TBPN - Guide to the AI Barnyard, Eli Lilly Hits $1T Valuation, Has AI Ruined the Em Dash? | Julia Steinberg, Bobby Ghoshal

Episode Date: November 21, 2025

(00:11) - Eli Lilly Hits $1T Valuation (11:24) - Adobe to Buy Semrush for $1.9B (15:27) - Guide to the AI Barnyard (44:13) - AMD Chief Challenges Nvidia Dominance (57:13) - WSJ Mansion Section (01:04:30) - Has AI Ruined the Em Dash? (01:14:36) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (01:52:42) - Julia Steinberg, General Manager of Books and editor at Arena Magazine, discusses the upcoming release of Arena's Issue 006, themed "An Ode to Capitalism," scheduled for December 1st. She reflects on the challenges of large-scale government infrastructure projects, expressing skepticism about their efficiency compared to private sector initiatives. Additionally, she shares her experiences living in San Francisco, highlighting issues like homelessness and public safety, and notes the city's efforts to improve conditions during major events. (02:24:11) - Bobby Ghoshal, co-founder and CEO of Dupe.com, discusses how Dupe serves as a shopping companion that helps users find desired products or similar alternatives at better prices, emphasizing its role in providing confidence to shoppers. He highlights the challenges in building the product experience, noting the importance of partnerships with brands to access live inventory, pricing, and customer behavior data, which are crucial for accurate recommendations. Ghoshal also shares the company's growth, mentioning that Dupe has reached approximately 18 million shoppers and is approaching $100 million in gross merchandise value, with plans to expand into categories like fashion and perfumes. TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.comFigma - https://figma.comVanta - https://vanta.comLinear - https://linear.appEight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpnWander - https://wander.com/tbpnPublic - https://public.comAdQuick - https://adquick.comBezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.comPolymarket - https://polymarket.comAttio - https://attio.com/tbpnFin - https://fin.ai/tbpnGraphite - https://graphite.devRestream - https://restream.ioProfound - https://tryprofound.comJulius AI - https://julius.aiturbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.comfal - https://fal.aiPrivy - https://www.privy.ioCognition - https://cognition.aiGemini - https://gemini.google.comFollow TBPN: https://TBPN.comhttps://x.com/tbpnhttps://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

You're watching TVPN. Today's Friday, November 21st, 2025. We are live from the TBPN Ultradome, the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the Capital of Capital. We've got to ring the size gong for Eli Lilly. Big Farm is getting bigger. One trillion dollars. That's the new market cap for Eli Lilly. They're a one trillion dollar company. Normally you got to be selling ads. You got to be a tech company or you got to be an oil. company to get to the $1 trillion club. But people did say back in the day, whoever creates a cure for obesity is going to be a trillionaire. Yep. And they did the meme. They did the meme. They did the meme. Eli Lilly just became the first $1 trillion farmer company in history. I want to see the CEO Dave Ricks. You know, he went on the Cheeky Pint podcast. I want to see him post, you know, how to run a 13-figure business. Give me a thread. I'm a 13 figure businessman. I'm a 13 figure business man. I'm a 13 figure business man and I'm on Instagram giving you some advice. Teach a course. Come on. Tell me how you do it.

Everybody's run that playbook yet. But it is a fascinating business. It's one that I'm not super familiar with. And so I wanted to understand exactly how the weight loss market's playing out earlier in the year, maybe a year ago. We looked into GLP ones. We talked about them. We read about Novo, of course, their competitor. We laughed a little when Novo failed to renew one of their patents. Yeah, that was crazy. And I think it cost, I'm going to look it up. But it was something like that.

Yeah. So what's been fascinating to me is the lack of importance of intellectual property here. Normally, when I think about developing drugs, all pharma, I think about it as like, You get a bunch of scientists in a lab, they discover something, and then they patent it, and you have a complete monopoly on that for years. It's like, you know, you have the patent on the intellectual property. If I have Mickey Mouse, you can't use Mickey Mouse for decades until it enters the public good, the public square. But that's not exactly how this is playing out.

So, Novo was originally the one getting all the attention for kicking off the GLP1 boom, but over the past few years, Lily has caught up. It's sort of a Google story. It's sort of like the Google narrative. Novo sort of race to market. Basically, everyone was working on diabetes drugs. Then they figured out that these could be used for weight loss and everyone rebranded, ran a few more studies,

and then brought the drugs to market. So now the name of the game is Macon American GLP-1s. Eli Lilly is building a massive new plight. plant North Carolina to support what's now a $72 billion market. The revenue numbers are really crazy. It feels like an AI story, but in this case, AI stands for appetite inhibitor, I guess. That's right. Long-term forecasts get really massive. Eli Lilly's currently expected to generate $63 billion across their entire portfolio, but by 2034, they're expected to sell over $100 billion just in weight loss. So this new business is going to be bigger.

Yeah, exactly. It's going to be, it's going to be, basically twice as big as they're existing as everything they are now. And they're already a big company. So I was, I was surprised that there was not more of an exclusivity period here. I wanted to dig into it. We were wondering, like, is it some sort of deal? Are they working together? Novo and Eli Lilly. In fact, they are- Historically, they did. No. Really? They were accused of working together. Oh, interesting. And that would have been illegal and they would have been colluding. They are bit of rivals going back 80 years. They've never worked together. They, they, they, they, they, do not work together. They, in fact, are fighting over this market completely. And so what actually

wound up happening was that the first, you know, the, the, the first drug that kicked this all off was Novo Nordisk. They patented semaglutide, which was marketed as Ozempic and then Wagoovee. And to my point earlier, referencing the Canadian market, this happened around five months ago, Novo Nordis actually lost Canadian patent protection on OZembek and would go. in Canada because a few years ago they didn't pay a very nominal maintenance fee on their patent. It's crazy. It's crazy. Which will ultimately, you know, cost them billions. Well, don't do that. Instead, get on ramp. Time is money. Save both. Easy to use corporate cards,

bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. So back to GOP-1s. No one can patent a biological mechanism. You can only patent a particular chemical, a particular structure. You can't just, you can't patent the idea of inhibiting, mimicking GLP1, which is what all these drugs do. They mimic the GLP1 hormone, and that's what's important. So, Novo patented semi-glutide. Lilly had terseptide already in the works. Again, they were working on diabetes, not on weight loss.

Something else. But it was already kind of predicted to be a big market. So they both have products. And then as soon as, as novo is able to pivot to weight loss, Lily's able to run the same playbook very, very quickly. And accidental discoveries and quick rebrandings are nothing new in pharma. Viagra was initially created by Pfizer as a heart medication. They gave it to both men and women, I believe.

But male subjects obviously had a particular side effect, and that unlocked an entirely new market. And then that discovery came out of left field completely. So they had a true, Pfizer basically had a true monopoly for five years before Cialis came to the market. This is obviously different because both companies were working on the underlying structure. Adderall also had a really odd path. Amphetamines have been around for over 100 years. They were used by soldiers in World War II. So obviously you can't patent them. In the 1970s, they were sold as weight loss drugs. And so there was a drug. It was an appetite suppressant. Yes, yes. So it was called Obitrol. And Obitrol was sold as a weight

loss pill. In the 90s, a company bought Obitrol, renamed Adderall. Math. Yeah. It's a great weight loss drug. Try it today. It's actually so crazy. I imagine that it didn't really take off as a weight loss drug because it had crazy side effects. I don't actually know. I would imagine it was effective, but probably just very risky to use. Yep. But in the 90s, a company purchased Obitrol, rebranded it Adderall, and then marketed it for ADHD, and they didn't have the patent on the chemical. Remember, you can't patent the chemical amphetamine because it's been around for so long. So what they were able to do is develop a brand, and Adderall is a product that the brand name somehow, it just completely broke through in a massive way, and it's just synonymous with ADHD. It's just synonymous with, like, study medication even. And so it's been wildly successful. They actually did wind up getting a patent later on for Adderall XR. So Adderall XR is a bunch of beads in a capsule.

And they were able to patent the delivery. That's a form factor. Yeah, delivery. Exactly. And so even when you don't have the patent on the underlying tech, you can still patent things around it, patent the biosimilars. There's a bunch of different things you can do. And so it is a shame that the Gila Monster, like, never is not really getting any

side. Not getting the bag. Any of these weight loss drugs. Yeah. That really is the origin, right? They really should do that. They should do like 1% for the Hilo Monster. And just 1% off the top, they should donate it to like Hilo Monster.

Maybe a foundation of sorts. Yeah, yeah, a foundation. A nonprofit. A nonprofit that just makes the Hila Monster live an absolute luxury. That's right. As a thank you. So Eli Lilly will be fighting like this endless battle with every other farm. And to be clear for those that don't know that the,

It was Nova Nordisk that figured out what was happening in the Gila monster, which... Is it the Gila monster? I don't remember. Yeah, it is. It's the GOMO monster. Because there's the Komodo dragon, too. And I often get those two creatures confused. But yeah, it's the saliva in the GILA monster, I believe, that uses the same pathway, the GLP1 hormone. So basically over the next couple of years, we're going to see this interesting dynamic where Eli Lilly, Novo, and basically every pharmaceutical company like wants, they have to get it on the action because it's such a big market. Obesity is a massive disease. It really is that trillion dollar opportunity. It's been that for a long time. There's, you know, hundreds of millions of obese people. Everyone who has that, you know, doesn't want that. The market is so, so broad.

And so what's interesting is that the patents haven't resulted in a perfect monopoly where it's not this winner take-all situation where Novo is just going to run away with it. Eli Lilly is just going to run away with it. What's actually happening is that it's a doopoly right now, but demand is so high that they still have high margins. So they're in like a price war. And that's even with the competitive dynamics of the compounders, companies like Hems, which are creating. Yep. A ton of different GLP1 products, you know, just in their own, in their own facilities. And so the price has fallen three X. And normally, you know, if you, if the price of your good is falling three X,

you're charging three, if you're selling a $50,000 car and then a couple of years later, you're selling it for $15K. Like, that's not a great. It still will cost something like in the same range to produce. And so you're just getting massive margin compression. But the growth is so insane that it hasn't really mattered. Yeah, exactly. So the market is growing so, so much. Marges have fallen from 80% to like 60%. But the mass adoption just completely offsets that. And so they're making way, way more dollars in total. And so the next race now, you know, Eli Lilly's a trillion-dollar company, what do they have to do next? They have to go and make it a pill. They're going to try and make these weight loss products in pill form. And there's a whole new battle duking it. out between Eli Lilly and Nova Nordisk, again, and some other players. But it's a fascinating time.

And there's a lot of, they have their own little barnal economy. There's a lot of analogies to the AI race, a trillion dollar companies and high margins and all this. But at the end of the day, what matters in the GLP one market is just the actual supply. Like, you have to go and build a massive facility. And once you get that facility up, people will buy it because just the demand is so high that if you can make it, you will. be able to sell it and you'll be able to sell it at a good, good margin. Anyway, let me tell you about Restream. One live stream, 30 plus destinations.

If you want to multistream, go to restream.com. There was some interesting news in the SEO world. Adobe is buying Semrush for $1.9 billion. Should we do Sizgong for SEPR? I think so. I think so. I think so. Yeah, fantastic, fantastic outcome.

It was notable to me because, Obviously, we've been tracking the generative engine optimization space, and there wasn't really a great comp for a lot of those. I remember we were talking about it, and it's not like you hear a lot of SEO companies getting acquired in that range. And so, anyways, the geo market is still highly, highly, highly competitive. Obviously, we work with Profound, which has been the clear leader in the market to date. But I would expect this to drive even more companies to come in and compete. And ask any VC, they're getting pitched companies in this category multiple times a week still. So people are just piling in.

I wouldn't think of Semrush as a GE player. No, it's not. It's an SEO. It was the SEO leader. Yeah. That being said, I would expect them to also want to play in geo. It's not like they're going to completely ignore. I would almost be thinking about Semrush having their own build versus buy conversation.

It's sort of unclear what it would take them, how much data they have, how they can jump into the GEO market. Obviously, a lot of companies have been able to get something up and running very, very quickly. And they do already have a tool. It's called Semrush AI visibility. But again, there's so much demand for this kind of new product because every single company. is, you know, spending a lot of time thinking about how they're appearing in different L-L-L-A queries. So still up for grabs.

Reportedly, Samarash did $250 million in revenue back in 2022, probably grown a little bit since then, founded in 2008, a true overnight success at 10, almost 20 years to get on to the next thing with Adobe. Speaking of Adobe, I need to push their tools to the limit at this point. They were so behind in terms of generative AI and their models. They were training their own models. But eventually, I saw a demo where Nanobanana was in Photoshop. And I feel like that is really, potentially a really, really big unlock just for workflow.

We've seen so many different examples of this in AI where the models are, are incredible, but having the harness and having the wrapper, whether that's a product that was introduced five years ago, 10 years ago, 50 years ago, like they're all getting better. Adobe works with Fall.

So they can integrate pretty much any model in the world and inference it. So I expect them to, it is funny that whatever it was, two years ago, every single player felt like they needed their own models. And now I think the

the narrative is really flipped. Well, speaking of fall, build and deploy AI video and image model with fall, trusted by millions to power generative media at scale. And also Gemini 3 Pro, Google's most intelligent model yet, state-of-the-art reasoning, next level vibe coding, deep multimodal, deep multimodal understanding. We've been having a ton of fun with Gemini 3 Pro and Nanobanana Pro.

We have generated an image of the aura farm, the world trying to understand a barnyard map a barnyard uh sort of an ai market map but through the lens of a a barnyard because that's really what uh what is going on in ai these days um let's see i think we need to zoom this out just a little bit to get it to line up but uh we can show and we can take you on a tour of our our farm based market map to uh to explain what's happening in the state of in November of 2025. Tyler, do you want to take us through it? Sure, yeah. So we like to use a lot of animal idioms on this show. A lot of these you might recognize, but we've kind of expanded out to try to cover all the major players. And, you know,

so yes, so this was made with nano-manna pro very, extremely good model. But you will notice, as you get more and more complex, it gets a little bit sloppy. There's some sloppies, there's Some slof in some places. Okay. But broadly, I think it did a very good job. Had a lot of fun making this. Yeah, before Nanobanana Pro was released, we would have needed to hire somebody that maybe illustrates children's books.

And if they were an expert, maybe they could have whipped something together in a day. This took you far longer than that, you know, prompting over and over and over. But I'm very pleased with the outcome. Yeah. Okay. So I guess let's just kind of go through each of the animal. maybe maybe let's just start with some of the more obvious ones the ones we've talked about a lot on the show so let's start over here with with the piggies so here we see the pigs at the at the slop trough

who's there who's there so this is broadly this is just label as meta you can imagine a lot of people here right you could you could you could see soror here sure bill pebbles bill pebbles could be you know eating some slop yes metal vibes yep that makes sense I mean just like broadly, AI in general, some people think basically all AI is slop. They do. They do. There's been a lot of criticism. Yeah, but I think that one's fairly clear. You don't want to be the pig at the slop trough. Although sometimes, you know, maybe the profitability of being a slop farmer is underrated.

Obviously, America has a lot of pigs that live at the trough. They eat from the trough. they eventually, the pigs go to slaughter. They become bacon. They are sold into the economy. You can make a good living as a farmer who maintains a trope. And then there's the Jeremy Gaffauntake, which is we hate slop now because we know that in a few years it will no longer be slops. So don't count out the pigies yet.

This is the sloppiest slop will ever be. That's right. That's true. Okay. Who else is on this market map? So then let's move up. Let's see. We have the hen house here.

Yes. And who's in the hen house is the fox. The fox. And so this, you can say, it's kind of Oracle in the same all one, right? Oracle is the henhouse. Yes. They're letting the fox in a little bit. Potentially.

Yeah, we'll see what, you know, what ends up happening. Again, now that I'm looking at this image, the fox isn't actually in the henhouse yet. But he's under the henhouse. He's circling the henhouse. And there's a question of how far into the henhouse has the fox got. And I think it's notable that the chickens don't seem too disturbed yet. Yes, yes. Yeah, yeah.

They're getting along. Because the Fox could just be browsing, could just be stopping by. Could be a friendly. Friendly Fox. But of course, it is, if you have a lot of cash flow as a big company, if you have the ability to borrow billions or hundreds of billions in the debt market, you have to protect your henhouse because foxes might come by and might want to, you might want to use you to co-sign a loan. Yeah.

Okay. So then we see the cash cow. The cash cow. This is Nvidia. The only profits. AI. For a long time, I don't know if anyone has really unseated them. They're certainly the most profitable by far. I think for a long time, they were making more than 100% of the profits across everything. Everyone else is losing money. Yeah, now you're starting to see maybe some cracks with

TPUs. But even then, I mean, they're still. It's still a cash cow. And we just saw they just beat earnings. Yeah, they just beat earnings. I mean, we have an article here from the journal. And video results fail to quell AI worries. Not enough people are milling. I gave you the perfect quarter. Or maybe the cash cow. I gave you the perfect quarter. I know. And you still sold off.

60 billion or something in revenue. Yeah, maybe the cash cow has been overly milked and is out of milk at this point. I think it's still producing. I think it does seem like it's still producing. That looks like a healthy cow to me. That looks like the crown on the cow in particular definitely helps out there. All right, moving over. What do we have going on here?

So here we have the bowl in the china shop. The bowl and the china shop. I think there's a couple ways you could read into this. So Elon, one is just kind of on the, maybe the data center infrastructure side where he's kind of the bull. Imagine that you're a contractor and you're building data centers for these companies. And then you see Elon come in and he does it in eight months. What took you in a year and a half? Yep.

He's kind of messing up your world, right? Totally. He's like, oh, man, this bull, he's messing up my business. I need to be working way harder, way faster because of him. He's also shipping features so fast. Like before people could even have a discussion over adults. content. It was like, boom, Annie, here it is, here it is, Valentine. He's moving so

fast. This is the other way you could say he's the bull because there's kind of this maybe unspoken rule between the model companies where it's like, okay, we don't want to go too hard into the companion space. There were companies doing that, but they weren't, it wasn't the opening eyes, it wasn't the anthropics, wasn't the Gemini's. And then now you

see a frontier model actually moving into there. Also, you know, GROC is of course the maximally truth-seeking LLM. Just yesterday I was asking Grock, who is the strongest CEO in tech? And it told me that Elon Musk is the strongest by far. And it actually compared him to a bull. It said he was stronger than a bull and that he could beat a bull in a fight if he went

head to head. I believe it. With his bare hands. Absolutely right. Absolutely right. What else is going on here? I bet Claude would agree. If you really pressed Claude on it, they'd say, yeah, you're absolutely right.

You're absolutely right. Who else is going on? So let's move down here. we have the lipstick on a pig. And I think this, you could say, is Apple Intelligence. Yes. Right? I mean, although I feel like this is actually almost flipped a little bit, right?

Because the pig is usually like the ugly thing and then you add the makeup to make it look nicer. Yeah. Well, I think that's what they did here, right? They took a bad model and they dressed it up and they said it was great and they said you should buy a new iPhone because of it. And the model was bad. And there's no amount of marketing that is going to like change public perception once the product hit the market.

You could also run the, the pig is the privacy focused iPhone ecosystem that is pretty difficult to just run in and throw AI on top of. Like Apple has been building a brand around, we don't access your data, we don't store your data, we would never train on your data. And that put them in an awkward position where they couldn't just snap their fingers and deliver a great AI experience, whereas Google has been, hey, We'll give you Gmail for free, but we'll also probably train on wherever you go on the web and try and understand and route ads to you appropriately.

Meadow is in a similar position. And so those two companies were a little bit more equipped to just on day one go and deliver AI features. Apple had to put lipstick on their pig, which is their privacy. It was definitely more of like an afterthought. It was more of a kind of shallow integration, you could say. And then hopefully we'll see with the Gemline. The marketing for Apple Intelligence felt like they were, it felt like a lot of makeup on top of something.

It was not a lot of, it was not a foundational rewrite of iOS in any way. Not a lot of substance. It didn't feel like an entirely new thing. It just felt like little lipstick all over the place. Yeah. And then before we go over there, let's go up here. We have the rooster.

Yeah, that's Jordi. This is Jordy calling the top. Every morning. Every morning he wakes up and he comes on the show. 11 a.m. sharp he calls the top. He says, this is, it's actually over now. It's so over. It's never been more.

If you call the top every day, eventually you'll get it right. Eventually, you'll be correct. It's true. Eventually you'll be correct. Okay, what else do we ask? So then we have the dark horse. The dark horse. And this is SSI.

Okay. Of course. We're still yet to see anything really from SSI. I'm just charging around in the background. Yes. Yeah. Kind of this elusive figure. It's kind of, I mean, like, so the big kind of departures from Open AI,

it was Miramari and Alia, you could say. And Miramari's company, thing machines. She's raising up rounds. They have blog posts. Yeah. They do actually have a product. They do have a product. Let's hear it for product.

Why did you tell me earlier? Why did you bury the lead? They have blog posts. They're a good blog posts. So in a couple of years, we could be seeing vibreels. Is that what you're saying? We could be seeing launch videos. So they do have a product, right?

It's like RL fine tuning. Watch your head. There's a hoof. The horse is really about to hit you. Okay. But, I mean, they're not really dark horse. Like, you can, they're a bright horse. I don't know if that's a phrase, but you can see what they're doing.

Clydesdale or a beautiful style. They're a unicorn 50 times over. 50 times over. Yeah. We didn't put a unicorn on here. That's an animal. Maybe for the next generation. After a certain point, I couldn't add it anymore.

It would just get too sloppy. Okay. What else do we have? What else is going on on the aura farm? So here we see another horse. Yes. And there's two ways you could look into this horse. Yes.

One is this phrase, look a gift horse in the mouth. Yes. Do you want to explain this, John? Yes. So do you know this phrase? You don't know this phrase? I actually don't know this phrase. Okay, so looking at gift horse in the mouth is if someone gives you...

Just like a term that was thrown around in the 80s? Yeah, yeah. This is back in my day. Back in my day. So obviously, just giving someone a horse, a horse is a valuable asset today, but also hundreds of years ago. It's always been a valuable tool on the farm. And the way that you assess the quality of a horse, one way to assess, whether it's been taken care of, whether it's healthy,

is to look in its mouth. Always look a gift horse in the mouth. Never look a gift horse in the mouth. Oh, because it would be offensive. It's offensive. After you get the gift, after you get the gift later, imagine, after they leave. Imagine if I got you a GT3RS and you're like,

pop on the hood and you're like, okay, let me. You track this. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, you're feeling the tires. Oh, I don't know about this. It's not that good. Oh, it only has 2,000 miles on it, but they're around the NERBRA ring.

Exactly. Exactly, exactly. That would be looking at GT3RS in the tread. You don't look in the tread because, you know, yes, if I gave you a horse, just be happy that I gave you a horse. You know, don't look in the mouth, don't assess it. And so what's happening with that? Yeah, it's like you're not expressing gratitude. Yes. So I think this, these are just the public market investors, right? We've been given this gift of AI. Why are they selling their stocks right now? Why are they selling? They need to be buying. They need to be buying. This beautiful gift and they just don't want it. Yeah. They're selling. They're selling. They're selling down. Yeah. They're beat earnings, guys. Why are you not being grateful? They need to be buying the dip. They need to be buying more. They need to be levering up. They need to be going further into the public markets.

Every dollar they have. Not financial advice at all. But instead, they're looking at gift horse in the mouth saying, oh, can the, can Open AI afford all the different 1.4-trial? Is Andy Jassey the guy for the job? Is the Google, you know, is Google set up to, to, you know, actually take advantage of AI? They're digging in a little bit too much. Yeah.

They should just be happy that they've been given AI. Exactly. The next mega trend. Exactly. So also the horse could be a workhorse. A workhorse. Right? And so I think you could say this is Amazon.

Yeah. They're just kind of cooking around. It's a bit hard to define Amazon's AI strategy. It has been. Part of it is they're building data centers for anthropic, but they're definitely not getting overly ambitious. They're not like, you know, getting over their skis. But they're just doing the hard work. They're building the data centers.

They're serving, serving models. Maybe not fast enough. They might not be building the data centers fast enough. They might not be super aggressive. They're not, they're not, they're not, they're not show jobs. They're not show jumping. They're just dragging the plow. They're just consistently dragging the plow.

Old reliable Amazon's cooking along. They're staying out of the slop trough. They're not doing a deal. Amazon has not done a deal yet with OpenAI for the agentic commerce thing. Maybe that changes. But for now they're just plodding along. Who else we got over here? Let's go to the black sheep.

The black sheep. So black sheep, there's also a lot of people that can fit in this. Yes, of course. But I think maybe Carpathy is one of them. Yeah. Andre Carpathie. Some of these contrarian takes about maybe just the decade of agents. To be clear, we're not calling him a sheep. He's not...

It should be more of a black wolf. Black wolf. But the idea is that he's standing out. A lot of people in his class of ultra-respected, you know, technologists, some of the, you know, most experience, he's really been at Tesla. He's seen the AI wave. He's been working in it for decades. He's really worked on. He's printed all of it.

Yeah, he's done so much. And yet he's not sitting with the rest of him saying, bah. He broke, but he broke rank. Even though he's worked at Open AI, even though he's worked at Tesla, he broke rank, he went on the Dorcasch Patel show and said, you know what? I think we're more in a decade of agents. I think AGI might not be right around the corner. He took a contrarian stance at a very controversial time.

And he, but it was not, yeah. And he popped the bubble with it. He basically popped the bubble with it. Maybe. Well, see. Of course, the elephant in the real. The elephant in the room is, was, in my view, really more of the $1.4 trillion, right? Yes.

That was the big question. That was what everybody wanted to talk about or at least understand better. Frad asked the question and it's been downhill ever since. Yes. And it is, yeah, the elephant in the room is in every conversation. Every financing round at this point is this deal predicated on a continuation of exponential growth in investment in everything, like how much more, how risky is this relative to the amount of froth in the market?

Yeah. Never, never ask a woman, her age, a man, his salary, or a lab founder, how they're going to spend $1.4 trillion. Yeah. Or how they're going to pay for it. Yeah. Who else we got on here? So then in the top right, we have the bird's eye view.

Yes. So I thought this was, yeah, this is situational awareness. Great awareness. This is Leopold. It's the perfect name. He has the situational awareness. He's seeing everything. He's kind of the master of the board.

He's taking his bets, and he's been doing pretty well off them. Yes, yes, yes. Yeah, that one's pretty self-explanatory. Yeah, I love it. So then we go down, we have Lionshare. The Lionshare. This is Satya. Satya has taken great position in opening up.

I don't know why he's on the head stack. I'll take a third of the company, and you can give me $250 billion, and I'll take 20% off the top. And I'll take all the IP as well. Yeah, everything. I'll also take your chip, and I'm making my chip. Your chip is my chip. Your chip is not your chip.

The entire OpenAI Microsoft deal is basically, could just be summarized in one line. I get the lion's share. I get the lion's share. And that's what he did. It's fantastic. Incredible, incredible dealmaker. So let's go down here and we see. And we can zoom out a little bit.

Yep. We see monkey business. These are the podcast. That's us. We're having fun. Yep. We got props. We got all.

sorts of stuff, sound effects. We need some monkey sound effects on there. We have a bunch of animal-themed sound effects we need to have more fun with. Anyway, and then maybe let's go into the pond. We have the sitting duck. Yes, the sitting duck is incredibly cute. So Reddit, why were they, why was Reddit a sitting duck? Yeah, so I think they brought me. It's because whether or not you have a permit, you're getting, you're getting, like the hunters are going to get you. I think Alexis O'Hanian sort of laid this out saying that when Reddit did the deal to give the data to Open AI, they didn't realize how valuable that data was going to be. And that relationship has grown, grown, grown. And so they were kind of the sitting duck just sitting there.

They didn't really, they kind of got caught off guard. Maybe could have trained their own model on their data internally. Maybe could have, you know, maybe had something that was more of a valuable resource where they would. would have had more leverage if they'd weighed it a little bit. It is crazy that CoreWeave and Reddit are sitting at roughly the same market cap now. Very interesting. Yeah. Which one is more valuable over the next couple of years?

I don't know. Yeah, I mean, I feel like Reddit has mostly been, you know, they've kind of already gone out to the slaughter in a sense like every model company has trained. You'd think so, but look at the market cap. It just keeps going up. Reddit's been, I mean, Reddit was sold for $5 million or something. thing when it launched. It's been... It was 10 to Condé Nass. 10 to Condé Nass. That's a crazy,

crazy low valuation. And then eventually spun out. And then for a long time, it was in the hundreds of millions. And no one was thinking this is a tens of billions. For a long time, like, people, the narrative was not, oh yeah, this will be orders of magnitude more than snap. No way. No way. And then it just

sort of finally came together. Who's the headless chicken? Yeah, let's go down a little bit and we have the headless chicken. This is perplexity. Perplexity. So I think Perplexity, they have a lot of different strategies. Some of them kind of seem opposed to each other, right? Maybe they're doing a browser.

Maybe they're doing a Bloomberg terminal. Maybe they're rebuilding Yahoo Finance. Maybe they're building phone. The browser, to their credit, I do see more positive reviews of their browser than any of the other AI browsers. From independent folks? Yeah, independent people. We've had a lot of investors come on the show and say, like, I love the browser,

but it's hard to take that seriously. Every investor that's invested in a browser says their browser is the best browser. I don't listen to what they say, but I've just repeatedly seen people saying, like, the perplexity browser is great. So whether or not that means a win, but the headless chicken thing going over

and giving $400 million to Snapchat kind of, you know, I don't know, I think a lot of people, good for Snapchat, maybe. There's just a lot of stuff. stuff going on. It's the Snapchat deal, the trying to buy TikTok, trying to buy Chrome, launching a venture fund, Bloomberg Terminal. It's like, are you competing with all of these? Really? You're going to be TikTok and Chrome and Bloomberg and the next thing and see the next great company. It is just a lot. It's a lot to process. Yeah, like, Headless Chicken is kind of like a

fun thing to watch and then people, you know, love to talk about perplexity. They love to say like, oh, we're all short perplexity. That's true. Yeah. It's like this very, it's a very, It's become consensus, yeah. But let him cook. We'll see what happens. Yeah. So then if we go down a little bit, we have the snake in the grass. Have you guys ever witnessed a headless chicken?

No, I haven't. Growing up in the country, I have. You grew up in the country? What are you talking about? I thought you grew up with the East Bay Rationalists. I was born in Berkeley, but I grew up in wine country. Oh, okay. And I have fortunately, unfortunately, watched my father take one of the chickens, you know,

every now and again a chicken needs to be to move on to the next chapter and as a child. You sound like you're firing the chicken. Very amicable split. I mean, we're wishing the chicken the best. I mean, yes, it's, it happens. It's the next chapter. I will say that it is a real thing. They run for, you know, at least 20 seconds or so.

Yeah. And I'll never forget it. Well, before we move on, let me tell you about cognition. The makers of Devon, the AI software engineer, crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. Okay, let's continue. Okay, so next we have the snake in the grass. Snake in the grass. This is the Chinese open source models, right?

These are kind of lurking. I still don't really see that much coverage of Chinese open source models. Nobody wants to talk about it. Well, no one has bags, so they can't pump them. It's an, it's an elephant in the room to some degree. So this is where I sort of disagree with. you because snake in the grass feels like it's going to attack. Elephant in the room means we got to address it. It's like it's totally possible that the entire open source LLM ecosystem is

just like, yeah, there's like a $10 billion business there. It's sort of like, you know, a stalking horse, another animal-based analogy, but it's sort of a stalking horse for like, hey, Gemini and Anthropic, like if you guys don't lower your prices, we will go to the open source option. And that's sort of what Linux, how Linux works. It's like that, that you can kind of bid the closed source models against the open source models. But for all like the Dumer takes around, like, oh, Chinese open sources, like one day, they're just going to snap their fingers and all the Manchurian candidates are going to activate in America. I think it's more of a, I didn't realize I was using Qued and now I believe that nothing happened on Tiananmen Square.

I think, I don't believe that's more of a threat to the, it's, it's a, it's a very real threat. to the business models of some of the closed source models. Maybe. I don't know. Again, it's putting, it's certainly a pressure. Kimmy is hot on everyone's tails. I mean, Brian Chesky, he was talking about. Yeah, Brian Chesky, the other thing is a soft power thing.

Ask a Chinese open source model about Tiananmen Square. I just don't think that's going to be that big of a deal. I don't, I don't see. Those are two very different things. One is like Brian Choskey inside of opening, inside of Airbnb. It becomes a big deal if they proliferate all over the world and it's and and I'm not saying it's the end of the.

No, no, what I'm saying is that is that if you're a business owner like Airbnb and you're like Brian Cheskey at Airbnb if and you're deciding between Kimmy, you know, some open source model like deeper in the stack like you're not you're not surfacing something that has like cultural relevance. or like some sort of like, you know, where American values come through. Like, you're using it for like fraud detection or you're using it to like transform every

Airbnb listing into like grammar check every listing that comes through. Like spell check at all. Like you're doing something that's very commoditized and it's not, it's not this weird thing where you're going to inject the like the values of the Chinese people. I just see that as two sipper things. Now, now if you had a whole bunch of people. that LLM will be the new, are effectively globally going to be history books.

And if you have some control. So that's true as the application layer. At the application layer. I think of the application layer that matters. So I would be maybe more worried if it was like, oh, it turns out that Open AI is going to just use deep seek now under the hood. Sure. I'm even talking globally a bunch of different application layer companies.

Okay. Use these models because they're cheap and good. Yeah. And then they have like a very specific. point of view that's not necessarily aligned to the West. I just think that point of view is irrelevant in many, many automation use cases. For sure. For sure.

I'm not worried about Airbnb using Chinese models for like business process automation. Yeah. I also think you can, I think you can probably kind of fine tune a lot of that stuff out. Totally. Because like the, you know. Back to perplexity. They did it. Didn't they do DeepSeek 1776 or something like that?

I also did that. You did that. I did that actually before them. So it's whatever. It's whatever. Okay, now we see. It's personal. That's why you put perplexity there.

Because you got an axe to grind. Yeah. I did it before they did. But like the Chinaman Square stuff is probably just a fine tune that they like made it more Chinese. Yeah, yeah. So you can just undo that. Yeah, exactly.

I agree. One would assume. Anyway. But yeah. So we agree it's a snake in the grass, but unclear how poisonous the snake is, unclear the size of that snake. Yeah.

Anyway, let's move on. Let's move to. Who's the early bird that got the warmer? The early bird that got the worm, there's no sign here. That's kind of an artifact of the nanobanata pro. But early bird that got the worm, this is Josh Kushner. I think so. Right?

He got the worm. The worm was opening eye. Yes. He was very early on. Early with size. Early with size. Double down many times. Yeah.

He got the worm. He's the early bird. Incredible. Yeah. Okay. Why is anthropic donkey work? Donkey work? What does donkey work mean?

I'm not 100% sure that this is like a real phrase. Apparently, I was asking, I asked, I asked GVT 4.5 and I asked Gemini 3 Pro. Okay. And they both said it was a real thing. Okay, it's boring or laborious part of a job.

It's drudgery, donkey work. Yeah, so I think there's a lot of ways you could do Anthropic. Yeah, anthropology is all over the place. So in this case, I think it's kind of that Anthropic has gone very hard on coding and API and Enterprise. Okay, okay, yeah.

The laborious work. It's kind of laborious. Yeah, they're not doing like the really hot sex They're not doing a browser. They're not solving science. Yeah, they're not doing consumer science stuff. Yeah, they're doing the donkey work. This is good.

I think it's some of the more laborious stuff. I like, but there's a lot of ways you can do it. Darya is sitting there being like, who's going to take all the jobs? Who's going to take all the jobs? But you could do Anthropic as the scapegoat. David Sachs really does not like anthropic. That's true. That's true.

They get scapegoated a little bit. They never get invited to the White House. Yeah. the lame duck? Lame duck? No, lame duck is when the president is, that's the second term. Ugly duckling. Ugly duckling a little bit.

That's the one I'm thinking of. There's a little bit of chicken little of the sky is falling. Scaredy cat. Scaredy cat. They're worried about safety. There's a few of these. But I like donkey work. That feels the most accurate for what they're doing.

They're going after the entry level white collar workers. They're doing the donkey work. Google, I just love this image. I think this is the last one. Google is the fat cat. Google is the fat cat. Before we had Google Snails Pace, I think this would have been true maybe a year ago.

Fat cat's so much funnier. Look at that cat. It's so fat. I love it. All the cash flow. All the TPUs. They're GPUs. They're GPU rich.

They're rich in every sense. They have a ton of researchers. They're releasing, I mean, now they have the best image model, the best text model, depending on what bent parts do you look at? They're on top of the world. Yeah.

Okay. Slightly concerned, we have a sign for Golden Goose, but there's no goose. removed, but the sign was removed. Who stole the golden goose? Yeah, who killed the golden goose? Or is there just no gold, if there's no golden goose in the AI barnyard, is that,

is that bearish? I think one take, maybe the golden goose. Wait, so first establish what the golden goose is. The golden goose is a goose that lays a golden egg one every day and in the parable, in the story, the farmer kills

the golden goose to get all of the gold inside, but it is revealed that by killing the goose, you no longer get the passive income from the golden eggs. So it's a- Jack from the beanstock studied. It's being a little bit too greedy. But we couldn't land on who the golden goose was. So maybe one take is the golden goose, they were the neoclouds. And then the market is hurting, it's taking the goose away.

Yeah. Coreweave not in the past past what month they had been selling off a little bit. Correweave continues to lay golden eggs, but the market got overheated, and so that sort of killed the gains or something. And the gold is the GPUs, subsidized GPUs. I don't know. In the data center. It's not quite good. There's something with the Bitcoin miners that just had a lot of energy that they had effectively prepaid for that they're unlocking some value from.

Oh, well. Oh, well. But I think that's all of them. I think this is a pretty, now it's pretty clear. This helps you understand how AI is playing out. There's no more questions. No more questions. If you can see this infographic, it really makes everything crystal clear.

That's great. Well, thank you for taking us through that. Great work, Tyler. And let me tell you about Adio, the AI Native CRM, Adio builds scales and grows your company to the next level and get started. One company that didn't make the cut for our infographic was, of course, AMD. And fortunately, there is a great, great profile in the Wall Street Journal of Lisa Sue, the CEO of AM.

And let's pull this up because this is a fantastic picture minus a very weird reflection going on in the glass. And so if you zoom in on this, there's something that is right in her nose that looks like a bugger or something. It's a very odd choice of image. Of course, it's just a reflection on the glass. The photo, otherwise, the way she's positioning herself. It's powerful.

She did her job. Everything else, everything looks great from her perspective. She looks great. But the photographer just like didn't quite catch that one reflection. And so it just gives a very odd look. But anyway, let's dig into the article. The Chip CEO staring down in Vida and talk of an AI bubble at a board meeting in late 2022, Lisa Sue, chief executive of chip designer AMD, announced that she was

radically changing course. Quote, I'm going to pivot the entire company, she told the directors gathered around a boardroom table at the company's Austin campus. The rise of AI was a once in a lifetime opportunity, she said, and the company had to put AI at the center of its entire product line. Three years later, the Santa Clara, California-based company has nearly quadrupled in size. Its market value rising from 90 billion to more than $3.35 billion, despite a recent poll. back, AMD's strategy of positioning itself at the center of the global AI race has paid off handsibly making Sue into a billionaire and her company into one of the only viable designers of powerful chips needed to power advanced AI models. In a market that has recently been completely dominated

by NVIDIA, Sue is showing that there may be a place for a strong number two that can compete on... Insane flow, by the way. Check this up. Yeah, look at that. She's 56 years old. She has a PhD in a electrical engineering from MIT and a deep understanding of the physics behind her company's products. She developed a reputation as a giant slayer by out-competing market leader Intel a decade ago to take the lead in producing central processing units or CPUs. Now she's staring down the ultimate Goliath in Nvidia, the world's most valuable company and the foremost maker of the chips that power AI data centers. AMD will have to deliver on its promise to produce chips that are comparable to invidias.

most of the sophisticated... Staring down her own cousin, of course. It is. True. Investors bid up AMD's stock price in October after the company announced a marquee deal with Oracle and OpenAI, which have both agreed to buy tens of thousands of AMD's newest generation of chips

known as the MI450. Mika says the Jensen's Sue Thanksgiving must be wild. I wonder if they're close enough to actually have Thanksgiving. Their first cousins once removed. Yeah, that feels like... It just depends on how

hard do you go for Thanksgiving? Some people have, you know, how big is your Thanksgiving? Do you go? I have a pretty small family, too. My, uh, my, uh, my in-laws, but we're still doing, we're talking 20 people, maybe is like a typical Thanksgiving. Um, and, but I know so there are some people that are like, yeah, let's get, let's get a hundred people together. Let's turn it into, let's turn it into Woodstock, which, which I'm down for, honestly, it's fun. Maybe you need, you know what do you need to do this Thanksgiving? You need to get everyone who's cooking for your Thanksgiving dinner on linear. It's the system for modern software development. It's a purpose-built tool for planning and building products.

The product you're building this Thanksgiving is a beautiful, bountiful feast. It's a feast, folks, and you need linear to help you plan who's doing what. Who's making the pumpkin pie? Who's making the cranberry sauce? Can you assign tickets? Can you close those tickets? Are you using AI agents? Are you using AI agents?

I think that there's something here. Everyone wants to build coding agents. Nobody wants to build Feast agents. And I think that's wrong. Get on linear. I love it. The Open AI deal turbocharged, the roadmap, said Sue. It represents a huge vote of confidence in the MI450,

which, of course, we've seen from semi-analysis is performing very well. And AMD has caught up a ton this year. They've just been on a tear, taking feedback from all over the tech industry, integrating it very quickly, and actually outperforming Invidia with certain models. And all of that's been chronicled by the folks over at Semi Analysis in their inference max model. So the growing AI market is a huge opportunity, and we want to make sure that we have deep partnerships that enable to get us a big piece of that. The rest will handle itself.

The dealmaking was on display again this week when the company said it would work with Cisco and Saudi Arabian AI venture firm and a Saudi Arabian AI venture firm to build a large cluster of data centers in the kingdom. Sue attended a black tie dinner. I think so. Sue attended a black tie dinner for Saudi crown prince Mohammed Bid Salman. Alongside other executives at the White House Tuesday, an AMD sent a representative to a U.S.-S.-Saudi Arabia investment forum on Wednesday.

Until now, data centers have mostly been entirely Nvidia's market. One tech analyst said, AMD is in a position to take a more meaningful piece of that. So $1 trillion a year. Let's get into it. At the heart of Sue's strategy is her belief that there is insane. a noticeable demand for computing power, and that as the market for AI grows, the company's offering the best and most reliable AI infrastructure will thrive.

She said she believes AI is a, he's not a zero-sum game, and that recent concerns about an overheated market for chips and data centers are exaggerated. In recent weeks, the massive spending on data centers have intensified concerns that an AI bubble is building, AMD's stock, which had jumped nearly 60% in October, has fallen about 20% this month. I'm not concerned about an AI bubble, Sue said in the interview. I do think that those who are thinking that way are a bit too short-sighted. They don't really see an hour of the technology.

It's actually only down, I don't know exactly when its article was released, but 13 and three-quarters in the last month. Yeah. Better than some others. This is not the time to stay on the sidelines and worry, hey, am I over investing? she said, it's much more dangerous if you underinvest than if you overinvest, in my opinion. Let's go. I love it. A year ago, she predicted that the market for AI chips would hit 500 billion in sales annually by 2028.

At an investor presentation last week in New York, she was even more optimistic. The market for AI and data center computing, she said, will reach one trillion a year by 2030. Interesting that she underpredicted or seemingly underpredictive. because Jensen by himself is saying that he's, that NVIDIA has a line of sight to 500 in 2026. Half a trillion. And that's just for them, revenue full year. Yeah.

That is a lot of money. Wow. Very exciting. Well, speaking of NVIDIA, Sue is also helping to capitalize on an inflection point in AI, many executives in the chips industry, including NVIDIA, chief Jensen Wong, expect demand to shift from clusters designed to assist in large training runs to inference.

and inference doesn't require chips with as much computing muscle as training does, according the Wall Street Journal. As AI models like Chatchip T and Gemini become increasingly integrated into daily life, and as companies design thousands of enterprise software tools that rely on AI models, demand for inference functions is about to go up by a billion times, Wang said last month. Swang and Sue and Wong are distant cousins, but they didn't meet until both were established executives. That's interesting.

So I don't think they'll be hanging out at Thanksgiving together if they're, if they're, if they're, if they're, if they're, if they're just met recently. But maybe, maybe. Unless that's just a story and they've, their entire family, both their family lines have been colluding to corner the AI chip market for generations. It does feel like a, uh, a storyline from Dune or something. AMD has a strong line of inferencing, inferencing, inferencing,

but has struggled to design chips powerful enough to compete with Nvidia in training. Let's see, they're, they're, they're going, uh, they go, uh, They go into a little bit of her backstory. She was Taiwan-born, Queens raised. She worked for IBM, where she focused on designing products, according to the needs of big customers. When she took over as CEO of AMD in 2014,

the company had a market value of less than $3 billion. It's up 100x since then. She did deals with Chinese partners that helped stabilize the company's finances and move the chip designer deeper into the processors that powered PCs and data centers, capitalizing on Intel's weakness. Today, AMD sells an estimated 41% of data center CPUs up from, essentially zero percent five years ago.

What a run. It was that success that allowed AMD's board of directors to trust Sue when she proposed in that fateful board meeting in 2022 to pivot the company to go head to head with Nvidia. One of the board members attended, said, told this story. She had a vision around our ability to be AI from endpoint to data center

and everything in between, said Tall Walker, one of the board members who attended the meeting. she had the conviction of the need and the need to move fast. What do you think about vision, Jordy? Is it good that she had vision? I think vision is still underrated. Your pro-vision.

Pro-vision. Some people don't like vision. Some people are anti-vision these days. I think I land on the side of pro-vision. I think it's important. Sue was able to dispense with Intel as a competitor because Intel had self-inflicted wounds at Daniel Newman.

See a research firm Futuram Group. That's in sharp contrast to Nvidia, a company that's expected more than $200 billion in revenue next year that has gotten thousands of AI developers hooked on the proprietary software that Nvidia chips rely on. But Nvidia can't make enough chips to keep up with demand

and the open AI deal prove that large AI companies are eager to diversify their supplier base. We got some major update here on Lisa Sue as a celebrity. As AMDs become a bigger player, she's begun to embrace the spotlight. Earlier

this year at an industry summit in Paris, Sue was treated like a celebrity with many young women asking her to take selfies and sign autographs. That's amazing. Jensen Wong was signing autographs a couple months ago. That was this year maybe? It was like five, six months ago. Yeah. That one image. Well, now she's, now she's also signing autographs as the, as the industry grows. more and more celebrities are minted. Well, in July, Sue attended an AI summit where Trump rolled out his AI strategy. When she addressed the audience, Sue pulled out one of the company's chips out of her pocket and said it had 185 billion transistors and took my nine months to make. Such chip can cost tens of thousands of dollars.

Trump later mentioned her in his speech as one of the notable executives in attendance. She was still in the shadow of Wong, however, who Trump asked to stand while the crowd applauded. What a job you've done, the president said to the NVIDIA CEO. So he's like, he's like, thanks for the Lisa sued for being here. But let's give it up for Jensen. Well, again, he's giving it up too much for Jensen. He's not having, you know, a balanced approach. I think, well, I don't think it's necessarily his job to.

Well, 10 times the market cap, 10 times the applause, perhaps. That's right. Market cap weighted by applause. Let's see. Over the next decade, AI will transform every industry, every business, every product, every interaction. Our chips are enabling this massive new revolution. Well, very, very interesting. I would like to learn more about Lisa Sue as a celebrity.

I want to see more deep dives, more page sex style writing is what I'm looking for. Maybe a New York Post cover. Exactly. A lot of caught on the street. A lot of like, you know, like what type of copy? Does she like? That's what we need to know. We need to get her in the mansion section. Should we do some mansion section? We do. We should. There's a big question in the mansion section today First, let me tell you about graphite.com. Code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. The question I know everyone has been asking Is is 200 million the new 100 million in luxury real estate? What do you think? Many people have been asking that. So there's a 200 million dollar house in Indian Creek a 250 million dollar house in Bel Air.

a $300 million house in Aspen and a $205 million house in Palm Beach. And this is funny because we've reviewed like almost all of these houses. We've actually like... Old Rock says Lisa Sue on Hot Ones. That would be great. Maybe on Theo Vaughn as well. A surge of ultra-rich buyers has pushed asking prices to new extremes, yet many headline-grabbing Mega Mansions languish on the market

or trade for a fraction of their debut numbers just a decade ago. The 100 million price tag was still, considered a new frontier for luxury real estate. The first nine-figure home sale occurred in 2011. Wow. By 2019, there had been about 20 sales recorded at that price point. Now, real estate insiders say a new price pricing benchmark is setting the tone for the high-end market, $200 million. Since 2025, at least five major U.S. properties have listed for $200 million or more, mostly concentrated in South Florida. On Indian Creek, a private island near Miami Beach, Florida often called the billionaire bunker, cosmetic surgeon, Dr. Aaron Rowlands and his wife,

Marine Rollins, listed their unfinished waterfront estate for $200 million earlier this month. About 70 miles north in Palm Beach, a circa 2005 mansion, once owned by the late Frank and Maureen Wilkins, is asking 205. In Aspen, the longtime home of California billionaire, Stuart and Linda Resnick listed for 300. The listings raise the question, is this aspirational pricing, or as the ranks of the global billionaires expand at a rapid clip, is it possible that the top of the market has actually doubled? I would say, yes, it's totally possible. Look at the run-up in the stock price. The assets are more valuable than ever. There's going to be a massive wave of wealth created from the AI,

boom. I would not want to be in the market for a single-family home within 20 square miles of open AI. Yeah. There was... There's some post. I don't know if it made it in the timeline, but there was some post about, there's like 40 people that are looking for houses in the $5 to $7 million range in North San Francisco, and there's none for sale. All cash offers. I'm sure. From the liquidity. Also, Porsche allocations are going to be pretty rough out there. I think so. I expect it. Matt in the chat says, Lisa Sue is a car enthusiast. No way. drives a metallic blue, graphite, Porsche. Oh, I like that.

She apparently names them after her chips. So she has cars, Risen, Epic, and Radion. That's cool. That's very fun. Yeah, this Resnick, this Bel Airhouse, the 250, I remember digging into him, and he was part of the telecom buildout in 2001. And so even though his company went bankrupt, he still wound up with a full. fortune that allowed him to buy a huge house. You could think about the same thing happening in the AI boom. Well, here's another note.

AMD sponsors the Mercedes AMG F1 team, which has a new co-owner, the CEO of Crowdstrike. So all eyes on George's team this weekend. We'll see how they do with their new co-owner. Before we move on to our next story, let me tell you about fin.a.I. The number one AI agent, AI that handles your customer support, the number one AI agent for customer service. Silicon Valley estate sells to mystery buyer. I want you to guess who it is, Dordy. I don't know. I want you to make wild guesses. Wild guesses. In California, Silicon Valley, a roughly 12-acre estate designing classical Italian style has sold for more than, sold for $56 million. There we go. known as Via del Prato.

The property is located in Portola Valley, one of the country's wealthiest towns. The sellers are venture capital investor, Bandel Carrano, and his wife, Paula Carrano, who built the estate after buying the land in 2013 for $13.625 million property record show. Hmm. Have you looked up Bandel Carano and what deals he did to be able to afford such a wonderful house? I would love to know the story of his venture capital work. The Coronas put the home on the market for $85 million in February. The most recent was asking price was 65.

It went for 56. It's the priceiest home to sell in Portola Valley to date. The prior record was $35 million for a 13-acre estate. The buyer who currently lives in San Jose searched for several years before purchasing the Portola Valley property. But they didn't want to name the claim. client. The Coronas didn't respond to request for comment. Massiveness. You got to get it. And Del Corona was an investor in Polycom Inc. Oh, wait, the Polycom? No way. That's amazing. Well deserved.

One of the, one of the most iconic conference call phones. We used to have one on our desk. It's probably in the studio. It was a prop that we used for a long time. I think it's in the back. You got to bring it back. We never actually used it. We wanted to have it set up. How long until somebody creates like an AI polycom? I don't know. Yeah, that's so crazy. He did the deal in Polycom and made a bag. I love it.

Listing agent said, okay, they built after raising an old home, completing the project in 2021. In addition, the roughly 23,000, 12,300 square foot main house. Property house has a pool, a pool house. And then another unfinished 5,000 square foot building has a ballroom and a one.

wine seller. Wow. There we go. They designed property. He's a general partner at Oak Investment Partners, a venture capital firm with offices in Wilton, Connecticut, Menlo Park. In 24, the Carranos listed a nearly 2,000-acre ranch outside of Bozeman, Montana. Portola Valley had a median sale price of $5.5 million. Interesting. What else is in here that we wanted to look at? So there is some articles on San Francisco. What's going on there? San Francisco. is back after pandemic-related struggles. And growing up, affluent young families demanding space have elevated the 9-4-127 zip code,

which is anchored by the walkable West Portal Village Center and encompasses desirable residential neighborhoods, such as San Francis Wood. This west side pocket reliably offers a rare San Francisco luxury, detached single-family homes with yards. The suburbia in the city lifestyle has recently propelled the zip code to rival historically more expensive city enclaves. In October, its $2.5 million median listing price was second only to the $2.7 million median price in Premier

address Pacific Heights. Interesting. So there are a bunch of shops. People are moving in. The median price per square foot is $952 and the houses are moving. 37. Days on the market is all it takes for the median house to find a new buyer. Pretty good. Let me tell you about profound. Get your brand mentioned in chat, GPT. Reach millions of consumers who use AI to discover new products and brands. Should we let AI ruin the M-Dash?

I think the game's over. It's over. I think AI has already ruined the M-Dash. I think it's ruined. I think we have to move on from it entirely. But Joel Stein at the Wall Street Journal has another take. Joel says don't let AI ruin the M-Dash and writes a defense of the newly controversial punctuation mark. It's so funny because I, M-Dashes are not even the way that I first identify a lot of AI writing.

Like it's often the, it's not this, it's that that hits way harder. Totally. Joel says a few weeks ago, my 16-year-old son, Laslo, a student journalist, received a tip for his school newspaper. A source had told him that the administration, which had banned all use of AI, had used it to write an email to parents. The email in question was certainly boring enough

to be written by ChatGBT, GBT, but it was also boring enough to be written by a school administrator. We ran the text through two AI detection tools, and both determined that there was a zero percent chance a computer wrote it. I don't know how a computer figures out if it's dealing with another computer,

but I'm guessing it asks which of nine photos, are motorcycles. So why did this source think AI had written it? Because the email contained M-Dash's. The M-Dash, a punctuation mark a bit longer than a hyphen that denotes a long pause, has become the black light on the hotel sheets for AI shamers, a sign that an essay... Blacklight on the hotel sheets is a good turn of raise. A sign that an essay, a letter, or any kind of written work was written by a machine and not a human.

The M-Dash is now a GPTism and is not advisable unless you want people to think your writing as an output of an LLM. On Instagram, the beauty influencer Lux, Jen, warned that if people don't want to be accused of using AI, they should take out the chat GPT-hyphen. They just call it the chat-p-tieft. Last week, OpenAI CEO posted on X the following brag. Small but happy win, if you tell ChatGPT not to use M-Dashes

and your custom instructions, it finally does what it's supposed to do. It's interesting that they just didn't release an update that eliminates it. Like, they seem to think it's a feature, not a bug, and they're asking people to kind of opt out of it by doing custom instructions, which I'm sure, like, one percent of the user base actually uses. Yeah, it's weird.

It's weird that they couldn't just have a custom instruction that goes over all of chat chit that just says, like, you don't need to never use the MDash. Just let's turn it down by 90%. Yeah. All this mdash shaming has been upsetting because I, a professional writer, love, love, love an m dash. And he uses a lot of mdashes. In my writing, the chat chad chabit tells me I use 11. m-dashes every thousand words.

Wow. Other professional writers use them a lot too, four point four times more than the average person. These numbers upon investigation could be highly inaccurate since I got there from ChatGBTGBT, which explains one reason why my son's schools bans it. But the point is M-Dashes are loved by professionals. This is starting to make a lot more sense. What is ChatGBTT trained on?

A lot of professional writing. They literally have a deal with the Wall Street Journal. And so if it's used 4.4 times more than in everyday writing, which is just going to come up a lot. Yeah. I mean, if you tried to, you have to give it some direction

on like where, what the output's going to sound like. Yeah. And if it just winds up being like, yeah, make it sound like a, like a Reddit comment. It's like, okay,

well, that could go all over the place. That could be very, very weirdly worded. And this would not be very consistent. Yeah. So the point is, M-Dashes are loved by professionals. Why? Because more than any other punctuation mark

that M-Dash is deeply human. It's the breath marks of Emily, Dickinson, the stream of consciousness of Virginia Woolf, the head-clogging maximalism of David Foster Wallace, or the self-aggrandizing asides of Joel Stein. It's also the mark of discretion when Holden Caulfield tells his writer that he loves it when his classmates digressed during a presentation. He says, I don't like it when somebody sticks to the point all the time. The boys that got the best marks in oral expression were the ones that stuck to the point all the time. I admit it.

and he admits it naturally with an M-Dash. Large language models consume a lot of the best writing out there, which is why they use M-Dashes. Unlike most people today who think a period is a rude way of screaming, AI believes in punctuation. If there's anything to take away from the M-Dash scare, it's that we should use more of them, because while most people can't find one on their keyboard

and wouldn't know when to use it if they did, that's pretty funny. The M-Dash requires more nuance than a thumbs-up, a heart, or an egg plant. It's less jarring than parentheses, but a bigger interruption than commas. It's the length of an M, which sets it apart from the boring shorter N-Dash. In the men's locker room for writers, we make fun of N-Dashes. Interesting. Most of all, we should use M-Dashes because they are a declaration of humanity

in the face of AI's onslaught, if only ordinary people will learn how to use them. Do you see this link, shorter N-Dash? for some reason it linked to n dash.in and that website just goes nowhere N dash I don't know why it's just like

Indian domain I don't know that's just like a mistake or something they should correct that because n dash. dot in doesn't go anywhere yeah I I have never really used M dashes

I also I like this take I mean I agree with this this makes sense he should defend the defend the castle maybe the bigger tell to your earlier point is around that contrastive parallelism that it's not this, it's that. That's what that's called.

And that contrastive parallelism, I was wondering about that. And I went through a bunch of the old scripts that I'd written for YouTube and I couldn't find a single example of ever using that style, that structure. I'd written a lot about a lot of different tech companies. And I'd never said, you know, I've made a whole video about Nvidia. In my Nvidia video, I never say, Nvidia isn't just a GPU company. Google isn't just a search company. I've never, I never said that.

It's a holding company of the future. Yeah, yeah. I don't know, I don't know how that got baked in. I think that's maybe from marketing, from like marketing lingo, because I was trying to run the benchmark of does this contrastive parallelism creep in more when you ask, when you ask the, let's see, what is it? It's antithetical parallelism or contrastive construction or correlative conjunction pairs. This is the term.

I learned this from them. But that antithetical parallelism, it's not this, it's that. We're not writing a story. I never use that. And it just, it has a sound that sounds like marketing. It sounds like, it sounds like marketing. Like, I feel like you could probably go through the New York or the Wall Street Journal, and you'll see a lot of m-dashes, but you won't see a lot of antithetical parallelism.

And so I feel like the antithetical parallelism is an even bigger tell. And, Tyler, what do you think? I also think it's interesting. Like, you would imagine that a lot of these, like, GPTisms would be, they would only be, like, with one model, right? It's like, just 4-0 does that weird way. Totally, totally. But it's, like, not that at all. Yeah, yeah.

It's also not just like Open AI models. Yep. Like yesterday I tried the Gemini 3 Pro and I asked write an ad for a GT3RS. Yeah. And then, so I'll just read the start. Listen to this. There's a moment at 9,000 RPM where the world stops. The noise isn't just sound, M-Dash, it's frequency.

The vibration isn't just an engine, M-Dash. It's a heartbeat. Like, it's like the exact same. It's very similar. It's very similar. It's very strange. I wonder like why this is. there's a case you could say that models are just like training off each other but it seems

that seems like not something that they're doing yeah I don't know it's just kind of landed in this zone where that is what is seen as good or something I don't know and it's just like sort of decided that antithetical parallelism is the greatest thing so uh thank you to uh Joel Stein at the Wall Street Journal for writing this article I will support you in your fight to keep the M-Dash. But I want to hear your take on contrastive construction. Action speak louder than words, John.

Are you going to just rip like 20 M-dashes in your next essay? So the problem is that I have never, I'm the guy, I'm the one who doesn't know how to find it on my keyboard. I'm who he's talking about. Just hit dash-dash space. Find it on your keyboard and wouldn't know when to use one if they did.

I don't know when to use it. I don't know where to find it. It wasn't taught to me. in English class. I just never learned that. I'm teaching it to you right now. Go on your keyboard, at dash-dash space on IMessage,

and it will create it for you. Okay, but when do I use it? You can also do shift option dash. Shift option dash. I don't know. I think you can't teach you old dog too much. I don't think you can teach an old dog new tricks. I don't know if it's possible

to teach me to use an M-Dash, like reliably. I think I might just throw them in randomly. What if I start using like two M-Dash? next to each other. Just throw people off. No one would expect that, right? It's completely unexpected. So you'd be like, oh, well, like,

this looks like AI, but it's something weird. It would be a really bad model. Whatever model he used was terrible. GBT2 for this. Anyway, let's move on. Let's do some timeline, and then I think we can come back to this article on solvency if we have more time.

But first, let me tell you about turbopuffer, serverless vector and full-text, built from first principles on object storage used by cursor notion linear anthropic 10x cheaper extremely scalable I like when we're talking over each other during the ad reads though that's really the flavor we want to bring through I love it okay so there's a major shakeup going on at TBD Labs met Augustus Odina is out and I'm giving him a follow for this he's going he's going independent free agency yesterday I resigned from TBD labs slash meta AI wasn't there for very long

but I think I got a few useful things done. Nice. It's an impressive group of people. And it's especially impressive that it got assembled as quickly as it did with such a high talent bar at a large company. Quote, unquote, founder mode is real and good. I will certainly miss my coworkers there.

I think now is an unusually high leverage time to pursue ambitious new projects at the intersection of AI and other technologies. Please reach out to me if you're interested in that sort of thing. And I expect I will have something more detailed to share in not too long. Is that the sound of a thousand venture capitalists writing term sheets with blank numbers on them? I messaged him yesterday and he said,

a fan of the show would be honored to be on the show when he's ready to talk about it. Yeah. So looking forward to that. Bernie Sanders. Okay. What's happening with Bernie? Fire and shots. He's taking shots of the AI oligarchs.

He says, here are some of the most powerful AI oligarchs. in the world, enjoying a private dinner with a dictator who murders his own citizens with a bone saw. Whoa. Uh, does anyone really believe they want to wipe out poverty or improve life for ordinary male Americans? I don't. And he's sort of maugging Greg Brockman here because he leaves Greg Brockman's net worth.

He doesn't even try and estimate it. He just says question mark, question, question mark. Guess Bernie Sanders age? Uh, 75. Guess again. 78. Guess again. 77.

Guess again. 80. Guess again. I have no idea. 84. 84. Oh, he's up there. He's up there.

Oh, wow. Okay. So, grandpa is pissed. He's absolutely pissed. But what does that to do with him? Not being able to look up Greg Brockman, the CTO of Stripe, do a back of the envelope. What's Stripe trading for in the private markets? Call some secondary brokers.

If you're Bernie, you just need to call a bunch of secondary brokers, understand where Stripe is trading. then work backwards from what his, what his stripes take is, then call Satya Nadella, ask him based on the equity. Are you marking OpenAI at 500, or do you think you should mark it more at like 400 or maybe 600? Are you bullish on that? All of that goes into the DCF. You should build a spreadsheet and then you would have a fair market valuation for Greg Brockman's net worth. And you wouldn't need to use questions marks.

Chad got pretty close, 83 and 85. Good work. But, you know, if you really wanted to stick it to his American AI, oligarchs, he could have used like Kimmy to, yeah, do the kind of analysis that you were talking about. He would have gotten a lot closer. I think we need

I think we probably need to do more to define oligarch in the AI era, right? Yeah. Does does a billion dollar network? I thought people would use Plutarch. Plutarchersy. Plutarch is a

person. But what's one? Plutocrat? There's one that just means... Technocracy. There's one that specifically means wealth. That's like wealth. The plutocrats. That's it, right?

Plutocracy is... I think plutocracy is plutocrat. But also, I mean, does Bernie not realize that Greg Brockman... Yeah, government by the wealthy is plutocracy. Oligarchy is something else. That's just ruled by a few, I think. Ruled by a few. Interesting.

A small people, a small group of people having... control of a country, an organization, or institutions. Well, you know what Bernie's got to do? He's got to start a lab, start a foundation model company and compete in the free market. I like it. I like that active retirement. Yes. And then start trading on public.com. Investing for those that take it seriously. Multi-ass investing. Trust is by millions. Yeah, I don't blame Bernie for being a little bit salty at this point because he's never on those charts of the best political traders in history. That's true. He's been having to sit there and watch Nancy Pelosi go on for the most insane runs. And he's just missed out.

The FOMO must be crazy. Every day he's opening up and Nancy's up another mill. And he's just sitting there like, ah, I missed it. I missed it. It's a trade of this century. Sam 3D. Meta. We talked about this a little bit.

What? Yeah, Tharva. Yeah. is hyped on meta's new model, M3D. I forgot about this. So this was purposely released at the perfect time because we were just earlier accusing meta of slopping it up at the slop trough with meta vibes. And, you know, there's a little bit of a narrative that was emerging,

which is like, okay, you know, Zuck did this whole talent war. He acquired a ton of talent, clearly invested crazy amounts, huge gigawatt, five gigawatt plan, Hyperion, Pro Mee. Methias. He's going all in and on AI. And then the first thing that he came out with was like meta vibes, this sort of like sloppy TikTok AI clone that didn't really break through and just kind of frustrated everyone in the timeline did not appreciate it, did not like it. And so at that point, I think everyone was calling for, okay, you got to deliver something that's actually solid. You got to deliver something that's useful, that's valuable. Maybe it's a

contribution to open source. Maybe it's a, you know, even just an API for coding that's really good or a model that does something unique, you know, special. Or just free ASI for everyone. That would also be acceptable. Yes, that would definitely reset the narrative on is meta slopping it up at the trough. But this is an example of them not slopping up at the trough. This feels elevated. This feels useful.

I'm very excited for where this gets implemented all over the place. This feels like a very serious organization, like the work of a serious organization, the work of a group that's taking their work seriously and not just trying to, you know, score points, go viral, just make a couple extra bucks. They're actually doing some real research. So I was excited about this. What was your take? Yeah, I mean, this is really cool. I think people have probably just over-indexed too much on vibes. Yep. Because, like, I don't even really think of vibes as being like an Alexander Wang project. It's like they trained a new model. That's not their model. It's just a bunch of project managers to create a new app. Yep. So I think there's still like a ton of really good researchers. I'm very

excited to see what they actually put out because I assume that it's going to be great. And I And it's hard to know without actually knowing the usage of meta-AI. You can look into it a little bit by just looking at the App Store charts and seeing the kind of traction they have. But I think in hindsight, they would have just been much better off not releasing that or not making it a moment. Dude, you're telling me you don't like meta-bibs, dog. What are you doing? That is Trump in an orange and rainbow suit dancing. I thought we had PTZ.

I thought we could zoom in on this. Yeah, I mean, there's some golden stuff. You know what I was actually thinking about was they kind of, it's kind of a do nothing win situation, right? Because I feel like at least this year, the vast majority of AI slop will be consumed on Instagram. Like, no matter if, even if it gets made in the SORA app, like it's coming over to Instagram if it's going to do well.

And it's going to be distributed on the other platforms. And so I would be very closely watching the, the actual user minutes, the time on site. But I would imagine that the amount of SORA generated content, the user minutes is like a hundred times on Instagram than on the actual SORA app, just because it's such a bigger, bigger audience. And so even though it's made by SORA,

it's distributed elsewhere. Anyway, yeah, let's check in with the... What's going on? Google's Cheetah. SOR is still number nine. in the chart. Not bad. Capcut and TEMU shop like a billionaire are sitting just ahead alongside Go Wish, your digital

wish list. Well, let me tell you about numeral.com. Let Numeril worry about sales tax and VAT compliance. Compliance handled so you can focus on growth. Luxury watch guy is concerned about the Bitcoin sell-off because he says there are going to be so many effing APs on the market, Face Palm. Flooding

the aftermarket. So we'll see how that nets out. But the cryptocurrency industry certainly has been known to enjoy an AP. Yeah. Google's genius, by not selling TPUs, Google allows

NVIDIA to maintain high GPU pricing, which in turn props up price of inference. Google then captures that inference price premium by running TPUs for inference on GCP. This is a conspiracy theory by Dave 3 and 30 Tepper. I'm not sure how real that is. Yeah, there's also... They are going to sell TPS to.

Just because you have two players in the market doesn't mean you can sort of have a, you know, what happens in the soda industry, right? But effectively, like, the general... I was thinking of the GLP one market. Yeah. There's just a lot of demand. You don't need to cut prices.

The price... That. And you also understand that you can get in, there can be reason not to get in a race to the bottom dynamic and effectively have a gentleman's agreement to keep prices in a certain range. Of course, that can go too far. Well, let me tell you about Vanta. Automate compliance and security.

Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform. Do you mind doing some timeline while I, quick brain. Pierre from Cal, dot com says shower thought why is no one doing outbound for pizza hey this is giji from gigi's pizza calling you ordered last week we have a pepperoni pizza ready and could deliver it in 10 minutes are you hungry tech sales guys has a trillion dollar idea and of course it goes viral again some ideas uh and bangers are evergreen uh Morgan houseill yesterday uh was saying I think the majority of societal problems right now are all downstream of housing affordability.

Austin asked, how would you fix housing affordability? The current admin has suggested 50-year mortgages. We'll see how much of, we'll see if those go through and how much of an impact that they have. But Morgan Housel says, build more homes, plenty of demand, plenty of capital, mostly a local zoning issue. And that certainly tracks living here in California. John Palmer, dear friend of the show and somebody that we are actually working on a little project with, says, this might sound crazy, but they should pivot. He's talking about Sunday robotics, which make the cute new robots with fantastic little hats. He says, this might sound crazy, but Sunday should pivot to a consumer app where you just teleoperate your own mess.

which is the name of the robot and meet up with your buddies and do fun stuff as robots. I agree. I would love to meet up with the lads in the real world in robot form. I think you might be on to something. There was a story coming out earlier this week. An investigation from the lever found that a PE firm is buying hockey rinks and banning parents from recording and taking photos of their kids games. Based.

This story broke because they tried enforcing the rule on the wrong person, U.S. Senator Chris Murphy. So a little excerpt here as the $40 billion youth sports industry comes under private equity control. Corporate-owned facilities and leagues from hockey rinks to cheerleading arenas have begun. prohibiting parents from recording their own kids sports games. Instead, parents are forced to subscribe to these companies' exclusive recordings and streaming service, which can cost many times more than the streaming costs for professional sporting events. That's so funny because I was thinking about how, how, like, I, I'm such a gear nerd

that oftentimes when I'm watching my four-year-old play soccer, I'm like, one of these days I'm going to bring out these like PTCZ cameras out here and like get the most cinematic footage. And they're going to have to go up against me. I'm going to be fighting them. Yeah, every kid's sport team should have a dad or a mom that's the CTO. And their job is just to rig the entire field with cameras and then provide crazy edits for each kid after. Even if they lose, it's like the one moment that they had, you know, they finessed someone. You still think this is base, Tyler?

You're still saying hello base department? I mean, I don't know. You appreciate value creation. How else do you expect private equity firms to make money? Yeah, how else do you expect them to make money? Hardworking private equity firms to, you know, build, you know, afford their interest payments. Yeah. In some instances, parents have been threatened that if they chose to defy the rules and record the game,

they may end up on a blacklist that punishes their kids teams. Well, what they need to do is they need to form some sort of like union, basically, where they all say, we all are going to film or none of us are going to attend and we're going to take our business elsewhere. Those threats were even reportedly made to a sitting a sitting U.S. senator. I was told this past weekend that if I live streamed my child's hockey game, my kids team will be penalized and lose a place in the standings, said Chris Murphy at a public event. Why is that? Because a private equity company has bought up the rinks.

So he was trying to live stream himself. Like he was just trying to set up a camera and live, like, how does that? Like, at some point, at some point, I think the obvious solution here is parents can take as many pictures as they want. If I'm a parent, I'm going to take some pictures.

But I would probably still get the recording. I would probably still subscribe so that family members could watch. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It doesn't have to be all or nothing. Compete in the free market. Let us both, Phil. whoever gets the better vibe real,

whoever gets the craziest edit out of it is going to be able to sell it. And if I can out edit you and I bring better gear than your private equity backed videographer, I'm not paying. I'm not paying for it.

Let me tell you about Figma. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. You can get started. Triple gleams. Every time Open AI says anything, it gets turned into a headline these days. The latest one is that the keyword

is headwins. They have to start using sign language. But I guess even that would still potentially get turned into a headline. Yeah, I don't know. It's very tricky. Signing something to the TG. I feel like I feel like people use, I feel like if you went through, if you went through a variety of like earnings call transcripts from plenty of public companies, CEOs say the word headwinds all the time. They're like, oh, yes, like this particular thing, the tariffs, that's a headwind. Oh, this is a headwind. Interest rates might be a headwind.

That might be a headwind. Competition might be a headwind. Like, people throw this out all the time. Yeah, if you say as a business that we don't have headwinds, you're not going to be taken seriously. Yeah, yeah. But Open AI has somehow wound up in a situation where they're so priced perfection. that even just admitting that there might be more competition is like a massive news cycle now.

It's pretty remarkable. But the actual quote here is that Sam Altman warned of headwinds from resurgent Google. This, of course, is a story that we've all been tracking through Gemini III. It's very good. Some temporary economic headwinds for our company. Economic headwinds is pretty wild. Didn't have to say it, but that part in. I wonder how that's going to manifest.

Are people going to be unsubscribing from chatyptee going over to Gemini as an app? Or are they going to, is this on the API side? The API side seems a little bit more, like, easy to, like, slide around from one to the other. It feels like Open AI certainly caught up very quickly with Codex. They were behind for a while and they caught up. But now Google's, you know, sort of out in front, although Anthropics doing very well. It's all just like a variety of horse races. some of the revenue should be stickier than others.

But when the goal is $100 billion in revenue so fast with this serious of competition, it is very difficult. He also said, chat Chb-T is AI to most people, and I expect that to continue. So, Brand is a powerful element, but not enough to eliminate all competitive threats. He added, I don't want this to be a downer. We are doing remarkably well as a company, and I expect that to continue. Yes, yes.

Let me tell you about Julius AI, the AI data analyst that works for you. Join millions who use Julius to connect their data, ask questions, and get insights in seconds. What is this story of the FBI raising a bounty for a former Olympic snowboarder

who turned alleged drug kingpin? We love these stories. We covered this guy on the show before. Okay, his name's Ryan Wedding. Ryan James Wedding. He's married to the game. Is he? What is that?

No, what, Ryan Wedding? Oh, Ryan Wedding, okay. Yes, he's married to the drug deal game, I suppose. He's a former Olympic snowboarder from Canada. He represented Canada at the 2002 Winter Olympics in Men's Parallel Giant Slalom. Whoa. After the Olympics, it is alleged that he became a transnational drug trafficker

and orchestrated the murders of various witnesses. Whoa. And he's only 44. So he's kind of just kind of hitting his stride. He was added earlier this year, March 6, to the FBI 10 Most Wanted. So he's in the top 10. Ten. They have any idea where he is?

I wonder how he'd hunt this guy down. And they're saying he's running one of the largest drug trafficking operation and is believed to be the dominant cocaine distributor in Canada. So from the Canadian Olympic team to the Canadian narcotics trafficking MVP status, Pam Bondi, the hard thing is when they talk about. Because drug kingpins have just been the stars of so many different great television TV shows and movies, Pam Bondi said he's the modern day iteration of Pablo Escobar. Somebody was about to turn him in, but they hear that, and they're like, oh, he's too cool to turn in.

I can't do it. It's not worth it. I just got to be friends with this guy. I'm living through history. Oh, wow. So after the 2002 Winter Olympics, he moved back to Vancouver and attended university. He got into bodybuilding and started working as a bouncer. After two years in university, he dropped out and began to speculate in real estate,

which he financed by growing marijuana in a massive warehouse. He eventually expanded his operation and joined up with Iranian and Russian smugglers. And in 2010, he was convicted of attempting to buy drugs from a U.S. government agent. And he went to prison for it. You know, there are so many startups these days that are going after Palantir's market, competing in enterprise software, enterprise AI, for deployed engineers. It's all a bunch of memes.

Everyone's keying off of the Palantir strategy. I think if you're trying to play in that market, you've got to take down a most wanted fugitive. You get the $15 million. That's your seed round. And you use this as marketing. The company that finds this guy,

I'm going to believe that your model's pretty good. Whatever you're doing, if you can find this guy, I'm going to be like, yeah, yeah. That's a good, that's enough of an eval for me. You pass the benchmarks. I don't care your MMLU. Tell me how many, how many fugitives have you checked off the FBI top 10 most wanted list? That's what I want to see. Well, there's a documentary series in the making titled Snow King, from Olympian to Narco.

Okay, yes. Based on a Rolling Stone investigation. Okay. So, Jack Allman says, I heard the term forward deployed VC, meaning investor who's helping a company. And now I'm logging off for the rest of the year. What's funny is like there used to actually be forward-deployed VCs. What's that Genentec story, right? Who is the VC in Genentech? It was, who was it?

I don't remember. Robert Swanson, a venture capitalist, met with biochemist Herbert Boyer in 1976. There was, I think it was either Sequoia or Kleiner Perkins, but one of... Bob Swanson, I believe was at Kleiner Perkins. Okay. Is that, is that right? There was one example of a VC who basically was in the office of the company every Friday and was basically just like their financial back office the entire time

because the team was a bunch of scientists who understood the technology but did not really understand how to build the business and the forward deployed VC did really go in. That's a lost start because we are in the air of like founder friendly let the engineer figure out everything, let them hire, like kind of hands off from the venture capital community. So I'm actually okay with the term forward deployed VC if it's actually forward to play. Like you can't just be like helpful. You need to be like actually in the office. The show who's like basically like probably doing like actually 20 hours a week for one of his portfolio company. and has been for years.

I would give him the Ford Deployed VC. But he would never call himself. Yeah, it would be a very bad matter. Matters. How about forward deployed Privy? Because Privy helps you build on crypto rails, securely spin up white label wallet, sign transactions,

and integrate on-chain infrastructure all through one simple API. Peter Reinhart is in the news. This article might be a little bit too long, so we might tell you to go read it. But Peter Reinhart says, My lobbyists are very nervous about me posting this, but overregulation is working against us. All the costs are astronomical to us all but hidden.

There's one excerpt that I'll read. Yes, this is the CEO of Charm Industrial, and he has been going viral with a new article about overregulation. And so he's giving an example. So as one example, one state agency asks Revoi to do certified engine testing to prove that the Revoi doesn't increase emissions of semi-trucks, and that Revoi must do the certification across every single truck engine family. It costs $100,000 per certification, and there are more than 270 engine families for the nine engines that our initial partners use. That's $27 million for this one regulatory item, and keep in mind that this is to certify that a device whose sole reason for existence is to cut pollution by 90%

and which is done so across nearly 100,000 miles of testing and operations is not increasing the emissions of the truck. It is a complete waste of money for everyone. So the Revois system attaches to the truck and adds as an extra battery pack. It's a way to retrofit a gas powered truck to include an extra electric engine. there's something where I guess if your claim is that you're reducing emissions, I don't have that much of a problem of you trying to certify that you're not increasing emissions because that's the base level for your claim, like your marketing claim. You're claiming that you're reducing emissions.

If you're increasing emissions, then you're doing the opposite of your claim. So there is something about like whatever claim you're making, you should be able to back it up. but the main thing is that 27 million... Any type of system that requires you to spend $27 million just to get in the game. Yeah. When you're... You would think that there'd be a better way to understand the actual impact of this.

I mean, there's so many maybe more efficient ways to deal with this, whether it's just like, okay, how widely deployed are these? If they're making $100 million a year, take the taxes, do some independent analysis, pay for it yourself, and then decide, okay. Also, the question in this case is why does it cost $100,000 per certification? Is there like a monopoly in the certification market? Absolutely. It's the government. The government's the one that does the certification. But yeah. Well, oh, I thought it was an external. I thought it was an external partner. But even then, it's hard to imagine that there's like $100,000 of services that goes into this. So you should be able to cut that cost pretty dramatically. Before we move on, let me tell you about adquick.com.

Out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Plan, buy, and measure out of home with precision. Casey Hanmer has a big post here. Should we run through some of this? Oh, you want to skip down to this one. Okay, here we go. Got another one-off cockroach. The private credit cockroaches have been scuttling around.

This time, private lenders are swapping debt for equity in distressed 4840. I am logging into Bloomberg so that I can actually read the article. 4840. Private credit lenders are poised to take control of pallet company 4840 solutions. About a year after providing $1.75 billion of debt to support Summit Partners acquisition of the business, A group of lenders, including Antares Capital, are said to take equity in 4840 under a proposed restructuring. Other lenders include KKR, Black Rock, Carlyle Group. The deal would shed $1 billion of liabilities from 4840's balance sheet.

In cases where borrowers were struggling with their liabilities, private credit firms are more frequently swapping their debt positions for equity stakes to try and prevent losses. While swaps can produce upside, they also offer more unpredictable returns than direct loans. pretty crazy to be set up to get a payment for the debt and then be like, yep, well, actually, we're just riding with you on the equity side. But it's happening more and more because it's better than the alternative of watching the company go out of business. And so this is, this was originally the cockroach phrase is that this poster is riffing off of. is, of course, from Jimmy Diamond, who was identifying first brands as the cockroach and was saying, Usually when you see one, there are more cockroaches.

That was his whole point. And the Blue Al CEO, co-CEO executive team kind of fired back and said, like, yeah, maybe at JP Morgan, we're good. And so they've been kind of duking it out going back and forth. Here and here is highlighting another cockroach. Fairly concerning conversation with a buddy who has a pretty scaled company in the consumer packaged goods manufacturing space. And he was saying that around a number of

the people that he competes with in his category have taken on so much debt from various private credit players over the last like five, six years. And a lot of that, you know, at least a number of them, he thinks are just not going to

make it out of the next two years without a restructuring. So we will see. I'll let you read through this post from Will, and then I'll be right back. Will Manitis is on a generational run of long posts. He says, on becoming legible to capital, the most underrated factor in the success of firms is the degree to which they are legible to capital. Defining this precisely is hard.

You know, when you see it, but an idea, a firm or a person is legible to capital, which he spells with a capital C, when by dint of the dint of, their existence, capital forms behind them in excess. Think of an idea being legible to capital as being magnetically charged to the capital markets. Dollars are just attracted to you. Allocators discuss it at cocktail parties, funds market it at their AGMs, and Twitter discusses novel financing schemes to get more dollars behind the idea. Becoming legible to capital is the single greatest superpower for a fledgling firm. Look at ramp, look at cognition, look at Leopold, look at Tony and Danny.

These are all superhumans at being legible to capital. It's worth noticing how ideas and people become legible to capital. First, there's no divide between the CEO management and the idea. The story is not that of an individual successfully and impressive, of that of an individually successful and impressive individual, bringing their talents to a new platform, you can see these kind of puff piece stories in many companies that are illegible to capital. The company is never about you. For a founder to be legible to capital, there can be no air between them and the expression of the idea. Their lives only matter insofar as they are building with intensity towards the pure form of the idea.

Second, the company can be understood fundamentally as an equation slash trade. In a best case, the most legible companies grow as a super-level company. linear function of dollars in. The founders are highly verbal and can clearly articulate and understand the inputs to this growth equation, talent, capital, management, etc. The companies that are most legible to capital and the management that runs them at their best feel like clockwork toys in the hand because by looking at them, the levers of progress and output become immediately clear. They are immediate, smack you in the face expressions of an idea that is both small enough that you can feel the thing click around in your hand, but cosmically large enough that the feel

that the idea feels true in some sense beyond literal, when the trade is immensely clear, every capital provider across the stack can immediately understand their role today, but more importantly, their ability to scale to putting 10, 100, 1,000 X, the number of dollars into the thing as it reaches maturity.

Finally, a company becomes legible to capital when it is clear the entire firm from capital to management to talent is singing from the same song sheet. They are all living their lives in expression of the same exact idea. An idea I've stolen shamelessly from is from Phineas Barnes, Finn Barnes, who was over at first round, now he's at the GP, is the chocolate cake problem. Many firms have great inputs, eggs,

chocolate, flour, some beautiful icing, but management thinks they're cooking a souffle. Investors think they're getting cupcakes and talent thinks they're getting pound cake. The companies that are most legible to capital are obsessive about chasing the tolerances between competing ideas of the firm to zero. By becoming legible to capital, a firm not only can achieve singularity in the private capital markets, i.e. unlimited free capital forever, but more importantly, it can unify the secret that ignites it internally with the world outside. When that secret is shared, there is truly no limit. Jordy, what's your review? I think of this in the context of, like, when you think about El Segundo specifically, and watching companies become more legible to

capital over time and the momentum that starts to build where early on at the seed stage there's just like excitement around an idea and a team and then you watch as these companies like basically bifurcate into sometimes you can have an incredibly talented founder that really stops accumulating capital because the the sort of potential still remains unclear and they're not building that momentum whereas another one that has the same quality of founder starts to build that legibility. Yeah. I think there's, yeah, Tyler. There's something kind of interesting.

We've been talking about this a little bit where I think Jordy basically said this thing where it's like maybe the role of the CEO is actually to separate like the valuation from like what it like kind of really should be. So it's almost like it's less legible, right? Where like if you have, if you're in a sector like quantum or something and it's kind of very actually it's quite hard to understand what the fundamental are, that's actually where you get like higher multiples. Interesting. So maybe that's like kind of against what Will's saying. Yes.

How does the meme stock craze fit into that? The meme stock, the meme stock craze is legible to a form of capital. It is legible to retail capital. It is legible in the sense that the retail stock trader, the meme stock trader, understands how the stock will move on the basis of press releases, on the basis of viral moments, CEO comments, you know, enthusiasm. Like if you are in a meme stock army, the legibility is derived from the power of the community. The apes strong together.

Well, how many apes are there and how strong are they? If you notice that your apes are growing. Roaches strong together. Roaches strong together. As you, as you, as you grow your ape army and you get stronger and stronger, that's the nature of the legibility. When I think of the examples that he's using, I think of it almost more like just the checklist of questions about a business and the inputs and outputs with regard to the capital. But also, you know, once. the TAM is so well established, there's no more questions about it. It's like, well, of course,

this is a trillion dollar industry if things execute well. Well, of course the team is the best one in the market. We've tested every other team. We've tested this idea, and we've seen, we have full coverage of the team. There's no incumbent that's coming behind them. We know we have the leading team, and we know the market's huge. And then also, are we sure that the gross margins are great forever. Are we sure that this is monopolistic or not super competitive? Are we sure that Google won't copy this and successfully compete in that space? So just getting super high confidence about, however, whatever framework you want to use, whether it's all the questions in zero to one or five forces or whatever business, whatever spreadsheet or slide deck you want to see at your firm

when you're making an investment. Once you've checked that off with a company, so many times that everyone's like, yes, this is the winner, they're pulling away, they're doing great, they're a compounder. The legibility of capital thing is important because you don't have earnings. You're not in the public markets yet.

And so you need to become this like foregone conclusion and then run from $1 billion to $50 billion in the private markets. And if you're illegible and there's still this question about, oh, well, like, when are you shipping or what are you doing? Like, how does this, how do I put my money in and get my money out? That, and it's more of like a moonshot, it gets a lot harder to just stack up. Yeah, and even at the early stages, it's still underappreciated that people say, like,

I have zero faith in this idea, but I'll still back the founder, just because they're great. There is one way to become more legible to capital. Go to getbezzle.com. shop over 26,500 luxury watches, fully authenticated in-house by Bezell's team of experts. Get a hitter, put it on your wrist when you walk into that asset management firm. They're going to whip out their checkbook. You know, you know that you know what's going to work. You know it's a secret hack.

Should we bring in our first guest of the show? We have Julius Steinberg. The legend. Welcome to the show from Arena Magazine. She's back. Thank you so much for stopping by. Thanks so much for coming down. It's nice to see that the studio is real and it's not AI generated.

It is real. It is real. We are here in Hollywood bringing media back to Hollywood. We appreciate you. Are you the only ones left? We really are. We're in a huge complex. Yeah. And to our knowledge, not a single other firm actually shows up every day.

I do have, there is a one benefit. There are many benefits to being in Hollywood. One is that it's in between where Jordy and I live, so it splits the commute. The other benefit is that I think it should dramatically increase our chances of winning a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Because if there, it is a lifetime achievement award. You're truly in incredibly rarefied air. You know, Frank Sinatra is there. Leonardo DiCaprio is a star.

You truly have to be at the pinnacle of your craft. But if there is some bonus point for actually being in. In Hollywood, I think we get, yeah, it increases our chances dramatically. Lifetime achievement award of animal analogies applied to artificial intelligence. Yeah, yeah. I wonder if they'll just start putting influencers on there. Like, where is Alex Earl? Why is she not on the Hollywood Walk of Fame?

Because that's what Hollywood is at this point. Portnoy. Portnoy. Made the most people angry of anyone ever. Yeah, Portnoy is, I mean, as you walk down the Hollywood Walk of Fame, like, Yes, there are some absolute legends, but there are some other folks who are, you know, more mid-tier.

Yeah, I would say mid. And so I would put influencers there. The weird thing is that the influences aren't in Hollywood. So the question is, like, does the Hollywood Walk of Fame just wind up reflecting what's happening in- Hollywood? Is it geo-fetched? Are the stars geof-s?

Like, when does Mr. Beast become eligible? Because he's in North Carolina. Well, when are they going to do a Saudi Arabia? Oh, yes. Hollywood Walk of Fame. That's what I'm looking for. Don't give them the idea. They will definitely do one over there.

They should hire me. I'm open. I bet Hollywood as a, is Hollywood a city? I don't know. I don't think it's an independent city. I think, West Hollywood is. I think Hollywood, there's obviously folks here that want to raise money. They should franchise the name. They should sell the rights to the name Hollywood and put a Hollywood in. Saudi Arabia should just recreate every city in the world in the desert and then use it and then use it to incentivize movies to get made there. Yeah.

Bring culture to the desert. That's what LA did. Yeah, yeah. No, we've been to New York on the Fox lot here in L.A. They have basically a mini New York. Full representation of New York. You can go film whatever you want there. Anyway, give us an update since you've been on the show a few months ago.

What's the latest in your world? You're full-time arena magazine. I am full-time at Arena Magazine. We're getting ready to launch our upcoming issue, 0-0-06, an ode to capitalism. and that's all I can say. More will be out next week. So keep your timelines open. I remember I was talking with Max.

I was like, oh, it's like Thanksgiving week. Is that a good week to launch? Will, like, more people be online? Or fewer people will be online because they'll be with their families. Sure. And we had this whole debate about how online people were going to be during Thanksgiving week. And the answer that we came down to is actually people are going to be more online during Thanksgiving week. I think so.

They, you know, they don't want to be responsible for getting the turkey in. or out of the oven. They don't want to argue with their family about Epstein files or whatever. Yeah, I wonder what the online behavior is because over Christmas, like we noticed that that's when like that really crazy H-1B dust up happened. Well, I'm Jewish. I don't celebrate Christmas. So I was, I had, you know, I had plans.

I had to go get Chinese food. I had to go to movies. And I was just totally offline. And all my Christian friends or my friends who celebrate Christmas, they're hyper aware of the H-1B discourse. They could recite, you know, this person said this. odd timing because a lot of the tech podcasts were off for the holidays and didn't need to comment on it, even though it was this like hot political issue that you would have expected most tech

podcasts to touch on. But then by the time everyone got back from New Year's, like the whole, like, you know, dust up had sort of moved on. So maybe that's good because the H-1B issue is just you shouldn't touch it. It's too controversial if you want to be monetized still. Yes, yes, yes. So maybe that was some like very clever, like Jewish marketing gimmick by putting the H-1B discourse on Christmas. so only the Jews could participate. Maybe. No, I know. So I do think everyone participates in,

in the timeline over holidays. I think it's, but maybe it's more phone time, less computer time. Like people are milling about, they're stepping away from the turkey, but they're not necessarily sitting down and writing a full essay.

More good screen, less bad screen. Wait, which one's the good screen? I mean, that's the joke. It's like, I close my bad screen. The bad screen is the computer? Yeah, yeah. Oh, I haven't, I think my good screen is the computer. My bad screen is my phone.

I would agree with this. On my phone, actually. I mean, you guys are not working an office job that you hate. Sure, sure, sure. Yeah. Yes. Yeah, I think there will be people milling about reading posts,

but they won't have time to sit down and really, we were debating this over the stream. Like, will anyone have time to watch like a three-hour stream on Thanksgiving? Of course, we're taking Thanksgiving off. But not Black Friday. But we are going to be a lot on Black Friday. We're going to be open for business.

We're going to be celebrating commerce. Tell me what deals. Tell me what to buy on Amazon. Yeah, we will. We have some good people lined up. So, yeah, what, what, what, what you write about last magazine? And did the California Forever piece line up with, it's going to publish in the next. Yeah, so in the last magazine, I did the review of Dan Wong's breakneck.

That's right. We talked to him, too, a little bit. What was your takeaway? I think, I really like Dan. I think he's a really smart guy. I've hung out with him a few times. He gave me a huge stack of the London review of books. Cool.

This is just like the greatest thing ever. So it was nice bonding over print media with him. That's great. I do think that it's just, like, I'm very skeptical that the United States government should get involved in these huge infrastructure projects in its current state. Like, I like the idea of engineering, but what makes American engineering so spectacular and so amazing

is that we do it in the private market. It's distributed. It's distributed. And if we just said, okay, we're the United States government is going to do this huge engineering project. It's like, do we trust the United States government to do this huge engineering project? I drove down to L.A. yesterday from San Francisco,

and it's like half the roads were terrible. And it's like, you know what? I sort of wish this whole thing was a toll road. Yeah. I'm not like that, like, diehard libertarian where I'm like government shouldn't do roads. At least not yet. Give me like five years.

I joke that the G-Wagon is so popular in L.A. because you actually need a four-by-four to, like, get around some of, like, the roads are so. Well, it was raining like crazy yesterday on the freeway, and I was driving down. I was like, thank God that my beautiful, beautiful RAV-4 has four-wheel drive or else I would die because these roads are terrible and no one knows how to drive in the rain. Yeah. I was reflecting on, there are so many interesting anecdotes about, like, is the government equipped to take on the project that you are interested in? Whatever your pet project is, whether it's healthcare or space exploration or whatever you want?

And yeah, I keep coming back to this part of like, like, step one in any of that is like fix the productivity problem in government projects. Yeah, I think for the next issue of Arena, zero zero six, it's coming out December 1st. I wrote about California Forever, which is the project to build a new city in Salonah County, which is about an hour northeast of San Francisco. And it's sort of like an interesting concept to me because it's like, oh, it's this privately funded city. you know, all of the, like the Hues Who's Who of Silicon Valley, Lorraine Powell Jobs, Colison Brothers, Reed Hoffman, Not Friedman, Mark Adreason, all these people put money into this.

It's a privately funded city. But so much of the struggle with getting California Forever off the ground is just because of government. And I remember I was fact-checking the essay, and I was communicating with Julia Blystone, who's the California Forever Head of Coms. And I said, like, okay, well, the next step is there's just like 1,200-page environmental review, and she's like, no, it's actually 12,000 pages. I don't think I've read

12,000 pages in my life. I don't think anyone in this room is read 12,000. And I read a lot. Maybe I have in my life, but not at once, and definitely not environmental review report. Yeah. Especially a report that somebody is just going to drag into chat, TBT, and say, turn this into five bullet points, please. Turn this into one image. My favorite memory from college, actually, is this is actually when Peter Thiel was co-teaching at class. And my sophomore year, German 266. And it's a class with like, you know, 60 people. You have to fill out a form to get in. It's supposed to be like, you know, a good class. And it is a

very good class. It's a fascinating topic. But my favorite, or one of my favorite memories in the class is the kid next to me who had this startup that was worth like, that millions, if not tens of millions of dollars. Put in chat to PT, summarize Hegel in three bullet points. I love that. One shot it. Yes. Don't make mistakes. That would be, yeah. That's, well, maybe, maybe, I mean, Stanford WizKid is startup's only worth a couple million bucks. Maybe he's actually not that, not that elite. Yeah, what is the, what is the mood in the Stanford alumni world right now? There was this question.

I was sending you this post from Delia in this question about like, the age old question of like, is this next generation cooked? Is there, is, is AI actually turning off folks' brains to? to the point where they can't sit down and read Hagle all the way through, that everyone is doing this is a systemic problem, or is this, you know, just cantankerous old millennials shaking their fist at the younger generation? Well, I will say this. At Stanford, there's a thing called co-terming.

It's like a fifth-year master's. You apply most of the time people get in, and you just sort of stick around for another year, finish up at master's, and you get two degrees at the end in five years. Apparently a third of my class, the class of 2025 co-termed, whereas co-terming right now. A third. 33%.

Yeah, we've seen this a lot. We saw some data that more people are applying to law school. Oh, yeah. The law school thing is terrible. I have a few funds for studying with L-SAT right now, and I'm like hitting them in the head with their huge L-SAT books. Is that because you think it won't be a career path? There aren't going to be associates.

Maybe they're going to be like five associates, but there aren't going to be 50 associates because the AI is better. It's interesting because if you genuinely are excited about devoting your life to understanding and finessing the legal system, it's probably as good of a time as ever because you're going to be able to learn a lot faster. You're going to be able to be more productive. Like if you're super high agency, you'll find the right firm and attach your career to that and probably be able to have a wonderful career. But deciding to do law school because you don't know what you want to do and you're trying to buy time and you want to do something

that's sort of like high, like on a high status track and hopefully high earning without being necessarily high agency just feels like a train wreck, an inevitable train wreck. Well, how it seems to me, my dad actually, he just retired from a legal career and he was the first person to say, like, yeah, all the associates are sort of screwed because they're like, they just can't out-compete the AI. And law, especially how it's structured, because there needs to be like a partner on the case as per like, this weird agreement that was reached, I think, of the early 2000s, associates can't really be on cases anymore.

So there's even less of a need for associates, and this is going to be true in all fields. And I think, obviously, in law specifically, there are these, you know, 100, 200-year-old firms that really care about legacy. They care about reputation. So they're like, okay, we need to have, like, some young people to carry the firm on, but it's just a question of, like, how are those people going to learn anything if Chat, TBT is just doing all their work, or Harvey,

or anything like that. I think how I, like, I think for, if you're, like, the top, like, five percent of, like, lawsuit, you're probably going to be fine. We're still going to have judges. Judges are one thing, and then, like, maybe AI should just replace judges. We have a lot of bad judges. That seems like a, that's a crazy idea. Before, of the courtroom, the thing to replace, you would think would be the stenographer.

Like, we have dictation, and yet, and or, you know what else would. I don't know, I use auto AI all the time. Is that great? Is that great? Okay. We can get into the bear thesis for AI in a minute. But the court, the illustrator, what do they, what do they call? Just court.

Court room illustrator? Court room illustrator? We have cameras. Why don't we just take a picture? The downside of if you actually use Nana Banana or any other image model, it would, it would just be like good enough to not produce a funny result. And I feel like there's so much humor. No, it has to be like studio gibblee like murderer or murderer like defendant.

No, no, that would work, but I'm saying, like, sometimes the illustrators, like, botch an illustration so badly that it's funny. Like SBAF or something. Yeah. That's what you're thinking about. Yeah. Yeah, I was shocked by how resilient that job was to automation, since we do have the camera, and we've had the camera for a hundred years almost, and it's stuck around as a real-

I think, I don't know, like, a lot of court or a lot of law is, like, ritual. Like, and I think in the UK, the judges still have, like, the weird head things that they need to wear, the wigs. Or even like the judge's robes. My dad, like he had to wear a tie. This will be around for a really long time. Even if the AI can do so much, it just, we will do it out of procedure. We will have these conversations with humans for whatever reason.

I don't know. Yeah, procedure is very inelastic. And also, I think, just, you know, lawyers, it's a very easy, like, cast of person to demonize. And I think just as, you know, McKinsey will stick around so they can say, oh, sorry about the layoffs. McKinsey made us do it. it's going to be the same with the evil lawyers. Yeah, sure. Yeah, you want the buck to stop with someone

and not necessarily an AI. No. Not necessarily. Because if you say, oh, sorry, the AI said this. Well, they said like, well, you used grok instead of Chad GbT. Can you ask Chad Ghibit's T because that's my preferred AI model. If it's just McKinsey. Yeah.

What's the, I feel like, I feel like there's still probably some alpha in becoming a lawyer. You're going down the legal path in 2025. if you are basically setting yourself up not to just be, you know, associate fodder for, you know, high margin billing, but in fact you are setting yourself up to gain control over an institution that would be harder to build independently. Well, I think with young people especially law, it's because you have,

you know, you make like good money in your late 20s and 30s, but you start to make really good money in your 50s and 60s. And I think for... Sort of like an MLM? Yeah, a little bit. But it's also for people my age who it's like, oh, I could either like work really hard for like 30 years. And maybe if I make partner and I'm one of the really good partners, I can make... Like a good amount of money.

It's like, why do that when it's like, oh, if I learn how to code and after like 10 years, I can make this much money? Four years with vesting. Yeah, with vesting. All you need is the four years. Yeah, it's at the right hot company at the right time. Yeah. So it's interesting to me because I feel like with the Gen Z financial incentives, it's so oriented around like make money now. Yeah.

Or even like the, oh, you have X amount of years to make money before AGI hits and the economy is like permanent underclass. Yeah, permanent underclass. I'm still waiting for the gambling on your student loan debt, you know, the double or like double your debt or pay nothing, you know. I've become, I've become very skeptical of the permanency of the underclass phenomenon. I feel like there will be, like the strength of the underclass is growing in number, but the permanency is decreasing. Because at any moment, someone can be plucked from the underclass into the global elite through just one right, like, parlay, or one right actually, like building a company, joining a thing. Like, distribution on the internet is so, so aggressive that you can be languishing in the underclass and then go viral and launch a D to C line. you just have like a few things go your way, you become like the, the market just gives you

$10 million basically. Yeah. But it's very rare. It's random, too. It's random, yes. Yes. Yeah, yeah. It's like you were on that plane and you screamed at that person and then you went viral and

you became a sensitive. And then you started a podcast, meme coin. Exactly. Yeah. Don't give people ideas. I think it usually goes the other way. Like the Hawk to a girl, for example. I don't know exactly know how it all played out for her, but Haley Welch.

Well, she was stupid with it. Yeah. I think she launched a coin and it did not execute well. But that type of opportunity is entirely random. And every once in a while, the market just comes around. It does not feel permanent to be in the underclass. So on Wednesday, when I fly to see my family for Thanksgiving, when I start really aggressively yelling at people on the plane,

you know it's time to buy Julia coin. Yes, yes, yes. You've got to get in early on that, for sure. You have to get an early before I have my like tantrum on the plane. Yeah, yeah. What else is, has anything updated you on the Get Your Bad Culture? Are people now self-aware of it? We were talking to Jessica Livingston, and she was referring to the concept being actually

not very new. She was saying, carpetbaggers. Yeah. Well, yeah, that was like a term for the Civil War, and it was like anti-Northy. It's like, oh, these people are just exploiting business opportunities, which I don't know. It's like, I don't like the term, like, exploitative business opportunities. Like, I think we have enough regulations that it's like our, like, I'm. How true is that in the United States, at least.

But I don't know. Something I've been thinking a lot about is, so we're in L.A. right now. I went to high school, like, a few miles from here. And I think, like, a very, like, core memory for me, and was the college mission scandal. Cool memory. Shout out, Ashley Vance. Yes.

The college admission scandal, horsey blues. Yes. I was a junior in high school when this happened. Okay, so you experienced that. So my school, actually, the whistleblower's daughter was a senior, and she was going to go to Yale for soccer. And we're all like, oh, it's sort of weird that this girl, I'm going to call her Susie.

Sure. Susie is going to go to Yale for soccer, but she's not on the soccer team at her school, and there's not really evidence that she plays soccer. Interesting. But she's going to go to play soccer at Yale. One of the most elite teams in women's soccer. Sure, I don't know anything about soccer.

But this girl was going to go to Yale. Then, you know, at my high school was very elite. Everyone was concerned with if they gone into Yale or not. So it was all sort of like, oh, like this is important. Like everyone flagged that Susie's going to Yale. But we all sort of knew that she didn't play soccer. And I remember my high school was very small, and, you know, it was a college prep school. And the day before the news came out, I had a meeting with the head of school to talk about, like, where I should apply to college, what my SAT scores was, blah, blah, blah, blah, I acknowledge that I had a very elite upbringing.

But I remember the principal was late, and this never happened. There seemed to be something very wrong. And I was like, I don't know what's happening. And she was late to the meeting, and it was fine. And I was told that my SAT scores were fine, blah, blah, blah, blah. the next day, first period, I have a moral philosophy class. I'm the only junior in the class, it's all seniors. I petitioned to say I can take this elective.

And we're talking about meritocracy. And whether meritocracy is real, yes, in the class. We have a reading about meritocracy. Is it meritocracy just? Is it something that we should optimize for? Is it a thing that's unjust? Because, you know, intelligence is heritable, so it's not earned, blah, blah, blah, blah. And we get to the class, and, you know, at 7 a.m. that morning or whatever we all woke up,

we all saw that this girl's dad was, you know, he was arrested for securities fraud and part of his plea deal was that he was giving up this college admissions scandal where this college college coach was telling people to put that there were black on their college apps, that they were faking associations with various sports teams and all of these elite schools. So we go in and it's like, okay, like we're talking about meritocracy. What about Susie? What about the college admission scandal? Because we're all sort of fed up with the whole college admissions. process. It's a dog and pony show. My little brother's going through it right now, and I'm like, why are they asking you what three words you are? What could this possibly have to do with how good of a student you will be or anything like this? But I remember going through the college admissions scandal firsthand, just seeing like how corrupt it is, but also in a way it was sort of like an equalizing form of corruptness. Because like if your family can donate $50 million to Harvard,

you will get it. Like you have to be like really, really, really, really bad to not get in it family donates 50 million. Yeah. But if your family doesn't have 50 million to donate to Harvard? What if they only have 500,000? Well, then you have to make 50 million before you apply. Or you can use a $5,000 to buy your spot on the sports team. Oh, yeah.

So it's only $5,000? 500. Oh, 500. But that's a lot less than $50 million. Yeah, yeah. So it's sort of more equalized. And so it was for, it wasn't like the, like, 0.1%, but it's still like 1%. Sure, sure, sure, sure.

Corruption. So I think that experience is... Isn't there a pro-libertarian hot take that says, like, you should just auction off every slot. I've said this before. Like, I, well, my, my sort of take on this is that college admissions office should just be sold to the highest bidder. Yeah. It would be a lot more honest than what's done now.

Sure. Because right now it's, they sort of, they give you the spiel about like, oh, we need to have a super diverse class where we have one cellist and one person who's really good at, like, studying molecular bio and like. And a sailor. Yeah. We have to have a sailor. A Michael sailor.

We actually don't have enough sailors. They're doing walk-ons and the sailing team at Stanford. My best friend in undergrad did that. But yeah, I think we should just auction off the college admissions office. We don't have enough sailors in this country anymore. We don't have enough sailors in this country. That's so bearish. Yeah.

We got to get back in the sailing. That's hilarious. But yeah, I think this is actually something I was talking about with my boyfriend. It's like how much would it cost if you just auctioned off a slot? Maybe if you only auctioned off 10. If you limited to 10. I would think you would auction off literally every slot, all of them. Like what is the market clearing price?

Because, you know, in the luxury watch world, Like, there will be a certain number of, I mean, this happens with like the market, what is the market clearing price for Taylor Swift tickets. But like, you know, there are, if Porsche comes out with a new, a new GT3RS, there might be, you know, 5,000 made, and they will try to find the market clearing price as close as possible to what the market will bear. Sometimes they overpriced them. They don't sell them all.

Sometimes they underpriced them and they immediately trade up on the secondary market. But you could even have a secondary market that, you know, okay, yes, I bought my slot at Harvard for $2 million, but they're going to $3 million now, so I'm going to sell that, go to NYU instead. You can have an entire process just to maximize the price. I just don't know. It's like if that happens,

what percent of the Stanford class would be international, which is a good question. It would be hugely international. Of course. I mean, it would be across the entire world. Everyone would just pay to go. And I mean, there's already a little bit of that, but it's definitely like there's more design

to the system than that. There's certainly, I would imagine. How do you, how do you, how do you defend that against, you know, just eliminating an entire track for young people that maybe have negative capital within their family systems? And even if you tell them, even if you tell the family at birth, like, you know, expect to be able to purchase, you know, if you want to go to, if you want your child to go to Sanford or the auction range at that point, counting in inflation, will probably be, you know, 70 to 80 million to get into the school.

Well, probably what we'll have is like... And then it ultimately actually destroys, would naturally just destroy, I think some of the... would certainly be valuable for students from elite families to network with other students from elite families, but ultimately would kill a lot of what makes universities great. Yes, I agree that it would kill a lot of that, but probably what would happen is,

you know, now you have a lot of scholarships. When you apply for college, you know, the Coca-Cola scholarship is a very big one. A lot of these are sort of mostly like full rides to college, like the very prestigious scholarships. And so probably what will happen is that instead of having these scholarships to college, it's like, okay, young people of America whose family can't afford the like $50 million sticker price of college admission apply and we will give you the $50 million to pay your way for this price. But yeah, it's obviously a very flawed system, but it's interesting, it's an interesting, like, mental model about how much we value college admission, especially because, you know, at a place like Stanford, there are, like, what, like, 1700 to 2,000 graduates a year. Not all of them do fascinating things. Yeah.

What's, what city are you living in these days? I live in San Francisco. What is the mood in San Francisco? Do you think it's getting better? I don't know. I've only lived there since August, so I can't really say. There was this narrative in the mansion section today about cleaning up its act. Okay, I have a fun story.

There's more demand for West Portal Village Center. I've never heard of that area. It is now more expensive to live there than in Pack Heights, apparently. $2.5 million, median list price. There's also the story about the open-AI secondary is driving up real estate prices, but it's always interesting to feel what's actually happening on the ground. So I live in Pack Heights. I live in Lower Pack Heights. And a few weeks ago, there was a homeless guy who just totally passed out on my doorstep. It was a Saturday morning. I woke up late. It was like 9 or 10. I checked my phone in our apartment WhatsApp. It's like, hello, there is an unhoused person on our doorstep. Please don't disturb him. And then in this group chat, we had this huge debate over whether we should call the cops. And the conclusion is just the cops won't come. We can't really do anything about it. He seems not.

violent, maybe we should wait for him to leave. So I left my apartment at like, you know, 1030. I was back at 3 and he was gone. But it's still like a weird thing to account for. You sort of want to call an ambulance for someone who is sick. Well, you just want to call someone. Yeah. And have, in my building, you know, there are probably like 30 people who live in the building. So it's like someone could have called someone or maybe if all 30 of us tried. But it was very disconcerting because it's one of those things where it's like, oh, everything. everything's better. Everything's fixed. Was everything noticeably cleaner during a sales force this year? Salesforce's conference? Because a few years ago, Benioff, like, just completely cleaned up the entire city.

And then the other time that they cleaned up the city was when Siege and Ping was everything. Yes. When Siege and I was in SF that week and it felt like it was a different place. Really? That's funny. I think SF generally or urbanism generally, it's just, it's so hard to justify living in one of these places. I think for most people. I agree, but it's almost the flip side where it's, it's so easy to justify living in a suburb. Because, yes, you're in the city and it feels like, oh, this is like, we got to clean this place up, we've got to clean this place up. But then you sort of work on that.

And then you also work on your life and your company and your business and whatever. And then as soon as you have money in a family, it's just so easy to go to a suburb. And there's so many fantastic suburbs. And that's always, it was always the thing that annoyed me about the discourse of like San Francisco has fallen. or San Francisco is such a bad place to live is like, well, people live in Palo Alto. They live in Atherton. They live in, you know, up north in wine country. They live in Inclined Village.

They live all over the place. And they live in these wonderful, luxurious places that have no crime, no homelessness. Like, they have like fantastically managed cities just a commute distance from San Francisco. Yeah. I think San Francisco, it's always sort of been like a young person city. Totally. When I lived there, it was super rough. But I was like, I'm young.

That's fine. Yeah. I saw a guy on Twitter who's going to give me a taser. so thank you. But I think... Like acquiring weapons on the internet. Yeah, giving away weapons on there. You can buy a taser on Amazon.

It'll show up this afternoon. But it's like a taser gun. So I think it'll be easier to use. I was going to buy a taser. Yeah, there's illegal. You can also just buy this. Yeah, it's... But someone's going to give you a free one.

Yeah, someone's going to give you a free one. So SF is sort of, it's, you know, the duality of San Francisco is it's great because some random stranger on the internet will give me a free taser gun. But the sort of negative part is that I need this taser gun to stay safe. Yeah. It's always been so fascinating. I mean, I wonder, I wonder if the open-eye wealth will meaningfully change the, the budget of the city. You know, it's just so much, and it's actually, the company's actually in San Francisco. It's not a Mountain View company. It's not a Palo Alto

company. It's not a, you know, Menlo Park company. It is a San Francisco company, and you have $500 billion of wealth loosely with, you know, tens of billions in the pockets of employees right there, like that should wind up doing something, even if it's just some renovations, some private security. How good are open AI in place at spending money? I don't know. How would they spend it? How would you recommend? I have a friend who works at Open AI, and you just like, you know, I don't really know how to spend my money. And I was just like, do you want, like, I can yacht. Yeah. Yacht. Yeah. There is a marina in San Francisco. There is, yeah. It's beautiful. I like to go over and walked around there and there are these like cool boats and yachts it doesn't need to be like a super

ostentatious one but I don't know I think yacht is secondary to uh to cleaning up the streets you know yes but all of like even buying a yacht would help clean up the streets because it is some simulation of the city's economy okay uh I don't know speaking of boats it's like someone has to water's high tides rise all boots sure sure sure yeah so I don't know it's I guess it's sort of it's silly to say like raise the economic output of San Francisco because it's one of the most economically intensive regions in the country. But I do very strongly believe that, you know,

just let market forces do their thing. Things will get better. Well, thank you so much for stopping by the Ultrodome. This is fantastic. Yes, thank you for having. Always great to get the update excited for 006. Yeah, and 007 is next after that.

Where can people get it? People can... ArenaMag.com. ArenaMag.com and at Barnes and Nobles near you. Yes, there's a Barnes & Noble deal now. There we go. So if you want to buy any Romanticie books, which I think is the new genre.

Yeah, there's romantic fantasy? Yes. Okay. That's the new genre that one of the most of the next to like. It's not my type. You have to get on that. Well, thank you so much for popping on this. Great to see you.

This is great. Great to see you. Cheers. Let me tell you about 8thesleep.com. Exceptional sleep without exception. Fall asleep faster. Sleep deeper. wake up energized.

We have our next guest joining right now. We have Bobby Grouchal from Dup. This is a very fun company. What's happening? Welcome to the show. What's up? Thank you. We made it, guys.

We made it. We made it, finally. Great, great setup here you got. You're just daily driving that for Zoom. That's it. Yeah, I mean, it's comfortable. It's cozy. Introduce the company.

I remember, When you launched, I remember seeing a whole bunch of posts go viral, but how are you describing the company today? Yeah, so Dup is used by millions of people to find the products that they want or similar products for less. It's a search engine. It's a generative marketplace. I could throw a whole bunch of buzzwords. It's AI-driven, this and that. But ultimately, it's a shopping companion.

It's a shopping app that helps give people a confidence pill a little bit of a boost to know that what they're buying. is at the best price and is the right product. Agentic Commerce, OpenAI is talking a big game about it. Is that a headwind for you? Yeah, you know, it's, first of all, nothing's set in stone yet. Don't count us out. We're also talking to them. Sure.

We're building an app that would be native to chat GPT. Okay. You know, it's like the thing I like to say about ChatGPT, Google, all these tools is that they can do everything, and that is the problem. It's like you can, if you're a chef, you can use a Swiss Army knife to cut a tomato, but why would you? I think verticalized AI tools are very powerful because they are single purpose and they solve a problem in a more precise way. I mean, it's odd. I have like no doubt that there's people out there that are making tens of millions of dollars on Studio Ghibli apps, right? Or, you know, different animation apps, different sub apps that maybe could be done in chat GPT if you know the right prompt, but because it's lower tier on like the prompt ladder, you kind of got a no to go there to get it. It's not coaching you through it. It's not actually giving you all the different harnesses. and wrapping that you need to actually do it. How hard has it been to actually build the product experience?

Because I'm assuming you're effectively browsing the web on behalf of, you know, if I upload a product or I paste in a link and then you guys are browsing the web or you already have and you're sorting products to find products that look the same or maybe from a different manufacturer or the same end manufacturer or a different brand. but how hard has that product experience been? Because I've been continuously disappointed by computer use and just web browsing from a lot of different LMs at this point. When you say computer use,

and you're talking about things like the browsers doing the browsing on your behalf, basically. Yeah, go out and find this thing. The example that he gives is... I use it for cars. That's my... Find me a GT3RS. It's a rare car. It's a specific trim.

What a great car. It's a great car. But it's not... it's not like find me someone who sells Diet Coke. Like Diet Coke is a commodity. It's sold everywhere. A GT-3-R-S, there might not be one for sale right now. Like, it's possible that there's just none for sale.

And so, yeah, maybe a few of them. Quite a bit more common. But there are certain cars you look for and it'll say, I found you this one. And it's like it sold two years ago. Yeah. And so on that eval of like go hunt around on the internet, find this particular thing that's not particularly fungible.

not particularly commoditized, at least agent mode, these agentic commerce products have not been up to Jority's standards, at least. I take it you haven't bought the GT3RS yet. Not yet. And the only reason is just the AI is not good enough. Yeah, of course, of course. That's the only reason. Come on, guys.

So first of all, I think it's, I too have been fairly disappointed with these like browsers that browse on your behalf. That is ultimately not what we're trying to do with Dup. AI has some flaws in like the shopping universe and maybe that, you know, it speaks to some of the pain points you're finding with, you know, finding your perfect car, which is they don't have live inventory, they don't have live price, they don't have product catalogs, they don't have customer preferences, they don't have customer behavior. There's a lot of data that is missing in the shopping journey.

So ultimately what you're left with is the best guess. So to answer your question, how hard has it been? It's hard because the way you do it, the way you do it right, is you got to do it the old school way. In the shopping world, you got to go press palms, kiss babies, hug people, take them out to a drink, meet them at conferences. You got to know their names. You got to know their kids' names. It's like a lot of trust building in person. It's not as simple as just kind of plugging it in because when you build that trust, they then trust you with their product catalogs.

And they give you a commission for sales. you turn out to be a partner that drives a lot of sales for them. So it has been pretty hard. But the tech that we have is product ingestion from these partnerships, but also live scraping. So it's, you know, in a sense, it is browsing and it's scraping this data for you. We have vectorized millions of products or tens of millions of products at this point. So we can do kind of a live assessment of what products look like each other, what products should go together, stuff like this. ultimately the way to solve it, you can't, AI is not sort of a panacea. You have to pick your battle.

So, Dup, for example, for the last year and a half, has been focused solely on furniture. Why furniture? Well, it turns out, unlike the GT-3RS, a lot of furniture is made in the same few factories, sold back to brands under different names. The brands then upload them to their website under different names, different prices. But it's the same furniture. And I know this because I got scammed with buying. furniture online and it really pissed me off because I found the same product I wanted for about

40% at last, the exact same, same spec, same color, everything, exactly the same. And so that ultimately is like the lore of what spawned dupe. And I've seen these factories in person. I've visited China. How do you think about incorporating human feedback? That feels some, that feels like something that would be a really valuable resource. I was thinking about like on Instagram, you see a lot of ads for a bunch of different stuff. Some of the stuff is, like, it really grabs your attention. People just buy it. But then it's really low quality. And if you could actually have some sort of, you know, okay, feedback, hey, we, we, we, we shipped you this dupe, this product. We think we got to the lowest price, but like, tell us how the product actually performed, because that better

informs our, our decision making. Do you think that'll be like a compounding advantage? Do you think that's valuable over the long term? It's so, it's so, it's so, uh, it's, it's, so valuable. And we don't even need to ask the customer. First of all, we have access to all these reviews. We also have access to the checkout data and we have access to the return data. Because if someone returns something, we don't get paid. All right? So these brands pay us four months after the sales happens, three months after the sales happen after that return window is set. So we know which products get returned the most. Absolutely, that's a compounding effect. Yeah, that makes sense. Jordi. You get a lot of hate mail from certain brands.

brands that kind of realize, like you're providing a service that consumers love and then certain brands out there that that are sourcing products and setting whatever price they feel like is relevant. And then you're actually in some ways. Blowing up my spot. I had 99% margin on this couch. Yeah, we basically like killed shop drop shippers. Like for sure. Like the drop shipping industry is a, is a total scam. And they hate us. But ultimately, our brands, our partners love us. We drive millions of dollars in sales for them every, every single month. And so why is that? Well, let's say, like let's take a partner like Walmart. So some people think Walmart has thousands of products. They don't. They have millions of products, right? Millions of products. They're not always in store

because a lot of those products are a drop chip. So what we do is, you know, let's say you guys are looking for, we'll take a piece of furniture, for example, that chair right there. I mean, that's not being sold at Walmart, but let's say you want something like that. And you up. upload an image to Dup or you tell Dup like, hey, that's a Herman Miller, find me something like that for less. Walmart has 15 versions of that chair. You don't know that. You would probably never even think to look at Walmart for that chair. But Walmart has a great version of that chair, and they love us because we merchandise their products at that exact high intent moment where the customer knows what they want. They just want a great deal on it. We surface the partners up.

Now, there are some brands, for example, we were sued last year. Yeah, yeah, we were sued. I'm not going to name the brand. It's very easy to find. Sure. The brand, they are the largest, largest furniture brand. Now, the lawsuit essentially, like, it tried to kill our company. It was, it was like a pretty tough, a pretty tough lawsuit that we had to fight.

We settled it to both parties content. Like, it's fine now. But. What was the claim? there are a couple claims. So copyright infringement. They were pissed that we were using or letting our customers use images from their website to find similar products. They were pissed that like they were part of, we went super viral when we came out.

I did all of these like post-it note ad campaigns and stuff that went super. They were pissed that they were in some of those social kind of TikTok videos. They weren't even ads. They were literally just social content talking about our website. They were really, really upset about that. And ultimately, they were pissed that we were unfairly competing, essentially. I obviously, you know, we have a public statement on how we felt about all of these claims. And so they basically said we were falsely advertising, you know, that they were white labeling stuff, that we, that we were unfairly competing and also infringing on their copyright.

So ultimately, you know, cold water under the bridge, where we're here, Dup is alive. It's well. It's working. as we wanted to, and it's crushing. And so there are some of those partners, but those are very few and far between, and it tends to be like the, almost the monopoly type partners,

you know, that are upset. Everyone else, everyone else, and most of the Fortune 500 that we work, they are thrilled that Dup exists. That makes sense. How did you get the domain? It's absolutely fire. So the company was called Carrot,

before it was called Dup. We had three months of runway before we pivoted the company. to do we worked with Nikita beer on it. He was a total goat helped us find like that one. Spent your last 20 grand on intro.com. Well, we had we had more than 20 grand. We had about three months of runway, but yes, we definitely spent more than 20 grand. I know, I'm just picking a number. Yeah. Just with Nikita. Probably the best money, probably the best money I've ever spent, saved our company. Let's be completely honest. That's actually crazy. I love it.

It's like total bananas moment for us. But the, the domain was, a very last minute decision. We knew we needed a great name to stand out in the kind of shopping space. I did a bunch of Google research on keywords. One of the words was Dupe, and I saw Dupe was on Google Trends, a hundred rated Google Trend keyword and growing. And I saw that no one used, no one was using dupe.com. We reached out to a broker that was sitting on that name. They wanted just the most insane price. We then negotiated a far lower price for Dupes.com. went back to the owner of dupe.com and said, if you don't sell this domain to us in like five minutes with this price, which I thought was a fair price, it was all of our money. And we gave them all of our money. And, you know, that we're going to pull the trigger on dupes.com and they sold it to us like on the spot. And they basically said, okay, fine, go for it. Smart. That's great. That's how we, that's how we negotiated it.

I love that. That's great. Thank you. That's a good story. Yeah. That was like a bet the, like a literal bet the company moment. And then Nikita did the most mensch thing ever. put out a tweet about us and instantly blew us up. It was crazy. I remember that tweet. He framed it very, very well. And then you can imagine this. It just works on social. What other categories do you think are most ripe other than furniture? Yeah. So we do fashion now, handbag shoes, clothes, a really big one that we don't do very well yet because AI doesn't have a sense of smell. You know, it's a little looking at kind of vision. Perfumes. Perfumes are huge. Yeah, it's basically I look at is anything without a logo. So like furniture, like there's iconic shapes and silhouettes and, you know, materials that get used along that. But ultimately, people don't have, you know,

you're not like, you don't have a couch that has like a restoration hardware, big logo printed on it. The challenge with fashion is that people want like the association with a specific, like, brand and that can come through a logo or a, or a silhouette that actually can't. be implemented without getting, you know, kind of... You're right. You're right, except we're going through this, like, bizarre moment in shopping where brandless is a thing and not showing logos is a thing, like this kind of quiet luxury movement. Like, people want something to feel good.

And that buttresses, like, even the brands that you love, they're white labeling guys. Like, they are, they are, they are, like, none of this stuff is like custom made specifically for a single brand. Maybe if you're going into the Couture world, of course, that stuff is custom made. But ultimately, you know, when someone sees skims leggings, like, yeah, they want the look. People shop, people shop the look. Like, that's what they're shopping ultimately. And it's less about, like, you know, people often misconstrue what dup.com is.

Like, we're not trying to sell you replicas. We actually ban replicas across the board. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And all those sites. We are trying to get you that look, that garment. that furniture for less. And most people shop for the look now, especially in this market.

Yeah, that makes sense. What, how do you, do you think you'll have enough leverage at some point to get the underlying brands to pay you at the time of sale? Is that even important? It's actually very important. I'll tell you why it's important.

If we were growing 100% month over month and we weren't seeing our cash flow for three months, it stifles our marketing budget. We would have to then either raise credit or go raise a massive round just to pay down the marketing. This is actually like the biggest risk that I think about. So one of the things we're partnering with the largest payment network to do agentic checkout, global checkout.

And, you know, we're not announcing the name yet, but we are working through that tech. And the idea being, you know, most of these brands are really upset with agentic checkout because they don't get the customer information, but we do it in a way where the checkout would happen on Dup, but the brand retains the customer information and the customer relationship. And the only reason we want to do that is so that we can go from net 90 payments to Net0, Net 1,

instant payment back to our company. So yeah, this is very top of mind for us, and it's definitely a risk that I think a lot about. How big do you want, do you want Dube to get? I think Duke, we often talk about a road to a billion shoppers. The way that we're going to do this is we have an MCP. So any LLM can plug us in. You know, the largest LLMs and the long-tail LLMs, they can plug us in.

Ultimately, we want to be the canonical answer engine for how do I get this for less or find me something similar to this. We want to be that answer engine for these websites. The beauty is because they don't have access to the behavioral data, the shopping data, the product catalogs, the product prices. thing, the moment they plug us in, it's basically zero effort. It's just, you know, a few lines of code. The moment they plug us in, any click going out from our answers that gets monetized, we split that commission back with the LLM. So it's like instantly monetizing their user base in an entirely

new way. So that's something that we're very excited about. And when you think about how, like, the growth potential of that and the tailwinds for any LLM to really consider. partnering with us for our links and for our expertise and the ability to monetize instantly, I think we can get to hundreds of millions of shoppers on our infra. They might not be on dupe.com, but they'll be used to- You're still monetizing them. Yeah. That's right. That's right. That's very exciting. That's right. And the last 18 months, we, you know, we're right around sub-20 million users between, let's go. Oh, my God. Do I get the con? Of course.

No, dude. I wasn't sure if you're going to give us a number. But we got one. Yeah, yeah, no, no, no, no. So I'll give you a few numbers. I mean, we're rounding a corner. We're going to come up on 100 million in GMV sold through dup.com. Oh, 18 million shoppers. Fantastic.

Between one and two monthly, one and two million monthly shoppers, which we just launched our app last week, went number one in the app store, by the way. Super stoked about please everyone listening. Go download Duke, DUP, D-U-P-E. Look for it in the app store. Leave us a review and rating. Got to put it in the plug. Went number one of the app store.

And, of course, we had a lot of fun with that. We've been putting a lot of fun content out with that. How did you go number one? Was it content or some type of viral incentive? We have a lot of users. These people, they want our app. They use our website to shop and have used our website to shop for many months. They want it our app.

And the way the App Store works is on a 24-hour clock. So the number of installs you get in a 24-hour period, if it's more than any other app, you rock it up to the top. I didn't think it would happen on day one. I actually had a whole, I was convinced that we were going to go number one. First of all, I called this shot in August on Twitter. I said, we are going to unseat dethrone chat GPT when we launch our app in November. So we shot our shot and we kind of netted it, but it happened within a couple hours of us going live.

I didn't expect that. I expected it to be about 48 hours. So it happened very, very quickly. Wow. Very cool. I mean, we still have a lot of work left. I mean, you know, obviously, we're at the beginning of our journey. your shot again, 100 million in GMV.

When are you going to, or when are you going to hit it? We're a couple months away from that. Okay. Well, we got the gong ready for you. Amazing. You're in L.A., right? New York. Oh, okay.

Okay. Well, we should be able to get to that, I mean, this shopping season. Let's see how Black Friday goes. Make sure none of our systems go down, but that would be pretty dope. Yeah, that'll be awesome. This is your Super Bowl. Very cool. We'll talk to you soon.

Great hanging, dude. Thank you so much. Thank you. Congratulations. We'll talk to you soon. Let me tell you about Wander.com. Book of Wonder with Inspiring Reviews, Hotel Grady Menis, Dreamy Beds, Top Gear Cleaning, 24-7 concierge service. It's a vacation home by better.

And that's our show for today. That's this week in TVPN. Thank you for tuning in. Thank you for listening. Thanks for hanging out in the chat if you've been chatting this week. We love you and we'll see you on Monday. Have a fantastic weekend. Have a great weekend.

Goodbye. Cheers.