TBPN - Elon's Trillion Dollar Pay Package, Breaking Down the State of AI | Katherine Boyle, Mikey Shulman, Immad Akhund, Jordan Castro

Episode Date: November 7, 2025

(00:17) - Timeline in Turmoil over OpenAI (09:36) - Fannie & Freddie May Buy Tech Stakes (11:27) - The Mansion Section (18:23) - Elon's Trillion Dollar Pay Package (28:06) - Breaking Down the State of AI (55:55) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (01:11:07) - Katherine Boyle, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz leading its American Dynamism fund, discusses the transformative speech by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, which outlines significant reforms in defense acquisitions. These reforms prioritize commercial-first technologies, streamline the procurement process, and encourage competition from startups, aiming to modernize the military and enhance national security. Boyle emphasizes the positive impact these changes will have on Silicon Valley and the broader defense innovation base, marking a pivotal shift in defense technology integration. (01:29:44) - Mikey Shulman, co-founder and CEO of Suno, an AI-driven music creation platform, discusses the company's mission to democratize music production by enabling users to generate songs through text prompts, eliminating the need for traditional instruments or production software. He highlights Suno's evolution from a Discord bot to a web application, emphasizing the shift from a tech-savvy early user base to a broader audience seeking creative entertainment. Shulman also addresses the integration of AI in music, noting that while professionals increasingly adopt Suno to enhance their workflows, the platform primarily serves individuals who love music but lack formal training, fostering a new behavior of accessible music creation. (01:56:49) - Immad Akhund, co-founder and CEO of Mercury, a fintech company offering banking services tailored for startups, discusses Mercury's recent milestone of achieving three years of profitability, emphasizing the importance of building trust with customers by ensuring financial stability. He highlights the company's proactive measures, such as providing accelerated FDIC insurance to safeguard client deposits, especially in light of the Silicon Valley Bank crisis. Additionally, Akhund shares insights into Mercury's strategic use of AI to enhance back-office operations and customer service, underscoring the company's commitment to innovation and efficiency. (02:14:20) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (02:36:51) - Jordan Castro is an American novelist and poet known for his works "The Novelist" and "Muscle Man." In the conversation, Castro discusses his novel "Muscle Man," which follows Harold, a discontented literature professor who finds solace in weightlifting, exploring themes of masculinity and academia. He also reflects on his personal experiences with fitness, the impact of physical activity on mental health, and critiques the media's portrayal of masculinity. TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.comFigma - https://figma.comVanta - https://vanta.comLinear - https://linear.appEight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpnWander - https://wander.com/tbpnPublic - https://public.comAdQuick - https://adquick.comBezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.comPolymarket - https://polymarket.comAttio - https://attio.com/tbpnFin - https://fin.ai/tbpnGraphite - https://graphite.devRestream - https://restream.ioProfound - https://tryprofound.comJulius AI - https://julius.aiturbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.comfal - https://fal.aiPrivy - https://www.privy.ioCognition - https://cognition.aiGemini - https://gemini.google.comFollow TBPN: https://TBPN.comhttps://x.com/tbpnhttps://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

You're watching TBPN. Today is Friday, November 7th, 2025. We are live from the TBPN Ultradome, the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the Capital of Capital. Time is money to say both. These use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. Ramp.com, baby. The timeline is in turmoil over Sam Altman again. What were we calling it, backstop gate? Backstop gate continues unabated. John, the timelines. Termole over Sam Altman. Every single day this for the first time. Every single day this week and last week, it is nonstop open AI what will happen.

Is it over? Is it the end of the global economy or will we live to fight another day? The main point of debate is over, you know, Sarah Friar's comments that she used the word backstop. She backtracked on her backstop comment. and said, I wasn't asking for a backstop of Open AI equity. I was advocating for this American manufacturing plan. Then Simfer Satoshi is going pretty hard.

He says, here's an Open AI document submitted one week ago where they advocate for including data center spend within the American manufacturing umbrella. They specifically advocate for federal loan guarantees. And Simfer Satoshi says, Sam lied to everyone. Let's read the specifics. Yes. The specifics are AI server production and AI data centers. Broadening coverage of the AMIC, which is the American Advanced Manufacturing Investment Credit, will lower the effective cost of capital, de-risk early investment, and unlock private capital to help alleviate bottlenecks and accelerate the AI build in the United States. Counter the PRC by de-risking U.S. manufacturing expansion. To provide manufacturers with the certainty in capital, they need to scale production quickly.

the federal government should also deploy grants, cost-sharing agreements, loans, or loan guarantees to expand industrial base capacity and resilience. Okay, so loan guarantees. So what's happening here is Open AI a week ago, and everyone can go and read this letter, which is publicly available on their website, was making the recommendation that the government should effectively treat data centers or AI or token factories, put them in the manufacturing bucket, which would qualify them for similar incentives that traditional manufacturing,

defense tech, etc. And I don't have a problem with asking the government for a handout. I think that that's actually like best practice. It's actually in your shareholder's responsibility. Like you have a fiduciary duty to ask the government for as much help as possible. I think that everyone should go to the government. right now. Hey, if I'm paying 50% tax, how about we take that down to 20%? How about we take it down to 0%? Like, you have every incentive to ask your, your person in Congress and your senator, the people in

Washington to do everything they can to support your mission. This has worked out in the past with Elon and Tesla. It didn't work out in the case of Cylindra. But like, the game on the field is if there are taxpayer dollars that are moving around the board, you want to get those into. the industries that are aligned with you. And so the thing that people are taking issue with is that in the opening of his message yesterday, he said, we do not want, we do not have or want government guarantees for Open AI data centers. Yes. And that seems to conflict with the message, the letter that they wrote a week ago that is still up on their website.

Yes. So if it's, if it's, what is it, what is it, what, loan guarantees to expand in. In the chat, and the X-chat is taking the initiative, just sent the admin a safe to sign. Un-cap note. You literally can do this now. There's a sovereign wealth fund. Like, it sounds crazy, but, like, they're ripping checks.

Like, this is the new economy. And, you know, you can be upset about it, but you also have to understand, like, what is the game on the field? You can always advocate for, like, we should change the game. Like, we shouldn't be doing this. Like, I would prefer a more,

of a free market economy. But in the world where we're not in a free market economy, you want to have your company win, right? That's just rational. That's just actually playing the game on the field. Now, it is weird optics to talk about the game on the field. That's something most people don't like doing. And that's very odd. Because when you say, oh yeah, this is a one hand washes the other situation. Or, oh, yeah, this is a situation where a backstop will allow us to be more aggressive. That feels like the banker saying, oh yeah, I knew that the government was going to bail us out in 08. So I was intentionally underwriting loans that where it was somebody's fifth house and I knew that they couldn't pay it. I wasn't asking about their job. I wasn't asking

about their income. I wasn't asking about their assets. And so they, I pushed it way further. And I made a lot of money. And I got out at the top. That's what's really upsetting to Americans. because the bailout comes in, the backstop comes in. Yes, it makes sense to rationally do the backstop in that moment. But if some people get out early and then other people get cooked, that's a really bad optics. That's really, really bad optics. Which is why I kind of expect a lot more of the narrative

and to shift towards subsidizing and incentivizing, bringing new energy on time. You were talking about that yesterday. Which directly benefits the labs and anybody building a data center. But it also feels very much in America's interest broadly, right? And it benefits, it theoretically would benefit the average American, too. We were listening to Ben Thompson this morning. It wasn't on Restream, one live stream 30-plus destinations,

multi-stream, reach your audience, wherever they are. We were listening to the Stratory RSS feed. Hopefully, Ben goes live at some point in Restream. That'd be awesome. By the way, I think the chat has discovered that, yes, this is a turbopower. This is one of two. I sent the other one to Simon. Oh, that's amazing.

But you can see. It looks great, especially with the green background, the color grade. The production team is on point today. Let's hear for the production team. So, yes, I agree with you on the energy front. I think Ben Thompson, his point today. And fabs. Yeah, and fabs too.

Yeah, his point today was like, was like, Open AI needs to be crystal clear about the position that they're in, which is that they are the hottest company in the world. There is unlimited demand for their shares. They could be a public company. They could go raise more private capital. They need to be on the opposite end of the risk curve from the stuff that's like, uh, no one really wants to invest in an American fab that might lose money for a decade. Like, like there is truly much less appetite for, yeah, let's go. And, build a nuclear power plant that might take a decade and who knows. Like, when you think about the things that make money in the short term, it's SaaS, right?

AI for SaaS. Just go and transform the legacy business with some AI sprinkled on top and just start printing money. Like, this is what works. You know, people's concern for government-backed data center lending is that you're lending against chips, which have a really fast depreciation schedule. Yep. We don't know. There was some pushback.

I made the comment, hey, maybe that these things don't depreciate as fast. There was some pushback in the comments. I think everyone kind of agrees that these things depreciate quickly. And so energy infrastructure is the place. Yeah, and if you look at right now, it's core weaves corporate default swaps are now sitting around 500 basis points,

jumped up dramatically. And so this is one of the leading neocloughs, 500 basis points? 5%, 5%. Yeah. They jumped 5%? No, they jumped from like, I think, like 2 to 5. Oh, okay.

I try to find it somewhere in the stack. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But sorry, I don't mean to like ask particular stats, but clearly like people are worried about this. Yeah, and so, and again, this is for a leading neocloud, right? We, semi-analysis cluster max, the updated version came out yesterday. They are only in the platinum. Neocloud in the platinum T.

and people are worried about them, right? Yep. Potentially, you know, having some bankruptcy risk. And so if you start doing, you know, basically government guaranteed data center lending, you could get in a situation where there's a bunch of new data centers that come online that really don't have a clear pathway to ROI. Yeah. And it just incentivizes the entire stack to just get, you know, really exuberant, right?

And again, going back to Sarah Fryer's. interview on Wednesday. She was, uh, she felt the market was not exuberant enough. And I think a lot of people disagree with that, right? There's a lot of, uh, there's been a lot of insanity, uh, this year, silliness. Uh, maybe we don't need more, but we will see. The other news that was, uh, interesting out of today, uh, the director of the federal housing finance agency, William Pult says Fannie and Freddie eyeing stakes in tech firms. Bill Pult, the director of the federal housing finance agency, said that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are looking at ways to take equity,

stakes in technology companies. We have some of the biggest technology in public companies offering equity to Fannie and Freddie in exchange for Fannie and Freddie partnering with them in our business. Pult said Friday during an interview at a housing conference. We're looking at taking stakes in companies that are willing to give it to us because of how much power Fannie and Freddie has. have over the whole ecosystem. Yeah.

This Wall Street Journal event is just so many articles came out of this. The Wall Street Journal did a fantastic job, bringing a ton of people together. This is where that Sarah Fryer quote came from. It's also where the Corweave CEO was on stage. You were mentioning Corweeve earlier. And the Corweeve CEO, the headline in the Wall Street Journal is, Correve CEO plays down concerns about AI spending bubble. And the quote is from Michael, if you're building something that accelerates the economy and has fundamental value to the world, the world will find ways to finance an enormous amount of business.

And he went on and said, if the economy doubles in size, it's not a lot of money to build all those data centers. And so there's a lot of folks to, you know, addressing bubble concerns right now. He says, it's very hard for me to worry about a bubble as one of the narratives when you have buyers of infrastructure that are changing the, the economics of their company, they are building the future. And so if you are, if, if the products are, you know, effective in growing the economy, then all of the investment is worth it. There's a fascinating mansion story we should get to that's actually related to this. Good. So there is a, before we do, let me tell you about Privy, wallet infrastructure for every bank. Privy makes it easy to build on crypto rails, securely spend up wide-level wallet, sign

transactions, integrate on-chain infrastructure all through one simple ab? Yeah. Did you get a whole new Soundboard? What's going on with the soundboard? I did. I did. Thank you. Really? Like, do they swapped them all out? Michael. Do you still have the horse? I still got all the classic. Got all the classic. But I'm working with some new material. Working with some new material. I like the sheesh. Can we get the vine boom on there? Is that on there? I don't know. Boom. The thud. That's a big one. Anyway, Casa Encantada is a 1930s estate in Los Angeles. It's one of the most important homes in the 20th of the century. In 2023, it was also briefly the most expensive home

for sale in the United States with an ambitious asking price of $250 million. This is in Bel Air. So it's a Bel Air property. It was sold in the foreclosure auction after the death of its longtime owner, financier Gary Winnick. So it's an 8.5 acre property. He bought it in 2000 for $94 million. He bought it in the year 2000.

No way. Do you know who this guy is? Gary Winnick. he had something to do with the last bub. He did have something to do with the last bub. It's one of the craziest stories. So, is it... To satisfy the debt, which is now grown, blah, blah, blah, blah.

So basically, like, it's a 40,000 square foot house built in the 1930s, counts hotelier, Conrad Hilton, and Dole Food billionaire David Murdoch, among its former owners. It's located right next to the Bel Air Country Club. golf course. It has a seven bedrooms, has a swimming pool tennis court. It's awesome. Anyway, Gary is perhaps best known as the founder of Global Crossing, which built fiber optic cable, a fiber optic cable network across the world. The company made him a billionaire, but it imploded did they have a little bit of dark fiber? A little bit of dark fiber. A little bit of dark fiber.

imploded in the early 2000s under the weight of massive debt. Casa Incantata, Gary's primary home went on the market in June of 2023, five months before his death. Now it's asking $190 million. And they kind of move on from there. But is there ever a lesson? He was somewhat of a global businessman. He was the headquarters were in Bermuda.

You know this? I didn't know that. I wonder why. I wonder why. I mean, it might literally because it insulates the assets in America. Like that is one thing that you can do if you don't want to have to give up your lovely home post-bankruptcy. You want to be able to get liquidity before the bubble pops. That's the lesson here.

Sell the shares before the top. Buy low, sell high. That's the phrase that we live by here. Was there anything else, Tyler, that came out of your deep research. research report on Gary Winnick. Did you, the chance? I mean, so let's see. How do you tell this? He also started Pacific Capital Group in 1985. That was kind of the precursor. So he was set up to to actually marshal all the debt to do the big infrastructure building. He had been a global businessman for a while before. Okay. Nice. Let's give it up for global businessmen.

Let's give it up. Yeah, what a wild, wild story. We're hyper, hyper local. businessmen. We like to do our business right here in the Ultradome, but we do. Got to give it up for them. Also in the mansion section, which we should continue on. But first, let me tell you about cognition. The makers of Devin, the AI software engineer, crush your baglog with your personal AI engineering team. You have a new neighbor, Jordi. You have a new neighbor. So Tom Petty apparently lived in your neighborhood in Malibu, California. The late Free Fallen Rocker had a personal music studio. deep lore. Please.

I saw Tom Petty. I believe it was the first ever. Who headlined the first ever outside lands? Was the first or second? He was living in Malibu in a $11.2 million house, 8,744 square feet, seven bedrooms. That has a music studio. The buyer is Stephen Slade Tien,

a psychoanalyst and author according to people with knowledge of the deal. TN didn't respond for a request for comment. I wonder if he'd want to get beer sometime, hang out, maybe go surfing, go for a walk on the beach. We should reach out to him for comment on... Okay, so I was at the first ever outside lands. Really?

How old are you? I thought you were... It was basically the first ever, like, major concert experience. I didn't realize. And so Tom Petty headlined on Saturday. This was in August of 2008. And that was my first time smelling cannabis. And I kept, I was there with my friend and his parents.

And I kept asking, like, his friend's parents, like, what is that stinky smell? It's so stinky. We can't get away from it. Yeah. And very, very memorable. Very memorable. That's amazing. Do you know where this is?

2.6 acres above Escondido Beach. Is that close to you? Yeah. It's a few minutes away. It's a gated property. Escondido Beach is the most underrated beach. It was Petty's home for decades before his death in 2017. Lead singer of the Heartbreakers purchased the property for about 3.75 million in 1998.

Petty turned his guest house into his personal music studio with soundproof rooms for recording music. And said Levi Freeman, who's putting up. There's a one-bedroom guest suite. Seems like a very nice start. He was from Florida. He shunned the spotlight offstage. He's a member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, best known for songs like American Girl,

and I won't back down. What a lovely little house. Well, that's always fun. Anyway, we should move on to our top story. Do you want to go through the Elon, the Elon Pay Package thing a little bit? I had two questions for you on that, and then we can go into our MAG7 review.

Is that sound good? Let's do it. Okay. First, let me tell you about Figma. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. I really enjoy this graphic package we got. This is great.

So, Elon's trillion dollar pay package is done. It's signed. It's approved. I'm sure it will be contested in the courts. It's always contested in the courts. but the Wall Street Journal is a very nice little breakdown of how it works. They have a nice little infographic here I can share. And it kind of shows this is top-tier.

This is what technology podcasting is all of that. Pull that up. Pull that up. Yeah. So basically, Elon could get one trillion in Tesla stock if he hits all these different tranches. And so it's actually not that many shares. So he's worth half a trillion now, but he also owns 414 million Tesla shares outright, got another award in 2018 of 300 million shares. And this next award is 424 million across 12 tranches.

So it's not like they're giving him twice as much as he already has. They're just kind of giving him a little, like basically what he already had. They're giving him the same amount again. And there's a bunch of things. that he has to do. He has to get the market cap really, really high. And then there's also these like qualitative operational goals, or I guess they're quantitative, but 50 billion in EBITDA, 20 million cars delivered, one million robots sold, one million robotaxis in operation, 10 million full self-driving subscription. Now, some of those are obviously more gamable than others. What's the

definition of a robot? If he comes out with a really cheap robot and he sells a bunch of those because it's more of a toy, does that really fulfill the goal? Or like, what's the, you know, million robotaxies in operation. What's the definition of a robotax? Yeah, what qualifies? Is it just a Tesla that is enabled? Yep, and I turn on FSD and my friend rides in it for one day. Is there anything for actual rides? There's 10 million full self-driving subscriptions. Yeah. And so some of these are more gameable than others, but the market cap really isn't. How many full self self-driving subscriptions are there today? I saw, I looked that up. It's somewhere between like one and three million right now.

So he definitely has to like triple the size at least. Robotaxies obviously goes from like zero to one million because there's barely any on the road. He hasn't sold any robots. So a million would be entirely new robots. He's obviously delivering a lot of cars. And on the EBITDA front, 50 billion in EBITDA company did like 13 last year. So that's that's a huge increase in EBITDA. I mean, 50 billion and EBIT does a lot of money.

But he's, you know, it's not 20 X where he is right now. And neither is the market cap. Like he's, he only has to take the market cap to 8.5. trillion and Tesla is already worth a trillion. So it's it's within, you know, striking distance. The market cap is now around 1.5 trillion, actually. So my two questions were one, like, it's going to be weird to live in the world of the trillionaire, like, but we are getting close. Like that's going to happen, not just within our lifetime, like definitely within the next decade. This sets him up to be the first one, but it's going to happen. And I wonder how that's going to reshape

our culture, like the world in America, because when I had this realization that when billionaires became so prevalent and prominent, there was a lot of heat that was taken off the millionaire. Like if you're just like a guy, yeah, I have an HVBillionaires. A heat shield. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Like, yeah, I'm a millionaire. I have a boat. I go to Baspero shops.

But I'm not getting protested because I have a million dollars in my house and boat. And isn't it like one out of ten Americans is a... Yeah. Yeah. So the millionaire became more accessible. And the billionaire became the thing that the society scapegoats for all the problems. Approximately 9.4 to 9.5% of American adults are millionaires. Yeah.

And... But my question was, what do you... Like, what happens to the billionaire when trillionaires come in? Because, you know, like Bernie Sanders and the whole... There's a whole crew that say, like, billionaires shouldn't exist. Every billionaire's a policy failure. Well, like, what happens when you have to say, like, well, like, trillionaires are the real policy failure, but billionaires are also the policies failure.

And millionaires were like kind of okay with, but it's not great. It's like, it becomes much more complicated. But at the same time, it definitely, like, if Elon is the only trillionaire, it's going to be really, really easy to target him and be like, he's bad. He's a trillionaire. Can he be more targeted? I don't know. Yeah, maybe max it out already.

But I thought that was interesting. And then the flip side was, what does this mean? for other companies. What does it mean for Sam Altman at OpenAI? Can he run a similar playbook? It's clear that he had a ton of soft power during the Open AI coup. Could he go to the OpenAI for-profit board and say, hey, if Open AI IPO is at $2 trillion, I want 20%. If Open AI moons to $10 trillion, I want 50%. Like, how extreme can Sam get? We know that Sam runs a bit of an Elon playbook. They were in business together. They co-founded Open AI together. So clearly they learn from each other. I wonder what Sam Altman can do similarly. And then I also wonder what will happen at the

garden variety unicorn. If you're just the CEO of a $5 billion company and you're just kind of hanging out there and you say like, yeah, I had 30% of the company when I started. I've been diluted down to five or 10. But I like this company and I want to get it up. Like what if, What if I say, hey, could I go to the board and say, okay, we're at $5 billion now. If I get us to $50, will you double my equity position? And how would shareholders treat that? How would Sequoia treat that, our founders fund, or Kleiner or A16C? Like, how would the growth stage venture companies, the venture capital firms,

deal about that? So, I don't know. Any reactions to that stuff? I think there's a sentiment, like there's, you know, any venture-backed founders, like, going to be hyper-conscious of dilution, right? There's a sense that it's like one way. Yes. Right? It just goes down and down and down and down. And I think the right way for founders to think about that is like, okay, you're not actually, like, no one's taking your shares unless you

decide to sell them. Yes. Your job is just to make the share price go up. And there's going to be more shares issued over time. Yeah. But if you just make the share price go up forever, it doesn't really matter. And you can also buy back. You can also, you know, get buy back like Drew Housden. Yeah, Drew Housden is the best example. And then give more share, create new shares if you want to get your percentage ownership way down.

Yeah. Like if you want to go to zero. More like, if you want to bail. I mean, yeah, we, we need to do, we need to do, uh, uh, an analysis of the most deluded CEOs in the public markets because if you look at some of the IPOs from the last 10 years, like some of the guys that are still hanging around running these companies have, have sold out, you know, sold down so much.

And this is what makes Larry so admirable. Yeah, because just buy back, buy back, buy back. And he's the second richest person, $300 billion. It's remarkable. By the way, I think Oracle is like fully round-tripped now from... It happens. Well, what about the... So, yeah, I mean, the question is like,

on what timescale do you think this happens? Like, Jordi, do you think we'd actually hear the story of somebody, a CEO, founder, maybe past their vesting cliff, maybe one of their co-founders has left, because I think about that a lot, where it's like, okay, yeah, there were like two or three people, they were basically equal. They did their full, like, four-year earn-out,

but then there's clearly one that's, like, still there grinding for the next decade. Like, they kind of do deserve more. It's not that crazy. And yes, there is just the stock buyback don't sell, but is there a world where someone like Drew Houston goes to the board

and just says, like, I think I can buy back. this and I want the pay package to do it and I'm going to be in the office nonstop and I'm going to go more time. I think that happens all the time. Not to this degree. No way. Not okay, not to that degree. Yeah. Not even the headline number. Not even the headline number. Just in this sense of like we're going to dilute everyone like five or 10 percent if this happens. Like a trillion on eight point five is is serious dilution for the rest of the shareholders. But if I'm holding at one point five trillion and I'm like, you're going to take me that $8.5 trillion?

Like, I'm totally in for 10% dilution. You're going to 5x my shares. Like, I'm in. But what's interesting is that we just haven't seen other CEOs pull that from the Elon playbook and say, I'm doing it too. Was it Kimball or someone else saying, like, almost no other CEOs would take a deal like this because it's so ambitious. Yep.

And so I think it's healthy. Yeah, no, no. And I think people are offended by the headline number. Totally. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, I mean, obviously, I'm very pro this. I think we're all pro this. That's not the discussion.

The question is, like, how widespread does this become? Does it become memetic? Is it like every C.E? Because there's a lot of people that are just like, oh, Elon did it this way? I want to do that way, you know? And I'm wondering how much it actually spreads. Anyway, we'll have to keep monitoring it. We'll also have to tell you about Vanta.

Automate compliance, manage risk, and accelerate trust with artificial intelligence. Vanta helps you get compliant fast, and we don't stop there. our AI and automation powers everything from evidence collection to continuous monitoring to security reviews and vendor risk. What else is in the timeline? There's so much in the timeline. Should we do our mega cycle review? Let's do it. I got the laser pointer. We got the laser pointer. Our good friend Tyler Cosgrove has put together a slide deck for us that tries to help map the Mag 7. Really, I call it the TBPN top 10. The top 10. Well, technically nine. There's nine? Well, no, no, there are 10. There's 10. There's 10. We'll see, well, one of them maybe

shouldn't be there. No, no, no, no. No, there's actually 10 because it's the Mag 7 plus Oracle. Oh, Oracle. I forgot Oracle. Yes, you did. So it is the TBPN top 10. The 10 most important companies in AI loosely. The Mag 7 plus a few bonus ones. And we're going to try and take through and look, you're got to hit the horse. You got a hoof. And so we're going to try and go through the various companies and rank them based on how AGI-pilled they are and how much they need AGI. Is that right? Yeah, basically.

So let's pull up the actual scales. There's two axes. Let's go to the next slide. So basically on the horizontal, we have how AGI pilled they are. So I feel like that's fairly self-explanatory. You kind of believe that AI will become something like, It can produce the median economic output of a person. Yes, yes.

And there's a few different ways to understand if somebody believes in AGI. It could be the rhetoric of the CEO or the founder. It could be the actions of the company. Yeah, yeah. Actions speak louder than words. And is there anything else that could lead someone to show that they believe in AGI? I guess it's mostly just the actions and the words, right? I mean, those are the main things that you can kind of do as a person say or do things.

We will, well, we have it then. We will be judging them by both their actions and their words. Yeah. So then on the vertical axis, we have how much they need AGI. Okay. So I think this is maybe a little harder, so I want to qualify this. Yeah. So, I mean, this doesn't necessarily believe that you have this kind of sentient, you know,

AI that's as good as a person. Yeah. But I think it more so in this context just means that AI will continue to become more and more economically valuable. Yes. where you can kind of sustain, you know, building more and more data centers. You can do more and more Cappex, you know, that's kind of stuff. Yeah, there's a little bit of like, how much will this company be transformed if the AI wave plays out well? If AI doesn't play it play out well, how chopped, how cooked

are that? Exactly. That's a great framework. Yes, and then also, yeah, if we, if we flash forward, nothing really changes, total plateau, total decline in token generation or something, is the business just continuing business as usual. Okay, so who are we starting with? So let's start with Sam Allman. Okay, Sam Alman. Where is he on this? So Sam Alman, I think this is a pretty reasonable spot.

Sure. He believes in AGI, right? He runs kind of the biggest AI company. He also needs AGI. Because if you imagine that, you know, if the models stagnate, right, they have a lot of CAPEX, they need to fulfill. If models stagnate, like, what are they going to do? Maybe they can, maybe the margins somehow work out.

But you're probably not in a good spot. if models get worse or if people start using AI less, if you're saying all one. But he's also not in the top, top corner. Okay. Right? And I think this is, you can justify this through a lot of open AIS actions.

You see stuff like SORA. You see maybe the erotica. This is not very... Who's running the laser pointer? I'm running the laser pointer. Okay. You want him here? Maybe put him down here.

Okay, explain that. Explain that. Okay. I think that more and more, at least in the short term, Open AI looks like a hyperscaler. They're kind of a junior hyperscaler. And I think their actions are more, you know, I think that Open AI, a lot of people, you know,

want to say that they're bearish on Open AI and current levels. But ultimately, when you look at how their business is evolving, they seem to me like they'd be fine if the model's plateaued. Yes, but, yeah, I feel like the, I feel like the mood on the timeline was much more slide Sam to the left, doesn't believe in AGI. There was that post about like, if, if Open AI really believed in AGI, they wouldn't be doing SORA or they wouldn't be doing the erotica thing. Like all of those were very much like needs it, but it, but kind of accepts that it's not coming and so stop believing it. Yeah. So I think in response to

Jodi, I think, um, because it's not like this, the vertical axis is also just about like if it's going to continue to be economically, you know, economically useful. So if So if people just stop using AI in general, or if the kind of revenue stops accelerating or any of this stuff, I think open eye will be in a bad spot regardless of the models actually getting much better. Like if they just make the models much more efficient to run, you could say that's not very like a GI-I pilling because the models aren't getting a lot better. But that's still like...

But I'm just saying like if there was no more progress at all. Yeah. Like we never got a new model for many of the labs. I think that opening eye would add ads. They would add commerce. They would increase descriptions. They would make agents a lot better. But I mean,

they would enter, the one point four trillion in commitments. Like that is hard to justify if it's just the business today, just growing like it's growing because it's just like it's good. No crazy breakthroughs. Like just you really,

you're going to play. You're laying out the bull case now. They're playing. They're playing. crazy. You're laying out the bull case saying, oh, if they just add ads, they're going to be able to hit the $1.4 trillion, no problem. I'm not saying, I'm not saying they can pull back on a lot of these commitments.

Sure, sure, sure. They don't, like, I don't think these are like going to end up being like real liabilities that the business is just cooked. Okay. They can't hit them, right? So I'm just saying, like, I think there's a shot they have. They could, you know, when, when they talk about having success in. consumer electronics, right, which is something you talked about yesterday. Like, they don't need,

like, I think they can probably build a really cool device. Maybe it could be competitive with, you know, if there's, if it can be at all competitive with an iPhone, like that they could be fine without AGI. Right. Okay. Bull. Also getting into, like, I guess, like, let's get some other people on the board so that we can see where people. Yeah, I think it's useful to be relative because exactly. These are not quantitative numbers. Yeah. So next we have Dario. Okay. Whoa. Dario is up here. Dario is kind of, when you listen to what Dario is saying, he is, you know, he's extremely a GI-I-pilled.

Yes. Right? This is kind of the reasoning why he's so anti-China, right? Because he sees it as an actual race. This is going to see what intelligence. It is a national, you know, security. Totally. It's a problem if China gets there first.

What is that new sound cue? I don't think Tyler has sound effects. What is it? UAV online. UAV online. Okay, I like that. This is the UAV. We should give this UAV aesthetics for sure.

This is good. Okay, continue. But there's also a sense that he needs AGI. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because if AI stops becoming, if it stops growing as fast, and you imagine that things kind of settle where they are now, open AI is definitely in the lead. Sure.

So you need a lot of continued growth for Anthropic to keep kind of making sense economically, I think. Okay, yeah, yeah, sure. Who else is on here? So I think next is Larry. Larry Ellis is Larry. Larry's in kind of an interesting spot here. So this is kind of a weird place to be where you don't believe in AGI but you need it. Okay.

How did he wind up there? So I think... You're probably wondering how I ended up in this corner. Record scratch, freeze room. So I think this is how you factor in. There's kind of the personal rhetoric and then there's the actions of his company. Sure. So when you listen to Larry speak, he doesn't seem the type that believes in some kind of super intelligent God that is going to come.

that's going to, you know, birth this new thing, and humanity will rise. But then you look at Oracle. Has anyone found his less wrong username? Is he on there regularly? I don't think, you know, I don't think Larry's reading Gwern. Okay, got it. But then, but you look at Oracle and they are, you know,

they need AI to work. Okay. They are, maybe they're levering up a little too much. Or maybe not enough, depending on how aege-I-pilled you are, but, you know, he's not very a-gy-I-pilled. Exactly. Exactly. It's kind of hard to square, but...

It's a bold bet. Yeah, this is a unique spot, I think. It is. This is a unique spot. He's off the grid. Okay. Who's next? So let's see, who's next?

Okay, Satya. Okay. There we go. I think this is a fairly regional spot. Yeah. Obviously, there's, you know, there's some sense where he's slightly EGI-I-pilled, or maybe more than slightly. He believes in the power of the technology. Yeah, I mean, he's very early on Open AI.

He thinks that AI in general will become very useful, but maybe it won't become, you know, super intelligent, maybe it's not going to replace every person. It's just a useful tool. The quote I always go back to is him saying, like, my definition of AGI is just greater economic growth. So show me the economic numbers, and that will be, it's like, it's a, it's a very practical definition. I think people see him as very reasonable. He's not getting over skis. Yeah, I like him in the center. I like him in the center of the grid somewhere. That seems like a real. He's also, you know, if AI doesn't work out, I think Microsoft is in a very good spot. It's going to stick around. You know, they're not.

you crazy over investing open AI. Yep. They have a nice share of it. Yeah. They'll write some code. If Open AI works out, he'll do very well. If they don't work out, I think he's also, he's doing quite well. He's hedged.

He's doing a leased. He's happy to be a leaser. Yeah. That's a good quote, too. Okay. Yeah, you wouldn't be leasing if you were super AGI pilled, right? You're hoovered up everything. You keep it all for yourself.

I think let's actually talk about that with, I think it's Jensen next. Okay, yes, Jensen. Wait, he doesn't believe in AGI. He's the whole reason why we're here. Explain that. So, yeah, this is maybe. my personal take. If Jensen was very IGI-pilled,

I mean, he is the kind of, he's the rock on which this all is built on. Yes. He has the chips. If he was a.GI-pilled, he would not be given out to those chips. He would keep them all to himself and he'd be training his own model.

Okay. So that's why I think he's more on the, he doesn't believe in AGI's side. But if there's any kind of downturn in the AI economy. Could you put Sam, like, potentially closer in this direction too because he's talking about getting into the, like compute resigning. Re-selling, for sure.

So if there's so much demand and the models progressing so quickly, wouldn't you want to just hold on to all that compute yourself? I think this would also be interesting to see over time. Like, Sam has definitely shifted leftwards over time. He's moving. He's moving. Basically this summer, you've seen a lot of the actions of opening eye. They seem less and less AGI-I built.

I mean, pretty much everyone has been like moving the AGI timelines outward, which you could transform into no longer believing in AGI. It's more just like the timelines have gotten longer. this year, broadly. Pretty much everyone. Do our cash up? Later, there was a new blog post yesterday. It was basically AI 247. There was a new one. It was AI 2032. So it's basically

very small arguments. Wait, is the same team? Different team, but the team of AI 2027 was promoting it. Did, yeah, AI 2027 should be like, it was actually AI 3027. We're off by that from here. Hipo. AI 3027. We couldn't get that domain.

We're just off by 1,000 years. Continue. Yeah, but there's definitely the sense where if AI there's a downturn, Jensen, the stock is going to go down. Yeah, yeah. But it's not going to go down as far as Larry, right? Because they're still not on it. They don't have insane cat-ex. This is not financial advice.

Yes. You know, they don't have, you know, completely unreasonable cap-ex. They're not levered up that I know of. Oh, yeah. Their Z score is through the roof. Their Allman Z score is through the roof. They're looking pretty safe. Yes.

Okay, let's see the next one. I believe, okay, Sundar. Sandar. He believes in AI more than Sautja, you think? Yeah, well, I think you can see this in kind of, they were even earlier in some sense than Sotia, right, with Deep Mind. So I think AI has played a fairly big part in the Google story very recently. They've always, I think basically for the past 10 years,

they've been trying to get into AI. Maybe their actions didn't actually do much, but, you know, they were the transformer paper. They, you know, Gemini now is. They're about applied AI. Like, they're actually applying. They built self-driving cars. And the core Google search is just an AI product.

It's just an index on information. They're organizing the internet. Also, I mean, compared to Satya, I mean, Gemini is a frontier model. Totally. Gemini 3 is supposed to be this incredible model. Everyone's very excited. Sotia is not, Microsoft is not training their own base model yet. Yeah.

And also, like, it's, like, there is a little bit of, like, if you really believe in AGI, the actions that we see are you, like, squirming and being like, I got to get in. It doesn't matter if I'm one, behind or 10% behind or 80% behind. I got to get in. And I think we know someone who's doing just that. Gabe in the chat says, is this AGI or AG1 from athletic greens? Needs AGO1. Needs AGE1. Fine without AG1. Believes in AG1. Now, we're the only podcast that is not partnered with AG1. But we do like green. Green is our hero color. Let's go to the next person. Okay. But also before then, I think Sundar is also.

So definitely below this line because, you know, Google has been doing very well. AI was at first, I mean, people thought of AI as like, oh, this is going to destroy Google. This is bad for Google. So if AI doesn't work, then Google is just in the spot they were before, which is doing very well. If AI does work, then, I mean, Gemini is one of the best models. They'll do very well, too. Speaking of Gemini, Google AI Studio, create an AI powered app faster than ever. Gemini understands the capabilities you need and automatically wires them up for you.

Get started at AI. Studio slash build. Yeah, continue. Okay, so I think, yeah, next is Zuck. Yes. So Zuck is also kind of an interesting spot. Yes. I think Zuck is actually someone who has shifted right word. It's fascinating.

Yeah. So you've seen this, basically, I mean, for a while. He's been traveling. Yes. Yeah. So for a while he was doing open source. Yeah. Which in some sense, it's very AGI-I-pilling because, you know, you're building it.

You're training a model, right? It's like you're moving the frontier forward. But it's also, it's open source, which you can kind of think as being, you're trying to commoditize everything. You don't think that there's going to be some super intelligence that will take all the value that you need to hold on to. You can kind of give it out. And now he's kind of moved towards close source. We're going to get the best people. We're going to train the best model.

It felt like Zuck was sort of like, oh, yeah, AI. Like, it's this cool thing. I'm going to check the box. I got my team. We did this fun little side project. It's this open source model. We kind of found our own little lane. but we're not like competing in the big cosmic battle between open AI, anthropic, deep mind.

Do you think that was just a counterposition to way to, like, try to win the AI whirb? Go say, hey, we're just going to try to commodify this market and like to take the Chinese approach. Yeah, commoditizing your company. It's easy, good strategy. Yeah, that makes sense. And then maybe you could say that, oh, once the Chinese have been getting better, he can kind of step out of that position. sure, and he's moved towards

close source. Yeah, but now it feels like he's way, way, going way harder on the AGI vision, paying up for it,

investing so much money in it. You know, it's like, and depending on how much he invests, you could see him neat pushing up. It's true. But right now,

but right now, the business is just insane. It's so phenomenal that even if he winds up spending all this money and, you know, they don't even get a frontier model and like all the,

all the, the researcher like, yeah, we didn't discover anything and we're just gone. Like, the business is fine because it's such a behemoth. So that's why he's fine without UGI. After earnings, they took a fairly big hit. So maybe he should be a little bit higher. Yeah, maybe a little bit. But I think Meda broadly is still a very safe play if AI doesn't work out.

And it was the same thing during the Metaverse. It was like he believed in the Metaverse. He invested in the Metaverse, but he never needed the Metaverse. And so after the stock sold off like crazy, it went right back up because everyone realized, like, wait a minute. raising debt off the balance sheet, which would kind of could push him up into this zone, right? If he's like, you know, if you're worried about, why don't you just carry it yourself? Yeah, yeah, yeah. How do you carry it yourself? What do you, really, you believe in AGI?

Just, just let it ride. Yeah. Okay, who else are we missing? Okay, so I think, next is, is Jassy? Oh, Elon, Elon, Elon. Yeah, yeah. Okay, Elon. So Elon, I mean, he's been a GI-pilled, I think, for a very long time. Super AGI pill. I agree with that. Open AI co-founder, even before that, I think he was fairly big in the safety space. Totally. You see him, even on Joe Rogan, he was talking about AI safety. He still believes it. He doesn't back off. And AI safety is important because

it's going to become super intelligent. It's going to take over the world. Totally. Totally. Yeah, even this was part of the dialogue around the new comp package, wanting the voting power to be able to be part of securing his robot army. Oh, yeah. Interesting. Yeah, I think robots are very

underrepresented on this board. And Elon is kind of the main player in that space right now. Yeah. So he talked yesterday about humanoid's being sort of an infinite money glitch. And I feel like you kind of need AGI in order to kind of unlock the infinite money glitch. Yes. But at the same time, very strong core business. The cars don't need AGI.

The rockets don't need AGI. Starlink doesn't need AGI. So he's not entirely indexed on it in the way they'll found. Foundation Labs are, right? Yeah. I mean, there's definitely a significant part of the Tesla market gap that is basically betting on robots. Totally.

But there's also a big part of it that's just... But that's why he's in the middle of the needs or fine without. It's like... He is betting on it. He is betting on it. Is needs... Yeah, but that's just one piece of the Eon. ...more than...

SpaceX. Yeah, SpaceX is very, seems very uncorrelated with the AI. Totally, totally. Unless you have the data sets. He's happy to be a telecom baron. He's happy to... Happy to, yeah, he's happy to be the new Verizon. Who else is on here?

Okay, so I believe now is Andy Jassy. Jassy. Yeah, so he is, I think broadly does not believe in AGI, although he, you know, fairly major stake in Anthropic, which maybe is very AGI playing, but they have not. He's hedging with Anthropic. Yeah.

Yeah, I think that's basically what you can say. He doesn't seem at all worried about kind of the core business, AWS seems to be moved. And isn't Google building their position in Anthropic? I saw some headline about that. That was wild. Imagine. Like, Sundar, such a beast.

So I didn't talk to, really, both of them. They just have huge stakes. Broadly, Andy Jesse seems very quantitative. He's focused on the numbers. Sure. Realistic. He's not making these, you know, grandiose statements about the future of intelligence

or what humanity is going to be like. Yeah, when you look at the AWS earnings, it feels like they invest when the demand shows up and they build data centers when there is demand. And they are not in the business of doing, you know, a 10-year hypothetical sci-fi forecast based on breakthrough. So Ben Thompson on the recent Sharp Tech, we were listening to it on the way in. He was talking about how Amazon has repeatedly said, hey, we're supply constrained.

We have a lot more demand than we can fulfill with this new deal with Open AI, the $38 billion, which only got announced Monday, which again feels like forever ago at this point. but Ben was kind of hypothesizing that they kind of let Open AI jump the line because that $38 billion deal was starting effectively immediately versus some of the other, like Larry's deal with Open AI was announced, this like massive backlog is revenue that cannot be generated in a meaningful way today because they have to build the data centers that can actually deliver the compute. Yeah, I mean, and, you know, Amazon, has been building data centers. They're building data centers. They're basically, they built all the

data centers for Anthropic. But it still seems very, kind of restrained. It's not overly ambitious. Anthropic has had issues with capacity, and it's probably because, you know, Andy Jassy doesn't want to get over his skis, he doesn't want to build too much. So I think that's why he's kind of on the left side. And also, I mean, if you think AI doesn't work and we're going to kind of be in this, you know, the same spot of Web 2.0, you need, you need AWS, you need your EC2 server. I think he's very well positioned there. And then I think the last one is Tim Cook. Tim Cook.

Whoa. Let's go. Let's hear for Tim Cook. Criminally underpaid but has done a fantastic job not getting over his skis. Yeah. This one I think is fairly self-explanatory. I mean, he seems. He doesn't believe in AGI.

He doesn't believe in LOMs. He doesn't believe in chatbots, apparently. I don't know. The new Gemini deal. signaling. As of two years ago Apple was like, yeah, we're not doing that stuff. Yeah, there was that famous stuff.

But I think what's under-discussed, my takeaway from our conversation with Mark German and Apple's ambitions around their new LLM experience with Gemini is that I think that there's a very real scenario where Apple wants to compete for the same user base as

Open AI. They want that transaction-based revenue, that commerce revenue. Yeah, I disagree on this point, but I'm not saying that I'm putting their odds at like winning that market at over like 10%,

but I think that they would be right to realize that it's potentially an opportunity. Yeah. Is it a billion dollars a year that they're paying Google for? I believe that's the number, yeah. That feels really low, doesn't it? I don't know. It just feels super low to me.

among all the different deals that are going on. When I think about like, when I just think about like the value of AI on the iPhone, and you're like one billion dollars, like when I think about like, what is the value that we're, that the market broadly is putting on like AI for the enterprise, AI for whatever.

When Sundar on the Google earnings call was talking about their top, I think 10 customers and how many like trillions of tokens they were using, but it really was netting out to like a hundred $150 million of, like, actual revenue. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so this is, this will be their biggest customer for Gemini on day one. Until one of our listeners gets on.

Of course. Yeah. And I think, I mean, even with the Gemini news, Apple still seems very kind of reactive to AI. Yeah. They're not kind of seeing, oh, this future where AI is going to do everything and moving there right now. They're kind of seeing where the demand is, seeing where the users are, and then moving, which I think is very kind of, you know, classic.

you know, that's how business work. It's not very AGI pilling. Also, on that point of $1 billion, like, I have no idea, how can they possibly know the amount of inference that's going to happen in Siri plus Gemini over a year period?

Like, there's just no way to predict that. Or can they? Like, I feel like if the integration's good, there will be a ton of queries. It will have a ton of cost. I didn't read the $1 billion headline And chat can correct me if I'm wrong, but I didn't read the $1 billion headline. I felt like that was a technology license, not necessarily inferences.

And then there might be consumption on top of that. Yeah. Okay. Or maybe, or maybe, yeah, yeah, maybe they're licensing Gemini and then they pay per query for the energy and the CAPX. And couldn't a lot of the stuff be done on device? For sure. Yeah. Because Gemma has like baked down models that could be smaller.

So that's possible. Chad says, where's Tyler on the chart? feels like Tyler isn't AGI piled anymore. Let's figure it out. I actually am on the chart here. Let's go to Tyler. I am. Hey!

So I, yeah, I think I'm very AGI-I-pilled, right? You know, I'm ready for the Dyson sphere. Yes. I think it's, you know, only a matter of years, handful. Only a matter of years. It's a couple thousand, hundred thousand days away. You need to, you need a publisher. 100,000 days away.

AgeI 2026. Yeah, 2025. We still have a month left. We still have a month left. We still a month left. AGI on Christmas, this Christmas. It's coming this Christmas. This holiday season.

But why do you need AGI? I think I also need AGI. Why do you need AGI? Well, I mean, look, if you look at the current jobs data for, like, college aid students or post-grad, it's looking pretty bad. It's bad. So I think you kind of need AGI to really boost the economy. If AI does not work, the macro economy is looking not good. Oh, sure, sure, sure.

So I feel pretty bad about my job outlook without AGI. Sure, sure. even though you're already employed. That's hilarious. Well, thank you for taking us through. Chat wanted to know where would you put Lisa Sue? AMD. Yeah, so Lisa Sue, I think she's broadly been quite reactive, actually.

You've really only seen AMD start kind of making. You don't get credit for being reactive is what you're saying. Yeah. I think it's really only over the past year maybe that she's been making any kind of deals. You saw George Hots maybe a year or two ago, basically trashing AMD chips for how bad they were in. But maybe she's given so much of the company away. Maybe she thinks that shares won't have very much value in the future.

She's like happy to just give away 10% of the company. Yeah. So I think I would, if I had to pick somewhere, I would say that she is, she's honestly getting a little close to Larry in that AMD. It's very much like an AI play still right there, chip company obviously. but you don't get the feeling that she's a true believer. Yeah. Yeah.

That tracks. Okay. The new Siri, I'm reading through some of Mark German's reporting. Speaking of Apple and AI, the new series plan for March, give or take, as has been the case for months. Apple has been saying for nine months, it's coming in 2026. Apple simply reiterated on that. And then on the actual deal, it's a $1 billion deal for a $1.2 trillion parameter artificial

intelligence model developed by Google to help power its own and overhaul the Siri AI voice assistant. The two companies are finalizing an agreement that would see Apple pay roughly $1 billion annually for access to Google's technology with the Google model handling series summarizer and planner functions. Apple intends to use the Google model as an interim solution until its own models are powerful enough and is working on a $1 trillion parameter cloud-based model that it hopes to have ready for consumer applications as soon as next year. That is interesting. I feel like they're going to have to pay a lot more to actually run all the queries,

generate all the tokens. But I'm sure we'll find out more as Google reports earnings and Apple reports earnings. Before we get to that, let me tell you about graphite.dev. Code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. What else is in the news today? We have some breaking news. We have some breaking news.

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You only had 600 horsepower instead of 8. That was the main problem. I also needed to park it in cities. Oh, yeah. Which is just absolutely brutal. Yeah. What are the specs on the Raptor are again? It's a pretty wild.

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The AI data analyst. Connect your data, ask questions in plain English, get insights in seconds, no coding required. I'm trying to go through the timeline. We got Wilmanitis talking about some other stuff. Let's pull up this post from Pegasus

since it's relevant to the overview we just did. Pegasus says Altman today, of course he's talking about yesterday. We're looking at selling compute, but we need as much as possible. Zach last week, we sell compute. Are we in a compute shortage or not? Because both are saying they're buying as much of it as they can and thinking about selling it. That's very interesting. Yeah. I mean, the supply and demand

dynamics, I like that story about Jensen where like he understands the dynamic here, but there's still, you get kind of crushed if there's a sell-off in terms of demand. Like, you just have to go back and study what was going on during the crypto boom for Nvidia. Like, yeah. During the crypto boom for NVIDIA, it was like buy as many as possible. Just ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp. And then they literally had a glut. Well, yeah, and I can... Completely had a glut, and they took huge right off.

Yeah, the steel man here, if you're a large tech company and you have the ability to, and the financing capital to buy a lot of GPUs, it's not the worst idea to buy as much as you can, so that you have preferred access to it and then resell some if you have more than you need, right? Yeah. But yeah, the question is... Historically, that does not have been, how things have been done. Like, I understand the, the pitch there, but I mean, we just talked to David Bazuki from from Roblox, and he was saying that, look, we had our, we had our own on-prem, but then we had we had spikes of demand. And so we went to the hyperscalers for that, because they can load balance across, well, people are playing Roblox here, and then maybe they watch some Netflix

over there, and they are storing, you know, all sorts of different data. And there's different workloads that happen at different times. And so, traditionally, the, like, the hyper-scalers have been able to service, like, multiple users across them, jumping straight to selling compute. I think that the timelines are a little bit funky on this one. It seems, it seems odd. It seems rushed. It seems rushed, especially when your core product

is growing so quickly. Like Google Cloud Platform was released, what, seven years after Google launched? Same thing with AWS. Same thing with Azure. Like, these were very mature businesses, very stable businesses,

with cash flow that were able to justify the investment. It was not something that was done as part in the growth phase as much. I don't know. Speaking of other wild, wild, you know, new business lines. Elon apparently confirmed that Tesla is going to build a semiconductor fab.

Yep. I've been advocating for this for a long time. I'd love to hear what Elon had to say. But first, let me tell you about Fall, the generative media platform for developers. The world's best generated image, video, and audio models all in one place, develop, and fine-tuned models with serverless GPUs and on-demand clusters. Let's play Elon. What do we got here? Let's play Elon acts. It's still not enough.

So I think we may have to do a Tesla TerraFab. Whoa. Great name. That is a bombshell. It's like giga, but way bigger. Terra, yeah. He's feeling good right now. I can't see any other way to get to the volume of chips that we're looking for.

So I think we're probably going to have to build a gigantic chip. of fat. Morris Chang and TSNC is like, no, actually I'm fine. I will, I will supply you. Samsung is like, I'm good. I will do it. I'm good for it. Pull up this other, pull up this other video of Optimus. It's crazy. Because there was some new moves of Optimus getting, getting jiggy. Let's see. It is at the bottom of the Tyler app. Look at this. Let's see. Look at this. Okay. So this was, this was shown in contrast to the first Optimus, which was just a guy in a suit. This thing has motion.

Yeah, it's not bad. This feels like getting to getting pretty close to unitary level, definitely at that level. I don't know. Imagine you're working late at the office one night and this thing just walks out onto the floor and starts looking at you and doing these moves. Yeah, weird. It's so weird how these new projects like, they seem. I understand why a lot of people look at this with skepticism,

but at the same time, like, it just doesn't seem that complicated to just manufacture that thing and ship it. Like, they do it at, you know, in China, they do it all over the place. This doesn't seem that insane.

And at the same time, like Apple couldn't ship a car. So, like, these new projects, like they do kind of... Elon's ship some cars, though.

Yeah, yeah. I meant it more as like, as like, if you're doing one thing, It can sometimes be hard to branch out into the other thing. I remember a few weeks ago, there was a headline around Tesla ordering like $600 million

worth of actuators. Yeah, like it seems like they're going into some sort of production. Yeah. I wonder what, who they're going to sell to. You don't need 600 million for like test, just for testing. It's just, the car analogy is so tricky because it's like most people that bought Tesla's already had cars, right? And so it's just like a one-for-one swap. Who are you replacing

with this? It's tricky. What do you think? Well, with this, you can replace like an exotic dancer? Yes, that's true. I don't know if many people have that an exotic dancer in their life, who they're ready to, who they're ready to replace. It seems, I don't know, it'll just be very interesting to see where these things actually diffuse. Because if you sell them, if you sell them for one price to consumers to do their laundry, but they work in an industrial capacity, like people will just buy them and use them for that. But when we talk to people who are in industrial environments, they're like, I definitely don't want a humanoid robot for that. I'd rather just like a big, massive robotic arm that's like bolted to the ground and can actually lift like 10,000

pounds as opposed to one that can only lift like 50 pounds. I don't know. Ryan says they're going to sell them to the police. We'll see. Maybe they certainly would be I don't know backup. I think they would be pretty effective deterrence. Maybe, maybe. I like Vitorio having some fun on the timeline going viral getting community noted. Vitorio said Elon Musk now has one trillion dollars in his bank account. That's a thousand times one billion dollars. He could give every single human on earth one big and still be left with $992 billion. Let that sink in. People love this funny math whenever it drops.

What else is going on? The humanoid. Yes, China has a similar humanoid robotic project, although it's way, way scarier because it went full Terminator mode on this. Of course, this one is hooked up to power, but... Yes, so this video was in response to earlier, this week. There was a, I think it was unitary

presentation and they brought out this new robot and it was walking with such like, swagger. Natural gate. Yeah. Basically that people thought it was actually just a person in suit. And it was not.

And so they replied with, with it fully stripped down. That is remarkable. Yeah. Oh, because they put it, they put it, they put like the suit on the robot. Yeah, it was like a neo. It was kind of like the one X robot.

We're getting spooky, spooky territory. This is pretty crazy. Oh, wow, yeah, it does look human. It does look human. I'm looking at the other video. Sorry. Let me tell you about TurboPuffer.

Search every byte. Service vector and full-text search. Builds from first principles and object stores. See these new logos, John? Cheaper. You see these new logos? Oh, wow. Stacked.

Stacked. Absolutely stacked. They're cooking. Chris Bakke says, in the last 10 months, three very talented friends have joined separate hot, early-stage startups in senior roles and quit after realizing

that the company's actual revenue was significantly less than what the founder had told them during the interview process and shared online. Hmm. You have things to clarify. I'm not joking.

In two of the three cases, it would be hard to tell that you were joining a bad actor company on the surface. Solid investors. Founders worked at unicorn companies. The third was maybe more obvious. The only ones who really lose here

are the employees. The investors have 200 port codes and can afford some losses and our industry doesn't really pursue founders over fraud slash misleading information up to a certain point. For if you're thinking about joining an early stage startup, asked to see their stripe and or signed contracts before you join.

Not bad advice. Yeah, again, this is going back to spring, right, that just felt like there was this, like, every founder was feeling this insane pressure to show like one to 10 million of, like a one to 10 million ramp that was just insane. Yeah. And the weird dynamic is that like,

as that pressure ramps up, you just get more and more incentive to fake it with community-adjusted, ARR, and contracts that don't actually stick and all sorts of different twists on something that's like, is it actually cash? Is it actually people coming in? Are they on long contracts? The quality of revenue has been maybe degrading, but also just maybe in just, you know, It's just been easier to game than ever. There's been more incentive to game it than ever. So stay safe out there, folks. Kazakhstan has signed an MOU to buy up to 2 billion of advanced chips from NVIDIA.

Let's hit the gong for Kazakhstan. Warm it up. Warm it up. Warm it up. Boom. Great hit. Great hit for our friends in Kazakhstan. Good to see them getting into the game. Does Borat take place in Kazakhstan?

Isn't that the whole thing? Maybe they should do Borat 3 about data centers. He goes to a data center. Well, Sasha Bear Cohen on data centers would be on the AI. Reprises his role, all to bring AI to Kazakhstan. Sasha Bear Cohen doing a doc, like a... Yeah, like just on AI in general. Incredible.

It'd be amazing. So I can use it to do better web search. So I can. can use it as an auto-complete? You're not doing the bore-out voice, brother. I'm not going to do the borat voice. I will do the profound voice. Get your brand mentioned in chat, GPT.

Reach millions of consumers who are using AI to discover new products and brands. Go get a demo. The Kobe-S-E letter says, breaking Nvidia's losses, accelerate to negative 5% of the day, now down 16% since Monday's high. That marks a drop of

800 billion since Monday. Wow. is a wild sell-off. Didn't Tyler quote this and say, is this bullish or something like that? No, that was on the door dash. They went down 20%. Everyone's down 10 or 20%.

We need... Yeah, whether you beat or miss, you're going down. Wait, is this Trugov? Ari Emanuel said he's working with Elon to bring optimist to the UFC? That would be incredible. Please don't be fake news.

Please don't be fake news. We need robots in the UFC. I mean, Rogan and Palmer Lucky were talking about it on their podcast. And it certainly seems like a hilarious and wild thing. Even just as an exhibition match before the real UFC, get an optimist.

Though here's a question. Would Elon want a human to thrash on Optimus? Is that good for his brand? Or would he want Optimus to win? And if Optimus wins, then is that actually entertaining? I don't know. I think putting Optimus up against the best MMA. fighters in the world

Yeah is fine It's impossible though Right because if you just kick metal You'll just break your foot And if you punch your- This was Ari Emanuel At the All-N Summit

Yeah It was released I guess one day ago Oh interesting But he was talking about wanting Wait wait what a weird What a crazy crazy timing That's so He says

I saw what he's creating The Man's Genius I want to do a USC fight With his robots Yeah Very cool Heisenberg sharing a little bit of red here. Microsoft down 10% in the last eight days,

Nvidia at 12% in the last four days. Allentier at 16%, down 16%, meta, down 18%. Losses have accelerated. Compound 248 was sharing yesterday. He's like, when I clip this, I didn't expect to crash the market. markets globally. But he, certainly, that clip seems to have played a part in this little sell-off. Always take a victory lap for having world with historic consequences. I actually think that that particular clip was like less than 5% of the total views on that clip because there were

other people that clip didn't. It got all the views. Oh, sure. You went everywhere. But always claim victory. That's the lesson. That's right. Anyway, we have our first guest of the show, Catherine Boyle, from Andrewison Horowitz joining us. She's in the Restream waiting room. Welcome to the TV channel. Catherine, how are you doing? It's great to be here. Good to see you guys.

Why are you playing the night vision goggles sound? You already got a new soundboard today. I felt a little tactical. I felt a little tactical. It's great to see you. Good to see you. Should the Department of War get a soundboard during these speeches? I heard Hague Seth was given a big speech.

Are they sticking mostly to the cheers and the clapping? Or are we doing firing off muskets? Are we firing off cannons? Is there pageantry? Is pageantry alive in the Department of War speech? Bring the pageantry back to the Department of War. That is important. You guys should definitely have your own sound for them. For sure. You guys are getting the first look at a major speech.

Yes. So it is just ending right now. I just topped off the live stream. And I can tell you my phone is blowing up with just how many people are enthusiastic, not only in the venture community, but just across, Washington about what has been said in this speech. And it's going to have dramatic repercussions for defense tech and for Silicon Valley and the broader defense innovation base. So it's, it's an extraordinary speech. You'll be hearing a lot more about it, but you're getting the first

look. Fantastic. Incredible. Take us through it. And it is, it is definitely, I'd say, you know, for the last, say, 10 years or so, we've been talking about defense reform, why it is so important for increasing competition for startups. And what is amazing about the speech is that it's not just lip service to, yes, of course, we need competition, basically what you've been hearing in Washington for the last 10 years. It goes line by line. HECSeth actually made a very, very funny comment. He said, if you're watching this on Fox News, your eyes are glazing over,

because this is the most boring thing you've ever heard. But for everyone in the room, from the Andrels, the Palantiers, the SpaceX's of the world, all the way down to the little guys to the primes, it was like Christmas come early, right? Because it really is changing the way that acquisitions are going to happen inside the department and ways that are so meaningful, not only for Silicon Valley companies, but for private equity-backed companies and for the primes. He basically told the primes in the very beginning, you have to be investing more in research and development. The companies that have

been getting the large programs cannot just continue as business used to be done. He actually quoted Donald Rumsfeld. Didn't tell us he was quoting Donald Rumsfeld for the first five minutes and basically went line by line through his speech that he gave on September 10th, 2001, about how how important it is to change the defense acquisition process. And he said, you probably don't recognize this. But the speech I'm giving now is actually Rumsfelds. Wait, September 10th?

Yes, the day before just happened to be. Happened to be the day before where he said, we have to change the acquisition process. That is a crazy coincidence. Very, very crazy coincidence. But it shows you just how long this has been going on.

Sure, sure, sure. So I'm happy. I have my notes here because I was taking Kobe's notes throughout the speech. Yeah, let's go line by line. I'll let startups know what's going to be changing. Yes, please. But the first thing that I think is really important for all of the startups in Silicon Valley is that he mentioned and called out the importance of commercial first technology.

So this is going to shock people who are not in the defense world that right now, if you need to build a product specifically for the Department of Defense, the vast majority of contracts that are given out are not given out with a purview of what exists already in the marketplace that we can buy. Yes. People, you know, it's a requirements process. a very long 300-day requirements process, actually, that he called out, that requires the different program offices to say what they need, to write it down, and then to find people who will build

explicitly for those requirements, they are doing away with the old requirements process and saying this is not what we're going to do anymore. We are going to focus on commercial first technologies, even if there is a technology out there that is only 85% of what we need, we will buy it. or that is that is the goal and then we will turn it into what we need to for actually for the warfighter. This is cots versus gots for the DOD, DOW, nerds like commercial off the shelf versus government off the shelf. This is what Handel and all the defense tech community has been beating the drum on for basically a decade now. And it feels like it's finally getting echoed back from the administration. Is that correct?

Yes. And there was there was a lot. The administration in the EO that was out a couple months ago said that they wanted to commercial first technology. Now you're hearing it straight from the secretary's mouth. There's always dustups about this on Capitol Hill with, with, you know, various parties arguing over whether we need more studies or whether we should just do this. It looks like now this is a real change that's about to happen. And it's going to be transformative for all of the startup community. What it really says is that the best products will win. Yeah, who are the losers here? Well, I think, I mean,

the major loser from the speech is the primes. I mean, he said, I don't want to pick on anyone. I'm not going to call out companies, but you have to be investing in research and technology. Like, you have to be, the fact that the primes only spend 2% on research and development and are focused on, you know, constantly kind of maintaining the status quo, that is not going to happen on his watch. 2% on R&D. Yes. And haven't historically been acquiring venture-backed companies.

So this is also the problem where they're really just on a much slower timeline than is needed by the department. And I'd say that the takeaway from the speech, and I think the soundbite you'll be hearing more and more about, is that the new process is really going to be used to enable speed and volume. And one of the things that I think, you know, a number of companies have been talking about for a long time is that by taking more risk in the acquisition process, you take less risk on the battlefield. And he actually echoed that. He said, we want to take more risk. We want to have, we want to reward the people inside of the department who are making risky decisions, or supposedly risky decisions because they're acquiring new technologies

or from companies that are not Raytheon and the kind of big guys, right? But what they ultimately said is like they want those, the people who are going to be making this acquisition decisions to be taking on the risk because it takes less, it will affect the risk of the warfighter, right? It will make things safer for the warfighter. So it's basically linking this entire process, bringing it back to what needs to be done before war start

and before products get into the hands of the work. This is like a top-down directive, and then who are the players that need to actually put this into, like, who are the kind of key players that need to put this into practice? Yeah. So, I mean, like, the main thing that I think, this is definitely a message sent to Congress because there's currently, you know, two different bills going through on Congress that are actually pretty aligned and most of the things that they're saying. There's a few callouts where I think you'll see sort of some sort of back and forth between

the House and the Senate. But this is definitely a call to them. like this is happening on the secretary's watch. This is something that he cares deeply about. This is something that the administration cares about. And so it definitely is a huge push, not just a major signal, but they sort of outlined, this is how we're going to change things inside the department. One of the biggest things that they do is they created this sort of portfolio-based approach

of how they're going to be allocating capital to companies now. And this is always shocking when I explain to people that this is revolutionary, because you'd say in a normal company, you're given a budget. and if the vendor you choose is, you know, fails, you'll go to another vendor and you'll use that capital in order to buy whatever product you need. That is not how the department works. And so with this new portfolio-based approach, they're basically saying we're going to give what's known as the PAE's, the portfolio acquisition executives, the right to say, okay, if this one product that we acquired 60 days ago isn't working on the battlefield,

we can use the rest of the money and reprogram it for a product that is working. And right now that is that is not possible inside the Department of Defense. Right now you have to write a whole other list of requirements in ways that you would build a new product and theory that can take years to actually build. And by the time it's built, it isn't meeting the requirements or the needs of the warfighter. So the fact that they're even changing the budgeting process and that they have an explicit call out of how they're going to do that, that will show up in this year's NDAA once it's passed. And it will be the way that things are done from now on. So this is extraordinary. Yeah.

So this means that if a contract is allocated to a certain company and they start underperforming, in real time, the person who's in charge of allocating that budget can basically say, hey, this other startup, like, we're going to, like, rotate this budget over here because they're actually going to deliver on this. I've heard some. Yeah, I've heard some horror stories and even opportunities where some of the bigger primes have just been, have just held onto contracts forever. They're kind of like barely delivering.

They're kind of like trying to deliver and startups coming in and saying like, hey, we'll actually take this over. And sometimes those deals can happen. But this seems like it'll be a lot more effective. Are there any new categories that are opening up generally? I mean, we, you know, we've heard this week about like data centers in space. So if you're tracking like data centers or space, like that's a story.

But I remember Secretary of the Army was talking about modularity of weaponry, taking a part of drone, fixing it. I feel like the whole idea of drones or autonomous submarines, these are new categories that sort of opened up. There have been a number of competitors. But at the thematic, like within defense technology level, are there any categories that you think this new administration is maybe more excited about than ever before? Yeah, so, I mean, you mentioned modularity and with the Secretary of the Army's talking about. I mean, this was actually called out in Secretary Hegssef's speech where he said, part of the reason why we need these PAEs and what we're formerly called PEOs, but PAEs, these portfolio-based approaches, is because right now, if you want to take something apart

and put it back together, you have to build an entirely different system to acquire those parts, and you have to go through a requirements process. So if you're building modular-based approaches that update in real time, and he actually said, like, we want it to be more like software. We want to do software updates in real time and not have to go through a requirements-based approach. You need to be thinking about things in terms of modularity. So I think there's a lot of different, even just changing the way the budgeting works, it opens up a lot of different technologies that were not able to participate in the acquisition system

because they didn't want to go through the requirements process, or they knew they wouldn't meet the requirements that are being put out by the. Department of War. So it is going to radically change, I think, not only the types of products you're seeing in the hands of the warfighter, but just how quickly they get there. Makes a lot of sense. Switching gears a little bit. Sam Altman suggested on Wednesday this idea of, like, my interpretation of it was kind of like a GoCo model for AI factories. Without commenting on that specifically, can you give us the history of GoCo's, when? and how they work well and what kind of some of the challenges have been.

Well, I actually didn't see what, can you give me a little more context? Yeah, so I'll read exactly what he said. So this was in response to clarifying the sort of backstop gate. He said, so anyways, he basically said, the obvious one we do not have or want government guarantees for open AI data centers. And then like later in the post, he said, What we do think might make sense is governments building and owning their own AI infrastructure, and then the upside of that should flow to the government as well.

We can imagine a world where governments decide to offtake a lot of computing power and get to decide how to use it, and it may make sense to provide lower cost of capital to do so. Building a strategic national reserve of computing power makes a lot of sense, but this should be for the government's benefit, not the benefit of private companies. And just in some of the ideas around this just reminded me of how Gokos have worked in defense tech, where the government is basically saying, like, we have, we're willing to commit resources and land to, like, a certain initiative, and then you can have the private market potentially pay a role. And I have no idea how this would, how this would look like in the AI context, but I just want, I just thought it would be helpful to understand, like, how these sort of, like, public-private partnerships have worked in the past, specifically in defense. Yeah, well, no, I can talk to one that was actually discussed today. So the Secretary of the Army was on squat,

this morning talking about specifically if we are giving the land and security for massive data centers, could the Army have its own data centers and be one of the largest providers and actually offtake that compute? So I do think that there are ongoing conversations. Candidly, I haven't seen, you know, massive conversations about how it's going to be enacted by the Department of War. But I thought it was very interesting that the Secretary of the Army was basically saying that this is something that they would be very interested in, that they know that they are going to need their own compute. And that that. if there is sort of a trade-off of we provide the land and the security, there should be an

understanding that that compute then goes to the Army. So I don't know that they fully fleshed out the details of those sorts of things, but I do think there's a lot of conversations about this. And it's good to hear that Sam is also talking about that in certain ways. But I do think for the Department of War, they know that it's top of mind. And I think they're being a lot more experimental, which again comes back to if you have a system of requirements that is far more sort of open, I'd say, to experimentation or working with new companies that can do that. It does give the secretaries of the Army or the Navy a lot more authority to make those decisions on kind of the actual things like compute or energy that they need.

Yeah. How do you think about the flow between like entrepreneurial ideas, like problems that are identified in the private sector, somebody starts a company? Like with Anderl is like the flipped model, this idea that R&D should maybe live outside of the taxpayers. dime, be funded by venture capitalists, that company gets built. Eventually, those ideas are percolating into DC. And then the world updates, America updates, we change the way we work. Things get better, but and are all benefits. And people are pointing the finger, you know,

like, hey, you, you're the one that advocated for this. And I feel like that's kind of where Sam's caught right now. We're opening eyes advocating for things that I think are good for America. But also might benefit open AI. And so he has to do this delicate dance of like, well, I was independent on this one, but this one does benefit me, et cetera, et cetera. It's like such a communications challenge. Do you think it's like, do you have any best practices for like how to not get over your skis on that? Well, I think it's, I think as you said, it's sort of a typical Washington story where in order for things to change, you do have to sort of, you know, kind of Washington's a meme town. Just as Silicon Valley is a meme town. Like you have to be able

to tell your story why it's so important. I would argue that Anderil was exceptional at really telling the story of why you need attributable systems, why you need modular systems. Basically, the kind of frameworks that we're using today inside the Department of War came from those memes being established. But yes, if you're successful inside of Washington, you're going to tick off a lot of different people. Totally.

And you're going to certainly upset sort of the bureaucratic class. And what was very interesting, too, about this speech is that the secretary actually called out the bureaucratic class and said, like, this is not a problem with people that we have. This is not a problem with innovation or technology. It is the bureaucracy that is stopping us from making great decisions. And I think, like, that is something that is, you know, always been the problem with D.C. And I think, you know, the most important thing that companies can always do is just continue saying what they believe, going to Washington, building those relationships. And I think, if anything, over the last 10 years this defense acquisition reform, which everyone said was impossible, is now actually at our fingertips and going to happen because it makes sense the argument has been made. It's been made in dozens of different ways across many administrations and everyone's an agreement on it now. So for founders that feel like, oh gosh, look at these great companies that are getting backlash because they've, you know, kind of spread their own gospel and now they're being attacked for it. Like, that's actually, I think, a sign of progress. If you're being

attacked for what you're what you're advocating in Washington, that's usually a good thing. Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense. Final question. What is your most up-to-date guidance for your portfolio companies around the shutdown? Yeah, no. So, I mean, it definitely is having an impact, right? Like the companies that were expecting contracts to come in or reprogramming dollars, like they're not going to necessarily see it on the timelines that they thought maybe, you know, maybe a quarter ago. That said, I do think that a lot of these provisions that are happening right now are so transformative that in the long run, like the kind of, if we look back on what happened in the year 2025, it will have been a

very, very good year for startups. Maybe their numbers will lag by a quarter just because, okay, like the funds can't be delivered, depending on how long the shutdown goes down. I think it's having a greater impact actually on the citizen, right? Like, I mean, what's happening with air traffic control, what's happening, you know, across, you know, civic benefits. It's like that is something that I think we're now all feeling the pain of or people who are dependent on those benefits are certainly feeling the pain of or people who are traveling or planning to travel for upcoming Thanksgiving are certainly going to feel the pain of the shutdown. But it's certainly having an impact on companies. And I think most companies are still working exceptionally hard on the things that they can work hard on now, even if the contracts can't get signed or the press releases can't be put out or the dollars aren't coming in yet. But I think when we look back this year, the story.

of this year will actually be the defense acquisition reform and what's happening for these companies in the long term versus sort of the short term. Yeah, short term pain, long term gain. Yeah. Awesome. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for taking notes and giving us a full breakdown. Thanks so much. Yes. Always great to catch you. We'll talk to you soon. Cheers. Have a good one. Let me tell you about linear. Linear is a purpose built tool for planning and building products. Meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects, and product roadmaps and start building. And we have our next guest. Mike Schulman from Suno in the Restream Waiting Room. Welcome to the TPPN Ultrodome. How are you doing?

It's great to be here. I'm doing great. How are you guys? Fantastic. Fantastic to have you. I'm very excited about this. I have a million questions and I know that we're just going to go super deep into all the details of user behavior, but kick us off with just a general high level introduction on you and the company and then we'll go from there. Cool. Yeah, it's great to be here. I don't know, I'm not so interesting. The company's much more interesting. The way I like to think of it is we are delivering the best, most valuable digital musical experiences to the whole world. And right now, the things that are available to the end user are not always amazing. They're not always differentiated. And I think that's just like a failure of imagination that you can do so much more with music and you can enjoy it so much more. So that's how I think about us. What was the first song that you ever made? ever made. I've been playing piano since I'm four. I played in a lot of bands in high school and in college.

I play every day. So I don't actually know the answer to that, but it's probably like chopsticks or something. Are you a foundation model company? Chopsticks is a classic. Or an application layer company or both? Look, the answer is both. You know, all the technologies are ours.

These didn't exist. But I think about, and maybe this will color the conversation, and certainly, you know, when you guys were discussing us last week or two weeks, ago, all that matters here is the product. All that matters is that we deliver an experience to a user that makes them feel a certain way. And so at the end of the day, like that, if there were a way to do what we're doing without AI, like we would probably do that. There just isn't. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So in, there is a wind condition where you don't even train models and you

use someone else's models, but as long as you have the best application, like, that's where the value accrues? I think so. Like at the end of the... Yeah, users don't care. And I think probably at some point, maybe there's like a last model we officially release. And the rest is just like amazing product updates.

No, no, I completely agree that. That makes sense. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. What, uh, walk us through, we normally don't talk about the history of companies too much during interviews, but because you're, I mean, this is the first time on the show. Like, I'd love to kind of understand the different inflection points for the business.

I mean, you guys just grown tremendously over the last year. So walk, yeah, walk us through kind of the history of Suno and then kind of the history of even AI music and how those two things track. Sure. We launched this product a little over two years ago.

I think it was in September. And it was kind of barely passable back then. It was a Discord bot. It's actually something I got wrong completely. Thankfully, I have good, co-founders who disabused me of my bad ideas. And was that like a mid-Journey? Was that a mid-Journey?

Were you inspired by Mid-Journey? Yep, that makes sense. It was working for mid-Journey. It was working so well for mid-Journey. And I thought we'd be on Discord forever. And then it was like around Thanksgiving, we released of that year, we released like a really thin web app. It didn't even have the full functionality of the Discord bot.

And five days for 90% of the traffic to move over to the web. It's like, so if ever there's like market signal that I got something wrong, that was like very, very strong. And I think slowly but truly, you know, we keep releasing new products, new models. The product gets more engaging. The music gets more impactful. And slowly but truly, I would say the cartoon you should have is it becomes more and more appealing to a larger and larger group of people every time you make the product better.

And so it's basically been a lot of iteration. Yes, there are inflection points. Everything consumer is like a little bit lumpy. But that's the history of it. Yeah. What did the early cohort of users look like? How were they using the product? Like, why were they, I'm assuming they were, you know, you had, I'm sure you had a cult

kind of cult following, kind of early. What did that early cohort look like? And is it that much different than today, or is it just scaled up? It's very different today. So the early cohort, I would describe as like very tech forward and music curious. And it's like, here's this new thing. you kind of have to suspend disbelief. You need to be really forgiving

because the music actually isn't all that good. And as you make the product better, you grow out from there and now. It's like people who love music who are like a little bit tech curious. And actually at this point, you don't even need to be all that tech curious. There's like a fairly easy to use experience

on both web and mobile that you can just kind of dive into. And so I think the early users are indeed like, if you were on Discord, when we put it this way, If you were on Discord, like, you are a very different kind of user than the type of person who might find our mobile web. Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

Yeah. And so today, I think, like, part of the debate that we were having and you can deliver some truth around this is, like, what are kind of the key cohorts that are using and loving Suno? Everyone by now has probably seen, you know, viral short form videos where people are combining two different songs and some of the, reach on on these assets is insane you'll see you know somebody combining like uh rap artists like future with uh jazz music and and you know getting you know hundreds uh tens of millions or you know potentially even more uh views on this type of content but then we've also heard of stories of professional musicians using this to like accelerate their workflows and then we've now heard stories of people that are just using creating music just for personal consumption and so what it what

What do the different kind of cohorts look like and what are you guys, what kind of user are you guys most focused on? So the professional content creator, be their professional music creator or other content creator, this is like mid-single-digit percentage of our user base. And the vast majority of people are people who love music but aren't making music for any other purpose. That's just, we call it creative entertainment. This is just like a new behavior.

And so I think trying to apply. too much of what you know from other things, be it consumer social platforms or video games. It's always, you always just have to take everything with a grain of salt. But most people, they come and they find that music making is incredibly enjoyable. And if you have studied an instrument and made music with your friends, like you probably already know this. And you just don't believe that it can be done digitally. And then you kind of find the product and you realize, oh, my God, this can be done digitally. I'm going to enjoy the hell out of making music.

I usually try to cartoonize our average user as people who would say, I love music, I love to sing, you don't love it when I sing. That's kind of our sweet spot. That makes sense. And that tracks on actual monetization. It's not like those are the free users and then all the revenue comes from professional people or like API. Like it actually matches roughly what you described. That's right. That's fascinating.

You know, you guys mentioned a couple weeks ago, the Chris Dick. and thing that like, come for the tool, stay for the network. I think about it a little differently for us. I kind of think of it for us as like, come for the gimmick and stay for the joy. And this is like the party trick of making that song that even if it's not your favorite artist, which you large can't platform,

but it's make the country song about Debbie being late. That's the party trick. But there's something that is behind the party trick that you get pulled into and all of a sudden you are a music maker and you're enjoying it. And so I actually, I don't think it's bad that, you know, there's like this, this song that is meant to be consumed once that you're never going to consume again, that like you laugh for four seconds with your friend. I think one of you said, like, I almost just need to know the prompt. And then I don't need to know the rest of the song.

Like, I don't actually think that's bad because there's this amazing experience that it gets backed up with that people spend hours a day on. Totally. Yeah. And when I think about some of the most fun moments of my childhood, it was my dad. writing and playing a song for guitar and singing it one time and never singing it again. And I still like just remember the moments and the joy of that. And so like the concept of like ephemeral songs that can be created for a moment that historically you would have needed, you know, studio time. You would have needed to spend all this time like writing the song,

you know, producing it all this stuff. And now it can be done in an instant. I think it really is, it really is totally magical. I think this is similar to this is similar to this. Like there's ephemeral pictures on your phone, right? And you never go look at them again unless Apple tells you to. Yeah. Yeah. Where are the rough edges or where are the edges that you want to be like careful around?

I feel like with chat GPT, no one was really expecting the whole like getting one shotted and like psychosis and like delusions of grandeur. Like that came out of nowhere in my opinion. And then all of a sudden it was like an issue and they had to work on it. And of course there's like guardrails that they can put up. Mid-Journey, I think a lot of people use that as art therapy. I haven't seen that many people or heard that many anecdotes about people like going crazy because of mid-jury, but they're still like, if you're doing image generation, you don't want to generate adult content, for example. Do you have an idea of like the shape of the battle that you're going to be waging against like the risks that you want to like fight off? Yeah.

Look, I think for us, they're actually just fairly lower stakes than those other ones. like, sorry, I'm turning anyone into paper clips, and not that I think that that's a real thing anyway. And like you said, I don't think we're inducing psychosis in anyone. You know, this is a tricky question. Music, the content has kind of always been filthy in the best music. And I don't really want us to be the arbiter of that. So we have like some content moderation that's like pretty, I would say pretty forgiving.

And currently that's actually, that's a. and then lots of copyright moderation, of course. Yeah, I was raised on Little John and the East Side Boys. And it was indeed filthy. Yeah. And yes, it would not be your place to necessarily filter that. I would imagine that you at some point have to do some sort of like KYC age verification or even something that's just like parental controls, that type of stuff.

That certainly makes sense. I have a follow-up question, but... Go for it. Yeah, there was an article in the journal. yesterday about how Instagram had used PG-13 as a heuristic for the type of content that they would show to teenagers on Instagram. And the MPA actually pushed back against that. And I was very upset about that because I feel like we need shared language for how we describe

what is acceptable on new tech platforms. So like, I want you to be able to put the label of like explicit. Remember that explicit content on every album? It became so iconic. It was actually cool, which maybe had a bad effect. But if you put that black and white flag with the explicit on there, I know exactly what I'm getting. And I know that I'm going to keep that out of the hands of my kids for a number of years. And I would hate to be in a situation where you couldn't use that.

And you had to come up with some new jargon for your policy. I love just building on the shoulders of giants. But have you thought about adapting any of those terminologies or just making your moderation language match what people already know? Is that relevant to you? Not as much as it is on other platforms. I mean, but it is. You know, I feel like we should not be the arbiters of a lot of these things.

And, you know, quite frankly, maybe, like, you don't want us to be the arbiters of these things and that there should be other guidelines set by other things. And so, like, yes, if you're dealing with children, you're going to have different roles about the songs that you can make and that you can not make. And actually, right now, parents making songs with their kids is actually a mega use case. It's probably half of my usage, which is a lot.

I use the product a lot. And so it's like right now this is actually not the biggest focus for us. Like what we have, like, works pretty well. There are always going to be edge cases. There are edge cases in moderation on every single platform, literally, you know, ever. of course, kind of just to do them as they come. Yeah. What are your conversations like with people in the music industry?

There were some news earlier this week around the first, like, AI artists signed a record deal. I don't know if it was actually the first, but that's how it was being reported. How are the conversations are going with your users that are, like, true pro users that are using Suno to either, like, you know, experiment with, like, a bunch of different variations of songs, get new ideas, make entire songs themselves. What are those conversations like? You know, I think there's been a huge shift in the last six months. I would say, like, now I really don't meet a lot of professionals who don't use Suno at least a little bit. Like songwriters use us a ton.

We run a lot of camps. It's cliche, but a creative companion or a creative co-pilot for helping craft the right songs, you know, verse by verse or getting ideas. Basically, every producer I know uses Suno. It was recently put to me just in an incredibly pithy way of we've become the OZMPIC of the music industry. Everybody's on it, but nobody wants to talk about it. And while that might be frustrating for us that in the interim, nobody wants to talk about it. In the long run, that's actually great.

In the long run, the fact that everybody is using it and loves it is fantastic. And so it's this weird dynamic, I think, where one-on-one people are quite pro, even though the industry as a whole may have different feelings about it. It's interesting. Yeah, I wonder, I wonder how this, like, like, the creative, the creative element of this, like, really throws me because on, on the one hand, I see if, if I'm thinking about Suno in the creative realm as, like, you know, cursor for your, for your DAW, your workstation, your, your fruity loops, or your pro tools, or your Ableton, and your generating samples and actually working. through that. I feel like that is something that, yes, we'd get to 100% penetration. But on the flip side, like, we've had the ability to generate blog posts and text for years now at human touring test level. And yet, like, it does not feel like we're close to just, oh, yeah, just put in a prompt, write a good blog post and it comes out and it's good.

Like, you still need that spark, that inspiration. And then most people, I feel like, I feel like, are still not, they're, they're still in the co-pilot era, for sure. And I feel like that, that's interesting. Yeah, I don't know. I think there's a big difference though here. Yeah. There's a few big differences. But for me, you know, hearing you say that, it makes me think a lot of, you're thinking of us largely as a tool. Sure. It's because a lot of AI products are tools. And the point is not to just turn this blog post out. Actually, the point is to have enjoyed the process of it. I happen not to really enjoy the process of writing so much. Maybe, maybe you guys are different.

But like, for us, the way people use Suno, it's like you're coming. Yes, there is some song at the end of it that you listen to and the fruits of your labor are enjoyable, but the journey of doing it is actually why you're there. And so the actual tool analogy doesn't really work there of like, I don't just write in the prompt and it comes out perfect. That's not even the point here. Yes. So I think what I'm, I think where I'm getting is that the actual market for AI audio is going

to bifurcate, in my opinion, and there will be people, just like there are people right now that use LLMs to just chat and just have an AI therapist, or they have a friend, or they just ask chat GPT40 for, you know, hey, what should I do at work about this? They're just having a conversation. And then out of text generation, out of LLMs, we also got just the ability to do code completion. And so we got, you know, Winsurf and Cursor and Codex. And, you know, we got these like coding agents and then we also got like AI therapists and these are two wildly different things from the same underlying technology and I feel like the like I would I would just be shocked if you don't see both emerge over time I mean maybe the different company comes in and takes

one more seriously than you because of the market's really big but I would I would imagine that you wind up servicing both to some degree no for sure I mean we already service both but you know I almost think of this as in the coding example, you might vibe code something. Yeah. Um, and that's just a few prompts. Yeah. Um, or you might actually need fine-grained control over the thing, and then you use a different tool, like something that's basically auto-complete on steroids. Yes. I don't mean that in a majority of ways. No, no, 100%. Music is the same way. I might vibe, create something and have a session where music is generally what I'm looking for and I enjoyed the process of getting there. Um, but maybe that's the end of it. And if this is going to be,

a song that is everlasting and intended to top the charts, I need that fine-gram control, and I need a different paradigm and a different set of workflows and tools for doing it. There may even be the same underlying model that powers both of those things,

and it's a different end-user application. Yeah. How do you think, like, video creation is distinctly different than, like, music creation? Because I think, you know, on our side, watching the SORA launch, SORA was like a cool creative tool that had this novel like feature that was the cameo feature. But then immediately those outputs just wanted to go live elsewhere, right?

They wanted to go where these big audiences were. And I feel like with Suno, the difference is like you can create music and you want to save stuff. And it's actually can be very enjoyable to just listen to the content. Is that, is that just a, like, do you think that will, do you think that will always be? kind of the dynamic or do you think eventually like video models will catch up to the point where like people are generating videos and then just like consuming them a lot because I haven't again like I think a lot of the output of something like Asora has been like very ephemeral it gets maybe shared in a group chat or gets shared on another social media platform but people are not

like revisiting the content yeah I think look very fast moving space and so you know this is just one guy's opinion today, I think there's basically two big differences. One is the joy in making the music. And I think people mostly enjoy consuming the SORA outputs and the experience of making it is less interesting. And then the other thing about video in general, but especially AI video, is it really tends to short form. And actually, the beauty of music is that it really is meant to grab you for minutes at a time and not seconds at a time. And it makes for a completely different consumptive experience. And so, and I think that's actually a lot of what's broken in music consumption today is there's so much pressure to put on a song and then put, you know, through headphones and then

put your phone in your pocket and not even really pay attention to it. But I think a lot more is possible where I do have somebody's attention for three minutes, four minutes, and you can actually tell the story through music in a way that like a 30 second video really does not. And so maybe AI video it will get there. Maybe it will get there in a year. Maybe it'll get there in five years. But like today, that's what I see as the two big differences. Makes sense. How do you think the music streaming platforms will navigate AI music? I think they, look, they already are. There's AI music on these platforms. Spotify's announced that they'll start doing AI music. And so I very strongly suspect that in like five years, this is not a conversation that's being held.

because I already know that there's little bits of our music everywhere in, you know, mega-smashes. And the same way you don't think about, like, was this song digitally produced or was it produced on a giant console in a studio somewhere? And that's maybe something that people thought for five years, you know, 30 years ago. My very strong suspicion, or just like auto-tune where now every song has auto-tune in it, even if you can't hear it, my very strong suspicion is that that is where everything ends up. reason is it is better for consumers. It would really be bad for consumers and therefore bad for the size of the ecosystem if these things kind of bifurcate. Yep, that makes a lot of sense. It's like

asking, I don't even think anyone ever asked the question, how will social media apps handle Photoshop? Photoshop was, Photoshop outputs were just immediately, the tool existed prior to social media, so it just proliferated immediately. I mean, speaking of Photoshop, uh, Photoshop, uh, Photoshop has had to grapple with the existence of generative images, through partnerships, through rolling their own. How important is it to you to play in the market of like the enterprise audio workflows, due deals, partnerships? Because what we saw in the text, in the, at least in code, at least, every coding platform or, and there were a whole bunch of new ones, like there's been a real battle for the IDE and I'm wondering if there's like a battle coming for the um the the the top end

of the music production workflow um I think there there probably will be a battle but it will be not nearly the blood bath that it will be in other domains and it's just because the average piece of music today is produced in 800 different tools and so and everybody has all of the tools and so I actually don't think it's entirely reasonable to think that there will be one tool that uses up all of your screen time. And like, that's going to be the thing that you produce 99% of your music in, if you are a true professional. And so there, the end goal is the perfect song and a little bit less the journey of how

you got there. Yeah. Interesting. In the code, it's like VS code is just open all the time. And I don't want to have another editor. And if you like, talk to people who develop iOS, they're pissed off because they have two editors. But it's not nearly the same 800 different tools that it is in music.

Yeah, no, that makes it sense. That makes sense. This is super interesting. Thank you for coming on to break it down. Yeah, this is awesome. Thanks so much. I'm going to use Suno to try to make bedtime with my three and a half-year-old a little bit easier later tonight. So I'll report back.

I'm excited to hear. What are some of your favorite prompts that you use with your kid or kids? You know, a lot of them are songs. I have a one-year-old and four-year-old. It's like still too early for the one year. A lot of them are songs about him in fantastical situations. Like my most favorite one is just like last winter after the Zamboni driver at the local ice rink, let him like ride in the Zamboony.

So it was like a whole album of songs about him riding in a Zamboony doing all sorts of crazy stuff. And yeah, they're like very special and personal. And I do go back to those. And gosh, yeah, I think this is wonderful. Sometimes we joke if we were a kid's app, we'd have five. times the revenue that we do. You know, it's just like, um, kids is like the most straightforward way to get me to part with my money. I'm sure you're the same way. Totally, totally agree. Suno kids, maybe. The iPad, the iPad app. Yeah. Coming next year. Oh, not actually.

So great to meet you, Mikey. Thank you for going on. And congratulations on all the progress. We'll talk to you soon. Bye. Let me tell you about numeral.com sales tax and autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. Speaking of kids, so nice to drop the HQ. Yeah, drop the HQ. RIP to NAMRL HQ. Speaking of kids, I want your review of this way to decide how to buy a house. So in New York City in 2023, this real estate agent worked with a couple who wanted to purchase an apartment on the upper west side of Manhattan. But they wanted their Pokemon-obsessed six-year-old son to have a say.

How? playing Pokemon in each neighborhood before his parents would commit to a purchase. We spent an afternoon covering four neighborhoods as the child played the game and caught Pokemon characters. It turns out that Central Park West was a hot spot for Pokemon Go characters that day, and we toured a two-bedroom co-op that was listed for about $2 million. The child ended up catching a snorlax as soon as we stepped inside Central Park. A snorlax is a blue-green character that looks like a bear, and is apparently extremely rare to find because it spends the majority of its life asleep. The child is screaming, jumping, up and down.

He was so excited to find it. Although my clients looked at seven other apartments that day, no other area came close in terms of Pokemon action. So they knew that apartment was the one. They rode up an offer that same day for the full asking price. What's your review? Is that a good way? Is that cute and adorable to bring your kids in? I think it's cute or is it weird?

It potentially could lead to total heartbreak, you know, if the kid's just like, yeah, this is the It's actually a dry spot now. This is a Pokemon hot spot and then they're, then the, then the Pokemon dry up a week in after moving in. Good take. And they're like, what are we doing here? I know we just moved in here, but

we got to, I've got to go. We got to go ahead of road. We got to get closer to the Pokemon. We got to, mom and dad, we got to book a wander. We got to find our happy place. Find our Pokemon hunting spot. Book of Wonder with Inspiring Reviews. How great a many, these, dream beds, top tier cleaning, and 24-7 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better, folks.

Yeah, I don't know. I think I like the idea of bringing the kid, the six-year-old, into the house purchase process, but let's leave the phones at home and let's develop a taste for, let's become snobs. How about that, six-year-old? Become a snob and say, no, I couldn't live anywhere, but. I don't like the cafe. The Upper East Side, because. I have strong opinions about this.

Get into the lore. What happened on this street? That's what the six-year-old should do. I'm fine to delegate to the six-year-old, but not to Nyantic the company behind Pokemon Go. Anyway, our next guest is waiting for us. In the Restream Waiting Room, we have a mod from Mercury. How you doing?

Good to see you. Welcome to the show. Great to see you. Hey, good to be back. How are you doing? It's been a little bit. Yeah, it's been a while. A little bit.

Great to be back. Give us an update on what's going on in your world. And then I want to just talk about all the crazy. stuff that's happening in tech, honestly. Yeah, let's go for it. We just announced today on Fortune term sheet that we had three years of profitability. Whoa. Whoa, whoa, whoa.

I'm excited about. All right. We're hitting all the sound effects. That is wild. Yeah, full founder mode. Yes, it's been a one weird trick. VCs hate this. VCs hate this.

One weird trick. Area man discovers profitability. It's actually really funny. I love my VCs, but there's definitely every board meeting. They're like, okay, how can we spend this money a little bit faster? I was actually talking to some CEOs

just like last this week. And yeah, most of the time, spending more money doesn't mean you grow faster. And that's kind of like what I was trying to celebrate with this milestone that like it's, you know, we're building software companies there. At least we are, but know everyone. Yeah, I got a pitch for you.

You don't need to spend money to grow. I got a pitch for you. You're in a strong, financial position, you should put out a press release, say, we don't need a backstop. We don't need a government backstop. We are, we are profitable. I didn't know there was a backstop available to be here. Yeah, I was ready to use, when those comments started floating Wednesday, I was ready

to use the analogy of like, what would happen if there was a government backstop on venture-backed corporate cards? I mean, I mean, truly, you are, you are a bank and you've obviously lived through, you live through the financial crisis. I can't say he's a bank. No, okay, okay. We're not a bank. We're partner with banks.

But you're obviously intimately familiar with the financial system. Do you have any unique lessons or stories that you tell from the financial crisis, warning signs that you pull from, even just like movies

or books or something that you keep going back to is like, you know, we want to stay sharp on this. You know, I think like building trust in what Mercury does has always been, it's actually probably the hardest thing we do, right? Because, you know, we're asking a lot from people.

We're storing all their money for their business. And, you know, it's like, I had this conversation when we first launched Mercury with someone who'd raised $10 million. And he was like, this is more money than I've ever seen in my whole life. I'm not going to give it to a startup banking service. And now we have customers that have more than $100 million with Mercury. So, like, building that trust is always so important. And, you know, obviously, I don't know which financial crisis you were referring to.

I was like in 2008, actually. But I do want to talk about SBB as well. It's like the SVV crisis. Yeah, of course. It goes. Take it through the SUV crisis. Yeah. What were the biggest lessons from the SVV crisis?

Yeah, I mean, the biggest thing for us was it can't just be all talk, right? Like if I, yeah, and I was talking to founders saying like, hey, you should trust Mercury. And they'd be like, oh, man, like, SVB is a 40-year-old company. and they just like, you know, are dying. Why should we trust Mercury? And then, you know, what we did and what we've continued to kind of invest in is to make it. So it's not just about trusting Mercury. It's about, like, having products that deliver, like, trust.

So, you know, we have, like, accelerated FDIC insurance, which is, you know, I guess on the website, we published 5 million, but it's actually most accounts get way more than 5 million. So almost all the deposits that sit at Mercury are FDIC insured. Yeah. And that was the big thing. I think SVB was at 80-ish. percent uninsured deposits. And that's just because, just for anybody that's not super familiar,

that's because they had standard $2004 million of FDIC insurance, but almost every account had well beyond that because they were started. Especially VC-backed businesses, you know. And also in a zero-interest rate environment, in a zero-interest rate environment, you're like, I'm just going to keep it in the checking account. I raised a $5 million seat. I'll just literally keep it in the checking account because, like, what's the point? If I move it to some other vehicle, I'm going to earn 0.5% or 0.1%.

Now it's a different environment? Yeah, was it always the plan to get profitable, stay profitable as fast as sort of reasonably possible? I think like... Or did that happen because of SBB? If people are trusting you as like a financial platform institution, it's not exactly comforting to know that you're burning money and your financial institution. Because I think the other, you know, the other thing that was part of SBBB was, you know, like people just had so little time to move all of their... operations and it's just like there's so much reliant on a bank account for a business. It was such a funny moment.

I was with SVB. It collapsed and I was like, I need to go someplace less risky. I'm going to First Republic. Yeah. And then that collapsed to it. I was like a lot of people. But that feels like an even old. I don't know which one's actually older.

I think First Republic was older. But it was this odd thing. I think that's a little young, I believe. Total, total refutation of the Lindy principle. It was like, actually go to Mercury. Yeah. Would have been better off. Sorry.

I was going to say, I think, one of the parts of that was like, you realize so much of operations. And it's even more extreme for Mercury customers because, you know, we do more than banking, so we do people's credit cards and invoicing. And, yeah, we've been building more and more features and our customers are reliant on a broader set of features. So, I think part of, like, being profitable and sustaining profitability is being, you know, making that promise to our customers that this is like something that's going to stick around.

So if they use us, it's not like, you know, one day we don't raise a funding round or, you know, whatever. There's like a crash or something and people have to like worry about that. So it's definitely like a core part of that kind of having that trusted service. Yeah. Where are you guys getting the most leverage from AI? Yeah, good question. The biggest thing we've done is like back office stuff. There's just a to run a fintech, especially kind of on the banking side, there's just a ton of people that have to do a lot of back office things.

and, you know, it's like you have to upload a formation document and someone has to review it. And, you know, all of these things are very ripe for AI to just, you know, smooth it out, either, like, automate 100% or automate it 80% so that, like, a human can just review the, review the answers. So, yeah, lots of stuff on compliance risk back office is, it's been our biggest investment. We've got lots of, you know, I'm not, I guess a lot of what we do at Mercury is, like, not kind of follow fads or whatever. So we have we've done a bunch of things that are user facing, but you know, we try to add like

little bits of value here and there. So yeah, we have a chat bot so you can ask your questions. And that's been actually, actually it's sold like 40% of tickets, customer questions are just like, you know, hey, when's, yeah, how long does it take for why it is that all? And like that, yeah, those kinds of questions. And that's just a better customer experience. And, you know, we think about. And that's 40% over the baseline of like, because most, most, most customer supports this. like what if you email in it would just previously do like fuzzy database search to be like

yeah yeah oh it seems like you're asking about this FAQ you got a 40% lift on top of that because you were already out doing best practices I imagine um yes it's a bit more complicated because we still have that email system when people email it in um so this did replace like the suggested topics and like the live messaging system um so yeah I don't know exactly what about the cost side the suggested answer was way, way less because people don't like reading those suggested things. Like they just want an answer and they won't move on.

What about on the cost side? We were talking to Ivan Notion. He said that his inference bill was actually having an effect on his gross margins. You've remained profitable. But if I'm looking deeper in your financials, will I see an uptick in inference bills based on actually,

is that something that you're actually trying to manage as you stay profitable? Or has it been low enough that it just like, it's not? Yeah, and I think it's wildly different, I think, using it in back office context where you're sort of processing forms and PDFs and things like that versus Ivan where people are like, I'm going to generate, you know,

trillions of tokens because I'm just making long documents. Totally. On the back office side, it's mostly being a cost saving, right? Like you're kind of giving leverage to humans and... Or you're moving off of like a mechanical turk or scale or something like that. whatever workload it is. And yeah, on the user-facing side, it's, you know,

I think a big difference for us is, you know, we have 200,000 plus customers, but it's not that many customers, right? Like a lot of, like, consumer services of millions of customers. Like, each of our customers is obviously, like, much more valuable. And also, you probably don't have, like, a ton of DA.

I mean, you probably have a lot of DAUs, but it's not the app that people open when they wake up, you know? It's a great. It's much more utility than productivity, right? People are actually kind of happy if they don't need to open. Exactly. And so the inference is just going to be so much lower than if Instagram is all of a sudden being like, we're going to run an LLM query on every photo that gets uploaded.

It's like, okay, well, that's a huge amount of inference. Yeah. And we're doing more and more, though, so potentially, you know, when you're churning through all these transactions, they'll go up. I don't expect for us. We also make way more on a per customer basis than, actually, I don't know about notion, but than like most prosumer consumer type thing. So I think it would net out that it would be a smallish percentage.

Yeah, that makes awesome. What are you seeing across your angel portfolio? You've been investing like I guess for context, I've done about 350 investments in the last 10 years. I don't know if I need a go in for that. And I just actually announced earlier this year, my, I have. like a formal angel fund now. It was a 26 million kind of angel fund. I mean, I'm still mostly investing in the same way. I mostly invest because it's just fun to talk to founders. And I guess the same reason you guys run this podcast is like interesting to talk to founders

and learn new ideas. It's all it's very AI focused right now, as you can imagine. You know, what's, I think AI is kind of fun to invest in because like every six months where you're investing in like changes a lot. Right. Like for a while, it was kind of dev tools in AI and now I feel like that's done. So most of what I see right now is kind of deeper, vertical, kind of B2B applications of AI. Do you think AI gives people the permission to invest in more unique categories? Because basically like there used to be like a whole set of categories that were just

kind of like small businesses or industrials or some niche or some weird niche thing. And they would just be kind of off limits because it would be like, oh, no, no, no, like the real money's made in, in FinTech. The real money is made in maybe, maybe ed tech, but that one's difficult. Or ad tech or marketing, martec. You know, it's like there were these easy themes, but with AI, you can go and actually put together a pitch around something that's maybe more or less untouched by tech and actually

generate a deck. it's definitely like this extension of the software is eating the world kind of vibe that Mark Andrescent talks about Right So eating a little bit more of the world

On the edges Like 10-ish years ago It was all like social and mobile Right Like that's why everything was And then we started doing Like even Mercury's like 10 years ago

It was probably off limits To like try to make something that went after the banking market And I remember when I started in 2017 It was like You know It sounded weird right like it was it was it was not something that was done

I think the thing that AI does is like open up labor right like in robotics it opens up physical labor and then in the case of kind of the white collar workers it opens up like human kind of intellectual labor and that is like a whole set of categories so you know people generally VCs hate services firms right like it's like they'll be like oh this like a services firm but now like services firms are cool you're like oh yeah it's human it's human as

AI plus human services firms are like the the thing that a lot of people are investing in ideally trying to get to like fully human only so fully AI only but yeah it's definitely like it opened up a lot of industries that wouldn't have been interesting from a investment perspective do you think people have been overly bearish on

on SaaS it's you know notable that open AI uses everything from Salesforce to Slack to Qualtricks. And I imagine you use a lot of, on your business, I don't think anybody's out there saying, you know, I'm going to vibe code a bank, you know, even if they could, even if you could somehow build that on like a banking as a service platform,

it's like the level, you know, the amount of work you need to do to maintain a vibe coded bank on top of, you know, it just doesn't make sense. And really, I mean, I think there will be a wave of disruption. that will happen in SaaS, but I don't think the answer will be everyone's just making their own

end-to-end like Salesforce. Like that just, that sounds ridiculous to me. I mean, I hope someone builds a much better sales force, but it'll still, yeah, and maybe their pricing won't be like per seat and it'll be like per sale or whatever. But I think the category will exist, the shape of the category will change, the business model

will change. But I don't think the answer is everyone's building their own sales force. Like, that just sounds inefficient. Like, it just sounds ridiculous to me. but there will be like, I think actually like the incremental new applications people build will actually make, will just be more applications, right?

Like if the number of vendors you had was like 10 and like you're paying a lot, like maybe you'll have another 90 internal apps that like people just made for like small use cases. So like the amount of software people will use will go up, I think because of vibe coding and the ease of coding. But I don't think like these big categories are going to just disappear because like people can now make it themselves.

And do you think, Do you think companies will go multi-product sooner? And are you seeing that across the portfolio if the actual engineering hours are less to go from one product to a second to a third that will just encourage more companies? I think it's going to be like industry-specific. I mean, I think a big story about fintech

in the last couple of years has been like every fintech going multi-product, right? I think it's partly because, you know, when we started in 2019, like no one was building like a better new bank. So that's all it took. Like our first product was a bank account and it was like really good.

Now to compete against Mercury, you would have to have bill pay and credit cards and invoicing because like that's just what people look for. Like they look for more of a bundle product. So I think it depends where you're competing. And to some extent it gets a little easier because you can just make products quicker. but making like amazing products is

is never easy right like I think you just like the quality and craft and all of that like do matter and we try to invest a lot like when we make a new product it's never easy it's like it takes a lot to make an amazing product

but when you're like very new to a category and like almost everything in AI is like very new you can build more quicker and then like kind of refine it over time but it's a good question I think a lot of the ways people end up competing with incumbents, right? Like, I've heard a ton of, like, I don't know why we're picking on Salesforce,

but I've heard a lot of, like, how do we beat Salesforce kind of strategies. And a lot of them are like, oh, actually, we're going to bundle, like, a AISDR and, you know, X and Y and, like, we're going to make it, like, a much more fully featured kind of version of, like, Salesforce. So I think, like, when you compete against incumbents, like, doing a bundle strategy sometimes is, like, a better strategy. So, like, we'll see that play out. Yeah.

Very cool. Congratulations to the whole team of a three-year milestone. Looking forward to the fourth, the fifth, six, and hopefully hundreds of years of Mercury profitability. You've got to get past the SVB mark. Yeah. Become the longest standing institution. It's funny.

They were started like a year before I was born, so I have this exact mental motive. Oh, wow. 42 years ago. That's amazing. Maybe I'll stop thinking about that when they're going to further down. Very cool. But yeah, really appreciate you having me on.

Yeah. We'll talk to you soon. Have you good one. Cheers. Bye. Bye. You heard about the importance of AI agents for customer service. You got to head over to fin.com.

A.I. The number one AI agent for customer service. Number one in performance benchmarks. Number one in competitive Beacoff. Bigot world champion. Ranking on G2. And he was also mentioning better CRMs. Why not try out Adio?

Customer relationship magic. Adio is the AI native CRAM that builds, and grows your company to the next level. Brett Adcock fired back at hype around 1X, presumably. Figure CEO, Brett Adcock says his, quote, major competitors are using teleoperation, human operators in their videos and calls it deceiving. Will he call out 1X by name? Will he call out Elon by name?

Will he call out Unitary by name? Let's find out by watching this clip. His analogy, it's like if a self-driving car pulled up and we found out there was some guy from Tennessee. demonstration of a robot doing something that's like not teleopt or like coded. And what you're seeing now in the world is like, I would say most major competitor to us at this point are putting out most of their content and updates teleopt from a human. And I think it's like perhaps some of the most deceiving things I've ever seen. It's like if I was driving a self-driving car, if a self-driving car pulled up next to us,

we found out there was some guy from Tennessee driving it. We'd both be like, that's not what I thought this was. would look like. What you want to see is... So the funny thing is that... Tyler, why are you laughing at that? Well, that's like exactly how self-driving cars work right now. Teleop is actually maybe critical to the development of full self-driving cars and maybe used by all

the top companies all the time. Yes, I mean, it is odd that like... I thought it was... I think it's like a key... It's the key enabler for OneX to actually get robots in homes and getting them to a point where they can do valuable work. Yeah. Right. And they're going to be taking a loss on that.

They're going to be taking a loss on that. They're charging like $2 an hour. But that's going to be, you know, a flywheel for them to get more and more training data. Oh, the founder of Onex actually replied, I think, DAR. That's the founder, right? No, Dar's the founder. Oh, he's just the VP. founder. Oh, but he's just the loudest voice on X, so I give him all the credit. He's one of

he created one ax. It would be nothing without him. Anyway, he says, so basically Waymo, there were two operators to every car when Waymo started. It is interesting that, yeah, Waymo has never, that I know of, they've never really, like, published data on how many operators they have per car. I think that that would actually give people a lot of reassurance around, like, okay, these cars are driving around? Are there people over watching them? And then you just get to a point where you say, okay, yeah, there's 10,000 operators for 5,000 cars. And then next year there's 8,000 operators for 5,000 cars. And eventually there's 5,000 operators for 5,000 cars. And then eventually there's 1,000 operators for 5,000 cars. And eventually there's one operator for 5,000

cars. But it's just a slow process of getting people up to speed on the new technology. and it just gives people confidence at every turn, much like the confidence that I feel when I go to sleep on my eight sleep. How'd you sleep last night, Jordy? 88 from me, seven hours, 38 minutes. I want to hear of that soundboard still has my favorite song on it. Boom. You got an 88?

I'll give it to you. Wait, do we tie? No, I got an 83. Oh, 83, okay. Rough one. Rough one. Well, we have breaking news from the Pope. He chimed in on the AI bubble.

some bub talk from the from the papacy a papal bull is that a top signal on the bub talk no no it's not it's not in the bubble it's not on the bubble it's not on the bubble it is about it is on the it's from the pope though who i should be following why am i not following the pope uh technological innovation can be a form of participation in the divine act of creation it carries an ethical and spiritual weight for every design choice expresses a vision of humanity. The church therefore calls all builders of AI to cultivate moral discernment as a fundamental part of their work, to develop systems that reflect justice, solidarity, and a genuine reverence for life. I like that. Good line. Liquidity thinks it's AI generated slop. Very bearish. No. Yes, he used one M-Dash. Like the M-Dash is not a tell tell sign. You can just use one if you're just hammering on the keyboard. Or you can just write a note and then in the edit someone can use an M-Dash. I don't know. Is the Pope one shoted? We'll never know. I think this is fine. I think this is a nice little call to action. What do you

think, Tyler? You put this in here, right? Yeah. I mean, what are you guys doing if the Pope comes out and says like, I actually don't care about AI margins? What are you doing? I would be extremely bullish on that. What I'm worried about is the Pope coming out and being like, actually, like, I've discovered some novel physics. I've been chatting, I've been talking to Grock and I've been talking to chat GPT for just like thousands of hours. People don't think about the recursiveness in the Bible. Yeah, no, yeah, recursiveness in the Bible. Actually, it's crazy. You know, I'm the Pope of the Catholic Church, but I've been getting into polytheism recently. I went down a rabbit hole, and I think there might be more than one God. I think there's multiple gods.

A.B. in the chat says, got to get the Pope on Vanta. Totally agree. 100%. I think it would be interesting if the Pope started coming out and said, we're exploring taking equity stakes in technology companies like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Yeah. Well, we've got to get the Pope on Bezell. Because your Bezell concierge is available now. It's certainly any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch. Yeah, the Pope already has the drop top six wheel. G-wagon. Is it six wheels? I think so. No way. I always thought it was a rules. No, it is a G-wagon. But there's,

I feel like he has a wild set of cars. It's, no, it's not six wheels. No, it's not six wheels. No, it's not six wheels would be so. But it is a one-of-one and they made it, they made an EV. I love it. Um, speaking of EVs, the Ford F-150 lightning is potentially going out of production. No way. It is, it is close to failing. Uh, the Wall Street Journal has a story on the front page talking about um where is this i can pull that up the ford f1 f1 uh ford ways ending electric f-150 truck uh executives at ford motor are in active discussions active talks they're in talks about scrapping the electric version of the f-150 people familiar with the matter said which would make the unprofitable truck the u.s is first

major EV casualty. Maybe this is, do you think this is all triggered by T.J. Parker? Possible. World famous venture capitalist and founder himself. He bought a Ford, but he didn't buy an electric one. He bought a R. Why they should make, why don't they make the electric one like the Raptor R? Like with an internal combustion engine?

Exactly. I feel like if they want people to buy the electric version of the truck, they should give it like an exhaust and an engine and gas. A real engine note. Yeah, real engine note. When I have my Raptor, I... And it's more cylinders. For people, anytime I was on a call in the car,

people would assume that I was driving a sports car because there's so much engine noise in the cabin. It was ridiculous. Yeah, I mean, the Raptor R has... How many cylinders does it have? Is it an V8? It is, right? I thought it was...

So it has eight cylinders. the F-150 lightning had zero cylinders. That could be why it's not selling very well. The Ford Raptor R had 5.2 liters in its engine. The F-150 Lightning had a zero-liter engine because it didn't have one. So it makes sense why this has been struggling, and we will see what they wind up doing. We've got to change the subject because all this Raptor talks got me thinking about getting one again and... Pull the trigger.

Well, if you think it's bullish or bearish that Ford is pulling the Raptor. No, they're doubling down on the Raptor. They're pulling the lightning. Get over to public.com investing for those that take it seriously, multi-asset investing, industry-leading yields. They're trusted by millions. Quadrillion. What else is going on in the markets?

Lewis. Lewis says, my inbox is full of people breathlessly trying to interpret this. And it is one-year look at Spy. It's over. slight dip. You can interpret this in two seconds. It's over. It's just completely over.

The bubble popped. Now it's ready to start rebuilding. It was a good run. We can go up from here because the bubble has popped. You're welcome. Yep. It was rough. We got through it.

We are now... It's almost a weekend. We are now past the trough of disillusionment. We're in the plateau of productivity. That's good. That's what I see. That's good. And pretty soon, oh, the stocks have already stopped trading.

Yeah. So we're safe now. We're safe. You can't hurt us anymore. The economy can't hurt you on the weekend. There's so many more charts. It's really chart talk time. Consumer sentiment almost back to its record low.

People are not happy with consumer sentiment right now. You see this to Bank of America. Yes. Just as of yesterday, just fully recovered from the global financial crisis. Wow. Took 19 years. To the day and then it's like back in another crisis. Can you imagine?

It's like, no, we just dug her way out of the hole. No, fantastic, famously backstopped by none other than Warren Buffett. Yeah, it's been interesting to follow, I mean, Berkshire Hathaway is green this week. He's got so much cash.

He's so much cat. He's building cash pile. So it's $1.07 trillion. Maybe the least AGI-pilled person in the world. Cash-pilled. Imagine if if Berkshire Hathaway

just comes in and just, acquires like 90% of open AI. He likes those authentic greenbacks. AG, what's the eye for? Authentic greenback incentives. I don't know. Daniel Heath says,

is commenting. So, Nvidia put out something on Wednesday. As I've long said, China is nanoseconds behind America and AI. It's vital that America wins by racing ahead and winning developers worldwide. Daniel

says, this is an insane statement. America is more than nanoseconds ahead of China and AI. The actual gap is months and it would be larger too if NVIDIA stopped the flow of advanced GPUs to China. So putting him in the truth zone. There's some more information on

the Snap. Snapchat deal. Snap gets 400 million, which is greater than perplexity's total revenue. Snap gives nothing except access to Wait, wait, wait, wait, whoa. It's more? What? They're paying more than their revenue? How does that work? Perplexity is taking VC dollars, giving them to SNAP for distribution. There's also an equity. All the SNAP holders are...

Okay, sorry, this is extremely confusing. Let's read this. The deal looks incredibly in SNAP's favor. Snap gets $400 million, greater than perplexity total revenue. Now, Signal is saying this is most likely $399 million of perplexity equity to SNAP, not cash. So there is a question about how much of it is cash versus. So, yeah, the raise VC dollars give it to SNAP is one theory. But it is possible that they're just giving $400 million of equity, like a stock grant. I think it's a, it's some split. Yeah.

I don't know if they published it. But Signal's thesis is that it's. it's $399 million of equity and like $1 million of cash. And so it's basically just like, we want distribution in SNAP and we're willing to give you equity to pay for it because $400 million on $20 billion is 2% of the company, right?

Something like that. Yeah. It's crazy. 2% of the company. Snap gives nothing except access to an unloved AI chat. Perplexity gets indirect access to zero income teens.

Sasha is not a fan of this deal. Spiegel negotiation master. Go back to the conversation we were having, I think, Saturday. We had a couple hour drive and we were basically doing a podcast with no mics. But I was saying I was surprised that Snapchat has not figured out a way to just monetize all the capital that a lot of these consumer AI companies have, given their massive, massive user base. Well, it's because the numbers are like all flipped around. Like Snap is, I think, like way more mature on all the business metrics and yet worth half perplexity right like look at the look at

the difference in terms of like business metrics d a u's uh paid flexity does not want will not want people comping it to snap and their next financing yeah it's odd i don't know it's it's some sort of like uh you know dance to actually uh integrate these two things uh time FNA says, Snap will be integrating Perplexity directly into Snapchat's chat interface. Perplexity will pay SNAP $400 million over a year in a mix of cash in stock as part of the deal and gets access to SNAP's 900 million monthly active users. AP in the chat. Snapchat's going to accidentally build AGI, just trying to make the dog filter blink realistically.

I love it. What do you think, Tyler's out of pathway to AGI? Well, I mean, look, Spiegel, I mean, Spiegel might be back. You think so? I mean, look, we know someone who was previously... What do you think he actually... What do you think he actually gets? What do you think he actually gets?

I have a lot of trouble understanding what perplexity is because it's somewhat of an application layer company, but a lot of the APIs, a lot of the foundation model products, like do deep research. Some of them have news hooks already. So if my choice, like Apple could have gone to perplexity. They went to Gemini. Like, does Gemini give you search results the way perplexity?

Like, perplexity's initial pitch was it's a LLM, but there's no cutoff and we'll search the web for you. I feel like most of the LLMs just do that out of the box now. And so, like, what are you getting when you partner with perplexity over something else? What's the differentiating? You're getting cash. That's why I think a lot. No, I think a lot of this deal had to have been cash because, I think if I'm Evan Spiegel and I'm looking at like perplexity's revenue and user base relative to his own.

Yes. And you're not. Okay. So help me understand this math. If I'm, if I'm Apple, how many, how many DA used does Apple have? Is it, it's like the same size as Snapchat, right? In terms of like actual iPhone users, it's got to be a billion, right? There's like a billion iPhone users.

something like that? I think it's more. Like 1.5. Okay. So, and then Snapchat has like 400. Oh, wait,

no, Snapchat is almost a billion, uh, MAUs, but DAUs is like 400. Right? Uh, yeah, like 470.

Okay. So let's say that, so let's say that Snapchat is roughly 40% as many users as Apple. So it's 40% to Apple's, you know, billion plus 1.5 billion. Uh,

Apple is paying, Google 1 billion, Snapchat could potentially go and pay Google for access to Gemini 40% as much, right? Because they're 40% the size. So they could pay 400 million and get the exact same quality of AI product that Apple is vending. You'd think because Apple says, hey, or Google goes to Apple and says, hey, you want to service a billion users? That'll be $1 billion. Oh, you want to service 400 million users. That'll be $4.4.000. That'll be $4.4.000. $400 million because it's billion, because it's basically a dollar a user. I don't know.

Google's basically charging a dollar a user, but perplexity is in the opposite scenario where they're paying for the right as opposed to the other way around. Yeah. The definition of perplexity is inability to deal with or understand something complicated or unaccountable. It's perplexing. It is perplexing. Similar to confusion, bewilderment, puzzlement.

Yeah. I mean, this was a little bit of my question with Mark German. And he was like, no, no, no. and he kept shutting it down, and I think he has a strong opinion, and he might wind up being right. But my take was when a platform, when an aggregator,

partners of the foundation model lab, which direction should the money flow? And he was like, obviously it should flow from the application layer to the foundation model app. So obviously Apple should pay Google because Google is inventing a technology

and then selling that technology to Apple. I think, again, it would have looked a lot different. It would have been flipped if Apple was just, if Gemini was becoming the default assistant within Apple, which they would never probably allow, right? Well, they would if they're getting paid. Potentially if they were getting paid $20 billion. Exactly.

Which is like how I think this plays out, actually. Yeah, which is. I think somebody, maybe it's open AI, but I think somebody will be paying Apple for the right to funnel those LLM queries wherever they want and take the cut. just like what happens in search. But that's a hot take, and I respect people that don't agree with me. In other news, Deutsche Bank is exploring ways to hedge's exposure to AI to data centers.

It's looking at options, including shorting a basket of AI-related stocks and buying default protection via synthetic risk transfers. So they're hedge-matter. So they bet big on data center financing. The scale of the expenditure on AI infrastructure has prompted concerns that a bubble is with some likening the enthusiasm to that which preceded the dot-com crash. Skeptics have pointed out that billions of dollars have been deployed in an untested industry with assets that quickly depreciate in value due to rapid change in technology.

Stream Yimbi in the comment says if there's one thing Deutsche Bank is really good at, it's being very exposed. So in recent months, Deutsche Bank has provided debt financing to Swedish group Eco Data Center, as well as the Canadian company 5C, who together raised more than $1 billion to fuel their expansion. The investment bank does not break down how much money it has lent to the sector, but it's estimated to be in the billions of dollars. Hedging exposure to the industry could prove difficult

because betting against a basket of AI-related stocks in a booming market will be expensive. Meanwhile, SRT transactions require a diversified pool of loans to earn a rating and investors to likely demand higher premiums. Hyperscaleous pursuit of superintelligence has fuel demands for infrastructure that will help them build it. I mean, this is everyone from the haunted mansion proprietor. Like, everyone is getting in on the action. Like a few years ago, like the, like, it was like if you have anything that's related to AI, like go, go, go, raise money, grow it, spin it, flip it, turn it around, pivot it, whatever you want to do.

Europe is expecting a wave of deal-making consolidation and digital infrastructure. And the cost estimate from the financial times on the total AI buildout, three trillion, three trillion bucks, pretty wild times. Business Insider has a scoop here that Google is looking to invest in Anthropic at a early discussions. $350 billion valuation. It's interesting. Anthropic seems, what, one quarter the revenue of Open AI, and yet from a vibe perspective,

from a public attention, from a PR crisis perspective, Anthropic used to be in trouble every other week because Dario would be out there being like, paperclip, we're going to paperclip everyone, you know, we're going to get rid of everyone's job, and it was like really aggressive, right? And so like, like, they had to back stuff up, but they had to backstop, they had to backstop their comms a couple times. it's been great. And Dario's looked great for the last six months. And he's just been beating the drum on, hey, there's geopolitical considerations here with China. But overall, we're building and we're happy to be an API. We're happy to be, we're happy to help businesses. Yeah, generate

code. Running the experiment of like highly focused lab versus highly, not distracted, but taking a lot of shots on goal with opening AI. We're doing. We're going. We could we could be looking back on this in a couple of years and being like, man, they really missed erotica, they really missed a slop. Consumer electronics. It's possible. But on the flip side, it does seem like they've built a bit of an elegant business and it seems to align well with Google's strategy. And every hyperscaler wants a piece of it. Yeah. I mean, similar to how Microsoft has access to open AI models on Azure, you know, Google, bringing Anthropic in through an increased investment. Also, I just wonder, is it hard to do a deal at 350B these days in the venture

community? Like, there was already that reporting that Dario had to go all over the world to scrap together the last round. And I'm wondering if there's a world where you, if you're trying to $40 billion, you should just go to the hyperscalers. Well, yeah, they're using every possible capital source. We've seen some of these SPVs that have like, you know, zero percent carry, 10% management fee up front. So, they're tapping everything. Let me tell you about adquick.com. Out of home advertising easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only ad quick combines

technology. Out of home expertise and data to enable efficient seamless ad buying across the globe. Jordy, where'd you want to go next? I think we should bring on our next guest, our first and only in person guest. Let's do it. Jordan Castro. He's here live in the TBP and Ultradome and we will bring muscle man himself. He is the author of Muscleman and the novelist Wait, was that your first novel? Did you write a novel called The Novelist? Yes. What inspired that?

It's kind of like, it's recursive. Yeah, well, I wanted to say, first of all, thanks for having me. Oh, of course, of course. You know, I, yeah, I, um, and shouts out to Norman plays in the chat. Someone just showed me. They said, I'm here for Jordan Castro. Oh, let's go. There we go.

There we go. There is. But yeah, I, I, I write novels. I also, you know, you guys had the Pope up talking about the hope, and I work with this guy, Luke Burgess, with this thing called the Clooney Institute. Oh, no way. And one of the things I've noticed,

it's sort of, we sort of do stuff at the intersection of like what we say, Athens, Jerusalem, and Silicon Valley. And so sort of bringing religious wisdom into the tech conversation. But so I've been like, I'm not really related to tech, but I've been like at all these different, like, talks and so on about tech and whatever. And I noticed that when people normally talk about AI, they sound like AI. They immediately just sound like AI. And when you guys were doing your AI quadrant thing, I was like,

they sound like people. Interesting. And I was like, why do I like... Let's give it up for people. Yeah, yeah, let's give it up for people. That's right, that's right. Yeah. And I was like, why do I like TVPN?

You know, because I shouldn't like... I mean, you know, I shouldn't like it or whatever. And I was like, because you guys, like, talk like people, and you talk about people. You know what I'm saying? And so much of the conversation about text... Yeah, there was very deliberate to put the faces of the people there, not the logos of the companies.

Yeah, and I noticed that they weren't particularly flattering photos. Yeah, yeah. Oh, interesting. You mean, we didn't make them into gig chats? We would have made them into gigat shats. A lot of times we will give them muscle. Well, we will literally make the muscle man. We have fun with that.

For that, that decision was actually more just about, like, how do you actually fit them all in? Like, if you make them the muscle man, then you have to make it smaller. You can't see those facial features. No, I mean, some of those photos are like their hero photo, that, like, their comms department clearly, like,

put on the Wikipedia page or something. I don't know. Or, like, their corporate photo. You don't always get to pick what photo becomes you on the internet. But sometimes. Trust me, I know. When people get mad at me on Twitter, I've been publishing since I was, like,

Oh, do they go find a stupid photo? They find pictures of me like in high school, wearing like a pink button up and they posted in their, you know, comedy games that probably can't. That makes sense. Yeah. Yeah, I have some silly photos from, from, of old that I'm sure will resurface when people want to dunk on me.

Break this post down for me, actually. What was your read on this? So technological innovation can, can be a form. You think you used AI for it? Do you think he did? Well, I think the worst, actually, the, the worst thing about AI is that people are saying you can't use M-Dash's in it. I agree.

I love the M-Dash. Okay, okay. So I don't love the M-Dash. Like, it's not like I hate it. I'm just indifferent to it. I didn't, I don't even know where it is on the keyboard. And so like, it's, uh, you do minus sign, minus sign, and then space, I think to generate one. You can, I think you, I mean, I know, double tap.

Double tap space. Shift option dash. So like, isn't it just double tap space? And I go here. You can double tap it, but sometimes it does. Be like, this is the story. And then I want to do an M-dash and then space. Oh, you can hit it.

Oh, you can hit. Putting on an absolute human M-dash. This is an underscore. That's right. That's an underscore, dude. Look, underscore, underscore. Maybe it's just something that I know how to do. Test, underscored test.

How do you do it? Maybe, yeah. I just run it double, double dash space. So I completely agree with you. So I write like a little 300 word, 400 word, like summary of my current thinking on whatever's in the news every day. I just write it right in Google Docs here. I don't use any AI. I hand it off to Brandon on our team.

he edits it. I don't think he uses any AI. Sometimes he would put M-Dash in and if we put in even one M-Dash, all the commas, we'd be M-Dash, what was the problem? And it's just like, okay, like, now I just can't use the M-Dash because like the masses will go crazy. I refuse to let them take that from me.

You're fighting in the good fight. Okay. You think you can win? I think that it's just, I lost it. And Brandon was like, really? And there were places, I'll show you. Sometimes I will literally just right, like a minus sign. Not an M-Dash. I'll just be like, you know, close a quote.

I will deliberately break the rules that I know I'm not supposed to. Like, even when you put something in quotes, you put like the period inside the quotes or whatever, I will just break all those rules because it just makes it clearer that I'm not slopping it up. I don't know. I think you're accepting the frame of the haters.

I think so. I think it might be. I think you're right. I think you're right. Also, shouts out Brandon. I didn't hear any claps for Brandon. Yeah. Let's get some.

We call him in the, he's got a new haircut. He got a new haircut. We need a, we need a trading card for Brandon's new hair cut. He's a sleeper muscle man, too. He's a muscle man. I know why I've got, I got, is it fair to say I got you into it? What? You're the reason?

He's the reason you got jazz? Is that fair to say or is that? He's the reason that you're absolutely shredded and diced. He's the reason you're walking around at 2% body fat? Okay. Wow. Wow. Brandon content.

That's why, that's why you can bench three, plates? You can just wrap it out because of him? Four. Okay, four. Wow. Whoa. Whoa. Whoa. Whoa. Look. Crazy. It's good. Wait. So, yeah, actually tell me the story of the muscle man book. Like, what inspired it. What was the thesis? It's a novel about an English professor who hates being English professor and loves lifting weights. And part of it was that... And this is a real person or... No, it's a fictional character. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. But like, you know, part of it was that I, when I was growing up, I basically grew up online. And, you know, it's sort of a classic story,

but it was like I was totally anxious, you know, like I would be at school, then I would get on the screen, and, you know, I would just post and sort of lurk and be sort of weird and creepy in front of the computer, you know? And then when I started lifting, my anxiety and depression just like completely went away. Yeah. You know, and I was like, damn, like, you know,

was my dad right my whole life, you know, or all the sort of jacked guys who are like annoying and saying that, you know, you've got to start lifting, where they just all totally right. The other thing, that tracks with my personal experience. I used to have trouble falling asleep at night. Yeah, that too. Exactly.

I started lifting daily or six days a week. It just went away entirely. And the lesson is people that struggle to fall asleep, at least in some cases, are just not exerting themselves enough to be just physically tired enough to, like, fall asleep. Yeah. Started lifting soon enough, it's like,

okay, you basically close your eyes, knocked out in like five minutes totally yeah yeah yeah and so I wanted to just kind of like I and then I tried to find novels or even books about lifting that I thought were like compelling at all and I couldn't find any so I started sort of trying to write something like that it's also like a satire about higher education there's like a lot of rants and stuff about the universities and stuff that's cool um so yeah talk about the reception's been sort of idiotic okay um you know the the the the media as we all probably let's give it up for idiotic Let's get up for the idiotic media.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, it's, it's, it's, um... The idiotic media and we have a horn going on. We are the idiotic. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, you know, you know, um... You have a horse wearing a hat in the back of it. I consider, we're not journalists, but I definitely consider us to be part of the idiotic media.

Yeah, well, that's, you're using it in a good way. You're reclaiming it, you know what I mean? But, but, but most of them are idiotic in a bad way. And the reception has been like, here's a novel. to explain the man. The manosphere, right? And, like, here's, like, a novel about men. And I feel like, you know, back in the day, like, there's this great, the literary, the writer

Norman Maylor has this debate with these feminists, like, back in the 70s, and it keeps calling them lady critics. This is a very hilarious debate. And I feel like, in a weird way, they're doing the same thing to me, but they're calling me, like, a man novelist. Okay. You know what I mean? Where it's, like, this is a novel about a man.

Sure. So, like, it has to be about masculinity or something like that. Yeah, everyone wants to know what's going on with young men. Yeah. And it's this kind of fake discourse. Yeah, I saw Chris Williamson on Tucker the other day. Yeah, yeah, exactly. It felt very much.

I mean, honestly, like, I feel like Chris has done a fantastic job of actually sort of explaining, like, what's going on with young men. Yeah. Like, it is an interesting question. Yeah, yeah. There's a whole bunch of, and I feel like every media outlet has their own way of interrogating this, whether it's Harper's or Vanity Fair or wired. Like, everyone's telling stories and writing profiles about interesting people in young men. And I don't know, it seems like it was somewhat worthwhile discussion. to have if it can inform interventions, even just in your own life or with your own kids. It seems

like there's some value to the discourse, but did you have any intention of actually sparking that debate? Or like actually, like, was one of your thesis, like, I need to put this book out so that more people lift weights at young ages? No, but I did write an essay for Harper. That was just basically a straightforward pro-lifting essay. So that had more of that. Sure, sure, sure. That's awesome. The thing that my takeaway from going, I was very anti-gym growing up because I was a skateboarder and a skater, surfer, like the idea of like going inside, being indoors, lifting stuff up and putting it down just for the, whatever the reason was, it wasn't appealing to me as a kid because I was like, well, I could just go to the beach and surf and like be out in nature. And so I had a generally negative sentiment around the gym. And I was also like super scrawny growing up. I got like long arms.

I was like in high school probably like 140 pounds. Like getting under like one plate on bench was like, I'm going to die at first. I never really got into it. I wasn't, I didn't play football or anything like that. And then I got really into it in college and it was the biggest unlock for like mental health. Yeah.

Like I prior to that I was like a teenager. I was like teenagers I think are just naturally kind of like moody and figuring out who they are and how they fit into the world and all that stuff. And then I found lifting and like a lot of that stuff just like went away entirely because I had a purpose. I would even if that purpose was like so simple and just like going, I woke up, I was going to eat well and I was going to go to the gym. I was going to lift as heavy as I could and go on with my day. And it just it ended up being like it was like a drug almost immediately because I was like I want the feeling. of how I feel after I lift. It was incredibly addictive

in a very positive way. So I did that, and then about probably a year or so, I went from like 100, by that point of like 150 pounds to like 190 in like a very short period of time. Like basically spending, I was, this was from freshman year to sophomore year, and I was spending like so much of my energy just focused on lifting.

Yeah. And I ultimately, reached a point where I was like, okay, at some point, this is actually not the most productive use of my time. And I was fortunate enough at that point to kind of like discover like work and things that I was passionate about and ways that I could use my energy that was more interesting to me. And so I think like the debate to have around lifting is like I think like basically everyone should be like picking up heavy stuff and putting it down like at least a little bit, right? You don't need to go to the extreme. The advice that I find myself maybe giving like,

like, you know, people that were in my shoes is like figure out the point where you maybe actually want to dial it back a little bit because it's possible and probably healthy to go way too much to the extreme where you're spending like, like I was, like all my time and energy, like just lifting because I didn't have anything better to do besides like, you know, work and school. And then at some point I actually need to dial it back and actually apply that energy in other places. But I got the benefit of like that period of just like obsessiveness that I still carry with me. Yeah, 100%.

I mean, that was sort of actually what the novel was exploring. Because when I first found it, like you said, it's like, is this the answer? Is this the ultimate answer? You know what I mean? And it really is. I mean, that's part of the issue that I take

with like the optimizers, you know, like Huberman. I mean, I know you guys had Huberman on or Brian Johnson, where you sort of become like perversely obsessed with health or with lifting or something like that. You sort of tinker.

You know, you think of the person, the human person as some sort of like, you know, mix of neurons and chemicals and stuff. Yeah, it's interesting. Like, even between Brian Johnson and Heerman, I see a huge wide gap. There's a big gap, yeah.

Let's put them in the same bucket. Yeah. How do you contrast your philosophy? I think you need to be injury maxing. Okay. You need to be horsing, heavy weights. Interesting, okay. And I think it's like a spiritual endeavor.

I think you need to almost, I think you need to get crushed under a body breaking weight a few times. Okay. Okay. And, yeah, it's more of a spiritual process than an analytical process. Yeah, 100%. It's Eric Bouganagan, who's like my favorite, like, lifter on YouTube, always talks about how it's a mindset. And he has these things where like he'll just fail insane amounts of weight multiple times and then just like work himself into this kind of like crazy mental state and then lift it, you know? What do you think about the other YouTubers? What do you think about Sam Sulek?

Oh, I love Sam Sulek. What do you think about the trend twins? I love the trend twins. I love, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure, for sure. Sam Sulik, also Sam Sulik is weirdly emo. Yeah. Like he will, you know, his vlogs. Actually, there's this weird thing where, so my, I don't know what I'm talking about this now,

but my brother died like a year and a half ago. And after the funeral, one of my buddies threw on a Sam Sulick video. And I don't, and-inspiration. Yeah, it was incredibly inspirational. But I noticed, I was like, Sam Sulick's videos are sort of emo where he's, like, driving by himself. Yeah. He's, like, talking to the camera.

he's like taking unnecessary loops around the parking lot. I think that's why he's so popular. I've maybe watched like 20 minutes of Sam Sulek. I appreciate like the content like that, the world that he's built. But because specifically I remember being in that mindset of like I was kind of like, again, I remember I was like 19. I was in school.

I wasn't that happy. I was like living in Santa Barbara, which was like paradise. But like mentally I was chasing that like I need to, I'd be like that those scenes really. you're like driving, I'd be driving to the gym at like 5 a.m. Dude, I can relate with everything you're saying, like down to the specific. Like I started lifting too, like sort of like I was in school, just moved.

It didn't really have friends. Would like go to the gym at 11 o'clock, you know. Yeah, yeah. Weird hours. These early, early mornings or late and then getting like food afterwards. And like honestly that era for me, like future, the rap artist was like absolutely peaking. What year was this monster? For me, for me monster was just out.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So I became, we might be the same guy. I became a man. Wait, is your full name Jordan? Yeah. Wow. This is brother. Make it make sense. Make it make sense. What's going on here?

But yeah, so I would, I would drive. I just remember, like, at the time, I was driving a Prius with like 200,000 miles on it. And I'd just be like driving to the gym, just blasting future, drinking protein shakes. And that's like when I think I became a man. Yeah. Like. Incredible. And so I want, I want, I, I think it's super important. And like when I hear, when I hear that a young person is getting into going to the gym, I'm like, great.

Totally. Like, you're going to become, you're going to find yourself through that. And my only thing is like, I think at some point you have to evolve beyond that and take the learnings and that, like, that mentality that you get from going to the gym and apply it to other, other ways. I think, like, the big takeaway that I learned. early on was like early on I was obsessed with like how many how many sets am I doing how many reps am I doing how am I how am I you know just approaching different lifts how many different exercises should I be doing in a lift and I very quickly realized that there was like two fact there was maybe three factors it was like was I sleeping a lot yeah was I eating a lot and was I like hyper

consistent and doing a lot of volume and those are the same lessons that I've brought into my real life outside of the gym. It's like, am I sleeping a lot? Am I, like, nourishing myself? Am I getting the right amount of calories? Am I getting the right amount of just like the right kinds of food? And then am I being consistent in the work? And so we apply that every day.

We come in and do the show. And you also go to the gym. I mean, I don't know. Behind the scenes look, the whole squad was at the gym this morning, which I think is a great thing that you guys do. Yeah. A lot of people that were on that chart, a lot of the tech elite are deeply unpopular people.

I think Elon was polling is less popular than Donald Trump, so not just controversial, but actually just unpopular across the board. A lot of tech CEOs, a lot of tech people are just unpopular in America. Obviously, we love them here. But we're weirdos about that. But my question is, like, when I think about who's really popular,

I think Tom Cruise, I think George Clooney, I think people that are in shape, is there something, you know, we do this jokey, like, giga chat, identification of these people. Is there something where, like, it would actually be in their best interest for the tech elite to get a lot.

Look at Bezos. Look at Zuck. I was going to say, like, that, you know, I used to think Zuck was a full creep. Yeah. He was like a beady-eyed sort of bug. He would like, you could, when Zuck would look in the camera,

you could almost like hear him blinking. You know what I'm saying? It was, it was, and then he got jacked and threw on a chain. I was like, this guy's not so bad after all. You know what I mean? So maybe, so maybe they would. would all benefit for mom. PR. PR teams hate this one simple trick.

Well, PR teams should love it. No, they should love it. But they maybe aren't awake to it for some reason. Yeah, look, if you're on a billionaire's PR team, step one. Step one. Hire a trainer. Bring the trend twins in.

Yeah, yeah. Bring the trend twins in. Get jacked. And, you know, then the public opinion. Why do you think health is so political? Oh, man. I did an event two nights ago here. and someone asked the same question, and this guy in the audience stood up,

because I actually don't know. I mean, one reason is that I think that when you're jacked and you're strong or you're competent, it acts as a judge, actually, because if you're, like, fat and you're lazy, then you feel just sort of implicitly judged. The other thing is that going to the gym and getting jacked implies a certain value system.

You know, there's like, you know, if you lift 145, you know, that's less than 225. Sure. And if you're in the gym, you're trying to get stronger, the implications that it's better to lift 225, you know? And so, like, a lot of people who are, like, dogmatically committed to a certain kind of, like, egalitarianism. Don't like that. But the guy at the event stood up, this guy, he looked just like Joe Rogan.

His name's Anthony, actually, shouts out Anthony. But he was like, he said that, he said that, generally speaking, the left tries to impose their ideas onto nature and the right starts with nature and discerns their ideas from there. And so there's something just sort of fundamentally different about that. I think lifting sort of falls into the latter camp. I have a question. Yeah, I'm always surprised at how much, like there seems to be more controversies within in between like various people, even that consider themselves all to be pursuing their ideals

of health. It's like everybody like kind of picks it lane in a category. And then it's like they're fighting over like green powders. What green powder should you take? my green powder is better than your green powder. It is universal. Like, I feel like it's hard to make a political issue out of something that doesn't affect everyone because you just keep bumping into people.

And if your whole thing is like, you know, corporate cards or something or like, you know, the manufacturing supply chain for large gongs, it's like there's a lot of people that are. You guys have a lot of those. Yeah, yeah. Even have the, you got, you, I noticed in the bathroom that the picture of the jacked guy, the shirtless guy hitting the gong. I think these guys love the gong. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, it's hard to get everyone animated about that. It's a niche interest. Whereas, like, health care, how much money you have, your job, your health, your food. Like, these things are universal so anyone can relate to them. And I can give you a take and you can bounce off it immediately instead of being like, I don't really know anything about that. That doesn't really affect me ever. Yeah, but there's also, there is so much, more people die in this.

This is actually, I actually don't know if this is true, but you see this talking point all of them. More people die in this country from like obesity and from start. You know, there is this total cope around, around being unhealthy. And people don't like the idea that there's actually something you can do about it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. It's just like everyone, everyone can be obese or not. Like, not everyone can have a, like, a large corporation that goes bankrupt under their stewardship.

Like, so it's just less relevant to them because, like, they might not be the CEO of a company that's going bankrupt or something. Pickleball. There's, I couldn't find it in here, but there's a in the mansion section online. There is a house that is up for sale right now that has a pickleball court outside and a pickleball court inside. What's your take on pickleball? Dude, it's fun.

I hate to say it, but it's fun. Guilty pleasure? I mean, I played it one time with a friend, and I was like, man, this is, I probably said some words. And then we played it, and I was like, this is awesome. Yeah. So I don't know.

You played inside or outside? Outside. I mean, two courts is a little bit. You know, I don't know, if you love something. Zoom out for me. Build the ultimate mansion for athletics. Are you going all in on one particular athletic endeavor? Are you making sure that there's a pool and a basketball court, a tennis court? What's important to have around the mansion? For me, definitely a basketball court. A basketball court. And then like a gym in a garage with no AC. No AC. And what's in that gym? Are we doing rogue racks? Are we doing?

Rogue racks are good. Okay. Yeah, yeah. Free weights? What is it about, what's the archetype that can make a home gym really work? Do you have to be like spiritual? Like every time I've just been in a debt, like only, like during COVID, I bought a bunch of weights and I was working out of my garage. And I just got so small.

Hard to be motivated. Yeah, I got, that's a skill issue, but I'm sorry. Yeah, no, no, I think I'm implying it's a skill issue because I would be going in there. And I was at home so I could get an email and I'd be like, okay, I'm. I'm going to run in and respond to this email on my computer because it's easier. And if I was taking a more monk-like approach, I'd probably have been getting even more jacked because there's no distractions, right? It's just like more focused.

Well, during COVID, I mean, we ordered a bunch of weights, me and my lifting buddy, like right when, like right at the tail end because everything sold out like super fast. Yeah, but you still had a buddy. That helps. Had a buddy, yeah. And we ended up getting these like dinky probably like 25 pound. barbells, these like shitty weights or whatever. But I would just go in, I had a shed at the house, and I would like go in the shed and throw on music.

And it was actually the first time that I was lifting where I understood the power of like shrieking and screaming while you lift. There's a lot of power. You can, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Yeah. The modern man does not shriek and scream. What's in the supplement stack?

What's Lindy? What's interesting? What are you staying away from? Are you beta alanine? Are you use creatine, protein supplementation? mass gainers. What do you like? I'm feeling reactionary against the optimizers,

and I want to just say nothing. I mean, creatine, for sure, protein's fine, but I think you could basically just eat. Raw milk. I do like raw milk. I drink a lot of raw milk. Recently I gained,

I went from like 165 to 200 pounds over the course of like three months. And so I was drinking like a gallon of raw milk a day, a tub of Greek yogurt a day. Yeah. The raw eggs, I do think like drinking, You know, 12 raw eggs makes you feel amazing. Okay.

But that's kind of the... I went through a raw egg. I went through a phase where it'd be like five eggs mixed into raw milk, just raw. Were you bodybuilding.com guy back in the day? That was a long... That was a long. I was like... I wasn't even like a phase.

I would just... That was just me for a long time. I realized like, wait, I don't have to scramble the eggs. I can just put them in a jar and just drink it. I would... I didn't like the taste. I would kind of almost throw... up sometimes, but it was just so effective.

I mean, Derek from our place more days talks about just drinking the full carton of liquid egg whites. He does. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. That was a good era. There was a period where I was watching his videos.

Like when I was first getting lifting, watching like, I remember being like, I can't believe I'm watching an hour and a half videos about some. But it's so meditated. Well, it's like what we were saying at breakfast. It's just amazing to watch anyone who loves what they do. Master of craft. Yeah, exactly.

Makes sense. You would have appreciated we gave a talk last year. we had done like a few episodes of the podcast and then we we gave a talk at hereticon of like the case for like founders getting on like pEDs because you have like when you think about like pro athletes are like spending all their time trying to be healthy sleeping well working out and being as strong and as physically fit as possible and they legally or cannot take pEDs although if you ask them like if you could take pEDs if it was legal would you do them they'd be like yeah absolutely i want to go to the next level

Meanwhile, in the business world, you have people that are not sleeping that well, they can't train that much, and they're not that healthy. They have, like, kind of not that great hormone profiles. In a perfect world, they just start sleeping well and training and eating well and getting on track. But for a lot of people, for your CEO, busy CEO, you're scaling your company. You don't have, like, some of these people, like, can't prioritize it or they don't for whatever reason. And, like, I genuinely think if they just got on PEDs, they might build, they might build the, you know, of course, under doctor's supervision,

but they might actually, like, get motivated in order to build some of those healthier habits, but at the very least have a lot more energy and bring that intensity. What's your take on PEDs? I don't do them because I haven't had kids yet, but they do seem probably good. I don't know. Have you done them?

Actually, although I, actually, one of my buddies from Cleveland was having a hard time on, I won't say his name, he was having a hard time on the dating apps, and he was like, no one's responding, you know, whatever. And he started blasting gear because he thought it would help him get girls. And I was convinced.

Yes, immediately. Whoa. And I was like, but he didn't even get jacked in the meat. It was like, it was literally immediate. And I was like, was it a mindset? I think it might have been a mindset. Sure, sure, sure. Yeah, yeah.

He's like, I got, I have, I've solved the problem. Yeah, it was all my problem. So I can bring the confidence. It worked for him like the next day. I find, I find dating. Dating. Last year. What's that?

I find creatine genuinely very. Yeah, yeah, I take reason. I also find caffeine extremely performance enhancing in the gym. Yeah. If you can, like the Celsius phenomenon, I think is very real, like 200 milligrams of caffeine, getting actually very fired up before a workout, genuinely helps you stay focused during the lift, push you a lot farther. Yeah, we want to make the beta alanine for the workplace, you know, imagine you've got to do some emails.

Is that the tingling? Yeah, you start tingling. You're like, I got to get through these emails. I mean, I will say that the, yeah, for sure. I guess the supplement stack is like. like drinking enough caffeine to like kill a small child. It's really good. Not that I'm going to kill a small child, but that would if they drink it, kill them.

These mattses are really good there. You guys sponsored by these guys? We're not. No, we're just friends. That's Andrew Huberman's Brandt. Fuck. God damn, sorry, man. Hey, look, look, I love your product.

If you, you know, I'm talking trash, but I don't know, you're a good. I don't consider Andrew's philosophy, like, about over-offination. Nothing you said is wildly disagreeing. Yeah, but yeah, I, I, I, I, I think it's more about like understanding, understanding yourself and the various input so that you can then make calculated decisions. Like, yeah, I still, I know how important sleep is.

There's plenty of nights. We, we were traveling on Tuesday, didn't get a lot of sleep, made a call to try to get some more sleep, but ultimately I think it's just about, my view is like, as much as possible, try to understand how the body works,

but at the same time, you need to remember that the the real edge is like having like a fiery like spirit like and just being like

that that is like that's the thing that you want to cultivate right? Yeah there's that yeah I mean I yeah maybe part of the my feeling about it is that the one time I tweeted something negative about Andrew Humervin

I got like ratioed into oblivion you know people calling me gay and it gets like 5,000 likes you know So, yeah, they came after me hard. But you're probably, you're probably right. I don't know. But then, but the counter argument to that is like that. Makes a delicious Yerba Mata.

Well, yeah, he makes a delicious. Matina Yerba Mata. He makes a great product. And actually in my first novel, there's a long passage about how Yerba Mante is great. Oh, really? Yeah, yeah. In the novelist. But I guess the counterpoint to the sleep thing that you're saying is that there's that

for a while when like the Tate brothers were just all over. the feeling? Or is that one of Tristan being like, you know, I'll go to sleep at 6 a.m. and wake up at 5.59 a.m. and, you know, one minute before 6 a.m. And I don't need any sleep. And, like, that's the kind of counter argument. That's what you want to do? I mean, it's just, it's a, it's an admirable vibe. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I always get it. I always, I always, I always do beef with Brian Johnson about this because I'm just like, don't you think that if you just have like great well and a life's purpose, you can live forever, even if you're super unhealthy.

And I always cite, like, Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett, who, like, eat McDonald's and drink Coca-Cola all day long and, like, live to 99 and 100. And just, like, you know, they don't look jacked. They don't really do any biohacking. But they seem to be extremely sharp. One thing we probably agree on is, like, I don't think you should let health trackers, like, decide your mood. Totally.

Or decide, like, how you're going to approach it. Oh, totally, totally. It's like, I wake up some days. I sleep on an eight sleep. I have, like, a. No, the tracker is a competition. I'm still going to the gym. It's not telling me what to do.

Well, and it's just, yeah, it's just a little friendly. It's not tracking me. I'm tracking it. You're tracking it. I'm tracking it. But then there are also studies that are like, you know, the people that live the longest have like, you know, they have like good relationships. Yeah. They have some sort of spiritual life.

You know, it's like those. Yeah, that stuff is very unquantified right now in the quantified self movement. And it needs to be more included, I think, for sure. That's why I don't think you can really, like, quantify that stuff. People are really uncomfortable things you can't quantify. Totally, totally, totally, totally. But I think probably, yeah, good relationship, some sort of spiritual life, general health, you know, eating the things that, like, you're, because also different people, different, you know, diets work better for different people's and stuff like that. Totally. Yeah. And what's your actual routine?

This is a, what's that? What's that? Are you a bro split? Push pull legs. What's you doing? Manosphere split? The Manosphere split. Just crushing fentany. Not beating the Manosphere allegation. Yeah, yeah, exactly. lately I was doing a mad cow I think it was called it was just three days a week and it was literally just go crazy it was um it was uh uh just power lifting so it was like squat bench deadlift barbell rose three days a week five by five three days a week so you do all of those every day no all of those three days or you rotate through them you you're squatting three days a week okay well benching twice a week you're doing overhead press too and you're adding um you're adding five

pounds a week. So it was like, and that was when I was doing the spirit bowl. And five by fives. Yeah, exactly. I like the five by five. That's good. That's a good. So I was doing that recently.

I do like, I mean, the thing that got, I'll, it's funny. I, the thing that maybe we're just holding back a little bit of our progress is like we want to work out every day. And there's actually like studies that show if you just take more rest days, you can put on, you can, you can just like start. But the problem with that program is like, I also like, I also like, lifting every day. So it was like a problem. Like I was like it was actually not the most enjoyable thing. I do like as much as I'm like opposed to it in theory. I do like Jeff Nippert's programs.

Oh yeah. Power building programs. I like him a lot. Yeah, they're very good. Yeah. So the power building one and power building three. I think my favorite programs up to. Yeah. I just like the way he like structures his like lessons and stuff. Well, he's also natural, which is like a big deal. You know what I mean? A lot of people who make these programs aren't natural. So it won't work for guys that aren't sure, sure, sure. Sure. Yeah. Makes sense. Yeah, they're like, do 10,000 reps of this. The Rich Piana eight-hour armwork out.

I'm on enough trend to kill a horse. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's fantastic. Well, thanks so much for chatting. What's your, you have your next book in the works? Yeah, kind of, but I don't want to talk about it. Yeah, yeah. It's going to be a thriller.

Can you share the prompt? What's the prompt? No, no, I can't. Because the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, don't make mistakes. No, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not going to do it. But thanks for having me on. Muscle Man is the current one.

You guys can buy it. What about the biggest fish you've ever caught? Dude, I just did. I never. You've never been fishing? No. No, no, not even a little bit out. No, dude, I was too punk.

I was too much like he was a ski. You've never shot a fish in a barrel? Nothing. Nope. Nothing. Okay. Well, we'll have to change that soon. Yeah.

The outfit looks like it could maybe transport. I agree. I agree. Fishing boat and fit in. It's funny. That's funny because I wore this the other day for an event. And my buddy was, I told him my friend that I was coming on this show. And he was like,

you actually kind of dressed like he thought the vest was somehow TBPN. Also, Brandon content over there has the same, has the same vest. He told me about, he told me that he has it. He's looking, he's looking sharp. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts on Spotify. And if you're listening to this and you haven't lifted today, hit the gym. Go for it. Get in a lift. Get the gym. Visit the Church of Iron. That's right. Have a great weekend, everyone. We love you. Goodbye. See you Monday.