TBPN Live - Tesla Robotaxis Go Live, OpenAI Pulls Jony Ive Promotional Materials, Iran Updates | Yacine, Farzad Mesbahi, Sebastian Siemiatkowski, Jon Chu, Eric Romo & Thomas Mueller, Derek Thompson, Alex Robinson, Jesse Zhang

Episode Date: June 23, 2025

(01:33) - Live From the backseat of a robotaxi w/ Farzad Mesbahi (07:58) - Timeline (10:53) - Telsa rolls out Robotaxis in Texas (16:30) - Iran launches attacks on U.S. base in Qatar (20:27) - OpenAI pulls promotional material around Jony Ive (32:03) - Timeline (56:38) - Sebastian Siemiatkowski, born in 1981 to Polish immigrants in Sweden, is the co-founder and CEO of Klarna, a leading fintech company known for its "buy now, pay later" services. In the conversation, he discusses his early entrepreneurial influences, including Richard Branson and Ingvar Kamprad, and his journey from working at Burger King to founding Klarna at age 23. He also highlights Klarna's growth to over 100 million users and $100 billion in annual payment volume, the company's strategic expansion into the U.S. market, and the impact of AI on white-collar jobs and business operations. (01:25:32) - Jon Chu, a Partner at Khosla Ventures with a background in machine learning and engineering leadership, discusses Meta's strategic moves in AI, emphasizing the company's commitment to securing top talent and its willingness to invest heavily to remain competitive. He highlights Meta's strengths as a fast follower and its readiness to take significant bets, noting that even a second-place position in the AI market could yield substantial returns. Chu also touches on Meta's potential to integrate AI across its product suite, from chat applications to ad optimization, underscoring the company's focus on leveraging AI to enhance user engagement and revenue. (01:51:25) - Tom Mueller, a founding member of SpaceX and the CEO of Impulse Space, discusses the future of humanoid robotics, expressing optimism that their capabilities will advance more rapidly than some predictions suggest. He highlights the potential impact of humanoid robots on manufacturing and space exploration, emphasizing their role in reducing costs and risks associated with human space travel. Mueller also shares his vision for Impulse Space, focusing on enhancing in-space transportation to facilitate access to higher orbits and support missions to the Moon, Mars, and beyond. (01:51:25) - Eric Romo is the President & Chief Operating Officer at Impulse Space, the in‑space transportation company founded by Tom Mueller. He began his career as one of the earliest propulsion engineering hires at SpaceX and later founded startups in the solar energy and virtual reality sectors. Romo also served as a Director at Facebook Reality Labs. He holds both a Master’s in Mechanical Engineering and an MBA from Stanford University. (02:08:58) - Derek Thompson is an American journalist and author, known for his work as a staff writer at *The Atlantic* and as the host of the podcast *Plain English*. He has authored several books, including the national bestseller *Hit Makers* and the #1 *New York Times* bestseller *Abundance*, co-authored with Ezra Klein. In the conversation, Thompson discusses his decision to leave *The Atlantic* after 17 years to pursue independent ventures, emphasizing his desire for new challenges and the freedom to explore diverse topics. He reflects on the success of his book *Abundance* and the strategic timing of his departure, noting that the book's reception provided a unique opportunity to engage with a broader audience. Thompson also shares insights into the book's promotional strategy, highlighting the effectiveness of television appearances in driving sales and the importance of creating engaging content that sparks public discourse. (02:43:19) - Alex Robinson, co-founder and CEO of Juniper Square, a leading investment management software company for private markets, discusses the company's recent $130 million Series D funding round and the launch of their AI product, Juni AI. He highlights Juniper Square's growth to approximately 2,500 customers managing around $1 trillion in assets, and addresses challenges faced during market downturns, including necessary layoffs and strategic pivots. Robinson also emphasizes the importance of integrating generative AI with deterministic tools to ensure accuracy in financial reporting, underscoring the company's commitment to innovation and efficiency in fund administration. (02:52:43) - Jesse Zhang, co-founder and CEO of Decagon, discusses his company's AI-powered customer service agents that handle tasks like booking hotel rooms and managing loyalty points, aiming to enhance efficiency and customer experience. He highlights the advantages of large language models (LLMs) in managing complex customer interactions, moving beyond traditional chatbots to provide nuanced, personalized support. Zhang also emphasizes the evolving role of human agents, who are transitioning to higher-level positions such as managing and overseeing AI agents, rather than handling routine tasks. (03:00:43) - Yacine Co9z5oe, founder of Dingboard and co-host of the "John and Jordy" podcast, discusses his recent experiences at X (formerly Twitter), where he addressed numerous bugs and observed the company's rapid advancements following its merger with XAI. He shares his plans to enhance Dingboard, a meme creation tool, and introduces the "Ding Bot," a 3D-printed robot designed to tackle everyday annoyances like dandelions on lawns. Additionally, Yacine reflects on his approach to online engagement, emphasizing his commitment to honesty and the balance between fun and stress in his prolific posting habits. 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.comFollow TBPN: https://TBPN.comhttps://x.com/tbpnhttps://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235https://youtube.com/@technologybrotherspod?si=lpk53xTE9WBEcIjV

You're watching TBPN. Today is Monday, June 23rd, 2025. We are live from the TBPN Ultra Dome, the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the Capitol of Capitol, massive news today. Over the weekend, Elon Musk announced the Tesla AI Robo taxi launch in Austin, Texas. This was the big technology news. It was the weekend. Of course, we will be covering what's going on in Iran. We have an exclusive interview with Shervin Peshavar, the investor and Iranian entrepreneur who came to America decades ago, has been waiting for this moment for 46 years, as he put it to us. We prerecorded an interview with him because he is in Paris. It's very

late there. But it was a very fascinating interview You'll hear that at the end of the stream. We have a great lineup tons of interviews going on We're talking to the founder and CEO of Klarna. We're talking to a partner of Kozlo Ventures Tom Mueller from impulse space is coming on then we have Derek Thompson the author of abundance and owner of a new substack as well as we're doing a lightning round with a bunch of founders who have raised money recently. And then we're talking to Yacine, the ex software engineer of X. He's an ex ex software engineer. So it'll be fun to talk to him.

Anyway, we have someone who's written about the Tesla CyberCab in the RoboTaxi, in the back of a RoboTaxi, hopefully calling in to the show. I sent him the link. We'll see if we can bring him in. Hey, how are you doing? Perfect timing. How's it going, guys? What's happening?

Here, let me see. Can you see it? Yeah. Wow. Yeah, there you go. Amazing. We got a safety rider right here as well. Oh, okay. Got some sick sick glasses on but yeah, we're uh, we're in the robot taxi right now This is my fifth ride. I'm also here with Harry from the UK

What's going on? He's a fan of the channel Yeah, so yeah, this is my fifth ride. It's been amazing so far. It really does feel like ride it's been amazing so far it really does feel like Tesla has hit this one out of the park truly. The geofence area is definitely much smaller than Waymo's right now but I think they did that with the thought process of like hey we want to make sure we have a really good launch we want to make sure that it's going to roll nice and smooth and but so far the rides I've taken have all been really really good very smooth it's very hard to communicate just how smooth the car is unless you're familiar with the software, unless you're familiar with FSD and how it operates on the Teslas. It's very, very similar to that experience.

It's just there's just nobody there now. And that's the freaky part is that, you know, for a lot of people that have been following the company, a lot of us knew this day was going to come where Tesla would pull the trigger and start, you know, for a lot of people that have been following the company, a lot of us knew this day was going to come where Tesla would pull the trigger and start, you know, getting actual paid driverless cars on the road. But nonetheless, now that it's here, it's kind of like this is this is wild. This is wild. So is that better? The stock is up 9% today. 9% today. Wow. Yeah. You're welcome, everybody. Yeah. Yeah. Give us your other takeaways. Yeah, you're welcome everybody. I'm kidding. Yeah, give us your other takeaways.

I saw you posted a good breakdown from your experience. What else do you have to share about the process? Did you need to go through a pre-registration to get onboarded? It feels like it's not completely open access just yet. Yeah, so yeah, we were invited. We're a part of like a very limited group of people that were invited.

I think Tesla was just out here. So somebody crossed over the road and it just navigated that no problem. Wow, very nice. Yeah, it's a very small group of people. I think a lot of us that have followed Tesla very closely over the years, Tesla went out of their way to sort of get us know, get us some

early access so we can go out there, test the system, get it out there for people to see how it performs. So far it's very, very limited in its use case and I'm showing you guys here just on the road. Hopefully, does it come across? Can you guys see the road? It's very steep. I think Tesla very specifically started this very small, but now if you go and their zip code and their phone number and email address so they can sign up for the service and that's probably a way for Tesla to get some some idea of how much interest there is for this thing out there, but so far it's very small small geofence area small group of people And I think I I don't know how many cars they have on the road But I doubt is more than ten right now. We're a four-way stop right now, and it's navigating that no problem

But yeah, I think I think it's very limited on purpose, but I will tell you that for those of us that are so lucky to be able to experience this firsthand, it's just, it feels surreal because it works. It works. It just takes you around and there's no one there. And you're like, okay. It's wild that we got full self-driving cars

before reliable cell coverage in major cities. You're breaking up a little bit. They need to drop Starling on top of this. I mean, I have one more question we'll let you go. I mean, what's remarkable about this is not just that it's a self-driving car, but particularly that it looks like a stock $38,000 model Y. Is there anything, are you seeing anything on the car

that looks like it might be aftermarket, added to extra cameras, anything? Nothing, nothing. I mean, there's different software, but I mean, that's just a software update, right? It doesn't, there's nothing that I can gather that says, oh, this is a very uniquely equipped Tesla that has some additional sensors

This looks to me like the point you made is exactly and this is why this is such so mind-blowing Like I just can't believe it's happening the best-selling car in the world where Tesla's making over a million of these per year That costs less than forty thousand dollars potentially less than thirty thousand dollars to make is driving itself in Austin, Texas With a paid ride. I paid four dollars4.20 and it's driving me around, the best selling car in the world. Like that's a weird thing to process because it fundamentally breaks the, like how we think about self-driving transportation.

Cause you think about, oh, self-driving, a lot of sensors, et cetera, et cetera. No, the cost structure for this thing is the scale that Tesla has been able to achieve that same car is going to drive itself right and that just breaks everything as your cost per mile plummets the method they've taken as far as training the software should allow them to get this thing to scale much faster than Waymo can and they have the cars right so Tesla makes as many of these cars every five hours that Waymo can and they have the cars, right? So Tesla makes as many of these cars every five hours

that Waymo has on their fleet total, right? And that's the mind blowing piece of it. And Waymo should be celebrated for the work they've done because it's such an incredible technology and I'm really happy they exist. But the scale piece is the challenge. And it seems like now that Tesla has figured out how to get paid rides going as we come to our destination,

that's my Cybertruck right there just hanging out. You know, it's like it's monumental. This is a monumental thing for us. Like Disneyland for tech bros. You can just keep taking rides around all day long. Yeah. This is like, thank you very much. Yeah. Thank you, brother. Yeah, dude. It's like, you know, sometimes I'm like afraid. I'm like, does my, does my wife think I'm too nerdy? Like, am I getting too nerdy about this? What's going on? but it really is like it's it's it's it's just upending You know what? Tesla has been historically great at is just upending the equation around The technologies that they work in with the electric vehicle now with self-driving they're gonna get into the the human or robot space

Yeah, this is what they do And so I think this is just another reminder that they're their full steam ahead and it's it's very exciting and it's just such an honor to be part of this this release truly. It's an honor Historic. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for calling in. This was great Have fun out there. Talk soon. Thank you guys. All right. Bye. Bye Yeah, the the scale of this thing. I mean it like Elon wasn't the first person to put a satellite in space He's just the first person to figure out how to get the rockets go up and back every single six hours or something like that.

And so scale really matters. It's more of like an industrial question than a technology question at this point. And yeah, they seem really set up for it. I love this post by Nick Cruz. He says, Elon Musk is back on his main quest focused on the Robo taxi and you'll love to see it. Little bit of side quest going on for the last six months.

You know sometimes you find a little pot of gold at the end of a side quest but it's not the main mission. Pot of gold. Pot of gold. Anyway, there's some other news here. Power Bottom Dad says time will tell but my bet is that this signals the death of the Waymo leaving Google in a $20 billion hole, and likely Uber as well.

Very dramatic. I'm not, I think, Power Bottom Dad is a very strong poster. And the competitive dynamic is really heating up. I'm interested to see how quickly Tesla can actually scale this in other cities. Right now, it sounds like it's 10-ish cars in a very, very small area. But again, they could potentially

scale 1,000 times faster than Waymo. It's all just going to come down to safety and what's actually going on behind the scenes. George Hotz last week was saying that Waymo is our tele-operated. He said, I haven't fact-checked this. Thankfully, we're not journalists. We don't have to fact-check.

But he said something like 1.7 people per car. 1.2 or something. Sort of overseeing Waymo's. More than a taxicab. Because a taxicab only has one. Yeah, so the real question will be, is Tesla doing teleoperation as well? Do they, how long will these companies need to do that?

But once things are really working and they're safe, Tesla theoretically could be everywhere all at once. I think the real question is what corporate card should you use? That's right. Ramp.com, time is money, save both, easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place.

No, it's a good point. And I don't know about Waymo and Google. I think I'd lean with PBD here saying that they have a lot of explaining to do, Waymo, Google, and Uber. It's hard to imagine how you can compete if your product's 10 times the price. Or if you, like the Uber has, the bull case for Uber is that they have the customers, right?

And that everyone has the Uber app installed. But if the only way to hail a cyber cab or a Tesla Robo taxi is through the Tesla app, how hard is it going to be to get people to install that app? I think it's going to be very easy because the brand awareness is huge. The brand awareness is huge. It's not like Zooks where it's some, oh, you got to be an insider to know that they're doing tests and that the other major player in The space or whatever the virality the virality of seeing Tesla's

Army like he's doing the promotion for free and getting a ton of yeah When it comes to uber you have to remember that Dara CEO was formerly the CEO of Expedia which was a booking website Yes, so it didn't own planes if uber can figure it out it's like hey we're just routing yes and and we're taking a cut yes but we're integrating with multiple different you know autonomous vehicle providers that that actually would be the bulk of us the question is does Tesla just say can that happen we got this yeah we're not gonna give up we're gonna let consumers go direct.

I guess a lot of the question depends on the timeline because if the RoboTaxi, so we don't know how much work they did, these might be somewhat tele-operated, they might have, they have a safety driver literally in the car, right, although it's interesting because the safety driver, did you see the safety driver? Do they have a pedal? Because if they don't have a brake,

what is the safety driver doing? Like is the safety driver gonna reach they have a pedal? Because if they don't have a brake, what is the safety driver doing? Like is the safety driver gonna reach over or push a button on the screen? Kind of unclear. But the question is, if the RoboTaxi can't generalize to odd conditions, then you wind up in a situation where if you have the Tesla RoboTaxi app and it doesn't work in the snow,

or it doesn't work in the rain, or it doesn't work in the rain, or it doesn't work if you need to get to the beach, or we won't go into the mountains, well then all of a sudden, you actually do want something, like the beauty of Expedia is that it can book me a Southwest flight from Burbank to SFO, but then it can also book me a Dubai, you know Dubai Airlines first first-class Emirates air all the way across the world

And so if there is a world where where I want a variety of products Benefiting from variety and not exactly frequency of booking if you're booking a Tesla Cyber cab multiple times a week. Yep, and you can save by going directly to the app. You're just gonna do that Yeah, overall. I thought Robotexy did an incredible job under pressure, probably it's the first sort of live show that it's been a part of. And so the fact that it stayed composed, that it didn't make any erratic turns

or anything like that, I'm pretty impressed. Yeah, yeah, it's very exciting. But you don't always wanna be in a self-driving car that costs $38,000. Sometimes you want to be a Ferrari driving Harvard med graduate, AI angel investor. We saw this photo on the timeline. Incredible.

Loved this. Seems like pure bait for VC congratulating themselves for VC brags. AI angel Harvard Medical School. Is that a Roma? I think so. Would have hit harder if it was an SP3. Yeah, okay, you're an AI angel investor,

but probably weren't seed investor in scale. But clearly has done well and enjoys the war. Lewis, I think it's a Roma. Lewis, I think you're wrong, Ben. Ben, I think it's a Roma. Let us know in the comments. You know what's missing from this picture? A luxury watch. This person's got to get on Bezel. Lewis, I'm sure they have a hitter on. They might even have a racing machine on the wrist. They might.

Go to getbezel.com, shop over 25,000 luxury watches, fully authenticated in-house by Bezel's team of experts. Trump, this is the news of the day with the Iran crisis. Donald Trump says, everyone keep oil prices down. I'm watching. You're playing right into the hands of the enemy. Don't do it. You love to see the president talking to everybody.

Everybody's saying, everybody's, you know, saying this is ridiculous, but it's never been tried. People always say, Oh, all that matters in, in oil price supply and demand. Yeah. Well, all you gotta do is say, Hey, supply go down. Hey, supply go up and demand go down and we supply go up, and demand go down, and then we will have lower prices. I mean there is something to that. It hasn't been tried before, it's worth trying something.

If you do signal, I mean there are stories about oil prices going down because Americans got the signal that prices were gonna be high and they stopped traveling as much during the summer vacation for example. Like that does happen every once in a while. But yeah, very, very odd to post anyway. Back on watches, the Watches of Espionage account says,

men who guide the destinies of the world will wear Rolex watches. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, John Dan Razine Kane in Situation Room during attacks on Iran wearing a Rolex GMT. Well, you need a GMT because you got to know what time it is in Iran. We got to start doing these.

This is a good one. This is a good one. I haven't seen this. I've seen the Merkel route. I've seen the, the, the, the, the, the brake cracking your knuckles, but this is, this is special. It's like four points of attack.

I mean, I guess they did hit four sites. So you got to point to all of them. Yeah. That's right. Interesting. Well, it's they did hit four sites. So you got to point to all of them. Yeah, you know, that's right Well, it's been an eventful morning. Yep, Iran attacked a US base in Qatar. Yes, that's the latest and people are basically saying that it's bullish because there were no casualties All of apparently all the missiles were taken out in the air. Yep, and this could lead to a de-escalation Yeah, and a return to a steady state of tension. Yeah.

This has been my position for a long time. I'm pretty anti-aggression, anti-war, but I'm extremely pro domes. Iron domes, golden domes. I want to be able to shoot down every missile before, as soon as it leaves, no matter where it's leaving from let's shoot it down Immediately from space from land do whatever you can but missiles bombs nuclear bombs these things should not be relevant in the future But Druva has a breakdown of this the strike package that destroyed the Iranian nuclear facility at four Dow The Iranian nuclear facility at Fordow represents over one year of US production capacity

of the GBU-57 Bunker Buster. It's primary explosive, AFX-757, is difficult to produce, and we don't have many factories to do it. It's why way more robots are necessary to do everything from production to automating research. I'll also note that China has been very interested in higher throughput production of this very compound for some time now.

Very interesting to see. Joe Weisenthal had some polymarket news. Bombing of the nuclear facility did not push down the market odds of Iran possessing a nuclear weapon in 2025. In fact, it's at the highest level of the day. I wonder what's driving that. Do you think that's more driven by, we didn't actually take them-

The former Russian president comes out and said, hey, we might just give them a nuke. That would be bad. Which would be bad. That would be bad. The other thing that's interesting, the Fordo nuclear facility destroyed before July, polymarket, is only sitting at a 32% chance still on 4 million in volume. So I think people are basically saying, calling that it wasn't actually destroyed.

Or at least that's what the market is saying so it is impacted but not Destroyed even a Trump came out Saturday night and claimed total annihilation. Mm-hmm Well the the crown prince of the opposition party gave a speech in Paris earlier We talked to Sherwin Pishvar about it earlier. You'll hear that. You'll hear that interview at 230 today and Shervin Pishvar about it earlier, you'll hear that interview at 2.30 today. And he launched a website to help recruit defectors. If you're designing a website, you gotta get on Figma. That's right.

Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. Go to figma.com. Combat Learjet says, my buddy was a B-2 pilot. He flew one of those extremely long missions several years ago. The mission was two pilots, 36.3 hours of flight time,

Missouri to Iraq and back to Missouri. The mission required five air refuelings, taking on over 500,000 or 500K kilograms maybe, 500 kilograms of gas total. These pilots are legends. Yeah, that's insane. Oh, I guess pounds, 500 pounds. I don't know.

Anyway, what a beast, a 36-hour grind. I never wanna hear you complain about, sitting at your desk for 10 hours or coming down on the weekend to do some PowerPoint or some Excel, the investment maker specifically. Oh, I work so long. No, 36 hours, get it done.

Yeah, really wild. Anyway Jacob Helberg was celebrating this very excited. He has been confirmed by the way and he says he's already shifting the conversation I think in a good direction. He says not a single Chinese humanoid robot should be sold on US soil. US government should preemptively ban Chinese humanoids in the US without delay in in all caps. And Jason Calcana says, "'The fact that you need to tweet this is crazy.'" You realize this was posted a year ago? Oh, this is a, whoa, and he just reposted it.

Yeah. Or he edited it or something. Yeah, so he was ahead of the curve. Oh, he's way ahead of the curve, yeah, yeah, yeah. But now he's part of the admin. Now he can tweet it. He can actually make some of this stuff happen. So, excited to see him. Yeah, we talked about this.

Why are we, you know, let's not allow what happened with DJI to happen again with a new robotic form factor. Yep. Anyway, there was some news that maybe the Johnny Ive OpenAI deal might not happen because OpenAI apparently scrubbed everything about Johnny Johnny Ive and Sam Altman off the website and YouTube it's just completely gone

YouTube video private blog post removed everything is gone I confirmed that you get a 404 when you go to the original web page Mark Gurman so everyone thought the deal was falling apart maybe Johnny Ive was getting poached by Zuck over at Metta that would be dramatic Mark Gurman has the story, he says, the Johnny Ivan opening idea is on track and has not dissolved or anything of the sort, I'm told. Here's what happened, they were sued over the name IO, and there was a restraining order issued by the judge.

They had to pull all materials with the name. That's interesting. Also interesting that they didn't, we knew that the name of the company was IO before this acquisition, right? No, it was Love From, and then they had an internal project called IO, and then it combined. I thought that we knew that the new project

was called IO like six months or a year ago. But they're suing now, this happens a lot. There's kind of multiple sides, we'll hear both of them. Nick, who I believe is more in the Elon camp, is saying that it's the beginning of the end for Sam Altman and Johnny Ives' project. He says, a federal judge has banned OpenAI to use the word IO to brand

for their upcoming AI hardware device. Little rough language there. The ruling caps a fierce trademark battle sparked by Silicon Valley startup IYO, similar but slightly different name, which spent the past six years developing its voice controlled AI wearable. The IYO-1 court filings revealed

an eyebrow raising series of events. So this is from IYO's point of view. I this is from IO's point of view. Yes. I'd say from 2018 to 2024, IO publicly showcased its earworn device, investing heavily to carve out its niche between 2022 and 2025. Altman's Apollo projects and IVE's Love From team participated in extensive pitch meetings, factory tours,

and hands-on testing of IO's product. On March 5, 2025, Altman declined investment in Io, disclosing he was working on something competitive, which ended up being called Io, i.io, not IYO. Said when OpenAI revealed a $6.5 billion venture named Io in May of 2025, Io's fundraising immediately stalled

as Sam Altman influenced investors to stop investing in May of 2025. IO's fundraising immediately stalled as Sam Altman influenced investors to stop investing in the small startup. Obviously these are all allegations. Yeah, what's interesting here is like, Sam invested in Humane and that project didn't really get to fruition. And so there's this question of like, it's possible that he was like, okay, idea is good

but team maybe can't deliver at scale or can't deliver as an independent venture, and so for that reason I'm out, and that's kind of clear. You also kind of know if you're pitching an investor that's actively running a huge company that you, like you can go pitch Mark Zuckerberg to be an angel investor, but if you're pitching him like Instagram 2.0,

you kind of know, okay, I'm letting the fox in the head house. Yeah, the thing that's clear here is that it's very possible that the company IYO has great grounds around the trademark if they've been operating for a while. And it is confusing, right? Even when we're seeing it out loud.

Also, IO, it's not such a good name that they have to stick with it. I would just change that name immediately. Yeah, I never thought the name was amazing. And I would rather just have it called the ChatGPT phone or something, or the OpenAI phone or something. There are other, they probably couldn't get away with that

because it sounds too much like iPhone, but there are other brand names that they could spin off of to create a device that's the open AI device, and they don't necessarily need to use that IO keyword, and so backing off of that seems fine. There's also this trend of when big dollars are changing hands, like six billion in this case, oftentimes there are folks that come out and file lawsuits

because just because there's a whole bunch of money changing hands, everyone wants it to change hands quickly, and so if you can show up and say, hey, I'm owed $100 million, a lot of people will just settle to make it go away. This happened to Palmer Lucky during the meta acquisition or the Facebook acquisition of Oculus.

There was a guy who came out and said, I invented VR, I have a patent, you have to pay me. Palmer went all the way to court bought it and won But it was still it was still framed in the press for a long time as like Palmer lucky stole the idea for virtual reality which of course is one of those things where it's like Okay, like the idea of virtual reality has been around for like decades if not like a hundred years Yeah, Palmer used he stood on the shoulders of giants, used some patents and some technology

and licensed some of that stuff. And so you might have a claim, there might be some sort of settlement, there might be all sorts of different things. But at the end of the day, there was no evidence that Palmer was like, literally cheating off his homework, like looking over there being like,

let me just take this to market. Also the general idea for virtual reality had been something that had been written about both in venture and in sci-fi for decades. And it's the same thing here. So here's what actually- This IEO device looks really cool. It's this headphone, but again, it's like,

our AirPods can do this in a couple years. What's interesting here is it's a potentially new type of product that could ultimately be similar to what OpenAI develops with Johnny Ive and LoveFrom. So the IO-IYO is a product designed to be an ear-worn device. The device uses 16 beam-forming microphones to create a quote-unquote audio display or an immersive audio environment for both speaking and listening. The IO-1 achieves this through the use of natural language.

The user does not have to learn, know, or memorize special commands, words, or gestures to cause the device to do what is asked of it. Instead, all the user needs to do is speak to the device naturally as though the user were conversing with a person. Yeah, I mean, like this feels like souped up AirPods in some ways or completely disruptive

and it ultimately depends on how great the software is, how great the interaction pattern is, the branding, the design, the go-to-market. It's not, I don't think that they own the idea of like put a thing near your ear and play sounds. Like that's not, like if OpenAI comes out with something that competes with this, I think we would more likely comp it to AirPods

and ask what is Apple doing to respond, how are the AirPods going to be a competitor in this category. I mean it's the same thing with the MetaQuest and the Apple Vision Pro. These are somewhat similar devices, screens on your face. They have slightly different design choices, but they're both in the same category.

I wouldn't say, oh, like, BZUK should 100% sue Apple for launching the Apple Vision Pro, right? Like, that is not, like, they don't own the idea of screen on your face. And I would say that Apple doesn't necessarily own the idea of audio in your ears, and Johnny Ive doesn't necessarily own that idea either.

So it's gonna be a much more nitty gritty question. You might be more quick to come to the defense of IYO if you knew they were funded by both Big Tech and Big Defense Tech. Lockheed Martin and Alphabet are both in the company. They've raised over $20 million in venture funding to date. So we'll see. Yeah, I mean, it could definitely be a valuable product,

but I think the game will be one in the execution of the software and the hardware, not strictly the idea of voice-first computing in your ear. That's not enough to win. Just like Serial United Faces. Yeah, in many ways, the AirPods have already done some re-adventure version of this for a while. Yeah, you can say, hey Siri,

and it'll talk to you a little bit. It's like they're not executing well. Or you can call your executive assistant and say, hey, can you book this up for me? Hey, can you call this person? Hey, can you schedule this? Hey, can you book me a flight? Yes.

In many ways, they're just trying to recreate a great EA. Yes, well, whatever IAYO is building, they gotta get on Vanta, they gotta automate compliance, they gotta manage risk, and they gotta prove trust continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the 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. But yeah, I mean, these lawsuits are always interesting, could wind up being a big settlement. I mean, if they can even get $40 million from the $6.5 billion in a settlement, that's a series B for them. They get to keep going, keep building.

That's probably a good outcome for them. Maybe they can give them a change of name. I think this is the most attention. The name is crazy. The most attention. If they spin this and say, hey, the OpenAI team spent years ordering our products, meeting with the fitting specialists,

doing all this stuff. Because it's so great, maybe they'll get some orders out of it. And you know the best thing for everyone in this scenario? What's that, John? We're going to get some emails and discovery that are going to go on big tech history emails, the X account. And you know we're going to find some funny back and forths between Johnny Ive and Sam Almond.

Speaking of lawsuits and emails and discovery, Elon's lawyers are apparently claiming that he doesn't have a computer as part of the lawsuit between OpenAI. Who doesn't have a computer? Elon. Elon doesn't have a computer. So he doesn't use a computer.

He doesn't even have a work computer. You posted this earlier today. I found this out because I posted earlier, Elon doesn't use a computer. It doesn't even have a work computer. You posted this early I posted yes, I posted earlier if your CEO has a quote-unquote work computer and a personal computer It's time to start polishing your resume. And so somebody responded to that with notes to We basically claims that How does Elon play Diablo? Well, he probably has a gaming rig a gate. Oh, it's a rig. It's not a computer Yeah, but the the verge post this your honor my client doesn't have a computer. He has a rig

He has a gaming oh you want access to his rig. Yeah, where he plays games on yeah Yeah, you want you want to see if he's really back people that would actually definitely want that for sure. The setup. Yeah, I don't know, maybe the second greatest Diablo player of all time will subpoena that information. Be like, I want actual data, how many hours did he log? I need to know the real account information. So Wired is reporting this morning that the claim appeared in a court filing

related to Elon Musk's ongoing lawsuit against Sam Altman in OpenAI. He said that the lawsuit also flags that he has posted about his laptop numerous times in the last year. So people are trying to put him in the truth zone. That is crazy. So he doesn't have a computer,

he doesn't have any apps installed on a computer, he doesn't have any apps installed on a computer, he doesn't have linear installed on his computer? I'm sure his team does. His team must because how would they get anything done without a purpose-built tool for planning and building products? Like they need a system for modern software development. How else would they streamline issues, projects, and product roadmaps? How else would they run such a big service with so few people on their team? It would make no sense.

Unless everyone is just significantly. I think we're going to find the computer. And when we find Elon Musk's computer, we're going to find it. There's going to be one app on there. One app, linear. And it's linear. For sure. That's right.

Linear.app. An anonymous little birdie told me that he does have a gaming PC with an ultra massive screen and indeed does not have a work computer. Hello. So pretty base. Okay, anyway, Wealthfront is filing to go public. Very exciting.

We've heard about this FinTech platform before. They- Seems like the window is open, John. The window is wide open. if you're a series D company series C company series B company maybe clearly gets out who knows clearly get out with Chamath It's possible anything's possible Windows open so go for it if you're a founder our advice to you just go public Just take your company public and then go on a generational run,

compounding it 40% a year stock price for decades. You have a couple decades. That's all it takes. And then you'll be in the mag seven. Yeah, in many ways if you go public earlier, those initial years can be easier because it's such a small base. Yeah, everyone says, oh,

the SEC requirements are so difficult, and you could be short sellers, could attack you. It's like that's just inspiration to grind harder. With putting up incredible quarter of a quarter results. Blow them out, blow out the shorts. Speaking of the public markets, Anthony Pompliano posted this morning, today I'm announcing a $1 billion merger to create ProCap Financial,

a Bitcoin native financial services firm. The company will be a publicly traded entity on NASDAQ at the conclusion of the proposed business combination between my private company Procap, BTC LLC, and Columbus Circle Capital Corp. Corp. 1, a publicly traded spec. The ticker for the publicly traded entity right now is CCCM and he has raised over 750 million dollars they will focus on acquiring Bitcoin for their balance sheet while also developing products and services to

produce revenue and profit from Bitcoin on our balance sheet let's give it up some people would say that should be the first goal. But it's the third goal. Let's give it up for revenue and profit, everybody. We love it. Love to see it. Try to be the Warren Buffett of Bitcoin. Buy companies, invest in Bitcoin,

funnel the Bitcoin back in and buying more companies, produce more Bitcoin, and the flywheel continues. That's right. And that's the goal. Well, whatever company he buys, gotta put them on Numeral, numeralhq.com, sales tax on autopilot, spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance.

Should we do some of the downstream fallout from Cluely? Who didn't even know if it's fallout or something? Yeah, I just wanted to cover this post from Will Brown first. Oh yeah. Zuck hired Alex Wang for a half to 1% equity. He's basically a founding engineer. Thought that was good when the 15 billion number

was being thrown around just a week ago. Everybody was freaking out, but it's barely a point. Yeah, I mean, we identified that. It's like, what would it take for Alex Wang to move Mameda's market cap 1%? Well, like, I don't know, a great llama five release, that would probably do it, right? Like, there's a ton of things.

There's a lot of opportunity. If you're just talking about that being the stakes, it's not that he has to overnight double the company in size. He just has to, you know, implement a rational and effective AI strategy. Ben Thompson was talking about this earlier today. For a multi-trillion dollar opportunity. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And there's so many places where AI products can have an impact. Ben Thompson was talking about this, this idea that the researchers are really important, but what Zuck has been on a terror about is hiring actually great managers. When you look at Daniel Gross, Nat Friedman, Alexander Wong, like these guys are,

the criticism, they're not researchers, but that's actually probably the benefit to the strategy because we are in the application war right now. We are in the implementation of these AI tools, and the capabilities of the models are clearly way, way ahead of the actual foundation models, like the actual science that's happened. I was thinking about this just like,

for Instagram during the Dolly moment, I was like, I wonder what would happen if you just took every single person's on Instagram, their most recent photo, and ghibli'd it, studio ghibli'd it, and just sentli'd it and just sent them to it, sent it to them proactively. It would cost a ton of money to do this in the inference. But you do that, you send it to everyone,

and you just say, would you like to post this? I bet you have the biggest day on Instagram ever, right? Because you're just creating all this viral fuel for the day. Or what does it take to distill that model down, bake it into just a filter? So when you upload a photo, you can just select the studio Ghibli thing it runs efficiently and that's almost that's not really a research Task it's more of like product management and I'm not even like a product manager at Instagram, right?

It's like for product manager but like those types of like the volition that it'll take and the will and the Incentive alignment that it'll take to actually roll out a product like that and really push the team to be like no We want to spend all this money rendering these Ghibli's because we think this is a calculated risk that will put us back in the AI image conversation. Or we want to spend all this money to just still down images, image generation diffusion

to a point where it can just be a filter button on the Instagram app. Those are product management, those are cost, it's almost like more of a CFO question than a research question at this point. Like we know that the Ghibli filter is doable and it's great and so how do you actually get it out into the world effectively?

And that's more of a manager discussion. So he's basically a founding engineer, but I think he's going into more of like a C-suite role. So we'll keep tracking it. Anyway, should we keep going into the AI application later with the rapper of all rappers, Clueli? The final rapper, the final boss of rappers. Yeah, we should get Tyler's take on this

because the question that I think people are digging into is that Clueli, like the easy take was like, oh, this is like Ther Clue Lee it's like the easy the easy take was like oh, it's this is like Theranos And it's like I don't think it's like Theranos at all like the product works like you you tried it and You would agree that it is a real product. Yes. Yeah for sure It's it does what it advertises. It does what it ever advertises now There are some questions about like the actual long-term value there, or I think the risk, the bare case for Clueless is-

The risk is that the opportunity does not align with the marketing strategy. So like the opportunity for helping students with their homework and this sort of like traditional nature of cheating aligns with the marketing strategy. I think they can dominate there. The enterprise opportunity of let me intake

all the information from every call that you have internally, every sales call that you have, every, you know. That's a very competitive space. That's a very competitive space that the labs will probably wanna own because it's very valuable data Yeah, you can imagine open AI having a desktop application. That's permanently running. They already do they already have a yeah But they haven't adopted that pattern degree and so yeah, the risk is like is like if if if the pattern really works and people are like this is what we want we

always want the screen really works and people are like, this is what we want, we always want the screen capture and constant responses from LLMs, like if it's a really big opportunity, you're gonna face competition from the really big labs. If it's a smaller opportunity, it's hard to kind of scale up. So there's a lot of discussion there. The other pushback was high level, why are we funding these types of businesses that are loud

and not truly sort of bending the world in any type of positive direction? And it has the cheating angle, which some people, I think that was very intentional. Yeah, I think it was basically like a rage and troll. The pushback I would have there is like, it seems like there is enough venture capital right now. Like if you have a great idea in hard tech,

defense tech, manufacturing, et cetera, you will be funded. And it's, you know, it's, it's not like some great, you know, manufacturing American dynamism business is not getting $15 million this week because Clueless got 15 last week. And so it's not zero sum. We had some good reactions. Kevin, AKA Plant Daddy, was quoting a segment from our interview and said, Roy was basically saying there's not enough viral content,

which is actually interesting. Take his take at a high level as if you make something great, novel, engaging, it just will naturally go viral because there's actually a scarcity of like viral content. I think it's an interesting point and I think that he's probably right to some degree. Kevin fired back at a high level and said,

this is not correct while it is true that when, oh, and sorry, the last thing, Roy was basically saying that consumption has just shifted so dramatically to TikTok, which is a new form factor. And so that's changed the dynamics. Kevin is an active creator, I believe on YouTube, and I'm sure he's everywhere. So he was just firing back.

He says, this is not correct while it is true that when TikTok blew up in 2020, there was a brief moment where there wasn't enough short form content to satisfy consumption. That lasted 12 to 18 months. I remember it well because I was one of the first gardening accounts on TikTok in 2019. It was free back then, literally any video popped off.

Then millions of new creators came onto the scene, coupled with 10X reduced friction in creating content due to TikTok's native editor filter and cap cut. You saw an explosion of short form videos. So both the number of creators and number of videos dramatically increased. Consumption just increased even more because the videos were all five to 15 seconds long.

So one scrolling session equals a hundred videos instead of 50 to 70% of one YouTube video. It's not true that for the next six to 12 months, anything that you post has a potential to go viral, will go viral. That's only true when there's a paradigm shift and all platforms have to catch up. The phase where IG Meta released reels

and YouTube released shorts to catch up to TikTok was truly a free attention grab era. And thousands of creators made a fat bag during that era. From 2020 to 2022, I grew Epic Gardening from 300,000 to something like eight million across all platforms. It was that free. That time isn't today though. Says, I think what you're seeing right now with Cluely

is someone applying a Mr. B style hyperscale influencer content model into something that VCs will salivate over B2C AI. Whether anything comes of it is another story, but it is somewhat comical to see the tech VC space go crazy for the viral attention grabbing when the type of attention they're grabbing as well as the scale of it is dwarfed

by almost any top 1% creator of which there are thousands of. Yeah, Christian Kyle was pointing out that Clueli is getting millions of views on X, but only a few thousand views on YouTube, and so it's very, very platform specific. And yeah, but Roy is really fantastic at applying the viral playbook that works for X on X,

and it's been very successful. I think they're successful on other platforms too, but it is interesting. Yeah, and it's interesting, Slow Ventures created a fund. Megan Lightcap over there runs it. We've had her on the show, I believe, right? We had Sam. I don't know if we actually had Megan on, but we should.

Basically saying, hey, there's all these creators that are getting a massive amount of attention. If they have capital, they can monetize it. So some people are paying attention to this. It's still, like, I've been surprised by how much the cheating buzzword has been really controversial. It seemed very clear to me that that was deliberately edgy and just kind of an edgelord statement

and that it was pretty clear that the tool was very much just like embracing the new norm of co-pilots happening everywhere, and that cheating was deliberately used as a word to kind of spark controversy. But it really is acting as baggage on Roy, and so Sarah Guo over conviction said, we should celebrate hacking, not cheating.

Cheating quietly pockets extra monopoly money, insider trading, plagiarism, inflated metrics. Hacking openly flips the game board, exposing rigged rules and inventing a better game for everyone. Wikipedia replaced Britannica, Airbnb monetized spare rooms, Linux openly challenged Windows.

Both break the rules, but hacking doesn't compromise integrity. It reveals the old game wasn't worth playing. Yeah, it's interesting because he could have totally reframed the Clueless launches as hack everything, hack dating, hack your online interviews or whatever. And it probably would have been much less viral, but much less controversial.

Yeah. But it'd be the same thing. The other thing is give yourself superpowers in any of these domains, right? Yeah. I mean, the co-pilot thing is the friendliest framing of all of this, right? It's like, yeah, it's just something to help you out.

Autocomplete, saying autocomplete for everything is not nearly as viral. And many people have said that over the last year. And I think this is what Roy is already battling with, is he, I think, generally has good intentions, right? He has his own intentions around, he clearly is excited about being famous. In many ways, he already is a niche tech celebrity.

Over 100K followers. But at the same time, he already is a niche tech celebrity. Over 100K followers. But at the same time, he does want the respect of insiders. And you can tell that from some of his comments over the weekend and replies. So anyways, he's young. He's going to figure it out. Well, if he's going to try and sell this into enterprise at some point, he's got to get an Adio, customer relationship

magic. Adio is the AI native CRM that builds, scales, and grows your company to the next level. Lulu continued the conversation saying, one thing Clueli got really right is hiring only marketing people who have already built large followings on their own. Any marketing person that isn't bringing you an audience

is just being subsidized by yours. I thought this was a good take. I don't know how, it's tricky because many people who have built large followings have their own businesses, but Roy's clearly created some sort of like great relationship with them such that they can come in and earn a paycheck and at some point get paid very highly. Kind of unclear how much is cash and stock,

but it's enough to get people to step back from a Tic-Tac account that's 100,000 followers or something like that, but that type of person Kind of unclear how much is cash and stock but it's enough to get people to step back from a Tick-tock account that's a hundred thousand followers or something like that But that type of person understands the algorithm and actually can do marketing more effectively and so I think there is an interesting lesson there in that the new marketing like we transitioned from from Resumes to github profiles for hiring programmers We've seen this with folks that the interns we focused that we've hired where someone will come in and say from resumes to GitHub profiles for hiring programmers. We've seen this with folks, the interns that we've focused, that we've hired where someone will come in and say,

I built this this weekend, here's an example of what I can build, or here's an example of something I built in the past, an open source project. And the equivalent in the marketing world now is building some sort of following, and actually understanding content creation at some level. And so, yeah, it's very bullish. Maybe marketing departments should be doing

more proactive outreach to folks that are building large followings but not quite monetizing them just yet and saying, hey, you clearly understand Instagram, TikTok, whatever you're doing, you should come inside the organization and work here in our marketing team, which I think can make sense. Dillon Field had some alternative framing of the Cluely story.

He said, Cluely isn't just good marketing. Roy hacked the algo feed with an anti-fragile mimetic virus and the more energy you throw at it, the stronger it gets. Well, here we are throwing more energy at the mimetic virus, baby. That's what it's all about. We can move on from Cluelin a little bit. Teddy Blank says, Roy Lee disturbs people

because by any measure he should be a successful crypto slash forex influencer, core sales hustler, but instead he chose B2B SaaS and it feels unnatural. Funny that he's saying B2B SaaS because the previous post by PlantDaddy said B2C SaaS. And so no one even knows. Well, Roy said they're doing both.

They're doing both, I guess, yeah. They'll sell to willing buyers at market prices. Also interesting in the open source world, Ian has the story, while Clueless spent that $15 million on marketing videos, this random guy on Reddit built an open source, the exact same project. Always interesting to see when these open source projects

break through because I remember there was a competitor to Devon, OpenDevon, that was open sourced and everyone was like Devon's cooked. But we saw the data and it seems like Devon's producing tons and tons of GitHub pull requests and has a very different go to market motion and that for a lot of enterprises that are doing re-platforming of their.NET application to Python,

they might not want to use an open source product. They might want to have a team there that's actively improving the project on a daily basis. And so the open source did not kill Devin in that case. In fact, their more significant competition comes from OpenAI and another large enterprise scaled $100 billion company, not just some random developer. comes from OpenAI and another large enterprise scaled, you know, $100 billion company,

not just some random developer. On the flip side, we saw DeepSeek and Manus come out with open source projects. Manus? But not quite these like, you know, I just open sourced it and made it free. Like DeepSeek and Manus, nobody would call those like true side projects.

So it's unclear how much this will affect. At the same time, if you are hesitant about sending screen recordings to Clueless, maybe open source is the one that you actually wanna run. You wanna run this locally because of a privacy issue. But it will be interesting to see whether or not this is a factor in Cluely's rollout. I would be surprised if this is something

that makes a difference to them. I would imagine it's much more about. Yeah, they're clearly marketing to people that don't know how to run open source software. Totally, yeah, yeah, yeah. The thing that was interesting, Gary Tan shared, are people building brands ahead of the tech just to try to hold space right at the moment

that the just right models hit? Somebody named Ethan Ding was highlighting that he was comparing Cluely and Icon, both of which have been very controversial. Ethan said, I'm surprised no one's connected Roy Lee's playbook to the Icon ad maker playbook a couple months back. Have an unusable product, dominate mind share for potential buyers,

buy time for the AI to catch up to bail you out. I don't, you know, Roy Lee's product is not unusable. We used it on the show Friday. It worked for the use case that they advertise the most. They clearly are dominating mind share. The question is, will AI catching up actually enable them to win in the enterprise or these categories?

The issue is that the two categories is that Clueless is going after being effectively like B to C, so like students, and B to B, enterprise, are two categories that chat GBT is already dominant in. And so the question again is, are they gonna be able to win head to head with OpenAI, even if OpenAI doesn't have as many viral TikToks

being produced in-house? So. Yeah, he calls out the risk of churn here. I think that's very real. I think the bigger question is, Cluelessly and very much is wrapper, but at the same time, it's not trying to compete on the foundation model level.

And so if the models get better, Cluelessly should get better. And so you are very much riding the rocket or riding the wave of technological improvement, which seems like a good strategy. I guess it just keeps coming down to the question of if this is truly the UI paradigm that people want to interact with ChatGPT through, you would expect the ChatGPT app to launch this.

But, you know, who knows? Maybe it gets popular and maybe there's other pockets of opportunity that come through and there's a bunch of... In other news, Mark Gurman was reporting over the weekend, he said Apple will need to leave its M&A comfort zone to succeed in AI, basically calling out that Apple has held various early conversations with different companies like Perplexity

and ThinkMachines around potential acquisition. People were pressing him saying, why Perplexity? Mark responded, which looks like it's an output from ChatGBT. I don't know. It's not. It's not? It's from his article. He actually wrote this. It's got output from chat GBT. I don't know. It's not This it's got so many and look how many m-dashes it has though John wait no no I think I actually maybe this is from I don't know. I'm confused. I can't tell anymore. Yeah, this might be from chat You see I thought so he says a proven consumer ready product

It fills a clear need a decently sized team and a reasonable valuation at around 14 billion perplexity wouldn't break the bank. And the timing too is interesting. Apple's long running search deal with Google is under threat from a US antitrust suit. This iPhone maker has to prepare for a post Google search world and acquiring perplexity would allow it to finally launch its own Apple branded search engine.

My question about perplexity would allow it to finally launch its own Apple branded search engine? My question about perplexity going to Apple is, what is perplexity building on top of that wouldn't be an issue in an Apple acquisition? Because I don't think that they trained a foundation model themselves, and I don't think they necessarily wrote a massive web scraper, so I feel like they might

be sitting on top of a few APIs that might be renegotiated if all of a sudden Apple's the buyer on the other side. So Google Search or Bing, I think Bing also had for a long time an API where you could search the web using Bing and resell that as a product. But if Apple's the buyer, it's gonna be a different conversation with Microsoft,

right? So they use a number of different, they have their sonar family of models, those are perplexities, in-house models, then they have R1 1776, which was a DeepSeek, then they have a bunch of different third-party models that they use Open AI and throw pick Yeah, X AI so they're they're routing to a bunch of different

But they say the default model is optimized for speed and web browsing delivering fast relevant answers. So yeah, it's like city's been solid I Use it once a day. I don't know if I do at least once a day I don't think I don't know if I... Oh, you do? At least once a day, I don't know if I'd use it if I wasn't running the show, but I get value from it day to day. Yep. I'm not sure if it'll happen. It certainly makes sense.

I posted over the weekend that Siri was an acquisition. And so even though Apple has this culture of let's never acquire anything, or let's never build everything in-house, everything needs the Apple polish, they do have a lineage of acquisition, although Siri was a much smaller acquisition much earlier stage. 200 million. 200 million, and think siri had been around for like a couple years

Kind of similar and if you think about what I mean, it's with inflation 200 million in 2010. It's a hundred times as expensive. It is it is a big big deal, but still It's you know know, it could happen. Well, in more important news, the All In podcast released their new tequila brand over this weekend in LA. There was quite a lot of pushback, but I thought the bottle was quite unique

and I would be down to sample it. I would be down to sample it as well. Also people were saying oh this is so out of character but Elon Musk has Tesla tequila and Donald Trump has Trump tequila apparently and so or liquor brands I guess Trump has a liquor brand and so this is this is a proven proven strategy. Anyway we have our first guest of the show our second guest technically since we already have that call in the CEO of Klarna. Welcome to the stream. How are you? What's going on? Welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. I was just realized

the light in here is very, very odd, but I hope this is fun. I think you look great. You're good. You're good. Thank you so much. I imagine you had to stay up late for this. So we always appreciate it when someone can do that Would you mind last man in the office? It looks like yeah leading by example Exactly, this is what you see some more people here than me. Yeah, you know, no your team said this about you They said that you're you're you're obsessed with artificial intelligence right now obsessed with digging in the weeds tinkering with stuff Probably goes back to the the early history of the company. Maybe that'd be a good place to start. How did you actually, like, what was the inciting element or the inciting

incident that led you to start the company? Wow. Well, so as you may know, I've been at this for longer than many others. So I'm at the 20th year of this venture. An overnight success. An overnight success. this venture an overnight success But I was 23 back then so not bad yeah What did you ever have a real job or did you go straight in lunch I had many jobs I had many jobs. I yeah, you know, I started working when I was a 15 year old at Burger King

flipping burgers. That's great. Were you any good? What? Were you any good? Flipping burgers. Yeah, I think we actually had a competition for making Whoppers really fast.

No way. With quality. With quality. I think I scored pretty well. That's awesome. Good, good. So yeah, walk me through to that. History of greatness.

So 15 year flipping burgers, 23, you're starting a massive tech company that will go on a 20 year run. What happened in between? Very shortly, well, first look, you know, for whatever reason I always dreamt to be an entrepreneur, kind of odd thing to do as a kid. My father really wanted me to be a doctor, but I was inspired by Richard Branson and Ingvar Kampra, the founder

of IKEA and stuff. And I went to business school, bad idea, I should have learned to code the first thing I did, but that was a bad idea. But anyways, and then you know, after a few years of just like testing a lot of different jobs, I ended up by very odd story, going around the world without flying, coming back too late to continue my university studies. And as a consequence, ending up as a sales guy at a factoring firm that was doing like account receivables, last thing in the world I ever thought I would work with. And at that point of time, I realized there was a lot of these very small newcomer

e-commerce companies that were selling stuff online and they needed a better payment solution because their customers didn't trust them then trust that they would ship so they preferred the idea of buy now pay later where you would first receive the product and then kind of pay for it once you had it and that was pretty much the beginning of climate that makes sense. Amazing. Yeah. That's awesome. Yeah, walk me through the more recent developments. How big is the company today? So we're about 100 million users worldwide. We do about $100 billion worth of payments volume annually.

There's about half a million merchants, but a lot of them are really large. So there's like Nike, Macy's, Sephora, Walmart nowadays. And and yeah, what else on number of employees about 3000 people? Yeah, well, yeah, what was the what was the initial go to market? I seem to remember, there were specific dynamics in Europe around cash on delivery being a unique kind of vector into growth. Can you walk me through kind of like what the early go to market was and how and and it like it seems

like you almost like leapfrogged the technology curve a little bit. Well the truth is funny, even in the US, if you look at the beginning of credit bureaus, they actually, a lot of them started as mail order companies where the first credit was provided actually by you shipping a product and asking for cash on delivery. And then the third time you shipped to that same address, you would say, well, this customer seems to have money

every time I ship to them, So I'm going to provide them a small credit line credit line. That was actually the beginning of a lot of credit bureaus, even in the US back in the early 20th century. So I kind of same thing happened across Europe across the US. So the idea of doing like cash on delivery, and then turning that into a credit line based on the performance of that customer always having cash at hand when they were buying those products or paying for those products that they ordered at that point on time mail order catalog orders,

right? That that actually worked. So in the end, to us, when online came along, most people were offering debit card payments. And the problem with debit card payments is the customer ships money and then maybe receives what was on that picture that they ordered. And so basically offering credit, not necessarily for the purpose of lending, but more for that kind of security of getting and touching the product before you paid for it. It made a lot of sense, especially in markets

where credit cards were not as prevalent as they were in the US, right? Yeah, what was the, as you were looking at the global map of expansion, what informed where you go next? As you were looking at the global map of expansion, what informed where you go next? Walk me through the different markets that you had at the top of the list and how you chose to kind of rank those

as you expanded the business. How soon did you know the American consumer was undefeated? You had to be here. We like stuff. We like stuff. We like stuff. Exactly. Funny enough, it took a lot of years before we realized the user's mark. I mean, first and foremost, like when we started, you have to remember, at that point in time, there was one, one globally successful European tech startup, and that was Skype. That was it. Like Skype was the thing.

Everything else had been launched out of Silicon Valley. There was no real European tech success of that size that had like global consumer, you know, recognition, right? And hence to us, it was like, okay, where are we going to go from Sweden? Let's go to the massive market called Finland. That is half the size of Sweden, because it's very close. And we kind of know what it means, right? So we kind of started with expansion in the Nordics, then went to like Germany, which was a huge thing for us. Figure that out. And then went to UK.

And we always thought that we never like figured out how are we gonna come into the US market because credit cards are so prevalent. But the funny thing that we hadn't realized was due to the financial crisis in 07, there was a lot of regulation introduced that made it much harder to get a credit card. One thing that kind of sounds sane

is that credit card companies couldn't advertise in campuses anymore. Which is one of their most common places to sign up credit card holders. Really? And so there was a lot of that regulation. So it meant that between 2010 and 20, debit cards in the US grew like,

a credit card's volume grew about 2x, debit card volume grew 10x. And so actually, rather than us figuring out how to be successful in the US, it was the other way around. The US market became more like the European markets with much higher debit card penetration, whereby now PayLater and the kind of products that we offered became much more relevant suddenly for this new consumers that didn't have credit cards to the same extent or didn't where buy now pay later and the kind of products that we offered became much more relevant suddenly for this new consumers that didn't have credit cards

to the same extent or didn't have as much credit limit as they used to have historically, right? Yeah, what was the rollout like in Finland, Germany, the U.S. from a regulatory perspective? Do you have to get like banking licenses, is there approval, is it mostly like regulatory or are you more focused on the engineering challenges, setting up servers, localization? All of them. All of the above. But I think from a regulatory perspective, we quickly

identified that it would be a benefit to be fully licensed over time. So about 10 years ago, we did get our bank license. And we were fortunate that the EU had implemented legislation that meant that you could take your Swedish bank license and passport it across all the European countries, right? So we run on the Swedish bank license, but it's applicable for all. And it included UK up until Brexit, right? So that worked for a long period of time.

But obviously, technology was an important challenge for us as well. What are the knock-on effects of having a bank license? I talk to FinTech founders all the time where it feels like they're in the money moving business but then you find out they have all this float and they're making a ton of money on treasury bills or something like that. Is there an aspect of your business where you can actually drive more profit and bottom line on the basis of having that bank license or is that less relevant and then I want to

go from there into stable coins and what's going on and how that might be changing the market. So I think that the in our case what you're referencing is kind of funny enough something we have underutilized the Kloner which is the ability to generate the deposits and kind of earn enough, something we have underutilized the Clona, which is the ability to generate the deposits in kind of urban interest of those deposits, right? Funny enough. And that's something we're addressing right now where we're introducing more products and services

in that area. But where the big advantage for us was, if you look at like the history over those 20 years of a lot of fintechs who were credit providers, a lot of them offechs who were credit providers, a lot of them offloaded their balance sheet and did so effectively up until at some point in time, something went wrong in the underwriting model and it turned out that the losses were higher than they expected.

At which point of time, the people that had taken on their balance sheets realized that they wanted to shift the liability back to the fintech. But the fintech was not capital-wise equipped to take that on, meaning that their valuations either collapsed or the whole thing went bankrupt. And this happened over and over again if you look at a lot of the fintechs over the last 20 years. In our case, the benefit of having deposits is we are a bank. We're fairly capitalized as a bank. We need to hold the same capital that any large bank needs to do in comparison to

our balance sheet. And it means that we're much better equipped, like even if our losses go up and down or whatever, it doesn't change the sentiment of our balance sheet, doesn't mean that we can dry up funding, we're not dependent on the funding in the market. The whole thing that went down in 07, right, which was the problem, where basically we only have deposits that are insured by the government and so forth, right? So it gives us a much more stable way

of funding the bank, basically. Then on stable coins, is there any benefit to you there? We've heard stories about lower fees and faster payments, and obviously there's a massive, you know, the frequency of payments across the Clarn network is massive are you looking at it have you already looked at it what's your takeaway on on stable coins or the the genius act that is seems on the cusp of passing. We've had fintech CEOs on the show that have said actually traditional

banking rails can be pretty awesome if you utilize them properly. So curious how well you're doing this. I think that the, I have been one of the crypto skeptics for a long period of time. And the reason for that is when like I started playing around with this stuff in 10 years ago, I felt that, you know, I always ask myself like, how's this technology gonna make my mom's life better? Like, how's it gonna make our products

and our customers experience better? And I didn't really see any benefits of the technology apart from the fact like people have been speculating that it's an interesting asset and alternative asset to hold, right? Like Bitcoin or whatever. But then I gave it a second chance, a second look. Now one, about a year ago, started looking at next generation of stable calling implications and implementations. And I very much agree with the fact that like now the technology is showing strong promise both in its speed, in its costs, etc, etc, versus the traditional bank rates,

especially, especially obviously, in international transfers, in orders that are more like, you know, you're moving money from like UK to US, you're probably not going to make that big of a difference. But if you're moving money from, you know, Brazil to, let's say, Greece, oh, sorry, that was a euro country, stupid idea, stupid suggestion. But another one, which with a smaller currency, you're going to have a very real benefit of it, right? So I think that stable calls definitely are going to be a major thing. I think also like crypto is here to stay and the bitcoins of the world are here to stay as assets,

right? That people find are interesting assets in their portfolio. So I don't think crypto is here to stay and the bitcoins of the world are here to stay as assets, right, that people find are interesting assets in their portfolio. So I don't think that's gonna change either anytime soon. Yeah, I'm always interested in where the value will accrue with these technological shifts, specifically like with stable coins, you can imagine if you're going from two-day settlement to instant settlement,

well, if the customer would accept one day settlement, all of a sudden you have one day afloat that's gonna sit there that you could kind of keep as your own margin and maybe put in T-bills and maybe it gets to be a big number and so I've been kind of trying to understand when time is money and when time decreases and systems get faster, you can pass all of that along,

you can pass half of it along, and there's different things that different companies can do based on the consumer preferences. So it's interesting. I think you're totally right, but that also means that in some degree, which is something I tell my investors, right, it's a race to the bottom.

Like this payments industry has had a, you know, combined revenue globally addressable market of like $2 trillion or whatever. It's not going to stay that way. There's no there's no real good reason why it's more costly to send money than send an email, right? There's a little bit more risk involved. There's a little bit more like, you know, security involved. But in essence, you're just like shifting data between two accounts. And so like, in some to some degree that like, that those kind of solutions will drive that also means that the revenue generated from these services will be significantly lower than it is today. What's your broad, not to go too broad, but what's I'm curious to get your broad market

outlook right now, you have this interesting view into consumers, companies all over the world. It's a very interesting time right now. We have geopolitical instability. We have, you know, and effectively war. We have tariffs, trade wars all happening at once. Yet at the same time, you know, we've seen circles when public and is now trading higher, I guess,

higher than Coinbase. Yeah. You know, so that seems like the general excitement around capital marches on. Yeah, capital is marching on. But yeah, how are you thinking about markets broadly from your view? To me, from my perspective, because of kind of the deep interest that I've taken into AI and try to understand the

implications and how to apply the technology, I am very much convinced that it will have implications on white collar jobs. If effectively you can have like economical swings that you know, recession, non recession, it may, you know, higher inflation, higher cost pressure, and so forth may have some implications for consumers' sentiment of spending, you know, I don't like I'm gonna spend a bit more, I'm gonna spend a bit less, and so forth. But the true life-changing moment that affects people's true ability to pay back, right, is to a large

degree, loss of jobs, right? If you lose your job, then it severely impacts your ability to do so. I think that the key question now is to what degree we're going to see an acceleration of loss of jobs among white collar people, which in itself then potentially leads to a recession and less spending in that group of people, which is obviously a group of people that have had a lot of money. So I think that's the area that I'm like mostly because the tariffs so far obviously have been announced and kind of changed and then announced again and changed and so forth. And now it almost feels like if I look at our merchants, when the first tariffs were

announced on Labor Day, they really did adjust their marketing spending. We saw changes in the transaction volumes. We saw, for example, some of the larger Chinese companies that we work with would shift their marketing spending from US to Europe and would try to offset more of their inventory in the European market as opposed to the US market etc. But as now also like there's been more and more like turbulence around these things, people start also discounting it saying like yeah it was announced this week but who knows what's going to happen next week. And so we're not going to draw too early conclusions from this.

We're not going to change, you know, the business of what we're doing until we know it's for real, right. And until it's actually going to happen. So I don't actually see currently in the trends, the direct implications of the terrorists themselves in our business. But, and I'm more just like, trying to second guess if I'm going to see a major change in the In job and what do you do?

The other thing is you're kind of hedged in some way and that that I think people would be more likely to use Klarna if they have if they you know In some ways have reduced spending capacity or you know, you or more likely to leverage a product. I'm curious, just getting more specific around this, what is your updated hiring strategy throughout the rest of this year and next year? What are you hiring? What areas are you hiring in or kind of shifting away from?

So we, about almost now two years ago, after experimenting with ChachiPT and so forth for a few months, our conclusion was that this will lead, this will change our ability to get more done with less people. And that we believed that in an AI world, revenue per Ampli will be a very key metric, because the higher revenue you have per employee,

the more profit you make per employee means that you can spend more on marketing, means you can acquire more customers, which you can scale more. So if you have a low revenue customer, you'll be less competitive basically. And so for us, the question then was, how do we catch those efficiency gains? And so we decided to stop hiring about two years ago. At that point of time, we were about 5,500 people. And since then, we shrank to about 3,000 employees that we are currently, which is basically through natural attrition,

because in a tech company, about 20% will leave on an annual basis voluntarily because they're going for other jobs, other opportunities. And so by just being very strict in not rehiring, we have been able to shrink down the company and continue to do so. Now we've hired a little bit, doesn't mean that we haven't hired at all. We've hired in some areas and so forth. But if you look at the net, you can see that we've shrank from about 5,500 to 3,000. And then what we

also done is internally, we've been very honest and open about this. And we've communicated to our levies that what's going to happen is the gains because obviously, this means our labor costs are shrinking, while our revenue actually has been growing, right? So revenue, as a consequence of that, our revenue per MP went from about 400k to about over a million now, which is a kind of equivalent to where Goldman Sachs is. Now next, yeah, thanks. Next step is, is kind of equivalent to where Goldman Sachs is. Now next step, yeah, thanks. Next step is kind of, you know,

Apple, Netflix being at $2 million. I sometimes joke because like OnlyFans is at like $30 million. Don't go there. Don't look at Tether. Don't look at Tether. We'll have you looking at net income per employee. Yeah, exactly.

So I'm not sure that's a great comparison you wanna have. But the thing is that like, anyway, so I'm not sure that's a great comparison you want to have. But the thing is that like, the anyway, so we are continuing down that path. And the point is that what we've communicated internally, however, is that as the total labor cost shrinks, we are reinvesting that in an acceleration of compensation for our existing employees. So as they participate in the efficiency gains, we have been able to accelerate both equity and cash compensation at Klarna to our existing employees more than we had in previous years.

And that's kind of a way for them to share the benefits with the shareholders of the efficiency gains that this creates. Right. So if you're a new grad and you want to get a job at Klarna and make a career out of it, maybe be there for 20 years and earn a lot of stock and cash over... Come for your job, maybe. Come for your job. What should a new grad do? Should they learn prompt engineering? Should they learn to vibe code or program? Or should they be focused all on networking and management skills and people skills and the things that the robots seem to be mediocre at? I think very clearly is there's one area where we have not reduced number of people at all

and that's sales. In our case, I mean like B2B enterprise sales. So we have people locally on the ground across the world in over 50 offices, whether they sit in China next to Xi'an and TikTok and so forth, or whether they sit in Portland next to Nike, or whether they are somewhere on the East Coast or in parts of Europe. And also, obviously, there's no immediate expectations that those are affected by this, rather the Rather the opposite, like that human connection in customer relationship is super important. I've never seen a chat GPT have a power lunch and a steak dinner. Exactly, yeah, it's impossible.

Till we get better humanoids. Exactly, they're safe. But on the rest of jobs, actually it's been quite interesting because for a period of time now, we said, okay, let's stop hiring all other competences, then engineering. So if you look at that 5,500 of them, 1,500 were engineers.

Today of the 3,000, 1,500 are engineers. So actually the number of engineers have kept the same, while it's all the other like marketing, you know, analytics, whatever it might be that shrank. Now with that said, however, in the last like months, because of the acceleration of cloud code and cursor and all these tools, what you're seeing is now is a group internally at Klarna who are like a few hundred business people that in the last two years

have learned how to code, not necessarily like the most complex things, but inspect code, understand code, interact with code, but doing so with most complex things, but inspect code, understand code, interact with code. But doing so with having all the business knowledge, understanding what the customer wants, understanding a lot of things that engineers sometimes have struggled with, like they can't articulate why we're building the product for what purpose for how it's going to solve customer needs and so

forth. And they've been maybe sometimes more focused on just like latency or technical implications,, you know, et cetera. So I kind of see a convergence now of the truly kind of Renaissance people that are kind of, you know, on both sides that can understand the code, but can also understand the business. Those are the ones that are now truly becoming

the most productive in my opinion. What is your framework for buying AI tools versus building AI tools internally? Right, so we have been fairly vocal about the fact that as part of acceleration of AI at Clona, one of the first thing that we concluded, remember ChatGPT came along, there was this like, hey, I can now connect all my PDFs to ChatGPT,

and people were like, Oh, that's awesome. The only problem with that is that like the truth in data modeling and data science has always been like, shit in, shit out, right? So if you feed it tons of like, internal stuff that is contradicting, inconsequential, not truthful, whatever, it's just going to get lost, right? Just like some of our MPs get lost when they start navigating the internal workings of Flana. So the first thing that we realized is we can't silo the data anymore. We have to have a common data model. And that meant that we started removing software as a service providers. So we closed down Salesforce, Workday. I think the next big one that would go is Atlassian, Jira, and so forth. But then there's also like a long amount of smaller software as a service vendors that we

have utilized. So actually, if you kind of count it in total, there's over 1500 that we have closed down in the last two years. Now, obviously, some of them are like super small, like some plug into Jira or whatever, like it's not like every one of them is like a tremendously big software as a service application. And then we've kind of harmonized and standardized our data layers

so that we have one data that we can then let the LLM interpret and run on top of, allowing us to do more with less, right? So currently, there are a few things that we will use 11 labs for voice. We will use specific people that are really proficient. We use a company called Full Story that's fantastic to kind of catch user interactions.

So there's some places where we just found this software is so strong that there's really no meaning in trying to replace it. But a lot of traditional SAS may have just been a database with, you know, some nice UI and some data and some process logic on top of, and that is easier to replicate today. And it's not easy, but it's easier. And the problem is if it's spread out,

it's inconsistent and we need it to be consistent for both humans and LLM to make sense out of it. Well, this is fantastic. This is super interesting. I feel like we should talk regularly about the situation with white collar workers and just the advance of AI tooling. There's so many interesting things

where you have a unique insight because of your position in the industry. Last question from me before we jump. Do you think? cookies hurt conversion rates across Europe Policies yeah, just the fact Well, Jen is generally half an hour Yeah, yeah, we could spend half an hour but no but generally like the more clicks you need on a website to get to the eventual purchase, you know the worst the conversion rate and...

Maybe that's why the American consumer is outperforming. Yeah, it's just purely a technicality. I think the challenge of GDPR, which is the legislation that led to those, that cookie sort of shit show, is that the problem was it came from a very good principle and idea. And that is that we as users should own and control our data, not the companies. Right.

And if you think about it, when, when a few years ago, WhatsApp, there was some rumors that they have updated the terms of use and now there was so much more privacy infringing and everyone should shift, right. Now, how many people really shifted to Telegram or whatever? Not enough, right? Why? Because at the center, the way it should have worked is you should have been able to go to WhatsApp with a click of a button, extract all the data, all your

contacts, all your messages, and be able to then feed them into Telegram or, you know, Signal or whatever your choice of preference would have been. That would have been true customer mobility. And that was the purpose of GDPR is to allow that customer mobility. But because the legislation wasn't implemented thoughtfully enough, that hasn't materialized. Because in that world where you had 100% customer mobility, the point is if you lost trust in WhatsApp

as a provider of your primary chat messages, you would have instantly been able to move to something else. And the fear of losing all your users in such a very mobile world where everyone could move would have forced WhatsApp to be concerned about privacy and not just speak that they are concerned about privacy, right? So like, I think that, and that was the original intent, but then it was implemented with these

cookies, which actually creates the opposite, which is that like, we're just tired of accepting cookies. I don't want to go to new website because then I have to click again on 55. Like the people that, the people that wanted these kind of laws had the right intentions, but the implementations are horrendous and actually cause the opposite, which is less customer mobility, people less willing to shift services and try different things. And funny enough are hence playing into the hands of the same companies that

they were annoyed with for infringing on our privacy. Because as that creates just like the bigger success of these big tech companies, full customer mobility, the being able to take your data with you and go to wherever you want, is the key to creating a better competitive internet where companies actually have to compete on creating more value for you as a customer

rather than locking you up and locking your data up and then you know creating models that just forces you to use the same thing. Makes sense. Makes sense. Thank you for joining. It's fantastic. Thank you for having me. Thank you for an amazing pod. Yeah we'll talk to you soon. We'll talk soon. Bye. Let me tell you about public.com investing for those who take it seriously. Multi-asset investing industry leading yields. They're trusted by millions millions and they're the sponsor of Aston Martin f1. That's right public.com head over. We have our next guest in the studio already. We have John Chu Ventures what's going on? Welcome to the show It's great to have you I we didn't we didn't prepare at all

Which is the part of the beauty of our show. We just come in, you're live, we will do it live. The show business. It's great to have you. I've got a bunch of questions. You're always getting spicy on the timeline. We'll talk through a bunch, but why don't you introduce yourself,

quick background, what you're doing at COSA, all that good stuff. Yeah, so I'm John, I'm one of the partners here at KV. I do a lot of technical things. So basically anything I've really written code on in the past. So like data infrastructure, dev tools, a lot of AI stuff from foundation models and the app layer, if I really understand what it does, right?

Yeah. Awesome, let's, right? Yeah. Awesome. Let's get right into it. What did you read? What are you reading into the news around DG potentially going to meta and all that? Was that a surprise to you? What can you talk about there?

Yeah, so it was a big surprise. I actually say like the funny thought that came to mind when I first heard the rumor was, like, should I be buying meta options? Because does that mean, like, Zuck got Ilya, right? And then that gets announced and meta just jumps. But, like, look, it's pretty obvious what's going on here is that there's a giant market in AI, right?

OpenAI kind of proves that. The pie is huge. And Zuck has a shot on goal. And Zuck is not someone that likes to lose shots on goals. So if he has to pay up to get the best talent that he thinks that can actually compete, he doesn't even have to win. You don't have to beat open AI, you just have to be number two.

If he can get there, billions of dollars is worth it, right? So like all of this makes sense when you think of it through the lens of like, Facebook is a giant company, a billion dollars, $5 billion. That's a drop in the bucket. If you take on this new market that ends up dominating. What do you, yeah, the last thing he wants to be is like Microsoft and miss phones. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. What do you think about the phone story? At one point, Facebook was working on a phone and maybe the lesson that Zuck learned is that he should have put more resources into that instead of not try to do it at all.

I'm wondering because there's all these different stories, VR, he's investing way ahead of adoption. Reels, he was a little bit behind, but wound up rolling out a product that I believe produces tons of profit. And so it was totally worth investing in and taking the shot at building out all those data centers to do the recommendation algorithms.

So yeah, I mean, what other examples do you think we should be pulling from the meta history? Or do you think that might be relevant here? Well, I mean, there's basically two things to know about Metta, right? One is that they are fantastic fast followers. They either buy or they copy. I think like Snapchat is a fantastic example of that, where like the stories literally like that was a team that just copied stories and just executed better. So like if anything, Facebook is an execution machine and they are able to pull that off. And then the second takeaway is Zuck is willing to take bets. So like I think Oculus, the acquisition and the whole metaverse is a great example of that. And you don't win all of them, right? But

like, I think on the upside, he's won more of them in terms of like, call it shareholder value, then he's lost. So this is just another one of those. And this one, I think he has extremely strong conviction behind more so than you. Like the fact that AI is already doing real things in the real world that actually are impacting enterprises and impacting real people gives you a significantly higher confidence bar than like the metaverse that totally have significantly more confidence here. I was talking to like a guy at Windsurf who like runs their field engineering team and he was like oh you know I talked to his enterprise and they're like

we're gonna buy like 2,500 Windsurf licenses because this was fantastic and those guys he's like what why don't you buy 5,000 because like you have 5,000 engineers and he's like, why don't you buy 5,000? Because you have 5,000 engineers. And he's like, yeah, we're not going to have 5,000 engineers. Because of windsurf, we're going to have 2,500 engineers. It's actually doing real things. Yeah.

Yeah. How can Meta benefit broadly from AI, not in the just in the foundation model game or image generation or things like that? We've talked about just getting slightly better at AI across the entire organization can have tremendous benefits on just improving delivery of ads and these sort of basic things you

were working on ML at Facebook back in the day. So I'm sure you have some strong insights. Well, so I think there's a few layers here. If you start from the product level, the obvious is that there's new products that are going to be built. There's the whole Jony Ive and OpenAI thing. And that's some kind of hardware thing, we're all guessing.

That's probably a new product. And if you just take the lens of like, if this technology in five years gets significantly better, I have a bunch of hardware products inside of Meta, I can add more, I have a great research team that knows how to build great hardware. I know how to handle the supply chain. What can I build?

There's like random upside there in products, right? If you go back to the current Facebook suite, there's Meta AI is like already doing a lot of this, but you have chat apps, you have Messenger, you have WhatsApp, right? Like you can already do chatting in there. You have a great llama model. If you have chat GPT in there,

you can just pull them into conversations and already add value. That increases engagement, that increases ads views, right? That's automatic money there. And then if you go back to the, where I worked like in ads views, right? That's automatic money there. And then if you go back to where I worked, like in ads models, you're seeing less of it with Generated Eye today, mainly because everything is doing attention on sequences

and ads, like ranking models are a little bit different, but people are already applying research to different layers of the ads models. And like, if you have a 1% uptick in ad score, that's like a billion dollar. Actually, it's like a percentage increase in revenue. So like a billion dollars today in the future, 1% is going to be like $10 billion, right? If Facebook goes tax. And there's some really interesting research there.

Like I have a portcode that I invested in actually was a distinguished ad at Facebook or at Meta. And like, he's kind of got some technology that's a foundation model for ranking where you really just don't need any feature engineering. And I saw another company this morning, which is the same, that's like, that rips out giant pieces of infrastructure has like automatic increase in ad score ranking. And you can like fire all your ML engineer, you probably don't want to do that. But like you can fire most of the ML engineers at Facebook. Like that's gigantic, right? That kind of stuff is going to happen. I mean, the timescale is a question, but it's going to happen over time. Do you think that the UI paradigm around AI's interface with

social networking is defined enough? I I'm thinking of the example of Snapchat and face and Instagram stories. It was very clear that Evan Spiegel at Snapchat did enough of the experimentation to define how vertical disappearing video and images would be distributed on social networks. And then Facebook was able to adapt that and adopt that and bake it into Instagram.

When I think of what big tech companies, which of the Mag-7 is most closely cheating off of ChatGPT's homework, it feels like it's Gemini and the Gemini app feels much more directly competitive to the ChatGPT app. I would be surprised if Facebook or Meta or Instagram tries to stuff an entire chat GPT experience into the fifth panel

on the hamburger menu. So I'm wondering, is the story of Meta's AI rollout really just about ad optimization, or are we actually gonna see it instantiated in different UI and interaction paradigms? You're gonna see it everywhere. Okay. Ads is just an obvious place.

You got to win, right? Yeah. But like you're going to see it. Actually someone might stick it in a tab somewhere. If I know anything about Facebook having been there, like if a number goes up into the right, they'll do it. So like that might happen. But like I said, inside of Messenger and WhatsApp,

I think there's going to be lots and lots of usage there. And if you think about it, like people ask this question, I was actually a little confused at first. They're like, why did you pay 15 billion for what it sounds like just Alex Wong, right? Like that's my guy. And then you think about it for a bit and you're like, okay, well, what makes OpenAI OpenAI?

You're like, yes, there's great tech, but Sam, like Sam actually runs that thing and Sam makes it successful. And then like, if you ask anyone on why even Paul Graham is like, okay, if you had to pick someone again, that's like a top founder inside the YC network. That's not Sam. Who would you pick? Even Paul Graham says Alex. So like, if you're looking at products inside of Facebook or even outside of Facebook, like pick the guy, right?

Yep. Yeah, I mean, it feels like a really, really strong total reset of Meta's AI strategy, bring in three absolute hitters and turn them loose on whatever the next phase is. Jan LeCun was there for kind of the research journey and the research part of the AI story. Now we're in the application story

and so go get the managers, right? How much should people read into, again, this is all alleged, I don't think it's been confirmed that DG is joining Meta yet, but rumored. How much should people be reading into, you know, the CEO of SSI leaving to work at Metta and using that to inform their general timelines.

If we were on the cusp of developing superintelligence in two years, maybe you wouldn't leave billions of dollars on the table at a company that had the potential of cracking that. Even getting a billion dollars-ish liquid at Metta, it's great, but still, I think it's hard not to read into the move if it happens. I have no knowledge here. I don't know Dan well enough to know what his thoughts

behind this are and what drove the decision. Right. But like, I can say honestly for myself, uh, working with Ilya would be like an amazing dream and it's kind of amazing, uh, to do at the same time. Like SSI is a pure research lab. So it's not like open AI or Sam is over here trying to build products. It's a pure research lab. So it's not like OpenAI or Sam is over here trying to build products. It's a pure research lab. And I don't know if that's what Dan actually finds fun

and also like what he actually excels at versus like Meta also has a giant research lab, tons of opportunity and like unlimited GPUs and money, right? So like- And distribution to scale products extremely rapidly. And get data to feed them back into the models. Yeah, it's huge. Yeah, this is the whole thing about Facebook.

Like distribution, everyone underweights that. Totally. All these DMs that come out of Facebook and pitch me, the thing they always miss is like, no, distribution is not trivial. It was trivial for you at Facebook, but it's not trivial for the world. Yeah, yeah, oh, you got a billion people

to click on your new button. It's like, that'll be a lot harder when you're starting from zero. Do you think, do you think- I wanna talk about Apple. Yeah, I're starting from zero do you think Apple yeah I was gonna say do you think Apple will make a big bet here there were conversations reporting over you're talking about Tim Cook going to Metta to get a pay bump yeah yeah yeah he's barely scraping at Apple he's having 75 under 75 a year he could probably double that if you went over to Metta yeah something there but no but do you

do you expect Apple to make a big bet here? There was rumors over the weekend of reporting that they had spoken to perplexity and thinking machines. Do you think that they're willing to make a big investment? Siri, over 10 years ago, was 200 million. That's like an AI seed round for ants these days. So I'm curious. Man Man seed rounds are so expensive. You're like, don't remind me.

Dude, I've been priced out of almost every round in AI research I've tried to do this year. There've been a few exceptions, but like, it's not like I'm priced out by a small amount. It's like two X my price or whatnot. How are you even underwriting AI research bet these days? Are you pulling out a spreadsheet and building the market size or is it just like based on the vibe of this founder, I'd pay 50,

but the price came back at a hundred. Like, I get into the future and then I figure out if it's actually going to work. It's basically you got gotta underwrite the team and then the opportunity size. Sure. That's really all you can do. Yeah. I mean, that's basically what we did when we did Sakana.

Yeah, I was gonna ask about Sakana, the Japanese language model. Very cool company. But that, like today, it's even worse, is like, that's really all you can do. Yeah. And then part of it's like, if the price is just not there,

given the confidence interval, then like, you gotta step back, right? Yeah at the same time I mean the the the SSI deal the scale AI deal like it feels like It's potentially easier than ever to get taken care of as an investor If even if you overpaid and did a seed at 300 like the mag 7 has money to spend on Multi-billion dollar acquisitions. Like a lot of these crazy looking deals might get rolled up,

but I don't know how many of these there will be. Like you have to be backing a founder like an Alex Wong or like a Nat and Dan to even have that on the table. Yeah, if you back a generational entrepreneur, you'll have a little bit of a safety net. But they have to be. Yeah, it's funny. We, we don't typically underwrite to acquisitions, right? We only underwrite to a Candace company IPO. And I think most investors do that.

If you think about it too, there's like seven of the nine seven. So like, if not on goal is like not really an investment, you're going to put like 200 mil post on, right? Yeah. That being said, like I made this it was a half joke. We're looking at one of these hot rounds in the seed rounds. I was like, you know, we should do like we should just invest now and then sell the next round.

It'd be like the best hire on the planet. And I know it like looks at me dead. And he's part of me. He wants to be dead. He's just like, you'd be a great hedge fund manager. We don't do that here. Yeah, I think it's a good here. Yeah, that's great. I think it's a good strategy for angels, to be honest. The angels are the only, the check sizes are lower.

You can get a quick 10X and sell in three months. Yeah, would you rather have a $4 billion SPAC or a $14 billion aqua hire on your ROI? Yeah. I'll see, I'll see, tracks again too. I got pitched to SPAC recently. Oh, really? Wait, why are they pitching you as Spax?

They're like, hey, got any portcodes? Then he wanted us in the pipe. And I was like, wow, we're Spax now. They're coming back. Wow. What's your updated thinking on memory as a lock-in and a moat for different model providers and app layer companies? sounds like you've been pitched

by a bunch of like plaid for memory type companies. You've been posting about this. What's your kind of framework there? I still don't have a clear view to be honest. I think it is a mode. So you look at all of the model providers, they need different ways to keep their customers coming back to them versus going to other model providers.

And memory is one way to do it. If you have enough history on the person, you can tailor recommendations, tailor responses, et cetera, et cetera. You've seen this play isn't like the first time someone's done this. I think the best example of a data mode is effectively Google and search.

It's literally like, oh, I get so much search data that I can do better ads and make a better product. And then like no one on the planet can get more search data than me because I am the best. You all come to me and you give me more data, right? So it's kind of the same play. At the same time, like I see why users want this memory thing of like, oh, I can like shift memory from open AI over to like Anthropic.

But then like, I have the same question of like, well, why would open AI let you do that? Like, why is Google going to let you take their data and give it to like Bing? Right. Just like not going to happen. So I still don't see what the outside function is where like an Anthropic or an open AI would be game for that Yeah Yes, I mean this seems like the entire dynamic is that it's a good idea, but customers won't demand it

It's the same. It's the same dynamic as you know should I be able to we're having this discussion back in like 2010 about like Google's walled garden like can I Export all my Google data or all my Facebook data and just give it to Google to get better ads? Like that potentially, but no one's demanding that from the customer side and so it'll never happen from the B2B side. Yeah, are you worried in general about, you know, there's been a bunch of different app layer companies that are kind of B2B players that are building products that ultimately will just potentially be built into things like the Google Suite, right? And happen where you can get sort of these sort of fast revenue ramps, something like account leave,

but then ultimately just get added as a functionality to core Google workspace or team's functionality. Yeah, so this is kind of funny. This is like, um, one of those questions that keeps coming up is like, started with like GPT wrappers where it's like, oh, my startup is going to die. And now it's like, all right, what's inside the space of these model companies? And the answer is like, you need some story for defensibility. And I actually don't understand why this is so hard for people to rock because like this has been the history of technology forever.

It's like, yes, there's tech. Tech eventually gets eroded. Like what stays along that gives you defensibility? Is it like community? Is it some kind of open source thing? history of technology forever is like, yes, there's tech, tech eventually gets eroded. Like what stays along that gives you defensibility? Is it like community? Is it some kind of open source thing? Is it like workflow lock-in? There's like these motes that have existed forever that everyone knows about. And for some reason, because the word AI is here, like entrepreneurs and VCs just like forget about the existing motes. They're like, yeah, this is like something different and new. And it's like, no, it's not. It's just like

technology like before. Right. So that's really the story is like, yeah, this is like something different and new. And it's like, no, it's not. It's just like technology like before. Right. Um, so that's really the story is like, yes, things will get eaten. And like, yes, you're already, I've seen plenty of companies get killed that are shallow GPT rappers. And I'm seeing some actually deep, like technical notes getting overrun by opening up an anthropic and you just need the story on like, okay, how do I get to something defensible and can I get there in time? What do you think about these new generation of? startups some of them are in AI where it seems like The efforts of the team are like 90% marketing

and they're really really good at getting a ton marketing, and they're really, really good at getting a ton of attention, and they're being very noisy, and Gary Tan was kind of framing it as like, maybe they're trying to win in distribution, and then kind of hold on to the attention until the AI models pick up. It feels like it's almost like a necessary evil of the current market and how fast things move

that if you want to accelerate revenue and kind of live up to the standards of the day, you have to be very, very noisy online. But do you see this like a counter signal or do you think that there's something where maybe this is around to stay? It's not necessarily a counter signal. Like, um, it's the same as like when, when we pick companies, if you're too early, you're wrong. Right. Same thing for founders here is like

some of these founders are fantastic, especially like these like younger founders are fantastic fantastic at getting attention. And I think historically with any company, any movie, any like pop star, any type of hits, eventually the attention wanes, right? So really it's a timing thing of like, I need the attention to translate into customers. And if my product's not there, I'm going to see churn. So how long can I capture attention? Does that overlap before my product actually doesn't have churn? If I have enough timeline in the middle and I timed it right, then I win.

If I don't, then I lose, right? It's like pretty much that simple. It's like, it's simple to say, it's not an easy game to play, but if you play it correctly, you have a giant company. Yeah, yeah, the organic attention getting, it seems like a really great go-to-market or like early beachhead, but it doesn't feel like a sustainable flywheel versus some of

the other permanent go-to-market motions or like viral loops that drive, you know, meta to beat earnings every year for decades or something like that. It can get you into one, right? Exactly. Yeah, it's an opportunity. Yeah, it gets you the shot on goal, where as a lot of entrepreneurs that are maybe those PMs that say, I'm going to get distribution, and they just put out a press release, and they're like, where did all the customers go?

I don't have any clicks on my button. So yeah, it is kind of a necessary thing. There was a market map a while back showing all the different venture funds investing in all the different labs. You guys at COSLA are open AI purists, so passed on, I'm sure had the opportunity to invest in all the different, you know, Anthropic, XAI,

Coheer, all these different players. Talk about kind of that, was that always an intentional decision? Is it, let's stick to venture's roots and have our bet? Or was it sort of a lucky ability to just be in, you know, the breakout winner that's the lab and the consumer app? And so, you know, talk through that decision-making process and maybe kind of insights from different partner meetings. I don't know if we've ever like discussed this intentionally

until we kind of came to the like open eyes thing. But I think it happens kind of organically where you work with a founder, you work with a team, you have giant breakthroughs and giant wins, you own enough of a company where like their success is basically your success. And it kind of looks like they're going to win it anyways. Like, I mean, we had this back and forth in Twitter, I know, but like Keith was kind of like,

I don't think another Transformers based or another like foundation model company is going to be a great VC return outside of acquisitions. And it's kind of like, yeah, how are you going to beat OpenAI? It's quite hard. They have distribution. They have marketing brand. They can have a shittier product and they probably still win this, right? And they have money. Money is actually very important in this game because of GPUs. So it's both the like, we bet on this horse, we love this team, we work very great with them, very closely with them. There's like symbiotic value here. And also like, they're probably gonna win this.

Yeah. Yeah. We'd love to have you. What are you, last question, what are you expecting out of, are you expecting to see ads in various LLMs, consumer apps this year? I'm sure you've been pitched people saying, I'm gonna build an ad network for LLMs, consumer apps this year. I'm sure you've been pitched people saying, I'm gonna build an ad network for LLMs.

I'm sure you have opinions on that as well, but what are you expecting to see out of the next year? Big question I have is, will the average American pay for their favorite LLM three years from now? And I've been trying to figure that out, or will it just sort of go closer and closer to free over time? I don't actually know.

Like, I think- What do you mean you're a VC? You should have a crystal ball on your desk, you know? I like technology and I think there's many ways to monetize this and people will try all of them. So like, are there gonna be like ads? Yes, people will try it. I mean, like Arvin over at Complexity

already said he was gonna try it, right? So we're gonna see that at some point. If it's going to be the model that works, who knows? But it is like a nice tried and true model, right? So there's a good probability that it does work for some set of products. I saw somebody at a pretty viral post last week saying, I'm so sick of being asked to sign up for different services across the whole internet and then

What's his name at Antonio at Coinbase was like I'll tell you a model You're not gonna like it Anyways, thank you for joining Appreciate all the all the insights and welcome back anytime. Yeah, this was fun. We'll talk to you soon. Thanks guys, this was fun. Have a good one.

Cheers, John. Bye. Until you can buy ads in ChatGPT, you gotta stick to ads out of home. Out of the home. Out of the home. Using adquick.com, advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising, only adquick combines technology,

out of home expertise, and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. We have our next guest in the studio, Tom Mueller, from Impulse Space. I'll be right back. I will handle the intro. Cool. Tom, how are you doing?

We are bringing him in in just a second to give you more background on impulse. I met Tom, oh, it must have been two and a half years ago, legend in the space community, worked at SpaceX. Also a car aficionado who engaged with my post about the Kugen test, which of course is the challenge to have a humanoid robot, step into a Dodge Viper ACR and lap the Nurburgring in under seven minutes.

It's been done by a human in seven minutes and one second and a few milliseconds. It's an extremely difficult challenge requiring physical endurance of the G-forces, but also a bunch of dexterity and obviously image processing. And I was talking to a bunch of AI folks about how long it will be until humanoids are actually at that level

where they could do something like that. And it took, I think the consensus was around 2045, something like that. Anyway, Tom, great to meet you. I don't think it'll take that long with it How long do you think it'll take? This is a great question. I don't when you take fear out. Yeah. Yeah, maybe that's a big one I don't know you you've done a lot more laps than I have so please They already shown that fighter aircraft can be the human and you know and dogfight so yes

so the difference there is that I I'm adding the challenge of the the Dodge Viper ACR must be stock and so the humanoid must operate three pedals and the stick shift and the steering wheel and that's a lot more challenging than just plugging into the steering column and you know controlling it like you do in a Tesla or Waymo and so I think that adds a wrinkle but I don't know 2045 2035 it's clearly going to happen but oh that's that's a good way to say that you're bullish about humanoid robotics yeah do you anticipate that humanoid robotics will have an impact on your business in the next decade in terms of maybe

manufacturing or something even more narrow scope? Certainly manufacturing. I think I think for manufacturing robotics are developing fast But I think you know, I think human should explore space but but it's really expensive and dangerous to put humans in space So if you really want to like you know use the economies of space, I think it's gonna take a lot of robotics. So I'm bullish about robotics. We got to put a Nürburgring on Mars. And then ship the bike on the moon, which I'm all about. Yeah, I would love a taxpayer dollars to put a racetrack on Mars. I would love that. Anyway, sorry, we jumped straight into it. Would you mind kicking us off with an introduction for both of you and a little bit about the company? Yeah, sure.

Yeah, I'm Tom Mueller. I'm the CEO and founder of impulse space. I was one of the founding members of SpaceX, where I led the development of propulsion systems for Falcon nine and Dragon and a little bit into Starship. And left there in 2020 and started Impulse in 2021. And we have our four year anniversary here coming up next month. Congratulations, that's great to hear.

That's amazing. And it's been doing great. And Eric, would you mind introducing yourself? Yeah, sure. Hey, I'm Eric Romo, the president of the company. I've been with the company for the last two years. I've known Tom for a better part of, got Tom, 22 years, I want to say now.

23, so I was an early propulsion engineer at SpaceX in the very early days. And then, Wynn did a bunch of non-space, non-propulsion stuff for a long time and found my way back to Tom a couple of years ago. Amazing, yeah. I mean, as I describe it in kind of layman's terms or in terms, even a venture capitalist could understand you can get to Leo pretty easily, but you need impulse

to get to higher orbits. Is that still kind of the bread and butter of the business? Am I describing it even remotely accurately? Yeah. You know, at SpaceX, we I, uh, made Leo very accessible, lowered the cost, made it, you know, you get, you know, flights going there, you know, every other day. I want to do the same for, for everything beyond Leo. So get it,

make it much easier to get to high energy orbits, to get to the moon, to get to Mars, get to outer planets anywhere in space. Like, let's make it much easier, much more affordable. And, you know, really start the true space age. Yeah. When you were at SpaceX, did you have an idea of how valuable Leo would be? I think a lot of folks,

Starlink took them by surprise, basically, in terms of not just how awesome that service is, if you've been on a plane and used it, but also the business that was to be built there. Did that take you by surprise? And then is there something that you can use as a concrete example of what is exciting about the higher orbits?

Well, yeah, I'm old enough to remember the first time we tried to do Leo Constellation back in the late 90s and actually worked with some companies that tried to do it. And it wasn't the right time. Technology's improved a lot, especially low cost launch, better bandwidth, easier to manufacture spacecraft, all of the things. So I kind of realized it was the right time

when it was, when SpaceX first started talking about it, it really clicked. I'm like, yeah, we need to do this. Yeah. And so in terms of the higher orbits, I mean, obviously going to the moon is very concrete. Are there specific, obvious business cases or anything that would be,

inspiring or immediately relevant that somebody would... Geostationary orbit is still probably the most important orbit because it's the 24-hour orbit over the equator. So you just point your dish at that and it's always there in the sky, your antenna. Or you can cover the whole earth with three satellites. So making access much more affordable to that, I think is a huge help. But then I'm, you know, I've always said,

I'm really all about a lunar economy starting and even mining asteroids and things like that. So those are the things I'm most excited about. Question, I'm sure you guys have gotten asked in every single pitch meeting, so I'll ask it. Why, do you think this is on SpaceX's roadmap? Are you guys partnered with them already? Do you expect them to want to prioritize this in the future?

Or what does that kind of partnership or competitive dynamic look like? Let me cover that one here. Yeah, I mean, they're pretty busy, right? And so this is the equivalent of the Silicon Valley startup question of like, why doesn't Google just do that or Facebook just do that or right?

They could, they could do anything, all right? They're technically amazing company that show them they can execute on pretty much anything they sink their teeth into. I think the question is will they and where would this be on the priority stack? So, you know, one of our products, Helios, is really good at getting large payloads

to high-nature orbits like medium-earth orbit and geostationary orbit. SpaceX can certainly do that with a Falcon Heavy, but they've been super vocal about the fact that they would prefer not to. And there's operational reasons for that, cost reasons for that. So this is a space where we think that we can actually help

them and other launch providers get to a thing that they're to some degree ignoring right now. And then on the small spacecraft side of things, we make a small highly maneuverable vehicle called Mira, which is largely useful for Space Force. So we announced some contracts with them late last year and a partnership with Andral to go to market with Mira. And that's a thing that's pretty far afield from anything that SpaceX is working on today. The Starlink is awesome, but it kind of just sits there, right? It's a constellation, whereas Mir is designed to

move very quickly as its core competency. Can you talk about the lunar economy and how you imagine that developing? Does it start with tourism or scientific exploration? Do we need an ISS like base that's kind of taxpayer funded on the moon first? Or do we go straight to mining or helium-3? I remember the movie Moon. But what are the rest, what does the tech tree look like as we build out the moon as a capability? Possibly all of the above.

Mining helium-3 certainly could be a good starting point because it's even right now on earth if you don't flood the market it's on the order of $29 a kilogram. So you can certainly if you can get it on them I don't know how the part of getting it like you got to mine apparently millions of tons of regolith to get it. If you have it there transporting it back is like one 500 to that cost. So it's definitely, it's economically doable, assuming that you have a can of it. But I think if you're doing megastructures or massive manufacturing in LEO pretty fast, you'll figure out that it's 23 times roughly

more efficient to bring mass from the surface of the moon than from the surface of the earth, just because the gravity well is so much lower. And I think that's when the real use of the resources of the moon will happen, just to get material to lower orbit. Yeah. Yeah. I've always thought that the moon was also just a great staging ground for Mars.

You imagine if you're up there, the moon's always facing earth, so if something goes wrong, you know, the sci-fi version, oh, there's a crack in your suit, you can just dive in an escape pod and you're aiming in the right direction, whereas Mars, you have to deal with the transfer window. It's a whole different problem, and if we can get really good at living on the moon, we're probably going to be able to get good at living on Mars. I am interested in kind of these questions about when the, one of the great stories about SpaceX is that it feels like it's a relatively smooth handoff of capability

in terms of launch capacity from NASA to SpaceX, from the taxpayer to the private sector. At the same time, I love that NASA put a helicopter on Mars, because I can't imagine that would ever happen, no matter how crazy the VCs are. I don't see that happening and being underwritten against any sort of 10 year, 20 year, life cycle of return on investment.

And so my question for you is like, what type of space projects should we be pushing into the NASA world, the government funded world, the even the nonprofit world versus what is commercializable today? And do you see both as important going forward that we kind of have this taxpayer funded R&D, the really fringe scientific experiments,

and then we commercialize thing when they're ready. Well, I think two things really that I'd like to see from NASA mainly is answering the big science questions like, is there other life out there? And also let's explore what's out there. I just posted a picture this morning from the new Vera Rubin Observatory. Amazing, you know, just amazing stuff that you could continue to do things like that. And but I think as far as develop, they should develop technology that's that that takes a lot of money to develop that maybe commercial companies aren't going to invest in now. Like I think the next thing Jared Isaacman

was talking about is NEP. I'm always touting that too as the next step in propulsion. So rather than build a giant rocket that competes against people that already build giant rockets, why don't they go develop the next thing, the next technology? I think that's probably the best use of taxpayer money through NASA is to advance science. How do you think about, oh, sorry.

I was just gonna say, fundamentally I think NASA needs to figure out if it's a jobs program or if it has goals Right. I mean, I think that's the that's the thing like SLS made no sense in a commercial rocket economy Maybe it did when it started planning 20 years ago or whatever, but in for the last decade or more It's made zero sense But yet it's still kind of hanging on because Congress wants to fund jobs in Alabama, which is you know, maybe a noble purpose But you know, is that the purpose of NASA? I think is the thing that they need to figure out. Yeah. How do you think about?

extraterrestrial life do you ascribe to the dark forest theory or like Do you think it's promising do you think you know, we will have an answer to this in a few years Do you think we're getting closer? What what is your take overall? Yeah, we need to get, we need more information definitely. I hope it's just life is extremely rare and it's not, you know, some great filter that's still out of us. Yeah, yeah, that'd be a good... What are the kind of upcoming events in the next one to two years in commercial space that you think can be major catalysts for the industry overall that maybe you guys are working on or that you want to see from the industry broadly?

Well, something that we're not working on, but something that SpaceX is developing is Starship. I really started this company realizing that Starship and other reusable rockets are going to be bringing massive amounts of cargo to LEO and it needs to go other places. So that was the premise of this company. So I'm excited about Starship finishing development and becoming a commercially viable spacecraft. And then we have really, we have the MIRRA that Eric talked about earlier, and NHE is really for government and defense. And then we have Helios coming on online here next year. We're developing it right now,

which is basically adding a third stage to Falcon 9 and other mid-sized rockets. And that's what it can allow us to get more easily to high energy orbits. So those are the two big things for us right now. Yeah. Super excited about lunar landers, Mars landers, all kinds of cool stuff. That's gonna be awesome. Yeah, I was just gonna tack on. I think you're seeing one big trend is that Space Force, the rhetoric of counter space or space defense activities has really ramped up in the last six months. In the public sphere, there's not been a lot of investment in, you know, sort of space on space defense. But in private, Space Force has been talking about been a lot of investment in space on space defense, but

in private, these space sources have been talking about that a lot more. And then they started about six months ago, really publicly, not coincidentally with the change in administration. And so the question I think for companies like ours is, do dollars follow that rhetoric? Is there increased investment in that sort of thing? And then on the commercial side, I think you have an awful lot of operators who are trying to figure out how do they carve out a niche and survive in a post Starlink world? How do they figure out what their space is as a commercial comsat operator that, you know, once you have the dominant Starlink player in the market?

I'm interested to hear about the challenges of developing rocketry or engines at different scales. I've heard this story that one of the reasons the Raptor engine was so successful was that it wasn't a mega project in the sense that you didn't need to bring in a crane necessarily to work on it. There were more smaller modular pieces. Is that true?

And then I'd love to know about the challenges of scaling up and making bigger rockets it I was tracking obviously I want Starship to work as soon as possible it feels like it's a really really tough challenge and it feels like it's a harder challenge than the Falcon one or the Falcon nine which you know when it did it did crash several times exploded several times but you know SpaceX is a much more mature company, and so you would expect that it's not just,

you know, the first time that they're doing it, it's actually something fundamental about the larger scale engineering that's going on there. So can you share anything about that? Well, we've become a lot better at developing rocket engines, you know, over the last 20 years, certainly. When we started SpaceX, there wasn't really,

it wasn't like startups would do rocket engines. That's why I had such a hard time hiring people in the early days, because nobody believed in it. And now there's many teams all over the world that are developing liquid rocket engines, and it's never easy, it's not. But it's doable, and modern tools are affordable and available and certainly modern manufacturing techniques like 3D printing is almost a cheat code for rocket engines.

But when you're doing something like Raptor, which is an extremely high pressure, full flow, stage combustion, very advanced engine, the most advanced engine ever, it takes the difficulty to 11. So not surprising that there's been setbacks. Also one of the hardest things to do in launch vehicle recovery is getting back in upper stage. You saw we had pretty good success with Falcon 9, getting back to first stage and certainly

flying the boosters back and land that awesome landing. But second upper stages are coming in with a lot of energy. So Really hard. Um, they're gonna solve it. Um, it's it's just a matter of time Yeah, this time. Well, it is rocket science after all People don't people don't use that phrase. It's not rocket, you know This isn't rocket science anymore because we've gotten really good at there's a lot of stuff that is rocket science Come on Tom. It's not rocket science. It is rocket science Well, I'm sure you have a lot of rocket science to do we'll let you get back to it

We really appreciate you taking the time to chat with us. This is a lot of fun. Yeah, thank you guys I have a great rest. Here's guys Next up we have some breaking news from truth social where news breaks Trump says Iran has officially responded to our obliteration of their nuclear facilities with a very weak response Which we expected and have very effectively countered There have been 14 missiles fired 13 were knocked down and one was set free because it was headed in a non-threatening direction I am pleased to report that no Americans were harmed and hardly any damage was done. Most importantly, if they've gotten it all out of their system and there will hopefully

be no further hate. I want to thank Iran for giving us early notice, which made it possible for no lives to be lost and nobody to be injured. Perhaps Iran can now proceed to peace and harmony in the region, and I will enthusiastically encourage Israel to do the same. Thank you for your attention to this injured. Perhaps Iran can now proceed to peace and harmony in the region and I will enthusiastically encourage Israel to do the same. Thank you for your attention to this matter. That'd be good. It's a good way to, it's a strong way to end your post. Now if you want to come across presidential, just bolt on. Thank you for your attention to this matter. That's great. Well, we have our next guest, Thompson The author of abundance in the studio welcome

Thanks guys Congratulations on the move a businessman your businessman now. I'm an entrepreneur. I'm the see I'm a CEO I mean, I'm everything you you name whatever peace wearing hats corporate suite that you want to name I guess I am that I'm C CTO, I'm COO. It feels great. He's about to become a hyper capitalist. Vibe shift. Yeah, talk to us about the move.

I mean, we're gonna go into a bunch of stuff, but maybe just start with a little bit of background and then the decision to move. Yeah, sure. So I've been running for the Atlantic for 17 years, which is honestly freaking disgusting to even contemplate I don't wait how old were you when you joined? Uh, I want to say four. I mean, yeah, it's much better about myself. Uh, the answer is 22

So I joined in september of 2008. Wow after graduating from college. I was like a comms intern for a while Um, i'm currently the comms intern for my sub stack. So it's right back to that old position. And I wrote for 16, 16.75 years at the Atlantic and it was great. And the truth is like, I've always had like a little bit of wanderlust. I've always felt like I had a bit of an entrepreneurial bone in my body. There was never a great time to leave because the Atlantic is really a wonderful place to work. They let you write about my position in my case, about whatever I wanted, tech, science, economics, social mysteries and conundrums. And finally, I just thought, you know, abundance, the book has become a lot of things. It's certainly become something almost like something that could be a full-time job. Like if I just wanted to reply to and engage

with like the political feedback, that would be its own job. And part of this was like, this is an opportunity to do something on my own, to do something that's really independent, not put the Atlantic in a position where they're like a non-political organization with a writer who's doing some things that are explicitly political.

But also like, I just kind of wanted to know, and this is what I said, I think in my original essay, maybe you guys felt like this when you started this show, like, what does my mind feel like when I wake up in the morning with a new job, a new task for it, right? Like you work at like a, maybe like a VC, right? Or you work at maybe a private equity firm and like you wake up and like, how do you process the world? You process the world the way it's most remunerative to you at that private equity firm or at the VC. And when you change your job, you change your mind. New tasks, new questions, new mysteries are unlocked.

And I wanted to do that for myself. I wanted to like wake up with a new set of questions. And so that's what I'm doing right now. Was there a price that could have kept you at the Atlantic? Many people say everyone has a price, but it feels like legacy media is not set up to retain superstars. And I imagine.

No, look, the Atlantic paid me well. And the book paid me well. I'm really lucky from that standpoint. There's not really a number, right? Like, you know, $1 billion. Okay, now suddenly you're talking about something completely silly but like I wanted the freedom the freedom to Say alright, like I'm 39 years old, right if I stay for another 11 years

I'm 50 years old like now I'm basically on the other side of the hill At some point you want to be in your electric prime, be like, what is my mind like? What is my life like when I give myself an entirely new task of starting my own company, of thinking about the world from the perspective of, I'm writing for myself, not writing for this aghast institution.

So no, I don't think there was a number. And I also think it's important to say the Atlantic is one of these places that as much as independent media is growing, and obviously I think that's great, there are a couple of empires that are going to the Times is going like crazy. The Atlantic is hiring like crazy. They pay their writers over overall, I think quite well. So this was not really about about money at all.

This was about being in a fortunate position to take to take a risk that had nothing to do with money. Yeah. If you just cared about money, you'd become an AI researcher and you'd join Metta. Get 100 million. Well, we gotta pitch him on private equity because he sounds like he doesn't wanna be a private equity guy, but I think scale the sub stack,

start acquiring, rolling up other independent journalism. Could happen. Could happen. I do wanna talk about advice from Ezra about this. Obviously you wrote the book with him. He's been at the New York Times, he's started his own thing. What was his advice to you as you kind of stepped out in this next, next? Yeah, no one's asking that question before. So I told Ezra

three days before the book came out. We had just done here. I'll set the scene for you. We had just done, um, freed Zakaria show and it was one of the first in the use that we did together. And we were in the hut. Are you guys are based in San Francisco? We're in LA. You're not. Okay. Cool. I'll see you.

So in New York Hudson yards is that like enormous like skyscraper mall, right? And we go like, get some food and get some lunch. And, um, we sit down and I say, Hey, by the way, just so you know, I'm starting to think a little bit about doing something independent. Um, this was before abundance became what it was. This was before a single book had been officially sold. I kind of think I want to do something on my own. And he said, you know why? Like the Atlantic is a wonderful perch. And I honestly told him, I told him

what I told you. I was like, like the job of like being a content creator, right? It's a weird and wonderful job. Your job is to wake up in the morning and think, what do other people want from me that lives in here, that I can put out here and give to them? It's a really weird and wonderful job. And I feel like that work requires a certain amount of churn and experimentation. If you're stuck somewhere,

and I didn't feel stuck at the Atlantic, but I was there for 17 years. If you were in one place for 17 years, there's a certain amount of experimentation that you're essentially choosing to block yourself out of. Right. And so I told him, like, I really wanted to, to experience like, you know, what, what different kinds of questions were different kinds of writing styles and podcasting styles, maybe eventually like, you know, um, video podcasting styles would eventually be unlocked by going independent. I think that's a lot of the, the appeal of Substack for people, for people in a certain place or Beehive or some of these other

places. Patreon is really getting into the game here as well. It's this opportunity to be like, all right, what does it feel like to be a content creator for myself? I'm not answering anybody else and I'm taking on all of the responsibility and the stress that comes with being my own boss. I feel like that's an experiment that more people should run on themselves. What about the timing of the launch? You always hear about the big bump that comes from like a big podcast appearance or something like that. Is there a world where you think you should have been doing email capture in the lead up to the book? So when the you did the interviews for the book, people could just go subscribe

immediately is this the ideal time it seems like it's it's really well time because the like the book has really really done extremely well and so you're you're in this like capturing moment it would have been probably a much riskier to launch this a year from now but did that factor into it did you do you think about doing it before or later? How'd you land on this time? Look, here's a framework that I thought about. It's not like the only framework that in my head

is everyone. Obviously, having a number one New York Times bestselling book is a good opportunity to do something new because a certain number of people are already paying attention to you. Like there's a certain amount of obviousness there that I don't want to be like, um, cynical or, or conceited or vain, but I think it's just flatly true.

And there was a certain calculation that was like, if I do want to do this in the next 10 years, does it really make sense to think, am I going to have another, another number one best selling book in five years? Like almost certainly not. Yeah. And you're not like, it is an incredibly fortunate and frankly, just strange thing. I mean, I don't think there's no, there's no reason for you to know this. Our book did not hit number one on week one. It didn't hit number one on week two or three or four.

It hit number one on week five. Like a discourse built around the book allowed it to sort of like hover in the two to three range and then spike to number one in a way that my book agent said she's never seen this before. Like no book. She said, she said, I've had a lot of books hit number one, none for the first time in week five. So it was a really original and not original really maybe unique experience in terms of the way that it hit the discourse. Was that a product of like the podcast appearance

strategy I saw as we're going and you both of you guys going on like a really wide swath of podcasts and and bringing the message to places. And I think a lot of authors when they launch, they think like I'm going to do like five big things on week one and then like,

uh, you know, I'm done. But it felt like you were kind of taking the message to all these different pockets of the internet and really capitalizing over a long time. And it didn't feel like it was necessarily like, okay, you got 50% of the audience in week one, and then 10%, and then 10%, and the 10%. It felt more like you're having different frames on the same conversation again and again, and actually building that momentum. Yes.

So if we were doing like book publishing economics 101. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. The book publisher controls very little distribution themselves, right? There's very few channels of exposure. The book publisher controls themselves, right? Even if you love reading nonfiction,

my guess is that you aren't going to randomhouse.com to check out their nonfiction titles every Tuesday when the new nonfiction titles come out. Right. What do you check? The New York Times Book Review, podcasts that you listen to, other sites that review books, right. TV interviews. Those are the channels of exposure. When you're a book author, you're basically in a position of begging. You go to Friedrich Zuccar and you say, please, please, can you talk to me about this book? And you go to Barry Weiss and you say, please, can you talk to me? And you go to the far left podcast, you say, please, go to the right wing podcast. You say, Ben Shapiro, please. You're asking, please, please, please, of everybody and their assistants and the assistant producers and the producers assistants,

you're begging the entire world. Made this and almost every author is doing that. Every author is in this position of begging because often other people control channels of distribution that they don't. Now in Ezra's case, he arguably has with the Ezra Klein show, like the medium of exposure

that is most successful for launching books. So that's unique experience for me and my co-author. That said, two things. One, I would guess that if you really looked into the numbers, what sold this book early on, despite the impression that you gave that this book was on a lot of different podcasts, what sells books is still television. The reason why is not because television is bigger than podcasts in a weird way, it's because television is shorter and it's a worse product, but a worse product gives you a better amuse bouche for the book. If I talk to Lex Friedman for four hours about abundance,

exactly how many more hours do you want to spend inside of abundance? That's a great point. If you talk to Frieds Akaria for 10 minutes about the book, it's this little amuse-bouche that makes people think, ooh, that sounds exactly what I want. The future democratic party, the future of liberalism. So my feeling is that while podcasts are important, because in a weird way, the product of a book is even more the conversation about the book than the product than the book itself. The best way to sell a book weirdly, even in this like podcast heavy moment is still

television. That's my, that's my unempirical vibey bet right now. That's fascinating. Yeah. I love that. Yeah. I mean, I noticed that with, uh, I mean, Ezra on his, I believe it's his own branded podcast channel put out a 20 minute video essay outlining the thesis for the book.

That video did very well. I believe it went viral and got maybe millions of views. That feels like number one bestseller on that week. But I think that happened on week one one not on week five, which is interesting Which is where yeah, I mean so what happened was um John Green the author of the fault in our stars Who's become a nonfiction writer wrote a book called everything is tuberculosis and that book? I don't think I can share the inside numbers that I have

We did great week one That book kicked our ass. We weren't even close. Like, I don't know if you guys are, what kind of sports fans you guys are. Like that was like the Miami heat. That book was the Cleveland Cavaliers. We were the Miami heat. Like everything was a blowout. It destroyed it. So like, we weren't even close number one. And that does go to show that, that with book selling, it's all about channels of exposure and there's already a celebrity owns their channel of exposure.

And so the book publisher by giving them a lot of money is essentially buying their channel of exposure and that's partly what they're paying for. Um, but yeah, the strategy, you know, beyond strategy, there's this question of like, how do you sell, how do you sell a book? And there's also this question of like, how do you sell a book? And there's also this question of like, I don't mean to get like weird existential, but like, what's the job of a book? Like what's his job? And I think the job of a nonfiction book is to get people talking about it. Of course you want people to buy it, but like

Or start your presidential run. Or start your presidential run. Honestly, you should do it the other way around. Because the best way to get attention for yourself, like if you dudes run for president is a ticket. It's like,. Honestly, you should do it the other way around. Because the best way to get attention for yourself, like if you dudes run for president as a ticket, you'll get a ton of media exposure.

A ticket, we haven't even thought about that. That's hilarious. Then you'll build, then you'll- Then people will buy our book. Totally free. It's totally free media. Because all these people, the New York Times is like, what are these guys doing in the Washington Post?

Like what are these guys doing, right? You get all this free media exposure. Then everyone knows your name. Then I have to talk to you. I was doing it in the Washington Post. Like what are these guys doing? Right. You get all this pre-media exposure. Yeah. Then everyone knows your name. Then you go to a book publisher, then they give you a lot of money. And then you have this, this, um, platform that's been co-constructed by media organizations that were conspiring even though they didn't even mean to. So you should not write the book, then go for president.

You should, you should do it the other way around. Exactly. But the, but the, the product is the conversation. Um, and so the reason to go on podcasts, the reason to go, you know, on, on shows like this, because like you want these ideas to get out in the ether. Like no one should write a book if they don't want to talk about it for 50,000 hours, cause that is the experience of writing a book. You finish it. And then if you're lucky, you talk about it for the rest of your life. Okay well talking about things actually in the

book this has been fascinating so far I've really enjoyed this but um that one of the narratives that I keep coming back to you is the the story of California high speed rail. I grew up in California. I have friends and family members who have worked on that project, actually. And I think for a lot of technologists and Californians, the comparison between SpaceX and the California high-speed rail story really draw a very clear conclusion in people's mind, which is that the private sector is more efficient than the public sector.

And I'm wondering how you, do you think that that narrative of, you know, one was literally rocket science, but at the same time we had put things up into space, it wasn't entirely a new capability. The other was a train, which, you know, we've had trains for generations, and we tried to build a train,

and we tried to build capability to get to low earth orbit. One feels very successful, and the other feels like we didn't get anything out of it. And I think for a lot of people the takeaway is let's not have the government even try and do things. Let's let the private sector do as much as possible. And that trade off between if there is an economic feedback or there is a profit motive or a payback,

that will act as a better incentive to actually get the result that people want, which is transportation or the ability to get to space. How have you grappled with that anecdote specifically? I'm a liberal who believes in a large role for private sector innovation. There's no question that SpaceX is an extraordinary company that has done things for rocket technology and especially for rocket efficiency that no other company in the world has done, no other individual in the world has done. How many people has moved to space?

A lot. How many? Like dozens? A thousand? Hundreds? I don't know. It's just the I.S.S. How many people are in California? This is our, this is our Iran population question. Yeah, this is our, we're getting out of here. 50 million, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. In California. To build infrastructure.

Yeah. That is a public good for 50 million people is a different challenge than building technology whose proof point requires several dozen. These are entirely different challenges. And that's why we need... Yeah, I would say like SpaceX has provided internet infrastructure for billions of people. Yeah, the satellites kind of count as the people in this case, because that's the benefit that people really want out of...

The public benefit is that people in around right now can access the open internet. internet. Yeah. And I think that the value of Starlink is sensational. Yeah. But when you're talking about, right. I mean, when you think about like broadband technology, yeah, broadband technology is already being built by a lot of private companies. Right. So it's not as if the creation of Starlink is taking away what has historically been a public service and is creating a private company out of it. Like broadband companies exist, like Charter exists, Comcast exists. So I think it's great that there are private companies that are working on that.

When we're talking about questions like public goods, when we're talking about roads and bridges, things that are frankly quite difficult to monetize. And it's not entirely clear that we want to like directly monetize them. Like, do we want to charge poor people a certain fee every time they use a road or a bridge? Or does it make sense to live in a rich society with a progressive tax structure such that we can tax the rich a little bit more than the low income and use that money to create a set of public goods that makes life better for everybody that allows frankly, low income people to use those roads to drive into areas where they can provide services for high income people such that everyone turns out better

off. I see it a large, large role for the federal government and for state and local governments to look out for public goods. And to me, when I say public goods and you look at the actual budgets, the federal, local state governments, overwhelmingly what we're talking about is healthcare, subsidized healthcare. We're talking about education, we're talking about infrastructure and transportation, things like roads, things like bridges. I think there's a huge role for government to play. I like having both mixed economy, right? Muscular government and also even more, I would like to see in the book is probably about this, even more purposeful pro tech, pro science strategy, because the truth is, if you look at what SpaceX did for rocketry, why haven't we done that for Alzheimer's?

Why isn't there like a SpaceX for like chronic inflammation or SpaceX for carbon capture technology? So I see a huge role for both of these things. I don't think that the success of government in some places proves that the private sector can't do certain things very well, or that the success of SpaceX means that the government should get out of the business of building bridges. Yeah. I agree with you on the roads and bridges thing. I guess my worry is like the free market solution to how do I the real problem that you're solving is like, how do you get people from LA to San Francisco? How do you move people around California? And

the free market solution is a one hour Southwest flight that costs 100 bucks or a Camry that drives you there and maybe costs $20 in gas or something like that. And so the free markets kind of solved like if you have six hours, you can do it in 20 bucks or if you have one hour, you can do it for 100 bucks and you kind of choose those. And we kind of came in with like, we want something that's cheaper for two hours,

but there wasn't this like massive market pull. And so it was more like the decision to create that interim solution. Just never really happened. But I mean, we kind of move into- Just stop there. I love Southwest, I love flying on airlines. At no point in my life have I been like,

what we need to do is nationalize United. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We need to do that. But, who built LAX? Totally. Right. what we need to do is like nationalized, you know, but like, who built LAX? Totally. Right. Like you need public infrastructure or infrastructure that is partly publicly financed in order to create a kind of platform technology for the private sector to succeed. And this way, if you look at the history of Elon Musk's companies,

like what is the total number of government contracts and loan guarantees that SpaceX and Tesla have benefited from in order to become the companies that they are? I'm pretty sure numbers in the billions, especially when you count all the NASA contracts. Yeah. So I guess the question is like, should we- A huge opportunity for a public-private partnership to give it some of the outcomes that we're most proud of. Yeah. for a public private partnership to give it some of the outcomes that we're most proud of. Yeah, with the California high-speed rail example, the question I guess is,

is it was a mistake for the government to pick high-speed rail as an important project? Like was it a misranking? Should have spent more money on roads and or was it just execution? I mean, billions of dollars are spent on a rail system. I mean, $33 billion were essentially tacitly approved by a bond that was voted on by the public. I think several billion dollars were actually spent constructing rail that isn't connecting anything to anything right now. So clearly if you were looking back,

like the total number of man hours spent and dollars allocated on high-speed rail has not been worth it for people who live in California. I don't want that failure to indict the good that the public sector can do. Any more than I think you would say that the failure of one SpaceX launch proves that SpaceX is in fact totally overrated.

Like, how much, switching gears a little bit, how much are you digging into general research funding? We had Andrew Huberman on the show last week talking about his concerns around NIH funding. Tell me his concerns. Can you actually, I didn't see that. Can you say where I see it? Yeah, so he had a long interview with Jay Bhattacharya and essentially the proposal is to cut government funding to university labs and scientific research labs by something

like 40 percent. And that's a pretty significant chunk. He was very worried about this. There are some unnecessary costs potentially that he highlighted, but in general, this is the research that cannot be underwritten by the private sector because it does not, if you're just doing research on how do we fall asleep or like how does the brain work at a very abstract or what is DNA? You can't patent DNA as soon as you discover it

and yet as soon as you've discovered it, boom, there's a huge, huge massive boom in biotechnology, but it won't be captured by a single patent holder on the underlying. huge massive boom in biotechnology, but it won't be captured by a single patent holder on the underlying. Yeah, so that just feels like an area that you could really dig and dive into in an area where it's okay to be kind of skeptical of this hyper-capitalist viewpoint

and venture-backed companies can solve everything when some of the smartest people in the world are. Well, what I like about that is that it's broad. It's a ton of funding of a smartest people in the world are. Well, what I like about that is that it's broad. It's a ton of funding of a whole bunch of different research areas. They all can't be underwritten by the private sector in any way versus being very prescriptive.

We need to train from here to here, and we are going to hire the people to build it. That feels like much, much harder for the government to get right. I agree with the way you guys are thinking about this, and maybe it means I agree with the way that Andrew's thinking about it as well. I think what's happening at the NIH right now under HHS is horrendous.

I think if what you wanted to do was to reduce America's annual deficit by $18 billion, which is what we're cutting from NIH, you could either cut NIH, the fountain of scientific discovery for it, not just the US, the entire world. You cut NIH by 40%, or you could cut the corporate income tax cut by 0.4%. Why not just like kind of reduce the size of the corporate income tax cut by a microscopic percent and still fund scientists to discover the basis of Alzheimer's and chronic inflammation and multiple sclerosis and pancreatic cancer. You said it really well. Knowledge can't be patented, period. Like when the first scientists who looked inside the Gila monster's mouth discovered that there was a little

hormone there that seemed to suppress its appetite and regulate its insulin, you can't patent a lizard's tongue. But our knowledge, our subsidized knowledge of the liquid on top of the lizard's tongue gave us GOP1 drugs, which now appear to be something like a miracle drug for everything. I mean, they don't just help people lose weight. They don't just help people reduce inflammation. They literally seem to, there's a study going on right now that they might reduce rates of Alzheimer's because Alzheimer's might be caused in part by inflammation in the brain. And if GOP1 drugs work by not only reducing obesity

but also reducing chronic inflammation, they might ironically or incidentally be a neurodegenerative drug that works through the gut brain interface. That's fucking crazy. And we see this by looking in a lizard and no smart VC. Like Marc Andreessen's brilliant, but he would be an idiot if he told scientists,

if he gave scientists tens of millions of dollars to just look in the mouths of a bunch of reptiles. That's dumb. It sounds really dumb, but it's really wonderful to have a publicly funded organization that asks scientists who simply discover the truths of the universe with the hope that if it's true, someone along the line can find a way to make a product with it that makes money and save people's lives. So I think we need a really aggressively funded NIH

and NSF. I think what's happening right now in the Trump administration is really, really sad. And Jay Bhattacharya, if you're out there, I would love to talk to you about what's happening at NIH, because I know you a little bit, we've talked a little bit, I know you don't want this deep down, and I would love to talk about how we could amend NIH policy to truly make Americans healthy again and make America great again,

because cutting NIH by 40% ain't it. Yeah, I think the frustration from Andrew was seeing the increased spending and trying to reckon with the two decisions there. Let's switch to something less politically charged. Can you give us the highlights of your conversation with Mom Donnie? You released that this morning.

Oh yeah. Right before we got on the air, so we haven't had a chance to listen, but I'm sure it'll be entertaining. Look, let me give you my reaction as a person, and then as a political thinker. He's unbelievably charming and engaging and thoughtful. Like, you know when you're talking to someone who's listening or who at

least is very good at performing the act of making you think you're listening to them? I only know this guy for 37 minutes, but I loved our conversation. I really, really loved it. I think he's wrong about a lot. I think rent freezes are a terrible idea to increase housing supply. I think fundamentally you cannot try to cap the price of something whose supply you're trying to increase. The way I put it in the podcast, that was like, you want grocery stores in New York to be better. If you pass a law that capped receipts at grocery stores at $50, what do you think grocery stores would start doing? They would stop stocking the shelves because you can't make money selling nice stuff to people if it's illegal to make $51 on the receipt.

So in the same way, if you cap the price of a good and you're trying to increase its supply, you're tying the hand behind your back that you're trying to use. He was respectful, but we disagreed about that point. We disagreed about the fact that I think I'm persuaded that while I'm not against public sector unions in the big picture, if you look at why New York City subways have among the highest transit construction costs in the world on the per mile basis, one part of it is that their union staffing levels are four times higher than the international average. their union staffing levels are four times higher than the international average. You cannot build, you cannot build anything efficiently. If the first rule of your company is your staffing levels have to be four times higher than all your competitors, like it doesn't work. So I asked

him whether he was interested in talking to public sector unions, which are a democratic ally, of course, if he was interested in building public transit efficiently and increasing public excellence. Again, he disagreed. That said, I was really impressed by his insistence that he wanted to be a politician who was outcomes first and process second. And there was a certain amount of ambivalence that he seemed to communicate to me again. Maybe he's lying. I don't know him that well. He's a nice guy on the phone. But there's a certain amount of sort of procedural ambivalence that I really like in a politician. Like if Jay Bhattacharya came on your show, right? Or if RFK Jr. came on your show or whoever else in tech policy, someone who's doing AI policy. And they told you that the

outcomes that they wanted were the outcomes that they wanted were the outcomes that you wanted. They were ambivalent about what process it took to get those outcomes, but they were going to try their damnedest to make sure that when they left office, those were the outcomes that everybody could agree about. There's something that's very refreshing

and non-ideological about that perspective. And I heard a little bit of it. That said, I'm- Is that tying into changing his mind around how police should be funded? Where he- We talked about him changing his mind on two things. One, he told the New York Times he's changed his mind

in the role of private developers in housing. I think he used to be more on the side of like, the government should build up the houses. I'm more on the side of the government should fund some of the housing construction, but like we've got private companies that are really good at building housing. That's, that's not do what the private sector is already doing, um, too much.

But the other thing he changed his mind about, as you said, is defund the police. He talked four years ago, five years ago about defund the police being, um, a slogan that he believed in. And now he really, his policy has fund the police. Um, he thinks that police don't solve crimes fast enough and that in many cases they're forced, and this is clearly true, to act as social workers rather than police officers. And so if you've got a police officer

or say a hundred police officers who have to basically be street therapists and social workers all day long, how are they gonna solve crimes? How are they gonna stop crime? And so he said he's changed his mind there a little bit as he talked to more police officers. And the end of our conversation was,

I thought a really refreshing point that he made that he thinks that his job, he sees his job as surrounding himself with people who aren't too fast to say yes to all of his ideas. He likes being around people who challenge his ideas. And I think that's, I think that's a useful thing for really just, I mean, anybody, any politician or executive.

And so there were many things in the conversation that I was impressed by, but also fundamentally, I think it's just important to say, there are very big differences between socialism and liberalism. And he's a socialist and I'm a liberal. So we're not gonna agree about everything, but you have to be able to talk to people

you don't agree with. What are you hoping to see out of tech, the intersection of tech and Washington in a post-Elon White House world? We gotta get beyond this insanity where the administration attacks on progressive thought the administration attacks on progressive thought become attacks on the kind of talent America needs to train and attract and retain to keep our dominance and to keep the really valuable information clusters that we have here. If we attack Harvard because we're pissed off at them

and force all of the international students to leave, or if we encourage some of the smartest people around the world who deep down wanna be at Caltech, wanna be at Harvard, wanna be at Duke, and we push them to be in London and Beijing and Shanghai, we are losing so many great ideas, so much agglomeration, the interaction effects that happen when you put a lot of smart people together in America.

It's important that Silicon Valley is in California and not in Brazil or France or Poland. There is a special sauce to America, I think. You want to attract and retain these people. I want us to rationalize our talent and immigration policy and not have it be a kind of unfortunately like a sass needed bystander in this war between the Trump administration and a progressive movement that they think has gone too far.

I think we really need to get back down to a reasonable basis on immigration policy in particular. And then I would like us to add back the funding to NIH and NSF. I'm sure Andrew talked about this a little bit. Is it possible that there are so-called indirect costs, money that I work at Harvard, let's say, you're NIH, you give me some money for my Alzheimer's study,

you also give me money for Harvard. Is it possible that Harvard money, that those indirect costs are too high? Yeah, sure. Let's have a public debate about that. Let's have public testimony. It's not cut NIH by 18 billion dollars and say, well, hopefully we're only cutting the fat and not the muscle. So better immigration policy and better science policy number one. I wish I had a good answer on AI.

I don't know what the hell the next five years look like. I feel like the smart people that I follow change their mind every six months. Sometimes they accelerate, sometimes they decelerate. I wish I had like this sort of crystal ball that could tell me what like optimal AI policy coming out of Washington looked like. Right now I don't, but hopefully in the sub stack

I'll be able to get some answers there. Well, we're excited to follow along. That was great. Thank you for joining. This was great. Thank you answers there. Well, we're excited to follow along. That was great. Thank you for joining. This was great. Thank you so much. Yeah, we'd love to have you back. Cheers.

We can talk all day. All right, great. I'll do it. Have a good one. Awesome. Talk to you soon. Later. Bye.

Sorry, I went way over. The stack lined up. I thought we were five minutes over. We are 11 minutes over. We have a light system in the studio, but the golden retriever does not concern himself. The lion does not concern himself with who's in the studio but the golden retriever does not concern himself with the lion does not concern himself with who's in the waiting room we have our next guest from Juniper Square thank you for waiting great to talk to you and we got

some news what do we got here guys what do we got we got two things we got here guys? What do we got? We got two things. We got a hundred and thirty million dollar series D Congratulations, I've been waiting to do that all day Yeah, and then we launched our AI product that we call Juni AI That's our second. Okay news now that we got the important stuff out of the way. Who are you? What do you do? Yeah, yeah, well, I'm I've become a fan of what you guys are doing. So I'm glad to be on the show. It's really interesting and unique. So keep it up. Yeah. Yeah. So my name's Alex. I'm the co-founder, CEO, Juniper square and Juniper square is an 11 year old technology and services company. All of our customers are private markets, GPs. Sure. So venture capital firms, private equity firms, real estate investors, crypto, private credit, you name it.

If they raise an outside fund, then we help them with fund administration. We help them with technology to manage that fund reporting. Basically everything is not the investing and we've got close to 2500 customers now, trillion dollars that were responsible for stewarding about 750 employees. 2500 customers. Is that, is that not all of them? How many investors are there? I feel like I saw that number on your website. You need to update it by the way. It says 2,000 on your website. You're at 2,500 now. Yeah, we gotta get those numbers out.

I mean, I feel like there's, I mean, we try and talk to, I thought we talked to all the VCs. We've done hundreds of interviews. I thought we talked to them all. Apparently there are more. There's some left. How big is this market? It feels like, you know, you talk about

private markets investing. That feels like, like, you know, you talk about private markets investing that feels like a small market, yet series D is a billion point one, like you're building a big business. How big is this market? Right. So the, you have to kind of take it by asset class, right? Because VC is relatively small as an asset class, both in terms of the capital that it manages and the number of GPs or investment firms that are out there. Private equity and real estate are respectively probably five times as big as venture. So there's thousands and thousands of, you know, just think

of all the middle market private equity kind of LBO growth focused firms out there. I think of all the different real estate investors focused on, you know, apartment buildings or retail or whatever. There's probably about 20,000 GPS globally that matter. Was the Zurb crash hard for you? Was that a slower growth period for your business? Because it seemed like it was really rough for all the VCs and a lot of investors pulled back but it's not as like they really shut down their funds. Yeah, it's more like net new fund creation. So yeah, was that a real driver? Or are you just going after the existing players and so the new ones don't necessarily

matter as much? No, we definitely felt it. And you're right that we're what we're sensitized to is in a given quarter a given year, how many new funds were created? Our market share solo that we still can sell to existing funds and people switch their providers all the time, but it's always easiest to get the new ones that's raised. So we had the double whammy of, you know, big focus for us is commercial real estate. So when COVID hit in

spring of 2020, you know, just took out retail, it took out hospitality and hotel and commercial real estate was it was really tough sledding from like 2020, you know, really until 2022. And then the rate hike started in commercial real estate, you know, the heavily capex intensive, it's super rate sensitive. And then we had the big bust in, you know, sensitive. And then we had the big bust in public markets correction. We had the big overhang of everyone investing at 100X revenue multiples in 2021, 2022.

We're gonna bring those back. Yeah, we're working on it here. The sober days of 100X revenue multiple, which we're kind of back to now. Yeah. Areas. How do you get through all those times? It's recovering, it's coming back. of 100x revenue multiple, which we're kind of back to now. Yeah. Areas. So how do you get through all those times?

It's recovering. It's coming back. How do you get through the tough times? Did you have to do layoffs or change the direction of the business? Were there any pivots in the story? Specific meditation track. Yeah.

I saw you in the meditation, actually. OK, cool. Yeah, bring it down. Yeah, all of the above, you guys. We had to do some layoffs for sure, like everybody. I mean, we were going into, you know, the fed started hiking rates in like late 21. But by spring of 22 is when we had that huge correction in the public markets. And by that summer it was clear that companies like us and pretty much every high growth late stage

tech company was spending too much, right? We were all investing for revenue growth and we all had to pivot to invest for growth efficiency. So we did a round of layoffs then like a lot of people did. It was the first time I ever do that as an entrepreneur. It's not fun by any means, but it was necessary. But then the big thing for us is, we started out as a technology company, but then we added in 2019, we moved into the world of fund administration and we became a full service fund administrator. And fund administration is like a really critical market

for private capital. There's probably 30, $40 trillion of private capital out there in the world. And almost all of it needs a third party administered administrator. So we kind of moved into this market that was like 50 times the tam of our previous market concurrent with this big correction happening. And so those forces ended up working out that like the company did really well and we continued, you know, we grow, we've grown really quickly, uh,

through a really challenging market period. Um, so it wasn't without its bumps and bru continued, we've grown really quickly through a really challenging market period. So it wasn't without its bumps and bruises, but overall it's been really well. Yeah, talk about the new AI products. I imagine it's a difficult one to build. You can't really, like LPs and investors can't really tolerate hallucinations. I can imagine a product that works well.

I don't mind if you leak my fund returns to my direct competitor. No problem. Less of that, but if you're trying to understand fund performance and things like that, or reporting, you can't like, oh, I'm sorry, I misreported. TVPI. Yeah.

Yeah, so that is the crux of the challenge is, I mean, as you guys know, you talk about it a lot on the show, you know, generative AI is probabilistic, right? So next token prediction is is probabilistic in its nature. And the kind of work that we do of reporting on financial assets is deterministic, right? Like one plus one always has to equal two. And it can never equal, you know, one or three or anything like that.

And so the real trick is, and if you guys ever know, if you've ever like taken a pile of invoices or something and uploaded them to ChatGPT or any LLM and been like, hey, tell me the, you know, invoice amount for invoice number eight. It's terrible at financial data extraction. And so the big hole that we have in the market that we're filling for our customers is, if you're an asset manager, if you're a financial services firm, like a venture capitalist or a real estate investor or whatever, one of the key things you have to do is you have to report to

your regulators, you have to report to your LPs. That reporting is like, you know, you're putting your brand and reputation and your ability to raise more money in the future and everything behind it being accurate and correct. And so the trick is, how do you leverage all of the power of generative AI, this like all these summation use cases, document extraction, the chat interface that we've all become so accustomed to? How do you fuse that with a set of deterministic tools that do all the precision stuff, the precision math,

so that like you're calling functions in Python to run some code to answer a question. You're not trying to have a next token prediction be the answer of that. And that's basically what this platform is. Is it's multi-model, we have a bunch of different models running inside of it. And the idea is, think of it as like a model orchestration layer, where if you're a private markets GP,

there's a lot of work you got to get done. You want agents for different things, different models fit different use cases. And you need a way of orchestrating all of that work, ensuring it's compliant, ensuring it's accurate accurate and that's what this layer does anything else This is great. Yeah. Yeah, we gotta have you back on we're running behind today as you saw but we really appreciate you stopping by Congratulations on making it through the fire and come back on when you have more news. Yeah, we'll talk soon I'd be here guys. You and the team cheers Alex. Bye. Yeah Really quickly. How'd you sleep last night? I

Hope I'm hopeful. I'm on a run 94. Let's hear you beat me last night. I'm gonna be 86 oh, let's go for John. It's crazy Ever since I got sick I've been off trailing you you by like 10 points. Off your game. Well, we got Jesse from Dekagon in the studio. He's certainly been on his game. How are you doing, Jesse? What's going on?

Welcome to the stream. Guys, good to see you. Thanks for having me. Yeah, thanks for hopping on. Give us the news. What does the company do and what's the breaking news with you? Yeah. Hey, everyone watching.

I'm Jesse. I'm one of the co-founders of Dekigon. If you don't know about us, we're essentially an AI customer service agent. And so what this means is, you know, imagine next time you're booking a hotel room or something, right? There's an AI agent that's there that you can call or chat with live, and it knows everything about you. It can book rooms for you. It can upgrade.

It can answer questions about loyalty points and so on. And so essentially what we do is we work with these large, usually consumer businesses that have a lot of customers and a lot of contact center volume. And we're there to both drive a ton of efficiency for them because now their human agents don't have to deal with these more mundane issues. But also we are able to give a better customer experience for the actual customers. So that's what we do. And then today we're very excited to announce our Series C co-led by A16Z and Excel at a 1.5.

Let's go. Give it a bigger head, John. There we go. Talk to me about the early beachhead for the company. I feel like LLMs are so generalizable and yet go to market is so specific. Every vertical industry has slightly different customer service needs, whether it's a Shopify store that needs access to an inventory management system

or refunds or stripe versus a SaaS product. What has been most interesting to you? What's been, where has adoption been the strongest early on? Yeah, that's a good question. So I would say that with most of the use cases out there, the ones that have had the most impact from AI has been ones where there is a little bit of complexity, where you need the AI to go and take actions for you or look up data for you. ones that have had the most impact from AI has been ones where there is a little bit of complexity, right?

Where you need the AI to go and take actions for you or look up data for you. And it's kind of adding this extra layer beyond what traditional chatbots have been able to do. Because I'm sure both of you have used chatbots in the past and usually it's a pretty frustrating experience. Yesterday, I was trying to cancel spectrum internet at our old office. Good luck, John. And couldn't do it on the website. This is 100% deliberate by them, by the way. Couldn't do it on the website.

Of course, this is a CRUD app. I should be able to click a button and update the... You have to wonder if it's intentional. It's 100% intentional. They broke one password so I couldn't log in. Finally, they say, hey, text us. And I'm texting with their chat bot. It texts me natural language,

but then asks me to click a dropdown for two different options every single time. Finally get through all that flow. And they're like, you need to call us. And by the way, we're closed today. It was awful. It was the worst. Yeah, is that some maybe friction in the sales process

where people are like, I get it that you want to make this more frictionless for our customers, but you're going to increase our churn, 10%. I don't know if we should tie up with this. Are there actually trade-offs there? I'm super interested. Yeah, no, that is one use case, right? So to your question, what use cases are good,

it is where you need a little bit of complexity because in the old days, the reason why you can't do that today is because it's really easy to game that system. Oh, sure. They made a decision tree, then people somewhat make a Reddit post about, hey, here's how you actually cancel easily and everyone will just do it immediately. Yeah.

And it impacts the revenue. Right. So the nice thing about LMS now and the thing that really unlocks is this level of nuance. You're able to create much more complex flows and sort of situations that are tailored to specific users. Because of that, you're able to cover way more ground. So we have customers, for example, that use us to process refunds. We have customers that use us to either book flights or reorder of credit card or things like that. And that's really powerful because it's just wasn't possible before, right? Before you're kind of in this more dumb decision tree

that you have to get forced down a certain path. And maybe that path is kind of what you want, but you want like something slightly different and you're just forced to go down the path, you get stuck and you get escalated, right? So that's one of the main benefits of these LLMs. Last question from my side, I know we're going crazy on the timing,

but in my previous jobs, when I've hired a really all-star customer service agent, the thing that's always impressed me is when they're able to expand out of their role as just customer service, just doing specific flows, and actually turn into sort of a salesperson, and actually turn the interaction into customer service, just doing specific flows, and actually turn into sort of a salesperson, and actually turn the interaction into customer education, or upselling, or cross-selling, or, you know,

hey, yes, you said you wanted to cancel, but I think you want to cancel for a reason that we could actually alleviate by switching you around or giving you a discount or doing something like that. Some of that can be deterministic. We've seen this with like, are you sure you wanna cancel? We'll give you 20% off. But the real best customer service agents

tend to do it with more touch. Is that something that you're seeing already being able to be handled by LLMs? Do you think that's coming with more agent workflows? How do you see the role of the customer service agent or human evolving over the next couple of years? We work with our customers a lot on that exact concept, which is what is the definition of customer experience over time? Because when you start, you're generally working on the low-hanging fruit,

like processing transactions or looking up information. Even FAQ, right? Right, exactly. But if you end up having a really, really good AI experience, and if you just think about it with the products in your life, you're just going to interact with it more. It's not that you're going to, it's like, oh, I'm done with this. If it's a good experience, you're going to interact with it a lot more. And that opens up a much broader surface area for what customer experience means. You can start being proactive instead of just reactive.

You can start looking at revenue generating use cases like you just mentioned. And it doesn't just have to be a cost center, which is what a lot of enterprises look at customer service. It's like, it's this thing that's not really strategic to us, we're just going to put it off to the side and try to save as much money as possible. AI is changing a lot of that and a lot of the customers that use Deckingon are super excited by this concept that,

hey, if you have a good system there, it almost becomes essentially a concierge for your product. It becomes like a newcierge for your product. It becomes a new UI that customers can use to interact with you. Because if it's really good and it can do everything, maybe people are just chatting with it instead of using an app or going through a bunch of drop downs and stuff like that. Sorry to interrupt, what's happening in the call center BPO market right now? Is there already pretty massive impact from companies like Decagon, Intercom, Sierra, etc.?

Yeah, the call center market is definitely thinking about this space a lot, as you can see. When AI first came out, a lot of their stocks went down by quite a bit because it's one of the most obvious use cases for AI. I would say the best BPOs out there are really figuring out how to become AI native in either partnering with solutions like us or spending a lot of effort in building their own.

I think partnership would probably be the realistic path because when customers, when end customers buy these services they usually kind of see BPOs as a service provider. So there is room for partnership, when customers, when end customers buy these services, they usually kind of see BPO's as a service provider. So there is room for partnership, but that's typically the way it will happen. Yeah, I mean, just the advent of software as a service or just websites in some ways reduce the amount of humans in a sales interaction because you could go through the Shopify checkout by yourself and yet there was still a role for the human so I'm sure that will be evolving but it's

exciting stuff thank you so much for stopping by congrats on the round and congrats on picking up Max Garnechia a couple months ago star sales leader I went to I went to college with Max no way he's an absolute Chad he's telling me about you earlier. Yeah. No way. So shout out to Max. That's awesome. Thanks for coming on.

We'll talk to you soon. Yeah. Cheers. Have a good rest of your day. Next up we have Yaxine. Yaxine. Yaxine. Welcome to the studio. The chat has been waiting.

Yaxine. How are you doing? What's going on? You are on mute, brother. No audio yet. But do love you got the video We got the weight set up in a weight rack or looks like hello test. Yeah, we testing. How you doing testing? I haven't set up my DAC yet. So no, you're good. You're good. What's happening? Let me just ask Let me just check like let me just look at something on.

Sure. Yeah, we'll give the basic background on you for the audience while you figure that out. Okay. The poster who needs no introduction. He needs no introduction. Founder of Dingboard, a web based. Of the hosts of... John and Jordy.

John and Jordy, hey, how's it going? Nice to meet you guys. My name is Yaseen. Apologies. Good to meet you. Hello, thanks for the introduction. I appreciate the time as well. And I'm actually a huge fan of you guys.

Like someone I used to work with introduced me to you guys. So I found a lot of enjoyment. That's great. That's great to have you on. How have the last few days been? A little bit stressful to be honest. I've slept three hours every single night because posting on Twitter has been so fun.

And unfortunately for- Fun or stressful? Yeah, so both fun and stressful because I can't stop posting and that's not good for me, but I will basically just not stop posting. But if you keep posting the way you have been, could you potentially replace your salaries?

You were making it in the seven figure mark. You got to really ramp it up a little bit. I used to go on 4chan and these people would be like, yeah, I'm making like a million, like a two million at these AI companies. I'd be like, no way. There's no way you guys are making two million at these AI companies.

When I started making like seven digits at an AI company, I was like, wait,. There's no way you guys are making two million of these AI companies. And I started making like seven digits at an AI company, I was like, wait, like these guys weren't actually lying. Like you actually make that much money at these AI companies. And it's like pretty fun work too as well. So yeah, for what it's worth, like I didn't work on AI, I worked on like bugs that really annoyed me on the app.

And that's why I joined actually. So I joined X because there were a lot of bugs that really annoyed me. I fixed quite a lot of them. So I'm pretty happy like with the work I've done. X is the product I use that I find the most bugs, yet I'm not just, I don't abandon the product. That's how addicted I am.

That's a super interesting thing. And it's because there's like, it's a very large app, right? So the scale is huge. And you guys are like right tail users, right? Like you guys are famous. Like the podcast of the Tech Bro podcast, sorry, the host of the Tech Bro podcast, you guys are famous. So the amount of notifications you guys get, the amount of replies you guys are famous, like the podcast of the tech bro podcast. Sorry, the host of the tech pro podcast. You guys are famous.

So you might have notifications you guys get, the amount of replies you guys get, the amount of DMS that you guys get is an insane amount. You guys are so far into the right tail, but how many people are there like you? That's why it feels buggy for you. For most people, like an engineer who's like creating a test account and like clicking around, it's not, it's not going to be buggy for them. For what it's worth, this is true across all the apps.

Power users will always experience a lot of bugs, unless they have someone to really talk to them and understand what their pain points are. And for what it's worth, X does a really great job. I mean, it's actually remarkable how well X has run as a company. And just working there, I got to learn a lot about how to get engineers motivated and really get shit done.

It was awesome work there. It was super fun. How do you wish you had the opportunity? You were working remotely the entire time, and that was maybe counter to the broader ex culture. Do you think it's the type of organization where if you're going to work there, you should just 100% be in the office?

Or do you think you could work there? So the person who hired me was like, dude, let me tell you, you're going to have to get to the office. So at the time I got the offer, in me like was like, dude, like, let me tell you, you're gonna have to get to the office, my wife. So at the time I got the offer in between I was interviewing, I found out that my wife was pregnant. So I let them know. Congratulations. Because, yeah, so the kid is born now he's seven months old. So that's by the time I joined, I was like, okay, well, we're gonna I'm gonna work remotely for a bit and then see if I can move. But as the kid got older, my priority started changing a bit. And I was kind of considering and talking to my wife about different ways I could come to politics. I could totally work remotely and be productive. I think after the X and XAI merger, the information attractor got so strong and the talent at XAI, they were like, ship, they're shipped so much. I used to be able to read every commit.

I used to actually just sit there on my email and click archive over and over again and read every single commit that went into the code base. But after the XAI people joined, there was literally no way. I told one of the XAI guys this. When you have dinosaur shit, which is the sort of code base, and you get extreme pressure, which is XAI talent, you get diamonds. That's how you get diamonds. And I was so bullish after that.

They're really pushing on it. It's really awesome. Honestly, I really wanted to be there. I wanted to go. I think probably I was talking to my manager at the time. I was like, can I maybe come twice every quarter or something? He was super happy. Forrest Worth, by the way, my manager was reading between the lines, totally surprised, totally surprised.

He looked super depressed in the meeting. I felt so bad for him, but if you're watching this, it's okay, dude. Don't worry about it. You're seriously like some people like the, probably the best thing I think like working at X is like, I got to work with these engineers who've worked at Twitter for so long. And when I joined, I was like, Oh, these guys were like, are onboarded onto everything, but that wasn't the case.

Like my manager literally could just figure anything out. When I joined, I was like, oh, these guys are onboarded onto everything. But that wasn't the case. My manager literally could just figure anything out. It felt like he was already onboarded onto everything. But he could actually just read the code, look at the logs, and figure out what the problem was within 30 minutes. And it didn't matter what it was. I was like, this guy must have been here for years. No, he's actually just that good.

So I really loved working with him. He was a really awesome guy. I think he was surprised. I guess I kind of guess what happened, to be honest, but it doesn't really matter. But anyways, it's been really great working there. So I was going to go to visit, actually we were planning to visit Palo Alto. My wife is going on a trip with her mom and the baby. And I was like, okay, that's one week. I know I'm not going to go on a trip because I had work to do.

Not anymore. So I'm probably going to go and it's going to be pretty fun. But like I was going to, I was planning for that week to go to Pal Pal Alto, but also my manager was like, can you come like next week? And I told my wife and she was like, literally like, you know, baby in her arm, like, you know, trying to like scarf food in her mouth for like the few

seconds that she had just to clearly die. So first time parents, right? So we're kind of getting used to it, but yeah. No, it's a crazy, it's a crazy change. What, why don't you give some background on what you were doing prior to X, Dingboard, and then I want to talk about the future. Is that the exciting stuff?

Okay, sure. So you guys can, I'm probably gonna like work a bit more on Dingboard. There's a bunch of bugs that I want to fix. I just didn't have the time with my full-time job. So dingboard.com is the best app ever. dingboard.com if you want to make a meme in seconds, 15 seconds meme. I was I was a paid user. I loved it. Thank you very much for actually very,

very good. You know, like your money actually helped pay for this. Like this is John Coogan. No, no, it was it was and you should give him naming rights. is it is sell the name right crazy that that mobile meme making is so in the dark ages and I feel like you just pulled it forward I used to have an app called like Photoshop mix or something and it was pretty good and then they just completely deprecated it and then they put ads in it which was I would I was dealing with and then they just shut it down and it was pretty good at

dropping out the backgrounds and doing it wasn't Great, but it was okay And then they forced you to go over to Photoshop Express and Lightroom and and so I'm using two different apps and neither of them Are good anywhere near what you need and so I was always I was always a fan of ding board But I was actually like in the process when I joined them I was in process of rewriting it so that I could deploy on web like applications and sorry on iOS and Android It's actually like if you guys if you nerd, there's something called Sokol. Sokol is made by this Swedish guy, I think. He's retired, kind of. He works three days a week. And on the four days

that he has, he's working on this cross-platform GL graphics library, I guess like transpiler. So you write it in one GL language. It'll produce the metal version for iOS and it'll produce them at the version for Android and it'll produce the version for web. So I can use the same code and the code can be basically like it can basically be the same code base deployed to all apps. And then John Coogan and Jordy can make memes in seconds

and get more followers on x.com. That's what I'm talking about. This is the future I was promised. Yeah, it feels like an incredible founder market fit for you to make a tool that helps posters. I mean But it was because I was like making memes on my software engineering diagramming tool and then they like started adding a watermark I was like fuck this. Yeah, you fucking ruin my me making tool. I am going to war Yeah, I got two weeks or and then I remember you had you had sponsors

This is I love this there were sponsors when you would open a new ding board file It would just have a semi analysis ad from doing me., they're still there. Oh, it's still there I mean semi analysis Dylan Patel you should guys should go check out a sub stack He sponsored me for three months and he saw sponsoring me and I was too lazy to remove it He's not but He's that passport with Ben Thompson, but anyway, he's the man and we love him and But the big question is like ding board. You're super popular online Why didn't you go and raise like 15 million dollars from?

Dude, man, that sounds so lame and like raising money with Not that I'm so Like this I have two plugged in right now and I don't have enough power going to my house to like plug this one in, which is why it's unplugged. But like I could serve literally a fucking million people. A fucking million. You're something about me.

You're gonna blow your mind with this, but sometimes you can raise 15 million and you can do what's called a secondary transaction where some of the money goes directly into your pocket. You don't have to hire that many people. Yeah, so you could raise like 50 on 500 exactly. And it's, you know, take take 40 million straight to the bank. Yeah. Just just to kind of set yourself up a cushion. They call it a cushion.

Safety net. I feel like you want the opposite of that. I would never interest the founder who asked for that example. No, he's just joking. He's joking. Yeah, I'm joking. Never happens. You don't you don't want to found her with money. You want to found her with no options. You want a founder with no options. You want a founder like Roy Lee from Cluey. New dad, new dad or new dad. You got to figure it out.

I've got to figure it out. I've got to figure it out. I need a two acre lawn and a zero turn tractor. That's what I need. I need this. I will get it no matter what, maybe the next 10 years. But like Roy Lee, for example, CEO, I think of Cluey. He got kicked out of his university,

a disgrace, tartan feather. He has no choice. I wish I got an allocation. I even know he was racing out of it. I need the money, right? Like I got a kid, I would have written a check without even thinking I don't even care what he's doing. Yeah, you're a you're a Roy Lee defender. Okay, okay. I want a number for ding board. How many users did you get? How much money were you making? Give us some sort of numbers so we can ring the gong for you peak MRR was like

Like I mean, I don't remember. I don't remember not raising. I don't want funding. I probably is raising Developer let's hit the gong for you Honestly honestly ringing that for your fans too, because you're, you're genuinely, you're an internet celebrity and you have real fans. The question, the question I have for you is, because you're a Roy Lee defender, what, what's your line between balancing, you know, engagement, sort of like rage baiting versus, you know, you sound like much more even keeled, you know, on the show right now.

All my rage baits, here's what makes people so mad. Sure. That I actually believe what I say. I'm not saying it pisses people off, I really believe it. Like I actually really mean it when I say it, which makes them even more angry. Makes them just like, and but like when you're honest, like I mean, like, you know, I'm a big believer

in like honesty and stuff like that. And like, like when you're honest, like you kind of like like, you know, I'm a big believer in like, honesty and stuff like that. And like, um, like when you're honest, like you kind of like also the same amount of haters that you gain gain, you kind of gained twice as much as like people who like are fans of you. And I think that's what really matters. And sometimes the haters can kind of drown it out. Uh, so like, I mean, the reason I'm a big fan of the Roy Lee is because he posted that video right around the time I got fired. I got like an email,

which was a bunch of like really scary legal words, like non-dispersion. I had like to like Google what this meant. Like I even what disparagement meant. Okay, I'm not gonna sign anything I'm gonna wait for a lawyer and and then boy lead did this thing and I realized like, you know what? Like Roy Lee's a fucking legend. He's got skin in the game. Like Roy Lee has to win. So, you know what? I'm just gonna fucking be retarded. I'm gonna be a retard I'm gonna be a retard online and I'm going to have to win and then I'm going to I'm obviously capable of winning but if I have like, you know like the one thing I don't understand about people like Elon who like work super hard like super smart

and like no Elon's done he's got like compounds he's got like you know tons of children you could spend all day all day with like he's got all the toys he could possibly want to play with all the engineers he could talk to you like if I was him I would just like goof around with fun toys but like he's actually trying to get to Mars like you know like I feel like I feel like sometimes it's like So I think about being Elon. I could never be him because I would give up at 20 mil. I'll be like, all right I'm done dude. Like this is me. Like I did my part like I'm gonna chill with my zero turn tractor And my two-acre lawn. Um, so I don't know what you want. Yeah. Yeah, exactly

Right. So but like I think that's what happens to a lot of founders is they get enough money like Palmer lucky Palmer lucky It was like a chip on her shoulder. He was like, he's like fucking Jason Cowell. I'm going to fucking get that guy. Like I'm so pissed. I'm going to do it again. And he did it again. 100 percent did it again.

By the way, I love Jason. I love Jason. I love Palmer. I love both of them. And you know what, Jason is like the it's like it's like you can't have Batman without the Joker, right? You can't have Palmer Lucky without Jason. He's the Joker of tech. Okay. Nevermind.

I see it. He's the Joker for Palmer Lucky. For me, the Joker would be the middle manager who I pissed off by complaining about Android bugs. Okay. We're getting into the story. We're learning what actually happened. We're unraveling it.

Don't worry about it. I never said anything about my... Don't worry about it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What's next? Yeah, I mean, yeah. So what's next?'t worry about it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What's next? Yeah, so what's next? All in on Dingboard, building out the team.

Okay, so Dingboard is doing great. I'm gonna keep on growing it and try to get more money because I need some land. And here's why I need some land. I've been building things. This is the Dingbot. The Dingbot. The Dingbot.

See this? What does it do? I 3D printed this. What does it do? This is an arm, ESP32, attached attached to a motor driver attached to a stepper driver Assessor, sir stepper motor. Okay, some 3d printed things that I made with ding cad by the way ding cad comm It's currently down because I had no time to work on it But I have like a local host version ding cad is coming back breaking popsicle sticks no events. Oh

Here's here's the genius of it. Okay, it is. I need cash flow. You know hardware is hard because you buy an iPhone and like you have an iPhone. It's like good for like 30 years, right? Yep, but with popsicle stick robots, they'll break in a month. You have to buy a new one. Oh, it's a plan to get him in the board room. You know what? It's like you have a Dobby the elf robot.

That's like cleaning the house and like, you know, it costs you 30 bucks and it makes a mistake. You just go in and just fucking eat it. You like kick it across the room. Cause it's like 30 bucks. You can just buy another one. It's like, that's the feature. It's a shitty robot. You're not worried about, you know,

getting paper clipped by abusing your Dobby robot? Cause it'll come back to get you at some point. Oh no, you just program it to be happy that it gets kicked. You know, it's like Dobby's like, you know, please, you know, please, sir, you just program it, right? Like, this is like a soft problem, by the way. No, we're not going to get run away. I think the real problem with like AI and stuff is like YouTube shorts. Have you seen these kids all like, like I saw a kid like, so he

eat dinner. So with my family, this kid was like at the, uh, trying to get to the bathroom. He's 12 years old and he was on his YouTube shorts and he was like, trying to like find the door now, like click was like at the, uh, trying to get to the bathroom, 12 years old and he was on his YouTube shorts and he was like trying to like find the door now, like clicking or like, like not clicking around, but like, like reaching around, uh, actually kind of, kind of brutal. But like that, I think that's like the real AI risk for what's worth like YouTube shorts specifically. So you're in retirement. Is there anything that could get you to come out of

retirement? Could you I was coding yesterday. A hundred million dollar offer? I mean to get you back into a mega corporation. Yeah. A mega corporation. What's it going to take? Is it going to take 80 million? A hundred million? A hundred and twenty million? What gets you to take the job for those who are listening? I think I'd probably find it really hard to say no to 2.5 probably. But I don't think

the companies I would work for have that kind of liquidity hanging out. I mean, I think they do. Well, what are those kind of companies? What are those kinds of companies? Well, I think like tech, we could run a process right now. I'm talking big tech. So I know you don't wanna work there,

but there has to be a number. What's the number? All right, I'm gonna just start doing an auction here. Okay, I got a message for 500, 500. Do I have a 600? 600. All right, 700. Our internal goal was to get you hired on this stream or at least get you to raise 15 million with 5 million in secondary. 600, 600, 700.

Our internal goal was to get you hired on this stream, or at least get you to raise $15 million with $5 million in secondary. I could raise money super easily and I could also get a job super easy. I have friends. The thing is I'm a very honest, hard worker. The places I've worked at I could go back. I have a really strong network. So I don't really need a job. And I mean, I'm not worried about getting a job, but if I wanted to join in terms of like, for me, the mission alignment is super important. Like I really need to like use the product to actually enjoy it. So I sold some dingboard t-shirts on Shopify and I'm like aligned with like Toby's awesome.

And then Cohere I think is like a really interesting place to work for because they're on the come up. But mostly like, I mean- He's in Canada, he's in Canada. Hold on, yeah, break down Cohere. That is not the common narrative. I mean, I love Aidan and I think it's But it does seem like you know, there's got to be some sort of like geopolitical strategy there for that company to really play out

I think I just think they're based dude. Yeah, just So it's just pure culture they'll figure it out Yeah, just like I mean like, you know, like it's a lot closer than Palo Alto or like, California Yeah, yeah, and I think they're fucking cool like they got it. They need a poster in residence Are you basically you could a thousand X their their impressions. Do you listen to death grips? Oh, yeah Yeah, it goes it goes it. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, because Aidan's a big death grips guy. Oh That just bumps cohere on top of Shopify. Yep, yep, yep. Wow.

Yeah, he did an interview in a Death Grips t-shirt. I saw it and I was like, this guy's a killer. But what's wrong with just becoming a full-time poster, getting a sub stack set up, getting a nice little revenue stream? I think I'm gonna try to become an actual billionaire. The ding bot thing is not a joke. I'm actually going to actually do it.

That's cool. And I'm not gonna race. I think I can do joke. I'm actually going to actually do it. That's cool. And I'm not going to race. I think I can do it. I probably can find people to, to do this for there's a lot of things I'm really interested in on the way, which is like, uh, doing like reinforcement learning for like, uh, control of robots, certain types of robots. Um, uh, I think I figured something out after listening to a proper lucky podcast about don't solve for things in hardware when you can solve them for them in

software and I'm pretty good at software and I'm sure hardware isn't that hard. Clearly, it's not hard enough to start. What I feel like it's easy actually. You proved with that that it's easy. Yeah, explain that with the reinforcement learning for robotics. Are you thinking like you're gonna do stuff in simulation

and then transfer the knowledge back with reinforcement learning? Are you doing the thing that Dylan Patel was posting about with like the robots on the harnesses, trying to walk and then reusing that as reinforcement learning data? Like what are you actually thinking in terms of reinforcement?

So I don't think that humanoid robots is what I would do. I think I would do robots for things that annoy me. For example, dandelions on my lawn. And I would do whatever is possible. I have a pretty good solid network. Like talk to some of the guys from ETH Zurich. I don't know how to pronounce it. And just be like, hey, like just give me feed me the papers and like some shitty Python code all clean up and make good. Sorry, researchers. You guys are not very good programmers.

This is extremely Matt Freeman coded. He's out of the game. Someone's got to build a robot that picks up the leaves. Yeah, exactly. Exactly what now because it's like I'm so fucking sick of like going outside and just, you know, just like poking out all these Danielize. I'm so sick and tired of it. It's so easy to build this like literally 3d printer, like you could even 3d print the wheels like you can get like five bucks off of AliExpress and ESP 32 costs like three bucks. I just impulse buy them. I like get my ex ad revenue payout and I just like spend the whole thing on AliExpress. My house constantly has these random AliExpress packages. I just maybe build a Minecraft sorting system in real life.

I feel like if you could build it, you could sell it at Home Depot for like 300 bucks. I could also sell it for 25 bucks on subscription and you get a new one every month. Oh, there we go. Yes. There we go because people are kicking their daubies. Yeah. Subscription hardware. It's like if it breaks like I literally will tell the users

Hey, I'm just you know a dude and there's a CNC shop here that does wood So like they do wood CNC So I'm gonna make the robot chassis out of maple wood because there's a lot of maple here in Ottawa and I'm gonna laser You know laser on like made in Ottawa on it Except you know modulo the the motors inside that will be made in China until I figure out how to make motors, which shouldn't be that hard. But I guess like the core insight I have after doing Dingboard and like honestly working for a lot of these big tech companies is like, there's a lot of little businesses on the way to something like I'm going to try to do this.

I'm going to realize like, holy shit, like all the CAD software fucking sucks. And I'm going to build it because I can. And like, you know, Gemini 2.5 Pro just like ripping on my credit card. What about Grok? Gemini 2.5 Pro is the best model to use for coding if you write your own coding frameworks because it's cheaper, it's faster, and it's good enough. Like I'm not like giving all of my work away to, I don't need a PhD level intelligence

because I'm not a PhD level guy. I'm trying to write React. Like it's not that hard to write React. I need a model that can listen to me and understand what I mean and kind of like, doesn't avoid using too many if statements. Stop, just stop using if statements and like, yeah. So, okay, okay.

So, but here's the thing. You need, you want to build a bunch of stuff. You need some cashflow. Why not set up, why not set up, you know, some type of subscription. You have a lot of fans. A lot of People want to give you $10 a month so you can have honestly that was the ding board subscription that I signed up for it It was like support this guy who's doing something cool. Yeah, the issue is ding board

I don't know how to sign up for how do I even sign up for ding board right now? Okay, never okay first of all Jordy never dealt my conversion levels ever again Okay, first of all, Jordy never doubt my conversion levels ever again. I am a conversion I can convert anything to anything. I am I am I am a conversion god. Okay, go to dingboard.com I mean, you're so good. You're so good. You don't have a buy button because you want to inspire yourself to grind harder Okay, I'm here. I'm here sign in first. Do I have to sign in? I don't even have to tell you what to do Legend legend All right. I'm signing in. I'm signing in. Okay, I'm here. What do I ding scribe? There we go. What's your sign in? I just want to know what ding scribe even means. You can't

not ding scribe. 12.99 per month. You got to get your numbers up, dude. This should be 100. 12.99 per month? Dude, I actually don't have the code. It's like on my server. No, you got to do what Google does. It's 500 a month, but they give you six months at half price and then it just auto converts up Yeah, that's the real ticket or I could just double the price. Yeah. Yeah, but the price should be you know cheap on day one And they just get more and more it should go up by 10% every month

All right, I I'm a some kids are brain-shitting like that. All right, I'm a ding pro subscriber. You're a ding subscriber. I'm dinged up. No, dude, you're a ding scriber. You have to get the, dude, Jordy, never get that wrong again. You're a ding scriber. Ding scriber. Ding scriber.

You're part of the crew. I'm ding maxing. Okay, talk about the rest of your stack. Gemini 2.5 Pro, are you cursor guy? Curse! GitHub copilot cursor? What do you mean? Never, no. Never say cursor. Okay, I have a custom framework I've written for Neo Vim.

So basically what it is is I have a server that creates a facade for all the LLMs that I have. So Claude and before Gemini was good Claude and then open AI's models. They'd go down all the time. Like the infrastructure is hard to serve at scale. Like I don't blame them. It's like, that's a problem to solve. So I have like, oh wait, I always have a model available.

Like even if both of them are down, like I could hit DeepSeek over an open router, right? Like it's a facade. Can't you do that in cursor by just switching the model router? Switching, was there a hotkey? So for me, it's like, I have a weird, I mean, let me flex on you guys a bit.

So this is my keyboard. Let's see, flex, flex away. Whoa. There we go. Whoa. Nice now flex, flex away. Whoa, there we go. Whoa, wow. We're nice now, by the way. Yeah, that's amazing. I got a homie from China to make it for me. And so basically, space, what is it?

Space, I don't even remember, it's all, space I is an LLM provider, so that's Gemini 2.5 Pro. Space K is Gemini Flash, and it all renders in a single markdown file. And I've created commands for these models. So basically like, depending on the fence, so three, uh, three apostrophes, and then there's going to be the command name. So like edit file, it can, I can give it basically give it into syntax to edit a file for me.

And then I actually manually, is this open source? Like, you people put their.files up. Can I install your setup? So no, it's not open source, mostly because people are going to start posting issues, and I'm just not interested in fixing them. So I'm just going to do it for myself. I'm pulling up the ladder behind me. I know how much this is like how valuable this is.

If it's not open source, you get a raise for it. It sounds like we got ourselves a real cursor competitor here. It is a cursor competitor, and it's probably going to kill cursor if I open source it, but I'm not going to sell for money. I think what's going to naturally happen is like when people see me do use it, they're going to have ideas of their own and then they're going to build it for themselves. Like the whole point of it. So it's a Neo Vim plugin kind of, it's like also a server and it plugs into a bunch of, I'm good at software.

So part of the problems with, so Neo Vim is great because the software is configurable as a feature. So like the best software you can get is like software you can read and understand and actually change. The best software for you is software you've written yourself. Is it something that annoys you?

You can actually go change it. And that's why I really like to like write my own frameworks. Cursor I'm sure is a great product, but I like, I'm just so particular about certain things. For example, I want to implement tree server across multiple files and automate adding files to my context. So I have a file which has a bunch of file paths.

And those get added to my context based on the workspace that I'm in. And I manage it manually by literally going to the file and deleting the lines. And what I want is to automatically create an AST, so an abstract syntax tree, to be able to jump around with an LLM or like train a model to actually go through the AST.

And this is all super obvious to me. It's like, fuck man. What about you're gonna make any products in the parenting space? Yeah, so actually I had an idea. So I use an E Ink display. By the way, before you try to hack this, I never update the software

and I never write anything private on it. So I'm going to put it public. So I have an E Ink reader, slash like tablet. And what I wanted to make is to teach my kids to write instead of texting him. I want to make like a kind of like a radio E Ink display, kind of like an Etch and Sketch, which you can write on, but it's synced to your parents Etch and Sketch. So my wife will have one, I will have one and my kid will have one. And he'll learn how to write because we'll write to each other over distances. Right. I think that's like a really cool idea. So I'm probably going to build that. If you want him to make like a gajillion dollars, it's so easy. Just look around and like come up with good ideas and actually just believe that you can do it. Like literally just go

do it. Like it's not that hard. It's actually not, get a 3D printer, watch some YouTube videos. YouTube is great products. I would love it if they stopped putting shorts because there's so many great videos we can learn. Stop with the shorts, stop. Well get ready, this is gonna be a YouTube short. We're gonna edit this.

Yeah, exactly. This'll be on TikTok maybe. Yeah, exactly. Like Minecraft, yeah, Minecraft speed run. Yeah, we'll put subway surfers over you, anything. The I slop how many kids you want to have so as much as God allows us to have so just leaving it up to God and yeah, that's how many kids good answer. That's great What else what else you have to say to the people while you're here? Uh, thanks for doing your this podcast guys I know how hard I

Know how hard it is to run a podcast and all the tech behind it. Let's just say that. And like the doing live and stuff, like it's a pain in the ass. So keep it up guys. I know like and the live the video team at X are like generational talents, like super, super good people. Like so like just like find someone to like find a way to reach out to them. So when you have any issues and like actually talk to people.

I didn't fully realize that you were the bug guy until you posted over the last few days. Otherwise we would have been hammering you with messages every single day. But this has been great. Come back on whenever you want to talk about your projects. Yeah, we'd love to just hang out and chat. Yeah, thanks, I really appreciate you guys.

And yeah, so keep it up. Thanks, awesome. Yeah, we're excited and I'm excited to be ding maxing. Just offer a premium tier, I don't know, like 10 grand a month or something like that. Maybe we become, you know. Oh, I mean, if you guys want an ad space,

I'll sell you right now, like spit handshake. If you want to put an ad on Dingboard, your podcast, I'll, let's say 12 grand. 12 grand, okay. I mean, I was making a million dollars. We'll talk to our CFO. All right, all right, all right. And our CFO, our C we'll talk to our CFO

Our CFO our CFO will talk to your CFO Can we get the semi analysis deal where it's perpetual? It's 12 great ones so we get it forever because what if you guys in a one time is it a one time or a great option? There's a lot of upside here. It depends on how good your podcast is yeah, okay, okay? We're gonna keep working on it. Hopefully ding-boring keeps growing for the next decade and we can be massive together. Yeah, absolutely We're excited to fall on Godspeed. I go one. Bye Next up we have to talk to you about wander find your happy place Find your happy place book a wander with inspiring views hotel great amenities, top-tier cleaning, and a 24-7 concierge service.

Yep, Sien should get a Wander. He should. He's gonna be traveling around, interviewing at all the top companies. Wander would be a great choice for him. We have had a great show. We were gonna play you an interview that we did earlier today with Shervin Pishavar,

but there are some security issues, unfortunately, and so we're working to potentially blur the background and we will get you that interview as soon as we possibly can, but security. It comes first. It comes first. And so we will obviously relay some of the key takeaways. And honestly, it's such a developing story.

I feel like already the story has moved and we should just have him back on again soon from a more secure location and make sure that everything is above board. But thank you so much for watching. Thank you for tuning in and we will talk to you tomorrow. Have a great day.