are we somewhere in a business cycle that's going to lead to some consolidation? and when the talent consolidates, are they going to start negotiating with the platforms? Is there going to be some sort of... I mean, that would be a natural business cycle, right? Yeah, what was that new left-wing substack publication that just announced?

They said they're lipping out or something. Remember this? Yeah, what are the... Anyway, there's like a collection, the argument. So there's a new publication that's launching that's aggregating a number of writers who are sort of on the left. and we were kind of debating will they have leverage over different platforms because they're all together or does it actually make more sense for Matt Eglacius and Derek Thompson to just have their own substacks and go direct and then you know and then on the far other side is the is the platform and there's really no one in between

but we're still early in the in the development of the argument well there's something very strange it says there's a weird confluence of worlds right now yeah my son just texted me and And he's, he's been trying to get to you guys. Really? No this. Does he want to, does he want to, do you want to, do you want to join? We'll send him a link. Yeah, yeah, we'll send him.

You can join right after you. Listening, maybe call my phone and I'll put you up to the microphone here. Let's do it. Let's do it. He's consolidating the ad department, you know, the management, the lawyering, the ad services, the distribution. He's trying to consolidate that onto a tiny little team. Sure.

Because these things are necessary. All this stuff is not needed anymore. You need an ad agency. Yeah, this is amazing. The chat is going wild. Everyone's really happy with this. They're calling your son the prodigal son. I'm going to see if I get him to call me.

He said he emailed his partner named Jake emailed one of you guys. Okay, okay. We'll have to follow up. But they're having huge success. He's the one to start talking about AI. He's in the middle of all of this. The tech influencers, the Google store. or the Sixthock store or everything.

But all of that is more efficient, more efficient, more efficient, right? And what you have is the talent agencies and the ad agencies and the managerial services and the lawyers holding on. They're like going into the foxholes as opposed to adjusting and adapting and changing what it is they do.

They are just insisting the things continue to be done the way that they've always been done. And it's, I guess, a classic business, mistake right yeah totally yeah um i have one i have one uh one one one health one health one question for you yeah what are the uh uh john and i are starting a what we hope to be a multiple decades run of of uh daily live streaming uh what would you have done when when you were earlier in your career health-wise to um to better sell you know you seem to be doing incredibly well now so what are what are the key things to look out for health-wise to make sure you can do this for

decades um be hypomanic uh helps which which a lot of successful business people are yes you're going to the as you know as i hear many of the podcasts you're going to suffer you're going to work hard you're going to lose sleep i wish i'd pay more attention to sleep but if i had i couldn't have done most of what i did i'm trying to pay attention to sleep now And, you know, you've heard it all before. It's not, this is not new. Trust your instincts, explore. Don't be afraid to fall down.

For me, the big, as I look back on all the things I did, it's just the willingness to improvise and to go into dangerous situations. I mean, a lot of, oh, he's calling now. Let's get him on. We got the sun on. I don't know if they can hear. I'll have to translate it from you. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Put on speakerphone. Hey, how's it going, guys? How you doing? What's happening? It's not obviously, but we, my business partner and I actually emailed you a couple weeks back. Okay. We rep Roberto Nixon. Oh, no way.

I love Roberto. That's amazing. Okay, yeah, we got to get in touch. My dad was on the air with you guys right now. I'm flying back from Seattle. Okay, yeah. Okay, I do. So we did have a little exchange.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's follow up. He's going to keep talking, okay. I'll tell him what you said. He can't hear you. Okay. He's talking, Douglas. I was going to say that I, so Rob and Jake are going to an oasis concert.

next week in Pasadena. And I was going to ask you if you could meet Rob in Pasadena. Okay, yeah. His sister also, her kids are going to Polly. And Douglas went to Polly too. That's amazing. That's amazing. It's a little reunion.

Like you said at the beginning of the show, only famous people go to Polly Technics School. That's fantastic. No, I just wanted to say hi and show you that we're not like the rest of those guys that probably email you randomly asking for things and wanting to build a relationship. It's very funny that this all happened in a strange way. So yeah, this is amazing.

Incredible. I actually have to take a call for this creator named Rourkeith. Who's a Gen AI creator because he's in Dubai and I, you know, just trying to get on the fucking... You got to get on with Dubai. We know, we know how that goes. All right, get going. I call these guys because they butchered my... My dot com.

And I did get some... John. Which one's John? I'm John. John. John was actually at Dr.D.com when he was like 10 years old. Yeah, intern in the year. Yeah.

I was in the very cold data center. Yeah. Racking servers. That's spectacular. So there's a long history on all fronts. Andy went to Pollock. Okay, we'll talk later. Yes, Andy went to punk.

Amazing. Okay. Okay, I have one more question on the health side. For you, for you. Okay. Sorry, Douglass. Later, Douglas. Later.

Yeah. For you. Last week, we had Mark Cuban on the show. He said that drinking raw milk is extremely dangerous and should never be done. Yet, I drank, I drank, I'll go on the record, I drink a leader of raw milk every day, every day for two years straight. And you were fine?

Yeah. What's the, uh, so anecdotal? Did he explain why? He didn't, he didn't give any underlying rationale. Yeah, I doubt he knows why. He was just saying that the LLMs might convince you to drink raw milk and that might lead to some sort of doom scenario. You can get brucellosis, you could probably get two, You can get Listeriosis, and we can treat that with antibiotics, no problem. But they can make you very sick, and they're very rare. I wouldn't do it, but I don't.

The fact that, look, there's something terrible going on where people are so fearful of being the biological agents that we are, and the reality that we are going to die, that they are afraid to live. living well is the goal not living forever not living perfectly free of illness it's living a good life and we are off of that i can't great we are so far off of that it is disgusting and for a non-physician to have an opinion about milk that contains pathogenic organisms that he's never heard of or he learned to pronounce yesterday is disturbing to me the same thing was when people went after hydroxychloroquine, the day they learned how to say that word, a medicine I've been prescribing for decades. So it's all, we are so out of whack with this going to live forever, fear of death,

oh, illness, infection, oh, shit. Yes, we are, we, we, we, my generation of physicians, we walked into illnesses that had 100% fatality. AIDS had 100% fatality, and we did not know what we were dealing with. And we didn't cower in the corner. We marched in. the right thing to do that i don't know what's happened i i can't understand this at all but uh here we are we need to focus on living well living a good life period you uh did you uh did you did you predict the decline of alcohol consumption hmm it's i did not it's it's a lot of a cliff right yeah yeah i did that's still surprising to me but it fits with the lack of dating and the lack of having sex the lack of socializing it it that was that was a that was a

a prime social lubricant for decades. I'm glad to see it. It's a good thing. You know, the people are starting to understand. It's a poison and it's not good for any tissue in our body ever. But it makes me all so, I mean,

what happens? When did we become such pussies? When did that happen? That's my question of days. When did that happen? I don't know. Have you ever said something like that on CNN? This is why you've got to stay off the networks.

You just got to be. do your own show i i guess i'm just i've been through so much lately i've just lost all uh inhibition i i'm a huge advocate for freedom of speech and freedom of many i'm not happy about this flag burning thing we freedom freedom freedom is what i'm all about now i will put you one possible explanation um i i think that the the fear of very you know consequential but low probability events, like the raw milk or the risk from raw milk or the risk from COVID, is tied to a lack of belief in immortality and not in the sense of living forever, like biological immortality, like science will cure this and let you live

forever. That's just one way to think about immortality. You can also think about immortality in your legacy. If you are written about and you have lived a great life, you will be remembered and immortalized. You can also think about it through your children and also through the afterlife. If you're spiritual or religious, you could think that you're going to heaven. And if you don't believe in any of those modes of immortality, you don't believe that you're going to have kids or do your life's work and be remembered in the afterlife or go to heaven or you don't believe that science will be able to fix you if you do wind up getting sick from raw milk, then even a small chance has an incredible, incredible penalty. And so

you discount it very, very high. I agree with you with a couple of caveats. I do agree with you. Embedded in that observation is a general lack of meaning-making. If the meaning is I'm trying to ascend to a afterlife, whatever the meaning is of my living, that meaning should be deeply meaningful to me and purposeful. It does not have to include an afterlife.

You can also include just creating a good life for my children. that's why I'm here to do that that kind of thing but but we people are here for their narcissistic needs and that's when things become fragile yes because we are not the beginning and the end of everything we just are not and if we think we're all there is is what's happening to me yeah man and then we have people whipping the frenzies and the fear and they're learning to control us with that and that that is disgusting yeah so what about um have you been tracking tracking AI psychosis at all? Any thoughts there?

I hear about it. I don't believe it. I'll make a bet that it's way overblown. It was somebody who's already psychotic and, you know, whatever. And not that the AI relationships are necessarily going to be good. I worry about that. But this psychotic episode, I don't know. I don't know if you remember back in the 90s, there were news stories every night.

I wasn't born, sir. okay do you have to rub that in do you just said no i don't know no no later 90s i got into the action but uh but there was news reports like every night like oh these parties where all the parents throw their keys in a bowl and they just they just grab a set of keys and that's who they go home with that night oh sure sure the press the fake i don't think people were sensitive to fake news we have to be very sensitive to reporting these days and so much of what's being reported is And it's just to catch your eyes. It's just to get your attention.

The person that wrote that article was a 23-year-old segment producer somewhere who doesn't do any research of any meaning. It just becomes something that they catch on the line. They saw other people report it. They report it. It's ridiculous. Yeah, I mean, my read on it is, it seems obvious now that if a large number of people take ayahuasca, some of them are going to have some type. of psychotic break of sorts and maybe they were prone to or had some some underlying issue that enabled that but the issue with very you're right they already had a psychotic illness and

they just happened to break when they're working with AI but you're raising you're making a very smart observation that the that AI world is populated by people that microdose on acid and do ayahuasca which I tell you it categorically causes severe psychiatric problems. I've seen it my entire career, scares the hell out of me. They should not be doing that. Did you ever consider, yeah, if you're listening live from Burning Man, just listen to Dr. Drew. Did you ever go to Burning Man, by the way? No, we've got friends keep trying to get us to go.

It's not my jam, exactly. It's not my jam either. Well, you could go there and try to talk people out of it. How about we stick to the Bud Light, buddy? Yeah, let's stick to the crushing beers. Have a couple glasses of wine. Anyway, this has been fantastic. Thank you for joining.

Come back on anytime. We appreciate this. We'd love to have you back on. You guys are great. I learned something just listening to you guys. Talking about the baseball cards, they'll fascinating. You guys have a great, you're obviously extremely well trained in your respective fields.

And it's very interesting to hear you talk about these various markets and opportunities and things. And I leave with one caveat. Please. If you don't call my son, he's going to kill me. I know, we will definitely. We're going to, we'll go to this concert with him. We will, we will. Exactly.

It's in Pasadena. Yeah, I live in Pasadena now. You live there now? I do. I live over there. Rose Bowl is literally walking distance for me. So do I. Amazing.

There we go. Did you guys just become best friends? I don't want to cross my address, but I'll swing by you. We live over by Anadale. We live by Annadale. Oh, okay. Yeah, I'm right over there. Okay.

So. Just up late to Vista. No excuse. I don't want to get too, I don't want to get too precise show up with people in the front door. Anyway, thank you so much for hopping on. This is fantastic.

Great hangar. We'll talk to you guys. Bye. That's why we leave a 30-minute gap in the middle of the ass. We've got to start doing that. Anyway, we are shifting gears. We're going into the world of Palantir. We have Colin Anderson coming into the studio.

He's in the really stream waiting room, but we're bringing him in now to talk about running finance at Palantyre. He was there for years. I actually ran into him on Saturday. Got a chance to catch up with him. And he had some fantastic stories. Hopefully you can share most of them here. And we're going to talk about different force multipliers for finance teams and growing businesses like Palantir. I mean, what else do you want? So we will welcome Colin to the studio. How are you doing? Hey, I'm good. Thanks for having me. Good to see you again. It's been too long. It's been almost 48 hours.

I was going to say it pretty short, but good to be here with, I guess, more audience this time. Yeah, for sure. Where should we kick it off? Could you give us a little bit of just history for the listener on your career, your path, particularly like the road into Palantier? I think that that's an interesting story. You were touching on some of the stories there, and then we can kind of take this wherever you'd like. Totally. Let's do it.

Well, maybe just to situate for those I'm meeting for the first time, Colin Anderson, and co-founder here at Friends and Family Capital, venture firm we started. And before that was the CFO at Palantir for a very long time led finance there for eight years. So what does that mean? Intersection of supporting great businesses through finance for two decades. And a lot of scar tissue is the other thing that means. And how do you share that with people? Getting into Palantir, that was really saying, hey, who's working on a really hard problem that matters? And if you look at the time, you had, you know, we were still post 9-11, we were still trying to overcome the false trade-off between national security and being able to defend ourselves and also privacy and civil liberties. And people used to think that that was an impossible trade-off and that seemed like a worthy challenge.

We only have so many, so many hours in the day, we should work on something that matters. And talent density was there and I was just really attracted to that. And it helped having spent time deep in the bowels of an investment bank where you realize that humans are a very expensive piece of middleware. And what if you could see all the data you're supposed to see nothing that you're not? You can probably do a lot of great things there. Yeah. How did you first hear about Palantir? What was your first day on the job like?

Who was around the table? I mean, at this point, people know everyone from Karp to Peter to Shamsankar, like Gary Tan's involved at some point. Like, people know who's around the table, but what was your early, like, first days in the job like? Totally. Well, I was introduced to the company actually through Joe Lonsdale. He brought me in. And I was an industrial engineer by training, which means to my English major friends, I'm an engineer, but to my engineering friends, I'm an English major. So got pretty deep into the process at Palantir in the early days. There were probably 20, 30 people at the time. And Joe said, hey, look, I actually think we're not ready for you. You want to go work with Peter Thiel and myself. up at Clarium Capital. So privilege to work there, learn a lot. And fast forward, the company had grown to the mighty number of, I don't know, just over 100. And Peter's like, hey, I think, I think they might need some help here. It's great. And, you know, it's really the mission that drives you. I was like, I don't know what I'm going to do. Maybe I'll sell software. Maybe I'll talk to

politicians. Maybe I'll help with this finance thing. And I don't think I was very good at the first two, but the last one stuck. So just keep doubling down where it works. Yeah, what was the, what was like day-to-day role like is everything from just like financial control to putting together projections thinking about burn rate i imagine that the company wasn't wildly profitable in the early days it was it's known for being one of those like slower compounders and now is like one of the biggest companies in the world but uh it took a long time to get there what was that like at the early stage uh well Palantir had its time in the desert right where it's the roughly four years of pre-revenue, large expense, wouldn't exist without for, you know, basically Peter Thiel

and the co-founders just pushing through and bringing capital to bear. So what does that look like? And we see this all the time at companies now in our portfolio where you spend all this time in the desert building things. And then suddenly you realize, oh, wow, we actually have a product here. And now we have a real business. What do we do? And finances, you know, at Palantir and today, something you you wish you had yesterday once you realize you need it and uh so it was kind of one of these just fire hoses that you keep your head down and build what was the reaction like from venture capitalists around that time because there's there's there's there's like this is controversial to be working with the government at the same time it's like it is an enterprise

software software software company it should be pretty easy to underwrite if you're an enterprise software venture capitalist i would imagine hopefully um but then at the same time like you're out of the you're out in the desert and so um there's there's a little bit of like you know, is the company mature enough to underwrite this particular investment? It's not this like hot, no-brainer. It's kind of secretive. It's cool, but it's like behind the scenes. So what was the temperature in Silicon Valley around defense tech around that time?

Yeah. Well, first of up, defense tech as a term didn't even exist. So we got it way back. I met the company in 2007 and joined in 2009. And we were very shy because we, you know, no one knew quite what to think of us. We were kind of a, you know, a Marvel team up of a bunch of superheroes that had weird peaks, but also weird valleys and just kept our heads down and built. The really in the earliest days, no one in the valley, you know, but for a small group understood what we were, right? And we made every mistake from what they wanted to invest in, right?

At the time, this was Facebook was cool. So you should be doing consumer, not enterprise. And if you were going to do enterprise, you should sell the big corporate. Well, we're going to actually sell to the government. And, well, if you're going to sell the government, you should go hire a bunch of experienced operators in general. We're like, we're going to go hire a bunch of 20-year-old kids. So, like, every single on the decision tree was like we were wrong. And so that, that, you know, sort of pushed us out.

And it really took building a great product and showing value to customers to actually prove to people that it worked. And it's great to see what they've been able to do. As an investor now, how do you try to underwrite teams that are still wandering in the desert? because there's great examples and survivorship bias that happens when you have a team like Palantir that's wandering in the desert and then you find this, you know, you find something that works and you can really scale out of it. But then I've, you know, I've invested in teams that stumble into the desert and never make it out. So it's not exactly, certainly not a, no guarantee that you're going to find, you know, some palm trees and water. Yeah, you find the skeleton drinking out of the

whiskey bottle a decade later. Not everyone makes it out of the desert. We spend a lot of our time in the earlier stages here at Friends and Family Capital, and we put a lot of our dollars once it's clear it's working. So tech is one of those great businesses where when it works, you can run and you can win a whole lot longer. So we're happy to get involved.

And it's kind of the forward-deployed engineering model. We'll forward deploy. We'll help you. We're not going to charge you. Maybe we'll put 50, 100K small check-in. and but we're really looking for those operational unlocks. When does it look like Palantir? Right? We were there. I joined,

we got about $5 million in revenue. Right. So you sort of $5 million revenue to $20 billion valuation. You see full stack what good looks like. And so you're watching for those inflections. What are some of those? Like getting a seven figure software contract is really hard. So if you see that, you should get pretty excited.

Being in an enterprise and going from, you know, let's say a million a year to three or five million a year, like a multiple. of the initial land that's pretty hard we get pretty excited and i think the other thing is just what's the mission what's the purpose why are people joining this company why is the you know many people why is the 20th person why's the hundred person i say why is the skeptical you know engineer when you're a thousand people going to join you uh fast forward why you know five years post ipo why is the skeptical public market investor going to join you it's got to be you got to be doing something that's that's worthwhile to dedicate your life to um so find a big mission yeah how do you think

about the relationship with the government. I don't know if this is true, but I seem to remember that Incutel made an equity investment. This is the venture arm of the CIA very early on. And so you had this situation where Palantir's like, customer is the government, but the government is also on the cap table. And we're saying that today with Intel. There's now the government's taking an equity position and it feels like this has never happened before. But then when I flash back, I'm like, wait, actually, this isn't the rarest thing. There's a world where the capabilities that are brought to bear by Palantir exist within the U.S. government, and yet they don't.

Like, what, like, how does that, how should, like, the American taxpayer think about the interaction between, like, public, like, private companies and the government? Like, when should the government be willing to invest? When should the government be buying a capability? It's always seemed like Palantir, the actual technology was something that could not be brought to bear with inside the government, even though the government had a very clear set of requirements in front of itself. It needed to be built in Silicon Valley. I mean, software is really difficult.

And some people are, you know, hardware is difficult too, but building world-class software to handle complex things is tough and often can be built better in the valley than, you know, at the coal face. And I think Palantir is a good example of that, but we've got, you know, we've got many examples. But I would push back and say, you can't build great software or great business in an ivory tower. And I think one of the great things about Palantir and you've seen Anderil and we've got a company Paragon technologies, they're really breaking down the barrier of saying, we're going to go build it in an ivory tower and then we'll sell it and people will just use it. It's like, now, if you think of a spectrum of product and services, right, everyone always put Palis. in the services bucket for, you know, the reasons we were misunderstood. Really what you're doing is you want to capture the perfect value delivery of services, right? You're solving one thing for one person that 100% solves their problem, but you want to do it as a product.

But the product roadmap, the traditional playbook says create distance from your customers, not create proximity. So Palantir was able to, this is that forward deployed engineering model you hear a lot about. It's like you need the beauty happens when you get world class software. that's willing to go deep into the belly of the beast at the coal face, you're going down range, you're sitting in an air gap network with a tie on when you're a silic, and that's where you actually see what's the core problem. So we really, I think pounded that in spades. I look for that every day at friends and family. What companies shouldn't be using the forward deployed model? Because anytime something becomes a meme, then everybody starts applying it. It sounds

It sounds like it makes sense. This is the whole like, you know, Uber for dogs kind of meme. People were like, we're Uber for this. And it's like, wait, there's actually unique things that in Uber's sort of supply demand. Consumer package goods. I want Andrew Huberman to come pour this Yurb-Mata into my mouth. It's a forward-deployed caffeine salesman. Yeah, well, it's funny.

Yes, you should run anytime you hear someone pitch themselves as I'm the X for Y. Yeah, it just run. The FDE model, it's great in certain markets. It's terrible in others. The only reason Palantir could pursue anything with deploying is you've got to be solving a hard enough problem, right? So you think of a world-class engineer plus their equity dilution. I mean, this is an expensive check. So you really have to be a capital allocator as a founder to want to pursue this model.

So if you're selling things, small and medium business where your average, contract land is 20k, 100K or less, you shouldn't look at this. Unless you're saying, let's get out there, that's R&D, let's productize it and push it out. When you start to get up into those seven-figure-plus contracts, that can support it. If you're doing eight or nine figure, it definitely can support it. But then, even then, you get people think they're doing it. So I love these conversations. I get probably one inbound, two in-bounds every week of like, hey, how did you do forward-deployed engineering in the early days?

And you can understand if someone's in a position to build it by the questions they ask around it. So you'll get these like figuring out the footwork. What's the what's the pre sales? What's the who does it pre sales or post sales? Is it customer success or is it sales AEs? And like if you're looking at the FD model through that lens, you've lost the plot. Right? It's really like let's start with first principles.

How are you thinking about focusing the firm on stage or or theme or sector? Do you have any kind of guardrails? Well, they already have a round named after them. Yeah. Well, it's funny on the round, so friends and family round, it's usually the early days when it's like a deeply consultative relationship and people who have your best interest at heart and want to, you know, do it. And I don't know, but when we got to the later stages of building Palanty, right,

it was there through the series K, the nature of the relationship changes with your investors around the table. So the ethos here in the name is, how do you extend, to your point, how do you extend that friends and family mentality and really partner and deliver and sort of live your values so to speak like don't take board seats be deeply consultative for deploy your finance people if they need help all those sort of things do do a lot of gen ai companies need help with the finance function we've heard uh we had a we had a we had a video go viral because we had an investor on the show who made an offhand comment about account he said accounting rules

aside and a lot of people pick that up on X and we're we're dunking so counting rules in fact do matter but it was a part of a larger conversation and but but yeah I'm curious like you know what what you're seeing out there in terms of people getting maybe a little too liberal in terms of like what's what's a R what's not AR all that good stuff like one of the core functions of finance there's many it's hygiene right it's hygiene it's eligibility and if you lose that then you're building your house on sand so there's a very important part of the world for for accounting for getting those entries right now you can disagree on the exact accounting treatment you can do your you know your pro forma here's your gap to non-gap reconciliations every company has their own

version of how they run the business but it's helpful to have some standard way of looking at it so i think you you got to get it right but really with finance it's what's the past what's the present what's the future and you've got to do all three if you're running your business just on the accounting, you're going to have some trouble. If you're just looking forward, but you can't pay your bills on time or, you know, the cell phones and the Nordics went out because we, you know, the credit card bill that we paid didn't apply. It's like you got to really hold that as a first class priority. And then on the future, like there was times where it's like, hey, look, Shom, who I know you've been on your program, the CTO at Palantir. It's like,

look, we're going to hit our numbers this year and we're going to hit our numbers next year. But we got to do more pilots or we might have a problem three or four years out. And here's the data why. So finance has to do all of them. So it can't just be world-class accounting. It's got to be world-class everything. Lessons from Palantir's IPO that you think now that the IPO window feels extremely open, God willing, it'll stay open forever. But any lessons from the Palantir IPO that you could, that you would advise a founder that's exploring, you know, opportunities in the public markets today totally well first off so I was not the CFO taking up public my my dear friend who I pulled into the finance team

Dave Glazer he's he's the CFO and took it through there and and a lot of the team that joined and worked with us back in the day is still running the company which which is refreshing I think that's you know as as you're getting ready for the public markets I think you really need to be able to articulate like why you have a strong core business model you have to back it up with data and you have to have a narrative that says, here's why it's going to keep going for a while. And we have a bunch of companies, you know, whether it's friends or it's in our portfolio that are at the scale where they could go public. And I think you're seeing a lot of people start to weigh, you know, is the window

open? Should I run through it? I think there's still some question marks depending who it is. But if you're, you know, you're operating at scale, you've got accelerating revenue growth, expanding free cash flow margins and a good narrative, I think we're going to see a lot more of that, which is exciting. But if you can't articulate your core business model, it's I think the window's not open yet. So you've got to keep building. And that's probably healthy. And that's healthy.

Yeah. How are you thinking about, like, opportunity and defense tech broadly right now? There's the, you know, there's the meme of, like, the Anderol for Axis anderol, you know, Palantir's, like, this compounder that's going to take a lot of market share. And the ship has certainly sailed on a few of, like,

the really big companies. But at the same time, like, there's a boom. And people are starting to, you know, start companies in the space because there's more appetite from investors. and it's more just accepted to hire people. What's your temperature check right now? Yeah, well, so been honored to be a part of, you know, some of the great names that people now call Defense Tech.

So Palantir, we've been investors in SpaceX since $10 billion, and or else since around $4 billion, you know, built Palantir of those guys. So love that the whole ecosystem is starting to develop. Back in the day, there was no defense tech. I think what does the world need? The world needs a strong America. Right? So PACS AmeriCon, I think, is, you know, we can argue debate this. Many people do. But I think it's good to, you know, to be able to back up at the, hopefully we never have to use it, but just be able to negotiate. And look, we need more of it. And I think you're also seeing the Intel news from today. You're starting to see that, hey, vertical integration matters. a saying we had deep in the bowels of Pounder was trust no one's execution but your own, right?

And if you're beholden to someone else, whether it's on the supply chain or whether it's the value delivery to customers, like the tail might wag the dog. And so I think it's great that we're starting to see more capital flow here. I think as with anything where you turn on the spigot, not everything is going to be the highest ROI project. But let's look at the other truth. If we do nothing, then we're certainly not at a local maximum. So we need to do something. I'm excited with the developments. Yeah.

There was a post by a founder talking about the state of defense tech. I want to get your take on some of this. The end user is not the buyer in commercial. The person who uses your product often decides to buy it in defense. The operator might love your system, yet it means nothing. The buyer is a program manager with a budget. The operator's endorsement is at best a data point, not a scalable purchase order. I don't care that some E6 at Drum played.

around with your product and thinks it's cool, it doesn't really matter. True, false. What's your take? You know, you're hitting on this causes many sleepless nights, months, months, years at Palantir. Ultimately, I mean, Palantir had to sue the U.S. Army. You can note Palantir versus U.S. Army for should you buy Cots versus Gots. There's many. That must have been a fun. It must have been a fun decision for you to be weighing in on, like, how much you spend on litigation is already expensive but going up against your customer yeah it's uh it's not the prefer let's just say they don't teach that in a classroom yeah um the look i think i think enterprise sales is tough but enterprise sales inside you know the government or any large

institution is even more difficult and there's a couple different things you have to do and number one you've got to create the facts on the ground right that's that's the mission wins that you're you're referencing there. But that's not enough. It's necessary but not sufficient. At the other side, you have to go and make sure the decision makers know what to do. And then you can do a pincer and say, all right, let's just move it and put some pressure on the middle. And I like to think it was when is it riskier to not act than to act? So you're sort of creating this constellation where you can get movement. But the advice to anyone embarking on the defense tech journey is make sure you're very well capitalized because it's going to take you a long it's a long road to hoe

and so make sure you can withstand it i'd also think this is a point shamsankar you know at palantir has made is you've got a dual source really helps because it can bring down that cost curve as you scale especially if you're working with atoms and not just electrons and that that can help you survive while you're waiting for the door inside the government open palatier would not have had a strong government business if it didn't have a commercial business and vice versa On that note, Chris in this post says, if you're pitching dual use, you're probably just unfocused, real dual use companies are vanishingly rare. The example he gives us Palantir. Most that try end up with a watered down product, no real defense tech traction, no commercial fit. Pick a market. Do you disagree with that? Or does it just depend? What nuance would you add to actually understand if a company can meaningfully be dual use? Because you do see founders kind of bolting it on now. that it's a little bit trendy. Oh, we have this thing. Yeah, and we also have a office in D.C. And we have one person who we work out there. And yeah, how would you, how would you,

how would you lay out like if a company can actually get the benefit out of dual use as opposed to it just being marketing? Well, it's easier to change lines of marketing than lines of code. Yeah. So you've got to start out from a first principle and say, what is the thing that ought to exist. And if you look at Palantir or any other class that's built dual use, it's saying, I can build one product and with a little bit of customization at the end and just the end, then it can be sold to both for a very important but different reason. So an example, also in our portfolio, we have Astronis, right? They're building microgeo satellites. Yeah. Same, you know, broad category. There's a few tweaks, but who doesn't want that sovereignty over their data, right? And so

If you need that, you can sell it in a defense capacity, they've been down-selected on $2 billion-dollar-plus programs, so, you know, a lot of work to do, but that's exciting. It's here for astronomers. We love those guys. And then, yeah, John's been on the show. He's great. Yeah, he's great. And then, like, also on the commercial side, like, let's say you need, you know, more trunking and back-all, and a lot of telcos are turning to this from the disruption they're seeing

in the market. Sure. So I think that's one of those ones where they're not building two types of satellite. They say, that's a terrible idea. Yeah. But if you can build one thing and sell it to both parties, that helps bring down. on the cost curve. Fantastic.

Totally. Do you have anything else? No, this is great. Thank you so much for taking the time to hop on. This is fantastic. We will talk to you soon. You're our new finance correspondent. Is that sleeping bear dunes behind you?

Close, but I'll tell you next time. Okay, you'll tell you next time. Somebody in the chat said bullish on the painting of sleeping bear dunes in the background. I was just trying to take credit for being identifying it, but I was wrong because they were wrong. But anyway, we'll talk to you. Well, good to see you guys. Thanks so much.

Have a good one. Colin. Cheers. Bye. Bye. We have Truman Sachs coming on in a few minutes, but in the meantime, let me tell you about Adio, customer relationship magic. Adio is the AI-Native CRM that builds scales and grows your company to the next level.

And you heard Dr. Drew talking about the importance of sleep, you got to get an eight-sleep. Yeah, I mean, he said that. I was like, we partnered with eight-sleep was one of our very first partners. We had the foresight to understand that if we wanted to do this for decades, we needed to sleep-like champions. It really was one of those partnerships where it was like, this is going to be. additive in like more than in many many ways right 93 I probably back in the 90s seven hours 47 minutes I put up what did I do eat sleep two and a half hours of deep sleep 83 83 how did I

do on deep sleep one hour of deep sleep oh no you were an absolute mess this morning I know I was such John showed up to the gym and the and so sleepy I was like wake up dude yeah yeah anyway we we got a touch on the timeline and turmoil Martin Casado said the idea that non-consensus investing is where the alpha is, is actually quite dangerous in the early stage. Follow on capital tends to be more and more consensus align. He's basically saying being contrarian is bad, being consensus is good. I could not agree more. I completely agree. Consensus is amazing. Do you agree? He's not just right. He's on point. It's incredible. Tyler, do you agree? Yes. I think everyone agree. Ben, do you agree? I think everyone agrees.

Everyone agrees that agreement is good here. No, of course, of course, this is, it's funny because the whole contrarian meme has become such a meme that it's now consensus to say that contrarian ideas are better. And so by saying that consensus, things is actually contraried, you know. But of course, you know, the contrarian idea still holds this consensus. John Chu went on the attack. Oh, yeah. This sounds more like they overpaid for everything and their companies are struggling to raise.

So he's asking for help marking things up. That job pose is hilarious because in his name is Coastal Ventures. And so it hits as like a sub-tweets. It's like going to war so much more aggressively. It's not a- It's great. Yeah, it's not a sub-stice. It's a direct attack.

Yeah, yeah, it's a direct attack. It's timeline and turmoil. But, I mean, I just like, I mean, this was a way for the entire allocator community to signal that, hey, we're not packing for Black Rock City. We're here. Oh, yeah, we're here debating, debating whether or not we should do consensus deals. Or non-consensus. Or stick to the non-consensus ones.

There was a really funny post earlier. I don't know if it made it into the timeline, but there was this somebody who had created a restaurant. They were complaining. They were like, my food is so good. It's all farm to table. I don't know why people aren't going. I'm only making $50 a day. And somebody quoted it with like a picture.

Teal's picture of PT and then the excerpt from zero to one where he's like talking about you know British food in San Francisco and how you can have the best British food. Yeah, it's highly competitive. Yeah, so. Yeah. The Martin Casado post, there's a little back and forth, Leo Polovitz says if you consider the top, top few dozen highest alpha bets of the last 10 to 15 years, what fraction would you say were consensus versus non-concessus at early stage?

Martin Cassato says, I suspect more consensus than not. And Keith Rubei chimes in and says, open AI was non-consensus. Scale was non-consensus. Stripe was non-consensus. Whiz, the C round, I guess, was not. Ramp, DoorDash, R.H. Robin Hood, Canva, Figma, all being non-consensus. He gets quote tweeted then by Martin Consensus.

Yes, Keith, you're right. I'm very sorry. You're very original. And it's an AI image of Keith Rubei saying, I'm so original. I moved to Miami. but like i like how he was kind of dunking on keith but keith looks fantastic he does look diced here it looks really good uh yeah but that's the nature he replied he's like nice picture nice picture yeah but the other thing is like is like moving to miami was contrarian like that was not that was not a consensus

thing at all so i i don't like he really is was that was a very original idea to try and build a tech company in miami like um and that's the nature of the of the contrarian and like the non-consensus Betts is like, yeah, sometimes you get a lot of wild cards. You want to be consensus among the contrarian investors with elite returns and non-consensus with the consensus investor. No, I actually have distilled it. You want to be greedy when 145 IQ people are greedy. You want to be fearful when 101 IQ people are greedy.

That's the real move. That's the play. Yeah. We've cracked venture. Yes, that's it. It's fine to be. hypermimetic as long as you're hypermimetic with a genius and you're copying a genius this is like the nancy Pelosi stock trader or something anyway if you're trying to trade some stocks get over to public

dot com investing for those that take it seriously they got multi-asset investing industry leading yields they're trusted by millions when you get on there remember be greedy when others are fearful and be fearful when others are greedy do your own research make some good investments folks well we should pull up this launch video from our next guest, Truman. Let's pull up the... Who announced Cubby Law today.

Let's pull it up. Let's react. And then we'll bring in Truman Sachs from Cubby Law. You shared it in the group. Let me tell you about Bezell while we're pulling that up. Your Bezell Concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet.

Seriously, any watch. Go to getbezzle.com. And... And here's Truman. Welcome to the show, Truman. No, stop. Let's play this. And how you're graded depends entirely on your professor.

But most students study with generic outlines and flashcards, not the materials they're actually being tested on. Cubby is the first AI teaching assistant for law students, trained on your professor syllabus, past exams, and student outlines. So your case briefs match how they teach, and your practice exams mirror how they test. It's like having your professor tutor you ever. night. Learn the law, master your professor, and outperform the curve with Covey. Good set design, too. I love it. Well, welcome to the stream, Truman. How you doing? Welcome from the restream waiting room. You are muted. TBPN Ultradome. No, you're good. You're good. I can hear you now. I think we're just being noisy. What's up? Good. Congrats on the launch.

Haven't seen you, thank you. Since, uh, workout. Phil, was it six months ago? It's true. Yeah, it was about six months ago. I know. I like, every morning, I'm like, damn, I wish I could see him with the boys today. Yeah, next time you're in LA, come hang. It'll be fine. Every day. Every day. And you were telling us about this play.

Yeah. So it's great to see it launch. Thank you, man. I'm excited for it to go public. Yeah. Break it down for us. What are you launching? What's the pitch?

And what kind of led you to this particular submarket? Yeah, great question. You know, it kind of dates back to like a conversation you and I were having with Senra a few years ago now. I'm another Runyon hike. Yeah. You're telling me how like. Fateful Runyon hike.

it's like we're great stories begin. Runyon Canyon, folks. Running Canyon is in an hour. A couple influencers doing Runyon. Dude, we got stopped like every second. It was crazy. Anyways, but no, I mean, John was talking about this idea that just like there are power lot of people, they're also power a lot of books. It's a Kugan idea right there. And zero to one is the, what we both agreed is the business power lot book. And there's a quote, which I, I, I think like kind of defines my personal operating philosophy, which is like the perfect target market for a startup is a small group of particular people concentrating together and served by few or no competitors.

So I think that like sums up the law school industry in a shell. Law school is three years. It's curve based. So everyone's stacked rating against each other with public rankings. And it's like directly correlated to the job you get after law school is how you perform with your grades. So like big law firms, everyone's buying for the same big law jobs. law school, which pay like 220K out of pocket, like first year. And there's only a

limit amount of them. And they're literally just... 2.25 a day. Yeah. Yeah. Research market is a bit... Yeah, yeah. If you don't make that start chasing ambulances, bro. That's what happens. Seriously, it is a knockout, dragout fight in law school. Yeah. You got to get to the top of the ranking. But no, yeah, it's crazy. So like, everyone's competing each other because there was like everyone knows there's public rankings. Like, you're either the top of your class or you're not. and the firm see that and that's what they're recruiting off of. So the mindset of the consumer is that of like I will invest in my future. Like anything that will help me do better in school is an investment and I will spend money on it.

So it's a really like powerful lever to tap in as a business. You know, I have to tap into that market. So what we built was like the first AI teaching assistant for law students. We've like trained the model on thousands of practice exams and case groups written by like a top Georgetown law student who just graduated. And we built like an entire experience. That's almost like a dual lingo style course that calibrates all the material that's specific to your course and your professor all the way through the final exam. So you could take unlimited final exams and practice throughout the semester, get instant grades, feedback. And it's all kind of built to mirror exactly how your specific professor would like teach it great.

Because that's what decides you're great. Yeah. Well, what's the business model then? Do you do you want to sell to the law school? Sell to the law students. Just take like 30% of their lifetime earnings. Yeah. Don't worry about the business.

Whoa, whoa. We think like a really aggressive terms and conditions. What's that Lambda school is doing? ISA is income share agreements. No, no, no. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But income share agreements might be the real accurate. I think those are, I think those aren't kosher anymore.

Yeah, it's always tricky. Anyway, yeah, who are you going to? Who's actually putting down the credit card? So, good question. Right now, like, funny enough, there's already an existing tool in this market from 2007 called Quimby. Everybody in law school, like, ask eight out of ten law students. They buy Quimby for $30 a month. So there's around 120,000 law students in the U.S.

per year and like there's all spending 30 bucks a month on this software from 2007 that hasn't changed it's like a static company for like cliff notes for case law effectively so we we plan to come in as like a 10x better replacement for that and think that like our tool versus there is like just shape that like the decision will be obvious sure so that's kind of in what we're trying to strip up initially and then over time like we've already had some interest about like partnering with schools themselves yeah yeah how do you see the top of funnel like how do you reach a there's so many there's so many fun things that you can do on campuses to make sure that you cannot go to law school without knowing about

drone show well as we speak right now we have hundreds of law students at from Cordoza law at a cubby cafe truck outside of the campus yeah exactly we had free coffee Papa bagels ice cream so that's like an on-campus approach for this week you guys should do branded Adderall dude low key Do not do that. Do not do that. Do not do that. I'm sure there's, I'm sure there's the telemedicine company that could, uh, no, no.

The company care package. Controlled substance. It's specifically you cannot do that. But it's just so funny because this industry is run by like, like, like, legacy, like, these, like, massive bar prep companies. Like, our biggest business got acquired a few months ago. And, like, the second we launched, like, a small TikTok, like, of just like what we're doing, we got some assisted by them. Oh, wow. Just like, hey, like, we think you might be training on our materials.

And if you are, like, we're going to come after you, but like, we're not sure. So we're just like, fuck off. And they're like, oh, yeah, yeah, we're sorry. Like, we're going to countersue you for these anti-competitive practices. So it's an interesting, like, sleeper market that I, like, I think it's an interesting wedge as well to go deeper intellectual law, like legal tech space as well. Because once you have that relationship with the customer, you know, they're the future lawyers of America.

Sure. You should prove how, how well the product works by personally counter suing the. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I learned it all with Cubby. It is particularly difficult to pass the bar without going to law school. There's one loophole where I believe you can mentor under a lawyer, and they can say that you're allowed to. But in general, you cannot take the bar and pass it just because you did the study.

You have to be in a law school accredited. Yeah, it's all to control the number of lawyers to drive up. Well, maybe we'll open our own law school at this point for kids who just are fed up with the traditional system. Yeah, there's like one online law school, or there's only a few, like, that actually let you do it in this particular way. Like, it's very, like, hacky. It's a very tightly controlled, like, market in general.

Sounds like you tried to hack it at some point. I actually... If there's a system, I did. John will try to hack it. And I emailed the guy who did it, and he was just, like, basically credential maxing. And he was, like, a lawyer, a doctor. And he figured out how to do all of these things because he was really smart and he could take tests really well. And so he just went around and got like law degrees, but figured out like

the the minimum time, maximum amount of money. So you pay a ton of money to do this, get all the test prep, and then take the test. And I was like, well, did you wind up using the law degree ever? He's like, no. But it's a flex. Yeah, it's a flex. It's a flex. I was like, I like this guy. I should email him on the show. Anyway, how big is the actual market? Like are you going to go like venture mega round like harvey style or or or is this more something that you want to grind out for for a long time and you think you can just like find a great wedge great business and then maybe if there's like a secondary market that opens up then that's the venture territory yeah great question um so the legal education market's five years it's from

alsette bar like you mentioned yep um we have 120,000 plus people going through that every every year and I think the average like customer spends over through over five years uh five thousand on like supplemental spend. So take that times the time. You're looking at like a billion dollar just a little education work. Sure, sure, sure. But at the same time, like,

so I do think Barr and LSAT's kind of where we take it next. We can see some like meaningful AR growth from there. But I just, I'm really excited about this concept of like, we know in the age of AI everything is like distribution and like what kind of like moat and competitive edge do you have on the customer acquisition side. And like it's so difficult to break into legal tech. Like I don't think that's why we see so many rappers in the legal tech.

space because it's just like such an old guard and you need to have connections. You need to have specialized models, the bar for quality so much higher. And I think if we really entrench ourselves and establish ourselves as a meaningful player in law school, like I said, like every single one of these players are going to legal and to the big law firms next. And I think if we're able to kind of create that relationship with them, help them start building like practicing legal research in their like breaching classes while they're in law school, they're going to get used to that flow just like they got used to Google Docs and brought that to work to work with them. So I do think there is a really interesting play to kind of like continue with the customer to the

workforce that I think we'll try to angle for it makes sense are you playing to somebody at taylor in the chat is a not a p not a pc uh but that's going wild right now they said cubby branded one one and a quarter by one and a quarter ziplock baggies for for maybe the associates after they moved to new york i'll be a man at marquee on saturday night yeah uh john actually threw the horse emoji in the chat, is their plan to do horse branded merch? You know the trend's a huge into horsepower? Do you have the horse noise on there?

I don't know if you guys see that on my wall. Oh, yeah. There you go. Anyway, great catching up with you. Thanks so much for hopping on. Yeah, great to see you. We will talk to you soon. Good luck with the rest of the rollout.

Talk to you soon. Bye. Let me talk about Wander. Find your happy place. Find your happy place. Book of Wander with inspiring views. hotel-grade amenities, dreamy beds, top-tier cleaning, and 24-7 concierge service, it's a vacation home, but better.

But anyway, Paula Rambles says, every day in SF is an opportunity to discover a new type of guy, e.g., this guy in a holographic Ferrari, with a pet duck and a very loud chihuahua dressed up as a chicken. So the duck is real. The duck is real, but the chicken is a dog. This is wild. We got to get this guy on the show.

I'm assuming he already listens to the show. I hope he made his money in enterprise SaaS. That would be fantastic. It has crypto written all over it, but it could be driving business value with vertical integration or something. I don't know. Well, on Friday, Alexander Wang announced a partnership with Mid Journey to license their aesthetic to technology for our future models and products, bringing beauty to billions. And David Holt says, bring sublime tools of creation of beauty to billions of people is squarely within our mission, excited to partner with the Titans of Industry to make. this happen. How much do you think they are paying to license Mid Journey's tech?

I have no idea. Has it leaked? No, no. I'm just purely speculating. I mean, I would go out and guess that it's hundreds of millions of dollars. Yeah, I mean, I would imagine it's priced based on like inference, right? It's probably like some margin on top of like Mid Journey's inference infrastructure. And I believe Mid Journey was fantastic at optimizing inference early on. They were known for because the images take a minute to generate, latency, actual latency, like to the data center doesn't matter. And so if you're in America and you're generating an image on a mid-jurney, that that generation will happen halfway across the world in a data center that's at not peak load.

And so they're basically always moving allegedly. I have no idea if this is true. I just heard this on the podcast one time. but they're allegedly moving inference around the globe to find pockets of available compute to do the inference. And I mean, I think the mid-jury models are so good they should be able to do a ton of optimization, bake it onto a chip at some point.

Who knows? But it's certainly, like, having Mid-Journey in Instagram makes so much sense. Yeah, 100% agree. The reason this feels like, you know, I would say the mid-journey team and David, I'm sure they, they, they, they're not interested in flexing some big number on the timeline. Sure, sure, sure, sure.

At the same time doesn't care to have another, you know, massive deal even be announced. But this field, in the way that licensing, the lot, think about when we've been hearing technology licenses in the sort of AI. Oh, yeah. These end up being, you know, Google paid a billion dollars. Yeah, yeah. Billions of dollars to license windsurf, right? So, what do you think, Tyler? How do you think the mid-jury partnership will play out with meta?

And they might need to rename because this is anything but a mid-jurney. Yeah, it's definitely interesting. David, he also replied to that post. He said, we remain an independent community-backed research lab with no investors. So we just now have hundreds of millions of suck bucks coming in. I mean, I'm pretty sure I have hundreds of millions of subscribers. No, I know. That's what I'm saying.

They have to be underwriting this against, like, well, we could just go get a bunch more customers. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I imagine that Zuck had to back up. It's, yeah, it's very interesting. I heard David Holes's, like, secret sauce described as just pure taste. So, like, they would train a model. They would look at the different, like, benchmarks and e-vals and what was performing, and he would just look at the images and be, like, we're using that model.

Like, it doesn't matter what it's as, basically. Yeah, I mean, it's hard to do, like, really. good benchmarks in, you know, diffusion models. Like when you're generating, like, visuals or video or stuff like that. Yeah, I mean, I think you kind of set up like a GAN, like a generative adversarial network where you have one model that's trying to detect, is this a real image or a fake image? And then you have another, so you're generating a bunch of,

you take a bunch of real images, and you take a bunch of AI-generated images, and you keep training the AI-generated image generator until the detector can't detect that it's fake. And then you have something that produces real images. but I think his goal has been I don't just want to create images that look real I want to create images that look good and so there's definitely

I mean you can see even like different Mid Journey versions there's definitely like a style that you can like almost it's not like immediately obviously you can say like that's Mid Journey B5 or something but there is like a vibe that I mean images in chat GPT it was like clearly nailed Ghibli's like out of the park and was probably like RL to some extent

like on that or like optimized for that a little bit and it was a great user experience and it was a good decision. But the flip side is that mid journey is kind of gone for like their own style. And it's great. Yeah, very exciting. I mean, Georgie, have you heard the story of David Holtz's first company? Lead motion? Oh, it's fantastic. Oh, I think you've told it before. A crazy crazy story. Yeah, I probably told it. I made a whole video about it and stuff. But basically, it was a point projector that would track your hand in 3D space so you could pair it with a virtual reality headset to

detect hand motion and so you could actually put it in and through using this like aftermarket 3d printed device like on the front of an oculus and then it could track your hands doing hand tracking and I believe that there was a plan rumored to sell the company to Apple and Apple had already like printed welcome packages to the to the leap motion team and then I think at some point the deal fell apart maybe that was because David Holes didn't want to work that the company or something happened and and the deal fell apart and he wound up moving on but then like took clearly like all those learnings everything he had studied and transferred all of that over to

image generation when when the first like image generation boom started and then just like absolutely found like a rocket ship opportunity with mid journey so fantastic fantastic story, very excited that their partner. And then the other story that we should cover, I don't want to miss it. Elon Musk's XAI sues Apple and OpenAI alleging they are, quote, monopolist. So Elon and the team going to legal war, Musk says the partnership between the two companies has given Chat, GPT, Maker, access to billions of user prompts. Interesting. So Elon Musk's AI company XAI sued Apple and Open AI Monday Monday Monday.

Sunday, alleging the companies are illegally thwarting competition for AI companies, the lawsuit says the iPhone maker's partnership with OpenAI makes the startup's chat GPT the only Gen AI chat bot that benefits from billions of user prompts originating from hundreds of millions of iPhones. That enables OpenAI to use the prompts and feedback to improve its model, a significant advantage, according to the complaint. The suit also says Apple is deprioritizing the apps of competing chat bots and App Store ranking. Is it really billions of user prompts? That is crazy. So I've tried to use. use chat GPT I like chat GPT I use it a lot I have it on my home row I also I try and trigger it with Siri every once in a while I'll go to I'll press the Siri button and and bring up Apple intelligence which is Siri and I'll ask it a question and then I'll go open the chat GPT up and type in my actual question because it does not work I just had this happen where I asked Siri to calculate the hypotenuse and series triggered.

To calculate the hypotenuse of a triangle with a right triangle with sides that are like 18 feet. We need to calculate something in the studio here. And it just says like the hypotenuse is equal to the Pythagorean. It just didn't answer the question at all. And then I just had to go over to chat chit and have it actually do the math. So there's ways to trigger it. But like I would just be shocked if people, if like your average iPhone user. I'm sure they're just counting in this lawsuit counting all people that have downloaded the chat chitpity iPhone app.

Oh, you think it's that? Yeah. I don't think it's not that. Because, yeah. Gabe Azar, who said earlier, he has 15 lawyers in the Azar family, says, yet again, lawyers stay winning with these pointless cases. The lawsuit says in a desperate bid to protect its smartphone monopoly, Apple has joined forces with the company that benefits, that most benefits from inhibiting competition and innovation in AI, open AI monopolists in the market for Gen. chatbots. And Apple spokesman didn't immediately respond to request for comment. Apple has previously said the app store is designed to be free of bias and the company has defended the fairness of

its partnership with OpenAI. Apple executives have said they will only partner with what they see as the best products to provide the best user experience. Yeah. So I believe the I believe the Apple OpenAI partnership on routing Siri queries to chat GPT is no no monetary value exchanged either way. which is interesting because you could see, you could make an argument that both of them would pay because Apple would be better off if I had ChatGPT kind of installed natively within Apple intelligence.

And then simultaneously, ChatGPT benefits from getting more users from Apple ecosystem. So I believe that it just netted out where they don't pay each other at anything. But if you're XAI and you want that relationship, you could go and say, I'm going to pay, potentially, and maybe pull it away. and say, hey, now Mac is coming to Apple Intelligence.

Might be a hard sell. Yeah, I mean, the challenge here is I think Apple, Apple can defend just based on the kind of content that, you know, I don't see Apple putting X-A-I or GROC at the top of even curated. But I do think that Apple's never been a fan of adult content. They've just never been a fan of adult content. They've just never been a man. X-A-I has it should fairly, should be able to request that Siri route to GROC. Yeah, totally. A user should be able to.

Yeah. I mean, you can do that. The long-term scenario, like, I'm pretty sure you can go and select a different search engine for your Safari default in iOS. You can say, I'm a Bing guy, and I want it to route to Bing, and it will do that. The Bing Army. The Bing Army does that. Stop talking down on Bing. They make $4 billion a year or something.

It wasn't it more? It was a 16 billion or something? Yeah, it was some crazy number. Yeah. And so you could imagine that, yeah, you should at least be able to do that, and that's certainly not a feature. And so, I don't know. Anyway.

Yeah, the chat is saying the GROC army wants to route Siri to Rout to Ani. Yeah, it's the worst time to be named Ani, I suppose. Anyway, congratulations to our buddy John Fiorentino. These pictures, he says, are about 10 months apart. first picture was the test second is the creation you can move faster than you think experiment find the spark explode it

drinkvolta dot com I went I went yep roughly 10 months ago I went and got vaulted John had a setup outside of jeans in New York the product worked honestly

potentially too well I was I was jacked up after it but he has his flagship in Nashville now and it seems to be packed every single day. So it's incredible. God wills it, who is the phrase from the crusades. Theo saw how quickly Elon is spinning up data centers. He said, why can I spin up a Volta flagship in Nashville in months?

Let's do it. It's been a huge success. Dax said, my wife's water broke, so she went to download an app to time her contraction. I grabbed her phone out of her hands. What are you doing? Don't you realize we live in the age of personal software? We downloaded Replit and vibe-coded the perfect app with 3JS and SuperBase.

We're naming the baby Grock High 20, 25, 08. I put this in here, and I only read the first line. And so I thought it was going to be like a meditation on like actually like staying in the present during like a beautiful moment in your life. Yeah, I put this in there. I'm glad you didn't actually read it. That's really funny. I love it. Yeah.

This is a good post from Andrea. Productivity is a Spectrum. And this, we basically have picked aside. Yeah, yeah. I got the Diet Coke here. I eat McDonald's. I spent the weekend in my sauna and cold plunge with my... Oh, you're on the left.

I'm on the left. I'm on the right. I'm even back, I'm an investor in Magnet. Oh, you are? Okay. Yeah. I mean, I'm, I pull from both sides. I pull from both sides.

I like Hewerman Lab. I like the sauna. I won't shy away from a monster. Chipotle, Burrito bowl. Yeah. I do a little bit of both. Never get into the hard stop over here. Don't like that.

Get in the middle. You know, the middle is the, is the. Yeah, yeah, a little bit of both. Everything in moderation, including moderation, folks. Okay, so pull up this president, or sorry, sorry, not president, picture of the Oval Office. We have, wait, do you want to start with, what it used to be? We should start with, we should start with what it looks like today. Today, today is the third one.

It looks like. Yeah, so this is the Biden. The Biden Oval Office versus the Trump Oval Office. One forward is the Biden Oval Office, I believe. And probably every Oval Office for the past like three decades. Pretty standard, comfortable, muted. It's opulent, but not over the top. And then if you switch to the next shot, you will see Donald Trump has really, really brought back the 17th century touches.

Yes. With gold accents everywhere. on every surface floor to ceiling floor to ceiling gold i like how we added those trophies i got i want to know what the trophies are for it used to just be some leaves and then uh semiconductor world champion edwin says uh when a millennial becomes president and it's this ultra minimal design that is uh it hits it hits hard that is a that is a standard uh that is the standard issue um luxury apartment or living space these days for everyone first millennial president is going to be wild.

Yeah. Maybe we go straight to Zoomer. I've said for a long time, I want a president with stamina, someone who can just pull in all-nighter with his boys and solve the problem, monitor the situation. Anyway, Lala says there's no such thing as taste. At the signal level, there's only personalization and variance. When LLM outputs look tasteless, it's a sign of the app not having the right user model or not having tuned the output variety well.

Let's go to our taste expert, Tyler Cosgrove. Do you believe AI can have taste? Maybe not right now, but the post just seems like, it seems like obviously wrong. Like there's that good Paul Graham post where he's like, is there good art? Or like, can, is there an objective, like, good art? Yeah.

And like, obviously there is because some artists are better than others, right? because, like, I'm a worse artist than whoever. Maybe. And, like, who's a better artist? It's if you make better art, which means there must be better art. So, like, taste is the same thing. There's objectively good taste because...

I would say there is good taste. I would say there is not objectively good taste. There is subjectively good taste. But I believe that subjective things are true. I believe that money is a construct. It's an idea. It doesn't have intrinsic value. Yeah, there's many people that would say that Trump's Oval Office is of poor taste.

But to him, it's the highest of high. Exactly, exactly. And yet, and yet I believe in things that have an unobjective quality, a subjective quality. Do you think there's objectively like good art and like art that it's better than other art? I think that there is art that is better than other art, but I don't believe that it is objectively better. I don't believe I can quantify how it is better. John's been bidding on the banana tape to the wall, by the way.

I'm not a big fan of that one. But of course, I think that there's some art that's better than others, but I would not say it is objectively better. Do you think Michael Andrews is objectively a better artist than me? Maybe. There's certainly, like, the ability to instantiate the art is, is an objective quality. Like the ability, like a certain person will be able

to make a functional vase on a pottery wheel and another person will fail at that. One person will try and draw a person and it will look more photo real. But that's not the only thing that I see art being. Like Michelangelo did not paint the Sistine Chapel himself, right? He had a team that did that. I'm pretty sure.

I don't know. We'll have to look it up. Grock, is this real? Chat, is this real? But... Well, more important... But I do think the two things are sad. And I think the taste is different than the skill set. Can we, I want to get on to some more important topics. Can we pull up this post of Doge employee Big Balls rep in 225?

Wait, really? Oh, that's who that is? I saw the picture. And this is great. I saw, I saw, it's Edward Correstine. Is that who that is? Recovery? Yeah.

This is Mr. Balls. Wow. Just wrapping it out. Looking great, too. Good form. He's not... Five points of contact. Okay, but coming off.

Strong men create good times. Happens to me. Wow. And this is, of course, a response to the mayoral candidate in New York City, Momdani, who was seen potentially not being able to bench

his big ball is running. But it's possible that he just had an over-eager spotter. We're unclear, but... He didn't look super comfortable under there. Yeah. He had to go to a dark, place for those reps.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. He knew when he stood up that he was cooked. But I don't understand how he wound up in a situation. He seems very calculated in what he films. A lot of it's very cinematic. Apparently, there's other angles of it. He was resistant to doing it. Oh, he got kind of like, yeah, got talked into it.

Okay, that's rough. Yeah. That's a bit of a gap. I regret who was posting, somebody was saying, like, the real shrewd political, like, if he had taken a step, back and said, you know what, this is going to be hard for me, but together, we can, we can do anything. Yeah.

Let's, let's, let's, let's, let's, let's, let's, let's wrap this out together. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, let's socialize the weight. I want two guys on the side lifting. Everyone lived 10 pounds with me right now, and we're good. Yeah. Anyway, Nikita Beer went to Starbase. It was one of the perks of being, uh, executive at X. Uh, I spent the day at Starbase and never really understood the scope of what's

happening here. It's a modern-day Manhattan project, an entire city built for the singular mission of going to space. Rows of 1950s, ranch homes, a couple of restaurants, a grocery store, hovercrafts, shuttling people around on water? I didn't know they had hovercrafts there.

That's awesome. And launch pads and rocket factories everywhere. He shares a beautiful picture of himself looking up at the starship, which I believe did not launch, is that right? Or it did launch, and it was not successful.

But obviously the crew... No, it didn't... It didn't launch. They were scrapped... Yeah, they aborted the launch. But, of course, the machine at Starbase is unrelenting, and I think they're going to get that thing up there eventually.

They will. Yeah, the video that Elon showed inside the factory just showed this incredible scale. Yeah, yeah. Well, I have a post we can end the show with. Bucco Capital says, this is from last night, my timeline tonight, you need extremely concentrated positions, 10 bagger thread, bet heavy on consensus, stupid to have cash because bear markets are so short. cyclicals pitched as secular winners.

They're going to run it hot, careful out there. And Zumer, the legendary Zumer, who is zooming on Chinese tech, says Max Levered Long, all in tech, Bucco. And, of course, Zumer is going gig along on PDD. How do you even end up at PDD and four? I genuinely don't get it. You got to have them on. The great Zoomer versus Unk.

consumer versus um debate buco on oh starship is set to launch today two hours and 20 minutes till launch oh wow um i i i'm i'm really can't wait for it uh never bet against Elon baby he's going to get that thing out there eventually well thank you for tuning in fun show today always great when we can get the doctor to drop to drop on always a fun show i cannot wait for tomorrow we're working on getting somebody to call in from the playa folks so working on it if you are are listening to this from Black Rock City. Let us now. We'd love to get some live coverage. The trophy in the White House in the Oval Office is the number one president trophy, self-glaze. Thanks for hanging out, guys. We will talk to you soon. Have a good day.

We love you. See you tomorrow. Good evening. Goodbye. Thank you.