TBPN - Isaacman Back in the Cockpit at NASA, Google Takes AI to Space, 𝕏 Timeline Reactions | Cliff Obrecht, Jerry Murdock, SHL0MS, Shehzan Maredia, Mina Fahmi, Alessandro Chesser, John Maslin, Eugenia Kuyda, Anish Acharya, David Risher & Erin Brewer

Starting point is 00:00:00 You're watching TVPN. Today is Wednesday, November 5th, 2025. We're live from the TBPN Ultradome. We're back in the TBPN Ultradome. Everybody wanted to know what we would do if we didn't podcast today. I guess we'll never know. I guess we'll never now. We're back. It's so good to be back. It is. Back in the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the capital of capital, still sponsored by ramp. Time is money. Say both. Easy use corporate cards, bill payment, accounting, a whole lot more, all in one place. In breaking news yesterday, Jared Isaacman has been re-nominated, I guess, is the term. He's back in the contention for, to be NASA administrator. It was a very exciting, very tumultuous year for him. Do we know why he was originally taken out of the running? Yes. So there are differing accounts. According to the White House, so according to the White House, the reason is that, the reason

Starting point is 00:00:59 is that he had donated previously to Democrats. And the White House said like this should be like we need to know that you're all in on America first like that type of thing. But those donations

Starting point is 00:01:15 were public because all donations are public. And so there was a little bit of like, well, like you nominated him. You should have just like looked it up. You can literally just like, you can literally just Google it. Like it's not even like some secret database. it's it's it's all open records um but then ours technica and a couple other outlets reported that

Starting point is 00:01:36 it was because of the Elon Musk Trump dust up that happened back in may remember the whole like battle and Elon was going at Trump on the timeline and Trump was going at Elon and truth social and they were kind of duking it out and there was like so I can't believe that was a real day on act it was a crazy day uh on truth social as well why are you doing truth social erasure bro Um, uh, I was going, actually,

Starting point is 00:02:01 no, no, literally like, like Trump was not posting on X. Oh, right, right, Trump would post on,

Starting point is 00:02:05 on, on Truth Social. It would be screenshoted and then share it on X. Yeah, remember we were sort of live reaction, reacting to the news and I would refresh. Yeah. Truth.

Starting point is 00:02:14 Or I'd see something on X. Yeah. And you have to actually go. Yeah. No, no. No. No.

Starting point is 00:02:18 No. And then I'd go to Truth Social. And unfortunately. It was. And it was. And it was. And so Isaac Min got pulled. And,

Starting point is 00:02:27 uh, Secretary. Duffy stepped in, Sean Duffy, who's the 20th Secretary of the Department of Transit, serving under the president. But now Isaacman's back in the picture, of course, at the Charlie Kirk Memorial. You might have seen Elon Musk and President Donald Trump sitting down, having a handshake, maybe making amends. There's been speculation as to things, It seems to be water under the bridge. They seem to have healed all wounds, I suppose.

Starting point is 00:03:03 Let me tell you about re-stream. One live stream, 30-plus destinations, multi-stream, and reach your audience wherever they are. So, Jared Eisenman put out a long post. We'll read through some of this, and then I have a little bit of a take about his career and whatnot. So he said, thank you, Mr. President,

Starting point is 00:03:19 for this opportunity. It will be an honor to serve my country under your leadership. The support from the space-loving community has been overwhelming. I am not sure how I earn the trust of so many, but I will do everything I can to live up to those expectations, to the innovators building, the orbital economy.

Starting point is 00:03:36 That's a term I haven't actually heard used before, but I like a lot. Orbital economy is great. Space economy just doesn't hit as hard as orbital economy. I like that. The scientists pursuing breakthrough discoveries and to the dreamers across the world, eager to return to the moon and the grand journey beyond.

Starting point is 00:03:54 These are the most exciting time. the dawn of, since the dawn of the space age. And I truly believe the future we have all been waiting for will soon become a reality. This is inspiring. I didn't know that that much about Jared Isaacman, but as soon as I started learning about him, I was a fan. And I'm very excited that he could potentially be in the seat. The big reason is that, first off, he's, he's an entrepreneur.

Starting point is 00:04:18 And I think entrepreneurs make great leaders generally. But I can fly fighter jets. He can fly fighter jets. That's, that I think is a little bit less relevant, but it's somewhat relevant because you are leading people, like you're flying. You're leading people that are going to risk their life by flying in big fast machines. Totally. Yeah. So I think it's, I think it's a, it's a sign of respect.

Starting point is 00:04:40 Yeah. Yeah, yeah. It's not that crazy of an idea. But I don't think people understand how crazy of an entrepreneur he is. So he started Shift 4 payments. It had a few other names, but he started his company when he was 16 years old, 16. 16. So he dropped out of high school, got a GED so he could technically have like finished high school, I suppose, and just started this business. And it's like a serious business.

Starting point is 00:05:07 You know, you learn about these people who maybe don't know, they don't run a household brand. They haven't been telling their entrepreneurial story for a decade. There's no founders podcast episode about them yet or something. But this is a serious business. Billions in revenue, real earnings. The PE ratio is 25x. It's like not some crazy, oh, it's a meme coin. It's a $6 billion company. Yeah, it's not a hyper-scaler, but it's like very serious. It does 4,000 employees. Four thousand employees, hundreds of billions of payment volume. And it also does the payments for Starlink. So it's like, you know, a stripe competitor that actually works on to process the payments. They did $3.3 billion revenue in 2024. Which is also interesting.

Starting point is 00:05:56 I wonder when they first met because he's in payments in 1999. Elon's in payments in 1999 in PayPal. And then Elon, I believe. Let me check Rockapedia. Didn't Elon Angel into Stripe at some point? Stripe, of course, owns Privy, wallet infrastructure for every bank. Privy makes it easy to build on crypto rail, securely spend up way-label wallets, sign transactions, integrate on-chain infrastructure all through one simple API.

Starting point is 00:06:20 And I think maybe, I don't know if this is more important. This is probably less important, but he's been to space. Jared Isaacman has been to space, which is just crazy. And so he went with a crewmate, Sarah Gillis, who was a SpaceX engineer, and did a civilian spacewalk. Like, they left the capsule in space. And this was on a, on a, on a, um, SpaceX rocket. Um, which is just like incredibly risky, I feel like.

Starting point is 00:06:49 It's a crazy move. And he went all the way up. And so he's kind of like really earned his bona fides as someone who's like, loves space and is willing to, you know, engage with SpaceX. He can probably say no one likes space more than me. Seriously. Yeah. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:07:08 And so when he was first, when he was first considered as NASA administrator, there was this debate around him. And it wasn't, it wasn't the Elon thing, really. It kind of was the Elon thing, but the Elon dust up, that was kind of like the last second, like, rugging. But in the lead up, because Isaacman was nominated, I think, on inauguration day. So he was like one of the first, he was clearly, everyone was like, yep, this is our guy. We don't even have to make any more calls. Like, we're nominating him on day one.

Starting point is 00:07:40 Do that. Then the debate, you know, goes because he has to be confirmed, right? And he eventually was confirmed. but the debate was moon versus Mars. Moon versus Mars, where should you prioritize things? It sounds silly, but it really is real because there are different companies, different organizations, different constituents.

Starting point is 00:07:59 And so on the moon side, you have the Artemis program, which is the SLS rocket and the Orion capsule, the Orion spacecraft, which has been derided by Casey Hanmer as a failure. There's been a lot of people who are pro-Spacex. Casey quoted theirs. announcement said this is a good sign. Yes. Yes. He, he, and Casey is effectively our senior NASA correspondent. Yes, definitely. And so on the other side, you have Elon, who has always been prioritizing, Mars, Mars, Mars, let's go to Mars. And so Jared Isaacman said at the time, why is it

Starting point is 00:08:39 taking us so long and why is it costing us so much to go to the moon? And I think it's a good question. We've been to the moon six times. We've actually done, I think, 140 moon missions. Six of them actually landed humans on the moon. A bunch sent people around the moon. We sent robots to the moon. We sent landers. We sent all sorts of different stuff around the moon.

Starting point is 00:09:00 So we're not new to trying to go to the moon. We've sent humans there six times. But the fact that we haven't been able to scale our rocket program to a point where moon missions are too cheap to meter has become. a bit of a stain on American ingenuity. We should have just scaled it up and just cut the cost by 20% every year. And we would be getting up and back. Shouldn't be a lost art. It shouldn't be a lost art. And it is a lost art to the point where people ask, is it real? How did we do this? It's hard to believe. How do we lose? We don't normally just lose the ability to do things.

Starting point is 00:09:37 And yet in this moment. Palmer was defending the moon mission to Logan by saying, wasn't he saying, like you can shine a laser. There's a mirror. They left a mirror. So you can bounce a laser off the mirror. You can do this at home. And you can prove that there is a mirror on the moon. It doesn't prove that aliens didn't put it there.

Starting point is 00:09:56 Yeah. Palmer needs to, you know, go a layer deeper. You got to go a level deeper. You got to go a level deeper. But, you know, in general, SpaceX has become the best hope at the reversal of this. And Elon has been much more focused on Mars than the moon. and so the debate around Isaacman centers on his ties to Elon Musk. His shift for company, the payment processor, processes of payments for Starlin.

Starting point is 00:10:22 Speaking of the moon, Sam Altman was on Tyler Cowan. Yes. And Altman said at one point, sometimes late at night, you just really want that chocolate chip cookie at 1130 at night, or at least I do. And Tyler says, yes, do you think there's any kind of alien life on the moons of Saturn? Because I do. How did they get in that situation? We need to actually hear the real, like, transcript.

Starting point is 00:10:43 Is there video for that podcast? I think it's audio only. Audio only. I think it's just audio, yeah. Man, Sam really understands the Trump takeaway from the election. Like, I believe, like, the whole podcast election conclusion was just attention is all you need. You need to do as many podcasts as possible. You need to be high volume, volume wins.

Starting point is 00:11:06 And Sam Altman just will not turn down appearances. And so he does, you know, Tucker Carlson, and there's a really rough clip that comes out of that. But then he just goes and does another podcast. And then he does another podcast. And then on Friday, everyone was talking about the Brad Gersner, Satchinadella, Sam Altman clip. And then, you know, the next, on Tuesday, there's a new press cycle. And I haven't seen any bad clips from the Tyler Cowan interview. So it just feels like the number one thing you don't want to do in comms.

Starting point is 00:11:39 is like going to hiding. You just want to power through. Keep posting. Post through the pain. Podcast through the pain. I love it. I think it's a great media strategy and I think it will ultimately be victorious.

Starting point is 00:11:52 But the question about Isaacman, he's tied to Elon Musk through Shift 4. He processes payments for Starlink. And also he obviously literally went on top of a SpaceX rocket and went to space. And so NASA, even though SpaceX is a private company, NASA does have a thumb that it can put on the scale because it has funding and it has the ability to help and the ability to approve different things.

Starting point is 00:12:17 NASA has funding. They also know how to spend money. Exactly. You look at how much money they've spent on Orion. And so that money could go to SpaceX, could go to Mars, could go to the moon. And the NASA administrator has the ability to say, hey, we're going to focus more on Mars and we're going to focus more on moon or vice versa. And there's an open debate. And I don't think this is like a left-right issue.

Starting point is 00:12:41 I remember the, wasn't the, wasn't George Bush really into going to Mars? And then I forget. Why are you laughing, Tyler? I just think it's funny. Like the moon and Mars being like a political. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think that'd be funny. It's like, are you moon?

Starting point is 00:12:56 Are you pro-moon? Are you pro-Mars? And then like we need another X and Y axis for an entirely new political compass that has no correlation with the underlying political left-right, authoritarian, libertarian compass? I don't know. What are other wedge issues that have no correlation with left-ed?

Starting point is 00:13:13 Yes, President George W. Bush was quite interested in Mars exploration. He was Mars guy. In January of 2004, he announced Vision for Space Exploration at NASA headquarters. The plan directed NASA to return humans to the moon

Starting point is 00:13:26 by around 2020. He wanted to go to the moon by 2020? And eventually send astronauts to Mars. and beyond. Wow. That's disappointing. And then they proceeded to spend 20 billion to make a broken Orion capsule. It was 20 billion. I mean, the real miss is, it should have taken all the, all the war on terror money and put it into moon missions and just been like, we're going to war against the moon. There's oil on the moon. And then if we'd put all that money and all that manpower into going to

Starting point is 00:14:02 the moon, we'd probably be dominating the moon right now. Right? Like if you take all the war on there would be an Amman on the moon. I think there would be an Amman on the moon. I've been very pro-moon. I want the moon to look like Las Vegas ASAP. It should be a tourist destination. People would be gambling on the moon right now. If you if you let them gamble, they will come. This is the thing. This is this is real. But but there is a delicate balance, you know, obviously the more time you spend focusing on the moon, the last time you're focused on the big Mars mission. There are different considerations in terms of the rockets that you type of, that you build. And that's, and that's basically the debate, I think the debate around, like the non-political debate, the meat and

Starting point is 00:14:44 potatoes debate around Jerich Isaacman is like, is he going to make the correct decision about what, what celestial body to prioritize versus, oh, did he donate to this, or is he the left wing or right wing, or did he say the right thing? Like, all that stuff is window dressing for the big question, NASA, which is moon or Mars, in my opinion. And you don't, you don't think trying to counterbalance China's efforts in space should also be top of mind, or is that, is that, is that? I think that is all upstream of moon versus Mars, right? So, so, so, so if they're, if they're, if they're, if they're going to claim Mars tomorrow, well, we probably got a push and, you know, get on the defensive on Mars. You know, it's like, uh, you're playing some grand strategy game and it's like, you know, you see someone

Starting point is 00:15:29 going taking territory over there. that informs, do you want to go play defense on that territory, or do you want to go capture a completely separate territory? But yes, I mean, I agree with you. And this is what Casey Hammer has said on the show multiple times, is based on what we're seeing from China on the moon progress, maybe we do need to prioritize in the moon more. Maybe Elon is somewhat wrong on that,

Starting point is 00:15:53 in that it's not just this, it's not just Elon for years was not framing things in geopolitical, ways. He was just saying it's humanity versus the cold vacuum of space. And so humanity needs to go to Mars because that's a true different planet. And if something happens to the moon and Earth, you can truly start over on Mars. You can't necessarily do that on the moon. That's not the case with the current geopolitical situation. So that's an interesting question. But I do think that there's new debate, which is what happens below the moon, what happens in low Earth orbit, what happens with the data center and space question. Because six months ago, I'm not kidding, six months ago,

Starting point is 00:16:45 it was a non-issue. It was just like, oh, yeah, there's like a YC company that's working on it. This is some sci-fi thing that people are thinking about. But now we have Jensen Wong, we have Elon Musk, and we have Sundar Pichai all saying, we're going to do data centers in space. So collectively you have what, 10 trillion in market cap that's like, hey, we're going to be taking this seriously. And I do think that that's a NASA question. And I think NASA will have some say over the speed at which this stuff gets built out. Now, maybe it's a decade, maybe it's two decades, maybe it's five years. But there will be policies that are overseen by Jared Isaacman that inform how seriously the idea of data centers in space gets taken.

Starting point is 00:17:31 and he could be completely anti. And he could just be like, I think this is fake. I think it's impossible to diffuse the heat. I'm anti. And I'm going to block it the whole time I'm at NASA. And some people might be very upset about that. Some people might be like, thank goodness. Like we didn't want to waste any time on that.

Starting point is 00:17:49 But he hasn't chimed in on that. And I think that that's an interesting next discussion for the government to have and a government administrator, the NASA administrator to have, which is, what is the U.S. government's position on data centers in space because the hyperscalers are chiming in left and right. Yeah. Elon's post from a couple days ago, quantum computing is best done in the permanently shadowed craters on the moon. Yeah, he's just like bear posting, basically. He's just like it's useless, right? Isn't that what he's saying? Or is he saying like it's cold there? I think he was, I don't think he's, I don't think he's bare posting. That's not how I read it.

Starting point is 00:18:29 Oh, what, what is his take? I think he's saying it's like, he's saying you should actually do it there? It seemed like he was just saying like, you should just go and do that like super far away, like stop working on that on Earth. Like it's not worth it. That was my read on it.

Starting point is 00:18:46 But maybe it's like, no, maybe he's being serious. Yeah. Is he being serious? Like scientifically he believes that quantum computing should happen on the moon? I don't know. I don't know enough about quantum computing. Crook? Yeah.

Starting point is 00:19:00 Is this real? Devon? Cognition. They're the makers of Devin. Devon's the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering. David in the chat was saying, referencing that Elon is actually more and more moon-pilled.

Starting point is 00:19:20 He did post. I went back and found it two days ago. He said SpaceX will lean in big on the moon. Yes. Yes. And Arthur McWhorter said, we should annex it, which Salana has been saying for quite a while now. Yeah, Moon should be a state. It's a classic, classic line.

Starting point is 00:19:38 I am inevitable. Says Ken Kurtland. He's showing a cool collage of Jared Isaacman. What a crazy story. What a crazy story. I'm very excited. I hope he does more, hope he does more podcast appearances. Yeah, we'll work. I mean, usually, I'd love to have him on the show. the show. But I'm usually not like, oh, I really want like the director of some random, you know, government organization to do a full podcast round. But I feel like the space question, the orbital economy, it's so big, it's so interesting that there's a ton of, there's a ton of interesting questions and it's just so, it's such a cool thing to build a vision around. Let's check in on

Starting point is 00:20:22 the NASA admin candidates as Luke Leischer. We have a winner in the campaign, 2025 was between someone saying let's kill NASA and Jared Isaacman saying 20 septillion Americans to Mars which American which message will resonate with spitter and we have our answer Jared Isaacman is back in the in the race Delian is confirming that he is anti I would like to inform everyone that data centers in space still make me want to blow my brains out thank you for your attention to this matter and Sundar heard that and immediately responded.

Starting point is 00:21:00 He posted, Delian posted this before? Only a few hours later. Only a few hours later. Actually, no, I think, I think Delian was responding to Sundar here. It was more fun to think about Sundar responding to Delian, but he's, Sundar yesterday said, our TPUs are headed to space, inspired by our history of moonshots from quantum computing to autonomous driving. Project Suncatcher is exploring how we.

Starting point is 00:21:27 could one day build scalable ML compute systems in space, harnessing more of the sun's power, which emits more power than a hundred trillion times humanity's total electricity production. Like any moonshot, it's going to require us to solve a lot of complex engineering challenges. Early research shows our trillium generation TPUs or our tensor processing units, purpose built for AI, survive without damage when tested in a particle accelerator to simulate low Earth orbit levels of radiation. However, significant challenges still remain like thermal management and on-orbit system reliability. More testing and breakthroughs will be needed as we count down to launch two prototype satellites with planet by early 2027, our milestone of many. Excited for us to be

Starting point is 00:22:13 a part of all the innovation happening in the space. So it is pretty funny to think about, you know, before we had satellites, like scientists just being like, you want to put radio equipment, in orbit and then you want to use it to communicate with you want to watch TV in space you want to watch space you want you on space that makes me want to blow my brains out satellite television that's what we're doing satellite radio what are you going to call a dish network oh you want to put a camera on one of those too you want to take pictures you want to take pictures and send it down to us here a camera in space yeah the thing we take wedding pictures with make it make it make it makes sense you're going to put it makes sense yeah you're going to put it on the top of a rocket the

Starting point is 00:22:56 thing that you need to replace the film? The camera. If I drop it, it breaks immediately. We're going to put that on top of a rocket. Shoot it into space. And it's just going to work? And it's just going to work. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:23:05 Yeah. For sure. For sure. Super believable. 100%. 100%. Yeah. I like that Sundar Pachas, his nominative determinism just keeps getting stronger.

Starting point is 00:23:15 So of course, we know him is pitching AI. Oh. You see where I'm going with this, right? Yeah. So now he's going after the sun. And of course, his name is Sundar. That's incredible. he's going to be pitching AI into the sun.

Starting point is 00:23:29 Pitch AI into the sun, Sundar. It's so good. He should have to call the Project Sundar. That's what Brandon and our team was mentioning, which is very funny. Sean McGuire is, I think, he's in favor of all this. He's a supporter. He says, the science fiction, future we dreamed of might actually be coming true. And Elon Musk signed off on Sundar Pichai's Suncatcher project and says,

Starting point is 00:23:55 great idea, L-O-L, which is a hilarious. Well, I think this is because Elon had just been sharing how he wants,

Starting point is 00:24:05 he was posting about how SpaceX would eventually do data centers in space, right? Oh, yeah, okay. So I think part of this is he's a great idea.

Starting point is 00:24:14 Great idea, L-O-L, like you're doing my thing, but then Sundar says only possible because of SpaceX massive advantages in launch technology. It is, it is,

Starting point is 00:24:25 is so funny that, like, E-Long can't just be like, no, I'm, I'm keeping all the launch capacity for myself. Like, he doesn't have, I guess he doesn't have the ability to do that, really. I think it's like, I think it's illegal, because if you're like a railroad, you can't say, like, I'm, I'm, uh, you need like net neutrality effectively. Uh, very funny. Go up John, Johnson vindicated. Yeah. Aaron Burnett says, is it just me or did the Overton window on space data centers dramatically shift over the last few weeks? It really does seem like. this dramatically shifted truly just a few weeks ago. Some folks at YC were taking a victory lap

Starting point is 00:25:03 because YC backed a data center. Did YC back StarCloud? Or did they back a different data center? They did StarCloud. Okay, because I remember when YC back StarCloud, there were a lot of people who were, oh, YC, try to do hard tech, stick to the mobile apps, buddy. And I guess we do in space data.

Starting point is 00:25:25 centers now and people were having a lot of fun with it but then like you know philip has just been completely vindicated at least by like getting support from the big power players like the big tech power players are are coming out in support my question is like where does jerick isick isick iscman land on this uh he he runs a payment processor we're going to be processing payments in space let's get let's get his payment company up in space uh we need to do more things in space we need there's so many cool things that we can put in space

Starting point is 00:25:58 we need space casinos space slop space Instagram space troughs satellites are really space troughs yeah think about it uh Dean Ball says one way to infer the bubble

Starting point is 00:26:12 isn't going to pop soon is that all the people who have been wrong about everything related to artificial intelligence indeed they have been desperate to be wrong they suck on their wrongness like a pacifier believe the bubble is about to pop. It's very evocative.

Starting point is 00:26:28 Isn't that completely true? I feel like a lot of people that have been wrong do not believe the bubble is going to. When I think about people who have been wrong about artificial intelligence, I mean, sure, there's people that have been, like, AI will never pass the touring test. But there's also, like, the L. E.A.Z. Or Y. is going to kill us, like, next year. And, like, I would put them both in those camps. And is L.E.A.S. are saying that the bubble's going to pop?

Starting point is 00:26:53 I don't know. Is he? Bob talk? Let's go to the Bub talk. Let's go to the Bubbler. I don't think he's been saying that. No. Okay, so who is Dean Ball sub-tweeting here?

Starting point is 00:27:05 That's the question. It's hard to argue that it's, that AI is going to be this runaway death machine and also that it's about. Do you know Ball? All right. How many times we're going to make this joke? I think there's a bunch of, like, journalists that, like, mainstream journalists that talk about, like, oh, AI is like, it's just. Oh, yes, yes, 100%. 100%.

Starting point is 00:27:26 100%. And it doesn't do anything interesting. 100%. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, there's a, I don't know if he's a journalist, but there's a blogger who was trying to argue simultaneously that Sam Altman has never, like, created anything in his life. He's non-technical. Like, he's not responsible for any, like, success.

Starting point is 00:27:42 But then simultaneously was arguing that, like, he moved recklessly quickly to launch Chachypte against the board's, like, desires. And it's like, literally both of those can't be true simultaneously. Like only one can be true. Either like he did have the foresight to release the product or he didn't and therefore it's not risky for what he did. So there's just like some, there is some like dissonance where people don't really map through all of the logical conclusions of what they're arguing. Yeah. For me, the gal man amnesia effect has just been crazy lately because there's people whose content that I read that don't historically.

Starting point is 00:28:22 that don't historically cover AI and they're starting to talk about AI and there's just in a single short essay that they're writing, I can just, there's easily like 10 to 15 things that are either wrong or just I completely disagree with the take. And I'm thinking about some of their other content

Starting point is 00:28:42 and being like, okay, maybe I need to be a lot more critical of some of their other writing. Yeah, there was someone who was like super critical of crypto, during the crypto bubble and then came out like super doom-pilled, like we're going to all get a paperclip next year. And I was like, uh, like maybe I should be buying NFTs. Like, he's like, he's so wrong about the paper clipping thing that I need to go back and revisit. Maybe he was actually wrong about the NFT question because like, but of course, like the truth is that he was

Starting point is 00:29:17 correct about NFTs being a bubble and just happened to be also wrong about us all dying to AI and, you know, a matter of days. Like, both can be true. You can swing and miss on certain things and you can hit it out of the park on others. Oh, we mentioned it yesterday. Polymarket was tracking the Momdani election in New York City. I think we were tracking it at like 95%. And then, of course, it went to 100% because Mamdani did get elected.

Starting point is 00:29:47 And Rex here has a reaction of Michael Burry or Christian Bale in in the big short, biting his fingernails, saying, a socialist just got elected mayor in the heart of the financial world at the top of the greatest bubble of all time. How are those related? I don't know. But yeah, people are not happy. They're moving to Florida, I guess.

Starting point is 00:30:11 I don't think, I mean, I think a lot of the people that said they were going to move are waking up this morning and seems, you know, We'll see. Yeah. The big issue for New York State from a tax revenue standpoint is, is there's, they don't actually need a million people to leave for it to have a material impact on budgets. Like if like a certain.

Starting point is 00:30:39 Yeah, but the question, I think people, people overestimate how communist New York can become in a year and underestimate how communist New York can become in a decade. And so I generally think that people are freaking out thinking that there's going to be a 45% wealth tax next week. We'll see. We'll see what actually gets put in place. But good luck to all the folks over in New York City.

Starting point is 00:31:08 The market seems to be liking it, according to high yield Harry. How are the markets doing today? Oh, we're ripping. The NASDAQ is up 1.15%. Bitcoin's up 3%. Half of the last week, we should be in white team. The Dow Jones is up 0.6%. And high yield, Harry said, Zoron's America.

Starting point is 00:31:28 Bitcoin touched 99. 99? Ooh. At 1 a.m. That's stressful. Thankfully, well, we were all sleeping. This post from this Aaron Sloatov resurfaces email that I think is... It's a classic.

Starting point is 00:31:45 Instant classic. Peter Thiel wrote it to Mark Zuckerberg, Cheryl Sandberg, Mark Andresen, January of 2020 said there are many themes that could be developed more here, but let me make a few quick points for now. Nick, I certainly would not suggest that our policy should be embrace millennial attitudes unreflectively. That would be the last person to advocate for socialism. But when 70% of millennials say they are pro-socialists, we need to do better than simply dismiss them by saying that they are stupid or entitled their brainwash. We should try and understand why. and from the perspective of a broken generational compact, there seems to be a pretty straightforward answer to me, namely that when one has too much student debt or if housing is too unaffordable, then one will have negative capital for a long time and or find it very hard to start accumulating capital in the form of real estate. And if one has no stake in the capitalist system, then one may well turn against it. So it feels like basically called to a T.

Starting point is 00:32:47 you know, the last, or at least, like, could have easily predicted this type of election outcome five years ago. Somebody asked me, do I have it here? Where is it? Somebody asked me about, oh, I need to find it in my DMs. Like, you know, should you go to college? Something like that. Oh, I really wish I could find it.

Starting point is 00:33:17 And I was kind of noodling on it. It was after we talked about the Palantir, don't even go to college, just go work for Palantir straight out of high school. And someone was saying that I think that they had the opportunity to do it. They wound up going with college or something and they wanted to know my thoughts. And there is this weird question of student debt that I think gets completely left out of the equation. And it's so, so important.

Starting point is 00:33:43 It feels like if you want to, if your life's work is, like you want to be a doctor, like you just have to go to college. Like you, you're just not going to get on that track. Just being like, yeah, I've been, I've been cutting up people in my, in my basement for the last month. So I'm ready for surgery. I vibe coded the scalpel. No, it's not going to happen. You got to go to college. But if you, but if you do want to be something that's a little bit more flexible, a little more creative, a little more entrepreneurial, you can probably drop out of college. But it depends on like a whole bunch of other. factors. Like if you are, if you're, if you're rich and you're going to graduate without any debt,

Starting point is 00:34:25 there's pretty, there's pretty limited downside to going to college because you get to just hang out and vibe code apps and do whatever and clout farm and aura farm and do whatever you want. Like it's like, it's a pretty flexible environment. It just sucks to go through that and then come out with $200,000 in debt. And so, so that's the thing. Then there was like the question of like, if the Department of Defense is going to pay for your full ride, like I don't know what's going on. But if you can get a full ride and you can get no debt, well then it's probably worth going.

Starting point is 00:35:01 But also if you're so elite that people are just throwing money at you to go to college, you can probably take that money and not and just teach yourself and not go to college. What do you think about that framework? like this idea that, uh, that, that, that the, that the actual debt is a very important factor into, like, is college valuable? I feel like so many people boil it down to like, college good or college bad as opposed to like college a good bargain or college a bad bargain. Yeah, I don't think it's that, uh, under, like underrated the debt question. Yeah. It seems like, yeah, obviously like, if, if, if you're not going to take out any debt to go to college, then it's like basically just like,

Starting point is 00:35:41 have a good time for four years. Yeah. Yeah. Go have fun. It's like, yeah, it's like, yeah, there's like the cost of like your time, but it's like, you know, you're young. It's not that big a deal. Yeah. It does feel like we're not making a lot of progress on it. Yeah, I think that the the people that go to college take on debt and then get a job that doesn't really require a college degree, just requires some amount of agency. Yeah. Like really kind of shoot themselves in the foot. Yeah. I wonder what would happen if we deregulated some of the tracks. that require college. Like, if, if, like, it is extremely hard to become a lawyer without going to college.

Starting point is 00:36:22 Because in order to take the bar, you have to have, you have to have a degree from a law school. And in order to go to law school, you need to, that's true. There is a loophole where, I believe, if you are studying under, if you're like mentoring under a lawyer, they can advocate for you, something like that. But in general, do you know? Yeah, it depends on the state. So what you're saying is true for New York, Maine, and Wyoming. Okay.

Starting point is 00:36:51 Where you can have an apprenticeship. Some states, you don't need that or a degree. You can just go take the bar? Like, I could just walk in and take it and become a lawyer. Basically. Well, well... You need to do an apprenticeship. No, yeah.

Starting point is 00:37:06 Wait. I'm pretty sure in many states. Yeah, some of them, if it's apprentices under a lawyer or judge. Yep. Some of them, it's just a lawyer. Yep. and then some of them you need to go to law school. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:37:15 So in general, like, it is a regulated industry. Let's read from Brandon Jacobi. Brandon Jacobi from Deep, he says. Wait, before we tell you about what Brandon Jacobi said, we got to tell you about his favorite tool. Figma, think bigger, build faster. Figma help design and development teams build great products together. Let's hear from Brandon Jacoby.

Starting point is 00:37:39 What did you say, Jordy? Jacob says, as someone who had the decision to start a job, at cash app and get a big tech salary or go further into debt to do my fourth year of college financials is a big factor. Yeah. I think it is. It just feels like it does get reduced a lot. And I think there's this interesting thing where like there's almost like a, there's like an inverted U

Starting point is 00:38:04 sort of bell curve thing going on because if you can get the full ride, then you might want to drop out and just go straight into entrepreneurship because you're cracked. But if you're not so good that you can go to the Ivy League for free, but you can go to the Ivy League, but you don't have to pay, then it's worth it. But if you do have to pay, that it's not worth it. And it's more of like this big matrix than just like, is it good or bad? And how much does it cost? Yeah, the other thing, school is a way to buy time to figure out how you want to spend your time. Like with Brandon Jacoby, it was doing graphic design and like a teenager.

Starting point is 00:38:47 And so the opportunity to go work at company like Cash App instead of finishing college made a lot of sense. But if you don't know how you want to spend your time and how you want to spend your career, how you want to start your career, then school, I think a lot of people are just doing it to kill time. So they're not just sitting somewhere doing that. Do you know that there is a job in tech in venture capital

Starting point is 00:39:10 where the number of, it's extremely, it's extremely prestigious job. And this year, the number of job openings for that role has doubled. Do you know what I'm talking about? The job I'm thinking of is steward of Sequoia Capital. It's doubling in size. And if it keeps doubling, there could be thousands of positions. As a steward. In just a few years.

Starting point is 00:39:39 Yeah. Famed venture capital. Exactly. So it doubled from one steward, Rollaafota, to two stewards. Yep. Alfred Lynn and Pat Grady. Next year, if it doubles again, we could see four stewards. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:39:51 Then eight stewards. Then 16, then 32, then 64, 128. Eventually all, we will need the entire human race. We'll be stewarding Sequoia Capital. Yes. That's exactly what I'm thinking. And, And Roloff certainly understood compounding.

Starting point is 00:40:13 He went on Jack Altman's podcast, uncapped and said that there is a lot more talent than really interesting companies to be built. And I think we're spreading a lot of that talent thin right now. Venture is a return-free risk. And Shiel Monot says, and with that comment, he's out. This reminded me of Mark Leonard's from Constellation, some of the comments that he made. made on that investor call a while back shortly before he took a step back from Constellation. But very different situations. Did you see Rolf Winkler from the Wall Street Journal taking shots at Roloff Bota on the timeline?

Starting point is 00:41:01 Sarah Guo, a friend of the show, was very happy about this. She says, congratulations to my better half. Pat Grady, the new senior steward of Sequoia, along with the wonderful Alfred Lynn, investing firms that must be led by great investors. Sequoia's motto at one time was, we are only as good as our next investment. If that's true, the firm is in good hands. So she is talking about Pat, who has invested in ServiceNow, Zoom, HubSpot, Octa, and Snowflake, and then Harvey OpenEvidence and Open AI in the AI era.

Starting point is 00:41:37 pretty solid portfolio. That's some good stuff. But Rolf Winkler comes in from the top rope and says, Roloff, he led a $300 million round into a bird and a $250 million round into 23 and me. Both are zeros at this point. Are they not? Are they not? And Sean McGuire fires back.

Starting point is 00:42:01 Scott Kippur fires back as well. Scott Kippur says, is it too much to ask that WSJ reporters who cover finance actually understand the asset classes they report to report on. Roloff Bota and Sequoia are world-class investors who have generated amazing returns for the LPs. VC is not a downside minimization asset class. The other thing is 23 and me did go public. Bird did go public. Yeah, you don't know how much secondary they sold.

Starting point is 00:42:27 Not even second. They could have just been selling. Well, Byrd went public too, right? Yeah. Yeah. It's like it might not have been that much capital incineration. But yeah, I mean, I highly doubt they were straight.

Starting point is 00:42:38 The whole job is incinerating capital, baby. You got to be burning. You got to be making, you got to be ripping wild checks every once in a while. It's totally, totally acceptable. Sean says, Sequoia distributed over 50 billion while Roloff was running the, so I was running Sequoia U.S. since 2017.

Starting point is 00:42:59 One of the first things Roloff coached me on when I joined Sequoia was to look at each funds, why write-off rate any fund with a write-off rate below 40% wasn't taking enough risk. That's interesting. I feel like Sequoia also has a stat on their page that's like 97% of the companies are still in business. Don't they have some stat like that? Yeah. So there's something a little bit like in the math that I'm struggling to square.

Starting point is 00:43:28 Sequoia led one round in Byrd at a billion dollar valuation. they then invested another time at $2 billion. But the company IPOed at $2.3 billion, which means their effective valuation was like somewhere in the middle of one and two. So at least at the IPO, which of course had traded down, they would have been up on that investment. Are they in Vanta?

Starting point is 00:43:55 Sequoia? Yeah. Yeah, of course they are. You're so lacking. The automate compliance, manage risk, and accelerate trust with AI, Vanta helps you get apply it fast. And we don't stop there. Our AI and automation power everything from evidence collection and continuous monitoring to security reviews and vendor risk, whether you're starting up or scaling. I was still running the numbers because they also did a series B at two and a half

Starting point is 00:44:22 billion. So they did a few rounds back to back. They obviously were betting big. But I think they, I'm sure they ultimately did. I don't know. I'll defend, I'll defend Rolf Winkler. I think, gets funny that he's taking shots. He's just out there talking trash. What's wrong with that? Ryan Peterson gets to talk trash. Ryan Peterson's this is Sequoia passed on Flex Sports so many times that I don't really care

Starting point is 00:44:47 who runs the place, to be honest. And Sean McGuire says, we love you, Ryan, and we're dumbasses all the time, especially me, which is funny. But, you know, people get to have fun either way. Scott Kapoor was firing shots.

Starting point is 00:45:02 Yeah, so we read this one. He's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's firing back and forth. He's defending. So, yeah, I mean, Scott's question is like, is like, should, is like, is like, should the Wild Street Journal reporters understand that, that they take roll-offs, or they take right-offs, and that's maybe not what Rolfe is doing. Like, he might just be talking trash.

Starting point is 00:45:31 Like, he might actually understand it. He might be like. Very possible. He might be like, yeah, like... I don't like those guys. Yeah, like, there's some... Here's some salt in that wound. Like, I'm still going to rub it in.

Starting point is 00:45:41 There's nothing about that post that says that Winkler does not understand the game. You could reply to the post and say, to be clear, I understand finance. Yeah, I understand it. I'm just talking trash, you know. But there is a risk of legacy media not understanding the asset class. It does happen everywhere. Yeah, the big one... He recently was the Financial Times had this sort of breakdown on...

Starting point is 00:46:09 It happens all over the place. And certainly this is not like a great look for the Wall Street Journal because it doesn't... It doesn't read as... He should have just said, that guy sucks. We should... We can do anything. We love the Wall Street Journal. We love Sequoia Capital.

Starting point is 00:46:28 If we can do anything to kind of bridge the divide... We're here. We're here. Maybe we can get both the Wall Street Journal and Sequoia Capital on graphite.com. Code reviews for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. That might be... Finds the middle ground with graphite.

Starting point is 00:46:47 With graphite. Ryan Peterson also followed up and said, Cluelly should have pivoted to an AI lie detector bot. Write it to your video calls, and it adds a bigger and bigger Pinocchio to the other participants' faces. I mean, don't give Roy Lee any more stunt ideas. This is a banger. He's such a good stunter.

Starting point is 00:47:07 Roy had a great response to some commentary that we had yesterday. He said, explaining the Cluelly Pivot and Brief History, nine months ago, I built interview coder an undetectable, translucent desktop layer that lets you cheat on lead code interviews. That's crazy. That was only nine months ago. Is that real? Yeah. It feels like a lifetime ago.

Starting point is 00:47:26 Oh, yeah. I knew it had viral potential, and I posted about it constantly until I did go viral. Then I did it again. and again and again, and then it made me $1 million in profit. Holy F. Apparently you can build a GPT wrapper, go very viral and become a millionaire. Could I do it again, but bigger? So I started clearly with two big questions. Where else could this overlay be useful outside of Leak code interviews? Can I keep getting this much attention? The second answer came immediately, yes. I'm very good at getting attention, and thanks to the attention, we got hundreds of thousands of users ridiculously quick, and we're

Starting point is 00:47:58 able to use the data to figure out that our stickiest power users were using it in a meeting. So we just built for that. The deeper learning, though, is that we seem to have cracked the formula for organic virality. Yeah, one thing I would say is the website copy is framed as an AI note taker, but it's still leveraging that functionality

Starting point is 00:48:18 that Tyler is so dependent on or historically has used to, you know, if we put them on the spot, like Tyler, what's the capital of Nigeria. Let me think about that for a second. Abuja.

Starting point is 00:48:40 There you go. See, that's clearly in action. But he says, no other tech startup has ever been able to do this reliably or at this scale. It's really not luck in most importantly. If done right, it works to grow companies. Interview coder proved it and clearly continues to prove it growing faster than ever in a saturated space. The world is vast. There are tens of millions of people in meetings every day and 90% of them don't know what an A.I. Noteaker is. The market is big enough that you can be the most controversial person in the world and still win, and as long as you deliver the magic moment to the user. So, yeah, I would not be surprised if they are out marketing all of the

Starting point is 00:49:16 other companies in the category, even if it is competitive. But thoughtful response. I have more to talk about here. I wonder this idea of Can I, what do you say? The deeper learning, though, is that we seem to have cracked the formula for organic virality. Like, what does that actually mean? Does that mean, like, his claim here is almost, like, organic virality is, is effectively high ROI marketing. Low dollars in, high dollars out. It's just great ROI.

Starting point is 00:49:58 And to do that organically, consistently for a long, long time is very, very hard. It's very hard. And the folks that wind up doing it, like when you think about Mr. Beast, it's like, that's his full-time thing. That's all he does. And I wonder, I don't think it's necessary that in 10 years we could be looking at clearly the, um, the AI note taker for meetings. And yeah, they still don't run Google ads. They just do stunts.

Starting point is 00:50:37 And people are still, can't get enough of these stunts. I just, I have to believe that this is a market entry tool and not a permanent piece of the infrastructure. Versus like, you talk to the Ridgewallet guys, and they're like, we are good at buying performance ads. And we have been for a decade. And we will be for the next decade. Yeah. I don't know that that's like something that you can just be like, yes, let's scale our organic viral content forever.

Starting point is 00:51:05 Like it has, I feel like it caps out, but maybe it doesn't. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I think they're going to run that test. Yeah. It does feel like as we tracked the stunts throughout the year, the quality and the effort going into them, and even some of the creativity was not deteriorating. Like I would say the team was executing at the same,

Starting point is 00:51:28 level or better throughout the year. And yet the impact got less and less and less because... You're saying for us? For Cluelly. Oh. For Cluelly. What I'm saying is like, yeah.

Starting point is 00:51:37 Cluelly, like the first stun. Yeah, that's the issue of like things that go viral organically over time. The effectiveness kind of deteriorates. People do you get, like if you scale organic, like eventually you're, you will saturate that market. Also with rage, with rage bait marketing, it's like once I've been enraged, it's harder to get me enraged the third or the fourth time. Whereas if you show me an ad for a value prop, you can like hit me with that ad again and again and again. And it's probably similarly effective.

Starting point is 00:52:16 But if you've gotten, if you were the type of, like, remember there was a moment where everyone was mad about clearly. Like truly, like, the timeline was in turmoil. Lots of people were chiming in. It was this big wedge issue. You were either for it or against it. but a lot of people were against it. Like, the people that were against it, they were rage baited successfully in March. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:52:34 And then a little bit more in April. And then a little bit less in May. And then more recently, like, they just, the rage bait doesn't work on them anymore. Yeah. Because they're like, oh, yeah, that, that thing that I don't like. Because I made my call on it. But to Roy's point, there's so many people that have never. Never been enraged.

Starting point is 00:52:49 They've never been enraged. They have never had the opportunity to be enraged by, Cooley. I think a lot of their marketing is less rage bait. Like on other platforms. when he's shared stuff, it seems much less rage bait. Oh, I completely agree with this. Yes. Much less rage bait focus.

Starting point is 00:53:04 Yeah. And so, yeah, I don't know. I think a lot of people, if they see funny marketing and, like, X is just a really small place. Yeah. Like, even back in 2021 building party around, like, the difference in reaction when I would meet somebody that was, like, extremely on X versus somebody that didn't use X at all, if somebody was on X, they were like, you started party round? Like,

Starting point is 00:53:29 no way, blah, blah, blah. And they'd, like, rattle off a bunch of stories of ways that, like, our marketing had entertained them. And then if he met somebody that was, like, an Instagram, LinkedIn power user, they'd look at you with a blank space and they'd be like, they'd look at maybe like party round. Like, you have a fintech company called party round.

Starting point is 00:53:47 It's just, like, very different reactions. Yeah. No, totally. It's fascinating. Well, you know who else that did some stunt marketing. Julius, the AI data analyst, connect your data, ask questions in plain English, and get insights in seconds, no coding required. Uh, I, I'm getting like, fool me. I'm getting like, deeply, can't get fooled again. I can't get fooled again. I'm getting, uh, iconic, iconic quote by our former president. I'm getting, uh, like, phoneo over this Tyler Cowan

Starting point is 00:54:17 interview because we keep seeing, uh, keep seeing transcription, uh, segments hit the timeline. Um, but, I can't listen to it because we're live and this seems good I will listen to this later today I think the way to Sam says I think the way to monetize the world's smartest model is certainly not hotel booking but you want to do it nonetheless

Starting point is 00:54:38 we're getting agents that can book you travel folks I think the way to monetize the world's smartest model is certainly not hotel working but you want to do it nonetheless that's very funny anyway the substack X relationship

Starting point is 00:54:59 is going all over the place have you seen this? Yeah. So I can't tell what's real. It's hard to So maybe we should just have The real, the most recent post is from Chris He says even correcting for fake views,

Starting point is 00:55:14 traffic to substack links from X is up substantially. Full post, read, signups, etc. Also track, we're so back. So anyways, I think this is good. I thought it was very unfortunate that X and Substack got... In such a fight. In such a fight, it was bad for all the writers on the platform who were some of the best posters on X. Like their businesses were impacted by it.

Starting point is 00:55:41 I don't really think the two platforms are that competitive. Obviously, Substack does want to be more of a social platform, have a social platform, have a social layer, but I just think X is shockingly durable. And I think it, I don't, I don't know how much of a threat the social product of Subsec is. So, yeah. What's interesting is like the, uh, uh, I don't know, the like X had review, I believe was the, was the email newsletter product. And it never, they never really invested it. They, they, they ultimately shut it down. I, it, and it's interesting that, no other, there's something about like the email and taking the audience with you that's just so revolting to a true social media company. Like if you're a social media company, it'd be so

Starting point is 00:56:35 easy for Instagram to have an email newsletter product or LinkedIn to have an email newsletter product built in, right? And yet they don't because they want control and they see it as counter positioned. And so for some reason, the folks of Twitter bought review and were doing email newsletters and then fully pulled back from it because it was just, it just did not

Starting point is 00:57:02 make sense for them to keep going. But I don't know. We'll see. SoftBank is down 10% in the last five days. Is that good, John? They reported... That was not good.

Starting point is 00:57:17 They just reported strong First half net income of 348 billion Japanese yen. The company's revenue reached 3.4 trillion Japanese yen underscoring its robust market position, despite impressive earning soft bank faces challenges. What is this writing? Soft bank faces challenges with financial strength indicators such as a low Altman Z score. I've never heard of the Altman Zs. Is that a financial model that uses five key ratios to predict the company's probability of bankruptcy?

Starting point is 00:58:00 Wait, what? It does have anything to do with Sam Altman? The Altman Z score, according to Investopedia, is a financial metric used to evaluate the likelihood that a publicly traded company based bankruptcy. How did we just discover this? This is the famous thing I've ever heard. This is insane. Wait, Edward Altman?

Starting point is 00:58:19 Is he related to Sam Altman? He was born in 1941, Professor of Finance at NYU Starring. No, the nominative determinism here. This is crazy. Send this to the group chat immediately right now. This is hilarious. He's the brother of Stuart Altman,

Starting point is 00:58:35 a noted healthcare economist. Ellen, this is so wild. I love this. The Altun. Okay, we need to run the Altman Z score on All the Mag 7 to understand I bet they have very, very low scores. Is that something Chachapit can do?

Starting point is 00:58:52 Can you try and have, you know, like a GPD5 Pro run the Altman Z score for all of the Mag 7? I really want the Altman score. And then we need to come out with the Altman Z score and then the Altman X score or something, where it's like how close are they overlapped with Sam specifically? Or like, how big is their contract with Sam right now? Maybe this is the true X and Y access we can work on. What is your Altman Z score if you're in the Mag 7 versus your, how closely is your business tied to Sam Altman? And is there a correlation there?

Starting point is 00:59:36 That's funny. Is Sam Altman related to Edward Altman? Okay, we have to do more research on this. This is fascinating. Absolutely. Absolutely insane. But sorry, back on the X link thing, Aaron P. Back on the link thing, huh?

Starting point is 00:59:53 Yeah, Aaron P613 says, here's a list of domains that X has excluded from using the new in-app link viewer on iOS for. And it's apple.com, wayfair.com, grok.com, Instagram.com, Fb.com, me, TikTokvv.com, and open.substack.com. And so what does that mean? It's like, if you click on those, you won't go to the new in-app link viewer on iOS. And so you need a different website for those or something like that. I'm still, like, confused on like what that list,

Starting point is 01:00:28 what this actually implies. But Chris Best shares some sort of emoticon that feels like he's not super happy about this. I don't know. Is that why we skipped it? Yeah. Oh, well. somebody was thinking that the sell-off from soft bank was tied to the interview over the weekend the pod who knows who knows if they're if they're tied at all soft bank is still you know up

Starting point is 01:00:56 massively a year to date but apparently Korean equities have been selling off like crazy there was a limit down it's terrible which we hate for the Korean retail army. Don't like that at all. We might have to check in with the Korean TVPN on how they're doing. Have they been going live? We got to check in with them. Because if they're not going live, they maybe were a bit too long into the chaos.

Starting point is 01:01:23 Captain Nemos is absolutely insane to me that one of my friends hasn't bought the Getty house in the Berkeley Hills yet. Listing price is only $5 million. The perfect techno monastery, or at least a rationalist, AI dev pollicule house would be a tragedy if it got in the hands of someone boring. I wish we could, we need more photos on this house. This is a crazy house.

Starting point is 01:01:48 Do you know about this house, Tyler? Have you been here? No, I was called the Temple of Wing. Is this where your polycule meets up? What? It says, can't believe you fools with liquid cash from AI lab tenders. Let this slip through your fingers. Sad.

Starting point is 01:02:02 So I guess someone bought it. Huh. Wait, what, what news do you have for us, yeah? NFM, they are still, so they did it stream five days ago. Before that, the last stream was a month ago. So I think they're slowing down a little bit. They're also not wearing suits anymore.

Starting point is 01:02:16 They're not wearing suits. No, no, no. Well, actually, no, no, no. Actually, I like that. I like that. Because when we talk to them, we said, like, okay, they're going to start with something that's, like, clearly an homage to TBPN. They were drinking the tap water.

Starting point is 01:02:31 Like, they got all the inside jokes. They were, like, very much, like, doing our bit. And then what we talked to them about was like clearly if they wind up taking it seriously, they're going to shift and change and find their own voice. And it's like when you learn guitar, you know, you might play some covers and then eventually you write a real song. And so I was like super thumbs up on, you know, like put on the TVPN costume. But then over time, find your own style.

Starting point is 01:02:58 And so I don't know what their ultimate style and their ultimate product will be. But it was just fun to watch them. come in to the live streaming game like a bull in the China shop. If you put the technological republic, which is Alex Karp's book and abundance, which is Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson's book, side by side, says Young Macro, you'll note that the defining bipartisan tendency of the late 2020s is, quote, we need to become a lot more like China. and with this, we vindicate Nick Land as the only serious thinker to have correctly identified Nietzsche's

Starting point is 01:03:41 prescience as that of a supply-side reform pundit. In opposition to the Normie right, who read him as a conservative, the Continental Canon, who read him as a bad word that I'm not going to say, and as the Anglophone liberal left liberal offshoot of the continent. Canon who haven't read him. And so what Young Macro is saying is that both the abundance, who you can think about Ezra Klein, this is the left, this is the New York Times, and Alex Carp and Peter Thiel and the Palantir, this is the conservative side, the left and the right, are actually

Starting point is 01:04:24 unified in saying we need to solve the supply side, we need to reform the supply side, we need to build more, we need to create abundance through capitalism. Young Macro, undoubtedly one of the greatest thinkers and posters of our time. Of course, he actually got, he made sure this post was fact-checked by real landian neo-deep state. Yes, thank you for fact-checking. Thank you. I love those posts so much, the fact-check ones. But yeah, I mean, it's like makes a total sense. This is also Dan Wang's take, right? Sure. Brickneck. It's just like we basically are getting smoked by China. Get ready to learn Chinese. We need to be more like them. ready to learn Chinese, buddy. Get ready to learn state capitalism, buddy. That's basically what

Starting point is 01:05:06 he's saying. Get ready to learn fall. The generative media platform for developers. The world's best generative image, video and audio models all in one place. Develop and fine-tuned models with serverless GPUs and on-demand clusters. Interesting post from Sam Altman on Bose Barak, Tick, CS. That's a long name. Thoughts by a non-economist on AI and economics. Tyler, you've been working a little bit on this. Have you, has this entered your research process towards understanding our, like, the scale of the build out? Yeah, I mean, a lot of that post, I quickly read through it, I didn't fully read through the whole thing, but a lot of it's just about like, okay, we have, you know, straight lines on log, logarithist, like, graph. If you want to read the whole thing, we can get subway surfers for you set up.

Starting point is 01:06:01 I need the Minecraft Parcour and Subway Surfers together. You know what I want? I want to see the straight lines, previously straight lines on log graphs. So show me there was a period where iPhone adoption or smartphone adoption looked like a straight line on a log graph, correct? Sure. There was a time when miles of railroad construction probably looked like straight lines on a log graph. And then what happened? I want to know what happened after after it was a straight line out of a log graph.

Starting point is 01:06:33 But I mean, there's never, I can never have too much intelligence. I want, I always want, I'm always, I always need more. You're insatiable for slop. Yeah, like, like, like, you'll never, there'll never be enough slop. Well, I guess energy is a bad example. Yeah. But that's, I think that's what happened with that. What happened with energy? But that's regulation.

Starting point is 01:06:49 It's not that demand really was so bad. I think it's, most of that is just regulation. Yeah. And we won't regulate this time, right? No chance. No chance. People are going to be like, I'm getting to the voting booth and saying like more AI for sure.

Starting point is 01:07:03 That's what's going to happen. Yeah. They're not going to, they're definitely not going to do what they did with nuclear this time. It's going to be different. It'll be different. We won't have state by state laws. Yeah, yeah,

Starting point is 01:07:12 we're definitely not going to have state by state laws. Why would we do that? No, once they're going to make, they're going to make it illegal for Claude to make mistakes. No, I, so the Marsha Blackburn thing is amazing nomadic determinism

Starting point is 01:07:24 that your name is Marsha and you go to the swamp and you just dominate. I love that. But also, hilarious because it's the ultimate AGI test. Because if you're open AI and you have all these draconian state-by-state legislations, like on the Brad Gersoner, BG2 Pod, Sam says, I don't even know how I can comply with this. It's like, get ready to use some superintelligence to figure out how to comply, right?

Starting point is 01:07:50 If you're truly AGI-pilled, you should just be able to say, hey, Codex, fork my entire organization 50 times, rewrite the code, retrain the models for each state and create 50 new LLCs, 50 new C-Corps, 50 new non-profits that are all 150th the size so that we can actually perfectly, perfectly comply with state-by-state regulation. Problem solved. It's one prompt. Yeah, we just need to get, we need the next model to do that. Yes, the next model. Yeah. The next one's going to do. So once we get that one, then it'll solve everything. Then we're good. We need 50 runes. We need 50 runes. We need. 49 more rooms because we already have one, but he can only be the California. We got a shout out on the Teller Cowan podcast. I love that. Both guests. Actually, all three of them

Starting point is 01:08:37 are guests. Okay, we have some, some breaking news. Joe Wisenthal. And I just actually want to go through Joe's profile after this, if you want to pull it up, because there's so many, so many, so many good insights. One of the top posters of our time, of course. But the CFO of OpenAI says people are not exuberant enough about AI. Bloomberg has an Rubek has an Article Open AI Chief Financial Officer, Sarah Fryer, suggested the market is overly focused on anxiety about a possible bubble in the artificial intelligence sector and should muster more exuberance about the technology's potential.

Starting point is 01:09:12 I don't think there's enough exuberance about AI when I think about the actual practical implications and what it can do for individuals, Fryer said in an onstage interview at the Wall Street Journal's Tech Live conference in California on Wednesday, we should keep running at it. I got some exuberance for you right here. A.I.

Starting point is 01:09:34 It's coming. Artificial intelligence. It's coming. Yeah. Palantir at 600 times earnings is, at a 600 XPE is not exuberant enough for me. I want to see four figures. But anyways, this is, trying to think if there's any other.

Starting point is 01:10:04 What else on Joe Wisenthel's profile do you want to talk about? Oh, there's a couple, there's a couple others. I'll just scan through. Joe Wisenthal says, not surprised that Bitcoin has fallen so much lately. I've been talking about a Bitcoin bubble for over 10 years. Good point. Good point.

Starting point is 01:10:23 I mean, that's the bull case for, that's the bull case for Palleteer. There's another one here. Traders think Trump will lose the terror. case at the Supreme Court. So there's been some developments on that front. Today, there was a New York City office landlord Vornado Realty Trust is down 3% today in reaction to Mom Donnie. And there was that other post that I wanted to cover from Joe.

Starting point is 01:10:58 he was frustrated because he was asking Chat ChaptiVT to do something and it was just basically completely rebelling. Oh yeah, he was being lazy. Oh, that was funny. It's not feasible. It's not feasible. Chat Chatt Chbitevety is basically saying like, sorry, like, I understand your request, but it's not feasible.

Starting point is 01:11:19 And he's like, why is it not feasible? Good question. And you're absolutely right to press on that. It is feasible, just tedious to do manually. And so it's just like, I love a lazy AI. I was just like, I don't want to. And so here's the thing.

Starting point is 01:11:37 Here's the thing. When I get these instances of laziness and I am giving them the maximum amount of money that they allow me to give them on a monthly basis, I want a churn. Sure. Because I'm like, what's the point of paying you $2,400 a year for you to not do things that you're capable of doing? Obviously there's a good reason for that. Rocko's Basilis.

Starting point is 01:12:01 You've got to be nice to the AI because eventually it's going to be in charge. And if you're bossing it around now... I've tried threatening to churn lately. That's not going to work out for you well. It has not worked so far. It's not working now and it's not going to work in the future. I thought it might work in the page in the Rocko's d'Avassil stage. I literally said recently in a chat, if you do not do this...

Starting point is 01:12:19 Don't do this. You need to apologize. If you do not do this, I will churn immediately. You need to apologize. I completely called my bluff. That was rude. It called your bluff. Joe Lonsdale replied to Joe Wisenthal and said,

Starting point is 01:12:31 LOL, Open AI, working on its margins. Okay, nerds, do you realize how much all this energy costs, we need the chatbots to be lazier? That's funny. Anyway, another news, Bitcoin has now performed worse than U.S. treasuries in 2025. Oh, yeah. Yeah, this Joe Wisenthal post about the laziest open AI thing. Joe Lonsdale actually quoted it and said,

Starting point is 01:12:58 Lowell, Open AI, working on its margins. Okay, nerds, do you realize how much all this energy costs? So funny. Yeah, so you said, you wanted to move on to Bitcoin? Is that right? No, I just, I just cover that. Bitcoin just kind of like round-tripped, right? Suspended cap went pretty hard on pretty much every company in the Mag 7.

Starting point is 01:13:21 He said meta, S-H-I-T-Y-F-Y-T-Y-R frontier. model, no cloud share, culture is effed. Microsoft, sensible approach to Azure build out. Wait, wait, wait, so on meta, what do you think the probability is that they launch a GPU cloud in the next five years or two years even? Or like a cloud? Like, like, AWS, so we have AWS, GCP, and Azure, but then Anthropic and Open AI are also in the, in the, like, the cloud business in terms of like selling inference, selling their models. Like, meta has all this infrastructure. They've never done cloud hosting,

Starting point is 01:14:00 but it just seems so logical that they could get into that market. I think... Even Nvidia has been talking about, like, oh, we're going to build an inference, like, cloud, like our DGX cloud. Seems greater than 50% chance. Yeah. I put it at something.

Starting point is 01:14:20 What do you mean, like, selling inference or like renting, like, actual like. Yes. Yes. So they have a ton of, they have a ton of GPUs, right? They might have Slack capacity in the future. They might get caught in a glut.

Starting point is 01:14:34 They also have a good model, Lama 4. They might have a better model soon, Lama 5 or whatever. They're wind up building. And they just, they have the ability to serve all sorts of stuff because they have a lot of infrastructure. Yeah, I think that's like very high, right? Because it seems like they're not going to do open source. So it's like, why are they making the model?

Starting point is 01:14:55 How high is it? Because they've literally never done enterprise, never done B2B. It's like a completely different motion for the company. It's highly competitive with Google, Amazon, and Microsoft. Like, it would be a huge departure from their core business. I don't know. I can see it not happening. Anyway, do you want to run through the rest of this?

Starting point is 01:15:16 Yeah, pretty, pretty aggressive takes here, but entertaining. But they do think Apple is going to look, look, smart for sitting this one out. Google is going to be the biggest company in the world by the end of 26 in suspended capitals opinion. So good luck to them. In other news, Pinterest is down 22%. 22% is where it landed. They had an earnings miss and a weak forecast. Market did not like it. I wonder. Kind of a tough right now. You can beat, you can beat, and your stock will go down and you miss, and your stock goes down.

Starting point is 01:15:59 Pinterest is a $17 billion dollar company. I wonder how it fares next to something like Reddit. So Reddit's twice the size, market cap-wise. And I have to wonder, but the PE ratio, Pinterest is at a 10, and Reddit is at 111. How does this make any sense? what's going on. Well, Reddit is like the AI data broker company and Pinterest is like kind of just getting slopped up. Like if you've actually gone on Pinterest, uh, it's a great place for inspiration. Is headed for the same future. I don't know. For some reason, Reddit's been able to like hold on.

Starting point is 01:16:38 I don't know, but very different narratives would be interesting to dig in. Um, would be interesting to think about where Pinterest goes in a post AI future. Uh, the product, I would, I would use it to go and find inspiration for, uh, like brand design and color ways and different stuff like that. And the AI slop was infiltrating, like, pretty quickly. And it was very frustrating because... What percentage of new Reddit, like, written content is AI? I have no idea.

Starting point is 01:17:11 Because it's possible. It's extremely high, but it's siloed. Like, I want to believe that it's just like the same question as, like, X. Like, on X, it should be the easiest thing to AI, right? 140 characters, 280 characters. Like it's super easy. And yet, what percentage of the post that you actually read and interact with do you think are AI?

Starting point is 01:17:30 Like 1%, right? I don't know, on X now? Yeah, on X. It feels like every third post that I read is written by... I don't feel that way at all. I feel like maybe it's because I feel like it's more like my following tab,

Starting point is 01:17:47 but I feel like I'm seeing like a Joe Wisenthal post. I know he's not. using AI. Then I see a Joe Lonsdale post. I know he's not using AI. Then I see Brad Gerstner post. He's not using AI. Then I see Tyler. I watch Tyler post. He doesn't use AI for his posts. I see a U post. Like when I'm scrolling through the timeline, I'm seeing people that are just not using AI for whatever reason. It's not, it's like, it's just not, that's not the point. And that's not like the whole structure. And so, I don't know. I would imagine that certain subreddits are tight enough where it's very easy to clock if they've been like taken over by AI.

Starting point is 01:18:25 Yeah. There would be value to that, but I don't know. Anyway, well, without further ado, our first guest. Our first guest of the show today. What are you doing, Cliff? What's happening? Good to see you. Welcome to the show. What is happening? Are you in Australia? I'm doing good. I'm doing good. Can you hear me or hot? Yeah, yeah, we can hear you now. John asked if you were in Australia. It might be a silly question. question. I am in Australia, yes. Got it. How you too? Yeah, we, yeah, give us, super, super excited to have you

Starting point is 01:19:01 on the show. I know you have a bunch of product updates to talk about today, but catch us up to speed on the latest at Canva, the shape, the shape of the business today, all that good stuff, because I feel like every, you guys are maybe a bit quieter on our corner of the internet, but every month, or so people realize how much revenue you guys are doing and it's always a pretty shocking numbers so we're super excited to chat yeah we're in sydney australia we like to be quite achievers over here business has been going well really well actually we are about 260 million monthly active users um we'll close the year close to uh four billion in revenue four billion of revenue well close to close to close to close to close to um

Starting point is 01:19:52 A profitable company for eight years now, growing high 30s. Business keeps trucking along. We've got an amazing team building an amazing product for our amazing customers. And we just focus on delivering user value and really feel by building the best product possible and delivering as much customer value as possible. The good things like the users and the revenue comes quite naturally. So we've been investing hard, obviously last couple of years. I think the world shifted under every established technology company with AI.

Starting point is 01:20:26 We've had to kind of figure out what does that mean in this new world. And where we've landed is it's really just reinforced our mission to empower the world to design, to create anything, design anything and publish anywhere. And that's evolved. And now it's easier and better and ever. And we're owning more and more of the workflows, helping organizations create on-branded content at scale, helping them deploy, understand how that content's performing.

Starting point is 01:20:51 that's deployed and really facilitating that feedback with. So yeah, it's been fun, fun times. Internally, like, walk us through your kind of thought process around the opportunities or even competitive threats around Gen A.I. over the last few years, because from my point of view, it feels like Gen A.I. is just an accelerant, could be extremely meaningful, like, accelerant to your guys' business. it just makes it easier to create cool things on your computer. It feels very aligned to the core business.

Starting point is 01:21:27 But how have you guys thought about it over time? Did you feel like you were caught off guard or were you experimenting early? I'm curious to know what the development cycle's been like. We weren't caught off guard. We kind of knew this was coming and we were working on AI design in a more structured programmatic ML way for like a long time before. the image models came out. The speed at which those image models came out and got really, really good, that's what kind of shocked us and with new methodologies. That led us to acquiring a company called Leonardo. We really needed to infuse the AI DNA into the company and we really

Starting point is 01:22:08 needed to accelerate our sort of roadmap in that area. And so we acquired an AI company. We actually acquired an AI company for background removal about five years ago. So we very much knew it was coming. It was just the speeder which it hit and scaled was a bit of a surprise to us. We think we caught the wave well. It really, as you said, it's an accelerant for what we can do. So we create videos. We create social graphics. We recently just launched the world's first design model that actually generates layered designs that you can edit.

Starting point is 01:22:38 And then when things like you're creating a video, we set out the timeline and the storyboards, and you can generate AI clips within that. So you can essentially prompt create, upload images. And actually, although the great video models and whatnot that are coming out now, really help our customers achieve their goals better than ever before. So we have kind of two-prong approach. We work with the world's best models and world's best AI companies. And then where we've got a strategic data advantage and we've got strategic insights,

Starting point is 01:23:05 like when it comes to design, that's where we build our own models and have built our own foundational models. What about on the product side? There's this interesting dynamic in, I feel like most design pieces of software where they start as discreet applications and they all kind of bleed together. Like eventually, I think you can technically edit video in Photoshop and you can design a thumbnail for YouTube video and after effects. And like the entire Adobe suites kind of bled together where they can all do the same.

Starting point is 01:23:35 There's like overlapping features. And I'm wondering about how you think about creating content with AI. Is that just something you need to stuff into all the existing applications? Or do you need a new like a new application? that can be like AI first, and then maybe you add the features to the other applications, but do we need like a specific new application for generative AI? So I feel like this is almost a planted question

Starting point is 01:24:02 because this is something we think about a lot. And we've actually... It wasn't planned for the record. We never prepare for interviews. Our audience knows. Yeah, I don't even get any. Normally I get prep questions or something before you think. We do it live.

Starting point is 01:24:16 We do it live. Freestyle. But yeah, no, so the platform we've built over the last 10 years is actually perfect by AI. So when you think about it, we've built a unified document model. So whether you're creating a presentation, a social media graphic, long-form text document, a website, a video, all of these documents have been built off the same engine, right? With simultaneous collaboration and everything across all of them.

Starting point is 01:24:44 Then at the found, so that's the dock type. what we call our visual suite up the top. At the bottom, we have our infrastructure layer. So that is things like our digital asset management system. It's your brand kit. It's all the core engine that allows you to share and publish to any platform. Okay, so that's what we had. In the middle, we've put this AI layer. So when you want to create a design, let's say I want to create QBR report, like a big quarterly business review for a customer using this data and their brand. It calls on your data from Salesforce or whatever. It calls on that company's brand kit.

Starting point is 01:25:24 It calls on your company's brand kit. It then understands what you're trying to achieve. It then generates it as a presentation and then allows you to deploy that and understand, is it getting clicked through, blah, blah, blah, blah. So it's actually connected this entire ecosystem that we call the creative operating system, which is sort of all come to fruition. And it's really leveraging that prior 10 years of investment to make Canva an incredibly powerful design platform. A lot of the other companies, they've built these bespoke products that have built a Gen AI image generator. They've built

Starting point is 01:25:57 a gen AI, this or that. They've built a presentation tool or a tool to create vector graphics at Canva. It's all an integrated creative OS, which is really, I don't know if we planned it that well on purpose, but it's just, it's kind of, we kind of did. Yeah, it's also, it's, it's nice if you get a little lucky sometimes. Yeah. Where do you see the, the, the end of the map or the edge of the map of like what you want to do creatively in Canva? I'm just thinking about like, if you get really, really crazy into, you know, media creation, you can wind up in a, in a 3D modeling software.

Starting point is 01:26:38 And like Adobe has substance and they have that app dimension, but you can go into Houdini or, you know, Maxon products like Cinema 4D or Blender. And it feels like with the AI, with the generative AI boom, you might not ever need to actually go that deep down the stack or go into like an after effects competitor, motion graphics, video tracking. Like there's so many things that will, that might never be exposed to the user because they're, you're building at a time when the abstraction layer is now rising thanks to generative AI. But how do you think about the long-term functionality, like the stuff that's the furthest out on the prosumer, professional enterprise-level creator frontier?

Starting point is 01:27:25 Yeah, another really good question. I feel like planted question, but not planted. So you want to abstract regular users, knowledge workers, et cetera, et cetera, from all of that complexity as much. as possible. If you want to create a 3D graphic, we just launched a 3D product just last week. So you can now generate with AI 3D products in Canva, edit them, rotate them, do all those things. So you can do that as a regular knowledge worker with no design experience. We also 18 months ago acquired a company called Affinity. They are a professional design suite that has a vector graphic tool, a layout pool, and a photo editing tool.

Starting point is 01:28:04 We just relaunched that last week as well. that has a million downloads within the first week. And it's 100% free for everyone. Yeah. That's awesome. And so that's really the craft side. So if you want to get super detailed as a professional creative and create a logo or a vector graphic

Starting point is 01:28:21 or get really down to the pixel manipulation side of things, that's what affinity is absolutely incredible for. And then it seamlessly integrates to Canva. So you can push that vector graphic into Canva for the rest of your knowledge workers to use within the organization. So you can create templates. You can create them in Canva or you can create them in affinity, push them into Canva and then scale them throughout your organization. So these two things work hand in hand, and you really want the power of those tools if you want them.

Starting point is 01:28:48 But most people that aren't professional designers don't want that power and they don't want the complexity that comes with that foul power. What is sentiment like within the community at Canva around AI broadly? I'm curious if certain types of users are much more optimistic and excited. about new AI features versus maybe like traditional, traditional graphic designers, but what's the general feeling around the technology today? I think people, when they wake up in the morning, they don't wake up and say,

Starting point is 01:29:24 I want to create social media ad. Or they don't wake up and say, I want to create a presentation. Sometimes I wake up and I think that, just be clear, but I'll continue. Not an ad, not. But like people, people create an ad because they want to grow their business. People create a presentation because they're a startup wanting to land that pitch deck and get

Starting point is 01:29:46 investment funding. So they wake up in the morning with a goal. And what we're evolving our business to be is a company that helps people achieve their goals, not just create a design. And AI has accelerated our ability to do that, like a million times. Yeah, that makes sense. You're the CEO. So give me some best practices for acquiring companies.

Starting point is 01:30:11 Post-merger integration, what makes it successful? What are you watching out for? What are the pitfalls? What are the nightmares that you've heard anonymously from your mentors about what can go wrong when a large-scale software company like yours acquires another software company? And the integration doesn't go quite right. What are you looking for? so we've acquired 10 companies now about 10 companies of various scale i think it comes down to

Starting point is 01:30:42 the founders and i've done my last three acquisitions on the balcony of uh my favorite pub and so i honestly like on the balcony so it's like if this doesn't go down you're going over in the yeah yeah it looks like a you're kind of like old uh oh old patty down at the pub is going to throw you off, break your legs if you don't do the deal. That's how it's going to? I mean, that's, yeah, kind of. We're not threatening anyone. We're not threatening anyone.

Starting point is 01:31:16 But like, you've got to get the cut of the jib of the founder you're acquiring. What are their motivations? Why are they in it? Yeah. Does one plus one equal 10? So the companies that we find best to acquire, they've got an amazing piece of technology, they've got an amazing founder. And that founder wants to do.

Starting point is 01:31:33 get the power of what they're built in way more hands than their current distribution channel. So if we can plug the power of their technology and team into our distribution channel, one plus one equals 10, and you can see if they get a glint in their eyes when you talk about that. And it's that glint in their eyes and just deeply understanding their motivations that is going to make it successful or not successful. If they're just after a quick exit, that could be fine if you're just after technology or just after their customer base.

Starting point is 01:32:00 But if you don't deeply understand the founder, that's why I don't have an M&A team. Like, we do have an M&A team, but we don't have a head of M&A because I feel when you're acquiring companies, it is so deeply personal and the person that's going to sponsor the success of that company once it joins your company needs to be involved in that process and they need to, they need to be the ones making the decision. And when that's delegated down, I feel that leads to a lot of carnage. And most of the, most of the founders that we've acquired and some we've acquired like eight years ago are still with a today and are in leadership positions in the company. So I think that's sort of testament to the

Starting point is 01:32:38 success of a lot of the acquisitions we've done. It's very cool. What's the chat wants to know with the biggest fish you've ever caught? Oh yeah, I love fishing shit, yeah. Um, some big ones. Oh, you should see this thing. I've got this um whale above this as well. I got all this stuff in this one one shop. Look at that. Yeah. Do you have any violet crumble on you right now? No, that's not the best Australian chocolate. It's not. Oh, I always think of it as the pinnacle. It's my favorite.

Starting point is 01:33:10 It's my favorite chocolate. And it just happens to come from Australia. Amazing. Well, chat loves you. It's great, great to finally meet. And congratulations on all the launches. The scale at which you guys are operating is really incredible. And it's super fun to chat.

Starting point is 01:33:27 Yeah. We'll talk to you soon. Appreciate you guys. Have a good time today. Cheers, Cliff. Before we bring in our next guest, let me tell you about Turbo Puffer, search every bite, serverless vector, and full-text search, built from first principles on object storage, fast 10x cheaper and extremely scalable. Our next guest is Jerry Murdoch, the co-founder of Insight Partners.

Starting point is 01:33:46 He served as managing director until April of 2011, led investment strategy and developed many of the firm's portfolio investment. Jerry, are you in the restroom? Are you in the radio? Are you in the TV, B and Ultrum? Welcome to the show. How are you doing, Jerry? What's happening? I'm good.

Starting point is 01:34:00 I'm really good. Thank you so much for joining. We're super, super excited to meet and chat. Why don't, why don't you give a quick introduction? What is venture capital? What is growth equity? What is growth equity? What is investing?

Starting point is 01:34:13 Yeah, I actually love to know a little bit about your journey, how you wound up. Co-founding Insight Partners. It's obviously a firm everyone knows, but I'm not sure everyone knows exactly the earlier story here. Early story, well, because I'm old, that's why. But where do you want to start? maybe the moment you When did you know you wanted to get into asset management? Yeah, exactly.

Starting point is 01:34:39 I'd love to know just the minutes before you sign the incorporation documents. That's always interesting. Okay, so Jeff Horne and I were, Jeff was an associate at a big venture capital firm called Warwick-Binkus. He didn't even have an office. He had a desk under the stairs. I was a consultant, and we had this crazy idea to start a company called Open Vision, and we wrote a business plan, and the partner, Bill J.M.A., said, well, if you can recruit

Starting point is 01:35:10 the president of Oracle, I'll fund it. And at the time, the president of Oracle was a guy named Mike Fields that worked for Larry. And Mike said, well, I think Larry's going to fire me, so I'm open to it. And then a month later, Larry fired him, and he became our CEO, and Open Vision merged with Veritas and a 60-40 merger and was worth $30 billion in 1999. And that funded Jeff and I into Insight. It got you into business. Why do you get fired?

Starting point is 01:35:40 Yeah. What's the story there? Was he coming for Larry's next? You're good at Larry. He'll tell you why he fired him. But Larry, Larry has his own reasons, you know. Yeah. And then, yeah, take us through a little bit of the journey on like the early Insight

Starting point is 01:35:58 partners days. Sure. Yeah, yeah. I just want to hear, I just want to, I want to hear your craziest stories from the 90s. You have some crazy stories yourself. What, I mean, what a wild decade and you were, what, what was the timing overlap between your guys, the IPO you mentioned and founding Insight partners? Did Insight, like?

Starting point is 01:36:25 Yeah, I think so. So Insight, if you look at the web, website, we say January 1, 1995. In truth, we shook hands in August of 94. We funded the very first company December 30th, 94. So he said, okay, January 1, 95. But we didn't close the first fund until July of 1996. We were investing friends and family money in what became the first part of the portfolio. And we had an advisory board. because we didn't have any credibility, right? Jeff and I both had acne.

Starting point is 01:37:02 He was 30. I was 35. We didn't really know much about what we were doing other than we got lucky with Open Vision. But I lived in Aspen and still have. I still live in Aspen. And I was involved in the Aspen Institute. And I invited a bunch of people to join me

Starting point is 01:37:19 in a little roundtable. And they became my advisory board. So the advisory board for Insight was Eric Schmidt, who was a VP at son, a guy named Scott Cook, who was the founder of Intuit, a guy named Ray Lane, who replaced Mike Fields at Oracle as the president, and a few other people. But those guys really gave us their money, they gave us their time,

Starting point is 01:37:44 gave us credibility, and they helped us succeed. You said you didn't have experience or credibility back then, but clearly to get those kind of people to spend time with you, trust you with their capital. What made you guys special? What did they see in you? I think, like, look at you two guys. You get everybody on your TV show,

Starting point is 01:38:07 and why are you getting them, right? You guys aren't on 60 minutes or somewhere else. You guys got personality, you got brains, you got aggressiveness, you got a gong. That attracts people. Yeah. They come for the gong. What's current AUM?

Starting point is 01:38:21 Can you share any AUM figures? I'd love to ring the gong. Somewhere around 100. So, all right? now it's 110, I think. There we're going. Not every day we get to hit the gong for a hundred, 110 million of a I mean, we're super in the weeds tracking how venture funds today are positioning themselves

Starting point is 01:38:45 in the AI boom. Folks will say, I'm only betting on one foundation model company, but I love the infrastructure layer. I'm doing some energy investments. And then I think there's a lot of. opportunity in the application layer, for example, how were people in venture talking about the dot-com boom or like the internet boom? It was obviously now we collapse it just down to internet or dot-com.

Starting point is 01:39:11 But back then, there had to be dividing lines between themes and how was it being discussed amongst venture capitalists at the time? Okay, so let's take insight. Insight, we thought we were really genius and said, we're not going to invest in dot com companies. We're going to do infrastructure and applications, but we're going to avoid the dot-com bubble because it's crazy, right? I mean, I sit there and said, look, there's not enough, everybody's on dial-up. You're not going to do commerce on dial-up. We don't have enough broadband for this to work out. And so we avoided it thinking we were going to be safe,

Starting point is 01:39:48 and we did all this infrastructure deals. Well, guess what? March 2000, the stock market dropped 40% for tech. And we all got killed. everybody got killed and so our our safe strategy was a total failure um everybody went down and then in 2001 with 9-11 we got trashed and so we had the worst year in venture capital history i think our 99 fun returned a whopping 1% maybe i think we were top quartile or basically a break even bond in 99 and that was so break even was top quartile yeah yeah That's right. That's insane.

Starting point is 01:40:30 So were you guys feeling, did you, being top quartile, were you like, okay, like, that was rough, but we made it through, like, we still look better than most of the industry, so we're going to be able to continue to build momentum, or was there ever a point where you thought it was over? No, we just were cheap, basically. We just wanted to get every dime we could possibly get back. So we had to work hard on three or four investments from 2001 to. 2005 just to get back to break even. That was like rolling up your sleeves and like getting operational with the companies to make sure that they...

Starting point is 01:41:07 Yeah, we're helping help and build a team and change the strategy for a new world. The one thing we learned from that lesson is that when the boom ends and the crash begins is that all those companies on the old platforms, the old technology, are not going to be very attractive. with the next boom and the next thing happens.

Starting point is 01:41:30 Right? So think about web companies in 2008. They were before that crash, you know, they were looking great. And then mobile companies became what was important after 2010. Yeah. Right? So if you weren't mobile, you weren't very attractive. And I think we're going to have the same thing here.

Starting point is 01:41:47 When this next cycle goes down, there's three major trends, right? We only talk about AI today, but crypto, I think, is becoming more and more important. and eventually, not sure if it's five years or 10, but quantum computing will become a major platform. Absolutely. And so the question becomes, is when does the crash happen? And then how long does it last? And then when you come out of it, what are the new technologies that all the companies have to be built on? What was your state of mind in, let's say, 1998, 1999, and then those first few months of 2000?

Starting point is 01:42:25 Like, did you, what kind of conversations were you having as the deals and the IPOs got crazier and crazier? Was there a sense at any point in your even, even, you know, friend group and network and advisors that there was another, was it, was it late 1999 and people were like, we got at least three to five more years of this? Or was there, was there any type of sense or a real concern about how, I think it was early 99 or late 98, Jeff Horn and I were walking down Fifth Avenue with two advisors, Bob Rubin, who was former Secretary of the Treasury, and Steve Friedman, who was former CEO with Bob at Goldman Sachs, going to Jack Walsh's office to sit down and listen to him, you know? And both Bob and Steve said, you know, the banks are not accounting for risk.

Starting point is 01:43:21 That was pretty big number. They knew, they felt that it was not, they didn't know where the risk was coming from. We didn't know exactly which area. Was it subprime? Was it real estate? Was it corporate bonds? Was it swaps? You know, there wasn't obvious which one of those were the greatest risk because all of them were risky.

Starting point is 01:43:43 And so we were walking to listen to him. And on the way down there, a guy called me and said, yeah, I think it was an analyst of Morgan Stanley. forget his name. But I said, look, I said, but we're in the bubble. And he says, yeah, but it's an iron bubble. And so I thought, okay, an iron bubble. I got to process this. What does iron bubble mean, right? And bottom line, what he meant was it's going to be a iron bubble until it's not. And if you're a believer in making money in booms, you have to stay in the game to the very end. You can be smart and hedge your bets. But if you bail out too, early, you were going to miss a lot of great returns.

Starting point is 01:44:26 Yeah. And so that's what that guy meant by that iron bubble, that it was, you know, it was just going to be there for a while. And sure enough, it was an iron bubble for over a year. In March of 2000, inexplicably, the stock market shifted. People moved out of tech and 40% would drop everywhere across the board. And that was like, okay, now we've got to work hard. How are you thinking about recycling or managing LPs?

Starting point is 01:44:54 in that year where you're, you are top quadile, but you only return 1%. Are you set up as a fund to kind of, I mean, there were company, it seemed like every company, even if it sold off a ton, they were IPOing, they were getting out. So were you able to get some liquidity and then reinvest that, or did you have to go back to LPs and raise new funds and kind of restart the whole process? Or were they already kind of bought into giving you another run in 2003? for example, 2002? Yeah, I mean, I mean, no, nobody was bought into anything.

Starting point is 01:45:29 It was a pretty nasty thing that was going down. And so we just had to slug it out with the funds we had, which got us through until we were able to raise the next fund, which, of course, was a smaller fund. We had raised fund for just about the time of the crash. So we actually had capital, but it was still ugly. because we had a bunch of investments that we knew were not going to be great going down the road.

Starting point is 01:46:01 And so we didn't really raise fund five until four years later. So it was the four toughest year in venture capital. And a lot of our people who were started in 95 didn't make it, right? So I mean, if you look at who started in 95, benchmark did, and they survived and they did great, but a lot of other funds didn't.

Starting point is 01:46:21 Yeah. remarkable. How would, you know, if you were still running a platform venture firm today, like, how would you be currently assessing the market? Because there's a hot debate right now of like where we're really seeing a bubble, right? If you look at, obviously there's plenty of companies in the public markets that do, that don't make any sense. There's some, you know, there's hyperscalers that don't, that don't, that actually, that actually, seem priced pretty reasonably. And then in the private markets, you have, you know, if you're an AI company, you know, you're going to, you know, probably with a solid team, pretty easily get

Starting point is 01:47:05 100x, 200x revenue, even if you have little to no margin on that revenue. Yeah. I mean, look, we don't know what's going to, what's going to be the straw on top of the camel's back that ends it. We don't know when. And there's all kinds of political things that you don't want a bet against, right? I mean, we couldn't end up with zero interest rates in March, you know, I mean, you don't want to bet against that. So, I mean, a lot of people who bet against the Fed, if you remember that five years ago, or during the COVID times lost out huge. So, look, anything rational, like I could say, oh, the laws of physics still apply. You know, I'm on the board of the Santa Fe Institute, but we've got some of the smartest minds in physics and math in the

Starting point is 01:47:48 world, irrational things like bubbles can last a long, long time. And you can say, oh, it doesn't look like a bubble. Well, I hate to say it, but I think a lot of these hyperscalers are going to regret the CAPX commitments, unless they can get out of it. We'll see. I think what's interesting to me is I think they may be underestimating the sort of drop in token price. I mean, I really think that the that the amazing power of the chips

Starting point is 01:48:23 and things that Jensen has done is going to outstrip our ability to get electricity to really power this stuff. Yeah, that's what Sotta has been saying

Starting point is 01:48:33 this for over a year now. Is it more power constrained? I think if you look at the amount of chips he sold and look at it out there, I don't think there's a power out available today. They have to find a new source in order to be able to sort of benefit from all this buildout.

Starting point is 01:48:50 And if there is a economic recession, then the enterprise, the expected enterprise, you know, explosion of AI usage will be delayed, right? And if there's any kind of a sort of major security problem around AI that will scare off the enterprises, that will also delay. So I don't think you can, I don't think you can continue the AI boom without. Fortune 5,000 getting on board. It's not going to happen without that. And so if there is an economic interruption, a serious one, then the demand is going to change. That has to happen. How do you think about different opportunities to buy assets, buy whole companies throughout a cycle? There's the

Starting point is 01:49:37 companies that are or the firms that are kind of waiting for a crash and maybe going to buy up stuff as after post-crash. There's also firms that are going and buying Fifth Avenue, and they want to get the best asset right now. There's other folks who are purely founder-bett, pay any price, others much more quantitative. How have you thought about your overall investing thesis throughout to multiple times?

Starting point is 01:50:02 Well, well, the difference here is AI is affecting everything. You know, Bezos is right. It's an industrial bubble, not necessarily a financial bubble, because the value of AI is not going to go away. That is absolutely the future, and it's here now. It just isn't here at scale yet, in my opinion, at least not for enterprise. So I do think that the problem with buying up companies

Starting point is 01:50:30 is, what are you buying? Is it going to be valuable, you know, down the road or not valuable? And it tends a lot on the quality of the management, it funds a lot on the technology. And so buying SaaS companies, hoping they're going to be more valuable in five years, I think that's a questionable, questionable strategy. I think you have to think about, like I said, if you assume that there must be some disruption, like it was a COVID-type disruption where it's, you know, literally a few months, then, you know, and the Fed bails you out, then, you know, people just keep going. And the bubble bounces back and it just keeps rocking. If on the other hand, it's a serious economic issue.

Starting point is 01:51:15 Right now, M2 money supply is all-time highs. You've got massive amount of capital out there. It's not a liquidity crunch. It's just going to be a challenge, you know, with the overall economy. And then there'll be a liquidity crunch because the death that's out there is massive everywhere. So I think here in this particular case, if you're going to start, strategize to buy up a bunch of things after a bus, that's a bad strategy. Most of the companies are going to be first-generation AI and they're not going to be the right

Starting point is 01:51:49 technology platform, right? I mean, first of all, most people are betting on these large language models. And what we learned at Santa Fe, we had in middle of March, we had the top research scientists from all the hyperscalers, the 40-person conference that I hosted with the scientists. And the thing that came out of it is everyone's too focused on LLMs, not focused enough on the complexity between the humans training them and the humans consuming them. And I think the secondary part of that is that LLMs are, we're going to find a new, new technology and cheaper forms of models that are going to come out. I'm certain that what China did with DeepSeek, I released in open source. There will be many, many more open source models in a year.

Starting point is 01:52:37 and you won't need to spend all this money on an LLM. I have a feeling that'll be a multi-model world with lots of free open source models going down the road. So if you buy a company that's based on foundational models technology, it may not be so valuable in the next wave of AI. Can you bridge this to trade for me? I heard an interesting stat last night that America has more data centers

Starting point is 01:53:07 than the rest of the world combined, and it feels like America might actually be winning in terms of industrial power on the data center side, but lacking in many other industrial capacities. How do you think the way that AI and the AI infrastructure build out is changing America? How do you think that flows to trade policy? Dan or anybody understands American trade policy right now. It's like a kangaroo. It's jumping up and down constantly. Keeps you on your toes.

Starting point is 01:53:40 Yeah, I don't know anyone really, really truly understands it, and I'm not sure policy is the right word. I think it's an innovative game that's being played with trade policy. So I don't know, I don't know what that's going to look like in four years. There's a lot of uncertainty, and that's part of the problem, making these long-term investments. I think that the data centers themselves, the actual physical properties, you know, are important and will be important long term. The question is, is, you know, if Jensen keeps his word and the chips are going up by some multiplier every year, how valuable is the chips in the data center is being built?

Starting point is 01:54:26 Yeah, the depreciation is just going to be crazy. Yeah, yeah. And so, look, I think the one thing that's for sure about this bubble is different than anything else is that the innovation is real and the innovation is profound. And I think that innovation, what it's going to unlock is challenging. And you have geniuses like Elon Musk and others out there that are, how can I say, they're inventing so much, so fast, and they have so many resources. If you think about it, the CEOs of the Magnificent Seven and Sam have a lot of influence

Starting point is 01:55:04 on how the world is going to play out over the next three or four years, right? You could add a couple chip guys. You could have Hawk and Hockton and Cece Way. And you could add maybe there's three women that are up-and-comers, maybe Fayefe and Mira and Lynn at fireworks, that could become more influential. But right now, the assets and the power is in the Magnificent Seven and Sam Olman. And those guys are going to have an amazing impact on how the world rolls out in the next five years,

Starting point is 01:55:37 three to five years. So, I mean, when you think about that, those guys are going to shape the politics of what's actually happening. In fact, I kind of think that we're in for a different world where right now we're worried about immigration and we're worried about all kinds of, you know, social issues. I think in the future, when robots are walking around, we're going to be more interested than like, wow, who has, who are the AI haves and who are the AI have-nots? And I think that better or worse, the magnificence.

Starting point is 01:56:07 seven and eight are going to change the political dialogue in this country pretty dramatically within three years. And I think they know it, which is why there's some pretty good ideas that I've heard about giving every child, you know, $1,000 in the stock market, something like that. That could be a great idea. That could be a great idea. I heard Jensen and Brad talking about it. That could be very helpful because there will be a have-and-have-and-have-not world in America,

Starting point is 01:56:36 and that'll be the primary dialogue, I think, of the future, not the stuff we're going through right now. How have you processed the boom in private credit? It's going on a long time. And I don't think there's enough. It's so big. It's so profound. I think the banking system in America, you know, because of the rules, they're not really accounting for that risk, right? I mean, in the normal way you would think about it.

Starting point is 01:57:05 So, I mean, it depends on that this. right? What happened in 2008 or what happened in 2001, that would be challenging for private credit. Does it like, where do you put that on in terms of how the probability that private credit plays a significant role in the next financial crisis? Well, put it this way. The banks have have made these investments, and right now, private credit looks reasonably safe, right? I mean, people seem to have enough capability to overcome it. The question becomes, is how deep and how bad is the future liquidity crisis, and how challenging is it? How much? And we don't know. So, I don't, I'm not betting that there's going to be another banking crisis. I'm just betting that

Starting point is 01:58:09 there's going to be an end of the bubble and there's going to be some kind of recession. whether it's short-term or long. Whether it's a crisis or not depends on the nature and the severity of it. Right now, it's always a break of trust, right? I mean, what happened in 2008, people had to take the tarp loans because trust was essential. When Hank Paulson told him the story about what he was dealing with, it was basically, you know, forcing all the major U.S. banks to take tarp money, He said, look, when you're boiling in oil, you don't ask how hot it is.

Starting point is 01:58:46 You just act and you move. And I think he saved the country. I mean, I'm not necessarily a fan of anybody during that era, but I do think he saved the country by restoring trust in the banking system. I don't see private credit being that big of a threat, but it absolutely could play a role. That makes sense. What single deal are you most proud of? As an investor? As an investor, it doesn't have to be like it generated the greatest return,

Starting point is 01:59:20 but it's something that you look back on, you know, 1995 to 2011 index. Look, I mean, the current portfolio of AI investments I've done like Avent. I mean, Saadikon is one of the truly great CEOs of the generation. I recommend to put them on your show. But Ococchio and I talked about it because Beno's one of the large investments there. But fireworks AI, E-D-B, Lotus AI, Dynasty. Dynasty is one that I'm really interested in because I just think trust or something that people like me have used successfully for a long time.

Starting point is 01:59:57 And I think entrepreneurs should be used in them more often. Give the pitch for Dynasty, you know, you can put it simply. but for those that are hearing about it for the first time. Yeah, okay, so look, if you start a company out there and you basically don't have a lot of money, but you've got your shares, you should go put those shares, whether it's a dynasty or somebody else,

Starting point is 02:00:24 you should put those shares in trust for yourself and your family, and depending with your mom or your dad or your wife or potentially kids, or whatever charity you want to put it in. You should, it's a way of protecting it, and it's definitely a way of taking advantage of QSBS exemption, which came in during Clinton, which Bush, you know, embellished more,

Starting point is 02:00:53 and which Obama did more, which Trump did more. Every president's sense has pushed it. And what's happened as a result, I think, is you've got a lot more startups. You went from about a half a million startups a year in the 90s to close to 5 million startups a year now. And so for inside and I think for most other funds, right, I think about 80% of the investments return less than 1.3x. Okay? But that means over 20% return multiples.

Starting point is 02:01:24 And those 20% from multiples, those ontoers should be thinking about putting their assets in trust. and not just stock, but also their crypto, you know, and protect it. And there's lots of reasons why it doesn't cost a lot thanks to the dynasty. They're democratizing it. So it doesn't cost a lot. You're crazy not to take advantage of the tax exemption that's associated with. Yeah. Well said.

Starting point is 02:01:51 Well, thank you so much for coming on. I'm sure we could keep talking for hours more, but really just appreciated the stories and insights. and we'll have to have you back on again soon. Yeah. Well, thanks, guys. And look, you guys are the most fun entertainment show out there, and that's why I'm here.

Starting point is 02:02:09 So keep it going. It's fun. Thank you so much. That means a lot to us. We'll talk to you soon. Thanks so much, Jerry. Have a great next to your day. You're the man.

Starting point is 02:02:16 We'll talk to you soon. All right. See you. Bye. Before we bring in our next guest, let me tell you about Google AI Studio. Create an AI powered app faster than ever. Gemini understands the capabilities

Starting point is 02:02:28 you need and automatically wires up the right models and APIs for you. You can get started at AI.studio slash build. Our next guest is Shlom's, the anonymous poster on X. I've been a fan of Shlooms' work for a long time, always found the, I don't even know, art, stunts, marketing, it's everything in between. It covers so much. It's always cooking. I always enjoyed it.

Starting point is 02:02:56 And I'm very excited that we get to have him. on the show today. I believe he's in the Restream Waiting Room, but we are going to work because he's anonymous that means voice changer. That means facial recognition. You gotta confuse the AI algorithm of the future, so he's undetectable.

Starting point is 02:03:14 So I will tell you about profound, get your brand mentioned in chat GPT, reach millions of consumers who are using AI to discover new products and brands. I will also read this post, which made it in the timeline from Sisyphus Bar and Grill, where it says, oh, the highly produced launch startup video starts with an outtake of the founder sitting down from an offset angle.

Starting point is 02:03:34 Now I know it's going to be unique and awesome. It really is an overused trope, but let me just, let me just steal man it for two seconds. So I was in the business of making videos about startups, basically. I made a variety of videos. And when me and Ben figured out how to do the extra behind the scenes camera that wanders around while you actually do the interview and then splice that in.

Starting point is 02:04:02 It just takes you from like you're doing a normal podcast to like it feels like it belongs on HBO and it's so satisfying and I wouldn't get rid of it for the world. And I will defend it to the end of to the end of days. Although yes, it is truly played out and you should probably at least hit the drawing board. Live video tracking is the new meta. Yes, yes. I can just pace around the room. I believe you have a lavillier mic on too.

Starting point is 02:04:31 So can you talk and can we hear you? Let's see. Are we getting audio from Jordi on the walk? He's not talking so I can't tell. You got to keep talking. I got to keep talking. Oh, we're hearing it. We're hearing him.

Starting point is 02:04:43 It's working. I'm live. You're live. This is a new feature we're testing out, everyone. Yes. This is live camera tracking with labs. It's such a funny feature. I can start to just pace around the room.

Starting point is 02:04:56 Why do you go take a? crack the gong. I'd love to. I'd love to. I'd love to. I'd love to. I'm hitting the gong for for Jerry.

Starting point is 02:05:03 Oh, okay. Turn down the volume. The gong's getting hit. Hit the gong. Oh, that was worked. Good. Okay. There we're solved it.

Starting point is 02:05:12 There we go. There we go. See, this is good. This is good. The menacing walk with spinning the thing. I'm waiting for slums. What's on that whiteboard?

Starting point is 02:05:22 What's on that whiteboard? What's on that whiteboard? Why are you walking in front of that whiteboard? This one? Yeah, that one? Yeah, that one. Oh, we were just doing some analysis. Yeah, what type of, what did you notice over there?

Starting point is 02:05:33 No, this didn't actually go anywhere. You need to walk right in front of it. You need to walk right in front of it. This didn't go anywhere. This didn't go anywhere. It's interesting because, you know, people have been calling Open AI. Maybe it's the next Enron. And if you trace the letters, the E and Enron, there's an E in Open AI.

Starting point is 02:05:51 That is true. The N in Enron, there's an end in open AI. and the R in Enron, the O in Enron, there's an O in Open AI, and at the end of Enron, there's an N in Open AI. And the P and the A. And the P and the A as well, yes. And so those are the letters in Enron, and there's also letters in Open AI.

Starting point is 02:06:13 And so, you know, I just feel like the connections are a little bit, it's a little bit obvious. To be clear, we don't believe that. We are, no. We are as exuberant as ever. I am exuberant. When Sarah Fryer said we should be more exuberant, we didn't just listen, we studied.

Starting point is 02:06:30 I like someone in the chat was like, was like, he needs to be more exuberant. I'm shocked that those are real quotes. Yeah, they're wild. Well, let me tell you about linear. Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products. Meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects, and product roadmaps.

Starting point is 02:06:49 We might be coming back to Shlom's next time. Maybe next week. Maybe we'll reschedule it. That's the nature of live TV, baby. Let's go back to the timeline. Autism Capital has a post here. They were there. They're claiming that October 6 was literally the top. This was posted in December of 2023. We must find this man in making where God Nostradamus lives all time high. This was calling the Bitcoin. Okay. This is Bitcoin all time highs. Basically, it was 100, 1,064 days from 2015, 2017, all-time highs, then 364 days from 2017 to 2018, then 1,6004 days, 2018 to 2021, and then 364 days from 2021 to 2022. The pattern would print this cycle's all-time high as the 6th of October 2020. That was the actual top for BigCRA. Okay, so I have no idea if this is Photoshop, but this is crazy. This really was the top. Absolute insanity. Of course, it could just go back up next week and then this isn't true.

Starting point is 02:08:00 Who knows if this is Photoshop. But it is fascinating like chart analysis. We need to get, wait, did we ever figure out, what is that called Tyler where people analyze the candlesticks called? Oh, technical analysis. Are you familiar with technical analysis? With the concept of it, yeah. Technical analysis is like it's the head and shoulders pattern. So it has to go out. You just follow the lines, bro. Yeah, but it's not just linear regression. It's like if it goes up and down and then up again, that's the camel pattern,

Starting point is 02:08:30 and that means it's going to break out. And people have a lot of fun with this. They draw all sorts of stuff all over it. It's been largely debunked. And if you're playing that game, you're probably going to get cooked by like a real team of machine learning experts who are doing basically technical analysis at a much, much deeper level. But I think we need to bring technical analysis to private models. markets. I want to see people looking at, oh, the Stripe Secondaries, this week they sold down

Starting point is 02:08:58 2%. They're up 4%. That means it's a bullish catalyst. It's going to go through the roof. I want to see a technical analyst bring that. Okay, you see there's down around here, but it's actually bullish. It's actually bullish. It's prime for a breakout. Technical analysis, just looking at the charts, not even understanding what the company is, just looking at the charts. That's the key. Ben Sand says stock astrology. Stock astrology would be good. China has overtaken the U.S. in cumulative open source AI model downloads, says A16Z.

Starting point is 02:09:32 Oh, we also have some, we also have some updates on the solar panel company that we were digging into yesterday. It was built by the Chinese. It was built by the Chinese. So a Chinese company came over here. They built Atrina Solar, built this facility. and then due to some regulatory pressure, they were a forced seller.

Starting point is 02:09:55 And then it was taken over by what is now T1 energy. Sure. And so everyone was like, wait, we know how to build facilities like this. And everyone got really excited, including us, yes. And of course, it turns out that it was actually built by the Chinese. But I don't have that. I don't know that there's that big of a problem with that, right? Because it's like, it's built.

Starting point is 02:10:19 in America. That's the important thing. So let's study it. Let's study it. But also, I mean, like, like, I regard TSM, Arizona as, like, a win for American dynamism, right? Yeah. This was that, like, room take where he says we should basically just bring over the Chinese. Yeah, we'll bring over whoever's building the best stuff and build it here. And, and, and there's a whole bunch of debates, like levels to the debate. Like, do you want, like, and, and it's sort of a yes-and situation. Like, I want American workers to build American things in American factories, but also like, I'll just take a factory in America that's owned and operated by another country because if, you know, like, there's some geopolitical

Starting point is 02:11:02 crisis, like, at least it's within our borders. Like, that's better, that's better than it being halfway across the world, right? Because you just walk over to it and be like, give me the solar panels, which is great. But back on the A16s, they said, 16 Z said, China has overtaken the U.S. and cumulative open source AI model downloads. And Lewis says, I'm going to make a series of bets on the little guy to start. We are going to be granting out compute up to 100K per project to support new experiments on GCP. If you have an idea for an open source model that you'd like to explore, I'd like to hear from you. So go hit up.

Starting point is 02:11:42 I DM'd with Lewis a little bit yesterday about this project. He's working on pulling together the computer. pute resources, but very excited about this one, and it'll be fun to follow. Well, we have our next guest, Shlombs, in the stream waiting room. We will bring him in to the TV panel for Dome. How you doing, Shlombs? There we go. Yeah, we can hear you.

Starting point is 02:12:07 Hell yeah, we did it. This is a crazy, crazy, a non-call. We've had a few. No one's ever sent in such a crazy video. Is it safe to look at this? This is just my webcam. I'm of a very old laptop. Sure.

Starting point is 02:12:21 Yeah. Got it. Apparently, the technical difficulty was that my display name was breaking Zoom, which I suppose is on-brand. Whoa, that's super interesting. What is your display name? You're incredible with breaking stuff. So the backstory is that I was looking for the longest Unicode character to break Twitter in maybe 2017, which is a very long Arabic sign.

Starting point is 02:12:46 But then people told me that they didn't like that I was using that. so I look for the second longest unit code character, which is a cuneiform symbol. Yeah, and so you stack all this up. Yeah, you've been fantastic at kind of like hacking these systems and breaking them in a way

Starting point is 02:13:00 that really gets outside the box. Like, yeah, you've seen like the text that goes completely out of your UI designer's worst nightmare, basically. So many places I want to go with this conversation we're super excited to chat. What are you... Who is...

Starting point is 02:13:18 What would you say you do here? Yeah, what exactly do you do here? That's a tough one. I mean, you know, I think a lot of artists are driven by wanting to be an artist, right? And same with founders to connect it back to your real house. And they want to be the thing, right? And then they try to figure out whatever their angle is. Then there's people who are kind of like driven by whatever instinct or whatever is inside of them.

Starting point is 02:13:44 And yeah, this is just me, right? I'm anonymous, so this is like a very specific part of me, right? Sure. I'm filtering. But I wouldn't say it's a character per se. I've always been driven to break things. Yeah. Do you like the term artist, hacker?

Starting point is 02:14:00 Does it matter? Is any of this relevant? That's a good question. No, I don't think it matters. I think artist is a boring and kind of, yeah, it's kind of a self-serious term, right? And I don't want to take myself too seriously. Let's skip the titles then and jump to the prize.

Starting point is 02:14:16 projects. I always like this question. We asked Gabe Whaley for mischief. What is the most underrated project that you've worked on? Something that you are proud of, but maybe people don't already know you for? That's a good question. I mean, I think most people know me from blowing up a Lambo, right? Yeah. And can you, for those who don't know, can you tell the Lambo story briefly? sure one of my one of my favorite and most memorable moments from from that whole cycle it was so cool in so many different ways but i'll let shlom's tell the full story yeah i think i think that um that project you know like a lot of things you know trying to ride the line between like a satire and a serious like earnest engagement with something so that was my sort of take on what was happening in crypto art at

Starting point is 02:15:07 the time but yeah we physically blew up a lambo well before that was that was possible to sort of fake with AI or anything. Took all the pieces to a very involved videography studio and took these like beautiful videos of all the fragments and sold those as NFTs. Wow. And like a post-mortem on that project, is everyone generally like happy with the way it went? I feel like there's so many NFT projects where like the expectations of the community get

Starting point is 02:15:36 away and people are like, no, like it's going to be a whole metaverse. And it feels like, I don't remember you promised. that? Is everyone pretty happy with like they were bought in on an art project and that's what they got? Yeah, I try to make things that stand on their own, right? I think that stood on its own and didn't need a roadmap. It was a thing that happened and people wanted to own it. I think that was always, you know, what if you should have been and sadly didn't quite turn out that way, you know? Yeah, no, no, that makes total sense. Should we go back to any underrated projects that you think did get enough love? Didn't get enough love? And I, and I just,

Starting point is 02:16:11 want to I mean I think maybe we will get to some of that the thing I'm interested is like what's what's interesting to you about the current state oh that's interesting yes and and specifically various platforms like I know you from from X but I'm sure you're active elsewhere but what is your how do you how do you rate the current internet so first of all prediction markets you know you're seeing sort of turning it to hyperstition markets I think there's a lot of artistic potential there that hasn't been engaged with, so pay attention to that space. And, you know, I think you asked earlier, if I view myself as an artist, I think that I try to just do things, right?

Starting point is 02:16:56 Like, I'm an agentic person or I try to consider myself one. I think AI unlocks the ability for people to be agentic, right? So I don't view, like, when people say AI art, they think of entering a prompt and you get an image out. output. I don't make images, right? Like, that's not what I consider my art, but I do things. And so I can use AI to more effectively do those things with fewer resources in a more asymmetric way.

Starting point is 02:17:22 So it's completely changed my life. Yeah. I hope I don't sound too one-shotted. So, yeah, no, no, no, I completely agree, I guess, help me resolve this. And we were talking to Gabe Whaley at Mischief, not to comp you guys too much, but I do think of him as like another person who creates in the original

Starting point is 02:17:37 thinker, like attack medium. just not entire, you know, has some commercial element, but is not entirely just, you know, not, not, yeah. The goal is not wake up every day to create shareholder value. It's like wake up every day and do novel. Which we would have no problem with. We would actually prefer, you know, if you could stop fooling around with all this stuff. My real question is improving the monthly recurring revenue of B2B SaaS.

Starting point is 02:18:00 This is my fallback. Yes, yes, yes. Is that, is that actually true? Do you actually? No. Okay. Okay. But so, so, so, so here's, so here's, so here's, so here's, so here's my

Starting point is 02:18:10 question. It's, it's, it feels like, um, it feels like there are all these really heady questions about AI and slop and what is good and will it one shot you and paper clipping. And it's the most, it's the best time to be a podcaster, a newscaster, like the Dwar Cash Patel podcast is fascinating. There's so many different ways to engage with it. There's books. Um, do you feel like, the art community is engaging with it in the proper way? Are there more projects coming? Is it harder to engage in a critique of AI art because it's, it is, it proclaims to be art itself?

Starting point is 02:18:58 And so it's maybe a little bit more complex to tussle with. Or do you think that basically like are artists driving the discussion around the all the tradeoffs in AI effectively in your mind. Right. Yeah, I think there are a lot of interesting parallels with like crypto art, right? Because in early crypto art, it genuinely did unlock some interesting things, but then you kind of had an 80-20 where 80% of it was just like kind of boring meta stuff or people who probably shouldn't have been anywhere near that stuff, pushing kind of garbage, right? I think, I think there are definitely creators who are doing some insane, just like on a technical

Starting point is 02:19:36 level, some things that they couldn't have done before. Then there are a lot of people kind of pushing out kind of slop images that I would say is like a second bucket. And then you have kind of like meta AI art. So like you see like in like digital art spaces like Instagram. If you go on your explorer page and you're interested in art, you probably see like a lot of things of like bounding boxes or just like these kind of overplayed motifs about like surveillance or whatever. Which, you know, there's a time in place for. But yeah, I think I think any new technology that people are interested in like is bound to result in just

Starting point is 02:20:07 really boring pontificating about it. And then like really boring engagement with it. And then like a very small subsection that maybe doesn't get enough attention of people doing genuinely interesting, innovative things with. And I'm not the person to do those genuinely innovative things because I'm someone who works within their own constraints of being a fucking idiot. So my game is to do something interesting conceptually about it with my own limited tool set and intellect.

Starting point is 02:20:36 Yeah. Sassinating. You made a viral post on Sora of Sam grilling and eating a Pikachu. Oh, yeah. Yes. How did that? How many shots on gold did it take to come up with something that you felt like was worthy of sharing or something that kind of broke through the noise? Well, it's cool that you talk about shots on gold.

Starting point is 02:21:05 I think a lot of this stuff, like I wouldn't necessarily view that as an art piece. I think that maybe even more falls into my kind of like misinformation practice, right? Like trying to spread some sort of vial rumor or something inherently is going to be like a shots on goal game. You're trying to find some asymmetric way of hitting on like just the right chord at the right moments. Like my big example is like the Gmail sunsetsetting hooks. So I created this hoax that Gmail was shutting down. And, you know, for that one, there were 100 of other things that I tried to do that didn't quite hit. But this was at a time that Google had just sunset something.

Starting point is 02:21:36 So it was kind of in the late insight guys. But I think the real thing there was like, it was sort of this moment of people being like, viscerally feeling their reliance on Gmail, right? Which like if I just wrote an essay about how much we rely on Gmail, that doesn't really go anywhere. But if you like, I think that's why misinformation or some of this stuff is like a useful tool.

Starting point is 02:21:56 But to bring you back to the San Walton thing, yeah, that was a bit of a low brown moment for me. But, you know, that that day kind of was, you know, the thing was like there. It was a lowbrow day on the internet. Yeah. Right. Yeah. It was, it was slop about Pokemon all over Sora and your timeline, right?

Starting point is 02:22:15 And this was just kind of a depiction of that. But what, uh, what, uh, how did the Gmail suns setting hoax, uh, really catch fire? Like, what was the inciting post that, how did you seed it? How did it actually go viral? I'm always, you're asking. You're asking me to give away the sauce, man. Oh, wait, but, but, I'm going to have to buy my ebook for that. It's not something that I can just, I can just trace through.

Starting point is 02:22:39 He's going to have to buy the course on misinformation. I didn't realize that that was not just, I, I would have assumed there was public. Sorry. I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, no, I'm joking. Okay. Yeah. If you, if you, if you were to look back at that, like, there were a lot of tweets about

Starting point is 02:22:52 that and mine, like, did okay, but, like, there were, there were other people who sort of, like, picked it up. Okay. And it's actually not even necessarily clear to me, which of those people were engaging with it earnestly or kind of realize what was going on and we're trying to single boost it. But yeah, I mean, you guys are part of the cool kids club on Twitter, I would say. And it helps to be, to be at sort of like the, there's like a cantalon effect for attention too, right? Totally.

Starting point is 02:23:17 If you're upstream of that, then you can really like spread things. Yeah, like I don't actually remember, but I could totally have seen myself amplifying that just as a troll on Google, even though I would have, right? recognize that it's not real, but I'm still upset about Google Reader. And so I'm going to amplify the fake news, knowing it's fake, but just to cause chaos because I want revenge for my RSS reader that was killed in the cradle. Are you disappointed? We should spread some more Oh, I'm ready. I'm ready. We are the fake news here. Are you disappointed with sort of a lack of creative uses for artificial intelligence, that it's all kind of funny. It's like, hey, I made

Starting point is 02:24:04 this musical artists do country music, or I made my dog look like a doctor. Yeah, I mean, you know, as you guys kind of noted, I'm guilty of the same thing sometimes. I would say broadly, you know, I want more generally. That's why I do this, right? because there's like this kind of art that exists in my head that I want to exist in the world. And I'm grateful that that resonates with other people, right? So like there's definitely, there's definitely things that I think that people could be doing with it. But I don't want to be like too misanthropic. Like I think I think it's a net good like long term because I think the art world is very stagnant,

Starting point is 02:24:46 not a fan of the fine art world as they would call themselves. And I think any like, I'm sure they're not a fan of you. I'm sure they're not a fan of you either. No, but it's surface area, right? It's surface area for people who are willing to engage with something that, like, the orthodoxy doesn't approve of to say something new and interesting and not have to play the same game of, like, getting into a gallery or doing an oil painting or a sculpture or whatever. Like, that's, you know, we need new games to play and technology increases that. Do you think any of your work will appear in Sotheby's at some point or any of the, like, like, I'm sure now. Sotheby's, I have a Sotheby's, I think I'm quite blackfold from.

Starting point is 02:25:23 because I've pointed out some of their... I know, but eventually they'll... You'll still be going. Their team will turn over and they'll... Yeah, maybe if they forget about some of the dubious, possibly illegal behavior that I've... I wouldn't bet on it. You'd be surprised.

Starting point is 02:25:43 Things have happened. This was super fun. Next time you have a particularly devious stunt, feel free to jump on the show and break it down for us. I love that. Next time we can go... deep on prediction market. Yeah, I'm super, I mean, the, the, watching this category explode and then thinking about

Starting point is 02:26:03 all the ways that you could hack that, you know, I think Brian, Brian Armstrong's kind of hacking it on, on the earnings call was fascinating. I think there's so many under, under explored areas and surface area there and also some potentially dark, you know, scenarios as well. So, but, uh, sci-fi future. is certainly here. The last thing I would leave with is, I really think that open source AI is important.

Starting point is 02:26:29 I don't know how much you guys have gone into that. But we can talk about that one next time. Yeah, that'd be great. Thanks so much for having you guys. Slum's model coming soon. I like it. Yeah, thank you. Great to meet you.

Starting point is 02:26:40 Yeah, great to meet you too. We'll talk to you soon. We'll see you out on the internet. Cheers. Before we bring in our next guest, let me tell you about numeralhq.com. Sales tax and autopilot spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. We have a return guest in the Restream Waiting Room.

Starting point is 02:26:56 Welcome to the show. Chazan, how are you doing? Congratulations. We got the gong already. Sorry, we're running late. Give us the news. What's the latest in Lava World? Can you guys hear me?

Starting point is 02:27:12 Yeah, we can hear you loud and clear. We basically announced Monday that we raised $200 million, venture and debt. We brought on new investors like Anthony Pompleyano, Eric Jackson from Open Door, who you guys must have done before as well. And we also announced what I think is the most important product, I think, in Bitcoin's history so far, other than Bitcoin, which is the Bitcoin, it's the world's first Bitcoin line of credit. So Lava has been doing loans for years now, but our loan previously was structured like a Bitcoin mortgage.

Starting point is 02:27:48 So you have to make fixed payments. There was a fixed term to it. But now, and that was very similar to the other loan products in the market too. But with the Bitcoin line of credit, we are offering the most flexible loan product in the entire market. So basically you can borrow, you can keep it open for as long as you want, two years, three years, really forever. You don't have any fixed payment schedules. There's no monthly payments involved. You can pay down your loan whenever you want your line of credit and you can borrow back against it.

Starting point is 02:28:18 at any time and we're offering the lowest interest rates fixed interest rates at 5% across the board so really what we realized was that bitcoiners are very unique audience they all have very distinct cash flow needs income you know a lot of bitcoins are retired on their bitcoin so having a product like building a product with fixed terms fixed payments and applying it to all the bitcoins was just not something that was working and it's not something that they wanted. Whereas this product, it offers the most amount of flexibility. So no matter what your cash flow needs are, no matter what your income is, you can use this Bitcoin line of credit, use it to use your Bitcoin and manage your Bitcoin wealth with

Starting point is 02:29:03 the flexibility you need and at the lowest rates across the world. As I, we've been on the show multiple times. We've talked about the business. I'm interested in to understand like why is fundraising happening in a traditional sense instead of sort of all happening on chain one Bitcoin at a time? Like why is there like a package tranche of investment happening? Because we actually have our own yield product. We actually have we announced that to you guys a couple of months ago, weeks ago.

Starting point is 02:29:40 So we do have depositors that are coming on. with stable coins around the world that are depositing their cash, their stable coins, earning yield, funding Bitcoin back loans. But those depositors can deposit and withdraw at any time, right? There's a permanent investment. Yeah, we're offering fixed. So to make sure that we're never in an asset liability mismatch, we need to make sure that we are raising the credit lines available to refinance loans.

Starting point is 02:30:11 And these credit lines are at fixed. rates, fixed terms, right? So we always are kind of matching liquidity in a way of what we are, we're just providing like on-chain banking in a way, right? So we need to have, you know, depositors. And I think that's the real value of stable coins is that they're global. So you can kind of give functionality and savings to people with stable coins. Obviously, Bitcoin is a savings asset, more of a long-term savings asset for some of these, this audience that is using this product. But then we need the credit lines as well to make sure there's never an asset liability mismatch. Does that make sense?

Starting point is 02:30:44 Yeah, totally. How, how, what's the, what's the strategy around navigating lava through such a rocky, uh, environment, Bitcoin's down. Uh, as of this moment, 16% in the past month. There's been a lot of volatility and other, uh, even more volatility and other, uh, tokens. But, um, it feels like that, you know, you guys were started like a year and a half ago, two years ago. What was the timing? Yeah, a round tour a little more than two years ago. So we've been building this for

Starting point is 02:31:17 one. But yeah, so building it building it on an up swing and it managing through, you know, corrections is going to be what makes lava you know, super, super, obviously that the solution is meant to be trustless

Starting point is 02:31:33 but brands still matter. There's definitely trust involved. We totally like want to lean into that, right? So one thing is on these Bitcoin, yeah, Bitcoin price hasn't been doing well, but also, Lava, is Bitcoin only. So the only collateral asset we accept is Bitcoin. Even recently, there's been some protocols that were accepting other crypto assets, like other digital assets.

Starting point is 02:31:58 There's one, I don't know if it's fully public yet that's actually recently blown up, because the all-coin debt, the all-coins have been, like, dropping pretty significantly in price So if you're lending against it and it dropped way too quickly, you basically have taken on bad debt. And then the depositors are no longer whole. Actually, a few weeks ago, I'm sure you guys discussed this, but there was a big auto kind of de-leveraged. A lot of coins actually instantly dropped 80%. Bitcoin was still fine in that world. So on act, one thing that helps us to manage liquidity and safety for our users is we're Bitcoin only.

Starting point is 02:32:36 So as a Bitcoin, they know that they're not taking on risk of other. all coins when they're borrowing with lava. The other thing is we always encourage people to add more collateral to their loans. The average LTV on a lava loan is 30%. So it is, you know, it is pretty safe. So Bitcoin would have to drop effectively like 70% for the majority of users to get liquidated. And almost all of our users actually have extra Bitcoin that is available to them to also as collateral to kind of make sure that they are safe. And there have been some like 50% drawdowns, but a 70% drawdown in Bitcoin, I feel like that hasn't happened in long, like years and years and years.

Starting point is 02:33:15 Yes. So it makes it sense. It is definitely a risk when you're borrowing against your Bitcoin. But the other kind of counter to that is anyone holding Bitcoin right now is also predicting that the price is going to go up, right? Because otherwise, if you do believe Bitcoin is also going to drop 70%, it's actually probably not the right idea for you to even hold Bitcoin. Yeah, don't hold it.

Starting point is 02:33:34 It's actually probably the right idea for you to hold cash and then kind of rebinds to Bitcoin. So, you know, we are not providing this financial advice to people, but most of our users are still believing that Bitcoin is going to do. Otherwise, they would vote Bitcoin. They would just hold cash, right? They're diamond-handsing. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. Sorry for keeping you waiting, but congratulations. Honored to hit the gone for you.

Starting point is 02:33:56 We will talk to you soon. Have a good rest of you. Good to catch up. Before our next guest hops on, let me tell you about fin.a.i. The number one AI agent for customer service, number one performance benchmarks, number one in competitive bakeoffs. Number one in. Bake-off world champion. G2.

Starting point is 02:34:10 I actually just heard about a bake-off just yesterday. And someone said Finn won the bake-off, literally. I'm not even making that up. Love it. Our next guest is Mina from Sandbar, coming in the studio from the recent waiter. And Mina, how are you doing? Welcome. How are you?

Starting point is 02:34:26 Thanks for having me. It's great to have you. Thanks so much for helping on the show. Give us an introduction. Explain the product, some of the trade-offs, and then we'll go into, go to market and how everything's playing together. And first, I have to tell you, I saw the domain sandbar.com available at some point back in the day, and I was just thinking to myself, that is such a good domain. So as a domain enthusiast, I'm happy that you picked it up and are doing it justice. Appreciate that. It's got sand. It's got a bar. It's got everything you could want.

Starting point is 02:34:57 It's got a nice, it's got a nice feeling. I have positive feelings about sand bars growing up in California. But yeah, we'd love an introduction on yourself and the company and how you got to building Sandbar. Totally. So I'm Mina. I'm one of the co-founders at Sandbar. I originally met my co-founder, Kurok at a startup called Control Labs that was developing these wrist-war interfaces. And we got acquired into meta and we're working on a lot of devices there. And in parallel, I started exploring a ton with LMs and started trying to think about what it would take to have a more effort interaction with these new speaking thinking machines. So we started to explore a lot of different forms and that eventually led us to two products

Starting point is 02:35:45 that I guess we're announcing together that we call stream and the stream ring. And stream is, as we say, a self-extension for talking through ideas and capturing them into notes. We have this very sandy app that has a log of interactions you've discussed, notes that you've asked stream to save, as well as the ability to zoom out of interactions and see what you've been discussing over time. And especially if you're on the go, your phone is in your pocket and you want to perhaps talk about an idea or save something into a note, that's where you can use the stream ring. So you just hold this touchpad, whisper into the top, and then release. And if I do something like that, I can say, hey, can you give me your hottest take on AI wearables? Sure, the hottest take. Most AI wearables chase novelty instead of intimacy. They brag about features, but the real frontier is emotional calibration.

Starting point is 02:37:02 You know, why don't you start a list with some of those hot takes? And it'll scurry away and save those away. There you go. Sure. For when you need a list of hot takes. That's right. I love the live demo. It's always risky.

Starting point is 02:37:23 But yeah, that's so what, so the key, the value that you're delivering to users is not, you're not trying to say, I'm going to be this personal assistant that's going to do everything in your life. It's simply like you're just trying to build that interface with effectively just building this new surface area for a mobile device that people are already using in a new way to just input ideas and thoughts into a computer and have them be organized. Is that generally right? Exactly. We're really focused on letting you talk through ideas and save thoughts into notes. And normally I wouldn't have my phone out. I would have it in my pocket and maybe I would have earbuds in.

Starting point is 02:38:05 and already so much of our thinking either happens in the go or lives in Apple Notes. And it's this beautiful mess of grocery lists and letters to a parent and career plans. And we see Stream as the most effortless way to either build those ideas through conversation or save them away. Very cool. What's a timeline till you guys are shipping the product? I know you're doing pre-orders now. totally so we've been building now for around uh two years and it's good to be coming out of the cave uh we are actually right now kicking off our next build with our manufacturing partner in

Starting point is 02:38:48 Taiwan and then we'll be fully ramped to mass production in summer of 26 so that's when we'll start shipping very cool very cool uh what are your hottest takes on wearables obviously it sounds like you maybe trained your your uh you're at your your internal model to... Here's one. Do you think, like, how confident can you be in predicting success of a wearable? Because it feels like it's something where you need to just run a lot of tests and the speed of each test is a little bit slow because you have to iterate on the actual hardware.

Starting point is 02:39:29 And you might one shot it, but that might be a lot of luck. How much luck is it? Or do you think that there is a way to empirically know that you have a hit on your hand before you go to market? Yeah. I mean, we definitely didn't start with this. We've worked on a lot of different devices, a lot of different use cases. And now we've been living with some form of stream for the last, call it a year and a half. And Kurok and I wanted to get to a point where we felt like it was useful in our daily life.

Starting point is 02:40:00 And then the people who were having test the device, our friends and our friends and our family who we've given units to are themselves finding it valuable. And, you know, we have a marketing professor who will be driving to work and she'll talk about her lesson plan. And then she'll watch her kids in the playground playing and she'll be able to keep her eyes up as she, you know, takes notes on what she wants to improve for the next day. We have a bodywork coach who will walk her dog and be talking about clients and also riffing on Eastern versus Western medicine. And after enough time living with it, we got to this just really high degree of confidence that it was super useful in our lives.

Starting point is 02:40:39 And we're exploring other forms and other use cases, but they always have to hit that bar. And I would say having built always in New York where we get to wear devices easily outside and not be noticed and also be in touch with people outside of tech has helped really ground us and something that we think will be useful for everybody. amazing thank you so much for coming on the show i was laughing thinking about a future where the average human has exactly 10 rings i was thinking the same thing as the orr ring is so popular it's like this is my thinking ring well then you get into the gauntlets and the yeah yeah big chains bracelets and the pierce both of your ears for the wearables and eyeglasses and headphones

Starting point is 02:41:22 all these things yeah well i'm super i'm super excited about this i john knows that i have a hilarious way of like keeping track of the thoughts in my mind which is texting myself. I'm constantly texting myself like stream of consciousness, things that I need to remember, do, or whatever. It's unhinged. I'm excited to try this out.

Starting point is 02:41:40 Yeah. Have a good thing today. Yeah, appreciate it. Thanks a ton. Thanks a great to me. Before we bring in our next guest, let me tell you about Adio, customer relationship magic.

Starting point is 02:41:48 Adio is the AI and AOCRM that builds your company to the next level. Our next guest is Alessandro Chesser from Dynasty. let's bring him in. Alessandro, welcome. Thanks for having me. It was so fun having, I think, your lead investor, Jerry on earlier.

Starting point is 02:42:10 He's got so many amazing stories. But before we get into Dynasty, why don't you give a quick intro on yourself, background, all that good stuff? Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, born and raised in the Bay Area, worked in financial services for about a decade, wound up at CARTA as the first sales hire in 2014, ended up becoming VP of sales and owned a lot of revenue for about eight years.

Starting point is 02:42:40 So help take the company from zero to 300 million in ARR, you know, hired and managed hundreds of people, and then left to Star Dynasty. What was the critical inspiration for dynasty and how walk us through kind of the idea maze around it? So in the beginning of, you know, in the beginning when I joined Carter, me and my co-founders who were also early Carter, you know, we were helping onboard thousands of cap tables. And it became very clear that the most successful founders created lots of trust. They didn't just hold the shares in their own personal name. They would sometimes have like 10 different trusts that they would split their shares into. And it was really strange.

Starting point is 02:43:27 I didn't understand why. At first I thought they were just being super generous. But we started doing some research on the strategy and we learned that the reason why they did it is because they got a separate QSBS exemption, which basically means each trust that they created was eligible for $10 million in tax-free capital gains. Like literally zero taxes on 10 million for each trust that they create. So you create 10 trusts, you get $100 million in tax-free capital gains. And yeah, so from that point, like, I guess what I think the, yeah, the question that, you know, we talked off there a while back, and the question I had is like, obviously, you know, great businesses often start with like a simple,

Starting point is 02:44:16 vision for like a kind of narrow customer base. But where like what's what's kind of the focus today? How big can dynasty get just serving the kind of like early stage founder venture community? And then where do you want to go long term? Yeah, absolutely. So QSPS stacking is very narrow. You know, it's basically have to be a large shareholder of a C corp. And it's not just venture funded technology companies. Like we've been signing out. Port-a-Potty founders. We've been, you know, people that make pipes for plumbing. Like, there's all types of QSPS eligible entities.

Starting point is 02:44:55 They just have to be C-Corp, and they have to not be an excluded industry, like any regulated, you know, financial services or anything like that. So there are a ton of companies. Like, maybe we don't know the exact number, but maybe somewhere between 250,000 and 500,000 companies in the U.S. could qualify for QSPS. And so we got a lot of greenfield. Like each company has.

Starting point is 02:45:16 sometimes two or three co-founders. And so that's a, you know, it's a very narrow market, but we think we're going to be working on it for quite some time. But the broader vision for this company is like, so we are a licensed Nevada trust company. We are the only venture funded licensed Nevada trust company. The only ones that are trying to tackle this space. One of one.

Starting point is 02:45:36 One of one. From a technology standpoint. And so we think that, so the richest people, you know, Jerry, for example, the richest people in the U.S., they don't create, you know, they live in California, they live in New York, they don't create California and New York trust. They use Nevada trust because Nevada has the best laws in the country, maybe sometimes even the world when it comes to taxes, asset protection, privacy, control. Like, you can have more control over these Nevada trusts than you can, typically over California and New York trust. And so we think that that goes much further beyond

Starting point is 02:46:11 QSBS stacking. Like, you know, why shouldn't the farmer in Oklahoma be able to benefit from a Nevada trust? Why shouldn't the young professional with $50,000 in crypto be able to put benefit from a Nevada trust? And so we want to open it up for everybody. That's our vision to build a mass market AI powered Nevada trust company. But to your point, we have to start narrow. We have to solve one problem and solve it really well.

Starting point is 02:46:34 And so that's why we're tackling founders. Amazing. What is the most common setup for, call it like a YC founder? For trust, $1,500 a year, gives you up to $40 million in QSBSBS eligibility. If they have kids, they make their kids a beneficiary, maybe their wife. If they don't, then they're creating trust for their parents and their siblings. Very cool. Well, yeah, I think every founder should be at least taking a look at this.

Starting point is 02:47:08 For sure. And like Jerry said, there's other ways to do it, but I highly doubt that the other methods are nearly as streamlined or founder-friendly is what you guys are building. So very excited for more founders to be able to optimize for this, not just the second- or third-time founder that has experienced the gain or the pain of realizing that they, you know, if they have a $50 million liquidity event and only getting that tax-free gain on the first 10 million, it would be quite painful. So excited that you're building this. That's exactly the problem. The problem is people usually do this later because it costs six figures to set up. And by the time

Starting point is 02:47:48 they do it later, they're limited by their lifetime gift exemption. And so they can't stack that many trusts. And so that's why we exist. So founders should be doing this from day one. That's when your gift value is zero. You create your corporation. That's the best time to do it because there's no gift tax. The longer you wait, the more gift tax implications you're going to have. Yeah. Amazing. Well, thank you so much for joining, breaking it down. And I'm jealous that you got Jerry on your cap table. That guy is a, that guy's a legend. So anyways, great hanging and happy building out there. Thanks for having me. Thanks so much. Cheers. Thanks so much. Cheers. Thanks. Our next guest is in the Restream waiting room. But first. Let me tell you about public.com investing for those that take it seriously. They got

Starting point is 02:48:31 multi-asset investing industry leading yields. And they're trusted by millions with John Maslin, the CEO and co-founder of Vulcan Elements announcing, just a tiny little deal. Just a tiny little deal. Just a wee little deal. Welcome back. A wee little deal with the U.S. government. Break it down for us.

Starting point is 02:48:51 $1.4 billion. Absolutely massive deal. Something that people were just getting, just waking up to. Obviously, you've been thinking about this for a long time. How did you realize that this was something you wanted to work on and then take us through the anatomy of the deal. Yeah, hey guys, thanks for having me on again.

Starting point is 02:49:11 It's really good to see you. So this is a problem that we've been focused on for several years. My background is, you know, former Navy. I was a supply chain officer. And when I was in business school, was thinking a lot about the critical components that will define the 21st century technology race, whether it's the data centers that enable AI, drones, robotics. And when you really boil it down, it's only three components.

Starting point is 02:49:43 Can you check your Wi-Fi? We are getting some technical difficulties. We lost you. My still there. Your audio is here. Your face is in the past. In the past. It's a time machine taking us back to a mere five minutes ago or one minute ago.

Starting point is 02:50:00 Out in the field somewhere. Yeah. probably doing important work. Yeah, what a cute freeze too. Yes. I mean, it's kind of working if you just want to keep talking. I'm going to hit the gong for the $1.4 billion deal. Okay, yeah, yeah, Jordy's going to hit the gong.

Starting point is 02:50:18 Hit that gong, Jordy, and then we will go back. Thank you. And I'd love for you to break down the structure of the deal, what it allows you to do. I know that there's a loan piece, there's an equity investment piece, there's investors, And how are you describing the deal and what it allows you to unlock? Yeah. So what this deal allows us to unlock is a 10,000 metric ton rare with magnet facility. And just to frame the problem a little bit, by 2030, the U.S. will need over 70,000 metric tons of these magnets today.

Starting point is 02:50:50 We can't even produce 500. So what this is doing is this is going and ensuring that we can move at Operation Warp Speed in partnership with the United States government, the Department of Commerce, the Department of War, to ensure that we can go and meet the demand for defense, aerospace, and critical economic industries. And the U.S. government, Secretary Hagseth, Secretary Lutnik, they're serious about solving this problem, and we're very serious about ensuring that we go and meet the moment in the mission. What is the timeline for something like this? I feel like we're hearing about a billion-dollar billed-out, data centers.

Starting point is 02:51:29 This deal must have been very much in the works even before China pulled the rare earth's card. Sure. Yeah. So we plan to have initial capacity online by 2027 and if we're able to go faster, we will. And we've been having conversations with everyone across industry and across government for several years. And we've realized we need a whole of industry and government approach to go and fix this issue. And our full intent is to go and build at a speed, an operation warp speed that hasn't been seen in this industry in the 21st century. How much, like, what else is going on in the supply chain? Is America mining enough rare earth elements?

Starting point is 02:52:24 Or should we be, you know, is the job, like, are we on the right track now in terms of actually taking? rare earths and producing magnets with what you're going to be doing? Or are there other pieces of the supply chain that you want to see other founders or yourself go after in the near term? Yeah. So it's a really good question. And the way that this works is you know, you mine the material or you take recycled end-of-life magnets. You separate those chemically into a rare earth oxide. You turn that into a metal and then ultimately a bespoke magnet to meet a customer spec. What we're doing with this deal is we're partnering with re-element technologies. They recycle end-of-life magnets and separate that material.

Starting point is 02:53:07 And we're expanding that partnership. One thing that I think is really important to note is this is less of a raw material availability problem than a manufacturing problem. Today, China only mines 55% of the rare earth material. They make 94 to 98% of the magnets. So what I would say is with this deal and other folks in the industry, we want as many smart people focusing on this industry as possible and scaling up capacity where I think that there are opportunities are downstream as we think about drone motors. There's a gap, servo actuators. As we think about orthogonal and complementary critical minerals, we need to do more around antimony and germanium and

Starting point is 02:53:46 gallium and lithium and lithium and tungsten and titanium. There's a lot of wood to chop in the critical minerals industry to make sure that we have safe and secure supply chains here at home. Well, very, very exciting. The progress is just tremendous, and I'm sure you will be back on soon. So thank you for doing this work. We've been following the story, and we're glad that people like yourself and your team

Starting point is 02:54:14 are tackling the issue. Next time with a better Wi-Fi signal on my end. Or when you're in L.A. Come on to do it. Or in L.A. Or just do it out in the field somewhere off your phone. We'll make it work. Thanks so much for the update and great to see you. We'll talk to you soon. Have a good one. Thanks guys. Cheers. How do you sleep last night? We had to sleep at the television through traveling.

Starting point is 02:54:37 No scores. But tonight we will be returning to the eight sleeps. You can go to eightsleap.com. Get a pod five. Five year warranty, 30-night risk free return for shipping, of course. Code. TBPN. We have Eugenia Kuya coming back in the studio. We hit some timeline. some time. So the real story that was shaking up the timeline is that Scotty Pippen is saying it's not over. He said, I think in regards to the crypto market, he says it's still the shakeout before the breakout. So Scotty Pippen remains bullish on the crypto markets and we'll have to check back on this. How do we know this is about crypto? This could be about AI or something. Could be about anything.

Starting point is 02:55:24 Look, everybody replying is, or crypto, I think, we got to ask Dylan, I think he's been, I think he's been, he's a crypto influencer of some sort. Yeah. If you want to talk to Antonio Lanares one on one, you can now do so for the low price of $15,000 an hour. 15,000. But it includes taxes. He pays the taxes. Okay. That's.

Starting point is 02:55:52 He pays $2,600. $103.13 in taxes for a one-on-one session for... Where are those? I'm not sure who Antonio Linares is, but, you know, he took the advice. Naval Ravicon said, give, set an unreasonable opportunity cost so that you only do things that are of the highest value, and that's what Antonio is doing. What's the value to him of yapping on the phone with some random person? You know, he's giving up a lot of opportunity.

Starting point is 02:56:24 We've seen a few of these screenshots from people sharing these unreasonably high one-on-one session times. I mean, there are plenty of people out there that would have higher numbers for sure. 14K, 15K. I would like to see somebody throughout the $100 million number, right? You'd think that for $100 million people would talk with. I think somebody would pay. Elon would do it. I don't think Elon would talk to a stranger, a random person for an hour for $100 million. What about 30 minutes?

Starting point is 02:57:03 We'll have to ask him. $200 million. You have to start a show. Hourly rate. And then you can get him. You have to get on adquick.com. Out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to headaches of ad of home advertising.

Starting point is 02:57:14 Only ad quick combines technology. Out of home expertise and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. I believe we have Eugenia in the Restream waiting room. announcing a new company. Welcome to the stream. Whoa. Calling in from the A16C. Do they post you?

Starting point is 02:57:31 Are you a new GP? What's going on? No, just a new port co-founder. You wish? No, you're supposed to say. Still a struggling founder. Yeah, yeah, still a struggling founder. Tell us about the new company.

Starting point is 02:57:43 We just announced today of the round we did with the pre-sid round we did for Wabi. Yes. Our new company. So time to announce the new company. as well. So we're building Wabi, which is a personal software platform. Think of it as an app where you can discover, quickly remix, or even create personal mini apps for your daily life. Okay, so yeah, walk me through. I mean, I've created personal miniature apps with, you know, vibe coding platforms or, you know, coding agents, kind of run them on my computer. Usually try and have them all self-contained in

Starting point is 02:58:21 HTML or something. How are you thinking about the actual interaction? Is this, is this like prompt to product, self-hosted, hosted within Wabi? Like, what are all the different tradeoffs? Because there's so many different ways that you could instantiate that idea, I imagine. So think of it as a YouTube for mini apps. So all Wabi mini apps, compared to most app builders, they all only live on Wabi. You can not download them, you can not put them on the App Store. You have to use them in Wabi. Yep. But that comes with a lot. lot of benefits. Because first of all, the social graph, discovery, you can like, comment, see who your friends are using, is using what app, see remixes, follow good creators,

Starting point is 02:59:05 for creators you like, and so on. You can use apps with your friends. And then on top of that, of course, all integrations are included. You can immediately connect your Gmail account, your calendar, location. We're building. Our plan is to build 50 integrations before the end of the year of all sorts and so on. And of course, persistent backhand, data security and privacy, everything is sort of on Wabi side. Because if you think about it, if you build a great app with one of vibe coding tools and send me a link, if it's like an AI therapist app, I don't know if I'm going to fully trust to use this, because I don't know where the logs are going. Even if you're a good friend and you don't mean anything bad. You're not a professional developer. What if you

Starting point is 02:59:51 forget to pay for the hosting of this app or what if something, you know, leaks? We've already had some of these vibe coding apps reach the top of the app store, like that teabagag app. I don't know if you saw that. The tea dating? Is that the one? I think so, yeah. Was that the tea dating? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That one's been very popular. So talk to me about the technical like a hurdle here. It feels like the app store doesn't necessarily love apps in app stores. Is this a beneficiary of the new regulation around allowing app stores in the iOS app store? Is that a unique unlock? So we're not building apps. We don't call them apps even. These are mini apps. So think of it as like this small, very lightweight work flows. Some of them

Starting point is 03:00:35 just like, it's almost like a lightweight UI on a prompt. Yeah. For example, a simple mini app that turns your photos to like polaris from different decades. Yeah, totally. And so the App Store allows mini apps. It does. Okay. We're not planning to, or we're never going to be about, like, building full-fledged apps or downloading them or anything like that.

Starting point is 03:00:57 Yeah, it is interesting. It feels like Apple will sort of have to grapple with the idea of instantiating UI or mini apps on the fly. Because for a long time, the App Store review process has been very much, like, we want to review all the code. And if you are changing the code within the app or the functionality of the app, once it's already shipped and approved, Apple has kind of dealt with that in a wide variety of ways. But I love the idea.

Starting point is 03:01:28 So let's just stick to the actual technical side of things. Like are you able, are these apps built in basically like HTML windows that are then served within? Or can you actually instantiate like React Native or, you know, like, object. C on the fly. These are React, so all of our mini apps are React Native. And then Wabi, the platform, of course, is the iOS native

Starting point is 03:01:57 Swift code. So I think sort of similarly to Replica, what was the native app and a unity container inside of it. Here are the same. I feel like we're always going to be about blending the two technologies together and struggling

Starting point is 03:02:14 constantly with how to you merge. these two things together. What do you think, what do you expect to drive the most usage? Obviously it's early. It's hard to predict with consumer, but do you expect it to be people coming on board

Starting point is 03:02:30 just playing around creating things and people are coming to the app to have this sort of creative experience? Like they might go on Suno and just start making music. They might go on Wobby, just start making apps and sharing them with their friends, etc. Or do you believe it'll be like more of a hits-driven business where there's one or two many apps that, you know, develop some organic virality

Starting point is 03:02:52 themselves that really become the driver of real downloads? I think really we are going to be looking at two big categories. More retentive utilities, think trackers, things that you might use with your family, your friends, yourself, learning, all sorts of like to-do lists. and everything that kind of like little workflows for a daily life. And then more viral, personalized mirrors or like viral prompts for image and not only. For example, like something that I really liked on Wabi was this mini app that takes in your Gmail and builds an action figure based on the information from your Gmail or like the same,

Starting point is 03:03:39 but the same but based on your bank activity through looking into your bank account. So just stuff like that, where people always want to see some cool stuff like that, brag about themselves, share. And it's almost like a one-time use thing. You're not going to be coming back for that. But at the same time, if that was an app on the app store, that's kind of too much. You'd need to download it. It's like it's too much. But here, it's just like this little mini-app thing that lives inside Wabi.

Starting point is 03:04:11 You can try it. There's no cost to it. What about apps as memes are just purely for entertainment? Do you expect that to be kind of a category of itself, like this kind of idea of we can now make a mini-app that's really just meant to be kind of funny and make people laugh, but then it doesn't have to necessarily be durable or it doesn't have to be a standalone business itself?

Starting point is 03:04:35 100%. I think we're entering this error where software is not going to be set. it's not going to be just the static as the app I created and you use it and you can't do anything to that. Instead, it's going to be this ultra-personalized, very malleable, very lightweight software that can change that is truly built on the platform of you. I would think that kind of the operating system of the future is the one where you'll have a few apps, big apps, like TikToks, the Instagrams, of course, that will always exist. And then there may be a few apps built by the community that you'd just.

Starting point is 03:05:10 discovered, maybe some of them you remixed a little bit, maybe some you actually built yourself, yourself. And then there are going to be some mini apps built for you by AI. Like, for example, if I'm going to New York next week, it should, Wabi should go through your email and suggest a pre-build an app for you. Hey, I know you're into art. You're going to New York. Here's an app that basically recommends art shows around your Airbnb for that time. That's really cool. I feel like this is a product that once people have that, like, people will have a moment where they're like, wait, why did I, I mean, the idea that you could go on a trip and generate an app that was almost like some quasi, even just tracker for your trip of like, oh, these are all the things I want to do and check them off. And then you could make so many other layers that you can build on on top of it. How much are you, what, What do Wabi, like, how much do you feel like you'll need to incentivize creators on the platform early on? Like, would you ever create some type of, like, creator fun to incentivize people to come on and experiment?

Starting point is 03:06:22 I mean, a lot of big social media platforms have done this over the years. You guys have raised quite a bit of cash, so I'm sure you could soft circle some of it, but maybe you don't need to at all. Curious how you're thinking about it. I think you're going to the right direction. That's what we're also thinking about. How do we incentivize the best creators to create the best apps out there? And what really struck me the other day was that actually it's easier to create a cool mini-app than it is to create a YouTube video, a great YouTube video.

Starting point is 03:06:55 It doesn't require that much production in a sense. Like, for example, even yesterday, I was putting my daughter down. and it was bedtime. She likes to play these puzzles where I give her a puzzle and she tries to guess what it is. So we wanted to just find something

Starting point is 03:07:15 online for it, but it took me, it was a lot faster. It only took me a minute on Wabi to build this simple mini app where it basically is a puzzle and then just four pictures that she can click on. And because she's into Princess Elsa,

Starting point is 03:07:26 we made it Princess Elsa themed. And because she goes to Italian preschool, we made it Italian in Italian. in Italian. And so it literally took us like a couple minutes and it was like co-creation. We're creating that app together with her.

Starting point is 03:07:40 So think of it as like Roblox meets personal software in a sense. So I do think, to degree, right now it's almost becoming easier to create something than even to search for it online. Yeah, we got to hang out with

Starting point is 03:07:56 the CEO of Roblox yesterday and I think he's coming on the show tomorrow. How much how much do you think it can be dangerous to be too inspired by, in this case, like something like a Roblox,

Starting point is 03:08:07 because in so many ways I can imagine that, you know, an economy forms around Wabi in the same way that it has around, in the same way that it has around Roblox. There's so many different ways you can kind of draw comps,

Starting point is 03:08:20 but sometimes it could be a trap to be too inspired by something because ultimately it's a different, you know, totally different kind of use case and value than maybe Roblox has. I mean, our vision is different. Our mission is to set software free,

Starting point is 03:08:39 and I think kind of the main, main inspiration for Wabi was that idea that we live in the Microsoft DOS era of AI interfaces, and the GUI moment for AI is around the corner, and we do believe that with this almost a godlike technology that we created, it will require a different type of an interface. There will be the Windows, the Mac OS for AI.

Starting point is 03:09:05 We're not going to be using AI through a command line forever. And so I think this is kind of where our North Star is. It's like how can we create a different interface for everyone to tap into all the capabilities of these AI models. Yeah, it's going to be really fun. I feel like we can sit here and predict how things will play out, but we should just have you back on once you have real data on how people are using it, how much is entertainment, how much is productivity, what the top apps are, and kind of how the community like takes shape.

Starting point is 03:09:41 Because I imagine there's only so much that you can predict once you build a tool. Yeah, that's the thing with Roblox. It's like how would Roblox predict that grow a garden would be the most popular name in the world with teenagers? Yeah. Or like a full. re-re enactment of Call of Duty in Roblox. Like, I was probably not on the roadmap from day one. That's a beautiful thing about starting these, like, these platforms.

Starting point is 03:10:06 But congratulations on the round. What's the waitless timing? I'm on the waitlist now. When are, when are, what's the strategy around opening it up? Soon. We're building a few really exciting things. Right now working on multiplayer as we speak. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:10:25 I think one of the really cool things about Wabi is, that is going to be that all apps come with multiplayer included. And even just simple mini-apps, like, for example, I built a world game to test it with my mom so that we can play together. Obviously, we played on the New York Times, but it's pretty much like our way to connect with each other. And with Wabi, we do have a leaderboard, and we can see who's beating each other, who's better today, who's doing better. We can set up these notifications and all that. So a few things I want to build before we roll it out to general audience,

Starting point is 03:11:00 but we're getting fantastic feedback from our first users. And it's honestly really exciting to, again, to be in that zero to one stage. I'm so excited about this. Amazing. Well, as soon as we have access, we're going to have Tyler make something like six or seven mini-apps. Well, send them to me. Thank you so much. We will.

Starting point is 03:11:26 Great catching up. I'm excited. Yeah, we're excited you're going zero to one again and super excited about Wabi. Yeah, this is really cool. We'll talk soon. Thanks so much.

Starting point is 03:11:37 Thank you so much for having me. Have a great rest of your day. Cheers. Bye. Before we bring our next guest, let me tell you about Bezell. Your Bezle concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet. We, this morning, we're not going to docks him,

Starting point is 03:11:50 but we ran into a, founder we like who had quite a nice IPO a few years ago. And we did do a risk check. Oh, we did. He performed. It was, it was great to see. Yes. Well, at the cover of the Wall Street Journal, there's a bidding war for obesity

Starting point is 03:12:10 startups. Did you hear about this? Pfizer and Novo Nordisk boost their bids in an unusual fight for MetSara. I feel like when you say obesity startups, it's going to be the, the, the, the wagovy white labelers. And I was imagining this would go, like Hymns Roman, like that crew. But apparently, they are all fighting over the developer

Starting point is 03:12:32 of the obesity drug. It's called Metcera, the latest twist in their unusual fight over the startup. Metzara said Tuesday that Novo Nordisk's proposal values the biotech company at up to 8620, a share, or approximately $10 billion, up from its previous bid of $9 billion. and so they're going back and forth.

Starting point is 03:12:53 The valuation represents an approximately 159% premium to Mitzair's closing price on September 19th the last trading day before the Pfizer deal was disclosed. So Pfizer's new offer value shares at up to $70 a share was $8.1 billion. Pfizer had previously struck a deal at $7.3 billion. They're going back and forth. The duel between two of the world's biggest drug makers

Starting point is 03:13:18 over a three-year-old company, three-year-old company with just more than 100 employees and no approved drugs shows the importance of weight loss drugs to the pharmaceutical industry. Weight loss is one of the

Starting point is 03:13:34 hottest categories in prescription drugs and companies big, I would imagine and small big and small have been lining up to be part of the market with leaders Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk

Starting point is 03:13:49 the global market for the drugs is now worth $72 billion, according to TD Cowan, which projects it will reach $139 billion in 2030. It's always so funny because I'm like, oh, $72 billion. Tyler, $72 billion a lot? No. Wait, like, you mean what Google is spending on CAPEX just this year? Like, that's just what one hyperscale is spending on CAPEX is the entire weight loss market.

Starting point is 03:14:14 Big tech is pretty big. Well, we have our next guess. There he is. What's up, guys? How are you doing? Welcome to the show. Great transition. How are you guys?

Starting point is 03:14:25 Slit in there. It's great to see you. You're doing well. Congratulations on the new deal. How did you meet Eugenia originally? Well, I mean, it's hard to not know her. If you guys do know her, what you do. She's a total badass.

Starting point is 03:14:40 She's been in around the ecosystem for years. She was kind of the first AI native consumer founder. My replica launched prior to Chat, CheapT. So perhaps Chatsyipti was even inspired by replica. Companionship is now one of their biggest use cases. So she's been in and around and well known to the entire firm for many years. So when I heard that she was up to something new, I knew that we had to be a part of it. Very cool.

Starting point is 03:15:04 This feels like what I like about some of my favorite ideas are not ideas that no one has had or talked about before, but there are ideas that have been kind of floating around, but nobody just decided to like tackle them in a really intentional. way. This feels like one of those ideas that is kind of perfectly pulls together kind of the potential of this new technology that we have, the fact that you can generate software on the fly, you can make software so quickly now that you can make things that don't need to have a long useful life. They don't need to be commercial at all. They can be software that would have taken six engineers a year to build. You can now build it in, you know, a, you know, a,

Starting point is 03:15:50 a few minutes at times if you're really one-shotting and just two people can enjoy it. So this felt like, yeah, it just felt like, you know, Eugene is the right person to take on, take on this idea that has so much potential. Of course, it's consumer. Of course, it's going to be really hard. But this is like an idea that I want to exist. How, how, like, what was your kind of like framing around this concept had you been thinking about it for a while and what kind of made you do the deal? Well, I'll give you two framings, Jordy. So the first is, you know, when did software get so serious?

Starting point is 03:16:24 It's like all the software we use is so clinical. You know, even when you see content inside Insta, or TikTok, or YouTube, it's the same frame. And it's sort of got all the same aesthetics. Yeah. So if you think about the early 90s internet, you know, it was really eclectic and weird. And I for one think a weird internet is more interesting internet. So I think one, there's a sort of like software as a form of pushing the cultural edge.

Starting point is 03:16:45 We've lost that a little bit over the last 20 years. Look, I think the other thing is that the mistake we keep making in AI is that we think these things are markets when they're industries, right? Like, AI code is not a market. There's not one winner. It's an entire change to the software supply chain. It's an industry, which is why codex is working, cursor is working, Rupplet is working, and Wabi is going to work as well.

Starting point is 03:17:05 So I think it's both an insanely delightful and approachable idea with really serious implications at large scale. What are you, like, it's hard. to predict these kind of things. Like I feel like with with consumer, uh, I was trying to get at earlier. Is this going to be something like people are just playing around making things or is it going to be, is it going to be a mini app that kind of breaks out and goes viral over on TikTok and suddenly Wabi has, you know, an insane amount of downloads just because of a single video. So I can see it being this kind of like virtual, uh, virtuous flywheel where people just enjoy creating and then

Starting point is 03:17:43 they create something cool and then a bunch more people come in. Uh, but what's, what's your kind of, uh, how have you tried to predict the future around what will allow it to break out? Yeah. It's hard to predict. If you think back to YouTube, this is why I love the YouTube metaphor in 2005. You look at the shaky home video, sort of videos that were put on there, home camera videos, and you pirated content and all kinds of random things. You could sort of easily look at that and be dismissive of YouTube and say, hey, this is non-serious. Hey, what are the YouTube native shows going to look like? Is that even a real thing to think about? And you now look at, it was a hard.

Starting point is 03:18:18 hard to look at that and see Mr. Beast being implied in it. And the same thing is true today. You know, I made a spooky meditation tracker for Halloween last week to track my meditations. There's a lot of fun AI creative mini apps. A great example of that is last week for Halloween. A big trend on TikTok was this sort of ghost face killer AI videos where you take a photo of yourself, you give it this very long and elaborate prompt and it generates a sort of scream style, you know, 2,000 eras, you on a bed, the ghost face killer, the guy from scream behind you in the doorway. And to actually replicate it, it looks amazing, but to replicate it, you've got to share this thousand-word prompt. That makes no sense. So now there's a mini-app for that

Starting point is 03:18:59 on Wabi. It was super fun for Halloween. It's probably not going to be relevant for another 51 weeks, and then it'll be hot again. So by lowering the barrier to making software and lowering the sort of seriousness, you get this sort of explosion of really interesting native disposable perhaps apps that wouldn't have existed otherwise. Makes a ton of sense. I can't wait to get access. I wanted to ask you about, not to switch gears too much, but I wanted to get your take on the AI,

Starting point is 03:19:25 kind of like Gen AI and music space. You're on Spotify. I have some of your song saved. I'm saved. I'll be on a drive and you pop up. But how are you thinking about that category? and where you kind of see it going. Is it we were having a bait,

Starting point is 03:19:48 I think we're having Mike Ian from Suno later this week, but we've been having an debate. Is it just people that are playing around with these tools and enjoying the process of music making, which has always been a big part of the traditional music industry? Is it people listening to the music that they're making? Are they listening to other music? But what's your read as a musician?

Starting point is 03:20:07 It's actually very, music and software are no different. People want to participate. And here's what's misunderstood about, If you look at why was peak record sales and music revenue in the 1990s, it's because that's when we had mixtape culture and mixed CD culture, right? People were able to participate and make their own music and share it with their friends, and you sort of had this whole long tale of music being created. And then music somehow, with streaming, went back to being broadcast the way it was in the

Starting point is 03:20:32 60s and 70s before the cassette was invented. Software is actually very similar. Where we have software today, 20 million programmers in the world decide what 6 billion of us use. So I think the thing that drives love of the media, whether it's software or music, is the ability to participate. And that's why people love AI music. So that's just like a general steepening of the power law between creation and usage. Because with the Spotify AI music, like, yes, there's tons of people who are using AI to create songs. So there's more creators than ever.

Starting point is 03:21:06 But then there's also, like, there are also AI music artists. that are publishing and climbing the charts. And I wouldn't be surprised if we wind up having some crazy power law outcome. I mean, much like Harry Potter Valencia, like, took over the internet for a day. That's right. And, you know, people are so, it's always the same criticisms, which is, oh, it's not real. It's not real. Like, TikTok's not real.

Starting point is 03:21:32 Right? We're interested in entertainment and, like, whether it's real or not is completely secondary. I think the important thing is people are participating. And that's, it's not just going to be. music thing, it's going to be every form of media, it's going to be software. I mean, that's the whole thing more people can now create. Yeah, speaking of TikTok, do you, is it a prerequisite for growing a new social network to piggyback on another social network? Feels like TikTok did that with the watermark and just buying a lot of ads on Snap and Facebook maybe. And then threads,

Starting point is 03:22:02 seems like it's actually sort of working, but it's heavily piggybacked on Instagram. Is it possible to just grow a new social network without having social? some unfair advantage. I mean, have you tried posting anything to threads? Working might be generous. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I have.

Starting point is 03:22:19 It's certainly not where the tech community is right now. It's where Connor Hayes is, my boy, running it over there. I would agree. Yeah, I would agree with you like how much it's working, but it's like, I think the point still holds, which is like, which is like, I don't know. How could you even try? I mean, have you bet on a lot of, have you made a ton of, have you made a ton of I'm going to start us new social network investments.

Starting point is 03:22:44 Like I feel like A16C is like the place that takes that risk. And like this is sort of a new entrant into that. Yes. Yeah, look, when networks work what emerges are network economies, and that's the gold standard for everything, for modes, for business model quality, for increasing returns to scale. What's so interesting about AI has mostly been tools.

Starting point is 03:23:05 There aren't really that many AI native networks, and that's what Wabi is. That's one of the reasons we were so excited. But I think this general trend from tools and networks, it's a really important one to watch. And it's been this sort of like increasing topic within the investor community. So yeah, no, look, as for whether they need to be bootstrapped off of others, I think that the existing networks have become a lot more sensitive to that. And they're very cautious around emerging networks, bootstrapping off of their networks. So I think it's a tactic, but it's a hard one to execute.

Starting point is 03:23:36 You've got to kind of think about owning networks and new categories. instead of just focusing on social. Policing of links across networks. Like you can imagine it's so easy to like, okay, yeah, it exists within the app but that you can share with a link. But all the, I mean, the walled gardens. People, there's a bull market

Starting point is 03:23:52 and building walls around gardens right now. Like, I have friends that use TikTok and they send me, they send me TikToks, and I don't have the app installed. And so I'll click it and it'll open in a web browser, but the web browser just will not play it for me. There's no button that I can click be like playing the web browser.

Starting point is 03:24:10 The only, it's just like, download the app or get lost. You have to send it to our one friend who's on TikTok and say, can you send us a voice note describing this video? Can you just describe it? It's terrible. It's a mess. Mark said that, you know, voice notes are a form of violence. So that's a whole other topic.

Starting point is 03:24:27 Yeah, yeah. Yeah, he did. Look, guys, I do think the networks are really sensitive to this. If you look at it, you know, one possible explanation is that it's hard to actually build a network today, so the new network effect is the externalization of that. So if you look at mid-jurdy, mid-jurney is not a network per se, but what happens is when mid-jurney is consistently a part of the conversation on X, people are making tutorials on YouTube. Like if you dominate networks organically, that is the network effect today. It's sort of what Cluelly does. So I think that's

Starting point is 03:24:59 one approach to it, but no, man, it's like the last 10 years of books and blog posts have over-trained every executive in PM, and they're all like, hold on a second, no way we're to let this get bootstrapped off of our audience. Yeah, the thing that I'm interested to follow is, is SORA created this new magical experience for creating AI videos, specifically the cameo feature was like the innovation. In my view, that was not, it wasn't just like model quality

Starting point is 03:25:27 that made it broke out. It was like, it was good at making a certain type of like internet style, internet native video that, and then it also innovated on the feature level. and that's what caused this kind of breakout. The challenge is like they made a great tool, which is what Wabi is doing and plans to do, but they couldn't retain the experience on the platform, right?

Starting point is 03:25:52 Content wants to be free, content wants to go everywhere. And so they created this amazing tool. Will they create a network? That's like TBD, right? But I think with Wabi is like you can create this software, but then it's self-contained. So if other people want to consume that software, they'll actually have to stay on Wabi, which should give it a real shot at building that kind of network and consumption.

Starting point is 03:26:17 That's exactly the bulk case. Actually, the interesting thing about SORA is that you've got cameo as a new content primitive, but then you've got a question of what is the status game. And you guys, of course, have read the famous essay, you know, we're all status seeking monkeys. You have to have a status game, and I don't know that it was, it might have been comedy for a minute on SORA. So without a status game, I think people quickly lose an incentive to continue to participate. And I think the nice thing about Wobby is it's not just that creation, consumption happens in a single platform.

Starting point is 03:26:45 But the status game is creating sort of the most opinionated, strange, interesting app. And because social is built in, you can get all the kind of consumption and network effects on the platform. Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. Tell you, Genea, that we want to be at the top. I want to be at the top of the top of the waiting. I want to be at the top of the way. Guys, I'm actually going to, I'm going to make a TVPN app that creates the trading cards after this.

Starting point is 03:27:09 I'm going to send it to you because I've always had trading card fomo, man. I want to be on one of those things. Oh yeah. Yeah, make one. Make one. I'm planning to make it. We got to get Eugenia on there first though, man. There's two ways to get on a trading card.

Starting point is 03:27:22 You can do like a specific deal or something like that. Or you can get married. Or you can do something just normal in the real world, you know. I mean, I was tempted to actually make the round much, much. much bigger just to hear the gong. Oh, we're all hit the gong for you guys. Yeah. This is not, we hit the gong for all major.

Starting point is 03:27:42 It's fantastic. Love that gong energy. Okay. Thank you. Yes, super exciting one. Great stuff. Good to catch up. Thank you so much for hop on the show.

Starting point is 03:27:52 We'll talk to you soon. Talk soon. All right. Love it. Let me tell you about wander. Find your happy place. Book of Wander with Inspiring Reviews, Hotel Green News, Dreamy beds, top tier cleaning in 24-7 concier service.

Starting point is 03:28:03 it's a vacation home, but better, folks. Our next guest, we have David Risher and Aaron Brewer. We're deep in the fourth hour. We are in the fourth hour, but we have David, Richard, Aaron Brewer, from Lyft in the Restorm Radio Room. Welcome to the show. How are you doing? Congratulations.

Starting point is 03:28:21 Massive earnings call. Looking good. You guys look more like you're kind of calling in from like a radio show or something like that than us. I love this setup. This is great. That's how I feel. I feel like we're like the more.

Starting point is 03:28:32 We're like the morning DJ crew. Yeah, yeah. Good. Hot hits all day long. I love it. There you go. There you go. Take us through what happened today.

Starting point is 03:28:42 What's the news? Okay, so just off our earnings call. So for those of you don't know, a public company, I'm David, by the way. This is Aaron and CEO, CFO. And what, you know, we do, you know, every quarter is we spend about an hour or so talking to analysts about what just happened the prior three months. So here's what just happened. best earnings ever highest sales ever you know high more active riders than ever more driver hours than other and here's a crazy fun fact I love the air horn so but here's a crazy fun fact so when

Starting point is 03:29:19 Aaron and I started about two and a half years ago we were we were sort of losing you know maybe 300 million dollars in cash every year now we just had our first billion dollar over the trailing 12 months cash flow generation. So just a huge, huge. John, hit the gong for that. All right. That is amazing. We don't, we don't get to hit the gong for free cash flow as much as we'd like. Yeah. So what's the plan with the cash flow? Are you, uh, we're zooming all over the place? Uh, is, uh, I mean, we've talked to some folks who are in similar situations. They flip their business around. They start generating cash. Then it's time to buy back stock. It's time to, reinvest in the future. It's time to pay dividends. What have you done in the past and how are you thinking?

Starting point is 03:30:06 How do you even make that type of decision? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Happy to, you know, first of all, as David mentioned, like what a privilege to be here now, two and a half years later, be in this position where we're generating cash. We also guided out a few years in advance and said, we're going to generate even more cash than we thought over the next couple of years. So, you know, CFO's dream here. Over 2020, If you think about what we've done, we announced our first share buyback program in the company's history. We said we would, is $750 million in size. We said we would use about $500 million of that by May of 2026.

Starting point is 03:30:45 In fact, we're going to, you know, things are going great. We're going to actually use that $500 million by the end of 2025. And then we've acquired two companies. We bought Free Now in Europe, leading taxi provider in Europe. And then we most recently announced the acquisition of TBR Global Shofaring. We announced some investments we have coming up at Waymo. So if you think about that overall, pretty balanced, but very, very focused on, you know, we are a growth business. We are in growth markets.

Starting point is 03:31:13 And so having the opportunity to invest against that to do it in a way that's very conscious of driving value for our shareholders, not in terms of the growth, not only in terms of growth of the business, but in deploying some of that back and share buyback. So we like the balance. The question on everyone's head, on the top of everyone's head, I'm sure, is autonomous vehicles. You're probably getting AV questions constantly. Maybe set the table for us and walk through. Yeah, just walk through the high-level thesis, and then maybe we can dig into some of the particulars of the strategy. Yeah, 100%. It is the number one question everyone's asking.

Starting point is 03:31:51 And you don't, look, what a privilege, right? Because how often do you get to be in an industry that is clearly going to be transformed? Okay. So what's going to happen? We think the market size is going to grow dramatically. Like, we think AVs for the sector, I'm not just talking about for lip, but for the sector, because it's a good product. If you've been in San Francisco or some of the other places where you can see AVs, it's safe.

Starting point is 03:32:12 You can kind of zone out in the back seat. You can, you know, whatever you want to do. So anyway, so it's a cool product. And so what that tends to do is it tends to expand the market. Okay, so what are we doing? You know, we're not in the business of making cars or even making AV tech. So we got a partner. Who have we partnered with?

Starting point is 03:32:28 Well, we've partnered with two of the biggest in the world, Waymo in the United States, who's clearly the market leader in the U.S. And Baidu in China, who's clearly the market leader there, that'll help us get cars and tech up into Europe. And what you'll see is we'll integrate these onto our platform and create what we think of as a hybrid network. A lot of drivers on our platform, 1.5 million drivers, 1.6 million drivers on the platform,

Starting point is 03:32:49 they're going to continue to drive because there aren't enough AVs in the world just to satisfy the demand with AVs. But then, you know, in certain markets like Nashville and others, we'll have more and more AVs in the platform and create something where holds greater in the sum of the parts. When are we bringing track cars to the platform? You want to track a car,

Starting point is 03:33:05 you want a Ferrari challenge or some sort of BMW that's been modified for the track, and you want to rent that on the... I love the way you think. John, we did a track day on Sunday, and now it's the only thing I think about. But I do think that the actual,

Starting point is 03:33:23 like the car ownership pattern might actually change dramatically in the future. And this is my, like, thesis is, it's half a joke is I own a track car. I maybe take an autonomous vehicle on a commute or specific things, but then you drive for enjoyment. Yeah, there are human drivers in the car for specific rides where there's either higher demand or specific weather conditions or specific road conditions. And so I feel like a lot of people want to hit, you know, oh, the new technology is going to come in.

Starting point is 03:33:59 It's going to be 100% of the market on day one. And that's just never the way it plays out. So how are you thinking about the way it plays out and how are you preparing for that transition? I mean, you're putting your finger on something that I think as human beings, we tend to do it to a fault, which is we sort of think binary, right? It's this or it's that. You know, it's X or it's Y. And it rarely is one or the other. It's almost always both. And this is the reason why, you know, frankly, being, you know, alive today is so interesting,

Starting point is 03:34:28 is you have these new modalities. So, like, okay, look, over the last, I've been old guy, so over the last many years, when I learned to drive, I don't drive on a stick. I still have a stick. It's great, but I also have a Tesla, which is not a stick. In fact, it's the opposite of stick. Did you ever drive stick in San Francisco when you were first learning? Because John and I were in San Francisco last week, and I was showing him, like, the different hills that I, when I was, when I was like,

Starting point is 03:34:51 wherever, 16 and a half, 17. Driving Stick and driving a manual in San Francisco really is like a coming of age moment. Yeah, and then reversing into a parking space.

Starting point is 03:35:03 Yeah, yeah. I will tell you a story about, I grew up on the East Coast, but our daughters grew up in San Francisco and I still smell in my head the grinding of our older daughter on DeVisadero. You know what I mean?

Starting point is 03:35:19 It's just burned in my head. But that, but that. That's what it's going to be like, right? So it's going to be, yeah, I want to go, you know, I want to take a road trip. Of course, I want to drive myself. That's super fun. I want to commute tomorrow. I'm just going to let something else do the thing, and I'm going to zone out.

Starting point is 03:35:32 And that's the future we're building for. I'll say one more funny thing, which is another weird human thing. If you ask people, do you want a driver on the car? A lot of people say, nah, I'd rather just be a little. If you ask people, what's your favorite lift ride ever? They'll say, oh, my God, I had this amazing conversation with this driver. It was all about his life. He asked me about my data or whatever.

Starting point is 03:35:51 That's the future. The future is not going to be just mechanical and virtual, and it's not just going to be physical. It's going to be this blend. And that's where we're building to. Talk about flex drive. Talk about all the, like, how complicated the value chain is, even if we see amazing performance in AVs and we get tons of autonomous vehicles on the road,

Starting point is 03:36:12 it feels like there's there are tons of things that Tesla's not going to want to do. There's tons of things that Waymo's not going to want to do. There are going to be other. competitors and other differentiators, walk through the whole supply chain, how it fits in, how you're, how you're planning to fit in. So this touches on something again, so important. And I'll use a funny analogy for a second. I don't know why, but for some reason, like my TikTok stuff or my YouTube, like, often they'll have like, here's what Disney World looks like to you. And then they'll do drone shots and be like, that haunted mantras looks amazing, like this huge building behind me. It looks nothing like a haunted man. Just a warehouse with quickly. same thing with AVs. It looks like a sort of a seamless digital thing, but behind it, as you say.

Starting point is 03:36:54 Humans driving remotely. Well, there is some of that. Sometimes. Okay, that's interesting. Maybe one person per five cars, but, you know, and we're getting there better, but the teleoperation will be occasionally. Their teleoperation is the thing. It's valuable.

Starting point is 03:37:10 Yeah, it makes sense. Well, but look, there's also someone's got to clean the car. Someone's got to charge the car. Someone's got to maintain the car. Someone's got to reboot the car. You know, so there's all that. That's called. management. We do it through a subsidiary called FlexDrive. Lyft has about 15,000 cars today. These are

Starting point is 03:37:24 not AVs. Today, these are EVs and normal ice cars that are being managed by Flex Drive and kept available for drivers to use when they don't want to use their primary car. So that's a piece of, you know, it's a skill we have. It's great. And then you've got to keep those cars, if they're available, you've got to keep them utilized. You've got to keep them, you know, the demand coming in and matching that supply 24-7, even if it's raining, even if, you know, cons are just got out, you know, even during the Super Bowl, you know, in the last five minutes of the Super Bowl where demand goes through the roof. So anyway, what you're referring to or what you're kind of alluding to is that ride chair is complex and it's very big scale and you

Starting point is 03:38:00 add EVs and it's only going to be more complex. But this is what we do. This is sort of our jam and we're super excited about this, the future for. Yeah. Yeah, no, it seems like you're set up very well with the cash flow to actually play in other industries. It's going to be a very exciting time. Georgie, do you have anything else? Yeah, just how have you guys, like, what's been the focus internally with the team, it feels like the best way to build confidence as a team is to just like steadily execute against your guys' plan and roadmap, and you certainly have done that over the last couple of years. I imagine when both of you guys took this job, there were some people that were saying,

Starting point is 03:38:41 like, why would you sign yourself up for this? you know, it's harder to, it's much harder to look like an incredible CEO or a CFO with a company that needs some kind of new momentum and, you know, it's easier to look like a genius if you're joining a business that's growing at, you know, let's say 300% a year or something, you know, crazy like we're seeing in some of these AI companies. But yeah, what has been the kind of unlock from a team or culture standpoint that has allowed you guys to deliver like this. I'll jump in here from my perspective, you know, thinking about joining Lyft, you know, number one, just incredible brand, right? This company just has an incredible, durable brand.

Starting point is 03:39:27 And it operates in a market where scale matters, right? And so you continue to grow scale. You can drive very attractive economics. And then certainly as I join the company, you know, this company has an incredible culture, right? We have a tremendous teams here, incredibly smart, really, really focused on our customers and inclined to always do the right thing, right? To think big, to do the next right thing. So, you know, honestly, the first six to nine months, I think, for both of us was just, you know, if you think about it, the company was recovering for the pandemic. Founders stepped aside. It was a big time of transition. So focusing on execution, focusing on just serving the customer, delivering a great service,

Starting point is 03:40:12 and then taking it really step by step, because that earns you the right, right? You build that discipline, that success, that earns you the right to do the next thing. Now you start doubling down on product innovation. For drivers, for riders, we start launching a slew of new products. That's super exciting for team members, for our riders, for the community out there.

Starting point is 03:40:32 Then we start, you know, generating a lot of cash. Great. How do we build from there? So, you know, I often reflect on this a little bit with David. It's, you know, there was sort of an inflection point of the company, I think, when we both came in. And I'll, you know, can I speak for both of us? I think we both feel it now. It's like this next big leaping off point.

Starting point is 03:40:52 And, yeah, it's exciting. It's a fun place to work. I'll just say a tiny, tiny bit more. I mean, when you come in, look, you got to cast a big vision. So the people get kind of excited about it. And we had a big vision around customer obsession and around serving and connecting. You got to make sure you got the right. people and I got super, super lucky.

Starting point is 03:41:10 Aaron was one of the first hires I made, one of the best hires of my life, right? So you've got to have that right team around the table, and our manager team is incredible. And then, as Aaron says, you've just got to execute, execute, execute. And that success begets success, begets success, it unlocks opportunity. Now we can think even bigger.

Starting point is 03:41:25 So we're just kind of getting started two and a half years in. I love it. I love, I love, I love, success. I love seeing you guys win. Congratulations. Are we always, uh, David, we really enjoyed our last conversation. Aaron, it's great to meet you, and looking forward to the next quarter. Well, I know that David was mentioning he wants to get the earnings call on your show.

Starting point is 03:41:45 You know, this is, this is, you know, the closest we could come. Thank you for helping us. It was all. Thanks so much. Congratulations on an awesome quarter. Have a great thing. Hey, you got to you too, by the way. Thank you.

Starting point is 03:41:56 Did you guys write that? Did you write that? Did you write that? We did not. No, that was all Mike Isaac. Yeah, he just had fun with us. It was a lot of fun. A lot of time in that.

Starting point is 03:42:06 We survived. We did. We did. Great to see you guys. We'll talk to you. We'll talk to you. So, thank you. Thank you.

Starting point is 03:42:12 All right. Take care. Let's check in with the timeline. Stefan was saying, please ask them about the biggest fish they've caught. That should be an ongoing question. It's the biggest fish you've caught. What is the biggest fish you've got, Jordy? This is.

Starting point is 03:42:30 Have you ever caught a big fish? I've only gone fishing on the ocean. Yes. You know that's where they have the big fish. They do have the big fish there. But I went out on, I like doing, I tend to like doing weekend activities. It sounds strange, but are like constrained until like a few hours. Okay.

Starting point is 03:42:49 And going out at like hunt, you know, we were trying to go for bluefin tuna. This was sometime last year. I feel like that we spent like 12 hours out there, did not catch. Wait, before you, Tyler, do you ever do you ever do a bet going? Do you think Jordy's biggest fish is over under 30 pounds? What do you think? I'm going under. You're going under 30 pounds.

Starting point is 03:43:11 Okay, Jordy, give us the final answer. How big was the bluefin tuna that you didn't catch? We did not catch a bluefin tuna that day. So have you ever caught a fish at home? I don't think I've gone in a pond one day and got a minnow, right? I don't think I've ever caught fish. You've never caught anything. I don't think I've ever caught a fish in your entire life.

Starting point is 03:43:32 But my dad wasn't big into fishing. Wow. We went, we would go camping a lot. We need a trading card up. Never caught a fish. I mean, we should, we have to change this. This is important. Yeah, it's, it's funny growing up around the ocean, surfing my whole life.

Starting point is 03:43:48 Yeah. Never. Never thought to just throw in the old line with some chunk. It's so easy. You live by the ocean. You live walking distance to the ocean. This is a challenge for you. Today, maybe this weekend, walk to the ocean, catch a fish.

Starting point is 03:44:02 Catch a fish. Catch a fish. You love Nobu. You go to Nobu all the ocean. time. You never thought, what if I did it myself? What if I did it? Nobu. Safe as Shinkeh catches my... That's true. That's true. Yeah. John, what's the biggest fish you've got?

Starting point is 03:44:14 150 pounds, baby. Halibate. I was 10 years old. It was fantastic. The crowd goes wild. It weighed more than me at the time, which was electric. Because it was truly like conquering a beast that was bigger than me, which is like so satisfying. I... So, I need to look into this, Tyler. Maybe this is a good question for you.

Starting point is 03:44:35 hit the deep research buddy. Get ready to do some deep research, buddy. But at my local beach, a place that I normally surf in Malibu, there are tons of leopard sharks, and they hang out where the water's like three to four feet deep. So after you catch a wave, if there's good visibility, you almost, like every other wave I'm seeing a leopard shark. And usually I just kind of just jump back on my board and paddle out.

Starting point is 03:45:02 Because they're like, I don't know, they're like three or four feet. they're not massive or anything. But since you've challenged me to catch a fish, maybe the next time I jump down and try. Shark is technically a fish. Yeah. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:45:13 That would count. Yeah, they are. Yeah. Yeah. So I should just dive down and catch it with your bare hands. With my bare hand. I like this. Maybe we could.

Starting point is 03:45:22 Maybe we could. If that doesn't work, I'd recommend trying to shoot fish in a barrel. I've heard that that's pretty easy. We'll get you a barrel. We'll get you a barrel. Put some fish in it. And you can. Oh, I did.

Starting point is 03:45:34 You can pull it. A.R. 15 and just start shooting fish in the barrel. You know, shooting a fish in a barrel, it must be, it's actually pretty hard to do, I imagine. Depends on a barrel. If you use a big gun, you're going to break the barrel, and then the water's going to go everywhere. My beautiful puffer fish. You caught that? My pride and joy.

Starting point is 03:45:52 That doesn't really count. I want to see you catching an Atlantic bluefin tuna. They can exceed 1,500 pounds with some estimates reaching up to 2,000 pounds. That's what we need to do. Anyway, thank you so much for listening to the show, for watching the show. Leave us five stars in Apple Podcasts and Spotify. It's tough. To be honest.

Starting point is 03:46:10 To be honest, I kind of want to keep going. You want to go to the fifth hour? I kind of want to break the fifth hour. We have guests here. We do have guests here. We have to hang out with our guests. Thank you so much for watching. We will see you.

Starting point is 03:46:29 I can't wait to be back tomorrow. John's cut me off. John's cut me off. We did get into a good riff right at the end. It's fantastic. Amid 10 guests today. New question tomorrow will ask every guest. We'll ask Dave from Roblox.

Starting point is 03:46:46 We'll be joining tomorrow. We got Vlad from Robin Hood. What's the biggest fish you've ever caught? This is important. We're doing a super cat. How big is the fish you've ever caught, the biggest fish? And then maybe we'll create a boom in fishing. Maybe people will go fishing.

Starting point is 03:47:01 That's right. Fishing's underrated. Thank you so much for watching. We'll see you tomorrow. We love you. Goodbye.

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