TBPN - Charting The Media Landscape, WSJ Mansion Section, Emily Sundberg LIVE in The Ultradome | Jordan Schneider, Saagar Enjeti, Justine Moore, Glenn Solomon, Dion Harris & More
Episode Date: October 24, 2025(00:22) - Sundberg LIVE in The Ultradome (04:02) - The Media Landscape (21:12) - Mansion Section (43:24) - Timeline Reaction (58:59) - Saagar Enjeti, an American journalist and c...o-host of the podcast and YouTube show "Breaking Points," discusses the societal implications of AI and data center expansion, emphasizing the strain on electricity resources and potential political backlash. He highlights that in states like Virginia, data centers consume a significant portion of power, leading to rising electricity costs and public opposition. Enjeti warns that this trend could escalate into a national issue by 2026, with both left and right political factions uniting against unchecked technological growth. (01:28:21) - Jordan Schneider, host of the ChinaTalk podcast, discusses the escalating trade tensions between the U.S. and China, focusing on rare earth elements and AI technology. He highlights China's strategy to become more self-reliant while increasing global dependence on its resources, and critiques the U.S. administration's inconsistent policies, which he believes may inadvertently benefit China. Schneider also touches on the potential for Chinese humanoid robots to enter the U.S. market, expressing concerns about the lack of American competitors and the need for regulatory measures to address this emerging challenge. (01:53:34) - Chase Lochmiller, CEO and Co-Founder of Crusoe Energy Systems, announced the closing of the company's Series E funding round, valuing Crusoe at $10.4 billion. He described Crusoe as an "AI factory company" that builds infrastructure to produce intelligence, focusing on energy cultivation, data center development, and software platforms to support large-scale AI applications. Lochmiller emphasized the company's commitment to speed, reliability, and cost-effectiveness in delivering AI infrastructure solutions, highlighting the rapid development of their 1.2 gigawatt campus in Abilene, Texas, and plans to integrate small modular reactors (SMRs) to power AI factories by 2027. (02:06:42) - Kathleen McMahon is the co-founder and CEO of Valthos, a next-generation biodefense company focused on building infrastructure for American biodefense. In the conversation, she discusses the increasing asymmetry in biodefense, emphasizing how advancements in AI have made it easier and faster to engineer pathogens compared to developing cures. She also announces that Valthos has raised $30 million in funding, with support from Founders Fund, Lux, and OpenAI's startup fund. (02:16:09) - Dion Harris, Senior Director of HPC, AI, and Cloud Solutions at NVIDIA, discusses the company's role in advancing AI infrastructure, highlighting a projected $3 to $4 trillion investment in AI by 2030. He emphasizes NVIDIA's commitment to enhancing platform efficiency and supporting diverse applications, from chatbots to drug discovery. Harris also notes the company's efforts in redefining data center architecture to meet the growing demands of AI across various industries. (02:27:23) - Burkay Gur, CEO of fal, discusses the inaugural Generative Media Conference held at San Francisco's Ferry Building, emphasizing the event's significance in providing a dedicated space for the burgeoning generative media industry. He highlights the diverse participation, including foundational model labs, media professionals, and notable figures like Jeffrey Katzenberg, reflecting the industry's rapid growth and specialization. Gur also notes Hollywood's increasing experimentation with generative AI, anticipating a shift towards broader adoption in the near future. (02:36:24) - Glenn Solomon, Managing Partner at Notable Capital, a global venture capital firm specializing in software infrastructure, discusses his firm's 25-year history and investments in companies like Vercel and HashiCorp. He reflects on the inaugural Generative Media Conference, noting the enthusiasm among developers and drawing parallels to early HashiCorp events, predicting significant industry growth. Solomon highlights generative media's potential to revolutionize content production across sectors such as advertising, marketing, entertainment, and education, emphasizing its speed, cost-effectiveness, and ability to create new applications beyond traditional media capabilities. (02:40:16) - Diego Rodriguez, co-founder and CTO of Krea, discusses the integration of AI tools in creative workflows, emphasizing the need for seamless collaboration between various technologies to enhance storytelling and creativity. He highlights the blurring lines between professional and consumer tools, noting that users across different levels seek both flexibility and user-friendly interfaces. Rodriguez also shares Krea's growth, reporting over 30 million sign-ups and increasing enterprise adoption, underscoring the platform's impact in the creative industry. (02:47:36) - Justine Moore is a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, focusing on AI investments, including foundation models and applications. In the conversation, she discusses her usage patterns of the Sora app, noting a preference for desktop due to its enhanced control features, and observes that the current content volume may not yet support highly personalized feeds. She also explores the evolving landscape of AI creative tools, suggesting a trend toward both horizontal platforms and vertical-specific applications, and highlights the rapid proliferation of AI-generated content, making it challenging to track emerging trends. 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Transcript
Discussion (0)
You're watching TVPN. Today is Friday, October 24, 2025. We are live from the TBPN Ultrudome,
the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the Capital of Capital.
And we're here with a special guest. We have a special guest from the show.
Happy to be here. Thanks for having me. Thanks for stopping by. We wanted to have you on the show
for a few reasons. We are going to run through the mansion section and get your opinion on
whether these homes are worth passing up or an absolute steel at something like $50 million.
So we'll be going through that in a minute.
We also wanted to hear from you what's new in FeedMe World.
Do you have any scoops for us?
Do you have any breaking news?
Do you have any exclusives?
We invited you here.
Scoot maxing.
We want some news.
Well, I've been in L.A. for a few days, and I got some local L.A. news from some of my readers
because I did a pop-up for a few days to sell these new houses.
which LA readers got first.
Some of the people that came by had TBPN merch, which was cool.
There we go.
They're fans.
So it's good to have crossover.
What news do we have?
I'm hiring an intern, which you guys are saying not to say.
Breaking news.
You heard it here first.
That's why you come to us for scoops like this.
This has never been shared.
She did not post about this included in the newsletter.
It's not breaking news until TVPN coverage it.
That's right.
That's right.
What else can I say?
Feed Me's first podcast is going live in two weeks.
We get to push back the live date.
And wait, run through the thesis of the podcast.
I thought it was getting to.
Oh, it's like, it's a restaurant podcast.
It's hosted by my restaurant critic and it'll be fun.
We have this idea that there's sort of a white space in kind of, wait, you guys don't curse or you do?
We don't curse.
You're welcome to.
You're welcome to.
You feel like that.
I'm not going to.
If you want to be the first person to say a swear word on our show.
Yeah, it's sort of.
Uh, any, everybody likes restaurants.
Yes.
And anybody can talk about restaurants.
So we have some interesting people coming on to talk about restaurants with our restaurant
critic, which will be a blast.
That'll go live in two weeks.
Thanks, Substack for supporting that.
Um, some other things might come up.
That'd be fun.
For the next few minutes.
Yeah, I, I like that it wasn't just like the Feed Me show.
That was intentional, right?
Because that would be the logical thing.
It's just like.
To do like Emily's show.
Exactly.
Or, I mean, it could, feed me would kind of be a good name for a restaurant.
I know. I know. That is hilarious. I was talking to somebody the other day.
Would you have a different brand for it? It's called expense account. Okay.
Which is the same name as the restaurant column. Is Ramp sponsoring it? They need to.
They should. I'm having some. Be of their sponsoring us, Ramp.com.
Time and money say bold. We love Ramp. Cards. Bill pay counting and a whole lot more all in one place.
Yeah, they should. Where is my single, by the way. Is it over here? Where, what? Oh,
which one am I on? There we go. Okay. Now I found my single.
Perfect. Thank you.
Oh, some people read my substack.
Who watched this?
That's so good.
Yes.
That's so great.
Only David Senator can curse on the show.
You're keeping...
That's true.
Okay.
Well, we are about to understand the landscape of the restaurant world, thanks to your new podcast.
Yeah, it's going to be great.
Which is called...
Expense account.
Expense account.
But the real reason that we wanted to have you on the show was to help us understand the media landscape.
There's been a lot of debate, right?
There's been a lot of debate.
There's been a lot of time.
talk. You have Paramount Skydance. You have, you know, the free press starting a conversation. You have
media people like to talk about media. So today we're going to talk about media. Also, I think
people have just simplified things way too much. They try and break it down into a binary. Are you
legacy media or new media, right? Right. Legacy media or new media. We all know it's way more complicated
than that. And people like to say if you can't explain something in simple terms, you don't understand it.
Yes. But that doesn't apply here. Today, we will. So.
So we have a, we have a market map.
Yeah, sort of market map.
I'm going to kind of walk us through a little bit of it, get feedback from Emily and
Jordy and Tyler.
And if we get anything wrong, take it up with Tyler because he's the one that created this.
He made this graphic.
So if there are any errors on it, you know where to go.
So we have to start with the mainstream media.
What is the mainstream media?
Arguably the best, I think it's the best stream.
Because if you were to pick a stream to do media in,
Would you want to be in the main one or some alternative one?
You want to be in the mainstream.
Ideally, I think everyone is on the march to become the mainstream media.
Yes.
But mainstream media is broken down into several subsections.
You have the legacy media and the traditional media.
And why don't you explain the difference?
Because a lot of people would say they're the same thing.
A lot of it comes down to the aesthetics.
The aesthetics of you're seeing serif fonts, the New York Times, the Washington Post.
when you go over to Fox News, BBC, CNN, you're getting something that feels like it is fighting for its life.
It looks like TV.
It looks like TV. It looks like TV.
I need a little more on my lab is really doing a number.
Here we go.
Is that better?
Can you guys hear me okay?
I got really caught up.
This is your Sam Hyde bit.
Sam Hyde's that talk.
Yeah.
You know you know.
Okay.
So, so there is a continuum.
There's a gradient that exists between legacy and traditional.
CNBC right in the middle.
You have Forbes.
You have the Financial Times.
And you can kind of tell that as you get towards business insider CNN,
you're more in the legacy world.
You're kind of in the danger zone.
David Ellison might be kind of licking his chops saying,
oh, maybe I'll take you over at some point.
David Ellison, he's not going to make a play for the Wall Street Journal,
for the Washington Post for the New York Times.
Part of traditional media outlets.
You can actually get it via newspaper, right?
Yes, yes, that is key.
That's a factor.
A lot of people will put the split divide of like your new media if you have a blog.
Right.
Or your legacy media if you print it out.
But we forget that there is a whole host of mainstream media outlets that do not print out their work.
They do not ship a newspaper.
And so most of the newspapers, you'll see the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post,
the New York Times. Those are in the traditional media.
Economist. Another one. Atlantic. Yes. The Economist. Another one. Atlantic. Yes. So this is really the
heart and soul, the beating, the beating polls of the mainstream media. But you also have
offshoots from each of these areas. So you have the post-trad. Let's talk about post-trad
and why I see this little number right here, Bloomberg. Bloomberg is moving over into
post-trad media. Obviously, that's on the back of Tracy Alloway, Joe Wisenthall with the
Odd Lots podcast. You can think of that as the classic post-trad.
media.
What?
And Tracy.
Yeah.
I said Tracy.
Oh, you did.
Yeah, Tracy Aller and Joe Wisenthal at the Oddlocks, at the Oddlots podcast,
are a great example of post-Trad media where they come from traditional media, but they have been
so early to the podcasting game.
They're what, a decade in?
Isn't it a decade?
I think so.
Yeah.
They're a decade into that.
And so they jumped on podcast early.
You know, from Michael Bloomberg to, what if I could just be the news?
What if I could create the news?
Maybe some frustrations with traditional media and, you know, saying, why not me?
Yes, yes.
And so you can see him like, he's slightly less traditional than the New York Times.
But still, you know, some post-trade region.
We also have proto-media.
I'm not exactly sure why Dig and Hacker News wound up there.
More just like early online efforts that weren't really trying to play in these weren't trying
to be traditional media corporations.
media organizations.
They weren't telling a story about being new media in any way.
They were sort of the program.
But you could almost put Reddit here.
We're missing Reddit in some ways.
But Reddit was trying to be the front page of the internet to kind of curate stories.
Yeah, I mean, you could probably go all the way up here and add social media and TikTok
and stuff.
But we want to stay on the media outlets, the folks who really proclaim that they are the media, right?
And so over here we have the post legacy media.
And this is a crew of former legacy media folks.
who have now ventured out into Substack and YouTube.
Substack and Substack.
Would you argue that a few years ago, Barry,
like the free press would have been there too.
Post-Legacy?
Well, I think Barry's way down, if I remember correctly,
she's in more of the legacy new media.
She was new media.
Yes.
But now she's in the legacy new media bucket.
So if you're, wait, what are these guys?
Post-Legacy.
So post-legacy is where you were up until recently, like in the 2020s,
or traditional media.
If you worked for the legacy media in the 2020s, like Alex Heath at Verge, which isn't
exactly legacy media, but at Forbes and obviously Bloomberg with Ashley Vance, if you
were working with the legacy media, you didn't jump ship in the 90s, you didn't jump ship
in the 2000s, you didn't jump ship in the 2010s, you rode it all out.
2020s. And then the mid-2020s, you were like, okay, this legacy media thing isn't working for me
anymore. I got to go out doing it. That's where we got Ashley Vance and Bloomberg here. So this
kind of crossover. Yes, yes, yes. But the free press, the free press, Barry left to the New York Times
famously, you know, crazy dust up. And that was in the pre-post legacy media era.
Right before, right before that started. Exactly. So she used to be in the new media bucket.
Yes. But current, now she sits in the legacy new media. And that's because.
there's a whole new wave of new media. And so Andres and Horowitz is leading the charge here. They
have a team that is just called new media, which of course asked the question, what were they doing
before? Which was their marketing team. Yes. So they were doing media. It's not like they just started
doing media. No, they just started doing new media. Their old media is now known as legacy new media.
And so legacy new media also includes the information, BuzzFeed, Wired, Vice, organizations that
came out and said, we are going to be doing the new media thing, but they said that a decade ago.
And so now it's a little bit legacy. Then you also have, of course, alt media vice kind of
bridges these two gaps. You have the trappings of a new media organization, but with a little
sharper edge. Over here, you get into the darker media. Dark media zone. You get the Sam Hyde,
the Curtis Jarvins, the passage press, of course. We still haven't figured out where FeedMe goes.
We'll do that at the end. We'll do this at the end. But we can move over to
Neo alt media.
You have the Adam Friedlands.
Yes.
So you still have some of the edginess, some of the rebel spirit of your vice magazines,
your Redskirts, but obviously newer products, newer media products launched more recently.
Then you also have new media with the NU.
That, of course, is media that covers new metal.
So anyone who's, if you're writing a blog about Limp Biscuit or POD or Slipknot or form.
That obviously goes in the new media category.
If you were to build the kind of like the free press for corn fans, you would go in new media,
NU, not N-E-W media.
And of course we have to talk about the post-corporate media category.
Chopo Trap House, obviously fitting in there.
It's a very funny choice to put that there.
But obviously anti-corporate, sometimes socialist, sometimes communist, sometimes
left wing, but distinctly anti-corporate, you're not going to run a lot of ads on a post-corporate
media property. But you might curse some people. You might hire some people on that.
Which is, yeah. That's possible. Now, we do have the post-neo-media. So, as you think,
you think traditional media, legacy media, regular media, new media, Neo-media is the newest.
Neo-Trad, which we'll get to in a little. Post-neo media, you can think of it as the most
accelerated, the most aggressive, the final, the most cutting edge media properties that are out there.
We have Martin Screlly, he just turns on a live stream. He goes for hours and hours and hours.
It's not a media company. It's not a TV show. And he's moving, he's moving markets, right?
Exactly. Exactly. Then you have I Show Speed and Mr. Beast, other examples of neo-meat, post-neo media
creators. You, of course, have had the expert media sphere with Andrew Huberman, Lex Friedman,
AI expert, Joe Rogan, UFO expert, and then Andrew Newman, of course.
And then we have the neofactual media, more of the analysts focused on the actual truth,
one of the really the only truth-seeking organizations on the map in general.
Where are we?
Let's move over to, so traditional media, we know, traditional media, you're printing things out,
you're making traditional content, you're instantiating your ideas in traditional ways.
and the neotraads are doing this in a new way.
This is new media that cosplays as traditional media.
Exactly.
So that's TBPN, right?
It has some of the aesthetics of an ESPN, but it looks and feels.
Good job, guys.
Thank you.
Thank you to the production team.
I'm glad you guys like the show.
Yes.
And so Colossus is another good example here.
There obviously, you know, if you look on this map, what is Colossus?
There was debate last week, right?
This is part of what started the video.
What is Colossus? Are they writing profiles? You know, is this journalism? And we just immediately thought this is obviously, you know, Neo-Trad media. There's no other way to look at it. This is traditional print media reborn for the modern era.
Yes. And specifically, you wind up getting a lot of attention in Neo-Trad media from the old media, from the mainstream media, from the legacy media, because you are wearing traditional media clothing.
So Arena Magazine, it's a physically printed out.
It's kind of sitting squarely between Post-Trad and Neotrad.
And so if you are the editor of Forbes or Fortune Magazine, Fortune Magazine has done a cover
story on Josh Kushner.
Colossus Magazine just did a cover story on Josh Kushner, and they printed it out,
and it's a physical magazine.
And so it feels much more like a direct attack and a comparable product,
as opposed to if Colossus was just a substack,
the editor of Forbes, the editor of Fortune, they would be able to say, well, that's just a substack.
What makes us special is we print ours out in mail-in.
Would you ever do a daily print newspaper?
Daily print? I don't think so. But I would do weekly. Daily print, there's so many hands involved and like material getting into places.
You just geofense it to New York, Manhattan. You could have little people and feed me outfits.
Yeah, or I guess the other thing people do, I don't know if you guys remember this paper during
COVID called the Drunken Canal, which was like a downtown gossip paper that they put in the
newspaper stand boxes around the city.
But that was maybe four times a year or something.
But that was really fun because you couldn't really find the content online.
It created some tension around discovery.
What were they going to publish?
Yeah.
So then we have neocorporate media.
These are like obviously from a corporation that does something that's not media.
You have the AWS Developer Tools blog.
Let's give it up for them.
Some of the greatest content.
You have the opening eye podcast, Cheeky Pint,
which sort of dresses up as Neo-Trad in many ways,
but also is fully owned and operated by Stripe, a corporation.
Then you have the Neo-Conglomerate media.
This is whatever David Ellison is working on, we believe.
David and Larry.
I want you to take me through.
We forgot it.
We could have added UFC as part of this new neoconglomerate.
But then we also have the East Coast.
You can always update it.
Yeah, the East Coast Underground.
You'll have to explain everything.
in this section.
Yeah, we weren't familiar with this.
What's going on?
You guys know New York Magazine, come on.
Well, yeah, from the Andrew Heerman.
Is that the New Yorker magazine?
No.
Is that the New York Times magazine?
No.
Is that the New York New Yorkers?
New York Magazine?
New Yorker is part of Fonday Nast.
Okay.
New York Times magazine is part of.
The New York Times?
Correct.
And New York Magazine is something else?
Who's it owned by?
And is it supported by like the city?
It's under, it's under Vox.
Wait, they should nationalize it.
Mom Johnny, let's do it.
Yeah, I mean, that's a big one.
You guys should probably know about that one.
I feel like I love New York Magazine because to come out of a magazine,
the New York Times already has a magazine and the New Yorker has a magazine,
and you're just like, you know what, New York needed a magazine.
That's something that we would say.
It's the best one.
That's the one where I worked.
Yes.
It does seem cool.
And I feel like when you see a New Yorker, a New York MAG profile, it is great.
Oh, my God.
It's great.
Yeah.
They have their own special flavor that's not quite the New Yorker.
It's not quite the New York Times magazine.
Right.
It's the New York, it's New York Magazine.
It's New York MAG.
Yeah.
And why are these so underground?
You guys have never heard, okay, you've heard of Puck because you've been on Dylan's podcast.
Yes.
But Tyler, our intern, has not heard of Puck.
And he's heard of all of these other.
You haven't heard of, HALGIT, you wouldn't know about it.
That's more of like a New York left-leaning politics.
Tyler, do you know some of four?
No.
Okay.
Do you know status?
No.
Status was started by Oliver Darcy.
And he came from CNN, I believe.
So, like, we should move him maybe over there.
But something that's interesting that's happening is some people are logos and some people
are faces.
Yeah.
Like, you guys chose to put TBPN as your logo.
And I'm curious, I'm happy that FeedMe is not my face and it's my logo.
You want the brand to grow.
But Feed Me is starting to become more of a platform.
Platform company.
Bingo.
Yeah.
I would put you.
Yeah.
We left off Punch Bowl.
Punch Bowl, yeah.
I mean, they're ex-politico, right?
Okay, so what I'm actually hearing is that East Coast Underground is really sort of a further post-trad, post-legacy.
Maybe they're post-legacy.
Yeah, I think a lot of them are post-legacy.
I think the difference between them and like an Alex is a lot of them have raised like tens of millions of dollars to get their things off the ground.
But they're thinking about more is like, so they're thinking less independent media.
We needed a category for heavily VC-backed.
You really do.
You really do.
Because we're going to be watching how those play out in the next few years or months.
Yes.
Well, are there any major corrections that you think we should make?
Do you think we got any of this wildly wrong?
No.
I mean, it's really interesting that you guys, the East Coast Underground thing, because those are the publications that people are like wringing their hands.
Is that like going crazy over in New York City?
Sure.
And maybe your audience is...
I definitely think these folks need to be over here.
Yeah, I think we can redistribute the underground.
Yes.
Because you can basically see it goes like...
I mean, New York Magazine's not underground back.
Less tech, more tech here.
And then politics is kind of running through this way.
But then over here you have some tech.
And then over here you have some tech.
Yeah, those can be sort of redistributed.
Next to each other.
Status I would call Post Legacy.
But...
Okay.
But it's almost like there's...
There's some difference because these were started five, ten years ago, correct?
Like, Puck is not this year.
Puck didn't start this year, right?
Puck started, I think, like, three years ago.
Oh, three years ago.
Okay, that is pretty recent.
And they've raised, like, 20 million.
It's not quite as recent as well.
And they also just acquired air mail, which was Graydon Carter sort of luxury magazine.
Can you hit the gong for Puck for raising 20 million?
But the big story with Puck right now is that they just acquired airmail.
Okay.
What's Air Mail?
Who's that?
Graydon Carter, the great editor of Vanity Fair.
Okay.
There we go.
So he's more, you know, you know about that?
Is Airmail in the Post legacy media?
Airmail is something else.
I mean, it still is.
It's still in existence, but it's sort of like, you go, it's very luxury.
So it's like, this is what happened in this resort in Sweden.
This is like the crazy, like, a thousand-word story about it.
in every, you know, sort of 20 words, there's a big Hermes ad.
So it's like, yeah.
Let's give it up for airmes.
Zach Meyer in the chat says,
I think this needs to be three-dimensional to better illustrate their place.
I agree, I agree.
Okay, well, that concludes.
Well, I'm glad we could clear up the media landscape because there's been so much debate lately.
And sometimes you need to, you know, expand in order to really help.
I mean, we were joking about this being completely schizo, but I think we have something.
Yeah, we got to add bar stool.
Okay, let's make some notes.
We'll do a V2 before we release the next iteration, but we'll get something there.
Let's go through the mansion section.
I want some advice on what is a buy, what is a sell.
Before we do, let me tell you about restream.com.
One live stream, 30 plus destinations, multi-stream to reach your audience, wherever they are.
Well, you said that you were interested to talk about Carl Icons, NYC Penthouse.
Is that correct?
Are you familiar with this?
You know about the Carl Icon pasta at the restaurant?
I think it's like two blocks from his house.
There's this restaurant called, I think it's called Iltinello.
It's an Italian restaurant, and they have like a $20 Carl Icon pasta.
I looked at this up recently.
Only 20?
Yeah, because it's not exciting.
It's like a very simple pasta, but he ordered it a lot.
So I think one of the things if you buy there, you can sort of like always take friends to that place and sort of get into, well, you know, who used to own my apartment.
Who?
Carl Icon.
No way.
You can do that every time.
Oh, oh, if you live there.
Yeah.
Okay.
That's, you know, neighborhood.
You can have maybe rename the pasta if you learn if you move there, you know.
Icon has also entertained numerous corporate giants of the apartment, including computer titan Michael Dell, Apple CEO, Tim Cook, Netflix.
co-founder Reed Hastings. He would extend.
It is.
He was hanging out with Dell.
It was pretty fun. It's $23 million
property. How many square feet?
People are liking the lifestyle news.
You guys should talk about restaurants more.
We should. The apartment has
views around the city, including
Central Park. A dramatic double height
foyer has a circle staircase.
23,
250 units.
I'm not sure how big this is. Oh,
It is 14,000 square feet.
It's a combination.
Why is that sad?
That's huge for Manhattan.
That's massive.
14,000 square feet is a combination of three apartments that were purchased over 40 years.
And so he slowly built this like larger and larger.
Some 56 or 53rd.
Does that make a difference?
Well.
Is that material?
Like, do you know Manhattan that well to know?
I would hope so.
I would hope you know it that well.
I know that well.
I don't know the difference.
So it is on the apartment atop museum tower on Manhattan's West 53rd Street spans the 51st and 52nd floors.
It has 14,000 square.
That's a buy.
You think that's a buy?
It's a buy.
So Carl Icon has said, Carl Icon has said the billionaire is unsure why his beautiful apartment on West 53rd Street hasn't found a buyer yet.
You think you agree with that take.
It doesn't make sense.
Somebody needs to step up.
Yeah.
Somebody will step up after this story.
Okay, so you could get 153rd Street, 14,000 square foot apartment.
I like that.
They say in the story.
I mean, so here's the thing.
He had a Hindenburg research report on him.
On his empire.
And so I think, and Puck has an article here.
I just searched Carl Icon fall off.
And Puck pulls up Carl Icon on How to Lose $20 billion.
So I think people don't want to buy the apartment because they're worried about negative or a...
But you call a priest, you call, you got some sage, you just sort of...
That's every apartment in New York.
So for 23 million, it's fixable.
You can make it work.
Okay, what about this Delmar Beach House for $50 million?
This one was actually sold.
I can hold it up here.
A beachfront compound with a ping pong pavilion.
Are you pro ping pong?
Sure, yeah.
rank these paddle sports ping pong
paddle sports ping pong padell uh what's the other one called
i don't like sports that were invented in the last 10 years
yeah tennis is top so rank those four tennis is the top yeah and then ping pong yeah and then
pedel padell and what's the other one and then pickle balls at the bottom yes pickleball it just
has a terrible name i know the word doesn't sound good oh here's the picture of the house so 50
million it has 6,000 square feet seven bedrooms how would you
rank this. I will keep, I will keep giving you extra information.
Basically, Del Marr, Del Mar is in San Diego County.
That's really not my kind of place, but, no.
Yeah, what's pulling people to live there? It's kind of a brutal view.
Don't say that. It's kind of a brutal, look how brutal. It's like a brutal. It's like,
it's like, if someone was like from first principles, let's just make the Hamptons better,
they would come up with Del Mar. But look how brutal the view is from the pool.
I don't think this was the best photo they could have ran. You see the beach.
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I can see the beach.
behind the staircase and like through this little sliver.
Oh, so, so are you an infinity pool guy?
You want the pool straight out to the ocean?
Okay, okay.
Well, the seller is a limited liability company tied to Sandra Nathsker, whose family
has been major cattle ranchers over a century in Arizona, California, and Oregon.
Land, land family.
Land maxing.
Land is the most underrated asset.
Completed last year, the oceanfront compound first came on the market for
75 million. But the price has been reduced. It finally sold for 50 million. The listing agent said it's
remarkable sale for San Diego coastal real estate agent. The property includes a 4,500 square foot main house.
Somebody would have to pay you quite a lot to live there. It is crazy to get...
That's not my kind of beach and that's not my kind of house. It's crazy to get to get half the space
and you're in Del Marr, which is cool, but you're not in Manhattan. You would think that Manhattan
would just be more expensive and you're paying twice as much.
much for half the space. Yeah. I say take icons property. That makes no sense to me. What else?
What about Hawaii? What, what about Hawaii? What's your take on Hawaii?
Been once. It's the, it's the Hamptons of the Pacific. Do you agree? The only thing I'm curious
about with Hawaii is I really want to visit a Zucks ranch and meet those cows. Okay. Meet those
cows. You want to meet those cows specifically? Yes. You don't just want to see how big the property is.
The cow specifically? I'm curious about what he's sort of doing there with the, he's obsessed with like breeding
the perfect cow.
Yeah.
We missed,
they had Zuck burgers at the MetaConnect event that we were live from.
And we missed,
we,
we just got really busy podcast.
It's basically impossible to eat while you're streaming because you have to eat talk on
the microphone.
None of them could have put one aside.
Did you guys have any?
Yeah, no, no, no one had any.
Wow.
Missed opportunity.
Missed opportunity.
So Catherine Conrad spent a decade perfecting the gardens at her Honolulu
home overlooking the ocean.
the estate has granite pathways that wind around a Carrara marble fountain.
I don't know what that is, actually.
An antique pergola cost about $40,000.
Her favorite view of the garden is at night when the Cyprus monkey pod and flowering
Tacoma trees are illuminated.
She's trying to pitch the monkey pod as a feature, but it sounds like a bug.
You have a monkey pod.
I guess that's like a cat tree for a monkey.
It's hard to visit you in Hawaii too.
The time, the time zone is so.
brutal. Yeah. Or you have
neighbors you love maybe or you meet new
friend, but if you're buying in California
or New York, someone's always going to be in town.
Totally, totally. I also feel like
as for the celebrities out there, it really
puts a target on your back when any time
there's, every time there's been like a natural
disaster, it's like, oh, you know, the rock
didn't let. It's because you took all our water.
Well, that, but there was the
tsunami warning last year and they were getting
really canceled for that and then
canceled for the tsunami. And then the fight.
No, because apparently they had like
private roads that everyday citizens were backed up in traffic trying to escape the tsunami and they
were not inclined to open their private roads. It's always going to be more controversial to buy in
Hawaii. Yeah. Okay. So 0.8 of an acre. It was the first lot was bought for $7.55 million,
then $4 million for the adjacent parcel. So you put two properties together around $11 million in
land value. Then $12 million in renovation.
asking 34. It's a four bedroom, 5,200 square foot house, ocean views. It also has a Pilates
studio. Is that a feature for you? I like to leave my house for Pilates. You want to leave your
house for Pilates. So at 34 million, are you buying or are you selling? No. You're not buying.
You're passing. Passing. What about this house in Puerto Rico? I haven't been to Puerto Rico
in a very long time.
Before we move on,
we got to do another ad.
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I don't have it today.
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So, yes, Puerto Rico
was very much a thing
during 2020.
Whoa, that is crazy.
Be there invite.
They're saying,
come hang out.
I have a friend who,
yes, yes,
they want people to come visit.
I have a friend who would refer to that as a gulag.
Yeah.
Because you get all your boys to come and visit and hang out and they all sleep in bunk beds.
But you really could sleep like with 12 people there or something.
So this mansion has 17,000 square feet,
eight bedrooms,
a basketball court,
a pool.
It is for sale for $65 million.
Is it in that zone?
I think, I don't know if it's the four seasons
or there's another
hotel company that is effectively
set up a mini city in Puerto Rico.
You know about this?
There is information about the Ritz-Carlton
in here. Oh, it's the Ritz.
Let me read it. Simon said he and his wife
had little intention to buy in Puerto Rico
before stopping by the Ritz-Carlton sales office
in 2015. They quickly became enamored
with the idea of building a house there,
buying a one acre parcel of land on
one of the community's golf courses, the parcel
overlooks the ocean. It was completely impulsive. There were a few false starts. The phallics got the
keys to the new home in 2017 just before Hurricane Maria hit, closing down the resort community
and resulting in minor damage, water damage to the home. Soon after the community recovered, COVID
hit. In recent years, the phallics have spent long weekends and holidays of the property as well as
several weeks in the summer. They are selling because their grandchildren are older and don't spend
it much as much time on the property. Puerto Rico's luxury housing market has boomed in recent years,
thanks to tax incentives and the rise of remote work. It's become very attractive. They undid
a lot of those incentives. There's some people that are grandfathered in, but now they're just
sort of trapped in the Caribbean. Yes. And so this is a lot in the Dorado Beach, which is a Ritz-Carlton
Reserve Resort. 65 million. Buy or pass? Um, pass. Um,
but maybe try to get, I don't know if those Disney posters are coming with the house,
but I feel like the posters in the film room, you could flip those.
Yeah, split them off.
Oh, really?
You know?
Break it up.
Break up big Puerto Rico.
We got to talk about JP Morgan's new headquarters.
Michael Dell shared it.
I have a post pulled up here.
Oh, yes.
This is peak performance.
And I wanted to get your reaction to this setup.
Can we pull up this post in the timeline?
it would be great to be able to pull a post both in the timeline and there that's the future well that's
what can we not pull it up there while we're pulling that up let me tell you about cognition they're the makers
of devon devon is the a i software engineer crush your backlog with your personal ai engineering team
all right pull up this post from lit quiddity and we'll put it on there we don't need to put it on
the on the on the back screen we can actually just pull it on the um yep yep and while we're doing that
let me tell you about figma dot com think bigger build build
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started for free. Did you see the, what else is going on here? Would you guys buy anywhere
besides California? New York eventually. California has so much. I feel like I just want to
grow the map of places I go that are driving distance. We're both excited. Santa Barbara. Yeah, the
Monocito to L.A.
Marino.
Marins.
No, it's a little far.
But even Big Bear.
So you just want to buy houses close to each other.
Houses that are less than an hour away from each other.
In California, in L.A. specifically, you can get in a car and in two hours be in a
different bio.
Right.
You can be in the desert or you can be in the ocean.
Yeah.
Or you can be on an island.
So here's, they got video footage of the JPM analyst going to their new workstation.
This is a post from liquidity.
But pull up the post from Mike.
Michael Dell that shows the actual setup here and we need to rate my, rate my office.
Did you guys hear that employees have to pay for the gym?
What?
At JPM?
Why?
There was a story about it.
I mean, I guess that's just like some insight.
People were not happy.
I mean, employees were not happy about it.
They were like, why do we have to pay to go to this?
I guess it's just such a big organization that if you don't put some sort of limit, people
will like kind of all flood right on January 1st or something.
And I'm sure that they have.
It's just kind of like a flow.
I'm sure that they have like a health account or something to use towards it.
So this is what peak performance looks like for sure.
This is beautiful.
I actually, I saw this setup and I thought, I want to recreate this here.
I'm down to be in the trenches.
Yes, this is what the trenches look like.
I like that they have the thing that new hotels have now where you just, you have the outlets right there.
Yeah.
In the desks, that's nice.
We're not seeing shares.
Imagine having chat TBT add up numbers for you while sitting in that setup.
So what I'm interested is like when was this taken?
Because I thought they worked hard.
I don't think that's a real photo.
That doesn't really look like a real person.
Michael Dell just posted this and said congratulations JPMorgan on opening your new headquarters.
He sold them all the monitors because the monitors are Dell monitors.
I think this is a rendering.
I don't think so.
No way.
This is real.
I think this is real.
You don't think that jaw line is possible?
That's pure APM power.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I have to see it for myself.
I emailed their team.
Even Michael Dell replied to his own post instead of we are monitoring the situation.
Yeah, you don't do that on some slop.
I think they finished building out the office.
Michael Dell was excited.
The office looks like slop.
Look at those beautiful Dell monitors.
I will fight you on this.
I need this.
I want to go.
Maybe that's from my shoot this.
That is where you're shooting.
Yeah.
This is the spot.
We're hop-skipping and a jump
And the people that will actually
I need to go.
I need to see it for myself.
Yes, yes, yes.
Okay.
Is it beautiful building?
Have you seen it?
Last thing.
We have to.
No.
It's beautiful.
Oh, it's a whole new building.
And it has like crazy LED at the top, right?
It has a crazy light show.
There's like a rock.
There's like a big story about like the rocks that they brought in to.
Dwayne the Rock Johnson?
We should bring him in, have him do it.
I feel like when,
you, when you set up a new, a new fortress of finance, you should have like an inaugural,
an inaugural lock in and you should bring in like a, like, Warren Buffett should come and like lock
in and type the first row in a spreadsheet and be like, yes, like we've opened the office.
Jamie Diamond himself has come and done and written the first sell of the spreadsheet and now
the office is open for business. It's like, it's like smashing a bottle of wine across a boat.
I like that.
You need a christen a new office.
Let's pull up this post from none other than the New York Post,
which I don't think they made it on the media landscape,
but mobsters ran rigged poker games at Kylie Jenner's Lux, NYC Pad,
while she still owned it.
Apparently, Travis Scott also was owned a piece of it too.
What's going on here?
You think this all ties back into the,
to the holes.
Isn't this part of the story that came out yesterday about...
I just got an email from you 19 minutes ago.
You're sitting right here.
It's crazy, right?
Isn't this part of this story with the NBA gambling?
Like, there...
I haven't been following this too closely.
Yeah, the headline yesterday on The Times about the NBA coach gambling,
there was in the headline, it also mentioned mafia.
So unless there's two mafia poker rings going on,
which is totally possible in a city like New York,
I think they're connected.
And I wrote about it yesterday and one of my readers emailed me.
I'm not going to say who it was.
But he was like, if you want to talk about this, I was there.
The game was held at gunpoint.
What?
If you want to talk about it.
And I said, sure.
And he said, me the neighborhood.
What is game held at gunpoint?
Like, someone's forcing you to play poker?
Well, you guys don't play poker.
Sometimes that happens.
What do you mean that happens?
Guns, drugs.
But in what scenario?
Mafia.
But under what conditions am I like, I'm really enjoying.
enjoying playing poker with you.
So you will die.
Oh,
I think it's more like,
they're just having so much fun.
Yeah,
you do a little,
you have a little too much fun
and somebody like pulls something out
that they're not supposed to pull out.
And,
yeah,
I've never had a gun at a poker game,
but I've heard.
This is why I'm not leaving California.
This,
this New Yorker seems crazy to me.
There's none of this here.
This is,
this is not.
There's a post here on the,
on the sports gambling arrest.
Mike over on X with 2 million views
on this post.
The NBA is very concerned
about the multiple arrests made as a result of the FBI's sports gambling raid.
Use code multiple arrests for a 30% profit boost on a three-leg parlay with draft kings,
the official gambling partner of the NBA.
I love it.
I am glad that people are still playing poker in person as opposed to just only playing online.
That's good.
That's kind of a white pill, for sure.
Touching grass.
Yeah, touching chips.
I used to have a poker podcast.
Really?
Yeah, it was called Chips and Dip, and it was about poker and chips, like potato chips.
Tatea chips.
Yeah.
Were you,
were you like a good poker player?
I am,
I was,
uh,
my ex was like a good poker player and then our friend,
the third guy is also very good and he's borderline addict.
Hmm.
It was gambling addict.
Cool.
Good luck to him.
He's doing okay.
He might start writing about poker.
He should go work in a hedge fund or something.
Yeah.
Put it to work.
For sure.
Uh,
he should go lock in.
He should be,
he should do the inaugural gamble.
The first gamble at the new,
at the new Morgan Stanley H.
It's Morgan Stanley,
right?
No, it's JPM.
Oh, it's JPM.
Okay, JPM.
Yes, yes, yes.
The first, the first fat-finger trade.
This is important.
Anyway, thank you so much for stopping.
Thanks for joining us.
Thanks for having me, guys.
We know we have to get you, you have to get out of here.
Really fun.
Got to go to the Hammer Museum.
Breaking.
She will be.
The Hammer Museum.
I didn't know this is a real place.
You could go by and say, oh, you play.
Don't say that.
Be careful.
Okay.
Bye, guys.
Bye.
Great hanging.
Cheers.
Cheers.
while we rearrange the seats.
Let me tell you about Vanta.com.
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Alex Heath says SNAP is in talks to raise at least one billion for AR glasses,
multiple investors involved,
including Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund.
plan is to move specs into a new independent subsidiary.
Spinning it out.
And structure similarly to Waymo and Alphabet.
I want to get Evan on the show so badly.
I think it would be a very, very much interesting conversation.
We're working on it.
It will happen soon.
Samsung just launched a Vision Pro competitor, right?
Samsung Galaxy XR, the headset.
So there, and Google's announcing it today.
this is 16 minutes ago.
The Samsung Galaxy XR is powered by Android XR,
and it's supposed to be basically at the Apple Vision Pro level in terms of fidelity,
I think.
But they obviously have a YouTube app because it's a Google partnership.
And so on day one, they have a lot more partners because Android's been kind of a
better steward to the developer community than Apple.
And I think a lot of a lot of the obvious developer partners that would go and build
apps for the Apple Vision Pro are taking a wait and see approach.
Because they don't want to,
they want to have more leverage over Apple instead of just showing up and being like,
okay, I'm going to be paying the Apple tax on day one.
They're saying, hey, like, why don't you go get the audience first, Apple?
Make sure that there's actually 100 million DAUs of this thing, like the iPhone, before I build an app for this.
Yeah.
Speaking of smart devices, Kohler, the toilet manufacturer, is making a new toilet camera that provides health insights based on your bathroom breaks, which is insane because Throne, you know, the startup Throne is doing this.
I really thought nobody would do, no, nobody would go and I thought it was like an insane idea.
Yeah.
But at least no one else would go and compete.
And then,
Nicola,
you know,
obviously a major manufacturer decided,
I'm sure they were somewhat inspired by Throne.
Yeah.
To go get into the game of toilet cameras,
health tracking.
So we'll see how this plays out.
That's very funny.
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Gabriel is posting.
There was an article from the Times that said female spies are waging sex warfare to steal Silicon Valley secrets.
This is a funny story from the Times.
Is this the Times of India?
I think it's the Times of India.
But this has been the meme of like the CCP spy girlfriend.
And the Times London.
The Times of London.
Okay.
So we had a whole, there are a lot of different times.
there are a whole bunch of different,
uh,
like iterations of that,
of that viral concept of like,
is,
is the girlfriend a spy and then the backlash to like,
well,
you shouldn't judge the girlfriend because she might be a spy and going back and forth,
back and forth on that.
Uh,
so it's interesting that the times of London,
is this just something where Europe takes two months to get to the current thing on X?
Because this,
this is a,
this is an article that literally just says what X was
talking about four months ago, right?
Yeah, I think that, I mean, this is there new information.
This has been an ongoing thing.
I think maybe what they've discovered and, you know, we're not factual media,
so we don't need to get into kind of the truth here.
But they're saying some of the spies are even marrying and having children with their
targets, which is really.
You know what a good, have you seen the Americans?
That's a great movie.
A great TV show.
The Americans are great.
Atlas says, geez, I would sure hate for a beautiful Chinese spy to wage sex warfare against me for my production secrets.
My production secrets are super important.
I would hate for this to happen.
Did he go mega viral for this?
Yeah, 15,000 likes.
You got the Elon response.
That's great.
NIR has been going on its hair highlighting and Driesen-backed companies.
And there's definitely some that are...
Specifically speed run, right?
These are A16NZ Speed Run companies, which is under...
Andrew, Andrew Chan.
And it's more of a, it's more of an incubator or an accelerator.
It doesn't have the same weight as like a David George came in with the growth team and like actually like did some analysis. It's like, they're ripping checks. But it's out of, you know, it's out of their speed run.
Okay.
Run by Andrew Chen.
Sure.
And, uh, yeah, so this one is cheddar. It's the TikTok of sports wagering.
Okay.
Unlike other platforms, they allow players under 21 and in 46 states.
Is this, is this from a deck or from their website or something?
I think this is from the speed run.
How did NIR find this?
I think this is from the Speed Run website.
This is ridiculous.
Okay, wait, there's another one.
I need to talk about double speed.
I need you to explain this to me.
The founders in the chat going back and forth in the replies.
So NIR says A16Z back double speed
lets you control thousands of social media accounts with AI,
ensuring they look as human as possible.
Quote, never pay a human again.
Control is all you need.
I can imagine some, I mean, I was about to steal me on this, but it's really hard.
I can imagine that puppeteering a thousand devices might be useful for something or other in like a data generation.
So double speed, I think they're trying to position it as this is an alternative to influencer marketing,
but it does look and feel more like an influence operation.
So I would be, this is the kind of thing that needs.
Nation states,
nation states typically take this kind of thing on
where they build,
you know,
a phone farm.
Yeah.
This feels like bot farming.
It feels like very much against the terms and conditions.
The other one that was wild.
Hold on,
but like NIR went through this whole flow
where NIR is,
is just quoting them,
which is interesting because NIR is not really dunking here.
Like NIR is just saying A16Z back,
double speed lets you control thousands of social media accounts
with AI.
It's basically just the same as what's on their,
website copy. One of the founders or the employees automating attention at double speed,
Zuhair Lakhani chimes in and says, let me know when you sign up, we can help you grow your
company, Oren. And Nier says, it wants to charge me 5K before I try it, it seems.
Zuhair says, sorry, we don't do free trials. Let me know if you have budget to allocate and
we'll get you onboarded. Day says you can do 2000. Zuhir says, yes, join our Discord. But the
founder, wait, is this, is this, this, this is a founder of Speed Run Cohort 5. I don't know if it's the founder.
Bessert Copa says, people are calling this like morally lame and impoverished and
Bessert Copa says, how so, there are already a million bot farms around the worlds.
They wreaked havoc on our elections not so long ago. Shouldn't the best ones be built in America
and pioneer the latest tech and rules to govern it?
Wait, so he's saying they have wreaked havoc on the world,
but so we should build it in America?
Yes, yes.
It's basically like, oh yeah, you know how fentanyl is bad,
but we should make it in America.
I think double speeds should pivot to being a defense tech company
and just work with our government to run foreign operations.
Yes, yeah, this is good.
America has such a long history of running, you know,
various influence operations in far off regions of the world.
Spam from first principles.
Here's another one.
Edgar is bringing real money engagement into free-to-play sweepstakes.
America's number one social casino for slot lovers.
These are insane.
I can't believe this is real.
I had to go check the speed.
It is wild comparing these to the Nat Friedman cohort that he did, which Julius was a part of,
Julius.a.i.
What analysis do you want to run?
Chat with your data and get expert level insights.
What was that?
So the last one we have to cover is covered, which is bet on your bills.
Only fans.
This is so dark.
I can't even.
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comfort of our app.
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And so my only, my reaction here, I mean, John, you're going to be in
by this, six million views on this post and only 292 likes.
So bad.
It means that someone like nuclear ratioed them.
But I mean, such an insane missed opportunity to say bet on your debt, right?
Like they say bet on your bills.
Yeah.
Like bet on your own debt.
Well, it's not debt.
This is potentially the most American.
Because you've already paid it.
Or maybe you're in debt.
No, but you're, you can wipe them.
If you, if you bet right, you get them wiped from your statement.
So bad.
It's so funny that just a, just a quote tweet that's from, from Hero Thousand Faces,
that just says societal breakdown gets more likes with 30,000 views.
Like, the like ratio is insane on this.
Trey says, this is incredible.
Double your bills or nothing.
What's funny is like there was a guy who was a really cool, like, kind of funny design
who was designing stuff like this, little modals,
and one of them was Apple Pay with a double or nothing button.
And people were like, oh, this is really funny.
But to see it actually productized is like, oh, like,
we were joking about that.
Yeah, the interesting thing is, you know,
a lot of these kinds of ideas, kinds of apps,
end up being massive businesses.
But you don't typically see, you know, venture funds backing them.
They typically booted up.
But this is one of the challenges.
is one of the challenges of scaling a venture platform, right? It's like, you know, there's tons of
partners at Endresen that probably would have passed on these deals, but, you know, individual
partners have autonomy and they can do what they want. Well, stick to the infrastructure,
maybe, go to Turbo Puffer, search every bite, serverless vector in full tech search,
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Did you see this? A gummy bear. Basil says a gummy bear company casually dropping revolutionary battery technology for $25 on Amazon, the lightest ever of this capacity, and pretending nothing happened. Just one of the funniest things of all time. This is Haribo. I just actually think this is Haribo. I think this is someone stealing the Harribo brand.
Well, they may, hopefully it's the gummy bear company. So, yeah, people are immediately,
wondering, like, is this real?
Uh, is this actually the best power storage per dollar possible or per weight?
And so Michael went ahead and bought one and here's his findings.
He says, its weight is 286 grams, just a little bit over what they claim.
The capacity is 83 watt hours.
The printed, printed on the battery, it says capacity 20,000 milliamp hours, um, or 77
watt hours.
So I'm measuring in excess.
of what is claimed.
I think they're stating
the voltage piece
is what makes the battery capacity
measurements nebulous,
but Wad-Irists don't have that issue
and I'm getting better than claimed.
Minimum charging current of 0.5
of an amp, less than this battery pack
turns itself off,
not able to recharge the battery via the building
cable, that's weird.
So overall, my conclusion is this battery
is the real deal.
It meets the claimed capacity
and pretty much hits the weight spec.
Wow. So maybe you've got to go
pick up all these up.
Very, very, very.
funny post. Oracle just secured a $38 billion debt deal to finance two new data centers. They said
they couldn't level it anymore. They shouldn't, but they are not listening. 23 billion will go toward
a Texas site and nearly 15 billion towards one in Wisconsin. Ted Zhang says, here we go. The debt
finance deals are coming. We got Chase Lockmiller from Crusoe coming on the show in about an hour
to break down his series E. The godfather of Stargate. Yes.
Star Lord.
The Star Lord.
Satrini put this out a bit ago, according to Ted.
Something that has been a relative comfort in being able to stay long despite calls for an AI bubble.
So far has been the fact that most of the CAPEX has come from cash, cash flow.
You don't have a bubble, really, until the majority of the expansion is done on debt.
We have yet to see significant financing, but that absolutely should be something to watch.
On one hand, that leaves another leg of the trade, leveraging up still results and more money being spent.
On the other, it sets the stage for consequences of not realizing ROI that we haven't really had to contend with in the existing paradigm.
With Microsoft 10-year bonds trading at a G-spread of three basis points, there's still a lot of room for the hyperscalers to issue debt or tap private credit to fund continued spending on AI.
However, this also induces a lot more fragility.
Going forward, monitoring the share of AI CAPX that is financed rather than funded from cash flow is probably the most important aspect of determining exactly where we are in the cycle.
Again, there's been a number of players using debt.
X-XAI has been using debt.
Meta's already tapped the debt markets.
I feel like Satya just generally is a lot less inclined to lean in and lever up too much.
But there's a post here from Junk Bond investor.
It says, just offloaded some data center construction debt to his school teachers, 401K.
My father is a retired school teacher, so hopefully.
He didn't get burned here.
He's going to be a little frustrated with me if that ends up being the case.
But I'm sure that's happening.
With Nexperia, there's been a little chaos on that front.
Nexperia, the semiconductor company out of the Netherlands.
They notified its Japanese automotive customers
that it may no longer be able to guarantee supplies.
triggering renewed concern about upheaval at the chip maker.
So some chaos over on the European front.
Before we do the next post,
let me tell you about Google AI Studio,
the fastest way from prompt production with Gemini.
Chat with models, vibe code, monitor usage.
Do you think everyone's talking about the AI bubble?
They never talk about the podcasting bubble.
Maybe we should be getting some more attention.
Everyone's saying like, wow, TBPN is feed me these businesses.
is if they don't work out, if they don't deliver,
the entire global economy will collapse.
Well, no, on a more serious note,
we did hear of a podcast
raising it at a half
a billion dollar valuation
that is burning money, so
that could be a sign.
There might be.
Packy has a post here, never
change. Masa, this guy rocks,
and it's a post that says
SoftBank Hunts for Humanoid
Robot Startups, SoftBanks,
Masayoshi's son has long predicted a future where robots would outnumber people and take over
many jobs from humans. But some of SoftBanks' bets and robotics over the past 10 years, such as Robot
Company Pepper, have not panned out. Now the company is renewing its robot ambitions, particularly
in robots that resemble humans. Can you imagine Brad Agg-Dock reading this? He's got to be just like,
oh, let's go. Like, I want to be the one. Softbank up 172% year to do.
Does it feel like actually a bad time to invest in humanoid robots?
I don't think it feels like a bad time at all.
I think it's probably true that Masa and SoftBank were too early in some of their robotics
bets, right?
They bet really heavily, you know, a decade ago.
This feels like a great time to be building in humanoid robots or robots generally.
There's a ton of interesting startups, 1X, and there's smaller companies and there's supply chain stuff.
And it's like, it's one of those things where it's like, are you more worried about being too early or being too late?
Probably too early on the humanoid robot side because they're not quite, you know, getting deployed profitably.
They're very much like research tools.
They get bought by researchers, you know, one-off stunts here and there.
There isn't really, there's no customer that's just like, oh, yeah, they're buying these like every mom.
They're buying more and more and more because like they're actually you know seeing increasing returns to scale. There was that story
last week about Tesla buying actuators from Chinese firm, right? Yeah. It was like a $675 million order, which to me signaled that's the kind of move you make if you're actually trying to get
scale into production like in real time. Yeah.
Or at least have a product that people can order. My theory was that if they felt like they had more
time. They might have done them themselves.
Yeah. Right. Well, our first
guest of the show is in the re-stream
waiting room. Let me tell you about profound.
Get your brand mentioned in chat.
GPT. Reach millions of consumers who are using AI to discover
new products and brands. Be like
MongoDB. Indeed. Docky
document. Yeah. We have
Sager and Jenny from breaking points.
Sagar, how are you? Oh, it's
great to see you guys. Thank you for having me.
Great to see you. Finally. Only after
a million text messages
every morning back and forth on the AI apocalypse and political crises. Have we actually just put it
together that we should just hang out on the stream? I really appreciate you taking the time.
Oh, thank you. Thank you. Give everyone like a quick shape of the actual flow of the content,
like the proper funnel of your business.
Sogerson credit. He kind of created Neo-Trad Media, which is a new framework we're working on,
which is new media that sort of embodies or,
kind of looks and feels like the traditional media.
So your show looks like a proper TV show.
You wear a suit.
And so we call that neo-traditionalist media,
neotrad media.
And we're firmly trying to do that as well.
I love it.
And I will say one of the only reasons I am here
is because both of you are bringing suits back
to the bones of Silicon Valley.
And I know many of you are watching right now
in your Lulu Lemon or Viori.
And you don't look cool.
You don't look better than John or Jordi or myself.
You all are billionaires.
buy a suit. Stop. Just stop it.
Stop it. That's great. I couldn't agree more.
I think we're starting to have a small
effect, but it's taking hold of it. A lot of people that visit
the Ultradome wear suits. Well, I mean, pretty much
like there are going to be tons of AI folks, tons of tech
people who are going to be dragged in front of Congress
over this data center buildout. I think you've clocked this
correctly. But walk me through, is this a thesis that came from
you see this coming or you're seeing smoke signals already.
Walk me through your thesis of how tech and the AI buildout runs on a collision course with the average American.
Yeah, the thing is, guys, and I really want to hammer this home for people who are watching because I, you know, shocker, I think many people in Silicon Valley do live in a bubble.
One of the best parts of my job is I do genuinely, is I interact.
And we'll return to bubble conversation, by the way.
But what I get to do is not only interact with a lot of people who are normal in politics,
and I mean that at the very base level, not people who live in Northern Virginia.
The vast majority of my audience don't live in Washington, D.C., many are Uber drivers,
hotel clerks, et cetera.
And I start to see bubbling stuff over the last five years over cost of living.
At the same time, I'm tracking the electricity story.
And it doesn't take a genius to pair that with data center buildout.
So one of the things that I really want to flag, I think, here on the show is that the
coming data center collision, at the heart of that is about electricity. It doesn't have to be this
way. One of my favorite notes is there's an analyst I follow who was in China. He had a very
different view of this in China, even though, of course, they don't have democratic politics,
but of course they do have some little democratic input, is they said nobody's concerned
here because electricity is considered a solved problem. We don't have a solved problem of
electricity here in the United States. And in fact, worse, you know, our grid is aging and actually
things are getting worse. So with all of this capital expenditure in data centers, you are seeing
a literal finite resource competition, especially in rural areas. So Virginia, the state where I live,
40% of all of our power is consumed by data centers. Oregon, for example, is some 33%. To be fair,
to many of the AI people who are watching, it's not all AI. We are the hotbed, right, of servers
and Amazon and much of the federal government. But the point is, is that this is bubbling up at a very
organic township level. So from Arizona to Virginia, data centers actually had a mention in our
more recent gubernatorial debate. Both the Republican and the Democratic candidate said that they
wanted to do something about it. There's Prince William County here in Virginia where this is an
active live issue and the public is overwhelmingly against it. The city of Tucson is moving. And so if we
see this continued capital expenditure go up and especially in more rural areas, we see headlines
to like 267% power increases for power bills in rural areas,
which are built near data centers,
not to mention environmental concerns, et cetera.
Then it's when you're going to see people start to get dragged before Congress.
So, yeah, go ahead.
Yeah, I'm just curious what, obviously, every area, you know,
people are not going to just watch a data center get built, you know,
in their backyard and not, you know, talk to their mayor,
talk to the governor and actually start a conversation.
a debate and ultimately create policy around this, is there not some type of solution that would
allow, effectively allow data centers to pay a higher rate than everyday citizens and kind of
make up the difference?
I think it's a great idea.
Unfortunately, that's not how our power system works.
The foundation of the United States is basically built on the fact that we're going to build
this grid, this infrastructure, and we can all kind of consume the social benefits of it.
There are pieces of legislation, Georgi, of what you're talking about on the table.
in Oregon and a few other states, but these are few and far between.
I also think we've got to take everybody through the story of the last 25 years.
Again, with great respect to the audience, I'm speaking to, you can't be Amazon and be the
second largest employer in the United States, and then in your shareholder meeting,
come out and say that we want to fire 600,000 people, or at the very least, not hire 600,000
fewer people.
These are people who watch their towns get decimated, then they watch Amazon.
I mean, Nomadland.
It's an Oscar-winning film about this, you know, this population of people who move around.
What's so challenging about this issue is that you have these massive infrastructure projects
with massive spend and almost zero job creation.
Exactly, exactly.
Like the plumbers and the electricians are going to get paid, and that's great.
But we've even heard stories of the plumbers and electricians being flown around on private jets
because their skill set is so.
heard the same.
And so that's not going to get people.
But yes, if you're, you know, living in a little town and you're watching, you know, the mega project gets spun up and you're getting not only, you know, no real benefit, you know, maybe you get more sloping your trough every day.
But it's not.
And anyway, that's the point.
Yeah.
Can you maybe take me a click forward into, let's assume the trend lines kind of continue.
electricity prices go up.
There's more, it's more clearly attributable to data centers,
et cetera, et cetera.
Like, how do the different political coalitions
reframe themselves around this issue?
Like, I imagine that there's a right-wing version
of tech backlash that looks one way.
There's the abundance lib direction.
There's going to be the actual socialist left,
and maybe they just say, like, no AI at all.
Yeah.
Right.
So, like, how do you use?
see the different coalitions
grappling with what the
the V2 of the messaging might be here?
There's going to be a horseshoe element here.
I think that the socialist left and much of the right
is going to actually come in the same place.
Enough. And so a lot of the socialists
left is actually Bernie Sanders. I don't know if you guys saw this.
Right before I came on the show just called for a breakup of
OpenAI. So this is huge news. He's the first
US politician actually to do so.
What is there to break up? They have chat GPT and they have a
bunch of other things that are subscale.
How about the nonprofit, profit arm or whatever the hell?
You guys can explain that to me.
Yeah, yeah.
I think Sam's like, I would love to break it up.
I'm actually trying to break it up.
I would love to just have a sequel to guys.
Break me up, Bernie.
Yeah, is this some sort of like 40 chess and Sam's gotten to Bernie and told Bernie,
hey, yeah, we need to break it up.
That's really popular messaging.
And he's like, yeah.
You know, Bernie's probably, you know, he's picking from an old toolbook.
Sure, sure, sure.
He's basically just saying, let's pressure them.
Let's make sure we have more regulation, right?
Exactly, more regulation.
On the right, I mean, much of this is going to be about distrust of Sam and many of the tech guys themselves.
I mean, when you have these people outwardly bragging about mass job loss, mass societal creation, there's a lot of us who are like, yeah, do I want this guy who's introducing AI porn to be the most powerful person in the world?
I mean, the challenge is that the job loss, like vision.
is so good for fundraising because if, you know, people are like, hey, maybe I don't have a job in 10 years. It's like, well, I want, I want my money going into these companies. So at least I'll have a chance at escaping the permanent underclass. Question for you. Social media went through, you know, and continues to go. It's like a perpetual backlash at this point. People say they hate it. They don't like it. They say it's bad. Many of those people still use it. How,
Do you think this AI development is different than that,
and that a generation will just log off?
Or do you think it will be the same type of dynamic
where people say they hate it?
They're frustrated with the potential impacts of it,
but they still line up.
That's a very astute observation,
and I think it's going to be somewhere in between.
Actually, Jority, this kind of gets to the point
of what I reacted to.
you put out a tweet about AGI and pornography.
And what I reacted to that is I was like, yeah,
AGI is not coming, guys.
What's coming is porn.
And what that means is the internet is just coming again.
And so, you know, I downloaded the chat GPT browser.
It's fine, you know, it's fine.
It's a browser.
And so it's a browser that's going to serve me.
I mean, literally the ad read before I came in was about putting ads into chat GPT.
Wow, what a business model.
Somebody should have invented it already.
They did.
it's called AdWords in 2003.
So are we just competing for the exact same type of unit economics, of screen time,
of use, of pornography, of the very same things, which, as you said, Jordy, are making us
miserable because that doesn't seem very cool to me.
And it also doesn't necessarily justify, let's say, 80% gain of the entire S&P 500 over the last
2025.
This is the stuff, actually, that I text John about literally every day when I'm like, a bubble
is coming, a bubble is coming.
Yeah.
A bubble is coming.
I think the steel man of like the the like the the mid the medium the case or so I don't know how to put it but it's like if I told you it's just like well yes like AI is not AGI you're not going to lose your job over it. It's not going to kill anyone but it will help you do research better. It's better auto complete. It's this nice tool that will help clean things up better spell check better grammar check. You know, it's better. Better gambling odds. And if you're like you're going to be you're going to be a little bit more more knowledgeable a little bit. A little bit more knowledgeable, a little bit. A little bit.
bit more
performance, a little bit more
efficient, and it's going to
to cost, we're going to need to build
some data centers, but we're not going to
build, you know, so many data centers
that we all lose our light and
heating and AC.
That's a reasonable, like, abundance.
I think that's what we're going to end up.
That's where we should, though.
The moment we are right now is that when
somebody, you know, sees an AI
video of, you know, the one
that went super viral a while back was
like people on the roof of an
apartment building and it's a pool
and the glass breaks and people flow off.
Yeah. It's like that video and videos like it are not worth for the average American an extra $100 a month,
you know, an extra $1,000 a year added to their electrical bill, right? And so that's what-
that's the political dynamic. And that's why, John, I go, hey, all of that sounds great.
Yeah. It's a little worrying to put my entire retirement portfolio based upon, you know, a very different
message. And when that's the reality of where we're going to end up, a little bit better Microsoft
Teams is just really not the anthropic vision, which is,
being sold to me, okay?
About, I mean, I talked to a guy who works at Accenture.
I said, how do you use AI?
He's like, yeah, it's great.
It does auto meeting summaries for me.
And I was like, wow.
You know, I mean, listen, definitely great.
I mean, it means you don't have to hire some entry-level guy, although maybe that's not
great.
And what really ended up happening is that you end up using it for these extraordinarily
mundane tasks.
I have no issue with that as long as the attendant social fallout, government policy, power
bills and all of that is tied up into it. Not to mention, and I really can't belie the social
cost, because what you said, Jordy, is a central thing. There is a mass elite revolution right now against
social media. And between, I think Jonathan Haidt might be one of the most public, like,
important public intellectuals in a long time, leading what I think is going to be at least a top
middle discussion with all of these different school districts, states and others, which are banning
phones. The recognition is that they are controlling us and we need to re-take control of our life.
AI is kind of supercharging that message. And if you talk to the vastly rich, which you do, and I've
spoken to a few of them, how many of them really let unlimited screen time for their phones in the
way that, you know, the income of, let's say, people making less than 100,000 do for their
children? It's just completely different. You know, they're very aware of that dynamic. And that is
permeating social culture at a way that I don't think people in tech are quite realizing.
Do you think it always takes a generation of guinea pigs to understand where technology winds up?
Because I grew up with the panic around video games and the idea that if you played Counterstrike
competitively at a very high level and became one of the greatest Counterstrike players of 2003,
you were definitely going to be crazy.
Well, I did it.
I was great at Counterstrike.
I wasn't maybe one of the best ever, but I was pretty good.
And I don't have any violent impulses whatsoever.
I was fine.
I was not one shot by 360 no scoping people.
I became a productive member of society.
And I feel like we came up with the ESRB, E, you know, R, like teen rated games, M-rated games.
And we kind of figured out like where the line is, parents adapted, kids adapted.
And we got through that.
Social media, it feels like we're towards the tail end of getting through it,
where most parents know, hey, the young kids should not be on Instagram, like, constantly
or TikTok constantly.
And with AI, we're just starting to understand.
But it feels like we'll kind of wind up in the same place, which is like, you might be right.
But let me challenge you a little bit on the video game front.
Please.
Because I think that, John, you also know my crusade against sports gambling.
So Robin Hood, if you're listening, please don't allow sports betting.
But one of the important things around gambling, you also know my crusade against
marijuana is here's the issue with video games with all of these vices and things that you're
talking about it's fine sometimes yeah but there is an attendant part of society which actually
does lose it when immersed in this culture so you know i've pointed unfortunately part of my job
i cover a lot of mass shootings we had two or actually three very recently we had minnesota
we had also the charlie kirk killer and then we also had the ice shooter all three were deep
in these weird discord gamers the ice guys
spent 20 hours a day gaming.
But Discord is a social media thing.
Discord the platform for...
I don't think it's like a video game.
It's the Discord platform.
Yeah, but you guys can locate his Steam data.
He was logging.
I don't exactly remember the number off the top of my head, but an absurd number of hours
playing video games.
This is somebody who's 31-year-old male.
This is kind of a contrarian take.
I feel like most people close the book on the video games as causing balance.
You're back.
I never left.
I love it.
Actually, no, I've never left.
I love it.
And that's part of what I think is important to say is that people say it worked out.
I just dispute that.
I mean, we have millions of people now who are addicted to gambling, who are addicted to marijuana,
who have gone psychotic, people who are wasting their lives in front of these screens.
And it's like, did it work out?
I mean, yeah, it worked out for the S&P 500.
Did it work out for the United States of America?
I would say no.
I mean, if you put all those things together.
Yeah, it was interesting.
Ryan Cohen from GameStop came on the show on Monday.
This was crazy.
He was, he didn't say this explicitly, but he,
he was basically, he was,
seemed generally in favor of just stopping
all AI research.
Well, I thought you were going to talk about his take on call of duty.
He was like, I don't want, oh, what did he say?
He was basically like, I don't want people playing call of duty.
Like, I don't want kids playing call of duty, which is crazy from like the GameStop
guy.
He's the CEO of the company.
But he had sort of a similar, like, anti-video game tag.
Like, maybe it's not as safe as people think it is.
Well, I mean, if you guys talk to teenagers and you're like, how do you guys hang out?
A lot of them will be like, oh, we don't hang out very much, but we play a lot of video games.
Together.
Sorry, that's bad.
I mean, it's just, it's weird.
It's weird.
Wait, but what about all the dudes?
I'm sure you know some of the guys who have been like one shot by golf,
where just golf is their whole personality.
They just are, all they do it all day is think about golf.
And then on the weekend they go golfing.
It's similar.
Is it not?
No, it's not similar because, well, okay, when I said video games,
what I said is they're at home playing online with their friends.
Yes.
Now, you and guys, we're all relatively the same age.
Online play was not around that time.
So what you would do is you would gather at a friend's house.
It was still pro, so.
It was, it was, it was, it was a thing when I was, a kid, but I lived somewhat in the country.
And so before anybody could drive, it was like your, your parent wasn't necessarily, it was, it was tough to get around, basically.
And so video games were a way that you could hang out with your friends.
And otherwise, it would have just been hanging by yourself or whatever.
Maybe that's, maybe that's, maybe that's better.
Maybe.
I mean, I don't know. What would get you to, what would get, is there any, can you imagine any scenario that would get you to change your mind on, on AI? Because I'm with you of right now, it feels like AI is an expand, like the current state of AI in terms of products that people use and, and are an everyday part of their life is just an extension of big technology, right? Open AI has the aesthetics now of a big tech company. They launch products like they're a big tech.
company. They have a user base, like they're a big tech company. They're very young, but that's what
they look and feel like. They still have their nonprofit and they still have, you know, a research arm
that is working on AGI, but it's hard for people to spend too much time thinking about AGI research
when all the launches and the announcements are social media and new web browsers and erotica and
things like that. And so, but I'm curious, you know, and this is something we are always
trying to tease out on the show is people that come on the show to talk about AI typically have
some AI to sell you or some they have a startup equity to sell you that that's that's sort of predicated
on on on these sort of more utopian visions of AI and it's hard to parcel out right and so you
had the the Carpathie interview recently which was kind of throwing fantastic interview yeah and
I that didn't necessarily like update my worldview a lot I think you put a lot of these ideas really
well, right? This idea of, you know, agents are not, you know, are not, the agents that we were
promised maybe this year are not here yet. And I think that's, that's okay. But I'm curious what would,
what would update your worldview? Because it's hard, it's like if we get massive job loss,
you're not going to be sitting here. Like, if we get like an OZMPIC level drug success that was designed
from AI, that probably makes it all worth it. I think John, I think what John is correct is just show me.
actually show it to me. Stop telling me because it's creeping me out to watch talk about UBI and,
you know, oh, everyone's going to be, you know, extremely happy even though I run the entire world.
I mean, listen, this, I got to put my own cynicism and bias on the table. Like, I'm literally
an anti-establishmentarian podcaster. When these guys open their mouths, I'm just like you're
lying. And most of the time, that turns out to be true. Yeah. So it's one of those where,
so I would, I would take the other side of this argument and, and say,
that it is possible that we never get some sort of big binary moment where we're like,
oh my God, yes.
Like it did the thing that we wanted to do, but it's still like net good.
I think about it like, you know, the invention of the credit card.
It's like it just like speeds up the economy every little, it takes a little bit of friction
out so that the corner store can sell a couple more muffins and then the person can pay
with the digital, you know, the digital cash.
They stored in their bank account, and they don't need to do the check writing,
and it sort of puts a couple check writers out of business,
but people have new jobs because they can do more things.
You will track your CO2 consumption.
No, no, no.
But there are tons of, there are tons of examples of like.
Not to put on the tinfoil hat, but do you think it's funny how for basically decades
people were so against central bank digital currencies,
and now they're like, let me, now, now everybody's like, I present to you stable, stable coins.
They're a little bit different, but they're sure, they're different, but the potential risks associated with digital money are still there.
Yeah, I want to pick up on what John said.
Sure.
I think it's such an important point, which is I think you are exactly correct.
But this is why I react so negatively to the rhetoric.
And, you know, guys, I mean, sure, you, how?
have as well. One of my favorite books, dot con, you know, by Cassidy, I could go through the list.
Michael Lewis has a book on dot com. I've read through. I even, I watched a few documentaries.
CNN, and you'll never hear me say this, actually has some decent documentaries about the decades.
And they have a decent documentary about the 1990s. Yes. Shout out to the old CNN.
Shout out to the old CNN. They had a great documentary about the 90s, which I watched.
And the same level of enthusiasm, they were talking about the information superhighway is quite
literally matches much of the rhetoric of today. I'm too young to actually have experience much
of it on the airways, but the same way and the fervor, which was fueling so much of dot com,
just seems, I mean, same thing. Like, ironically, I used chat GPT just before I came on here,
because I knew we were going to talk about this. And I said, tell me. That's what I was saying,
though. It's one of those things like people, like social media, they hate it, but they use it.
Well, I don't hate ChachyPT. I just don't. Yeah, yeah. Oh, but.
My finding was that we are mirroring almost exactly the same levels of tech stock growth from
the year 1999 of the entire S&P 500 of stock gains and similar ones in terms of our GDP.
If anything, the GDP number is higher today.
So the systemic risk, which matches the rhetoric and that the risk itself of the fact is,
you know, John, what I've probably been texting you the most about is these round-tripping
vendor finance deals.
And you made a great point to me privately about ASML and how vendor finance itself
is not necessarily a negative term in and of itself.
But it's really hard not to go and read the story of Cisco
and to say, hey, you know, if we have very similar type of downturn
and reduction of expected revenue,
I'm not saying OpenAI itself will go bankrupt,
but that itself is fueling the entire retirement portfolio
of the whole country, not to mention GDP, interest rates,
everything is banking on this one sector.
I think that's really dangerous.
And especially that background article,
you guys are going to know a lot more than me,
but Sam's story about, you know,
going back to Masayoshi-san,
which, look, no offense to the viewers.
You know, I read the We-Work book.
I'm just saying, I'm not saying,
I trust the guy's-judgment.
Credit on Masa.
With We-Work Masa never really got a markup, right?
Or maybe you got one or two,
but not a lot on the real dollar.
No, he was buying the top.
He top-ticked it.
And so that's the dialogue earlier this year
was Masa top blasting opening eye. And then, of course, you know, opening eyes up, you know,
another one and a half. Listen, I mean, his deal worked out, but it was more just the, to the extent of,
it's very similar kind of Adam Newman-esque to me about like, oh, Sam, you need to go bigger.
And that's exactly what encourages him to start doing so many of these deals. I don't begrudge them
necessarily to do it. But, you know, I really took to heart the too big to fail element of this.
Because I'm thinking about this from a mass society. Just say you're not an investor in soft bank group
Corp.
Up a hundred, up a hundred,
up 173% year to date.
So we have Jordan Schneider from China Talk joining in just a minute,
but the last question I want is the update on, you know,
obviously, you know, you believe there's an AI bubble.
Is there a media bubble?
Is David Allison trying to build one?
Like what's going on in the media landscape?
We were trying to map it out earlier, taking you through new media,
neo media, traditional media, the legacy media,
the mainstream media.
There's so much.
many different phrases, like what's the most interesting story in media in 2025? Because we've
already had the story about like, we're leaving the mainstream and going independent.
Here's my countertake, which I really came home with the gambling story recently at NBA.
There is a new media bubble and it's in sports. And it's entirely because Fandul and
Draft Kings have propped up way too many people with opinions. And when there is even a modest
pushback on prop bets and the rest of the bullshit that these sports books,
are allowed to send you,
p.m.
pardon my take,
and maybe two or three others
are going to make it.
Everybody else is going to get wiped out.
There are way too many sports,
sports podcasts if you're out there.
And in my opinion,
the biggest bubble is in sports media right now,
entirely inflated by the gambling industry.
Yeah,
what does you have any sense
what percentage of advertising revenues
in sports podcasting is gambling?
But it has to be like 70%.
I would say 80% to 90%.
I would say 80%.
I think the Pat McAfee deal
was maybe 50%.
paid for by sports betting.
Well, I have a startup to pitch you.
There's a new startup that launched that allows you to bet on your bills.
Only fans, child support, and last night, Uber's wipe them from your credit card by playing
your favorite casino games all from the comfort of their app.
Are you?
So if you have a big only fans bill, you can gamble it away.
You can gamble it away.
You know, the investor in me.
Yes.
The investor in me wants to, the investor in me wants to buy that company.
You need a vice clause on your own investments.
You're right.
I mean, I've said, as much as I preach against this stuff, if I actually had to open a business,
it would be called game day loans, like instead of payday loans, and it would float
sports betters who are out there who need like an 18 to 25% interest.
So that's a free idea out there.
Game day loans.
I'm telling you it's a billion dollar company.
It's going to happen.
It's going to happen.
If you want to sell it to Van Duel, you're ready.
What's your last thing?
What's your kind of like timeline on the, on the, on the,
this sort of tension bubbling up around data centers and slop and, and, uh, the, the,
I have a very clear idea of how, of how, like, how bubbles, it can get more, it can get more,
it can get more, it can get a lot more intense from here. It'll go national in 2026. The Democrats are
going to win a decent amount of elections. Okay. Anti-tech is already a small D democratic issue.
They are going to start hearing a ton of it at town halls. It's already happening. And, uh, 2026,
2027 is when it's going to happen. And, and on the right, you're tracking.
like Marjorie Taylor Green or Josh Holly.
Like who's going to be leading the front there on the right?
It'll probably be Tucker Carlson at the top.
And from that point, it will flow to the Marjorie Taylor Greens, the Josh Holley's.
I'd be very curious to see where JD lands on this.
Actually, where David, David, I mean, is a central figure in MAGA right now.
Yes, David Sachs.
Well, I'm very curious.
This point, Sacks's point, I think, from earlier this week was that without AI, you have basically zero GDP growth.
So I think he's taking the side of-
That's the problem.
And listen, that's not his fault.
He's the AI advisor.
He should be making that point.
But if I want to lead our country, that's not the sell I'm making because what we have learned over the last 25 years.
We need to prop up the economy so you can lose your job.
Yeah.
Exactly.
There you go.
That is the end all of this entire conversation.
Okay. This is the final boss of the anti-tech wave. It really is the, is the, potentially, potentially the final battle.
Yeah. And it's going to be, it's going to be, it's going to be crazy. And I'm excited to have many more conversations.
The singularity will be. Oh, I would love to. Yeah, yeah. We'd love to have you back. This is so much fun.
Thank you guys for having me. I really appreciate it.
Always welcome. And congratulations on all your success, obviously.
Well, I've been doing this shit for seven years. Nobody gave me a Sunday, New York Times,
profile. I think it's not what's going on here. We know, we know a guy. Yeah. Yeah, we got to make it
happen. Well, thank you so much. Have a great weekend. We'll talk to you soon.
Cheers, Sager. You too. Before we bring in Jordan Schneider from China Talk, let me tell you about
linear. Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building projects and products.
Meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects, and product
roadmaps. Let's bring in Jordan Schneider from China Talk. Jordan, how are you doing?
I'm doing all right. You should have kept me on with that last guest.
That was great.
I know.
Yeah, we started doing a little bit of that earlier this week.
We had like Brian Armstrong and Brian Chesky kind of next to each other for a little bit.
Call him back in because the answer is we will all be so distracted by our AI boyfriends and girlfriends that we won't be stressed out about losing our jobs.
I think I actually, it's very, it's very dark, but I think that the world is so entertained now that almost nothing matters.
and it's sad, but no matter how dark certain futures could be,
it's expected that everyone will have infinite entertainment constantly,
and it's so much harder for people to stand up and protest and try to create change
if, you know, you can go back to your phone and, oh, here's another funny video.
I just saw Stephen Hawking's of the X-Games, and it was awesome.
and I'm going to send it to a friend.
It actually is awesome, though.
It is sick.
It's really sick.
It's totally worth paying a lot for that.
Totally worth the extra $2,000.
That clip is the duality of TVPN.
I haven't even seen my dog do it yet.
Just wait.
Once I see my dog at the X games.
No, I think it's important.
I think like you can't, you know,
I continue to be a firm believer that the technology is a massive net positive for the world.
but it has a dark side and it's important to talk about it and it's will be important to
continue to talk about it.
It's numbing.
There's like a taking antidepressants lens to it, right?
Where you just kind of feel less if you get these dopamine hits.
And we've, you know, we have not evolved to have the dopamine hits with, you know, within
literally five seconds.
Anytime you feel bad about yourself or bad about the world or something.
something that happened around you or, you know, someone disappointed you in your life. It's like,
oh, okay. Like instead of like addressing that or, you know, going to protest to Jordy's point,
you know, we can be consoled by these things that live in our pockets. And they're only going
to get better at it, which is the sort of, I guess, awesome. This is the worst, this is the worst,
the dopamine feedback loop will ever be. This is the worst the infinite jest will ever be.
Do you think China is less dopamine addled, like probably brain-rotted?
Because we hear these air-codes about like no, no brain-wrought TikToks or no video games.
Their TikTok is just science videos.
It's just not.
Yeah, right?
Absolutely not.
I mean, look, like, who needs opiates for the masses more?
Like a country with 20% youth unemployment or a country that has like, what, 3.5% unemployment?
I think the part.
the party has successfully kind of like numbed out.
Which country has 20% unemployment?
China.
You're unemployment?
Yeah, which country are you talking about?
Well, yeah, give us, let a eye run for an extra year or two, I guess.
But over the-
Those are rookie numbers.
Like, if you told me that was America, I'm not that far off.
I mean, I've heard that the numbers are going up.
They might have spiked.
But no, I think there is, I think this sort, you know, it's fun.
You guys should have Jasmine and Son.
And I asked her this, like, because she just came back from a trip to China.
I was like, who walks around looking down at their phone more people in the Bay or China?
And she couldn't really distinguish between the two.
I don't, just like, like, just like equally sort of like zoned in while like walking down the street, you are like simultaneously swiping.
Ben Sand in our chat says iOS liquid glass is the best line of defense against phone addiction.
I totally agree.
It's like the worst software Apple's released in so long,
and it just makes using your phone worse.
I'm sure I hope my screen time is going down.
Don't worry.
Johnny Ive will come in to save the day, Jordy.
We won't be safe.
That won't save us for long.
Yeah.
Okay, wait.
Zoom out.
The original reason we wanted to chat was because of the,
it's always fun to have you on the show,
but obviously about the rare earth.
Just give us the high level update on like the trade war.
This has been, what,
since the entire time, since your very first appearance,
is it real?
Is it real?
Is it even worth, like, thinking about, like,
what the high-level summary is of the status of the debate?
Sure.
I mean, I think, like, like, look,
we've seen this administration swing from side to side
on lots of different things.
You know, we were yelling at Zelensky in the Oval Office,
and now we're finally doing the sanctions
that Biden couldn't bring himself to do around oil.
You know, we had Trump trying to, you know, doing a liberation day, taking it off, you know, giving them H-20s.
They don't want them.
Now we're trying, now they sort of tried to tighten the grip with the 50% rule from BIS, so sort of Huawei subsidiaries can't buy equipment.
And China came back with rare arts.
I think the sort of the fundamental fact is that like both countries have the, you know, the,
both countries have the ability to do significant economic harm to each other.
And it's a bit of, you know, there's an aspect of playing chicken.
And there's a, and there's this kind of question of escalation dominance, like,
which side can take more pain and which side really cares more.
And both of them have, have basically a ranked list of tools in the tool chest,
chips on the poker table, and something like, we're not going to set.
value rare earth is extremely painful to America, maybe not that painful to China.
And then we're going to tax happy meal toys or whatever is maybe, you know, something in the
American tool chest or and the invidia thing. And is the process that we should think about the
lens of this year more thinking about just every, both sides are trying to actually understand
the shape of how painful each tool in the tool chest is?
Because it feels like we're very much like turning these things on, turning them off to understand, okay, if rare earths are plus 60 points.
Nvidia chips, we thought it was plus 20 points for the U.S. It's actually plus five.
It feels like we're just trying to like map all these out. And then we will go to the meeting and actually say, okay, what's equal? Is that what's happened?
Yeah. Well, the problem is, I think the she has had a longstanding goal, which he's really, which is, which is, which is really,
He's repeated in speeches numerous times, that he wants to make China more self-reliant,
and he wants to make the rest of the world more reliant on China.
And the problem with what you're seeing out of the Trump administration's policy towards this
is what they're optimizing for changes literally week to week.
So, you know, tariffs are for revenue, tariffs are for, you know, this trade war is to bring
manufacturing back.
This trade war is to actually help NVIDIA.
gain market share in China.
The trade war is to crush the Chinese semiconductor companies.
And the problem is it's like it would be easier to sort of get to some sort of equilibrium
where each side is just going to run as fast as they can at their things.
Like if this administration had a sort of grand vision that it was working towards consistently
for.
But I think the dance that we've seen now play out over, they've made.
met each other like 15 times is it seems like the negotiators every time they go are actually
operating under kind of like different, a different incentive structure. So, and I think this just
plays to China's benefit because the fact of the matter is America has an enormous amount of power
and leverage that it could bring to bear. But the first time that China bit back in the case
of rare earths, that kind of really freaked out the Trump administration. And it showed
and sort of the...
So what will be interesting.
Sorry, yeah, please.
Yeah, to make this more tangible, like,
how is this netting out for China's AI industry?
The messaging has been, obviously, you know,
you're not going to buy NVIDIA chips.
Maybe we'll look the other way on Malaysia and Singapore data centers.
We're going to invest as much as possible
in catching up the leading edge in our own, you know,
domestic semi-industry, we're going to dominate in power, and in five to ten years, like,
we're going to be, you know, relatively, you know, in their view, hopefully, you know, relatively
equal in terms of, like, overall computing power. And then I want to get a sense of, like, on the
rare earth side, how solvable that is for the U.S. in your view. Well, Chris Miller on China talk had
a good line. Like, we're just, we're about to see what's easier to do. Building
EUV machine or build a rare earth's mining, you know, rare earth mines and refining facilities.
So from the Chinese AI perspective, I do think that their decision to sort of say, we don't
even want your age 20s is fascinating.
On the one hand, it may just be a ployed to get Blackwell to be like, oh, okay, like we don't
want this.
We'll sell you even harder drugs to use Latinx, like addiction.
phrase, but there also may be some sort of information mismatch because there obviously are
lots and lots of sort of Chinese AI labs and hyperscalists who would love to buy Nvidia chips,
but Huawei may have gotten into the ear of the state council saying, yo, like, we got this,
don't worry, like, you know, we'll make you all the chips.
Haven't, you know, hasn't like Singapore and Malaysia like spiked quite a bit?
Like, can that demand?
not just flow there?
Yeah, so it turns into a bit of a bridge.
And this is something that the administration seems to be, well, look, if you're fine selling
the chips into China, yeah, why not just sell them into Malaysia and Singapore?
I mean, I, for one, I'm more comfortable with that as a kind of intermediate step.
But the problem with that is, like, what you're doing is providing this bridge for all these
competitors of the U.S. AI stack to kind of like keep developing and staying on the frontier
such that when Huawei really is able to scale, you know, potentially is able to scale to a level
to compete with Nvidia, you have these firms still running. And the question I really want
to know is like, look, if we're, if we want to sell the AI stack to the world,
why don't we just make, why aren't we selling like all of it? Like, why is it cool that we're
just doing the Nvidia stack and then like,
We're allowing Nvidia to do partnerships with, like, Alibaba Cloud abroad and, like, sell that into
Malaysia. I mean, it would not be that hard to say, okay, like, you want Nvidia chips. You should also
be working with American hyperscalers, and you should be buying from AI and buying Western models.
That seems to me to be like a, like, there aren't too many, like, alternatives on the table.
The U.S. does have the leverage there, and I think it's a shame that that's not the line we're pushing.
instead just sort of like ending the monopoly of the AI stack at the chip layer and letting the the clouds
and models just you know go whichever way they will. I think America needs a deep seek for energy,
an American deep seek for energy, right? So what that would mean is like what did deep seek do?
Like they got they jumped to our frontier. Yeah. So Jordan Schneider is the more cash is the cheap state.
Yeah, really cheap, really fast. But they stole like our fundamental thing. They're like, we need to steal how fast they can
build energy over there and make it an American company. So however they build stuff. Or just like invent
nuclear fusion. Yes, John. Well, is that, is that nuclear fusion? I have a feeling. No, no, no,
it's something that they're doing, right? Aren't they, aren't they installing? They're growing way
more energy. So what is the company that's doing that over there? What's the organization over there?
What do they have that's special? Let's, let's copy that. Is that possible? I mean, the answer is like,
it would, like, the reason I went to nuclear fusion is like, it would be really,
nice to have a shortcut.
Because the answer is like really boring and frustrating.
But don't you think America will just get lucky?
Like we always do discover, you know, some novel, you know, method of energy.
But we always, anytime we need a resource, we just find some of it.
I feel like we'll have.
Yeah.
This is the, this is the whole Tyler Cowan thing.
Like, do not underestimate the elasticity of supply.
It's not just finding it, right?
It's like all of these, you know, global.
capitalism is now scared of their dependence on Chinese rare earths.
And they kind of got a taste of that in April.
They should have learned their lesson in 2014 when China did this to Japan.
But now it's really real.
And now, you know, all your VC friends that come on the show are going to understand that this is a much more investable, you know, finding like the solution to uterbium and like, you know, manufacturing like lab grown diamonds.
like people are going to be willing to pay a premium for that stuff in a way that they maybe weren't
even six months ago.
Why are lap grown diamonds important?
There is actually a cyan banister company, Long Journey, is in something called Diamond Age.
Amazing.
I mean, it's that important in the rare earth context?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's an input to, I think, China.
This is actually one of the ones that the world is doing okay on.
China has like 70% of the market.
But yeah, it's part of the sort of, uh, uh, uh,
You know, it's used in fabs as part of the sort of manufacturing process.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
How are you tracking the backlash to data center built out?
We were just talking to Sager and Jetty about this.
He thinks that, like, there's going to be a serious backlash.
What's the deep state saying, Jordan?
So here's the answer.
You saw these, you may have seen these articles come out with the Secretary of the Army talking to PE firm.
about how they're going to lease out land.
It's like, all right, well, it's just like,
build this stuff on,
yeah, just build this stuff on military bases.
He's been on our show.
No one's going to complain if it's just like in the middle of nowhere.
Yeah, you think so.
And, you know, you can pollute all you want on those.
There are all these sort of regulatory exemptions for these places.
I think the money's going to find a way.
The problem with this is like, sure, you know,
the NIMBY stuff is useful when it's,
It's like you're going when it's like one neighborhood, right, or two neighborhoods.
But like you can put this stuff almost anywhere and it is like 97% as useful as if you get to build it in Virginia, right?
So I'm not I'm not all that pessimistic.
I think, okay, maybe a few, a few localities will be like loud enough to kick it out.
But America's pretty big.
There's a lot of places.
I like that.
What do you think is going to happen on the humanoid front?
We saw this really insane demo of a Unitri robot that was transitioning from walking to
crawling like an insect, and now Unitree is selling in Walmart, and it just feels like we're
going to repeat the DJI thing where we let every American have a humanoid in their home,
that, you know, a Chinese humanoid in their home, and I'm sort of surprised that we're running
this back.
It's interesting.
I mean, there aren't real competitors at scale for the consumer market in the U.S.
Yeah.
I mean, there are very straightforward regulatory things that the Trump administration could do to ban them.
There's also a handful of kind of dependencies that the Chinese robotics ecosystem still has on the U.S.
Still has connected to the U.S.
So, you know, a lot of those chips come from TSMC.
like there's a there's a sort of like invidia software layer maybe this is something that the trump
administration is thinking about when they're saying oh we're going to like ban critical software so
there are things that the u.s can do to kind of slow down the um the yeah i just i just like
human rights are not you know even in unitri's robots current form it's not like they're
delivering incredible value to americans and by banning them you're like you know reducing you know
the productivity of businesses or anything like that. And so it feels like maybe in two years
are actually providing some value across the economy. It'll be much harder to go out and say,
we're going to ban the cheap ones and you have to buy American. And it just feels, you know,
I don't know. Sure. Well, what's really interesting is like in Ukraine, UGVs are a real thing now.
So, you know, a lot of the like sort of resupplying infantry that's on the front line is an incredibly
dangerous thing, and now they just have these little track robots that go back and forth. You've even
seen videos of like Kazivak, so people who are injured, that they can't, you know, carry out in any
other way being sort of like rolling themselves onto some like bed and having a drone drive them
out. So I'm with you, Jory. This stuff like, they're kind of cute and fun for now, but we'll get,
like, we'll get there pretty soon. It's not going, it's not impossible. Yeah, they're cute. They're cute.
But at the same time, when the humanoid starts crawling across your floor and you realize,
and your human alarm, you have like a biological alarm bell going off that says like,
this thing like looks like it, like from all the sci-fi movies I've seen, this thing looks like it
looks like it wants to kill me.
Yeah, it feels way more tractable to me, like self-driving cars, like, you know, OCRing text
in an image.
It feels like something that we can just like chip away at versus, like, like, you know,
like the novel scientific discovery thing, that feels like very uniquely human, very complex,
like much further out. This is just like make the motors work the right ways. It feels very
simple. Like we're not trying to make someone superhuman at moving. Like it's just do the thing
that any human can do. And we have tons of training data for stuff. How we're,
what's happening in, in Chinese markets right now? I don't know, man. I'm just the tech guy.
I'm going to pass on that.
Let me go back to the...
You should spin up a small venture front on the side, then you'd be able to answer that question.
Well, no, well, the thing that I am spinning up that I want your blessing from, actually,
is so I've started a new series about war.
I think it is actually just SportsCenter for war.
We've been doing it once a week.
The current name is Second Breakfast, but I think WBPN would probably be a
better thing. So I don't know what the licensing arrangement is here. Maybe this is a conversation for
offline. I love the second breakfast concept. I love the topic selection. I would not recommend
SportsCenter for war because the because like there are just going to be episodes that are sensitive
and it's hard to bring humor and levity to something that's really dark. Yeah. Sports Center is about
providing an entertainment layer over existing entertainment.
And like, I'm sure it's been a little dark this week with all of the gambling
ring action.
But in general,
most of the time,
I don't think you want your face across the New York Times being like Jordan Schneider's,
you know,
the Sports Center for War guy.
Yeah, it is tricky.
I mean, people have pitched us like, oh, are you going to do a trading card for
the hostages being released or something?
in geopolitics and stuff.
And it's like, it just feels like
that's not our space.
And when you re-contextualize it,
even if it's a positive story,
it still feels like,
oh, there's like,
there's real lives at stake
versus like, you know,
just money at stake,
which is what we talk about.
Or just points in the imaginary sports world.
In the literal sports world,
like it is just a game.
Yes, it's extremely high stakes
at the Super Bowl,
but it is just a game.
And so you can have a lot of fun with that.
And you can also have fun with just some VCs who are writing checks, but the war thing is a little bit, it requires a little bit more sensitivity, I think.
Yeah, I mean, it's interesting because, like, this community is just chalk full of dark humor.
Sure.
So, you know, I've told this to a few people, and they just, like, think it's the funniest thing in the world.
Yeah.
Even, like, going back and forth with like, the conversational element of talking about the war history, that makes so much sense.
Like, for sure.
I don't know.
But all right.
Point taking things for that.
Where can people check it out?
I know it's in the China Talk RSS feed.
Do you have to hit substack?
How are people getting into the ecosystem?
Yeah.
It's just on the China Talk podcast feed for now.
Maybe it'll end up metastasizing.
But yes, second breakfast, if you need more Venezuela content in your life.
What is?
I've been out of the loop on what do you think happens with Venezuela over the
next month while we're while we're here. You can give a little taster of your of your new show.
Well, there's two paths where, well, I guess there's three paths they're on. One, he's just bluffing
and we're going to move on to something else in a month. But like having this many boats in the Caribbean,
sending a carrier makes me feel like it's a little more than that. So then there's path number two
where America fights like a covert war with a cartel. And then there's pass number three.
three where we sort of like kill, exfiltrate, end up intimidating out of the country,
sort of Maduro and his like leadership team. And I don't think this administration is
necessarily going to be that if you break it, you buy it mindset. So, you know, then I guess the
cartel takes over the country. I don't know. It is not clear to me that this has been entirely
thought out. It just seems a lot
like a Sicario cosplay
at like a giant, horrific
on a giant and like really horrific
scale. Maybe there's a better idea
out there behind all of this.
But the sort of
head of Southcom
for whom this operation
would have been like the crowning achievement
decided, like
said he was going to retire one year
into his three year tour of duty, which
has basically like never happened
in the past 40
years or so. So I don't know. It's going to be really messy. The U.S. actually does have like a kind of nice
case study in what, in Columbia, and what we were able to do to sort of like get the, you know,
bring the, like talk and fight the FARC out of existence over the course of the 2010. So that's
the happy story that might manifest. But the thing there is like you were working with the central
government. There were only 50 Americans on the ground doing the thing.
And like now we're trying to get rid of a cartel that apparently the president is saying is like one in the same with the government itself.
So I don't know.
Big mess.
Very far from like pivoting to China.
But we'll get there eventually.
You know, it's only a matter of time.
I know.
I think you got to maybe start with updating China talk.
Maybe it's just, maybe it's just one.
World talk.
World talk.
World.
Just world talk.
World time.
Yeah, Globe.
World time.
Globe radio.
No, I think just Jordan Schneider.
I don't know.
I mean, all these.
Somebody in the chat said Saturday night live for human rights violations.
So that's what you want to, that's what you want to avoid with your whole sports center for war thing.
It could be rough.
Although maybe if you just own it, I mean, like, you listen to Tim Dillon.
He's like extremely candid.
Anyway, we do have a guest waiting.
So thank you so much for coming on the show.
Always good.
Always good to catch.
Let's do it again soon.
We'll talk to you later and have a great weekend.
Good to see you guys.
Cheers.
Before we bring in Chase from Crusoe, let me tell you about numeralhq.com.
Sales tax on autopilot, spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance.
We have Chase Locke Miller from Crusoe in the restroom waiting room.
Now he's in the team UP and Ultradome.
Welcome to the show.
You're looking fantastic.
How are you, Chase?
Congratulations are in order.
Give us the breakdown.
What's the news today?
You know, today we are announcing the closing of our Series E round of funding,
valuing the company of 10.4 billion.
Gong.
Gong.
Another one.
Another one.
Another one.
10.4 million.
Two gong hits.
I don't know.
Fantastic.
Fantastic.
How are you describing where the company, what you do?
It's such a fascinating.
What exactly do you do?
Yeah, I mean, you've been doing somewhat of the same thing for a very long time.
And yet there's been multiple eras in terms of what
the end and customer has done.
There's been where you sit in the stack,
the type of size
of project, scale of projects.
So how are you describing the wheelhouse
that or the, the,
yeah, where Crusoe fits?
Yeah, I think putting it
simply, you know, Crusoe is
an AI factory company.
So what that means, we're building,
you know, these factories that produce intelligence.
And this is both a hardware problem
and a software problem.
And we focus on,
on all of the things ranging from cultivating the energy
and helping develop the energy resources needed
to power AI infrastructure.
We're building out the data centers themselves
and redesigning them to fit these large-scale accelerated computing clusters.
And then we also built out this whole software platform
that operates these large-scale AI factories
so that they can actually be effective in producing intelligence
and really enable our generation's greatest minds
and entrepreneurs to do their life's work and help build and scale their AI applications to
impact people around the world. Is there a superlative that you're chasing in the Neo-Cloud
market? Do you want to be the firm that can build bigger than anyone or else or faster than
anyone else or more reliable? I mean, obviously you want to win on everything, but is there
something that you're chasing that you think is like the true differentiator? Yeah, I think
I think right now speed is the biggest focus for the business in terms of being able to move very, very quickly.
It's a very dynamic market.
But certainly, you know, reliability, scale, cost, all these things really come into play.
And ultimately, we want to deliver for our customers what they need, what adds value to them.
So, you know, being able to deliver, you know, to our cloud customers, the best price performance tradeoff for
There are infrastructure solutions alongside a reliable, you know, well-managed platform, I think, is,
you know, ultimately our goal.
But, you know, I think being able to do that very, very quickly right now is a major, major advantage.
And it's something that's very difficult to replicate.
When you look at, you know, kind of what we did in Abilene, Texas, in terms of, you know,
starting from from nothing into a large-scale AI factory that's, you know, managing, that's operating,
you know, tens of thousands of GPUs at this point.
point is a very important aspect to, you know, bringing this infrastructure to life.
So Abilene's is up and running.
Yes, we announced recently the first phases of the 1.2 gigawatt campus are up at
operational today.
Operational.
That's incredible because I feel like there was like this whole press cycle about
like, oh, it's off track and it's like, this thing was announced like months ago.
I expect these things to take years.
I don't know.
I was, I was, I feel like people aren't taking enough of victory lap there.
Yeah.
No.
And I think there's been, you know, Stargate's been this like very overloaded term in terms of, you know, it's a company.
It's a, you know, it's a site.
It's a concept.
It's a, you know, it's like what is Stargate?
You know, I'm still not entirely sure.
But, you know, there's, uh, I think we got wrapped up a little.
bit in the, you know, rumors swirling that this thing's behind or, you know, that the company is
behind. But, you know, the project has done extremely well. People took the most expensive,
the most, the most ambitious vision and the shortest possible timeline. And that became what
you were measured against, basically. And so it was like, unless, unless a trillion dollars is in the
ground working in six months, like, it's over. It's like, wait, we never said that.
Well, it's rightfully had a lot of pressure because the project got announced via
the president. That's not very standard for, you know, a launch. It's a good tip for startups. If you,
if you want a spokesperson, the president would be a great. Tyler Cowen has a quote that's been going
around quite a bit recently, which is like, don't underestimate the elasticity of supply
in the context of, and it's been going around in the context of energy. It feels like Crusoe was
started on this idea of like there actually is a lot of energy out there and there's real
demand for it, you just got to go out and find it. How much is that, how much is that ringing true
as you kind of evaluate, you know, new sites and opportunities for your business?
No, that's absolutely the case. And I think that's one of the things that set us apart and
enabled us to move quickly and build at scale is having this energy first approach to developing
the infrastructure. Part of our announcement today was announcing our energy pipeline, which,
is in excess of 45 gigawatts at this point.
And, you know, putting into context, you know, the Abilene campus is 1.2 gigawatts.
So, you know, it's, you know, orders magnitude larger or an order and a half of magnitude and
larger in terms of overall capacity there.
I'm in New York City today.
You know, it's something, you know, on the order of, you know, eight New York City's
worth of power.
So it's a very substantial amount of power that's going to be required fundamentally for,
AI to scale and to really, really reach the ambitions and hopes of the industry.
Last question, we'll let you go. Last time you were on, we kind of walked through a little bit of
a debunk of the, we're going to run out of water for data centers. What's your current
thinking on the story that's emerging around like data centers are going to drive up my energy
prices? Is that solvable on the short term? Is this going to be some short term
paying for long-term gain? Is it something that you need to rethink regulation or just
speed up building of new energy? How are you thinking about that question? Because it seems like
it's going to get bigger and bigger. Yeah. So I actually found it fascinating. There was a report
that came out recently that showed actually in markets with substantial data center investment.
The overall cost to rate payers actually came down compared to other markets.
where there was less digital infrastructure being built,
where prices actually went up substantially.
And, you know, I really see this trend playing out as a whole
because what ends up happening is, you know,
the digital infrastructure players, the folks building the data centers,
at this point, you know, a lot of the energy market is saturated.
And there isn't just, you know, a bunch of free power laying around, you know,
underutilized, not doing much.
You know, there's some of that, but, you know, it's becoming more and more scarce.
which means that in order to realize all of these ambitions that are taking place in AI,
we actually have to build out a lot of net new power.
We need to build new power plants.
We need to build new creative energy solutions to effectively energize this infrastructure.
And when data centers are doing that,
they're having to build out power capacity that meets their overall peak demands of the facility.
And as a result, it ends up with some incremental power that is being underutilized,
and can become an asset to other participants in those energy markets and really actually
bring down their overall cost of power because there's more abundant power.
And that really goes in line with the Crusoe Mission, which is accelerating the abundance
of energy and intelligence.
We really view those two things as the key pillars of progress in this chapter for humanity.
Yeah, I love it.
I think it's definitely, I mean, there's a bunch of different political frameworks where you
could use to understand where this is going.
but it feels very solvable.
One last question that probably would take 10 minutes to properly answer,
but how much are you banking on nuclear on a shorter time horizon, if at all,
talking five-year timeline?
Yeah, so we're really excited with a lot of the advancements happening in the nuclear space.
We have a number of partnerships across the SMR ecosystem,
including a plan to energize the first SMR-powered AI factory in 27.
So, you know, that's going to be sort of a smaller scale deployment,
but we think will be a great template for us to hopefully scale
and bring new nuclear-powered AI infrastructure to life.
It's also, you know, this has been a huge priority for Chris Wright
in terms of, you know, helping create a,
a regulatory framework for nuclear and sort of re-evaluating the NRC, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission,
in terms of, you know, how do we actually enable the private sector to build the energy necessary
to power demands of society, data centers, you know, being a big, big component of that.
So, you know, very excited and I think it's going to be a huge win.
And then, you know, there's also the big nuclear plants that, you know, I'm excited to see come to life again as well.
you know, Westinghouse, you know, is announcing, you know, a number of very big APW-1,000
campuses that, you know, we think will play another big part in, in terms of getting the power
we need for intelligence.
I'm very excited about that.
I hope that we get all those campuses online as fast as possible.
Well, thank you so much for coming by the show.
Sorry to get you late.
We will talk to you soon.
Congratulations on the Massachusetts.
The whole team.
Thanks.
Awesome.
Always great to see you.
Yeah.
Fantastic progress.
We'll talk to you soon.
Have a great weekend.
Cheers.
Up next, we have Tucker from Orion Technologies.
We are running a little bit behind.
Let me tell you about Finn.AI, the number one AI agent for customer service, number one in performance benchmarks,
number one in competitive bakeoffs, number one ranking on G2.
And let's bring in Tucker for a quick hit of the gong.
Give us the news.
Tell us what you're building.
We would love to ring the gong for you.
How are you doing?
I'm doing all. I can't hear you, really. It sounds like you're speaking in slow motion.
Oh, odd. Check, check. Check. Check one, two. Orion Technologies, you're coming out of stealth.
We'd love to hear about the rays. If you can take us through, just the high level, we can ring the gong.
And maybe we can try and have you back on later. Do we have Tucker? Let's see. We might need to move on if we have technical difficulties.
We can always have you back on the show another day.
Should we move on All right?
Can you guys hear me?
We can hear you.
We can hear you great.
We can hear you great.
Let's see.
I can hear you guys, but it sounds very slow for some reason.
Okay.
We'll let you do.
My name's Tucker.
I'm the CEO of Orient Technologies, and we're coming out of stealth after a $3.5 million
pre-teed.
Let's go.
Jordi, ring that gong.
Thank you very much.
Take us one level.
deeper about the problem, the solution, what you're building. And then we do have to move on,
but please give us a little bit more on the progress of the company, some of the decisions
that you've made, how you're thinking about building the company. Yeah, so we are building
essentially the interoperability layer for manned and unmanned aircraft. So what does that actually
mean? We enable man and unmanned aircraft to communicate, coordinate, and deconflect. And we're starting
with heterogeneous assets. So drones built from different vendors within cities and around
airports today.
Congratulations.
We're going to have to have you back on.
Later, we'll do a technical check next time.
But have a great rest of your day.
Have a good weekend.
And congrats on the race.
We'll talk to you soon.
While we bring in our next guest,
let me tell you about Adio,
customer relationship magic.
Adio is the AI Native CRM that builds
and grows your company to the next level.
Can you get started for free.
New technical difficulty unlocked.
We haven't seen that before.
We have Catherine from Valthos.
coming in to the TBPN Ultradome.
She, I believe, is in the Restream Waiting Room.
Let's bring in.
Kathleen, welcome back to the show.
We had you on the show.
It was a very fun conversation, and there were some things that we could talk about.
There were some things that we couldn't talk about.
I'm glad that we're here today, and we have plenty to talk about.
But please kick us off with an introduction on a little bit more on yourself and the company
and what you're announcing today.
Yeah, last time I was here, I was so stealthy.
But now very excited to announce what we've been working on.
I'm Kathleen.
I'm the co-founder and CEO of Valthos, which is the next-generation biodefense company.
So we are trying to build infrastructure for American biodefense.
Amazing.
And when we had you on, there was some great, wasn't it, there was some story in the news about like some Chinese, like scientists that were bringing some type of bio weapon around or at least working on it.
So good to have you back with some more happy news.
Yeah, I'd love to know the state of like,
what are the case studies that you're latching on to, you know,
in the early days of Anderol,
there was this narrative around the rising power of China
and our decrepit military systems.
People would talk about the failure of the,
or not the delays with the F-35 program.
Do you have particular case studies and stories
that you like to ground the story of your company with?
Yeah, absolutely. So when we're talking about biodefense broadly, the big problem is asymmetry. So it is just so much easier, cheaper, and faster to make a pathogen than it is to make any kind of cure. And that's just like at the heart of everything we're talking about. It was true before AI. But what's really changed is how some of these new AI capabilities are magnifying that type of asymmetry. It's two big ways that we're focused on in terms of the case studies you were saying. The first is more about uplift. So it's how many people, how much technical skill set does it take to?
actually engineer a pathogen, and that's just dropping week over week. So we used to be worried about
these sophisticated state-sponsored programs. You can read what our folks in defense are focused on
in Russia and North Korea. Now we can talk about like a couple students, maybe at the grad level,
we have access to a lab, and like that's probably going down to one or two as these capabilities
to expand. So like massive, massively different landscape. The second side is just like how
potentially lethal can these sets be. So we're getting...
I think we have more technical difficulties. It's a technical difficulty day.
Oh, no. It's Friday. The internet is slow, but you're back. I'm back. Please.
Maybe I can reframe the conversation, not to kind of just cut you off and restart, but
people have been saying we need an Anderil for bio for a while. Is that an appropriate moniker?
And maybe we could use the Anderol example as understanding a little bit of a little bit of a little
bit deeper on what you want to build because I think of Anderol as very much, you know, separate
from Palantir. They're building hardware. They're building specific programs record for the DOD,
competing against the primes. Are there companies that you're going to be competing with out of
the gate? How do you think about the shape of the business as it grows? Is this on our side?
Are we having technical difficulties on our side today?
It might be a Zoom. It might be a Zoom thing. Is there a major attack? Let's,
Let's flip over to the production team.
What do you guys have to say for yourselves?
What's going on?
I don't know.
Is it AWS 2.0?
Tyler?
It could easily be us.
I seem to be back now.
Okay.
Yeah, I think we have...
I think we're back.
One more chance.
Okay.
Talking about the Andrewle comparison.
Please.
I would say probably much closer to Palantir than Angel.
I mean, one of the obvious ones is like, what does our product look like?
And we're talking about software and how we bring, like, the best,
frontier capabilities to both understand what a threat is and then very quickly design a countermeasure
to it, how do we take those things that are largely in academic labs emerging really quickly
and put it into something that's operational. It could actually react in the time as real-time
data flows in and you actually need to design a countermeasure. But in terms of the overall,
do we need private sector innovation in this space? Absolutely. Like the people in defense and health
that are absolutely the front lines of this keeping us safe now. The pace of biotech innovation is so
massively outpassing, outpacing our ability to react to it, that like we have to start bringing
these types of tools to really augment the defenses that we have today.
Yeah.
Question from the chat, Trey asks, Moderna designed the C-19 vaccine in two days.
In a clinical dev today, the slow part is often validation, trials, manufacturing,
and access distribution.
Is Valthos solving for that for biodefense?
Thanks, Trey.
Yes, I think a huge part of it.
it is how accurate you can make predictions that are coming from computational models.
How do this translate into clinical development, translational? Can you actually have a really
precise understanding of what these therapeutics look like as soon as you start designing them
in silico? So that's a huge part of our focus is as more and more generative methods for
countermeasure design come online. How could we help the people that are designing those drugs really
quickly understand whether it will be effective against whatever kind of evolution we're seeing
in terms of the of the pathogen landscape. I think on the manufacturing and supply chain side,
another massive problem we think about overall biosecurity for America. It's not the first
challenge we're taking on, but it's certainly something we'll partner on in the future.
How do you think about, I don't know, there's like, like, like, ISR versus like actual bombs or
something in the Anderal context. Like, like, Palantir might make a map of like where all the
bad guys are and then Anderol might be the one that builds the missile. How do you think about,
like, does America have the ability to pull up a dashboard of every different strain of
flu that is at LAX right now? Because I know LAX is like a famous petri dish of, you know,
just like different flus and colds because everyone's traveling from all over. Do we have the
ability as a country to actually understand what's going on biologically across the country?
Largely, no, it's getting better. I think there's two dimensions to it. So a lot of the innovation
we've seen in the last couple of years is focused on, do we even have, like, the lens? Like,
is the data even flowing in of what's circulating in LAX? I'm closer to JFK, so that's the one that
really hits home that I get worried about. The part that we're focused on and what I think has to be the next step,
is how do you take those data inputs and make them actionable so you can do something with it?
So pathogens aren't static. It's not like there is something today and that's what we need to worry about.
It's how is this changing, which means that in two weeks, what is the shape of this that we're going to have to hit?
So a big part of what we're focused on is trying to understand these are the things that are emerging today.
How quickly do we know that there are threats?
And then what do we need to change in terms of the countermeasures that we have to be ready for what's ever coming?
So really focused. And I think that's where a lot of the Palantir analogy comes in.
it's not, you know, data for data sake.
It's how do you actually pull that data into the decision-making process
so that you can start seeing changes in operations.
And that's what we're excited to do.
That makes sense.
Give us the fundraising news.
What happened?
What's coming out of stuff?
Well, we are very proud to announce the re-raised $30 million.
Congratulations.
Incredible.
Who are the backers?
A bunch of no names, right?
You really had to scrape the bottom of the barrel.
you had to put together
rag tag group of
you could barely call these guys venture
capitalists
everyone wants to prevent
bio weapons
what can I say
no it's a murder as well
you got a bunch of great
a bunch of great firms in
FFF
founders fund
We do we have founders fund and Lux
they've been with us
from the beginning
and then we just had Open AI
their startup friend join in
help lead around
they're like
they have been ringing the alarm
on what the bio
the risk of some of these new
frontier methods are for bio, like way before anyone, and we're super excited to partner with them
to try to stop it. Well, congratulations. We'd love to have you back on the show. Whenever the next
announcement is, whenever the next progress point comes, or whenever, hopefully we don't have to be
giving you a call when bad stuff happens. We can just talk about product releases. And you'll,
you'll be like a good cornerback in the NFL. We won't hear about you because you will be defending us
and we won't be calling out. Something bad happens. We'll prevent. We'll prevent.
the headline.
All right.
Thanks a lot, guys.
Thanks so much.
Great to have you.
Great to have you.
Great regards to the team.
Let me tell you about 8Sleep.com.
I put up a generational run last night, 98.
I slept for like 10 hours.
It was fantastic.
Jordy, how'd you do?
91.
How many hours did you actually sleep?
Let's pull it up while we bring in our next guest.
I slept eight hours and 42 minutes.
Wow.
And I got to the gym.
Get a pod five.
I got to the gym at least 30 years before.
before you and my drive is twice as long.
This whole week is going to last for me.
I was slacking.
But our next guest is from Nvidia.
Dion Harris is here to break it down for us.
How are you doing?
And looking incredibly sharp.
You look fantastic.
Thanks for having me.
I didn't want to make you guys look bad.
So I even threw on the jacket.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
You're enjoying a little bit.
Thanks so much.
So great to have you on.
And great to meet.
We'd love to get a little bit of an introduction on yourself and where you sit in
Nvidia.
It's not the smallest company in the world.
It is, in fact, the largest company in the world.
But how do you position yourself within the firm?
What's top of mind for you today?
Sure.
Thanks for having me again.
So Dionne Harris, I'm the senior director of our HBC AI and Cloud Solutions Group.
So not a very imaginative marketing name, which means I run a lot of our HBC, scientific computing
national labs.
Obviously, we're here in D.C.
So, you know, lots of engagements supporting a lot of our national labs,
both here in the U.S. and across the world.
And of course, AI and cloud, it speaks for itself in terms of a lot of our
hyperscale clients, as well as the cloud, cloud providers who are building and delivering
on our platform.
So engaging with a lot of those, those folks, partners, customers, and internally,
obviously, to bring those solutions to market.
Yeah.
How big, do you have like a headline number that you're thinking about broadly for just
AI infrastructure?
It's the hottest topic these days.
But how do you think about forecasting AI infrastructure?
infrastructure and where we'll be in a few years.
Well, you know, I think Jensen has been on record.
I think it's a pretty sound sort of estimate.
We expect it to be about $3 to $4 trillion in AI infrastructure.
Yeah, yeah, that's a big number.
It's with a T.
So, and I think what's really driving that, and I've been listening to the show and here, you know,
there's a ton of demand for how and where AI can be put to use.
Of course, we're familiar with the chat bots that we, you know, use and to speed up our
email communications and to, you know, review and spell check. Those are great use cases. But
what's really exciting is when you see it being used to detect new drugs. And so there's new use
cases that are happening in drug discovery all the time. I do a ton of work with national
labs and seeing how it's being applied to climate and weather, being able to replace a lot of
our old numerical-based approaches. And so using AI to go and tackle really big problems that
we all care about, even if we don't see and use those applications every day, we're impacted by
them, right? And so what's really driving that number is, like I said, also looking at how
AI is being brought to industries. You're going to hear a lot about next week when we announced
at GTC how we're helping industry adopt AI. And this is really important, not just in terms of the
bottom line of U.S. companies, but really making the U.S. competitive in a global scale, right?
making sure that we can deploy and run and build and manufacture at an efficiency that makes
it competitive on a global scale. And so that's really going to be a lot of what we talk about
here at GTC next week. Do you have one of the easier jobs in tech? Just because if I'm a data
center operator, I have to answer questions about, well, am I using natural gas or clean energy?
and if I'm an inference model creator, I have to answer questions about, are the answers truthful,
or are they fair, or am I generating something that's valuable, or am I generating slop?
But Nvidia, I feel like, has the perfect, it's just the perfect business, because you're already
optimizing for the most efficiency. So no one can say, oh, well, you're not taking energy efficiency
seriously. Like, that's the entire point of business. And no one can say you're unprofitable.
And no one can say you're a profitable. So, like, are you feeling good right now? Are you feeling
Are you feeling happy?
I don't know.
Yeah, what's the energy like even internally at Nvidia?
I'm curious.
It's got to be such a wild environment.
It's great.
It's definitely incredibly crazy right now.
But what I would say is just because there's so much interesting excitement around not
just AI, but accelerated computing.
A lot of what we do, we're an accelerated computing company at heart.
And there's over a trillion dollars of infrastructure and still moving from CPU to GPUs.
In fact, Oracle just last week announced that they're going to be accelerating their classic database.
No way.
Now, that's – most people don't think about databases.
That's crazy on GE.
And they're back-ending every major application.
And so, you know, when we think about Nvidia, you know, obviously accelerated computing is how we've really got started.
And now that we're in this era of AI, you know, we're really looking to help power every application across multiple industries.
But to answer your question, we wake up.
thinking about how can we make our platform better?
And how can we make it more efficient?
Because that's really at the core of the value for our customers.
But we're actually doing a ton of work beyond just our core platforms.
In fact, our solutions are shaping and redefining how the data center overall is built.
And so a lot of the work that we're doing is building solutions and blueprints and reference
architectures that help the entire ecosystem get ready for what we're building, which delivers
more efficiency at the end state.
So, again, I think our position is unique in the market.
marketplace and that we totally see and understand all the new new models that are being developed
and coming coming to market we obviously understand what our products are going to be able to do
today and going forward and we therefore are giving lots of insight into all the mechanical electrical
and plumbing infrastructure providers the power generation folks yeah how do you think about
balancing we're giving lots of feedback all the way up the up and down the supply chain that yeah
that Oracle database on GPU thing is it feels massive to me it feels like very significant
like immediately, very tangible, you know, performance benefits I can imagine. I haven't seen the
actual stats, but I imagine it's extremely, it's going to be more efficient or faster. But how do you
balance marketing like sort of stories like that, stories about the AI buildout with stuff that's
more futuristic, more further out? There was a lot of debate on the timeline this week about
StarClap. Yeah, how fast GPUs will be in space and everyone's saying,
like, look, like, we love this founder.
We're having them on the show, actually, next week.
It's a really exciting project.
But I think everyone kind of agrees that this is not going to happen tomorrow.
And the rendering is more of a sci-fi movie than they put out.
It shows like, you know, the whole truckloads of GPUs moving around in space.
How do you think about balancing that from the NVIDIA brand perspective?
Well, from our perspective, you know, we recognize that, like I said, there's a lot of interest and investment.
like we talked about that $3 to $4 trillion that's going to be invested in AI infrastructure.
And of course, that infrastructure is going to be deployed in lots of different areas.
Obviously, as we've talked about how a lot of the concentration historically has been around highly populated dense areas.
But now we recognize, you know, AI factories can exist anywhere.
They can exist anywhere there where there's, you know, cheap, clean power.
And so obviously space is someplace where there's lots of renewable energy.
So, yeah, I suspect that will certainly be a place where data centers will land eventually.
But right now, you know, we're really focused on how can we help build the infrastructure that's right in front of us
and help really deploy that in most efficient, performant way as possible.
And, of course, along the way, make sure that we're adding value because that's really what we're here to do for not just ourselves, but the broader ecosystem.
You would laugh.
We were running the numbers on building a hearth or a wood-powered data center.
our server here at the studio.
It's surprisingly doable.
Like out of like a normal fireplace,
we believe you could potentially power
eight H-100s and fine-tuned
GPT-OSS however you want it
over the course of a day, basically.
We haven't, we haven't,
We want to be the first Nvidia customer
to be focused on the wood-powered data center.
Yes.
It's our own part of the market map.
It's very comfortable.
rosy to chop firewood and boil water as they did hundreds of years ago.
That's right.
I'm super excited for GTC next week.
Yeah, this is great.
Thank you so much for giving us a little preview.
For giving us the preview.
And have a great weekend.
We'll talk to you soon.
Great hanging.
Appreciate it.
Thanks a lot.
Before we bring in our next guest, let me tell you about public.com investing for
those to take it seriously.
They have multi-ass investing industry that yields and are trusted by millions.
Soon billions.
I think we might actually have a one minute break before our next guest comes in.
There's no one in the Restream waiting room or is there?
No, not yet.
So give us a post, Jordy Hayes.
If someone's smart, if someone is smart but has bad aesthetics, Normies will not take them seriously.
This is good.
Aesthetic contains real information.
This post is from Defender of Basic.
That this category of smart people can't read.
and if they gain power, these blind spots
will lead to their undoing.
I completely botched this reading.
This is a mess.
Here's another one.
Alex Danko.
Sundar Pichai said yesterday,
or a couple days ago,
new breakthrough quantum algorithm
published in nature today.
Our Willow chip has achieved
the first ever verifiable quantum advantage.
Willow ran the algorithm,
which we've named quantum echoes,
13,000 times faster than the best
classical algorithm
them on one of the world's fastest supercomputers.
This new algo can explain interactions between atoms and a molecule using nuclear magnetic resonance,
paving a path toward potential future uses in drug discovery and material science.
The results is verifiable, meaning its outcome can be repeated by other quantum computers or
confirmed by experiments.
This breakthrough is a significant step toward the first real-world application of quantum computing,
and we're excited to see where it leads.
again, see this positioning right?
It's positioned as an internal science project.
Of course, he's saying it's a step toward the first real world application of quantum.
Did you see what Martin Sculley said?
What do you say?
Contrived results, still not faster slash advantage.
He's like so bearish.
Alex Danko, though, says, okay, I'm sorry if this is a dumb question, but why do?
And I think when I see this and I see the algorithm and I see how they're talking about it,
It really does feel like, yes, over the next decade,
like there could be some really, really powerful niche use cases that are extremely
not possible here.
It's a good quantum computer, sir.
I agree, I agree.
One more post before we go.
Did you want to explain why quantum computers look like that?
Because that's what Alex Danko is asking.
And there is an answer.
It's because they need to be cooled.
They need to be really cold.
And so you have to hang it instead of attaching it to the floor.
each layer of the chandelier is colder down to the last one
where the quantum computation is taking place.
And so you see this chandelier funneling smaller and smaller
and colder and colder until you get to the very tip.
I don't know.
Interesting.
Well, we have our next guest in the Restream waiting room.
Let's bring him in to the TBPN Ultridone.
How are you doing, Burké?
Burké, welcome.
Good to see you.
How guys.
What's happening?
Huge, huge day.
Congratulations on all the news.
in the fall ecosystem.
Thank you, thank you.
So today we are doing our inaugural generative media conference.
I'm in the ferry building.
Very cool.
You can probably tell.
Beautiful venue.
Yeah, it's a big milestone for us.
It's, you know, we thought that generative media really needs its space.
And, you know, we need to talk about it because it's an extremely big deal.
and we thought we would honor this industry by by you know throwing a big big event where
foundational models are coming here people from the industry are here Jeffrey Katzenberg
actually that was that was pretty awesome yeah so what what what are what are attendees trying
to understand or or advance yeah what are people talking about yeah yeah yeah
There is, there is, like, I mean, this is, this is becoming a full industry, right?
So it's many, there's many kinds of people here.
So there's people from foundational model labs.
So they're trying to build these models compete against the big, big giants, right?
And it's a very diverse space.
So unlike the language model market where you have a few big winners, here we're seeing like hundreds of companies building models, customizing models and using, you know, their, their,
are using in production. So there's foundational models. There's people from the industry. So media,
we had a talk from an architecture firm that's using generative media and production.
And yeah, like early stage founders and even like some big Hollywood names, like big production studios.
Yeah. Are people focused now on benchmarks, evals, certain niche capabilities?
like we're starting to see this like kind of refragmentation, I feel like,
where Sora can do cameos and V-O-3 could do audio
and certain KREA can do lip-syncing well.
And there's all these different sub-applications where it feels like
if you're a buyer of generative media of tokens or, I don't need, frames, I guess,
you are really looking for the right tool for the job.
And you might have to kind of go through the haystom
stack to find the needle that fits your use case specifically. Is that the general vibe?
Yeah, absolutely. I think there is, there's definitely alignment on how these models are getting
more specialized. On one hand, there's, there's general models. Like, I think VO is, it's pretty
general, right? Like, it can do many things. But on another hand, you need, you need more and, you know,
what we're hearing from people is you need more and more specific workflows. So workflows is a very big topic.
And we are now in the like kind of usefulness utility phase of this whole space where like, there we go.
Let's give it up for utility and usefulness. Love it.
So so we're what we're seeing is, you know, people are building these, building this tooling, right?
So they're building the application layer such that, you know, these downstream users from marketing, you know, architecture, gaming, movies.
so that like creatives can start using this technology.
Yeah.
How is, what's your view on how Hollywood has most recently been kind of navigating
Gen. AI?
We've heard from folks in the industry that people are experimenting with it,
but they're hesitant to even talk about it too much because they get so much blowback from,
you know, we're here down in L.A.
There's a lot of people that aren't excited about Gen A.I.
For a number of reasons.
But how do you see Hollywood navigating this current moment?
Yeah, I mean, we're definitely feeling like a shift in the vibes.
So they're definitely turning towards a side of like experimentation.
I know that there's like a few good projects in the pipeline that are going to come out.
I think we're going to see this shift happening towards the end of the year, early next year.
And yeah, we see we see very big players actually embracing this tech.
And yeah, it's going to be.
Somebody in the chat.
Somebody in the chat just said,
you guys should get Hollywood on as a guess.
We should.
We'll work on that.
Another question I had is,
I don't know how much you can share,
but what's SORA II adoption been like so far,
how quickly are a number of different application layer companies
kind of turning it on and burning up the GPUs?
Yeah.
We don't have full visibility into SORA's adoption,
but from what we know is it is a very good model for like a very certain aesthetic, right?
Like you can probably tell that it is extremely fine-tuned on, you know, social content.
So, yeah, it is getting, it is getting amazing adoption, but, but, you know, this space is virtually infinite.
Like there's literally all sorts of things you can do.
That's why we believe like this, we were just in the beginning.
And yeah, it's just a form factor, right?
And it's just one kind of model.
We think there's going to be many, many versions.
Totally.
Can you walk me through?
My immediate reaction to SOAR is like I could see this being used for like very specific.
If you wanted to generate UGC style ads, it could probably do a decent job at that.
But that same application would also want to generate ads in a bunch of different styles, right?
Cinematic styles, things like that.
Exactly.
And, yeah, like, don't get me wrong, I think, you know, that model, like it's the, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, you know, I would speculate that it is really fine tuned on this, like, social use case, but that doesn't mean that there is no, you know, amazing model in, in, in the, in the back of it. So, so technically they can crank out different things for different use cases. Totally. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I go so much deeper on all this and all the, like comparisons of all the models. We'll have to have to have to be. We'll have to.
have you back, because I know you're at your conference and obviously need to get back and meet
customers and whatnot. But thank you so much for taking the time to stop by. Thanks for having.
Yeah, excited to have a bunch more folks on in the next 30 minutes or so. Yeah, this would be great.
We'll talk to you soon. And have a great weekend. Great to see you.
Let me tell you about adquick.com. Out of home advertising made easy and measurable.
Say you about headaches of out of home advertising. Only ad quick combines technology,
out of home expertise and data to enable efficient seamless ad buying across the globe.
our next guest is Glenn Solomon from Notable.
We'll bring him in to the TV fan Ultrodome.
What's going on?
Can you hear me?
I cannot hear you.
We don't have audio yet.
No audio.
I'm sure the production team is working on it.
I will tell you when I can hear you.
So just, I guess, keep chatting, I guess.
Still, still nothing.
How are we doing, folks?
We got nothing.
We got nothing coming through.
AGI is just days away.
And we need AGI to put some resources towards technical difficulties for podcasts live streamers.
Anyways, we will, I'll kill time.
Here's a post yesterday.
Okay, sounds good.
Okay, I think we got something coming through.
Can you hear me?
I can hear you.
Ah, Jordy.
Great.
This is Glenn.
It's so great to see you, Glenn.
An amazing, amazing setup here.
Are you, did you already give a talk?
Are you going to give a talk?
Or are you just, uh, I've been in the, I've been, I've been enjoying the, uh, the amazing
talk so far.
And I'm excited to talk to you about them.
Amazing.
Uh, why don't you give a quick intro on, on yourself and your firm and then, and then
we can get into reactions from the event.
Sure.
Yeah.
So I'm Glenn Solomon, managing partner at Notable Capital.
we've been in business for 25 years.
We're a global venture capital firm focused on software infrastructure.
And one of the key personas we focus on as a software developer,
we backed companies over the years like Versel recently, HashiCorp,
some great businesses that we've been very fortunate to work with.
What was the exact moment that you founded the firm?
25 years ago, 2000.
No, I know, but like what was it 2000? Was it March? Was it during the crash? Like when, when, do you, do you remember the month specifically? It was February. So early in the year. So you basically went on a roller coaster. You started up here and then just that's a little known fact, though. It's actually good to found a firm right or about then because you don't get in. You can deploy, you can deploy in the Valley of Despair. Wow. Exactly. That is a great, great timing. Great timing.
Amazing. So yeah, walk us through some reactions to the event so far.
So, you know, it's been really cool to be here. It's the first generative media conference
that Fowles put on, really their first user conference. And there's about 300 people here,
and you can just feel the energy amongst the developers who are building all kinds of amazing
applications using general media. It kind of reminds me, I was lucky enough to invest early in
HashiCorp in 2016. I was at their first user conference.
up in Portland. And there was 150 people in the room. Basically, anybody who wanted to attend
could. And it was a bunch of very intrepid DevOps professionals who saw the future somewhat
similar to HashiCorp. And the reason I mentioned is because four or five years later, at their
user conference in San Francisco, there was 5,000 people. And I think this is the start of something
very similar. We're going to see this industry grow dramatically over the next several years.
and it would not surprise me if, you know,
a Dreamforce lookout,
this general media conferences could be really big
over the next several years.
I believe it.
What Burkhei was saying there's an architecture firm
talking at the event on how they're using,
what are some of the other maybe more like edge cases,
niche use cases that you're seeing?
Well, definitely advertising, marketing,
you know, your feed on social media,
entertainment, education, all of these things are, people spend dramatic amounts of money today,
hundreds of billions of dollars on content production for traditional media.
I think that's all going to shift over time.
And we're just starting to see the early days of that.
But clearly there's going to be a shift because using generative media, you can move much quicker,
it's less expensive, you can be much more targeted in what you do.
So I think all those industries are experimenting.
experimentation mode, maybe for second inning, but it's early.
But one of the things I heard about today that I thought was really interesting is really the net
new applications that I think are going to come as well, things that don't exist yet today.
A good, maybe a harbinger of that would be, like if you've ever been to the sphere in Las Vegas,
you know, you look at the geometry there and the just sheer size of the place,
traditional media couldn't really solve that problem and create an immersive experience.
And so that's a great area where genera of media is doing something that couldn't be done in the past.
So I think you're going to see both replacement and overtime net new.
And I think that's why people are so excited about what's going on here today.
Makes a lot of sense.
Yeah, that's amazing.
Well, thank you so much for stopping by the show.
We'd love to talk to you more.
Yeah, the first guest appearance from a podium.
Yeah.
I'm a longtime listener, first time caller.
This has been awesome. Thank you guys.
Amazing.
Well, come back on again soon and have fun out there.
Give our best to everybody at the event.
We will.
We'll be.
Thanks.
Good, man.
Cheers.
We'll talk to you soon.
Let me tell you about Bezle.
You got to go to get Bezell.com.
Just do it.
Get a hitter.
They're available now to source you any watching the planet.
I'm really pushing John to get the cubitus.
I think it's time.
Green dial.
I wish I wish I had.
had more time to give you the full, my full case for it, but we will move on to our next guest.
We have Diego Rodriguez from Kraya in the restroom waiting room. Welcome to the show,
Diego. How are you doing? Welcome.
What's happening? Talk to me about the AI suite for creatives. I was particularly interested in
this debate between like chopping wood and creating new workflows for specific video generation or
AI use versus like trying to instantiate some things on the fly.
I always see these like, I made this amazing AI video.
Here's how I did it.
And it's piecing together like three different steps where they fine tuned on their face.
And they did a special model that had a beginning and an ending frame.
And then they did some sort of control net on top of it.
And then they upresed it.
And how are you thinking about actually piecing all the different tools together in a way that someone, it's like a, the fine.
U.I.
effectively.
I mean,
like,
I mean,
I'm here,
like,
at the Falk conference
and I talk
actually exactly about that.
Okay,
perfect.
I don't know.
It's kind of frustrating
to see people
being like,
this is the,
I generated,
this is not.
Dude,
it's a new medium.
Yeah.
Like,
it's just a new medium.
So, like,
whenever I see a frame
by say now Hollywood
is starting to toy around
tools,
like,
the best people
that you're like,
like,
you don't ask them,
like,
is,
they use Photoshop.
or After Effects or Houdini or AI,
he's like, do it all of them.
Like this was even a dialogue.
When we were discussing about a certain idea,
that's also part of the process of making things.
I think we're far from automating,
like true storytelling,
which is why we need tools.
Where's the pencil for the latent space?
That's what we need.
Yeah.
How do you think about
what the actual product looks like
that people want at each level
of scale.
Like, Enterprise is fine with APIs, and they will have a team of software engineers, like,
build the tools exactly that they need.
Then the prosumer might be fine with a node-based workflow or something that's a little bit
more, you know, fine-tuning parameters under the hood, but then they want something that's
maybe repeatable that they can jump in and out of.
And then the final consumer wants, like, you know how you see those, like dedicated app?
It's like just the face-swapping app.
And, like, face-swapping is obviously a feature.
that should exist in the node-based workflow in KREA, in a prosumer, in a professional tool.
So how do you think about, like, checking the box on all the features out of the gate
versus leading enough flexibility that your users might get lost because you don't handhold as much?
I think that these barriers are, let's call them, vestigial concepts.
from our culture.
I think those barriers are there
because of where we come from,
which is like, okay,
we used to have their professional
who goes to Photoshop and everyone
that maybe doesn't need as much control,
goes to something like Canva,
and then if you're just a random person
that is towing around with making stuff,
then you use a certain iOS app or whatever.
But the reality is that a lot of these barriers
used to just be APIs,
like a certain plugin or a certain API call or whatever,
and with bif coding, they are blurring out now.
So I actually see consumers who ask me,
can you get an API because I bifcoded some things.
And then I actually get enterprises being like,
oh, your UI is actually one of the best ones,
and that's why we are doing these things.
So I think that this is a time full of uncertainty,
and when you have uncertainty,
the only thing that can run you is first principle.
So you have to go back to the beginning,
like think about what is truly true
and what is your marketing fluff.
So the way I'm thinking...
Do you think images and video
are two separate products long term?
Like Premiere Pro is a different product
than Photoshop.
They are different,
and even Lightroom is another product
in the Adobe ecosystem.
I can imagine you can,
I mean, it's just pixels.
You can clearly put all the tools
in one bucket, one app.
Adobe didn't.
Is that vestigial?
Or will we see another separation?
I think separation will be here in the short term and midterm, because you can argue that, like, as we advance, there's actually even more separation, right?
Like, at first, books were only in a certain way, and now there's a myriad of formats and images, and, like, can you even do books for, like, you know, for kids where they even have things inside that they, like, animations even.
So I feel like as we push the medium, and by medium, I mean.
in the latent space for work,
we will actually realize that we need way more tools
than we thought we need it.
And that's why we're starting,
like we've seen on like this Cambrian explosion
of like, okay, we have control net, we have ConfuI,
we have Korea, but then in Korea you can like jump
in between tools and then you can use say an image model
within many tools.
And that's the key part, which is you said,
it's just pixels.
And it's like, yeah, but guess what?
Like a song can be represented as pixels
if you have a certain frequency diagram.
It's just pixels too.
So at the end of the day,
sheet music.
Maybe you scans sheet music.
That's pixels.
Yeah.
So what we have at the end of the day is a technology that can understand
like information in almost its more distilled form.
Yep.
That technology can move around products, but the product will be different.
However, they will all use that same technology.
And that's what we're seeing.
Node-based tool, image tool, iOS app all connect to our image model, for instance.
We create one or flux context or whatever, but it's different applications.
Yeah.
Yeah, fascinating.
We like to hit the gong for guests.
Oh, yes.
How many users does Korea have?
What's the latest?
What's the latest number?
Give us some numbers.
What did you got?
The big numbers.
Last time I checked sign-ups, it was like over 30 million.
Oh.
Congratulations.
That's wild.
Yeah.
And then, like, I'm actually more interested in participating in, like, the enterprise,
because I'm starting to see true business adoption.
And that's where it starts to be.
like still being a bad.
Very auspicious gong ringing.
I don't know if you can hear it,
but the gong is still ringing for you.
Yeah.
Something about how I hit it.
It's very good.
It was a very good omen.
It was a bullish hit.
It was a very good omen for your company.
30 million,
you know,
I just want to take a second
because we get lost in like the AI boom or whatever,
that 30 million is so many.
That is such a huge,
that is such a huge impact to have on a product that you've built.
So sincerely, like massive congratulations.
That's very, very big.
And I feel like, you know, Sam Allman's out there throwing around trillions and stuff.
And we lose track of the fact that 30 million is a lot of users.
And congratulations.
That's very great.
Thank you so much for coming on the show.
Have fun at the event.
Yep.
We'll talk to you soon.
Cheers.
Have a good one.
Up next we have Justine Moore from A16Z.
Is there her second time on the show?
The third time on the show?
Dylan in the chat says I felt that gong hit in my soul.
That gong hit was wild.
Justine, more, can you hear us?
We're back on the podium.
Hopefully we have audio.
Fantastic.
Here we go, loud and clear.
I'm here.
It's great to be back, guys.
Fantastic.
What is new from you?
Wait, wait, wait.
Open screen time.
I want to know how much SORA.
This is a good question.
Let's see it.
Let's see it.
We know she loves Slop.
This is not going to be super impressive because I mostly use Sora on desktop.
Okay.
Okay.
Your desktop user.
I would guess if I had to guess, it's probably like 15 minutes a day.
15 minutes on my phone.
In the feed or making?
Making stuff, right?
I like the phone.
Okay, when I do it on the phone, I like to scroll through the feed and see what other people
are making on desktop.
There's a lot more controllability with like the storyboard and stuff like that.
And you can do landscape as well.
Oh, yeah.
Powery.
Do you feel like you've given Sora the app enough date?
that you're actually getting fine-tuned recommendations,
or are you just seeing the cream of the crop
because there isn't enough to give you specific things that you like?
What's the temperature?
Take the temperature on the feed.
You know what I'm talking about, right?
I think it is not yet enough content
to be able to have a very personalized feed for everyone.
But I'm not sure because I haven't seen anyone else's feed.
Sure, sure, sure.
So they might be super different.
Yeah, because like if I go on TikTok and I say,
I like car videos and you go on TikTok and you say,
you like boat videos.
Like pretty quickly, we're both going to just get unlimited cars and no boats and vice versa.
Yes.
Interesting.
How are you thinking about, we were just talking to Kray about this, like winning in the application layer for creativity.
Like SORA is a creative tool you can create on desktop with the storyboard.
There's this world where we wind up with one app that instantiates UI on the fly, lets you do everything.
There's another one where we see even more bifurcation.
just like we have Lightroom and Photoshop and Premiere and After Effects,
we could wind up with 20 apps for individual little fine tune of face,
up res over here.
How do you think it's going to play out?
Yeah, it's a great question.
I think, honestly, at the beginning of the wave,
we thought maybe there'd be a little bit more concentration than there has been.
The market just keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger and we keep seeing more specialized apps.
I think because these creative AI tools are enabling all of these
people who couldn't create content before to make content for the first time.
And so that unlocks a bunch of different verticals who weren't using creative tools much
before.
So my guess is like there'll be some kind of horizontal tooling layers, whether they're
for developers, like what the folks that fall are doing, which is awesome, or for consumers,
prosumers.
And then I think we're also going to start seeing more vertical-specific applications, just
like we've seen with LLMs, honestly.
Like we've seen a lot of for accounting, for law, for finance.
Sure, sure, sure.
Different industries and different personas have different use cases and workflows.
Yeah, it's interesting.
I haven't thought about it that way because when I think of like an AI law firm,
I don't think about them as like fine-tuning tokens or like running a specific,
but it is, it is very much the same.
How are you thinking about the mobile versus desktop divide?
You're obviously experiencing it on SORA, but are you seeing a bifurcation where you might actually back a company that's saying,
we're going after mobile gen AI in this particular niche, or we're going desktop.
And is that a meaningful designation or are companies with vibe coding able to kind of go multi-platform on day one?
Obviously, open AI was, but they have a lot of resources.
I think sort of the mobile versus desktop speaks a lot to sort of the user persona and use case.
What we've seen so far is that stuff that blows up on mobile tends to be consumer products
where you don't have to put a ton of work into editing the output, into having super long prompts,
things like Sora 2 or like Lenza, if you guys remember, which blew up a couple years ago now
to make these like AI profile pictures of you.
Yeah, it was huge.
I think like true creative workflows and really detailed editing tend to require bigger screens.
We've actually seen more companies start looking at iPad apps too, which is crazy to say.
It's not just like four-year-olds on iPad.
It's like real creative professionals because people love to kind of draw on them.
And it's a larger screen that enables kind of more knobs and dials.
Yeah.
What are you seeing on the monetization side for pure.
AI content creators. I know you track a lot of these accounts. I'm interested to see if some of these,
again, like not just a content creator that might use AI here or there, but like a new content
creator that only makes AI content. Will they monetize via, you know, influencer style marketing?
Will they go straight to doing deals with, you know, the Netflix's or other streaming platforms?
But I'm curious what you think there. Yeah, it's so early. It's hard to say. I think like how it started
was people started growing these sort of AI-only accounts and monetizing in the traditional ways,
which was like ad revenue or kind of some share of the views you got on your video,
things like that on platforms like X and TikTok and Instagram.
I've also seen, honestly, a ton of the ways that AI creators monetize is by selling like prompts or courses
or teaching other people how to make the same things just because there's so much demand
and most people are not experts at these tools.
I think it's going to be really interesting to see
when we start to see more AI native IP or characters
that can appear in a Netflix show
or have a song that they release on Spotify
and they kind of get a cut of the streaming revenue.
We've already started to see some of that,
like that AI actress.
And we've seen some in music too, especially in Asia,
but I think we're just at the very early stages of that.
Yeah.
Are you losing the ability to actually define a particular AI virality moment?
Like the Lenza era was definitely a thing.
Everyone had the magic avatars.
The studio Ghibli moment was a moment.
Then maybe it was like the Sam Altman stealing GPUs era with SORA.
But I feel like we're just now in like the SORA moment.
And maybe it just becomes an era.
But in the Italian brain rot, like are,
Are we accelerating? Are you feeling acceleration where you can't start, you can't even track all the memes because it just happened so fast?
Yes, I used to keep basically the spreadsheet where I tracked like the number of impressions as far as I could guess from like certain trends or launches or announcements or things that would happen.
And I gave up on it probably like six or so months ago because there was so many things happening at once.
It was like nanobanana and V-O-3 and SORA and like two new Chinese models that were amazing.
and like the World Labs launch, like, there were just 20 things happening like every day.
And I think the interesting thing about that, too, is like different people are excited by different things.
Like sometimes I talk to people who are really deep in AI creativity, but they're really into one part of it.
And so they don't even know about the other launches because it's so hard to keep up with everything right now.
What was the nanoban?
They're using the meta vibes app too much.
I'm sorry, I don't have time for anything else.
What was the, what was the, what was the,
like, viral, like, moment or driver?
Like, what was the canonical, like, thing that you would prompt
that nanobanana did so well that made it really popular?
I mean, the, the interesting thing about nanobanana was,
I think it wasn't just one prompt.
Yeah.
It was a series of them.
There was, like, the Polaroids putting yourself in a different era.
And then there was making yourself an action figure.
And then one I've been following this week on TikTok is, like,
college kids are making videos of them like hugging their younger selves from an image that they
create yeah like with them and their younger self on nano banana what do you think of that
i'm not a fan i think it's not i mean don't we all want to hug our younger self no not at all
i'd say toughen up yeah toughing up pull up the boots up now that i'm thinking about it by your
bootstrap i would i would make an a i would make an a i video of my younger me picking myself up by my
bootstress. There you go. Okay, so, you know, we're close there. We will, we will be participating in, like,
the next slight iteration of the, of the viral sensation. But no, I won't be hugging myself. That feels
very odd to me. You can do a new one of you yelling at your younger self if you want. Yeah.
This is a free idea of, or boxing. But yeah, I mean, a lot of these are, a lot of these are odd.
Stephen Hawking at the X games is odd. A cat, steamrolling its way through a house is odd.
But, I love most of those. But it's important.
It is important.
Humanity needs these videos.
I think we do.
I think we do.
Laughing is important.
Yeah.
Lapping is important.
Creativity.
It is creativity.
Whoever prompted it was creative.
I would not have thought to put Stephen Hawking at the X-Games.
And someone did.
Me neither.
What else is,
are people talking about what are the key, like, stress points?
Are people worried about like AI bubble generally?
Is it all just about like, let me find the, the most efficient?
inference arbitrage or inference provider, the best AI factory? Like what, what are the current
discussions? I imagine it's not Doom anymore. That one's kind of moved on. What are people talking
about at this particular conference? Yeah, we actually had an investor panel earlier with a bunch of
great folks kind of talking about those sorts of things. I think like the bubble question is an
interesting one. I personally don't think we're in a bubble. I think like just the true demand for the
products is massive and we're seeing companies grow faster than ever before and also retain
users higher than ever before. A lot of folks, like I'm sure you guys do, have questions
about kind of gross margin. I think like we find that margins tend to improve over time,
as you've seen in many areas of consumer software, like Amazon and Uber and DoorDash, like a
lot of these companies were gross margin negative or neutral at the beginning and then
kind of become more efficient over time as they scale and unlock various network effects.
I think where I would be worried we were in a bubble is if the margins were all negative and the
retention sucked because then it's like you're not actually building products that people
want and you're raising a lot of money for it. Or if there was only like 100,000 real users or
something like that. Totally. Exactly. Which we've seen before in different tech trends.
Yeah. Yeah. No, totally. Totally. I mean, yeah, we just talked to Korea like 30 million users
is like very significant.
And Chachibouti, close to a billion users.
Like, it's just, it's just accelerating much faster.
And the distribution is there.
And it's a lot because, like, Stripe exists.
Like, you can just actually get 20 bucks a month out of someone pretty easily.
And you couldn't do that in 1999.
It was just no way.
And so you had to say, well, we'll monetize the eyeballs later and we'll do ads and people
will pay.
And it became this kind of weird circular economy.
But now you can just be like, how much value am I delivering to your business?
put down your card and we'll pay for it or churn, which is great. Well, thank you so much for taking
the time to stop by during a busy conference.
Second ever podium guest.
I'm honored. Thanks, guys.
Yes, we'd love to have you back. Have fun at the event and give our best to everybody there.
Yes. Thanks for coming on. And just so you know, we're coming for your lunch. We dropped our first
market map. I don't know if we saw, but we dropped a media, we dropped a media market map.
So now we're in direct. It's not schizo at all.
You know, the competition fuels me, so I'm excited for it.
Yeah, fireback.
Fire back with your own market.
This is like a rap battle for people.
It's a map battle.
It's a map.
A rap battle that like five people are interested in.
Yes.
A rap battle for people who know how to read a term sheet or something.
Anyway, thank you so much for stopping by.
We will talk to you soon.
Have a great rest of you day.
Thanks, guys.
Goodbye.
We've got to go over to this post from Marvin von Hagen, which is one of the
most royal names ever. This man is destined for greatness. He quoted the essay that I published
yesterday and just with two excerpts from my piece, he said, The Interaction Company of California
has managed to really break through the noise and deliver a truly novel consumer AI product
experience. Dot, dot, dot, nothing important. Don't worry about it. Poke.com itself is a fantastic
domain and a name for their business and audience.
I just skipped over, of course, the part where...
Oh, there's a little bit of criticism in there?
No, yeah, I was like, I was criticizing the general sort of like name convention, but this
was an absolutely perfect response, and I really want to have Marvin on the show.
So Marvin, let's get you on the schedule next week.
This is, yeah, yeah, this is the nature of working with...
Chef's Kiss, a perfect response.
What's going on here?
Austin says you should never use an M-Dash.
you're writing anymore, you will be 100% be accused of using AI, especially if it's on social.
That is true. I actually recently, like, today in the newsletter, I use just a minus sign instead
of an M-Dash. And Brandon was like, certainly we can use the M-Dash here. Like, you intended to
use an M-Dash, and I was like, no, we're using the minus sign. We're using the wrong thing,
because I don't want to deal with it's an M-Dash. You used AI or whatever. So I have completely
sacrificed it, but what is Alyssa
Pumpkin Queen said? She says, that's what the
Clanker, dropping the M-Dash, that's
what the clankers want you to do, surrender
the M-Dash, but by the grace of God
we will out-maneuver the clanker, sink
our hands into their motherboards, and remind
them what mankind can do.
Let the clanker hold their position.
We won't.
We won't.
So good.
By the way, the chat
wants us to do a conference.
Yes. And Ben Sand says, I'd go to the
conference, but we needed a TBPN cruise. I'm not joking. We've talked about getting a yacht to park in the San
Francisco Bay and do a conference there. So I would like to pull that off at some point. And the chat will be
the first to know. Ohio has a new bill that goes far beyond banning her marriage. Far beyond banning
human AI marriage. The measure would define AI systems as non-sentient entities.
strip them of any claim to legal personhood,
forbid them from owning property,
holding financial accounts,
controlling IP,
or acting as company directors.
So it's basically game on if we get a humanoid.
Like we can,
it has no rights in Ohio.
So if we take it to Ohio,
like the unit tree is going to be sitting there being like,
hey guys,
why are we going to Ohio?
You know,
I'd love to stay in a different state
because I would hate for you to like destroy me
and then face no legal consequences
because I have no rights in Ohio.
Yeah, this, this, this,
Ohio clearly hasn't read, uh,
less wrong.
It's not,
it's not,
uh,
familiar with Rocco's basilisk.
Um,
Ohio might be the first place that the clankers descend on and,
and Skynet goes on.
Yeah,
they really put themselves in the crosshair,
the clanker crosshair on the aggress,
uh,
Daniel Tenrero has finally,
before we read this,
let me tell you about wander.com.
Find your happy place.
Book of Wonder with Inspiring News. Hotel Great Amenities, Dreamy Vez, Topton, 24-7 concierge service.
It's a vacation home, but better. What did Daniel say?
He says, finally, some good news, which is that hedge fund assets hit $5 trillion with most inflows since before the financial crisis.
Great hit, John. Assets in the global hedge fund industry have surged to record $5 trillion as investors poured money into alternatives and funds posted solid gains.
Our gong is gifted today. You hear this, right?
It's still going. It's still going. Still going.
still going.
Is it me or is it gone?
Is it me or is it?
Not inflows of nearly 34 billion
in the first three months through September
with total returns across all strategies
averaging 5.4% over the quarter.
So underperforming
the average terminally online zoomer
that is just massively levered
into the Mag 7.
Yeah.
But still, still,
uh,
uh,
not,
not so bad as a whole.
Uh,
cryptocurrency hedge funds posted solid double digit gains in the third quarter,
recovering from sharp losses in early 2025 to bring
year-to-date performance to 6.7%.
Can we play this clip of,
it's probably too long to react to.
Bucco Capital, the legend
says, I'm always so confused when Tesla
goes down on earnings as the business
performance is completely irrelevant to the price
of the stock.
They put up over
$1.4 billion, I think, of
free cash flow as a
trillion-dollar company. So that's good.
They beat earnings. Yes.
The stock went down? Is that what happened?
No, no, no. I think they...
They missed earnings and the stock
up. I don't know. I agree.
No, he's saying they missed, but he's in the stock traded down and he's like, why is it
traded down? It shouldn't even matter. It shouldn't even matter.
Let's skip the Dorsey reaction. We got to get out of here. It's Friday. We got to start
our weekend. Apparently the sale of TikTok was upon sacrifice to opening up the diplomatic
chess board. And Rune says it's pretty bad that see.
Xi Jinping models TikTok as spiritual opium and feels okay selling it to the West in a revenge opium
war set up.
For Trump, basing the sale of the high-profile app was a populist victory framed around
national security.
For Xi Jinping, however, the app was a low-cost bargaining chip.
He had privately dismissed it as spiritual opium according to the people close to Beijing
and viewed it as easy sacrifice to secure the continued dialogue on China.
China needed.
That makes a ton of sense.
In a more important geopolitical news, Justin Bieber is on Twitch.
Michael Siebel says almost 19 years after we got started, we finally got Bieber.
So never give up.
And this was, I think, my favorite post of the week, it's now been deleted.
I won't read the user's name, but I think it's funny.
It was a post that said, I honestly don't care if I get fired.
I was part of the illegal gambling ring with Chauncey.
Billups and Terry Rose here. My name is Andy Jassy and I work at Amazon. So these,
these like fake framing someone who did something is so funny. Shareholders are I didn't realize
that like there was a retail army for for Andy Jassy that cared about Andy Jassy and and Amazon.
Yeah, it's tough when your stock goes up 20% year to date and people are still like calling for
you to to be fired.
Yeah.
But,
I think that's a good place to call it.
We've had a fantastic...
You know where we're going to call it?
Where are we going to call it?
We're going to call it with Gabe over at Sora.
Sora was dethroned in the app store by Dave's Hot Chicken.
Play the Want-Wan.
And an eagle sound effect for Dave.
For Dave.
Because something, their team, I think, is just really cracked
because I don't think this is the first time they've, like, charted number one.
think most people think that the Dave's Hot Chicken team is like one notch above the Open AI team.
In terms of just, you know, product design, growth. Yeah, just IQ and strategy. AI research.
Yeah, these types of things. I think most people think it's sort of like, you know, a hotbed of the best talent in the world.
Absolutely. I'm unsurprised. No, seriously, the Dave's Hot Chicken team must be cooking because something crazy happened in their marketing.
because to go to the top of the charts,
even if it's momentum-based,
that means that they had some campaign that just hit.
And it's not like it's the Super Bowl right now.
Like, they must have had some crazy call to action
to get that app to the top of the store.
But congratulations to everyone at Dave's Hot Chicken.
I'm a huge fan.
I order Dave's Hot Chicken all the time.
Maybe I should get the app.
I usually use DoorJess.
Never ordered it to the Ultradem.
No, I haven't.
More of a weekend thing.
More of a weekend thing.
More of a weekend thing.
But Dave's Hot Chicken is awesome.
Highly recommend.
It is almost the weekend.
weekend for our east coast audience.
If you're on the West Coast, we're going to...
Continue to your lock in.
Please stay locked in at least until five.
Hopefully, you're not leaving the office at five
because it just looks bad.
It's like you just were hanging out.
Trying to get the optics in.
But we had a really fun week.
Next week is going to be wild as well.
I think it's going to be a magnificent week.
I think so, too.
It's going to be absolutely magnificent.
I think it will be magnificent.
And I can't wait to be back.
So have a wonderful Friday, have a wonderful Saturday, have a wonderful Sunday.
We will be counting down the hours until we are going live again on Monday.
And thank you for tuning in.
Goodbye.
Cheers.
