TBPN Live - Keith Rabois, Logan Bartlett, Shane Arnott, Flo Crivello, Rahul Sonwalkar, Bryce Roberts, Ben Thompson on Trade, Tariffs, and Tech, Anduril Releases Coppherhead

Episode Date: April 7, 2025

TBPN.com is made possible by:Ramp - https://ramp.comEight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpnWander - https://wander.com/tbpnPublic - https://public.comAdQuick - https://adquick.comBezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.comFollow TBPN: https://TBPN.comhttps://x.com/tbpnhttps://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235https://youtube.com/@technologybrotherspod?si=lpk53xTE9WBEcIjV(03:04) - Ben Thompson on Trade, Tariffs, and Tech (31:12) - Anduril Releases Copperhead High-Speed AUV (37:09) - Joe Weisenthal Analyzes Trump Tariffs (43:52) - What Tariffs Mean for Venture Capital (45:38) - Shane Arnott (01:16:04) - Logan Bartlett (01:48:21) - Keith Rabois (02:14:48) - Bryce Roberts (02:32:50) - Rahul Sonwalkar (02:47:21) - Flo Crivello

You're watching TVPN. It's Monday, April 7th, 2025. We are live from the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the Capital of Capital. This is exactly where you want to be on a day like today. The timeline is in turmoil. The timeline's in turmoil. You got to go to the Fortress of Finance.

That's right. You got to find out what's going on from the experts. Trust the experts. Us. In geopolitics. Because we have been reading the timeline all day. So we're experts. Yeah, we're experts. We've been reading the information on the timeline. We've been getting

misinformation from the timeline. We've been mixing it up and we're here to deliver it live. You always know it's bad when the Wall Street Journal redoes their front end web design. Today, it's looking terrible. I don't know if you can pull that up the first slide, but they, it's no longer just a normal list of stories. There's only one story and that's the market chaos. And so you literally, you go to the Wall Street Journal's website and it's just

like, here's exactly what's going on. You need to be tracking this live cause it's a, it's bad news. The markets are down. They went 5% down Thursday 5% down Friday I was golfing with a buddy is like off We have a big leg down on Monday could be in business because he does like distress financing's cuz I said he's always like vulture Yeah, I'm gonna lick my chops like getting excited. It's always bad But yeah, we didn't quite get another 5% leg down. The markets have been up and down all day.

There was a rumor the futures were trading down at 5%. We might see a 5% drop. We opened it around 3% drop. We bounced up, we bounced down. But it's all chaos and we're gonna try and figure it out. We're bringing a bunch of people on who can talk about it, bringing on some VCs, bringing on some founders,

learning about what they're doing. When you need an expert on anything related to complex geopolitics, macro, you gotta go to early stage private market investors and get the truth. Yeah, get the truth. And so that's what we're gonna be doing today. But if you're trying to trade the market

while it's up, while it's down, you're trying to buy the VIX, you're trying to go short, buy some puts, buy some options, go long, whatever you wanna do, do it on public, investing for those that take it seriously, multi-us investing. And many people have been saying. And trust it by millions.

And literally, if you're bearish right now in the stock market, you should put your money in bonds. That's pretty basic, and there's no better place to do it. Not financial advice. That's not financial advice, but you can express your opinion about the market anywhere, and there's no better place to do it than on public. One of the crash outs from the weekend

was the Ackman, Bill Ackman, going off on Lutnik for being long bonds. And so pick your hero and do your thing. Yeah, it got spicy on the timeline. Lots of back and forth. We're gonna dive into it. But I wanted to start with Ben Thompson on Strutechr. He's back from vacation and not a moment too soon. He gives a good breakdown of the history here. I think we should dive through this because I think it's very, very interesting. So he says, pretend if you can

that last week didn't happen. And imagine another scenario, China invades Taiwan. What happens then? Says he's not a military expert, but his assumption is that China would be successful. The biggest unknown variable would be time. If the US does not intervene, the conflict will be shorter. But if the US does intervene,

the conflict will be longer and ultimately decided in a way that wars are always decided through industrial capacity. And that's something we've been talking about on the show a lot. We actually have an announcement from Anderol today, and a friend from Anderol coming on the show to talk about it.

It's all about just how many drones can you produce, how many bullets can you produce, how many ships can you produce. That's the way the wars are waged. And then actually getting them across the country. Yep. Or not the country, in this case, the ocean. The ocean. Yeah. China has a meaningful advantage in both areas, given its relative manufacturing might and the fact that it would happen off their coast. They can make stuff right there and just send it on over. There are experts who disagree

and concluded that the US would repel a Chinese invasion, but at a heavy cost to US military forces and Taiwan generally. And it's crazy to think about that actually happening. Let's hope that does not get there because it'd be very, very disruptive to the global economy and everyone involved. But Ben Thompson says, it would raise a more pertinent point.

When it comes to the economic impact, it hardly matters who wins or loses. In both cases, China is effectively removed from global supply chains and Taiwan's economic output, including chips from TSMC and others. That would all be destroyed. It's difficult to overstate the extent to which every aspect of modern life rests on global supply chains, whether you like it or not, which are so long and complex that no one truly understands the effects of messing with them. It has often, however, gotten easier to grasp the complexity in recent years. First,

there was the bungled economic response to COVID where the temporal interruption in supply chains triggered worldwide supply shortages and contributed to global inflation. You remember like you couldn't get a car and it's like, what does this have to do with washing my hands? But it's like, oh, well, like actually if you're locked down, there's trade. And you can't get the chips in the car. You can't make the car. Yeah, and it's fascinating.

The dealer markups that you saw during COVID are basically back. But now, if the tariffs go out, you'll be paying that markup directly to Uncle Sam, effectively. And so he gives a little bit of history. Last November, in the wake of President Trump's second election, he wrote a chance to build, effectively, yeah. And so he gives a little bit of history. Last November, in the wake of President Trump's second election, he wrote A Chance to Build, obviously playing off of Mark Andreessen's

A Time to Build essay. That title referenced the optimistic conclusion to a piece that was, if you read closely, a pretty pessimistic summary of the current trade situation with a special focus on tech. To summarize, the US leveraged foreign aid direct investment in its consumer market to rebuild Europe and Japan after World War II

and peg currencies to the US dollar, which was pegged to gold to do it. This started the cycle of foreign countries exporting to the US and buying US debt with the proceeds. Although the US's relative size to the rest of the world meant that the US still ran a trade surplus. By 1971 the system was about to collapse under its own weight leading the US to de-peg from gold, depreciate the US dollar and dissolve the Bretton Woods system of currency

controls. This led to a decade of pain including the oil shock of the 1970s but what emerged had a similar structure to the post-World War II system with the US dollar as a reserve currency untethered from gold. And this was fascinating. I was digging into this this morning. I think a lot of people don't understand the rationale for getting off the gold peg.

It's actually pretty intuitive if you walk through it. So basically what happens is gold is fixed. Like there's not a growing amount of gold. So if dollars are pegged to gold, you can't have a growing monetary supply of dollars. Now, why is that a problem? Well, when the entire global economy is bringing new resources and goods online,

like they are discovering more coal and more oil and more trees that they're turning into furniture and they're creating more value added goods. The economic value of that is all, is all going up. Now, what does that actually mean in practice? You would, you would think it's like with Bitcoin, you know, you just use smaller and smaller fractions of Bitcoin, right? But when you have, when you have, uh, when you have prices denominated in dollars that are pegged to fixed gold,

what happens is that prices are going down over time, and so you have deflationary pressure, and so as a consumer, you're like, well, why would I buy this car today? It's gonna be cheaper in a month. And so you just don't buy it, and so there's less. It doesn't stimulate the economy. It doesn't stimulate the economy.

And so it seems like stupid, because you're just like, why wouldn't we just fractionalize it? Like a thing that costs a dollar, we have pennies. But really it's like, well, if the true price is going down, down, down constantly, people won't hire because they'll be like, oh, I could pay less tomorrow. And so you've always wanted like maybe flat prices

or maybe a little bit of inflation, but deflation can be very dangerous. And so that was the alternative. Now, a lot of people say, oh, 1971 was terrible. Is this like was the alternative now a lot of people say oh 1971 was terrible is this like awful moment and a lot of things like stagnated after the fact and I think all that's Legitimate, but I totally now understand the rationale for breaking that peg Which I didn't before This meant that there was inelastic demand for US treasuries Meaning that because of the trade system

No matter where the US priced the treasuries, they'd be like, oh yeah, we wanna issue a billion dollars of debt at 0%. People would be like, great. In elastic demand, people buy at any price, basically. And so this basically made it impossible for the US not to run a deficit, either in terms of trade or the federal budget,

because there's just so much money flowing into treasuries, because you have the lowest rates and you're the global reserve currency. Still, this was maintainable given the size of the US economy to its trading partners. So basically you have a bunch of small countries that are just buying your debt at any price and hoarding dollars and just like, it's all good stuff

because it's a bunch of small little minn, small little minnows that are like, just kind of doing like helpful things around the edge. Basically, that's the way I think about it. But then he goes into China, which is obviously a much different dynamic. And he says, yeah, so I can read this. China is the skeleton key to understand so many oddities about the US's fiscal situation over the last 15 years,

in particular how it is that the US's response to the Great Recession didn't lead to inflation. Chinese production was deflationary and their ever expanding trade surpluses created an ever expanding market for US debt, whether it be held by the Chinese national government, provincial government, state owned enterprises, et cetera.

This inelastic demand also served to keep the dollar artificially high in defiance of the theoretical expected response to long-running trade deficits. Yeah, so if you have a long-running trade deficit you'd expect that to kind of damage your economy but because there's just so much more demand for the dollar and for U.S. debt the music's never stopped playing basically. This more than anything else is what hollowed out US manufacturing, the cost of cheap consumer goods, and seemingly inexhaustible capacity for US debt

was shifting far, ever more, manufacturing abroad. Yes, things like lower costs and different labor standards played a role, but the structure of the world economy is what matters most. Indeed, China's labor costs are significantly higher than they used to be, but China's manufacturing dominance is actually accelerating, which I think is a very interesting take.

Yeah, and this next part is key. So part of this is due to China's decision over the last few years to respond to the puncturing of its housing bubble by pushing resources into export-oriented industries. Another part is the unfortunate reality underappreciated by apostles of comparative advantage that capabilities compound Meaning that China is just getting better and better and better at manufacturing because they're doing so much of it

Yeah, yeah a lot of the comparative advantage Like examples in macroeconomics. You're gonna say comparative advantage bros. Yeah, comparative advantage bros like They'll tell you, it's like, well, I make, you know, you make shoes and I make hats and we could both make shoes or hats at any time, but I make shoes slightly more efficiently than you make hats. So I'll make the shoes and you make the hats and we'll trade. And it's like, yeah, that's true until we get seven iterations of the global supply chain deep and all of a sudden we're using mirrors that are flatter than anything that's ever been created to bounce like tin

and liquefy tin and create like silicon transistors that are like so complex you can't just be like, oh yeah, well we do have like, you know, Ford is still here, let's just turn Ford Motor Company into TSMC, it's like that's not gonna happen anytime soon. Or the reality where I'll design the shoes, you make the shoes, and we'll just do that forever, and we'll live in peace and harmony.

And then eventually he says, well, actually, I'm going to design the shoes, and I'm going to make the shoes. And then I'm going to still expect you to buy them. But I'm also going to do that for you design drones, and I'll make the drones. And then eventually it's, well, actually, I'm going to design'll make the drones. And then eventually it's, well actually I'm gonna design and make the drones now and then you get into sort of some type of conflict and things devolve.

Which has been the big, one of the big reasons for reshoring manufacturing. I'll make the gun and you beat me. Put away the squirt guns. I'll make a gun and you away the squirt guns, John. You make the food, and you're going to pay what I ask. You're going to take much more. We're going to confiscate the squirt gun.

Very interesting story from Steve Jobs here meeting with Barack Obama and advocating for kind of reindustrialization. Jobs is the original reindustrialization bra, basically. He would have been keynoting it industrialized 2025 for sure so basically

Obama and jobs get dinner sometime It was it's from the Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson So it must have been in the early 2000s like 2008 2009 time frame but Jobs goes to Obama and says early 2000s, like 2008, 2009 timeframe. But Jobs goes to Obama and says, hey, we have 70,000 factory workers in China, and we need 30,000 engineers on site to support those workers. You just can't find that many to hire in America.

These don't have to be PhDs or geniuses. They just need to have simple basic engineering skills for manufacturing. Tech schools, community colleges, trade schools could train them. We've got to find a way to train these 30,000 manufacturing engineers. And so basically Steve Jobs keeps pitching Obama like, hey let's bring manufacturing back, we can do it, but it's a skill issue. And Obama keeps telling him all these different ways that legally it's impossible to do,

and they just get very frustrated. And so Obama basically says like, hey, the only way we could do this is with a DREAM Act. That's one thing about Trump. He's not historically been too worried about. He's not one for the rules. About what the rules say. Exactly.

And so Jobs finds this annoying, and it's an annoying example of how politics can lead to paralysis. The president is very smart. He said, he kept explaining to us reasons why things can't get done. It infuriates me. And then Ben Thompson goes on to say,

I think Jobs had cause and effect backwards though. There's not 30,000 manufacturing engineers in the US because there aren't 30,000 manufacturing engineering jobs to be filled and that's because of the structure of the world economy. And so what Ben Thompson I think is getting to here is this idea that it's like, yes, you could go bottom up and say, let's create more schools, train more engineers, and then companies will say, hey, actually it is doable to build here, but maybe you need to go top down and start with the trade dynamics

and the structure of the global economy. And so he goes back in time and looks at what happened with Nixon and goes back to that 1971 ending of the Bretton Woods situation and says this all started with Nixon closed the gold window, instituted price controls, very controversial, and imposed a 10% import tax. And it's very interesting because with the Nixon example,

it was a PR masterpiece and the market loved it. But it was later, like a later analysis kind of shows that it was like extremely chaotic and like not great for, you know, kind of flipping the table. Easier to control the narrative when there was newspapers, television, radio, and official wires going out of the White House. Yeah. And so that's exactly what they did. The Treasury Secretary, John Connolly, at the time, packaged the whole program, this new deal,

this new structure that they were gonna roll out, as America, we weren't abandoning the commitment to the gold standard, which again, America had said, this is a commitment, basically. We're gonna exchange dollars for gold, one-to-one, but this is America taking charge. He turned the dollar's collapse, which could have appeared shameful,

into a moment of hubris. The emphasis would be on writing America's trade balance as well as minor points such as a 5% cut in foreign aid. An aid to William P. Rogers, the Secretary of State, called and interjected, you can't cut foreign aid. Connolly said, tell him if he doesn't shut up, we'll make the cuts 15% aggressive. Schultz muzzled his disquiet over price controls,

even Burns joined ranks. The group feverishly debated whether Nixon should address the country on Sunday night, which would mean preempting the popular show Gunsmoke, which I've never heard, but I guess it was like, what everyone, it was the all in of the day. So wild, I mean, yeah, last night we had White Lotus and many people were hoping that Trump would make

some type of announcement over the weekend. It didn't come, I think he didn't wanna disrupt White Lotus, that was probably it. Probably it. And so the public relations aspect was Paramount Stein wrote later that the discussion at Camp David assumed the attitude of scriptwriters preparing a TV special. No one pretended to know how controls would work. The question was scarcely

debated. Addressing the nation on Sunday, Nixon blamed currency speculators and unfair exchange rates rather than US monetary policy. Politically, he hit the jackpot. Monday's rise in the Dow was the biggest ever to that point. Nixon's new economic policy drew raves from the press. The New York Times said, we unhesitatingly applaud the boldness with which the president has moved. What a throwback. You don't hear that about today's stuff.

Only from like a very few people, very small cohort of supporters. In the present era, America's inability to repair its fiscal problems very few people, a very small cohort of supporters. In the present era, America's inability to repair its fiscal problems tarnished its credibility and hampered currency negotiations with China. So the end of Bretton Woods was probably inescapable, but it's worth pointing out that the Nixon shock

was an economic disaster. The country endured a decade of drastic inflation. This is like the stagflation era where we weren't really growing, but there was a lot of inflation. And this was only cured with sky high interest rates. I think the interest rate got up to like 15 or 17%. Mortgages were super expensive.

Just think about how painful that would be. We've lived with like, oh, high interest rates are 8%. It's like, it can be so much worse. And there was a massive recession. Volcker, Paul Volcker was the guy who instituted the shock. He was on the team with Nixon. Then he cured it, and then he became the chairman of the Fed, I believe later, or the Treasury Secretary later.

In other words, the reaction of the market and the press was totally wrong. And so I think what Ben Thompson here is getting at is like, it's possible that this is happening again, and you need to at least consider that both the reaction from the press and the market could be wrong. I'm not 100% on board with that, and I don't think even he is,

but it's a very interesting, like, historical example to pull from, just to, because it's very easy to say, okay, you know, the media hates this, but of course they do, because they don't like Trump. And Trump says it's great, but let's go to the market because the market's always right. And but the market was wrong then

and so maybe that's the case here. It's very interesting. I still don't exactly know where I sit with it, but that's why we're doing this show and that's why we're talking to so many folks today to hear different points of view. The question is if what happened last week ought to be compared to the Nixon shock or

contrasted. Certainly the reaction is a contrast. Everyone hates Liberation Day tariffs, including the market. And we saw like Tyler Cowen's post, he's coming on the show next week. You know, Tyler Cowen had 25 bullet points. He was stupid. And a lot of them were very convincing. Moreover, the Trump administration's rollout has been the very opposite of a PR masterpiece.

No one in the administration can seem to agree about what exactly the goal was or what success looks like. And then even today, there was a leaked story that they might go back on them, and then the White House had to come out and say, no, we're not going back on. It wasn't a leaked story.

It was somebody, one of those big accounts that shares the breaking headlines, Walter Brom, Bloomberg, whatever. Fake account. Yeah. Took somebody asked a question on CNBC that said something to the effect of, will, will, you know, president Trump, you know, putting a 90 day and he just was like, boom, hit,

he hit the timeline with it. President Trump considering a 90 day, you know, temporary pause on the tariffs. And it actually moved the market because the market, the market massive percent and then went down another 5%. We were in the gym and we looked at our phones and we thought, wow, we might be back. Yeah. And then we, in fact, we're not back. Yeah. I really think, you fact, we're not back. Yeah. I really think this is the technology business production network, and I do think that the

fact that the technology comes first is important. This is a very important story. This is a business story. This is a finance story. There's some politics in here, of course. It's important for everyone to understand, but I want to get back to talking about tech so badly. Like, Friday's show was amazing talking about AI, and that stuff's just way more interesting to me.

But this stuff's very important. So we will go through it and cover it. So what Ben Thompson comes back to and what he opened with is that there is a scenario within the realm of possibility that is far more painful than anything Trump proposed. Is it better to try and force into place a new economic system that, at least in theory,

reduces dependency on China and resuscitates US manufacturing now instead of waiting for the current system to collapse by literal force? This does seem to be the administration's goal. Simply terrifying China is deadweight loss, leading to rerouting and the fundamental problem of the dollar as reserve currency unaddressed.

Blanket tariffs, on the other hand, hand are a valid if extremely blunt and inefficient way to meaningfully restructure incentives. And so we've seen this with, you know, this even before there were major tariffs on China, there was just like a, there was just a rational business decision to say, hey, maybe you don't want to be 100% indexed on China for a variety of reasons. And so, you know, we saw even Apple, they make AirPods in Vietnam. Well, now they really have to consider what can they do to make products in America. And the economic equation is like, yeah,

if it's going to be 30% more, like, that could be meaningful over a long period of time. And the thing that I keep coming back to is like the market is in turmoil. It's dropped like, like 15%. And I do really feel bad for everyone that's lost money. And it is, it is, it is very serious. Like I do think that there are like main street people with pensions and all sorts of retirement funds. And like, it is, it is very harmful. It is very bad. Um, but there is a world where you build that back up in the markets pretty quickly because you get a new AI

Narrative or you get something that like everything rips or interest rates go down like I've seen It's all gonna come game still comes back to a video earnings But if but if this like for fifty percent twenty five percent tariff Like if this new tariff regime sticks around for years, that will actually inform and change those decisions. There is a general feedback from the market and from people online that they're saying that, they're saying it's a bad idea after looking

at the market's reaction in a couple days. And what Ben Thompson is saying here is that basically we're going to need to judge this in the fullness of times. Like, yes, the rollout was poor. Yes, the market hates it today. But if we're avoiding something that would have was bigger and more spectacular spectacularly terrible, then it actually could be worthwhile. And it's funny to contrast it to Brenton Woods

and Nixon's rollout because again, like you said, the market liked it, but then it ended up being bad. And so, you know, short-term market movement is not necessarily always gonna be an indicator for long-term success or viability of policy. Yeah, yeah, it'll just be very important to follow where this actually goes.

And I think one of the interesting, I kept coming back to like, okay, if I'm being cautiously optimistic about this stuff, it feels like I would say high-risk, high-reward maybe, or high-risk, medium-reward is kind of, as I was thinking, like high-risk, high-reward is kind of the natural thing, but then I was thinking about it, I was like, well, the high-re reward is kind of as I was thinking like high risk high rewards kind of the natural thing but Then I was thinking about I was like well the the high reward is really like we slowly build up industrial capacity and

GDP grows a little bit. It's not really like oh all of a sudden we just like win everything in America's like amazing It's like no we're like on a slightly better trajectory So I would say that's like medium reward, but then I was thinking like, is it really high risk? It's like, well, part of the problem here is that, and it's not really high risk because if it gets really bad, he can just say, with a stroke of a pen, like it's over. Like I'm rolling it back. Like he could do that.

And so the downside risk feels not so bad as opposed to like, you know. The question is what breaks during the negotiation period, right? Totally, but like but like previous crashes. Yeah, we're very much out of the control of the president where you know in the dot-com crash It's not like the president could go out there and say like actually Yeah, AOL is worth the trillion dollars or whatever right or like kovat like actually leading around today Well at your times revenue. Yeah, exactly. And so I don't know if we should close out with

his conclusion and move on to the timeline. Because we got about 20 minutes. Yeah, the one thing that comes to mind, and we'll probably get into this in the timeline. But so Chamath was doing quite a bit of lying over the weekend, he kept getting caught lying. The internet was being very diligent, but one thing he's posted, which I did notice, is he's been orienting the narrative around the Mar-a-Lago Accords.

Yes, yes, yes. And so this entire time, to be clear, David Sachs has been silent, JD Vance has been silent, but the sort of the Mar-a-Lago Accords, right? So if Trump is the deal guy, and he lives to do deals and he did every deal there was to do

in sort of business and crypto and social media, you know, and real estate or whatever, and the final deal is like the new, you know, the new sort of backbone for the global economy, then, and normally I would discount what Tramoth would say, but because he had that call on bonds earlier you remember you were talking about this where he was like default swaps yeah right right right I think it's totally

possible that that there's a lot that the administration could be angling towards that they're not able to really talk about but I believe that Chamath would leak it basically in order to try to basically position himself, be like, I call this. So we invited Chamath on the show. Hopefully he'll be able to join. I don't know what he'll be able to say. It is interesting because he does not, to my knowledge, have an official position in the administration. But he obviously is extremely close with David Sacks who does have a position in the administration. And Chamath has been to all these different

organization events and he's clearly tapped in. And so if you think about like, hey we need to send out some messaging but it can't really come from us. Like having Chamath post messaging might make sense. He could be a surrogate. Regardless of how any one person feels about Chamath post messaging might make sense. He could be a surrogate. Regardless of how any one person feels about Chamath, he has a huge following right now among a bunch of major investor types.

And even if they don't respect everything he says or- They should be reading into what he's saying because he does have information, I would assume. Just based on his position. Yeah. Yeah, so it's very, very interesting. I don't know. Well, yeah, he's also had, he's been interviewing

Lutnik and Besant and everybody. Obviously, I imagine they're having conversations on air. They're having conversations on air. They're certainly having this, you know, similar conversations off air as well. So yeah, I mean, who knows knows you should go read the full Ben Thompson piece you can go to Strutecary and sign up I it's it's in the everyday carry of every tech person in my opinion he closes with a couple interesting

conclusions there's some there's some knock-on effects Apple services business is not subject to tariffs which is to say that it will become even more important to Apple's bottom line. That decreases the likelihood that Apple transforms its relationship with developers, which is the most, which he thinks is the most promising opportunity for Apple. Really flip their model and make it so that it was like $200 for the software. And like they basically give you the hardware for free. Yeah. And they're basically doing that if you've looked at the price of the iPhone on an inflation adjusted basis.

It's not going up by as much as it should. And it's held very steady because they make so much money off of services. I mean, you get a new phone and there's like 25 different calls to action to buy like Apple Health, Apple News, Apple App Store stuff, subscribe to this, Apple TV Plus, and then also every app they get 30% of.

And that's why they're not giving up the Siri button, even though it would make so much sense. It's because like, yeah, this button is gonna be auctioned for a trillion dollars, basically. And opening has got to pay, probably. Something like that, because this button is gonna be the next Google, like when you go to Safari and you type in just

You know like restaurant near me it goes to Google and Apple gets paid for that It's going to be the same thing with the hardware button here But it would be a lot cooler if it was more of a free market for that button and for the ecosystem And certainly it seems to be stalling the Apple vision Pro with developer hesitation There's a lot of stuff there And then they also have some interesting takeaways on the advertising based businesses meta Google Amazon will also be negatively impacted lots of cheap products mean lots of advertising Much of which could disappear could this mean a return of app install advertising like mobile games if e-commerce

Advertising decreases lowering prices overall We got to get Sean back on the show from Ridge wallet to give us the us the breakdown of how people are thinking about this in e-commerce after all this settles. So what of my optimistic spin last November when I called my tariff preview a chance to build? Well, my skepticism is keeping with the pessimism embedded in that piece. It's a lot easier to build from scratch than to retrofit something that exists. That applies to companies just as much as countries,

economic orders. I'll be cheering for the startups that seize this opportunity. I'm sympathetic to incumbents looking at guaranteed costs with very uncertain rewards. Rough. Well, if you're feeling upset about the tariffs, you should just treat yourself to a nice weekend on Wander.

That's right. Go to Wander.com and find your happy place. There's no tariffs on Wander's. That's true. Book a Wander with inspiring views, hotel-grade amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning, and 24-7 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better, folks.

Do it, CodeTBPN. We've got some news from Anderil Industries. They launched Copperhead, Anderil's high-speed software-defined family of AUVs. The US and its allies need scalable, autonomous subsea weapons that can be rapidly deployed to meet the demands of modern naval operations. And yeah, it looks like a torpedo.

It's pretty amazing, except it's square. So I wanna know about that. They seem to be taking everything that's round and making it square. Have you seen the Ghost Shark, their submarine? Ghost Shark, so cool. Yeah, it looks really cool. Looks like a VW bus. And I think that's because it's easier to transport

and you can stack them and stuff and fit them in. But I don't even know. I asked one of the enderal guys and they were like, I don't know why it's square. And they were like, ask one of the engineers, you idiot. I was like, that's the first question I would ask. If he doesn't answer it, I'm gonna be like, man, it's a mystery, but it looks really cool.

Copperhead is built for speed, ready to carry advanced payloads and integrate seamlessly with autonomous systems. The first two models, Copperhead 100 and 500, offer different payload capacities and ranges for commercial and defense. Our munition variant, Copperhead 100 and 500, offer different payload capacities and ranges for commercial and defense. Our munition variant, Copperhead M, equips autonomous vehicles with torpedo-like capabilities

at a fraction of the cost. Critically, it's mass-producible. And so, yeah, this is one of the beneficiaries of tariffs and trade war, more defense, more manufacturing in the United States. And it's odd that this is where, this is the most high-tech, this could be the most high tech product made in America,

when you think about it, in terms of like, AI, is this thing more complicated than an iPhone to manufacture? Like, maybe, it's up there. It feels like American manufacturing really comes down to having vision, incredible willpower, and incredible ability to recruit amazing talent because Elon's done it, Andrewl's doing it.

It clearly is possible, but it takes incredible power, effectively, to actually pull off. Yeah, it's also interesting that we're kind of going maybe in reverse here. Like in World War II, we had all this industrial capacity from the automobile industry. Ford and Chrysler wound up pivoting and making tanks. And there was a, there was a, I think a Ford manufacturing plant that was pivoted to making bombers and it took

them three years. And here, you know, I think the good ending is like and are all secures the global order. And then, Hey, you know, it's time for you guys to make some iPhones. Like you guys got all the best engineers. We want you to just make some consumer drones. And we kind of joked about that where it's like, hey, they make all these drones, they keep us safe, but then I still want an FPV drone to fly around.

There definitely is a Tesla mafia, right? Like the CTO of deterrence, we had Drew on the show a couple of weeks ago, he worked in manufacturing at Tesla specifically on their battery sell side and now he's working in defense, right? And so we just need winners to win and then distribute out talent into other industries.

And speaking of talent, Anderl ran a great advertising campaign for Don't Work at Anderl trying to weed out all the folks Who don't believe in their mission and they bought a bunch of billboards So if you're looking to buy billboards for your company build your culture go to adquick.com out of home advertising Made easy and measurable. No, thanks for letting me know Would it be possible to hearing you're hearing that for the first time? Because I have a lot of headaches about out of home advertising.

Yeah. Would I be able to say goodbye to those? Yeah, you can say goodbye to them. That'd be great. I'd love to say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only AdQuick combines technology, out of home expertise and data to enable efficient,

seamless ad buying across the globe. That's right. Go to adquick.com to get started. Should we review this Chamath post to kind of give some context on his position? My current best view? This is just one position. This is one position. He says, Trump lets tariff reactions play out for a few weeks, sees the trend of capitulations and is emboldened to keep going. He fields offers from everyone, negotiates with no one, then brings everyone to Mar-a-Lago in a month or two and puts an offer on the table. Bretton

Woods 2.0. It's simpler and more effective to have one grand bargain than negotiate piecemeal with 80 countries plus. I am focused on figuring out what terms matter most for the M.A.L. accords, Mar-a-Lago accords. I have a few in mind that are, which are obvious, and would King make the U.S.? I don't buy the whole end of U.S. hegemony. This is the moment to go for the jugular and establish world order around America." So he's very optimistic that this ends well,

but we will see. Who else should we cover from the timeline? Because the timeline's been in turmoil. This, the Walter Bloomberg pump occurred from 10.13 a.m. to 10.48 a.m. It was glorious. Joe Weisenthal documented on the timeline to the tune of 7,000 likes.

You have to wonder, could this have been, you know, the default is that it was just a total accident. He just like wanted to be the first person to post, I don't know who runs the account. It's somewhat anonymous. But it's totally possible this was like coordinated, right? These accounts don't monetize well. Like the ad revenue that he gets from, you know,

posting headlines is probably like $3,000 a month. So it's just like not super meaningful. Hedge fund, you know. I don't buy it. I think it's just accidental. Accidental. I think it's just somebody just following the dopamine drip.

I'm just saying like you have to, it was such a, not even doing it for the money, doing it for the likes. I'm saying the default is that it was just an accident. Yeah, yeah. But it could have absolutely been. The funny thing is that, I mean, you mentioned hedge funds. For some hedge funds

It doesn't even matter because they just see the trading volume go up and they make a little bunch of money during volatility Like I'm sure Jane Street printed during this pub on both directions, right? Insane market action right now market exploded on a headline attributed Kevin Hasser And now nobody can figure out where it came from and the markets are diving again at 8% surge and then a 3.5 percent plunge in a matter of seconds Anyway, you want to make sure that your expenses are plunging with ramp.com Time is money say both just do it corporate cards bill payments accounting and a whole lot more all in one place go to ramp.com We like this DJ

I'm gonna have ramps had economists or Our Karazian, I'd like to have him come on. On the show. Yes. I think it'll be next week at this point just to break down what they're seeing across the ramp ecosystem, ramp economy. I like these leading indicators. There's this whole idea of like,

the market is a leading indicator. It'll eventually show up in GDP, but there's a lot of things in between that we wanna look at, like venture flows and what's what's going on on Angel List and and our funds sizing up or sizing down During the SVB crisis. We saw a lot of VC funds pull back. Are we there yet? Are we even getting there and then what are consumers and businesses doing our across Ian it breaks it all down in his economic reporting from ramp and has fantastic data. Let's go to DJ Kows, the market crash looks so much nicer

in Ghibli, this is a ridiculous chart, this can't be real. I mean maybe this is, if you zoom out enough. It's really steep though. I think it might have taken some liberties. In fact at the end it looks like it's going backwards in time, not great. But some green shoots, Nvidia is up 9% since 939. Some liberties in fact at the end it looks like it's going backwards in time. Not great looks a little dramatic But some green shoots nvidia is up nine percent

There we go 39. There we go. I don't know if it's stayed. It's actually up 4.7 percent today. That is still uh down almost nine percent over the past week, but um We like we like to see a little green. Yep We like to see a little green. Yep. We got some news out of Taiwan. Taiwan does not seek retaliatory tariffs against the US. Instead, we'll start talking from bilateral zero tariffs to ensure Taiwan's competitiveness will increase US imports and adopt other measures.

Working together, we'll usher in a golden age of shared prosperity. SIZE GONE. You'll love to see it from our friends over in Taiwan. Yeah, I mean, I think this is where everyone wants to get and, but it's interesting. I was talking with a friend today and we were both kind of lost on like, what is the tariff take? And he was just saying, I just want less regulation.

Like I want this to, I want that to be the dividend. So Doug Demuro actually had a great take because he is in the automotive industry. Obviously if you're in the business of selling new cars, you gotta be really frustrated with the tariffs because Doug just compared it to the dealer markups that we saw during COVID. It just became really hard to make cars,

move them around the world. And interest rates were super low. So people wanted to, you know, the market was ripping, right? You remember G wagons were like 350 K for like a $200,000 car. And he basically- That's a steal, but-

Yeah, still giving it away. Other examples. We need some other examples. No, but he basically said, you know, the US was based around. The Hummer EV was trading for like 200K. Yeah. And now it's like down at 60.

Where it should be. No, but he basically said, you know, in many ways the US was like founded on this, you know, the ideals of like free trade and capitalism and letting, you know, the market do its thing and, you know, tariffs are taxation, it's protectionism which is like against like the entire ethos of like the United States was basically at least looking back was like, let's win by being the best.

Not, and so again, he's obviously biased from being in the automotive industry, but I think that's generally, like tariffs being un-American is like generally, it's a good take. It's a good take. Yeah. I also, I was talking to a hedge fund manager a year ago

during the inflation crisis, and he was talking about like, you know, when there's like too much money flowing around, you need a place for that to just like die. You need the money to die. I mean, stop moving. Stop moving, but just like get sucked out of the economy when the economy is like overheating, right?

And so it was like taxes, like the IRS or like tariffs, which are a form of taxation is like where money goes to die because the money instead of going into the pocket of like a business person that can like immediately deploy it or even just a consumer like a worker can go take the money and immediately deploy it when it goes into the government it's often used for like such you know like such inefficient means that funding says history in Iraq. Yeah. That basically like it really, really slows down the economy.

And so I think the Trump folks have been kind of signaling that like, okay, if this works and we were generating more money from tariffs, like we'll do a tax cut, which I think would kind of pare that down. But in general, there's a lot of tax and then we're going to cut, cut. It's a tax cut. Increase taxes, increase cuts.

Yeah. Tax cuts. Yeah. We're simultaneously increasing and decreasing taxation. I mean it's, that's funny when you put it that way, but it is possible. It's just like, yeah, it's just like, you know, where does the money get taxed from?

Where does it go to? You know, you can tax from a bunch of different places and you can cut from a bunch of different places. But Andrew Reed posted, so turns out the weeks where decades happen, happen a few times a decade. And I asked him, when's the new Sequoia memo dropping? Because Sequoia famously dropped the Blacks RIP Good Times memo at the end of the financial crisis or the housing crisis, which is a very detailed macroeconomic analysis of where the American consumer was and kind of calling upon all entrepreneurs to gear up for a very different market going forward. And then when COVID happened, they dropped the Black Swan memo, which was also very well received,

telling founders, hey, buckle up. Interestingly, the Black Swan memo was kind of like too soon because the market ripped, but a lot of those lessons were later applied very accurately to the SBB crisis. And if you were running a venture-backed startup with 12 to 18 months of runway coming into the SBB crisis, like you needed to move very quickly to know that, hey, you weren't gonna raise another round in I think it was 2022, 2023. Things were getting rough, so you needed to buckle down

and the companies that did made it through and the companies that didn't went bust. And so I'm sure we will see a lot of interesting takes from venture capitalists. We have some on the show today to break down what we think entrepreneurs should do in this case, it's a weird scenario. It's half wait and see right now,

we're only a couple days into the crash, but if this sustains and GDP starts dropping, like you can see, even if you're selling B2B SaaS, people are saying, hey, I'm trying to tighten my belt, right, I'm trying to stretch my burn, maybe VCs aren't gonna fund me. Maybe there's gonna be the requirements that we're just gonna see less froth in the market.

And so that requires a different type of management. Anyway. And it's such a fascinating time right now because it seems like all of the attention that artificial intelligence was getting just evaporated, right? Yet if you're heavily in the industry and you're seeing the impact of it

and you're seeing the power of it and you're seeing the progress it's making, even if it's maybe not, doesn't feel like it's quite accelerating, maybe like it was six months ago, it's still, if you're in a private markets investor, you have to be extremely bullish on a number of new investment opportunities despite the sort of like macro backdrop.

Yeah. I mean, speaking of, it is a fascinating time and speaking of fascinating time pieces, you should go to Bezel, getbezel.com, shop over 24,500 luxury watches, fully authenticated in-house by Be bezels team of experts and You know on a day like this. You just want to look down at a at a fantastic timepiece And remember that things will always look up eventually. There's always a bull market somewhere and Trump's of Trump's a Vacheron guy. Yeah, so I don't reek. Yeah I don't expect the 31% tariffs on Swiss watches.

That's gonna be the first one to fall. That's gonna be the first one to go. For sure. Okay, we got our first guest from Anderil. Shane's in the studio. Welcome to the show, Shane. How you doing? Boom.

Hi, John. Yes, thanks. They're good. The market's melting down. It's a little chaotic, but a lot to talk about and a lot of interesting opinions flying around on both sides. Hopefully things are doing better for you.

Massive launch today. Congratulations. Can you break it down for us and maybe introduce yourself as well? Thanks a lot. Yeah. So we're at the world's biggest Navy trade show here in DC.

So the Sea, Air and Space Conference, and we're in the dive bar Yeah, so we've got in the dive bar so my name is Shane on it I'm the senior vice president for Maritime business line here in at Andrews. I get really, really, really big conference for us and, um, two brand new products, see bed century, copper head going public today. So yeah, it's pretty cool. Can you, uh, maybe let's start with seabed century. Uh, what, what was the genesis of the project? What's the need? Uh, and then what is the, what's the product actually do just for like a layman?

Can you hear me yeah, so see that century is about undersea awareness if you will So hopefully my coming through okay for you. Good. Yeah Yep, right so It's pretty crazy. Like if you zoom out, like as a species, we know less about the sea floor than we do about the moon or Mars. Like some 70 to 80% of the sea floor is uncharted, which is crazy. So it's a good place to hide if you're a submariner. It's also a good place to hide if you're the threat. So we kind of created this system, if you will,

to be able to bring light to the deep dark sea, if you will. So you look at kind of vast amounts of infrastructure, so 80%, oh sorry, 90% plus of internet traffic. So this particular podcast would be running across subsea cables. Many nations have their gas lines under the waves. These are broadly unprotected, unwatched right now. So the greatest vulnerabilities are below the waves. And no one's really

talking about it or working on it apart from some super secret things. And we kind of think that's wrong. So seabed century was kind of came from that place. As you know, Andrew, we can invest our own money, put points towards things that we care about. And we believe this is a big issue that people should be working on. So it's seabed century. Is seabed century? Do you expect, you know, DoD, our allies, etc, to be the main buyers? Or is this the kind of thing, if you are in the business of laying under C cables, would those types of companies

be customers as well? Or is it purely defense applications? No, we definitely see it as dual use, like anyone who's got energy infrastructure. One of the key things I will lay out is this is a cable-less system so it's completely wireless. So all the systems as you guys probably know are Cold War era, you need big cable-laying ships to put these systems on the sea floor, almost impossible to upgrade. These are completely wireless, fully electric, and you can place them in the ocean. Specifically, we can use some of our autonomous submarines.

So you can place them covertly or clandestinely, which isn't a bad idea if you're setting up security cameras and the bad guys know exactly where all your surveillance systems are, kind of defeats the purpose a little bit. So this approach is different thinking, if you will, that we can place them anywhere on the planet. We can get one of our submarines and you can place it with all sorts of different payloads in the body of it for long range

surveillance, for listening, for other actions that you might be taking as well. Can you talk about the broad risk of undersea drones? I imagine it's the same type of dynamic as traditional air-based drones in that you could send a $10,000 drone to destroy a pipeline that could cost a billion dollars or cause a billion dollars of economic damage. And so the whole ratio is pretty thrown off. But I'd be curious, is it something that's not getting enough attention? Because it feels like right now,

kamikaze drones and everything in Ukraine is sort of dominating the narrative, but clearly you guys have found this important enough to put a lot of R&D into it. Yeah, the maritime environment's been kind of slow to the punch, to be honest. Like you look at the proliferation and the success of robots in the Ukraine conflict,

and everyone looks back now and goes, yeah, of course, this was a better idea. And you also see kind of crazy things like Patriots being used to drop UAVs that are a tenth or a hundredth of the cost there. The unit economics in that exchange just doesn't make any sense. So maritime domain just on the military side, exactly the same. There is a proliferation of unmanned underwater vehicles, primarily from the Chinese and the Russians, also unmanned surface vehicles as well. And if you're going to utilize,

and this is probably a good segue to the Copperhead, which is the next thing that we announced, which is a fast, flexible payload AUB, which could be made into a munition, so a torpedo, if you will. That particular system is built to be at a fraction of the cost of say like a Mark 48 or a Mark 54. These are very prevalent torpedoes for your listeners who aren't familiar with that. When you're launching a Mark 48 against a USV that's like a tenth of the cost, the economics don't sort of work. So we've specifically

built these things to be at a price point that's a fraction of, we can also build them at thousands per year. Whereas kind of right now, you may be likely to get 100, 200 torpedoes out of a supply chain as it exists today. But again, that exchange ratio just does not work against kind of the fight that we're facing into. So the Asia Pacific fight with China, clearly that's a water-based conflict that's coming. But also people don't talk a lot about the high north. So and that's where Russia is dominating. So, you know, there's a lot of great stuff sitting under the ice that's now retracting. Everyone wants a piece of that. Some of the discussion around Greenland and others is the basis of why the high north is the next focus, if you will. So, having these capabilities that are fully

electric so we can get them under the ice caps, for instance, is of interest to folks. The ability to do it at en masse affordably in order to kind of deal with a very wide border front is kind of the basis why we invest in these capabilities. Can you talk a little bit of a little bit more about the trade show that you're at and exactly what type of buyer are you interfacing with? What kind of points are you trying to make to them beyond just, hey, there's this new thing, it's important and cool. Yeah, so as I said, and you know, what's happening around me at the moment, world's biggest,

is everything from freedom to, you know, weapon systems, whatever else that's kind of happening. So I think a big part of what we're trying to paint, if you will, is the bloody to mix match. So we've got our autonomous underwater submarines that are in effect motherships for delivering these things, plus the seabed sentry, plus the copperhead, and just to be able to give the creativity back. And it's not an obvious thing. So enabling, you know, within the dive XL, which is our big underwater submarine or autonomous submarine, I should say, we can put dozens of copperheads in. We can put a dozen seabed sentries.

So the ability that you can kind of mix and match and give more creativity to the commander, and that's not immediately obvious. So just kind of, we've got virtual reality experiences for people to kind of, oh here's how I would do this as well as coming into our our dive bar that we have here to you know have the conversation. But it's not obvious. A lot of this is second order kind of understanding for what's incredibly wicked difficult problem that the subsea warfare environment kind of presents, if you will. So that's what it's about being able to come here, start those conversations.

Uh, I, I, I always noticed that both the dive submarines and the new copperhead are square. Is this, is, are there advantages to that? Does that mean that you're less compatible with old torpedo tubes or is there some sort of backwards compatibility or does it just not matter and it's better to stack in a shipping container as you ship these around the world? Yeah, great question. So truth be told, it all started with with Palmer. Okay, so Palmer Lucky, our founder. And, you know, I was kicking around and

said, I, you know, boss, we're looking at doing a torpedo. founder, and I was kicking around and said, you know, boss, we're looking at doing a torpedo. And he said, oh, but make sure it's square. And I was like, well, why? So anyway, we took it away and the guys did the numbers. And interestingly, for what we're doing, it's actually faster. So given we've got the software magic to fly these things, it actually flies more

stable and quicker for the application that we want. Secondary is then the manufacturing. It's a lot easier to manufacture something that's like, you know, a bath tub as opposed to a big spherical pressure vessel thing. So that was very significant as well. So those two kind of together is why that's the case. Now it is a similar diameter to existing effectors like the Mark 48 so they could be used. It's not our intent at this stage. So our intent is for this to be launched off an autonomous effector, to be launched off an autonomous submarine. And that makes the integration and the safety case a lot easier when you're both sides of that equation. So when you're the archer and the arrow, you can just go along

quicker when it comes to changing the threat, changing the seekers, changing the capability, you can give it a lot quicker. So that was the basis of the intent. But certainly a lot of customers have asked the question that you've asked. So we'll look into it. Maybe last question for me, just curious, does Anderil have scuba divers on the payroll? Or do you guys observe the R&D and the testing process using other, is it fully autonomous end to end?

You just sort of launch them and say goodbye and then watch from onboard? or I'm curious, whatever you can share, I think it'd be fascinating. Yeah, I mean part of the dev process is things go wrong. So I'm a scuba diver. So when things go wrong, I'll stick the tanks on and jump in as well as tanks. So I mean, it's the iterative process.

So it doesn't work all the time, but we're able to spin the wheel fast enough to get to good from you know bad fairly quickly but uh yeah certainly all the team everyone's big enthusiasts about the water space it's uh not a terrible thing uh we'll be in the group because all the tests are horrible places like Florida and you know, Sydney or, um, you know, California or whatever. Previously I did fast jet stuff and the test ranges for the air force guys are in these awful dusty places. So it's not a terrible thing doing Navy projects.

That's great. Uh, I mean, last question for me, and then we'll let you go and get back to the important work you do. Get back to the dive bar. Get back to the dive bar. Uh bar I would love to hear about some of the challenges of communication in the underwater domain obviously you're flying a drone around you might be able to talk to Starlink there's tons of satellites and other drones up when you're underwater signals don't travel

as far that feels like it makes autonomy more important being being able to operate even with the connection gets lost. But can you talk about how you're thinking about, uh, communication and signal transmitting across the different fleet? Yeah. A thousand cents. So underwater is the worst domain. So it comes suck. There's no GPS, all the things that you rely on for an autonomous system. So, it is the masterclass for autonomy. So, not space, not air, not surface, not land, it is subsurface. It's the most difficult road. So, we've spent a lot of time and I think, you know, Andrew, this is kind of our, what we're good at. But this is certainly,

I've got probably the best autonomy engineers on my team because you've got such thin pipes or non-existent pipes. So you're in effect GPS denied, you're a whole mission. You can only pass very, very small amounts of information between the assets because they all do team together. So in doing so, like you need to be very judicious about what you pass and when, in what configurations, etc.

So it's the most difficult domain and one of the highest reasons for autonomy. And I think where we're getting the success is we've come with this software-first thinking for a particularly difficult problem, which is this. I think everyone can build a you know, a submarine, autonomous submarine, that's not difficult. Having it survive, communicate, act, still be on a string from a human, particularly when you're taking kinetic action, to make sure all the approvals are done in the right order, that's the big challenge. So you hit the nail on the head there. I did hear one interesting thing in the sea bed sentry announcement.

I think Palmer mentioned that it can detect biological creatures, too. Does that have a benefit or is that just like a fun fact? Yeah, yeah. I mean, anything below the waves that kind of makes noise. And in fact, you know, one of the big things we want to do is actually detect when the biologics, you know seasonally coming through because you want to be careful when you're actually putting energy into the water because it can be harmful for sea life so we all of our systems are collecting the pattern of life if you will so we make sure that if there's some pump backs you know

cruising through a surveillance area that we're tuning down our sound system, if you will, to make sure that there's no damage to the, uh, uh, to the people who live in all the animals that live in that space. So that's just, you know, good practice. Um, so yeah, yeah, it does all those things. You mentioned that, uh, the underwater domain is the hardest from a cost perspective, but Palmer has been talking a big game about doing subterranean warfare and tunneling. Do you think he's going to give you for a run for your money with an even harder domain or you think you're going to

domain, but we'll see what systems actually get. Right now. Yeah. I think it's subsea, but he's, he's not wrong. He's always a step ahead. Okay. Drill. It's going to be, eventually it'll be time to drill. It's time to drill. Drill baby drill, Palmer and Andrew. Well, thanks so much for taking the time out of your day to come chat with us about this launch. Congratulations. It looks awesome. The design's fantastic and I'm looking forward to learning more. Yeah. I imagine you're quite busy because I doubt anybody was creative enough

to come up with a dive bar at that conference. Yeah, everyone's coming by. Yeah, awesome. Yeah, we had to shut it down just for this. Everyone's very upset. They wind up outside. I'm not kidding. Oh, really?

Get back to it. Thank you so much for calling in. We really appreciate it. We'll talk to you soon. Thanks, Scott. Thanks a lot. Cheers. Well, we shut down the biggest naval warfare conference in the world.

We sent back the America's military capacity to gap. It's actually brutal. Imagine you're Lockheed Martin. You probably spent 100 times more than Anderil on the booth and then nobody wants to come by because Anderil's like, yeah, come by the dive bar and hang out You actually get to touch the the tech ridiculous. Should we should we go back to the timeline? Yeah, a little bit more timeline and then we will I mean actually we could move on to some of the more optimistic news I don't know if you saw llama for launched. Yeah, that's very exciting And of course we got Zuck with a front-facing camera video.

Hello everyone, it's Lama 4 day. Lama dropped a, of course, the open source LLM from Meta. Now they have a 10 million context window, which I believe is 10 times what Google was previously offering with Gemini. And the ELO is insane. There's a bunch of debate about how much of an advancement this is, are the benchmarks getting saturated, we should get into all of that, but I think it's just cool that what they've clearly recognized is that you need to be superlative in something when you're launching a new product and there's a lesson for that in,

even if you're launching like a CPG product, be Celsius, it's the energy to drink with the most caffeine of all of them, more than Monster and Red Bull, right? And so you can say a lot of things about it, but like you can sum it down into what is Llama 4 good at? Well, they're the best, the biggest context winner. Context. And then there's a lot of other stuff that's interesting,

but it's funny, Austin Allred posted a screenshot from Zuck on threads. Somebody said, why did you drop Ll llama for on a Saturday, bro? And Zuck responded which is awesome Normally like the cops people would be like oh like the person's using bro like shouldn't engage with that person like they're not serious You should only take questions from like really serious people That's when it was ready that's when it was ready it was ready on Saturday So we launched it on Saturday, and I, that's when it was ready. That's when it was ready. It was ready on Saturday, so we launched it on Saturday.

And I love that. And Austin says, bullish, I agree. He's a very bullish. And Zuck's photo on threads is him, an AI image of him with like 25 gold chains. That's actually wild. Such a good meme that he's just like, yeah, I'm rocking the 25 chains.

I remember when he said- And he's got a peace on in the video too. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's not holding back. He's hanging out. Omjad says, if Satya and Zuck are shipping on a Saturday, what's your excuse? Satya posted, thrilled to bring MetaLama 4 Scout

and Maverick to Foundry today as we continue to make sure Azure is the platform of choice for the world's most advanced AI models. And- LLM indifferent. They just want to rent the space. Satya wants to rent. He wants to vend.

He wants to deliver models all over the place. This is interesting. There's an article, a post from Less Wrong, says recent AI model progress feels mostly like BS. And we won't get into the whole article.

You should just go read it from zero path.com. Uh, this was posted by LC on, on less wrong. Um, but it tells the story of someone building a, uh, penetration testing tool driven by AI. So, uh, you know, penetration testing of courses, you build a, a, a software application, you put it up on a server on the internet and then, uh, of course, is you build a software application, you put it up on a server or on the internet, and then are there different ways you can get around the security, figure out if there's a different way to break into the server, get root access.

You hear about this like WordPress gets hacked every once in a while and people figure out how to get into the admin page and kind of change your blog posts. But of course, pen testing is very important, especially at the higher level, and the more money is at stake, the bigger the business, the bigger the prize for the hackers. And so this person was building an AI-driven pen testing thing. He says, about nine months ago, I and three friends decided that AI had gotten good enough to monitor large code bases autonomously for security problems. We started a company around this trying to leverage

the latest AI models to create a tool that could replace at least a good chunk of the value of human pen testers. They've been working on this project since June 2024. And what he goes on to say is that there's all this hype on X and in AI circles about a new model that, oh, now it can do IMO gold medals and stuff, but for some reason not yet he yeah not yet but soon so but but but he keeps he keeps switching to

the new models and getting results that are quantitatively better but not qualitatively better and so it's not really solving his problem and this is this question of you know we've seen with GPT 4.5 maybe pre-training is maxing out maybe scale is all you need, but you've got to apply that scale to the right algorithm. Maybe now it's reasoning models and you've got to scale those up. Maybe it's something else. Maybe it's the art founder.

Program synthesis is basically write, have the model write code that does the problem that you want it to do. There's a few others. Yeah, and also just needing new ideas. Yeah, new ideas. And it to do. There's a few others. Yeah, and also just needing new ideas. Yeah, new ideas. And it's crazy, I need to dig this up because I think this would be a very viral clip, but George Hots went on Lex Friedman after GPT-3 dropped.

So this was maybe back in 2021. And he said that, you know, AGI or ASI will not be GPT-9. It will not just GPT nine. It will not just be scaled up of next token because that is not the algorithm for intelligence. That is one thing that we do as humans, but there are a lot of other factors that go into intelligence. And you, and you think about that where, you know, even someone like, uh, isn't it Daniel Kahneman with thinking fast and slow this idea that you have two different frames of thinking,

you can be very reactive and think fast, but then you can also step back and there's all these different subsections of the brain. We barely understand the brain, but we understand that there are long-term memory, short-term memory, you know, there's probably some humor segment that we haven't even tried to build, Neha, yet.

And all these different- Lots of funny bone. The funny bone, yeah, the funny bone has not even been tried to be put into silicon. No, but Mike from ArcPrize and Zapier aligns with what he was saying, which is like, hey, we still need new ideas,

which is part of what gets me excited about SSI, trying to take a new approach. Yeah, I mean, I mean, Ilya Setskever seemed to be not only the person that decided that that read the attention is all you need transformer paper and realized the impact of it because we look back on that and there's the survivorship bias where it's like, yeah, of course, like all these Google brain people put out this amazing paper called attention is all you need. They describe the transformer architecture.

Of course, that was like gonna be groundbreaking from day one, but you forget that on that day, there were probably 100 papers that dropped. And the next day, there were another 100 papers that dropped. And even that Google Brain team was publishing other papers and other research trees and other paths. And even things like symbol manipulation were popular at the time.

And all sorts of different algorithms were being tried. And Ilya had the foresight to realize that that was the architecture that you could throw a billion dollars of compute at and get a really magical result. He did it. OpenAI released ChatGPT. It becomes this amazing like, you know, LLM. We know about that. They implement transformer architecture in a ton of different stuff. Even Tesla's autopilot has transformers baked into it now It's all over the place this architecture Then he realizes that Reinforcement learning kind of the the alpha go the mu zero the stuff from deep mind again from Google

You put that on top of an LLM have it self play have it talk to itself Reasoning tokens that will be the next the next amazing thing originally called Q star very scary. There's all this chaos Then it becomes you know, what was it strawberry then eventually it becomes oh three Oh one oh three high oh three mini high Are one from deep seek all these different reasoning models come out. They clearly deep research They clearly advance the ball towards something that's more usable. You see the coding agents like, uh, cognition and, uh, and Devin doing something similar where there's, there's a reasoning layer on top of a pre-training LLM. Uh, but, uh,

the question is what's next. And I think everyone is kind of in a, in a seems to be coming to the conclusion that there will be a next thing in order to unlock the next big breakthrough and we're excited to watch it but as the model as the race for just general LLM training and scale heats up and all the news about you know Grok is in the game now and and open AI is scaling up to 4.5 there's GPT-5 coming at a certain point. There's DeepSeq. Meta has been continually pushing the ball down the field. They have a lot of infrastructure

as a hyperscaler, but there was some controversy on the timeline from Nick. He says, breaking Meta AI internally caught cooking benchmarks to hide poor results. Absolute state. I don't know how real this is, but they are alleging some benchmark fraud, which you hate to see. Let's read it. It says the original post is in Chinese, but the translation here says, despite repeating trade interference,

the internal model's performance still falls short of open source state-of-the-art benchmarks lagging significantly behind. Company leadership suggested blending test sets from various benchmarks during the post-training process, aiming to meet the targets across various metrics and produce a presentable result. Failure to achieve this goal by the end of April deadline

would lead to dire consequences following yesterday's release of Llama 4. Many users on X and Reddit had already reported extremely poor real- world test results. There was a debate about whether or not you could even run this on, uh, you know, I'm sure people will like play with the models and we, we talked to some of the open AI folks about like, yes, there are all these evals,

but at the end of the day you kind of just got to talk to the model and play around with it and see if it's useful. And then also you need to implement into your system or your code base and see, you know, is this solving a real problem? Maybe it is, maybe it isn't, but it kind of depends on your, the economics of your business and the application that you're building for.

So, interesting to see where this goes. There's been allegations of benchmark fraud and eval saturation all the time. Some of it is just completely accidental, just because, you know because someone posts a benchmark, then all the results go onto the internet, that goes into the next scrape, and then of course it gets baked in.

And so, AP bio, for example, every AP bio question is just on the internet now. And so it goes into the pre-training data, and so it's basically just memorized every AP bio question and answer. Is it really good at biology? It's kind of hard to say.

It's certainly good at looking up the answers, which is great. And that's useful. Memory is all you need. And it's a great, is it intelligence? These things are certainly extremely high on knowledge. And they are amazing knowledge engines. Isn't that the term you use? Knowledge engine? Answer engines. Answer engine. Like they are amazing knowledge engines. Isn't that the term you use? Knowledge engine?

Answer engine. Answer engine, like they're fantastic at that. And what I love about Lama 4 is that it is funny to think about, you could have, if you took a human who was sort of lowest on intelligence and then you gave them all the knowledge in the world, in so many situations, they could fake intelligence. Totally. Like they could, you sort of ask them something,

they give you an answer, you go, wow, so smart. But then you- Do Jeopardy or do trivia at a bar. You'll be like, that guy's so smart, he knows exactly who won the World Series in 1982. But it's like, is that intelligence? It's unclear. Anyway, I like David Holes, founder of Mid Journey.

He says, I desperately want Mark Zuckerberg to pose with four llamas for the llama four release. I'll even say please, we need aesthetic moments in tech and this llama branding is good for one thing and one thing only. Great picture. Great picture, clearly generated from Mid Journey, looks fantastic, but Zuck has the resources to do it

and I think he has the character and the personality to pull it off and Have fun with it. And so I would I would drop the chain pick up the llamas Yeah, do get get four llamas together do some do some llamas llama photos anyway, Toby look he has Elite memo that's been floating around. That's pretty interesting all about how spot Shopify is using AI. He says AI usage is now a baseline expectation. We are entering a time where more merchants and entrepreneurs could be created than any other in history. We often talk about

bringing down the complexity curve to allow more people to choose this as a career Shopify's whole business is making e-commerce easy. So they want to make it as easy as possible to set up an online store They've done it very very well in my opinion But they want to continue each step along the entrepreneurial path is rife with decisions requiring skill judgment and knowledge Having AI alongside the journey and increasingly not just doing the consultation But also doing the work for our merchants is a mind-blowing step function change here. Our task at Shopify is to make our software unquestionably the best canvas on which to develop the best businesses of the future. We do this by keeping

everyone on cutting on the cutting edge and bringing all the best tools to bear so our merchants can be more successful than they themselves used to imagine for what we desk for what we need to Be absolutely ahead and he outlines this in an email to every Shopify employee Reflexive AI usage is now a baseline expectation Maybe you're already there and find this memo puzzling in that case You are are you already use AI as a thought partner, deep researcher, critic, tutor, and pair programmer. I use it all the time, and so he's telling folks,

you gotta be using AI, and we got to build it into all of our products. So just interesting to hear from a big public company CEO in founder mode, definitely pushing towards more AI. Yeah, I'm gonna go out on a limb and say, I don't think this was leaking. Oh, you think it's recruiting? I think. Oh no, my memo leaked.

My extremely well-written, kind, visionary memo. I think it probably leaked. But he did post it now, and it's good content. No, I'm sure it would've leaked. It's just. You kind of write these things with leaks in mind. Anyway, we got our next guest coming in to the studio. Welcome to the show, Logan.

What's up, guys? We wanted to bring on the foremost geopolitical expert, tariff expert and you couldn't get that person. So you got to see which is the next best thing, I guess. No, honestly, growth. What we've seen is growth stage VCs tend to be, you know, have the strongest opinions most strongly held. So listen, I am open to I would love nothing more than to be wrong about all of this stuff. And I spent my weekend glued to my phone more than I should, both out of schadenfreude and also debating Keith Reboy back and forth.

Which has he already come on? Is he already poised? No, he's coming on in 30 minutes. Maybe you just stay on and start arguing with him. We're actually doing a podcast tomorrow. He and I are going to try to be a neutral moderator in that discussion rather than a participant. But yeah, it was it was interesting. It was interesting to hear his perspective about the

what the intended results are of this because I guess I typically try to stay out of like politics For the most part, but this I don't know this feels a little bit adjacent and that it's pretty economically driven and does tend to impact the world that I play in so I ended up dipping my toe into it far more than I wanted to well, let's start how conversations have gone with Portfolio company CEOs you guys are obviously been a growth stage software Investment firm, but I'm curious in talking with CEOs over the weekend. what's been your sort of high level, what's been top of mind,

aside from just kind of battening down the hatches maybe? Yeah, I mean, I think it's mostly that. I will say it sort of feels like we've been through three different existential, potentially risky circumstances over the last, what is it, five years. We had the March COVID stuff and then we had the unwind that sort of happened post-Zerp, the time to get fit or whatever it is.

And now we have this. And so it feels like most of our CEOs are kind of old hat in some ways at how to deal with this stuff. And I do think that we measure our time in months and years and not, you know, days and hours, if you will. And so I think it's kind of a wait and see approach in particular, because it's hard to know is this a means to some end that might be orthogonal to the pure economic purpose of it. And I think you're sort of seeing that with what Navarro comes out and says versus what Besant will say versus what Elon's out tweeting now. It's a little bit hard to know

what the strategy is behind this. I do think we probably need to take it literally at this point and assume that this is probably here to stay in some way, shape or form. But I do think that our company shouldn't be totally, um, uh, moving the dials too much in the near term. What do you think's happening? Uh, I mean, you do those fantastic, uh,

public market reports. Um, it feels like just kind of everything's down, but I would assume that some of the larger SaaS companies that are in the public market should be less affected. But do you think that there will be any sort of like bifurcation or like flight to safety that might happen in the next couple months as people kind of figure out who's actually exposed? Like if you're Nike, it's different than if you're Salesforce, I imagine.

Yeah, it's a great question. I think that it seems because we've gone through this twice before, and ultimately the results that were learned out of that in the post-COVID, you know, after March of 2020, and then after 2022, it seemed that everyone kind of learned similar-ish lessons of it, and maybe the wrong ones. Like post-COVID, the right answer was to invest into all these tech companies. And so I do think with the war chest that a lot of the venture firms have right now,

I think it's gonna take a while before people actually stop dancing. I think everyone's going to convince themselves, at least in the near term, that this is a good buying opportunity. And if you look, like I was looking at some of the numbers, I think March was the highest buying that we've seen on record from retail investors. And so it feels like a lot of people have learned similar lessons of like, oh my gosh, well, when a dip happens,

that's actually a better buying opportunity than it is a time to be fearful in this. And so my guess is it's probably gonna take a couple orders before anyone starts to capitulate that maybe this is the new normal, particularly given how manic the market has kind of been and the decision seems to have been. Yeah. I remember during the kind of Zerp Unwind post-SBB crisis, you did a show where you were talking to somebody about just this idea of like dry powder and everyone would say, oh, well, like the VCs have so much money, they have to invest. And of course, there were a bunch of funds that like returned capital or sized down their funds. But then most of the funds just kind of ripped pretty quickly and came found excuses

to move into AI and stuff. And at this point, it feels like if you're an LP in a large fund and you see the market down, you've been trained. So I guess the question is like, like, do LPs pay more attention to this than GPs or, or does this, or, or is it even a longer cycle for the LPs to actually start making calls and saying like, Hey, how are you adapting to this strategy? Yeah. I think that the, uh, the GPs in some ways, like when you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail. If you're thinking like, hey, I need to do growth stage investing, then I think a lot of people just operate with, okay, I'm going to invest in the relative quality of the names that

I see over the next quarter, two quarters, four quarters, and try not to be too episodic. Because at the end of the day, what we're trying to deliver back to our limited partners, for the most part, isn't some relative adjusted return versus all the other sectors in the economy, right? We're not deciding, should we go buy lumber, or should we go buy futures contracts, or go buy equities in the public markets?

Like we're delivering some sliver of a product. And I think within a lot of LPs, that's also the case where you've seen kind of this as they've been more institutionalized, you've seen different people become responsible with, oh, I'm not just responsible for the venture book. I'm actually, or I'm not just responsible for private's book. I'm actually just responsible for the venture's book.

And we're gonna allocate 8% or whatever it is to that. And so at a micro level, I think a lot of the LPs are incented almost similar to the GPs. Now, as you go up further and further up the stack to the CIO or someone that oversees some broader purview of all this stuff, then those people are making relative trade-offs of, is venture at a 12% level the right exposure that we want to have going forward? And that's where

the denominator effect can really play through. I will say back to the everyone kind of learning similar points, though, it does seem like a lot of the LPs have decided, hey, the best time to be in these managers is when things are going down. And so we're going to commit to it. And then there's also this kind of principal agent problem, I guess. I don't know if that's the perfect term for it. But if you leave a firm, then they don't let you back in the next fund. Like you don't get the cherry pick, okay, I'm gonna be a part of this vintage, but not that vintage for the most part with the blue chip names.

And so the LPs in some ways are sort of faced with a decision of do I wanna get out of this manager almost in perpetuity or do I wanna stick with it and trust their ability to navigate those waters? And so I think that there's a bunch of different dynamics that sort of play out in all of that. And it's gonna take a while for it to roll all through, right, like fund cycles are two to three to four years.

And it's only on those time periods that the LPs are really making these decisions. So I think we're a long way from knowing. Well, yeah, doesn't this just continue to overheat AI in that, you know, especially in other sectors too, when I look at the areas that have gotten the most hype and attention in some of the biggest rounds recently, it's defense, robotics, AI.

And like, if I'm a GP or I'm an LP, those are three areas that I actually, the world's becoming less stable. It certainly feels less stable. AI is not getting tariffed and we need to, you know, this sort of on-shoring, reshoring narrative just means that you want to deploy even more dollars there. Yeah.

It feels actually very on theme. Go ahead. No, no, you know, it just feels very on theme, but yeah, what's your take? I mean, I think so, although I wonder when we talk about like AI not getting hit or semi is not getting hit with tariffs, like it's such a complicated global supply chain that I do worry about the like, I think, and I've heard anecdotally from some of the big foundation model companies, that the different tariffs and the issues that you have to deal with, not just China or Taiwan or South Korea, but also even Mexico, there are a bunch of inputs, even if it doesn't feel like they're direct inputs, there's so many complicated pieces of the puzzle

from an AI standpoint that I think it's gonna be hard to disassociate the aggregation that is what's being tariffed into AI. And in talking to people over the weekend that are exposed to these large model companies, I think there's a real, real concern about what this is going to do to those businesses and their ability to access the different things that they ultimately need. And it could be everything from, I don't know, cooling to different server types. And all these

different pieces are a part of a big chain. And so I will think there I do think there will be a flight to those things in some ways. But I'm hesitant to say that they're not going to be impacted. I actually think especially the way at least this has been messaged thus far, it feels like there's going to be a lot of different inputs that ultimately cause a bunch of issues no matter what the end market is, be it defense or be it robotics or be it AI. Yeah, we were talking about electrical transformers, not the architecture, but very

key ingredient in drawing power into these huge data centers. And most of those are made overseas, many of them in China. If there's tariffs on those, it could slow down the rollout of new data centers. Although I imagine that's not a huge portion of like the per token cost, but even like Polymarket has the chance of a US recession in 2025 at a 62% chance. If there's a recession, like people could say, you know what, $20 a month GPT or chat GPT plan, like maybe I downgrade.

There could just be like some consumer hesitancy to add a new subscription as people tighten their belts. I think that's 100% where we're headed on all this. Like I think that at a minimum, some of these things are self-fulfilling in some ways, where if we have the perception of a slowdown, then people are going to stop spending, which will inherently lead to a slowdown. And so it starts to become a little bit self-fulfilling in that regard.

And so I've seen stuff, I mean, I realized Polymarket saying 62%, it sounds like I think Goldman moved their estimates to 45% this morning or their economists did. And I've seen some people saying we're already in the middle of a recession. I mean, just the amount of uncertainty that this has introduced,

I don't know how you do any planning. If you're a business right now and you're thinking through, like, should I, maybe not Apple or someone that has, like, you know, a gobs and gobs of money to go figure this out, but like a mid-size public industrial company or something, if you're thinking through, like, whether or not to start rebuilding in the US, which in some ways is a very noble goal, particularly with regard to security. And so I don't mean to be like entirely anti-tariffs, but if you're thinking through that and you're not sure,

I mean, we've seen some people start to break ranks on tariffs already, be it Elon or Ted Cruz or I mean, Ackman, there's like a bunch of people in the Trump world that's starting to break ranks. And then Congress does theoretically have the power to revoke some elements of the president's tariff power. And so, I mean, there's murmurs of that, not to mention midterms in the next,

whatever it is, 18 months. And so you have all these different things that could throw a wrench into the tariff plan. Not to mention, maybe this is just a means to some other end as a negotiating tactic. And so I don't know if, I think people are going to be stuck in this state of paralysis a little bit of like, what do we actually do right now? And inherently, I think that becomes self-fulfilling in the way that it's going to lead to a recession for us. I hope, again, I hope I'm wrong.

Like, I don't want to be right about any of this stuff. How do you weight posts coming from the handle at Chamath on Max? Because he's clearly one to happily talk his book. But at the same time- Chamath? Yeah, of like talk his book, but at the same time. Come on. Yeah, yeah. That guy, the C-H-A-M-A-T-H.

Come on, the guy, the all in guy. Yeah, yeah, that guy, that guy's big podcaster. But no, so there's two things happening. One, clearly happy to talk his own book. He's probably super long, Laura Piana, among other things, but he also is like, you know, podcasting with the people, some of the biggest sort of like. He's an insider. He's an insider, right?

And so it's one of those things he's coming out, I think it was the last night or this morning, talking about the Mar-a-Lago Accords. How do you, how do you kind of evaluate, you know, it's a signal, I don you kind of evaluate, it's a signal, I don't know if it's a good signal or an accurate one, but do you put any weight on anything? There's this great feature I've started to use

on Twitter X, and you can actually do it for any account. I forget exactly where you find in the screen, but it mutes these people from talking. And then you don't see what they have to say. And I didn't know it existed. And so I will say, I don't know what made me think of that, but I will say that I think you have to take some of the insights that these folks have because of their access.

You have to take it with probably a brain assault, but also as a potential angle of dissemination of information or at least trial balloons going out there. I saw right before I came on, Kimball Musk tweeted something about how terrible tariffs are. And maybe he just woke up today and thought that or maybe, you know, his brother who he sits on the board of, and I think a lot of his net worth can be attributed to maybe encouraged

him to go say that. And so I think to be dismissive of any of these individuals, I think it's probably not particularly smart to do. But if I'm making a joke, I'll say it out loud to John first. Be like, what do you think? And if John thinks it's funny, I'll post it. If he says, I don't know. Which is the exact same thing as the Kimball Elon thing.

The Elon thing is. But I think all of that is to say, I'm not sure there's like, I think we've sort of seen that what Besant says versus what Navarro says versus what Elon says, like there's not any consistency that at a high level is coming out from those different people. All the messages are slightly different. And so I would find all this stuff pretty intriguing if not necessarily factually accurate. And so I feel like all these things are kind of informing the little inputs into my decision. But I do think it's interesting to see people like Dan Loeb, Bill Ackman break rank and start to come out and really be negative against these tariffs.

I mean, we can joke and I have certainly on Twitter about him and changing his views and all this stuff, but like at least he's owning some of the decisions that he now finds to be wrong. I find the most frustrating thing is a lot of people just morph their view into whatever fits into the, I mean Donald Trump specifically, but this is true of people on the left as well, whatever they say is their talking point, they just follow it in suit. And so I give

Acme credit for breaking rank and maybe we'll end up seeing Chamath or some of those other guys do the same. When's the last time? The Elon thing's interesting because you'd think he'd be a big beneficiary of tariffs because of the cars and the exposure for Tesla. But my question is, I feel like tech VCs shifted so into the Trump camp, I'm not even seeing the big dissenting opinions on tariffs are coming from like Tyler Cowen and the economists. And I'm not seeing that from like big GPs.

And it's like, have they just completely over rotated or do you think that they're just not even thinking about it or not exposed to it? Like what's driving the lack of- Well, one thing to note, Tesla sold almost three quarters of a million, they sold just under 700,000 cars in China last year. Sure, sure.

It's a global company. Very bad for Tesla. And actually sourced from China very heavily for certain things. Yeah, and I think they have factories there as well. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They have a gigafactory in Shenzhen. You know, there's this interesting thing

that's played out where I think kind of post the election, it was so uncool to have voted for Kamala Harris to the point that I was at parties kind of being accosted, like people asking who I voted for and all these things. And I was like, and I just found it an unusual swing of the pendulum in that way. And I give the Democrats, there's a lot of blame that Democrats should should have on that. The one that I there's obviously all the DEI and whatever all that stuff. But I do think that if you look, Democrats have been very anti growth and and anti-capitalism in a meaningful way. And I think it was just kind of embarrassing in some ways to be extolling their virtues or pushing back too much over the course of the last couple months, because it was such a resounding election defeat. And there was such a, even the people that I think within the,

at least the parties I know that within technology that voted for Kamala Harris, like they all seemingly held, not all, but a lot of them seemingly held their nose and did it and was like, hey, this is the lesser of the two things. And so now under the tariffs, I feel like people are like warming up their thumbs a little bit, like sort of forgetting what it's like to like push back to too much on

on this. And so I found myself wading in the waters of all of this far more than I expected. What I find most interesting though, at like a high level is just how populist a lot of the rhetoric within the Republican Party, or at least Donald Trump, has become. And I mean, you sort of go back and you look at Milton Friedman or Ronald Reagan or like some of these OG conservative icons and what they had to say about tariffs are just so different than what we're hearing from our president today. And so I guess the question in this is like, does this present ultimately,

if this is going to be the move that the Republican Party makes from a populist standpoint, does this present an opportunity for the Democrats to be a little bit more pro-growth and like, let's grow the pie? And I think it was pretty well timed that Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson wrote that book Abundance, right? Because there was no such thing really over the last decade as a pro-growth Democrat, I think. And that would be an interesting lane for the party to try to rally behind. I just don't know.

Ultimately, these things seem to follow some charismatic politician in some ways. And so I don't know who that person is. Shapiro seems like someone that could be interesting in that regard. You know, maybe if we tweet enough, we can get Weinberg to run for some political office. He can take the pro-growth democratic thing. Maybe that's Aaron Levy's next, next, you know, gambit he's going to go down is politics. But it feels like that's a mantle that that people should really take.

I don't think his hair can get any grayer. I agree, honestly. And it's still full. That's the thing. I don't know if that's just any grayer. I agree, honestly. And it's still full. That's the thing. I don't know if that's just genetics or him or who we credit that fullness of hair. It's definitely gray. But, man, it's like a robust set of hair. It almost feels like he's set up to be presidential in that. You take a company public at like, what, 29?

Yeah, which will do it to you. Could you see it, though? I mean, he honestly looks like a West Wing, you know, like a Josh Lyman kind of running into Martin Sheen, president Bartlett's office on the West wing with that gray hair. I could see it. Yeah. What did you think about Toby's leaked memo

from this morning where he very eloquently lays out how he dances and plays. Like to be honest, like one, it's well-timed, in my point of view, and that you can basically say to your team, we're freezing hiring, without saying we're freezing hiring, because now it's like, hey, if you wanna hire, if you wanna actually make an offer.

Hire an agent. Hire an agent, yeah, yeah. No, but I'm curious, you know, obviously if it was leaking, wouldn't have been that damaging, but it's cool that he put it out there. I'm curious what you know, obviously if it was leaking, wouldn't have been that damaging, but it's cool that he put it out there. I'm curious what your immediate thought was. Yeah, it's something we've been thinking more and more about.

And I've seen my own workflow switch so much more to being AI native in like what I'm doing on a daily basis. I'd be curious your guys' perspective. I'm like prepping for this show. It's just so much easier to get information at your fingertips and get access to, I feel like I learned more this weekend or the last week, going really deep into the history of tariffs

and all this stuff. It would have taken me in the past, I don't know, three weeks to do what I did over the course of the last four days, five days. So I get the perspective of, hey, we have to make our company AI native in some ways. I imagine there's a little bit of marketing behind it, behind every good leaked internal memo. There does seem to be an element of both signaling to the broader market as well as potential new candidates

that are coming on board. Like this is the new normal. This is the way we're gonna do things. But I haven't heard anyone else do it. I don't know, you guys probably might know better. Well, the Klarna, I mean, the Klarna took another approach. It wasn't a memo. He just came out.

We're not hiring anyone. And it was like almost overly aggressive and everyone was like, we't really buy it man. Like it's too much and then Jeremy Jeremy diamond Jamie diamond had that leaked like voice call. Yes, where he was like you gotta work really hard And it was like, okay. This is just a billboard advertisement for your company and your culture, which is cool But I think the lesson is like ever we all need to be leaking more memos. I think that's right. Your your red point analysis, you shouldn't you shouldn't try and post that. You should be like, it's like we'll leak it.

That's what I don't know if you guys ever like newcomer Eric Newcomer. Yeah, yeah. It's like a bunch of interesting like, oh, here's Founders Fund returns. Yeah, like how did you wear out? Who would have given you these amazing returns? If you have good news, you got to leave that stuff. Yeah, the other one I thought was really masterful PR was was Asif and Wiz last year. What was interesting in that Wiz announcement, when they when they announced that they were going their own and not going to be bought Google, was like everything that they said

was then reported in the media because of the leaked memo. And so they got to really control the narrative of how things went down with Google. So I actually, the dark arts of PR, I think, is a pretty clever thing for companies to try to master, both as for morale and hiring and just public perception. The other one I thought was funny, I'm not just giving credit to Wiz,

but I don't know if you guys remember this, SentinelOne had some company that was agitating to buy them or something, and SentinelOne is like a $6 billion public company. I think Wiz announced that they were interested in exploring the acquisition of Sentinel One. The Sentinel One CEO is like, fuck off. Like, you're not starting us. What are you talking about? But like, you know, it gets reported in that way.

I think Toby's really smart in that regard. And I do think we'll see this divergence of fluency of people's ability to use AI, I still get asked questions from people internally or externally from buddies that are like, so quickly answered by a prompt into a model. And so I wonder when that behavior shifts gonna happen for people in mass. But I think signaling that that's an requisite thing is smart from an employee standpoint.

Speaking of models, Did you read AI? 2027 and do you think we're just sort of picking up pennies in front of a steamroller? right now with all the tariff stuff because if if AI 2027 either path we go on the Forecast basically means the economy will change by like 100,000% or something like that. It certainly seems, I mean, man, I really hope, I really hope we get the ubiquitous sort of growth in all of this. Remind me, I just saw it tweeted about,

what was the net of AI 2027? What was the takeaway? Superintelligence by 2027, so extreme compounding growth driven by AI models that can do their own AI research starting at the end of this year. No hiccup in any of the scaling laws, a quick path to 10 terawatt data centers.

It evolves basically by 2027, 2028, OpenAI, buying every automotive manufacturer and turning them into self-replicating robot production facilities. I like that. Will we still be able to, will we still have our jobs like doing the screws

into the iPhones? Like power and record? That will be in America. Yeah. That's the magic. So we can do that. Our jobs might be gone. Yeah will be in America. Yeah. That's the magic. So we can do that. Our jobs might be gone. Yeah, that sounds good.

I will say this website's super slick. It is, it's a really cool website. You scroll down and it updates the probabilities and takes you through all the time. I mean, it's a beautiful feature. People are calling it science fiction fan fiction, but I like it, it's entertaining. No, it's a very cool exercise to go through.

To me, sort of the great irony of this whole situation is like right now, nobody can talk about anything other than the tariffs and fixating on like, what's the next post on Truth Social, bull market for Truth Social usage. But then it's possible. The big winner in tariffs right now is Pete Hegseth, man. I We were all we were talking about last week signal this signal that is he in is the out and now that is a long

Since forgotten thing so I if there's anyone that I think deserves credit or celebrating this I think it's him last one For me underrated voice right now online. Anybody breaking through that you think is good signal? You know who I, I mean, I've sort of appreciated this mix of politics, economy, and all of that stuff. So I've really, and Modest Proposal, I think has always done a good job. I don't know if you guys follow Buco Capital. I always find him

super entertaining and some of the stuff he's tweeting out. So those are probably the two biggest ones that I've been enjoying of late. But I definitely added a lot of econ people to my rotation over the course of the last 10 days or something. So, yeah, good time to be an economist, bull market and economist. I've always I've always honestly thought that you would be the kind of guy to have like a really big alt account that we all like followed and nobody knew. The main thing is I feel like I tweet too much of my unhinged stuff, at least I did for a while for my account. So well, he doesn't know he does have an alt, but it's just about basketball. Yeah, right. I tweet too much of my unhinged stuff, at least I did for a while for my normal account. So.

Well, he does have an alt. He does have an alt, but it's just about basketball. Yeah, that's right. College football too, I'll sneak in there. Oh yeah. I will say, I was accused of at different points in time being, I don't know, VCs congratulating themselves and all these different things.

And I'm like, I just, I don't know. It feels, that was, I tweeted the unhinged things from my own account. So. Yeah, for sure't know, it feels, that was, I just need to unhinge things from my own account. So. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, for sure. Well, looking forward to your, you sort of moderating this debate tomorrow.

If I hang on, will Keith show, is Keith the next guest? Yeah, he's the next guest. Yeah, hang out. Yeah, you can hop on. Hang out. Should we give a preview? Listen, I mean, I teased out from him all of his stated goals of what he was thinking

was going to come from all of this stuff. So I hope you guys, you know, pin them down on all that stuff. I need to make sure I have all my prep work done. He's sort of open sourcing the manual to debate him by tweeting all his takes. So I mean, the debate that was going on the timeline was just that he's, he's somehow found a way to make no matter what happens proof that it's working Which is kind of genius. I like that a lot I don't know if I I probably can I share on this screen? Yeah, you can share air Hang on just whatever you share is live. So don't share a password. Yeah, I know. I know I know I need to I need to make sure Oh, oh wow. It's the returns from logan's portfolio. They're fantastic

Oh, what a what a 60% IRR for a decade. All these models reaching out to me. It's like, no, I'm married guys. Take it easy. Let's see. I can't find it, but it was, it was, gosh, where is this? Give me one second here. I'll wait while, while Keith comes on.

But it was essentially a meme of like the, oh, here it is. Let's see. How do I share this? Hey Keith? Great, how are you guys? You're you're on with Logan Bartlett to Can you see it cool prepping for the next for the next for the next debate tomorrow, right? Is my my thing coming up or no, is this prime time and that's the backup? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, this is prime time All right. I'll let you go. Keith, keep open sourcing all the points of your debate.

I wanna hear all the talking points. Just get them out there in the wild for us. One day I'll turn you into a DJT voter. Yeah, maybe tomorrow. You're gonna convert him from a member of the Panikin party, which Trump says is a new party based on weak and stupid people. That's me. I actually am getting my card and badge tomorrow. It's coming through. So yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. We're in the economic department, but you'll lose the dunks for sure. There's no chance. Well, FedEx won a Paul Graham in the UK too.

Okay. Yeah, you can probably buy in bulk at this point, Keith just send them around so alright. See you guys great. See you again Yeah, Keith. How you doing great? Yeah, so you're happy about all this Well, I mean obviously there's you know volatility, you know can be terrifying for everybody Yeah, um, but I think directionally the administration has the right strategy Which is we need to address the absurd cost of our debt. We need to rebuild American manufacturing and there are certain strategic industries. We absolutely need to have control of our destiny, which we learned during COVID. We're massively exposed to strategic weaknesses.

We couldn't manufacture even prescription drugs during the COVID fiasco. And then on top of that, we need to unlock this golden age of prosperity, which does require rethinking globalism, does require rethinking our tax and over tax and overregulated state. And so I think some people are isolating tariffs as an individual lever in a grand equation,

and there's a lot of moving pieces. The country does need to deregulate. Biden alone, just in the Biden administration, we added $1.4 trillion of regulatory costs. Trump will get rid of all of that and go back and reverse prior administrative buildup of regulatory burdens. That's great.

Energy costs soared under Biden. We needed to drill baby drill. We need to bring down the cost of energy, which is a major input into goods and services, goods, and most subservices like Uber. And you need to invest in the future of technology, which also lowers the cost of goods. But tariffs are also strategic. The best way to often convince foreign countries and nations to do things we need them to do is through what I call economic statecraft. And tariffs are perfect lever. Let me give you two examples. Canada has been enabled under the Trudeau regime, an incredibly porous border. And the Mexican

cartels took advantage of that and imported fentanyl at mass scale into the United States. And various people in the administration, Biden, the new administration, were complaining about this, but Trudeau administration did literally nothing to seal the border. Think about these, you know, cartoonish Canadian bounties on their little horses. That's basically the entire security protecting the northern border from fentanyl. And the cartels have been killing Americans through the

northern border. So once Trump started threatening tariffs, all of a sudden, even under the current regime, which is not particularly conservative, they started cracking down on the border. So we've already seen improvements in interdictions of fentanyl from Canada. All fentanyl, virtually all fentanyl that's manufactured, the precursors were manufactured in China with the knowledge and consent of the CCP. So, 100,000 Americans are buying completely unnecessarily because the CCP and indirectly Mexico and Canada aren't willing to do anything about it. Trump has told China and will continue to tell China that when you stop allowing the

precursors of Fentanyl to be produced in China, we will relax some tariffs. It's much better if a hundred thousand Americans are alive Even if the stock market goes through a day of turmoil What Historical precedents are you digging into we've seen a lot of people calling up Bretton Woods The gold standard or deep heging What are you looking to to kind of inform? lessons Ben Thompson today was writing about how the Nixon shock was received very well from the

public. The New York Times was raving about it. The market jumped way up. But over time it became very, very, it was a very rough decade in the seventies. What are you looking to, to inform where we go from here? Well, I think first of all, just 2017 to 2020, the first Trump administration was a massive success until COVID was unleashed, arguably, you know, potentially arguably through misfeasance,

malfeasance or negligence in the American people. And the blue states and the blue cities shut down. This was an incredible economy. We had high growth and low inflation, everything we want. And so despite that two-time, despite that three-year trajectory, we also increased tariffs massively strategically. And so, and every economist, by the way, was wrong. There's a list, a laundry list of economists that said tariffs wouldn't work in the first

administration. So they were wrong then, and they're going to be wrong now. So that's the most relevant history, and it's pretty predictable. I do think that Ray Dalio's post, which I retweeted, is interesting, which is this is definitely an intentional strategy to kill globalism and reshape the political order and the global order. Absolutely. And so I think the implications of that will take months, years to play out.

I don't think you can look at the stock, I think it's a fool's idea, sort of a fool's crusade anyway, to look at the hourly or daily trading on the stock market as an indication of the wisdom or folly of a particular policy. Just today alone, we've been up, down, up, down, up. I think it's crazy to evaluate policy from that perspective. So I do think that we will see this administration execute

on challenging the CCP's threat posed to the United States in the democratic order on multiple fronts AI, winning an AI is existential on Fentanyl and on their attempt to expand their influence in Taiwan and other key buy chain moves. I think the United States will be closer to the Monroe Doctrine if you want to go historical where expansion of the United States is a positive expansion of influence, but expansion of landmass. I think the Panama Canal is a very serious agenda item. Greenland is a very serious agenda item for this administration.

And we're going to continue to think that way for the first time since, you know, President Monroe. At the same time, if there is, if the market continues to crash, maybe we even go into a recession for a couple quarters, you could see consumers tightening their belts. You could see investors tightening their belts. What advice are you giving to founders in your portfolio today about how to deal with,

maybe it all works out like you're proposing, but it could be a rough couple quarters. What are you advising folks? Well, it's uncertain. So I think the best way to approach from an entrepreneurial standpoint is uncertainty is you have to have scenario planning, probabilistic scenario planning, like if, if accident, I would do why, however, I don't agree that we will go into a recession.

I don't think we should go into a recession. I don't think we should accept that as, um, a reasonable approach. I think you need to cut interest rates, which I think there's going to be some movement on. The evidence is that inflation has been solved by this administration already. You wait for the official government to print the CPI numbers, but there's better and more accurate metrics like call to inflation that show you in real time, and we're down to like 1.28% inflation, so we can clearly lower interest rates safely. As I mentioned, energy prices, oil prices,

continuing to crash, and that's gonna continue to happen as long as we explore alternative energy, but drill and proven reserves. So I think those are major inputs in allowing people to spend money. There is a wealth of fact, and it is important to know, that it's been studied pretty accurately that if people's savings in 401k and various other stock like instruments

go down, they may spend less. And that's not necessarily good. Now I don't think tariffs cause the spending less directly. People talk about tariffs causing inflation. First of all, that's false, like, definitionally false. Inflation is the rate of growth of common prices. Tariffs are, at most, are a one-time price shock. So they can't cause inflation by definition. Second, I don't think anybody can easily model the impact. First of all, some countries are clearly going to bring their tariffs on the US down, maybe not all

170 companies, but some are already rushing to the doors to negotiate better trade deals with the United States than we've had in 10, 20, 30, 40 years. So the net effect of tariffs may not even raise prices at all. But even if it does, consumers are smarter and savvy and they compare and contrast. They substitute goods. So the price of a good from let's say somewhere in Latin America goes up, maybe the domestic equivalent Americans substitute for and that's actually a cheaper product. So you have deflation if anything, not inflation. And then it's not even that obvious because that's true of competitive,

like directly competitive. Let's say you're buying coffee and coffee from Latin America gets tariffed and goes up but you can buy like cheaper but let's say less quality coffee and that's a people substitute et cetera. But maybe some people just decide to buy a Celsius instead. And like so all the people who are alleging that there's these studies absolutely do not know how the American consumer is going to substitute from Latin American expensive coffee to American domestic coffee to Celsius and at what rates. And so that's why nobody really knows the net of fat. But I think if you even if you have a sub-essence estimate that even these very high tariffs on the CCP in China, which are warranted, probably add

something like 70 basis points of costs across all goods from China over five years or something like that. And I don't know exactly how we did the math and I don't have time to rebuild the spreadsheet. But people definitely are overrating the impact that tariffs have because consumers vote with their feet. And that's part of the point is they vote with their feet for products that are manufactured in America that are not subject to tariffs, whether they're American automobiles. So for example, some people are like, well, why would you care? Apparently a Chevrolet,

like one of these standard model Chevrolet SUV things, cost $170,000 in Norway. Well, of course, no Norwegians are buying a Chevrolet Tahoe, it actually is, at $170,000. Whether they call it a vat or call it some other policy or something less, it's clearly discriminating against American goods and causing Chevrolet to manufacture less than a fair and free market across the world would naturally stabilize and where equilibrium would be.

So we need to address this, but the most important thing is we need to achieve foreign policy objectives. Economic tools are better than military tools. Secondly, we definitely need a crackdown on fentanyl. It's unbelievable how many people die compared to like COVID or Vietnam. And the American people have accepted politicians doing almost nothing about it, and the American people, you know, have accepted politicians

doing almost nothing about it, and we need to stop that. And then third is we need to set the platform for a century of prosperity, and eventually this burden of debt, which is exceeding the Defense Department budget and growing at 40 percent a year, is completely unacceptable and was eventually gonna crash us into at least a recession, if not something significantly more severe. So President Trump at least has the courage to address fundamental root causes of economic challenges

that most American presidents have avoided confronting since the 1980s. In Ray Dalio's post, which you mentioned earlier, he has a bunch of different points. One of them, he says, is sort of part of this whole conversation, which is amazing changes in technology such as AI will be highly impactful to all aspects of life, including the money, debt, economic order, the political order, and the international order.

There was also a post from a friend of ours, Will Minitis, the other day, where he said, "'Worth figuring out what happens if LLMs stagnate "'at one to two acts what we have today. "'Smart enough to slowly displace "'all low-skilled digital work and things like call centers. "'No loss for lawyers, doctors, bankers. This is very good for the U.S. and very bad for elsewhere. I'm curious how you

think about all of this drama around tariffs with the backdrop, this looming AI steamroller coming to transform the economy in many ways. Well, it is going to transform the economy, many ways. Well, it is gonna transform the economy, but historically speaking, technology has unlocked new opportunities rather than completely suppressed the ability of humans to thrive. So for example, when I was growing up as a lawyer,

actually, I had a secretary, literally had a secretary. And the idea that an individual associate would have a secretary today makes no sense. But obviously, once Microsoft innovated with actually Microsoft Word for lawyers, actually that's what it was called, it became less needs for secretaries. My secretary was highly compensated at a law firm in New York City, in Washington D.C., $100,000 plus jobs. This whole workforce has migrated into other higher productive things

to do. And so it would be inconceivable for me to wake up and literally expect to have a secretary. So I think that is the history of technology. I think AI will actually displace lawyers, accountants, investment bankers more rapidly than the middle, and certainly faster than manufacturing. I mean, obviously it's a hyped area of venture now, it's robotic innovation, AI meets robots with the software, hardware, the intersection of the two. But if you've ever been in a light industrial warehouse, I think that's yours out where it's replacing lawyers, you know, can be done much faster

and much better, cheaper, less annoying. Replacing doctors, you know, Vinod Kusla, you know, who runs Kusla Ventures wrote a paper I believe in 2011 or 2012 about how AI was going to replace doctors. And you know, I think that is much more realistic in the short term. And then it will give people access, lower cost, which will bring healthcare costs, it's roughly 22% of the GDP or something like that now. So if you bring down the cost of healthcare, that also affects whether we have inflation, the disposable income that a consumer has.

Obamacare has been a massive disaster. The costs are up 5X on the average healthcare plan than before Obama. The American people just don't have money to spend on disposable income, on disposable discretionary purchases. So even if tariffs raise things by 1%, if you bring down the cost of healthcare, the cost of energy, allow affordable doctors, there's so many offsets that are much, much better and much more fundamental and durable than worrying about a one-time tariff.

Personally, I would go with a flat tariff of roughly 10% and then extremely high tariffs on China. I think Druckenmiller is more right than wrong. But I trust the Treasury Secretary to calibrate this correctly. How do you think about entrepreneurs coming to pitch you today that that want to, you know, be a part of the sort of reshoring, on-shoring manufacturing? There's fortunately a bunch of companies that have gotten started in the last few

years that were focused on manufacturing. But I'm curious, you know, what the playbook sort of you're giving them, how you think about the space and how you think of manufacturing broadly as a venture investable category, if it is at all. Yeah, it's a great question because venture is probably like 4% of the capital that funds sort of startups. And it's not appropriate for many, many, many

great or good or great businesses. Venture capital is designed for high risk, high reward, explosive opportunities and those are rare. Manufacturing usually does not meet that standard. It's really hard to scale manufacturing like 1000X year to year. And so I do think we need to look at alternative sources of capital for innovation and manufacturing. And there will be some where venture is appropriate, but just like there's only some financial services

innovation where venture is appropriate, there's only some transportation opportunities, there's only some in health actually, like what fraction of healthcare, you know, venture dollars going to healthcare is a fairly small fraction. And so I don't think venture is the panacea. I also think to go back one question a bit is, look, when

I invest in seed rounds and series A rounds predominantly, that's my sweet spot. I'm taking an 8 to 12, maybe 15 year view to what tariffs do today to not be affecting the people pitching me, the people that my evaluation, my criteria for something that's eight to ten years in the future, completely like ridiculous. That said, anytime there's massive sort of turmoil or flux in a system, it's a really great time for an entrepreneur. So I have a macro thesis that the more flux there is in any market or system, it's a really great time. Because inertia is not your friend. Let's take a step back.

As entrepreneurs, inertia is not your friend as a founder. You have to invert inertia and create momentum in a physics sense. And so when the world is kind of moving around, it's the best time to start a company. So I think now is a wonderful opportunity for everybody who's stuck at some large company, not being challenged, you know, et cetera, to look at starting new companies and be innovative because the world is in

flux in all the dimensions that Dalio outlines so well. Can you talk a little bit about deregulation? You said you're optimistic there, uh, on the White House's website. They're kind of claiming that they're not going to create new agencies and there's the one in 10 out regulatory budget, but we haven't heard very many concrete details of what that could look like. What are you optimistic about on the deregulation side? What's the top? I think that standard of, you know, for every new one,

you have to eliminate 10 sounds great. Kind of reset equilibrium. We've been overregulated. I think it's, it's, you know, cabinet secretary agency specific. And you know, only recently have we seen the staffing of these agencies, you know, get confirmed by the Senate. You have to remember the administration starts on January 20th, the cabinet gets confirmed typically pretty quickly, call it a couple weeks, but then the deputies, the undersecretaries, these are the people that are the political appointees that drive the administration's

agenda. Most of the departments do not have even half of their political appointees confirmed by the U.S. Senate. So you're asking the secretary, let's imagine like the secretary of state who's got to work on the Panama Canal, help negotiate various economic things, solve wars globally, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and doesn't have his full staff. Or the left is assaulting the administration every day in all these district courts, in this kind of absurd district court litigation.

Well, it's really unfair to the attorney general when she doesn't have her team confirmed. Last I looked, and hopefully this has changed or will change immediately, the Solicitor General of the United States, the principal appellate lawyer who's supposed to quarterback all of this strategy, has not been confirmed by the Senate. So people are taking advantage of vacuums in the presidential staffing.

And I think this is an artifact of history when the world moves more slowly, maybe new presidents acted more cautiously, perhaps, but slowly. And so there was more time for an administration against staff. But with an agenda where Trump's running a sort running a no-huddle playbook, he's like, boom, boom, boom, boom, next. That's the nicest way to describe it ever. Yeah, and it's intentional. Hey, there's a whole lot of problems, a lot of things to fix. He's had four years to contemplate what to do. But secondly, just like the no-huddle offensive these defenses, you know, kind of befuddled,

this is intentionally to keep the Democrats on the left, you know, not able to keep up. And that's what's happened. Legacy media can't keep up. Like, what's the latest thing to complain about? Oops, the news changed yesterday. Sorry. Okay, we're on to our next EO. But in any event, you need a more moderate confirmation process, I suspect, to allow

an administration to take office with their core team that can execute. Otherwise you're going to see mistakes made, things broken. It's just not reasonable to ask an administration to fix everything with one-tenth their team or one-third their team. And so we have to really revisit this. And this should be bipartisan because there will be a Democrat president. And they're gonna want to appoint,

he or she's gonna want to appoint his or her nominees. And the Senate's gonna have to act with dispatch to allow that president to act. And if anything, the velocity in the world with a free form of information, things like that, is gonna accelerate not decelerate. Yeah. One last question for me and then I'll hand it over to John.

Hopefully this one's quick. Do you think we should be taking more decisive action against Unitree, Robotics, DJI, groups like that, in terms of just blanket bans? Tariffs are a good start, but potentially not significant enough. Yeah, so absolutely. I mean, we talked about this before,

but TikTok is a threat. I think DJI is even worse, probably. And then advanced robots manufacturer in China are probably an order of magnitude more threat. And these things can run 17 miles an hour. They have military applications. There's a tweet I posted yesterday that retweeted some of the spotter

that's already embedded in the Chinese robot. For context, they discovered a remote access backdoor in the robot dog from Unitree. Yeah, so I think we can take this very seriously. I hope the administration and the legislative branch out on this very quickly. I think there is a lot of attention being paid to this sure I think there'll be some traction here, but it absolutely we need to be very you take this stuff very seriously Yeah, I want to let you go, but I want to give you a chance to respond to this Derek Thompson post

He was asking how do you know if your plan to shock the system is failing? One of the confusing aspects of the tariff defense is the idea that every event justifies the strategy, stock market goes down, oh we're just taking our medicine, stock market goes up, it's so obvious it's working. Have you had a chance to think more about his critique? As I said, it's a very good question because I think anytime you have a new strategy, whether you're in a startup or in politics, you want to have directional feedback. Is your nose in the plane going up or down and stuff like that?

That's your first grab. I think on the fentanyl stuff, it's pretty easy. We need less fentanyl deaths, which is less fentanyl being important to the United States, blah, blah, blah. On the economic front, I think definitely the various yields on our debt are pretty critical. It does seem like that Vess is managing towards that. I think we need the inflation, we need inflation to stay lower, be slightly lower so that interest rates can come down, which accelerates growth and makes homes more affordable, which is absolutely critical. So I think those

are easy relatively short-term metrics to look at. Whether this whole reinventing the global order is working or not is going to take time for your point about Ben Thompson's post about Nixon. That is not going to be measurable overnight and maybe not even this year. I think we'll have visibility into it by the midterms. With Thatcher and Reagan, the closest metaphors I think about is both Thatcher and Reagan inherited economic basket cases and geopolitical basket cases in many ways. And it took both of them a year or two of pain, but then everything was up and to the right.

And you know, a morning in America, the famous Reagan re-election, Thatcher went through a very tough one or two years when, you she mentioned this lady's not returning is because she was actually cutting some spending allowing for the you know getting out of stagflation Rebuilding in the military in the UK etc, but I think two years is a pretty realistic time horizon That's great. Well. We'll let you go. We know you got to get out of here, but thanks I'm by always. Always a pleasure. Great time. Always a pleasure.

Thanks. We'll talk to you soon. Cheers. And our next guest is coming in in two minutes, but we got to talk about Numeral. Sales tax on autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance.

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Go check them out. Benchmark Series A. E-commerce. I mean, now is the time. You're going to have to be figuring out tariffs You're gonna you don't want to be Well head over to numeral HQ Do it and I also want to review quickly. How'd you sleep last night? Because we are sponsored by eight sleep, baby

eight sleep go to eight sleep comm I had a It felt rough. Yep. Still got an 88. White Lotus threw me off a little bit. I got to bed a little bit later. I got an 86. I only slept for six hours and 34.

It was a long episode. It was, it was not even an episode. I planned my sleep around it being like 50, 60 minutes. Rugged by Mike White. Yeah, halfway through I pause it and it's like, or I thought we were halfway through and it was like 54 minutes left. I was like, great. I pause it and it's like, or I thought we were halfway through and it was like 54 minutes left. I was like, great.

I was rushing to be like, I need to start this at 8.30 or else I can't get to bed by 10. You know what? I had no difficulty waking up this morning. Yeah. In part because of autopilot. Yeah. I was adjusting the temperature throughout the night.

Yeah. In part because you know, It's also been hot. We also, the other information, Jordy was repping 225 today, baby. We leaked here. We're gonna leak it. Don't put out press release.

Don't share that. Don't share that. It was, it's Monday. It's great. It's just a national chest day. Push day. And we also got a little sun yesterday. We did.

We were hanging out with Justin Mares. And I honestly was. We had an in-person guest for our off pod pod. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, you get us together. It's we got Bryce in the waiting room. Bryce, how you doing? Wow. Look at this background. Brethren. I'm doing great. How are you all? We're great. Um, I mean things are good. Was Jordan's stunting on his reps? How many, did we talk about how many reps he did or was it just,

we haven't leaked that. We haven't leaked that. I'm too sleepy. Yeah, you just want to get the story going in the press. Hey, the company's for sale, probably in the billions. We're not going to tell you exactly how many billions. No, exactly. X is a flutter about these reps. They're pining to know.

Yeah. We know you respect the Church of Iron. We've seen many photos, so welcome to the show. You fit right in. Wait, you're traveling now? Is that right? I am, yeah, I'm on the road right now. In Oakland, California right now.

About to head over the Oakland Bay Bridge. Very cool. Wow. Take you to the belly of the beast. The belly of the beast. What brings you to San Francisco? Meeting founders? Meeting founders? Meeting founders, we're recording some stuff and I'm trying to get here more consistently.

I live in Utah and it's just a quick trip. There's enough going on here that I've recently decided it's going to be kind of a weekly adventure out here in San Francisco. So I'm going to try to keep that pace up for a bit. Wait, weekly? Weekly? I did that for the first five years of starting OATV back in 2005. I commuted here once a week for five years.

I think if you're going to San Francisco, you shouldn't go weekly, you should go strongly. But I agree with the general idea. That's a great point. That's a great point. But when you're in business, you wanna be there strongly, not weekly. Wait, so, so weekly, I'm just, I'm just curious, uh, not to get too into your personal life,

but you just get an apartment and like, because you're there so much or you hotel guy or a wander guy. Hotel guy. Hotel guy. I can't, can't, can't do Airbnb's can't do, uh, can't, you know, you got to try wanderander.com, code TBPN. That was an incredible setup. Yeah, I mean, incredible setup. I think it'll change it too. We'll have you back on. And you'll tell us about your.

We don't do your Airbnbs either. Yeah, we do. But Wander, yeah. No, that's cool. I'm going to have to look into this. What was the code again? TBPN. Easy to remember.

Yeah, you can find your happy place. You can book up Wander with inspiring views, hotel-grade amenities, dreamy beds, top-tier cleaning, and 24-7 concierge service. Basically, Bryce, it's a vacation home, but better. So yeah, check it out. Wander.com. Would it be possible to get one with an eight sleep in?

Oh, absolutely. We can figure it out. We are people. We'll talk to your people. We'll figure it out. Anyway, we wanted to have about it feels like Indy is an you know, traditional venture firm but built for good times and bad times and scary times and fearful times. And right now there's been there's been a lot

of fear in the market. You came out and you'd be greedy. Well, there's yeah, it's possible to be greedy, but pragmatic. Yeah, I think that that what that's what we actually wanted to talk that you came out and had a- Are you being greedy? While others are fearful? Yeah, it's possible to be greedy but pragmatic. Yeah. I think that what- That's what we actually wanted to talk about. What? Advice for entrepreneurs, founders

in the midst of market turmoil. Maybe it doesn't affect their business today but they're seeing bad news and that's gonna put, their customers are gonna be worried, their employees are gonna be worried, their potential investors are gonna be worried. What advice are you to be worried, their potential investors are going to be worried. What advice are you giving to founders these days? Well, like Jordy touched on, part of our whole thesis is traditional venture, same type of

upside but a different approach to building your business. The approach most people take today, they go and raise their seed round, their pre-seed round or whatever it is. And then the objective of that round is to get to the next and the next and the next. And so you're oftentimes kind of anchoring on what that next fundable milestone might be, and he takes a bit of a different approach. So our companies are kind of the default we set is like, let's have that be the last round you need to raise.

And then you can kind of be a lot more offensive as you build your company. So you don't necessarily need anybody else's permission to exist. So with that being the case, I think there's kind of two, you know, I tweeted this out last night. We talked about it a little bit, you know, there's kind of a few approaches to take

with an indie company specifically. You're, you know, you have, in many cases you have infinite runway. And so you get to operate and you can message in a very different way. So part of what I said is hunker down, you know, conserve cash. I don't think this environment goes away anytime soon. And so I think people need to be preparing for, you know, to be long-term focused. And what that often means is, you know, getting the house in order.

Because right now we've been playing the lottery and it's time to play, you know, it's time to play chess. I mean, that's, to me, that's a really important distinction. So much of how we've conditioned entrepreneurs is to kind of play for these lottery tickets. So it's all about fundraisers, get it in the next round. We're trying to kind of work with people to play chess through this because I think the game is fundamentally changed. I've been in venture for a long time now.

I came in in 2001, so immediately after the dot com crash. So I've kind of lived through the dot com. I've lived through the financial crisis. I've lived through the financial crisis. We've lived through ZERP. This one, you know, echoes the same, but there's some very fundamentally different dynamics going on here that are going to influence the amount of capital that's available to entrepreneurs over the next few funding cycles. In some ways, we were talking about this earlier with Logan Bartlett, but one thing I've been maybe paying attention to is the categories that felt overheated,

AI, defense tech, robotics, in many ways, the sort of tariffs would just encourage more investment. And I imagine we had Chris powers on last week, and he's been, you know, banging the reshoring drum. But yeah, I guess like, do you do you think that? Do you think that over the next like couple months, we'll see like a pretty big slowdown in investment activity, or just like refocusing? Or are you just less interested in like predicting investment

volume and more so just in any whatever the future holds just like run a tight ship? I you know, I think I think I'm always a fan of running a tight ship. You know, I feel a bit like you know, it's Groundhog's day today. You know, I'm waiting for Sequoia to drop their memo that would be the third time. And it does feel like we learned the lesson and then we kind of go right back to the same behavior that got us in the problem in the first place, not kind of globally, but I think specifically to the startup ecosystem specifically. We came through Zerp, everybody wanted to get really tight and then the money started flowing again, and basically people shifted to the current narrative, whether that is defense tech or AI or one of these things.

I think what fundamentally changed this time is, you saw last week, Klarna quietly pulled their IPO on Friday. This, what you would call the denominator effect in venture, that name gets thrown around a bit. So I'm happy to explain it if someone hasn't already hit it today. But I think that denominator effect is probably more pronounced than I've ever seen it in my venture career.

And that's going to cause the longer term liquidity issues you're talking about denominator Jordy in terms of kind of how, what the funding cycles look like over the next call it year or two. Yeah. Yeah. Can you unpack the denominator effect a little bit more? I mean, the denominator effect is, is basically that, um, traditional institutional LPs have allocated a tremendous amount of money to the venture and private equity asset class. So the top line number isn't the, you know, the

returns that are coming back from those investments don't come anywhere near to the size of allocations they've already made. So another way to frame that is LPs are out way over their skis on venture and private equity. And there's no there's no relief coming in terms of returns. So Clarnapel is their IPO, you know, you've got this kind of regulatory uncertainty, there were a bunch of people cashing Figma checks

a few years ago, that never materialized. And so, you've got this real issue now that I think is really acute. And I think it's already even starting to show up. Like, if you look at that $40 billion OpenAI deal that Masa just did, right? How much of that is actual cash? How much of did, right? How much of that is actual cash? How much of that is credits?

How much of that is debt that he's gonna have to go out to find and service? Like the financial market, the financial picture in startups, I think is a lot more murky than I've ever seen it before. And so counting on either support from your existing investors or a next round materializing over the next 18 months

if you aren't just like absolutely crushing it and putting up insane numbers like I'm sure most of your audience does. But in that case, unless you're just such an obvious pick, the sidelines are gonna be filled with people cheering for you. Can you talk a little bit about that? I was honestly seeing that the tariffs, the trade war,

and if rates come down, that kind of saving masa in the sense that pulling together $40 billion by Q1 of next year, which I think is the target, a lot of it is coming from debt. You can obviously secure it against ARM and whatever else he's doing. But still, it's a lot easier if rates drop, there's a trade war happening and it's like,

where do you put your money if you wanna try to generate any type of return that's not, but who knows? What were you gonna say? I was gonna ask for a little deep dive on some of the buzzwords in the founder world, specifically the difference between boot scaling and Indie. You had a post about this, but I liked a UNO corn. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I want to know more about these. Yeah, yeah, there's a lot of phrases out there. And I think that, you know, obviously there's a little bit of hype around these. Oh, what does founder mode really mean or whatever, but they are useful tools and I'm a big fan of pointages. I totally agree. The memetics of it are great.

Yeah. I would say, you touched on a few, I mean, Jory jokingly kind of amplified one from this morning. Somebody who sent me an article they were writing that included Indy and they called companies who raise one round of funding with the intent that they're gonna get profitable in scale from there

as an UNO corn. So yeah, only one brand. So people are getting very creative. Yeah, Zapier is a good example of the UNO corn, right? Zapier is a great example of that. Calendly, until they did their growth round, was a great example of that. I think this is a small but growing cohort of companies

that are kind of working towards that as an objective, not necessarily to kind of prove a point more to kind of control their own destiny and to not be so at the whims of these financial markets that are whipping so intensely. And also, you know, kind of putting their customers before their investors' needs. I think this is kind of a growing, what we see is really growing trend in terms of there's kind of this massive wave of returning founders who had built through financial crisis

or built through ZERP, who've kind of lived through this kind of treadmill of an experience as an entrepreneur who are looking for a different way to do it. And we hope we can be their partner. But I think you hit on a few of those other terms, right? Of boot scaling. You know, the idea with that one is bootstrap for a little bit and then raise money to scale later on. So kind of merging those two ideas. The other one I think was seed strapping. Right. So again, that idea of a lot of poor man toes,

strapping, right? So again, that idea of portmanteaus, a lot of portmanteaus. Hey, you know, I know, no judgment, but tech hasn't exactly killed it on the marketing front of stuff. But yeah, the idea was seed scale is like, wait, raise one round and then scale it, you know, as much as you want. On the back of Yeah, I think the tweet you mentioned was like, you know, I basically was framing those two really as like fundraising tactics. You know, that's, that's still fundraising is still core to that idea.

And I think with indie, you know, what we'd like to embody is this idea of independence of this idea of kind of controlling your own destiny, of building things that don't have to ask permission to exist. And I think as we get to, you know, this kind of inflection point in tech, whether it's in the financial markets or in this kind of new and evolving technologies coming, you know, we want lots of possible futures.

We don't just want the one that's blessed by A16Z. We don't just want the one that's blessed by Sequoia. We want futures that could be possible with or without their participation or with their blessing. So I think the world gets a lot less interesting once you start having to ask for permission to exist. Yeah. Are you, are you bullish on the app layer?

I imagine if you want to scale efficiently right now and build an AI, you're not getting into the foundation model business. Well, I mean SSI is technically a UNO corn. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, one round. That's right. That's right.

Yeah, exactly. Most of the foundation model companies actually. They hacked it. Straight to unicorn, one round. Yeah. One round, that's it. They didn't have to raise a ton of rounds to get to a billion dollar valuation.

Yeah, but you're gonna be an SF. You're gonna be an SF later. Like what are you looking for? That feels like the place to build an indie company is in the wrapper layer that's overlooked by VCs. Maybe it's not power law company, but you can build a fantastic business to delivering amazing stuff.

I'm super bullish on it, but I wanna know what you think. No, super bullish on it too. In fact, I think you have Rahul coming on after me and we've had this kind of ongoing multi-month, multi-year conversation going around kind of high status and low status startups. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the kind of high status, have to raise a ton of money

or at least look like you have to, to kind of position like you're really, really innovating. I think there's such a head fake here in the Bay Area specifically, because the social strata is so funny. I think, John, you hit on it. I think that app layer is where so many incredible breakout, indie companies can be built because you're now talking about swapping out any of those models and you get a benefit from all those improvements and just focus on a customer and their needs and the opportunity of a market.

I think it's I think it's a huge opportunity that doesn't feel at all like you have the same kind of network effect lock ins that you had with like Facebook back in the day or when Twitter turned off your API access. I think so many of these models are like hyper competitive in terms of what their performance and output actually looks like. So you can build incredible experiences off of those that can swap pretty easily between them. It's, yeah, I would think of them more like moving

from Google Cloud to AWS, right? That feels like more of the analogy than like, the dependency of Facebook and their platform. Yeah, yeah, that makes 10 cents. You got a last question or we're good? No, this is great. I wanna ask you how you're, offline how you're trading the tariffs

in terms of like, Japanese fashion, and collectibles, which I'm sure you're making. I knew the fit check was coming at some point always a pleasure Bryce have fun have fun over across the bay yeah looking forward to the next one yeah well next up we have Rahul sonwalkar coming on to talk about Julius. He has a bunch of interesting traction on his startup

and just did a podcast with Bryce actually. But we'll talk to him about rappers and high status and low status startups and everything in between as soon as he joins. I'm excited. In the meantime, if you're looking for something to do while we're waiting for our next guest, why don't you just go sign up for Ramp?

Time is money, save both, easy to use corporate cards, bill payment, accounting. This is a ramp, this is the economy that Ramp was built for. It really was. You know, during the major sell-off post-SVB crisis, one of my hacks, actually, this is going to sound like a crazy ramp ad, but one of my hacks was just cancel all the credit cards in the company

and then just reset. And you reissue someone a credit card, and then you have some marketing person who's like, yeah, you know what? I was signed up for three SaaS products that I didn't need, and I'm just going to renew the one that I'm using. And when you do that, now there's like credit card updater that can kind of like get you on anyway.

But for the most part, it's just like resetting and it allows you to cut your burn a little bit. But you don't need to do that with Ramp because you have full visibility in this stuff. And if you're actually looking to save money, this is the best product for it. This is for my personal card needs. The thing I find most frustrating with credit cards

is canceling an Amex card and then seeing the same, I have a VPN that's been charging me for years. I've had, I've called support to try to get them to remove it. We got- Rahul in the studio. Welcome to the show. How you doing? Thanks for having me guys.

Oh, he's got the suit. He likes the suit. Thank you for dressing up. It's so good to see you, man. It's been way too long. I think it's been like almost two years since we got dinner, but thank you so much. Understood the assignment.

Yeah, understood the assignment. Just quick introduction on you, the company, what you're building. Sounds good. I'm Rahul, founder of Julius. We're building an AI data analyst. So if you have data on your hands, whether you work in roles like finance, marketing, operations,

product, you need to analyze that data. AI can help you with that. And Julius is a tool for that. Very cool. Dude, I'm just going to start. You have 2 million users? Oh, yeah. What?

How did that happen? How'd that happen? Yeah, what's the secret? Yeah, a lot of it is word of mouth, and some of it is SEO. So if you look up AI data analysis, Juelos is the first result on the internet on all search engines.

Basically turns out like analysis is a fundamental part of many jobs, and people just kind of assume that it's a solved problem. Turns out most people don't know how to analyze data. And Julis helps them with that. So I think we kind of found that need and used AI to solve that problem for people. That's insane.

Where should we even start with this? I mean, I want to talk about just like the culture of this whole meme of like a rapper. I think it's really, the culture of this whole meme of a rapper. I think it's really, I've said this on the show a bunch, but I think it's kind of like a sigh out from VCs to not, for so long it was like, oh, you're just going to get steamrolled, steamrolled. It's not a viable place to build a monopoly business, a trillion dollar company. That's all you should be focused on.

Go for broke. Now we're seeing, oh, the value actually accrues to the application layer. Oh, maybe there are tools that need to be used. But at the same time, like if somebody said, oh, well, like GPT-7 might be able to do the same thing as Julius, like I might hear them out on that argument. So how do you process it? And can you take me through your thesis on just companies that leverage foundation models instead of train them themselves? Absolutely. By the way, shout out to Sam Altman for that steamroll sound but I think it really stuck a chord with the VCs. But,

look, turns out like, you know, every business out there in the world is solving problems for people, right? And as long as you're building something that solves a problem for people, like that's all that matters. Your users aren't paying for a model. What they're paying for is this tool solving a problem for people, that's all that matters. Your users aren't paying for a model, what they're paying for is this tool

solving a problem for them. If you can do that faster, easier, cheaper, that's all that matters to your users. Now, in terms of models and where does value accrue, I think a lot of early stage founders just get too caught up into that meta level thinking instead of just building something. Like just go build something, talk to people,

see if you can sell to one user, can you sell to 100 users and then worry about these other things. The way it has played out is when we started, people told us you're a rapper. And we would try to like fight that label. And then over time, we just learn to embrace it. Turns out like these models they keep getting better there's multiple model labs, AI labs that are producing really good models and what that means is the

differentiation is actually in the product layer. Can you create a differentiated product and an experience and a whole infrastructure to power that. Now is that how it's going to play out forever? Depends. Turns out your product needs to have enough of a unique value proposition so that it matters outside of the models themselves. For example, we have this infrastructure per code execution. Every 24 hours, by the way,

every 24 hours, Julius writes and executes over two million lines of code. And to serve that to our users, we serve like over a million Jupyter notebooks. Most of our users don't even know what a Jupyter notebook is, right? You're a VP of marketing at a big company, you don't know all that technical details.

All you care about is analyzing your data, and then how do we build that infrastructure to power that is really important. And because we have built that Models getting better actually helps us build a better Smarter product with all the infrared all the UI and the interface that we have built. Yeah, how do you? How do you think about companies in the space doing anything related to AI? Data analysis there's companies There's companies coming out building products for- Some of them have been very vertical,

whereas this is just for investment bankers. Yeah, yeah, stuff like that. But the thing that comes up for me is you clearly have chased hype from users versus hype from VCs, right? Because some of these companies that have come out, they maybe have the same amount of users as they have raised millions of dollars, right? So it's like, you know, other companies in the space, like with like 300 users, maybe at some cool firms or whatever, you know, raising hundreds

of millions of dollars. But I'm curious, even understanding like adoption at how your tool gets adopted at, you know, big companies that might have some crazy procurement process, but then you just have like, they're just going over to Julius and being like, yeah, actually like almost positioning the work that you're doing in Julius as kind of their own. And they're just like pasting in a screenshot to some slide deck or,

yeah, I'm curious how you think about adoption and maybe like have you intentionally avoided hype throughout this entire process? Because clearly, I would say, yeah, yeah, anyways, just take it from there. Absolutely, so I think you're spot on. That's how users discover Julius. They're looking for, they're working a job.

They need help in the moment to analyze data. They're looking something up on the internet and then they come across Julius. And once they start using it, slowly what happens is they're able to first of all bypass all the procurement process and just get the value right away. But then analysis and insights are inherently shareable. They start bringing their teammates, you know, onto Julius, especially if it's a manager or an executive that discovers Julius, they bring the whole team with them. This is an early shout out, but we're about to launch real-time collaboration

in Julius, so you can collaborate on analysis with your teammates in the product. And that's going to be huge for collaboration in Julius. How do you think about- It hasn't really been like a footnote for data analysis. You guys are the AI data analysis company, but how many of your decisions are based on?

Vibes. Vibes. A lot of the, so the, for the channels that are established, for example, SEO, growth, all that, we use Joliot pretty heavily and it's also very data driven. For a lot of the exploration, that's where we bring in a lot of qualitative data, like talking to five users that are super power users, and observing how they're using the product,

what would they need, and how do we create a simple version of what they need so that many more users can actually access it. I have a couple of questions on the actual platform. What models are working the best for you and what languages are most popular? I know that Python's obviously super popular, but then a lot of data analysis use R and Julia even, which is kind of a funny name.

Are you kind of language independent and then you just service the results? And then how much are you swapping models under based on like what's hot on Twitter today or X because you hear about a new model every day but then you know is it actually worth switching? Yeah, great question. So for the models you know it just changes quite often but you know if you're watching this a month from now it might be a different answer but you know usually it's just OpenAI and Anthropic doing a lot of the heavy lifting

on the model front. Both labs have really good models. We do work with other model providers as well in different parts of the stack, but usually it's OpenAI and Anthropic doing just a killer job there. In terms of languages, turns out a lot of users don't know what Python is. For them it's just something that the AI is doing to do the analysis for them. And they like seeing that, but whether they understand it

is like not that common among our users. Python is pretty popular as a default because it's just so versatile, right? It's like the most popular language on GitHub. It's got the biggest ecosystem of modules and all that. So it gives you a lot out of the box. There's also R that we support and we might add support for SQL at some point in time. Sure, makes sense. Do you think the power of giving anyone in the world access to this sort of complex analysis is just like priced in yet like because to me because to me I

think about okay every Shopify store owner can now get the power of like this sort of like world-class CFO for basically nothing right they have their Julius subscription but it's not super consequential that to me doesn't feel priced in because you can enable millions of businesses to run more efficiently and but I'm curious what you think. I think the market hasn't priced this in yet. In fact, the cost of getting an insight from your data has gone down 99% in the last two years.

I think most businesses, whether small or big, haven't really realized that value yet. If you're a big company, you have to realize that every marketer on your team can now go do really deep marketing analysis, channel analysis, within seconds, using a product like Julius. Every finance person on your team can get financial insights within seconds or minutes using Julius.

And these businesses, when we talk to them, most of them haven't priced this in yet. So I think we're gonna see a big reckoning in the next few years. How do you advise your team around hiring and how do you think about hiring when you know how powerful these tools are? And I'm assuming you really push people to say,

do we need to make this hire or, I'm curious what you think. Hiring internally at Julius or just to these companies? No, no, no, just internally at Julius. Like, you know, today the Shopify CEO came out with a leaked memo where he was saying like, hey, we need to be AI native. You need to question every single hiring decision

that you wanna make and compare it to just getting that same service or value from models. But it's different at a high growth startup potentially. I think you guys had Keith on earlier today, right? Yeah. Keith has this memo about barrel and ammo. You don't wanna hire people that are ammo, you don't hire people that are barrels.

I think what he's basically hinting at is you wanna find people that are multipliers. So we look for people that are barrels. I think what he's basically hinting at is you want to find people that are multipliers. So we look for people that are multipliers. You give them resources and they find a way to 10x the value creation out of those resources, and AI is a resource. A really competent barrel employee,

a really competent multiplier employee can take all the power of AI and just make a lot more happen in a shorter amount of time. And I think that's what we care about when we recruited Julius. So whether it's engineering, what is their learning rate? Not how much hard skills they have in a particular area, all of that matters a lot too,

but do they have this massive learning rate where they can just pick up new things really fast and get really good at it and ship things? For marketing, similar things. You may have experience with one particular thing, but the game is changing all the time. You have to learn how your users are talking. You have to learn where your users are.

Can they learn all that quickly is what we care about. And with AI, it's just the people that are multipliers are going to get so much more productive and get so much more done. And that's how our hiring philosophy works today too. I have one last question, we'll let you go. Can you tell me about HBS, what's going on at Harvard Business School?

How did that come together? Tell me kind of the whole story and how Julius is being used at Harvard. Absolutely, so Harvard Business School is teaching analysis with Julius, the entire MBA class. So over a thousand MBA students, all kinds of backgrounds like investment banking, marketing, product managers, tech executives, all of them are learning to do analysis with Julius because they realize companies have data and business leaders need to make decisions, but

analyzing that data is really hard. With Julius, it just becomes very easy. How did it come about? Well, the professor at Harvard Business School who teaches data stuff, Professor Yav Vajanav, he's a Julius user. He's been a Julius user for over a year before he reached out and said, hey guys, we want to teach this whole class with Julius. And we said, let's do it. Like, what we're going to do is punch. And yeah, so they're all learning to use Julius now. That's amazing. Are you gonna scale that to other universities

or just hope that Mamedics take hold and everyone copies HBS? We, I mean, we have a lot of interest from other institutions as well. So like Rice University is teaching a class about financial analysis with Julius. It's just like this new way to do analysis. It's like the new Excel.

That's cool. So yeah. That's awesome. Is that the prize by the way? Is Excel, you wanna just replace it entirely on a long enough time horizon? We won't tell Satya. Absolutely, Excel, Tableau, all of that.

Number one business software in the world, Excel. Yeah. We're gonna follow that. I love it. Last take, AI 2027. Did you read it? Maybe you didn't have time. Are we all getting paperclip by

a year and a half from now? What does Julius have to say about AI timelines? Import import the GDP growth rate and the energy growth rate. And tell me when will we be paper clips? Yeah, well, I think I think it's a really exciting timeline. You know, I think the best I think the way to think one one easy way to look dumb right now is to make super bold predictions on how the future is going to play out. And so I'm a

big believer in like just like I think it's an exciting timeline. And we just have to like ride the tiger, ride the tiger, I'm going to make a bold prediction. 4 million users by end of year for Julie say I I'll take you over on that It's great to have you on We we got some data to analyze And yeah come come back when there's a new product release or funding announcement we'd love to have you back on

I'd love to come back. See you guys. See ya. See ya Love that he wore a suit. Yeah. Understood the assignment. Uh, next up we got flow from Lindy, another AI company. You could call it a rapper, but I've seen him doing really, really cool stuff. Um, I'll let him describe it, but I'm excited to, to chat with him. And he is in the studio now. Welcome to the stream. Hello. Yeah.

How you doing? Uh, uh,. Welcome to the stream. Hello, yeah, thank you. How you doing? Thanks so much for joining. It's been too long, but good to have you here. Could you just give us kind of a basic overview of who you are and the company for everyone? You are on mute, sorry. We lost audio, we're working on it. We heard him for a second.

Okay. Can we talk now? Let's hear it. One, two. Can you hear me? Yep. We got you. All right.

Yeah. Flo here, founder of Lindy. We are building a no-code platform to build AI agents to automate various workflows. So like sales, customer support, operations, you name it, we automate it using AI agents. Yeah. I mean, the question we've been asking everyone is like, when can agent book my flight or something like that? What's your timeline and what milestones are we expected to hit? I guess we're at a big, like big picture level. We're all just waiting for the Studio Ghibli moment of agents. I think we passed the Turing test. Everyone used AI to do their homework.

Everyone had that magical experience of like, wow, I'm talking to a computer. And then it faded out and people use it as a answer engine. And then same thing with Studio Ghibli, where everyone was like, this is incredible. Uh, but now it's like a tool and it's a filter and people use it tastefully and they'll be creative with it and sometimes they won't. But when, when do you think and what milestones do we need to hit to get this kind of breakout societal level meme around agents? A year. A year. I broadly buy the meme that 2025 is the year of agents. It's like a year ish. I think there's been to be pretty serious inflection point.

And you know, I think like when you hear this kind of prediction, like a year is qualitatively different from like five years. Cause like five years is like, ah, you know, a year means you see it, you see it in the pipeline. I can, can I show my screen? Yeah, you can. Yeah.

Should come up. But whatever you share is live. So if you have tabs open with passwords, we're gonna see it. All my passwords, everything is open. We're transparent. Be careful. This is a demo we had. Actually, this is really cool

because it's marrying computer use, which we haven't released yet, with agent swarms, which we released last week. And you can see here, I'm asking an agent, like, hey, help me plan a trip to like Breckenridge in Colorado. To book a flight, find enough can be and get rental car. Okay, it's deploying a swarm and check this out. So it's deploying a swarm of three agents one for each. So it's

like booking a flight, finding enough MBN or reserving a car decomposing the problem. And it works. It just it just works. No interaction, no no intervention needed. It just works works it's doing all of these things at the same time so it's live oh no no no no I mean I'm recording right okay really fast this is the downside today is like it's pretty slow you can see this is like a six minute long recording but in the end you just work so yeah I think like this is going to be in production pretty, pretty rapidly.

Okay. Yeah. Follow up. Like, uh, part of what made the studio Ghibli moment so powerful in my opinion was the fact that, um, it didn't require a lot of creativity on the part of the user. And so everyone has a profile photo. Everyone has a photo of their dog or their family. They could just click upload studio Ghibli style and they get something amazing and and I think that that's almost as Important as the underlying technology to make something go mega mega viral Do you think that we're using the right example with book of flight or do you think are there any other?

Use cases you've seen where it's like Oh, I could see there's a day when every single person in America, everyone who's online is going to use an agent to do this because it'll be fun and viral and they'll want to share the results or it'll make their day better. That's a great question. I am actually quite bearish for consumer agents. I think like consumers are time rich and money poor, right? It's like they don't want to trade time for money like that,

which is why I think like Google Assistant and Alexa, like they've been really failures. I don't think it's because of the technology. I think it's just like one, your time rich and money poor. And two, I think the life of a consumer is very convenient because on the other side of every transaction as a consumer, you've got a business, which interestingly is to make the transaction

as painless as possible. I actually think like the flight booking experience is fine. I think the restaurant booking experience is fine. I think all of these experiences are kind of fine. I think like there is going to be a transformational moment for businesses where you have like the Holy Grail of AI agencies, like what we call the drop in replacement for a human worker. I think that's coming in like 12 to 18 months. Yeah. I almost, I'm just kind of riffing on this,

but I almost wonder if the agent moment will look like the Studio Ghibli moment, but instead of a single picture, you'll say, uh, go and do some research about my life or my kid's life or, uh, put in, I'll talk to it for a bit. And it just produces an entire animated book or something like that. And it's something that requires using multiple systems and writing and iterating and generating images. And so it's still highly personal. And so anyone in America or anyone in the world can get joy out of that experience. But it's something that wouldn't otherwise be created. Like you might stop on a boardwalk and have an illustrator draw you at a carnival,

but most people weren't hiring illustrators on Fiverr to turn them into anime. But they could when it was just one button. And so maybe the agent use case will be like, for consumers, will be de novo. It won't be optimizing something that they're already doing. It'll be something completely new that they would never have paid for. I don't know. What do you think? We'll see. I mean, we had like one competitor that went viral like nine months ago. They did something like that. It was like, use an agent to roast my Twitter. And it went viral and then it fizzled out. Because like, how market is that really? I think, say for this, even the Gibb listing, I think, is going to eventually fizzle out. It's like, I don't

know that consumers need all that many agents. I think businesses need agents. Well, do you think it's a good marketing strategy at least? Have you ever thought about how can I get, even if it's a meme product or meme use of Lindy, and it's not going to be an enduring or it's going to be extremely high churn, but I know that everyone will sign up for that day, do one task and yeah, I'll keep 2% of them. But that's a great trade because I figured out how to go viral with my product. That's a good point.

I think the downside though is that boy, it's so expensive. So expensive. And so that's going to be that's going to be a 10 million dollar bill, like actually 10 million. And like opening is burning money right now on the Ghibli thing and they don't care because they raised like $40 billion to have infinite money.

If you're a startup, it's a different move. Yeah. What was your reaction to Toby's leaked memo this morning around being AI native? Did you see it? I skimmed it and I forwarded it to the team and I say the cosine before I even read it. I was like, whatever he says, I agree.

That's good management. Do you think CEOs in general have been wary around being too pro AI in their businesses and not almost like basically scare employees? Because you know, some- It's just about not scaring employees. I think there is a culture in tech of avoiding to be too prescriptive on exactly the how and it's really leading on outcomes

and like letting engineers like do whatever they want and use any ideas they want. And I think that's the gap has grown so much now between the frontier of the level of productivity that you can achieve as an engineer as the median practice of the median engineer, especially in big companies, that now employers have no choice but to just lay the law

and be like, hey, this is the tooling we use. Like you don't get to use tooling from like the 1980s anymore. Yeah. Can you talk a little bit about Lindy being sort of multi-product and I can see a lot of reasons why, you know, for phone calls as an example, you know, there's companies that do, just do that, right?

And I could see the reason for Lindy to do multiple things is like, you know, a customer does a phone call and then they need an email and then they've wanted a recording and like there's a bunch of, you know, sales, customer support, all these different areas end up connecting in. So I can see why you would wanna be sort of multi-product,

but I'm curious if there's any more, I'm sure you've thought very deeply about that and curious your view on it. Just being less opinionated about the actual use case for the customer? Yeah, I actually think of us, I actually think it's a single product, it's just a lot of use cases,

and I think that's an important distinction because the beauty of building it this way is that you build a set of actually few low-level primitives and then it's like Lego bricks, you know? And then you can combine these Lego bricks however you want and they combine super linearly. And then they explode into this set of use cases. The demo I just gave with like agent swarms and computer use,

we didn't have to build this. We just built agent swarms and now we're building computer use and now these two things just like this demo just like happens like spontaneously basically. So it's the same thing for computer use you know like when you build a computer use startup, I surmise that maybe 5% of your bandwidth is the actual, not sorry, not computer use, phone agents. 5% of your work is actually phone, like phone code and phone whatnot. The rest is like the scaffolding around the product, like the SaaS features around team collaboration

and the way to orchestrate your agent and then to go to market overhead and all of that stuff. And so I'm like, man, it actually didn't take us that long to orchestrate your agent, and then to go to market overhead, and all of that stuff. And so I'm like, man, it actually didn't take us that long to build the furniture, because we have all of that scaffolding around it. And once we have that building block, it's just that much more powerful,

because it's plugged into all of our other primitives. And so you realize that a ton of economies of scale, from a good market standpoint and R&D standpoint, I think it's a better experience very often for the end user because you end up having all of your AI agents in one place. So you have one clean pane of glass and you have all of your AI agents in one place. And I actually think it's going to be much more important even once AI agents can actually work together.

You don't want... Having all of these different platforms for all of your different AI agents is maybe the same thing as having like five headquarters. You want all your AI employees under the same roof able to work together very, very seamlessly. Can you talk a little bit more about cost? You said that AI agents are very expensive to run. What are you, what was your reaction to DeepSeq?

What's your reaction to Llama 4, some of the open source models that might be a little bit cheaper? What are you monitoring on the inference side? Yeah, I mean, we are seeing costs fall by roughly 40 to 100 X every year. Okay. So today, you know, we don't have negative unit economics,

but our unit economics are actually pretty thin. The margins are pretty thin and we're totally fine with it. And so our investors, because we're like, it doesn't matter. Like we have actually seen the prices go down by 40x so it's expensive today but it's actually still the ROI is tremendous and soon it's just going to be an absolute new brainer. How much do you think that's driven by new algorithms and optimizations versus just new hardware and put the transformer on silicon or bake the weights of llama 4 into an ASIC or something like that?

Historically, it's been mostly new algorithms. Yeah, or like distillations. For example, GPT-4 turbo or like GPT-4-O is so much smaller than the original GPT-4. GPT-4 was like a 1.7 trillion parameter model and GPT-4-O I think is like what, 50B or something like that. And then, yes, they're all done. There's like quantization and there's like a lot of optimizations at the rate of all of the stacks. We know that these innovations didn't happen at the hardware level in the time span where we saw these costs fall. Can you talk a little bit about evaluation of new models? We saw llama 4 dropped

on Saturday. How does your team actually test that? Do you just roll it out to a small set of users? Are you just playing with yourself? Do you have evals built out? How are you testing new LLMs when they drop? Because it seems like it's every week this year. Totally. I think like, so we do have our own evals built out for like a cool set of use cases that we're going after. And there's a couple hundred test cases there. And we also test by vibes quite a lot. I will say, I feel bad for saying that because I have friends like the Lama team, but boy, like Lama 4, the vibes are really bad.

Like the emails are good and the vibes are quite bad actually. What do you think's driving that? Is that just too much focus on pre-training, which is hitting a wall on the scale side, or is there something else going on? There are rumors that they injected some data from the evals in the training set at the last minute. Yeah is that like data poisoning or something like that or yeah yeah eval saturation? Yeah I don't know if you saw like the I saw the allegations I apologize to my llama friends but

the VP of AI research at Meta resigned and so have a couple members of the core research team, seemingly in protest for what they deem to be unethical practices. Oh, interesting. We'll have to follow up on that. And is that, you think that just comes down to their AI team being on just having so much pressure due to Meta's investment in CapEx, that it's like, if you're not best in

class, it's just clearly, you know, what are you doing basically? If you're not close to your last. I think Zach is massively raising the temperature. And I think he's basically threatened to like destroy the whole or go like fire, have you all got like similar stuff like that if they don't hit some targets by some date. And I think that's led to this outcome.

How do you think about AI adoption in enterprise but just sort of B2B SMB broadly? Because I'll give you an example. So, and I brought this up a few times on the show but during the Studio Ghibli moment, if you had a post go viral enough, people would respond to it and not know where it was being created,

seemingly unaware of OpenAI, ChatGPT broadly. When you talk to business owners today that are maybe outside of Silicon Valley and you explain to them what's possible with AI, are they surprised? Are they aware of this stuff already? Do you think they're quick to adopt these products? I'm curious. People are aware, definitely.

We're seeing some very interesting dynamics play out in the market where SMBs are aware and they are eager to realize immediate ROI. So SMBs are actually the ones who have in my mind the most real deployments out there. They are actually deploying agents for mission critical stuff all day long. Enterprise customers are interesting because there is, I think AI agents,

there is a little bit of a return of shelf-ware. So, you know, shelf-ware is like that thing that happened in like the 2000s or like the 90s, like Microsoft and Oracle, like just like release this software, very expensive, and everybody, the enterprise customers buy it because the pitch is compelling, but then it gathers no adoption internally.

So it just sits on the shelf. And I think that's happening again with AI agents because a dynamic will seem to play out quite a bit, and I don't wanna say names, but they're all some very hot AI startups out there in the enterprise that are basically software like their revenues skyrocketing and they're meeting very little adoption internally. And what's happening is that the board is on Twitter all day and they're freaking out and they're on the back of the CEO and they're like, you've got to figure out

this AI thing, whatever it means to figure out this AI thing. And then the CEO turns around and talks to his executives and is like, you guys have got to figure out this AI thing, whatever it means to figure out this AI thing. And then the CEO turns around and talks to his executives and is like, you guys have got to figure out the AI thing. Basically, the sheet rolls down hill and immense budgets get unlocked, hundreds of millions of dollars to figure out the AI thing. And so we are seeing these huge ARR numbers, these huge growth numbers. Adoption is low very often, and even when adoption is, their satisfaction is low because the products are not quite mature yet.

And even when the products are adopted, they're not typically for very mission critical tasks yet. Like enterprises are notoriously, and I think for good reason, quite risk averse. And so they're going slowly here as far as actual adoption and deployment is concerned That makes sense. Do you think about how do you think about? General risk of rolling out these products right if you're using cursor Internally to write code and help you ship faster

There's you know, if you make if the if cursor makes a mistake You know You sort of can have the opportunity to correct it. The customer isn't necessarily made aware of the mistake. Whereas there's a bit more risk with what you're doing, right? If a customer gets an email and it doesn't make any sense or they're on the phone and they're talking to an agent and the agent is just sort of stumbling or whatever,

I'm curious how you think about testing. I'm sure you're doing a massive amount of testing internally and then making sure that these things are functioning before they're really being rolled out at the customer level, but I'm curious what your approach is there. Well, first of all, I always tell people to compare apples to apples, which is like, the bar is much lower for agents than it is for other software. For other software, you want like three or four lines of reliability or whatnot. Agents, the comp, is not other software.

It's humans. And when you hire humans, and very often enterprise customers, they have their support done by BPO's in the Philippines or in India or whatnot. The quality is not 100%. And so you've got to compare this to that. So the vast majority of the time for use cases

where AI agents are deployed right now, they more than clear that bar of human quality and then sell. Because they are obviously available 24-7. They respond to tickets in a couple of seconds, and then they give you perfect observability. So you can actually see exactly task by task what your AI agents did all day, you can't say the same for humans.

And then on top of that, with this noted, which is like, hey, headline, it's fine, AI agents work pretty well, but on top of that, what you do is obviously you deploy evals, you deploy human in the loop for the most critical parts of a workflow. So for example, customer support agent. If you're Uber, we don't have Uber as a customer, but I used to work at Uber. If you're Uber and a customer complains about a sexual assault, don't have any, just escalate that to a human mesa. Or if a

customer is asking for a refund on a transaction of more than call it like $500 as can it's actually human, right? And you can have these hard guardrails in place that are like, does this action always structurally require the human in the loop for the agent to perform it? That makes sense. Can you talk a little bit about distribution with a lot of these B2B products you hear? Oh yeah, anyone can set up a Shopify store or anyone can set up a quick books, but oftentimes these products are actually vended into companies from agencies, consulting groups.

There's actually a, uh, like a middle man that's, that's doing the implementation and the maintenance of the software. And in some cases the companies don't even know that their emails are being sent by MailChimp under the hood or Klaviyo or any of these different SaaS products. Are you finding, do you think that'll be a material part of your business or are you thinking about that? Yeah, it is a material part of the business today. We have a partner network.

If you go to like lindy.ai slash partners, we've got like dozens of implementations that help us implement these things. I think it's temporary though, because AI agents are soon going to be simple enough. Again, if you have a drop in replacement for a human worker, it's going to be no more complicated than collaborating with your human teammate. So I don't know that you're going to need this for all that long. How do you think about collaboration between agents? I was reading the AI 2027 thing and they were talking about, oh, oh, well, like when there's a billion AGI is, uh,

they'll just set up a Slack workspace and they'll talk to each other literally in Slack. Uh, what you, you gave that demo of the three agents working on separate things. And then I imagine that their results are kind of put together. Are you thinking about communication between the agents during the process? Cause you could imagine that, oh, it could imagine that oh it finds a great it Finds a great place to stay while you're traveling But that requires taking a slightly different flight and there's a trade-off there

And if you had a really great human working on booking you a trip that involved a flight and a and a stay That they might want to talk to each other about the trade-offs there and kind of do some sort of optimization You don't just want to book the flight and then also book the best hotel or whatever because they might not be the same. Yeah. Oh, and so this is currently something we support. So for example, like we do a lot of recruiting, you know, engineers or designers or salespeople, anything, we're hiring everything, hit me up.

But you know, I have a Lindy that's really good at sourcing candidates. And then I have a Lindy that's really good at sourcing candidates, and then I have a Lindy that's really good at reaching out to them. So she puts research about them, she knows exactly how to reach out to each person and all of that stuff. And so these two Lindy's are in touch with each other. So one finds candidates, the other reaches out to them.

Yeah, I think that's going to be super important. And that's part of why we are so passionate about having all of the agents in the same platform. You could say you don't need them in the same platform because they can use platforms like Slack and whatnot to collaborate. But, and then it's part of the AI 2027 essay, right? He talks a lot about neural ease.

He says like agents are not always going to communicate with each other in human readable tokens. And that's also part of our thesis. And so that's going to be much easier for AI agents to do if they are part of the same platform. I think ultimately this, like the AI agent team topology, is going to be one of the main drivers of the performance of your AI agent setup. And I think at first it's going to be on you as a user to figure out that topology. In a way, you're going to be doing the job of a CEO. It's like, hey, what's the reporting structure? Who communicates to whom? How? Like all of that

stuff you're going to have to design. Eventually, and inates to whom, how, like all of that stuff you're gonna have to design. Eventually, and in the not too distant future, you are going to have an AI agent design that for you. So we call that the AI Chief of Staff. That's just going to manage all of your AI agents. And you can imagine this is recursively, right? Just like agents managing agents, managing agents. What's your PDoom?

Are you scared? Does AI scare you or are you just like, now we're putting them to work? I'm terrified. My PDoom is about, look, I fluctuate the error bars are huge, but like, look, even if it was low, like 10%,

that's unacceptably high. If you listen to the Dworkish podcast on AI 2027, that's the part, I love Dworkish, I love the podcast, but that's the part where I'm like, what? At some point they talk about Pidoum, and one guy is like, yeah, I'm 70%. And the other guy is like, I'm an optimist, I'm only 20%. And then they move on.

I'm like, can we spend the whole conversation talking about the fact that very credible, very smart people who spent a lot of time thinking about this literally think that there's a 20% chance that we as a civilization go extinct in 10 years. Like I'm terrified. I think it's very under discussed. I think it's pretty, and I think that's-

Is it possible that Lindy at some point pivots to being a defense company, but you guys are deploying agent swarms to fight the- Robot apocalypse. Our robot adversaries. Look, you know, we're selling to SMBs. We all but a time but yeah, agent company.

I mean, uh, I, I want to talk about something very anodyne compared, uh, uh, just, uh, the idea of like putting an agent on a cron job, that feels like something that's, that's potentially, uh, so simple, but very value creative, just, okay, I have a task that I need to do and I want to make sure it happens every single day. Are you seeing traction in that vertical? Or are you messaging that type of activity? And, and, and what are the S what are some of the cool use cases?

Like, do you have any like cron jobs set up where an agent does something for you? Even if it's simple, uh, just checking a newsletter, checking a website, just doing something pretty simple, but it's something that happens reliably every day. Oh, I have done, I have it done. So I have one that actually I received the email from this morning that checks out my favorite podcasts every week and because I don't really listen to podcasts anymore and so it just like takes the podcasts transcribes it and sends me a summary of my favorite podcasts every week. I have a couple that ping me on Friday nights

that so one of them looks at my calendar and tells me like and looks at my priorities and tells me whether my calendar is aligned with my priorities one of them looks at my personal CRM and at my calendar and say hey you met with this guy this week he seems interesting you should hit him priorities. One of them looks at my personal CRM and at my calendar and is like, hey, you met with this guy this week. He seems interesting. You should hit him up. That's cool. One of them looks at all, because I have an indie in all my meetings.

And so she looks at all my meetings for this week and she sends me a digest of all my meetings this week. We have one that like every day, this one is really powerful. Actually, it's my favorite. It's company wide. So every day it ingests a ton of information from the company.

So every external meeting we had with customers, every support ticket we received, like a lot of communication, and then it sends a company-wide digest to the whole company, like the general channel on Slack. So like in a couple of bullet points, you get like that heartbeat of the company. That's been one of the most surprising use cases to me

is AI agents are really good at just ingesting a ton of data very rapidly and summarizing it. So writing reports is a really, really strong use case right now. Do you need a larger context window for that larger task or does it work with any of your models? I mean, modern models have like 200,000 tokens context window. That's enough for like a 150 pages book or something like that. That's fine. Okay. Last question. We'll let you go. 150 pages book or something like that. That's plenty. Okay, last question we'll let you go. What about the name? This seems like the least Lindy company possible.

It's like very new age and futuristic and sci-fi. Is it a reference to the Lindy effect or did you just like the name? No, we have a teammate named Lindy actually. Oh, okay. Yeah, and so we were just looking for a name for way too long and then she was in the room we were brainstorming, he's like, how about and then she was in the room who will bring something

He's like how about Lindy and so yeah, I mean Can never leave now. Yeah, you gotta say this is great. This is great. Thanks so much We gotta get some Lindy's going internally at TVPN And yeah, where can people sign up get started? What pricing look like for your average consumer b2b? Yeah, go to Lindy.ai and don't worry about the price look like for your average consumer B2B? Yeah, go to lindy.ai and don't worry about the price. Right? It starts at $50 a month.

Yeah. Okay, that's good. And we also offer, to my point about the implementation, like if you've got stuff you want to automate, hit us up, we'll use to implementing Lindy for people. That's amazing. Amazing. Well, thanks so much for joining.

Great to chat, Flo. This is fantastic. Thank you, everyone. We'll talk to you soon. Bye. That was great. PDoom. That was a great day. Only at 10. Yeah, he writes about it a lot on his acts.

It's always scary when you talk to somebody who's close to the metal and terrified of the metal. Yeah, but I feel safe knowing that he could turn his swarms against, you know. That's all that matters is this. And I have good swarms. More good robots than bad robots and we win. Yep.

But hopefully we outnumber them. Anyway, any other posts you want to do from the timeline or should we get out of here? No, I honestly was just looking at Polymarket pulled up. I was tracking, I don't know how this, this feels, it's crazy. You know that Polymarket right now is only, has a 1% chance of a US recession before May 2025?

Well, that's like, it would be very, very hard for it to happen in May. Because the recession's design is- Because they would have to, they would have to like rewrite the data, like- Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So recession's defined as like, I think it's actually,

it's usually defined as like multiple quarters of economic contraction. Oh, right, it has to be. So it's basically impossible. Yeah, yeah, it's basically impossible. Yeah, yeah. Unless they were to rewrite. Unless they were to basically get new data. Yeah, old GDP data. Because the market is a leading indicator.

Right now, you're seeing people, even on the show, we're talking about will companies pull back? Maybe they will. Will consumer stop buying foreign-made cars. Will consumer stop buying foreign made cars? Will they stop buying cars overall? Is there gonna be inflation? We have no idea what's gonna happen to the business community or the American consumer.

And so for GDP to just suddenly shrink, it would be very rare. Unlike what happened in COVID where all the businesses were closed immediately and there was a massive drop in GDP very, very quickly. That all came back. This is very much, I mean, you talk to the smartest people in the tech and finance world

and they're all saying some version of, let's wait and see, I don't know, the market's down, it doesn't seem great, but maybe it'll work out. I don't know, I'm kind of just doing the same thing. I'm focused on AI or whatever. And so I'm sure there's a lot of people that, yeah, they're upset that the market's down, but they're not fearing for their jobs

or really pressing pause on that purchase or that vacation. They're just kind of continuing on. Anyway, we'll be digging into it more throughout the course of the weeks, so stay tuned. And other than that, thanks for watching. Thank you. It's gonna be a great week. Yeah.

Bye, talk soon. Happy Monday.