TBPN Live - Windsurf Chaos Aftermath, NVIDIA Back in China, Richard Mille Deep Dive, Apple Buying $500M in Rare Earth Magnets | Zak Kukoff, Brian Venturo, Tyler Cowen, Austin Hughes, Kris Fredrickson, Dick Lucas

Episode Date: July 15, 2025

(00:27) - Windsurf Chaos Aftermath Breakdown (15:17) - Dwarkesh Patel Article Breakdown (27:17) - NVIDIA Back in China After Trump Meeting (30:20) - Zak Kukoff, a recurring guest on the show, discusses the U.S. government's recent decision to allow Nvidia to resume exports of its H20 AI chips to China, following previous restrictions that had significantly impacted Nvidia's revenue. He highlights the strategic implications of this move, noting that while it represents a substantial economic win for Nvidia, it also raises national security concerns due to potential military applications of the technology. Kukoff further explores the broader context of U.S.-China trade relations, emphasizing the delicate balance between economic interests and security considerations in the evolving landscape of AI and semiconductor exports. (53:31) - History of Richard Mille (01:16:20) - David Protein Launches Boiled Cod Flavored Bar (01:28:31) - Brian Venturo, co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer of CoreWeave, discusses the company's evolution from a cryptocurrency mining operation to a leading provider of GPU-based cloud computing services tailored for AI and machine learning workloads. He highlights CoreWeave's commitment to delivering scalable, high-performance infrastructure that meets the growing demands of AI developers and enterprises. Venturo also emphasizes the company's focus on customer-centric solutions, enabling clients to efficiently scale their computing resources and accelerate innovation in their respective fields. (02:01:16) - Tyler Cowen is the Holbert L. Harris Chair of Economics at George Mason University, faculty director of the Mercatus Center, and co-author of the economics blog Marginal Revolution. In the conversation, Cowen discusses the rapid advancements in artificial intelligence, noting that current AI systems can perform intellectual tasks as well as expert humans, and emphasizes the importance of human adaptability in integrating these technologies into various sectors. (02:31:12) - Austin Hughes, co-founder and CEO of Unify, a go-to-market technology platform, discusses his journey from leading the growth product team at Ramp to founding Unify in early 2023. He highlights Unify's recent $40 million Series B funding and explains how their product streamlines sales processes by automating research and data collection, allowing sales teams to focus on engaging prospects. Hughes also addresses the evolving role of AI in sales, emphasizing the importance of human creativity and personalization in outreach strategies. (02:43:12) - Apple Buying $500M in Rare Earth Magnets (02:45:58) - Kris Fredrickson, a seasoned investor and co-founder of Curology, discusses his new $175 million investment fund, emphasizing a concentrated strategy with 8 to 10 core positions to ensure each investment significantly impacts his limited partners. He highlights the importance of aligning with founders' visions and providing substantial support, drawing from his extensive experience in various investment roles. Fredrickson also touches on the evolving venture capital landscape, noting the resurgence of mergers and acquisitions and the potential for multiple winners in expansive markets like AI. (02:59:16) - Dick Lucas, a software developer and entrepreneur, is running for California's 51st State Assembly District, encompassing areas like Santa Monica and West Hollywood. He emphasizes the need for competition in California's political landscape, expressing concerns over the state's one-party dominance and its impact on governance. Lucas identifies housing affordability as a primary issue, advocating for streamlined building processes to increase supply and reduce costs. TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.comFigma - https://figma.comVanta - https://vanta.comLinear - https://linear.appEight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpnWander - https://wander.com/tbpnPublic - https://public.comAdQuick - https://adquick.comBezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.comPolymarket - https://polymarket.comAttio - https://attio.com/tbpnFin - https://fin.ai/tbpnGraphite - https://graphite.devFollow TBPN: https://TBPN.comhttps://x.com/tbpnhttps://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

You're watching TBPN! Today is Tuesday, July 15th, 2025. We are live from the TBPN Ultra Dome, the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the Capital of Capital. We have a great show for you today, folks. Lots of guests, lots of news. The big one is we are doing a postmortem

on the Windsurf Chaos. I was saying that I liked this post from Pavel Asparuhov. I think he sort of nailed the postmortem, but we can debate this. It, I mean, if you leave someone for dead, but someone else calls in a helicopter, that doesn't really change your moral positioning in the situation.

And Deleon says this 100%, the Windsurf founders in Google thought they could pull a fast one, and that the broader community slash Windsurf employees are somehow are worded enough to not catch on that their leave the Shell Co with cash plan was totally morally bankrupt. Everyone will remember. And so I don't know, I'm perhaps ready to put on the steel

man hat and not go quite as far as Deleon. I think you might agree with the Deleon and Pavel take a little bit more. I still think it's important to debate because we want to avoid this kind of situation in the future. There's probably going to be more of these deals. John Ludig had some good commentary on this,

basically saying if you are a big tech company, it is much easier and faster to do something like this. It's not just the FTC sort of like climate around antitrust. It's just that it's much easier and faster to do something like this. It's not just the FTC climate around antitrust. It's just that it's much easier. It's much faster. And oftentimes, these companies are just buying the team and the talent. So if they can license the tech and get the team,

that's just capitalism doing capitalism. In this case, the answer to capitalism doing capitalism was more capitalism in the form of Scott Wu coming in hot, working over the weekend to get a deal done. So anyways, fantastic outcome. Scott Wu looks like a hero. Scott Wu looks like a hero. I think Cognition is gonna be stronger for it.

They got a world class, you know, GTM sales marketing engine. What John Ludig said here was, big techs AI talent shortage means these M&A choices. A, you get the talent only, but you get it today. Or B, you get the talent plus the business plus the product, but months after regulatory scrutiny. And he says they will pick every time.

Thankfully for Windsurf the product lives on, but A, as the default, is existentially dark for startups. And so I think what's interesting is like, we were debating how much of the blame goes to LineCon, and I don't actually know that there's all that much on LineCon specifically. It's like it's fun. It's fun. It's fun.

It's fun to point the finger. It is, but I think in general, like the FTC has always had some sort of approval around big public company buying a small company. They're going to review it. Even if they would have approved it, they wouldn't, Google would not have gotten the talent actually in the door,

actually working at Google for six months. Months after regulatory scrutiny. And so that time, you guys are real valued. And the other comp here that we have is Figma, who was slated to get acquired by Adobe. Took forever. Adobe had to pay a $1 billion break-up fee.

Now Figma is going to IPO, and I would be shocked if they end the first trading day below the price that Adobe was gonna pay and the company is doing better than ever has launched a bunch of new products and so... Not financial advice but I will give you product advice. Go to figma.com think bigger build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. Can't say anything about the stock,

but great product, we do love it. Anyway, Varunam Ganesh had a good take here. Windsurf employees over the weekend, and it's the we're so back, it's so over, we're so back, it's so over. And I think the underrated take on this, like yes, it's funny, and it's a good point, but this has a real economic cost.

Like losing sleep, we're sponsored by Eat Sleep, as we put out a video today. Sleep is valuable, and if you make me lose sleep, that does have an economic cost, that does have a moral cost, you shouldn't do that, and so you should, as a founder, try and land the plane, not just save everyone's life, but actually not have a super rough landing.

Make it a win for everyone, but make it smooth for everyone. Make it smooth for everyone. And there was a good post, Pavel. Pavel was on a tear in the last few days, defender of the founding engineers. But he said, I hope these guys smoke Google at AI coding. Imagine the chip on your shoulder after this

if you're a Windsurf employee. And Sandeep Shah over at Windsurf, he's a vice president there, said, it's bigger than a chip, we're coming for it. And so, a lot of the energy. He was left behind in the Romain Co, is that correct? He did not go over and he's ready. He's on the ghost ship.

The ghost ship. And Augustus says, go off the king, and Will depuses LFG. Lots of support for Sandeep in the AI coding, in the AIDEs war that's continuing. Anyway, Signal has a post here. Startup comp used to be confusing because it was complex. Now it's confusing because it might be worthless,

even with a large exit. The founders can dip anytime. Last chopper out of Saigon vibes, except they're flying private while you're holding the bag. Good post. Yeah, my take here was that Scott Wu looks like the hero, not Varun Mohan, the founder and CEO of Windsurf, who should have gotten an amazing outcome

for his team in any other situation. Like in any other situation, I say, hey, join this fast growing company. We're just post pivot, we're second in the market, we're doing some cool stuff, I'm raising some money, and we're growing, but we're only doing 40, 80 million ARR, and I get you, liquidity at 2.4 billion, you should be like, I am ride or die for this guy forever.

And I think that a lot of these employees aren't gonna feel that way in in five years even after all the dust settles They're gonna remember that this was not not handled as well as it should have been and so they're gonna be like Yeah, which is wrong. I'm sure when when the muzzle is Removed he'll be able to yeah, hopefully call every employee one by one. That would be good. Yeah. Sorry, and make up. And so I still put some of the blame on FTC stuff, just FTC stuff broadly, some of the blame on Google

comms, some of the blame on LenaCon and how she changed the FTC. And the other thing is, B, this was happening really. Remember the sort of exclusivity period that OpenAI had on the deal expired and I think this got announced like the very next day. So I'm sure it was in the works

but they definitely were moving quickly. And again, it would have been a good outcome if they all ended up at OpenAI, but I also think this is a good fit going forward as well. So I'm excited to see what each branch of the team can do. Roon here has some pushback on Signal. He says, this has always been true, the idea that startup comp is confusing and complex.

Investors and founders screwing over early employees during an M&A is a time-honored tradition in Silicon Valley. I don't know how true that is. There's a lot of examples where that didn't happen, but of course it has happened. If anything, the abundance of capital has made things better for early employees. And so, you know, people taking both sides.

We didn't get to this post, but it was funny. Connor saying, Windsurf is the so-humpery of startup acquisitions they got acquired by OpenAI, Google, and now Cognition Labs all in one month. You'll love to see it. Swix has a six-way parlay. He said, I want Mistral founders to Apple, Mistral team to Meta, Character, Romain, Coda perplexity,

Cora to perplexity, Ideogram to Figma, Gamma to Notion, read it back. Read it back. There was rumors that Apple was interested in picking up Mistral, taking a look at it. The funny thing though is that if you're France, do you want your national champion to, you know, the luxury AI.

Mistral should go to LVMH for sure. Should be home with the Arnaud's. Didn't we post a joke post around that I think we did we did yeah I think I want fine luxury language models. Yeah Some of the missed drawl folks were like this is hilarious, but also like complete misinformation anyway Sandeep says it's bigger than chip. We're coming for it and Rob Says let's talk about a reboot for HBO Silicon Valley.

And it's funny because when you see the Windsurf tag right in the name, you're like, oh, okay, this is hilarious. You think this is ridiculous. And at least you're having some fun with it. Can we talk about our upcoming guests? Yeah, yeah, we're gonna have one of the co-creators of HBO Silicon Valley on the show. He has been working on Barry for a couple years,

kind of out of the Silicon Valley parody world, but we're gonna drag him back in. We're gonna try to get him back. We're gonna explain to him what's going on line by line, what's been going on, and I think once he really processes it, he'll be interested in making a reboot. Yeah.

Well, you can reboot your finances with the ramp. Time is money, save both. Easy use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. I like this post. Yeah, I threw this in. Kind July brand ambassador says, the business I stood on was operating at a loss.

40K likes, you love it. So good. Perfect. Business I stood on. Perfect intersection of FinTwit and Justin Bieber. Yeah, I remember we put up that, when we talked about the Justin Bieber launch,

you were like, you're so offline, John. And it's like, I'm extremely online, but just in one narrow bubble of the internet? And so I somehow missed the entire Justin Bieber saga. The new number one album in the world. It's the new number one album in the world. See, I'm learning this again. I think so.

Wow. We listened to some of it. We should do some, I don't know if we're in the music group. We were saying we should listen to this on the drive home. As research. And we made it two songs. It wasn't really hitting for us,

but congrats to him on the comeback. I mean, it seems like a great launch. Do you think the viral moment was staged, or do you think it was organic and then he just leveraged it later? Seemed like a legitimate crash out. I mean, it seems like, you know. But it was extremely well played.

Even the best of us in technology have gotten frustrated with the journalists from time to time, so who amongst us are above that? Yeah, yeah. If the misinformation caught me outside of Nobu like that. Yeah, you might crash out. I might crash out. And then drop an album at number one,

a number one livestream. And so Kyle Zhang, I think from the browser company or browser base has kind of a hot take here. One of the browser companies. Kind of a hot take here. Soyboy versus Gigachad, Varun Mohan, left his company for big tech, screwed over employee equity, and then of course Scott Wu,

can solve any math problem imaginable, giving Windsor employees accelerated best thing and clips wave. I like that it's math problems. It was just like math problems. Scott basically came in and was able to run the playbook that a lot of CEOs have run. Who was it from?

From Matrix, Ilya. Ilya Sukhar. From Parse. Yeah, Parse. He did the same exact thing with his employees back in the day when he didn't actually have to. And he revested, which is the same exact thing with his employees. Yep back in the day when he didn't Facebook he's actually have to and he revested which is pretty common and I I would believe that That the team that went over to Google is revesting

To get that multi-billion dollar sure I don't think it's just a cash and you can just quite immediately because the whole point is a talent acquisition So it's got a vest, right? but Yeah, I mean, crazy situation. And I do wonder, I do wonder, like what the price would have been to say, hey Google, it's all or nothing,

what price will you pay now? Because there's a price to wait for Google. Google would have to pay a price to wait to actually bring over the whole Windsurf company, right? They need FTC approval for that. Let's call it six months. What is Google's cost? Send our pitch AI doesn't maybe feel like he has six months.

He would miss six months of pitching. If you want a real shot at meaningful traction in CodeGen, another six months, feels like a long time. So what, a billion dollar cost? Two billion? Is it a zero? Well it could be the difference between winning

or having a horse in the race and not. Because plenty of people are leveraging Gemini broadly across their companies. Haven't heard it a ton from engineers on the show talking about using Gemini in their coding stack. Yep, Yapsin was a big fan. But doesn't come up a ton. And they know that there's billions of dollars

being printed in CodeGen. And I'm sure that Google wants a piece of it. Very few business lines that I imagine they can see a through line of we can get this to a billion dollar run rate and that's kind of the bar at Google. Well, if you need to review some code, head over to graphite.dev, code review for the age of AI. Seamless, John. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. And speaking of artificial intelligence,

I wanna go to Tyler and get the update on the new Gwern piece. He read it on the treadmill this morning, is that right? This morning on the treadmill, yeah. I realized that there's Google on the treadmill, so I was like, oh, I'll read the new. Wait, what? There's like, there's now the apps.

The treadmill has a browser? Yeah, so usually they have like YouTube. Wow, that's the real browser wars. That's the real browser wars? Wait, is Comet available? Just Google,. Wow, that's the real browser wars. That's the real browser wars? Wait, is Comet available? Just Google. But yeah, that's a good. Wow, break it up.

Break up the treadmill market. Yeah. This is ridiculous. It's a monopoly. Yeah, OK. Google's Chrome is probably paying to be on all the Equinox treadmills. Probably.

OK, so Gw Gurn wrote this piece and it kicks off with Dwarkesh Patel. What was the actual inciting tweet that I saw? I saw Dwarkesh posting about it and he was saying, he was saying, really interesting new Gurn essay, LLM Daydreaming, it's a proposal of how default mode networks for LLMs are an example of missing capabilities

for search and novelty. By the way, I know it's a bit cringe to delight in, but if you had told 19-year-old me that a Goren essay would open like this, I would have found it hard to believe. And it is a huge milestone for Dwarkesh, so congratulations to Dwarkesh, he deserves it. So Dwarkesh Patel asks why no LLM has apparently

ever made a major breakthrough or unexpected insight. You would expect this given the incredible IQ that is on display for 15 minutes as you use an LLM. No matter how vast their knowledge or how high their benchmark scores, while those are by definition extremely rare, contemporary chatbot style LLMs have now been used seriously

by tens of millions of people since chat GPT, November in 2022. And it does seem like there ought to be at least some examples at this point. This is a genuine puzzle. When prompted with the right hints, these models can synthesize information in ways that feel tantalizingly close to true insight.

The raw components of intelligence seem to be present, but they don't. What's missing? It's hard to say because there are so many differences between LLMs and human researchers. So Tyler, take me through the piece. What did Gwerne have to say? Well, yeah, so basically the question is like,

okay, why have they not produced new research? Yep. He basically gives two reasons. So the first is like, they don't have continual learning, right, which is like, you train an LLM, you put it to inference. It's like the weights are fixed. They don't change. There's sure. There's like test time inference, but it's not really learning like, you know, between your chats, right?

Yeah. Unless it's in the context window. Yeah. There's some kind of like privative ways to do memory you're starting to see, but it's really like not super great so far. So he kind of, it, there's an analogy. It's like, does a person who has like permanent amnesia have, have they ever like produced novel research? Like probably not. Right. Interesting. Yeah. This is the PhD amnesiac. Like we bring them in, they're genius, but every time they go home,

they forget everything that they've learned about running our business. And could they even figure out how the printer works? They would have to start from first principles every single time just to print a stack of tweets for us. And all of a sudden we'd have a genius who couldn't really add value at our company. If you can't print tweets, you're gonna have a tough time. You gotta operate the brother printer

under this roof. to work at this company. Anyway, continue. Yeah, okay, so there's continual learning and then there's continual thinking, right? Which is kind of like, the model is only Producing tokens when you prompt it, right? So it's not like Like an average person is like daydreaming or they're like normally dreaming

You kind of are always like passively thinking about stuff So it's like sometimes you wake up in the morning. You just have this like new solution to a problem that you're working on It's like, oh, how did that happen? I wasn't thinking while I was sleeping. Yeah, how many great ideas have been shower thoughts? Yeah, exactly. It's really true. So basically, the solution is he has this system where you basically just draw two totally random concepts,

ideas, and then you just prompt the model. You say, draw a connection between these two things. And then for almost everything, it's gonna be total nonsense, right? It's like two random things, there's not gonna be anything. But if you do it enough times, you'll eventually get like, oh, this is actually an interesting connection between these two things.

It's like a new concept, it's like a novel idea, you can use it for research, stuff like this. Yeah, so you're just randomly drawing like, like almost words, like cow ethernet cable, like no connection there. But if you iterate, you might wind up with like cow and Fitbit, and then you come up with the idea for that company halter that's making like a trillion dollars and is doing really well. And I never would have thought of that. But if I just like iterated enough to be like, wait, does a cow need a Fitbit?

Maybe, okay, is there a business here here and you can kind of trace through that Yeah, basically and then so you have this like you have like two sides, right? You have this thing that kind of tries to make some non obvious connection Then you have this other like half of the model that basically says is this and like an interesting idea Yeah, then basically so if it is an interesting idea It like saves it to this memory bank. And then you use that memory bank to keep pulling new ideas from that

and from everything else. So you're building on top of these ideas. And then eventually, you're going to slowly, very slowly, build these really interesting ideas that are totally novel that you'd only get from basically passing in millions and billions of totally random concepts. Yeah I feel like yeah one of the things that he highlights is like this would be incredibly compute intensive right like you're talking about like running all

the data centers all the time to kind of think about this and it feels like it puts me back on Kurzweil timelines of like 20, I think he says Singularity in 2045. And so it's like, this is an interesting idea. What if it takes a thousand times as much compute as we have now? Yeah, I mean, you're basically like root forcing research, which like kind of doesn't make sense in a way. But if you have these models that are like small enough,

you can kind of distill them down. I don't know, think about a scenario where founder exits their company. They do their earn out They want to start something new instead of spending two years lost in the woods You know think trying to come up with a decent idea They just spend five million dollars five minutes and just like generates like a bunch of different ideas Yes You still then have to like pick an idea and it might seem good on the surface and then you talk to people in the industry

and they say, well, here's kind of the issue with how you're thinking and then maybe you gotta do another run. But I think the interesting question is like, five million feels like the point at which we would say, if someone built this system and they actually said, hey, we've designed the algorithms such that you can you know Tell it to go and it will come back with a good idea

But every time you hit go it you get a five million dollar opening I bill like people would push that button for sure And and it would be venture backed and stuff But what if it's five billion or what if it's trillion? Like there is a point where it just won't, no one will push that button. Ideas guys would be so thrilled if it costs like five billion dollars to come up with a good idea. I think it actually does right now. I think it might cost more.

I think the current paradigm is that even if you ran this algorithm, you ran this strategy, like the current models are so, what's the word, like they're not great at like compressing and they're not efficient. And so you might be able to brute force it, you're brute forcing research. But the level of brute forcing might, like when you math it out,

might be like in the billions of dollars to get an insight. I don't know. I think it also like, it doesn't maybe make sense if you're like a random person, you're gonna pay $5 million for an idea. But it maybe makes sense if you're a big lab and you need, like you're hitting a data wall,

you need new data. I think that it kind of makes sense. Yeah, it makes sense. And then also, he also brings up this thing which is like, if you like kind of distill the model, even if you like open source it, you're not really giving away the new ideas, right? Because say that you have some weird concept that you find,

it's baked into the model, but the only way to access that is to specifically query for it. So you're not actually giving away these new ideas, even if you're giving out the model. That's another kind of interesting. So you actually have to inferences it enough to pull the insight out of the model even if they're it's literally the the there's a hundred million dollars in your laptop and your job is to pull it out like

There's a billion dollars in the weights of GPT 5 or 4.5 But you know to get the insight out of it might cost another billion dollars Yeah, it's basically like the the monkeys typing on the yeah, he won't totally get Shakespeare. Yep, like the same thing but for like Research do we have a monkey sound effect yet? No We gotta get one of those I don't it What's your reaction to Chris best founder of sub stack friend of the show? He said he's quoting this contemporary chatbot style LLMs have now been used seriously by tens of millions of people since ChatGPT November 2022.

And it does not seem like there, it does seem like there ought to be at least some examples of novelty at this point. And Chris says, potential answer, there have been, but the human users hogged the credit. So maybe these chatbots are spitting out novel ideas, but people are just like, I'm not telling anyone that I got my idea from Chat TV,

because that's like a bad signal. Yeah, I think that could be plausible. I think it's also just like, like the way that LLMs work is like, you're querying for a specific thing. Yeah. So like, if you have, it's more of like,

you have a hunch of like, this could be an idea, and then the LLM like really gives it to you, but you never really see like, if you have, it's more of like, you have a hunch of like, this could be an idea, and then the LLM like, really gives it to you. But you never really see like, LLM just like, here's a cool idea, right? Which is what this is kind of. And this is the- The other thing is a lot of business ideas, like good business ideas end up being simple.

And they don't always feel like, oh, look at this novel novel insight It's just obvious yeah like other people will see the idea And they'll actually be if they're this kind of founder type or maybe they're looking for their next thing They will legitimately be annoyed because they think all right. I could have thought of that yeah, and so different cows I could have thought And roll for dogs I love that business. Andral for dogs? I love that business. No, so that's the other thing is, at least in our world,

in the private markets, a lot of ideas that end up being worth a lot. It's not necessarily the idea that's worth a lot, but it's having the idea at the right time and then the execution against that idea for a very long time. And I think that kind of gets to my silly Kugens eval, which is tell me a joke. That requires novel insight.

Because if you just tell me a joke that's already been out there that I've heard, it's not funny. So it requires novelty. It requires insight. It's actually really hard to come up with a new joke that's never been told before Because it requires putting multiple things together see realizing something and so I think that even though I'm not going to chat GPT regularly and asking for like

Make a scientific discovery or like give me a genius business idea I think the tell me a joke is in the same vein of like hard problem for LLM. And I think that if they get to the point where you can ask it for a novel, new, humorous, joke with insight that's actually new, it should be able to do the other things. And I think that is some sort of fundamental restraint,

and it's what we're talking about when we talk about spiky intelligence. It's like very good at certain things, but it's missing this one human capability. Is there anything else from the post that you think we should highlight, Tyler? I think that was mostly it. Okay, Quern is on the absolute tear, we love him.

He's back in the bay. Oh yeah, he's back in the bay, that's great. Well, we have four minutes until our first guest of the show, Zach, comes around. Yeah, so let's cover a little bit of the story. Let's cover some ads first, let's tell you about Vantos. Good idea. Automate compliance, manage risk, improve trust continuously.

Vantos Trust Management Platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation, whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program. And then should we kick off with some Nvidia backgrounds when we have Zach on? I just want to say congratulations to Vanta

for picking up Scott Holden. Oh, for sure. He entered the trade portal. They picked him up. We love some personalities on this show. Heading from Brex over to Vanta to lead marketing efforts at Vanta. And wait, do we have the post?

The traded post? Yeah, no, Christina's post, which was hilarious. Let's pull it up. I didn't know she had this in her. It's great. I got it. She says, big day at Vanta after a couple of days in the transfer portal.

Scott Holden commits to the purple Looking forward to working with you Scott. So let's see it. That's a great photo of him, too Wow, I wonder what the context was for that photo. Just like a Chad Yeah, but like you know, you see a lot of like LinkedIn like just like headshots This is like the full body shot really nice soft lighting teeth looking extremely white fantastic just really nice soft lighting, teeth looking extremely white. Fantastic. Just full breakdown.

Full breakdown. Looking diced. Anyways, let's get into this story before Zach Kukoff joins. So, news today out of the journal, NVIDIA can sell AI chip to China again after CEO meets Trump. Jensen's, Huang's case proves persuasive

as the US agrees to grant licenses for the H20 chip. NVIDIA said it has received assurances from the Trump administration that it can sell its H-20 artificial intelligence chip in China days after chief executive Jensen Huang met President Trump. The administration's move marks a turnabout after the Commerce Department restricted sales of the chip in April, costing Nvidia billions of dollars. The news came during a visit by Huang to Beijing, where he met he was meeting senior officials. I'm very happy, he told reporters.

Shares in Nvidia rose more than 4% in early trading on Tuesday. So big, big turn of events. Big turn of events. The also coincides with Gurley's in China right now. We gotta have Mon to give us a breakdown of what's happening on the ground there. But yeah, a bit of a surprise. This also feels like something that Sax would have been heavily involved with as the AI czar.

So it's good, you know, whatever people, a lot of people have their feelings about Saks, but I do believe he is a patriot and would have had a lot of different people around the table working on this decision. So obviously, China Hawks in shambles very upset about this I imagine Not all of them commented on it, but I imagine that with people who take the vanilla view of Like you're sort of like zero-sum competition between the US and China. They're gonna be upset because they say hey just restrict the Nvidia chips

They won't be able to train AI and And for a variety of reasons, AI is dangerous, it's gonna be super intelligence. We need a democratic, a capitalist super intelligence. We don't want a communist authoritarian super intelligence that's controlled by a single person. We want it to be controlled by humanity or controlled by the American voters, something like that. On the flip side.

We want it to be freedom-pilled. For sure, and I agree with that to some degree. The question is, is there a potential world where selling Nvidia H20s into China actually hurts Huawei more than it hurts America, and so it's somehow advantageous for us to get the entire world standardized on the CUDA stack and the Nvidia stack,

and then we are able to have more leverage over the Chinese AI ecosystem, and that gives us more control to basically shift the overall amount of America-pilled-ness in AGI generally. I don't know. There are multiple sides, but we're going to talk to Zach Kukoff, our first guest of the show. He's been on multiple times now.

You know him. You love him. Zach Kukoff. How are you doing? Wow. There he is. He was almost the first guest to do a three-peat, three days in a row. Almost.

Almost. He made it two. but depending on how, yeah, we got bored of the swamp. We got bored with the swamp, sorry. It happens. That's all right. We want to talk about trade deals. Today gets a little bit, you know,

if this week gets more chaotic on this topic, maybe we'll run the, you'll get the three-peat. It's a really perverse incentive. Like I'm really hoping for horrible things to happen. So I can come back and complete the repeat here. Yeah. Yeah. Take us from the swamp to the TSMC clean room. It's the swamp meets clean room segment of the show. So kick us off. What, how, how would you characterize the news, exactly what's happening? And then we'll go into some analysis.

Yeah. So I think everybody knows the H20 chip was specifically designed by Nvidia to meet Biden era restrictions on what chips could be exported to China, right? So if you zoom out, you go back to April, the beginning of Trump 2, what you have is basically a little bit of regulatory uncertainty, where Nvidia spent a lot of money producing chips that are specifically designed to go to China. And the admin comes back in April at the last minute and says, sorry, you can't export the chips. We're putting in export controls. We're having a licensure requirements.

Nvidia takes a huge like $8 billion revenue impairment basically on the cost of producing and not selling this huge swath of chips. By the way, at the same time, huge domestic market for H20s, lot of demand, even though they're weaker, lot of demand from startups domest they're weaker, a lot of demand from startups domestically for the same chips.

Last night, basically between April and last night, you've seen a full court press by Nvidia for the last X number of months, where Jensen has been doing a winning campaign, a successful campaign of influence in Washington, trying to make two points exceptionally clear. The first point is we need to export these chips because the same reasons John just said, the stack, American dominance, we want everyone to standardize, so on and so forth. We're losing the biggest market besides America. And also, he's made the point of, look, we can also comply in a more regulatory aggressive way.

So there's the Chip Security Act was introduced in Congress in May. It's working its way through the House. It's the chip security act was introduced in Congress in May, it's working its way through the house, it's moving through the Senate right now. Basically, Nvidia has helped shape that act aggressively. And it says, Look, we have to make sure that there are ways to track the diversion of these chips, track where they're going. And and this is still up in the air, is there going to be a kill switch built into these chips? This is all to say last night, huge win for Nvidia admin comes out and says, for Nvidia. Admin comes out and says, okay, or really Nvidia comes out and says,

admin has told us we are going to be allowed to export these chips to China for the first time with some checks on them, but almost an unfettered way. Markets are up, obviously Asian markets are up quite a bit. Nvidia is up quite a bit on this news. Huge economic win for Nvidia, huge question mark from the national security folks who say, look, there's some real risks with these ships going out.

Is there a horse trade going on? Is this part of a larger bargaining discussion where we, even if it's not explicitly Nvidia chips for rare earth materials, something else might be happening behind the scenes. And this just looks like a little bit of a give from the United States and we might be expecting something, or maybe we already got something. Talk to me about kind of the trade imbalance and just the overall, uh, deal making that might be happening. It's a really good point. This is the,

the backdrop of all of this is the trade war between the US and China. And as much as it is to you and to me and probably to most of the TBPN folks, the most important question is AI. It is one of many questions the admin has to work through. Rare Earths, by the way, is a huge one. Obviously, tariffs on a number of American products are a second one. So the big question is, look, in April, the reason we stopped and we actually put in the admin put in these export controls on Nvidia chips to begin with is in large part because of their ratcheting tension with the United States and China.

And now part of the reason they're reducing some of these is because the Chinese market is opening up. We're having great progress. Ironically, Japan has been difficult to negotiate with China has been a good negotiator on trade. And China really wants these chips to come in because even though they want to Wean off Nvidia and go to Huawei as quickly as possible The H20s are a bridge to get to Huawei's ascendant architecture like to get Is the meme that we're gonna get China dependent on US chips Is it really just a meme like the idea that the idea that? there That they would just play,

basically Jensen makes a good point, which is like we want them to be dependent on our infrastructure. But the Chinese government and industry will likely just say, okay, great, we're happy to depend on these for another few years while we ramp up our own. Did they promise not to reverse engineer them this time? Yeah.

That's the question? This time, not this time. You know, we've done it, we've done it thousands of times now, but this time will be different. That's right. And I guess this time Charlie Brown can hit the football for once. That's right. So I guess, you know, some of the pushback was somebody yesterday when this news broke, Walter Bloomberg,

prominent journalist who always follows journalistic standards says, NVIDIA CEO Wang expects Chinese military won't use AI chips, which is a good thing to expect, but probably unlikely. And then somebody quoted it and said, the increasing willingness of Jensen Huang to boldly play both sides makes Nvidia

one of the most serious threats to US national security and global technological dominance currently running. So very dramatic, but valid point of view for this person to have. How do you think? Have you been surprised at how Jensen can effectively go? You know, I mean, yeah, I wouldn't necessarily play both sides, but, you know, this first thing he did when the chip, when the initial H20 band happened as he flew over there and he started working on a new R&D center in Shanghai.

Yeah, yeah. So he's definitely a capitalist, but it's been interesting to see. The other factor here is like you're running the most valuable company in the world. So you do have quite a bit of leverage and he almost, in some ways he's sort of like holding up the you know The entire global economy

It does a couple bad quarters and everything it does feel like the good ending that I'm hoping for is like This is a stabilizing force for the world in general And it's not it's not escalatory and even if it's like Okay, we're gonna be competing more on chatbots and and it's not, it's not escalatory. And even if it's like, okay, we're going to be competing more on chatbots and tech companies and stuff. It's like, this moves like the potential for a Taiwan invasion down. And like, I care a lot more about that than did,

did Huawei ship a lot of chips? I don't know. Yeah, I don't know. What's your take? I don't know if I agree with that. Well, I'll say a few things. You guys had the Apple in China author on, right? Yeah. So a big part of Apple in China was the whole shtick of Apple comes in, says we're gonna teach the Chinese

how to do what we do domestically in America, and then they do it, they get better at it, and they no longer need Apple, and they have a domestic market that can produce it in the same way. That's the risk of this export, right? Which is that there's no dependence. Think Jensen's a really talented operator.

And by the way, the evidence for that is there was a big letter that went out critiquing his trip to Beijing. Only two senators signed it, right? It was Banks on the right and Warren on the left. And if you think that they didn't try to get other people in Congress to sign that letter too, you would be shocked at how few people were willing to go on the record on the anti Nvidia side of this. Right. The other thing I would say to you is if you think these chips aren't going to get diverted to CCP use right to military use to PLA use. I think that's a little bit of a naive perspective. Right.

It's impossible to prevent them. Yes. But my question is, let's just not use them for the thing that's most critical to national security Yeah, it's like exactly great if it'd be great if they could you know set up a local instance of X AI's new way Really ramped up, but okay, so if That the slight difference that I'm kind of steelmanning here is is if Apple goes into China and teaches a bunch of CNC engineers how to mill aluminum to make iPhones, and they explicitly demand that those manufacturers have other clients like Huawei for smartphones, like they are building up an internal capacity. If you're just selling in GPUs that are fully assembled,

yes, you could tear them down and rebuild, but maybe there is enough lock-in in the CUDA ecosystem that you can't just swap out and just shift off. John, here's another headline from the journal just a couple months ago, Nvidia to set up a research center in Shanghai. So they are setting up and investing in R&D locally.

And all of that, whatever they know how to do there, whatever they learn how to do there, it will all disseminate broadly into the Chinese economy. And that is just a fact. And if somebody disagrees with that, I think it's naive. And I guess we are seeing like cracks in the Cuda ecosystem lock in right now with AMD

and ROCM and ROCM. And so people, and the T GPU and Tranium and Amazon, and I'm sure Meta's thinking about custom silicon and on-device inference at Apple. So it's like, yeah, if you can go and train a frontier model on these H20s and then distill it down and run it on Huawei SNs, that does pull their capabilities forward

How what is the mood in in? DC around the idea of like AI as being a really impactful military technology right now because for most people it's knowledge retrieval with ChatGPT and CodeGen with Cursor, Cloud Code, Windsurf, Devin. And beyond that, it's like, okay, my B2B SaaS company is a little bit more efficient

and I have some AI agent stuff in there. But people aren't really saying, oh, it's transforming everything yet. They're not showing those examples, even though that's kind of the narrative. Concretely, besides like, yeah, you know, prompt defeat America, you know, like, like, get me from where we are here to there. And walk me through the mood in Washington around AI as a military technology, specifically.

Think people on the military side are probably some of the earliest to realize the value of AI for a couple of reasons. One, there are already real battlefields today. There are theaters of war where automated decisions are being made that are life and death decisions. And putting aside perspective in any of these wars, whether you're looking at Russia, Ukraine, whether you're looking at Israel in the Middle East, there are already real instances today of AI deployed on frontier live to operate things like drones, to operate things like targeting infrastructure. That's happening today. It's

not happening in America, but that is happening today. The military is very good at keeping abreast of what our compatriots are doing overseas. That's the first thing. Second thing I would say to you is the big unlock for a lot of this is the decreasing influence of humans in warfare, right? Like in 10, 15 years ago, 20 years ago, if you were an Air Force pilot, that meant you were actually sitting in a plane

doing top gun shit. Today, if you're an Air Force pilot, it means you're in Arizona in a cooled warehouse piloting a drone that's like remotely dropping bombs on things. That unlock, there's no reason that should just be the case. We take them out of the cockpit, put them into the warehouse. The next step on that is why have the human piloting at all, right?

Why not have the autonomous pilot of the drone making those decisions effectively and actually fighting the frontier of war for us where there's no risk at all domestically to our people going into war. So there's a risk at all domestically to our people going into war. So there's a lot of enthusiasm, maybe enthusiasm is not the right word, there's a lot of awareness of the value they are in warfare. I think the double-edged sword of that is if you're looking at, if you're concerned about an invasion of Taiwan, it's far more concerning thinking about a China, the PLA army is not an up-to-date army in many respects. It's far more concerning thinking about a PLA army that has access to supercomputer clusters built by H20s

or other kinds of American ships, and it'll be H20, that is able to more effectively fight in Taiwan rather than a PLA army still fighting conventional warfare where it's never been able to excel. Yeah, I guess my pushback or question is just around, I guess my pushback or question is just around, I hear you that AI is being used on the battlefield. When I think of AI on the battlefield, I think basic image recognition,

look at a satellite image, pick out the missile silos, or if you're a drone, it's a very small neural network. I haven't heard a lot of concrete examples of like, yeah, we're running a large transformer-based AI system to make wartime decisions, but at the same time, like, that feels like a year away. But who's going to, you know, what government is that? Is that good PR for any military or government in the world?

Hey, by the way, we're building the biggest supercluster ever, and it's for killing. It's a killing machine. Who wants to go out and say that? One question I have is part of why Nvidia has been so effective on lobbying. You mentioned not only being able to get a, if you can only get Elizabeth Warren to sign your doc,

you're in a rough spot. But I saw, so in 2023, they spent about half a million on total on lobbying. 2024, they spent. This is Nvidia? Yeah, they spent $640,000. But then in Q1 of this year, they spent nearly a million. So they clearly ramped it up.

But how much do you think they benefit from just being the largest company in the world and everybody being an Nvidia bag holder somewhere or another, right? I mean, success against success. You know, if you're the largest company in the world, people wanna be a part of that. Also look, the number of dollars you spend

is not always the proxy for lobbying, right? Like the hard thing to understand is Jensen is spending more time than probably any other of his peer CEOs. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, his travel budget is probably bigger than his lobbying budget, right? That's exactly correct.

Why would you need to have 30 registered lobbyists running around when your CEO has a personal relationship? This is the new thing. This is the sort of unique aspect of this admin relative to other admins, which is there is a retail politics relationship based components of a lot of this work that did not exist before.

And if you're Jensen and you can have the great relationship with POTUS yourself, you don't need 30 lobbyists running around. You can fly to Mar-a-Lago. He's in founder mode. And let's not forget Donald Trump, Vacheron Historiques owner watch guy yep recently spotted with a 1 million dollar or Richard mill so I've never

felt more poor in my life if you if you go to shake a hand in Washington and you got a bare wrist you might be getting booted but if you pull up with a hitter you're going to the moon what do you guys what are you boys rocking today? I actually forgot to put on my watch Bear bear wrist today, but but I typically I typically wear a Vacheron Constantin And oh very nice and Jordy wears the Audemars Piguet Royal Oak Anyways anything else we should be looking out for this week Only thing I would say to you look John, to your point on who's using actually sophisticated AI, it's not gonna be today,

at least what's declassified today is not gonna be, hey, we blew up this thing. It's a lot of cyber warfare, right? Like, and as more and more things are about, hey, I wanna disrupt the infrastructure of my opponents, their water infrastructure, their electrical infrastructure, their banking and financial infrastructure, that's where LLMs are increasingly being used.

What you should look for is look, do the chips get exported? Does this actually happen? Does it get flipped again, right? What are the gunks in the works, the requirements on licensure that enter? And then also what happens on Ship Security Act? Does it make it through?

Does it actually get through House, Great Momentum, Senate, TBD, truly to say. Okay, that's a great take because I feel like right now, today, I would be more worried about a CCP controlled, large language model, transformer based large model, just spamming the United States internet and social networks with a bunch of AI slop

that's slightly anti-capitalist, then... Which is happening. Then Xi Jinping querying, please invade Taiwan. I don't think that the... I don't think that the... Claude. Xi Jinping is in...

Don't make any mistakes. Claude, he goes, please invade Taiwan. Don't make any mistakes. Don't lose any troops. Yeah, make it better. Make it better. But yeah, I think that that's maybe even, even, it's more of a clear and present danger today. That's right. Um, which is interesting by the way, that's tick tock. That's tick tock today.

If you're opening up tick tock, it's not AI, but that's the soft power component of China's influence over America. Yes. And being able to, and being able to train that model, which is large and is, probably the next version does require a lot of Nvidia chips, was probably trained on a lot of Nvidia chips. Doesn't have the same quantifiable, oh, this many parameters, this many gigawatts, this many tokens went in. But if it gets 1% better and you have control over it, it is a risk and it should be considered.

Last question, any chatter on the ground in DC about the Windsurf Google deal, or are they gonna find out next week on LinkedIn? So funny, I had a conversation over the weekend with somebody who's part of this Neo-Grandeisian movement, which is to say a very sort of Lena Con orientation. And I asked her, I said, what are people waking up to this? Like what's going on? Why is nobody talking about it? And her only answer to me was stay tuned.

So my only answer to you is stay tuned. Ominous. Last question on the Tik Tok sale. Polymarket has a Tik Tok sale announced in 2025 at a 35% chance right now. And a Tik Tok announced in 2025 at a 35% chance right now and TikTok banned in 2025. I guess it was already banned, but it's just like been in limbo. But have you been hearing anything on, or do you have any interesting takes or insight about what might happen to TikTok since we just landed on this topic randomly? I don't know.

We didn't prep this. I mean, there's no political demand for it. There's no constituency who is making the argument of, because if you were pro-TikTok ban, you got what you wanted in theory, not enforceable, but you got what you wanted in theory, and you've now taken the win and you've gone home. And if you're anti-TikTok ban.

What about my American flag-toting Mag-7 CEO Mark Zuckerberg? Is he not a constituent that wants TikTok banned? I think it's too, if he comes out too publicly pushing for that, it's like an antitrust nightmare. That's exactly right. I mean, like the whole TikTok story proves that you potentially can build a new social app

if you're willing to spend, or at least you could in the rise of vertical video, you could in that moment create a meta competitor if you were willing to spend $20 billion, incinerate $20 billion or whatever they did to just spend money to acquire all the users and build your own network. That's exactly right.

And there is nobody on the ground in DC who's using their limited lobbying dollars for the TikTok ban. What Zuck wants is better data construction, better data center construction, right? Fix the energy policy in this country. And if it's by the way, it's a, it's a negative sum system. You can only work on so many things during every congressional term, every admin term. Wait, negative sum, not zero sum?

It's even worse. It's even worse than zero sum. It's everybody's got to lose. It's even worse. Zero sum system. That's right. Lose is the least wins. That is unfortunately true in politics. Everybody's got to lose. It's even worse. Zero-sum system. That's right. It's whoever loses the least wins. That is unfortunately true in politics. Zucks says he's building a 1 gigawatt cluster aiming for a 5 gigawatt cluster. This should count as a three-peat because you've told me three times now. Last question.

Last question. This is fun, man. I appreciate it. I'll take the three-peat. He said 5 gigawatt cluster in a few years, in several years. That feels further out than most of the AI hyper accelerationists. Is that an energy policy thing? What are his clear asks? Like what, what, what, what would, what would he want to change in Washington around energy

policy? This is a huge energy policy problem. Energy policy is annoying because it happens both at the federal level but also at the state level and even at the local level. You get things like zoning. If you guys read the abundance book, you get things like zoning that impact you at the very local level. And the critique on the left right now for a lot of these questions, it's a hard one for these folks to work on, is gosh, look at all the environmental problems of building the data centers near communities and so on and so forth.

And I would expect that in an Ocasio-Cortez administration or a Buttigieg administration to be a big problem in four years. What Zuck wants today is make it easier for me to build, reduce regulation at the state and local level for me to actually construct data centers. Let me bring new nuclear reactors online, bring new sources of energy online faster in this country. And that one federal standard to regulate many of the rules such that you don't have different states and different localities who all have patchwork systems. Because if you need multiple people to coordinate all at once

that's where you get these long timelines and complexity. It's gonna be the Delta smelt versus super intelligence. That is really the battle to watch. That's wild. Great having you on, Zach. Thanks for having me, boys. Hope to have you on again very soon. We'll talk to you soon, Zach.

Have a great day. Thanks, cheers. Take care. Well, if you're looking to pick up a hitter and you're heading to Washington, go to getbezel.com. Do not visit the swamp with a bear wrist. Your bezel concierge is available to source you any watch on the planet.

You can go to your bezel conciergege and say I'm heading to Washington DC I'm talking to the big dog talking to the big man I'm going to Mar-a-Lago and I need a hitter and they will hook you up Go to getbezels.com. Don't if you get a meeting with Jensen Show respect. Yes, where an RM where an RM where an RM I want to talk about the history of Richard Mill It's fascinating. There's a I found a good thread. I also did a chat to be deep, deep research report. I found an interesting and I had to say, by the way,

little, little note in there. I forget what the line was, but we said it's the cold emails, the the warm intros, the deep research, and the deep research for the show in some instances, the deep research. The deep research, yeah. And the deep research for the show, in some instances. Is literally deep research. So the watch business here says, Richard Mill has no history, no tradition, and looks like a happy meal toy.

So how did it become a $1.7 billion brand in 20 years, selling watches that cost more than a Ferrari? Here's the wild story. And so, very, very interesting story. Most, the thing that popped out to me was that there is a consequence. So that does not look like a Happy Meal toy to me. I think it looks fantastic.

So it's the global juggernaut of ultra-luxurious watchmaking. They call it the billionaire's handshake in elite circles. And so, he was born in the south handshake in elite circles. He was born in the south of France in 1951. Richard Mill is the name of both the founder and the company. He became obsessed with precision machinery and fast cars at an early age.

As one does. As a teenager, he was such a motorsport enthusiast that he would take the train to Monaco for Grand Prix weekends weekends even sleeping trackside to snag a Prime view of racing legends like Jackie Stewart. That's probably not possible anymore if you try to sleep They're like you can't be Where's your $50,000 wristband Yeah, but I mean back in the 50s I mean racing and even F1 was a total like it was just like

a bunch of dudes being guys basically. It was not, it was not, it was not like heavily sponsored, heavily organized. Like I don't even know if the FIA existed at the time. Anyway, so Jackie Stewart called the Nurburgring the green hell because it was so demanding and it stands to this day it's a great quote and so in 1967 he is 16 years old and he is Richard Mill is there and he witnesses this famous crash Ferrari driver Lorenzo Bandini's car burst into flames right in front of him and the incident left a vivid impression of the extremes of engineering and danger in racing.

So he winds up joining the, in 1974, he joins a small watchmaker, Finn Hoare, and then in the 90s he'd become the head of watchmaking at the Parisian jeweler, Mar Boussin, where he successfully launched a watch line for the firm, and so he had extensive experience handling luxury jewelry and fine chronographs, but he was dissatisfied.

In Mill's own words, working with others meant he was often held back from creating timepieces that could break boundaries. He felt the watch world was too conservative, too boring, and too self-centered, as he later put it. And he longed to push design and engineering far beyond the status quo. By the late 1990s, with decades of industry know-how

under his belt, he was nearing 50 and facing a now or never moment. He decided to create his own watch brand as a sort of 50th birthday present to himself, one that would realize his wildest ideas without compromise. So in 1999, he co-founds his company. He has a trusted friend. They establish this new firm and Audemars Piguet, they partner with the R&D firm, the R&D arm of AP,

which is Rinald et Papi, A-R-R-N-P, and they get this legendary engineer, Julio Papi and Fabrice Deschanel to help turn sketches into reality. So AP got a small stake in the venture, but otherwise to this day. If they own about 10%. Yeah, they own about 10%,

so they own pretty much everything. So the whole idea was to apply the cutting edge materials from Formula One, aerospace and other advanced fields to high horology. And to be clear, this is the opposite of a outsider story. This is an extreme insider leveraging every possible advantage that he has, but then winning on a massive scale and effectively doing the impossible. Yeah.

For most people today, if you said, I want to start a luxury watch brand, you could raise a billion dollars, and it would be very difficult to do it. And that's why Rolex and Patek and RM and these brands actually end up being very valuable is the amount of money that you would need to incinerate to try to recreate a brand with legacy like that, a brand that could be 200 years old. The other thing is time, right?

So you can create a luxury brand, but it's not that appealing as an investor or founder if it's going to take you a hundred years because you won't be around to see to see your, you know, really achieve your goal. I was texting with Sean Frank from the Ridge Wallet as CEO of Ridge Wallet today this morning. And and I was kind of explaining to him in this piece that Richard Mille is considered like an overnight success, like the startup, like the massive quick winner in watches. And he's like, only in fine watchmaking is grinding for 20 years to become successful, like an overnight success, because every other firm is hundreds of years old, basically.

And so they struggled a ton to actually build the first watch because they wanted to build a three dimensional object showcasing this extreme technology and they wanted to create a racing machine on the wrist. And they did. And they did. And so there were blood and tears in the start up phase,

innovations that took a long time to become reliable, resulting in years delay for the launch of the first model. It took them two years from the company's founding to perfect their inaugural watch. Which is not even actually that much time. It's a long time if you think about, I raised money and the seed investor is like, so when you guys launching, you got 12 to 18 months of runway.

And you're like, it's gonna be two years. Yeah, but I think true R&D, true product development can take, easily take. I completely agree. Even if you're moving it's gonna be two years. Yeah, but I think true R&D true product development can take easily take I completely if you're moving really really quickly open AI Sigma Plenty of other companies take me was like four years to build a piece of software plenty plenty of great companies took a long time to build like and actually deploy the thing but It's certainly a narrative violation around like they like the okay. I got into YC I'm launching my company

in three months, launch early, get feedback. It's just like, it's different things. Rora was a similar story. Yeah, how long would it take? It probably was 18 months, and it took an incredible amount of back and forth with the design firm that we work with, and Charlie, who really led the product development.

And yeah yeah and then you have a certification process and and again I think good things take time so 18 months doesn't doesn't really sound crazy at all 24 24 two years but he was prepared for this he had plunged into the project knowing it would be exhilarating exciting challenging fun and a lot of hard work finally in 2001 rich the Richard Mille brand unveiled its first creation, the RM001 tourbillon, and immediately sent shockwaves through the conservative

Swiss watch industry. Only 17 examples were made, but that was enough to make history. It wasn't just the bold tonneau-shaped case. I was looking for the word of the shape. It's the tonneau-shaped. And the skeletonized dial exposing futuristic guts that grabbed attention.

It was the audacity of the whole package. It was high complication, it had a manual tourbillon, which is the little spinning thing that keeps the time more accurate when your wrist is moving around. Packed with technical innovations, a base plate of reinforced carbon fiber, a torque indicator, and a dynamometer

to monitor the movement's performance. Dynamometer. Sounds like some American dynamism. I love it. How American dynamism-pilled are you? I don't know. I'm seeing it everywhere. Dynamometer. Yeah. If you don't have a dynamometer on your wrist and you call yourself an American dynamism investor, get out of here. I just said the math. They've averaged making 2,500 watches a year

since their founding. Wow, that's a lot. So low volume, but extremely high margin. That's like 50,000 watches of all time. Yeah, crazy. And also, the engineering stuff really comes through. Most watches have 48 hour power reserve. RM went with 72 power reserve.

And there are some crazy, crazy stories here. So this is where the conspiracy theory comes in. So the price tag. Yeah, yeah, please. I gotta tell you, one of our dear friends, who I will not name, who is a size lord and capital allocator in real time just sent me a picture of his RM on his wrist while a helicopter is taking off in the

background. It's a fantastic piece. Okay so anyway so RM launched and it was a hundred and thirty five thousand dollars for the first watch this guy will ever launch this in 2001 $135,000 this is twice as expensive as the next most expensive tourbillon So just take the most tourbillon watches are already really expensive. It's incredibly complicated Take the the most expensive one to just double it and and so there is a, so people are Patek fans, they're shocked. They're bluntly asked Richard Mill why he thought anyone would pay such a sum for his newcomer watch.

And Richard Mill said, "'Very easy, because we are not competing "'with Patek Philippe, nor anyone else.'" In other words, he's playing in the league of his own. So that line doesn't typically work on a pitch call. At least in the software business. We're not competing with cursor. You're charging, you're building this database company,

you're charging twice as much as a full enterprise snowflake deployment and you're gonna win because you say you're not competing with them. Yes, yes. And so orders came in as soon as the first watches went out the door, but there is this interesting conspiracy theory, which is that there was a mistake.

And the reason that they are so expensive is because the someone- Who's doing a print ad. Yes, and so, okay, so a rumor has floated around that Richard Mills' first advertisement, which was in the Financial Times, baby, you know it, you love it, in the pink sheets. In the, so he buys an advertisement in the Financial Times

and the advertising department misprints the price. They added a zero. He wanted to sell the RM001 for $13,500. They printed in the ad $135,000, 10 times the price. And what's interesting is that, so the ad goes out according to legend, the RM team is like, you guys botched it, like, who's gonna buy this? It's only a $13,000, what you trying to sell it for 135?

This is crazy. But then, they start getting calls. I gotta have it, I gotta have it, $135. I have $135,000 burning a hole in my pocket right now, and I would love this watch. I want it on my wrist. And so, Mill received so many inquiries at that price, burning a hole in my pocket right now and I would love like this watch. I want it on my wrist and so Mill received so many inquiries at that price

He decided to stick with the higher number and so this is why it's conspiracy theory is because Richard Mill as a brand it denies that this ever happened But the legend obviously terrible terrible if it came out there. Yeah, they wanted to make a $13,000 watch and then they acts accidentally charged 135 and then they look around the orders are coming in exactly like wait We just you know a thousand X are You know, yeah, but this is a classic example of what's called a Veblen good So with in economics typically, as price increases, demand decreases if supply is constrained.

So if you raise the price, people buy less. With a Veblen good, a higher price actually increases demand. And it's reserved for perfect examples of this, like luxury goods, where it is a status symbol. And now when you see the billionaire's handshake going on, you know that's $100,000 watch at least, potentially much more. Pricing is intimately tied with the way

in which people feel about a product, right? 100%. And, you know, for a good example of this is the GT4 RS. It's incredible to drive, but people want it maybe, like I know very few people that can honestly say if price was no, wasn't part of the equation, would you want a GT3 RS or a GT4 RS? And there's like an aesthetic component as well,

but even though many people, if they just drive both cars find that the mid-engine Version is is is fantastic and enjoyable. They'll still Three for the for the status an even stronger example in the car world is probably like the Lamborghini Reventon or the Lamborghini Veneno. Are you familiar with these? So these are extremely limited Lamborghini releases and they're built on the existing platforms. So they take a Huracan and then they restyle it and it looks way more extreme, way more, and they tune it and they improve it as much as they can.

But these limited Lamborghini's sell for millions of dollars. And really, you're buying it because it's signaling that you have that much money. I mean, and to some extent, a Lamborghini is a Veblen good to begin with, but this is the most extreme. And of course, a Veblen good is not purely binary. You can be more Veblen than the other, and more of the decision-making can be driven Veblen than the other and more more of the more

of the decision-making can be driven by the higher price than than others anyway Richard Mills conviction proved infectious despite industry skepticism the RM001 found buyers almost immediately orders came in and a GQ later observed Richard Mills very existence knocked some of the stuffiness out of luxury watchmaking by showing that expensive watches don't have to be stayed or classical. And so- Yeah, they've always been controversial,

but for what RM does, they do it extremely well. Yes. It is, they own their category. They truly don't have competition. Any other watch that I've seen that that tries to emulate what they do. It does look like a cheap knockoff 100% and Yeah, it is true, you know, they basically anytime you have a situation where where Insiders come into an industry and have every possible advantage, but then absolutely hit such a grand slam. You just gotta appreciate greatness.

Totally. And I think that what matters with the story of the actual watches, like the RMs, is that it's not just a knockoff Nautilus with twice the price. It's differentiated on price, yes, but it's also differentiated on shape. There's no other major watch that looks exactly the tonneau shape.

In my opinion, the putting skeletonized so forward doesn't exist anywhere. So that's like the fourth, the third or fourth point. And then the last point that's interesting is that every luxury watch brand, they're not telling you this is a rugged watch. And Richard Mill was all about ruggedness. So there's an interesting point in here. He says, one of his breakthrough strategies in establishing credibility was to demonstrate

the ruggedness of his high-tech creations in a way that bordered on outrageous, outrageousness. At watch fairs and presentations, he would literally take a prototype and throw it on the ground to prove it wouldn't break. This stunt wasn't just for shock value, it was making a point that a Richard Mill wasn't a delicate museum piece,

but a luxury watch that could withstand anything. The company engineered every component for durability, cases were curved for strength and comfort, movements were torture tested with massive G-forces and stocks. As one company Monograph described, prototypes were subjected to simply brutal trials,

including a device nicknamed the goat's foot, a heavy pendulum hammer that smacks the watch from all angles. If a part failed, Mill's team iterated until it survived. The result was that these extravagant watches could truly be worn during intense activities. Yeah, yeah, this is why people see somebody playing tennis in an RM, and they're like,

oh, I can't believe they would be playing, doing some sport with a watch like this. And it's like, no, it actually was designed to do this, and it does it very well. Yes, the tennis thing is a very interesting example. The first athletic ambassador was F1 driver, Philippe Massa, who joined the Richard Mill family in 2004. Related to Massa.

Massa, yes. He's like, yeah, the last name has two S's. He flipped it. It was so powerful, he flipped it. And so in practice sessions and races, he wore a prototype RM chronograph to see how it held up under high g-forces and vibration so even if it's not going to destroy the watch it still might throw off the time and Actually having a watch that could hold up. Maybe it's not in maybe it's not you know remarkably important for a watch

But it's a cool cool status novel. It makes it special makes it different than everything else It's a cool, cool stat, it's novel, it makes it special, it makes it different than everything else. But this partnership paid off dramatically during a violent crash at the 2004 Hungarian Grand Prix, Matt Moss's car was wrecked, but both the driver and his Richard Mell RM-006 tourbillon walked away unscathed. The watch's carbon nanofiber movement proving its toughness

in extreme conditions. And then the other tennis example that I wanted to get to was in 2010 after years of experimentation the brand introduced one of its most famous collaborations the RM027 tourbillon with tennis icon Rafael Nadal. This watch became legendary for its absurdly low weight under 20 grams with the strap achieved through lithium alloy movement and skeletonized design. The doll a fierce baseline player, put it through its paces in Grand Slam matches.

In fact, Nadal reportedly broke five different prototypes of the RM027, so that's probably like $2 million worth of sales. It's not like the prototypes actually cost the retail price, but yeah. Remember, these things have 99% margin apparently, if the rumors to be believed. And so this allowed them to test it

and the engineers perfected it to withstand his powerful swings. The finalized watch accompanied Nadal to victory at the 2010 US Open, visibly strapped to his wrist as he hoisted the trophy. The sight was astonishing. A $525,000 tourbillon on a sweat soaked wristband surviving every smash, every serve.

It sent a clear message that wearing a Richard Mille was compatible with even the most intense athletic pursuits. A perfect melding of luxury and performance. Per another perfect example, our friend who sent us this video is actively heli-skiing. Really? Really putting it through its paces. Really?

Not at this very moment in time, but in the recent video. That's hilarious, okay. And then of course, once Richard Mill became kind of dominant in sports, they wound up breaking out slowly. So in 2011, this is over a decade after, into the buildup of the business, they partnered with Hollywood actress Michelle Yeoh and co-designed the RM-051 tourbillon

that featured a diamond set phoenix motif. They did a collab with Natalie Portman on the RM 1901 with a dramatic spider design. And they're just doing all these, anything they can do to create something that's extremely unique, identified with like equestrian polo players, yachtsmen, extreme skiers. So just really focused on this brand and willing to do anything even if it means

building something from scratch, like a piece unique. Uncompromising functionality under real world stress, which is just, it's a promise that no other brand is even trying to make. Yeah, they own their category. They found a new category and then they dominate it. It's absolutely beautiful. I'm pissed there's no Harvard case study,

Harvard Business School case study on the business yet. There are some GQ articles, there are some Hodinke interviews. I need a proper SWOT analysis. For sure, for sure. Guess we should go to Grokfor Heavy and say write a Harvard Business School case study on Richard Mell. Yeah.

Please include a SWOT analysis. Be good. Don't make any mistakes. That's kind of what I did with the research. I basically asked for that, but. No it's just such an incredible story because it's effectively, it was incredible execution all the way from founding until today. But still doing something that most people would have said was completely impossible. Yeah no discounts ever. 5,000 watches per year, only sold in elite boutiques,

Dubai, Monaco, Beverly Hills, partners with athletes in rich sports, F1, tennis, golf. To be clear. Yeah, pretty. There's a certain podcaster that we really wanna get, want him to start, you know, because he gets really into his shows, having, you know, an RM on the wrist.

Well, that one would just make sense because of the weight. And the performance, yeah. And the performance, yeah. He's putting up five, six, seven hours in the studio. But it gets hate. They call it a Happy Meal toy. They call it the Rich Man's Invicta. They say it looks like plastic.

They say it has a lack of heritage. It's only 24 years old. But it doesn't matter. RM is here to stay. It's redefining luxury in real time. Anyway, fun story, if you're planning to build a new watch brand, get on Linear, Linear.app. Linear's purpose-built tool for planning

and building products. Meet the system for modern software development. Streamline issues, projects, and product roadmaps. Start building at Linear.app. Linear really is the Richard Mel of product management, platforms and tooling. People have been saying it. We've been saying it since about 10 seconds ago.

And when you go to sell a watch online, gotta use Numeral HQ, sales tax on autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance at numeralhq.com. Anyway, David protein, crazy stuff happening there. I have weird take. I still don't know what's going on. I don't really know what's,

I have some people texting me with their theses. I wanna hear yours, but let me kick it off with some basic background. So David Protein announced yesterday, "'Our commitment to protein has led us to a strange place. "'Boiled cod, we're selling it now. And a week ago, it seems like Peter Rahal, the CEO, friend of the show, was teasing this by saying,

what should we make next? We will make what wins. And he said, cookies and cream, salted calmer, caramel, key lime pie, frozen cod, and cod lost by a huge margin, but they made that. And Ryan Harmon says, cod lime pie. So maybe he's in on this stunt. I'm sniffing a stunt here, we'll figure it out.

We'll get to the bottom of this. So Andy Rosenberg says, David teased the boiled cod product on its website months ago because 75% of the calories from David come from protein, and the only thing that's higher is boiled cod, which has 85% of its calories coming from protein The built bar is at 52% the quest bar is at 47% and the bear bells, which is delicious But it's more like a candy bar is is something like 40%

And so your dirty little secret. Oh, yeah, if I'm picking between David and Bear Bells It's like, you know, how hard am I going today? You've been known to have three in a day, so you might do two Davids and then a Bear Bell as a little treat. Also, the Bear Bells, there's some that, they get you down the funnel of like, this one's actually a protein bar,

and then you get like, well, I tried them all, and the one that's just pure caramel tastes the best, so I'll stick with that, and then you read the back of the label for the Bear Bells caramel one, and you're like, wait, this is actually just a candy bar. But it's delicious and it does have some protein, and they have a great product.

I think Bear Bells is fantastic. But there's a time and a place for everything. Sometimes you gotta eat boiled cod, apparently. But there's a big question. So they put up an out of home ad campaign. Hopefully they did that on adquick.com. Out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home ad campaign. Hopefully they did that on adquick.com. Out of home 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. I don't know if they went with adquick. They should have. But the ad says boiled cod. It has a picture of the cod. And it appears to be in New York with a gray,

is that a Boxster driving by? That's some cool car. So I think they're actually selling Cod. You can just buy it. Are they actually gonna buy it? You can just buy it. Okay, so first off, my reaction. This sounds gross.

I don't like this. I don't care how high protein it is, I'm not into it. So what's going on? They bought a billboard, hopefully MadQuick, and it feels like maybe a stunt of some sort, but they are such a young company, this might actually confuse people because people are still just learning about David.

But I was talking to a friend of the show and he was saying to me that at a certain point, a little inside scoop on boiled cod view from perspective of an earned media, earned discussion, as opposed to paid media slash ads, a segment of TBPN, like this one, proves that if people are talking about a company, that's usually a win, especially when the convo is about cod having the highest protein to calorie ratio of any food. David bars are second only to boiled cod,

can't beat them, join them. And so that's an interesting take is that, hey, all earned media is good media, but if this gets out of control and all of a sudden people think of David bars as cod flavored and when they go to grab the next David bar, they're like, that could be a risk, but it seems like it's going on.

If I order a pack of these, will you eat one on the show? I will eat one on the shelf. I will test it for sure. Okay, we'll work on it. And then holding you to that. And then the other question is like, it seems like they're in a battle with some other brands over their supplier, David Barr.

It seems like they acquired their supplier. The key ingredient supplier makes EPG, or esterfide propoxylated glycol, a fat alternative developed by Epigee and made from modified plant-based oil. It's a controversial ingredient choice because it's less natural than raw meat, like boiled cod. Boiled cod seems like the other end of the barbell,

but I need to know more. And I'm curious to know how this played out, how this is working, and are they seeing results from this campaign because it's exciting stuff, it's cool. Anyway, if they do wind up buying that EPG supplier and they need to get some new clients, they gotta get on ADO. Oh, they already did.

Okay, well then they gotta get on ADO, customer relationship magic. ADO is the AI native CRM that builds, scales, and grows your company to the next level and gets started for free. In other news. What else we got? We got a bunch of stuff.

We got Fin.ai, the number one AI agent for customer service. You are on a credible run here. Number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive make-offs, number one ranking on G2, fin.ai. High Yield Harry says, this is going to end in tears. He's quote tweeting Jim Kramer, a new acronym for the meme stocks that just won't quit.

Park. Park. Park your money in Palantir. Palantir, Applovin, Robinhood, and Coinbase. The four wolves of this bull market. They are the four wolves of this bull market. How's Applovin doing? I haven't, you haven't seen people posting charts, but Well, there was all that conspiracy theory that like they weren't making any money But we talked to Sean Frank and he was like I'm using app love and it's like it's maybe not the best but it's pretty

Good and I'm actually paying them. So it is real. So here to date. They're flat, but they're still a hundred and eighteen billion dollar business Okay. Okay. Well, that's pretty good Interesting in other yeah, they're 2024 revenue is four point seven billion. We'll see what they put up this year We had there was an interesting post here. So this founder that has been beefing. Yes, Sean McGuire Creating a bunch of websites about him, emailing his boss, emailing his LPs, things like that, has been going around claiming that he's a portfolio, a Sequoia portfolio founder, when in reality he got a 10K scout check

and then his company shut down. So kind of throwing stones from a bit of a glass house there. But yeah, if you get a scout check kind of throwing stones from a bit of a glass house there. But yeah, if you get a scout check from a venture scout from a fund that does not qualify as getting an investment from that company. Yeah, that's true. This is a violation of the social contract in Silicon Valley. Yep.

And Sean clearly looked this up and was like, wait, did we invest in this guy a long time ago? I dug through it. And so the whole thing with the whole thing with Sequoia is like, they at this point, they have a lot of companies in the portfolio. But I think if you if you actually look at the stats, it's like, like 99% of companies are still operating. And so he would know he would know if they had done the deal. Sean really roasts him.

How much does Sequoia invest in your company? What partner led the investment? And what happened to your company? Can you please enlighten me? The answer is Sequoia invested zero. Sequoia scout invested 10K and the company failed. Rough. Well, don't get in the mud pit if you don't wanna get muddy.

If you hate mud wrestling if you go in the mud pit of X calm with Sean McGuire, you're gonna get muddy He's gonna he's gonna he's gonna roast you Brian singer man has a new fund Yes, PT is a big backer the tech crunch is reporting. So interesting strategy. Did you read this? Yeah, I was gonna get into it So former founders fund Fund GP Brian Singerman and co-founder and managing partner of Quiet Capital, Lee Linden, are seeking over $500 million for a new fund called GPX. Love the name, three people familiar with their strategy

told TechCrunch, so sounds like TechCrunch is scooping them, which I'm sure they're not happy with. But it makes sense that these kind of things get out. So GPX uses a two-pronged strategy. The firm will invest approximately 20% of the capital into funds managed by emerging VCs who are targeting precedency stage startups, and the remaining capital will go towards partnering

with emerging managers, the same emerging managers you would imagine on leading later stage investments, most likely at series B of their breakout companies so oftentimes let's say a pre-seed focus or early stage fund does a pre-seed round for a company they end up growing really quickly GPX can come in and basically provide the capital in order to help that manager actually lead later rounds versus that manager going having to raise an SPV from 50 people. It's harder to win it's harder to actually win the deal because it can take a lot of time the capital

is not actually fully ready to deploy. I've been in that situation where the early stage seed fund seed fund is like, yeah, I would love to lead this for next round, just give me six months to actually close all the money, I'm gonna go around and then you have this weird, I gotta talk to this person, then I gotta talk to you, and then I gotta talk to this person, then I gotta talk to you, and then I gotta talk to this person,

and it's just so much back and forth. So if you have this fund to funds backer who just lets you stretch one round further, really, really cool concept, and I think it could work out really well. Yeah, Brian Sigerman. Great, great investor, great person. I always had a fun chat with him when I was at Founders Fund,

so excited to see him launch this fund and kind of get it going with a new strategy, because it seems really cool. Anyway, we should talk about 8 sleep we launched a new ad today let's play it let's play I want to play our our advertiser this is the big challenge for our production team yes just playing videos on the show they can do everything else it's pretty complicated but it's not easy it's no joke this so let's play the ad and then we will tell you more about Eat Sleep.

We're gonna. People see the three hour streams, the hundreds of guests, the thousands of clips. For us, it's the work that happens off mic. The cold emails, the warm intros, the deep research. Sleep is the edge. Whether it's tracking down a viral poster or interviewing a Fortune 500 CEO,

staying sharp is non-negotiable. Podcasters sleep on eight sleep. It's so funny that we did the white suits that day because it was just complete chance that we were in white suits that day. Complete chance. It's funny, some backstory on this. Andrea was on X saying,

this is what you get when you're allowed to have creative freedom with advertising. Can't wait to see more of these. Well, more are coming, so you can look out for that. But the cool thing here with the 8Sleep team, we didn't tell them the concepts for the shoot. We didn't give them notes on the shoot. All we did was actually send them this final cut

that we posted, and they were like, this is awesome, rip it. And that's part of part of what we're doing. I mean we we make these for fun Yeah, and it's a good creative process for the team. Yeah, and it's it was cool. Yeah It's also like an homage to the other eight sleep partnership announcement between Charlotte Claire and Eight sleep that they clearly spent a lot of time concepting and shooting and we were just like, let's match that one for one and it'll be a lot of, it'll be cool and it'll also be funny

and so we had a lot of fun shooting that. So you can go to 8Sleep.com to get started. Five year warranty, 30 night risk free trial, free returns, free shipping. Code, tbpn.com. In other news, Reindustrialize is this week. Happening tomorrow. Happening tomorrow, yes.

And they have been on an absolute tear posting interesting things. They said, we exist to reverse this. Pull this chart up. The top employer in each state, back in 1990, you can see the map is almost entirely green because almost every state, the top employer in each state was manufacturing.

In 2024, the top employer is healthcare. There's a few states that are holding on to manufacturing. A couple that are Utah's in retail, Nevada has been in hospitality the entire time, surprised for us, staying strong. Hawaii is the top employer is hospitality. That makes sense, is a tourist destination. But for a long time, America was a manufacturing powerhouse,

and this is a really striking chart or visualization of what can happen in 34 years of neglect, essentially. So if you're headed to reindustrialize, let us know how it goes. We couldn't be there because of travel schedules and whatnot, but I hope it's a fantastic event. And we're very excited for everyone who's over there. Well, our next guest is ready to join us. This is Brian from CoreWeave.

We will be talking about the Neo Clouds and AI training and what it's like being a public company. Yeah. So good to meet you, Brian. How are you doing? What's going on? Pretty good. Welcome. Thanks for having me. Congratulations on all the success. Um, can you, uh, just take us through like a brief introduction and kind of maybe a little bit of history on the company, but then kind of where you are today. Cause I,

I imagine we can jump into a bunch of stuff. Most people are probably familiar, but yeah, sure. So, uh, first off, my name is Brian Venturo. I'm one of the founders. I'm the chief strategy officer of core. We've, I started out as CTO until they found me out. I've been demoted to chief strategy officer. So It's murdered. It's gotta be more fun more. No, it's demoted dude. Definitely Well, well, I'm just saying like, you know day to day I imagine You're you know, you still have the stress of you know running the business and all that but but but maybe you're not on call, which would be nice. Nothing's changed, they just don't let me write code anymore,

which is probably better for everybody. But I'm the chief strategy officer, I run a lot of product strategy, infrastructure strategy, I work with clients on big deals. Probably half the company indirectly reports to me. So I'm on the board of directors, etc, etc. So I've been involved in pretty much every aspect of the business. But I'm happy to talk about whatever you guys would like today. I want to talk about naming every strategy. I want to talk about the overarching strategy.

Walk me through how you would think about defining the current strategy, what is the highest priority, relationship with hyperscalers, new companies, creating a fluid compute layer, all the different government incentives, what is top of mind for you on a day-to-day basis in terms of positioning core weave against competitors or just broadly solving a problem in the market.

How do you actually break down these problems? So it's two things, right? The first is serving the customers and partners that got us here. That's the big AI labs, it's the hyperscalers. It's the people that have an insatiable need for computer infrastructure. They're the ones that have an insatiable need for compute infrastructure. They're the ones that are blocked

from delivering to their next customer, from growing their user base, because they don't have any GPUs. That has been, it's been insane to be a part of, right? It's because every time it increases in order of magnitude, you're like, it can't go again, and then it goes again six months later. And, you know, I was listening to the show

before you're talking about, you know, Meta's five gigawatt data center campuses, et cetera. Fantastic. You know, it's like, we're headed there, right? And I think that right now it's the question of, you know, everybody's in a race and how quickly you can build that like that large, but it's also understanding what are the local constraints?

What are the actual grid constraints? What are the supply constraints to be able to get there. You know, you run into things like labor constraints, you know, there's not enough electricians in the world to go out and build these things and timelines these people need. How do you modularize the data center construction? You know, everybody's kind of solving this as the planes in the air already. Yeah, Right. And you know, it's a race. You know, I always say internally, like I can always, I can solve any problem with enough time or capital, right? And a lot of the times you don't get both. So it's choosing, you know, what's the right path to go? You know, how are we gonna solve this for them? So that's kind of one side, right?

It's like, okay, how do we build to everything that they need? How do we understand what their demand's gonna be? And when you look at the thing that I think the world misses is that everybody on the hyperscale side and expect like in our seat as well, like we're looking at it going, we need to build x number of gigawatts data center capacity, right? Like we know the demand signals are there. But the capital and the speculative capital isn't there to do it.

Interesting, right? Is I can go out and I can build X gigawatts of capacity for the next two or three years, right? From my balance sheet. But any more than that, and the demand doesn't show up, and I put my entire company at risk. Yeah. Right, so we're basically having to haircut the demand signals that we get,

and only build to a certain extent of it, and then by the time we get out there, we're in the same constrained position we're in today. Got it. Talk to me about. How do you, real quick, how do you think, so it was 2019 that you guys decided to focus more on AI and cloud and for broadly, is that correct, roughly?

Yeah, so. And the reason I asked this is because I saw a company, as there's been a bunch of companies that were The reason I asked this is because I saw a company as, there's been a bunch of companies that were effectively came to the conclusion that you guys did, but maybe six, five, six years later in terms of, hey, we're gonna sort of pivot away from Bitcoin mining into AI because that's where the real growth is.

And it feels like a lot of those company, from an outside looking in, it feels like a lot of those company from an outside looking in, you know, it feels like those companies are going to be at a massive disadvantage. But I don't know if I have if I have the right read there. Yeah. So we when we started out in 2017, we made the decision that we were never going to be as good as the ASIC producer and mining Bitcoin. Yeah. Right. And the idea there was, you know, there's always going to be something they don't release. It actually wound up being true.

They had released like their low power mode. I forgot what it was called in 2018. And everybody found out that they were hashing 30 percent better power efficiency. The world lost their mind about it. And it was kind of like the OK, we were actually right. Like we were kind of we're paranoid about it. We never actually knew until then. So we know we said, we're not going to do it as good as them. Where is there a level playing field? And we thought there

was a level playing field in GPUs. And we also thought, okay, if crypto goes to zero, the GPUs are repurposable, they're used for gaming, they're used for graphics rendering, like we could either sell them on the open market or we can build another service with them. What we were most surprised by is when we first launched our, let's say first non-crypto product in 2018, 2019, it was a rendering service for an open source 3D graphics platform called Blender. We had like a thousand people sign up in the first day. And I was just like, oh boy, there's a market here,

people need this stuff, and we had never expected it to be that large. And people would come to us and they'd send us like a support team saying, hey, just wanna tell you it's so awesome, I was able to do so much more work because I got access to GPUs I've never had before. And that was like signal number one, and we're like, okay, we convinced our early investors

we're going to go all in on this thing. We're going to use crypto to pay for it as we're building out more compute. And we set it up so that as we didn't have actual cloud or compute workloads, it would turn back to mining. And the mining would cover all of our fixed and variable expenses. And all of our fixed and variable expenses and all of the cloud stuff was just upside.

So we were able to show over time this constant penetration or kind of constant growth of our margin, which was really easy to grow. We were able to lever the cryptocurrency into a massive resource base. So the timing played a lot into our success there in that we had that permissionless crypto revenue to lean back on. Yeah, but also just having, I think, incredible foresight to some degree, which you're being a little bit more modest

about it. But the fact that companies, even I saw a company that was getting pumped on Axe last week that is still in the process of transitioning from Bitcoin mining to you know, something that will look like a Neo cloud and the idea that you're gonna come into this market six years late and really be a Key player feels like a long shot. It's um, so I think it's even worse than that It's so I think it's even worse than that. It's even worse. It's even worse than that because the talent pool is so small.

Yeah. And to be successful as the technology has gotten more sophisticated and harder to run. You have to be the best in the world. Right. And, you know, we have some of our low level hardware engineers. They're amazing. Like I've seen them solve problems that nobody even knew existed. They identify the problem, they're able to say, okay, this is what the problem is.

They go back to Nvidia and they jointly develop a solution for it. That's really important as you're building at scale. Anybody can run 100 or 500 or 1,000 GPUs, but if you're running hundreds of thousands of these things, like, it's really, really hard to do, especially at high quality. Right? So, people think that there's folks that are 12 to 18 to 24 months behind us. Good luck.

Really quick question. I have to ask, what's the story with the wheels behind you? All right. So there are F1 wind tunnel tires yeah and we just did a so we're we just did a sponsorship with Aston Martin. There we also and we also executed a computer agreement with them. I'm so excited about this one you know when I talked before about like the, the way that we think about our first cohort of clients, it's the AI labs. The second is the enterprises. Yep. And I feel that if we can walk into Aston Martin and help them modern,

our modernize their AI and ML stack and in the most hyper competitive sport in the world with so much data and so many eyeballs already on it, we can do it for anybody. Yeah. So, so, uh, being more concrete there, you have an F one car, you need to simulate how air flows over it. That's a particle simulation. And that's perfect for accelerated parallelized computing, GPUs. They're probably doing it on premise. At some point, they're going to take it to the cloud. They're going to take it to your cloud.

It's so much. Yes, but it's so much more than that. It's not just the CFD workloads. It's also things like taking radio data from other teams and trying to decipher what their strategies are in real time. That's awesome. I mean, it's running tire degradation simulations, like how does track temperature change with cloud cover?

How does weather come in and actually impact this stuff? It's helping them make better decisions on track in real time. Wow. It's helping them make better decisions on track in real time. Wow. It's like, it's the coolest confluence of the technologies that I can imagine. And I'm like, I'm totally into it.

That's amazing. Yeah, translate all of Ferrari's comms from Italian into English. Yeah, well, I mean, good luck with Ferrari strategy. So talk about, talk about sort of data center build out timelines. I think Colossus and the XAI team were getting a lot of credit for bringing a lot of compute online very quickly a lot of energy online. How much was that an outlier or are they just really good at marketing?

I think it's both, right? One of the things that I admire about Elon is he sent an email a couple years ago on Thanksgiving and it was like the biggest problem that we have right now is there's nobody to turn a screwdriver on the line. I'm gonna go turn a screwdriver on the line, right? And he is so good at identifying what the bottleneck is and breaking through it. And if you're the richest guy in the world

and you don't really care about the consequences, you can do that a lot more than you can as a director of a public company, is what I've learned. Is, you know, they're able to go, and I think some of what they've done is a bit of the, you told me I can't build it, but I already built it, it's already there. And they're like, no, you can't build it. No, no, it's there. Right. Um, and when you're in a race like this,

that bravado matters. Right. Um, I, I don't know, I don't think anybody knows the truth of what's actually there. Uh, but they've definitely been incredible in how they've been able to execute. Yeah. Yeah. I mean the, the, that data center seems like it's performing very well, but what I learned from Dylan Patel over at SemiAnalysis with the ClusterMax ranking is that not all clouds

are created equal, and 100,000 H100s is not perfectly substitutable for another 100,000 H100s over here. And CoreWeave did extremely well on Cluster Max, and I'm interested in peeling back a layer deeper into understanding first, how do you think you did so well? What concretely makes CoreWeave stand out as a NeoCloud on the features level from a customer perspective. And then internally, what's the secret sauce?

Like is it just great employees? Are they aligned? Are they working harder? Is there key insight? Are you like, how do you actually deliver that product at a higher level than, you know, competitors that Dylan Patel reviewed? Yeah, so let's not get off the XA. I think yet. I'm going to trans transfer

into that. Um, you know, if they have a hundred thousand GPUs and they get 60,000 of them running and they don't care about the other 40,000 of them, it's kind of enough. Got it. Right. And if they're looking at it saying, I don't care how much this costs, I have to win and they're in the position to do that. And if you're Elon Musk you are Right, that's a powerful position to be in sure now the clients that we serve Are typically going to be more cost-conscious and are going to look to optimize, you know

They're spending make sure they get the whatever they need out of their investment And what we found is that you know these, these jobs and this infrastructure, it breaks all the time. Right. And when you accept that something's going to break all the time and you design for it, your solution is going to be very different than if you're just kind of, you know, square peg in a round hole after the fact saying I have to go deal with these failures. Right.

So what we did initially is we built with a incredibly high level of observability at the bare metal layer. And the bare metal visibility is really important because things do fail and you have memory failures, you have thermal failures, you have all these things that impact your jobs. But if we're able to help our customers

identify what's happening, triage it for them and explain to them why something failed. They don't have to go back and say, oh, was it my code or was it one of the 700,000 connections in my cluster? They can immediately point to our software stack and says, oh, it was this link flap over here. We took it out of service.

You restart your job, you'll be totally fine. That's been very, very, very powerful. And it's not just that visibility layer, it's also the storage and networking and the quality control that we put around those things. You know, I have to give credit to our new, our now CTO, Peter Salenki, who used to work for me until they found me out.

He is, he is incredibly focused on the low level of visibility and quality and drives a lot of that culture throughout the company. If one of 500,000 things is going to break, I need to know immediately so I can go in and fix it to make sure my customers are back up and running like three minutes later. So it's building from that low base and understanding what the problems are gonna be. And then culturally, we have people that are here that take so much pride in being first and being best.

Right? And if we're not first to market with a new release, like they're gonna cry for a week kind of thing. So when we did GB300 a couple of weeks ago, or maybe it was just a week ago, like people went out to one of our data centers, like all of our low level engineers went out there and they delivered for like two weeks to get it done.

Right, like they go and they work from 8 a.m. to 4 a.m. every day and they love it. And it's a cultural thing. And I think we're really lucky to have that. Bit of a tangent, were you an H20 buyer at all over the last few months? No. Or not needed? No. And there was H20 sales happening in the United States from what we heard. Who are the kind of players that are that were making use of that? I don't know. If that did happen, I don't know who it is.

But for us, if we had any power available, we're going to buy the best accelerator we can. There's no reason for us to buy the cut down accelerator if we have power available. Yeah, that makes sense. You mentioned that one of the key things is the insight into what's happening in the data center. If a specific chip is failing,

you want your customer to be able to know, you want to be able to, I mean, we talked to Dylan Pateli who was saying, sometimes you just need to turn it off, turn it back on, or there's a whole bunch of different things that can happen that feel very abstract when you're looking at it from the outside, but are very concrete when you're on the inside, and that's actually what separates great data center

performance is just like the hand to hand combat that happens on an inside day. My question is like, we've talked to some people who are like, we're gonna put data centers in space, or we're gonna put data centers like on the moon, or on a boat. And that doesn't seem to align with your framework of being like, we need to build it in a way knowing that it's gonna break

Often we're gonna need to fix it and hard to do that if it's it's yeah I don't think space is the right place for a data center Okay But you know to the point there of sometimes you have to turn it off and turn it back on to solve the problem We don't find that to be true. Okay, right is if you if something needs to be turned off There's a reason why it needs to be turned off. Sure. And that one comment maybe what separates us

is our engineering team, if they're like, I'm not gonna reboot the system, that doesn't solve problems. I wanna know exactly what happened there because we have to go solve it because if it happens one time, it's gonna happen another time. The scale that we run at, these skeletons come out.

Yep. Right. Um, and you know, making sure that the data centers on earth and is acceptable by is accessible by like human technicians is really important. Yep. Um, because sometimes you have to make judgment calls on like what's actually causing this. And um, you know, how do you fix it? Yeah. Um, so the, the one kind of, I mean,

th th th there's a few things that the space data center folks will tell you about like free energy or free cooling or something like that. We don't need to go too deep into that, but I guess the question that I'm more interested in is how are the recent results from different training runs? We saw this with Grok 4 that the reinforcement learning post-training was 50% of the overall cost.

That's kind of the rumor. And there's been kind of mutterings about, hey, maybe in the future, you'll need a whole bunch of distributed compute all over the place generating reinforcement data and doing rollouts and bringing those back. And you won't need as much of this hyper-concentrated compute in one place.

And so maybe having 10 1 gigawatt data centers is better than one 5 gigawatt data center. It's just power and compute all over the place. How do you think the shape of distribution of compute clusters will evolve over the next few years? If you have any insight there. Yeah, so great question. Let's put it into perspective, because you said one five gigawatt or 10 one gigawatts.

Those are insane, by the way. Yeah, okay, okay. Like even building a gigawatt data center and its impact on the local grid, we'll see. I mean, you talk to people and they're like, and they're like, there's going to be a hundred gigawatts data centers in three years. Like the, the crazy AI people get crazy. And so I'm, I'm, maybe I'm a little bit on, you know, like out in space here, literally, but bring back down to earth.

Yeah. So, um, people definitely want to build at that scale, right? When you think about the a hundred gigawatt data center or a 10 gigawatt data center, the capital required yet to do this. But back to the question of, is it going to be more distributed? Is it going to be more centralized? I think that right now, while the ability to centralize it exists, people would prefer to do that because the optionality of having it altogether is worth more than having it distributed. I think that as you have workloads that become more latency driven, right, so, you know, we're starting to see customers that say, hey, I need something that's actually

local to a metropolitan area because I'm running, you know, agentic AI for one of my customers or for a banking customer. I need to make sure it's there. That's a very different story than 12 months ago where people didn't care where inference was because your first response wasn't for like two or three seconds. Yeah. You actually wanted it on the other side of the world ideally where it's low load. Yeah Then you're managing to optimize for cost. Yep, right But there's a group of people that are gonna optimize for cost is a group of people are gonna optimize for performance

you know for us one of the products that we're really excited to develop is You know almost like a global load balancer product that helps people choose what they're optimizing for. And we've been thinking about that for a long time now, because like you said, you have to have that compute distributed. And it may not be because you're trying, if you could choose, you'd always have it in one place. But when you build it distributed,

then you have to have the software services that can intelligently say, okay, where am I going to run this? What am I optimizing for? Where's the data that I need? Right? And that's where, you know, we've been investing in, you know, we've built a massive global network backbone. We have a ton of our own dark fiber to be able to move workloads around and have our customers connect. What does that mean? What does that exactly mean? You're on dark fiber. So we've leased dark fiber between a bunch of our data centers

across the United States and in Europe. That allows us to install our own optical gear so that we can flex up bandwidth as we need to. We have some customers that need things like 64 terabits per second between sites, like crazy amounts of bandwidth And the idea there is that they're moving synchronization data or they're synchronizing models between sites. Yep So, you know, that's where you know, we have to make these big capital investments knowing what's coming, right?

So when our customers start asking for it was like, oh, yes, we already have it there So, you know some of that is just it's the focus that we have and the specialization to know, hey, we better start investing in this because a year down the road, we're going to be screwed if we don't. Yeah. How has it been? What are some of the differences been in building out data centers in Europe? I know you guys have Norway, Sweden, Spain, and the UK.

Is that correct? Yep. in Europe, I know you guys have Norway, Sweden, Spain, and the UK, is that correct? What's it been like developing new data centers there versus what you've done in the United States? Not so different actually, right? Everybody was initially saying, oh, it's gonna be so hard to work in Europe, are people gonna show up and work as hard?

And one of the things that we've done, I think that we've done really well in our onboarding process for employees is we've actually brought all the European teams over to work with our Tiger teams inside of our data centers. And- You just blare the Star Spangled Banner just loudly. Yeah, if you blast music continuously,

all of a sudden, they have to get bumped. The culture is infectious. One of the best things about the company is that all of our... The company's so young that there's been no real attrition. Nobody's left. The people that are running the data center started as data center techs a couple years ago. Everybody's still fired up.

They still have the same drive. They want to be first. They want to be best. And when you have new employees that walk into that environment and those people are genuinely happy to teach them, it transfers pretty well. Right? So I think our European investments have gone a lot better than I thought they were going to, which I attribute largely to our people. A couple of years ago, I feel like everyone in tech had to learn about Nvidia,

and then everyone in tech had to learn about TSMC and then everyone in tech had to learn about ASML. And now people are kind of getting familiar with SK Hynix. What do you think the next big company in the semiconductor stack or data center stack or even networking, like what is the next big theme or subcategory of important foundational technology? People are starting to dig into the rare earth materials and what's going on, like what is on the horizon

in terms of like under explored or misunderstood as important as having a role as we try and build out these one gigawatt, 10 gigawatt data centers. What are we going to be hearing about? That's such a, such a good question. And the kind of question, man, I don't even know. I'm not sure I have an answer for you. Yeah. Maybe it's networking gear. I mean, you mentioned you're putting optical gear at and just hearing, what was it, 42 terabits a second.

That seems like something that could become very important. Not that you have to call out a single company, just like the overall industry is interesting to be like, oh, everyone's gonna be thinking about this industry. Yeah, that's definitely one of them. Fiber capacity between metros is going to be an issue. I don't know that it's an issue that's insurmountable. There are definitely some gotchas that I can see coming down the line at people.

I don't want to say it because then I'll give them a warning and since we've already identified what they are, I feel like I'm in a better position. Sorry. Yeah. I don't mean to put you on the spot too much. What about electrical, what about electrical transformers? Um, I've heard a little bit about like, there, there's sometimes there's a shortage. They're very complicated. Like, is this, is this like big technical thing that's big piece of hardware? Uh, is that like an important, uh, thing for people to be aware

of going forward or like an important industry to understand? So a bit of a tangent off of that. Everybody talks about how there's no power left in America. And if you actually look at the data, there's a tremendous amount of power available from base load and load following generation. That's great. Thank you. And the problem exists on peak days.

And what solves peak load problems is solar. Solar and batteries will solve peak load problems. You're worried about five o'clock on the hottest July day when everybody gets home to turn their air conditioning on. That's the thing. Um, and you know, everybody wants to talk about how, uh, they want to use demand response as a way to, you know, bring supply back to the power grid from data centers. Um, you know, this stuff is really hard to bring up and bring down. It's,

it's not really intermittent load, right? Um, you know, I think that a lot of this shortage narrative from a power perspective is coming from the fact that everybody and their brother has become a data center developer in the past year. And there's a lot of people out there squatting on power, right? They're squatting on power rates. And I don't think that the local regulatory commissions understood what they were signing up for when they started doing load studies for free and giving power allocations.

You know, but it goes back to my point earlier that the biggest constraint is speculative capital to build out to meet demand that we expect. Interesting. Right. So like, yeah, transformers are a problem, but they're not outside the lead time window. You know, UPS is everything's a problem if you need it tomorrow. Sure. UPS is everything's a problem if you need it tomorrow Sure But if you're able to plan and make the investments in like in a reasonable period of time and you trust your demand Forecasts and the market is there and believes in it Like this is all fine. Yeah so you still I

Feel like the chart that people have been tracking is like China bringing on, you know new, you know, basically like copy and pasting nuclear China bringing on basically like copy and pasting nuclear reactors. Do you think that the US should be seriously, there seems to be enough people now from tech to Washington that care about nuclear? So hoping to see. It used to be very contrarian.

It was very, very edgy to say, oh, yeah, nuclear, it's like it's safe and we should do it. It's still scary. Yeah. In your view, would you like to see more focus on, more attention on nuclear or more attention on solar if you had to pick? I mean, so they solve two different problems. Nuclear builds your base load.

Nuclear's not load following. It's really hard to bring those things up and down. They have long outage cycles. It's a base load solution. So as your data center demand is going to increase so much and you're shifting your base load requirements up, that's the solution. Particularly if you want to retire old coal or you want to retire some of the base load natural gas. Nuclear, I believe is the solution there. But as you're dealing with peak loads, right, you're looking to match that load profile and you know, solar is a great one to do it.

Yeah. Wind doesn't necessarily solve that problem during peaking. Wind doesn't peak during the afternoon, it peaks overnight. Sure. So you just have to match, what's the load profile you're trying to match and which part of the curve are you trying to solve for?

Is the load profile for AI not perfectly matched with nuclear? And is that because of inference demand from actual customers? for AI not perfectly matched with nuclear? And is that because of inference demand from actual customers? Like I've heard people use ChatGPT during the work week, but they don't use it when they're sleeping. So there's actually maybe,

it follows more of like the solar load profile. Because when I think of training, I think of we're gonna run this entire data center for months, I don't know how far off I am on that. But like, that feels like perfect. Oh, build a nuclear power plant right next to the big data center for months. I don't know how far off I am on that, but like that feels like perfect. Oh, build a nuclear power plant right next to the big data center. Run it continuously. Just keep training. And then when you get done with one model, train the next one and just keep it

running perfectly matched forever. But but how are we actually like like the actual AI workloads? How how do they match to different load profiles? Yeah. So if you're in a global constrained environment, right, you're serving as much load as you can around the clock from anywhere. Yeah. Right. So I don't think that you have any load shape right now. I think it's just flat load and it's like it's pinned to 100 percent.

As bullish. Yeah. Yes. It's insane. It's stressful. Stop talking. It's incredibly stressful, but it's a good problem to have. Yeah. I have people yelling at me every day. Like, where's my stuff? Where's my stuff?

Where's my stuff? And I'm like, I promise I'm doing everything I can. But I think that as that, like as you have the investments where things are more latency sensitive, you'll see that the load curve may not change. It may still be pinned at a hundred, right? But the types of workloads may be more, it may still be pinned at 100, right? But the types of workloads may be more shaped.

I'm not sure how it plays out. All right, I think that, you know, the problem that you're trying to solve there is not necessarily data center load shape, it's residential and commercial load shape, right? Because you're not running, like your big commercial buildings in New York aren't running at 3 a not running like they're big commercial buildings meet in New York aren't running at 3 a.m. they're running at 3

p.m. that's the problem makes a ton of sense well this was really fun yeah I hope that we see you at the track soon one of our other one of our sponsors is also an Aston F1 sponsor hopefully we run into you on the paddock. I'll be there soon actually. Fantastic. Amazing. Great having you on.

Let's make this a regular thing when you guys have news. It was awesome to get all your insights. Yeah, this is great. Thanks guys. Thanks so much. Cheers. Bye. And since we're mentioning public.com,

investing for those who take it seriously. Multi-asset investing, industry leading yields, they're trusted by millions. Our next guest will be joining us in just a few minutes, but first we can tell you about Wander. Find your happy place. Find your happy place. Book a Wander with inspiring views,

hotel-grade amenities, dreamy beds, top-tier cleaning, and 24-7 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better, folks. Okay, I got an update from a friend, friend of a friend, which says that his friend, no, no, no, sorry. Our friend says that he has a buddy that owns some RM boutiques

and has not heard of the conspiracy, which is interesting. The pricing conspiracy. Maybe it was hallucinated. It might have been completely hallucinated. I don't know, I need to find the source for that. Where was that actually in here? I will figure it out.

And we will get to the bottom of the conspiracy theory. But we will do that later because our next guest is here. It's Tyler Cowen. How are you doing, Tyler? Hello everyone. Which conspiracy theory? So this conspiracy theory is that- You'll actually like this one.

Okay, so are you familiar with the high, the ultra luxury watch brand Richard Mill? Only by name. Okay, so- I don't have one. You may have seen it on a sailboat or something like that. Yes, so Richard Mill is famous for selling watches at 10 times the price of other luxury watch brands So a Richard mill the first one was

$135,000 for a single watch and at the time $13,000 would have been more appropriate for that kind of tier of watch and the conspiracy theory is that When Richard mill went to promote their new watch, they took out an advertisement in the financial times. They sent over the copy for the advertisement saying, please, uh, please promote Richard Mill. Our new watch is, uh, is available for purchase and the price is $13,500. And there was a mistake in the newsroom and they added an extra zero and they printed $135,000. And what happened was, there was a mistake in the newsroom and they added an extra zero and they printed a hundred and thirty five thousand dollars and

What happened was instead of getting no offers? They got flooded with offers because people had to have it a classic example of a Veblen good And and the rest is history and to this day the brand denies it, but what do you think? Well, it sounds like the opposite of a conspiracy, just an innocent mistake. And then it worked out well for the company and bad for the buyers. Yeah, I believe it. The conspiracy is that the brand now obviously denies it because it would it would not be a good look for them now to be like, well, we actually wanted to price it at

13,000. And then we actually, you know, now that you're willing to pay 135, well, good deal, let's do it. But. There'll be a deathbed confession on that one. One way or the other. Maybe. Well, it's great to have you here. It's great to have you on video.

Superintelligence. Yes, yes, yeah, yeah. We had some technical difficulties last time, but I'm glad. You look great. How are you overall? Let me take your temperature on the last time we talked you said AGI was around the corner later than two days later Oh three released we now have oh three pro. How are you feeling on artificial intelligence progress?

Overall, do you feel like we're accelerating? Decelerating are you happy with the products? How are you using them? Take me through kind of the state of the union. Everyone has a different definition of AGI, but the definition I grew up with, which is that it can pass a Turing test and do at least as well as expert humans on most endeavors, intellectual endeavors, it clearly passes.

If you wanna call it AGI, you can. I don't insist on the term, maybe it's more misleading than useful. But 03, 03 Pro, I use them every day. I ask them questions about history or music or travel. My wife and I did a trip through Europe, France and Spain. We asked it about our hotels, our restaurants, the churches we saw, everything. It just keeps on working.

It's amazing. Much better than having a historian guide with you. So to me, it's like AGI. It's better. In fact, are you, what is your prior for hallucination at this point? Because that, that Richard mill conspiracy theory that I just, um, relayed to you that comes from an, from a chat GPT Oh 03 Pro deep research report, and we're getting text messages that many people hadn't heard of it.

I haven't checked the sourcing yet, so I'm not sure if it's real. I haven't gone down and done all the fact checking, but just in terms of your prior, how likely would you believe that it's a hallucination? Well, just to ask it, right? If it's something important, you double check with another AI and or you ask and you find out. So hallucinations should not be a practical problem.

They end up one because people are silly. Or they'll ask it questions where there may not be any answer at all. And that is by far when it's most likely to hallucinate, they'll just make something up to please you. But if you know in advance, that's when it's most likely to hallucinate. Again, you take countermeasures. So it's a way overrated problem. I agree. I agree. And I just fact check this and it does come

from a 2021 GQ report, which again might be wrong, hallucinated by the off- But GQ never hallucinates, right? Gentlemen do not hallucinate. No, gentlemen do not hallucinate. What do you think of Dwarkesh Patel's new formulation that there's sort of a two-axis diagram between you and him? AGI is here, AGI is not here.

The impact of AGI economically will be massive in his mind and the impact of AGI will be more muted in his assessment of your assessment. And I think your general stance, which is we should hold ourselves accountable to the definition that we set out to achieve decades ago when this work started and not constantly just be pushing out the requirements, moving the goalposts is important.

And then there's this new definition, super intelligence. I'm waiting for super duper intelligence, right? Giga intelligence. Ultra intelligence. We're already past it. Everyone, folks like us, we know what super intelligence is. We already have it. We're waiting for the next one. Maybe the best measure is how much of people's time are they spending with this thing?

And that's rising steadily, right? So that to me is quite impressive. Dworkesh understands my views perfectly well. He and I use the term AGI in different ways, so it all ends up being confusing. I just think the human bottlenecks are so significant that it's not going to be fast progress anytime soon. That's my core view.

It's not based on any kind of bearishness about AI. It's that I've spent my whole life working in human institutions. And there are plenty of much simpler developments, like don't be a jerk, that would boost productivity immensely. But we still haven't gotten around to really implementing. Yeah. But I mean, on the topic of super intelligence,

I think what people are kind of getting at is that it feels like we have 15-minute AGI. It feels like we have spiky intelligence. it feels like we have 15-minute AGI, it feels like we have spiky intelligence, it feels like we have intelligence that can memorize every book in the English language and yet not tell you a funny joke or put a novel connection together between two disparate disciplines. And potentially more important is this idea of intelligence with amnesia, right? It's like we've been talking about this on the

show and Dworkesh talked about it last week, which is this idea of PhD level intelligence that, you know, can't remember what you told it, you know, yesterday, right? And so it's difficult to sort of build real momentum and real agency. I think it can do all those things. Now it might require a little smidgen of work from you. Like you might need, for one thing you can turn on memory, that's maybe not as much memory as you'd like, but you can just reinsert the dialogue you had with it and tell it to start from there. So okay it's a slight inconvenience, but my goodness, they're so unhappy. Like, it's incredible what we have. And with modest effort from you, it does all these things.

So I completely agree. I love these systems. I enjoy spending time with them, even if they're not directly providing economic value. I find them entertaining. I find them just interesting. I learn things. It's fantastic. I guess the question is like, yes, you can stuff the context window, but increasingly folks are saying that there's some sort of fundamental limitation with the size of the context window that,

yes, you can do needle in the haystack analysis with a big context window, but even if you have pages and pages of all your best practices, the current systems are more likely to forget some hard one lesson early in working with you than just an average employee. And that feels uniquely unhuman. I don't know. I've worked with a lot of employees. One generous way I would put

it. The things are not perfect. If you compare them to smart humans on intellectual tasks, they're basically ahead. They can't dribble a basketball. They cannot do most jobs, that's for sure. It's a big reason why progress will be slow. If nothing else, those jobs intersect with the physical world. Robots are far away. And there you go. I think it's a pretty clear prognosis. I don't really get why anyone disagrees with it.

Well, if you need to raise a billion dollars, it's not super convenient truth if robots are far away, for example. And specifically economic growth is far away. This is the Satya Nadella position, which I think he agrees with you on the economic impact that we're currently seeing and potentially the economic impact for the next few years. And so he is underwriting a very different investment strategy in artificial intelligence.

Yeah, it says a lot in our view that everywhere you look, there's just blaring top signals in the market, both literal all-time highs, but then just other more indirect signals. And at the same time, Satya is doing layoffs, being seemingly very pragmatic. And I read that as more aligned with your view, which is transformative, impactful, incredible, wonderful magic, but also potentially incremental, and going to be transformative in the fullness of time,

but not next quarter. Forgive me for not sounding like a complete capitalist, but this is all so important. People should just be doing it. And to some extent, they are. The labs are working very hard to make progress. You can debate how much the motive is profit, but look, these are driven people. They, they get how important it is and they're doing their best.

I think that's amazing. Yeah. Are they all going to get rich? I'm not predicting that. I don't know. Yeah. I think the, the trade-off that people are debating broadly in the market is if the next training run that's a little bit of a stretch for the market, we were just talking to the

co-founder of CoreWeave and he was saying that the capital markets just aren't really ready to absorb what it means to 10x data center construction. And at the same time, if AI researchers are saying that by 10x-ing data center construction, we will lift ourself off of the GDP baseline, and we will see breakout economic growth, and we will get through some of the problems that you've identified about actually restructuring the economy and speeding up economic growth, all of a sudden, that question, and how much should humanity as a whole invest as a portion of GDP,

that becomes a very important question for the overall market to solve. Well, let's go talk to United Arab Emirates. They can either buy some more parts of sports teams or do this. I think they're going to do this. The growth rate, I think will go up. I've offered the very speculative estimate of

half a percentage point per quarter, but that's an enormous sum of money. That's massive. Now, you know, is it captured by the capital markets, the shareholders and so on? No, just the free time liberated by chat, GPT, and the other services already is enormous money. So remember, Satya had that challenge,

when will it earn $100 million? Well, it has many times over, it just hasn't earned it for him. So people get their work done more quickly, you add up those valuations of time. I'd love to see a study in the number, but it's way, way above 100 million right now. Well, on that point, there was a study in the number, but it's way, way above 100 million right now. Well on that point, there was a study last week about does AI code generation tools,

do these tools actually improve developer productivity? And they did a, I believe a double-blinded trial with, or maybe just like a split up trial based on talented software engineers working on open source projects, kind of trying to work on some of the harder problems in software engineering, not just build me a new web page. Actually advancing open source projects and they gave half of the developers access to tools

like Cursor and Windsurf and Cloud Code and then the other half didn't have these AI driven development environments. And they said that the AI enabled engineers expected a 20% speed up, but they in fact experienced a 20% decrease or 19% decrease in productivity. What is your take on that? Do you think that there's a world where

we're fooling ourselves into believing that we're actually sped up by these tools? Or do you think that that's completely ridiculous and it's obvious that these tools speed us up? That's BS that paper. First, only 16 data points. Second, only one of those people had experience working with AI already.

And that person's productivity went up. It's the other fools who were just trying to get a handle on it at all where the productivity went down. So we need to throw that out, get it out of our minds. It's obvious from marketplace tests that AI speeds up developer productivity. Of course you have to do it right.

You need to learn some things, but it's working. Overwhelming real world evidence to that effect. Do you think that there are particular tasks maybe that you've encountered where you've gone to AI and then afterwards realized like, well, for this particular task, not just planning a vacation or trip or something, I was actually slowed down?

Sometimes I like giving stupid dogmatic answers. I'll just say no. I think it's a giving stupid dogmatic answers. I'll just say no. I think it's a correct stupid dogmatic answer. No, it's never happened to me. I love that. It's definitely happened to me when I've said like generate a two by two chart and I'm like seven prompts deep and I'm like I could have done this in Excel or I could have done this and just taken a screenshot or I could have done this in Photoshop faster. It does happen to me, but I agree on that. I feel sped up and I feel very happy to use the tools and I'm enjoying them.

I use it to prepare for podcasts. It cuts my prep time in half. No real doubt there. I don't use it for charts. I just tell a human. Maybe the human uses it. I don't even know. I get the chart back.

It's great. I love the world. I love it. What is the what is the labor economist in you think about the AI talent wars? Has have AI researchers been historically underpaid? Are we in some sort of odd intellectual property theft ring where we're paying for trade secrets to trans to change hands what does your read on kind of all the talent moves that we've seen at staggering numbers by comparison in what's historically happened in Silicon Valley? Yeah and then specifically do you think that an AI

researcher in the year 2030 will be getting a hundred million dollar signing bonus or do you believe that things will maybe normalize and and Researchers will go back to being paid well, but maybe not more than fortune or mag seven CEOs Probably normalized now I'm an NBA basketball fan and what I observe is the top teams need some time to gel So you look at the Miami Heat they got LeBBron, Dwayne Wade, Chris Bosh. The first year they lost. You look at, you know, Chicago Bulls, Jordan and Pippen.

It took them a few years. You look at the Lakers, what they had, Carl Malone, Gary Payton. Was it Shaq and Kobe Bryant? They didn't win a title. So it's not as easy as you think. Not that those aren't great, great players, but there's something about how it gels and the process and what part of people's trajectories you get them at

that all has to fit together. I think it's a fascinating experiment. I'm dying to find out how it's gonna work. What do you think of the missionary versus mercenary debate? A prior guest on the show highlighted Tom Brady in the sports world taking a lower salary in order to build a better team around him. Bit of an economic sacrifice for greater performance, longer legacy, ultimately reap the rewards economically. But a lot of people have been saying,

you can't buy great missionary talent that will stick with you during the hard times and really advance the frontier of artificial intelligence. In the case of Brady, he has these contracts for shoes, jerseys, footballs, other things. He probably made a lot of money from that pay cut by staying more focal. So maybe for some of these AI companies,

we need more endorsements, a line of tennis balls or something. And then it'll be cheaper to hire talent because the outside market will pay them. We're not at that point yet. Maybe we'll get there. I think that- Yeah, I want a game worn jersey.

I think they would sell. Here's what Ilya wore when he built the key parts of GPT-4. Exactly. I mean, we've been putting out these little trading cards, sports, whenever an AI researcher moves from one firm to the other, and I mean, it seems like an insider joke, but these posts are getting millions and millions of views. Like, it really is turning into sports

in terms of the attention of the entire tech industry on these trade deals. Maybe it's just the big numbers, but I think it's also the fact that this is an important technology and people are excited about the developments and they wanna know who will win. What product will I be using in five years?

Will it be Open AI? Will it be Meta? Who knows? All of the above, I hope. Probably. How did you, how would you try to value the Dutch East India company? And the reason I bring that up is Nvidia crossed a $4 trillion market cap. Everybody's calling it, you know, one of the most valuable companies ever. But I think a

lot of the people that run the kind of valuation analysis and inflation calculations and things like that believe that the Dutch East India Company was worth somewhere around 2X of that. Have you spent much time thinking about that business? I look at all the numbers in general. I don't feel I can outguess the markets. So the market is a better estimator there than I am. But look, markets are always wrong. That's why the price changes all the time.

So the fact that Nvidia is priced so high shows the market is paying attention to AI, which is good. But the fact that everything else is priced more or less normally, I think, is evidence for my thesis of slow slow takeoff that it will matter a lot over time, but not that much right away Yeah, make sense Interesting something we just had one of the founders of core we've on which is now a 70 billion dollar public company And I was thinking about the advantage that he has as a public company Where he doesn't have to raise capital

from the private markets and tell this 10 year story. He can kind of focus on the next quarter and just say how do we deliver more compute to our customers. And it's like this interesting change where a lot of the companies today, let's say you're a lab with a $10 billion valuation and you need to raise billions of dollars.

You kind of need to tell the story around super intelligence. Meanwhile, if you can just get out in the public markets and have billions of dollars of revenue, you can kind of go back to telling the story of, yeah, we're hoping to bring more compute online, more data centers online, and just actually focus on the business. Yeah. That can cut either way. data centers online and just actually focus on the business. That can cut either way. But look, if you're selling socks today, public market is fine. But as you well know, fewer and fewer companies want to go that route. So that does suggest to me the public markets are somewhat broken, over-regulated, too much disclosure required,

too much bureaucratization. Shareholders themselves can be kind of nutty. So it's good to have the two compete, but I'd like to see us make the public markets easier to be in. What about Delaware? We saw Andreessen Horowitz moving to Nevada. We've seen some other high profile exits. Do you think Delaware will try to turn it around? I know about a pretty meaningful amount of their budget comes from franchise taxes, things

like that. I say get out, send them a message, they're not feeling enough pain yet, let's make it really tough for poor little Delaware. What do they call it, small wonder? Well small wonder that they haven't gotten their regulatory apparatus into better order. Wow, that's a great thing that's roasted. What about in this, I want to talk more about the public market distortions versus private market.

It feels like Elon has kind of run an A-B test with Tesla and SpaceX. They're like within an order of magnitude of each other, maybe within like 2X in terms of valuation. And now Elon seems to be building some sort of a Japanese style caretsu between all of his private market and sometimes the public market companies as well. Would a hallmark of a well-functioning public market be that there is just one ticker for Elon Inc.

and all the companies are under one umbrella? Or is there value in the public markets to having pure plays? I hear some public markets, hedge fund investors are like, I just want a pure play on the Robo taxi. I just want a pure play on humanoids. And I don't know if that's actually like an economically valuable thing

for our society to have, or what would be best for Elon or the shareholders. I'm just kind of struggling with all the different stakeholders. I suspect the pure play idea is useful. So you get a market price signal, what's working, what's not. So Elon obviously has become less popular. So the value of Tesla goes down. You see that quite directly.

If they're all bundled, the signal is far more muddled. So I think it's better separate. So ideally, um, if it was easy to operate in the public markets, we would just see SpaceX and companies would be going public once they hit like 5 billion or 10 billion, something like that. I'm not sure if something like NeuroLink would be. That's just weird to begin with, non-legible. Who are the customers? What are the products? Yes, the disabled, but after that, I would think should be in private markets. Are you sure about that? Because I feel like it's also in many ways like a classic biotech drug, you know, FDA approvals.

Once it's approved, it goes out to everyone. It feels like that's one place that the public markets are particularly functioning as they always have, where new drug comes, goes through phase one, one phase two trials but goes public very early we were not seeing the stripe of biotech hang out in the private markets for two decades what am I ever gonna buy from neurotech no insult intended by the way but it's not transparent to me I think it's amazing I'm all for it yeah maybe it has to be not so legible to public shareholders and Elon wants to do it. That's great. You might not buy a particular cancer drug.

I would hope that you'd never have to buy any of them, but that particular drug for some certain indication, some certain illness could be taken through FDA trials. They could go public. Their stock price could trade on the basis of the FDA results, and then when they get approved, they start selling that drug, maybe they get acquired by a bigger drug company,

but then they live or die by the market size of that particular illness. Well, if it was a cancer drug, sure, I'd buy that, but a brain-computer interface? I don't know. I don't want one, I'm happy with it being there, and again, it seems to me that's probably not a good matter for public shareholders.

Oh, okay. Yeah, I'm more just thinking, I mean, yeah, I guess if you're thinking about valuing it as like brain computer interface for the masses, that's a different story than it is a treatment for the illness of being a paraplegic. Or if you are blind, it can cure blindness, and that is a medical diagnosis,

and it is a medical product. But obviously, Elon's telling a much broader story about that, so that's a different thing. Were you surprised to see Uncle Sam put up a surplus in June, or were you expecting that? I wouldn't say I expected it, but month-to-month fluctuations can be so severe Nothing like that should surprise us the debt and deficit. They're still out of control. It's like a

Startup, it's a startup that that's like yeah, we're we're profitable Is that one month a great class one one month of free class free cash flow or one day annualized? Yeah, that makes sense. How about stable coins? There's been new regulation. We have a issuer that's now public. There's a massive amount of excitement. It seems like a lot of the use cases outside of being,

as a value transfer to facilitate investing in the US, but then the potentially more interesting use cases internationally. But how are you thinking about adoption? And do you believe that the US, and specifically the traditional dollar, will be a major beneficiary of the tech. It's been great. The rest of the world wants access to dollar-based systems. Our government makes it hard for them. Stable coins are a workaround. I'm not sure what their long-run fate will be because keep in mind regulations can change and other payment methods can innovate as well. But they're going to pass the genius act. It looks like I'm all for it.

It's not perfect legislation, but it will give people a chance to experiment with these things on a legal transparent basis and let it rip. Right. Why do you say that our government makes it hard? I always thought it was an authoritarian government that or, or, or just a foreign government that wants the ability to inflate away their own debt. And so they're keeping dollars out of their economy. They're trying to avoid dollarization.

They don't always avoid it successfully, but you look at the U S government, know your customer laws. For instance, it's a pain in the neck to deal with an American say who wants to open a bank account in Germany. I've tried to do this. That's because of the US government putting reporting requirements on the German bank. They don't want your money. So a lot of the problem is USG, not Argentina, Russia, whatever.

It's both. But in fact, if people just hold dollars, that is usually tolerated. And it's a workaround for both. I want to talk about Google's acquisition of Windsurf. Google paid a licensing agreement. They acquired 50 or so engineers from Windsurf. The CEO and the preferred shareholders got paid out by Google.

Roughly 400 or something employees were left in a ghost ship in the Remain Co. They also had $150 million roughly on the balance sheet and so they were scooped up by Cognition. I'm not sure how closely you follow the drama but my question was, is this a Pareto improvement or a Caldor-Hicks improvement for Windsurf stakeholders as a whole?

It raises the cost of capital and we're going to need more covenants to limit this happening. Like say I start a company, raise money, then just pay myself a huge dividend for all the money. Well that's typically against the law because there's a covenant in the contract saying I can't do that. So we need new covenants to cover these cases. Those will be harder to write but the market will respond. In the meantime it's a problem. Do you believe that the problem should be solved by employees demanding a new covenant, employees demanding more strict employment contracts? Where will this solution sit? It depends how you're doing the financing, but very often in other settings it's done by the bondholders.

The bondholders want a covenant that you can't just drain all the resources out of the firm. The more the firm is based on human capital, the easier it becomes to do that, because human capital leaving is not monitorable in the same way that a big cash dividend is monitorable. But we'll figure out ways of doing it. Maybe it will require arbitration, but this absolutely needs addressing. Otherwise, you just keep on starting up companies, ship the talent out somewhere else,

and, in essence, sell it twice. Bunch of different people are screwed over. For the next person who tries it with no intent of doing that, the cost of capital is too high. And that's the longer run problem. But again, markets are very good at solving problems like that with covenants. So this is, uh, this will be solved by the market. This is not an FTC issue.

I would not involve the FTC. I don't like them. I don't trust them. Their previous boss, their current boss, they're both bad news. Neither knows any economics My goodness, they're a nightmare. Why would you call them on the phone? They're gonna make it worse Well, thank you for the for the for the solid breakdown and being very clear about your opinion This is fantastic Tyler. Thank you so much for coming on the show Thank you for the update and your wisdom luck. Thank you for the update. A pleasure. And your wisdom. Good luck with the rest of the day.

We appreciate it. You as well. Have a great day. Cheers, Tyler. Bye. We'll talk to you soon. Bye. Always a great segment.

And we have our next guest already ready to join the show. Austin, welcome to the stream. Let's play that, I wanna play that intro song a little bit. I like that intro song. Oh, maybe he's already here. Maybe you just get the Ashenhall. Sorry, we got a soundboard. We got an issue with the soundboard,

but we're gonna make a sound for you. Yes. A handcrafted sound. Kick us off with the news and an introduction on yourself. Thanks for having me guys. Honored to be here. Everybody, I'm Austin, co-founder and CEO here at Unifi. Today we just announced a $40 million series

be led by battery. Wow. Led by who? Who? Doesn't matter. Couldn't hear. Doesn't matter, congratulations, awesome firms. Awesome firm leading, awesome firms along for the ride.

Awesome, a awesome firm leading, awesome firms along for the ride. Awesome. A bunch of questions, but give us a quick history on yourself. You said earlier, was it the proudest day of your father's life was when you signed an offer to work at Ramp? And then the second proudest is today? It was, yes. It's been a big couple years for me with me and my dad.

Took a lot of years going through college to get to that point, but quick background story. So originally joined Rant back in 2020 on the Growth Product team. Really attracted to just like the talent density that existed even back in that period of time. Spent a couple years there working on the Growth Product team with a bunch of incredible folks

I know you all know well, including Sam Buck, you know, folks like Pavel you had on the growth product team with a bunch of incredible folks. I know y'all know well, including Sam Buck, you know, folks like Pavel you had on the show, the Crosby guys, et cetera. So ton of great folks, spent a couple of years there and spent a lot of time thinking about distribution from an engineering led perspective. And so joined, saw everything that was happening with OpenAI in 2022 and it felt like the nexus of go-to-market

and AI was starting to happen. Didn't know that chat should be T and things like that were about to drop but ended up starting Unify beginning of 2023. Pretty quickly raised a seed round from a combination of OpenAI, Thrive, Emergence and we're off to the races. Fast forward two and a half years we're a 50 person team today, serving a bunch of incredible companies like Cursor, Perplexity, you name it. And so just grateful, grateful to be here. Okay, explain the product like I'm a new grad SDR. So if you're a new grad SDR,

the pitch of the product is, you used to have to push a million buttons just to get to the place where you could actually do something that was valuable to talk to a prospect. We take care of all that on your behalf. So example is you might show up in the morning, you're gonna make your list of the 25 people that you wanna reach out to based off of,

okay, this person started a new job. I reached out to John in the past, he's now at this new thing, he started a new job, or he got a new promotion. We'll make that list for you. We'll automate all that research. We'll also deploy agents to go get 50 other data points for you.

So you can start from the 90 yard line and then you can just be polishing the messaging and the actual work that we've done for you. But you don't have to start by just manually combing through LinkedIn or manually combing through a database like Crunchbase. So we'll do all that work for you. That makes sense.

What is the sentiment like among sales leaders all the way through kind of the entry level roles, SCRs, BDRs, et cetera, just around AI broadly? I think there's been a lot of dialogue recently around the core challenge with a lot of AI tooling right now is this amnesia. So the model is really smart, but it can't remember sort of lessons from at any point in history. You know, there's some memory, but not the sort of hard-won lessons that you get from going out

and doing 100 phone calls with customers, things like that. Yeah, that's a really great question. So the evolution of the sentiment has changed over the years. So 2023, we started the company. There was a lot of aversion to using AI to do the end-to-end job because it just wasn't there, wasn't remotely there. Agents could sort of, you could see them coming, but we weren't in a place where it felt like that value was tangible. And so it was really in early 24 where it started to feel like the world started to believe

that even as a seller, the best thing for me to do was to adopt AI to try to automate a bunch of what I'm doing. But to your point, exactly 24, it's been this version 1.0 of AI where products are done. They can do basic research tasks for you. They can do them over and over again, but they have no context that they've done that task four times in the past. One of the things that we're really excited about that we launched a couple months ago is something we call our

observation model, which is actually this underlying primitive that looks very different than anything else that's existed. Basically, it looks like you have a memory associated with every person you've ever talked to. And that memory is not a database. It's actually a flexible set of contexts, just a big text doc, basically, that is every interaction and every piece

of notable information between you and that prospect. And so as an example, let's say we're talking about perplexity. Perplexity has maybe reached out to, I don't know, Ford Automotive in the past. And they've got some record of all the sellers that they have and they've contacted them, they've gone back and forth, they maybe like, maybe exchange a few ads.

All this sort of data has usually existed in a pungent different silos, but we actually built this observation model to join all that together. So you actually have one clear set of contexts. And then when Unify wants to understand, Hey, what should I do next? It can ask that set of context. What do I know? What's the most relevant thing that I can surface right now? And let me go ahead and hit on that. And so we really see that as being the evolution of where these AI products are

going to go to just make them that. And so we really see that as being the evolution of where these AI products are gonna go to just make them that much smarter and more powerful. It feels like one of the really like just layup use cases for artificial intelligence in the sales context is just data hydration, cleaning up the CRM. But I'm interested to hear about how high the walled gardens are in a business context. We've heard stories about Glean getting pushback

from different big tech companies and it's one of those weird things where every company says, yeah, it's your data until I wanna give it to their competitor potentially that's overlapping. So what data sources are particularly AI friendly these days and what is the shape of the garden and the walls of that garden these days?

It really depends on, I think, the overall data strategy for the company and just what their strategy is built on. And so to give you one example, Salesforce, historically, their advantage is built on being a fairly open ecosystem. So Salesforce, the App Exchange launched, call it like 10, 20 years ago at this point,

it's been building motes around Salesforce as people have connected tens of applications into the product and that's sort of built the stickiness. You have 25 different products that all integrate through Salesforce that happens through this open ecosystem of connectivity. But my gut says that the platforms that are built much more on open-endedness, like something like a Salesforce

are going to continue to remain open as that's the core value prop of the product. And that's the reason why they haven't mowed itself. But I think products that have historically been a little bit more walled off until you know, Slack is an example of that, we'll probably continue to stay that way and trend even more in that direction. Generally speaking, people haven't been super privy to give out slack information, they wanted to keep that in, especially within an organization.

And so I imagine we're going to see those things clamp down even further in case of point is that is the glaning example you brought up. Do you have a thesis around sales copilot type products that you can imagine this is a sales call and you're, you know, running an LLM in real time to give you the next answer. I don't think you guys have one of those in your suite of products, but I'm curious how you think about that category. It's definitely super powerful.

I mean, you see what's happening with with Cluey right now, right, and what's going on. You're like, that's a great question. It's pretty wild. Let me just, real quick. It's wild though. And I think we're only at the beginning of that period of time. I think the way in which people absorb information is going to dramatically change over the course of the next couple of years as we get more and more used to these products.

Today the closest that we get to that in our product is that we've got a composer for emails and for anything you want to do in Unifi and next to that you've got all these AI nuggets and AI research tidbits that we've done for you alongside that. We're generally speaking, believers that the faster your product is, the more real time it is, the more addictive it is to users, the more helpful it is to users in that context,

especially in a work context. And so we're gonna keep pushing the product in that direction. Something like a clue is like the far-flung example of that. We're not quite there yet, but I imagine the world is gonna keep moving in that direction. That makes sense. I wanna talk about, I mean, your website's tagline

is scale your revenue team's creativity. And I'm wondering if there's any sort of like, just like really creative sales solutions. Like I was talking to Sam blonde a while back. He was working with Parker Conrad for a long time and said like one of the best campaigns he ever did as a sales guy. He's like a SDR for a long time was a head of sales was like sending bottles of champagne to people because like they just open it,

then they have a phone call, they have this nice thing. And so I- It becomes incredibly rude not to respond to the email. Exactly, and so I'm wondering about these like weird, squishy like the handwritten note, and in many ways I feel like these creative, these creative deal closers, like the unexpected text message from a friend who's already using the product

is the thing that gets you to actually go and say, yep, I'm ready to onboard fully. I get my company on this new product. But are there any world, I feel like a lot of the creativity in sales is specifically showing the client that I'm not using software for this. I handwritten that note. I sent you, I got your address,

I sent you a bottle of champagne. And so is the goal to more just like remove all the barriers to let the humans do the creative things? Or do you think that there's a world where we can use AI tools to speed up those creative, out of the box solutions that might be uniquely tailored to just this one company strategy. They're the only one that does this weird thing,

but it's working and they found this alpha and they stick with it for a long time. Yeah, big fan of Sam's and he's done a bunch of incredible outbound campaigns over the years. My thinking is that what will happen is what always always the thought behind all these things and the reason why it matters this all comes back to taste right I think people and more and more are talking about tastes in the

world of AI and it's all about knowing what's relevant at the time knowing what's gonna resonate with someone personally and being able to do something that feels really delightful. So it's an example like one thing we did as part of our fundraisers announcement today we put out about 25 cameos that we had custom built for everyone. We've got one for you guys on the way right now. So we'll have a tea later.

But like things like that that are based off of someone's personal experience and show you thought about it. Doesn't really matter if you use chat GBT in the brainstorming process, right? What matters is that you got the idea that originated from something special and then the actual end delivery is the same quality you put out as a human.

What the person feels. Exactly, exactly. But I think ultimately today AI doesn't feel and so it can't really use that judgment. It's the reason why in the world of content and in the world of the stuff that we do here, it's like you just can't AI that. It just feels bland and generic.

I think that's gonna continue to be true in a sales context. What you need is a human behind the scenes who's providing that little touch of what it means to be a person and what it means to be a person what it means To be a friend and so we'll continue to lean into experiences that make it easier to stay on top of those friendly experiences but But just get easier over time to actually execute It's great. I'm ready anything else. I

Got a bunch more questions, but we'll save it for another time. Thank you for joining Congratulations on the new raise get back to work. I'm sure you guys have a bunch of people to hire who? Play that capital. We'll talk to you later. Thanks for having us guys. Thanks for coming. I appreciate it Cheers Austin in other news Apple is reportedly planning to invest 500 million dollars in a Rare Earth Magnet startup. This is MP materials They're gonna build a new recycling facility in Mountain Pass, California. Currently they recycle rare earth,

they take recycled materials and they make rare earth magnets in Texas. There's a huge Wall Street Journal profile on MP Materials and now there's news that they're working with Apple. My takeaway is that this, it shows that Tim Cook is actually thinking about long-term supply chain strategy. And it's this funny thing. How much do you think MP materials

is up in the past five days? I have no idea. 85%. Let's go. Ring the gong, $500 million. Let's do it. Hit that gong. I'm going to warm up the gong properly.

Yes, yes, yes. We've gotten some notes that you must warm up a gong before you hit it. Also, hit the gold part, not the center. Really? Yes. That's what that's what somebody said in the comments. Is that better? It's about the same. I don't know. I'm not I don't know enough about gongs. I'm sure I'm going to be an expert in 20 years when we're still doing the show. But I thought this was interesting because, you know, Apple's a huge company. Tim Cook's a legendary operator. And there's just something about being a big company that even if you're seeing,

oh, the current thing on X today, everyone's talking about supply chain in China being a risk. It's going to take years to actually build up another supply chain. So this kind of tied to the re-industrialization story. There's, you can start a new company, you can actually build something, like before Apple can really turn the massive cruise ship that is the, or the battleship, or the aircraft carrier that the company is, but it seems like it's happening,

and this seemed like a huge white pill. So I was excited to talk about it. And we should dig into MP materials more deeply soon. They're up 22%, I guess just the day that this profile came out. And seems like a very, very exciting company. And honestly, when we were talking to the co-founder CoreWeave,

very exciting company and honestly, when we were talking to the co-founder CoreWeave, we all learned about chips and then ASML and then SK Hynex and memory and I feel like rare earth minerals and rare earth magnets are gonna be the next thing where everyone's learning about it at the same time and a lot of people already have and they've done pieces on it, but I want to learn more. I could see AP doing a rare earth Royal Oak.

That would be incredible. Yeah, like instead of the, what was it, meteorite dial? Yeah. The meteorite dial, you get the rare earth. The rare earth. Go through some timeline, I'll be right back. Well, we have our next guest. We'll welcome Chris into the studio.

Okay, yeah, yeah. I'll go through some stuff. I'll just welcome Chris in and get the intro from him. So welcome to the studio Chris. Good to see you. It's been far too long. What has it been? Over a week? Over a week. I think that sounds right. I'm excited to be here. I'm glad to have you. Kick us off with an intro and a little bit of an overview of the news today. Well look before I started, I should say that if at any point during this interview, windsurf gets acquired for a fourth time, cut it off and I will, there'll be no hard feelings.

Uh, quick intro on me though. I've been in the Valley for 15 years, working with tech companies the whole time and kind of every stage and, uh, uh, variation and just about any role that you could think of. So I, most of my career was as, as an investor. I worked at benchmark working with early stage companies, CO2 focused on some later stage companies. Uh, before then, I founded a healthcare company called Cureology. And before that,

I was an investment banker working with big tech companies and helping them, uh, taking them public and, and do M&A transactions and all that kind of stuff. Okay. We'll get into the news in a bit, maybe when Jordy gets back. But, um, the, the question I have is like as investor as a board member There is generally a you mentioned windsurf. There's generally a duty to be like founder friendly But what do you do when the founders and the employees are misaligned? Like are you as a board member?

Are you supposed to vote in favor of what's best for the whole group of founders plus employees as a class? Are you supposed to back the founder if they want to do something that's less employee friendly, vice versa? This feels like the modern debate that we're having in Silicon Valley is like the social contract is reevaluated. How have you processed the Windsurf news? How do you think this change is going forward?

What are the next questions that you think venture capitalists and founders need to be talking about to make sure that, you know, when an amazing deal happens, everyone's happy about it. Yeah. Well, I think our first goal is an investor. You know, we rarely have a lot of power. We have sort of in the best case influence, but I think your first duty is to try to help the founder understand that what's good for the employees and what's good for everybody is sort of in the best case influence. But I think your first duty is to try to help the founder understand that what's good for the employees and what's good for everybody, um, is sort of the right thing for everybody over the longterm and the ecosystem and

your reputation and all that stuff is really critical. And so I, uh, I, I was delighted to see that everybody got to a very good outcome on this one. And I think that's, uh, that's where it should have landed. It feels like a one plus one equals three kind of thing. Yeah. Yeah. It seems like, uh, I mean, when the cognition news broke, we had been talking about like, Oh, where could the remain co wind up? Maybe it lands at like a more legacy tech company, like the humane team wound up at HP and people were kind of memeing about like AI

printers and stuff. And that seemed like, you know, it probably would have been a fine outcome financially, but it would have been like, okay, a lot of those people kind of need to restart their careers and kind of get back into the high aggressive Silicon Valley, high growth startup world that they probably fell in love with, and that's why they wound up at Windsurf six months ago,

or 10 months ago, or 15 months ago. But with Cognition, it's just a complete continuation of that aggressive take over the world build something new mindset So yeah, I agree with you amazing outcome for everyone involved obviously a tumultuous weekend But we're glad that the plane landed. Let's get into some better news. Yes. We got to talk about the new vehicle Broke in Forbes this morning, but we're happy to have you on here today to talk about it Give us give us a story give us the number and I'm gonna stand up and get ready to do something back here.

The $175 million debut fund. Let's go, congratulations. You guys say is the gong individually mic'd? Because that sounds incredible. I don't know about mic'd, it's got its own camera. Yeah, yeah. But yeah, we're always working on the fidelity of the gong. Yes.

It's really important to the- Congratulations. $175 million? $175 million. Stage agnostic, sector agnostic is the idea. I'll make a very small number of investments, so sort of 8 to 10 core positions. A normal venture fund might have 30 or 40 positions or something like that. And the idea behind that was my favorite part of my career was when I was just making my

first few investments that were going to matter a lot for me. And because it felt like there was sort of a symmetry between what I cared about and what the founder cared about, like for the founder of this company is their whole life. It is everything they live and die with it. And I think one of the problems as you get more senior as an investor, you naturally have more companies that you've invested in every individual company is going to

matter a little bit less. And so with this vehicle vehicle the idea was create a vehicle where structurally everything will matter to me It's eight to ten core investments Every one of them is going to matter and I'm gonna work really hard on each of them stage agnostic sector agnostic Still I imagine not an RIA not playing in the public markets not Not putting more than 20% of the fund into secondaries. Is that roughly correct? It's crazy. I even have to ask that question, but yes, we are in crazy times. Is it even possible to start an RIA at this scale or is that something that only the mega funds are thinking about?

No, it's definitely possible. It just, it eats into some of your management fees and it requires some various compliance obligations that you have to get used to. You probably have a second phone and some things that are like you hire some compliance consultants and all that kind of stuff. I had looked at it because I do like buying secondary from time to time and just decided against doing it. There's also some additional rules around how you can market the fund and stuff like that. You have to be a little bit more careful when you're in RIA. And so I decided to go the ERA route.

It's a flexible vehicle. So I'll do things just kind of of any stage. I will often not be leading rounds. I'm willing to lead rounds. The idea was because I'll be so selective on the company quality, I think I have to be flexible about everything else. And so I'll try to just show up in a way that is useful and easy to work with.

How is the concentrated strategy resonating to founders so far? I imagine it's it's a very real differentiator of just saying hey you can be one of 40 bets or you can be one of 10 and I'm gonna do everything in my power to help you win. You can see how that would, but what's it been like on the ground? I think so far it's working well. I have founders who text me 10 or 20 times a day. I also have founders who want to be left alone for the most part, and I'm happy to do that also.

But I think so far it resonates. I tell every founder when I make an investment, I just want to be along for the ride. And things will be good, things will be bad. A lot of the time they'll be difficult. Building companies is mostly pain, and things will be good, things will be bad. A lot of the time they'll be difficult. Building companies is mostly pain and I will just try to be someone who eases that along the way and helps you navigate the difficult moments

and all that kind of stuff. Is there an alternate world where you launched this fund prior to Curology and I think it's sort of funny because if you were in that situation, you would have said, I had a non-traditional background for venture capital and it's HBS and GoTo and Benchmark and sort of a traditional background, but you went and did the hard thing and built a big company. But did you have it in mind that I'm going to go be a founder,

do this, and then come back around to venture? Or was it all just kind of an accident? I think I was always built to be an investor. I enjoy it. And there's a lot of features of investing that are well-suited to me. But I just think it's kind of a rite of passage. If you haven't operated inside of a company,

if you don't know what it's like when things are difficult and bad, I think it's kind of difficult to give good advice to a founder. And so I think it was an important thing for me to develop some empathy. Like I try to understand that this is one of the hardest and loneliest jobs in the world. You'll have weeks where everything is going wrong. And there's sort of, you know, playbooks for navigating each of these things that go wrong. But I think you have to have been through them before to understand how to do it and who to call and what the foot faults are and that kind of stuff.

And that's sort of how I thought about it. What was the fundraise process like? 175 million for first fund. It's a big number, but I heard from a little birdie that you got some pretty insane LPs in this one, so it sounds like you were doing something right. I think that's that. I will thank you for that. And I think it's right. Well, thank you for that. And I think it's right.

It went relatively quickly. I was real lucky because I had a few LPs who were just fast and early believers, and everything else sort of ended up forming around that. And so I ended up sort of many times oversubscribed and ended up with a group that I'm very, very happy about. I think most of them I'm not allowed to say their name, but the ones that I can say are Adam Street Common Fund, Northwestern University,

Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and a bunch of causes that I'm very excited to be working for here. That's really cool. It's exciting. What do you think, how do you think about investment kind of time horizon if you have a such a concentrated fund, very possible that you'll meet five companies in the next six months that you'll invest in, but it feels maybe unlikely. Maybe it's more like one a quarter, but it's hard to plan these things.

Yeah, when I was raising, everybody says they're gonna deploy the fund in three years, and then they end up going a lot faster than that. And so maybe this ends up being two years or something like that, but I just don't have that many amazing ideas every year. And so part of the reason for the way the fund is structured is it's kind of how I like to work that I develop a lot of conviction around something over a period of time. But then I like to have a bet that matters. I think the single most painful thing for me is if I find a company and I sort of am able to persuade

the founder, I'm able to win the right to invest and it ends up working and it still doesn't matter in a material way for my limited partners. That's something that I think is something I don't want to deal with. And so that's the reason for the sort of bigger bets, the concentrated strategy. And that requires, I think, going a little bit slower also because there just aren't that many companies that will meet the bar. That makes sense. I have a question about venture markets generally, loosely in the context of Windsurf, but I'm wondering if it feels like right now the labs are on a buying spree,

not just OpenAI and Anthropic, but DeepMind, and you could see acquisitions happening all over the place and it one framework to think about it is that they're all just buying call options anyone who's got a unique technical direction or unique technical talent the labs are just happy to pay any price because maybe it's 1% of infinity if you solve super intelligence, or maybe it's, hey, we already have, you know, Mark Zuckerberg has a massive business in, you know, delivering ads. If you make that 1% better, you've added $10 billion to the market cap, so what's a couple

billion in acquisitions going out the door? Totally makes economic sense. But my question is, does this change venture capital underwriting at any particular stage like It feels like you really want to be backing. I Guess teams that could be You know aqua higher talent because it gives you this like liquidity option But then maybe the real alpha is finding the at the same time very maybe the real alpha is finding the at the same time, very founded to our emissions.

If you look at the capital deployed into windsurf, obviously the majority of the capital didn't get a tremendous return despite it being a big headline number. Is that just because a lot of the seed and they did? I'm just saying like the majority of the capital came later. And then I think it was probably at somewhere around a billion. OK, yeah, I don't know. But yeah, I mean, I think on the underwriting question, I think in the history of our industry,

there was always like a hard and fast rule that you always backed one company in a space. There was always going to be one winner. And then I think as the markets have gotten progressively bigger and you know, there's, there's like one winner in search for a long time and one winner in operating systems. As the markets got bigger and bigger, you started to have like two player markets, like you have iOS and you have the. As the markets got bigger and bigger, you started to have two player markets. You have iOS and you have Android, and then they got bigger, and you have three player markets, and you have the cloud, AWS and GCP and Azure. I think AI is going to be the

biggest market of all of these. I think one of the ways that it changes underwriting is that there's probably going to be more winners in each space than we expect. I think you of the ways that it changes underwriting is that there's probably gonna be more winners in each space than we expect. And I think you see this a little bit with Cursor and with Windsurf and you see some like really high quality companies. I also think it changes underwriting because it feels like M&A is coming back a little bit. And I think there's sort of a cause for optimism around that.

That's great. Anything else, Cory? That makes sense. No, join any boards recently. I don't know if you can talk about that kind of thing. Yeah, yeah, I joined the board of Perplexity recently. Congratulations. There we go. I wanted to give you an off ramp there in case

you weren't ready to talk about it. The product I use 20 times a day and a half since it came out for investment research and everything else, and one of the best executing teams I've ever been around. So I'm very excited to be a part of the effort. Fantastic. We love Arvind. Yeah, yeah, we love Arvind. Yeah, yeah, I find myself using it every time we record.

You guys gotta try the browser if you haven't. We demoed it live on the stream. Tyler, our intern, used the Perplexity Comet browser. Had some good feedback for it, it was good. Amazing. Awesome, well, congratulations, I would say to the full partnership, but you are the full partnership is that correct?

Are you gonna be adding anybody to the team just me and the head of operations very cool amazing I love that on yourself love it awesome Chris well congratulations. Thanks for coming on. I'm sure we'll have Soon and we have our next guest already here in the waiting room Dick Lucas He had a video going viral today there. Wow look at that background element. How you doing? I'm good. How are you guys doing looking sharp in the suit? You look like you ever since the viral video. I I know I know actually I My shirts are my shirts are dirty.

This one's not. So this is the same outfit, same pin as well. So congrats on the success of the show. It's been awesome to watch you guys cook. So thank you for fitting me in today. I appreciate it. Yeah, thanks so much for hopping on. I saw your name for the first time this morning

when you started going viral. Great silhouette on the video. You look like you're in the palisades somewhere. Where, just give us a full history on yourself and maybe what inspired you to get involved in politics or mud wrestling as we call it. Awesome, well I think it really starts in, it starts in high school when I got my first computer

in the dig.com days. That's when I got really into technology and got really into software and saw this whole boom taking off and was like, this stuff's really cool. I didn't think computer science, I thought that was only for smart people, so I didn't declare my major for CS until sophomore year of college.

Like it was a history of mine, I was like, you know what, I'm just gonna do the CS thing. It kicked my ass, but I got through it. You can get a bachelor of arts in computer science if you can believe that, and that's what I got through it. You can get a bachelor of arts in computer science if you can believe that. And that's what I got. So I had a long belief in technology. And then from there, started doing software stuff. I was an Android developer for several years.

So I was in the code mines, started an agency with a homie, with Sawyer. And now we're cooking on that. And what inspired this really is, I was creating voter guides. I was like, okay, California's obviously run horribly. Maybe if I just read all what the candidates are saying and go deep on like, who's running for water board?

Who's running for this? Who's running for that? And actually no one even knows what a state assembly person is. I'm running for state assembly. Most people don't even know what that means. So I'm like, okay, if I go and like look at these candidates, there's gotta be people that are out there that are good.

And I'm going through these campaign websites, and they barely even say what they believe. There's no competition, there's not even debates at these local levels. And I'm just like, there is a huge opportunity here for someone that is willing to just get themselves in the game, put a couple videos out there, say some common sense stuff stuff and shake things up.

So that was really the inspiration. So tell us what running for state assembly means. What is the role that you would like? What does that look like? And then what's the process to get there? Okay, so the primary is in June. It's in June of 26, excuse me, June of this year. Excuse me, next year.

June of 26. So there's 80 assembly members in California. Each state has something different, but it's basically like a mini Senate and a mini House of Representatives, just like the federal government. So you have 80 assembly people and you have 40 state senators.

And unlike, in California, there's 80 districts districts I'm in the 51st district Santa Monica West Hollywood Westwood other parts of Hollywood Beverly Hills and each district has assemblymen and then each and there's also state senators as well so same thing the federal government there's stuff that comes out of the Senate state senator stuff that comes out of the state assembly and that's how legislation stuff that comes out of the state assembly, and that's how legislation gets passed. That's how the machine works. And right now what we've seen is it's basically one party state. Now I'm not, I think the left has good ideas, I think the right has good ideas, I think that there's opportunities on both sides. The problem is when you lack competition in a system, which is what we

have in California, it becomes sick, it becomes ill. I mean we see this in every single institution or system since the dawn of time. You need to compete, there needs to be pressure on the system or it collapses from within. And that's what we're seeing in California. We're starting to see a small shift, I'd say, but you know what really broke the camel's back for me

was fires happened and people wouldn't even hear about the wildfires in the palisades that eat and fire out where I grew up. People wouldn't even hear, they wouldn't even hear about the wildfires in the Palisades, the Eaton fire out where I grew up. People wouldn't even hear, they wouldn't even wanna listen if you said, yo, maybe we could have done some things better. Like the Santa Yanez reservoir that went dry in the Palisades was down for eight months. I talked to a state senator, I went to a meetup with him,

I was like, bro, what happened there? He said, well, it's unclear how much that would have actually helped. It's like, dude, if it helped 5%, if it helped 10%, it helped 50%, like, you couldn't even really have a discussion about it. And I said, okay, this is, the system itself is completely sick.

We had a whole bunch of stuff burned down. Our mayor in Los Angeles was gone on a trip. We had fire hydrants go dry. And people, even in my network, people didn't even wanna talk about it. So I guess the only way to talk about it, you gotta run. Yeah. No, I love it, taking action.

We covered the fires. John and I are both here in LA. Uniquely, John lives in Pasadena. I live in Malibu. We both had to get out of town for a while. I missed a show John was covering one day. It was really the only show I've met miss this year, but yeah, but the the my reaction to the fire is it seemed like there was a lot of excitement around clearing PCH because that was the thing that was

most obviously a Reminder of the the competency of the government and so but that's only of the competency of the government. And so, but that's only very small percentage of what the overall response should look like. I'm curious, do you know who your real competition is? Yes, I do. Yeah, a Democrat, he's been in the machine for several years and that's the other thing.

Looking at these people, what they've done, a lot of these people, with a while have this audience, if you are considering running, you should run for office. You should look at who your local person is and you should run because, not you two, all your listeners, but you two as well, because you look at their website, you look at their CV, you look at what they've done.

A lot of these guys are community organizers. I still don't know what that means. And also people, they're lawyers, or they're people that haven't built anything or created any jobs. So it's like, all my smartest friends, no one even thinks, and I'm sure it's the same with you guys, no one even thinks about going into politics.

So it's like, if all the people that are smart or driven in your network aren't going into politics, who is going into politics? Well, we see players, basically. Yeah, now that makes sense. What's at the top of the stack in terms of low-hanging fruit you get in? What do you want to push on? What do you want to change?

What are the most exciting or like tractable problems that you think you could I think the biggest thing that is resonating right now Is the cost of housing? You know, there's the phrase that the economy is stupid and obviously we need to work on that too But housing in California is 100% the national average same Same with our gas prices, our gas utility prices. Gasoline is the highest in the country, as you know. I think housing. Which is not partially due to the market, but also due to just massive taxes

that the government has voted to apply to every gallon. Oh, for gasoline, yeah. So you drive across the border it's not like a supply demand thing as much as it is. Or top eight oil producing state it had the highest and the highest gas price in the country doesn't make any sense. There's obviously there's also some good things that we want clean gas so California puts a lot of restrictions on refiner refiners. They want to pay for the top quality clean gas so we don't have refiners, they want to pay for the top quality clean gas so we don't have smoky valleys and it doesn't look horrible like it did in the 60s.

So I get all that, but it's completely out of whack. So the other thing, housing, we need to make it easier to build. They did just pass, the Dems did just pass something, and I tried to understand it. You can go read these bills and they talked about it as a big win but it's it's difficult to even understand what's going on like in terms of what they got done you know they're making it easier to build now recently as of like July 3rd near transit areas and you go read the bill and it's like 30 pages of is like is this making it easier why isn't it just just say, like, you can build here. If you own the land, you can build here.

Like this is, it's completely out of whack. So we have a supply problem here. We need to just make it a whole lot easier to build. And, you know, there's people talking about freezing the rents. We can do better than, the funny thing is, is the people that lie to you will say, oh, we're gonna freeze the rents for everyone.

That's not even that good. We can do better than freeze the rents. We can actually lower if you add supply. And we've seen this in Austin. We've seen this in other cities. In my view is there's 50 different experiments going on everywhere in our country. Every state, you just look at what works.

Where price is coming down, where our business is going, and you just fall, yeah. So it's like we have the tools right here. I'm not the smartest guy in the world. I know that I have a lot of respect for people in technology because I think they're epic. I think they're smart. I think they raise the standard of living for everyone and I'm not gonna you know invent the next nuclear reactor or whatever

So I'm looking at this. I'm like, this is an opportunity that I can actually, you know, I'm smart enough And it's like we have 50 experiments. Let's follow what works. Let's just do it How can people support you? How do people like who who are your constituents who will actually be voting for you? So it doesn't sound like it's just everyone. Do you cover are you gonna be covering the gondo or is that out of range? No, it's out of reach. It's out of reach. Unfortunately, I'm a Represent those guys but dick Lucas calm my biggest following is on X. Damn. You got me sweating boys. I'm fired up Yeah, I'm notcom's stoked on that.

Yeah, I'm not taking any money right now. We're just gonna see what noise we can make. The people that will vote for me are the people, like I said, in my district. And I think very few of those people have seen this viral video, so I wanna do two things. I wanna get the word out with you guys and with technology people and the people in my network. And the second thing is ground game.

I gotta knock on doors. I gotta talk to people. Now that I have a website, my video up, I'm going to just go door to door and be like, yo, let's talk. I actually want to hear what people, obviously, what's their biggest concern. When you say knock on doors, do you mean literally knock on doors? Yes. Yes. Door knocking is very effective in these local races. You just have to do it. Yeah. How many doors? You have to quantify how many doors it is? Break it down, I guess.

But you have a long time. Well, I think there's a hundred, there's a thousand, I think my district's 490,000 people, something like that, or eligible voters, something like that, so it's pretty big. So a couple hundred thousand, you do, you know, yeah, I mean, you got what, 300 a day, okay, you can get through a bunch of those.

I mean, it's huge. And I'm gonna be working while I'm doing this, so it's like, I'm gonna do, and I have a kid coming in November So I'm like, let's just see what the kind of noise we can make And yeah, I'm excited to start knocking on doors and let's just see what we can do Technology is the only way you get more for less. There is nothing else. Yeah, you can make processes better But fundamentally that's the only thing that you would get more for less

It's the only thing that raises the standard of living for everyone. So I don't know why people have such an aversion to it I'm just trying to be like, this isn't left to right. Let's just let's implement things that make our life better and make everyone more rich and prosperous. I love it. I love it. Yeah. California, despite, you know, shooting ourselves in the foot over and over and over for decades, it's still amazing place to live. So let's just, you know, stop shooting ourselves in the foot.

100%. I think we can have a bigger economy than China. I mean straight up. Let's go second. Everyone, Newsom, fourth. We're top four, top five. And yeah, we are. Not because of you. I think we can, let's just do this. It's possible. Let's do it. Have you met Gavin Newsom? You've got to get on the podcast. No, I have not. I have not. You've got to reach out to him and get on his podcast because he's had all sorts of people So I know I don't think I'm big time enough for him yet, but I think I've done this

I'll send you I'll send him this link and I'll say okay. I know it I know what Jordy and John are doing okay. Yeah, come on. It's time. Well. Thank you for doing this It is truly a sacrifice. It is it is gonna be an absolute slog, but it's worth doing and It is going to be an absolute slog, but it's worth doing. And somebody's got to step up and do it. And it can start in your district. And we'll have to have you back on as the campaign gets closer. Appreciate it. Appreciate it.

Thank you. Thank you gentlemen so much for having me on. Really, really do appreciate it. Thank you so much. Good talking to you. Good luck. Bye. What a sign of respect. Joining with a suit with the flag.

Totally. He checked both boxes. A lot of people bring the suit, they don't bring the flag. Yeah. And he should get a California flag up there too. That'd be great. Yeah, the bear. We love the California flag. What else we got?

We got some timeline. So Michael Truel, the founder of Cursor, released a very cinematic, kind of like a podcast conversation with Patrick Collison, the founder of Stripe, and it's very cool for a few reasons, but it has the aesthetics of the Johnny Ives, Sam Altman video. So you just immediately assumed. Immediately, I was like, oh, there's a deal

they're acquiring, cursor, and I don't, that's not the news, I don't even think there's a rumor, but there's something about when you film two CEOs walking into a coffee shop with cinema cameras I just permanently think Acquisition now thanks to Sam Altman, but I didn't get a chance to listen to this whole thing I'm definitely going to it's gonna be it's like a full hour or 45 minutes or something Seems very cool. I love these kind of conversations. And I think this is like an interesting, untapped media product where it's not

cursor starting a podcast, it's just a one-off, really cool thing between two CEOs and they're- Yeah, they're not making a commitment of putting out a video like this once a week. No, it's just like- Or quite a couple times a month. Yeah, they're just like both technical CEOs. And so you look at the list of topics,

it's like writing your first startup in Smalltalk, Lisp, Chatbots, Red Victor, and Dynamic Land, Coinbase's, Accodebase's Big Bang Moment, and MongoDB, rewriting Stripe. How do you, Patrick Hollison, use AI? Changes to GDP slash total factor Productivity unexpected beneficiaries. Yeah, so they're just having like the conversation that they probably have when they just hang out and get dinner together

but they're just recording it with cinema cameras and Great audio in a coffee shop and then just putting it on the internet. I think this is a very interesting new New form of like going direct and then just putting it on the internet. I think this is a very interesting new form of going direct. It really helps me understand who Patrick is and who Michael is. And it's in this, they're both insiders, they can just have the conversation they wanna have.

I feel like this is great for both of them for recruiting. I don't know, I was just like, I haven't watched the full thing, but it just felt like a cool new modality of content in the startup world. So aside from the confusion about potential acquisition announcement, it seemed really, really cool. And I was excited to see it go out.

So go give it a watch if you're looking to spend 45 minutes hanging out with two absolute, to spend 45 minutes hanging out with two absolute amazing CEOs talking about AI and coding. In other news, Andrews Horowitz managing partner Scott Kapoor has been traded to the US Office of Personal Management. Potentially poached. Potentially poached, no. Of course not. This is obviously.

I'm sure had been in the works for a while Things announced I think he passed confirmation Again Going to the government is not Very sexy. Yes, not high status. Yep, but like dick just said it's important and the war up and make sacrifices to serve their city, county, state, country, et cetera. Yeah, we applaud him.

The AI war has opened a new front on Wall Street. We've talked to a number of founders that are building AI tools for Wall Street. And today, AI giant Anthropic announced the launch of Claude for financial services. Finance is a natural fit for AI, given the reams of structured data, says Nick. The industry processes, the big platforms are focusing

more and more on fintech products. Anthropic already signed Bridgewater, an S&P global that's here for Anthropic. And we saw earlier that Devin got hired at Goldman Sachs. You'll love to see that. And Citi, was it Citi? Both. And Goldman?

Both, and yes. So Kaplan, the president of Cognition, I believe that's his title, he said like, this was the news that we were hoping to launch on Monday. We had this all queued up that we did this big deal with Citi. We're very excited about this, but no one saw it because we were acquiring you know, acquiring the current thing and that became the story.

But that was very exciting. So all the big AI companies are figuring out how they can plug in to the big Wall Street companies. And there's some more. There's going to be some big launches and announcements this week from some of these labs and we'll be covering them as soon as they're ready to share more. TBPN was in the ringer this morning.

Talking about the AI trade wars and tying them into sports, which we know nothing about, but it was cool to see Katie break that down. And then in other news Shane Copeland over at Polymarket says eight months ago on election night we were on top of the world after Polymarket called the election. Eight days later the FBI broke down my door at 6 a.m. and took all of my computers and phones looking for anything that could imply foul play. While traumatic it etched the story of Polymarket's accuracy and the ensuing resistance into the

history of American politics. And today, I'm happy to announce that this chapter of the story is over. After cooperating and engaging, we've been cleared of any wrongdoing. Justice prevailed. God bless America. And of course, Polymarket probe ended by Department of Justice and win for crypto bets under Trump. So, very cool for Shane. I think we were live recording when the news broke that he had been rated,

but we were not live yet. Like we weren't actually live. So we were recording. We got off the show and we looked and we were like, wow, it's insane. Well, I have one last post. Do you have anything else you want to go through, Jordy? Or can I close it out? A councilman has been charged with petty theft after allegedly removing a Palantir Advertisement from the baggage claim area at Freedman Memorial Airport Trip Hutchinson pleaded not guilty if convicted he will face up to one year in County Jail and a thousand dollar fine And so did you take this because he wanted it for his garage game warring

It's a game worn out-of-home ad and he must Be an out-of-home ad fan maxi. It must be a huge Palantir fan and I think it's a I think it's probably a just a honest mistake But I think all these great out-of-home ads they should find a resting place with they should be auctioned off and you should be Able to get we should be on our wall in them on our walls So if you run a great out-of-home ad put it up in the airport, you're taking it down send it to us. We'll throw it up here in the Ultra Dome. In the Ultra Dome and we will see you tomorrow in the Ultra Dome. I cannot wait. At 11 a.m. Pacific sharp. Thank you for being here. Leave us five stars on Apple podcasts and Spotify and thank you for watching today.

We love you. Talk to you soon. Bye.