TBPN Live - X Article Apocalypse, Hollywood's AI Takes | Jordan Schneider, Eliot Pence, Fil Aronshtein & Matt Grimm

Episode Date: January 19, 2026

Sign up for TBPN’s daily newsletter at TBPN.com(01:11) - X Article Apocalypse (44:42) - Hollywood's AI Takes (01:01:44) - Elon vs. OpenAI Updates (01:05:33) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (01:17:54) - Is the American Dream Obsolete? (01:25:25) - Jordan Schneider is the creator of the ChinaTalk podcast and newsletter, focusing on U.S.-China relations and technology. In the conversation, he discusses his disappointment over the Buffalo Bills' firing of head coach Sean McDermott, analyzes the political strategy of Ro Khanna in positioning himself against Silicon Valley, and critiques the media's role in political discourse, emphasizing the importance of asking challenging questions to guests. (01:59:18) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (02:16:21) - Eliot Pence, founder and CEO of Dominion Dynamics, discusses the company's mission to enhance Arctic surveillance by developing distributed mesh networks that integrate commercial off-the-shelf sensors across land, sea, air, and space domains. He highlights the strategic importance of the Arctic, noting Canada's underinvestment in the region and the need for improved situational awareness to secure it. Pence explains that Dominion Dynamics' technology enables Canadian Rangers to capture and transmit data from remote areas lacking communication infrastructure, thereby strengthening Canada's defense capabilities in the Arctic. (02:29:15) - Fil Aronshtein is a technologist and entrepreneur focused on applied AI and software infrastructure. He’s known for building products at the intersection of data, automation, and developer tooling, with an emphasis on shipping fast and scaling systems in production. Matt Grimm is a technology investor and operator with a background in software, startups, and venture capital. He focuses on early-stage companies, platform shifts, and the business mechanics behind emerging technologies. TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://Ramp.comAppLovin - https://axon.aiCognition - https://cognition.aiConsole - https://console.comCrowdStrike - https://crowdstrike.comElevenLabs - https://elevenlabs.ioFigma - https://figma.comFin - https://fin.aiGemini - https://gemini.google.comGraphite - https://graphite.comGusto - https://gusto.com/tbpnLabelbox - https://labelbox.comLambda - https://lambda.aiLinear - https://linear.appMongoDB - https://mongodb.comNYSE - https://nyse.comPhantom - https://phantom.com/cashPlaid - https://plaid.comPublic - https://public.comRailway - https://railway.comRestream - https://restream.ioShopify - https://shopify.comTurbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.comVanta - https://vanta.comVibe - https://vibe.coSentry - https://sentry.ioCisco - https://cisco.comOkta - https://www.okta.comFollow 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 TVPA! Today is Monday, January, 19, 2026. We are alive from the TVP and Ultradome, the Temple of Technology. The Fortress of Finance. The capital of capital. Ramp, time is money. Save both. He's used corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more, all in one place.

Go to ramp.com. We have a great show for you today, folks. We're talking about the article apocalypse that's happening on X. Will it stop up the time? line, the million dollar slop fight, will it slop up the timeline? Will the algorithm handle the flood of, of AI generated content that will be sloped up in the timeline? We will see, we will dig into it, we will discuss it. We'll also try and understand what is going on with Nikita Beard strategy, what's the strategy at X?

Will this growth hack work, this competition? Of course, this all started with a Nikita Beater post. Hold up. We got Main Street Summit in the X chat. Hey. What's up, Main Street, Summit. Shout out to Brent and the whole team. Love you guys.

Cheers. Cheers. So this all started with Nikita Beer on X. He said, ladies and gentlemen, we are giving $1 million to the top article posted on X. You have two weeks. It's time to write. And very, very different structure. They thought there's so much AI-generated essays on X.

Let's do. Why not make AI-generated essays on X? generated essays lottery tickets. Lottery tickets. Let's turn them into lottery tickets. I like it. I mean, they're definitely paying out more than a million dollars in creator payments across all the little $100,000, $1,000 checks that go out to folks. You have to imagine. But running a sweepstakes, I mean, that's time honored. What's not to like about a sweepstakes? It's great. I think it's a lot of fun. Obviously, people are worried

that this will create some, you know, perverse incentive. There was already a perverse incentive for slop on the timeline because if you engagement farmed, you could potentially get a big creator payout. We've seen some people that get, you know, $20,000 randomly sent to them just because they went mega viral. We've seen a bunch of people that have just built up accounts where they're getting a couple thousand dollars every month. There's always been an incentive, and that incentive exists on YouTube where you can get creator payouts. You can, there are plenty of platforms where you can go and get attention and convert that into ad dollars or revs share. I mean, back in the day, there was a huge incentive to, like, do listicles and clickbait

to get visitors to your website that you would put Google ads on. Some of it, you know, made a decent amount of money. Some of it didn't stick around. Most of the bad stuff eventually went away. Eventually people stopped showing up. Eventually, the audience quality got so bad that all the advertisers said, why am I paying to show up on this listicle of, like, the cutest dogs in America or something? I don't know.

Maybe that one actually rips. Who knows? But so Nikita's kind of taking two sides to this. He says, it's time to write, but also he tells everyone else, please bear with article Armageddon. My question was, what's the strategy here? And what will the outcome be? So before we dive into it, let me tell you about Vanta.

Automate compliance and security. Vanta is the AI trust management platform, the leading AI trust management platform. So it's sort of crazy to me how long Twitter went with 140 characters. Yeah. Do you realize Twitter launched in 2006? They held the line on just 140 characters for over a decade. It wasn't until 2017 that they doubled it to 280, which now feels still a little tight to get a tweet in under 280, but 140 was truly a constraint.

You needed to be extremely terse and extremely concise. And even that was a relic from the SMS era. Like the default text message that you could send was 140 characters. And so Twitter was very much built on, hey, if you verify your phone number, you can just send a text in. And it will post it on your Twitter account. And so a lot of people in the early days were using it that way, although obviously people were also using it on web. And, you know, it's always been an important watering hole for tech power players. the tech elite have always liked hanging out on Twitter.

But it's never captured the value that it created. It was very, very hard because people are not in the, they're not in the same frame of mind as when they're scrolling Instagram, scrolling Instagram reels. You're basically shopping when you're on a meta platform. And then you see an ad for a product. To be clear, meta captures a lot more value, but certainly not all the value it creates, right?

That's the point of a platform. Yeah, exactly. You create more value than you capture. But in the case of Axe, it's like, you know. They were capturing a very small. Very, very, very tiny percentage. And there were lots of stories about people building businesses that basically exported audiences from Twitter or they went viral there. Ben Thompson talks about LinkedIn, actually being a big growth, early growth vector for him.

Because links did very well. They would convert to his newsletter, Surtecary.com. But people have done this all over the place where they've been consistently viral with threads, build up an audience, and then they take it somewhere else to monetize it, either with subscription. or ads, but they don't really do that commercial activity on the platform. And so there's always been a question of like, could X or Twitter capture more value? And a lot of that big turning point happened when Elon made the acquisition. So the Elon taking over felt like, okay, it's an entirely new day. Everything's moving way faster. Now, some of those projects had actually

been in the works for months or years before. I think, Community Notes was the big one, where the Twitter team had been building that infrastructure for a while, but they had five thousand people working on it for over five years. Probably, something like that. But so Elon, it's not like he kicked off a lot of the, that many of these projects, but he definitely like green lit them, shut things down, just sped things up. Yeah, move more. It's a speed thing. Exactly. Let me tell you about Octa.

Octa helps you assign every AI agent a trusted identity so you get the power. of AI without the risk. Secure every agent, secure any agent, secure our wide-angle camera, because the Ultradel is secured by ACTA. So, 2023 was a big year for expanding character limits. They'd also previously acquired this Dutch startup review, which was a direct competitor substack, but that product was shut down in less than two years, like January to January, they only made it two years, never really got it off the ground. And I think it was because it was sort of counter positioned with Twitter.

It was kind of like always, oh, well, if we get people on the review platform, they'll leave or they'll take their audience elsewhere. It ever really felt. Yeah, and I don't know that a lot of people had some incredible faith that, hey, I want to build my business on, like a Twitter. I mean, even pre-Elon, there had been companies, startups that had built on the Twitter API, which had gone through a number of version changes. Elon made some more extreme changes to that. But there were plenty of times when people would build businesses like too closely to any platform, really, and then they get steamrolled, whether you're, you know, Zinga building on, building Farmville on Facebook, and then they change the algorithm or they change the integration, and all of a sudden your growth engine's just gone. This happened with T-spring. They were selling custom T-shirts, so they would go and figure out a specific profile, like people who run podcasts with the last name, Hayes, and then they would like print a custom, they would generate an image of a shirt.

And it'd be like, yes, my name is, my last name is Hayes. Yes, I'm a podcaster. And I'd be like, I got to have it. I got to have it. It was like, who is buying this cringy, cringy nonsense? But it really sold a ton of shirts and T Spring was on like an absolute, like, meteoric rise. And then they changed the algorithm and they stopped a lot of those advertisers because they felt creepy because it was like, wait a minute, like, why am I seeing an ad with my last name and my job title in the image? Like, it's too much. And so Facebook put a, on that and and the rest is history. But, you know, they've been working on making X a more literate, long-form platform for a while, 20-23. We need to teach our users the English language. We need them to read more than, you know, 180 characters. So they've obviously done a ton in video. They've never really leaned into a video library like YouTube. Like I used to cross-post my YouTube videos on X. Sometimes there were length limits for a while. Then they got rid of those. so I could just actually copy a 25-minute YouTube video, put it on adics. And it was cool.

People wouldn't watch nearly as much as they did on YouTube. And there was no catalog value. That was like the really weird thing. Was that on YouTube, like my old videos that I haven't uploaded in over a year, and my old videos are still probably getting like, I don't know, half a million views a month just because people are every day, they search, like, what's the history of Anderol? Or what's the history of Ramp?

Or what's the history of Siegeen Ping? And they're going to land on. So it just continuously gets served. Exactly. And then once someone watches one of my videos, they watch five more. Well, and part of that, if you want to be a serious video platform, you need to be, like, have, you know, actually incentivizing people to watch on TV. Like so much of YouTube watch hours happen on TV.

Yeah, yeah. And X, I think, has a streaming TV app. Yeah. But it's certainly not, doesn't get a lot of love. Yeah. I actually made a whole documentary about El Segundo, went around with Augustus and toured everything. And it just didn't really work for my YouTube channel. so I only put it on X.

It got a ton of views. And actually the response was probably better than anything that I would do on YouTube because it was very tech insider. A lot of VCs were getting up to speed on what was going on in El Segundo. We're having some of the El Segundo folks on the show later today.

He's not truly El Segundo, but Phil is like spiritually Gundo. You know that. And And Anderl, in many ways, is spiritually gung-o. Let's take you through the linear lineup, who we have on the show today. We got Jordan Schneider from China Talk coming on. at 1230. Then Dan from T1 Energy, Elliot from Dominion Dynamics. We're in hard tech land kind of all day.

I'm very excited for this. And then we have Mac Grim, the co-founder of Anderl and Phil from Dirac coming in person at 1.30 together to break it all down for us on what's going on in building hardware, building defense technology. Remember, T1 Energy is a company that we talked about in Q4 of last year. It was a unique situation, I believe. It was a Chinese company. solar manufacturing plant that was forced to sell. And now it has a cool brand and new management. And the stock is absolutely ripping. I love that.

It is up 433% in the last six months. Just find some random company. And then all of a sudden we're talking to the CEO. Anyway, of course, if you've forgotten linear, it's the system for modern software development. 70% of enterprise workspaces on linear are using agents, should be too. So continuing with the long post journey that X has been on, 2020 was a massive year. February took it from 280 characters to 4,000 characters. That's

more than I need for most of my posts. I don't think I've ever posted anything longer than that. April expanded it to 10,000 characters and finally in June they maxed it out at 25,000 characters. that's longer than most blog posts. That's around 4,000 words, maybe a little bit more. And you can still thread these posts together. So I was always wondering, like, why does articles exist if long posts are so long that you can put 4,000 words there? In fact, I took, you know that in one super viral article that everyone, they're all joking that, like, oh, he should have waited a couple days to post it because then he would have won the million dollars.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like how to change your life in one day. And wasn't that effectively inspired? Like my view was like that post, they were like, we should do more of this. Let's incentivize a lot more of this. Totally. Yeah. It seemed like Rick Hedda saw that and was like, okay, articles are creating satisfaction on the platform.

People like them. It does seem like the algorithm is, it seemed like at one point the algorithm was maybe misaligned. Not that it was punishing articles, just that it wasn't really processing the time that people would spend in articles and the way they would engage. Because if there's a viral post, people might be more inclined to like it than a long, long essay that you read 45, 75% of, and then you get out of it. You actually spent multiple minutes with it. You really enjoyed it, but you forget to like it because that's way down at the bottom or you forget to retweet it or whatever.

Or you're not commenting on it. You're just kind of enjoying it reading. And then you close your phone because you're like, oh, wow, I just spent 20 minutes reading this thing. I'm moving on in my life. Or I got a phone call. And so they needed to dial the algorithm in. And I think that's what's happened. And now I think that essentially articles are first-class citizens in the algorithm.

And there's really no downside to posting articles. But that post, that article, how to change your life in one day or something, is like 30,000 characters. So it almost would have just fit if you just like edited it a little bit more. It would have just fit into a long post. But it worked as an article. There's something about the title and thumbnail that really works there. Maybe X should do a deal. with our partner 11 Labs and let you listen to these articles.

11 labs, of course, build intelligent real-time conversational agents, reimagine human technology interaction with 11 labs. Zach Foll had a great idea. He said, Grock, summarize this article in 280 characters. Don't make any mistakes, thanks. So if you really yearn for the days the pre-article era, just respond and tag Grog on every post and have it turn it back into just regular old-fashioned.

140 characters, no even shorter. I mean, I think somebody did that with how to change your life in one day because a lot of it was like from atomic habits, I guess, which is a very popular book. But all this like lifestyle stuff is always like recomposed from various previous prior art. It's all just reformatting essentially with some new flavor and new spice. So when articles launched in March of 2024, it didn't really hit for me. Like I was not like, oh, I got to jump on this. I got to post. You know, we started doing the newsletter in 2025.

mid-year, we started cross-posting. Articles were available. I think we might have tested one or two as an article, didn't really see a difference, so just kind of stuck with the longposts. But last year, so my pieces are usually around 5,000 characters. They fit fine in a long post. I was doing long posts until I saw Lulu, Masservi, friend of the show, posted standing out in 2026 as an ex-article. Now, she's been viral before for Going Direct, the Going Direct Manifesto, which was a thread of long posts. And I like, I think it was maybe just a really long post or maybe a thread of long post, but I really like that format. And I would actually use that format as sort of a template for if I wanted to communicate something in a few paragraphs. I would sort of look at what she did with the going direct post and use that as like the backbone. Obviously not taking specific words, more just like, okay, you want an intro paragraph, an opening paragraph, a couple bullet points, a summary, a takeaway.

And what's really interesting is that her standing out in 2026, it's an X article. It has a header image of these robots, and it grabs you, so you click on it, and it was dropped January 5th, good timing, kick off the year. It went super viral, millions of views, thousands of likes. But it's really, really short. It's only 443 words. It's under 3,000 characters. So it easily would have fit in a long post. But you went with article.

It worked. And when I saw that, I was thinking, okay, maybe we should do articles for our pieces. And I've been doing that, and it's been fine. It hasn't been... Honestly, the metrics are exactly the same. So maybe I need to work on the titles and thumbnails or something. But it's not like articles have been some magical cure-all.

Or, oh, yeah, we're getting 10x more views now that we're using articles. It's kind of the same thing, but it does seem like an interesting format that maybe they will surface. I think it's a better experience as a reader. Maybe, I think so. It's hard to tell. I mean, you can definitely, if you take advantage of the formatting, maybe, but, and you're doing bullet points and bolding and italics. Like, you can write. Embedding posts.

Yeah, embedding posts is cool and also images in the, I saw one that had like graphics and it read almost like a, like a strategic piece. It had embedded images and stuff. It was cool. I don't add. Gabe in the chat had an interesting idea. He said above X should acquire Beehive, which would become interesting. Because like Beehive, Beehive, one of the issues with the review acquisition is that I seemingly, I didn't know anybody that was like building a business on review. Yeah, that's true.

It was, it seemed like Twitter had done a couple of these like early stage acquisitions. Like, I mean, Vine was very early pre-monetization. They did, I think, Periscope, the live stream. streaming video platform. That was maybe pre-revenue, like pretty early. We talked to one founder who sold this company to Twitter before they even launched. And so the previous Twitter management was very quick on these like smaller acquisitions of like pre-launch, but venture funded. The team's been building for six months. They go and show the Twitter team and the Twitter team says, hey, how about we take it for 100 mil or something like that? And it's a great outcome for

the founders. And then years later, they gripe that they should never sell a company, like the Yeah, that era, I feel like taught San Francisco that like some of these smaller scale acquisitions were just relatively straightforward, commonplace. And then in the 2020s, people realized that that era just kind of went away. Yeah. It either turned into like these mega aqua-hundred things. Apparently Twitter had done approximately 79 individual acquisitions. Wow, that's a lot. They did Talaparte, which was digital advertising, was half a billion.

Magic Pony, 2016, for around 150 million. NIP, social media, data aggregation, 134 million. Tap Commerce, which is mobile ad retargeting for 100 million. Periscope, if you remember that, Vine, tweet deck. So a bunch of different deals. Yeah. Before we move on, let me tell you about Gemini 3 Pro. It's Google's most intelligent model yet.

State of the art reasoning, next level of vibe coding, and deep multimodal understanding. strategically, this big article push, it feels like another shot at Substack, Chris Best's company. I didn't put Substack in my article. Because I'm up on the Algo speak. I'll say Unalived. I'm not afraid of the real word, I guess. No, I am terrified of the Algo and being punished and shadow banned. So I said Chris Best's company, this is best practice if you want to talk about Substack. But I don't know that anyone's going to be rushing to get off of substack based on this because the value of

substack, the value prop is that you own your email list. So you have a direct relationship with your audience and you could take that anywhere. You could leave at any time. You can even take your stripe account with you, which is a crazy thing. It's so creator friendly. And substacks made that their brand and they built a great business around it. And long term, I think substack should probably figure out how to build some sort of ads product that can run across all of the different substacks because that would probably be a total TBPN victory it would it would they've been very very anti ads anti ads but I just see like what does it take to get substack into the uh snapchat Pinterest reddit category sort of like DAC a corn category and you imagine that for a lot of these like

if you're they're clearly trying to push people into the substack app but even just embedding ads here and there. It could be done tastefully. I think it can be done in a way that's not too abrasive. And you're getting a lot for a little now, of course, like, you know, we use substack. We don't charge for our newsletter, TVPN.com. You should go sign up. But so if they put ads on ours, we'd be like, ah, that's kind of a downgrade. We want to put ads in ours. But, but I think just from a business perspective, it would make sense and really open, we'll open them up to some big, big dollars at a certain point. Because there's a very high value. high value audience.

You had kind of a rough theory that maybe there was some logic to doing this just for having new training data. Yeah. So there's this idea that somebody untitled. Yeah. YouTube chats is that data is worth 10x more than one minute. There were a few people that were mentioning this. Before we dig into that, let me tell you about plaid.

Plaid powers the apps you use to spend, save, borrow, and invest, securely connecting bank accounts to move money, fight fraud and improve lending now with AI. Talk about a company that feels very immune to vibe coding. Platt? You don't want the, if somebody comes to you and they're like, I got Platt, but I'm going to charge you half as much. Oh, yeah. It's like, I'll take the real one.

I'll take the, for storing and processing my customers' financial information. Noah in the chat says, I don't want to read Substack without ads. So that's, there we go. That's advertising, strongest soldier. But so the question is like, you put out this million-dollar balance. How many people will show up? How many articles will actually get posted? I am seeing a lot of articles in the feed.

It's also hilarious when you see a Fortune 500 CEO post an article. He's like, oh, damn, are you really down and you need a mill? Like, what's going on, buddy? And it's like, no, they're just posting news and they just need to get something out so they use an article. But it's funny to imagine that they're like,

oh man, the million would change everything for me. Yeah, it's what I need, it's what I need. But. Tim, Tim Cook, they're dripping articles. He's just like, actually. He's like, I need to, I can't be like within the same. We're not going to do a keynote this year for the new iPhone. We're dropping an article.

And we're releasing it nine months early. No. The question is, is the data valuable? So a million dollars, how many people will show up? How many people will play the game? How many people will buy a lottery ticket by writing original articles that go viral? Generating articles. There's already a lot of allegations of.

AI slop in the articles feed. Every time I see an article, somebody tags that AI detector. Pangram Labs. I mean, I've been seeing so many people quoting articles, sharing them, and say, you need to read this. It's incredibly well written. Sure. And then I tap in, and it's just obviously.

Slop. Slop. Some people love Slop. I mean, we're going to get into this with the Hollywood reaction to... Can we get a pig sound effect? Matt, to... Thank you, Scott. to the latest Joe Rogan episode.

But some people just, there is more and more content on the internet where I see it, me and you can clock it as AI, but you read in the comments and everyone loves it. And they're happy. This is what Stam Altman told us. Like one person's slop is another person's treasure. Like some people like this stuff.

Also, there's the interesting counter dynamic which is I don't use AI to write. I don't even put the final draft through an LLM to like reality check it or do anything. I just sort of hammer on the keyboard and type, and if there's typos or weird, weird phrases, that's my style. You're just hearing it from my brain.

It's like a brain dump. But that doesn't stop people from commenting on all my pieces, like, this is AI, or did you use AI? Or how do you write so much, blah, blah, blah. So, like, there's a little bit of inevitability. Honestly, we should just live stream you writing every morning. Yeah, you could see me lock in with the actual doc right here. I should live stream the, or at least you should put a time lapse out of my screen while I'm doing this.

I mean, obviously I use LLMs to research. Like for, like for this article, I needed all of the dates of different changes to X's and Twitter's like character limits. That's obviously something I'm going to go to an LLM for. Do the research, pull it together, find the sources for me. It's superpowered Google search. It's great. But the question is strategically, doesn't seem like anyone's going to be bailing on substack today to move. over, but there is just valuable.

And then there's also the question of like, so you're probably not going to get your own audience list on X, but will you even be able to monetize with subscriptions? X does have subscriptions, but substack has a way more like built out product. I wonder what the, I wonder what the monthly revenue is for the person that's utilizing subscriptions the best, right? Who's the highest earning subscription driven creator. I have a couple people that subscribe to me and pay me just, because they're like, cool, we like you.

And I've never posted just to subscribers, but they're just like, they're just like, shout out. Keep you know what you're doing. Riding with Kugan. I think it's public, so I can say like, Gary Tan has just been ride or die for like years. Just sending me five bucks. I'm like, thanks, Gary. This is not an ad to go and do that, by the way.

No, no, no, no. No, you will get nothing. But the, but the interesting thing is that Substack offers more than just a one-time subscription monthly. You can pay annually, get a discount. You can also do like VIP tiers, different tiers, access to discords, access to different things, participate in the live stream, get the chat. And then there's also like business plans, group plans. So they just have a way more mature product catalog when it comes to monetizing a customer list or an email list.

And then obviously you can take them elsewhere. So if you ever don't, if you want to, if you're like, look, my newsletter product has grown so much that I have like enterprise level needs. I have to be off substack. You can go and build something from scratch that does exactly what you want and has all the different integrations. And some companies have done that. Other companies, I mean, the free press is scaled immensely

with substack. And you go to the free press's homepage and it looks like the New York Times. Like there's like 25 different articles popping up, little subsections. It is a full featured CMS for like a newspaper for like a modern newspaper. Anyway, MongoDB.

Choose a database built for flexion. and scale with best in class embedding models and re-rankers. MongoDB has what you need to build what's next. Let's Mongo. How did you conclude? What was your takeaway? My question was, so I don't see anyone who's a writer online who's on substack being like, okay, now's the moment.

A million dollars is on the table. I'm shutting down my substack and I'm going over to X exclusively. But a lot of people crosspost, that's what we do. I think a lot of people, if you have a free, if you have a substack that's Part free, part paid, post the free part on X. Why not? It's all upside. It's just more attention that can actually get you into funnel.

I believe that the posting of the articles on X has been additive to our substack list because at the end of the post, we follow up and say, hey, this post is emailed as well. You want to go check it out. Go to TBPN.com. And so we, I think this has been net growth. I don't think people have been like, oh, I'm unsubscribing from TBPN's newsletter because I'm getting it on John's random Twitter feed that may or may not surface to me in the algorithm. But I don't think, so I don't think X needs writers to go all in.

I just think that they want more copies of the best writing to make their way to X. And so if you have a great YouTube video, they want you to share it on X as well, so then they can surface that to people. If you have a great piece of writing, put it on X as well. And I think this does that, and I think they'll be successful there. And I think they can, they can. Yeah, the question, I mean, if you're, if they're really successful and you have, like, YouTube for long form writing, like the UGC platform for long form writing, it's probably

it's probably a solid business, but it's not going to be a juggernaut like YouTube, specifically because it's not going to monetize nearly as well, right? You have, like, they don't put ads and articles today. It's such an act. They could add them in, but you're like locked in reading an article versus like when you're watching something. Totally. Like you can put it, you can put a two hour.

YouTube video on your smart TV and it will just play an ad and you just won't you don't need to do anything whereas if you're scrolling an article and then all of a sudden an ad pops up like you you that breaks the flow of like what you're doing it's not it's not a passive experience an active experience so yeah i completely agree with you um i want your take on whether on the actual article experience first i'm going to tell you about figma figma make isn't your average vibe coding tool. It lives in Figma, so outputs look good, feel real, and stay connected to how teams build, create code back prototypes and apps fast. So I was chatting with some folks who have really, really big on Twitter, a little group of folks who are all well over 100K, I've gotten there back in, like,

the thread era. They were like thread guys, basically. And they were saying, like, I don't think Naval's how to get rich without getting lucky thread would have worked as an article. that the fact that it was all these bite-sized pieces, like that's, that was what was special. Now, I think personally that meta has sort of died, and we haven't seen that work,

but what do you think? Coming back and just unironically ripping threads. Why not? Zig, do you miss threads? Do you miss that error at all? Can you remember any iconic threads other than Luloo's? and Naval's?

And apparently Lulu was just a long post. Someone corrected in the chat. So, no, No, Noval is the main one that I remember. I probably scrolled a few threads. I actually did have a thread that actually blew up my account. So I was at 10,000 followers. Is this the Alaska one? No, that was not, that got me unfollowes because I posted about bringing tech.

You know, I was early on the let's leave California train. And I said, we got to go to Alaska. We're not going to Miami. We're not going to Texas. We're going to Alaska. Because if you have runaway global warming, it's going to be beachfront property up there, baby. It's going to be 72 and sunny every day in Alaska. Palm trees.

Alternatively, if we solve global warming, we will have unlimited nuclear power. You will be able to heat, air condition, do whatever you need in your Alaska compound because you will have a one megawatt nuclear reactor dropped on your doorstep, and you will have unlimited power. And you'll be lounging in a beautiful scenic mountain, retreat perfectly temperature control. Alaska did not like that. They did not like that. I got a lot of DMs from a lot of people showing me their guns, saying, if you come up

here, California boy, there will be consequences. And it was a rough day on the internet. I had to lock my account. It was very funny. But anyway, I survived that. But the post that blew up my account was I had written a, so Chris Miller had kind of popularized the idea of TSM and Taiwan as an important geopolitical. football in the U.S.-China battle.

And I'd read the book, really enjoyed it. I had done a YouTube video all about U.S. China competition that had done very well on YouTube. So basically what I did was I re-contextualized everything that I'd learned and pieced together for that YouTube video into a thread. And I gave it a very salacious title. I said because FTX was collapsing at the time. Something else was going on crazy.

There were like two major current things happening. Is it chat. I don't know if it was chat GPT launching, but basically I was like, FTC is a distraction, you know, Elon Musk is a distraction, like you need to be focusing on U.S. China policy or whatever. And I just sort of like contextualized why Taiwan is important for the semiconductor supply chain in the AI boom. And it wasn't anything revolutionary for anyone who was paying attention, but there were a lot of people who just hadn't really learned what ASML was or TSM was at the time. And so just having that in a nice digestible feed, it went so. super viral. And because it was so, like, authoritative, it took me from 10,000 followers to 20,000 followers in, like, a week. And it was, it was, like, really, really gross. It's like the clearest jump

in the follower graph. And then everything else has just been, like, slow growth. And we know this from posting, like, you post like a viral, funny banger. It doesn't, like, double your account. But if you posted a really, really great thread, people would follow you. And I think that's true for the articles, too. The guy who wrote the How to Change Your Life in One Day. he has almost a million followers now. And I imagine that he had way less than that because I'd never seen his account before. Yeah.

So. Because he's, he's providing, like, insight. Yes. Well, you know,

people could critique the article or say it's, you know, a lot of these ideas have been talked about before. But for better worse, he summarized, like some key insights

he shared it on how to improve your life. That is value that somebody is like, I want to keep improving my life. Totally. Or they didn't read the article. They just saved it and followed him. Yeah, yeah,

because they don't have time to improve their life. I'm busy right now. We didn't say which day they were going to use. It could be any day. So they'll circle back on that. Yeah, circle back. Whereas if you just make somebody chuckle... And then there's also the fact that if you spend an hour with someone,

or it takes half an hour to read that piece from start to finish, if you spend half an hour with someone, you feel like you know their perspective, you've learned more about them, as opposed to you just see some funny post. And you're like, yeah, that's funny. They made me chuckle. Okay, I don't need to like be in... I don't really have a relationship with that person. But once you've spent a half an hour sort of cohabiting with them, you're more likely to hang out.

So I closed out saying that maybe there's article apocalypse. I'm not really seeing it. I think the algorithm is pretty well equipped to handle stuff like this. People always seem grumpy with X generally, and honestly, Nikita specifically a lot of times. But I've always felt like the sloppy algorithm changes that happen, like they sort themselves out really quickly. Like there's plenty of times when we will come in on a Monday and we'll be like, wow, the algorithm was really brutal over the weekend. Like I was just seeing like just junk that didn't feel at all tied to what we're interested in. It just seemed like they made some

change and someone hacked it and it's all just like viral videos or some quote tweet meta or some meme form. There was an era where you'd get eight Elon posts in a row. That happened. So there's like a whole bunch of different, there were just a whole bunch of different like crises where people were like, it's over. And then a week later, the algorithm sort of adjusts and learns that people don't actually like all that slop or they don't like this thing and then they adjust and it's fine. And so the other little quick tip is that if you ever really get sick of the 4U page, you can actually disable it by uninstalling the app, bookmarking X.com as like a homepage icon that just opens in Safari if you're on an iPhone. And then you can install this extension called

social focus that will allow you to turn off the 4U page. So it opens. opens to your following tab by default. And you just can't even access the 4U page. So you can always do that. I've done that for like a month here, a month there. Honestly, it's not that much better. And it's one of those things that's classic stated preference versus revealed preference.

Stated preference is, oh, I just want to see who I follow. I don't want to see these random viral posts. And then the revealed preference is like, actually, some of these viral posts are pretty good. They're pretty funny. And I enjoy them. And the problem with the 4U, with the following tab, is that you,

is that there are some people that post a ton and there are some people that post very rarely and you want to see some sort of even balance. And you don't realize that there are some folks that you follow who post a lot, a lot, a lot. And then it's like, really, I just want to see the cream of the crop. I just want to see their best posts, but then I want to see every post from certain people

and it's hard to find too. Long term, I think, you know, we'll get to a point where you can define your algorithm a little bit more. But for now, you're subject to the whims of Nikita B. And fortunately, should we talk about... Graphite? Absolutely. Code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. What should we talk about?

We should talk about X-A-I. Oh, yes. What's going on with X-A-I? So, Ty Moors did a podcast with... I'm going to potentially not pronounce as name right. Sulemon. Sulemon Khan Gori. Yeah. who was previously, at the time when the podcast was done,

he of course was working at XAI. He came in. He talked about WTF is happening at XAI, predicting bottlenecks, bootstrapping off the Tesla network, how Elon deals with fires, what it's like working at XAI, Cybertruck Bet with Elon, how they built Colossus, how XAI hires, experimentation, how Elon recalibrated his timeline estimates. No one tells me no.

that's important. That's a wild one. Why the fuzziness between teams is an advantage. Testing human emulators as employees, biggest blunders, what a meeting with Elon is like, how Elon gives feedback, figuring out what is truth for Grockopedia, what happens when Elon sees

wrong GROC outputs on X, what it's like operating in XAI's war room, and a number of other things. So massively viral, by the way, four million views just on X, 5,000 likes. This is a massive performance. And so, and so anyways, like, I'll start by saying that

this is fantastic content. Beautifully shot. Well, that. Ty Moore is a very well done. Very well done. And, and great content, right? People are so curious about what's happening at XAI, right? We want to understand, you know, how they're approaching different problems. And Elon talks about in such high level. He's talking about, you know, AI, AGI, super futuristic. And then He'll give little details on like some massive buildout that he's working on. But he's not in the nitty-gritty. One small problem. Yes.

Usually a $200 billion company likes to control who's going to go out and do a tell-all about the company. Yes. And specifically with Elon companies, if you hadn't noticed, there's not a lot of people that work for Elon companies. No. That go and do the podcast circuit and talk about everything going on. No. I mean, at SpaceX, Gwen Shepard. Shotwell has given a few speeches, mostly at like commencement speeches, like inspirational speeches

to colleges and that type of stuff. She's not going on Rogan or different space podcasts or tech podcasts. It's very rare to see content with her. And then Kiko Donchav is their head of launch, and he will do engagement with NASA. And if there's a, if there's a real heavy industry-focused panel, he might attend, but he's also, he's also not just hopping on stuff. And then beyond that, and generally he's not trying to create like thousands of superstars. No. He does, he wants you to work for him forever. Yeah, I saw a post in here. But when a company, like, when somebody, when someone super talented leaves, it's not like Elon in general is lining up and saying, like, let me do your first round. Let me do your first like, you know, 10 million, 20 million, 50 million bucks. Right. He's actively

trying to incentivize people to not develop big brands. He wants people to stay. And he wants to be able to control the message. And wait, speaking of that, look at this, look at this Sam Schaeffer post. He went and found a 15 years ago, they did a SpaceX office tour. It is so, like, it's just, it's crazy. It just looks like a cubicle office. But in there, Sam Schaeffer finds that there's someone who works on propulsion named Matthew McKeown, McCune. And he's been on propulsion for 70, 17 years and eight months. That's exactly what Elon wants, a true believer who's riding with him through thick and thin and has probably done extremely well financially, worked on really interesting problems. Is he going to be a household name? Is he going to be a podcast circuit? No, but does Matthew

really want that? Probably not. He wants to, he wants to propel the rockets. And that's exactly what he's done for nearly two decades now. So that's the Elon strategy. And you should know that going into that environment. Maybe it should be more explained, but it certainly ended in disaster in this things. Yeah, the funny thing is I didn't catch all the interview, but they talk about like how like HR in general is like not super formalized at the company. And so you can also imagine that like PR and the media relations team is not super active. Maybe nobody in HR said, hey, don't go do it an hour-long podcast. You know, if you're anybody but Elon,

maybe don't do an hour-long podcast, telling all. And so, of course, people, what happened? Ultimately, Suleiman. He said he's left. We don't actually know what happened. But it is odd to go do an hour-long interview and then quay. Anyway, so I think, like, good intentions potentially took the concept, which he talks about in here,

no one tells me no a little bit too far. But I posted earlier. You can't even share the internal secrets of your AI lab on a cinematic podcast in this country anymore. Brutal. Andrew Curran had some good context here. He said the speculation is that this is the result of the interview he gave where he said XAI intends to run 1 million human emulations,

a digital version of Optimus for online work, which will be powered by leasing compute from Tesla owners when the car is parked and charging. So that's an interesting development that we actually haven't heard about before. This idea that you have a pretty advanced AI chip doing self-driving in the Teslas. They're just sitting there overnight. Why not do some inference and lease that back to the network? Why is it a digital version of Optimus? Is it going to be sitting there in the corner like clipy?

I mean, I think realistically it's probably just like agentic rollouts. So if it's for online work, it's like, you know, what are a bunch of tasks that you could, you could like turn grok loose on everything from like, you know, the classic like order door dash in a simulation, try and buy something on Amazon in a simulation, all these things that require moving around on a screen, doing computer work, using Excel, building stuff, writing code, all these things that require a lot of heavy inference to roll it out, create a plan, write some code, test it, go back, double check, test it again, blah, blah, blah. Oh, so.

Regov says, I somewhat remember, but maybe not quite in as much detail, right? I feel like when I remember him talking about this kind of thing, it was like, yeah, we have like distributed compute that we can leverage. Yeah, this might be in more detail. But still, again, if you're at a company, any company, you should probably clear the public speaking engagements with... Solomon didn't just read Lulu's going direct. He studied and he sat down.

It's wild. And I actually DM with him briefly this morning and I think he's going to work on a startup. Okay, cool. We'll have to have him on at some point when he's ready to talk about it. I mean, he certainly has a law now. Honestly, kind of benefit of like going and working at a Google or a meta is they'll straight up tell you. Don't talk to the media unless you've been explicitly. Yeah, or go.

I mean, there's different strategies at different companies. Some companies are totally cool with a bunch of people going out and talking about their business. But yeah, this seems like one of the more secretive organizations. So a life lesson there. Anyway, console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. Let's go over to Ben Affleck.

Ben Affleck. You know, I had a premonition, a little preview that this was going to happen. He went on Joe Rogan and gave some very good takes on AI. There's some discussion over how good of takes they are. But I ran into somebody that said that they met Ben Affleck. They were like a proper AI researcher and they said that they met Ben Affleck and he used compute as a noun. And they were like, yeah, that was impressive. Like he's talking about like scaling compute.

He's actually very, very deep in this. Which, you know, he went to Harvard. It's not shocking. But I think there's just a general vibe that, like, Hollywood is behind or out of the loop to the point where they wouldn't know the big models. They wouldn't have tested them. It's like, no, this is their business. I mean, there are some, like Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Yeah.

Pretty tapped in. I mean, he's big up in. Isn't his wife on that board of opening high back in the day? She was. She was. Yeah. You can't get more tapped in than that. Well, hasn't he just been spewing, like, AI safety nonsense constantly?

Yeah, he's a big safety guy. He's a dumer or just a safety guy? He's a dumer. Dumer. He said, today we're announcing a new organization called the Creators Coalition on AI. Well, fortunately, we have the counterpoint to that because Ben Affleck is not a doomer. He's actually pretty white-pilled, and it seemed like a really good interview. Let's play this first clip from Forrest, who says that Ben Affleck has great takes across the board.

Ryan says, what if he's just acting? If you try to get ChatGBT, BT, or Claude or Gemini to write you something, it's really shitty. And it's shitty because by its nature, it goes to the mean, to the average. And it's not reliable. And it's, I mean, I just came to stand to see what it's writes. Now, it's a useful tool if you're a writer. And you're going, ah, what's the thing? I'm trying to set something up or somebody sends someone a letter, but it's delayed two days and gets,

and it can give you some examples of that. I actually don't think it's very likely that it's going to be able to write anything meaningful. Or, and in particular, that it's going to be making movies. like from Holcroft, like Tilly Norwood. Like, that's bullshit. I don't think that's going to happen. I think it's not, I think it actually turns out the technology is not progressing

in exactly the same way. They sort of presented it. And really, what it is is going to be... Just like sort of visual effects. There was a line in here where... Yeah, there was a line in here where I was like, that is a Carpathie line. Like, he definitely heard this from Carpathie.

He's listed to Orkash for sure. For money. I can't. You can sue me, period. It kind of feels to me like... The thing we were talking about earlier where there's a lot more fear. The whole idea of like these models being made, that's not quite true. I mean, it's hard with like to develop a reinforcement learning environment with a verifiable reward for like a great script that will break through because even the great script writers have flops that are unexpected. Literally everyone thinks it's great and then it goes out and it just is a box office bomb.

We can pause this for a minute. But later he actually makes a stronger case, I think, because they're talking about Dwayne, the Rock Johnson in the film The Smashing Machine. And Matt Damon is recalling an interview that he did with Dwayne Johnson about his, you know, one of the most climactic scenes in the smashing machine that's very emotional. And they, and they ask, Dwayne, you know, how did you pick this, you know, motion? He pulls up a sheet because he's sad and like, what were you conjuring? What were you drawing on to create?

that experience as an actor and bring that emotion to the screen because Matt Damon's saying, like, I love that, I love that scene. I loved your performance. Where'd that come from? Because you're thinking about content without ads in order to draw on this sort of like deep sad. Yes, yes. That might be what that does it for you. But I mean, Dwayne Johnson gave like a very emotional response about a family member who was diagnosed with cancer and he was in the room when she got the news. And so, and so her reaction, he was like channeling that. It was very emotional. And then the other one was, I think, about another family member who had substance abuse issues.

And so it was just this very unique blend of human experiences that he was able to bring to bear. And I continue to think that the lore and the storytelling that happens outside of a piece of content is as important as the actual content in many cases. This was the same thing with art and the N. FD boom. It's not like the the scarcity is important, but the storytelling behind the art piece is a lot of it. Like people like a Van Gogh because they know about him cutting off his ear and all this history. And he's in all the history books and everyone just knows Van Gogh. And yes, you could go even with with cars, right? It's a car is worth more if the prior, if the previous owner had was significant in some way.

Yes, yes, yes. Steve McQueen is going to sell for more. And I think that for certain storytelling elements, for certain stories, that lore of like who this person is and their likeness. And then he also makes a really good point that it's like, yes, you can, I mean, you can obviously generate something that looks exactly like a Van Gogh right now. You can paint it with someone who knows exactly how to paint like Van Gogh. It's not going to have anywhere near the value. And when he gets to the idea of just AI generating a Dwayne Johnson movie, it's like, like, well, he'll sue you immediately, and that's very easy.

And you've been able to Photoshop Dwayne Johnson into marketing materials for years, and we've had a system for counteracting that. Like, you have to pay licensing fees, and that will happen. So he has a good balance. We can go into this second clip from Barely AI. I think that's Trunk Bands Company, because it's a little bit longer. It's about a four-minute piece. So while we pull that up, let me tell you about Label Box, R.L.

environments, voice, robotics, evals, and expert human data. Label box is the data factory behind the world's leading AI teams. Get in the box. The label box. Let's pull up Ben Affleck diving a little bit deeper. And we might have to skip ahead. Yeah, we've been spending time looking at this.

Like, my belief is sort of like, what's going to happen with electricity? So we can skip to like 50 seconds. Well, a lot of shit is going to happen with electricity. And it's and it's, don't think it's very likely that it's going to be able to write anything meaningful. and in particular that it's going to be making movies like from Holcroft like Tilly Norwood. Like that's bullshit.

Can you pause this? So I think that he basically says that like he doesn't think that like an iconic, amazing movie is going to be generated by AI. And I sort of agree with that. But I think it's important to consider like what are we defining as a movie? Because we don't really watch movies anymore anyway. People watch content. And if you think about it like, you know,

decades ago, people might see one movie a month or one movie a week. And that's like two to eight hours a month of screen time. Well, now people are doing two to eight hours of screen time a day. But it's these fragmented pieces. And so if AI seeps into the cracks within the cracks, within the cracks, and the goal is not to create the experience of a two-hour movie that you show in a theater and you get everyone to come and buy tickets. Joe Rogan's really turned into Dwar Keshe for A-listers.

Just come on and talk about AI, right? It's really... Gregory McConnor-Hae is talking about wanting this, like, personal L-LM. Oh, yeah. Well, you can log to data in. Yeah, that one was a little bit rougher than this. Affleck's got to die. Let's continue with Affleck.

I think it's not, I think it actually turns out the technology is not progressing in exactly the same way. They sort of presented it. And really, what is, it's going to be a tool. Just like sort of visual effects. facts and yeah it needs to have language around it you need to protect your name and likeness you can do that you can watermark it your those laws already exist you can't I can't sell your fucking picture for money I can't you consume me period I might have the ability to draw you to make you a very realistic way but that's already against the law

yeah and the unions are gonna I think the guilds are gonna manage this where it's like okay look if this is a tool that actually helps us for example we don't have to go to the North Pole right we can shoot the scene here in our parkas and whatever it is, but then make it appear very realistically as if we're in the North Pole. It'll save us a lot of money, a lot of time. We're going to focus on the performances and not be freezing our ass off out there and running back inside. Pause for a second? Just like Spencer Tracy and...

What if? Before you rebut this. Let me tell you about that, vibe.com, where D2C brands, B2C startups, and AI companies advertise on streaming TV, pick channels, target audiences and measure sales just like on meta. Continue. Small chance that... AI saves Hollywood as a place, right? You're getting clapsed. As a place.

Yeah. And the reason for that is one of the issues right now is filming is so expensive in LA. There's so much red tape that people have to go to Atlanta, Canada, Europe, whatever, international. But all the talent, the writers, directors, producers, the platforms, they're still here, right? It's very depressing. It's a bad vibe. All the restaurants are shutting down. Everything's cooked.

but if you can start to generate the content here, just on your computer, there's a chance that you see a kind of resurgence in Hollywood the place, right? Yeah. And I think that realistically, that is the strategy that the industry should take because having this concentration here,

there's already so much talent, keeping it here, and actually embracing AI is much more likely to revitalize the city. Yeah. There's an incredible quote in here. Hopefully we can get to it. Let's skip ahead and play because he has a line that truly is directly out of Andre

Kirk Hathie's mouth. Let's play. The thing we were talking about earlier where there's a lot more fear because we have the sense that's existential dread. It's going to wipe everything out. But that actually runs counter, in my view, to what history seems to show. Jevin's Paradox. Slow.

It's incremental. Let's go. I think a lot of that rhetoric comes from people who are trying to justify value. around companies. We're going to change everything. It's literally a Carpathie line. The reason they're saying that is because they need to ascribe evaluation for investment that can warrant the cap expense.

He didn't just watch Carpathians. He said he said he. He's sitting there taking notes. Make the social network three, but it's just about Dwar Cash and Carpathie hanging out in Ilya. It's just about AI research. It's about it's about, and exciting NURIPS, and that's it.

App Loven. Profitable advertising made easy with axon.aI. Get access to over one billion daily active users and grow your business today. People are already having fun with the memes out of this. I like this amend and pretend. Ben Affleck on AI software. I suspect many AI native software companies are misrepresenting their growth in quality of revenue. Use of credits, annualizing proof of concept revenue,

and lack of annual contracts lowers the overall quality of revenue ultimately the multiple. I mean, he's not that, I mean, this is a joke. He didn't actually say that, but he's not that far off from what he's actually said. This is a great template. I hope this meme runs way further because it's so good. Banger. I love it.

Oh, Forrest also clipped Ben Affleck talking about the GPT40 people. Let's play this, because this is interesting. And while we pull it up, let me tell you about Cisco, critical infrastructure for the AI era. are very pleased to be partner with Cisco. AI's new frontier, the edge. Let's do it. Early AI, the line went up very steeply. And it's now sort of leveling off.

I think it's because, and yes, it'll get better, but it's going to be really expensive to get better. And a lot of people are like, fuck this, we watch ShedGPD4 because it turned out, like the vast majority of people who use AI are using it to like as like companion bots to chat with at night. And so there's no work, there's no productivity, there's no value to it.

I would argue there's also not a lot of social value to getting people to like focus on an AI friend who's, you know, telling you're great and listening to everything you say and being sick and fat. That's sort of a side issue. Tyler's just engaged over there. Yeah. Yeah. What's your, what's your rebuttal? Let's give Tyler. Let's give Tyler a rebuttal.

Defend AI. I think most of these takes are like pretty outdated. Okay. Like writing is actually AI writing. You can still tell that it's AI. but it's like, it's good. It's good. Videos are like, I think... Okay, okay. Sell a screenplay then.

Sell a screenplay. Yeah. Yeah. Shop a screenplay. Do it. Do it. Just prompt it. Just prompt it. But why would I sell a screenplay? I could just make the whole movie myself. Okay. Just make the movie. He has this idea like... Just make the finish movie. Call on Netflix.

Instead of... Instead of filming in Antarctica, you can just get in the parkas and film it here, right? You don't need the parkers either because you can just have them be in normal clothes. That's true. And then it's like, well, you don't actually... we need the people, right? Because you can just maybe fine-tune a model so you get consistent to characters.

Sure, sure, sure. And then, yeah, I will say, I will say just in the last two weeks, I am getting served AI content. That's pretty good. Pretty good. There's some pretty good stuff out there. Now, a lot of it's like,

a lot of it still has that, like, creative human element, like someone will take an iconic movie scene. It's still all about the idea. It's about the idea. And the idea didn't come from the model. It's a bull market for ideas. It'll be good.

And maybe. Maybe the A I will get good at a guess, but that does feel like the next breakthrough. This idea that Ben saying, I would push back a little bit on Ben saying, like, you're not just going to be able to generate a film. You will, but it won't be a film in the sense that it won't be Titanic, it won't be something that everyone goes to the movie theater, sits down, watches the same film. It will be a lot of films that are for different people. I don't think there'll be anything. Yeah, but I'm just saying, like, people are going to create like insane fan fiction style heroes, journey and kind of like like standardized plot but for a specific sub-community you'll have like

one subreddit where everyone totally totally and i mean there there is a lot of just slop movie content on streaming platforms right now you can just go and watch gap year tyler put aflac in the truth zone not not everything is yeah not every movie is is you know is titanic is you know cicario like a lot of look on netflix there's a lot of stuff stuff, it's like, yeah, they spend a million dollars. Every time I look on Netflix, I'm like, is, these are, these are films? I know. There's a lot of slop on there.

Anyway, so I think, like, in Hollywood, at least, like, I like a lot of movies, like there's certain writers that I like. Okay, you like movies? Wait, you said you like movies? All right. Name every film. Name every film on the TVPN chat. Best film list.

That's movie list. Okay, but you always hear about, like, certain writers. they have a hard time getting their films made because maybe it's like kind of a weird concept or something like it's hard to market. But this is like AI is actually much better for them, right? Because if you have someone who's like actually has some like unique look at the world

or they're like very creative or something, like AI is like super good for them, but kind of only for them, right? So maybe in the industry it's not super great. But for the people like, if there's a certain director that I like really love, they're going to be, you know, they're going to be able to make way more of their movies

or whatever, you know, instantiate all their ideas. Why are people saying that the Papa Tai is AI generated. This song's from 2013. Someone's saying that there's the most viral song of 20, of the year so far is an AI-generated song, but it must be based on another. It's an AI cover of a human-written song. Okay, yeah, so it's like style transfer on top of, it's like a filter.

This still feels like tool level, not to push back. I mean, that is an interesting watershed moment, that something that involves AI could be so dominant, but there is a lot of human work at play there to build the original song that then was edited with AI. Anyway, cognition. They're the makers of Devon, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team.

Anything else on Hollywood, or should we move on to the battle? Chad is calling Tyler based zoomer. He's a zoomer. It's good, good times. Okay, so there's an update to the Elon Musk OpenAI lawsuit, which is sitting at about 60% chance that Elon wins on Kalshi right now on the prediction markets. But Elon Musk is now seeking. So on the day that the Brockman files went out, started going viral,

Open AI put out a release. They countered some of the narratives, added some more context, but they also sent out a letter to their investors saying, hey, look, we think it's going to be $34 million or something at worst. We'll have to pay him back for what he donated, but it's not going to be. Well, they said we think, we think this is the most, but it could be more. It could be more. And Elon said, yeah, it's going to be more. It's going to be $134 billion in damages is what Elon is seeking. Elon Musk's legal team argues that his early fund.

and involvement materially contributed to OpenAI's rise, which is now valued at $500 billion, and he wants his slice. The lawsuit says OpenAI has become a for-profit company entitling Musk to compensation tied to the value created from his early contributions. Musk helped found OpenAI in 2015 and donated approximately $38 million in early funding. When asked about the lawsuit, Elon Musk responded, I've lost a few battles over the years, but I've never lost a war. It's funny. And here's the thing. Here's the thing. So, so great line. Yes. But I don't think this lawsuit is the war. Yes. I think it's a battle in a longer war. Yes. And I think that it may play a role. Yes. And how the, and how this sort of like war between XAI and Open AI or Elon versus Sam evolves. But

ultimately, like this judge is not going to make, you know, the judge and jury are not going to make a decision that just like decide to war. Right. Yes. Just, like, the war is going to be won by overwhelming domination in the categories that they compete, which right now, consumer enterprise. Yeah. And I'm sure. If he gets that, it's like over 25% of the company, something like that.

And that's going to be, and that's going to be hard, again, depending, I'm sure it'll come out how much Sam owns exactly in this, in the case. Yeah. But it's going to be hard to justify that he just. deserves more than Sam given their... And also just play out what happens if Elon does get all $134 billion. It's like you're not CEO, you're not, you don't have board control, you don't have super voting shares, but you're a massive shareholder that can just constantly do shareholder lawsuits. And so that's going to be incredibly annoying and very bad.

But at the same time, like maybe a distraction, how do you actually get to control if that's what Elon's going for? It's a very, very odd scenario to work through, even though I don't think it's likely that it lands there. We will see what the judge thinks and where the damages land if he wins, which is still not guaranteed by any means. It could wind up being a fieric victory for Elon. It could be something where he wins the battle, but he loses the war in the sense that, like, it's a distraction. There's going to be a ton of discovery. It'll be, you know, ultimately, even if he gets $100 billion, he's worth $7. $700 billion. It's like a drop in the bucket. I mean, he's like 10% richer then. Okay. Does that really matter? 20% richer? Of course it matters. But it's not that's right. Gabe says once I churn from chat. GBT there, screwed. The straw that broke the. Yeah. A couple of people have been coming out rallying, supportive Elon saying that they're they're churning. They're out. Seems like Sequoia is maybe picking a winner.

Happy to diversify. They're planning a big investment into Anthropic, joining a round led by GIC and CO2. They're investing 1.5 each. Anthropic is raised in the aim $25 billion. And this is, yeah, Sequoia gets the Financial Times article because it's an exciting moment to have them pick. So the Financial Times says,

Sequoia Capital is lining up a big investment into Anthropic, throwing its weight behind the AI startup for the first time as part of a funding round set to raise tens of billions of dollars. California Adventure Capital Group is funding around led by Singaporean sovereign wealth on GIC and U.S. investor CO2, who are contributing $1.5 billion each, according to multiple people. These people said Anthropics raising $25 billion in a deal that values the company at $350, more than doubling its $170 billion valuation just four months ago. We've heard about this round for months now, but these things take a long time, so we won't be ringing the gong until we get Dario on the show and the deal is closed.

So Microsoft and Nvidia have committed to invest up to $15 billion into the company, and VCs and other investors are doing 10 of the 25 that they're raising. Sequoia obviously had a shake-up, roll off both in charge of Sequoia, passed on previous funding rounds for Anthropic, was wary of the concentration of VC investment into a handful of highly valued startups, arguing that venture capital was not an asset class. He said in an interview last year that throwing money into Silicon Valley doesn't yield more great company. He was ousted in November with the firm's partners electing Pat Grady and Alfred Lynn to co-lead the firm instead. Sequoia was an early investor. Let's give it up for the stewards. The stewards. Google, Apple, Airbnb, and Stripe and has backed some of Anthropics' biggest rivals.

Sequoia invested in Open AI's funding round last year and Elon Musk's AI Group XAI. So venture capital firms rarely back rival startups in the same field, preferring to pick winners in each category. But the scale of the financial opportunity in AI has changed that approach. And Claude Code is just too much fun. They love it. They can't stop using it. And so they have to get a check-in. Got to get a piece. Anyway, Railway. Railway simplifies software deployment, web servers, apps, and databases run in one place with scaling, monitoring, security built in. Well said, John. Continuing. Little known fact, Sequoia was an early investor in Ilfer Nio, owning 6.3% of the company at its 1997 IPO. I love that the Sequoia team in the early days was like doing pizza joints and restaurants.

restaurants and software. You know, didn't they own Chuckie Cheese, right? Yep. That was a funny one. So, yeah, this is from Andrew Reed. Ilfer Nile owns and operates 13 full-service white tablecloth Italian restaurants serving creatively prepared, premium quality Italian cuisine based on authentic regional recipes. What a fantastic business. And Sequoia Capital got a huge slug, 6.3% at the IPO. Yeah, so sad news, Elphornaio, how do you say? Elfer Nio. Elfornio. Is there closing their restaurant in the bay? Elfer Nio was like the cool spot to go before high school dances when I grew up. It was like the, I think there's one in Pasadena. It's really good.

I hope that they can keep it open somehow or someone can rest you. This feels like FTX. It's right. It's tiny. You know, shutting down, closing locations. Sure. Yeah. So much history.

Sequoia involvement. Secoia involvement. Ridiculous. Now, that was obviously years and years ago. Anyway, these guys love violating narratives. It is so funny to think about Sequoia getting a deck for a restaurant. Being like, this is right in the sweet spot. We've got to get into this one.

This is right down the way. We've got to get in right down the fairway. Right down the fair way. This is that a sweet spot. We're waiting. We had a market map of restaurants. We had authentic Italian, authentic Italian carved out.

There was no one there. We did a two-axis graph. Italian, authentic. You're in the sweet spot. You got a deal. You're not going to believe this. The founder for the partner meeting invited us to the restaurant. The food was fantastic.

You know, they actually did another restaurant later. They did the melt. Are you familiar with this? No. Yeah, Sequoia did the melt, which is a grilled cheese spot. It's still going. It's all around L.A. I enjoy the melt.

That is, I mean, as if I needed a reason to love Sequoia more. I know. Amazing. They're supporting the grilled cheese. It's a really funny story because the guy, the founder, I believe was like a amazing physicist, like a genius mathematician or someone's like really, really quantitative. And they were like, you're the one that can solve fast casual grilled cheeses.

And I think he scaled the business. I think it's done pretty well. Wall Street Journal article from 2014, Sequoia backs the mouth moves beyond grilled cheese. Yes. Yeah, they have burgers now. They have soups. I used to go there. They got burger meals, chicken melts, mac and cheese. I get a grilled cheese and a cup of tomato soup. It was delicious. It was amazing. Anyway, Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. So, David Sacks says, narrative violation. And Joe Wisenthel says, these guys love violating narratives.

The narrative violation is that the largest AI data center uses roughly the same amount of water as two burger joints. There are over 200,000 fast food restaurants in the United States. So this is a tiny amount. This is, of course, from semi-analysis. They did a whole write-up, a breakdown, comparing various water usage. We were asking, when is the semi-analysis water model coming? Well, it's here. and they did a whole analysis on how much water these data centers are using,

and it's a lot lower than people think. It's in many cases less than golf courses. It's not nothing, but it certainly seems manageable, which is great news because people have been worried about this, and now we have some hard data to point to when you want to say, hey, the water thing is actually not that big of a deal. Let's focus on the energy thing because that actually is a big deal. Let's build some nuclear power plants.

Let's get some solar on the ground. and let's get some more energy up into the right. So there's another narrative violation. Another narrative violation has hit the timeline. David Sachs is narrative violation. According to BlackRock, the U.S. does not have enough workers to meet the surging demand for the construction boom. AI is creating too many jobs.

And there's a beautiful picture of a... Overnight success. Some sort of construction equipment. And so BlackRock is now warning that a worker shortage could hurt construction boom. We heard that hilarious story. If I was graduating high school, college, didn't want to work in an office, I would actually get a plane ticket down to Texas.

I'd show up to Abilene with my ID and say, put me to work. And I bet you could get a job. I've told several people to do that, at least take the trip to some of these new gold rush towns and see if there's a way to bring your business there as a real estate agent, a lawyer, like, whatever you're doing. like actually go and understand like how much is this going to change the community. Because it certainly has in the past. Anyway, crowd strike.

Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. We were hanging out with some folks at the Singer Drivers Club yesterday, our friend of the show, Paul. And a number of the coaches who are professional drivers, we're talking about how much a legend George, founder of CrowdStrike is. Like, he has, he has the respect of, like, the most elite drivers in the world.

It's awesome. Like, this guy is the real deal. Speaking of driving, we have seen Elon, he's beefing with Sam, he's suing Open AI, and he wants $136 billion, something like that. He's said that he will drop the lawsuit if they change their name to closed AI, and there has to be, there has to be a point where if the judge is about to actually issue 136 billion...

Call up Delaware. Hey, I got a name change. This is not a joke. I mean, like, would ChatGPT actually see a decline in user numbers if they change the company's name to closed AI? I don't think so. I think a lot of people just think about ChatGPT. They think about ChatGPT. They may be no Open AI. They maybe know Sam Allman's name. They don't know Greg Brock. Like the average Chachapit user could probably deal with the name change. I don't think Ben Affleck would be able to handle it. I know, you know, he would be upset. But truly, like, I mean, Facebook rebranded to meta. It's entirely new name. Okay, John, but like realistically, the lawsuit's not getting dropped because of the name

changed. A post is not a contract. He will abide by the results, okay? He will abide by the results. Well, he's also asking if we should buy, if he should buy Ryan Eyre. Have you seen that? Yeah, I've seen that. But I have another way to resolve the lawsuit.

Okay, so when Elon was beefing with Zuck, do you remember when they were going to go in the Octagon? They were going to fight it out. They were going to do UFC, mixed martial arts battle. Do you remember what they were fighting over? No. Isn't that hilarious? Do you remember what they were fighting over?

No. I can't remember. I can't remember the fight. But I looked it up, and they were fighting because Mark Zuckerberg was about to launch threads. And Elon was in this vulnerable position where he levered up to buy Twitter. and he bought it sort of at the top, and Twitter, and the whole market was down, and he was legally obligated to buy it. And so there was a lot of debt. There was a big question of like, what is he

going to do with Twitter? Is he going to be able to juice it and get the ad product working? All the advertisers were leaving. He was in a vulnerable position, and that's when Mark Zuckerberg was like, I'm jumping in with my competitor threads, and I'm leveraging the Instagram network. I'm really piping everyone in. It's a shot across the bow. And so, Elon said, we got to say, we got a Absolute dog. Yes, he put Connor in charge. And Elon took it personally and said, we got to settle this in the octagon. But it never happened.

They were thinking about doing the Coliseum. Dana White said, I'll officiate, I'll make it happen. I'm down. I'm into this. Never happened. But I was thinking, how can Sam and Elon settle their lawsuit that doesn't require a bunch of jurors in Oakland wasting a bunch of time to courtroom? They got to settle on the track. I thought you're going to say pay-per-view as well.

No, no, no. Obviously they're not getting in the octagon. That's not going to happen. Track is good. Tesla, Tesla starts their own Formula One team. Sam's got his Claren F1. Yeah. I want to see Sam and the McLaren F1, Elon and the Tesla Plaid. I want them around the Nureberg ring, 24 hours. They got to go for 24 hours. And then they got to do, they got to do a quarter mile race. They got to do an illegal street race for sure. That's definitely going to happen. They also got to do it. a drift track. I want to see them both drifting. And they probably got to do a Pike's Peak as well. I want to hear both of them racing up Pike's Peak. And then you do sort of like best of five.

Like you do a 24 hours of Lamont, see who does best there, average that with whoever's quickest off the line in a quarter mile. Then drag race too. Maybe throwing an Indy 500. I want like a month of Elon and Sam just racing various vehicles against each other. And this would satisfy the people that are saying pause. Yeah, the AI pause. They're like, okay. Okay. We'll pause. Yeah. Yes, and it's a month of live streamed races between Sam and Elon. It's like Tour de France. Yes, exactly. They go from one place to another, do every different circuit.

Yeah, Bobby says, and a cannonball. They definitely have to do a cannonball. Just whoever gets from New York to L.A. faster, we drop the lawsuit. They win the lawsuit. That would be ideal. Anyway, Lambda. Lambda is the superintelligence cloud, building AI supercomputer for training inference with scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands. So, Rune posted, do your duty while weeping, if you must.

There's nothing clean and gentle in the crooked timber of human relations. And Gabriel says, every Rune tweet contains material, non-public information, and it's your job to get it out. And there has been a lot to read into the Rune tweets lately. He's been on a tear, but we won't, we won't speculate anymore. What else should we... In the journal. In the journal.

Why the tech world thinks the American dream is dying. Silicon Valley fears this is the last chance to amass generational wealth before AI makes money worthless. People are really into the underclass. This got a lot of comments. A lot of chatter. Thousand comments on the WSJ post. It's kind of a confusing subtitle because why would you, if AI makes money, like the people that think AI is going to make money worthless are the ones that are just going to go sit in the park, right? Is that the whole point?

Potentially. Let's get into it. Silicon Valley is filled with all sorts of dreams, but one of those wild. Wild-Eyed ideas long debated on subredits and in hacker houses is becoming a real-life nightmare. Will the AI boom be the last chance to get rich before AI makes money essentially worthless? One note. There's some people that love Mikey money so much. They will keep doing it for the love of the game.

It's just going to be like a sport. It'll be like going and putting on the cleats and playing a little soccer, right? You just want to run up the score sometimes. Even if money becomes worthless, you know people are still going to be looks maxing. It's going to be all status games. It's all going to be height maxing, various levels of inserts in the shoes. It's going to be a whole. No, I think what I'm saying is in that scenario would actually just be like a video game.

Like, yeah, I made a unicorn. Did it change my life? No. I just wanted to prove that I could do it. Sure, sure. It's like somebody that's running a marathon and... You'd like grow a unicorn? Like the bio company we talked to?

What do you mean to make a unicorn? Oh, like actually build a company. Just purely for the love of the game. Yeah, yeah. Because in this AI abundance area, you could potentially go to Claude Codd-Colid and say, don't make mistakes, make a unicorn. Make a unicorn. Genetically modify a horse.

Anyways, continuing. The argument is that tech companies and their leaders will become a class unto their own with infinite wealth. No one else will have the means to generate money for themselves because AI will have taken their jobs and opportunities. In other words, the bridge is about to be raised for those chasing the American dream and everyone is worried about being left on the wrong side. It's the kind of FOMO that on first blush seems to require a huge suspension of disbelief, but the idea's mere existence helps explain so the increasing class worries in California.

We're a growing movement to tax billionaires. We're calling this the business elimination tax, is the new branding, according to Lulu, is roiling the Democratic Party. Affordable housing is real concern, and the idea of the middle class seems out of reach. Yet it smacks of sci-fi thinking, but in San Francisco it feels real, and it's made more believable by the exploits of Elon Musk, the rise of open AI, Sam Altman, and warnings by Anthropics Dario

about Great Depression-like worker displacement. The transition will be bumpy, Musk said on this month on a podcast, will have radical change, social unrest, and immense prosperity. A little bit of a roller coaster ride. It's a universal high income, is his term for it.

And that's Musk's best case scenario. History is filled with technology booms that create new winners and losers. AI optimists like to point out that a rising tide has tended to lift all boats. What's being talked about now, massive job loss to automation and the need for public safety nets in the form of universal basic income paints a dramatically different future.

It's still not clear if there's an appetite for so-called UBI, which runs counter to many Americans bedrock ideals of personal achievement. Quote, I used to be excited about UBI, but I think people really need agency. They need to feel like they have a voice in governing the future and deciding where things go. Altman, opening I's chief executive, said last year when asked by a podcaster about how to create, how people will create wealth in the AI era, quote, if you just say, okay, AI is going to do everything

and then everybody gets a dividend from that, it's not going to feel good. You got to lock in, you got to grind. You didn't say that part. And I don't think it's what it would actually be good for people. If money is out, scarce assets like art could become key. We saw some massive results at a Ferrari auction this weekend. A bunch of Ferraris trading for maybe three over what people thought the market was going to be. Lots of speculation about what's going on there. But people are certainly getting in on luxury goods. If you don't have a scarcity of resources, it's not clear what purpose money has, he said at a conference last year. More recently, Musk suggested people shouldn't even worry about saving for retirement predicting AI will provide health care and entertainment.

You like that, Tyler? No, I was just going to say, I think, I've heard out Anthropic, at least. A lot of people don't contribute to their 401K for these reasons. Interesting. Still, it also helps that if you've been there a while, your company went from sub-10 billion dollar valuation to $500 in the span of a few years. You're not like, it's like, oh, I better, I'm so worried I haven't added much to my 401K. Yeah.

But. Okay, that's fair. Maybe you don't want to contribute to your 401K, but if you want to change, the world, you gotta raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. We're very pleased to be partnered with the New York Stock Exchange where you can go and change the world by raising capital. Let's finish this out. Weeks later, social media posts on X and LinkedIn and Facebook began claiming Nvidia's Jensen Wong said something similar. The CEO, these breathless posts claimed was warning, quote, the period from 2025 to 2030 may be the last major chance for

everyday people to build wealth through technology. Scary stuff, except Jensen, he didn't say it. Rather, his numerous public appearances in the past few months have been filled with talk about the potential for AI to be more of an equalizing force for technology. Quote, we're going to have a wealth of resources, things that we think are valuable today that in the future are just not that valuable because it's automated, he told Joe Rogan last month. It can afford, it can be hard to sort fact from fiction in an era of technology that seems pulled straight from an Ian Banks novel, and backers of AI companies have billions, if not trillions of reasons to hope their gambols aren't just once in a generation jackpots, but once in a human existence.

Further contributing to the FOMO in San Francisco is the expectation that local AI companies, such as Open AI and Anthropic will soon go public, minting many more millionaires. After the New York Times ran a headline this past week about a wave of mega IPOs expected this year, Local real estate agent, Rohan Dar, posted on X, may I humbly suggest you buy your house in San Francisco before this? It is interesting. I feel like the S.F. housing market has really been through some crazy gyrations because it was way down for a little bit.

And yes, I mean, I agree. I expect it goes way up. The tech entrepreneur, who was once part of Y Combinator years ago, told me he was drawn to real estate in part because of a belief new AI wealth will fuel a housing boom, or as he predicted last year, the mother of all. Back booms is coming. Get some while you can. Well, thank you to Tim. One of the comments here is interesting. Somebody, Jason Barger, says,

When I graduated college in 1999, I remember those pursuing teaching being mocked for going into an obsolete field. The internet was going to replace teachers. Some thought it would replace educational institutions themselves. Anyways. Well, we have Jordan Schneider from China Talk in the Restory Room. Before we bring him in, let me tell you about turbopuffer, serverless vector in full-tech search. Built from first principles on optic storage, vast 10x cheaper and extremely scalable. Let's bring Jordan Schneider in to the TBP in Ultradown. Jordan, how are you doing?

Good to see you. I am doing amazing. I'm so glad to be here. I'm just love listening to your ad reads. They're truly the best ad reads on the planet. Thank you. I appreciate it. There's no competition.

We love ads. Careful what you say. John is really tempted to start doing them during guest interviews. and I'm like, I don't know if we want to. We've said, like 30 minutes is a lot of time to hang out with Jordan. We might need a break halfway through, slip in an ad. Every once in a while I do it, specifically, if a VC is on and they're pumping their bags and one of the bags that they're pumping happens to be a sponsor, why not slip in an ad read?

Yeah, why not be confused about it? Why not be a little on the nose bit? John, I give you the pass. I give you the pass. I'm ready for it. I want to see the creativity. Well, if there's a lull in the conversation, expect an ad read. But anyway.

Dude, you seem pretty happy, right? Yes. What's going on? You're like in the best mood ever for a TVBN appearance. Do you get a vacation? What's new with you? I'm actually in a terrible mood because the bills just fired Sean McDermott, our Godhead coach for the past nine years.

It's some Game of Thrones shit. The GM is like, you know, knifed him in the back. He's now got a promotion. And I was asking Chat GPT and Claude what the correct tech analogy would be to explain that. to the TVPN audience. And there was not a good one. So I guess AGI.

And back up for the viewers, who are the bills? The Buffalo Bills are an American football team. It plays in Western New York. They've had a great run. They have a wonderful quarterback. Everyone should root for them. They have a lovable loser reputation,

never won a Super Bowl, and have been on a generational run. They've been the second most winning team over the past 10 years, can't seem to get over the hump, and we can talk about something else. I know this is not. So I just looked at 12 teams have never won a Super Bowl? Is that like, imagine being in the-

A lot of them are new. A lot of them are newer. Jacksonville, Jaguars, for example. Okay. Yeah. But the bills, we've been there for the beginning. Jaguars, Cardinals. It's a lot of teams.

I'm glad we get to do it. You know, it's a, it's a, this is like the debate among, among, how do you watch football? Like, do you want your kids to suffer? Okay. Oh,

how do I watch football? Like, do you do TV now? Do you do the David Senra and like you lean forward and you just like really focus like this? Or are you kind of like writing the newsletter? It's a family event.

And I think the level like are myself, my brother and my father's levels of intensity of fandom have evolved over the years. I have started to lean back a little bit. But when the playoffs, come around, I am screaming and cursing and getting very heated again. So I kind of like taper in and over the course of the season until they inevitably rip my heart out, not only with Evers on the field, but apparently errors in the management side of things as well. But anyways, we'll see.

We can talk about China if you want. I also have some media criticism of you guys I want to do. Okay, yeah. We can talk about that. I'm just glad that you're coming on blackpilled about sports as opposed to geopolitics. because... Oh, I'm sure he's black-billed about geopolitics, too.

But at least you didn't lead off with it because if you were, if you came on here and you were like, invasion of Taiwan's imminent, it's all... Wait, why don't you give us the geopolitical comp

for whatever the bills just did? I don't even remember. They like, let, you know, let go the head coach. It's Operation Paper Club. You know, you know, here's my analogy, here's my analogy, okay?

So, like, talking about invading Greenland is what Trump wants you to do. I don't think he's going to do it, but like the thing that gets him jazzed up is people being upset about crazy ideas he has in the pushback. And this, I think the fascinating analogy here is the whole Rokana saga that we've had over the past month or two. Because like the amount, like this is what he wanted to happen.

He is not dumb. He is a politician who has a national presence and has ambitions. And what he wants to do is. as the Silicon Valley representative, like, there is a risk for him in a potential 2028 Democratic primary of saying, oh, you're just in the bag for these guys. So having, like being able to sort of manufacture this enemy of all these, like, rich billionaires who, hey, by 2029 when no one has jobs, or 2028, 27, when no one has jobs anymore, like, and we have two more years of tech pros running the White House, like, the Q score

of that segment of society may be down. Like having all these people on the record saying, we're going to take him down. We want to run against him. He's going to take our money, which by the way is something a lot of Americans I don't think would be all that upset about. And like, yes, your median TBPN listener

understands the nuances of taxing unrealized gains may not be the best thing for innovation. But like the ease at which this entire ecosystem was baited, I just found to be fascinating. And it's kind of the same thing with one. I think that's a good, I think it's generally good. take because if you actually press, you know, anybody that's actually press row, like, he has no

defense for his policy stance on this. Like, he, he actually cannot defend it and, and stay logically coherent, right? Like, it's like he's running, he really is, it seems like he's running like a bit. But since, but since when has that matter in politics? I don't know, like the Kennedy Nixon debates or something. Like, yeah, he is now setting himself up. against billionaire capitalist overlords who are apparently on the other side of him and hate him and want to do everything to bring him down. And like that is a winning play for him.

And these folks are so scared of their bags and they're so confident that like, oh, like they say something and then it will happen. And no, there won't be second order consequences that it was a fascinating saga to watch on the sideline. Yeah, he's on a whole media tour now. He's done a ton of, he's popping up everywhere. and he's definitely taking advantage of the moment.

He's done really well. Because he's got some haters because he's smart. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. He's playing the heel. He studied, he sat down and he watched a bunch of WWE game tape, and he's like, okay, I know what I got to do. Yeah, yeah. Okay, all right.

This brings me, this brings me to my media criticism. Yeah, yeah. And I think, like, look, you guys have gotten a lot better, and the show has evolved, And the centrality of it in like American discourse is really something to behold. And with that, it comes responsibility. And I think you are slowly but surely maturing into that. I mean, the big moment you had a few months ago making fun of Cluelly and everything is an important part of that maturation process.

And, you know, even that- Are you talking about the case against rage bait? Yeah, the case against Rage-Bade. And sort of as you're doing more of this, like, you know, pushing yourselves to do like more independent thinking and writing with the essays every day, you're going to have more politicians on. You're going to have more and more of this is going to be trending towards that. I'm sure all the presidential candidates are going to want to come on. Same with the 26 candidates. I just think it's really cool.

And politics matters to this world, whether we like it or not. and watching you guys kind of like grow into being, having the stature and comfort to ask harder questions of guests, I think is really cool. So I just want to give you kudos. Yeah. I'm excited to see where all that goes. I like that.

You're trying to rage bait us into politics. Yeah. So I mean like, so you're 100% right. There is a weird dynamic where, at least with our viewership, we actually do notice a decline in the metrics when we talk about politics and have politicians on. And like some of the chat will just be like, go back to talking about like, you know, space or attack or whatever.

But I understand it. It's going to happen. At the same time, I really enjoyed Joe Wisenthal on China Talk. And I particularly liked Joe's point that on the hard question issue, people often have this fantasy that if you're talking to someone, you're like, okay, here's a hard question. Are you a fraud? They'll just be like, you got me. I am a fraud. like you ask the hard question like I can't say I can't lie when when in fact we actually did ask

something we actually did do that once and it did work and and ironically it worked with joe wisenthal too because on odd lots with Matt Levine they asked SBF like how does this work and sbf was kind of like it's a Ponzi scheme and and Matt Levine says so you're in the Ponzi business and it's a good business and he says yeah and so he kind of confessed so there is a there is a way to ask a hard question but but but but but but but but I'm saying can we talk about about B2B sass instead. Yes, we can. Restream. One live stream, 30 plus destinations.

If you want to multistream, go to restream.com. That's some B2B SaaS for you, folks. Also, applicable to China Talk. Maybe we'll get you live streaming this year. Anyway, so give us how you process the hard questions. Well, before that, I think the question I would ask you, because people ask us, like, the topics that you discuss, become, you may not be approaching them from a political angle, but they have political implications.

Like, it's your duty to talk about them. And my response historically has been, obviously, tech influences politics. Obviously, it's going to be, like, a large part of the debates in 2028 in the midterms. And, and, but that being said, I've always seen our role as, like, talk with really smart people and get an understanding of the individual players, the teams, the companies, the startups, the public companies, and they get an understanding of the industries. And then there's an opportunity for people to do kind of like meta political analysis, even based on that understanding.

Like something that we've, you know, people... Like, if you... I think defining it as powering politics as... a little too narrow. I think it's more like there are aspects to all of this, which are bigger than will this company grow its revenue at this, you know, at this rate and will these guys beat out. That's exactly what I want to talk about, though. And so like, you have to hold me back. I want to talk about revenue. Well, yeah, so I'll give you, I'll give you another example. So I wrote maybe a week or so ago,

like why would Americans be excited about AI? Like there's a video on Instagram, and I'm sure there's hundreds of Sam Altman saying, AI is probably going to kill everyone, but it's going to create some cool companies in the meantime, right? Like that is like a mainstream, like, video that millions and millions and millions of people have seen, and they'll use ChatGBT,

and they'll use some other AI product, and they're like, this is cool, but I actually like the world, and I don't want, I be down to like pot. Like so, so part of it, part of it's like, I definitely think it's our responsibility or worth talking about questions like that, which is like you're not giving people a real reason to be, you can't say like we're curing cancer or AI is going to cure cancer and then simultaneously say all these other things and expect people to just broadly say like,

you guys are the greatest thing to ever happen to humanity, like keep it up. Right. Like why would- Totally. Yeah, I mean, I think coming back to a point that John made of like, like asking the hard questions is not, does not necessarily conflate with being a dick to your guests. I mean, just recently, like, I had this thing that went viral. I was having two folks on the China Commission on and they were talking about like the downsides of, you know, China developing. And one of the things they said is like, wouldn't it be really bad if China. cured cancer before the U.S.

I was like, really? Like, are we sure about that one? Look, I want to save humanity, but I don't want anyone to save it harder than me. Exactly. But, you know, and kind of getting to that point in the conversation of like exploring what your views are at the limit doesn't necessarily mean that you have to say,

oh, don't you, you know, you want to kill grandmas or whatever. It's like, you know, viewers aren't stupid. They can kind of read into that what they please or like, you know, make a decision based on what the guest says. But you do need to like take the guests there and bring them, as you guys said, to conversations which are a little deeper than, you know, revenue targets and new products. And I do, I do enjoy those types of conversations with business leaders. I just, maybe I'm just new to the talking to a politician, but it feels like it's entirely, it's like an entirely, it's like an entirely. different game. Like the type of conversation we're having right now is like we're both podcasters, we're just talking back and forth. It's great. I can get a CEO on and they're,

they're there to talk about a specific launch. And it's halfway. It's some conversation. We might be able to get them to crack up. We rang a gong. We do a bunch of stuff to like engage them. I know a little bit of lore. There's stuff that can get there. But the politicians, at least for right now, like I don't know the lore. I don't know all their positions. And so it can just be, I just feel like I'm struggling to keep the car on the track. Like I'm not even, I'm like, I'm spinning out a lot. I'm spinning my tires a lot. The cool thing with the CEO is like they're playing the game of capitalism. And whatever they're saying, you know at the end of the day for the most part that they just want to make their company bigger. Yeah. Whereas with a politician,

like Roe Kana is talking about, you know, these insane policies that will, you know, make California, you know, descend into, you know, a tourism and agriculture based economy. And and I don't want that for California. I've lived here my whole life. My family has been in California for over 100 years. It's very important to me. And I'm not even like, I'm not tapped into this whole Washington thing. And it makes sense when you say like, okay, he's just doing this to like prove that he's stood up to the tech guys and so that he can go on his presidential run.

But I have no interest in like really engaging in that specifically because there's enough enterprise SaaS to talk about. And there's also a lot of good media coverage in politics, or at least there's a lot of, there's a lot of media coverage in politics. Like there's so many huge outlets that do huge numbers, and there's plenty of outlets on the left and the right for all sorts of things. And also, it feels like a lot of the politicians are crossing over. For like, for a while, there was this criticism that, like, there was, like, the right podcast echo chamber and the left mainstream media echo chamber. But in the last year, it feels like there's been pretty massive crossover, whether it's like Gavin Newsom having conversations with people on the right,

the New York Times platform. Well, the Moderates over at the Nalk Boys. Left. Yeah, the Nalk Boys have platformed everyone, you know. Where is your Nalk Boys crossover? We got it. We got the Happy Dad Seltzer right over there. We love the Nogh boys over here.

Yeah, we had John Chahidi on the show live in person, in the Ultronome. When are you getting to the Ultronome? You've got to come out. The steward of the Noghuis. Next time you're in L.A. You got to come hang out in person? TPD. It's great. Anyway. I got more topics.

you guys. We can talk Nvidia PR stumbles. We got my Claude Code games. Okay, okay. I want to hear about the NVIDIA. I want to hear about the NVIDIA the Stumbles. Is this Jensen specifically? Walk me through what you're thinking.

No. So I guess it was last week in the House of Representatives there was an act introduced called the AI Overwatch Act, which basically would essentially start to require congressional approval for AI exports, certain AI exports in the same way that Congress has a role to play when it comes to exporting arm sales abroad. So if you, you know, you sell fighter

Jets to Israel or Saudi Arabia or Taiwan, Congress has to like give a nod to that. Sure. And within two days, you saw Lara Lumer, Brad Parscale, and like a long tail of 10 to 15 other right-wing influencers. basically all tweet the same thing. A lot of phrases were repeated. House Republicans are being lied to. We need to win the I-I race. This is going to strip Trump of his foreign policy powers. But the funniest part was that AI was spelled not a capital I, but a lowercase L across every single one of these.

That's crazy. So I have a story like this. There was a, the, I mean, to be clear, we do need to win the owl race as well. We need as many Al Frids as possible. We need Al in charge. We need total control of Al. We got an owl in at Sequoia, Alfred Lynn. That's right.

There's a couple other Alberts and Al Frids all over America. We need to capitalize on them. I was once, I once gave some, what ended up being bad advice to a portfolio company. They were, like, asking me, like, how should I, how should I handle, like, my, launch and I was like, you know, basically you need to prepare your investors that you're going to launch and then encourage them to share it and maybe gives them some thought like starters on like what they could share because they're going to be busy. They're going to be in a meeting. And so it very clearly was like rewrite in your own words. Like these are just examples.

And then and then everyone just copied the first one. Right. Six or seven people just like copy and paste it. Nope. Just like and then of course. Yeah. Yeah. There's been a couple of tweet that I've seen hit the timeline from people who are clearly very busy where it, where the whole quote tweet starts with a bullet point and you're like, I know what's going on there. Yeah, it's become its own meme format. This would be a good bit. We should, we should run this as a bit. We get like 20 of us to like all share. Yes, yes. Yeah, yeah, we should all quote the same thing about the latest China talk episode. What's that like a Italian point? Jordan is a truly masterful interviewer.

parentheses, please feel free to rewrite this in your own voice. No, we got to do it for the Italian restaurant that's shutting out. Oh, Elfranio. It's like Elphorna is one of the most storied institutions, a Sequoia backed company. It is absolutely imperative that it stays operational. It needs a taxpayer bailout. Yeah, the taxpayer bailout. The treasury should wire a billion dollars right now for 10%.

Wait, so tie this to Nvidia. You said Nvidia was involved in this. Explain. Well, I don't know who else is paying Laura and Brad Parscale. But why doesn't NVIDIA want this to happen? Oh, well, because they want to win the AI race, not the Al race. They want to win the IRA race. Okay, so they want to be able to sell internationally as freely as possible with his little oversight

and maybe just a rubber stamp from the president gets it done. if it goes to Congress is going to be more complicated. And to be clear, this seems like something a PR team, a PR firm ran, where they're like engaged by Nvidia. It sounds like I'm just speculating. It could be engaged by anyone in the company engages a PR. Yeah. And they're like, we're going to engage key opinion leaders.

Sure, sure, sure. And then, of course, you get. As soon as the KOLs get involved, it's all over. Interesting. Yeah. Okay. I mean, to be clear, this bill would put these restrictions for exports to Russia, Iran, China, and the DPRK.

So I don't know. But look, it's funny because there's been this real learning arc with Nvidia and Washington where, I mean, as of three years ago, there was like one person in D.C. It was really not a company that engaged deeply with D.C. And then October 2022, you have these export controls and all of a sudden this firm has to ramp up. and what they've kind of seen, or the success that they had over the course of 2025,

was basically Jensen doing the job. We were looking, we were looking earlier this year on how much they actually spend on lobbying. Really low. Super low, like single digit millions, like whenever I checked. But travel.

And I was like that Jensen's gas bill could very well be higher than how much they're actually spending on, like, lobbying. But to finish the thought. So, you know, okay, they've got the White House one over, they've got the president one over, but the problem is the idea of exporting chips to China is not popular in Congress. You've had a number of bipartisan

bills be introduced in the Senate and the House, which have basically tried to cramp Trump's style when it comes to how he wants to sell these chips to the PRC. And so, you know, starting to do, starting to play the, and they've been able to actually kill one or two of these bills, but the momentum does seem to be building. So having a flailing response like this is like, yeah, kind of cringe makes for some good TPP laughs, but also is indicative of the fact that, like, yeah, they are worried enough about what's happening on the Hill with respect to AI exports that they feel like they need to start to play these sorts of games.

But what if we sell a ton of GPUs to North Korea and they cure cancer? Look. Would that be so bad? Kim John. What's North Korea's AI? Al strategy. Their owl strategy is probably all fine-tuning on the glorious leader. He's absolutely right.

He does. He does hit a hole in one every time he golfs. Just hard-coded into the weights. Back to media criticism. I love that Vanity Fair piece and like the last paragraph where I forget what it was, but there was some funny tweet. And it's like, this is the reason that all these other ones fail is because, You guys are talented and you guys are very funny.

And, like, that is a, it's a thin diagram of not a lot of people who can, like, check all these boxes. So anyways, hats off to you. Yeah. I mean, hats off to transistor radio. It's one of the funniest podcasts ever. It's amazing. Every time you guys drop one, I turn it on immediately. It's fantastic.

Never quit. It's amazing. Sorry. Did you want to move on to something else? Because I still want to get the update on just broad China, Taiwan. We talked to someone who was particularly blackpilled, seemed like they were very upset with America's capacity to protect Taiwan. And I was wondering if you've seen any movement there. From my perspective, it feels like it's been kind of quiet.

All of 2025 was sort of quiet. I don't know if that's just me focusing on U.S. tech and AI race stuff and I'm out of the loop, but would love just sort of your lay of the land on U.S.-China, Taiwan negotiations. Sure. So I think the big story of, I mean, there was a lot of drama over the course of 2025. Liberation Day we forgot. There is a whole other arc, which of course included 150% tariffs on China, which got negotiated and down, then got ramp back up. Then you had rare earth controls. And then finally, we've sort of seemed to reach a bit of a equilibrium. Trump's supposed to go there. And I think March or April. Nobody was. really wants to rock the boat too much between now and then. But specifically on the Taiwan issue, no blockade, no invasion, no, like, you know, firing back and forth or drones or conflict that I remember seeing anything like that. And that was sort of like the worst case scenario was that maybe they were going to start

with some sort of soft blockade and it wasn't going to be violent, but it was going to really escalate the situation too, like we're repositioning ships. Yeah. I mean, this has been one of my polymarket trade recommendations over the past few years is no No war invasion. I'm not particularly surprised. We've had something crazy. Look, I think she sees a lot of upside in the direction of travel of a lot of things.

And yes, China has problems, but like starting World War III. I mean, right now he has like a pretty good equilibrium with the U.S. and that all of the kind of like we had a sort of slow but steady creep up in controls over the course of. of, you know, really starting and towards the second half of Trump won. And that with what she has been able to do by kind of throwing the rare earth thing back in America's face to stop that. And, you know, I think who's the really old guy who does trade in the White House? But who like had the – he says like dumplings are bad or something. I can't remember his name.

This is your world. Peter Navarro. Peter Navarro. You're like, you guys are ready to cover D.C. We're like, couldn't tell you who works there. Dumpling, man. Google this dumpling quote while. I'm like, Peter Navarro dumplings. Okay.

I have heard of him. I have heard of him. I'm sure he's a nice guy. He said, look, like it's a different chessboard between, from what it was a while ago. And the fact that China both has leverage and is willing to, and more importantly, is willing to use it and understands that using it will get the U.S. to back down, I think, is a new dynamic, which we had. really seen in the trade war arc of Trump won and then in the Biden administration. The one thing

that I do want to flag to you guys a little bit is this saga currently going on between Japan and China where the new PM, Prime Minister of Japan made some not super offhanded remark basically saying like a problem that China has with Taiwan is a problem that we have and it's very likely that we be involved in any kind of scenario. Okay. And this has basically been the goal of American presidents for decades now to kind of get Japan off of its butt, get its spending more on its military, and get it, you know, really part of the equation to dissuade, to like make the balance of military power in the

region such that China has no interest in going into Taiwan. And what you sort of saw in response to the Trump. administration was kind of nothing. No big statement, no saying, hey, we're here to support you. Basically, Trump called she and then Trump called Takaichi saying, hey, chill out. And look, like, they just had a nice visit, the defense minister, Koizumi, the son of the old prime minister, who, like, is like a hot shot 37 or something. You guys should have him on. They had a nice meeting. We say that the alliance is okay. But I did find it a little disappointing that, like, we're not kind of cheering them on when the whole thesis of the Trump

administration is like we want to step back and have our allies do more of the heavy lifting. You're famous for the mandate of heaven tier list amongst AI labs. Have you been feeling that China labs have been falling off? It feels like they've

certainly been making less sort of dramatic breakthroughs like the original Deep Seek. Manis is now an American company. Let's go. Let's here for Zuck. There was an article in the and the quid models are great, but you know, It just doesn't feel like it's in the conversation as like, this is an existential risk to open AI or anthropic or or Google. Like the real like heavy hitters are like the main labs in America and then even XAI and MSL are doing exciting things.

And so you have like five significant efforts. And it feels like the open source narrative has sort of like fallen back. It's still there, but it's not nearly as existential or just as embarrassing. as it used to be, where, when, you know, a hedge fund could spend 10 mil and defeat Mark Zuckerberg. Yeah. I mean, I think the big thing that folks need to remember when it comes to the U.S. in China is on the talent side, yeah, roughly equivalent. Maybe the U.S. has an edge because we can pay higher salaries. On the data side, you know, still probably a wash. But when it comes to compute and the ability to deploy these models, there's really no contest, as well as capital

able to be put behind this whole arc. There's really not a contest between the U.S. and China. I think current numbers are like TSM, like, SMIC and Huawei production is like one-fifteenth. What Nvidia plus TSM, plus TSM, plus all the A6 can can pop. out. And, you know, this matters less in a future where you aren't kind of using all the available compute. But look, people are going to come up with ways to use this stuff. I'm doing so much dumb shit on Claude Code every day. So is the best of the economy. How optimized is your Claude code set up? I'm sure you spent all weekend. Not at all. I just use the terminal and like

spin up fun apps. But but the fact of the matter is like I think it is it is, this is why the AI chip exports are so concerning is I really do think like the ecosystem with the compute and the capital is going to be able to drive ahead because then you'll have these great kind of reinforcing loops of productivity gains and growth then leading to kind of, you know, more development, more compute and so on and so forth. And the fact of the matter is that China, even though it has really good engineers that can train good models, is compute constrained when it comes to development in deployment. We just translated this really interesting panel that happened in China with, I think it was like the CEOs of four of the top labs, so Jirpoo, Quinn, Mini Max, and someone from

10-7. And basically all of them were like, look, we are so jealous of Open AI and Anthropic. Like, we have to use all of our compute to deploy stuff just to kind of keep the business going, like the amount of, you know, the scale at which they can deploy a compute, the amount of, the of data they're getting from their users, and then the ability of these firms to run experiments to kind of put into the next stuff and get to the next breakthrough really means that in the current paradigm, America and the broader kind of Western AI ecosystem has a real edge. And throwing that away to export a handful of chips to China and my idea, Pyrrhic vision that we can still hook them on NVIDIA seems a little silly.

but overall, yeah, it's been a pretty good six months for American air. Let's go. One more question. Can you give us a take on Canada's New Deal with China, specifically the trade. You get soybeans. I get infinite cheap EVs. What's going on there? My sense is it's a bit of a bait as well.

Perhaps a Roecona play to get. the White House's attention and maybe a little escalate to deescalate. What's interesting is, like, I think the amount of EVs they're letting in is pretty low. So I would not be shocked if this was more of a negotiating tactic to get the USMCA in a place which is more favorable to the US. Canada buys around two million new vehicles a year. I think the cap is at like 50,000 initially, and then it goes up to 70,000. Okay. Yeah, that's not. That's 2%. Yeah, not huge.

Yeah. It'll be fun seeing the Yang Wang U-9 jumping over potholes in Toronto. Saskatchewan. That's where they got the potholes. Anyway, thank you so much. Only waste men will drive, though. For coming on the show, Jordan.

I'm glad to hear that your 2026 is off to a great start. Can't wait to have you back on the show. I know. And let us know when you're in L.A. I wish we had more time. Hey, we're about to have Dan, the founder of T1 Energy, the solar manufacturing company that previously was Chinese owned, and they were forced to sell it.

I believe I have the history right. So you might enjoy listening into this one because when I saw the T1 Energy had a video go out and it was just showing like this like incredible, like high volume advanced manufacturing, I was like, America's back. And I heard that it was not quite built by it. Chinese plan. Anyway. But it's American now.

Going through transformation. Anyway. Anyways, have a great rest of your week. We'll talk to you soon. Cheers. Bye. Go bye.

Century. Century shows developers, what's broken and helps them fix it fast. That's why 150,000 organizations use it to keep their apps working. Our next guest is Dan from T1 Energy. We're going to bring him in in just a few minutes.

I don't think he's ready yet. He's not ready yet. False alarm. We will tell you, we'll give you some more news. The New York Stock Exchange, our partner today, they're announcing that the development of a platform for trading and on-chain settlement of tokenized securities, the New York Stock Exchange's new digital platform will enable tokenized trading experiences, including 24-7 operations, instant settlement,

orders sized in dollar amounts, and stable coin-based funding. Its design combines the New York Stock Exchange's cutting-edge pillar matching engine with blockchain-based post-trade systems. This is obviously very exciting. And we've been talking about 24-7 trading happening a long time. The interesting thing to track is that the volumes, even when you enable overnight trading, the volume is not the same during the day. And the reason is because a lot of the traders work 9 to 5 in New York hours and they

have families and they want to go home and sleep. And so some hedge funds have set up overnight desks, but they basically take less risk during the night because there's less people on staff. We can't escalate. Oh, some trade's happening. We think that there's news that's happened at 2 a.m. We think this might be mispriced, and we should be trading. But we don't have the rest of our risk team here to price it, so we're going to be a

little bit more risk off. So the volume is much lower. So I'm interested to see where this goes and how much the volume ramps up. But obviously, it's a very exciting development for the New York stock. And ultimately, this is still going to be subject to regulatory approvals. Yes, yes. And the bill that's been, we've got to have. have somebody on to talk about because there was some beef going back and forth between

Coinbase. Not happy with how the market structure bill was coming together. Yeah, yeah. Well, let me tell you about phantom cash. Fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen and spend with the phantom card. Lulu has proposed that we don't call it the billionaire tax. We don't call it the wealth tax. We call it the business termination act. And, you know, if Moses says the Job Destruction Act. If people are against it and they're rebranding it against, you know, they need an anti. The people that are pro this act will need to rebrand it as well. And so I think that they should do like the, the grind incentive initiative,

something like that to reframe it as it's a, you know, we're not, it's not a billionaire tax. It just incentivizes everyone to grind harder. You're 5% down. Now you've got to build yourself out of that whole. It's almost like a prestige in Call of Duty. Exactly. Yeah, prestige. You've got to start again. Exactly. Maybe they should. It's prestigious for being rich. How many times do you prestige? Yes, yes. Maybe if you, so they could call it the 10x tax, where it's a wealth tax, but it only applies

to people that are not 10xing their net worth annually. That's true. Because like, you really, like, ideally, if you're trying to build wealth, you should 10x it, 10x your portfolio, 10x it again, and then 10x it again. It'll be in a really good spot. Yes. And so we should have, if we're going to have government regulation, we will, we want it to encourage, you know, people to really...

It should ramp up every year. They should... One percent, then two percent, then three percent. Eventually, everyone has nothing. But the last man standing is kind of like a, you know, a... What do they call it? Badge of honor? I don't know.

I lost it. Anyway, let's go to Flo. Flo Crivellio, Al-Timor, has been on the show multiple times. He says, almost every single founder I know in San Francisco, including me, has reached the same conclusion over the last few weeks. that it's only a matter of time before we have to leave California. I love it here. I truly do want to stay, and until recently intended to be here all my life,

but now it's obvious that we won't be possible. Whether that's two, five, or ten years from now, there's no future for founders in California. But maybe he'll get a spot in inclined village. Maybe he'll domicile in Miami or Nevada. There are plenty of ways, and I would be surprised if everyone fully relocates. I think people will be spending a lot of time in San Francisco, but probably less than 180 days. We'll see.

Yeah, it makes absolutely no sense. Every state in the country wants these kind of companies to be created. We've got to talk about some other better news. How well do you know Preppy? Let's play a quiz. There's a quiz in the Wall Street Journal. How well do you know Preppy? It is in the timeline.

You can pull it up and play live. but I'm going to read this to you. So it's 10 questions on the cross, Jay Press and more. We're going to see how you do. So the first question, which is, which of the following is not a preppy approved label? Lily Pulitzer, Jay Press, Versace, or L.L. Bean? Tyler, do you know? I'm going to go, what is Versace.

Nailed it. He got it. He got it. What type of shoes are you wearing right now? That's a preppy shoe. The term preppy is used as a slur in which canonical prep novel. A, the Catcher in the Rye, B, love story, C, a separate piece, or D, the Great Gatsby. What do you think it is? I think I've only read the Great Gatsby. I'm going to say,

you've ever read Catcher in the Rye? No, we didn't do that. I don't even love story. Yes, you got it. Love story. Wow. Okay, name the non-preppy sport, the least crappy sport. Volleyball, rugby, lacrosse, or squash? Volleyball. Nailed it. Nailed it again. Which New York Cool Girl collaborated with G.H. Bass and Oweigen Design? Eddie Sedgwick, Diane Brill, Chloe Svigney, or Leandra Medine Cohen? The last one. No.

Chloe Zvigney. Although I thought she was in L.A., but I guess she's also a New York Cool Girl. Which shades of pink and green should be combined for optimum prepiness? Fuchsia and Forest Green, baby pink and emerald, Hot pink and lime green or Cirris and Chartreuse. I'm going to go baby pink and... Emerald? Wrong.

Hot pink and lime green. Rookie. I think. I have to flip the whole page over to see the other side. Five is C, which is, yeah. C is hot pink and lime green. Let's see what else we got in here. What is the origin of the term urban hot bourgeoisie?

Henry James is the part. portrait of lady, Wilts, Witt Stillman's Metropolitan, Patricia Highsmith, the talented Mr. Ripley, Andy Warholz, the philosophy of Andy Warhol. These are hard. Really hard. Have you ever been into dressing preppy? I don't know. Not really. I've never had any sort of like lane and just put on clothes as they're made available to me. Anyway, there's some other good news. And Shopify LMP2 is back in action for the Daytona Rolex 24. New team, new co-drivers. Still, Toby Lutkey and DHH at the wheel, now riding with Rails and O-Markey 2.

They got their whole livery. It's amazing Ruby on Rails base camp on there, the shop app and Shopify on the livery. It's green. Okay, we might have to do it. We might have to ride with them. We might have to do the 24-hour watch-along live stream. This might be the one that we need to do. This is absolutely amazing.

I'm always excited when I see. It looks fantastic. The race, let me confirm, is going to be later this month. Actually. There's also a post by Toby Lukke. Good testing days. Can't wait for the Rolex 24 next week. This photo is incredible.

This is this weekend. So it's 24 hours. They'll be racing. And yeah, Toby Lukie. He needs to do a racing podcast. He should go on Vincent. Lando Landino's show. He's done shows about Starcraft, all about gaming.

I've never heard him talk specifically about racing, but what a sport, what a sport. Finn.a.I. It's the number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to handle your customer's support, go to fin.a.i. We should pull up some of the new livery that was announced. There was some... Gabe was sharing earlier. he said that Zinn made it on to Ferrari this year. They're allowing a nicotine sponsorship.

No, no way. And Haas, if you pull up this post, somebody was showing off Haas' new livery from above. I'm in the timeline. You can see it looks almost uncannily like the top of this toilet. What? You see that? No.

Oh, wait. Yeah, what is that? I mean, it's just part of the arrow on the top part. Anyways, I think the Hoss car looks fantastic. Yeah. I was like that it's an American machinery company, right, Hoss? And yeah, it's just a cool little, you know, obviously not a car maker. You can't go buy a Hoss and drive it around.

But still a lot of lineage and logic to it. I mean, Red Bulls have been so good that it sort of tracks for me anyway. It doesn't seem jarring or anything. that you have an energy drink car on the grid. But I feel like I still like the Ferrari. I'm excited that Audi and Cadillac are getting in. I like what the... Cadillac's livery looks insane.

Have you seen it? Go and get it. I haven't seen the livery. I saw Vincenzo Landino posting some absolutely hilarious images of sort of what he thinks the Cadillac should look like. I don't know if we can pull up his... his post. I know he replies to all this stuff. What did he post? He posted some hilarious Cadillac livery that was

an AI image here. My neighbor sent me this photo of the new Cadillac F1 car. You got to see this, it's amazing. It's got the... Drop it in. I think it might be already in there. I think I got it. But if we can pull this as, he said, my neighbor actually did send me this photo that his friend sent him. I have no idea whose credit goes to. If this is yours, let me know. is this in the bottom of the timeline? Did it go through? Let's see. Yeah, it's here.

Look at that. That's incredible. It's so funny. It has to be AI, or did they actually race something at this at one point? I don't know. I sort of assume AI at this point. Who else is in the news? Three teams have now revealed their 2026 liverys.

Red Bulls looks a lot less shiny. When we saw them in Vegas, it felt very, very, perlescent, very like almost pink sparkle to it. This looks like a little more classic to me. Well, we should do, we should talk more through, speaking of cars, Porsche has suffered the biggest sales fall since 2009. People are not buying Porsches. The German sports car maker was hit by a lack of petrol variance for best-selling McCann and weak demand in China. So Porsche's sales slumped by a 10th last year, they lost 10% just in a single year, as the German sports car maker faced weaker than expected demand for its electric models and struggled in the Chinese market.

The company sold about 280,000 vehicles, which is down from 310,000 the year prior. That was the steepest slide since 2009 in the midst of the global financial crisis when deliveries fell by 13.7%. That makes sense. The economy's not doing well. People are going to stop buying Porsches. but the economy did well in 2025. So what's going on? We're going to dig into it.

The decline underlines the challenges ahead for the new Porsche chief executive, Michael Letters, who took the reins at the start of the year. The company has embarked on a restructuring program to reduce its production capacity and is in talks with trade unions in Germany about further savings. Portia last year was forced into a costly adjustment

to its model range, shifting the emphasis back to petrol and hybrid models and shelving plans for new electric vehicles following. Yeah, the market has just completely rejected. Do you think they will ever ship the, I can't even remember, what's their new hypercar? The one that is the, it goes Carrera GT, 19 Spider, and then it was the Mission E or Mission X. That was supposed to be the electric hypercar from Porsche, and it was rumored for years, and we saw a lot of the other hypercars. There was a whole idea of like, there's going to be a new Holy Trinity.

The Holy Trinity, of course, is what the 918 spider, the La Ferrari or the Enzo, and the P1. And then you kind of go back and you retcon a Holy Trinity out of the Carrera GT, the F40. Like, you kind of piece it together with the McLaren F1. Even though that wasn't really a trilogy, people sort of put those into like legendary bucket together. And there was this idea that, okay, maybe McLaren's coming out with a W1. That will be exciting. You have the F80. That's exciting. And then maybe Porsche will come in with something that's in the lineage of the CarrierGGT and the 918 spider.

And if they'd looked, if they'd read the room around the 918, it seemed like CarrierGT was way more popular. So maybe go back to that or do something there. Well, Ford said, hold my beer. Yeah. Because they're coming in with a new hypercar. That's true. Do we have any details? So they did confirm that Ford will be making a hypercar or supercar.

In 2027. And it's not just a continuation of the Ford GT. It's not a Ford GTB3 because there's been a number of those. We had the good fortune of seeing one on the track over the weekend. Looked beautiful out there. Performed very well. But back to Porsche while you looked that up. Last year's sales slump has been partly due to supply gaps for the 718 and the McCannes, its best selling model.

So they're not making enough of those. Porsche stopped selling petrol versions of both models in Europe over a failure to comply. with EU cybersecurity regulations? What? Whoa. They didn't, they got to get on Crowdstrike and decided against developing replacements

that would have met new standards. So they're down. It's a rough, they've had a number of really high growth years. They came roaring back after the 2009 global financial crisis. 2010, they were up 25%. 2011, they were up 20%.

They were putting up 20%. They were putting up 20% growth years for five years straight, basically. Then the last decade's been a little bit slower, but not contracting. And now we're way down, way off, way off peak, which is not good. So despite an increase in U.S. tariffs announced in 2025, North America was its best-performing region, down only a few hundred units compared with significant declines elsewhere. Sales collapsed by 16% in Germany, Porsche's home market, with a 13% decline for Europe. Do you want to give everyone an update on T1 Energy, Dan Markello, because I believe we're rescheduling.

Sorry, everybody. We're going to reschedule. There was a scheduling mix-up. It happens. So we'll get Dan back on. So the next guest will be Elliott from Dominion Dynamics at 125 in about five minutes. So I'm going to continue with this Porsche piece. Continuing with weak demand in China, where European car makers have found it increasingly

difficult to sell luxury vehicles amid growing domestic competition. also wait on the tally. In China, I mean, there's a lot of homegrown heroes. You're really excited about your national champion, whether it's Huawei or some phone maker. It seems a little silly, but the cars are cheap. They're great. They have fun, crazy features.

They can jump up and down. They can go zero to 60 in two seconds. They look exactly like Porsches. And if you're a local, you're just looking at the dollars and cents, and then also you're supporting your buddy who runs the company or builds it on the line, you know? Why not? by local. You know, it's popular over here. It's popular over there. So,

Porsche sold 41,000 Porsches in China, which has been down 26% on the previous year, and it's under half the total for 2022. So back in 2022, they were selling 80,000 cars. Now they're selling 40,000. That's not good. You want to be up into the right, and they are down into the right. Sorry. Yeah, I'm trying to figure out how much of a factor, according to registration data for the full year of 2025, Chinese-branded auto manufacturers sold approximately 60,000 to 70,000 vehicles in Germany.

That's still only 2.5% of the total German car market. But if that's eating into Porsche's sale of some of these kind of more entry-level EVs, could definitely be a real factor. Cool. Well, I believe we have Elliott in the restroom waiting room a little bit early. I see no reason not to bring him in as long as he's ready to hop into the TDPN Ultradome. Let's do it. Well, we bring him in.

How are you doing? What's happening? Good, guys. How are you? Great to have you on the show. Would love a quick intro on yourself and the company. Sure. Nice to meet you guys.

Elliot Pence. So, founder, CEO of Dominion Dynamics, Dominion's building distributed, distributed intradable mesh networks in the Arctic, amongst other things. That's kind of the wedge in. Very interesting. How do you start? What brings you to building something like this? Look, the Arctic is a huge challenge, as is very clear. Over the last couple of months, it's been kind of at the foreground of geopolitics.

Canada has underinvested in securing the Arctic. Awareness is core to securing it, and we're building for that. So we started in June of last year and I've built about a dozen products, deployed them a few times and I'm about deploy them again and just outside of the Northwest Passage. So the highest north of them. Very cool. So what does this actually, what does it actually look like in practice? These are hardware that is being deployed, but give me a sense of it more practically. Yeah. So it's basically, it's us building on top.

of Kott's system. So we're not building the hardware. We're using radios that are, you know, from mesh-tastic to persistent systems to Gottena to Silvis. We build software that sits on top of that RF that allows Rangers, which is Canada's kind of reservist force that exists across the country, but in particular in the Arctic, to capture more information from their environment. allows them to take videos, to take pictures, to do voice notes. We compress that information down and then manage that across a mesh network. And then we reinflate that data when it gets to a satellite backhaul and push it up into a common operating picture. Very interesting. So what, give me, give me a sense of how, how the Rangers even approach trying to secure and understand the Arctic.

I imagine it's like one ranger for every, you know, multiple thousand square miles. Like it's not a very large area. Imagine they can't have people everywhere. Yeah. Yeah, this is the fundamental challenge, right? There's 5,500 rangers across the country. Canada has a coastline of 200,000 kilometers. Their principal task is they do a sort of anomaly detection patrols every other week.

And on those patrols are often out for sort of 48 hours looking to see if they can find a nominally, whether that's like on roads, whether that's in the water, drones in the sky. But they're radioing that stuff back and they're capturing it in kind of an analog way. What we're building is a way for them to capture all that data, store it, and then to start thinking about, okay, well, what are some predictive processes that we could build into this community of 5500 reserves? service. Do they, do they, uh, do they, uh, do they roll as kind of like a little squad or is it just like one guy out there on a boat? You just like, like, uh, yeah, you can, I can just imagine, you know, a, uh, a, uh, a movie of like, you know, Lone Ranger, it's one guy out there just going crazy in the wilderness thinking that, uh, uh, they roll deep. It's like 30, 30 per patrol. Uh, and then, you know, they're doing this all the time. Yeah. So, where are you going to, what, so specifically the anomalies that they're looking for is that, uh, like foreign intrusion. Yeah. Like surveillance. It's a mix of, it's a mix of things, right? It's like, you know, is a roadblock that's critical for a community. Um, you know, a few years ago, we had a Chinese balloon that really nobody knew about for a while. There's, uh, indications that there's buoys in, uh, some of the, the channels.

up in the Arctic. So it's both strategic and just tactical of like how do I get to where I need to be going in an emergency. Is the buoy like the Chinese weather balloon story where you just kind of like send it off and you know collect whatever data you can basically?

Effectively right? I mean part of what we believe is happening just outside of the Arctic is they basically put buoys in currents that brings it through the Arctic and they're just sucking up information about what is the operating dynamic light. So we want to be ahead of that and we want to.

Is it like how thick the ice is? So if you brought an icebreaker ship, like how big would that ship need to be? How many would you need to get through to bring a warship through or something like that, just strategic intelligence? Yeah, honestly, I'm not sure why, but things like that. But that's one possible reason if you were in charge. You'd be doing that. Makes sense. Why, why this market? How does this fit? It's like beautifully niche. Yeah. And that, you know, probably somewhat of a small market initially, but you can probably saturate it and then expand from there. But why, yeah, why specifically the Rangers?

Well, if you say, so the Rangers were the sort of least technically advanced group, but they had the hardest problem set. And, you know, for Canada and for the NATO alliance, the Arctic is becoming really quite critical. And so it's sort of neat. niche right now, but it also gives us sort of a good user community to build a useful product and have an extreme delta, like an extreme effect on. So we want to build, you know, broader than just that community, but that's a good starting. This is like the iPhone moment for the Rangers.

Yeah, right. Where are you building the company? Where are you based? Where's the team based? What's hiring look like? Yeah, so it's a very Canadian company. It's deliberately Canadian. Company is headquartered in Ottawa.

We have offices in Kingston, Toronto, and Ottawa. I'll be based in Ottawa. I've been based in the U.S. and D.C. for the past 20 years. It's back principally by Canadians as well. Yeah, I saw. But, but yeah. Yeah. What about hiring?

Is Canada caught up to America with the defense? Vents Tech fervor, the Palmer Lucky podcasts have not reached Canada yet. They get stopped at the border. They get stopped at the border. Yeah, yeah. But seriously, like where are you recruiting from? What type of people are you recruiting? And is there this idea of like serving the national interest, working in government

technology that might be slower. There might be, it might be harder, might be longer hours, might be more technical. But there's some sort of light at the end of the tunnel on terms of impact. Yeah, there's no TBPN in Canada yet. But this interview is making me feel like TBPN is the TVPN for Canada. Yeah, we got to ship it off. North America. I know Carney's not making it seem like we're all big, one big happy family the last 48 hours.

But we're still in our world, we're still family. We're still family. So Canada has not caught up on the defense tech sort of surge. That's kind of what we're looking to catalyze. I would say that when we raised our pre-seed, we had literally hundreds of Canadians that are working at U.S. companies come back up and want to build something for sovereign capability or sovereign capacity. So, you know, and there's an immense amount of talent in Canada. Like the Waterloo quarter order is ridiculous. Talk about the process of actually selling into the government and how it's different.

I think most people will be familiar with the American Defense Tech arc of SBIRs, program of record, how you kind of sell into the U.S. government, the Department of War. What's different? What's similar? How are you thinking about it in the market? Well, the thing that similar is they have a version of SBIRs in Canada. They call it ideas. I would say it's a little slower, a little less money, a little less diverse.

Sure. But it still sort of doesn't get you into a program of record. So you still need to figure out how do you get into, those kind of long-tail contracts. What's different with Canada, and this is changing right now, is there's no version of an OTA. There's no other transaction authority. So you can't getting onto a contract is a real challenge.

And that's what we're hoping to change and catalyze and lobby for because without the ability to get on contract, this market doesn't make sense for anybody. Government knows it and is trying to change it. Yeah. So it's a very Canadian company. But is this just a foothold and then ultimately you'll sell to folks in Alaska, Greenland, maybe, the Nordics? Like, where do you see this going over time? Is it like if you can do it in Canada, you can do it anywhere?

Yeah, the basic logic is this is the hardest operating environment on Earth. If you can build tech that works in the Arctic, it will be valuable to everybody. The U.S., Europe, NATO allies. Yeah. It doesn't matter. I don't want to build just a Canadian country. company just focused on Canada. This is a getting an even company focused on the world. Yeah. What does the supply chain look like? I mean, you mentioned that you're,

you're partnering with like Gotenna and building on top of a lot of things. Does that make it less capital intensive? And you do need to build stuff on top of it, but it looks more like software teams, engineers, and you're maybe able to match it with the money that's coming from the government on the sales side? Yeah. Yeah, we're definitely software first. There is a supply chain in Canada. It is pretty extensive. It's actually. actually built pretty, I mean, most of Canada's defense hardware is American, about 80% of it. And so they're integrated into large American platforms. But we are a software first company.

We're taking a similar approach to a lot of the other neoprimes where you start off with software. You realize you need to do hardware. You vertically integrate. You push platforms. Yeah. What's exciting on the connectivity side? Obviously, the Starlink story is big. Is that the main driver of progress there?

Are there any other connectivity stories that you've been benefiting from? Well, one of the challenges is that Starlink isn't... So the polar orbit doesn't have a ton of stat. I didn't realize that. The polar orbit sucks, right? Like, there's nobody that really does polar orbit. Okay. And so that's actually what we're solving for.

We're solving for localized connectivity. Okay. The Starlink, Eridium, one web, there's Canadian company called Teleset. They're all kind of coming up there, but the connectivity still sucks. Interesting. And that's across, like, it affects, you know, your localization, your P&T, how you move autonomous systems. So connectivity is a real challenge.

Yeah. Do you have an idea of how astronomers fits in here? I know that they do geostationary, large satellites for Internet. They were putting one over Taiwan, and they were putting one over different countries. Is that something that they could track? I mean, obviously we can ask it from them directly, but I'm wondering if you've gone down that rabbit hole. Yeah, no, we're going down that rabbit hole now.

There's a bunch of new providers, and I think the satellite problem will be solved over the next five years, but like five years is a long time. Yeah, that's great news. Well, we got to hit the gong. Tell us how much do you raise. What's the biggest seed round in Canadian history? I think it might be the second biggest Canadian seed round in history.

Close. Well, this is going to be the biggest gong hit in Canadian history. Okay, good. I think so. How much? $21 million. Great to meet you. Thank you so much for coming on. And yeah, glad, you guys are focused on the Arctic, cultivating Arctic power. Keep us important. Thanks for having me, guys. Great to meet you. Have a great to your day. Let me tell you about Gusto, the unified platform for payroll benefits in HR built to evolve with modern, small, and medium-sized businesses.

And without further ado, we have Phil and Macrim in the studio in the TBP and Ultram. Come on. Come on down. guys. Thank you so much for taking the time to come the TV pit Ultradome. Great to see you. Good to see you. Two of the most athletic men in tech, both athletes in their own right. Bench Press World Champion. Benfress High School Champion. What was the stat again? At the age of 17. 17. Broke a bench state record for New York.

Let's go. That's the real news. What was the actual? amount, weight? Nothing crazy. Oh, okay. What's the number? Three plates?

It was two seven five. At the time, I could do three plates. Okay. I overshot it in. Oh. 55. Oh, no. I didn't actually get to do a 335.

Oh, no. But it is what it is. Wait, so that was a high school state record. Yeah. Yeah. For age and weight class, I was 17. Amazing. I weighed like 190 at the time.

And what's the latest on the MRF? Is this an annual thing now? It's an annual thing. We're doing again this year, rolling it back. Do you think you'll beat your time? Definitely beating the time. Oh, yeah. I have one hour goal.

and 12 minutes last year. Okay. You're going to show about 12 minutes. Yeah, yeah. That's what, 20% of the time? A lot of training. Yeah, you're going to come out and do it this year? Yeah, I'll be that.

Last year there was a lot of talk and then not a lot of follow-up, so, you know, you keep coming out heavy. You know, you know, when we started the show, you invited me down and we did a MRF, or we didn't even do a full MRF, we just did like some training, and I was completely dead. And I went down and I had like a fever for like a month. It was brutal. I was so sick doing the show.

It was absolutely. But this year, yeah, we're rolling it back. And then most importantly, we're going to do a big one in Ohio. It's a part of a partnership of Ohio State. Cool. And the launching of our Arsenal One factory there with everything getting up and moving. By the time the MRF comes around, we'll be just opening for production at the factory there. So it'll be a pretty big big day for us.

Great timing. Let's rewind, introduce yourselves, just so we have it on the record. I think everyone knows since you repeat guests, but kick it off. Oh, I mean, I'm Phil, the co-founder and CEO of Dirac. Yeah. We are building the first AI-Native production orchestration platform, starting with automated work instructions. Okay.

And then I'm Matt Graham, the co-founder and COO of Anderl Industries. Okay. And then why are you two here today, together? Ooh. We are very, very fortunate to chat with you guys about an excellent partnership that the folks at Dirac and Anruel have come to. Cool. We signed an excellent multi-year agreement to roll out DRAC across all of Anderl's

manufacturing facilities. Okay, so that includes the one in Ohio. We'll include the one in Ohio, yes. So I first met Phil about two years ago and changed. There was a video that they sent around that went kind of viral in manufacturing tech nerd circles. And it was a video of an earlier iteration of their build OS showing how you could go from a model in CAD and that the build OS platform would then take that, break it down and turn that into instructions for factory floor workers to actually put together and assemble. So I saw the video reached out and said like, hey, this seems kind of cool.

We've got a lot of factories. We're growing and we're building. You know, could we set up a call? So we kind of did a couple of calls, did a couple of videos, you know, video zoom screens, and then I brought them in to do a proof of concept, and we've been kind of building together for the last two years, fully integrating the Build OS platform into our existing suite of tools.

We call the tools the Arsenal OS that is the combination of our ERP on the back end, then our PLM that our CAD designers use every day to design the software, our MES on the floor that our production workers are interacting with, and then getting DROX, Build OS plugged directly into that, which will then reduce the amount of time going from an ID on a whiteboard to a model in CAD, then ultimately to those work instructions that the factory floor workers need to actually assemble the products. So with Build OS implemented, we've seen pretty wild, wild improvements, and the time that it takes to go from that CAD model to that work instruction for the factory floor

was the number 80-something percent. Oh, 87.5 percent. There we go. It was 87-4-5 percent. It was a 12-hour reduction. It went from 12 hours down to 90 minutes. That's amazing. Without, without the initial.

Let's give it up for SAS. So how, not getting enough long? How often are the work instructions changing? Is this just, is this more unique to Anderrol because you're developing new products, new CAD designs? And so you need to go from CAD design to work construction every day, every month, every year, versus someone who's just like, look, I make 5, 5, 5, 6 rounds. It's the same CAD design, same work instructions for the last decade. I'm just doing the thing that I'm doing. Why is this important for you and how does Dirac plug in?

There's an excellent question. You're not just a pretty talking thing. You know some things. So the challenge for a company like Andrel, as we scale up and we're diversifying across a number of different product lines and a number of different geographies, is then you have engineers with an idea who want to make a tweak or make a change or sometimes we're responsive to quality issues in the field or something like that. You want to make a design change.

So every time a design change gets made, The current method for doing work instructions is predominantly manual. So every time a bracket or a wiring harness or a connector or a circuit board changes, you have to change the work instructions else on the factory floor, you get an instruction that says like screw bolt number ABC 123 into this whole tight into this torque, whatever, but it's a different bolt now. So then the guy in the floor gets an instruction and it's like, but it doesn't fit. So then for us, as we scale, and we're specifically trying to take a faster iteration kind of

faster mentality to this manufacturing process, reducing that time is absolutely, absolutely clutch and critical. So for us, it is especially paramount, though I will say that I think this is a problem that plagues a lot of industries and a lot of our supply chain, a lot of our other partners and vendors. So I'll let Phil speak more to the rest of the market, but it's definitely compelling in working for us. Yeah. Because you've had success in, like, automobile manufacturing as well.

We're pretty vertical. Noxas, last time I came on the show, we talked about a shipbuilding partner. Yeah, that's right. Andrew will makes a ton of things, playing, ships, all sorts of different things. And what we've seen, at least with Dirac, is that our problem set that we work on, right, automating the work construction, it's not just useful for just defense folks, right? Because we end up working with folks in aerospace and defense, automotive, agriculture, construction machinery, maritime, complex industrial machinery, really, anybody that has any sort of

complex assembly, you need operators on the shop floor who know exactly. exactly what to build and when. And when it takes weeks or months to make a work instruction, a guide for your folks in the shop floor, most of the time they're operating on outdated information. And when you want to have an industrial base that is agile and robust, you can't have your operators and your technicians operating on outdated information, on outdated context. And that, you know, we often talk about the work construction as the core atomic unit of information in the factory. And if that is the core driving force by which you're, factory builds, you can't let it be manual. Can't be PowerPoint. You know, can't be, can't be

my only reference here is if you've ever gotten, you know, like some baby furniture thing, you got the instruction set. And like if you're actually following it closely and you realize that the instructions are wrong, it's just the most enraging experience ever. And so I imagine even for like, like employee morale like on the shop floor, if like you're constantly dealing with just like terrible instructions, why should somebody be like, yeah, it's great. they're high agency and they're going to try to like fix it and manage up. Yep. But at the same time a lot of people are just going to be like, you know, just actually become less engaged. They're like, I'm not getting the right information and the

resources. Why should I even, why should I even try? Correct. And in your baby furniture example, that is, that is not an electronic product. So you have to think of that exact problem and then layer on all the complexity of electronics and wiring harnesses and power distribution and all those extra components. So like one of the major challenges is that there's a quick iteration, of chips. There'll just be a new chip that'll be faster on a different board, kind of new power new power specs or whatever. So you need to make a slight tweak. The traditional way of doing that is to take all of those changes that you want to make on a very slow cadence, somewhere on the

area of annual, sometimes biannual, and batch all of those changes up into a single block upgrade that you then do all at once. So then for a long period of time, you're deploying outdated hardware. So you want to be deploying the best that you possibly can to your customers, but to Phil's point in order to get the best onto the factory floor and then ultimately into the hands of the customer, you drastically need to reduce the time from idea to work construction to factory floor and then most importantly keep all of that in sync because when you have at our scale with thousands of design engineers and then many thousands of factory floor workers like keeping them all talking off the same sheet of music becomes a really hard orchestration problem to keep everybody

talking together. Thousands of design engineers? That's a ton. We just passed through 7,000 employees. Wow, congratulations. Thank you. Thank you. We got to bring that gong closer for you here. How are the work instructions actually evolving from a form factor standpoint? Like I imagine historically you just get like a printed out kind of, I don't know, big stack of papers. I can imagine every time. Like a very thick IKEA instruction. Yeah.

And I think like the number of companies have come and gone trying to, you know, basically put work instructions into like, you know, like VR or stuff like that. How far away are we from that? I imagine this is a question that's come up with investor pitches. VR is an interesting modality for displaying work constructions. Typically, what we see nowadays on the shop floor before we come in. Most manufacturing engineers are using PowerPoint or Word. Microsoft, that old beast is still dominating the work construction market. So they just have a laptop pulled up and they just kind of...

Oftentimes. So they will draft it into PowerPoint or Word. They'll then print it out and it'll sit in a thick white binder. on the assembly station. If they're lucky, they're updating it, maybe once or twice a year, flipping through, say, oh, it's this version. No way, get that binder off the rack over there

to make this different model. The way that we think about it, right, the way that we've seen it, on the design side of things, right, we've seen 15, 20 years of an explosion of excellent software in the design side. And because CAD is so advanced, what we've seen is an explosion in the variance that people are able to design, right?

Think about the increasing complexity of the different modular builds, right? You know, company like Andrel, right, has modular products, but that have from palos that are reconfigurable. Now, think about that from the design perspective, great. We can swap out a bunch of different modules. Now, from the manufacturing perspective, that means that you have to have, when you can have thousands of different combinations of things,

you now need thousands of different work instructions. Where if one picture is off and one step is off, you have somebody building a completely different thing. And thinking about that from the top level build perspective, that makes sense, right? Like that's a ton of different configurations. But when we're looking at all the people who make up the supplier base of the companies that make planes, cars, trains, everything in between, we're talking about companies that make pumps and valves, complex mechanical subassemblies, right? Think about how many different variants those guys have to have.

Now, they're in deep trouble because when they lose the ability to not only have folks on their shop floor that are, you know, year veterans who just know off the back of their heads, you know, okay, this is, I remember how we built this last time, I don't really need instructions. Because all those folks are also retiring, our entire industrial base and our supplier base is also at risk because we haven't codified all of that tribal knowledge. And that is a key mission of ours as well, not just to be a rubber band around the variance, but to also codify and capture and embed the travel knowledge. Basically, like, how do we used to do it? Why do we stop doing it that way? Like, making sure that's maintained. So if a guy doesn't retired or not calling them up, like, what are you used to do in this situation?

Exactly. Similar to a McKinsey analyst who put together a spreadsheet or a PowerPoint that was like, 150 slides. They're like, hey, how did you, what macros did you use? What formulas did you use for this thing? That's like another framing to think about it, except that guy retired. Yeah. How many products does Andrew will have now?

Because I think most people know Fury, Roadrunner, dive, but there's different variants with each product. How do you think about the product footprint? To Phil's point, they're roundabouts 30 of the core products, but then there are many, many hundreds of individual variants that'll come along with those. So, for example, the Australian military might use a slightly different radio than the U.S. military.

So then there's just, and it's not a hard change, but it's still a change, a slightly different bracket, a slightly different connector. Because they're not standardized on the specific size, so you need different bracket sizes and all that. Exactly. And then to Phil's point about payloads, So for on the dive XL, for example, maybe you want to put a very advanced sonar package

or maybe you want to put a mine sweeping package or something along those lines. So the actual dive is still the same, but then inside you need a slightly different bracket to hold the thing, a slightly different plug. You consider it's a USBC. This is a thing. This would be the ideal. I think it's a long ways out, though. It is, right? Because standards, I mean, it takes so long even just to roll out into the phones.

I mean, how long was it before the iPhone and the Android phone had the same charger? Clearly we need European style regulation to force us into it. Seriously, like do we? Like, does it need to be defined from the government? So there are a number of standards that exist out there, specifically about, you know, communication protocols and things. And then this is part of why we run these international multi-military exercises, partly to kind of work through these types of issues.

Especially for comms, I imagine. Exactly, exactly. If this helicopter can't talk to that plane, you're dead. It's a huge pain point. Yeah. So there is some standardization, but that doesn't quite get down to the chip level. like inside the seeker head of a barracuda, that there's maybe a slightly different sensor

that this customer or that customer wants to use. The body of the barracuda is the same. The wings are the same. The engine's the same. The power module is the same. All that's the same. But at the front, there's a slightly different module, which then to Phil's point means then you need another set of work instructions.

You need to train your workers a different way. And then that becomes very hard to manage at scale. So with Phil's platform, we'll be able to kind of bring that together. shorten that time and ultimately lead to products getting in the field quicker. Talk about Ohio. How far along are you with the project? Is Trey vindicated in all of his Ohio? You know, I'd be, don't want to take swings at Trey here, but the Arsenal One project in

Columbus, Ohio is running incredibly smoothly. We've got about the first 30 in change Ohioans hired already. We hired them about six months ago and then brought them out to, California, so they've been at headquarters where we've been building the first few tails of the Fury line. Then they're coming back to Ohio this month, and then we're doing the stand-up and provisioning of the line. So the ultimate Arsenal One campus will be about a dozen buildings, totaling in the neighborhood of about 5 million square feet total. The first building that's just shy of a million square feet, it's like 800,000 square feet, is fully built. The internal is being constructed now, the inside, and the production line on all the equipment, all of that, test rigs and all of those things are being

provisioned and we'll start production on Fury this summer. You said building two is the walls are vertical, so that's that's going up and then building three is immediately thereafter and building four right thereafter. So we'll be rolling out a new building about every year-ish for about the next seven, eight years. You said the Fury tails are being built one place. Is this a matter of like building different pieces than bringing them all together? Is there an assembly line?

Is it like a manufacturing of a one-fifty? A term term of industry. Tail being the full plane. Oh, okay. Like a tail number on the plane. Oh, okay, okay, okay, tail number. Got it. Yes, yes, yes.

So the first, the first, the first out of four or five, I'm going to get in trouble for not remember. First four or five will be, I built will be assembled at HQ. Yeah. And then test flown at our test range nearby. Yeah. And then the next one will be built. Yeah.

The tail number, the whole thing. God. The tail number, the whole thing. But then from there on out, they'll be manufacturing. In terms of assembly lines, are we still paying homage to Henry Ford with a, with a plane that moves down and gets things added, or is it a more integrated process? For Furies line, it will resemble something in the neighborhood of opening for a guess that. So it'll move from station to station.

It's actually more like the grim method. There you go. There you go. There you go. We'll coin that one. We need a gong hit for that. Yeah, perfect. Let's give it up for the garage.

Thank you. Thank you. The line will resemble closer to that where at station one, we do the hydraulics. It's station two. Do the electronics. It's station three. Do the fuel system. Something along those lines.

And then it's ultimately the Fury line will be 22 stations. And then where the Fury line in particular gets complicated is that we have to do a number of very complicated coatings and paintings on it. So that's a little bit tricky and specific. And then, of course, the propulsion element of it is just very, very complicated. Talk to, you know. Testament to how far out Mr. Mack Grim thinks about, has been thinking about Fury. Two years ago when he initially reached out after seeing, seeing our demo of Build OS.

His initial outreach was, hey, I saw what you guys are working on. Can you use it to build robotic fighter jets? And I said, yeah, I mean, depending on how cool they are, of course. Yeah, yeah. Two years later, here we are. Here we are. Yeah, and what a moment, too. Yeah.

And how validating this is for Dirac. I mean, I feel like part of why you guys are coming out and talking about it together is I imagine you want your supply chain to probably get on Dirac. Is that a part of it? Like wanting the whole supply chain to modernize? quality part that you get at the end of the day. Good question. So there's a couple of parts, a couple reasons why I'm here in particular to support the announcement here. First is that Andrell's on a mission to save the West. It's kind of

the name of the company baked into that. And it is my firm conviction that part of that journey will be reindustrializing the West and reindustrializing America. And part of that is getting the supply chain teams and get manufacturing organizations, production operations, to be more tech forward and be more tech enabled. And just like accounting software and sort of like traditional kind of big, big software platforms, a lot of the core technology in that ecosystem is pretty hard to use. It's almost user hostile. It's just very difficult.

So part of the mission here is that, like, yes, of course, we want to adopt it. Then we want the supply chain that supports us to adopt it. And then in the long run, we want more and more and more factories operating this way, because if we're going to compete with China and the rest of the world on the large-scale manufacturing, we need to get faster at this. And part of the lag in Western manufacturing is exactly that, to your point about the work instructions of a kid's playset that aren't quite right, what happens on a line then is it's like then the line is stopped at station seven because the station seven instructions. So then you just get like, okay, well, then it's stopped here, stopped at six, stopped at five, stopped at four.

Because that guy is like, I don't know what to do. I can't fit this. So then extrapolate that out across industries and there's just so much wasted time and effort that gets spent on problems like this that I think can be solved with technology. It's a perfect application of where AI can be very powerful to help accelerate the development and the shipping process. So that's one point. And then the other point I want to bring up is that we've seen this very fascinating and

honestly unpredicted outcome of our work with DRock is that by talking to our customers, so talking to the Navy, the Air Force, et cetera, about how we are going to scale manufacturing and talking to them about how we go from designs into PDRs and CDRs and MRRs, the whole engineering process to get something designed and fielded. We've been specifically pitching DRock solution as part of that ecosystem to help them understand exactly this question about how we get from that idea to that work instructions to the factory floor to help us accelerate. And it's been pretty good ahead of sales. In a bizarre way, it's been an accelerant for our sales to help our customers see that we're

leveraging this newfangled technology, this AI, because the government customers are like, what is this AI stuff? How am I going to use it? And we come in and say, here's how are you going to use it. We're going to use it on autonomy on your end products. You're going to use it in the manufacturing line. You're going to use it in the back office. And here's how it's going to ultimately get you better products fielded for cheaper. I want to talk to you guys about the labor market in manufacturing. Specifically, are you guys going ahead? There's so much demand for probably type of talent that could do manufacturing or they could go work in a data center development project. Are you guys competing for talent with the data center build out? Is there enough people, enough

people excited about entering this, this workforce? So there's actually two pieces to talk about there. Interesting thing to bring up data centers. Increasingly, rather historically, the way the data centers have been built out, right? It looked a lot more like architecture projects. And so you've seen the tooling that people use to design data centers historically on AutoCAD, auto desk, which is a little bit more of the architecture. You know, they're doing it in BIM, which is like a building.

Yes, exactly. Throw a bunch of racks in there. Historically. Yes. But now, something that we are seeing as a company through the companies that we're working with, increasingly more data center companies coming to us and saying, hey, we need to start building at scale, the same way we produce electronic systems at scale. And so we are seeing a massive migration of data center producers and data center builders away from traditional architecture-oriented design and build systems towards the more manufacturing-oriented design and build systems. And with that,

they're saying, hey, we are going to have to build data center systems all over the world, and we cannot have folks not having the context of what to build. Can Dirac's work construction software be useful for this? And so, of course, we say yes. And so that's one thing about the data centers, just as an interesting anecdote, that might be interesting for folks to know about, that we are also trying to build data centers the same way we build cars and planes and everything else. And then on the labor question, another thing that we think about is radically reducing the barrier to entry for net new folks into many.

backsharing because, you know, pictures worth a thousand words, but an animation is worth a million, right? Earlier you were asking about how do we change the modality of the way a person interacts with the work instruction? With our software, it is not just a picture, not just a photo, not just a printed out thing. It is a 3D, interactive, animated, dynamic work instruction that an operator technician can interact with, right? Pictures worth a thousand words, but animation's worth a million. And so because you were able to have less skilled folks, potentially take the roles of operators, and because you're also codifying and aggregating all of that tribal knowledge and context, we're seeing that the companies that we work with are actually able

to hire less trained technicians, and so it's easing that burden in pain for them. On the Andril side, I add a couple points there. First is that on the data center side, in the construction market, it's becoming pretty contentious just because, you know, big, huge builds made big huge bulldozers and concrete layers and electricians and et cetera. So on the construction side that is basically competing for the same kind of firms for the time of firms that are getting offers from data centers that maybe have a different so on the construction and build kind of side of things yes it's that's certainly getting competitive on the actual technicians on the factory floor we haven't seen pressures from data centers because the the dot I would add is that these data

centers while very big and very powerful tend to employ very few people there's not that many people engaged in the actual day-to-day running of the place so for for us like on the technician side we don't much competition from them. And where we are spending a lot of our effort is investing into the local communities, including in Ohio, through partnerships with the local universities and trade schools and community colleges, like that kind of ecosystem to work with them on the types of skills that we want to see new hires have, whether that's additive manufacturing or welding or particular CNC programming or just like electronics assembly, whatever that skill set is, helping design curriculums that can then produce graduates of those programs that

are ready to come get a job at Anderol. So for us, it's kind of a long play because we invest that time up now and those graduates won't come out for a couple years. But in the long run, we think will lead to a pretty fertile supply to say nothing of being good for the communities that we're engaged in. What are you seeing within the armed forces on the self-repair side? There's been a couple press releases about being able to repair drone or something on the fly. I remember I toured a aircraft carrier and they had a machine shop and there was a a sailor in the machine shop who was talking about if something breaks on the ship, they will go and mill the bolt right there.

They don't go and buy it because, and he was very proud to say, you know, we're saving the taxpayer. They want to charge us $1,000 for this bolt. I made it for $5. That seems like a really positive thing. Does that play into automated work instructions at some point, some digital solution? And then just what are you seeing on the overall repairability from the systems that you'll be deploying

and are deploying? So, yeah, funny enough, maintenance and repair is a very, very common next question when folks ask us about work instructions, right? Most of the time when they're saying, hey, awesome, you can now automatically generate my work instructions for me. I can now have operators and technicians interact with it in a 3D manner. Awesome. Now, can you do maintenance and repair instructions? And our answer is, of course, yes, right? MRO is a natural inverse, generally, of actually the initial build of the thing.

And so part of what our roadmap is, part of the things that will work. working on with a variety of different folks is, is automating maintenance and repair instructions. So we're very big proponents of, you were mentioning the right to repair, not just of tractors, but of drones out in the field. It's a very big thing that we've been talking to a lot of different folks about.

And it's something that we're a big proponent of because we don't think that these should be two different domains of instruction sets. Context should live on the model. Context should live in the hands of folks who are actually designing and building those systems and repairing them. And so you should,

at the time of making your first instruction set have the ability to codify all that context into one core instruction set. And maintenance and repair instruction should fall naturally out of that. And that's a lot of how we think about things. Yeah, that makes no sense. From a policy perspective where I think the lines get a little bit blurred is that we're talking about a bolt or a bracket or a fixture or something that you can carve out a metal makes obvious sense in one area. And then the next area would be somewhere in the middle of rewiring or reconnecting, you know, an additional battery pack or something like that.

It's kind of in the middle. And then all the way on the other end is like all the way down to the chip level. The chip broke. You're not going to fath it. Yeah, you're not laying silicon chips out on an aircraft carrier or something, right? So there is a spectrum there at which point, at some point on that spectrum, you say, like, actually I do need to call the experts to help me on this. Right.

But in my opinion, the default of saying, don't touch it, we'll come repair it, ship it all the way back to our factory. That's just not going to fly at any time of conflict. because like we do need our sailors and our airmen and our soldiers in the field to be able to at minimum replace the consumables you know the brake pads the tires etc but then also to do kind of the next level of repair into you know replace a fuel pump or something along those lines when it gets down to the chip level though you're like I'll probably send you a replacement module and then maybe the work instructions say take bad module output new module in reconnect these cables but in general yeah we want to be as

as friendly as we can be to this forward repair concept, because in a time of conflict, you just think, like, I need the thing now. I need to go on admission. You said brake pads, and mine went to motorsports, because I know Andrew Rolls supporting NASCAR. And then I was curious, are you guys working, has there been any inbound from any racing organizations

that are having to make parts on the fly and are in heavy R&D? And maybe they only make the part, like maybe they're making different variations of the part, but they're not actually doing it at scale, because it's not a manufacturing business. Any opportunities there? So funny enough, I cannot confirm or deny explicit names, but we are actually in conversation with several motorsports teams who are actively evaluating us for use cases on and off the track. Yeah, probably like a very different workflow,

but so many learnings and just great for the brand and whatnot. Exactly. work there. Exactly. Yeah. How are you reflecting on the DoD or Department of War budget potentially being increased? I still say DoD too. I'm trying. I'm trying. It's, but it's, you know, years of it.

The Dow. Yeah. I mean, the post saying that we might go to $1.5 trillion, that seems like that was not Anderrol's original mission. Anderil was all about doing more with less. But at the same time, if it accelerates the mission, that could be good. How have you been processing it internally? Well, I mean, I think any time a customer says they want to spend more on the things you make is generally a good thing for us.

That said exactly to your point. Like we would love to see this increase in funding. If it happens, of course, it's got to go through Congress and all the usual. But if it happens, be spent smartly and on new technologies, new approaches and not just kind of funding the old way of doing things in the old kind of legacy model that, in our opinion, hasn't worked for decades. So, yeah, of course, you know, customer spending more money is good for us, but we're going to be lobbying pretty heavily to have them spend it on more AI-powered, you know, weapons of futures, autonomy, that kind of construct, and especially on a different kind of contracting model, more towards the cost plus type of model, sorry, away from the cost-plus type of model to the firm-fix type of model that we like to do business with. So still a lot to digest there, but we're in general pretty excited as part of... That initial flipped model of like, you know, like raise venture, take risk capital, build a prototype, build something, then show up to the Department of War with a concept or something that's maybe ready to be fielded,

and then say buy it. Has that held as long as you thought it would? Do you think it holds forever? Because at some point, if a customer shows up and says, I'll pay you to do the R&D, what are you going to do? Turn them away. But at the same time, there's some, you know, there's the financial hazard that the firm was founded around. So how's your thinking evolved around the whole flipped model and doing R&D on your balance sheet? Yeah, a couple of thoughts there.

First is that we spend an inordinate amount of money on our own internal research and defense, Iran type research development rather, spending, just an absolute inordinate amount of money. And we're grateful to have the support of our investors who believe in this business model. So for us, we haven't not at all seen a like, let's just shift back to that way. It's a lot of capital, less risky, capital safer, all of that. So, no, I'm not surprised. To your point, this is exactly the kind of thesis, the mission of what we're trying to do. If anything, we've been very happy to see venture capital funding to the sector increase

to fund more companies approaching it this way. Because I think that for us to win a great power conflict, we're not going to need one and roll. We're going to need five or eight or ten of them. So we're excited to see new companies get started with this kind of mindset and go out and chip off parts of the – ecosystem here. The last point I would say is that to date, something in the neighborhood of 85, 90-ish percent of our revenue has not been from these kind of cost plus traditional

like customer-funded models. The vast majority of it comes from us selling our product to our customers at a fixed price. And then a bit of recurring revenue tied to that for kind of think of it like an extended warranty kind of concept where we are doing the maintenance, we're providing the support, we're doing the security upgrades, the patching, the, the, all of that, which from our perspective really aligns incentives for us to deliver the best possible product, because to be blunt, like, we will have a higher margin if we don't have

to send repair guys out and keep replacing things. But then also gives the customer a more reliable product, and then importantly, gives the customer predictable pricing. So they know what their total four-year, five-year cost of ownership for a product will be, because they know that within that number, we're responsible for anything that breaks, any sort of problems or maintenance that needs to happen, that aligns everybody, and we're seeing a broader acceptance of that business model within both. the DOW and with DHS.

So we're pretty excited to see those messages landing. Yeah. Give us an update on the secondary wars. Ooh. Ooh. Ooh. Oh. Spicy.

Are you the head of investment relations? I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. Alison Lazarus is our... You're the guy she calls to lay the smackdown. Yes. To be honest, at some point, there's going to be some enterprising young SPV slinger that's like,

if I make a really heinous memo, Matt Grimm is going to pump it. The Grim Reaper is going to come to the timeline. So give us some backstory first. Okay, so first I would say that our investor relations is run by this incredibly talented woman named Alison Lazarus. She's great. She works closely with Trey on kind of managing the cap table and all the inbound and interested investors and all of that.

So not really my turf anymore. That said, I've had a long running battle against what I would call the Wildcats in the secondary market who have absolutely zero respect for any sort of control of the cap table, like who our investors are, information rights, any of that. And they're just out kind of slinging offers at early investors, early employees, at share prices that are completely insane. And those people don't care whatsoever about the impact that has on the company, whether that's around 49A valuation or RSU pricing or any of those kind of internal dynamics. They don't give a shit. So they just kind of create headache for us by then us having to field this inbound.

So beyond the headache, the point that I'm really worried about, and I think the SpaceX IPO will be very, very interesting because this is going to be a situation where the tide goes out and there's going to be a lot of people without trunks on. That's just people have been out there slinging, in our case, access to Anderol, or I have limited access to their next round at some insane price that is nowhere close to what the actual price is as set by the market. and then people are buying and that's not even factoring in the fees which are sometimes kind of crazy layered fees so there was this one situation of someone slinging an offer around

that was an SPV into another SPV that was buying a chunk of an investor's and early investors holdings so there's like layers and layers of fees and carries on top of that at a price per share that was something like 70% above

what the last round traded at so it's just an insane thing where they're pitching access to a deal they don't have. And I know for a fact that there are, there was a recent indictment announced in New York around a case where someone was out slinging Andrel SPVs

that did not have access to Anderol and the guy was just pocketing the cash. And then he was just indicted and arrested at JFK. So like this is a thing that happens and the reason I bring up SpaceX is not to create more work for them, but that the world of SpaceX SPVs. Because the legal fees of unwinding all these things. It's wild, right?

Because there's just, there's a lot of this nesting. SpaceX is a fantastic company that's been in business for a long time. So there's so many of these nests of who owns what. And for a lot of these types of like main street investors, it's totally possible that they're thinking, well, I got into SpaceX at 200 when you didn't. And then it goes out at 1.5 and that's my retirement. And then it goes out and you're like, where are my shares? And the guy skipped town. And then you're just out whatever you put in.

And not only did you lose the whatever you put in, but you also lost the mental of where you thought you were. And what you were planning, you might have been planning a certain lifestyle. Of course. And the opportunity cost of deploying that capital is a very big problem. And I've used this joke before. But my joke is that how many investors in America think they own a chunk of SpaceX when they're actually funding their ex-roommates' boyfriends co-cabbit in Miami? And it's like probably a non-zero amount, right? What do you think the solution is?

Can the investor community police itself? It seems like, obviously, like, you have a legal team that's working on this stuff, but there is an element of, like, going direct. Like, you need to get the word out that this is happening, and that's important too. Yes. So this is why we as a company have been more public about this, is because we're specifically trying to send a message to the market that's like, we see you, we're aware of you. And like, secondaries, of course, have their purpose. Of course there are early investors who need to liquidate funds or fund lifecycle problems, of course. So it isn't a blanket comment that all secondaries are bad.

They're not. They're not. there's a category of these people who just have like really no respect and are basically just fraudsters hucksters and what I think needs to happen is two things one the investor community needs to be better at policing ourselves around just who these bad actors are and kind of shining a light on them and then second sadly I think it's going to take law enforcement action whether the SEC or the FBI you know thacking enough of these folks that that community starts to see like this is this isn't good for me yeah and it just kind of puts a damper on on that side as well

Last question for me. Adam Porter Price has been out of tear, doing deals, buying companies. Yep. As COO, what's the, as COO, what is the key to a great post-merger integration? The, it's a great question, and an often overlooked part of doing these deals. The deal makes a headline. I'm busy popping champagne, and then you've got to get to work. Adam logs more airline miles and more and more iPhone minutes than means.

No way. Brian, then Trey than anybody. Wow. Because he's constantly out there. The best of the biz doing this. So from a post-merger perspective, there's a tickey-tacky piece of it that is important, which is payroll benefits, equity ownership, you know, all the 401-K transitions, the email has to migrate.

But making it sure it happens on day one, there's no, oh yeah, you'll get your paycheck, but it's a delayed a week. That's annoying. Correct. It's that taste. Nothing will burn your trust with a company faster than screwing up. up their first paycheck. So for us, it's a thing that we try to lean as heavy as we can into that employee education and systems transition up front. It's not possible to transition

like ERPs and years of design software. That takes usually, you know, six to nine to 12 months on the long end to get those systems fully working, but like the guts have to work first. And then second, as I would say, is a cultural alignment that's just like how we pitch our products, how we price our products, how we plug into the kind of go-to-market ecosystem and engine. Like we have to get that right. And then the third piece, I would say, is trying to get some wins pretty quick. Because if you're an acquired company and you get integrated and you're like, who are all these people?

This is different. I like to look at gas. Yeah. Exactly. Maybe they're in scrappy mode. And then they're like, hey, I'm in a separate. I saw the campaign, don't work at Andro. Why would I?

Yeah, exactly. Well, I'm at Amarral. I just don't work. Why I'm here? I just sell it my page. So kind of aligning with the, what are we trying to build? Why are we building it? What are the deliverables we're trying to hit?

Like getting that kind of. alignment for folks to see, kind of see the destination, see the lighthouse on the hill and say that's where we're going and aligning folks to that. And it's, it's those second two that are really hard because that's much more kind of personality based and kind of relationship based. It takes a lot of investment from the leadership team, takes a lot of investment on the engineering team especially. How are you designing your products now? What's your release cycle like? How do we get that into Andrews kind of way of doing business? There's just a big transition there. But it seems. It seems, There's been this maybe kind of sentiment or joke, shoot for NICE, even if you miss, you'll land at Anderol. You know, this idea of like, you know, maybe I don't build a multi-billion dollar company as a new, like, Neo Prime. But I have, you know, maybe like the next outcome is I land at Anderil. Can you reality check that because I feel like in practice? Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, no, no. And I'm just saying, I think it's like for founders to understand, like, what is the actual bar?

Because you guys, every, every company that's built a great product, but maybe the business side isn't, like, fully working yet. And they're thinking, like, okay, like, my product's great, our team's great. I bet we could fit in there. Yeah. So the reason I'm pretty dismissive of it is the, that implies that Andrew will acquire anything or any company that's struggling or not. Yeah, because Adam's logging all these miles, but he's not exactly doing it. No, we do like two a year on average, if that, right? So he's saying no a lot, a lot. But what we look for in acquisitions is really a sweet spot of two things.

One is a very strong engineering team. They have to have something that's very compelling and very unique and very interesting. And then the second is a area where we can add a lot of value or accelerant or fuel to their go-to-market. Yeah. How do we speed up the timeline? Exactly. And you guys talk a lot with defense-fathers. and you've had a lot on, and folks will consistently talk about how hard it is for the go-to-market engine.

And there's a lot of nuts and bolts around that that get underestimated around what formal government proposals look like, how to do formal government contracting, security clearances, the government relations kind of lobbying side of this to be a player on these bigger deals, then relationships within your customer that are, so you're not just pitching, you know, the guy flying the drone out in the field, you're pitching the whole chain and how it fits into their ecosystem, how fits in the program. some outfits in the program. There's a whole lot of that infrastructure, that, to be blunt, like, we're pretty good at. We've gotten pretty good at this. So when we find a company that has an incredible team building a really cool product that's, like, really unique and interesting, but it's maybe struggling there.

They haven't seen kind of the ramp that they want, and we see that and say, hey, look, we can help with capital, obviously. We can also help with this go-to-market engine. We've built this legal infrastructure, this facilities infrastructure, this government relations infrastructure, all of that, that will then take your product and can help really accelerating, get it deployed, both to the U.S. and to friendly governments around the world. Like, that ends up being the sweet spot. So the reason I would say that the base question that you started from is just completely off base is like, we're not going to go look and try to find a company that like isn't clicking. They don't have a great product. They don't have a

strong team and they haven't sold a lot and then be like, yeah, let's go get them. My sense is that if you're doing a couple deals a year, it's like usually like you're going in and being like, we want to buy this company, less like, hey, like, things aren't working that well, we should try to sell. Yes, exactly, exactly, exactly right. And the last point I would make on that is that to date, we've done exactly zero turnarounds. And I think this is a kind of a mental model for us is that, like, in general, we don't really want to be in the turnaround business. So take a, take something that's struggling and come in and fix it and, like deploy our team of operators to go fix it. Like, there are plenty of PE firms who are very good at doing that. There are plenty of other

organizations who are honestly better positioned to do that. For us, we really look for that strong team, strong product, and then where we can really accelerate sales and go make an impact. Very cool. Do you have a favor? I don't want to put you in hot water. There's no chance I'll answer that question. No, no.

I love all of my children equally, yes. Excellent. Good answer. Which one did you log the most? I think we know. There's a great company we acquired in Ireland that was called Klaus, class. And they make these absolutely incredible computers and networking. When I saw that, I was like, I want one of those.

Yeah, they're great, great devices, great team, but it's headquartered in Dublin, which is very far. So a lot of time spent over there. And that acquisition is gone absolutely swimmingly. Couldn't be happier. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you guys for having us. Appreciate you. Hang out for a second.

Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. We will be live tomorrow at 11 a.m. Pacific. Sign up for our newsletter at tbp.n.com. and thank you. We will see you tomorrow. See you tomorrow, folks. Have a great MLK day. Thanks for hanging out. Goodbye. Cheers.