TBPN - Ellison's Counter Offer, Chinese H200s, Data Centers in Space | Aaron Ginn, Matt Kalish, Emil Michael, Blake Scholl, Naveen Rao, Ofir Ehrlich, Gorkem Yurtseven, Pedro Franceschi

Starting point is 00:00:00 You're watching TBPN. Today is Tuesday, December 9th, 2025. Just a few days until Christmas. We're so excited. We're live from the TVPN Ultraderm. The Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the capital, capital. No travel until Christmas, baby. No travel until the new year.

Starting point is 00:00:18 We're in the Ultradome hanging out. We're monitoring the situation. We're monitoring the Paramount Netflix, Warner Brothers situation. Because this is one of the most fascinating deals. the deal has gone hostile. Paramount has launched a hostile bid to acquire Warner Brothers. It's an all-cash offer.

Starting point is 00:00:36 77.9 billion. Really, really. And it's a fun one because I feel like it's obviously tech-adjacent, but it's not the story that people have been monitoring all year. We've been talking about foundation models. That whole story has just gotten a little bit stagnant.

Starting point is 00:00:51 Like the media said, they got tired of not getting enough attention. Exactly. Let's spice it up a little bit. Let's spice it up. Here's something new to learn about. So everyone's having fun. everyone's learning new things. And I could tell because when I came in today, I had a bunch of

Starting point is 00:01:04 questions that people were throwing at me about how all of this works. Why isn't Warner Brothers just going with the highest price? Like when I sell a stock, I don't care if Citadel or Jane Street's buying it. If I'm selling 80 bucks of stock, just give me the best price. But when you're selling an $80 billion company, there are other considerations. And it goes beyond just maximizing shareholder value. And so I wanted to break down a few of those. So I did that in today's newsletter. We can run through that and then we can run through some of the news. Perfect. But first, let me tell you about ramp. Time is money. Save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bell payments, accounting, and a whole lot more, all in one place. So this question,

Starting point is 00:01:47 you know, it seems obvious. The board has a fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder value. That's legal requirement to take the higher offer. And yet, that's a, you know, that's a That's not what's happening. Like yesterday we saw that Ellison and Paramount came in with over $100 billion. Of course, that included the CNN, the TV assets. But even when you broke it out, it seemed like it was very clear that Ellison was willing to pay more money and make a higher offer. So under what circumstances can a board whose job it is to maximize shareholder value not

Starting point is 00:02:20 take the higher offer. They can't just be whoever we had the better dinner with, right? Which is part of the news, of course. they went out to dinner and Paramount CEO David Ellison sent a text to David Zazlov, who's running Warner Brothers, after they made a hostile bid today to buy Warner Brothers. And David text the other David and says, David, but I guess he misspelled his name, even though that's his name, which is just funny. But anyway, he says, I appreciate your underwater today.

Starting point is 00:02:50 So I wanted to send you a quick text. Know that despite the noise of the last 24 hours, I have nothing but respect. an admiration for you in the company. It would be the honor of a lifetime to be your partner and to work and to be the owner of these iconic assets. He's talking about foghorn, leghorn. He's talking about Porky Pig. He's also talking about Batman and Superman, obviously, and Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings

Starting point is 00:03:11 and a million other iconic assets, which is true. If we have the privilege to work together, you will see that my father and I are the people you had dinner with, which I like that. I think that's cool. They had dinner. It's a fantastic text. Yes, yes, yes. It's a great one. So quickly, let me tell you about Julius, AI.

Starting point is 00:03:32 The AI data analyst that works for you, join millions who use Julius to connect their data, ask questions, and get insights in seconds. So there are two main reasons why you don't just take, why your size might not be size. Directors at a company like Warner Brothers, they have to maximize shareholder value. But maximizing shareholder value is an expected value calculation. So if you come in with a $100 billion offer, and I think there's a 75% chance that you're going to deliver that, and someone else comes in with an $80 billion offer, and I think there's a 100% chance that they're going to deliver that. Well, the expected value of your bid is $75 billion. The expected value of their bid is $80 billion. I go with the $80, even though it's like a lower headline number, it has a higher expense.

Starting point is 00:04:18 How much of the calculus do you think is just a deal that will actually get done, right? A deal that is going to get. So a deal that doesn't get done could still have value because of a breakup fee. So you could, you could, in theory, go into a deal that you know is impossible. And the example that I gave is, what if Bight Dance came in? And they were like, hey, you know, we're a $400 billion media company. We'd love to own porky pig. We'd love to own these iconic assets.

Starting point is 00:04:47 Let's, let's pick up Warner Brothers. We'd love to own CNN too, you know? Who knows what we'd put on the TV? You already own TikTok. We already own TikTok. Why not CNN also? Why not Shark Week? No, not Shark Week. Not Shark Week. They'd have to carve out Shark Week in my book. But obviously the government would block that. And we have Sipheus, which is an organization in the U.S. government that determines whether or not an international buyer can take an American company because of intellectual property, all sorts of geopolitical considerations. We don't want another country cornering a market on a really key piece of the supply chain, like the NVIDIA H-200.

Starting point is 00:05:23 for example, which we might be talking about later in the show with Aaron Ginn, co-founder of Hydrohost, repeat guest on the TBPN show. But then there's also just the FTC. So certain deals, like I gave you the example yesterday, like Disney, Disney would be so blocked, I think, that that deal doesn't even get kicked around. No one even talks about it. And because it would get blocked by the FTC, so it doesn't even happen. But it would maximize shareholder value if Disney came and said, yeah, we'll give you a $10 billion

Starting point is 00:05:56 breakup fee and we want to try and buy you for $200 billion or a trillion or $200 million. You would immediately say yes because you just want the breakup fee. But being in this turmoil and being in this limbo and not being able to sign deals with other, that has an opportunity cost, right? And so you might want to back off of that. And so basically the- Yeah, you look back at the Figma acquisition. Adobe paid a billion-dollar breakup fee.

Starting point is 00:06:21 It's effectively like non-delutive financing for Figma. That has a happy ending because they were able to, you know, re-accelerate, get out into the public markets. But there was another situation where they went through a rough patch and actually really needed that capital to get through. Yeah. So there's basically two buckets of risk that I think most deal makers would be considering in this situation. First is financing risk.

Starting point is 00:06:49 So will they come through with the money and what money are they paying with? Because the initial offer, this is the history, there's actually been six offers put forward by Paramount. David Ellison is putting on a clinic of just not taking no for an answer. Because all the way back on September 14th, he offered $19 a share and 60% of that was cash. So 60% cash offer. Then September 30th, two weeks later he comes back, $22 a share. and ups the amount of cash to 66.7%. Zazlov is doing a masterclass in making your opponent negotiate against themselves.

Starting point is 00:07:27 100%. It's actually great. And so October 3rd, 2350 a share, 80% cash. Then November 20th, 2550 a share, 85% cash. Then finally December 1st, 2650 per share, 100% cash. December 4th, $30 a share, 100% cash. Now, why does this matter? Well, it's because you get locked into owning the shares of 40% of the shares is paramount.

Starting point is 00:07:51 And then while it's closing the stock trades down, you wind up getting less value. And so the $80 billion today might wind up being $70 billion later. And that doesn't maximize shareholder value. And so there's also just the question of like, can you actually marshal the cash? Just like if somebody comes to you and you're about to sell your house to them and they say, yeah, I'm definitely going to get a loan for this. Well, that's a financing risk. Maybe they don't. Maybe they back out of the deal.

Starting point is 00:08:16 Cash offers oftentimes. Exactly. If you can just prove that you have the cash, that makes a difference. And, I mean, he's effectively gone and done that because he's teamed up with Jerry Kushner, reportedly, and gone around the world, got a whole bunch of different sovereign funds and just really people. Any one of big deep pockets has kind of, you know, said, yes, I'm down to come along on this ride and put up a bunch of the Capitol. The Capitol has been marshaled. It seems like it's ready to go. And then also you have Larry Ellison.

Starting point is 00:08:46 who has three times as much money, I think, than the whole deal value, something like that, $275 billion to his name. And he's only trying to put together. Assets, not cash. Assets, not cash. But he should not just, I know they want it, but do not market sell your Oracle position, please. Yeah. But he's like, I'm actually going all cash now.

Starting point is 00:09:07 But he's effectively acted as backstop. And so everyone who's come in and said, okay, who, I guess I'm good for $10 billion of that 80 billion, but only if everyone else is in, Larry Ellison reportedly has come in and said, well, you know, if there's one person in the bunch that backs out of their slug at the last second, I'll jump in and get that. He's not saying he's going to put up the whole 80. He's just saying he's backstopping it. Yeah. And that's the term that's been thrown around. So, so David Ellison feels very, you know, good because he's done what Zazlov wanted him to. He said, hey, they wanted an all-cash offer.

Starting point is 00:09:45 I brought them an all-cash offer. I brought them an offer that's higher. And we believe that there's no reason why factor number two should come into play. And factor number two is regulatory approval. And so there's been this question about, will Netflix get approved? If there was a different buyer, it would have even more regulatory risk. And so you don't want to, even if the price is higher, you don't want to accept a higher price with a lower chance of actual conversion, right? Bobby thinks NLE CHAPA might up his offer to a hundred K of cash and get back

Starting point is 00:10:21 in the minute. In that scenario, at least you know that the 100K cash is real and it's going to be delivered on the day of close. Maybe in actual cash. Probably. I think that was the, that is funny because that that was the joke of that meme was that he was giving like actual cash. When we're saying cash offer here, of course we are not talking about physical cash. Hey, you never know. Are Does he put a money spread over there? Is Tyler doing money spread? What does he got? Did Christmas come early for you?

Starting point is 00:10:48 So I had a question, though. What makes the Paramount offer, like, hostile? Is it that it's, like, reacting to the Netflix offer? Is that the Netflix board, or sorry, the Warner Brothers board went with Netflix, and they're coming, it's hostile because they're saying, screw the board decision, we want to go to the shareholders. Okay, yeah, because it sounds like they had a nice dinner and the text were, like, kind. Yes, yes, yes. No, no. No, no.

Starting point is 00:11:11 No, no, no, hostile in the sense of like not accepting the final, like the final decision there. And then, and then also there is a, there is a point where you can appeal directly to the shareholders and make the, you can actually make the legal case that the board is not acting in, in their fiduciary duty and in their, in the interest of shareholders. Because, but again, these things need to be argued in shareholder lawsuits because it is fuzzy. because like if I say I'm offering you a hundred billion and someone else is offering 80 billion and the board says yeah but that hundred billion has only a 75% chance of going through you have to discount that now now the board says it's worth 75 but whoever made that offer can say no we're actually good for it you need you should apply a 10% discount rate and treat our offer as if it's 90% or 100% good right and so and so all of those arguments those can be

Starting point is 00:12:06 made in the court and the shareholders can, you know, react to that. And if the shareholders align and say, yeah, actually, we think we'd be getting more money here with this, with this deal, then they can push back against the board at a certain point. But, yeah. Friend of the show, high-powered media exec says, Zazlov has been architecting this situation for the last 12 months, sitting pretty, and he's a wily old fox and has what he has been shooting for, two heavy hitter, fighting over a deal, don't doubt there will be a couple more turns here with the price or even another bidder coming in sideways. Don't quote me. Which is remarkable because the price is so high already compared to where it was six months ago. Zazlov, it really feels like it's coming together

Starting point is 00:12:57 that he will be remembered as like an incredible business executive for this deal. I want to know more. I'm still learning about this particular industry. And so I've been having fun. digging in, but... Possible deal guy at the year? Possible deal guy. He's definitely in the... Sam was... Sam looked like he was running away with it over the summer.

Starting point is 00:13:16 That's true. Early fall. And he lost ball control. He lost ball control, yeah. Well, quickly, let me tell you about fin.a.I, the number one, AI agent for customer service. Automate the most complex customer service queries on every channel. But there is a wrinkle that people haven't really been considering.

Starting point is 00:13:36 which is the fact that Warner Brothers Discovery holds a massive, often underrated vault of masculine cinema. And if this falls into the wrong hands, what is masculine cinema? Masculine cinema would be. Is that just guys being dudes on film? So they own a bunch of Clint Eastwood films, Dirty Harry, Magnum Force, the Enforcer, Heartbreak Ridge, American Sniper,

Starting point is 00:14:04 letters from Iwo Jima, Unforgiven, Grand Torino. They also own the classic Stephen Segal run. Basically every movie where Stephen Segal was a massive theatrical star before going to direct a video. We're talking about above the law, hard to kill, marked for death, out for justice, under siege, which is die hard on a boat. Under siege two, on deadly ground, fire down below. exit wounds. they also own Rambo the whole

Starting point is 00:14:34 servicesters to loan the cobra demolition man the specialist tango and cash bullet to the head get Carter the 2000 remake they also own

Starting point is 00:14:44 mad max lethal weapons all of the lethal weapons the matrix blade mortal combat 300 rush hour Pacific Rim

Starting point is 00:14:52 and a number of dad and military shows band of brothers the Pacific Generation Kill there's a whole host They should release the full DVD set, which is called Guys Being Dudes. Yes, they also own some Jason Statham properties, the Meg franchise, where Jason Statham fights a big shark. Whoa.

Starting point is 00:15:10 Wrath of Man. I guess most of the Guy Ritchie films are actually with Lionsgate or MGM. But there are a variety. And I think this could be a big political hot button of what happens to the Rambo franchises, the Hollywood hunks. No one's talking about the Hollywood hunks. Everyone's focused on the Looney Tunes characters. But if the Hollywood hunks fall into the wrong hands, it could swing our entire culture potentially.

Starting point is 00:15:37 Anyway, let me tell you about Dantau. Apparently, Michael on our team, worked on Rath of Man. Oh, really? No way. First job. Very cool. Very cool. Danta, automate compliance and security AI that powers everything from evidence collection and continuous monitoring to security reviews and vendor risks.

Starting point is 00:15:53 You're hiding in-ordered amounts of Middle Eastern funding sources and your takeover bid. Are you not? says boring business. And not hiding it, it's out in the open. Like, this is, this is like the playbook for these big deals. But again, it's double, double that of the amount of equity that the Alessons are putting in. Okay.

Starting point is 00:16:12 Putting it around. Yeah. I mean, I think everyone assumes that there'd be a lot of Middle Eastern funding in this. That has become the standard funding instrument these days. I don't know. Like EA Games, we just followed that story a little bit. That was obviously a huge amount. 3% of Saudi money.

Starting point is 00:16:30 And that is part of the modern deal-making playbook these days. Every, I'm pretty sure most of the, a lot of venture funds have raised money over there, a lot of the big AI companies have raised money over there. Like, that seems like a foregone conclusion that if you need money, you go where the money is. Why do bank robbers rob banks? Because that's where the money is.

Starting point is 00:16:52 Well, Dylan Byers says, David, I appreciate your underwater today. So sent you a quint, quick text. He's talking about the dinner. Oh, so that was the mispelling, D-A-I-V-D. He must have been texting very quickly. It does give you a little bit of... Let's turn this into a copy pasta.

Starting point is 00:17:09 Yes, I enjoyed the dinner. So, exec sum has an overview of who's actually putting in the money here. Filing's reveal that Paramount's bid for Warner Brothers is backed by equity commitments, including $11.8 billion from the Ellison family, $24 billion from Saudi Arabia's, Qatar's and Abu Dhabi's sovereign wealth funds, $1 billion from China's 10 cent, additional commitments from Redbird Capital Partners

Starting point is 00:17:34 and Jared Kushner's affinity partners. That doesn't add up to $100 billion. So there's must be cash coming from somewhere else. This is, maybe there needs to be some more reporting until, oh, they did give an updated version of this post, but it doesn't quite add up. So we'll be interesting to follow where, you know, how the deal comes together. And we have a few more people joining this week to help us break down the deal.

Starting point is 00:18:05 Ben Smith from Semaphore tomorrow and then Dylan Byers. Oh, Bill is coming on? That's great. Amazing. I'm excited. Oh, he's coming in person. Yes. That's great.

Starting point is 00:18:15 Well, let me tell you about numeral compliance handled. Numeral worries about sales tax and VAT compliance. So you can focus on growth. growth. Trump says that the United States will allow NVIDIA H-200 chip sales to China and get a 25% cut. This is a pretty big change. I mean, we were talking about not selling. I mean, I guess it's not Blackwell, right? It's Hopper. So we're still a generation behind. But was this, it was like a pretty nerfed chip before. We're getting less nerfed. We seem to move, we seem to be moving in a, in a, in a more thumbs up direction, more, let's actually get the chips over to China.

Starting point is 00:18:58 At the same time, AI is fake, so it doesn't matter, right? That's the take. The pro-China take is that it's like, it's SaaS. It's SaaS or it's not, it's not like this nuclear bomb that's going to destroy everyone.

Starting point is 00:19:13 So it's getting harder to make the, the Manhattan Project argument, right? And it feels important. possible to make the argument that we're going to get them addicted to the U.S. AI supply chain, and they'll never develop their own capabilities. And so we want them. Oh, I disagree with that. I think that that, I think that that argument actually holds. That argument holds for sure. If we can, in, in the next, I mean, I, I totally disagree. I think they're, I think China's smart enough to know they don't want to be dependent on any foreign country to produce any

Starting point is 00:19:49 critical. Yes, but I still think there's enough of like, I think there's enough of, like, I think they're like a market force within China that if we flood the market with cheap Nvidia chips, like they will, it'll just be expensive for them to keep propping up their local industry. Even if they are aware of it, even if they know that they have to, it's a cost. And it's something that a lot of AI researchers over there will just say, you know what? I'm already, it's so much easier. The Nvidia ecosystem is so great. I'm just going to stick with that.

Starting point is 00:20:17 I don't know. I'm a little bit, I'm a little bit skeptical that, like, there isn't there there's no advantage to to selling invidia chips there i've become more i've become more uh receptive to that argument particular even though you have not um but that's fine tyler what were you going to say about this uh yeah i was just going to say i mean we kind of joke about this yeah but it is kind of crazy the extent to which you can basically bake down all like like a i policy questions to like if you are aGI pill yeah because like if you are if you're dario yeah i mean you shouldn't be giving stuff to china you also

Starting point is 00:20:52 So shouldn't, like, if you are aGI-I-piled, you should be thinking about safety, all these things. Like, we had Keith R. Boy on. He doesn't seem super AGI-I-pilled. He's also like, oh, safety's a hoax, et cetera, stuff like this. I think basically all these questions you can just, you know. Well, it depends, because if you're super fast takeoff-pilled and you're super, like, ASI, it's like, but you think that it can somehow be contained in whoever gets it first. You actually don't mind if China's six months behind you, because as soon as you hit

Starting point is 00:21:22 that inflection point, you're a thousand years ahead. And so you might as well just do whatever it takes, fund, whatever, make as much money as possible, as long as it accelerates you to be the first one to hit that inflection point. So there is an argument where you can be extremely a GI-I-pelled, even super-intentioned-well. True Social is creating a prediction market's product within the app. I thought you were going to say AI product. Did they launch an AI thing last week? I think that was fake, okay. But it's possible Trump is going to use the prediction markets on true social in order to kind of set AI policy going forward. Say H-200s to China, good or bad.

Starting point is 00:22:02 That's wild. I mean, that's not that. Robin Hansen says that that's like a good idea. That was the whole, that was the whole pitch originally. There is definitely a bull case you could say like a steel man for that. Yeah. There's always a steel man. Yeah, I mean, it's basically...

Starting point is 00:22:16 Where's your helmet, John? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I need to put on the helmet. Well, let's read through this Wall Street Journal article on the on the details of the new nvedia deal but first let me tell you about figma think bigger build faster figma helps design and development teams build great products together so uh notable that this seems to have been completely priced in already because nvita is actually down half a half a point today yes it's it's been such a dramatic story all year and yet it's always felt

Starting point is 00:22:48 like a complete footnote in the overall financial performance of Nvidia, it's never felt like, okay, yeah, if this, if this goes Nvidia's way, they're going to double their, double their revenue or double their profits. They're like, you know, really move the needle. They're growing so fast that, you know, I don't know how many, we're going to get into figuring out how many H-200s they sell, but they would need to sell a lot to actually move the needle on this behemoth of a business, what is the world's largest company in the world. So President Trump said he would let Nvidia export its H-200 chip to China and that the U.S. would receive a 25% cut his latest bid to make money for the government in an unusual agreement with a

Starting point is 00:23:27 private company. I have informed President Xi Jinping of China that the United States will allow Nvidia to ship H-200 products to approve customers in China and other countries under conditions that allow for strong national security. 25% will be paid to the US of A. The move is a boon for Nvidia, which has fought for months to maintain access to the world's second largest economy. The company had agreed earlier this year to give the U.S. 15% of China's sales from a lower performing chip, only for the Chinese to scuttle those plans as part of continuing trade talks between the two sides. Chips from the world's most valuable company have become a prize geopolitical tool. The H-200 has higher performance than the H-20 that NVIDIA was previously allowed to sell.

Starting point is 00:24:13 But this isn't as powerful as the company's top Blackwell products released this year, nor the Rubin generation of chips coming next year. The move follows a meeting between Trump and Jensen Wong last week, where the pair discussed H-200 exports. People familiar with the matter said, NVIDIA shares at nearly 2% after hours. That's not too bad. Even with the U.S. government taking a cut,

Starting point is 00:24:35 the decision could be worth billions of dollars in sales to NVIDIA, which enjoys comfortable margins on its AI chips. In the most recent fiscal quarter, Nvidia reported gross margins of 73.4% on $57 billion in sales. That is crazy. They can totally afford 25% for the big guy. I have no idea if it'll be legal. We'll have to figure out if this gets approved

Starting point is 00:25:00 because in general, the United States does not enforce export duties. That's not something America's done. Historically, we had some folks on the show to contextualize that and give us some background when this was first floated. It feels like it is happening now, but we'll see where it lands.

Starting point is 00:25:18 In August, NVIDIA CFO collect Kras said that if geopolitical issues subside, the company could ship between $2 billion and $5 billion of chips to China per quarter, which could increase if orders pick up. So they're doing $50 billion a quarter. Lutnik was on CNBC, and this was the quote that originally ticked off the Chinese. He said, we don't sell them our best stuff, not our second best stuff, not even our third best. and he said, you want to sell the Chinese enough that their developers get addicted to the American technology stack. That's the thinking. And of course, CCP basically immediately said,

Starting point is 00:25:58 we don't want any of them now because we're offended. But it does seem like, yeah, I don't know. We will have to have Bill Bishop or someone on the show to contextualize how China is receiving this information, whether or not they will actually buy it. Of course, we're going to be joined by Aaron Ginn in just 30 minutes, so stay tuned for that. Also, let me tell you about linear.

Starting point is 00:26:20 Meet the system for modern software development. Linear streamlines work across the entire development cycle from roadmap to release. So the exports could help Chinese tech giants that have struggled to get top chips to train their models. Wong has argued NVIDIA should be allowed to compete in the Chinese market because China has many of the world's top AI researchers and the U.S. should want them using American technology.

Starting point is 00:26:41 if you are not going to replace China, Wong said at an event at a think tank event. Trump said that the government would take a similar approach to exports from Nvidia competitor, AMD, as well as Intel, in which the government now has a 10% stake. The approval comes just weeks after administration officials, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, torpedoed a push from Nvidia to sell a slim-down Blackwell chip to China before a recent trade meeting between Trump and Xi Jinping. some officials, including AI czar David Sacks and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnik, have backed exporting the H-200 because it could be a good compromise that allows Nvidia to compete

Starting point is 00:27:19 with China's Huawei technologies without vaulting China past the U.S. in AI. People familiar with the discussion said. I don't know. It's such an interesting question that I still wrestle with. We exported a ton of Teslas to China. B-Y-Y-D and Huawei have now... But arguably, completely leapfrogged. Completely leapfrogged.

Starting point is 00:27:46 So they did not become addicted to the American electric bar stack. That was the point I was making earlier. You can make the art, like almost with every single product. They've said, we'll work with you to make this thing that you want to make. We're really good at making things. Yes. And then they ultimately just make a better version of said product and they make it for, cheaper. Yes. And in the case of cars, right now we're obviously not allowing these cars to be

Starting point is 00:28:15 imported into the U.S., but, you know, they can simultaneously say, we're happy to keep making you these things. We're also going to compete with you directly and constantly try to be better than what you do. I just wonder, like, if you play it back, you don't, and you don't allow Tesla to export the amazing model S or model three, does that slow down B-YD's development of their car or or Huawei's or Xiaomi's development of my understanding is they were able to basically get a paid education making Teslas and they were able to leverage that into making. But that's about making the car there. If you don't make the car there, which is because the And V-VVIA has a Shanghai.

Starting point is 00:29:03 But that's research. That's not made there. That's not made there. Like, it's very different when you're saying, okay, we're going to go and produce this product there. And, like, you are going to get educated there. And the workforce there. But you remember, we've gone through this before China's, like, five-year plans to create a domestic chip industry. They've been doing five-year plans for 60 years.

Starting point is 00:29:25 I know. They're building. That's what I'm saying. And I would argue that it's working. They're not caught up. but they are certainly made massive amount of progress. It made more progress than any other country on Earth. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:29:36 I don't know. What do you think, Tyler? I think if you want to think about, like, getting the Chinese addicted to our chips, it's like how addictive are the chips? Yeah. Because if you can make a comparison between, like, you have the Nvidia chips, and then you have the Chinese or, like, TPU, right? Because the TPU is, like, in some ways it's harder to use.

Starting point is 00:29:54 The open source is not as good. But if it's just more economical, like, if the actual hardware is just, like, a little bit cheaper, then it doesn't really matter how worse the software is, people will eventually move to it. So it's like, I don't think there is actually that much, like, soft power in the kind of general open source stuff, like, that in regards to, like, Nvidia. It doesn't seem very addictive outside of it just being cheaper. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, at the same time, like, like, we are, America is very much, like, addicted to Chinese solar panels right now. Like, the Chinese solar panels come here.

Starting point is 00:30:27 They're cheap. And so we don't wind up buying or building a domestic solar panel industry because just to get anything off the ground, you have to go in and say, okay, we're going to deal with having no margin forever and no venture capitalists can underwrite it and no private equity firm can underwrite it. And so it just doesn't really happen. Yeah, but the Chinese, they do do that. I guess they do, they do bear the cost more. So it doesn't matter. But it's like they wouldn't have to bear the cost So we're imposing a little bit of a cost on them. It's like they actually have to pay it whereas like they don't

Starting point is 00:31:06 Whereas like they wouldn't if we didn't do that, right? Because if we if we if we don't go in and we don't really and we don't sell them in video chips Then they're like okay, well it makes economic sense to to back Huawei and and fund them Whereas now they're like it it's not economically logical to back Huawei but we have to because because there's so much pressure from better chips flooding the market, like Nvidia chips, that if we don't fund Huawei un-economically, if we don't lose money on Huawei, like we will never get to, we will never get, we will never be competitive. Yeah, I think it seems to me that like either way they're going to fund it, the government, the Chinese government.

Starting point is 00:31:47 I think it's like really, I don't think it actually matters that much. Yeah, I don't know. Well, let's let's move on. But let's also tell you about Adio, the AI Native CRM. Adio, build scales and grows your company to the next level. The United States will allow NVIDIA's H-200 processors. It's second best. So this is a change from what Lutnik said, right?

Starting point is 00:32:11 Lutnik said, we're not selling the best. We're not selling the second best. Turns out we are selling the second best now. Maybe we'll sell the first best soon. Who knows? Well, we should play this clip from Patrick O'Shaughnessy's fantastic interview with Gavin Baker on invest like the best. He's talking about space data centers.

Starting point is 00:32:29 We had Dallion on the show yesterday talking about space data centers. Dahlian still thinks it's pretty far up. Gavin knew we needed a new narrative. He said after the fateful BG2 episode ended the AI trade, we needed a new trade. And now we're getting the space data center trade. Okay. Let's hear the space data center. I think the most important thing that's going to happen in the world in the next three to four years is data centers in space.

Starting point is 00:32:55 If you think about it from first principles, data centers should be in space. What are the fundamental inputs to running a data center? They're power and they're cooling. And then there are the chips. The inputs to making the tokens come out of the magic machines. So in space, you can keep a satellite in the sun 24 hours a day. Pretty cool. And the sun is 30% more intense.

Starting point is 00:33:18 And this results in six times more irradiance in outer space than on planet Earth. So you're getting a lot of solar energy. Point number two, because you're in the sun 24 hours a day, you don't need a battery. This is a giant percentage of the cost. So the lowest cost energy available in our solar system is solar energy and space. Second, for cooling in one of these racks, a majority of the mass in the weight is cooling. And the cooling in these data citrus is incredibly complicated. You know, I mean, the HVAC, the CDUs, the liquid cooling.

Starting point is 00:33:54 And space, cooling is free. You just put a radiator on the dark side of the satellite. It's fucking gold. And it's as close to absolute zero as you can get. So all that goes away. And that is a vast amount of cost. And then let's think about how each satellite is kind of a bit more complicated than that. The dissipating heat in space.

Starting point is 00:34:15 This is what everyone's fighting about. I'm not exactly sure how it plays out like the physics of it. But a lot of people are saying like, yes, it's in a vacuum. But because it's in a vacuum, you can't just, you can't, like, it's not as passive of cooling. It's more of a material science problem. Like, there's more physics problems there. Also, like, I don't know. I feel like you might need some, I feel like you might need some batteries because I think there are,

Starting point is 00:34:46 there are orbits that are effectively in the sun all the day. But I think that the Earth's shadow, like, hits them, not like every day, but, like, every once in a while, you'll be caught in a shadow, almost in like a, what's it called? I don't know, some sort of, you know, you just get caught in the shadow, not every day, but like every 12 days or every 30 days or something like that. And so in that scenario, I mean, maybe you,

Starting point is 00:35:16 maybe it'd be fine if you're doing inference and you can just turn it off the whole system for a little bit and there's some redundancy. I just texted our resident spaceman down. Yeah, I said. Answer this. I just said quick take. Yeah, on this. It's urgent. It's urgent. Well, we'll get back from him. There's more to that clip, though, we should play this because there's a funny part in here. Look at this. What are going to connect those racks. Well, it's funny. In the data center, the racks are over a certain distance connected with fiber optics. And that just means a laser going through a cable. The only thing faster than a laser going through a fiber optic cable is a laser going through absolute vacuum. So if you can link these satellites in space together using lasers, you actually have a faster and more coherent network than in a data center on Earth. Okay? For training, that's going to take a long time. It's just because it's so big. But for inference, let's think about the user experience.

Starting point is 00:36:13 You know, when I asked Grock about you and it gave the nice answer. This is crazy, though. They've done it a podcast together five times. Why is he asking Grog about Patrick? I was What is going on? Went to some sort of metro aggregation facility in New York, probably within 10 blocks here. There's a small little metro router that's routed those packets to a big XAI data center somewhere. Okay?

Starting point is 00:36:41 And then the computation was done, and it came back over the same path. If the satellites can communicate directly with the phone, and Starlink has demonstrated direct-to-sell capability, This whole thing, I would like to know how much SpaceX exposure Gavin has, because if this does become a dominant, at least narrative over the next few years, a lot of the people that we know that have computers in space are not exactly bullish on data centers in space on a short time horizon. We have not, we had the founder of Star Cloud on. He's obviously bullish, but I don't believe he has any satellites in. in orbit.

Starting point is 00:37:24 Yep. We've had Delian on. He puts things into orbit. He brings him back down. He's talked about having. He technically has computers. I mean, Delian's a hilarious position because Founders Fund has a huge position in SpaceX, obviously. But also, Delian has had to do the hard work of, like, getting something in space and

Starting point is 00:37:39 probably understands, like, how much of a grunt work it is and how much of a grind it is to get even just, like, something as small as, like, the pod into space. And then he's also seen at Crusoe, like, what a real... data center looks like and the idea of putting something so massive into space. Like it's bigger than the Hubble, it'd be bigger than the ISS. Like, what do you think about this space data center thing? Have you evolved on this? Yeah, I mean, I don't know.

Starting point is 00:38:06 To me it seems just kind of impractical. Like if you think about if you're doing inference or something, like how much of the cost of the token is actually in the energy, right? Because like I feel like one of the main benefits of having the data center in space is that energy is basically free, right? It's right there. Sure. But if you think about, like, I think Casey Hanmer has talked about this.

Starting point is 00:38:28 Like, if you think about an inference, when you're doing inference, the portion of the cost that's actually the energy, it's like very tiny. Yeah. Because it's like the chip is expensive. Yep. Or doing it, like, it's like not that expensive. Yeah. So it's like, okay, the cost gains overall are like not that great. And then it's like, well, what if you want to change the chip to the next generation?

Starting point is 00:38:49 or what if you need to do some kind of like mechanical work? Yeah, you want to change the... Are we ignoring how broken cluster would take some sort of intervention to fix as well as the cost per kilogram in fuel costs? Yeah, just for context. So Gavin was at Fidelity and led a $900 million investment in SpaceX at a $12 billion post-money valuation. That's amazing. Wow.

Starting point is 00:39:14 What a go. That's incredible. Okay, actually... Yeah, so maybe they didn't do the full $900 million. GROC isn't sure. Sure, sure, sure. But I mean, either way, like, you can be pro or con on space data centers. And Grogh also says SpaceX has been a trade's largest venture capital position as of 2022, comprising an estimated 30 to 40 percent of its VC portfolio.

Starting point is 00:39:38 Yeah. It feels wild. So anyways, Gavin is set to, on one hand, Gavin could know things about space data centers that the rest of us don't know because of his position and proximity to SpaceX. At the same time, SpaceX, if they go public next year, would benefit a lot from having a space data center kind of like narrative as part of this.

Starting point is 00:40:03 It's crazy because the business is so solid. I feel like you don't need a fourth act or whatever. Okay, wait, so what about this? So if a lot of the gains of space data center are just because the energy is free, why don't we just... But then there's this hard part about having, like, different satellites everywhere.

Starting point is 00:40:16 Put the data center on the moon. There's no atmosphere, so you don't get the 30% reduction in energy from the sun and just put data center on the moon. Well, don't you get a 50% reduction because there's, like, there's a dark side of the moon? Like the moon. You wouldn't put it on the dark side of the sun. No, I know, I know. But what I mean is that our dark side sometimes gets light from when it's not facing us, right? and so, so you only, if you're on the moon, you only get light 50% of the time.

Starting point is 00:40:53 Whereas, whereas if you're a satellite and you're flying out in space and you're kind of orbiting the earth, like, but at a weird axis that you're not constantly in shadow all the time, you're getting sun. He says 24 hours a day. I think it's, I think it's like 99.9% of the time. But regardless, it's like almost always. Whereas if you're, if you're actually like on the moon, you don't get sunlight. 100% of the time. You get it 50% of the time. I'm pretty sure.

Starting point is 00:41:20 I don't think it's... Right, maybe there's some flaws. Yeah, the sun's not... The sun's not like... Or the moon's not sun-locked. It's earth-locked. Put up this post. I put it at the bottom of the stack

Starting point is 00:41:31 from Joe Morrison. He's over at Umbra. Well, we pull that up. Let me tell you about re-stream. One live stream, 30-plus destinations. If you want to multi-stream, go to re-stream.com, and we will pull up this next post. What we got?

Starting point is 00:41:43 Joe says, you just put a radio. on the dark side of the satellite. And he says thermal engineers in absolute shambles right now. Yeah, people are not... I don't know, people are so splinter. Casey Hammer says, to be fair, this is a big satellite.

Starting point is 00:41:58 Joe says many big satellites. Big satellite? Makes it easier? I don't know. Yeah, I think you need, like, a lot of... Yeah. Like, you need basically a lot of mass in order to dissipate enough heat.

Starting point is 00:42:13 from a from a G.B 300 or something, G. B 200. Somehow AST Space Mobile Inc. is up 27% in the last five days. So people are, people are quite excited. Yeah. Well, should we head over to Gulfstream news? There's some massive news from Gulfstream Aerospace.

Starting point is 00:42:37 The G400 introduced next-gen Gulfstream tech to its class. Sound on to learn more with Gulfstream president, Mark Burns. How has Mark Burns not been on the show yet? Here we go. Clearly don't have a no-render policy over here. They're render-reacting. You think they could just be adding special effects?

Starting point is 00:43:02 What do you mean? This is the most rendered video I've ever seen. This looks like it was rendered in 2010. You think this is real, though? Bring Gulfstream performance standards. like green screen. Damn. Filling our customers' needs for a product line to see every trip.

Starting point is 00:43:19 Look at this. You're like, this is real. This is what it looks like. It's far away. It does look like an ace plane, though. With Gulfstream's signature combination of range, speed, and cabin comfort. The G400 will provide unrivaled efficiency. Thanks to the combination of the advanced practice.

Starting point is 00:43:39 This is going to be a hot Christmas gift this year. Absolutely. People have been wondering. I think this will be top of, this will be under the tree for a lot of people. It's not ideal to do like a pre-order as a gift, you know. It's nice to have something under the tree, but I think people would make an exception here. It's so funny, I was talking, I was talking with a mutual friend of ours, a guest who's been on the show many times, and they're planning to purchase a jet at some point in the relatively near future.

Starting point is 00:44:08 And he was so fixated on like needing to be able to, it's his first, it will be his first jet. He was so fixated on like, I need to be able to stand up at, like, like, it can't have, like,

Starting point is 00:44:20 the cabin needs to be big enough that I can, like, walk around freely. Like, come on, for your first jet and you're not just like,

Starting point is 00:44:26 you know, tolerate, like, slightly lower height in the cabin. He was like, no, I got to be able to, I got to be able to move freely.

Starting point is 00:44:36 Go straight for the 747, the BBJ. Yeah. Get the, the VIPP package. the one that only the Qataris have for some reason. Well, Casey Hanmer is...

Starting point is 00:44:49 I got a text back from... Delian. I won't read all of it. Okay. There's a line here. This is from someone else. Dude, all this data centers in space stuff. Also, I'm not going to read that. You need 1,000, 100 kilowatts sats to generate 100 gigawatts in orbit,

Starting point is 00:45:08 100 kilowatts, Sats, Wang. 1,000 kilogram, including payload, would mean a 5x increase in power density, and you can't just not have batteries and slap a radiator on the back, L.O.L. And then there was some choice words exchange that I won't read on the show. But anyways, I think we should host the data center in space debate. That sounds good. We should get a few people on here, somebody to be bullish, somebody to be bearish. I think we want somebody to be bullish that has put things into orbit and taken them down many times.

Starting point is 00:45:47 I think it's hard to lean on somebody's kind of take or opinion if they're not actually participating in space. They're just sort of speculating. Yeah. Let's read through a little bit of what Casey Hammer had to say. He said, here's one idea about SpaceX's next big thing. AI computing inference, again, not training, on orbit. But how the hell can SpaceX do this cheaper than just building more data centers on the ground? From first principles, it's an attractive proposition because the GPUs have extremely high value per kilogram and extreme revenue per kilowatt, both of which are relatively expensive.

Starting point is 00:46:25 That is the value prop somewhat washes out the pain of operating in space. So I took a closer look. If anyone can make this work, it is a Starlink derived system. So I started with the Starlink V3 satellites with some high fidelity CEO key. had below. Orbital parameters pick a sun-synchronous orbit, so we're in full kilowatt, 1,400 kilowatt per meter squared sunlight at all times, no need for batteries, deploy the solar array in sun-slicer mode facing full sun, but the edge is pointing in the orbital direction, bottom right in these images to minimize drag, but the inference starlink, star thought,

Starting point is 00:47:05 satellites don't have to scrape the atmosphere. Being in sunsynchronous orbit, they'll need to use the rest of the Starlink constellation for backhaul via laser links anyway. And higher orbits actually improve worst case latency very slightly too high though. And SSO is relatively full of debris. Let's pick 560 kilometers. A Starlink satellite in this orbit has full sun. So the back half is always shaded and relatively cool. The next hottest thing in the sky is is the Earth taking up almost half the sky to the bottom left in these images. And so what does he conclude? He says, I've seen a bunch of high inclination Starlink launches from the Vanderberg recently,

Starting point is 00:47:46 but I don't think any of them were going to sun-synchronous orbit. In any case, a ring of inference satellites visible at dawn and dusk running north and south will be awesome. If one starship can launch 100 tons to Leo, then that gets close to 30 megawatts of inference per launch. A thousand watts is 300 gigawatts. Now we're talking at real scale. We're doing one launch of Falcon 9 per day.

Starting point is 00:48:12 There was Delians loosely. You know, we're now one a day, so 300 in a year. So you get to, you know, a thousand over three years. If you're on a one a day cadence or if you can wind up getting more, the math is not that crazy. But it does seem like Delian was pushing more towards like, hey, this is maybe 10 or 20 years, not the next three years. but it certainly will be fun to follow the story.

Starting point is 00:48:38 In the meantime, let me tell you about cognition. The team behind the AI software engineer, Devin, crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. Jordy has survived. I keep like getting the podcast in a can. Like down the wrong. They should really make a drink specifically for podcasters that has no carbonation that cannot be choked on in any way. Mark Banioff says LLMs are the new disc drives. commodity infrastructure, you hot swap for whoever's cheapest plus best.

Starting point is 00:49:09 The fantasy that the model is the moat just expired. Mark Benioff having fun on the timeline. I love that he's having fun. I love that he's taking shots. Don't they have an AI lab, to be clear? They were working on Einstein for a while, but I think that they are very much happy to be a rapper, happy to be a buyer of LLMs at this point.

Starting point is 00:49:31 it certainly has penciled out that way. We can talk more to Mark about that. It's feeling good. Stocks up 10% in the last five days. Best salesman history. What do you think about Michael Burry saying the whole industry needs a $500 billion IPO ASAP? So everyone that knows anything knows this. Open A-I is the next Netscape.

Starting point is 00:50:03 and hemorrhaging cash. Microsoft is still trying to keep it afloat while keeping it off balance sheet and sucking out the IP. So why do they keep getting funded? The whole industry needs a $500 billion IPO ASAP. The whole industry needs to go away and sit in a corner for a couple of centuries. Think about what's done. This is Jeffrey Miller. Wow.

Starting point is 00:50:24 I don't know. This is, people want extreme takes. This post would go super hard if you don't understand the Microsoft Open AI. relationship. Yeah. But, yeah, it's just, it's just, uh, overly dramatic.

Starting point is 00:50:40 What was, what was, what was net scares? I remember correctly, they IPOed with like 15 million of revenue. That feels a little bit different. In Netscape's peak revenue, 1997 was 500 million. I mean, you were up at 20 billion this year for Open AI. Yeah, their total revenue before IPO for just first two operating quarters. Netscape reported total revenue of 16.6 million. Just odd.

Starting point is 00:51:07 I mean, did Netscape have like an enterprise business? That's smart. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, even if there's a, yeah, yeah, like, even if there's more commoditization, like it's going to take time. And I don't know, the dynamics of the, of the competition here feels like there will still be a lot of value,

Starting point is 00:51:28 even if there are, even if it is somewhat commodity infrastructure, It's like, you know what else is commodity infrastructure? Like, AWS, GCP, Azure. Like, you get, you get a, you know, like a server with some hard disk on it. Like, that is commodity. And yet they all have 30% margins. And they're all massive businesses. And when AWS, when Amazon broke out AWS as its own line, it was like an IPO of its own company because it was so big.

Starting point is 00:51:56 It was such a massive business. And it should be completely commodity because it's just servers in a data center. And yet, it's, it's interesting. Yeah, it's interesting, too. I mean, Burry has, you know, positioned himself of just hating any company that's overheated. But chat GPT having close to a billion weekly actives and ultimately, even if they just compete in search, right? At least it's a, you know, multi-trillion dollar opportunity, whether or not they, you know, fully-executive. against that is another thing.

Starting point is 00:52:34 Are you buying the IPO timeline of cohere, then anthropic, then open AI? Or do you think they will be sorted in a different pattern? What was the order? Cohere first. That's Aidan Gomez's Foundation Model Lab. He is, of course, on the Transformer paper, also a dripped-out technology brother. That's right. with a fantastic set of outfits,

Starting point is 00:53:02 then Anthropic, and then Open AI, open AI third. That's the rumor. Yeah, hard to say. I have no idea how the market will react to Cohere. Yeah, Coher has shifted more into like the business, the enterprise market, fully enterprise. Not in the timeline at all.

Starting point is 00:53:24 That could very well be intentional. Yeah. But it would be, it'll be interesting how much excitement they can build around the IPO, assuming they're losing a lot of money. Assuming the enterprise is really competitive. They're competing with Anthropic and Open AI and open source models. If the narrative changes to the point where this idea of every enterprise is going to need a, basically a custom LLM that's fine-tuned or pre-trained on their data,

Starting point is 00:53:53 like what ADBS CEO, Matt Garman, was talking to us about, about these pre-training checkpoints where you can go in and say, okay, I have a business and I absolutely do not want to upload my data to Anthropic. I don't want to update it. I don't want to upload it to OpenAI, but I want a model that understands my business's data at a core level in the pre-training step and coherer can offer that and show traction there. That feels like that could be the next wave, we've talked to a number of founders that are building those sort of like custom pipelines. And there's not really a public company that is even anywhere in that narrative. And that narrative does feel very nascent. It feels like it has not percolated through the public

Starting point is 00:54:39 markets yet. So I don't know. It could be, it could be, you know, exciting for them. Well, let me tell you. They've only raised 1.4 billion. I did not really. Sorry, 1.5 billion. 1.54 billion, very modest amount. Especially when you have seed stage companies raising half a billion. We got one of those on the show today. Dean Rao joining. Later, he kicked the Hornet's Nest on the timeline.

Starting point is 00:55:07 A little bit. People were pushing back. Because of his racing history? No, no, no. Oh, people show respect. I love that to show massive respect. No, but I think Jack Hitz-Low was saying that, and Vydea was valued at 500 million when they IPOed.

Starting point is 00:55:26 Of course, that was a very long time ago. But anyways, people, people were just saying, like, feels pretty potentially overheated. But we have Neveen coming on the show today, and I'm excited to hear about the opportunity from him. I'm ready to say it's overvalued unless he's built a company previously and sold it. Twice, maybe. Yeah, twice. If he's done that, then he's off the hook. But he's got to prove it to us.

Starting point is 00:55:52 because if he's just some new grad, some dropout. Like a Waterloo. Yeah. If he's just like, if he shows up on the show and he's just like, yeah, I had this idea in my garage. I didn't go to school. I've never done in business before. And now I'm going to call him out.

Starting point is 00:56:07 And I'm going to say, you're overvalued. You raise too much money. But if he can prove to us that he's done it once or twice before, then I'll let him off the hook. Yeah. I'll let him off the hook. Anyway, I think that's fair. Let me tell you about privy.

Starting point is 00:56:22 Privy makes it easy to build on crypto rail, securely spin up white label wallets, sign transactions, and integrate on-chain infrastructure all through one simple API. Let's read the semi-analysis post. It says important, a common misconception about OpenAI's upcoming custom chip is that since it's a custom chip, it won't be flexible and will be a data flow machine. Open AI has recognized that the 100x efficiency gains for training and inference happen at the algorithm layer and the hardware chip needs to be flexible enough to accommodate these algorithm changes. We went from just pre-training transformers to now doing RL post-training on transformers. We went from dense transformers to mixture of expert transformers and soon ultra-sparse transformers that will have four active experts per token out of 2,048 total experts. We went from casual MHA attention to MQA and GQA to attention-sync sliding attention to now even learn sparse attention despite the AI tourists think.

Starting point is 00:57:19 The chip open AI is building with Broadcom. be far more flexible than TPUs, interesting, despite most of AOPN AI's chip team being poached from Google's TPU team. Hmm. The semiconductor horse race continues to fascinate me, and I'm so glad that we have the good folks over at semi-analysis coming on the show regularly to help us understand it. I always enjoy talking to them. And we have two folks from semi-analysis joining the show next week, so we will be having a great time.

Starting point is 00:57:50 Let me talk about Turbo Puffer, serverless vector in full-tech search, built from first principles and object storage, fast, 10x cheaper, and extremely scalable. Of course. That's right. It's scalable. A hedge fund was ordered to pay a bonus to a trader who made 97% of its revenues. This is hilarious because when I read this at first, I thought it was he had made, like, his target bonus was, let's say, 10 million, and he brought in 9.7 million. and so he was 97% out of the way to his bonus. And they were like, you didn't hit your bonus, buddy.

Starting point is 00:58:24 You don't get the bonus at all. And I was like, oh, that sucks, but like that's kind of the deal that kind of makes sense. But evolution capital management has to pay him because... Yeah, so a hedge fund that was sued by a trader for refusing to pay a performance-related bonus, despite him making 97% of its revenue has been ordered to pay him $5.4 million plus interest by the high court in London. When I read the headline of the story, I expected it to not be in the mid-7 figures. Would you expect? I mean, I was hoping at least eight.

Starting point is 00:58:59 Yeah, hoping at least date. He's not getting a G-400 off of this. Come on. Not even close. Not even close. Robert Gagliardi sued his former employer, Evolution Capital Management in London, alleging that it acted in bad faith by denying him a $7.5 million discretionary bonus after he had generated more than 60 million for the firm.

Starting point is 00:59:19 Wow. Wait, does this mean that every other trader? Lost money? It was just... Something like that. I don't know. He was at the fund. Brief stint.

Starting point is 00:59:29 He made 12 million. He was already paid $7 million, including a $625,000 signing bonus. Base salary was $425K and a $6 million new issue bonus. So he needs to get out of this. He needs to go into AI research. research ASAP, if he wants to be putting up real numbers. Yep.

Starting point is 00:59:48 This is rough, but there's some harsh words here, he said. Gagliardi, a block trading specialist, alleged that he was told in early 2021 that a return of $10 million over the rest of the year would be an excellent result. When Gagliardi asked the fund's founder, Michael Lurch, for the payout in 2022, he responded, I'm not going to pay you the bonus. F you sue me. So Gagliardi already did, and he won. He did, he did. Although Evolution did not dispute his extraordinary returns,

Starting point is 01:00:23 the fund argued that the damage done to its reputation as a result of dealing with a U.S. SEC probe into some of Gagliarty's trades, at his previous employer outweighed his performance and that the bonus did not need to be paid because it was discretionary. There's no question that Mr. Gagliardi made exceptional profits for the fun.

Starting point is 01:00:41 and Mr. Lurch frequently praised his performance in that respect. Had Evolution properly performed the contract, Mr. Gagliardi would have received a discretionary bonus of $5.3 million. The judge also said that Gagliardi was Lurch's prize asset at Evolution. That's a good goal for everyone that is maybe working at a company, become the prize asset. Hopefully that doesn't result in a lawsuit like this. but they're feeling,

Starting point is 01:01:11 they're feeling gagliardi and his lawyer feeling very vindicated. Well, we have our next guest here in the re-stream waiting room. Let me tell you about Gemini 3 Pro first. Google's most intelligent model yet. State of the art reasoning, next level vibe coding,

Starting point is 01:01:24 and deep multimodal understanding. We have Aaron Ginn, the CEO and co-founder of Hydrohost. Good to see you. It's been too long. How are you doing? Welcome back. Been all right.

Starting point is 01:01:34 Yeah. Yeah, I just got back from South Dakota. Oh, yeah? Well, yeah. And despite some of the critics were saying, I wasn't smuggling, you think I should have been smuggling. So I'm not accused of smuggling. That is wild.

Starting point is 01:01:48 Well, give us the update on your interpretation of the H-200 deal, where things landed, where you think the next debate points will be. I'd love to hear that. Yeah, like the, I mean, as you know, I've said a number of times that the, the, even though I am in China Hawk, that we have to realize that Trump fundamentally is a pragmatist. Sure. And he is not interested in the ideological warfare. And I think that him taking over the Republican Party proves that.

Starting point is 01:02:22 And the orientation of reshoring to America, which y'all know, like I wrote one of the first arguments for Newman-Roe Doctrine. So now you saw that the Department of War has been putting that out. The White House has been very clear that it's trying to reshore its emphasis back to Latham and, South America and to build up the ring of fire from, you know, South Korea down to Singapore, essentially, to be more sovereign. Essentially, NATO, as we've approached ourselves with having them spend their own money to support their own military, that the expectation is that Asia would do the same thing. So, ideally, China on trade, was always on the table and was very likely because both parties actually want this to happen. and and I do believe that with Huawei that yes it is the national champion and they do want to proliferate it, but they're more interested in selling it to other people and promoting themselves as a means of trade like they did with their Belt and Road initiative than they are for internal uses.

Starting point is 01:03:25 Like that's just kind of my estimation talking to people in the region. and I mean, it just came back from there. So, so Nvidia, being in that region and being sold, particularly China, I think is important for American interests, whether it's an H20 or B30 or H200, I'm kind of less opinionated on. I just think that we need to be there because half of all AI engineers are Chinese, and we can go through any list of anyone scrolling at the bottom of this, you know, this, this, this broadcast. and you can see that probably the majority or Asian descent minimally.

Starting point is 01:04:01 And as America, we just have to realize that we're good at certain things and we're not good at certain things. So we're very good at commerce. We're very good at free markets. We're very good at enterprise. We're very good at creating the default framework, the rules of the road for the world to transact.

Starting point is 01:04:17 I think when it comes to trying to do these other strategies, I think we're not very good at it. And we just kind of have to realize that also that the president of the United States is interested in making deals. He's not interested in trying to get involved in other people's business. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:04:31 Let's, I mean, there's like a million different pieces here, but let's start with the fact that there are so many fantastic genius AI researchers in China. Why is it in the interest of the United States to help them? Is it that if they start developing on Nvidia chips, it gets the Kudo ecosystem stronger and we will actually get more open source software, basically for free from China that will come back to America and make our AI efforts stronger? Or is it we want them to be

Starting point is 01:05:07 familiar with Nvidia when ultimately they come over here on 01 visas and start working for American companies? I think that's too narrow focus. It's sort of like Boeing. Do you want Boeing in China? I mean, yes, because I want Boeing to be a thriving, American business. I want Boeing to maximize profits, and I don't see the, the 747 as a piece of, I don't, I don't see the 747 as a nuclear bomb. Yeah, I mean, I think that that's the key prior, right? Yeah, on the second one. It's like, do you think that an H-200 is a, I don't know, like a, like a, some form of missile technology? Yes, yes, yes. Increasingly, I, increasingly I have backed off the idea that, that these chips should be viewed as as weapons.

Starting point is 01:05:59 Like a defense technology. Yes, yes, yes. I backed off that. Yeah, because I view it much more like telco technology. I agree. And we're like, and we did not win at that. We lost that. And that's because we didn't offer the world an alternative.

Starting point is 01:06:13 We just were like, hey, don't use ETE. Don't use Huawei. And then it's like, and they were like, okay, we'll give us something else. And we're like, well, I don't have anything to give you. Right. So what do they do? We're sort of separating things out here. because on the one hand, like, there's give the rest of the world something,

Starting point is 01:06:28 and then there's other, which is like give China something, which is like there is a different there, right? Yeah, no, no, that's true. Because, like, I'm totally down to go belt for belt and road for road all over the, all over the globe, right? But the question of like, can, like, is there any world where we could get a different cell phone tower deployed in Beijing that's not a Huawei tower? Like, no way, right?

Starting point is 01:06:51 This is impossible. But then you go back to the fact of, like, you're right. Like, you know, all metaphors fail. That's where they're metaphors. Sure. So the other exogenous factors, I think, that's different from telcos is the fact of, like, the level of AI engineering talent. In fact, like, it's funding isn't like, you know, propelling for American AI. That's just the reality of where we are.

Starting point is 01:07:14 The second is the fact of, like, they do not have the founder capacity or the foundry skill set to produce similarly level. at scale. Scale absolutely is true. They could be at some point be approaching some form of like five nanometer process and there's like rumors around that. And that's a little bit of obsession

Starting point is 01:07:34 because it is a barrier of technology that like we, I should say the West has been skilled at, not particularly America, Japan and the Dutch. But that's there, we don't want to fund that enterprise. And I think that that's where the pragmatism comes into play.

Starting point is 01:07:47 It's like if we don't offer them something, they'll just do it themselves. And I'd rather take money from them and build our own sort of reshoring in America. But to be clear, they're still going to do everything themselves, right? No, I don't think so. How does it? No, I don't think so. You think that China will happily be dependent on foreign powers for critical technology?

Starting point is 01:08:11 They were putting out press releases saying like, hey, if you're going to buy Nvidia, you've got to prove it. You got to prove that you need it. You got to prove that Huawei won't work. It felt like there was a lot of pushback from the. I don't believe, I don't believe, I don't believe at all that they're just going to be like, thank you for the age two hundreds. We're going to stop investment in our domestic chip manufacturing. Yeah. So, but the problem is like in that flow, one, you assume a level of CCB control that's just not realistic. Sure. That it's a country of like 1.3 billion people with

Starting point is 01:08:45 very successful entrepreneurs. Yeah, but they've been ripping five year, they've been ripping five year plans for over and over and over and over to... Yeah, but that stuff doesn't matter. You have to understand that there's lots of propaganda that think that they say that they actually never happens in a real world.

Starting point is 01:09:00 Go look at Africa, go look at all the airports, and see actually what actually happened. Go look at the ports. Yes, there are a certain example of ports actually been transferred like the Sri Lanka port, but go look at the rest of the ones like they didn't happen. So they say lots of things, but the question is like, what matters in terms of the National Security Orientation of America?

Starting point is 01:09:17 And I would much rather take money from their economy and put it back into our economy, then trying to give them both the demand side and the supply side argument. You're making a supply side argument, which I think is very much how CCB thinks about the world, which is like, oh, we need to build their own chip supply. But in the orientation, I think that Jordi are more biased stores, which is like, well, let's also give them a demand argument. I'm like, no, I don't want to give them the demand argument.

Starting point is 01:09:39 Like, I would rather mitigate that as much as possible to say the guests, like they have, you know, probably like five or six multi-billion dollar operations that, like, want to have these types of chips that are not military oriented. And by applying these export controls that are overly extreme, you're basically giving them a demand argument as well. And I'm saying, I don't want the demand argument. Like, they're still going to have supply argument. That's fine.

Starting point is 01:10:03 Like, go buy a B.D, you know, car and hopefully doesn't catch on fire. Like, so, like, you know, like, just because BYD exists. Are you bearish on BYD? They're catching strays right now. I saw one of them on fire in Hong Kong, no joke. Yeah, I have a video of it. Okay, I text you. Yeah, let's go to the cars and talk about what we were debating earlier.

Starting point is 01:10:26 If we are just talking about cars instead of chips, of course there's going to be a metaphor here, but if we're just talking about cars and we want, and the frame is like we're all China Hawks and we're putting on like, rah, rah, we want America to win the electric car race. Should Tesla have sold Tesla's into China? because it feels like they did, and then China was able to make the whole bunch of cars

Starting point is 01:10:57 that compete directly with Tesla, and it feels like maybe better, maybe cheaper, maybe better and cheaper on some sort of parade of frontier. If we run that experiment, we try and think through the counterfactual, if Tesla had never sold a car in China, where would the Sioux 7 be, the jumping Huawei car,

Starting point is 01:11:17 the Shaoomai car, a Xiaomi car, the B-Y-D Han, the one that has the karaoke machine in it. Like, there's some crazy cars. Would those exist? Would they be delayed? Would they happen faster? How do you think about that? So I think this is where there is a reality, right?

Starting point is 01:11:32 Which is that they're going to copy. And I don't think that that is something we can change. Speaking as a half-Chinese American. So it's just the nature of what is the way they think about the world. It's just competition. Yeah, they do competition as copying. Yeah. And importantly, it's a big part.

Starting point is 01:11:48 Like, like, there's one world where, you know, they need the industrial power of like one million H-200s. And there's another one where if you give them a single H-200, they can tear it down and, like, try and reverse engineer it as much as possible. And then they can also do all the learning curve stuff on their, on their companies, on their national champions on Wallach. I think it's, it is reasonable in terms of an argument against expert controls. if you view this as a means of trying to slow down their own model level progress. Like, I can at least cogently understand what's being presented. I do not agree with this from the perspective of hardware engineering. Because, again, if you don't have the ability to make a car, then what's the risk?

Starting point is 01:12:35 Right? Like, mitigate their ability to make a car, which is generally even my position, is like, I want to mitigate their ability to make chips. And so in a world where there's a demand and supply, right, they, in SCCP, because they're communists, so they love focusing on supply solutions to everything, which, by the way, doesn't work. I mean, we're all freemorkers here. We're all a bias towards Austrian. Like, we know that their philosophy of the world doesn't work.

Starting point is 01:13:03 So they can talk about supply-side engineering all they want, but again, they don't have the ability right now to aggressively address. rest, there are Lafocari programs. And so in that world, I want to just win. Because if we remove the demand stuff, because all of our companies want to use in video, if we remove the demand stuff, we're removing one of the biggest parts that would give them justification to accelerate on the Smick side. But if they're just going to go and play around and be like, hey, we're going to dump money into Smick because we want to use local, but we're everywhere. It's like the fast food thing of like, sure, they have local fast food, but McDonald's and Starbucks rush. And And so like that's more how I think about it.

Starting point is 01:13:43 They're still going to try to copy, but if you don't give them the ability to actually have the toolkit, then it's a much safer transaction. And I think, I think, John, what you said is important is that the debate is highly mixed up between you think in H200 is an F-35. If you remove that as an A prior, then the world becomes significantly simpler to understand. But if you view the H-2100, Black War, or whatever, as a patriot missile, then, like, there's no real place to, like, have a conversation to be rational. Yeah. Because my view is, like, you know, I don't have as much of an opinion on, you know, GB or B, that kind of, like, debate. I just, I think American companies need to be in China. because we want the ability to not only address the second largest economy in the world

Starting point is 01:14:37 and have access to, like, that is the Trump position and that's my position. Like, we should sell to the world. It should be an export nation. But the other is like China is going to copy. And it's just part of the equation. Flip around for me and give me the, sorry. I wanted to hear. Keep flipping.

Starting point is 01:14:53 I wanted to hear more shifting to domestic semiconductor supply chains. what is your theory of the current horse race between Traneum, TPU, and NVIDIA? It felt like NVIDIA was dominant last year, the year before. Then we were hearing rumblings of like, hey, maybe AMD is getting it together on the software side. Hey, maybe this TPU thing could be used to train a decent model. The DeepMind team seems to have been able to do that. Are we moving towards more of an oligopoly? what are you thinking about how the American

Starting point is 01:15:31 semiconductor AI accelerator horse race is playing out? My view from the on the TPU side, I don't really know who would buy that as just like a product. I think meta is the closest one that kind of makes sense, but why would any of the clock companies do it? Because they are in a position right now trying to build their own, and they're trying to de-laver, why they're building their own,

Starting point is 01:15:59 they're trying to de-lever for them video. So why would they want to homeingle themselves with an actual direct competitor, like a direct competitor and sell their stuff? And then there was a mocked. Yeah. Like, there's also this, like, weird zealotry around TPUs that I may, because we had Thanksgiving, there's not going to happen. But to say that, like, there's, like, minimal switching costs is absolutely absurd and

Starting point is 01:16:22 insane. There's significant switching costs. And so if you're of the mindset of like, hey, well, we have all this CAP-X and it kind of makes sense. And that's justifiable. Like, I can understand that. But that's like the same reasoning that you could apply to the multi-cloud argument. And we didn't really see that happen at all. Basically until GPUs.

Starting point is 01:16:44 Now you're seeing much more multi-cloud products because GPUs made everyone multi-cloud. And if you were multi-cloud before GPUs, you were as a function of an acquisition, it was not generally intentional. So I think CPCs makes sense for Google just as a like vertically integrated strategy because that's what they like to do. And there are probably some other companies that maybe like maybe Apple, I could maybe see that because they love low-cost chips just in general. But I don't really see it breaking beyond Google because I just don't know who is really

Starting point is 01:17:14 incentivized to buy that. And then I agree with you on the AMD side. The software is getting better. I think that's just the natural orientation of just the least suit is. the most reasonable because a competitor to Nvidia's general purpose computing dominance. I'm pretty bearish on Trinium. And TPU is just from a

Starting point is 01:17:35 from a chip perspective, I'm bearish on, but as an integrated strategy, it makes sense for them as a company. Okay. But the Nvidia does not really get as company. We're running out of time, but I wanted to ask you about one other thing. There seems to be a number of people trying to manufacture a space data center pump.

Starting point is 01:17:53 Oh, yeah. As somebody, and even Nvidia, was posting from their corporate account, some renders of a company called StarCloud, some space data centers that they're working on. As somebody that has spent a lot of time in data centers or around data centers all over the world, what are your timelines? Are we talking? Gavin Baker was saying the most important thing in the next three to four years is data centers in space. I've had plenty of people on the show that believe that it's an exciting possibility. ability or opportunity, but maybe their timelines are more like 10 to 20 years. How do you think about it? Most of the stuff that has been announced will not happen. I never, no, like then think of it as like a 50% so if they announce like five gigawatts probably going to be like two. And and because the stuff's really

Starting point is 01:18:45 building stuff is actually quite hard and America has not really behaved in a manner to me that believes it's that series of a thing. Like, this is a very niche issue. And one reason why the going by the age 200, the reason why it's making less noise now is because it is a niche issue. It is something that maybe a couple hundred thousand people really care about. And the data center, it affects, even though it does bring jobs, it does bring these types of opportunities to cities that previously never had a position

Starting point is 01:19:18 to support a data center, which is great. It is really kind of a narrow set of people. that are really benefiting. And if you go look at, you can go read the bills that are in consideration across America. America is not acting like it's very serious about building data centers. The power profiles, the approvals that are happening,

Starting point is 01:19:37 like, it's just not happening versus the other countries. They're generally more serious about it. And many of these announcements that you, as Jensen disclosed, they're fundraising announcements. They're actually not actual projects yet. So they're trying to, let's say they have an equity already lined up. But the equity generally is like 10 to 15% of these projects.

Starting point is 01:19:59 So you've got to go raise the other portion of it. And the offtake side outside of the hypers, there's not a lot of confidence the credit side has outside of those hypers. So the debt side of the world actually has been quite conservative on the private credit. So that's why I never really thought, like, you know, the clinical bubble talk and bursting, it like we're nowhere really there if you go talk to lenders like we're nowhere even close

Starting point is 01:20:27 the type of capital being deployed has actually been very conservative has been aligned with contracts has been associated with high paying credit you know top tier customers we're not seeing you know the Jordy credit union in the middle of

Starting point is 01:20:41 you know SoCal doing black you know B300 loans yeah yeah yeah we're working on it yeah like the So that's where if you look at the legal side, if you look at the power profiles,

Starting point is 01:20:58 if you look at what's happening and the political nature of it, I don't think many of these projects actually scale to what they need to. But I do agree with Gavin that we actually do need to get serious about it because it's not like the world would be worse off with more power, more compute capacity. If everything, of all those things get cheaper, our entire life gets better. And just as it's cheaper today to get a banana, that it was 100 years ago, and that means there's more bananas.

Starting point is 01:21:25 That means people consume more bananas. So the logic will still apply. Let's give it up for bananas. They love banana. I'll give you a layup for that. I love banana. Great to see you, Aaron. Software is eating the world.

Starting point is 01:21:38 Software is eating bananas. Thank you so much for coming on the show. We shouldn't have booked 15 minutes. He should have booked two hours because it's always a fun chat. Thank you so much for taking the time. We'll talk to you soon. Merry Christmas. Merry Christmas.

Starting point is 01:21:51 Merry Christmas. Merry Christmas to graphite. Dev. Code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub, ship higher quality software faster. What's under the tree this Christmas? It's graphite.

Starting point is 01:22:04 Dot dev, baby. Put it in your, it's a great stocking stuffer. Up next, we have Matt Kallish, the co-founder of Draft Kings. He's a board member at Draft Kings. He's also a board member of Phase Media. He's the founder of Hardscope,

Starting point is 01:22:20 which launches, Today, let's bring him in to the TBPN Ultradome. How are you doing, Matt? Great. What's happening? Thanks so much for taking the time. Hey, guys. How's it going today?

Starting point is 01:22:30 It's going fantastic. Merry Christmas. Good to see. Merry Christmas. Please, for those who don't know you already, I'd love to kick off since this is the first time on your show with a little bit of your background. You have one of the more interesting backgrounds with Draft Kings.

Starting point is 01:22:45 How do you tell a story in, you know, in just a few minutes? Well, I had a couple of friends. from some early corporate jobs in my career. You know, I came up through analytics, technology, and then over the years moved more into marketing. And, you know, I met some of, you know, my two partners, Jason and Paul, really, at those jobs. You know, Jason at Capital One,

Starting point is 01:23:10 we were early stage business analysts. And then went to a company called VistaPrint. That's where we learned direct marketing. And, you know, we all had this entrepreneurial bug and we're really looking for the right opportunity to go and spin off and do something kind of in the startup world, which, you know, we had no experience doing, but, you know, we had that drive. So we looked at a million ideas and then draft kings kind of stumbled along. We just felt like there was a lot of people that liked predicting things in sports,

Starting point is 01:23:44 but didn't really have a great way to do it. So that was back in 2012. We launched the Daily Fantasy Sports platform. over the course of a few years grew that to over 10 million registered users, and it became just kind of a big cultural phenomenon. And then come 2017, that's really when sports betting started opening up in the U.S. So Draft Kings was in a really great position to extend our product, launched a sports betting platform first in the U.S. outside of Nevada,

Starting point is 01:24:18 and became a market leader in that space. and then over the years just kept developing out the product went public in 2020. And it's been a really amazing ride. I mean, a growth story that I'm really proud of. Yeah. Take me through. I'm sure there's a ton of questions that we can kick around around prediction markets and sports betting and what's going on there. But first, take us through the launch today.

Starting point is 01:24:44 Take us through hard scope. How are you positioning that? Yeah, I had a 14-year. run at draft kings that you know we've seen it all the ups and downs and you know built a really amazing team over the years I have you know the type of team at draft kings where if I don't come to work for a week

Starting point is 01:25:05 things are amazing and fine I'm telling you like the caliber the people the leadership there the team has been built out just so well and you know I'm a builder at heart I like starting things I like participating in industries that are disruptive, you know, that are in the middle of a lot of displacement change. And a couple years back, I worked with one of the original founders, a phase to buy the company off the public market and bring it back private. And it's kind of a space that I'm just super intrigued by the massive amount of disruption in media,

Starting point is 01:25:46 moving from traditional forms into creator-led to community, this sort of decentralized media through social channels. And I've also found it really intriguing how content discovery has changed so much, like short form clipping and the TikTok, the shorts. That's how people are really finding content these days. And phase is really one of the best in the world at that. So just kind of jumping in, rebuilding the business. side of that team and kind of relaunching and bringing phase back to number one in creator media.

Starting point is 01:26:22 That was an initial focus. And I decided to leave Draft Kings and transition out to do this full time to launch Hartscope, which is kind of the platform that phase operates on. It's a talent and brand platform to access the creator economy at scale. And it's a space, I just think, is tremendously underserved and a really massive market. opportunity. So, you know, I felt like it was the right time for me to go all in on that. And I'm really excited to be doing it. So what's the, like, like, walk me through how to actually use the product if you're a brand. Does it feel like just a autonomous marketplaces where

Starting point is 01:27:04 brands are meeting creators? Are there, yeah, I guess, I guess a better question is like there's probably been, there's probably been. How much handholding is going on? There's, there's been maybe hundreds of attempts at building these sort of like brand creator marketplaces. A lot of them haven't. Some have turned into great

Starting point is 01:27:23 businesses. There's been little to know like venture. Shopmise is like sort of in the same space, correct? Yeah, a greater commerce tool. But this is more advertising focus. Is that correct?

Starting point is 01:27:42 What's special about hardrope is the impossible part is building the actual valuable content assets that, you know, brands want to be a part of and reach the audience. And that's what our team for talent does really well. It's a full stack operating platform. You literally don't need any other resources we do in all in-house production, socials, clipping, all the distribution side into commercialization like brand partnerships, e-commerce, access to capital and venture for initiatives, and the reputation really of phase as the number one creator collective in the world is the proof.

Starting point is 01:28:23 I mean, that's a group that operates with this team on this capability set. And so Hardscope is really bringing that to new creator collectives and more verticals, really high potential talent, and platforming them to really make the most of, you know, the opportunity that they have, which is really, unprecedented. Like the level of power and control over the content, their community, and how to commercialize it that talent have today, it's a totally new age, really. And some creators have built out great teams, but most really have underrepresented teams in particularly the commercial side. You know, like, how do I take my great content and then maximize the opportunity as

Starting point is 01:29:10 basically the CEO of a media business. And that's what we specialize in for talent. Yeah, I think I was a little bit confused. So you're effectively like a back office for personality, personalities, content creators, whatever you want to call them, to help manage everything from ad sales to editing to clipping, content distribution, effectively social media management. Like kind of, am I saying that correctly?

Starting point is 01:29:40 Yeah, I mean, the landscape is laid in with middlemen, let's just say. Like the L.A. ecosystem is unbelievably brutal. There's middlemen for everything. And we're trying to provide really a full stack solution where you don't need all of this noise to run a really successful business. You need a great business partner, a great team. And we've proven that with the operations of Face Clan and how that's come back in a, you know, prominence as the number one creator collective. I mean, you're talking about a group that had the top seven accounts on Twitch last

Starting point is 01:30:17 month that's growing in an unprecedented rate, and people thought it was dead two years ago. So, like, we came in, relaunched the brand, and totally turned that around. And that is the proof, you know, that's the proof of concept, really, that I think, is attracting so much interest from other talent and other verticals. And, you know, you had asked about the brand side, That's more my background. You know, I was a large media buyer at Draftings. We have, you know, as you've probably seen, a lot of advertising out there in the world,

Starting point is 01:30:49 probably bought every channel you can think of. And the one channel that's hard for everyone is Creator Direct Partnerships. Nobody does this well. And unless you are a peer play specialist where your number one marketing strategy is through Creator, you probably are doing this not so well right now. And traditional agencies who try to tack on things like YouTube buying or other, you know, creator products tend to not do that very well at all. So we're seeing a lot of opportunity on the brand front to be almost like a new kind of agency of record, right?

Starting point is 01:31:27 Where we can focus just on creator direct partnership, help kind of bifurcate that channel out from a lot of people just lump it in with audio or other kind of traditional definitions of channels, the opportunity is really breaking out creator direct into its own lane, and maybe it's 2 or 3% of media mix today, but the landscape is changing. This channel might be 20, 30% of people's media mix in the future. The Unilever said it's over half of their media mix in the next year they're planning.

Starting point is 01:32:00 So, like, a lot of companies are seeing, like, we are just not reaching Gen Z, audiences that are diverse under 30 are just not watching traditional media and this is the way to reach them yeah makes makes a lot of sense how are you how are you like financing hard scope do you have outside investors was it uh am i hearing it correctly was you effectively took phase private and is it the same entity or i'm curious how uh like how you're planning to scale is this something that you want to just operate profitably indefinitely, or is this, you know, something that you'd one day want to, you know, take public again? Yeah, look, I mean, I've been funding it. I led the acquisition initially, and the biggest reason was it was kind of a mess. I mean, the public

Starting point is 01:32:53 company of phase was in really rough shape, and it needed a lot of work and putting in the two years to really rebuild the entire operation. And also to relaunch the brand of phase, have that, you know, in such a great place today. That was the upfront investment I viewed as getting the ball rolling, kind of building the initial momentum. And I didn't think it made a lot of sense to, you know, involve a ton of people in that.

Starting point is 01:33:22 I thought it was something we had to prove as a team here. So there's no noise in the company. There's no outside investors funding. I do think in this next stage now that we've launched as we scale up, there's a lot of interest I have and the team has in certain strategic partners. So I think including people that can be helpful to us, absolutely. I mean, that's something that we're going to be looking to do in the next year. Makes sense.

Starting point is 01:33:50 A little bit of a connection issue, by the way. Sorry, sorry if there's a lag. We have to ask you about your kind of personal. personal views on the state of both traditional sports books, online sports books, gambling platforms, as well as prediction markets. It's absolutely bloodbath on the timeline right now. Everybody involved seems to hate each other, even the investors on every side of it. And it's an absolutely wild time right now. How do you think this kind of category evolves over the next 12? to 24 months. I mean, I love it. This is one of the most competitive spaces in the world, right?

Starting point is 01:34:36 Like you had mentioned with the crater economy, it's very competitive, all these different companies doing this or that. Like, great. I love that. Like, there is nothing better than having a super vibrant competitive marketplace for products, having to compete and win for customer engagement, for loyalty. There's always some curve. ball in gaming and gambling and sports betting, whatever, something new every year, some new competitor, some new kind of product variant. And I think the exchange, like how fast that's kind of come in since the election and evolved into a sports product, you know, it's a fascinating thing.

Starting point is 01:35:21 And I think it'll be very competitive. You know, draft kings obviously announced they're launching in exchange. Pretty much everybody, I think, in the sports betting space has some plan here. And then there's the Kalshi, Polymarket, that rivalry. And we just look forward to competing. You know, I feel like Draft Kings has proven world-class technology team. We deliver leading products. We have the best customer satisfaction in the market.

Starting point is 01:35:50 We pride ourselves on that. So competitions are favorite. It's like some that drives us. that makes sense what what percentage of content targeting men online do you think is entirely dependent on either gaming ad revenue it feels like there's huge swaths of the internet that honestly like wouldn't really exist or creators who i'm curious if you have any kind of internal estimates even like creator media well yeah it just feels like i i can think of a lot of soccer was on the show talking about like he he was saying, like, there's a bubble in sports podcasting,

Starting point is 01:36:31 specifically because of all the sponsorships that come from sports books. It's actually made a lot of people in the creator economy be able to go full-time because they've been able to have a group of players where you look at their business and you're like, okay, 90% of your revenue is from, you know, either some type of, you know, online casinos or sports books, etc. Yeah. Yeah, it's. such a valuable category that, you know, going back to Hardscope and expanding beyond just phase clan, which is a sort of mass market, super mainstream media business, you know,

Starting point is 01:37:10 going into verticals like sports really aggressively, you know, sports, food, like the content verticals that have a lot of really attractive partnerships is, that's kind of the whole purpose here is to represent the creator economy across all of the vertical. at scale for brands. And in sports, you can build out entire content properties and invest in them, knowing that it's going to be supported through some kind of deal, some kind of partnership. It's one of the sure things. So I feel like as a company that builds assets that makes content from scratch,

Starting point is 01:37:47 puts together creator collectives from scratch and scales them, like we can invent these things knowing that the sports landscape. it's so vibrant that there's going to be deals there. That makes a lot of sense. You said that you're working on food channels, and I think that that's one area of the creator economy that has not been financialized yet, and that feels like fertile ground to me.

Starting point is 01:38:14 Obviously, business channels. Don't threaten me with a good time. Exactly, exactly. I don't know exactly how it works. It's like, I'm going to bake this cake. We're going to do a blind taste test, whoever likes this more, they win. But I'm sure there will be an attempt.

Starting point is 01:38:27 at financializing baking channels in the future, the great British bakeoff. I mean, there's probably a prediction market on it already. Will I burn the cookies or not? Will you burn the cookies or not? That's a good question. Anyway, thank you so much for coming on the show. This is a lot of fun. Congratulations on the launch, and we will talk to you soon.

Starting point is 01:38:45 Have a great rest of you day. Merry Christmas. Hey, thanks for having me. Merry Christmas. And, you know, love to come on again in a year and give you some updates on all the great stuff for it. That'd be fantastic. That'd be great.

Starting point is 01:38:54 Anytime you have hot takes, too, on anything. think gaming or prediction markets relate. I know it's a little tough since you're still on the draft kings board. You've got to keep that in mind. But we appreciate the insight and congrats to the team on the launch. Thanks so much. All right, guys. We'll talk to you soon. Cheers. Goodbye. And let me tell you about public.com investing for those to take it seriously. They got multi-asset investing. They're trusted by millions. Public.com. In a groundbreaking endeavor, the University of Utah athletics is entering into what could be a 500, million dollar equity partnership with Oatro Capital featuring the creation and shared ownership

Starting point is 01:39:34 of a for-profit entity to operate athletics. Sources tell Yahoo Sports. So college football is going to the big leagues. They're going to the private equity leagues. Private equity is now going to own your local college football team. Oh, people absolutely hate this. I know I hate it too because why are they stopping with college football? Please, high school football,

Starting point is 01:39:59 Milly football, lower school, little league. Preschool. Preschool. Let's financialize that. Let's roll them up. We actually, this is happening. We talked about the hockey rinks that have been sold to private equity rolled up, and then you can't film your own children without paying for the...

Starting point is 01:40:17 Somebody out there that really hates private equity just yesterday was saying, you know, private equity has come for everything, but at least you can still go to a college football game. I don't know. And again, so how do we think they're going to, you know, so it sounds like they effectively sold for half a billion dollars. They just sold. Yeah. You remember it was Chicago, I think, sold all their streets or their parking meters. Oh, yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 01:40:41 Back in the day, it was like for like 75 years. Yeah. So, I mean, the big thing is you got to get the money correct. You got to get the deal right. Yeah. So they basically buy a college team. Yeah. You can say that it's some more sophisticated.

Starting point is 01:40:56 structure than that, but effectively that's what happened. They'll have to immediately put draft Kings or a prediction market logos all over the helmet and all over the jersey. So that's probably that's probably like a $50 million new revenue line that the college could never do.

Starting point is 01:41:16 What else? So the current mascot for the University of Utah is Swoop, a red-tailed hawk. That's pretty cool. They could change as a draftee. drafting off the airways. Okay, so another thing they could increase if you want season tickets to the game and you're a student, they could, of course they're going to jack up the prices. They're probably going to make it like $20,000 a year. Let me steal, man.

Starting point is 01:41:39 You're being too negative here. $20,000 a year. And they're going to offer the private equity firm can bring a private credit partner into the mix and help finance the season tickets. So you don't just graduate with student debt. You actually graduate with game day debt that will stay with you for, decades. That's ridiculous. I mean, there are so many reasonable ways to monetize a football team over, you know, the entire life of ownership for this farm. They could sell the windshield. They could sell. Yes, yes. It's very funny to sell everything. But, I mean, there is something that actually could be very good for academics at this school, because if you have $500 million in cash, you can go and build a new library, a new science lab. You can go build, like, actual academic buildings. Yes, you don't really need to, and you don't need to worry about, like, okay, we got this donor.

Starting point is 01:42:26 somebody went to the University of Utah. They hit it big. They're a billionaire. They want to donate $500 million, but you know what? They just like football, so they're going to build this new stadium. And you're like, but wait, wasn't the point of this whole thing, you know, unrestricted gifts? Wasn't it wasn't the point academics? And that might not, that might be less of an issue now.

Starting point is 01:42:44 So they might be able to fund more great academic activities and endeavors with this money. So I don't know. It's very funny to make fun of. It's very funny to riff on. there are some potentially really good outcomes that could happen. Anyway, we have our next guest in the Restream Waiting Room. We have Emile Michael, the Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering of the United States. Amil, good to see you. Merry Christmas. How are you doing? Welcome to the show. I'm doing great. Thanks for having me. Thank you so much for taking the time.

Starting point is 01:43:18 You look fantastic. Yeah, I would say thank you for wearing the suit. But unlike a lot of our guests, this is a daily driver, I'm sure. Yes, yes. Well, we're buying a high school football team today, so I had to dress up. Oh, nice. That would be a real treat. Well, you're not, is it fair to say that you're buying Gemini? Are you buying tokens?

Starting point is 01:43:40 Or is this one of those deals where the partnership is structured so that it's not really a major cash infusion for Google or it's not a burden on the taxpayer. It's a little bit more of just two great American institutions. institutions working together. How are you framing the deal? It's making to 3 million Department of War employees that includes military members and civilians, access to Google, Gemini, on

Starting point is 01:44:11 our network, which is a private network, right? So you actually have to port it over, and they gave us a great deal for the first year. It's like 47 cents. So they're very patriotic. I'm super excited to have that at the hands of everyone at the Department of War. It's never happened before. Yeah. Were there historical examples that you were pulling from? Like, because I imagine that service members have been Googling things for a long time. I've heard stories about, I mean, even during the war in the Middle East, the war on terror, they were using Google Maps just to

Starting point is 01:44:48 see satellite imagery. And there were a whole host of reasons why a warfighter might want to use a Google product. Is this a new structure? Are you building on the shoulders of giants? Do you feel like when you came in there, the Department of War, had a good reference point for how to work with a big tech company like Google? Or was it sort of new territory? How did you think about actually interfacing with Google? I mean, it's entirely new territory, right? Because you could get those apps off the app store or on a red browser. So to get AI in, there's a lot of sort of of fear about AI, what it could do. And then you have to, remember, when you're doing a Google search, like, yeah, it kind

Starting point is 01:45:30 of records where you're searching. But if you're putting stuff in AI, you don't want that to leak back into the model. So you have to architect it in a unique way. So it's kind of new territory. And we did it all in like three months. That's amazing. Yeah, what did the team on the Google side look like? I mean, I imagine that they have a, you know, a large team just for working with the government.

Starting point is 01:45:53 You mentioned a few, it was a few weeks of work, but what did they bring to bear to actually deliver this on their side? I mean, they had a ton of engineers because you got to put it, you know, in our networks, which are not simple, right? And you have 3,000, 3 million people all over the world, all kinds of devices and so on. So they really brought the heat, right? And they had a, you know, for today for launch, they had a room or the, you know, war room, if you will. No pun intended. And as we, to make sure that it launched, it launched correct. I mean, we got a lot of flack on Twitter today.

Starting point is 01:46:32 So, yeah, I saw these comments, but it was very obvious if you used one brain cell that you needed to be on an actual approved device on a military network if you wanted to access the service. So I didn't, I didn't get the flack. Yeah. Well, people want to give flack just to give flack, right? Well, I think some people wanted to, they wanted to try it out themselves. And it's like, well, if you want to do that, you can join, become a service member. Yeah, we put it, we'll put a link on the error message a few hours ago for job openings at Department of War. If they want to join, so they get access to Gemini from government, we're open for business.

Starting point is 01:47:11 Yeah, what else has, have been the highlights of the year? As you look back on the year, obviously confirmation took time. but then there was this big White House AI action plan. What are some key moments that you feel like have been maybe under discussed or under, didn't get enough appreciation at the time? I mean, you know, there have been like three AI executive orders, which is a big deal, right? And Jensen said the other day that no other administration has ever done this much for the AI company. So we're really championing like these four national champions, right?

Starting point is 01:47:50 Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, and XAI, and giving them, like we're talking about, you know, data centers on military land. We're talking about how do we get more power these companies? Because it's a race. And I think we're the first group in the last six months to really realize that we better get great. We better get better and stay great and ahead of everyone else on this because it's really, the next generation of tech.

Starting point is 01:48:17 On the subject of data centers on military bases or land, what kind of comps have you looked at on that side? I know there's like historically in weapons manufacturing, you have like go-cos, which seem like they would provide some framework. But how have you thought about that? We haven't thought about that yet. We haven't broken ground yet or to the business models. We just had the executive order said we're going to do it.

Starting point is 01:48:43 And then we got to figure out how do you prioritize who gets what, right? And we may reserve some of that data center capacity just for the government to use for our own purposes. But the point was to send a message that we're all in on AI companies, all in on the data center, power chip needs of these companies in a way that the last administration we think was just trying to constrain everything with these orders to really have one company win and that's it so they can control sort of the outputs. We're going the other way. We're going to have all the national champions.

Starting point is 01:49:16 We're going to support them all the way. David Sachs is out there making sure the American tech stacks and as many other countries as it can be. And that's a big deal, right? If anyone's going to be using AI, we want to be on our stack. Yeah. How do you think about the fact that all of the big tech companies seem to be working with the United States government

Starting point is 01:49:39 effectively for free, 47 cents, I've heard of deals of a dollar, as high as a dollar. But then I think back to, you know, a few decades ago where Microsoft had a deal to develop virtual reality headsets, augmented reality headsets for the U.S. government. And I think it was like a $10 billion deal. And I was really excited when that project went over to Anderl because it's a lot, you know, younger, faster moving company.

Starting point is 01:50:03 Now, I love Microsoft. I love them as a infrastructure provider and the fact that they have open AI's IP is amazing. There's a ton of great things. things that Microsoft does. But developing an AR headset, that always felt like it was going to be a rough go. It was such a big burden on the taxpayer at $10 billion. Much better to see it in a different, in a different land in a different company. How are you thinking about how the government is working with big tech, when to open up the pocketbook and write a billion dollar deal, or when to ask for

Starting point is 01:50:35 47 cents? Yeah, I think, you know, we want these companies to be successful. So we're going to pay them market rates eventually. It's just how do you get out of the gate? And you get out of the gate by like giving three million people access and not having to worry about like a token count every day, right? And then that's exciting to them because now they get three million more customers, right? And they get to learn use cases and so on. So it kind of works for them, works for us.

Starting point is 01:51:05 But we need to pay them fair rates, but they're going to be commercial. Yeah. And I imagine that there's like when a new. new technology comes up like, you know, Gemini. There's just a lot of service members that are just, you know, not, by no fault of their own, just like accidentally using it a little bit too cavalierly. And this is an initiative to actually refocus on security, refocus on privacy. But can you take me through some of the, you know, I'm not particularly worried about Google having, you know, information from the American Warfighter. But I am worried about some of the, you know,

Starting point is 01:51:41 the international chat bots having access to the American warfighters prompts. Can you take me through how the Department of War is thinking about LLMs like Deepseek, Ali Baba, these other AI models? Are those just banned everywhere? How do you think about actually, you know, banning different vectors of attacks from a security perspective? Yeah. Well, I mean, first of all, we're going to train, you know, everyone. is going to train if they want to use it for like, you know, higher risk use cases, right? Sure. But it's going to be on their devices just like the web browser is and they can still search Google.

Starting point is 01:52:22 But when it comes to the foreign companies like Deepseek and Chinese, like in the bill that was just released by Congress, I think, yesterday, we're going to ban, you know, Deepseek and all these foreign models from use by DOW members and contractors and anyone who touches it. because last thing we want is for those models to get data on how we're using AI, right? That would be a tragic mistake. So I think we're already there, but it's going to be in law pretty soon. Yeah. What's your pitch to talent to come work with the Department of War, specifically in AI? It's like the craziest talent or of our lifetimes, most likely.

Starting point is 01:53:07 you know, you're trying to recruit people that can go get a, I don't know, anything from a million dollars a year to $100 million a year to a billion, even up to more. Literally a billion dollars. And so I imagine you have to have a, you know, pretty dialed in pitch to recruit people. And it's, and maybe that pitch is you're going to be able to work on, I mean, the H200 news today says that, you know, we aren't the, you know, the H200 is not like a F-35. It's not military technology yet, but I'm sure there's a pitch. to work with you and your team on actually applied AI in a military context.

Starting point is 01:53:42 But how do those conversations go? Yeah, so I call them recruiting Tuesdays, right? I spend all afternoon Tuesdays calling, dialing for dollars, emailing, referencing, interviewing, and my whole team does that. And like the pitches, you know, okay, you have to have some patriotic instinct, obviously. but then maybe you're in between companies or you're just motivated. I mean, Elon has five companies and he still worked through the government for like seven months and brought a ton of those people who are motivated by the mission.

Starting point is 01:54:15 So I'm trying to motivate people by, hey, this is the biggest technology deployment in the world. There is no bigger organization than the Department of War. There's no more exquisite, crazy, interesting use cases, whether they're intelligence or fighting, you know, even corporate use cases. And you get to be a part of creating that. It's never been done before. That's a pretty good pitch. And then when you leave the Department of War and you've done that,

Starting point is 01:54:39 I think you get more valuable in the private sector, right? All these big AI companies now have big federal businesses. They all have sort of cooperating with, like, the government in different ways, and you have another notch on your belt of good stuff that you've done and been an innovator on, which is pretty rare in government to, like, literally innovate while you're sitting in the job on something that's never been done before. That's that big.

Starting point is 01:55:02 Yeah. How do you think about the different levels of AI diffusion, AI integration where AI can actually help the warfighter in the American context? I mean, a lot of people kind of watched the Palantir story evolve over the last few decades, this idea of analytics, just putting dots on a map sometimes, that being enough to identify where an enemy threat might be. for example, how do you think about integrating AI from the most mundane use cases of just speeding up a little bit of paperwork here and there to some of the bigger questions that will be ultimately face the warfighters of today? Yeah, I mean, imagine like the most simple use cases just like any big organization, like an employee in any big organization, right? It's writing PowerPoints for you, writing job descriptions, like making spreadsheets, the basics. Then there's like the cool intelligence use cases. Imagine that we've got decades of satellite imagery, decades of that, or sensors that we've had, or all kinds of things. And now you could, instead of one human

Starting point is 01:56:12 analysts having to go, like, I think I see that there, you can go back through 50 years, train a model and say, look for things you've never seen before, right? And then on warfighting, logistics, planning, you know, all kinds of simulations, if you want to simulate a war game, and a really incredible way with all the data and all the stuff in there. So it's like pretty compelling and exquisite to mundane

Starting point is 01:56:38 that you could do with this stuff when you deploy it the right way. Yeah, how do you think about I mean, this partnership with Google it feels very much like giving you know, almost the consumer product of Gemini to everyone in the military? How are you thinking about larger projects

Starting point is 01:56:56 that might require bringing together custom code, multiple systems, multiple pieces. You know, I mean, as a consumer, we're running into things where Anthropic might be better for coding and one day and the nanobananas better for this and Chad EPD is good for deep research. And if you want to build a business,

Starting point is 01:57:13 we see a lot of startups pull three different models off the shelf. Is that something you're starting to look at as like a phase two of AI integration into the military? Yeah, I mean, so ideally we'll have all four models and all four of the newest versions, like all the time at every classification level. Wow. And the reason you want to go up through the classification levels

Starting point is 01:57:37 is so you can do more exquisite work, right? More complicated stuff. And then the reason you want all models is just what you said. If you're trying to write code, maybe you want to use Claude, if you're trying to do these other things. So as they compete, we want to benefit from it. And we've never had that here before.

Starting point is 01:57:52 So it's trying to consumerize it, give choice, but then give more and more capabilities. is you go up the chain of like, of security classification. Yeah. Who owns the data? Does the taxpayer own the data? Does the government on the data? I see a lot of stuff where it's like, oh, this company now owns you.

Starting point is 01:58:10 Google's going to have your government data. Google's going to have the data. It seems like they might be storing the data in some points, but they don't have authority over it. How do you frame to like the American who's maybe worried about government overreach or or wants to understand where important, critical military data is living? Who has control? Who has final say?

Starting point is 01:58:34 Yeah. So taxpayers own the government. Government owns the data on behalf of the taxpayers. Google does not own it. We control it. It doesn't leave our control. And that's why it was complicated to actually launch, right? Because AI models are built so that they learn as you continue to query them, right?

Starting point is 01:58:53 And to make it such that the model, we got the latest model, and it took in queries, but then the learnings from that don't go back into the general model is a form of making sure that the American taxpayer's data doesn't leak anywhere else and just used for the purpose of it was intended. Yeah. How many other organizations globally, you know, allies, things like that, need to take on, like, a project like this? like it feels like you clearly is very important to move quickly because if you if three million people can't use the latest AI models in a in a secure way, you know, that it's not, it's not super sustainable. They'll eventually, you know, go elsewhere to get these products. Do you think a lot of other kind of groups need to, you know, pursue a project like this? And are you guys trying to help create kind of a framework so others can can benefit?

Starting point is 01:59:46 Yeah. I mean, any, well, so. we all know, and you guys know, any large organization needs to be using AI just for efficiency purposes, right? And just, you know, dollars and cents, if your competitors, you know, showing more profit in Q1 relative to you because they have too much overhead that it could be solved with AI, you're going to be in trouble. So when you talk about governmental organizations, should every government be using it in some degree? Yeah. I mean, it's sort of like an economic imperative, but it's like a strength imperative to. It's sort of like the way I describe it to people is you're opening the human context window.

Starting point is 02:00:21 So we're not replacing a warfighter, but we're allowing the warfighter to do more with the same amount of time, right? To analyze more intelligence, to do more scenario planning, and all that. So I can't imagine any other organization like ours that wouldn't be thinking about this. But hopefully, I think we are setting the pace here.

Starting point is 02:00:39 We're going to be the pace setter here. For the U.S. government and for governments around the world. I love it. Well, thank you for setting the pace. Thank you also for coming on the show today. This is fantastic. It's fantastic to have you. And thank you for all the work that you're doing.

Starting point is 02:00:53 Yes. On behalf of every citizen. Come back on anytime. Anytime. Always welcome. Thanks a lot, guys. Have a good one. Goodbye.

Starting point is 02:01:00 Let me tell you about profound. Get your brand mentioned in chat, GPT, reach millions of consumers who use AI to discover new products and brands. Patrick Collison had a post that hit the timeline, rocked the timeline with 1.3 million views. He says, two conversations this weekend, make me hear. think that there's a vibe shift, a foot in Silicon Valley around what one should work on and what is worthwhile. Culturally, it feels like the moment is ripe for new frameworks. One, Davos expert morality is stale and discredited. Let's give it up for the experts. Joe Rogan, Andrew Rubman,

Starting point is 02:01:36 Lex Friedman, those guys don't, they're not Davos guys. It's very possible the next Davos could just be a roundtable between Joe Rogan, Andrew Huberman. Yes. the real expert. Chris Williams and Lex Friedman. We love that. That would be fantastic. It's also apparent that the quote, Just Be Super-based counter-enlightenment is not really an answer.

Starting point is 02:01:59 Yes, woke went too far, but simply inverting it does not work. Good point. Effective altruism is no longer the automatic default for smart people. They pushed it too far. They tried to save too many shrimp from their farming fates. And now they are cooked. Sorry, shrimp.

Starting point is 02:02:18 There is increasing skepticism of slot and slop machine dynamics. People don't want to work on a slot machine. They don't want to work on a slop machine. They want to work on something worthy and valuable. The question is, overall, what is worthy and valuable? It feels like this question is becoming more central. What do you think is worthy and valuable? I think it's worthy and valuable that OpenAI hired Slack CEO, Denise Dresser,

Starting point is 02:02:45 as Chief Revenue Officer. Hmm? It's a scoop. It's happening right now. OpenAI has hired Slack CEO, Denise Dresser. No way. Chief Revenue officer.

Starting point is 02:02:56 That really flipped me for a second because they have a CFO, they have a CEO of applications. I don't know where CRO fits in, but they got someone, and that's very exciting. Is that gongworthy? I think it's very gongworthy.

Starting point is 02:03:12 I think it's very gongworthy. And in other news. We got some new SpaceX news from Bloomberg. The chat had at first. Thank you guys. We're in the middle of chatting with Emil. But SpaceX plans to go public at a one and a half trillion dollar valuation up from the rumored 800 billion just last week. They plan to raise 30 billion dollars, raising, I guess, far above 30 billion dollars. Anyways, so this is reporting. SpaceX is moving ahead with plans for an IPO that would seek to raise significantly more than 30 billion in a transaction that would make it the biggest listing of all time.

Starting point is 02:03:53 I'll hit this. The Elon-led company is targeting valuation of above $1.5 trillion for the entire company, which would leave SpaceX near the market value that Saudi Aramco established during its record 2019 listing. The oil major raised $29 billion at the time. Space X's management and advisors are pursuing a listing as soon as mid to late 2026. The timing of the IPO could change based on market conditions.

Starting point is 02:04:20 Let's hope the window stays open, folks. We will do our best to hold it open. I hate when the IPO window is closed. But anyways, no comments from the SpaceX team. But the junk bond analyst says, of course, congratulations on saying the biggest number. always great when you can say the biggest number. Yeah. Do you think the timing here with Gavin going on about space data centers is just a coincidence?

Starting point is 02:04:53 Or is this part of an allocator conspiracy? I still believe the Primac take that Elon has run the A-B test on public companies. and Tesla was miserable. SpaceX was great. And so you want to stay private as long as possible. There's no funding is not drying up for SpaceX by any means. There's no real requirement to go public. There's no reason why he has to take that company public.

Starting point is 02:05:25 I don't know why stuff is leaking right now. It might just be some sort of head fake, but it doesn't seem critical to me. I don't know. Certainly doesn't seem critical that they go public. I would just say you have two major leaks in the span of a week. It's just very different than the Open AI thing where Open AI, like, in order to win, they need to like marshal all this capital.

Starting point is 02:05:47 They need to, you know, become GPU rich. They need the GPU prices to fall. They need energy to get cheaper. They need everyone to do everything. They need everyone to get in line. Whereas SpaceX is very much, like, established. They have their supply chain set up. They've been in this business for 20 years.

Starting point is 02:06:05 They're just like cooking and computing. pounding and I just don't see a need for them to, to, you know, marshal more capital or do anything really special. It, it does seem like there's something going on with like, okay, we're talking at a second, third act here. But at the same time, it's not like Elon needs to take this company public. I don't know. Do you think he does? No, a lot of great companies don't need to go public, but there's still a lot of reasons to go public. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So what do you put the odds? It would certainly be exciting. And I think it would be a great. And I think it would be good, like, it would just be a, like, there's a lot of people that are, you know, into space

Starting point is 02:06:41 and can't get, can't get any, like, allocation into us, into space generally. You know, they just can't, they can't participate in the economic upstate. AST mobile. That's it. That's it. But you can't, you can't, yeah, Echo Star is the hold cup. I wonder, I wonder, I wonder, this is, the market's closed now, but I wonder, Echo Star, which owns, I think it's 10, 12 billion of SpaceX stock. Yeah, I wonder what that's doing. Up up, up 6% today. but it's been fluctuating. So, I mean, back to the Patrick Allison. A lot at the close.

Starting point is 02:07:11 Back to the Patrick Collison post, like, what is worthy and what's valuable? Like, I still honestly feel like SpaceX is one of the worthiest and most valuable missions. And in terms of just, it has no slop machine dynamic. It does not create slop. It is, I don't know, it seems above enlightenment, counter-elightenment, woke, super base. Like, yes, Elon runs it. But just as a.

Starting point is 02:07:37 company, just the idea of like, let's go to the moon, let's go to space. That should be apolitical. It doesn't, it doesn't even have the Davos expert morality impact on the environment. It's just like one of the, it's one of the purest missions, in my opinion. And I feel like it, the, the reason I think there's, there's not, like, there's something interesting about what Patrick is saying here where there is this highly worthy, highly valuable mission, but it's only, there's only 5,000 people that can really play in that game. Maybe like 10,000 or something. Like, it's just not, it's just not a career path in America.

Starting point is 02:08:17 It's not like I'm going into real estate. I'm going into lawyer, legal. I'm going into medicine. I'm going into lawyer. Going into big a while. You can't, you can't just say I'm going into the orbital economy. I'm studying and I'm going to, you know, maybe I'll work at SpaceX, but there's a whole, there's a whole host.

Starting point is 02:08:35 You can go into tech. It's very accessible. You can just go and get a job in tech. It's very hard to do that in space and make a career. I don't know. It's nowhere near as easy as it is for tech. Because tech broadly is probably a thousand times bigger. You go to aerospace engineering and then you have a number, you have optionality.

Starting point is 02:08:54 It's very hard. Try to land a job at a true space company or you can work for a phone. What if you're not cut out to actually go do aerospace? What if your actual skill set is, marketing. Well, you can go and be a marketer in tech. You can't go and be a marketer in space. It just doesn't happen. They hire like two marketers. Okay. There's no, there's no, there's no, is no. What is that, why is that, is that, is that, is that, is that, what I'm saying is that, is a federal backstop on marketing jobs in the oracle. No, no, no, no. I just don't see what the

Starting point is 02:09:27 problem is. No, no. What I'm saying is that is that is a vibe shift because, like, like, so Patrick Collison is asking the question, what is worthy? What is. valuable. What is a valuable mission? And I'm saying, I know what a valuable mission is. Going to Mars. Going to the moon. SpaceX is a valuable mission. But 99% of people can't participate in that. They can't make that their life's work. Because if they're not cut out to be aerospace engineers, aerospace designers, you know, if that's not what they're great at, they just can't participate. Whereas when previously, in previous areas, like tech was organizing the world's information. Don't be evil. it was just cool. Tech was the mission. Tech was the thing that was worthy and valuable. And so you could

Starting point is 02:10:10 show up and say, I'm a finance guy. I got a job in tech. I'm a lawyer. I work in tech. I'm a marketer. I work in tech. No matter what your actual skill set was, you could come to technology, the technology industry, and have a career. And you can't do that in the orbital economy yet. You can't do that in space because there just aren't that many jobs. And so I think there is something that's worthy and valuable. It's just not able to absorb the actual demand for worthy and valuable career paths. And so for a lot of the marketers, for a lot of the lawyers, for a lot of the financiers, they wind up being forced to work in slot machine companies or slop machine companies because those are the ones that have the jobs.

Starting point is 02:10:53 They have 10,000 jobs available. I don't know. That's sort of a hot day. Yeah, I think that's fair. I just would, I think you could also. make the argument that many people are looking at jobs that say like a boom supersonic and they're choosing they're just making the choice to work at the infinite slot machine company that's fair that's fair well hopefully they'll read patrick hollison's post they'll say what's worthy and valuable i got to work

Starting point is 02:11:22 for boom supersonic i got to work for blake shoal who's our next guest so while we bring him in from the restream waiting room let me tell you about getbezzle dot com shop over 26 000 luxury watches fully authenticated in-house by bezzel's team of experts we have Blake Shoal. Look at Blake Shoal. Wow. He is in a jet. Oh yeah, he can fly. I forgot. You can fly. Right? Hang on, guys, I got to shut the engines down. This is crazy. What is going on here? Wow. Look at this. My captain. It's been a complete rat race to try and put on the most insane performance during a TBPN interview. I think this is going to take the cake. Blake, how are you doing? Introduce yourself. What's going on today? Hey, guys, it's good to see you.

Starting point is 02:12:05 Thank you for having me. It's a big day at Boom. This is a huge day at Boom. I'm so happy. This is amazing. Look at this. Okay, where are we? Take us through this.

Starting point is 02:12:13 So we are in the Boom Supersonic Factory. This, of course, is the XB1 airplane. This is the airplane that broke the speed of sound in January. Wow. The airplane that resulted in Supersonic flight being legal again in the U.S. Amazing. So it's blown wide open. But, you know, a year ago,

Starting point is 02:12:34 A year ago we were joking that it would be way easier to fund this company if we were an AI company. We were laughing. Yes, I didn't think about that on the show. That's right. Yes. It turns out we are. So the engine that we're building, we've been building for almost four years now to power our overture supersonic airliner makes the perfect ground power turbine for AI. And so that's today's news.

Starting point is 02:13:00 We've got a product called Superpower, 42 megawatts, natural gas. It's going into data centers. Crusoe is our launch customer. We're going to be generating tokens and quiet sonic booms. That's amazing. That's amazing. So you guys want to see the factory? Absolutely.

Starting point is 02:13:15 Give us a tour. Give us a tour. So one of the things that anybody building in hard tech learns quickly is that the legacy aerospace supply chain is just really screwed up. And so we are building this factory to go from raw materials in one side of the building and completed jet engines up the other side. So this is some of the raw material that's just come in. This is 17 pH hardened stainless steel.

Starting point is 02:13:43 It's heat-treated. This is what they call the hot stuff. And, you know, I found this the gym this morning. There you go. Get it in. I do a little bit here. But this is going to turn into stage five stator veins. They go inside the 70 engine and the superpower gas turbine.

Starting point is 02:14:01 So one of the most amazing, surprising things is the technology that is ideal for supersonic passenger flight is actually the same thing you need to power a data center. So this is Elon pioneered this in Colossus. Sam's doing the same thing at Stargate, these larger arrays of what are called

Starting point is 02:14:22 air derivative jet engines. And it's like the, they're like the blade servers of the energy world. I put a lot of them in array and just the same way blade servers beat main engines. frames, error derivative turbines could be mainframe gas turbines. So let's tell me how they work. This is a one-third scale model of our engine.

Starting point is 02:14:41 It works on a complicated principle. Stuck, squeeze, bang, blow. All right, so let's break that down. Air comes in this way. This thing spins, super high RPM, compresses. You can see the blades get smaller as you go in, getting air down to about a 20-to-one compression ratio. Burners in here, this can run on jet fuel,

Starting point is 02:15:00 and also run on natural gas, just for the different fuel nozzle, and it goes out the back here. So the model you're looking at here is what powers the airplane. The model that powers AI is very similar. We basically take the fan off the front, we lose these two turbine stages, and then we have what's called a free power turbine on the back, three stages that extract energy,

Starting point is 02:15:19 spit a second shaft, and that powers a 42-magawatt generator. Yeah. So, like I said, the vision here is, we're going from raw materials in one side of the building, completed engines at the other side. The facility we're standing in now is going to do the first 200 megawatts

Starting point is 02:15:35 over the next about 18 months. And they were building a much larger factor that's to be able to do two gigawatts a year and we're just going to scale from there. Wow. So let's go inside the shop. Yeah. And this is all on the back of,

Starting point is 02:15:49 it was seen as controversial that boom did not just white label another engine from another company, correct? And now it's sort of come back to benefit. fit you. Is that their correct narrative? I think that's correct. I mean, people called us crazy to not

Starting point is 02:16:05 outsource our engine. Frankly, I was a little bit nervous about it. I was just really good to go. It's the best decision we ever made. We're getting a fully custom engine for about a quarter of the development cost. It enables things like boomless crews could not do boomless without our own engine. It enables a totally new passenger

Starting point is 02:16:21 experience. I haven't revealed it yet. And then I think the most important thing is we can now take that same engine core, put a power turbine on it, and and get to profitability years faster than otherwise we could happen. This makes, basically, superpower makes not just electricity, it makes capital, and it makes the capital that finances the capital-dispensive development of the overture passenger airliner.

Starting point is 02:16:44 So let me walk you around the shop here. So this is basically the first unit of what we will copy-paste into the facility that will do two gigawatts per year. What are Jedgins made up? Well, you've got big round things. And actually, if you look inside this machine here, this is called a turnmill. This machine weighs 65,000 pounds, and spinning on it right now is a 4,000 pound donut of cast incanel. And that's a nickel alloy.

Starting point is 02:17:16 So this is a relatively hard alloy. This is going to be the turbine center exhaust frame. This is the first very large part that we're machining in-house. So big round tanks. Then you've also got discs with blades. all around them. That's called Blisks. These are some of the hardest to make parts. And so we have started what we call the Blisk Krieg. And this machine here is actually a more than five-axis mill. So this will hold a disk of forged titanium or forged powder metal super alloy. And then the

Starting point is 02:17:51 disc will kind of rotate in and out like this while another cutterhead comes down and basically sculpts each individual compressor blade out of metal. So ultimately we're going to have a whole bunch of these machines cracking out disks. Over here, on the other side, this is part of an automated production line for compressor blades. So to give you an example of this, this is the what's called the Stage 1 variable guide veins.

Starting point is 02:18:18 This goes in the front part of the compressor section of the engine. These actually move as the engine changes power settings. to have the optimal airflow. And this machine here starts with that bar stock, those kind of heavy beams I was showing you outside in the hangar floor, comes in on this feeder in one side, it's held in the machine,

Starting point is 02:18:39 the cutter head comes over, cuts it away. Another gripper comes over, grabs it, machines the back side, a robotic arm comes and grabs it, puts on the table, we start the next door. So this thing is ultimately going to be able to run 24-7 building engine parts. Quick questions about the factory.

Starting point is 02:18:55 Where are we? Where is this factory? And how big is it overall square footage, roughly? Yeah. So this building is about 70,000 square feet. It is five minutes from our engineering HQ in South Denver. And we are, we're about to open early next year, another factory that is three times the size of this one. And that's what's going to be able to do two gigawatts a year. Yeah. So what are the key challenges now? This feels, hard but maybe more straightforward than supersonic commercial flight like what are you guys

Starting point is 02:19:33 be less approvals yeah yeah exactly and have like massive massive demand yeah what are kind of like the key challenges that you and the team are looking out for to be able to deliver on the timeline that you were talking about yeah so after having done a boomless supersonic jet that was safety critical pilot on board

Starting point is 02:19:52 this feels like doing it on easy mode literally xb1 had 68,000 parts. 68,000 parts, and they're all safety critical. The turbine has less than 2,000. And so there's going to be a lot of challenge and getting that to work, getting to work reliably, getting manufacturing up to scale. But after having done XB1, it feels like easy mode.

Starting point is 02:20:12 We've got customers that are going to take as much as we can possibly make as fast as we can make it. Today we've got the capital to go do that. How much capital? 300 million. Congratulations. Thank you. Thank you. After basically continuously fundraising for about a decade, I can't tell you how good it feels to have raised the round that lets us ship the revenue product

Starting point is 02:20:39 that then produces the cash to fund the rest of the stuff. So we're done fundraising. This is the last equity around we ever have to do. Let's go. That's incredible. How was the first night's sleep after you close around? Did you? I imagine that was a pretty surreal moment, even though you're still just getting started. I would say people are going to be like a natural concern is like, is this mean we're not getting, we're not going to get the supersonic commercial aircraft. You obviously, I don't, I haven't lost any faith. This feels like an intelligent move in order to enable that future,

Starting point is 02:21:21 basically by the company time to get us to that point. but what do you have to say to anybody that might be wavering? Yeah, no, this, if you want superphetic passenger flight to exist, you should be very, very excited about this, is that the single biggest challenges we had were, how do we prove that we have a reliable engine, and where do we get all the money to do it? And running the sting on the ground proves the engine is reliable,

Starting point is 02:21:45 and it literally prints the cash that we need to go develop the airplane. So I think this takes that from, you know, less than 50% chance of success to a far greater chance of success, I think overture supersonic flight is basically inevitable at this point. And some people are saying like, oh, Blake got lost. I'm going to be, you know, I'm just going to become an energy guy. And it's like, guys, I didn't bust my ass for 10 years in order to like only make power turbines. I'm very excited with the power turbine business.

Starting point is 02:22:12 America needs it. Like, we're losing to China. We really need this. But this is absolutely our bridge to the even bigger opportunity to just reinvent all commercial aviation. It's awesome. Makes a lot of sense. From a, from a, like, looking at the existing sort of like turbine landscape, a lot of them have supply chain challenges as part of Boom's edge that you guys are so used to making all of your own componentry and parts that you basically, effectively just need the raw materials and you can make stuff happen. How are you kind of avoiding maybe some of the

Starting point is 02:22:50 other delays that legacy manufacturers are experiencing? Yeah, well, I think you named it. Being able to build our own parts is huge. And the room I'm standing in here does not exist at GE, does not exist at Rolls-Royce. In this sort of Jack Welch era of everyone getting focused on return on net assets, by the way, what a random metric. They all sold off their supply chains. And they can't make anything anymore. And now we hire like disaffected engineers. out of Pratt, out of GE, and they were like, holy Toledo, we can resolve in an hour what used to take us three weeks or three months to do at our last companies

Starting point is 02:23:30 because they didn't have access to hardware. And if they ever wanted to change anything, it's really hard to change. That's actually one of the biggest innovations here is what we're doing is we're trying to make the world of atoms, more like the world of bits, and you can iterate, you can evolve, you can change. And part of that is about taking software engineers,

Starting point is 02:23:48 putting them on hardware engineering teams, an automating design workflow. So that means we can change digital designs really quickly when we learn. The other piece is how quickly it can we turn apart. Like if we take a turbine blade and we send it to a traditional supplier to be made, it's going to take six,

Starting point is 02:24:04 maybe nine months for us to get that part back going from digital design to hardware. What that means is if you're the engineer designing it, and you get it wrong. Like, it's really bad. You've set the whole company back six, nine months. So now there's a lot of hand-wringing. Now there's analysis paralysis.

Starting point is 02:24:19 Now you've got to have layers of managers, double-checking everything. Now you're really slow. But if you build that part in house, you can actually turn a turbine blade in 24 hours with the 3D print process, heat, treat, praise, get it out into the engine. So what we can do is iterate really quickly. So we're liberating engineers to move really fast because if they make a mistake, if they want to do an iteration, we can turn it in days or hours in the same building that they work in.

Starting point is 02:24:46 That's super powerful. I see what you did there. It was accidental. I love it. I love it. Is there anything that you've been tracking on the regulation side that you think needs to change? We were talking about making boomless crews legal, removing speed limits or high-speed travel. If you were to wave a magic wand, is there anything that you'd change around energy production?

Starting point is 02:25:17 in America today to accelerate reindustrialization and everything? It's much bigger than energy production. We have a huge problem that I think not enough people are talking about, which was we have a permission-based approach to building, not a freedom to innovate approach to building. So if we drove to work the way we build buildings or permit energy plants, you'd have to go file a plan. You have to list out exactly what turns you're going to take.

Starting point is 02:25:45 You're going to promise that you're going to stop at every stop sign, not run through any red lights, always drive the speed limit. And then some bureaucrats are to sign off on that, and then finally you can drive for work. It's insane. That's the way we build a building. That's the way we build a power plant. I think we need to go from permission-based,

Starting point is 02:26:01 which is such a huge delays and huge costs to, hey, we're going to have a rulebook. We're going to have commonplace rules. And then you can pledge to follow them. And if you break them, then you get fine, do you get in trouble? You get your permits taken away. But I think we have to really get rid of the entire concept of market pre-approvals if we want to move fast.

Starting point is 02:26:21 It's really holding America up right now. It's the biggest problem with building anything physical. Yeah. Yeah. Are you guys hiring it all right now? We're hiring as fast as we can find great people. That's great. I figured.

Starting point is 02:26:36 In fact, I'll plug this if you'll let me. If you go to Boomshipersonic.com slash referral and you send us somebody great. We're looking for great engineers, hardware, software, mechanical propulsion, everything, technicians, CNC machinists. It's hard to find enough great CNC machinists. Send us somebody. We will send you a free overture desktop model if we end up hiring that person. I love it. That's very cool. That's very cool. Well, this has been the best hard tech tour we've ever gotten. We've had a number of people attempt what you just did. It always goes poorly. Yeah. There was no high stakes. It's very high stakes.

Starting point is 02:27:14 because anything can go wrong with like your Wi-Fi or anything. I'm very impressed. This is amazing. And honestly, it was just like chilling, watching learning. This is really awesome. Normally have to ask way more questions to get information,

Starting point is 02:27:27 but this was really informative. I'm so excited for you and the team. Yeah. Put together a great group of investors. What a crazy story. I mean, I'm sure like the job's not finished. The book has not been written,

Starting point is 02:27:37 but, you know, I've followed your career for a long time. And it's, it's, you're on an amazing run doing an amazing thing. So we appreciate you taking the time to come talk to us.

Starting point is 02:27:49 Appreciate you're having me of making this so much fun. Thank you guys. Have a great rest of your day. Merry Christmas. Cheers to the whole team. Talk to you soon. Merry Christmas. Over and out. Goodbye. 8Sleep.com. Exceptional sleep without exception.

Starting point is 02:28:01 You close the $300 million round. You need to sleep on an eighth sleep. Fall asleep faster. Sleep deeper. Wake up energized. If you're trying to build a 42 megawatt natural gas. turbine while working on a supersonic jet, you definitely need a good night sleep. I want my eight sleep to be powered by a natural gas turbine.

Starting point is 02:28:22 I want to just give me a mini boom turbine for my bedroom. Yes. Please. Just a small one. It doesn't have to be full scale. Yeah. But just something small that I can really rely on. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:28:35 Because. Yeah, it is weird. The eight sleeps, you plug it into the wall. It's electric. You could get a diesel. a diesel version or you just fill it up with a little bit of diesel and then

Starting point is 02:28:48 you pull start at like a lawnmower and just leave the window open yeah so there's some air change yeah I mean the exhaust needs to like kind of flow out of the house but or you could wear a mask and just run a like a well that could be diesel powered too

Starting point is 02:29:04 you have a diesel powered sleep apnea that's pulling air out that's pulling air from outside that's fresh exactly exactly but then you have a diesel motor, you put your whole house on your face. Your face is potentially kind of vibrating, but it can see it. Well, people are starting to talk some trash about the old meta-super intelligence lab. Who? 0.005 seconds says it's now painfully obvious that meta-superintelligence

Starting point is 02:29:33 lab went on a massive hiring spree, promised the world, and delivered absolutely nothing. There has been a mass exodus. I feel like Alex Wang was a colossal mishire. When is Zuck going to clean house and admit his mistake? Let him cook. Let him cook. I was the first one to say that meta vibes should never have been released or at least advertised publicly. I think it was definitively just not a good product. Yep. And, but let them cook.

Starting point is 02:30:11 What was it? Yeah, again, the mistake is like, people are going to judge the first thing that your new organization releases. It felt rushed. It looked bad in comparison to SORA. But we need to see the next version of Lama.

Starting point is 02:30:26 I'm sure they'll call it something else. But give them more than... What should they actually do on the product side? Like, Google has been able, Gemini, I feel like, has been able to carve out a really unique position with nanobanana. And like, it went viral and this was Anjniz at, at the time, Archeney's like take about like the Empire Strikes Back. And I have found that like, you know, having the best, having the best video model is a reason for people to go to your app. Having the best, you know, audio model, the best photo model, the best deep research product.

Starting point is 02:31:00 The Bannabana is what the rotissory chicken is to Costco. This is a great analogy. Great analogy. Right? It's a loss leader. It's like come and make a bunch of images. We're going to lose a lot of money, but we're going to get you hooked on our bread and butter. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:31:15 Yeah. Our language model. And so, yeah, I mean, Open AI has obviously developed just a great like back and forth chat experience. The voice mode is really dominant there. The deep research product is. It's possible that Zuck wanted his true believers to be able to, accumulate meta shares at around the one and a half trillion dollar mark because he wants to reward his most loyal. Potentially. Potentially. Stammie here says Limitless is acquired by Meta today

Starting point is 02:31:42 and to a lovely journey with Rewind and Limitless. And Ryan Jones says Zazaki's going on a generational run of Max Paranoid missing mobile. Really, really, really, really scared him because he just bought an AI wearable startup. He's still spending on the Metaverse. I think it's obvious that Meta's just going to keep shipping hardware. I think that the limitless acquisition looked like, you know, a soft landing for a team that had proven that they can ship products. Again, they did that I know they had customers because some of the customers were mad that meta acquired them and they were talking about it.

Starting point is 02:32:17 So, yeah, I shouldn't be a surprise. I don't think you can, I think it's hard to argue that meta should just ignore any forward-thinking product lines and just just do yeah well speaking of the metaverse we should watch this video of a robot that was clearly being teleoperated absolutely destroying a water model it's one of the craziest videos ever seen uh this is like so insane so it it the operator clearly takes it it feels like it should be a i or something so that daniel says the hand coming down with enough force it just explodes the water bottle, which is not easy to do. If you just have a water bottle and you can't just rip that thing open,

Starting point is 02:33:03 but the robot, the robot teleoperator takes the VR glasses off and then the robot just falls backwards. See ya. Is this real? Imagine having one of these hanging out. It's comedic genius. Imagine having one of these hanging out in your office and it's just running bits all the time. Like its whole goal, I have kind of class clown energy in the office. Yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 02:33:24 But if I could outsource that to Optimus and just be able to focus more on my work and he's, Optimus is just going around running, running bits. I mean, that, you know what we have to do? We have to get one of these robots that, you know, how so many of the robots are claiming, like, we're going to do your dishes. We're going to do your dishes. I just, I want to just have, okay, we're going to all have a nice glass of wine. We're going to put 50 different glasses, wine glasses of all slightly different shapes on the table and just tell the robot,

Starting point is 02:33:51 hey, clean up the glass, clean up the wine glasses. just load them all in the dishwasher. Nothing's... I can barely do that. I can barely do that without breaking. Oh, yeah, all the time I'm smashing these things. And you imagine one of these robots just completely decimating the...

Starting point is 02:34:07 Sure, I'll unload the dishwasher just in there. Oh, no, no, no, please. Allow me to unload your finest crystal stemway. Allow me to unload your stemware. You discover an edge case where the robot thinks, Well, to unload the dishwasher, I should break every glass and use a vacuum and just vacuum it out. Way easy than just taking them all out at once. Oh, sorry, sir. Would you like me to polish your fine stemware?

Starting point is 02:34:36 I'll polish it into dust. Polishes it into dust. Anyway, our next guest is in the Restream Waiting Room. First, let me tell you about adquick.com. Out of home advertising, made easy and measurable. Plan, buy, and measure out of home with precision. We have Nevin Rao from unconventional. CEO of Unconventional AI in the Restream Waiting Room. Novin, how are you doing? Thank you. Thanks for having me. Let's jump right into an introduction on yourself, companies you built in the past,

Starting point is 02:35:06 and then we'll get into Unconventional. Yeah, so the first company I built in the AI space was called Nirvana. It was actually the first AI chip company. It was back in 2014 before most people knew what machine learning was. Yeah, just a little too early. but you're back i think it was actually decent timing to be honest with you um but you know i i think i sold too early to be honest um uh the second company was actually moving more toward the software and algorithmic side called mosaic ml uh sold that to data bricks back in 2023 and i led

Starting point is 02:35:40 a i at data bricks up until uh just a couple months ago where i left to start unconventional incredible uh so yeah jump jump right into it uh talk about you know the vision uh i feel like you guys the perfect amount of controversy yesterday because people were latching on to not a seed round at a $500 million valuation, but a $500 million of capital invested at the seed round. It was honestly perfect. You want a little bit of spice on the timeline to get attention, and I'm sure there's been a ton of inbound interests, both from the candidate side and future customers. Yeah, I mean, obviously that was somewhat intentional.

Starting point is 02:36:18 We wanted to have a big shocking moment. But I think it's actually pretty rational when you think about the opportunity ahead of us. So what we're doing at unconventional is rethinking how a computer works. The computers that we use today, the fundamental distractions have been around for nearly 80 years. And it's kind of weird to think about in the tech industry, something being around for 80 years. But it really is true. And now we've come to the point where we've pushed that paradigm as far as we can push it. you know, fundamental constraints around energy are now hitting us at the global level.

Starting point is 02:36:53 Like, if we keep scaling AI like we're doing, I mean, I think AI is amazing. I use it all the time, and I think the rest of the world is going to do that too. We can't get there. We're going to run out of energy to scale these things up because it requires very power-hungry chips. So really, we're saying, can we rethink the paradigm actually from the circuit level up and build something that's vastly more efficient, like a thousand times more efficient than what we've been building? and focus only on AI. We don't need to do accounting software

Starting point is 02:37:22 and artillery calculations and all the things that traditional computers do. We'll let that be in the realm of digital machines. But can we build something that's much more efficient for the substrate of AI? And so the opportunity ahead of us, I think, is nearly infinite. And that's why evaluation actually can make some rational sense. So what does your supply chain look like?

Starting point is 02:37:42 Or what do you think it will look like in the near future? Yeah, I mean, when we started this project, there were two fundamental constraints I put on it. One is that we have to be able to solve the problem within five years because this problem is going to hit us in three or four years and we need to have a solution ready. Then at that point, when we have a solution, you can't have something. It's like, I've solved the science problem. Now what? We have to be able to manufacture it. So we have to have scalable manufacturing.

Starting point is 02:38:07 So we believe we can solve this problem in a big way within five years that actually leverages the silicon ecosystem. So we do want to manufacture it on standard lithography techniques. Now interesting. Yeah, some of the- ASML could potentially be a partner in the next five years, like they're not off the table. Yeah, TSMC we're talking with already. You know, I was out in Taiwan just a few weeks ago for this purpose. And, you know, it doesn't mean that's the be-all-end-all.

Starting point is 02:38:33 What we're doing is really building a new set of abstractions. Like a computer is built on a digital abstraction. Can we move away from that and actually move to something that is more amenable to using fundamental dynamics of the substrates. And if we can do that, we can actually open up the world to a whole new set of, you know, potential substrates. Silicon is one of them. And maybe there'll be more exotic things. I've talked to folks who are building 3D printed circuits and all kinds of crazy stuff. And so I think the world is going to be very rich in the next 20 years in terms of new capabilities. Right now, we've got to leverage what we have. Yeah. I mean, in terms of

Starting point is 02:39:09 leveraging what we have. I feel like there's been, you know, movement from, okay, Nvidia GPUs are bust. Everyone's just doing that. Then we got some serious movement this year from AMD stepping it up. We got TPU. Trainiums looking pretty good. There's like these A6 are doing well.

Starting point is 02:39:27 There's a whole crop of A6 startups that are saying, hey, we're going to bake the transformer right on to the silicon. They're going with TSM. Can you help me understand how you were thinking about like creating something that's higher performance, but still leaving enough flexibility to be able to actually work with whatever the next algorithmic paradigm looks like.

Starting point is 02:39:56 Yeah, I mean, one part of what we're doing is a very deep code design. So we're not saying, here's a transformer and it's immutable. We're not looking at it like that. The way you define the neural network itself is something that we're going to change actually link to the hardware.

Starting point is 02:40:10 And if you look at biology, there is no difference between the definition of the neural network and the physical substrate. They're one and the same. So the dynamics, the physics of those neurons actually gives you the algorithmic richness that you have. So we want to move more than that direction.

Starting point is 02:40:26 It's not this abstraction on a digital machine, which is built out of numerics. All the machines that you highlighted just then, which all have a wonderful purpose, by the way, all work on the same fundamental abstraction. They all use bits to represent numbers, and those numbers represent weights that then are manipulated in some way to build a neural network. We're actually talking about building those sort of effective numerics on the physics, on the fundamental properties. Do you have a view on, you know, we were reflecting on this Mark Benioff post earlier in the show.

Starting point is 02:41:00 He was kind of making the argument that LLMs are going to commoditize, that, you know, it's like hard disks and you're going to be able to move them around. and there's not a lot of value or not a lot of lock in at the, okay, I got this bag of weights layer. And I'm wondering if you have a view on how the foundation model landscape will evolve over the next five years because I want to know what your customer mix looks like, but you can kind of tie that together however you like. Yeah, I mean, Transformers are something that works really well today. We're able to scale it up.

Starting point is 02:41:32 We're able to prove out that we can build synthetic systems that learn. I think that was enormous in the last several years, right? And actually, not just that can learn, but can be useful. So now it's about, okay, well, we can define what useful is. Now we have these quality metrics for what a token is. That actually has opened up a whole new world to me in a sense where I can say, well, as long as I can supply that quality, I don't really care if it's a transformer. I don't really care what it looks like. And if I can do so very cheaply and very fast, that's all I care about.

Starting point is 02:42:03 So now we're really getting to this almost pure play supply of intelligence. that's what we want. So now if that's the abstraction, it's not about a transformer. It's about intelligence and I can define that with some metrics. Okay, now I can supply that in new ways. And so that's the way we're looking at it. Like, I'm not looking at the world today. I'm looking at the world in four or five years in terms of a product.

Starting point is 02:42:25 Yeah, can you, like, what do you, what do you, can you break down more specifically what you expect your like kind of first initial customer cohorts to, to, to, you know, look like. Yeah, I mean, the way we're going to see all of the stuff expressed is really much cheaper per token cost, like one 500 cost per token or something like that. And I think our cohort is really, at first, we're going to go out for Data Center as the fundamental rollout. But anyone who's using intelligence for an application at that point, they're going to actually have probably strict requirements on what the capabilities of the models are, what there, what the token quality is defined as. So when we have that metric, we can build toward it.

Starting point is 02:43:09 We can say, okay, well, GPT-8, or whatever it is at that point, gives me this. And is there a way I can recapitulate that in the kind of neural network we're defining? And the answer should be yes. And so we will have kind of strict specs in a way to build toward in terms of what that intelligence token really means. And so it's really our customer cohort will be anyone who's using AI as part of their application. And we want to supply that faster, cheaper, and eventually in a more ubiquitous way. I mean, personally, if I really want to look out there like 10 years, I think robotics are going to be huge. And I think robotics require us to solve this problem of bringing energy down drastically to actually have more processing on the bot itself.

Starting point is 02:43:52 That's how we're really going to open up this world of autonomy. And so personally, I think that's where I'm really excited. Maybe that's just the kid and me excited about seeing that future. But I think that's where we're going to go. What, yeah, I mean, I know you talked a little bit about the size of the seed round, but can you help me understand a little bit more? $475 million is a ton of money. Is there like a bill that you see yourself paying where you're like, yeah, I'm going to, I'm

Starting point is 02:44:18 going to spend $200 million on this? Or is it more like you're just going to be operating at the level of like, okay, we're burning $100 million a year on a lot of top engineers and AI scientists? and like it's just a big organization early, and you're just kind of jumping to growth stage company scale as fast as possible? Not really that. So I don't anticipate the company becoming huge

Starting point is 02:44:44 in terms of people. I call it 80 to 100 people. Okay, well. I've set in a state for a while. Yeah. But much like a frontier lab, like a frontier lab spends a bunch of money on GPUs to iterate. Yep.

Starting point is 02:44:55 Like training GPT5, maybe 30 million bucks, but you've got to follow a bunch of dead ends. Totally. And you do that with GPU. compute. Our version of that is actually building hardware. So we're going to be fabricating chips. We're going to be trying different things. It's very hard to model some of this stuff, actually, numerically. And we're going to do our best to model it, scale up that modeling actually on GPUs. But at the end of the day, you've got to

Starting point is 02:45:16 build it, you've got to test it, and you got to see if the whole thing works end to end. And we're going to do that a whole bunch of times. Yeah. How are you planning to actually use existing Gen. gen AI, kind of the existing gen AI stack to accelerate your own development of an alternative to traditional, you know, GPUs? Yeah, actually, that's a great question. It's really interesting. As we start clicking into, like, the tools for designing hardware, they're still pretty far behind. You know, automation of digital logic has been done to some degree as almost like coding tools. But on the analog side, this is still relatively new. And we are seeing.

Starting point is 02:45:56 now companies that are saying, hey, I can explore the design space of different circuit architectures for you using AI. And, you know, we said, great. We want to either work with them or buy them. I don't know, whatever it is. Whatever makes sense for us. But yeah, we're trying everything to use the latest techniques to accelerate our exploration of the space. That's the way we're looking at this is how fast can I iterate? How fast can I find working solutions? That's our main goal right now. It makes sense. What have you learned from racing that you've applied? to company building and what have you learned from company building that you apply to racing? Oh, boy.

Starting point is 02:46:34 I think racing, when you start getting into like truly competitive events, you start to see that every like 10th of a second matters. When you're coming into the pit lane, for instance, you have a pit lane speed limiter, right? So I don't think people even know this, but when you, when you come in, you hit this pit lane speed limiter and when you drop below the pit lane speed limit, you hit the throttle and it pegs it at the speed limit. You basically want to optimize that so you don't even lose a tenth when you come into the pit lane.

Starting point is 02:47:01 You basically hit the brakes at a certain point, slow down and are at this pit lane speed. You don't want to slow down ahead of time and kind of ease your way in. Every tenth of a second matters. And that may be in even a 24-hour race. And I think that's true with the company. Like, don't waste time. Every moment matters. You may make bad decisions.

Starting point is 02:47:18 That's okay. Figure out how to back them out. Move as fast as you can. If you hired the wrong person, fix it. And so I think the main thing I learned is that, Time is your biggest enemy always. Love it. Well, we normally ring the gong for $475 million,

Starting point is 02:47:34 but we should also ring the gong for 265 points in the Ferrari Challenge. There you go. Yes, I'll take it. They're both massive accomplishments. But we're big fans of the Ferrari Challenge around here, so it's a big deal for us. Thank you so much. MSA is where it's at, really. That's the big stuff.

Starting point is 02:47:52 Oh, cool, cool. Yeah. Yeah, we were out in thermal a couple weeks. ago. And it was a first time for both of us on the track. And it was a life-changing. It was like a new, like, okay, this is the hobby. This is the hobby. This is the hobby. Here and there. Awesome. Anyways, congrats on on the announcement and everything and the whole team. Sounds like an incredible place to go work right now. Yeah. I'm sure I can't wait to have you back on. And what a murderer's row. You got Andreessen, Lightspeed Sequoia, Lux, DCVC, Future Ventures, Jeff Bezos,

Starting point is 02:48:25 Databricks and many others. What a fantastic way to kick off a new business. Congratulations. Awesome. Have a great rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon. Go bye.

Starting point is 02:48:37 Let me tell you about wander.com. Book of Wander with inspiring views. Hotel Grated Many's Dreamy Beds, top tier cleaning and 24-7 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better folks. That's right. Our next guest is already in the Restream Waiting Room. We have the founder of Eon.

Starting point is 02:48:55 Welcome to the show. How are you doing? I'm doing great. Thank you very much for having me. I'm very excited to be here. Thanks for very excited as well. We wanted to get you on last week. We were on the road.

Starting point is 02:49:07 And yeah, very excited to chat. Thank you very much. Introduce yourself. Introduce the company. We'd love to get, you know, how you're positioning it. And then I want to go into the funding round, some of the implications of this. But kick it off with a little bit of an introduction for us.

Starting point is 02:49:23 So sounds great. As always, I always start by saying my. My name is Ophir. I'm married to wonderful Julia and father to Rome, objectively, cutest baby ever born. Wow, that's a great intro. I love it. These are the important stuff. Less important stuff.

Starting point is 02:49:36 I started a few companies before. Actually, four companies, to be exact. Wow. Most recent one was a company called Cloud and Do, which we sold to Amazon on January of 2019, grew the business to a billion-dollar business doing migration and disaster recovery to the cloud. Let's give it up for migration and disaster recovery in the cloud. Doesn't get enough credit. It doesn't get enough credit.

Starting point is 02:49:58 It does not get enough credit. That's right. I agree. I'm actually this, I always say I'm this crazy guy who really love data, data, data regression, data protection. Yeah. We leave this all so long. And both me and my co-founders. And while we were there, we saw an opportunity that we just couldn't resist.

Starting point is 02:50:15 All those companies really moving to the cloud, especially around COVID and later on. And all the incumbents in our space, they were born on premise. So we decided to start a company in cloud backup. You could say cloud backup, isn't it solved already like in 1981? Yeah. Well, we figure out that as companies move to the cloud and become very significant, they have a very big problem actually managing their data. Imagine the secondary storage.

Starting point is 02:50:43 Backups like tapes. These are companies storing their most precious data for a very long time, and they can't access that. So we started as a backup company. I said, I'm just crazy person. starting a non-AI company in an AI world. Yeah. But then you know what?

Starting point is 02:50:59 It hit me. AI is such a strong compelling event, which are strong tailwinds that we just had. I mean, look at the C-Ga-N Western digital stocks. They're through the roof this year. It's crazy. Exactly. It makes sense because everyone's going to need to store a lot more data. Everyone's creating so much more data.

Starting point is 02:51:17 So much data is created all the time. And you always need the data. And I don't know who is going to win the computer wars. Yeah, yeah. Open AI, Anthropic. a data brick snowflake in any area. What they do know, no matter what's going to happen,

Starting point is 02:51:31 data is going to be the enterprise mode. And we're here to help them unlock this data. We're automating cloud backups. Sounds boring, right? Making it into useful, accessible assets. Yeah. Statelics. So you can backup all your data

Starting point is 02:51:47 in a very seamless, easy way, but then you use it. For example, to train models. That's all the hype, right? Yep. And analytics and B.I. Wait, so no tapes? It's on drives? No tapes.

Starting point is 02:52:00 As it seems, we're software-only solution. Okay. Only in the cloud. Yeah, cloud-borne. This is what we've been doing. Yeah. We're able to build us. On a public cloud or on your own cloud?

Starting point is 02:52:12 Because I imagine that one of the benefits of backups and one of the, one of the key things that people want to buy when they're backing up data is, hey, I'm already tied to AWS. I don't want everything on AWS. I want, I want security in case AWS goes down. I want to back up somewhere else. How are you thinking about that? Perfect. So, and we've seen quite a few outages in the last few weeks, right?

Starting point is 02:52:32 And what we're saying with democratizing your data, it's your data. What is AWS, Azure and GCP, great clouds or other clouds, we're making sure you can extract the data, make it portable between clouds, making accessible, performance, browserable and searchable. You can search and browse all of your data and all of your history immediately. And because we're building our own source. software only, it's not going to cost you a dime. It's actually cheaper than building it on your own or using existing cloud technologies to do that.

Starting point is 02:53:04 So we're trying to make sure that we give you an easy button as a customer to just enable the use of all of your data, making accessible to if you want to run snowflake or data bricks or Redshift or BigQuery of anything that you want on your data, that's great. We are here to make sure that you're unable to do it on all of the data that you have. have and all of the data that you had in the past. But how can you possibly be cheaper than the big hyperscalers, the big public clouds? I imagine that, you know, Microsoft, GCP, Azure, AWS, like they're buying so many CGA drive, so many Western digital drives.

Starting point is 02:53:43 How can you possibly compete on price? That's an unbelievable question. Actually, I don't want to just win on price. I just want to make it easy for you. So what we're doing, even though we're still in the cloud, using cloud building blocks, object storage, GCS, S3, Azure Blobs, etc. Got it. We're building in a very different way.

Starting point is 02:54:02 Sure. And actually building a more efficient, it's called a version of cloud snapshots that purposely built for backup and data retrieval. Okay. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Take us through the news. What's the funding news? I want to ring the gong for a data storage company.

Starting point is 02:54:20 Thank you very much. I'm also very excited. So we raised 500 million dollars in total. $300 million just in this round. Really excited, led by El Ad Gil, who is not only an amazing investor, he's also an amazing human being. And we got to raise money.

Starting point is 02:54:38 What's it like being a fly on the wall when you and Alad get together and talk about data? Well, El Ad is simply unbelievable. You know, he's one of the most humble people I've met. And at the same time, brilliant, brilliant, and so well connected. I don't think I've ever seen an investor that everyone likes so much.

Starting point is 02:55:00 And I have the privilege to choose amazing investor. I have Sequoia and Lightspe and Greenox and Bond Capital and likes of Omri Kaspie who are just amazing, amazing investors. And Elad Gill is very unique. Actually, we got preempted by 16 VCs and I so wanted it to be Elad, really. And when a lad wanted to, I'm going to lead my round, I was in New York.

Starting point is 02:55:29 He flew from San Francisco. He came to my office. He basically wouldn't live until I signed. And to be honest, I really, really want to do that because I got to know the person, not just the investor in the last few months and a year, he put a small chain in a previous round. And honestly, we just fell in love, not just myself, my other co-founders as well. That's incredible. When we had the chance, we had to do it. And I'm really, really happy, excited about it.

Starting point is 02:55:56 He wrote the book on High Growth. I know, I know. Absolutely. Absolutely. And I'm really thrilled. We have now a lot of capital in a time when we can now plan ahead. We don't need to think about the macro. We don't need to think whether everything's going to continue to be rainbows and unicorns.

Starting point is 02:56:18 Do we going to have a downturn soon? Who knows? But we know we can build a strong, fundamental business that's going to be here for a long time. This is hilarious, but it's a great take. It's a great way to build your company and your business so that you can take advantage of these tailwinds, but also survive the headwinds.

Starting point is 02:56:39 And congratulations to you. That's great. This is what we need. Exactly. We're here for a long time. Yeah. Forever. Forever.

Starting point is 02:56:47 Is this your, you want this to be. You've done four companies prior to this. Do you want this to be the last one? You just want to just... Last one. Last one. All the way to the IPO and beyond. Yes.

Starting point is 02:56:56 That's my goal. Fantastic. Incredible. You have incredible energy. I'm excited to follow your journey. And you're welcome on the show anytime. Thank you so much for coming on the show. I'm really excited.

Starting point is 02:57:09 I love your show. Amazing. Thank you very much. I'm going to get back and tune to that. Thank you. Thank you. We'll talk to you soon. Have a great rest of your day.

Starting point is 02:57:16 Thank you. Goodbye. That is worthy and valuable. We were debating. What is worthy and valuable? That feels like a company. That's the worthy and valuable company of San Francisco. He's keeping...

Starting point is 02:57:28 That's what you need to do. I'm glad he's keeping all of our data backed up. Yeah, yeah. It seems extremely valuable. He's that guy. Well, we have Gorkham from Fall in the Restream waiting room with some massive news. He's back. He's back.

Starting point is 02:57:45 He's back. On the show, you know him. You love him. makes all of this possible. Every time you're on, I'm like, he's going to be back on. He's going to be back on. How you doing? Merry Christmas.

Starting point is 02:57:57 Merry Christmas. Thank you so much. Good to be back in the Temple of Technology, Capital of Capital. That was one more. The Fortress. The Fortress of Finance. The Fortress of Finance. Yes.

Starting point is 02:58:08 Thank you so much for coming on the show. Give us the news. What happened? Yeah, today we announced our $140 million dollar series D. It's led by Sequoia and meaningful participation from Kleiner Perkins and Nvidia. It's the Sequoia of venture capital firms. We had an incredible year this year. We have some of the biggest advertisers, retail platforms, design and product utility apps and movie studios, generating images and videos on the platform.

Starting point is 02:58:42 And we atex our revenue in the whole year. This is our third fundraise of the year. We announced our CISV earlier this year in the beginning. You got one more? You're going for the four Pete, one a quarter. Come on, come on. We got two weeks. You got two weeks.

Starting point is 02:59:02 A couple of weeks. It's remarkable. What's been the biggest driver of revenue growth? Has it been uptime, you know, being a one-stop shop? Like what messaging has really resonated the most and driven the most growth for you this year. Yeah. So beginning of this year, we thought we were going to write the AI video wave for the whole year. That was accurate. It was an incredible year for AI video. But what was surprising to us is actually rise of image editing. Like image models existed a couple

Starting point is 02:59:40 years ago. Like that's how we started our business. But image editing, one of the first good models came out around May and now it's a bigger part of our business than AI video that was surprising to us so we thought we were going to ride a big wave but another even bigger wave you know collided

Starting point is 03:00:00 with it and our business group is that surprising because I mean when you think if it's very it's very common place now to like one shot a great image output and it's so much harder to one shot or even get a great video

Starting point is 03:00:16 output. You can get a decent video output. So I feel like it makes sense. Everybody's making images all the time. It's like it has it's like when you think about in the workplace, there's just so many different use cases, even, you know, for consumers. So I think it makes sense. And it really is just exciting because that's the image models feel like they're so good now. Everybody's so used to seeing it and getting kind of like faked out by an image now because you can't tell the different video. You can still usually tell. But if you're It feels like maybe in a year from now, it'll be the same situation where it's like, I just don't know what's real. I don't know what's fake. It's all confusing. 100%. Video models are still very hard to work with still. Some really talented AI creative people create great content with it, but it hasn't really reached mainstream. I would say it takes even more effort to create an ad with a video if it's like high quality than actually shooting it yourself. But what happened with image models is going to happen with video. And the user experience of video models are going to get much, much better. And we'll have even more mainstream adoption of these models. I'm pretty sure of this. And that's what makes me really excited because we went so far.

Starting point is 03:01:34 It's a lot of image models, a lot of image editing, just a glimpse of video models. And this is all going to get better and better. And it's going to reach complete mainstream. all the studios, all the retailers are going to make use of this technology. How? Oh, sorry. Yeah, just what are you seeing? Like, how are you thinking about 2026 from a model progress standpoint?

Starting point is 03:02:00 You know, Nano Banana was obviously, you know, massive leap. I'm expecting we'll see even more activity in 2026, but I'm sure you have somewhat of a preview just given your guys' positions. in the market. Yeah, exactly. So usually one of the frontier labs pushes the boundaries. In this case, it was Nana Banana twice this year. It was like their first release and now this very recent Nana Banana Pro release.

Starting point is 03:02:30 But very quickly, either the open source community or labs from China, people catch up. There are a couple reasons for it, to be honest. Once they see there is demand for it, once people know exactly. what to build for. It's usually easier for them to get motivated and catch up, but also some of the tricks, some of the research tricks leak, and people use them and train these models. The model market for generative media is a lot more fragmented than LLMs. There's so much choice. There's so many models that are different and that are better at different things, that the best model keeps changing. Even Nana Banana was dethrone a couple times.

Starting point is 03:03:14 throughout the year. Right now it's considered the best image image editing model, but I don't know how long that's going to last. What are you excited for in terms of capabilities for next year? Do you have specific like benchmarks that you're tracking or even like functionality? Like I've noticed, I have one that's the where's Waldo test where I will ask you to generate a full wears Waldo and even Nanobanana Pro still can't quite do it. It'll either put Waldo right at the center or it'll make two Waldo's. And those images in the children's book are really complicated. It's not just a portrait and there's maybe not enough training data on the internet. But that's one test that I've been tracking. Do you have your own internal benchmark or whatever you think is

Starting point is 03:04:07 like next? The thing it can't do right now. Yeah, I have some of my favorite prompts that I try with every single model, but I rely on our team. We have great creative people in the team. They spend all their living hours working on these models. They are usually ones coming up with very creative ways to utilize. One thing that changed with Nana Banana is you can actually feel the model has more world knowledge than other models, and that opens up other door. I don't know, have you seen people are now adding some web.

Starting point is 03:04:43 search and creating like newspaper articles on the fly, things like that. That is, there are very creative uses of these models. And on the on the video side, people really want more controllability. They want character consistency. They want scene to scene consistency. And some of the releases that happened recently, Kling, for example, is one of the better video models out there. They've announced some editing capabilities, which are pretty remarkable.

Starting point is 03:05:13 And all of that is going to get easier to use. And once people have more consistency with the scenes that are creating with video models, I think that's going to make a big difference. Yeah, I always see those videos of a little yachty walkout. That is character swapping. And it's always really obvious what's going on. It's rough around the edges. But it's still hilarious because it's a great meme.

Starting point is 03:05:36 And I definitely would predict 2026 is the year that that that little yachty walkout just looks 100% real. 100% next. Next fundraise announcement. I can't wait. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We need to do that for you. We need to get your body scan a little bit.

Starting point is 03:05:53 You know, we've never asked this question, but you might know the answer. You know why it's called Nanobanana Pro? Where do you have any idea what the origin is of the names? So they had a code name, Nana Banana. Usually when they put these models into the benchmarking websites, they usually had a codename. There were blueberry was one code name. Red Panda was another.

Starting point is 03:06:19 And this was Nana Banana, and people recognized the model like that, and they kept it. That's the story I know. I don't know if there's another version of the story. But I guess the other question is, obviously it is a code name, but where the code name come from?

Starting point is 03:06:35 Google has a long history of using fruit, although so does opening eye with strawberry, but all the Android iterations were like ice creams and desserts for a long time. But the question is, yeah, is what's the nano doing there? Because I want the full banana. Give me the nano banana. Give me the gigab banana. I want the gigabana.

Starting point is 03:07:01 The biggest, XA banana. The mega banana. I want the biggest banana model. Don't give me the shrunken down nano one. I want the gigab banana. Yeah, I think it's using the, smaller Gemini model as the LLAMP? As the reasoning.

Starting point is 03:07:16 That's why it's nano. But it's nice. But it's funny. It's funny to have fun with. Anyway, thank you so much for coming on the show. Congratulations in the massive news. And thank you for supporting us all year long.

Starting point is 03:07:27 And you got a if you 8X again next year, you got to 8X the number of fundraisers too. That put you at like two fundraises. Two fundraisers a month, two fundraises a month, 24 for 2026. We'll see. That'd be great. But congratulations to the whole team, and we're very excited for you guys.

Starting point is 03:07:45 Have a good one. Great to see you. Cheers. Bye. Well, we have our next guest already in the Restream waiting room. We have Pedro from Brex, the founder and CEO of Brex, announcing a massive partnership. We're very excited to welcome him to the TBPN Ultradome. Welcome to see you, Pedro.

Starting point is 03:08:04 How are you doing? How's your day? Merry Christmas. I'm great. How are you guys? Thanks for having us. Fantastic. We're in the Christmas spirit here. We are in the Christmas spirit. We got bells, very, very holiday themed, holiday themed shows for the rest of the year. Yes. But it's great to, it's great to meet. Yeah. And please take us through the news today. Oddly, I'm actually a fifth third customer. So I want to know how this applies to me. Yeah, you get a Brex cartoon. No, so in all serious, thanks for having me.

Starting point is 03:08:36 So today we're announcing a pretty big partnership between Braxton Fifth Third Bank. It's a $5.6 billion commercial card partnerships where effectively, wow. Massive. I love that. I love that. I love that in my office. Fantastic. And we're really excited just because, you know, when you look into across all the U.S.

Starting point is 03:08:58 and we just see, you know, tens of thousands of businesses out there, there are still 98% of business that are still using legacy corporate cards. There's so many, there's so much opportunity in just automating how these teams run their finances. And Fifth Third just has this massive distribution and trust. And of course, Brex has the financial services and the software and the AI that just helps these businesses automate so much of their manual work and that are allocated capital. And they're really exciting. Yes, sorry to interrupt. I'm curious when you guys started working on embedded products, because if you go back to 2021 and 2022, I'm sure there was a bunch of companies that or at least a few that got. created to go and pitch some of these same banks and say, hey, you're corporate, I don't know if

Starting point is 03:09:40 people remember, anybody that remembers SVB, like corporate cards back in the day. I had a few of those. Their UI was truly insane. It was like, how is this? How is this Silicon Valley Bank? You had like a different login, too. It was crazy. It was truly the most heinous product experience of all time. And it was like, this is Silicon Valley Bank. We're supposed to be the tech. But, but yeah. But yeah. At some point you said like, hey, like, like, like, We'll go compete here as well. Yeah. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:10:09 So for us, it's really been driven by a lot of just customer demand. So we started this with Navon and Zip, where they really saw a lot of the value in bringing financial services and card workflows into their software. Sure. And we're really excited about it because it's just a one plus one equals five situation. Both products are coming better together. Yeah. And then as we thought about the rest of the U.S., and, you know, there's, you know, 8% of businesses are now, you know, accessible through his partnership, for example, in the U.S., which is a really exciting thing in the commercial space.

Starting point is 03:10:38 And the really big thing is how do we make the bank's product materially better? And when we bring the technology and what we've done on the card side, and especially the financial infrastructure that we build from scratch, like we don't run on Stripe issuing or Marquetta, we just build our own rails from the ground up that enables a partnership to actually take place. So it's how does it actually work? Is it fully white labeled or does somebody in first third get kicked out? No, no, no.

Starting point is 03:11:04 it's actually a fully a fully Brex branded card. And the reason is because Fifth Third wants to have someone that's actually responsible for delivering this great customer experience on the card and implementing the software and rolling that out to their customers. And what they do really well is the banking side, right? It's the lending side. Is the banking? Is the relationships?

Starting point is 03:11:25 And then, you know, the thousands of branches and just the thousands of distribution partners that they have on their side and the tens of thousands of customers they serve are, all effectively relying on that and already have that relationship. And now they get a Brex card, which you're really excited. Yeah. Sorry, you mentioned you're not using Stripe for what was it. Issuing. Issuing.

Starting point is 03:11:46 Does Stripe or, do, are there other fintechs that do play a role in, like, your supply chain? Or are you, like, down at, like, an ACH later? Like, just, like, what's kind of going on under the hood? Yeah. So what we've done since 2018 on Brex's. is we actually build our own financial infrastructure from scratch. Okay. So we actually went straight to the metal MasterCard

Starting point is 03:12:09 and built everything from the ground up. And because we vertically integrated the whole thing, this created this pretty big advantage on everything that requires, like, their metal capabilities on financial services. So, for example, global, right? We operate in over 200 countries today with local cards, local issuance, because for us, it's just a matter of saying, hey, MasterCard, we're going to issue in Europe or Brazil or India or Mexico,

Starting point is 03:12:32 and just flipping a switch for them. because we are our own issuer. We run our own stack. And then fifth third was another example where we said, Fifth Third wanted to issue a fifth third issued card. They wanted to be their name on the card. It has to be under their license and master card and all of that. And for us, it's just effectively bringing in a new bank live,

Starting point is 03:12:51 which we have a few banks on the back end, and including Fifth Third, of course. So for us, it was sort of pegging back on this advantage that we've had over many years by building our own rails from the ground up, which is really... How are you thinking about... we've had a bunch of different teams and companies on the show building like new layer one blockchains for payments they're touting like speed default global all these things we've had a bunch

Starting point is 03:13:16 of stable coin issuers and business i'm sure in conversations that you have you know you're you're being pitched these companies for to be an infrastructure provider i'm sure your your investors are like maybe asking you sometimes should we should should should should there be a breck stable you know who knows Sure. I'm sure these questions are coming up. How do you think about kind of the layer one landscape and you're operating a global business today? And so I would, I would, you know, your opinion on some of the stuff in terms of the real value of it, I feel like it would carry a lot of weight. Yeah. So the way we think about it is maybe a little bit different, which is we think that first, like, stable coins and blockchain general have a, you know, tremendous application. And we're really excited about a lot of the work there. We, you know, we announced support for stable coins. this year, when it comes to our banking product, and you can pay the card to stable coins. We've done a lot of that. But when it comes to global, right, and just supporting customers in a wide variety of

Starting point is 03:14:14 countries, really the challenge there is the on-ramp and off-ramp, right? And specifically, you know, the Fiat last layer for, you know, an employee to reimburse you in, you know, Indian rupees or Brazilian Reyes, and then for you to settle the card in that currency and do all that locally. And unfortunately, stables don't help you that much on that last layer. And the whole actually a misconception about the way a global product works is a lot of the value comes from remaining in local currency. Because what you're trying to do is minimize FX, right? Even on stables, like, FX has a cost just intrinsic to it.

Starting point is 03:14:49 Sure. And a lot of what we're trying to do is keep you entirely in RIAs. So your revenue in RIAs in Brazil are settling your expenses in Rai's or in Eros or in GVP or whatever currency you're in. So a lot of the infrastructure is to enable this most. multi-currency and multi-entity operations versus having to do the effects and a lot of the benefits that they will typically bring to the table. So our use case is a little bit different. I'm sure that's disappointing to people building global payments at L-1s. And they're like, wait, you're supposed to need this.

Starting point is 03:15:19 I mean, we do use it internally for some stuff. But, you know, I would say the value prop for our customers is we stay in local currency as much as possible because it just minimize so much savings and effects. Yeah. What are the other like keys to success? Obviously, you, you know, you have experience internationally, but you're like a YC company. I think I think of Brex very much as like an American company. But then in terms of winning internationally, what does it take? What, what have the lessons been? What are the, what are the interesting insights or what were some surprises that, that cropped up on the journey? Yeah. So I would say the biggest one is that when you go into like true global, like true enterprise, the

Starting point is 03:16:04 amount of requirements and specifically on both the card and expense management site is unbelievable. So you have these rules, for example, local per diems. So when you are in Europe, there's these rules that if you have a German employee traveling to London is one set of rules. If you have a London employee traveling to Germany, completely different set of rules. And then if they rent a car, there's different mileage requirements. And then all this information is something you have to be aware. of and, you know, of course, we use a lot of the car data to make that easier and we can solve

Starting point is 03:16:33 it automatically. But probably the biggest challenge overall is just building the core financial infrastructure because this is something that, you know, we're literally the only issue in the U.S. that actually had done this from scratch. And just the amount of time and energy that we dedicated into building these, you know, core financial services infrastructure is pretty tremendous. But, you know, it gave us a pretty big advantage when it comes to these enterprise customers. And you know, today we have maybe three or four years ago, I think, we've had five or maybe 10 public companies in Brex, and now we have 250 and growing. So that's an exciting thing.

Starting point is 03:17:04 That's amazing. Awesome. Well, congrats to the whole team on the deal. Congrats to Art. Yes. Love Art. Chief business officer, correct? CBO.

Starting point is 03:17:14 CBO. He was coming in to defend Keith Rboy last week was talking some smack about the BD people of the world. Does Open AI have a chief business officer? Because they just got a CRO. they have a CFO and they have two CEOs. I think they're missing a CBO. It's an unrated title.

Starting point is 03:17:33 You got a lockdown art. He's going to get pushed. Arge's taken. Don't listen to that. Awesome. Well, yeah, congrats to the whole team. Congratulations. Congratulations.

Starting point is 03:17:42 Yeah. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. We'll see you soon. Have a good one. Merry Christmas. Goodbye. Thank you.

Starting point is 03:17:48 Merry Christmas. The ho ho ho ho. The ho ho really gets me every time. I've been thoroughly enjoying it. I love that, I love the idea. idea of country-specific per diems, because if I had a German employee, I would want them to know that they are not an American employee, and they are second-class citizen in this organization,

Starting point is 03:18:11 and they will not be dining out on the company dime and a nice... At least the U.S. dollars. They will be eating sauerkrautton in the gutter for $5. That's brutal. The most American, the most American American, John Kugan, everyone. Yes, yes. Well, speaking of travel to international countries, if you go to Saudi Arabia, you can now booze it up, I guess. You can drink alcohol. Saudi Arabia is loosening alcohol rules, letting non-Muslim foreign residents earning over $13,000. You can buy alcohol. So you have to check, you have to do a whole checklist. Daniel's line is great. He says, this is such a galaxy-brained idea. It could only come from a mind totally disconnected from normal material reality.

Starting point is 03:18:55 It's hilarious. It is interesting. It's like, hey, if you want to do, you know, drugs, if you want to consume alcohol, that's fine, but you have to be putting up numbers. Yes, yes, exactly. You have to be putting up numbers, right? And so, you know, if you're underage. Essentially, cannabis should be like $10 million a year on your W2. I was about to say.

Starting point is 03:19:16 But you know what happens then? So you have everyone in America, you know, you turn 17, 18, 19, you're not 21 yet. you get a fake ID to try and buy some booze. You're going to need a fake W-2 as well. Fake your income statement. And you're going to need to do all these crazy things where you have all these like circular deals. Bringing your fake W-2 to the corner liquor store just being,

Starting point is 03:19:39 and they're just like looking through every line. In Saudi Arabia. So you're in Saudi Arabia. And let's say you're making $1,000 a year, USD, or you know, you're making $10,000 royals. You need to go and set up a circular contract where you're a 17-year-old, somebody, I pay you 10,000, you pay me 10,000.

Starting point is 03:19:57 And then we get our... Exactly, we do that a couple times. Then we're earning enough to go by alcohol. We can go get drunk together. That is crazy. That is truly galaxy brained. We're out galaxy braining them. We're going to galaxy brain all the way to the top.

Starting point is 03:20:13 We do have to hop on with Riyadh soon. Let's close out with anything else that's on the timeline. Jordy, why don't you take a pass? Let me know if there's anything that we mix. Fluid stack raising apparently $700 million out of $7 billion valuation. Okay. Built on Google Back leases for new AI data centers, according to Rohan Paul. Fluid stack, a real player on the semi-analysis.

Starting point is 03:20:44 What's it called? Cluster max. Cluster max. And so not surprising here. interesting that potentially you've got Leopold looking to lead the financing. So dipping his toes into privates. Well, I mean, they have cluster max over at 70 analysis. They have inference max.

Starting point is 03:21:06 Are they going to do looks max? Potentially. They could. It looks like, you know, looking at some of our officials, it looks like we might be developing a strategic looks maxing reserve. I mean, there are lots of people that would comment on looks maxing and try and rank like the hottest men in tech. I personally would only,

Starting point is 03:21:24 I would only regard semi-analysis's opinion as credible on that, on that issue specifically. It must come from them. Host here from Bucco, he says, Hocktan acquired VMware, had coffee chats with the employees where he made fun of them, inspired half the business.

Starting point is 03:21:40 So a little excerpt here. Earlier last year, Broadcom CEO, Hawk Tan decided to host what he likes to call a coffee chat with employees of VMware, the software giant that Broadcom CEO had recently purchased. for $84 billion. The company-wide meeting was Tan's effort to introduce himself and answer questions from those

Starting point is 03:21:56 employees about life at the semiconductor firm. At the time, VMware's Palo Alto campus sprawled over 18 buildings and 100 acres of delicately pruned gardens, an outdoor amphitheater, and a turtle pond. Employees enjoyed nice HR perks, including child care, marital counseling, and an annual $1,000 well-being allowance for anything from dumbbells to Xboxes. A thousand dollars on Xboxes? That's like one Xbox. every three months.

Starting point is 03:22:22 So many Xboxes. You can actually only spend this on Xbox. When Tan opened the discussion up the questions, a VMware employee asked if Broadcom provided such benefits. Tan seemed surprised. Why would I do any of that? I'm not your dad. He replied according to three people in attendance.

Starting point is 03:22:41 We need a trading card. I'm not your dad. Over the next few months, Tan fired about half of VMware's 38,000 employees. That is wild. He also stripped down the campus, We know this. Selling all but five of the buildings.

Starting point is 03:22:53 At the remaining offices, Tan had the espresso machines removed. Okay, well, that is a question because they need to stay caffeinated. I got to hold the line here. What are they doing? I mean, I'm okay with, I'm okay removing espresso machines.

Starting point is 03:23:03 Do you think they're doing white monsters instead? If they're doing white monsters, then I approve of it. But if you're going to have a decaffeinated workforce, that just makes no sense. That's just not elite performance. He says the article says, somewhat against the odds.

Starting point is 03:23:17 The turtles were allowed to stay. So do you think he's putting espresso in the turtle pond? I imagine he had a he had like a massive broadsword and was above the turtle ready to let it all go. And he's like, oh, I can't do it. And he drops the blade and it falls to the ground clanks him and he says, oh, you live to fight another day, turtle. You're too important here. It's got to make in TPUs. Completely different vibe from when Pat Gelsinger was getting a VMware attack.

Starting point is 03:23:49 tattoo on his arm or temporary tattoo at least showing his love for the company that he just bought while he was at Intel. Hawk's hand clearly cut from a different cloth, but clearly also putting up big numbers. Broadcom's been on an absolute run. Alexis Ohanian says, been worn in y'all. AI everywhere, dead internet. Real is increasingly scarce online and thus increasingly valuable. The wired article called AI Slop is ruining Reddit for everyone. This is my, this has always been, there's such an incentive.

Starting point is 03:24:19 for companies and people to just, like, create narratives on Reddit, because AI is training on Reddit. And the natural end state is, you know, it's 99.9% bots and just a handful of humans. So stick to the group chats, I guess. Yeah. In other news, Netflix has launched Best Guess Live, a new Netflix mobile game show,

Starting point is 03:24:42 where guessing the right answer based on five clues, could win you thousands. Dylan Aberscott on our team. In this economy? Come on. Let's get those. Oh, they're willing to spend $80 billion to get $40 billion per Warner Brothers. They should give you some IEP.

Starting point is 03:25:01 You should be able to win Porky Pig. I get Foghorn Leghorn. Or some of the masculine film. I want the Steven Segal rights. I want the rights to hard to kill for sure. Dylan, Abbas got on our team says, can I copy your homework? Yeah, just change it up a bit so it doesn't look obvious.

Starting point is 03:25:17 you copied, of course, he worked at, you know, a competitor to this, or the precursor to this. He created game shows. He created game shows with HQ trivia, which you should know. Rune says a lot of people think CEOs are on Coke or stimulants because of how hyper they look in interviews, but I think the unfortunate truth is that natural amount of energy is extremely unequally distributed. I was going back. Yeah, I was going back and forth on this one. Obviously, it's a subtweet of cart.

Starting point is 03:25:42 But I think he's, I think he's just like that. I think he's just, I think he's just high energy. And I think that, so the carp clip looks crazy as a single clip. But I actually watched the full interview. And there is a flip on it, which is maybe more negative, which is like that was a question he was squirming on. Like that was an uncomfortable question. And I notice it on this show all the time.

Starting point is 03:26:12 If we ask someone a question and they're like not that happy that we ask that question, you'll see on their body language they'll cross their arms. And crossed arms is a, is like a well-established body language for like, I'm closing myself off versus like, if I'm hanging out here with you, I'm just having a good time. If I'm sitting up and... Yeah. Yeah, and so there's a world where you're literally, they call it being in the hot seat. They just needed a better camera tracking, so...

Starting point is 03:26:39 Yeah, they call it being in the hot seat. And when you're in the hot seat, you're kind of bouncing around. And yes, it can look like you're on a lot of stimulants. maybe you're on some caffeine, maybe you're a little wired, but also maybe you're dealing with a serious interviewer, Sorkin, across from you, on a stage. There's nothing to help you at Deal Book. The crazy thing is you keep seeing people's legs all funny, and it's like because you're just in a chair, there's no desk there, so there's nothing covering you up. So it's like you're very vulnerable. There's this big wall. Has somebody done like, everyone's looking at you. And also, it's not just a

Starting point is 03:27:14 private conversation where it's like you and Sorken are just hanging out. out here having a normal conversation. Like there's a couple people. All of our friends are here, right? Imagine it's like all of your rivals are in the, all of your rivals. All your haters are watching online and all your rivals are in the building, in the seats right there, looking at you, answer tough questions.

Starting point is 03:27:32 I don't know. It just feels like this is not that crazy of a reaction for a high energy guy who's kind of quirky, who's in that position and is asking, is answering some tough questions. I don't know. But Tyler, figure out how to use AI to run an analysis on every guess we've ever had to see who and just rank their body language from most trustworthy to least trustworthy. Yeah. I did like Gabriel here. He says, he's quote tweeting someone who's like, there's zero chance that these hyper animated CEOs are just naturally that way.

Starting point is 03:28:05 Kind of the counter to what I was just laying out as an argument. And Gabe says, cocaine expert here. These CEOs do a lot of cocaine. feels like a very 20-25 moment somehow. And I agree with that. I agree with that. It is a very weird, weird thing. Well, in less weird headlines,

Starting point is 03:28:22 we have some fantastic news from Lulu, who has raised a $40 million. Give me the mallet. Give me the mallet. All right, now you go for it. Too late. Too late. Congratulations to Louis.

Starting point is 03:28:34 This photo goes hard. It's a good photo. It's proper paparazzi. She got caught by the Papps. The Paps got her. This is a throwback photo from when she was working on the Microsoft Blizzard deal. I mean, the fact that she's a board member at Activision is just crazy at the time, 80 billion dollar company.

Starting point is 03:28:55 You know, people talk about Lulu like she's some like, you know, small time PR advisor for startups, but it's like she was on the board of a 80 billion dollar company. She also intentionally flies under the radar. Yeah, well, we're blowing up here now. Sorry. Sorry about it. Anyway, at least it's at the end of the show. Lisan Al-Gaiib says,

Starting point is 03:29:18 the Normies are waking up on TikTok. They're saying chat chitputee is washed. John says perplexity is goaded. Hard to say. They're ranking them. They're all over the place. Claude greater than Gemini. Never be washed.

Starting point is 03:29:33 You don't want to be cooked either. Yes, we've learned this. Don't be washed, cooked, or chopped. From our. If you're a language model that wants Gen Z adoption. Margenzi employee who is currently both chopped and cooked. He's not here. We hope he gets, not you, the one who's sick, who we hope gets better soon.

Starting point is 03:29:53 But we didn't learn any lingo from you, Tyler. Bucco says, what people get wrong, opening eyes, code red is bullish, not bearish. It's an admission. They were overeating, getting beat and needed to focus. That's what great teams do. Now, here's the challenge. Code reds are really hard. It's easy to say, yes, hard to say not right now.

Starting point is 03:30:08 All lies on how they execute code red. Skeptical overeating seems to be embedded in the culture. Same obviously likes to dabble in a lot of things. Every code red is followed by a Baja Blast. That's right. I think the next model should be Baja Blast. Go back to the crazy names that make no sense. Stop it with the 5.2 tomorrow.

Starting point is 03:30:31 Wasn't 5.2 supposed to come out today? That was, if you looked at Polly Market, that's what it looked like. It's now moved to, I think, by December 13th. It's like 90%. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyway. But also, this is a separate topic, but I need to put you in the truth zone. There actually are spots on the moon that are perpetually in sunlight.

Starting point is 03:30:48 Oh, really? You figured it out. The rims of certain craters. Oh. The inside of them are always in darkness. The rims are sometimes in the crater is always in the sun. Yeah. So that's where we need the data center.

Starting point is 03:30:59 Okay. Well, how much crater rim is there? Is there enough crater rim to actually build a lot of data centers? If there's not, you could probably nuke the moon, make more craters. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. I still have trouble

Starting point is 03:31:14 visualizing this. Doing like the celestial body physics math in your head is very, very difficult. In other news, this person on X. Kew.

Starting point is 03:31:25 Nazari says they got their hands on some North Korean cigarettes. They did? They got them in a DPRK stayed on restaurant

Starting point is 03:31:32 from a waitress who was from Pyongyang. Basically impossible to find any background info on them online. They taste

Starting point is 03:31:39 and look. 100% what is that juge I have no idea but I like the packaging the packaging goes pretty hard it feels

Starting point is 03:31:49 does but I can't support it because I don't support North Korea and this is a good place to end the show Sag Harbor Capital says if this niche

Starting point is 03:32:00 Scandinavian brand doesn't ship my overcoat in the next 24 hours I'm going to blow up the Nord Stream 2 pipeline that's really funny you tag a brand too.

Starting point is 03:32:12 He does wear? Oh, oh, wait, Bergen-Bur. I need an overcoat. I was trying to just go around to York last week. Oh, God.

Starting point is 03:32:18 Just my suit. And I was kind of cocky going into it. I was like, oh, John, nice, nice coat. You're going to be outside for two seconds. Two seconds.

Starting point is 03:32:28 Yeah, you're like, in succession, Kendall Roy doesn't need a code because he's so rich. I didn't say that. I didn't say that. I think Dylan said that.

Starting point is 03:32:35 Dylan said that. But I was like, yeah, like, we're not, we're not that rich yet. whatever's going on in succession. We went for a half-mile walk

Starting point is 03:32:44 and I was devastated. We did. But it's nice when you're in a coat. It's fun to walk around in New York City. Also, it wasn't that cold, but you were getting destroyed. We got to pull up last post of the day. Scoot says the concept of getting sent to rehab by the Taliban because you and your cousins

Starting point is 03:33:00 wanted to Larp as the peeky blinders in Afghanistan. And the account here that says reportedly four people in the Harat province were detained and sent to rehab by the Taliban's virtue ministry for imitating characters from British crime series Peaky Blinders and parading around the city resembling the vintage gangsters, an act seen as violating local values. This, it's, I have no idea how to process if this is real at all. Hope says rare Taliban L.

Starting point is 03:33:29 This is crazy. I mean, they look, they look fantastic. They do look fantastic. I feel like this would encourage, potentially they could open up a tourism market. for people, kind of like the Disneyland for Peaky Blinders enthusiasts. It's such a weird phenomenon to happen here. Also, like, what does it being sent to rehab look like in Afghanistan? They're just like...

Starting point is 03:33:52 No more peeky... Is it like Alcoholics Anonymous? You're like, first step, I am powerless to Peaky Blinders. I'm a Peaky Blinders impersonator. You have to come, you know, I've got to come clean. You have to say, I'm an alcoholic. You know, I'm a Peeky Blinders impersonator. and I am powerless.

Starting point is 03:34:12 And you need to say the, what is it, the Lord's Prayer? Something like that. Anyway. Anyways, thank you for being with us today, folks. We love you dearly, and we will see you tomorrow. See you tomorrow. Fantastic evening. Goodbye.

Starting point is 03:34:27 Cheers.

TBPN - Ellison's Counter Offer, Chinese H200s, Data Centers in Space | Aaron Ginn, Matt Kalish, Emil Michael, Blake Scholl, Naveen Rao, Ofir Ehrlich, Gorkem Yurtseven, Pedro Franceschi

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