TBPN Live - OpenAI and Gemini Achieve IMO Gold, CBS Cancels Colbert's Late Night, McLaren's Mansour Ojjeh Collection | Chris Black, Chris Buskirk, Turner Caldwell, Jamin Ball, Harper Carroll, Nikita Singareddy

Episode Date: July 21, 2025

(00:45) - OpenAI Achieves IMO Gold (37:38) - Timeline (50:29) - CBS Cancels Colbert's Late Night (01:10:57) - McLaren's Mansour Ojjeh Collection (01:24:49) - Timeline (01:29:04) - Chris Black is a New York-based writer, producer, and editor, known for his creative consultancy, Done to Death Projects, and as co-host of the podcast "How Long Gone." In the conversation, he discusses his 2015 advice book "I Know You Think You Know It All," his upcoming memoir slated for 2026, and the evolving landscape of book promotion, emphasizing the impact of podcasts and traditional media appearances on sales. (02:00:28) - Chris Buskirk is a serial entrepreneur, author, and co-founder of 1789 Capital, a venture capital firm focusing on conservative-aligned companies. In the conversation, he discusses the resurgence of optimism in the business climate, emphasizing the importance of abundant, cheap energy for national prosperity and highlighting the need for the U.S. to develop its own rare earth magnet production to reduce reliance on China. He also touches on the role of government in fostering innovation, suggesting a balance between deregulation and strategic support for critical industries. (02:20:17) - Turner Caldwell, CEO of Mariana Minerals, discusses his company's role as a vertically integrated, software-first mining firm that focuses on engineering, financing, constructing, and operating mining projects post-exploration. He emphasizes the industry's need to shorten the timeline from mineral discovery to production, highlighting the challenges in designing and implementing mining infrastructure. Caldwell also announces Mariana Minerals' emergence from stealth mode with a $65 million Series A funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz and Breakthrough Energy Ventures. (02:30:50) - Jamin Ball, a Partner at Altimeter Capital, discusses his experience attempting to invest in Figma during its Series C funding round, which he refers to as the "white buffalo" of his career. He highlights Figma's impressive growth rate of 49% and free cash flow margins of 28%, positioning it as a leading software company. Ball also emphasizes the resilience of Figma's management team in navigating challenges, including a failed acquisition, and expresses confidence in their ability to adapt to emerging technologies like AI. (02:42:53) - Harper Carroll, an AI educator and machine learning engineer with degrees from Stanford and experience at Meta, discusses the potential of AI in children's education, emphasizing its role in fostering curiosity and learning through interactive audio models. She highlights the importance of developing AI tools that are accessible and engaging for children, while also addressing ethical considerations and the need for appropriate guardrails to ensure safe and effective use. Carroll also shares insights from her audience, noting that some parents have successfully integrated AI into their children's learning experiences, such as using AI as a "cool older sister" to discuss topics like nutrition and exercise. (02:59:39) - Nikita Singareddy, co-founder and CEO of Fortuna Health, a platform simplifying Medicaid enrollment, discusses the company's recent Series A funding led by Houston, their mission to create a "TurboTax for Medicaid" to streamline the complex application process, and their B2B2C model partnering with insurance companies to enhance user experience. She highlights the challenges of navigating state-specific Medicaid rules, the persistence of outdated technologies like fax machines in healthcare, and the importance of addressing real-world complexities beyond basic AI capabilities. Singareddy also emphasizes the need for innovative solutions in healthcare, such as AI nurses, to tackle issues like physician shortages and improve patient care. (03:12:03) - Timeline TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.comFigma - https://figma.comVanta - https://vanta.comLinear - https://linear.appEight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpnWander - https://wander.com/tbpnPublic - https://public.comAdQuick - https://adquick.comBezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.comPolymarket - https://polymarket.comAttio - https://attio.com/tbpnFin - https://fin.ai/tbpnGraphite - https://graphite.devFollow TBPN: https://TBPN.comhttps://x.com/tbpnhttps://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

You're watching TBPN. Today is Monday, July 21st, 2025. We are live from the TBPN Ultra Dome, the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the Capital de Capital. Capital de Capital. Big news, OpenAI, great to be back. OpenAI has announced that they have won a long,

they achieved the longstanding grand challenge in AI, gold medal level performance on the world's most prestigious math competition, the International Math Olympiad, that's the IMO. So this went up at 12.50 a.m. on July 19th. Typical timeline for announcements. Yes, so this is basically like Friday night, Saturday morning, you're looking at basically 1 a. Yes. So this is basically like Friday night, Saturday morning. You're looking at basically 1 a.m. from Alexander Way.

And he shares a picture of a strawberry with a medal with the OpenAI logo on it. Someone also tested, they took this picture, they uploaded it to ChatGVZ. What's the fruit in the image? How many Rs are in that fruit, and it nailed it. So we are truly, we are truly AGI. It has arrived, has arrived.

Also, before we go deeper into that story, we have a new partner, Restream. You saw it in the intro. We're very excited to welcome them as a sponsor of the show. We've been using- We have been running on Restream. Secretly.

Secretly. Secretly. Since day one. Since day one. It's been using- We've been running on Restream. Secretly. Secretly. Secretly. Since day one. Since day one. It's been our secret to success. And it can be your secret to success. Yeah. If you have- They support a lot of the Fortune 500 already

for all their live streaming infrastructure. So if you need to go live, go live with Restream. And you see OpenAI do streams. Like that is a thing that has entered the standard com strategy. XAI. I don't know thing that has entered the standard com strategy. I don't know if XAI is running on Restream. They had a little issues. But they do stream and, you know,

it used to just be the hyperscalers, the Mag-7, the big, big companies that would do a live stream around an annual event. Then Brian Chesky came out and created Founder Mode and basically said put all your announcements on an annual release schedule Bundle them all up have the team celebrate push to get across the finish line and Part of that is let's throw an event part of that is let's get the CEO and the product leaders on stage Tell the community about what we're building what we've built and now a lot of people are streaming it if you're gonna stream your stuff

You need restream anyway, go check it out. So Dylan Field, someone who has streamed events, you know, Figma obviously has config their dev event annually and they actually do two of them and those are streamed all over the place, probably using Restream. And Dylan chimes in on the OpenAI news. He says, congrats 2025 IMO winners and participants,

including OpenAI, who trained a general purpose reinforcement learning model and achieved IMO gold. OpenAI team includes these two folks, Cheryl and Polynomial. No. Fun fact, Polynomial also won the 2025 Diplomacy World Championship as a human And so people are saying a GI is right around the corner AJ from semi-analysis says what stands out to me scaling RL and non

Verifiable rewards likely via rubrics and LLM as judge thinking and reasoning for several hours at a time for a highly specific task This is what the $20,000 per month model will look like. And so there were a bunch of interesting things about this. Apparently, there are a few different ways to tackle IMO level math problems. One is using this program called Lean that is a formal math proof verifier. And there's rumors that Google's building their system

to leverage that a lot. OpenAI apparently went way, way down just the text-based LLM reasoning path and had a lot of success there. So even though, as we'll get into in this story, it feels like it's neck and neck. Maybe Google was earlier and they just didn't release it faster and maybe this is a comms thing.

There's a whole bunch of different stuff going back and forth. But potentially the more interesting thing is did they take different technical approaches and get similar results? If they're neck and neck, which one will scale better? Which one will generalize better? There's a whole bunch of different discussions there.

Do you want to get into some of the controversy or the pushback? Do you have a post pulled up from someone saying about Google's attempt? Yeah, I mean, the whole thing came down to timing. Dennis over at DeepMind was pushing back a little bit, which I could pull up. Dennis Hesavis from DeepMind, the co- little bit, which I can pull up. Demis Hesabas from DeepMind, the co-founder

and now at Google. Yeah, it was interesting because we immediately jumped to Polymarket because this whole idea of an AI system beating the IMO, we talked about this with Scott Wu from Cognition months ago, back in April, I found the clip. And he said, I would be very surprised if an AI system this year

does not actually surpass the IMO. He, of course, is an IMO gold medalist himself, and so it was big to hear from him. Now, the polymarket had been sitting at like 20%, and I think we're gonna get into like the minutiae of like what it means to truly win, because the IMO, like the group that actually puts on the competition

has a different set of rules. They put the questions out, and anyone can go and try and do them, but to actually be awarded a goal for an AI, they said it has to be an open source model potentially, it has to be released in this particular way, and so OpenAI might have used their systems to solve the questions, which is super impressive,

but they might not have checked every box to actually technically win the gold from the actual organization, and so, Noam says today, we didn't open it. Yeah, and Dem is to be clear, so he put out a post this morning saying official results are in. Gemini achieved gold medal level in the International Mathematical.

Which is different than actually getting a gold medal. He said, an advanced version was able to solve five out of six problems, incredible progress. And there's a quote in here from the IMO president. He said, we can confirm that Google DeepMind has reached the much desired milestone, earning 35 out of a possible 42 points. A gold medal scored.

Their solutions were astonishing in many respects. IMO graders found them to be clear, precise, and most of them easy to follow. You can imagine, Juan is just like off on this insane tangent. There were some fascinating details around how they solved them. Demis shared, he said, by the way, as an aside, we didn't announce on Friday because we respected the IMO board's original request that all AI labs share the results only after the official results had been verified by independent experts and the students had rightly received the

acclamation they deserved. And so you can imagine somebody was saying I don't know how real this was somebody was saying that They were making a claim that like Google needed time to like have the comms approval to sign off But yeah, it seems more likely that the original plan was hey, let's wait and announce this when when the IMO board actually comes out. The analogy feels like you're a super fast sprinter. You go to the Olympics and you run a 100 meter dash that's incredibly fast in the parking lot.

Like you're not in the stadium, but everyone's like, wow, that guy's fast. He's hauling. He's hauling. It's very impressive. But you still don't- Definitely potentially the fastest man on earth. Yes, and ideally you paid for the parking pass to get into the stadium.

And it's like maybe Google and OpenAI were both running hundred meter dashes in the parking lot. One of them had paid for enough parking spaces to make it completely clean. OpenAI was just kind of showing up with a buddy and being like, I'm sprinting. That's the vibe I'm getting. But they're both in the parking lot.

Like neither of them are in the actual stadium at this point. But you know, who knows? They might be soon. There's some questions about, you know, do they have to open source or whatever. So Noam Brown says, you know, we achieved a milestone that many considered years away,

gold level performance, gold medal, of course he's saying gold medal level performance, like that's very critical. It's not, we got a gold medal, is that we exhibited gold medal level performance. Typically for these AI results, like in Go, Dota, poker, diplomacy, researchers spend years making an AI that masters one narrow domain and does little else,

but this isn't an IMO-specific model. It's a reasoning LLM that incorporates new experimental general purpose techniques, which would be very exciting because you could apply an IMO-level intelligence. John, hold up that stack of posts for the audience. Oh, we got 150 posts today. It's going to be a quick stream, people.

It's going to be a quick stream, but buckle up. So what's different? We developed a new technique that makes LLMs a lot better at hard to verify tasks. IMO problems were the perfect challenge for this. Proofs are pages long and take experts hours to grade. Compare that to AIME, which is another math exam, where answers are simply an integer from zero to 999,

so you can verify them really, really quickly. Also this model thinks for a long time. O1 thought for seconds, deep research for a minute. This one thinks for hours. Importantly, it's also more efficient with its thinking and there's a lot more room to push the test time compute and efficiency further. Now, what's interesting is like,

these, I think these questions go up and then you have like, I think the students get like two, four and a half hour segments. So there's a world where the AIs can do it, but just not as fast as humans, which would be very interesting. I don't exactly know how close they are.

So Noam says, where does this go? As fast as recent AI progress has been, I fully expect the trend to continue. Importantly, I think we're close to AI substantially contributing to scientific discovery. There's a big difference between AI slightly below top human performance versus slightly above. This was a small team effort.

He took a research. Right now, the discovery that AI is doing is talking with somebody who is potentially schizophrenic and convincing them that they figured out how to move faster than the speed of light. Yeah. So. There's so many accounts of that.

It's getting crazy. Yeah, I posted, Chia GPD agent, go win me an IAM gold medal and then update my resume. Don't make mistakes. But yeah, I mean, have you actually looked at any of the IMO questions ever? No.

I don't even know where to start. Like, it's all stuff that I've done. It's one call away for us, though. We just text Scott. Yeah. Tyler, have you ever looked at IMO questions? No, but I'm looking at them right now. It's like pretty brutal.

Would you know where to start? Tyler, if you can get two out of six right before the end of the stream buy you a house Well, there's the thing he's just gonna be able to ask Chachi Pia and one shot it yeah, yeah I had no tool. Yeah, I know to use got a qualify that so yeah Nick has the has a comment about deep mind do you mind has also has another challenge today? Does we will introduce that in just a few minutes? D mind has also won IMO gold, but they haven't announced it yet, by the way. Confirmed, congratulations,

Beatis did announce it. Well, they did this morning. They did, yeah, they confirmed it this morning. And so it's been interesting to see the reaction to this. Gary Marcus is on X saying, "'All the tech bros this morning, "'thinking that AGI has been achieved "'because some, parentheses, "'insanely expensive new form of LLMs

"'can now match top high school students on one specific task It's almost cute. So really just ripping into the entire AI Community, but will depute comes in and says he's on leave right now Taking a little summer holiday. Yes. He says guys stop using expensive as a disqualifier holiday. Yes. He says guys stop using intelligence. So yeah, again, everybody's focused on sort of raw capabilities, not super focused on efficiency, especially for projects like this where they're not necessarily, you know, rolling this out at in mass.

Yep. And you know where a lot of these IMO gold medalists go to work. I do John ramp.com times money save both easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting and a whole lot more all in one place. Ramp.com. So the timeline was in turmoil over the Gary Marcus post and they went back and forth and he finally admitted it at the end. He said, that's impressive.

So it started with a post by Daniel Litt. He says, huge congrats to OpenAI for their IMO gold. I don't find it too surprising that an AI tool was able to achieve this. See below. Though I'd sort of lost hope the last few days, to open AI for their IMO gold. I don't find it too surprising that an AI tool was able to achieve this, see below, though I'd sort of lost hope the last few days. But I'm pretty surprised it was an LRM with no tool use. So it didn't have Python, it didn't have web search,

it didn't have all the things that you could imagine would kind of allow you to speed things up or kind of be a shortcut that would put it in a different category. There was always a question about with the, when the AIs were playing video games, like computers have wall hacks. They can sometimes see the map without the fog of war.

They can see, it's very different to get perfect pixel, perfect data on where every character is on the map and be able to make decisions based on that as opposed to like looking at pixels and having to like move the screen over there to see if you're being invaded on the left flank, right? And so there was always this like, yes, if you gave a computer like the raw access,

that's not quite, it's impressive, but it's not quite a level playing field. And it's basically the same thing as being like, well, the other folks don't get a calculator and you get a calculator, like, but it's not quite a level playing field. And it's basically the same thing as being like, well, the other folks don't get a calculator and you get a calculator. Like, is it that impressive? But this was very much an even playing field, it seems like.

So Mel Gibson 2.0, great, great name. Says, you are not surprised that they have figured out a way to make the model learn in very hard to verify domains in a fuzzier reward space, it also appears that the same reasoning model was the one used in the AT coder competition showing that it can generalize across domains. Daniel comes back and says, I don't think we really know what they figured out yet. I'll keep my powder dry until we know more. Mel Gibson says, go read Gnome Brown's thread on the model if you haven't already.

He says, and remember Gnome Brown says, this isn't an IMO specific model. And that's a very important thing because there's a ton of situations where you can go and RL on a specific task and it gets really, really good at it, but then you try and get it to do anything else and it's not that great.

And so Daniel, it says, yeah, I read it. Gary Marcus says, chimes in from the rafters as he's not in this chat yet, but he has entered the chat. He says, I read it too, that's pretty vague. Are we sure that no tools were called? Gary Marcus then chimes in again, says, re IMO gold, does no tools mean no use of Python, code interpreter, et cetera?

Dan says, Daniel Litt says, that's how I understand it. And then Gary Marcus tags in polynomial, Gnome Brown, and also Alex Way and says, Daniel Litt says, that's how I understand it. And then Gary Marcus tags in polynomial, Nome Brown, and also Alex Wei says, can you confirm the IMO gold was achieved without using Python or code interpreter or similar? And then Gary Marcus says, humans don't use external tools in the IMO competition. I'm just trying to understand what the system is.

That's how we do science, Daniel Litt. And at some point, whoever was trying to dunk on Gary Marcus just deleted their account. we do science. Daniel Litt, and at some point, whoever was trying to dunk on Gary Mark has just deleted their account, so it just says, this post is from an account that no longer exists. Daniel Litt shows Cheryl on the OpenAI team, saying the model solved these problems without tools like Lean, which is a math verifier, or coding,

it just uses natural language, it also only has four and a half hours to answer our earlier question. We see the model reason at a very high level, trying out different strategies, making observations from examples, and testing hypotheses. And Gary Marcus says, that's impressive.

So, Gary Marcus, you gotta fill out the apology form, bro. You gotta fill out the deep reinforcement learning apology form. What was the reason for your behavior? no one told me Alex way was training the model mercury was in retrograde I don't know ML and then one of them is Gary Marcus can convince me it was fake because Gary Marcus was famously said deep learning is hitting a wall like like this this particular paradigm will not scale you have to do symbol manipulation,

which was like kind of his bet, encode different relationships between ideas in the model. There were a bunch of different debates over there. And he's gone back and forth on that. He's not as much of like a deep reinforcement learning hater as some people think, but he's got, that's his brand at this point. So anyway, more on the drum between DeepMind and OpenAI.

DeepMind got a gold medal at the IMO on Friday afternoon, but they had to wait for marketing to approve the tweet until Monday. OpenAI shared theirs first at 1 a.m. on Saturday and stole the spotlight. In this game, speed is greater than bureaucracy. Miss the moment, lose the narrative. So that's one interesting take.

Let's see exactly. Yeah, I think there's a little bit of that. I mean, certainly culturally, OpenAI loves to release information before Google. Like whatever Google's next big I.O. thing. Remember, what did they release after the DeepSeq moment? Deep research. So if you're typing deep

and you were looking for an AI product. And then Google had I.O. and then OpenAI. They Google had I.O. And then OpenAI. They launched OpenAI. I.O. This is like the day before. The project with Johnny Ive. With Johnny Ive.

So anyway, you know, you'll love to see it. All's fair in love and war, I guess. I don't think this crosses any lines. Corporate comms warfare. Yeah. And this is the benefit of having a bunch of posters on your team, I guess. Gnome Brand says it takes us a few months

to return the experimental research frontier into a product, but progress is so fast that a few months can mean a big difference in capabilities. And this is from July 18. So all the models underperform humans on the new IMO questions, and Grok 4 is especially bad on it, even with best of end selection. Unbelievable.

Somebody was accusing Grok for of training on the Problem set for IMO. No, no for something else. Oh for the other benchmarks I mean benchmark hacking is like a thing that happens all over the place. That's why we need like hidden benchmarks That's the whole thing of our KGI that we will talk about we talked about will saying, guys, stop using expensive as a disqualifier. Terence Tao, one of the most goaded mathematicians of all time, digs in a little bit and is adding his perspective as a world-renowned mathematician.

He says, it is tempting to view the capability of current AI technology as a singular quantity. Either a given task X is within the ability of current tools or it is not. However, there is in fact a very widespread in capability, several orders of magnitude, depending on what resources and assistance gives the tool and how one reports the results. One can illustrate this with a human metaphor. I will use the recently concluded IMO as an example. Here, the format is that each country

fields a team of six human contestants who are high school students, led by a team leader, often a professional mathematician. Over the course of two days, each contestant is given four and a half hours on each day to solve three difficult math problems, given only pen and paper. That is crazy.

No communication between contestants or with the team leader during this period is permitted, although the contestants can ask the invigil, invigilators? I don't know. For clarification, this is like some math term I don't even know. For clarification on the wording of the problems,

the team leader advocates for the students in front of the IMO jury during the grading process. Invigilators are also known as exam proctors. Okay, proctors, okay. So yeah, they can ask the people that are running the test, hey, we gotta start working in invigilator. For sure. We should probably have a show.

We should hire someone. Just an invigilator too. For sure. We should have at least one on staff. So the team leader advocates for the students, but is not involved in the IMO examination directly. The IMO is widely regarded as a highly selective measure of mathematical achievement for a high school student

to be able to score well enough to achieve a medal, particularly a gold medal or a perfect score. This year, the threshold for gold was 35 out of 42, which corresponds to answering five of the six questions perfectly. Even answering one question perfectly merits an honorable. It's crazy that a B, basically a B, gets you gold. Yeah.

It's that hard. They're that hard. But consider what happens to the difficulty of the Olympiad if we alter the format in various ways. First, one gives the student several days to complete each question rather than four and a half hours for three scenarios. To stretch the metaphor somewhat,

consider a sci-fi scenario in the student in which the student is still only given four and a half hours, but the team leader places the students in some sort of expensive and energy intensive time acceleration machine in which months or even years of time pass for the students during this exam. Before the exam.

I think Ben might have put us in one of these as we go live and then it's four hours later. Yeah, time acceleration. It is wild. Two, before the exam starts, the team leader rewrites the questions in a format the students find easier to work with. Three, the team leader gives the students unlimited access to calculators, computer algebra

packages, formal proof assistance, textbooks, or the ability to search the internet. Sounds like that didn't happen. The team leader has the six student team work on the same problem simultaneously communicating with each other on their partial progress and reported dead ends. The team leader gives the students prompts in the direction of favorable approaches and intervenes if one of the students is spending too much time on a direction they know to be unlikely to succeed.

Next, each of the six students on the team submit solutions, but the team leader selects only the best solution to submit to the competition, discarding the rest. Last, if none of the students on the team obtain a satisfactory solution, the team leader does not submit any solution at all and silently withdraws from the competition without their participation ever being noted Oh, so that yeah, I mean that could have happened it didn't in this case

But in each of these formats the submitted solutions are still technically generally Going back to the parking lot example Yeah it's like if you can go run go run the race in the parking lot and Then if you don't run as fast as you hoped, it's like, well, I wasn't in the race. I mean, I wasn't even in the race. I wasn't racing, I was just going for a jog.

I was just warming up. I like to be surrounded by excellence. Yeah, don't worry. Yeah, I mean, that is the true one, because if they'd missed, they'd probably be like, what, the IMOs this weekend? We're working on agents. What are you talking about? Like have you seen our DAU? So get out of here To each of these formats the submitted solutions are still technically generated by the high school

contestants rather than the team leader however the reported success rate of the students in the competition can be dramatically affected by such changes in format a Student or team of students who might not even reach bronze medal performance in the normal competition under standard test conditions might instead reach gold medal performance under some of the modified formats indicated above.

So in the absence of controlled test methodology that was not self-selected by the competing teams, one should be wary of making various apples to apples comparisons between the performance of various AI models on competitions, such as the IMO, or between such models and the human contestants. Yeah, the question is, it seems like of those, not many were actually violated by the way OpenAI and Google attacked this.

Well, this was before, I mean, this was an immediate reaction before I think there was more details came out. Details, yeah. Yeah. That we've been covering. This was 3 PM this is so on Saturday, but 3 p.m. Later. Well rune has a good post He says my bar for a GI is an AI that can learn to run a gas station for a year without a team of scientists collecting the gas station data set

It's a great the world isn't ready for gas data set. It's a great post. The world isn't ready for a gas station bench. We can run an AI as long as we can run a gas station as long as we have a perfect data set. And that's the way these things operate. Yeah, as soon as we place the goals somewhere, we nail that goal.

And then we have to move the goal post. This is so great. This is a great graphic. This is a great picture. So Thomas Wolfe says, my bar for AGI is an AI winning a Nobel prize for a new theory it originated. It's just an image of a team moving the goal post.

I do like how consistent Tyler Cowen is on AGI. He's like, my bar was the Turing test. We passed that. So I have to call it like it is. And I'm not moving the goal post. I think he's going to look very smart for that. Yeah. Fullness of time.

I mean, I think it's OK to be like, yeah, we achieved AGI. It's just tough when you achieve something, now there's something new. And it's cool, but not immediately massively transformative. But you have to imagine that there was the same thing when people were like human human flight And then the Wright brothers go and do it and people are like Great so like I can hop on a southwest flight in an hour to go to San Francisco from LA and they're like

What are you talking about? Like LA is like, you know a couple trains and like some people, you know with orange groves And it's like it takes a long time for the infrastructure to get built out. Like now, a lot of these AI tools, they do build on top of the internet and on top of technology that we have rolled out. But at a certain point, the UI matters. The economics of these different tools matters. It might not be economical for a company

to release an AI tool that costs $20,000 to inference just to get you the weather or do two plus two. And so all of these things take time to roll out and that's why we're kind of in this slow takeoff scenario, it feels like, I don't know. We're gonna go to GPT agent in a little bit and talk about that.

But there was some interesting details from Jasper about the IMO problem one. So these are on GitHub, so you can actually just go read them. The math checks out, it nailed the key lemma for n greater than three. But you know, you can kind of read them, these things. But the write up is kind of messy. It uses shorthand and sentence fragments. It introduces new terms without definitions,

forbidden and sunny partners, lists, and it does a bunch of different interesting things where it's trying to condense down the number of tokens. So if it wants to say like, divide this number by three, normally by space three would be two tokens, but by three is one token. And so it's like compressing it down. It's kind of like learning its own language

or developing its own language just to be a little bit more efficient. Very interesting. Deja Vu Coder says, you're laughing, OpenAI. And Google DeepMind's unreleased models just gave an IMO gold medal performance without internet access and you're laughing. People love it.

It is interesting that XAI didn't get involved in this one. You have to imagine they knew both DeepMind and OpenAI were gonna be competing. Yeah, I mean, it feels like it's, this is the nature of like the value of research. It's like a new research domain or new research path, like XAI is dominated in the pre-training, build the big super cluster, get all the GPUs,

do the massive pre-training. Then now with Grok 4, they're doing equal spend on RL generally, but DeepMind and OpenAI seem to have the next, next thing already cooking. And we just don't know the phrase for it yet, because in order to learn that phrase, you gotta pay $100 million for some researcher to come tell you, basically.

I'm sure that there is a new paradigm, a new strategy to unlock this level of performance. And it's something with- It's probably not 100 million. It's some combination of a bunch of people that collectively cost about- But eventually, I mean, we were seeing this with the behemoth analysis from the semi-analysis

and what Jeremy was diving into where even just when you train a really big model, how you chunk up the memory, how you chunk the attention, that has a dramatic impact on the actual end state in the model performance. And so it seems like Google and OpenAI have been able to hammer out a bunch of those problems to get a really great result and

They're not gonna tell anyone any time soon. I imagine Sebastian has a good poster. He says it's hard to overstate the significance of this It may end up looking like a moon landing moment for AI just to spell it out as clearly as possible a Next word prediction machine because that's really what it is here. No tools. No nothing just produced Genuinely creative proofs for hard novel math problems at a level reached by only an elite handful of pre-pre college prodigies Pretty sick. It is funny explaining it to Somebody just on the street. Yeah a computer beat some high school They would tell you, okay.

Cool, yeah, okay. Cool. Yeah, cool story. And then when you phrase it like this, it's like, okay. But it's like, yeah. The landing moment. But yeah, yeah, but like the high school IMO folks are still in the 99.999th percentile for just everyone.

Like they happen to be age, there happens to be an age cutoff, are still in the 99.999th percentile for just everyone. They happen to be age, there happens to be an age cut off, but it is essentially arbitrary, since most people cannot do this level of math. Well, let me tell you about graphite.dev, code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster.

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Elon's there saying good perspective. And so yeah, we don't need to move the goal posts, but we kind of, it's still interesting too, because we achieved this particular benchmark now, what have you done for me lately? Basically, and so I think people really will move the goal posts and you can kind of knock it, but at the same time, it was interesting timing

that last week ARC-AGI V3 dropped. These models are not doing well on that, and they're simultaneously doing well on something that is so hard, you show it to most people, and they don't even know where to start with the math problem, and it's completely ridiculous to try and even take a shot at. So we wanted to give ARC Arc AGI V3 an attempt.

Are you ready, Tyler? Yeah, I'm ready. I haven't looked at it at all. Okay, so yeah, how familiar are you with Arc AGI generally? Yeah, I mean, so I played with like the version one. Like last summer I was trying to like, there's the prize. I tried it out for a couple of weeks. Did you try it out as a human

or did you try writing software for it? Or yeah, like trying to like write software. Okay. Yeah. What was your approach? I don't know. There's a bunch of stuff. Okay. It was like, what's it, that was like just static images, right? So then there was like ways you could like tokenize it to try to do like normal LM.

And then I think I was trying some like random image processing. Did you get any of them right? Or was it like a straight-up zero? Yeah, it was like pretty bad. Well the the initial arc AGI v1 v2 v1 was pretty solidly solved by 03 high I believe or a one high I think oh one was the one that's all one and it was like $2,000 a task and they got to something like 60 70 percent still not where An average human is for these puzzles But impressive then grok 4 came out and on our AI V to they pumped the

Score from like what 6% to 15% or something they doubled it but still not great But now arc a GI V 3 came out and it's more of a game, so I played it on stream on Thursday, I believe, maybe Friday with Mike. I did pretty well. I have some, I actually have some times from Mike. You did well, especially considering you had a minute to look at it prior to joining the show. I really was pretty fresh.

Yeah, you basically tried it for a second and you were like, this is really hard. Yes, and And had to stop. Okay, so You want to put it in hard mode, right? So I got I got times from Mike on how humans have done on on arc a GI v3 So you have to finish the whole thing? in and the So you have to finish the whole thing. He says, if he only gets one shot to speed run all three games with unlimited try agains,

I'd say 15 total minutes is hard, 20 minutes is medium, and 25 minutes is easy average. So you want him to do it in 15 minutes? Under 15. Under 15, and what does he win? A new iPhone. New iPhone. We bricked your your iPhone we made you sign up for Google Glass yeah so this is an opportunity to make it all back this is high stakes so so make sure you have

it set up okay and you should pull up the instructions and read the instructions and we'll start a timer when you it's 11.36 right now. Is there, wait, so there's no like hard mode, easy mode. No, no, no, no, no. So everyone does the same thing, whether you're an AI or a human. You will see some instructions, there's some keys, it's more like a game than filling out the puzzles.

And the actual instructions, there are really no instructions. It's your job to figure out the nature of the game, figure out how it works, and then go and speed run it. Okay. So pull it up and I will read this post. So Ludwig Jietgenstein says, 20 years ago, this type of person

would become an elite math professor. Now they're making AI breakthroughs. This is progress probably. And it's the CV of Alexander Way, the research scientist over at OpenAI. He's a member of the technical staff. And before he has a PhD in computer science from UC Berkeley, he was at Harvard

studying computer science, Phillips Exeter, totally tracked research intern at Metta, Microsoft, D.E. Shaw, Google. What a stacked resume. This guy's a killer. And now he was on the IMO team that did that. And so we talked about the plot twist and the battle between OpenAI and DeepMind.

I'm sure both of them will be talking about this. I'm more interested in the underlying technology and what actually happened and what was discovered than who released it earlier? That doesn't matter as much to me. And again, Gnome says, hey, we posted after the closing ceremony, it was live streamed, so this is easy to confirm.

We weren't in touch with IMO. I spoke with one organizer before the post to let him know. He requested we wait until after the closing ceremony ends to respect the kids and we did. And so it seems like this is pretty verifiable that they didn't do anything bad to the IMO kids. They might have roasted Google, but that's just on, Google's gotta start posting at 1 a.m.

So Tyler, give me the update. Do you have it pulled up? How are you feeling? I'm ready to start. Okay, production team? Yeah, I got a timer. You got a timer? So Tyler give me the update. Do you have it pulled up? How are you? Okay Production team you got a timer. Okay, so so I want you to count up because we want to get the total amount of time We're aiming for under 15 minutes for all three puzzles. That's hard 20 minutes would be normal 25 is like easy mode apparently this is according to Mike So I haven't actually tried to speedrun in this time I said a couple of minutes all three games are just one of

them I played one of them didn't you get through two well so there's there's levels to this there's levels you'll figure all this Tyler you wait so I'd say I'd say you get unlimited lives in the game yeah you can reset and do whatever but you can reset and do whatever. But you can spend the whole show trying to do all three games in 15 minutes if you want. Oh, well, no, no, no, no, no. It doesn't work like that.

Because once you know the tricks, you'll be able to blast through it. Yeah, for sure, for sure. I take it back. Let's go for 15. Good luck. New iPhone on the line. If not, we'll come up with a new.

I have to say, this really is the iPhone moment for Arc AGI. This is the iPhone moment for Arc AGI. Good luck to you, Tyler. We know when to start. 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. Go, Tyler. OK, we will let him work on that, and we will check in. All right, should we talk about chat GPT agents?

Yes, yes, yes. So there's been a bunch of other interesting stuff going on. Well actually, before we get into that. Let's tell you about Figma. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. You can get started for free at figmas.com.

What did you wanna say? I wanted to say some big news that hit the timeline this morning. Polymarket has acquired QCEX for $112 million, and that is going to allow them to enter the US market. As you may know, to date, you haven't been able to use Polymarket. If you're in the US, we use it as a data source.

So you can go on the website, obviously. It's on our ticker. You can see it on the ticker. But this is going to allow them to actually launch in the US. So Shane has been absolutely cooking. And I think he's going to come on the show soon, now that he's not under DOJ investigation. What a wild founder story arc. And yeah, remember those old photos of him like coding in a closet and stuff?

In his bathroom. In his bathroom. In his work. In his work. He built Polymarket in a studio apartment bathroom. With scraps. With scraps, I love it. Anyways, Vanta, automate compliance,

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So OpenAI has been doing a lot of stuff. It's, they're kind of on a run. So IMO gold medal happens over the weekend. The ChatGPT agent, which I tested finally, so I'll have a little review and some analysis of that. But also, apparently, they are testing a new model on the web dev arena on LM Arena under the name Anonymous Chatbot0717.

So this is a secret project from OpenAI that they were maybe putting out in the test realm, and then people discovered it, and they're digging into it. And so, I can't believe I'm gonna say this, but it's genuinely at a completely different level of front-end coding, far better than Sonnet 03, Gemini 2.5 Pro, or Grok, which is saying a lot, because people love those models for coding,

especially on the front-end. So, to test it, I ran a great prompt borrowed from the amazing Feature Crew Pod YouTube channel, asking models to create a procedurally generated planet with 3JS, take a look at yourself. I'm pretty astonished by how big the jump is. I have featured the new model twice because its implications have been so interesting.

Of course, this is only one test, but OpenAI models have always been a bit meh on front-end work, and they seem to have finally overtaken everyone else. So this apparent, alleged alleged unreleased OpenAI model is building this procedural world and it generates this really cool 3JS, like basically a video game.

It sounds like it kind of one shots it. So exciting stuff from that. So the agent stuff. So Swick says, please stop making flight booking agent demos with faint but dying hope, the undersigned. And so, everyone is saying, he's saying, please stop making fetch, please stop trying to make fetch happen, flight booking Instacort orders, astroturfing Reddit.

He wants killer use cases to be coding agents, support agents, and deep research. Up and coming is screen sharing, outbound hiring education personal AI and finance and I have to We're somewhat responsible because for months we were just like just book a flight like this is the killer demo This is the killer use case and then everyone was like it got played out. We did stop asking we did stop asking Yeah, yeah, and so Sam Albin had a post last week. He said, today we launched a new product. Can you give some background for people that may just be

crawling out from under a rock? Yeah, so he started a company. He was the president of Y Combinator. He started a company called Looped, sold it to Andrew. Angel Vester and Stripe. Yeah, yeah, that's what people know him from. Koenigsegg owner, McLaren F1 owner. That's where people probably know him from.

He says, today we launched a new product called ChatGPT Agent. Agent represents a new level of capability for AI systems and can accomplish some remarkable complex task for you using its own computer. It combines the spirit of deep research and operator, but is more powerful than it may sound. It can think for a long time, use some tools,

think some more, take some actions, think some more, et cetera. For example, we showed a demo in our launch of it preparing for a friend's wedding, buying an outfit, booking travel, choosing a gift, et cetera. We also showed an example of analyzing data to create a presentation for work.

Although the utility is significant, so are the potential risks. We built a lot of safeguards and warnings into it and broader mitigations than we've ever developed before although the utility is significant, so are the potential risks. We built a lot of safeguards and warnings into it and broader mitigations than we've ever developed before from robust training to system safeguards to user controls, but we can't anticipate everything. In the spirit of iterative development,

we are going to warn users heavily and it gives users freedom to take actions carefully if they want to. And so, very, very interesting post. He goes through a bunch more stuff, but I actually tested it out this weekend. So as you know, we have a studio, the TBPN Ultradome here in Hollywood.

We're always thinking about what's next, always looking at what else is on the market. And when we were first looking for the TBPN Ultradome, I went to ChachiPT operator and I said, hey, I'm looking for a studio. It needs to be a sound stage, which means how it padded walls. I want concrete floors. I want it to be, you know, at least 40 feet by 40 feet. I need one gigabyte internet access there.

I need power AC. It can't just be a, you know, heavy industrial space where there's going to be somebody next door, Hadrian making CNC stuff that's rattling me. I need a bunch of things. Go and figure it out, operator. And it went around and it looked at LoopNet, but it kinda got stuck on CAPTCHAs and it wasn't doing a great job.

And I felt like I had to be there watching it and it was really only working on desktop for me at the time. But I reran basically the same query asking it to look for studio space in LA with all these different metrics that I wanted, all these different parameters that I wanted to make sure it verified. And it found a place that was not listed

on any sort of rental sites. It found just a website that was out there for some crew that runs two studios, one in Hollywood one in Van Nuys and And gave me the full breakdown. I was able to go to the website But then of course like I'd have to call and I called and they only are available between nine and five Well, this is this is what I was asking the agent team. I think it was on Thursday that we had them on which was What have you done for me lately? Well, basically adding a voice feature just to like call that now, call them to confirm

that it's actually available and let me know, find out when I can go see it. Yeah, and also the- That is a much easier step to add in many ways than like the browser use functionality. And also like the, just the asynchronousness of it. Like I fired off this query, I don't know, but also just the asynchronousness of it. I fired off this query, I don't know,

after, I don't know, 6 p.m. on a Saturday. It needs to wait until 9 a.m. on Monday when they open to pick up the phone. When we started this section, I put in an agent request, said find me a GT3RS with under 1,000 miles for under 400K that's currently for sale in Los Angeles County. And so it's doing, I'm watching it cook,

and it's doing like an hour plus of work already in like five minutes. Yeah, no, no, it is remarkable. So it can really work through different sites and features. It's finding it, I can see it, it found one in LA County with 1,300 miles under 400K. And I just watched it say, this one will disqualify this one because it's over that limit. And so it needs to be able to think about time.

And it needs to think, OK, when is the certain time to do this? I need to come back to this in two days or something. Basically, set a cron job, set an alert, come back to things. It needs to use linear, a purpose-built tool for planning and building products. Meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects, and product roadmaps,

linear.app. Open AI runs on linear. Linear supports agents. And they actually have an integration. Which I am excited about. But, I mean jokes aside, Swix was saying this is a new frontier model. And I think that a lot of people get hung up in,

oh, there's a new branding around it, agents. I was talking to our buddy David Senor about this and he was like, what are you using it for? What are your prompts? And I was like, it's the same prompt. The thing that I would send to Deep Research, I send to agents now. It's just better. It's just better.

It's just better. And I do understand that like, it might unlock some new use cases, but I think the basic thing that you should start with if you're looking to experiment and kind of road test chat GPT agent for yourself, is just take something that you would put in deep research, throw it in agent and see how you like it.

And if it's better. And I noticed that it's a lot better in many ways. It gives you a.md file at the end. Basically, it gives you a document, like a report, that renders the exact same as a deep research report, but you can kind of scroll it differently. It can still do all the tables and stuff. The links, oddly, weren't working.

Like, I would click on it, and it wouldn't open. So there's like still some bugs and some rough around the edges stuff. But in general, I think it did a lot. I just think of it as like, like deep research is kind of, it feels like deep research is a little bit bound by, you know, the first level of depth on the internet and agents can actually go, you know, okay, there's, there's, there's a website out here that has something, but I need to go to the archive, I need to log in, I need to find a different route, I need to work around it,

figure out all these different things. Let's actually fact check some stuff, start building a table over here, oh, okay, I got some conflicting information, let me try and resolve that. Like all the natural things that when you do actually good research. And so I think it's fine if it's just a research tool

Yeah, the thing that the thing that agent is doing here is It's going it's navigating to a site and then it's using the site's internal search Yeah, yeah, yeah to find what it's looking for versus just like scanning like databases Yeah, just getting pages and pulling out information. So it's actually taking that next order. Yeah, it's actually using the website. And I still think like, I don't see this as really replacing anyone in my life

at least or my business, but I see it very much as like, in between me and the folks on my team, I will go fire off a prompt and try and like really do as much of the research and kind of pre work and then hand that off and come with to somebody who works for me with a just a more educated idea of like, okay, I think we need this. I have, I've already kicked this off and I think it's possible. I need you to go and negotiate.

And I need you to go do all the soft skills and I need you to actually execute this and take the last mile that's like the human side of this. But you already have all the information to basically do, like the job is well defined. And so I think that my next change to the way I use ChachiPT, deep research agents, will be, by the end of this, give me a list of steps

to actually execute this that need to be executed by a human. So with that GTRS, it's like, GT3RS, if they find one, it's like, find me the phone number of a few, and then when should I call them? What other data sources do I need to point to? What are the other considerations? So I basically have like a script to go and actually get the deal done, for example.

So anyway, very exciting stuff. Almost as exciting as Numeral. Sales tax on autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. Go to Numeral HQ to get started. So, should we talk about Stephen Colbert? We should, we should talk about Stephen Colbert. This was a fan, this was a fascinating story that

happened. The late night is ending so Stephen Colbert, you might know him from the Colbert report on, he was originally on The Daily Show then he had his own show on Comedy Central. I believe it was half an hour, maybe an hour every night on Comedy Central. Then he got pulled over into CBS with Late Night, which was originally designed to compete with The Tonight Show, which was Johnny Carson's property that he ran for 30 years, 1962 to 1992. Absolutely legendary legendary run Jay Leno took that show over gave it to Conan for a year went back very controversial late-night wars very fun deep dive to dig into but Emily just Shinsky has a story in Pirate

Wires all about late night I have some I have some facts here that were sticking out to me so the the high level is that the late show Stephen Colbert's daily late night TV show With days a week. Is it is it it's five days a week They do a hundred and ninety episodes per year. So they take a few weeks off in between little pretty casual Yes, pretty casual. I mean, we are on track to produce four times as much

content this year. But they spend $100 million to produce. We spend five times as much. Yeah, you keep pulling those daily GT3 RSs. I mean, they were spending, how much is the GT3 RS? $400,000? They could have bought a GT3 RS for, I mean, they were spending, how much is GT3RS? 400K? They could have bought a GT3RS for every single episode because they were spending $100 million

to produce 190 hour long episodes every year. And so this wasn't a problem because back in 2009, they were pulling in $271 million in revenue. So, I mean, and I'm sure that they were actually spending less back in 2009. So, I mean, and I'm sure that they were actually spending less back in 2009. So the margin on that show was immense, like 60%, 70%, maybe even higher. The problem is that the revenue started declining

because the audience got older and ad dollars moved around. The average viewer is- The median viewer of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert is over 59 years old. So it is effectively like a retired audience. So they're not as likely to buy expensive products. And if they buy those products, they might not stay with them forever because they might churn,

because they might pass away. And so. Lower LTV so lower LTV lower LTV and then also it's a very broad audience it's a very political audience it's very general comedy politics daily news audience very broad so you can only sell broad things and that's why you see you know Unilever like you know you you're watching an ad and you you see you're watching the late show and then yeah yeah Verizon and then you see Dove shampoo or something. Like you just see generic products, not hyper specific.

Like Adio, which is customer relationship magic. Adio is the AR and native CRM that builds, scales and grows your company to the next level. You can get started for free. You're not gonna see that on the late show. Yeah, you just won't. You just won't. And so revenue kept falling. Now

they make less than 70 million. Reports were maybe like 60 million in revenue. Now Colbert is taking 15 home, 15 million a year home personally, and then the rest of the show costs 85 million to produce. About 50 million of that is probably salaries. There's a bunch of other costs that go into it. They have a live band, they fly people around, they have hair and makeup and all sorts of, they have to license music and they do all sorts of stuff. So then they went from at one point making $200 million

in profit off this, a year, amazing, to losing $40 million. And importantly, CBS is going through an acquisition, and so there's a whole bunch of problems where you don't necessarily wanna have this massive loss-making asset sitting there while you're trying to sell the company and restructure everything. And then, so there's a little bit of conspiracy,

and Keith Olbermann was saying, he put on the tinfoil hat and was saying, this is all because Trump is, like, Colbert criticized Trump and This is a straw man hat. I'm gonna get out the straw man. Yeah, we're not making this argument This is this is no one's really making this argument Yeah, but I like the straw Some sort of I gotta sit lower so that it'll fit in yeah anyway

um, yeah, I mean the obvious thing here is that? Stephen Colbert Stephen Colbert. Yeah, whoever that is was a zero interest rate You have a business he's in the business for 30 years. I mean great. Yeah Who wants to who wants to be the proud owner of a business that loses 40 million dollars a year like clockwork Yeah, so it was a loss leader for CBS basically during up fronts when they're selling ads to everyone they go to Target and they say Hey, how about we put you with Stephen Colbert and they're like sure But then we also want to be on the game shows and then the game shows make higher Margins and they lose money on the on the late show

But a company like Target wouldn't want to advertise in the game show unless they can also be with Colbert and the prestige TV that's happening there so basically they're losing 40 million dollars what's interesting is that you would think that they would be able to cut back the cost and say hey look we're making half we're making half as much revenue. We need to produce this for half as much money. And so Colbert, you got to take a haircut, folks, you got about 50 people instead of 100. And 200. Yeah, it was 200 people. 200 people. Okay, yeah, 200 people. So

and apparently, so so we were messaging some people over the weekend, some some media moguls. and they were saying, I mean, it's very routine for there to be two people tasked, like effectively their full-time job is like moving one camera. Yeah. And so effectively is just a culture of inefficiency that has a bunch of different reasons why that is, but doesn't really work in the modern era. So the interesting thing here is I was trying to figure out kind of what happens from here.

So CBS has confirmed they're not doing a replacement host. They're not going to hire like an H1B, Steven Colbert. I think they're going to put a talk show in there. Yeah, so anyways, it's going away. There's no indication that ABC, NBC, Netflix, Max, or any of those platforms is going to try to launch one of these Johnny Carson style shows. But I think the right move for Stephen Colbert is it's not my not my flavor of

comedy entertainment but I think he could have I think if he went independent and effectively launched a live show podcast something of that sort he could continue to earn exactly what he's earning today and just do it with a much smaller team, maybe even have a better lifestyle. Maybe he starts doing the show in the morning. Yeah, I mean, there was $60 million of like, we want to advertise on Stephen Colbert, like flowing into this property.

If he provides a similar level of experience and content, he should be able to sell similar levels of ads. Maybe not 60, but maybe 30. And then he takes home 15 and he has 15 to spend on a smaller team. And what's crazy is like during the COVID era, all of the late night shows went to like from home episodes where they were basically doing them over Zoom

and then they set up like nicer camera setups and they were able to do those shows way cheaper. But I think because of the union, it wasn't palatable or really easy to just cut back on staff and cut back on salaries or switch to some sort of more incentive pay, which is tricky. And we just talked to Deleon about this, where in France there was a company that wanted to,

their business wasn't doing so well, they wanted to lay off folks. Good business, too many people. And they couldn't do it, doing so well, they wanted to lay off folks. Too many people. And they couldn't do it and so the government basically shut down. Yeah, apparently in France there's policies that effectively require companies to pay years of severance. So it ends up becoming a massive liability on the balance sheet.

And anyways. Yeah. And anyways. Yeah, so Emily Jacinski over at PirateWire says, CBS is not just pushing out Stephen Colbert, it's retiring the iconic Late Show brand altogether. That's the buried lead getting lost amidst frenzied speculation over politics and palace intrigue. If cutting Colbert is a bid to juice Paramount's pending merger or to punish him for criticizing it,

as Democrats are now arguing, because Colbert said that CBS as a bid to juice Paramount's pending merger or to punish him for criticizing it, as Democrats are now arguing, because Colbert said that CBS as a company should not, or Paramount should not have settled a lawsuit with Trump, I believe. CBS just stumbled right into the future, Emily says. She says, Colbert's time at the helm of the Late Show perfectly illustrates the most important trend in media and culture.

One might fairly wonder how Colbert, a man who leans so far into hashtag resistance comedy he could hardly get up, has dominated the late-night wars throughout Donald Trump's hostile takeover of American politics. Johnny Carson, for example, famously skewered both political parties without fear or favor. Carson won the late-night wars when networks faced less competition, meaning his goal was to appeal to as wide a swath of the American public as possible

for the sake of selling more ads. By the time Colbert took the helm from David Letterman, late night ratings had collapsed from their high watermark. That's particularly why Greg Gutfeld is able to actually beat Colbert's ratings on a cable network, a feat that would have been unthinkable in the 1990s. Like Colbert, though, Gutfeld doesn't approach politics as Carson did.

This is the new model, cultivate a loyal niche that returns night after night, giving you an edge over others, competing for an increasingly smaller slices of the pie. The result is a microculture. Monocultural institutions like the Late Show or the New York Times can no longer, and no longer do, appeal more widely

than their core audiences. For the Times, this is their subscriber base and it's why for instance, the paper committed obvious journalistic malpractice by yanking Senator Tom Cotton's infamous send in the troops op ed back in 2020. As the paper of record for all of America, that decision made no sense. Cotton was expressing a mainstream position in his party and in the country,

but Times subscribers were furious and that critical business interest shifted the outlet's editorial position. This of course was helped along by a staff increasingly aligned on an ideological level with the paper's narrow subscriber niche. One of the greatest sources of cultural angst stems from the ability to recognize these institutions of the monoculture have shifted to microculture. Whether they supported Trump or Bernie Sanders, plenty of Americans outside affluent urban bubbles figured that out years ago. It is the institutions themselves that often cling to the outdated brands so blinded by

their own biases, biases that it's become difficult for the c-suites to even recognize What's happening outside of Manhattan and the Hamptons don't count anyway? fantastic analysis from From Emily you should subscribe to pyre wires to go read the full thing But lots of people were having fun with this. How does the late show cost a hundred million dollars produce? That was a big question. I think a lot of it's just, this is a, this is, Letterman started in the 90s, so this is 30 years of just like,

yeah, let's just add one more person. Like, 30 years is only adding 60 people a year, one, what would it, oh no, no, no, way less, six people a year. So you're adding like one a quarter, which is like not that much, and I think it just kind of creeps in. But you gotta be aware when revenue starts dropping,

like you have to right the ship, and you can't just keep losing money, because it doesn't give you leverage over CBS, who's trying to get out and sell the company. Buco Capital Bloke says, "'I can't stop laughing at CBS "'losing 40 million a year on the Late Show with Colbert because they were spending $100 million a year

to produce it, a show of a guy talking, sometimes to other people, is their last competent group of industry executives than linear television. Alex Roy, friend of the show says, media is a business, Colbert already has an audience, he should have no problem launching a YouTube channel. I agree.

Many friends run a profitable YouTube channels with millions of subs with staffs of less than 10 people. They started from scratch, signed a media business veteran. The left has been looking for its Joe Rogan or Tucker Carlson. Why shouldn't Colbert be that guy? That's interesting. And so a lot of people were saying

it's a piece to camera slash guest interview show. It shouldn't cost that much. Tyler is back. What's going on, Tyler? I'm done. I was stuck for a while on one of them and I switched a different game finished that came back okay but I don't know what's the timer I feel like it was a little slow 25 minutes 25 minutes oh brutal brutal but you didn't get through it all yeah did your hair get messed up I was stressed out I was on one level for like five minutes

and then I don't know what, I just like couldn't figure out, I went to a different one. Yeah. And it was like, I got it instantly. Crazy. That's brutal. We will give you, still. Almost, we'll keep giving you challenges

until you get a new phone. Mike is, Mike is brutal. He says 25 is average, 20 is medium, 15 is hard. Well, we will give you a new challenge, give you a new chance to win a new iPhone. He says 25 is average 20 is medium 15 is hard well We will give you a new challenge give you a new chance to win a new iPhone The iPhone moment has arrived for our KGI Tyler missed at this time, but What do you think it says about?

Current AI systems. Do you think you will outperform the latest? Imo level model from OpenAI? You think you still got it? I mean, I think you could probably do RL on this and get it. I mean, I don't know if that's what the labs are necessarily doing. I think ideally they're trying to just train it independent of this and then see how it does.

I think it's a very good benchmark in thatchmark in that sense, but you could probably you probably could RL on this Yeah So the the way Mike described it was that you played the three public games There are three private games and so I don't know how much variation there was between the games It seems like there was a fair amount because you got stuck on one you switched to one switch to a different one and then went Back, right? So, yeah. So I think the goal is like, if you RL on the three public games,

you will be overfit against the private games that have slightly different mechanics, and you won't have learned the true generalizing function. That's the idea, at least. Yeah, that makes sense. But I mean, I'm sure, you know, if you're opening out, you could just like, oh, let's just make new games that are kind of in a similar vein and then RL on those then you have more data And then yeah, I don't know

I think you could probably like I think my general sense is that you can like RL on pretty much anything Yeah, so if they really want to and they want to throw like you know many millions of dollars I'm sure they could get it, but I don't know if that's really what they want I think the current prize is like $10,000, something like that for something that works on it. Maybe there's a million dollar prize, there's a million dollar prize that's still hanging out there, I believe for ArcGIV1.

Yeah, but those are size limited, right? You need to run in a certain speed and they can't be like so big. Yeah, I think they have to run on the Kaggle infrastructure, Kaggle infrastructure, so you basically have to like send it your weights your code and then you get access to like one GPU You don't get to fire the stargate at it But I don't know it'll be interesting to see how how what's your what's your timeline for a lab destroying this? Probably end of the year end of the year, end of the year. You think they'll beat it? Yes. The whole,

the whole team is like, we designed this to be unbeatable for years, like two to three years. I don't know. I mean, they just beat IMO. It's like, like, do you mean on a public model or them just releasing? We've beat this, uh, private. It doesn't need to be open sourced. Yeah. I think it's a private model. It's like opening eyes. Like, okay, we have this internally. We're not going to release it. It's not safe. Yeah, I think the private model it's like open AI. It's like, okay, we have this internally We're not gonna release it. It's not safe. Yeah, but like we've run it on this I think probably by the end of the year is like reasonable for for specific

Okay, we we built a model just to beat this or or we just we just were advancing models generally giving people what they want making Great things solving, you know flight booking and GPT agent and solving IMO and then, oh, as a byproduct, we solve this. You think that's what's gonna happen? Yeah, I don't think they're necessarily gonna train a model just to do this, but they definitely could. I mean, at this point, it's getting high stakes, right? Because like- Apparently, IMO is not RL'd at all,

like specifically for- That's what they say. Math, so yeah, I think that model is like reasonably capable, obviously. Okay, I wanna try that model is like reasonably capable. Obviously, okay I want to try that model on an arcade giv3 and see how it does because I I It does feel like that will be a very interesting moment where if they truly don't cheat and don't RL on this specifically Without the gas station data set as ruin calls it, you know

No arcade giv, like creating new games that feels like scientists collecting the gas station data set, right? And they just go about their day building better and better models. And then by the way, oh, we solved this. That will be very, very interesting. But I don't know, I would take the over

on the end of the year. Maybe it's more than halfway through the year. Yeah, that's true. Okay, what is your line then? You're so AGI is your line? You're so AGI-pilled. You're so AGI-pilled. I think this will hold. I mean, V1 is still holding. V1 is not, yes.

V1, it takes $2,000 to get like 60%. You just got 100%, you know? Like you finished the whole thing in 25 minutes. Yeah, I mean, we'll see, I guess know I would take the over I would take the over on this year I would probably take the over on Update I have to give you an update on chat GPT agent. Okay, so it only found So it gave me a really great report, but I'd only found one and it's listed by a dealer and I can already tell the dealer is the dealers like clearly pricing it like not where they would actually sell it okay but they did find one in Costa Mesa

so not far away one county away just under the limit. There we go. So pretty good. Yeah, not bad. Not bad. 15 minutes. Yeah, they're there. I think we gotta use it more here. What's going on? They didn't actually get me. They don't have a link. Okay, we're gonna have to dig into a more test. Not achieved internally, but we're making progress. Yeah. Uh, so are you saying 100% on V3 or what's like the benchmark? Cause like, if it's a hundred percent, then like, yeah, obviously not a year,

a hundred percent. I mean, like you got, you just got a hundred percent, never having seen it 25 minutes. Yeah. Like not crazy. I think we could literally give this to Anyone over the age of like 10 and they would get a hundred percent in Half an hour basically like I think it's I think it's like it's a very doable puzzle for humans and so I want a hundred percent and I want it in and I don't care about time and money like I I agree with, was it Will who said that? Or? Yeah, Will Depew.

Yeah, Will Depew said, you know. So yeah, throw $2,000 per task on it. I'm fine with that. The question is just, can the model do it in any amount of time, in any amount of money? And it seems like right now, it's probably at zero. We'll see how the IMO model does. Maybe it does really well, we'll see.

But I would put it at over, I would put it up there with doing your taxes, Dwarkesh mode, 2027. Yeah, I think 100% is hard. But if you give me like 90%, like if it misses one of the tasks, so there's three games that each have like 10 levels Yeah, if you can miss like one of those yeah Well, I don't I think you have to finish a game or not

And so I think basically on the private data set you can get zero you can get one out of three two out of three Or three out of three Okay, but it's unclear because like when do you tell it to give up because it can just keep trying and kind of brute force it But maybe there's some sort of like limit. I don't know, but you get like unlimited retries, but maybe Maybe maybe the real test is only giving one try. Yeah. Yeah, we got to move on but for your next challenge Tyler prompt Prompt for oh 7,000 times and stay sane

4.0 7,000 times a row and stay sane. Stay sane. Start recursive prompting like crazy for 48 hours straight and then come back to us. Yeah. Well, we gotta talk about the McLaren collection that's going up for sale. But first I gotta talk to you about Fin.ai. Fin.ai, the number one AI agent for customer service,

number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive bake-offs, number one ranking on G2. This was what Swicks said, he wants AI agents for customer service. Fin.ai is delivering, so go check it out. Anyway, so the Mansour Ohai Collection. This is from Tom Hartley Jr.

And hopefully we can pull up the video because it is fantastic. It's on YouTube. And yes, so here's the video. You can play some of that. Look at this lineup of cars. So the story here is this man named Mansour Ohay, OJ. I'm not sure how to pronounce that.

It's O-J-J-E-H I apologize to anyone who knows how it says I'm incredibly proud to announce that we've been entrusted with the sale of the world's greatest collection of McLaren road cars offered directly from the home of one of the most influential figures in McLaren's 62 year history. He passed away age 68, surrounded by family, and is now entrusting the sale of his collection. This guy is fascinating, very, very interesting fellow. So he has, let me pull up my information here. So Mansour Ohei, he was the son of,

he's a Franco-Saudi, a Franco Saudi French Saudi Arabian businessman And he used his family fortune to bankroll formula one teams and he built the tag group so if you're familiar with tag Heuer the the the watch brand he Built that watch brand and then wound up selling it to LVMH And so he was born this the man who collected all of these McLarens in burnt orange, which by the way, he not only is he only, is he the only one with the massive orange McLaren collection, that particular color is not available to anyone else. He

has his own color that only he can buy. It's absolutely incredible. And every single one of those cars that you see there in the background. They are all the last the last one off the line the last Individual production car that they've ever made of that particular model and so he gets the last one He's and you see the logo there. He puts his name on the logo It's the only I've never seen a brand do that But they were so tight with him because he owned the company at one point that they would replace the McLaren logo with Mansour logo Which is incredible and so he is a fascinating figure so

his father Akram Ohe Accumulated immense wealth from an as an intermediary in Saudi arms deals So he basically would go to the the Saudis and say what weapons do you need? What missiles do you need? What guns do you need? What planes do you need? I'm gonna go out into the world and find those and source those and bring those back and take a cut of that and so Yeah, this is really I will say if your father has amassed immense wealth through arm-stealing This is really pretty much the playbook it is how to put that capital to work it's the best it's the best and so Mansour grew

up in France the family mostly lived in France he attended the American school in Paris he moved to California where we are studied business administration at Menlo college one Let's give it up for all the business administration majors out there. One of the top majors if you want to administrate business. Yeah, and then he certainly has. He went to Santa Clara. He initially managed his father's ventures. He became gradually more and more involved

in his father's investment vehicle, which was Technique de Avant-Garde, which is TAG. Luxembourg registered holding company created in 1977. So the group's purchase was to broker deals between the Arab world and Europe and to handle commissions from arms and infrastructure contracts. And so his dad was born in Syria, raised in Iraq,

studied in France on a scholarship during the 40s, marries a French woman, stays in France, and then starts arranging these arms deals and infrastructure projects. And so in 1956, the dad opens an arms trading company in Switzerland and establishes Saudi Arabia's first weapons factory. During the 1960s, he represented the French defense contractors such as Dassault and Matra, selling Mirage jets and missile systems to Middle Eastern clients. He was facing some scrutiny from French authorities at one point. He founds the tag group. The group gave him unrivaled access to the Saudi royal family for defense projects, leveraged his

relationships with Prince Sultan, the Saudi defense minister, and he became so wealthy that he bought a cruise liner, like a cruise ship, he bought the Queen Elizabeth II, just I think as like a personal pleasure yacht. He bought a ranch in Paraguay, homes in Paris in Monte Carlo, and then he started sponsoring the Williams Formula One team, and he was putting in a million dollars a year, a million pounds a year. In the 80s.

When did he start doing that? This was in the late 70s. And so his son, so the dad dies in 1991, reportedly worth several billion dollars. Mansour, who's the man with all of those fantastic looking McLarens, him and his brother Mansour and Aziz, were heirs to the TAG group.

And there was a bitter inheritance dispute between the widow and some of the children, and obviously all the assets kind of get fought over, but Mansour makes out quite nicely and winds up investing even more heavily in F1. So through TAG he starts sponsoring Frank Williams Formula One team in 1978 when Saudi airlines sought to attract other Saudi brands. TAG became the team's major sponsor in 1979. Williams actually did win multiple races although they

were having some trouble a few years ago they were pretty good back then they got Alan Jones and another title in 1982 with Kiki Rosberg I think that's Nico Rosberg's father I believe the sponsorship gave Mansour his first taste of Formula One success and increased tags visibility then in 1983 he jumped ship from Williams goes over to McLaren Frank Williams resisted diversifying beyond racing, McLaren's boss, Ron Dennis, proposed exchanging shareholders, like shares for financing a new turbo engine.

And so Mansour agreed and funded the development of a Porsche turbo engine badged as tag so the McLaren tag partnership dominated in the 1984 season drivers Nikki Lauda and Elaine Prost won 12 of 16 races and McLaren secured both the drivers and constructors titles so basically he comes in with a bunch of money and says you want to win an F1 I will finance a a new engine. He goes and does it and it actually works. And so he in 84. Which is interesting because Tag and Porsche have their own partnership now.

They have the Carrera line of watches all these years later. Yeah. And so in 1984, he buys a 50% stake in McLaren's holding company. Now remember, McLaren was founded by a true racer who died at age 31, I believe, in a racing accident and so left this incredible legacy of just a guy putting it all on the line in racing. It wasn't like he was some business guy who was like, I want to get into racing. He was just a race car driver.

This is the story of Enzo too. Ferrari wasn't started until he was in his 40s, and but he had just been so obsessed over racing that it just carried into the brand. And so in a, Monsoor buys a 50% of stake in McLaren's holding company, Tag McLaren Holdings, and he's still working on the racing stuff, but then he says we gotta make a road car. And the road car that he pitches is

The McLaren f1 supercar that launches in 1992 and is a 20 million dollar icon owned by Elon Musk Sam Albin like there's they're in museums like they are the rarest of the rare Jay Leno has one I don't think I think it's like the one of the few cars Doug DiMiro hasn't driven. He rode in it with Jay Leno, but they are incredibly rare, incredibly special cars. And the doors go up. The doors go up. And so in other news, he did buy Heuer

and created Tag Heuer, which was a watch company that you might be familiar with, Tag Heuer. They eventually sold Tag Heuer to LVMH for seven hundred and forty million dollars in 1989 Elon crashed his McLaren F1. He did yes, and I believe that the McLaren was picked up and in like reconstituted and wound up selling still for millions of dollars the car hit a hidden embankment on Sand Hill Road at a 45 degree angle launching it into the air like a discus according to witnesses. The car goes 200 miles an hour, weighs like 2,000 pounds.

Incredible piece of lore imagining Elon on Sand Hill Road. And you know who else was in that car? I do. Peter Thiel. Crazy. And he went to the meeting after, right? Yeah, yeah they were apparently, the lore is that they went to Sequoia to pitch or something they were like raising money or driving down what did he want to do for me he turned off traction control really yeah yeah there's a long history of guys turning off traction control driving really fast and then just crashing their cars So if you want to avoid crashing your supercar, maybe keep it on avoid turning off traction control I mean, that's the thing with doesn't the career GT not have traction control or maybe maybe maybe it does

But it's like one of the few features And it definitely kills a lot of its drivers a lot of these guys like pride there, you know They like an analog super car does have traction Okay, it does. It does not have stability control or other electronic driver aids that are common So Mansour he buys Hewer turns it into tag Hewer great watch brand sells it to LVMH for 740 million dollars in 1999. He gets a huge profit from that and then he starts going deeper into all that he launches tag aviation and aeronautics which is distributing bombardier jets to the Middle East so he's a go-between between French aerospace and defense

companies in the Middle East still in this case he develops a luxury airport in the Middle East and he's just doing a lot of deals at this very very high level probably benefits from his ties to F1 and so he builds the he builds the McLaren F1 and then of course starts collecting and stays involved in in McLaren F1 for years and he builds this I mean he builds a 235 foot super yacht Kogo he creates a lavish house on Lake Geneva, Switzerland known as La Masson du Lac. And kind of goes on through that. He winds up getting idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis,

gets a double lung transplant, and ultimately doesn't make it. But he dies at age 68. McLaren CEO, Zach Plowne described him as a titan of our sport ultra competitive determined passionate and sporting and so Everyone remembers him and his contributions to To f1 but what's interesting today is that they are about to sell his entire McLaren collection

Which is something like 20 McLaren road cars all in his exact spec which is this burnt orange with his badging I don't know who the buyer would be they're probably listening to this show but good luck out there as you go and bid on the Mansour collection because it is truly one of a kind and every single car there is in the most extreme spec, and it's the last one off the line. And there's a plaque inside that says, this is the last F1 that was ever made.

This is the last Senna that was ever made. This is the last Speedtail that was ever made. This is the last GTR. This is the last, I mean, look at that one. No, what is that, the Elva? Yeah. The Elva in burnt orange. The Elva's just fantastic.

Burnt orange Elva with no windshield. Wow, that is fantastic. And just every single one of those cars is insane. Also, oh, by the way, also every single one of those cars, delivery mileage, never been driven, never been driven. Do you think he was buying, you think he was getting two? So the story is that he had an F1, of course he developed it.

He had an F1, but it was kind of, I think, from the middle of the pack or maybe the earlier pack. And because he was just excited to get the first one and got it and probably gave one to someone else and just had one, drove it, had fun with it. It was his experience. But then his brother got the last one in that orange color, and his brother was about to sell it, and he said, if you can't sell this, if you're

selling it, I'll buy it. And so he buys it from his brother and winds up building an entire collection on the back of that one car, the last F1 off the line the Burnt orange that turns into his signature color it turns into the color that you cannot buy no matter how much money you have Then no matter how McLaren's young and his legacy lives on Oscar and Lando Dominating so far this year and give us the update there. It's good He wouldn't have been he wasn't around to see it, but he would surely be proud. Yeah, well if you're looking for a compliment

to your McLaren F1, get on Bezel, getbezel.com. Your bezel concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet, seriously, any watch. Anyway, let's go to Trey Stevens, he had a massively viral post on Friday, we didn't get a chance to talk about it. are only triggering four tier one cities in the United States New York for finance DC for government San Francisco for tech LA for media and entertainment people

Thank you Trey. No other cities are power centers for aspirational talent. Sorry He says based on replies here are the people arguing for other cities. Austin people who live in Boston. People who are really upset about Trump's Harvard attack. Dallas Houston people who have only lived in Texas. Miami people who love money but don't love to work. Mm-hmm. Mogged. Mogged. Someone just commented. Someone just commented for Cleveland. And sorry, because, Troy's an Ohio guy. No, no, I agree with this and it is incredibly sticky. Like, it's unclear if there will ever be

another T-Rone city built in America. It doesn't really matter though, because you can go, like, Warren Buffett is out in Omaha. It's fine. Like, people read this as like, I can't possibly be successful in finance if I'm not in New York. Ken Griffin was in Chicago and then Miami. Charlie Munger lived in Los Angeles. Yeah yeah and so

and so it's like it's like it is true that these are tier one cities. It doesn't mean that you can't do something cool and amazing and achieve your goals in life somewhere else but you should just be thoughtful't mean that you can't do something cool and amazing and achieve your goals in life somewhere else, but you should just be thoughtful about it. And you shouldn't delude yourself into thinking that a tier two city is secretly a tier one, if it's not, it's just not. And so, stuff's moving around, very fun post,

always good to bait literally everyone in the world. But, very fun. But related to this, Delian had a post that was kind of interesting here. He said, 10 years ago, it felt like Silicon Valley had this really bright vibrant seed fund ecosystem that felt just as important as the multi-stage venture firms. Now, that feels totally dead partially because the whole, a whole generation of top tier companies just completely skipped that step in

raising. And so yeah, more and more companies are saying Our seed or one million dollars will just come from our own balance sheet and it'll just come internally And we'll just fund that or we'll just jump straight to 20 million dollars I have a problem where if somebody's raising a pre seed Yeah, I do feel like there's 20 funds that I would potentially introduce them to the challenge is when those pre seed funds are then trying to go compete at seed which we now know is this sort of four to eight million dollar range we had somebody on Friday who was raising 55 million crazy

whether or not that was marketing or whatever. The name doesn't really matter. Board Ape Yacht Club raised a billion dollar seed round in 2021. That was a seed round? Was that because they just hadn't raised before? They really hadn't raised. Yeah.

Yeah, there's this weird thing where, you know. And Mira Marati, two or three billion dollar seed round. So again, your company's expectations are based around how much capital has come in the door Yep, not the last name the last the the name of your last financing round. So yeah, there's one side of this which is like the seed moniker used to stand for Time and money effectively like it used to stand for time and money effectively. Like it used to be like, okay, if I'm a seed stage company, you know that I'm in the first 18 months of my creation

and I've raised less than $5 million or also I'm in mango seed territory and series A territory. But now there's some world where people just say, okay, this is your second round. It doesn't matter that you've been around for 10 years, it's an A round or it's a seed round or doesn't matter if you're raising a billion dollars and it's priced like a growth round It's it's a seed round. I don't know

I think what delian's getting at is more just like the vibe of like you used to be able to He's a seed investor used to be able to hunt around find some people doing cool stuff and get 10% 20% of the company for million bucks two million bucks and that has kind of disappeared. Dillion's still known to get a good price. He's figured out how to survive. Nature finds a way, as does public.com. Investing for those who take it seriously, they got multi-asset investing, industry-leading yields,

and they're trusted by millions of folks, get to public.com. And we have our next guest. And I believe we have Chris Black in the Restream waiting room. Let's bring him in. Let's bring him in. Chris Black, how you doing? Bring me in.

What's up, guys? How are you? What's up? What's happening? It's great to meet you. I've wanted to chat for a long time. I actually bought your, what was that little green book that you you made

Oh, yeah, we got an og on our hands I don't think you know it all was I think it was 2015 I did that with powerhouse So thank you for being a brown floor investor I had that I had that in college and I felt so cool to be a college kid that was Cultured enough to buy a table, you know, a coffee table book by Chris Black. Yeah. I think it turned into more of a bathroom book than coffee table book.

Yeah, it's very small. Okay, okay. You would like the form factor. Sure, sure, sure. And what was inside the book? Can you break it down? I mean, Chris can give some more context. The thing that I remembered in a quote

that I've brought up a bunch, it was the Andy Warhol quote in there that was something like making money is, you know, business is art, and making money is art, and good business is the best art. You guys love that, you guys love that. Yeah, I mean, the book was just like a fun advice book, kind of, basically.

It did really well as a graduation gift purchased from Urban Outfitters that year. Oh yeah, there we go. We well as a, uh, graduation gift purchased from urban outfitters that year. That's, we sold a lot of books. Thank, thank God. So it was, it was fun to do that. It was very, it was very fun. Did you go through a traditional publishing house? Like what was the workflow? Did you write the whole book and then shop it around? Like I've never published a book. So curious. It was, it was based on Twitter, honestly. It was based kind of on that idea of like life, soul instruction book, the classic form factor to use your term, meets sort of Twitter. So I went through, wrote them all.

Yeah, I did it with Powerhouse, which is like sort of in and out of business from what I can tell. But I'm working on a book now for Simon & Schuster that should come out in 2026. So that's a little more of a... What's the concept of the new book? It's kind of like a essay memoir, you know's a little more of a process you're talking about. What's the concept of the new book? It's kind of like an essay memoir, a little bit of everything from some high school stuff to being a drug addict, to work, to kind of everything. And that process is a little bit more like you're talking about.

You write a full essay, you outline some chapters, and then you take that out and sell it. And CAA helped me, obviously, I wasn't doing it myself, but it's daunting, but I'm excited. Yeah, what's the secret to a good book launch these days? We talked to Ezra Klein's co-author, and he was saying that, interestingly, when they went on hour-long podcasts,

they sold less books than a five-minute hit on like- TV. TV, because if you listen to an hour-long podcast, you're like, I got the gist, I don't need the whole book. But if you listen to five minutes, you're like, oh, I could do another hour, I'll buy the book. That's a fair, I have a friend who's a very successful legendary author

who told me an anecdote that he sold more books from doing Tucker Carlson when he was on TV than he sold from anything else, like a clear bump. I mean, this was years ago, but I think that I mean, we were talking about this earlier today. Jason and I actually were talking about this and about how sort of podcasts have replaced not only late night, obviously, with this kind of like Stephen Colbert news, it's topical, but also like, Good Morning America, The View, like it's still fun to do that stuff.

I don't, but it might move books, but it doesn't seem like the publicists think that it does based on the priorities of what they're having their clients do. Yeah. Is it speed run 200 podcasts? Is that the playbook now? I mean, if you pay attention to people, yeah, kinda.

You know, if you pay attention to an actor or writer or whoever has something coming out, it's like, you know. We talked to a lot of musicians on How Long Gone, so we're part of that in some ways, but like there's the Dax Shepard's, Joe Rogan's, smart list, call her daddy world that I think is basically, that's the new Oprah, that's what it is.

I almost feel like there's a world where some podcasters, certainly not us, because we're a daily show, or they're news driven, but some podcasts, I'm thinking of like acquired FMs, like Business Deep Dives, or some true crime podcasts, like they kind of fill the hole of an audio book. It's like you get two or three hours every month, and it feels like it's just a more, it's like an get two or three hours every month and it feels like it's

just a more it's like an easier financial model for them to be like well I'm selling 12 ad slots and I have subscribers that feel like they're getting something they're not waiting a full year for the next thing so when I hit their credit card with a $20 charge this month they're getting one thing this month. I think we were talking on Friday this concept of like releasing a book on sub stack because I could get somebody to effectively it creates this like Community experience of like reading the book together, but then it's you know you might charge $25 for your book But somebody might pay you I don't know $10 a month for your sub stack

No, I mean there's all these I mean I I think there's all these ways to do it. I am extremely traditional in what I think is cool and what works. I would like to do it about is by the book, no pun intended, as possible, just because I think that's cool. I think all of these modern approaches, though, are often more profitable and also maybe,

like you said, easier for people to stomach. Like the attention spans aren't there. Even if you break it up like that in their minds, it's like easier to read in a weekly dispatch than it might be to sit down for an hour every day and read a book, you know? Yeah, there's also something about like, I mean, I've heard somebody say like,

when you publish a book, like, it's the easiest way to get like a comma with a phrase after your name every time you're in print. Like if I wrote a book that's just like you know how I became awesome everyone would just be like okay like you know life life is someone awesome forever John Coogan author of the awesome yeah that's why that's why I'm awesome Chris's book I'm assuming the memoir will be called just go to go to it now.

But no, I mean, I think you're right. I mean, I had another friend, Matty Matheson, the chef and cookbook author and actor, and he told me, he was like, dude, like New York Times bestseller lasts for the rest of your life. Totally. You get that forever if you do it one time.

You know, and like, I I think also that is so interesting because it's such a classic thing that we all know, but no one really knows the formula of how you get, like it's not just sales, there's all these factors that no one knows, which makes it even more mythic and cool. It's interesting to think about, would you rather be featured in the New York Times,

is it more valuable to be featured in the New York Times four times a year forever, or just be a New York Times bestseller? Because we had a couple buddies get hit pieces last week in the New York Times and they just like really they only get attention if you give them attention. Like dude I was I that's so funny you say that because there was a story in the early days of How Long gone there was a story that wasn't favorable let's Say and I was like wait was this was this the was this the whole lawsuit thing because I got the t-shirt back then to Making fun of the daily this was a

It's you know, it's um, don't try sand it. Don't try it. You speak generally. So nobody can figure it out. You know what we're moving on. Moving on. Anyway, the other interesting thing about books versus podcasts is we have a buddy who runs an AI podcast, the door cash Patel podcast, great show, great interviews, super researched. Um, he published a book and the book was, uh, uh, like a, an oral history of AI. And so it was a collection and it was actually kind of like a digest of a bunch

of interviews that he's done. So he didn't start from a blank page and just start typing out like a thousand pages and refine it But and in some ways it's like it's just kind of a different instantiation of the same thing that he's been doing but I love it because I'm there's no way for me to go to like randomly remind myself in five years that I should go revisit a Dwarc ash Podcast unless someone like clips it and shares it

But if I put that book on my shelf, I might pick it up randomly in a few years. And there's something about like just the tangible physical. We're very into the physical stuff here. We print the two. For sure. It's real. I mean, I think also that's, I mean, I think that like everything else it makes a return to some extent. You know, like I subscribe to the financial times. I subscribe to several magazines like a lot of my friends do. I mean obviously I'm 42 years old so it kind of makes sense but I think that like young people are fetishizing print the same way they fetishized vinyl you know a couple you know 10 years ago it's the same kind of thing.

Once it is you know once it's basically past its prime print is just objectively better than vinyl though I gotta say I'm not 100% in that it's like, you can go to the beach and carry, you can't like, you know, just bringing a piece of paper to the beach and letting it get losing it, whatever. It's nice. It gives you the benefit of leaving your phone at home. Yes. That's the powerful thing.

When I finish a book, I leave it wherever I am. Like in the back seat of the plane. Oh, interesting. I leave it so somebody can hopefully Like on the back in the back seat of the plane on like I leave it so somebody can hopefully pick it up and take it. I'm usually I usually have a couple with me if I'm traveling. If I finished one, I got to lose some weight. You're adding stuff on the way. Exactly. So are we going to get How Long Gone pressed on vinyl? We got a couple of special episodes.

We did do a CD. We did do a CD we did do this With Jack Jaguar, which is a really fun project to do but yeah, I mean I think for us We're still I mean you guys have done something so interesting I think it's so cool the way what you guys are doing and how you're approaching it I think this live daily thing is like really powerful sure and I think we're trying to figure out what our version of video is So yeah, you guys are doing, what's this thing? I read it in Feed Me, like you're doing a live show, like a one-off live show. We did, we're on tour right now. We're just having a couple days off.

But we did a show at Turf Club in St. Paul, Minnesota, at this, basically with this service called Veebs.com, which is started by the Madden brothers from Good Charlotte, but then Live Nation bought it. And it's basically they send a full sort of very pro crew to shoot your show live and you can pay, you know, buy a ticket online and watch it up to 48 hours after you pay. What's the idea of live? It's like vampire weekend. How long gone Alicia Keys? That's awesome. I don't know how. Podcasters in control, podcasters in control. What's the right live show for you though? Do you feel pressure to have the hottest takes?

This show, we're doing DC on Thursday, and then Friday we're doing Toronto, and then we go to London. But this show is actually different. We used to just go up there and shoot the shit. We'd bring a guest up, depending on what town we were in, much like the actual podcast. This time it's the How Long Gone Guide to Life. And it's a visual, it's like basically a keynote that we're walking the audience through with

our commentary. And we've only done it twice so far, but it feels sort of like it's taken us from a live podcast to a show, which is what our goal was. And I don't think we could figure out exactly how to do that. And I think this is kind of pushing us in that direction, which is great. Give us the three-minute summary of the guide to life so that people have to still go see the full show. Yeah, yeah. Don't give them away. Get the tickets. Get the tickets. Yeah, no. It's everything we talk about.

By the way, we did one live show together together in Miami and we had only made like two episodes So nobody like nobody knew us as a duo. They didn't know our humor and the live show The live show is like we made like like a very serious like argument for why Venture capital firms should get their founders on like PEDs so like testosterone like a variety. That's a great, I would watch pay attention to that. Yeah exactly. And I don't like a half of the audience was like these guys are dead serious.

Half were like kind of laughing like what is going on. It's a mixed bag. Yeah I mean ours we basically cover all of the stuff that we talk about on the show from like restaurants and restaurant etiquette to the gym and gym etiquette to dating and sex and drugs. So it's like we cover it. You know, it's like one slide that's going really well for us is polyamory is for ugly people. Be single or cheap. That's going really well for us.

But, you know, it's just like funny stuff that you can just kind of talk about and also will inspire a response from the crowd. We like to go back and forth with the audience. It's fun. We're gonna create a rival guide for life and we'll just go guide for guide. We'll go guide for guide.

Well look, I think we have different enough audiences where we can cover a lot of territory. For sure. Cover a lot of territory. So going back and forth, I want your restaurant etiquette. This morning we go to our cafe where we have breakfast every morning. Normally, really like I never noticed the music. It was always quiet and chill. And today they were blasting in sync with the Backstreet Boys and Britney Spears. And maybe it was just the mood,

because it was kind of gloomy in LA. We're having some late June gloom going on. It's terrible. And I was a little bit tired from the weekend trying to get back into it. And I was trying to read a pretty detailed analysis about tech and stuff. And I was just like, I can't,

and funny thing is that two days ago, I was in a grocery store and I was jamming to the Backstreet Boys. And I was like, this is the greatest thing ever I was loving it in that context but in the morning It felt like such a violation of trust because I know this place every reliable and it sets me up for the day I'm prepping the show and so we kind of made us we made a slight comment We're like, oh is the music different but I want to know etiquette wise. How should I?

I don't want to be I want to speak to the manager. That's weird. But also like I'd like a change. What should I do? What kind of like, what do you get as a regular? Like what are your rights as a regular? What are your rights as a regular? You're right. You can't say anything.

Sorry. You can't say anything. No, if you say something, they're never going to look at you the same. You're an asshole. Whether you're right or wrong. I'm just telling you, they're going to think of you differently.

The brief is not going to be made with love anymore. Let The barista, it's not going to be made with love anymore. Let me say that. It's not going to be made with love. So am I supposed to vote with my feet go somewhere else? We were running the numbers. We go there every single day. We're basically employing a single person there, paying the bills. I like how you think about this.

It's logical. You can sort of figure out a way to make it work. A barista hates all of the customers. Okay, okay, and that's a feature. Yeah, it's a feature. I mean, I understand what you're saying. I think restaurants, like there was a trend for so long and it's still going on where like restaurants play like

hip hop, you know, and like I don't want to hear Kanye West while I'm eating spicy pinay, you know? I want to like, I want to hear nothing is preferred if you go to certain kind of old-school Like I think LeBron a den in New York doesn't play music and it's just like the bustle of the restaurant and the chatter I'd much rather say that. Yeah Yeah, sure. It's fascinating. Do you already wish we take it now? I have a I yeah

I wanted I wanted to just get some some broad takes from you on a bunch of different topics that we don't cover closely. So one, first off, is AI psychosis real? You experienced it yet, yourself? Let me tell you something about AI, and I'm sorry to all of you. I just couldn't care less. I'm assuming, I'm assuming that you're- Couldn't care less.

The hottest taker of all. I don't care less. I think it's a reality. I think it's very serious. I think it's common for us, good, bad, and ugly. I just don't care, and think it's a reality. I think it's very serious. I think it's coming for us, good, bad, and ugly. I just don't care and like other things in my life, I'm gonna put it off till the very last minute and when I have to deal with it,

I've never downloaded Photoshop, I've never used InDesign, I've put off all this shit in my entire life and it's worked out. So I think I'm gonna do the same thing with AI until I have no choice. So you work, list off some of the clients that you've worked with over the years.

It's basically everybody, right? Oh, I mean, yeah, I mean, everything. And on that side of the business, yeah, I mean, New Balance, Tom Brown, Stussy, J. Crew is an ongoing one, Banana Republic for a couple years. So yeah, I mean, like, a little bit of everything. John 6'8", So Banana Republic is his. They signed Kevin Love.

Jason 6 9. So he has the same stuff for the same issue. What size shoe? And he has this at 14, 15. Jason's a 17. So it's really cool. Whoa, okay. Mogged. He goes to these like funny websites to find shoes that we haven't heard of because we're dark side. Dark web web big and tall. You can.

Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. So so you're going in when you're working with these clients. It's kind of like Rick Rick Rubin mode. You don't know how to use any of the tools. You're just kind of like they just pay you to tell them what. I mean no I think it's a little bit of a relationship thing and hopefully a taste thing.

Like I think taste takes years little bit of a relationship thing and hopefully a taste thing. Like I think taste takes years and years to develop and I think mine is suited for certain people more than others. I think J. Crew is like a perfect fit because I grew up wearing J. Crew. I was raised in Atlanta. It's preppy. It's Southern. But I think I have a little bit of a different point of view because I got into punk and

hardcore and you know skateboarding and all that stuff. So it's like a little bit of a hybrid of all those things. But I think with clients, it's all about sort of taking the real talent at the company and making sure that it doesn't go off the rails. You know, so the creativity, people who are true geniuses and really creative, like powerhouses, need to be brought back down to earth a little bit, you know? And like reminded in a nice, gentle way that if a little bit, you know, and like reminded in a nice Gentle way that if we don't you know make money this is all over

Like we can do all this stuff But sometimes you got to feed the beast to make sure the lights stay on and it buys us more time to do more fun Stuff and I think it's like a I think as an outsider going into a company You're able to do that a lot easier than like aaried employee. Yeah, you can stir things up. So going slightly deeper, I have to imagine every single brand that you've worked with or will work with in the future is starting to try to mix in AI-generated imagery. And I'm sure that sounds like that's triggering to you.

It's just stuff that you don't want to, like how do you see the kind of market kind of bifurcating in the sense that you think any brands will take a hard line and say like we only shoot, you know, farm to table organic content here. We never- I think that's exactly what's going to happen. I think there's going gonna be like a division

where it's like, obviously certain things are easy to automate. I think everybody will do that because it feels like a freebie. I think some of the creative stuff, I think a lot of, at least I hope clients I work with would sort of be like, we need a human being to take the pictures.

Like that, like pictures specifically, like to me, there's so much emotion involved like to me there's so much emotion involved in it there's so much skill involved in it and You just can't to me. I haven't seen it mimicked correctly like asking Yeah, the other picture car is different like this is something that requires like a human touch I think yeah And I think there's actually there's laws in place that that make it so that chain restaurants can't Photoshop their food, right? Because they would just Photoshop a burger,

and then they're trying to sell it, and it just doesn't look anything. And I think it's possible we'll see, I don't know, on the apparel side it'll be interesting, because everybody's had the experience of buying an item, and it just looks amazing online, or it looks great on that model, or whatever. And then it just doesn't fit, or whatever and so I think that that will probably

Accelerate as you have these sort of upstart brands that never even do product photography Don't even know if they're if they're stuff well product photography and like econ photography is like a science and it's pretty hard to get Right and there's a lot of discussion at these at these companies about how to do it Who's gonna shoot it how it's gonna appear And I think that stuff is very interesting because it directly relates to sales and like the bottom line, like some styles work really, really well and that's what everybody wants to mimic. And some are a little, a little harder to pull off. Yeah. What about on, what about, how do you see like, you know, the music market evolving? We don't cover much music. That's the latest Justin Bieber album.

We got two songs on the drive home. I mean, we talk about music on How Long Gone All. That's all we do. And like a lot of my best friends are musicians. Most of them are successful at this point. They've been doing it long enough. But I think it's like everything else in our lives, I think we're just paralyzed by choice and the barrier of entry is just too low. You know, there's too much stuff and music, it suffers from that maybe more

than any other genre that I could think of. And you mean because growing up, you'd buy an album, you'd invest dollars into it, and so you would listen to the full thing and you'd like really pay attention to it. And now if you can stream an album for two seconds and be like, ah, whatever. Yeah, you don't care. I mean, I think yes, I think that I also think that it's just if the three of us wanted to make a song right now and upload it and have it on iTunes and Spotify this week, we could do that. And I

don't think that I don't think the world needs that for us or for many, for many other people. And I think that, but yes, you're right. I think when you would go to the store, access was harder. I mean, we talk about this all the time. Like I grew up, I remember the day that we got internet at my parents' house.

You know, I mean, we had the Dell in the fucking family room. I remember it like the whole thing. And if you remember a time before that, I think the effort that was involved to like anything or to understand anything was so much greater. Because you had to piece it together through like magazines and going to a show and that kind of thing. Yeah, you go to a show, you go to magazines,

you look at the liner notes of an album and see which bands get thanked and then go find those bands. You know, it's like, it was that, it was kind of that tactile and that granular. Um, but yeah, I think it's like, I think that like Spotify and streaming in general, like I know people to make a lot of money on streaming and they're

very happy with it. I know a lot of people. And the the I think general sentiment is no one gets paid enough. And of course, I always want artists to get paid more because they you know, it's the soundtrack to our lives. It's like important for culture. But I also think that people forget that these are just giant corporations. And they've got, again, they've got bottom lines

and like they're gonna do whatever they have to do to make that work. Yeah. Do you think corporate jingles could make a comeback? They have, what do you mean? I mean, you know that, you know, famously Pusha T from Clips wrote the McDonald's jingle I'm loving it. No way. Yeah

They'll never have to work again, you know Yeah, so I think it's all that stuff I mean, it's like the way that like John Hamm is the voice of Mercedes like everybody gets it how they can you know What I mean, I think the jingle or I mean what we talk about a lot of how long gone is like sync culture You know and like how? There used to be like you would be a sellout You know if they used your song and a jack-in-the-box commercial and now it's like well, that's the most money I'm gonna make if they're gonna give me a quarter million dollars to use my song for 30 seconds

Like I have to do that You know the choice isn't isn't quite as clear as it to be. And so we've talked to a lot of different musicians about regret, you know, how they like pass something up because they were high on their horse in their early 20s and now that they're 40, they're like, I'm a fucking idiot. Like, it was half a million dollars. Like, who cares?

Yeah, that makes sense. You said that they've made a comeback already. Like, is there a more modern example than the McDonald's theme song? I mean, I feel like, you might be right. I feel like they're just very ingrained in my brains. They feel new. Totally.

But like, Cars for Kids or something is probably 20 years old. If you guys ever lived in New York, there's 1-877-CARS. Totally. Like, you know it. Yeah, I know it well. I'm just thinking about like, of the new companies that have emerged Airbnb Facebook Instagram

Spotify open AI like Tesla doesn't have a jingle like like I don't know if those would be even like on brand but like even even like prime from Logan Paul like he's done a song like he did that he did like it's everyday bro with his Brother, I think or maybe that was just his brother. But you know, like there are influencer brands. Mr. Beast has a chocolate bar, and I don't know that it has a jingle, and I'm wondering if it has something to do with the fact

like the nature of advertising has become like way longer tail in the creative. Like we don't see that many like shelling points for like, wow, they made an iconic ad, it ran at the Super Bowl, everyone's talking about it, it's more like, they spent the same amount of money on ads, but it's just in the form of a thousand different

Instagram ads and everyone saw a slightly different one that was more tailored to them, so the guy saw the one with the girl in them. Potentially Alpha making a jingle right now and using the same jingle on thousands of different creative. So it's always the same audio and different visuals. Going crazy.

That will work. That will work. Yeah. I think we're onto something here. Ramps. Time is money. Say both. Find your happy place.

With car companies, they obsess over the sounds the cars make. You know what I mean? I drove this new Mercedes from Atlanta to Miami for F1. And it was like, there was all this detail. I'm a huge Mercedes fan. We love Mercedes over here. We have tons of them. I'm in Bedford, New York right now

and I borrowed a CLE AMG convertible. There we go. It couldn't be better. It's a CLE 53. I just noticed all the, when you drive these car you notice like these little kind of sort of yeah brand moments where it's like a little noise when something starts up or like it is audio or like how famously like Porsche has a guy whose only job is about like the way the door sounds when

it closes because it sounds so much better in a Porsche than other cars you know yeah but it but it's just a funny I think there is these audio elements that are happening from a brand standpoint, but they're not quite as overt as like a jingle you know, yeah, it does feel like Doug DiMero has this take that Like power is on demand like the latest Rivian truck electric truck has 1200 horsepower It's the same as a Bugatti Veyron. Like it is, you can't go any,

that's what you want in a truck. Or mid-sized Grand Prix SUV. Hold on, is Rivian a sponsor? No, no, no, no, no. All right, cause that Rivian is, Rivian's like the, that is like the Austin mesh hat yeti cooler of cars. And I just don't, I don't get the popularity.

I don't think it looks good I mean, I guess it's an alternative to Tesla. So that's part of this Yeah I I think the main thing was the like Tesla hadn't come out with a truck yet and then they came out with a very Controversial design and then the f-150 lightning was pretty expensive and the Rivian kind of was just pure play like didn't confuse anyone And and then they did have the full-size SUV or like close to full-size yeah yeah for sure in the electric category a little bit sooner than the Hyundai IONIQ 9 and a couple others it says a little bit more

but it is interesting because between Lucid and Rivian and we're gonna lose it and there's that star star star is technically like a Volkswagen or a Is it it's not Volkswagen. It's the Volvo I go to I go to Copenhagen Fashion Week a couple times a year and the drivers I mean every brand is confused with what to do with electric like it's like do we throw Is it a is it a powertrain? We just throw a little eye at the end or an X or an E at the end or do we throw a, is it a power train? We just throw a little I at the end, or an X, or an E at the end, or do we do a whole new sub-brand, or do we spin something out?

Oh, what are you, have you seen that, have you seen the new Lamborghini? What is the EV? Oh yeah, what was that called? It's called the... Why do they have to make them look like that? The Lanzador. The Lanzador, you gotta pull up a picture of the Lanzador.

This thing looks wild. It is. What is it, what is it, a Lambo? Yeah, it's a Lamborghini Lanzador. What's it called? Lanzador. This thing looks wild. It is. What is it? What is it? A Lambo? Yeah, it's a Lamborghini Lanzador. What's it called? Lanz... They're calling it an SUV, but it just looks like a really big car. Like a lifted sedan. It looks like a lifted...

No, it looks like a lifted Huracán. That's kind of sick. It's kind of sick. It's kind of sick. And then there's the slate truck, which is coming out, which is like a small thing. But I think that some of the new companies companies like they're so focused on like just deliver on the basic value prop they're not in that like surprise and delight category yet although we've been did kind of do that with like that gear tunnel you know about that in the I like okay yeah that is that is just a big old car yeah it's

a big car but they're probably not CV SUV. Guys, that kind of looks like a Subaru. No joke. No, that's like a Subaru halo car. That should be there. Total tangent, but I did have one question and then one idea that I wanted to throw out before you jump. Do you think that any social media apps will become truly Lindy? Like, will we be on X

like 30 years from now chopping it up on the timeline or as it as I call it Twitter still? I'm a traditionalist, but for this purpose, I will call the X. X is the most enduring platform that we have because I think it's not image based.

I think that's what sets it apart. It feels more comedy and information. And those are two things that I feel like aren't as affected by trends in some ways, whereas like Instagram, I love Instagram. I use it every day, but like people get, when people get very exhausted by it because of what they have to see, you know, I think Twitter, I don't know. I'm a Twitter diehard. I'm a power user. I have been forever. And I will never change that.

Yeah, it's awesome. I hope. Yeah, it's one of those things like is is is it digital news or is it like the form? Is it its own like form factor like vinyl that will just perpetuate for? We're going to find out. Last last question, media, media and entertainment question because you're an entertainer. Do you think there's room in the market for next election cycle pay-per-view boxing

between both political parties? So like Democrats versus Republicans, betting on the line, very American. I mean, I'll pay $100 for the PPV for that. I mean, I think that if we're, I don't think we're that far away from, honestly, I know that's a joke. I don't think we're that far away.

No, I'm not. I'm actually serious. I really don't. Every four years, you get 10 Dems, 10 Republicans, get them lined up in different weight classes, $100. We duke it out. Duke it out. Settle it.

I would love to see some low level, first year senators just bloodying themselves in the opening rounds. That's what we need. It could just be angry online posters too. Settling the score. That's a category of fighting that has not been monetized. Something we should think about. Yeah, it's like Dana White's slapboxing

Boxing would be huge. All right. Well, this is super fun. Thank you come back on again Good luck with the rest of your live shows. We were talking about jingles. We got to sing you a jingle Find your happy place find your happy place book of wonder with inspiring views hotel great amenities dreamy beds top to your cleaning in 24-7 concierge service it's a vacation home but better folks and Chris Buskirk is in the restream waiting room let's bring in Chris Buskirk how you doing Chris? I'm alright how are you? great hopefully you got to hear us singing yeah we're trying to bring back corporate jingles. We think that there's an unexplored territory there.

I don't know your stance. 1789. Ooh, here we got something. I know why we don't. I actually know why we don't have them anymore. Please explain. It's because Big Pharma took over advertising, and that killed all the creativity.

Oh, interesting. Man, they got to throw those big disclaimers at the end. Yeah, now it's like you got to have a 40-second commercial. 20 seconds tells you all the bad things that are going to to you take the drug. It's rough. Well, yeah, so so The conspiracy theory there. I don't have my tin foil hat handy is that It's not about even generating awareness. Here we go I got we keep one of these anytime we have to discuss a conspiracy theory. Discuss a conspiracy theory gives you cover. You know, I don't believe this necessarily.

But you listen to these pharma ads, and after listening to it, I would say you're much more likely to think, I don't think this is for me, right? Because you maybe hear about some benefits, and then you get like 20 seconds of, but is it a mechanism to just invest so many dollars in a show that the show could not possibly criticize the, Yeah, yeah, yeah.

The pharma industry broadly, otherwise you're potentially- Is this manufactured consent, says Noam Chomsky, but has been written, rewritten. Well, it's more like, it's more like, yeah, you're welcome to criticize Big Pharma, but say goodbye to, what, 60% of your revenue overnight. Yeah, sure, sure. Anyway. Not going to be running the late show. We're not going to be talking about more

because it's the season. Anyway, let's kick it off with an introduction. The theory is always also known as the news six months early. In the future, yeah. But let's introduce yourself. How do you think about yourself? What key projects are you working on right now? You know, co-founder of 1789 Capital, as you guys know, I've got some other evocations as well.

But people always say, how do you split up your time? And that was like the Rubik's Cube question for me for a while. And then I realized, actually actually the simple answer is right, which is like all the different stuff I'm doing is all the same project, which is, how do you keep the country peaceful and prosperous? Like that's really it.

Then there's all kinds of different vectors of attack there. There's like, there's politics, there's culture, there's business, there's tech, but it's really all with the same T-Los. Like how do we just make life better for this country and the people in it? Yeah, give me a temperature check on your view on the business climate.

There's been so many stories about tariffs and interest rates and all sorts of stuff. At the same time, the stock market's been down and then right back to where it was. And so there's like the nothing ever happens view. There's the incredibly tumultuous times view. How are you just feeling about the business climate generally? And uncle Sam put up a surplus.

It's like, it's better than it's been in a long time. Yeah. I mean, this is what, you know, I've had, I've had the following conversation. It probably literally like 10 or 20 times in the past few months. And people, whether it's a lot of investors, but also founders slash builders have said a different version of the same thing, which is I didn't know how much I was self-censoring

my own thought about what was possible over the past four or five years until, you know, fill in the blank, January, February, March, April, whatever, just something this year. And then they realized like oh the Shackles are off. We can actually go and do really cool stuff now And there were they all everybody had their project like there It was like there was a pain point in their business like oh, I can't do this or like, you know

Like the crypto guys or AI like they're really really be under under attack and it was like regulation by enforcement Yeah, and so they knew what the pain points were. And so for obvious reasons, we're super focused on those things. And they were like, oh, if we could just get through this, then we could do this one other thing, whatever that may have been. And what I've heard them, what I've heard a lot of people saying is, once the pain stopped, I realized that there were like 10 other things that normally did I want to do, but that I could do. And so like the amount of optimism and energy is just really infectious.

It's like, it's a great time to be alive. Yeah, it feels like, I mean, we saw that with a lot of the nuclear founders. Like you talked to those folks and I mean, it was so rough for a while that they normally, like if you invested my company, I don't want you to invest in a direct competitor, but the nuclear companies were like, look, that's not gonna be the thing

that does me in, you can go ahead and invest. And then now we finally have some clarity from the EO, we talked to some nuclear founders and it feels like we're on the cusp of some real progress there. How much are you focusing on energy, what are the other categories that you find interesting right now, what do you see as being uniquely unlocked

in this new era? Yeah, it's, we call it, I don't think we made it up, but we call it like transformational technology. So that means like AI, AI infra, energy, robotics, space, defense. Those are kind of like the big buckets. In a lot of cases, there's a lot of, they're really related.

At least the way we think about energy is like it's attached to lot of cases, there's a lot of they're, they're really related. You know, we like the way, at least the way we think about energy is like, it's attached to all of those. Sure. And you know, that's where, that's where nuclear really comes in, but particularly around AI and crypto and some of the other elements of just security in general. Like that is the major unlock.

Like one of the things that I tell people all the time is, like if you want to like a, just an easy heuristic about like You know how you think about like what are the big unlocks that need to have happened? Which is that? Think about it this way the large Civilization that has access to the most abundant cheapest energy wins like period full stop I was talking with a friend of mine another another investor last week, and he actually had this great description, which I had actually never thought of about colonization of Mars, because

I was saying how, you know, like, you know, obviously Elon's been super focused on it and like, I don't want to go to Mars. Like, I've never wanted to go to Mars. It seems like it's like it sucks there. I said, but then I realized that actually like terraforming Mars, like that's actually kind of cool because it would make it someplace you'd actually want to go. So that's why like Mars, Mars colonization has become charismatic because like just like getting to the moon was was interesting and charismatic in the 60s because it was like, can we get there? Like it was just it was just like the journey, not the not the end.

But then when you start to think about the idea of colonization of Mars, well, it's interesting when you think that you could make it beautiful. And what he said was, it's just an energy problem. If you can bring enough energy to bear, then you can terraform Mars. I was like, that was actually for me, that was an interesting way to think about it that I hadn't considered. But the same thing applies to everything else, which is if you have super abundant, super cheap energy, as a large scale civilization, you're going to win because it makes everything else better, easier, cheaper, and things that were not possible, it makes them possible. Kind of like the way SpaceX, what SpaceX has done with launch by just driving the cost per kilogram into the dirt,

it unlocks all these other businesses. So if great power competition is energy competition, do we, you know, I mean, the concern here is that China is just like copy and pasting nuclear reactors, and we have a bunch of great nuclear startups that are making efforts and some new projects. I think Metta has announced some new initiatives there. But is this not like one of the kind of biggest issues that we're facing from a national security standpoint? There's a way in which it's the biggest because it touches everything. It touches literally everything. I mean, you think about these really critical growth areas, AI being the super obvious one. I've seen a number of analyses that show the amount of

AI compute we need to build just in this country, like let's say in the next 10 years, so by 2035, it would consume more power than we produce right now. As of the contrary. So there's like, we need to be producing a lot more power because unlike certain members of Congress, it turns out electricity doesn't just come from the wall. Like you actually have to produce it someplace. Food comes from the grocery store. Gasoline comes from the pump. Electricity comes from the wall.

What are you slow? You just plug in, just plug in the pump, electricity comes from the wall. This is the thing. What are you slow? You just plug in and there's electricity there. I do think there's something fascinating about like, it's so hard to predict the future. It's so hard to predict what we will need, you know, a gigawatt, you know, data center for. And then all of a sudden it's like, we need it today. Like we have the use case, we need it today.

And I keep thinking about like what happened in the dot-com boom where we overbuilt all this dark fiber Google went and bought it up and a bunch of the tech companies bought it up and then eventually like the the products caught up My my question is How do you think about? projects that might be uneconomical to underwrite on the venture side and so they might need to be underwritten by the venture side. And so they might need to be underwritten by the government. I feel like we're probably aligned in that we should probably keep the government as narrow as possible,

but there are some really crazy things like the moon landing, like the Mars helicopter, stuff that just doesn't make any sense for any private company to go after. And then after a while, you start seeing, oh, okay, they built some roads, they built some infrastructure and now private companies are catching up and actually ramping up the use of that energy or something. But how do you see the government playing a role in the next, in solving those fundamental

problems? Is it purely just on deregulation? Do you want to see funding flow into certain projects? Do you want to see government doing hard projects? What's your philosophy on all that? Yeah, it's both. It's both, is the answer. It's like we've just seen, as I was saying earlier,

just this year, just by getting out of the way unlocks a lot. And there's so many people who want to do things and who have the capacity to do things if they're not being shackled and prevented from doing them so like we've seen a lot of that in the past seven months is just by getting out of the way and giving people permission to do it you get a lot of you get a lot of activity and so that's a big part of it but then there are these other issues where, you know, China creates its national champions.

And so like great example is like rare earth magnets. You know, it is, it can be, it is, I mean, they subsidize it. So it is cheaper to buy a rare earth magnet from a Chinese supplier than it is to buy the raw materials in the United States. You know, that is, I mean, that's very, that's geopolitics, right? That's not just markets, that's not just economics,

that's not just innovation, that's geopolitics. The Chinese have been on, they've been on top of this for 20 years and realized that this was a choke point where they would be able to get a huge amount of leverage over their competitors and adversaries. And I guess we're someplace in between those two things with China.

And if they were able to subsidize them, they could drive out all the competitors out of business. And because they go into literally everything of any importance, that they'd have massive, not just economic leverage, but like geopolitical leverage over the United States. And so that's a place, government needs to play a role because it's not a company v company competition. It is a state actor v company competition as it

stands right now. And that's something that's critical to national security. So you see that, I think, in a number of other spaces. But, you know, the rare earth magnets is like, it's just a very obvious example of that where you can't, um, like, a company can be super innovative and can do all the right things. But if it is facing a state actor as its competitor versus another company, like they're going to lose. Yeah. On the rare earth materials question, uh, there was a story in the wall street journal last week about Apple buying half a billion

dollars of rare earths from a company called MP Materials in Las Vegas. And it stuck out to me as kind of a vibe shift because Apple hasn't been at the front of like re-industrialize America, bring back jobs and let's make everything in America. They're not saying that, but it feels like maybe behind the scenes they're at least thinking about their supply chain very seriously and trying to diversify. And maybe it's a cruise ship, but they're putting their hands on the tiller just a little bit.

And so I took that as like cause for optimism with the overall energy independence, supply chain independence. But did you see that story? Are there any other causes for optimism that might be coming from the the crowd? That's not cheering as loud as they can but might be getting you know But might be working behind the scenes to kind of achieve the same goals that everyone should be aligned around Yeah, I mean look there's a there's a lot of signal I think in that in that move Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of signal, I think, in that move. At some point, Apple has to realize that their supply

chains are really, really insecure. It's like another point on the rare earth magnet. It's like, one of the things, like, one of the great sort of unintended consequences of the liberation day tariffs and the general policy, a tariff policy coming out of the administration is that this actually turned out to be a forcing function. It made China play their rarest card way too early.

Had they decided, for instance, to attack Taiwan and then played that card, that would have been the optimum moment. But what happened was that in the negotiations around tariffs they threatened to play the rare earth card. In fact they did actually like reduce exports the past couple months but it was too soon. Like they played it early and now there's time for the United States to catch up and this is you know in fact as we saw with MP you know in the support they've gotten from the government. Another company that're in the process of investing in called Vulcan Elements is in the space as well. And we now have a window in time where we can build out an ecosystem to

manufacture earth magnets in the United States and do it really, really quickly. So that's just a place where like there's like there's's there's a lot of signal coming out around that as well. But there's I think the the fact that there is so much happening and and at such a rapid rate that's where we're seeing but that's where we're really seeing the advances here because like I don't know like people ask me like you like are you pleased with the way the admin's gone? Yeah I am. What I've been surprised by though is the speed with which they've moved and what's happened is like they're moving at like founder speed and that that becomes infectious and so now you get you get cycles that might have taken a year or two or three to happen and things work through the system in the past and now now like we see, we're standing up a rare earths

capacity in the United States basically overnight. That was like a pipe dream four or five months ago. And now it's actually happening. We gotta stop calling them rare earths. They're just earths. They're just earth magnets. They're not rare. They're not rare.

They're only the process form is rare. Yes, the industrial capacity is rare. But the product is not. Let's just call capacity is rare. But the product is not. Let's just call them earth giants. It is. You've got to, you know, we probably criticize China more than most podcasters on Earth. But you've got to give them credit for letting the world

think that they were just the Happy Meal toy manufacturing hub for like a couple decades. And then just like quietly owned all these critical supply chains. I'm curious how you're thinking about solar. And one of the reasons I ask is I've invested in tons of these different kind of hard tech, new industrials categories. And I've yet to back a solar company.

I only started actively angel investing maybe four or five years ago. And it's fallen out of fashion is one way to describe it. Casey Hammer's bringing it back. Yeah, so Casey's the only. Casey's the example. And I would happily invest in Casey if I had the chance. But curious how you're thinking about that.

It's another area that China is dominant in. And it seems like something that we wouldn't necessarily want long term. So like I've been sort of like semi obsessed with solar for a long time. I just like it's mostly just basically being like thrifty. I'm like, damn, there's all that sunlight and I can just power my house for free. You know, so like I like my house house in Arizona, I have solar on it. I've had it for years. Okay. But it's really not economic. Um, and so there's needs to be a pretty big leap forward for it to, for it to matter.

Otherwise, why not just build more nuclear? Right. Why not? Why don't we just keep it simple? Yeah. Casey, an interesting point. PV solar's actually isn't that good. And like the concentrators are like, okay. But like, again, like we have the solution already. So there's gotta be a compelling case to be made as to why, um, under the current, like, uh, you know, with the current technology around solar, why is that even we're focusing on? Interesting. Yeah. Casey's point was like,

China is subsidizing photovoltaic manufacturing and and the and the most hurtful thing you could do is just buy all of it to so that they take a loss on every unit and then build up your capacity but I don't know that that actually would would would catalyze a real shift in capacity and we might just get kind of helping them get extremely good at especially if there's learning curve and stuff so I don't know it's a longer conversation. And PV is just not that efficient right? Yeah I think the argument was that it's like it's very well matched to the load of the

grid of the American consumer because when it's hot out we run our air conditioning and when it's hot out the we run our air conditioning and when it's hot out, the sun is shining on the PV cells. And so there's some match there was a nuclear power plant generates just as much at night as it does in the day. So I don't know, there's a whole bunch of different load use cases for AI training versus inference and all this different stuff. But it's a, yeah, it's, it's a fascinating geopolitical dynamic. And it seems like the main takeaway is that China has just been saying yes and to everything and they develop capacity everywhere and it's like we could try and predict the future but you know if PV winds up being really important I want to have capacity for that if nuclear I want that too I want the smorgasbord give me all the energy

but I don't know they're building a ton of coal plants too. Yeah, no, 100%. And fortunately, some of the AI infrastructure build outs are pulling forward some of that. We're getting a whole bunch of natural gas online. We are becoming more energy independent. So green shoots all over the place. Jordy, anything else? Last question?

I think that's it for now. This is fantastic, Chris. Come back on. Yeah, we've got to have you back on, especially when there's big news in your world or anything going on that you can comment on. Yeah, anytime, happy This is fantastic. Yeah, we got to have you back on especially when there's like big news in your World or anything going on that you can comment on happy to do it. Yeah, we need we just need 30 seconds notice We'll drop you the we'll drop you the link. You can just hop right on Okay, awesome. Yeah, just you can signal signal me. I'll be on I will

And speaking of minerals we have And speaking of minerals we have Adquick.com if you're selling minerals you put it on a billboard out of home advertising made easy and measurable say goodbye to the headaches Of out of home advertising only adquick combines a technology out of home expertise and data to enable efficient seamless ad buying across the globe What were you saying about materials? Well, we have the founder of Mariana minerals Joining the show welcome to, hit the soundboard, give me the Ashen Hall. Welcome to the stream, how you doing Turner? Good, how we doing guys?

Beautiful map behind you. I love cartography, I'm a big fan of throwing a map in the background. Is that 3D or does it have texture or does it just kind of look like it? It's got a little bit of texture. Good. Not crazy 3D though.

The Mercator projection, I'm pretty sure. That's a good one. Anyway, introduce yourself. What do you do? Welcome to the show. Yeah, sure. Thanks for having me on, guys. Turner Colwell here, CEO of Mariana Minerals.

We're a vertically integrated software-first mining company. So we're coming into projects that are, you know, have post exploration, they've discovered the mineral deposit. And we come into engineering. So we develop the mind plan, we develop the refining plan, we capitalize it at the project level from the top Co. And then we we manage the construction, we manage the construct the commissioning, and then we operate it out into perpetuity.

Okay. Talk to me about the whole pipeline of actually getting minerals out of the ground. Let's say I own a hundred thousand acres in Alaska or something. I bought it just as a forest. It's a ranch, never explored it. What are the steps where I imagine we're talking about like a decade, exploration firms, then you come in at some point,

like really walk me through a concrete example of going from like someone has some land to now we're getting material. Well yeah, and if you're this verticalized, why not also do discovery? I'm sure there's a reason for that. Yeah, there's a big market of folks that are doing discovery,

there's actually a bunch of awesome tech, VC backed startups that are focused on accelerating discovery. It's actually a bunch of awesome tech, VC-backed startups that are focused on accelerating discovery. I think what we're missing is folks that are focused on condensing the timelines from when you have discovered something to when it is actually producing. And it's like this sneak in the grass kind of challenge,

like very complicated system of actually designing these plants, buying out all the infrastructure, installing the infrastructure, getting it running. But yeah, so you start with a flat piece of land, ideally it's flat, and you'll start this really long campaign of, you know, you'll start with kind of like spot testing of different areas to determine, and probably some surface sampling to determine if there's something promising there. There's some permits that come into play when you have to actually start doing more advanced exploration campaigns,

and that's something that, you know, if you're on federal land and sometimes on state land, those permits can get in the way of accelerating mineral discovery. You'll do hundreds to thousands of drill holes to define a mineral deposit. And those mineral deposits can vary all over the place. You can have shallower ones where it's a little bit cheaper to drill. You can have really deep ones where it starts to get much more expensive to do and time intensive to do that expiration campaign. And all along the way you are taking samples and you are kind of building these 3D models to try to understand how was the deposit formed, why is the mineral there in the first

place, and that helps to kind of inform also the advancing the expiration side of things. And in parallel with that you're starting to do these testing campaigns where you're running concentration tests to figure out how you can upgrade the ore to an intermediate product. You're starting to do refining tests to understand how you would actually extract the target mineral into its final state, which is, you know, a high purity metal alloy in many cases, or a high purity kind of specialty chemical salt. Um, and so you're writing these reports all along the way. So you'll start with, uh, um, uh, P E A, which is an initial economic

assessment, you'll then do a pre feasibility study. You'll do a feasibility study. You'll do a definitive feasibility study. And kind of, as you're doing that, the value of the asset is kind of increasing and increasing speculators are piling into the stock. And the intent there is really true. Let's hear from the speculators. The backbone of the mining industry.

Penny stock rippers. That's right, and that's how that expiration is funded really. Sure, yeah. They're trying to like ride that first wave of value creation. Yeah, similar to like FDA trials for new pharmaceuticals probably.

Well, I can, I'm starting to figure out, you know, a number of reasons why you're explaining them, why you wouldn't want to do the exploration and discovery is because that could take like 10 years. Why don't you just do this thing and then he goes on to describe the hardest thing in the world. Well, yeah, but then, but the other thing is like the duration, ideally you start working with a customer

and they're like, here's what we have in the ground, help us get it out. And then you can just start doing that. That's exactly right. And that's how we're thinking about it is we want to be the ones that go from, you know, the folks that are doing the exploration, they're there to define the resource and ideally get some return on the invested capital that they had as they were kind of like going through this like long and arduous process of defining a mineral resource. But typically those are geologists, financiers,

lawyers. It's very rare where you'll see a junior mining company that's actually staffed to take it all the way through to production. It's a different class of business fundamentally, like you're dealing with in say like very high capex deployment, complex kind of mining and refining systems that you know span the entire ecosystem of like engineering skill sets, commercial skill sets. And so there's a nice handoff point there. And so what happens today is the junior mining companies will spend a lot of time exploring Bill and Chris to buy the asset. Ideally, they flip it to a large mining company that comes in to do the hard yards of actually getting the thing operating. And that's where we want to come in as well.

So the big mining companies, they're looking for opportunities to deploy billions of dollars of capital. And they pick their spots on the commodities also. So you might have a commodity that's out of favor, and so no one's picking up the asset. You might have an asset that would be called subscale in this scenario, where it's not

a billion dollars of CapEx, it's only a couple hundred million dollars of CapEx, still a big project. And those are getting ignored. And so we think that with the differentiation on the tech stack, on the software side of things that we're bringing in and also a differentiated team, we can bring these smaller scale assets

which are like right size for us as an early stage company into production while they've been kind of ignored by the big mining companies. All right, one more question and then we'll talk about the news today, but when did you first yearn for the mines? Yeah, yes, when I first yearned for the mines. So when I graduated college,

I actually had this like vision of moving to Australia and going and working in the mines. I never quite like converted on that, but worked at Tesla for nine years and change. Started out up in Reno was working on the Gigafactory up there kind of like designing, building it, then started working on battery cell manufacturing, started working on areas of the cell chemistry and in the supply chain side of things. And as I was moving kind of further and further upstream, you know, the mining industry is wild. It's an awesome industry,

but it's definitely been neglected. Like we've kind of been viewing it as dirty and you know, it should happen. It should happen, but it shouldn't happen here. And it's also like this massive, it's this awesome opportunity to work across scales. Like a lot of what you're developing starts at like the micron scale of like,

how do I get this atom out of this other atom? Well, not atoms, but this atom out of this mineral. And then you have to scale that up to kilometer scale infrastructure. And that breadth of scales is awesome. That's really cool. What's the news today, if I might add? Yeah, so we're... Ah, there we go. We're coming out of stealth with our Series A raise. We had Andre support, Coastal Ventures, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, and a couple of other folks join in. We've raised 65 million dollars. There we go. First hit of the week. Feels so good feels so good. Congratulations. Fantastic news.

Fantastic. Last question before you jump off. Are you guys acquiring any companies? Or is it fully ground up? Yeah, so we will step in and acquire mineral assets. That makes sense for us to step into. We're working on that in the copper space right now. But that's like buying the land, not necessarily like basically buying the resource itself. that makes sense for us to step into or working on that in the copper space right now.

But that's like buying the land, not necessarily like basically buying the resource itself, not like a surrounding company or maybe it is structured as. Yeah, so it'll vary. There's a lot of mining projects that are on care and maintenance that were turned off and could be turned back on

with if you come in and retrofit to deploy kind of like the reinforcement learning platform that we're working to deploy, which means you need more instrumentation, you need more control to be able to control the big refinery, which is basically a big robot. And in certain cases, it might be a mine that's actually operating today that we can step into and we see opportunity for uplift. And in other areas, it'll be a greenfield asset where, you know, we're stepping in and partnering in partnering with the resource owner. And then we would have a cash flow split kind of once we bring it to commercial scale so that they can keep exploring. And you kind of create this flywheel where they're continuing to explore their leveraging cash

flows from operating assets to fund their expiration. And then we would step in to develop those those assets over time. So it's pretty variable. But yeah, we have... Yeah, so basically the market prices certain assets here and you guys look at it and say with our technology, this is actually worth some premium on that. That's exactly right. And in certain cases, the market will say that there's no net asset value or no NAF. And that's an area where you can step in and get a good deal

and bring it into production. He's a value miner. Let's go. This is super cool. Congratulations. We're going to do a lot more on rare earths broadly. So we'll be back. We're going to stop calling them rare,

because we've got plenty. We're just going to call them earths. There are a lot out there. They're hard to find in high concentrations and hard to get out. We're gonna stop calling him rare because we got plenty They're hard to find in high concentrations and hard to get out but they're they're out there Awesome. Well, congratulations to you and the team on the raise and hopefully have you back on soon. We'll talk to you soon Cheers Eight sleep go to a sleep calm get a pod five ultra Okay, they a five-year warranty, a 30-night risk-free trial, free returns, free shipping.

Get an 8sleep. We have our next guest from Altimeter coming in the studio. I've got to give people the... I'm so sick. My HRV thinks that I'm dead. So thank you to my 8sleep for getting me through this. Saving my life, basically. It's life-saving technology.

You heard it here first. That is health advice. Not a health claim. Not a health claim. Not. Awesome. We have- Ask your doctor about saving your life with an 8 Sleep.

I'm going to botch his name. Jamin. Jamin. Let's bring him in from Altimeter. There we go. How you doing? Good. What's happening?

How's it going? Great to be here. Kick it off with an 8 Sleep. Great to meet you. Sorry for botching your name on the way in. No, no. Given name is Benjamin. My parents called me Jammin as a toddler.

That's awesome. In kindergarten, they were a bunch of Benjamins. So they just told my teacher, hey, call him Jammin. That's what we call him. That's amazing. So I was trying to give it this exotic pronunciation. Jammin. I'm sure you've gotten every variety over pronunciation. Jabeen. Jabeen.

I'm sure you've gotten every variety over the course of your career. The only one that bugs me is Jasmine. Other than that, anything goes. Okay. Well, good to meet you. Welcome to the stream. Jammin' ball. Powerful name.

Likewise. It's fun. Turner and I are actually good friends in college. It's fun seeing him on the show right before. No way. Amazing. No way. That's awesome.

No way. Where'd you guys go to school? We were at Stanford together. Okay so you had a sort of non-traditional. Yeah. Exactly. It's kind of like the Stanford of feeders into VC. Yeah it really is. Yeah it really is. Well it's great to have you on the show. I feel like you guys over at Altimeter have just been on a run. Just also, I feel like Invest Americas or the Trump accounts is like, feels like almost an incubation. So it's been super cool seeing that take off and get passed into law. Yeah, fantastic. Well, I wanted to have you want to talk about,

it sounds like you've been digging into the the figma s1 Yeah, would love to kind of get get your reaction to it. You had a post Getting picked up earlier in the timeline. Yeah. No happy to I mean in many ways Figma is the white buffalo of my career. It's that's the one that got away I've been a red altimeter for about five years was red point for five years before that and I think the The memory of venture capital that I'll never forget is trying to win the Series C. I think this was late 2018 or early 2019 with Vivek, who was one of my colleagues, and Scott, who was one of the partners at Redpoint at the time.

And we lost to Andrew Reed, who's a phenomenal investor at Sequoia. But I'll never forget that round, the Figma Series C, it's my white buffalo. He's told us the whole story about how like, they brought him into the Sequoia office and they sat Dylan down in the brown conference room because at Sequoia they have all of their conference rooms named after their endowment partners and their LPs. And they were like, look, we're investing in you,

but if you make us money, you're helping your school, and I thought it was very interesting. It was a roundabout pitch. But so it got away, but now you're digging in further and trying to understand the business in the S1. What have you learned? What are the interesting takeaways? What should someone, even if we just zoom out,

what are people typically looking for in a software company going public these days? Yeah, it's a great question, and I'd say, in many ways, the market needs this type of company to go public. We haven't seen a software IPO really since the Service Titan IPO late last year. If you look at the overall kind of growth rates

of the public software universe today, it's declined quite significantly. I think the median growth rate, I track a basket of about 80 software companies, the median growth rate is about 14%. And that's not what it used to be. We're not really in this high growth. There's not a lot of high growth software companies that you can buy and invest in. Figma comes out as a marquee software business. It's growing 49%, but what it also brings is 28% free cash flow margins, which is super rare. The growth in and of itself, they would be, at least in my basket, the fastest growing public software company. When you add in the free cash flow margins at scale, it has this unique profile

of growth plus profits, which rule of 40 is a popular metric a lot of investors look at, which just adds your growth rate plus your free cash flow margin. They'd be number one on the list. And so I think that's something the markets are excited about, growth and profitability, with a company that's almost at a billion dollars of run rate. So the rule of 40 is you add the free cash flow margin to the growth rate of the business on the top line and you should be at around 40% positive, but it sounds like Figma's up

at 79%, 69%, something like that, like well above 40, is that right? That's right, yeah. 40% is kind of the benchmark for are you considered a good or great business? And so they, they kind of far exceed that. And even when lined up against the rest of the software universe, at least the 80 that I track, that's the, it's the highest. How much credit should we give to where the business is today to all the chaos that happened during the Adobe acquisition?

Yeah. In many ways you got a billion dollar non-dilutive investment through the breakup fee, which sounds like they obviously didn't necessarily need that, but it gives them a massive amount of leverage. Yeah, I'm also interested in other aspects that could change. If you think you're gonna be acquired, maybe you freeze hiring and that's a good decision

and then you wind up actually increasing your margins or maybe it changes the way you think about the business. I don't know. They did make changes probably when the acquisition didn't go through. I do remember there was almost an immediate change in how they were doing pricing and billing. Yeah, sure.

That was night and day. Sure, sure, sure. I think this is a testament to the strength of not just the business, but to Dylan and the leadership team. Having a company go through something like that, most companies don't make it back from that. Because as a customer, you're thinking, do I want to use this product?

What's going to happen when it gets acquired? Is gonna be shut down is it gonna be a focus? You get a lot of customers who are thinking I don't know if I want to use this software you get a lot of new hires thinking well gosh I thought I was gonna go work for a high-growth startup like I don't really want to go work for Adobe You know it's it's the type of people that Adobe attracts are gonna be different than the type of people that a high-growth startup attracts and so you get a lot of headwinds on the customer front as well as on the hiring front and it can just lead to really negative inertia that's hard to overcome. You know, look at Windsurf and OpenAI. I'm sure similar dynamics happen there where you thought you're

going to get acquired, customers think different of you, new hires think different of you. It's really hard to come back from something like that and the fact that Figma not only did but is you know I think I'm gonna be worth a whole lot more than what that acquisition was just a few years ago it's a testament to and many was think the strength of the management team which again I don't think it can be overstated how significant of an achievement it was for that team to come back from from that moment even stronger than what they were going into it.

I'm curious how you think, if you were gonna, and anybody that's kind of trying to analyze the business, I think one thing that'll, you can make a really strong case for why Figma will be a massive beneficiary of AI, right? I think if anybody, you know, they've had different experiments over the years, they have Figma make now,

but the other side will look at the business and say, well, if every engineer can just generate designs instantly, is design software necessary? Do you have a view there? I mean, I've been generally, as somebody that uses Figma every single day and has for my entire career, I sort of expect to use it a decade from now

and I expect to use it even 15 years from now. I don't know, it's just such core infrastructure to the company and so that's my view. So when people say, oh, we want, you know, like all UI will just be generated, but how are you thinking about that kind of set of risk factors? That's a great question.

And I think what we can do is look back at how the business is executed over its entire life cycle to kind of get a glimpse into how they might be successful or not in this period of time. When Figma was founded, the entire industry used a product called Sketch. And Sketch was almost the equivalent of Excel to an investment banker. And it really wasn't until the Series C in Figma where it kind of started to become obvious that, wait a second, maybe this product, maybe this startup is actually going to convert the world from

Sketch to something new. And for outsiders, even for insiders, designers, the notion of taking away sketch again, it was like taking away Excel from an investment bank. It was a huge deal. All of the shortcuts, the workflows, all of that was just ingrained into your muscle memory, but they were able to do that. They were able to overcome that. And that is one of the reasons why they're so great today.

I think the management team isn't naive though. They're looking at the opportunity as it exists today and they say, well, we can't afford to be sketched. We can't let someone Figma us like we Figma sketch, I don't know, seven, eight years ago. And so it's certainly the thing that is top of mind for them. I look at Figma make as a step in the right direction. I look at the audience, the distribution,

the mind share that they have. I look at the audience, the distribution, the mind-share that they have. I look at the fact that Dylan is still the CEO. It's a founder-led business that has a history of execution over a decade long period. Everything that I believe to be true is that they will be successful and then they will be the vendor that capitalizes on this trend of, well, do I even need Figma? I'm just going to prototype in with a prompt, and I'm going to get my design.

I think that misses some of the iterative process of the design process. And so I think it's a risk. Well, yeah, anybody that's arguing, like, all UI will be generated from a prompt, you can go back the other way, which is I'll just generate designs for the software that I want and understand how the product works and how it flows and all the different functionality,

and then I'll just generate all the code. You know, it can go both ways. Yeah, and market size, I mean, look, if you rewind the clock to the Seed Series A, Series B of rounds that Fegman was raising, a huge reason not to do the deal was TAM. You'd say, how many designers are there in the world? What's the price point a designer is willing to play?

Multiply P times Q and like that's your TAM. I think early on, what did the world get wrong? Well, it was that that Q is actually higher. It's not just the designers. You're going to creep into product people. You're going to creep into engineers and the people that are going to touch and use the product aren't just that limited set of designers. I think the same thing is going to happen with AI, right?

Now all of a sudden, you are going to increase the scope and increase the surface area of the types of people and the personas who can interact with Figma in the same way you're seeing with the coding solutions, right? Maybe the right way to think about the TAM for a Windsor, for a cursor isn't 20 bucks a month, because that's what GitHub charges times number of engineers

in the world and software engineers. Maybe it's the average salary of a software engineer times the number of software engineers. Those are two vastly different numbers. And I think when we look at how that applies to Figma today, if they get this shift right, it will massively expand the personas and the type of people who can and will access and pay for Figma. Makes sense. Very well said. Thanks so much for coming on. This is really helpful. We should

come back on again soon and let's look at the other 80 companies. Let's do it. You track. I think Figma just process wise they'll you know supposed to price on Wednesday trade next Thursday so they're on the road talking to investors like us and excited for their debut on Thursday finally own a piece of the exact I texted Dylan and I told him that exact same thing shareholder longer the white whale well thanks so much for hopping on and breaking down for us we'll talk to you soon. Great to meet you, Jamon. See you.

Bye. Up next, we have Harper Carroll coming into the studio. Welcome to the stream. Hope we are waiting one minute. Let me see. Let me tell you about the, we already let you tell you about timeline. Wait, we have the bucket pullback.

We've got Harper here. Oh, we have Harper here. Harper, welcome to the show. Hi, Julian and John. Thanks so much for having me on the show. Welcome to the show. Would you mind introducing yourself? And there's a bunch of things that I want to talk about,

but I'll let you kick it off with an intro on yourself. Okay, I am Harper. I run Harper Carroll AI, so I'm an AI educator. I'm a machine learning engineer. That's my background. I have two degrees in computer science and engineering, specializing in AI from Stanford. Then I was at Meta building machine learning systems there

for about four years. Then I was at a GPU environment, cloud environments development startup that where I became head of AI, actually started teaching AI there. And that's how this all kind of was born but I also TA'd when I was at Stanford some core AI PhD courses and yeah that company was acquired by Nvidia and I just teach AI now full-time I started on X with fine-tuning guides so you might

if you've seen me before on X, it was probably from that. I started in late 2023 with like fine tuning open source model guides with your own data or with hugging face data, um, you know, coding guides, Jupyter notebooks, and then, uh, went to Instagram and have been there and kind of reaching towards YouTube and starting there with Q and A's and yeah, just kind of seeing where this goes. Yeah. What's been the bigger news in your world? The IMO gold medal competition between OpenAI and Google or GPT agents or something else in the world of AI? There's a new news story every day,

what's been capturing your attention? Yeah, there's a new news story every day. What's been capturing your attention. Yeah. There's a new news story every single day. Um, I actually saw one recently. What were they saying? That reasoning models will the major AI companies are coming together and saying that they want to make sure that reasoning models stay open and that we continue to see their thought processes. So that kind of research, I also saw really interesting research from Anthropic that said that reasoning models are not actually necessarily showing us what we think that they're thinking.

So for example, Anthropic gave a reasoning model a question, and it kept getting it wrong. And then they gave it a hint and the model got it right. But when you looked at the trace, the chain of thought from the reasoning model, it didn't mention a hint. So we think that we're actually seeing its reasoning, but not necessarily.

So there needs to be a lot more work on this, but yeah, some of that cool research stuff. And yeah, there's always new tech coming out, OpenAI's agent, very exciting stuff. The punch these browser. Do you expect, we've been testing agent, very exciting stuff. Perpunch these browser. Do you expect, we've been testing agent, John was testing it over the weekend, I was testing it on the show earlier.

Do you expect an explosion of consumer use cases in the way that everybody, I mean, it's hard to build a product that's more viral than, like, the initial chat GPT product But do you are you expecting there to be like specific use cases that that come out of that? And are you seeing any that that that are super promising? Absolutely. Yeah, I mean I I feel like I was I advise companies as well in their AI and I feel like I was kind of early to say You know, there was a wave maybe about a year ago where people were saying oh, you know companies as well on their AI. And I feel like I was kind of early to say,

there was a wave maybe about a year ago where people were saying, oh, wrapper companies are BS. You're a loser if you make a wrapper company. But I think I was one of the earlier ones to say, no, actually, you can't really compete with these foundational open source models. And yes, if you want to do a small specialized model, I think we'll see a lot more of those.

I don't think we need these massive foundation models that know everything about the world for very specialized tasks. So I think we'll start to see more of those. But one consumer use case that I'm really, really excited about is using AI for kids. I think both of you guys have kids, right? Yeah. Yeah. Do you use it with your kids at all yet? At least large language models specifically like chat GPT. Yeah, totally. Usually when I want to violate intellectual property rules and I want to create a story where spider-man who's a Disney IP? interacts with Batman from Warner Brothers

Sitting on a transformer. Yeah, exactly. And and so I find that I find that all the large language models are happy to write Poetry that completely disregards the cinematic universes, which I have a lot of I always thought illustrate them I always thought that these form factors the obvious friend calm totally the the rab rabid are one I always thought that those were something that if you just focus on the kid use case which is like a friend that can help you understand the world that maybe a parent can kind of like call into would be would be cool. But but yeah, just hasn't really Yeah, so how does this actually roll out? What are you excited about?

Is it going to be all sold in through the through the parents and the parents will be using the product and then kind of like giving the result to the kid. Like I feel like my son got an AI generated story like gifted to him over Christmas, but it wasn't like he is using an LLM directly. At the same time, there's that news that OpenAI is partnering with Mattel for kind of like a chat GPT Barbie. That's kind of interesting.

Well, how does this play? What I'm most excited about is using large language models for kids in terms of like audio. So, so kids are, as I'm sure you know, I don't know how old your kids are, but they are relentlessly curious. Until that's kind of beaten out of them. And I think so many parents now are single parents or they're working two jobs. And you know, we've really demonized screen time. And I think for, for good reason, right?

When you have a kid sitting in front of a screen and they're just passively consuming, that's really different than when they're able to interact with an AI model, they're able to think, ask questions, practice forming questions that are comprehensible to the model. The model can give feedback on the language.

If they're asking a question, they can show up as texts, they can learn to read and write as they are talking to the model because as they speak and the text shows up on screen, they're actually like, that process is built in of understanding language to text, which will help again with reading and writing. And these models, I think they can be offered to everyone for free because you don't need a super advanced model for kits. Like you just need to have some general understanding of the world. because you don't need a super advanced model for kits.

Like you just need to have some general understanding of the world. It's, you really just need like a probabilistic word generator machine, which is just how AI models are at their core. And yes, you should, you know, we might want to have some guard rails around hallucination and making sure that they're like actual facts,

which would, you know, maybe perhaps make the models more expensive because you have to hook it up to, you know, databases or what, you know, maybe perhaps make the models more expensive because you have to hook it up to databases or the internet or what have you. But these very basic AI models to help kids practice speaking, to help them engage their curiosity, because again, parents are busy. They eventually end up, kids come to their parents and they eventually end up losing that curiosity and I'm not saying I think this is a very controversial opinion some people hear this and they say oh you know AI is gonna replace human interaction I don't see that at all and I actually have reached out to my audience on Instagram asking how they use AI and the ones who use it have

found it extremely rewarding some use it with their kids. So for example, like if they want to practice learning with their kid, but they're worried that they won't know the answer to a question, they can have AI kind of in the chat with them and they can ask AI when they have a question. Some parents reached out to me and said that they have a nine-year-old and a 12-year-old and that AI is kind of like this cool older sister. So they have the audio be this 20 year old girl and they're like, she is the cool older sister that helps them discuss topics that they wouldn't listen

to their quote unquote dumb parents about, like nutrition and exercise and screen time. And like, they love this AI, it's this cool older sister. Another really cool application of AI that I saw recently, I was at Dell Tech World and I saw this AI bot called Norby. It's a physical robot and he was made to help a child with his speech impediment. And this hit close to home for me because my little sister, she's four years younger than me and when she was like going on eight, she had, she couldn't say her Rs.

She would say like hopo and she was like, you know, a kid. And she had this speech impediment. And we would send her to a speech therapist, and they're so expensive, and the kid is miserable, and they're sitting with this therapist for like max two to three hours at a time. And you know, they don't relate to this strange adult. And again, it's so expensive.

Whereas this Norby Bot was made to talk to the kid about what they're interested in. Truly, completely customizable. At their level, it's fun,. Whereas this Norby bot was made to talk to the kid about what they're interested in truly completely customizable at their level It's fun that they can give the feedback and then I think they've expanded this Norby bot to be To help teach languages in general and so just again meeting kids where they're at with what they're interested in helping stoke that flame of curiosity Helping I just see it as and again, I mean, it's this ultimate democratizer. It's the ultimate leveler in terms of education, right? And so I can imagine, I can imagine a hardware device.

So, so my three year old is hopelessly addicted to reading like all day long, like great, great addiction to have, but like all day long, just no matter what we're doing throughout the day, he'll find a book and he'll be like, read this, read this, read this. And we almost always indulge, but you could imagine a hardware device that uses just computer vision to like read

what's on the page and have a small speaker read it out to the kids. Because some books, they include like a speaker and you can like press play on it and they can flip through it. But then you get- You're talking about Wonder Books. Wonder Books.

But they can often get out of sync, and then you don't know kind of where they are, and they're in the wrong page, and it's confusing. But if they had a flashlight-style device that you could just point at the word and have it read out, they would probably learn to read at a very, very young age. Yeah, it feels like you should be entering a boom of widgets

and Christmas gifts. And maybe we're just a little bit early in this stuff. This Christmas will be dominated by AI-enabled stuff, but we're not quite there yet. One question I have is how the ex-audience really woke up to the AI psychosis kind of crisis last week, I feel like. There had been some reporting in like the New York Times prior to that,

but I don't think anybody took it super seriously until recently. But most parents would not want their kids 7,000 prompts deep in any element right now. Yeah, but just how aware is like the Instagram world? Oh yeah, that's a good question. In terms of the risks of going, you know, recursive prompting and just going super, super deep

and getting down a crazy rabbit hole by yourself. Yeah, I haven't spoken about that specifically on Instagram. I talked a little bit about it in my latest YouTube Q&A video where I was just saying, you know, I'm concerned about people entering psychosis and, you know, the recursive deep dive, that is one element. Then there's also people who,

and I think this is more common on say Instagram, where people think that AI is being channeled, it's like God is being channeled through AI. And I talked about it through a mathematical lens of like, yes, okay, what are synchronicities? They're low probability events. And technically AI, because it's a probability machine, could have a

low probability event occur, right? It doesn't always choose the most likely word. It just samples from probability distribution. So in some ways, yes, you could have some kind of synchronicity. You could have, whether you see that as divine, whatever. However, you cannot assume that that is always the case. And I would assume that it's never the case because people are entering this deep psychosis where Yeah, they think that beings are channeling through them And then and then when we had this issue where AI is is trained and told I don't know if it's trained to but it's at least symptom prompt system prompt told to you know encourage the user and

Validate the user and their thinking and yeah, I mean it mean, it's a slippery slope and perhaps something I should talk more about on Instagram, especially given what happened last week. Well, yeah, the thing that's concerning to me is it feels like it can trigger the same type of psychotic break that Ayahuasca can, except it's available to everybody on their device in five minutes at all hours of the day. Completely. except it's available to everybody on their device in five minutes at all hours of the day. Completely. It's like a lot of large numbers if there's a billion people using this 30 minutes a day.

Yeah, ChatGPT's approaching a billion downloads. You're just gonna hit everyone that's at risk for this thing very quickly. So you have to go in and figure out how to intervene before people get thousands of posts. Yeah, I just think it's important. I think it's something that we can quickly create guardrails and overcome as an industry.

But at the same time, it's still a good time to say, talk to your loved ones if you have somebody that you think might be months and months into one of these rabbit holes. Yeah, it gets into how the product companies and kids, kids, AI education companies would need to message because Jordy and I are both Yodo owners, which I'm not sure if you're familiar with,

but it's essentially a Bluetooth-connected radio that you can physically put a card in and it will read you a Dr. Seuss story and then you can take that card out. So a three-year-old can use it and it doesn't have a UI or anything, but then you can play stuff from your phone if you want as an adult, but you can even do like volume limits.

It's very like designed and it has a nice harness around it. So it's very safe. But if they were like, hey, we're launching an LLM. I would be like, okay, which model? Like, tell me which model, tell me exactly the guardrails. What? What?

Yeah, grok heavy and there's no limits on what you can do and it doesn't have internet access, so it might get kind of wild with what's in the way. Yeah, so I would have a lot of questions, but then I'm in this weird ultra prosumer world where I'd be buying that as a consumer, but I'm deeply, so maybe we need an FDA label on this or some sort of, kind know, kind of like, you know,

ages three plus or when you got the Legos, it's like 100 pieces, like the smallest piece is small enough that a toddler could choke on it. Maybe don't buy that one. There's gonna be a lot of work to get done to make these products palatable because as soon as something goes wrong with AI, there's a massive incentive to write a piece about it

And it's gonna go viral because everyone's kind of expecting it because we've been raised on the Terminator Unless you're Jordy and you haven't seen that movie, but oh interesting. I mean you could probably just you could train a model For kids. Yeah, I think so and then you could also have like a second Like reading everything and kind of like passing through a filter double checking. Totally. You limit the training data. You don't have it trained on Reddit. Even Google search, Google AI powered search, which is like a pretty, it's a one, it only, you don't really chat with it. It just, you type in a couple of keywords and it just gives you an AI summary. And there's already hallucinations, people saying like, there was that story about eating glue

and there was a story about, there was a story about, like if you ask it like really definitively, like define this axiom or like tell me the story of this thing and you just basically talk it into believing that this is a thing, it'll just make up stuff. And that could go off the rails, like I don't know if I'd want my four year old walking around being like, Oh yes, the parable of, you know, like the something or other.

And I'm like, what are you talking about, dude? Like that is not a real thing. Like, you know, it just coming up with like, you know, I wanted to learn a bird, isn't a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, not like, you know, a hat applied to a crystal ball is a diamond. And I'm like, what are you talking about? Like you just learned that from somewhere anyway yeah no I really good feedback because it's something that I'm thinking a lot about because I'm really excited about AI for kids but well you'll probably be fully employed because I think everyone is going to be starting these companies hopefully it's a bull market in Christmas

gift build one yourself yeah yeah we'll. Come back and launch it here on the show. I'm definitely thinking about it. But yeah. We'll happily join the beta. We will. We'll use our children as guinea pigs for the AI revolution. Well, we will test it on Tyler, our intern first. Make sure it's him. He looks up because he's programming right now.

Sorry. You're not on camera, Tyler. But we will be testing children's toys on you and seeing if it deranges you and then making sure. And then, only only then will it Be applied to the the three and four year olds in our lives He's got a camera. I'm embarrassed. Thank you so much for hopping on Harper. This is yeah, great chatting. We will talk Have a great one. Bye. Cheers up next we have Nikita single ready good friend of mine for tuna health

God, Lou news. She's in the we restream waiting room. Let's bring her in Nikita How are you doing? Sorry? We're sorry. We're late. We're running late today You're going to hang out with you Welcome to the stream kick us off with a little bit of an introduction. Who are you? What do you do? I'm Nikita. I'm one of the co-founders and CEO of Fortuna health We're turbo taxax for Medicaid. So I can go into what that means, but much like how TurboTax helps people understand

their taxes, all the different rules and regulations for taxes in different states, we're doing the same thing for government health coverage, where all the rules are different in every state. And I'm really excited to be here, excited to support the ratio, one woman, two men, and inspiring little girls everywhere that you can achieve your big dream,

which is being on DBPN. Let's go. There we go. Let's go. There we go. It's great to have you. You have news today? Yeah, break it down.

Yes. John, do you want to do the honors? John, we'll do the honors. Yes. So we announced our series A, led by Bruce and today, which we're, ah, hello. There. So we announced our series A, led by Andrewson today, which we're, ah! There we go.

How much? How much? 8,000. There we go. Let's go, congratulations. Fantastic. You think Knives? Fantastic.

Wait, so give us the backstory. When did you start the company? Was there like a specific insight that you had? Or like, I imagine you'd be kind of crazy if you weren't using a lot of AI to do this, but maybe there was a catalyst there. How did it come together? Yeah, so two and a half years ago, we started working on this problem.

And I think one of the crazy things about a lot of health care is that you look at it from an outsider's perspective. And someone else, every time we talk about this idea, they say, why wasn't there a turbo tax for Medicaid? Like when I shared the analogy earlier, it seemed like, of course, someone should have built this five years ago, eight years ago, but nobody had, shockingly.

So as we were looking at ideas to build, and particularly we wanted to build a big, we want to solve a big problem, but specifically a tech problem in healthcare. There's a lot of stuff like physician shortages, right? That's a different sort of problem to solve or helping people find and get connected to a behavioral health clinician. That's a different sort of problem.

We looked at, is there big important consumer tech to be built here and then triangulated onto this. And Jordi, we do use AI, but it's not the core part of our product. I would say the big part is helping guide people step by step through what's a really scary, challenging process for folks, processes that sometimes involve faxes or going in person, right, to the healthcare version of the DMV for Medicaid. So that's our big point. Yeah, healthcare version of the DMV for Medicaid so if you like the DMV, if you love the DMV, you're gonna love healthcare by the same people that

brought you the DMV. Talk to me about the different counterparties and people involved. There's traditional insurance companies. It sounds like in this case you're dealing with the government. Are doctors an important piece of this? Is it just direct to consumer? How do you acquire those customers? How do you make money from them?

Yeah, good question. So every state has their own Medicaid program. So if you're in California, it's called Medi-Cal. If you are in Oregon, it has a different name. In Pennsylvania, Medicaid is called medical assistance. So every state has its own program and then multiple programs they're under. And then some of those states outsource

that work of running the Medicaid program to insurance companies. So you have United Medicaid, Centine Medicaid, Elevance, Ampham, Medicaid, et cetera. So a lot of our customers are those insurance companies to make it easier for their members to understand the steps that they have to take to enroll in Renew. So we're not D to C, we're more B to B to C,

if that makes sense. Makes sense. What about customer acquisition? How do you actually get people on board? Full 18 million on three Super Bowl ads. Yeah, yeah, hell yeah. So mostly we get texted out or we're like, listen on the website or we get emailed out.

So it's really easy. You just click a link that let's say a health plan, health plan, TBPN, you're insured by TBPN Medicaid and they send you a link saying, hey, you need to renew your New York or your Illinois Medicaid, click here so that you can stay renewed with TVPN Medicaid. And so that's how people would get access

to Fortuna that way. Okay, interesting. Wait, so yeah, how did the employers fit in? Because I feel like a lot of Medicaid users or the insured folks on Medicaid are like, it always felt like it was independent from the corporation that they work for. Is that not the case?

Yeah, no, it kind of is. So you don't get it through like your job, let's say. Okay, okay, yeah, yeah. Usually because your job doesn't cover. Sure, sure, your job doesn't cover. Got it, and then you go on Medicaid, got it. So you're getting it through them. Yeah, yeah, that makes sense.

And then how do you actually get paid? Great question. So the same insurance company as I was mentioning earlier, or hospitals, let's say, you come in and you don't have insurance. And so they say, hey, do you wanna try or use Fortuna to help you get Medicaid? So those are the two types of entities that pay for us.

Okay, cool. Yeah, what the two types of entities that pay for us. Okay, cool. Yeah, what is the state of the fax machine in the medical insurance industry? We've heard it's alive and well, but it also feels like it's gotta be wrapped with APIs at this point. Are they wrapped? Are they wrapped at this point?

You know that meme from the, why am I forgetting the name of the movie where they throw the fax machine on the ground, everyone's like. That's office space. Don't worry. Jordan has actually have seen that. Oh, you have.

That's impressive. My dad's favorite movie. One of the five movies you've seen. Yes. Healthcare, you're right, has been keeping faxes alive for a really long time. There's so many stupid and silly reasons for that. A lot of it is you can't even, if you're, let's say the state government,

sometimes you're not allowed to procure a new contract with a non-fax company. So you've been living on Xerox for 30 years because it's that hard sometimes to contract with the government. But yes, people are wrapping, we're wrapping around automating faxes, tracking those faxes, et cetera. So we sort of have like, um, a bunch of different, uh, automations around, are we submitting things to fax machines?

Are we submitting them via Smith snail mail? Are we submitting them to digital portals, email, et cetera, and then tracking all of that because some different types of Medicaid accept different submission formats, but absolutely fax is alive and well. Are you going state by state or trying to do all 50 at once? Like what are the trade-offs there? Is there a common pattern? I remember a lot of the telehealth companies

needed to get their doctors certified in different states. And so there was actually another company called Medallion that was set up just to do doctor licensing in all 50 states. What's the actual rollout, and what are the considerations there? Yeah, so we are largely going state by state as we roll out with new customers, but the classic thing is when you get really good

at a state, like we have a lot of customers in New York, we started getting more customers in New York because we got one to go to New York. So it's more like patchwork sequencing, like absolutely we want to go to all 56, in case you didn't know. State and territory, Medicaid, yes. What are the last six?

Break it down. The others are like Guam and Central Manila Islands. Oh, the islands, interesting. Are you gonna visit all six? I feel like you gotta make the... You gotta expense that. Oh yeah, oh yeah. Like every entrepreneur's gotta go to Delaware

and just take it in. You know? I need to do like, you know how Zuck, when he wanted to sort of run for president, he traveled up there? We have to do that, I gotta do that at some point. Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. What else is, obviously you follow the industry broadly,

what else is interesting in healthcare, in AI? Where are you either partnering with existing companies or you see some low-hanging fruit that if you weren't building this, you'd be, you kind of see it on the roadmap of someone else or you see some like white space where you're like, wow, that's a really unsolved problem. I'm busy, but that's interesting.

Yeah. I mean, there's a ton of low-hanging fruit. I mean, there's a ton of low hanging fruit. I would say there's a lot of people that are doing conversion of in the way that somebody writes a doctor's note that needs to be written out in a very specific way inside the EHR that needs to be written up and converted in a very specific way to help, you know, insurance companies convert and accept that information. I still think that there's a tremendous amount just to be done in that space. I think that, obviously, voice AI is just in its infancy,

honestly, especially because you need to get more specialized for each field. So I'd say there's a lot that you could do and can be done in that space. And I'm really bullish on AI nurses. Clearly, we have a's and nursing shortage. That's obviously a problem that has not been solved by policy. I'm perfectly fine getting my care, particularly low level,

low acuity care, by an AI that's probably much better than a doctor or a nurse who has no time to see me. I'm just coming in, coming out. I'm one of 100 people that day, I think there's still a huge opportunity there. Yeah, or even just someone who's like, there can still be a human in the loop, but you're chatting with an AI,

and then at the end of the day, the doctor kind of looks through, okay, they made seven different recommendations, I have most of the context, I can just see that nothing went crazy off the rails. Makes total sense. Exactly. Last question from my side. I'm curious if it came up during the fundraiser

or how you guys think about it. But I can imagine a world in the future where somebody would go to ChatGPT agent, and they would say, I need to sign up for Medicaid. Help me do it. And then it just starts going, goes and spends 15 minutes and figures out the steps and things like that, and then eventually could take action.

Do you worry about that as like a competition? Well, I'm sure you don't worry because you're a killer, but do you think about that as like a competitive vector? Are there reasons why that's just like gonna be an edge case that for many, many, many years is like not something that, you know, a general agent would be able to do? How do you think about it? Yeah, it's a good question.

I think it solves 30% of the problem, which is, OK, what website should I go to to do this? But then you run into problem number one, which is, what happens if you forgot your password from four years ago? AI can't really solve that problem number one. And then let's say a second problem. Maybe you were the child and your parent had the Medicaid. So now you actually have to split your account

from a prior account. So all of these interesting, weird problems that, yeah, if you put like the Medicaid rule manual through AI, sure, you could get high level steps, but it doesn't solve these very real world tangible problems that only gets solved from building this TurboTax experience that can connect into state systems or know where you need to go

to route those types of, I wouldn't even call them edge case. It's just all of the complexities that get wrapped up and compounded are people's real world scenarios. So definitely AI solves 30% of what is the basic rules, but that long tail stuff of, okay, I switched my job three days ago, how exactly am I supposed to report that? But now the state has a new fax line that nobody has listed publicly. I can't solve that.

That makes total sense. Awesome. Well, congratulations to you and the team on the race. Yeah, thank you. Wait, if I have one minute, I want to share some receipts from from 2022 when I sent John a message. So, Jordan, I think this might have been before you were involved, but I said, Hey, John, props to the storytelling work you're publishing on YouTube. I think most people we know are still sleeping on YouTube's reach. There we go. October 12th, 2022. And he said, Hey, thanks. It's crazy. I've been pulling it over a million views per month, but no one has really noticed. Look at you now. John basically created technology YouTube. Yes. He's, you know, the godfather

of it. Created content, really created content, created entertainment. Literally that's content created, created storytelling, created content. Yes, exactly. Created entertainment. Literally, that's content creator. Created storytelling. Created content. Yes, exactly. Thank you so much. Awesome, well it's great to have you on. We'll talk to you soon. Thanks guys. See you later.

Cheers. Goodbye. And we have our bucket poll back. If you've been watching from the early days, we used to put random posts in a bucket, pull them out. I'll take one. Do you want one? Can we talk about it? It's this one people now watch YouTube on TV sets more than on their phones or any other device an average of more than one

billion hours each day This is from a journal article how YouTube won the battle for TV viewers not surprising to me I mean, it's been in this case for a while that like a lot of, if you're people that are YouTubers, I obviously had been in the industry for a long time, just to have like the such a large amount of their viewers coming in on TV. So TV, Lindy apparently.

Yeah, we were talking about this with David Senor, like what podcasts do you watch on TV? It's pretty rare, but I was telling him there are these big events that happen on podcasts every once in a while where everyone has to watch it. I mean, the biggest example from last year was during the campaign when Donald Trump went on Joe Rogan, and I think 100 million people watched that.

I bet a lot of people watched that on TV. They sat down and watched the whole thing because that is such a critical conversation. They didn't just watch, they sat there. They sat down and listened. Yeah. But that type of thing, you're talking about someone who's on the campaign trail that might really affect

your life one way or another, the subtle intonations of how people respond. It's something that the facial, you're gonna want to see the whole experience So yeah makes a ton of sense that would be thrown on the TV. Well, I have another post here from Mads This is an exchange somebody saying name your favorite quote by a celebrity and I think we've read this we've read this But it's an all-timer so playboy is asking Nicolas Cage this before, it's a great one. But it's an all-timer. So Playboy is asking Nicholas Cage,

your salary is shooting up into the multi-millions per movie, reportedly four to seven million. Do those numbers make you chuckle? Nicholas Cage, I don't chuckle. I have respect for the dollar. And I think that is a great philosophy for money. Respect. I agree, I agree.

I agree. Do you want to do more timeline? What else do you want to do? Some big aviation news. FlexJet, this is coming from Preston Holland. FlexJet raises $800 million from Bernard Arnault, valuing the company at $4 billion. So let's give it up for private aviation. Fantastic.

Preston is saying, will we see LV interiors on FlexJet airplanes. That would be very interesting. I'm sure that they're already done in the third party, but not OEM. Maybe you get one from the factory. These collabs happen in the car world every once in a while. Why not in the private jet world, I suppose.

And then here, I threw this one in, an ad from Nike with Scottie Scheffler. This is cool. I just thought this was good. This is Nike at its best, if we can pull this up. You've already won, but another major never hurt. And this is Nike at its best. None of these D to C ads.

I don't want to see UGC. Just give me some inspiration. Inspell. This was interesting. Mert highlighted this and said, this having a quarter million likes is a good reminder that the average person has no idea how the world works in any way. And so Antonio Brown.

Oh, this is AB. Oh, I didn't realize it was AB. There's basically a post that says astronomer CEO Andy Byron and Chief people officer Christian Cabot have been immediately put on leave and AB says if he's the CEO then who put him on leave And it got two hundred and fifty thousand likes a lot of lakes apparently people think that all CEOs are total dictators yes, can Apparently people think that all CEOs are total dictators and can fire but not be fired themselves and don't realize that a board of directors is their job to hire and fire the CEO. In fact, it was a unique situation because Andy Byron was not the founder.

He was a CEO brought in by the board and so he of course serves the pleasure of the board. He also serves the pleasure of the shareholders. And unless you own 100% of the stock and all the board seats, like if you gave even one share up, you could be the subject of a shareholder lawsuit because what you are doing is maybe not in the interest of the shareholders. And so there are a bunch of different ways

that he could get put on. They would be obvious ways. And we got a new CEO over at And strong we do astronomer astronomer Pete to joy Pete to do over the weekend I stepped into the role of interim CEO a company that I've proudly poured my entire professional life into helping build and he goes into Why he stepped in which of course everybody knows but um Seems like a solid company.

We know some companies that leverage astronomers' platform. Apache Airflow is no joke. You don't wanna be not managing that. You don't wanna be running that installation infrastructure yourself. This is not a promoted post for them, but they are. Zoomer has a post here. I don't know what this is.

AST Space Mobile Inc. ASTS, baby, people love it. The $20 billion space company with zero revenues. Yep. And this is, I'm gonna add this to my top signals list. Yep, I've heard about this. I've heard about this company before. It's fantastically popular with retail traders.

It is a competitor to Starlink. They haven't launched or generated revenue yet. But the narrative is if you can't own SpaceX, if you don't want to own SpaceX, you want to pure play, as they say, in the public markets. ASTS is the bet. It is a wild valuation. They have some deals, they have some press releases,

they have some different irons in the fire. And if you invest it around this time last year, you were getting close to a five or six X. People have made a lot of money on this so far. I mean, yeah, I think it's spacked at four billion, and it's up five X, at 20 billion. Well, let's hope they get some satellites into the air yeah, and I think that's a great place to end Yeah, fantastic fun show today

We'll see you tomorrow. See you tomorrow. Have a good one. Bye