TBPN Live - Meta Poaches OpenAI Researchers, Murati's Plans to Take on OpenAI, NATO Takeaways | Mike Gallagher, Pippa Lamb, Dan Shipper, Eliano Younes

Episode Date: June 26, 2025

(02:28) - The Social Network 2 Sneak Peak (06:27) - Meta Poaches OpenAI Researchers (29:28) - Murati's Plans to Take on OpenAI (31:18) - Pippa Lamb is a partner at Sweet Capital, an early-stage tech fund established by the founders of King.com following their $5.9 billion sale to Activision Blizzard in 2015. In the conversation, she discusses the recent increase in European defense spending, highlighting the UK's commitment to allocate up to 5% of its GDP to defense by 2035, and the potential opportunities this presents for both established defense companies and emerging startups in the sector. (01:00:34) - Timeline (01:10:07) - Dan Shipper, co-founder of Every, a writer-focused media company, discusses the public launch of Quora, an AI-powered email assistant designed to streamline email management by filtering messages, drafting responses, and providing concise summaries. Priced at $15 per month, Quora aims to reduce the time users spend on email by automating routine tasks and prioritizing important communications. Shipper emphasizes the challenges incumbents face in integrating AI into existing platforms and highlights the advantages startups have in leveraging new technologies to innovate user experiences. (01:23:45) - Eliano Younes, Palantir's Strategic Engagement Lead, discusses the successful relaunch of the company's merchandise store, emphasizing its commitment to American manufacturing and the overwhelming demand that led to rapid sellouts. He highlights the store's evolution, noting the shift to U.S.-made products and plans for unique, limited-edition items. Younes also mentions the significant traffic from international markets like South Korea and the store's role in strengthening the Palantir community. (01:32:19) - Mike Gallagher, Head of Defense at Palantir Technologies, discusses his transition from military service and Congress to the private sector, emphasizing his commitment to national security and preventing global conflicts. He highlights Palantir's partnership with The Nuclear Company to develop an AI-driven Nuclear Operating System (NOS) aimed at streamlining nuclear reactor construction, reducing costs, and enhancing energy security. Gallagher underscores the strategic importance of this collaboration in maintaining U.S. leadership in nuclear technology amid global competition.

You're watching TVPN. Today is Thursday, June 26, 2025. We are live from the TVPN Ultra Dome, the capital of capital. The temple of technology, the fortress of finance. Remixed it for you there. We got a great show for you today, folks. The current thing is the AI talent wars.

Meta has poached three open AI researchers. Then there's also news and the information about what X Open AI CTO Mira Moradi is planning to do with thinking machines or thinky as we like to call them. Thank you They're gonna make money. That's the plan. She's money Going to help other businesses make money as well. I'm excited Pippa lamb is joining to break down what's going on in Europe. She's our European correspondent.

Developing nation correspondent. Developing technology. Potential, lots of potential there. Very excited for that. We might revisit what's going on with Bumble. We might talk about, if you didn't follow the story yesterday, Bumble cut 30% of staff as online dating hits,

quote, an inflection point. We might dig into that. Also, Google has a new artificial intelligence which will help researchers understand how our genes work. Very interesting. There's a new investment platform, Republic, that is planning to let anyone bet on SpaceX. They're going to apparently put secondary shares on chain.

Also, we mentioned this yesterday, but China is tracking down. You're gonna be able to lever up your Fartcoin to buy SpaceX. That might be the right move. You never know. China is tracking down its rare earth experts and taking away passports,

and Mike Gallagher is joining from Palantir, and so is Eliano from Palantir. And so we will get the Palantir update, which will be a lot of fun. Also, know we have to tell you about ramp time is money Say both easy use corporate cards bill payments accounting and a whole lot more all in one place Of course the news that was tearing up the timeline was the fact that the social network too is Officially in development with Aaron Sorkin returning this time as director Yaxine says wrong. I'm the director and I'm also the main character.

I thought that was really funny. He's definitely the main character. Andy, TwoCents.money is writing some jokey dialogue here. He says, sorry, I left my ORA ring at South Park Commons along with my Aidsley burner phone and Bored Ape ledger wallet. You absolute diesel. It's pretty funny to reimagine it.

But interesting, we have a little scoop here. We actually got our hands on a couple pages of the new script. It was left at the gym. Yes, in Hollywood. In Hollywood where we are. And we're fairly confident it could possibly be. This is the social network two.

Official. Official dialogue. Yeah, they haven't shot We script so with the other script they've been doing table reads. We wanted to do a little table read for you today So I'll break it down. You'll play Mark Zuckerberg. I'll play not freed man So this happens is taking place in Mark Zuckerberg's office at night in the meta HQ Yeah, so a middle a minimalist expanse lit by floating AR displays and whiteboards full of transformer diagrams. Mark Zuckerberg is focused yet restless. He stands at a window.

Nat Friedman is calm but energized. He enters and Nat opens the scene. You've open source llama, Mark. 70 billion parameters running in 8K token context windows and word there's a 405 billion monster still in the lab open source isn't unleashed Nat it's a guided evolution we publish the weights so the community can help tame them community a sizable slice of fair hop to startups like Mr. all how's the village supposed to ride the beast

without many of the original Wranglers talent moves ideas stay group query attention scaled rotary positional embeddings with NTK aware stretching. This isn't incremental, it's a step change. Meanwhile, Yan's out there talking about non-autoregressive world model hybrids saying the next wave won't be token by token racers. He's ready to retire your thoroughbred mark. Yan's job is to keep the herd agile. Llama is today's workhorse. Scout and Maverick are the horizon. Right now, Lama is our public manifesto. Your manifesto just made every kid with a decent GPU a potential sorcerer.

Hugging face downloads are exploding. What's next? Magic carpets? Exactly! Open weights let the village scale faster than our walls ever could! Purple Lama covers us. CyberSec eval, Llama Guard, full red team cycles. You know Purple Llama isn't bulletproof, Mark. Open AI is minting cash behind APIs and you're handing out multilingual long context models for free. The Llama 3 community license only restricts firms over 700 million monthly active users. Innovation rises bottom up.

Ask Ahmed. Ask Joel. Democratization is the point. restricts firms over 700 million monthly active users. Innovation rises bottom up. Ask Ahmed, ask Joel, democratization is the point. You're wagering north of $60 billion in AI capex on that democracy. It's a big bet, Mark. Not a bet, an ecosystem. Scout is multimodal. Maverick is video first.

LoRa, Chlora, NFR, quantization. Llama derivatives already power agents. Ragstacks, NFR, Quantization, Lama, Derivatives, RE Power Agents, Rag Stacks, University Labs, it feeds itself. Provided the community keeps aligning with you. Alignment happens in real time. RLHF, DPO, RLAIF. This is an ecosystem, not a monopoly. And if that ecosystem births something you can't steer?

No one controls progress, Nat. We guide it openly, transparently. No secret rooms, just a billion hands shaping what's next. Then hold on tight and hope we're ready. We will be. We're building it together. And scene. He really jumps off the page.

Wow, riveting. Yeah, Hollywood's back.'s back this might save Hollywood Yeah, I think this will be said that I'm Oscar bait right here for totally totally sure Anyways, you know maybe maybe somebody just left this as in you know as a prank knowing we'd find it Knowing maybe it's entirely possible. It's entirely possible This is you know totally real, but you know they're to be doing a lot of design work on the next social network movie. They're going to need to use Figma over in Hollywood. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build products together.

Get started for free at figma.com and make products. You can make products on there now. Check it out. So the scoop that we wanted to talk about Metta has poached three open AI researchers, Lucas Bayer, Alexander Kolesnikov, and Zhuo Hua Zhai? Zhuo Hua Zhai. Zhai? Zhai.

According to people familiar with the matter, an OpenAI spokesperson confirmed the three have left the company. I've never seen somebody abbreviate spokesperson into spokes. A spokes. Oh, spokes. A spokes. A spokes, okay, yeah. You're abbreviate spokesperson into spokes. A spokes. Oh, spokes. A spokes. A spokes, OK, yeah.

You're a TVP on spokes. Will Brown has a post. He says, wow, they snagged the whole Zurich office. This has been something that's been percolating. The idea that Mark was going on a hiring spree, sending out messages, setting up dinners with AI researchers, it seems like he's done it. Tyler Cosgrove has a little bit of background on these folks.

I pulled up some posts, but what do you have for us, Tyler, to contextualize the trade deal that just went down? Yeah, so these guys are really kind of all stars. So they're all at Zurich office. They started the OpenAI Zurich office. Is there anyone left? I believe I don't know. But I think it might have been just them three.

Because I know Lucas had, there was a tweet where he said, he started it just because he didn't want to move. So I think it was just them. But yes, so they all work on multimodal research there. So they're best known, they were all co-authors on the original Vision Transformer paper. So this was in 2020. This is basically, this paper is like the reason why you can like basically pass an image to ChatGBT. Yeah. Because it then led to Vision Transformer then to Vision Language Model which is now just like

kind of, they're all like multi-modal now. Yeah, VLM is what physical intelligence has been very bullish on, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. So I can just give a little background on Lucas. So 2018 he finishes his PhD. He goes straight to Google Brain. This is where they basically write the first like, you know, vision transformer paper. Then from there, he 2021 2024, he co leads just the entire multimodal team there because now they basically realized that, okay, we can actually get these things to

be fully general, not just text. Yeah, we saw a Gemini demo of that a couple years ago where it was like a phone looking at a looking at a desk and it would in the demo person would draw something and then Gemini would be speaking in real time and the idea was that that was not three different models kind of dancing between each other, it was all one model. And it was a little controversial at the time because it was sped up I believe, but it was still incredible technology

and you can see that that's something that is gonna get better and now is more in real time. And we're seeing that with Gemini where you can pull out your phone and show it the world. And Meta's doing this too with the Meta Ray Bans. What am I looking at, right? Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's really big because you used to have,

you would have your text model, then you would have maybe a convolutional neural network just for the images. It's very convoluted. Or you'd take the image, stuff it through BERT to get some tags around, like there's a dog in this image And then the text model only really knows dog and it's only seeing text But in this case it can take it can continue to see what's actually in the image got it. Yeah, so okay

So so then Lucas he's co-leading the multi-metal team at DeepMind 2024 and then just this in 2025 this year. He joins opening eyes starts the new office Wow Oh, so he doesn't know full year. He's been there. Yeah, it's been really short. Yeah, but yeah I mean these are like real killers. Yeah, you know, this is a huge huge move. Yeah, I like Lucas cuz he's It sounds like he's a legit legend in AI research, but he's also a poster Hey, I don't know if you saw this but he was getting back and forth with yeah with the yak scene He said ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the most surreal.

What might say he was the reason that Yaxine was essentially terminated? It's entirely possible. So I present to you the most surreal exchange I've had on X, the Everything app. And Lucas says, sure, if you add 10 hours to my days, 10 hours during which the kiddo sleeps, because it seems like he has children

and is dealing with the kind of work-life balance. And Yaxine says, just perform less good at your job to fit in the 10 hours with the kiddo. That's what I do, and I'm sure it will be fine. Going from P99 to P90 isn't that big of a deal. And then an hour later, wait, this might be bad advice. Please hold.

And then Lucas says, oh dang, now I see. I got fired today And what was nice was that Lucas very graciously said I originally kept the screenshot to wait until the wound healed as I'm not One to put salt on a wound but since he's addressed this himself now. I assume this post is okay Let me know if it's not and I'll delete it so very very nice of also There's a funny post in here. He says no I just found out that I left a 4090 GPU running and completely forgot about it for months oopsie daisies I guess this is

how you learn well I can say now that I think you can afford I think you can afford a hundred and seventeen dollars and thirty two cents per day on a 4090 bill you might even be able to expense that to me week on a week oh it's per week yeah that's not that bad just Just a flesh wound. Anyway, AI girl asks, does leaving open AI get you on the Sam Blacklist? It turns out these guys weren't open AI's best people because last week, Sam Altman said the best people haven't left for meta kind of, you know, saying, Hey, don't leave because you'll be labeled as a non performer basically but the Wall Street Journal has more data here. They're joining Meta's super intelligence project. It's no longer reality labs or llama project.

It's the super intelligence project and we've seen a number of the executives come in but they're obviously staffing up on the research side as well. Zeca, would you? We heard last week that Mark, or maybe it was earlier this week, that Mark is personally texting, calling people, inviting them to dinner. And getting dinner. Full founder mode, not leaving it up to Meta's massive recruiting team. I think it's the right move. Very motivated.

Yeah, I mean, this feels like a product and a project that doesn't necessarily need thousands and thousands of people. It seems like you need the really, the thousand ex-engineers and necessarily need thousands and thousands of people. It seems like you need the really, the thousand X engineers and you need only a few of them, the 50 people. Yeah, and the interesting dynamic is, if you're an engineer that joined in the last year, you're getting a pretty meaningful valuation bump,

but not going from, call it 10 billion to 300. And now the other thing that's sort of coinciding with all of the, you know, this sort of like recruiting chaos is that OpenAI and Microsoft aren't exactly getting along right now in terms of restructuring their deal. So there's a lot up in the air in terms of can this entity transition to a for-profit? Is it gonna be able to IPO?

Sure, they provide different mechanisms for liquidity. But Meta has the ability to provide potentially more stability in that you're getting equity at what is it, $1.7 trillion-ish. But it's highly liquid, unlikely to fluctuate, you know, necessarily to the same degree. And you're getting a lot of resources in that, you know, like OpenAI Meta is spending tens of billions of dollars on CapEx

to support the incredible talent. It is interesting, like, like the live player dynamic of Zuck in founder mode, like you can do the horse race between Sam and Zuck all day long, but this feels like it, this puts the screws much more to what's Amazon doing, what's Apple doing, what's even Microsoft doing on the AI researcher side if this is such an important,

such an important role, and we'll go into this with thinking machines and some of the other labs and what they're doing. But if you are Tim Cook, you have to be asking yourself, am I appropriately staffed for the next generation here? Because it's clearly possible for a trillion dollar big tech company to catch up if you get the right people and you build the right things. And so it seems like this is almost like less,

this feels like it could be less nerve wracking for Sam who has a dominant consumer app that's growing, growing, growing, and a really solid team in place. These have hired a ton of people. There's been just as many big talent moves into OpenAI as have moved into Meta, but we haven't seen that on the Apple side. There's also more, I'm sure I would imagine,

more clarity internally at OpenAI around, we are building what could become a new tech giant giant it could be the mag-8 right? Whereas at a meta it's very exciting. There's a lot of resources. There's a lot of ambition right? This is a super intelligence team, but at the same time It's unclear exactly how AI will fit into the meta ecosystem And it's it's you know if people want to work on something very specific, you know, working on an app that might a year from now have, you know, a billion plus DAUs and something truly novel

is certainly gonna be appealing to some type of people. Well, if you're trying to build an app with a billion DAUs, you gotta get on linear. Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products. Meet the system for modern software development Streamline issues projects and product roadmaps should we go to the chief open AI hater opening? I is a linear customer themselves

Well, and I'm sure if you ask them they would say the only reason we are successful is because yes Yes, yes, it's like the transformer model and linear. Yeah. Those two, and then you're done. Two key ingredients. Nick is pouring some cold water on OpenAI as he's known to do. He says, Microsoft signals to walk away from negotiations with OpenAI. OpenAI plans to convert into a for-profit company to raise capital and potentially IPO,

but needs Microsoft's approval. Microsoft has IP rights to all OpenAI models until 2030 and 20% revenue share. OpenAI wants to waive this AGI clause and end Microsoft's IP rights and swap 20% revenue share with royalty plus equity. Microsoft is not happy with the new offer. OpenAI is considering a nuclear option

of accusing Microsoft of anti-truth. Which is funny because having the nuclear option sort of like be leaking out already is kind of rough. Part of the strategy. Austin Allred says, still absolutely insane to me that Microsoft gets 20% of OpenAI revenue off the top, not 20% of profit, 20 cents of every dollar OpenAI brings and goes straight to Microsoft.

It's like something out of Shark Tank. That's very funny. Now you can imagine hearing a Shark Tank pitch and one of the sharks gives the sharkiest possible deal. It's extremely sharky. Here's the deal. Give you a million bucks, but I want 20 cents of every dollar that comes in.

Yeah, I mean, at the same time, would OpenAI be where it is today without pulling forward that multi-billion dollar GPU credits and that investment that Microsoft made. Microsoft did take a risky bet. Ben Thompson was basically saying that if you're, oh sorry. I'm sure they have an entire plan around how they would accuse Microsoft

of anti-competitive behavior, but overall this was a deal that they did, that they agreed to, that OpenAI wants to renegotiate now. And I think that Microsoft made a big bet at the time. So Ben Thompson was digging into this idea of like, what is the structure and incentives of Microsoft? So Microsoft is not a venture capital firm. And so do they have a shareholder duty

to hold on for another 10X in the stock essentially? Or should they be comfortable getting out of the stock essentially? Is there a world where they are justified with their shareholders to renegotiate this and what are their incentives? I think Satya has a fiduciary duty to maximize that present value, right?

The value of this partnership and this investment that they made. And so what are all the- And I brought this up, I think, when we were talking a couple weeks ago, which is like, they're not an investor that's like worried about their brand as an investor. It's not like an important portfolio company they're not an investor that's worried about their brand as an investor.

It's not like an important portfolio company goes to a VC firm and they're like, hey, we wanna bring in this new investor and you're gonna get diluted a little bit. It's like Microsoft is not, it's not like they need to build a brand of being founder friendly. This is a multi-hundred billion dollar company

dealing with a multi-trillion dollar company and with a multi trillion dollar company. And it's at this point, it's not about, you know, being startup friendly or founder friendly. It's just business. Yeah, I guess I, I, I would probably lean if I were Satya just off the top of my head, like lean into allowing the for-profit conversion. And I would want exclusivity over the openAI API because I'm in the enterprise business. I wouldn't necessarily care too much about the long-term revenue split on the consumer app. I don't know, I might be willing to trade that

for owning the B2B side. You have some breaking news? Breaking news from Lucas Byer. Hey, all, couple quick notes. One, yes, we will be joining Meta. Two, no, we did not get $100 million sign on. That's fake news. Excited about what's ahead, though.

We'll share more in due time. And he CCs his buddies in the Zurich office. That's great. And yeah, it's funny. It's very easy to say, no, we did not get $100 million sign on That's Fake News, because he could have just gotten like 101 or 250 or could have just gotten like a hundred one 50 or

You know, it's like yeah investing we're each vesting, you know Yeah, that's the only thing he denies yeah Exactly denies that we did not explicitly get a hundred million dollars sign on got them anyways How much you got I'm sure you should you can afford a luxury watch so you should head over to bezel go to get Sorry, you're already in Switzerland. It's perfect Your bezel concierge is the way is available now to source you any watch on the planet seriously any watch so Lucas We'd be happy to introduce you to a bezel concierge to get you set up with some fantastic Swiss watches It's it's so perfect having a watch sponsor. Yeah, he might have like today off, tomorrow off,

starting in Meta on Monday. Plus, if you're going into Meta, I mean, Sam is not a watch guy, but Zach is. So you don't want to walk into the skip level meeting with Zach, you know? I don't know who he's reporting to, maybe Alex, maybe Nat, but you don't want to walk into that first meeting with Zuck and have bare wrist.

Or certainly not an Apple Watch. Certainly not an Apple Watch. Like that is straight up rival, right? No. So yeah, you're going to want a racing machine on the wrist to let Zuck know that you appreciate high horology. This is important. Separately, OpenAI was at Hard Fork Live.

Yeah. And they were asked by the host about Dario saying that 50% of entry-level white-collar work could disappear in one to five years. And if they agreed, Sam Altman says, no, no, I don't. And then Brad says, COO says, no, we have no evidence of this. Dario is a scientist and I hope he takes an evidence-based approach to these types of things.

Anyways, he went on in the clip to basically say like, yes, jobs will change. Right now we don't have evidence and basically reorients around, it's gonna be important to know how to use these tools really well, but they are rolling out AI at tons of different types of companies from SMBs to large multinational firms. I also think this is more of like an economics question

than an AI research question. There's this idea of like, what is the, so if AGI becomes a one-for-one replacement for a white-collar worker then what are you seeing in the labor market you're seeing supply increase dramatically but what is the demand for white-collar work like how much stuff do we have to do how much software do we have to build how many software products do we have to sell? Like, we might see the demand for labor is actually 10x. And so, yes, if you believe this world

where we can not only have AGI at white collar worker level and then scale it up to produce, I mean, how many white collar workers are there? If you say 50% of entry level, that's tens of millions of people. So can you actually run the inference at that level consistently without brownouts or whatever? And then will demand for labor stay the same?

It could increase by 10, it could increase by 100. Like we might find more things to do, in which case you might want both working. You might want to have 10 times as many AI is working as humans and you might still want all the humans working This happens all the time And so I I don't know the the fast takeoff thing we can go back and forth on this But I think we're kind of post this yeah going back to the internet example in the dot-com era CEOs We're selling that you would be able to run, you know, the same type of rhetoric around you're gonna have a

10 person team doing a billion dollars in revenue and that ultimately Didn't play out. Yeah exactly that way so well staying in AI world Sam Altman is Providing some emails and extra context around the Jason Rogolo Allegations these four emails really These four emails really bodied Jason Ragulo. So we were covering a few days ago how there's a company called IYO that had been developing this audio type computing device that would allow you to leverage AI, speak with it.

What was interesting to me is it was, they have some type of technology that they're allegedly developing to provide kind of like different layers to audio to kind of give you like this like audio display. So cool language, interesting to think about. Sam basically says they're suing us over the name. The name thing I do kind of understand. And clearly, a judge felt that way.

Otherwise, I wouldn't have had to scrub everything. But the initial lawsuit really painted this picture like OpenAI was trying to mine this company for kind of IP beyond the name in terms of how the product work. And then you think either of these names are good. No. Like my iPhone, I pulled out my iPhone, I pulled out my IO, I'm using my IO, hand me my IO, pass me my IO, give me my,

like, you know, I need to charge my IO. I need to charge my IO. Like they're definitely confusing. OpenAI has a history of naming things strategically. Yes. Like maybe it breaks through. DeepSeek. Like Google was not, Airbnb, these names weren't like super logical,

but then they became so popular that people use them. I don't know, it doesn't jump out to me as like a perfect, amazing, horrible thing. Yeah, I think they're gonna, OpenAI's gonna be able to come up with a great name. They might be able to power forward. I mean, I imagine that this is a settlement. I imagine that this is a settlement. Anyways, we can read through some of the emails.

If I'm IYO, and I have, he was asking for $10 million to invest in the AI Meets Audio Hardware Company. So it feels like $10 million would allow the company to kind of move forward with the next thing. He's interested in research and development. It seems like it's pre-launch. So you could settle, say, hey, yeah, we do have a claim on this name a little bit.

Give us a couple million dollars to back off the name and we'll rebrand and then when they come out with their thing, they can come up with a different name. It just feels like they would be able to come up with it. This type of, the lawsuit overall seemed to be about more than just the name. It was like a frustration with OpenAI's behavior, but these emails that Sam shares.

Destroyed. Destroyed, absolutely destroyed. So on March 4th, 2025, Jason, the CEO of IYO says, "'Hey Sam, I'll keep it brief. "'I'd love the opportunity to pitch you "'to invest $10 million in my AI "'meets audio hardware company. So the key issue here is that it seems very clear

that OpenAI had been working on working. People had been talking about Sam Altman's interest in hardware for AI for two or three years since he made the investment Humane and he was talking about this for a long time. And it's also just super logical that everyone who's building a consumer app wants to own the next platform, Zuck is going into VR.

It wasn't rocket science to figure out that Sam Altman would be interested in hardware at some point and so that makes sense but then Sam clarifies very quickly here, like thanks for reaching out. So let me chat with Johnny I, he's the one driving this. And Jason himself understands, he goes, Like thanks for reaching out with Johnny. I he's the one driving this and Jason himself understands he goes rot row

Want to work together. I don't want to go up against you man not the right language to Try to set something up Anyways, they're both in lowercase. This is this is breaking their their yeah Here on the lower case're both in lowercase. This is breaking news. Yeah. Sam's gone back and forth on the lowercase. Lowercase on lowercase violence. Anyways, Peter, another member of the team, they, I guess, tried the product on May 6. And you can see from Jason's email that there were a bunch of demo fails in terms of basically wasn't working,

still trying to figure out a way to partner. And anyways, Peter says the device is, this is about a month ago, very orthogonal to ours and doesn't really work yet. They offered that we look at the IP, but I doubt there's anything there. Again, the device wasn't working reliably, it sounds like. So anyways, more of this will come out in court, but at the moment it seems like maybe something there

around the name and some real frustration, but ultimately won't be probably a big deal. Well, there's no frustration when you're using Vanta. Automate compliance, manage risk, prove trust continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation. I feel bad for people that have never gotten a chance

to automate their compliance with Vanta. Joy of using Vanta. That's right, so Turner Novak says, huge if true after raising an astonishing two billion at a $10 billion valuation from investors including Andreessen Horowitz, less than five months after its founding, Miramarati has told investors that tiny,

what, Thinking Machine Labs? Yep. TML is developing custom AI that will enable businesses to make more money. Thank goodness, this is amazing news. I can't wait to get our paws on this. There's been so much, exactly. There's been so much yapping in AI about,

oh, changing the world and exponential takeoff, fast takeoff. It's interesting. They're saying it's the first indication of the startup strategy. You know, the media had been taking this angle, like Mira just came out and just raised billions without actually talking about what she was doing.

And yes, she could raise billions without really talking. She could get a blank check. But I have to imagine that she would have had conversations with some of the investors and said, here's generally what we're working on. And this is a pre-seed, remember? So it's just about the team. What's interesting here is that there's been this

pervasive narrative that OpenAI has been hemorrhaging talent and co-founders, right? Because Dario was at OpenAI, he started Anthropic. Then Ilan starts XAI, Ilia starts SSI, Mira starts Thinking Machines. And my question was always like, okay, the narrative has always been like, they don't like Sam and that's why they leave.

But my question's like, why don't they all join forces and work together? Like, why didn't Mira go to Anthropic? Why didn't Ilya go to Anthropic? Why didn't Elon just work with Anthropic instead of starting another competitor? Everyone always starts like a new competitor. But this kind of seems like it reveals the idea

that Mira Moradi and Ilya Sutskova might be very diverged on the path of where AGI is going. Because- Mira wants to make money. Mira wants to do RL for businesses. And other businesses make money. And Ilya is much more of this true believer that's thinking that he wants to go straight

shot to super intelligence, no products. So anyway, we will continue to cover this story as we learn more about thinking machines, but we have to bring in our European correspondent, Pippa Lam from Sweet Capital. Welcome to the stream. How are you doing? What's going on? Hey guys, how's it going? Coming in from Europe.

It's great. Is your Starlink connection strong? I know they don't have they don't have broadband out there in the old continent. You know what, we're all just trying to get ourselves to the Hague and get some of that defense procurement. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. So yeah, hopefully the Starlink will make it here. No, hopefully, he'll be okay. Hopefully. Yeah, give us the breakdown of the latest news from NATO. Yeah, so it's exciting. I mean, I think that's pretty much all global press has been focused on this morning. You know, President Trump and the current US administration has really managed to do,

thank you very much, has managed to do the thing that no US leader has actually managed to do before, which is to get Europe and US's allies here to actually open up their wallets and increase their annual commitment to percentage of GDP on defence spending. So this is something that dates back to I think 2017. I mean, obviously, certainly a lot of American presidents have really pushed for this before. This isn't a new ask from the US side, but certainly this is the first time we've really seen some progress.

I mean, to put this in context, the US has really paid out, yeah, it has paid about two thirds of, you know, the NATO budget for the recent year. So it's really been on it upon Europe to really, you know, increase how much they're contributing. And so I think it's certainly a big win for the US, but also a big win for national security across the West and its allies. So yeah, definitely, definitely good sentiments here on the ground. And I think certainly when it comes to if you see how Trump's mood has changed from

when he was boarding that helicopter a couple of days ago to some of the comments he was making after Secretary General Rutte's comments, I think that the US is in a really interesting position now and so is NATO. Did we ever figure out what the NATO chief, he claims he didn't call Trump? I don't know.

No, no, no, I'll break this down. I don't know if you saw anything. I couldn't tell what was fake news. Did you have any insight there, the NATO? So I saw the headlines. There's an ABC news headlines from yesterday. It says NATO secretary general calls Trump quote unquote daddy.

Oh yeah, and then the White House put out a video about this. But then the NATO secretary general, I guess, came out and denies it. Yeah, the White House, this is on the official page, put out a one-minute video, and the comment on Axe is, daddy's home, hey, hey, hey, daddy. President Donald J. Trump attended the NATO summit in The Hague, Netherlands. And then the secretary general came out and said,

daddy referred to US leadership, not Trump. Okay. So, still. White house social media never disappoints, I have to say that is, I always have my expectations and they surpass. It's pretty wild. I did go back and watch the original clip

to try and understand the analogy. And effectively, Trump was comparing some of some of our some of the geopolitical conflicts right now to children playing in the playground. And then of course, Secretary General Rutter then comes and says, and sometimes if people are being children, then he brings in the daddy analogy. And of course, Trump just jumped on that. He said, yeah, they called me daddy. You know, it was, he just ran with it. And as we saw in the White House account this morning, I think there's reels, there's, you know, there's YouTubes.

They really went for it. So, but it's something. So on, on your dispensed spending, there's actually a graphic that is pretty interesting to pull up here. It is, the United States is paying like more than two thirds. So in 2023, NATO's budget was 1.3 trillion. 860 billion of that came from the United States.

Germany was the next second highest with 68 billion. So less than one 10th. Then the UK at 65 billion, France at 56 billion, so less than one-tenth, then the UK at 65 billion, France at 56 billion, Italy at 31 billion, and then a bunch of other countries in the 10 to five to eight billion range, Canada's at 30 billion. And so yeah, this is a big change. I guess the current benchmark is 2% of GDP,

and this is, I guess it is agreement to to try and get to five percent now that's gonna roll out over the next decade to 2035 and and I mean the real key takeaway is that now Trump is publicly supporting NATO he's been very against it but he's in favor but and then there was also some questions about the shift away from the focus on Russia and Ukraine. Trump wants to end the conflict there. We can talk about that, but then eventually I wanna get into what this means for startups.

Yeah, I think what's also interesting is I have the same questions as you, right? So they put out these headline numbers. It all sounds very good. We all agree that there needed to be more of a balance between the US spending versus the rest of NATO. And I think what was really encouraging to see in terms of how this is going to impact markets is if you look at comments that came out from the UK this morning from Prime Minister Stammer,

he actually said, okay, well, we've got this, you know, target by 2035, we are going to dedicate up to, you know, five, well, 5% of of GDP spending on defense. But he actually then gave us further information and said that actually, if you look at where we see the national security needs now, we actually expect to surpass 4% of spending by 2027 or in 2027. So that's to me, that's, that's a great, uh, signal to markets that this isn't some sort of lofty target that they're going to try and hit and push out and sort of, you know, relabel things as defense or really kind of be very gradual about how they're deploying and how they're going to procure. I see this and I think, okay,

Europe is really serious about this. The UK is currently just the perspective at around 2.3 percent of its GDP. So it's slightly above that 2% benchmark. But the fact to go from, you know, 2.3% to 4% by 2027 is really encouraging. And I know certainly on the ground, we're already seeing quite a lot of increased interest in European defense plays. Some of the existing, I suppose, call them incumbents, but you know, the androids of the world are getting really excited about this market and less so from a change on their side, but the fact that, okay, the UK and Europe is potentially finally actually putting its money where its mouth is in terms of how it wants to procure

and how it really wants to beef up its national security efforts. Yeah, there's a question will be how does that budget actually get distributed between new players like Helsing which Daniel at Spotify had a nicely timed Investment. Yeah, actually, it's almost like he had a crystal ball or something and then new new kind of the new Daddy of the Nordic tech scene Chief would probably refer to him that way. And then, you know, Anderl all the way down to, you know, the, the bowings and the, yeah.

I mean, the four companies that I think are really interesting to study in this, in this, like, how this development plays out are probably Ryan Mattol, Helsing, Anderl and Palantir. And they all kind of represent very different strategies. But you could see money flowing to any of them. But then there are also decisions with all of those, obviously, Rheinmetall, very old company, legacy incumbent in Europe. And so easier to get across a deal done

because they have all the infrastructure there. Helsing's kind of the up and comer. Anderl's the hot American company. Palantir's founded by some Germans, but ultimately an American company. What are you seeing on the- And it's interesting, even Rheinmetall has been on this crazy run.

Oh yeah, it's the start to it. It's $432 a share. In 2022, you could have bought it for 30 bucks a share. Wow, and what is it now? And 432. 410X. So yeah, up tremendously. Even this year is up 250%.

Yeah, so what are you thinking about, I mean, this seems like a massive military budget increase in Europe. How serious is the rhetoric around the desire for homegrown defense technology solutions in Europe broadly? So I mean, I think Jordi as well on your point on Rheinmetall, I think you also wanna pull up

the chart for Saab that's been rallying a lot. So you're definitely seeing some allocation from institutions into existing incumbents. But I think for me and other members of the startup and venture community, what we're really asking is how serious is seriously is this going to impact the pre IPO and private markets? And I think what's very interesting here is you also saw Andrew announced a partnership

with Ryan Mattel, I think about a week ago. So you're certainly going to see some, you know, there's plenty to go around in terms of the market opportunity. And I think the sentiment is really beginning to shift now in terms of, you know, both investors and governments opening their wallets. But I do think that, you know, on one hand, I do still tend to agree with this argument that defense primes are really hard businesses. There is always going to be, in my view, a monopolistic or oligopolistic element to how these markets run. It's not that we're going to come out and see 10 Andrilles all spring up. I think ultimately, defense prime doesn't spring up overnight. And

as you mentioned, you already have Andrille in the US, who by the way, has been very present in Europe and the UK from the very start. You also obviously have our Swedish backed German company, Helsing. And there's some really interesting companies coming out of the UK right now. There's one in stealth at the moment which has been getting a lot of interest both here on the ground but interestingly a lot of the cap table is is American so I think well it's here for America undefeated. The air horn is always ready it's always ready. That's great. I think, look, on one hand, I haven't changed my thesis on defense investing overnight. I still think that there is a monopolistic advantage that companies like Andrew will have here.

But I do think at the same time, this does mark a real change in sentiment and opportunity around European and UK defense. And I think there are a few reasons why. I think number one, if you look at pure dollar spend, Europe and the UK is just coming from a much further or earlier starting point. So if you look at the multiples in terms of pure purchasing and procurement,

they're going to far outspend the US because they've been so behind. So on a pure kind of procurement dollar basis, Europe has to play catch up. So I think that's obviously going to be, tailwind both for companies like Andrel, but also some of the local players. And I do think that this is kind of furthering this idea

of what's called trusted capital. So the opportunity for the US and its allies. So certainly, you know, getting in some contracts by Helsing or a local company here in the UK. I think the second piece that's really interesting is that the UK in particular, is behind from a manufacturing standpoint. So there's gonna be a huge opportunity

for a lot of companies to really onshore here and that could be, you know, American companies who want to build out manufacturing capabilities here in the UK or across mainland Europe. And that is also going to result in your investment dollar spent and a huge opportunity for the defense sector. I think the counter to this, and this goes along with a lot of conversations that I've had with Brian Schimp from Anderle, who, by the way, was having a lot of these conversations at Bilderberg in Stockholm a couple of weeks ago, across the Paris Air Show and with leaders here in the UK and Europe. And that's that the criticism has to be that Europe has had a template for modern warfare on its doorstep for the last several years. Putin first invaded Crimea in 2014. There have been so many blueprints for how modern warfare looks on our doorstep, yet the governments haven't really got the memo. This is really the first time that we're seeing governments come out with real new blueprints for how modern warfare should be conducted. So, you know, the classic example is, you know, who few rebels sending over drones and, you know, the US and its allies having these exquisite exquisite weapons systems to shoot down these these drones. So, you know, Europe has really been asleep at the wheel when it comes to some of these

more kind of modern warfare or scrappy warfare strategies. And I think that from what it sounds like from conversations here on the ground, the government is actually getting the memo now, which does clear that path for startups to enter with a different product spec. I think not to talk up my own book, Being British, but I do think that the UK is leading the pack here. Sorry. You know, the UK has just done a strategic military ground with, it was UK Tech Week a week ago, and Matt Clifford, who's an advisor to the Prime Minister, talked specifically about how there is going to be an opportunity to have a trillion dollar market cap out of the UK, and he actually mentioned that

defense really could be somewhere that we could see that happen. So I think it's time. What about British dynamism? Is there a groundswell of excitement on the ground in Europe? You have some great manufacturers, Bentley, Rolls-Royce, Aston Martin.

And then you also have ARM, so the computing history as well. So it does feel like there's still some very, you know. We just got a new head of MI6. So the one public facing, he was a woman, actually the first ever chief of MI6. And her role actually at MI6 had previously been Q. So I don't know if you followed the James Bond films, but her background was in technology.

That's not just Hollywood creation. I thought that was entirely for the cinema. Well, I mean, I think that it was- The world is a cinema, John. It's the greatest cinema of all time. That would be the adjacent role that she had before. And so, but C, which is the name that is given to the bureau chief,

that is the one front-facing full role of MI6. So, but she obviously does have a background in that space. And so I think it is very interesting. And, you know, it would be remiss to say that the UK has got a fantastic R&D sort of heritage, you know, whether it be in, you know, AI, obviously, we've talked about this before, DEMIS and DeepMinds and a lot of machine learning talent.

We've also had, you also had incredible stuff in robotics and synthetic biology. There's some really fantastic R&D centers outside of London, Oxford, Cambridge, Bristol. And actually we also saw some exciting news in the autonomous vehicle space about a week ago with UK company called Wave who announced their first public road rollout

of autonomous vehicles on public roads, which is going to be in partnership with Uber, which is gonna be the first time we have like a Waymo equivalent experience witnessing them on the streets of London. So yeah, so I think that- We're gonna have, it's Alex Kendall from Wave, is the CEO.

I think we're gonna have him on the show soon, which I'm excited about. Yeah, I think we're gonna have it's Alex Kendall from Wave is the CEO. I think we're gonna have him on the show soon Excited about he's great. And and also I think if you look at some of the work that again Advise it to Downing Street. Matt Clifford has done the the government came out with his AI opportunities plan in at the beginning of the year and in the spending review review last week, the UK committed to spend, I think, $2 billion, or maybe it's two billion pounds on AI opportunities and a further one billion pounds for ARIA, which is an R&D deep tech body. So I think certainly, you know, defense is one angle.

We're also gonna see continued interest in autonomous vehicles and robotics and some of these really deep tech sectors that actually the UK has got a very deep history in, um, that, you know, hopefully is going to translate into market opportunities for both, both local investors, but also us investors that want to get some exposure to some of these increased dollars that are going to be spent.

Interesting. Um, flipping back a bit to the Ukraine situation, is it possible that we see like a drone company come out of Ukraine? Ukraine has a long heritage of fantastic software developers. There's a lot of companies that have had like offshore Ukrainian engineering teams for a long time. Like the, the, the populace has clearly been very technical. But then, you know, the pressure cooker of the war has resulted in just insane industrial capacity. I'm pretty sure they make more drones in Ukraine than I think. Even even China, like anywhere in the world, they're making the most of them.

Now, a lot of them are like handmade and it's it's not fully automated. It's not fully productized. But like my my hope would be the war dies down, but then there's this residual capability that comes out of that. But have you heard any like rumblings about that? Or do you think that there's any sort of like peace dividend that could come out of Ukraine? I think that once, you know, as I alluded to before, the Ukraine has really been a blueprint for, you know, how modern warfare is conducted. And I think that certainly we've, you know, definitely been following very closely in Europe, what's been happening on the frontline in the Ukraine.

I think also, you know, the Americans have also been paying close attention. If you look at a lot of the work that Eric Schmidt has been doing, especially since the US announced that it, you know, its intentions to pull back some of its commitments to the Ukraine. I think you've had private individuals such as, as Eric Schmidt, you know, really take the mantle when it comes to how some of these newer sort of more scrappy drone technologies are being built. So I certainly think that that is going to provide an opportunity for, across procurement on other areas of the continent. I do think that in some ways, and I was talking to a defense founder this morning about this,

there is an opportunity in this middle space. So I think that traditionally we had these exquisite weapon systems, which are, the luxury, pick your car of choice, the Aston Martin of defense. The B2 Spirit. There we go. Okay. And then we had the very kind of scrappy, you know, drones that are being built in the frontline.

And I think what is the really kind of sweet spot right now is going to be trying to fill out some of that gap in the middle. And certainly, you know, if you look at some of the products that Anderil have been building and some of the incumbents that I'm sorry, I should say new entrance that I'm looking at here in the UK, they're really trying to, to try and fill that not quite the very early entry sort of technology pieces, but that kind of one up which are more affordable and you can still use against, you know, your hoothy rebels or whoever, and it's not going to kind of use up your entire budget. But it's also, you know, modern technology, it's,

it's, you know, looking at technologies like, like autonomy, autonomous vehicles. So I think that that is a really strong entry point for some of the incumbents, sorry, the new thought ups we're seeing now. Yeah, it's kind of an interesting wrinkle to the idea of like, when you're ramping up defense budgets as fast as NATO is in this case, it's like the budget itself isn't necessarily as big as America, but there's so much new budget coming online that you're almost better equipped to buy autonomous systems as opposed to the United States and the Army modernization effort is reallocating budget. No one's saying like, oh, yeah, let's double it. Like we don't have the money to double it.

And so every dollar that we allocate to an autonomous we could. But every dollar that we allocate towards an autonomous system a modern system has to come away from an exquisite system that has a ton of Constituents a ton of people that build it a ton of lobbyists come from so many different states exactly different senators that that yeah Whereas if you're bringing net new budget online, it's a lot easier to go with the newest and best technology that's actually equipped for the modern war. My question is will we see a $5 billion company that just makes drones for defense? Could a Neuros be something like that? Or if you look at history of these contractors, you see that they often are very, the primes

are obviously all multi-product, right? And so we will have to see how it develops. Very cool. I think what's most encouraging though for me is the sentiment has changed. So I think there was this hubris, right? Amongst a lot of the, I mean, US and its allies, but particularly in Europe,

where they just wanted to create these exquisite weapons systems that were really never designed to be used. And so I think the biggest shift for me has been kind of like waking up and realizing that this is totally unfit for purpose. And actually you kind of look silly by having these exquisite systems that are completely, you can't use them. So I think that for me, when I start to see more of a kind of cultural shift in government, which is very rare, that's when I think you can start to see some of these impacts trickling into markets and be it in the later stage or in public markets, but then

also really kind of at this, I'd say series A stage at the moment where you're seeing a lot of interest from US and European investors Very cool. I mean, it's really exciting stuff. We got to track it more. I'm excited to talk to some of those founders Wave and Helsing lot to give them on What other situations are you monitoring? It's a lot going on this week we've been we've been I don't know if you've been following the the prediction market space, but with the with the New York City primary was interesting. Is that, is that, is that you paying much attention to that category?

Do you think there's potentially opportunities for new prediction markets or are, is polymarket and other players kind of racing away? I mean, I haven't been following it so closely beyond, you know, it's impossible to even sitting here in London, avoid all the the memes that are coming out about about what's going on in New York. I think that, you know, I think Shane Kuplin is a fantastic operator. I don't know how much space there is in terms of, you know, post deregulation of some of this space, you know, you would think that there are going to be other entrants. I think that, you know, Shane's created such, you know, in some ways, a head start for himself and how Polymarket is doing that I haven't been spending active time looking at sort of new

entrants in that space. But, you know, look, ultimately, our fund has a heritage of gaming. And so I think certainly whenever there's an interesting consumer trend that is unlocked, or there is a regulatory shift that can, I guess, impact how a consumer product is being built, then we do pay attention. But yeah, I've definitely been spending way more time on some of this geopolitics. What about any, you mentioned Wave earlier in the autonomous vehicle space with their UK launch. Are you expecting, has there been any chatter

about what Tesla would do around autonomous vehicles in the UK? I think they sold sort of, I think they sold around 25 or 30,000 cars in the UK last year. And so it could be an interesting dynamic that we'll see with Waymo here in the US and Tesla, where Tesla has a much more efficient way to build a network where they don't have the same capex requirements as someone like Waymo. And I'm interested to see if, you know, how you see that market unfolding in the UK. It's interesting.

I think that Wave has really been the poster child for autonomous in the UK, especially in recent years and its partnership with Uber. They also have launched NSF. I mean, Alex Kendall, I'm sure he'll tell you about this when he comes on. Fantastic founder has been spending a lot of time in San Francisco.

I think an interesting story for me here with the autonomous vehicle space in the UK is that, much like I was saying earlier, the UK has a really strong heritage of deep tech. And there was actually initially another competitor in autonomous vehicles who was sort of incubated out of Cambridge. I mean, so was so was so

it's wave. I think Alex Kendall took his first VC pitch meeting in his Cambridge dormitory or something. You know, the law is cool. It's perfect. But actually, this is I often use autonomous vehicles as an example for the government because there was actually a front runner ahead of wave at the beginning. but because it was incubated out of Cambridge University, I think it was Cambridge Oxford, I think it was Cambridge, I'm ex Oxford, so not to kind of hate on my conclusion. But what was interesting is that there was this technology transfer clause, which meant that the cap table got totally messed up by the arrangements in place from Cambridge University, UK government, which basically said for a product of this nature, the university has to own a certain amount in order to unlock R&D

credits or research spending for this company. And actually, it's a perfect example I use for sort of the old way of building technology in the UK, which was incubated out of these like very old historic universities, enter then Alex Kendall, who also wants to pursue autonomous vehicles. And instead of going to the university or do those sort of traditional incumbent capital providers, goes out and raises venture capital. And it's able to therefore scale much faster, build up the technology. I mean, again, these are not overnight.

Well, you got Masa on board. I'm sure that helps, right? For sure. Yeah, right. And so I think for me, it's maybe just an interesting anecdote which pertains to this sector about, how maybe mentality in Europe is at some more of an inflection point. And I think that autonomous vehicles is one of the examples where Alex Kendall was able to go out and raise venture capital and

really prove out some of these more kind of hard problem, the teal flying car adjacencies in Europe. So I think, look, going forward, let's see. I think that robotics, hardware, deep tech coming out of the UK is not going to go anywhere. I think it's going to continue to see a lot of interest from US investors. I think that the fact that that Wave have partnered with Uber is also significant. So the idea is that it's not it's not simply gonna be you know One company is expected to be able to do everything I think that on a distribution and kind of regs perspective it makes a lot of sense to have been partnered With uber and I think Dara was here Yesterday, so yeah, so look I am I'm let's see how the stage four trials go here

I think it's gonna be it's gonna be a bit of a culture shock for the Brits here to see the cars driving around. Well, I think you could have a culture shock. You put a Waymo in the streets of London and say it's driving on the wrong side of the road. No one would have a problem with that because Waymo is a Jaguar. That's a British car.

Oh, so it might feel at home. But the Wave car is built on the Nissan platform, which is extremely foreign to the other Shemines. I didn't hear rumors though that the Waymo was going to change to a Chinese supply. Oh, interesting. Yeah, this is a lot of people. I was really hoping they went with Bentley.

Yes. Bentley Waymo. Yes. The Conti Waymo. We'll pitch Alex when he comes on from Wave. We'll tell him, hey, let's rip out Nissan. Let's get on the Continental GT platform. This is logical.

Exactly. We need some James Bond approved autonomous skills on the streets. I'm a big Waymo Maxi, so I'm just excited to be able to translate that to the times that I'm here in London. But let's see. Awesome. Well, thanks so much for stopping by.

Great to see you. This was fantastic. Have a great evening. Great to see you guys, as always. We'll talk to you soon. Bye. Bye. Let's go back to the timeline, talk about investment platform Republic.

Mert Helius.dev, friend of the show, says, big news, soon you will be able to trade SpaceX on Solana, which will be followed by Cursor, Ramp, XAI, and more. Internet, capital, markets. Maybe they'll be able to trade Numeral one day. Numeral HQ, sales tax on autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance.

This is from The Washington. This, we can kind of go through the journal article. Investment platform Republic plans to use blockchain technology to sell investors exposure to SpaceX another effort in an arms race to give regular traders access to hot startups. Yep. And something that was like bringing some predicted, but felt like it had immense regulatory pressure, but they

just I guess they're figuring it out. Yeah, which is crazy. So we're going to have the CEO of Republic on the show Friday very excited about Ken he is an animal but we can break this down so they are planning to sell digital tokens that mirror the performance of SpaceX's private shares in a move largely untested with regulators and untested with companies because you know historically illiquidity is one little trick. No, CEOs.

Illiquidity is a feature. Yeah, you don't want your shares to be getting constantly marked to market, right? Or imagine what Anderil shares would have been doing. Yeah, it depends. It depends. I mean, I remember a story about Enron during the dot com boom.

The shares were absolutely mooning because they were kind of doing some cooking of the books. They were cooking. Everything looked really good. They were cooking. They were cooking the books. Wrong kind of cooking. But I mean the stock was truly on like a generational run

and they had in the elevator, when you went into the office, you got in the elevator, the share price was right there in the elevator displayed at all times. And so you'd come in, and the, oh, stock's up. I'm happy. I'm working hard today. I'm worth more.

You multiply it by the number of shares you own, you just know that your net worth just went up. By the time Ken Griffin showed up, it's probably flashing zero. Yeah, they must have ripped that out of the elevator by then. But yeah, so they're going to start with SpaceX. It could be good or bad. And they plan to.

And SpaceX, for the most part, only goes up. Sometimes the rockets blow up on the launch pad. But token buyers won't have access to companies' financials and won't own actual stakes. The tokens could draw scrutiny from regulators, which we're in a friendly regulatory environment. Republic says it won't need permission from the companies who's token it is selling

because the tokens represent securities sold by Republic. So this is kind of like a stable coin play where for every token that is sold, they will try and go and buy one share, and so they'll be backed one to one or something like that, or is it more like a mean token? That's what it share. And so they'll be backed one to one or something like that. Or is it more like a mean token? That's what it seems like.

Or they'll fractionalize it, or it'll be, you know, tokens that represent ownership in an LLC, you know, an SPV that owns shares. What's weird is that you kind of have this like dual float situation where there could be, like someone could be willing to pay a massive premium for these tokens that they no longer track the underlying price of the secondary shares.

So if SpaceX is trading at like a $350 billion market cap, but someone wants to get in and they're willing to pay up to a $500 billion market cap, the token could trade. But that doesn't happen with stable coins because no one ever says, hey, I'm interested in paying more than a dollar for one stable coin dollar. These are unstable coins, John. These are unstable.

It'll be interesting to see where they actually trade. I mean, it should be some sort of price signal, but at the same time, if the supply is so restricted, I mean, they're saying that the Republic says it's able to offer the tokens in part because of a provision in the 2012 Jobs Act that lets private US companies issue securities and raise up to $5 million a year from retail investors.

Republic says it would be the issuing company and the tokens are essentially a note that assures token holders they will be paid any increase in the price of SpaceX's common stock if it goes public or is purchased. Now, SpaceX has $350 billion of value, right? And so if you're thinking about we are going to offer a $5 million slug of that, what will demand for that be like

and will that track at all with the broader private market? It could be completely disconnected. with the broader private market. It could be completely disconnected. Yeah, and important context, Ken, the CEO, was general counsel over at AngelList in 2014 to 2016. So he's been in this space for over a decade now. And so anyways, the big takeaway here is that one thing is for sure,

there will be, I think, an exceptional amount of demand for this product. The question is, will regulators like it? Will companies like it? And it's possible that it'll be no on both fronts, but it's possible that, you know, at the same time, this sort of overwhelming consumer demand, and I think that in general, retail investors should be and can fairly be frustrated by not having access to companies like SpaceX, Figma, Epic Games, Stripe, Anthropic, Ramp, Cursor, Andro, Mercury, Canvass.

So these are all companies that they're planning to launch even linear. This is almost looks like a mirror of our partners is that you on their custom relationship man not yet Adio is the AR native CRM the bill scales and grows your company John at EO comm slash TPPN check it out but public has a license there's a isn't there a SPAC that bought SpaceX secondary and trades at like a massive premium to the underlying value of the asset? It's not a SPAC, I don't think it's Destiny.xyz.

Yeah, and so, I mean, like there clearly is demand in the public markets for private market shares. And so there have been a number of platforms and a number of strategies attempted. This is the first one that's using crypto, but it'll be extremely exciting to follow what happens with the actual prices of these assets once they got.

And if you're interested in trading. Yeah, right now the Destiny Tech 100 is trading at $425 million. Okay. And I'm trying to figure out the book value. The book value. I think it is a fraction of425 million. Okay. And I'm trying to figure out the book value. I think it is a fraction of that based on what investors actually mark. Yeah, and it's because there's such limited demand,

such limited liquidity. Yeah, there's limited supply. Yeah, yeah, limited supply. And so much demand that people are just willing to pay a multiple of what. Which is fascinating. Institutional, so it's funny because in this effort to get retail access to these highly sought after private company shares,

retail gets kind of hosed by ending up having to pay a massive premium. But if you're an investor who takes it seriously, you gotta get on public.com. Investing for those who take it seriously, they got multi-asset investing, industryleading yields, and they're trusted by millions. We have other news from Palantir. Oh, George Savulka, founder of Hebia AI,

he's coming on the show soon. He is thrilled to share his acquisition of FlashDocs, the number one AI company in AI slide deck generation. That's fun. FlashDocs turns prompts into fully branded presentations in seconds. Goodbye PowerPoint. I need this badly.

This is very helpful. I mean, I'm interested to see how he bakes this in because he's been focused on the Wall Street crowd, the hedge funds and the investment banks. So could be more of like a B2B product than a generalization product. Feels that way. Feels that way.

But we'll talk to him and figure out. Yeah, and I expect some pushback from slides, crafts people. Yes. People that treat the making of a great deck, something almost more than an art form. Yes. And so, interested to see the outputs here and we'll talk with him live.

Yes. Palantir has some news which we'll talk about in a little bit. They have signed a hundred million dollar five year deal with the nuclear company. Yes. I had never heard of the nuclear company before. Well we'll ask Mike Gallagher about it

when he hops on the show. And we have Dan Shipper joining in a minute to talk about a new product that he's launching under every his parent company and media. Is he running out of home ads for it yet? Not yet, but he should. He really should. He launched a great video.

Out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only ad quick combines technology, out of home expertise and data to enable efficient seamless ad buying across the globe. The, Mark Andreessen says the term chat GPT wrapper is tired and really really wrong quoting Andre Carpathy. Says plus one for context engineering,

over prompt engineering. People associate prompts with short tasks, short task descriptions you'd give an LLM in your day-to-day use when in every industrial strength LLM app, context engineering is the delicate art and science of filling the context window. I like Max Meyer chiming in here, kinetic energy rapper, gasoline rapper,

aeronautical lift rapper, everything's a a rapper should we bring in our next guest let's do it welcome Dan what's going on welcome to the show good to see you guys can hear me yeah we can hear you loud and clear great to have you back you're always calling in from exotic places where you say it was entropic dev day where are you now I am currently in a cabin in upstate New York in Hudson Valley with Hersh Agarwal CTO co-founder of the browser company a good friend of mine and another another friend of ours and Hersh's wife and their baby, so it's a it's it's really fun time amazing Let's get right into it. What are you launching today?

Break it down. We launched publicly Quora, which is, you can think of it like a chief of staff for your email that costs $15 a month instead of 150K. So what Quora does is it sits on your email, connects to your Gmail, it screens your email. So when emails come in, it decides, is this important? Do you need to see it right now? Is it urgent? If it is, it makes it to your inbox. If not,

it automatically archives it. For anything that's a common request, Quora will pre-draft a response for you. So you open your email, anything in your inbox has a response. And then twice a day, we send you what we call a brief, which is a really beautiful summary of everything that's in your inbox that you need to see see but you don't need to respond to And so you can basically like do three hours of email by just scrolling through in 30 seconds. It's very very cool We also have a full-on assistant so you can chat with you can email it You can tell it all about your preferences all that kind of stuff. It's been in beta for about six months We have about 2500 between 2500 and 3000 users users on it

and We are launching it publicly today. So anyone can sign up 2500 between 2500 and 3000 users users on it and We are launching it publicly today. So anyone can sign up. It's 15 bucks a month It also is bundled with every so if you sign up for every 20 bucks a month you get access to Cora Spiral which is our content automation tool sparkle, which is our file organizer and all the all the writing that we do on every all for that price You guys are cooking you got to raise prices $100 a month. You got to get those numbers up. I'm thinking about it.

But now that you said that, I can blame it on you. So thank you. I appreciate it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You can say, Jordy complained that the price was too low. Very cool. The perfect irony of the timing here is right before we got on the show, John was onboarding.

I'm texting him. Like an EA type person who just joined the team. And literally saying all these things. These kind of emails, like just archive them. These ones, I want to see it, but it's not important. I'm sending the link right now so he can install it on my inbox. So we'll get it spun up.

I have a bunch of very specific questions because I'm in the perfect consumer for this. No, and this is a product you've been asking for. Yes, yes. I've been asking for this. Because, yeah, I mean, I'm like the product you've been asking. Yes, yes. I've been asking for this because yeah, I mean I paid for like the top tier of Gemini and like there's this Gemini button, but it just, it just gives me bullet points for each individual email. It doesn't do anything at like a higher level abstraction, at least that I can tell. And then when I search, if I search for Dan shipper, it will, it will

search like the JavaScript in some marketing email and find that there's some token in the URL that has the text SHIP and then it'll surface that. And I'm like, instead of just the email that's obviously from Dan Shipper, how does it not know to rank the name of the person higher than some embedded CSS class or something.

It's always super frustrating. I've been very, very upset about the Gmail search functionality for a while. I feel like it's, it's not that it's like degraded, it's more like the nature of email has scaled where I think every person gets about an order of magnitude more email than they did, you know, a decade ago. And so the traditional search tools

are just completely breaking down and then also email marketers are getting a couple hundred a day and you're averaging even 20 seconds in email. It's a lot, it's a lot. And yeah, and then also the nature of the way people write emails. Like there's so many of these hacks

where people say, like they'll do that thing where they'll say like, if you're doing like outbound for every, for example, you'll be like introducing Dan and John. And it's like, wait, like this is a sales email. Like why are you acting like we're, why are you making a warm intro? Or people will do like re, like signing up for every. And it's like, wait, this isn't a re?

Like you're not responding to anything. Like you just put that in the title. And there's a, wait, this isn't a re? Like, you're not responding to anything? Like, you just put that in the title. And there's a million of those little hacks that I feel like the traditional Gmail workflow has been exploited by kind of black hat emailers. SDRs. SDR, black hat SDRs. And I feel like it's the perfect thing

that you need to hammer with AI. So I'm excited for that. Talk to me about the drafting of responses. I was talking to the fellow on our team about how, like we get a lot of pitches from people that say, hey, I have news, I want to come on the show. Sometimes I want to let people down like softly and say, hey, this isn't a fit right now,

but we want to have you on when there's news or, and I kind of have like a template for that. I'm a little bit hesitant to to send something that has like a an LLM flavor to it so I'd almost rather just have a like a pre-written script but I would also be okay with some fine tuning like how are you thinking about making sure that the voice doesn't spiel to LLME? So basically what we do is when you onboard, we will look at all about a thousand of your previous emails and abstract out, okay, what's your job title? How do you normally talk to people? What do you normally do in these kinds of situations? So for company emails that

you get, so like a pitch, what do you normally say? And then we create a set of procedures for ourselves so that when we do the draft, we can refer back to, okay, you have a procedure for a process for, here's how I respond to pitches. And that's what we use to fill in the draft. So it's basically we use your historical emails to inform how we, how we write the draft to your earlier points. So I think those are, I think those are really, really important. Um, one thing that, uh, I think connects to something you said earlier in the

show is, um, the, the idea of, of rappers. So like in a lot of ways, this is a rapper on Claude and Jeb and I, right. Um, and what's really interesting is I think there was this narrative about like a year ago, two years ago that all the incumbents were going to win an AI because all they have to do is bolt on AI. And you can see like if you go into Gmail, like their AI features or the search features, like they're still not very good. And that's because it's so hard when you have a scaled, huge user base that is used to things working in it in a particular way and a large organization that's used to building things in a particular way to actually start from a particular way and a large organization that's used to building things

in a particular way to actually start from a blank slate and get the most out of a new technology. And so I think that's one of the things that we and other startups like us can do for email that like a Google can't or it'd be much harder for them to do. And I think you can see that, for example, in some of the filtering things that you're talking about.

So one of the problems with the sort of black or gray hat emails that you get is it's a little bit hard to get a specific rule for, okay, this is the kind of email that I don't want to see. It's not going to be from a particular sender. It's not going to have a particular thing in a subject line. It's kind of a vibe. And historical email filtering has to be very rule-based. It has to be from this center.

It has to have this keyword in the subject line, all that kind of stuff. And language models change that. Now you can filter emails on vibes, and that's what Quora does. It also has a rules-based filter too, but it has a vibes filter to be like, anything that looks like this, get rid of it,

or make sure I see it. And that's much more powerful. And the funny thing is people have been training, you know, a chief of staff or an EA to detect the vibe of an email. Yeah, exactly. Like this is the kind of email, like it looks salesy, but it's actually really interesting

because it came from this person and it's an opportunity that aligns with what we're, with our focus. So it's interesting. Yeah. And I think incumbents, it's very hard. It's going to be harder for them to do that, because it's very expensive to filter on vibes for everybody's

email account, because there's hundreds of millions or billions of people getting billions and billions and billions of emails a day. And so startups, because you start from a smaller user base, you can do the expensive LLM inference that is going to get much cheaper in five years. But for now, it's not affordable unless you have a smaller user base that's all paying. And that's something that we can do, which I think is great. How do you think the actual email infrastructure and Rails evolved? It seems like every six months, Google Workspace just sends me an email that's like, we're raising prices.

And I always think it's funny because it's like they could theoretically just continue to raise the price for a very long time without much pushback. Because what's the alternative, at least as a company? How do you see that evolving? Have you thought about other companies like Hey, that actually want to kind of own the underlying layer,

the deeper layer and? That's a good question. I mean, I think one of the beauties of emails is, of email is that it's decentralized and interoperable. And so right now we sit on top of Gmail, but we will eventually add support for Outlook and other third-party, like POP or IMAP-type services. And I think that that's great.

And I don't think that you'll see us create our own. Like, hey, that's very hard and complicated to make sure that you deliver emails and you don't get stuck in spam and all that kind of stuff. And I think we've been focused on building at a layer above that because that's where the new stuff is. There's something completely different about software that doesn't have to operate on ordered lists. So email is just an ordered list of things in the order they came in. And software doesn't have to do that anymore. You can rearrange everything based on priority, based on vibes.

And so I think for us, I'd probably rather not get stuck at a layer of ensuring email deliverability for senders and all that kind of stuff and let Google do what Google's good at for now. But who knows? I think eventually this will be an email client where you can do all of your email through Quora. For now, it interoperates with Gmail, with Superhuman, so that we don't have to mess with all those baseline features. Even creating an email sending feature where you're like, it's a compose window, there's

infinite amounts of complexity in there that you can get stuck doing if you're a small startup that we've tried to avoid to just make something that's so good at one or two things that you'll use it even if it doesn't have everything. How are you building the team? What's the ambition with this product specifically? I know you wear a lot of hats. Only wear the every hat. Yeah, so there's a super talented team building this,

and it would not be possible without them. So Kieran Klassen is the GM of Quora. He's incredibly technical as a Rails guy, like very agent-pilled, like he's running like 15 cloud code instances at any one time. And we just we have our most viral YouTube video ever is him like talking about how he uses agents that has has 50,000 views from a week ago.

Amazing. And so he runs Quora. He also used to be, in his past, he was a composer and a pastry chef. So he's got this crazy resume. And he's amazing. We also have one engineer. His name is Natesh, who's also amazing.

And they're just like, I think they're both iterating on what email can be and iterating on how to actually build software in this new paradigm, because there's a whole new way of building software with agents. I think that they use this term that I love called compounding engineering, which is doing the work so that each successive feature you build is easier than the last.

And I think that that has allowed them as a super small team to just move really fast and build this beautiful product that is scaling to thousands and thousands of users. We also internally, Brandon Gell is our head of studio. So he works a lot with them. And then we have a whole creative team. So Lucas Crespo is our creative lead.

And he did the video and all the visuals and all that kind of stuff. So, and I'm helping out with whatever, wherever I'm needed, but I think all of those people are doing an incredible job and I think we want to kill email. I think you should do email very differently. I think generally we all have a very anxious attachment to our inbox And it's quite unhealthy and one of the things that I've noticed using Cora is Everything is much quieter and that can be really unsettling because you're like where like what if I miss something? but it has turned out at least for me that

mostly it's fine and only 10% of the emails or 20% of the emails are things I actually need to see and And only 10% of the emails or 20% of the emails are things I actually need to see. And when I use it, I get to spend much more of my time doing shit that I actually care about and want to do rather than email. And that's a very exciting mission for us and for this product. I feel like I developed email anxiety

probably when I was like 10 years old, whenever I first got an email, it was like summer break and everyone was just sending emails around and stuff Yeah, and it's stuck with me ever since so thanks email, but thank you for trying to help fix it We're excited to try the product and always great to have you on the show. Check it out. Thanks for having me Have fun in the woods. Thank you. Yeah, but up next we have Eliano Eunice from Palantir coming in the studio Oh Tyler's perking up sitting upiano Eunice from Palantir coming in the studio. Oh, Tyler's perking up, sitting up straight, looking for some Palantir merch.

The Palantir merch king himself in the studio. There he is, head to toe. Head to toe. Is this a dripped out technology brothers? What's going on here? You know, you just kind of gave me an idea. I should get like, you know, like the Chicago Bulls, like, you know, 90s are coming out. they got the music and the coach for the Bulls is Phil Jackson and then they start ripping them off

That's the next that's like the next stage of the Palantir March Store So but anyways, good to see you guys good to see you too How many how many pull-ups have you done today? How many were kipping? How many were non-kipping? You know, it's funny I have that tweet right over here How many were non-kipping you know it's funny. I have that tweet right over here He's got the printout this was this was the beginning of our journey as like you know I remember I was just sitting there one day, and I and I get this clip I'm like who the hell are these guys and it was like you guys had just started out And you guys geeking out about it

And it was just really awesome to just see how far you guys have come since that it's been it's been it's been like really Crazy growth, but I actually thank you for printing since then. It's been like really crazy growth. But I actually did go to the gym. Well thank you for printing that out. That's a sign of great respect in our culture. It is a sign of great respect in our culture. And I actually went to DC, I did pull ups with Eliano. I can attest he can do a ton of non-kipping pull ups.

Yeah, well I'll admit I didn't go this morning because we launched the store and it was pretty, you know you're making sure everything's working and so, but I will be at the gym tomorrow, John, and then I will bring the newspapers into the sauna. Okay. Give us the story of the launch, the store, the URL, where can people go buy? Well, so first and foremost, the URL is store.palantir.com, but I think we sold everything out.

We sold more merch in three hours than we did pretty much in any day, maybe in any week that we did last year. So the demand is at all time highs. And basically this is the third iteration of the store. You know, when we first launched the store, it was well before I started, it was kind of, you know, as a company was going to DPO, they launched the store as a way to sort of cultivate people that were interested in the company. And then they took it offline because it kind of became a cost center.

No one really owned it. It was kind of like made in China, the process, the shipping and everything was kind of weird. And so then last year, about a year ago, I was like, Hey, like, we need to do this. And I eventually did it after a lot of internal lobbying and it ended up being a success, but around, you know, really about a month after we launched the store last year, it just, something didn't feel right. It didn't feel like Palantir.

It didn't feel like the aesthetic, the website, the merch, like it was made in, like we were buying hats that were blanks that were made in other countries. And I was just like, Palantir is a special company. We do things a special way. We do things our way. And so I was like, we need to just tear this down and rebuild it.

So that's what we did. And today, about seven months later of working on it, we launched a store, everything's made in the USA. We're buying literally shirts from scratch. We're like, we're working with the mills and they're milling the cotton and we're making things all in America Really want a hand-sewn version from you

I want I want to I want to see you on the ground in the factory American dynamism You know just yeah, give us the stats how much have you sold are we turning it into a profit center? How big is what I care about? How big is the scale the merch operation can we? I don't know if I'm allowed to like give out details because then it's like you like it's like during That's what I care about. How big is the scale of the merch operation? Can we ring the gong for anything? I don't know if I'm allowed to give out details, because then it's like during market hours, people might. I don't want the lawyers to say maybe.

Oh, yeah, sure, sure, sure. I will say this. This could cause some major price action, if people realize that it's not just the ontology business, it's also in the on-shoring apparel, which is hundreds of billions of dollars. Well, we're still going to ring the gong for you, because congratulations on the launch.

Fantastic. I appreciate it. I will say, our car, the Palantir, as if it's last earnings, it like what 80 percent 80 something percent and margins like a really good high-end you know company that does like you know Hermes or Louis Vuitton they're doing like 60 percent margins so until I can get to like 80 percent margins I'm not even gonna go to Dave Glazer the CFO and even try to like get this in there but for now the intent of the store really is just to get the stuff out there,

get good stuff out there, and grow the pot that I have to buy and then resell stuff and invest in really cool, just really unique one of 15 items that are gonna be four or five figures. I mean, we're gonna take this to the next level. Let's go. It's amazing.

If you get into bespoke suits, call us. Call us first. The Palantir suit. We're happy to wear it. We're happy to wear that. The Palantir monogrammed suit. And I'm saying this. You're not saying this, of course, because I can say this as a newsmaxer.

But you move the market. If I was just looking at the stock chart, the stock popped this morning. I'm assuming it's because of the merch store. Yep. And the market cap is moved by about three billion, so. Wow.

Fantastic, fantastic work. Congratulations, no comment from Eliano. Just say no comment. But it's clear, it's clear what's going on. The story is very obvious. You know, you do have a gentleman named Mike Gallagher coming on later, who by the way, is probably the biggest merch

fan at the club. Like nobody likes Palantir merch or like I'll get so if you think I go to the gym early, Mike goes to the gym at like 5am religiously, he will send me messages, he'll signal me from the gym and being like, like what about an XYZ and I'm like, bro, like stranger. And he really loves merch. And you'll get a chance to talk to him about maybe some other reasons why the market cap may have moved. Yes, yes, yes. I saw him name drop you on a podcast he was on.

And I was like, yes, let's go. Eliana. He sees a vision. He sees the vision. So, but no, I'm really, I think, I don't know. I've thought a lot about the merch store and just sort of like my role at Palantir and, and sort of how I engage the community. And I think it's, it really boils down to, you know,

the founders and Dr. Karp and all these people and all these tremendous engineers have built this like great company. And we just, you know, we're a company that stands for something. And so we've really built this community organically. I didn't build the community. I just cultivate it. And it just feels really good to serve them and just give them as much gear as possible. And so the demand, the numbers today, again, I can't share them, but the numbers today were way above anything I expected to the point where the site almost crashed within four minutes. And I mean, we're talking about some of the

most traffic that we got was from South Korea. And like we have a that's our third largest market despite, you know additional shipping. Let's give it up for the South Koreans Palantirians out in South Korea No, I thought it was funny. I looked on the website at all It's all pre-order right now because I think you guys sold out and I was like wait They can't be doing this because of like, you know, a lot of peril companies will do pre-order because they don't have the balance sheet to pre-order. Working capital is a real issue.

So the reason for the eight weeks, and the reason for that is actually, so when the whole tariff thing happened, all of these people were then looking to do stuff to find alternatives inside the USA. And so we were already sort of tracking the whole USA thing. So our vendor, they're working, I can't, they've asked me and we wanna just kind of keep it secret

because they're very special. But basically the amount of demand that they got for like cotton that was American source and everything like skyrocketed And then we tweaked some designs and stuff So that's the reason for the delay but as we sort of ramped this up and get it like fully, you know Basically like in production My hope is that we won't sell out of everything but we'll actually sell out of a few items like sure We're gonna have limited drops of different products that are unique

But you know, hopefully the the hats and some core shirts will be available 24 seven. That's amazing. Thank you so much. Well, it's great to see you. Let's get a workout in soon. Yeah, let's do it. Awesome.

Thank you gentlemen. Have a good rest of your day. Cheers. And up next, we have Mike Gallagher from Palantir Technologies. He's the head of defense. And he put out some comments about the partnership between Palantir and the nuclear

company. Says this partnership marks the first time Palantir software will be used to help power the next generation of nuclear energy infrastructure. So we're excited to bring him and welcome him to the show. Mike, how are you doing? What's going on? Great to have you. What's going on guys? I'm honored to be with you. You guys are famous. You're famous too. Thank you for joining. I used to be, man. I used to be. Now I'm just, you know, I'm a has-been. You're a technology brother. You're one of us. You're one of us.

I mean, that's actually a great place to start. I want to talk about your career and the transition that you went through. There's, there's, you know, obviously it's very exciting what you're doing now. There's also this story about like, I want you in the government too. And I want people like you in the government. And so is the government a place for high performing technologists to flourish? Is there something that needs to change there? I'm interested in digging into that. But why don't you kick it off with kind of like how you tell the story of how you got here to this moment? Yeah, I think obviously, you know, from Northeast Wisconsin, Green Bay, and I kind of grew up always interested in the world outside of Wisconsin in the United States. When I went to college, I studied Arabic in the Middle East, I became fascinated by what was happening. I was an undergrad when we invaded Iraq.

I was a senior in high school during 9-11. And the more I dug into that intellectually, the more I became convinced that I would regret it if I didn't step up and serve. Felt very strongly about service to country, but also on a practical level, really wanted to apply the language and regional and cultural skills I was learning

in a non-ac non academic context and felt like there was no greater challenge than joining the United States Marine Corps. So even though I didn't come from a military family, didn't know anything about the military, I just felt like this was the hardest crucible that I could throw myself into. I had a just really an awesome experience, couple of great deployments, learned a ton with the counter intelligence, human intelligence officer. experience, a couple of great deployments, learned a ton, was the counter intelligence human intelligence officer. And it's kind of similarly when when I got out of the Marine Corps, and you know, I worked on a presidential campaign, I worked

in the Senate as a Middle East guy never thought about running myself. I moved back home to work for this energy and supply chain management company. When some people reached out to me about running for Congress, I was very young, I was 31. And I my initial reaction was hell no. I mean, it was just I was not I didn't know anything about raising money. You know, I was the guy who like wrote the white paper that someone read before they went on TV. I wasn't wouldn't be on TV myself. I kind

of thought of myself as like a pure national security professional, not a politician. I still don't think of myself that way. But honestly, it was the fact that it scared me that like led me to do it. I felt like anything that forced you outside your comfort zone is good for your development personally. And it was I felt like it would be an extension of my military service, a way to continue my work of enhancing American deterrence, albeit from a legislative perspective. And, and I'll swear I'll wrap up after this. I went into it knowing it was never going to be a career for me. I was the youngest guy in Congress when I got elected. I always conceived of it as a season of service. I think the problem with Congress is that we have too many career politicians. So I

kind of always had in my head, I do a decade and when I decided to leave, Palantir was just an obvious way for me to continue that mission. I mean, Palantir was one of the rare companies that was unapologetically pro-American military, committed 100% to enhancing deterrence, willing to say that we're the good guys, the commies are the bad guys. And I really felt like it was a continuation of that theme in my career where something really hard that scared the crap out of me, IE now being surrounded by genius, you know, like 20 somethings that make me feel stupid.

And then a continuation of the mission. And I've, you know, I've kind of dedicated my life to this idea of preventing World War III. And I'm seeing kind of how we marry the tech community with the warfighter every day in Palantir. So that's the short version. And it's been really exciting.

Is that a typical flow for elected politicians? Someone reaches out to them. Is there kind of like a scouting department in our government that's looking for up and coming talent and then giving them the ideas? Because I feel like the story that most people tell is is this guy, you know, wants power wants to you know, he's on a war path, everyone tells him no, and then he runs and gets elected or kind of sheer force of will. But but which direction does it go more commonly was your path uncommon or is it more than norm? uncommon or is it more the norm? Well to be clear I don't want to pretend like this was some pure aw shucks Mr. Smith goes to Washington thing right like clearly I was driven ambitious like kind of always had a drive my whole life yeah

and wanted to like test myself but honestly it was not like I didn't think of like the political domain at that point in my life. I think more often than not, people are drawn to politics. It used to be the case that like you'd go to law school, you'd become a lawyer, you'd run for state or local office. And then that would be a natural kind of like farm team that would lead into Congress. And then you'd run for Senate and then you try and be president one day. I actually think that's changing a little bit.

Like one actually healthy thing I saw during my time in Congress is we started to get more young veterans, veterans of the kind of 9-11 wars running for office, which created a cool bipartisan group of legislators that were willing to work together on stuff. I think, you know, I think we're seeing voters like wanting to have more outsiders, whether it's, you know, business people, traditional or tech bros,

like, you know, you guys talk to a lot. I think people are just tired of business as usual. Everyone's a lawyer. It used to be everyone, every single person was a lawyer. Well, also, like, being a lawyer, yeah, being a lawyer seems miserable to me. No offense, lawyers. But I don't know. And I will say finally, I went in with the assumption that the fundamental problem with Congress was the people, right? The people were either purely Machiavellian, ambitious or like horribly corrupt and just didn't attract the right people. Now, to be be sure there are plenty

of people that like would you know could not like they can't leave Congress because they're otherwise unemployable and like you know they're like they're not like the greatest in the world. But I was actually pleasantly surprised with the quality the talent as well as the patriotism and I would say most people run for Congress wanting to serve the country, wanting to make a difference, wanting to do right by, you know, the part of the country that they're from. And they get forced into a system

where the incentives really don't reward hard work in the domain that Congress should be focused on, right? Like there's really no reward for doing the boring work of oversight of the executive branch, of caring about the legislative process. The modern Congress has become so structurally weak

that people channel their ambition into building a media platform, social media in particular, and that almost becomes their full-time job. And that's really a problem, because we need Congress to focus on the nuts and bolts of budgeting, of oversight, of reclaiming its authority from the executive branch. I came to believe that kind of the fundamental problem with most things is that we've become so unbalanced in terms of the overall power of the federal government. And then within the federal government, the power is purely concentrated now in the executive branch,

which is why our presidential campaigns get so intense every four years, because the stakes are high, right? Everything is done via executive order and it has profound consequences for every business. I think a healthier balance would be if Congress Article 1, which was envisioned by our framers

to be the dominant branch of government. In fact, they were concerned that Congress would grow too powerful. They never would to be the dominant branch of government. In fact, they were concerned that Congress would grow too powerful. They never would have envisioned the current state of affairs. Congress surrendering its power since the 70s and then in bipartisan fashion continuing that trend has had really perverse and unintended consequences

for our politics and it's why they've become so intense. And why people are turned off by it, I think. In our lifetime, do you think we will see term limits in Congress at all? It seems like a lot of smart people, seeing certain actors over the last decade, would feel that that would be beneficial to the United States.

It's this weird distortion where it feels like people are in power for a long time, but not even necessarily thinking in decades or a long time, but not even necessarily thinking in decades or super long term. They're thinking in, you know, election cycles and kind of create some distortions, but I'm curious what you think having been in there. You know, it's funny, man.

By the way, can I say you have great flow? I just want to throw that out there. Both of you, in fact, as someone who's losing his hair, I just have to admire it and, you know, cherish it. Gentlemen, some people should just be news anchors. It's funny, like when I first came in and I got elected in 2016 and we thought like our freshman class Democrats and Republicans, we thought we had serious momentum behind a term limits bill.

We had a bipartisan term limits bill. I remember going to the White House. So this was Trump's first year in office. A group of six of us, three Republicans, three Democrats went to the Oval Office to get Trump's support on our term limits bill. Because our basic theory was unless the president was using the bully pulpit to force congressional leaders to do it, it would never happen. And so if memory serves Trump actually, we did about it endorsing the bill.

And I remember I did some selfie video, you know, having just a complaint about members of Congress focusing on social media. This is probably the day you got a dab on. You got a dab on. I remember doing some like selfie video coming out of the White House and I genuinely thought in that moment that we had momentum behind a term limits bill. It's overwhelmingly popular with the American people. The counterarguments which we can discuss I don't think are persuasive.

What was unique about our bill and the reason we thought it might have a chance of passing? Well, two things. One, we were in that moment to sort of drain the swamp moment. The reason Trump got elected the first time, you know, everyone's disgusted with the status quo business as usual. He had made a pledge late in the campaign that he's going to support term limits. And then secondly, we kind of phased it in. So what was unique about our bill is we applied it to our class

and all subsequent. That's what I was going to say. You grandfather in if you're if you're a career politician and you're like, I got another 15 years that I was planning on really, you know, running it around here. You let him phase out. And then the new the new guard, you put some limits on them. And then it totally grandfather and the grandfathers. And they just sort of die off over time. And then the new people. So and then and then we made it equal in the grandfather and the grandfathers and they just sort of die off over time. And then the new people.

So, and then, and then we made it equal in the house and the Senate, 12 years in the house, so six terms and then 12 years in the Senate. So theoretically, someone could do 24 years. I could do 12 in the house, run for Senate. And so that seemed generous to us, but it died. It died a slow death and then a sudden death. You know, the problem is, you know, nobody in leadership wants to bring a term limits bill to the floor because they fear it endangers their own power. So I really do think

the paradox, it's like the things we need to do to enhance the power and the functionality of the modern Congress actually require an over empowered president to make them happen. Otherwise, Congress won't do it on its own. And I was never able to transcend that paradox, if it makes sense. Yeah, yeah. I want to kind of wrestle with this idea of, you know, the executive branch having power. There are term limits there. We've also had a wildly back and forth executive branch with Trump for four years, then Biden, then back to Trump, kind of unprecedented.

We had previously been in eight year stretches for a while. And I wanna run a theory by you around Iran. My working theory is that they're not happy with how things are going right now. And part of that is because, part of how Iran got into this particular situation is that they potentially saw America

as not supporting Israel aggressively during the Biden administration. And more importantly, the idea of a president who would strongly support Israel like Donald Trump would, was it was unthinkable that he would get elected again because he was being indicted and he was seen as kind of like a joke almost and was deplatformed from social media how was this guy even have a Pinterest account he didn't even have a Pinterest account and so he he so so if you're if you're Iran and you're thinking well America is

backing off and doesn't seem to be coming back on the offensive anytime soon. Now is the time to start ramping up spending with the Houthis and Hamas and Hezbollah. But then, surprise, Trump's in. Now we have to deal with the consequences of that. And so, in this weird way, America feels almost unpredictable geopolitically, and maybe that's an advantage if you take it seriously, but maybe it's a risk. And to your point about wanting to avert avert World War Three, I'm wondering about the current structure of the executive branch changing hands every four years. Is that bullish for avoiding World War Three? Or is it a risk? Do we need to just tussle with it more? Like how do you think about all those different concepts? Yeah, well, first of all, great question. A lot of interesting threads to pull on there. The first I would say, I'll go even further back

than the Biden administration to when we started to negotiate in earnest with Iran of its over-succulent program in the second half of the Obama administration. And really it was sort of like covert negotiations that then become overt amidst the backdrop of a region that had gone from all this hope around the Arab Spring turned Arab winter, Syrian civil war, coup in Egypt, just chaos everywhere. And then Obama was pursuing this nuclear deal with Iran. Obama had sort of

a theory about the region. He talked about creating a new equilibrium in the Middle East whereby we would sort of distance ourselves from Israel and balance sort of a recognize Iran's enhanced power and role in the region and use Iran to balance against the Sunni Arab Gulf states and Israel. The only problem is that that new equilibrium created intense disequilibrium and missed the real story, which was the only path to equilibrium in the region is to build off this alignment of interests between Israel and the Sunni Arab Gulf states,

which are on paper strange bedfellows, but are united by the shared threat from Iran. The long pole in the tent that links all of our traditional allies together is the threat from Iran. And unless you want an enhanced American military presence in the region, the only way to forge assemblance of stability is to build off of that. And that was kind of the genius of the Abraham Accords that Trump would later put in place. Long story short, the other missed opportunity.

So there was an analytical problem with Obama's approach to Iran. There was a constitutional problem, which relates to what we were talking about before, where the Iran deal sure looked a lot like an arms control agreement. But Obama recognizing, because at that time we still had sort of pro-Israel Democrats in the Senate, recognizing that the deal was unlikely to get congressional support in the Senate in this case, recognizing that the deal was unlikely to get congressional support in the Senate in this case, he constructed it purely as an executive agreement, an agreement between himself and the Supreme Leader. There was no congressional buy-in. And so therefore, when Trump got elected, one of the first things he did after extended review was to throw it in the trash. Biden comes in, tries to resurrect it. Trump comes back in, in his second term,

and basically he gives the Iranians 60 days to negotiate and then took the action that he just saw. So that's a long way of me saying there's a misunderstanding of the region and then a misunderstanding that as hard as it is to bring Congress into the process, it actually makes your executive achievements more durable and I think improves your negotiating position. Now to get to the last part of your question, I do think the president's recent decision was the right one. I think really going back before Obama's failed and flawed agreement with Iran, the Iranians have consistently used the cover of diplomacy to covertly advance their program. And at some point we were either going to have to accept the nuclear run or take kinetic

action to set back their program. And this is the first time in a long time, really since the invasion of Iraq, that we've combined maximum economic pressure with a credible military deterrent. And so I do think it gives us a chance to effectively eliminate their nuclear program. That being said, there's a lot of work we need to do in terms of rebuilding our entire defense industrial base so that the munitions we're using in CENTCOM don't completely deplete the resources we need

in other theaters along the way. And I'll stop there, cause I could talk about the Middle East for 20 minutes and all of your audience would evaporate. No, this is fascinating. I'm really enjoying this. Do you have a follow up there? Or I wanted to talk about-

I wanted to get a quick read on how you think China has viewed the events of the last couple months and couple weeks specifically. Well, I think that my most bullish case for what Trump has just accomplished would be not only has he set back, if not eliminated for a decade, Iran's nuclear ambitions, he could have just shattered the emerging axis of chaos, this sort of axis between Iran, Russia, and China. Because China sort of views Iran as both a source of hydrocarbons, as well as like a gateway to expand its influence in the Middle East and continually poke the Americans and our allies in the eye. This is incredibly problematic

for China's view of the region. That being said, the biggest wild card that I just don't know enough about is where Trump is going to go next on China. There was some reporting yesterday that he was going to allow China access to Iranian oil. And so I think it's, you know, in Trump 1.0, there was this tension between some more hawkish members of the administration on China, and then more dovish members at Treasury. There's sort of a version of this tension

going on right now. And then Trump himself at times wants to make a deal with Xi Jinping and thinks he's uniquely suited to do it. At other times, he's like uniquely able and willing to impose costs on China. I think he deserves credit for actually the biggest shift in US foreign policy since the end of the Cold War in terms of the more hawkish turn on China. And so I guess there's lingering questions about how we want to approach China. But I really think this is the serious setback for this, this axis of chaos, this anti-American access.

Russia, of course, was getting enormous benefits from Iran in terms of drone technology for its ongoing war in Eastern Europe. I can't help but think that that's going to be increasingly difficult given that Iran is, is, is, is dealing with the aftermath of the attack as well as increasing internal pressure and then hats off to the Israelis. given that Iran is dealing with the aftermath of the attack as well as increasing internal pressure. And then hats off to the Israelis. I mean, I think this shows how valuable it is to have lethal allies

that not only have extraordinary capabilities of their own, but are willing to take a big role in the regional security architecture and not just rely solely on the United States of America. And in fact, what we've seen really in terms of the way they've gone after Hezbollah, the BIPR operation and then their systematic campaign against the nuclear facilities, some of the most daring and imaginative intelligence and military work that I think I've ever seen in my lifetime.

And even if one isn't as pro-Israel as I am, I think you'd have to admire just how effective their military and intelligence community is. Yeah, that's undeniable. Bit of a random question, but I'm curious if you have any insight here. There was a lot of- What's the population of Iran?

No, I don't know. There was some interesting price action in Bitcoin, which is hard to read too much into, but people were alleging that the Iranian regime was mining a lot of Bitcoin. Fascinating. Maybe it didn't come up for you, but I saw somebody posting that he was like,

I'm not buying Bitcoin right now. It seems obvious that the regime is just like dumping in order to fund. Dumping Bitcoin to try and fund the war effort. Basically the recovery effort even. It would make sense. But if you don't have any insight there, we can move on. I wanted to, you know, I'm afraid I don't,

but I do think, and I've said this to like all the smart crypto folks like Brian Armstrong and others. I think there's, or a Wisconsin colleague of mine, Brian Stile, who's one of the leaders in the house on this issue, you guys should have him on. He's really smart, young Congress from Wisconsin. Yeah, Brian style. He's always Exactly exactly

That I think there's like a underexplored aspect or argument About like cryptos role in national security, right? Because the anti crypto argument is always like this is just a way of sanctions evasion and money laundering. And I think what people don't appreciate is like how this could be a tool to advance America's and our allies national security interests. And certainly it was a case when, you know, people were trying to get out of Ukraine and Afghanistan, that crypto was enormously valuable in that regard, it might allow us to do certain things in denied areas and transfer

assets that are uniquely valuable to our intelligence community. So I shouldn't get to that's an area where like NASDAQ nerds like me should pay increasing attention to the utility of crypto. But I hadn't heard that about switching gears to the European continent. I wanted to get your reaction to the NATO spending news and maybe kind of the backstory. I'm sure when you were in Congress, you probably always felt strongly about this kind of thing, but any reactions there?

Well, listen, I think anytime, first of all, this idea that the American president would want our NATO allies to spend more on their own defense is not a new thing. It is not unique to Trump. Eisenhower, the first Supreme Allied commander of NATO, actually made this argument and expressed frustration with our European allies at the time. We've had Democratic senators try to defund

NATO because of their frustrations with NATO. So this is like an old argument that is new again. I think the fact that certain European countries are willing to spend more on their defense is a great thing for deterrence in general. I would say, however, I've always been of the view that this obsession with the inputs, i.e. what percent of GDP a NATO member spends on defense is not the right lens of analysis. Every NATO country could be spending 5% of their GDP on defense, but if they're all buying the wrong crap or buying stuff that isn't interoperable and doesn't actually amount to a coordinated multinational deterrence by denial effort with hard power shifted as far east as possible with the frontline

states playing unique role. Then you actually have, you haven't actually fighting off a common operational picture and shout out to NATO for acquiring Maven Smart System made by Palutier Technologies, no big deal. Then you have actually an answer turn. A sports team doesn't wake up one morning and say, let's all give it 100%. And that's the only coordination.

It's like, yeah, yeah, yeah. You can easily turn this into a jobs program where you say, yeah, we're going to spend 5% of our GDP on horseback and cavalry. And it's like, you're going to spend 5% of our GP on horseback and cavalry. And it's like you're going to lose. But yes, you're technically going to be spending 5% and you're going to have a massive military, but you're going to get rolled if you're not investing in the right programs.

So is there any do you think that the European countries are thinking about it correctly? Because it feels like it feels like to me getting from 2% to 5% is the bigger mental hurdle than the allocation of that 5%. And yes, we're right to move the conversation to where you're taking it right now, but that feels like an easier conversation or maybe I'm wrong there. I think the closer you are to the threat, the more you're thinking is sharp, right?

So it is my experience that, you know, Poland, the Baltic States tend to have a clear view of reality and are making hard decisions in order to invest in their own military. By the way, we've acquired two new NATO, acquired is the wrong term. We've got two new countries joined NATO in recent years that bring phenomenal capabilities to the table.

I think, you know, traditionally struggled convincing the Germans who are, you know, the big elephant in the European room to make the right investments and to make more investments. My hope is that that conversation is getting better. You know, I guess I worry sometimes that kind of related to what you said earlier. they'll be privileging certain domestic companies, even if they don't actually produce capability. I think it's fair to say, obviously I'm biased because I work in an American software company, but we are the best in the world like by 10 orders of magnitude when it comes to software development in this country.

And that's just not something that Europe does well. So there could be opportunity for creative collaboration between the palanters of the world and European hardware defense manufacturers. I'd love to see more of that going forward. And I've always been a proponent of, we have a ton of troops in countries like Germany and Western Europe, getting them out of garrison,

shifting them further on NATO's Eastern flank, taking advantage of the invitation that certain frontline states like Poland made, at least in the previous administration, to build new bases and forts that enhance our deterrence posture. I think there's a huge opportunity here. And it may just be the case that Trump's rhetoric,

as unpolished as it can be at times, is the thing that's shaking, it's taking it loose right now. I mean, obviously it's a bit over determined. I mean, you know, the other thing shaking it loose is Russia's invasion of Ukraine. And it's a massive wake-up call for Europe that they need to invest more and buy the right things.

But I do think we have a moment here. And I think what's critical to our analysis in the US, particularly my own party, the Republican Party, is to do a better job. And I didn't quite do this well when I chaired the China Committee in Congress in teasing out the connection between Russia and China and why what happens in one theater affects another theater

and that it isn't just a choice between Europe or the Indo-Pacific. We're a global power, We're a sole superpower. We have an existential challenge in the form of communist China. We have to pay attention everywhere. Yes, we have to make hard decisions and prioritize accordingly. The Indo-Pacific is the priority theater. But one of the best ways we can invest more of our own exquisite resources into the Indo-Pacific is to get

on the same page with our allies in Europe and ensure that they're buying the right things and that the way we fight together is actually leveraging cutting edge commercial technology, software or hardware. That's great. Great. Should we talk about the news today? The announcement, the nuclear deal that you guys want? Nuclear.

Yeah, that'd be great. Can you break it down for us? Everything is nuclear. Everything's nuclear. We're going nuclear. Yeah, I mean, I want to know the shape of the partnership, anything you can share there. But then I'd love to go into kind of what you're particularly excited about in nuclear or even just energy broadly. We've seen that the United States energy production per capita

is kind of flatlined for a while. China's increasing energy production very aggressively. It feels top of mind, especially in the backdrop of the foundation model AI race, that we need to be building more energy infrastructure. And there's different resources coming online. Nuclear is probably the most fascinating one that has the ability to scale because we've tamed the atom and yet we can, and you know, we can't just seem to copy paste, uh, you know, uh, Diablo Canyon, 50 times to, to actually get a massive increase in energy production. There's also stuff happening on the smaller scale. Uh, I want your take on nuclear as a whole, in addition to the deal.

Yeah. By the way, I may get pulled to do a TV interview about this, the nuclear stuff, but it's your fault though, because my understanding is I'm just, um, batting cleanup for Eliana. By the way, I may get pulled to do a TV interview about this, the nuclear stuff. It's your fault though, because my understanding is I'm just batting clean up for Eliana. Oh, yeah. And he talked too much, but I'm happy to come back at any point. Listen, I mean, we can't, obviously, we can't dominate the commanding heights of critical technology and AI if we don't improve our sort of all the

above energy policy. There is no workable energy strategy without a nuclear renaissance in this country. The Trump administration has put out some really productive EOs, but now it's incumbent upon the private sector to step up. And the nuclear company is that. I mean, they're going to leverage our software to build reactors, which right now take over a decade to build, and collapse that timeline down.

And I think we're at the forefront of something really interesting. China is investing billions of dollars in this space, putting their best and brightest on the problem, and we can't fall further behind. And by the way, it affects our military deterrence as well, because our diplomacy is enhanced with foreign countries when we're able to come to them and say, we are a reliable partner for civilian nuclear technology and we help you build and access that technology safely. When what I don't wanna see is a replay of what we saw with China and 5G and Huawei

where China was going all over the world saying, you can have 5G internet, steeply, we'll just control the infrastructure, it'll be in a box, you know, you won't even have to worry about it. You don't have to worry about anything. You don't have to worry about anything. And like in America, we'll be like,

whoa, don't do that, time out. But if you're a country that doesn't have resources in Africa or in the global South, like you're probably not paying as much attention to the CI concerns. And so there's something similar playing out in the nuclear space right now. So I'm very bullish about this partnership

You know, I think this is the custom of something big But for the nuclear company and for Palantir and we're gonna be able to leverage all the lessons we have from working with Anderil, Saronic and non-traditional partners with our warp speed manufacturing product and apply it into the nuclear space. That's fantastic I'm getting pulled We'll talk to you soon. Have a good one back for Packers commentary. That's great. Cheers Yeah, the the the nuclear like like like a lot of people still don't understand fully what Palantir does But you you have to pull the example from Airbus manufacturing So Palantir is that's one of their partners. If you're making a plane, you need to know

how many screws you have, how many wings you have, how many engines you have, and the lead times on all of those, how much they cost, when they depreciate, what the testing regimen is, as you integrate them into the plane, exact same process for building something like a 747 as building a nuclear power plant. So, very exciting deal, and I'm excited to see it play out.

But that was fantastic. Let's run through a couple timeline posts and then get out of here. We got two ads left and that's why we're leaving early today because we're gonna go film some ads for Wander. Find your happy place. Find your happy place. Book of Wander with inspiring views.

Hotel grade amenities, dreamy beds, top cleaning and 24-7 concierge service It's a vacation home, but better we're heading to a wander in just a few minutes to film an advertisement City of Malibu that will Malibu, California That will be airing on TVPN and then go out on the on the internet and we're also filming an ad for eight sleep How'd you sleep last night? You got good at X. You got right. I have a on the internet. And we're also filming an ad for 8 Sleep. How'd you sleep last night? I got wrecked again. You got wrecked again?

I have a systematic issue with a three-year-old. Yeah, it's rough. Have you tried telling him man up? No, I mean, I would be down for my sleep to be disrupted for a decade if it means he sleeps just a little bit better. But certainly the thing that really hurts is losing to you. I got a 78.

I got an 86, baby. Hit me with the Ashton Hall. Mogged again. This is my favorite soundtrack on the whole soundboard. We're going to need a new sound effect. I love this sound effect. No, this is the sound of me winning. It's now, it's now.

When there is a John Wynn, I get the Ashton Hall sound effect. That's right. Anyway, go to 8sleep.com slash TBPN. And if you're building a go to 8sleep.com slash TBPN. And if you're building a company like 8sleep, head over to finn.ai. Number one AI agent for customer service. It is number one in performance benchmarks, number one

in competitive bake-offs, and number one ranking on G2, used by Coda, Consensus, Aspire, Lovable, all of your favorite software companies and more. So check it out. We've got to have On again. We should have Monique. Yeah.

Yeah, once a day, once or twice a day. That'd be great. You can colorize the show with us. He's an absolute legend. I think he's a little busy for us. And yeah, if you're selling to customers, if you're a businessman or woman, you're going to benefit a lot from Finn.

Well, that is pretty much everything. There's one more piece of news I wanna cover. Bai Ju over at Ather Flux has a new board member, Dan Gallagher, he's worked with him for years. Dan is in the league of his own. He is a man of integrity and has become a close friend over the years.

He'll help us engage in Washington DC and support Aetherflux and America to lead in space solar power. If you're not familiar with Aetherflux, they are putting solar panels in space and then beaming down the energy that's captured in space via lasers, very cool. They're beam maxing.

Also, Bajiu, absolute hitter on his wrist every time he's spotted. Absolutely criminal because this photo here in the slide deck. Cuts it out. Cuts it out, we can't see what he's wearing. The photographer, what was the photographer doing? What was the, this is a huge mis-opera. Journalistic mis-info.

We have another post here from Scott Balski. Observed among the most successful people I admire who really worked for it. They don't want to network, they want to learn. They are mining you for information constantly. Yep. Sometimes it looks like networking, but they're mining. Yeah, Zach Weinberg says,

in fact, the networking part is really just a tax you get comfortable paying in order to do the learning. I like that, that's a good point. We have a post here. But this is the same thing, it's like, don't ask for money, ask for advice. Like if you're genuinely interested in something, you wind up meeting interesting people

because that's the only way to get the real answers that aren't baked into the LLM yet. You gotta go to the source. You gotta meet people. And you gotta ask them for the answers to the pressing questions of the day. Yep. Anyway.

We have a post here from Woodrow Oats Montague. I'm so done. He says, I'm so done. I can't take this anymore. And there's a Bloomberg hit. A footwear startup is teaming up with two space companies to design a shoe in orbit as part of a mission to make artificial intelligence and blockchain

less expensive and more eco-friendly than it is on Earth. Orbit's Edge, a company that supports AI and blockchain applications, and Copernic Space, which offers digital marketplaces for space assets, planned to send a solar and battery powered satellite to space, equipped with a computer that will use AI automation to produce a shoe design for the Sintelay brand.

The mission is expected to launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in early 2026. We should call Deleon and do a wellness check. Yeah, see how he's doing. He's been like, I'm the guy who's manufacturing space. I'm the space manufacturing man. Well, so much for your monopoly thesis, Deleon. There's another space manufacturing company

in business now. They're using AI and blockchain technology to do solar. I haven't heard Varda talk about AI or blockchain yet at all. This is missing from their thesis entirely Wow what a blind spot for deli It's so funny to feel like you need to send something to space to produce AI slop Anyways Let's end on a let's end on a positive Brad Gerstner. I don't think this was a response to our the the socialist, though wrong, but he said the answer to socialism is more capitalism and the Invest America Act is more capitalism,

Mr. President. It makes every child a capitalist from birth sharing in the upside of America, worried about what just happened in NYC. Help is on the way. I love this let's ring the gong for Brad Gershwin. Fantastic well this is the shortest show we've done in a very long time but fortunately I'm sure we'll be back with but we're still recording we're going to be recording

over the next few hours minutes and then that will hit the timeline later anyway so thank you for tuning in to the show as always leave us a five-star review on Spotify or leave us a written review on Apple podcast and we will read that on the show so have a fantastic afternoon we'll see you tomorrow see you tomorrow bye