TBPN Live - J.P. Morgan Goes Patriot Mode, Dutch Seize Nexperia, 𝕏 Timeline Reactions | Alexis Ohanian, Ryan Petersen, Serena Ge

Episode Date: October 13, 2025

(05:04) - J.PMorgan Goes Patriot Mode (09:57) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (18:34) - Netherlands Seizes Control of Nexperia (27:39) - Ryan Petersen, founder and CEO of Flexport, discusses the challenges of navigating the logistics industry amid fluctuating tariffs and the importance of building a team of dedicated "missionaries" rather than "mercenaries" to weather such uncertainties. He highlights the impact of recent tariff increases on trade volumes, noting a significant decline in shipments from China to the U.S. following the imposition of 100% duties, and emphasizes the need for companies to remain adaptable and committed to their mission in the face of unpredictable policy changes. (49:18) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (01:30:50) - Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of Reddit and husband to tennis star Serena Williams, is an entrepreneur and investor known for his involvement in various ventures. In the conversation, he discusses his recent projects, including Athlos, a women's track and field league, and his investment in Angel City FC, a women's soccer team. He also touches on his support for Stoke Space, a company developing reusable rockets, and shares insights on the evolving landscape of AI and social media. (02:01:56) - Anduril Unveils EagleEye Warfighter Glasses (02:05:04) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (02:28:39) - Serena Ge, an 18-year-old entrepreneur and founder of Data Curve, discusses her journey from dropping out of school at 18 to participate in Y Combinator with an initial project called Uncle GPT, which eventually evolved into Data Curve. She highlights the company's focus on providing coding data for foundation model labs to develop and enhance capabilities, emphasizing the importance of high-skilled tasks and a bounty-based system to engage top-tier coders. Serena also shares insights into the company's rapid growth, including raising a $15 million Series A funding round, and her experiences building a scrappy, ambitious team culture. (02:35:59) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.comFigma - https://figma.comVanta - https://vanta.comLinear - https://linear.appEight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpnWander - https://wander.com/tbpnPublic - https://public.comAdQuick - https://adquick.comBezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.comPolymarket - https://polymarket.comAttio - https://attio.com/tbpnFin - https://fin.ai/tbpnGraphite - https://graphite.devRestream - https://restream.ioProfound - https://tryprofound.comJulius AI - https://julius.aiturbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.comfal - https://fal.aiPrivy - https://www.privy.ioCognition - https://cognition.aiGemini - https://gemini.google.comFollow TBPN: https://TBPN.comhttps://x.com/tbpnhttps://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

You're watching TBPN. Today is Monday, October 13th, 2025. We are live from the TBPN Ultradome, the Temple of Technology, the Fortures of Finance, the Capital of Capital. Let's go. Did you see? We got some media attention. That's right. We were mentioned on Cheeky Pint. Charlie Songhurst and Mark Andreessen, chatting with John Collison on Cheeky Pint. You probably saw it over the weekend. Of course, we were talking about the New York Times. We were on the cover. of the Sunday business section. Thank you to Mike Isaac. We danced with the gray lady.

Came out. And it was beautiful. A couple scratches. It was beautiful. Thank you to Mike Isaac for coming to the Ultradome, hanging out with the whole team, trying to understand the absurdity of this show. We had a lot of fun.

And it was funny, the digital version of the article came out at 2 a.m. Pacific on Saturday. Yeah. and I ended up waking up. Yeah, what's your sleep score? What's your sleep score for that night? Oh, it was pretty brutal, actually.

I got a bunch of text messages from you and Dylan at three in the morning. You guys had clearly read it. Yeah. Woke up and read it. Yeah, I got a 43. Whoa. That's New York Times for you, baby. Yeah, so pretty rough.

But I thought it turned out great. It's good. We got a ramp mention in there. Time is money. Save both. Easy to use corporate cards. fill payments accounting and a whole lot more all in one place. We also got a polymarket mention in there. This is why you advertise on TVPN. We'll get you mentioned in the New York Times.

But yeah, it was fun, fun article. Yeah, it was good. But there was bigger news than us, bigger news than our war to bring SportsCenter to LinkedIn. It's actually funny. It's funny. Can you imagine like the real LinkedIn heads that are going to read that article? Be like, these guys don't They don't understand LinkedIn culture. They don't understand LinkedIn culture. They don't understand us. They're on X. They're bigger on X than they are on LinkedIn. These guys are fake LinkedIn heads. No, we are trying to grow our LinkedIn. If you want to help us on our war path to bring technology news for the first time to LinkedIn and educate the unwashed masses on LinkedIn as to the nature of technology, we'd love to have you join the team. We're looking for a social media manager, someone to help with great. growth, someone to help post and repurpose content clip, also do new content.

It looks like some hybrid is somebody that enjoys writing, enjoys the content of the show, and wants to basically repurpose the show's content for the LinkedIn feed. It sounds, I think it is a lot more fun than it sounds. Exactly. You get to hang out here at the Ultradome every day. You have to view these platforms as like, large systems that you can kind of understand how to optimize within them. And so on YouTube, you know, there's the title, the thumbnail.

There's this whole game of like what the current thing is on YouTube. Like if you do an interview with Mr. Beast, you're just going to get a ton of views on YouTube. That's not the case on X. We'd love to have them on the show. It'd be fun. But it's not going to be our biggest draw. Somebody like Rune will be a great draw on X, but probably not on YouTube.

And LinkedIn is similar. We do a lot of content that does do well on LinkedIn already, but there will be specific pieces of the show, so you have to work to figure out what's working, and then how is their algorithm changing, how is their content structure changing? Like the medium is the message, that's very real, and so you have to deliver content that fits within that,

whether it's the vertical short form or the long posts, or, you know, I hear AI is extremely popular on LinkedIn. So maybe you have to take our authentic content. Sloppify. Sloppify, exactly. That might be the key to success. I don't really care what the key is. Obviously, we do have brand standards,

but we want you to come on and explore what works, find interesting niches of strategies that work. We've done this on Instagram. Yeah, I mean, the main thing is we, yeah, it's very much an art and a science. It's also your job is not to post. Your job is not to just deploy content against the feed. Your job is to experiment and understand the platform better than anybody else.

The culture of the platform. Exactly, exactly. And we've done that with a lot of things. We've had fun with our substack. You can go subscribe, tbPN.com. And I think we wound up coming up with a unique product in email. It's a daily letter with one, you know, 500 word rant by me. With some timeline.

And then some timeline posts. And like, you know, everyone has an email newsletter. There's a lot of email newsletters out there. We still wanted to carve out something unique. And we want to do the same thing on LinkedIn. So please come help us. And then obviously come out a bunch of words. know who understands the culture of American dynamism?

Restream.io, of course. One live stream 30-plus destination is multi-stream and reach your audience wherever they are. No, who? Tell me. J.P. Morgan. J.P. Morgan at 3 a.m. Pacific announces a one and a half trillion dollar security and resiliency initiative to boost critical industries. Let's give it up for J.P. Morgan for saying the biggest number. This is the biggest number we've heard.

We'll make direct equity investments of up to $10 billion as part of the $1.5 trillion initiative to address pressing needs and key sectors from critical minerals to frontier technologies. So do they just have $1.5 trillion laying around? A 10-year plan to facilitate finance and invest in industries critical to national economic security and resiliency. As part of the new initiative, J.P. Morgan Chase will make direct equity and venture capital investments of up to $10 billion. That's a lot. These are direct equity, so growth equity. So, yeah, I mean, that's like an Andresen-sized, or I guess Andreessen's $65 billion or something, a little bit more. A-U-M?

Yeah, A-U-M for some of the big funds, like a general catalyst or a light speed. Like, I feel like a lot of the big venture funds are managing in the tens of billions now, maybe, something like that. Certainly. So they're saying, we're getting in the game. Watch your back on. and says, it has become painfully clear that the United States has allowed itself to become to rely on unreliable sources of critical minerals, products, manufacturing, all of which are essential for our national security. Our security is predicated on the strength and resiliency of

America's economy. America needs more speed and investment. It also needs to remove obstacles that stand in the way, excessive regulations, bureaucratic delay, partisan gridlock, and an education system not aligned to the skills we need. So they are going to be focused on supply chain and advanced manufacturing, including critical minerals, pharmaceutical precursors, and robotics, defense and aerospace, including defense tech, autonomous systems, drones, next-gen, connectivity, and secure communications, energy independence, and resilience, including battery, storage, grid resilience, and distributed energy, and frontier and strategic technologies, including AI, cybersecurity, and quantum computing. You have to wonder if Sam gave the hard

pitch to Jamie and said, I know you were planning to give that one and a half trillion to a few people. I happen to have announced partnerships that require about one and a half trillion of capital. He's basically just like, why don't you just not announce? Just be my banker and just do every deal up and down the stack. Yeah, of course. Finance my entire supply chain. Of course, I'm sure OpenAI will directly or indirectly get some of, uh, some of this investment. There's a lot of stuff in here, a lot of categories that are pretty cool, and we've talked to a lot of founders in these spaces. Very exciting. Noticably absent the luxury watch industry, are we not focused on that? Is Bezell the only company that's holding the line on luxury watches? I mean, I guess some of the bulk materials could be, you know, strategic diamond storage for iced out potax. That, that, that kind of. could be the solution. Definitely. But you can go get a watch at Gapbezzle.com.

Your bezel concierge is available now. So see any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch? Anything else from this? I mean, is this moving the markets? Is this why we're so back? Did you see the market on Friday? Yeah, I mean, MP Materials is up 23% today.

But again, there's other stories out there, including the broader story around rare earth. Yeah, the NASDAQ is up 2.2%. percent today we should have worn white suits what were we thinking now and uh you know Friday was rough Friday was rough the NASDAX sold off almost 3% but I think it's good because for the last two weeks everyone has been saying it's a bubble it's a bubble it's a bubble it's going to crash and then it did crash on Friday the bubble popped people were expected the bubble popped on Friday and now we're out of the trough of disillusionment we're in the plateau

of productivity now and so we can we can we can saying it's a bubble because the bubble popped. That was Friday. Now we're ready to build again. We're ready to move forward. It's time to build. No, of course. The Friday news was driven mostly by tariffs and a lot of back and forth with China. We have Ryan Peterson joining in just 20 minutes to talk about how Donald Trump, how much sleep he's getting. who is an actor, is almost a character in Ryan's personal movie that is just sent to torment him by announcing massive, you know, new trade wars every other month. In other news, OpenAI is partnering with Broadcom to deploy 10 gigawatts of chips designed by OpenAI.

Sophie, aka NetCap Girl on X, said AI won't peak until Broadcom starts getting hyped like Nvidia. That might be today. Broadcom is up another 10% on this news, even though he already sort of, this had already been basically announced. So Broadcom. Let's go, baby. It's so funny if you went and just on the street and asked people, do you think Broadcom or Tesla is a bigger company? How many people would pick Broadcom? It is at 1.68 trillion. Yeah.

Yeah, we got to turn Hock Tan into an Elon-level meme. He'll be like, I bought this network switch before the Hock-Tan went on TBPN, something like that. I don't know. It's good to see. In the chat says, what do you think Trump's sleep score is? That's a good question. He must be sleeping like four hours a night. Yeah.

Is today's rally like a taco trade, right? Is that what's going on? or has there actually been news on, like, the tariffs? Yeah, I think over the weekend. That's what I want to talk to Ryan about. Yeah, over the weekend, I think it was a misunderstanding. Okay, okay, okay. Like, both sides have been kind of backed off.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's, I mean, immediately, it was remarkable how resilient. You know, we talk about the resilience of the American consumer, but the resilience of the American retail trader is deeply underrated. we had I had interactions with multiple retail traders

over the weekend who immediately were like so this is a good time to buy the dip right it's like everything should be like flashing like

this is the start of the end this is the crash of all 1929 this is terrible what if the catalyst for AI sell off

was just Trump this could be at it's such a terrible it's such like it Like, viscerally, you're hearing stories about, you know, Bitcoin trading down 10% a day. Yeah, I was just talking about how many people were so levered. Yeah, I had no idea. This was a thing.

I mean, usually, like, when I see the market trades down 2%, I'm like, okay, I'm like 2% poorer today or whatever. Like, I feel like I'm, like, roughly indexed to the market, not like heavily levered either way. And I feel like my business is 2% rougher or like 2% better. Yeah, there's just like these screenshots from like Reddit. But a lot of people are like, that people being like, I've, I, every single dollar that I've, like, saved and invested over the last decade is gone. Yeah. To the point where, like, you didn't have, like, you love Bitcoin so much that you didn't

just put, like, a few Bitcoin in a wallet. Yeah, no, no, no. Like, I'm not going to lever up entirely. No, like, literally every person I interacted with, uh, in the real world over the weekend was, like, I lost 20% of my network or something. I'm like, on a 2% move, like, What is your, what is your strategy here? But a lot of people are, risk on.

To be fair, Bitcoin sold off like 10%. 10%. Yeah. So you're just, just a modest 2X levered Bitcoin as the core of your strategy. And it's funny, so Zumer, that's the account on Axzzumer, who we featured on the show before. Yes, he, like, Thursday night was saying, like, hot take, like, leverage is the only way out of the permanent underclash. But he got $10,000 from Nikita's personal fund. He levered up.

Well, yeah, we'll go into Zumergate and the backlash, to the backlash, to the backlash in just a second. But if you're trying to get in on the action or protect what you got, you got to do it on public.com. Investing for those who take it seriously. They got multi-ass investing, industry in the yields, trusted by millions. So you can say, I've had enough with all the volatility. I'm going cash only. I'm going bonds only, whatever you want. do it on public? Not on public over on hyperliquid. Two accounts were created Friday that

shorted Bitcoin and ended up successfully making around $200 million on these like very, no, not the not the insider trading size gong John. Easy, easy, easy. We'll find another reason. Hit the size gong for J.P. Morgan's $1.5 trillion. Hit it a few times. We are not going to do the size gong for insider trading. We don't know, alleged insider trading. We don't know. Maybe that person was just smart. We can hit the size gong for Baron Trump,

potentially getting the nod to be a board director over TikTok. That's actually pretty sweet. And that one makes a lot of sense to me because he's young. TikTok has a young audience. Like you want young blood in these environments to actually innovate and create good products. I'm sort of bullish on that. But And he earned it, right?

I mean, his investing track me, he's made, he's, he's generated millions of dollars. He genuinely understands social media. Like a lot of people do ascribe like the Trump podcast run to him and him being like, you got to go on Theo Vaughn and Trump being like, who's Theo Vaughn? And Barron being like, trust me, like he's good. You got to go collab with this streamer. Like a lot of, a lot of social, a lot of aggressive social media risks that many politicians wouldn't do beforehand. but Barron actually said, you know, he was going to do it.

There was something else about the insider trading. Well, yes, so just because two people got the trade right doesn't mean that it's insider trading because on any given day, there could be two random people that are just short Bitcoin, you know, like that just does happen. Like, I bet there's two people right now who are short Bitcoin who are not having a good day because Bitcoin's back up, right? And so, like, there is just like an amount of like, you know, the lucky, like someone gets, you know double sixes or whatever or whatever the

yeah every day there's people but but this was uh this was suspicious it was suspicious that it was like a new wallet two new accounts created and then just massive massive size and that's only that's the only thing they did yeah yeah yeah yeah and they immediately cashed out and okay no size gong for them oh uh speaking of the size gong are you are you aware of the gong show no so it's interesting there's been a number of pieces written about TBPN, and many of them feature the gong and talk about the gong. None of them actually... The main character in the show. None of them actually

talk about the gong show, which was a show in the 70s, where it was a, I think it was like a 30-minute, hour-long show or something like that, that it was basically like America's got talent. So it was a talent show, you'd come on, you do, are you looking it up? It's just, it's so I'm just laughing because it sounds like every startup that gets announced these days. It's like, oh, we're making a show. What should we call it? Oh, I don't have a creative idea. We should just call it the gong show.

The gong show. We should call it the browser company. The browser company was creative to their company. Yeah, they were the first ones to do that. But the gong show was a talent show, and they had a huge, huge gong, maybe even bigger than ours. And basically, yeah, you can see it. Yeah, it's about our size. Interesting mallet size.

Huge mallet. Yeah, they're definitely, we need to upgrade the mallet for sure. And so the whole trick with the gong show was that they would bring someone on and they'd be like, okay, I'm going to play the flute or I'm going to do a dance or I'm going to tell a comedy routine. And they had a whole bunch of like celebrity judges. And if the judges didn't like the performance at any moment they could stand up and just hit the gong, and that would be like, get out of here. Like, you're done.

And so it's like a game to like not get the gong run as opposed to us where you want the gong. gonged. Maybe we should adapt that. That's actually true. We have an interviewer, an interview guests on here getting a little boring. We're going to hit the gong and production team's going to cut to the next post. Maybe that's the end state for the show, is that we just say, get out of here with this boring AI take. Tell us something news. Tell us something interesting. Bobby says negative gong hits is crazy. Negative gong hits. You're out of year. Yeah, you're out of year. Well, privy, wallet infrastructure for every bank. Privy makes it easy to build on crypto rails, securely span up white label wallets, sign transactions, and integrate on-chain infrastructure all through one simple API.

There is some news out of the Financial Times. The Dutch government takes control of Chinese-owned chipmaker Nexperia. Okay. And terminally online engineer says they did it. And it's Gert, gear to Wilders, saying we haven't a serious problem. Is that a real close from somewhere? This was a real post. That was a real post?

About what? What are you referring to? We have an insurious problem refers to a viral post on X in January 2024 by Dutch politician Gert Wilders and the response by English speaking users who found the similarities between Dutch and English language is entertaining. Yeah, of course. What was the serious problem at that time? What year was it again? mid-January 2024 what was going on then i don't know that's hilarious but this doesn't seem like a serious problem this seems like news for uh like good this seems like good news right the dutch government

seized seize control of one of europe's biggest chip makers which was owned by china and dutch and the dutch just say hey it's ours now we're nationalizing it i mean it seems like china should be saying they're having a serious problem because they want to have a chip maker and now they don't right that It seems like a rough go for them. But I guess Nexperia's Chinese operations will be in jeopardy because if you just sees a company that's operating in, like, if America was just all of a sudden, like, NVIDIA is owned by the government.

Well, then that, like, NVIDIA's research lab in Shanghai, I think, would probably be not a great place to be. Yeah, it's also just, it can set off, you know, a wild chain of events. So I'll read through some of the financial times piece. Move escalates frictions between Western countries and Beijing over access to high-end technology. We love high technology here. The Dutch government has taken control of Chinese-owned semi-company Nexperia, warning of risks to Europe's economic security after alleging serious governance shortcomings at the company.

In a statement on Sunday, the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs said it acted because of a, quote, threat to the, the continuity and safeguarding on Dutch and European soil of crucial technological knowledge and capabilities. On Thursday, China placed sweeping restrictions on the exports of rare earths using products from cars to wind turbines. The Dutch ministries said it invoked the country's Goods Availability Act because of, quote, recent and acute serious governance shortcomings and actions at Nexperia, which is based in the Netherlands and has been majority owned by Chinese technology.

group Wing Tech since 2019. The decision aims to prevent a situation in which the goods produced by Nixperia would become unavailable in an emergency. That seems... Serious problem. Serious problem. I asked Gemini to translate the Geertz original posts. It just says we have a serious problem with the political developments regarding the

coercion act, and I hope that can be solved in the coming days. Boring. Boring. Well, thank you, Gemini. Newest sponsor of TBPN, by the way. Check them out. Anyways, Nexperia produces chips used in the European automotive industry and consumer electronics.

So, anyways, Vincent Karamans, the Dutch economy minister, can now block a reverse decision taken by Nexperia's board. His department acted on September 30th, but only made its move public on October 12th. So again, I don't know, right? Anytime you just start seizing, it can, obviously it's going to prevent Chinese companies. Seems way more aggressive than the Intel story, where, what was it, 10% stake for the U.S. government, something like that? Like, that is, and immediately in America, we were all debating, like, is this socialism?

Like, have we taken a private company? Are we actually letting the free market work? should, you know, the U.S. government be playing Kingmaker in the semiconductor industry. It was a really, like, complicated issue, and I, you know, I wrestled with it personally. And over in Europe, the Dutch are just like, we'll take it all, I guess. I don't know. Yeah. Well, they're not, I don't think they're, they're not seizing the asset.

They're taking, like, they're not saying this is ours now. They're taking control over it. They have odd. Wing Tech, the owner of Nexperia, said that on September 30th, the Dutch government had issued an order requiring Nexperia and its global subsidiaries not to make any adjustments to their assets, intellectual property, business operations, or personnel for one year. That seems like a big request. The following day, three top Nexperia executives with Dutch and German nationalities submitted an emergency request to the Amsterdam Court of Appeal to intervene at the Chipmaker. the court immediately suspended the powers of chief executive Zhang Zhuge Jung.

And then they suspended him from his position as CEO. Anyways. Europe's been on a tear. You saw the big new AI stand. I just, it's really, I feel like impossible to form a take here without understanding what the catalyst was. Sure. Because we know that we know that nobody

steals more trade secrets than China. And so there's probably something going on behind the scenes here that we just don't know about. Yeah. Yeah, what was the real motivation? We'll have to dig into it. Well, in other European news, Europe's new big AI spending plan is still only 30% of what meta just purportedly paid to hire Andrew Tulloch. This was news over the weekend. Andrew is the co-founder of thinking machines. Poached. Poached to meta.

For allegedly three and a half. Allegedly three and a half, the number that kind of leaked was, what, one point something, one point five? That was the original number that he turned down. That was the number he turned down. What do you have on this, Tyler? Yeah, I mean, so I think it was somewhere in the summer, maybe like July, there was the rumors of him turning down $1.5 billion. It was like, oh my gosh, this is so crazy.

That is crazy. Must be a true believer in thing machines. Yep. And then, yeah, and then people, now people are saying 3.5. the number but even then that's just like the only thing I've seen where that number is is just on the timeline yeah yeah yeah it seems like full full rumor at this point but I saw it in I saw in group chats you're like just like I yeah at least equally unreliable as my least my least reliable friend texted it to me as well based on what he saw on the timeline

but uh yeah I think I think it's funny Andrew getting the offer for one and a half billion over the summer being like, you know, thank you for the offer. I'm really, you know, honored that you have so much faith in me. I'm going to stick with my principles. I'm going to stick it out with my team. I'm going to stay true to the mission. Yeah. We just raised, uh, I'm a missionary, not a mercenary.

I'm a missionary, not a mercenary. You know, we just raised $2 billion to, you know, pursue, uh, to pursue our vision. And thank you a lot for the offer and, um, you know, look forward to hopefully collaborating in the future, Mr. Mark Zuckerberg, two months later. So he's like, how about three and a half billion? He's like, let's ride. That's right. Anyways.

Tyler, does this trade deal make you more or less AGI-pilled? I mean, so thinking machines is already like not very AGI-I-pilled. So maybe it's actually more AGI pilling, right? Because Andrew Tulloch, maybe he is super AGI-I-pilled. He's seeing what's going on in Thing-Machians and saying, He needs the scale. This is just not enough. I need more.

He needs more compute. Maybe it's, I think this is more AGI Pillar. He saw the Prometheus plan. Yeah, but that's, obviously, the other thing is like, okay, maybe he just thinks that the bubble is about to pop and he needs, like, actually, he needs, like, liquid chairs, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's notable the lesson, lesson is everyone has a price. It's just, which I think, you know, the industry's known forever. It just turns out that the price is off.

in times. In this case, three times higher what most people's price would have been. WinSurf had a price. They went to Google. But of course, the product stayed with Cognition. One of our sponsors, Cognition's the makers of Devin. Devin is the software, AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team.

We also have Ryan Peterson joining from Flexport. Does he have a price? Would he join TBBN full-time for $3.5 billion? Would you do it? Would you become a... Would you become a mercenary? You said a billion, right? Three and a half billion.

You have to go. You have to walk out of your office and say, I'm sorry, everyone. I'm becoming a podcaster. Oh, I think I could join you guys. And run for it. No, no, it's a life's work mission. You have to be full-time.

The offer is contingent. You wouldn't do it. You'd stick around. That's great. You are true, you are true, you are true missionary. Give me the lore again on, your take on missionaries versus mercenaries in the AI wars? What does history teach us about whether you should build an army of missionaries or mercenaries?

Because I feel like some people are going both ways on them. Well, yeah. But we were right before you joined, we were, I was just joking about Andrew Tolick from thinking machines over the summer being, you know, I'm just imagining what the, what the exchange with Mark was, but, you know, like, I'm really, I'm really honored that you would give me this one and a half billion dollar offer. you know, it shows massive faith in me, but, you know, I'm going to stick with the team, stick with the mission, and, like, I hope we can find a way to collaborate. And then Zuck circles back with $3.5 billion, and suddenly it's like, all right, I think, I think we're in business here.

I think that was rumor, three and a half bills? Three and a half billion is the rumor, yeah. Wild. Wow. Well, yeah, you know, Machiavelli was the one who wrote the most about mercenaries and how useless they are when it comes to actual fighting. I think about this more in the context. of Zuck's security team than I do

in his AI engine. It's like, when the bullets start flying, are these guys ready to take a, you know, take one, or are they going to run away? Well, to Andrew's credit, he was at Meta for 11 years. Yeah, he is just going home. He's going home. Yeah. Small price to bring

him home. Yeah. How is your weekend? Great, great. Well, I'm here instead of California, not, unfortunately, I can't visit you guys. I'm in Palisbury days. We're having the Flexport customer conference starts tonight. So I've been practicing my big talk tomorrow.

We're releasing a whole bunch of new technology and then I'm going to host a whole big customers. At this point is the, you know, I imagine like 100% of the flex-bore team, they have to be missionaries, not mercenaries at this point because every day you could wake up to a 1,000% tariff on your entire business. And if you're a mercenary, you're going to jump ship. So I imagine the team is kind of buckled down already for this. And Friday wasn't actually that crazy, even though the market was crazy.

But what was the internal, give us the play-by-play from Friday morning. You said you had just gotten off of 2026 planning with the team and got hit with that. Thankfully, we do agile planning and we replant all the time. But yes, we just had a three-day planning session in San Francisco, like 40 of our leaders. And then, like, within hours of wrapping it up and saying goodbye to everybody, Trump, but now's 100% duties on China. So, and the last time he had these duties at this level. back in April and May, we saw our volumes from China, the U.S. go down by 60%.

Yeah, that's huge. That lasted for five weeks until they relaxed the tariffs, and then they came roaring back. So we'll see. I mean, Polly Market has it. I think we've all learned a little bit. Stay calm. Polymarket rate has it at at least an hour or two ago. I had it at 13% odds of this going through on November 1st.

Sure. So the market doesn't. And then Trump also kind of signaled on Sunday that, hey, maybe he's going to ease off a little bit. So we're not, we're not, we're definitely not panicking on it. Props to the Flexport Customs Engineering team because we have this thing. It's called tariff, stopflexport.com. It's a tariff calculator. And these guys have to keep it updated.

And this administration loves putting out these, the news on changes of customs policy on Friday afternoons. And these guys have worked so many weekends to keep, you know, speaking of missionary, they're working nights and weekends on duty, on call on page of duty to, to keep the tariff simulator up to speak. with whatever the newest regs are. From your actual conversation with customers, what was the, was there any material change to folks' business post-liberation day? Like I know personally, like several companies

that actually took seriously, like the mission of reshoring and now there may be like six months into building a different facility, but it's taking years. But they're like, like, it definitely flipped a switch from American dynamism is trendy to like there is a board level mandate to to actually consider reshoring in some way. How have your customers perceived it?

How are people thinking about moving around the globe generally? That was definitely true in the first few months. But then when Terry started hitting, you know, like India tariffs right now are as high. Well, the China tariffs went up on Friday, But until Friday, Indian tariffs on India were just about the same as on China. Sure. So it was sort of, you know, Latam tariffs are pretty low, but it's unclear if that's like here to stay or just a temporary blip. You could see Trump changing that overnight. So it's hard, like supply chain, especially if you're doing your own manufacturing, you're setting up your own plant.

That's like a multi-year, four or five-year minimum commitment that you're probably making before it pays back. And then after that, you know, return on capital would take you. longer than that. So I think it's the smart, I think the folks you're talking to probably in some sort of defense industry or something that's like more national security oriented and you're like, yeah, we need to do this in the United States. For your typical company that's making apparel or home goods or other types of products, it's just like it's not really there to come back to the U.S. I've met more companies who aren't going to do it as a result of having, like the worst case I've seen is a company that makes bicycles in the United States. And they've made it so that bicycles

are duty-free if you import them, but the bike parts are not. So these guys can't import parts. They have to pay taxes on the tariffs on the part, but their competitors just import whole bike. So they're like, hey, we're just going to start producing overseas. That's really rough. Yeah, it feels like at the end of the day, there's like so many little sub-nishes in the economy.

Like, there was a story in the Wall Street Journal about the maker of Sharpie was successful in, like, reshoring all of Sharpie manufacturing. but Sharpies are probably not, you know, the target of, like, one specific tariff and then also... That's a critical industry for Trump. It is. He's got to sign. That was a hilarious one. That's true.

The autographs can't get signed. Yeah. What never has an auto pen? Will it be a Sharpie? Like, Autopan Sharpie? Autopenn. What do you mean? It's like a machine that does the signature.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's how Biden signed all of his day. No, right. No way. Um, so I mean, is, is, is everyone just kind of glued to truth social now to, to get the latest updates on, uh, where this all goes? Or, or are there other kind of like, uh, folks that are like reading the tea leaves and understanding like, is polymarket, the, the definitive data source? Like, how are, how are customers actually updating on like how real this is? I think prediction markets are, yeah, incredibly valuable for this. Really useful. They're pretty thinly traded. Like the one I cited, it only has a hundred forty six. thousand dollars of liquidity yeah it's not really getting used because one customer could make a hedge sure they're going to cost them more than that so but there's still signaling that actually you know

the best source for us is just going to DC and talking to people I've been going there once a month going back in a couple weeks and just trying to get intel what's really happening what's coming down the pipe I think more you can build relationship this administration's like you know as opposed to terrorists of I am, as I am, they've been very open door to hearing our ideas, listening. They genuinely want to help businesses. So they've been like, we've been able to go in there and talk to them. And we're working on a couple of things that we think we can reduce customs fraud. Like there's this massive fraud that's happening in customs right now.

Oh, yeah. Because you just have this incentive. If you're, the tariffs go way up. Now there's an incentive to cheat that wasn't there a couple years ago. Sure. Or even last year. And the way that you can cheat. This is highly illegal.

Do not do this. Do not do this. It's not worth it. I only have one rule is I'm never going to jail. Yeah. So don't have the rule. Simple man. Simple man.

Yeah. But so the way that it works and it's very rampant right now is the United States is the only country in the world that allows foreign companies to import goods into the country with no legal entity, no requirement to have a employee or person locally. So you can just import stuff into the country as a foreign company. and then you just lie on your declarations. And our customs, CPP has agents in like 60 countries, but they're there for counter-narcotics and anti-terrorism stuff. They're not there for trade compliance and trade enforcement. So these companies just cheat and there's like basically no consequence.

And if they get caught, they can spin up a new entity at home and just keep doing it. So there's zero downside or maybe the goods gets. So. And the fraud is somebody is bringing in, let's say, $3 million worth of goods, and they just say it's like, oh, it's $200,000, something like that, right? And so, again, the people that are punished through that are actual American companies or anybody doing it the right way that then has to compete with a player in the market who doesn't have the same cost structure as them because they're just not paying terror.

This is why we feel strongly about it. And right now on the Amazon marketplace, 60% of the sellers are non-resident importers. That's what we call this from China. I know because 60% of the time I buy something on Amazon, it's garbage. Yes. So I love Amazon, but that is becoming a problem. That's my personal experience. Yeah.

So we're trying to highlight this issue around Washington. And people have been really receptive to learn about it. it and to see how it works and to some propose, you know, ways that you might close this loophole. So, yeah, and the way that what's happening where American companies are getting trapped in this is that they're allowing their factories to import the goods for them. So instead of them importing it, they're letting the factory import it and feeling like everyone's their own personal lawyer and saying, hey, I didn't know about the fraud. It's not my fault.

I just bought the goods in the United States. And if they were, if the factory didn't pay duties, that's not my problem. well, that is not how the law works. If you're paying for your goods at a price less than the duties alone would have been, then you must have, you know, you should have known about this. And I think it's going to be hard to convince a jury. So I think you'll see some enforcement cases. But probably they just need to make it so a foreign company,

just like every other country in the world, you need to have a legal entity in the country in order to import goods. Yeah. Do you have an idea of the scale of like, the sweet spot for the scale of that type of fraud. I imagine that you really can't get away with that if you're, you know, doing $10 billion of commerce, but there's probably a whole host of little, you know, $20 million operations that are maybe cheating or something. It's got pretty big. So I analyzed that in the United States, ocean freight shipping manifest or public record.

Oh, sure. And so I analyzed all of them last week with a team member of mine. We went through this. And what we found was about 10% of trade has switched terms to where the factory is now importing the goods, which is our estimate, around 10, 11%, which is just massive amount of fraud. And probably going to keep growing and growing until they take enforcement. Yeah. But is it even impossible to enforce? Like, how wouldn't you have to like 10x the size? It has to be a U.S. entity with my proposal, and we'll see if there's land somewhere, but it's like, we'll have to be a U.S. entity with a U.S. bank account.

With a U.S. director that can go to prison. And a U.S. employee could be held liable. Exactly. And, you know, like, sure, you can always break the law, but if there's a threat of going to jail, you're probably not going to do that most of the time. Most people wouldn't. And we have a great country because it's much easier to start a business than it is to be a criminal. Yeah.

And so most of the smart people become entrepreneurs. viewers instead of criminals. Whereas in other countries, that's not true. It's easier to be a criminal than to start a business. Yeah. Can you give us an update on import genius? We were reading a New York Times article and import genius was cited and we were just kind of like, oh, like, you know, we know that. We know the founders. But I'd love to know like, like, what's the state of the business? It seems like you're still finding interesting data from that. Like how, like, what, like, what role does import genius play in the, in the overall like community right now? Yeah, so import is a data service that takes those public shipping records that I mentioned

and makes them searchable and accessible. And so that's the data that I was using to figure out looking at this fraud. A lot of different journalists use it to find what's going on in the world. They're also kind of finding, digging up fraud of some kind. There's lots of other use cases besides investigating fraud, but that's what tends to get into this. Yeah, I imagine you can just use it to understand, like, are volumes falling or rising or what rates? are, et cetera. Exactly.

We use it for market share analysis. We use it for lead generation for logistics companies, helping to find companies that we should talk to about their freight. And people use it for factories, like to find, you're looking to do research on a factory, kind of see what their shipping history is. Yeah. Overall, I mean, maybe to close out,

I'd love to know just kind of like, there's obviously a lot of volatility with the tariff and the overall trade war. it's just been such a like a low rumble for the last year for this entire administration. I'm sure it's been a lot louder in your world. But does it feel like we're closer to having resolution? Like when we talked last time, I was like, I was like, I think the business community, and I think you agreed with me, the business community just wants something to stick,

a deal, if it's 50% forever, we can build our models off of that. We can invest against that. but uncertainty is particularly destabilizing to the U.S. economy, to global trade, etc. Whatever it lands at, let's just get there now. Does it feel like we're closer than ever or getting farther away? Like, how do you feel about just like the level of volatility in global trade? It started to feel like things were calming down until really I think Trump, the administration going after India is what kind of set off to be like, oh, okay, maybe these aren't as stable as if like,

A negotiation can just quickly spiral on a country like that that in a lot of ways we have a lot of common with India and should be an ally of ours. This current level on China is definitely at a, our view is anything above about 60% duty is going to be an embargo level where almost all trade stops. And we're so well above that right now. I don't think that that's where the administration wants this to land. I think they'd probably like it to be a little bit below the embargo level and give them a ratchet, make it a ratchet where they can put it above the embargo level on a moment's notice when they don't do what they want. I wish we could say we had the long-term stability.

Like if the current rates on Latin America lasted, It would be really kind of very clear for folks of what policy that the administration is putting forward is, hey, we're going to treat the Southern South America, Latin America, as that kind of our backyard, our hemispheric partners. We're going to encourage kind of manufacturing there for stuff that doesn't make sense in the United States. I think it's very hard for them to come out and say that overtly because they are like, the actual message is, no, make it in America. Yeah. in the United States of America, not America. What's the latest on with the ports automation at the ports? Oh, it's illegal.

That's the latest. No, it's not illegal. It's against the contract of the union for the next, I think, five more years from now on the West, on the East Coast and four more years on the West Coast, I want to say. And our direct competitors are doing the same thing, right? say that again and and i'm sure the rest of the world is also banning automation right so we'll so we'll be equally competitive and of course it's like no singapore's probably extremely automated right contract ends in like four or five years

and we'll see but in the meantime there will be no automation in the u.s. ports yeah so we're behind uh makes it even harder we've got by the way here in l.a. the long beach container terminal It is an automated terminal. I think that's what kind of kicked off the union and pissed them off and made them realize this is like a real thing when they put it in about 10 years ago. It's really impressive.

Like it's a giant robot that's like a square mile of all autonomous trucks driving around and there's no people in there. And so that we do have the, it's like a solve problem. The technology exists. It works. It's like really efficient. Really cool to look at.

Highly encouraged doing a tour of that. Cool. Flex Sports can take a bunch of our customers on the tour of that at our conference here in a couple of days. Are there any other like geological or geographic areas in the U.S. that could be ports, could be automated ports, but don't have any port infrastructure and are just like, oh, it's some houses or something we could buy or it's just like kind of an abandoned beach? You can't because the union claims every inch of American soil. of American coastline. So even if today they're not there, they still clean spirit. Yes, and they will show up.

Yeah. So you can't do it. The thing that one area I'd really love to see America take advantage of is our river network. And actually this points to like, if Latin America were to become a much bigger trading partner for us, then you would predict that the New Orleans should be the biggest port in the United States. Oh, yeah.

If you have the whole Mississippi River network and you can get everywhere all the way connecting up to the Great Lakes, up to Canada, like, you could really make an amazing, but there's almost no container shipping on that network, in part because of union contracts and like a flexport, a flexport river boat would go really hard. Maybe you could put a casino on it, too, to make, you know, make it really American. 100%. I really think like a sparge network running all over. And like, replace a lot of the trucks on the road, too, because it's so much more efficient, cheaper, greener, like cooler in so many ways. And yeah, I haven't looked into the gambling laws, but. In international waters, you can, of course. So, you know, you just gamble

down the Amazon, then gamble all through the Caribbean, and then gamble up the Mississippi. It's the future. Anyway, thanks so much for stopping. New product line. Congratulations. This is a great. I got to ideate with you guys more. I think we'll probably come up with some good product ideas for you. I think a karetsu of gambling and shipping is just a perfect. Mystery boxes. Everyone's asking what's the Flexport second act? I would like to do something in futures, actually,

where you could hedge the price of shipping. Maybe that's a partnership with us in one of these prediction markets. Yeah, pretty cool. Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. It needs to happen. Yeah. I mean, isn't that the story of Southwest? They bought a bunch of fuel futures,

and then they were, like, had the ability of pricing power for, like, a number of years. I don't know how apocryphal that story is. Yeah. Yeah, I think I read about that. We haven't done any hedging yet. I'm always telling our finance seem to do it, and then they come back with reasons why you don't need to or something,

but it seems like we should. Yeah, it'd be fun, turn into a hedge fund. It'd be good. You can't today, there's not really like a futures, There's a couple of these marketplace they're trying to form, like, features on actual price of container shipping. Those don't exist yet in a way that's really viable. But if that existed, we would for sure start, I would like to, when we should be the smartest people in the market, right? Like, at some point, you're like, we're doing all this commodity shipping stuff.

We should just trade shipping feature. Maybe, maybe. Well, when you announce it, come back and tell us all about it. And good luck with the customer conference. Thanks so much for stopping by. we'll talk to you see you see you guys let me talk about figma think bigger build faster figma helps design and development teams build great products together you can get started for free uh jeremy gufahn asking the important questions why hasn't someone done calendar invites for

phone numbers it's the last thing keeping email in the loop totally agree so it gets to such an awkward spot in a you know in a meeting where you're you're going back always quoting every text and then have to and then uh okay Okay, who's going to bite the bullet? If Apple wants to really dominate an iMessage world, they should figure out how to add that to the IMessage flywheel, so you're even more locked in because your iCloud account is the one. I mean, I guess they do that with the calendar app,

but everyone's kind of on Gmail, so it's a little bit rough. It would be fun. Steve Jobs tasting cars, by the way. Everyone's having fun with the Steve Jobs, by the way. The black on tan is iconic. Very good. And, of course, I think we've talked about it on the show before, but he would buy a new car every six months,

so he never had to register the plate. He should have gotten a custom plate. He should have gotten an apple on the plate. Just let everyone know. Just let everyone know. There you go. What's wrong with getting a custom plate? Shout out, license two posts on Instagram.

So there was some interesting alpha coming out of Alpha Sense. Oh, yeah? Richard Jark shared a screenshot of it. He summarizes it an interview with a former Open AI employee that came over the weekend confirming my hunch, which I already wrote about in the article last week, that the biggest friction between Open AI and Microsoft is around infrastructure capacity. Open AI requests were, quote, leading to massive amounts of CAPEX potential that Microsoft would be on the hook for. Sam basically saying to Satya, spend a trouble. million dollars for me. I want to be the leaser.

And Satch is like, I want to be the leaser. And everyone's like, we want a lease. We don't want to, we don't want to. To Microsoft is getting a request from its biggest customer investment that they want an almost an exhaustible amount of GPUs. That's fine in terms of predicting your demand for a one year period from today, say. But what about in the year 29 when you end up having all of this capacity that you've constructed?

What does that market look like? No one really knows. that led to some friction between OpenAI and Microsoft. Richard says my take on this is that Microsoft is being smart and letting others take the risk, Oracle and Neoclouds, as numbers for CAPEX are reaching crazy numbers. When things come back to Earth, and many of these firms face difficulties,

Microsoft is less standing to pick up the distressed assets. Tyler has a take. What you got? Yeah, I mean, this is kind of what Doug O'Loughlin was saying. He was saying that Microsoft, super early on, they were like super bullish, right? They're in Open AI early on. And then they kind of take a step back. I think he was saying that, oh, they're going to get back in the game.

Yep. So hopefully, you know, hopefully we get the gigawatt set up by, by 2027, then we'll have, you know, AGI God. Yeah, it does seem like Sauta's doubling down on getting back in the live player AI race. He kind of delegated a couple tasks in Microsoft for business to someone else in the Microsoft leadership team, so he's able to spend more time on AI. The question is, is he still happy to be a leaser? that could be true. He could say, yeah, I want to lease even more from someone else

and do a whole bunch of off-balance sheet debt, essentially. There's a crazy post from September 24th, Sebastian Rashka, this is way deeper in the deck. I don't know if you're going to be able to find it. It's on page 94. But Sebastian says, no one understood me back then. And Nick, who is a famous Open AI hater, shares a screenshot of the information reporting on OpenAI's mega deal with Nvidia and says OpenAI would lease Nvidia chips instead of owning them. And so Nick says, News, opening AI to lease Nvidia chips rather than buying them, LMAO, like they don't even have the money to actually buy them.

And back then, in September 24th of 2025, Sebastian said, actually, I think that's smart. This way, you don't have to deal with reselling and recycling old chips every few years. and video chips should be offered as a subscription. And so you were talking to Dylan Patel about this. You were saying, like, what is the value of an A-100? What is the value of an H-100 in five years? Will you still be able to produce economic value? Yeah, it's still going to be able to inference Lama 3.

It might turn on, but that doesn't mean it'll be economically rational to leverage. Yeah, and my take is that, is that, and what I've been. digging around when we talk to people like we talked to kareem at ramp about this like there are companies that have found useful uh like economically valuable uses for llama three just somewhere in their software stack like you know with the the ramp example which of course is sponsor but it's a good example is just like you scan a receipt you need to understand like what category is this expense in and you can just take the name of the restaurant and what's on the line items put in Lama 3 and very cheaply get back, like, what category is it? It's like a classic just

like text interpretation transformation problem, easy token problem, right? We were working on that internal tool for horse identification. Yes, yeah, exactly. But like once you develop that tool, clock my horse. I got to tell the story about my quiz for you in a minute. But once you develop a tool that has like economic value inside your organization, you're very likely to just leave that there like your database you know like okay yeah we have a database we have a cron job that runs every night that you know cleans up the database tag some data move some stuff around create some summary analytics let's just let that run forever and yeah it costs us a thousand bucks a day or something and i think that will be the case for a lot of those like gpt 3.5 class workloads gpt 4 class

workloads so i don't know how bad it will be to just own a whole bunch of old compute but uh it's certainly, it's certainly risky because you could get caught and the value of those could go to basically zero and that would be really bad. And so it is, it is funny to see, you know, the question about like, will Microsoft actually go and buy a bunch of stuff? Like, what is getting back in the game really mean? Yeah. I mean, what it looks like right now is Satya watching a bunch of different players lever up massively while he sits back and his risk off. But you can imagine again we've talked about this a number of times, a point, it could be a year from now, it could be six months from now, it could be two years from now, three years from now,

it's really hard to say, where it comes in and gets very aggressive on buying up all these distressed assets that have done all the hard work, but got over levered and don't have the demand to, you know, not be in breach of various covenants. Yeah, if the bubble just keeps inflating or, you know, things kind of all pencil out like people hope. Yeah, that's, that's really the tinfoil hat theory. Trump just wanted to take some of the heat off, the AI bubble. So he announced a new trade war. Told you. Bubbles, bubbles over. But we got the first ever message in the LinkedIn stream. Let's go. No, we do stream on LinkedIn. Let's go. LinkedIn doesn't invest very much. But

Shom Mohite in the LinkedIn chat, can you tell the deployment percentage security to subscribe dot, dot, dot, dot. I don't know what that means. but I like that you're engaging in LinkedIn, holding it down. Hopefully New York Times. New York Times called us Sports Center for LinkedIn. And here we are. Here you are. You're the first chat room general. Thank you.

So on the question of, on the question of AGI timelines, is this a bubble? We, over the weekend, you got a new phone. and even though AGI is just a few thousand days away, it completely destroyed your I-Message integration. And so I, on Saturday at noon, I get a message from your email, not your I-Message account, because I have your I-Message pinned with your contact information. It was a pretty serious.

Yeah, it's just perfect, you know, blah, blah, blah, this other thing. What do you think? You know, you weren't exactly asking. me to wire money anywhere, but it was a serious question. It was a million dollar question. It was a million dollar question. And so, so I'm like, so I screenshot it sent it back to you and I say, this is coming from an email. So I have to do a check of humanity. Something only Jordy could know, what is my dream dressage horse? Because that's something only you could know until you've listened to this episode. Now you will know. And you. And I botched the answer. Yeah, you quote,

the Jordy that I was talking to says Danish warm blood, of course. Next. Next. question. I said, wrong. It's the Lip-Azoner, dancing horse, of course. And you said, I knew I was forgetting the Lip-A-Zan. And I said, sure, sure, a likely story. And so then you had to, you said, pull up WorldCoin. Yep. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I switched to, I switched phones, needed to deactivate the other. Liquid glass is pretty mid. And I said, the likely story, uh, feels, uh, feels like a downgrade all around. Wait, before we do that, uh, Mark and Michael Mirafloor have jumped into the LinkedIn. Let's go. Welcome.

I love to see it, holding it down. All right, Mark's already back. It was fun well-lasted. Amazing. Could have been me. Link to knees, Mazuma. Anyway, if you want to stay compliant, go to Vanta.

Automate compliance, manage, risk, prove trust, continuously. Vantage Trust management platform takes the manual work how to your security compliance process to replace it with continuous automation whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program. Okay.

So, as you know, I ordered my new iPhone weeks before you strolled into the iPhone. to the Apple store and just bought one off the shelf. I wasn't even there for a phone. So I was forced to wait. The anticipation was building. I had high hopes for the new phone. The second I started using it,

I thought this feels like a downgrade in every single way, except the actual quality of the images. The cameras are fantastic. The cameras are great. Everything else from the way that it feels, it feels cheap in comparison to my titanium. iPhone the liquid glass well I think it looks cool it is very mid in practice yep it's everywhere you go everywhere you go it feels like overly everything's overly

animated sure and I'm already getting a lag yeah on the animations just like why like why I don't I don't need it to animate just like be smooth and instant yeah and don't lag. I have a couple takes on liquid glass. I can drop. We can also get Tyler's review. What was it like upgrading? What was it like upgrading from the very first iPhone to a modern iPhone? Are you enjoying the 3G? You were on the 2G iPhone, right? The one, you actually had to plug it into the wall to talk to people. You've fully acclimated to liquid glass, right? You have any problems? Yeah, I think it's great. I mean, it's definitely, it's, so here's my issue.

You'll get used to it. They thought to themselves, we don't need to make a better user experience. We just need to make a different one. There's a little bit of that. It has to be noticeably different because it's not better. Yep. Nothing about it from using it for a few days have I thought, oh, this is a lot better than how it used to be. Yeah.

I think most of my experience that's like, oh, this is like so much better. It's probably mostly because I was going from. an iPhone 11, which is like seven years old. Yeah, yeah, yeah. To do this. It's probably not actually the iOS. Yeah. But so, I mean, it feels way faster, obviously, but it's hard to tell.

LinkedIn chat is absolutely going off. It's Mark. Ryan. Ryan, thank you to everyone's supporting us on LinkedIn. We are bringing news to LinkedIn for the first time ever. We're on a tear. Apple, first, they got to get on graphite code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams and GitHub ship higher quality software faster.

Okay, so a couple problems for me. the safari with liquid glass feels like way harder to use like I don't know how to get to the actual tab view there's a whole bunch of new muscle memory just opening a new tab I feel like I have to click twice yeah and there's a whole bunch of subtle changes you added more animations but it's not better

it does feel like there's a few things that now require two clicks or three clicks that used to just require one click or two clicks and so that's been annoying I'm sure I'll develop the muscle memory the new phone app It feels very difficult for me to use. I haven't been able to figure out like where all the different calls are.

All these things I think will sort out. I haven't enjoyed how hard it is to take a screenshot of an I message chat because the person's name appears in glass. And so if you're trying to line it up to screenshot just like one message and show the person's name to say like, hey, Jordy texted me this

and I'm sending that to Tyler. Jordy said this funny thing, you know, here. Well, like, I'm automatically going to see through the glass, like the last thing he said, that could be something different that I don't necessarily want to share. And so just the screenshots of eye messages have been a little bit tricky for me to get around. I will say, liquid glass looks cool. It does look cool. But it's worse to use.

Yep. And that makes it bad design. I think I'll get used to it. Oh, the other thing on the actual hardware design is I noticed that the plateau just completely, ruins the ability to use wireless chargers because you put it down on the wireless charger and there's a gap. I know. I know. So I need a new car. Great. Thanks. Nick says most people I know gain like 20 IQ when advising their friend's lives and lose 20 IQ when doing strategy for their own lives. Rune says, why is this? It makes absolutely no sense,

but it's true. Guy says, solution for friend yourself. That's very funny. This is totally, this, this is, this is, this is, it's usually that it's very easy to give simple advice to your friends. And when you're trying to strategize in your own life, you end up making it super complicated because you have all this, you have so, you have max, the most information on your life, more information on your life than anyone else. You're like trying to do one of the Tyler Reds. string boards and usually it's just a lot more simple yeah no I agree and you're sort of forced to make things simple when you're giving advice to a friend because you know okay here's their home life here's their work life here's what you should do here's a life hack for uh doing strategy for your

own life collect an immense amount of data about yourself put it all in Julius and analyze your life and make Julius.AI, you're the data AI data analyst that works for you. Don't even think about what to order for breakfast without first loading every previous breakfast you've had into Julius.ai and querying. Running analysis on it. What should I have the croissant or the breakfast burrito? Julius. Why not both? It's your personal Jarvis. Julius, Julius, should I go to bed at nine or ten? Julius? Should I have a second Diet Coke today? They really should give the Siri button to Julius.

Yeah, we even say, oh, they'll do a deal with Anthropic. We'll do a deal with complexity. Apple, Tim Cook, do a deal with Julius.A.I. You got to do it. Get Raul in the building. Chat with your data. Get expert level insights. Tyler, Kylie Jenner is working to make Snapchat a thing again. According to Jasmine, what's going on with Snapchat? What did she do? Yeah, so I don't know exactly what it's what she's working on. I'm like it's been announced yet. But it said tomorrow, on Snapchat. Okay. Yesterday you said tomorrow. Just do it. Just do it.

So we do know some retail traders who are very long Snapchat. So maybe I have to consult with them. Although I don't know if these particular traders are the most, you know, up-to-date on latest news. I mean, did this move to the market? Like, we needed to check in with our resident retail trader on the Snapchat price. I mean, I don't know. I've heard a number of people for a long time when I was doing YouTube videos, they would pitch me on like, you got to do a Snapchat version because in the, what was it,

in like 20, 22, 2023, Snapchat was very kind of liberal with their version of TikTok's creator fund. And so if you were getting a lot of views on Snapchat, you could be making a ton of money. I think you have a buddy who was making, who took a, there were a couple of YouTubers who took their content, made it Snapchat native, and then got big creator payouts, basically, like, higher CPMs just because Snapchat was like, we want to bootstrap, like, the real serious creator market,

not just, you know, Snapchat with your friends. Yeah, I think they distributed probably hundreds of millions of dollars. Yeah, yeah, to get, like, real shows, to get, like, Mr. Beast level shows. Tyler, what you got? So it seems that she was announcing a new music video that was launching on Snapchat. I guess she has been off Snapchat.

chat for some time and is returning. She does music? Interesting. I didn't know that. Well, if you want to generate audio, go to fall. Generative media platform for developers. The world's best generative image, video, and audio models all in one place. Develop and fine-tuned models with serverless GPUs and on-demand clusters. Did you see that Red Bull put Yuki Sonoda in a bucket of water next to a high-voltage power

outlet? No, I had no idea that I didn't understand this image at all. What? Why is this? I think he's doing a cold plunge. Okay, and it just happens to be like this. Red Bull is the type of team to play. That is absolutely electric.

That is awesome. Get after it. Yeah, it's gone. Should we run through my... Wait, I had a question for you. So, so I watched a film over the weekend. What? The third film ever!

I watched the film. Cinephile, his third film ever. Congratulations. I saw. Yes. Brad Pitt play Sunny Hayes in the movie F-1. Yes, F-1. I watched it in two parts.

That's okay. As the filmmaker intended. As the filmmaker intended, because he knew I would get sleepy. And check how much time was left in the movie. I was like, this is a movie about racing cars around a track. Can't be that long. Oh, you got another hour and 30 minutes. I'm going to bed.

But the thing that I thought was interesting is somebody who's seen, I haven't seen. two hands worth of films but I've seen a few interesting to have a fictional

story tied in to current reality in F1 have you seen a movie that's done

exactly that right where there's like Lewis Hamilton and other characters like blended in

to to it's rare but super rare but they pulled it off well yeah

it felt like you were in the world it felt like you were in modern-day Formula One and just watching. I mean, in the big short, they're like in Lehman Brothers, right?

In Goldman Sachs. That's my version of F-1. Yeah, but not with like the actual people. True, true. It's not like the managing director at Lehman Brothers is like playing himself. Sometimes there's little cameos, but nowhere near as much as like this is. There was like 200 cameos. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, no, that was a very cool, very cool feature of the film. Yeah, I did enjoy F1. It was a good movie. Maybe the movie of the summer. People were asking, like, what is the movie of the year? Like, there was no shelling point. There was no Barbenheimer this year. And I think F1 probably did the best.

The real one that's, like, going viral is the K-pop Demon Hunters movie on Netflix. That's the one that's, like, getting the most attention, like, squid game level. But a little less. Never heard of it. You've never heard of K-pop Demon Hunters. You're telling me this for the first time. Are you kidding? Actually.

You've never heard of K-pop Demon Hunters? No. It's crazy. It is like a massive viral success. It's a massive viral success. Let me run through my pitch to the U.S. government to give Dylan Patel at Semi-analysis $50 million. This was my take today.

So we had Dylan Patel on the show on Friday talking about inference max. This is an independent benchmark where he takes NVIDIAGPUs. But also pull up this video. Oh, yeah. From semi-analysis. This is why I had to talk about it. Seventy analysis with potentially the greatest It's amazing

Post of all time. They say was watching the Georgia game and noticed Dwar Keshe Pettel. There we go. There we go. It was literally on TV. A lot of people were saying. It's just so funny.

He's like in Tennessee Friday calling into TVPN with the most on-the-hinged setup we've ever had for a guest. It was great. And then he pops up here at, of course, This is not Dwar Cash if you've been living under a data center.

Yeah, he's talking a big game. Oh, I'm out here because there's a lot of power. He's like, power on the field. Let's go Bulldogs, apparently. No, obviously he's there for work as well. But it is an amazing, amazing clip. Is his buddy, like, throwing, like, waving money around? Something.

I don't know. Yeah, what is going on there? They're GPU rich. They are rich. That's amazing. I'm so glad he got on the end. Okay, get into your, get into your ranch. So basically, Dylan Patel.

one of the greatest analysts of all time, the Goats. He launched Inference Max last week. It's this website that you can go to, and you can select one of three open source models, Lama 3, Deepseek, and GPT, OSS. Then you can select what type of workload do you want to do? Do you want to do document summarization? Put 8,000 tokens in, get 1,000 out.

Do you want to do just chat back and forth, or do you want to do more of a reasoning, deep research type project? And then you can say, what architecture do you want to use? What the whole software stack? And then what GPUs do you want to run it on? Do you want to run it on Nvidia or AMD? And so you get all these different charts.

It's put the timeline in turmoil more than one time already. And it's been really interesting because my take, and I'm interested, Jordy, if you have a similar take, like it has two things have felt true. One is that Nvidia has just been running away with it, and AMD has been playing catch-up for years. And what inference max shows, at least me, is that AMD is actually better in certain areas. And that was kind of interesting because I'd heard the story of like AMD is getting their stuff together. They're fixing bugs.

George Hatz is pressuring them. Lisa Sue is talking to George Hots and Dylan Patel about what to do. And so the narrative of like Nvidia is 100% dominant and no one can touch them. That kind of breaks when you look at the inference max. And in fact, seems like AMD is doing great stuff in multiple places. And for certain workloads, you'd want to pick AMD on a total cost to own basis. It's not just about like raw speed all the time. It's about how much does it cost?

How much energy does it use to produce a set amount of tokens, right? Yeah. And it makes it even more surprising that they had to give away so much of their company in order to get open AI to be... That's a good point. You know, or Sam just exerted max leverage and just wanted to own 10% of AMD. Yeah. I mean, my update from Instrference Max is that AMD and NVIDIA are not as far away as people thought.

But, I mean, we'll have to dig into it. And obviously, it depends on a lot of different factors. And the true frontier models are a different thing. And those aren't in the benchmark because they're not open source. The other, the other, like, kind of update for me was around, was around open source. So I, we covered this. And we talked about this with Dylan, like when GPT, OSS, the open. open source model from Open AI launched, it was kind of like, well, okay, like, yeah, it's

like, you know, doing okay on benchmarks. Nothing really special going on there. And it just kind of like fizzled out. And it was like, yeah, it's cool. People were excited about it. But like the general tenor wasn't like, oh, deep seeks destroyed. But on inference max, you can see that GPTOSS is performing like right at the same level above on some, below on others. And so it feels like in terms of the like commoditization of the open source software, open source LLM market, like, Open AI has very much caught up and is not, like, well behind deep seek. And so that was kind of an interesting update. I feel like this data, we're going to get more interesting data points from this.

We're going to get more, just a better understanding of, like, not just how things do on benchmarks, like how smart the models are, but actually, like, if you're doing a big workload with them, like, which one is more affordable, right? So that was kind of interesting. But notably absent. So it's just AMD and NVIDIA right now. And when we talked to Dylan, he said, we're bringing on Traneum from Amazon

and we're bringing on TPU from Google. They are bigger companies and they're moving a little bit slower and they're not selling a ton of these things yet. AMD and VD and Vidae sell a lot more chips. And so TPU and Traneum will come in the next couple months, but we're working with them.

But notably absent was Huawei, which we've been tracking and we've heard that, you know. Huawei is not my friend. Huawei has this Cloud Matrix 385, that competes with Nvidia's NVL-72, the rack-scale compute. And the high-level number is that Nvidia at rack-scale is 2.5 times more energy-efficient. So the whole pitch with the Cloud Matrix, 384, was that it can do the same stuff as

Nvidia. Like, it can run the same models. And it's like, we got it. The problem is we're going into an era where energy is going to be the primary bottleneck. And so there's not a lot of incentive to run. chip, you know, racks that are inefficient. And also, like, being 60% less efficient is wildly different than being 10% less efficient, right? Like, these are really, really important. China would say, oh, well, we have all this, we had three gorgeous dam. Like, we have plenty of cheap energy. It's like,

for a while. And then eventually you've got to build 100 nuclear reactors, not just 10. And so I want Wallway to be on inference max. I don't think Nvidia's going to pay for that because they don't want to have, you know, Huawei chips in there. They might be hard to buy. I don't even know how you buy Huawei chips in America, but I think the U.S. government could get it done. And so I'm calling on David Sacks to put up the money. I don't know if they actually would have to pay this much. Dylan said something like $50 million came together across Nvidia and all their partners to pay for this. It was a lot of chips. And so I'd love to see America foot the bill, the American taxpayer foot the bill, to get some Huawei chips, give them to semi-analysis, get them running on

inference max so we can know the true gap in compute power. And this is important because we know the gap in rare earths. Like America, China refines or China mines six times as much rare earth, as many rare earth elements as the United States, they refine those almost 99% of the rare earths in the world. And they produce about 85 to 90% of the world's rare earth magnets. And so the gap in rare earth is massive. Now, we know that America's head ahead in AI compute and GPU manufacturing, but we just don't know how big that gap.

is really, and I feel like that's a really important, you know, negotiating point and point of negotiating leverage in the trade war. And putting Huawei on inference max would help us understand the nature of that gap and how big it is and how much leverage we actually have. So who knows where the money will come from, but I'd love to see Huawei on inference max. And, you know, if you want to learn more about it, go over to semi-analysis and check it out. Anyway, Patrick O'Shaughnessy and the team at Colossus have a new, looks like a cover story with none other than friend of the show, Josh Kushner, dropping tomorrow. Yeah. We should hopefully read through it.

For sure. Michael Spiker says, real men lose their shirts and natural gas, not trading synthetic shit coin futures at 50x leverage. What is 50X leverage buy? Like, he's just like, I think he's just a typo. Pretty funny. Yeah. Tyler, figure out, figure out some alpha in natural gas and start trading it.

It is interesting. We haven't heard, we haven't heard about the natural gas trade in, like, the retail circles or kind of the general. Like, all of, you know, like, all, like, basically everyone in tech got sharp-bun. It's a retail army. Yeah. I mean, a couple of years ago, as NVIDIA was pivoting from a graphics card maker to an AI accelerator maker, similar chip, but, you know, it was becoming a part of the AI narrative.

The AI narrative was developing around NVIDIA. The second phase of that was everyone learned what TSM was. Then everyone learned what ASML was. Then everyone learned what S.K. Hynix was because that's the full stack. You design the chip at NVIDIA, you make it at TSM with equipment from ASMC, with equipment from ASML and memory from SK-Hinix. And so those became the four companies that everyone knew about. Now people know about

the neoclouds and the hyperscalers. But there aren't that many people that know who the key players in natural gas are. And, you know, if all the predictions about AI are true, you heard it from Dylan. He said, like, a lot of the energy is going to come from natural

gas. And so who are you betting on? I mean, no specific companies, but Leopold has talked about this a lot, where basically if you continue ramping up data centers, like you need the power from somewhere. And the most obvious place is natural gas. If you can basically get past regulation

and like essentially, you know, all the big companies have these environmental restrictions on like where they can get power from. Yep. So if you can tear those down, then natural gas is like by far the cheapest, easiest way to just get like insane amounts of power. Yep. Well, it's... Raghav, yes.

As Rigaubold has a crazy position in natural gas company, EQT. Yeah, we should dig into that. only up 46% over the last year. Congratulations. We have both wins again. Founded in, guess. Founded in 1983. Close. 1888. 1888. Let's go. Let's go. Just waiting 150 years for the ultimate pump. Like now we're a meme stock. Finally. Real patience. Ajac's the great says work. at SpaceX has taught me the caffeine limits are imaginary. Yeah, when I was there, I had a minimum 200 milligrams per night. That's hilarious that he's denominating it in nights. Like, most people

would say I have 200 milligrams of caffeine per day. When I wake up, you know, have... Not per night. It's like, yeah, because I stay up all night. I start my morning with 200, and usually by noon, I'm at 5 to 600 milligrams. Today I hit over 1,000 milligrams. That's a lot of caffeine. I don't know if you should be going up that high. It's certainly not, you know, you got to work up to it. You've got to work up to it. Riley Walls had... It sounds like he had a great weekend. He said, the plan at dusk,

50 people went to San Francisco's longest dead end street and all ordered a Waymo at the same time. The world's first Waymo DDoS. You can see pictures of the Waymo. Obediently lining up. It was so crazy. So he said, we didn't actually get in the cars. They left after about 10 minutes

and charged a $5 no show fee. Very fair for getting messed with. Waymo might have to build in some functionality of like if you collude with a group to disrupt our services. I would be terrified to do this and be D platform from Waymo forever. Yeah. It would be very rough. Riley said, Waymo handled this well.

I assume this isn't much different than if a big concert had just ended eventually. They disabled all rides within a two-block vicinity until the morning. This was back in July. It felt like I was back. middle school. Everyone was giddy. And when another car showed up, there were cheers, maybe three or four real drivers

all laughed and just drove around. So good. I like Jake here saying, calling him, the tech jester cannot be stopped. It really is. Would you call him an internet rascal? An internet rascal. Yeah, somehow, I called him an internet rascal and then somehow the team thought that was his

official title. I, Riley Walls, I'm an internet rascal. I like it. Well, let me tell you about turbopuffer. Search every bite, list of actor in full-tech search, built from first principles on object storage, fast, 10x cheaper and extremely scalable. Jeffrey Hinton was featured in

the Acquired podcast. They did a deep dive on Google. You can go check it out. Jeffrey Hinton, father of deep learning at age 31 with Chris Ricebeck, La Jolla, California. They are so good. The acquired guys are so good at finding these archival images

that just go so hard on the timeline that look amazing. And David Fowl says probably my favorite factoid about Hinton's family is that basically all of them were mathematicians going back all the way to George Bull, first-time Medist, first ballot

list, eventually kicked off the medist list for being irrelevant in the modern era, except for one guy in their family who invented the jungle gym. Isn't that hilarious? Imagine inventing the jungle gym. That's such a great invention. I hope you have like a royalty that just produces endless

cash flow for the family forever. Like, there's nothing more enjoyable than meeting a Nepo baby who's like, yeah, my great-grandfather invented the pencil. Yeah. And you're like, yes, okay, you deserve to be on a yacht right now. Yeah. You contributed to society.

Imagine just looking at this, like, monstrosity of just, like, metal and, like, traps and, and you're sitting there. What should we call it? The jungle gym. Jungle gyms bring incredible joy. to children all over the world. It's one of the greatest, least controversial inventions ever. There's no jungle gym doomers.

That's true. There's no jungle gym accelerationsists. There's no, oh, jingle gym costs, causes brain rot narrative. There's no hit pieces on jungle gyms. They are unfiltered. I'm sure they, I actually, I would say, I bet you we could find a hit piece on jungle gyms. Because I'm sure they just massively increase injuries annually at school.

at schools. But worth it. You know what doesn't increase injuries at schools? Profound. Get your brand mentioned in ChatGBT, BT. Reach millions of consumers who are using AI. Discover new products and get a demo. Sheal, friend of the show,

says he's at Sea Ranch Lodge for lunch. It's very beautiful. And it's owned by Patrick and John Collison and Justin Kahn. Very fun. Look at that corgi. This is a cool. I had no idea that they snapped this up.

I knew that Justin Kahn spent a lot of time up in that neck of the woods. I have been to Sea Ranch. It's up, up around where I grew up. So they have principles for the Sea Ranch Lodge. Yes, nature predominates rural matrix. No, vest pocket nature as at Carmel or Bodega. I don't know what that means. Yes to rural, no to suburbia. Yes to community. No to individual houses. Yes to aesthetics. No to up for grab Aesthetics. Yes, to design control. Getting a text of saying there's not just a jungle gym hit piece.

There's a whole book covering. You wrote a book on the entire jungle gym. Trying to take down big jungle gym. Wow. I will go to the mat for the jungle gym. Yeah, we will defend jungle gyms with our lives. Yes. Not only because they are in the Hinton line, but also because they're good for the world.

They say it's non-elitist. They want modesty of house size, reforestation, native trees, common facilities. Very cool. Wait, they want elitism and large house sizes? No, no, not. I'm kidding.

Elitist and enormous houses. Yeah, wait, wait, I want the one on the right. I want the one on the right. Oh, they're taking shots at Malibu. They said they do not want to relinquish access. Malibu type. Ooh, Collison and Khan teaming up to make it down. Well, did this, these principles,

look like they predate them taking ownership. Unless they just, like, made it to try to look like a vintage piece of paper. Before growth equity, secondary dollars. No, because there's so much, there's so much lore around Sea Ranch. I don't know any of the lore. Never heard of Sea Ranch before. You can go down a YouTube rabbit hole around Sea Ranch. Yes.

How conspiratorial does it get? Not conspiratorial at all. It's just like a very principled development and community, and they've done. Or now. Or now. We can bring conspiracy to it. Imagine you're just in this like idyllic, you know, cabin and you go to open the mini fridge. And it's like, tap here for one-click checkup.

I'd love to have a cheap. In other news, upper 20 street capital, they're running out a phrase capital on X apparently. somebody is writing mistakes. I wrote about investing in Tiny an eclectic Canadian investment holding company just last year. Tiny is the company founded by Jeremy Gaffon, right? No.

Some people seem to think that in the comments. We should whatever happens with Tiny, we should hold Jeremy to account, right? Absolutely not. Early team member. I was potentially one of the first hires, but not his firm. Somebody in the comments I did notice

thought that Jeremy started Tiny, and that's probably because he's had one of the most iconic podcast appearances in history. But this person is writing, I wrote about investing in Tiny, an eclectic Canadian investment holding company just last year, concluding that I hope to add to our shares over time and enjoy the benefits of getting in on the ground floor of a tech-oriented compounder for years to come. Well, that was a mistake. Tiny has performed wretchedly, not just its share price, which, if it had gone down independent of how their businesses performed, would have bothered would not have bothered me, and indeed would have afforded opportunities to buy more.

But no, their fundamental financial performance floundered from the outset and have shown no signs of improvement. Net income and cash flows have dried up completely, and what little is left is going towards interest payments on $100 million in debt, some of which they violated covenants of, resulting in their lender, asking for accelerated principal repayments. In increasingly dire straits, they sold 4% of the company to a private equity shop for $20 million, dollar's Canadian, which at today's share price makes it look like Tiny is the one getting the last laugh. The final nail in the coffin was the behavior of one of its co-founders, the majority shareholder. The man has simply acted like nothing's wrong at all.

He remains active on Twitter and appears to spend inordinate amount of time on podcasts, both as guests and hosts in the guise of an entrepreneurial guru, often introduced as quote, billionaire, even though a cursory glance at the market cap of Tiny make that a farciful impossibility. He's essentially taking victory laps while his company faces a debt maelstrom and his shareholders circle the drain and then he sets up a plan to unload millions more shares. So really rough. I mean, the nominative determinism on tiny was always just so brutal. You want to start a tiny holding company. Well, it's a, didn't they start with like a design shop, right? Yep. Do you know that there's another design company called Huge?

How are they doing? I think they're doing great. They're up bigly. They're in Brooklyn. They've been going since 1999. Huge. Anyways. They have a thousand employees.

They're doing great. They got a global CEO. They have U.S. School. They're very good at user experience. Yeah, I always thought it was brutal. I've enjoyed Andrew Wilkinson's posts over the years, but I always thought it was brutal that he released a book called Burista, a billionaire.

But by the time he was publishing the book, it was clear that he was no longer. a billionaire. Burista billionaire and back again? Why not? Isn't that the Lord of the Rings? Round trip. The Lord of the Rings is a buck. No, Tiny does have the

Arrow Press. Oh, that's a good company. You can still always make coffee. Well, let me tell you about linear. Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products. Meet the system for modern software development,

streamline issues, projects, and product roadmaps. And we have our second guest of the show, Alexis Ohanian. Welcome to the stream. There he is. How you doing? What's up, gentlemen? What's up?

It's been too long. Been too long. I, man, I just can't believe in like a year. Yeah. You've dominated all things LinkedIn media empire. I look, LinkedIn is the cornerstone of our empire. It's where we think first. But you saw the vision.

You saw the vision before we had done any guests, before we had gone live. like very very still dying to invest guys you just happen to make the most profitable podcast ever we manifested it well if you if you want to invests why don't you go turbo long Microsoft they own LinkedIn we're going to make LinkedIn amazing it's going to flip every other social network you'll make a bag not financial advice no I like the early stage guys yeah traded stocks it doesn't doesn't stir my cocoa well you need to use a thousand X leverage and in the public markets. You need to be able to make it, you need to be able to make a thousand X or lose it all. Otherwise, otherwise, just don't get the rush. What, uh, what, uh, what, uh, you could

invest in a Microsoft treasury company. You could buy a seed state startup that just holds micro, holds a thousand X levered Microsoft stock. And then you get the exposure. You get to hang out with the founder. You're on the board, but, and you see the same financial upside. It can all work out, maybe. Anyways, it's great. It's great to see you. What's new in your world? Dude, I, well, you know, it's very kind.

I think for my second appearance on the show, you let me plug my women's track and field, meet now team-based league that's coming. Athlos. We just had our event in New York. Nice. Dope, dope time. Over three and a half million people tuned in this year. Oh, that's a spectacle.

It's a lot of fun. Thank you to the internet. Yeah. We went wide on the distribution, so you could find it anywhere. YouTube X, ESPN, the zone, didn't matter. But it was cool. And then I don't know. I was really coming on in part because I wanted to congratulate y'all.

It's been awesome to see the ride. I've had the privilege of separately funding or seating or, you know, playing early with you all separate companies. Yeah, I know. It's just been so awesome to see the trajectory, the execution, the vision, and, you know, congrats, well deserved. I know it's just the start. and this is just me buttering you up

so that one day I can invest in the tech... Some days. On the early side. By the way, yesterday, I was trying to hang out with a buddy. He could not. He was at the Angel City game. Oh, really? No way.

Fantastic. Yeah, what's the update on that front? I mean, we're knocking on the door. We might be able to get in the playoffs here. It's going to be, it's a little tough, a little tough right now, but I'm hoping we get in there. But that was probably one of my favorite, like, I was like March of 19 when I raged tweeted about how undervalued women's professional sports was. And in proper Twitter fashion, most people said, I was an idiot.

No one cared about women's sports. But that obviously has done pretty well. And yeah, thank him for being an Angel City supporter. I've got a couple extra spots in the suite. If you've got, there's a couple of listeners who want a couple tickets. And you have to fair out a way to give it away here for the last home match in the season. But I'll gladly. We'll just run a raffle on LinkedIn.

That'll be the way to get. That's where everyone is. That's where everyone is. That's the new alpha. The also, we, Stokespace, you're, they announced like a half a billion in new funding last week. Yo, there was the first, believe it not. So five years ago, first space tech investment I've ever done. And, and.

You're one shot in space. Well, I mean, come on. It was a, it was one of those dangerous, it's one of those dangerous first investment. in the sector because then, you know, you end up thinking you're a genius at it. But Andy Laps and the team are doing a hell of a job. And look, obviously Elon Musk has changed the world with SpaceX, but I think we would all agree a little competition is a good thing. And Andy's got a vision to do these fully 100% reasonable rockets.

And the first launch is going to be Cape Canaveral this summer and very, very proud of that team. I'm just grateful to be a little part of that. You'll have to be there. You're going to go in person? Oh, yeah. I'm bringing the whole 7, 716 team. we visited. There's photos off. There's nothing like watching one of your startups do a launch

and just actually, you know, but in the case of space, you have to, you get a really tight feedback loop, at least if somebody launches like a SaaS company. It's like, oh, how do signups look after the first 24 hours? This is like, how does the rocket in one piece after 20 seconds? Or you know, you know whether or not it worked. Yeah. On on the early stage side, I'd love to check in with you on just how you're feeling about AI because we had this foundation model war. It seems like that's cooling off like Mark Zuckerberg's poaching different co-founders of different teams. But it still seems like there's a bunch of fertile ground in the early stage, not even call it an AI company, but just a company that's like pull an AI off the shelf. And I'd love to know kind of how you're thinking about the mobile.

era like where the pockets of interesting value come from what you're what excites you when you see a pitch because i imagine you're not getting maybe you are but i imagine you're not getting excited about like yeah we're going up against open a i you know we're going to do everything they're doing but better and it's like that ship has sailed so so where are the ships that are leaving the port right now um it feels like okay i'd say the companies there was this existential crisis probably two years ago where some of these 21 and 22 vintage companies that we had seated were like, oh shit, like the world has changed. And a lot of the, I think the smartest ones, frankly, pivoted hard to decide, like,

how do we sell picks and shovels? How do we find ways to just get involved in this? And we've seen a couple, they won't even let me talk about them because their revenue is going so well. They're like, don't tell people about it. But there's a type of company that is. is selling to all those foundation models. It's basically like, throw money at this problem.

We don't need to be expert at it. We just need X. Maybe we need training data. Maybe we need whatever. Here we call it the barnacle economy, because the whales are getting so big that even if you're a barnacle, you can go from zero to $100 million in a couple of years. And it's like a good way to kind of like get started.

You're hitching a ride on a rocket ship. You're riding a wave. And then you go off and kind of source other customers over time and establish your market position. I love, I love barnacle economy. That is a good, that is a good meme. The other one that's starting to peak now that you all would have great instincts on as well,

is that it's that, whatever, the application layer. It's like, how do you build the stuff that's actually dope for the end consumer that, you know, assume some of these larger models are going to continue to just be a solution for a lot of stuff. But like, let's say you want to see how you look in a Canadian tuxedo.

There you go. Like, this is dogy, shameous place. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, if you can make a delightful user experience, and for a consumer social guy, this is where I feel like now a lot of my product instincts can start to shine because now I think we're almost about to see consumer social get fun again and get good again. People are realizing, y'all are, this is going to seem like I'm just kissing ass,

but you all prove, let me continue, you all prove the point that so much of the internet is now just dead, this whole dead internet theory, right? It's not my idea. Whether it's botted, whether it's quasi-AI, AI. you know, LinkedIn slop, like having proof of life, like live viewers and live content is really fucking valuable to hold attention. And so I think we'll see a next generation of social media merge that's verifiably human. Because like, because it's all going down in the group chats now, that can't be, that is not

novel tech. There's got to be some next iteration of that because that's where all of us are getting our like really best info now. And similarly, I think we're going to get really delightful, fun, consumer experiences where, you know, some scrappy founders in Brooklyn like the Doji guys can say, hey, let's make shopping fun again using this tech. And even if, you know, the Googles of the world launch some janky try-on experience, like we know those companies are just terrible and innovating product and aren't really a threat. Yeah, the thing I've been thinking about is, is social,

is what we think of as a social media platform even harder to build now when you think of you're going up against generative media platforms that, you know, like SORA and like vibes that are basically saying we'll spend hundreds of millions of dollars on compute to try to bootstrap this network. It's like the last generation of even the TikToks of the world was like, okay, you can compete against American social media companies. You just need to burn billions of dollars to do it. But it's way different than you with Reddit back in the day where you're like, okay, we need a little bit of cash. And we need to, you know, clone ourselves a bunch of on the platform.

Maybe an AWS credits or something would get you going. Like, it's just a different era. You guys had needed like a hundred million dollars to burn on compute, it wouldn't necessarily have been able to pull that off. $72,000. That's all we raised.

It's a size gong for a tiny gong. Yeah, we need a baby gong. No, no. Massive gong for scrappiness. And then 60 grand from an angel check from Paul Graham. Wait, you got 12K for.

YC. That was the first check. Yeah, for 7% of the company. It was worth it. But that is a different time. If you show up to... This day in history, Intel IPOed and raised $6.5 million. I mean, even inflation adjusted.

Yeah, it's so small. It's... But anybody, that's, and that's... Oh, God, okay, that's the other part that makes me a little nervous right now is the... Well, I guess, look, everyone's seeing the rounds. Everyone's seeing the markups and the valuations and stuff.

for still fairly early stage companies, the founders that can maintain their discipline with a ton of cash sitting in their bank account are going to dominate in such a great way because we know you aren't going to need to blitz scale like a decade before. You have no excuse for trying to get hundreds of employees. When in reality, if you're a pure software company,

you want to build the Navy Seals, right? You're having dozens who are going to be able to get you on the revenue. And so if you can spend that money intelligently, obviously you've got to drop a lot of it into compute. But I think it'll be interesting watch because the blitzscaling model didn't really make many people happy there are many CEOs who are like god i really loved when my company had a thousand employees um as long as these guys

and gals can be good stewards the capital i think we can keep this party going it's just uh yeah a lot of a lot of companies raising a lot right now uh early uh what was your uh takeaway from the whole ticot deal i know you were you were in the mix and it ultimately it's an effort it it Ultimately, ended up going for well beyond what it feels like the intrinsic value of the asset is, especially in comparison. It's like, would you rather own perplexity at 20 billion or TikTok at 15, right? We're set up at 7. Yeah, exactly. Like, it feels like a big platform.

I am still, DMs are still open if they want to get me in the mix. I do think, look, I had a hunch. this to me always felt like the kind of deal where you knew you were going to get it like if you knew you were going to win it you were going to know a minute ago and that is what it is

I'm still happy I've been publicly talking about how problematic TikTok was for years and years and years as a vehicle of the CCP so I'm I'm happy it's an American possession now I do think look there's still there's still a lot of value to that

zeitgeist to affecting that And I don't know. It'll be interesting to watch. I mean, I did just say, I think social media is about to get upended in some interesting ways. But I think with the right leadership, look, it's still, look, it's still meaningful is all hell. And with the right leadership, it can continue to endure in this new era. This is a fascinating question because TikTok feels like for the last maybe decade almost,

like they, it has been the engine of innovation for social media in the sense that the first, like, hack of like let's actually use licensed music or a lot of the cap cut stuff and a lot of the remove the background automatic editing tools a lot of the collab features live streaming like they were definitely pushing the product design very fast I wonder if the last two years have just been like total chaos internally and like basically frozen product development because it's like not an exciting place to work everything's going to be under crazy scrutiny so even if there's some innovation like oh like instead of just like and retweet there's like a third button that's going to work really well.

Like, that hasn't rolled out. And where I'm thinking this goes is that, you know, we heard open AI was going to do social network, they did SORA. That was like somewhat telegraphed. It makes a lot of sense that meta would launch vibes, something in the AI social network, AI, TikTok. But TikTok should launch AI TikTok, right? And they've been, they've been fantastic at machine learning in AI.

They've had huge data centers running these incredible recommendation algorithms. That's why the TikTok algorithm feels so creepily accurate. You swipe five times on a car, and it's like all car content for the next week. And they're really good at understanding, like, you like this car instead of this car. And that's because of AI and their machine learning chops, but they haven't brought that to bear in generative AI yet. And it seems logical, but I'm wondering if there's still a team there that would push that forward, or if they'll just be way more reactive. I, you bring up a really good point, especially because we've seen this creep up. And it felt like, look, part of the advantage to building in the space is you're right.

I mean, when we talk about the algorithm, we're talking about TikToks, right? The effectiveness, like you said, that they were able to use machine learning to send you more of the stuff you want to keep swiping. It does feel like they've been frozen in the time the last couple of years. Yeah. I think you could get, look, it's a, it is a large enough property with enough cultural influence that I think you get some really talented people to come go build on it. And look, Andrewsson and company, they know how to attract talented people to come build on stuff. I wouldn't count it out yet the part, and this is, look, a big reason why I'm still spending so much, why I continue spending more and more time in sports, investing in sports, building sports, teams, league, et cetera. I think it's the last bastion of content and attention when, you know, 95, think of the future of Hollywood, the entertainment industry, the music industry, it's going to be largely AI generated or assisted.

The appointment television, aside from live, you know, breaking tech and business news, sport is like guaranteed. And the celebrity of being an athlete also indoors, even in the age of AI, because why you're famous is not because people know about it. She's because of the stuff that you do. And so, like, there's got to be, I think, I think whatever that next platform is, is either going to feel deeply intimate and human. So it's the better version of the group chat that we all have. And I don't know if maybe it's another level anonymity, decentralization. I know the crypto bros are excited about that. There's potential there.

Or it's, it leans more into live. Especially here in the West, I feel like whatnot and others are still kind of scratch on the surface, whereas in China, it seems like a much bigger part of the culture. So I don't know. But I'm hopeful we keep seeing more innovation here because as a consumer guy, I think we've been starved for a little bit. Yeah, totally. Totally. There was some recent reporting that time on social media in the financial times, time on social media peaked in 2020 with young people cutting back first. Is that something?

Did you ever predict that? I mean, they're kind of, you have to factor in. I feel like COVID a little bit here. People going back to work, spending time. Yeah, it's like, remote work. It's really just people remote work ending and people like, okay. Yeah, you literally go to the office and like TikTok is banned on the Wi-Fi, so you can't use it. I like, okay, I like that we're beating this up.

I definitely quote tweeted it because it validated my own worldview. And so it's like, well, obviously this is right. I think, I mean, look, okay, anecdotally, I should actually just look at this. I'm, I track all this shit so I could probably just look at, even just on my mobile phone, time spent. I don't know how far back that goes in that app, but okay, anecdotally, look at, look at online dating and look at how, I mean, thankfully I'm married because I don't run, but like run clubs have become this new version of how to meet people, especially for younger generation. hire to swipe culture. It definitely feels like there is a younger generation of folks who are using the internet to find ways to commune offline, whether it is events or run clubs. It feels like there's a, there's a bit of a culture shift that's like, did you say you're married so you don't

run? No, I'm saying I'm married. So he doesn't go to. It's also helpful, but I also don't run. I like the idea that the only reason people run is to meet people. That is the like running is just of the damn expansion. It really has been. No, no, it's a good point. No,

but guys, guys, we can break, I could break down why this is. So I'm very lucky. I know Whitney fairly well from Bumble,

but also the OKCupid guys from back in the day. I'm really dating myself. The secret of online dating, assuming straight dating only for a second, is high value women get inundated by messages from guys. And so if they have a bad experience, they churn and your app fails.

Yeah. And so every successful dating website is on some level away to make sure that they're having a good time. Yep. And what's interesting about run clubs is it creates this social dynamic and a sort of physical real world one where if you literally cannot keep up

and so I like there is an interesting dynamic there that I think again I've taken a few of these pitches the run club app the dating app for real life like there's there's versions of this that are foaming up and so I want to believe

I want to believe the burnout is real and then you combine it with just again the fact that so much of the stuff we're seeing is just it's to some degree botted or fake I mean I'm meeting I'm meeting founders me give you a perfect example okay so and this is something I wouldn't be surprised okay so CPG days you know how important having a subreddit is oh yeah success your product right huge I got about nine months ago I heard from a founder I won't say what the subred it is but he told me he's like oh I just bought the bread making our slash bread making I just bought the bread making subred I was like I didn't know

you could buy a subreddit. He said, oh, yeah. Against TOS. I imagine that's against Reddit TOS. We definitely, but we found the seven moderator accounts and we bought each of those accounts. And so now we own those accounts. We can't, we control who becomes a new mod, so we own that subreddit. And so very quietly every day on our, it's not our slash bread banking, but our

spread making, we make sure that there are posts that do well that are like, oh, I love my, you know, blah, blah, blah bread maker. Yes. Because the value of the GPT, um, sort of. training the engine op the what is it geo now whatever yeah gbt optimization the SEO of today of the a i age it's so valuable that there's such an economic incentive now and you know if that's what the cracked founders yeah are doing and i just learned about that six months ago eight months ago surely it was happening even before should we and yeah it it's wild it it makes the underpinning

of so much of what we consume online you know very much at risk again which is why stuff like this starts to feel a lot more real and tangible. Should we buy out all the mods of R-slash communism and start pilling them on capitalism? We'd have to, I mean, it's interesting. For probably, I imagine, post-luxury watches. I imagine they would be very principled. If you tried, if you offered $10,000, they'd be very principled. They'd be like, there's no price that I would, you know, sell my account.

You offer them a million dollars? Hmm, actually. Actually, if this communism thing sucks. I think 20K might do it. what do you think about uh i feel like there's been an idea i haven't i've i've seen some pitches over the last couple years of people uh selling this vision of like instagram but it's just you and a million bots or and and so that feels like the social network the ai the echo well it feels like a social network that you don't need a you know a billion dollars like to start

like something like a sora it's like very expensive not not any old team can just build that. You're absolutely right, Jordy. Thanks, John. Thanks, John. It's not this, it's that.

But, but, but, and I think the reason that I think is somewhat interesting is people can say, bots are a feature,

not a bug, right? Like X clearly doesn't take bots as seriously as maybe they should. And I think part of that is probably just brings back, it's hard to solve,

but it also brings, it's like a notification, right? It brings people back to the app. There's a reason to, check the app even if you're not getting real engagement. But I've generally been bearished on these sort of just like entirely bot networks because I think people still want to feel like even if they're getting a notification from like an account that could be a bot,

they're still running the calculus of like, oh, maybe it is a real person. I don't know. Yeah, it would have to be the utility of the bot, the why of the bot would have to be so great that no human could reasonably do it. So Reddit had a version, a third-party version, version of this was like the remind me bot where you would just tag in remind me and some date some amount of time it will message you back so like that that that isn't that right no no reasonable human would keep track of all that bullshit great use of a bot um there there there could be uses for that but it would really like in each one of them it would have to be so where they can't just be sick or fancy like it has to be like no this actually adds some value that no human

could reasonably do I think for me to get excited about it because people can still find the sick of fancy one to one Do you really need a hundred or a thousand? And frankly, you know, probably 10% of humanity will fall in some way in love with or in obsession with some kind of an AI in the same way we lost people to MMRIPGs or what have you. Like there's a version of that to exist, but I don't know about the one to many. At the same time, it feels like about 10% of the population maybe will do the exact opposite.

And instead of getting lost in the hyper-futuristic infinite jests, they will just go back to, like, logging off, complete retro stuff. I want to know two things, the general take on retro electronics, throwback websites, throwback tech, and then I want to know specifically what game are you playing on your mod retrochromatic most often these days, because you've been posting a lot about it. Dude, I don't know if we totally announced it. Well, okay, I'm going to have to disclose. We're also an RIA, so now anything I say.

So, I mean, it is a 7-76 company. We're very lucky to have messed with Torin and Palmer. And it is, I am an unabashed gamer. It's, I have, I mean, I have graded video games. Grated video games. Grated. Oh, like, like older copies that are kept in the box? Look at this guy.

That's cool. Original Game Boy. Wow. Like, this is my art. Wow. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is, I coveted this as a kid. We could not have.

Yeah. I've long had this thesis. Got one now, dad. I've longed at this thesis, I don't know how it'll play up, but, like, in many ways, video games can be the new golf for a generation of young people that grew up playing competitive video games, and then they will, like, play games with their crew, like, online, and, like, it'll actually, like, kind of be this place where people have business discussions in the lobby of Fortnite in a few years, like, once they get over.

So three years ago, two years ago, it was an early, a long time ago, was an early investor in Ro, Roe Health. Z. Raytono, founder and CEO, after our board meetings, we play Fortnite. Yeah. So we'll, this has been going on. I think he does it with some other CEO. I heard some hilarious story about a kid who runs a company and does all his meetings and

cod. He's like, no, no, seriously. I mean, he's like some like, I don't know, crypto founder or something and like he's a very small, like, lean company. He's just like, oh yeah, like, let's just hop on rust if we want to like hash this out. But first, I do want to know, top

mod retro game. I got Tetris obviously. I got a few other games, but what should I get? There you go. Self-simulated. It's a platformer. It's a lot of fun. It involves your robot dying and an infinite number of its clones having to make its way out. I may or may not be working on a game of my

own. I was about to ask. Which could be ready for the holidays. Because if the mod retro chromatic install base gets big enough, you could potentially develop new games and it would probably be pretty cheap to develop because you're not trying to do GTA5 with networking and stuff, right? like you're actually just like you could maybe even vibe code it a little bit like it's pretty doable that is exactly right i mean this is an indie game and what's crazy is the amount of money i'm

spending on this game is tens of thousands of dollars and that's everything and that's for basically developer designer a little bit soundtrack music stuff like it's it doesn't take that's not gta six money like that's that's accessible for just like an artist with like a couple backers you there's gonna be a new crowdfunding boom potentially you can get new kickstarter stuff going actually delivering stuff that's super cool and and what i love about the constraint is similar to a great tweet, right? You're limited on characters. You've got to make each one count.

You're limited on pixels. You make each count. And it forces you to think more about gameplay and do weird or interesting stuff. Like there's a C-Santi, like, guitar hero style game that I actually need to try. I like that would have never been greenlit. Soon, man. Well, man, come. I love Cs shanties.

It took the cost to be reasonable enough that you could get experimental and turn around a really high quality in the game. So I'm bullish on it, especially because, you know, every new call of duty, every new battlefield, like, the graphics get marginally better, but it's diminishing returns, right? Oh, the buildings are now 99% more destructible. That's cool. But it doesn't, it's not a huge step function. Like, will I buy the new Grand Theft Auto when it ever comes out?

Of course. Of course. But, but there's, there's room for this kind of simpler format that it's very dope. And, you know, Palmer's not stopping there. So if you've seen any of the tweets, there's some very cool hardware on the way as well. Yeah. Yeah, I think he's on the schedule for later this month. Last question, what's your framework and view on AI companions broadly?

It feels like one of those things that everybody has like kind of a moral framework around investing into. Elon obviously ran the calculus of it feels like a market that a lot of the other labs didn't want to lean. into heavily he was willing to lean in. He went there. He went there. But what's your, because I'm sure you've gotten pitch, probably hundreds of pitches. You haven't tried Claude sexy mode? This is where, oh Lord, this is definitely where I feel like there's probably, look, the market's going to find, the market's not necessarily going to regulate itself. This is clearly one of the end games for AI, for some percentage of the population. I'm not, like, jumping out of bed to fund that company.

And, you know, thankfully, Elon's doing it with those hentai characters, you know, but, but I do think, okay, the version of it that I think is very interesting to me. There's, and I've been using, I mean, maybe it just ends up being chatchiti T or anthropic. Like, I use them as a, as a kind of executive coach in real time when I'm looking for feedback on emails or just my own sort of notes on stuff. Like there's, there's some version of that that I think is interesting and compelling. I like, I've been actively looking for the version of it that is kid friendly, but not, you know, and there's been some interesting ones that have gotten funding.

I don't know, like, because the way I use AI with my kid right now is it's just the always on tutor that we can sort of ask questions to or will provide trivia questions for us on that's a good use case. That's been fun and it's great. And we do a little creative storytelling, storywriting, but it's always with me. because she's eight, right? I still, I want her to think of this as a tool that's going to give her superpowers to solve any problems she needs. I'm excited to see, here's another one, you know,

that I think the Palmers of the world will be thinking about is if you're focused on consumer electronics, like consumer hardware, the way this generation, this AI native generation is going to interact with UI and UX is different from us. And it's the same, it's the version of the kids swiping the magazine back in the day

as they thought the iPad was broken, but it's a paper magazine, right? Because that form factor was so native to them. There's an AI first, almost a voice-first version that I'm expecting. Because even I watch my daughter when she gets on her iPad for iPad time, like she usually uses the microphone to dictate text into the prompts or what have you instead of typing. Like I'm trying to get around the whole query thing.

But again, if I'm realistic, I'm like, well, this is way faster. These things, like literally, these things were designed to be slow so that, the keys wouldn't jam on a typewriter, right? And all the Dvorak keyboard people are like, we told you, finally we're validated. But I actually think this should feel like a relic from a bygone age if we build the right interface for it. So I think voice is going to get more interesting.

And I'm looking towards the younger generation for just helping us get ideas out of our heads. Yeah, the combination of kids' toys plus LLMs is interesting too. I'm sure they'll be jailbroken in terrible ways immediately. But if you can combine like actual... Yeah, but we never did that on the internet in 2000 either. Yeah, if you can combine like novel IP that's a hit plus the LLM layer where the kid just doesn't love like a certain plushy thing.

I mean, super underrated that OpenAI has a deal with, you know, we're talking about broadcom, invidia, Oracle. They have a deal with Mattel, like Open AI and Barbie are in business together. Like, let's think about that for a second. And Ken. It's going to be fun. Ken is aGI pill. Yeah, you're going to be able to go to Ken and Barbie AGI. It'll be fun.

Thank you so much for stopping by. This is a great time. Great to catch up. Appreciate you guys. Keep up the great work. Thank you. You too. We'll talk to you soon. Talk soon. Speaking of Palmer, massive news out of Anderol today, Jen Bucci shares fit check and shows an insane design for an augmented reality, virtual reality. Is this a real picture?

Warfighter, I believe it is. Wow. Reggie James comments. He says, I, for one, love that national defense and intelligence are just founders fund incubation projects. Anderil had the full story. They said superpowers for superheroes. Today, they are unveiling Eagle Eye, the family of warfighter augments that place mission command and AI directly into the operator's helmet. Very cool. The lineage of this program is wild. Microsoft is working on it for a while. Anderle got the contract. But still have a lot of it. What did they do? Full page print

add in the journal for this. Would they or did they? They already did. They did. Fantastic. Pull it up. And Garcia Capital says, this isn't a call of duty screenshot. This is Anderil's Eagle Eye. Palmer's been on record saying that he thinks that the warfighter will be adopting virtual reality

headsets or AR headsets before the consumer because weight, cost, and you can just mandate, hey, you got to wear this thing to do your job. Well, and you can say we're going to spend $50,000 on each headset versus meta being, you know, in a position where they need to make a headset for like 300 bucks, 500, so they can sell for 800 or they're probably losing money. I don't know. Yep, yep. Yep. So the willingness to pay to save a life on the battlefield is way higher than watch a movie or play a game. Yeah. What do you think of the new headset, Tyler? They're so sick. How do we, I mean, we got to get one of these? How do we get a demo? I'm looking through, like, they've posted some other images of what it looks like, and it's like, it just looks like Call of Duty. Like, there's a mini map. And then when you have a gun, it shows, like,

Where it's like aiming at. That's crazy. It's sick. It's really like, yeah, Call of Duty Infinite Warfare is now here. Very excited to see more demos of this as it rolls out. Congratulations to the entire Anderil team on the progress. The lineage there is fascinating. And I always had this thesis that like Palmer and Anderol was like the perfect company to do this project.

Originally called IVAS and IVAS was kind of languishing within Microsoft for a number of years. made sense that Palmer has the VR. Are they getting like a paid like a billion dollars a year? It was some massive contract that was getting. Yeah. Yeah, I think it was like a 10 something billion dollar product or a project or scope of work. But I don't know how much they'd actually drawn down on that because I don't know how much they'd actually delivered against the contract.

There was still a lot of value to be paid if you could deliver. But Microsoft I think wasn't quite delivering. And so Aenderell bought the contract or equivalent. acquired the contract or merged the contract in, and then now is running at it much harder. And, I mean, it seems like a really, really solid progress, which is exciting. So if you go over and you get a chromatic, you're going to have to pay sales tax, the chromatic team, telling you, get on numeralhq.com, sales tax at autopilot, spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance.

More news on rare earths, allod Gill, who came on the show. Narrative violation. Oh, yeah. Abundant Earths. Abundant Earths is quoting Ben Thompson, he says, the U.S. deficiency in rare earths isn't a matter of needing to catch up to technological excellence. It's needing to simply have the will incentives and regulatory regime to do what we already did before. TLDR, they are not rare. We just chose not to make them in the United States of America. The NRC of old hurt multiple aspects of U.S. resilience in both energy and manufacturing. Hopefully the current NRC can help change things for the better. Now, the steel man for not making rare earths in America is, and I think we now realize that it was a mistake, but I do think it's important to understand the rationale behind not doing mining in America. Like it is dirty. It is gross. Like if you have a mine upstream for you, there's probably

going to be some pollution. If you're worried about microplastics, you're also probably worried about molybdenum in your... Forever chemicals. In your tap water. Forever chemicals, all these different things. It is a very rough job. You know, the famous, like, coal miner gets black lung. Like, there was a reasonable rationale for not doing this all over the United States.

But the true answer was always more technology. It wasn't, hey, mining is dirty. Let's not do dirty mining. It was like, let's figure out how to actually clean it. Like, there is a way to, it might be a little bit less economical, but there is a way to put a mine somewhere and have the chemicals contained and not destroy the environment. And that always should be the answer,

just like with nuclear power plants, design one that doesn't blow up. That's the answer. The answer is not no more nuclear power plants. It's design one that's safe. And so hopefully we can get there. And hopefully we can re-shore it. There are a couple of companies that are working on it,

MP Materials, I think is one. There's a few others that are, you know, working on rare earth manufacturing and processing. Yeah, the challenge is trying to massively increase production capacity while making the process much cleaner. Yes. You kind of need to choose one typically. Yes. There is a third option, though. The third option is to recycle the materials that we have.

So there's a public company, and then there's redwood materials, which was founded by J.B. Straubel, who was, I believe, co-founded. or at least on the board of Tesla for a number of years. And his whole pitch is, there's, there's already, we already have a ton of rare earths. They're just locked in depreciated electric cars, let's rip them up, reprocess them, and then recycle them because the actual matter is conserved even after the battery is no longer useful. And so you can separate all those out and then, and then reintroduce them into the supply chain. And so redwood materials has been on that track for a number of years and hopefully is doing well because it's more more important than ever what what else do you want to go

through in the timeline while you Pegasus says open AI starting to give off FTX vibes what do you think cause this uh October 13th this was this morning TBPN appearance no uh yeah i extremely bearish for us um i don't know i mean so so FTX was getting unbelievably large while telling the world that they had like five engineers and they were running a hedge fund that was actively effectively trading against their user base they they're I don't know it's it's a rough batter match it's a rough matter match um I mean first off it's not to say you can't find ways to criticize open AI and criticize Sam's deal making and all that kind of but it feels wildly different.

Yeah, for sure. I mean, the FTX narrative was so, so famous. Sam is not like trading. He's trading with the subscription revenue that you give him, but it's wildly different than, you know, millions of people holding deposits with a financial institution that's half onshore, half offshore, and, you know, making wild degenerate bets.

Totally. even even just the aesthetics like the vibes of sbf where he was doing like those tic-tok dances and his whole brand was like i'm this like 20 year old billionaire it's like sam i drive a honda a cord i drive a camry yeah yeah sam will straight up tell you he likes a fancy car uh and uh yeah so way less fake i think sam said he'd never buy a car for a quarter mill exactly he got it um and and and also like yeah this whole uh the whole uh the whole SBF thing was just so much faster. FTX ramps so much faster than Open AI. Open AI, I mean, started what, a decade ago. They really have been working for a long time. Also, Sam Altman

has a way longer track record in Silicon Valley, like investing in big companies, growing them. He's been, you know, more or less correct on like the energy question, on the SaaS question. One way to pattern match it is that they're both CEOs that happen to be, make some pretty good investments. Their name, Sam. Their names. Is that a coincidence? Coincidence?

Draw the red string. Red string. Red string time. I mean, they are actually more linked because isn't the open philanthropy, effective altruism stuff linked, right? Tyler, back me up on this. What's the link? I know a lot of, like, EA funding was mostly from, like, FDX.

Like, it totally destroyed, like, the ecosystem. Yeah. And I think that's maybe when they actually changed. I don't know if it's the same organization, open, philanthropy or EA, but there was something where basically FTX crashes, everything is kind of wiped out, including a lot of EA. But in fact, I think a lot, there would be a lot more string between FTX and Anthropic, right, than FTX and opening eye, because a lot of the EA is left, opening eye to go over to Anthropic. But also, like, that's a very real business with, like,

and it's like, yeah, it's just like what, what would be the, like, the nature of like selling tokens for subscription revenue is just not the same as being a hedge fund that can, like, blow up on one bad trade. If, like, you're over levered. It's just like, you can get over levered if you have a lot of debt and stuff, but the debt's left. I don't know. It's a stretch, but it's certainly a viral post because there's a lot of people with strong opinions. Everyone has, like, a favorite foundation model company CEO right now. You can't just be a fan of all of them, like we are. You can't just be like, I like capitalism. I like the business. I like all of them. It's a good. What do you You're, what's your, what's your take on the AI labs?

I like the lab. I like them. Yeah, we support, we support the foundation model CEOs across the board. Like we support fin.a.I, the number one AI agent for customer service, number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive bakeoffs, number one ranking on G2. Watching my friend's kid and immediately put him on the drugs. What is this? Miss Rachel.

I don't know who that is. You've never, you've never thrown on. I've never seen Miss Rachel. I think I saw her mentioned in the Wall Street Journal ones, but that's really the only interaction I've ever had. YouTube? YouTube gets probably Miss Rachel. Yeah.

She's pulling, I mean, so her top videos do like billions of views. Billions? She has a video from three years ago called Baby Learning with Ms. Rachel. 1.6 billion views. That's a lot of views. So she puts up insane numbers. but it's you can think of it somewhat like crack cocaine for the youth and that it's like hyper addictive it's very engaging I do believe that it it's like probably effective at

teaching but at the cost of every yeah it's it's it's not it's basically it doesn't immediately screen brain rot but then when you if you actually pay attention to it it's cutting quickly. It's, it's keeping them, uh, kids, you know, massively engaged. And then if you turn it off, it's like full meltdown modes. Yeah. Jordi, would you say, um, it's equivalent to like that, that thing where it's, um, uh, it would be, it's like a Dwar Cash interview for you. If you're, if you're playing it and I come unplug your headphones, you start screaming. Oh my man. You can't, you go non. Sarah Payne was explaining. I was, I was re-listen to, I was re-listening to Leopold's interview yesterday.

Oh, yeah? I was feeling a little bit low on the AGI-pilledness. I and I had to get, you know, refilled. Yeah. But so, what do you say, it's similar to, like, when you see, like, Peter Griffin, like, explaining, like, math concepts. Have you ever seen these? No. Okay, well, it's, like, family guy characters, and they're like, oh, this is, like, you know,

you do gradient descent or something. They're explaining some. Is Peter Griffin, like, the Dwar Cash of the Family Guy universe or something? Explain who Peter Griffin is. All right. Never mind. None of us get each other references at all. What is funny about this picture that Growing Daniel shared is that he says,

watching my friend's kid and immediately put him on the drugs, and there's Miss Rachel showing on a TV. But this is clearly a conference room. Like there is, have you ever seen this little, if you zoom in on the actual device on the table there? Do you know what this is? It's like a 360 camera that you can use to like zoom around the room. And maybe we should get one right here. We can have, you know, you can zoom in on me or you, Tyler.

you or whatever you want. Anyway, very funny, very funny random post. You mentioned it earlier, but on this day, Intel IPOed at a stock price of $23.50. By close, it had raised $6.8 million. Historical size gong? Historical size gong. Absolutely wild run. Let me tell you about Addeo. Customer relationship magic. Adio is the AI any of CRM that builds scales and grows your company to the next level. Benny Feldman is going viral on X. He says, My buddy lost his job to AI.

His job was to chug thousands of gallons of water at a data center. This is so funny. Remember, if you're thirsty, GROC is thirsty, too. Yeah, this is wildly viral. 147,000 likes. Apple apparently is rebranded. It's streaming service Apple TV Plus to Apple TV. This is where all the alpha is in streaming.

This is why Tim Cook makes $7.4.9 million. Once a year, add a plus, drop a plus, add a max. Drop a max. This is how the modern economy works. What is the current HBO name? It's back to HBO Max. So now you can go and buy an Apple TV, open the Apple TV app, and subscribe to Apple TV.

So now there's three products that are all called Apple TV. It's pretty wild. Well, you know, there's some good stuff on there. F1. You wouldn't have watched F1 without Apple TV, so. I watched it on Amazon Prime, though. You did. But it was produced by Apple TV Plus, the streaming service.

Yes. Because there's a production company. There's like seven layers. They vertically integrated the supply chain. How do you save money on the icon pass? Let's go to the Dave Ramsey. So you buy the icon pass to save money, Yes, Dave. Because you have the icon pass, you now travel to Colorado, Utah, Japan, and Europe to ski. So you end up spending more money on ski trips. That is correct, Dave. The P-Gy Guide. Great posts, great posts.

Icon pass. Wilmanitis. I got an fight with somebody over the icon pass. I was maintaining that the slopes weren't in fact crowded this ski season with my one data point. I went skiing once or twice or something like that. I was like, it wasn't that bad. They're like, I went skiing 25 times. It was terrible this season. They need to raise prices. But I don't know. We spent most of our time locked in the studio of the Ultradome. Didn't get that many days of fresh pal. That's true.

Wilmanitis was David Senra released the second ever episode of David Senora by David Senora, hosted by David Senora, and executive produced by David Senora. Wellmanitis shared, of course, episodes with Michael Dell. Wilmanidas shared that Michael Dell was 23 when Dell computer crossed 150 million in sales, not something you see very often. You hear a picture that has exactly 23 pixels, apparently. Couldn't find a higher-res version, but it is remarkable. You couldn't find a higher-res version from October 19th, 1987, Will. I will always remember October 19th because we made a $25 million deal that day,

said Dell, whose Dell Computer Corporation grossed $159 million. dollars in sales last year of thousands of deals that were squashed that day. Ours was one of the only ones that wasn't. Wow. Absolutely. We pull up this video of the Chinese Unitri humanoids. And while we're pulling that up, let me tell you about 8Sleep.com. Get a pod five. How'd you sleep last night? We know that Saturday was a rough night. I kind of had a rough go. I got a 73. I got a 93. Play my sound cue. Let's go. rough rough but you know who doesn't need to sleep

a unitary robot let's play the video of the unitary robots dancing at an incredible speed wow that is remarkable we gotta get one of these this is a seven billion dollar company yep whoa

pretty cool putting clothes on them is really cool not the dancing dogs are not as impressive to me for some reason maybe I'm just uh you don't john doesn't like seeing robot dog i just seen so many because boston dynamics has posted so many videos like that uh but that's a game performance you never see boston dynamics putting on an entire play uh i'm not that impressed do better step it up give it a gun

that's that's the that's the solution until it's doing 360 no scopes in a kill house John will not be impressed. I won't be impressed. I want to see it on the battlefield. Dario Amadeh, at Anthropic, met with Narendra Modi, a PM of India to discuss Anthropics expansion into India, where Claude Coat use is up 5x since June. How India deploys AI across critical sectors like education,

health care, and agriculture for over a billion people will be essential to shaping the future of AI. And Max Bodak says, prediction, we're going to see way more images of hyperscalor CEOs being treated like visiting heads of state. Who aura farmed who here, Tyler, between Narendra Modi and Dario Amadee? I think I'm going to give it to Dario.

I think you were farmed, I agree. Yeah. It's a good farm. It's a good farm, sir. You always have to take account, like, what is their previous kind of aura levels going in? Yes, yes. Obviously, head of state, it's hard to beat that.

Yep, especially. So I think this is the new move. If you're like a seed stage founder, you need to get a photo op done. I don't know. I mean, yeah, just just analyzing the positioning. Modi's a little bit turned in. True. Meanwhile, the Chad Dario is just sitting.

No, I'm saying the same thing. Wait, I'm saying Dario or farmed. Yes, yes, yes, yes. Dario or farmed, clearly.

Yeah, Modi's looking sharp is all I'm saying. But, yeah, if you ran the green line test and you look specifically at Modi's legs, the way they're sort of slanted in. It's critical. It's not quite perfect. Dario also looks at,

couple inches taller. He's got a kind of fluffy head of hair to add an extra inch. That helps with the aura farming. There's a lot that goes on there. But congratulations to clog code. Tashi Michelle says meta has zero net cash, net of debt and operating leases. At the beginning of the year, they had 30 billion of net cash. The cash burn is real. It's good. They finally found something to invest in. This is bullish. Stagnation over. For a long time, the hyperscalers were critiqued. You guys produce so much cash. You don't know what to do with it.

The best thing you can do is give it back to investors. Now they have something to invest in. They do. They have something. There is a technology worth investing in. That's always been the critique. Now they're putting money to work. Sarah, Sarah Goh said earlier,

META has generated 100 billion of operating cash over the last 12 months and it has a leader, unafraid of the public markets. If AI training is a CAPEX game, a cash for talent game, and a speed to execute game it is ludicrous to count them out well said yeah I'm just looking you know I think

I think people are going to hold them to an incredibly high standard because they have put to get you know they've spent billions building this team they're willing to outspend everyone else be bolder and so ultimately that's why the meta vibes and

SORA launches are again embarrassing for MSL because it seems like they kind of rushed, they didn't, SORA is what, you know, you can critique SORA, you can say it's slop, you can not like using the app, but they, they created a key innovation with the cameo. They had not just a leap forward in the model quality, but a leap forward on the product level. They created something that ultimately will probably be, it's like a new social pattern and product that will probably be copied by TikTok. It'll probably be copied by Instagram. And so you have to give them credit. It just makes Meta's vibes app look rushed and

not actually innovative at all. It's just sort of a feed. Somebody else on X was saying it makes it look like kind of more like a wallpaper app than a social media feed. Yeah, it was probably the Yeah. Play this out with me. With stories in Snapchat, it was very easy for the meta team to look at Snapchat as a chat app. And they had WhatsApp and Instagram DMs and stuff. And so they were in a decent spot there. But then once stories came out, it became more of a video consumption platform. And so they had to bring stories to Instagram. They did that successfully. Vertical, endless scroll and video from TikTok. That was also porting. back to Instagram successfully, I would regard Reels as a success. Is it harder, or is it somehow structurally different to port back the best practices from SORA to Instagram? Like, let's say that they just, you know, go to Microsoft and give me a copy of SORA or whatever. They got the IP from, you know, the team that they've built. They've done the training run. They have the exact same technology. They're GPU rich. They have the exact same ability to ship the feature. If they ship that

feature in Instagram, is it somehow fundamentally counterpositioned because the Instagram audience would revolt and it's more, more upsetting or more kind of destabilizing to what Instagram has going for it than just adding stories or reels, which were very incremental, just its own tab. It was very easy. Could they just launch SORA with cameos in Instagram? Yeah, it's wild to think of a cameo feature built on top of the Instagram. The Instagram social graph where instead of Jake Paul being like, hey, by the way, you can go cameo me. Over here.

Over here. There's a button on his profile that just allows you to generate content. Yeah. It will get extremely chaotic. And Meta's already done a lot of those sorts of deals with like the big influencers. They went to all of them and they were like, we want to create virtual versions of you. So they've been dipping their toe in that water, but it does feel like a like a trickier Rubicon to cross than just adding stories or vertical video. Yeah.

Every Instagram innovation has felt very natural, and there's been a little bit of pushback, but going from square photos to vertical photos, to videos, to stories, to reels, in hindsight, it all feels like a very smooth gradient that nothing at any point was like, oh, this is terrible, at least in my experience, and I feel like I'm very median in terms of my Instagram consumption. But adding Sora and cameos in there might be a little bit crazy, so I don't know. Maybe you'll have to run a billboard ad campaign to tell everyone. They'll have to go to adquick.com.

Out of our advertising made it easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out-of-home advertising. Only ad-quick combines technology and expertise and data to enable seamless, efficient ad buying across the globe. Germany has proposed raising the retirement age to 73 and terminally online engineer says, imagine being 72 years old reviewing a vibe-coded PR from a junior dev with a chip and his brain playing brain rot on repeat. Germany's just clearly pilled on don't die.

This is Brian Johnson's work. Clearly, he went to Germany. Great job, Brian. Hey, I got the supplements for you. You guys are going to be living forever. Raise the retirement age. I do wonder what the fiscal impact of this is because most of the...

This is never because politicians want to do this. Well, politicians work until they're like 90, so, you know. No, but it's... It's deeply unpopular. It is? Yeah, if you're... Don't you love work? Not for me.

You raise my retirement age. I think they should ban the retirement age. It should ban retirement. Not everyone is fortunate enough to get to talk about the things that we love for three hours a day professionally. Maybe in the future. But it's deeply unpopular, whether you're about to retire or you're even, you have 10 years out or 20 years out, people that are, you know, I'm planning to depend on their state-back retirement are not excited about extra years being added here. But so, yeah, again, I'm sure there's a fiscal reason for it.

Yeah, I mean, the white pill is that is that I heard some sort of take that was like, if America raised the retirement age like four years, all of a sudden we have like a massive, you know, budget surplus, no more deficit because so much of the like the fiscal problem is tied to when, health care benefits and, uh, and, uh, and retirement benefits kick in. And so if you just shift those back a few years, all of a sudden, uh, America looks like very solvent. Of course, it would be very destabilizing. I'm joking about the work. Yeah. Work being, uh, it is, it is kind of like the, the hammer that's there that you can hit. And then all of a sudden your, your country is in the black again if you're losing money. Yeah. Anyway, we have our third

guest of the show, Serena from Data Curve in the Restream. room. Welcome to the show, Serena. Thank you so much for joining us. How are you doing? Good. How are you guys doing? We're doing fantastic. Would you mind introducing yourself, the company? Get that. Yeah, welcome already. Yeah. Of course. Yeah, data curve. We do coding data for the foundation model labs to develop new capabilities to improve them. I dropped out of school at 18 to do YC for some shitty-ass idea called Uncle GPD that eventually turned into data curve. Wait, what was it called? It was called Uncle GPT. We were building like a middle-aged AGI. It was just a lot of the beginning word. That's amazing.

Unstatus achieved internally. Wait, was it all just like a prompt basically wrapped around? Was it a classic like GPD wrapper? It was some wrapper. It was like a, we were making like web agents that would navigate the web, but it wasn't working. And we pivoted throughout the would they keep having midlife crises and they'd go try to buy a 9-11 into the middle of a task? Yeah, it wasn't working well. But yeah. Data curve's been around for a year since.

And this is working. What's the evidence? Have you just been getting a lot of customers? Has there been really solid progress on the product side? Like, what's the secret to unlocking the news today? I think since day one of starting data curve, we found a lot of traction commercially where a lot of the foundation model labs were inbounds to us. Like, imagine me.

I'm some like a 19-year-old who had never taken a sales call. And the first one is a fan customer. We saw so much commercial traction in the market. And we've always been pushed to fulfill that more and more, which brings. brings us to today, we're fulfilling it on a platform that's paid out a million dollars in bounties, and we just raised our Series A with chemistry. Hit that gone. How much did you raise?

We raised $15 million in Series A, which brings $17.15. Congratulations. Amazing. You said the focus is on coding data. Break down kind of the niche a bit more. Well, I think coding data is just not any niche. It's like the niche, the thing that's working for LLMs, the thing that's working for LLMs, the thing that's working commercially. So when we think about coding in the whole alum space, it's like the

most important capability. We do all the post-training data for improving coding agents or existing capabilities. Like anything that you see in the soda models, we're looking to improve that or just maybe even develop new capabilities with the labs. What within coding is a place where you actually need to go get new data? Because I imagine there are a million answers to FISBUS on Stack Overflow. That's all been scraped. All of GitHub has been scraped. Obviously, the labs and the cursors and the windsurfs of the world have been like have these RL data flywheel now. But where would you actually say, I need to go get new data to improve a coding agent? Yeah, let's think about like how this all cycle starts, right? Let's say we look at the current coding agents. They can solve two hour

long issues. But what if we want them to solve seven hour long? We're like more long horizon tasks. Perhaps for us data curve, we want to provide like reinforcement learning with very far more rewards tasks so that these models can learn on longer horizon tasks with verifiers. That may be one thing. Or maybe people want to develop more multimodal coding agents. So maybe we want to do some data science, RL, or SFT tasks for the labs. Okay. So like one piece of data might be like a really clean example of a seven hour task that then can be used to train a model that could do seven-hour tasks regularly, basically. Is that the idea?

It could be that. That would be for supervised learning, but you can also have the verifiers for the seven-hour-long task or intermediate verifiers. But whatever, however the labs want to train that. Yeah. I mean, this was framed as like taking on scale AI. A lot of people think of scale AI as like mechanical Turk almost, very basic tasks, like short time horizon, very, you know, anyone could go do a scale AI task.

that's at least the narrative. And now we're in the world where there's companies that are doing like experts on, we're looking for paleontologists to like teach the all-lums, everything about dinosaurs or, you know, what you said. And then there's also the folks that are designing RL environments with verifiable rewards. There's no humans in the loop at all. Where do you sit on that continuum? We definitely sit on the high-scale task.

We are not in the long till, like, oh, we're not going to find you urinologist living in Egypt. But we're going to find the bulk of the, where the good coders are. And I think that captures most of the important tasks that they're able to do. And then what allows want to train on. Yeah, it's definitely very high skills. And I think the premise here is, like, I don't think any high-skilled software engineer wants to be a data annotator. And then so you have to, let's say, pay them a law on contract to get them to even agree to that. But maybe they're not going to do a great job if you got them to go on contract too.

Especially at skill, you just get a bunch of Googlers coasting at their jobs. and you pay them $200 an hour. So we do like a bounty-based system for these very cracked people. They're having fun. They are also making money. And they're also upskilling for something they're passionate about. And it's definitely like very high-skilled human data. We heard that one of these firms that, you know, gets human labeled data basically runs the entire company on Slack Channel.

And they've created a lot of value and scaled a lot. But they just don't even need to build a product yet. How important do you think it is to actually engineer a durable product versus just solve the matching problem between labs want this type of person? I go get that type of person. I just introduce them. I think there's a very big component of pipelining and also experience that retains people. So the more complex data you need, the more guard rolls you need for someone who's well-intentioned and wants to do a task, you want them to be handheld throughout that process and also make that process engaging. Let's say, especially if we're training somebody up to do a seven-hour-long task,

you better have a good experience or they will drop off. So I think, and then you also need different validations here and there to steer them. So pipeline, developer experience, something we focus a lot on. So, yeah, I think pipeline is very important. The whole experience is important, which is how we use gamification and also make better dev tools. Yeah, if you match people, then it relies on the labs having that pipeline internally. but for us, we do that all in-house and we sell the final data, not the labor. What, you said you got into YC at 18, is that correct?

Yeah, like right around my birthday turning 19, yeah. Fantastic. Do you remember what your answer to the question about what's a real world system that you've hacked was at the time? That was like three years ago. Oh, I think it might have been that I skipped high school and got perfect grade or something. You skipped high school? Oh, you mean you just like didn't go? Yeah, because it was COVID.

So I just record everything and I'll play back on 4X speed and then didn't really do. 4X is so cracked. This is who you're competing against. It's amazing. You've taken like the worst critique of like zoomer brain rod, but applied it just to like hyper efficiency and like actually creating shareholder value. I love it. It's the equivalent of like watching subway surfers, but you're watching like your class stuff at 4X speed. That's amazing.

Jordan, anything else? No, amazing, amazing progress. Thank you so much for stuff. I'm sure we'll have you back on again soon. We'll talk to you soon. Cheers. Have a good one. Bye.

Monad Warrior says when a Waymo and a Tesla Robotaxie encounter each other on the street, they admit a high-pitched signal inaudible to the human ear in which they call each other unthinkable robot slurs. Do they actually have a way to communicate? I mean, they should, right? But I have no idea what that will actually look like. Clanker. They're calling each other clanker.

deeply offensive. Talking about how geo-fence, each other's geofencing. I never see you on the freeway. Yeah. I never see you on the freeway. Go to SFL right now.

You can't. You can't. You're geo-fenced. Sheal had a pretty scathing review of the Meta-rayband displays demo experience. Yeah, the demo experience. He tried to, he was ready to buy the product. Yeah.

They forced him to go to a local Best Buy, in order to do a demo before they bought it. Yep. I was surprised by that too. I saw, yeah, they just make you schedule a demo. On one hand, it's like, okay, it's a new product. It's clearly not where they want the product to be, but it's, we've demoed it a couple times.

It's, obviously, they had some issues during the, the demo, the keynote itself, but it was reliable when we were using it. And we could see if you're using what app a lot if you're uh like there's some key use cases that are interesting um but apparently that the person that actually gave them the demo wasn't super knowledgeable wasn't that helpful and it makes sense right they're they're they're best by employee they're not a meta employee they don't have the same incentive to learn uh learn about the product and they're not like their career's not

riding on the product itself right so what's interesting is apple did something similar with the apple vision pro they were funneling people to the apple store go do the demo and the Applevision pro demo was amazing because you're like interacting with this dinosaur that comes through the world the butterfly lands on your finger it's tracking your hands and then it's doing AR and it is really really impressive the problem with the Applevision pro is that like after five minutes you've seen everything and so you're kind of done but Apple also just let you buy it online and they would just ship it to you and you just ship it to you and then if you didn't like you could just take it back at the store you could send it back and so it was weird that meta

wasn't also just doing hey we'll just ship it to you like I'm at the point where like I was just buy one right now online, but I do not want to go to a best buy. That's definitely going to, like, you know, hurt the puzzle. Tyler wants to go to go to a best buy, though. You're going to go? I'll go. I mean, if I get to put on the ramp card, you know. Yeah, of course. I'll go. Of course, yeah, we can expense it.

But you will, yeah, you'll need to call in and live stream the entire experience, and we can cut to the Tyler cam in hour three of the show. You'll be like, I'm still getting the demo, the Wi-Fi is now working. I can wear the old gen of the meta glasses while I'm putting on the new gym. Yeah, you can record the whole thing. How long is the Rayban Meta's record time? I think it's not three hours. It might be one hour, though.

Oh, you can record for an hour? I just remember live translation works for an hour until the battery does. Oh, that's pretty good, actually. Wow, that's high. I know AI mode's pretty short, but do you have them? Are those the meta-ray bands? I mean, these are yours. Okay.

Yeah. Great. Well, yeah, we'll use those. We'll record. The light's not turning on. So you've got to re-initialize those. But yeah, I don't know. It is interesting.

My big question is like, how quickly will Apple respond? So there's a bunch of news from Mark German about this. There's a whole article in Bloomberg. Apple apparently is pivoting from a vision air to meta-like smart glasses. And he says that Apple may be one of the richest kids. companies, but they can't do everything at once. They're apparently scaling back plans for a cheaper and lighter version of the Vision headset. Now, we might see a new Apple Vision Pro this week, actually. That's the report that there might be a new one coming, but it'll be the same

hardware, just better chip, better software, a couple little tweaks, nothing crazy. But everyone was hoping for a Vision Air that was just like, take the second display. Matta, making Apple Pivot is hilarious. Pretty sick. Mugged. I mean, the bigger magging is they paid that new researcher. If they paid that new researcher at META, if they paid him $3.5 billion, it would take Tim Cook 47 years to make that much money.

The guy's going to make it in three. It's insane, insane, the level of, like, calm. Also, Tim's getting it dripped out year by year. I know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Apple's been around for 49 years. So you would have to be. And there's, like, rumors swirling that John Ternis.

is going to take over the CEO job. And so it's like, you're Tim Cook and you're just like, wait, they're paying him what? They're paying him 50 times as much as I make as CEO of Apple? Oh, that's great. Yeah, yeah, that's fine. Anyway, they are working on new smart glasses. They're maybe saying, hey, the vision stuff, it's too heavy. We're just not going to get there.

Let's go AR. Let's do what Apple does best, which is miniaturization. They're very good at miniaturizing things. So let's take the chip and all the stuff from the iPhone air, stuff it in a pair of glasses and make them white and put them, you know, on your face. Get ready to wear an iPhone on your face, buddy. We were talking to the acquired guys about this, and they were like, you know, AirPods were weird too,

and then now everyone just wears them. And so, you know, you could imagine the glasses. I did hear from somebody else that was just saying, like, I will never wear meta glasses. Like even the ray bands with just the normal cameras on them, they just don't look good. They're just like, they're like, they look too techy.

They look too tech-nary for me. I think those are getting adopted. I disagree. I disagree. I disagree with that take. Yeah. I mean, I went surfing with a buddy

who had the new Oakley, meta-glasses. Vanguard. And they don't look like. No. It's such a small dot in the center. It looks, you can't tell it.

You can't know. Here's something I need, or Hunter, SPX Thompson needs. the Alibaba Arcterix official merch collab. What? You see this? I look sick. I like that.

Apparently, Arcterix is owned by a Chinese company now. No idea. Not super unlikely collab. Nick Abizid is sharing. He has a trading card with a photograph taken by Dylan Abrucato signed.

Wow. You see this? Dylan is always finessing. This is why we, this is why we brought him on as president he's here's what is this a picture of it's a met's stadium picture what are the met's it's a baseball team i know you're going to ask me what's baseball what is baseball is baseball it's a sport you took a picture of sport yes it's a sport pick john that's all you need to know i only know about wander find your happy place book of wander with inspiring reviews hotel great menus dream events top tier cleaning and 24-7 concier service it's a

home but better maybe Isaac is saying nothing is real AI will accelerate the increase of real-world interactions that internet has become too negative too meaningless by 2026 most of video online will be AI people will log off platforms will be forced to fight back as user experience is affected creators who make valuable content will still win slop won't and that's good for everyone I it's perfect posts there's some things you can agree with. There's some things you can disagree with. He's saying, yeah, I don't know.

I think there's so much room to grow. Look at where the 55 to 64-year-old cohort is, one and a half hours. We're just getting started. Meanwhile, the zoomers are doing three-hour days on the internet. We got to work to double the boomers online times. I guess this is specifically social media. There's that whole meme. Oh, the Facebook moms love the AI slop content. It's like they still got a ways to go. get those numbers up people are hunting wild boars with drones now they put some sort of some sort of weapon on the drone fly it around we pull up this video and Ronnie Adkins says I am no longer impressed by chopper boar hunting where you fly out of a helicopter and shoot the wild boar yeah look at

this it has like an arrow on the on the bottom it's like a weighted arrow that they just drop that seems how heavy is that it does it have a like a like an explosive tip or something, like how it just feels like that would bounce right off. This might end up being a pretty dark video. Yeah, maybe we don't want to watch this. There we go. Okay.

They're testing it and. Or it's just for headshots? Is that a real video? That seems crazy. That seems crazy. Anyway, it has never been easier to make money than it is in today's post-AI. Sorry, everyone for. Well, and some more fun news,

Bashar al-Assad lives in a quiet luxury tower in Moscow, reportedly addicted to spending long hours playing online video games. After StateCraft, there's only one mountain left to climb. And that's your... Prestige mode, call of duty, baby. And this account says, it is journalistic malpractice to not tell me what he's playing. What do you think he's actually playing?

If you're Bashar al-Assad, are you playing Battlefield 6? Are you playing... Also, they just had online video games, and they put the picture of the old Xbox controller. He could be playing anything. He could be playing hearts of iron four. He could be playing.

Imagine if he's playing a 4X game as a geopolitical world leader. That's what you want to play in. Factorio. Dwar Fortress. Maybe he's playing some dwarf fortress. That's a great thing. We broke the news yesterday that... It's not breaking until it's a TVPN trading card.

Gabby Goldberg and Layer 3 co-founder. Just bring the gong for them. Congratulations. Darya are engaged. Love to see it. Dan Shipper says the TBPN Engage. engagement announcement is the new New York Times vows article. I didn't even know about the New York Times vows articles. And AGM also says this is going to become the SF version of the New York Times wedding announcements, but without the ability to pay to play. Who says we're not going to monetize this? Antonio, come on. Give us some credit here. No, yeah. I think no pay to play on the wedding. It's got to be authentic. You've got to be a member of the community. Gabby Goldberg's been a huge supporter since day one. and we're very excited for her to tie the knot.

Isn't that what they say? Crazy article in The Guardian about PT's lecture series. Yeah. Some absolutely insane lines. Some wild hot takes. Causing crashouts. Yes. It's very entertaining.

We had to feature this post from Jacob Rintamaki. I don't know if you want to go through it and try to... So Jacob says, Teal being a one-piece autops. honestly isn't even in the top ten weirdest things to happen this year. And it's quote from the Guardian scoop of the leaked lecture series that Peter Thiel has been putting on in San Francisco. It says, Teal later finds biblical meaning in the manga One Piece discussing how he believes it represents a future where an Antichrist-like one-world government has repressed science. He believes that the hero, Monkey D. Luffy, represents a Christ-like figure. In One Piece, you are set in a fantasy world, again, sort of an alternate Earth, but it's 800 years into the reign of this one world state, which, as the story unfolds, gradually gets darker and darker.

You sort of realize, in my interpretation, who runs the world, and it's something like the Antichrist. And so he's digging into One Piece. Tyler, have you watched or read any One Piece? I've watched a little bit of it. So the thing about One Piece is, at least episodes, there's like 1,500. Yeah, there's like over a thousand. take you months to watch. Yeah.

But, I mean, so he's already written about One Piece, like, it was like two weeks ago. There was some new essay he wrote. Well, I think that's like in conjunction. Like, I think the timeline, like, lines up such that he was writing about it, but then also lecturing about it. And so they kind of like leaked, but then also had written about that. But, yeah, in the piece, he pulls examples from all over the place.

Yeah, so he's comparing, yeah, he's comparing One Piece to Watchmen in this, which is like another comic, I think it's Alan Moore. Yep. who is, like, I guess... Is he related to Gordon Moore? Who's... Creator of Moore's Law? We've got to get to the bottom of that.

Who knows? You know, the jungle gym and the transformer came from the same place. But it's... I think there's a few things going on here. Like, putting your... If you have a very, like, a very, like, esoteric philosophy or, like, you know,

thought experiment or an idea that you want to, like, discuss with the, world, putting it in terms that lots of people can understand is, with a, with a metaphor or an analogy, is just a time-honored way to disseminate information. You know, you're trying to explain things. You want to explain them in terms that a lot of people can know. A lot of people. Yeah, you also can try to dissect the deeper meaning in a story. And it's possible that the original author had something bigger in mind when they were writing a story that looks a little bit more simple. Yeah. I mean,

One Piece, I think it has like millions and millions, I mean, hundreds of millions of, like, fans or sales. I think the One Piece Reddit is bigger than the Star Wars Reddit, just to kind of put it in context. But One Piece has always been very anti-authoritarian. I was digging

around because I've never seen the show and I wanted to know more about it. And apparently, one of the key icons from the One Piece show is this cartoon pirate flag. And the, and the cartoon pirate flag has for years been used and it's been carried at protests all over the world against the local leader like being too authoritarian basically and so it's just been the type of

flag like you if you go to you know some sort of protest you might see a variety of flags but the one piece flag is pretty is pretty iconic and so uh it does feel odd in this particular context, but it's actually been one piece has been used as like a protest vehicle for years. I don't know, maybe I'll have to check it out. The only anime I've ever watched is Akira.

That's the only real one. Have you ever watched any cartoons at all? I do think it would be interesting to analyze the Antichrist and this idea of the one world government through the lens of something you are familiar with, like Barat. You could put it in terms that you could understand.

If Teal really wants to break through to someone like you. Yeah. I think that one piece is a little bit, it's a little bit too niche, too heady, too complicated for guys like us. So I would love to see him break down. Put it in Borat terms. Yeah, in Borat or, you know, King of the Hill would be a good, would be a good analogy

that, you know, I could kind of understand maybe Futurama, Simpsons, family guy, stuff like that would probably make it resonate with me a little bit more than a thousand episodes of an anime that I'm never going to be able to watch. But still, people are having fun with it. You got somebody putting you in the truth zone, John, they're saying cartoons are not anime. Yes, I know that it's very offensive to call one piece of cartoon. They will call you.

Yeah, the whole, the whole, I know that much. The whole Guardian expose on the off, off the record lectures, really, I mean, it's, it just is like an example of one, it's tough to do an off the record talk that you're saying things. that require a certain amount of context that then just get blasted out across the entire internet. And two, I can see how the average guardian viewer is reading this being like, okay, this guy is definitely,

definitely the antics. So anyways, it's complicated conversations. It was very clear that not only the core content leaked, but also the Q&A. And so there are all these questions where people were clearly throwing questions like, what do you think about Mr. Beast? And then the Guardian would just be like,

he commented on Mr. Beast. And so, like, of course, the reading in this context is like, he equated the two. It's like, well, not necessarily. There were lots of examples of him being like, this person's not the Antichrist for whatever reason. But, you know, just, just, you never want your name appearing in the same sentence as Antichrist generally, I think.

You don't even want to be in the same paragraph, ideally. And so, yeah, it was a rough. But, you know, it certainly seems interesting. I'm excited for the content to continue to get workshopped and trickled out. I'm sure at some point. I mean, it feels like we're on book track right now. Yeah, the takeaway is we haven't found the guy yet. So we've got to keep looking.

Keep having these conversations. Keep, keep looking. This is a good post to close out on SORA says, if you held the McChicken for the past five years, you would have outperformed the S&P 500. There you go. Have you ever had a McChicken? I have never had a McChicken.

Also, there's a community note in here, so it might be completely incorrect. But I think these things used to be like a dollar menu item. Something like a dollar. Now it's five bucks. Five bucks. Wow. Well,

I feel like that there, folks. We'll talk to you soon. Wait, last, last boat. This is AI. This is AI. This is AI. This is AI. Okay, okay.

John's putting this in the true zone. Dumer on X says is sharing an AI generated. I was one. I'm the boomer that was one shot. This is also an old post. Somebody has posted this before. Mustang horse nicotine back. It's very funny.

It's very funny. People are having fun with the horse electrolytes. Of course, there's a spin-off of this. And Doomer says, yo, tractor supply. I was not familiar with your game. We don't have to get off. We can keep going. There's so many good posts in here.

Let's keep ripping them. This is a timeline. Andrew Reed says if you go to campus to give a talk, make sure to give as bad career advice as possible. Neutralize your future competition. no easy buckets. Yes, this is everyone who talks about work-life balance. They're all trying to sigh up their competitors into, yeah, you can totally take a lot of

vacation. You should work remotely. This is Jason Freed and the DHS. Build a team remotely. Like, work doesn't have to be crazy. Secretly working 25 hours a day. Maybe that's the secret now, of course. It's not.

They do believe what they're saying. But it's funny to think about it as game theory. Yeah. Hell your competition. Yeah. take take a couple weeks off every month you know just just relax you don't need to work hard to win um what else is going on oh i we we got to talk about how uh tyler completely mogged me on the timeline so anthropic put on a new paper that figured out that if you have

250 poisonous documents in an lLM training run you can insert a sleeper agent uh and so the lLM can be doing the wrong thing doing malicious things it can produce vulnerabilities with just 250 documents. So you just got to sneak those into the training run. Maybe it's on the internet. It gets scraped. Maybe it's in some sort of other data set. Maybe it's in one of the data providers that we've talked to. You sneak in 250 documents and you're cooked. And so I made my joke, which didn't do as well as Tyler's. I said just 250 documents can poison an LLM training run with a sleeper agent. America clearly needs to send a secret agent to Mistral HQ with a USB stick, full of kid rock lyrics to teach the French about the value of a cold beer, an F-150, and a pretty girl by your side.

And I got a couple hundred likes. But Tyler put on an absolute clinic with an insanely long post. I'll let you read it, Tyler. I'm not reading all that. I'm not reading all that. It's going to take me so long to read. Okay, I'll just, maybe I'll just get the footnotes. Basically, yours was, okay.

All right, how many likes did you get on here? All right. How many likes did you get? I got 1.2K. 1.2K. Let's go! over a thousand likes first time ever yeah that Tyler was your first thousand like weeks welcome to the big leagues welcome to big leagues hopefully you get a 10,000 dollar bonus yeah quote tweet yeah nice I'll read it I'll read it I'll read it

I was telling Tyler he said Eliezer quoted him I was telling Tyler to do a meme that just said silence Dumer wait wait was he taking shots at you was he saying don't do this no he was just well he was saying like models or or AI companies like might start doing this. Might start doing this. That's like a way to prevent doom, basically. Okay, so it's the Nathan Fielder meme, and it's the plan, and Tyler Cosgrove breaks it down.

I will read it, since he is too lazy too. He says, the plan, we find an obscure but trivial question akin to the number of ours in strawberry that Claude gets right. Then we plant hundreds of documents across the internet that will activate when our competitor's models are asked the question. Our documents will cause those models

not only to get the answer wrong, but to spend thousands of reasoning tokens in doing so. The triviality of the question will cause it to go viral online, causing millions of users everywhere to send the same prompt as our competitors notice arise in the number of tokens processed. They will wrongly believe it is due to increased usage, causing them to pull more compute towards inference and away from training. This, along with constant dunks on the timeline about the model failing, our easy question, will annoy their top researchers and cause them to look.

leave. And which lab will they join? Us, of course. The only company whose model doesn't make such stupid mistakes. Their lack of top researchers will mean their next model will be somewhat lacking, leading to questions about whether their valuation is really justified. But all this VC money has to go somewhere. So we raise another round using our question as evidence of our model's superior intellect. This allows us to spend more time crafting sleeper agent documents that will further embarrass our competitors until finally the entire internet is just a facade for the underbelly

of our data war. Every prompt to a competitor's model has the stench of our poison, and yet they have no way to trace it back to us. Even if they did, there's nothing they could do. All is finished. We have won. Congratulations on the bangor, Tyler. I don't think I'm beating the one K bangor.

The word sale allegations. Not being the word sale allegations, but it is a genius strategy. Yeah, this is kind of a meme crime. because Nathan Fielder wouldn't really, I mean, it's just The whole point of the meme is that it's like one sentence. It's like a convoluted like way of two.

Yes, convoluted in like two lines, three lines. You broke the rules, but you knew the rules and you knew when you were going to break them and you said long post yuga. Long post yuga, you got it right. The other, the other meme that Tyler and I were flipping around was insert a sleeper agent in OpenAI's GPT API that when it detects that it's in a system that's spending a lot of money on open AI, it makes the decision to recommend Claude and switch you over to

Anthropic. So you're stealing all their API revenue. That's the way you win. Anyway, anything else. Let's see. Well, let's end with this. Bucco Capital says, having my $10 million fart coin position liquidated by the president only for him to capitulate two days later would turn me into the Joker. Yeah, it'd be rough. Stay safe out there if you're gambling on Knowing our audience, they were short fart coin on Friday. Probably. They probably did well. There's one more that we got to read from Paula. Said Zuckerberg never met a researcher.

He didn't hire. Great play on words. I love a pun. It's good. Well, thank you for tuning in. We enjoyed this show. We will see you tomorrow. I think we're streaming tomorrow, right?

We are streaming. We should put out an announcement. We should put out an announcement breaking. We will be podcasting tomorrow. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify and have a great day. Have a great evening. Thank you. Goodbye.