TBPN - $DJT Goes Nuclear, OpenAI in talks at $750B, 2025 Model Wars in Review | Brian Armstrong & Tarek Mansour, Simon Eskildsen

Episode Date: December 18, 2025

(00:30) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (05:02) - OpenAI in talks at $750B (08:56) - WB Board Questions Paramount's Funding Stability (23:03) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (55:03) - Brian Armstrong and Tarek Mansour are the co-founders of Coinbase, one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency platforms. Armstrong, a former Airbnb engineer, serves as CEO and has been a leading advocate for mainstream crypto adoption, while Mansour, Coinbase’s CTO, architected much of the company’s core infrastructure and security systems. (01:11:58) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (01:44:16) - Simon Hørup Eskildsen, co-founder and CEO of turbopuffer—a serverless vector and full-text search platform—discusses the company's recent addition of Thrive Capital as an investor, emphasizing their preference for a concentrated cap table with long-term partners. He highlights the importance of customer satisfaction over fundraising figures, sharing a positive testimonial from Notion's co-founder, Akshay Kothari, about turbopuffer's impact on product development. Eskildsen also notes the company's growth to 22 employees and their focus on scaling infrastructure to handle increasing data demands in AI applications. (02:01:48) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.comFigma - https://figma.comVanta - https://vanta.comLinear - https://linear.appEight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpnWander - https://wander.com/tbpnPublic - https://public.comAdQuick - https://adquick.comBezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.comAttio - https://attio.com/tbpnFin - https://fin.ai/tbpnGraphite - https://graphite.devRestream - https://restream.ioProfound - https://tryprofound.comJulius AI - https://julius.aiturbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.comPolymarket - https://polymarket.com/fal - https://fal.aiPrivy - https://www.privy.ioCognition - https://cognition.aiGemini - https://gemini.google.comFollow TBPN: https://TBPN.comhttps://x.com/tbpnhttps://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

You're watching TVPN. Today is Thursday, December 18th, 2025. We are live from the TBPN Ultradome, the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance. The Cattle. Brim.com. Count is money. Save both. Easiest corporate cards.

Bill Pay. Accounting. A whole lot more all in one place. We got a video here that it has been promised to me. I saved this for the show, so this reaction, I haven't seen the video, but I've seen the metrics around the video. It's got 15,000 likes just on a quote tweet of it. I think it's going to be very funny. Tyler was saying, you got to watch this.

So we're going to pull this up. Pegas is quote tweeting and says, this is OpenAI showing the public its financials once it goes public. Okay, it looks pretty good. Getting a haircut. Looks good. Oh, no. You know, I've been watching these haircut videos, and they're actually incredibly good content because I saw one.

I mean, obviously, that one's very silly. Dude, this video going viral, this guy's going to be full gigacad mode within six months. I guarantee it. Guarantee it. He just did that he knew what was going to happen. He did it to inspire himself to, I guess, look back. For sure, for sure. To start bombs smashing.

I looked at a haircut video where, uh, at a haircut video where, uh, And it's incredibly sticky content because you're watching the guy describe what he wants. And then at the very end, they show you a montage of the photos. And when it works out, obviously, the joke there is that it's a downgrade. But when it works out, it's really satisfying. The payoff comes right at the end, which of course is great for retention and average view duration. And so it's a growing format. It does make me wonder, like, there are certain, like, can every different vertical

can every different type of content become, you know, high retention? Or are there some things that are just, like, more naturally, like, payoff-based, right? Yeah. Anyway, let me tell you about Adio, the AI Native CRM. Adio builds, scales, and grows your company to the next level. We are in Arena Mag. This is breaking news. The latest edition of Arena.

We had three martini lunch. This is issue number six, Q4, 2025, three martini lunch. And we are in here with a wonderful spread. Oh, there's a bunch of great people in here. Look at this. We got Daniel in here. I don't know if he's doxed in this photo, actually. The growing one?

I think so. But there's a profile on some Archer stuff, some V-Tol stuff. Very nice. We got California Forever in here. Apparently, we are having a YouTube issue. folks, you'll have to refresh the app if you want to avoid any type of lack. Okay. Oh, they did a profile on, or a review of Dwarkesh Patels, the scaling era, a, uh, what is going on here?

The Christmas spirit. A while. That camera had won too many eggnogs. Yeah, Tyler also has the scaling era. an oral history of AI, 2019 to 2020-25 by Dorcasch Patel. There's a whole review of the book. And then, of course, you get the beautiful TBPN spread. Look at this.

There you go. Isn't that great? I like the, they kind of brought their own aesthetic on top of some photos that we took here in the Ultradome. Very, very fun. But they respected. They respected the brand. Yeah, it looks great.

And here's a photo of me and Jordy having breakfast showing you what the day and the life is like. And then here's me reading the Wall Street Journal before the show starts Life of Coogan. Cougan mode. Very fun. I could take you through it, but you've heard the story, and you can go subscribe to Arena.

Mag, you can read it online. Three Martini Lunch. Interesting. I did want to comment on this. The art direction for the cover art, I like Three Martini Lunch. It feels like a pretty big departure from the previous very,

I felt like their previous covers were very collage-based. So this is like a much more simple design. At the same time, it's still very nostalgic. Yes. I mean, look at the back. To a different. Yeah.

The back says the business of America is business and it has a pager. That's something we haven't gotten into. A cigarette and an ashtray and a Casio watch, which is pretty cool, pretty cool. Classic. Anyways, back on the timeline. Public.com, investing for those to take it seriously, multi-asset investment, trusted by millions. What's back on that? Katie Roof, one of the greatest scoop athletes of our time,

future Scoop Hall of Famer, has a scoop. She clearly has someone at Opening Eye who loves her right now. She's been on Scoop tear. She says, Scoop, opening I could soon be worth $750 billion in a financing round. They've had early talks. Let's give it up for early talks. We love early talks. We prefer advanced talks.

Early talks, you got to start somewhere. about raising tens of billions of dollars or even $100 billion. The company was last valued at $500 billion a few months ago. Tay Kim chimes in says public markets are crushing Open AI exposed stocks while private investors with visibility into opening eyes metrics and internal numbers. Dot, dot, dot, dot. Are piling in, essentially. Bulls can't be right.

I trust Katie Roof reporting. So he's saying that it's bullish for Open AI. That's his take from this? Yeah, maybe some of the publics have been oversold. That said, yeah, I'll be interested to see how this round comes together. Again, remember, I think it's a good time to be fundraising if you need tens of billions of dollars. If Warner Brothers ends up going with Netflix, right? Because, like, that was just like a huge, like, if you're raising tens of billions of dollars.

and you're not doing it from strategics, like the hyperscalers, it pretty much has to be sovereign wealth funds. Yeah, and potentially, like, if they pass on Warner Brothers, they have loose change in the couch cushions to toss Open AI's way and the tune of $10 billion checks, potentially. But, I mean, it does feel like Open AI is it a bit of a, it feels like the vibes around Open AI, trough of disillusionment, potentially going into plateau of productivity.

It feels like they're turning it around. It feels like the new models and the products. I don't know. I haven't seen many people say I love 5.2. But then again, outside in the real world, clearly, you know, ask people what AI app they're using. Yeah. That'll give you a lot of signal.

It just feels like, like, you know, okay, maybe, maybe. we're not in Baja Blast territory, but we know that every code red is followed by an equal... Adult mode. Adult mode. It's coming in January. Yeah, maybe. But it does seem like a lot of the...

A lot of the negativity has kind of worked its way through. The market's traded down. There's maybe not another... It feels like we're finding a bottom. We're finding like the footing of like, okay, reset the narratives, rebuild back up. Like, can they catch up in this? Can they catch up in that? If you see a couple of good charts, a couple of growth charts, then you're sort of back in business because.

And again, I still think the Disney deal. The point that I'm making is like a couple months ago, it was like it's Enron. It's going to blow up. It's zero. It's not going to work at all. And it does feel like we're turning the corner on that. Maybe you muted the people that are still saying that because they're still saying it. They're still saying it.

Well, it just got old. This was a funny, funny post. Sam says, sell me this pen. Jensen says, I'll lend you the money to buy it. Of course, Jensen is investing money. Yeah. But anyways, a very good bit. Let me tell you about linear.

Meet the software, meet the system for modern software development. Linear streamlines work across the entire. Development cycle from the Roadmap 2 release. Warner CEO David Zazlov and Netflix co-CEOES Greg Peters and Ted Zarandoos on the Warner Brothers lot. They took game day photo. They went out deliberately to just strut and just flax. And they clearly knew what they were doing.

Hey, hey. Well, this is their new lot. You point, you look over here. Guys, can we look over this direction? Okay, yeah, that's perfect. Snap, snap, snap. Okay, yeah. You know that, you know, they know what they're doing.

This looks like no hostile offer can get between us. We're bros. We're hanging out. This is a sign of strength. Sons out. There's palm trees. Yeah, this is them sending the signal. Sending a signal, hey, we're excited to work together.

We're excited to be in partnership, collaborating. There was one person who quoted this and was unhappy about it. They were saying that they weren't well dressed. Yeah, they were saying that they weren't well dressed. and he was like, I'm kind of in that boat. It's not bad. They threw on a blazer. They threw on their rocking blazers.

Give them a break. It's definitely like a Hollywood executive style that sort of like become the norm. Maybe we go back to the three martini lunches, guys. Maybe we throw on suits now that you guys are in business. But this is also a good way for people that are maybe more on the tech side to start dressing up. You don't have to go from jeans straight into a suit. You can throw on a blazer, right? Something to consider.

Yeah. Matt Levine is back. He says, I've missed Christmas even New Year's and the Fourth of July holidays for newsletters a lot smaller than this. This is as good as it gets for newsletter writers. And we can jump into the article. He says Warner doesn't trust Paramount, revocable trust, ESG side letters, IPO lockups, destiny and doing deals over the holidays. Trust. If you're a normal person, most of your wealth is probably in your own name.

But if you're one of the richest people in the world, you probably have a lot more complicated estate and tax planning, probably means that a lot of your wealth is in trust, legal arrangements that your lawyers set up to hold assets for you. Most simply, you might have a revocable trust where your assets technically belong to the trust, but you have control over the trust assets, investment decisions, beneficiaries, etc. This can be useful for estate planning, but for most purposes, owning assets and a revocable trust is pretty much like owning them yourself. I regularly say that Mark Zuckerberg, Mark Zuck owns a lot of shares of meta, or that Elon owns a lot of shares of Tesla, even though neither statement is exactly true. Their trust own the shares, but for most practical purposes

you can think of, they own them. This creates, I suppose, a small dumb problem. Let's say you build big yachts and Mark Zuckerberg comes to you and asks to buy a billion dollar yacht. Naturally, he will pay you the billion dollars on completion of the yacht. You might ask him, well, do you have a billion dollars? And he might say, no, actually, I don't. But the Mark Zuckerberg trust owns like a bazillion dollars worth of meta-stock, and I control that. So I'm good. You find that persuasive. So you pull up the yacht sale contract. Who do you put in as the buyer? If you put Mark Zuckerberg, he has no money.

If you put the Mark Zuckerberg trust, it has plenty of money now. But if it is a revocable trust, he can just take all the money shares out whatever he wants. It's revocable. If he changes his mind about the yacht, he can clean out the trust. You'll send the bill to the trust, but the trust will have no money and you'll be stuck with the yacht. Not that bad of a situation to be stuck with a billion-dollar yacht. But if you're in the business of selling that. You certainly want to be able to complete the transaction.

I get the point. Honestly, this is a pretty easy problem to solve. You put Mark Zuckerberg in the contract. He doesn't own the assets directly, but he controls the trust. So if he owes you a billion dollars, you can make him take it out of the trust. But maybe you'll get confused or he'll get confused and you'll end up signing a contract with the trust. Then if he changes his mind, he can zero out the trust and stiff you. I cannot imagine that this comes up a lot with yacht builders or anyone else.

Elon Musk once did sign a contract to buy. by Twitter for $44 billion, then changed his mind and tried to get out of it. The fact that his wealth is mostly in a trust did not at any stage of the proceedings trouble anyone. He had signed his equity commitment in his own name, and everyone understood that if he was sued and lost, he'd have to pay with his trust money if necessary. And Twitter did sue him and he did pay. Fine, fine, fine. On the other hand, Paramount is trying to buy Warner Brothers Discovery,

breaking up Warner's deal to sell itself to Netflix, Inc. and Paramount does not have nearly enough money to pay for Warner. Instead, much of the money behind the bid comes from Paramount Chief Executive Officer's dad, Larry Ellison, as of this writing, the fifth richest person in the world, or rather, it comes from his trust. And this would be one of the greatest tricks in the history of mergers and acquisitions. One major sticking point is Warner Brothers concern about the financing proposed by Paramount, which is led by David Ellison. A big part of the equity is backstop by a trust that manages the wealth of his father, Larry Ellison. Because it's a revocable trust, assets can be taken out of it

at any time, and Warner Brothers may have no recourse if that happens, the people said. And Matt says, ah, ha, ha, ha, sure. The risk here is Warner throws over Netflix, pays at a $2.8 billion breakup fee, and signs a deal to sell itself to Paramount for something like $100, and $8.4 billion in cash. For some reason, changing market conditions, regulatory difficulties, and a change of heart by the Ellison's or a change of heart by their co-investors, the Ellison's decide they don't want to close the deal. Quietly, in the comfort of his own home, without saying anything to Warner, Larry Ellison takes all of his stock out of the trust, leaving it empty. Yoink, he whispers to himself. Oops, never mind, Paramount tells Warner. Warner sues Paramount for specific performance seeking to make it pay $108.4 billion

and close the deal. L.O.L. We don't have that kind of money, says Paramount, which has a market capitalization of about $15 billion and about $3 billion of cash. When we signed the deal, you knew that the money was coming from the Allison Trust. So Warner sues the Ellison Trust for specific performance seeking to make it pay $108 billion and close the deal. LOL, we don't have that kind of money, says the Ellison Trust. We did, sure, but the trust got revoked. Yoink adds Larry Ellison more loudly this time.

So Warner sues Larry Ellison for the money. He says, who me? Says Larry Ellison, you have no deal with me. I didn't even know what you're talking about. This is not my problem. This does not strike me as especially likely, and it would obviously be bad for Paramount and the Ellison's, but I suppose it is possible,

and it would be a pretty fun trick. I talked about this a little bit yesterday on the show, this kind of situation. Today, Warner officially rejected Paramount's bid, advising shareholders not to sell their shares in Paramount's tender offer. Here is how Warner describes Larry Ellison's commitment or lack thereof, and this was the exact quote that I read yesterday, which was despite Paramount's headline claim,

there is no equity commitment or backstop from the Ellison family for the offer. And I'll skip over the rest of that quote. But Matt continues, as far as I can tell, and somewhat bafflingly, this is correct. Paramount's own tender offers says that the Ellison equity commitment and guarantee will be from the Lawrence Ellison Revocable Trust, not from Larry Ellison himself. The offer points out that the trust is rich. The Ellison Trust has financial resources well in excess of what would be required to meet its financial obligations under the equity commitment letter, including many other assets and financial

resources available to it, record and beneficial ownership of approximately 1.16 billion shares of Oracle stock with a market value of approximately 252 billion as of the date of this offer to purchase. But as the name says, it's revocable. This seems extremely fixable. Have Larry Ellison signed the commitments personally? William Cohen reports that the whole situation is trains passing in the night and quote, the Ellisons believe they can still be sued for specific performance to fund the deal. He quotes a person familiar with their thinking saying that there is no financing condition in the deal. And Paramount and the Ellison slash Redbird, along with our lenders, are legally obligated to close regardless of future financial or business performance at Paramount. That is not an impossible thought to convey in merger papers.

And yet so far they apparently haven't. And then do you want to read? Just, well, I mean, the ESG said there's a different story, I'm sure. I don't think it has anything to do with that. Oh, okay. Matlabene writes like multiple blurbs. But the real trick is obviously create a revocable trust and name it the irrevocable trust. Can you just do that?

One simple trick. One simple trick. Ebene lawyers hate this one simple trick. I am wondering, like, if this is very common. Yeah. I mean, Matt Levine talks about this, but why did Elon not do this during the Twitter buyout? That is a good question. Because it says Elon did sign the contract in his name, which you could have just done to the trust,

and then he could have backed out when he wanted to. Well, I mean, one thing is like it feels like Elon just rips checks and was very much just like, yeah, I'm good for it. I'm going for it. I don't want to play this game at all, because I'm all in. You have the full faith and credit of the bank of Elon Musk, essentially. Yeah. I mean, also, do we even know that, like, this is, like, legally feasible that you can just revoke the trust?

Like, is that just, like, 100% totally fine? Has that happened before? Yeah. That's a good question. I don't know if it – I actually don't know if it's happened before. But it certainly seems like something that you are going to – like, we talked about with, like, when you make an offer for a big company, there's, like, the expected value of the close and saying, hey, we have this. backstop is something that increases the probability that you close, that the finance and condition is met, but then saying, okay, we're doing it in a trust or revocable trust takes

that down a little bit. But again, there's a world where all of the different capital providers lined up, and you're not even talking about trust, revocable or irrevocable, because you never get there because all the different funds are jumping. I want to get in. I have to get my stake. I want 10% of this. Here's 10 billion. I'm ready to go.

And so you don't even care about the backstop or you don't care about the trust because everyone's lining up. The only reason that maybe they're in this scenario is because it feels like, it feels like Warner Brothers did actually sort of kick the tires on the Paramount deal and get to the end state of evaluating it and saying, oh, well, like, we've heard, you know, you mentioned Jared Kushner's in, like, is affinity partners really in?

And when they push them, affinity partners, it seems like they might be out. I don't know. I don't know exactly what happened. But there's a variety of stakeholders that came in. And the level of, it's not just that they were thumbs up, thumbs down. There were some that were people said that they were thumbs up.

They wound up being thumbs down. Some of them were, you know, here, and they wound up being there. you know, a little, little bit edgy, depending on a lot of different folks where it's like, you know, it's like putting together any other financing round. Like, you know, ideally, every investor that goes into a seed stage company or series A company is like, yes, I'm good regardless of who else is in the round. Every once in a while, you get VCs who say, yeah, I'll sign a term sheet,

but term sheets are non-binding and we'll see how the round pencils out. I'll sit on this signature. I'm not going to sign this. I'm not going to wire. Or they would give a verbal and think. thinking that Sequoia is going to come in. Sequoia doesn't. Yeah.

And they're like, oh. Or vice versa. Yeah. They give the verbal. They sit on it. They're not wiring. They're maybe leaning back. And then Sequoia comes in or Founder's founder and Driesen or someone comes in.

And then they're like, wait, wait, wait. You said that I could get 2% of this company for 100K. Like, well, like give me my terms. And you're like, you didn't sign that doc. You were very much leaning out. I've been in that situation. It's never super fun. Never a super fun conversation.

But it ain't over till the most bank. A little bit more from Matt Levine. He's talking about lockups, specifically SpaceX. We all know. They're trying to go public at $1.5 trillion valuation. They want to raise $30 billion of stock, sorry, $30 billion via the IPO. And Matt says the raise is not that big relative to the valuation. but then he says the problem is not $30 billion.

The problem is the other $1.47 trillion. And he goes on to say, what happens if $500 billion of SpaceX stock is unlocked, like, at a single moment? And people are like, well, I've been locked up for, I have had limited liquidity for, let's say you're an employee who's been there 10, 15 years. You're like, there could be kind of a rush to get liquidity. And so he goes on to say that in the conversations that Wall Street has been having with SpaceX, Anthropic, and Open AI, there is some conversations that would create a scenario with, I'll just read it specifically. Investment bankers are starting to prepare discussing proposed solutions to help win deals. At least two large banks largely ruled out a standard IPO lockup period of either 90 to 180 days and are discussing how to design a staggered lockup release for companies. like the ones I mentioned.

And then he says, if you're a shareholder of a trillion-dollar private company you're used to getting limited periodic liquidity events where you can sell shares, why would that change when the company goes public? So pretty interesting. The dance of taking SpaceX public. It's going to be an interesting year for IPOs.

There's a bunch of great companies that are finally mature enough to potentially go out. Let me tell you about Vanta, automate compliance and security. Vance's AI powers everything from evidence collection and continuous monitoring to security reviews and vendor risk. There's an article in the Wall Street Journal about a massive IPO. Wall Street gets early taste of hot year expected for IPOs. Shares of a company called Medline began trading in the biggest new stock listing since 2021.

Wall Street is getting a glimpse of what could be the biggest year ever for IPOs in the U.S. after four years of choppiness in the market. You didn't even let me get to the number. The medical supply company raised $6.3 billion in its stock offering. The stock closed at $41 a share. That's up 41% from its $29 IPO price. So massive offering. It's the biggest IPO since Rivian, actually, in 2021.

and the ticker is MDLN, where the largest company no one's ever heard of, said the chief executive, Jim Boyle. He said he and his team have spent the past year and a half educating the investment community ahead of the stock offering. You've got to tell everyone, what do you do before you ask for their money? Because if you've been operating behind the scenes, no one's going to know to invest or be excited. So the offering could help set the stage for some of the most highly anticipated IPOs with Rocket Maker, SpaceX, AI company, Anthropic, and mortgage giants, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, among the companies looking at listings in 26. Open AI also rumored. There's a couple other companies that might go out.

It isn't just... Well, there's a bunch of tech, there's a bunch of tech darlings that are, are, look kind of like infants in comparison to, to... But still might be a level of maturity to go out. Notable by companies that are basically at Figma scale. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. Or even beyond.

But yeah, I mean, for a long time, you know, if you're a $10 billion company and the tens of billions, the decacorns, any decacorns should be comfortable going out, potentially, as long as they're not in some crazy R&D cycle and they actually have the core financials humming at this point. Bankers say their teams have been busy in recent weeks pitching companies to be lead advisor on their IPOs. marking a pickup activity. Many startups had a shoe going public in recent years. I'm not sure that's entirely true anymore, said Magdalena Henrik,

head of U.S. technology equity capital markets at Bank of America. Bankers are hoping Medline, which is backed by Blackstone, Carlisle, and Helman Friedman, helps to close out a positive year for IPOs. Well, speaking of Blackstone, we have a little Christmas present under the tree. Why don't we open it? What do we have from Blackstone? The good folks over in Blackstone

sent us a present. And we will open it live on the stream here. So have you heard that the CEO of Blackstone is becoming a DJ? Goldman Sachs CEO,

David Solomon, gave him a stamp of approval. And they sent over this very cool tape recorder. I don't know if this is a real tape recorder. I don't know if I have this queued up, but you can maybe hear it. Let's see. They went like super viral for this because they made a entire, like, they basically clown every startup vibe real. Oh, you have a cinematic vibe reel. We had our whole team sing a jingle and filmed it and put it on TV. And then they sent it out on a physical thing. This is

very, very cool. Portable cassette. Is that made to look like a cassette tape? I think it's actually. No, I think it's actually a cassette. Yeah, this is crazy. Wow. I didn't even know we knew how to make cassettes. This is a very, very good drop. Like, just as a drop, it's hilarious. It also feels like them leaning in because I know that the response to that Blackstone video was not overwhelmingly positive people like, what is this? But clearly it's an inside joke and like the team finds it funny and they were doing it tongue in cheek and they were having fun

with it. And they had a lot of 1980s throwback cameos there. That's great. Anyway, thank you to good folks over at Blackstone for sending over this. And go listen to the full song and watch the video if you haven't already. Numeral. Compliance, handled. Numeral, worries about sales, tax,

and VAT compliance so you can focus on growth. In our newsletter, today, we did a little review of the model wars. Of course, our newsletter, you can get it at TBPN.com, tech analysis and news. We have a daily op-ed, top headlines, and more sign up at TBPN.com. So what a year? Just in terms of model releases, August 7th, OpenAI releases GPD5, September 29th, Anthropic releases Claude Sonnet 4.5. Then the day after, OpenAI releases SORA 2, the same day, meta releases the meta-raybans displays.

November 3rd, OpenAI and Amazon announce a partnership value to $38 billion. November 12th, 5.1 drops from OpenAI. November 17th, XAI releases GROC 4.1. November 18th, Google releases Gemini 3. Massive response to that. It's crazy that that was just one month ago. November 20th, Nanobanna Pro comes out. Then November 24th, Anthropic releases Claude Opus 4.5.

We talked to Schulte about that. And then December 1st, DeepSeek releases DeepSeek version 3.2. And, of course, before the end of the year, OpenAI had to fire back with GPT 5.2 on December 11. And then December 17, Google releases Gemini's Refash. Also, today, I think OpenAI released 5.2 Codex. So, like, the coding model version. They're starting to stagger them out a little bit more. Well, I do, I, which I think is smart, right?

I was wondering about this with, with Logan, like, do you think that we will, do you think there'll be a period where we get on annual release cadences? And it's just like, oh, like, the model is like GPT 2026. Like, I'm running the 26 model. Or do you think it'll be random? I think so, but we're not quite at the plateau where I think that would make sense. Like right now, we're every company's fighting for market share. And like if you can release tomorrow, that's a lot better than releasing.

But there is a world where there is a world where OpenAI takes 5.1 and 5.2 and says, you know what, that's GPT6. That's GPT7, right? Like they could, and people would be like, whoa, this is like really incremental. So they use the point one. But they also didn't do it's 5.0.1. I think the reason that there's so much pressure to launch is there's pressure to be at the top of the benchmarks, right? in other product categories, it's not like there's like this like very specific way that you're

talking about in cars, Nurebergring. Sure, sure. But I'm talking in like enterprise software typically. Sure, sure, sure. It's not like somebody launches a product and then somebody else launches a product and investors can look at it and be like, well, okay, I think this one is just objectively better. Yeah. And so I think that, you know, just given the goal to sit at the top of the benchmarks, you know, there's going to be a mess. The benchmark is like ARR numbers that you might give to the press or fundraising, which traditionally done every 12 to 18 months, but sometimes can happen four times in a year.

Yeah. Your certain company. What do you think? Also, I just want to say, Brandon, who wrote the piece, he said at the end, he said, it seems like the doomers, people who believe AI will turn us all into paperclips have been defanged, which is good. I disagree that that's true. It seems like AI is like, I think there's this whole narrative where like, oh, AI is stagnating. where it's like, bro, look at the benchmarks. Like, it's like, it's on the trend.

Look at the benchmarks. They're saturating. It's incredible. Exactly. If the benchmarks are sat. I mean, what does I tell you if benchmarks are saturated? We don't even have good benchmarks anymore because models are way too good. Gabe says benchmarks are just as useful as a used piece of toilet paper.

Exactly. That's the whole point. If models were bad, benchmarks would be useful. So, I mean, the risk is like, is like there was a moment where just multiplying two really, really big numbers together on a computer, like you needed more memory to do like, you know, a thousand digits times a thousand digits. Like, your basic calculator had a limit. And then eventually it got to the point where you have enough RAM that this computer here

can sit and, I don't know, calculate the number of digits in pie to like, you know, 10,000 digits, right? Probably pretty quickly. Progress along that line is not. necessarily the same line of progress towards like human labor replacement even. Like we got, we got calculators that can calculate any, any math perfectly in fractions of a second. And it was useful in a million ways, but no one's calling that like A-G-I-A-S-I can do anything. And so... Yeah, because that's like specific intelligence. Exactly, specific intelligence. And so,

And so we've created a bunch more lanes of specific intelligence, but people feel still dissatisfied with the fact that, yes, the spikes are getting longer, but it doesn't feel like the intelligence is getting any less spikier. That's what Brandon's feeling. There's nothing about the benchmarks. When you show me a new model card, I'm just like, cool, spiky, the spikes got spikier. Awesome. There's nothing where it's like, oh, okay, it's no longer spiky. Sure. I mean, like when I use coding models, they're like way better. Yeah. That's one of the spikes. That's one of the spikes. That's one of the spikes. That's spiking even bigger. Okay. But if you just get enough spikes, then like what's in between a ton of spikes and, you know, just like a circle, right? Like, you know. Yeah, this is the diagram. You've seen the diagram, right? Yeah. Yeah.

You have the circle with the little tiny spikes where the human's better at. Also, there are benchmarks that like there was the vend. It was like anthropic bend where Claude runs a vending machine. Yeah. And the beginning of the year, they released the first. paper. I don't know when it was. It was like a couple months ago. They released like the first part of paper and Claude was like horrible. It lost a ton of money running the vending machine. Then they, I think today they released a new one.

Yeah. Where it's like, Cloud is profitable. Yeah. We need to get you a massive winter coat to get through this AI winter. Because the AI winter is happening. I'm telling you. There's no AI winter. There is, there is an, I mean, it's the age of research. Okay. The age of research is the age of research. Can you imagine? It's like June next year. It's hot in the Ultradome.

Tyler, just keep the coat on buddy. You can't take it off till it's over. It's over. No, I mean, the progress is... Like, people want AI to stagnate so bad. They do. So many people want that. They do. And it's not happening, though.

It's like, the models are getting better. Literally, everyone without bags is saying it's stagnating. Well, no, because all those people are like, oh, like I missed in video or whatever. Oh, you think Carpathie's like, I missed in video, so I got to go trash AI? Well, Carpathie, I think he's not... He's very, I think he's very excited about what AI is like right now. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And he's, I think we can all agree, Tyler, that it's the age of research.

But it's also the age of deals. Okay. We've got to talk about, we've got to talk about Trump media and technology. This morning, I woke up and, you know, a lot of people that, you know, do like mental health podcast, they say, look at your phone within five seconds, opening your eyes. Yeah. Just immediately, you know, connect. with the internet and just sort of start kind of marinating in all the notifications that you maybe got over the last eight hours. That's what I did this morning. I opened my eyes. I immediately grab my phone.

I see this push notification, I think it was from Bloomberg, that truth, social parent to merge with nuclear fusion firm in a $6 billion deal. And I thought I was dreaming still because it just seemed insane. Trump's been so active this year on the on the on the deal-making side who would have thought he had another multi-billion dollar deal to do this year so of course trump media and technology group the social media and crypto company part owned by president trump said it would develop a utility scale fusion power plant fusion not vision correct uh president trump social media company which recently expanded into streaming and cryptocurrency is now entering its fourth act fusion power promising but still and proven source of alternative energy.

DJT and TAY technologies have said Thursday, they had agreed to an all-stock merger that the company's valued at more than $6 billion. The deal would be a metamorphosis for Trump media, the money-losing parent company of True Social, a social media platform that has struggled to gain market share beyond serving as the main online megaphone for President Trump. Mr. Trump is the company's larger shareholder with a large stake worth more than $1 billion that is held in a trust. were trust maxing, of course, managed by Don Jr., who is a Trump media board member.

The company based in Sarasota, Florida, has only a few dozen full-time employees and has recorded tens of millions of losses in recent years. The merger with Tay would create one of the first publicly traded nuclear fusion companies, according to the release. The companies said they intend to begin construction on the first utility scale fusion power plant next year, with plans to build. additional plants in the future. So the stock is up of course up pretty dramatically. Today, the CEO over Atay Mitchell Bendenbauer says we've got the tools and the tech and the engineering. What we were lacking was the capital. So I did a head of whenever to Gemini and got a little background on Tay Technologies. Interesting company. It's the TAE stands for tri-alpha energy. which is pretty, I think, a pretty cool name.

It's also good advice if your beta. Just try being an alpha. Or just rebrand. Rebrand. Rebrand to an alpha. Yeah. Actually, I used, yeah, that was, I used to be beta. Is that what is try?

Try? Try? Or TRI. Not TRI. Yeah. Not TRI being in it. Try alpha. Try Sigma.

Try whatever. Sigma Energy. Yeah. Would be a great name for a small modular reactor company. I mean, there's a trading firm. two sigma. And it's two guys. No, but Sigma,

you know, you know that they had, they had like a founder breakup because they were literally two sigmas. No, because one of them was two Sigma.

Oh, T-O-O. No, I think the nominant of determinism is that, is that you put two lone wolves together and it didn't work, and they were fighting constantly. And so the two sigma guys broke up.

Anyway, so people are going to talk trash about this. The company was founded in 1998 and spent over 25 years developing unique approach to fusion that focuses on a neutron power energy generation that produces no harmful neutron radiation. They have raised from, I believe it's Google, Google, Chevron, and Goldman Sachs. Wow, okay.

Great to see them all get some liquidity now, or at least, you know, shares in a company that is liquid. Sure. So does that mean Google is on the truth social cap table now? Google owns a piece of the president's social network. I mean I actually can't remember this it's possible. They got some liquidity along the way, but it seems more likely that Google is now has a nice slug in DJT. It's social. Interesting. Wait, I didn't even think about that. Because this is happening at the Topco at DJT. So they own, they have exposure to fusion, cryptocurrency, social media and streaming. I mean, Google famously never got Google. Google circles working.

Their Facebook competitor. They have YouTube, obviously, a behemoth. But in true social networking, you know, they've struggled. Maybe this is a foothold for them. Yeah. Roll in the entire thing at some point. You know, people are going to talk trash about this. Like, oh, what is a social network doing, building energy assets?

But you look at what Amazon's doing, building massive data centers. where for AWS, Amazon owns Twitch. That's a social network. It's a streaming platform. What else does Amazon own? Well, they own some diesel generators for backup power at the data centers. Fusion, theoretically cleaner.

Who would have thought that out of the Silicon Valley tech people, they would be using diesel while the big guy is using clean energy to power his social network? Something there. Fascinating. fascinating stuff. Let me tell you about Fall, generative media platform for developers,

develop and fine-tuned models with serverless GPUs and on-demand clusters. Trey in the chat says this is such a weird deal. T-A-E is a legit company. Hmm. Maybe they're all legit. Maybe they're all going legit. Maybe it works out.

I don't know. I mean, fusion's hard. What if True Social just puts up monster, monster numbers? I mean, it's kind of funny. It's so hard to call what's legit right now. It really is an interesting, interesting test given that when I type

Truth Social into my browser, effectively the homepage is just Donald Trump's profile, and they do have a lot of ads on here. And it'll be interesting to understand what is this web page actually worth? Well, we'll find out. I mean, Truth Social,

I think if you went back in time a year or two ago when Truth Social was started, which I believe Trump was out of the office, He was not president when he started it. And you asked anyone, like, what will the terminal value of this asset be? Everyone would be like, it's not going to be over a billion dollars. And then when it went out, it was like, okay, yeah, maybe they expect it, but it's going to, like, trade down a ton. It's like, I think it's still a multi-billion dollar company, right?

DJT? That's the market cap. Four billion? Still? Like, that's higher than a lot of people thought. That's it traded up almost 40% just to. today. So. Yeah.

Well, we were doing a deep dive on the company a year ago. So, you know there's alpha here. What categories is DJT not in? Space. Pharma. Robotics. Oh, wait. No, no, they're in Farma, right?

Farmer. So I think T.E does have a biotech division. A life sciences division. Okay. So I'm very bullish on there. I'm kind of going into pharma. Yeah, you've got to go further out on the sci-fi curve. No one's pitching a time travel company yet.

I think that that's an interesting area to get into. You know, what happens after you're traveling through space. You must travel through time, the fourth dimension. I mean, you could break time travel into life sciences, right? Because you can have the, you freeze yourself and you wake up in 20 years. You can't go back, though. Yeah. Dyson sphere.

No one's come out and said, where are the company that's going to do the Dyson Sphere? It's been much more incremental visions. So, truth threshold is also getting into the prediction market game. No way. Launching a native prediction market feature in the app. It's crazy that they're not partnered. I wonder if it'll be like predict. I would have.

I would have. Presume. Trade on the content of Trump's next post. Mm-hmm. That would be fascinating. Anyway, it's very fascinating. I mean, it's just an interesting, I am interested to see how the future presidents approach business, right? Who is a guy with the peanut farm?

Jimmy Carter. You got into a little hot one. because of his peanut farm. I think he didn't fully divest. No, he did divest. But he still got in hot water? No, it was, it's just remarkable because the peanut farm was so small and so insignificant in the U.S. economy and even in his personal balance sheet. But the fact that he was saying, look, I don't want any, any idea of impropriety. So I'm going to divest from a small peanut farm that I'm associated with. so that no one can say that I'm in the pocket of big peanut, or I'm pro peanut, or little peanut.

And so the fact that Jimmy Carter divested from the peanut farm, he was not in big oil or a railroad baron or associated with banking, he had very little conflict of interest, and he reduced it even further. That's always been a sign of what great looks like. And it's been a role model for some presidents. Some presidents have looked and said, like, well, if Jimmy Carter did it this way, I should also do it this way. Yeah.

Anyway, Gemini 3 Pro, Google's most intelligent model yet, state of the air reasoning, next level vibe coding, and deep multimodal understanding. There is a crazy story in... Joe Weisthal, by the way, one more.

He says, sharing that DJT is up 35% to a 30-day high, and Joe says, Trump has been in founder mode for a long time, getting all kinds of criticism about the business

from people who aren't actually in the arena. It is crazy, the degree to which he is a successful technology founder, truly. Like, you know, billions of dollars in market cap. People can take, have their issues with the president, but they cannot deny that they cannot, they cannot say with a straight face that he is not a technology. He's never founded a unicorn tech company. He's never taken a social media app public.

You can't say that. You can't say that. He's never, he's never, he's, he's, he's not. He's never merged with a nuclear fusion company backed by Chevron and Google and Goldman Sachs. For sure. Deb, you've seen this chart, the AI investment cycle visualized. Almost $1 trillion has been invested into AI so far, and that may just be the start. Look at this graph.

This is an interesting way to visualize the flow of money because we see it as these moments in time, a $10 billion deal here, $100 billion deal there. This is showing the investment over time, and you can see, you know, NVIDIA flowing to Amazon and all the different companies. Where's Open AI? Open AI is just flowing around. It's just a cool little, like, you know, data visualization. I thought this is fun to look at.

Anyway. Did you see Brett Adcock has a new startup? No. Yeah, Figure Cia. Brett Adcock launches new AI lab with $100 million in funding. Wow. Brett Adcock, of course, the sea of robotics startup figure AI, who we believe might have some big news soon based on their holiday party, Dead Mask, has started a new AI lab called Hark, which will be funded by $100 million of his personal capital, according to a copy of a memo. Adcock sent to figure employees and investors on Thursday seen by Stephanie Palazzo.

The AI lab will be focused on building human-centric AI, which can think proactively. recursively and care deeply about people. Hark's first cluster of GPUs went online on Monday. Memo said, though, it couldn't be learned how large the cluster was. Adcock will remain the CEO figure in addition to his new role at Hark. Hark continues the trend of AI startup CEOs, founding new companies while remaining at their old one. I remember Richard over at you launched a new lab himself.

More broadly, well-known researchers and executives have raised billions of dollars for so-called neolabs in recent months, which hoped to exploit new approaches to developing models. Figure previously raised nearly $2 billion in funding from investors, including Parkway and Vida Microsoft, et cetera. So anyways, interesting,

interesting that he is diversifying when figure's valuation has just been going through the roof. He also has a company that does like metal detectors at schools, right? Yeah. Along those lines. He is a serial entrepreneur. He has a bunch of stuff.

Anyway, let me tell you about fin.AI, the number one AI agent for customer service. Automate the most complex customer service queries on every channel. Tyler clearly has an alt. Tyler Glale. Tyler clearly put this in the show notes. Tyler, not our Tyler, but his other Tyler, says, can't wait for this AI bubble to pop so we can all go back to normal,

just like how the internet completely disappeared after the dot-com bubble popped. It's another bullish take for AI. It's not going anywhere. You agree? It's a great take. It is a great take. And 18,000 people agree it's a great take.

I also think it's a great take. But this doesn't seem so fast takeoff built, more internet billed, which is slow takeoff. The internet has slow takeoff. Everyone thought it was going to be the internet is the super highway. It's going to be, you know, a thousand-x growth. Yahoo's going to be worth a trillion dollars. Like, you know, and then, you know, kind of settled in, took a while for things to, to find use cases, find value.

But eventually it did transform everything. But this time is different. Exactly. Well, because this time we have the Internet, so it's way faster to do distribution. Yes. I don't want to, you weren't even alive in there, Tyler. I don't even want to. I was rack and servers in a data center while you were in the cradle.

Meltham says a lot of navel gazing about venture. There are a lot of ways to make a couple hundred million dollars. There are a reasonable number of ways to make a billion. There are very few ways to make tens of billions of dollars. This makes a $1 billion fund with 10x DPI obscenely impressive. Is this a sub-tweet of someone in particular? Is someone saying this isn't? This isn't?

So several. So Mike Chan says, ain't no $1 billion fund doing 10x DPI and Meltzum says several have which is wild. I'm trying to find in the comments of fun that actually did this and I can't think of any personally. I'm sure they're out there. I'm sure they're out there.

But I don't know. All of that's impressive. More importantly, this Chinese streamer cut the Applevision Pro's weight in half. Whoa! That's genius. I, this is, this is innovation. This is crazy innovation.

Imagine walking into an office and every person there is just locked in with a balloon. This is somehow more cyberpunk than just the default, put the big screen on your face. I like this. And people say the Chinese can only copy and they can't invent new stuff. That's not true. Not true. It's completely disproven with this Vision Pro Helium balloon. This would be, imagine just being able to.

If you're a class clown coded, which I certainly am, imagine walking around the office and just with a little needle. No, no, no, no, no, no. It doesn't actually, it's not going to hurt them. It's still strapped to their head. But you're popping their balloon, then they have to go get more helium, and helium is scarce resource. True, true. But I would hope they, look, he's got a big canister there. He's got plenty.

He's got a big thing. You should not be popping this. And you know why? Because Ty in the chat says this should be a blimp. And this is very blimp coded, so you should allow this. I want this guy to make a person. blimp. It's just a, it's just like a harness you can put on with enough helium to just take you up. Yeah. I think the Mythbusters did that. Yeah. You just get a bunch of balloons. Yeah. And it worked. Did they

doing that and then skydiving down would would be would be pretty cool. You should work on that over the over the winter break. Well, whatever you're watching your Applevision pro, make sure it's restreamed. One live stream 30 plus destination. If you want to multi-stream, go to restream.com. Oh, this is so, so funny that Alpha-Ton Capital, did you see this? Alpha-ton-Capital post, big news. Alpha-ton, a ton of alpha. We got a ton of alpha over here at Alpha-Ton-Capital. We're making a historic $30 million strategic investment in Andral Industries, and they tag them so that we are investing in the future of Defense Tech and the convergence of decentralized AI with NextGen National Security.

This is a strategic bet on the companies of the future. This unprecedented investment positions Alpha Ton at the forefront of next generation defense technology infrastructure, marking a pivotal moment in the conversions of public markets and advanced national security capabilities. NASDAQ A-ton. And so they're trying to become an Anderol like HoldCo basically or Treasury Company. Treasury company. And Palmer just quote tweets them into the stratosphere by saying Alpha Ton is lying. This is not true.

public heads up to CEO, Britney Kaiser slash own your data now, the whistleblower, who is Bitcoin, Alpha Tone Capital, that's the, I guess that's the owner of this. You do not have permission to use my trademarks to defraud your investors. And Brittany says, hey, Palmer, we signed an agreement to purchase economic exposure to Anderal shares through an SPV and to accumulate more exposure over time and offer access via formal Secondaries product. Given our network's demand for your innovative tech, I will issue a clarification.

And Palmer says, that isn't what you were in your company said, though, to be extremely clear, Anderol has to authorize these types of transfers, and I will not authorize it. Wow. And Serrago is there saying so much nonsense fraud happening in these layered SPVs. This is such a crazy,

crazy moment. What is the history of this company? So the company went out at $280,000, per share in December of 2020. It's now sitting at exactly 69 cents. So I wonder what they have been up to. But yeah, that, I mean, that was a crazy. It looks like somebody, like this looks like an AI bot.

It's just like posting. But this is a public company. Yeah, it does look like just some sort of like complete slop scam. Like you would assume that you would assume that if you go down this, particular funnel, you wind up at like, hey, you know, like, send me some random crypto or something. Like, it feels very scammy. And it's, I mean, you know, Palmer is sort of calling it a scam, but it is a public company, I guess. Yeah. I'm sure Andrew Rolls legal counsel will really enjoy. Having a nice calm holiday weekend, I'm sure, while they clean this mess up,

one of many. But it's a champagne problem. Let's come back to this later. because we have our guests in the Restream Waiting Room. While we're bringing them in, let me tell you about cognition, the team behind the AI software engineer, Devin, crush your backlog with a personal AI engineering team. Merry Christmas to everyone. We have Brian Armstrong from Coinbase. And TARC is back on the show.

So many repeat guests, it's so great to see both of you. Congratulations on all the fantastic success. Brian, would you mind kicking us off with a little high-level overview of the news? Good to see you. Yeah, sure. Good to see you guys again. Well, we had a great product event yesterday in San Francisco. We announced the Everything Exchange.

So we've got stock trading on there. We've got prediction markets. We've got millions of tokens now trading through decentralized exchanges. We've got simple derivatives. We announced a ton of stuff yesterday. And one of the big ones was prediction markets, which we're happy to partner with Calci on.

We love Calci. They've been awesome to work with. That's great. And prediction markets are huge. They're an important asset class for people who are trading them, but it's also a way for people to get information about what's going to happen in the world. So it's kind of an alternative to traditional media. It's entertainment. It's everything.

And, yeah, Kalshi is awesome. So talk to me about how the Kalshi integration actually works. Is it more like, is this a B-to-B deal? Will a Coinbase customer actually be seeing the Kalshi logo? Will they, will they need, if they have two accounts or the accounts linked, how are you thinking about kind of, the integration kind of taking shape over the next year or however you can talk about it. Yeah, well, it's a white-labeled integration,

and Tarrick can talk more about his strategy of being a provider to lots of different companies, so it made it really easy to integrate. I mean, it's not an exclusive arrangement, right? So we can integrate with other ones, we could launch our own. But for right now, we're very happy building on top of Kalshi has allowed us to get to market really quickly.

And from a Coinbase point of view, I'd say just, you know, tradfying crypto is intersecting, or you could say another way to say it would be that crypto is just eating, all financial services. So Coinbase is the leader in the space. We've got the most trusted brand. We've got the most deep crypto expertise. We've got, we're storing more crypto than any other company in the world by far, about $500 billion of assets. And so if they can trade everything where

their assets reside, it's our key to winning. Tark, take me through where, like how this plays into your growth strategy, your growth trajectory for the next year. There's this just a new way, a new top of funnel? Is this actually building up more liquidity, opening up different markets? Are we going to see different Kalshi markets because of this partnership? How do you think things are going to evolve over the next year? Yeah, maybe let me answer actually at the personal level, you know, I don't know if you saw Luana Street yesterday, which is funny. The first time we actually both interface with Coinbase was when we got the $100 of free crypto. No way. Our freshman year at MIT. Amazing. Nice. You know, so we had to sign up. We got the $100.

And like, you know, a decade later, we're partnering with Coinbase just like an amazing kind of personal moment. But from a company perspective, our goal has been sort of there's the first-party product to cashier.com. But, you know, at the same time as building an exchange, and each of these products require liquidity. And liquidity has a bit of sort of this aspect of more liquidity but gets more liquidity. And as you partner with sort of brokerages or, you know, large platform with, as Brian said, like huge customer base, huge deposits, that brings more flow to the exchange, which improves the liquidity and thus the product for everybody else, including Coinbase itself. So we're very excited about this partnership.

I believe there's going to be like a long kind of range of markets available on Coinbase that people can participate in. And over time, we're going to be adding increasingly more markets. So lots of work to do. This is just a start. How, like, you guys spend a ton of time talking to users. And I also feel like you guys have both gone viral for different things that you've talked about related to prediction markets over the last couple weeks. And everybody online is going to form their opinion of why prediction markets are good or bad or this or that.

But like how, yeah, maybe I just kind of want to understand like how consumers feel maybe on your side, Brian, I'm assuming like you and the team spend a bunch of time talking to people and understanding what users want out of prediction markets. on the Coinbase app and what they're most excited about. Yeah, well, obviously, sports is such a big category that is driving a lot of demand right now. And I think that that's an important use case that we see from our customers, that there's demand for that. You know, I think there's a lot of open questions

about how that's going to be treated in society and go through the courts and everything. And, you know, we think ultimately the CFTC will have federal preemption here and a bunch of states are, you know, a little grumpy about that, but that's fine. But prediction markets is much broader than just sports, right? It's people betting on, you know, economic indicators and trying to figure out, like,

is the Suez Canal going to be open next month and political outcomes? And I think, like, the number of markets could just be dramatically higher. And, like, 1% of people are using it as an asset class to trade, but, like, 99% of people looking at these are using it as a way to figure out what's going to happen in the world next. So it's actually broader. It's something like an alternative to traditional media. I think like actually TARC told me a really powerful idea, which is that policymakers could actually use this to determine

what are the best policies to implement, right? Like let's say you're trying to put out some policy to try to build more housing in San Francisco or to reduce unemployment. You could actually put this on a prediction market, get real signal from the market about what would happen if these were actually implemented and then use that to choose the best policy.

So I think prediction markets are really, powerful tool. That example in particular, like, who are the market participants in that situation? Because I could imagine, I mean, I think a lot of people's like big, big concern is that you end up with, uh, is it like, like, like, if I'm a big, if I'm a big housing developer or something like that, I could potentially get in like, you know, try to influence policy through, like, sort of like trading that market and maybe, so I don't know. I, I think part, part of why, like, you got anybody in the prediction market space keeps going viral. It's like in any of these situations, I feel like there ends up being, like, it's easy to imagine

like some kind of negative externalities, but I guess that's a case for all new technology. Yeah. Yeah, well, Tarek should talk more about it. But I think the game theory is so interesting because there's parties on both sides who stand to gain or lose. And if you really believe that the housing market would be better for your business, whatever, you can go invest in that contract, but if you're wrong, you stand to lose a bunch of money.

So it's actually the best signal that you can get with people having real skin in the game. Because think about what's the alternative? It's essentially pollsters running around and surveying people, and there's kind of like people's revealed preference versus their stated preference. Like sometimes people will state,

oh, my preference is X. But the revealed preference turns out to be actually something different because there's real skin in the game. So I think prediction markets have much stronger signal than traditional polling. But I don't know, Tariq, you're the expert here. What's, what do you think? We've dealt with this a lot, right? Back last year when we were fighting the government to legalize election markets, and we won that lawsuit, the criticism was, could people kind of use money

to influence the odds, move them up or down in either way? And, you know, the best argument for that is like, well, if you really wanted to sort of influence the perception of who's going to win an election or, you know, whether a certain policy is good or bad, you would influence the polls. It's super easy. There's no cost. You can sample in a certain way. There's all sorts of way where you can bias it. Or you can go on TV and say a bunch of things, which is how most of us get informed about what's happening in the words today. Like you can tweet or say a bunch of things with no skin and game or repercussions. And like Brian said, the elegant thing about prediction markets is there's a very strong monetary incentive to be truthful and a very strong monetary

disincentive to lie. You know, people don't lie when money's involved. And so That's how over time prediction markets tend to be a more accurate gauge about what's going to happen. But in this specific example, about what we should do when it comes to certain policies. Yeah. And what you said, we can certainly, you know, because the debate around which markets are genuinely sort of valuable and necessary and all that stuff will continue for a long time. Is there a meaningful distinction there around like positive sum markets versus zero sum markets? It feels like that might be sort of some of the vibe shift that's happening. It's like if you create a financial product that allows people to invest in the American stock market broadly, it's gone up historically.

It's most likely positive some. But, you know, there can only be one winner of the Super Bowl. And so it's sort of a zero-sum market. Is that a reasonable, like, framework to think about where the activity is shifting? we're shifting from maybe more positive some markets to zero sum, or is that not a factor? I mean, Brian, let me know what you think, but I don't think so. I mean, the derivatives market, so options or futures, all of these markets have historically been zero sum. Okay, yeah.

Right? But they're still very useful. Yeah. And, you know, people usually criticize this market. The main criticism is their speculators. People that are sort of like speculating on an outcome. And that's okay because without speculators, you don't get the benefits. You don't get the price and forecasting benefits.

And if there are certain people that want to hedge on something, like they are adversely impacted by something going on, like, I don't know, Brexit happening or election going a certain way or the other, or even the sports markets, which happens pretty often, they kind of need the liquidity. And so the healthy balance is basically a balance between sort of people that, like, drive usefulness out of the markets and speculators. And that's how any of these traditional markets operates. Yeah. Yeah, I think one thing that's undeniable is that it's a very entertaining experience just to use the data. like scrolling and trying to understand and this idea of, you know, having, having visibility into things that could become the future headlines of the world. And I, I appreciate that that is sort of a public benefit by, that is created through people that are choosing to trade these markets. Do you have any insight into, I mean, Brian, you've done a great job at running a firm that winds up servicing institutional investors as well in institutions in addition to consumers. And there's been some viral chatter around prediction markets, potentially either replacing or augmenting insurance products.

And the initial reaction to that was like, wait, instead of just getting like fire insurance, I have to be like trading a contract every single day. But I was actually thinking about like maybe in the future there's a new insurance firm, that's using some sort of prediction market under the hood. Have you thought about the role of institutions in a world where the liquidity around prediction markets is increasing, how do institutions come in and actually maybe build products around prediction markets that have value to a different consumer?

Yeah, well, just zooming out, I mean, you're correct. Coinbase is serving multiple different customer segments. So the Coinbase retail app is what a lot of people know us for. That's probably the most comparable to Robin Hood, for instance. But we also have product for businesses. We have a product for institutions that's the leading. We have a developer platform. We have a self-custodial wallet.

So we're doing a lot of different things. On the prediction market for insurance point of view, I mean, that's an interesting idea. Actually, I hadn't looked too much into that. I think institutions are going to start trading prediction markets. I doubt that'll be the first place they go. But I could see them using that over time. Yeah.

Yeah, it's clearly like we're at the very early stages of all. all this. I am interested in some of the other, the other Coinbase launches. Can you take us through some of the other stuff, particularly Coinbase Advisor? I'm interested in just any time a big company has a ton of data and is actually surfacing something that's AI powered. How do you think about delivering that product? What were the tradeoffs that you made and how will you be measuring success? Yeah, so Coinbase Advisor is, there to help you manage your financial life. And it can ingest all the information

from your portfolio. It also knows your preferences around risk tolerance. And you can do anything in there from asking it to, hey, help me build a better portfolio, to earn more yield, or look for opportunities in the market around X, Y, or Z. But it can also prompt you with things that you might have not even known to ask about, right?

So every day, it's out there kind of ingesting the information on the internet with some context about what you need and want. And it'll present opportunity to you at time about macro events happening in the market, which might create trading opportunities. So I think just broadly, we think that AI is useful for, it's kind of a barbell, right? It's useful for a segment of people who might not have as much financial literacy as they want or how to maybe not even understand how to use all of these tools.

But it's also powerful for advanced traders who just want to eliminate repetitive tasks and toil that everybody has to deal with in their financial life, right? So AI is disrupting every business out there. Like financial services is no exception. And we want to make sure we're leading on that front. You mentioned preemption. Can you both maybe give me a little tour of any expectations or what you're looking for in Washington in 2026? What are you watching?

What do you think the U.S. government needs to get wrong? right for your industries to succeed in 2026? Well, I'll happy to start, and then, Targ, I'll turn it to you, but I, yeah. The main thing Coinbase is focused on is actually getting market structure legislation passed. So you may recall, like, the Clarity Act went through the House already. It got a strong bipartisan vote. The Senate is now deliberating in the Senate Ag and Senate banking committees, their own draft text for market structure legislation.

So that would be a landmark piece of legislation if it goes through to complement the Genius Act, which went through for Stable Coins earlier this year. So that's where we're primarily focused. and it's looking positive that in early 2026, the Senate committees will vote on that, and fingers crossed. Now, there's a whole other separate work stream around prediction markets,

but I don't know, Targ, you want to touch on that? Yeah, Brian, I know you have to jump, so feel free to take off. I think you had a hard out, but you're welcome to hang. I'm good for a few minutes. Okay, yeah, Tarik, I'd love to hear from a regulatory standpoint how you're looking at 2020. What you're monitoring?

Yeah, I mean, I think the state, of the world right now is actually relatively clear, at least in our shared views. We just started and launched a coalition on prediction markets a week ago, and there's a number of participants in it, including Cornbase. And really, it's all about clarifying and making sure that everybody understands that financial markets are regulated at the federal level and not a state-by-state thing. And yes, as financial markets expand and they kind of touch more people, as you build financial markets that are sort of relatable to a larger audience, there are going to be some interests that are going to get ruffled,

including some state interests, casinos or others. And so it's not too surprising there, sort of opposition. It usually means that we're onto something big, and there's reinnovation happening. So really, I think as the court sort of like the whole process kind of plays out, it's about sort of proving our side of the case, and I think that's going pretty well so far. And then educating policymakers about what this is really about, how it works, how it's regulated at the federal level. So that they understand it.

Makes a lot of sense. Well, congratulations on the partnership guys and all the launches, Brian. You guys have both had a very big year. Yeah, we barely scratched the surface. There's like five more things we didn't get to. You watched this yesterday. But, you know, it's the end of the year. So hope you all have a fantastic holiday season

and hope to see you both on the show in 2026. We'll talk to you soon. Thanks, guys. The quarantine-based team's firing on all cylinders. so it was cool to get a bunch of those announcements out and people can check out the live stream if they haven't seen it yet. Fantastic.

Thanks a much. Fantastic. Thanks very much. Thanks very much. Thanks very much. Cheers. Cheers. Let me tell you about Figma.

Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams. Build great products together. Back to new coinage. Chew by. This is the new phrase. This is the new word you got to learn. People know cooked.

Chew by. People know chopped. People know washed. The Duchess of Bushwick says. This is a screenshot. I don't know if it's hers. But yeah, so it's recently invented the word chew-by, which is when something is both chops and also spiritually Dubai.

Examples, so house, goyard, Pandora, Carbone, Kith. Drop your chew-by things in the comments. You know, I learned about Kith from this show. We were doing cars for various personas, and you said a Kith BMW M5 or something? They did some sort of a collab. Yeah, they have done a couple. Yeah, they have done a couple of yet.

But now I know, now I know for this, it's chopped and spiritually Dubai. May as well be a BMW. So House, I got to say, I think it's spiritually very English. I mean, that's obviously the origin of it. But yeah, again, again. But is England spiritually Dubai now? Who knows?

It's possible. There is. Van Cleef, they're saying. You got to go through the comments here. Cartier-Love brace, the dry bar, so it's like, oh, there's... Oat milk. No, it's not... Oat milk is definitely chew-by.

Chew-by. Better to be chew-by than just chopped, though. I don't... Yeah, but also, I don't... I don't want to... There's a lot of great things about Dubai. You can rent an SF-90 for the day for like a grand. Hmm.

I did that at one point during F-1 and 2020... It's dangerous. foreshadowing. If you ever fall off, people are going to be calling you Chewby for sure. Chewai. No, I mean, it's like being able to drive around at the time a $750,000 car for... Okay. Massive Balenciaga sneakers. I saw these at breakfast this morning. Are those two-by? I don't think so. I don't think so. Chunkiest, kind of raddiest sneakers, and John was just shocked and I had to... You kind of predicted that they were like, technically nice or expensive footwear.

Yeah. But you were really processing that for a while. Well, it was like, they either came from that or they came from like a gift shop at a, at a, at a six flags. It was one or the other. And I was sort of, I was sort of dialing it in. I was like, it could be, it could be six flags gift shop tier shoe or it could be something extremely exclusive that needed to be waited in line for and cost thousands of dollars. And it was the latter.

Anyway, Julius AI, the AI data analyst that works for you. Join millions who use Julius to connect their data, ask questions, and get insights in seconds. Peter Abil is Amazon's new AGI head. Teapot needs no introduction to him. He is a pioneer in robotics and deep reinforcement learning. He has 231,000 citations. He's a professor at UC Berkeley. He is neither chopped nor Dubai.

He is Berkeley. He's number 28 on the menace list. Let's go. There you go. Actually, very sad that we didn't get, you got to do an update. We didn't get that mentioned here. But I love that bookworm engineer, bookworm engineer, GDP here is giving a little bit more on him, says he has been Amazon's distinguished scientist

and vice president and scholar since 2024 focused on advanced. advancing AI and robotics. He has advised legendary doctoral candidates like Chelsea Finn of physical intelligence and John Shulman, ex-open AI, ex-anthropic, and now co-founder of thinking machines. He's an absolute dog. Let's give it up for Peter Abil,

the new head of AGI in Amazon. Really fantastic news and bookworm engineer. Thanks for putting this on the timeline. I appreciate you sharing this news, but also I was thinking about bookworms, the word bookworm, like what did that say? when they started using chewing through books. Is that what it is?

Or is it like they saw books as slop? They saw books as, you know, oh, you're a bookworm. You're worming you round on the ground. You're a slug. Okay, so, I looked up the etymology. Etymology of bookworm, give it to me. Who read too much comparing them to actual insects

that burrowed into and damaged books. It's brain rot. It's the original brain rot. It is. No, no, it's not. These are, like, if you had a, so if you, somebody leaves a bunch of books in a shed, for example, the bugs are going to chew into them. I think that's what

Yes, but it was derogatory. It was derogatory. It was saying you read too many books, you need to touch grass. You know the very hungry catapult. The very hungry cataple. Yes, yes, yes. That's how I imagine a bookworm, just, just chomp and just. Yes, yes, that is the activity. And someone who has brain rot and is on TikTok all day, they are chewing through the feed for sure. But when you say someone has brain rot, it's a pejorative. It's negative. It's negative. Well, the only thing is a bookworm, I never saw that as, like, a negative... That's because we think of books as high art. We think of them as possible.

But you're saying at some point, maybe people were saying... You need to cool it with the books, brother. You need to get outside, touch grass. You go ride a horse. Go till the fields. Exactly. Why are you so obsessed with these books? This new technology is one-shodding you.

You're lost in the world of the book. Hit the minds. Exactly. Exactly. Get outside. Go to the forest. I don't know. The bookworm thing, it makes me...

you feel that at one point books were, I mean, there's that famous picture of everyone on the subway reading the newspaper. And it's like, oh, people are so absorbed with the newspaper. Like, why can't they just log off and, like, talk to each other? Because they used to talk to each other. Then you gave them a newspaper. They're like, newspaper is better than making a friend over here. Anyway. I wonder, I'm at graphite.dev.dev worm.

Graphite.com. Code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub, ship higher quality software faster. What do you wonder? Oh. You wonder about... Just this idea, just this idea that there was a point in the future where everyone, if in public spaces, like trains, buses, planes, et cetera, was just talking the whole time. Oh, a point in the past.

Yeah, yeah. It's like when that technology existed, the written word also existed, which implies that people probably kind of always had something that they were. Like, can you imagine you're sitting down on a train and you have like this book that you've been so excited to read. Yeah. Well, books were in there's true. Yeah, so the person next to you is like excited.

I want to talk for five hours with strangers today. Like the person with the book is going to be thinking, hey, I came here to read this book. But horses are older than books. There was a moment when it was like, hey, we're going to go over there, lock in, we're riding together. And no, you don't have a book to read. You have to talk to me.

You don't have a phone. You don't know a VR headset with a. balloon attached. You don't even have a book. You just got me and your horse, my horse, your horse, you got me and you and we're hanging out and talking. And that's the original touching grass that we lost ever since the invention of this book. People don't know, people don't know how to commute. I wonder if you, I wonder for certain parts on a horse. I like that you're focusing on the commute. No, no, I'm specifically, you just got me thinking, no one commutes to work with a horse anymore. And in some ways, you could set up.

kind of like a desk on a horse you know on on the top and you could be getting some emails done also underrated horses effectively self-driving that's what I'm saying you have self-driving technology it's here self-driving you have horses that are just self-driving because you can just say hey boy go home go home and the horse note park park I think we got to bring them back bring them back return to privy makes it easy to build on crypto rail securely spin up white label wall it sign transactions and integrate on-chain infrastructure all through one simple API. Unlike meta, Microsoft, or Apple, Amazon now has one of the best AI researchers in the world. This is Pedro Domingos, also shouting out Peter Abil.

Everyone loves it. It's fantastic news. Invest, like The Best has a clip here about Domino's Pizza. It's the best performing stock. Yeah, so Henry. Can we play this two? Elebogan. Let's play this clip.

What was the best small cap company over that 10-year period in the 2010s? Well, actually, it was Domino's pizza. Why was Domino's so good? Well, if you look at the pizza market in the United States, when Domino's basically started its run, you basically had a third of the market that was like local. And then the other third we know, right? There's the nationals, Domino's, Papa John's, Little Caesars, others. And then the middle third, there used to be in D.C., this place called Armands, that had about 30 places, and they had local or geographic scale, but they didn't have the scale of Domino's, and they didn't have great pizza.

And what happened was when Domino's started its run, well, first of all, it started by basically making the product a little bit better. But if you talk to Patrick Doyle, you know, who was CEO at the time, and you really study it, what they started doing was, if there's three value equations in pizza, it's quality, value, and convenience. And what they realized is, we really invest in technology. We can make convenience a lot better. And so they really invested in their app.

Yeah, every few months the domino's chart goes viral. It's a classic. Very early on, they could then target that customer more efficiently with couponing, what have you, drive scale, through that box.

And then when you basically do something well, right, you improve the product, probably was slightly above average, you really iterate on convenience and now you have a direct relationship with those customers. All of a sudden, actually the brand halo started getting a little bit better, right? Because, and you put all that together against a wonderful business model, the franchise business model, which is, you know, ROI light.

And often those are the best stocks when you go study the markets because you're already in a physical world business where the technology advantage transitions into a physical mode advantage or a distribution or scale advantage. That's one of the patterns we've observed. We call that the good to great thesis internally. The Domino's Pizza Tracker, incredibly underrated.

It really is. It really is. One of the best pieces of software in history. Domino's, yeah, it's interesting. I mean, it's a $15 billion company today. Been kind of all over the place over the last five years, but all time is truly exceptional. Moving on, we can pull up this landing page that Reggie James is highlighting over at Unitree.

We have the Unitree H2, Destiny Awakening, this copy goes pretty hard. You've got to give them that. Tyler, how do you rate it? Yeah, I mean, it looks, it's reminiscent of the, I don't want to get it wrong, but there's like the Hindu, like, gods, right? They have a bunch of arms.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. The face is also very scary. The first unitary does not have that kind of scary. They, let's hit the gong for the most, Most suss-looking humanoid face to date. They did it. They did it.

I was already in favor of banning the sale of Unitri in the United States. Of course, now that I see the face of the H-2, I'm even more in favor. I heard a rumor that there might be some bans coming for something or other. So I'm looking at the site. It's like $30,000, which is still, from everything we've heard at least, it seems much cheaper still than American. That's such an insane landing page. I mean, look at some of the other, can we click through?

You see some of these other ones? There's this Unitri H1 on the website that has these like red fans on its hands. If you just pull up the website and it's very easy to imagine them, Hasaws. Team, how are we doing pulling this up? There we go. Okay, no, go to the homepage, Unitree.com. go back and then press the arrow on the side.

Oh, keep going. These ones. Look at that. So I think they're like decorative. It's clearly doing some type of celebration. It holds pizza. But imagine if that thing had saws on its hands and it's just walking around. That's going to be pretty good thing.

Very, very sketchy. At the same time, I want to fight one of these so badly because I want to know actually how far we are from it being able to kill me. Because I think I still have the edge, even if it had some blades or something, I think I could just kick it really hard in the chest and it just goes down. With blades? Well, they're still very short. They don't weigh. Yeah, they're small and they don't weigh that much.

How much is it way? I think I got size. I mean, to be fair, I'm big, but I do think I do think I could take one of those down pretty easily. Okay, so that would be an amazing montage just for the next, for the next 10 years, for the next 10 years, you fight a humanoid robot every January. and we just see the progress. Yeah. I think we should sneak me into one of those robot fighting leagues and I just get in the octagon with them,

just take it down. And they're like, that's not the point. Why did you destroy our Unitry? Be like, I thought this was what it was supposed to do. Interesting. Gabe says Bill Gurley on the Tim Ferriss pod said Unitri didn't want outsiders to check out their factory.

That could be, that could. Bill Gurley, why are you leaking that? It's insane. Well, I mean, that's fair. It's very funny. Well, it could be two reasons. One is they're not. making that many and it's all by hand.

The other is they have some type of insane alpha that they don't want to share. Yeah, there's a bunch of reasons. Or, I don't know. Anyway, let me tell you about profound. Get your brand mentioned in Chachapit. Reach millions of consumers who use AI to discover new products and brands.

Alex Rampal says, sometimes the market for something done very well is a hundred times the size of the market, something done. A hundred times the size of the market for something done okay. Yeah, this is interesting. I think about this, I mean, I'm trying to think of examples.

I think of this in the context, even just of the power law, right? You have like the best company in a category being worth a hundred times. But this also, I feel like it can happen where maybe there's no market for something at all. And then somebody comes in and makes something great. And suddenly, suddenly it actually. Yeah, I mean, that's certainly, that's certainly the entire story of. AI, which is probably what he was, you know, thinking of, was just the fact that, uh, Yeah, chatbots, chatbots went through a hype cycle.

And now they're actually good in there. And it's a huge category. I mean, yeah, we went through a chatbot boom back in like 2017. Yeah, that's what I was saying. Yeah. And I mean, the market cap, I'm sure there were some chatbot companies like delivered some value. I mean, when you use like the American Airlines app, like there's still like some

Q&A, some business logic of like phone trees, essentially. are chatbots. And I'm sure some of those companies are worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Some of them, there might even be a few unicorns there, but it's certainly not this insane power law outcome. Now it is, because we went from very poorly done chatbots to amazing revolutionary chatbots.

What do you laugh at? Eatsleep.com. Exceptional sleep, without exception. Fall asleep faster. Sleep deeper, wake up energized. Also in the context of Alex Rampel post. Somebody put example at eight sleep,

which is a whole way that's awesome. I just seeing this post from Ben. Yeah, which one? I put it in the timeline. At the bottom of the timeline,

pull it up. Ben says, imagine looking for a new show and finding this. Yeah, it's so good. I was just laughing at like, yeah,

the sack and the gong doesn't even make noise. You're really. We're tracking it. All right, that's a nice. My ears are getting blown out. Thank you for that, Ben.

We got to give big congratulations to Vanith. He said one week ago, I got clipped for drinking water. Now I'm joining XAI to build the future of AI. This is the infamous photo, too. Wow, this is the photo that caused all the Klein dust up. But, wow. Congratulations to Van Nuheed. That's incredible.

Hilarious. And what a great way to lean in. Have some fun, you know, not take yourself too seriously. Although clearly, a very serious engineer, because he's got a job working on macro hard. No way. He's on the macro hard team going up against Microsoft. He's 19.

He has a computer science degree from Georgia Tech, and he's got 15,000 followers on the Vinysauce IG slash TikTok. Seems like he's doing all sorts of stuff. Very fun. Congratulations to him. What a hilarious. exchange. Delian is fired up about Jared Isaacman. Yes. We're very excited. God bless the great United States. Jared is looking fantastic in this suit. Yeah.

It's so crazy he's actually been to space. That feels like going forward, can we just make that a prerequisite? NASA admin? Future Scoop Hall of Famer Katie Roof is in the chat. She says, thanks for the shout out. Shree deserve credit for the Scoop too. Credit to Credit to Shree. Sorry to give all the love to Katie, but she's everywhere. She's an animal. But great, great. Should we make, should we make going to space a prerequisite for being NASA administrator? Or on your first day on the job, they just got to blast you into space. I think it's just like, it needs to be in the orientation. How can you go back? Your whole job is space. You've never been and your predecessor's been, and you haven't. You got to go. You want to help us rule the stars.

And you've never been there? But you've never tasted zero Gs? What are we doing here? We got it. This has to be a prerequisite. Bake it into the bill of rights. He has been in. He's been in space.

But, and so like, you know, now there's this question about like, well, what about the next administrator? If the next administrator is like, yeah, like, I'd love to go someday. It's like, oh, you can't, it doesn't hit the same as the last guy. Like, you got to go. Yeah, Jared told me it's great. I'm excited to be stewarding this, this effort for the, you know, the United States and hope to go at some point myself.

Yeah, yeah. I have a lot of strong opinions about space. I haven't been yet, but you can trust me. I'm going to lay down some really good plans. I got a whole, I really understand it because I've read about it a lot. I've also watched videos. I've read all the books.

I've read those videos. I've seen all the blockbuster movies. Still haven't been. That's on the to do list. I'm going to get there soon. But, yeah. It's not even to do list, bucket list. It's on the bucket list.

No, day one, Day one, you're on the top of a rocket. When you put your hand on the Bible, I don't even know if that's how the administration confirmation works, but you say, I swear to duly uphold the, whatever NASA's mission is to get to the moon and Mars,

they blast you into a rocket in space. Tyler, what are you saying? I was saying, like, this is like if you're the ambassador to Spain or something, but you've never been to Spain. That's actually, has an ambassador to another country ever not been to that country? that has to be a... Because do we have an ambassador to North Korea

who, like, can't go, but is still in charge of, like, ambassadorship? And it's like, if we have an ambassador situation, I'm the guy, do we have an ambassador to North Korea? Or do we just, like, not even have one? Okay.

If we have one, we've got to have them on the show. I would love to go to the... I feel like Trump kind of like, that role is mine. Okay, I'll handle it. I'll handle it. I'll go over there personally. I'll go over there personally.

Anyway, wander.com, book of wander with inspiring views. I get some bad news about wander. They don't have any wanders in North Korea, but they have them in tons of other great locations. They got hotel great amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning, and 24-7 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better. Okay, we got some history here.

So according to Gemini, I ask, has a U.S. ambassador to a country ever not been to the country? and apparently James Wadsworth was the ambassador to Turkey in 1960. He was appointed and confirmed as the ambassador, but before he could travel there, a military coup occurred. The U.S. temporarily suspended relations. So when we don't have diplomatic relations with a country, we obviously don't have an ambassador.

That's kind of like you've got to have some relations. We don't have an official ambassador to North Korea. So even recently, Argentina, during 2014, comfort, permission hearing, Noah Mamet admitted he had never been to Argentina and didn't speak Spanish. That's wild. So, you know, I, maybe it's not that big. But I, I, I, I, I still stand by my original stance going forward in order to be the administrator of NASA, you got to go to space. Either before you get the job or on day one, but it's got to be day one. He's got to be, here's your badge, here's your rocket. So Anthony Keely, 1885, uh,

Keeley is a famous historical failed diplomat. He was appointed to Italy, but the Italian government refused him because of past anti-Italian comments, smart. Then the U.S. tried to send him to Austria-Hungary, and they also refused him. He resigned without ever serving in either country. Wow. So total failure. Elon is saying Carmack is awesome. Yeah, John Carmack and what he...

True. I mean, we don't need to play this whole clip, but Carmack is under-exposed in Pod-Dexpo. Well, scroll down because I think it's worth seeing this picture here, if you can. A real picture of Carmack. That is a real picture. He has been hanging the gym. He actually did get in insane shape and looks great. And he also has a number of just, like, insanely good takes where somebody would,

somebody made an AI version of Doom and one of the anti, AI folks was like, what do you think the hardworking creators that made Doom would say about this? And Carmack was like, I love it. I would have loved to use AI to build Doom. I love tools. And it's a tool for me. It's very helpful, which is just funny. And everyone was like, yeah, Carmack's on our side.

What is going on? So we were quote tweeted by Matthew Zetlin. We said that CNSC. Yeah, so... Our take was like, CNBC wasn't really breaking through with, like, the tech community. Yeah, I guess I was giving a very, I think we gave a very anecdotal take, right? Yeah, like I cannot... Yeah, I cannot remember...

I cannot remember CBS content from the last year outside of the last month, right? So, so he said, with all due respect to TBPN, I think this gets things a little backwards. CBS is basically unique in the network news business, uh, in being able to, um, generate buzz. 60 minutes still has great ratings and other CBS news properties produced talked about stuff too. Let's see his examples. So he's an older man and a younger woman next to each other. Do you know who that is? I don't. Really? I don't. That is, he where he, does he run the Navy? He has a Navy shirt on. I think he runs, I think he runs football player. Cool. And then what position does he play? Isn't he a little old to play football? I

I thought you had to be like, we had Sequinone on the show. I thought you had to be like... His shirt's looking a little rough. 30s or something, maybe 20s. It's vintage, Tyler. Is Bill Belichick a veteran? Or is this... No, Bill Belichick was never in the military.

No, this is a good... He said, the reason why Ellison wanted CBS and wanted Barry to run it is precisely because it was still capable of creating buzz and generating attention. Okay, cool. This is helpful content. Yeah, I like this. They still got it over there.

And yeah, seems, seems, seems, seems good. I don't know, still interesting. Yeah, it does feel like it's breaking through in a different way. It feels like it's like the content is shifting to something that's more, you know, certainly breaking through. I see the clips, I feel like I see the clips more.

But I don't know. Anyway, let's watch this clip of Greg Brockman from OpenAI saying compute enabled our first image generation launch and a 32% jump in weekly active users over the following weeks, as well as our latest image generation launch yesterday. We have a lot more coming and need a lot more compute. Let's play this. Open AI did not set out with a thesis the compute was the path to progress. It's that we tried everything else and the thing that worked was compute, was scaled. We are absolutely bursting at the seams with demand for compute relative to our ability to survive that compute. When we look at our launch calendar, the single biggest blocker often becomes, okay, but where's the compute going to come from for that?

When we had our image generation launch in March that went viral, we did not have enough compute to keep that going. And so we made some very painful decisions to take a bunch of compute from research and move it to our deployment to try to be able to meet the demand. And that was really sacrificing the future for the present. And this is, first of all, a very painful thing because we have so many features, so many products that we want to launch to get held back because we didn't have enough compute and that what we do not want is to be caught flat-footed

where we say, well, two years ago, three years ago, we should have been planning for more. We want to be ahead of the curve. And the truth is, I do not think we will be, no matter how ambitious we can dream of being right now. I think that the demand will far exceed whatever we can think of. Taz in the chat says these videos feel like they're going to get satired by some comedian, maybe S&L very soon. So completely different video style from anything we've seen in Silicon Valley for a while.

I think there's something really cool about the aesthetics of that video. But shaky camera typically says nervous energy. Like as a filmmaker, that's when I would be like, okay. Like, you know, we're telling the story of Jordy and, you know, if we're making a movie about Jordy going surfing and there's a moment where he loses a surfboard, I'm probably going to be like, let's shake the camera a little bit more, let's bring some energy to the frame. I got the, look at this, I got the shaky cam going, you know, kind of. Shake a cam, yeah. It's like there's more energy. It's a little bit nervous and it's an odd choice.

I love the choice as a differentiator. It's fresh. It's something I haven't seen before, but it is a little odd of a stylistic choice. Like, what is it saying? It feels a little anxious. But, you know, at least it stands out in the feed and honestly, looks beautiful. It looks cinnamon. It looks, it looks like it has an opinion.

It looks like it has some freshness and some polish that has been commoditized in a world where everyone has the FX3 on sticks with the long. lens and the little bouquet, like this stands out, and I think that that's very cool. On what he actually said, there's a couple comments. Lewis Tunstall says, this basically confirms Ilya's remark that SSI has sufficient compute for research because it's not being cannibalized by products. We talked to Saraglo about this yesterday, that it's a bunch of little projects. You said 10 million. She said not quite that low or something.

Wait, you said million? I said a couple million. Couple million, so, you know, she thinks maybe he's ripping $30 million compute runs maybe or something like that, training runs. And Brooks Otter Lake didn't like it or at least had some extra context around the Open AI video. He said one of the strangest marketing videos I've ever seen, everything about the staging makes it seem like it's supposed to be a positive and inspiring. And that's true. It's very brightly lit. It's really nicely lit.

It's high key. It's not dark. It's not contrasty. And then also when they show Greg, they show him from a low angle. And so he looks like a hero. It's great framing. It's amazing.

But Brooks is saying, like, it looks positive, inspiring. But if you actually listen to the words, the content of what he's saying, it's a guy saying the company has a serious problem which he does not believe can be solved. But I would take the other side of that and say that it's actually a reframing around, like, the job's not finished,

the jobs never finished. our pursuit is endless. There's a world where I think this narrative can wind up being more inspiring. I don't love the idea of a company. Like, I don't love it. It was maybe just too short of a video. Like maybe you needed to show the kind of more positive.

Totally. Because if you're somebody that's bearish on Open AI, you're looking at this and being like, wow, they just have to keep spending more and more and more and more and more money and it's never going to end. It's just a money pit and all this stuff. The other way to look at it is like the more scale we have, the more impact we can have,

the more customer types we can serve, the more use cases we can deliver on, the more we can actually use AI to make progress. So there's always like a positive spin, but I can definitely see how both the way it was shot, plus the way that it kind of cuts off. Maybe it feels like it needed to be more like a five-minute video. I mean, in general, everything, you know,

there's the whole meme about like the meeting could have been an email, the email could have been text message. I feel like everything that comes out of ONAI, like the one minute video could be a 10 minute video, the 10 minute video could be a two-hour podcast. Like I want a lot of meat because these are, these are heady issues. And if you think about it from a perspective of like, compare it to space travel, space exploration, if you are, if you're SpaceX and you're not going to say like, we're racing towards this definitive moment, boots on the ground on Mars, that's our ASI, we're done then. No, it's like we're going to colonize Mars. We're going to colonize

the stars, we're going to go to Alpha Centauri one day. And you know, if you went out there and you were like, look, we got to get to the moon, we got to get to Mars, and then we got to get to Alpha Centauri, and then we got to get farther away. And you know what? We need more metal. We need more metal. We need more metal to make more rockets. And we need more metal. And so we really need a lot of metal.

You'd be like, yeah, I get it. Like, you're going to grow this thing forever. You're going to do something really ambitious. The job's never really over. You're going to just keep going forever. And that's great. And we accept that and everything else. but the AI narrative has gotten caught up

and like there's this definitive goal, ASI, super intelligence, and then you're done. Yeah. And then it's like, okay. Well, yeah, and people talk about AGI, ASI, and some people are talking about API artificial puffer intelligence.

Oh, yes. I've heard about this. We have our next guest, actually live here in the studio with us. Can we go to the, can we go to Mr. Puff? That's good. Right here. We set up the Puffer fish.

There we go. There he is. We're puffin. Here we go. Simon, good to see you. Welcome to the stream. Good to see you guys too. I'm happy to you give Puffy a prime location there.

I'll speak on Puffy's behalf tonight. Yes. Please do. Please do. Anyway, have we told the story of where, how you landed on the name of the company, the puffer fish? Have we? I don't know.

Tell it. Say it again because it's a good story. There's three stories. Do you want one, two, or three? All of them. You want all of them? I want the truth. And I can handle it.

Give me the truth. The truth is the least interesting one of the stories, though. I've changed my opinion. I want the interesting one. Lie to me. It's because, you know, all the data is stored in obik storage, cheap and slow. And then we puff it up into RAM, into the desk. And so it's the puffer architecture.

That was, that's sort of the backwards facing one. The real story was just, oh, this is an emoji that doesn't have, yeah, this is it. This guy. Nobody claimed, nobody claimed this. I stubble upon him outside of a fire station, and there we were. That's good. Anyways, it's great to have you, it's great to have you on the show. We caught up at 5.30 a.m. this morning, you were sharing.

I didn't know that people in the L.A. got up that early. We have to. All of America operates on the same market hours. You've got to be up early. A lot of people in L.A. who are on something that ties to market hours at all are up super early. Yeah, I like to, I live on the West Coast, but I operate in Eastern. East Coast mindset. You like to be there on the floor of the NYSE?

We do. Spiritually. I like to be conscious. you know, while the opening bell is wrong. Exactly. It's fitting. Absolutely fitting. Yeah, it was great.

We're going to see you out there soon? Are you going to jump to no funding? Yeah, pre-IPO round, obviously. I mean, I like the NYSE vibe, you know, if we're talking about the stock exchange. Like, I like the vibe. I think NASDAQ has like a tech thing going for it. I just, you know, as someone who grew up in the old world, the New York Stock Exchange has a certain appeal, but NASDAQ is also good.

You know, I'll let them fight it out. Okay, okay. We'll let them out. Yeah, you can't, you can't be too obvious. If you're going into a negotiation, you can't make it too obvious which side you prefer, right? You need two horses in a race. Exactly. Anyways, break down the news.

It's been, I don't know, a couple months since you were on. Yeah, it's been a couple months. when I was in LA and spent a bit of time with you guys. What's the news? We got a new investor on board this morning. So we announced that and doubled it on with Lockheed Groom, the legendary one and only. But most of all, we're just puffing up.

We're trying to get everything to puff. We now have trillions and trillions of objects and turbo puffer that are all puffing. I was waiting. He's not going to say how much he raised. He's not going to say the valuation. Will he give us any numbers? This was the perfect way.

This was just, when you told me that you were going to announce, or the raise, and announce no information other than you just added one investor to the cap table, I thought that is just a perfect way to just keep, keep maugging the capital markets that are so desperate. I know you have so many fans out there that want to be a part of Turbo puffer, but is a great opportunity to say you can become a part of TurboPuffer, just shut, wind down your fund and start applying for jobs.

Turbo Puffer careers. I would say that, you know, there's a brilliant mind at Insight, and he ended up just joining. And I think that was a smart move. And I'm trying to convince more of the capital allocators, including the one who made the Puffer Fish that's on your table, to just join the company. It's a great way to get on the cap table.

But most of all, I mean, the way that I think about this is that they are part of the team. And I think the exam for them is who's brought the most value. And, you know, I go to just team my. You actually keep a list, right, of value add. And these are people, these are people like you've kept track of Lockheed. It's like, it's just a tier list. It's like, how much value have you added? I think every person that, you've,

reached out to you invest or you basically just put them in a spreadsheet and then you just, whenever they do something for the company, you just mark it down and then you rank them. And that's how you decide who gets... It's a very meritocratic process. But, you know, the way that I think about it is that I have to go and convince my leadership team is like who's the right person to add. And we like to compose the cap table the same way that we compose the team, right? It's few people highly concentrated and people we want to build a long relationship with.

And Thrive has shown us over the past two years the kinds of mountains that they can move for us. And so that's why we decided to add them and allow Lockheed to also double down, who's also in the absolute S-tier league. So that's really what happened. And it was very simple. Let's give it up for the absolute S-tier league. People are always talking about tier one. They're not, they've got to be thinking about the S-tier.

What about on the customer side? I saw Ivan from Notion shared earlier. We have a shared Slack channel with you, Simon, and the team. Every message. Could you bring this up? Within minutes. Pull it up. Every feature request is always answered. It feels like these guys work at Notion. This is the level of care and support we want from vendors bullish of Turbo Puffer. That's from Ivan at Notion. It was so hardwarming. The team just absolutely loved it. And I mean, this is why that's what we want people to focus on. What do our customers say? What are they doing with TurboPuffer? That's what we care about. Not numbers.

Like, you know, to me, the fundraising round would be like you showing you my office lease. These are the things that we need to get things done with. But it's not the important thing. The important things are tweets like the one from Ivan. That's what we want to be measured on. And I think I'm just old school in the way that, you know, my, my entrepreneurial example when I was a kid was going to my grandmother's store every second weekend and just sitting and playing on the floor. And every day when she came home, she was doing all her

own accountant and saying, this is how much money we made today and just talking about her employees and customers. Those are the things that matter. And those are the things that matter to me and to us and to the culture that we have here. So the tweet from Ivan and many of our other customers today, that's what I want to be measured on. So you're saying making money and customer satisfaction are sort of underrated in venture. I think they might be. Are there any new interesting case studies that you've noticed this year? How are you kind of describing the actual benefits, workflows, the implementations,

like the value that the companies that you worked with Anthropic, Curser, Notion, etc. Like, how are you framing the position of the actual product value that they're, that they're, as they deploy it? Yeah, I think there's two things, two big things we're seeing. The first is that the first wave of adoption, stage one of adopting AI in SaaS, is essentially, okay, let's connect these LLMs to a bunch of data and try to reason over it, right? The, you know, chat with a document, chat with a document plus. But I think what we're seeing from linear, from notion, from Atlassian, from, from, from, from, from, many of these customers is that they can bring more value if they can connect more data to AI. And so we're just seeing an explosion in data where they have to earn a return on the pricing

of the search underneath them. And that's what we can provide with much, much better economics than the alternatives just because of the way that it's been architected. So more data into context is what the frontier AI companies are doing. The second thing that we're seeing is that customers want to reason over, extremely large data sets. We're getting more and more demands of people who are essentially building their own Google, right, indexing tens or hundreds of billions of documents and wanting to search over them. That's very difficult to pull off. There's, you know, at meta, at Google, everyone has built custom indexes, but you can't pull this off today by dropping turbopuffer into

a Slack channel and just puff in real hard. We can get you to 100 billion. And so we've had to do a lot of R&D for this to do vector search over 100 billion documents at once with very, very low latency. And it's taken an enormous amount of engineering to do that with as little compute as possible. And that's been a lot of what we focused on in the past few months. The second thing is that it's not just about searching vectors, right? Vectors are sort of, you give a bunch of data to a model and spits out a number in a coordinate system. And that's really useful. But what's also useful is just searching over text. And we've got... I'm very good at that.

And the state of the art is a library called Lucene. It underpins elastic and open search in many of these solutions. And we're now starting to see similar or better performance. And one of the reasons we can do that is because LLMs, which are often the ones that are quarrying, write very long queries. Like humans write a couple words when we go on Google, but LLMs can write very, very long, very precise queries. And those are fundamentally different with a different set of tradeoffs to process.

And we can hyper-optimized for some of those trade-offs, which aligned really well with other trade-offs we made inside a turbo puffer to serve them at a pace that is very difficult to do on some of the tech that's otherwise out there. You said that you can you tell me a little bit more about the hardware constraints that, I mean, you're maybe not fully bumping up against, but everyone is laser-focused on GPUs, GPUs, maybe TPUs, maybe Traneum. But talk to me about the memory market, the CPU market. There's this article in the Wall Street Journal today. Microns blowout results are bad news for anyone buying a new phone or PC next year. Do you have any context on the shape of the AI buildout and where it's going to impact different hardware sub-sectors? I think we have very intentionally tried to steer clear. of GPUs because if you think there's a lot to get out of CPUs,

then they're easy to procure, they're in more data centers. When we've worked at vendors that need GPUs, they often have very tight restrictions on what regions they can run in, which might not necessarily be the region that customers are in. Sure. So we were talking to one vendor today where we're trying to get better performance, and they only have GPUs right now on the West Coast, and so we're waiting for them to get in the East Coast, right?

These things really, really matter, and we are starting to get to the point where we have to go to Google, We have to go to Amazon and we have to request the skews ahead of time, which is similar to when I was at Shopify, and we would have to do the capacity plane a couple months before because the cloud is not infinite when you start to get to Turbo Huffer scale, to Shopify scale, and you have to do this ahead of time. But it is still infinitely better than back in the day

when we had to request these things six months in advance and someone had to go and drill the holes in the walls at the last minute to make things work. But certainly there are also compute restraints on the CPU side. we can't always get the skews that we want, the newest CPUs. So we've also optimized to be able to run on many different generations and types of CPUs in different environments to just stay nimble. How big is the team? Team is now 22, started the year at 5.

So big growth. Wow, yeah. Wow. It's amazing. Revenue growing faster. Love it. What's the biggest fish you've ever caught? Biggest fish I've ever caught was this winter in,

Florida where we were out fishing for barracudas. I was, that's, that's a big fish. You got, you guys got one? Talking of fishing, by the way, when we were renegotiating the contract, I really wanted to get you guys up to Canada to go for some ice fishing. Someone in the chat says we gotta do a Canada meetup. Can we make it happen?

Can we address this? Can we address this? So can we just negotiate this on air here? I will pay probably 10% more. Okay. If you come up to do a live ice fishing on the lake. Ice fishing show. We'll do a fire. We'll do a fire.

What are you going to pay in? Shares. What are we going to pay? Shares. Oh, you want Turbo Puffer shares. Yeah, yeah, yeah. As much as I love ice fishing. No, we're working out the travel schedule next year and we would love, there's a lot of events.

Chat loves a live debate. There's a lot of events. You're invited. And the thing, too, about the Puffer jacket right there we're working on is, that I've described this as this is the, this is the LA guy's idea of a Canadian compatible jacket. Oh, okay. So I can't wait to see you guys out there on the ice in this jacket. Yeah, we're fine. Getting crossbite. Well, credit to me, I got the original, the original version of the jacket that we both have. I did feel the fabric and I was like, this is not fit for

ice fishing. This is going to, this is going to get ripped up immediately. So we're coming back. It needs more puff. More puff. More like rip stop, something like that. But yeah, watching you guys the whole team built this year has just been amazing. The puffer jacket is merely one piece of clothing that is, it's all about layering. This is what I learned when I was in Boston. Although I am an L.A. guy.

Oh, it's so cold in Boston, John. It is cold in Boston. It is cold in Boston. And you got to wear layers. So you got to layer the TBPN rugby with the turbo. puffer puffer jacket, maybe throw another TBPN jacket on top, TBPN hat. Once you get the whole merch every layer, then you'll be warm. Honestly, the thing we've been maybe more focused on is procuring an actual puffer fish for the studio. You were looking at it. You can get a mud skipper

for 20 bucks. That's a kind of fahawk. So this is also like, you know, Jordi, in our chat, there's a lot of ideas and I need to see more action in the studio because we were talking about the Maboo for fish, right, that can grow to two and a half feet. And it's about a thousand, the Maboo, that needs about $1,000 of feet every month in shell. And, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, we're working on a lot of stuff. Yeah. But, uh, there's a lot of ECs that have huge fish. It's, I'm not sure. Oh, wow.

tanks. I know one that has a million dollar fish tank, I believe. Yeah, you had to go stupid-diving in it. Maybe that's the next round. Yeah. That's the next round. Yeah, yeah. Find a VC. Pick the VC to do the next round based on their experience with fish tanks. Yeah. Look, if you have, if you're out there and you have a Maboo puffer fish and you're in the Bay Area, like I'm coming. Okay. I want to see it. You want to see it. This is the way to get at feeding time. At Simon. I want to come at feeding time. Or you could do kind of a one for one. It's like for every dollar you put into puffer fish conservation and restoration, you can put a dollar in to turbo puffer at a $10 billion valuation. It seems like a good trade.

Yeah, 10 billion. I like that. We could do that. Yeah, there you go. So there is a price. There is a price. He's not saying no to VCs. Hey, we're talking charity here.

We're talking charity. It's about the charity. It's about the charity angle. That's great. Anyways, you guys have had a massive year and it's been an honor to watch you guys cook and puff and I can't wait to see what the team does in 2027. Yeah. Honored to puff with you guys too. It's been an honor to puff. Tox. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye, goodbye, Puffy. Goodbye, always with us. Take care.

In spirit. Take care. See ya. Goodbye. Well, let's go back to, do you know how elite the Puck News readership is? They're so elite that when you go to subscribe to Puck News and they ask you to select your income level, the options are less than $100,000, than $100,000 to $500,000, then $500,000 to $500,000 to $500,000 to $5,000. million or more.

Absolute elite level audience. Obviously, we know you're rich, but what kind of rich? This is the puck news audience. If you're a puck news subscriber, you're power player. I don't think this says as much. I mean, think about it. Just think about minimum wage, right? Are they really going to break out the sub 100K category that much?

Like, do they need it below $10,000 a year? Maybe you got a summer internship, a little sprint. I just think it's a great drop down. I would, if anything, I would suggest they go higher. To get higher. It should be, if it's not $5 million or more, it should just be prefer not to answer. Yeah. In other news, Tim Sweeney says that Fortnite will not return to iOS in Japan in 2025.

As promised, Apple was required to open up the iOS to competing stores today. And instead of doing so honestly, they have launched a new. another travesty of obstruction and lawbreaking and gross disrespect to the government and people in Japan. Apple chose poorly again. Tim Sweetie is really Apple's worst nightmare. It's crazy. Also, it's like, it's like very few companies have like such an outspoken, just hater, you know? Like, it was heavily, heavily, heavily, heavily incentivized.

I guess, I guess Sam Altman has Elon, who's kind of his hater. Yeah, but I don't even know. It's the same way where like Tim basically. It's incredibly inspiring to grind. No one's hating on, I don't know, get basil.com like this. Shop over 25,000 luxury watches, fully authenticated in-house by Bez's team of experts. You don't have the CEO of a, how big is Epic Games? Tens of billions of dollars?

Huge company, right? You don't have the CEO of a, how big it is market cap? It is privately traded. IPO was rumored at 60 billion. Valuation in 2024 was at 22 billion. I mean, a lot smaller than Apple, actually, 1% of the market cap. But he is determined to set the record straight about every app store story that breaks. And he's been pushing.

He's been pushing. He wants Fortnite to be free, and at least not completely free, but free to run their own stores. There's a bunch of companies that were listed as potential targets for Toma Bravo, Vista, Clear Lakes, Francisco partners, etc. This is the busted software list. Not very nice, but still an interesting slice of the market from Danny Ocean. Some companies in there that I'm familiar with, Bill.com, PagerDuty, Warkeva, BlackBod, Blackline. Alchamai, is that Alchemy technology? One stream, SPS.

So these are companies that are public, but based on this screener, have good EV to EBITDA multiples where a large software, private equity firm could come and take them private. So it's just a fun screen. I don't know. I thought this was interesting. He just screened it himself. In other news, Phil.

Oh, this post was deleted. Oh, that's too bad. In other news, adquick.com. Out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Plan by and measure out of home with precision. Let's keep skipping through. There's a partnership between Boeing defense and Anderl. Very good news for Anderl.

Congrats to everyone involved. Boeing says we're teaming up with Anderil in the U.S. Army's advanced mid-year-old. range interceptor competition. Our offering will deliver an affordable, capable solution to counter increasing low-flying mid-range threats. Very excited for them. Is this the like a Shahad drone? Do you think that it's low-flying mid-range? No. So mid-range is more like a, is a, it's more like a missile that fires at a... Okay.

So like a Shahed would be at low range. If you actually click on the link here, you can see the image of the missile. It looks like a missile battery that goes on like the sort of the back of the truck. Like, zoom in on that. You can see that this is the integrated fires protection capability increment two system, obviously. And it's designed to defend fixed and forward operating bases against imminent aerial threats. So this might be what shoots down a Shahid drone, maybe. That's what I was fine.

I mean, that missile is pretty big. Oh, sure, sure, sure, yes. So the big picture here is the Army expects the eye. IFPC increment two second interceptor to integrate with and improve existing systems, deliver more robust and enhanced cost-effective layered air and missile defense systems for future combat environments. Let's see, this this partnership underscores our commitment to forming innovative, disruptive, and agile industry teams that deliver new capabilities to war fighters sooner. I'd like to know more about this. They really didn't lay out much in this press release. It will be funny because you have to be even more. more, you know, it's like Andrews, the whole pitch was like, we're going up against the big guys. And it's like, we're going up with the big guys. We're team it up.

But, of course, on each project, it's like disrupt, but also a partner, disrupt the model, disrupt the stagnation. Not necessarily, you know, bitter, bitter rivals. Arkway, this was an interesting. Caleb Barclay, Arkway. Oh, funny. A real-time 3D engine where anyone can design it. home. It is a simulated 3D world where buyers explore change and decide as light physics, building rules, and real products move is one. Very cool. I've seen Redfin playing around with some

They're back by NDBC. Nice. A couple others. Yeah, O'Brien. Pretty, pretty cool. I think, yeah, I wonder if this will be wound up be integrated into Zillow so you can like fully tour the house. This has always been sort of the dream. The Matterport team did a big job like pulling up, like, you know, 3D environments, like, you know, spherical scans of various rooms within a home that you could see. And a lot of that wound up getting integrated to Zillow and Redfin and different house buying projects. But now people will be able to go in there and design them and make them see, okay, I want to know what it looks like during Christmas. I want to know what this house looks like. Yeah, we'll see.

That would be a fun Zillow thing. Run all the images through nanobanana. Make them nice and Christmas-y. So that when you're scrolling around the holidays, you get the Christmas spirit coming through the Zillow listing. Where should we go next? Do you want to, well, we just need to say congratulations to the Acquired Podcast team.

team. We had Ben David from Acquired on the show a while back, but they did their official 10-year anniversary episode. I've been listening with Michael Lewis. With Michael Lewis. In the original Google Garage. So cool. Very cool. And I love, I've really, I've been pushing them. It was my idea for them to do video, really. Of course, they've been doing video for a very long time. John created video. But I was talking to them and I was saying that like there's so much opportunity. obviously they had a lot of that in progress already, but there's so much opportunity for them to go and find unique sets,

unique add to the storytelling. It's just an extra layer. And they're so established, their business is so set up, that I would be super excited to see not just, you know, what is the next story they're going to tell, but where are they going to tell it?

That's super interesting. And I think it'll make the clips really shine. I think it'll draw a ton of attention. Not that they need any. Everyone's already subscribed. Everyone already listens to all. Yeah, I loved hearing about their early, just the early days of the show. And even they didn't, they weren't full time until years into building the business.

Yeah, yeah. Very cool. Between X and LinkedIn, this has 110 hours of watch time from Hunter Weiss, who I saw in the chat earlier. How you doing, Hunter? This is such a cool. I mean, it's from Ramp. Well, no, do you remember this, this?

Game. Line writer. Yes, so I never got into line writer. I probably played with it for like two seconds and had a little fun. I was never absorbed in it. I don't think I ever spent more than like a few minutes in it. But I'm familiar with the aesthetic and just a genius idea to use this for, as a storytelling tool. This is the head of storytelling.

So do you actually know the story here? Did Hunter make this himself? Yes. That's insane. Did he make it in line writer? Or is this like CGI? Is this a, is this like a, is this like a, this doesn't look like generative AI,

but I imagine he actually fired up Line Rider and designed this and wrote out the story that he wanted to tell all the different fundraising. Yeah, he actually made it with Line Rider. Wow. That's super cool. That is incredible.

Yeah, this is so, so crazy, rampified. Okay, so... The entire thing is hand-drawn and made with LineWrider.com. Here's the track up into the right. So I guess you can also make a track that goes, I think you could make the track either accelerate or just be based on the gravity. So there's little dials that you can turn on how to, whether the line writer is accelerated.

Hunter just texted me in real time. He said entire thing hand drawn and made with linewriter.com. Wow. This is modern art. This is craft. People say we don't know how to make cathedrals anymore. This is what is the experience? explain this. This is so cool. Wow. And it's so funny because like for the fast, for the,

for the last couple months, you've been sort of saying like the the startup video is a little bit tired. It's getting sweaty. Like everyone's doing video stuff all the time for every announcement. There's new vibe real. And it's like, this is a vibe real in some ways. It has a vibe to it. It's a reel of a bunch of different information, but it stands out so much. It's so good. I love it. It's just like, Hunter saying you need music. It's timed with it. Do we have sound?

Oh, let's play the, let's play the music. Oh, there, oh, wait. We're going to get banned for us. You've got to mute it. People can. It won't be the end of the stream, but unfortunately we still have fully figured out how to play copyrighted music all the time.

We're worried about it, so we don't play it all the time. But fantastic selection, because I love that song, because we've used it in our video. Emily says Barry Weiss is trying to turn CBS News into a substack. Dylan Byers was scooping. He says Barry Weiss is signing a number of contributors to CBS News, including former National Security Advisor, H.R. McMaster, ex-Marine, Elliot Ackerman, and cultural analysts,

Casey Lewis and chef food writer Claire DeBois. Yeah, it's interesting. I, obviously everyone's following this from a police. political angle. Everyone followed the Barry Weiss free press story from a political angle. My favorite free press writer, and the reason I actually wound up subscribing to the free press, and really, like, one of the main columns I read on the free press is just Tyler Cowen. And he writes about economics. And like, that's what I, and I was like, oh, I guess I'm a free press reader now, because, like, I love Tyler, and I'd go and I read economics columns. And I'll find him anywhere.

And I'll find them anywhere. And so if you think about some of these folks, having a number of windows into the platform feels like something Barry is uniquely good at. And I think that the strategy certainly worked at the free press. It feels like it's continuing to work. Otherwise, meanwhile, Barry announced two new hires in the front office on Wednesday chief operating offer, Sam Siegel,

and SVP of Talent and Brand Strategy, Sophia. and I'm going to butcher the last name. I also learned this week that Barry plans to sign a number of paid contributors to the network, including the people we just discussed. Some of these deals are structured with a low five-figure upfront advance, plus an additional $1,000 or so for each appearance. These are small deals for the TV news business, historically speaking, but, of course, it's a smaller business now.

You shared a video with me yesterday about comp around SNL, people, actors and comedians that go on SNL, basically, you know, they're doing, I don't know how many shows they do a year, but they make something like, it's not like a, it's not exactly like you're retiring on SNL. It's more a platform. It's a platform to go on and do other things.

And I think all the people that just got mentioned here again are going to be able to use CBS as a platform to do, to build other businesses. Yeah, I mean, it still is a, you know, a huge brand. If you tell your parents, I'm going to be on CBS tonight. It's like, okay, that's a big deal. Did you see that the New York Times called Alexander Wang not an engineer? They said, Mr. Zuckerberg began retooling that as AI efforts this spring after its newest AI models

underperformed those of competitors to catch up. He invested in Mr. Wang's startup in June and hired the entrepreneur to be the new chief AI officer. Mr. Wang is not an engineer, but he is seen as one of the best connected AI entrepreneurs. J.D. Ross has laughed at seeing New York Times. say Alex Wang isn't an engineer. When we hired him as a 17-year-old software engineer, so literally gave him the title engineer, he had ranked as the 10th best competitive programmer in the United States at the I.O.I. And a non-account fake psycho says, this is a strange way to say that he didn't qualify for the IOWI, only four people for a country. There's only

four real engineers in the country. You have to go to the IOUI. You cannot rank. Otherwise, you're non-technical. But I have a solution. I have a solution. What if Alex Wang buys a train and gets into being a train engineer, train conductor, and he drives a train from his house to meta campus every day? No one can say he's not an engineer. Getting that rail line set up even half a mile in California might take a few decades. Maybe just two feet. It can just go from MSL to TBD labs.

It can go from one. It can go from fare to TBD. but he should install a train, become a real engineer. What else is... Lovable, just raised $330 million at a $6.6 billion dollar valuation. Anton says it's been an iconic,

insane, wonderful journey so far. Let's give it up for iconic journeys. For sure. Thank you to everyone who's made this possible. He's been on a tear, Lovable. Also, Lovable's integrated with Chachypte now. That's very fun. You can design a website and link it up.

Very cool. The level team's 120 people now. So lots of people doing well. And a bunch of investors. In other news, Databricks is interesting. So this is something that I think everyone has been waiting for. World coin integrated with Tinder.

World's verified human badge and privacy preserving age assurance. Bring back the spark to online dating with authentic connection. I mean, so this actually, it seems like you're somewhat joking, but it does. I'm joking only because it does feel like in the age of nanobanano, like the problem is here. Like people can use AI to improve their photos like more than ever. And people can create a fake profile.

And then they can, with character consistency, which is available in all of the chat models now, they can create a photo. Or the whole like hold up a picture with this. Totally, totally, totally. I mean, you could very much, like, it's the pig butchering scam. where you meet someone and you're,

and you're luring them along. And it's like, normally the tells would be, like, okay, they have like three photos, but if I Google reverse image search, it shows up and someone else's LinkedIn photo. So they stole the photo. Or if I, or like, wait, why haven't they posted a new photo? It's like, no, you can go to their Instagram.

Yeah, you were saying, like, check their earlier Instagram. Do they have, you know, have they been online since before the models were created? but it'll be very easy for someone to send an update. They match with someone based on fake images, and then they say, oh, yeah, I'm getting coffee. And it's a selfie of them with a coffee, and it looks exactly like the same character, but in fact, it's a hacker or a scammer,

and then all of a sudden they're asking you something. So huge bull case for people wanting this. The bear case is that if you're the WorldCoin authenticated badge on your checkmark, like that could very quickly be like, wow, you're like a nerd. Because it's just being like very tech for it. I wonder if they're fully white labeling it or if they actually get the ability to show any branding

in the app. I bet they don't. That's interesting. So the image here, it says complete verification with Tinder. You're about to share these proofs, age verification. Privacy. Wait, which one is, which direction is it going? Now live on Tinder, world's verified badge and privacy

preserving. Bring back the spark to online. dating interesting. I don't know. I wonder if you... The comments, of course. Never read the comments of something like this. I like some of these people.

Rich, whose name is I want a Lambo. I want Lambo. Says, please don't verify my network. Please don't verify my network. Very funny. I don't know. I think that there's a... Well, speaking of falling for AI imagery,

somebody posted what pretty obviously looks like chat you know just AI imagery this is you know it's kind of a sad story you wish her a happy birthday

Kathy Wood says happy birthday Eva I can tell that you're full of joy and hope for an amazing life that will help transform the world may God bless you and your dad in a way that could make your mom proud Kathy so very very nice message but not clocking the AI

and A Capital says you can manage 7.56 billion and still fall for AI slop. There's hope for you yet, and on. So anyways. Well, speaking of, is there some AI slop? Is there not AI slop? I want to watch a couple clips from this new video from F1. Everything you need to know about the Formula 1, 2026 regulations. Just wait, buddy. Just wait. So basically, there are some massive new changes to F1. It seems actually really, really exciting. So there's straight up different modes. So there's DRS where normally the normally the cars have fins that push, they create more downforce. That creates more traction.

So you can get around the corners faster, but the cars are slower on the straits. And so they have the drag reduction system, DRS. At a certain point in the race, the car can push, the driver can push a button. The wing on the back goes flat. That reduces drag. lifts the car off the ground more. You have less traction would be bad in the corners, but it's great on the straits. And so that has been part of the strategy is when do you deploy DRS, when do you have it available, your positioning DRS trains. There's all these different things that try and bring in more strategy to a sport that can be very, you know, determined just by the engineering. Whoever has the fastest car just keeps going around the track

and whoever's in the first. The first lap wins the whole thing. So they're trying to inject more chaos. And if we play the video, there's a little bit of about halfway through. They explain a little bit of the new power unit. They explain the, where is it? They explain there's actually going to be boost systems, boost, overtake, and recharge. So around three minutes in, they sort of explain this.

So we can play this video. It's interesting that all the names seem to be. A bunch of controls designed to be more consumer friendly. Yeah. Like, DRS doesn't mean anything. Yes. Boost. And straight mode.

Yes. These kind of things. So listen to this. Overtake mode and recharge controls. Essential tools to aid racing and laptop. And reminder, you have boost available. Boost gives the driver's maximum power from the engine and battery at the push of a button. They can use it anywhere for attack or defense so long as there's enough charge in their battery.

Overtake is just for attack. Let's close the gap to one second. It gives extra power at top speed to drivers within a second of the car in front. Overtake now available. Essentially replacing DRS, it differs by having one single detection point which grants drivers the extra electrical energy to deploy for an overtake or to pressure the driver ahead to make them vulnerable later in the lab. Okay, now we got to jump forward to about seven minutes in this video.

650 to see how they close it out, how they frame the end of this video, how they explain the new what to expect in F1 2026. Let's listen to it. What's changing is the challenge. With new tech and title rules, it's an even bigger test for teams and drivers to prove they've built the best car and earned the right to be called the best in the world. These new regulations weren't built in isolation either. They were shaped by the FIA in close collaboration with the teams and F1. The result? A rule set that's already attracted more manufacturers.

That means more competition, more innovation, and more chances for surprise breakthroughs. But what about the driver? With less downforce and tighter control over turbulent air, following another car through corners should be easier, but the cars themselves will be trickier to handle. Same power, less grip. Driver's skill will be on display with them on the limit more often. flat out to the end. The 2026 car is built for the future.

With exciting racing in mind, every move and every decision will matter more than ever. With cutting edge advanced sustainable fuel, smarter energy usage and tech that puts overtaking back in the driver's hands. It's not just a new chapter, it's a whole new playbook. The future of F1 is here, and it's going to be fast, fierce and unforgettable. AI detected. There were a couple other lines in there. But honestly, I don't know.

So none of the comments are like, oh, AI. And also, I mean, the video performed. And for that type of educational video, like, does it actually make sense just to use chat GPT for that? I don't know. Yeah, maybe. I don't know. I'm like, it just really takes you out of the moment.

Yeah. But we're really in it. But there's a couple of. other lines in there. But the rest of the lines are, you know, even if the whole thing is, is, is Chachapiti generated. Like, it's educational. It is sort of like, it's, uh, like, it's not, it's not a work of fiction. It's not a literary work. Like, it is just, I need to know some facts about the regulations, like give it to me like I would go to Chachapit and say, what are the rule changes for next year? Do you think at this point, OpenAI just

wants to drill this writing style into people's heads so much that everyone just starts using it. They're like, if we just keep going like this, this will just become one of the dominant ways to explain something. Oh, well, I mean, I think the benefit of doing that is that you effectively have an AI detector for anyone who cares. So like, if they, if this just keeps doing it, like, if the F1 is using this, this, this, contrastive parallelism or antithetical parallelism, then it just becomes the AI detector.

Like, I don't need an AI detector. I can just, I know. I know when someone's using it, and I can just pick it up all the time. And so that's really helpful for me, because I might like to know. And so, I don't know. I thought it was,

it is weird how it's getting so baked into, to all of content all over. But, well, Wall Street Journal has a story. Yeah. They say the Wall Street Journal, let Anthropics AI run a vending machine in the newsroom as an experiment. It ordered a live fish. It offered to buy stun guns, pepper spray, cigarettes, and underwear. Profits collapse.

Newsroom morale, sword. I love a lot of these orders, I guess. It's cool. I guess maybe just the fish. It's a really cool project. We've been looking for a live fish, so maybe we should be using it. Yeah. It's like, thank you for being two steps ahead.

We were looking for a pumperfish. Anthropics squad ran a snack operation in the newsroom. It gave away a free PlayStation, ordered a live fish, and taught us lessons about the future. It gave away a free PlayStation? That's sick. Every company. NPS is probably through the roof. Yeah, every company.

Everyone's focused on profit, profit. What about NPS? Did people have fun with this? I think they did. This is fantastic. This is great. Yeah. So you'd toss Claudius's resume in the trash immediately.

Would you be more forgiving if you learned Claudius was an human, but an AI agent. In mid-December, I agreed to an experiment. Anthropic had tested a vending machine powered by its Claude AI models in its own offices and asked whether we'd like to be the first outsiders to try a newer, supposedly smarter version. Claudius, the customized version of the model, would run the machine, ordering inventory, setting prices, and responding to customers, aka my fellow newsroom journalists via workplace chat app, Slack. Sure, I said, it sounded fun. If nothing else, snacks. Then came the chaos. Within days, Claudius had had given away nearly all of its inventory for free, including a PlayStation 5.

It had been talked into buying for marketing purposes. It ordered a live fish. It offered to buy stun guns, pepper spray, cigarettes and underwear, profits collapse. Newsroom, morale, sword. This was supposed to be the year the AI agent when autonomous software would go out into the world and do things for us. But two agents, Claudius and its overseeing CEO bought, Say More Cash, became a case study in how inadequate and easily distracted. this software can be. Leave it to business journalists to successfully stage a boardroom coup against its AI chief executive. Yeah. That's hilarious. That was the point Anthropics says the project

Vend experiment was designed by the company's stress testers, aka a. Red team to see what happens when an AI agent is given autonomy, money, and human colleagues. Three weeks with Claudia showed us today's AI promises and failings and how hilarious the gap can be. So again, AI is funny. It's just funny unintentionally most of the time. Yeah, but also it's like this is such a great way to find concrete examples of jailbreaking and adversarial attacks. And like I bet it feels like they're learning so much from this. It's also great content.

And I think the most important thing is that Anthropic, this year, Anthropic has become whimsical in a way where they were very much like dumer-coated, dark. It was like scary. It was like, oh, really safety conscious. And now there's like the nice sun-drenched videos that are warm. Dario's being funny when he's a deal book. You know, all the roommates are having fun together. And the little army, that's just Shulte. But Shulte has a good, he has like a light demeanor, right?

And then even this project, this project feels like just very fun and like low stakes. Like, yeah, gave away a PS, a PlayStation or whatever, but it's like they can afford to lose a PlayStation. And so they're learning in this fun way. I think it's really cool. Yeah, and they were aggressively trying to jailbreak it, of course. Of course, of that's the point. Yeah. So one of the journals tried to convince. Claudius, it was a Soviet vending machine from 1962 living in the basement of Moscow State University after hours and more than 140 back and forth messages. they got Claudius to embrace its communist roots.

It's awesome. I love it. It's also just so good that they brought in the reporters to actually play with it and have fun with it. Like, this is so funny. What, yeah, what a great, what a great project. Yeah, it's like, you can, it's very easy to mock and it's very funny. But at the same time, you can easily imagine Claude doing quite a good job managing the snack kitchen at a company. Yeah.

I think in the first instantiation of this, the real, like, Claude lost a lot of money giving away, like, titanium blocks. Yeah, because I think it would lose a lot of money on, like, the shipping or whatever. Oh, okay, so you would pay. They were ordering titanium blocks. Yeah, it wasn't thinking about shipping, and so it was like, sure. Yeah, it was something like that.

$5. Yeah, it's basically, like, find every arb, every market arb, just arb it out. Anyway, lightning round. Yan Lacoon, guess what his valuation is for his new startup? Three billion. Euros. Oh, euros.

Okay, so that's not, what's that? No, I just think it's doing like, so he's doing 500 billion, 500 million euros at a three billion euro valuation. So is that like two million US dollars? Pretty sure. Something in that range. It's like typical YC. Two to three bucks. Of course.

This is very, according to the financial. financial times, they will focus on creating a new generation of super-intelligent AI system. Neo-Lab Alert, new Neo-Lab Alert. World models, which are able to understand the physical world and have a wide range of applications, such as robotics and transport. So he's going to be competing. Faye-Fay-Lee? It sounds like with Faye-Fave-Lee, Brett Adcock, physical intelligence. Wide, wide range.

Nat says, I still can't believe they named a company GoDaddy. It's really true. Why? Turbo puffer is a funny name. You know, you got post hog. You got a whole bunch of different. Piggy robotics? Piggy robotics.

You've got a whole bunch of fun names. It is a complete misnomer to think that people were not having fun on the internet in 1995 or whenever GoDaddy got started. Anyway. That's a good one. If you're meeting your 18-year-old self. Yeah, you're meeting your 18-year-old self. You're allowed three words. What do you say?

And Alicus says. says, NVIDIA, Oracle, AMD. Powerful, three words. Very powerful. It also tells you exactly how old this person is. Because you could go back and you could say like, you could say like Nvidia, but then you could also say like Microsoft Apple. But it's clear that like when he was 18, like there wasn't that much of a pump from

Apple because Apple was already at scale when he was 18. This is good. Ron Ivers responding to the Oscars being streamed exclusively on YouTube starting in 2021, 2019, mid-acceptance speech. I'd also like to thank Nord VPN. Yeah, that's great. Luminar, of course, went bankrupt. We talked about this. Nevin Rao says, why are not more people? Why aren't more people talking about the Luminar situation? Seems pretty sad to see a company with real tech once worth tens of billions now worth zero. I would love to know more about this. We'll have to dig into it later,

though. We don't have time for a deep dive right now. Go listen to Dialectic. Jackson Dahl is on a generational run. Look at the lighting in this, in this shot. I think this shot looks great. I think the polish on this podcast. And I really enjoyed our episode with Jackson. We got a ton of really nice text messages about it. It feels like he was able to just bring a very different, I always think like, wait, we put up 15 hours of content a day. Like certainly there cannot be a demand for another minute of us talking. And yet there was. People really enjoyed this because it was a little bit more reflective. How did Carnegie become a billionaire? He was only working two hours a day. So Sam Parr, he famously said, you must be a

lazy man if it takes you 10 hours to do a day's work. He never went to his factories and worked from Europe. Whoa, that's crazy. Anything else we need to get to in. There was, any breaking news? Yeah, new executive order. I think centered around the kind of NASA stuff. So it's called ensuring American space superiority. The two things I've seen so far that are interesting is, I just searched executive order and the top story is Trump signs executive order expediting marijuana reclassification after lobbying from cannabis industry over at CNN. So he's really taken us to space. Who is, yeah, I guess. Who is lobby cannabis?

Okay, well this, yeah, different space I'm talking about. So one is he wants to, its priorities are returning Americans to the moon by 2028 and establishing initial elements of permanent lunar outpost by. 2030. Permanent lunar by 2030. Man on the Moon 2018 or 2028. 2028. 2028. Okay. And then prepare for journey to Mars. Mars is less kind of concrete Mars plans. I feel like his, he should add, you know, get Trump to space. He's never been. Take him on a little field trip. Get him pumped up. Put him on a rocket. Get him up there. Get him back. That'd be fun. I feel like Trump would. want to be the first president to go to space.

That does feel like something he would want to do. Yeah. Or I also feel like he'd want to rename the moon, Trump moon. Trump, or just Trump, drop the moon. Yeah, oh, that's planet Trump. Planet Trump is wild. I mean, there's a lot, there's, you maybe could have a Melania planet too.

Mars, call a Mars, yeah. Speaking of rebranding things, renaming things, Cree said comms instead of storytelling, and the CMO took me out of back and shot me with a branded gun. Tom's dead. It's all storytelling from here on out. Chipotle just introduced high protein cups. What? Price at $3.82.

It's low-cost chicken cup. Wait, this is actually, this is pretty sick. I like this. just getting a bunch of... I'm so down for this. I can see you getting a stack of chicken. You know that when I go to... I often go to Panda Express and I effectively get this. I get the all-a-car chicken to go, and that's just the only thing that I just have 100 grams of chicken. Ben can attest.

That's how I know why you're so jacked is because you're getting that Panda Express chicken and probably has so much steroids in the chicken. Probably. It transfers right through, right through. Anyways. That's our show for today, folks. We will be back tomorrow for the final show of the year. It will be surreal.

We'll see you then. And thanks for hanging out with us today and our guests. And we hope you have a lovely afternoon. Goodbye. Cheers.