TBPN - Google Doubles Down on Cloud AI, Hulk Hogan Passes Away at 71, Hill and Valley Forum Reactions | Casey Neistat, Chris Samra, Zak Kukoff, Vineeta Agarwala, Micky Malka, Alex Hawkinson

Episode Date: July 24, 2025

(00:14) - Timeline (05:16) - Google Doubles Down on Cloud AI (38:10) - Hulk Hogan Passes Away at 71 (49:49) - Timeline (57:44) - Zak Kukoff is a venture capitalist with over a decade of experience in the technology and venture capital sectors, focusing on early-stage investments and entrepreneurship. He currently serves as the Chair of the Tech and Venture Practice at Lewis-Burke Associates LLC and is a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation. ([lewis-burke.com]( [thefai.org]( In the conversation, Kukoff discusses the recent interview of Trevor Milton on Tucker Carlson's show, expressing that it was a poor choice of platform and suggesting that a more direct approach to questioning, such as confronting Milton about specific fraud allegations, would have been more effective. (01:14:37) - Timeline (01:29:04) - Vineeta Agarwala, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, discusses the transformative role of AI agents in healthcare, highlighting their potential to revolutionize drug development and patient care. She emphasizes the increasing adoption of AI-driven tools to address labor shortages and improve efficiency, noting that both startups and established companies are integrating these technologies to enhance operations. Agarwala also points out the growing interest in open-source models within the biotech sector, facilitating rapid innovation and collaboration among researchers and organizations. (01:51:11) - Micky Malka, a Venezuelan-born entrepreneur and founder of Ribbit Capital, has a history of pioneering financial services innovations, including co-founding Latin America's first online trading platform in 1998 and establishing the first online bank in Europe. In his conversation, he reflects on his journey of creating financial solutions that enhance accessibility and trust, emphasizing the importance of building brands that resonate with consumers. He also discusses the evolving landscape of fintech, highlighting the convergence of financial services with technologies like AI and crypto, and anticipates a future where tokenization plays a central role in transforming the industry. (02:18:47) - Casey Neistat, a renowned filmmaker and YouTube personality, discusses his involvement with ModRetro's M64, a modern reimagining of the Nintendo 64 console. He shares his passion for retro gaming and the importance of preserving the authenticity of classic gaming experiences. Neistat also reflects on the challenges of integrating modern technology while maintaining the original essence of beloved gaming hardware. (02:51:08) - Alex Hawkinson, Founder and CEO of BrightAI, leverages over 25 years of experience in IoT, AI, SaaS, and cloud-based technologies to transform critical infrastructure management. In the conversation, he discusses how BrightAI's platform integrates sensors, robots, and wearables to provide real-time monitoring and proactive solutions for essential services like energy grids and water systems, addressing challenges such as aging infrastructure and labor shortages. He also highlights the company's recent $51 million funding round led by Khosla Ventures and Inspired Capital, emphasizing the importance of achieving product-market fit before seeking external investment. (03:00:48) - Chris Samra is an engineer and founder of Symphonic Labs, where he develops AI-enabled consumer tools and gadgets. In the conversation, he discusses the launch of Waves, a new type of camera glasses designed for content creators, highlighting the positive response from creators and addressing privacy concerns by including an indicator light that can be disabled for capturing candid moments. He also shares plans to test the device with 100 creators, aiming for mass production in Q1 next year, and explores potential partnerships with prominent IRL streamers to showcase the product's capabilities. (03:15:10) - Timeline 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.ioFollow 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 Thursday, July 24th, 2025. We are live from the TBPN Ultrudeau. The Temple of Technology. The Fortress of Finance. The Capital of Capital. It's Google earnings, earnings season. Baby, big tech earnings are happening.

Now, Google reported earnings last night. Ben Thompson has a breakdown. It's in the Wall Street Journal. There's a bunch of good posts. We're going to break it down for you today. So, Bucco Capital Bloch says many queries that moved to Open AI will move back to Google. AI overviews are good now, less hallucinations. I've experienced that for some of those quick answers.

Google's still really fast. Two, can move to AI mode for follow-up. I haven't really played around with that yet. Have you bounced into AI mode very much? Of course. You have. In Google searches, you've actually done that. Yeah.

Oh, interesting. And the main thing missing from Google search and the reason why chat GPT has been so good is you can search something, get information, and then chat with that information. Yeah. And that before typical, you know, you're going down a search query, you click onto a page, you can't really chat with the page or you could maybe search for information on that page. So that was the key innovation.

Yeah. Type into toolbar v. Open new app. That is a huge advantage. A lot of people have, you know, the primary app on their laptop is that's open is a Chrome browser for most people. And so, you know, command T and you're already searching, that is a huge advantage. And that's probably why Chad GPT is starting an open-ass thinking about a browser, because if they can replace that, they can get way more queries into chat. For Google's models are better. They search the web better.

I don't know that their models are that much better. I haven't noticed that specifically. I know that they're better on like some benchmarks and they're certainly dominating on that Pareto Frontier graph that Swix puts out. It feels pretty comparable to me. But yeah, it makes sense that they would search the web better because they have, you know, what, two, three decades? I think it's on it's it they try to obfuscate it but to my knowledge chat GPT will leverage Google search it does feel like that's kind of happening and then uh cloudflare just gave them a massive structural advantage that of course is because cloud flare by default now they used to have like the big easy

button for blocking all AI crawlers previously if you had a website and you didn't want to be crawled you could put that in your robots dot txt so whatever your website it was slash robot.tXD. Crawler should go there. And out of the goodness of their own heart, they would respect that, but it was not legally binding. So you could still scrape a website legally if you were using it in a fair use context, transforming it like for search.

Now, Google famously did respect robot.t. They did for a long time. They still do. But now Cloudflare has disabled AI crawlers by default. The problem is that Google has two crawlers. They have Googlebot, which crawls for Google search, which you definitely want to be in for sure for the SEO. Who doesn't want to be findable in Google? And then they have Gemini crawler, separate crawler that you can disable with Cloudflare.

But there is still AI sort of crawling happening with the Googlebot. Because if the Google bot goes and crawls all your web pages for search, that your data will show up in the AI overviews, which feels like they're not maybe training the foundation model, but they're still summarizing it, and they still might be, they still might be reducing traffic. Now, for publishers and content creators, that's harmful, potentially, but for e-commerce people, it's great. So there was a post on R-slash SEO five days ago titled ChatGPT Plus is secretly Google powered. My Hidden Page Experiment proves it. So he created a dummy page index only in Google and got it to show up in ChatGPT. plus results within hours.

The same query in Bing, duck, duck, go, et cetera, still returned zero results. Interesting. And he did this by coining a nonsense word, put it on a page that was not linked anywhere, forced Google to index it via the search console, and then asked ChatGBTGPT Plus to define the term, which he invented, and it quoted the hidden page verbatim.

Interesting. So, yeah, I wonder what that relationship's like. I mean, Open AI has, you know, I, I, I, I, felt like there would always be some relationship with Microsoft because Bing has really solid search infrastructure. For a while, people were saying, like, Bing has as robust as a crawling infrastructure as Google. Like, they built the technology. They just weren't able to actually transform, you know, customer behavior to the degree that people would, by default, go to Bing. They ran this big campaign, Bing it and Go and all this. And it never really happened. But the tech

was always good because they knew what to build and they went and built it. They just couldn't change people's behaviors. So interesting, I wonder if Google will be bringing out the sharp help us anytime soon for open AI. Anyway, let me talk about Ramp. Time is money, save both. Easy use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place.

Go to ramp.com. So Tane, who's been on the show before, says Sundar Pichai on Google CapEx with this strong and growing demand for our cloud products and services, we are increasing our investment in capital expenditures in 2025 to approximately 85 billion. and are excited by the opportunity head. We got to hit the gong.

Hit the gong for Sundar. Well deserved. Sundar pitch AI. He's pitching AI and he's pitching it successfully. The Google earnings are staggering. So 14% jump in year over year revenue. Guess they're ARR, their annualized revenue. Wow.

I don't even. Oh, run. Their run rating, 400 billion almost. Okay. They did. They put up 96.4 billion in the second quarter and said CAPEX, it's like it would be a lot if it was in millions. It's in billions. They said that CAPEX would increase 13% to 85 billion, and that compares with 52 billion last year.

So that's a big, big increase, even above expectations. Ben Thompson has a great analysis of this and came away from my reading pretty excited about it. So Andrew Curran also has a post here says, Sondar Pachai on the earnings call. The growth in usage has been incredible. At I.O. in May, we announced that we processed 480 trillion monthly tokens across our surfaces. So that's both AI search features and Google search,

AI Mo, Gemini, also API stuff. So overall tokens, we're gonna have Mickey Malka on the show later. He's gonna talk about token factories. The demand for tokens is immense. And it's really just, we're just, weaving its way into all these different nooks and crannies. It's certainly going mainstream.

If you just ask a friend who's not, you know, in the horse race of who's going to win just a just a normal friend, let's look at your screen time. How much time are you looking on chat ch pt? You're going to see 10 minutes. You're going to see 30 minutes a day. This was buried, not in the main post, but Andrew follows up and said, he said there would be over 70 million user videos made with VO3, which is, which is impressive, especially considering that they massively rate limit everyone.

You pay $500 a month and you get a measly couple videos a day. It's hard. It's hard to actually use that. Somebody made a great, very cool intro video using VO3. So they've doubled tokens since May and then, yeah, totally. The more interesting thing here is that safe super intelligence, Ilya's small $32 billion AI Upstart is going to exclusively use Google TPUs. That's exciting.

That seems like a bombshell? Maybe. I mean, you got to get big infrastructure somewhere. And if everyone's optimizing against Nvidia, maybe there's like Slack capacity in TPUs. I mean, you certainly, like, if you are trying to bet on a hyperscaler to hit your horse to, and you see that Google's increasing their capax pretty significantly to $85 billion, like you know that they are going to have like enough capacity to surface, to service you to the two. of one gig a lot or something like that if you want to do some massive training run.

I do wonder how compute constrained SSI is in the sense. Like how much is Ilya feeling the scaling wall? Because for a long time, it was scale as all you need. Just go bigger, bigger, bigger. And that's certainly the playbook that we've seen Sam Altman run with with the Stargate project and with the bringing in Masayoshi Sone, bringing in Donald Trump and Crusoe and putting together this team that can actually marshal half a quadrillion dollars. Is that right?

It's 500. No, half a trillion. It's 500 billion they want to spend. They haven't marshaled it yet, John. It's a lot of money. They're working on it. It's half a trillion. But SSI, at least like the rumors or the memes around it have been very much,

have been more focused on let's advance the research. and maybe that next phase of research is not purely compute bound. It's not purely, hey, we're in this scaling race. We're going to build a bigger transformer. That's honestly a little bit of what Elon's been doing. We have the transformer architecture. We're going to scale this up a ton. And where we are great is building a massive cluster of the Colossus,

100,000 GPUs. We'll build it faster and we'll get it up to speed and we'll train it. And in three months when most people would think it would take a year, we haven't been seeing that from SSI. We haven't seen, oh, SSI has tents with GPUs in it. That's their edge. The edge with SSI, as it's been pitched, at least, has always been foundational research progress, just making progress on the underlying research that might be an elegant solution

that increases the efficiency and you get a better model with even less GPUs. But if they need a ton, Google will have them because they're investing more in CAPEX more than ever before. While taking a question on agentic capabilities, it sounds like Sundar said this, when we built our series of 2.5 pro models, it's the direction where we are investing the most. That's definitely exciting progress, including in the models we haven't fully released yet.

Long answer on agentic progress. The good news here is that we are making robust progress. We think we are at the frontier here. He said they have projects running internally, but now they are slow and expensive. They see the potential and are making progress on both. Gemini has a deep research product, which I would call an agentic product. The question is, are they going to try and match what ChatGPT launched with agent mode sooner than later?

Is there a security or a risk thing? Google's been a little bit more hesitant to just throw stuff out in the wild, but they're moving very quickly. And I think they will probably be able to get something up. There's certainly nothing on the CAPEX or model capability side that would stop them. And Elon Musk just says, wow. Well, Elon is playing the enemy of my enemy as my friend mode. It's like, I love these guys. Love to see it.

It's not a knockout, dragout fight. So let's go over to, oh, this is interesting. So Moffat Nathanson, Michael Nathanson, who's been on Stratory a few times in the Wall Street Journal, was quoted. What people worry about is just the math around search. Isn't AI going to be negative to search? And they went out of the way many times on the call to say that's not what we're seeing. And so there's this big question on can Google avoid disruption by integrating the new disruptive technology, artificial intelligence, in a way that doesn't destroy their core business, which is search ads. They're putting up 80 billion revenue a year on it.

My personal feeling is that Chrome specifically is just so unbelievably sticky. Yeah. And as long as it takes the average person to, you know, hitting hitting two buttons to get to the point where they can do any type of search, Google will continue to dominate because right now I can hit Command T. Yep. Search something quickly. Yes, I'm sure I could update the default, like search to something else,

but I haven't. I love the model. There was a time when I bounced around. I remember having Opera installed and Firefox installed for a while. then for the last decade it's just been. I used to love, there was a moment, like probably five years ago that I was loving Safari. It was just so snappy and fast and simple. I believe it's also built on chromium, but yes.

But it's not a Google product, so they could, in theory, reroute, reroute. No, Safari is not built on chromium. Interesting. uses Apple's own web kit rendering engine. Okay, okay. I do like, so it's weird. I use Safari on my phone and Chrome on my desktop, which feels, feels like it totally breaks the continuity, right?

But I've just kind of stuck with that and it's been fine and I don't have like tabs that float in between. They're kind of separate, but it's fine. Really quickly. This show is brought to you by Restream, one stream, 30 destinations, multi-stream, and reach your audience wherever they are. We love Restream. You can sign up for free. So let's go over to Ben Thompson talking about Google earnings.

He has said, I've repeatedly laid out the theoretical case for why AI is potentially, to Google and we asked him about this when he came on the show my question was like is there a world where where revenue and profit from from generative AI products is actually not as counter positioned against Google in the sense that like if they had launched the Gemini app first and become the chat GPT they'd probably be seeing a drop in search volume but then also seeing revenue spike from an even more popular Gemini that's monetizing even better and was it a question of them just like not being able to take that pill or was it more about like the risk and

PR nervousness than actual structural that stood out that stood out to most the most to me and I'll probably butcher it a little bit but effectively he was saying like it's really hard for companies to change who they are when you look at Google's mission statement to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful that is so deeply aligned with AI it's like what does chat GPT do, like organizes information and makes it useful, right? Agents, like chat ChbT, agent is making that information useful. Yep. And so it just feels like, again, like, generative AI is like deeply aligned with the core mission. And so it's easy to see, you know, them continuing to win here. Yeah, I think the, the problem is, is like, the, like, disruption comes

when you create a product that is not as good, but, the financials are structurally different. So the idea of like if AI disrupts like a law firm, you look at this product or even like, I don't know, what's the classic example of disruption that people go through? I don't know. But like this idea of like, yeah, the big thing was innovator's dilemma. Yeah, in the innovator's dilemma, the example is like a new product comes to market that does something 90% of, you know, as well. And so it's unacceptable to the people that are buying

the current product. But then over time, it gets better and better and better until it replaces the current product. And so there is a world where if they had just changed the Google search bar to just be like, this is just an LLM now, people would have been really, really disappointed with that shift. And they would have been like, I want to go back

and ripping that Band-Aid off to the tune of what, $300 billion a year and a year in search revenue would be really painful. So they had to take a more iterative stepwise improvements. But it seems like they're doing well. And Ben Thompson is kind of echoing this. He says, once again, however, I have to come to Google's defense. All available metrics suggest that the company is doing quite well.

Indeed, I would go further. You can make the case that the company's biggest mistake is not going harder. And so they flip the switch on cloud. Their infrastructure spending is through the roof, as we mentioned. So after the Q4, 2024 earnings and their announcement they were spending $75 billion on CAP-X, then Google Cloud's revenue numbers disappointed, but this was because they didn't

have enough GPUs and they were actually constrained. So they missed on top line, like they didn't bring in enough revenue, but their margins actually improved. And so what that means is that there was so much demand that they had pricing power. And they could say, no, we're not giving. you any discounts because everyone wants these GPUs right now or the TPUs. They want our infrastructure. So we don't need to, we don't need to sell them at a discount. And so their margins were really good. And what that revealed was that they were capacity constrained. And that justifies the bigger

KAPX spend that they're going into right now. And Google is still the polymarket, which company has the best AI model end of 2025? So December 31st, there's been one and a half million in volume, and Google is still sitting comfortably at 46% chance of being at the top of LM Arena at the end of the year. Yeah. This is such a crazy supply constraint metric. So the Google CFO, Anat Ashkenazi said on the earnings call, in cloud, as I mentioned, the demand for our products is high, as evidenced by the continued revenue growth and the cloud backlog.

Guess how big their cloud backlog is? Just the demand for Google Cloud products that they can't fulfill because they haven't built the data centers. But if they had more capacity, they think that they could deliver this. $106 billion. That is so much money. Great. Honestly, more businesses should try to put themselves in the position. Yes.

160 billion of demand that they can't. 106 billion. We try to not give business advice. Yes. So based on it. Well, it's just like every business is different. Every founder's different, but in general, if you can develop a demand. It's a good call for like a YC company.

Like if you go on stage a demo day and you say like, yeah, we have LOIs and we have some demand backlog. We have $106 billion of demand. There was actually a YC company yesterday or two days ago that was getting a little bit roasted because they were like, they launched a product and they were like, wow, today was insane. Our servers, our servers went down immediately. and you could see the user chart

and they had like 250 users and so people are like wait like your entire your product went down on 250 users that's ridiculous anyways but happy happy for their success yeah well let me tell you about Figma

think bigger build faster Figma helps design and development teams build great products together you can get started for free at figma.com and so this so he keeps going into the CAPEX Wait before we do that Figma Make is generally available today

You can go to figma.com slash make and just start building various products. Tyler has been using Figma Make to make a product that will be releasing very soon. Very excited for that. We will announce that soon. So from the earnings call, given the strong demand for our cloud products and services, we now expect to invest $85 billion in CAPEX from 2025, up from a previous estimate of $75 billion, just a $10 billion incremental investment. Absolutely massive.

Our updated outlook reflects industrial investment in servers, the timing of delivery of servers, and an acceleration of the pace of data center construction, primarily to meet cloud customer demand. The challenge, Pichai cautioned in an answer to an analyst question is that it takes a while for these investments to come on board. So of course the risk is like you overbuild, but there's certainly no evidence of that given the massive backlog. So the other interesting thing that is that you're going to be able to be able to be able to be able to

that Ben dips his toe into. So Ben Thompson, Mr. Teckery, famously, does not get caught up in trade deals and non-CEO employee shifts. They're below his line. They are below his line. They're below his line. But he had to chime in on the CFO change

that happened at Google. So he says, I'm always hesitant to delve too much. I like that he's thrown into delve. You know it's not written by AI. But he's baiting. Yeah, he's baiting for sure. He's like, how do you? dare you accuse. He's like, you can go back and look at how many times. I've used Dell a million

I created Dell. I coined that word. There's a there's a there's a there's a YC company called Dell. Oh yeah yeah. As well. Yeah. It's doing well. So he says but it's interesting that the Google that the earnings call was Ruth Parrott's last one as CFO. Parat earned a lot of plot hits for getting Google spending under control in the late 2010s. But what's seems clear in retrospect that is that 52.5 billion that Google spent on CAPEX in 2024 was too little. And so he's kind of like you know noodling on this idea that maybe the CFO was too cautious going into an AI boom. You could lose your job over that. Called a maybe Ruth Perraught was calling top signals like us. It looks terrible. Fortunately,

we don't lose their job when we get something wrong with calling top signals. There's something wrong with underinvesting. You get in hot water if you're specifically calling the top. Yes. Trying to identify top signals is more of a meta game. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So basically, Google, it does seem like Google underinvested in CAPEX in 2024, based on demand, wound up with that massive backlog, missed on top line, couldn't make enough money,

couldn't generate enough revenue, had higher margins, that's great, but didn't deliver on the cloud side on the actual scale. So Ashkenazis calls, meanwhile, have repeatedly reiterated that Google Cloud is particularly supply constrained. They don't have enough servers. And the company has now surprised investors twice in six months with the scale of its KAPX plans. Let's go. This, in my opinion, is incredibly bullish for Google. Go back to the disruption lens, which we were kind of noodling on earlier. The exact avenue from which you would expect management resistance to a disruptive innovation to flow is from the, is the, is the

CFO office, like the CFO should be resistant to disruptive innovation. And when you look at the history of companies that got disrupted, the CFO is saying, we have a good business. Let's just keep printing cash. Like this new thing, let's not worry about it. Let's not go. Nokia CFO. Exactly. Are you guys seeing the numbers? Yeah. But like for a lot of those companies that got disrupted, it's like they were printing cash, high dividends, for decades even after the disruption happened. The next, the iPhone comes out. And in order to actually do something to compete, they have to completely go into startup mode. They have to burn a ton of cash, cut their dividend, stop stockpiling cash, issue debt, do a ton, raise more equity maybe.

Like, they have to become a new product development company. And it would be very, very difficult, usually. BlackBerry's annual revenue in 2005, 1.9 billion. They completely pivoted. BlackBerry's annual revenue in 2024, 580 million. It's a cybersecurity company now. They bought a couple cybersecurity assets while they were valuable, while the stock was up, and then eventually they wound down the phone business and just kind of became a cybersecurity company.

Because obviously they had a ton of enterprise contracts because BlackBerrys were sold into large enterprises as work phones. Very few people had BlackBerrys as like everyday phones. But so they had all those solid sales team, solid connections, bought a new asset, and we're able to continue the business, even though, obviously, it's not the company that it once was. So Ben Thompson goes on to say there's a, there does seem to be a major shift in mindset in terms of the company's willingness to lean into AI, particularly for a segment Google Cloud that even in the best case scenarios is significantly lower margin than the company's core business. What's interesting about that margin point, however, is that it. two is another reason to be bullish on Google's prospects. Google is the only company, we talked about the TPU thing. They're the only company with an at-scale ASIC alternative to NVIDIA's GPUs,

which should give them a meaningful cost advantage to that end, to the extent the cloud compute becomes commoditized. At scale to a point where they're going to be able to support SSI, which is crazy. Not just their own needs. And then there's also another question. The dynamic that's interesting is like OpenAI needs to massively scale infrastructure. structure and as we covered earlier this week commit to spending tens of billions of dollars with Oracle and their revenue today doesn't support that.

Obviously their growth trajectory is absolutely insane. But opening I being in a position where they are competing head on with Google for this very, very critical consumer use case, search, knowledge retrieval and ultimately usefulness, it is an extremely tough position for opening I to be in. Yeah. So the other hyperscalers are working on ASICs that are alternative to NVIDIA GPUs, but they all seem to be following the similar path, trying to get line time at TSM, not fully at scale. Then there's also the question, you know, I think a lot of people's mind is like, is this the end of history? Is there something that's coming down the pipe that could disrupt the NVIDIA GPU monopoly,

the Kuta ecosystem, or even the Google TPU? And semi-analysis has a funny meme here way down in the stack. about the next generation of chips that were that have been pitched from startups like etched and a few others so semi analysis says although baking transformers into silicon may sound cool it's most mostly just a marketing slogan 90% of transformers flops are just GEMMs and 256 by 256 or 128 systolic arrays in TPU and in TPUTRAe and in TPUTRAe are already optimized for these Even modern GPGPUs with tensor cores are optimized well for GEMMs.

Even if you bake transformers into silicon, aka just create a giant systolic array, most of your dye area will still be taken up with SRAM cells that's the memory, and you will still face the memory wall since your HBM memory bandwidth will be the same as GPGPUs, TPUs, and Traneum. And so the meme is not transformers are just 90% mat mulls. George Hoth had a similar analysis or take just saying that But if you look at the actual energy use of GPUs right now, there isn't that much opportunity to squeeze more value out of them.

They're pretty efficient. And most of the energy that goes in goes into these very, very specific math calculations that are already pretty optimized. We did hear from someone something about the, this is from Martin Screlly, the Jane Street or was it Jane Street? One of the high-frequency trading firms figured out how to run one of those very, very, their basic mat-mull calculations on a GPU more efficiently and I guess kind of open-sourced it or something or got out into the into the research world so it doesn't it doesn't feel like at this

moment I still think that there's a interesting bull case for the edge crew in some ways and some niches or something some specific models but it doesn't seem like there's some new disruptive chip architecture that's going to come out and and obviate the need for both invidia GPUs and Google TPUs and so Google's very well positioned as Ben Thompson is writing. So he says this should give them their position that they have an at-scale ASIC alternative to Nvidia GPUs should give them a meaningful cost advantage to that end to the extent that cloud compute becomes commoditized is the extent to which Google actually has a margin advantage because if all of the clouds are commoditized but all of them are on invidia and then Google is taking the invidio margin basically from their TPU,

They should be in a very good spot. This is, to be sure, a bit weird. Perrott gained these plotits, those plotits because there was so much waste in Google to cut, which was downstream of the company's amazing monopoly and margins in search, which hardly seems like the recipe for a structural cost advantage. But here we are. Sundar's going to tell every employee, we're cutting your daily massage allowance from three massages down to one.

We're deeply sorry, but we need to get fit. Got to get fit. And you've got to get on Vanta. Automate compliance, manage risk, improve trust, continuously. Vantas trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation, whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program. It was great talking with Christina yesterday. She's an absolute dog. Boardroom general. Boardroom general. She put the KPI as in orbit. She really has. She really

has. Did you see that? No, she has it. She has a read shared. Yeah, this chart. She says, Andrew said Christina often talks about stacking rice. on the chess board. Yeah. And I didn't see this until after the show, but I was like, it seems like you guys are just chopping wood. Like every day, just out there, like, that's what it is. Putting in the work.

Just yeah, a couple percent here, couple percent here. Just very consistent growth, very consistent growth, very smooth growth curve into a monster of business. So, congrats to everyone over Advanta on the new round. And we will go back to Google. So more broadly, the way in which Google seems to have flipped the switch in terms of going all in on AI, along with Meta's spending on AI talent really does strongly suggest that AI in the end is a sustaining technology that

favors the incumbents most of all. Both see a line of sight to new revenue streams and critically both can fund AI from profits, not speculative investment or debt. And of course, both have distribution, including search, sometimes the empire strikes back. I love that. So there were other takes from search. You'll have to subscribe to Sir Tecary to get the full analysis. You gotta go and subscribe to Sir Tecary.

you're not subscribed, what are you doing? But the interesting takeaway from search is that it seems like Google's being a little squishy about, hey, we don't want to report certain KPIs anymore. So they used to report paid clicks, and now the chief business officer, Philip Schindler, is saying, and on your paid click question, look, to be very clear, I think we said this before, we managed the business to drive great outcomes for our users and attract our attractive ROI for advertisers. We don't we actually don't manage to pay clicks or CPC targets, which is fair and good, but it's funny because Ben Thompson's like, but I want that data.

That would be helpful to me. I mean, when a business has a metric that they tell you is important for a long time and then they suddenly tell you it's not important, you got to read into it a little bit. But it does make sense. They're a huge business. They moved on to bigger and like higher levels of abstraction. Just look at the growth and tokens. Don't worry about anything else. What he says is that there are there are product changes and policy changes that actually drive better monetization, but at the expense of paid clicks, and that's probably AI searches and stuff like that. You'll see in the 10-Q paid clicks, we're up 4% year-on-year,

but a number of factors affecting these metrics from quarter-to-quarter, such as advertiser spending, product changes, policy changes, user engagement. So it's really important when it comes to pay clicks in CPC to avoid drawing overly broad conclusions solely based on these metrics. Don't put me in the truth zone on this, he says. So, Ben Thompson, this is exactly what you said. I don't even think you pre-read this, but you basically have Ben Thompson working in your head because... This is what I said. When Ben Thompson came on the show, I was like, I think your way of thinking has been so ingrained into my mind that I think that I have an original thought and you've already thought it. Okay, so this is what he says, and it's literally what you just said. The more that management

tells me not to pay attention to paid click rates, the more I want to pay attention, which is exactly what you just said. Regardless, once again, the fact that paid clicks were up 4% and search revenue was up 12% makes it clear that search growth is primarily being driven by higher prices. And so the actual number of clicks is up 4%. But revenues up 12%. That means that they're monetizing each click better. But people are obviously going to read into, oh, paid clicks aren't growing that fast. Like the actual pie isn't growing that fast. They're just getting like, it's basically like, you know, once Instagram Reels is popular, everyone's watching it, then you just got to put more ads in the feed, right? And that's kind of, it seems like what they're doing, and that's what's

driving search revenue up 12%. AI overviews is another question. This is a funny one where basically the chief business officer, Philip Schindler, Google, basically says that AI overviews are monetizing as well as other Google searches. And Ben Thompson says, given the fact that the vast majority of Google searches don't monetize at all because people just click on a link. That's what I was about to say. Oftentimes, if you're searching for information, you can have very low purchase intent.

Yeah. Like how many times a day do I search for a specific fact? And never would have, you could show me the best ad in the world and I wouldn't click through because I'm just looking for a fact. Yep. So if you're looking for something like, you know, Hulk Hogan's age, that's not a purchase intent if that comes from an AI overview

or it comes from a you know how they used to have those like knowledge boxes or like we would pull from Wikipedia or if you click on Wikipedia none of that is making Google any money so it really doesn't matter the UI or the actual underlying technology to get you that answer

and then Gemini is on absolute tear really remarkable how many monthly active users do you think the Gemini app has These are MAUs, not D.U. On the mobile app, web app, combined? I think this is probably across mobile web and desktop, but I would assume mobile.

70 million? 450 million. Ooh. Big, right? And it doubled. Like, I guess I get, I mean, they kind of get the, it's kind of a, they have a cheat code because everybody already has a Google accounts that are like signed in. Yep. But in term, I don't know.

They're monthly. and what we know from semi-analysis is that they're not taking share of queries that much, but 450 million downloads on an app and monthly active users is pretty, pretty high. And so if there's a world where Google can build a business around, if they can bring in ads faster and keep the Gemini app cheaper and offer better, better products, and like you get deep research, you get agent, you get the $200 tier, the ad-free, if, OpenAI and chat GPT has a $200 tier that's ad-free.

And then Google's giving you the same product and the same experience, but with ads for free. Like that feels like an Android iOS battle going on. That feels like something that could actually be pretty sustainable and kind of drive this like a little bit of a duopoly. I don't know. We'll have to see how it goes. But daily requests grew over 50% from Q1 to Q2.

And I think everyone is pretty surprised by that. And I was also surprised when I went and pulled up the Gemini app when I went to go download it. The number of five-star reviews is like hundreds of thousands. And I was like, okay, this is very serious. And that reflects the actual number that they shared, 450 million monthly active users. So still a lot of work to be done. I was very frustrated. When I went to go get V-O-3, I got the Gemini app.

And they were advertising V-O, but I couldn't access it. Is Gemini? frustrations default in Android yet? I don't know. I imagine that it has to be pre-installed in the next round of Android phones that go out. Why would you not want that pre-installed and there? But I would be surprised if that's what's driving it

because, I mean, how many Samsung galaxies have they sold in the last quarter? Probably not 200 million, right? I doubt that that's what's driving the growth. But maybe that might be an interesting thing. How many of them are pre-installs, pre-loads? But even then, you have to open it to become an MAU.

But yeah, maybe they're testing. Maybe people will churn and go back to Open AI and chat GPT. Android users have had access to Google Assistant for a long time. That's getting phased out. It's just going to be Gemini. Yep. Well, let me tell you about graphite.dev. Code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster.

You can get started for free at graphite.dev. I don't know if people can hear, but anytime we do an ad read, the entire team breaks out in applause in the studio. Yeah, so it's really. Let's hear for some advertisements. There we go. In other very, very sad news, Hulk Hogan has passed away at age 71. Cardiac arrest was what you said, right, Jordy?

I didn't actually get into that. I looked a little bit more into some of the history. I wanted to know a little bit more about his story. There's a whole bunch of different profiles. There was at one point going to be a biopic about him. In a recent interview with Variety, director Todd Phillips revealed that his long gestating Hulk Hogan biopic will not progress. Unfortunately, it got canned. This was back in about a year ago today.

I love what we were trying to do, but that's not going to come together for me. Chris Hemsworth had signed on to play Hogan in early 2019 with the Joker, writer and director duo Todd Phillips and Scott Silver attached to lead the charge. Films producers. you got Phillips, Hogan, Hemsworth, Bradley Cooper, Michael Sugar, Sugar, I don't know, sugar. Staggart. Staggart. And Hogan's longtime pal and New World Order stablemate Eric Bischoff. In a July 2020 interview with Total Film, Hemsworth described the training he'd have to undergo to transform into the 80s WWE icon.

As you can imagine, the preparation for the role will be insanely physical. I will have to put on more size than I ever have before, even. more than I put on for Thor. There is this accent as well as the physicality and the attitude, Hemsworth said. The Hogan biopic would explore his rise to stardom in the early 1980s. His WWF World Heavyweight Championship

win over the Iron Sheik in 1980s. It's a good role. You know that Hemsworth has a personal fitness training app called Center. I have heard of that. Is it good? Like, I'm really going to have to use my app a lot for this role. Maybe we should start using his app.

Get on the Hulk train. become Hulkomaniacs, as they called him. Did you grow up watching wrestling at all? I didn't, but I was aware of Hulk Hogan just through the lore because it was so dominant. Even I feel like I would hear more about Hulk Hogan in the context of the Gawker. Oh, yeah, we should go into that. I want to pull up this Hulk Hogan video. I'll send it to the team.

There's some like great like rants. Where is it? There's one where he's talking trash about something. Wow, everything's just like RIP. But he was legendary at like, I don't know, what do they call it in UFC where you like are pre-show pump up talking about the competition? I guess it's like a promo. Is that what it is? That makes sense.

Yeah, this one. Seek and destroy. We got to watch this. I will put it in the tab so we can watch this. And then, yeah, we should talk about the Gawker fallout a little bit. Let me put that in there. The best promos. Hulk Hogan, Seek and Destroy.

Let's pull that up. Hulk Hogan has recently been a founder. He has a real American beer, which he did with the Budweiser family. This is what we need to channel. We need to bring this energy to the show every day. But there are those right now that are questioning whether you can withstand the big man. Well, I don't care about those people, man. I don't care about those people that aren't Star Craven Hulkomaniacs.

I could care less what they think. I'm fighting for life, brother. I'm fighting for all those people that have remolded their lives, man. Model after Hulkomania. Get their priorities in order, man. Walk around with a lot of pride. As far as those people that are on Andre the Giant's side, I wish it'd come on down too.

to slap them around just for a warm up. But I've already gone through my transformation, man. I'm ready for Pontiac, Michigan. I'm not the Hulk anymore. I'm the Hulkster, man. Looking through my eyes, man. Hulk, come on that mountain top. Back off, little man.

I'm on that mountain top. And I'm waiting for you, Andre. And I'm guarding that mountain. And the hawkster that's garden. He's got a 32-inch neck, a 64-inch chest, the largest arms in the world. And I'm geared to seek. and destroy, seek and destroy the cancer of Andre the giant, seek and destroy the weasels empire.

And what you're going to do, Andre? In Pontiac, Michigan, when Halkomania destroys you. He is indeed absolutely livid, going against the man that one time he looked up to and respected. That's the energy I want, uh, Sinderer Pachai to bring to Google endings. I got 85 billion of capax. I grew 50% top line and I'm coming for Sam Altman They're coming for me

I'm coming for I'm coming for chat chagip-t I'm coming for them I got 450 million MAUs on the Gemini app The search overviews are going great They're monetizing just as well As regular search results Come here to Mountain View

Get down to Mountain View And if you're riding with If you're riding with the Andre the Giant You've got to be a Stark Raven Hulkomaniac. That's so good. I love it. Chris Hemsworth signed on to play Thor, from Thor, signed on to play Hogan in early 2019. He said you had to put on a lot of size. The biopic would have explored his rise to stardom in the early 1980s and then Hulkomania

takeover that ruled the wrestling world well into the 1990s. Phillips take on Hocomania was going to stay away from Hogan's recent controversies. Instead, focus solely. on the early years, Ben Affleck and Matt Damon are currently developing a film titled Killing Gawker that will explore Hogan's campaign against the media empire in the wake of an explosive home video. Hulk Hogan was 6'7, which is wild because you'd be able to heightmog him. Pretty close to me. He's got you on next conference.

He's got me on next conference for sure, for sure. And I think I will be staying away from his supplement stack. hoping hoping to make it longer. Really sad though. Yeah, very sad. What a career and what a fantastic. The Hulk Hogan theme song, I am a real American.

Such a good song. Such a great rallying cry. That's the name of his beer, Real American beer. Yeah. Fight for the rights of every man. Such a good song. Light, crisp, crushable.

So there is a, there is a reflective piece in the New Yorker about Hulk Hogan's Gawker lawsuit that we can go through. But first let me tell you about linear. Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products. Meet the modern, meet the system for modern software development,

streamline issues, projects, and product roadmaps. Go to linear. That is a powerful homepage. And you know, if Hogan's selling beer, you've got to get you on numeralhq.com sales tax on autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. A friend of mine is

was business partners with with Hogan on that. That's crazy. So we have Zach Kukoff joining at noon to break down the AI day yesterday in Washington DC. The besties met up with the Hill and Valley crew. Honestly crushed it. We have a bunch of great posts that we can run through. First, let's go through a little bit of the Hulk Hogan

Gawker lawsuit. This is from 2016, well before we actually saw the results. from all this, but on Monday afternoon, a Florida jury added $25 million in punitive damages to the $115 million it had awarded Hulk Hogan on Friday in his invasion of privacy case against Gawker Media. Hogan sued Gawker for posting portions of a sex tape. It received from an anonymous sender. It's a shocking amount, not least because it's $40 million more than Hogan, whose real name is Tadie Haleah, had demanded. Verdicts of this size can pose an existential risk to,

immediate to a media company. That's what happened to Gocker. Gocker has reported that it earned $44 million in revenue in 2014. In January, Gocker's owner Nick Denton announced that he had sold a portion of his company to investors in order to fund this case. Gocker will certainly appeal the verdict, as it should, after it pays a bond of up to $50 million, arguing that the jury was unreasonable in finding that Hogan's right to privacy outweighed Gocker's right to publish the material, which it believes was of public interest, which is a very, yeah, Strange defense. It is, it is, it is hard to argue.

He is a public figure, but this is a very personal thing. Yeah, I mean, if they had just posted that it existed and they had seen it. That's true. And that's kind of what's happening with the Wall Street Journal. They're not posting everything all the time with regards to the, to the Trump Epstein stuff, but they're referencing that it exists, that they verified it. And that seems to be a safer path for media companies to kind of report that they've confirmed that something exists without actually putting everything out necessarily.

So the publication of the videotape of consensual sex between adults is not the most appealing place to plant a First Amendment flag, but it is worth considering the possible effects on publishers if a judgment of this magnitude is allowed to stand. And so the fallout from Gawker was certainly celebrated in tech because they also had Valleywag, which was very annoying to a lot of people in tech because it was basically like TMZ for tech. I don't know if you were aware of Valleywag back in the day. Before my time.

Before your time. But it did have like a chilling effect. I remember being at South by Southwest and a friend of mine who's a venture back founder at the time was really into doing handstand pushups and was doing handstand pushups and was doing handstand pushups and was doing handstand pushups. People were just kind of hanging out and he was just doing some handsstand pushups as one does. And there was a Valleywag reporter there. and wrote about it as a characterization of like how broie the situation was,

but didn't include his name. And he was like, I dodged a bullet because like it could have been forever outed it is. I mean, in many ways, in many ways it could have built his aura. I agree. If he was named. In the modern era, it would have been incredibly bullish. But at that time, it did feel like something that could destroy you.

It was, it was a very tense time, very, very tense time. Roy Lee would not have done well during that era. Yeah. Maybe he would have, maybe he would have changed the meta, though. Because he's making shirtless posts on the timeline, bringing them into the modern era. Yeah, it is an interesting thing. Like ValleyWag would probably be writing about Cluelly a lot and framing it in a different way. There's already probably folks out there who are framing Cluelly is particularly bad on the other side of the aisle or in the anti-tech category.

But it just doesn't seem to have the same effect. It certainly doesn't stop venture funding or customers or any of that. It doesn't, it seems to be that we're in a different era where people, people in tech were, were, clearly was controversial in tech. People were definitely divided. I think it would be good if there was some law that required if, if a media company wanted to write about someone's physique, they should have to post physique. Oh, their own physique, yes. So that should just be in the footnotes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's important context. Anyway, in other, another news, pin.aI, the number one customer, the number one AI agent for customer service, number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive bakeoffs, number one in ranking on G2, go check out fin.aI. And own is apparently helping launch a media company.

And so if you want to go work for Own, or this new company, which I believe is called Cool Tech News, go check it out. They're looking for a producer. The founder of Nicola, the electric vehicle company that went bankrupt and landed its CEO founder in prison for a brief time.

He was in jail for life. Then he got pardoned. Just did a sit-down interview with Tucker Carlson. And Nate Anderson from Hindenburg Research had a lengthy rebuttal to this that I thought was pretty interesting. So Nate says, I am Nate Anderson, the founder of Hindenburg Research, referenced repeatedly. Okay. And just for context, if people haven't seen this yet, Tucker is basically positioning the takedown of Nicola as a woke witch hunt. Is that, is that, is that an accurate summary?

It's, it's kind of unclear. I think he's, I think he's more just really, really open and digging into like, hey, Trevor Milton, like tell your side of the story. And it seemed like, it seemed like Tucker didn't come with really strong opinions, at least for the part that I saw. It didn't seem like he was taking a super strong stance on whether hydrogen is a good strategy or what happened. I haven't dug in, dug in, but a lot of it, a lot of those claims I think don't come from Tucker. I think they come from from Trevor Milton.

And so the real debate, it seems like, is between Nate Anderson and Trevor Milton side of the story. I wouldn't say that in this podcast interview, Tucker has a particular thesis that he's advancing. He's more just, asking Trevor Milton to tell his side of the story. And people are not liking it. People are not happy with this for sure.

People are saying pitiful. Someone else is saying Trevor Milton is a convicted fraudster and pathological liar. Another guy is saying terrible take. Scam artist platformed. Anyways, another person just says seriously question mark. And even TikTok investors is meming it just being like, wow, this is dark. A lot of people got burned, right? Funny thing too is he was, wasn't he initially prosecuted during the Trump admin?

Yes. So Nate goes into this. He says, I'm the founder of Hindberg Research referenced repeatedly in this bizarre and fantastical interview. During my career, I helped expose numerous financial scams, including over a dozen Ponzi schemes and numerous instances of public companies lying to and stealing from investors. Of course, he's talking about Hindberg Research, his firm. I am immensely proud of the career of that career, including our work on Nicola Motors referenced in this interview. Trevor Milton is a convicted fraudster held criminally responsible for the incineration of hundreds of millions of dollars in retail investors hard-earned money, and as should be unsurprising, Milton in this interview seems just to fabricate key events and information out of thin air, unfortunately with zero critical questioning or pushback from Tucker. For starters, contrary to Trevor Milton's implications that his prosecution was some sort of Biden in Minutes,

administration conspiracy. Conveniently, neither Milton nor Tucker share that the investigation into Milton was started and disclosed in September 2020 under the first Trump admin, as well as before the 2020 election. There were numerous inaccuracies throughout this interview. The claim that Hindenberg paid employees for inside information is patently absurd. The key whistleblower discussed in the interview was only briefly a contractor for Milton. He was so horrified by what he viewed as Milton's repeated false claims that he did a tremendous amount of research on. his own unraveling numerous additional suspected lies that Milton peddled to the investing public. Further, Hindenburg didn't coordinate anything with media or the DOJ. Such entities ran their own investigations for their own purposes unconnected to us. There was ample evidence that Milton misstated numerous aspects of his business and as the company later itself acknowledged. What's interesting is like I feel like when we talked about the Marquez Brownlee Escobar phone,

like MKBHD kind of broke that story and did some investigative journalism, wound up getting his hands on the phone, and then the DOJ or the FBI came and said, hey, we want that phone as evidence. We'll give it back to you maybe in five years. And so it's interesting that it seems like the DOJ, according to Nate Anderson, did not coordinate with Hindenburg. Maybe that's just because Hindenberg was doing public research or just doing like informational research and didn't have any like hard physical evidence. But I certainly wouldn't be surprised if the DOJ reached out to Hindenburg,

but it seems like they didn't coordinate, according to Nate Anderson. It would take hours to write out all the other observities, have truth, innuendos, and false statements in this interview. But in the interest of correcting some of the record, here's a handful. Milton waxes on about his pardon, but no one mentions that Milton's lawyer was Brad Bondi, the brother of A.G. Pam Bondi. Nor did anyone mention that Milton donated $900,000 to Trump in October 2024, less than a month before the recent election, strategically timed well after his criminal conviction

and immediately prior to the presidential election. What's interesting is like, you know, you take a company to bankruptcy, you wind up in prison for life, you would think that you get zeroed pretty hard to the degree that you don't have $900,000 sitting around to make a political donation. So I'm very curious about how the money flowed around

post-bankruptcy, post post indictment and conviction because I think that will change the calculus of people that are thinking about doing crazy stuff in the public markets. Because if you're like, okay, yes, I might get thrown in jail, but then I can squirrel away some money, donate it, get pardoned, and then have half left over to hang out. Like that's a pretty good deal. So certainly not the functioning of the system that we want. very, very odd. Yeah, the other thing that Nate calls out, he says,

waxing poetic about hydrogen in the interview echoes Nicola's lies to retail investors that it successfully produced hydrogen at a cost 81% lower than anyone on Earth, a feat that it would have upended the entire energy industry had it been remotely true. Nicola's head of hydrogen production, presumably in charge of this world, world-changing scientific breakthrough turned out to be Milton's own brother who had no scientific background and previously did odd construction jobs in Hawaii. See, I want to push back on that because last night, I was like 7,000 prompts deep and I feel like I cracked the code to upending the energy markets.

ChatGPT had you pretty convinced that you could produce hydrogen. It was like, John, you're on to something. You're onto something here. Go public. Go public. It does not matter that you're a podcaster. You were just a mere podcaster. You cracked it.

You cracked the code. Yeah, I mean, you know, one thing you can kind of, Tucker could have pushed on was you rolled a truck downhill and you, and you marketed it as though it was a functioning vehicle. Yep. That was a big one. And doesn't seem to be something that he pushed back on. Yeah. Big questions about short selling. and he makes the case that short selling is good

because it creates a financial incentive to expose companies that lie and engage in fraud. I think I agree with that. I think I'm pro-short sellers, although, of course, they can be very frustrating if you're on the other side and you're being shorted. Fortunately, TBPN is a privately held company,

so we don't have to deal with short attacks. That's right. Well, with that, let's bring in our Washington correspondent, Zach Cooke. Rukoff. Zach, what was your reaction? What was your reaction to Trevor Milton going on Tuck? Tuck Radio.

I just think terrible choice of network to go on first. The clear answer was TbPN. I don't know if I'm ready to know. It's a tough one. We'd come with a fact sheet of just fact by fact and say, did you roll the truck down the hill? You're telling me you wouldn't have coddled him the way that Tucker did? I don't know.

I don't know. When we had Soham Perik on, people were saying we went too easy. But clearly, we got him to just admit to having multiple jobs immediately. Are you working multiple jobs? That was my first question. He just said yes. And then from there, it's like, okay, he's admitted it. Let's talk about redemption. Is there a possibility? What else that people want him to admit? Like five other made up things he hadn't done? I think I think the critique that was fair was that he's clearly a pathological lie. and fairly charismatic and we probably just should have said hey it seems like you're still lying but at the same time we got to check in with the company he just joined he said he's going what did he say he said he's going exclusive exclusive he said the term I'm going exclusive I'm going exclusive just one job now so I don't know I still want to believe in redemption not many people believe in redemption that's where it was interesting but yeah I mean like

I suppose that if I was interviewing Trevor Milton, the first question would be, did you roll the truck down the hill? And did you actually do that? Because that is the fraud claim mainly. And if it's like, okay, yeah, I did that. I made a mistake. Now I'm on the redemption path as opposed to, you know, like, you know, waffling around it. But I'm opposed to, no, I didn't roll it downhill.

The truck was just built that way. And the hill was just built that way. I mean, this has been a big, we got to call out this has been a big week for podcasting. You have Sam Altman on the Yovon. Fyobon. You have Netten Yahoo on the Nowcoys, and you have Trevor Milton on Tucker Carlson. I mean, what a week. What a week. But and Zach Kukoff on TV. And Zach Kukov on TV. And Zag Kov, four figures of equal stature. Correct. Thank you very much. I think higher stature than some of the years. Yeah, well, higher than some lower than others. Correct. Exactly. What's going on in your world? How was yesterday? It looked like total, total, total, also total podcast victory.

Total podcast victory for sure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yesterday, I think somebody said, All In is now state media, which I loved. I was like yesterday literally was total podcast dominance, which was wild. It was very well done. Major props to frequent TPPN guest, Delian, who did an amazing job. And they put the whole thing together. And like, Christian and Delian, yeah. They put the whole thing together in like 10 days.

You guys noticed? The whole thing came from nothing. Yeah. 10 days. When you get a 20-minute block on the president's schedule, you got to move quick. that is exactly true. They started Hilling Valley a couple years ago just as a dinner, but now there's like enough of an organization.

I think it is like a company at this point that's doing these events and they have a playbook and every time they execute, it's better than the last one. My understanding is they have like 30-something people who help put these things together. It's a serious, surreal, real operation that really staffs it up. Where was it? It was at the Mellon Auditorium,

which funnily enough is like next door, or maybe even part of the Environmental Protection Agency, the EPA. So it's a nice, it was very funny because I would not say it was a particularly environmentally focused group in the audience, but beautiful space nonetheless. Honestly, a highlight of the day for me, and probably for everybody there, a very funny, very well done POTUS speech. At end of the day, keynote, real red meat for us and for tech on a lot of the key questions on AI development. Also, a lot of very funny crowd work. like really talented crowdwork fits on Jensen and on Doug Bergam.

I was like, wow, it's going to be a really talented Netflix special. This all gets packaged on. And did he have a, did Trump have a good line on Jason too? Or I couldn't tell if that was fake news or was real? No, it was real. Trump gets up. First thing he says is thanks to the All In podcast, Shemoth and David and yes, even Jason.

And there was a huge pause for laughter. And he goes, yes, we're even thanking Jason today. A lot of Jason Galcanus jokes. I will say one interesting dynamic at the thing that I don't know if I don't know it was streamed online but wasn't but one interesting dynamic that I don't know if folks saw the uh Jason was doing the voice of the liberal in the in the questioning he was like trying to really put a little bit of the heats on some of the uh trump admin guests and it was an interesting departure from everybody else who was asking a question that's good that's people will find a way to hate that but it's good

yeah no it's good to get the diversity of voices I will say clearly some people that I don't necessarily expected it. But yeah, it was good to get the diversity of forces. That's fun. Up there. Yeah. What was the best line, though? The best line to me was somebody asked Jensen to talk about America's AI advantage.

And he said, the one thing that no other country has is President Trump. That's right. That's why Jensen gets to export age 20s because he's had good lines like that. It's wild. Amazing. It was a well-done speech. Honestly, it was well-done event. I would say highlights for me from a serious way,

the big one for me was fair use training of copyright material for AI. This is the one we've been asking about for a while, and a lot of companies have been talking about it. In fact, there was a recent entropic court case that ruled on this, said, look, if it's trained on legally procured, legally purchased copyright material, that's fair use, that's in scope. If it's stuff that you're pirating, which allegedly entropic and meta and others have done to build their corpus of data, that's when you get into legal trouble.

This was the first time that I've heard the admin come out and codify that, which is really nice. So I loved that. I loved the energy permitting stuff. There was a lot of stuff for all the abundance boys on permitting. A lot of permitting reform questions, a lot of accelerating data center buildouts, a lot of trying to streamline getting new sources of energy online. And then, yes, there were some talk about how do you try to tighten, even while we're still letting folks like China by age 20s. Some talk about things like location tracking for export controls too. So there was a lot to like in the speech.

I actually thought it was a very, very well-done speech. And it was funny because there was actually a live, I know, who's your partner? Is it Kalshi or a Pauly Market? Polymarket. Okay. So there was probably a polymarket. I saw it on Kalshi. There was probably a polymarket market going at the same time where people were betting

on things like will Trump say David Sachs name in the speech. Yeah, yeah, yeah, before it gets resolved. So I thought it was really, really well done. Vance spoke super well, Bergum and Chris Wright had a very funny panel with the two of them together where Chris Wright and Jason got into it, mono-a-mono a little bit, which was interesting to hear too. But great and really good energy in the space. A lot of good companies, Hadrian did a very good, almost like a sermon on the enthusiasm of re-industrialization. I love Chris from Hadrian did that. Yeah, he's been on the road show with that because he was probably giving some similar version of that at re-industrialized. worked worked out the bit took the tight five to DC you love to see it it was a tight five it was great that's great what uh how should i think about this AI plan this documented website that's been floating around yeah is this is this more of like like laws aren't changing but this is just these are this is the plan for the laws that we will eventually change is that the

idea so think about it in two ways one way is this is the white house using its bully pulpit to call for a series of changes that yes, would need Congress to enact them or would need agencies to change their policy. Right now, agency changing their policy is something the White House can do. The other side is, look, there are two EOs that were signed live on stage yesterday that Trump's did a very theatrical signing off, which is beautiful. And those are things that the admin can do directly. So there are some things, for example, some of the energy permitting stuff, it's, you know,

there's certain things like doing categorical exclusions from NEPA that are a little bit worn within the realm of things that can be done. My understanding is via EEO. But there are also things, as you guys know, a lot of permitting is done at the state and local level, right? So the White House can't necessarily say we're going to overrule what state and local government does on permitting as a Fiat. They have to work with partners all up and down the stack of government to get what the AI action plan calls for actually implemented. Yeah. So how big are those EOs? What were people tracking on those? And then I guess, what was the specifics?

There was, was one of the EOs around making it so that states can't enact AI safety laws for the next 10 years? Do you have specifics on that? That felt super significant. So there were three AIEOs, said two earlier I was on there. Three AIEOs, sometimes why. One was on bias-free AI, which is something I would instead frame as transparency, right? There was a lot of talk about woke AI and removing things like DEI from AI implementation. The actually specific version of that, the instantiated version of that is that model providers that they want to be used in government procurement have to attest to the values, to be transparent about the values that go into their models.

That's AIEO number one. AIO number two is trying to fast track some of the development work we did. So fast-tracking some of the data center permitting stuff that we did. And the third AIEO that we talked about is the export expansion. It's funny, Jordi, the thing that you're asking about, which we talked about last time, right? This idea of a moratorium on AI regulation for 10 years. The big challenge is to actually get that done. That's something that has to be now done actually beyond my understanding is beyond the scope of just what can be done in an EO, right?

Something that can be started has to actually transcend that as well. And some of the challenge, like you saw today, California is already starting to push back on the idea that the federal government has preemption ability over California's ability regulated eye. And the truth is, there are powerful senators like Marsha Blackburn, we discussed last time, whose job it is to protect their local industries like the music industry in Nashville, Tennessee, right, her home state who are not going to be thrilled about what I think is a pretty reasonable, but ultimately controversial idea of trying to create a standard set of regulations that aren't 50 patchwork states. Because the default, and Trump mentioned this in his speech, is that in 50 different states, whoever's the most

restrictive is when people end up following. Yeah. Because if you're a product, if you're a product company or a foundation model lab, you want to be available everywhere. So the default is like basically be, be allowed under the most restrictive regulations. That's right. That's right. One kind of funny framing I was kicking around was the idea of no paper clips.

So this kind of marks a shift away from worrying about AI. Doom. We're not worried about getting paper clipped. We're not worried about fast takeoff, this crazy Doom scenario. So we're pulling back on safety, pulling more, pushing more into geopolitics, let's actually scale up infrastructure, get these products out into the world because we think that by and large, they're safe. And now the game is to win on more or less like industrial capacity. Like if we're just producing way more tokens than every other country, that will help our GDP. We will grow that way. The flip side of the no paper clips is that there's no move to do a new operation paper

clip where we pulled scientists from Germany to America to build the bomb. And the reference point there is that something like 75% of AI researchers on meta-super intelligence team are I think on 01s or they're not American citizens. And we've seen the deep seek team and Manis and there's some venture capital firms that investing in Chinese AI and kind of the bull case is like okay well get them from China Singapore and then get them to Silicon Valley and then we have the team on our side and so it feels like that's the one area that wasn't really discussed I know immigration's obviously just a broadly hot topic but in terms of like

brain drain of the ultimate top AI scientists is there any movement or people thinking about that is there any nuance coming up between okay maybe that's a different maybe that's a different problem set or different question than like dealing with like fentanyl dealers coming across the border. So I don't know that that was super within scope for the AI action plan. I'll tell you personally, there are definitely people who are thinking about an operation paperclip or how do we get the world's best and brightest, the truly, truly elite, right, even above people who might qualify for old ones to come and build in America,

AI with their families. That's the first thing. Second thing is, listen, the question you're getting to, which is a question of soft power, is a question the admin is thinking about, right? And so the reason that the AIEO, sorry, the AI Action Plan is so supportive of open source and open weight models is because the admin views it as a national security imperative to get American soft power, i.e. American models to become the most widely used in the world. So the soft power lever, the admin's pulling, I would like to see more and I'm hugely supportive of getting people here on a really targeted basis, ultra elite talent to come here and build as opposed to building for adversaries. Yeah. I mean, we're talking about like 50 people. It's like it's super. Yeah, exactly.

Like 20 people. It should be a completely different discussion than like, you know, border wall or anything. Correct. No AI researcher has ever been impacted by a wall. Like that's not. Maybe the pre-training scaling wall is their problem. I know you have to run. Yeah, sorry.

There was a post yesterday going viral. Somebody realized you could Venmo the government to help reduce the national debt. What's the right amount to start Venmoing Uncle Sam if you want to do your your part. Listen, there's no tax on tips now. So we should all be tipping the government, help them. They should be tipping. We should be getting tipped, paid in tips, no tax on that. And then we could turn around and tip the government in Venmo as well. Yeah, I would say as much you can do economy. As much as you can do, but every day. Really quickly. But every day. Last question for me, we'll let you go. Um, uh, that point on open source is

really interesting. It feels like Mark Zuckerberg could be the national champion. He could be the hero of American open source with the Lama Project. We don't know if Lama 5 is going to be open source, behemoth had trouble getting out. He hasn't really given clear guidance on how hard he's going into, how hard he's going to stay in open source. But how do you think the mood is around Mark Zuckerberg in D.C.? Is he a winner or loser? The Wall Street Journal had this article on, you know, how much people have donated.

Obviously, Jensen feels ascendant. Elon feels like he was at the top. and then kind of dial back a little bit, but is still doing okay. The other hyperscalor CEOs are like, none of them are in bad, bad positions, but Zuck is like the interesting one where you could see a really interesting partnership form, but I don't know where we are on that. Zuck, I think is interesting because it took a big swing. I said, listen, I want to go do the cultural work.

I want to unmesh myself really deeply. And what we've learned is this is an admin that really respects power and success, right? Success is its own ability to attract more success, the virtuous cycle. Jensen does well, in part because he's tremendously gifted interpersonally, but also because he's the CEO of the most valuable company in the world, and the admin respects that, right? And when he comes to the town, we know this is an admin that loves talking about, things are number one, things are the biggest and the best and most important,

and Jensen has that. Zuck tried to aura farm a little bit, you know what I mean? He tried to get in here and do a little bit of that, and I don't know that it's fully landed for him. I agree. Listen, I hope he keeps Lama 5 open source predominantly because I think it would be a great bite at the apple for him with national priority here, But part of that's going to also be his ability to invest and do some of the interpersonal retail stuff that Jensen's done so well.

Yeah. Yeah. With Open AI launching the open source model, you have to wonder if, if like, national open source champion of America is a title that Sam Altman is like, I'd like that. Yeah, exactly. Even if it doesn't have like direct economic value, if it comes with political power, that could be incredibly valuable. So interesting to see how it breaks down. Thank you so much for joining. We'll let you get to your next meeting. Sorry after a lot. Thanks guys. Making you miss your next one. No, no more to talk to you soon. And we will tell you about Adio. Customer relationship magic. Adio is the AI native CRM that builds scales and grows your company to the next level. Get on ADEO. It's the next gen of CRM. It's the next gen of CRM. And speaking of gens, Gen Z has a particular nihilism. I call get my bag culture says Jasmine's son.

The mentality of everyone's grifting. So I better get my own. This ties into the Trevor Milton debate that we were having earlier. They've never voted without Trump on the ballot. All content is sponsored content and less proved otherwise. Post-truth politics is all they know. The president's been scamming for the last 10 years. So don't be meek and virtuous or else you're going to lose. So no wonder why you end up with Cluelly. A bit of a hot take.

Interesting. But I do think that there's this, there is this world. The interesting thing, just to call out, that the Cluelly haters will be in shambles over this. But Roy was posting yesterday that he set up a 20% employee option. pool. He was paying a lot and people are pushing back and being like, your burn's got to be crazy. And his pushback was basically, we're way more efficient to, you know, you can get

to 10 million of error with a small team. I pay people a lot. And I also, you can also give them a lot of equity. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, interesting. I do, I do worry a little bit about just as we see more meme stocks, it gets more tempting. So for like, ah, like, and that, that meme about like, you have five years to

get the bag before the permanent underclass like and if you're just seeing people get away with things that feel crazy and you're like well they like everyone else got away with it maybe i should get away with it too um it is it is sad we need gen z founders building permanent structures institutions products that will outlive them and uh there hasn't been a ton of those uh Alex Wang was certainly the the leading candidate as kind of all-star gen Z company yeah and people people were pissed when uh I mean, a lot of people were super happy when Ross Oldbrick was pardoned. A lot of people were upset. They were like he was dealing drugs on the internet and tried to kill someone.

So I think there's, allegedly. Allegedly. Is it alleged? No, I think he did order the hit, but it didn't work. Okay, okay. Like it didn't go through because he was talking with a undercover agent. Happens to the best of us. Sometimes, sometimes you put something on the TV list.

Trump's like, who has an order to hit? Yeah, sometimes you put the two list. Not even one. Sometimes you put something on an underling's to-do list and they just forget about it. It happens. And you're like, ah, they drop the ball. It happens. Anyway, in other better news, there's a profile in Colossus of Rompton, Naomi.

Oh, boy. Who you've worked with, you've met. And he says, it's your friend. We've been quietly building abstract for nine years. He's your friend. He hasn't been on the show. Well, he's never done any media. Literally never.

So this is like the first significant media that he's ever done. Interesting. He's been very, very under the radar. We don't have to list out his full portfolio, but if you look at, you can go to abstract.com. He's backed a lot of incredible companies. He backed my last company.

He was an incredible partner and has been a true friend throughout as long as I've known him. It's fantastic. And I'm excited for him to talk about it. It's a crazy story. he had a fund blew up, went bankrupt when he was 24, and he's 34 now, has $1.8 billion under management. Wow, that's impossible. And he's an absolute dog.

I can't wait to see him at the top of the Midas list. For sure. It's going to happen. So that will be in the next edition of Colossus magazine, which you should of course subscribe to. And you can read this article for free. The man with the hot hand. The man with the hot hand needs to link up. with the man with the hot leather jacket.

Jensen Wong apparently dropping a bombshell at the AI summit that we were just talking to Zach Kukoff about. I have 60 plus leather jackets. My wife picks them. That is the scoop that I need to hear. Beth, thank you for reporting on the ground. Jensen Wong says I have 60 plus leather jackets. That's a lot.

One for every week of the year. I love it. Anyway, another quote from which you mentioned, Jensen Wong. America's unique advantage is that no country could no country could possibly have is President Trump He is happy to be partnering with the president the commander in chief also a reconciliation of sorts between Delian Asperuhov and Chumoth polyhapitia in DC They're comparing anacondas and a I RRs Delian and Chamath of course to put the timeline in turmoil a couple weeks ago talking trash to each other All friendly all's fair and love and war

all up there on the timeline taking a friendly picture together you'll love to see it i love a recaliciliation even if the the language is a little vulgar for my taste but great to see two capital allocators hanging out in dc together uh christian garrett also broke it down so man behind the behind the scenes pulling all the strings pulling all the strings the puppet master last night was truly something special david sacks and the all in pod brought jacob hellberg and delian and i in in to something that we'll all never forget. The business of America is business, as Calvin Coolidge said, and it was never more important than last night.

Friedberg stressed the importance of showing how the everyday American and those who the system has not worked for are already experiencing job creation and transformation due to AI. Winning the AI race will be part of a bigger story that benefits us all. There were members of Congress from both sides at the event, showing how there is a unified front that's bipartisan around techno-industrial policy

and the opportunity AI presents itself. Jacob Helberg and those in the admin now have to get to good work. Amazing work, dude. Congrats, says Will O'Brien. Bobby Goodlate says, saw some of the post, looks absolutely epic. So all three former guests, you love to see it.

So President Trump said he had planned to break Nvidia up until he learned who Jensen Wong was. What's funny is, I don't even know how you would break. up Nvidia. Like it's just just a it's a fabulous semiconductor company. Like it's not like the Intel thing where you have you have a fab and then you also have a design company. I mean I guess you could break down like gaming and AI training or something or I just I don't know where the dividing line would be would be. It's really just like they haven't the story of Nvidia isn't they don't have an Instagram. They don't have a story of oh they acquired this company and it

and it got really big and it saved them from disruption. Yeah, you could break it out. and say okay you're gonna have an AI division and a gaming you know you know maybe yeah yeah I mean they have some other stuff that's in there I mean I don't know you break out kuda or something I don't know how you force Jensen to sell off the majority of his jackets yeah yeah break up the jacket down the national debt but anyway Jensen's been in DC we saw him there a couple weeks ago a couple months ago and he's been doing the work to get to know Donald Trump and it has worked out spectacularly and now Jensen is the best I have a we this will go and mention but I had we have a friend

of the show and Jensen walked up to us and the friend introduced himself and his company and Jensen didn't know the company and he's like oh it's so bearish for me wait that was Jensen oh okay I know the other side of that story I didn't realize he's like he's like he really took it personally yeah well but he's on a generational run since you want to be known by the greats yeah the folks who only worked at denies and then started a generational company never ignore that 10 year gap anywhere else um this is an interesting thread by kevin brian um talking about how the new y times is reporting on the a i action plan kevin says come on man there's no way you can read the a i action plan and think this is the

first order thing that that the first order thing that new y times readers should know about it. Anthropic is positive. AI has huge implications for the national economy, defense, future of science. Half this article is about copyright. It is wild how much tech journalism comes from a place of extreme hostility towards the technology. It often reads like RFK writing articles about new pharmaceutical breakthroughs. No wonder the Silicon Valley set completely ignores this. And then he closes with a post about 90% of mainstream writing on AI is one encoded bias, two, theft of copyright, three, wasting water and electricity ad nauseum. Gangs, gang, folks in these labs think they're curing cancer, honestly, who gives anything about one,

two, and three given that even if those worries were true, they aren't. If you think those three things are the most important policy issues or even the biggest downside risks of AI, and I mean this in a let's be real, not. Yeah, it's hard. It's hard to argue that energy use by itself is a bad thing. Yeah. And it is true that data centers require an obscene amount of energy. We talked earlier this week about how Oracle's partnership with Open AI, where Open AI will be spending $30 billion a year with Oracle by 2027, at least how it was reported, will require two Hoover dams worth of energy, which is an exceptional amount. But as energy, as energy, as energy, production has gone up, so has human prosperity.

Water production. There's plenty of water for the data centers. There's plenty of water to fill your eight sleep. You can go to eightsleep.com. Get a pod five. I'm back in the game. I'm back in the game. 30-night risk, free trial, free returns, free shipping.

Go get a pod five. I've been ill. I finally put up seven and a half hours last night. I'm back in range. My HRV, I'm no longer looking dead. And I got over two hours of REM sleep last night. So we have Venita from Andrews and Horowitz joining in just a few minutes. In the meantime, let's do some timeline.

I want to dig into this Financial Times article. I think we're going to need more time. Let's do that later. The headline, of course, just to keep you up to speed is that Nvidia chips worth $1 billion were smuggled into China after Trump export controls. We've heard about this black market. We've heard about people stuffing suitcases full of them and flying around the country. They're not the biggest thing in the world, so it's easy to rather.

them around there's always a question could the government have done more could invidia have done more what are who are who are the truly the bad actors is the crazy graphic right there good graphic love it but we will we will cover this later in the show danish is uh thrown some shade at elia he says how you got 32 billion uh he doesn't have 32 billion uh and don't take the turkey flight to restore the hairline i would have pavl d'urov myself into a greek god the instant It was financially feasible. Dude does not give an F about anything but the mission incredibly bullish. You don't think super intelligence is going to be able to cure hair loss?

Like that's going to be the single prompt. Right before cancer. Probably. It does seem more tractable. It doesn't seem that crazy. Very rude. Anyway, people having fun on the timeline. Oh, well, we have Andresen Horowitz partner Vanita joining in just a few minutes.

And there's a post about Andreessen Horowitz. So James Lynn says A16Z and Sutter. Hill Ventures. So the context here. Oh, yes. Avidon Rodonski says recently got asked which VC firm changed the game like Steph Curry did for the NBA. Lots of sports metaphors in tech these days.

You'd love to see it. It's tough when you know nothing about sports. And so the two examples of VC firms that changed the game like Steph Curry did for the NBA and Jerusalem Horowitz and Sutter Hill Ventures, but in completely different ways. James Lynn here says A16Z realized that everyone was undervaluing startups and massively overbid. 10x what other people were offering. I don't know if that's actually happened that often that you go get a term sheet and

Andrews and comes in at 10x the price, but they've certainly been aggressive on pricing and it's worked out in many cases. Yeah, it could be 50% higher, but... Yeah, but... So it got them Twitter, Instagram, Coinbase, GitHub, anderle, Airbnb, Slack round sizes went up after that. Sutter Hill saw trends in cloud computing and incubated snowflake from idea to IPO. They made Mike Spicer, a partner, the interim CEO.

hire the technical co-founders, funded the entire Series A. They had 20% stake in Snowflake at IPO at a $33 billion. That was worth $12 billion position for that. So pretty much the best incubation of all times. So A16Z finds talent and makes several outsized bets. Sutter Hill sees a trend and operationalizes one to two companies completely in-house. Now larger rounds are the norm and the Venture Studio model is much more common. That makes a ton of sense.

We'll have to ask Vanita about that when she joins. What else do we have here in the timeline? I also think you can't leave YC out of that group, right? Who else changed the game? It's an entirely different model, but highly, highly, highly, highly effective. Yeah. I think the initial YC, the way it changed the game was that it made it completely possible for college new grads to go and start a company without getting any experience

in enterprise or in business. And so that was the initial ARB. Like Sandhill Road existed. Sequoia Capital existed. Kleiner Perkins existed. But if the Airbnb guys had gone straight to Sequoia. You didn't need a friends and family round to get a friends and family round done. Exactly.

So if the Airbnb guys, I think, had showed up to Kleiner Perkins or Sequoia, who actually, I think wound up doing the Airbnb deal later. I think Sequoia did. Pre-YC, that might have been like, this is a little weird company. This is a little bit out of our sweet spot, but then you go through YC, you get coached by Paul Graham at the time, and you polish things up such that you're ready to go and ready to talk to the big firms. And Paul Graham, I think famously told the Sequoia partner, like, you should do the Airbnb deal, even as weird as it is. Like, think about, you know, eBay for space, and it worked out. Fantastic story.

Pretty good. Anyway, we have Vanita from Andrewson Horowitz in the studio. Welcome to the stream. How are you doing? Hello. Hello. How are you doing? How are you doing?

Yeah. What's your take on this A16Z changing the game by recognizing that everyone was undervaluing startups and massively overbidding for early rounds? Do you think that resonates? Do you feel like Andrews and Horwitz has changed the game in venture? Totally unbiased. Totally unbiased. I do believe my partners are changing the game.

Now, and part of what's amazing about A16Z is our willingness to bed in every sector, every vertical, every part of the economy, really every part of the economy, you know, both locally, domestically and globally. So my corner of the world, it's a big corner of the world, it's a $5 trillion corner of the world is health care. And one of the things I love about our firm is that we've really established a dedicated strategy here too and hopefully changing the game here too. Yeah. How has bio investing, healthcare investing changed? We were talking about the Airbnb example. it feels like it's it's easy for a couple folks with just a hope and a dream they don't need to do a friends and family round they can just go to sandhill road they can go to places like yC they can go to

and address and raise a seed round and have enough to actually pay the bills hire a couple people do a couple tests launch a consumer app launch an enterprise app has there been a meaningful change in the way health care and bio companies get started for a long time it felt like the only way to do a company in space was you're at MIT and you do some partnership with flagship pioneering and then your IPO and then you're living and dying by your FDA trials. The traditional venture path felt very just like a completely separate track but how has it evolved from your experience? Yeah, great question. I mean I think we're absolutely we're absolutely part of the agentic wave. I've never seen so much interest in in the role of AI agents.

in transforming how science is done, how research is done, how discoveries are made, how drugs could be developed. The FDA launched an AI agent called Elsa, cute name, but potentially signaling a transformative role for AI even in the regulatory agency, which is kind of a mind-blowing thing to think about, right? You would have thought that it would have been the innovators and the startups kind of pushing AI first

and then waiting for the regulator to say, yes, we believe these predictive tools. are going to help us make drugs. So I think we are seeing a really different market pull than ever before. At the same time, the business models in healthcare, you know, are still similar. And the core products that drive value are still similar. So we're in the business of making new medicines. So are the startups that we back in large part or making the practice of medicine way better and transforming the practice of medicine. And both have some really established business models around them. Drugs that work that have an impact on patients get paid for. They get paid for because they

save the system money. Services we pay for because people need services on time, you know, from the right specialist for the right disease. And so those are all, you know, great business models in which to invest and in which startups can run. But certainly startups are now running in a much more capital efficient way in a much more AI powered way than they ever were before. We need agents in the game in our space too. Where is Silicon Valley sweet spot or like strike zone in bio? Because I was reading the Wall Street Journal today about a company that does, they're developing robotics for lab testing equipment.

So basically like pipeting. You know, famously it's like a PhD student just going like this all day long. A bunch of robots doing that makes a ton of sense. That feels like Silicon Valley all the way. How many how many cursor for bio pitches have you got? Is it in the hundreds? But that feels like more in the sweet spot. When I think about like an ERP system for for biotech companies, that feels a lot easier than saying,

I'm going to take a cancer drug through the FDA trials and I'm never going to go public. I'm going to raise growth rounds at every stage. Like we haven't seen that much, but maybe we're still just early in that trend changing. Yeah. And I think part of that, the trend is changing in part because of the same trends we're seeing in other verticals that AI is getting paid for through labor budgets. and AI is not necessarily replacing, but augmenting labor. 90% plus percent of all chemical screens for new drugs fail.

No drug comes out of it. 10% of all nurse positions across the health care system are vacant. We can't find the nurses to fill the positions. So we're living in a world where actually we need agentic resources to come in as labor. And that is different than the world we were living in before, where we were trying to squeeze out IT budget from, you know, let's say a large pharma company or, let's say, a hospital system to deploy the types of Silicon Valley technologies that could have been transformative for the industries. And so now that there's a lot more, you know,

autonomous task completion as well as augmentation well beyond what humans could do in those fields. I do think some of those Silicon Valley technologies, you know, obviously, yes, they are being informed, yes, we are absolutely being pitched the cursor for bio right now. And we think it's very credible. We think it absolutely is the case that if you have a lot of data, you're a company that's, let's say, run clinical trials before, managed many, many drugs through development. You should have agents crawling through that data, learning what humans might have missed, learning why things failed, why things succeeded, and then bringing that knowledge to your next set of endeavors. And so absolutely, you know, this kind of regime of a fully virtual agentic lab that for every one human scientist, you know, has hundreds of agentic scientists is a really, really interesting vision.

At the same time, making the drug is really valuable. So we really do think that great innovation can take it all the way and can, you know, great startups can actually develop their own. Yeah, how often a company comes to you that wants to be more on the picks and shovel side, kind of infrastructure, maybe more B2B, how often do you find yourself encouraging them to try to take it all the way and actually use whatever innovation or insight they have to not just make that product available to other bio or pharma companies, but, you know, actually deliver the end value? I think it really depends on the founders and exactly where the innovation sits.

We've backed both. We're along on both infrastructure for the industry and, you know, SaaS forward-deployed SaaS, SAS plus Agentic implementations. And, you know, I think we think a lot of that has a ton of value and it will fundamentally change how every organization operates and not every organization is going to build their own cursor-like tools for research. At the same time, sometimes the innovators who are closest, I'll give you a real example, you know, autoimmune disease,

is horrible. 10% of people have an autoimmune disease and sounds like science fiction, but recently we tried car tea therapy. Take my T cells out of my body, engineer them, and instead of attacking a tumor cell, attack bad autoimmune cells. Okay, well, that's interesting. And what if I could deliver it in the same type of vaccine type format that you got your COVID jab in, an LNP and an RNA? that we're kind of surprised to hear you calling a vaccine. I'm kind of surprised to hear you calling a vaccine a jab. But maybe that's just a comment. It's like reclaiming tech bro.

Yeah, reclaim it. We reclaim tech, tech, bro, technology brothers. Yeah, the pharmaceutical industry definitely needs to reclaim a job. The name of this thing to tech nerds. What about, you mentioned. To finish that story out, to make that requires a lot of engineering and a lot of optimization and a lot of so-called silver.

Silicon Valley style optimization. And so we're seeing that. A company in our portfolio called Orbital Therapeutics announced really exciting data in monkeys, demonstrating that that might be possible for autoimmune disease. So I think it goes both ways. Silicon Valley Tech is going to permeate every company, whether they're based here or not,

and whether they're making drugs or not. Do you think that these sort of early IPOs that drug companies have done historically is a feature or a bug? Like if we have more developed private capital markets, do you think that, like, is it even right that effectively retail, uneducated retail could just be taking these like, you know, gambling in the public markets on effectively FDA trials?

Or is there a better way? There is a huge public market for biotech. The stage at which companies accessed those markets in the last few years was miscalibrated. And so that's why you see the headlines you're seeing with respect to public biotech stock performance, with respect to public fundraising challenges for companies because they were very far from the clinic,

they were very far from generating commercial value, they were very far from demonstrating hard data that they were close to developing a product of value. So I do think the private markets continue to be, to have massive pools of capital in them, and biotech companies will stay private for longer. But at the same time, we're seeing huge demand and appetite for technologies that work from pharma companies that have a really rich ability to continue to back biotech companies,

partner with biotech companies, fund biotech companies by biotech companies. So we partnered up with Eli Lilly on that front and started a whole dedicated fund focused on supporting the biotech ecosystem. And that serves pharma and that serves the biotech ecosystem too, right? And so there are lots of ways for companies to continue to make progress on those technologies while progress, until they have the metrics that justify going public. That makes sense. You said something earlier around nursing job vacancies.

How do you, what's your thesis on how that market evolves in four years? Are we still going to see, you know, hospital systems unable and various groups unable to get the nurses that they want? or do you think that agentic systems can kind of backfill those roles, and there will be more kind of balance in the market? Yeah, I hope we also project needing fewer roles. I mean, we are projecting that we're going to be short over 3 million health care workers just in the United States alone over the next year, right? So it's a huge number.

And the people making those projections, are they AGI-I-pilled? Are they a humanoid robot built? Like, it's cool that the FDA has a chief AI officer that feels important. But anytime I'm like reading into projections, it's more interesting to get a projection or insight from you, given that you're backing all of these companies that understand that reality and want to. Right. That's a big number. That's based on, you know, the job count, you know, job health systems and providers are opening, but unable to fill.

based on the projected increase in health care demand as our population ages. But absolutely. I hope it's not really that high because there's only like 8 million total job vacancies in the U.S. That's like almost half our total job vacancies in health care alone. So we have to actually decrease our need for those jobs. And we could redirect some of our extremely skilled health care existing workforce from answering phone calls, dropping up, you know, picking up drop balls,

re-communicating the same information to patients, re-communicating the same information between providers who are trying to coordinate. There are a million ways in which our system does not work today, and so I hope that number goes down. But the reality is that the willingness to try out the agentic solution, whether it's for documentation, whether it's for getting prior off from an insurance company,

or whether it's for actually providing a clinical consult, has never been higher. Because the reality is today we don't, have the humans to fill those jobs. Wait times are long. 30% of Americans skip care. Like, they skip or delay prescribed care. We're developed country in which that's happening. And 60, 70% of Americans say, I will see an AI doctor. Like, just I will see one. Like, at least I will engage with one. And in fact, I'm probably going to engage with one before. I engage with a human doctor now, right? We've all changed our consumer behavior that way.

almost overnight. So it's a pretty remarkable shift that's happening that will, I hope, make us need a lot fewer than those, you know, that number of open jobs. I remember, what was it, in like 2008, there was a boom in electronic medical records, startups, like Athena Health was one of them. And there was kind of like two waves going on that were kind of adding together and making those businesses work. One is like a technological wave, obviously, like we had access to cloud databases.

in cloud infrastructure and better software. And so you could actually like put medical records securely in a cloud. And so that was obviously like a great business. But then there was also an EHR mandate from the Obamacare legislation, I believe. Are there any regulatory tailwinds that are adding on top of like the AI technology tailwinds right now in bio or healthcare broadly? Yeah, absolutely. So there are, first of all, I will say historically, Historically, a lot of healthcare software and technology was adopted because of regulatory

incentives and payment incentives. But for the first time, we are seeing bottoms up adoption of tools and technologies and an extraordinary NPS of healthcare software with scribing tools like those developed by companies like ambience and a bridge, you know, evidence access tools, like what open evidence has built. And so for the first time, we're also seeing pull. that's just like, hey, this is better. I don't need the government to give me a kickback to tell me it's better, but it is better.

So that's a separate trend that we're very excited about. But huge regulations are also going to incentivize a better technology infrastructure. So price transparency is a good example. There are clear incentives and penalties for not being able to share transparently your pricing cards as a provider, as a payer, and to create that type of open access for patients. And so building that infrastructure layer is going to be super important. The administrations talked a lot about patient choice. That could be patient choice with respect to how you use your benefit dollar,

patient choice with respect to what plan coverage you select. And ICRA is a good example of a potentially big change in the employer-sponsored healthcare space. So these are all financial rails and incentives. CMMI continues to advance value-based initiatives that basically prioritize preventive care and say, hey, at the end of the year, if you save the government a dollar, if you save CMS money, dear smart provider who's using technology, you'll make money, right? So that's a clear financial incentive. It's good for patients. Generally being out of the health care system,

preventing something before it costs a lot of money is good for patients. But the financial incentives and policy incentives do need to, you know, do provide a huge accelerate in our space, and that will continue to be the case. Can you give us the update on the drug pricing EO from, I don't know, is it six weeks ago, eight weeks ago? It feels like a year ago at this point. There's been a lot that happened. We had a bunch of people on the day of, and a lot of people were kind of saying that it

wasn't going to be as impactful as it kind of felt in the moment, but what's the update there? I don't think there's been a policy update. Like, you know, nothing has been enacted yet. That's still an EO. The concept of it, of course, was to say, was to use international trade as a backdrop for holistic negotiations inclusive of drug pricing to say, you know, as part of an overall tariff negotiation, why is it the case that the U.S. pays two or three times or more for the same exact drug that another country pays.

And so it is a logical question to ask. And we know that CMS is continuing to ask that question. But the actual policy is going to depend on quite a bit of, you know, there are a number of moving parts and a holistic policy with respect to every other country. So it's important for us to retain huge incentives. And it's not going to be as simple as cut the price, get great drugs. That's not how the market works. But should the price be more equitably shared across countries, it's an absolutely reasonable

perspective to have. How popular is open source in the bio world? I feel like the cursor for bio thing is very interesting. But when I think about the electronic lab notebooks that folks are using, like if it's not open source, you can't fork it. And it feels like part of cursor's ability to grow really fast was that they sit on top of your code base and you can change IDEs very quickly. But if you're you if a, if a researcher is using a closed source lab notebook that has

a database built in, that company is going to be like, no, no, no, like I do not want you just stealing all my customers or like migrating off, but are, is open source popular? Are there opportunities? Like what's the VS code equivalent, I guess would be the question? Yeah, I think there's a lot, you know, in bio research, there's There's a lot more informatics and less organized software. I think that will change.

But historically, historically there is a lot of bespoke informatics, which is why some of the agentic adoption, like for exploratory informatics research is happening on its own. And people are adopting open source agents for resources like that. You know, the protein structure models like alpha fold were followed by a number of models that were open-sourced and within a period of weeks, thousands of scientists, thousands of companies adopted additional structure prediction models. Bolts 2 was a popular one, the CHI model, a number of startups put out open-source models, and we saw really fast adoption, which is kind of cool, right?

It's like it's a scientist sitting in a company who says, I want to try that, you know, and see if it would help my workflow. And actually, I want to benchmark it and I want to try three at the same time. So we didn't have that many great open source resources like that before we had data sets, but not necessarily models and APIs to those models that made them easy to use. So I think that that whole ecosystem is in its like square one infancy of growing and exploding, but you're going to need a library of models. You want to be able to try all the models.

You want your agents to be able to use the models without even a human interface. And so suddenly the same thing that's happening in enterprise software in every vertical is going to happen here too. You know, agents on behalf of scientists will be able to select which models to use, try five models at once, and then incorporate the results and predictions of those models into a workflow, you know, that is deeply integrated with, you know, with other agentic automation. So it's, none of that's built, I would say, for the vast majority of the industry of the industry. industry, and so it's a huge, huge opportunity for startups to build. Yeah. Last quick question.

Maybe if you could answer in 60 seconds, that's the challenge. What is the vibe on the Stanford campus right now? Are people dropping out of PhD programs to start companies in bio? I'm sure we're seeing people dropping out of PhDs to join meta and other AI research orgs broadly, but I'm curious if that's happening in bio. There are a number of fast-growing AI biotech startups, right, that are bringing AI and computational tools to model trainings. We are seeing that.

If you're asking, you know, is it a response to federal funding changes? I think the, you know, that's always been the case that a large fraction of trainees from university campuses end up in biotech and pharma companies, and that's great. It's a great outcome. I don't think, you know, I do think there's probably in the near term going to be continued exploration of industry alternatives to federally funded research. And I really hope that the, you know, federal grant funding is clarified and, and that there's more stability on university campuses for federally funded research because some of that infrastructure is absolutely, has been behind a huge number of these innovations.

Makes sense. Thank you so much for joining. Thank you so much. Great to chat. Talk to you soon. Cheers. Up next, we have Mickey Malka, the founder of Rivet Capital. Really quickly, I will tell you about AdQuick, out-of-home advertising, made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out-of-home advertising.

See you. See you. See you. Add-Qquick combines technology, out-of-home expertise and data to enable efficient, seamless ad-buying across the globe. And we hopefully have Mickey Melka. How you know, Mickey? Good to meet you.

Hi, guys. Good to see you, John and Jorlie. How are you guys? Welcome to the stream. Great background. Yeah. What's going on there? Break it down for us.

Those are some NFTs. Wonderful. There we go. From an artist called Bright Moments. They did an exhibition all over the world and these are crypto citizens from the 10 cities around the world where they have their exhibitions. Amazing. It's great to have you on the show. We've been excited for this.

You guys have been on an absolutely crazy run and it's awesome that you're starting to talk about it a bit more. Yeah. background, I think that you might actually have a non-traditional path to venture or at least a very interesting entrepreneurial journey prior to launching a venture firm. So can you just give us a little bit of background on your history and how you wound up running a ribbett? So I'm an entrepreneur and I'm still entrepreneur. It just happens that I started when I was 17 years old and that's all I know how to do. And I started in financial services. Growing up in Venezuela in the early 90s, it was inflation.

crisis, bank failures, all the things that you need to learn in your life, I had them by the time I was 22 years old. Speed run. Oh my God, yes. Lightspeed through all of that. So I started four different companies around the world before the word fintech or crypto even existed, always trying to do something around the internet and making money better. Simply, that was the whole thing.

And what did some of those first companies look like where they, specific to problems that you were having in Venezuela or were they global by nature? The first one was it was the first online trading platform for Latin America. A little bit what Robin Hood is today. Yeah. Imagine that in 1998 in the beginning of the internet and you could trade online stocks of every local Latin American market. Mexico, Argentina, Venezuela, Chile. We had a Brazil. We bought its stock exchange seats in all of them and we were able to allow people to trade. So that was one of the first ones. And then I...

And you were like 20 at this time? I was 23, 24 when I started, yes. Wow. That company. And there were no venture capitalists in Latin America. There was nobody. We had to convince some people in the U.S. and New York to fund us and headquartered in Miami to avoid any kind of problem with choosing a place in Latin America.

And that company became the largest online broker-dealer in South America. Wow. Insane. And then where do you go from there? I went to Spain because my first company was acquired by a big Spaniard bank. And the internet had blown up a little bit like when they think it was all hype. It will happen to AI eventually when people will think it was all wrong in eventually the future. And I started the first online bank in Europe.

There was no online banks. It was a bank called Open Bank because it was supposed to be open 24-7, 365. It still runs in Spain. And it was- Were you the was adding open to the start of a word? Were you the first person to do that? Because it's been open-a-high, open store, open-store. Even coins were taking over the open words these days. Pay me my fee. I coined that. Yeah, that's wild. Who is the first LP to kick you off? Like, what was the story? Well, first, I have to ask, I'm assuming there wasn't bank,

there wasn't like 20 banking as a service platforms back then. How did you get it? How did you convince a bank to, in Europe to bank? Well, I had to become regulated. By the time I was 25 or 26, I was regulated by eight central banks to go to the whole K-YC, bank approval process, myself.

So very early, is it more just like you filled out the forms perfectly, you sent the right messages? Or were you like kind of knocking on doors trying to grease palms to make it happen? All of the above. Depending on the country, you had to do a lot more. Some were a lot more technical than others. But definitely you had to see, they had to see that I was not just this kid who didn't know anything about finance. And then I had to pretend I knew a lot about finance. So, yeah, you want to continue with that?

No, from where did that go? I don't want to leave a cliffhanger. So that business grew to the fastest bank in Europe. I sold it back to the bank that we were partnered with. And then I moved to Brazil, started an I got approval by the president of Brazil. Back then, Lula, which is again president now, to approve a new banking license granted. So we could start a bank to serve the on bank with financial services. So I lived in Sao Paulo, did that for three years, became the large.

retail bank in the country serving almost 15 million customers. I'm seeing a trend. I'm seeing a trend. It's a bad day to be unbanked. Well, no, no, I was going to say, you seem to like being the fastest growing or the number one in your category. You know, what I like is making, allowing people to, when people have access to better money, it makes their life better.

It's not about having more money or less money. It's just making money better. And better money means you should be able to invest the same way I can anywhere in the world. You should be able to get the best loan and not get your knees beaten up if you don't pay back a credit. You should be able to get a good insurance product no matter where you are or what you're trying to do. That's what I call better money. So I think the journey of my life has been one of pursuing that better money makes life better. And moved to Silicon Valley 18 years ago to start a company in payments before the iPhone came out.

I had a feeling people were going to tap and pay with their phones. So we were one of the first companies tapping on NFC stickers, putting them on back of the phones. You could pay for merchants. And that when the App Store came out with the iPhone, we were the first wallet in the phone. So that moment was like an aha moment. When you saw mobile and you saw the app store, this is like, this is what I had been waiting for 20 years as an entrepreneur. That moment in time when suddenly you can compete with incumbents in a playing field that they were not looking at. So that's where Rivet Capital started.

Instead of building one more company, because I always consider myself, even though we always moved the ball forward, I was a failed entrepreneur because the best entrepreneurs never sell their companies. So I decided to start RIVET as a way to say, this is the one I'm going to run until the last day I want to run it. That's fantastic. Sorry, now I'm going backwards. Can you talk to me about some of the wedges that you used in the previous companies to actually drive adoption of a new banking product or new bank online? Yeah, and there's so many different place solutions. I have to imagine starting in markets like, you know, Spain, Brazil.

et cetera, helped you, you know, many, it's been, the narrative violation over the last 20 years has been that developing countries adopted FinTech faster, they adopted new methods of payments, new, you know, much faster than developing countries in many ways, because there just wasn't that legacy infrastructure. So I'm curious if you even think you would have been successful if you had just tried to come and only crack, you know, the U.S. market? No, I will have been a failure. I would not understand the world.

I was never the best student at school, but I was a student of life. And walking through the streets of all these countries and seeing how people behave with money was the best class and the best master class I could have gotten. Because at the end, everything you do is building a brand. And brand means trust. And it's very underrated to understand how long it takes. to build trust and how fast can you make it shake or disappear or fracture and then how long it takes to bring it back. So if you see a pattern in everything that we've done is working with things

that we believe can build a brand and working with them because that is the only mode that you can build that gives you the chance to succeed in financial services. Because every financial product at the end, it's a commodity. It can be copied. You can see. start with free commissions, it will be copied. You can start with free credit scores, it will be copied. You can start with free interest rate lenders or tipping, it will be copied. So it has to be the brand. And that's a special DNA that I got to understand from working in markets

where people's level of trust was even lower than in developed markets. Yeah. Yeah. How do you actually build that trust and build that brand in some of those markets is it different in Brazil than other countries? Are you talking about the feel of the product or actually just the marketing and telling people what your brand stands for or does it infuse through the interactions with a bank teller in the virtual environment probably? I think it's all of the above. It's the little things. It's really telling a story in a way

that people believe and consistently see that you're doing that. And every, one, every company does it in a different way. So there was a story I remember from New Bank in Brazil when we backed them super early. You know, in Sao Paulo, they are 18 million people, but there's, I think there's like four million dogs. It's almost like one dog for it. And so whenever they saw that you, you had a transaction on your credit card for a vet, they will send you cookies to your helm. Wow. Right? Because it meant that your dog was sick or something was happening. So imagine, but those are little things that you do that with consistency and if the message is we care about you and we're paying attention to what's going on in your life,

that's how you build a trust. It's a bunch of little details. There's never a big thing, but it has to be genuine. And you can see when CEOs or teams are not genuine, you can see it 10 miles away. How do you feel about, so you did the first institutional round of Coinbase and Robin Hood, correct? Yes. And did you think at the time that those companies, did you have a feeling that if they were successful, they would end up ultimately competing with each other? Because it's not exactly head-to-head yet, but you can imagine 10 years from today, these companies will just be going at it. And maybe that's just because of the trends around bundling in fintech, right? If you can create one product, you can add a bunch of others. If you can

earn someone's trust in one category, you can expand out. But I think we're at this really interesting moment where the last 10 years were about you had like traditional fintech and you had crypto and they were these distinct categories. But it seems that it seems very obvious now that they will be massively overlapped in ultimately just one category, which is money. Yes. So we were the first institutional round to Coinbase and Robin Hood, but also to Revolut, which is the same camp. And also to New Bank. Yeah. Also to, we were super early and we built with Mercado Libre and Mercado Pavo, which is the competitor of New Bank.

So if you had told me back then that all these companies were going to be competing for this, we will have never guessed it, ever. And the reality is. Well, I'm surprised you say that because it seems like you have a bit of a, you got a secret crystal ball or something. Well, five years ago, we told our LPs, our investors in our. one of our Investor Day meetings, that the rails of crypto and financial services were actually starting to blend. And it was going to be indifferent. And then companies that didn't do both were going to be completely spaced out or lost the window of chance to build. So five years ago, we started to see it, but it wasn't obvious before that because there were different geographies

and all of that. But now they're competing globally to each other. So the way I think about it is the first decade of all of this momentum was the few companies that will have the right to win. And they've earned it by building brand, by building teams, by delivering on services, by getting licenses, by doing all these things that they need to do. So now we have a call it 30 or 40 players worldwide that we call the compounders, the one that will deliver and compound for the next decade. Now, this second decade of those 40 names or 30 names is a decade where they steal market share from every single incumbent. Because so far, they haven't that much. But this decade, with AI, with crypto, with the way they're building new products, with the way they're using their own brands, with the trust they have, with the government regulators leverage they have today versus five years ago, buckle up because what's coming. coming, it's going to be really fun if you're in combat and really tough if you're in

combat. What lessons do you think the company, the coin bases, the Robin Hoods, etc. of the world learned in 2020 during, in 2021, during that sort of chaotic market cycle that it feels good and that many of them learn various lessons. I was also told to ask you about. Are you talking about COVID era? Yeah, just the whole like, you know, like, like Robin Hood, Robin Hood, GameStop saga, those moments. It feels like there was a lot of hard ones, lessons.

And then we've started this new cycle, this new bubble, whatever you want to call it. And hopefully a lot of them have taken those, taken learnings from that and are implementing it, whether it's around risk management and things like that. Yeah. So I think the lessons from that time was when COVID started, most of these companies were not ready to turbo charge. And what happened during COVID, if you look back, is that you probably fast track four or five years of customers and growth into 12 months. And none of these teams were prepared for it. Being at home, not being able to do much more, it just supercharged all of these companies. And they overhire and they were working remote and they didn't have capital, you know,

frameworks in place because the growth was unexpected. And we remember getting a bunch of calls during that time. At the beginning, like, this is amazing. And then this is getting tough. And this is going to be problematic. And it can crack here or there. And when we got the phone call at 3 and 4 or 5 in the morning from Robin Hood saying the GameStop Day and what needed to be done. And we funded them in four hours, almost half a billion dollars that we didn't have, that we asked a bank to lend us to do it.

We've all called in a favor favor from an old friend. Yes, literally a favor from an old friend. And that's what it takes to build relationships in banking. You need decades of that so you can call in that favor when it's needed. And that day, and look at how long it took for the brand to regain the trust of the market. It was almost two and a half years from that moment. And you got to be a special leader and a special team to go through that turf and come back out of it. And now they're hitting their cylinders, but they got their story right.

So you can see it in the Brian Armstrongs, in the Nikola Zoronskis, in the Vlad Tenets, in the David Belize. They have that now. They went through that. And they're on the other side. And they're all between 38 and 41. So they got the best decade of their life coming their way. Yeah. What does that mean for competition at the early stage?

It feels like it's, it was really, it was in, in, in, in. In retrospect, it seems like a no-brainer to back disruptive technologies in this huge market finance. But now you have, if you're starting a company that's going to carve out a little slice of, oh, Robin Hood's not touching this yet or Coinbase isn't touching this yet, it's like, well, those companies are incredibly well capitalized and they're run by founders who are not about to retire anytime soon. Seems kind of dangerous. So where are you seeing pockets of opportunity on the early stage? What are you seeing in the next generation of founders that might actually go and be able to carve

enough of a slice to grow into a generational company. Yeah, I think what's coming for the other. I'm more excited for what's coming this next decade and the last decade, if you ask me. The last decade was just a setup for this decade. There will be a bunch of new teams and companies. And we have been spending time with the young generation, like kids who are between, founders who are between 19 and 25, or 19 and 27 call it, their brains are just faster.

faster. Their ways of thinking about how to build products is just different. They are, they, they spend the best years, the year of COVID's learning and learning how to think really fast. And I've been blown away on how quick they are understanding and how quick they are to build. So we have this thesis that we've, we've been, we wrote, it took us almost a year to write, which we call it token factories. And it's this world where forget about, crypto rails or FinTech or AI, all of these things are blending. If before it was FinTech here and crypto here and we said that they blended, now we have financial services with crypto rails with AIs.

And the thing between all of them is that they're all tokens. Everything is a token. So we call it the token factory, a token revolution era. And tokenizing information, tokenizing money. and tokenizing power. And how those three things combine, it's where we're seeing some of the best entrepreneurs working.

So that's what gets us really excited. So we found a bunch of young teams who are building what we call now token factories, companies that are building either access tokens that give you abilities to connect anywhere they want in the world to do anything. There's expert tokens. These are companies that are generating knowledge

or expert information that is solely unique, that is going to change the way you manage wealth management, wealth advisory, the way you manage insurance products, insurance agents. And then you have what we call asset tokens. And stable coins is the first of the asset tokens, outside of Bitcoin. It's the first of the true asset tokens. Talk to me about real estate. I feel like that was something at the peak of the crypto boom 2022.

We were starting to hear about mortgages on chain. physical assets on chain. We're now starting to see stocks get on chain and obviously US dollars, which are much more tangible than artworks, for example. But it feels like most of this generation's entrepreneurs probably learned a hard lesson during the global financial crisis of like the risks of over-financialization in the real estate markets. But maybe like how do you see things developing or real estate assets playing out?

generally over the next decade. So I think you said something that was really important. If you look this wall behind me, artists always tell you where the future is going before we get there. And NFTs was a, it wasn't about just about the beauty of the art and the tokenization and the provenance and the transferability and the democratic. It was the first asset that was truly put on chain. That you trusted, that you knew there was only one of each,

that you knew who had it and you knew when it was minted and you can find an you can lend against it, you can pledge it, you can do whatever. So guess what? Artists did their job. They showed us where the world was going. So to me, I'm very grateful because that's how we learn what was going on. And then we found companies like Figer who has tokenized most of the mortgages that you got Helux right now. They're the biggest Helixirinizer in America. Then you had the circles of the world and the Tether's tokenizing dollars and there's like 10 more coming behind them. Now you have Robin Hood tokenizing stocks. So I think the problem with mortgages is that they don't move that much.

Out of all the financial assets, they probably transfer themselves 10 times in your lifetime, maybe five. Maybe you buy a home. So it's not the lowest hanging fruit need of a tokenized asset, even though it's a great asset to tokenize. But I think we're going to get there because right now, the SEC and all the regulators have put the real rules in place to see tokenization. And the best organizations, you're not going to see. You're not going to realize their tokens. But suddenly you're going to be able to click, make two clicks and get a mortgage against us.

And you're going to be able to do one more click and swap to another mortgage issuer and not miss a beep on your payments or in your servicing. That's what the consumer is going to see. That's what the consumer is going to see with Robin Hood. token that has stocks. You don't, you're going to have the same US experience and just trade stocks anywhere in the world, not knowing that they're tokenized. And that's, that's where we get super excited, uh, because we're just at the beginning of that ecosystem, which is probably like growing up again in the 1970s when you're about to electronic, create electronic payment transfers.

How have you thought about the investability of stable coins as a category when it feels like a feature for so many of the companies that you've already backed? I know you guys did Privy, which recently sold to Stripe, but that bet. We did bridge. What was the other one? Bridge. Oh, there you go. It sounds like we told us the Stripe that we're shareholders we love. them were good friends with Patrick and John and the whole team and we'll we told them that we

were we were their core of their team because the two investors we didn't stable going infrastructure they took out of our plates in less than a year yeah but how but yeah so so you made some infrastructure bets are there are there consumer bets that you see going forward I know there's a bunch of different potential use cases but again it's so easy for an existing company to add stable coins and they already have the distribution and the customer network to quickly, you know, service. Yeah, so it's a great question, Joey. We've been trying to find, we've been looking worldwide for consumer applications

that start with table coins first as a user experience. We haven't found one that will say this is the way it's going to work to scale globally at a scale that matters. So that's why we have backing much more the infrastructure providers of all these. schemes because they feel like they have a lot more growth potential than the consumer side. But I think we're just starting. I think now we're starting to see the beginning of agentic experiences with crypto rails and AI with through agents. And I think in that intersection, we're going to find native stable coin retail brands that are going to provide services that

you don't expect. So we've been we've been investing in lot there in learning. We've been testing ourselves a lot there. We have our own diseases on how it's going to work. So we're actually building some of them in learning. But we expect to see entrepreneurs worldwide working around them in their very near future. My guess is in the next year. We will be surprised to find a few already. Well, when you come back on and hopefully you'll come back on many more times between now and then. But I'm assuming in 2030 we'll have the same conversation again. You've got every single new stable coin pure play that matters. What about on the issuer side, I feel like the big, now that stable coins have clear regulation, it seems like we'll see a lot more people start to issue them.

Is that needed? Do you see use cases or are the USTCs and the tethers like providing kind of enough value right now? I think people underestimate how important the tether brand is worldwide. I think when you are in Argentina or in Venezuela or you're in Indonesia, they don't even say USDT. They just call it Tether. Right. And I think Tether has a chance to be a really global brand that most people were well under imagine the scale of it. Circle has a great reputation institutional side. But we're super early.

I mean, think about it. We're only $250 billion into stable coins. We should be in $2 trillion in the next year or a year and a half or two. And if we're not there, something's off. So for that, we will probably need like five, seven, ten more names. Now, you're not going to care as a user, to be honest. You may have a preference. I remember growing up my parents and asked to save money from inflation in Venezuela.

Every Friday, we walk to the bank branch and we bought travel checks. And it was a way of saving, which is, literally the same as stable coins today. And those travel checks in the era, you could buy American Express travel checks. You can buy Thomas Cook, which were MasterCard travel checks, and there was another third brand I forget. I didn't care which one we got. All I care was getting the dollars and being able to save. So I think, but over time, I remember my family's Q2 American Express travel checks. For whatever reason, it had like a better recognition brand. So I think we're still in the early days of that. And that's going to happen.

And I think we're going to see five to ten. We're going to see the incumbents issuing their own token and stable coins. And now the bridges of the world are going to be super important because they're going to be the bridge to connect all of them, no matter what you're doing. And it's going to be very simple to solve. So my guess is five brands in the next five years. Wow. Great.

Very exciting. This was awesome. Yeah. You're a legend. Come back on again soon. You guys are doing amazing job. We're following your show and congratulations. It's really fun and you bring super fresh content and news and people to the show.

Thank you so much. Thank you, Mickey. We'll talk again soon. Looking forward to it. Bye. Up next, we have Casey Nystatt. Recently, the YouTuber, the creator that needs no introduction. Working on the chromatic, which we've been playing in the studio, working on the M64.

How you doing, Casey? There he is. Almond, good to see you. Welcome to the stream. What's new in your world? How did the, are those the nothing ear one? Let's give us a little review. Oh, yeah, these are fantastic.

I actually to take them off because the noise canceling on these is, it's like too good. And I'm at home right now. My kids were screaming two seconds ago. But yeah, these things are fantastic. Yeah, we had Carl Pay on the show a week ago. And he put them down and I was like, I was too afraid to ask like, oh, are those for me? Like, are you going to leave those for me?

I kind of want those. I need a new pair. I'm not enough of an audio file to know what if something sounds good or not. It's either good or it's not good. Yeah, same. Physical switches, like buttons you can touch. Yeah. I really like.

And the, like the Apple, I don't know what they're called, what are their AirPod? AirPod Maxes, yeah, AirPod Maxes. There's no on-off switch. Yeah. Like I can't. There's a digital crowd. I need an on-off switch and these have that. I like that.

It's key. Yeah, are you a big teenage engineering guy? It feels like kind of like that, that they're almost coining like a trend that's like becoming more mainstream now. Teenage engineering is the only company whose products I buy religiously, even though I have no idea how to use any of them. The same thing happened to me. I bought the little keepers like, I'm a musician now. Couldn't figure out how to make a song. I use it. I love it. It's amazing. Looks good on a desk. It's so beautiful. It's so beautiful. Someone that cares that much about the craft. I want to support them unconditionally. Yeah, so tell me about mod retro, how'd that come together. What

is the news in your world? You know, the mod retro thing is really funny because my video says all this, but like I'm a big retro gamer. I'm guilty of sometimes playing Call of Duty on my Xbox, but it doesn't work out when you got a wife and kids. You're not being guilty. Every man should have an allocation of time daily for Call of Duty, you know, getting on rust. Get it's just. Getting on Rust with your boys. I'm so close to that W, and then the door comes flying open, the children come running in. It's challenging.

But I'm 44. So, like, apex of video games for me was, like, 1989, I think, getting a Game Boy the first year they came out for my grandmother for Christmas. And, like, you guys are younger than me. But before that, all we had were those, like, LED LCD games that were, like, really janky, like, the Tiger games. games and they were terrible. And the first time I turned on the Game Boy and saw the Nintendo come down, I was like,

holy, this is such a moment. And then Nintendo 64 came out when I was, I was in like just getting into high school as a freshman. We used to sneak out of high school, get on the city bus, like the regular bus, and then drive two towns across and then walk a mile and a half to Toys R Us to sit in Toys R Us and play the demo of Mario 64 when that thing is. came out, I think it was in 94, so I was 12 or 13 years old. So I love that stuff.

And Mod Retro, when I first learned about it, when I first learned about the Chromatic, their Game Boy, I thought it was really stupid. I didn't understand because you can get those, like, Chinese ones off of Amazon for 50 bucks. And a friend of mine was like, no, this is great. They're doing great things. Do you want to talk to Palmer about it? And I'm a huge Palmer-Lucky fan. And I was like, I'd love to.

And I don't know that I've ever been evangelized so much in my life. Like by the end of that call, he didn't just convince me, but I was like, I felt like an idiot for not seeing what Mod Retro was. And then as I got to know Torin, who is the CEO of Mod Retro and understand the vision for the company, I was just so, like, overwhelmed. I was like, this is the most, like, beautiful vision ever. I don't understand the business of it. It makes no sense to me.

but the fact that these guys have the guts to do this, like, can I be a part of it? And I think I pitched back to them what I understood the company was, and they're like, that's it. That's what we want to say. And I was like, all right, give me a job. And my job will be to figure out how to communicate that.

And we'll make videos and stuff. And they're like, sure, but we're not going to pay you. And I was like, great, I'll take a business card. It's been great working with it. I'm an investor in Mod Retro. I have a vested interest in them succeeding, but I mean that's not where the passion to be a part of what they're up to comes from for me. Yeah.

So many places we can go with this. This is fantastic. What, yeah, do you think that there's a world? I mean, I love the handheld gaming stuff. My experience having kids was I stopped playing console games. The N64 was actually my first console ever. And but once I started your games. Mario 64 for sure.

Golden Eye was big, big head, golden gun, you got to do that. And then a couple other, Donkey Kong and was never really into the Mario Kart racers, but then Smash Brothers kind of took over and that was the real competition with everyone eventually. I think what's exciting to me is like building new consumer hardware that will still turn on and work and bring joy 20 years from now. I had the game, I have like my Game Boy Pikachu edition from growing. up and I when mod retro came out I went and found it and I turned it on and it worked and that was like such an amazing moment for me because like when like I haven't I've got old iPhones lying around

I've never been like not one I've never been like oh I should could turn that on it's going to be fun right because it's like it's not evergreen it was of the moment and you just move on and so I think if mod retro can do anything which is like make consumer hardware which is so disposable today across all these different categories and make it so that yeah you're going to get your mod retro or your m64 you know this year and then you're going to turn it on in 30 years and like you know bridge generations yeah you know it's i think there's there's it's easy to sort of shit on um planned obsolescence because it is real i think of that like we woke up my house woke up this morning at 730 a m because the refrigerator repair man finally

showed up and was banging on our door at 7.30 in the morning, the dog was freaking out because our two-year-old refrigerator doesn't work. And this is a refrigerator that has Wi-Fi. There we go. Let's give it up for Wi-Fi. Everybody's always- It doesn't work. It doesn't work. And when I think about that, it's like that refrigerator that we had as kids with the one big heavy aluminum door, like it just worked. It worked forever. But in order to keep selling shit, you have to keep coming out new things. I think that's the the negative of planned obsolescence. But I think when it comes to consumer technology, there is an argument for having to keep up with the rate of innovation. You know, like new phones

that come out, every time you get a new phone, it does do something that your other phone didn't. So there's maybe a reason for that. But I think with that sort of tidal wave of innovation, that feels faster now than it ever felt when I was young, I think we lose some great things. and my understanding of mod retro at least what i wanted to be and i think what what palmer and and what torren also wanted to be is like let's identify consumer electronics that people just love like had an unbelievable relationship with they really like the love i had for my game boy i don't know that there was another thing that i owned through my adolescence that i treasured more than my game boy and let's bring them back and let's do them justice let's build them so they last forever i think

Palmer's quote when I was interviewing was, we don't want to build another Game Boy. We want to build the last Game Boy, like the last one that ever needs to be built. And that's the vision with M64 as well. Like, you can get emulators that kind of work, but let's build the thing that, you know, you and I had John when we were kids

and let's have it last forever. And, you know, I just think there's so much romance in that. When you start digging deep, you can start to see products everywhere. And, you know, Mod Retro's tiny for a couple people working out of a small office, but like the list of products that we want to build, the list of ideas that we have is endless. And that's like a, that's a really exciting thing to take on. It's also such an interesting company because you're trying to recreate things of the past that were good products and you want to improve on them, but you need to stay true to the original product. otherwise, you know, what are you, I mean, it's not to say that Mod Retro couldn't one day create, you know, novel, totally novel products, but it is like an interesting constraint and challenge and you actually have to, it's really, in some ways it's easy because you know exactly what you need to build, but in other ways it's harder because you're taking a product that was almost perfect in its original form and still, like, you need to make it, it should be better. Otherwise, you know, what are you doing?

Yeah, you know, like one interesting challenge, and I'm not the right person to speak to this, I'm not the technical guy, but to make the screen match the old Game Boy screen was an exhausted process. So when you buy one of those handheld emulators that looks like a Game Boy, the Chinese made ones, they have fairly high pixel density screens on that. So in order for them to give the look of an old Game Boy, you're using multiple pixels to emulate a single pixel. So it's inaccurate. And real psychopaths, I'm not one of them, but I appreciate it. Real psychopaths on Twitter have done like this super zoom into a pixel. And you realize that Mario is like jumping a half a pixel too lower, a half a pixel too high within the frame because of the limitation of the screen.

And Torin and Palmer's like religious obsession with matching that screen was one of the hardest things to overcome. So it was actually harder to build something that matched the quality of a product that's 20 years old than it would be to actually get the latest and greatest screen and just plug it in there. Yeah, I remember Palmer saying something about like a couple of the companies, the screen is actually rotated 90 degrees. So instead of the scan lines coming down this way, they go across this way and then they just transform it at the last second. But it's like this bizarre thing that you would never really notice of, but it's this craftsmanship that actually you feel, I feel like. And it feels like something that's just like been lost in the last. this like everything's disposable, everything's junk, everything's a knockoff culture.

And it feels like, I don't know, like it just feels like it's worth it to have stuff that exhibits craft and taste. And even if I don't, even if I'm not the one that can tell that Mario's one pixel too low when I do the jump, like the fact that the craftsman worked on the product means something. It's hard to put an exact, like, quantitative value on it, but you feel it, right? That is the gamble that is the company. Palmer said that in my video, but he's like, you know, maybe nobody cares about this, but weirdos like you and me, but that's enough. And I think it's like, there is an argument that's like, well, who cares if it's off by half a pixel?

And if you're one of those people, totally cool. You're well, there's plenty of products in the market for you. But if you're someone who does care, if you're that weirdo that buys teenage engineering products because you just value the integrity of the product so much you want to have it, then, you know, there's a place. in this world for companies like Mod Retro. Yeah, what do you think about, like, the temptation to just make, like, one small change, like, the Chromatic has a USBC port on it. That's a huge upgrade. But you could easily turn this into, like, well, like, you know, we have the technology

to make the M64 handheld. And then, you know, then you're in switch territory. And all of a sudden it's like a completely different product, right? I think that's ever present. And that's the problem with sort of limitless, you know, like when, Nintendo was building this, what was almost 40 years ago, 35 years ago now, they were so limited by what the technology enabled them to do. Like when you think about the Sega Game Gear, I don't know if you ever had one of those,

great product. It's this big, but it was the first one that had really great color screen on it. And it took six double-A batteries instead of four, like the Game Boy, but the battery life on it was like 40 minutes. Yeah. And do you remember the N64, like, expansion pack that you put in to like double the memory? Yeah, dude, I remember. That was about the Rumble Pack that shipped with Star Fox.

That was like the greatest innovation ever. My mind exploded when the controller shook. Yeah, dude, these like these add-ons because like they couldn't bake it all into the first product. And that's indicative of the limitations of what tech can do. And when you look at like, you know, I don't know what Samsung announced last week, two weeks ago, unpacked and you're looking at what the limitations are today of like a folding screen that's as thick as 10 sheets of paper, you realize how far we've come. But when you go in the other direction,

but there's kind of no limits and you're looking to make something that was made 30 years ago, the problem is like, where do you draw the line? And I think that's a really, it's a really interesting thing to try to overcome and confront. Yeah, what can you teach me about the lore

in the video camera world? I was looking at a cool, new music video and it had this fish eye lens and this grain and I was kind of digging in. It seemed like they shot it on like a Sony skate camera with mini DV tapes. Like this feels like something that I was looking like, maybe I could buy one on eBay, but it's probably broken.

And I want someone to go remake it. But then of course, you always have like, oh, you could just like throw the filter on there in Premiere or whatever. But what are some of the iconic video cameras or just like creative tools that might, you know, be worth revisiting at some point? It's such an interesting examination. And your question's great because my family and I are, out, we're in Massachusetts for summer vacation.

And there's a lot of kids around. Like we went and got ice cream last night, a lot of teenagers around. And a lot of these kids come up and they ask me for selfies. And the amount of teenagers that come up to me and ask me for selfies, and they're carrying the point in shoots that we had in like the 2010s, like before your phone camera was good enough, they all carry them. No one makes that camera anymore, which means if you have one, you have an old one. And every one of these kids has it.

And when I ask them, because I'm curious, like, why do you carry that? They're like, I love the way it looks. And I think we've reached this point, like iPhone, cell phone photography, it all looks still perfect in a way that it almost becomes artificial. Like, I think the iPhone 5 was the last iPhone where when you took a picture, just sort of took a picture. And then after that, every time you take a picture now on any modern smartphone, it takes a picture and then runs it through an algorithm to make the picture sweeter and cleaner and sharper and better for you. And I think there's sort of this yearning for something. that feels more real and authentic. It's like you look at a, you're at a store,

looking at a picture, you know, a camera from a picture from 2010 or a camera or a picture from an iPhone today is like you're at the grocery store and there's the organic apples and they look good, but like they're a little fucked up and, you know, they may be like, whatever, part of it's kind of rotten.

And then you look over and you see the perfect apple. And like intuitively you know that you're like, It's a little bit too good to be true that Apple over there. And I think, I don't know, the other thing that's real is removing the camera, like adding the camera to the phone has been one of the greatest innovations of this century, right? In many ways. But now removing it, removing the camera from the phone and being able to leave your phone and just bring a camera around is also an innovation, right?

Going backwards. And I think that's the other thing that kids like, and I've found that's nice. I'm going to the beach with my kids, it's nice to be able to bring a camera but not have my phone. Yeah. My daughter is 10. This is the first summer she's allowed to like walk around with their friends without a parent. And she has a flip phone. And she had this whole argument for getting an iPhone that has nothing on it but the phone and messaging. And my wife and I have this discussion and the reason why we said, no, it has to be the flip phone is because of the camera. Like it introduces is a new level of sort of attention and why you're in purpose. And the reason I wanted to have

a phone is simply to stay in touch with us, no other reason. But the minute you introduce this other sort of novel aspect of it, it becomes much more of a social dynamic and a social consideration and the way that you're trying to get away from that. But I think just going back to the camera things is such an obsession of mine. I think that we are quick to ignore or look past the relationship we have with the aesthetic that a camera yields. And when you see those pictures off those old point-in-shoots, they look like something specific. Like when you were talking about that old skateboard fish IDD look, it looks like something specific. You have a relationship with that. When we see stuff that looks like at VHS, we think of the 80s or the 90s. And I think now there's

just sort of this generic aesthetic across the board, this like crispy flat 4K phone thing. And there's this desire to have something that it has some sense of identity attached to it. And that's why we're seeing these sort of Gen Z types, you know, looking for older tech that reflects more of who they are, more individuality. And I think that's a trend that we're going to see continue. Yes, this generation's vinyl. Yeah, I've joked that I want to film, I want to film the first podcast on Panavision film or something,

just spend fortune developing the film. What other, what other consumer tech category? Are you excited about? We're having we're having the founder of Wave on and I in 20 minutes and they got like 12 million views yesterday for launching like sunglasses that like will just live stream constantly. Do you have a do you have a ratio of positive to negative mentions in those 12 million views? I mean, I think everybody people had a viscerally negative reaction to it. That's my take on as well. And it makes me think you know, my software development company being my startup and we started that company in 2014 and a little known aspect of that company is initially it was built around Google Glass. No way. And we actually, you know, we rewrote the code.

We rewrote the software that Google Glass ran so that had a singular function, which was you push a button like this, it captures 10 seconds and immediately shares it to your feed. That's where we started with that. And I remember meeting with Google and they were excited about it and they showed us what Google Glass 2 was going to look like and we're like, fuck yeah, we started raising money based on that. And then a week later, they announced they were killing the entire Google Glass program.

And we backed off. We're like, we'll just do it on the phone now. But I think when you ask about sort of the social impact of being all the time of the negative reaction that we're seeing based on waves video they posted yesterday, I think the social dynamic is something that is often overlooked

in the hardware startup. world. I think of the Humane AI pin. You know, a really good friend of my work for humane and obviously super excited about new technology. Yeah, Sam. Which parenthetically, you joke about Panavision for a podcast, Sam Schaeffer has in his studio for his live streaming setup a VHS camera hardwired into his deck so he can be live streamed from VHS. That's amazing. But Sam would be around me. I tried to hire Sam, by the way. We worked with him on a project and I was like, he's way too hot. He's way too hot. He's got to be so long. He's way too big of a deal.

Sam's the best. But when I'd be around him and he had his AI pin on, I was always sort of looking down at that or like thinking about what I'm saying and uncomfortable about speaking openly to him. And I think like that's what I mean by social implications. Like, you know, my phone is on my couch right here. But if we're sitting together and I'm holding my phone like this the whole time we're talking, you're uneasy about that.

And so when I think of a pair of classes, that are live streaming or at least have the capability of live streaming the whole time, when I look at them, I'm uneasy. And I think of this, you know, maybe the most extreme example of this is Apple Vision Pro, which, you know, blew my mind when I got that thing. Like, I made the most glowing video about it because it was the greatest technology I've ever used. But later that night, because I made the video the same day I got them, I'm at home using them.

And my wife is like, Casey, take those fucking things off your feet. and pay attention to your kids. And I was like, oh, you can't wear these around other people. Yeah. And I was like, how do they not see that? And so I think about that because like we're sort of accustomed to people using their phones and it's kind of okay. Like we're used to this. This is not okay.

And so when I think about wearables, I think that that is going to be a gigantic thing to overcome, which is. Well, the crazy. So Amazon acquired a company. it got announced this week called B, which is a bracelet after all, everything they face with Siri, series listening to me, the B band just listens to you all day long. Everything. Everything. Everything. And it's cool. Like, I think all new tech for the most part is cool. Do I want my team to be wearing a B bracelet? Are we going to allow people to wear B bands? This might be a B free zone, you know? I'm not going to have any friends that wear bees. I don't have

any friends anyways, but if you have a bee, it just means like, we can't hang out. Yeah. Because it makes me uncomfortable. And look, I think there's an argument that's like, get over it. Like you fucking Luddite, like this is the direction everything's headed and you're being recorded all the time anyway. Sure. But in the interim, I do think like there is a, there's a learning curve.

I think that meta's decision to put wearable glasses with a camera on them in Raybans, the most common sunglasses in the world, was brilliant because we're all familiar with. with this pair of sunglasses. Like there was no learning curve. There was no like, what's that thing on your face? We know what it is. I think how emphatic they are

about having the indicator light. There's no way you can turn it off. If you cover it, they don't record. There's some degree, at least there's a task of knowledge. My question, my question for the Wave founder

in 20 minutes is should your glasses be bright red and have like, you know, a circle in the middle of your head that's flashing that says, I'm recording. Yeah, I mean, if people can,

if someone shows up with a TV camera, Like I don't feel like oh this is in violation of my privacy. I'm like I know exactly what's going on the news is here and if I step in front of that camera. I'm on the news like it we have a social understanding of that and we still might not want to be around it. Yeah and I might be like actually I'm going to turn around walk the other way because I don't want to be seen on on this camera or whatever. I don't know but there's an understanding that yeah and look on on waves website in the Q&A there's a question like is there an indicator light and their answers yeah but you can turn it off And so like I don't know that I read that makes me a little bit queasy Yeah As a guy who has a camera on him, you know, all the time and so much of the videos that I've made is about Filming everyone in the whole world around me

I still think there's something honest about having that camera on your shoulder pointing a camera at someone Versus like you know the glass hole movement of the you know Google glass which like by having this on your face everyone was uneasy around you I think it's even a big hurdle to overcome as we eventually like figure out what this hardware AI future is going to look like. Yeah. What do you think about like airplane demos? It feels like all there's so much tech where the demo is like you'll love this on an airplane. The Apple Vision Pro is a great example. A lot of the handheld devices. But it doesn't work when it's dark. It's not too dark on planes. It does work very well in planes. But it's this like weird niche use case that feels like killer application and then

you actually get out into most of your life is not spent on airplanes usually and so yeah look if that's the best you got like i travel more than most people i know we're still talking about you know maybe double digits maybe maybe 10 hours a month tops yeah so you know four thousand bucks for a face computer that i use 10 hours a month on an airplane which by the way it doesn't work for me on an airplane like i didn't like it at all on an airplane okay no it would like claustophobia or no when you're on an airplane you're surrounded by strangers. Yeah, yeah.

So the idea that, like, I'm just going to go like that and watch Avatar with all these people around me, you know, I don't fly spirit that often, but I have flown spirit. And I know it goes on on those flights. Like, it just, again, like the social implication of, yeah, the social implication of it. You know, I think if that's the best you've got, then maybe, you know, maybe you're not thinking holistically enough about your, about your hardware. Yeah. How do you, how do you spot talent?

You discovered Sam. Someone in the chat was asking. It's a great question. If you have a framework for it. It's a difficult question, but it's the same, I approach it the same way that I approach investments. And it's seldom the work and it's almost always the individual. You know, like I think Sam is brilliant, but he's brilliant at everything that he does. He's brilliant with the work that he did at Humane.

He's brilliant at the work that he did at the verge before. that. He's brilliant with his own YouTube channel. I've got a dear friend of mine, a kid named Hunter who works in the building with me. Hunter's a friend and we invest together. Hunter's fantastic. And like, I don't know what Hunter does because every time I have a conversation with him, he's starting some new business or some new endeavor. Like, the work is almost irrelevant. It's the individual. And I think it's like, it's that mentality that you have or you don't have. Not everyone has it. I do think maybe you can get it. If you don't, don't have it, but when I see that in people, I have a tendency to sort of gravitate towards

those people. And when I look at the, when I look around at the friends of mine that have some sort of professional relationship with a professional admiration for, they all have that thing, that sort of desire to see it through, whatever that it may be. So, you know, I guess the short answer is like, it's always the person, never the product. That's great. Hunter's in the chat, by the way, he says hello. Another question I have is we've been thinking about AI generated images, video, et cetera, is getting so good. If it stays at this pace, you're going to be able to generate characters consistently.

You're already seeing this on Instagram, people just creating entire personalities for influencers and different verticals. Do you have any type of strong thesis around how that will? play out if we're going to have sort of organic influencers, regular humans, and then, you know, these synthetic. I've been thinking about in the context of, you know, an example. It's like, I don't want the AI Andrew Huberman. I want Andrew Huberman to get health advice from because I know Andrew and I trust that he's making the best decisions and studying, you know, and making, you know, these recommendations and understands the weight of that. And you have, you have, you have, you know,

like a synthetic Andrew Huberman in five years. Doesn't care if he convinces a million people to do something dumb with their health because you can just shut the account down and turn a new one on. But I'm curious how you think. Yeah, okay, my cynical take on it, which I believe is accurate, I'd wager that this is accurate, is that it's a tidal wave that none of us will be able to overcome. We can hold our breath for a while.

It is a tidal wave. And I wish I had a better analogy, but it's a little bit like, you know, when Toy Story came out in 1999, it was the first computer animated feature film. And it was great. I loved it. But then five, six years later, there was just this, you know,

onslaught of computer animated films. And I was like, you know what? The hand-drawn stuff is better. I miss that. When CGI first started getting introduced into films, I was like, no, practical is better. I like practical better. That's going to be the thing.

And it's like, no, you're going to lose. And I think AI is probably the most existential version of that. I think that it's just going to be so good that it's going to become irrelevant. And old people like us might appreciate, you know, real human things. And we might keep it alive. But the generation behind us, my children, when they see hand-drawn animation, they're like, what is this?

They don't care. It means nothing to them. So I think it's just going to get so good that it really doesn't matter. And that tidal wave is going to consume everything. And I think that we're, the progress that we're, the progress that we, we've seen in the last couple years of how good it is and how quickly it's developing is incredible. But when you look at the capabilities of the latest GROC and the latest GPT, you look at how smart these things are, you look at the sort of conversations you can have with any of these agents,

and then you look at how good the images that can be spit out by Google's video or whichever AI you might be fond of. It's like they're just going to marry really, really quickly. And I think five or six years from now, we're going to start to see real sort of erosion in the space because what they're delivering is going to be so good. You know, like another example is like, we haven't had a number one song yet that's completely AI generated. But it's going to come out of nowhere. It's going to be like gangnam style, which like the novelty of it allows us to dismiss the lack of humanity that this song has. The first AI song that's going to be a number one hit is not going to be a Bob Dylan-esque song that comes from the soul. It's going to be something fun and outrageous, and we're going to forgive the AI made it.

And then slowly it's going to start to chip away. But I think it is a losing battle. And the optimistic take on that is I think that there is going to be an extreme premium. But on the humans that are able to sustain because of what they represent uniquely. Maybe another bad analogy is it's like, I love Marvel movies. They're fucking fantastic. but as far as cinema goes like you know there's an argument

to say it was like those kind of artistry that we saw in the 70s or 80s like the apex of cinema where it comes from one minute when you think of a Tarantino movie you think of you know a truly great filmmaker with a voice Marvel movies are something else

they're fucking great and we love them we all show up to see them and we're okay with that and I think that's going to happen with AI but it's going to happen at a rate of acceleration that we've never encountered before and it's going to be so good that we're willing to forgive it and i think it's going to leave a handful of people out there maybe andrew human will be one of them i hope i'm a fan of his as well but it will put an extreme premium on the sort of human voices that are distinctly um human that

distinctly represents something that i could never when you look at the landscape of media a lot of that shit could be replaced by a i so the power law gets steeper yeah absolutely Well, that's like a five-hour conversation, by the way. Well, we'll have you back on again soon. This was awesome. And congrats on your new fake but very real role at Mod Retro. I appreciate it. Thanks for the time, guys.

Have fun in Massachusetts. We'll talk soon. We'll talk soon. Cheers. Take care. Have a good one. Bye. Airhorn for Casey.

Up next, we have Alex from Bright AI coming in the studio. But let me tell you about public investing for those who take it seriously. They got multi-asset investing. industry leading yields and they're trusted by millions folks. Interesting. What else do we need to cover today? There are a bunch of posts we've been through, but we have our next guest here in the studio. We will welcome him in. How you doing? Welcome. Alex, it's happening. Hey guys. Thanks for having me on. Yeah, thanks for

hopping on. Give us an intro, break down who you are, what you do for everyone who's listening. Yeah, so I'm CEO and founder of Bright AI. We build physical AI solutions for all the sort of essential services that society can't live without. So things like energy grid, you know, power supply, water infrastructure, age fact, pest control and all those things. So we have a platform that lets you kind of real time observe this distributed physical infrastructure in the world and solves a bunch of the problems that people have in those industries in terms of like labor shortages, you know, breakdown in the aging infrastructure, sustainability challenges, all those things.

Is the customer more government focused or private companies? They're private companies now. It sort of touches everything, you know, these services. Obviously, everybody alive is a consumer of these things. You know, as a result of that, there's plenty of government involvement. But they tend to be owned privately in the U.S., so big utility companies, service providers, you know, house control operators, like all the different sorts of companies. And then you've got this crossover interest with, you know, the national interests and so on as well.

Where's the strain the worst right now across those different areas? Or like where are we seeing the most strain? What's the evidence of the strain? It's pretty severe everywhere. So like the U.S. has got a, you know, if you grade the infrastructure, it's like a C-minus or a D. So most of the critical infrastructure was built, you know, just before and after World War II. And it's like, of course, like typical American plan with a 20-year lifespan. We'll figure it out afterwards.

And now it's just, you know, in a lot of places, it's like really held together with duct tape and wire. And so if you look at all those industries, you have this aging infrastructure. And then you have labor force, like a systemic labor problems because older, like older technicians are aging out and sort of the bigger economy now, I guess. You know, it's still cool work to do. But younger workers are just not signed it up for the journey to be a, you know, 25 years. year time horizon to be a master technician in these spaces. So all that's crushing, I mean, to give one example, it would be like water infrastructure, like 30% of the water we clean up, leeches back out into the environment due to leaks in the pipes everywhere. Like my town has

wooden pipes, if you can believe that. It's crazy. I mean, I know about, I know about all the lead pipe that, that our country depends upon to deliver water to, uh, to homes, which is concerning. But wood pipe sound pretty bad too. That feels like a good thing. It feels like an aqueduct. I'm down. Give me a wood pipe. It's probably safer.

I don't know. It's like something a beaver. I don't know, but it's bad. It's like the fresh water is leaching out and the bad stuff is leaching in. Yeah. Yeah. So you're active in a bunch of different industries. What is like, what does it go to market and what does even the sales cycle look like?

Is this you coming to these owners of these various assets and saying like we're going to help you leverage AI and it looks like, you know, kind of Palantir's forward deployed model. Are you doing something different? Yeah, it's in that zone. I mean, we bootstrapped through the first $100 million in revenue. So it was like I was trying to figure out that path through, path to we need a word for bootstrapping to a $100 million run rate and then and then raising some capital later, but it needs its own. Maybe it's Hawkinson's, uh, Hawkinson's, uh, model, something like that. There you go. Well, I've raised too early a bunch of times before. So I can like give warning shots. To other founders, but believe you should raise capital when you got the pattern figured out.

But I had to figure out that go to market. All the beginning stuff was through private equity firms. It turns out that their, you know, private equity kind of sits and, and, uh, basically owns all the service companies that service this infrastructure. structure and so and they're also very aligned with like five to seven year cycles where they want to drive change like big EBOD growth and change in these industries and so that's where all of our first customers have come from so we work with a lot of the biggest private equity firms that's sort of their their secret weapon for physical AI yeah what yeah what's the latest news on the fundraising side yeah so we we just raised a 51 million dollar a

Thank you. Co-led by Kostla Ventures and inspired capital. And we picked those guys because, you know, Kosla is super badass. They were, you know, the first and earliest check in Open AI. They leaned forward into sort of the future of abundance. Yeah. Eerie, you know, there. And then inspired is a lot of people don't know about, but at New York-based firm, they're deep in infrastructure specifically and super great founder operators, you know, and all that. So it's good. Do you think the company will always be a software, more of a software provider? Is there a world in the future where you guys would just actually buy and operate the underlying asset if you felt like you could do it better than other players in the market? It's a good question. We provide a lot of software and hardware today. So our platform combines. We have, yeah.

Yeah, we have like sensors and robots and these wearables that you put on the front line workers. and it ties all this like crazy distributed infrastructure into one big like physical AI learning loop, if that makes sense. And we found some industries like are more efficient than others, but like the most efficient one we found, like give you an example is like 50% of the time they send a technician out. There's nothing to see. That's the most efficient. We found a lot of them are like 90% of the time you send somebody out.

There's nothing to do. But you still keep going. case it goes really bad. And so, you know, I think in some of those industries where you get, we're seeing 90 plus percent productivity gains, that might be so disruptive that we actually have to come in and just buy and operate assets directly to sort of make the value in like happen in the biggest way. But, you know, we'll see. Right now we put it deeply with these operators. It's a great great way to go fast. I was actually a customer of your previous company, smart things. What's the through line? What are the lessons that you learned from the first IoT company to new IoT?

devices, what are the biggest lessons from that story? Man, you're welcome and sorry, I guess, you know, that where it landed for you, but smart things was amazing. It was, you know, we grew it to today. It's like 500 million households. It's, you know, more than 2 billion connected devices. Pretty big platform all over the world. I guess so I learned a lot about scaling instead of making IT work.

You know, it's matured a lot since then. And so, you know, those things are good. I think I feel like I was solving the wrong problem though. So my wife hated the, not to say this in a bad way, but she like progressively hated the company more, the more time went on like once regular light switches and stuff. Like she doesn't always know. That was my, that was my experience.

It was like magical and then slowly like little like hiccups creep in. And those like the expectations of software and hardware or modern technology is that it's perfect because it's a computer and it's a robot. I had a, I had a, I had a, a wrong market. You know, it's not a big enough. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. I'd love your take on Sonos. We've been talking about Sonos a ton.

What do you think they need to do to make the app open faster? I opened the Sonos app. It takes me 90 seconds to adjust the volume. And I'm like, I don't know how I haven't churned, maybe I should. I want to be negative on Sonos, but I've gone through two like hopeful waves of buying it completely in my house. house and then everything eventually. Same thing. And it's in an orphan stage right now. I think I just donated a bunch of like great gear. It's the most they have like the best sound and all that stuff.

But talk about like missing the software opportunity like every stage in the company. Totally. And you know I just don't see you know it's sort of Alexis sort of faded out in a way Apple home. It's not going anywhere. The Google Home stuff hasn't really like Sonos has this opportunity to like own. they could be the thing that like unlocks, like chat GPT. Well, yeah, John's idea. My idea was Sonos is trading at what, like one billion market cap or something? Yeah. My idea was Open AI literally buys them.

And they shipped like five million devices last year. They shipped a tiny devices. And Open AI has fantastic engineers. Whatever the engineering problem is, they can fix it. I believe, I don't know. It's a wild. It's a license. Scarlett's voice this time and like, you know, let it.

Yeah. Yeah, it seems like. Do it properly. Not the dumbest crackpot theory we ever come up with. But we will leave the wild riffing to the next one. Thank you so much for hopping on. Congratulations to the bass around. Really tremendous progress.

Great news. Good luck out there. We'll talk to you soon. Talk soon. Have a good one. And up next we have Chris from Waves coming in the studio, Symphonic Flavs. He went viral yesterday. We should play his video.

maybe before he joins. Let's try and pull up the video that went viral yesterday about waves, the glasses. Okay, I'm hearing it. Let's bring it up. Let's see it. The cinematography on the startup ads is getting insane. It feels like noise cancellation.

It sounds like the audio is switching. So when he's tapping it is he starting a live stream or just taking a picture? Clipping. Clipping. Oh, clipping. I'm not late, am I? Wait, this is, this is.

Beam. This is what Casey Nice out was describing. Ten seconds or? Yeah, the bar for startup launch videos is gone up 10X. It's insane. Getting a Project X vibes. Do you remember that movie? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Your average, like the public company has trouble producing marketing videos at this level. This is remarkable. There we go. Whoa. Now we're getting into FPV, hardcore Henry. Somebody just pulled a gun at a house part. I guess wild yeah if you have a life like that maybe you do need to be recording all the time okay does she have it on too is recording oh there you go okay oh records

okay cool well let's bring them in I'm excited to talk to him about waves welcome what's going on the man the man that kicked the hornet's nest how you doing how's the last how's the foot how's the last 24 hours been I mean a lot It's been wild, man. Yeah. It's amazing. It's really, really awesome. Wait, before we start, sorry, are you recording this?

No, no, no, no. Okay. You can. You're live. We're recording it. Yeah, no, these are cosmetic. They, they're not. Not live.

So yeah, this is kind of like a typical hardware pre-launch, vision statement, collect pre-orders and then start manufacturing, I assume. Yep. Very cool. What was the key takeaway? What was the good response? What was the stuff that you think you need to address? How has the overall response been? What have you learned? What did you expect versus surprised you?

So I'll talk about the good and the bad. I think we have hundreds of creators in our inbox right now. It is it is really popping off. I mean, I think you know Twitter is is very much like a tech forward audience, but even with that, I think with the virality we were really able to lock in our ICP here. We have some of the biggest names in IRL that want to work with us. I can't name names right now, but But it is very exciting. The downside, I mean, like, I think we got a lot of feedback about privacy. And, you know, I think we're still pretty set on our stance here. Like, we're going to ship with an indicator light. But in the conversations that we had with content creators, a lot of them emphasize the fact that, like, you know, they want something that allows them to capture candid, authentic moments.

because those go the most viral. And if in certain situations, that means them being able to disable the light, we want to give that option to them. So, yeah. And that's distinctly, we were just talking with Casey Nystad. He said that if you try to cover the indicator light on the meta raybans that stops filming. Yeah. And so do you think part of your opportunity is that you're willing to go and do something that Zach won't? Counter-positioned.

I think so. So, like, I mean, I don't think meta realizes where the puck is going. I think they're way too focused on, like, adding AI and wave guide displays and trying to go after a bigger market that we don't really know is going to fully adopt just yet. What we're seeing now is, like, the most retentive Raybans users are content creators. And what are they doing? They're posting social content on Reels and TikTok. They're posting prank videos, RIS videos, like social interactions, interviews, things like that, right? And all of them that we talk to are just like, we want to take this, we want to go live.

Like instead of me flirting with somebody on a short clip, I want to actually live stream a date and have chat tell me what to say and what to do, right? So we just want to be able to enable those kinds of content to exist. How is the actual live streaming infrastructure? I assume this pairs with your iPhone somehow to pass to like some sort of stream key to Twitch or whatever. Yeah. Exactly. It's just RTMP. So we stream to the phone and then phone streams to either the streamer's back end and then to Twitch or kick or just straight to the streaming service.

Yeah. Is there any like pushback from Apple on this type of thing? Are they pretty open with those particular APIs? It's effectively just a camera. There are apps that exist already that let you do this just with your phone. Yeah, which is a different camera. Yeah. What about the how do you evaluate like the technical risk that the glasses look great?

small. They're very, and they look really tiny. You're trying to pack a lot in there. Maybe the actual quality of the video matters less early than just the ability to have that FPV view. So I'm pretty confident that, you know, we'll be able to hit a pretty similar quality to a meta raybans or a meta-oakly. We have good connects in Shenjin that have set us up with some really good suppliers. And, you know, I think like if the issue is like, can we fit it in these frames, the answer is yes. Like the way we've sized it is is kind of unique in that I almost call these like the hockey stick temples because we keep it thin in the front and then like thicker in the back. So PCB internal battery and then swapable battery at the end of the temples.

So yeah. Do they two different batteries? You can swap one and then swap the other and then swap the one and then swap the other. So there's only one swappable battery but we'll we'll pack it with two. so while you're using one, the other one's charging. And so you can just flip flop. And it's hot swappable. So you don't have to stop your stream. You don't have to stop your stream because there's enough battery juice in the actual glasses that when you take the battery out, you have a minute to swap the next one or something.

Exactly. That makes a ton of sense. What were you doing before this? So I originally started this company with my co-founder to do sub vocal speech recognition. We did a lot of stuff with like neurotech and just like ML research. And I think we were caught in this loop where like we wanted to make a cool gadget, but we were way too research focused and not market focused. We just decided to do a full 180 and just like, you know, I'm very inspired by what Roy Lee

has done and what Avi is done with their products. And I just think that like, you know, really focusing on a retentive user, so I.E. a content creator, but then also making a gadget that's just cool and nice to wear and doesn't look like a super bulky thing. just I think that's that's the goal for me so sub vocal so you were thinking like hardware device that I can whisper and it picks up what I'm saying just mouth out words yeah just mouth out words that's pretty cool yeah interesting how much did you spend on the launch video it's very well well produced that thing looks amazing so I mean we have a we have the next Spielberg on our team

man Donald is is an amazing individual we actually filmed it in Canada so for context my co-founder and I were both Canadian. We filmed it in Vancouver. It was around, I'd say, USD, like maybe 50, 60. Okay. Wow. Solid. Yeah. I mean, we all I did it. I mean, it looks like Super Bowl quality. Well, yeah, and there's so many different actors. I'm assuming you just like actually had to hire a bunch of people. Now, none of the footage is from the same sensor that will be in the actual camera. So there'll probably be some sort of disconnect there. But hopefully people are happy with the final sensor. Do you have any goals? Like, you know, we shoot on FX3s.

I like the full frame look. I like a 12 megapixel, you know, 4K. Obviously, can't stuff all that into something the size of a little smartphone camera. Where are the break points in terms of quantitative metrics for a camera to get good enough that people will actually share it? Because even with the meta ray bands, the pictures and images I was taking and videos,

they weren't jumping out to me as like, yeah, these are really great to post right now. Yeah. Yeah, I think a big thing with the metas is just image stabilization. Like if you're like walking around while you're taking the video, there's like almost like a bobbing effect. And I think there's a lot of work that needs to be done there. Low light is another thing. I mean, you're kind of working against the volume that you have to fit the sensor.

So you're already constrained with how much light that you can actually capture. But, you know, I think. Oh, yeah, that dark party scene you filmed. That would be extremely rough, dude. Yeah. Kind of a wild choice, not the sunny day. But it tells a better story. So I get why you did it.

And obviously this stuff will get better, but there are, like, laws of physics around, like, you just can't fit a medium format sensor in a pair of classes. Unless it's an eye patch. Maybe that's the future. Maybe. Maybe. Maybe. Maybe.

What do you expect the go-to-market to look like? I imagine you could partner with a bunch of just big streamers and really focus on delivering value for them. And then if it's working well for them, then you would have. have like the next 100,000 people ready to go. Is that how you're thinking? That's exactly what we're doing. So we're already talking to big IRL streamers about partnerships.

We're going to Shenjin in a couple of weeks just to get the beta device ready. And then we're going to test it on 100 different creators and just get their feedback, iterate, improve the user experience. And then we were trying to do mass production Q1 next year. And I think like, you know, there's kind of just like an infinite marketing glitch here. It's like if we give these streamers early access to just show what this kind of content can look like, it'll just inspire other creators and want to be creators to buy this product. Yeah, is there? I feel like there's like going to be a whole new, like you could create a

whole new class of IRL creators. I can imagine somebody that's high, they just do hiking or they just ski or they, you know, they, and I'm sure people do that already, but if you make it really truly seamless. And I can imagine creators that, yeah, are more like the like, like, these like ambient videos and music on YouTube where there's not really study with me. Yeah, type of thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, kind of crossover. We'll get it set up. We'll get glasses on Ben, our producer. We'll have a Ben cam feed. Awesome. Hey, we'd love to do a pair when we have one. Yeah, for sure. On on kind of like pricing and technology, one thing that I thought was interesting about the Vision Pro was that it was like almost an order or magnitude more.

expensive than the Quest, but it was very clear that Apple was able to spare no expense, get the best screen. And they jumped forward a lot in terms of just quality, didn't really hit the mark in terms of retention. But when I think about a streamer, most people who are doing it professionally, spending $3,000 on a Sony camera is totally reasonable. Is there a world where instead of metas, raybans, which are in the couple hundred dollar mark, you go to a couple thousand dollars and you're buying and you're providing a more prosumer, more professional level product and then actually acts as differentiation and then maybe you go down the price ladder over time. Are you looking into that? Is that even something you could do? Oh, absolutely. Like,

I think right now, uh, we're, we're going to stay sort of like in the mid market, but we, we would ideally want to find like bigger, um, like creator groups and like, I mean, like imagine like, I could almost imagine having like a super pro version that's like $1,500, $2,000 and like Mr. beast uses it for beast games. get the POV of like every single contestant in beast games dude that would go crazy and like i i i that's something i would really want to see yeah yeah i mean people do that with like the head mounted gopros it's a little bit awkward and just doesn't land as well but but you can get great footage out of a out of a gopro bounded to your forehead if you're racing around uh

injury anything else already no this is great thanks for thanks for jumping on congrats on the launch i think a lot of the people a lot of people's like concerns are real but I think there's ways around it and it ultimately will just come down to how individual people choose to use the technology. Like there's going to be people that use this to live stream privately for their grandma. So the grandma can feel like they're hanging out

with the grandkids. And there's a bunch, there's so many use cases that are really cool. There are people right now who use the cameras and their iPhones to violate people's privacy at Coldplay concerts. Yeah. Like that happens. So we have to deal with that as a society.

It's not a device problem. I think it's more of an actor problem. You have people that are going to do weird shit, and we don't condone that. I think we're just going to focus on creators that want to make genuinely good content. I didn't get to see what Casey was saying because I was in another call. But I would love to just pull up to New York this weekend and have a chat with him and show him the frames and get his thoughts. If that's something he's interested in, if he still likes the original vision of Beam,

I would be more than happy to have a conversation. Yeah, I'm sure he'd have a ton of interesting feedback that you'd, you could incorporate and twist around. It'd be a great meeting of the minds. Awesome. Real quick, John, just want to say, loved your videos on startups. Like I would always watch your like startup history videos while eating dinner. Like I love a meal in YouTube.

So just like that was, that was, you should go back to that at some point. I think it would be really cool. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But TBPN is awesome man. I love this show. This is great. Yeah, we're having a lot of fun. Thanks for joining.

Awesome having you on and good luck with everything. I'm sure. I'm sure your round will be done by the end of the week. Knowing how the valley moves these days. Have fun out there. Okay, take care, guys. Talk to you soon. Bye. Yeah, it all comes down to the device itself is not bad.

It's how it gets used. And I think there's a bunch of really cool use cases here. Awesome. If you want another wearable, go to bezel. Get bezel.com. Your bezel concierge is available now to source you. any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch. Uh, you know, why, what, what, you know, who needs a original camera on their face and they can have a patek, Philippe Nautilus on the wrist, condo on the wrist.

Condo on the wrist. Condo on the wrist. An R.M. For sure, for sure, dude. Uh, brand jacobie, we got some trade deal news. He's starting a new decade today, more focused and motivated than ever. It's time to build. I, I, I, I was like, you're 30. He's like, no, I'm 29. I'm starting the, I'm starting the 30th year. What? He texted me. Is his birthday? Yeah,

no, this is him announcing his birthday. Okay. I thought he was going to a different job or something. I was also very confused. Everybody's confused about your post. Stick to Figma, Brandon.

Stick to Figma. We got a post here from... Put the pixels in the bag. Just put the pixels in the bag, bro. We got a shout out. I'm Rita. Block officially joined the S&P 500 yesterday. She says it's not the finish line.

It's a signal that what we're building has staying power. Inclusion brings broader exposure. Proud of our team, focused on what's next. Hit the gong. She, I believe she's a CEO and CFO over at Block. Awesome. Liquidity says incredible work, fellas. Sidney had a campaign with America.

Eagle that went live yesterday. Of course, American Eagle was up 6% on the day and then 17% after hours. Makes total sense. But aren't, uh, I, I heard all like the big, uh, the big LPs are pouring into Andreessen Horowitz right now because the, just on the rumor that Sydney Sweeney might be joining Andreessen as a partner. Is that true? Yeah. I mean, the fund has to be the new, the new raise completely oversubscribed. Completely oversubscribed on that news. I did have somebody, I did have somebody smart text me and say, is this, is this really? real. I heard the news and I was like, I think it's real. I think it's real. But to me, I thought it was that Andreessen was investing in a company that had done a marketing deal with

Sydney Swoon. I didn't realize that the rumor was that she was joining as a partner. She kind of has the Midas touch right now. She did Dr. Squatch, $2 billion exit. We got a post here. We got a post here from Nat Eliasson, fantastic post. He says, Waymo is a godsend for working parents. Need to hand off the baby between meetings. Put them in a Waymo and send them to your partner across town. Impossible before now. Really grateful we have this technology. This went super viral.

I'm sure Waymo was like trying to get a community noted because I don't think this definitely not allowed against the terms of use, probably illegal in multiple ways. Wow. He was clearly. He was clearly joking. I was thinking about this though. I do think it's a game changer that, you know, how much time do you, do parents spend every day? just like commuting their kids to and from school.

I think AVs are going to be great for families. For example, like I remember like as a kid, my brother's school would start at a different time than mine. And like one of us would have to wake up earlier than the other. I think we're going to be living in a world where you don't have to hang out with kids at all. No, it's like more quality time and less, you know, commuting. Yeah, but who says the commute isn't quality time?

It can be. That's true. It can be a moment to, you know, actually have a conversation. and kind of unplugged from all the other toys and stuff. I've literally listened to hundreds of hours of dinosaur content driving. You got to give a lecture. You got to show up to the commute, ready to give a sermon on the T-Rex. Today is the first day of the rest of first grade.

Just pump up speech in the car. Just lock in, buddy. Get in there. I want you to win. I want you to win in the ground. Build the biggest sandcastle. We have another post from tweet Davidson. He says in your 20s, you get sorted into one of these four houses like Harry Potter.

I got both of them here. Celsius is out. I'm a big fan of three out of the four of these. I'm not big into the green one. What's the green one? Are you joking? I don't know what that is. It's a macha?

Macha? Yeah, you're definitely. Probably oat milk with a bunch of canola oil in it. Never been. We can do a Macha taste test live, see if you like it. No, we're absolutely not. I mean, Masha has never been for me. and never will be.

Yeah, I clearly just like, divide the line. No, Diet Coke for sure. Three out of the four. Celsius, yeah, for sure. I'm not, I'm not, I'll have a Celsius in a pinch. Black coffee's mid. That's mid. I do drink one every day though.

And we got to give it up for Satya Nadella. Massive news. We're releasing GitHub Spark, a tool and co-pilot that turns your ideas into full stack apps entirely in natural language. They're not a bad coding game. Getting into the game. Interesting.

They weren't going to sit this one out. They're not positioning this as a Claude code competitor. More is like a Figma make V0. It's definitely not a Claude code competitor. This more of like a, yeah, Figma Make, lovable V0. Lovable competitor. Interesting. Bolt competitor.

It's going to be a knockout, drag out fight. In the future, every SaaS company will have a little text box that lets you generate more SaaS. Yeah. And this is how SaaS will live forever. The Auroboros. The SaaS industrial. Big SaaS wants.

you to think that big sass wants you to think that you can get in the game too but on their infrastructure you can you can we we have we have a vibe coded project uh that uh it was very handcrafted as well from tyler coming soon dropping soon i'm very excited about that jack wait wait let's go to tyler any news in your world before you're you're taking tomorrow off you're not i'm just i'm just i'm not taking it off oh oh sure oh yeah the you're going to work so hard when you're remote. I have some breaking news. I'll bring us up.

Your camera's not working, but I'll bring. Okay, yeah, bring up the breaking news. We got some breaking news. What is this? We got, we got, Alad Gill, Scoop. Alad Gill is raising a $1.5 billion fund, which if closed would be one of the largest halls

for a solo GP. Love to see it. Natasha's got the scoop. Hit it. I'm sure this would be over-subscribed. Oh, we got the wipe. I like the wipe. job production team. That's fun. Very, very. I would have new gear. I mean, I could,

I could see a lot at some point with a, with a $10 billion. Yeah. The real, the real story that's the investigative journalists have to dig into. Is there anyone else on his payroll? Because if there's even one assistant, no, he's got a fantastic team. Jacob Brumackie. He's got a fantastic team. He's not a solo GP. I mean, I think he's not a solo investor. Oh, he's the only guy around. He's got other people on his team, but I, but I, but he doesn't have another GP. He's probably, I would, yeah, I would just imagine he, but he has the entire management company. What if he had like 500 associates, 300 principals, 200 partners, and he's the only GP. He's like, I'm a solo GP. I'm a solo GP. I have a bigger infrastructure team, bigger back office than Andresen.

But I'm still, you call me a solo GP. I'm not a platform fund. He's getting the platform fund territory. But congratulations, absolutely insane investor. Yeah, we covered his post yesterday basically saying these are the early. winners. And of course, he's in all the number one. He's in the number one company in all of those categories. We got a post here from Jack. Just crazy run entrepreneur for a long time. Color this DNA company. His book too is, is, is, uh, high growth handbook. Legit is fantastic. Everything he does. He hits out of the park. Uh, Jack Corbett has a post here went super viral. I was referencing this with Zach earlier. He says, you can Venmo the United States to pay off the national debt. And so they

have a website you can go to gifts to reduce the public debt and you can just make contributions. You can use ACH, PayPal, Venmo, Debit, or a credit card. So if you're really a patriot, go max out your credit card for Uncle Sam and make a gift to this country. Is it a tax write off? That's a good question. Does it count as taxes? Can I just Venmo my taxes now?

If I'm like, I owe this much, I just send it in and then be like, take that as a deduction. If this is not tax deductible, that would be the most annoying thing ever. Very funny. Jamie Cuff has launched Pace, the Agentic Process Outsourcing, APO for the insurance industry. Jamie is an absolute dog. Congratulations. I think I met him in 2021. He was at Retool at the time.

So excited to see him back in the game with his own startup. Brian Norgaard, he says, a rating system for men. in the dating marketplace was inevitable and so is one for women. That's interesting. Signal says there will never be one for women in his humble opinion. The market dynamics are skewed because every woman is going to for the same guy West Elm Calib effect. Oh that's an old story. I remember West Elm Calib that was interesting for dudes an adverse effect. Yeah I don't know reviewing women that feels like that would get disapproved by the app store for some reason it just feels odd. I don't

know we'll see where it goes but it is odd that I don't I even heard wrong about like there's a Reddit out there that already exists because like the whole idea of like the rating system app what was it called T T that app like that what was new about that wasn't that it was an app it's that it was a trend on Reddit I think reddit or some sort of community some sort of web-based community beforehand but anyway weird times I was talking to a friend of the show about T and she said it's what she say something like it's a Stalinist ritual or something like that and I kind of went over my head but I thought it was funny yeah I don't know how I feel about it

we're trying to get the founder on you can imagine he's being pretty busy at the top of the app store and getting a massive amount of hate constantly yeah I don't think but also probably doing a lot of project management it's in his blog it really is yeah product management let's let's go through this fun story from Charlie Munger very interesting to to dig into In 1949, Charlie Munger was 25 years old. He was hired at the law firm Wright and Garrett for $3,300 per year, or $29,851 in inflation-adjusted dollars as of 2010. He had $1,500 in savings equal to about $13,570. Now, a few years later, in 1953, Charlie was 29 years old when he and his wife divorced.

He had been married since he was 21. lost everything in the divorce, his wife keeping the family home in South Pasadena. Not far from where I live. Munger moved into dreadful conditions at the university club and drove a terrible yellow Pontiac, which his children said had a horrible paint job. According to the biography, written by Janet Lowe, Molly Munger asked her father, Daddy, this car is just awful, a mess. Why do you drive it? The broke Munger replied, to discourage gold diggers. Shortly after the divorce, Charlie learned that his son, Teddy, had leukemia, heartbreaking. In those days there was no health insurance. You just paid everything out of pocket and the death rate was

near 100% since there was nothing doctors could do. Rick Garon, Rick Garon, Charlie's friend, said Munger would go to the hospital, hold his young son and then walk the streets of Pasadena crying. One year after the diagnosis in 1955, Teddy Munger died. Charlie was 31 years old, divorced, broke, bearing his nine-year-old son. Later in life, he faced a horrific operation that left him blinded in one eye with pain so terrible that he. he eventually had his eye removed. Incredibly, incredibly rough. And then to go on an absolutely generational run after that, man, really speaks to resiliency and

perseverance. What a wild story. Anyway, we need something to cheer us up. We need to go to Howard Lutnik. His investment bank, Cantor Fitzgerald, is offering to buy the right to businesses' tariff refunds, basically betting that the courts will overturn the tariffs from Ryan Peterson. What does Lutnik know? financialize everything.

This is wild. What is Latinic now? Yeah, I mean, if you're, maybe if you have, if you paid a bunch of tariffs and you're expecting some refunds or thinking that there might be there, you could get the cash flow now if your business is in trouble. That's obviously relevant to flexports customers. In other news, SpaceX, direct-to-cell phone coverage is growing fast. Elon posted a chart that's not quite going hyperbolic, but certainly growing exponentially.

I didn't realize that direct-to-sell was, was, was growing as fast as it was. I didn't even realize it was that available. I see the generic satellite service show up on my phone every once a while, and it's usually a harbinger of very bad connection. But Starlink should be much faster. Well, that is a great place to end the show today. This has been a fun one.

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You can help us. Going. Listening to the show on Spotify, giving us five-star review. If you're on Apple Podcasts, I do recommend switching over to Spotify. We've got video. Oh, yeah. That does make sense. That would be a better experience.

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