TBPN - David Tisch, Mike Vernal, Edward Mehr, Will Brown, Stocks Mogged as Trade War Escalates, R.I.P. Pope Francis, How Prior Beliefs Distort Perceptions, Why Robots Still Can't Make Nikes, Robots Join Chinese Half-Marathon

Episode Date: April 21, 2025

TBPN.com is made possible by:Ramp - https://ramp.comEight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpnWander - https://wander.com/tbpnPublic - https://public.comAdQuick - https://adquick.comBezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.comPolymarket - https://polymarket.comFollow TBPN: https://TBPN.comhttps://x.com/tbpnhttps://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235https://youtube.com/@technologybrotherspod?si=lpk53xTE9WBEcIjV(02:31) - Stocks Mogged as Trade War Escalates (09:42) - R.I.P. Pope Francis (15:20) - How Prior Beliefs Distort Perceptions (29:58) - Why Robots Still Can't Make Nike's (48:47) - Robots Join Chinese Half-Marathon (01:29:04) - David Tisch (02:02:38) - Mike Vernal (02:34:08) - Edward Mehr (02:50:13) - Will Brown

You're watching at TBPN. Today is Monday, April 21st, 2025. We are live from the Temple of Technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital, the Institute of Iron, the Hall of Hypertrophy. We wanted us to kick it off with a post from my good friend, Sahil Bloom. He's been on the show before as we highlighted his book, but this one hit hard, especially today. He says, here's the truth. If you're half in, you're actually all out, even 90% in. gets you nowhere. There's something magical in the last little bit simply because so few are willing to do it. That's where you unlock new levels to the game and it does not take talent, just courage. Well, you're certainly being courageous today, John. Thank you. Congratulations. Yeah, big news. I'm all in

on TBPN. I am entirely in. I'm completely in TBPN. Full time, the announcement went out today. Fantastic experience is an entrepreneur in residence at Founders Fund. It was a great Two year, two year, three month run, incredible run. Fantastic team over there. They're really going to be suffering. They're just kicking off a new $4 billion fund. It's going to be rough. But, you know, I think they'll be, I think they'll be okay.

Management fees on a $4 billion fund should maybe be able to find a replacement of the EIR. Yep, yep, for sure. For sure. But honestly, I mean, fantastic team over there. Founder mode. Super close with everyone. And, of course, we have Delian as a regular on the show already. Trey is coming back.

He's going to be one of our first in-person guests soon. We're getting Scott Nolan talking about general matter soon. So obviously the teal bucks will still be flowing. We're not getting paid directly by Founders Fund anymore, but we are getting paid by Ramp, our sponsor, and one of a major Founders Fund position. That's right. So it's all one hand washes the other over here in tech media.

Remember, we are 100% corporate backed. We'll never ask you for a dime. And yeah, so if you're a company, and you want to sponsor us, hit us up. That's right. We love our sponsors. Anyway, speaking of sponsors, the market's in turmoil. If you're trying to get out on the action, head over to public.com investing for those

who take it seriously. They have multi-asset investing, industry-leading yields, and they're trusted by millions. The big news today, stock market is mobbed. Absolutely mocked as the trade war escalates. Global markets tumbled amid renewed U.S.-China trade tensions and an unprecedented clash between President Trump and the Federal Reserve. Now there's a rumor that President Trump threatened further tariffs on China and even raised the possibility of firing Fed chair Jerome Powell alarming markets.

I'm sure. We would have to have a very long moment of silence for Jerome, if that were to happen. Apparently, the rumor going around in the media is that the administration reportedly explored options to fire Powell after Trump lambasted the Fed, spurring fears. about Fed independence. And so, yeah, the Fed is supposed to be independent. We don't comment on politics, but it really is funny to, you know, come out with this tariff strategy and then be like looking for somebody to fire who's important and like fire

the guy who's like, what did I do? Yep. And so the Fed has the ability to lower interest rates when they're doing, I think, new auctions. But they aren't always doing new auctions. We talked about this with the buddy of ours who said that the Fed actually has, Not that much control over the long end of the yield curve. And they try and do different things to, yeah, the 10 years, like the really important signal. That's the one that people have been.

You can try to finesse it. You can try and finesse it. But it's going to do its thing. It's going to kind of do its thing. And that's the economic indicator that a lot of people have been tracking. In fact, some Trump appointees had said that lowering the 10 year was a goal for this administration. And the opposite happened. The 10 year rose.

And that means, you know, potentially higher. higher mortgage rates, less affordability, maybe house prices come down because interest rates go up. Sometimes that happens. But in general, it can lead to a lot of turmoil economically. And it's not where it wasn't the stated position of the administration. And so now they're maybe looking for someone new to step in to take over and potentially work towards lowering that interest rate. But there's only so much you can do. It is a free market. SMP 500 and the Dow fell sharply with U.S. stocks down over 10% year to date. moment of silence.

Moment of silence. This moment of silence is brought to you by Ramp. Go to ramp.com. Tech shares led those losses after companies like NVIDIA. It's a word. It's another rough drop. Export restrictions to China would, quote unquote, chisel billions off their sales.

We talked about this last week. The NASDAQ today alone is down three and a half percent. It's a big. I mean, it's not 5 percent like it was a couple weeks ago, but it's not great. They're calling it the sell America trade that picked back up on Monday. We've been saying this bull market for short selling.

Bull market for coining, but I would prefer people don't create a coinage around sell America. No, no, no. I don't like that at all. I like it. But it was the trade over the last few weeks. There's been a flight to safety. Gold has been on a record run,

which is accelerated amid the uncertainty. People are just looking to avoid volatility. Bitcoin has also been... This is the interesting thing you wanted to talk about. I'm decoupling. Yeah. I mean, it's been like a back and forth narrative because Tyler Winkovost posted, hey, for the first time, Bitcoin's not trading in lockstep with the market. So the market sold off and Bitcoin didn't sell off as much.

Normally, they're highly, highly correlated, which is something that was theorized not to be the case if Bitcoin really does become this asset of last reserve, this store of value, this digital gold. But now, after looking at the market from, and of course he posted that and immediately Bitcoin moved in lockstep with the, which is kind of just like, it feels like if you post something like very conviction led like that, you're just going to get destroyed by whatever market does. And I think who's the Marshall sports guy? Dave Portnoy was posting about Bitcoin. A lot of people, you know, decoupling. A lot of people said it, oh, could be, you know, sort of bad signal. that Dave Portnoy is bullish. But Bitcoin's down 7% year-to-date, but today it is up almost 2%, which is pretty meaningful. You wouldn't expect that given how much the NASDAQ has sold off. Typically, they move in lockstep.

So it'll be interesting to follow that story. We're going to do a whole crypto day on TBPN, bring on a bunch of founders and investors and just general crypto folks and try and get to the bottom of like, what is cryptocurrency? That's the question I want to answer. Like, I know it has something to do with, like, numbers and money. But you've never seen it. I've never seen it. So I want to bring on some experts.

We're going to bring on some people that run public companies, some people that are billionaires, multi-billionaires, and will ask them, like, what is this whole crypto thing about? And that should be very informative. Yeah. For me, at least. On a more serious note, interested to see where crypto goes from here, right? There's been a cool down in the meme coin market.

Yep. The Pumpdunt Fund chaos seems to have subsided. Yeah. And we've seen that twice now. We saw this with OpenC, you know, was doing, I forget, you know, hundreds of millions of net income a year. I think at its peak, pump fun was doing the same thing. OpenC's volume, you know, fell off a cliff, unfortunately.

We'll see what happens. They were in my YC batch. We should get up on the show. I'd love to know kind of like they have a lot of money. They have a lot of talent. They're clearly planning their next act. I wonder what that would be. I think that, you know, a lot of people have written them off, but that might be wrong.

Maybe they'll come back and do something else. There's clearly opportunity in crypto if you have a lot of money and a lot of, you know, hardcore developers to build something. But there's a possibility that they need to completely reinvent themselves. I agree. But that can also be a trap. Sometimes the second that, you know, a company reinvents themselves. The thing that they were originally working on rips again. So who knows what happens with NFTs.

Yeah, I mean, NFTs specifically were always one of those things where I was willing to buy the narrative of like, this is a digital art house, this could be the next Sotheby's, but their valuation was like 10 times what Sotheby's was or something like that very quickly. And so the idea of just being like a museum, like I think at the height like NFTs were the volume was higher than the fine art market. And that has hundreds of years of experience. So, so two reasons for that. One, same thing happens in the art world where if you discover an artist and you buy up their works before they get into Sotheby's and these big auctions and galleries, et cetera, you can buy incredible pieces of art for thousands, you know, single digit thousands. And then the second, the reason for the volume is that it's very hard to have a, you know, $200,000 piece of art change hands six times in a day. But that was happening with Cryptopunks. that was happening with, you know, board apes and many, many, many, many other projects.

Oh, well. Well, let's move on to the legacy of Pope Francis. He passed away, I believe, this morning. In fact, it was so sudden that the Wall Street Journal, the print edition, does not mention his passing away. It mentions that yesterday, thousands in St. Peter Square on Sunday were treated to a surprise Pope-Mobile trip, drawing cheers and applause as Pope Francis continues his recovery from double pneumonia. He also met with Vice President J.D. Vance. And this was getting me emotional because it's pretty, I mean, I don't know that this is the

case, but it feels like they did this because he knew that he was maybe not going to make it very much longer. And so it was like his last opportunity to go and see everyone. And it's just, it's just brave. I don't know. It's beautiful. Anyway, the Wall Street Journal, has an obituary, of course. And I think we should read through a little bit of it and give some background on who this man was. So he was elected the 266th Pope in 2013, and it marked a series of first. He was the first Jesuit Pope, and as an Argentine, the first from outside Europe. His legacy is Pope Francis, who died on Easter Monday at age 88, was disappointing even on the priorities he set for his papacy. Pope Francis was known for urging concern for the poor in the best Christian tradition. He

called for a clergy of shepherds who have the smell of their sheep. Interesting metaphor. That is, priests and nuns who shared the suffering of their neighbors. He made support for the weakest among us, the rhetorical centerpiece of his papacy. He brought a public informality and openness to the Vatican. Alas, Pope Francis believed ideologies that keep the poor and poverty. One of those earthly dogmas is radical environmentalism, which isn't about keeping the earth clean for human beings, but keeping the earth itself and treating man as the enemy. Interesting. So the Wall Street Journal is kind of coming for him a little bit on this, saying he shouldn't have been as much of an environmentalist as he was, which is interesting, how much the vibe has

shifted. And we'll see where this goes with the next pope. In one of his writings as Pope, he cited air conditioning as an example of harmful habits of consumption that will lead to mankind's self-destruction. He didn't seem to realize that escaping poverty requires greater energy consumption, which is something we've touched on with a lot of the founders on the show. Obviously, Augusta Toreko is religious, but then also says that, you know, it is our job as stewards to terraform and make the planet safer and healthier for all humans. There's a lot of evidence that if you enable humans to live in cooler climates, even just indoors, that can, you know, be quite positive.

Increased prosperity and also health, yeah. Yeah. His papacy was marked by anti-Americanism and not merely against Donald Trump. He seemed to believe that Latin America is poor because the United States is rich. That's a recipe for stagnation and despair because the real reasons so many in Latin America languish and poverty are at home. Lack of rule of law, business government collusion, protectionism, and other barriers to human flourishing. Some attribute his hostility of free markets to his Latin American background, born in Buenos Aires.

Pope Francis at a young age was made the provincial superior for the Jesuit order in Argentina. during the time of the military junta. This was a hard line to walk, and some of his order accused him of unfairly being too friendly with the regime. Argentina, for much of his life, was dominated by Peronism, a brand of left-wing populism

named for Argentine President Juan Peron. When he looked around, he saw corruption and the rich doing very well as their fellow countrymen languished in poverty. Perhaps it was undeniable that he confused Argentina's corporatism with capitalism, which is a common mistake. It makes a lot of sense.

Less forgivable was his deal with Beijing as the Pope that gave the Communist Party influence in the choice of bishops. Conditions for Catholics in China have worsened, though the Vatican has renewed the kowtow several times. The Vatican has stayed silent on the plight of publisher Jimmy Lai, who is China's best known imprisoned Catholic. Unlike his two immediate predecessors, John Paul II and Benedict,

Pope Francis was from the progressive wing of his church. He punished traditionalist bishops who disagreed with his direction, and he has populated the Cardinal ranks with fellow progressives. The irony is that progressivism is most popular in places like Europe where the Sunday pews are empty. The church is thriving in Africa among younger Orthodox Catholics in the West and among younger Orthodox Catholics in the West looking for meaning in life beyond material consumption.

The Cardinal, who will choose the Pope's successor, will determine which future they want for the church and the world's 1.3 billion Catholics. Fascinating. Yeah, interesting to see the Walser's, journal kind of wrestle with his legacy in a tasteful but critical way. One thing that he did is he got the PoteMobile to go electric. Wait, really?

That's an electric G-Wagon? It's an electric G-Wagon, so it's the car that he was in yesterday for... I had no idea. Because there is a new G-Wagon that's electric, but they electrify the old G-Wagon. They're using the G-580 base. Really? Which makes a lot of sense. You're in crowds.

Let's not emit. Let's flex on everyone with our G-wagons. Is that what you're saying? That wasn't what I was saying, but one can take it like that. But anyways, of course, there were a lot of memes because JD had a visit yesterday. But again, it makes sense if the Pope is sick, you want to go visit him before he's sick. Anyone saying anything else is being a little silly, in my opinion. Put on the tinfoil hat.

Put on the tinfoil hat. Anyway, there was an interesting. article, an op-ed by Roland Fryer in the Wall Street Journal that I want to go through, the economics of polarization. Are you familiar with Roland Friar? It's fascinating. So he's an economics professor at Harvard, very outspoken, very, he's been a little controversial. There's a back and forth. He was kind of attacked. But he came up with a bunch of behavioral economics, kind of foundational research. One of the most controversial things was that you should pay kids to do their homework. So basically, like, create an economy for children.

Yeah. But he studied it and found that it was, like, one of the greatest motivators was just paying kids to do work. It makes so much sense. Why would you not want to drill into a child's head that if you work hard, you will be rewarded? Yeah, totally. Because that's sort of the lesson of life. Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, 100%. 100%. This started, you know, mowing lawns, picking weeds. around. Yeah. I was listening to Palmer Lucky on on tetragrammaton with Rick Rubin yesterday and he was saying that he he had, he built like the largest collection of VR headsets and then he also built a massive gaming rig with six monitors and top tier computer hardware. And then that's what inspired him to go into VR and start Oculus. And I was just, and he was like, yeah, and I paid for all this like doing like little odd jobs and like side hustles as like a kid. And I was like,

yeah, but I'm running the math, and I'm like, if you're spending, if you're spending like $40,000, like, you're pretty good at those side hustles, Palmer. Like, you were working hard. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's very different. It's like, like, white hat hacking. Totally. I don't even know if it's that. I think about you just had like a true grind side for like not just mowing lawns, but like mowing a lot of lawns because most kids, you know, if they have like a side job, it's like 200 bucks a month or something. It's not, it's not enough to get you to like a $20,000 investment in like a gaming PC very quickly. Like for me, it was mostly like make some money and then go buy like a single video game for 50 bucks. Some candy. Some candy. Exactly. This is the usual stuff. But it seemed like Palmer really got the economic flywheel going early. But it makes sense because like he's very entrepreneurial.

It would make sense that he'd be making a lot of money. Anyway, Roland Fryer just published some research on the economics of polarization that I think is fascinating. There's this big question about, you know, America seems more polarized than ever. what is driving that. And the subhead here is people tend to interpret ambiguous information as confirming whatever they believed to begin with. And so we'll read some of this article and go through it. But it's interesting to see like where else will this take place and where else can this

potentially be exploited or mitigated depending on your goals, I suppose. So nothing throws America's divisions into stark relief. quite like having Donald Trump in the White House, but Mr. Trump is an effective, but Mr. Trump is an effect of polarization as much as a cause. We've been growing apart politically for decades. And so he gives some data to kind of back up this claim

that the political division in America is not driven necessarily by Trump. Trump is like a product of it. So he says... And a catalyst in many ways because he's... Totally. Extreme. Yes.

Yes. Totally. And so nowadays, 85% of Democrats, but only 30% of Republicans think the government should ensure that everyone has health care. So health care used to be a little bit more bipartisan. The gap has grown 24 points during the last two decades. Then there's some other stats here. The government has too much power when they poll people on that. 73% of Republicans say, yes, the government has too much power.

Only 31% of Democrats say the government has too much power. And it's a 51 points shift. In fact, during the George W. Bush administration, Democrats were more likely to say that the government has too much power. And then the split on whether abortion should be legal. Whenever my team doesn't have power, the other team has too much power. Yep, yep. Which I agree with. Yeah, yes, yes.

Yeah, 100% of people agree that they don't have enough power, I think. And then on global warming, the split is 33 points on abortion. It's 30 points. lawmakers have also become more polarized over the last 50 years. And there's even polarization over why this happened. Some data suggests Republican politicians pulled to the right, but conservatives note that the government has moved sharply to the left. And so 52% of Americans said that Democrats have moved too far left,

while 35% said the Republicans had moved too far right. And so everyone is saying, oh, the Overton window is shifting. I haven't changed. Everyone else has changed. It's a very common refrain. Even seemingly nonpartisan measures such as the consumer sentiment index reveal polarization, Republicans had more positive views than Democrats about their economic situation during the first Trump term.

And then this flipped in 2021. So they're like, oh, yeah, like, I'm doing pretty well economically. Like, I got a job. Inflation's not too bad. And then in 2021, they're like, oh, like, it's terrible. Of course, like, COVID's in there. There was really inflation. There was stimulus.

All sorts of stuff happened. but of course people are more likely to report that like, you know, I'm doing better of my guys in the big house in the White House. How can two people observe the same information and come away with starkly different conclusions and why do views on factual questions such as the cause of global warming or the strength of the economy break down so neatly on ideological lines? And so Roland Fryer tells this anecdote about his wife and how this, this like inspired him to run this test essentially. So he says, his wife is a great driver, but she blows the horn way too much for his taste, which is hilarious. So any slight perceived or real, and you get a loud honk if she's behind the wheel. One morning when we were commuting, a car pulled past her on the highway and veered just slightly our way so that its tires drifted into our lane. She honked.

I tried to reason with her. His driving was within the usual margin of air. What an economist thing to say. This is totally within one standard deviation of very. driving abilities. Like, you shouldn't, you shouldn't be honking. Could be a lot. Yeah.

So her response, she says, I've kept myself for many, many accidents by being a proactive honker. And so they observed, he says, we observed the same incident, but we drew opposite conclusions and each became more convinced we'd been right all along. Is this consistent with rational thought? And could it explain why Americans have become so polarized? As soon as she dropped me off on campus, I ran to my office to tell a fellow economist this anomaly I had observed. Was my wife irrational? Was I? Or did we need to think about

inference and decision-making a bit differently? I first confided in Matthew Jackson, who specializes in social networks. He seemed as perplexed as I was because he knows my wife. He offered up several interpretations that would make her seem more rational. Finally, he relented, and it became one of the guiding examples for us to think differently about how humans process information when there is uncertainty. In the simplest version of the model they deployed, imagine that the truth is either A or B. Climate change either is or is not caused by human activity. There's no gray area in between. The death penalty either deters crime or it doesn't.

No one really knows the truth, but we start with a prior belief about how plausible A or B seem. Each person observes a series of signals, information that suggests the truth might be A or B. Some signals are ambiguous and come off as A B rather than A or B. If you're fully rational, able to set aside prior beliefs, you'd store the information in a sequence. A, B, A, B, A, A, A, B, A, A, A, B, A, A, B, like that. So, so when there's a confusing signal, you just think it's both. But, and if you add that up, that sequence that he describes, it's three points for A, three points for B, and three ambiguous signals. Like, the signal doesn't, doesn't lean one way or the other. But if you tend to align unclear evidence with your

previous expectation, you would come away thinking your original instincts were right, because you'd, you'd count all the AB signals as A if you're on like Team A originally. And so now you think the evidence falls on your side by a two to one margin. So you would count up six A's. You would ignore the three Bs in the ABs and you would have three Bs. So you'd say, hey, six to three, I'm seeing a pattern here. Further observations of the world entrenched this view rather than correcting it because future ambiguous signals will have the same skew.

Our main mathematical result demonstrates that if a large enough share of experiences are open to interpretation. Maybe the guy who drifts into your lane until you honk is an example of the horn saving lives, or maybe he's an average driver who never posed a threat. Then two agents who have differing prior beliefs who see the exact same sequence of events can often end up polarized with one person being absolutely sure of A and the other of B. And so they ran an experiment online with 600 subjects modeled on a 1979 paper by Charles G. Lord. First, precipitants were presented with questions about their beliefs on climate change and the death penalty. They read a series of summaries of research about each topic.

After each summary, we asked participants if they thought the summary provided evidence for or against the topic on a 16-point scale. After all the summaries were presented, we repeated the initial questions about their belief on the topic. There was a very significant correlation between a subject's prior belief and his interpretation of the evidence. More than half of our sample exited our experiment with more extreme beliefs than at the start, even though the evidence presented to them was neutral. That is wild. The discouraging implication is that in a world where information is plentiful, people will become more divided, not less. That is true, even if they all see the same information,

which they don't because they can choose between Fox News or MSNBC, and it's true even if our widening divisions prove deeply unhealthy for our country. And that's why you got to turn off Fox news. You got to turn off MSNBC and you got to only watch TBPN. That's the only option. But there's so much to talk about here. And we promise to validate your preexisting beliefs. Yes. With data. Absolutely. Absolutely. I thought this was interesting because this goes back to the debate around Facebook. So when there was increasing political polarization, it was kind of blamed on Facebook for funneling people into extreme echo chambers, right? They called them, what were they called? I forget the name. There was like some buzzword for this, for this like you go down like a

rabbit hole on YouTube and you start with like. And this was pre-algo feeds even in the way they are today. Of course there were algorithms that would decide what content to serve you, but it wasn't, it was still heavily based on the social graft. Filter-bul. is the term. Filter bubble. Filter bubble. And so you would search for, like, you would start a search like, you know,

what to do after college. How do I get a job? And then you would land on, you know, a Jordan Peterson video that was just, you know, about how to live your life, make your bed, right? But then Jordan Peterson also had conservative views. And so you would go from the general life advice into his conservative views.

But, and then he's not really that extreme, but then there'd be someone else who is recommended who was like just political, less life advice and a little bit more extreme and then a little bit more extreme. Make your bed with an American flag. Exactly. And so people would go down these filter bubbles and then pretty soon everything they would be seeing was there.

Zuck made the argument that we haven't seen political polarization in other countries where Facebook is very active. And so he was saying like maybe this is more of a reflection on America than Facebook as a product because the usage data is really high. I think his example was like Malaysia or the Indonesia or something, and their society wasn't as polarized as America. But I think it's interesting that it's potentially merely the explosion of information that creates division.

And if you're just exposed to, if you're literally living in a cave, you're less partisan. It's kind of interesting. Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, I don't really know where all this goes. Does it exonerate Facebook and the social media platforms entirely? Clearly there are some platforms that are extremely skewed and biased. That's kind of like by design almost.

But it's interesting to dig into, at the very least, you as an individual need to understand if you're interpreting those A, B signals, those neutral evidence points as adding to your side. I think it also applies to the last few weeks with the tariffs. People are like, oh, treasuries are selling off. Oh, gold is, gold is ripping, Bitcoin is ripping. And everybody's seeing sort of the same set of information, but applying different beliefs to it.

Somebody might say, you know, gold is ripping. You know, people are, you know, basically shorting the dollar. They're short the dollar. They're short America, so they're buying gold. Yet every financial crisis, for the most part, people tend to buy gold because it's seen as, you know, more stable and predictable and a true store of value. Same thing with treasury selling off.

It's like, okay, if you're in a trade war and there's this complex, geopolitical, you know, dynamic and T-bill yields are ripping because foreign governments are selling them. Well, there could be a lot of other reasons other than purely just sell America. America's over. The dollars done, that kind of thing. And so, yeah, it's hard to, yeah, it's hard to balance all the different signals. But if you're looking to get it on the action with some gold, why don't you buy a gold watch on Fesla?

I'm going to get Vesel.com, download the app. Pick up a Rolex day date. A lot of people think, oh, I should buy gold. Yeah. I'm going to go get some gold bars. Yeah, why not? Gold. Something you can.

That's right. Or gold. Yeah. Buy a gold watch, go to Bezal. Your Bezile concierge is available and now to source any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch.

Not financial advice. Not financial advice. But speaking of things that are somewhat related to fashion, robots are having trouble making Nike sneakers. This is an interesting story in the context of re-industrialization. Trey Stevens had a piece

on pirate wires all about the importance of robotics and automation in the reindustrialization story that we should go through or talk to them about. But I thought this was an interesting discussion of like, okay, if the tariffs are here to stay

and we are trying to boost U.S. manufacturing, what can we learn from Nike's move to Asia historically? And so Trump is betting that the threat of tariffs on low-cost countries in Asia will pressure

American companies to bring back manufacturing and jobs to the United States. But high U.S. labor costs mean companies would have to find a way to replace human workers with machines for some industries that's proved surprisingly difficult. Indeed, a years-long effort by Nike to shift part of its manufacturing from China, Indonesia, and Vietnam to North America illustrates how tough it is for U.S. brands to wean themselves off of the flexible low-cost contract manufacturers that use armies of laborers to churn out an array of products for consumers. Yeah, I mean, one of the the interesting things about the push in Foxcon where they bring in a million migrant workers

is that you can't really do that with robots. Like the CAPEX, there's no, there's no fungible flow of robotics yet that you could say, hey, you can imagine a world in the future where you bring in a hundred thousand on-demand robots for a, you know, a sprint, a seasonal sprint. but that world also feels pretty far off 15 years away right it's hard to imagine it happening

in three years right or on the timeline that the tariffs are on which is the most pressing issue yeah yeah yeah it's not something that a company can think like okay we're like these tariffs

are going to affect our Q3 results like how do we automate everything so this actually started a decade ago and it feels like we're still a few decades out from the robotics automation of footwear manufacturing but back in 2015, Nike poured millions of dollars into an ambitious effort to partly automate what has always been a highly labor-intensive industry that's making shoes.

At the time, rising labor costs in China and advances in manufacturing techniques such as 3D printing opened the possibility of finding a new way to make shoes that would rely on fewer workers. Have you ever seen Zellerfeld? It's a 3D-printed shoe company? We should have the CEO on. I've met him at a party once. It seemed like a good... And I think the company is doing very well, but they've been obviously small because they're

startup. But it'll be interesting to see about where he thinks that will go. Yeah, but this is interesting because even as far back as 2015, Nike won. It was trying to think about bringing production back to North America, localizing it. And it hasn't exactly panned out. Yeah, yeah. Which puts them in a tough position, right? Because they're like, hey, we're getting tariffed.

And we've also been made a good faith effort to do this. And it didn't pan out. Now here we are stuck between a rock and a hard place. Yeah. So the Nike partnered with this company called Flex, an American manufacturer that helped Apple set up a complex factory in Texas to make Mac pros. That's the one that there was that picture

of Donald Trump cutting the ribbon. The goal was to make tens of millions of Nike sneakers at a new high-tech manufacturing site in Guadalajara, Mexico. Mexico by 2023. The plant would still include thousands of workers, but far fewer than are needed in Asia to make the same number of sneakers. If successful, the project could be a model for production in the United States, according to some involved in the effort. Nike's competitors also sense an opportunity to rethink manufacturing built around massive Asian factories where armies

of cheap, skilled laborers stitch fabrics and glue soles to shoes on hand. It feels less modern, more like a Ford Model T production line combined with a middle ages cobbler's bench, said Kevin Haley, the executive vice president innovation at clothing maker Under Armour in 2015. He pledged to use automation to make shoes in Baltimore in a project he called Project Glory. Love it. Good name. But, you know, it's rough. Adidas also got in the action.

They launched speed factories in Atlanta and Germany with high-tech manufacturing that's quickly spit out shoes, heralding a new era in footwear creation. They want to move out of China and Vietnam. They have the technology to do that differently, said Mike Dennis and Flex's then president in 2016. Nike's effort was the boldest. The company aimed for large-scale automated production under a decade, which it said would save on labor costs

and allow it to deliver new models of shoes to Americans faster. Tom Fletcher, who oversaw the project for Flex, came into the effort feeling confident, having just built a highly complex Mac Pro factory for Apple in Austin, Texas. You would think that making shoes would be easier than making Mac pros, and yet they ran into some trouble. At the time, Apple had been looking to bring some manufacturing home, flex pushed to rejigger production lines and use automation,

trying to find as many ways as possible to minimize human interaction. That experience came in handy. No, it's just interesting. Flex has not exactly performed, despite the boost in interest in localized manufacturing. Are you looking at the stock? Yeah, they're, they're, how big is the company? Very large company already.

$30 billion. $30 billion. $30 billion. $30 billion of revenue. I'm guessing one of the reasons for this is I bet their supply chain, yep, they're, they've still got, despite, you know, making efforts to help onshore, they have quite a bit of exposure to Asia. Everyone does these days.

If you dig deep enough, you're going to find some tariffed goods in your supply chain, no matter who you are. So the machines were supposed to build the upper part of the shoe, knit fabric, add logos, and glue the sole. I talked to somebody who was doing some outsourcing of the upper in China, went over there while the tariffs were there, very chaotic and yeah just like a very a very rough go big culture clash moment and so these efforts

ran into trouble the robots struggled to handle the soft squishy and stretchy parts that are integral to shoe making shoe fabrics also expand and contract depending on the temperature while in shoemaking no two souls are exactly alike so yeah I mean if you consider like the benefit of automation on a car production line is that like some of these parts are too heavy for people to lift so you have to use a machine. And then it's the same stamped metal every single time. And it's dangerous. And it's also just the exact same way.

And then there's also welding going on. And shoes are much smaller and more fine-grained and then obviously more malleable. Yeah. Everything about making electronics is about perfect precision, right? It's making sure that a component has a specific. specific spot within a device and you need to make sure that it goes there. You kind of don't want a human on that. Yeah, you can imagine that that being harder for a human to do very consistently.

Yeah, consistently. But if it means like, hey, we need to put, you know, this string in this hole and then that hole and over here feels very difficult for a robot to do, you know, entirely reliably. Yeah. All these things, all these things always sound trivial. Yep. hey, we're going to make a robot that makes shoes.

It sounds so easy, honestly. Yeah, it doesn't sound as hard as it is in practice, right? That you have Nike doing. I think it's, I would imagine that crocs are fairly automated because it's kind of just like pour. Yeah, pour the polymer in a mold and you're good. Just kind of like, you know, melt it together. But for something as complex as a Nike shoe that has a soul, a logo sewn on,

And there's, I mean, even just lacing a shoe. Like, that is an incredibly difficult task for a robot, right? And become laced. You have to poke those through. It's hard for me sometimes. Shoes don't lace themselves. No. You're trying to do something very precise.

And then it gets a little colder or warmer. And the material changes on you. We did not anticipate that. As a result, factory production never became as automated as envisioned as shoe production increased. The factory personnel swelled to five. thousand, about twice as many as originally planned and costing more than a similar workforce in Vietnam. Task after task proved challenging to automate, like the delicate work of gluing

soles to the upper part of the shoe. If you didn't lay it the right way, there would be a noticeable twist of the shoe, a misalignment that aesthetically means it would fail quality tests. A central product was also a huge variety of shoes Nike produces. For decades, American consumer companies have given designers nearly unlimited freedom to dream up the coolest products and relied on Asian manufacturers to deliver them. Unlike cars or iPhones, shoe models are changing all the time. Yeah, I mean, if you think about some of the, like the how it's made episodes that clearly are heavily automated, it's very much stuff like, you know, even like food manufacturing. It's like every Cheeto is going to be the same. They're just going to go in like slightly different

size bags. And you can just imagine, you know, all that going down a conveyor belt, a little bit trickier when you're assembling a shoe where, you know, they're all different sizes. I mean, just the sizing things crazy, right? It's a plastic bag and then something needs to go and it fill it up and it moves down. It's like far more easy than a shoe which has, I bet the average Nike shoe has, I mean, they sell a lot of them. But they sell a lot of them. But when you think about the skew complexity, I mean, what are there like 20 different sizes of men's shoes?

Just for a vanilla run, if you just want to be able to reach everyone from like a size four to a size 14 or something? Like you're in a very custom. So Nike says there's typically 23 parts to a shoe. Each one of those needs to be different for the size. The color lining tongue. The color needs to be different. Eyelet, quarter, quarter overlay. Bam, out salts, tip, laces, swoosh.

Wow. It's like a miracle that these even exist. It's almost like. Yeah. And then the sizing thing you were talking about is like, great. You get it working for one size. Is it going to work when you need to do the next size? The next size?

For your horse feet. Okay. It's fine. It's no big deal. So automating manufacturing means designing simple products that machines can undertake over and over. Electronics manufacturing uses hard, standardized materials, as you mentioned, allowing machines to replicate the same step millions of times. You'll have to make sacrifices from how to design to the complexity of the materials and models you work with. This is the former Nike executive who oversaw the project.

That goes against what the consumer wants. They want an incredible diversity of product. And we, I mean, we see this in cars. Like the Tesla Model 3, Model S, like they look very similar. Even the Y and the X look very similar. They often come in the same colors. There aren't that many. You don't really see that many with, like, oh, this one has fender flares.

This one has wings on it. Like, all that stuff would be completely aftermarket. It doesn't come from the factory that way. Versus, you know, a more mature company like Mercedes sells like a wagon version of the E4.50, right? the E-63. They also sell convertibles of the C-series. They sell long wheelbase versions. They sell SUV versus electric versions.

For example, the Q8 is the same as the cayenne is the same as the Euris. Yeah, yeah, yeah, same power trainer. It's all Volkswagen. So it's like basically the same car with like a different exterior and a different exhaust. And consumers want that. Consumers want that. And so, I mean, Elon's found a way and we'll go into the Tesla story later. but Elon's found a way to convince people in mass,

at least during the height of the Tesla boom, to say, hey, yeah, it's going to look like every other Tesla three and you're going to get lost in the parking lot probably, but it has a summon feature. It has the best self-driving. It's electric. It's super cheap. Found a new way to differentiate it.

Exactly. So it's like this appliance car. It's moving it to the iPhone. Nike, if they really wanted to go all in automation, they should have found a way to make a product that is as, ubiquitous as the iPhone with as little standard as, or as much standardization as possible. Tesla is just getting hammered down 10%. No, 7%, but they're suffering from the trade war.

Tariffs. Terrace, but then also. The lack of a naturally aspirated V8. Also just a broader tech sell off. Yeah. Yeah. And yeah, I mean, still no news about a gated manual, right? That's right.

And so that's got to hurt the stock. We're kind of waiting on that. That's the, that's the intermediary. Ferrari's coming back, by the way, with a manual. they're doing a manual V8. Did they name it yet? I don't know. All they said was that we are committing to a manual

ICE, like no hybrid car. They heard the vibe shift. Well, they saw what happened with Porsche. Yeah. Because Porsche launched the ST, which was really great. And then the R, I believe, was manual as well. And so they said, like, there are certain collectors that just want manual, like, more analog cars

and they're willing to pay for them. And it makes sense for Ferrari. They'll make a ton of it. Yeah. trying to think about it. I was trying to think what is the desire, a highly desirable car that is a hybrid or electric? La Ferrari. La Ferrari? I don't think LaFarri is a hybrid. I'm almost positive it is. Is it? Yeah. You're right. You're right. Mogged. Mogged. 918 spider. Hybrid. Yeah, the spider, too. 296. But? Hybrid.

I guess I could have made it more precise in the last few years, right? In the last few years, I mean, there's a new 9-11 that has a hybrid. I think it'll sell pretty well. What else? Who else? It is the latest W-1 from McLaren? Yeah, I'm sure that is. It's got to be hybrid, right?

Everything's hybrid now. Anyway, let's get back to Nike. At one point, it took the Flex team eight months to figure out how to automate a way to put the Nike swoosh on a shoe, only for Nike to move on to a new shoe line for which the method Nike developed no longer worked. And so there's just this cadence of like new shoes. They have to have new, new styles. They said it would have been easier to mass produce uncomplicated shoes, such as ones with a machine knit upper part and matched with simple molded bottoms. But Nike was unwilling to put limits on its design and expected manufacturers

to produce whatever new shoes their teams dreamed up. Manufacturing in a lot of ways did not have an equal seat at the table. And that's interesting because obviously the manufacturing of the iPhone is deeply integrated into the company. And they drive the manufacturing optimization that happens at Foxcon. This is the whole debate about are they transferring too much IP? But you know that the iPhone team is thinking about what is available on the camera side. How does that fit in? And then how can they build software on top of that? And that vertical integration has really led Apple to have this integrated approach that creates a fantastic product, feels like Nike was very much still in the mindset of like, let's separate. How could we design the phone so that it would be insane to not

get a case? Oh, what if we made it to the camera, like one of the primary use cases of the device protrudes across the back so it doesn't sit flat? That is brilliant. So by 2017, Flex's investors were balking at rising costs at the company with some questioning why an outfit that makes Electronics was involved in shoe production. Flex and Nike wound up the project. I actually think it's smart. It's like, hey, who's done really advanced-scale consumer product manufacturing? Okay, they've done it in electronics.

Probably a better, generally a safe bet. Yep. But it wasn't safe enough. And so Flex and Nike wound up the project by early 2019. By then, Under Armour had stopped mentioning to its investors, Project Glory, to make shoes in the United States. That year, Adidas, which had also. face challenges producing complex shoes with robots said it would close down production in

Atlanta and Germany. It shipped its speed factory technology to suppliers in Asia. The three shoemakers stuck with their original offshore locations, Vietnam, China, and Indonesia. Even after pandemic era, factory shutdown showed the risk of having such a concentrated note of production. Adidas, Under Armour, and Nike, they are not talking to the journal about this. but now China, Vietnam, and Indonesia are in Trump sites. They got huge tariffs on them, and there will be an army. Howard Lutnik said that the administration wants labor-intensive industries to return to the U.S. He actually said that there will be an army of millions and millions of millions of people

screwing in little, little screws to make iPhones. So we're going to make them here. That's a word-for-word quote. word for word quote in a recent interview with CBS. All right. I threw my How to Make iPhones book in the trash. Nope. You got to try to get it out.

I need to go find a dump, but they took it too. Yeah. You got to get it back. The threat of new tariffs is pushing some to ask whether Nike or others will ultimately have to reconsider efforts to automate manufacturing and bring shoe production back to the U.S. People think it could still be done, although it won't be easy. You need some deep pockets and some patience because it's not going to happen fast.

But yeah, we'll see. You know what? Aren't patient? Who? Tariffs. They're hitting. They're hitting right now. Right now. But if you want to track the tariffs, head over to Polly Market.

I'm sure there's a bunch of great markets on what's happening in the tariff world. And if you're looking to cut costs because the tariffs, head over to ramp. Time is money. Save both. They got easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. Let's move over to the next story. Man versus Machine. as China shows off humanoid robots and half marathon.

It's pretty crazy. Somebody came up to us in the gym this morning. It was like, you guys are talking about this, right? And we were like, ah, I actually hadn't heard this. But it is in the journal. China, the Beijing Half Marathon featured a road race between humans and 21 different robot models. And it showed how far robots are from mimicking people.

Good example of why it's difficult to make shoes. It's also difficult for robots to run in shoes. They're both having trouble. That's what we've been saying, would like to see a humanoid robot drink 12 beers and play 18 and call it work. Exactly. It's not happening in this year. Not happening in this year.

Not this year. So the Tian Kang Kong Ultra, a humanoid robot, runs across the finish line of a half marathon in Beijing. So let's run through this. Metal, asphalt. Metal met asphalt in a half marathon that featured thousands of human runners and 21 Chinese humanoid robot models. Saturday's road race involving human runners

and a score of robots in Beijing has been billed as a showcase of China's cutting-edge technology. I gotta say, this is extremely cool for the robotics industry, and we should be doing this here. I mean, you saw this with... No, I posted, you remember I posted,

we need a humanoid X games, right? I want to see humanoid swing. Yes, surfing. I want them to see... Do the 360, do the 1080. Any, like, athlete that Red Bull sponsors, humanoid robot companies should be saying, hey, we're going to get our humanoid to go cliff jumping.

to go bungee jumping to, you know, do it. You know, I want to see like, you know, we really got to have the one X, the one X founders on, Neo and a bunch of the other humanoid robotic founders on to talk about, you know, all our crazy ideas and force them to do it. Big wave surfing. Big wave surfing. That seems like the touring test for humanoid robotics. If you can get barrel, if you can be waterproof.

Also, I mean, I imagine these robots are pretty heavy. You got to sink. Yeah, that's the real test is a triathlon. You swim, yeah. Do you swim? You swim, humanoid robot that swims? That's crazy. How's your battery?

You're going to hold up in an hour in salt water. Yeah, yeah. Is a honey stinger going to take you across the finish line? I don't think so. You're going to have to be recharging for an hour, robot. So it's a 13-mile race, first of its kind. The interesting is the size difference. Everybody just assumes humanoids will be, you know, six foot.

Yep. They had four-foot humanoid. Four-foot humanoid, okay. Little guys running around. So China has said it wants the country to be a world leader in humanoid robots by 2027. They are well on their way based on what I've seen. Chinese authorities have lavish support such as subsidies, talent bonuses, and tax breaks on robotics companies. In reality, the race...

Really? I'm telling me that for the first time. They know how to do some central planning over there. Yep. Say what you will about capitalism, but if you look at the subsidize industries, There's another model that seems to be working pretty well. In reality, the race showed both how quickly and smoothly some robots are able to run, but also how far away humanoids are from being able to mimic human activity. Running is a very basic ability of human beings, says the chief technology officer of the Beijing

Humanoid Robot Innovation Center, which developed one of the robots. China is making a major push to produce more and more sophisticated robots, in part to raise the automation level of its factories. Oh, they actually put the, they actually put the robot in Skechers. That's really cute. It's interesting, too. So these weren't autonomous, right?

There's people following behind the robots actually driving. It's basically driving them with a joystick. Like it's an RC car. Yep. But still very incredible feat. Okay. So the first robot off the mark was the TN. Kung Ultra.

Five foot. point nine. Hey, there we go. Got to put you on the truth zone. They're not four feet tall. No, five, nine. Five, nine, one and fifteen pounds, humanoid. Ideal build. Featuring a pitch black head and sporting an orange tank top. Three people accompanied it to help control the robot. The race was the culmination of months of training. They had to navigate the course is flat and hilly roads and maneuver around six left turns and eight right turns, according to the organizers.

Developers had to train the robots to keep their stability and balance to avoid falling over. The organizers initially planned to cut off the race at around three and a half hours, meaning that the minimum average speed was 3.7 miles per hour. Developers said the humanoid robots can typically operate for no more than two hours on a single charge of their batteries. The faster they run, the shorter the distance they can cover. Components and parts could easily break while running, so developers replace plastic parts with metal and used extra strong but costly materials. One company trained their humanoids by connecting the robot to a fitness machine like metal stand to prevent it from following.

Tienkung Ultra was developed by the Beijing Humanoid Robotic Innovation Center, a research institute also called ex-humanoid and formed by robotics, firm UBtech electronics and electric vehicle maker, Xiaomi, and the local Beijing government. It could run an average of six miles an hour and could handle hills, stairs, grass, and sand, set a profile on a robot. Yeah, this makes you think we have a number of American humanoids, Boston Dynamics, 1X figure, Tesla Optimus, there's a bunch, right?

But we actually should have way, way more. If this is going to be very important technology, we should have 20 plus, you know, venture-backed companies sort of vying for this, right? They don't all need to raise hundreds of millions or billions of dollars, but it's an area that we should be, you know, probably investing more in. And so as they're running the race,

TN. Kung Ultra falls down because the battery failed. The robots were allowed to swap batteries, and they changed the battery three times on this particular robot, wound up finishing the race. The human male champion completed the race in one hour, two minutes, and 36 seconds. It's pretty fast, followed by thousands of exhilarated human runners. Some were exhausted, resting nearby to catch their breath. After two hours, 40 minutes and 42 seconds, Tiancong Ultra was the first robot to reach the finish line, a large crowd of spectators, including government officials were eagerly awaiting the robots.

In the end, only Tian Kung Ultra and Little Rascal and two were able to meet the original cutoff time. The organizers extended it to four hours and ten minutes so that more robots could finish the race. So the humans still got it, but I mean, you look at the trend line here. I think in a couple of years, they're going to be crushing this. I see no reason why. It feels like a lot of it's probably battery technology.

Like maybe they keep swapping the battery and that's fine, but if they can really find some sort of battery breakthrough, that's going to enable more power. And like running in a straight line and some slight curves here and there, that doesn't seem like even as much of a challenge is like assembling a Nike shoe, right? It seems pretty simple. And so they should be able to win this pretty soon. Bell helicopter carrying a bunch of batteries with an extension cord.

Oh, extension cord. That humanoid is sprinting. Unstoppable for sure. 50 miles an hour. Unstoppable for sure. Anyway. Very impressive. Should we move on to some big funding news?

Yeah. Grunz lands valuation around 500 million as supplement startups boom. You're familiar with this company. I was less familiar. I saw Austin Reeves talking about it. Yeah, follow them a little bit just because I had been aware that they had. I had heard about their first year numbers, and it was kind of unbelievable. Like, it was a lot of companies have got to, their gross revenue, I think, in their first year is the run rate that companies will, best in class companies can sometimes get to at the end of their first year, but they actually like did it in that in that year.

It wasn't. So clearly the founder's an absolute dog. Yeah, was it Austin who was talking about? Yes, I have the tweet here. He says, Grunz was the most obvious billion-dollar idea hiding in plain sight. AG-1 is a $600 million revenue business. The founder of Grunz was like, what if I took AG1 and put it in a form factor that is easier to consume and doesn't taste like S-H-I-T? Easiest billion dollars anyone will ever make.

And I don't know that I don't know enough about the company to agree with that. I can tell you probably exactly why it's working so. nominative determinism. The founder's name is Chad. Okay. So that probably has had something to do with the success.

But yeah, the idea of taking... Is he the points guy or something? People are saying he was like a points guy? I don't know. He says he's founder of Grunz Daily. Previous Stanford GSB. He was at Summer's Summit Partners. And he's on the board of Ruggable,

Dr. Squatch, Brooklyn and Solo stove and seven more. So like really, really great, scaled up consumer products companies. I've seen a friend who was applying to work at Ruggable and the economics of that business were fantastic. Are you familiar with Ruggable? Ruggable is one.

And then Dr. Squatch is also very under the radar. I think that's going to be a massive outcome. Yeah. I mean, we're seeing this with the Ridgewallet guys. There's increasingly a divide between like good idea gets market attraction, but the real killers come in and optimize the business and just. the business and just actually get the full value out of the company or out of the market. So throw in Chad a follow.

But let's read through some of the information article on this. So investors are on a health kick looking for new ways to tap into the fast-growing brands and the nutrition sector. This includes pouring money into selling into startup selling supplements, particularly those that offer new ways for people to load up on vitamins, protein, and other ingredients. The latest example is a two-year-old gummy supplement startup grunes, which raised fresh cash at an up to $500 million valuation in recent weeks, according to people briefed on the deal.

Their monthly sales were roughly $10 million earlier this year. They recently added kids products as well as a sugar-free version of its adult gummies and a fresh influx of cash nearing nearly $10 million according to securities filings. Wow, really low dilution. If that's $10 million on 500 post. Not bad. They're making plenty of money themselves. One thing, the American convention.

consumer has always been undefeated. Undefeated. But is especially undefeated in the context of gummy vitamins. Oh, everyone loves a gummy. Gummy creatine. Yeah. Dan with Create. I was initially, I talked to Dan right when he was starting

create and I was a little bit skeptical around kind of the market that he was going for. I'd taken creatine forever. Yep. But he was the first company that I'm aware of to put creatine in a gummy format. Yep. And I talked to him like two months later.

It was like so obvious that the business was just working phenomenally well. And he's been knocked off a bunch of times since then. But fortunately, there's an interesting thing in the gummy space where there's always been issues with quality in the supplement space. Yeah, yeah. But specifically in gummies. I watched a YouTube video about this separately and then Dan posted about it, how some you know, mass monster bodybuilding guy tested like 20 of the top Amazon creatine gummies.

A lot of them had zero creatine. Like, yeah, like 0.001% of the label claim is wild. Yeah. Anyway, I mean, Chad, if you're a real Chad and you're serious about growing this business, get on numeral. Go to a numeral HQ sales tax on autopilot. You know you're going to have to be paying sales tax on this stuff all over America. You can spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance.

That's right. Anyway, I want to keep digging into this a little bit and then we'll move on to the next story. So they have other hot brands include Create Wellness. That's our boy, a line of of creatine gummies, which tapped into the muscle building supplements growing popularity on social media to raise $5 million in Series A funding last fall. The brand has launched in retailers and is on pace for around $25 million in annual revenue when it raised fresh cash. Let's hear it for Create Gummies. Damn. Good job. The rise in popularity of weight loss drugs is also providing a marketing annual. Unilever too. Unilevers in the game. Oh, was in that deal. Yeah.

Oh, that's awesome. With brands claiming they enhance weight loss or help with side effects of the drugs. Grunz, for instance, has run digital ads. I had to just look that up. I thought I was leaking. Yeah. He did announce it last year. Oh, yeah.

I was like, wow, I just broke your fundraise, Dan. Sorry about that. No, no, it's in the information already. And so Grunz has run digital ads targeting people taking drugs like Ozempic who want to keep getting appropriate nutrients as their appetite fades. That makes sense. Whenever you're on a cut and you're in a caloric, deficit, whether it's caused by O-ZemPEC or just, you know, keeping yourself hungry because

you're trying to get diced for summer, you want to maintain enough protein, enough protein, and enough hypertrophy training and hard training so that you don't lose muscle mass during that cut. Micronutrients, too. Micronutrients too. Which is what the greens is doing. Yeah. Yeah.

And so they sell a monthly supply of gummy vitamins for $79 or $59 for monthly subscribers. They say the products pack more than 60 vitamins, minerals, and other ingredients into one serving and it markets as gummies as cheaper, more convenient version of popular greens powders, which are made of powdered vegetables and fruits mixed together into water or smoothies. Did you ever hear about this company Golly? Yeah. Golly. Wasn't that for gut health?

The apple cider vinegar gummies? Yeah. Are they really big? They have, they are large. They do hundreds of millions of annual revenue. Wild. I think they've been somewhat unsuccessful in terms of like capturing kind of enterprise value around it.

that said, just to give you a sense of the scale, they have 364,000 reviews on Amazon. So they sell 300,000 reviews. Yeah. So run the numbers on what percentage of their customers you think have left an Amazon review, and then you can get a sense of their scale, but it's in the hundreds of millions of annual revenue. So again, Americans are buying billions and billions and billions of dollars of vitamins. You know what else has great reviews? eight sleep. I got an 81 last night. I'm getting up on the routine quality and time slept was a

little bit lower, but go and get a pod four ultra, five-year warranty, 30-night risk-free trial, free returns, free shipping. Go to eightsleep.com slash tbpn. Last night, autopilot made adjustments to boost my deep sleep by 42%. Fantastic. Thank you, autopilot. I actually went to bed later than I would have liked because. I was watching last of us. Oh, you watched the Nathan for you. It's not Nathan for you, but it's the rehearsal. Yeah, I love it. Was it good? And honestly, I almost was texting the team

because they basically recreated an entire airport in the episode, just for one of these rehearsals. That's the bar. It's our new studio, which hopefully we're signing the lease on today. We've been in diligence for a while. But we're going to have to just recreate

LAX if we, you know, if we want, you know, to reach Nathan Fielder levels. He's been on a fantastic run. I've enjoyed everything he's put out. The old Nathan for you episodes are iconic. Very rare to have business and comedy works so well together. The new season is about aircraft safety. Amazing. So.

Can't wait. I'm enjoying Last of Us, although it is terrifying. It's essentially a horror film and it's not ideal for the deep sleep, I think. So I might try and push that to. Maybe Saturday afternoons or something. It's so funny because White Lotus ended. Yep. HBO likes to keep the dread really high.

My wife was like, I'm very, I'm happy that we're not going to like be having these crazy cliffhangers and like scary scenes right before bed. And then Nathan Fielder's like sitting there like walking through like the history of like every terrible, you know, aircraft, you know, accident. And it's just like extremely stressful. Yeah. Go check it out. Go check it out. I mean, in the world of Hollywood, the name of the game is getting an Emmy or an Academy Award. It's Emmy season coming up.

And breaking news, we're going to be going for a daytime Emmy. And we're going to get a billboard. We're going to get a billboard. On AdQuick. A four-year consideration billboard. If you've ever been driving around Los Angeles around Emmy season, all the shows have, you know, all their accolades up on the billboard, we're going to go to adquick. com, out-of-home advertising made easy and measurable. say goodbye to headaches of out-of-home advertising.

Anyway, let's go to some timeline. We got our guests joining in 24 minutes. We got a great lineup. We're going to start showing you the lineup during the show. We're working on some new graphics packages, but we got David Tisch from Box Group, Mike Vernal, from Conviction, Ed, from Machina Labs, and then Will is coming on from Morgan Stanley.

We'll be talking about what's going on in the venture market, what's going on at the early stage, mid-stage, what's going on in AI investing, both at the foundation model layer and the application layer. I'm excited for the set of conversations. But let's run through some timeline posts in the meantime. We got a post from Josh. Actually, Lulu first.

Oh, you want to do Lulu first? This is going to be a nice little surprise for you. Please. Michael and Ben and Scott, if you can pull it up. Let's see. Now, it's just in the main chat. In the meantime, why don't I tell you about Wander? They just launched Wander, Malibu Vista.

It looks fantastic. You can see the ocean from that thing. find your happy place, book of wander with inspiring views, hotel great amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning and 24-7 concierge service. It's a vacation home or better. If you stay in that wander, let me know and go outside in the backyard and start yelling, I will be able to hear you. Wait, really?

Is that close? That's amazing. You'd have to yell pretty loud, but I think. I don't think our listeners will have a problem with that. Yeah. With all the creatine and all the tea. Working out that's going on in our community, I think they'll be fine. They'll be able to belt it out.

but man what a beautiful little uh what is that uh driveway but it's circular looks really beautiful i don't know i'm excited here we go uh lulu says uh if kugin does the eyebrow while describing your business model congratulations you're going to have a decacorn so she identified uh uh a specific uh i guess so founders this is something you can read into now if you are um if you are um if you are, if Kugan is talking about your business, just pay attention. He's subtly underrated when you're trying to express your stuff. He's subtly signaling something. And in this case, it's very positive.

Very fun. Yeah, what a journey. Five years ago. Bored during COVID, saw a bunch of people. A lot of people already had podcasts. A lot of people had substacks. I was like, I want to do something different, but I think it's good to get, just be noisy on the internet.

Because you're not really going to happy hours anymore during COVID. nothing going on. Why don't I start yapping on YouTube? And the first year was really, really slow. I think it took almost a full year to get more than like 100 views on a video, like 50 episodes in a row. And it was just like, it was cool. I mean, for me, I didn't understand any of stats. I didn't have any benchmarks because I was like kind of the only person in tech. Eventually Gary Tan was doing stuff, but he was so big. I wasn't really like comping to him. And so I'd just be like, oh man, like I broke 100 views on this video. Like it's a banger. This is great. So many people would have...

And I was just, like, fired up about that. But I enjoyed the process. And I was like... I did a lot of motion graphics, spent a lot of time in After Effects. I remember I did a video on breaking down Varda, and I built a 3D model of a satellite that was like wildly inaccurate

based on, like, what they actually do. But they hadn't announced what they were actually going to do yet. So I was just like, it looks like this. And it was just wildly inaccurate. But it looked really cool, and that's what matters. It illustrated the idea of them launching a satellite

and then bringing it back down. Yeah, the first time I met Delian was in Miami at Hereticon. He was like, oh, yeah, you made like that video about Varda. We actually sent that to our real production team and said, like, make it like this, but like for us. Yeah. I was like, oh, that's great. I'm helping out. What a fun guy.

And then took you five years to realize you just wanted to do a news to newsmax. Newsmax. Always be newsmax. Always be newsmaxing. All right, we got a post here from Josh Puccini. who I have did a call with a couple weeks ago, early TVPN listener. He's quote tweeting Annie.

She says, name a better dopamine hit than running. I'll wait. And he says, getting a post read on TBPN. Well, congratulations, Josh. Today's your day.

You got your post read on TVPN. Josh also has a very cool AI startup focused on automating drug development. Oh, that's cool. If you want to work in that space, go hit a month. You know, it's funny. on one of the previous shows,

we were talking about startup names, and we were saying that there's this new boom in the American manufacturing company of America, advanced manufacturing company of America, Allen Control Systems, the San Francisco Compute Company, the New York Compute Company, the New York Browser Company, whatever.

And we said, all of those are done. There's no more alpha there. We've got to go back to the dot LYs, and Roy delivered on a Sunday afternoon. He drops his launch video at 2 p.m. on a Sunday. What a funny time to launch. On Easter Sunday. Klu Lee

is out. It's the old school.ly. We're getting back in the L.Y game. I love it. Clue Lee is out. Cheat on everything. And has a very like very formally produced like really refined cinematic launch video with some great

motion graphics in there. We're going to have Roy join the show tomorrow to break it all down. But massive launch. 4.3 million views, 16,000 likes as of the time of the show. And Chad Byers got in the deal, snuck a check-in, and he breaks it down. The CLEULELEEN manifesto. We want to cheat on everything. And interesting that he's using Wii, I guess he's already deeply involved with this company,

normally think about it as an investor, but this is clearly something he's really excited about. Not sure the round was announced yet. No, no, it is. Yeah, yeah, five million. Delian said that they raised. Maybe Delian leaked it. That's not on me.

But Chad says, we want to cheat on everything. Yes, you heard that right. Interviews, exams, sales, calls, meetings. If there's a faster way to win, we'll take it. We built cluel. So you never have to think alone again. It sees your screen. Here's your audio.

Feeds you answers in real time. While others guess, you're already right. And yes, the world will call it cheating. But so was the calculator. So was spell check. So was Google. Every time technology makes us smarter, the world panics. Then it adapts.

Then it forgets. and suddenly it's normal. Activate golden retriever mode. This is golden retriever mode. You don't need to know anything. You just sit there and clearly answers every question for you. He says, but this is different. AI isn't just another tool.

It will redefine how our world works. Why memorize facts, write code, research, anything when the model can do it. In seconds. Founder mode. The best communicator, the best analyst, the best problem solver is now the last. one who knows how to ask the right question. The future won't reward effort. It will reward

leverage and being a golden retriever. So start cheating because when everyone does it, no one is. Interesting. Amazing. I'm pumped to have Roy on. And a little fun fact. Ben made all of our sound effects with his own voice. That is true. That is true. If it sounded familiar, shout out to Ben, our producer. Could have been a voice actor. Speaking of the other Ben, let's go to Ben Stiller. That's right. Sinners, he's posting a variety. Sinners has amassed the variety in the truth zone.

Okay, we like to see that. A founder. He's going founder mode. He's a producer. He's the founder of many movies. Sinners has amassed $61 million in this global debut. It's a great result for an original R-rated horror film. Yet the Warner Brothers release has got a $90 million price tag

before global marketing expenses. So profitability remains away. a ways away. And he says, in what universe does a $60 million opening for an original studio movie

warrant this headline? It's a good question. I don't know. It's not that crazy because, I mean, when big studios put hundreds of millions of dollars behind a film,

like they're typically hoping that they recoup all of that on day one, right? So, I mean, it doesn't seem like varieties being like crazily negative here and they did kind of couch that in like you know they got a ways to go to get profitable which is

like maybe factually accurate if the price tag really is 90 million but it seems seems cool I haven't seen the movie but I don't know if I'll have a chance to go see an R-rated horror film that seems hard to rally the troops around but have you watched the trailer or seen anything about sinners I don't watch horror films no too scary might throw off your sleep score yeah we're in a knock I can honestly say I've never watched a full one. I just don't, I don't get. What about the classics? What about scream or cabin in the woods?

I'm also not a movie person. I've seen like, I've seen three movies. Three movies. Wolf of Wall Street, Wall Street, Wall Street, too. Those are the three movies. The only ones that matter. Scarface, Goodfellas, Godfather.

No, you haven't even seen those, have you? Yeah, not quite. Have you seen Wall Street, too? No. you seen Wolf of Wall Street? Yes. Okay. And you've seen Wall Street?

Wait, have you not seen Wall Street? No, I have that. Oh my God. American Psycho? I have seen that. Okay, good. But I read the book first. Okay, yeah, yeah.

That's weird. The book is weird. The book is weird. The book is weird. Anyway, should we go to Jim Simons on the only rule he focused on in trading, goat? He says, we'll pull up the video, but he says something like, never doubt the computer.

It's pretty great. Can we pull this video up? It was probably never. never trusted trading decision that was made before ripping a heater. Oh yeah, he's a big smoker. Yeah, Jim Simons, in case you're not familiar, he's the worth $31 billion, 55th richest person in the world. He's the founder of Renaissance Technologies, a quant fund.

Famously, there was a market crash. Everyone asked them, what was going on at Renaissance? What was your team doing while the market was crashing? And they said, we were at a movie. Amazing. They're just like, what are we going to do? The machine will handle it. Anyway, we're ready to play the clip. The only rule is we never override the computer. No one ever comes in any day and says the computer wants to do this.

That's crazy. We shouldn't do it. You don't do it. Because you can't simulate that. You can't study the past and wonder whether the boss was going to come in and change his mind about something. So you just stick with it. And it's, and it's, uh, that's, uh, that's. It's worked. I love it. I mean, this is the story of, like, this is Lisa Dahl, Move 37. If the AlphaGo team had said, hey, we think this is an error, we're going to override what the computer's doing, they would have thought that they were more likely to be at least at all because it was a novel move that had not been considered by humans before. And, in fact, Move 37 was very important in that game.

It's interesting, too, to think of it in the context of if you interject. and insert human decision making, you're actually taking away from the program's potential success in the future, which could more than make up for a one-time mistake, right? Yeah. Like there could be if, you know, the Renaissance team, if a computer does something that loses money, effectively, but then the next time it does that thing, it makes it back 10x, right?

Like, was it actually an error? Gambler mindset in the computer. Yeah. You know, only one computer-aided train away from, I mean, it literally worked. He made $33 million. 99% of computers, right, quit right before they're about to hit 100 acts. Just imagine it has like a side internal thought and you're just like, expand the reasoning on this one.

And it's just like, I'm feeling hot. I'm so due. I got a hot hand. I'm so due. Yeah, that's great. I mean, I wonder where else that philosophy has a potential. impact. We saw this with the debate over social networking where there was a there was a question about you know, the algorithmic social feeds feed people confirmation bias. They feed them content that

they enjoy. They feed them brain rot sometimes. Maybe the steward of the network, Zuckerberg, who has essentially complete control over meta, should step in and say, you know what, I'm going to dial back the brain rot or I'm going to dial up the, you know, turn down the news, turn up. Turn up the entertainment, turn up the educational content. There's a bunch of things that in theory could feel right, but maybe the end state is just step back and maximize for LTV. Who knows? I don't know.

I have a hot take on this, which is like the LTV is just, like if you actually think about the true LTV of a user of Facebook, it can actually drive a much stronger and more valuable outcome as opposed to optimizing for ARPU, which is a one-year metric. So if you're optimizing for a one-year metric, you're going to try and sell someone, you know, like gambling, mobile games,

anything that just pulls money out of their pocket and potentially gets them distracted from creating value in the society. But if instead you focus on what is the true lifetime value of this potential Facebook user for five decades, for their entire life. Well, then it might actually be valuable to, instead of trying to get some kid to play Candy Crush and spend all their parents' money on Candy Crush tokens,

instead send them a bunch of educational content, get them really pilled on capitalism. They go build something really valuable. They make a bunch of money. And then you can run advertisements on them for Rolls-Royce and Lamborghini. Or they'll just spend a billion dollars on meta-ats. Maybe, maybe, maybe. And so there's an interesting theory

where like what are we saying when we when we say the kids are suffering from brain rock. What we're really saying is like they will not contribute to society. They will not become economically valuable. But maybe they go and become slop farmers. Maybe. If they pull themselves out of the slop by their own bootstraps, it's possible. Of course it's possible. It's possible. But I do think that there's something interesting where if you think about it from an ultra long time horizon. It can actually be economically efficient. I don't think our quarterly, you know, no, uh, system will allow for that type of long, but that's the beauty of Zuck. He doesn't need to think in quarters, right? He doesn't need to. And so I'm, I'm, I'm optimistic that, that someone

like Zuck could take a really, really long view. Also, I mean, I think he has kids. I think he has a very good, strong moral framework. So I think he might just kind of like, you know, optimize for that naturally. But I do think that there's an economic model to optimizing for long, long, long life time value, lifetime value, education and like human flourishing, economic flourishing, even in the face of declining Arpoo

in the short term. I would love to think that Zuck is thinking of themselves as, you know, of meta as operating digital railroad's. And it's like, you know what? We're going to,

you know, we're just going to invest in delivering educational content to our children for the next five to ten years. We're going to get them really excited about, you know, learning and science. Because we will make more money in the future.

That's the key thing. It can't just be purely altruistic. It has to be, no, this is the right move for the shareholders. But it's gutsy, and it would never fly if you're optimizing to the next quarter's return. Anyway. I had a post on Saturday relevant to Facebook. I said, someday you're going to look down and realize that the good old days are over. X will be like Facebook.

Your group chats won't be popping, and your phone will just feel different. Don't let this time slip away. You need to increase your screen time now before it's too late. And funny enough, that thought came to me on a Saturday when my screen time is the lowest. Lowest. But it did, I've had this sense over time that Twitter and X are just sort of Lindy and will kind of always be here. But it's very possible that X goes away at Facebook at some point. We're just the boomers on Facebook, just all yelling at each other and arguing.

We'll become like a TikTok. reaction stream. Yeah. Or whatever's next. You always, always got to move on. We're going to Wee Me. We're going to Weee.

It's on the come up. We talked about it. Weeme. Wee. It's the future. Yeah, the FTC says that wee me is Facebook's, you know. Biggest competitor. Biggest competitor.

Or one of the top two. One of the snap and then weimi. Snap and Weeee. So we'll see you on Weemey, folks. We really got to chase that down. We got to get that C. I'm going to let you do this next one. Okay.

So Ward doll says you need to be dad maxing. You need to be waking up at 544. on a Saturday to hit the gym and then coming back to wake up your wife and kids by blasting creed while making breakfast. You need to be de-thatching your lawn. I don't even know what that means. You need to clean your car and then stare at it in the driveway for half an hour. You need to be telling your kids that Jerusalem belongs to those who worship Christ. You need to be treating Easter Sunday like Super Bowl Sunday. You need to be absolutely magging childless heathens with peak dad power moves as God intended. Very funny Easter post. Obviously there was a lot of like

He is risen posts that went viral over the Easter Sunday, but I thought this one was very funny. It is something that happens naturally. You start waking up earlier and earlier in 545. That's five minutes later than I wake up, actually, if I look at my alarm, 540. On the Ashton Hall grind. Anyway, Sam D'Amico, friend of the show, he's been on.

He runs Impulse Stoves. He had a good take about aliens that I wanted to share, he says. I remain convinced that the best evidence that the U.S. government has not recovered crashed alien spacecraft is that, one, that would be the coolest thing ever, and two, someone would have to share it in a group chat with the boys. And he is, of course, sharing a screenshot of Secretary of Defense. Pete Higsef is said to have shared attack details in a second signal chat. The defense secretary sent sensitive information about strikes in Yemen to an encrypted chat that included his wife and brother, people familiar. with the matter set. So send that headline to your wife and just say us. Us. Us. I was trying to do that earlier, but kept getting paywalled by the New York Times. The failing New York Times wouldn't let me screenshot the headline of an article. You just take the screenshot from this. It's great. We got a nice

clean screenshot here from Sam. Yeah, very funny. I actually think this is a great take. But we should have Jesse Michaels on the show to give us the latest and greatest in the world of UAPs, UFOs, and alien aircraft and spacecraft because he has gone way deeper and and regardless of what you think about aliens I think that Jesse's done a great job of finding interesting stories interesting historical anecdotes interesting anomalies and even if you remain unconvinced after spending time with him you will be entertained and you will feel like you are talking to an intellectual not just a crazy conspiracy theorist and so huge shout out to Jesse Michaels is one of the best to ever do it.

We grew up on YouTube around the same time. Anyway, let's move on to Atlas Creatine Cycle. He says they should have a 420 for creatine monohydrate. So true. I love it. Willow Brand says 106 because 10 grams a day and 6 looks like a G. Oh, okay, 10G. I get it.

So true, King. People are into creatine right now. A lot of debate over whether creatine... I have 15 milligrams here. Graham. Not milligrams. Sorry. Yeah.

Your max. Those are big scoops. Yeah, yeah, yeah, big scoops. Yeah, it's a little sandy, but you got to get it down. The creatine, it seems like, you know, maybe it's a fast-team bargain, but it's great. It's the best hair loss. It's the best hair loss supplement in the world. Yeah, a lot of people talk about hair loss, thinking that there are supplements that, you know, encourage hair growth.

Joe Rogan's bald. Yeah. He looks strong. Maybe it's the creatine. Who knows? Maybe it's genetics. Maybe it's a million other things, but yeah. You never know.

You never know. It's worth it. Worth it. Worth the risk. Anyway. we got four minutes. Let's do a couple more posts. This one by David Haber over at Andresen was interesting. He says, in any fast-growing organization, one of the best feelings as manager or CEO is having someone who works for you that I call safe hands. It's this implicit sense that you can delegate a task, project, or line of business, and trust that the person is going to execute with quality.

We've talked about this before with like the levels to to different employee skill sets, the pyramid that Sean Puri outlined. Safe hands isn't just about competence. It's about proactively communicating when issues arrive, acting as an owner when problem solving, and operating independently without the need for micromanagement. Importantly, safe hands isn't tied to seniority.

It's just remarkable how inconsistent it is across an organization. Whenever I find someone who is safe hands at my prior company, especially junior folks, I pour responsibility on them. Many of these individuals stretched far beyond their original roles and became leaders at the company with several now successful entrepreneurs. It's one of the most common conversations I have with founders I work with, especially in the series B plus stage as they're beginning to bring on executive leadership for the first time. Do you know, do you feel like you have safe hands across every functional unit of your business?

How much leverage do you feel you're getting from your team in those areas? every CEO instinctively knows the answer to these questions, and finding your safe hands is a key step towards scaling yourself and the company. And Matt Grimm says, I call this folks you can turn your back on and they're insanely valuable. In fairness, I didn't come up with that phrase. One of those types who reports to me told me,

and I'm shamelessly stealing it. Geordie, what's your take? No, I think oftentimes, in this case, David and Matt are founders. oftentimes founders end up getting credit for the things that these sort of safe hands roles end up doing. Oh, totally. And so Matt is a big offer. But that's the goal. You have to hire these people.

And then also train them and then take advantage of them, right? And then, you know, back them when they go out to do their own thing. Absolutely. Well, before we have David, we got to talk about Eric, Eric Hornberg. Oh, yeah. Speaking of Andreessen, Eric Torrenberg has joined Andresen Horwitz as a general partner. Fantastic news. He'll be on the show tomorrow to break it down.

for us. Very excited to talk to him. Been a good friend for years, talked about media. He's been in the podcasting space for, for multiple years now, Belt Turpentine, done tons of interviews. And one of the greatest networkers in human history, I think. Probably. He knows everyone. He will just, he will just throw you in a group chat with the world's most important people randomly. And I'll be like, why am I in this? But thank you. This is interesting. Yeah. Yeah, great guy. Anyways, very excited for him. For sure. And the firm and very excited to talk with him tomorrow. Anyway, let's bring in our first guest, David Tisch from Box Group. How you doing, David?

Hi, guys. How are you? Great. On discussions on having a new job today? I do. Yes, thank you. Yeah, I'm taking it from part-time, 50 hours a week to full-time, 100 hours a week. But it's only up from here. Are you hiring? We are. We are.

How do I pursue this? Yeah, the VC to full-time news anchor pipeline. Once you've done it all in venture, you know, like you have that natural step. When you start in this industry, I feel like that's the ambition, a daily show that you can pontificate across the whole industry. Yes. Well, we're hoping to recruit you to be, you know, once a week, drop in. We will be your podcast.

Yes. This is actually, like jokes aside, like the way. that you work for us is that when news breaks, you bring it to us. When something happens that you have an opinion on, you come on the show and you talk to us. You are elevating the venture capitalist way to, we don't have news, we don't have things that happen. I feel like you are really claim to the audience. What about like the most complex and naughty geopolitical conflicts? I feel like you guys as a class are like the best in business. Overqualified to talk about it. Oh, okay. So you want to stay away from politics today.

All right. So let's start with, let's start with tariffs. Yeah. Let's start with tariffs, Iran, China, Russia. Let's just go down the list. Good day in the market. Everything's great here. Everything's great. Everything's great. Have you heard about the accordion effect to early stage? Because that's our famous early stage line of like whatever happens in the latest stage market, it's like an accordion all the way to early stage. So it reverberates over the course of, you know, three to five years. Sure. So we will not. ever be impacted because the accordion basically never reaches early stage because something else will happen in the macro before then, which is a really nice, don't ask us any. And there's no liquidity, so you can't panic sell. Even if you wanted to, you can't hit 15 years. That's a third accordion ripple. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I mean, there's no better example of that than we have SVB crisis, interest rates go up. It's the death of venture. We're hearing about, oh, GPs are going to be giving back LP capital, but then, well, well, well, would you hear about

this AI trend and all of a sudden it's time to rip checks? Saved us all. Chapots. Who would have got? Yeah. Wait, yeah, what, wasn't there, this was sort of before my time, but there was a whole chatbot era, right? Wasn't there like, free AI?

Yeah. Free AI was like, it was supposed to be the thing. It was sort of right. It was just didn't have the underlying tech trend. Is that right? I feel like the tech wasn't there, but also the branding of chatbot to chat GPT isn't that different, but magically different from a outcome and sort of adoption curve. If you look like the automated chatbots, I think is what they were called for that moment in time. They all fell on their face because they weren't interesting enough, good enough.

They were like pre-programmed answers. and then OpenAI releases, in essence, just an advanced version of that in many ways from a consumer positioning. And here we are. And so you are like, the idea of chatbot was right in how you're interacting with the tech. The tech, to your point, just wasn't good enough. Yeah, 90% of chatbot founders quit right before they strike it big. Right before they sell the Open AI. I mean, I don't know if I've actually, we should find some chatbot founder. who stuck it out.

So hugging face. Hugging face is the one. Yeah, that's right. Hugging face is the winner. They were in a boot camp for chatbots. No way. And pivoted from a chat bot into hugging face. So that's your answer.

That's amazing. Yeah, we got to have it's Clement on the show. Yes, right? Yeah, we got to have him on. That'd be great. So yeah, I mean, to get a little bit more serious, like how are you processing this year? What are you actually excited about?

What is fatiguing you in venture these days? We have our annual meeting tomorrow, so I'm in the middle of practicing our script on the market, so I can just try it. Please. I love to hear it. I love HGMs. Yeah. The, you know, the pre-liberation Day, post-liberation day market speech is different in some way. But you really like, I don't know, you're investing at the earliest stage of a journey and trying to attach two people starting a company with big,

long-term 10, 15-year ambition to some moment-in-time macro, or what today feels like an incredibly volatile macro where you actually can't even understand what stability looks like or a new framework. Like, it's impossible. And so the day-to-day job here is we meet people. We get really excited about what they're working on. We give them money. And we wait five, 10, 15 years to see how that all play. out. So the investment moment of investing in an early stage company feels totally decoupled from the

macro of what's going on. The macro does impact the companies you invested in years ago as they come to market for more money, as they figure out their revenue retention. But the sort of day-to-day volatility, I don't think has an impact on our day-to-day job of funding great people, starting big, ambitious visions. Do you think that there are going to be stories from this tariff cycle that are like what happened in COVID where everyone was like Airbnb was particularly hurting as a startup. I mean, they were public at the time, but they were, I still think of them as like a YC company, right? And it found, it seemed like that the story of Airbnb was like COVID was a transformational moment for them and they emerged like a stronger company than ever. Do you expect that to happen to

any startups, maybe in your portfolio or just out there in the market that are getting beat up, but might emerge stronger than ever? So if you isolate tariffs that has a impact on a subset of companies very outside of software in many ways, I think there's software companies that involve logistics and shipping that definitely are impacted. But I don't know that the like come out of the tariff is a predictable framework. Like, what does that actually mean? Do we get to free trade in reality?

Do we get to some equilibrium? Is this China only that we're talking about? And I think within there lies very hard to foresee, again, point of stability, whereas at least in COVID, if you said we returned to a normal world, that was a more predictable endpoint. If you assume early in COVID, it was wait two weeks and then the world will start again. and then it was some longer period. But I think there was an appreciation for what coming out of it could look like,

whereas I think right now you're in like the creation period, harder to guess. Yeah. You know, the easy guess is like American manufacturing windfall, but that feels like a big stretch. Like no one's building a factory overnight. I feel like that happens in other parts of the world, not here. It does feel like it could be a catalyst for the American dynamism companies, the re-industrialized companies that have been placing that bet and kind of

hoping for just a little bit of a boost that you can see a lot of like, oh, that series A company went to series B like a little bit earlier because of this narrative. And then that was enough to get them over an awkward hump, build some real infrastructure out and kind of like realize the vision. I think, yeah, I'm like cautiously optimistic. Yeah, one of the, one of the, if you're a super early stage investor, which box group is. Yeah. And then you're trying to time markets by being like, oh, there's tariffs. Let me make a bunch of supply chain related or manufacturing investments. But then the company's not going to mature for five to potentially 10 years. So it could be a totally different environment. And one example that that was

relevant, we had the CEO of Astronis on last week, which I imagine you invested in like over, at least over five years ago. 13 years ago. 13 years ago. Overnight success. Oh, and that's like a good example of like you couldn't have, you, you thought that space was going to be important at the time and you like to. Actually, we're early stage VCs. We knew. We didn't think. Christopher.

You knew Christopher. Christopher. Obviously. No, I mean, like, if you think about AI, we're the earliest investor in a company called Clay. And Clay created a vision, had a product, and it was in need of AI for it to work. And it wasn't created yet. And so if you watch this seven-year overnight success, it clicked. when the underlying technology caught up with what the go-to-market product was.

And I think you see that a lot of the times that the founders who are early in a space and can see it through and wait for the world to come to them while they're sort of pushing the world to get there. That's where a lot of that magic is. And I think Estranis, or Zipline, again, 14 years ago we funded Zipline. Wow. Is another example. We are huge Zipline shills now that we talk to the founder.

I mean, what an incredible story. We left that conversation. We were basically like, would invest at any price. Yeah, because, I mean, it's not just that he's been grinding it out for so long, but I feel like if you watch the launch video, like he paints the, it's the opposite of the Black Mirror vision. It's a very positive vision of the future. And it's something that, yeah, jobs not finished.

He's going to be doing that for 20, 30 years easily. Like, there's so much to do. And now it's just a matter of manufacturing, scale, economics, all the basic stuff, but like, he's got the drive. We went to his office on a recent trip to San Francisco, and I probably had been in his office in a decade. And we walked in, and it was just like this jaw-dropping, American-built, hardware, software combo that you, like, you walked out of there and said, this is the beginning of a, another 15-year vision. Totally, totally. Was there, was there, you know, looking back

at these companies like Zipline, Astronis, was there ever a trend over the last, whatever, 15 years that you set, that you were tempted to go all in on? Because I imagine there was a lot of investors of that era that said, oh, space is so cool, I'm going all in on it. Climate tech is so cool.

I'm going to do this. You know, instant delivery. Just NFTs. Yeah, yeah. That was the one. Yeah. No, I mean, we're a generalist. We are founder driven.

We find people who have their own vision. I think us as a firm, we should never be in charge of coming up with ideas. We're not, that's not our job. Our job is to give people who have dreams, capital, and support to help them. John, your company, I think, is the single most heavily debated internal decision we'd ever made at Box Group. From a moral standpoint, we had to like, decide if it was good or bad. And so that was interesting.

So we almost pivoted into drugs. That was an opportunity for us. But no, I like the world pivoted to AI, right? So I think two years ago we were saying like 30 to 40% of the companies we see talk about AI or are oriented around AI. Last year was like 90. And this year it's 170%. you don't meet non-AI companies right now.

And if they're not AI first, it's we're attacking an industry by bringing AI to it, which is slower and stale. And I think that is a forced all-in versus a sort of opted all-in. Does the different business models that seem to be emerging, does that change the way you're underwriting these investments? I'm thinking about highly capex intensive business. businesses where you're just expecting a ton of dilution, or we've seen some companies that are kind of just doing like private equity style roll-ups, but they're raising from venture capital. And I imagine if you're not careful with pro rata or how you're sizing your bets, like,

it could turn out to be like, oh, we really didn't get the full bite at the Apple. But is that something that even matters to you or is it just like back the founder and we'll figure it out? Private equity, roll-ups, and venture always ends well. Definitely. Always. Yeah, yeah. I mean, we like to say private equity is not a mature business.

And so there's lots of opportunity for tech people coming in and disrupt it. They don't take it seriously. Famously not, famously not cutthroat. Famously not cutthroat. They're happy to leave all that money on the table. Yeah, exactly. Just dollars on the floor for VCs to come pick up, right? Jordy?

No, no, no. I was more, has there ever, you know, it feels like over the last two years, call it, there's been more of these sort of roll-ups, than ever before, was there was there another did was there another kind of like general like market wide crack or was it just sort of like individual areas, um, and opportunities. I struggle to think that the way to build companies is to replicate another company that's succeeding. In these moments, what you tend to have is one winner and a bunch of followers that don't win. And so can there be a single version of a rollup? If you look at

Anderle, they're great at acquisitions. That's a different phrasing of the word roll up. Roll up is either we're going to buy a bunch of things that are the same size or we're going to buy like one big thing and then tuck in some other smaller things around it. So I think unpacking the nuance in these words is more important than assuming a general like success across a wide variety of companies. I think the moment in time where you probably saw fast followers or fast movers win was in the on-demand business, right? When Uber trained the world that you could touch something on your phone and something in the real world would happen, it unlocked like a behavior across the world that was very different, right? And that was this phone to real

world connection that I think opened up a ton of other businesses. I don't think they all were. but I do think that that was a horizontal opening versus a business model innovation that has been used in other industries or financial industries and then applied in venture. Yeah, the idea, the classic sort of like accounting firm roll up when I look at that, it's like when it's been two weeks in my like CPA is not like on it or like is not, you know, like clearly like, you know, he's busy with other clients. I'm like, it's not like, it's not like, It's not like I want to switch immediately, but I'm pretty quickly. And so the idea that you're just going to buy like 20 accounting firms and then slap AI on it and not have like 90% churn.

It's just interesting. But have you tried AI? I mean, it's pretty good. Yeah, yeah. It's pretty, you know, it's only going to get it wrong 5% of the time and that's going to cost you millions. Yeah. This is a topic that Jordy and I have been debated and it's kind of related to Uber opening the mind. instead of like this delivery boom.

Chat GPT rappers, it's been derided as a term. We've now seen the VS code fork wars. But it looks like there's a chance that OpenAI buys windsurf for $3 billion. And I've been going back and forth to Jordie about this. Like is this game on for M&A in the rapper market? Because if OpenAI, who has, you know, great team, lots of money, can't like build it and they want to. buy it, then do we see Anthropic? Do we see XAI buying stuff? Do we see Amazon? All of the Mag

7 buy stuff. And then maybe even, you know, you get into some of the just Fortune 500 companies that want to buy startups. And so I'm in this weird scenario where I've been somewhat accepting of the idea that a rapper might not be a power law outcome. But everyone involved in Winsurf, if this deal goes through, will do very well. And so what is your take on that market and does this shift? My take as broadly that like this is highly strategic for open AI, but that doesn't mean every rapper, even if they have a lot of traction and revenue is like suddenly strategic to a wide range of buyers, right? Sure.

I think I think in my in my 15 years doing this, the thing I've under, or I overrated was the amount of M&A that would happen. I think if you go back in the early growth of like this era, if you look at, you know, anything from, you know, Facebook and before that, Google, Yahoo, Twitter, on their way up, they bought tens, if not hundred plus companies. And a lot of that was for stock. And it was stock that appreciated post-acquisition, incredibly valuable for both the company and the founders who sold. And I think if you look at the next wave of startups, a dramatic decrease in M&A, because instead of buy, you built. And the aqua hired didn't

prove out to be the best use of equity. A lot of the decision of buy versus build became easier as you thought about where to innovate. I think in sort of getting at your question, I hope we're entering a period of M&A. I think the easy way to rationalize it is the valuations of some of these companies that you mentioned are so big that they can afford to buy companies for substantial amounts that might actually align with the founder of the acquired's expectations. And I think that's where one of the other mismatch was happening is that the company that wanted to buy another company was just not able to hit the price. And so they didn't happen.

And so I think one way to rationalize it is whether it's the big seven or the scaled AI companies have big enough valuations to go out and buy things for numbers that will hit a founder's expectation, which I think would unlock, you know, a lot of, a lot of positive things in this ecosystem. One is liquidity, but two, is like, there isn't really an answer to how do things end right now for a ton of companies. And M&A is the piece that's been missing, to me, the most. It gets less discussed. And I think Fortune 500 companies need to modernize, right? And we saw that pressure 10 years ago, when you heard, like, all the non-tech companies are are going to become tech companies.

And then the public markets punish you on a quarter by quarter basis. And it's like, forget that. We're not going to do any of that. But I think today, AI might be such a dramatic forcing function that smart, big companies need to move quickly to get ahead of the curve. So optimist. Is that by versus, you mentioned, you know, these super acquisitive companies maybe 15 years ago. And then that changed.

Do you think that was a factor? I mean, you guys basically plaid was built out of your guys' office. There's a lot of, there's been so much infrastructure built during the Plaid era. Do you think that that was part of the calculus for some of these bigger companies that would have been acquires? But they said, hey, like, we could buy this tech and then maybe try to integrate it or we could get this team and do it. Or, hey, this infrastructure exists and we can just build it. You have so many factors. Like the biggest one to me is that the government.

didn't want big tech to buy more companies. And so if they were going to buy companies, they had to be like the biggest ones, not the, like they were going to fight the regulatory fights on big companies, not on small ones. And that dried a lot of it up. And then I think the valuation expectations was the other friction. When a startup decided they were worth a half a billion dollars

and the potential acquirers wanted to buy them for $100 million, that was no longer interesting. And so it just decoupled, that rationality from playing out in the M&A world, right? You have to have like a buyer and seller meat on price in order for the deal to even get going. And I think that's where the biggest gap was. Plaid sold, right? Plaid sold and the government stopped it.

And I think that that was, you know, to me, a interesting moment in the government getting involved in something that was debatable. And I think it also tells big companies, like, don't waste your time. trying to get these things through, and that slows down a whole wave of potential M&A. Interesting. I don't know if the M&A market relates to what you're seeing on the LP side, but we've heard that there might be some fatigue from LPs on what's going on in Venture, but at the same time, it feels like that David Goggins meme where, you know, Venture just keeps on chugging

no matter what. You're going to the AGM. what are you seeing broadly in terms of LP appetite for ever bigger venture funds? We're a small adorable seed fund based in New York City. So we are not responsible to answer that question. I think your job if you take LP capital is to give them back a lot of money one day. And I think if you haven't, you owe that to them. And so at some point, the patients should run out.

I appreciate that. I think the challenge is the time for liquidity in early stage venture has gotten pushed significantly from where it was more predictable a decade or two decades ago. You could say seven to 10 years on an early stage fund and mean it. Today, I think you say seven to 10 years. And you're like, by that I mean like 12 to 15. And that that's a substantial difference. And I think you need to align with your investors on what that timeline is because it's in a rational timeline. Like the people we fund, if you go back 15 years, they were like pre-elementary school for the most part, right? Like, if you look at the young founder that you're investing in today, a 15-year timeline is two-thirds of a life. Like, it's an irrational number. And so these like, the go in motion of making an investment

to the return the fund to LPs timeline is so decoupled from, I think a psychological standpoint that your stakeholders are just dramatically unrelatable. On that on the topic of like young founders, how has the early stage market evolved? It feels like there's a lot new, a lot more products. Like YC is bigger than ever, but then there's also Z fellows. There's different fellowships. There's people that are just giving away money to people to like go try a startup and then maybe I'll invest later.

And obviously the Teal Fellowship is kind of like a scaled version of that. But there's a lot of other, you know, initiatives. How has that changed your strategy? Has it changed your strategy at all? And kind of like what what does the early stage market look for you look like for you today? I think there's like there's always been these splashes of noise. And very, very little like if you go back again, I'm old, and so I've been doing this through these micro waves of change in the early stage

market, very few products stay where they are. They move in different directions. They either get later. So if you think about new entrances as funds into the early stage market, most of the ambition is to become a bigger fund. And in doing so, you become later by nature of scaling your business. And I think on a product side, you're only as good as the product you're offering. And so what has been amazing to me about YC is they've just continued to compound quality of the satisfaction to their customer.

They are they are not free, right? You're giving YC equity. And yet if you look at like the happiness factor, the MPS or whatever cheesy acronym you call reviews, but like people go to YC because other people who went to YC loved it and they think it was entirely worth it. And so I think the products that get invented need to live up to the cost. And if the cost is free, like nothing is really free. And so what comes with that freedom? Is that attaching to a brand? And if you attach your company to a brand, is that a good thing to have done?

Or is there some negative externality that comes with that? And so I think, and it's probably not the end point for the products that are offering free capital to be free forever. I would assume that's a hard thing to scale. And so I think you have to just, like, as a company, aligning yourself with the brand, the trusted brands have proven to be trusted for a reason, and the new ones need to earn that. And I think there are some that have been around long enough where you find good examples of quality coming from them. And those are the ones that I would tend to trust more.

You've been in the game for a long time. Can you tell me the story of your first investment ever? Yeah. Our box group is named after our first investment. Really? So it's like a combination. So the first investment is a company called Boxy. It was a Roku competitor. We were in their seed round as an adorable check.

I didn't want to write my name as an angel investor. So I created an LLC called Box Group to invest in Boxy, which made me feel bigger. The box was like a cool nightclub in the city at the at time. It felt like a cool word. I've looked with Aaron Levy. He registered box.net like two months before I did box group, which I'm bitter about. So, that's the point, he'll sue me and it's all over. He's been on the shows too, so he can come on and debate here for it. Yeah, well, we're all collaborative in this world anyway, no, no competitors. So, you know, Boxie gets funded,

follow on by Fred Wilson. I'm like, oh, my God, I'm amazing. at this. I got to read that guy's blog. This is so cool. And then General Catalyst came in. And then Avner, the founder, went in front of Congress to, like, fight the cable companies. So it was like an amazing first investment to like see the narrative of a startup. They sold to Samsung. And they were built into like the Samsung smart TV technology. But the idea was right. And the timing was challenging. They had to fight every single battle on behalf of the people that came after them. And I think that that was a really good lesson. Do you see you have a ton of portfolio companies? Too many, probably. Too many, I'm sure, to manage. Do you see, and case text is one of them,

which is an interesting example, because that was a company that no one. Nine-year overnight success. Yeah, exactly, exactly. I'll hit the overnight success. Overnight Success. But are you seeing that across? Do we get a soundboard for our like meet companies meetings? Oh, you definitely should. Yeah, you should.

Handshake deal. Yeah. Raise your forecasts. Yeah, yeah. There's an internal bingo that we run that every time they say buzzwords. We're preempting. But how do you think of AI? In the context of the portfolio broadly, are there a bunch of examples where it's kind of creating new momentum in the business or like tons of new opportunity? And, you know, I look at this like, you know, I have 50 odd personal investments. All them will work. All them will work. I'm sure they've all been marked up. So, so I'm sure. I'm sure it's real. I told me, which I was like, oh, yeah, yeah. I could be 98% successful. 98% hit rate. But, but, you know, how often.

How often are you seeing it sort of create momentum versus momentum just being something that once you lose it, it's really hard to kind of get it back if you're not getting, you know, sort of lucky? I mean, K's text is like the most amazing story. What a grinder into just being early in the right way. And I think to Jake's credit, he was always like the smartest person in the room and figured out how AI could come into what they were building in a differentiated way. like split a team off, built a product, got to market first in an industry that was ready for it.

And so I think it's this, and he landed, like, he landed an outcome that he changed his life and changed the team's life. And I think like a unique story. We're now like three years past that you're early to the game. And so if you haven't figured out how to take your stale product or your product that's maxed out and be. begin to re-energize it, it feels like you're a little late. There are those stories. And I think Clay is the other side of it, where it, AI happened and Clay benefited from sort of the speed of it and now is running.

But I think within the portfolio, there are companies that benefit from pieces of it. And whether that's on the cost-saving side or the growth side, I think you can find examples of everything. It's within the verticals that I find the most interesting momentum, just being recreated, right? It's companies that are servicing customers. And in some way, if they can be the deliverer of AI to an industry that can't get it themselves, that's a really big opportunity. And I think case text sort of represents that.

Yeah, that makes sense. It's awesome. Thank you so much. This was a fantastic conversation. I came on here to promote something. Oh, yeah, yeah. Let's go. Give us a call to action.

The Howard Stern of tech. And so when you go on Howard, you have to promote or like the late night shows, you have to promote. We have a conference that we're putting on with Union Square and first round in locks in New York called Founders, NYC. And it's FoundersNYC.com. It's free, which is different than most conferences. It's for people who want to start a company. We got the founders of Data Dog and Mongo talking to each other on stage. To me, a collection of all of the big.

great early companies that were built and scaled in New York coming on stage to just like sort of create the community effect of building here. And so if, yeah, do you want to take a, do you want to take a victory lap on NYC just generally? No, no, no, no. I'm just saying when you, when you started Box Group, a lot of people, like it maybe, maybe. No one had heard of, we're like the, you know, pioneers of New York City. No one had heard of New York City before. There was that era.

But it's true about tech, right? The amount of the capital concentration in New York City right now is incredible. It feels like it's never been more. We're like the pioneers that discovered Miami and the COVID era. Yeah. No, no, no, no, no. Look, I think New York's a home for people that want to win. And I think whatever you do in New York, it's like an incredibly harsh environment.

And in order to stand out and win in New York, you have to fight friction. No one cares. Right. And that's what's actually fascinating to me about tech in New York is like, if you went on a subway or to the restaurant nearby, nobody cares what you're doing. Like, no one cares about your business. No one cares about tech. And I think that friction creates people to have to fight a bigger fight here. Yeah.

Because there's not momentum. Like, there's not somebody pulling you up and saying, like, we're all in this together. And so I think the community here is just like people put their head down and grind. and it's produced some real success, and we're excited to put it all on stage. That's amazing. Thank you guys very much for having me. I'll see you tomorrow.

We'll see you back. We'll see you back here. Good time. See you. Bye. Cheers. That's fantastic. Humble giant.

Yeah. Overnight success himself. Yeah. Well, next time we got Mike Vernal coming in from Conviction. Very excited to talk to him. We'll bring him in from the waiting room now. Mike, are you there? Can you hear me?

How are you doing? I'm good, thanks. How are you too? We're fantastic. Great to have you. It's a wonderful Monday. I hope your Easter was well if you celebrate. I hope your weekend was great.

And I hope you're off to a great start of the week. Thanks. It was great. Yeah. Fantastic. Yeah, I mean, I'd love to kick it off with just a little bit of background on your career and then what you're excited about today. And then we can kind of go from there.

Does that sound good? Yeah, that sounds great. So let's see, my career. I've been an investor for the past decade, kind of an accidental investor. I never aspired to this, but I sort of, I spent 15 years operating. I was at Facebook for many years and decided to give it to try, and it's been great. So I've been an investor for the past decade. I'm like, I'm very motivated just by like individual founders and folks that I find compelling.

And so like a pretty broad set of companies. So like a mix of consumer and like SaaS and hardware and infrastructure and some others. Some of the larger companies are companies like Rippling and Notion and Verkata and Clay and a couple others. We just heard about Clay. Yeah, we just heard about Clay. David Tisch from Box Group was on. He was saying about how Clay was this overnight success that took seven years, but as they usually do.

I'd love to know the story of the first investment that really made you catch the bug. Obviously, you were at Facebook for a long time, but then at some point you were like, I got a knack for this and I'm going to take it more seriously. You know, I made a handful of angel investments before I formally became an investor. Sure. But they were, I think in retrospect, they're actually, like, they're pretty reasonable. Like, I only made a handful.

I probably made, like, seven or eight. One of them was Notion, which is probably the best of the bunch. But, like, Walthfront, it was, like, Notion and Walthfront and this company called Human Interest, which is, like, a 401k provider and a couple others. Say again? I'm, like, randomly friends with Jeff Schneebley who runs the company now. It's a fascinating story because it was a YC company. And then he came in as like a founder mode CEO, but he had like his background.

I mean, I love him, but it's like not super. He didn't start the company. He has a MBA and I believe he has a PhD. And he's almost like a manager mode type of guy. But he's been fantastically successful with the company. And I'm just the biggest fan. Anyway, sorry. Yeah, exactly, exactly.

But I think none of them really motivated me to do it. It was more, so I was lucky enough to join Facebook when it was relatively early like a few hundred people and I was there for eight or nine years. And I led a mix of sort of product and engineering at the company. And my wife and I had her first kid and it was the first time that I took like six weeks off

for opportunity leave. And it was a little bit of a, it was like the first chance to catch my breath in eight or nine years. and I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do next. And the obvious thing would have been to stay at Facebook, and Facebook is, was, and I think still is, just one of the most amazing companies out there.

But I've gotten to know a guy named Brian Schreier at Sequoia, and Brian was, Brian had actually backed two of my close friends at the Series A, guy named Matt McGinnis, who's now the C-O-O at Rippling. That's right. And Steve Garrity at a company called hearsay. And Brian had kind of said,

if at some point you decide to pop your head up and do something else, you should come, come talk to us. And so one thing I led to another, and I ended up at Sequoia. And it was a little bit of an experiment to just see if investing would be fun and interesting. And as it turns out, it is both fun and interesting. How did you, you know, people talk about, quote unquote, operate, you know, investors love to say, if they've spent, you know, two years at a company, they'd love to say they've had operating experience. you had some very real operating experience at Facebook. How did you feel how did you feel how durable were the learnings from the true operating experience

versus finding sort of common truths about the way to do business and the way to build products and teams that, you know, because I've found like, for example, like the influencer marketing that I maybe did in 2016, like no longer works. Right. Yet there were things that I learned in that era that, you know, I still use today, right? So how do you kind of delineate like, you know, sort of like a higher level of abstraction? Yeah, higher level sort of these sort of lindy ways of doing things that are durable and valuable to communicate to entrepreneurs that you back? Yeah, it's a good question. I will say one thing that I think I learned that still applies and one thing I had no clue about, which I didn't learn until like the investing side of things. I think one thing, one thing that's underrated, maybe it's not underrated, about Mark at Facebook, is he's incredibly patient. I mean, I guess you kind of see it.

I think he's like spent $80 billion so far on like reality labs. But I think, you know, he is at the same time both like patient and impatient. I mean, everyone talks about like the move, fast, break things. And I think there is like a very strong bias towards action and just like getting getting stuff done. but he also like from a first principal's perspective kind of if something should work like if something logically makes sense he will just keep playing it out to try to to until there's like new data that suggests that it that it is wrong which I think explains a lot of the reality labs investment and I think like I think one thing that's underappreciated about like a lot of great companies

maybe it's appreciated I don't know but like they take a long time. time. I mean, some companies are really fast and off to the races, but like, you know, Figma was like four or five years before it started to work. Notion was like four or five years before it started to work. Clay was four or five years before it started to work. I think Airtable, like, was founded in 2010 and didn't really sort of break out until maybe 2017, 2018. I mean, all this sort of the PLG companies, you know, everyone's, everyone says they like want to be a PLG company, which to me is like, yes, I want to be a high growth company. That is a, I don't want to have to do say, I want to grow quickly without doing sales too.

Yeah, exactly, exactly. It's like I also want to be born rich and handsome, but, you know, what are you going to do? The, it's, it takes, I mean, these companies just take a lot of bake time. And I think, I think if you've operated for a while and you've seen how, like, if you viscerally understand patience and, like, if you're doing random stuff or if you're like, literally there's no hope, then you should probably throw in the towel. But in a lot of cases, if you're doing the right thing and it just hasn't hit yet, you just kind of sort of, you got to play out some more cards. And I do think I've observed a lot of financial investors having a, like, if it's not up into the right three months in, it's like, oh, man, we made a mistake and like, what the hell are you doing? Or I was talking to your founder recently who has like a financial investor on the board now. and they were like, your competitor is, you know, at 5 million an AOR.

Why aren't you at 5 million in ARO yet? Which is like, I get it on one level, but on another level, like, you just got to, I think, I think you got to make sure you're doing the right thing and sort of doing it in the right way. So I think that was one lesson that definitely carried over for operating, which I think you kind of don't have until, I think. is correlated with people who have done it and sort of understand the messiness of building something. I will say conversely, at both, I mean, I was at Microsoft before Facebook, and in both cases, you're pretty insulated from like the market you're operating in. Like I think once you get to a certain

scale, you're kind of just thinking about how to build new things for your existing customers as opposed to how to really start in brand new markets. And so I had no real intuition for how to like evaluate a business and whether it was a good business or a bad business and if it was how to think about the, like I, there were obviously sales and marketing teams at both Microsoft and Facebook, but you don't really build an intuition for how to like attack a new business category,

I think unless you worked at a startup. So that was all new to me. I have a question. I've heard founders bring up the example of Figma as a company that took a long time to get a product out into the market and get traction. It was what was like four or five years until the first million of AARR. And I've heard founders use that as a reference point and be like, we're doing the Figma thing. It's going to take a while. And I'm like, no, you're not.

They were doing something that was like fundamentally, you know, very technically, difficult leveraging a new technology when there was no not of they were operating in a space that maybe wasn't hot for different reasons like you know sort of cloud design collaboration you know you you had sure there was other players but they had sort of four years to be multiplayer wasn't a trend multiplayer wasn't a thing they sort of created that so what would you say to founders that that tell you know oh yeah we're doing this but then you look at the market and you say well you have four or five other companies that have sort of more advanced feature sets maybe and are highly you know it's highly competitive and um i feel like that having the opportunity to do the figma thing is like a luxury of

being like very early you got to earn that you got to be dylan to earn that yeah i mean i don't think yeah if anyone came in and said it was going to take like four or five years to build figma i don't one i don't think anyone would build figma too i don't think anyone would fund Figma. I think there's an element of, like, you have to, I think you have to be moving quickly in the short term. Like anyone, you know, sometimes founders will come in and say, I mean, what is it? It's April. And they will be like, oh, yeah, we will be ready to launch at the end of the year. And unless you're like taping out silicon or something, that scares the crap out of me because I mean, there's a lot of time between now and the end of the year.

And so I think you want someone that is just like iterating at an insane clock speed and like learning at every iteration. And I think those iterations have to be pretty fast. But like sometimes you just don't know when it's going to start to catch. And so I know the Figma story less well than some of these others. But it's, you know, you're just talking to David and you guys are. Notion is a good example too, right? Yeah, I was going to say they were toiling away, you know, doing something, you know, in relative obscurity until they found the thing that really was magical.

Yeah, one of my favorite set of videos, you can find it online is there's like a Notion product demo from, I think, late 2013. And it's this, it's like this low-code, no-code environment. There's all these blocks. There's like a stripe block so you can like drop payments in. Like it's a pretty, it's a pretty wild demo because you see like the through line from today to what it was back then. And it's clear like all the ideas are basically the same. It's like this canvas and it's got blocks and you can drop all this stuff in. But of course, like the first iteration was like wildly complex and no one really used it other than like a handful of like diehard folks that that figured it out.

And so, of course, like, the rethinking of it was, okay, make this an insanely great note-taking app and then go from there, no-taking to Ricky in the lake. And notion's an interesting example because I think there's, like, incredible stubbornness on the vision. And I think, like, what Ivan has been trying to build has, like, not changed in 12 or 13 years. But there was, like, a lot of flexibility on tactics.

And it was like, okay, this thing didn't work. Let's try it again. Let's try it again until something caught. And I think that's kind of the, like, the art of it. is like have a really clear vision of where you're like what you're trying to build over a five to 10 year window and then but just move insanely quickly and be willing to like constantly change tactics I've been super excited about the idea of a email client built ground up around AI yeah it seems like an obvious startup idea we saw like the the mailbox era where Dropbox bought mailbox and there

was a new email client startup every few years now we're in this dangerous territory where You know, you have a company like Notion where Founder Mode CEO, at the helm, plenty of resources, clearly not asleep at the wheel, understands what AI is capable of. But as a product manager or just a user of email, how do you think about AI in the context of email? What are you hoping for? I have an idea in my head of what I want, but I think I might be wrong just because that's the nature of these things. So how would you break down that problem? How do you think about AI email?

Yeah, I think actually this is one I've thought a decent amount about. Actually, in the beginning, so if I go back like two years ago, two and a half years ago, my like theory of the world of like what would be interesting to invest in was there was kind of like three levels of the stack. There's kind of like the foundation models at the problem. There's all at the bottom. There's like dev tools and infrastructure in the middle. And then there's like applications at the top. And I was like generally pretty pessimistic on the dev tools and infrastructure space.

because I think it's just moving really quickly. The application layer seemed like the obvious place to invest, and you can kind of subdivide the application layer into, like, I would say, like, head, torso, and tail, or, like, horizontal and vertical, however you want to split it. And I was actually pretty skeptical at the time. Like, it was clear to me, like, I should not be writing my own emails in 2025

or to, like, a very small degree. Like, there is a massive amount of corpus I've had, like, a job. email account for 21 years at this point. Like, it should just be able to write every single email for me. But it's 2025, and I'm still writing my own emails. Like, it maybe gives me, like, two word completions. And I think

I've two conclusions from this. One is, like, the large tech companies are just, I think, way too risk-averse to build anything good here. Like, I, like, this Google up must be able to build this. Like, it seems like a very trivial

problem. I assume, like, the risk of me accidentally saying something really offensive in email is just too high for them to launch anything here. And so I, like, and I think that's kind of true writ large. Like, there is also, like, there is not a great assistant experience yet. Like, Syria is still pretty bad. You can get, like, the meta-AI assistant is actually pretty good if you're wearing, like, the meta-glasses, but you have to wear the glasses to use it. And so I actually think the horizontal like experiences are addressable by startups now because I think the big tech companies are just going to be too conservative. And then in terms of like the experience that I want,

I mean, I don't actually want, I don't really want, I'm like pretty good at email. I'm like, I'm a very diligent person. I like go through all of my emails. I get a lot of them. Reading them is like pretty fast. I don't need it to be summarized. If someone sends me a really long email, like I'm probably not going to read it anyway like I don't need it summarized like it is a negative signal if you send a very long email The the hard work is replying to them And if something could just give like read the thing and like write exactly what I was going to write that would be an amazing experience Especially if I worked on mobile because like composing on mobile is a total pain in the ass So I'm amazed the one hasn't built that yet it doesn't seem like there seem like there are a lot of hard problems out there

That does not seem like the hardest problem And so I'm I don't know I'm surprised. Yeah, I mean, we're seeing a lot of like, at bolt on AI narratives in the public markets. Are you seeing the AI narratives take hold in the fundraising around, like scale-ups, growth stage companies that aren't AI native companies, but they make so much sense in the context of AI?

I don't know. That's a good question. I think AI is very core to Notion, for instance. And so I think notion has like a very deep advantage here. And I think it's just like the next evolution of notion. I think, I don't know if I have enough data points on this. I mean, the thing about AI in my view is like it is not to, I never went to business school. So I may get the definitions of all this wrong.

it's a lay person's understanding, but like in the sustaining versus disruptive innovation, I think AI is like pretty clearly a sustaining innovation in almost all cases. Sure. I think it like might be disruptive to Google. Yep. And so assuming like a scale up is still competent and can still build new product, I think they can just kind of adopt this stuff as opposed to being disrupted by it. Yeah, this is the Salesforce for mobile was just Salesforce.

Yeah. And so, yeah, you could imagine. that Salesforce say, I winds up working potentially, or at least they'll hold on to that for a while. But it is a fun time because at the very least it's like a new battle for everyone to fight out. Like, you know, the Gmail team needs to pay attention because notions coming for them. I love to see it. Do you recommend sabbaticals? Oh, yeah.

I most definitely too. I had never, so I had like worked continuously from when I was. 14 years old. I like worked at a startup in high school and college and then I took off like a week between College and Microsoft and like three days between Microsoft and Facebook and a week between maybe it was 10 days between Facebook and Sequoia. I took off almost two years. I say took off because I kept like 15 boards and so I was on like 30 hours of board meetings and one-on-ones a week. But it was still amazing. I got to like play baseball with my kids almost every day. now they're pretty good at baseball.

I knew nothing about baseball, and so now I know something. And I think I was terrified that I would just be like irrelevant after taking some time off. But I don't know, maybe I am. Still got it. Still got it. It was amazing.

And I just like I would rather like getting to hang out with my kids is like the best thing in the world. I feel like saying that you're on a sabbatical allows you to release the FOMO, which, like, as an investor, there's probably no stronger force, right? It's like the founder wants to talk. She should probably take this call. Why conviction and why partner with Sarah?

I have a bunch of, like, you know, guesses, but I'm assuming you could have basically gone anywhere, you know, any firm, you know, raised $500 million out the gates on your own, you know, whatever. So I'm curious to hear. Well, I've known Sarah for a long time, almost a decade, though I recently discovered that she sent me a LinkedIn message in like December 2016, which I did not see until like two weeks ago. Amazing. But I thankfully ran into her in other contexts. And I think my theory on, I'd spend a bunch of time thinking about emerging managers and like what is the right strategy for starting a new firm.

And I think one thing that is underappreciated, or maybe I certainly underappreciated for a long time, is the degree to which, like, venture firms, you know, there's this funny thing where, like, people who work in venture kind of get, like, a little bit ruffled when you call their thing a company instead of a firm, because it's not a company, it's a firm. But you know what, like firms and companies are, like, first cousins, and they're all just organizations. And I think that, you know, if you're doing a startup, generally you don't say, I have an exception to this, but generally you don't say, like, I'm just going to go, like, build the next Google. Like, that seems like a kind of crazy thing to do. You, like, you start off with a market that seems kind of small. You dominate that market. Then you expand to, like, the next tier of market and then the next tier of market. And suddenly you build something gigantic.

And I think the same thing is true in venture. Like, it's hard to just go out of the gate and be like, I'm going to be. the next gigantic global multi-stage firm. I think you've got to like pick a market and go dominate that market and then sort of expand from there. And if you look at over the past like 10, 15, 20 years, the folks that I think have done this well, it's like Matt at Paradigm with crypto, it's Mickey at Ribbitt with FinTech. And so I, you know, AI was clearly going to be the most important thing over like the next

10 or 20 years. And so I think building a firm focused on AI and intelligent software and becoming the sort of preferred partner for founders in that category and then expanding from there seemed like the optimal strategy. And I think that's very much the founding thesis of conviction. And I think like Sarah and Panav and the team here were off to an amazing start. So known them for a while. I think the thesis this makes a ton of sense. And it's really fun. I think, like, one thing that is underappreciated in venture back to this, like, firms versus company thing is, like, venture is fundamentally predicated on the idea

that there are things that, like, a two-year-old startup can do that, like, are hard for a 50-year-old company. But then when you, like, venture is, like, not always that introspective about itself. So I think there is a belief that there are things that, like, a two, three, four-year-old startup that is in founder mode can do that maybe a 30, 40, 50, 50, 60, 70-year-old venture firm cannot. So when's the IPO? I know Andreessen's going out. General Catalyst, we're hearing rumors about. Conviction.

I'd like to see them in Q4. How have you, what's your broad, I'd love to give you a few minutes to talk about enterprise adoption of AI. We talked last week about how Johnson and Johnson had basically piloted, you know, 30-plus different AI tools. Wasn't it like 600? It might have been like 300. I might have it off by like an order of magnitude. It was like they basically tried hundreds of tools across different teams.

It was called like the thousand flowers. And then they've just been, you know, basically culling, you know, a bunch of stuff that was cool but didn't quite work. What are you seeing as somebody who is, I'm sure, at times a big buyer on the other side at Facebook? Well, I mean, certainly there are things that are working. like obviously cursor cursor is working in a gigantic way I think Harvey's working in a gigantic way Decagon and Sierra seem like they're

doing really really well I caught some of the conversation you were having with David right before this and you guys were talking about rappers a little bit I like I don't love the term rappers and to me there's like back to like the bottom

middle top thing you can kind of like if you're going to build an interesting company. I think you either have to attack it from, you have the handful of researchers that can literally push the state of the art forward, which is like maybe eight organizations in the world, or you know and understand and love and conserve a type of customer better than anyone else in the world and just like build down from the customer. So you're either like building up from the technology or building down from the customer. And so I, I mean, I think the companies that are working, I think just have really good taste and, like, deeply understand

what their buyers, like, what the customers need and are figuring out how to, like, adapt the technology to that. And then I think there's a bunch of folks that are like not, or kind of like hypothesizing what people might need, but don't, don't, like, viscerally understand it, either because they haven't worked in it or they're just like, they haven't figured it out yet. And I think that's the stuff that it's probably turning. But I mean, I think it's kind of standard at this point in the cycle. Like some things, some things are working, some things are not. I think more things will work. I think the defining characteristic will be like a deep focus on the customer, like the buyer and like building a great product for them. Do you expect big tech broadly to get more and more

inquisitive? We were talking with David too around, you know, just this era, maybe 10, 15 years ago when you had companies buying, you know, a single big tech company, even a Twitter would buy many, many, many companies. And it was probably healthy for the ecosystem broadly. And then, you know, now, you know, on the show last week, we spent a bunch of time talking about, you know, the FTCs, you know, what they're doing to meta around something that happened, you know, many, many, you know, over a decade ago. But I'm curious, you know, what's your outlook on? on MNA? I mean, I hope so.

I mean, I think all the, I think it all got shut down just due to government action. And I think like misplaced government action. I mean, I think there hasn't really been anything interesting on the consumer front in over a decade, like probably, I mean, if you ignore TikTok and TikTok has like a million asterisks next to it. There, I mean, it's basically chat GPT, I guess. chat cheap is obviously super interesting. But there haven't, you know, if you look at the 2008, 2009, 2010 era, there was Instagram, there was Snapchat, there was WhatsApp, there was Uber,

there was Lyft, there was DoorDash, there was Instacart. And part of that is just like the mobile phone and obviously like all the change that that ushered in. But I think part of the problem is especially starting around maybe it's probably 2016, 2017, there was just this crackdown on the ability to do acquisitions by big tech. And I mean, especially for consumer, consumer has this property that like very, very, very few things are going to work. But if it works, it works really big. But if it doesn't work, it's often like really talented entrepreneurial founders that can then either take what they've built to a larger company and adapt it for that or work on something outside that larger company.

And if you shut down the outs for those consumer companies, eventually people just stop funding them. So like every year some venture capitalist is like, this is the year that consumer is back. And I just, I don't think consumer will fully be back until either there's like some massive platform shift or like those companies can get acquired. Speaking of consumer, I'd be interested to get your thoughts on consumer agents.

I was talking with the founder last week that had an idea for a consumer agent in the insurance space. And it was a great idea. It seemed like it would be a very, very valuable product. And I basically explained my point of view is that even if Open AI is not explicitly saying that they're going to do this specific use case, the sort of natural evolution is that at some point you will be able to use. use Open AI to do a series of tasks like he was describing. How do you think of the, do you see opportunities in consumer agents broadly or given the foundation model's sort of emphasis on the application layer and building consumer products

that it's sort of a dangerous path to be building on? Yeah, I thought for a while, there seems like there's some intrinsic tension between being a great research lab and being a great product company. Like the, with the exception of Open AI, like most of the other folks haven't shipped that much product. Anthropic is starting to ship some product. And then Open AI has had some complexity over the past couple of years. I think, I don't know, I think there may just be some like intrinsic tension between being graded research and graded product. And I think that is good news for founders that are building like horizontal products.

And so I do think, I mean, this is kind of like the email thing. There's no great AI assistant yet for people, and it seems like it is a thing that is possible to build. I think the more general purpose you are, like if you're building something literally for multiple billions of people, I think the higher the likelihood that you are in a really square dead conflict with the foundation model providers, But I think, I mean, this goes back to the like building down from the customer. If there's some set of customers you can go build for that is even hundreds of millions of people. I think, I know, like a company, a lab like OpenAI has, like they have so many important things to work on. Like there has to be, I have incredible respect for Open AI.

but it's like if you have some strict stack ranking of the teams with an open AI like only 10 problems can have like the top 10 teams on it and so if you're any if you're doing anything after like the top 10 problems that they have then you're like by definition don't have one of the top 10 teams working on it and that seems like an opportunity for a start opportunity yeah well I have a I have a lot more questions yeah we'd love to have you back soon because I mean you can just talk about everything that's going on this amazing we really appreciate you taking the time so yeah Thanks so much. Thanks so much having me.

Cheers. We'll talk to you soon. Bye. Bye. Next up, we got Edward Mayer from, I'm going to mispronounce it. I think it's Machina Labs. I got it wrong the last time I tried to pronounce a word like that, but we'll hear it from him. He's got a bunch of interesting topics, and he is going to talk to us about a bunch of stuff.

Let's bring Ed in, and then we will have him introduce the company, so I don't mess anything up. and we'll go from there. Ed, how you doing? Hey, guys. Good to see you. What's going on. Would you mind just kicking it off a little background on the company? Maybe how you pronounce it. It's Machina Labs, right? Yeah, you're right. Machina Labs. Fantastic. And yeah, just give us a brief overview for the listeners.

Yeah, for sure. You know, I think Malken Labs is a response to something that maybe actually Peter Thiel said once, right? I don't want to butcher it, but it's along the lines of, like, you know, we want to flying cars, we ended up getting 140 characters, right? Which kind of comes down to the cornerstone of like, okay, software develops really fast, hardware does it. I think, you know, some people interpret that as a, you know, something that says, oh, look, we don't have as much less doing the hardware side, but reality is there's a lot of technological

challenges in terms of building hardware, right? So what we're trying to do at Machia Lab is just making that much easier, right? If you're a software developer, you know, two people can develop a program, you know, rent server from AWS, Amazon deploy it. If you want to build a hardware, you pretty much have to go build a factory, right? And that's why development timelines are like seven years, nine years. So what we're doing at Machina is we're using robotics and artificial intelligence to build it basically what we call a robotic craftsman. It's a robotic system that can do different types of manufacturing operations. And it's powered by AI.

I basically can figure out how to pick up different tools, do different types of operation to make different types of parts, physical parts, without anybody having to program it or having to handhold it or build tools for it. And can you talk about the specific kind of like first instantiation of the thesis? I saw Justin Lopez over at Base Power posting. And it looked like he used a picture of your warehouse. Is that you guys? Is that right? That is us. Okay.

And so he breaks the new manufacturing space down into three categories. Manufacturing SaaS companies, make parts for other people companies, and change the way the part is made companies. And which one do you guys fit in? I think you're in the third, right? Change the way the part is made, developed a way to make stampings complex geometry form, sheet metal parts without dyes. And so can you break us down like what is actually going on when this massive robotic arm, is like pushing into this metal. Explain why this is important, how it works.

Yeah, so we wanted to build a system, we call it a robot craftsman, right? The idea is like, where do we just get started? And we started as sheet forming. Sheet forming as largest metal processing sector today. I think it's like $280 billion industry. You know, most of the metal parts you see day-to-day are sheet metal parts. Like, you know, you're sitting in your car,

you're in a sea of sheet metal. Every other car body is sheet metal. for sheet metal parts or aircrafts are basically sheet metal cans. But today it takes a very long time to get your first batch of parts in she metal work, right? You have to go make dyes, put them in giant stamping presses, like four-story tall buildings, and then stamp your parts out. So our first kind of application of being sheet forming, we have two robots that form, you know, start from a flat sheet of metal between two robots,

they have these giant fingers that are super strong, but they can basically push and pull on the metal deformed it into a very complex shape without the need for any any dyes or tooling. Basically, you know, you get your from idea to the first part in matter of hours, right? It's similar to how a potter forms a clay ball with their fingers. They're coming into the sheet, deform it and shape it into different shapes. So yes, it's a new paradigm, a new way of doing manufacturing, but it doesn't stop there. We're already doing like trimming.

We're already doing sliding, homemaking. So the robot can literally pick up another tool, figure out what it need to do with it, to do the next operation, and does that. So today, there's forming. It does a lot of subtractive work like trimming, wholemaking. It also does a lot of QC. Are you, do you get worried? There's been a ton of, there's been an explosion of new manufacturing startups

over the last couple years, you know, long since you guys started the company, many of which promising to automate with robots, the creation of various products. We covered earlier today on the show just how hard it is to like, for Nike to manufacture a shoe, right, which sounds somewhat trivial. Like, you know, humans have been doing them for years. You should be able to, maybe we should be able to do it with machines. But then in practice, it's like there's so many different factors down to temperature.

Out of all, you know, when you look at manufacturing broadly, I'm assuming you have some type of framework for evaluating whether something like can be automated to the degree that people would like to see out of manufacturing or areas that, you know, are basically shouldn't be touched, right? Like something like like shoes, which have infinite sizes and a bunch of different factors. Yeah, I think it's like a combination of like three things, like the market size opportunity and how technology ready it is to be to be kind of disrupted, right? So, but also I think there's a lot of conversation around automation that that is in the previous paradigm.

I think for now, for the first time, we have this concept of LLM, this concept of we can actually reason very complex sequence of operations, as long as we can train the robots on that sequence of operations. So it comes down to what data do we have available to train the robots. We already figured out, okay, you know, neural networks, LLMs, these transforms. performers, if you give it enough data, it can actually learn a very complicated, complicated task. The real key was, okay, where do we generate enough data? Where do we have enough data to train it? So it means, and unfortunately for a lot of manufacturing tasks, the data is not out there, right? You cannot train a very complicated model one. For, you know, for chat GPT, the internet had trove of free data that you could use to create a very complex kind of chatbot.

for us coming up with rice sequence to make car doors or shoes doesn't exist. So the key is can you actually provide a solution that can scale with limited amount of data, with human intervention and limited amount of data? So you can deploy it in the field and get enough traction so we can have now enough data that comes from your machines to train your model. And that's why we run after she for me. Yeah. Can you talk a little bit about the NVIDIA announcement today?

that's very exciting. Seems like it might be a little bit of like a side quest or is this like in the critical path to, you know, mass, mass production? Yeah, no, NVIDIA's today in Austin was kind of a little fun thing. We did. Nvidia is an investor in us. So fundamentally, they are very interested in what we are trying to do, you know, being able to capture data from physical phenomenon and build models that can manipulate

the physical world. Cool. But I think we work with their artists and residents. It's actually those open AI artists and residents. and we work with NVIDIA collaboratively, to really turn just the artist speaking to a system into a piece of art, right? So Alex, the artist that would work with us,

basically spoke what he wanted to build, what sculpture he wanted to build, and the full stack of generating the code, running the robots, all were done autonomously. So from speech, from intent, all the way to the physical part, without anybody ever touching anything. I love that.

I was, when the studio Ghibli moment happened, I was taking some photos of like my kids play sets, studio giblifying them, and then immediately I wanted to print them out because I wanted to have some sort of like physical instantiation. Just showing the phone was like not satisfactory. So the idea of like speaking words and then getting like a sculpture out, like that's that sounds really awesome and futuristic. Yeah, yeah, go.

How a lot of an investment in humanoid robots lately, many of those promising to revolutionize manufacturing, replace human labor, automate the production of lots of things, as somebody who's been doing it with robots since 2019, how do you think of that form factor in the context of manufacturing? Yeah. Actually, Super Bowl is super bullish on humans, right? I think the question is, to your point,

is it going to be, is the first application going to be in manufacturing? I don't think so, right? I think the biggest problem, if you want to think of a startup as like, what do you need to do risk first? The first thing, you give an example of like Nike figuring out how to do the shoe manufacturing. The first thing is actually intelligence. We have kinematic frameworks for a long time. You know, we could do what humans does in terms of kinematic freedom with industrial robots. We can actually do it more precisely with higher force with industrial robots, which was what we need in manufacturing setting.

So the missing piece really was intelligence. So we're kind of a little bit intelligence first, right? We don't need to solve the joints. We don't need to solve people walking around, like robots walking around and, you know, having the human forefactor. If you solve the intelligence, you have enough kinematic framework, which is industry over robots, to do what you need to do. But that being said, I think, you know, humanoid is a huge opportunity, maybe not in manufacturing, but downstream and homes and all other places that we can use you much. What is the, you know, I imagine you guys are beneficiary from some of the tariff stuff in some way, but on the actual machine side, are you know, you in the industry seeing challenges of like, you know,

how much of like the actual robots that you guys are leveraging are sourced outside of the country? Chris and Hadrian was saying, like, yeah, my capax goes up by 10%, but the demand might go up. way, way higher. So what's been your experience? I mean, that's true. I mean, like, what we can, what we do here, so the challenge is for a lot of work that we do, and especially in the defense, aerospace defense, there is no industrial base. So we have to do it. So the demand is always there. Now, 70% of our mom is off the shop. And we intentionally try to do that so that we can actually finance it easily, right? Use, you know, multi-push their purse off-the-shelf equipment so that we can easily finance. The full harbor stat, that being said,

you know, a lot of the hardware that we use is either produced in America or it's in very, like, allied countries. For example, robots were produced in Japan. So the tariffs are a little bit more digestible there. But that being said, you know, we are one of the very few manufacturing companies that are like doing almost software like merchants. So there is enough room for us to, to be able to absorb that cost and still, you know, have a very high value, high market is. interesting is the idea on that note is the idea you know we've seen we've seen some investors kind of you know strictly software investors kind of poke fun at at vCs that are investing in manufacturing you know expecting uh software like margins and and there's sort of this sense that uh well manufacturing

hasn't for most things hasn't historically had software like margins you're seeing it today um how how do you think about the margin profile for advanced manufacturing over time, even in things that are like non-chips, right? Yeah, yeah. So it's interesting arbitrage. I think there's a lot of people thinking about manufacturing solutions in different ways. I think you can think of it as automating what traditionally has been done. And I think that's usually end up being very good origin, right?

But if you're creating something new that, you know, has some kind of arbitrage on either neighbor or has kind of arbitrage on equipment, right? In our case, where you don't have to make dyes, right? And a die, a single die for, you know, a car door can be up to a million dollars, right? So for us, we're faster, but we get rid of that asset. So it allows us to have the, you know, at the same cost, parity, have higher margin.

But I think, yeah, down the road, the margins could erode, and that's why we're thinking about it as a platform, right? It's a robotic system that can do forming today. Tomorrow is going to do your next. operation. It's going to do bending. It's going to do hemming. It's going to do forging. Right. So you're constantly expanding the capabilities of the system, which allows you to sustain a very larger volume business as some of the margins of the older processes kind of erode.

Yeah. Last question. You mentioned that you might have a golden dome take. We did a little deep dive. There wasn't a lot to dig into. I'm curious. It doesn't seem like it would interface with your business too much, but maybe you just have studied the industry. So what do you think is going on with the golden dome? He's making an actual dome. Yeah, make a physical dome out of gold to go over the United States. I would love that. If you like the blue, enjoy the blue above us while you can. It's going to just be all gold soon. Yeah. Yeah, that's right. I mean, there was like people were talking about how it's like competing with a golden dome at Nordame, which is like actual thing in terms of the name,

name any conflict. No, so why do we actually fit into this paradigm? We work a lot with missile manufacturers, right? And manufacturing components for the body of the missile for them. Hypersonics is one of the main enablers of how we can actually have defense against some of these missile attacks. So for hypersonics, you need to start processing very complex materials, materials that were traditionally very hard to process. Think of high temperature alloys, like nickel, titanium. And because of our robotic process locally manipulates the material,

we have way more control to process the material without getting to failure. For example, we can form titanium sheets without tearing it in room temperature, which is traditionally not possible. Right. So I think there's a lot of interesting opportunities there for us and we're exploring with our, you know,

with our primes that we work with. But yeah, I mean, the whole concept of Golden Dome is going to be interesting. You know, what I've heard last is it's going to be 7% of the DOD budget in the next two, three years, right? Once it becomes programmatic. Yeah. So that's, that's what I've been great. Obviously, next year we're looking at like, I think 20 billion on the missile defense, but over long term, I think the plan is roughly 7% of the defense budget. So it's going to be a huge opportunity. And obviously, I think something that's probably very necessary for that. But, yeah,

we can dive into details, but I don't know how much time now. No, no, no. I mean, I think we'll have to have you back on when there's more details that emerge and we actually get a, you know, a deeper dive into how the, how the program record evolves, what the subcontractors might be looking at. Right now, all the names parties are no comments, so there's not too much to dig into for good reason, but it'll be super interesting to see how this pans out. Jordi, anything? No, this was great. Yeah, we got to have you back on soon.

But congratulations on the success. And I'd love to come see the machines in action in person. It would be really interesting. You know, we were like, we were half an hour away from downtown, so downtown LA. Oh, awesome. Yeah, that'd be awesome. Let's do it. I want to do the show with a robot.

I want a robot to make us a bigger gong. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We need a possible. You gotta make it happen. We got to make it happen. That's a something we actually do very easy. Yeah, I can imagine. It's a perfect.

It's a match made and happen. Our people will talk to your people. Yeah, yeah. Our people will talk to your people. This is fantastic. Thanks for coming on. Thanks so much, Ed. We'll talk to you soon.

Bye. Bye. Next up, we got William Brown. The idea of like a 20-foot gong is very appealing. Very appealing. That you could have watched be made from the raw material. Yes. Be perfect.

Be perfect. And I mean, you could actually edge different things into it. There's so many cool things you could do with that technology. It's very, very awesome. Anyway, welcome to the show, Will. Hey, how's going on? Good to have you on here. Thanks for a big thing of your posts for a long time.

One of the top. Many people have said, one of the top poster of the year i think potential poster of the year for sure he's been burning up the timeline uh jordy where where should we start i mean i have a bunch of i have a bunch of stuff that let's do it we can go through i mean we can just dive right into it do you want to give a brief intro on yourself and who you are before we just started started talking about the timeline yeah sounds good uh i'm well brown i'm a researcher at morgan stanley by the way nothing i say here is morgan stanley opinions this is all me kind of just like sharing my thoughts um driving i'm

researcher. I work a lot on stuff related to LMs there. My background was in reinforcement learning theory. I did my PhD at Columbia. So I've been in New York City for a while, big fan of New York City. Great things happening here all the time. And yeah, I also just like talking about the stuff on the internet and like participating in the open source community. There's lots of like cool either projects or code bases or papers or models always coming out. And like I, a lot of my job is like needing to know all that stuff and being a liaison, essentially, like, from the internet to the company where, like, people want to understand, like, okay, what's the latest model for XYZ that I should be using? What's the right open source toolkit? Especially because, like, at a big

regulated company, we need to understand the landscape, especially for things that are, like, downloadable off the shelf without needing to, like, onboard a vendor, like, some things on board vendor for, but it's also, like, a much heavier lift. And so, like, we need to, like, map the landscape of, like, what's the right tool for the job? job for everything L unrelated. And so that's a large part of what I do. And it was also like my excuse for being on Twitter all day. That's great.

It's a great excuse. Where do you want to start? Where, aside from X, like where, where are you getting signal without giving away, without giving away all the alpha? Because I imagine like, you know, by the time Dwar Keshe has like done a podcast on something like, you know, it's been that the information is like, you know, disseminated. It's not necessarily alpha. There's a surprising lot of alpha still.

on X just from places where you don't. Like, so there's places I have not found much alpha on LinkedIn. The group chats, the Anans, the open source, like GitHub discussions. Lots of really good stuff is buried in like a GitHub issue or like a feature request for someone's like, hey, this thing would be cool. And these ideas are just all over the internet, but you got to like nowhere to look for them. Yep. I want to talk about humor.

You actually posted about this like a month ago or two months ago. You said it's interesting that 1.5 billion parameters is all you need to crush math competitions, but you need like 15 trillion to make the model be funny. Maybe humor is the right measure of true intelligence. And for a long time, my eval has been, tell me a funny joke. And every time there's a new model, it's tearing up X. And I ask you to tell a funny joke. And it's always the worst joke I've ever heard.

It's kind of an anti-joke. But is that just the lack of labeled data, essentially? Or do you think there's something more like innately human to the idea of humor? I mean, I think humor is like really hard. And it's also very hard to, it is very hard to label. But I think it's also really hard to like, okay, this is like a big debate topic. Sure. Is like, would it like, I think people kind of assume, oh, just like train it on funny data.

But like the things that make things funny are really subtle and pretty varied. A friend of mine, coworker actually, did this experiment where he tried to like have one model be a judge of like, is this funny or not? And what they do is they like lead into things that feel funny. And the results were actually kind of funny. But what it ended up just doing was swearing more. So like if you swear a lot, models think that's funny. And so there's all these like kind of like there's a lot of cheat codes. And RL and training these models is like the path of these resistances to find the cheat code.

But like real humor, like the people that to be really funny, you have to be really smart. Like think of like your favorite comedian, like Norm or Larry David or like all these people are like really smart. You can tell from the way that they compose jokes. Like there's like an attention. Like attention is in like transformer attention of like ideas that need to combine in a very sparse, like precise way to make a good job. joke is like you can't just like show things together you kind of got to thread the needle to make a joke land um it's not a very coarse mechanism and so i think like yeah uh dbtc 4.5 is like ginormous model trillions of parameters most likely um and that like there's more room in the model to have these like

little sparse connections materialize as you go through layers of the transformer um and I I just haven't seen anything like that come from a smaller model. How scale-pilled are you based on the results from 4.5? Are you off to the races, scales all you need? Or less in-pilled or what? I'm very RL-scaling-pilled. Like, I'm not big transformer-pilled, really. So pre-training wall real?

I think we don't, like, if there's another $100 trillion tokens of data sitting out there ready to train on, go for it. Yeah. I don't know like one I think is like people should do some app and map about like how long until big GPUs are readily available. And it's it's like going to be a while before people can really run like even deep seek R1 with like easy resources. Like you can you can kind of do it on one node. But like the quality bump over things that are much smaller is just like like the we're hitting diminishing returns on capital investment is a lot of it. like they're taken out of the API because like the they can sell other things with the same GPUs and make more money is part of it. Like it's a lot of compute to keep a model up like that. It's slow. And the things that it's better on are like not that economically valuable. And so the sweet spot appears to be in this like between like 30 billion active parameters and or parameters total and like a couple hundred maybe. but like I don't know that like when meta releases this behemoth model, I don't think anyone's really going to run behemoth for like their day to day stuff.

Yeah. It's just probably not going to be worth it. So I mean, given that, you know, Tyler Cowan's calling O3 AGI, like the economic results of these like big but not crazy big model seems to be pretty good, run it on a node. Should we be talking more about, hey, it's good enough. Let's bake it into an ASIC. let's just bring down the inference cost to basically zero like we did with Bitcoin hashing and whatnot. Like is that the conversation we should be having?

I mean, I think that's been that's kind of been how like Grox's Rebus Savinova are like playing that game. Yeah. And I think like those businesses make a lot of sense. Like they can kind of say, okay, this version of a transformer, we're going to be in this ballpark for a while. Yep. We can bake that into our plans a little bit.

I think what's the next way, 2025, like people have been saying you're the agent. but like what I think that means is identical RL. Like we're realizing RL works. Like the reason O3 is good is because it's trained to use tools. The way you train a model to use the right tool for the job is re-inforcing learning. And they've said as much like deep research,

reinforce learning. People have been throwing like random tools at models for two years and it only now works. Even then the models are the same. Like GPT4 was a bigger model than a lot of the models people are using now. It had just as much training data. But it was not,

or at least doesn't seem to have been REL in this specific way. And so that's kind of like my bet is like people are going to really want to train models to be agents. And I think you can get that to work well with a pretty small model. Does that mean like a flourishing of RLed big transformers for different tasks? Or are we still searching for like the God model that can do everything all at once? I mean, so okay, I think there's a couple leaps we need to have models. that can do everything all at once for like a super long amount of time. Like my, I tweeted something about this.

Like my, I'm happy to call O3 10 minute AGI. And I think like framing AGI in terms of like length of time it takes a human to do a task is like more reasonable than like a global framing. Like sure. There's a bar of like drop in replace for a human that we are like definitely not out yet like for general jobs. But most things that human can do in 10 minutes,

you can like get O3 to do that pretty. well. And so that's a very like I think there's even even like a web like make a website in 10 minutes. Okay, you have a good human designer is like probably could whip something up pretty quickly. Yeah, but not like an entire design system that works together across all the different website. Yeah. Makes it does sense. So so so so so uh seems like we're transformer maxing. We're RL maxing. Uh, is there a new paradigm that you're excited about? Uh, program synthesis. Are we bringing back symbol manipulation at. some point, like what, what are we going to pull from the tool chest to make this thing go to the

next level? I mean, I think it's just tool calls. Like, I think when people say program synthesis, like, we're already there. Like, O3 is program synthesis, but the programs are like JSON and Python. Yep. Like, you can do a lot with that. I would have, I did some tests on like, ArcadGI problems where you give the screenshot to O3 and it can like basically figure it out in 10 minutes of like zooming in and looking at the

thing and then writing some code to see if it like reproduces the thing. And it doesn't nail it, but I would, they haven't released the benchmark, but I would guess it'll do reasonably well. What are you seeing around AI adoption and finance broadly? I feel like we've been promised like, you know, somebody can just press a button and generate the deck and like generate, you know, a 20 page investment memo. And are are these types of, you know, deep research style tools being used? extremely heavily already, or is there just even a greater, now that they're being used, you know, hey, let's go spend our time talking to, you know, three times as many experts so that we actually get proprietary kind of insight into the, into the business.

Great question. And I think there's a couple of different answers I have. One is that like, on one hand, we at least have been pretty, I think, fast at certain things at adoption. Like the day GPT4 launched, Morgan Stanley had integrations because we had been working on it and these were like, we had pressure releases for these of like, we are ready to go. And so there are certain things where like initiatives can happen where effort comes together to make a thing ready to use. But the like, there's a long tail of smaller tasks that you do, there's not a drop in replacement for. If there's a vendor, it would take a long time to onboard them and it's not going to really solve the problem right away. And you could build something from scratch if you put a few people on for a few months,

but like engineer your hands are like few and far between. And so I think the deep research is an example of a product that I would say like works really well for the thing it's built for. It doesn't quite like do other stuff super well. Like if you wanted to give you a table of like 50 very precise things, it's going to make some mistakes there because the report format has a lot more room for like slop without it seemed like noticing be bad. But PowerPoint, Microsoft PowerPoint copilot is not great.

It's not a thing that I have heard many people say saves the month time. Do you have any takes on enterprise AI adoption broadly? We were talking, I think, late last week about how Johnson and Johnson had tried hundreds of different tools. Like they went through the effort to just like try a bunch of stuff because there was a top down mandate.

And now they're just like cutting probably 90% of it. And so all the startups that were like, yeah, we have a pilot with J&J. It's going great. Like they won't churn. Well, 90% of them just churned maybe. I mean like most of these pilots are very much intended to be churned. Like they're not, they're very much in a, they're not being rolled out broadly. They are coming through in a kind of walled off environment for people who are like,

going to be the beta testers. And so we have a crew of people who, like, and I'm involved with this as well, like, there, as new stuff comes, like, online, we test it out, we give it feedback. Most of these do not convert. Because, like, we're very willing to, like, try stuff in terms of taking the call,

in terms of, like, look at a demo, but actually making a thing be part of, like, the company-wide workflow is, like, a pretty heavy blith. Think of like onboarding a cloud provider. Like a lot of the reason, like maybe this is like one reason cloud providers have the margins that they do is because like moving clouds is really hard. Moving all your stuff from like AWS to Azure is a pain. I think especially in regulated industries, like a lot of software onboarding faces the same sort of hurdles where you can't just like bring it in and use it.

You got to like go through a whole process. and some companies have kind of planned for that and some have not. So like one example is I think like a reason that windsurf has been successful as a cursor competitor is they lead way harder on enterprise than cursor has. Like they have really designed for enterprise integration whereas cursor really has not. Do you, was a windsurf news surprising to you at all or was that just obvious OpenAI cares about coding and they should have a sort of dedicated enterprise, you know, coding. I mean, it makes sense.

Yeah. I think like to me it felt like the sign of there being some more friction with Microsoft because like originally it was like, oh, they already have that. It's co-pilot. Sure. And so this to me seems like them taking a step away from Microsoft. But I mean, this is just speculation. Yeah.

It does make sense that it's cursor and that is windsurf and not. I mean, they did try to buy Winf, supposedly. Like, I'm a cursor user. I think it's great. I haven't seen anything that really sold me on like, go move to Windsurf. I'm sure it's fine. It's just like the bar to like switch for me is like, I need a thing to have a feature that's like killer that the other one doesn't have.

And I have not like seen that yet. But I'm sure they have plenty of good stuff. what now that we're like a couple months out from the deep seek moment what is your takeaway is it something around kind of the the optimization of the inferencing these models or how have you processed that news now that we're a few months out yeah I mean they're like incredible engineering like I think a lot of their open source releases have really like like since r1 they've released a lot of code and details on their imprint stack and just training stack. Even Sam Alden was posting like, hey, if you work for a high frequency training firm, like come work at Open AI. And I read that as like, oh, they want to optimize their models now. Right.

I think some of the big players have realized they didn't have to that much. Like Deep Seek is serving all of China on 2000 GPS. It's kind of silly that Anthropic can't, like, has to have the warning about, oh, we have high limits. Please try again later for like their paid users. Like that's whereas like the deep seek chat is literally free anywhere. And so I think some other people probably are working on upping their input efficiency game.

But it's also like hard because it's very model specific. Every model has some quirks and you got to optimize around that. It's hard to like have things be reliable and fault tolerant. So you think you can't just port back like FP8 wasn't that one of the things or like the mixture of experts blocking all those different things. It seemed like there were some stuff that where it was like week two, we were getting, you know, analyses. And I was like, this will probably be open sourced and ported to Lama and all the others, like, pretty quickly. But has it played out differently?

I mean, to me, the surprising thing was not any individual one thing. It's that each of these is maybe like a 30%, 50% gain, but they have like 10, 15 of them that all stacked. And so getting all of these to stack nicely is what's hard. That's interesting. That's a great take. Yeah. That's interesting. What are you expecting out of Ali Bob?

and Quinn, yeah, three. Oh, I mean, I'm really excited. Like, they make, I think, still the best model suites for like doing research. So like I do almost all of my experiments on Quinn models just because they have a bunch of them. There's like so many versions. Like for every different model size, there's like seven different versions. There's like a code one, a math one, a multimodal one, an audio one, a base instruct, RL. like they really are optimizing for user-friendly like open source model ecosystem

in a way that uh llama was doing last year this current year we'll see if they can get their act together um so are they are are they also like rl pilled at this point and and then moving away i'm sure they are yeah like they have they have a reasoning model the reasoning model is not as impressive like but it is a pretty small one it's like a 32 billion parameter model but does well on math competitions. I don't know that anyone has really bitten the RL bullet in the way that DeepSeek did early and then opening I has been doing lately,

where they're really kind of betting, like opening eye seems to be essentially betting on scaling up RL as the path. And that it's not just longer reasoning, but it's reasoning integrated with system interaction. And I, like, that's kind of the drum I've been trying to beat, for a while, like a lot of the open source work I've been doing is around a multi-turn tool-calling

RL. I think that we need better ecosystems for that. There's like very, like there's starting to be more tools you can go use, but for a while there's just nothing that supported this. Everyone was very RLHF-pilled for too long. What do you think is going on with Lama 4? Did they just miss the memo about RL? Or is there something else at work? I mean, doing this stuff at a huge company where a lot is on the line is hard, and it's way easier to do nothing than something. And meta also doesn't have to print money off of their models. Like they don't, like, I think one analogy that I've been giving people is like, why did Amazon not win NLP? They had like 10,000 people in the Alexa team in the 2018.

And they have just now released like okay language models. And they're really betting on Anthropic to drive their revenue there. How are you thinking about the trade war in the context of the data center supply chain? And is that even, do you pay much attention to that? Or is it kind of you're busy enough on the model side? I do follow it. Yeah. I mean, I tend, I listen to Dylan Patel talking.

a lot of stuff. He's great. Seminoleysis. It's hard for me to like give a real take. I don't think I I think it's like important to keep an eye on. There's a lot of pieces of supply chain that will get. It depends on what happens. It's going to get messy for sure, probably. But I don't have like a hard stance. You should become a VC and then you can just give it. Yeah, yeah, exactly. You should flip over. No, I just think it's funny like in a year we'll be like, We were worried about the wrong transformers. Yes, yes, yes, for sure with the energy thing, for sure. I have one last question.

How is the culture at Morgan Stanley? I mean, it seems like talking to you, you sound like a Silicon Valley founder, but you're at like a company that's like over 100 years old. Are you part of a new guard, or has Morgan Stanley always been this way and you're just the first to kind of post about it? What's it like working there?

I'm definitely like the first to like read a lot. about it, but like the team I'm on has been around for maybe like it's like a machine learning research team where we try to, we try to be like a version, a finance version of like an MSR or a Bell Labs where you're like off keeping up with the research, we write papers, we publish, we go to conferences. We tend to, we kind of hang around as like expert consultants and advise on a lot of efforts throughout the company. And so the company has definitely been like betting on machine learning for a while.

I think we are like probably ahead a lot of a lot of like the quant firms in terms of the how early we were on realizing deep learning was important. And I think we've done a pretty good job at like keeping up with and following the like L and Kray's. Like we were we partnered with open AI before chat EBT. Wow. Wow. And yeah. That's amazing. Well, this was great.

I'd love to make it a regular thing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I definitely want to have you back. there's a new model release or something or new paper you publish. Yeah.

If I can do a quick plug. In June, I will be at the A Engineer World's Fair in SF giving a talk as a follow-up to my previous one. Very cool. I think we're going to that. I think we'll see you there. Oh, sweet. Awesome. See there.

Yeah. And then also I am doing a course of some kind soon official announcement pending. But you really want to like. It's how to get rich quickly. Agents and R.L stuff. Okay. And so if you DM me, your email, I'll put you on the list for more info. That sounds awesome.

Awesome. Good luck with it. I'm excited. Cool. Yeah, this has been great. Yeah, thanks so much. Awesome. Great. Thanks.

Thanks for coming on. We'll talk to you later. Bye. Should we go through some timeline and then get out of here? Yeah, you're a timeline addict. I mean, there's so many posts and we don't have enough time. There's so much in the, Monday is always a stack day because you have a whole weekend of posts to catch up on.

Of course. Adam Rankin says you're coding at the bar, I'm drunk at the office. Respect to that. I love that. Aidan says, the people I intellectually respect the most have quite lopsided output input ratio. They write, build, create more than they read, study, or absorb. Geniuses are not sponges.

They're volcanoes. I like that framing. That's interesting. I'm kind of going backwards. I think this one from Telmudic. The first time I heard of the Gomad, Gallant of Milk a Day diet, I love. laughed my, I laughed. There's no way I'm having my milked intake for a diet. Go mad, what are you cutting? The idea that he's doing two gallons of milk a day? Hilarious to me. I,

timeline and turmoil. Timeline and turmoil this weekend. Paul Graham taking shots of Palantir saying you shouldn't work at Palantier. Gary Tan shimes in says, is now an awkward time to mention I helped come up with the very first Save the Shire t-shirt at Palantir. Very, very funny. But, you know, we love Palantir. We love PG's writing, and he is a foundational member of the tech elite. But he gets spicy with the political takes. He has strong political opinions, and he brings him to the timeline. And I like that Gary and PG can have a little bit of fun. Yeah, exactly. Love to see it.

WebDev Mason, always with some great takes. There's some people. The Blue Origin story has really grown since we first covered it. Now people are very upset that Katie Perry went, said it was an affront to real astronauts. They didn't go all the way to space. They only went to the Carmen line. I saw people saying that, you know,

how could you go to space when there's problems on Earth? Yes. And then you could also kind of extend that out to how could you do anything when there's problems on Earth? I think that's so funny. like obviously it's like why are you wasting money on space when there's people that are hungry but we literally talk to a farmer who was like Starlink is increasing farming yields it's like no actually like going to space and spending on like the crazy thing actually help

people eat which is great but web dev Mason says this is so sad dead culture stuff eject me into the timeline where she yanks the microphones in and shouts I flew over our home world and saw us the pale blue dot the blessed sprouting seed of the Virgo supercluster and I must report to every living soul that it is dope. So she wants, because the story is that Katie Perry now regrets going and says that there's been too much backlash. She says that she shouldn't have gone. But Mason says, no, own it. Go and celebrate it because it is fantastic.

Question about watches. We already talked about Bezell, but is it appropriate to wear a Rolex GMT as an analyst? I love this answer. It says, it depends. Imagine your first all-nighter. you are burning the midnight oil when you decide to take off your Rolex GMT and place it on your desk to allow your wrist better control over the almighty Excel shortcuts you are about to employ. You take a look around and what do you see?

Every other analyst has placed their protect Philippe Calatrava travel time in front of them for the exact same reason. Now, if you, sir, are capable of bearing the overwhelming feeling of shame that will inevitably conquer you, then by all means, consider it absolutely appropriate. What a great post. It was hilarious. Anyway, we should cover the VCs, what's going on in higher ed at some point, but there was a good post by Connor. He says, VCs are attacking higher education.

Trump squeezes higher ed funding. University sell PE holdings to fund their operations. VC funding dries up. I don't think this is actually going to happen. The news is that Yale is like selling off a portion of their venture capital. portfolio, but I doubt that that really hasn't affected policy funding landscape. And I don't think, I don't think the university endowments are a major, major source. I think like pension funds are even bigger now and like sovereign wealth funds are even bigger. Yeah, and also very likely,

again, I doubt they're reacting to short-term pressure. It's probably, you know, Yale selling $6 billion of secondaries probably is part of a larger strategy to generate liquidity on long duration investments, right? So here are some posts that I want to follow up on. We'll highlight them today, but we'll either have these folks on the show or do deep dives on these topics. A person of swag, Adam says vibe sheeting, is this anything? He's built cursor for Microsoft Excel going into the Lions Den, competing directly with

Microsoft co-pilot, but we just heard it. some of the Microsoft co-pilot products are falling behind a little bit. And so I thought it was fun that he was building a like a plug-in just into Excel. And I could imagine this becoming a great company. So excited to talk to him about that and dive in deeper. Also, there's a new planet. Delian mentioned this K218B. I did a whole deep research report on K218B.

Very, very fascinating. Interesting. I had chat chappetipt. I had chat chepti tell me an entire speculative science fiction story about how we might get to K218B. Spoiler alert, it's going to be like 500 years to get there, even at like point one C or something like that, which is the speed of light, because it's so far away. But a multi-generational ship could do it. To understand how many episodes we could do in 500 years. We could do a lot.

Quite a lot. Interestingly, I had chat GPT. I was like, tell me a sci-fi story and like, why don't you just make me the character in it? And it was very weird. And it was like, now you're in cryosleep for a hundred years. It was like, now you're an old man, but because of life extension technologies, you're 150 years old. And like, like, all, like your kids are now older than you because of this weird time thing. It was very fun, very weird. All right. Not appropriate for the show.

Anyway, knock it off. Last one is notable cap. This is a leak from Arthur Rock, Arfer Rock, Series B to browser base, right? Paul Klein, who's been on the show. So, I assume he was. Oh, one last one last one from near. I like this one very end. Reminder of how far AGI goalposts have moved.

It's from an old book or something. It says, an AGI could beat you a chess, tell you a story, bake you a cake, describe a sheep, and name three things larger than a lobster. It's also solidly the stuff of science fiction. And most experts agree that AGI is many decades away from becoming reality if it will become reality at all. So, wow. The last three models I use could describe a sheep. Couldn't bake you a cake, though. Couldn't bake me a cake.

But it can tell you how to bake a cake. And it really can do all of those things and more. So, yeah, AGI's here. Just get on with your life. Unevenly distributed. Yeah. I was at the beach over the weekend and I was thinking to myself, I was looking around. I was like, none of these people are AGI pills.

And then everybody went back to enjoying the beach. Yeah, that's the nature of it. Anyway, thank you for watching today. We will see you tomorrow. We got a great show for you tomorrow. A bunch of news breaking. And we'll talk to you then. Bye.

Looking forward to it. Cheers.