TBPN - David Senra LIVE in The Ultradome | Chase Lochmiller & Alon Yariv, Filip Aronshtein, Gorkem Yurtseven, Sudheesh Nair, Julie Zhuo, Jakob Diepenbrock, Gabe Whaley

Starting point is 00:00:00 watching TVPN. Today is Thursday, August 21st, 2025. We are live from the TVPN Ultramm, the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the Capital of Capital. We have a post from Jeff Dean, the legendary programmer. Tyler, do you know who Jeff Dean is? Duhm question. Dumb question. Of course I know Jeff Dean. Of course Tyler knows Jeff Dean. Do you know the list of Jeff Dean jokes? So Jeff Dean is a legendary programmer, been at Google for a very long, time. One of the best to ever do it. And there's a list on, it was on some random website for a while. Somebody finally put on GitHub. These are the facts about Jeff Dean. Jeff Dean proved that P equals NP when he solved all NP problems in polynomial time on a whiteboard. Jeff Dean's pin,

Starting point is 00:00:51 his ATM pin, it's the last four digits of pie. This is, this one's true, actually. When Jeff gives a seminar at Stanford, it's so crowded that Donald Canneux. has to sit on the floor. Apparently, that actually happened. My favorite one is to Jeff Dean MP is no problemo. No problemo, yes. Another one, Jeff Dean got promoted to level 11 in a system where the max level is 10. Apparently, this happened at Google.

Starting point is 00:01:17 They had 10 levels of software engineering. He was so good. They were like, we got to make an 11th level. Let's take this one to 11. Yeah, it's great. He's a legend. You don't explain your work to Jeff Dean. Jeff Dean explains your work to you.

Starting point is 00:01:31 There was another one that I thought was funny, which is Jeff Dean. His keyboard only has two characters, one and zero. He just programs in binary. I think that's hilarious. Jeff Dean has exactly two keys on his keyboard, zero and one. Errors treat Jeff Dean as a warning. Compilers don't warn Jeff Dean. Jeff Dean warns compilers.

Starting point is 00:01:55 Anyway, you can go through these for all day. Google. It's basically Jeff Dean's side project. Anyway, he's a legend. People love him. I love him. I would take a bullet for Jeff Dean. One of the greatest to ever do it.

Starting point is 00:02:07 Seriously, he's amazing. But anyway, he posted something very interesting. So he said, AI efficiency is important. Today, Google is sharing a technical paper detailing our comprehensive methodology for measuring the environmental impact of Gemini inference. We estimate that the median Gemini app's text prompt uses 0.24 watt hours of energy, equivalent to watching TV, average TV for nine seconds,

Starting point is 00:02:33 and consumes 0.26 milliliters of water, about five drops. So they did all the averages. It's just a few drops. And so this, of course, is to counter the narrative that was growing online in the media and just in the general, like, anti-AI, anti-tech world that every time you, You fired off a prompt on any AI system. You were lighting the Amazon rainforest on fire, using enough power to power an American city, stealing water out of the homes of American people. And that does not appear to be the case. And to be clear, many of these new data center projects will use the energy equivalent of millions of single-family homes.

Starting point is 00:03:15 Yes, yes. So this is still energy intensive. Yes. But what matters is that the underlying products still get more and more efficient. Yes. As they get more efficient, we'll probably use them more. Yep. Hence, you know, the massive energy consumption.

Starting point is 00:03:29 Yeah, somebody was comping one of the latest buildouts as, I think it was in the journal actually today. It's like enough power to power a small U.S. city. And they think they maybe said like Austin, Texas or something. It's like one data center is enough to power that. But again, this is training, a model that will be used for years probably. and the training run only runs for a couple months, and then it's distributed. Yes, it's enough to power a million homes,

Starting point is 00:03:58 but a billion people wind up using the stuff. So you have to think about the overall value that is created by these systems, and obviously everyone wants to optimize them, not just the environmentalists, also the companies, if they don't reduce the amount of energy they use, their margins are terrible. And so it's not just Jeff Dean and the crew at Google

Starting point is 00:04:20 who enjoy optimizing systems, and I'm sure got a ton of joy out of squeezing such performance out of Gemini on the inference side. But it's also just the CFO who says, hey, why are we spending so much energy on a single Gemini app's text prompt? Let's get this down, let's optimize this thing

Starting point is 00:04:40 so we can actually make some money, which is great. And Bubble Boy, over on X had a good post. They said, AI inference is the new high-frequency trading and the companies that serve models and don't realize that will die. I thought this was a solid take. It's just that performance and efficiency and speed are going to matter more and more. Yep. And if you're in the business of serving up, farm to table inference, better make sure you're efficient.

Starting point is 00:05:08 So, yeah, Jeff Dean was like the original superstar AI researcher, just software engineering researcher, honestly, built a lot of the systems that Google built GCP on top of. And what's interesting is we just realized or came to terms with the rise of the superstar AI researcher. And that was underwritten probably, at least in part, on the back of superintelligence. If you find a researcher who creates an insane trek that unlocks trillions of values. Maybe it's an app purchases for your AI companion. Maybe, maybe, maybe. But no, XAI has not, has notably not been competing in that space. We have not heard about a billion-dollar aqua-hires at XAI,

Starting point is 00:05:52 100-million-dollar offers at X-A-I. Elon has said, I'm focused on engineers, not researchers. But the reason you would underwrite paying a researcher $100 million is that if there's a 1% chance that they create a new advancement in how large language models are designed, trained, implemented, well, then that could drive $10 billion in value overnight, just like what happened with GPT for RLHF, post-training, pre-training, all that stuff.

Starting point is 00:06:20 Anyone who's involved in that created a ton of value, right? And so basically, META's been saying, hey, we're going to comp the researchers against that optimistic scenario where they come up with some breakthrough and that drives a ton of value. Now, the question is, are we going to shift into an era

Starting point is 00:06:36 where the superstar AI inference optimization engineer is worth $100 million? Well, I will say that I, you know, the big labs are poaching from the high-frequency trading firms. Yeah, Mark Chen, worked at Jane Street. Yep. I mean, that wasn't a poach, but there are lots of people that come over. My question is, is if I come in.

Starting point is 00:07:00 So the poaching is just not happening within the labs. They're looking to areas of high frequency. Yeah, Sam Altman came out and said, hey, if you're working at, yeah, if you're working at a high-francerting shop, you should come over to AI research. But my question is, if I'm a superstar inference, optimization engineer, and I go to one of the cloud providers that's going to be generating tons and tons of tokens. They have these token factories, these massive AI data centers, and I come in and I say, I can make them, I can make them use 5% less energy, 10% less energy. That could drive

Starting point is 00:07:35 billions of dollars to the clock. Put some points on the board. And so are you going to get comped on that? I don't know. Will Jeff Dean be getting a maxed out contract? I'm sure he's had a maxed out contract this entire time. But can he go further? We'll see. The other interesting thing here is just how Google exactly pushes back on the media is very different than what we see from other tech folks. So obviously there have been posts about water usage in AI inference that have gone out in the mainstream media. Sam Altman did address GPT4's water usage specifically. They did an analysis. He dropped it kind of in the middle of a long post,

Starting point is 00:08:21 I think in the soft singularity or something. He just mentioned it randomly. Yeah. The, I like this approach of not being combative, not calling anyone out for being wrong, just saying, hey, we take this seriously. We have this,

Starting point is 00:08:34 this dog. They ran the numbers. And they're willing to talk about it. Here's the actual post. We have a blog post. We have a paper. You can see our full methodology. We're committed to this stuff.

Starting point is 00:08:45 And also it serves as like a big flag for hiring saying, hey, we're the type of company that's dropping our energy footprint on Gemini apps, text prompts. By 33X, like, that's got to be exciting. That's got to be on the back of some really solid engineering. So maybe we want to come work there. I mean, it's worth noting that despite the windsurf debacle, Gemini and the Google team broadly have been thread the needle avoiding a lot of controversy. You don't hear people about getting one-shotted by Gemini.

Starting point is 00:09:17 You don't see them posting, you know, 3D renders of scantily clad AI characters. They're just focused, clearly. I do think that we are going to see a new genre of, not necessarily hit piece, but negative AI story. It will be before bad person did bad thing, here's what they talk to chat GPT about or here's what they talk to their AI assistant about.

Starting point is 00:09:48 And we've seen this with, there's been a few articles of what were people talking to chat GPT about before they ended their lives or anything like that. But basically these tools are going to be so diffused within society that everyone's going to be using them constantly. And for a long time, if there was a high-profile crime, the courts would look up and say,

Starting point is 00:10:12 subpoena Google search records and say, well, they were Googling how to sell drugs across the world and they were how to start a drug cartel. And so that was kind of a smoking gun. Now it will be phrased in a different way, not just, it won't just be in a knowledge retrieval context, at least a lot of the articles won't be. Yeah. They won't just say before, before Pablo, the next Pablo Escobar started a drug cartel, he Googled how to start drug cartel. It'll be, before Pablo Escobar started, there was the Medellin cartel. Is that the one?

Starting point is 00:10:47 Yes. Yeah, the Medellin cartel. He was talking to Chachievit about starting a drug cartel and did Chachieviti talk him into it. Was it being, Pablo, that's the best idea ever. No one's thought of starting her drug cartel before.

Starting point is 00:11:01 The latest South Park is all about sycophon city. Yes, yes, yes, yes. And there's a scene where, I don't even know the character's name, but there's a husband and wife, and they're talking in the, and the husband is in a K-hole. And for the wife to try to break through,

Starting point is 00:11:16 she's acting, she's pretending to be chat GPT. And apparently David Sachs made it in there. Really? Nice. Nice. South Park. Well, if you want an AI agent that won't be sycophantic to you, get on ramp.

Starting point is 00:11:30 Ramp.com. Time's money, save both. Easy use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. Ramp isn't going to tell you, oh, yeah, that expense is fine. Don't worry about it. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:11:39 be like, yeah, go out for the stink there. No, it's going to say, let's save some time and money. Let's save both. Let's save both.

Starting point is 00:11:46 Let's save both. Anyway, we should do the inexorable rise of drug cartels. I've been waiting to do this story for days and we put it off. But there is a big read in the financial times that I want to read through because if you're tuning in for the first time

Starting point is 00:12:00 and they've been living under a data center, Jordy Hayes is a bit of an expert, a bit of an expert when it comes to the cartels. Certainly not an expert, but I, You famously fall asleep listening to stories of drug cartels, correct? Yes. It's relaxing to me. So it's, it's, it's business, business oriented content that's just far enough outside of my world.

Starting point is 00:12:21 Sure, sure, sure. That I don't, that it doesn't keep me up. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're not like, wait, should I invest in this? Yeah. So if you, it doesn't turn into like, wait, should I have the founder on the show? Like, this doesn't turn into work. I've maybe listened, watched like two episodes of Silicon Valley, TV show.

Starting point is 00:12:35 Yeah, it's way too close to home. And it's because it's not relaxing to me. me because it's just prompting, I got to respond to that email. I got to. Yeah, yeah. So we have the inexorable rise of drug cartels in the financial times with the cocaine, with a global cocaine business booming as never before. Organized crime groups are diversifying into a swath of other illicit activities. Politically leaders across the region warn about the threat to stability. We're going to find out what America is going to be doing about this. Do we have a particularly American sound effect today. Thank you, Jordy. Over the past century, the Tikuna, the biggest

Starting point is 00:13:13 tribe in the Brazilian Amazon, have fended off threats from loggers and illegal miners in some of the most remote tracks of the vast rainforest. But the latest challenge is more intense than anything they have experienced before. Drones were flying around this area last year, says Major Jonatas Suarez, the regional military police commander speaking in the village of Orik. about 1,000 kilometers west of the city of Manouse, drug traffickers, he adds, were stopping off there, storing their cocaine, and then putting drones up to check what was going on before continuing their journey. Yeah, picture this. They're in a jungle. They're hanging out. Normally, you can't get a lot of visibility. Yeah. They just pull the, they just send drones up, they look around, make sure everything's all clear before they make any moves, right? That's super interesting. Wow. Informants said there were 200 kilos. of the drug store there, but police were unable to locate the stash. One of the world's largest and most inaccessible stretches of rainforests, the upper Amazon,

Starting point is 00:14:14 has today become a superhighway for the export of cocaine to Europe, its fastest growing global market. I didn't know that Europe was down like that. Every week, Brazilian law enforcement officials say tons of cocaine make their way from illicit production labs in the jungles of neighboring Peru and Colombia through the Amazon to Manaus and the port of Belem for export to Europe and Africa. Sometimes the traffickers pay locals to smuggle just a few kilos downriver, or they hide larger amounts under the floorboards of motorboats.

Starting point is 00:14:47 At the other end of the scale, semi-submersible craft dubbed narco subs capable of carrying several tons of drugs have been detected on rivers feeding the Amazon from Colombia to and Peru. Imagine buying directly from the coca producers for 300 a kilo, selling a refined kilo for 60,000 euros. Wow, in Europe. That changes the life of the guy who's trying his luck, bringing it. So it's high risk, but high reward, at least financially. Yeah, so the, if you haven't gone down this rabbit hole, it's fact, the history of the way they make these submersibles. Oh, yeah. Is fascinating. So it started out, they would obviously

Starting point is 00:15:31 use regular boats. Sure. Those are still used. Eventually, they realized we could make these kind of homemade submarines that are not like traditional submarines and that they're going deep under the water but they're just hovering right at the surface level. So they might have like a snorkel. So you could see one like if you were looking out of the ocean five miles away, you would just not pick it up. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:15:50 But if it was sitting like right, if you were on a dock and it was right there, you'd just right there. It's just like one foot under. Got it. Interesting. And it probably makes it a lot less risky. You don't have to do with pressurization. You don't wind up in an ocean gate scenario because you're not putting it in

Starting point is 00:16:05 in any sort of extreme scenario. So the more recent trend is they're now starting to leverage Starlink to maintain connectivity and they are no longer having to put passengers and actual pilots. Oh, because they can be remotely for pilot. They control them, which just reduces

Starting point is 00:16:21 again, the cartels don't want to lose out on shipments like if one gets captured, but it's certainly better to just lose the product over a team member if that's if they want to go so far as to, I don't if they have these people in Slack or WhatsApp groups.

Starting point is 00:16:39 Chat is proposing spacking a cartel. We are firmly against that here at TBPN. We will not be... Don't give Chumath any ideas, folks. The global cocaine business... You asked for a business with free cash flow. I brought you one. Yes.

Starting point is 00:16:57 Stop complaining. The global cocaine business is booming as never before. I had no idea. Europe's drug habit has grown so fast in the past two decades that has overtaken the U.S. as the biggest cocaine market. That is crazy. They really are like 50 years behind everything. They don't get their movies for a few years.

Starting point is 00:17:16 They don't AC yet. And they're just getting the drugs that Americans were doing in the 80s, I suppose. While the narcos are hooking new users in the Middle East and Asia, flush with money, Latin America's cartels are diversifying from drugs into a swath of other criminal activities. We think 2024 was the most lucrative years. for organized crime in Latin America, says Jeremy McDermott, co-founder of Insight Crime,

Starting point is 00:17:40 which tracks a less illicit activity in the region. This was driven principally by three criminal economies. The first is cocaine, lagging not that far behind, lagging not that, not far behind that is gold. Gold.

Starting point is 00:17:57 They're smuggling gold? Okay. Number three is human smuggling and human trafficking. I would imagine the, the gold activity is tied in to the first one. Sure, sure. Yeah, that makes sense.

Starting point is 00:18:11 Drug-related crime and violence used to be concentrated in the narcotics-producing nations of Peru, Colombia, and Mexico, with nations such as Argentina or Chile, largely untouched. Today, such violence has become a feature of life in virtually every country in the region, reaching even former havens, Costa Rica and Uruguay. A nation of a million people sometimes hail is the Switzerland of Latin America. This is why Pam Bondi is putting out 50 million for Nicholas Maduro. That's right.

Starting point is 00:18:39 Yes, he's being accused of narco terrorism. Well, yeah, effectively having the government of Venezuela Yes. Run, basically run their own cartel. Not even getting a cut. Oh, they're actually. Like they're being accused of just actually running a drug cartel.

Starting point is 00:18:54 Well, that might actually be the answer to the drug war. Kind of like. If you put the folks who did the DMV in charge of getting drugs, you have to, oh, I'd like some cocaine, you go, you take a ticket, you wait four hours. They say, ah, we're out. You've got to come back. You got to mail in this form. You got to fill out that form. All of a sudden, you're like, you know what, I've cleaned up? I'm just going to stick with, I'm just going to stick with caffeine. Yeah. I'm good. I'm good. I don't, I don't actually need any cocaine. Anyway, really quickly, let me tell you about restream. One live stream, 30 plus destinations, multi-stream and reach your audience,

Starting point is 00:19:28 wherever they are. Stick to live streaming, folks. You don't need to go into narco-terrorism. Pivot to live-streaming. So, drug-related crime and violence. Organized crime has become the main threat to institutional stability of our nations, says the former president of Costa Rica.

Starting point is 00:19:47 No Latin American country today can escape this. You have to wonder what's going on with El Salvador, right? You do. They locked up all their... Is that the one that has Bitcoin, too? Yes. He's Bitcoin maxi, right? Yes.

Starting point is 00:19:58 They've locked up all the criminals. It's safer than ever. Are they, you know, through that, are they able to prevent trafficking happening within their borders? I don't know. I don't know. It's probably like anything else. It's probably like a cat-mouse game that is unending.

Starting point is 00:20:14 I went, I've been on a couple surf trips to El Salvador the day and it was historically known as one of the most dangerous countries to visit. And then the cartel at the time realized that it was, terrible for business if you didn't get tourists coming through the country. They couldn't sell drugs to the tourists. Oh, sure. And so by the time I got there, there had been some unspoken deal, which was that if anybody harmed a tourist in any capacity or stole from them, they would get like an insane beat down

Starting point is 00:20:48 from the gang. Yeah, it does feel like... I spent over a month there, probably like six weeks in total, and never had an issue at all, could walk around at night, could go anywhere. And so they had their sort of own cartel-enforced safety mechanism. Yeah, yeah. It does feel like there's a bit of a truce. Yeah, Gold Rock nailed it.

Starting point is 00:21:12 Cartels are just CPG companies with better PR. Not necessarily better PR. No PR or negative. They build in silence. CPG companies with no brands, right? Yes, with no brands. They have the distribution. they have logistics.

Starting point is 00:21:28 Yeah. They have very sophisticated operations. They just don't put a brand. There's no branding on the product. Yeah. Some of the larger players are so powerful, they challenge even the biggest states forging links with long-established

Starting point is 00:21:42 organized crime groups in Europe and Asia and generating billions of dollars in profit at the heart of Latin America's vast criminal enterprises, cocaine by far the most profitable, illegal business, production seizures, and use of cocaine hit all-time highs in 2023, remaking cocaine the world's fastest growing illicit drug market. Illegal production skyrocketed to 3,708 tons nearly 34% more. It is funny that they had to say illegal production,

Starting point is 00:22:06 because I guess there must be some legal production. Yeah, what's the fastest growing non-illegal market, probably AI tokens? Yeah, yeah, the question here, because the cartels obviously generate massive amounts of cash flow and profits. And then they have the choice of reinvesting that the illegal business, reinvesting it in legitimate businesses. Yeah, which is kind of laundering, right? Gas. And you could imagine, you could imagine Mexican data centers being built out with

Starting point is 00:22:36 cocaine dollars. Neocloud. In Colombia, the world's biggest producer, cocaine production, rocketed 53% from 2020 to 23. That is crazy. A senator and a presidential hopeful was shot in June at a rally in Bogota. And

Starting point is 00:22:56 later died of his wounds, raising fears that the nation might relapse into cocaine-fueled political violence that scarred it in the 80s and 90s. But cocaine is only part of the picture. Experts say Latin America's organized crime groups now run a portfolio of diversified businesses robust enough to absorb cyclical downturns in one area like a legal conglomerate. Criminals are now starting to accumulate revenue at the scale of national GDPs with none of the burdens of a state. They're operating across borders and countries with legal systems that were built for a past age. The combination of illicit businesses,

Starting point is 00:23:30 they're no longer drug trafficking organizations. They will move anything that transits their area of control. You have all of these new markets opening up. Incredible. Anyway, you should go and read the full deep dive in the Financial Times. Well, here's the thing that's more interesting. So Trump recently designated eight Latin American cartels as foreign terrorist organizations

Starting point is 00:23:52 and secretly signed a directive to the Pentagon to begin using military force against them. the New York Times reported this month. And as part of that, so now there's spy drones flying over Mexico, like gathering information in real time, and the U.S. has deployed naval forces into the Caribbean, basically the Gulf of America, formerly known as the Gulf of Mexico. And it seems pretty, it seems somewhat unlikely

Starting point is 00:24:19 that they would start striking the cartels. I don't know if we need to open up a new front at the moment. but it's certainly not totally off the table. Well, this is part of a three-part series. Part two will be on Syria's drug war, and part three will be on the illegal gold trade, which is very interesting. John, yes.

Starting point is 00:24:41 Okay, so you're a drug dealer, right? Yes. So are you going to start a cartel? No, I was talking to Jordy about that. The drawback of selling nicotine pouches is that there really are no cartels. Closest thing to cartels are the big... Are the big nicotine?

Starting point is 00:24:58 Yeah, the big tobacco companies have really, really solid control over their supply chains and their distribution. They won't kill an upstart like you, but they do try to make startup life a bit harder. Yeah, a little bit. It's more just like they have a monopoly over the distribution in retail, which is where people buy nicotine-containing products. And so they don't, they can just kind of sit back like they're chilling. It's kind of like Google's search monopoly. Like they're just, they're just good. They don't really need to be overly aggressive.

Starting point is 00:25:36 And Google doesn't really need to, you know, take shots at Bing or like try and like tie Bing up in court or do anything because like people just use Google and they're good. Anyway, let's, the chat says Tyler unlocked Groch Premium for. I miss something. What's with Tyler Spitt? It is Thursday, and it's summer. It's hot. It's a mid-August Thursday afternoon. Yeah. Anyway, let me tell you about public.com investing for those who take it seriously. They got multi-asset investing, AI-powered analysis, and they're trusted by millions folks. We have a very important post here from East Village Guy. He says being a salesperson that doesn't drink or golf is like playing Scrabble with Dyslexia.

Starting point is 00:26:24 Yeah, the golf. I love to see. The real fighting with one hand tied behind your back would be being a vegetarian and not being able to go out to those steak dinners. I think you can get by without drinking. Golf is important, but, you know, there's other things to do. You could go track days. Track days.

Starting point is 00:26:42 You could do something else. There was a fun article. But if you can't go steak to steak with a prospect, you're going to have a tough time. Yeah. Oh, this, this article. call on the front page of the Wall Street Journal really tells you about what's slow a news day it truly is. Nine beers, nine hot dogs, nine innings, challenge accepted. A gut-busting race against the clock has taken off among baseball fans.

Starting point is 00:27:06 I tried it, says Xavier Martinez and the Wall Street Journal. On the front page, this is front-page Wall Street Journal news, I lean back in my nosebleed seat, seven empty cans of Coors Light littered around me and eight hot dogs marinating in my stomach. I tried to remember how I ended up in this place, so sick and yet so determined to keep going. I'm not a big drinker, nor can I remember ever craving a hot dog. Oh, right, I was attempting the 9-99. Now, a ballpark tradition, the challenge entails eating nine hot dogs and drinking nine beers in the course of a baseball game. I had found out, I had found a group of friends who planned to take it on during a game between the New York

Starting point is 00:27:51 Metz and the Atlanta Braves and asked if I could tag along. Against the advice of every cardiologist ever, I decided to try it myself. Joining me in attempting the challenge, where Tim, a 29-year-old software engineer, let's hear it for the software engineers, folks. And William Lee, a 38-year-old analyst, Sharona Lynn, a 31-year-old writer. If things went wrong, we could share the janitorial duties. Wild, wild story in the journal just about this. Just the important stuff. Just the important stuff. And he truly, like, wrote, He wrote this piece fully. Like, it's great.

Starting point is 00:28:25 Does it kind of trail off towards that end? Like, he's clearly feeling the effects. Yeah. I was thinking about, this reminds me of the 999 that a lot of people in Silicon Valley do. Nine glasses of screaming eagle, nine servings of beluga caviar, nine different horses competing in dressage. Yes. And so that's the, when I heard he was doing the 999, I thought that's what he was doing.

Starting point is 00:28:47 Venture capitalist heard about the 996, and they decided it to adapt it for Yes, the 999. Our fears, our first beers had been a respite from a sticky New York afternoon. Those Nathan's hot dogs had surprised me with their juicy snap. It's never, I recall, Lee sang when the game began, and we naively clanked our 12-ounce cans together in celebration of gluttony. But now, with time running out in my body at war against itself, doubt was creeping in.

Starting point is 00:29:16 I'm limping, but I'm getting there, said Daigle. I was feeling worse. The 999 has existed for at least a decade, though for much of that time, it was largely the domain of frat bros and competitive gorgers. Recent social media attention and spinoffs have given it new popularity. NFL great JJ Watt completed the challenge last month. Barstool Sports this year debuted a 99-99 challenge with a nine-member team that included competitive eating champion Joey Chestnut. Skateboarders gather each year in Brooklyn to... Park to consume nine hot dogs, nine beers, while completing nine specialized kickflips.

Starting point is 00:29:54 That sounds extremely difficult. Specialized kickflips? Probably like a kickflip, a heel flip, a pop shove it, right? That's not a kick flip. It's, I think that's, I think he's using kickflip as an abstraction on top of just flip trick generally. Yeah. Well, he should, he should respect my culture.

Starting point is 00:30:15 How advanced can you do, can you do a double? kickflip? Can you do a triple kickflip? I probably couldn't right now in low first, but I could land a kickflip in five minutes if I was required. But at your peak, at your peak could you do a 540? Could you do a 720? All of them. You could do a 900?

Starting point is 00:30:37 You could do a 900? No. Okay. So there's a limit. Those are talking about half pipe. Yeah, okay. I'm just, I'm trying to understand. I had a mini ramp. My dad built me a mini ramp with scraps. My dad of my uncle built a mini ramp with scraps in our front yard. It was probably the worst thing ever.

Starting point is 00:30:54 What about a varial? Varyl. What about a switch-nolly quad heel flip? Quad heel flip. That's a special trick from Tony Hawksbrose game. Yeah, yeah, yeah. XX. What were the snowboarding?

Starting point is 00:31:09 SSX was the snowboarding one. Great game. You know what else? This is great. Vanta. Automate compliance, manage risk, and accelerate trust with AI.

Starting point is 00:31:17 Vanta helps you get compliant fast, and we don't stop there. Our AI and automation, power, everything, from evidence, collection, and continuous monitoring to security reviews and vendor risk, whether you're starting up or scaling. Oh, guess what, John? A little bit different.

Starting point is 00:31:29 What's up? Investment alert. Investment alert. The White House at White House has just posted. Investment alert. Adrian is investing $200 million to build an advanced manufacturing facility in Arizona. I said it before. America is cultivating Chris Power.

Starting point is 00:31:46 And he absolutely... They really are cultivating. Chris Power. The new startup meta, launch videos are done. Don't do launch videos. You got to get the White House to post your announcements from their main handle.

Starting point is 00:32:01 Or you can get Patrick O'Shaughnessy to post and do a whole profile on you. So there are a bit of dueling, dueling articles today because the Wall Street Journal is talking about a school that embraces AI learning will run through this, then we'll do the Patrick O'Shaughnessy Colossus profile.

Starting point is 00:32:23 Bill Ackman has a new fascination, a fast-growing private school that eschews lessons on diversity, equity, inclusion, and uses artificial intelligence to speed teach children in two hours. Alpha School is launching a New York location in September, and the investor and social media commentator has been acting as something of an ambassador for the institution. On Friday, Ackman is set to appear with Alpha's co-founder,

Starting point is 00:32:47 its principal and others on a panel discussion in his Hampton's home. The panel on K-12 education will be moderated by former financier Michael Milken as part of Milken Institute's Hamilton's Dialogues. Alpha School, which calls its teacher's guides, says it uses AI-enabled software to help students complete core subjects in just two hours daily. It claims students learn twice as much as those in traditional schools, despite condensed days. The schedule allows students to be.

Starting point is 00:33:17 do hands-on activity in the afternoon, which the school says help them build real-life skills. These include five-mile bike rides without stopping for kindergartners. No stops. No stops. Five-mile bike ride without stopping for kindergartners. That's pretty sick. And exploring personal hobbies through AI-generated plans.

Starting point is 00:33:35 They should learn some pick-lefs. Learn the 900. I would send my children to Alpha School. I was guaranteed a 900. Kids to do a bike ride and not stop, if you could actually pull that off. I don't know how your little guy does, but my little guy.

Starting point is 00:33:52 Stop's constantly. It stops constantly. It's a stop machine. He's not a kindergarten yet, though. So anything's possible. Maybe Alpha School. Maybe AI will make it possible. The school also strives to keep the hot button social issues

Starting point is 00:34:03 that have divided grade schools and colleges across the country out of its classrooms entirely. Co-founder McKenzie Price said in an interview, we don't let anything. Political, social issues come in the way. we stay very much out of that. Alpha's guides come from a variety of backgrounds and don't typically have teaching degrees. I wonder if there will be a backlash to this or like a response to this, like a hyper-political

Starting point is 00:34:29 school that teaches your child how to navigate the modern political landscape for maximum power. So you go there, you learn how to really pour the fire on the culture war and create a movement around yourself and get into the White House. could be some interesting alpha there. Do they not, is this, why do they call it alpha school? Are they trying to like develop alphas? Is that the idea? Yeah. It's like no bada's.

Starting point is 00:34:54 Well, John, if they wanted to develop betas, you could imagine what they would call it. I would be interested. So we need to start a competitor to this. Sigma school. Sigma. Sigma school. It's a school for lone wolves.

Starting point is 00:35:07 Loan wolves, yeah. And it just plays literally me songs on repeat. It's like, yeah, classes in session. going today you will become Ryan Gosling from drive you're going to be operating outside of social hierarchy yes yes uh class you develop any friends we live in a society immediately and you will be the joker today here's how to become joker five that's training we're training you up to to join the atmosphere one day yeah join the minister yeah when you when you're we're studying the Yeah, when you enter the first grade, you have to choose between Tim Ferriss,

Starting point is 00:35:42 Andrew Huberman, Lex Friedman, Chris Williamman, you get sorted into the houses. The houses of the manister here at the Cigma School. We're on to something here. Yeah, we need to study the blade, we're sure, purely so that in two decades time you can say, so you come to me in your time of need. Yes. The new school aims to launch with 30 or so founding families. You're still on Sigma School?

Starting point is 00:36:10 Sigma School? Yes. So imagine you have a five-year-old, right? They join Sigma School. So these are our principals. Individualism, right? So Sigma operates independently and doesn't seek to be at the top or even a part of a social hierarchy.

Starting point is 00:36:24 Yes, yes, yes. Like an alpha male. Yes. Solitude. Yes. So you need to teach the five-year-old find strength and solitude. So, you know, you'll be taken to like the base of a mountain. Yes.

Starting point is 00:36:37 And you say like, okay, class today. Oh, five-mile bike ride with all your friends with no stops? Yeah. How about five-mile bike ride by yourself? Summit this peak. Yes. You have eight hours to get to the top of this peak back. It's just like a monastery.

Starting point is 00:36:49 Yes, yes. You're describing a little monastery. Yeah. Monasteries. Go to the original. Not yet. Not yet. So the other aspect of the Sigma archetype, mystery.

Starting point is 00:36:57 Mystery. So teaching a five-year-old. Teaching a five-year-old to be mysterious. Good morning, Mark. Raghav says Alpha School replaced teachers with clankers. The backlash. I think the clankers are responsible to the teachers. I think there are plenty of teachers in the loop.

Starting point is 00:37:17 They should test the hormone profile of the human teachers to make sure that they are also alphas. Yes. Yes. So anyway, let's continue on this. They talk about Ackman. Ackman, who regularly weighs in on everything from fine dining to the war in Casa on X had uncharacteristically not said a word about Alpha School

Starting point is 00:37:40 on the social media platform until the Wall Street Journal revealed his involvement. I don't know why this is such a revealing thing. This is like, this is just like a startup that people are doing. I don't know. These parents. I guess it's because schooling is important.

Starting point is 00:37:54 It's like culture war issues and stuff. No, it really comes down to these parents want their children to get a good education. Yeah. On Wednesday, he wrote a fawning post that ran like an ad. A person close to the school said Ackman is now poised to become a de facto ambassador. He is already enmeshed in the New York's education scene and sits on the board of trustees of Horace Mann, the school's most storied, one of the city's most storied private schools. Atman first learned about Alpha School this year at this year's Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting after speaking to Sahil Bloom, author of the Five Types of Wealth. Some of the people familiar with the matter. What are the five types of wealth again, John? Cars, watches, horses, mansions, boats.

Starting point is 00:38:38 Oh, yeah. Boats. Yeah. I think we got to have it to like 10 sources of wealth. Ten types of wealth. Anyway, he has since been hyping up Alpha School to parents in his social circle. Ackman has been a spoken critic of DEI programs. He will appear on a panel Friday alongside Price and Joe Lamont.

Starting point is 00:38:59 Lamont, a Texas-based billionaire who Alpha says has served as its school principal for the past two years. Lamont is the founder of Trilogy Software, which became part of his private equity firm, ESW Capital. Do you know what ESW Capital stands for? Tyler, Pop Quiz. Pop Quiz. ESW. Enterprise. Enterprise Software.

Starting point is 00:39:21 Group? No. ESW Capital, Enterprise Software Capital. Nothing better than that. That is a fantastic name. Yeah. He has developed a software. to the Colossus story. We should. We should. We should. So Patrick has a and Jeremy Stern have a new profile

Starting point is 00:39:35 in Colossus today. It is available online. You can also subscribe to the print edition. But the profile is all about Joe Lamont and Alpha School. Yes. And the, I guess his co-founder in Alpha School, McKenzie. Yes. McKenzie Price. So crazy lore in here. It's like Deeply underrated. We've heard a lot of people have known about trilogy and known about Joe Lamont for a long time But to get this level of lower drop. And if you don't know about Joe and It wasn't because you weren't you were living under a data center. Yes Because he's pretty much been very proudly silent for the last 25 years Yep, yep, yep, yep. He was he's an alpha

Starting point is 00:40:15 But then he was an alpha transition to a sigma more of a sigma more a Syngma sort of mysterious outside traditional higher extremely sigma Extremely Sigma. So anyways, I'll give you some background here. So this is from the profile. Even after agreeing to break his silence after 25 years, Joe Lamont is still reluctant to talk about himself. It's hard to get him to relive trilogy,

Starting point is 00:40:36 the Enterprise Software Company. Let's just give it up for Enterprise Software real quick. The Enterprise Software Company he founded in 1989, which by age 27 put him on the cover of Forbes twice as America's youngest self-made Senti. So if you are, if you have been going through period of silence and mystery and you've been a sigma and you're trying to become an alpha, trying to get your brand mentioned in chat, GPT. Go to profound. Reach millions of customers who are

Starting point is 00:41:03 using AI to discover new products and brands. Continue, Jordy. So he isn't keen to expound on sales builder, which is an amazing name for software company. Trilogy's flagship expert system from the 1990s in the world's first billion dollar artificial intelligence product in all but name. Dido ESW, the investment arm of trilogy that's acquired hundreds of software companies since 2000 and helped make him a decadillionaire, yet the mention of which makes the otherwise inexhaustible Lamont, who always seems to be straining at some invisible leash, seem drowsy and bored. Nor is he interested in dwelling on his reputation as a tech pioneer in everything from expert systems to manufacturing configuration, college recruitment, corporate boot camps,

Starting point is 00:41:45 tech pro culture, remote work, monitoring employees with surveillance software and replacing American employees with overseas contractors, whether his reticence can be described to an inhibition about the things that made him rich or because he's refreshingly adverse to gilding them with hypocritical virtue signaling or because he simply doesn't give an S-H-I-T anymore is hard to tell. The one thing, Lamont, we'll talk about for hours on end is Alpha School, the teacher list, homework list, K-12 private school in Austin, Texas, where students have been testing in the top 0.1% nationally by self-directing coursework with clankers for two hours a day. Of course, with AI tutoring apps for two hours a day. Alpha students are incentivized to complete coursework to quote unquote

Starting point is 00:42:32 mastery level scoring over 90 percent in only two hours via a mix of various material and immaterial rewards, including the right to spend the other four hours of the school day in quote unquote workshops learning things like how to run an Airbnb or a food truck, manage a brokerage account or Broadway production or build a business or drone. And you know why you have to go to and actually subscribe to Colossus magazine because you can get this beautiful picture of this horse. With McKenzie Price. Yes.

Starting point is 00:43:05 The co-founder of Alpha School. And Flair, the horse. But when you think about, you know, thinking about these courses that they're taking, you know, these K through 12 students through how to run an Airbnb, I wonder if they found any course bros online that are that and and and trained in AI on on their programs of how to build a nine figure Airbnb empire first first trick there would be to just get those assets on wander find your happy place book of wonder a hotel great a manning's dreamt you that's top of your cleaning and 24-7 concierge service it's a vacation home but better folks

Starting point is 00:43:39 you know you have our first guest of the show no way lock miller is here welcome to the stream chase how you doing calling in from a log cabin set That's a beautiful background. Where are you? Great. Yeah, I'm in, uh, broadly. I'm in,

Starting point is 00:43:54 I'm in Jackson Hole right now. I have, uh, an event that I'm attending out here. So amazing, found a, found a corner of the log cabin to call in, to,

Starting point is 00:44:03 to hang out with you guys. I love it. Uh, give us the update. What's the news? Break it down for us. Um, you know,

Starting point is 00:44:10 we are excited and, and thrilled to share that, uh, you know, Cruso made an acquisition today. Uh, uh, Let's go.

Starting point is 00:44:20 Let's go. Let's go. Get the gong ready. What'd you buy? Crusoe acquired a business called Atero. Sorry, sorry to keep interrupting. I get a little excited. So Crusoe,

Starting point is 00:44:39 Crusoe acquired a business called Taro, and we're really thrilled to welcome the entire Atro team to Crusoe. Atero's been a company that's mostly been operating in stuff. but they have been focused on optimizing the very low-level pieces of the high-performance computing infrastructure stack, particularly around memory optimization. So, you know, there's a lot of investment being made today for these very large clusters, these large-scale AI factories that are bringing, you know, intelligence to the masses and embedding intelligence in the economy.

Starting point is 00:45:15 but a lot of that infrastructure is not used nearly as efficiently as it could be. And a lot of that has to do with getting the data into the right place at the right time so that your GPU utilization rate can go way, way up. And sort of our commitment in this Atara acquisition is building both very, very large-scale AI factories and then building the operating systems. you know, the software systems to basically operate those AI factories with an incredible degree of efficiency and scale. So amazing. I want to go into, I want to go into trends about inference cost and and kind of what's going on in the broader market. There was this amazing Google paper today by

Starting point is 00:46:05 Jeff Dean about saving water and energy. It seems like there's a lot of progress. But first, let's hear from Alon about the actual journey. When did you start the company? What, What made sense about teaming up with Crusoe here? Okay, we started the company last July, so about a year ago now, with the understanding that inference is going to be the next huge frontier in this space. Training was all the rage for the last few years. People all of a sudden realized that they need to make money off AI, and inference is the only place that you actually make any money building a model.

Starting point is 00:46:45 What we realized in addition, one of our members of the founding team, Ben Chess, he came out of Open AI. He led the infrastructure in Open AI for about five years. This guy knew what it means to run inference at scale. He knew what are the challenges. He knew the challenges of scaling. He knew the challenges of orchestrating different workloads on the GPU clusters. And our realization was that it is not enough to run models at a really high efficiency when you're running a single model on a single GPU, but the challenge comes when you actually

Starting point is 00:47:21 have a real-world workload that breathes and changes size, like changes the amount of resources it consumes, changes what models are being served, what type of prompts are being asked of it to do. And what realized is that memory is the main bottleneck for this infrastructure for inference. First, you need to shift the model into a GPU. Models are huge. They're about a thousand times larger than standard containerized applications, like just how much time it takes to put it into a GPU.

Starting point is 00:47:53 Secondly, user assets are also huge. Typically, when you have a user session in a standard consumer application, you have a few photos, a few text assets, those way a few kilobytes, megabytes. KV cache volumes, which are the equivalent of user sessions in inference those weigh gigabytes so it's another times like it's it's another increase of three orders of magnitude of how much memory you need into a process and so that's what we have solved with our technology we have the Attero UM technology the unified memory layer this allows you to utilize the

Starting point is 00:48:33 GPU cluster to its fullest shift memory assets fluidly and in the highest possible speed throughout the cluster And this allows you enormous performance improvements in everything related to inference. What layer of abstraction are you operating at? There's obviously a host of different large language models, some open source, some closed source. There's a variety of different chips. And you have stuff from Amazon and Google. Are you sitting above Kuda in the Nvidia ecosystem?

Starting point is 00:49:09 Are you agnostic to any particular piece of the stack? Just help me kind of understand when an AI company would pull this particular product off the shelf. So we have built, for the last year, a few different ways of structuring this offer, and this also relates to your question. But the way I like to look at it, I have two analogues in mind when I think about our tech. You can think about us as an in-memory high throughput cache. So it's kind of like a database, a Redis for your AI application that gives you the assets as fast as possible into the process.

Starting point is 00:49:57 So I like to think about it as something that is sort of orthogonal or in parallel with the Kuda stack and the VLM. So we integrate on the side and allow you to shift in and out assets from the existing stack. very rapidly. This actually allows us to very easily integrate to everything. We can integrate to VLM, but we can integrate to any inference runtime. And while we currently only support Nvidia officially or NVIDIAO officially, we are by no mean shape or form constraint to NVIDA Habel. Yeah, that makes sense.

Starting point is 00:50:33 That's one way I want to look at it, but the other way that I find more inspirational and kind of like tells about this partnership with Crusoe is, I like to think about as the sort of native virtualization for this new world. So it's virtualizing the memory, which is the main asset. So I think about it as the equivalent of VMware for the wave of AI. That makes sense. Chase, when I think of Cruzau's business, I think of like the big projects that get cinematically filmed in Bloomberg documentaries.

Starting point is 00:51:04 And then I also think about Crusoe Cloud. and the reports from Dylan Patel over at semi-analysis around ClusterMax. What does this allow you to say to customers that you couldn't before? Is this purely going to help with pricing in some sort of commodity offering? Is this a differentiator? Is this something that will increase reliability and uptime? I think a lot of people are maybe underpricing what it takes to actually not just, yes, I have a chip and I'm selling it at a cheap price.

Starting point is 00:51:37 but if it's offline all the time, people aren't going to be happy. So what's the shape of how you're sharing this with customers and where you hope this goes from like a sales position? Yep. Well, you know, we feel like a lot of the technology that Alon and his team have built at Attero's is incredibly complementary to our infrastructure software stack at Crusoe Cloud. And a lot of this is really about accelerating performance and enhancing performance across everything from, you know, how do you actually get the most out of the GPUs that you're paying for? And how do we do that through things like, you know, more optimizing or how do we do that by things like, you know, investing in the storage layer so that you're basically able to use multiple different layers of storage, very cool.

Starting point is 00:52:35 to have your data in the right place at the right time to utilize your GPUs more effectively. So I think from an efficiency standpoint, it's a major investment, from a reliability standpoint, it's a major investment, and then leveraging the scale that Crusoe has and being able to operate that infrastructure at, you know, gigawatt scale, I think is like a very important aspect to, you know, this investment we're making. You know, when I think about like benchmarks and metrics, I think like, you know, one of the things that people are frankly looking at is like dollar per token, right? And if you, you actually, you know, if you double your utilization rate of your GPU, uh, simply by, you know, optimizing how you manage your KV cash, how you know, manage your, uh, you know, how, how the model actually gets managed. Um, then, uh, you can actually drive down the cost per token by half.

Starting point is 00:53:35 Right? So when we think about it, it's like, what is the cost of intelligence running on Brousel Cloud and like the intelligent result that folks are actually, you know, coming to us for at the end of the day? And how do we actually drive massive efficiencies for all sorts of different high performance workloads? Yeah, it goes from cost per token to the, for the end customer in the end profit, profit per token. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah, I want to hear about. Yeah. I mean, if you're, if you're, you know, people get very focused on the dollar per GPU hour, but if your GPU isn't stable, it's not reliable, you know, you can't move data into it

Starting point is 00:54:10 effectively, you don't actually know how to utilize it effectively for your own, you know, hosted inference workload, you're not going to be able to create that much value for ourselves. So, you know, our goal here is to, you know, invest in the platform and to drive massive performance gains that will ultimately enable our customers to drive more value for themselves by using Crucible Cloud. There was a post we covered earlier on the show from an account called Bubble. said AI inference is the new high-frequency trading and the companies that serve models and don't realize that will struggle. What's your reaction to that? Is that what it kind of feels like right now internally in terms of just like it feels like speed, performance, costs?

Starting point is 00:54:52 Yeah, you hear all these crazy stories about high-frequency traders like, you know, Jane Street maintains O'Camel, like a special language just for high-froozy trading. They'll build their own, their own like, backbones if they need to, just. to move data more quickly. It feels like there's potential that we're going in that direction. Yeah, you know, speaking as someone who spent 10 years working in the high-frequency trading sector, I don't know if you guys knew that,

Starting point is 00:55:18 but I did not. That's lore. That's lower. That's lower. You know, I do think that there are elements of this that rhyme with kind of what's happening in high-frequency trading. You know, they're, you know,

Starting point is 00:55:31 I view it very much as a massively expanding pie, though. as opposed to kind of a fixed pie that the high frequency traders are competing for. And, you know, as performance gains increase, utility of, you know, this infrastructure will go up and demand will go up with it. So it has kind of this like reflexivity that, you know, if we can actually as an industry help drive better performance, we can actually grow the pie and make, you know, make, make the impact of what we're doing way, way larger. So I think it has like a, you know, positive force that, you know, high frequency trading doesn't in that regard. That being said, you know, I do see like hosting of, you know, hosting of more widely used open source models to be something that will commoditize over the course of time. And, you know, things like speed, cost and, you know, a bunch of different tricks to optimize performance are definitely going to be instrumental in, you know, providing a great product to the marketplace. Yeah, I mean, on that note of like tricks, do you feel like we're on a Moore's Law type curve for cost per million tokens where not necessarily that it mirrors Moore's law in getting half the price every 18 months, but it just that it's somewhat predictable versus the progress on the usefulness of LLMs felt extremely spiky and you get these crazy branches in the tech tree and

Starting point is 00:57:03 research paths that just all of a sudden produce a ton of value and it kind of goes from zero to 100. But on the cost side, do you think that we're going to be chipping away at this, making solid gains on a predictable cadence? Or do you think there might be like one weird trick that, you know, every AI lab will love? Look, I think it's both is the answer. You know, we're definitely like writing the, you know, invidia roadmap curve to like, you know,

Starting point is 00:57:34 better, more performant chips that we're able to drive down our dollar per flop by just kind of, you know, continuing to grow and build on, you know, a lot of the innovations that are taking place in the silicon companies. But certainly there's a lot of low-level software optimizations in terms. And as Alon, like frankly put it, you know, I think there's this massive opportunity to kind of have this, you know, VMware for memory where, you know, that ultimately is this critical piece of stack to produce valuable results from these chips. Amazing. Well, congrats on the announcement.

Starting point is 00:58:11 Thanks so much for hopping on. Enjoy the rest of your trip and safe travels. We'll talk to you soon. Appreciate it guys. Great chatting guys. Thanks a much. Goodbye. Cheers.

Starting point is 00:58:19 Let me tell you about graphite.dev.dev the AI developer platform, the AI developer productivity platform, Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. Get started for free. I'm very much enjoying the soundboard today. Missed dearly on Monday, it's back in action. The thing about a new sound effect, too, it's like discovering a new favorite song.

Starting point is 00:58:43 You play it like a hundred times. You've got to find a new favorite song because it doesn't hit quite the same it once did, but for now we're enjoying the Eagle. We have an alert noise. I'm pulling for that to come out during this next interview with Phil from Dirac. He is in the studio.

Starting point is 00:58:59 He's in the Restream Waiting Room. Now he's in the TBPN Ultradome. Welcome to the stream. I like that you're tenting your fingers in anticipation of a big announcement. What you got for us, Phil? What's new in your world? Gentlemen, it's a pleasure beyond. Good to see you all.

Starting point is 00:59:15 I'm Conan Live, currently forward deployed on site with the customer. We are, you know, a small burgeoning defense prime in Costa Mesa. You know, having a great time over here. As you can see from the phone booth that I'm in, it's great lighting. Great lighting over here. We have some pretty exciting stuff that we're talking about today. Two big announcements. One of them is a spectacular technology partnership with our favorite great giant Siemens.

Starting point is 00:59:41 So that means a team center integration for the uninitiated. But it means that Stephen- Got to hit the gong for Siemens. Let's go. They've been in business for a while. We won't take the team slander. Seamins, overnight success. Totally.

Starting point is 00:59:59 What else you got? We're helping. We're helping. So with the Siemens partnership, this means they're, like, bringing us into their customers. It's been great. They walked us in some pretty great automotive giants lately and some defense companies. So we're rock and roll, and great partnership. Love the Seaman's team. Secondly, we are announcing our primary financing, brought to us by Founders Fund and Co-to, our favorite Trey and Thomas LaFont. There we go.

Starting point is 01:00:21 How much? How much? How about it? The number. The number. Oh, sorry. 10.7 million. There he goes. It's up right now. Thank you, congratulations. There we go.

Starting point is 01:00:35 Thank you, gentlemen. Thank you. It's a pleasure. It's a pleasure. I thought, what better place can I tell the world than my favorite technology podcast and news network? The TVVIN fellows.

Starting point is 01:00:45 I appreciate it. We still have to do the live episode from the Empire State Building. Yeah, we do. Walk us through the most concrete example of like, what could be better about automotive manufacturing manufacturing. Like are there patterns from Tesla that you think could be ported back to the legacy OEMs? Are there entirely new things? Are there particularly broken processes in automotive manufacturing that you've discovered? Any anecdotes, you can share them anonymously, but whatever's

Starting point is 01:01:18 interesting? It's actually kind of interesting. A lot of our insights are not specific to industry. So it's actually this realization that you end up having a very bad context problem. So what where this paradigm that we're trying to push through is what we call context aware production planning. This means us basically taking, you know, every piece of information in a manufacturing facility is one node in a very, very large and deeply interconnected graph. And what Bill of the West is today is basically a point solution for a manufacturing engineer, one person in that whole process who is helping with the beginning of the production planning process and a good chunk of the production planning process.

Starting point is 01:01:57 And what we find at an automotive facility, at an aerospace and defense facility at an ag, like a tractor manufacturer facility, is that they have context that might live on the shop floor. They have contexts that might live in the design world. And they often aren't connected. They often leave the facility once somebody retires with all that tribal knowledge. And so a lot of what we found is there exists this interesting like spectrum of volume versus mix. So a aerospace and defense manufacturer does everything very manually. And so that might look like very, very high mix. They have a lot of variability in the production and very low volume.

Starting point is 01:02:32 So they call that high mix, low volume. On the other side of the spectrum, you end up having like consumer electronics manufacturing a little bit before that, you end up having automotive where it's pretty low mix. So like, you know, they're having like one line for one type of car, but it's very high volume. And because of that, you know, because of that predictability, you end up having the ability to have a lot of automation. And a lot of what we want to drive as a company is taking those two tradeoffs of high, mix, slow volume, so you have a lot of flexibility in your production, but you can't do a lot of

Starting point is 01:03:03 volume really quickly versus the other thing, which is like you can turn out a lot of stuff really fast, but you can't reconfigure your line a ton. We want to basically swap and democratize a lot of that value. And so we want to basically allow an automotive manufacturer to have very, very high reconfigureability and mass produce with a lot of flexibility. And then on the aerospace and defense side, we want to allow them to be able to mass produce that scale while maintaining that flexibility that they have. And so that's a lot of what we've seen. That's kind of interesting. Yeah. Yeah, I feel like Tesla's gone like, except with the cyber truck. Like, like all the cars are kind of like very clearly like, okay, this is the same platform, the Model 3, the Model Y. Like,

Starting point is 01:03:42 there's a ton of shared parts and that's been what's allowed them to scale volume. You can change the color of the seats. Yeah, exactly. There's like two colors, three colors. Whereas a company like Mercedes that's been in business for so long, they have like everything from like a small sedan to the the the the AMG one which is probably hand-belt what what is what is the biggest like bottleneck to getting more information out of the heads of like the old guard like is the is it just bringing on a new system that they are forced to use or are there other kind of like pieces of data collection I'm thinking about like like you know get Hux Cursor, cursor for bio, the electronic note and the lab notebook, just this idea of like,

Starting point is 01:04:33 if you can have someone use voice notes in medical context, all of a sudden you're starting to get that data into something that can be parsed with AI or to software. And it feels like that particularly, if someone says, oh, today I realize that this tool needs to be lubricated a little bit more in order to get good yield, that's staying in their head. They're not saying it out loud. They're not writing it down anywhere. Is there a solution to that? Is that a real problem or is that just something that people say when they're marketing?

Starting point is 01:05:01 A very, very real problem. It's a very real problem. I'm not a huge fan of approaches that don't structure that information in a very useful way. I believe that context is king and structure is key. My manufacturing facility can't just be like a dune buggy going off the rails being really crazy. You need a manufacturing facility to be extremely fast, repeatable, you need to basically have a high-speed rail system as the manufacturing facility. And so in order to do that, you need to be able to take that tribal knowledge in what might

Starting point is 01:05:34 be like in the back of, you know, some dude who's in their 50s and about to retire, might be in back his head a little bit unstructured, but you need to be able to make sure that you're capturing that information in a really structured and intentional way. And so a lot of the way that we end up serving as a platform for that is allowing folks to like associate, you know, specific like standard notes and different pieces of context with specific components, so that's one way to do it. But I've seen a lot of really interesting approaches in other places, right? The key is not just the tooling though.

Starting point is 01:06:02 The key is the culture. And a lot of folks on the manufacturing side are actually like, unfortunately for the past like 15, 20 years, some Silicon Valley folks have been just like flying into some facility in Texas or Michigan and saying, you know what? Like here's this some gobbledygook sass, you know, it'll take your manual pen and paper process and it'll still be manual, but now it seems with the cloud like, whoa, crazy. Thanks, yes. So the problem is that a lot of folks in the manufacturing world,

Starting point is 01:06:31 they see a new tool coming in and they're like, oh, this is BS. This is another one of those. I've seen this before. Oh, super intelligence. Exactly. Exactly. And so what you end up having to do is build trust and love and affection from like the guys on the shop floor. We've been very, very fortunate to be able to do that.

Starting point is 01:06:51 We have really great relationships with the folks who are actually doing the work. And so if you were a company trying to change the way the West builds, you can't just go top-down, you know, go golfing with the C-O-L or the CEO and like force the top-down adoption. You need buy-in from the guys doing the work. Otherwise, they're not going to use the thing. It's going to sit on the shelf collecting dust. Yeah, and that's very common. I mean, that's like the, that actually is like the adoption pattern for like cursor. You know, it doesn't come as a, as an enterprise sale mandate.

Starting point is 01:07:18 It comes by just one developer picking it up and then it grows internally and you have an internal champion. Well, I'm very glad everything's going well. Congrats on the new round. So bullish on you. We will talk to you soon. You're the man. Showing off the guns for us. Thanks, man.

Starting point is 01:07:32 Yeah, can we get a quick, can we get a quick, there we go. I want, I want your take on those shirts that allow you to bench press more. Are you familiar with these shirts, the compression shirts? Yeah. Is that cheating? I think it's cheating. It's cheating. It's awful.

Starting point is 01:07:48 It's awful. Yeah, but what if it gets you comfortable and gets you to that next level? Yeah. What if you're not? ready to bench 315. This is the thing that gets you out of the, out of the valley of despair. If you're using a slingshot shirt for a three, if you're using a slingshot shirt for 315, you got other problems. Like that's crazy. That's crazy. Just take some creatine, get some protein in, take like a healthy helping of pre-workout and rip it. Like you'll,

Starting point is 01:08:14 you got it. You don't need a slingshot shirt. You heard it here first. Thank you for stopping by. We'll talk to you soon. We'll talk to you soon. Have a good one. You're the man. Cheers. If you're looking to design parts, obviously, go over to Dirac. If you're looking to design anything else, go to figma.com, make anything possible all in Figma. Figma lets you turn big ideas into real products, brainstorm design, and build with your team at figma.com. And we have our next guest in the studio. Looking sharp. How are you doing?

Starting point is 01:08:43 We caught up yesterday. He said he was going to come prepared, but you're blowing us away here. You look fantastic. Give us an introduction. Explain the company. Give us any news that you got to share with us. Of course. My name is Garkam. I'm one of the co-founders of FAL. FAL is a generated media platform for developers. We provide fast, ready to use APIs for image, video, and audio models.

Starting point is 01:09:11 And then application developers in enterprises like Shopify, Canva, Adobe, they use these APIs to build AI-enabled products in their own product. And then I do have some news as well. Some news. So two weeks ago, we announced our C-C announcement. Be raised $125 million. Boom. Hit it.

Starting point is 01:09:39 It's not announced until it's announced on TVBF. That's right. We just broke the news. I have other news as well. Okay. Great. Let's keep it rolling. What else you got for us?

Starting point is 01:09:50 That soundboard, Jerry. And this month... More news coming in. Okay, give it to us. 100 million run rates. No! No! We have 10 more days, but yet we still crossed it.

Starting point is 01:10:04 That's crazy. It's been an incredible summer for us. And the whole industry, to be honest. Congratulations. That is absolutely insane. Amazing. Amazing. What's the key to the high growth?

Starting point is 01:10:17 What marketing channels are working? Are you buying an incredible amount of steak dinners? Is there some bottom-up adoption? Is there a self-serve option? Some golf? Are you secretly brothers with a hyperscalor CEO or something? What's going on? How are you selling this thing?

Starting point is 01:10:32 Yeah, I would say all of the all of the above. You are brothers with Tim Cook. Interesting. Except that one. That's great. Yeah, we are taking enterprise sales really, really seriously. We work with some of the biggest enterprise. but also like our developer experience, the way to get started is so easy.

Starting point is 01:10:54 We are getting a ton of like indie developers. Levels, I.O., for example, is a big customer. Amazing. So we are getting a lot of enterprises and indie developers. And the developers, they go work at bigger companies and they bring file with them. So both of the sides of the go-to-market strategy is working. So what trends are you seeing on the on the cost side? I'm sure people are saying, oh, yeah, you're making this much money in revenue. What does the

Starting point is 01:11:24 gross margin look like? And the same time, we saw amazing news from Google today that they drop their inference cost by 33 actions. Yeah. And the other thing on the media side, with text-based prompting, you can use a non-frontier model and get a great result if you're just using it in sort of like a Google search function. Totally. I would consider last generation video generation to not be on brand for a lot of use cases. So we see you're absolutely right. Some people, they want to use the best news model and they're willing to pay whatever it takes for that.

Starting point is 01:12:00 But we make more money actually on like the cost effective models. People who want to use it for higher volume, but the model is good enough. So that's a very interesting sweet spot that we actually make more revenue. But you're right. For a certain type of customer, they're always looking for the best and the newest. Maybe they're trying something. Maybe they just want to get it out the door. So the cost is not a problem for that.

Starting point is 01:12:28 Are you seeing opportunities on distilling models for specific use cases? I could imagine like an image or video generation model that's just good at really, really good at logo animations or text or just product photography or just beverages. and then that being just cheaper to inference. Is that a crazy idea? Is there something there? No, I don't think so. I wouldn't say it's cheaper to inference,

Starting point is 01:12:53 but it's maybe better to inference. So for image models, fine-tuning is actually a really, really big use case. Many of people pay attention to it because I don't think it works very well for LLMs, but for image model for the past year, we've done really good work on fine-tuning research, and you can basically fine-tune on a product, and you now can generate better images of that product.

Starting point is 01:13:17 It's actually a really big use case for us. And same thing is going to happen for video. We are just getting open source video models that are fine-tunable. So a lot of companies are working on post-training strategies to create different camera angles, different styles, you know, different angles of a certain product or a person. So I expect a lot of developments on the video fine-tuning side going forward as well. What are you seeing out of China, what are the best image video,

Starting point is 01:13:52 audio models coming out of China on the open source side? Yeah, video hasn't really had a deep seek moment, have they? I wouldn't say so. Like there is the best open source model is video model is Chinese right now. It's, it's coming out of Alibaba. It just came out a couple weeks ago and people started using it right away. I, I would, wouldn't call it the deep seek moment. I don't think the deep stick moment for the whole industry hasn't happened yet. You know, we haven't really hit that infection point that video generation or image generation is mainstream. It's hidden inside products. If you go to Canva, Adobe, all these products, it's still not the main feature. It's like an additional thing. We still have some time

Starting point is 01:14:37 to hit fully mainstream. But yeah, we have great models coming out of China. And we have a great I mean, this is the classic story of enterprise software. Like there are open source databases, and there are still companies that build amazing businesses on top of them providing enterprise tooling and support and infrastructure and all the different pieces to actually make a product useful instead of saying, okay, yeah, let's go provision some servers to do this ourselves. Fascinating.

Starting point is 01:15:07 George, do you have another question right now? Not for now. I'm just blown away. You guys are cooking. Yeah, I do want to talk about, hybrid deals or hybrid models. Somebody had me demo an AI image generator that I had to take a picture of me and turn me into a professional bodybuilder.

Starting point is 01:15:27 It was the most remarkable thing because typically when you go to chat GPT and have that do that, it kind of gets the face a little bit wrong. But very clearly, and I could tell this from the grain pattern, what it had done is it had cut out my face and then only operated on the body. And so the face was a pixel-to-pixel perfect representation. And for a certain thing, oh, you just want to change the logo on the shirt. You don't want to change anything else about the shirt. It seemed like a good value.

Starting point is 01:15:54 Now, I was being gaslit by the founder who was like, no, we're not doing that. It's all in one-down work. And I was like, I don't care. I just want good images. It's cool. But where do you see the different, like, value-added, like maybe less sexy, less pure end-to-end AI, but value-creative opportunities in image and video-generated? I could imagine like a multi-layer diffusion model that has a specific layer just to add text on top of images.

Starting point is 01:16:22 So you're not trying to confuse those. I don't know if that's actually how these models work, but what do you see as valuable in terms of like merging multiple models to create a better end product? Like the way, you know, O3 Pro has a web browser, a Python shell, and then also the ability to search the web and pull stuff together and reason. Yeah, I mean, one of the reasons why, you know, our business has higher margins than some LLM inference providers is because of this fragmentation of different kinds of models, different kinds of use cases. People are trying to chain these models together and create workflows. Both image and video models, they haven't really generalized yet.

Starting point is 01:17:07 So you can't write a long prompt and expect, you know, the, the, you know, the, you know, the image. image and video to edit itself it's still a lot of model chaining and workflow generation so like the use case you just said like putting your face on something else it's like chaining couple models and we have a lot of that behavior on the platform the models are getting bigger and better so some of that is actually happening you know by the model itself but but still unlike the lams where it's like a single prompt and you expect it to you know write a book but also generate code and like generalized very well. It doesn't happen for image and video yet.

Starting point is 01:17:48 Yeah, I can imagine that there's tons of interesting enterprise, like features and harnesses on top of the models that will be extremely value creative. So seems like you're in a good business, but everyone already knows that from the revenue and the fundraising. So congrats on all the progress, Jordy and anything else? We'll have you back on again soon. We'd love to have you back.

Starting point is 01:18:07 Thank you. Thank you so much. Legend. Bye. Let me tell you about Julius, the AI. data analyst that works for you. Connect your data, ask questions in plain English, and get insights in seconds. No coding required. Sorry, Tyler. You're out of a job. I'm going to be using Julius. Try Julius for free. They're loved by over two million users and trusted by individuals at

Starting point is 01:18:31 Princeton. And you connect Google. Your Google Ads account to Julius now. Run some numbers there. Love that. Love that. Anyway, we have our next guest in the Restream Waiting Room. He's here now in the TBPN Ultradome. Welcome to the stream. How are you doing? I am doing well, Jody, and Joan. Thank you so much for having me here. Thanks. Good to have you. Thank you. Would you mind kicking us off with an introduction on yourself, your company, and any news you got for us? My name is Siddish. I'm the CEO of Tiny Fish. First of all, I'm very happy to be here.

Starting point is 01:19:00 The first time I got to know you about Soham Parique. By the way, that was a great get. Yeah. That was a great get. What a wild day on the internet. Absolutely. And how fast it's all gone too, though. I mean, it's all gone. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, people were, we never got the full post, Mortimer. We'll need to check in, but he said he was going exclusive. There's somebody named Soham Parique, exact same spelling that's been appearing on AI research paper. Really?

Starting point is 01:19:24 No. People are trying to figure out, is it the same guy? I saw that too, yeah. Yeah. I think DPPN needs to have an investigative arm. Yeah, I actually did talk to someone that was thinking about hiring him after the fact, and it seemed like it was not enough of a red flag, and they said they were going to give it. a shot and hope that he's based exclusive. Right, I thought he was going exclusive. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 01:19:45 And so as far as I know, he is still exclusive, but I haven't done any research recently. Anyway, guys, thank you so much. Tell me about the company. Well, you both have built something in the last 10 months, entrepreneurs, investors. We appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you. Tiny fish, we just announced our 47 million funding series. I was not ready for that. I was not ready for that. Absolutely. I needed a big number. I needed a big number warning. Absolutely huge. Congratulations. 47 million is like a seed round, right? Mango seed. It's a seed round for tiny fish these days.

Starting point is 01:20:21 Tiny fish, but congratulations. I'm sure you can do a lot with it. So what are you going to do with it? I think we are going to invent a category, build a category that makes sense and build a great company. That's basically it's prior to this, you know, I was at Thought Spot and Nutanics. We have done some large enterprise companies. Co-founders, they all came from meta and companies like large. We want to build a large company doing one thing, which is to make web browsing like humans too, but a superhuman scale,

Starting point is 01:20:52 for solving enterprise problems. We don't want to be a consumer company. I know you both have built companies. There are a lot of AI companies doing things in consumer space, browser agents and all of that. We want to do a massive scale of web browsing and turn the internet into a structured database for enterprise customers to analyze and act on. Do you want to sell this to other software companies

Starting point is 01:21:19 that are going to piece it together with other APIs to create maybe even more enterprise SaaS? Like how deep do we see yourself in the stack? Look, I think nowadays there is no difference between enterprise business and developers slash builders because every enterprise product in the AI world starts as a builder product, somebody trying it out. we 100% want to be the best way anyone to connect code to internet.

Starting point is 01:21:44 Because look, these models can solve math problems at international math Olympics level, but when it comes to browsing, it's a mess. Because browsing is so complex that our brains make it look easy. Like, think about going to a movie. The seed that you pick is a function of complex reasoning. If I'm going by myself, I can sit in front and read the movie. But if I'm far away, with my family, I want to make the right place, right fishing, you know, contiguous seats. These decisions we make without even thinking, not to mention the complexity

Starting point is 01:22:13 of the website itself, how the pictures are popping, how there's like a pop-up here. These things need to be solved really well. We do that. So enterprise customers who want to browse 60% of all time of knowledge work in enterprises on browsing. And we think we can automate that through what we are calling enterprise web agents. So we heard reports that some of the big labs were building RL environments with verified rewards, basically cloning DoorDash, creating clones of Amazon.com

Starting point is 01:22:43 so that they could train an agent on the full Amazon.com web app and then an agent would be able to check out for you. Are you doing something similar? What does data collection look like? What does training look like? What does differentiation look like in the world where these agents might need to be

Starting point is 01:23:02 RLed on a specific website to really get good results. This is why I love talking to you guys. You geeks ask the right question to geeks. There are two models when it comes to these. One is synthetic websites like web arenas and others have built this. The other is paying money to say, let us go learn door dash workflows. Both are good, but both have downsides because both really create significant challenges with respect to scale when they come out of that environment. What we are doing is something very doing. a proprietary architecture that we have built, that freezes and takes that snapshot of a website in a way that becomes, that exhaust feeds ourselves in a very scalable way.

Starting point is 01:23:46 So yes, it is synthetic data that we are generating, but it is out of actual web. And more importantly, most of our use cases, we launched our company with a use case with Google Hotel as a customer. DoorDash is a customer. Great, great. I try to give this advice to early stage founders. If you're going to get a customer early, just get Google. Start with a Mag 7.

Starting point is 01:24:07 Start with a Mag 7. Why not? Why not, right? They built this AI technology. I mean, it all started with all you need is attention, right? So these customers are giving us access. There's a customer who has 22 million web skews in the product. There's another customer, the 40,000 sub-shops as part of them, class pass.

Starting point is 01:24:28 We announced them, right? So these sort of things, while we are solving for them, is giving us. a lot of data and that exhaust is mined by our products for annotation and creating labeling that makes RR. The second thing I will tell you, though, models are good at a lot of things, but they usually perform really well when the goal is straight and the reinforcement can be built on something where the context doesn't change. Web is exactly the opposite. Everything is context that is constantly changing. The goals are changing, the websites are changing, and the context is changing. So what we have done is we use reinforced learning and models,

Starting point is 01:25:03 for understanding and like sort of see what the heck the we are trying to do here, then we separate that and execute that code in CPU at massive scale. And then we use Alpha Evorb a version of that to make the code better. So separating exploration and execution is another fundamental thing that we've invented that is going to make this browser agents, you know, perplexity, comet and operator and others. That is like forcing and feeding us,

Starting point is 01:25:28 but this is where the execution framework. So that's an infrastructure problem. Think about the amount of browsers we have to spin up, the fingerprinting, the anti-bot, all of that infrastructure need to be solved. Interesting. How do you think the competitive landscape will evolve? Amazon's launching a bunch of stuff. I'm sure all the clouds have something that looks like a browser agent on the shelf somewhere. but we've seen, you know, Silicon Valley has, you know, probably hundreds of stories about

Starting point is 01:26:03 companies that have built things that have been competitive with the big hyperscalers and been wildly successful. But what's your specific plan? You know, there is a quote that often attributed to chestipolar marine that we are surrounded from the north, southeast, but I better watch out. This is one of those states where it is so amazing because there are three. three groups of companies that we will be competing with from a tech space. I mean, obviously there is share shifting of dollars. One are the browser agents who are doing one thing like Jodi going to go on a vacation, 20 minutes

Starting point is 01:26:37 and book a hotel for you. We want to sell to Expedia and not to Jodi because Expedia now want to simulate 100,000 Jody transaction from 50 states or 50 countries. How do we do that? So browser agents to a certain extent will be trying to expand to that space. I think we want to compete. The other is the infrastructure. So the browser base and others who have been building things, we want to build something

Starting point is 01:26:59 enterprise grade with the surveillance, the governance, the control. So that's the second. Third is going to be another interesting area where the code gen and the developers who build us who just want to connect their code to Internet so it can do amazing things. There again, there are parallel. You guys interviewed Parag. I do think that we will compete at them some level, not because today we compete, but all of these will converge because there will be a few.

Starting point is 01:27:25 massive companies built on how browser access, how internet can be turned into a structure database. So exciting time. We've raised enough only because we want to make sure that we build it in a way that is where we can control our destiny. I have a lot of respect for all of these companies. But to me, you know, if you're not surrounded by competitors, you're not in the right place. Yep, you're not going after a big prize. Well, congratulations. Fantastic answer. Great to meet you. out there. Have a good rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon.

Starting point is 01:27:56 I hope so. This was such a short conversation I enjoyed. I'll keep watching. Thank you so much. We'll talk to you soon. Bye. Let me tell you about Adio. Customer Relationship Magic. Adio is the AI Native CRM that builds scales and grows your company to the next level. We have our next guest

Starting point is 01:28:12 already in the Restream waiting room. We'll bring her in now. How are you? Welcome. Hi. Nice to be here. Great to me, Julie. What's happening? Great to be here. Would you mind kicking us off

Starting point is 01:28:24 with a little bit of an introduction on yourself, your company, and maybe some of your background as well? Sure. So I am one of the founders of Sundial. We are trying to build the cursor for data analysis. So we're trying to automate

Starting point is 01:28:37 a lot of what data scientists will do so that we can help companies make better decisions with data. We work with great companies like Open AI, Character, Captions. Before that, I led design, and research for the Facebook product.

Starting point is 01:28:54 I grew up at Betta back then. It's called Facebook. Could you explain for the audience what Facebook is? They've been living under a data center? No, I'm kidding. Sorry. So, you know, if you guys become friends

Starting point is 01:29:06 and your relationship gets to a certain level and you want to let the world know, can... Amazing. Broadcast it online. Amazing. Well, I think it feels like the absolute perfect background

Starting point is 01:29:19 to build sundial, because when I think people think about optimizing digital products and making decisions with massive amounts of data, people think meta and they think Facebook. Yeah, yeah, totally. I mean, you say that because you probably know more than most people, but I do think what makes meta so good is that it was so freaking operationally rigorous. It was so good at actually capturing and modeling what made it a great business and being like, you know, just so on top of every little thing

Starting point is 01:29:52 so that we could optimize, iterate, experiment, test, and eventually, you know, get to that scale. And did you guys, I imagine, had to rely on a bunch of internal tooling that you built in order to do that that was proprietary? Or what did that look like? Absolutely. Yeah, everything was just homegrown. Because, like, actually, the whole concept, I would say that meta probably introduces this idea of growth.

Starting point is 01:30:13 I mean, now everybody got growth teams. But back then, that was like a new thing. And it was only created with people like Tramath and Alex Schultz and Naomi because Facebook was growing like crazy and then one day growth kind of stalled. And I think that happens to every successful company right in the beginning. You're like we're great. Our intuition is on. We're solid. Like everything hits.

Starting point is 01:30:37 And then one day it stops hitting. And then everyone's like, oh my God, what happened? And there's a lot of questions. You know, board members are calling. And then it becomes like, well, we have to figure it out. And the only way you can do that is with good observability. Yeah, can you take us through like a concrete example of like one of the, like a case study of like design at meta and, and how like some of the decision making

Starting point is 01:31:01 linked to some of the data analysis you did? Like, do you have anything that you can share? I know it's been a while, but some of the stuff's probably private, but some of it you can probably share. Yeah. I'm trying to figure out what's an example I can pull out. Well, I will say that like a lot of the process. So I think we kind of segmented.

Starting point is 01:31:17 things into two worlds. The first is like, look, in order to build something new, you do need that spark of inspiration and it usually comes from intuition. Like you need to kind of have like a vision. And so often that would be like the spark of the idea. But then as soon as you realize that, you have like a hypothesis, you know, like I think what people want is, you know, better ways. Like if we give people more custom ways of sharing on Facebook, for example, they will share more. That's an example of like a particular hypothesis that somebody would have and usually that comes with like an idea you're like if I build you know a really awesome text editor or I give them a way to record video or you know I make it super easy to like pull in a quote right

Starting point is 01:31:59 then people will go and share more but the thing that you then need to do is to figure out well how quickly can you test whether that hypothesis is true like what's the what's the kind of smallest thing that you can build that gives you either more or less assurance that this thing is is the thing to bet on. And so we would try and figure out what's like the smallest framing of that experiment. And then if it seems like, you know, okay, it's inclusive or we actually think it might be promising, then you just double down, right? Then you like add more, you know, you keep building.

Starting point is 01:32:31 And I think that that's been like, you know, very, this is like a super early example. But I think like a hackathon project, like video was like a hackathon project that somebody did. And then very early on like video came out after the hackathon. on and it's like just very quickly you can see what what will you know like that that people are actually using in fact maybe a better example that I'm thinking about it is actually feed so feed is one of those very early examples where people hated it so news feed came out before that the way that people went to profiles is like you know I would go to your profile john I'd go to your profile jordi I'd see if anything changed but there was no system that automatically told me if you updated something

Starting point is 01:33:13 And so we launched feed, this was like back in 2006. And there were like huge protests. In fact, like a million people within a week joined this Facebook group called I FN hate Facebook News Feed because people thought it was like it was creepy. It was like, you know, there's too much surveillance. But the reason I think Mark and the team like we kept on it is the fact that like through the numbers, like through the data, you could see that people are spending a lot of time on newsfeed. And in fact, the reason they knew to join this group, I f-n't hate newsfeed is because of newsfeed.

Starting point is 01:33:48 Like it was like, you know, so it just was like very obvious to us that this was working despite what people are saying about it. Yeah. Can you talk about preference falsification more broadly? Was that like a hard one lesson that carried through? It feels like meta has really like absorbed that lesson and it continues to inform the company culture. Have you carried that idea of preference falsification forward into your career? How do you think about that disconnect between what people say and then what they actually do? I think it just like you have to gather the data. You just have to look at, you know, like you can say, okay, look, this is what I see. I see like data.

Starting point is 01:34:28 Their data is that people tell us they don't like it or they tell us they're feeling one way or another. So I think about qualitative feedback as data, customer surveys are, you know, or data. Like anything is data, but also behavior. Like what do people actually do? What do they click on? Where are they spending their time and attention? And the more we can have all of that in one place, the better, like a better, more realistic and accurate view of reality we have.

Starting point is 01:34:53 When should a company sign up for sundial? Because I think there's it, there's, it's almost a meme in Silicon Valley. If you launch a product early and you're obsessing maybe too much over the data, you could, you could go, end up actually going down the wrong. path and there's points in which maybe you disagree with this where the actual just like founders intuition is what's going to get you to that sort of take off with the product. But what's your read? I agree with that. I do think that it's there's such a thing as like obsessing too early.

Starting point is 01:35:25 Like when you don't have product market fit, you'll probably have to take bigger swings. You're probably not in the business of trying to optimize. But I think if you feel like you have product market fit, you're clearly scaling your team. Like you're like, okay, I probably need a growth person. I probably need a data. Like the reason you want to grow through data persons, you want to perform more fuel on the fire. Like you want to understand what works and what doesn't.

Starting point is 01:35:47 And so what all of these roles are trying to do is start a series of experimentation and just like, again, get to better visibility, right? Better observability for it. Like what we all want to do is just build a mental model. Like this is how the business works. And if you tweak this thing, more money goes up. And we click this more users, right?

Starting point is 01:36:05 We want to build a very real and, influential model and that is what like all of that work of trying to build and and and do analysis is there to help us do. Did you overlap with Laura Dana at Meta? Can you tell me a little bit of her? Yeah. She was in the Wall Street Journal earlier this week. What what what what's made her, you know, what's the secret to her impact? So Laura Dada joined as a design lead and I think she took over a messenger, so Facebook messenger. And I think the team was pretty small then, maybe about eight designers.

Starting point is 01:36:41 And she helped scale that up to like 200 designers. And eventually, she actually become the product group lead. So the product group lead is kind of like the GM role. And in fact, there's not that many examples of design leaders who become GMs. You know, like engineers can become GMs. I think Adam Osseri, head of Instagram is one. I think Loredana is probably the other that I can recall. So she ended up actually leading all of Bessinger.

Starting point is 01:37:06 I think recently she went to go work on AI and I just saw the news that she is joining as Figma's new chief design officer, which is fantastic news. I absolutely adore Laura Donna. I think she is fabulous. Yeah, we'll have to get her on the show. That would be, it'd be fun to dig into. Anyway, Jordy, anything else? I have a bunch more questions, but I don't think we have time. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for having to be back on. And yeah, congrats on all the progress so far. This is fantastic. We'll talk to you soon. All right. Talk to you guys soon. Bye. Bye. Cheers. Gabe in the chat says, whoa, she has a head. on how can I long this company. Totally agree. That's great. Let me tell you about Numeral HQ,

Starting point is 01:37:43 sales tax on autopilot, spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. You can get started for free. Benchmark Series A. Let's go. Let's go. Our next guest is in the stream waiting room. We will bring them into the PBPN Ultrodome. Jacob, welcome to the show. Finally. We've been waiting for this moment. It took us, Eric long. pretty good. How are you guys? We're doing great. Give us the breakdown. What did you launch today? CoR three applications are live.

Starting point is 01:38:17 Boom. Hit it. The best part here is the video. I assume you guys may have watched it, but it's, I think, the best gundo hype video. Wait, can we pull it up? That's a tall order. Can we pull it up? Yeah, production team. Ben, can you pull up the latest Discipulous Ventures post? Maybe we can put it in the chat. Can you send it to them?

Starting point is 01:38:40 I'm trying to find it right now. I'm trying to find it right now. Throw it in the chat. We will pull this up. We might need to watch this after you hop off. But give us the update on the previous cohorts. Who's in those? What companies are you in?

Starting point is 01:38:53 What's the general thesis? What's the why now for this particular organization? Yeah. Yeah. So cohort one was in Brainmaker and Valor at the time. They were sharing it. They were both pre-seed stage. I think it was still very much like, is this going to work or it's just not going to work?

Starting point is 01:39:12 I think now we're at the point we're like, okay, something's working here really well. And I think the big kind of thesis and point here is like we want to be like that entry point to what's going on in El Sigando. The culture is very attractive to mostly young people want to build companies that really do matter a lot for the country. It's kind of been pushed away from other ecosystems that don't really care about that. And then too practically, like if you want to build a hardware or aerospace defense, you should be in El Sikendo. So SpaceX started down the street for where I'm based. And the best talent, the supply chain, the whole supply chain, and a lot of the customers are in El Sondo area. So it's like if you want to build an El Sondo, if you're building an aerospace defense and hardware and want to be part of the ecosystem, we want to be that way to do that.

Starting point is 01:39:51 Augusta said earlier Rockefeller built El Sigundo. I never knew that. What's the lore there? The oil company. Yeah. It's Chevron. Like there is a massive oil and gas extraction. an oil refinery there when you're in El Sagania.

Starting point is 01:40:07 The whole town was built out service. Yeah, you can tell the story. I'll give the rundown. It means the second. It means the second Chevron Refinery in the state of California. So that's the reason why. So it's very cool. But on the company,

Starting point is 01:40:21 we got the video if you guys want it. Yeah, let's play the video. We're going to switch over to the video. This is the fall cohort applications are live now. Yeah, hit the soundboard. Why not just add more? layer on top. Are we going to get taken down for this? Is this an open source song, hopefully? We'll see. This is good.

Starting point is 01:40:44 It is necessary to be a bit better. That every young being in the United States It's a lot of backs that are adults, I can't offer them. Just by their shoulders. It's a cool presentation. Holy Baste. Good sound edit.

Starting point is 01:41:17 Good sound editing. There's Isaiah. There's Augustus. We got cameos on cameos. There we go. With the... Yes. We've done.

Starting point is 01:41:40 We're definitely getting demonetized. Thank you for demonetizing us. It was worth it. It was worth it. Take me through the economics. So how much money is, so how much money is, do you raise for each cohort? How much money are you putting in? What's the deal structure? Like, how does, what do the, what do the companies actually get out of going through the cohort?

Starting point is 01:42:03 Yeah, yeah. So I guess just top big picture, fund one, end up being right around the $9 million mark. We're basically doing five cohorts out of this. So three next year, one end of year in October. The basic kind of structure, each cohort, we do 10 to 12 founders. So a 100 paycheck. per company. It's sizable. Around 1.2 mil for cohort, and then that'll go across the rest. A little bit for follow-on for kind of pro rata. That's awesome.

Starting point is 01:42:31 But yeah, so the kind of standard deal. Coord itself is like, main thing again, you want to be an else to go to weird way to do that. You have all the big names people. Everybody knows. Like,

Starting point is 01:42:38 we can give you access to them just like that. We think that's very valuable early on. Because it become like a, I guess, a consensus bet in a way. Just to have those behind you is very helpful. And then we have a demo day. We bring out like 120.

Starting point is 01:42:47 I think we had 120 partners last time from top firms. Like, just like that, access to all of them. So that's kind of the breakdown. We have a house. It's very fun. We have a chef, gym, everything you need to build a amazing. Are you, are you officially taking over from Augustus's job as also going to a tour guide? Because every single, there was like a solid six-month period where every single VC and founder would hit up Augustus and be like, okay, time for the tour, let me go around. He doesn't have time for that. I don't think he has time for it anymore.

Starting point is 01:43:16 He's on the road a lot. Yeah. Yeah, it's funny. Yeah, I'm getting, I have too many tabs. from BC saying, hey, I want to see else come me around. So I think I've taken it. I think it's more of a appropriate job for me than him. But one actually cool. Cool. Cool. Here's the wire details and then I'll take you on the tour.

Starting point is 01:43:32 Exactly. Exactly. But also on that point, we had the most recent bonfire, which couple of you guys were at last week last Friday. Oh, Tyler. Because it's like, okay, you're taking this over. And we had like, I think close to 200 people come out, which is pretty awesome, which was like, I think a record, hopefully for one of the bonfires.

Starting point is 01:43:48 Wow. A venture capital firm absorbing an iconic. networking series. It's interesting. I'll be like completely honest when I saw DeSipolis launch. I wasn't I like I've backed a bunch of you know

Starting point is 01:44:07 I backed Rainmaker. I've backed Shinkay a bunch of the gundo companies but it didn't immediately click for me. But hearing you talking about it, it's just like and obviously we're super close with Gary and the whole YC team and they've backed a bunch of hard tech companies. So my immediate thought was like, do we need something like this?

Starting point is 01:44:25 Do we need a new institution? And hearing you talk about it and seeing, you know, the progress from the port coast so far, it just makes a ton of sense to have like an institution in El Segundo because we can't just rely on the city to give tour guides to people that want to set up company. I mean, a couple I went and did the tour of El Segundo. You created a couple. You helped facilitate the mean.

Starting point is 01:44:46 There were a bunch of folks that were highlighting it. And the energy was very similar to like, you know, Mountain View in 2009 or 2012, in my opinion. Like, it had that, like, University Ave feel. Like, it's sort of, it's just boring enough. Like, you're in L.A., but it's not, like, this hot town that you're going to get distracted by. Like, it's really just, like, a lot of cool companies building. And then you walk across the street, there's another founder. They have some tool.

Starting point is 01:45:17 Like, it actually makes sense to have people sharing stuff and moving stuff around. Yeah, it's a very, very cool community. It makes a ton of sense. Well, congratulations on the launch of the new application window. I haven't run this by John, but hopefully he agrees. We'll sponsor the next bonfire. Let's do it. Count of it. Let's go.

Starting point is 01:45:34 Can't wait. Come to the purple orchard as well afterwards. I've been to the purple orchard. It's a lot of fun. It's a good spot. Awesome. They do the dragon bowls there that you drink out of. Dragon bowls?

Starting point is 01:45:44 Dragon bowls? They light them on fire. Never been big in. They light them on fire. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway. Well, congrats, Jacob.

Starting point is 01:45:50 Thanks so much for hopping on. We will talk to you soon. Have a great rest of your day. Awesome. Thank you guys. In the meantime, let me tell you about linear. Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products. Meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects, and product

Starting point is 01:46:03 roadmaps. Cursor. Head over to runway. Perplexity. Retool. Mercury. Wake us ramp. They all use it.

Starting point is 01:46:11 We have another three hours of content to go through. I like this post from growing Daniel. The opposite of FOMO is when you skip an event. And then everyone who went says it sucked. Vindication of missing out. And Tyler Cohen says, Vomo. Vomo.

Starting point is 01:46:28 I think Vomo is a good one. Vindication. It's simply the best. It is the best. It is the best. It is the best. I'm trying to think of the last time I had Vomo. I don't want to put anyone in blast,

Starting point is 01:46:38 but I have certainly said no to things. Well, let's keep going through the timeline. John, can you text Gabe? Yes. And see if he is still coming on. He confirmed one. moved him up 10 minutes. We might need to do some timeline. I'm happy to hang out. Yeah, we can hang out. So Sophie, NetCap Girl, says, is showing a post saying, there must be some

Starting point is 01:47:02 mistake. I thought I'd be working on digital super intelligence. And it is an angry, a man in military uniform saying, build the goon bot. And so there's a lot of that going on right now. Luke Lacher has another post in response to the UK independent space agency is entirely scrapped to cut costs and we have Matthew McConaughey here saying we used to look up at the sky and wonder at our place in the stars now we look down and worry about our place in the dirt KPMG wrote a hundred page prompt to build a gentic tax bought. It produces advice in a single day instead of two weeks without job losses. And ex-Nihilio says 100-page prompt is crazy. You ever ripped a hundred page prompt, John?

Starting point is 01:47:57 I've gotten close. I've used a lot of those like repurpose prompts that people have online. Oh, this is the super prompt. Never, never got in the habit of like daily driving one of those. Dwar Kesheh Patel had a good prompt in Gemini that would take a transcript and clean it up. and it gave a really, like, the 100 pages is really like 100 pages of examples. Basically, like, here's what a messy transcript looks like out of a, out of just like a transcription service where the speakers aren't labeled and there aren't necessarily paragraph breaks. You give it a ton of extra, you give it a ton of extra context, a ton of extra examples.

Starting point is 01:48:37 And then that makes it perform a lot better because it knows, it understands the job. Yeah. But, yeah, 100 page promise. is pretty wild. So Kafka Esquire says, just one more model, bro. Just one more funding round, bro. Please. And this post from Walter Bloomberg, esteemed journalist. Where did this come from? So this was from some interview. Okay. And to be clear, yeah, taken out of context. The headline was opening ICO Sam Alton concedes. GPD-5 was a misfire bets on GPD-6. And this has been going pretty viral. People are poking a little fun. I think, I think, in some,

Starting point is 01:49:13 some ways, you know? Yeah. The Death Star kind of set them up for this. Doublebird capital says just one more trillion, bro, honestly, I swear. I mean, my take on this is that like the numbered releases should just go. When Facebook introduced the feed, they stopped saying we're changing things. It's a good take, because when you say people, it's a good take, sir. Yeah. When you say, when you tell everyone, we're changing everything, people are like, I don't like change. But if instead you just say like, yeah, like every day, Facebook gets a slightly different update and the algorithm is slightly different. And then some days people are like, ah, the alga is not really for me right now. And then they complain enough. And then you get the feedback and then they tweak and they

Starting point is 01:49:53 make it better and better and better. Like, I feel like we should just be in the era of GPT is what powers chat.com. And it's constantly getting better. And stop focusing on the size of the pre-training bubble. Stop focusing on the parameters if you're a consumer. Stop focusing on the numbers. focusing on your sleep number, your sleep score, go to 8Sleep.com. Exceptional sleep, without exception, fall asleep faster, sleep deeper, wake up energized. You can discover Pod 5 at 8Sleep.com. And I believe we have our next guest, Gabe, from Mischief, how you doing, Gabe? There he is.

Starting point is 01:50:29 Welcome to the stream. What's going on? You are live at the TBPN Ultradome. What's new with you? How you do it? I think everyone knows you. Maybe just launch into the announcement this week about. out the private military corporation that you're starting.

Starting point is 01:50:47 Oh, you saw the Twitter. I didn't think anybody looked at that. Interesting. Oh, everyone saw that. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, sure. Sure. What do we do this week?

Starting point is 01:50:55 Well, we launched an agency called Applied Mischief. Yep. The agency, honestly, like to rewind, where does that even come from? And a lot of people don't actually understand this about mischief because probably what you see is like, videos of people wearing boots or like press headlines or whatever. But the way we're actually organized is we are essentially a holding company of different creative enterprises based on categories.

Starting point is 01:51:24 So there's like a handbag division. There's a footwear division. There's a fine art division. There are other divisions I can't really talk about yet, but with like more bigger permanent structures. Well, you talked about a division you can't talk about. So I hit the... Oh, nice, nice.

Starting point is 01:51:44 So we've been operating like that for a second now. And to make that efficient, there's been an internal back office that's like normal stuff, right? Like finance, legal, manufacturing, customer support, but also like design and marketing. And that's a group that not only does design, but also applies that sort of like mischief magic, like viral juice or whatever. So the thinking here was we might as well. open up that to external clients, it can become a profit center, which is great. But the other part is like maybe it can make our world a little bit bigger too because we're hungry for more formats. We've made so much stuff over the last like six years.

Starting point is 01:52:25 What have we not touched yet? And like maybe we won't get sued this time around. Like maybe there's just stuff that we can do that's like, cool, we can. Well, it's it's there. What seems obviously exciting to me is partnering with with global companies. I mean, sure, I'm sure you'll partner with startups and scale-ups and things like that, but what gets exciting at a certain point has to be scale. There's so much money.

Starting point is 01:52:49 Instead of selling like a thousand of this thing, can we figure out, can we partner with a company and sell? It's like, that's just not, there's something special about that, about just like giving it. It's almost like patronage in some ways, it's marketing, but it's just like, it's still art and it's cool and it's

Starting point is 01:53:05 like unbridled. No, totally. Totally, right? Like the way that we look these is like it's not a service that we're providing necessarily like there are brands and entities and culture that we perceive as cultural material the same way artists looks at their material is like paint or sculpture or marble or whatever like for us Coca-Cola is material give us that and we'll make something new with it instead of fabricating a marketing story to sell more units that people through now anyways right the opportunity is like there's just so much cultural material being left on the table to make new things with.

Starting point is 01:53:42 So talk to me about inbound versus outbound. I feel like in that vein of like there's cultural material, if you come up with just like, I have a great idea. It would only work for this particular brand because the nature of the idea is tied deeply to the lore of that brand. They're never going to think about this. But I need to, I can, the only value I can get out of this is selling it to them. Are you going outbound and pitching,

Starting point is 01:54:08 big companies and saying, I have the idea for you? Or is it more like there is an actual process where you can sit down and do ideation? I'm doing outbound right now. This is a message for Gabe Newell from Valve. We want to design your submarine. That's go. I love that. That would be an amazing project. That's that's the outbound. That's what I want to do. Or extraterrestrial space research organizations. We want to design it that you're putting into space. I love it. We We were, look, we were fast companies number one design in the world in 2023. People don't think about that because they think about viral. But if you actually get like what we do, it is unparalleled.

Starting point is 01:54:48 So let us, let's like put some stuff. We got a, we got a space play for you with a company that we're very close with. Oh, yeah. I won't say anymore. Okay. Yeah, well, we'll talk after the stream. I have a bunch of, I have a bunch of questions. One, quickly on the business model of the new agency, is there a world where you would, you

Starting point is 01:55:06 would, you know, the standard agency model would be like, hey, let's do this project and we'll charge you like a million bucks or a couple million bucks. But there's some scenarios where you could actually, I imagine if it was a one-off more like drop style, you could take a percentage of the sales even. Is that something you would ever explore to get to really bet on yourselves and say like, hey, we think we could sell like a $10 million of this and we'll only price based on success? Is that something you would consider doing? It's totally, on the table and it's not that's not even uncommon from like the collaboration route. Like some of the collaborations that we've done in the past have been that kind of model where

Starting point is 01:55:44 it's like you make a bunch of product together. We both invest on our own ends and then you split the cut afterwards. I think what's more interesting though is because of mischief's position as like this artistic entity like in a way like we have a personality, we have an audience. And so we're actually like building a pipeline of joint ventures. Yeah. With bigger, it's where it's like, yeah, that's what I was getting. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:56:09 It's not even about 10,000 units. We're talking about millions of units. Yeah, over forever, basically. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, like I want the, I want a mischief themed line of kids' toys, right? Like, I would happily buy those. I would buy a bunch of those, right? And so that's like, if you partner with the right company, that should be in the, you know,

Starting point is 01:56:30 my personal lifetime value would be in the hundreds of dollars. And I would even pay a premium. Yeah. Because I know it's you guys behind. it. Another question I have, you know, I've, I've leveraged the drops kind of model to do marketing. I was inspired by you guys to do marketing for my last company party round. And something that I've noticed recently, a lot of companies in tech say they want to do drops. And it's because they're inspired by mischief. And they just see like, drops get attention. I want attention.

Starting point is 01:57:01 One drop, please. One drop, please. One drop, please. The usual, sir. Sign me up. The thing I usually push back on, and the thing I'm curious to get your opinion on, is like I think when companies think they want to do drops, what they really want to do is true advertising, and they don't even know the difference. And so like where's that line for you and how often would you talk to a company? And it's like what you really want is to do advertising. Yeah, just like a consistent message delivered via every channel forever.

Starting point is 01:57:31 Might be the right thing for you right now. Not even forever or like for a few months or a quarter. Yeah. I would take it even further. And it's it's like that is the final goal, which is like get a message out into the people, get them talking, whatever. But like the focus on the drop is is misplaced. Drop is just a delivery mechanism for something new. What these guys are actually looking for, like what they actually want at the end of the day is how do you break through the noise? And right now you can either just make more content, which on a. Honestly, the ROI I think is going down on that. There's too much content and not enough demand. Sorry, that's just how it is. But the opportunity is you can make new things that fit within your brand parameters, that use your brand as cultural material that are actually interesting, that are tactile,

Starting point is 01:58:24 that have a story to them. And if they happen to be ephemeral, then it's a drop. But don't get hung up on the drop. Just make something interesting. Are our ideas valuable? and if you had to, you know, what kind of think about like a, making something new, how much is it, is it the idea versus the execution in your view? Also, yeah, do you hire idea guys and then like operational, excellent people?

Starting point is 01:58:51 And they're like a dividing line? Yeah, and to me, John and I will sit down with companies that we're friends with and will generate like 20 ideas. It ends up being super frustrating because you're like, we're, like, we're, get we're feeding you this like incredible idea it doesn't even cost a lot to do and if you do it right like it could be like a million dollars of like you know brand value however you want to measure that but it it feels like you can give people these these things that in your hands they might be million dollar ideas but but poorly executed they're a negative value totally i think it's like

Starting point is 01:59:28 a like squeezing a balloon on two ends like there's the conceptual power and then there's the execution. There are things where like the concept is really high and the execution doesn't have to be crazy. You don't need a huge budget. It's just a good idea and it's going to work. What you typically see a lot of brands do is they're afraid of good ideas because good ideas have not been done by definition. So they lean more on the execution and you see like large budgets and like huge bloated teams and production. So it's sort of like now if you can dial in both, that's the match. But that's really hard to do because more money, more risk, you want to de-risk on the concept side. John, to your question, I don't have an idea of people. Everyone here is an idea person. We did,

Starting point is 02:00:15 I'll give you an example. A couple of years ago, we made handbags, right? They're very expensive. The smaller they get, the more expensive they become. So we made a microscopic handbag that sold an auction for $63,000 dollars at Paris Fashion Week at Burrell's whatever coronation of Louis Vuitton. that idea came from a summer intern. Anyone here can have an idea, right? The lawyer, our general counsel joins brainstorms, our ops lead wins brainstorms. Because being creative doesn't mean you have good ideas.

Starting point is 02:00:45 Being creative just means you're human. You have insights and you have reactions to things that are going around you. That's it. And then also like being creative means you're not afraid to like look stupid. And I think that's like a big defining trade here because anybody can look stupid here, including myself. What have you ever seen highly complex ideas work well as marketing advertising stunts? This is something that we end up talking with.

Starting point is 02:01:16 I think David Ogilvy said like simple ideas are powerful ideas. That's certainly something I've seen in mischief's work throughout your entire career. But is there some sort of contrarian or nuance to that concept? I think there could be the line that we use here. is a good idea should slap in one sentence and then slap even harder in three. And that just means there are layers, right? Like you appreciate it for the headline, but if you like really dig into it, you're like, wait up, is this thing making fun of me?

Starting point is 02:01:48 And do I still like it? And am I going to buy it? And if I buy it, am I a chump or am I a patron of the arts, right? It's like the layers are good. The ambiguity is good. But at the end of the day, like, from a... like from a marketing perspective, just being practical right now, like people's attention spans are so low. And honestly, like, people are just, we're all, like, very distracted. So you don't

Starting point is 02:02:14 have a lot of window to like nail it. So you do got to have that one lighter, like, pretty dialed in. How, uh, how dialed in is your crystal ball when it comes to releasing new things on the internet? Like, do you have a, do you feel like you usually have like a pretty accurate sense of? of how much attention something will get? Do you get surprised? Or do you still get surprised often? Totally still get surprised. Like you always get surprised.

Starting point is 02:02:40 I think it's easy for us to fall in a comfort zone where we're like, oh yeah, like this will work. Because what that ends up doing is you start coming up with ideas based on a framework of what has worked. We actually put in a lot of effort to come up with formats and mechanisms that don't really fit into our example. framework that we're like, oh, I don't know if this is going to work.

Starting point is 02:03:05 And is this offensive? I don't know. Are people going to buy slices of this giant foam baby that we're cutting up in Brooklyn? I don't know. They did. But no, you know, like. Is there a project that you think is like criminally underrated? People are obviously familiar with the boots.

Starting point is 02:03:24 They're familiar with the shoes and the footwear stuff and some of the other projects. but what's your example of a project? You're like, ah, that's still like one of my favorites. Good question. And the reason it didn't really get seen as much is because, to be honest, we were a little bit scared. Okay. And so, you know, buried it in an art show that we did. But are you guys familiar with the paradox of the ship of Theseus?

Starting point is 02:03:50 Yes, but explain it for the listener. Totally. So it's like, it's this old paradox where I imagine you have this like large wooden ship. and every day over seven years you're coming up with a new piece of wood identical to a piece of wood on the ship and you are swapping it out. The question is, after seven years, is it the same ship or is it a different ship? We found that a very interesting question, and so we decided to apply that in our own way to a sink located in the American wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Starting point is 02:04:25 As one does. as one does. And so we found the sink. We did recon. Not me. I'm not, it wasn't me personally with somebody here. But we found,

Starting point is 02:04:38 we tracked down the serial numbers, the parts ordered exact like replica, we ordered the exact same parts, built it here, tied off the dimensions of the bathroom here so that we could practice swapping things out. And then over many months, we would walk into the Met and do a quick swap and leave.

Starting point is 02:05:02 Then the next day, do it again and do it again, bolt by bolt, screw by screw. Just an art enthusiast. I just like art and I go to the bathroom. How did you get a big piece through? Isn't there like one piece? So that we decided to leave. Okay.

Starting point is 02:05:18 That we did not swap out. Although we had a plan. We fabricated a wheelchair that could have hit it in the I'm telling you, we got a little bit, we were honestly scared. You got a little carried away. We still did it. We got everything else. And so yeah, they have our sink and we have their sink.

Starting point is 02:05:40 And ours is now part of like our art gallery. That's amazing. Although I believe they figured it out and they've replaced it. Because as soon as we announced the art show, even though the sink was sort of like hidden in all the other pieces. People definitely found out and there was a line in the Met for that bathroom. They should have sectioned it off, turned it into an installation. If any of your viewers are on the board of the Met, the coolest thing you could do right now is acquire that sync from us and put it back. Let's make it happen.

Starting point is 02:06:17 Let's make it happen, Army. How many millions of dollars do you think you've left on the table by not doing crypto projects? It's a painful question. Is it like, it has to be like a hundred million? Yeah, probably. Honestly, probably. Probably. And is there, is there, like, there, I'm sure at some point there will actually be a way to do this.

Starting point is 02:06:47 Like there has to be something that makes sense. Like we did something back in the day with Party Round where we did, it was called Helpful VCs, where we made Cryptopunks for every VC. And then we put them on a website. and we said, you have four hours to retweet these. Otherwise, we're going to auction them off. And it was for, like, charity, right? We weren't, like, trying to make money. And that was, like, one of the ways that we broke through.

Starting point is 02:07:07 And, like, shortly after... I think there might be something to do with crypto and, like, stable coins where there's not as much gambling involved, but there might be something with crypto. I don't know. Yeah, yeah. You have to remove... You have to make it not, like, a speculation-based activity.

Starting point is 02:07:21 Yeah, because as soon as you leave the... Like, the people who get the joke are... And then the people who don't get the joke show up and then they're losing their life savings, that doesn't feel good. Whereas, whereas if somebody, you know, is bidding on that handbag, like, they probably know what they're doing. They understand that it's not. Yeah, exactly. Look, I think that crypto route for us is we've often plotted our own death. And I think there's like a chaotic evil way to go out where you just pull that rug.

Starting point is 02:07:51 Yeah. I shouldn't even think because now everybody's going to know. No, everyone's going to know. Well, I think switching gears to another topic that I'm sure you guys. So, one, I don't think AI is going to take your guys' jobs anytime soon, despite it being able to maybe piece together, you know, random ideas. It's so much about taste and things like that. But how excited are you to leverage that technology for some of these various plays?

Starting point is 02:08:25 Honestly, TBD, and I think it's, I do, I will say like unlike the whole like crypto craziness of the last couple years, we didn't get into that because we didn't feel like it was here to stay yet. That's like the truth. Like when you see the herd run so fast, it usually means they're running towards the end of a cliff. There's a little bit of a similar sentiment right now. That said, it is rooted in something real. But we're not in a rush to like use it necessarily, right? If it's going to be here forever, we've got time. Like, mischief doesn't win as a first mover.

Starting point is 02:09:05 If you look at all of our work, it was never about being the first to react to something or the first to like make use of a format. So we'll see. We just have to see. How do you think about, are there any projects, like time is an interesting variable that you can play with, right? Like part of the thing with the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, stunt that you guys did is it's just the narrative and the story of like you guys were conducting

Starting point is 02:09:30 this in secret for a long time it was like a very and and that's part of what makes it so entertaining is kind of like the the lore of what went into it but but have you thought about even longer term plays like things that you could do over a decade or 50 years that in hindsight would just be absolutely hilarious and but but again take this sort of incredible planning yeah yeah honestly we are at that stage of just like our lives and as a company now to be thinking like that right because like if you think about it we were in yeah if you if you if you if you you know i know you guys have have a few investors have you told your investors first thing we're working on is a 50 year stunt and you're there you're like all right buddy like why don't

Starting point is 02:10:18 you put some points on the board first yeah yeah but you guys have feel like i've earned it now like I, you know, something like a decade. No. Yeah, because like we've, we spent basically like we've only been around for the pandemic and post-pan, like a little bit post-pandemic, right? And all of that was just like, you don't know what's coming, like live day by day, like just survive. Like, banks are shutting down. Okay, get through to total tomorrow, right? Now we've been around for a second.

Starting point is 02:10:46 We're more well known. We have our existing infrastructure. And now we really are asking the questions of like, okay, what is that, like, what is that, legacy look like in 10 years or should we uh should we disappear for 20 years and then come back that would that would actually be the coolest thing we could do is uh go dark for two decades and then come back it's work for it's work for other it's work for other artists yeah um i i i could you do something so so we both loved uh nathan fielder's latest sort of like aviation stunt television show i can see you've heard a lot about it i haven't a lot

Starting point is 02:11:23 I mean, you should. It's one of the few people in the world that I think is executing on your guys' level in the sense of... His next level. Yeah, like one sentence, you know, pitch that's hilarious, but then the more you get into it, like the funnier it is. But could you do something like that for like the cost of housing? Like sort of a decade-long stunt. Like mischief, like mischief figures out a way to like reduce, you know, cut the cost of housing in the United States. I mean, that was the crazy thing. Like we, if there are any, like, pricey neighborhoods that would love to commission us as an artist to install a sculpture,

Starting point is 02:12:03 we have a really good trailer park trailer that we would love to erect in a public square that will drive the price of everything. I can just see like the right RV. Like there's this RV outside of our gym. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Kind of yellow from the sun. Like some windows open. The aluminum on the outside. Yeah, Winnebago.

Starting point is 02:12:27 It can be a stunt for Winnebago Corporation. How do you feel about the state of social media, like broadly? It feels like we've gotten to a point where in many ways the platforms look so similar, but they also have their own character. Some of them are becoming Lindy, even thinking about how durable, like Twitter and X have been. despite all this change. But what's your, and do you even, do you, do you feel like you need to use social media? Are you better off not using it and then just releasing, you know, stuff on the platforms?

Starting point is 02:13:03 Yeah, yeah. It's definitely a love-hate relationship with the, with the platforms, right? Because like, platforms, if you really think about it, they started as a way to share things that you found were interesting. and now they are mostly ways to share photos and videos of you talking about things that you find interesting. It's kind of become like less novelty based and more vanity based. Just fine, that's like a fundamental human instinct, so I get it. I would continue to love to find a way to not use the platforms to disseminate information. And that's kind of how we started.

Starting point is 02:13:45 Our first audience portal was Venmo. We had a huge audience on Venmo and we like had this huge phone bank, like a Chinese phone click farm. And we, every time we had a new project, we would Venmo our audience a penny and they would get that notification because that's the most powerful notification layer in your phones. The cha Ching. I am now banned from Venmo for life. Well, PayPal. If you're listening, let me know. PayPal, we'll have the CEO of PayPal on it.

Starting point is 02:14:21 I think the last company that came on works with Venmo will work on it. We should get this reverse. This is important. We were reading an article in The New Yorker yesterday about this concept of IRL brain rot. The examples were the viral. Labuboos, Dubai chocolate, the viral Italian sandwich. We saw a few of these. Joe Wisenthal at Bloomberg was also writing about the,

Starting point is 02:14:49 these kind of like viral as being something that you stamp on your product as a product feature, almost. And I was wondering if you're worried about the spillover from internet slop culture into the real world, just kind of how you're tussling with this idea of brain rot coming into the real world. I don't even know if you read the article or you have thoughts there. I think I saw it on Instagram. Yeah. Of course.

Starting point is 02:15:17 Yeah. Yeah, you probably did a front-facing video. talking about it. Or you saw something like a front facing video talking about it. That's like a reaction video. Yeah. I mean, look, it would, I don't know if it's a good thing or a bad thing, but like what mischief has put out historically is kind of in that brain rot category. Yeah, I mean the boots, the boots, right? Like it's like absurd, absurd aesthetic. And maybe, maybe even I could be so conceited as to say we were part of creating that. The meta. No, you guys definitely that it was an era of minimalism and it was like the Everlane era.

Starting point is 02:15:56 Quite lucky. The boots are like an incredible reaction to that of being like. Absurd aesthetic, just like popping imagery off of your screen. But then the challenge with this trend, right, is if you go back to minimalism, it's it actually becomes, I mean, maybe as like for me, right, I'm, I became. part of the mischief audience and a mischief customer in my early 20s I'm in my late 20s now eventually maybe I'd want some ultra-minimalist you know mischief item for my home but but but but at the same time like once you get on the on the on the on the maximalist track like you're kind of on this maximalism treadmill where you just got to keep like going

Starting point is 02:16:42 crazier and crazier and you know maybe maybe in the internet era there's no turning back it's totally possible right like we might we might have built a machine so effective that it's now our master and like how do you break free from that right but um i'm not too worried like we don't we actually don't think so hard about it we just kind of make the things that we like and then if it ever stops working then do something else yeah yeah well i i have an idea to put out in the ether i think next time a an a list celebrity is going through a massive comms crisis PR crisis or a scandal they should hire you guys to create something more more viral than the scandal they just need to do another crisis to compete with that all they got to do is go to Twitter and be like

Starting point is 02:17:30 send a Bitcoin to this address and I'll send you to Bitcoin and then they actually do it actually do it genius yeah that is a that is a one-time get out of jail free card you heard it here first just payoffs if you yeah if you're a celebrity and you're in trouble you're you're caught at a cold play concert. That's the only way you can reverse the tide. You'll be good. Yeah, sure. Go for it. Yeah. Awesome. This is great. Yeah, thank you. It's really great. Great to get the update and just hear so much clarity on all these different areas that we talk about all the time. Yeah, we can talk for hours. Yeah, we'd love to have you back whenever it makes sense. Yeah, we gave it, gave and I kicked around an idea that we won't share now. We'll leverage that for your next appearance. I can't.

Starting point is 02:18:17 I can't wait for it. 100%. Let's do it. Awesome. Great to catch up. Cheers. Bye. Absolute legend.

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Starting point is 02:19:05 What you got for me on the timeline, Jordy Hayes. Wow. Timelines and turmoil, are you seeing this Francois Cholet? Well, I was saying our next guest has a 133 ETA. Okay. Coming into the studio, David Senrae. He says a fire broke out on my route to the studio. Oh, no, we'll have to read more posts. Now he said, little do they know, nothing, nothing will stop extreme podcasting.

Starting point is 02:19:30 Let's go. We'll see you in a little bit, David. In-person. Yeah, let's dive into this post. You want to read through it. Yes. So there is a debate. Francois Cholet and someone named Oivind on the timeline. So there's this debate around how will AI impact worker productivity? It's very clear that when you use AI, it feels like you're getting a speed up. When you use a coding agent, it feels like you're getting a speed up. Meter did a study and found that maybe some AI tools are making you less performant. So there's this debate. And for a long time, there was this idea that AI will supercharge workers

Starting point is 02:20:15 and labor and anyone who's using AI will be more productive than someone who's not. And the advice that was given by pretty much everyone in the industry was like, you need to learn how to use AI effectively, because if you don't, you'll be left behind. And so OYVin shares that LLM adoption rose to 45.9% among U.S. workers, 18 plus, as of June, July, 2025, according to a Stanford World bank survey, inference demand will continue to surge, not just as more and more user, more usage per user, but as newer, more advanced gen AI models require far more compute. And so, obviously, no one was using LLMs just a few years ago. Now, almost half of the American

Starting point is 02:21:03 workforce over age 18 are using AI tools in their daily work. Francois Chalet, of course, is asking the question about when is this going to show up in the economic statistics. He says, LLM adoption among U.S. workers is closing it on 50%. Meanwhile, labor productivity growth is lower than in 2020. Many counter arguments can be made here, like they don't know yet how to be productive with it. They've only been using it for one to two years. 50% is still too low to see impact. Models next year will be unbelievably better, et cetera. but I think we now have enough evidence to say that the 2023 talking point that LLMs will make workers 10 times more productive. Some folks even quoted 100x is probably not accurate.

Starting point is 02:21:52 And so he gets a little bit of a turmoil here, a little dust up with Nome Brown, polynomial over at OpenAI. Francois continues and explains a little bit more of his reasoning here. He says, by the way, I don't know if people realize this, but the 2020 work from home switch, coincided with a major productivity boom and the late 2021 and 2022. Back to office reversal coincided with a noticeable productivity drop. It's right there in the statistics narrative violation. Productivity growth is now back to pre-2020 levels.

Starting point is 02:22:25 So for a lot of jobs in the American economy, working from home was actually a benefit. I'm not a huge fan. I felt like maybe I was more productive, but I certainly didn't enjoy it. And so we've been having time building in person. It's interesting. You'd have to dive in. Depends on the type of work. Well, yeah, and you can also be more productive,

Starting point is 02:22:44 but on the wrong strategy. I found it working from home during that era and having a remote team, I found it very difficult to, like, change strategy quickly, even on small things. Easy to lock in, but not, you were... Hard to zoom out. I felt less, yeah, adaptable, right?

Starting point is 02:23:04 You'd sometimes waste three weeks working. on something where maybe if you were in the same room, you would have, like, not made a different decision. Yeah. So Noam Brown over to Open AI says, I don't, yeah, yeah, get the gunshots ready. I don't recall a lot of people in 2023 saying that within a few years, worker productivity would 10x due to LLMs.

Starting point is 02:23:22 I do recall a lot of people in 20203 saying LLMs can't reason, though. Shots fired on the timeline. That is a fantastic. Francois says back in 2023, AGI was one to two years away in the form of GPT5. no less. Productivity was about to increase 10 to 100x, and developers were about to go extinct. People who questioned the narrative were a tiny minority. We were proven right. He was the John Brown standing up. I believe that AI will not 10x productivity. Tyler, do you have any takes on this?

Starting point is 02:23:55 Yeah. Will AI be able to get Tyler? Sure. An AI agent might, but he might be able to do it faster himself. Who knows? Still unclear on that. But I think the idea. The idea. that people don't know, like, aren't using them efficiently yet, makes sense, right? Because, so if you look at that meter study, it was about how, like, open source developers are actually slower when they use AI tools. But, like, if you actually read it, it was open source developers who, it was their first time ever using AI tools. Oh, interesting. So, like, obviously, like, there's, like, you know, some learning curve to using, like, cloud code or whatever.

Starting point is 02:24:31 Yeah, totally. You're not going to instantly become way better. Yep. So I think it's kind of a similar thing there. Yeah. I mean, we heard. I heard that there's an interesting phenomenon where some companies are getting more value out of having designers go from zero X engineers to one X engineers, and they're not seeing as much of like the 10x engineer becomes 100x engineer because the problems are still like intractable in some ways. Noam Brown says, I was on the AI job market in 2023. I spoke with a lot of researchers, a lot of frontier labs. Some thought scaling pre-training was sufficient.

Starting point is 02:25:04 some thought additional paradigms were needed, but regardless, almost none of them thought AGI was one to two years away. Yeah, that was something that was maybe more parroted in the on the podcast circuit and from those who were raising the mega rounds who needed to kind of justify underwriting AGI at, you know, a thousand X revenue multiple. It's interesting. I don't know. It is interesting that to look at the economic statistics to keep going back to what's happening in the labor market, happening with unemployment. Like it would be it would be weird to have a unemployment tick up without productivity tick up because that would just mean lower GDP and that seems like an like an impossible scenario. I'm somewhat receptive to the idea that that maybe AI is substituted for a different

Starting point is 02:25:55 type of work and and maybe it's not driving major productivity booms just yet. But I I have trouble believing both narratives that AI is driving massive unemployment and also it's not driving increased productivity because companies would just be doing less than and we're seeing earnings growth. We're seeing growth in the economy. We're seeing high GDP growth. So one of those has to be right. They can't both be. Well, breaking news. President Trump was on newsmax. Not our internal software that we used to create the show. But the TV show. President Trump tells Todd Stearns, he's going out on patrol tonight with D.C. law enforcement and the military. They're really taking D.C. seriously, aren't they? Yeah. Yeah. If you're in D.C.

Starting point is 02:26:45 have a keep an eye out. Nate Eliasson says, going to have to block Elon Musk soon for all the AI goon spam feels like I can't open X in public. I think a lot of people are feeling that way. skill issue. I've still fine-tuned my algorithm so much towards tech and AI content that I don't see any of the Elon. You don't? I don't see it. I get it because people that I follow reply to him and tell him the stop. Oh, okay, okay. Yeah, I follow Elon, but I still don't see it. I see high-yield Harry saying Tom Brady was so ready back in the day to be a finance bro,

Starting point is 02:27:22 and they share Thomas E. Brady Jr.'s resume. He was at University of Michigan. Then he went to Merrill Lynch, the University of Michigan golf course. Summer intern. Polo Fields Golf and Country Club. He was a sales rep. Hyalieri says, this guy could have had a successful career working at Merrill Lynch instead of pursuing football.

Starting point is 02:27:43 Now no one on Wall Street will remember his name. Andrew Reed, Juan had said, what the heck is a series K? That was Databricks. During Databricks. Andrew Reed says, I know quite a few people in SF with a series K problem. Yes.

Starting point is 02:27:59 Stay away from the series K. Enjoy the series C, the caffeine, the Yerba Mata. Next time you have an urge to do hard drugs. Why not try a fridge cigarette? Rune says the demand for anti-AI takes is enormous and we'll take anything and run with it. Metaconsolidating and doubling down on MSL is being misrepresented as bearish on AI, for example. I'm going to keep in mind. Yeah, they conducted a reorg because they added a bunch of people to the team.

Starting point is 02:28:32 Yeah, that makes sense. And had a few weeks together and kind of updated, certainly. And it got positioned as like layoffs almost, kind of what I was reading into. Yeah, it was very odd. For obvious reasons, it's not that popular when we're like, this technology will bring about a turning of the age and reshape the thought world of man. And even a miraculous year and AI progress can be spun into a discipline. Careful observers will note that revenue growth of the consumer AI industry has outstripped the most bullish expectations.

Starting point is 02:29:04 We maxed out the metacalculus predictions and nobody is mea culping on this. You're not going to get an apology for Maroon. No way. He's absolutely printing in consumer AI adoption. People love it. Anyway, what else is going on? Elon Musk, we were talking about the potential. spam. He is unpacking his ideas around the birth rate. People saw this as incongruent.

Starting point is 02:29:33 How can you possibly be worried about the birth rate when you are creating romantic companions that by definition cannot reproduce with their companions? Elon Musk says... DiOvan was was, you know, kind of getting into this with his interview with... A little bit with Sam. Yeah, it was a very funny interaction where he asks, Theo Von asks Sam Altman, what do you think about test tube babies, the idea of having children outside of the womb. That you could visit on the weekend, he specifically. Yes, yes, yes. And so Sam is kind of like, that, it sounds maybe like that's futuristic and that might happen,

Starting point is 02:30:07 and there are some scientific reasons, but it feels unnatural to me. I'm not that into it, says Sam. And Theo just goes, oh, like, I thought you'd be into that. It's like very revealing that Theo clearly sees Sam as like this, like, techno... dystopian. Yeah, or just like this crazy, crazy tech futurist guy, like from the future. And so they kind of like, they kind of like worked through it on the conversation, but it's a very funny clip because they're both like playing the game of like,

Starting point is 02:30:32 who are we? Like what, how do we perceive each other? Elon says, AI is obviously going to one shot the human limbic system. That said, I predicts counterintuitively that it will increase the birth rate. Mark my words. Also, we're going to program it that way. But what I find interesting is what Nikita Beer says.

Starting point is 02:30:52 He says, Grock Companions, duo lingo for dating. So the idea that you could go to a GROC companion, learn amazing pickup lines, like, are you an Nvidia GB200 because I'm getting hot hanging out next to you? And then take that pickup line on the road and meet someone real. The more interesting thing I think is, is if two people are talking to companions and they're a perfect match, just introduce themselves, introduce them to each other. say, hey, we are foregoing the future revenue here, and we are introducing you in IRL. But we'll see. The proof is in the pudding. He's got to put his AI where his mouth is and

Starting point is 02:31:37 actually deliver a product that increases the... Hopefully he doesn't put his AI where his mouth is. Who knows? In a literal sense. Who knows? China is pushing for a total ban on the use of foreign ships for inference. They're not a fan of Nvidia. Financial Times. Some Beijing policy makers are pushing. pushing to ban foreign chips altogether for inference, which accounts for most AI demand, according to a person recently summoned for a meeting with them.

Starting point is 02:32:02 That is unlikely to happen soon due to a shortage of domestic chip supplies, which Beijing hopes... Who do you think is going to sort it out? The juggler. The juggler. He's able to juggle the interests of America, the interests of China, the interests of Taiwan, the interest of NVIDIA. Jensen, the juggler, will get it done.

Starting point is 02:32:22 Hopefully he doesn't drop one. but we will talk to Aaron Ginn if there is a dropping of a juggle ball from Jensen the Juggler. Google declares the green versus blue bubbles debate silly and tired and Signal says precisely what a green bubble would say I will say my little brother

Starting point is 02:32:39 uses an Android. It's gotten quite a lot better to text him. We can now effectively use FaceTime through this weird kind of hangout integration thing certainly better but it's definitely it's definitely still a real thing.

Starting point is 02:32:54 You got something, Tyler? Yeah, this is different, though. No, hit me. Out of the White House, new executive order, they're establishing a national design studio. Okay. So, gigab bullish for Figma, obviously.

Starting point is 02:33:05 Let's go. Universal basic Figma for us. But yeah, like a new design language. Announcing America by Design. Okay. National initiative to improve experience for Americans. Like U.I, U.S. or? Yeah.

Starting point is 02:33:17 New Life into the designs of sites where people interface with their government. I'm getting known in the chat. Stop, stop. Chat is saying you look like Greg from Succession. That's the first time I've ever gotten that. That's weird. Never gotten that before.

Starting point is 02:33:30 Anyway, I've never. Moving on. You've never said that. I've gotten that at a ton. Of course. I actually lived in the same building as him. Okay, what if Greg from Succession was a Sigma? That's kind of the question that.

Starting point is 02:33:41 Well, the actor who plays Greg from Succession is, in fact, a Sigma. Yeah. He had his own apartment. Dar says, who has, A house like this in the bay, I would like to spend some time together, preferably in your house. That is a cool, that is a cool design. Like the soft wood tones, the brown. It feels very comfortable.

Starting point is 02:34:04 It actually doesn't feel that comfortable. Like look at that couch. That couch does not particularly look like loungable. I'm much more. I'm a fan. My ideal living situation is a modern glass box on the outside. but then log cabin on the inside. I want like the moose head on the wall of the glass.

Starting point is 02:34:27 And then I want overstuffed leather chairs. Brutalist outside. Exactly. The fortress on the outside. But then super cozy maxing like thick rugs, warm hearths. These are the things that I want inside. I always hate going inside those glass box houses and being like, okay, like everything's uncomfortable.

Starting point is 02:34:47 There's so many corners. Look at all these hard corners. Yeah, I can just bang into everything. Look at this glass. point. Yeah, I want like a wooden coffee table that's just so rounded, like there's just no sharp edges whatsoever. That's my ideal thing, but this is a little minimal. Gabriel says what does he know? He's quoting our post. We broke the story really after Ben Thompson emailed his newsletter subscribers on Stratory. We broke the news that after 21,

Starting point is 02:35:15 any 22 years in Taiwan, I think where did he say he's moving again? I think he's, oh, I don't know he said, but he spends time in the Midwest. So I think Wisconsin, I think Michigan, that general area. Did you see Dylan Abrucada's reply to our breaking news that Ben Thompson has officially relocated to the United States, Welcome Home Brother. He did the NBA commissioner. He said, time to learn English, buddy. Of course, Ben Thompson does know English. But a lot of people were speculating this is about Taiwan tensions. I don't think it is. And Ben Thompson said that exactly in his email. He said, yes, Taiwan is complicated, but that's not why I'm doing this. It's that my kids are at an age where we want them to go to school in the United States,

Starting point is 02:35:58 and we've been contemplating this for a long time, and we're very happy. He already spends summer in the United States and spends time, so going back and forth. But here, it was not like the last helicopter out of Saigon situation. One thing is for sure. If there is ever conflict in Taiwan, Gabe will repost his, this place. Yes, yes, definitely. Definitely. Jira tickets just said, my boss just told me, quote, quote, don't make mistakes like I'm a clanker.

Starting point is 02:36:27 That's brutal. Yeah. Clanker is still getting more juice. I'm still laughing when I hear it. It is not completely died out. It's actually gotten better. I think it's gotten better. It's gotten better.

Starting point is 02:36:38 It's building some lore. I'm having fun with it. Plus, it is turning into a bit of a culture war issue. Mike Solano was talking about this where there were a couple posts that went out that were saying, like, you should not use this. It's a slur. It's bad. like don't don't reuse the word clanker and I like I like that we're already being language police on it so that gives it a little extra juice like it makes it more fun to use yeah anyway um should we go to this post

Starting point is 02:37:00 from bone gpT back on the show back on the show thank you for posting our reaction to your post a few days ago bone says apple has no chance of catching up to google with AI features that will become increasingly useful Open AI thinks they can do hardware from scratch because they bought Johnny Ive, which is a level of delusion that's hard to describe. Shots fired. Meadows playing catch up desperately distorting the whole market with their hire so they can ship Stepmom. Google One. Shots fired. I don't know.

Starting point is 02:37:34 This is what I was kind of getting at earlier. They look really great during the AI wars right now. I think it's like, you know, if this is mobile, if this cloud, like, yeah, AWS is the first. mover in cloud, Azure, GCP, these are great businesses. Did Apple kind of win mobile and get the vast majority of device revenues? Yes, was it still extremely valuable for Google to develop Android? Did every company eventually need to have a mobile strategy and a mobile app and a mobile design? Like, yes.

Starting point is 02:38:04 And so it's a little dramatized, but that's why we love your posts. Bone, keep things spicy on the timeline. Keep us hitting that soundboard. anyway, timeline and turmoil again, Malo Burgon from the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, Miri, is getting in a fight with Roon on the timeline. Rune says, Miri is an incredible name, maybe the best in AI. It's a shame they don't research machine intelligence, and Malo fires back. Open AI is a pretty good name.

Starting point is 02:38:39 It's a shame they don't, dot, dot, dot. They said, yes, I know they published a couple open models. recently and he has to kind of walk it back because he got hit with a community note. But I think Rune also got hit with community note. Maybe Miri does research machine intelligence. Oh, I think Rune is getting community notes.

Starting point is 02:38:56 Yeah, because I think machine intelligence research research research research machine intelligence. Maybe they just don't ship models or products. Maybe they ship other types of research. Anyway. Anyways, opening eyes, CFO, Sarah Friar,

Starting point is 02:39:13 who we've had on the show. Yes. Absolute dog. One of the best to ever do it. She's on Bloomberg TV doing an interview. She's a real CFO's CFO, if I could say to myself. Yeah, totally. Yeah. Totally.

Starting point is 02:39:23 Anyway. If you know, you know. Yes. But she was asked about selling infraservices in the future. She said, I do think about it as a business. This is why Ben Thompson moved back to America. He's like, I got to end this right now. Ben Thompson famously does not like the fact that Open AI has an API.

Starting point is 02:39:42 He thinks that they should focus entirely, at least for now on saving every GPU cycle for the consumer product that is absolutely on fire, they should become, they should embrace being the accidental consumer company and they should go as deep as possible. Where do they have an incredible edge? Yes. It's in consumer. Yes.

Starting point is 02:40:00 Where do they not have an incredible edge in the just vending intelligence? I mean, they're doing great and it is a good business. And so from a CFO's perspective and from Sam Altman's perspective, it certainly makes sense. Like, yeah, like why not also be in that game? It is value creative. It is profit generating. And yet Ben Thompson thinks now is the time to focus, focus, focus, focus. At the same time, I kind of take the other side of this a little bit and say,

Starting point is 02:40:27 Open AI is in a fortunate situation. They have a lot of data, a ton of customers. They're going to have a very great consumer business that will probably throw off a ton of cash, especially once they start monetizing it more heavily. And what that means is they might be the next Google. in the best sense possible. And what I mean by that is that they might be able to go and do 20% projects. They might be able to go spend a couple billion dollars trying to build a new device.

Starting point is 02:40:56 And maybe it doesn't work. But when you add up all the Google 20% time projects and Google side projects, it's easy to laugh at all the things that they've shut down, like 10 different chat bots or chat products. Yeah, or businesses that have 100 million of revenue. Yeah, they launched a wave and they've launched Google Glass and they've missed on so many things. But when they hit, it's great. You know, they hit on Gmail, they hit on docs, they hit on cloud, they hit on Waymo.

Starting point is 02:41:20 And so I love that you get sort of this like humanity or America gets like somewhat of a subsidized R&D org at Google. And it all pencils out and it all makes sense. And so maybe the Infrastructure Services group is not that at Open AI, but I'm excited for these other, these other like less focused efforts from OpenAI. think we'll see some cool stuff. This is a good post from Steaver, if we can pull it up. Read it out. I say, you're finally awake. That fall looked real bad.

Starting point is 02:41:54 Sween, LLMs, B2B SaaS, what are you talking about? You're an electrical engineer. Let's go build some chips. I love it. So good. This post really going to be relatable for a lot of you. Yes. Nine figure hell is real.

Starting point is 02:42:10 Sure, you don't have to work and have some assets, but you can't really afford a decent yacht, let alone a private army or nuclear submarine. It's real. It's real. Get back in the wage cage. Yeah, get back in the cage, buddy. Get ready to send some emails, buddy.

Starting point is 02:42:24 Captain Nemo. Oh, they're doing an Open AI movie. And they're basing it on a book. I think there might be two competing scripts, but they are finalizing the cast. I believe Andrew Garfield, who is also in the social network. It will be playing Sam. But Will Brown, a friend of the show, has a recast.

Starting point is 02:42:42 he has, can you name these actors? Jason Statham. You got Jason Statham and who will he be playing? He'll be panes too? The joke here is that he's playing both Greg and Ilya. When I saw Jason Statham as Ilya, I was laughing out loud. And then the guy on the left, he was in a bunch of stuff. What stuff?

Starting point is 02:43:11 What have you seen? I don't even know his name. I've seen him a bunch, though. Seen him around. Yeah, yeah. He's a night crawler. Night crawl. It's Toby.

Starting point is 02:43:19 Wait. Actually. Whoa. It's a Toby McGriar? I don't know. I'm all over the place. Tyler, who's the sector? Oh, yeah.

Starting point is 02:43:29 Honoreday Armas. Yeah, Nade Armas. But who's the guy in the top left? Jake Gyllenhaal. Jake Gillenhall. That's right. Toby McGuire. That's a famous guy.

Starting point is 02:43:37 Everybody knows that guy. I got so tied up. Anyway, so the real cast of the movie Artificial is going to be Andrew Garfield, Monica Barbaro Esmir Marotti and then a guy named Ike Barrenholz is rumored to be Elon.

Starting point is 02:43:53 Yeah. Who's playing Dylan Patel? Yeah, who's playing Roon? Who's playing Roon is the real question. Yeah, Roon is the real question. Who should play Roon? Who should play Roon? Wait, so I wonder if Mark Zuckerberg is going to make an appearance in the film

Starting point is 02:44:06 and they're going to have to cast him again. Should they have the guy who played him in the session of that were who reprise the role? No, but he like hates suck, Wait, who? Jesse Eisenberg. Jesse Eisenberg. He has beef with, like, neck and general.

Starting point is 02:44:17 Why? I don't know. Oh, weird. Okay. Yeah. Why? Very odd. Anyway, it should be fun.

Starting point is 02:44:23 Hopefully we can get a cameo. We can sneak in. If you know someone, introduce us. Chat, thank you for helping us out there. John Gellie Hill from Gold Rock. Jake. Thanks, guys.

Starting point is 02:44:35 It's good. Kylie says, I can't believe this is real. I can't. I can't believe this is real. I saw this, and I was like, this is not real. President Trump dialed into Fox and Friends on Tuesday morning. We're a couple days late and revealed his newest and truest motivation for

Starting point is 02:44:48 brokering an end to the war in Ukraine. He's worried he might not get into heaven after he dies. I want to try and get to heaven if possible. He explained, I'm here and I'm not doing well. I'm really at the bottom of the totem pole. But if I can get to heaven, this will be one of the reasons. I like this. Whatever your motivation is for peace, do it.

Starting point is 02:45:08 Do it. It is solid. So there was a debate break now. Yes, break this debate down. Craig Weiss says, having kids before 30 is how you stay generationally poor. A real take-smith's take there. Yeah, so surely not going to have any controversy. The dude Richie, the rich, highlighted Warren Buffett net worth 154 billion.

Starting point is 02:45:34 He had a kid at 22? Child at 22, Michael Dell, 23. Let's go. Bernard Arnaud. 26. Some absolute dogs. Jordy Hayes. Also in the club. I just missed it by a year or two.

Starting point is 02:45:47 I think David Senor made me in the club too. I will say, I will say, you can come on whenever. Kids are much more. When I started making money, I got into cars. Yep. And when I started having kids, I realized that they are much more

Starting point is 02:46:04 quite, you know, I used to think there was kind of a meme growing up. Yeah, they're pretty close to. Well, no. People would say like the average American kid by the time they're 18 is like a quarter of a million dollars. Yep. But it feels like children feel like the carrying cost of like 10 supercars at time. That's true. Between school.

Starting point is 02:46:24 Well, we have our first in-person guest of the show. We got David Sen. Finally. The TVPN Ultradome live. See you. How you doing, man? Good to see, man. Finally in the Ultradome.

Starting point is 02:46:36 Finally in person. I was the drive. Five times. It's a testament to how much I love you that you got me out in Malibu. It's an hour and a half. Yeah, it's rough. It's a rough. Speeder and I do it every day.

Starting point is 02:46:48 No, but it takes you an hour and a half. You go at like five in the morning. 5.30 in the morning. This is a different story. Anyway. I love this place, though. You guys have an army back here. We do have an army.

Starting point is 02:46:57 You have the crew, the interns. Then I met the friends of the interns. Oh, yeah, we got everybody. Oh, yeah, we have intern friends. Interns, lads, lads, lads, lads, lads. What is this? That's a chat. So if they start saying how handsome you look, you'll see it.

Starting point is 02:47:13 People are talking about, yeah, the chat is still talking about this debate over whether you can become generationally wealthy while having a child before age 30. What do you think? Obviously. Yeah. And they gave Michael Dell Warren Buffett, Steve Jobs. Shout out to Michael Dell. Del Technologies on the. Don't say too much because that'll docks us.

Starting point is 02:47:39 No, actually, that might be an interesting place to start. I actually flew to Austin. I spent five hours with Michael Dell, like two weeks, two or three weeks ago. Yeah, what was that like? What did you learn from him? You know what? What surprised you? Because you've already done a full episode on him, you've dug in,

Starting point is 02:47:54 you probably spent days on his story. You know most of the facts. It's not only that. Like, I listen to, so I highly recommend every entrepreneur listen to his audiobook because he actually narrates it. And so I listen to it three, can you hear me? I listen to it three times. I listened to it three times and then read the book and then made the episode.

Starting point is 02:48:15 There was like halfway through our conversation. I said something like I'm having a hard time reconciling like this paradox in my mind about between like your immense accomplishments and just like how normal you are. And obviously he's a superlative extreme person. But he's unbelievably measured and controlled and kind and generous. It's just like one of my favorite people I've ever met. We got to get him on the Theo Vaughn. podcast. See how he does there. I mean, everyone in tech has been making the rounds. And

Starting point is 02:48:45 there's been multiple times when tech people have gone on, Theo, and they've had like kind of awkward starts. It took it took a, it took a minute to warm up. There was like the caffeine thing. Oh, you know, I don't. I think this is the mistake that people in tech make. Yeah, yeah. And you're seeing with a bunch of other podcasts, they should definitely come here before anywhere else. This is not a joke. It's like they see a number on a screen and they don't think about what that number represents and who that person is. And like, you can just read some of the comments. on some of these like mainstream podcasts. It's like this guy's six years old.

Starting point is 02:49:13 He's in his fucking underwear in Missouri. He's got unemployed. He's not the person. You're just optimizing for the number when you should optimize for the quality of the people in the audience. It's insane to me. Well, you know who's optimized for the quality of the audience?

Starting point is 02:49:26 Colossus magazine. There's a new profile. I love you printed it out while we wait for the print edition. You know, I don't know the print edition. But you can still go subscribe. Patrick O'Shaughnessy has printed a warehouse full.

Starting point is 02:49:39 this time. Have you had a chance to read through the Joe Lamont profile? Yeah, I got it. I get I got Patrick's you know obviously like my brother. I talked to him like every day. There's actually an interesting something we can talk about that I called him about yesterday. I actually think moving forward and I told him this yesterday and I told him again today. I was like if you give me more than a day to read it we if on especially these long form profiles. I should do it that is good enough if you read the whole thing. It takes like an hour and a half to listen to. So I read it. I was thinking about printing the whole thing and I was like, there's no way I can read this before the show. It's like 100 pages. I read it and then I threw into 11 reader and I listened to it on the way out.

Starting point is 02:50:16 Oh, that's good. And so it's like an hour and a half if you listen at 1X. But I think that source material is so good. I could definitely do an episode of Founders and it's like just tell me in advance, give me like two weeks, two three weeks, and then we can drop it the same day that you publish it. But one of my favorite little stories from that is how, so Joe had sort of a non-traditional entrance into startups and business. He was a Stanford undergrad. So no, more traditional in that sense.

Starting point is 02:50:49 But at the time that he was building, what was the software called Sales Builder or something like that, the initial? And his name, the names for his... They're so great. Enterprise Software. It's like building a microphone, like, it's called microphone. And I mean, you look at some of the companies here, like New View, GCE,

Starting point is 02:51:07 still secure, Ignite, or... object store, accept, prologic, ravenflow. So there's two things that stood out from the story. One is there wasn't a meme yet of VCs being like, I'm going to back the Stanford dropout. They wanted to back executives that had experience and crazy access to talent. And there were some early kind of garage success stories. So he was kind of following that.

Starting point is 02:51:33 But the other thing is bigger companies, Fortune 500 companies, refused to buy from startups. But then it's pricing. Did you see what he did with his price? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like it's a hundred grand and they're like, no, we don't buy from startups. They come back, okay, we need it, no one else can do this.

Starting point is 02:51:47 It's 300. And it goes from like, now it's a million. Now it's seven and a half million. Now it's $25 million. And everybody kept saying yes, because he did. But the other thing is the why now for the business. Yeah. The initial why now and why it worked, not like the business

Starting point is 02:52:01 catalyst was that they started sending, this was at a time where they would just send you a letter and said you're pre-approved for this card card. You just have to fill this out. He did credit card roulette. Yeah, yeah. So he would, he signed up, he racked out half, it racked up half a million dollars of credit card debt.

Starting point is 02:52:16 And was, was finally before he got his first customer still, no VC would fund him at all. He finally, like, he was basically like evaluating like bankruptcy. Like he had played it out in his head. Like it's going to be like seven years.

Starting point is 02:52:28 It's going to be really annoying. But it doesn't matter if you have, his calculus was like, you know, how much debt you have going into bankruptcy actually, like it doesn't, going from 100,000 to 500K, it's not that much worse to go. You might as well do it the real way.

Starting point is 02:52:43 So he just went full send. Absolutely. And then basically made it all back from like his basically first couple customers. So I, we have a mutual friend that we can't name. That has been close and is basically Joe's been like a mentor of his for a long time. And actually like a funder of a lot of projects that he does behind the scene. So I've heard a lot about this guy. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:53:04 And what I like about people is just like the people. that chart their own path and intentionally go in the opposite direction. So everybody heard Buffet and Munger, and they're like, you should buy phenomenal businesses, even if you have to pay more. And so then everybody in the VMS roll-ups, they're like, I'm going to buy the great businesses. And what he realized, and I heard this story like, probably two years ago, it's like, well, okay, so I have a lot more competition for the, everyone wants the great ones.

Starting point is 02:53:29 What about these shitty months over here? And he turned into a math problem. He's like, okay, this is your ARR, this is your rate of attrition. Like, I know exactly how much I'm going to get out of this in the next six years. They talk about it in the, you know, they use different words that they talk about in the article. And it's like, okay, so I can easily buy this thing for two because I'm going to rip, I'm going to pull out, you know, 15 over the next five years. He just does it over and over and over again. And then I heard, I don't know if it was in, if they said it, but like, you know, he bought

Starting point is 02:53:52 out his shareholders, he went 100% of the company. And what I heard is like he's been taking billions. Yeah. A year in dividends. His fucking paycheck at the end of the year. It's like, how much money did you make the year? I don't know, like $1.5 billion. That's crazy. Yeah. And no one knew he was. Yeah, he's built a machine. Yeah. A machine behind the scenes. Yeah, there's a few of these folks.

Starting point is 02:54:11 We've had some of them on the show. Going dark for 25 years and basically until this is, you know, this is like one of my fetishes. It's like these very silent family-owned businesses where they own 100% of them. You'll never hear about them. I've been lucky enough to have dinner with some of these people. And they're just, again. Yeah, I know. You've talked to people that have written books about their family business.

Starting point is 02:54:33 Yes. And haven't released them. And you're like, please let me. And they're just like, no. Okay, so I'll just tell the story. So there's this guy, he's 76 years old, okay? This is like one of my favorite dinners I've ever had. And I do really careful here.

Starting point is 02:54:48 So he started working in the family business when he was six, okay? He's the second generation of this family dynasty. They own, the original source of their wealth was one of the largest privately held shipping companies in the world. When he was privately held, owned by his dad, and now owned by him and his brother. Like, it's just like there is no shareholders, no border directors, it's just a family. I've now become closer to the third generation, and I get insight on how they run their, the family is a business and the business is a family.

Starting point is 02:55:13 And the way they go about things is just really, really intelligent. And so we have this phenomenal dinner. You look up his reported net worth. It's still in the tens of billions, and it's like underreported by a factor like four. Because then he tells you about like, oh yeah, I put money into this, and I never sold, and it's worth this.

Starting point is 02:55:29 There's just crazy stories. And he's also like super charismatic, one of the best rock contours ever been around, and just super, and he's still on it 24-7, like works all the time. And so there's two things that were funny. This has happened a few times where families will commission real writers, right? They commission an actual biography. And I have a copy of a separate family.

Starting point is 02:55:53 It looks like the book, it looks like a book you'd buy in a bookstore. The only difference is there's no ISBN number on the back. So like some of the books I have, no one else in the world has these books besides the family and the author and everything. Open AI would give you a lot of money for that. So there's two funny things that he told me. One, that they commissioned one for his father and then one for him. And I was like, dude, give me those books. Like, I would do such a good job on them.

Starting point is 02:56:19 And without hesitation, he's like, absolutely not. Like, that's out of the question. I go, why not? And he says something like, I have no desire to educate my competitors. And just real fast. And then he... Leave it to me in the will. No, and then all...

Starting point is 02:56:32 No, I think... So there's another found... The next generation. No, but there's another founder who's 78, and I spent four days with her, her, the CEO, and the top 40 executives. They were going through how to, they wanted advice on how to transition from a founder-led company. She's one of my favorite founders ever come across to my life, and like to the next generation. And so after talking to all the executives, spending time with them, they're like, hey, so what do you think? And after four days, I go, when she's dead, you're fucked.

Starting point is 02:56:58 He's just like, there's not, like, you're not replacing her. She's a singular individual. You should, like, either sell the company or go do something else because, like, there's no, transition error. It's like, what do you do when Michael Jordan retires? Like, I don't know. Start rebuilding. But he said something funny because they're obviously in shipping. They now have real estate and they have finance and everything else. And he's got also one of the biggest boats in the world. And he had mentioned no, but no, he mentioned earlier though. So early in the conversation, he's like, yeah, when you read a lot of these biographies, he had read all the

Starting point is 02:57:27 same biographies I read like Daniel Ludwig, Aristotle Nasis, all these like shipping guys, he knew all of them. They would also run their company headquarters from their private, like, giant boats, right? Giant yachts. And so he had mentioned earlier, he said, yeah, I spent, you know, part of the year, I live part of the year on, he said, I thought he said, boat, he said ship. So I was like, yeah, so like when, like, what months are you on? He's going to tell this. I go, so what, what, like, when are you going to go back on your boat?

Starting point is 02:57:52 Like, how long are you going in your boat for? He goes, what are you talking about? I go, you said, like, earlier you live on your boat. He goes, I don't have a boat. I'm like, is this some kind of joke? He goes, I have a ship. I go, what's the difference you know, boat and a ship? He goes, you can put a boat on a ship.

Starting point is 02:58:05 You can't put a ship on a boat. So my favorite conversations are these kind of people. And I'm obsessed with older entrepreneurs because they're just so much smarter than like a 25-year-old fucking startup founders. It's like not even, they're not even, it might as well be an alien. Yeah, it's just like these people are just,

Starting point is 02:58:22 they have so much more experience, they have so much more knowledge. Like I just can talk to them for hours and hours and hours. Have you dug into the trilogy Software Mafia? Are you familiar with this? No. So this was some science. secondary research I did out of trilogy. This is of course the the subject of that

Starting point is 02:58:39 Colossus profile on Joe Lamont. In the 90s trilogy was on such a tear. They were recruiting out of MIT, Harvard, and a bunch of folks went through trilogy and then went on to do cool things. Ellie Seidman, the CEO of Tinder, was a trilogy alum. Cyrus and Nick Gondju, founders of Zoc Doc. Henry Ward, the CEO and founder of Carter. Crazy. John Lilly, former CEO of Mozilla, and now he's an investor at Greylock. And Andy Palmer, the CEO of Tamer, former CEO of Vertica, which was acquired, major angel investor invested in Carter in part due to his connection. There are 87 trilogy mafia companies now on Crunch Base.

Starting point is 02:59:24 So it's just like this very interesting, we've heard that Joe keeps his team very tight, but clearly selects for extremely entrepreneurial. people, they don't often get poached to, like, other firms that are doing the same thing. If you leave, you're probably a company. I wouldn't want to make money the way he did, you know, put that aside. Like what I do admire, like, I'm like the most pro-American person. Like obviously the son of Cuban immigrants. Like I grew up, you know, meeting people. Like, literally came to his country, fled communism on a raft.

Starting point is 02:59:53 Yeah. Like, so I don't like outsourcing anything. I've had tons of people try to advertise on the podcast. So like, I have this outsource something. I was like, I want to find a way to pay people more money, not less. Like, I want to work with the best. best people in the world, and those people don't work for $8 an hour. But the thing I respect about Joe is, like, he doesn't give a shit what other people

Starting point is 03:00:10 think. And he's willing to have his own thinking. And then even if everybody's going in one direction, I was listening to your mischief on the way over here. Yeah, yeah, he had this great line where he's like, if everybody's running fast as something, they're probably running off a cliff. I was, oh, that's a bar. That's like a bar. And so I like that Joe's like, hey, you guys are all doing this. So that means, by default, there's an, there's an opportunity. I called Patrick yesterday. I was like, it's kind of funny. You know, there's not any other people more obsess of podcasts and me, you, Patrick, we talk about this stuff all the time. And I was like, everybody, even now is still starting podcasts. And Patrick, you know, he has the highest value

Starting point is 03:00:41 investing audience in the world. And what I love about what he's doing is he's like, oh, yeah, you guys are all going to go to the podcast. I'm going to write, I was that 15,000 word in-depth profiles, but they're so much better. Like the Neil Meadow one. Yep, really good. Who's the paradigm guy? I read. Matt Wong. Yeah. This one. Yep. And they're going to keep doing it. And he'll, he'll tell you in the group chat, like some of the ones they're working on now, they're crushing. I just love this idea. It's a very special product. And I went through when we were doing the show and we didn't have gas or anything and we

Starting point is 03:01:11 needed a lot of material. I went through and looked at old New Yorker deep dives profiles. So good. They're so good. Old Bloomberg and old Forbes pieces. And they're just not doing it at that level anymore. There are some profiles. But the one profile that was written in prestigious magazine about Zuck is all about, like,

Starting point is 03:01:30 did he have the right team in place? It's like a diversity, like referendum on diversity and stuff, like Brotopia type take, which is just not really the story. Like, that's a very minor piece of the Zuck story, in my opinion. I'm glad you said the New Yorker part because every single time I do a deep research report and every single person I'm working on, just to get an overview. And it's always like you, I want it written like a New York piece. One of my favorite.

Starting point is 03:01:51 Fantastic writers. Jackson Dahl. We read one on Mary Meeker. Yeah, the Mary Meeker. I read that too. I read that too. So Jackson Dahl, you guys should have them on there. He's doing, because.

Starting point is 03:02:01 For the record, Jackson Dahl. We have invited him. He needs to call in today. I don't know what he's doing. Nick, send him an invite. So have him join right now. The reason, no, no. I don't share it like sharing the mic.

Starting point is 03:02:12 Okay. You have to come after I'm done. Send the invitation. Send the invitation for tomorrow. But the reason I say that is because he put me on to one of, he's like, hey, you have this thought that I haven't heard anywhere else. Because something that I've talked about is just like, I actually think like introspection is one of the worst things like an.

Starting point is 03:02:32 entrepreneur can have. And I say some of the greatest entrepreneurs in history had low to no introspection. Like Sam Walton didn't wake up every day wondering like what his purpose of life was. Oh, sure, sure. Sure. Sure. The past. I wish I did this. Nothing. This is like being a gold retriever. You have to benignically be going after the tennis ball. Not thinking about the nature. No, always the last tennis ball. Yeah. Always the current tennis ball. Excellent. So Jackson's like, hey, I heard you say that. Have you heard of this guy named Larry Goghian? I didn't know who that was. And so he sent me this great New Yorker piece. The piece was so good I made an episode on it.

Starting point is 03:03:03 I think it's one of the best episodes I've ever done. It's one of my favorite, like, the guy's obviously crazy. Every single person I profile in founders is crazy. But it's better than a book. That New Yorker piece was better than if I read 600 pages on Gagosian. But yeah, I think there's like a clear, again, we all three talk about like,

Starting point is 03:03:22 what's the white space all the time. It's like what Patrick and his team are doing, it's like there's a clear white space there. It's crazy. But the profiles, but the profiles suck. There's no craft in them. Yeah. Yeah, the New Yorker is insane because it's...

Starting point is 03:03:32 And people care about the person writing the profile a lot. Well, did you guys ever cover... You know how Patrick found Jeremy Stern? No. So I think you covered that... I'm pretty sure you read this to me. I love when John Reed thinks to me. The...

Starting point is 03:03:43 I think it's the best profile ever written about Palmer Lucky. Oh, sure, sure, sure. I forgot the title. It had like a very... Yeah, I know the one I'm talking about. Yeah, like, Shreder. Jeremy wrote that. Oh, no, that makes sense.

Starting point is 03:03:56 Yeah. American Vulcan. Is that it? Make sure it's by Jeremy Stern. Yeah. Okay, so what did Patrick do? Patrick did this great, come do this for me, and then he did something,

Starting point is 03:04:04 and then Patrick did something smart. Choked him with gold. Yeah, yeah. You're just like, name your fucking price. So this is really important. No, this is a really important thing. So there's a line I sent to, if you're, for startup founder,

Starting point is 03:04:17 or for any founders trying to recruit people. And there's this thing I found in one of the books on Ogaby, where he was looking up letters that the Medici family would write to the artist that they wanted to sponsor. And there was this one sculptor, they wanted to essentially become a patron of and then move to Florence. And he's like, he says something like, come to Florence, but the last, the way he ended the letter was one of the most gangster things ever heard.

Starting point is 03:04:40 He's like, come, I will choke you with gold. That's great. Great, great. That's a bar. But that's exactly what Patrick is. It's just like, name your price. The guy that does my clips. Same thing.

Starting point is 03:04:49 Name your price. I'm not negotiating with you at all. What do you want? Yep. That's the number? Fucking send me an invoice. Pay today on my ramp card. Yep.

Starting point is 03:04:57 Always. We were covering a bit on Oracle's latest moves. Cash flow negative. Give us the five-minute founders on Larry Ellison. So I'm actually working on a Larry Ellison episode. So I did three episodes on it. It's like 124, 126, and 127, but that was probably like six years ago. And I reread the billionaire and the mechanic just now.

Starting point is 03:05:20 I was like, fuck, I don't think it's good enough to do another episode on. I need like a different angle here. So there's a guy in my audience who I knew was like completely obsessed with Larry Ellison. and we've been DMing for years. He had transcripts for every single interview Larry Ellison has ever done. So it's taken me a while, as you can imagine, but that's the source material.

Starting point is 03:05:35 Yeah, that's great. Highly likely it'll be out in three episodes from now. I'm doing Elon right now, which is fucking killing me. That's why I look like shit and I'm very tired. This outline is destroying me. Don't go on X right now, by the way. It's going to make you rethink doing that episode. Why?

Starting point is 03:05:48 He's in hot water. He's pushing AI companions, which people are not a fan of. Yeah. Oh, is this like the scantily glad companions. Yep. Okay, so I'll tell you what I'm doing. And this is why it's really important. Because, you know, people, the very first episode of Founder,

Starting point is 03:06:04 September 2016 was Ashley Vance's biography of Elon Musk. It was obviously an Elon fanboy. I was looking at Tesla's before they even had the Model S. You know, everybody that's a fan of his, obviously goes to, like, these cycles of like you have to ride the fucking Elon roller coaster. Oh, yeah. Well, you can say on the podcast, I made this episode before I went crazy. No, but like, the problem is,

Starting point is 03:06:26 And so, like, there's actually, I think the best biography of Elon written is this book called Lift Off because it's the first six years of SpaceX. Yeah. It's very fascinating. Those pictures where he's like standing in the rubble, right? Yes. Like iconic. So what I decided to do is like, listen, I mean, I don't care about politics, cultural or stuff. I don't care about anything.

Starting point is 03:06:44 I care about entrepreneurship, taking ideas from great people. Actually building the business. And just throwing it to the next generation to hopefully help people do that, right? Do that better. So no disrespect to Walter Isaacson. I've read all of his biographies. The Elon biography is written like it's a newspaper. Now, when you take an asset,

Starting point is 03:07:02 or you take a liability, you try to flip it into an asset. So I was like, okay, the problem is, no disrespect. There's no craft here. I like soul, I like craft, because I read for fun. Like, this is what I want to do. This is like a news update. But the good news of that is it's in chronological order. So the reason this is killing me is because the reading's been done for like five days.

Starting point is 03:07:20 It's just been outline, outline, outline, outline, outline, outline, nonstop. So what I did is like I'm gonna rip out every single thing about Elon. I'm not gonna talk about his family, his wives, his kids, his politics, culture war. This guy's got brilliant ideas. So this is literally just what are the most enduring principles that Elon used across three decades and seven different companies. And I really think I'm crafting something that's gonna be really valuable. And I think you're gonna have to be some level of like intelligent to listen to it because I'm not, I'm gonna like jump from idea to idea to rapidly. And like, you have to put the shit together yourself. And it's just like, hey,

Starting point is 03:07:57 this guy's been repeating the same principle for decades. And it worked in Tesla. I worked at SpaceX. It worked in NeurLink. Why is this working? Might work in your work. You should fucking know this. You should have a tool where you can listen to this. Hopefully listen to it today or whenever it's out. And then you listen to it a year ago, two years ago. Okay. I have a take on craft. So anyways, let me finish one thing. So when you get to the end of this, you're completely back on the Elon train. You're like, this is a singular person. Well, I think to people's credit, a lot of the people posting these recent comments are on his team and want, and it's this, I think they're struggling with like wanting him to focus on what rockets. But the rockets in orbit, sir, is like the take.

Starting point is 03:08:39 Yeah. He says that himself in the book. It was really interesting because he was talking about what do I have to do that if I don't do it, it doesn't get done. He's like, listen, somebody else, electric cars were inevitable. This is a direct quote from the book. I'm paraphrasing. He's like, electric cars were inevitable. They were going to happen with or without me.

Starting point is 03:08:57 But the rockets were not. And so therefore, I should focus on that. Yeah. I think people, the people that want to go to Mars are concerned that, you know, what takes down great men, it's... Ladies, liquor and leverage. Yeah, in this case, liquor, leverage, and goon bots. My problem is I would gladly give up the Mars ambitions

Starting point is 03:09:20 if we could get a Tesla with a V12 in it. And I feel like every moment he spends working on rockets is another moment that I don't have a thousand horsepower naturally aspirated screaming straight-piped Tesla. That's my goal. Anyway, on the topic of craft, I was trying to think about, you mentioned Joe Lamont. His business has been buying companies that are not generational products.

Starting point is 03:09:46 They're not the iPhone. They're not these amazing models. monuments to craft. They're businesses that deliver a little bit of value for a bunch of customers. And he has figured out a pattern of offshoring some of the software engineering, running the business more efficiently. He is like the private equity buyout. He's not trying to completely transform and build a generational product. The product is not a product of craft. He is not a craftsman. And then I was trying to think about... I think he's trying to be now the new one. So on the flip side, when I was talking to Deli

Starting point is 03:10:20 early on Delian Asperov, at Founders Fund about, like, how did he underwrite the investment in Ramp? He was talking about software can be like art and that the team there has like this attention to craft and they see, that's why they hire the IMO gold medalist. It's like, why do you need someone that good? It's because they see the product as like so, so important, even though it's in this highly competitive, like particular, like corporate card space, it's something that they take really seriously. And I think that there's this,

Starting point is 03:10:55 it's not that there's necessarily one pattern that's correct. It's more of like this barbell and you can be on either side, but you need to know what camp you're in. And so when I see Joe Lamont, I see him as software as widgets. He is crafting a machine that produces software and it produces it at the lowest possible cost and it all kind of looks the same.

Starting point is 03:11:15 And then I see on the other side, like Ramp and folks like that who take software development more as art and more as craft. And both can produce outsized returns. Both are big companies. Well, it's also where you apply the craft, I would say that Joe from my read brings craft to the organization. The organization of trilogy. Right? He has trilogy university. Yes.

Starting point is 03:11:35 And I think you're going to struggle to build an iconic enduring company if you're not bringing craft somewhere, right? Totally. Ferrari is bringing craft to racing. They don't necessarily care about certain other elements. They're not bringing craft or the mechanical. It's in the reliability. You said something like other end of the spectrum, I think like what I'm trying to drive home with founders

Starting point is 03:12:00 and why I'm like complete. So this is like there is no right way. Yes. Based on who you are and what you're into. Yes. So I just came, I just flew from New York. And I spent, I always spent a ton of time with Kareem and Eric,

Starting point is 03:12:12 founders of Ramp. And I specifically, this last time, spent two hours with them. And I'd like to talk about some of the stuff I've learned because I spent a lot of time with them. But there's an example of this. This is like, this is where people fail. They're like, this, Steve Jobs did it this way.

Starting point is 03:12:28 So I should just copy that. It's like, yes. It's inauthentic. Yes, natural. So I was saying for a long time, this is Michael Dell again. So I was saying for a long time, you need to build a business. It's very obvious when you read biographies people. You have to build a business that authentic to you. And then I read Michael Dell's autobiography, and I talked to him about this when I saw him in Austin a few weeks ago.

Starting point is 03:12:45 I read Michael Do's autobiography. And again, the guy wants to, IBM is the largest company in the world. It's the first company to reach a hundred billion dollar market cap. And this guy's like, I'm going to compete with them with a thousand dollars out of my University of Texas dorm room. It's not an exaggeration. And so he then brings in this older guy. I think his name's, I forgot the name, it's an episode.

Starting point is 03:13:07 But the guy had a couple successful businesses. and he works with Michael, think, for four years. And when he's 80, he's now looking back, I think he's 25 years older and Michael, something like that. And he's like, listen, he's like, four years of this. Like, I lost all my hair, my back hurt, I couldn't sleep, I had, like, intestinal issues. I had to stop.

Starting point is 03:13:27 And Mike, because, like, the competition was so intense and we had no money, we were undercapitalized, and we were just, like, going 24-7. I'm dying, and Michael was full of energy because he's like, he built a business, this is his line, natural to him. So I was telling, I was telling Michael when I saw him in Austin, I was just like, nothing we're doing with podcasting is like new. I was like, think about like, if you ever read Robert

Starting point is 03:13:49 Carrow's biographies of LBJ, one of my favorite stories in there is W. Leo Daniels, right? And it's this guy, Texas Hill Country, right? This is like, there's no internet. There's barely any electricity. So this guy has like 90% market share with the wives of farmers in the Texas Hill country, right? And so he has this daily news show, right, that's on for a few hours a day. We invented that. You're telling me that somebody was doing this before us. Here's the funny part. And don't let me go back to Cream and Erick, don't forget that place.

Starting point is 03:14:20 So the crazy thing is, so he wants to get like 90% market share in this area, right? So then he's like, okay, well, what should my sponsor be? Well, who's listening? What do the women in these houses need? And he comes, like, everybody needs baking flour. They all need baking flour. So I'll find the best manufacturer baking flour, and they'll be my advertiser. He sells a ton of baking flour.

Starting point is 03:14:41 And he's like, wait a minute, I can just, like, make my own baking flour. So then he starts to manufacture his own baking flour. He makes like $50 million, like the 1940s or something. And then he goes... And then he goes, what am I going to do next? Like, what can I do with this? He's like, I'm going to run for governor. And then people are like, this is Trump before Trump.

Starting point is 03:14:58 This is what I'm telling you. There's an element of Trump to this. Trump had vodka. Yeah, but so everybody tells them, everybody tells them, nobody, you're not a professional politician, you can't possibly win, but then he starts hosting these rallies. Remember in 2015, Trump was doing this? And then like the rallies, they'd be like selling out,

Starting point is 03:15:13 it'd be like a monster truck rally. It'd be like 50,000 people there. Of course that's going to translate from votes. So he wins the governorship of Texas, and he moves his radio show into the Texas governor's mansion. And so he's still broadcasting that. Then he, the reason he's in LBJ's biography. Ever stopped broadcasts.

Starting point is 03:15:31 It's because he runs. And he's like, what are you going to do next? I'm going to run for seven. He wasn't stealing the election from LBJ, legitimately stole the election. But I was telling Michael about this. And, you know, in Texas, they teach Texas history before they teach American history. If you go to any used bookstore in Texas, my favorite thing, do you know, there's huge sections on like, you have American history? It's like Texas history.

Starting point is 03:15:52 And Michael texts me back the funny saying. He goes, oh, I must admit, I missed this part of Texas history. I was too busy reading computer magazines. I want to fucking hit the table because that's exactly, he picked the business that was perfect to him. natural to him. Natural. Completely natural. It's what he wanted to do.

Starting point is 03:16:10 So the ramp guys, like, they're not, they're like, whatever the, you guys, I always have to, like, get the way people talk on the internet translated to me from you. Yeah. So I don't know if there's a term for anti-slop. Yeah. But there's a term for anti-slop. Kraft. Thank you. So if there's a very old term for this.

Starting point is 03:16:30 So the way I think of this, have you guys ever heard of Shokinen? Yes, Leslie. explain it for the list. So Shokinen is this idea in essentially it's almost like a Japanese word for craftsmanship. And it doesn't matter if you're building, you know, a $22 billion fintech or you're sweeping the floor. The Japanese, if you're Shokinen, you take pride in the activity, making your, you take pride in activity yourself and pride in making your work as good, even if no one else sees it. And so what I would say about this is spending a lot of time with Kareem and Eric is one, from the outside, they have very complimentary skills. And what I would say, especially with Eric, one of the best sales advice, and I think it was advice for sales, but I actually think it's advice for life

Starting point is 03:17:19 and dealing with people that I've ever heard, is Mary Kay, remember Mary Kay Cosmetics? They built this, like, massive empire like going door-to-door sales. It might have been like an MLM kind of thing. It's kind of like the proto-ML. Yeah, and they'd drive around like pink catalogs. It's good up for MLMs.

Starting point is 03:17:33 They don't get enough, underrated, criminally underrated, sometimes literally criminally rated. The way that she trained her saleswomen, she says, never forget that every single person goes through life with an invisible sign around their neck that says, make me feel special. And Eric has very understated charisma,

Starting point is 03:17:55 and he is gifted at salesmanship, at listening, he's a very good to listener, understanding what's important to you and then translating what's important to you into how his business can solve your problems. And so what I think, one of the things I'm worried about both Eric and Cream is like, I like people to take what they do very seriously.

Starting point is 03:18:12 I don't care what that activity is. And they work like dogs. I'm not into this, like, I'm not into work-life balance. I don't like balance. I'm not a balanced person. I'm either, I completely, I'm at zero or 100 and nothing in between, and they're both like that. Yeah, we're always telling you,

Starting point is 03:18:26 you don't have to destroy your life for this next episode. deliver the product you want, it's possible. You have to push yourself. So there's a couple things I think they do really, really smart. One is, and I think

Starting point is 03:18:39 they both have commonalities, is one, they pay attention to every single little detail, which is the point that you were making. So the point where like, they're running a giant company. They have tens of thousands of customers. They have thousands of employees. Their revenue growth is exploding right now. They have

Starting point is 03:18:55 all these features. They did 300 updates to the product. in the last year. And yet they... It's only 250 work days. Yeah, like, I think this was yesterday a day before. I don't even know what day it is today.

Starting point is 03:19:06 We sat in there. It's not like Eric and Kareem have empty schedules. No. And it was us three, and we sat there and we talked about podcasting. And like, the roller could play.

Starting point is 03:19:17 What, we talked a lot about you guys. And what I like about them, I'm just going to like say random stuff, you guys jump in wherever you want. But like, the one example I used for them. And I was just like, listen, I, and I like how fast they make decisions.

Starting point is 03:19:29 and then when they make a fucking decision, they don't like, oh, we'll kind of like test it out. They go all in. They make big, bold bets. And they're willing to take a risk, even if it will fail. I think the biggest mistake you can make in a world that's changing constantly,

Starting point is 03:19:42 the biggest risk is taking no risk. And so I use the example. It's like, is that an Elon quote or Sam? I don't know. All my quotes come from other people. I have no original ideas. I have no original ideas.

Starting point is 03:19:54 I don't feel bad about that. I think the original idea that you have that you beat the drum on is podcasting. It's a duck quote. The biggest risk is not taking it. So there you go. Shout out to Zuck. Can we get, you have a, what kind of, what should we hit for Zuck?

Starting point is 03:20:06 You're not going to be all to hear it. The Glazinator. No, but triple glazinator. The glazionator of 3,000. The glazinated of $2,000. So what Eric and Kareem both do, that they, the commonality they have with history of entrepreneurs is they bet on talent. So they overpay for talent.

Starting point is 03:20:22 They're like, they will find the best people in the world, like they're head of AI, some of their designers, some of their engineers, the people they partner with. They're like, that's the best person and let's make sure he or she are compensated at a level that makes sense. And so I was talking to him. I was like, I really do think we have like, John and Jordan are gifted at what they're doing. And we had a long conversation about this.

Starting point is 03:20:44 I was like, I'm telling you, man, I talked to a lot of people on a permanent basis. And I've told you guys this, you know, privately, I'll say obviously in public. It's like on a permanent basis. I don't know anybody else that comes up with better, more simple, more effective, and inexpensive marketing ideas. And I go, I really think we have this huge opportunity for leverage. It's like, if they have an idea

Starting point is 03:21:06 from the idea to execution, since we trust them, we know they're talented, there should be no barrier. There should just be like, here's a fucking pile of money, and next time you have a come with idea, do it. And immediately, they're like,

Starting point is 03:21:18 done, what else do you want? It's just like, there's no, like, there's obviously a good idea. John and Jordan and Jordi are obviously talented. Like, how can we get more out of the talent do we have around them? I just think that's,

Starting point is 03:21:27 There's just a million little ideas that they have like this. I remember, I don't even know what the valuation is now, but it went like a huge jump. I don't think it was this time as the last time. But we were having dinner. It was going to be me, Kareem and two other people. And me and Kareem got there first. And it was the day that that announcement came out.

Starting point is 03:21:42 And Twitter was going crazy. They're like, ramps fucking killing it. And your side of the world, all these VCs are like fighting over this shit. And Kareem shows up in the first 10 minutes. He's just like, this feature's not good enough. We lost this deal. this is an accent. He didn't mention a word.

Starting point is 03:21:58 And I just sat there smiling. And you know, it's really hard for me to not talk for 10 minutes. And I just start, I go, that's the reason, your perpetual, your divine discontent is why you're so good.

Starting point is 03:22:10 Because the value of your company is just the collective value of all the problems that you solve for your customers. And he doesn't give a shit about taking a victory lap. He cares about solving problems for his customers.

Starting point is 03:22:22 And I like the fact that I can call them. I've called, Eric, at 1 a.m., his time, and I'm like, where are you? And he's like, oh, I'm in, like, Chicago. And I'm, like, doing, like, customer meetings. And, like, I recruit people. And, like, I'm closing this deal. He's just like, they work all the time.

Starting point is 03:22:39 Working hard. Working hard. Work all the time. It's a good mantra. It's one thing you can control. Yeah. Did Joe Lamont? Think about that.

Starting point is 03:22:49 I mean, that's excessive. But I think they were having the, they were, in that piece, they were talking about this conversation he was having with Jack Welch, if I'm not mistaken. where he's just like, well, if you have a product that's working and you're willing to work 20 hours a day, it's really hard to lose at that point. Yeah, no. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:23:03 Find your life's work. Find something that's, what was the phrase? Not authentic? Natural. Natural. And then work constantly. Well, okay, so this is, again, everybody, I'm so happy to see what's happened to you.

Starting point is 03:23:19 I still consider myself your first listener. It's true. You are literally. Literally first listener. You send you the NPR. Google Drive. Oh, and that's another thing. So going back, I want to talk about why I think you guys are really special.

Starting point is 03:23:33 But it also goes back to... The glazingators. Hold on. It also goes back to what Eric and Kareem were willing to bet on talent when I was just like, guys, they have a thousand listeners right now. It was crazy. They're going to fucking blow. I don't know anything. I know about podcasts.

Starting point is 03:23:49 I know how history is greatest entrepreneurs think. I don't know anything about anything else. I promise you there's zero chance. They already knew you were talented, but they already knew. It was obviously Coving's talented. They tried to buy you and recruit you a long time ago. And they made a bet, and they made a bet on talent, which, again, is something that Brad Jacobs does, that Elon Musk does, that Steve Jobs did, that all these people did over and over and over again. Again, these are ideas that are timeless.

Starting point is 03:24:12 You can use them 100 years ago. You can use them 100 years ago. They were used 100 years ago. You're going to be able to use them 100 years from now. So get out there and use them. Get out there, folks. We have a 3 p.m. reservation. We do. We've got to get offline.

Starting point is 03:24:25 We've got to get off air. It's hard to get this guy off the mind. I wish that we could go. It's almost like this is professionally. We could go for another five hours right now. You in town tomorrow? Let's do it again. I got to finish this episode.

Starting point is 03:24:37 I got to stay in Malibu. It's already too soon. And I'm never driving here again. We're getting a helicopter. We're getting a helicopter. No, that's how the Kobe died. It was, it was foreshadowed in our first launch video. We open in with us in a helicopter.

Starting point is 03:24:50 We're going to be helicopter guys. So that's what me and Karim and Eric are talking about, your launch video. It's about the type of helicopter. Not all helicopters are created equally. No, we need to move the studio to Malibah. Anyway. The Center for Extreme Podcasts.

Starting point is 03:25:02 We will see you tomorrow. Thank you for watching. Thank you for hanging out with us. See tomorrow. See tomorrow. Leave us five stars in the podcast. Have a fantastic evening. Have a great rest of your day.

Starting point is 03:25:12 Goodbye. We love you. Bye.

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