TBPN - Intel’s Tightrope Walk with Trump, Surprise Appearance From Dr. Drew | Darren Rovell, Dr. Drew Pinsky, Colin Anderson, Truman Sacks

Episode Date: August 25, 2025

(01:59) - Intel's Tricky Dance with Trump (41:09) - Is Trump's Intel Stock-Buy Socialism? (50:44) - Timeline Reactions (59:47) - Darren Rovell, a seasoned sports business journalist and avid memorabilia collector, discusses his transition from ESPN to founding Cllct, a media platform dedicated to the collectibles market. He highlights the platform's mission to provide serious journalism in the collectibles space, emphasizing its role as a comprehensive hub for collectors and investors. Rovell also shares insights into his personal collection, including unique items like the world's oldest Twinkie and significant sports tickets, reflecting his passion for preserving sports history. (01:26:14) - Dr. Drew Pinsky, an American internist and addiction medicine specialist, is renowned for hosting the radio show "Loveline" and the television series "Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew." In the conversation, he recounts his venture into the dot-com industry, detailing how a high school friend guided him through establishing an online business during the tech boom, securing significant venture capital, and navigating the challenges of early internet entrepreneurship. He reflects on the rapid rise and fall of his company, highlighting the lessons learned from the experience. (01:57:30) - Colin Anderson, former CFO of Palantir Technologies and co-founder of Friends & Family Capital, discusses his journey from an industrial engineering background to leading Palantir's finance team for eight years. He highlights the company's early challenges, including a period of significant expenses without revenue, and emphasizes the importance of mission-driven work and talent density in overcoming these obstacles. Anderson also shares insights on the forward-deployed engineering model, the complexities of enterprise sales within government sectors, and the critical role of finance in supporting rapid business growth. (02:21:26) - Timeline Reactions (02:27:01) - Truman Sacks, a 24-year-old entrepreneur and CEO of Cubby, discusses the launch of Cubby Law, the first AI teaching assistant for law students. He explains that the platform offers personalized study plans and unlimited practice exams tailored to individual courses and professors, aiming to help students excel in the highly competitive law school environment. Sacks also highlights the business model, targeting law students directly, and mentions the potential for future expansion into legal tech by building early relationships with future lawyers. (02:36:46) - Timeline Reactions TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.comFigma - https://figma.comVanta - https://vanta.comLinear - https://linear.appEight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpnWander - https://wander.com/tbpnPublic - https://public.comAdQuick - https://adquick.comBezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.comPolymarket - https://polymarket.comAttio - https://attio.com/tbpnFin - https://fin.ai/tbpnGraphite - https://graphite.devRestream - https://restream.ioProfound - https://tryprofound.comJulius AI - https://julius.aiFollow 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

Watch it TVPN! Today is Monday, August 25th, 20205. We are live from the TBPN Ultradone. The Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, and the newly, hotly contested capital of capital. Do you hear this? No. It's in the stack.

Abu Dhabi is claiming that they are the capital of capital. We have to go capital for capital with them. We will figure it out. We will be running through that. That one's in the Financial Times, but we are kicking it off with a Wall Street Journal article in a couple posts. We're also going to tell you about Ramp.

Time is money saved. Both easy use corporate cards, bill payments accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. So, Polly Market, also a sponsor. Breaking the U.S. government now officially owns a 10% stake in Intel, the Polly Market jumped to a 99% chance. This broke over the weekend. They didn't think Uncle Sam could get an allocation. They didn't. You know, this is technically Intel Series A. They did a seed round of $2.5 million on convertible debt in 1960.

Invertebable debt. Inverte. Debt. Arthur Rock, not the anonymous poster, not Arfer Rock, but Arthur Rock. The OG. The OG. And then they raised 6.8 million in 1970, and that was their IPO. So this is their Series A, in my opinion. Back then, even if you would round down, right?

Like if it was going to be 6.9 million, the very Elon Coat had to go with that number. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Close. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Decided. Let's round down. Yeah, let's keep it classy. Let's keep it classy.

Yeah, so over the weekend, the Wall Street Journal reported, president says U.S. will take big stake in Intel. President Trump said the government is taking nearly 10% stake in Intel, capping a two-week frenzy in Washington over the future of the company and fueling speculation about what else might be done to help the trouble chipmaker. Trump said in the Oval Office Friday that the company has agreed to give the government the stake is part of discussions about the company's future and billions of dollars in grants. It has received from the 2020 Chips Act.

And to be clear, I don't think they've actually received it yet. They've received $2 billion already. But there was something like roughly $10 billion, maybe $11 billion in grants and then another equal amount in loans for an Ohio facility. And those are going to be rolling out and they should draw and Intel should be able to draw down on them. they could always be rolled back if something changes and the Chips Act kind of goes away. And so this is all the art of the deal. This is the pressure.

And so it's very funny the way Trump phrased it. He says, I said, I think you should pay us 10% of the company and they said yes, which is not typically how people discuss equity investments. Government grants too. Yeah, yeah. People just don't, people don't say pay us 10% of the company. Like a VC will come to you and say, hey, I want to invest. you know, $20 million and I want a 15% stake in your company. In exchange. In exchange.

And if anything, I would ask for that stake or I'm trying to build towards that stake. I want to build a position in your company. Not I want you to pay me. But that's the nature of this thing. So there's, I mean, we've all been tracking this. There's been a little bit of back and forth between Lipp Butan and Donald Trump. He originally called for the resignation. We can take you through the timeline.

The Wall Street Journal laid it out really well in an article. deep dive that we'll go through. But let's kick it off with this Howard Lutnik video. Let's play it. The Art of the Deal, colon, Intel. And this is from Howard Lutnik sitting next to Lipputon in a beautifully appointed room. If we can go full screen here, that'd be great. I'm sitting with Lippoo in my office.

And at 3 o'clock, we're going to sign a document together in the Oval Office, where the United States of America will own 9.9% of the great American technology company Intel. I can't be more excited for America and for Intel that we get to work together. First of all, thank you so much, Secretary. And this is a big, important historical agreement that we can work together. And then more important, I don't need the grant, but I really look forward to have the U.S. government be my shareholder and we can work together. Have you ever heard Lib talk?

So what happened is Lipu became the CEO of Intel. And he came to see me. And he said, you know, the Biden administration gave this company a grant of $10 billion. And we don't need a grant. We're a great company. Maybe not with the best leadership. We lost $20. This video is absolutely insane.

He said, you know, and that was the conversation. And then when we had the conversation with the president, he said, look, we don't want to take your money away from you. But shouldn't it be fair? And we agreed that it would be fair that the same money, they're vlogging deals from the White House and your barrack. Because it's just fair. And we agreed together. And then you went to your board of directors.

Yes. And they agreed. Yes. It's a giant public company, so it had to be fair. Yes. It had to be fair. Had to be fair. There's no other way.

And so we did it fair for Intel and for the American people. And I think this is exactly what Donald Trump is all about. I'm really excited. Today we get to do the deal together. Thank you so much for your support. What's that handshake? Is that a botched? What happened there?

Whoa. Wow. Lipu went for the Dapup. Yeah. Lutnik hit him with the power, the power grab, the power shake, and it just was botched. Interesting. Interesting. Very telling.

Ben, can we put that in slow motion and play that back? Well, the journal has a timeline here. Liputon was anxiously preparing for the biggest meeting of his life. Just five months into his tenure's chief executive of Intel, Tan, was already fighting for his job. A few days earlier, Donald Trump had demanded he stepped down over his past ties to the Chinese military. The demand sent Intel's leadership into a panic. They immediately contacted the White House for a meeting, and Tan flew to Washington huddling with advisors for hours on Sunday, August 10th. His team reassured him that the president would hear him out because,

quote, Trump loves meeting with CEOs. Who doesn't? Even those whom he has attacked publicly, according to people with knowledge of the conversations. Yeah, yeah. This is WWE. This is WWE. This is WWE. You understand. You call it your opponent.

You hash it out. You leave it all in the field. Yeah, it's good. The next day Tan met with Trump, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnik, and Treasury Secretary Scott Besson in the Oval Office. He sought to convince the president that he wasn't a Chinese spy

and that the U.S. government has a long-term interest in bolstering intel, one of the only homegrown manufacturers of the computer chips that power the modern economy. The CEO's argument proved persuasive. The president also took a liking to tan, a Malaysia-born Singapore-raised U.S. citizen who once considered a career as a professional basketball player and backed off his demand for the CEO's ouster. Can we get a, Tyler, can you actually try to find a highlight reel of Lip-Boucan? Can you generate an eye image of Lip-Buton dunking on LeBron James?

But the truce came with a cost. In return for Trump support, the administration proposed taking an equity stake in the company. It's interesting in that video, they framed it. as Lipp Bhutan was like, you know what, we don't need the money. Why don't you take a stake? Yeah. But maybe, maybe, you know, it's kind of unclear who made the initial move. It's kind of both ways.

So just for context, last year, Intel brought in $50 billion in revenue, but they lost $18.8 billion. So they did not do well on earnings. They missed on bottom line, essentially. Just a little bit. Just a little bit. And they switched CEOs, obviously. They've struggled on the founding side of the founding.

side. They're not making chips for, they can't find customers for their foundry stuff. So, you know, if that continued for a really long time, yeah, they would need the money, but they technically don't, and you can just look at the, you can just look at the stock price. Like, before any of this, like, it's not like Intel was trading as a penny stock. Like, it was still, it was too rich for Elon to buy with the, what was it, $40 billion that went into Twitter, something like that. I remember thinking, like, oh, I would prefer if he bought Intel, potentially because that one seems important. But it's always been around $80 billion company.

And so if it was truly on the brink of bankruptcy, the shares would be falling even more, in my opinion. So I think Lipu is not being disingenuous there. They actually could get by without the money. But they need to restructure very seriously. And Lipu Town is like doing that. Like he's cutting a ton, he's going to cut more. And if you cut everything that's not additive to that $50 billion,

and you just try and hold on to as much of that 50 billion in revenue as possible, and you cut everything that's losing money. Yeah, you should wind up with something that actually generates, I don't know, maybe $10 billion of free cash flow. Not a bad little business. No. Intel decided to convert nearly $9 billion in grants, promised Intel as part of the 2022 Chipsack

into a 10% equity stake in the company, an unusual arrangement that makes the government Intel's biggest shareholder. Meeting was a pivot point in a frenzied period for Intel. Once, one of America's most venerated technology companies now stuck in a years-long downward spiral. The companies scramble the control of fallout from the president's demand that Tan stepped down. Ton, triggered by a Fox Business Network segment

underscores the unpredictable environment major corporations face under Trump. By the end of the two-week roller coaster ride, Tahn's job appeared to be secure and the company's situation more stable. Japan's soft bank group agreed to invest two billion seeking to curry favor with Trump. On Friday, Intel and the White House

officially revealed the terms of the deals. He came in, he saw me, we talked for a while, I liked him a lot, I thought he was very good, Trump said of Tan from the Oval Office. I said, you know what? I think the United States should be given 10% of Intel, and he said, I would consider that. Yet a host of questions remain.

I think this might be the gong of the day. This might be the true size gong moment. Hit it, John. Hit that gong. Congratulations. Clean first hit of the day. the week. It is good to be back. We're calling it 1600 Pennsylvania Ventures. Yep. White House Capital Group.

White House Capital Group. Trump and Trump. Tan must resolve core business challenges to get his company on track. Some analysts say Intel isn't in a much better position without new commitments from customers. Converting government grants to stock will only leave the company in a worst financial shape by diluting shareholders. Trump will likely need to find more ways to support Intel not wanting it to fail on his watch. And that's why Liputon's genuinely excited. Yeah. Because he's like, now you're in.

Trump is effectively the SPAC sponsor of Intel now. It's a new, it's a new era. Yeah. He has bags, and so he's aligned. And so if Liputon needs to come to him and say, hey, you know, we're trying to make this a facility in Ohio. It's not going well. We need you to put some pressure on what government. We need to align up some customers. We need to line up some customers, all sorts of things. Like in terms of- He's on the board. He's value ad. He's a value-added investor. He's got audio. audience. Yeah. He's got his own social media tech giant.

True. True. Could be a potential buyer. You know, maybe truth social becomes a hyperscaler. Yeah. You know, it's happened before. Truth cloud. Truth cloud.

Intel needs a lot of help, and the U.S. needs Intel said Jimmy Goodrich, a senior advisor to the think tank. Rand, who focuses on tech issues. Hopefully something good is going to come out of this. We had Jimmy on the show like two days ago. Yeah. Anyway, Jimmy. Jimmy, good work, Jimmy. Intel was founded in 1968 by semiconductor pioneers Robert Noyes, who co-created the modern computer ship ship. The idea that computing power and chip efficiency would likely double every year or two a guiding principle in the tech revolution. By the 90s, Intel dominated the market for processors used in personal computers. Its Pentium line and Intel inside marketing campaign with dancers and multicolored clean room suits made the company a household name. Then came a series of tragic missteps. The company largely missed out on the mobile phone and artificial intelligence booms by over-emphasizing short-term financial targets, analysts say. Rivals and chip design like

Nvidia and manufacturers such as Taiwan semiconductors surged ahead. It's interesting how you, if you're a huge tech company, you can miss maybe one platform shift and do fine, but you miss two. You're going to be out of the game. Even Microsoft said, you know, we miss mobile. Yeah. to get into social media. I mean, LinkedIn. Yeah, you could. I mean, it's a really,

really stretched metaphor, but you could say that like Nvidia missed mobile more or less. Like, the, like, they weren't really switching into, okay, let's be the design arm of, because the iPhone...

You were buying enough chips for your gaming. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, it was just a gaming company at that time, mostly in scientific computing a little bit, but there is a graphics processing unit

on mobile phones. It's just part of the system on a chip that goes into the phone. And it was never, Nvidia never really, like, figured out a way to get a piece of mobile. And there's a world

where, like, the cloud rendering stuff happens, but, uh, the Nvidia kind of sat that out, but it didn't matter. Yeah. Because they,

they crushed AI. So, you see the chart. Look at a chart. Look at a chart. It's sales. This is sales by quarter. And it's just like,

and this is what a 30-year-old company is just completely, completely right. It looks like a YC demo day. Looks like a ramp. It's crazy. The company is still seen as key to reviving U.S. manufacturing.

In his first term, Trump touted Intel's plans for a $7 billion manufacturing plant in Arizona. Trump advisors began discussing what became the Chipsack, wanting to attract companies such as TSMC to the U.S. Has Arizona tried to brand like what they're doing? They have so many different chip manufacturers coming into Arizona.

They need like Silicon Desert or something. Chip City. Chip City. It really feels like they're, there is a significant movement there. Center of gravity. Yeah, that will ultimately become like a company town type vibe. Chip City.

As discussion on the Chipsacks crescendoed during the Biden administration, Intel Pat, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger lobbied aggressively, hoping for some of the laws, tens of billions of dollars in subsidies. In 2022, he sat in the first lady's box for the state of the union speech during which President Biden touted Intel's investment plans. While the bill was being negotiated, senators including Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren pushed unsuccessfully for a version that would see the government receiving equity in companies it backed.

Very interesting. This is what Mark Cuban was saying last week. He was saying this is Sanders and Warren's dream. He said it in a little bit less PG language, if I remember correctly. But Intel became the law's biggest beneficiary, qualifying for roughly $11 billion in grants and about $11 billion in loans for a plant in Ohio. expansion in Arizona and other projects. It seemed like a boon at the time, but the law's slow rollout and Intel's core business challenges led to repeated delays. Talk about ROI there. Like,

like, Lib Bhutan's saying, like, you know, we don't need these grants. And I think he's like technically correct. But it's an incredible nice to have. And the ROI on your CEO going to the state of a union and just sitting in a box and like taking some meetings. And, you know, I don't know what Intel's lobbying budget was, but it probably was less than 10 billion. Right? It was probably less than 10 million. It probably wasn't very much at all. And you get a huge...

So a friend of the show, Andrew Ross Sorkin, said yesterday, should the government start taking equity in every startup for the federal tax incentives we offer, or Tesla? How about the banks? How about when a state government offers a tax incentive? Should they get an equity stake in exchange? Board representation? This is a super slippery slope.

And Bill Gurley said, here's my take. If the government is a quote-unquote lender of last resort, they should take 100% take equity and arguably 100% of the equity. Failed to do this with GM, Goldman Sachs, United, and other airlines. How do you know if they are the lender of last result? Resort?

The company takes the deal. Which tracks... Because otherwise, the company would go with a financial investor who says, I only want 50% for the same price or whatever. And so, it is a good... It's a good point.

It's a good point by Bill. So in reference to the original Chips Act grants, the journal says it seemed like a boon at the time, but the law's slow rollout in Intel's core business challenges led to repeated delays. Late last year, Tan, who had been an Intel director since 2022, left the board in protest of Gelsinger's strategy. The board also soured on Gelsinger and pushed him out. Trump's victory presented another curveball. He had bashed Biden. Quitting in protest, deeply underrated.

Deeply underrated strategy just in life. Yeah. Yeah, I respect Tan for for quitting in protest and then ultimately getting a job. Coming back for the top spot. It's pretty, it's pretty sick. Pretty sick. Underutilized strategy. Yeah.

Just, I'm out. He decided basically in the trough of dissolutionment, he quit in protest. And then he said, yep, I'll pop back on the roller coaster for the slope of enlightenment. That's where Intel is. And we're really, yeah, I think we're, I think we were. Who's on the slope of enlightenment? I thought we were doing three colors, me, you, Tyler. I didn't get Tyler on there yet, but you're on, you're just,

I'm still on innovation trigger. You're just coming up to the peak. I just went to San Francisco. I was talking to AI researchers. They told me deep learning is undefeated. They told me that pre-training scaling will continue. And so I have yet to, my expectations can continue to be inflated. I am looking at the trough.

You're looking at the trough? Looking at the trough. You're going to the... I'm getting straight for the trough. Wait, and Tyler, where are you? I think I'm where Jordy is, too. Okay. It's the red ones on the other side of the...

The downslope? Wow. I thought you were so AGI-I-pilled, bro. I thought you were so AGI-I-pilled. But, I mean, like, okay, even Dorcasch is extending his timelines. Like, how can you... I mean, it's hard to still be... Extending the timeline just means that the initial innovation trigger slope is just going like this,

but he's still going up. He's still going up and to the right. He's happy. expectations are worse. Yeah, yeah, yeah. YX is expectations. I don't know. I don't know.

Let's just sprint to the plateau of productivity. The real move is that I don't think we're in the Trough of Disillusionment. How about, how about, I think we need to make the TVPN version of this for the AI hype cycle. Yes. And the slope of enlightenment, we need to just like. Another, another vertical line. Another vertical line. For the fast takeoff scenario.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like we get a bubble, we get a crash, and then we get a fast takeoff. That's the most likely for sure. No, our job is to recognize and diagnose when we are in the trough of disillusionment and re-illusionment such that we can get to the slope of the higher. I've never been in a trough of disillusionment that didn't one day get to the slope of in life. Exactly. So there's always hope.

There's always hope. Yes. But anyways. You know what could have made that video better if it was streamed on re-streamed? That's right. Live. live stream 30 plus destinations, multi-stream and reach your audience wherever they are. Liputon.

Howard Lutnik, if you're listening, get on re-stream. Anyway, continue, Joey. Of course. So Trump's 2024 victory presented another curveball. He had bashed Biden's implementation of the Chipsack, fueling worries that he could try to change deals or cancel them altogether. Intel's financial condition worsened and the incoming administration worried the company might fail.

Even with the recent share price rebound in August, followed by reports of the deal with Trump, the company is now valued at 110 billion, a fraction of its dot-com bubble peak. The stock is down roughly 50% since the start of last year. Intel has been left behind, Trump said last Friday. So around Trump's inauguration, January, Lutnik and administration officials began evaluating Chips Act recipients and which tech companies generally could increase their U.S. investments in line with the president's goals. They asked semiconductor companies receiving Chips Act awards to increase their total U.S. investment,

but they knew they might need to revamp Intel's deal or help the companies in other ways. What's interesting there is that when we talk to all of this is like, like everyone's doing art of a deal on each other. And meanwhile, like when we talk to Doug O'Loughlin at semi-analysis, he's like realistically like all this trailing edge capacity is going to be done in like South America. Like it doesn't make sense to do it in America. Like a lot of this stuff is just going to wind up getting offshoreed because it's easier to build some facility that's just copy-pasted down there.

And so it's very unclear, like, how, like, how it can actually work in the long term. And then, and then on the leading edge, like, it seems like it's TSM and Samsung, like, Tesla's going with Samsung. And those will be in the United States. And those will be, like, cutting edge, like, Ph.D. level jobs. Amazing researchers, like, really, really great, like, American innovation. But, like, we're kind of already on that path. And Intel's not really the party that you need to be twisting the arm of. it feels like if you want America to be like the leading semiconductor country,

you just need to make sure that you have leverage over TSM and Samsung. And maybe AMD Global Foundries a little bit. I mean, Global Foundries is part of Intel now, but a lot of the trailing edge, like it seems like it might not be a long-term thing that America is ever good at again because it's like it's commoditizing so rapidly. I don't know.

Anyway, clearly Trump cares about it and wants to keep it here. So that's what he's pushing for. The administration began early conversations with Intel's board about taking an equity stake. The talks didn't move forward, in part because the board, which has often been mired in disagreement, wanted more than the administration was willing to give. Did they want him to take a bigger position? No, they probably wanted like $40 billion in grants or something. Give us more for that.

Former banker, Lutnik, has had in recent months asked other tech executives what can be done to help Intel, even asking other chip companies like TSM, AMD, and Micron, whether they would consider potential deals involved in the company. This is what Doug is just generally wanted people with semiconductor manufacturing experience to be involved with the company. And so it's very possible. This seems like a step in the wrong direction, according to his heuristic, because it's like more government people on the board. But, I mean, to be clear, the U.S. government is not taking a board seat and not having a controlling stake. It's a purely financial stake, which we'll get into.

So in March, Intel's board name Tan 65 as CEO. One of the biggest decisions he faces is whether to keep the company as one of the few chip firms that does both design and manufacturing. Some analysts say Intel should consider splitting the business or doing other types of deals to cut costs. Tan has so far shied away from spinning off the manufacturing segment, which lost $3.2 billion in the second quarter. He has told confidence he has inherited a very bad hand. In July, Intel said it would lay off 15% of its workers by year end. cancel billions in planned investments and further delay work on the sprawling Ohio plant. The new rules of the road were no more blank checks.

TAN wrote in a memo to employees. TAN's early decisions at Intel were aimed at getting the company on more stable ground, but the CEO's past work at chip design software company, Cadence Design Systems, thrust the company into the spotlight. In late July, July, Cadence agreed to pay $140 million for violating U.S. export restrictions by selling ban technology to a Chinese National Defense University. The sales happened while Tan was CEO. So, you know, it seems like you probably had to sign off on that in some way.

Of course, it's like, is it a university? Is that, like, I don't know. I don't know how you, like, steel man this or dig into, like, you know. Steel man it. You're a steelman champion of the world. Steel manning, it would probably be like the export restrictions are just like super complicated and it's unclear. and it's one of those things where it's like

there's the spirit of the law and the letter of the law and they made some case for you know in this particular technology did not fit within the export restrictions because the export restrictions might just be like you know oh chips of a certain size or scale

and they had a chip that was like slightly under and then they and then the government like you know reinterpreted the export restrictions to include that like this stuff happens all the time because when these export restrictions get

get written. It's easy to say like... Crazy you don't hear much about Cadence Design Systems, by the way. It's a 95 billion dollar public company. Yeah, and that's why people think LeBouqueton's so equipped to run Intel because he took that company to like a hundred billion market

cap basically from I think like five or ten or something when he joined the company. So he is a talented operator. So a week later, Senator Tom Cotton sent a letter to Intel's board raising concerns about TAN's ties to China. Trump was watching, this is wild. Trump was watching Fox Business Network on August 7th when host Maria Bartaromo highlighted Cotton's

criticism at 7.34 a.m. Eastern time. Five minutes later, Trump fired off a message on his truth social platform. The CEO of Intel is highly conflicted and must resign immediately. It's crazy. He's just watching the news. then posting about it. Journal says it was one of the first times in modern history that the president publicly called for the leader of a major company to step down.

Trump's demand was seen by some on both sides as an opening bid in negotiations with the CEO. The president had already grown intrigued by the idea of government stakes in key industrial companies during his May trip to the Middle East. A senior White House official said, though the official added that it wasn't what sparked Trump's post, the president wants to see more such deals in the future. Well, if you're trying to maintain compliance, get on fancy. Automate compliance, manage, risk, group trust, continuously.

Vantta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation, whether you're pursuing your first. I imagine that will be, we know that Trump is not going to be on the board and not going to be sort of directly pulling the strings on the business, but I imagine one of the first things he wants Lipp to do is get on Manta. Yeah, for sure. So Intel Stock Price has been on a tear. Shout out to Leopold Oshambrunner at situational awareness.

They mocked him. They mocked him. They said, this guy's fun must have already blown up. Yep. Oh, he's not in until. What a weird non-consensus bet. Oh, well, it paid off. So Trump called for TAN's resignation mid-August. Then Trump met TAN. SoftBank invested $2 billion, and the share price rose from under $20 to over $25 a share. And the deal has been announced. So anyway, sorry, I cut you off. No, I think people were speculating whether Leopold has. had some inside information, or he just viewed Intel as a super strategic asset that the government

wouldn't possibly let fail. There was some guy on X saying like, oh, this is like insider trading. Everyone is insider trading. Even like Warren Buffett made his money on insider training, very blackpilled. And so he quotes me just being like, there's no evidence of any of this happening at all. And yeah, wait what you got, Tyler? I think also like this trade, like him being long Intel, totally aligns with the thesis of the of the fun situational awareness his whole thing is he's going to he's monitoring the situation

yeah they're going to nationalize like AI oh yeah so obviously like if the US is going to nationalize like start a lab start like building computing stuff they're going to have like they're going to take the existing infrastructure yeah yeah I didn't even thought about it from that perspective I was just thinking about it from

from the perspective of like we we talked to Ben Thompson about Intel we talked to Doug O'Loflin about Intel We were kind of like noodling on it back and forth as like commentators. And I didn't come away with a super strong like bowl or bear case. I didn't really look at the stock price of the valuation of the financials. But it didn't seem like crazy to come up with like an expression of your position in financial terms. And it's very clear that like Leopold and his team just like looked at Intel more deeply and saw that there was an opportunity there.

You don't need. Not every good train needs to be inside a job. trading people. It's like so ridiculous. Yeah. And, and yeah, I mean, it's the same thing. Like, it's like, what does he know about Nvidia? Like, is it possible? He just, he just knows that like, every, like, he's not in Nvidia. What does he know? Is he insider trading? Or is he just, like, looking at like, oh, well, invidia is like the obvious bet. So everyone piled into Nvidia. It's like the biggest company in the world. Like, maybe not a lot of juice left there. Yeah. I'm going to go where, I'm going to get 20%. I'm going to go and bet on the things that have high upside potential. And,

yeah, I don't know. Anyway. Yeah. In the Oval Office, Tan told the president his ties to Chinese businesses were years in the past and he was loyal to the United States. He presented ideas for turning Intel around and investing more in the United States. Lutnik told Tan that he thought it was dangerous to have so much of the global chip making capacity controlled by foreign companies. Tan agreed and reiterated that he was dedicated to Trump's America's first manufacturing agenda. By the end of the hour-long session, the president was convinced and agreed to lay off the criticism. I will no longer call for your immediate resignation on my social media app, Mr. Tan. That's great.

Tan and Lutnik then moved quickly to hammer out a deal for the government to take a minority stake in Intel. It was complicated negotiation because it was unusual to convert government grants that had already been awarded into equity. While they were in talks, SoftBank, led by Mossa, suddenly agreed to put $2 billion into the company part of its campaign to bet on U.S. firms and appeal to Trump. Absolutely. If they were putting together like a pitch deck for SoftBank, I feel like they should have used Figma for that. Yeah. Think bigger, build faster.

Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. I would be shocked if SoftBank uses Figma for the design of their decks. Yeah. Because they seem to be very PowerPoint coded, but they still are powerful. Imagine how powerful they could be if they would simply get on Figma slides. Let's see here. Did I tell you that my first internship ever was at a softball? bank backed company.

No way. Yeah. Dr. Drew.com. So Dr. Drew was a radio host with Adam Carolla on Kiss FM in 2005. Wait, that's crazy lore. Yes, this is insane lore. So Dr. Drew was a board certified psychologist, psychiatrist, I think. Wait, we're pulling up this website, by the way.

And so Dr. Drew. during the dot-com boom, wanted to start his own, like, live stream property, basically, and raised money from SoftBank and built a team of engineers and had their own data center racking servers. And one of my jobs was like to go to the, well, I mean, this is like what it is now, because he has like a podcast and stuff. And you don't really need like necessarily like a venture back startup to be an influencer. but

so Dr. Fu went to the same high school as me and every single famous person has gone to John's high school yeah it's wild but yeah like one of my like pop by the summer office was like go in the data center and it was like super cold it was like not like a data center

like people think today it was like a room with a couple racks of servers but there was no AWS so if you wanted to set up a website you had to like rack a server and like put the code on the server and then run it. Just put the servers in the bag, bro. Yeah. The brand was a little bit different back then. The first show that they were going to green light was this sort of like it was about a lot of

stuff was like relationship coaching. So Loveline people would call in about their relationships. And so I believe they were going to put two people like a man and woman who were maybe dating and they were going to go on a road trip and they were going to live stream it. And it was going to be like some sort of like new. new media. Well, all I can see is I can see why Masa needed to be in that website, John. It is incredible lore.

Is that part of how you underwrote the internship, too? You're like, look, you know. I wasn't really, like, technically an intern. I was so young, I was just, like, stopping by the office, basically. But it was cool. It was like a true startup environment, like a pool table, like pretty big office, like very much. Pool table? Yeah, pool table.

Amazing. It was very, it was very iconic of, like, the dot. tables in office. No, now it's like ping pong tables. Yeah. They've taken over. We should, do you like pool? I like pool.

Okay, we should get a pool table back here. Billiards. Billiards. Yeah. Yeah, it was like the classic, like, kind of overfunded ventureback.com bubble company where like huge staff for something that like would ultimately be. Small media company. So yeah, yeah, a media company that should focus on like the media piece and then and then like

the YouTube should just be like a platform. And so it's like, it's like, it didn't make sense to be in like the middle. You either just wanted to be like the influencer or the, or the platform. Anyway, so SoftBank had already pledged to spend at least $100 billion in the U.S. on AI and other tech investments, a move announced by Sun at Trump's Mara Lago Club last December. SoftBank had also earlier this year discussed a potential deal to acquire Intel's chip manufacturing business.

Intel and the U.S. soon agreed to the government would use $8.9 billion in grants that had been committed but not paid to take a nearly 10% stake at a slight discount. The U.S. won't have a say in governance. It already gave Intel 2.2 billion in CHIP's AX grants. That was what we were talking about earlier. Some had been given, but not all that was promised. David Shapiro, former partner on the Wall Street firm, Watchdell, Lipton, and Rosen, and Katz drew up the terms, including a provision that the government could acquire another 5% of Intel at a discount if the company sells the majority of its manufacturing business. It's an underrated naming scheme. I really wish start.

would do this. Like the next like AI startup should just be like, Coogan and Hayes and Cosgrove and this could be totally a new meta. It can only be done once. Yes. By a great team. If we did Kugan Hayes, Cosgrove and Kohler, it would be amazing. I mean, at some point we should just add the whole team. The whole team. Yeah. It's just the longest. We could definitely get the dot com. Kugan and Hayes and Kogsgrove and just over and over and over. So the administration insisted on this provision is 5% at a discount as a type of poison pill meant to dissuade the company from fully exiting the manufacturing segment. And this is what people are really excited about, you know, government involvement in the decisions of highly technical projects. Highly technical,

complicated businesses. Government famously good at building things. Yes. Yes. So if Intel were to give the government another 5%, obviously dilute shareholders and complicate things. So Despite the initial optimism, many analysts say the agreement will only be a boon for Intel if Trump can also find customers and attract more investment for the company. He might be able to do that. I think he's going to be able to do both, to be honest. I think he's going to be able to strongly encourage other companies. He's not going to be like a VC that just like sits back and like reads the investor updates. There's one thing.

People can criticize Trump for a lot of things, but he is available the week of August 25th. He's online. While many allocators, he's not a burning man. Which is crazy. Which is crazy. Which is crazy. You'd think that he's starting to get into venture. Yeah.

Investing into companies. He would go to Burning Man. Set up an Oval Office camp, at Burning Man. But instead of being at Black Rock City, he might be at Black Rock. That's right. Doing deals. That was one of our good. There's an early episode of TBPN where John and I are riffing out Black Rock City,

the home of Burning Man. And wondering if there's a connection. and there's almost certainly a connection. Obviously a connection to Black Rock, financial institution. Softbanks, $2 billion, and the $8.9 billion in government funding that had already been promised

aren't game-changing for the chip manufacturing business. And the grand scheme of thing, it's not that much money. They lost $18 billion last year. We're not even covering last year's losses. But it's better to have and not need, I suppose. Yeah. So the agreement is fueling speculation that the president could lean on other tech companies

to work with Intel. Lean strongly in, encourage, demand that they are fired if they are not, if they do not. He's going to rip some posts. Tan has met with potential customers, including Apple CEO, Tim Cook, trying to win support for Intel's next generation manufacturing process. This is not the kind of thing I see Tim being super interested in. He's like, more expensive, less performant.

Apple has spent, what, a decade getting off of Intel and Intel Max and going to Apple Silicon, which are like so integrated. so perfect for the Apple ecosystem. Like, now, like, you can run, you can run iOS apps on Mac and vice versa. Like, it's like, there's a ton of, there's a ton of, like, they've been spinning up, like, the ecosystem on top of Apple Silicon for so long, like, the different graphics engines and getting developers to go deeper into optimizing for Apple Silicon. And then they just, like, rugged, run back on it.

Yeah, so the journal says many executives say they would need big incentives to use Intel. for manufacturing, given how badly it trails industry leaders like TSM. It is difficult to switch semiconductor manufacturers because the processes are specialized and have to be planned out years in advance. The government stake in Intel is the latest in a series of extraordinary interventions in the private sector. I mean, what's the craziest thing that they could do? Like Apple GPU for a cluster at Intel or something, like kind of fresh start?

That seems like something way out of their wheelhouse of both companies. I have no idea how they would do that. I mean, if Amazon can do Traneum and Google can do TPU at TSM, like maybe there's a world where that happens? I don't know. Anyway, I'm hopeful that's punching the air right now. Anyway. So they highlight a couple of the other deals.

It's worth covering to the president when a quote-unquote golden share of control over Japan's nippon steel in return for allowing it to take over U.S. steel. These golden shares are in reference to what the C.C. Oh, I thought it was in reference to the president's toilet, which is gold. Yes, and many, many of the fixtures in the Oval Office. Yes. But, and last month, Trump struck a deal with Nvidia and AMD for the federal government to take 15% of their chip sales in China in return for allowing the exports.

Yep. In early July, the Defense Department took a minority stake in MP materials, a maker of rare earth magnets. Days later, Apple, which the Trump administration had long pressured to expand its U.S. supply chain, announced a $500 million deal to buy MP's products. Yeah, so that's an example of, like, Trump, like, acting is, you know, biz-deaf, basically for the companies he likes. I mean, he's really going to make a lot of ECs look bad. Oh, yeah.

Big promises during the deal process when they're trying to win allocation and then kind of I'll help you ramp your revenue for sure. Yeah, I'll help you hire founding engineers. I know a lot of the top guys. I know a ton of founding engineers. I don't have 50 other portfolio companies that also want to hire a founding. engineers. I got you. I got you. But the Intel stake is among the most notable, given Trump called for Tand to resign, then quickly brought him to the negotiating table.

There's this Darth Vader aspect of the whole thing, said Guantam Makunda, a lecturer at the Yale University School of Management, never heard of it, who studies innovation and leadership, referring to the Star Wars villain who started as good, became evil, then redeemed himself. anyways you want to read through this post the big question is is this socialism maga socialism is this maga socialism

a lot of people have been saying this and I mean I think like my default take is that like I don't know that Intel is so critical that we need necessarily a backstop I don't necessarily know that the government is the right board member you don't trust Doug on this

this? Doug really doesn't want, Doug from semi-analysis really doesn't, does not want Intel to fail. Yeah, I don't know. I'm still like on the fence about it. But, so the debate has been raising, like, is this socialism? And so we're going to the socialists who are self-proclaimed, the people's line from Carl Beher. And Carl says, no, but that hasn't stopped Democrats from complaining about it. it and this is interesting because obviously the Trump camp is very pro this deal and they're saying this isn't socialism what are you talking about we're just doing art of the deal we're making good deals and we're this is an America first agenda project the democrats are saying oh wow Trump is a hypocrite this is socialism the socialists are saying this isn't socialism it doesn't

nearly far enough it doesn't count as socialism because it's not a controlling stake so uh carl says former Obama Undersecretary of the state, Rick Stengel, is freaking out right now over the news that the Trump administration has taken a 10% equity stake in chip manufacture intel. This is a quote from Rick Stengel. Trump's strong-arming intel for government equity is something Mao and Stalin would be proud of once the GOP believed in a laissez-faire capitalism and government not interfering in the private sector. Look it up.

The state owning the means of production is called Marxism. So Carl continued. I couldn't find any evidence of Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders taking a victory lap on Trump's acquisition of Intel shares. Yes. Which was surprising given that back in the Biden admin era, they were pushing for this. Yes, but the key discussion that's going on right now is financial ownership versus true control over capital, and that's what Carl's going to get into here.

So he says anyone old enough to remember the phrase government motors, this is from the era of the takeover GM, should be able to appreciate what a wild line of criticism this is to hear from a former Obama official. As part of his troubled asset relief program, TARP, Obama took for the U.S. government a 61% equity stake in General Motors and the rights backlash was entirely predictable. Rush Limbaugh called this a sterling example of the left's crusade for government control of business. that proved the left's enchantment with socialism. John Stossel complained that this was a move toward more government control of the economy, and in the end, that's pretty close to socialism, that so many liberals have adopted this line of criticism,

Joe Scarborough took it up on Thursday, and Democratic consultant Jessica Tarlov ran with it on Friday, for example, should probably provoke some reflection among socialists who think of liberals as fellow travelers. While socialists may share certain egalitarian values and other priorities with contemporary Democrats, American liberals are still reflexively ambivalent to hostile toward the basic socialist agenda of nationalization.

They will opportunistically support it when it's time for Democrats to bail out the economy, but they will aggressively attack it if they think this will score points against Republicans. There are a few things that contemporary liberals enjoy more than catching a Republican doing something that they can rightly or wrongly construe as socialist. In this case, I would say wrongly,

Stengel's definition of Marxism as state ownership of the means of production is confused for all kinds of reasons. But here are the most salient that, but here are the most salient is that ownership does not imply control. Even if this was ordinary equity, 10% would hardly give the government any kind of significant control over the company. But as Intel made clear in a statement, this deal doesn't even give the government 10% control, quote, the government's... 9.9%. But no, no, so there's more. The government's investment in Intel will be a passive... ownership with no board representation or other governance or information rights, the government

also agrees to vote with the company's board of directors on matters requiring shareholder approval with limited exceptions. So this notion of passive ownership perfectly illustrates why socialist would do well to talk about control rather than ownership of the means of production, a major function of modern finances to sever the relationship between those two. To identify control, you have to look past the legal and business terminology and figure out who actually has the final say over any given lot of capital. In that light, it isn't clear that 10% ownership stake

even represents incremental progress towards control of Intel, which is what the socialists want. Convincing a business to give you a 10% non-voting stake in their company is very different thing from getting a 10% voting stake, let alone a 51% voting stake. Nevertheless, American partisans clearly aren't interested in litigating the fine details between ownership and control, and that's why socialists have an interest in this fight.

if Democrats are going to vilify Trump as a socialist, the best response is to complain that he isn't even doing socialism. He's not doing enough. He's not doing enough. And so my takeaway from this is that it's a good point. Like, it is not the goal of socialist, but at the same time it reaffirmed that I do not want to do the socialist thing here because I don't want the government voting on what Intel should do.

Like I don't think the government's equipped to make the decision on how they should position against TSM, where they fit in Apple Silicon versus TPU versus Traneum. It just doesn't seem like government's set up to actually run this company more effectively than anyone else. And so I'm very hesitant about that. It sounds like something that's like very good in some abstract sense to the socialist, but I have no faith that if the government were to get a 51% voting stake in Intel, that we would get a better outcome here.

Well, the better outcome people were talking about this on the timeline would be Trump answering questions on earnings calls. That would be fantastic. Maybe that's the good outcome. Yeah. But it'd be odd to have like, I mean, if we went to pure direct democracy and socialism, like you go to the ballot box and you vote. Like, are we going to do three nanometer? Like decide. Like, yes or no.

Like I think it's a waste of. Or just have the whoever is the Intel CEO. just have that as, you know, an elected official. Like, let the people vote on who should be running. Yeah, I mean, the question is like, how much democracy do you want? You can vote on everything. You can vote every single day. California is extremely democratic.

We have ballot measures for all sorts of things. We tend to not do ballot measures for different things at the federal level. We have representative democracy, not a direct democracy. But if you really play out the direct democracy socialism thing, it's like, yeah, you'll be voting on whether or not Intel launches a GPU. Or like Intel, like, hey, we miss mobile. What should we do about that? Okay, let's ask the American people broadly at the ballot box.

Like, that is the conclusion, which is kind of crazy to me. Should Intel launch energy drinks? Yeah. It's not really in our wheelhouse today, but, you know, big, potentially large opportunity. Yeah, it just, it does seem, it does seem fraud. It doesn't seem like, it seems like they're, there's potentially one of the sloppiest slopes that we've ever been on as a country. Well, I don't know.

This is saying that we're, like, we're, like, his point is that this isn't, this isn't a step towards real socialism because it's not real control. It's, it's purely a financial instrument. Yeah, but the Intel board said, uh, the government also agrees to vote with a company's board of directors on matters requiring shareholder approval with limited exceptions. What are those exceptions? Right. I'm not sure. Not sure that we know. But anyways, the timeline.

The timeline says it's a bad idea. We can vote against you. that's the exception. Anyway, first step I would vote for if I was in a democratic socialist society, I would vote that Intel gets on graphite.dev. Code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub, ship higher quality software faster.

Get started for free. Can I or in the chat says I think Intel needs to launch short-form content. Well, make sure your voter registration is up to date because President AOC might just make it happen. You never know. I could see it. I could see it. I could see it.

I mean, the real wild one is, yeah, Tesla, because Tesla's had a number of government incentives that they'd taken advantage of. You could make the same argument. You put the screws to them and you say, hey, we need voting shares for this. For the years and years. This is what Andrew, Andrew Sorkin was saying. Yeah. He was saying, like, yeah, like where do you stop?

And I understand that, yeah, there is this, like, slippery slope. But to Bill Gurley's point, like, Intel could have said, no. They could have said like, yeah, we're actually going to be fine without the Chips Act money. And so we don't want, we don't want an equity stake. Although, Liputon is sitting there just on fire. And you should be like, you don't need to help, you don't need to help put it out. I'll be good. I'll be good. Flames, you're just, like, no, I'm good. I'm good. I'm good. I'll cut more. He's like, I don't want to, I don't want to give the president. I don't want to give the president the ick. I'm just act all like. Hey, I mean,

BlackBerry is a cybersecurity company now. Maybe Intel just like pivots all the way down to just like, yeah, we actually just own real estate at this point. Like all we own is, we're real estate and we just lease to TSMC. And that's it. We're completely out of. Probably a decent business. I don't know. Timeline was in turmoil earlier.

Daniel Tenrero said the Emily's sunbergification of everything you love continues apace. I don't know what that means. Emily fires back and says, keep my name out of your mouth. If you came to the party I hosted with TVPN and you didn't say hello to me. He said hello to me. I don't know. There were a lot of people. There were a lot of people.

But we got to get some sound effects for that. I'll see multiple journalists on the horizon. Who's the journalist? Well, I mean. There were multiple journalists. In another life, Emily could have been a journalist. But anyways, you guys should come on TV in just debate. Oh, that'd be good.

Yell. Yeah. Yeah. That's great. Andrew Reed is highlighting some small-caps cell-side research notes under the, what company is this? I have no idea. CMRC. There are some things that just go better together.

Austin and live music, Tex and Mex, smoked brisket and just about anything. And perhaps commerce and the next wave of AI-driven agentic discoverability. Oh, this is for big commerce probably. Big Summit. Commerce is, oh, maybe they've just rebranded it as just commerce. but it used to be big big commerce.com. Commerce.com. Yeah.

Big commerce. And it was a competitor to Shopify, I believe. Yes. And they did not have a go. I have a buddy who was like, I think Shopify is overrated. I'm going long Shopify. I'm going short, Shopify, long, big commerce. Because I think that there's like too much of a delta there.

And I think that trade went very poorly. I'm not sure exactly executed it. Down 93%. But this went way down and Shopify went way up. Commerce.com, though, is a pretty hard domain. It is a good domain, but you need more than that. You need a goaded team. Yeah.

Silicon Valley launches pro-AI PACs to defend industry in midterm elections. Andresen Horowitz and OpenAI President Greg Brockman are among those helping launch and fund leading the future. Silicon Valley is putting more than $100 million into a network of political action committees and organizations to advocate against strict artificial. artificial intelligence regulations, a signal that tech executives will be active in next year's midterm elections. Well, if you want to analyze where all that $100 million will go, you've got to get on Julius. What analysis do you want to run, chat with your data and get expert level insights in seconds. We're loved by 2 million users and counting.

2 billion soon. Many are saying this. So A16 and Greg Brockman are among those helping launch and fund leading the future a new Superpack network, on AI. There's been a lot of rumblings around these, this idea, but no one's gotten it off the ground to the tune of $100 million yet. The head of government affairs, Colin McCune and Brockman and OpenAI, Chief Global Affairs Officer Chris Lehane, were involved in initial conversations earlier this year about the need to help shape industry-friendly policies, leading the future hopes to use campaign donations and digital ads

to advocate for select AI policies and oppose candidates who the group believes will stifle the industry at large. One of its goals is to push back against a movement back by some other tech titans that focuses on regulating AI models before they get too powerful and create catastrophic risks.

This is Tech Titan on Tech Titan Team Death Match. This is. Absolutely love it. The organization said it isn't pushing for total deregulation but wants sensible guardrails. So, I mean, the main debate is like, is there going to be, the AI FDA.

I think this was a talking point that I heard on All In years ago, and I heard repeated in Washington from someone in the House of Representatives, this idea that there should be a government organization that reviews and tests models before they get deployed. And very clearly that would slow down progress, like significantly significantly. Because like, I mean, deep seek ships a model without even the updating the model card and they're just like, yeah, run your own benchmarks. Like, we're not testing this thing. We're just releasing. We don't have time with that. It's not a hugging face.

And so imagine if you- You can figure it out. Let us know in the comments of this is- Before you release to Hugging Face, like you need to go through some sort of like FDA style regulation that could take years. That's going to really, really slow things down. Probably be bad for the industry overall. Maybe it creates a little bit more monopoly power for companies that have the resources to get through that process. But

would be very, very difficult. And it would certainly hurt the rollout of like small models, depending on how it was, because if you just say like any, you can't deploy any neural network of a certain scale or size, like how are you even defining that? All of a sudden, like, do you have to approve the latest Reels algorithm before you,

before you like update that? That's something that's updating all the time. The future of these models is like much, much more iterative. than like one big release. So it seems like, it seems sort of... Equally important, Sheel is on the timeline right now highlighting that Greg Brockman

married his wife, Anna, at the OpenAI office on a workday. Elia was the officiant. That's amazing. Which is absolutely amazing. Love it. Love to see it. If you are busy executive, consider marrying your wife in the office

with your co-founder as the officiant. There's some good precedence here now. Absolutely dog. I really hope. I hope Ilya goes back to Open AI. That would be such a fun twist. We'll see it. Anyway, if you're trying to get your brand mention in ChatGPT,

go to profound. Reach millions of consumers who are using AI to discover new products and brands. Used by MongoDB, Indeed, docusign, Zapier, Ramp, Majury, Workable, AitSlee, U.S. Bank, Chime, Clay. It's a good crew. Good crew. Many tech executives worry that Congress won't pass AI

rules, creating a patchwork of state laws that hurt their companies. Earlier this year, a push by some Republicans to ban state AI bills for 10 years was shot down after opposition from other conservatives who opposed a blanket prohibition on any state AI legislation. It does seem very difficult to deal with. State-by-state regulation when you're running an internet The chat is adding some commentary. QSBS rollover says little language models are threatened. Yeah, yeah. We must defend the little language models. Taylor says, USG doesn't realize the future of LLM proliferation looks more like the AK-47 and less like the bomb. Well, yeah, I mean, maybe that's a bull case for state regulation since most of,

I mean, there are some federal regulations, obviously, but a lot of it's state by state. The California compliant AR-15, the California compliant LLM will be severely nerfed. It certainly cannot do physics. It certainly cannot do physics, yeah. It would be too dangerous. Anyway, linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products, meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects, and product roadmaps.

Leading the future will generally align with the White House AI and CryptoZard, David Sacks, a frequent critic of AI Dumer's, the organization plans to start working for states, seen as key AI policy battlegrounds, New York, California, Illinois, and Ohio. The group said it would support both Democrats and Republicans. It would include federal and state PACs and a 501C4. organization that advocates for policies. The network's AI campaign is expected to start later this year. One of the best-manent venture capital firms, Andreessen Horwitz, is also big backer of fair shake. Billionaire co-founder Mark Andreessen was one of the most notable tech executives to support

Donald Trump last year after previously boosting Democrats. Part of a swing in Silicon Valley towards conservatives, the shift has worried some Democrats who fear they may be hemorrhaging support without more positive messaging around AI. Brockman co-founded Chad GPT maker. Open AI along CEO, Sam Altman and others and is now one of Altman's top deputies. He is contributing to the new group with his wife, Anna Brockman, who he married. And yes, this is the quote on a workday. Other backers include 8 BC managing partner and Palantir Technologies co-founder Joe Lonsdale, AI search engine perplexity, and veteran angel investor Ron Conway is in the deal.

So certainly bipartisan. Well, it'll be fun to track that and see what kind of billboards they're buying, what kind of out-of-home advertising they're doing what kind of, maybe they should have over to adquick.com. Out-of-home advertising made easy and measurable. I like, I was actually just talking about, you know, like a lot of these packs, they run like attack ads or they run, you know, policy ads.

They put out policy papers. There's a variety of things that they can do. Let's get a lead-the-futures packs spending, I would say like at least half, you know, the $100 million on AdQuick. We'll work on making it happen. But without further ado, we have Darren.

guest in the restream. Mel. Darren, how are you doing? Welcome to the show. How we doing? We're doing great. We're doing great. Excited to have you.

What a fantastic backdrop. This is not a virtual background, correct? No, it is not. It's a one-of-one painting of Kobe Bryant called Unfinished Business. And, you know, I was pretty close to Kobe and had them in my office staring at me, making me do my best every day. That's a good thing.

Over the weekend, I rewatched the Kobe Bryant, Wyden and Kennedy ad campaign, the Kobe system. Are you familiar with this, Jordy? Are you familiar with this Kobe system? Yes. Yes. It is remarkable. It's like this bizarre blend of comedy, all in promotion of the latest run of shoes. But we should watch and dig into that at some point because it is fantastic.

Anyway, could you give us a little bit of background and introduction on yourself, just for those who might not be familiar? Sure. I was at ESPN for 13 years covering the business of sports, did that for six years at CNBC. Then went over to gambling, the quant kind of gambling side with the Action Network sold to a Danish company called Better Collective. And for the last year and a half, I've been running Collect, which is on one side, pretty much the best journalism source proudly in covering collectibles. We all, also advise teams, leagues, and brands on what to do in collectibles, building their bespoke collectibles, have 13 clients and excited about that side business. What's on the frontier of like collectibles? What's something where you've seen like a team or league do that's kind of out of the typical path? Well, we actually just helped the Washington Capitals do a,

a piece that teams have never done before. So like our idea is if we're advising you, you're gonna make something cool, we'll stand in the background and be white label. So when Alexander Obechkin broke 895 goals, the all-time NHL record, I literally was shoveling the ice that came off the Zamboni after the second period.

We got 125 gallons of ice. We put them in these kind of like receptacles that then looks like it's the real ice. It's a mini rink and you get it in a cherrywood box and the 895 on the back has the shavings from the gold stick that Ovechkin was presented with by the NHL. So $1,500 range. These are high-end things that teams have never done before. So those type of things we're working on. That's very cool. Let's talk about the $13 million card and the buyer that was just announced.

Can you break down kind of the significance of that deal, how it came to be and kind of what you expect out of? Yeah, so this is very non-traditional. When you hear about cards, you think about the most valuable and two cards come up, the T-206 onus Wagner. from 1909, 1911, and of course, the 1952 Topspicky Mail. For the most part, for all time, that has been one and two alternating, with the small exception of Mike Trout for a little bit. And how often do those actually trade, like reprice effect? So it depends on what grades.

So a PSA 8, 8 out of 10, of a mantle will trade maybe twice a year. A PSA 9 will trade maybe once every two or three years. And a PSA 10 mantle, there's three of them. They're probably, in order for someone to trade it at this point among those three guys, they'd probably have to get $40 million for it. So that hasn't traded in 10 years. The honuses, there's 60 of them. They trade usually once a year.

and now you have these other cards, these modern cards, which in 2003, Upper Deck started coming out with these exquisite and Logelman cards, essentially gives you signed from a couple of players and then patches of that, where Upper Deck says that it's been represented to them that this is a game-use patch. And these cards back then were $35,000 to $100,000. dollars in the last five years they've become easy million dollar cards and you know there's not many of them most of them are one of ones so the Kobe LeBron the Kobe

Jordan whatever and this one was seen as kind of the most coveted a couple years ago probably would have sold for five million bucks and now there's a lot of interest there's interests from the people that bought it Kevin O'Leary and Matt Allen started secure collectibles which which is essentially, we think, of funds to buy into these modern cards. Previously, you've had funds for, like, vintage and get into these vintage cards, but the modern cards seem to be the ones that people are into. And it's hard for me.

I have about a $15 million collection. I've been collecting for 20 years. It's hard for me to get into the modern cards. What is that? I dropped something. No, no, it's just a big number. So I had to hit the air on before. That's a huge collection.

Yeah, yeah. So, but I don't really, I collect real one of ones. To me, this is, I'm not trying to shoot it down, but this is manufactured scarcity, right? The card company says it's one of one. I'm collecting something that's like really one of one. Like, you know, this is played out somewhat in the car world as well. Like, you know, I think from what I understand, like the sort of true classic Ferrari market has somewhat slowed. It has.

In that the younger generation, the Instagram generation, the millennials are probably more focused on some of these modern supercars. Like they might be more interested in acquiring an SP3. That has happened. That has definitely happened. You know, the question becomes, obviously, the $13 million card. So this card now has surpassed on the price alone, the honus and the, and the, it. be a mantle you know the question is like there's there's a lot of people still collecting a lot of these modern cards and they rely on we're in a degenerate economy my my friend howard lins and that's his

term that he loves um and uh you know my son opens up packs and he's 11 years old and if it doesn't have a number on it if it's not out of 25 or have a gold little foil or whatever he literally throws it in the garbage it's in the garbage and you're having these businesses now that are we getting are we getting the the youth hooked on on gambling at a young age is that is that is that i think everything is on tilt so so if they're not gambling straight up gambling they're they know about bitcoin already they know about things that trade non-stop you know the stock market stops um and so they're always like these repacks have you seen how these digital repacks basically what happens is you open up cards that they've scanned in the system okay so

they've opened the packs they have cards they've scanned in the system you open it it spins it opens it's like a slot and then if you and then if you don't get what you love now you can you could take that they can send it to you if you don't get what you love you could sell it back immediately at 80% of the value now normally you'd say 80% that That's horrible. Like, I lost 20% and, you know, that's so bad. However, if you come in from a gambling world, 80% is great, because it's a zero-sum game, right?

Like, if you're gambling, when you lost, you lost, it's zero. And so if you compare it against the gambling world, so these companies are, you know, this company courtyard, July, they did $60 million in repacks, and they're making the delta every time someone returns something back or if they're shipping it to them. And so, yeah, I mean, we're all on tilt right now. We can't go back. Yeah, that makes sense.

What is the, give us a read on the overall state of the collectibles market right now? Absolutely on fire. I mean, if you go to Fanatics Fest, if you go to the National Sports Collectors Convention, 125,000, 150,000 people, kids walking around with briefcases with $30,000 worth of cards. It is, it is not what it was when I I was a kid, I think the energy's there, but the money and the, I mean, it's outrageous. There are going to be things that will pop. I don't think the whole thing is a bubble, but there are a bunch of things that don't make sense. I think there's just a lot of very interesting markets, PSA, which grades everything, just

starting grading magazines. So what magazines do you want to grade? I'd say, okay, like, everyone finds their own nests. For me, it's it's Hollywood debuts. The first time someone has come on a, on a magazine, right? And so, hold on one second, hold on second. Let's bring this, let's bring this bin over here. We need PSA graded arena mags and colossal.

Yeah. So, you know, we got, I mean, like, this is a beautiful. You know, you got the Claw Daddy, you know, Akroyd, Belushi, you know, that's an early, that's an early one. You got the first time John Candy appeared on a magazine in 1985, a Canadian only. You know, you got the first Ralph Machio here. I just appreciate how I know, I know, I know like two out of the ten names. Yeah, right, exactly. But talk about the shape of the market and who the kind of key players are.

I know that eBay at some point or another, I think people were kind of writing them off, that they seem to have. No, the issue is that live commerce is the thing, you know, and right now eBay Live is just not as great as whatnot, which is just doing tons of business. And so they're a little bit behind. So to so live, live is, and live is dominating the traditional auction? Live is dominating.

A lot of it has to do with breaking. which is also gambling. So I told you about repacks. Breaking, breaking is essentially I buy a team, right? So like, let's say I spend $3,000 and I want to buy the Golden State Warriors and they open up a box and all these people are watching. Do I get a Steph Curry or do I get, and if you don't get one, they have to give you kind of some sort of card because otherwise it's an illegal lottery.

Again, these things are on the cost of will attorney. general, you know, get into these and say, this is gambling. But yes, these are breaking is just another reason why, you know, live is just going crazy. And what's Fanatics strategy been to date? I know they've been acquisitive and they now have an advantage right in terms of actually originating. They have all the rights. They're about to take over the NBA rights. They have the major league baseball rights through tops. They're about to take over the NFL rights. They have Fanatics live, which is breaking. They, you know, clearly have a lot.

They fanatics collect, which is their auction house. So they're really, really involved in the game to a point of, you know, almost or definitely monopoly power. Interesting. What do you think of L'Bubu? We got a question in the chat. I think it's hard to figure out. see the key to PSA and the key to the growth of collectibles has been population reports

tell me exactly how many there are right so I can tell you there's only three Mickey Mantle PSA tents right on Laboooo it gives me the odds but I feel like I need to know live how many have been opened how many have like how do we figure out how to have how to have population reports and grading these things because that's what gives you like the want and the wish to say, okay, I want to invest in these things, other than just have, again, that's just a, these mystery boxes are another way to gamble. Yeah, the degenerate economy. What about in the business collectible space? I know there's, there was this signed Steve Jobs business card that traded, but what are you tracking there?

I like jobs. I was worried about the number of checks that came out. I am one of two people who own a Steve Jobs signature that says go change the world. I think that's a cool one that I'm holding on to. I own the largest Warren Buffett's signature in the world. It's two feet long on 18 uncut, uncirculated dollar bills. I think, you know, when Warren passes, I think someone's going to want that on their wall. I'm going to hold for now. Do you think there's a potential play to build a kind of vertical marketplace for just business collectibles, or is that not the way?

Yeah, for sure. I have every Berkshire Hathaway meeting passed from 1996 to 2025. That's incredibly cool. The hardest one to get is 2000. I just got it, so I'm really excited about it. The business cards are tough, though, because unless they're signed, it's hard to figure. figure out if they're real. Yeah, we're in a unique position.

We were recently at the Figma IPO, and we brought a special gong and had the CEO Dylan Field ring the gong. And we were thinking about how we should evolve that, maybe. And we have a big studio here. We can hang him from the raft. Yeah, we think they're game hit gongs or something where they sign the, at the IPO. That would be pretty good. Okay.

I don't know that we're doing it for, it's more just for lore at this point than ROI. Yeah, but if you had, if you had a hundred gongs, you know, that would be kind of cool. We'll work on it. I always tell teams, you know, when you have a concert of an important figure in there, you should give them some custom thing and then you should have your own custom thing so that you get it signed. Yeah. No, that makes a lot of sense. Yeah.

But it's a listen, it's a fun vertical. It's, you know, if you know what you're doing, I think like anything, you should have a take, right? You should have a strong take and you shouldn't be a follower. You know, like, why do you think something should increase in value? and I jump all over the place in terms of trying to get into markets every day. I think the Beatles, costly, but still has a huge run-up. There's two guys still alive. How do you figure all that stuff out?

Is there a cottage industry of people, like, specifically in music collectibles that are just focused on acquiring assets from artists that are emerging today? Or do people typically kind of wait too late to start taking an artist? seriously. Well, again, it's like it's not too late, right? It's it's not too late in music because I think, again, we're still so behind.

You know, Billy Joel, right? Like every, you could see there's now, there's, there's a fur for Billy Joel type stuff. You could still get some good stuff. Now you can't get his own, his first concert at MSG because I own the only two of the world and I'll have to

sell it to you. But you know, you can get into these things. It's not, it really is not too late. It's never too late. You have to just say, okay, at the price it is now, what type of upside does it have? But in music in general, I think Billy Joel, Bon Jovi, Springsteen, Madonna, all early, early days. How do you influencers play into the world of collectibles? I've followed the story of Ed Bolian and the Lamborghini Mercilago market where he kind of, figured out that they were maybe less of a certain type.

I think it was particularly manual transmission LP 640s. The market had estimated that maybe it was like, you know, 60% people went for automatic when that car came out. And when he actually put all the vins together, figured out all the numbers, it was more like 99% of people had selected automatic. And then he popularized that through a series of YouTube videos. And I believe the market really caught up because of that.

Does that happen? Do you have any stories around that? Yeah, I mean, I controlled the ticket market. So when PSA said they were coming out with grading tickets, I said, okay, I got to find the 100 best tickets of all time. I've got to be really quiet about it. And then a year later, I got to say, hey, tickets are great. Now, this was not just a pump on me because I should say that I've only sold about 1% of my collection. However, I bought Tiger Woods' first PGA tour event for $1,000. And then a year later sold it for 77,000.

Wow. You know, so. You know, so. Yeah, underwrite the entire collection. So some big, yeah, there were definitely some ridiculous pops. I bought the, uh, the, the nicest full ticket of Marilyn Monroe singing, happy birthday to JFK, bought it for 6,000 sold it for 105,000. Um, you know, so like, there you can give me another one.

There we go. Uh, so, so, so, um, yeah, you can influence markets, um, and I do, but again, it's genuine, right? I love, I love tickets. Yeah, yeah.

I mean, at a certain point, like what Ed Bowley did with Lamborghini was like very much fact-finding. He wasn't, he wasn't manipulating the market. He was just bringing extra information.

Yeah, I do, I do, do you worry that, that, that so many, so many different things in our lives have gone digital,

which just reduces the number of, like, collect. Yeah, but is that a positive or negative? Yeah, that's a good point. And I would say in collectibles, you can't appeal to every audience. The ticket market is going to really appeal to the 40 to 65-year-old person right now.

And guess what? Those are the people that have the most money to spend. So should I feel bad that I'm not, that the 20 to 35-year-old doesn't care about my market? No. Especially if you have one of ones, right? Like, you know, I have the only 1899 silver certificate that was in the pocket of a guy who died on the Titanic. Like, okay, my market isn't that liquid, but I need two people. I don't need 700.

Yeah. Right? And that's really where, you know, for my philosophy, it's like the real one of ones. Yes, if you collect cards, you immediately know how much that's worth usually if it's not a one of one because you go on eBay and it sold yesterday. To me, that's not fun. I like to buy a real one of ones where someone says, hey, I'll pay you $20,000 for Disney paying his 1962 taxes, his check. And I'd say, no, I want $130. You're not going to go and find it somewhere else.

So you're going to pay me or whatever. So, you know, the real one of one markets are less liquid, but in a lot of ways they're more secure if you really believe in it. Yeah. What we have we have some space here in the studio. We would like to acquire a car that has some like you know provenance with a great technology CEO. I don't know that we were we'd be in the market for Elon's F1 yet. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But what is there is there is there a great? Is there a great former vehicle of a Silicon Valley CEO. There were a bunch of replica cars that were exact

replica cars that sold on Saturday. There was a Ghostbusters replica Hearst. There was two Jurassic Park Jeep vehicles, which were kind of cool. I'm trying to think of like what

normally if someone drives. Like I want to Larry Ellison at 11. You know Larry Ellison's McLaren F1 just went to auction, $23 million. Yeah. Yeah, just out of the price range for us. But hopefully. Which is interesting because often if you have houses owned by celebrities or houses

that were used in movies, people think that it ups the value, it actually decreases the value. Interesting. People who are buying these houses at the $3 to $5 million level or the $20 million level, they don't care that a movie was filmed in there or a celebrity had it. They just care about what are the bones and how much. do I have to redo it? There's a, the house that was used in Hannah Montana is near me in Malibu. Okay.

And if you owned it, it would actually be extremely frustrating because every single day, typically European tourists are taking pictures in front of it. So you'd just be constantly in the background of just random photos. Yeah, that's kind of, that's like what happened with the home alone house in, you know, in Illinois. You know, it's people just keep coming by. You become part of house tours. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, do you think, like, how do you think the internet and modern technology is changing, like, the creation of collectibles? Because when I think about tickets, I feel like almost everything's digital now. People don't really get the physical tickets. And so maybe some of your work and what you're doing consulting with folks, like, allows for the creation of new unique collectibles that kind of fill that. But are we seeing, like, net more inventory or less inventory? there's just so, I feel like so many products, whether I used to give someone a DVD box set or a book. And now it's, yeah, you probably have it on Spotify anyway. Yeah, and I was asked generally about this a bit earlier, but also is there, did you ever get excited about new technology like NFTs?

So I think there's, I think there's actually the shame of it is that blockchain got thrown out with the NFT decline. And I don't think they should be together. Blockchain has great applications, just really, really good for future, for counterfeiting, for everything in this space that we've been struggle for for friction, right? You can move something frictionless. You don't have to get it graded, then put it on eBay. So I do think that I'm not sure. The NFTs, unfortunately, I think.

I think a lot of it was just grift and garbage. And it just is what it was. And because bad actors gravitated to it, I think it got a bad reputation. I don't think all them deserve that. And I certainly think that blockchain has significant applications. I think we just need a little bit more time away and it will emerge. Yeah. Yeah.

We had a founder, a CEO of an NFT company called Pudgy Penguins on the show, and they've kind of gone backwards where they're focused on creating real products in the real world and kind of bootstrapping the community that way. They've already done the NFT launch, and that's kind of been. It's almost going back through typical licensing. Exactly. Exactly. And I think it's worked out really.

I just saw one gifted from a grandmother, to a grandson. And I had no idea that there was any connection there. So certainly, at least that company has kind of figured out a way to... But I do think that the young population does like physical still. Yeah. When it's available. Totally. Perfect. Well, thank you so much for hopping on. Yeah, thanks for joining. Anytime there's something in the news, hit us up. I'd love to have you on to break it down. Fantastic. Thanks, guys. Cheers, Darren. Let me tell you about numeral sales tax and autopilot. spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance in numeral hq.com.

And we have Dr. Drew in the waiting room. In the restream waiting room, we're bringing in Dr. Drew to hear the real story of Dr. Drew.com. I botched the story earlier on the stream. If you're turning in, in my defense, I believe I was nine years old at the time. But I'm glad to have Dr. Drew here on the show. Hopefully, let's bring in Dr. Drew Pinsky. How are we doing?

There we go. Can you hear us? Welcome to the stream. Hello? We are working on audio. Let's sort that out. And in the meantime, let me tell you about fin.a.i, the number one AI agent for customer service. Number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive bakeoffs, number one ranking on G2, fin.a.

Production team, tell me how we are doing. Hopefully we can get Dr. Drew in. Sounds like we're having audio issues. We will jump into the timeline. I can also just have him call my phone. I'm hearing something. Can you hear us? Oh, hello.

Do you hear me? Oh, wow. Looking sharp. You really understood this. You said you were just going to do a phone call, and now here you are. No, I thought I did a full want to here. This is amazing. Okay, so first off, I need to apologize.

I completely botched the story of Dr. Drew.com. In my defense, I believe I was 10 years old. when I stopped by the office as a kid. But please break it down for us. It's so funny. The only thing I found disturbing was how, how miserably you did with my credentials. Oh, I'm sorry.

I'm sorry. Let me start with that. Okay, please. I'm a physician. I'm a board certified internist. I'm a board certified dictionalysis. I'm a fellow with the American Board of Medical College of Physicians. I've got multiple,

I was an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry and practiced medicine my whole life. I'm not a psychologist. Okay, yes. We did you love line back in the day. I loved Love Line. I sincerely love Loveline. I wish I listened to it constantly. It was amazing.

Well, it was very popular, and it served to function back in the day. But this business spun out of it. I thought you guys would really like to hear this history because it is a piece of history. Incredible. Good friend of mine from high school, Polytechnic High School.

We went off to Amherst College, and then he went to Harvard Business School. I went to medical school. And I'm going along doing all these wild things, practicing medicine, and he shows up and he goes, I want to show you how to form a business. We're gonna do a dot-com company.

And of course, I was hearing about all the dot-com stuff in the wind and he'd got some seed capital from a company in Orange County, like a million dollars. And then he put together a little board, and he grabbed me by the arm and took me up to Sand Hill Road and we sat at SoftBank, rather, and made it, he just said, follow me. I go, what are we doing?

What do we create? I had no idea what we were doing. Didn't know how to start. a business. I didn't understand. Had you bought your dot com, by the way? Had you like gone out? Probably had done something like that at that point. I don't think we're sitting there without that. Yeah, exactly. And he just goes, follow me. And I was like, okay, so I followed along. And they go, what do you want to do? And I'm like, I'm, I'm, blah, you know, well. I don't remember what I said, but the six or seven in SoftBank VC representative marched out of the room.

And my Harvard Business School friend was anxious and like, I didn't even understand what was happening. Still, I did not. And they came back in and they go, okay, $10 million. That was that. We went down and we built the company exactly as you described it. And in fact, drove my wife crazy. She goes, what are people doing here? Why aren't they working?

It shouldn't be this nice an environment. But most of that was for the tech team. And you pointed out how weird the tech situation was. You've got that part exactly right. But the part you got wrong is, remember, people didn't have any idea what a website was. Yeah. And so we had an editorial staff. We had a medical staff.

We had a marketing team. And they envisioned, I kept saying, why do we need a magazine on my computer screen? Why? You're building this really great magazine. But with a chat room and with some feedback. And they kept, all the, all these sort of trigger words back now were interaction. Sure. And, and I didn't understand, I saw no value in any of it.

I kept saying, I kept saying, I, I kept, I, we had 120 employees and we had a board of directors from, from Northern California who were demanding we, quote, get big fast. This is interesting. Get big fast. Yeah. This guy, this, I came to our first board meeting. I said, look, I'm trying to decide if we should figure out how to make money. how to make this profitable or what we should be doing or how to you know they tell you don't worry

about that don't worry about that worse than that this one guy goes if he was manic as hell and he goes if I thought you were so stupid I never would have been on this board and he goes here's how you make money a dot com company and there was a giant whiteboard and he wrote in huge letters get big fast and they were demanding we burn through capital faster to try to get big fast So that became the weird, it was the weirdest thing I ever seen in my life. But the one thing I got right, I kept saying it's going to be video. Why else do we need this thing? It's going to be video.

Look what we're doing right now, right? Yeah. And I just kept saying that. And we put together a one night a week television show that was really a high quality show. We still have some of the tapes from it. And everybody came in, Paul Rudd, Tommy Lee. Everybody came on that one night a week show because it was the cool thing to do because there's this new idea, this dot-com company creates a TV show, and nobody could watch it.

Do you know why? Because you couldn't stream it? Because nobody had stream. Nobody had broadband. Yeah. Broadband. You needed broadband back then. That's how far ahead of the technology we were.

Sounds like you weren't making a ton of money, but were you selling the show on a subscription? Like, what did that? Was there any business model? Was it any revenue model? No. Just eyeballs. Just eyeballs. So Get Big Fast didn't mean revenue or profits.

It meant eyeballs. Eyeballs, Get Big meant number of people. And they kept talking about how the, you know, how the ascetic curve would develop around viewership and engagement and this kind of stuff. And we literally, this was a company, I mean, had lots of traction and engagement and stuff. People were kind of intrigued by it. So people were stopping by and looking at this thing. I'm not sure.

We did lots of interviews with celebrity. It was sort of like E meets, Teen B meets, you know, it was all these different types of things altogether in one site. And we literally were sitting in Goldman Sachs on, I believe it was March 19th, 2020, when was that? I'm sorry, 1989 or 2000. The day the NASDAQ fell apart. Oh, sure.

The day. We were sitting in Goldman Sachs and the woman across the table was contemplating giving us $30 million on a $110 million valuation for a company that had never made a penny. Wow. And I just thought it was the dumbest thing I ever saw, but I knew it was tulips the whole way. And I kept – and one friend of mine finally goes, look, it's Amsterdam 1680. It's tulips. You're going to grow Brussels sprouts or are you going to grow tulips? What are you going to do?

I thought, all right, I'm going to grow tulips. I mean, it's interesting to think back. And if it was structured as an investment that was actually in you and your name and likeness, it would have been a tremendous investment, but that wasn't a good dot-com story. It was why we got the money, though. In fact, as an ink article on my wall here, I was going to actually pull down and wave in front of the camera, but it'd be almost impossible to do it. They were sort of saying that's what they were, you know, that's kind of what they were thinking they were doing.

It was not a clear thought, but they were looking for brands. And I don't think they really knew that. That was not a fully developed thought at that time. Yeah. So what was the conclusion? It was like going to business school, I saw the entire, the entire from seed to dissolve. I saw the entire business cycle in one year. So did you eventually take over the site again yourself or what?

Oh, Dr. Coop bought the site. Remember Dr. Coop? You wouldn't. You're too young. He was the attorney general. And then he had a website that actually did rather well for a minute. Did he just redirect the website? Or was he still using Dr. Drew.com? No, no. He was a redirect. He absorbed everything. And he went bankrupt, as everybody did. And we got, we were able to weasel it back. I forget how we got it back. But we had to do some sleuth thing. We finally got it back. So, yeah, how did the shape of yours? business evolved then and like what like how do you think about packaging

everything that you do now um you know there there is I was listening to you guys talk and I was thinking boy I don't have any framework this is all very interesting to me but but I don't have a framework to sort of understand what I do my stuff is always an improvisation sure right when I started radio in 1983 I know designs on radio I just I was leave me alone so I can practice medicine I'll come here in the evenings on Sunday and do community service. That was my little notion in 1983 when I started doing radio. Then some television guys came along. I'm like, how do you do a TV show? I've never, I don't even know what you're

talking about. Well, this was the same thing with the dot com. My good friend comes to me and goes, we're going to do this. And I thought, I don't see it. I don't get it. But I think we might be able to do something with it. It would be interesting. This was a hell of an education. And you're asking how I frame everything I do now? Now, yeah, I was wondering. Well, it's just been interesting. It's interesting how many different technology friends from the dot com to, you know, podcasting, but it all comes back to basically radio and TV. Yeah. Like over the past, you know, more recent tech boom history, have you been hit with the,

hey, let's do a crypto thing? Or let's do an AI thing. Is this coming, is it rearing its head again? That has been, that has been, I've had conversations like that. Yeah, of course. Exactly what to do with it. Nobody knows. but it's part of the exploration.

I'm doing streaming shows regularly. You guys blasted them up there. It looked like hell. Wait, where you put it up there. I'm going to talk to my webmaster. I mean, it looks really good for conversion optimization.

It made me want to click. I think your person's doing a good job. Not meant to be shown other people's shows, I guess. But, you know, that's been interesting. It happened. And that all happened just because I got canceled for daring to say people shouldn't panic about COVID. Oh, yeah. And that caused me to just stop doing everything.

And I had somebody who said, hey, you should do a streaming show. I was like, what's that? Again, that's where I start every one of these projects. Yeah, you had a bad experience streaming the first time where you're like, if I make the show, you're sure people are going to be able to watch it. A little more confidence this time. No, no, I knew it. I already knew that.

I already knew. I saw what was happening with videos. I just kept, we just kept saying we were so early. We could have been, who knows what, we could have been, God knows we could have been YouTube or something if we had sort of been the first to really advocate for this kind of platform. But we were way early, and nobody else was quite as much of a believer

as I was. And so the streaming thing has been very interesting, and you, I'm in my own, my kid's playroom doing this. And it's the same thing. Everything here used to require me to go out to a satellite booth at CNN. Yeah. And now I just do it from here. So the efficiencies are fantastic.

And so I do television out of the studio. I do podcasting out of the studio. I do streaming shows. And it all started because I got canceled. And some of my webmaster said the streaming is probably going to happen pretty soon. I said, let's try that. And I wanted to talk to all the people, other physicians

who have been canceled. One of them happens to be the director of the NIH right now. And so I did the sense that these people had something to say and the cancellation thing was some sort of bizarre aberration, certainly in science and medicine. Had you gotten, you know, the opportunities that you may be lost due to the cancellation, have you gotten invited back in the last year or so? Or is it just a different set of opportunities?

Or is it, yeah, are you looking at totally different? Or do you not even want to go back to kind of the old? These are great questions. I don't know that I want to go back, but I probably would because I've taken the position that my opinions have never changed. I'm happy to express them on any platform anywhere. What has happened in the meantime is, you know, while I used to do, say, all the news outlets, all of them,

all of a sudden the only people that would have me on was Fox. Now, just last week, CNN called. So I thought, okay, good, this is a good sign. I couldn't make it, but I would have had I been able to schedule. Nature's healing. Nature's healing, yeah. We've been really obsessed with this idea that sort of a barbell is emerging in modern media where all the value either accrues to the platforms like YouTube, Twitch, Instagram,

or the individuals, the Joe Rogan, the Andrew Huberman, the Dr. Cruz, and that it's very hard to actually build anything in the middle. Would you agree with that? Would you, is this something that you've kind of experienced? It feels like something that, um, I, the, I absolutely concur with the, on the talent side. Yeah. Because it used to be, I would require to do what we're doing right now. Yep.

There'd be an executive producer. There'd be a segment producer. There would be a director in the studio, in the satellite booth. There'd be somebody directing in the other end at the satellite booth. And then you got the union, the unions involved. There'd be unions, every sales forces.

There'd be executive structure. Now it's me. Yeah. That's it. So it's so much more efficient. And it drives that world crazy. Yeah. So when Colbert gets,

gets fired for losing $40 million a year, I just looked at that and I go, well, of course. Yeah. That's going to happen to all of them. This is just not a model. Yeah, and our reaction at that point was he could just go set up his own home studio and probably have a fantastic business just with his existing fan base and none of the overhead. 100%, but they are, they are, you got to know how that world thinks. They're very spoiled. They're very spoiled and they're used to gigantic infrastructure and dozens of writers and this is this the world we're living in right as we have this interview yeah to them

look sort of cheap and dumb and people who aren't talented do that the real people people back back us with infrastructure and money that that just just not so this the other side of the barbell yeah which i'm wondering how you see it i just see it as largely non-viable so much of it has got to shrink dramatically and it's resisting yeah it's resisting like crazy yeah i mean i i would almost put the traditional media corporations, like in the center, when I think of the far big mega side of the barbell, I think of the platforms, Spotify, Facebook, meta, YouTube, Twitch, LinkedIn, the networks, and they actually accrue a ton of the value. And it is extremely hard to start one of those companies. If you do, you're not talent at all. In fact, you're probably an engineer. And you probably

at this point have the backing of like a state government because that's the only way. TikTok got going was, you know, so much energy and capital flowing in to actually, you know, break through. The ship has sailed on starting like new platforms for the most part, in my opinion. I think that's probably right. And they don't need to buy talent. No, not at all. It just comes to them naturally and they give 50% of the revenue or whatever the time of sure is. Yeah, we would rather, we would rather just have you jump on our show from your studio. And you benefit because people are going to trickle over to you. And, and, uh, and excellent. We don't have to be...

We just get to focus on making content and not focused on talent management. But the interesting thing is you have to wonder, are we somewhere in a business cycle that's going to lead to some consolidation? And when the talent consolidates, are they going to start negotiating with the platforms? Is there going to be some sort of... I mean, that would be a natural business cycle, right? Yeah, what was that new left-wing substack publication that just announced?

They said they're living out or something. remember this? Yeah, what are the... Anyway, there's like a collection, the argument. So there's a new publication that's launching that's aggregating a number of writers who are sort of on the left. And we were kind of debating,

will they have leverage over different platforms because they're all together? Or does it actually make more sense for Matt Eglacius and Derek Thompson to just have their own substacks and go direct? And then, you know, and then on the far other side is the platform. and there's really no one in between.

But we're still early in the development of the argument. Well, there's something very strange. It says there's a weird confluence of worlds right now. My son just texted me and he's been trying to get to you guys. Really? No. Does he want to, does you want to? Does he want to join the show?

Yeah, yeah, we'll send him a link. Maybe call my phone and I'll put you up to the microphone here. Let's do it. Let's do it. He's consolidating the ad department, you know, the management, the lawyering, the ad services, the distribution. He's trying to consolidate that onto a tiny little team. Sure. Because these things aren't necessary.

All this stuff is not needed anymore. Yeah. You need an ad agency. Yeah, this is amazing. The chat is going wild. Everyone's really happy with this. They're calling your son, the prodigal son. The question.

I'm going to see if I get him to call me. He said he emailed him. his partner named Jake emailed one of you guys okay okay we'll have to follow up but uh they're but they're having huge success and that's great he's the one that he's the one to start talking about AI he's in the middle of all of this the tech influencers the the google store the tictock store all everything yeah but all of that is more efficient more efficient yep right i mean and the and what you have is these the the talent agencies and the ad agencies and the managerial services and the lawyers holding on they're like they're like going to the

box holes as opposed to adjusting and adapting and changing what it is they do they are just insisting the things continue to be done the way that they've always been done and it's it's it's it's i guess a classic business mistake right yeah totally yeah um i have one i have one uh one one health one health one health question for you yeah what are the uh uh john john and i are starting what we hope to be a multiple decades run of daily live streaming what would you have done when when you were earlier in your career health-wise to to better sell you know you seem to be doing incredibly well now so what are what are the key things to look out for health-wise to make sure you can do this for decades um be hypomanic uh helps which which a lot of successful business

people are yes you're going as you know as i hear many of the podcasts you're going to suffer you're going to work hard you're going to lose sleep i wish i'd pay more attention to sleep but if i had i couldn't have done most of what i did i'm trying to pay attention to sleep now yeah and um you know you've heard it all before it's it's not this is not new trust your instincts uh explore don't be afraid to fall down i i uh for me the the the big as i look back on all the things i did it just the a willingness to improvise and to go into dangerous situations. I mean, a lot of, oh, he's calling now. Let's get on.

We got the sun on. I don't know if they can hear. I'll have to translate. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But on speaker phone. Hey, how's it going, guys? How you doing? What's happening?

It's not obviously. But we, my business partner and I actually emailed you a couple weeks back. Okay. We rep Roberto Nixon. Oh, no way. I love Roberto. That's amazing. Okay, yeah, we got to get in touch.

My dad was on the air. Fantastic. I'm flying back from Seattle. Okay, yeah. Okay, I do it. So we did have a little exchange. Yeah, yeah, yeah, let's follow up. He's going to keep talking, okay?

He can't. I'll tell him what you said. He can't hear you. Okay. He's talking, Douglas. I was going to say that I, so Rob and Jake are going to an oasis concert next week in Pasadena. And I was going to ask you. No way.

If you could meet Rob in Pasadena. Okay. Yeah. His sister also, her kids are going to Polly. And Douglas went to Polly too. That's amazing. Like you said at the beginning of the show, only famous people go to Polytechnic. that's fantastic um no i just wanted to say hi and uh show you that we're not like uh the rest of those guys that

probably email you randomly asking for things and wanting to to build a relationship it's it's very funny that this all happened in a strange way so yeah this is amazing incredible i actually have to take a call for this creator named cork he's a gen ai creator cool because he's in dubai and i you know just trying to get on the you got to get on with dubai we know we know how that goes All right, get going. I call these guys because they butchered my, my, uh, train. My dot com. And I did get some great heat.

John is that, which one's John? I'm John. John was actually at Dr.Doo.com when he was like 10 years old. Yeah. What? Yeah. Intern in the year. Yeah.

I was in the very cold data center. Yeah. Racking servers. That's spectacular. So there's a long history on, on all fronts. Andy went to Poll. So, okay, we'll talk later. Yes.

Andy went to Paul. Amazing. Okay. Okay. I have one more question on the health side. For you, for you. Okay. Sorry, Douglass.

Later, Douglas. Later. Yeah. For you. Last week, we had Mark Cuban on the show. He said that drinking raw milk is extremely dangerous and should never be done. Yet, I drank. I'll go on the record.

I drank a leader of raw milk every day, every day for two years straight. You were fine? Yeah. What's the, uh, so anecdotal? Did he explain why? He didn't. didn't give any underlying rationale. Yeah, I doubt he knows why.

He was just saying that the LLMs might convince you to drink raw milk and that might lead to some sort of doom scenario. You can get brucellosis. You can probably get Tuolremia. You can get Listeriosis. And we can treat that with antibiotics. No problem. But they can make you very sick and they're very rare.

Yeah. I wouldn't do it, but I don't. The fact that, look, there's a. it something terrible going on where people are so fearful of being the biological agents that we are and the reality that we are going to die that they are afraid to live yeah living well is the goal not living forever not living perfectly free of illness it's living a good life and we are off of that i can't great we are so far off that it is disgusting and for that and for for a non-physician to have an opinion about milk

that contains pathogenic organisms that he's never heard of or he learned to pronounce yesterday is disturbing to me. The same thing was when people went after hydroxychloroquine, the day they learned how to say that word, a medicine I've been prescribing for decades. So it's all, we are so out of whack with this gonna live forever, fear of death, illness, infection, oh shit, yes, we are,

we, my generation of physicians, We walked into illnesses that had 100% fatality. AIDS had 100% fatality, and we did not know what we were dealing with. And we didn't cower in the corner. We marched in. It's the right thing to do. I don't know what's happened. I can't understand this at all.

But here we are. We need to focus on living well, living a good life, period. Did you predict? Biological stuff comes what may. Did you predict the decline of alcohol consumption? Hmm. It's- It's not.

It's not off a cliff, right? Yeah. Yeah, I did. That's still surprising to me, but it fits with the lack of dating and the lack of having sex and the lack of socializing. It, that was the, that was a prime social lubricant for decades. I'm glad to see it. It's a good thing. You know, the people are starting to understand.

It's a poison and it's not good for any tissue in our body ever, but it makes me also, I mean, what happens? When did we become such pussies? When did that happen? That's my question of days. When did that happen? I don't know. Have you ever said something like that on CNN? This is why you've got to stay off the networks.

You just got to do your own show. I guess I've been through so much lately. I've just lost all. I'm a huge advocate for freedom of speech and freedom of many stories. I'm not happy about this flag-burning thing. Freedom, freedom is what I'm all about now. I will pitch you one possible explanation. I think that the fear of very, you know,

consequential but low probability events, like the raw milk or the risk from raw milk or the risk from COVID is tied to a lack of belief in immortality and not in the sense of living forever. Like biological immortality, like science will cure this and let you live forever. That's just one way to think about immortality. You can also think about immortality in your legacy.

If you are written about and you have lived a great life, you will be remembered and immortalized. You can also think about it through your children. And also through the afterlife. If you're spiritual or religious, you could think that you're going to heaven. And if you don't believe in any of those modes of immortality, you don't believe that you're going to have kids

or do your life's work and be remembered in the afterlife or go to heaven. Or you don't believe that science will be able to fix it. you if you do wind up getting sick from raw milk, then even a small chance has the has an incredible incredible penalty. And so you discount it very, very high. I agree with you with a couple of caveats. I do agree with you. Embedded in that observation is a general lack of meaning making. If the meaning is I'm trying to ascend to a after whatever whatever the meaning is of my living that meaning should be deeply meaningful to me and purposeful

it doesn't it does not have to include an afterlife you can also include just creating a good life for my children that's why i'm here to do that that kind of thing but but we people are here for their narcissistic needs and that's when things become fragile yes because we are not the beginning and the end of everything we just are not and if we think we're all there is is what's happening to to me, man. And then we have people whipping the frenzies and the fear and they're learning to control us with that. And that is disgusting.

Yeah. So what about have you been tracking AI psychosis at all? Any thoughts there? I hear about it. I don't believe it. I'll take, I'll make a bet that it's way overblown. It was somebody who's already psychotic and whatever. And not that the AI relationships are necessarily

necessarily going to be good I worry about that but this psychotic episode I don't know I don't know if you remember back in the 90s there were news stories every night I wasn't born sir okay do you have to rub that in do you just said no I don't know no no later 90s I got into the action but uh but there was news reports like every night like oh these parties were all the parents throw their keys in a bowl and they just they just grab a set of keys and that's who they go home with that night. Oh, sure. Sure. The press, the fake, I don't think people were sensitive to fake news.

We have to be very sensitive to reporting these days. So much of what's being reported is fake. And it's just to catch your eyes. It's just to get your attention. They, the person that wrote that article was a 23-year-old segment producer somewhere who doesn't do any research of any meaning. It just becomes something that they catch on the line or they saw other people report it. They report it.

It's ridiculous. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, my read on it is, it seems obvious now that if a large number of people take ayahuasca, some of them are going to have some type of psychotic break of sorts, and maybe they were prone to or had some underlying issue that enabled that. But the issue with- You're right. They already had a psychotic illness, and they just happened to break when they're working.

working with AI. But you're raising, you're making a very smart observation that the, that AI world is populated by people that microdose on acid and do ayahuasca, which I tell you it categorically causes severe psychiatric problems. I've seen it my entire career scares the hell out of me. They should not be doing that. If you're listening to Burning Man, please. If you're listening live from Burning Man, just listen to Dr. Drew. Did you ever go to Burning Man by the way? No, we've got friends. Keep trying to get us to go. It's not. It's not my jam, exactly. It's not my jam either.

Well, you could go there and try to talk people out of it. How about we stick to the Bud Light, buddy? Yeah, let's stick to the crushing beers. I have a couple glasses of wine. Anyway, this has been fantastic. Thank you for joining. Come back on anytime. We appreciate this.

We'd love to have you back on. You guys are great. I learned something just listening to you guys. Talking about the baseball cards. That's fascinating. You guys have a great, you're obviously extremely well trained in your, in your respective fields. And it's very interesting to hear you talk about these various markets and opportunities

and things. And I leave with one caveat. Please. If you don't call my son, he's going to kill me. We will definitely. We're going to, we'll go to this concert with him.

We will. Exactly. It's in Pasadena. Yeah, I live in Pasadena now. You live there now? I do. I live over there.

Rose Bowl. Rose Bowl is literally walking distance for me. So do I. Amazing. There we go. Did you guys just become best friends? I don't want to ask my address, but I'll swing by you. I'll bring you a 30 rack of Bud Light.

We live by Annadale. Oh, okay. Yeah, I'm right over there. Okay, so. There's no excuse. I don't want to get too, I don't want to get too precise show up with people on the front door.

Anyway, thank you so much for hopping on. This is fantastic. Great hanging. We'll talk about you guys. Bye. That's why we leave a 30-minute gap in the middle of the ass. Exactly.

You got to start doing that. Anyway, we are shifting gears. We're going into the world of Palantier. We have Colin Anderson coming into the studio. He's in the really stream waiting room, but we're bringing him in now to talk about running finance at Palantir. He was there for years. I actually ran into him on Saturday. Got a chance to catch up with him, and he had some fantastic stories. Hopefully you can share most of them here. And we're going to talk about different force multipliers for finance teams and growing

businesses like Palantir. I mean, what else do you want? So we will welcome Colin to the studio. How you doing? Hey, I'm good. Thanks for having me. Good to see you again. It's been too long. It's been almost 48 hours. I was going to say it pretty short, but good to be here with, I guess, more audience this time.

Yeah, for sure. Where should we kick it off? Could you give us a little bit of just history for the listener on your career, your path, particularly, like, the road into Palantier? I think that that's an interesting story. You were touching on some of the stories there. And then we can kind of take this wherever you would like. Totally. Let's do it.

Well, maybe just to situate for those I'm meeting for the first time, Colin Anderson, co-founder here at Friends and Family Capital, venture firm we started. And before that was the CFO at Palantir for a very long time, led finance there for eight years. So what does that mean? Intersection of supporting great businesses through finance for two decades. And a lot of scar tissue is the other thing that means. And how do you share that with people?

Getting into Palantifference. here that was that was really saying hey who's working on a really hard problem that matters and if you look at the time you had you know we were still post 9-11 yeah we were still trying to overcome the false trade-off between national security and being able to defend ourselves and also privacy and civil liberties yeah and people used to think that that was an impossible trade-off and that seemed like a worthy challenge we only have so many so many hours in the day we you work on something that matters. And talent density was there. And I was just really attracted that. And it helped having spent time deep in the bowels of an investment bank where you

realize that humans are a very expensive piece of middleware. And what if you could see all the data you're supposed to see nothing that you're not? You can probably do a lot of great things there. Yeah. How did you first hear about Palantir? What was your first day on the job like? Who was around the table? I mean, at this point, people know everyone from Carb to Peter to Shamsankar, like Gary Tans involved at some point. Like people, people know who's around the table, but what was your early, like first days in the job like? Totally.

Well, I was introduced to the company actually through Joe Longsdale. He brought me in. And I was an industrial engineer by training, which means to my English major friends, I'm an engineer, but to my engineering friends, I'm an English major. Yeah, so got pretty deep, got pretty deep into the process at Palantir in the early days. There were probably 20, 30 people at the time. And Joe said, hey, look, I actually think we're not ready for you. You want to go work with Peter Thiel and myself up at Clarion Capital.

Sure. So privilege to work there, learn a lot. And fast forward, the company had grown to the mighty number of, I don't know, just over 100. And Peter was like, hey, I think they might need some help here. It's great. And, you know, it's really the mission that drives you. I was like, I don't know what I'm going to do. Maybe I'll sell software.

Maybe I'll talk to politicians. maybe I'll help with this finance thing. And I don't think I was very good at the first two, but the last one stuck. So just keep doubling down where it works. Yeah, what was the, what was like the day-to-day role like? Is it everything from just like financial control to putting together projections, thinking about burn rate? I imagine that the company wasn't wildly profitable in the early days.

It's known for being one of those slower compounders. and now is like one of the biggest companies in the world, but it took a long time to get there. What was that like at the early stage? Well, Palantir had its time in the desert, right? Where it's the roughly four years of pre-revenue, large expense, you know, wouldn't exist without for, you know, basically Peter Thiel and the co-founder's just pushing through and bringing capital to bear. So what does that look like? And we see this all the time at companies now in our portfolio where you spend all this time in the desert,

building things and then suddenly you realize, oh, wow, we actually have a product here, and now we have a real business. What do we do? And finances, you know, at Palantir and today, something you wish you had yesterday once you realize you need it. And it was kind of one of these fire hoses that you keep your head down and build. What was the reaction like from venture capitalists around that time? Because there's, there's like, this is controversial to be working with the government. At the same time, it's like, it is an enterprise software company. It should be pretty easy to underwrite if you're an enterprise software venture capitalist, I would imagine, hopefully. But then at the same time, like, you're out in the desert.

And so there's a little bit of like, you know, is the company mature enough to underwrite this particular investment? It's not this like hot no-brainer. It's kind of secretive. It's cool, but it's like behind the scenes. So what was the temperature in Silicon Valley around defense tech around that time? Yeah, well, first of up, defense tech as a term didn't even exist. We got it way back. I met the company in 2007 and joined in 2009.

And we were very shy because no one knew quite what to think of us. We were kind of a Marvel team up of a bunch of superheroes that had weird peaks but also weird valleys and just kept our heads down and built. Really in the earliest days, no one in the valley, but for a small group understood what we were. And we made every mistake from what they wanted. to invest in, right? At the time, this was Facebook was cool. So you should be doing consumer, not enterprise. And if you were going to do enterprise, you should sell the big corporate.

Well, we're going to actually sell to the government. And well, if you're going to sell the government, you should go hire a bunch of experienced operators in general. We're like, we're going to go hire a bunch of 20-year-old kids. So like every single on the decision tree was like we were wrong. And so that, that, you know, it sort of pushed us out. And it really took building a great product and showing value to customers to actually prove to people that work and great to see what they're able to do. As an investor now, how do you try to underwrite teams that are still wandering in the desert? Because there's great examples and survivorship bias that happens when you have a team like Palantir that's wandering in the desert and then you find this,

you know, you find something that works and you can really scale out of it. But then I've, you know, I've invested in teams that stumble into the desert and never make it out. So It's not exactly, certainly not a, no guarantee that you're going to find, you know, some palm trees and water. Yeah, you find the skeleton drinking out of the whiskey bottle a decade later. Not everyone makes it out of the desert. Where we spend a lot of our time in the earlier stages here at Friends and Family Capital, and we put a lot of our dollars once it's clear it's working, right? So tech is one of those great businesses where when it works, you can run and you can win a whole lot longer.

So we're happy to get involved. And, you know, it's kind of the forward deployed engineering model. We'll forward deploy. We'll help you. We're not going to charge you. Maybe we'll put 50, 100K small check in. But we're really looking for those operational unlocks. When does it look like Palantir?

Right. We were there. I joined me at about $5 million in revenue. Right. So you sort of $5 million to $20 billion valuation. You see full stack what good looks like. And so you're watching for those inflections. What are some of those?

Like getting a seven-figure soft. contract is really hard. So if you see that, you should get pretty excited. Being in an enterprise and going from, you know, let's say a million a year to three or five million a year, like a multiple of the initial land. That's pretty hard. We get pretty excited. And I think the other thing is just, what's the mission? What's the purpose? Why are people joining this company? Why is the, you know, many people. Why is the 20th person? Why is the 100 person? I say, why is the skeptical, you know, engineer when you're a thousand people going to join you. Fast forward, five years post IPO, why is the skeptical public market investor going to join you? It's got to be, you got to be

doing something that's worthwhile to dedicate your life to. So find a big mission. Yeah. How do you think about the relationship with the government? I don't know if this is true, but I seem to remember that Incutel made an equity investment. This is the venture arm of the CIA very early on. And so you had to this situation where Palantir's like customer is the government and but the government is also on the cap table and we're seeing that today with Intel that there's now the government's taking an equity position and it feels like this has never happened before but then when I flash back I'm like wait actually this this isn't the rarest thing. There's a world where the capabilities that are

brought to bear by Palantir exist within the US government and yet they don't like what like how does that how does that how should like the American taxpayer think about the interaction between like public like private companies and the government like when should the government be willing to invest when should the government be buying a capability it's always seemed like Palantir the actual technology was something that could not be brought to bear with inside the government even though the government had a very clear set of requirements in front of itself it needed to be going it needed to be built in Silicon Valley I mean And software is really difficult.

And some people are, you know, hardware is difficult too. But building world class software to handle complex things is tough and often can be built better in the valley than, you know, at the coal face. And I think Pallenture is a good example of that. But we've got, you know, we've got many examples. But I would push back and say, you can't build great software or great business in an ivory tower. And I think one of the great things about Pallon's here and you've seen Anderil and we've got a company, Paragon technologies. they're really breaking down the barrier saying, we're going to go build it in an ivory tower, and then we'll sell it and people will just use it.

It's like, now, if you think of a spectrum of product and services, right, everyone always put Palantir in the services bucket for the reasons we were misunderstood. Really what you're doing is you want to capture the perfect value delivery of services, right? You're solving one thing for one person that 100% solves their problem, but you want to do it as a product. But the product roadmap, the traditional playbook says create distance from your customers, not create proximity. So Palantir was able to, this is that forward-deployed engineering model you hear a lot about. It's like you need the beauty happens when you get world-class software talent that's willing to go deep into the belly of the beast at the coal face. You're going downrange.

You're sitting in an air gap network with a tie-on when you're a cell. And that's where you actually see what's the core problem. So we were, I think, pounded that in spades. I look for that every day at friends and family. What companies shouldn't be using the forward deployed model? Because anytime something becomes a meme, then everybody starts supplying it. It sounds like it makes sense. This is the whole like Uber for dogs kind of meme.

People were like, we're Uber for this. And it's like, wait, there's actually unique things that in Uber's sort of supply demand. Consumer package goods. I want Andrew Huberman to come. come pour this Yerba Mata into my mouth. It's a forward deployed caffeine salesman. Yeah, well, it's funny. Yes, you should run anytime you hear someone pitch themselves

as I'm the X for Y, I just run. The FDE model, it's great in certain markets. It's terrible in others. The only reason Pallentier could pursue anything with deploying is you've got to be solving a hard enough problem. Right. So you think of a world-class, engineer plus their equity dilution. I mean, this is an expensive check. So you really have to be

a capital allocator as a founder to want to pursue this model. So if you're selling things, small and medium business where your average contract land is 20K, 100K or less, you shouldn't look at this. Unless you're saying, let's get out there. That's R&D. Let's productize it and push it out. When you start to get up into those seven figure plus contracts, that can support it. If you're doing eight or nine figure, it definitely can support it. But then, Even then you get people think they're doing it. So I love these conversations. I get probably one inbound, two inbound every week of like, hey, how did you do

forward to point engineering in the early days? And you can understand if someone's in a position to build it by the questions they ask around it. So you'll get these like figuring out the footwork. What's the what's the pre-sales? What's the who does it? Pre-sales or post-sales? Is it customer success or is it sales AEs?

And like if you're looking at the FD model through that lens, you've lost. the plot, right? It's really like, let's start with first principles. How are you thinking about focusing the firm on stage or theme or sector? Do you have any kind of guardrails? Well, they already have a round named after them. Yeah. Well, it's funny on the round, so friends and family round, it's usually the early days when it's like a deeply consultative relationship and people who have your best interests at heart and want to, you know, do it. And I don't know, but when we got to the later stages of building palliarty, it was there through the series K, the nature of the relationship changes with your investors around the table. So the ethos here in the name is how do you

extend, dirty to your point, how do you extend that friends and family mentality and really partner and deliver and sort of live your values, so to speak, like don't take board seats, be deeply consultative, forward to play your finance people if they need help, all those sort of things. Do a lot of Gen. AI companies need help with the finance function? We've heard, we, We had a video go viral because we had an investor on the show who made an offhand comment about, as you said, accounting rules aside. And a lot of people picked that up on X and we're dunking. So accounting rules, in fact, do matter.

But it was a part of a larger conversation. But, yeah, I'm curious, like, you know, what you're seeing out there in terms of people getting maybe a little too liberal in terms of, like, what's A. what's not an RRR, all that good stuff. One of the core functions of finance, there's many, it's hygiene, right? It's hygiene, it's eligibility. And if you lose that, then you're building your house on sand. So there's a very important part of the world for accounting or for getting those entries right. And you can disagree on the exact accounting treatment.

You can do your, you know, your pro forma. Here's your gap to non-gap reconciliations. Every company has their own version of how they run the business. but it's helpful to have some standard way of looking at it. So I think you got to get it right. But really with finance, it's what's the past, what's the present, what's the future? And you've got to do all three. If you're running your business just on the accounting, you're going to have some trouble.

If you're just looking forward but you can't pay your bills on time or, you know, the cell phones and the Nordics went out because we, you know, the credit card bill that we paid didn't apply. It's like you got to really hold that as a first class priority. And then on the future, like there was times where it's like, Hey, look, Shom, who I know you've been on your program, the CTO at Palantir. It's like, look, we're going to hit our numbers this year and we're going to hit our numbers next year. But we got to do more pilots or we might have a problem three or four years out.

And here's the data why. So finance has to do all of them. So it can't just be world-class accounting. It's got to be world-class everything. Lessons from Palantir's IPO that you think now that the IPO window feels extremely open, God willing, it'll stay open forever. But any lessons from the Palantir IPO or that you would advise a founder

that's exploring opportunities in the public markets today? Totally. Well, first off, so I was not the CFO taking up public. My dear friend who I pulled into the finance team, Dave Glazer, he's the CFO and took it through there. And a lot of the team that joined and worked with us back in the day is still running the company, which is refreshing. I think that's, you know, as you're getting ready for the public markets,

I think you really need to be able to articulate, like, why you have a strong core business model. You have to back it up with data. And you have to have a narrative that says, here's why it's going to keep going for a while. And we have a bunch of companies, you know, whether it's friends or it's in our portfolio that are at the scale where they could go public. And I think you're seeing a lot of people start to weigh, you know, is the window open? Should I run through it? I think there's still some question marks depending who it is.

But if you're, you know, you're operating at scale, you've got accelerating revenue growth, expanding free cash flow margins, and a good narrative. I think we're going to see a lot more of that, which is exciting. But if you can't articulate your core business model, it's, I think the window's not open yet. So you got to keep building. And that's probably healthy. And that's healthy. Yeah. How are you thinking about, like, opportunity in defense tech broadly right now?

There's the, you know, there's the meme of like the Anderol for Axis Anderrol. you know, Palantir's like this compounder that's going to take a lot of market share. And the ship has certainly sailed on a few of like the really big companies. But at the same time, like there's a boom and people are starting to, you know, start companies in the space because there's more appetite from investors and it's more more just accepted to hire people. What's your temperature check right now? Yeah.

Well, so been honored to be a part of, you know, some of the great names of that people now called Defense Tech. So Palantir, we've been investors in SpaceX. since 10 billion and or else since around 4 billion you know built talent with those guys so love that the whole ecosystem is starting to develop back in the day there was there was no defense tech I think what is the world think the world needs a strong America right so PACs AmeriCon I think is you know we can argue debate this many people do but I think it's good to you know to be able to back up

at the hopefully we never have to use it but just be able to negotiate and look we need more of it. And I think you're also seeing the Intel news from today. You're starting to see that, hey, vertical integration matters. A saying we had deep in the bowels of Pounder was trust no one's execution but your own. And if you're beholden to someone else, whether it's on the supply chain or whether it's the value delivery to customers, like the tail might wag the dog. And so I think it's great that we're starting to see more capital flow here. I think as with anything where you turn on the spigot, not everything is going to be the highest ROI project. But, Let's look at the other truth.

If we do nothing, then we're certainly not at a local maximum. So we need to do something. I'm excited with the developments. Yeah. There was a post by a founder talking about the state of defense tech. I want to get your take on some of this. The end user is not the buyer in commercial. The person who uses your product often decides to buy it in defense.

The operator might love your system, yet it means nothing. The buyer is a program manager with a budget. The operator's endorsement is at best. a data point, not a scalable purchase order. I don't care that some E6 at Drum played around with your product and thinks it's cool. It doesn't really matter. True, false? What's your take?

You know, you're hitting on this caused as many sleepless nights, months, months, years at Palantir. Ultimately, I mean, Palantir had to sue the US Army. You can know what Palantir versus US Army for should you buy Cots versus Gots. There's many.

That must have been a fun. It must have been a fun decision for you for you to be weighing in on like how much you spend on legal this quarter? Litigation is already expensive going up against your customer it's uh it's not the prefer let's just say they don't teach that

in a classroom the look I think I think enterprise sales is tough but enterprise sales inside you know the government or any large institution is even more difficult and there's a couple different things you have to do and number one you've got to create the facts on the ground

right that's that's the mission wins that you're referencing there. But that's not enough. It's necessary but not sufficient. At the other side, you have to go and make sure the decision makers know what to do. And then you can do a pincer and say, all right, let's just move it and put some pressure on the middle. And I like to think when is it riskier to not act than to act? So you're sort of creating this constellation where you can get movement. But the advice to anyone embarking on the defense tech journey is make sure you're very well capitalized because it's going to take you a long it's a long road to hoe and so make sure you can withstand it i'd also think this is a point shamsankar you know what palliare has made

is you've got a you know dual source really helps because it can bring down that cost curve as you scale especially if you're working with atoms and not just electrons and that that can help you survive while you're waiting for the door inside the government open palanterer would not have had a strong government business if it didn't have a commercial business and vice versa. On that note, Chris in this post says, if you're pitching dual use, you're probably just unfocused.

Real dual use companies are vanishingly rare. The example he gives us Palantir. Most that try end up with a watered down product, no real defense tech traction, no commercial fit. Pick a market. Do you disagree with that? Or does it just depend? What nuance would you add to actually understand

if a company can meaningfully be dual use? Because you do see founders kind of bold. bolting it on now that it's a little bit trendy. Oh, we have this thing. Yeah, and we also have an office in DC. We have one person who we work out there. And yeah, how would you, how would you lay out like if a company can actually get the benefit out of dual use as opposed to it just being marketing? Totally. Well, it's easier to change lines of marketing than lines of code. Yeah. So you've got to start out from a first principle and say, what is the thing that ought to exist. And if you look at Pallantir or any other class that's that's built dual use,

it's saying, I can build one product. And with a little bit of customization at the end, and just the end, then it can be sold to both for a very important but different reason. So an example, you know, also in our portfolio, we have Astronis, right? They're building microgeo satellites. Yeah. Same, same, you know, broad category. There's a few tweaks. Yeah. But who doesn't want that sovereignty over their data, right? And so if you need that, and you can sell it in a defense capacity. They've been down selected on $2 billion plus programs. So, you know, a lot of work to do, but that's exciting.

It's here for Estranos. We love those guys. And then, yeah, John's been on the show. He's great. Yeah, he's great. And then, like, also on the commercial side, like, let's say you need, you know, more trunking and back all. And a lot of telcos are turning to this from the disruption they're seeing in the market.

Sure. So I think that's one of those ones where they're not building two types of satellites. That's a terrible idea. Yeah. But if you can build one thing and sell it to both parties, that helps bring down the cost curve. Fantastic. Totally. George, do you have anything else?

No, this is great. Thank you so much for taking the time to hop on. This is fantastic. We will talk to you soon. You're only a finance correspondent. Is that sleeping bear dunes behind you? Close, but I'll tell you next time. Okay, you'll tell you next time.

Somebody in the chat said bullish on the painting of sleeping bear dunes in the background. I was just trying to take credit for being identifying it, but I was wrong because they were wrong. But anyway, we'll talk to you. Good to see you guys. Thanks so much. Have a good one. Colin.

Cheers. Bye. Bye. We have Truman Sachs coming on in a few minutes, but in the meantime, let me tell you about Adio. Customer relationship magic. Adio is the AI Native CRM that builds scales and grows your company to the next level. And you heard Dr. Drew talking about the importance of sleep. You got to get an eight sleep.

Yeah, I mean, he said that. I was like, we partnered with eight sleep was one of our various first partners. We had the foresight to understand that if we wanted to do this for decades, we needed to sleep like champions. It really was one of those partnerships where it was like this. is going to be additive in like more than in many, many ways, right? 93. I probably got back in the 90s, seven hours, 47 minutes. I put up, what did I do?

Eat sleep. Two and a half hours of deep sleep. I got 83. 83. How did I do on deep sleep? One hour of deep sleep. Oh, no. You were an absolute mess this morning. I know.

I was such a-john showed up to the gym and the, and I was so sleepy. I was like, wake up, dude. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyway, we got a touch on the timeline and turmoil. Martin Casado said, The idea that non-consensus investing is where the alpha is is actually quite dangerous in the early stage. Follow on capital tends to be more and more consensus align. He's basically saying being contrarian is bad, being consensus is good.

I could not agree more. I completely agree. Consensus is amazing. Do you agree? He's not just right. He's on point. It's incredible. Tyler, do you agree?

Yes. I think everyone agree. Ben, do you agree? I agree. I agree. I agree. everyone agrees that agreement is good here. No, of course, of course, this is, it's funny because the whole contrarian meme has become

such a meme that it's now consensus to say that contrarian ideas are better. And so by saying that consensus, things are actually contraried, you know, but of course, you know, the contrarian idea still holds this consensus. John Chu went on the attack. Oh, yeah, what do you say? This sounds more like they overpaid for everything and their companies are struggling to raise. So he's asking for help marking things up. That job pose is hilarious because in his name is Coastal Ventures.

And so it hits as like a sub-tweets. It's like going to war so much more aggressively. It's not a- It's great. Yeah, it's not a sub-stice. It's a direct attack. Yeah, yeah, it's a direct attack. It's timeline and turmoil.

But I mean, I just like, I mean, this was a way for the entire allocator community to signal that, hey, we're not packing for Black Rock City. We're here. We're here debating, debating whether or not we should do consensus deals. Or non-consensus. Or stick to the non-consensus ones. There was a really funny post earlier. I don't know if it made it into the timeline, but there was this somebody who had created a restaurant.

They were complaining. They were like, my food is so good. It's all farm to table. I don't know why people aren't going. I'm only making $50 a day. And somebody quoted it with like a picture of PT. and then the excerpt from zero to one where he's like talking about, you know, British food in San Francisco and how you can have the best British food. Yeah, it's highly competitive.

Yeah. Yeah. The Martin Casado post, there's a little back and forth, Leo Polovitz says, if you consider the top, top few dozen highest alpha bets of the last 10 to 15 years, what fraction would you say were consensus versus non-concessus at early stage? Martin Casado says, I suspect more consensus than not. And Keith Rubei chimes in and says, Open AI was non-consensus. Scale was non-consensus. Stripe was non-consensus.

Whiz, the C round, I guess, was not. Ramp, DoorDash, R.H. Robin Hood, Canva, Figma, all being non-consensus. He gets quote tweeted then by Martin Cassato. I was, yes, Keith, you're right. I'm very sorry. You're very original. And it's an AI image of Keith Rubei saying,

I'm so original. I moved to Miami. I like how he was kind of dunking on Keith, but Keith looks fantastic. He does look diced here. It looks really good. And he's like, nice picture. Nice picture. Yeah, but the other thing is like moving to Miami was contrarian.

Like that was not a consensus thing at all. So I don't, like he really is, was, that was a very original idea to try and build a tech company in Miami. Like, and that's the nature of the contrarian and like the non-consensus bets is like, yeah, sometimes. You get a lot of wild cards. You want to be consensus among the contrarian investors with elite returns and non-consensus with the consensus investor. No, I actually have distilled it. You want to be greedy when 145 IQ people are greedy.

You want to be fearful when 101 IQ people are greedy. That's the real move. That's the play. Yeah. We've cracked venture. Yes, that's it. It's fine to be hypermimetic, as long as you're hypermimetic. with a genius and you're copying a genius. This is like the Nancy Pelosi stock trader or something.

Anyway, if you're trying to trade some stocks, get over to public.com, investing for those that take it seriously. They got multi-asset investing, industry-leading yields. They're trusted by millions. When you get on there, remember, be greedy when others are fearful and be fearful when others are greedy. Do your own research. Make some good investments, folks. Well, we should pull up this launch video from our next guest, Truman. Let's pull up the... who announced Cubby Law today. Covee Law.

Let's pull it up. Let's react. And then we'll bring in Truman Sachs from Cubby Law. You shared it in the group. Let me tell you about Bezell while we're pulling that up. Your Bezell Concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch. Go to getbezzle.com.

And here's Truman. Welcome to the show, Truman. No, stop. Let's play this. And how you're graded depends entirely on your professor. But most students study with generic outlines and flashcards, not the materials they're actually being tested on. Cubby is the first AI teaching assistant for law students,

trained on your professor syllabus, past exams, and student outlines. So your case briefs match how they teach, and your practice exams mirror how they test. It's like having your professor tutor you every night. Learn the law, master your professor, and outperform the curve. with coffee. Good set design too. I love it. Well, welcome to the stream, Truman. How you doing? Welcome from the Restream waiting room. You are muted. TBPN Ultradome. No, you're good, you're good. I can hear you now. I think we're just being noisy. What's up? Good. Congrats on the launch.

Haven't seen you since workout. Phil, was it six months ago? It's true. Yeah, it was about six months ago. I know. I like, every morning, I'm like, damn, I wish I could seem with the boys today. Yeah, yeah. Next time you're in LA, come hang. It'll be fine. Every day. Every day. So, You were telling us about this play. Yeah. So it's great to see it launch. Thank you, man. I'm excited for it to go public.

Yeah, break it down for us. What are you launching? What's the pitch? And what what kind of led you to this particular sub-market? Yeah, great question. You know, it kind of dates back to like a conversation you and I were having with Senra a few years ago now, another Runyon hike. Yeah.

You're telling me how like- Fateful Runyon hike. It's like where great stories begin. Runyon Canyon, folks. Runyon. Running canons in an operator. A couple influencers doing Runyon. Dude, we got stopped like three second.

It was crazy. Anyways, but no, I mean, John was talking about this idea that just like there are power lot people, they're also power lot books. It's a cool good idea right there. And zero to one is the, what we both agreed is the business power lot book. And there's a quote which I think like kind of defines my personal operating philosophy, which is like the person, perfect target market for a startup is a small group of particular people concentrating together and served by few or no competitors.

So I think that like sums up the law school industry in a shell. Law school is three years. It's curve-based, so everyone's stacked rating against each other with public rankings. And it's like directly correlated to the job you get after law school is how you perform with your grades. So like big law firms, everyone's buying for the same big law jobs after law school, which pay like 220K out of pocket like first year. And there's only a limited amount of them.

And they're literally 25 a day. Yeah. Yeah. Research market is a bit of business. Yeah. If you don't make that, start chasing ambulances,

bro. That's what happens. Seriously, it is a knockout, drag out fight in law school. Yeah. You gotta get to the top of the ranking. But no,

yeah, it's crazy. So, like, everyone's competing each other because there was like, everyone knows there's public rankings. Like,

you're either at the top of your class or you're not. And the firm see that. And that's what they're quitting off of. So the mindset of the consumer is that of, like I will invest in my future. Like anything that will help me do better in school is an investment and I will spend money on it. So it's a really like powerful lever to tap in

as a business. You know, I have to tap into that market. So what we built was like the first AI teaching assistant for law students. We've like trained the model on thousands of practice exams and case groups written by like a top Georgetown law law student just graduated. And we built like an entire experience.

That's almost like a dual lingo style course that calibrates all the material that's specific to your course and your professor all the way through the final exam. So you could take unlimited final exams and practice throughout the semester, get instant grades, feedback, and it's all kind of built to mirror exactly how you're a specific professor would like teach it great.

Because that's what decides you're great. Yeah. Well, what's the business model then? Do you want to sell to the law school, sell to the law students directly? Just take like 30% of their lifetime earnings. Yeah.

Don't worry about the business. We feel like a really aggressive terms and conditions. What's that Lambda school was doing? ISA is income share agreements. That was. No, no, yeah, yeah, yeah. But I think those are, I think those aren't kosher anymore. Yeah, it's always tricky. Anyway, yeah, who are you going to? Who's actually putting down the credit card? So, good question. Right now, like, funny enough, there's already an existing tool in this market from 2007 called Quimby. Everybody in law school, like, ask eight out of ten law students. They buy Quimby for 30 bucks a month.

So there's around 120,000 law students in the U.S. per year. And, like, there's all spending 30 bucks a month on this software from 2007 that hasn't changed. It's like a static company for like, cliff notes for case law. So we plan to come in as a 10x better replacement for that and think that like our tool versus theirs like just shape of like the decision will be obvious. So that's kind of coming in what we're trying to start up initially. And then over time, like we've already had some interest about like partnering with schools themselves. Yeah. Yeah. How do you see the top of funnel? Like how do you reach a there's so many there's so many fun things that you can do on campuses to make sure that you cannot go to law school without knowing about drone show.

Well, as we speak right now, we have hundreds of law students from Cordoza law at a cubby cafe truck outside of the campus. Yeah, that's what I was going to say. Yeah, exactly. We had free coffee. Yeah, free coffee, Papa bagels, ice cream. So that's like an on-campus approach for this week. You guys should do branded Adderall. Dude.

Low key. Do not do that. Do not do that. That is illegal. I'm sure there's the telemedicine company. that good uh no no controlled controlled substance it's specifically you cannot do that but it's just so funny because this industry is run by like like legacy like these like massive bar prep companies like the our biggest got acquired a few months ago and like the second we launched like a small

tick-toff like just like what we're doing we got sees and assisted by them um just like hey like we think you might be training on our materials like and if you are like we're going to come after you but like we're not sure so we're just like fuck off and and and And they're like, oh, yeah, yeah, we're sorry. Like, we're going to counter sue you for these anti-competitive practices. So it's an interesting, like, sleeper market that I, like, I think it's an interesting wedge as well to go deeper intellectual law, like legal tech space as well. Because once you have that relationship with the customer, you know, they're the future

lawyers of America. Sure. You should prove how, how well the product works by personally counter suing the... Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I learned it all with Cubby. It is particularly difficult to pass the bar. without going to law school. There's one loophole where I believe you can,

you can mentor under a lawyer, and they can say that you're allowed to. But in general, you cannot take the bar and pass it just because you did the study. Like, you have to be in a law school accredited. Yeah,

it's all to control the number of lawyers to drive up. Well, maybe we'll open our own law school at this point for kids who just are fed up with the traditional system. Yeah, there's like one online law school, or there's only a few that actually let you do it

in this particular way. Like, it's very, like, hacky. It's a very tightly controlled, like, market in general. Sounds like you tried to hack it at some point. I actually... If there's a system, I did. John will try to hack it. And I emailed the guy who did it, and he was just, like, basically credential maxing.

And he was, like, a lawyer, a doctor. And he figured out how to do all of these things because he was really smart and he could take tests really well. And so he just went around and got, like, law degrees, but figured out, like, the minimum time, maximum amount of money. So you pay a ton of money to do this, get all the test prep, and then take the test. And I was like, well, did you wind up

using the law degree ever? He's like, no. But it's a flex. Yeah, it's a flex. It's a flex. And I was like, I like this guy. I should email him on the show. Yeah, that's interesting. Anyway, how big is the actual market? Like, are you going to go like venture mega round like Harvey style or

is this more something that you want to grind out for a long time? And you think you can just like find a great wedge, great business, and then maybe if there's like a secondary market that opens up, then that's the venture territory. Yeah, great question. So the legal education market is five years. It's from LSAT through Barr, like you mentioned. Yep.

We have 120,000 plus people going through that every, every year. And I think the average like customer spends over, over five years, $5,000 on like supplemental. So take that times of the time. You're looking at like a billion dollar just legal education. Sure, sure, sure. But at the same time, like, so I do think Barr and LSAT's kind of where we take it next. We can see some meaningful AR growth from there. But I just, I'm really excited about this concept of like, we know in the age of AI, everything is like distribution and like what kind of like moat and competitive edge do you have on the customer acquisition side.

And like it's so difficult to break into legal tech. Like I don't think that's why we see so many rappers in the legal tech space because it's just like such an old guard and you need enough connections. You need to have like specialized models, the bar for quality so much higher. And I think if we really entrench ourselves and establish ourselves as a meaningful player, in law school, like I said, like every single one of these players are going to legal and to the big law firms next. And I think if we're able to kind of create that relationship with them, help them start building like practicing legal research in their like breaching classes while they're in law school, they're going to get used to that flow. Just like they got used to Google Docs and brought that to work to work with them. So I do think that there is a really interesting play to kind of like continue with the customer to the workforce that I think we'll try to angle for it.

Makes sense. Are you playing to somebody at Taylor in the chat is. This is not a PC, but that's going wild right now. They said Cubby branded one, one and a quarter by one and a quarter Ziploc baggies for maybe the associates after they moved to New York. Covey event at marquee on Saturday nights. Yeah. John actually threw the horse emoji in the chat. Is there a plan to do horse branded merch?

You know the chain's a huge into horsepower? Oh. You got the horse noise on there? Of course. I don't know if you guys see that on my wall. Oh, yeah. There we go. Anyway, great catching up with you.

Thanks so much for hopping on. Yeah, great to see you. Congratulations to launch. We will talk to you soon. Good luck with the rest of the rollout. Talk to you soon. Bye. Let me talk about Wander.

Find your happy place. Find your happy place. Book of Wonder with inspiring views. Hotel Great Admittedies, Dreamy Beds, top tier cleaning, and 24-7 concierge service, it's a vacation home, but better. Anyway, Paula Ramble says, every day in SF is an opportunity to discover a new type of guy,

e.g., this guy in a holographic Ferrari, with a pet duck and a very loud chihuahua dressed up as a chicken. So the duck is real. The duck is real. The duck is real, but the chihuahua is a real dog. This is wild. We got to get this guy on the show. I'm assuming he already listens to the show.

I hope he made his money at Enterprise SaaS. That would be fantastic. That would be incredible. It has crypto written all over it, but it could be driving business value with vertical integration or something. I don't know. Well, on Friday, Alexander Wang announced a partnership with Mid Journey to license their aesthetic to technology for our future models and products, bringing beauty to billions. And David Holtz says, bring sublime tools of creation of beauty to billions of people as squarely within our mission, excited to partner with the Titans of Industry to make this happen. How much do you think they are paying to license MidJourneys tech?

I have no idea. Has it leaked? No, no. I'm just purely speculating. I mean, I would go. out and guess that it's hundreds of millions of dollars? Yeah, I mean, I would imagine it's priced based on like inference, right? It's probably like some margin on top of like Mid Journey's inference infrastructure.

And I believe Mid Journey was fantastic at optimizing inference early on. They were they were known for because the images take a minute to generate, latency, actual latency like to the data center doesn't matter. And so if you're in America and your general, generating an image on Mid-Journey, that that generation will happen halfway across the world in a data center that's at not peak load. And so they're basically always moving, allegedly, I have no idea if this is true. I just heard this on the podcast one time, but they're allegedly moving inference around the

globe to find pockets of available compute to do the inference. And I mean, I think the Mid-Journey models are so good they should be able to do a ton of optimization, bake it onto a chip at some point. who knows, but it's certainly, like, having mid-journey in Instagram makes so much sense to me. Yeah, 100% agree. The reason this feels like, you know, I would say the mid-journey team and David, I'm sure they're not interested in flexing some big number on the timeline. And for the meta at the same time doesn't care to have another massive deal even be announced.

But this feel in the way that licensing, think about when we've been hearing technology, licensees in the sort of AI wars. Oh, yeah. These end up being, you know, Google paid a billion dollars. Yeah, yeah. Billions of dollars to license windsurf, right? And so, uh, what do you think, Tyler? How do you think, uh, the mid-journey partnership will play out with meta?

And they might need to rename because this is anything but a mid-journey. Um, yeah, it's definitely interesting. David, he also replied to that post. He said, we remain an independent community-backed research lab with no investors. Yep. So we just now have hundreds of millions of Zuck bucks coming in. I mean, I'm pretty sure I have hundreds of millions of subscribers. Yeah, I know.

That's what I'm saying. Like, they have to be underwriting this against like, well, we could just go get a bunch more customers. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I imagine that Zuck had to back up. It's, yeah, it's very interesting. I heard David Holes's like secret sauce described as just pure taste. So, like, they would train a model.

They would look at the different like benchmarks and e-vails and what was performing and he would just look at the images and be like we're using that model. Like it doesn't matter what it says basically. Yeah, I mean, it's hard to do like really good benchmarks in, you know, diffusion models. Like when you're generating like visuals or video or stuff like that. Yeah, I mean, I think you kind of set up like a GAN, like a generative adversarial network where you have one model that's trying to detect, is this a real image or a fake image? And then you have another, so you're generating a bunch of, you take a bunch of real images,

and you take a bunch of AI generated images. and you keep training the AI-generated image generator until the detector can't detect that it's fake. And then you have something that produces real images. But I think his goal has been, I don't just want to create images that look real. I want to create images that look good. And so...

I mean, you can see even like different Mid-Journey versions. There's definitely like a style that you can like almost... It's not like immediately obviously, you can say like that's Mid-Journey v5 or something. But there is like a vibe that you get in. I mean, images in chat GPT. It was like clearly... nailed Ghibli's, like, out of the park and was probably, like, RL to some extent, like,

on that or, like, optimized for that a little bit. And it was a great user experience, and it was a good decision. But the flip side is that Mid Journey is kind of gone for, like, their own style. And it's great. Yeah, very exciting. I mean, Jordy, have you heard the story of David Holtz's first company? No. No.

Oh, it's fantastic. It's a great story. Yeah, I've probably told it. I made a whole video about it and stuff. But basically, it was a story. It was a point projector that would track your hand in 3D space. So you could pair it with a virtual reality headset to detect hand motion. And so you could actually put it in and through using this like aftermarket 3D printed device like on the front of an Oculus.

And then it could track your hands doing hand tracking. And I believe that there was a plan rumored to sell the company to Apple. And Apple had already like printed welcome packages to the to the leap motion team. And then I think at some point the deal fell apart. Maybe that was because David Holes didn't want to work at the company or something happened. And the deal fell apart. And he wound up moving on. But then took clearly like all those learnings, everything he had studied and transferred all of that over to image generation when the first like image generation boom started.

and then just absolutely found like a rocket ship opportunity with Mid-Jurney. So fantastic, fantastic story, very excited that they're partnering. And then the other story that we should cover, I don't wanna miss it. Elon Musk's XAI sues Apple and OpenAI alleging they are, quote, monopolists. So Elon and the team going to legal war.

Musk says the partnership between the two companies has given chat, GBT maker, access to billions of user prompts. Interesting. So, Elon Musk's AI company XAI sued Apple and OpenAI Monday, alleging the companies are illegally thwarting competition for AI companies. The lawsuit says the iPhone maker's partnership with OpenAI makes the startup's chat, GPT, the only Gen AI chat bot that benefits from billions of user prompts originating from hundreds of millions of iPhones.

That enables OpenAI to use the prompts and feedback to improve its model, a significant advantage, according to the complaint. The suit also says Apple is deprioritizing the Eightying. apps of competing chat blots and app store ranking. Is it really billions of user prompts? That is crazy. So I've tried to use chat GPT. I like chat chitpt.

I use it a lot. I have it on my home row. I also, I try and trigger it with Siri every once in a while. I'll go to, I'll press the Siri button and bring up Apple Intelligence, which is Siri. And I'll ask it a question. And then I'll go open the chat GPT app and type in my accent. question because it does not work. I just had this happen where I asked Siri to calculate the hypotenuse and Siri's triggered, to calculate the hypotenuse of a triangle with a right triangle with

sides that are like 18 feet. We need to calculate something in the studio here. And it just says like the hypotenuse is equal to the Pythagrid. It just didn't, it didn't answer the question at all. And then I just had to go over to chatypede and have it actually do the math. So there's ways to trigger it. but, like, I would just be shocked if people, if, like, your average iPhone user. I'm sure they're just counting in this lawsuit, counting all people that have downloaded the chat GPT iPhone app. Oh, you think it's that? Yeah. I don't think it's not, it's not that.

Gabe Azar, who said earlier, he has 15 lawyers in the Azar family, says, yet again, lawyers stay winning with these pointless cases. The lawsuit says in a desperate bid to protect its smartphone monopoly, Apple has joined forces with a company that benefits, that most benefits, from inhibiting competition and innovation in AI, OpenAI monopolists in the market for Gen. AI chatbots. And Apple spokesman didn't immediately respond to a request for comment. Apple has previously said the App Store is designed to be free of bias and the company has defended the fairness of its partnership with OpenAI. Apple executives have said they will only partner with what they see as the best products to provide the best user experience. So I believe the Apple OpenAI partnership on routing,

Siri queries to chat GPT is no no monetary value exchanged either way which is interesting because you could see you could make an argument that both of them would pay because Apple would be better off if I had chat GPT kind of installed natively within Apple intelligence and then simultaneously chatypt benefits from getting more users from Apple ecosystem so I believe that it just netted out where they don't pay each other at anything but if you're if you're XAI and you want that relationship, you could go and say, I'm going to pay, potentially, and maybe pull it away and say, hey, now, now Mac is coming to Apple Intelligence. Might be a hard sell.

Yeah, I mean, the challenge here is I think Apple, Apple can defend just based on the kind of content that, you know, I don't see Apple putting XAI for GROC at the top of. with the adult content it's but I do think that Apple's never been adult content they've never been XAI has it as should fairly should should be able to request that yeah Siri route to grok yeah to right the user should be able to yeah I mean you can do that the long term scenario like I'm pretty sure you can go and select a different search engine for your Safari default in iOS you can say I'm a Bing guy and I want it to route to Bing and it will do that the Bing army the Bing army does that. Stop talking down on bang. They make $4 billion a year or something. Wasn't it more? It was a $16 billion? Yeah, it was some crazy number. Yeah. And so you could imagine that, yeah,

you should at least be able to do that and that's certainly not a feature. And so, I don't know. Anyway, the chat, the chat is saying the GROC army wants to route Siri to route through to Ani. Yeah, it's the worst time to be named Ani, I suppose. Anyway, congratulations to our buddy, Fierentino. These pictures, he says, are about 10 months apart. First picture was the test. Second is the creation. Pull this post. You can move faster than you think. Experiment. Find the spark. Explode it. Drinkvolta.com. I went, I went, yep, roughly 10 months ago. I went and got vaulted. Volta. That's good. John had a setup outside of jeans in New York. the product

worked honestly potentially too well I was jacked up after it but he has his flagship in Nashville now

and it seems to be packed every single day so Deus Volta God wills it the phrase from the Crusade Theo saw how quickly

Elon is spinning up data centers he said why can I spin up a flagship Volta flagship in Nashville in months let's do it

it's been a huge success Dax said my wife's water broke, so she went to download an app to time her contraction. I grabbed her phone out of her hands. What are you doing? Don't you realize we live in the age of personal software? We downloaded Replit and vibe-coded the perfect app with 3JS and SuperBase. We're naming the baby grok high 2025. I put this in here and I only read the first line and so I thought it was going to be

like a meditation on like actually like staying in the present during like a beautiful moment in your Yeah, I put this in there. I'm glad you didn't actually read it. That's really funny. I love it. Yeah. This is a good post from Andrea. Productivity is a spectrum. And this, we basically have picked aside. I've, I got the Diet Coke here. I eat McDonald's. I spent the weekend in my sauna and cold plunge with my... Oh, you're on the left. I'm on the left. I'm on the right. I'm very... I've even back. I'm an investor in Magnet. Oh, you are. Okay. Yeah. I mean, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I mean, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I pull from both sides. I pull from both sides. I like Heberman Lab. I like the sauna. I won't shy away from a monster, Chipotle,

burrito bowl. Yeah. I do a little bit of both. Never get into the hard stop over here. Don't like that. Get in the middle. You know, the middle is the,

is the. Yeah, yeah, a little bit of both. Everything in moderation, including moderation, folks. Okay,

so pull up this president, or sorry, sorry, not president, picture of the Oval Office. We have, wait, do you want to start with,

no, we should start with, we should start with what it looks like today. Today is the third one. It looks like it looks golden. The Biden Oval Office versus the Trump. One forward is the Biden Oval Office, I believe. And probably every Oval Office for the past like three decades. Pretty standard, comfortable, muted. It's opulent, but not over the top. And then if you switch to the next shot, you will see Donald Trump has really, really brought back. the 17th century touches.

Yes. With gold accents everywhere on every surface. Floor to ceiling. Floor to ceiling gold. I like how we added those trophies. I want to know what these trophies are for. It used to just be some leaves. And then...

Semiconductor world champion. Edwin says, when a millennial becomes a president, and it's this ultra-minimal design that is... It hits hard. That is a standard... That is the standard issue, luxury apartment or living space these days for everyone. First millennial president is going to be wild. Yeah.

Maybe we go straight to Zumer. I've said for a long time, I want a president with stamina, someone who can just pull in all nighter with his boys and solve the problem. Monitor the situation. Anyway, Lala says there's no such thing as taste. At the signal level, there's only personalization and variance. When LLM outputs look tasteless, it's a sign of the app not having the right user model or not having tuned the output variety well. Let's go to our taste expert, Tyler Cosgrove.

Do you believe AI can have taste? Maybe not right now, but the post just seems like, it seems like obviously wrong. Like there's that good Paul Graham post where he's like, is there good art or like can you, is there an objective like good art? And like obviously there is because some artists are better than others, right? Because like I'm a worse artist than whoever. Maybe. And like who's a better artist? It's if you make better art, which means there must be better art.

So like taste is the same thing. There's obviously, there's objectively good taste because. I would say there is good taste. I would say there is not objectively good taste. There is subjectively good taste. But I believe that subjective things are true. I believe that money is a construct. It's an idea.

It doesn't have intrinsic value. There's many people that would say that Trump's Oval Office is of poor taste. But to him, it's the highest of high. Exactly. Exactly. And yet, I believe in things that have an unobjective quality, a subjective quality. Do you think there's objectively good art and art that is better than other? art? I think that there is art that is better than other art, but I don't believe that it is

objectively better. I don't believe I can quantify how it is better. John's been bidding on the banana tape to the wall, by the way. I'm not a big fan of that one. But of course, I think that there's some art that's better than others, but I would not say it is objectively better. Do you think Michael Andrews is objectively a better artist than me? Maybe. There's certainly, there's certainly, like, The ability to instantiate the art is an objective quality. Like the ability, like a certain person will be able to make a functional vase on a pottery wheel and another person will fail at that. One person will try and draw a person that will look more photo real.

But that's not the only thing that I see art being. Like Michelangelo did not paint the Sistine Chapel himself, right? He had a team that did that. I'm pretty sure. I don't know. We'll have to look it up. Grock, is this real? Chad, is this real?

but I do think the two things are separate and I think the taste is different than the skill set. Can we, I want to get on to some more important topics can we pull up this post of Doge employee big balls rep in 225?

Really? Oh, that's who that is? I saw the picture. This is great. I saw, I saw it's Edward Correstine. Is that who that is? Recovery? Yeah. This is Mr. Balls.

Wow. Just wrapping it out. Looking great, too. Good form. He's not five points of contact. Okay. But coming off. Strong men create good times.

Happens to me. Wow. And this is, of course, a response to the mayoral candidate in New York City, Momdani, who was seen potentially not being able to bench one 45. But it's possible that he just had an over-eager spotter. We're unclear, but... He didn't look super comfortable under there. Yeah.

He had to go to a dark place for those reps. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He knew when he stood up that he was cooked, too. I don't understand how he wound up in a situation. He seems very calculated in what he films. A lot of it's very cinematic. Apparently, there's other angles of it. He was resistant to doing it.

Oh, he got kind of like, yeah, got talked into it. Okay, that's rough. Yeah. That's a bit of a gap. I regret who was posting somebody was saying, like the real shrewd political, like if he had taken a step back and said, you know what, this is going to be hard for me,

but together we can do anything. Let's wrap this out together, the city of New York. Let's socialize the weight. I want two guys on their side lifting. Everyone lived 10 pounds with me right now and we're good. Anyway, Nikita Beer went to Starbase. It was one of the perks of being executive at X. I spent the day at Starbase and never really understood

the scope of what's happening here. It's a modern-day Manhattan project, an entire city built for the singular mission of going to space. Rose of 1950s ranch homes, a couple of restaurants, a grocery store, hovercrafts, shuttling people around on water. I didn't know they had hovercrafts there. That's awesome. And launch pads and rocket factories everywhere. He shares a beautiful picture of himself looking up at the starship, which I believe did not launch, is that right? Or it did launch, and it was not successful. But obviously, the crew is. No, it didn't. It didn't. It They didn't launch. They scraped boarded the launch.

But of course, the machinery at Starbase is unrelenting, and I think they're going to get that thing up there eventually. They will. Yeah, the video that Elon showed inside the factory just showed this incredible scale. Yeah, yeah. Well, I have a post we can end the show with. Bucco Capital says, this is from last night, my timeline tonight, you need extremely concentrated positions, 10-bagger thread.

bet heavy on consensus. Stupid to have cash because bear markets are so short. Cyclicals pitched as secular winners. They're going to run it hot. Careful out there. And Zumer, the legendary Zumer, who is zooming on Chinese tech, says Max Levered Long, all in tech,

Bucco. And of course, Zumer is going gig along on PDD. How do you even end up at PDD and four? I genuinely don't get it. You got to have them. on the great zoomer versus unkko oh starship is set to launch today two hours and 20 minutes till launch oh wow um i i i'm i'm really can't wait for it uh never bet against Elon baby he's

going to get that thing up there eventually well thank you for tuning in fun show today always great when we can get the doctor to drop to drop on always a fun show i cannot wait for tomorrow We're working on getting somebody to call in from the Pliah, folks. We're working on it. If you are listening to this from Black Rock City, let us know. We'd love to get some live coverage. The trophy in the White House in the Oval Office is the number one president trophy. Self-glaze.

Thanks for hanging out, guys. We will talk to you soon. Have a good day. We love you. See you tomorrow. Good evening. Goodbye.