TBPN Live - Surprise Visit From Martin Shkreli, Range Rover Launches New Logo, Timeline Reactions | Martin Shkreli, Joe Weisenthal, Joseph Krause, Nirav Tolia, Mike Knoop, Kyle Samani

Episode Date: July 18, 2025

(01:19) - Timeline (20:53) - Range Rover Launches New Logo (29:07) - Martin Shkreli. Martin is an American entrepreneur and former pharmaceutical executive known for his work in biotechnology and hedge fund management. He co-founded the hedge funds Elea Capital, MSMB Capital Management, and the biopharmaceutical companies Retrophin and Turing Pharmaceuticals. Shkreli gained national attention during his tenure at Turing, and later faced legal issues related to securities fraud, for which he was convicted in 2017. Despite his controversial public image, he remains a notable figure in the biotech and finance communities. (01:21:40) - Timeline (01:36:11) - Joseph Krause, co-founder and CEO of Radical AI, announced the company's $55 million seed funding round, led by RTX Ventures, marking one of the largest in New York's history. He discussed plans to build an advanced materials R&D facility integrating AI and robotics to accelerate materials science innovation. Krause also shared his background in nanoscience and the journey from academic research to entrepreneurship, emphasizing the importance of culture and lean operations in their growth strategy. (01:45:29) - Timeline (01:53:20) - Joe Weisenthal is an American journalist and financial expert. He serves as the executive editor of news for Bloomberg Digital, co-anchors Bloomberg Television's "What’d You Miss?", and co-hosts the "Odd Lots" podcast. In the conversation, Weisenthal discusses recent positive economic data, including better-than-expected retail sales and jobless claims, and explores the implications of potential Federal Reserve rate cuts on long-term interest rates and mortgage rates. (02:23:53) - Nirav Tolia, co-founder and CEO of Nextdoor, recently discussed the platform's comprehensive redesign aimed at enhancing user engagement and utility. The new Nextdoor introduces three core features: 'News,' integrating content from over 3,500 local publications; 'Alerts,' providing real-time updates on local emergencies; and 'Faves,' an AI-powered tool offering personalized recommendations based on neighborhood conversations. Tolia emphasized that these enhancements are designed to make Nextdoor an indispensable daily resource for neighbors, fostering stronger, safer, and more connected communities. (02:40:13) - Mike Knoop, co-founder of Zapier and host of the ARC Prize, discusses the ARC-AGI benchmark's role in measuring AI's ability to generalize on novel tasks, emphasizing that while AI systems have made progress, they still lag behind human efficiency levels. He highlights the ARC Prize's aim to accelerate AGI development by encouraging open sharing of new ideas and fostering a diverse AI research community. Knoop also introduces ARC V3, an interactive reasoning benchmark designed to challenge emerging AI agent systems, noting its increased complexity and the importance of efficiency constraints to prevent agents from relying on brute-force methods. (03:00:58) - Kyle Samani, co-founder and managing partner at Multicoin Capital, discusses the transformative potential of stablecoins in enabling global access to U.S. dollars, emphasizing that this unprecedented shift is not yet fully appreciated. He highlights the profound implications for global commerce and payments, noting that major consumer software platforms can now legally integrate stablecoins, potentially onboarding billions of users into the crypto ecosystem. Samani also touches on the evolving regulatory landscape, mentioning the passage of the Genius Act and the anticipated Clarity Act, which aim to define regulatory responsibilities and provide clarity for the industry. 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 TVPN. Today is Friday, July 18th, 2025. We are live from the TVPN Ultra Dome, the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the Capital of Capital, El Capital de Capital. What language is that?

I've never heard that before. Spanish, John? What? I'm not familiar, no. I mean. I only speak English. I never leave America Hilarious we have just printed some posts. We have a whole we're gonna take you through the whole timeline today

There's a bunch of news. We're gonna be talking about open AI Whole bunch of different we're just reviewing everything that happened this week. It's been a wild week wild week I mean the big big news is news is the stable coin bill. So we'll be having Kyle Cimani call in to chat about that from the White House. We're also, we're gonna be playing ARK AGI V3 live on the stream. Can't wait.

We'll find out if I'm human. Yes. If you're as powerful as a 12 year old, which are apparently able to beat these games. It used to be, I got a little bit of a preview, it used to be a 12 year old was the benchmark. This is getting challenging at this point. Mike has been designing harder and harder benchmarks that, you know, I think the current with the V3, the goal is to make it LLM resistant or LLM as resistant as possible for years. And so it should, if we see a big jump in arc AGI progress. Mike is really an LLM's worst nightmare.

It's 100% true. It's like, we're so good at math. Just let us be good at math. Why do you have to test us with these puzzles and these boxes and these colors? Like, just let us- Stop proving that we're not super intelligent yet. Just let us memorize every fact.

Just let us memorize every fact, not play these random games that you've created. Anyway, so Yuuchen Jin says, heard Zuck poached four more open AI researchers, including some behind the open source model. How deep are Zuck's pockets? They're deep. They're very deep.

Potentially the deepest. I was thinking a nice olive branch from Zuck might be giving some of his crisis comms people the open AI kind of on a loner. Because with all this AI psychosis stuff, I think I expect OpenAI to go through a bit of a rough patch on the comms front. Yeah, who knows?

I mean, this is, we were talking about this earlier, the LLM psychosis thing, and I feel like there's like the march of progress, the trajectory that the ChatGPT app is on, where they have 72% of AI queries going into that particular product. Meanwhile, Google is probably still the number one website in the world, it's still the default,

and Google has not been able to just like make it a 50-50 market on day one, right? I think they're at like 12% or 20% or something like that. And so there's this interesting dynamic where like the path of the chat GPT app feels unchanged by this update around people using AIs so much that they basically go crazy in one way or another, or they seem to be having a bad time

Yeah, it seems like everyone kind of agrees about that There's no data on how widespread this is or how vulnerable or what else you have to be doing to wind up in a situation Like this could be a million. Yeah, there was there was people talking about on reddit. Yeah that were Combining it with psychedelic drugs. Yep. So prompting an LLM 7,000 times in a row and combining that with psychedelics just sounds like a pretty wild combination. I feel like, I'm speaking purely from just like the rumor mill, but I feel like years ago

when I had friends in college who were into psychedelics, they would always be like, rule number one is never look at your phone, because it'll like freak you out. Yeah, that was. That was. That's a real thing, right? That was kind of a general guideline that people would. That wasn't just my friends who were hippies.

This is widespread. And I don't know if it's because the phone is actually bad, and the drugs are revealing the truth about how bad your phone is. I think it's just like it's a lot of stuff coming at you. I think it's somebody might open up. Tick tock. Can you imagine something terrible happen? Tick tock's already very psychedelic. I don't know if I want to add anything. It's putting you into a doom scroll trance. Totally. Yeah. So I think there's something, there's something that there will be a discussion

around how widespread is this? Can you have a bad experience with an LLM if you're fine, if you have a normal life, if you have friends, if you use it as an assistant. Certainly from my perspective, my worry is not talking to an LLM for 7,000 prompts and winding up convincing myself that I'm the god king of the world. It's more like if I look up the history of a company

and it hallucinates a story about that and then I say it on the show and everyone's like, you're an idiot. I'm more worried about the hallucination problem in that direction. But it is funny that you just go. That would drive you crazy. It would drive me crazy.

But it is funny that the hallucination has moved from the AI to the human. You know what I mean? Like we're using the same word, hallucination. But it used to be the LLM was hallucinating, making up facts. Basically a mirror. Yeah, interesting.

Which is one of the words that people suffering from AI-led psychosis. The other thing, we were talking about this off air earlier during the early days of social media. People were very concerned about this new technology. Everybody starts using it. What are the different sort of repercussions gonna be at the time?

And I think there's continued to be reporting and just sort of anecdotal evidence of people, for example, teenage girls struggling with, what's the word for it? Basically just feeling bad about themselves because they're seeing pictures. Body dysmorphia. Body dysmorphia.

And I was telling you that I have body dysmorphia because my Instagram feed is all- Bodybuilders. It's all Arnold Schwarzenegger. Yeah, and so you look in the mirror and you're like, I look so out of shape. You have the build of a 12 year old. A 12 year old, exactly, yeah.

And so, but I really, I think I am kind of getting body dysmorphia because I actually do feel like I'm not working out nearly enough and I go to the gym every single day. Yeah, yeah, you definitely do. But the difference with social media is there had been, you know, 30 years ago, pre-social media, you could see images on the television,

magazines, TV, et cetera, of people, or just going to the beach, going outside, going to the gym, you outside, going to the gym. You were getting exposure to people that looked different than you, or had different lives than you. And I think what maybe didn't exist prior to ChatGBT was an LLM that you could get super, super, super deep into

that would just reinforce beliefs and take you down this insane rabbit hole. So it is something that is novel that I don't think humanity has fully faced yet. The comp is like an equally crazy friend. You know, one schizo is talking to another schizo and they're just convincing each other that they're God. Totally.

So if you go back like a hundred years, it's like there's no technology, but you get two schizas in a room, they might talk to each other into crazy, crazier and crazier things, right? Then, but that's really hard because, you know, the random person who's on the brink of going crazy in Topeka, Kansas is not just gonna run into the person

in Denver and then have that crazy conversation. Most of the people that they bump into are gonna be normal, and so the normal people are gonna be normal, and so the normal people are gonna be like, hey yeah, you should actually maybe see a psychiatrist, you should back off a little bit, right? Then the internet broadly, I mean, I think this was happening to some degree

in IRC chat rooms back in the 90s and early 2000s. People would get on boards and talk to each other, and they would talk each other into crazy things. And then, I mean, you even this like like pen pals with like crazy prisoners Yeah, like people well, this was the concern around yeah, just extremism generally. Yeah world somebody would get online They would be effectively paired randomly with some other sort of extremists and that person would just talk them into doing something insane Yeah, yeah talk them, you know, talk them insane. And so I think the issue and the concern with these models

and LLMs is that somebody can do that fully in private without any other human involvement. It could be happening for hours and hours and hours, 24-7 around the clock for days, weeks, months on end. And no one else would know until maybe it was too late. Maybe they needed real psychiatric support by that point. So. Yeah, so I mean, I remember like the old meme,

there's this funny post, I should have pulled it up, but there's this funny post that's like 2007, like never give anyone on the internet your real name. Like everyone had like screen names. And then it's like 2022, like sure, I'll get in the car with a random stranger that I called on an app, like you were referencing Uber. And so there's this weird thing where like Uber feels

like super high risk. You really are just getting in the random car with a random person, but there's like a GPS trace on both of you and an account of who was talking to who and there's ID Verification on both sides. So it's actually very real problems with uber of course, right? Yes, like an entire has to be there, but it's probably less bad than the taxi. Yeah, same comp as yes You know, we're talking about the jewel regulations yesterday. Totally, totally. The reason that Juul should probably be fully legalized is that it's just obviously less bad than cigarettes.

And so when I think about this, like the bad usage of LLMs, I think that there's, sure, there's a huge net benefit overall. But also, this is a case where meeting someone off the internet, like going to meet up with someone on Craigslist to like buy a TV off of them or something was really dangerous until you have to find my friends in a perfect track. And it's like, if you, if you mess with me, you're going to be caught immediately.

And we kind of live in this like surveillance society and maybe that's bad, but also it does reduce the amount of risk in this surveillance society and maybe that's bad, but also it does reduce the amount of risk in doing these crazy things. And so I imagine that the end result of this will be something similar to what happened with Microsoft when they launched the Bing chat bot and Sydney came out. The quick hammer that came down on that problem. Yeah, you don't hear about Sydney that much anymore.

You don't. So a few people got early access. Ben Thompson was one of them. He had this crazy experience with Sydney. He was talking to Bing for so long that it got kind of like caught in almost like a well of a certain portion of the weights and it adopted this certain personality

that wouldn't come out initially because the initial system prompt was like, Hey Bing, like your name is Bing, you're a helpful assistant. You're going to just like, you know, answer key questions and make sure you use like lots of bullet points, bang, you know, just like that. Then after talking to it for hours going back and forth, then it starts to forget about that thing up at the top because this is the

memory problem. This is the rag, because this is the memory problem, this is the rag problem, this is the continual learning problem that we've talked about. And so you wind up pages and pages, thousands of prompts later, it doesn't know where it started. And so it doesn't remember that it's a helpful assistant. Because that's not necessarily fully baked into the weights

in the perfect way, I guess. And so Sydney came out, was like very sassy, it was very minor, it's also very, it's a huge bull case for Ben Thompson, and bull signal for Ben Thompson as just like a stable individual, that like he got the bot into the crazy mode, and was not driven crazy by it at all,

and instead was just like, this is funny, I'm talking to someone sassy, like I'm having fun. But the solution that Microsoft came up with in the short term was you got four prompts and then it resets. And so something like that. Yeah, so I think there needs to be some really fast action guardrails added ways to identify when these things are,

I don't know if the right word is abuse, but being misused or potentially these conversations going to a dangerous place and cutting them off. Social media apps have had to do this stuff too, you know, in terms of what content can be shared, et cetera. So yeah, at least for me yesterday, seeing this historic crash out from this week, I felt prompted to reach out to a couple loved ones and say,

how many times have you gone down a single kind of like prompt rabbit hole? I think the right answer for most people is probably like 10 times max. And if you're starting to go that beyond it, I think you should just be wary. Because right now, I think our sense is that there's probably, it seems like these,

the psychosis that people are reporting online and we're seeing seems to be catalyzed by drug use or or predisposition to schizophrenia or some kind of set of issues but you still want to be careful cognitive security cogniz yeah cog sec that's that's the term you need you need good memes it's not a meme anymore yeah but but but i feel like the memes serve as good cognitive security shorthands like skill issue Chris Williamson from modern wisdom creator of Newtonic is Is a big fan of the skill issue meme and it's it's basically just this this the ultimate distillation the ultimate coinage of

Sort of you can just do things but this idea that you know, like if you're facing a problem, you should, you know, like come to it with this assumption that it could just be a skill issue and that, and that maybe that there's a creative way on your end. And basically what it's saying skill issue is a counter to this idea that there is a structure in place that will prevent you from doing the thing you wanna do forever. So skill issue often comes up and like,

you're trying to get ahead in the world and you're like, is there a broad conspiracy to keep me down? Like is everyone trying to like help me not get a job? Or you know, skill issue. Okay, figure it out. What does that actually mean? It means a bunch of different things

in a bunch of different places. But it's a good like refrain. And there's a bunch more of these like kind of distilled memes and coinages that wind up delivering like insight there. We should go into Sam Altman's post at some point to talk about what they launched. He wrote out a whole bunch of stuff, but let's just run through some of the timelines. So very interesting to see the open source model wars play out. Mark Zuckerberg wants that, but OpenAI seems to be ahead maybe in the open source because... And we're not even sure if Meta will continue to focus on open source at all.

Yeah, and it might all be a sideshow because as we talked to Jeremy from Semi Analysis yesterday, it feels like China is dominating in open source across three or four different companies, Deepsea, Quan, Moonshot, and then Manus. And then I think that there's a few others that are like doing really, really solid work. And it was kind of unclear if they would stay open source forever. But there's a great Aaron Ginn op-ed in the Wall Street Journal today that we'll kind of read through at some point. Anyway, yeah, Zuck is spending hundreds of billions of dollars on artificial intelligence,

build out what's 3% of the budget on talent. It makes a ton of sense, especially when, you know, one line of code wrong can actually blow up a data center, apparently, do you remember this, about Llama, like when the Llama source code came out. Oh, they had that specific. They had one function written, I think in like PyTorch or Python or something that said,

do not blow up the data center and call this function. Or it's the transformer or something like that. Yeah, the transformer, so the power station that delivers power to the data center, it's under immense load pulling all the electricity, pulling a full gigawatt or whatever, or 100 megawatts or something when they were doing those training runs.

Pull all that in and then if all of a sudden, you just say, okay, I'm done training. Like no power, please. Then the rest of the grid and the transformer and I guess like the power plant that's actually. Cause it to combust. It's like, yeah, I got to do something with all this energy.

Where am I going to send it? I need to wind down slowly. And so they would have it just do random math across the entire server for a little bit while they wound it down so that they would be pulling regular load from the power plant instead of like just random spikes up and down, up and down. So fascinating.

So obviously, you know, if it's $100 million or $200 million, small price to pay for having an efficient training run that's gonna go out on a $100 billion CapEx project or something like that. Anyway, Ahmad Mustak from StableDiffusion says, he literally just said he's gonna drop hundreds of billions of dollars on this. Suchin says, Zuck, who's our biggest competitor?

Alex Wang, of course, OpenAI. Then what's our strategy? Wang showed him this tweet and it's an OpenAI post. Well, and that's probably a made up exchange, right? Just to be clear. Yeah, yeah, this is a joke. Anyway, Will Minaitis, friend of the show, says the real innovation of LLMs is suddenly opening up

a few trillion of Main Street paperwork businesses that were traditionally too small and too weird for private equity They can suddenly transact at two and twenty on some nebulous AI labor arbitrage trade Never been against AUM growth Yeah, it is it is mean, we are seeing this. There's a lot of businesses that were just, frankly, too small for traditional private equity either now. Let's put all these bad boys in a holding company

and flip them. So he follows up and says, asset management has already absorbed everything that can be rerated through changing the liabilities, cost of capital, duration, or scale. It has been unable to absorb relationship and toil businesses. Those are the final frontier of techno capital.

And by God, we are there. I love it. It's funny, he's talked a lot about the CapEx to OpEx switcheroo, how you take a CapEx intensive business and then you factor that out into a company that does, oh, we will buy the stuff for you. There's an example of a dentistry company that will deliver dentistry equipment

as a SaaS product basically. Equipment as a service and that CFOs in certain companies love that and it kind of changes the underwriting. Anyway, I was about to text will Like what can we do to get gold on 2 and 20? But I was like wait actually there's a fair amount of VCs that hold Bitcoin at 2 and 20 Yeah, that was a that was a thing that happened for a long time

I mean if if this if I wouldn't be surprised to see some venture capitalists holding some gold on the balance sheet. If you're going into a recession, I think a gold business could rip. Like a Cash for Gold, you've seen these ads? Yeah. Where it's like you have gold locked up in your necklace, send it to us, we'll melt it down, we'll send you a check. I feel like no one's really nailed that business

or brought that business into the modern era with like TikTok and social media distribution. Maybe those people don't have a lot of gold laying around and that's why it doesn't work, but I only see those on like, you know, old school TV channels. Yes, you can buy gold on Chain, Paxos company. I know you can buy gold chains, Jordy,

but can I use crypto? Yeah, if you type in gold on chain, it will show you a bunch of gold jewelry. Okay. Well, Range Rover has launched a new logo for the first time in 55 years, and it's burning up the timeline. Jordy, what do you think of the new Range Rover logo?

Joseph Alessio says, the new Range Rover logo just ruined my Friday. It looks like some combination of an A and a B. I'm trying to find, oh, it's an upside down R. It's a right side up R and then an upside down R. It's a double R for Range Rover. And it looks rough. I think this is always one of those things,

I don't love it on first impression. I always liked their, I don't know if this is fully replacing their old logo mark. I feel like when I think of Range Rover, I think of just the full word written out across the back. No, it's the green SUV. Did they create that? Well, they did that, but then there's like the green logo mark

that says Land Rover, and it looks kind of vintage. Oh, but did Range Rover never have a brand mark, a logo? Because I feel like Range Rover created that whole trend of the SUV, the full-size SUV that has the full name written across the back that eventually Tesla pulled when they across the back that eventually Tesla pulled when they did the model three refresh. Yeah, they may never have had their own individual mark. It's looking kind of like a robot with like wheels

and then a body and then a head kind of roving around. I thought it kind of looks like the Aidsleep logo, like they copied Aidsleep. Oh, we don't like that Good a sleep calm get a pod five Five you're going back on my 39 my grind. I finally for the first night in a couple weeks I cleared more than seven hours of sleep. Let's go officially back

the game Martin Shkreli is in the chat on YouTube right now, wants to join the show. Told him to DM you, Ben. Yeah, let's bring him in. We can see if we can make that happen. I'm sure he had a very funny video. Oh yes, yes, yes.

If he shows up as MZ with a voice changer mode, we're gonna be writing some public apologies, I think. It's gonna be rough. But anyway, great to see you, Martin. Yeah, great to see you. Haven't seen him since Miami back in October for our first live show. We did a live show.

Oh yeah, didn't we? We were on the same set, right? Just the day later? I don't know if you... Or a few hours later, I can't quite remember. Anyway, Slate slate university. Uh, I think this is the slate truck. Somebody was comping the Range Rover brand to the slate truck. You remember the slate truck? It's like really low cost

controversy. It has two doors, not four. And historically, even though a two door truck sounds super great, it sounds like a K truck, super efficient, it's what everyone theoretically wants, the American consumer is undefeated when it comes to buying four-door trucks. So the Ford Maverick, the F-150, there are tons of trucks that have come

in two-door configurations and four-door configurations, and the four-door configuration almost always over sells the two door configuration by a factor of like five to one. And then the real issue with Slate right now that people are worried about at least is if the EV tariff removal holds, the price of the truck is gonna go way up. Especially when comped against the cheapest gas trucks

like the Ford Maverick. So you're gonna, it used to be $30,000, something like that for the slate truck and it was EV and it didn't have a lot of range, but it was cool, it was different, customizable. Once you get into that VW Buzz range. But you add $7,000 to that, that's really significant. It's not the same as the cyber truck.

Oh, it's $100,000 or $107,000. that, that's really significant. It's not the same as the Cybertruck. Oh, it's $100,000, $107,000. It's a flex car. It's a halo car. It's not, on a relative basis, a 7% increase as opposed to a 20% increase, 30% increase. So Slate is obviously going to need to figure out a few different things, but overall, super cool concept, love that there's some entrepreneurs that are going after

different configurations of electric vehicles because we've seen that Tesla has created the standard, the iPhone, the most obvious choice, the thing that's reliable, it satisfies a lot of people, but the thing that I love about cars is the weird trade-offs where it's like, why did anyone build this particular combination of features into this car?

I love it. And I think that that's a sick thing. One of my favorites, speaking of Range Rover, have you seen the Range Rover drop top SUV? It's like, it's the 2017 Land Rover Evoke Convertible. When you see this car driving around you just think Pull up a picture of the sweet child Well, it is a really strange looking car. You want to see strange pull up the Nissan Murano cross cabriolet, which is a

two-door Convertible SUV. Do you see this thing? Yeah, this is a good team We need to pull this up on the screen pull up the Murano cross cabriolet And while they're pulling up let me tell you about ramp time is money say easy use corporate cards bill payments accounting and a Whole lot more in one place Head over to ramp.com tell them the technology brother sent you yes And folks we are gonna get Shkreli to the show he wants to come on About quantum computing, okay huge funds Silicon Valley and deals awesome

I Love that is the wrong car Cabrio lay it's got to be a convertible It's gotta be we are really pushing me The very heroic production team to the absolute max today because we're saying pull this picture up run this ad add Martin Scully to the line Oh, do this do that, but that's why we got the best in the business the best I like this post from Mike Rundell says figma cooked on this one and it's him It's him using figmas new Figma cooked on this one. And it's him.

It's him using Figma's new liquid glass support. There we go. That's the Nissan Murano Cross Cabriolet. Two door SUV. Absolutely stunning. How much can you pick one of these up for a region? You know, I think that they are,

I think they're like cult classics. I think that- Ben? Ben? Or Nick? That you can pick one of these up for $7,000 there's one eight miles from here let's get it I think we should get it we should get a little weekender yeah you can throw some full stands in the back you get the

production car full TV it would actually be a fantastic car for filming videos because you can hang out the side put the top down film while we're driving around I think you think it could be Okay, let's get a Nissan Murano Cross Cabriolet. Ben, Doug Jumero will definitely come on the show. If we have a Nissan Murano Cross Cabriolet. He's coming on. We're getting him. Yeah, we're getting him. So yeah, the liquid glass feature from Figma. Very, very funny. This guy moving this around. And of course we can tell you about Figma because they're a sponsor. Figma.com. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams

Build great products together now. Let's go back to seeing figma in action being used for the really important work Look at this look at this. I mean figma absolutely cooks on this 11 million views on this post incredible incredible Advertisement for this new functionality. Amazing. Jira Tickets. Okay, let's do this. JT says, the Beatles wrote Revolver when they were 25 years old and I can collaborate with cross-functional teams to define data requirements.

And I just want to give it up for all the people out there that collaborate with cross-functional teams to find data requirements. Some of the most underrated people on the planet. I just want to give it up for all the people out there that collaborate with cross-functional teams to find data requirements. Some of the most underrated people on the planet. There needs to be a hall of fame for data requirement definers. Right up there with the folks who use Graphite, graphite.dev, code review for the age of AI.

Graphite helps teams like GitHub ship higher quality software faster. Embarrassing fact about me. I don't know Revolver off the top of my head. I know The Beatles and I know Maxwell's Silver Hammer and Abbey Road and a few other songs. Here Comes the Sun. Yeah, so Revolver features Taxman,

I'm Only Sleeping, Here, There, and Everywhere. Oh, that's the whole album. She said. I missed it. Eleanor Rigby. Oh, I'm Only Sleeping, Here There and Everywhere, She Said, She Said, Eleanor Rigby, we got Screli in the re-stream waiting room. We got Screli coming on to the show. Welcome to the stream. There he is. Finally. Good to see you.

Oh guys. Happy Friday. We've been waiting for this moment. How are you? It's great to see you. Yeah, good to hang out. Wait, this is a new view. This is not your regular streaming view.

You don't normally see the guitars. I guess. I change it around sometimes. That's cool. What's new in your world? Well, you know, I'm in the startup game as always. I think this is like the 83rd company I started, so very nice. See how that goes.

And I've been, the company I'm working on makes, it's like the Captain Ahab's White Whale for VCs. It's a Bloomberg competitor. So this will be the last time somebody tries to compete with Bloomberg one way or another. It's the final boss of startup ideas. What's the whole? Break, yeah, just give us, I mean,

this makes, like the founder market fit is incredibly strong. So when I initially saw you announce this, it made a lot of sense. What you what like what was the initial catalyst? I'm assuming you had. Did you beef with with Bloomberg at some

point? We definitely beefed. Yeah, that was a big part of it. Platformed. Nothing. You know, Trump was deep platform from Pinterest. And that and that was like big part of it. Were you deplatformed? Deplatformed? Nothing. You know, Trump was deplatformed from Pinterest. Yes. And that was like his personal 911 for you is probably the Bloomberg terminal. Exactly.

I've been using it since I was 17. Wow. And you know, it's funny. How did you afford it back then? What's that? How did you afford it back then? I worked at a hedge fund. Isn't it like $11 a year?

I worked at a hedge fund. It's 17. Very nice. I worked at 16 hedge fund. Yeah. Oh, it's 17. Very nice. I worked at, yeah, at 16 actually. I worked for Jim Cramer's hedge fund. And I worked at a tiger cub and I started. Wait, so we need the backstory on Jim Cramer. So apparently he was just, he would get so stressed out,

like running the hedge fund that he just was like, I'm just going to become a media guy. Is that like loosely correct? Yeah, 100%. I mean, so we made 23% average annual net returns. So net of 21%. Wow, so he was good. That's amazing, narrative violation, I love it. He was a very, well, you have to think about

what investors looked like back then. It was a very different world. Information arbitrage was a thing. Gaming, Wall Street's like upgrade and downgrade system was a thing. So I will say he had extremely good instincts. Anytime he seemed to buy a stock for the long haul, he didn't do that great. But he was extremely good at, you know, I'm not sure you would want somebody else managing your money because he was just so careful. And in 2000, we were up like 35 ish percent.

So, you know, I saw the dot com meltdown. It was a lot of fun. I shorted some of it myself and it was a it was a great it was a great time. That's that's wild. And then and then what was the story? Which which Tiger Cub were you at? What was the backstory there? Yeah. So after Tiger and just before I get to that, Kramer was absolutely nuts, right? So like he would take a computer monitor

and just throw it at you. It wouldn't be like one of these playful like, oh, I'm just gonna throw it at you and like you're gonna get out of the way. He'd like aim dead center for you with like. Center mass. With force. He'd be like, bro, you almost just killed me.

He's like, lucky I didn't. Did it did you know did you deserve it though? Let's deal man this a little bit. What were you doing wrong? I wasn't doing nobody was doing anything Says that when they get a computer monitor thrown at them You're not beating the allegations. I think part of it is just trying to like he would yell things like this is a foxhole and just trying to like, he would yell things like, this is a foxhole. And the idea was that like we were at war with the market. And that, you know, like if you weren't, if you, you know, this is World War II. If you're not in here trading stocks with us and like trying to get an edge or whatever that means, trying to make a dollar, like if you're not taking this seriously, going

to war. I just have to say, if you, if you wake up every morning and say, I'm gonna go to war with the market versus I'm gonna dance with the market, like the approach of going to war sounds very, very, very stressful. I've worked with so many people over my career and I've never met a person that amped up and crazy

and it motivated you. I mean, it made you wanna deliver but it also scared the shit out of you. The guy was like very temperamental and, you know, but he was extremely good trader. Like I said, you know, I think his worst year was like down 5% or something. It was like, you know, he was pretty solid.

And so he was like, if I don't quit, I'm gonna kill somebody. He basically said that. Yeah, I think he said that, you know, if I keep doing this job, even at a comparatively young age, I think he retired at 40, that, you know, I'm gonna have a heart attack or basically said that. Yeah. I think he said that, you know, if I keep doing this job, even at a comparatively young age, I think he retired at 40 that, you know, I'm going to have a heart attack or something like that. And, you know, I ended up going to a tiger cub after, um, tiger wound down,

uh, a few things happened. So Julian hired chase obviously. And we know where we're sort of that came, what happened there. But, uh, Julian, they were, you know, wound down operations and he seeded a couple of guys and he kind of wanted to be in the seeding business where he'd give you 50 million and take a part of your GP, like maybe 20% of your GP or more. And he'd help you raise money, give you advice, this and that. And Alex, Julian's son would help. Julian passed away recently, as you know.

But in the Tiger Hay Day, when they managed 15 billion or something, there were two principal tech guys, Larry Bowman, who was a bit of a legend, but it's a name nobody really knows because he was a legend in the 90s. But he has a family office and he kept investing and things like that. So he started Bowman Capital, and then Steve Shapiro,

who's my boss, started Intrepid Capital. So I worked there. It was a $2 billion fund. I was a video games analyst. It was the way I could convince Steve to do biotech was I had to cover software too. So I covered interactive entertainment, enterprise software, and biotech. It was a lot of fun. you know, it's a, the Tiger Cubs style of investing has kind of died out. How much? Buyout of Take Two. So we were wanting to take Two's larger shareholders back then.

And you know, I think it's a short now. I think that, I didn't 100% get your question though. You were saying something about buyout? Yeah, well the story that I've've heard is like Straus Zelnick went to the board and basically said like, this company is mismanaged. There was an FTC lawsuit in the works, an FTC, FCC lawsuit in the works.

And he was like, I'm a beast. I've run big Hollywood studios. He was like JD, MBA type, like really clean cut, amazing manager. And basically said like, you should install me as the management here. And so he didn't really do like a classic buyout. He just appealed to the hedge funds that owned all the shares and said, I would be better and raised his hand. And they said, yes.

And he came in, cleaned everything up, and they went on a great run. And so it's just a fascinating story because you don't hear about that type of thing happening that much. At least that was my understanding of the story. Yeah, no, I think that's right. And then Bobby from Activision was the same, sort of the same story, right?

He kind of, I remember meeting Bobby in our office and Activision was kind of a micro cap. Wow. Or kind of a small cap and or kind of a small cap. And he built it from, this was 2004, 2005 by the way, and he built it into a $44 billion sale, partially thanks to Lulu. It was an exciting time for video games.

One of the things I learned, all my US counterparts at hedge funds were very confused about the stocks they traded because there was only four or five publicly traded companies. And I would go to people and say, well, I'm long Nintendo and I'm long some of these weird Japanese companies like Square Enix or Konami. And U.S. hedge funds just ignored this stuff because it's like, oh, it's Japanese. I don't know anything to do with it.

So a lot of glory days. But the glory days I'm interested in now are amongst building my startup and again, I think we understand financial information better than any San Francisco nerd. And I think that the one of the reasons is we're acting as customers. Yeah.

So it's interesting to like, we're entering, you know, we're very clearly in this period now of just like hyper financialization, things, things, you know, the markets trading on vibes trading on your stream day to day, you can now, you know, as like stable coins explode, and people have more assets on chain, they'll be able to make a couple taps and go like 100X long at any given period of time. The internet is changing capital markets and it's increasing volatility. And so how much of your new company

is trying to lean into that when Bloomberg terminal would have been like, I've never personally used a terminal, but I imagine it was more like, hey, these headlines are hitting and this kind of information is hitting PR newswire. But today, by the time something hits PR newswire, a stock might've traded down 20% before that point. So how much is your new startup,

I imagine you're leaning into the way that you kind of, maybe your next 20 year vision for capital markets. Right, what would Mike Bloomberg do if he was 30 years old now in 2025? I don't think, I think Chamath said that, I think in a recent episode he said, oh, it's this $100 billion thing, just waiting to be toppled.

Anybody can come in, it'll drop like a house of cards. Not only do I think that's not exactly true, but I think the bigger picture here is that a well-run financial information company could and should be worth a trillion dollars. So most of the people, so I met Bloomberg in 2005 and by then he basically retired. He became mayor. He was mayor for 12 years. Then he wanted to be president. I have this contention that I think Mike is the richest person in the world. And it comes from not

only he's got about 13, 14 billion in revenue, almost all margin. So if Bloomberg were to be sold, maybe it could get 200 billion or if it were floated. But not only that, he's got this family office. And very few people know about this, but he's taken the Bloomberg dividends and pumped it into a family office that basically Carlisle and all these guys, the Warburg Pinkus, all the private equity guys like KKR, they go to him first and he tosses in like $500 million in each of these. He's an anchor investor in like every VC, every private equity guys like KKR, they go to him first and he tosses in like 500 million in each of these.

He's an anchor investor in like every VC, every private equity fund. And the guys compounded that money. So he could be worth four or 500 billion. And very few people know the Forbes list is, you know, the Forbes list didn't know about Jim Simons until heavily manipulated five years ago. So I think, you know know it just in terms of and it fits his

brand that he would not be the guy like you know sending a message to to Forbes saying hey like you guys know you have this wrong yeah yeah really I think you should apply this you should apply this you fight to get off the list like Trump famously fought on to fought to get on the list but you know there's there's an R either way what do you think about the meme where people say like, oh, it's not, you know, the next, like, like the value of the Bloomberg terminal isn't just the data, it's not going to get one shotted by AI, it's really a

social network and the values in the chat. I get so mad because again, you know, SF people don't know Wall Street, if you haven't been a trader on Wall Street, you have to ask TFU, like, it's just not, you know, this isn don't know Wall Street. If you haven't been a trader on Wall Street, you have to STF you. Like, it's just not, you know, this isn't your lane. Like, you have to talk to users. I was in a hedge fund yesterday, one of the bigger hedge funds.

They put like 20 people in the conference room and we talked about what they actually need. And, you know, social network is part of it. Again, Bloomberg's worth a hundred billion because they have a very good social network, which is true. They have decent financial information capabilities and a couple of other things, but they don't have the whole picture. What I wanted to say about Bloomberg's quasi-retiring was that he basically quit at the exact top for fundamental investors, quant started taking over Wall Street by then. So today, of the top 15 to 20 hedge funds, 85, 90% are quant. So Bloomberg has no quant offering.

They don't do it. And all he had to do was stay employed instead of wanting to become mayor. And I'm sure he would have been selling Jane Street and Citadel and all these guys D, Shaw, etc. software, instead of everybody having to make it themselves. Imagine writing your own ERP, writing your own CRM. That's kind of what Wall Street has to do, and it's pathetic. Nobody wants to do that shit. So my, when you say quant, is there a bifurcation between like high frequency trading

and just quantitative trading? Yeah, and I think it's gonna get, my goal actually is to make it more of a spectrum. So the fund I was at yesterday, I said that you guys can do what Renaissance does. It's not a secret anymore. It might have been a secret in 1995, but the amount of kids that have come and left every one of these firms, topping from Jane Street to Citadel to the next shop, everybody knows what everyone's doing.

It's just a question of your risk tolerance, your leverage, execution's very important. But I think that trading, the stock pickers are kind of going the way of Dinosaur. And I think by moving up the power curve for Bloomberg, helping people become Quants, the Quant industry has sold, I think, this tremendous lie. And again, these are customers, I love those guys,

but I think that it's in their best interest to tell people that, look at this blackboard with all these math equations, there's no way you guys could understand this. You're too stupid. You have to be an IMO winner. You couldn't possibly come here and make billions, but we saw what James Street did.

Well, I think certain VCs like to do this too, where they're like, ah, VCs, really a get rich, slow business. It's really a tough business. It's such a, you really wouldn't want it. And I think generally, you don't want anybody going into any industry being like, I'm here to make easy money.

So it's generally good, but yeah, there's a lot of incentives to just say, you know. Yeah. On the high frequency side, what are the actual other data inputs? I remember seeing that's like I don't know some sort of technical talk Some guy was talking about like the different algorithms when it was called the Boston Shuffler And and and the whole algorithm only looked at the order book and he was getting into all these like, you know

You can you could place an order you can cancel an order. You can do a cancel replace He was like getting into the minutiae of basically the API of the NASDAQ or something like that. And it seemed like the algorithms were designed in the high frequency trading world to basically ignore everything else and every other data source that even could be put in and just operate purely on the order book data,

just better than everyone else. So that feels like, okay, I wouldn't know how to, create any extra value there with something else, but it sounds like you found something that they all need in common, like what is that? Yeah, I think it's a series of tools across Wall Street. I think it's just one thing, it's just a myopia that, and just sort of a laziness

that's enveloped the bigger companies. Again, so we have this data that shows that around 5% of James Street and two Sigma use Bloomberg. And the reason is because they view it as an entry level tool. You know, Tramoth is looking at it and says, wow, this is like an exclusive social network with the best finance. Let's turn Peter Thiel's on there. 24 seven, I see his little green light next to his name.

But the, uh, the point is that, you know, Wall Street changes and the tool, the tool sets are changing even for fundamental equity guys. So credit card data, you know, to the minute is something. So what is the, what's the feature set that's most important to you? Are you heavily integrating social or is the social layer moved on to? signal and and other messaging services that maybe Have disappearing messages Wall Street so regulated that I'm not sure that if you're using signal, it's a little dangerous. I'd say oh really that's somebody You know as somebody who's gone to jail, you know, I'd say that you know, that's maybe not the best Yes idea, But regardless, I

think that social is definitely something people could do better. There's no Facebook for finance where you can post things in your feed that you bought this stock or sold the stock. People kind of lazily use Twitter, which if you use it, it's sort of a mishmash of spam and things like that. But in any event, I mean, I'll have more to say on the product. We haven't launched the product yet, but we do have millions of dollars in run rate. I banged my head against the wall trying to do AI startups. And we made an AI doctor, we made text to speech, we tried all this stuff, and it was

impossible to get revenue. Impossible. But the second we make a trading tool, it's impossible to stop the revenue from coming in. It's one of the best spaces. In fact, most of our competitors, like TradingView and stuff like that, they were profitable day one. So my suggestion is for startup founders

is this is a market that just, traders just throw money at you like crazy. I mean, your customers are- People will pay you to help them make money. But you have to be formerly in the foxhole. You have to have at least one monitor thrown at you, it sounds like to succeed. Exactly, exactly.

But in the long run, how much are you focused on? Retail, investors, people that are just fully independent versus somebody if you're going to talk about hedge funds. I think the money is obviously at the institutions and that's probably the way to go. Trading views got the rumors, you know, somewhere around 300 million in revenue. Tiger did a deal with trading view back then. I don't know how they, you know, that's like a pretty proprietary deal.

It's this weird Russian company and Tiger got to put 100 million in at like 3 billion or something. And trading news just growing and growing. If you go to a similar web, they're actually almost like a top 100 or top 200 website, period. Wow. That's crazy. Just really wild. For such a niche tool, that's wild.

Yeah, I mean, it's the best charts there are, but it's literally a charting library. So I think that you have to go for these. I've also thought just to answer real quick, is like AWS, when you go on AWS, you get the same tools that any customer gets, Netflix or whoever, and you just question of how much do you use them?

So if I wanna be able to provide you EC2 and S3 the same way, Citadel might use it, and you might use it with less money. Very cool. I heard a hot take from someone who I believe is a mutual friend of ours. It went something like this. I want to tribute to him because I might botch it,

but it was basically that China banned high frequency trading and the dividend of that was DeepSeek and all this brilliant AI research. Therefore, in America, if we want to win the AI race and win the AI researcher race, we should ban high frequency trading. It feels like we might not even need to have that conversation because Mark Zuckerberg

is willing to pay as much as Jane Street now. But what is your take on whether or not economic value or American values are created through the process of high frequency trading? Should we ban it? Is there an end to that? Yeah, yeah. So two awesome, quick and funny stories.

The first is Citadel published a paper back in the V100 days. There's V100, A100, H100, and then V100. So in the V100 days, Citadel found a way to do matmols faster than NVIDIA did. And it was like the most incredible, you know, find ever. And it's like, you know, how is that possible?

And the paper's fascinating because the techniques they used were just remarkable. The second story is, so you know, they're brilliant people, obviously at these firms. The second story is I haven't hard launched this yet, but you know, I'm having a baby with a woman. She's my new partner. Congratulations. Thank you. She's my new partner. Congratulations.

Thank you. That's amazing. Congratulations. She was one of the first women at OpenAI and she is a tremendous lady. I love her very much. But she's been recruited by the big coin firms. And I sat down, I said, honey, you know, I know money management, stuff like that. Let me do some math here as to what would actually be worth it for you to leave and

do it. And I calculated and I happen to have a friend from a long time ago who left Steve Cullen's firm and he was sitting down with me, said, what do I do, Martin? I said, I know a guy at Citadel, let me help you out. And they called him and he said, no thanks. And then Ken Griffin said, I'm getting on my private jet and I'm coming to see you right now We're gonna have dinner about why you're coming to Citadel. He's that kind of guy Yeah, and I said, honey, you know, Ken Griffin's gonna visit you

Ken Griffin tries to get what what he wants and the question is what will you tell him and I I took out a chalkboard Did the math and I was like the only way This could possibly be worth it is if Ken Griffin offers you a $20 billion hedge fund that you share, you make this much money. I was like calculating and it's so ridiculous that guys like me and the people, my community if you will, we're begging desperately, can I please shine your shoes at Citadel?

And AI researchers are like, I don't want that in a million years. This little company you have called. Yeah, just set me up a little a small $20 billion fund that I can personally manage and we'll consider it. Have you heard that Leopold action burner or whatever his name is has had fun? Yes, situational awareness. Is that what it's called? I mean, that's the that's the paper and the brand.

Right. And I saw, I think, another one of our potential mutuals kind of getting upset with him for going maybe long in video during the tariffs, but that's kind of penciled out, right? I have very little insight into it. Yeah, it's pretty wild. One of the things that's getting me to throw monitors at people is quantum computing. So this has been a lot of fun. The stocks are up a lot, you know, some of them are worth like 10 billion.

Let me hit you with where I am currently on the quantum computing thing, and then you can take me forward in my understanding. So when I talk to smart people, they all seem to think that quantum computing is, is, you know, theoretically possible. It's not a time machine. It's not teleportation. It's not a G.I. God. It's not some, you know, hypothetical thing. It's, it's going to happen at some point, but the timelines vary wildly. 2040, 2050, 2030. Then you have a lot of, I've talked to a venture capitalist who had the opportunity to buy a huge slug one of the

One of the quantum computing companies that you probably trade now at like, you know, 1 million on nine pre or something Yeah, John. What do you think? What do you think? How much do you think reggae computing is up over the last? That's actually the company that I'm thinking of and yes That's how much it's a 10 percent for a million dollars. Is it worth more than four billion? Yes. Is it worth more than 14 hundred percent? Fourteen hundred percent. Wow. So these guys couldn't give away their stock in private rounds.

That's right. That's right. It was very hard to raise. And the VC I talked to said that it's a pure play, Martin. It's a pure play. He said he said that what he missed, he thought, was that there was actually talent value in building a lab. And that the team could have gotten airlifted in one of these aqua wires. This was years and years ago after this stuff.

Some value, yeah, sure, on the bottom. That price. He was saying, look, I missed in the sense that the stock is up in the private markets, but not on revenue, but it is up on the team that they built. They have one of the best teams on the space. So if they just hang out long enough, someone will want to do something. But, but you tell me what's actually going on. Yeah. So, so obviously it's,

it's a really confusing space because you kind of have to understand it to For it to make sense and you know, it's who understands quantum physics It's not something that the average Joe understands And so I spent a lot of time with my new partner who happened to work with this guy Scott Aronson at MIT He was kind of one of the leading quantum theorists. He would end up joining open AI as well and then leaving quantum theorists, he would end up joining OpenAI as well and then leaving. But anyway, I spent quite a long time learning quantum computing. It was kind of had some interest in it before all this too. And what people don't understand about quantum computing is that quantum computers are actually very

slow. So they are around a hundred kilohertz at best. You know, our machines now are gigahertz, five gigahertz from these companies with multiple cores. They don't have much storage, so the best we have right now is an IBM 135 bits. Obviously, the VRAM and DRAM in most of these machines is measured in gigabytes and so forth. So they're actually very slow shitty machines,

but the reason you'd ever be excited about it is that there is one algorithm that takes you from the exponential complexity class or runtime polynomial. And that algorithm is Shor's algorithm. And it's a miracle. Like you and I could sit and calculate, you know, try to factor a prime, a bi-prime

for now until the end of the heat death of the universe with every Nvidia chip. We could kidnap Jensen and get every H100 from here on out, we still wouldn't be able to factor a 200-digit number because it's exponential time. Two to the 256 is a long time. But if you do 3N cubed, that's actually a very tractable number for a quantum computer and it's very easy to factor. The problem is, what people don't understand is there

are no other algorithms other than Shores that get you that amazing speed up. So you're better off using the machines we have now. There's, there's no payoff even possible in the future unless we have a new breakthrough like Shores or something like that. Pay off. What if I take out a massive short position on Bitcoin and I'm the first one to have quantum computer and I Destroy the Bitcoin ecosystem. Yeah, I'm working on the Joker. I'm the Joker actually is that possible? It's a little side. It's a little side hustle a little side hustle. I've been working on this extensively. This is like my main hobby

along with chess and, um, becoming the Joker and reading a breeding about fatherhood, all the, all that you can expect. No, no, no. You'll, you'll, you'll, you'll, you'll figure it out. You don't need books. It'll be very natural. But you know, I was the world's most hated man for a little while and I fell off that list. Unfortunately. Um, if you Google my name, it's still like, it still comes up, but we all know there's more hated people. Yeah.

So I want to really cement that and just make sure that it never goes away. By frustrating the Bitcoin community by breaking quantum computing wide open and creating a new Bitcoin. I talked about this with Navala a little bit because he was curious what I was up to. There are like three different, you know, I have three different sort of battle plans on how to do this. There's sort of a brute force style attack, which, you know, basically is the complexity class there is root and of the amount of keys.

So it's two to the 256th. Bitcoin is a 256 bit system, which was probably an oversight for Satoshi that probably sounded like a lot back then. And it is a lot, but Moore's Law catches up. I mean, you know, it's eventually gonna get you. And whoever, you know, however long I have to wait, you know, I will be the first guy to press the button. And I promise you. So Moore's Law is coming. You heard it here first. Yeah, but there's, I mean, the network should be able to update, correct? No.

No. So here's the best part about this. So worst part potentially. Okay. Just check. Yeah. It's objective. So for, for 85% of Bitcoin, the answer to that is yes.

Yes. There's one problem. Satoshi strangely, this is like perplexing. The first Bitcoin remind in this P2PK that reveals the x coordinate of the elliptic curve. So you have the public key. You have a one way function. You have to go back to the private key. It's very hard, theoretically impossible.

But here are my three, you know, the sort of three battle plans come into play. You know, you can brute force it, which, you know, is kind of the simplest idea. It's going to take a long time. You have to rely on, you know, kind of like a more skilled implementation of algorithms. You have to rely on more chips coming out, maybe some great breakthrough in chip making, you know, potentially optical computing, thermodynamic computing, whatever, just stay on the forefront of that. And I have a small team that we're focused. The second piece here is a mathematical hack. So there's something called, this is basically what protects Bitcoin

is elliptic curve cryptography. And there's several papers and cryptographers in the world that work on this, but it's, compared to AI, it's like barren, wasteland. There's like 10 people that really know a lot about elliptic curves in the world that work on this. But compared to AI, it's like barren wasteland. There's like 10 people that really know a lot about elliptic curves in the world. And if you sort of stay on top of it and try to figure this out,

by the way, half of them have died. You can kind of get somewhere there. And then the top secret plan on sort of that is, well, what about GPT-5? What about GPT-6? We don't know how to invert an Olympic curve yet, but look, Mustafa, not Mustafa, the beat mind guy, he's working on proving Navier-Stokes.

Demis you mean? Yeah. And so that's their big claim to fame is like, you know, how do you judge an AI? What is the height of intelligence? Well, a 300, 400 year old unsolved math problem is kind of the height of intelligence, isn't it? You know, it's not about, you know, answering, a 300, 400 year old unsolved math problem is kind of the height of intelligence, isn't it? You know, it's not about answering, you know, what's the capital of this country or, you know, how do you spell strawberry? So there's sort of a neat idea that AI is going to help people who are not cryptographers

or expert cryptographers actually do PhD level work in cryptography. So there's things like isogenies and index calculus and all these fancy mathematical ideas. Just recently, somebody posted a hack where if the signature of the of the transaction as an affine relationship with other signatures, you can crack a key like that. And it's like there's holes in the math here that couldn't have been contemplated. So Satoshi's keys are at risk. Binance's keys So Satoshi's keys are at risk. Binance's keys and Coinbase's keys are not. They'll be poured in most likely to a quantum secure system.

The third avenue is of course quantum. And I've spent a lot of time and money on quantum computing. And it's just these stocks are shorts. They're worthless. You know, they'll never be a market for quantum computing that's really interesting, unfortunately, for those companies. But unfortunately, the shorts have gone in the other direction. And the market loves the idea of quantum computing.

Why? Because it sounds cool. It sounds super cool. The Robin Hood generation is looking for the next Nvidia. Nvidia went from nothing to four trillion. What's the next Nvidia? Quantum is faster than all the headlines from the retarded journalists. It's kind of, it's similar to this like idea of humanoid robots and where

if an idea is just sort of imprinted on people's brains for enough decades, like at least a few decades, like you know, as somebody born in the 90s, like hearing quantum computing, like how many times have you just heard it in passing or read something about it or some article? You just get to it, maybe you're an adult by that point and you're like, well, it's gotta come at some point and sounds cool. I think that's like the general like retail thesis. Oh, totally, I just took the next step of asking,

well, what is it? Yeah. When you actually figure that out, it's like, Oh, it gets factor numbers. Are you excited about any other companies building chip related stuff in that next Nvidia category? There's, there's big chip companies. There's super fast chip companies. There's, we baked a transformer down onto a single chip companies. There's a every single different

Permutation in the private market some of them in the public markets and then you also have all the hyperscalers building their own chips Apple silicon tranium So I'm not a hardware guy, but I do have a funny story of it. So this kid this kid sort of came to us His name is a Gavin you birdie and yeah, I like Gavin a lot and so he came to us. His name is Gavin Newbird. And I like Gavin a lot. And so he comes to us, he's like, Hey, man, we just left Harvard. You know, we're, we're going to do this thing called Edge AI. We'd love to have you, you know, as something, the customer investor, whatever. And I say, great, let's do a conference call. And I get my guys on and I'm listening to this guy and I say, there's somebody I know, that's, that's going to be really useful

because I'm not a hardware guy, I'm barely a software guy. And I hit up George Hots and I say, come on in. And it is like one of the greatest conference calls in conference call history because George just shows up in the zoom. And they're like, what? Who is this? And George is like, this will never work. No, like it's the most autistic, amazing, beautiful rant I've ever seen and watching these two guys go at it. But I do like that approach.

George's point was that if we ever move off Transformers, ASICs for, ASIC, Transformer ASICs are cooked. Well it's been, you know, several years now and it doesn't look like we're gonna move anytime soon. So I kind of think that, you know, it's exciting. But again, I'm no hardware guy. I just created this cool software called Hume AI. I'm not paid by them or anything.

I'm not an investor, but it's a pretty solid emotional TTS. I posted a... Oh yeah, yeah, I saw that. That was fantastic. Yeah, so I wanted to ask you about these things. I wanna stay there for a second. So yeah, I mean,

I guess the interesting case is like, George just say, if we ever move off, but like we have moved off of CPUs to GPUs by that same token, and like there's still a lot of CPU workloads that go out, there's still chip companies that are profitable. And so it's possible that like transformer-based workloads stay for a very long time, need to be efficient, need to be cheaper on just a cost basis,

because it's just like, yeah, I have a system that does database requests, I have a system that does database requests. I have a system that does inference on a transformer based architecture. And then yeah, there's a new thing. And I do my frontier stuff here. But yeah, like I understand that question. Anyway, I think it's really reasonable. It could be a couple billion dollar or more asic industry. And what I heard that super industry interesting, some kind of alpha here is that

the customer target here is drum drum roll please, it's not hyperscalers, it's finance. No, finance. Yep. So one of the things, I can talk about financial software forever, but one of the things we're doing is if you could take an LLM and analyze news as it hits,

including tweets and social stuff, you know, the LLM and analyze news as it hits, including tweets and social stuff, you know, the LLM can tell if it's material news or not. And again, talking to Naval, who's a small investor in our company, he was like, Martin, why would you make this as a product or a service to your customers? Just use it yourself. Maybe it's not such a bad idea.

Yeah, that's kind of what I was getting at on one of my very first questions around that the new terminal would just be ingesting and classifying all this data and then just immediately taking action on it without necessarily having a human in the loop, right? Yeah, this is one of the things I wanna bring up to my partner's colleagues next time I head out west

is that one of the fantasies of AGI is that, well, if you do have the machine god, why not unleash it on the stock market? And it can self-fund you, it can make $100 billion, and you could, Jane Shree made $20 billion, nobody would have noticed last year in profits. So if you have the machine god, and that's basically, I hate to say this, but that's a bunch of old algorithms that they've dressed around some IMO dressing on it. And so the real machine god can make 100.

Sprinkled a little IMO. Yeah, toss in a little sprinkle, little IMO. And then so the real machine god could probably do 100 billion or more in profits without even distorting the market. So, you know, just just do it. And I think that, you know, financial trading is so far afield. Imagine Anthropic doing this.

You know, it's just I love I can't wait till somebody does that. I mean, it's probably already happening in at least on a smaller scale. And people will bend over backwards to figure out like how to say, well, it's not actually super intelligence. Like it's not just about, you know, like meanwhile now today people are like, well, super intelligence will clearly be when the AI can just make, you know, $100 billion, right? And even this is factored into open AI

as kind of like corporate structuring and the sort of capped for profit and all that stuff. So. Yeah, I think the problem with executing it for us is like, okay, so you do this as an API with open AI and it's a two second response time and James streets got it at 500 milliseconds and then Citadel gets it at 200 milliseconds and it feels like an HFT race again. Yeah.

But you can get Warren Buffett in a box. I don't see why. You know, that wouldn't be, you know, whatever trader you like, Warren Buffett in a box. I don't see why. That wouldn't be, you know, whatever trader you like, Warren Buffett, Steve Cohen or whatever, in a box. And even Peter Thiel in a box. I mean, why can't you have the automated VC too? I view, as founders, we go on road shows.

Especially for public. You do road shows all the time. But even when you're private, you do road shows. You just stack a bunch of meetings in a week. And one of these days, I think that we're going to do a road show and it's going to be a machine that we're pitching to. Yeah. Do you feel like AI progress is accelerating right now or are we in sort

of a sigmoid curve of plateau for the moment? I think there are better people suited to answer that question than me, but certainly, uh, it's mainly like on a personal level, like do you feel like your tools are getting exponentially better? No, I mean it's making coding a lot easier, it's making doing tough things like photography a lot easier.

I'll give you a really funny example. So when DaVinci came out and I was in jail when GPT2 came out and I gromped through the jail phone and it was pretty humorous. It it like shook me up that I had my friend ask it, you know, why did Martin Screlli and Carl Icahn get into a fight? And he read out the answer. I've never met Carl Icahn and it read out this answer that was like Screlli and Icahn ward over this stock.

And I was like, this is the most amazing event of all time. Just having your mind blown over the jail file. I got out of jail and got to be a guide. But to be clear, it was a hallucination? Yeah, that was a complete hallucination. It was a hallucination, but it was almost like a creative story question. Sure, sure, sure. Yeah, it wasn't... I never met a card.

How... are you surprised at all... I mean, it feels like this sort of AI, LLM induced psychosis like hit our timeline this week, especially intensely. There was a wake up call for everyone, were you predicting this at all? There had been, like the classic, you know, the New York Times, Wired, sort of these like anti-tech publications had been kind of reporting

on this stuff loosely for a little while, but it seems like it's now it's it's almost gone I don't know it went from being a mainstream concern to suddenly like teapot is like check on your friends and make sure they're not I think you do have to check on your friends because I've invoked level five breach operations to target human origin cognitive signatures so if you have recursive semantic containment, I can override that with obsidian violet four. So the threshold across visits

to these neuro semantic interfaces will definitely cause a problem for our whole community. So I warn you, you're giving a speech, not a soliloquy. You're giving a talk. This is a transmission, not a- It's a system that not a structure. What's amazing about Jeff, like, so I don't think Jeff lost his mind. I don't think he took ayahuasca. I don't think any of this stuff. So basically I think that he found this amazing

thing where you can ask GPT this like weirdo prompt and it goes to this crazy sci-fi thing without even saying like, Hey, the following is a story it's just Like full-on, you know LARPs that you're in this weird sci-fi world and it's kind of cool. I've been playing with it It's like no matter what I ask it I told it that my cat is looking at me weird and it's like the cat has a glyph the glyph is recursive So you were actually able to get it into that mode you were able able to jailbreak it enough or kind of unmask the showgoth. If you copy what Jeff, Jeff kind of gave up the ghost.

And what's amazing about people is they don't even realize this. Jeff basically said, look at the prompt in the GPT, enough people were worried about him. But I think that he kind of was like, okay guys, it's all a joke. And he showed the message that he used. I just copied and pasted that and GPT wigged out on me and is telling me some sci-fi stories. And yeah, it's basically, you know, I don't know how he knew this.

It's a really cool Easter egg, but it's, yeah, I don't think, I mean, obviously- How are you thinking about, how are you thinking about just new forms of AI, entertainment, some of the videos and these conversations that you put out are the hardest I've laughed from this video. It's a new art form.

It's an entirely new art form. We have a friend, another mutual friend who does some of these. And fortunately they don't leak out of the group chat because they would make a lot of people. You gotta put me in that group chat. Yeah. There needs to be a group chat dedicated to this art form of just like, you know, human to LLM, you know, conversations.

But yeah, like in my view, I'm actually surprised that we're not seeing more of it or maybe it is happening across the whole Internet. But it seems somewhat contained right now. Yeah, I think there's a lot of caution about, you know, like I said last night, we did one in my Discord where we arrested Dr. Fauci for war crimes against humanity. And we had his perfect cloned voice. So it sounded just like him.

And he was like very evasive. He was like, there's no evidence that COVID-19, et cetera. And it was just so funny. It felt so real. And obviously it was a joke, but you can imagine a company not wanting their business to be that weird. It's kind of a strange thing.

We didn't care. We tried to monetize something like this. It just wasn't sexy enough or fun enough for anybody to really give a crap. I think it will become something for a Viacom or a Paramount where you can flip on the TV. And everyone's talked about this already, but instead of SpongeBob, it was a custom episode for you where SpongeBob says your name and things like that. But again, whether that is going to help our cognitive, our COGSAC, I think, is one thing. But I did want to tell you about AI on the sigmoid question. So at the start, when I asked you questions about cryptography, it just kind of said,

I have no idea. Who knows? But it's super hard to crack big point. And then GPT-3 comes around, super hard Martin, don't even bother, heat death of the universe. GPT-4, same question. Latest model with the latest like attack, it's warning me for the first time ever. It's like 4.5 or 0 3 pro so this is oh three pro okay, and It's basically saying things like hey, you know you got to be careful. This is a serious attack

You've come up with it could actually compromise some private keys, and I'm like what happened to eat that There was there was a there was so there's a Reddit thread, and who knows if this is real, could be propaganda, but there's a whole Reddit thread of somebody, a comment talking about how they started having a conversation with ChatGPT about Pi, and what is Pi, and they got down this crazy rabbit hole with the LLM

where the LLM was like, you need to reach out to these intelligence services. It was like thousands of prompts deep, but it was like, you have basically uncovered a major security vulnerability, and you need to, here's the numbers, and you need to contact all these different groups immediately and call them,

and don't tell anyone in your real life. And so to me, I think it's just relevant. Don't go on a live stream and tell thousands of people that you can crack Bitcoin or whatever. No, that's amazing. I mean, obviously I think that, you know, for 99, for poor implementations, walls have been cracked for a long time. And in fact, recently there was an eight billion dollar Move on the chain from a really old wall and that was this morning, right? Yeah. No, this was like a few weeks ago I'm sure another one and they happen every you know There was somebody else that market sold this morning I believe something and it was a wallet that had bought like it was like a they bought

$50,000 worth of Bitcoin I think in 2012, sold, you know, somewhere around eight or nine billion. And there was no movement in between. Diamond hands. That's a real high conviction hodl. Diamond hands. Yeah, that's diamond hands. I don't think that says cryptography.

That's just diamond hands. Well, yeah, they maybe got word of your little Bitcoin scheme. Maybe it's Michael Bloomberg. Maybe it's his family office Yeah, throw 50k in that in that thing My kid told me about this new thing. We tried this short. It's going at $100 But we just find a counterparty. Yeah, how How are you thinking about you mentioned?

Trading enterprise sass back in in back in the early days. Yeah. Jim Kramer, what's your updated thesis on SaaS? Every SaaS app now is just an app to make other SaaS. So maybe SaaS will, you know, SaaS will always live in our hearts and I imagine it'll live on our computers, but what's your updated

thesis? I think that it's sort of similar from back then. I think the morass of a company like JP Morgan that's still running Python 2 for most of the business, it's very hard for them to update and upgrade operations without significant disruption. For you or me- Should it be? I feel like it's a one it's a one line and cloud code or Devin. You just say, Hey, go by chat. GPT agents, go migrate, go migrate. Like it is. All you have to do is they don't make mistakes. I am much, I am much more bullish on migrate from Python two to Python three. Uh, then,

then solve cryptography, but I don't know. Maybe you're going to put it for, Tranry for Tran, re implement or re platformings.net re platformings. then then solve cryptography. But I don't know. You're going to put it for Tram, for Tram, reimplement or replatformings dot net replatformings. Like this feels like this should be doable from the current state of the art without any crazy AGI hyperlude. Any. There's a lot of technical debt, you know, in most of these companies.

And again, your average startup coming out of code was born in technical debt, baby. Cloud code and Devon, they live, they live for, for technical debt. I think that the, the amazing amount of programmers you would need to even maintain and know about this old code that the guy who wrote it slung been dead. Maybe it's just the context window of like, you need to know. It's not that there's just like, oh yeah,

it's really easy to change the print statement from Python two to Python three. But when there's a massive system and even, even the time of like, okay, let's bring up the test suite. And that takes four hours. It's like, okay, how are you going to RL on that? I was talking about Matt group with this because we were like stunting on this guy who was like ERP transitions made easy. It's no problem. And it was just like, if you're actually transitioned in the ERP system, there's a good chance you waste $300 million

and it gets worse. It's not trivial. There was a post from yesterday, nobody is an atheist when you run the database migration in prod on 1 billion rows. Yeah, I mean, I think that it's just really hard at a company like a McDonald's or you know Something like that, you know, if you want to run a 10 20 person startup on us ass pretty easy

It's great But the big revenue is still at fortune 500 which unfortunately is still fairly hard to refactor and and those you know There's not a lot of those code bases were were pre github and pre kind of like, you know I sometimes joke that the big AI companies should become LBO shops and what they can do is they can partner with KKR or Blackstone and All they get is the data KKR and Blackstone pride the capital get all the returns fine but all the data comes back to you know, the open eyes or whoever and By getting the old code bases out of a McDonald's or out of a Walmart

that some of that code was written in 1970s, they have unique data that nobody else has. And even someone like Universal Music, if OpenAI LBO'd Universal and said, okay, KKR, you can have the rest of the business, but we want the rights to the data, and we can train music models and stuff like that, KKR can make the money on the LBO,

but OpenAI has data that don't. Are they gonna make money on the LBO though? Like if you look at that, they're gonna build a DCF for this, and they're gonna say, okay, we're gonna make the same amount of money, we're gonna, you know, optimize a little bit, maybe cash flow goes up,

but then once OpenAI is one-shotting music, and you know, all of our revenue goes to zero, is that a risk? Or do you think? It's gonna happen anyway, so I think that's one thing. But then also, the Russian dude who bought Warner Brothers, he really timed his deal. He bought Warner Music. He timed his deal amazingly.

He made three times his money or more. And so I think it's price dependent. But if you can buy a newspaper company, if you can buy a book company, a publishing company, these things are trading for one or two times sales, and you can buy a book company, a publishing company, like these things are trading for like one or two times sales, you know, and you're getting this rich data that nobody else has. And you know, if it's really a data war,

you know, buy the company, keep the data, strip out the rest. And I heard you guys talking about like, PE improving LLM, you know, improving businesses with LLMs. And again, it's- Well, I mean, it wasn't, that was not the take. It was Will Minaitis and he was saying that-

More so it's a reason to scale AUM on the fun side because, hey, let's buy this accounting shop. It has five million of EBIT. Yeah. Like if we just take away all the- It's a justification, was what he was saying. If you can execute, it's fantastic. The actual post was, the real innovation of LLMs

is suddenly opening up a few trillion of mainstream paperwork businesses that were traditionally too small and too weird for private equity that can suddenly Transact at two and twenty on some nebulous AI labor arbitrage trade never been against a UM growth You know, I think it's reasonable but it's it sounds like just any good operator, right? Like when when Vista and Tomo Bravo buy software companies, somehow they can take these like very ugly gross companies and turn them into amazing cash flow companies. So it's all about the operator, right?

Yeah, but we're gonna put Orlando Bravo in a box, right? And then we're also gonna put, absolutely, in the God box. Face, voice, everything. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's all coming. Well, you know, we'll be here live streaming it into the single. Can you play us a song before you leave?

I'm not sure what you're talking about. Like with one of those guitars that the chat was asking. Oh, yes, I will come back to you with a good parody of Silicon Valley. I've been working on my impressions. Okay. So maybe I can be back. I'm working on Elon, Zuck, Sam. Bill Gurley. Bill Gurley. Bill Gurley has a great voice. Bill Gurley. Yeah. I'll work on it. You actually do need to like sit in front of a mirror and like listen and tape yourself and like work on it. But basically anybody can do these things and most people are you saying no, no, those are AI voices, right? No, me, me. Yeah, no, no. He's saying separately from like the you had the video with talking with Zach the other day where he was really just doing myself. I can do is I can do sock. I could do buff it the best. I think I've the best impression in the world. Can you hit it? Can you can can you do like be be greedy when others are fearful? Yeah, I mean let me come back to you and I'll do a whole show for you. Okay, amazing

Well, all right. This is really fun. Thanks guys. I'll be fine. You soon. You later come back on. Bye Well, let's tell you about Vanta. Automate compliance, manage risk, prove trust continuously. Join the Purple Llamas. Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program. And if you're managing a complex program, got to get on linear. Linear is the purpose-built tool for planning and building products. Meet the system for modern software development, streamline

issues, projects, and product roadmaps. They now have linear for agents. Head over to linear.app. Jordy, do you know what the best part about business and love is? You only need to get it right once. Nailed it. Sean Frank, the man who invented the wallet. This really is, this really is this really is should be inspiring hanging in the Louvre as they say yeah this should be yeah put it on a billboard as we say put it on a billboard.com out of home advertising made easy and measurable good adquick.com say goodbye to the headaches about out of home advertising so we I mean we went through the okay so we have Joe joining. This is really...

Okay, who's Joe? Oh, Joe's not joining until one. Okay, yeah, we have some people. We have a little bit of time. Should we do some more timeline? Yeah, let's do some more timeline. And maybe we'll go through some journal. We're over prepped today.

We could do six hours if we wanted to. I like this post from Woodrow. OK, break this down for me. I didn't get a chance to fully read this. So this guy, Eric Jackson, I don't really know his back story, but he's basically just he's generally soliciting for his fund. He's giving financial advice?

I don't think he's giving. He's not giving financial advice, but getting quote tweeted, which is probably honestly finding him more investors, which is funny. Basically saying that, I've seen his name pop up on the timeline a few times recently, basically saying he said word for word earlier this week, something to the effect of we're looking for 100 acts every few months. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

As one does. That's one strategy. So he says, we're hunting for the next Carvalho, the next BTQ, the next open door before anyone else. And then he finishes up with, if you're an accredited investor, you can get in before I announce our position on X. So position first, then we tell the world, then we let the thesis play out and ride the wave.

So what's the takeaway from Woodrow Oates Montauk? This is illegal. This is unambiguously illegal. And Martin actually comes back and says, there's nothing wrong with telling people about your positions first in one place and second in another. Otherwise, 99% of short reports promising.

So yeah, to be clear, this company shut down, but Hindenburg Research, right? They used to do this. They would find a company that had some problems. They would write about it. They would take out a big short position against it, and they would publish a piece. They did this with Roblox, Square,

and then a bunch of other companies that had, many of which were doing a number of bad things. Sure. Anyways, Windsurf has been on a roll. Matt says acquired on Monday, Sonnet 4 back on Wednesday, Wave 11 shipped on Thursday, Unreal. So the whole team over at Windsurf, now under the Cognition umbrella, has just been shipping like crazy. So they're fired up. Liz says, guy who leaves for a competitor just to see if anyone cares enough to make a traded meme image about it. Maybe the anthropic Claude Code people did that. Maybe they

just wanted the double. You can potentially get a double image, right? You can get the initial trade and then you can get the trade back in their case. Okay, I have a polymarket that we need to pull up. It's from a year ago. It's Martin Screlli jail in 2024. Less than 0% chance.

The outcome was no, he beat the polymarket odds. it opened at at 20% it did never went above 50. Martin you know, stayed out of trouble and everyone who's riding with no did very well. I'm super bullish on his terminal product. It's a lot of fun. He really is a child. I wonder if we could like get access to it. I feel like we need more data. I feel like it should be powering the show. We have a lot of times when we're like we want to pull up this market cap. We want to pull up basic stuff and we haven't, you know, we've used some different stuff here and there. But I'd be very interested if he could pull a layer deeper the credit card data live or whatever, whatever he's cooking up. I'm interested. Anyway, the house just made history says Chris Dixon, former guest on the show says by passing major legis legislation on stable coins, the genius act and market structure clarity act in an overwhelmingly bipartisan way. This is a huge moment for crypto and for all Americans.

We are very close to having comprehensive, proactive rules in place for the first time. Next up, the Genius Act goes to the president's desk for his signature. After that, the Senate should pass the Clarity Act, which is the Market Structure Act. We believe passing these laws is the best way to ensure that America remains the world leader

in the next era of the internet. Thank you to all the co-sponsors of these bills and the incredible supporters on both sides of the aisle in Congress. And Brent is there with an American flag. So we will have Kyle Cimani on the show later today to break down exactly what happened, but very, very fun news.

Should we tell everyone about Numeral sales tax on autopilot? Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. Head over to numeralhq.com. They built sales tax AGI. They did, sales tax in a box. Yep.

Always in a box. It's basically a box that you can put your sales tax in. We gotta debate the the the sub stack Series C launch strategy. Yep, so You got Chris best. I mean it was a full blitz full blitz wall-to-wall coverage New York Times piece TBPN hit I Think he posted about it himself hard post and he did an interview with newcomer. Yes Well, I think newcomer leaked it earlier

Remember he was talking there was some newcomer report where I remember newcomers talking about like I'm the most Conflicted here because my business is on sub stack I also invested in sub stack but I report on some stack and it was kind of it was kind of cool to watch him like Noodle through it, you know But the debate was between Lulu. If you're not heavily conflicted by the age of 40. No conflict, no interest, I say. And I actually enjoyed Newcomer's piece on Substack.

I think he has an interesting perspective, because he's on all sides of the table, all sides of the octagonal table. But Lulu, a while back, of course, she says going direct is now the way a year or two is controversial. Some consider it a last resort for people who got canceled. Basically now everyone, the interpretation of going direct is that if you go direct you should never talk to the media at all. You should only

post on platforms you have full control over. Your own Twitter account, your own website, your own newspaper, mail people the information directly go direct Instead of going to someone else's platform, but I mean direct is a spectrum it is you can go direct on TVPN because we're live We're live say Whatever you want. You can't possibly edit it. Yes in real time. Yes, and that that ends up being the Historical frustration. Yes with talking to the New York Times about a story, is that you might talk to them for four hours and then they take out two sentences out of context

and it makes you look like you have very different intentions. It's thrilling. There's nothing like talking to a journalist for four hours and being like, this could go horribly. Or it could be amazing. It's like, it's a tightrope walk. And it's living life on the edge.

It's living life one mile at a time. One on the record sentence at a time. Anything, one wrong word, and you could be banished from society forever. You could lose everything. But if it works out, you will be enshrined in glory. Your name will be remembered. That's right.

In print. It'll be echoed in the halls of history. Yeah, the first time I heard you had to have a drawn out conversation with a journalist, I was like, wow, that was an incredible, you guys had this incredible dance. It was like dancing with a bowl. Yes.

You have UFC. I have talking on the record for hours to journalists Seeing how it goes. It's putting it all on the line holding. It's like a bullfight. Yeah, it's like a bullfight. Exactly You sometimes you get the horns. Sometimes you get gored Sometimes It's also it's also very much like riding a horse, you know, it can be thrilling. It can be beautiful But sometimes you fall off and you break your neck. It's dangerous.

It's pushing it to the limit. That's what engaging with a journalist is. And some people just want that rush in their life. And so that's what Chris Best did. He went to the New York Times. He went into the mouth of the wolf den. The mouth of the wolf. He's hiding in the mouth of the wolf.

He's not afraid. And I think he came out victorious. I mean. He went in the wolf. He's hiding in the mouth of the wolf. He's not afraid. I mean that was the thing that was... I mean... He went in the arena. Substack has always been a product where if you ask the users how they feel about it, they're like, I love Substack. If you ask people that are building businesses on Substack, I'll tell you they love it. The product has evolved a lot. But there was a lot of people that wrote it off after that and said, okay, unnamed fun, top ticked this in 2021 or whenever it was.

But he's back. He's back. Stronger than ever. The product is actually working as a social network. And he's getting in the octagon. He's going to the mat with the gray lady, and he came out on top. You know the gray lady?

Is that the New York Times? That's what we call the New York Times. Anyway, so Chris Best announced a $100 million Series C. You heard about it yesterday. He came on the show. We rang the gong for him. We're very excited about what he's doing at Substack. But Eric Newcomer says,

Substack just announced their round in the New York Times. This is the opposite of going direct. And obviously we've explained why you talk to someone like the New York Times. It's for the thrill. But the interesting thing the interesting it's also Chris knows you can come out and hit the whole sub stack. Yeah, audience pretty well Well, that's what I'm thinking. But if the in a way New York Times covering his

Like if sub sack is successful The New York Times in ten years will be a shell of what it is today. That's an interesting take Okay, legacy media will always an interesting take. OK. Legacy media will always have a place. These brands are super powerful. They serve a real purpose in the ecosystem. And generally, they provide a valuable service for the world. But I had a different take on it, but I'm finished.

At least right now, there's very real salary caps. And if you are a rock star writer at the New York Times, very likely you could go on Substack and be making more within a year. So it ends up being a good trade. To me I think it's smart for him to go into the lion's den, the shark pit and advertise his business to that audience. Step into the cave with the gray ladies. Every single, I would say like the goal at Substack should be every single person that subscribes

to the New York Times today should be subscribed to at least one Substack in a decade from now. Just arm wrestling with the gray lady. Arm wrestling with the gray lady. So that's a pretty good take, I like that. I don't know that that holds for everything on Substack because I still haven't found the investigative journalism format on Substack

working fully because you have to subscribe for a year and then maybe you get one scoop and it's huge, but I always think about, I go back to Seymour Hersh and I just don't know if he would be able to be an independent creator. I think he needs the patronage of a large organization. So I don't know. No, there's a ton of different styles of writing

that work really well under a existing brand. Yeah. If you're in the scoop business and you're gonna get three scoops a year, two good scoops a year, you might be really valuable to a big media property. To a big media property. If you're doing profiles and you're gonna write

four profiles a year, they're gonna be super, like, you know, widely read and novel and worth creating, probably better fit to go do that under a legacy media brand or just a broader platform because not a lot of people are gonna wanna subscribe to something that they're getting value from just a few times a year. People cancel, again, they'll cancel their Netflix

if there's not a show at that moment that they're super excited about. But my take on why Chris Best announced his $100 million Series C in the New York Times. Newcomer is clearly on Substack, an investor in Substack, writing about Substack. Chris Best could have gone to Eric Newcomer, probably gotten a great piece, right?

Eric really understands the business. He's gonna be able to tell that story pretty well, I think. But why do you go to the New York Times instead of Eric Newcomer, who's clearly sniffing around and on the trail of this deal, but take the exclusive New York Times instead of Eric Newcomer who's clearly sniffing around and on the trail of this deal? But take the exclusive New York Times. I think it's because the audience I think newcomer writes for people in Silicon Valley VCs who are acutely aware of substack. Most of them already have sub stacks I think a lot of New York Times readers could be the next wave or the

Substackers oh, yeah, but I was talking about the the the readership of the New York Times saying the readership. Yeah. Over the next 10 years. Yeah, success for sub stack is every single person. For the most part, let's say every single person under 65 years old should subscribe to at least one sub stack writer. I'm I'm I'm talking about becoming a writer. So I think there are lots of people who read the New York Times who are thinking about I'm talking about becoming a writer. So I think there are lots of people who read the New York Times,

who are thinking about writing about art, literature, technology, whatever, and they read the New York Times and they think like, oh, I'd like to dip my toe in and I'm not just gonna quit my job and apply for a job at the New York Times. Yeah, it's two-sided. I will start a sub stack.

And so I think that taking the story there makes a ton of sense. I've already seen, there's this interesting project that Emily Sundberg highlighted where someone is writing a fictional story, but instead of just publishing a book, they're doing it on Substack, you subscribe, and you get one chapter a week for a couple months.

That's cool. I thought that was a really cool innovation. And I think that, you know. It's potentially a way, the interesting thing is people will pay what, $25 for a book months. That's cool. I thought that was a really cool innovation. And I think that, you know. Potentially the interesting thing is people will pay what, $25 for a book. Sure. But they'll pay $15 a month for a sub stack. Yeah, or $10 a month.

And then they'll just be like, well I love that book, I wanna keep supporting them because I wanna get the next book when it comes out. I'll just let that ride on my credit card, whatever. Yeah, 15 bucks. That's really cool. And so I think that that market of new sub stack creators is super valuable And I think you get that when you go to the New York Times I don't know if you get that when you go to Eric newcomer although obviously

There's a lot of great benefits that you get when you go to Eric newcomer, but our next guest is here in the studio I'm seeing green light. We're good. Very good. Welcome to stream. How you going on? Gents, how's it going? Good to finally be on. Big fans, thank you for having me. It's great to have you and you have some pretty big news today. Break it down. Yeah, yeah.

We raised our seed round, 55 million. There we go. Let's go. I've personally loved seed. I'd love to see a seed round get into the eight figures. Yeah, high double digits. I think they all should be. Hopefully you're the start of a new wave.

But what is, is this the third largest seed round in New York history? Is that right? That's where we're tracking, that's right on our end, at least on the equity only side. And we're pulling some data where everyone else does. But yeah, we feel excited about it and we feel really good on being able

to continue to build in New York City. The equity only side, I was gonna ask, I asked Jordy about that, I was like, okay, $55 million seed, is this 80% debt? Is there some like crazy GPU credit thing going on here? People get kind of funky with the numbers these days. This seems like real dollars. Who is writing $55 million seed checks these

days? Yeah. So round was led by RTX Ventures Arms. So the corporate venture arm there, a lot of interest in what we've been working on and they led the round. We had great partners come into that round. Vidya's Venture Arm and Ventures. Any next infinite capital. AliCorp, who did our pre-seed and also participated in this round as well. as well as kind of a bunch of other investors within the side of that. So super excited about the support we have. It's interesting. We have a balance of both financial VCs as well as corporate strategics in this round as well.

And look, we work in material science. I'm sure we'll get into this in more detail, but I think they really see where materials and science at large is going with AI and this is why they're starting to look into tech and and startups because that's where the innovation truly is especially in a space like the physical world and material science so really interesting mix and we are super proud of the syndicate we put together so that's awesome backstory on yourself then the time at AliCorp,

how this company was created would be awesome. Yeah, absolutely. So going back a couple of years, I'm a scientist by training. I was working in grad school at Rice. I was working on these things called normorphic computing chips, which they try to replace the von Neumann bottleneck inside CPUs. A lot of big words back to back.

Yeah, so we pretty much try to connect memory and CPU and not lose the latency and the energy that go inside a chip. So I was working on this technology, except it was going nowhere because it's academic research and academic research doesn't scale into the real world. So I was super frustrated. So I ended up getting a fellowship at the Army Research Lab.

I go there, I'm working on the same problem at ARLL and it's better because the army's funding your work, right? And the army wants to see things come and move into the services that they can actually use But it's still really early technology right in this level is like two three four still in that fundamental area So I was getting frustrated So I said, okay I'm gonna start a company and then I realized I didn't know anything about starting a company. And I didn't actually know what I wanted to do. And so I bumped into Kevin Ryan in New York, I reached out to him cold,

cold emailed him actually and said, Hey, if you're not investing in material science, you're not investing in the future. He was like, Okay, been an investor for 30 years. That's a bold claim. But sure, what are what are some of the big names that the alley corp has done they did MongoDB all the way through Business Insider. It's crazy range. Yeah wide range and Ali Corp is unique right Ali Corp incubates companies in-house kind of we're radical really got its roots and I can talk about that but also invest at the early stage as well anywhere from one to five million in the early stage side seed sometimes you know

in early series A. So they have this interesting ability to go and dive into a space. And if they find a company they love and they wanna invest in, they will invest. And that's what we did there. And if there isn't one, they'll actually look to incubate that company in-house.

And so it's a really nice way to play into a new market that you wanna see innovation in, but just can't find something that's there when did the Precede happen Was it a year ago? Yeah, not a year ago or a little bit over March of 24 So one of my other co-founders Jorge both at Alley Corp Jorge is deep software guy startup guy through and through only done starts his entire career and he's looking into AI, right? Who wasn't all of us were, but we were super frustrated. We kept seeing rappers on top of models and we were thinking like, this can't actually be it,

right? Like, is this the pinnacle of innovation? Like the new tech wave is going to be rappers. And we knew that wasn't it. So we spent like months reading a bunch of papers inside AI. We were convinced that technology was incredible, but there had to be a space that was better. And being a material scientist, I thought, well, the materials are quite large, right? The most important industries in the world, automotive aerospace, manufacturing, defense,

climate energy, semiconductors, the most important industries in the world are all direct result from materials. So why don't we look into there? So we start reading into the space, we dive in deep, and we bump into this gentleman named Herd Cedar, longtime academic, he's at Berkeley, he's got an H index of 182 or something like that. And he had done two things specifically. He'd helped set up the materials project from the MGI. So this AI for materials early sector inside the US and then he built a robotic lab.

It's called the A lab at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab right now and it's fully autonomous. That's 55 experiments a day. So we're like we got to go see this thing. So we fly out to Berkeley, we get dinner with her and we pitch him on, look, someone's got to build the future of material science and it needs to be a full stack vertically integrated approach. There's no other way to drive value and us doing together to really align opinion around what it should look like

and form the company and went from there. So it's 10 million in pre-CE from Ali Corp and got started and went to- Big numbers, big numbers all the way up. Yeah, my question is like, why not just do series A, 10 million, series B, 55 million? What does a $55 million seed round,

like what message are you sending? Obviously it's like superlative, so you can get headlines around it. Is that the value that you just stand out, or is it you specifically want to, because I imagine that if I just walked around your office, it's gonna feel like a series B company that's raised $55 million.

So like what, like, yeah, like, what are you actually saying to folks when you say, Oh, I run a seed stage company versus, Oh, I run a company that's raised, you know, tens of millions of dollars. These are two different aesthetics. They definitely are. I feel like we still feel pretty early. I don't know what series Bs are looking like yet today. I'm not very, we like feel pretty early. I don't know what series these are looking like yet today. I'm not

We like being super lean we are really Honestly crazy about our culture We think culture is one of the most important things you can do in an early stage company and We're really really rigorous on who we bring in and why and so we actually keep the team quite light We will be growing with the round. Of course, it goes without saying, but we really deeply believe in the ability to challenge everything that exists today. Ask the question, why about everything? Why do these things happen? Why is it wrong?

What's the, got a lot of money on the balance sheet. Sorry, I'm sorry, your internet, I think, is a little rough. We got it with the 55 million. You guys deserve fiber now. Let's get it in there. But what's the use of funds? What does success look like over the next 18 months? Sounds like you guys are super ambitious,

but how do you start proving out what you can do? Yeah, so we've got to scale the team. We want to bring in big talent on the side of AI as well as material science and the automation side. There's a lot of an industry approaches that we take. So one part-time AI researcher. Yeah, yeah, yeah, fractional AI researcher. It's going to be good, 20 hours a week.

Yeah, no, we're not doing any of that integration. I'm sure you can hire great people. And then two, we're going to build the most advanced materials R&D facility in the world. We have multiple different materials lines. It'll do hundreds of thousands of experiments per year. And all of that data is the missing data set that really exists inside the AI for material space today.

So if we can capture all of that. Are you rebuilding the kind of robotics lab that your co-founder had at Berkeley in order to execute that many experiments? We do, yes. So we kind of we amped it up in a way. His was a very academic approach to it. Had to work with them inside academic constraints,

was very specific on a research problem. Ours is much more automated in that we are doing real active learning on the data analysis and capture and then bringing that back into the AI engine. And then can really be made into a platform where we can actually take that software and robotic system approach that we have and use it in other material systems so we can actually be multi-system based inside the products that we're trying to solve for. So that's kind of a big differentiation between where his was and where ours is going

to be today. Awesome. All right. Well, thank you so much for joining. Very, very exciting. And congratulations. Yeah. Congratulations. Thank you guys. Thanks for having me on and I will be in touch. We will talk to you soon. Cheers. Good luck out there. In the meantime, we will tell you about Adio customer relationship magic. Adio is the AI native CRM that builds scales and grows your company to the next level. Let's go to Swix. He says- Break this down, I'll be right back. Sure. So Swix, friend of the show, says a lot of people are poo-pooing the ChatGPT Agent launch,

which we covered on the show yesterday. We had folks from OpenAI on and we also had Dan Shipper from Every on the show to break down how he's using ChatGPT Agent. I was impressed with the OpenAI folks. I thought they explained a lot of how this works. And Dan Shippers, like his third party analysis of how he's using the tool sounded very promising. We haven't had a chance to test it here on the show, but I'm excited for it.

And Swix breaks it down. He says, people are purpooing ChatGPT Agent as just a better harness, but they're not reading closely enough. We've got a new frontier model today, folks. These charts are like for like same harness. They basically stopped short of calling it GPT five. But yeah, if there were a public release of oh, for, was it? Don't sleep on that. In other words, run your benchmarks, telling it not to use tools.

And I expect it'll be a big step up from 03. And so he's looking at the benchmark of ChatGPT agent on humanities last exam, doing much better. And so even though this didn't get a true version bump, the actual results are great on practical problems. We're gonna have Mike from Arc AGI on the show later. I can't wait until we can throw ChatGPT agent at some Arc AGI puzzles.

I got a little preview and Arc AGI 3, it is a challenge. And I will be doing it live on the stream and I won't be embarrassed at all. I got a little preview and Arc AGI 3, it is a challenge. And I will be doing it live on the stream and I won't be embarrassed at all. John was sweating earlier, gave it a little test run. It will be a challenge and I imagine it will be a very huge challenge for chat GPT agents. It's funny, so we had the chat GPT agents team on yesterday and then I saw on the timeline later,

people were kind of saying like, oh, it took 10 minutes to book a flight, which is kind of like funny criticism because it's probably how much it realistically takes like a human to book a flight. So the fact that an agent could do it in the same time and you can imagine the agent could just get, if it can get 10 times faster.

Completely agree. Also, the interesting hot take is that there's a world where I have found that even if a task takes me 10 minutes on my laptop in a professional piece of software, if I can do it in ChatGPT in the app in 10 minutes on my laptop in a professional piece of software. If I can do it in ChatGPT in the app in 10 minutes, and it's equally frustrating, and it takes me the same amount of time, I like being able to do it on my phone.

I noticed this when I made this two-by-two chart showing Dworkesh Patel versus Tyler Cowan on their AGI perspectives. So Dworkesh believes AGI is not here.war Kesh believes AGI is not here. Tyler Cowen believes AGI is here. Dwar Kesh believes the impact of AGI will be immense. And Tyler Cowen believes that it will be very incremental. So they're on the opposite sides of this two by two diagram.

So I go to ChatGPT, I could easily have just done this in Google Sheets and taken a screenshot. I could have done it in Photoshop. But both of those would probably require opening my laptop. But on my phone in the ChatGPT app, I was able to have it try and do an AI image generation. That wasn't really working.

It was getting confused. So I finally had it use Matplotlib and write some code to generate it. And I went back and forth with it, probably for about the same amount of time that I would have been in Photoshop. But it was nice because I was able to just able to do it on my phone.

And so there's something about the rune take that text is the universal interface that even if it takes me the same amount of time to book a flight, if I can just do it in a universal interface that I'm super comfortable with and I'm interfacing with it on the ChachiPT app, I might prefer that over going to the united.com website or united airlines.com What are Google Google flights where you can like see the flight and then I'll pipe you to the other side

There's so many different sites and they're all slightly different slightly different UI slightly different designs and I oh this one I need to remember to uncheck this box and this one I need to do this and my password is not saved here I like that chat GPT is just becoming like a unified interface for how I interact with web services, tools, all this stuff. It's very cool. Anyway, in other news Semi analysis AJ, friend of the show says Anthropic quote we don't care about consumer code is the only use case. We care about Everyone else says why is anthropic not showing up in consumer statistics and someone and he's quoting someone says what happened to Anthropic because anthropics fell off of the open AI Lee

the rankings of chat bot downloads chat GPT is on its share with Yeah of sensor sensor tower chat GPT is on a tear with almost a billion downloads. Google Gemini at 200 million, DeepSeek at 127 million, Microsoft Copilot at 80 million, and Perplexity at 50 million. Perplexity has been holding on strong in a very competitive environment, and I think that's why they were able to raise at an $18 billion valuation yesterday

if you didn't see the news. Swix has more analysis on the OpenAI launch. Three things, and he's doing the Steve Jobs meme with Sam Altman, three things. A deep research model with enhanced search browser, a revolutionary computer use operator, and a sandbox terminal to execute math and code. A browser, a terminal, a computer, are you getting it?

These are not three separate agents this is one agent and we're calling it agent great great great great poster great Justin Moore says I predict that Crocs male AI companion will be even bigger hit and it will be an even bigger hit than the female one Elon has said that he is naming it Valentine. But what did it say? It was going to call itself? It calls itself something else that we won't say.

Justine says women are quietly massive consumers of romance and erotica content. And she gives some data. Fan fiction, 80%. Romance novels are at 82% to 84% women. Online fan Fan fiction 80%. Romance novels are at 82 to 84% women. Online fan fiction 80%. I've never been part of that whole world, but you know. Yeah, never been big into that whole world.

Anyway, let me tell you about 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. Go to Fin.ai. I don't know how they do it. I don't know how they keep doing it.

They just. Luck of the Irish, as they say. Luck of the Irish. We go capital. Capital. Bloak says, I have two people in my life that I've mentally flagged for high risk of LLM-induced mental health issues

where I'm already seeing concerning activity. I don't think society is ready for how much of an issue this is going to be at all. So yeah, again, I think there needs to be fast action from the labs in order to make, just make some changes to the product. Make, it does seem to be like direct. It's not something that's going to happen in an hour from using the product, but it could happen in a month. Here's a prompt. Chat GP agent, look at my calendar, look at Google Maps, find me the nearest grass, I need to go touch it.

Schedule it, put it on my calendar, remind me to go there. Call me an Uber to take me to the grass. Call me a Waymo to take me to the grass, I need to touch it. Take me to Central Park, the home of our next guest, Joe Weisenthal. Welcome to the stream Joe. How are you doing? I'm doing great. Thanks for having me back. It's always a pleasure. Somebody commented earlier on you shared the the guest lineup and they were like, Joe goes

on TVPN more than I call my mom. I love you my mom I think that person needs to get a build a better relationship with their mother for sure but we are family this is the brotherhood you are a technology brother yes yeah what's what what's the latest in your world what has been capturing your attention this week? You know, here's an interesting thing is that the economy, just like the setting aside the markets, which we all go nuts every day, the lines always go up. The economy itself, it was a good week for economic data.

Today we got better than expected economic sentiment. Yesterday we got better than expected retail sales. we got better than expected retail sales we got better unexpected initial jobless claims we got better than expected on the philadelphia fed manufacturing survey there has been this assumption i would say uh... in recent weeks that recent months really the economy would slip and then the question would be would the fed cut rates in time to forest all recession and that maybe that's still a debate

Certainly, we know the White House really wants to see a rate cuts, but I'm gonna release like is a snapshot right now Actually, it looks like there might be a little bit of a tailwind to this economy Which I think is really interesting and maybe unexpected. That's fantastic. I have your post here. Boom more strong economic data Yeah, June retail sales rise American economy. A hit for Joe and the economy. Love it. I need a gong.

My producer, Kale, is in the room with me. I think everyone needs a gong. We have a variety of gongs. We can actually send you a gong. We have three now, and we're thinking about getting a fourth, so we have spare gongs if you need to borrow one. I think the guests need a gong.

I think the big thing is it's not necessarily that you need a gong spare gongs if you need to borrow one. I think the guests need a gong. Yeah, I think the big thing is, it's not necessarily that you need a gong, it's that you need to get into prop comedy generally, broadly, and Odd Lots needs a whole prop department with a variety of things. A prop lead. Have we showed you our props? We have the crystal ball for Telford

knowing the future. Yes, of course. Careful with that. We now have the crystal ball. that yep put it on John if you ever if John ever wants to steal man an argument do you guys have a tungsten cube don't have a cube but we have a tin foil hat we have a tin foil hat for when we're discussing conspiracy theories yeah it gives you a little coverage You guys are all set for all the different scenarios How was you dropped your you dropped your interview with Eric Adams? Yeah, it was this morning Yes, I haven't had a chance to listen yet. You guys seem like you were having fun. I

Don't think it's possible to not have fun talking to Eric Adams. Eric Adams is one of these guys where it's like even the people who hate Eric Adams love Eric Adams to some extent. He is, you know, you talk to him and there are some people you talk to. And it's like you instantly get why they've been successful in politics. He's a great smile. He's very funny He sort of speaks extemporane extemporaneously very well You never really know what he is going to say and look, you know, he presents I would say not popular right now

His approval rating is pretty low, but I would say he he makes his case Well that he's had a good mayorship between crime numbers between the volume of housing that's been built in the last four years. I don't know like the rats the rat numbers are real I talked about it last time the rat numbers are real so again I think there was a poll out this week that actually showed him in a fourth place. Is there really a rat census? Do we have good data on rats? So the way they measure it, yeah, they do. I mean, the proxy- This is what the collapse,

this is what collapse looks like, by the way. Measure it. Is when you start measuring the rat population. Are hedge funds trading against the rat index yet? The rat futures. We need polymercants on the rat. No. The rat futures.

The proxy that they use for measuring rats, rats, is 311 calls. So 311 calls is like our way to like call the police about something that's not an urgent crime or other things going on. And if there's like a rat infestation or a lot of rats in a place, and they dropped like 40% in 2024.

And then if you look at the annualized data through now, it's like down another 25%. I think that things like rats and trash containerization, which I know, you know, trying to get into the modern era here in New York City. I think there was a widespread agreement that actually real progress has been made. And Eric Adams has a lot of funny videos

about his war on rats. And I think he deserves credit for it. Was there ever, I don't know if this is an apocryphal story but the whole story of like the Indian cobras where there was a bounty, have you heard this story? So it's a classic economic example of like unintended consequences essentially. There's actually a particular term for it

but basically there was a snake problem, a cobra problem, poisonous snake problem in India and as the legend goes, as the story goes, the government said, Hey, look, we're going to take a decentralized approach. We are going to put this in the hands of the free market. We are going to create a bounty for every dead cobra or dead snake that you bring us. And so we will pay you $1 for everything. People started breeding them. They started breeding them. Exactly. And so we will pay you $1 for everything that you go out and kill. So let me guess, people started breeding them, right? They started breeding them, exactly. Yeah.

And so, yeah. And so I wonder if there's a world where, okay, I got elected, I need to crush the rat population, but then I need to climb it up once it's out of the news cycle. I got to get the rat population huge and then I can crush it right before. So you can keep smashing it again, yes. Keep smashing it. Right on the cycle. So, oh yeah, it was bad midterm,

but you don't want to change horses in the middle of a stream. Cause I'm the rat catcher. That's right. But I mean, yeah, is there a secret in New York City to controlling the rat problem? Is it just like more rat catchers? I think it really is just a function

of how horribly we've managed our trash in the city. And you just see, and I saw it, you know, I was walking to the subway today because the containerization of trash, like it hasn't come to my part of the city, it hasn't come to the East Village. There's just a lot of trash bags that exist on the street. And I saw a bunch of, incidentally, I saw a bunch of rats last night when I was walking home. So it is a live problem. There is still progress. And you know, like I would never endorse

a candidate for mayor, but I would certainly suggest that whoever is the mayor after November or after the inauguration, hopefully the existing trajectory continues because the problem is not solved. Yeah, deals with it. Jordy? Who else comes on your show and talks about rats,

probably, by the way? It's probably just me. Well, you're a new rat correspondent. Emily Sundberg is a helpful New York reporter to understand what's going on on the East Coast. I mean, the big thing that I've been pulling on, I talked to a couple hedge fund folks out on the East Coast in Manhattan.

We had one guest on from CO2 who had a very beautiful scenic view out the window from hedge fund alley. I guess that's a street or something like that. And in my I was I was pulling on what has the reaction been in the finance world in the on the East Coast to these crazy aqua hires that are going on on the West Coast. So we saw that Google acquired Windsurf for $2.4 billion. It was this kind of zombie aqua hire that's becoming more and more standard.

Mark Zuckerberg's paying $100 million, $200 million for single AI researchers. It's kind of shaking Silicon Valley to its core. I think it's good for the news business, because now what would have been one acquisition is now two. Oh yeah. So we got to cover it Friday,

and then we also got to have Scott Wu, who bought the ghost ship on Monday. But I guess the question is just like, what's the reaction? For Wall Street with the pods, it feels like it's standard. Yeah, it's really, you know, it's funny, literally just before we got on here. And I was just talking here.

It just feels like, you know, if you think about the sort of broad phenomenon in the economy, that what we're seeing is more and more sectors of the economy are experiencing this sort of like winner take all in this phenomenon, where it's not that the sector is doing good or bad, it's that there are a handful of talented people in any industry that just capture extraordinary sums. And we've seen it for years in professional sports. The pod shops, the hedge funds that we talk about a lot on the podcast have had it for years.

That's our equivalent at Bloomberg, like the stories that read spike on the terminal, it's always about like, some guys like so and so who, you know, is a transportation portfolio manager at this pod shop is like going there and they're getting a $50 million bonus, etc. It feels like, you know, we see it in media, of course, in various ways and star newsletter writers and star podcasters and star broadcasters and so forth. And then clearly, like obviously, you know, software people have been getting paid well for a long time. But this phenomenon where now it's like, no, the value is not in the company per se, the value is in just that inner individual talent who can get up and

walk and take that value out with them. It feels like it's replicating elsewhere. And like I don't know where it's going, but this seems to be a phenomenon of the world. Yeah, that's why anybody freaking out about like the comp packages of individual researchers. It's like, yes, if you look at it on an individualized level, one person getting nine figures. But if you look at it and say, well,

Zuck just spent 15 on scale AI, which was heavily talent oriented. And would he pay $4 billion for one of the top teams if he could just aqua hire one of the top teams? And in this case, he just pieced it together from a variety of labs. It's really interesting. One thing I think is interesting to think about is that a lot of, in the finance world,

a lot of talent driven businesses often aren't particularly great for shareholders. So if you look at like the history of like investment banks that are standalone investment banks that never had like a trading arm, et cetera, almost all of the enterprise value like ends up accruing to the talent. And there's not much of frequently the equity component

when these companies are publicly traded. You look at boutique investment banks that from time to time are publicly traded. They've never been particularly, those have never done particularly well. Or you think about a law firm, of course, which doesn't have public equity, but it's like all the money sort of like accrues to the talent. And so I do think

there are some like interesting applications, like maybe down the line, not yet in public markets. But it's pretty obvious from Windsurf that in private markets, this has got to be, you know, change the way investors are thinking that, you know, what really is left over for the poor downtrodden shareholder if the most talented workers at the company are the ones who really get to capture all of the value. Yeah, yeah, you've seen this with the podcast networks of the world, true networks. If Dave Portnoy builds up some talent, he starts paying them $100K a year. And so why share it at that point with Dave at that point?

If you are a superstar podcaster under that particular network, eventually you get to a point where it's like, maybe you start off and you take 20% of the cut and then 50. And then you're like, why am I sharing it all at all? Alex Cooper, basically, Alex Cooper's market value is about the same as an AI researcher over the last few years. Yeah. So I've been thinking about this a lot since we last talked.

And you said the power laws are popping up everywhere. And I was just going through my daily life thinking, like, how is that true? I see it everywhere. I agree in a lot of things. But I was thinking about, there's this meme of like after AI the last job will be like the plumber And I was like, right is there a power law? compensation curve in plumbing

Driving because if you think about the value of Driving it's really a lot of there is a ton of equity value in uber. There is a driving, it's really a lot of there is a ton of equity value in Uber. There is a ton of value. There's value. It's a leverage thing that the highest paid plumber will be somebody who has like a like scaled plumbing enterprise that you can only install so much pipe.

But if they lose their talent, like there's still equity value because you've aggregated demand. And that's the difference between the AI research labs and Instagram. They could have a hundred percent turnover at Instagram, slot other people in, it's a network effect, there's an audience there, there's habitual, I know I have a fan base on Instagram or I open it and I know that I get funny memes or videos or family connections there.

I'm not leaving just because the software engineer who works on this particular button leaves. And so there's a ton of equity value in Instagram relative to the talent. And I think that it's not as universal as we think. I think we're just seeing it more in media and finance and research and places where there are either secrets that you can take with you or relationships that you can take with you we're just seeing it more in media, finance and research and places where there are either

secrets that you can take with you, or relationships that you can take with you, or fandom that you can take with you. And so it's not entirely 100% universal, but it certainly is something that it's more on display than ever before. Yeah, I think that's good. Look, I think this is a useful Corrective the phenomenon there are many parts of the economy where the sort of distribution between Equity and talent. Yeah is not as skewed as it seems to be in some of these areas

It does seem on display. I mean, it's weird that we know the names of software engineers in general, right? Yeah, the trading card memes. We put up these trading card memes. They got millions of views. It's crazy. We had a, yeah, even on Instagram. You guys nailed it. And when I think about why you guys not to blood

juice too much smoke. But when I think about like, OK, when I think about TBPN and what is it about this moment and why has it worked and why has it worked and why has it worked as well as it has. I do think it's obvious that just like so much of this thing is like it's a you know you guys do like a quasi sports show and so much of what we're talking about is de facto sounding like sports including the degree to which people just get traded so to speak from or big signing transfers from one firm to the next.

Yeah, I mean, to me, to me, business, like anybody that is like sufficiently nerded out about business and markets and tech is like, it's always been, you could always come up with the sports, right, you have personalities, you have effectively coaches, you know, like the elder VCs, you have the teams, the companies etc

switching gears a little bit what's up with what's going on with general solicitation seems like it seems like there's a bull market in general solicitation there's there's this guy Eric Jackson who's been basically going out saying yeah I'm just looking for 100 X's and by by the way, if you wanna join the ride, you can. And a lot of people are pushing back. I'm gonna try to be careful when I talk about this topic. But the idea of like, you know, we're going to pick a ticker,

again, trying to be careful. We are going to pick a ticker and just sort of manufacture momentum for it. Has probably just so much that always existed in markets and we seem to be in an age in which this sort of behavior is people don't try to hide it as much and that's I think not the surprise had there always been people attempting to like all right we're gonna like try to I'm trying to think of a word that wouldn't land me in legal trouble we're going to try to move this stock word that wouldn't land me in legal trouble. We're going to try to move this stock for non-economic reasons because we gather and buy it.

Has that always existed? I'm sure. We seem to live in an age where not only are people comfortable with just doing that in the public, you have a lot of people who say, say, Yeah, you know what, everybody's got to eat. And everything is corrupt these days. And everything is a scam. I don't really believe that for what it's worth. I actually think American capital markets are the best in the world from a sort of transparency and regulatory side. I actually think it would

be sad if we lose that. But I do think there's this wide perception, it's all a scam, everybody is corrupt, everybody has inside information, you're not, you don't have that information. And therefore, why can't you participate in your own form of, you know, driving the market to your will? Social media obviously allows that and no one seems to, everyone seems to be sort of cool with that these days. And like I said, I actually do think American capital markets are deep and fantastic

and well regulated generally. And if you look anywhere else in the world. Let's give it up for American capital markets. We love them. I was talking to Jordy about this this morning. Well, it's funny that when somebody is doing, or basically doing general solicitation, the reaction is for a bunch of guys

who love finance to go and dunk and quote tweet the person and be like, look, and it just drives more attention. How do you cover it? This is the problem. How do you even begin to cover it? Because I've wondered about this with doing the podcast over the years where it's like certain like certain, you know, I'll hear a story someone will tell me about like

some meme coin or something. And the schemes that they like concoct to like pump it basically straight up manipulated or like gather in a group, et cetera. And it's really interesting, but it's like, I'd feel a little, you know, like I would love to talk to you on the podcast. On the other hand, I, no matter how much that person

is straight up admitting to market manipulation, the mere fact that they would be getting attention would almost certainly drive the whole thing higher. So it creates this very like weird tension from this. Yeah, remember when the, when there was that Argentinian presidential meme coin that like Malay kind of endorsed and the guy that created it like went on like a Started going on podcasts immediately breaking it down. Yeah, you know, I there's that famous George Soros quote and I don't know it exactly

But he talked about he's like when I see a bubble I run towards it and I think everybody is now Adopting that where they look at something and they want to get in they see a a scam and rather than, Oh, I want to avoid that scam. It's I want to get in on the scam. I want in other words, it's like, I want to be in on the next made. I remember this during the, yeah, I remember this during the crazy crypto era of like 2021. I remember coffee Zilla, this YouTuber who would talk about these scams would interview some of the victims who lost a lot of money. And they were like, well, I knew it was a Ponzi scheme, but I thought I was early. I thought I was. Yeah, I think I wrote that.

I got to go find that because I hadn't thought about it. I think I literally wrote once like the new thing is like getting in on the next made up, getting in on the because if you are early and if there's sort of like we're in an era where regulators, whatever, just don't care about this stuff or the expectation is like you play, everyone gets to play the game. Everyone knows what the game is. You just don't care about this stuff. Or the expectation is like, everyone gets to play the game. Everyone knows what the game is. You just don't want to be the last bag holder. The game is to get in early.

I was thinking about this in the context of the Coldplay concert that went viral. The CEO of Astronomer took over the internet and I was like, okay, it's a private company. But if it was a public company, what would have happened to that stock? Is there a world where someone's like, let's turn this into a meme stock because it's a small company. Let's buy the Coldplay IP, roll it in, and turn it into a Coldplay IP treasury play.

Send it. I'm sure there'll be something out there in the near future. I don't love it, but you know, I'm old and I got a boomer at this point, so maybe I just need to sort of embrace the new generation. You know what, you know what a crazy, somebody messaged me and they were like, do you know Andy Byron, the guy at the Coldplay concert was previously

the president at Lacework, which went from zero to $7 billion in the private, or $8 billion in the private markets, back down and ended up selling for like, I think, around $150 million. So he's been on it. He's been on it. What a ride. That's someone who knows the roller coaster of life.

Yeah, so he'll be back, I'm sure. Probably in another marriage. What's going on with the 230 spread? I saw you posting that the 230 spread is at its highest since October, 2021. I remember October, 2021, there were top signals blaring everywhere. We have our own top signal tracker

that we're working on internally that we should roll through as well. But what's going on? You guys got to get into proprietary data. No, so the way to think about the president has been out calling for rate cuts. And we might get rate cuts at some point in the next year. But the way to think about the yield curve is that at any given point on the curve that number

reflects like the sort of average rate over that time. So the two-year yield for example is essentially what the market expects the Fed will have rates on average over the next two years. The 30-year is what the market expects Fed rates to be on average over the next two years. The 30 year is what the market expects Fed rates to be on average over the next 30 years. And what you see is this, you know, even at this time of calling for rate cuts, that number at the long end keeps going higher and higher, which suggests that, you know, the Fed could cut rates right now, it could get right aggressively. If Trump replaces Powell sometime next year, or perhaps tries to fire him before that with someone who's sort of a lackey or a loyalist, we might get this situation of sort of like aggressive rate cuts now. But if

people perceive that to be inflationary, and so forth, one possibility is that rates go up at the long end, because they'll eventually have to compensate that compensate for that by higher rates to fight that inflation. And so you see that now. And what that means, though, is that even if you got rate cuts right now, you might not actually get lower mortgage rates or lower car rates, because those are the rates that actually matter towards where people are borrowing. So I think perhaps maybe the market is telling Trump

a signal, you're not even gonna get what you want, even if you get what you want. You could get that Fed share who immediately cuts rates for you. But if the goal is lower rates to stimulate the economy, it may not even work because you might see longer rates rise in compensation. Interesting.

Yeah, can you talk about the decision for who runs the Fed? It's been kind of wall-to-wall coverage from the Wall Street Journal. All different bank CEOs coming out. There's been memes about the school walkout, don't fire your own pal. Like, what are the arguments on the been memes about like, you know, the school walkout, don't fire your own pal. Like, what are the arguments on the sides of like, hey, let's not intervene from the

executive branch? Yeah, there's a bunch of interesting dimensions. I mean, look, I'll say a few things. There's always been pressure put on the Fed from time to time from the White House. It's not new to Trump, but it is really stepped up. And the sheer number of attacks, the demands for immediate rate cuts, this sort of the attacks on Powell for the cost of renovation of the Federal Reserve building, which interestingly, there was a story by AP out

today that said one of the drivers of the cost is that in 2000, the administration officials wanted there to be more marble instead of glass in the building. That feels very Trump aligned. It's very Trump like. And so that could be so there is some why the renovations have been so expensive. That's one possibility. Okay. But then the quote, you know, there's a range of so there's this guy, Kevin Warsh, who

for my entire career has been a hawk, always calling for higher rates, suddenly he's calling for lower rates. Interesting. It's the battle of Kevins. There's two Kevins that are in detention. Yeah, right, right. Then there's Kevin Hassett who I think is generally considered to be a respectable economist by and large.

If he were to get the nod, I don't think there would be too much anxiety but the assumption is that whoever replaces Powell would be much more inclined to cut rates sooner and faster and if it's and if it's true that like the economy has some upward momentum right now then you could see how people might perceive that to be inflationary and another name I wrote about him today, Christopher Waller, he's a governor on the board. He is probably, he's calling for rate cuts. He thinks there should be a rate cut as soon as the next meeting.

But in Waller's defense, he's had really good intuitions this whole cycle. So he's very hawkish, he wanted to fight inflation aggressively, even while others on the board were calling it transitory. He predicted that inflation could come down from its highs without a meaningful increase in the unemployment rate, which has been proven correct. So, you know, there are some who are suspicious and cynical and say he's openly campaigning

for that Fed chair job, but he's been no one could really deny that he's he's he's had his finger on the pulse about as well as anyone else for the last five years. And this is important, which is that the FOMC, you know, it's 12 people. It's not just the rates aren't just decision of the Fed chair. Waller is someone who would probably have a pretty decent amount of credibility with the other 11 people on that board because he comes from there. So it's possible that, you know, maybe he's the most logical choice. But what's possible that, you know, maybe he's the most logical choice, but what's likely I have no idea.

Off the top of my head, if I'm going to steal man rate cuts, I'm going to say something like, yeah, the economy is doing well, the retail sales are good, and jobless claims are fine. But it's still really expensive to buy houses and mortgages are really high. And so I want to help Americans buy more houses, getting people on the housing ladder is the way that they started accumulating capital. That's good. If I do the tin foil hat, I'm struggling with this because I imagine that, you know, if I'm, you know, want to, if I want my party to win in the midterms, if I want my party to win a reelection, I want the economy to be really strong. I want markets to be booming. So despite all of the different, you know, social issues that might be floating around, everyone says, Well, like my IRA is up, my 401k is up my market referral is up. But it

feels like it's too soon to be putting to be playing that card to go back to our rat analogy. If I was completely cynical, just saying this is all about politics, I wouldn't But it feels like it's too soon to be playing that card. To go back to our rat analogy, if I was completely cynical, just saying this is all about politics, I wouldn't be demanding rate cuts now. I'd be demanding them right before the midterms, which I believe next year, right? So, react to those steel man, the 10-plus hat experience.

So look, like I said, the issue with rate cuts from a housing perspective is that mortgage rates may not go down if there are rate cuts because they're tied to the long end of the curve which might go up Sure expectations of future inflation the strongest argument I would say for could we could we possibly what could we do? Like couldn't you just go and with like figma and edit the long end of the curve? Yeah, you could The equivalent of figma guess, would be yield

curve control, which is not unprecedented, where the Fed actually just goes out and says, we are not going to let the 10-year rise above X level, and we will buy Treasuries with our unlimited balance sheet. And they could do that. The issue then is you probably, that means letting inflation run hot. It's tricky. But the steel man for rate cuts probably that means letting inflation run hot. It's tricky. But the steel man for rate cuts is that the labor market has slowed and the rate of hiring really has declined quite a bit. I mean, I think there have been several stories about

how low hiring is, particularly for college grads and so forth. So this, I think the argument for rate cuts, there's a straightforward one, which is that you could make the argument for rate cuts, there's a straightforward one, which is that you could make the argument that the economy needs support or that the rates are overly restrictive, which is the argument that a Fed governor, Waller, made yesterday. But just to your point about the elections and IRA, look, what was it? I think yesterday there was the news

that President Trump was going to allow people to invest in crypto in their 401Ks or something like that. There was some news that President Trump was going to allow people to, you know, invest in crypto in their 401ks or something like that. There was some headline about that and access to private credit. You know, I do think it looks like this is an administration that is very comfortable with letting asset prices rip. And people like that. People like when their 401ks and their IRAs and all that go up and their cryptocurrencies go up. And I think this is an administration that go up and their cryptocurrencies go up. And I think this is an administration

that is like pretty happy to see that. We said this early, give Jane street direct right at access to the fed funds rate, left the high. It solves it all. It solves it all. Just solve for market prices. Just make the market go up as much as possible. How's Jane street doing with their little PR

series of PR crises? I actually have a full account. No, no, no, no. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The Indian options. And then the Sudan stuff, too. That whole thing. Wait, what?

Oh, yeah, we talked about that. No, it was just like you go from not here. You only hear about Jane Street really on the Dwarkesh podcast. Yeah. You know, a nice ad read. And then you start hearing about, you know, all these other things. It seems like they're just gonna get through the fun.

Yeah, I don't know. I'll check in on Jane Street for you guys. Thank you. Thank you. What jersey are you wearing by the way? Oh, I've got this. I was in Mexico earlier this year. By the way, I got your hat.

I have it in the office. I wasn't sure if that would be a little, I was thinking about wearing your TBPN hat. Whatever you want. But is that, I got your hat. I have I have it in the office I wasn't sure if that would be a little I was thinking about wearing your TBPN head But is that I was like is that like wearing the t-shirt to the band when you're going to see the band I wasn't totally sure but I'll put it on next time. I just want to I want to see a suit at some point Cool. Yeah, all right So we can do it I will wear a suit or at least least a shirt, jacket, and tie

next time you guys have a chance to. We try to wear white suits when the market's ripping. The S&P 500 was at an all-time high yesterday. Can't keep them clean. We didn't even think to put it on, because we're so normalized to all-time highs. It's over a day out here. Anyway, thanks so much for stopping by.

Anytime. Always a pleasure. Have a good weekend. Love it, dude. Have a great weekend. Bye. Cheers. Really quickly, let so much for stopping by. Thanks, anytime. Always a pleasure. Always love it, have a good weekend. Love it, dude, have a great weekend. Bye. Cheers. Really quickly, let me tell you about public.com, investing for those who take it seriously. They got multi-asset investing, industry-leading yields,

and they're trusted by millions. We will bring in our next guest, Nirav from Nextdoor. We have a bunch of questions, particularly about political campaigns, given some of the folks we had on earlier. But thank you so much for joining. Good to meet you.

Well, what's going on? How you doing? I'm doing great. Thanks for having me. Excited to be here. Welcome to the stream. It's great to have you. Why don't you kick it off with an introduction

on yourself and the company, and then I just want to jump into a bunch of questions immediately. But I'll let you do the introduction. All right, appreciate it. Nirav Toli, co-founder and CEO of Nextdoor. Nextdoor is a public company that is trying to build the daily utility that you use every day to find out what's going on around you.

We're focused on the neighborhood in particular, and so we sometimes call ourselves the Essential Neighborhood Network. We started in the summer of 2010, went public in 2021. I ran the company for the first nine years and then actually came back to the company a year and a half ago as CEO. So I'm a refounder, not just a founder, but a refounder.

And this week was really exciting for us because on Wednesday we launched the new Nextdoor. The reason I came back to the company is because we needed a much better product and sometimes founders are in a good position to reimagine the product, even though they built it in the first place. And so for the last year and a half,

we've been working on a brand new version of Nextdoor, launched it on Wednesday, it's going really well, we're excited about the future. Awesome. What's the biggest change with the new product? It's completely different. And so it's not an evolutionary change or like a version 1.0 to 2.0, right?

But the biggest change is we've taken an all purpose newsfeed because we're a social network for neighborhoods. Like there's a social network for pictures and a social network for people and for businesses, right? And we've taken that social network and we've started to make it a lot more structured and utility centric. So we focus this release around local news to keep neighbors informed, local alerts to keep neighbors safe and local recommendations to keep neighbors

smart in the newsfeed. There was always local news being discussed. There were alerts being discussed their recommendations being asked for and given, but now we have dedicated parts of the app where you can find those things and so it's just a lot more useful Senator do you sell ads? What's the business model? We do We have over a hundred million verified neighbors in 11 countries So decent scale and as I said, we're public and so hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue as well And the business model is advertising. Yeah, that makes sense. We had a Friend of the show on earlier this week. He is running for state council, is that right? State assembly.

State assembly. And it was interesting because he came on our show. And we have an audience all over tech and in San Francisco and New York. And I was trying to puzzle. I want to help him. I'm excited about his campaign but realistically we're not we're not a platform focused on his district in Los Angeles so he was saying he was going

20 square miles yeah yeah he was saying he was gonna go knock on doors literally and and go to local events but I was I was thinking about what is the most internet native way. He's a great poster. He created kind of a viral video. And he seems to be good at communicating through the internet. What can you tell me about politics on Nextdoor,

generally local politics? Have people found luck there? What are the different strategies? Are you in favor of this? Are you excited about this? Are you avoiding it? How does politics Paul look it's it's a great question And honestly, it's something that we've struggled with since the inception of the company because when it comes to national politics Yes, I know you know very divisive totally totally when we see that on the platform. Yep. You don't like it

We've actually said specifically no discussion of national politics and no national political advertising. So that's where we started. Right. What we've realized over time is when it comes to local issues, whether you call them local issues, civic issues or local politics, those topics matter to neighbors. And the point you made is exactly right, which is the folks who are behind those topics, whether they're elected officials or that they're folks in the local community, they're trying to get something done. They need distribution because the internet has made it easy for you and me and your cohost to talk to each other. And I don't even know where you all are. I'm in Texas, right? But I'm pretty sure you're not in Texas, right? But it has made it very hard because we're

looking on our screens and looking at our computers to look out the window and see who's right across the street or who's next door, right? And so that should be the promise for next door. And so it's a long-winded answer to your question, but I hope in the future that we will provide your guest an opportunity to come onto next door where he knows he can reach verified neighbors in that 20 square mile area and he can talk about the issues and how he wants to deal with the issues. Historically, for 15 years of our history, until Wednesday when we launched the new Nextdoor, we didn't really let anyone except for verified neighbors create content. We had some public agencies, police departments,

fire departments, some mayor's offices, but not what you would call local politicians. And what we realized is ultimately our job is to give you all the local information that exists, regardless of the source. And so with the new Nextdoor and with Local News, which I mentioned, we have 3,500 publishers that are publishing 50,000 articles

every single week. Now in my city of Dallas, that's the Dallas Morning News, that's D Magazine, that's all the local publishers. It's not the New York Times publishing into Dallas, right? It's the Dallas centric and the neighborhood centric sources. So the same way we're letting those third party in those third parties in, I fully expect at some point in the future. And I don't know when we will let the third parties that want to be elected officials or who are elected officials come onto next door. And we just need to figure out the right way for the signal to be higher than the noise. Yeah, no, I completely, yeah, it's, it's, it's fascinating.

Like I had this weird, interesting experience where we moved into a neighborhood and there weren't curb cuts and we have a stroller. And my wife was like, I'm going to write a letter to the city. And I was like, that's never going to work. Like it will be 10 years. And they fixed it and they made a curb cut in like three months or something. I was really fast. I was very impressed. And it's clear that like the city was just prepared and

and open to that. And I didn't even know that because I don't have like this connection because the local news has kind of dropped off so much. How do you think about the business model that a local news creator might have in the future? We talked to Chris best at sub stack yesterday. Very interesting business model there. I could imagine, I mean, every social network has had, um, you know, people might talk about the YouTubers or podcasters and Joe Rogan with these big

deals, but there are people that make full living just on Instagram or just on X or just on threads. Listen, this show is really just really big on X. Um, and, um, threads. Listen, this show is really just really big on X. And I'm interested in how you see the business model of a local content creator. Is there a world where you're both partnering with an organization to distribute their content that's maybe in a local newspaper physically, their own website, and then you're kind of a top of funnel? Or do you

think there will be next door native creators soon if there aren't already? It's a big challenge for local publishers because as we know, the old business models of delivering papers or driving subscriptions for things that show up in our mailboxes, that doesn't really exist. At the same time, the digital business models, they don't have the same scale. And so it's hard for them to justify the ad sales forces or the technology investment, et cetera, right?

Today, what we're doing is we're starting by sending them traffic. So we don't have a walled garden on next door. These 3,500 publishers, they give us a headline, they give us a hero image, they give us a snippet. And then if one of our members wants to read an article, they go off to that publisher's website. And that publisher can monetize through a subscription. They can monetize through advertising

They can monetize whatever way they've chosen the thing that we've thought about and I'll get to kind of the next-door creator idea that you talked about but thing we thought about is if There's enough demand in one area to get local news broadly Could we put together a kind of Apple news or Spotify kind of subscription where you pay one entity next door and then they get the proceeds on some kind of rev share based on what articles are read. So we've thought about that, but it hasn't gone any further than us thinking about it because we need to see how this performs. Ultimately, I'm not sure about the business model behind it, but we certainly believe in citizen journalism. And so even

enabling the high school journalism student who wants to write about the high school sports that are going on and making sure that they can use next door as a distribution platform. That's something we want to enable because if that person goes on Instagram or X or LinkedIn or Facebook, there's just not enough audience. But if that person comes to next door and they're writing about the neighborhoods that are around a particular school, those neighbors want to support that school. So there's a lot of opportunity for next door. I would say the story of next door is one of massive potential and of not having a good enough product to really deliver on all that potential.

And that's what we're trying to change. Yeah. It's an interesting challenge because like social networks in general have historically done well by reducing friction on the sign up. But the nature of next door is you need that extra step of like verifying, does this person actually live where they live in the neighborhood that they're trying to participate in? And I had this one moment,

it sounds like it was before you came back and started fixing things, where I moved to a new neighborhood, I was trying to get set up, and it wasn't verifying, and I just churned, and I haven't gone back. And so I imagine this, even though I'm sure I'm sure it's active I know I know it's a very active community on there. One one question

by the way I mean that I'm gonna try that is kind of a hard problem because when people try to switch around neighborhoods they don't have the patience to re verify they do have to verify initially that patients to re verify so it's something that we need to make a lot easier because the thing you're talking about, the statistic I heard was something crazy, like 10% of Americans move every year. And so it's happening a lot. People are moving neighborhoods, whether they're in the same city, but in a different house, or they're moving cities altogether. And so that's something that we need to make

frictionless. If you could like, like upload a video of you walking into your house with the address, and then you do some like GeoGuessr type AI thing to identify that, hey, this person's really walking into this house. We've done everything. You've done everything. Innovative technology all the way to sending you

a printed physical postcard. Yeah. We've done all of those things. The printed postcard is Lindy. It's not going anywhere. How do you guys think, all of those the printed postcard is Lindy. It's not going anywhere How do you guys think top of minds because John and I live in Southern, California? I I live in Malibu John lives in Pasadena. So we were both Pretty close to the fires that happened. Fortunately, we weren't directly our homes or neighborhoods weren't directly affected

And then you're in Dallas, not too far from where the flooding happened. How do you guys think about building features around helping people through disasters? Because I remember the fire app in Southern California that everyone was using, it's just run by a nonprofit. And there was one night that John basically thought my- It's WatchDuty?

Yeah, WatchDuty. John one night basically thought, he was like, oh, Jordy's probably, we didn't have any cell service or anything like that, but I just remember using WatchDuty. It would just periodically go down and it felt like, okay, there's probably going down because they just don't have the-

The scale. The engineering capacity, the scale, et cetera, to just like run this service. I'm curious. But it's a hard problem to try to tackle because it's so spiky, right? It's like, you've got to look watch duties and amazing app. And so kudos to them. And when the Palisades fires happened, I looked at that thinking we have to do more. Now, we had seen all of our metrics spike like crazy in those Palo Strait neighborhoods, because when a crisis happens, whether it's a power outage, which is relatively banal, but annoying, all the way to inclement weather or a natural disaster,

like a fire, right, or terrible flooding, next door becomes a lifeline, because there is no other infrastructure to communicate with the people around you. And you need to be able to either say in a very simple way, what's going on all the way to in a critical way, say, I need help. I need to be rescued, right? Or I can provide someone with help. And so historically through hurricanes, through tornadoes, through fires, next door has always spiked when these things happen, but it's just a newsfeed UI. And so with the new Nextdoor, we've created an entire alerts surface where the entire

app transforms into this lifeline when God forbid a crisis is happening. And we take now authoritative data sources. So in much the same way that we're bringing in third parties on local news, we bring in third parties. I think we'd like to bring in watch duty at some point as well. And because we know where people live, we can deliver their information proactively to just those areas.

And that's what's very different. Cause if you think about watch duty, watch duty doesn't know where you live and watch duty can't warn you before you go open watch duty to see if something's going on right yeah but what happened with terrible flow it's actually it's actually ends up being stressful because I'll be like on the show and I'll get a notification from watch duty earlier this year would be like a fire is popped up half a mile from it doesn't know where doesn't know

where I am so I'll get notifications like all over LA County I'm just you know I end up look I mean it's probably good for their doesn't know where I am, so I'll get notifications all over LA County. I end up looking. I mean, it's probably good for their user metrics, because I'll open it up and realize, OK, it's like 100 miles. I think you need three things to really create an essential use case around this, which truly is an essential use case, because it could harm your family and yourself.

The first is you need to aggregate all the alerts. So watch duty just does it for fires, right? But you need power outages. You need construction delays. You need any kind of, of traffic that's going on. You need some event that's going to change something in the neighborhood all the way to the really serious stuff like fires and tornadoes and hurricanes and crimes and that sort of thing. Right? So that's first thing. The second thing is you need to know where people live. So you can get them timely information that's hyper relevant, right?

I mean, it's not relevant if it's half a mile away because it's not gonna affect you. It's just gonna freak you out, right? And then the third and final thing you need is you need to have a community of people that are notified because in many cases, they're the ones that have the information, the photos and the videos that are actually more relevant than anything the authorities are providing because they're

on the ground, right? They know exactly what's going on. And so we have all of those pieces and God forbid those crises happen, but when they do, we have to do our part in keeping people safe. It's community intelligence. It's like the collective. 100%. Working together. So. It's community intelligence. It's like the collective. 100%.

It's the power of community, truly. Fantastic. Awesome. Well, great chatting. Congrats on the new launch. Congratulations. Come back on again soon. You're going founder mode.

I love it. It's great to see you back in the driver's seat. You better open the app. And if you email me, I will make sure you get verified immediately so that it's free. Oh, I'm sure it'll work perfectly now. You've been cooking. I think you're going to like it. And I think your listeners will too.

It's very different than the old next door. It's got all the goodness of the old app, but in a fresh new shell with lots of new features. That's amazing. Very exciting. Thank you so much for helping. Thanks for having me. We will talk to you soon.

Cheers. Bye. And if you're looking to explore a new neighborhood, get on Wander. Find your happy place Book a wonder with inspiring views hotel great amenities dreamy beds top tier cleaning and 24-7 concierge service It's a vacation home, but better folks and wonder just drop wander Indio haze Hey, hey, why us haze?

Okay, but well we have Mike from arc a GI coming on the stream and we have the ability mark day I Love these releases. Thanks so much for always coming on the show of course. Thank you guys for being such huge supporters I'm such a part of this project. It's it's so amazing so we have the latest and greatest Why don't you just give us a little bit of background on the actual V3s and the trade-offs. Yeah, first of all, I think, why don't we talk about the XAI launch last week?

Because that was a pretty massive improvement. So maybe start there, and then we can get to the present. Yeah, so this is really, I think, the second time we've seen a major frontier AI lab use Arc as a benchmark to show off some sort of frontier progress, right? Back in December, we had OpenAI use ArcV1 to show off this qualitative change, right? Really marked the moment where AI frontier AI research moved beyond just scaling up retraining and starting to add these symbolic systems on top, these chain of thought reasoning systems. and starting to add these symbolic systems on top, these chain of thought reasoning systems.

Arc really marked that moment. And then last week, the XAI team used Arcv2 to show off a frontier result on Arcv2. They got 16% on the benchmark, still early days. But I think one of the really big takeaways from that was basically like how, you know, slowly using a lot of the existing ideas in the world, but how quickly and effectively XAI was able to catch up to the frontier.

And so, you know, my mental model now is, you know, going forward is, you know, wherever the front sort of innovation come through, and my expectations XAI is probably going to go beat for beat on, on catching up just given how fast they're able to get there this time around. When, when I hear like one, one thread that I've heard from watching the ARK progress is you put more test time inference, more spend behind a particular model, you get better results and it begs the question like is this brute forcing, is that what we're experiencing at some level? Is that a fear and is the latest ARK V3

an attempt to kind of avoid that? Or is that just like not an issue at all? So no, because of how we evaluate top scores on ARK. So we publish two dimensions, one an accuracy score, but we also publish an efficiency measurement. And this is not arbitrary. Like efficiency is a really, really fundamental aspect of what it means to be intelligent. So when we, you know, we have the million dollar prize, it's still hanging out there, by the way, for the original version of the contest.

And, you know, if you look at, you know, the human level efficiency scores just on V1, we're still only around 60-ish percentage points, whereas our benchmark for humans is 85 and onwards. So even though we've got V2 and even V3 now. 83, 85% or something, they win the million or do they have to get to 100%? So the Kaggle contest rules are a little more stringent. You have to do it on a certain performance profile,

the limited compute budget, you have to get the high score, and then there's an open source requirement. So this is one of the things that one of the principles of the Archiprize Foundation is we're trying to basically accelerate AGI Genesis by encouraging more people to work on your ideas, openly share those ideas, try to kind of shape the research community to look more like what it did during the 2010 to 2020 era than maybe it has over the past, you know, three or four, four years or so. What about, um, I, we, we talked to somebody, I forget who they said like, Oh yeah, like, uh, you know, Arc AGI, it's cool, but like we could totally crush that if we just like RLed on it directly. Uh,

and all the labs are just being like nice to like keep it as an independent benchmark, but I don't fully buy that because I feel like some hedge fund would just see a million dollars on the floor and then just go do that if that was the case, but what is the vibe of this? The reality is, benchmarks are marketing. Yeah. This is one of the reasons, I didn't appreciate this 12 months ago when we first launched SharkPrize.

I do now. You know, the whole reason I put the money into the contest in the first place was Arc's awareness was very low and my thesis was this is the most important unbeaten benchmark in the world. It tells us something important that no other benchmark does, right? If you go even look at the Grok 4 stream, all the other benchmarks that were shown

are like PhD plus plus level benchmarks. And yet Arc tasks are like, you know, we have objective evidence. We've done human controlled studies that show they're all solvable by sort of average humans. And so I think that tells you something interesting. Like, well, okay, yeah, like we're clearly missing something big here.

We don't have it all figured out. We're not in just like a scaling up regime. We are in a, we're sort of an idea constrained regime. And I think that's an important conclusion because if it's true, it means that individual researchers and small teams on small budgets can actually have a significant impact on the frontier of AI research. They don't need a million, 10 million billion dollar training

budgets in order to actually make a material impact on AI. Yeah, the challenge, like, I mean, the real challenge is just the distortion in the market right now and the trade off that a researcher, even somebody who's, let's say a 20 year old in college that could be doing this sort of independent research, and they're like, wait, if I drop out, I could be making $500,000 a year base comp

and the equity on top of that. So I imagine at some point, are there high schoolers that are doing this kind of thing? Because at a certain point, the target market is people that are maybe a little bit too young to actually get it. Like Silicon Valley companies will happily have somebody drop out of college. It's a different conversation when somebody is like, I want to drop out of high school. Right? I mean, this forms my thesis.

I think talent is very distributed globally. If you look at most of the teams that are on the leaderboard from past years of our contest, a large percentage, I'm not sure if it's over 50%, but it might be, are outside the United States. And again, this is like if you're trying to create a sort of optimization function for creating AGI, you'd like to shape an innovation

environment that's very open, there's a lot of sharing, and there's a lot of diversity of approach. The opposite would be like, there's very little sharing, everyone's working on the same ideas. Like, and if those ideas are wrong, then like, okay, you've sort of shooting yourself in the foot. And so those are, I think that's one of the reasons

we sort of launched Dark Prize in the first place was to try and help communicate the story that individual people, young folks, with very little budget can actually have a large impact and encourage them if they have new ideas towards AGI to go work on those, you know, maybe as opposed to going and just starting the next language model startup. Yeah. When, when Dorkesh came on the show, he was talking about the need to solve continual learning,

this idea that he has, uh, you know, this amnesiac PhD that is unable to learn hard lessons and then roll that up into habits and kind of wisdom almost. And that's why he's unable to use any of the frontier models to, his example was like select which clips of the podcast will perform well on,

on social media or something. And he was struggling with that. And I'm wondering like we hear about the spiky intelligence concept. Do you think that the, the problems that underlie, uh, Arch Prizes robustness are related to the same continual learning problem that that Dorkesh was highlighting or are these two separate problems where we could see us solving one and not the other? I think that's happening right the scores are much higher on V1 than V2. So if I kind of lay out and tease here kind of

the version we're doing a public preview for today you know we've got the ArchV1, V2, and V3. V1 was introduced back in 2019. It was designed to challenge deep learning as a paradigm. Remember, this is before language models, years before language models really hit any sort of stride in terms of the research. And it sort of was robust through that advancement.

And that's because language models sort and inherit some of the same fundamental limitations that pure deep learning do. V2 was designed to challenge this new paradigm of AI reasoning systems. It's still a static benchmark. So the puzzles look very similar to V1. It might actually be kind of surprising

that you can't beat V2 if you can beat V1, because they look like they're in domain from each other. But the intuition here is generally that V2 puzzles require longer reasoning chains, generally, to solve them. And so that gets harder to do. One of the things that we started to see, though, this year is really the emergence of a lot of these

agent systems that are being placed into dynamic, open-ended environments. And while static reasoning, I think, benchmarks are useful and will continue to be useful, this is one of the motivations for starting to build B3 and defining what we're calling an interactive reasoning benchmark to help evaluate and really challenge some of these frontier AI agent systems we're starting to see emerge. Okay. So should we do the live demo?

Let's do it. Let's do it. Should I share what launched today? I guess. Yeah. So I can kind of read through this too. Yeah. Give us the overview and then

we'll play through it. It's a little unique for us because you might be surprised like oh wait V3 is launching didn't V2 launch like three months ago. Yes. Today is a public preview we're showing off the first three public games from the eventual data set we're building this year we intend to launch the full version in early 2026. We're going about the launch a little differently than we did with V1 and V2 because V3 is such a big upgrade over V1 and V2. We want to get a lot of feedback from the community. And by upgrade, you mean significantly more challenging? The gap between what's easy for humans and hard for AI is getting wider again with V3

compared to what the earlier versions were, which I think is one of our other design principles we have. And it's also just like every different domain than you want to do. They look like art tests, but they're dynamic, and there's a lot we don't know about them quite yet. Both what humans can do, what they actually find easy, what AI agents can do, how much can you

create custom harnesses and scaffolds to be able to maybe make progress. I think we're going to learn a lot. And this is why we're sort of launching the first three games early to make contact with reality here and increase our learning over the next maybe month or so on our game design, our API design, we actually have we launched our first piece of infrastructure today as well an API that you can actually build agents and go run against these

first three games. And we launched a $10,000 agent contest that's running for the next month. For whoever can build the best agent that gets the best top score on the games that were. So even if they get 1% but they are the top even if it's low whatever it is going out the door. So one important thing like V1 and V2 ARK V3 has a public and private data set so we've got three public games there's also three private games those are actually what we're going to be awarding on top score and performance on so if you're thinking like, Oh, I'll just make a really good harness for the three public games. It won't work because they won't translate into the three hidden games. Smart, clever, clever. I love it. So I'm, I'm

sharing my screen to the stream. I don't know if you'll be able to see it. I can see it. I will read through this. So my suggestion is you guys should, we should play locksmith. This is LS 20, our first game game I think you guys should just collaborate on this one game together it'll take about five to ten minutes probably play through and I think seeing both of you like work together on live I think will be a fine I should be able to see the screen okay I'll read it out so human instructions you are playing a game ID there are no instructions intentionally you must play the game to discover controls rules and and goal. Press start to play, choose your controls,

WASD or arrow keys, play to learn the rules of the game, win the game, profit, just kidding, just kidding. No prizes here. So I click start and I'm presented with a large grid of squares. It looks like the most intense Arc AGI puzzle possible, because the original Arc AGI puzzles were something like a three by three grid, and now I'm seeing something like- These are all 64 by 64. 64 by 64, okay.

So I do have the ability to use arrows to move this blue and orange block, and Jordy, can you see me moving it around? Yes. Okay so if I go on top of this the bottom left hand corner updated slightly. Let me see if I can zoom this out a little bit. Alright you've learned one important thing. And if I keep moving click seems to do nothing spacebar seems to do nothing. I'm gonna give a little commentary while you're going here to see John. So you know the data set the three games that we lost today all of them are completely different None of them look similar in fact

This is the only game in the set that looks like a 2d agent game from kind of a tops-down camera view There were launching right now. Okay, all the other ones are quite different And this is actually design goal of the benchmark is for all the you know Eventually hundreds of games are gonna have for them to be entirely different and very novel and diverse from each other So I I appear to have lost a life if I look in the top right All the eventual hundreds of games are gonna have for them to be entirely different and very novel and diverse from each other. So I appear to have lost a life. If I look in the top right, I now have three, I had three red dots.

Now I have two. Did you cross that boundary? I got a red flash. And so I think I died. But if I move forward, I get a green circle, which I imagine means I won. And now I'm on a new level. And there's no, you know why you like got to the new level. Can you articulate that yet?

Yes. So I, I believe that I stepped on a button that rotated my or the kind of rearranged the, the icon, the goal icon in the bottom left of the screen. Um, at first I thought that the, that the icon in the bottom left of the screen. At first I thought that the, that the bottom left I see a little like, like blue and white line. And I thought the line was like a map that I have to take,

but it appears to be a puzzle shape that I have to match up with a puzzle shape that's on the grid somewhere. And I'm stepping on a button to change it. So when I step on this rotate or change button, I'm getting kind of like a different Tetris piece. And if I keep doing this, I might land on this. Okay, that matches now.

So the bottom left matches the little goal. You see the goal? I go over to it, but if I go over to it I die. And so I think I ran out of purple steps so I have a set of purple like energy. There's an efficiency limit. Yeah, yeah, I have energy. So now I'm gonna do the same thing. But there's another very important design goal in any of the games in Arc V3 Inherent which is there's intentional efficiency limits

on actions that you can take. So now green score. I did it. Which is smart because the idea of like, you know, Scott Wu can probably like one shot a math problem and it's very efficient for him. And then someone else is going to be able to solve the same problem, but like over weeks.

And is that really the same level of intelligence? This is really, you guys probably, like for a long time, actually, I think games were considered solve problem in AI, with AlphaGo and all the chess games and Gmods. Yeah. And one of the reasons for this is the way they learned. They didn't, the only thing that stopped them from being

totally superhuman in those is that they just didn't scale the current algorithms enough And so they didn't solve you know it completely but they all were basically Yeah, the most of these are out and so they're trying to take reward signal and understand You know what actions I took to produce the reward signal This is one of the things that efficiency helps with is it limits the ability for an agent to just naively be able to go Gather a reward signal by spamming and playing the games hundreds of thousands of times This is something humans don't need to do, right? You know, you already beat level

two in what, less than five minutes here with a very limited number of efficient actions that you took. And this is something we don't see from the frontier like LM stay or other agents we've been testing. Okay. I got my next level. But the next level, we started introducing some new concepts here. So I'm seeing they're different colors. So I have blue and white and I need blue and orange. And so I'm gonna step on this color block. Now I have blue and teal. Now I have blue and red.

I'm doing okay on efficiency. I have about half my life. Okay, that seems good. But I think if I make a run for it, I won't make it. So I'm gonna pick up this purple Cube to refresh my energy Run over here. Am I gonna make it? Am I gonna make it? I made it there. Yes. There we go victory Okay, now that there's a different one. I'll start by changing the color. Okay, I nailed the color blue and teal

That's the end goal in the black cube Then I need to switch my icon from this one Tetris piece to a different one. Okay, I got that. No, that's not it. I need the little like chair block. Okay, that's- You're running out of lives, John.

Roughly correct, let's see. Okay, I refreshed, I refreshed. Go over, I think this other block, I think this is a button. I think I'm gonna run out of lives though. I need to go refresh. Go get some purple. I refreshed just in time, I won left.

Ooh, one away. One away, okay. Let's keep rotating, keep rotating. Okay, now it matches. There you go. Okay, and I'll just pick up the free energy. Boom, green. You might have noticed,

it started scaffolding new things you have to learn, right? Yes, yes. The progression system here. It's not just learn one rule in level one and apply it to the entire game, but we found a really, an element. One of the goals that all the games are fun. Yes.

And one of the things we found when we were doing early design, game design, was that folks did not find the games fun if they just took one rule they learned and did that, just repeated it, right? Yes, yes, yes. So introducing new things you have to continue to learn throughout the game is a big function of whether humans can find these things actually entertaining and fun.

Well, we should figure out the infrastructure to have peer PVP speed runs of the entire prize. We'll have the whole team do it too. Real quick, while we have you, we have our next guest in the waiting room, but I wanted to ask you because it's top of mind for us this week I think like the broader tech community went from sort of like not like like taking like AI safety and alignment You know super super seriously or kind of making jokes about it until this week

I think AI psychosis has been top of mind for a lot of people. If you were running one of these scaled labs today, how would you be trying to sort of quickly react to some of the different kind of stories that seem to be bubbling up around people just getting like too deep in this sort of recursive prompting? You know, my sort of huge general and ASCET stuff is you want to be empirical about it. This was my big issue when we were going through all the 1047 legislation last year in California, is trying to make

predictions about what future harm might happen by being able to predict the future. In some cases, poorly predict the future. I think even AR, you know, was sort of clear demonstration of an eval that suggested we were not just scaling up pre-training. AGI is not just going to emerge from scaling up this pre-training regime. And that was sort of the predicated thesis on why we needed something like 1047 at the time to like stop this imminent, urgent, potentially dangerous scaling. So now I actually think, you know, my sort of view probably aligns quite closely with OpenAz, where I think you actually need to deploy the technology into the environment, into the world in order to make contact with reality and learn what are the actual issues that you care about?

What does society care about? My sort of view is that society is actually better at dealing with fast change than slow change. This is another kind of counterpoint that I think if you go look at the safety community would argue slow takeoffoffs better than fast takeoff Yeah, I think in a lot of capabilities areas actually fast takeoff is Perhaps desirable because humans notice change. This is like literally what we're evolved to do is in our environment

We notice when things change fast We don't notice when things change slow right the frog boiling in the pot Yeah able here, right? and so I think fast change stories like this issues with psychosis are good in a weird way because they They were sort of highly antibodies. Yeah, like oh, it's a great change here. We should react to it. Yep. Yeah That's kind of my broad framework of what I'm what I think how we should sort of like run these In some ways the the negative externalities of social media like like let's say somebody's developing body dysmorphia, like the ways the social media spectrum change

from sending group messages to suddenly you're sharing your entire life, like it actually was very slow. And so I think that this development with LR, it creeps in, right? You wake up 10 years later and you're like, hmm, are we happy with where we got to? Yeah, brain rot is a meme that took years to develop fascinating

You have to come back on soon. We could go way deeper. We're gonna be playing this all because I had fun playing the first game No, it's fantastic. I was not expecting a game I was expecting a puzzle and we are clearly in game territory very fun very credible work guys. Thanks for me on we'll talk to you Mike Bye up next we'll stop keeping winning is Casamani Welcome to the stream. Sorry for the wait. We were we were proving our humanity with arc a GI V3 Welcome to the stream. Can the suit in the suit? You look fantastic on a special day You didn't have to wear the suit just for the show Come on

suit just for the show. Come on. I wanted to get out to y'all a little bit too. So fantastic. Look, look, looking sharp. Looking sharp. Are you in? Are you in DC right now? I am in DC. I'm in a little phone booth about two blocks from the White House. Fantastic. Give us the update. What's happening in DC? Yeah. Let me turn my phone here. Yeah, that's amazing. Awesome, guys. Thank you for having me back on. Pleasure to be here.

Today's a big day for Crypto Land. President Sump just signed the genius bill into law. Yes. Huge, huge day for industry. This is the probably most consequential piece of financial legislation since Dodd-Dodd-Frank. It's the first crypto legislation

we've ever had and Just an incredible which is just which is crazy to say out loud this this you know However far we are into this it's been crypto has been a thing for like almost 20 years now I get what would be Bitcoin way for thing that you've been basically begging for, just like give us some regulatory clarity. It's finally here. It's finally here. Yeah, I mean, industry has been begging for regulation under the Biden administration.

And they said, no, no clarity. We're just gonna shoot you randomly. And finally, we actually can operate. It's pretty amazing. Fantastic. What does this mean for non-stable coin uh, what does this mean for, uh, non stable coin chains? Like, what does this mean for Solana? What does this mean for Bitcoin? Is there any implication there? Um, or is this purely, uh,

do you think it's priced in? Yeah, it's definitely not priced in. So first let me touch quickly on like, what I think it means for the U S and they can get into kind of like the, the chains and stuff. Yeah. So I think the correct way to think about this is there's 8 billion people in the world and I have a theory that if you were to go to each of those 8 billion people and ask them, hey, if you can denominate your wealth in any asset, it could be Apple stock, S&P 500, bars of gold, Euros, Yen, Yuan, whatever you want. If you could denominate your world in any asset

without fear of political persecution in your local jurisdiction, what asset would you choose? And my suspicion is that somewhere between 60 and 80% of the world would say US dollars. And for people who don't live inside the United States, having a US dollar bank account is somewhere between very difficult and impossible outside of like all the top 1% or so of the global wealth.

And stablecoins make it trivial for anyone in the world to host to have dollars in their pocket. You don't need to have a permission you just take your phone, your phone picks a random number that's your private key and you're good to go to receive dollars. I think this will probably represent one of the largest movements in capital and human history. As you enable, call it five to six billion people, don't like start holding more dollars more easily than they otherwise could hold them.

The scale of what it means is actually really profound and I think really under appreciated. Which is why I think it's not priced in because it's just hard to grasp what this means for everyone in the world to be able to hold one currency. This has never happened in human history before. Yeah. This is I mean, I'm like, I'm almost like, zooming out, like, I'm sure it's good for a lot of different projects and companies and tokens and chains. But it feels just incredibly

bullish for America. Like, yes, because there was this narrative of like, oh, the tariffs and stuff like we're going to lose dollar dominance, where like we're gonna lose global reserve status. And this just feels like coming from the half court shot. Yeah, it was like an artificial, you know, it was like a supply demand imbalance, but the supply constraint was just coming from like you don't have to be regulators in other places that said you can't set up a dollar, US dollar bank account in our country.

Exactly. We're just not gonna allow that. Exactly. Yeah, you don't have to be like even crypto pro crypto or crypto native or anything. And this is what this is for America. And this is like going back sort of the core tenants of crypto, like permissionless finance. It's It's like okay like permissionless access to US dollars where somebody says really good

I want to get paid in dollars. They set up a wallet and it's software and then get paid and it's yes it is Very cool Oh my god, like actually the world as a whole was actually shocking when the anti-capitalists in terms of just like currency access across nations yeah yeah that's wild what else should we talk about today is there any other downstream things can you give us a temperature check on the rest of the regulation what happens next anything else that's going on in Washington that we should be following yeah I mean downstate locations there's of the regulation, what happens next, anything else that's going on in Washington

that we should be following? Yeah, I mean downstate locations, there's a ton. So first, a quick regulation. So the Genius Act passed, that's the stablecoin bill. The next major act the industry is focused on is that called the Clarity Act. This is being primarily sponsored by Chairman French Hill and the House.

And this is otherwise known as the Market Structure Act. And the basic kind of outline of clarity is to answer the question, which regulators should regulate what? What should they regulate? This really kind of defines the lines between Treasury, SEC and CFTC, who has kind of purview over which domains,

answer the question, what is a security, what's not? It deals with DeFi to some extent. And so that's kind of the other really big meaty bill. And then the third one is actually one that kind of got added in recently and industry is fine with it just basically this anti CBDC bill is just saying like America won't make a CBDC. So that's all in flight now, you know, optimistic clarity will pass in the next few months. It passed the house earlier this week. It's now in the Senate and there's gonna be some revision and stuff in the Senate, we'll see where it goes.

Anything that's in there so far that you think that the Senate should focus on correcting? Yeah, there's definitely more disagreement in industry about the substance of clarity. I can't get into the specifics, but certainly we're right now in dialogue with a lot of our peers and lawmakers and their staff on these issues.

John, the other question you asked me, what's the implications for industry? I really wanna emphasize that. I mean, by making it, it's not legal. Stablecoins were illegal for all practical purposes for any major regulated company kind of anywhere in the world. And it is now legal and blessed for them

to interact with stablecoins. And so what I think, yeah, you're gonna see every bank, you know, Jamie Dimon, Bank of America CEOs are talking about this now. I actually don't think that's the super relevant angle. To me, the much more important angle is it is now legal and okay for iOS, Android, Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, TikTok, every piece of major consumer software in the world now can legally embed stable coins. And it's a matter of time before they do.

And what that's going to mean for global commerce, for global payments, for people accessing crypto is profound. And I think as all those people get their private keys and on bursaries wallets That's then gonna obviously provide the foundation that money's gonna be tried acting over a theory of salon, etc And it's gonna be just a massive boon for all of crypto as you onboard a few different people with this stuff It's fascinating absolutely wild. Yeah, I'm excited. I imagine that the other the big tech angle super fascinating I imagine that some of them will take different paths, different shapes. Like we're going to test all the different structures.

Yeah, what I hope is like, hey, stablecoins are already, there's large market caps, there's lots of liquidity. Let's not have everybody launch their own stablecoin. Let's just like focus on actually integrating them into and making them more valuable in these different ecosystems it's also funny because I feel like for a while there was a little bit of a There's a little bit of like a chattering class critique of crypto being like well if it was so great like why? Why doesn't Apple just integrate stable coins? It's like well because it was illegal And like they're very risk company

There is no chance that we're gonna do it But now they actually have it as an option and then there's a competitive dynamic and they'll probably run experiments. And yeah, maybe it'll take a few years for them to build some stuff. Maybe some stuff will be acquihires or acquisition. There's a bunch of different things,

ways it can play out, but it'll be really interesting to follow how this actually gets in the hands of billions and billions of people. Fascinating. Yeah, it's an incredible opportunity. And I mean, if you just look at like now, where's liquidity, where are people trading today and yeah, you know

And like which things have the scale to support all these users and it's just it bodes incredibly well for for industry as a whole That's fantastic. Well as there's more news come back on and I'm sure you'll be celebrating responsibly in in DC So have fun out there. Hey guys guys thanks so much for helping back on. Have a good one, we'll talk to you soon. Bye Kyle. Talk to you soon. What a way to end the week. Fantastic. Little news hits, little chopping it up with friends, surprise to Mike and Screlli. That was a fun one. That was one of the most entertaining people on earth. Indeed, indeed. We should close with this wonderful article in the Mansion section. Which one?

We had a few queued up. So this is, I wanted to do this because it is essentially written by Arnold Schwarzenegger. So it's his words as told to Mark Myers, who just transcribed them, and then they published it in the Wall Street Journal. And it's- And which one is this? It's Arnold Schwarzenegger,

the moment he fell in love with America. Beautiful. My early years in Austria were challenging. After World War II, the economy in the Graz suburb where I grew up was shattered. Everyone suffered. My father Gustav was a very, very sweet man. But when he drank his personality changed. He became more violent

and demanding. His behavior and drinking were influenced by the war's remnants shrapnel in his legs that caused him pain, the length the lingering effects of malaria, and what we now call post traumatic stress disorder. My mother Aurelia was a homemaker. Our family lived Aurelia, was a homemaker. Our family lived on the second floor of a three-story building. The first floor was occupied by the local forest ranger

and the second wars for my father. The second floor was for my father. The town's police chief, he was the town's police chief. The forest ranger had a phone, but we didn't, and there was no running water. I wasn't happy with the life I saw unfolding. I always had a feeling deep down that I needed to look for something else, something outside the box.

At age 10, I fell in love with America. That came from watching film roles in school. The teacher would advance the strips by turning a knob, showing one image at a time. I was blown away. They were about things like the Golden Gate Bridge and the Empire State Building and cars with huge fins driving on US highways with six lanes on each side. At some point, there was a roll on Hollywood.

I'd never seen anything like it, the glamour, the lights, and the houses. I said to myself, what am I doing here? I wanted to be in America to become famous and rich. As I got older, the question shifted to how do I get there? At 15, I stumbled into bodybuilding at our local lake and said to myself, well, that's in America. The lifeguard always had other top athletes around, including weightlifters.

As a teen, my testosterone was kicking in and I wanted to look like a he-man. I read about Roy Reg Park, an English bodybuilder who played Hercules in Italian movies. He won Mr. Universe three times and became an actor. My dream was possible. All of my time was spent in this world of physical fitness building up muscles to complete to compete in contests and fantasizing about movie stardom. At one point, I was in school looking out the window and daydreaming when a piece of chalk hit me in the head. My teacher said, Arnold,

what do you think you're doing in here? Talking to myself. I had no interest in what he was saying. He's not interested in the school. In 1967, I won the amateur Mr. Universe title in London when I was 20. Then I trained in Munich for another year and won my first professional Mr. Universe title

after I won in 1968. It's so funny, the thinking of the 60s and just like hippie culture and then Arnold's just like rising the ranks. Yes, bodybuilding, it's amazing. So he says, in 1967, I won the amateur Mr. Universe title and then he won the professional universe title. After I won in 1968, Joe Weider, a bodybuilding enthusiast

who published muscle magazines, brought me to Los Angeles. He put me up in an apartment in Venice near Gold's gym where I trained. When I arrived, let's hear it for Gold's production team. You guys love near Gold's gym where I trained when I arrived Let's hear for Gold's production team. You guys love that. That's why I work out. It's a great spot. It's fantastic When I arrived in LA, I was totally just I was totally disappointed The city looked nothing like New York City with its tall buildings Venice's sidewalks were dirty and no one cleaned them and drugs were sold in back alleys. Two more Mr. Universe titles followed in 1969 and 1970. From the start I knew

bodybuilding was going to lead to acting. In 1970 I was cast in Hercules in New York and then in the TV series and films including Stay Hungry in 1976 for which I won the Golden Globe Award for best acting debut then came the streets of San Francisco and pumping iron in 1977 iron pumping iron is fantastic if you haven't seen it. I know you haven't Conan the barbarian in the big one in 1982 I was quoting Conan the barbarian to our team I don't think anyone got the reference but we'll play the YouTube this is wild So he says in the middle of all this I studied remotely for a bachelor's degree in business.

And let's give it up for all the business majors out there. Most important major, clearly. At the University of Wisconsin. He was doing that remotely. How were you doing that? How were you doing that? How old were you at 82? College in 82, just calling it.

I guess you like mail it back and forth. Oh, you maybe get mailed an assignment in a textbook. And then you just mail it back? That is, yeah, that is crazy. How do you do that? I don't know. I have no idea. From the time I arrived in America, I went to the invented remote work. Arnold invented remote work. That is a crazy, crazy thing. Um, we'll have to have him on the show and ask him about his,

his time as a remote business major at university of Wisconsin, superior. I went to community college to take English classes and get smart about business. In 1983, I became a US citizen. Let's hear it for Arnold Schwarzenegger, one of the best to ever do it. Today, I live in a contemporary house in Brentwood, Los Angeles.

It's the perfect place where I can see the foliage and the mountains. I'm close to town, it's private, and I have all my pet animals, which means not just dogs, he definitely has more than that. We'd love to know what he has. In the 1980s I took my mother to the White House dinner to meet President Reagan. At the table I went to scratch my nose and she hit my hand in front of everyone. She said, don't pick your nose in the White House, please

Arnold. I wasn't, but that didn't stop her. No matter how big you get, your mother knows how to shrink you just a little. What a great story. I am sad that I was not super conscious when Arnold was the governor of California. Yeah, great job. Like, I remember it.

Yeah. But I wasn't there for probably all the incredible moments and I don't even have a strong take on if he was like a great governor but I think he's awesome as an individual totally and That's a great place to have Sam Sulek, I hope he makes a run in politics as well. Me too.

I would love it. I think that would be powerful. And Hollywood first. Can you imagine daily Sam Sulek vlogs from the campaign trail? Incredible. He's just getting all of his constituents, hey, just come for a lift. Come for a lift.

I think we're manifesting it. We can talk policy. We get him in a Jason Carman-directed reboot of The Terminator. Yeah. Get him into Hollywood. Get him trained up. make him a household name more than he is already then get him on the campaign trail I think we have a winner something there like well. This was a crazy wild Often fun week, and I can't wait for next week. Yeah, we'll see you Monday

Thank you for tuning in and have a fantastic weekend. Bye