TBPN - J.P. Morgan Goes Patriot Mode, Dutch Seize Nexperia, 𝕏 Timeline Reactions | Alexis Ohanian, Ryan Petersen, Serena Ge

Episode Date: October 13, 2025

(05:04) - J.PMorgan Goes Patriot Mode (09:57) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (18:34) - Netherlands Seizes Control of Nexperia (27:39) - Ryan Petersen, founder and CEO of Flexport, discusses the challenges of navigating the logistics industry amid fluctuating tariffs and the importance of building a team of dedicated "missionaries" rather than "mercenaries" to weather such uncertainties. He highlights the impact of recent tariff increases on trade volumes, noting a significant decline in shipments from China to the U.S. following the imposition of 100% duties, and emphasizes the need for companies to remain adaptable and committed to their mission in the face of unpredictable policy changes. (49:18) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (01:30:50) - Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of Reddit and husband to tennis star Serena Williams, is an entrepreneur and investor known for his involvement in various ventures. In the conversation, he discusses his recent projects, including Athlos, a women's track and field league, and his investment in Angel City FC, a women's soccer team. He also touches on his support for Stoke Space, a company developing reusable rockets, and shares insights on the evolving landscape of AI and social media. (02:01:56) - Anduril Unveils EagleEye Warfighter Glasses (02:05:04) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (02:28:39) - Serena Ge, an 18-year-old entrepreneur and founder of Data Curve, discusses her journey from dropping out of school at 18 to participate in Y Combinator with an initial project called Uncle GPT, which eventually evolved into Data Curve. She highlights the company's focus on providing coding data for foundation model labs to develop and enhance capabilities, emphasizing the importance of high-skilled tasks and a bounty-based system to engage top-tier coders. Serena also shares insights into the company's rapid growth, including raising a $15 million Series A funding round, and her experiences building a scrappy, ambitious team culture. (02:35:59) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.comFigma - https://figma.comVanta - https://vanta.comLinear - https://linear.appEight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpnWander - https://wander.com/tbpnPublic - https://public.comAdQuick - https://adquick.comBezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.comPolymarket - https://polymarket.comAttio - https://attio.com/tbpnFin - https://fin.ai/tbpnGraphite - https://graphite.devRestream - https://restream.ioProfound - https://tryprofound.comJulius AI - https://julius.aiturbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.comfal - https://fal.aiPrivy - https://www.privy.ioCognition - https://cognition.aiGemini - https://gemini.google.comFollow TBPN: https://TBPN.comhttps://x.com/tbpnhttps://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

You're watching TBPN. Today is Monday, October 13th, 2025. We are live from the TBPN Ultradome, the Temple of Technology, the Fortures of Finance, the Capital of Capital. Let's go. Did you see? We got some media attention. That's right. We were mentioned on Cheeky Pint, Charlie Songhurst and Mark Andreessen, chatting with John Collison on Cheeky Pint. You probably saw it over the weekend. Of course, we were talking about the New York Times. We were on the cover. of the Sunday business section. Thank you to Mike Isaac. We danced with the gray lady.

Came out. And it was beautiful. A couple scratches. A couple scratches. It was beautiful. Thank you to Mike Isaac for coming to the Ultradome, hanging out with the whole team, trying to understand the absurdity of this show.

We had a lot of fun. And it was funny, the digital version of the article came out at 2 a.m. Pacific on Saturday. Yeah. and I ended up waking up. Yeah, what's your sleep score? What's your sleep score for that night? Oh, it was pretty brutal, actually.

I got a bunch of text messages from you and Dylan at three in the morning. You guys had clearly read it. Yeah. Woke up and read it. Yeah, I got a 43. Whoa. That's New York Times for you, baby. Yeah, so pretty rough.

But I thought it turned out great. It's good. We got a ramp mention in there. Time is money, save both. Easy to use corporate cards, Phil. accounting and a whole lot more all in one place. We also got a polymarket mention in there. This is why you advertise on TVPN.

We'll get you mentioned in the New York Times. But yeah, it was fun, fun article. Yeah, it was good. But there was bigger news than us, bigger news than our war to bring SportsCenter to LinkedIn. It's actually funny. It's funny. Can you imagine like the real LinkedIn heads that are going to read that article?

Be like, these guys don't take LinkedIn. at all. They don't understand us. They're on X. They're bigger on X than they are on LinkedIn. These guys are fake LinkedIn heads. No, we are trying to grow our LinkedIn.

If you want to help us on our war path to bring technology news for the first time to LinkedIn and educate the unwashed masses on LinkedIn as to the nature of technology, we'd love to have you join the team. We're looking for a social media manager, someone to help with growth, help post and repurpose content clip.

Also do new content. It looks like some hybrid is somebody that enjoys writing. Yep. Enjoys the content of the show and wants to basically repurpose the show's content for the LinkedIn feed. Yep. It sounds, I think it is a lot more fun than it sounds. Exactly. You get to hang out here at the Ultradome every day.

You have to view these platforms as like large, systems that you can kind of understand how to optimize within them. And so on YouTube, you know, there's the title, the thumbnail. There's this whole game of like what the current thing is on YouTube. Like if you do an interview with Mr. Beast, you're just going to get a ton of views on YouTube. That's not the case on X. We'd love to have them on the show. It would be fun.

But it's not going to be our biggest draw. Somebody like Rune will be a great draw on X, but probably not on YouTube. And LinkedIn is similar. We do a lot of content that does do well. on LinkedIn already, but there will be specific pieces of the show. So you have to work to figure out what's working. And then how is their algorithm changing? How is their content structure changing?

Like the medium is the message. That's very real. And so you have to deliver content that fits within that, whether it's the vertical short form or the long posts or I hear AI is extremely popular on LinkedIn. So maybe you have to take our authentic content. Sloppify. Sloppify.

Exactly. That might be the key to success. I don't really care what the key is. obviously we do have brand standards, but we want you to come on and explore what works, find interesting niches of strategies that work. We've done this on Instagram. Yeah, I mean, the main thing is we, yeah, it's very much an art and a science. It's also your job is not to post.

Your job is not to just deploy content. Yes, yes, yes. Your job is to experiment and understand the platform better than anybody else. Understand the culture of the platform. Exactly, exactly. And we've done that with a lot of things. We've had fun with our substantiated. You can go subscribe, tbPN.com.

And I think we wound up coming up with a unique product in email. It's a daily letter with one, you know, 500 word rant by me. With some timeline. And then some timeline posts. And like, you know, everyone has an email newsletter. There's a lot of email newsletters out there. We still wanted to carve out something unique. And we want to do the same thing on LinkedIn.

So please come help us. And then obviously you know who understands the culture of American dynamism. Restreamed. of course. One live stream 30 plus destination is multi-stream and reach your audience wherever they are. No, who? Tell me. J.P. Morgan. J.P. Morgan at 3 a.m. Pacific announces a one and a half trillion dollar security and resiliency initiative to boost critical industries. Let's give it up for J.P. Morgan for saying the biggest number. This is the biggest number we've heard. The firm will make direct equity investments of up to 10 billion as part of the one and a half trillion dollar initiative to

address pressing needs and key sectors from critical minerals minerals to frontier technologies. So do they just have $1.5 trillion laying around? The 10-year plan to facilitate finance and invest in industries critical to national economic security and resiliency. As part of the new initiative, J.P. Morgan Chase will make direct equity and venture capital investments of up to $10 billion. That's a lot. These are direct equity, so growth equity. So, Yeah, I mean, that's like an Andresen-sized, or I guess Andresen's 65 billion or something, a little bit more. AUM?

Yeah, A-U-M for some of the big funds, like a general catalyst or a light speed. Like, I feel like a lot of the big venture funds are managing in the tens of billions now, maybe, something like that. Certainly. So they're saying, we're getting in the game. Watch your back. So Jamie Diamond says it has become painfully clear that the United States has allowed itself to become too reliant on unreliable sources of critical minerals, products, manufacturing, all of which are essential for our national security. Our security is predicated on the strength and resiliency of America's economy. America needs

more speed and investment. It also needs to remove obstacles that stand in the way, excessive regulations, bureaucratic delay, partisan gridlock, and an education system not aligned to the skills we need. So they are going to be focused on supply chain and advanced manufacturing, including critical minerals, pharmaceutical precursors, and robotics, defense and aerospace, including defense tech, autonomous systems, drones, next-gen, connectivity, and secure communications, energy independence, and resilience, including battery, storage, grid resilience, and distributed energy, and frontier and strategic technologies, including AI, cybersecurity, and quantum computing. You have to wonder if Sam gave the hard pitch to Jamie and said,

I know you were planning to give that one and a half trillion to a few people. I happened to have announced partnerships with every require about one and a half trillion of capital. He's basically just like, why don't you just not announce? Just be my banker and just do every deal up and down the stack. Yeah. Of course. Finance my entire supply chain. Of course. I'm sure Open AI will directly or indirectly get some of, some of this investment. There's a lot of, A lot of stuff in here, a lot of categories that are pretty cool, and we've talked to a lot of founders in these spaces. Very exciting. Noticably absent the luxury watch industry.

Are we not focused on that? Is Bezel the only company that's holding the line on luxury watches? I mean, I guess some of the bulk materials could be, you know, strategic diamond storage for iced out potax. That could be the solution. Definitely. But you can go get a watch at getbezzle.com. Your bezel concierge is available now. So we'll see any watch on the planet.

Seriously, any watch? Anything else from this? I mean, is this moving the markets? Is this why we're so back? Did you see the market on Friday? Yeah, I mean, MP Materials is up 23% today. But again, there's other stories out there, including the broader story around rare earth.

Yeah, the NASDAQ is up 2.2% today. should have worn white suits. What were we thinking? I know. And, you know, Friday was rough. Friday was rough. The NASDAQ sold off almost 3%. But I think it's good because for the last two weeks, everyone has been saying, it's a bubble, it's a bubble, it's a bubble, it's going to crash. And then it did crash

on Friday. The bubble popped. The bubble popped on Friday. And now we're out of the trough of disillusionment. We're in the plateau of productivity now. And so we can stop saying, it's not the problem. It's not. We can stop saying, It's a bubble because the bubble popped. That was Friday. Now we're ready to build again. We're ready to move forward.

It's time to build. No, of course. The Friday news was driven mostly by tariffs and a lot of back and forth with China. We have Ryan Peterson joining in just 20 minutes to talk about. Talk about how Donald Trump, how much sleep he's getting. Who is an actor is almost a character in Ryan's personal movie that is just sent to torment him. by announcing massive, you know, new trade wars every other month. In other news, OpenAI is partnering with Broadcom to deploy 10 gigawatts of chips designed

by OpenAI. Sophie, aka NetCap Girl on X, said AI won't peak until Broadcom starts getting hyped like Nvidia. That might be today. Broadcom is up another 10% on this news, even though he already sort of, This had already been basically announced. So Broadcom. Let's go, baby.

It's so funny if you went and just on the street and asked people, do you think Broadcom or Tesla is a bigger company? How many people would pick Broadcom? It is at $1.68 trillion. Yeah. Yeah, we got to turn Hawk Tan into an Elon level meme. He'll be like, I bought this network switch before. the hawk tan

went on TBPN something like that I don't know Stefan in the chat says what do you think Trump's sleep score is that's a good question he must be sleeping like four hours a night

yeah is today's rally like a taco trade right is that what's going on or has there actually been news on like the tariffs yeah I think over the weekend that's what I want to talk to Ryan about yeah over the weekend I think

it was a misunderstanding. Okay, okay. Like, both sides of being backed off. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's, I mean, immediately, it was remarkable how resilient.

You know, we talk about the resilience of the American consumer, but the resilience of the American retail trader is deeply underrated. We had multiple, I had interaction with multiple retail traders over the weekend, who immediately were like,

so this is a good time to buy the dip, Right? It's like everything should be like flashing like this is the start of the end. This is the crash of all 1929. Yeah, I was thinking what if the the catalyst for AI sell off was just Trump. This could be the beginning. It's such a terrible. It's such like a like viscerally terror. You're hearing stories about, you know, Bitcoin trading down 10% a day. Yeah, I was just talking about how many people were, were so. levered. Yeah, I had no idea this was a thing. I mean, usually, like, when I see the market trades down 2%, I'm like, okay, I'm like 2% poorer today or whatever. Like, I feel like I'm like roughly indexed to the market, not like heavily levered either way. And I feel like my business is 2%

rougher or like 2% better. Yeah, there's just like these screenshots from like Reddit, but a lot of people are like that people are like, I've, I, every single dollar that I've like saved and invested over the last decade is gone. Yeah. to the point where you didn't have like you love bitcoin so much that you didn't just put like yeah a few bitcoin in a wallet yeah no no like i'm not gonna lever no no no no like literally every person i interacted with uh in the real world over the weekend was like i lost 20 percent by now worth or something i'm like on a 2% move like what's what is your what is your strategy here uh but a lot of people are are risk on bitcoin bitcoin sold off like 10 percent 10 percent yeah so you

So you're just a modest two-x levered Bitcoin as the core of your strategy. And it's funny. So Zumer, that's the account on XZumer, who we featured on the show before. He, like Thursday night was saying like hot take, like leverage is the only way out of the permanent underclass. But he got $10,000 from Nikita's personal fund. He levered up. Well, yeah, we'll go into Zumergate and the backlash to the backlash to the backlash to the backlash in just a second. But if you're trying to get in on the action or protect what you got,

you got to do it on public.com investing for those who take it seriously. They got multi-ass investing, industry in the yields, trusted by millions. So you can say, I've had enough with all the volatility. I'm going cash only. I'm going bonds only, whatever you want. You can do it on public. Not on public over on hyperliquid. Two accounts were created Friday that shorted Bitcoin. and ended up successfully making around $200 million on these, like, very, no, not the, not the insider trading size gong, John. Easy, easy, easy. We'll find another reason. Okay.

Hit the size gong for J.P. Morgan's $1.5 trillion. Hit it a few times. We are not going to do the size gong for insider trading. We don't know, alleged insider trading. We don't know. Maybe that person was just smart. We can hit the size gong. for Baron Trump, potentially getting the nod to be a board director over TikTok.

That's actually pretty sweet. And that one makes a lot of sense to me because he's young. TikTok has a young audience. Like, you want young blood in these environments to actually innovate and create good products. I'm sort of bullish on that. But. And he earned it, right? I mean, his investing track me, he's generated billions of dollars.

He genuinely understands social media. Like a lot of people do ascribe, like, the Trump. podcast run to him and him being like, you got to go on Theo Vaughn. And Trump being like, who's Theo Vaughn? And Barron being like, trust me, like he's good. You got to go collab with this streamer. Like a lot of, a lot of social, a lot of aggressive social media risks that many politicians wouldn't do beforehand.

But Barron actually said, you know, he was going to do it. There was something else about the insider trading. Well, yes. So just because two people got the trade right doesn't mean that it's insider trading because on any given day, there could be two random people that are just short Bitcoin. You know, like, that just does happen. Like, I bet there's two people right now who are short Bitcoin who are not having a good day because Bitcoin's back up, right?

And so, like, there is just like an amount of like, you know, the lucky, like, someone gets, you know, you know, double sixes or whatever or whatever the consumer. Yeah, every day there's people, but, but this was, uh, this was suspicious. It was suspicious that it was like a new wallet, a specific time. Two new accounts created and then just massive, massive size. And that's the only thing they did. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, and they immediately cashed out.

Okay, no size gong for them. Oh, speaking of the size gong, are you aware of the gong show? No. So it's interesting, there's been a number of pieces written about TBPN, and many of them feature the gong and talk about the gong. None of them actually... The main character in the show. None of them actually talk about the gong show, which was a show in the 70s. where it was a, I think it was like a 30-minute, hour-long show or something like that,

that it was basically like America's got talent. So it was a talent show, you'd come on, you'd do, are you looking at up? It's just, it's so retro. I'm just laughing because it sounds like every startup that gets announced these days. It's like, oh, we're making a show. What should we call it? Oh, I don't have a creative idea. We should just call it the gong show.

The gong show, no. We should call it the browser company. Yeah. Browser company was creative to their company. Yeah, they were the first one. to do that. But the gong show was a talent show and they had a huge, huge gong, maybe even bigger than ours. And basically, yeah, you can see it. Yeah, it's about our size. Interesting mallet size. Huge mallet. Yeah, they're, they're definitely, we need to upgrade the mallet for sure.

And so the whole, the whole trick with the gong show was that they would bring someone on and they'd be like, okay, I'm going to play the flute or I'm going to do a dance or I'm going to tell a comedy routine. and they had a whole bunch of like celebrity like judges. And if the judges didn't like the performance at any moment they could stand up and just hit the gong and that would be like get out of here. Like you're done. And so it's like a game to like not get the gong run as opposed to us where you want the gong. Maybe maybe we should adapt. That's actually true.

We have an interviewer, an interview guest on here getting a little boring where you're going to hit the gong and production team's going to cut to the next post. maybe that's the end state for this show is that we just say get out of here with this boring AI take tell us something news tell us something interesting negative Bobby says negative gong hits is crazy you're out of year yeah you well well privy wallet infrastructure for every bank privy makes it easy to build on crypto rails securely spin up white label wallets sign transactions and integrate on-chain infrastructure all through one simple API there is some news out of the Financial Times. The Dutch government takes control of Chinese own chip maker Nexperia.

Okay. And terminally online engineer says they did it. And it's Gert Gert Wilders saying we haven't an serious problem. Is that a real post from somewhere? That was a real post? That was a real post. About what? What are you referring to?

We haven't an unserious problem. refers to a viral post on X in mid-January, 2024 by Dutch politician Gert Wilders, and the response by English-speaking users who found the similarities between Dutch and English language was entertaining. Yeah, of course. What was the serious problem at that time?

What year was it again? Mid-January, 2024. 2024. What was going on then? I don't know. That's hilarious. But this doesn't seem like a serious problem. This seems like news for like good,

this seems like good news, right? The Dutch government seized control of one of Europe's biggest chip makers, which was owned by China, and Dutch and the Dutch just say, hey, it's ours now. We're nationalizing it. I mean, it seems like China should be saying they're having a serious problem because they want to have a chip maker, and now they don't, right? That seems like a rough go for them. But I guess next beer is Chinese operations will be in jeopardy because if you just sees a company that's operating in, like, if America was just all of a sudden, like, NVIDIA is owned by the government, well, then that, like, NVIDIA's research lab in Shanghai, I think, would probably be not a great place to be.

Yeah, it's also just, it sets, it can set off, you know, a wild chain of events. So I'll read through some of the financial times piece. Move escalates frictions between Western countries and Beijing over access to high end technology. We love high technology here. The Dutch government has taken control of Chinese-owned semi-company Nexperia, warning of risks to Europe's economic security after alleging serious governance shortcomings at the company.

In a statement on Sunday, the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs said it acted because of a, quote, threat to the continuity and safeguarding on Dutch and European soil of crucial technological knowledge and capabilities. On Thursday, China placed sweeping restrictions on the exports of rare earths using products from cars to wind turbines. The Dutch ministries said it invoked the country's Goods Availability Act because of, quote, recent and acute serious governance shortcomings and actions at Nexperia, which is based in the Netherlands, and has been a majority owned by Chinese Technology Group Wing Tech since 2019. The decision aims to prevent a situation in which the goods produced by Nexperia would become unavailable in an emergency.

That seems. Serious problem. Serious problem. I asked Gemini to translate the Geertz original post. It just says we have a serious problem with the political developments regarding the coercion act, and I hope that can be solved in the coming days. Boring. Boring.

Well, thank you, Gemini. Newest sponsor of TBPN, by the way. Check them out. Anyways, Nexperia, Purdue. produces chips used in the European automotive industry and consumer electronics. So, anyways, Vincent Karamans, the Dutch economy minister, can now block a reverse decisions taken by Nexperia's board. His department acted on September 30th, but only made its move public on October 12th. So again, I don't know, right? Anytime you just start

seizing, it can obviously, it's going to... Chinese companies. Seems way more aggressive than the Intel story, where, what was it, 10% stake for the U.S. government, something like that? Like, that is, and immediately in America, we were all debating, like, is this socialism? Like, have we taken a private company? Are we actually letting the free market work? Should, you know, the U.S. government be playing Kingmaker in the semiconductor industry?

It was a really, like, complicated issue. And, you know, I wrestled with it personally. And over in Europe, the Dutch are just like, we'll take it all, I guess. I don't know. Yeah. Well, they're not, I don't think they're, they're not seizing the asset. They're taking control. They're not saying this is ours now.

They're taking control over it. They have odd. Wing Tech, the owner of Nexperia, said that on September 30th, the Dutch government had issued an order requiring Nexperia and its global subsidiaries, not to make any adjustments to their assets and intellectuals. property, business operations, or personnel for one year. That seems like a big request. The following day, three top Nexperi executives with Dutch and German nationalities

submitted an emergency request to the Amsterdam Court of Appeal to intervene at the chipmaker. The court immediately suspended the powers of Chief Executive Zhang Zhuge Jung. And then they suspended him from his position as CEO. Hmm. Anyways. Europe's been on a tear. You saw the big new A-I-Span. I just, it's really, I feel like impossible to form a take here without understanding what the catalyst was.

Sure. Because we know that nobody steals more trade secrets than China. And so there's probably something going on behind the scenes here that we just don't know about. Yeah. Yeah, what was the real motivation? We'll have to dig into it. Well, in other European news, Europe's new big AI spending plan

is still only 30% of what META just purportedly paid to hire Andrew Tulloch. This was news over the weekend. Andrew is the co-founder of thinking machines. Poached. Poached to meta. For allegedly three and a half. Allegedly three and a half,

the number that kind of leaked was, what, one point something, one point five? That was the original number that he turned down. That was the number he turned down. What do you have on this, Tyler? Yeah, I mean, so I think it was somewhere in the summer, maybe like July, there was the rumors of him turning down $1.5 billion. It was like, oh my gosh, this is so crazy. That is crazy. Must be a true believer in thing machines.

Yep. And then, yeah, and then people, now people are saying 3.5 is the number. But even then, that's just like, the only thing I've seen where that number is is just on the timeline. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It seems like full rumor at this point. I saw it in group chats. Like, you're like, at least, at least, uh, equally unreliable as my, my least reliable friend texted it to me as well based on what he saw on the timeline. Uh, that's funny.

Uh, that's funny. Uh, yeah, I think, I think it's funny, Andrew getting the offer for one and a half billion over the summer being like, you know, thank you for the offer. I'm really, you know, honored that you have so much faith in me. I'm stick, you know, I'm going to stick with my principles. I'm going to stick it out with my team. I'm going to stay true to the mission. Yeah.

We just raised, uh, I'm a missionary, not a mercenary. I'm a missionary, not a mercenary. You know, we just raised two billion dollars to, you know, pursue, uh, to pursue our vision. And, uh, thank you a lot for the offer and, um, you know, look forward to hopefully collaborating in the future of Mr. Mark Zuckerberg. Two months later, it's like, how about three and a half billion? He's like, um, let's ride. That's right.

Yeah. So, anyways. Um, uh, Tyler, does, uh, Does this trade deal make you more or less AGI-pilled? I mean, so Thing Machines is already, like, not very AGI-pilled. So maybe it's actually more AGI pilling, right? Because Andrew Tulloch, maybe he is super AGI-I-pilled. He's seeing what's going on in Thing-Machines and saying,

He needs the scale. This is just not enough. He needs more. Yeah. He needs more compute. Maybe it's, I think this is more AGI-I-pilling. He saw the Prometheus plan. Yeah.

I want that. The other thing is like, okay, maybe he just thinks that the bubble is about a pop and he needs, like, actually, he needs, like, he needs a great chair. Yeah. Yeah, it's notable. The lesson is everyone has a price. It's just, which I think, you know, the industry's known forever.

It just turns out that the price is oftentimes, in this case, three times higher what most people's price would have been. WinSurf had a price. They went to Google, but of course the product stayed with Cognition. One of our sponsors, Cognition's the makers of Devin.

Devin is the software, AI software engineer, crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. We also have Ryan Peterson joining from Flexport. Does he have a price? Would he join TBBN full-time for $3.5 billion? Would you do it? Would you become a, would you become a mercenary? You said billion, right?

Three and a half billion. You have to go. You have to walk out of your office and say, I'm sorry, everyone. I'm becoming a podcaster. Oh, I think I could join you guys and on the place for it. Sorry.

No, no, no. It's a life's work mission. You have to be full time. The offer is contingent. You wouldn't do it. You'd stick around. That's great. You are true, you are true, you are true missionary.

Give me, give me the lore again on your take on missionaries versus mercenaries in the AI wars. What does history teach us about whether you should build an army of missionaries or mercenaries? Because I feel like some people are going both ways on them. Well, yeah. Right before you joined, we were, I was just joking about Andrew Tolick from thinking machines over the summer being, you know, I'm just imagining what the exchange with Mark was. But I'm a missionary.

I'm really honored that you would give me this one and a half billion dollar offer. You know, it shows massive faith in me. But, you know, I'm going to stick with the team, stick with the mission. And like, I hope we can find a way to collaborate. And then Zuck circles back with three and a half billion. And suddenly it's like, all right. I think we're in business here. That was rumor?

Three and a half billion is the rumor. Yeah. Wild. Well, yeah, you know, Machiavelli was the one who wrote the most about mercenaries and how useless they are when it comes to actual fighting. I thought it's more in the context of Zuck's security team than I do in his AI engine. When the bullets start flying, are these guys ready to take one? Or are they going to run away?

Well, to Andrew's credit, he was at Meta for 11 years. Yeah, he is just going home. He's going home. Yeah. Small price to bring him home. Yeah. How is your weekend? Great.

Great. Well, I'm here in Southern California. Unfortunately, I can't visit you guys. I'm in Palisbury Day. We're having a FlexSport customer conference starts tonight. So I've been practicing my big talk tomorrow. We're releasing a whole bunch of new technology and then I'm going to host a whole big customers. At this point is the, you know, I imagine like 100%.

of the flex board team. They have to be missionaries, not mercenaries at this point, because every day you could wake up to a 1,000% tariff on your entire business. And if you're a mercenary, you're going to jump ship. So I imagine the team is kind of buckled down already for this. And Friday wasn't actually that crazy, even though the market was crazy. But what was the internal, give us the play-by-play internal. Friday morning.

You said you had just gotten off of 2026 planning with the team and got hit with that. Thankfully, we do agile planning and we replant all the time. But yes, we just had a three-day planning session in San Francisco, like 40 of our leaders. And then, like, within hours of wrapping it up and saying goodbye to everybody, Trump, but now's 100% duties on China. And the last time he had these duties at this level back in April and May, we saw our volumes from China, the U.S. go down by 60%. Yeah, that's huge.

That lasted for five weeks until they relaxed the tariffs and then they came roaring back. We'll see. Polymarket has it. I think we've all learned a little bit. Stay calm. Polymarket rate has it at at least an hour or two ago. I had it at 13% odds of this going through on November 1st. Sure.

So the market doesn't. And then Trump also kind of signaled on Sunday that, hey, maybe he's going to ease off a little bit. So we're not, we're definitely not panicking on it. Props to the Flexport Customs Engineering team because we have this thing. It's called Tariffs. Stopflexport.com. It's a tariff calculator. And these guys have to keep it updated.

And this administration loves putting out the news on changes of customs policy on Friday afternoons. And these guys have worked so many weekends to keep, you know, speaking of missionary, they're working nights and weekends on duty, on call, on page of duty to keep the tariff simulator up to speed with whatever the newest regs are. From your actual conversation with customers, what was the, was there any material change to folks' business? post-liberation day. Like I know personally, like several companies that actually took seriously, like, the mission of reshoring. And now there may be like six months into building a different facility, but it's taking years.

And but they're like, like, it definitely flipped a switch from American dynamism is trendy to like there is a board level mandate to to actually consider reshoring in some way. how have your customers perceived it? How are people thinking about moving around the globe generally? That was definitely true in the first few months. But then when Terry started hitting, you know, like India tariffs right now are as high. Well, the China tariffs went up on Friday. But until Friday, Indian tariffs on India were just about the same as on China.

Sure. So it was sort of, you know, Latam tariffs are pretty low, but it's unclear if that's like here to stay or just a temporary blip, you could see Trump changing that overnight. So it's hard, like supply chain, especially if you're doing your own manufacturing, you're setting up your own plant. That's like a multi-year, four or five-year minimum commitment that you're probably making before it pays back. And then after that, you know, return on capital would take even longer than that. So I think it's the smart, I think the folks you're talking to probably in some sort of defense industry or something that's like more national security oriented

and you're like, yeah, we need to do this in the United States. For your typical company that's making apparel or home goods or other types of products, it's just like it's not really there to come back to the U.S. I've met more companies who aren't going to do it as a result of having, like the worst case I've seen is a company that makes bicycles in the United States. And they've made it so that bicycles are duty free

if you import them, but the bike parts are not. So these guys can't import parts. Yeah, they have to pay taxes on the tax. tariffs on the part, but their competitors just import whole bikes. So they're like, hey, we're just going to start producing overseas. That's really rough. Yeah, it feels like at the end of the day, there's like so many little sub niches in the economy. Like, there was a story in the Wall Street Journal about the maker of Sharpie was successful in, like, reshoring all of Sharpie manufacturing.

But Sharpies are probably not, you know, the target of like one specific tariff and then also. That's a critical industry for Trump. It is. He's got a sign. That was a hilarious one. That's true. The autographs get signed. Yeah.

What never has an autopen? Will it be a Sharpie? Like, autopan sharpie? Autopenn? What do you mean? It's like a machine that does the signature. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's how Biden signed all of his day. No, no way. So, I mean, is everyone just kind of glued to truth social now to get the latest updates on where this all goes? or are there other kind of like folks that are like reading the tea leaves and understanding, like is polymarket the definitive data source?

Like how are customers actually updating on like how real this is? I think prediction markets are, yeah, incredibly valuable for this. Really useful. They're pretty thinly traded. Like the one I cited, it only has $146,000 of liquidity. Yeah. It's not really getting used because one customer could make a hedge. Sure.

It's going to cost them more than that. So, but there's still signaling that. Actually, you know, the best source for us is just going to D.C. and talking to people. I've been going there once a month, going back in a couple weeks and just trying to get intel, what's really happening, what's coming down the pipe. I think the more you can build a relationship. This administration is like, you know, as opposed to terrorists as I am, as I am, they've been very open door to hearing our ideas, listening. They genuinely want to help businesses. So they've been like, we've been able to go in there and talk to them.

We're working on a couple things that we think we can reduce customs fraud. Like there's this massive fraud that's happening in customs right now. Oh, yeah. Because you just have this incentive. If you're the tariffs go way up. Now there's an incentive to cheat that wasn't there a couple of years ago. Sure. Or even last year.

And the way that you can cheat, this is highly illegal. Do not do this. Do not do this. It's not worth it. I only have one rule is I'm never going to jail. Yeah. So don't have the rule. Simple man.

Simple man. Yeah. But so the way that it works, and it's very rampant right now, is the United States is the only country in the world that allows foreign companies to import goods into the country with no legal entity, no requirement to have an employee or a person locally. So you can just import stuff into the country as a foreign company. And then you just lie on your declarations. And our customs, CBP has agents in like 60 countries, but they're there for counter-narcotics. and anti-terrorism stuff, they're not there for trade compliance and trade enforcement. So these companies just cheat and there's basically no consequence. And if they get caught, they can spin up a new entity at home and just keep doing it. So there's zero downside or maybe the goods gets. And the fraud is somebody is bringing in, let's say, $3 million worth of goods and they just say it's like, oh, it's $200,000.

Something like that, right? And so, and so again, the, the. people that are punished through that are actual American companies or anybody doing it the right way that then has to compete with a player in the market who doesn't have the same cost structure as them because they're just not paying terror they're not paying this is what we feel strongly about it and um right now on the amazon marketplace 60% of the sellers are non-resident importers that's what we call this uh from china because 60% of the time i buy something on amazon it's garbage

Yes. So I love Amazon, but that is becoming a problem. That's my personal experience. Yeah. So we're trying to highlight this issue around Washington and people have been really receptive to learn about it and to see how it works and to some propose ways that you might close this loophole.

So yeah, and the way that what's happening where American companies are getting trapped in this is that they're allowing their factories to import the goods for them. So instead of them importing it, they're letting the factory import it and feeling like everyone's their own personal lawyer and saying, hey, I didn't know about the fraud. It's not my fault. I just bought the goods in the United States.

And if the factory didn't pay duties, that's not my problem. Well, that is not how the law works. If you're paying for your goods at a price less than the duties alone would have been, then you must have, you know, you should have known about this. And I think it's going to be hard to convince a jury. So I think you'll see some enforcement cases, but probably they just need to make it to a foreign company just like every other country in the world. You need to have a legal entity in the country in order to import goods. Yeah. Do you have an idea of the scale of like the sweet spot for the scale of that type of

fraud? I imagine that you really can't get away with that if you're, you know, doing $10 billion of commerce, but there's probably a whole host of little, you know, $20 million operations that are maybe cheating or something. It's got pretty big. So I analyzed that in the United States, ocean freight shipping manifests or public record. Oh, sure. And so I analyzed all of them last week, with a team member of mine. We went through this. And what we found was about 10% of trade has switched terms to where the factory is now importing the goods, is our estimate, around 10, 11%. which is just massive amount of fraud. And probably going to keep growing and growing until they take enforcement.

Yeah. But is it even impossible to enforce? Like, how wouldn't you have to like 10x the size? It has to be a U.S. entity with my proposal, and we'll see if there's land somewhere, but it's like we'll have to be a U.S. entity with a U.S. bank account. with a U.S. director that can go to prison. And a U.S. employee can be held liable.

Exactly. And, you know, like, sure, you can always break the law. But if there's a threat of going to jail, you're probably not going to do that most of the time. Most people wouldn't. And we have a great country because it's much easier to start a business than it is to be a criminal. Yeah.

And so most of the smart people become entrepreneurs instead of criminals. Whereas in other countries, that's not true. It's easier to be a criminal than to start a business. Yeah. Can you give us an update on import genius? We were reading a New York Times, article and import genius was cited and we were just kind of like, oh, like, you know, we, we know that.

We know the founders. But I'd love to know like, like, what's the state of the business? It seems like you're still finding interesting data from that. Like how, like what role does import genius play in the, in the overall like community right now? Yeah. So import is a data service that takes those public shipping records that I mentioned and makes them searchable and accessible. And so that's the data that I was using to figure out.

of this fraud. We have a lot of different journalists use it to find what's going on in the world. They're also kind of finding, digging up fraud of some kind. There's lots of other use cases besides investigating fraud, but that's what tends to get into this. I imagine you can just use it to understand, like, are volumes falling or rising or what rates are, et cetera? Exactly. We use it for market share analysis, use it for elite generation for logistics companies helping to like 40s is it to find companies that we should talk to about their freight. And people use it for factories like to find you looking to do research on a factory, you kind of see what their shipping history is.

Yeah. Overall, I mean, maybe to close out, I'd love to know just kind of like there's obviously a lot of volatility with the tariff and the overall trade war. I don't even like it's just been such a like a low rumble for the last years for the last for this entire administration. I'm sure it's been a lot louder in your world. But does it feel like we're closer to having resolution? Like when we talked last time, I was like, I was like,

I think the business community, and I think you agreed with me, the business community just wants something to stick, a deal, if it's 50% forever, we can build our models off of that. We can invest against that. But uncertainty is particularly destabilizing to the U.S. economy, to global trade, et cetera.

Whatever it lands at, let's just get there now. Does it feel like we're closer than ever or getting farther away? Like how do you feel about just like the level of volatility in global trade? It started to feel like things were calming down until really I think Trump, the administration going after India is what kind of set off. Be like, oh, okay, maybe these aren't as stable as if like a negotiation can just quickly spiral on a country like that. that in a lot of ways we have a lot in common with India and should be an ally of ours.

This current level on China's definitely at a, our view is anything above about 60% duty is going to be an embargo level where almost all trade stops and we're so well above that right now. I don't think that that's where the administration wants this to land. I think they'd probably like it to be a little bit below the embargo level and give them a ratchet, make it a ratchet where they can put it above the embargo level

on a moment's notice when they don't do what they want. I wish we could say we had the long-term stability. Like if the current rates on Latin America lasted, it would be really kind of very clear for folks of what policy the administration is putting forward is, hey, we're going to treat the Southern, South America, Latin America. that kind of our backyard, our hemispheric partners, we're going to encourage kind of manufacturing there for stuff that doesn't make sense in the United States.

I think it's very hard for them to come out and say that overtly because they are like the actual message is, no, make it in America. Yeah. In the United States of America, not America. Medica. What's the latest on with the ports, automation at the ports? Oh, it's illegal.

That's the latest. No, it's not illegal. It's against the contract of the union for the next, I think, five more years from now on the west, on the east coast and four more years on the West Coast, I want to say. And our direct competitors are doing the same thing, right? Say that again. And I'm sure the rest of the world is also banning automation, right? So we'll be equally competitive. And of course, it's like, no, Singapore is probably extremely automated, right? contract ends in like four or five years. And we'll see. But in the meantime,

there will be no automation in the U.S. ports. Yeah. So we're behind. It makes it even harder. By the way, here in L.A., the Long Beach container terminal is an automated terminal. I think that's what kind of kicked off the union and pissed them off and made them realize this is like a real thing

when they put it in about 10 years ago. It's really impressive. Like, it's a giant robot that's like a square mile. of all autonomous trucks driving around, and there's no people in there. And so that we do have the, it's like a solve problem. The technology exists. It works. It's like really efficient, really cool to look at.

Highly encouraged doing a tour of that. Flex Sports can take a bunch of our customers on the tour of that at our conference here in a couple of days. Are there any other like geological or geographic areas in the U.S. that could be ports, could be automated ports, but don't have any port infrastructure and are just like, oh, it's some houses or something we could buy, or it's just like kind of an abandoned beach. You can't because the union claims every inch of American soil.

Okay. Got it. So even if today they're not there, they still claim. Spirit. Okay. Yes. And they will show up. Yeah.

So you can't do it. The thing that one area I'd really love to see America take advantage of is our river network. And actually this point is to like, if Latin America were to become a much bigger trading partner for us, then you would predict that the New Orleans should be the biggest port in the United States. Oh, yeah. If you have the whole Mississippi River network and you can get everywhere all the way connecting up to the Great Lakes, up to Canada, like you could really make an amazing, but there's almost no container shipping on that network in part because of union contracts and like a flexport, a flexport river boat would go really hard.

Maybe you could put a casino on it too to make it really American. 100%. I really think like a barge network running all over. And like replace a lot of the trucks on the road too because it's so much more efficient, cheaper, greener, like cooler in so many ways. And yeah, I haven't looked into the gambling laws, but. In international waters you can, of course. So, you know, you just gamble down the Amazon, then gamble all through the Caribbean. and then gamble up the Mississippi.

It's the future. Anyway, thanks so much for stopping by. New product line. Congratulations. This is a great. I got to ideate with you guys more. I think we'll probably come up

with some good product ideas for you. I think a karetsu of gambling and shipping is just a perfect. Mystery boxes. Everyone's asking, what's the Flexport second act? I would like to do some. Something in futures, actually, where you could hedge the price of shipping and, you know,

maybe that's a partnership with us in one of these prediction markets. Yeah. Yeah. That makes a ton of sense. It needs to happen. Yeah. I mean, isn't that the story of Southwest, they bought a bunch of fuel futures and then they were like had the ability of pricing power for like a number of years?

I don't know how apocryphal that story is. Yeah. Yeah, I think I read about that. We haven't done any hedging yet. I'm always telling our financing to do it. and then they come back with reasons why you don't need to or something, but it seems like we should. Yeah, it'd be fun, turn into a hedge fund.

It'd be good. You can't today, there's not really like a futures. There's a couple of these marketplace they're trying to form, like features on actual price of container shipping. Those don't exist yet in a way that's really viable. But if that existed, we would for sure start, I would like to, when we should be the smartest people in the market, right? Yeah.

At some point, we're like, we're doing all this commodity shipping. We should just trade shipping T-shirt. Maybe, maybe. Well, when you announce it, come back and tell us all about it and good luck with the customer conference. Thanks so much for stopping by.

We'll talk to you. See you. See you guys. Let me talk about Figma. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. You can get started for free.

Jeremy Gafon, asking the important questions, why hasn't someone done calendar invites for phone numbers? It's the last thing keeping email. in the loop. Totally agree. Lote a bangor here. Gets to such an awkward spot in a, you know, in a meeting where you're going back. Always coordinating every text and then have to.

And then, okay, who's going to bite the bullet? If Apple wants to really dominate an I-Message world, they should, like, they should figure out how to add that to the I-Message flywheel so, like, you're even more locked in because your I-Cloud account is the one. I mean, I guess they do that with the calendar app, but everyone's kind of on Gmail, so. It's a little bit rough. It would be fun. Steve Jobs tasting cars, by the way.

Everyone's having fun with the Steve Jobs, by the way. The black on tan is iconic. 9-11 is very good. And, of course, I think we've talked about it on the show before, but he would buy a new car every six months, so he never had to register the plate. He should have gotten a custom plate. He should have gotten an apple on the plate.

You know, just let everyone know. Just let everyone know. There you go. What's wrong with getting a custom plate? Shout out license two post on Instagram. So there was some interesting alpha coming out of Alpha Sense. Oh, yeah? Richard Jark shared a screenshot of it.

Okay. He summarizes it. An interview with a former OpenAI employee that came over the weekend confirming my hunch, which I already wrote about in the article last week, that the biggest friction between OpenAI and Microsoft is around infrastructure capacity. Open AI requests were, quote, leading. to massive amounts of CAPEX potential

that Microsoft would be on the hook for. Sam basically saying to Sotia, spend a trillion dollars for me. I want to be the leaser. And Satchez's like, I want to be the leaser. And everyone's like,

we want a lease. We don't want to... To Microsoft is getting a request from its biggest customer investment that they want an almost an exhaustible amount of GPUs. That's fine in terms of predicting your demand for a one-year period

from today, say, but what about in the year 2019 when you end up having all of this capacity that you've constructed. What does that market look like? No one really knows. That led to some friction between OpenAI and Microsoft. Richard says my take on this is that Microsoft is being smart and letting others take the risk, Oracle and Neoclouds. As numbers for CAPEX are reaching crazy numbers, when things come back to Earth and many of these firms face difficulties, Microsoft is left standing to pick up the distressed assets. Tyler has a take. What's you got?

Yeah, I mean, this is kind of what Doug O'Loughlin was saying. He was saying that Microsoft, super early on, they were like super bullish, right? They're in opening eye early on. And then they kind of take a step back. I think he was saying that, oh, they're going to get back in the game. So hopefully, you know, hopefully we get the gigawatt set up by, by 2027. Then we'll have, you know, AGI God. Yeah, it does seem like Sato's doubling down on getting back in the live player AI race.

He kind of delegated a couple tasks, Microsoft for business, to someone else in the, Microsoft leadership team, so he's able to spend more time on AI. The question is, is he still happy to be a leaser? That could be true. He could say, yeah, I want to, I want to lease even more from someone else and do a whole bunch of off-balance sheet debt, essentially. There's a crazy post from September 24th, Sebastian Rashka, this is way deeper in the deck, I don't know if you're going to be able to find it. It's on page 94. But Sebastian says, no one understood me back then. And Nick, who is a famous OpenAI hater, shares a screenshot of the information reporting on OpenAI's mega deal with Nvidia and says OpenAI would lease Nvidia chips instead of owning them. And so Nick says, News, opening eye to lease Nvidia chips rather than buying them.

LMAO, like they don't even have the money to actually buy them. And back then, in September 24th of 2025, Sebastian said, actually, I think that's smart. way, you don't have to deal with reselling and recycling old chips every few years, and video chips should be offered as a subscription. And so you were talking to Dylan Patel about this. You were saying, like, what is the value of an A-100? What is the value of an H-100 in five years? Will you still be able to produce economic value? Yeah, it's still going to be able to inference Lama 3. It might turn on, but that doesn't mean it'll be economically rational to leverage. And my take is that, is that, and what I've been digging around when we talk to people,

like we talked to Kareem at Ramp about this, like there are companies that have found useful, like economically valuable uses for Lama 3 just somewhere in their software stack. Like, you know, with the Ramp example, which of course is a sponsor, but it's a good example, is just like you scan a receipt, you need to understand like what category is this expense in and you can just take the name of the restaurant and what's on the line items, put it in Lama 3, and very cheaply get back like what category is. It's like a classic just like text interpretation transformation problem, easy token problem, right? Yeah, we were working on that internal tool for horse identification.

Yes, yeah, exactly. But like once you develop that tool. Clock my horse. I got to tell the story about my quiz for you in a minute. But once you develop a tool that has like economic value inside your organization, you're very likely to just leave that there, like your database. You know, like, okay, yeah, we have a database. We have a cron job that runs every night that, you know, cleans up the database, tags

some data, move some stuff around, create some summary analytics. Let's just let that run forever. And yeah, it costs us a thousand bucks a day or something. And I think that will be the case for a lot of those like GPT 3.5 class workloads, GPT4 class workloads. So I don't know how bad it will be to just own a whole bunch of old compute, but it's certainly risky because you could get caught and the value of those could go to basically zero. And that would be really bad. And so it is funny to see the question about like, will Microsoft actually go and buy a bunch of stuff? Like what is getting back in the game really mean? Yeah. I mean, what it looks like right now is Satya watching a bunch of different players lever up massively. while he sits back and his risk off.

But you can imagine, again, we've talked about this a number of times. A point could be a year from now, it could be six months from now, could be two years from now, three years from now, it's really hard to say, where he comes in and gets very aggressive

on buying up all these distressed assets that have done all the hard work, but got over-lovered and don't have the demand to, you know, not be in breach of various covenants. Yeah, if the bubble just keeps inflating or, you know, things kind of all pencil out like people hope.

Yeah, that's really the tinfoil hat theory. Trump just wanted to take some of the heat off, the AI bubble. So he announced a new trade war. Told you. Bubbles over. But we got the first ever message in the LinkedIn stream. Let's go. No, we do stream on LinkedIn. Let's go. LinkedIn doesn't invest very much. But Shom Mohite in the LinkedIn chat, Can you tell the deployment percentage security to subscribe dot, dot, dot, dot. I don't know what that means, but I like that you're engaging in LinkedIn, holding it down. Hopefully New York Times.

New York Times called us Sports Center for LinkedIn. And here we are. Here you are. You're the first chat room general. Thank you. So on the question of AGI timelines, is this a bubble? We, over the weekend, you got a new phone. And even though AGI is just a few thousand days away, it completely,

it completely destroyed your I message integration. And so I, on Saturday at noon, I get a message from your email, not your I message account, because I have your I message pinned with your contact information. It was a pretty serious. Yeah, it's just perfect, you know, blah, blah, blah, this other thing. what do you think? You know, I, I, you know, you weren't exactly asking me to wire money anywhere, but it was a serious question.

It was a, it was a million dollar question. It was a million dollar question. And so, so I'm like, so I screenshot it sent it back to you and I say, this is coming from an email. So I have to do a check of humanity. Something only Jordy could know, what is my dream dressage horse? Because that's something only you could know until you've listened to this episode. Now you will know.

And you, and I botched the answer. Yeah, you, quote, the Jordie that I was talking to says Danish warm blood, of course. Next question. I said, wrong. It's the Lip-A-Zoner, dancing horse, of course. And you said, I knew I was forgetting the Lip-A-Zan. And I said, sure, sure, a likely story.

And so then you had to, you said, pull up WorldCoin. Yep. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I switched to, I switched phones, needed to deactivate the other. Liquid glass is pretty mid. And I said, the likely story feels like a downgrade all around. Wait, before we do that, Mark and Michael Miraflore have jumped into the LinkedIn chat. Let's go. Welcome.

I love to see it. Hold it down. All right, Mark's already back. It was fun. Well, it lasted. Amazing. Could have been me. LinkedIn ease, Ms. Mazuma. Anyway, if you want to stay compliant, go to Vanta. Automate Compliance Managed Risk. Proof Trust. Continuously. Vantage Trust Management Platform takes the manual work out of your security compliance process to replace it with continuous automation, whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program. Okay. So as you do that. So as you do. No, I ordered my new iPhone weeks before you strolled into the iPhone into the Apple store and just bought one off the shelf. I wasn't even there for a follow.

So I was forced to wait. The anticipation was building. I had high hopes for the new phone. The second I started using it, I thought this feels like a downgrade in every single way, except the actual quality of the images. The cameras are fantastic. The cameras are great.

Everything else from the way that it feels. feels. It feels cheap in comparison to my titanium iPhone. The liquid glass, while I think it looks cool, it is very mid in practice. It's everywhere you go. Everywhere you go. It feels like everything's overly animated. Sure. And I'm already getting a lag on the animations. Just like why, like why? I don't need it to animate. Just like, like, be smooth and instant. Yeah. And don't lag.

I have a couple takes on liquid glass. I can drop. We can also get Tyler's review. What was it like upgrading? What was it like upgrading from the very first iPhone to a modern iPhone? Are you enjoying the 3G? You were on the 2G iPhone, right? The one, you actually had to plug it into the wall to talk to people.

You've fully acclimated to liquid glass, right? You don't have any problems? Yeah, I think it's great. I mean, it's definitely, it's, so here's my issue. You'll get used to it. They thought to themselves, we don't need to make a better user experience. We just need to make a different one. There's a little bit of that.

It has to be noticeably different because it's not better. Yep. Nothing about it from using it for a few days have I thought, oh, this is a lot better than how it used to be. Yeah. I think most of my experience that's like, oh, this is like so much better. is probably mostly because I was going from an iPhone 11, which is like seven years old to this. It's probably not actually the iOS.

Yeah. But so, I mean, it feels way faster, obviously, but it's hard to tell. LinkedIn chat is absolutely going off. Mark, Ryan. Ryan, thank you to everyone supporting us on LinkedIn. We are bringing news to LinkedIn for the first time ever. We're on a tear.

Apple first, they got to get on Graphite, code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship high. quality software faster. Okay, so a couple problems for me. Uh, the safari, uh, with liquid glass feels like way harder to use. Like, I don't know how to get to the actual tab view. There's a whole bunch of new muscle memory. Just opening a new tab, I feel like I have to click twice. Yeah. And there's a whole bunch of subtle changes. Okay, you added more animations, but it's not better. It does feel like there's a few things that now require two clicks or three clicks. Yeah. That used to just require one click or two

clicks. And so that's been annoying. I'm sure I'll develop the muscle memory. The new phone app feels very difficult for me to use. I haven't been able to figure out like where all the different calls are. All these things I think will sort out. I haven't enjoyed how hard it is to take a screenshot of an iMessage chat because the person's name appears in glass. And so if you're trying to line it up to screenshot just like one message and show the person's name to say like, hey, Jordy texted me this, and I'm sending that to Tyler. Jordy said this funny thing, you know, here. Well, like, I'm automatically going to see through the glass, like the last thing he said,

that could be something different that I don't necessarily want to share. And so just the screenshots of eye messages have been a little bit tricky for me to get around. I will say, liquid glass looks cool. It does look cool. But it's a cool effect. Yep. And that makes it bad design. I think I'll get used to it.

the other thing on the actual hardware design is I noticed that the plateau just completely ruins the ability to use wireless chargers. Because you put it down on the wireless charger. Well, you haven't upgraded to the new wireless charger. I know. I know. So I need a new car. Great. Thanks. Nick says most people I know gain like 20 IQ when advising their friend's lives and lose 20 IQ when doing strategy for their own lives. Rune says, why is this?

It makes absolutely no sense. but it's true. Guy says, solution, for friend yourself. That's very funny. This totally, this is,

this, this is, it's usually that it's very easy to give simple advice your friends. And when you're trying to strategize in your own life,

you end up making it super complicated because you have all this, you have so, you have max, the most information on your life more information on your life than anyone else. You're like trying to do one of the Tyler red string boards. And usually it's just a lot more simple.

Yeah, no, I agree. And you're sort of forced to make things simple when you're giving advice to a friend because you know, okay, here's their home life, here's their work life, here's what you should do. Here's a life hack for doing strategy for your own life. Collect an immense amount of data about yourself. Put it all in Julius and analyze your life.

And make Julius.ai, you're the data AI data analyst that works for you. Don't even think about what to order for breakfast without first loading every previous breakfast you've had into Julius.com. And running analysis. Running analysis on it. What should I have the croissant or the breakfast burrito? Julius. Why not both?

It's your personal Jarvis. Julius, should I go to bed at nine or ten? Julius? Should I have a second diet code today? They really should give the Siri button to Julius. Yeah, we even say, oh, they'll do a deal with Anthropic. We'll deal with complexity. Apple, Tim Cook, do a deal with Julius.AI.

You got to do it. Get Raul in the building. Chat with your data. Get expert level insights. Can we work for? Tyler. Kylie Jenner is working to make Snapchat a thing again, according to, according to Jasmine. What's going on with Snapchat?

What did she do? So I don't know exactly what she's working on. I'm like it's been announced yet. But it said tomorrow. On October 11th, it said tomorrow on Snapchat. Yesterday you said tomorrow. Just do it. Just do it.

So we do know some retail traders who are very long Snapchat. So maybe I have to consult with them. Although I don't know if these particular traders are the most up-to-date on latest news. I mean, did this move of the market? We need to check in with our resident retail trader on the Snapchat price. I mean, I don't know.

I've heard a number of people for a long time when I was doing YouTube videos, they would pitch me on like, you got to do a Snapchat version because in the, what was it, in like 20, 22, 2023, Snapchat was very kind of liberal with their version of TikTok's creator fund. And so if you were getting a lot of views on Snapchat, you could be making a ton of money. I think you have a buddy who was making, who took a, there were a couple of YouTubers who took their content. made it Snapchat native and then got big creator payouts, basically like higher CPMs,

just because Snapchat was like, we want to bootstrap like the real serious creator market, not just Snapchat with your friends. Yeah, I think they distributed probably hundreds of millions of dollars. Yeah, yeah, to get like real shows, to get like Mr. Beast level shows. Tyler, what you got? So it seems that she was announcing a new music video. Okay. That was launching on Snapchat.

I guess she has been off Snapchat for some time. is returning. She does music? Interesting. I didn't know that. Well, if you want to generate audio, go to fall. 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. Did you see that Red Bull put Yuki Sonoda in a bucket of water next to a high voltage power outlet? No. I had no idea that I didn't understand this image at all. Why? Why is this? I think he's doing a cold plunge. Okay. And it just happens to be like this.

It's like right. Red Bull is the type of team to play. That is absolutely electric. That is awesome. Get after it. Yeah. It's gone. Should we run through my...

Wait, I had a question for you. So I watched a film over the weekend. What? The third film ever! Doris! Cinephile! His third film ever. Congratulations.

I saw... Yes. Brad Pitt play Sunny Hayes. in the movie F1. Yes, F1. I watched it in two parts. It's okay. As the filmmaker intended.

As a filmmaker intended, because he knew I would get sleepy. And check how much time was left in the movie. I was like, this is a movie about racing cars around a track. Can't be that long. Oh, you got another hour, hour and 30 minutes. I'm going to bed. But the thing that I thought was interesting is somebody who's seen, I haven't seen two hands worth of films,

but I've seen a few. Yep. Interesting to have a fictional story tied in to current reality in F1. Have you seen a movie that's done exactly that, right? Where there's like Lewis Hamilton and other characters like blended in. Yes. It's rare. Super rare.

Yeah. But they pulled it off well. Yeah. It felt like you were in the world. It felt like you were in modern day Formula One. and just watching. I mean, in the big short, they're like in Lehman Brothers, right? In Goldman Sachs.

That's my version of F1. Yeah, but not with like the actual people. It's not like the managing director at Lehman Brothers is like playing himself. Sometimes there's little cameos, but nowhere near as much as like this is. There was like 200 cameos. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, no, that was a very cool, very cool feature of the film. Yeah, I did enjoy F1.

It was a good movie. Maybe the movie in the summer. People were asking like, what is the movie? movie of the year. Like, there was no shelling point. There was no Barbenheimer this year.

And I think F1 probably did the best. The real one that's like going viral is the K-pop Demon Hunters movie on Netflix. That's the one that's like getting the most attention, like squid game level.

But a little less. Never heard of it. You've never heard of K. Pop Demon Hunters. You're telling me this for the first time. Are you kidding? Actually. You've never heard of K.P. Demon Hunters?

It's crazy. It is like a massive viral succession. It's a massive. viral success. Let me run through my pitch to the U.S. government to give Dylan Patel at Semi Analysis 50 million bucks. This was my take today. So we had Dylan Patel on the show on Friday talking about inference max. This is an independent benchmark where he takes NVIDIA GPUs. But also pull up this video. Oh, yeah. From semi-analysis. This is why I had to talk about it. Seminole analysis is potentially the greatest. It's amazing.

shit post of all time. They say was watching the Georgia game and noticed Dwar Kesh Patel. There we go. There we go. It was literally on TV. Soundboard. This is good. A lot of people were saying.

It's just so funny. He's like in Tennessee Friday calling into TVPN with the most unhinged setup we've ever had for a guest. It was great. And then he pops up here at, of course, this is not Dwar Keshe if you've been living under a data center. Yeah, he's talking to big game. I'm out here because there's a lot of power. He's like, power on the field. Let's go bulldogs, apparently. No, obviously he's there for work as well. But it is an amazing, amazing clip. Is his buddy, like, throwing, like, waving money around? Something. I don't know. Yeah, what is going

on there? They're GPU rich. They are rich. That's amazing. I'm so glad he got on the Okay, get into your, get into your ranch. So basically, Dylan Patel, one of the greatest analysts of all time, the goats. He launched Inference Max last week. It's this website that you can go to, and you can select one of three open source models, Lama3, Deepseek, and GPTOSS. Then you can select what type of workload do you want to do? Do you want to do document summarization? Put 8,000 tokens in, get 1,000 out.

Do you want to do just chat back and forth, or do you want to do more of a reasoning deep research type project? And then you can say, what architecture do you want to use, what the whole software stack, and then what GPUs do you want to run it on? Do you want to run it on Nvidia or AMD? And so you get all these different charts. It's put the timeline in turmoil more than one time already. And it's been really interesting because my take, and I'm interested, Jordy, if you have a similar take,

like it has two things have felt true. One is that Nvidia has just been running away with it, and AMD has been playing catch-up for years. And what Inference Mac shows, at least me, is that AMD is actually better in certain areas. And that was kind of interesting, because I'd heard the story of like AMD is getting their stuff together. They're fixing bugs.

George Hots is pressuring them. Lisa Sue is talking to George Hots and Dylan Patel about what to do. And so the narrative of like Nvidia is 100% dominant and no one can touch them. That kind of breaks when you look at the inference max. And in fact, seems like AMD is doing great stuff in multiple places. And for certain workloads, you'd want to pick AMD on a total cost to own basis.

It's not just about raw speed all the time. It's about how much does it cost, how much energy does it use to produce a set amount of tokens, right? Yeah, and it makes it even more surprising that they had to give away so much of their company in order to get Open AI to be... That's a good point. Or Sam just exerted max leverage and just wanted to own 10% of AMD.

Yeah, I mean, my update from Inference Max is that AMD and NVIDIA are not as far away as people thought. But, I mean, we'll have to dig into it, and obviously it depends on a lot of different factors. And the true frontier models are a different thing, and those aren't in the benchmark because they're not open source. The other kind of update for me was around open source. So we covered this, and we talked about this with Dylan, like when GPTOSS, the open source model from Open AI launched, it was kind of like, well, okay, like, yeah, it's like, you know, doing okay

on benchmarks. Nothing really special going on there. And it just kind of like fizzled out. And it was like, yeah, it's cool. People were excited about it. But like the general tenor wasn't like, oh, deep seeks destroyed. But on inference max, you can see that GPTOSS is performing like right at the same level above on some, below on others.

And so it feels like in terms of the like commoditization of the open source software, open source LLM market, like, Open AI has very much caught up and is not, like, well behind deep seek. And so that was kind of an interesting update. I feel like this data, we're going to get more interesting data points from this. We're going to get more, just a better understanding of, like, not just how things do on benchmarks, like how smart the models are, but actually, like, if you're doing a big workload with them, like, which one is more affordable, right? So that was kind of interesting.

But notably absent. So it's just AMD and NVIDIA right now. And when we talked to Dylan, he said, we're bringing on Traneum from Amazon and we're bringing on TPU from Google. They are bigger companies and they're moving a little bit slower and they're not selling a ton of these things yet. AMD and VD and Vidae sell a lot more chips. And so TPU and Traneum will come in the next couple months, but we're working with them. But notably absent was Huawei, which we've been tracking and we've heard that, you know. Huawei is not my friend.

Huawei has this cloud matrix 384 that competes with Nvidia's NVL 72, the Rack scale compute. And the high level number is that NVIDIA at Rack scale is 2.5 times more energy efficient. So the whole pitch with the cloud matrix 384 was that it can do the same stuff as NVIDIA. Like it can run the same models. And it's like, we got it. The problem is we're going into an era where energy is going to be the primary bottleneck. And so there's not a lot. of incentive to run

chip, you know, racks that are inefficient. And also, like, being 60% less efficient is wildly different than being 10% less efficient, right? Like, these are really, really important.

China would say, oh, well, we have all this, we had three gorgeous dam. Like, we have plenty of cheap energy. It's like, for a while. And then eventually you've got to build 100 nuclear reactors, not just 10.

And so I want, I want Huawei to be on inference max. I don't think Nvidia's going to pay for that because they don't want to have, you know, Huawei chips in there. They might be hard to buy. I don't even know how you buy

Huawei chips in America, but I think the U.S. government could get it done. And so I'm calling on David Sachs to put up the money. I don't know if they actually would have to pay this much. Dylan said something like $50 million came together across Nvidia and all their partners to pay for this. It was a lot of chips.

And so I'd love to see America foot the bill, the American taxpayer, foot the bill, to get some Huawei chips, give them to semi-analysis, get them running on inference Mac so we can know the true gap in compute power. And this is important because we know the gap, the gap in rare earths. Like America, China refines or China mines six times as much rare earth, as many rare earth elements

as the United States, they refine those almost 99% of the rare earths in the world. And they produce about 85 to 90% of the world's rare earth magnets. And so the gap in rare earth is massive. Now, we know that America's head ahead in AI compute and GPU manufacturing, but we just don't know how big that gap. is really, and I feel like that's a really important, you know, negotiating point and point of negotiating leverage in the trade war. And putting Huawei on inference max would help us understand the nature of that gap and how big it is and how much leverage we actually have. So who knows where

the money will come from, but I'd love to see Huawei on inference max. And, you know, if you want to learn more about it, go over to some analysis and check it out. Anyway, Patrick O'Shaughnessy and the team at Colossus have a new, looks like a cover story with none other than friend of the show, Josh Kushner, dropping tomorrow. Yeah. We should hopefully read through it. For sure. Michael Spiker says, real men lose their shirts and natural gas, not trading synthetic shit coin futures at 50x leverage. What is 50x leverage buy?

Like, you just like, miss typo. pretty funny. Yeah. Tyler, figure out some alpha in natural gas and start trading it.

It is interesting. We haven't heard, we haven't heard about the natural gas trade in like the retail circles or kind of the general. Like all of, you know,

like all, like basically everyone in tech got sharp on. Natural gas needs a retail army. Yeah. Just in the category. A couple years ago, as NVIDIA was pivoting from a graphics card maker to an AI accelerator maker,

a similar chip, but it was becoming a part of the AI narrative. The AI narrative was developing around Nvidia. The second phase of that was everyone learned what TSM was. Then everyone learned what ASML was. Then everyone learned what SKHinix was, because that's the full stack. You design the chip at NVIDIA, you make it at TSMC with equipment from ASML and memory from SKHINX.

And so those became the four companies that everyone knew about. people know about the neoclods and the hyperscalers. But there aren't that many people that know, like, who the key players in natural gas are. And, you know, if all the predictions about AI are true, you heard it from Dylan. He said, like, a lot of the energy is going to come from natural gas. And so who are you betting on? I mean, not specific companies, but Leopold has talked about this a lot,

where basically if you continue ramping up data centers, like you need the power from somewhere. And the most obvious place is natural gas. If you can basically get past regulation and like essentially, you know, all the big companies have these environmental restrictions on like where they can get power from. Yep. So if you can tear those down, then natural gas is like by far the cheapest, easiest way to just get like insane amounts of power. Yep. Well, it's. Raghav, yes, as Rigaub says, Leopold has a crazy position in natural gas company, EQT.

Yeah, we should dig into that. Only up 46% over the last year. Congratulations. Leopold wins again. Again. Founded in, guess. Founded in 1983. Close.

1888. 1888. Let's go. Just waiting 150 years for the ultimate pump. Like now we're a meme stock. Finally. Real patience. Ajax the Great says,

working at SpaceX has taught me the caffeine limits are imaginary. Yeah. when I was there, I had a minimum 200 milligrams per night. That's hilarious that he's denominating it in nights. Like, most people would say I have 200 milligrams of caffeine per day. When I wake up, you know, have... Not per night. It's like, yeah, because I stay up all night.

Start my morning with 200, and usually by noon, I'm at 5 to 600 milligrams. Today I hit over 1,000 milligrams. That's a lot of caffeine. I don't know if you should be going up that high. It's certainly not, you know, doctor recommended. You got to work up to it. Riley Walls had... He's on another time.

It sounds like he had a great weekend. He said, the plan at dusk, 50 people went to San Francisco's longest dead end street and all ordered a Waymo at the same time. The world's first Waymo DDoS. You can see pictures of the Waymo. Obediently lining up. So he said, we didn't actually get in the cars. They left after about 10 minutes and charged a $5 no show fee.

Very fair for getting messed with. Waymo might have to build in some functionality of like if you collude with a group to disrupt our services. I would be terrified to do this and be D platform from Waymo forever. Yeah. It would be very rough. Riley said, Waymo handled this well. I assume this isn't much different than if a big concert had just ended eventually. They disabled all rides within a two block vicinity until the morning.

This was back in July. It felt like I was back in middle school. Everyone was giddy. And when another car showed up, there were cheers, maybe three or four real. drivers all laughed and just drove around. So good. I like Jake here saying, calling him, the tech jester cannot be stopped. It really is. Would you call him an internet rascal? An internet rascal? Yeah, somehow, I called him an internet rascal and then somehow the team thought that was his like official title. I was like I, Riley Walls, I'm an internet rascal. I like it.

Well, let me tell you about turbopuffer. Search every byte, serverless vector and full tech search, built from first. We puffin. We puffin. And object storage. Fast 10x cheaper and extremely. scalable. Jeffrey Hinton was featured in the Acquired podcast. They did a deep dive on Google. You can go check it out. Jeffrey Hinton, father of deep learning at age 31 with Chris Ricebeck, LaHoya, California. They are so good. The acquired guys are so good at finding these archival images that just go so hard on the timeline. They look amazing. And David Fowell says, probably my favorite factoid about

Hinton's family is that basically all of them were mathematicians. going back all the way to George Bull, first-time Metis List, first ballot list eventually kicked off the Medist list for being irrelevant in the modern era, except for one guy in their family who invented the jungle gym. Isn't that hilarious? Imagine inventing the Jungle Gym. That's such a great invention. I hope you have like a royalty that just produces endless cash flow for the family forever.

Like there's nothing more enjoyable than meeting a number. Nepo baby who's like, yeah, my great-grandfather invented the pencil. And you're like, yes, okay, you deserve to be on a yacht right now. You contributed to society. Imagine just looking at this like monstrosity of just like metal and like traps and you're sitting there. What should we call it? The jungle gym.

Jungle gyms bring incredible joy to children all over the world. It's one of the greatest least controversial inventions ever. There's no jungle gym doomers. That's true. There's no jungle gym accelerationsists. There's no, oh, jingle gym costs causes brain rot narrative. There's no hit pieces on jungle gyms. They are unfiltered.

I'm sure they, I actually, I would say I bet you we could find a hit piece on jungle gyms because I'm sure they just massively increase injuries annually at schools. But worth it. You know what doesn't increase injuries at schools? profound. Get your brand mentioned in chat. GBT. Reach millions of consumers who are using AI, discover new products and get a demo. Sheel, friend of the show, says he's at Sea Ranch Lodge for lunch. It's very beautiful. And it's owned by Patrick and John Collison and Justin Con.

Very fun. Look at that corgi. This is a cool. I had no idea that they snapped this up. I knew that Justin Conn spent a lot of time up in that neck of the woods. I have been to Sea Ranch. It's a up around where I grew up. So they have principles for the Sea Ranch Lodge. Yes, nature predominates rural matrix. No, vest pocket nature as at Carmel or Bodega. I don't know what that means.

Yes to rural, no to suburbia. Yes to community. No to individual houses. Yes to aesthetics. No to up for grab aesthetics. Yes to design control. Getting a text of saying there's just not just a jungle gym hit piece, there's a whole book covering.

You wrote a book. The entire jungle gym. Trying to take down big jungle gym. Wow. I will, I will go to the mat for the jungle gym. Yeah, we will defend jungle gyms with our lives. Yes. Not only because they are in the Hinton line,

but also because they're good for the world. They say it's non-elitist. They want modesty of house size reforestation, native trees, common facilities. Very cool. Wait, they want elitism and large house sizes? No, no, not. I'm kidding.

Elitist and enormous houses. Yeah, wait, wait, I want the one on the right. I want the one on the right. Oh, they're taking shots at Malibu. They said they do not want to relinquish access. Malibu type. Ooh, Collison and Khan teaming up. Well, these principles look like they predate them taking ownership.

Yeah. Unless they just. like made it to try to look like a vintage piece of paper. Before, before growth equity, secondary dollars. No, because there's so much there's so much lore around C Ranch. I don't know any of the lore. Never heard of C Ranch before. You can go down a YouTube rabbit hole around

Sea Ranch. Yes. How conspiratorial does it get? Not conspiratorial at all. It's just like a very principal development and community and they've done. Or now. We can bring conspiracy to it. Imagine you're just in this like,

idyllic, you know, cabin, and you go to open the mini fridge, and it's like, tap here for one-click checkup. In other news, upper 20th Street Capital, they're running out of phrase capital on X, apparently. Somebody is writing mistakes. I wrote about investing in Tiny, an eclectic Canadian investment holding company just last year. the company founded by Jeremy Gaffon, right? No. Some people seem to think that in the comments. We should, whatever happens with Tiny, we should hold Jeremy to account, right?

Absolutely not. Early team member. I was potentially one of the first hires, but not his firm. Somebody in the comments, I did notice, thought that Jeremy started Tiny, and that's probably because he's had one of the most iconic podcast appearances in history. but this person is writing, I wrote about investing in Tiny and an eclectic Canadian investment holding company just last year, concluding that I hope to add to our shares over time and enjoy the benefits of getting in on the ground floor of a tech-oriented compounder for years

to come. Well, that was a mistake. Tiny has performed wretchedly, not just its share price, which, if it had gone down independent of how their businesses performed, would have bothered, would not have bothered me, and indeed would have afforded opportunities to buy more. but no, their fundamental financial performance floundered from the outset and have shown no signs of improvement. Net income and cash flows have dried up completely, and what little is left is going towards interest payments on $100 million in debt, some of which they violated covenants of, resulting in their lender, asking for accelerated principal repayments.

In increasingly dire straits, they sold 4% of the company to a private equity shop for $20 million Canadian, which at today's share price makes it look like Tiny is the one getting the last laugh. final nail in the coffin was the behavior of one of its co-founders, the majority shareholder. The man has simply acted like nothing's wrong at all. He remains active on Twitter and appears to spend inordinate amount of time on podcasts, both as guests and hosts in the guise of an entrepreneurial guru, often introduced as, quote, billionaire, even though a cursory glance at the market cap of tiny make that a farciful impossibility. He's essentially taking victory lapse while his company faces a debt maelstrom and his shareholders circle the drain, and then he

sets up a plan to unload millions more shares. So really rough. I mean, the nominative determinism on tiny was always just so brutal. You want to start a tiny holding company. Well, it's a, didn't they start with like a design shop, right? Yep. Do you know that there's another design company called Huge? How are they doing? I think they're doing great. They're up bigly. They're in Brooklyn. They've been going since 1999. Huge. Anyways. They have a thousand employees. They're doing great.

They got a global CEO. They have U.S. school. They're very good at user experience. Yeah, I always thought it was brutal. I've enjoyed Andrew Wilkinson's posts over the years, but I always thought it was brutal that he released a book called Barista to a billionaire. But by the time he was publishing the book, it was clear that he was no longer a billionaire.

Barista's a billionaire and back again. Why not? Isn't that the Lord of the Rings? Round trip. The Lord of the Rings book. No, Tiny does. have the AeroPress. Oh, that's a good company.

You can still always make coffee. 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. And we have our second guest of the show, Alexis

Ohanian. Welcome to the stream. There he is. How you doing? What's up? It's up. It's been too long. It's been too long. It's been too long. That's, guys. I, man, I just can't believe in like a year. Yeah.

You've dominated all things LinkedIn media empire. I, I look, LinkedIn is the cornerstone of our empire. It's where we think first. But you saw that, you saw the vision. You saw the vision before we had done any guests, before we had gone live, like very, very. Still dying to invest, guys.

You just happen to make the most profitable podcast ever. and they still need investor capital. We manifested it. Well, if you want to invest, why don't you go turbo-long Microsoft? They own LinkedIn. We're going to make LinkedIn amazing. It's going to flip every other social network. You'll make a bag.

Not financial advice. No, I like the early stage, guys. I don't publicly traded stocks. It doesn't stir my cocoa. Well, you need to use a thousand X leverage in the public market. You need to be able to make it. You need to be able to make a thousand X or lose it all. Otherwise, it just don't get the rush.

What about you can invest in a Microsoft treasury company? You could buy a seed state startup that just holds a thousand X levered Microsoft stock. And then you get the exposure. You get to hang out with the founder. You're on the board. And you see the same financial upside. It can all work out, maybe. Anyways, it's great to see you.

What's new in your world? world. Dude. I, well, you know, it was very kind. I think for my second appearance on the show, you let me plug my women's track and field, meet now team-based league that's coming. Athlos. We just had our event in New York.

Nice. Dope. Dope time. Over three and a half million people tuned in this year. Oh, that's a spectacle. It's a lot of fun. Thank you to the internet. Yeah.

We went wide on the distribution. So you could find it anywhere. YouTube X. That's great. It didn't matter. But it was cool. And then I don't know. I was really coming on in part.

part because I wanted to congratulate y'all. It's been awesome to see the ride. I've had the privilege of separately funding or seating or, you know, playing early with you all separate companies. Yeah, I know. It's just been so awesome to see the trajectory, the execution, the vision, and, you know, congrats, well deserved. I know it's just the start. And this is just me buttering you up so that one day I can invest in the Texas. Some days. On the early side. By the way, yesterday, I was trying to hang out with a buddy. he could not. He was at the Angel City game. Oh, really?

No way. Fantastic. Yeah, what's the update on that front? I mean, we're knocking on the door. We might be able to get in the playoffs here. It's going to be, it's a little tough, a little tough right now, but I'm hoping we get in there. But that was probably one of my favorite, like,

I was like March of 19 when I raged tweeted about how undervalied women's professional sports was. And in proper Twitter fashion, most people said, I was an idiot. no one cared about women's sports, but that obviously has done pretty well. And yeah, thank him for being an Angel City supporter. I've got a couple extra spots in the suite.

If you've got, there's a couple of listeners who want a couple tickets. And you have to figure out a way to give it away here for the last home match of the season. But I'll gladly. We'll just run a raffle on LinkedIn. That'll be the way to get. That's where everyone is.

That's where everyone is. That's the new alpha. The also, we, Stokes Base, they announced like a half a billion in new funding last week. Yo, there was the first, believe it not. So five years ago, first space tech investment I've ever done. And, and there's one shot in space. Well, I mean, come on.

It was a, it was one of those dangerous, it's one of those dangerous first investments in a sector because then, you know, you end up thinking you're a genius at it. But Andy Laps and the team are doing a hell of a job. And look, obviously Elon Musk has changed the world with SpaceX. but I think we would all agree a little competition is a good thing. And Andy's got a vision to do these fully 100% reasonable rockets.

And the first launch is going to be Cape Canaveral this summer and very, very proud of that team. I'm just grateful to be a little part of that. You'll have to be there. You're going to go in person? Oh, yeah. I'm bringing the whole 7, 716.

We visited. There's photos off. There's nothing like watching one of your startups do a launch and just actually, you know, but in the case of space, you have to, you get a really tight feedback.

back loop, at least if somebody launches like a SaaS company. It's like, oh, how do signups look after the first 24 hours? This is like, how does the rocket in one piece after 20 seconds? Or it didn't explode immediately. You know, you know whether or not it worked. On the early stage side, I'd love to check in with you on just how you're feeling about AI because we had this foundation model war. It seems like that's cooling off, like Marks Zuckerberg's poaching different co-founders of different teams, but it still seems like there's a bunch of fertile ground in the early stage, not even call it an AI company,

but just a company that's like pulling AI off the shelf. And I'd love to know kind of how you're thinking about the mobile era, like where the pockets of interesting value come from, what excites you when you see a pitch. Because I imagine you're not getting, maybe you are, but I imagine you're not getting excited about like, yeah, we're going up against open AI. You know, we're going to do everything they're doing but better.

And it's like, that ship has sailed. So where are the ships that are leaving the port right now? It feels like, okay, I'd say the companies, there was this existential crisis probably two years ago where some of these 21 and 22 vintage companies that we had seated were like, oh shit, like the world has changed. And a lot of the, I think the smartest ones, frankly, pivoted hard to decide like how do we sell picks and shovels?

How do we find ways to just get involved in this? And we've seen a couple, they won't even let me talk about them because their revenue is going so well. They're like, don't tell people about it. But there's a, there's a type of company that is selling to all those foundation models. It's basically like throw money at this problem. We don't need to be expert at it. We just need X. Maybe we need training data.

Maybe we need whatever. Here we call it the barnacle economy because the whales are. are getting so big that even if you're a barnacle, you can go from zero to $100 million in a couple of years. And it's like a good way to kind of like get started. You're hitching a ride on a rocket ship. You're riding a wave. And then you go off and kind of, you know,

source other customers over time and establish your market position. I love, I love barnacle economy. That is a good, that is a good meme. The other one that's starting to peak now that you all would have great instincts on as well is that it's that whatever, the application layer.

It's like, how do you build the stuff that's actually dope for the end consumer that, you know, assume some of these larger models are going to continue to just be a solution for a lot of stuff. But like, let's say you want to see how you look in a Canadian tuxedo. There you go. Like, this is Dogey. Shameous place. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, if you can make a delightful user experience, and for a consumer social guy, this is where I feel like now a lot of my product instincts can start to shine because now I think we're almost about to see consumer social get fun again and get good again. People are realizing,

y'all are, this is going to seem like I'm just kissing ass, but you all prove, let me continue, you all prove the point that so much of the internet is now just dead and this whole dead internet theory, right? It's not, not my idea. Whether it's botted, whether it's quasi AI, you know, LinkedIn slop, like having proof of life, like live viewers and live content is really fucking valuable to hold attention. And so I think we'll see a next generation of social media that's verifiably human because like because it's all going down in the group chats now that can't be that is not novel tech there's got to be some next iteration of that because that's where all of us are getting our like really best info now and and similarly i think we're going to get really

delightful fun consumer experiences where you know some scrappy founders in brooklyn like the doji guys can say hey let's make shopping fun again using this tech and and even if you know the Googles of the world launch some janky try-on experience. Like, we know those companies are just terrible and innovating product and are really a threat. Yeah, the thing I've been thinking about is, is social, is what we think of as a social media platform even harder to build now when you think of you're going up against generative media platforms that, you know, like SORA and like vibes that are basically saying, we'll spend hundreds of millions of dollars on compute to try to bootstrap this network.

It's like the last generation of even the TikToks of the world was like, okay, you can compete against American social media companies. You just need to burn billions of dollars to do it. What was the vine seed wrap? But it's way different than you with Reddit back in the day where you're like, okay, we need a little bit of cash. And we need to clone ourselves a bunch on the platform. Maybe an AWS credits or something would get you going.

Like it's just, yeah, if you guys had needed like a hundred million dollars to burn on compute, it wouldn't necessarily have been able to pull that off. $72,000. That's all we raised. $72,000. $12,000. Do you have a tiny gong? Yeah, we need a baby gong. No, no. Massive gong for scrappiness. And then $60,000 from an angel check from Paul Graham.

Wait, you got 12K from YC. That was the first check. Yeah, for 7% of the company. It was worth it. But that is a different time, 2005. If you show up to... No, you saw this day in history, Intel IPOed and raised $6.5 million. I mean, even inflation adjusted. Yeah, it's so small.

It's... But anybody... And that's... Oh, God. Okay, that's the other part that makes me a little nervous right now is the... Well, I guess, look,

everyone's seeing the rounds, everyone's seeing the markups and the valuations and stuff for still fairly early stage companies. The founders that can maintain their discipline with a ton of cash sitting in their bank of... are going to dominate in such a great way because we know you aren't going to need to blitz scale

like a decade before. You have no excuse for trying to get hundreds of employees. When in reality, if you're a pure software company, you want to build the Navy SEALs, right? You're having dozens who are going to be able to get you on the revenue. And so if you can spend that money intelligently, obviously you've got to drop a lot of it into compute. But I think it'll be, it'll be interesting to watch because the blitzscaling model didn't really make many people happy. There are many CEOs who are like, God, I really loved when my company had a thousand employees. As long as these guys and gals can be good stewards of the capital, I think we can keep this party going.

It's just a lot of companies raising a lot right now early. What was your takeaway from the whole TikTok deal? I know you were in the mix, and it ultimately ended up going for well beyond what it feels like the intrinsic value of the asset is, especially in comparison, it's like, would you rather own perplexity at 20 billion or TikTok at 15, right? We're snap up at 7? Yeah, exactly. Like it feels like a big platform.

I am still, DMs are still open if they want to get me in the mix. I do think, look, I had a hunch. This, to me, always felt like the kind of deal where you knew you were going. going to get it. Like if you knew you were going to win it, you were going to know a minute ago. Sure. And that is what it is. I'm still happy. I've been publicly talking about how problematic TikTok was for years and years and years as a vehicle of the CCP. So I'm, I'm happy it's an American possession now. I do think, look, there's still, there's still a lot of value to that zeitgeist to affecting that. And I don't know, it'll be interesting to watch. I mean, I did just

say, I think social media is about to get upended in some interesting ways, but I think with the right leadership, look, it's still, look, it's still meaningful is all hell. And with the right leadership, it can continue to endure in this new era. This is a fascinating question, because TikTok feels like for the last maybe decade almost, like they, it has been the engine of innovation for social media in the sense that the first like hack of like, let's actually use licensed music, or a lot of the cap cut stuff and a lot of the remove the background

automatic editing tools a lot of the collab features live streaming like they were definitely pushing the product design very fast I wonder if the last two years have just been like total chaos internally

and like basically frozen product development because it's like not an exciting place to work everything's going to be under crazy scrutiny so even if there's some innovation like oh like instead of just like and retweet there's like a third button that's going to work really well like that hasn't rolled out And where I'm thinking this goes is that, you know, we heard Open AI was going to do a social network.

They did SORA. That was like somewhat telegraphed. It makes a lot of sense that meta would launch vibes, something in the AI social network, AI, TikTok. But TikTok should launch AI TikTok, right? And they've been fantastic at machine learning in AI. They've had huge data centers running these incredible recommendation algorithms. That's why the TikTok algorithm feels so creepily accurate. You swipe five times in a car and it's like, all.

car content for the next week. And they're really good at understanding, like, you like this car instead of this car. And that's because of AI and their machine learning chops. But they haven't brought that to bear in generative AI yet. And it seems logical. But I'm wondering if there's still a team there that would push that forward or if they'll just be way more reactive.

I, you bring up a really good point, especially because we've seen this creep up. And it felt like, look, part of the advantage to, to building in the space. you're right. I mean, when we talk about the algorithm, we're talking about TikToks, right? The effectiveness, like you said, that they were able to use machine learning to send you more

of the stuff you want to keep swiping. Does feel like they've been frozen at the time the last couple of years. Yeah. I think you could get, look, it's a, it is a large enough property with enough cultural influence that I think you get some really talented people to come go build on it. And look, Andrewison and company, they know how to attract talented people to come build on stuff. I wouldn't count it out yet. The part, and this is, look, a big reason why I'm still spending so much, why I continue spending more and more time in sports, investing in sports, building, sports, teams, league, et cetera. I think it's the last bastion of content and attention when, you know, 95, think of the future

of Hollywood, the entertainment industry, the music industry, it's going to be largely AI generated or assisted. The appointment television, aside from live, you know, breaking tech and business news, sport is like guaranteed. And the celebrity of being an athlete also indoors, even. in the age of AI because why you're famous is not because people know about she's because of the stuff that you do. And so like there's got to be, I think, I think whatever that next platform is, is either going to feel deeply intimate and human. So it's the better version of

the group chat that we all have. And I don't know if maybe it's another level anonymity, decentralization. I know the crypto bros are excited about that. There's there's potential there. Or it's it leans more into live, especially here in the West. I feel like whatnot and others is there still kind of scratch in the surface, whereas in China it seems like a much bigger part of the culture. So I don't know. But I'm hopeful we keep seeing more innovation here because as a consumer guy, I think we've been starved for a little bit.

Yeah, totally. Totally. There was some recent reporting that time on social media in the Financial Times, time on social media peaked in 2022 with young people cutting back first. Is that something? Did you ever predict that? I mean, they're kind of, you have to factor in. I feel like COVID a little bit here.

People going back to work spending time. Yeah. It's like, remote work. It's really just people remote work ending and people like, okay. Yeah, you literally go to the office and like TikTok is banned on the Wi-Fi so you can't use it. I like, okay, I like that we're beating this up. I definitely quote tweeted it because it validated my own worldview. And so it's like, well, obviously this is right.

I think, I mean, look, okay, anecdotally. I should actually just look at this. I track all this shit so I could probably just look at, even just on my mobile phone time spent. I don't know how far back that goes in that app. But okay, anecdotally, look at online dating and look at how, I mean, thankfully I'm married because I don't run, but like run clubs have become this new version of how to meet people,

especially for younger generation. I got tired of swipe culture. It definitely feels like there is a younger generation of folks. who are using the internet to find ways to commune offline, whether it is events or run clubs. It feels like there's a, there's a bit of a culture shift that's like, did you say you're married so you don't run? No, I'm saying I'm married.

So he doesn't go to. It's also helpful, but I also don't run. I like the idea that the only reason people run is to meet people. That is the, like, running is just dating. It really has been. No, no, it's a good point. No, but guys, guys, we can break, I could break down why this is. So I'm very lucky. I know Whitney fairly well from Bumble,

but also the OKCupid guys from back in the day. I'm really dating myself. The secret of online dating, assuming straight dating only for a second, is high value women get inundated by messages from guys. And so if they have a bad experience, they churn and your app fails. And so every successful dating website

is on some level away to make sure that they're having a good time. And what's interesting about run clubs is it creates this social dynamic and a sort of physical real world one, where if you literally cannot keep up, you can't keep up. And so I, like, there is an interesting dynamic there that I think,

again, I've taken a few of these pitches, the run club app, the dating app for real life. Like there's, there's versions of this that are foaming up. And so I want to believe, I want to believe the burnout is real.

And then you combine it with just, again, the fact that so much of the stuff we're seeing is just, it's to some degree botted or fake. I mean, I'm meeting founders. Let me give you a perfect example. Okay. So,

and this is something I wouldn't be surprised. Okay, so CPG days. You know how important having a subreddit is to the success to your product, right? Huge. I got about nine months ago I heard from a founder. I won't say what the subreddit is, but he told me he's like, oh, I just bought the breadmaking,

R slash breadmaking. I just bought the breadmaking subreddit. I was like, I didn't know you could buy a subreddit. He said, oh, yeah. Against TOS. I imagine that's against RETO S. We definitely, but we found the seven moderator accounts and we bought each of those accounts. Interesting.

And so now we own those accounts. We can't, we control who becomes a new mod, so we own that subreddit. And so very quietly every day on our, it's not our slash bread banking, but our splitmaking, we make sure that there are a post that do well that are like, oh, I love my, you know, blobby, blah bread maker. Yes. Because the value of the GPT sort of training the engine. Sure, sure, sure.

What is it, GEO now? Yeah, G. GBT optimization, the SEO of today, of the AI age, it's so valuable that there's such an economic incentive now. And, you know, if that's what the cracked founders are doing, and I just learned about that six months ago, eight months ago, surely it was happening even before. Should we? And it's wild. It makes the underpinning of so much of what we consume online, you know, very much at risk. Again, which is why stuff like this starts to feel a lot more real and tangible.

Should we buy out all the mods of R slash communism and start killing them on capitalism? We'd have to, I mean, it's, it's interesting for probably, I imagine, post-luxury watches. I imagine they would be very principled. If you tried, if you offered $10,000, they'd be very principled. They'd be like, there's no price that I would, you know, sell my account. You offer them a million dollars? Hmm, actually.

Actually, if this communism thing sucks. I think 20K might do it. Yeah, everyone's going to have their price. What do you think about? I feel like there's been an idea. I haven't. I've seen some pitches over the last couple years of people selling this vision of like Instagram, but it's just you and a million bots.

And so that feels like the social network. The AI. Well, it feels like a social network that you don't need a, you know, a billion dollars to start. Like something like a SORA is like very expensive. Not any old team can just build that. You're absolutely right, Jordy. Thanks, John. Thanks, John.

It's not this, it's that. And I think the reason that I think is somewhat interesting is people can say bots are a feature, not a bug, right? Like X clearly doesn't take bots as seriously as maybe they should. And I think part of that is probably just brings back. It's hard to solve, but it also brings, it's like a notification, right? It brings people back to the app. There's a reason to check the app. even if you're not getting real engagement.

But I've generally been bearished on these sort of just like entirely bot networks because I think people still want to feel like even if they're getting a notification from like an account that could be a bot, they're still running the calculus of like, oh, maybe it is a real person. Yeah, it would have to be the utility of the bot, the why of the bot would have to be so great that no human could reasonably do it. So Reddit had a version, a third-party version of this was like the RemindMeBod. where you would just tag in, remind me,

and some amount of time, it will message you back. So, like, that, that isn't that right. No reasonable human would keep track of all that bullshit. Great use of a bot. There could be uses for that, but it would really, like, in each one of them, it would have to be so worthy.

It can't just be sycophancy. Like, it has to be like, no, this actually adds some value that no human could reasonably do. I think for me to get excited about it, because people can still find the sick of fancy one-to-one. Yeah. Do you really need a hundred,

or a thousand. And frankly, you know, probably 10% of humanity will fall in some way in love with or in obsession with some kind of an AI. In the same way, we lost people to MMRIPGs or what have you. Like there's a version of that to exist, but I don't know about the one to many. At the same time, it feels like about 10% of the population maybe will do the exact opposite. And instead of getting lost in the hyper-futuristic infinite jest, they will just go back to like logging off complete retro stuff. I want to know two things, the general

take on retro electronics, throwback websites, throwback tech. And then I want to know specifically what game are you playing on your mod retrochromatic most often these days because you've been posting a lot about it. Dude, I don't know if we

totally announced it. Well, okay, I'm going to have to disclose. We're also an RIA, so now anything I say. So, I mean, it is a 776 company. We were very lucky to have messed with Torin and Palmer. And it is, I am an unabashed gamer.

It's, it's, I have, I mean, I have graded video games. Grated video games. Grated. Oh,

like, like older copies that are kept in the box. Look at this guy. That's cool. Original game boy. Wow. Like, this is my art.

Wow. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I, this is, I coveted this as a kid. We could not have.

Yeah. I've long had this thesis. Got one now, dad. I've long had this thesis that, I don't know how it'll play out, but like in many ways, video games can be the new golf

for a generation of young people that grew up playing competitive video games. And then they will like play games with their crew, like online. And like, it'll actually like kind of be this place where people have business discussions

in the lobby of Fortnite in a few years, like once they get over. So three years ago, two years ago, uh, it was an early, a long time ago,

was an early investor in Ro, Ro Health. Z. Ray Tano, founder and CEO. after our board meetings, we play Fortnite. Yeah. So we'll, this has been going on. I think he does it with some other CEO.

I heard some hilarious story about a kid who runs a company and does all his meetings and cod. He's like, no, no, seriously. I mean, he's like some like, I don't know, crypto founder or something. And like he's a very small, like, lean company. He's just like, oh, yeah, like, let's just hop on Rust if we want to like hash this out. But first, I do want to know. Top mod retro game. I got Tetris, obviously.

I got a few other games, but what should I get? There you go. Self-simulated. It's a platformer. It's a lot of fun. It involves your robot dying and an infinite number of its clones having to make its way out. I may or may not be working on a game of my own. I was about to ask.

Because if the mod retro chromatic install base gets big enough, you could potentially develop new games and it would probably be pretty cheap to develop because you're not trying to do GTA5 with networking and stuff, right? Like, you're actually just like you could maybe even vibe code it a little bit. like it's pretty doable. That is exactly right. I mean, this is an indie game.

And what's crazy is the amount of money I'm spending on this game is tens of thousands of dollars and that's everything. And that's for basically developer, designer, a little bit of soundtrack music stuff. Like it doesn't take...

That's not GTA6 money. Like that's accessible for just like an artist with like a couple backers. There's gonna be a new crowdfunding boom potentially. You could get new Kickstarter stuff going. Actually deliver stuff.

That's super cool. And what I love about the constraint is similar to a great great tweet, right? You're limited on characters. You've got to make each one count. You're limited on pixels. You make each count. And it forces you to think more about gameplay and do weird or interesting stuff. Like there's a C-Santi like guitar hero style game that I actually need to try where it's like that would have never been greenland. I love, I love C-Shantertees. It took the cost to be reasonable enough that you could get

experimental and turn around a really high quality in a game. So I'm bullish on it, especially because, you know, every new call of duty, every new battlefield, like, the graphics get marginally better, but it's diminishing returns, right? Oh, the buildings are now 99% more destructible. That's cool. But it doesn't, it's not a huge step function. Like, will I buy the new Grand Theft Auto when it ever comes out? Of course. Of course. But, but there's, there's room for this kind of simpler format that it's, it's very dope. And you know, Palmer's not stopping there. So if you've seen any of the tweets, there's some very cool hardware on the way. I'm very excited. Yeah. Yeah, I think he's on the schedule for later this month.

Last question. What's your framework and view on AI companions broadly? It feels like one of those things that everybody has like kind of a moral framework around investing into. Elon obviously ran the calculus of it feels like a market that a lot of the other labs didn't want to lean into heavily. he was willing to lean in. He went there. He went there. But what's your, because I'm sure you've gotten pitch probably hundreds of pitches.

You haven't tried Claude Sexy Mode? This is where, this is definitely where I feel like there's probably, look, the market's going to find, the market's not necessarily going to regulate itself. This is clearly one of the end games for AI for some percentage of the population.

I'm not like jumping out of bed to fund that company. And thankfully Elon's doing it with those hentai characters. But I do think, okay, the version of it that I think is very interesting to me. There's, and I've been using, I mean, maybe it just ends up being chat chattiebtee or anthropic. Like I use them as a kind of executive coach in real time when I'm looking for feedback on emails or just my own sort of notes on stuff. Like there's some version of that that I think is interesting and compelling. I like, I've been actively looking for the version of it that is kid friendly, but not, you know, and there's been some interesting ones that have gotten funding.

I don't know. Because the way I use AI with my kid right now is it's just the always on tutor that we can sort of ask questions to or will provide trivia questions for us on the road. That's a good use case. And it's great. And we do a little creative storytelling, storytelling, story running, but it's always with me. Because she's eight, right? I still, I want her to think of this as a tool that's going to give her superpowers to solve any problems she needs.

I'm excited to see, here's another one that I think the Palmers of the world will be thinking about is if you're focused on consumer electronics and consumer hardware, the way this generation, this AI native generation is going to interact with UI and UX is different from us. And it's the same, it's the version of the kids swiping the magazine back in the day. Oh, yeah. Because they thought the iPad was broken, but it's a paper magazine, right? Because that form factor was so native to them. There's an AI first, almost a voice first version that I'm expecting. Like, because even I watch my daughter, when she gets on her iPad for iPad time,

like she usually uses the microphone to dictate text into the prompts or what have you, instead of typing. Like I'm trying to get her on the whole query thing. But again, if I'm realistic, I'm like, well, this is way faster. These things, like literally, these things were designed. to be slow so that the keys wouldn't jam on a typewriter, right? And all the Dvorak keyboard people are like, we told you. Finally, we're validated. But I actually think this should feel like a relic from a bygone age if we build the right interface for it. So I think voice is going to get more

interesting. And I'm looking towards the younger generation for just helping us get ideas out of our heads. Yeah, the combination of kids' toys plus LLMs is interesting too. I'm sure they'll be jailbroken in terrible ways immediately. But if you can combine like, actual IP. Yeah, but we never did that on the internet in 2000 either. Yeah, if you can combine like novel IP that's a hit plus the LLM layer where the kid just doesn't love like a certain plushy thing. I mean, super underrated that OpenAI has a deal with, you know, I'm talking about broadcom, invidia, Oracle. They have a deal with Mattel. Like Open AI and Barbie are in business together. Like, let's think about that for a second. And Ken. It's going to be fun. Ken is aging.

I'm going to be able to go to Ken and Barbie AGI. It'll be fun. Thank you so much for stopping by. This is a great time. Great to catch up. Appreciate you guys. Keep up the great work. Thank you. You too. We'll talk to you soon. Talk soon. Speaking of Palmer, massive news out of Anderol today, Jen Bucci shares fit check and shows an insane design for an augmented reality, virtual reality. Is this a real picture? Warfighter, I believe it is. Wow.

Reggie James comments. He says, I, For one, love that national defense and intelligence are just founders fund incubation projects. Anderil had the full story. They said superpowers for superheroes. Today, they are unveiling Eagle Eye, the family of warfighter augments that place mission command and AI directly into the operator's helmet. Very cool. The lineage of this program is wild. Microsoft is working on it for a while.

Anderle got the contract. But still have a lot of... What do? Full page print ad? in the journal for this. Would they or did they? They already did. They did.

Fantastic. Pull it up. And Garcia Capital says, this isn't a call of duty screenshot. This is Anderil's eagle eye. Palmer's been on record saying that he thinks that the warfighter will be adopting virtual reality headsets or AR headsets before the consumer because weight, cost, and you can just mandate, hey, you got to wear this thing to do your job.

Well, and you can say we're going to spend $50,000 on each headset versus. meta being, you know, in a position where they need to make a headset for like 300 so they can sell for 800 or they're probably losing money. I don't know. Yep, yep, yep. So the willingness to pay to save a life on the battlefield is way higher than watch a movie or play a game. Yeah. What do you think of that a new headset, Tyler? They're so sick. How do we, I mean, we got to get one of these? How do we get a demo? I'm looking through like that they've posted some other images of what it looks like and it's like it just looks like Call of Duty. Like there's a mini map and then when you have a gun it shows like where, you're, you

It's like aiming at. That's crazy. It's sick. It's really like, yeah, Call of Duty Infinite Warfare is now here. Very excited to see more demos of this as it rolls out. Congratulations to the entire Anderil team on the progress. The lineage there is fascinating.

And I always had this thesis that like Palmer and Anderol was like the perfect company to do this project, originally called IVAS. And IVAS was kind of languishing within Microsoft for a number of years. And it made sense. that Palmer has the VR. Are they getting like a paid like a billion dollars a year? It was some massive contract that was getting.

Yeah. Yeah, I think it was like a 10 something billion dollar project or a project or scope of work. But I don't know how much they'd actually drawn down on that because I don't know how much they'd actually delivered against the contract. There was still a lot of value to be paid if you could deliver. But Microsoft I think wasn't quite delivering. And so Aenderell bought the contract or acquired the contract. or acquired the contract or merged the contract in,

and then now is running at it much harder. And, I mean, it seems like a really, really solid progress, which is exciting. So if you go over and you get a chromatic, you're going to have to pay sales tax, the chromatic team. Telling you, get on numeralhq.com, sales tax on autopilot, spend less than five minutes per month

on sales tax compliance. More news on rare earths, allude Gill, who came on the show. Narrative violation. Oh, yeah. Abundant Earths. London Earths is quoting Ben Thompson. He says, the U.S. deficiency in rare earths isn't a matter of needing to catch up to technological excellence. It's needing to simply have the will, incentives,

and regulatory regime to do what we already did before. TLDR, they are not rare. We just chose not to make them in the United States of America. The NRC of old, multiple aspects of U.S. resilience in both energy and manufacturing. Hopefully the current NRC can help change things for the better. Now, the steel man for not making rare earths in America is, and I think we now realize that it was a mistake, but I do think it's important to understand the rationale behind not doing mining in America. Like, it is dirty. It is gross. Like, if you have a mine upstream for you, there's probably going to be some pollution. If you're worried about microplastics, you're also probably worried about molybdenum in your... Forever chemicals. And your tap water.

Forever chemicals, all these different things. It is a very rough job. You know, the famous, like, coal miner gets black lung. Like, there was a reasonable rationale for not doing this all over the United States. But the true answer was always more technology. It wasn't, hey, mining is dirty. Let's not do dirty mining. It was like, let's figure out how to actually clean it.

Like there is a way to, it might be a little bit less economical, but there is a way to put a mine somewhere and have the chemicals contained and not destroy the environment. And that always should be the answer, just like with nuclear power plants, design one that doesn't blow up. That's the answer. The answer is not no more nuclear power plants.

It's design one that's safe. And so hopefully we can get there. And hopefully we can resure it. There are a couple of companies that are working on it, MP Materials, I think is one. There's a few others that are, you know, working on rare earth manufacturing and processing. Yeah, the challenge is trying to massively increase production capacity while making the process much cleaner. Yes.

You kind of need to choose one typically. Yes. There is a third option, though. The third option is to recycle the materials that we have. So there's a public company, and then there's redwood materials, which was founded by J.B. Straubel, who was, I believe, co-founded. or at least on the board of Tesla for a number of years. And his whole pitch is, there's, there's already, we already have a ton of rare earths. They're just locked in depreciated electric cars.

Let's rip them up, reprocess them, and then recycle them because, uh, the actual matter is conserved even after the battery is no longer useful. And so you can separate all those out and then, uh, and then reintroduce them into the supply chain. And so, uh, redwood materials has been on that, on that track for a number of years and hopefully is doing well because it's more more important than ever. What else do you want to go through in the timeline while you pay? Pegasus says OpenAI starting to give off FTX vibes. What do you think cause this? October 13th? This was this morning. TBPN appearance? No.

Yeah, I'm extremely bearish for us. I don't know. I mean so so FTCS was getting unbelievably large while telling the world that they had like five engineers. And they were running a hedge fund that was actively, effectively trading against their user base. They, they're, I don't know. It's, I think it's a rough pattern match. It's a rough pattern match. I mean, first off, like... It's not to say you can't find ways to criticize OpenA.I.

and criticize Sam's deal-making and all that kind of thing, but it feels wildly different. Yeah, for sure. I mean, the FTX narrative was so, so... Sam is not, like, trading. He's trading with the subscription revenue that you give them, but it's wildly different than, you know, millions of people holding deposits with a financial institution

that's half onshore, half offshore, and, you know, making wild degenerate bets. Totally. Even just the aesthetics, like the vibes of SBF, where he was doing like those TikTok dances and his whole brand was like, I'm this like 20-year-old billionaire. It's like Sam has been-

I drive a Honda Accord. I drive a Camry. Yeah, yeah. Sam will straight up tell you he likes a fancy car. And, yeah, so way less fake. Sam said he'd never buy a car for a quarter mill. Exactly. He got it.

And also, like, yeah, this whole, the whole SBF thing was just so much faster. FTCX ramps so much faster than Open AI. Open AI, I mean, started, what, a decade ago. Like, they really have been working for a long time. Also, Sam Altman has a way longer track record in Silicon Valley, like investing in big companies, growing them. He's been, you know, more or less correct on like the energy question, on the SaaS question. One way to pattern match it is that they're both CEOs that happen to make some pretty good investments.

Their name, Sam. Their names. Is that a coincidence? Draw the red string. Red string time. I mean, they are actually more linked because isn't the open philanthropy, effective altruism stuff linked, right? Tyler, back me up on this. What's the link?

I know a lot of, like, EA funding was mostly from, like, FDX. Like, it totally destroyed, like, the ecosystem. system. And I think that's maybe when they actually changed. I don't know if it's the same organization, Open Philanthropy or EA. But there was something where basically FTCS crashes. Yep. Everything is kind of wiped out. Yeah. Including like a lot of EA. But in fact, I think a lot, there would be a lot more string between FTX and Anthropic, right, than FTC's opening. Yeah, for sure. Because a lot of the EA is like left opening eye to go over to Anthropic. But also like that's a very real business with like, and it's like, yeah, it's just like what, what would

be the, like, the nature of, like, selling tokens for subscription revenue is just not the same as being a hedge fund that can, like, blow up on one bad trade. If, like, you're over levered. It's just like, you can get over levered if you have a lot of debt and stuff, but the debt's lost, I don't know. It's a stretch, but it's certainly a viral post because there's a lot of people with strong opinions. Everyone has, like, a favorite foundation model company CEO right now. You can't just be a fan of all of them, like we are. You can't just be like, I like capitalism. I like business.

I like all of them. It's a good... What's your... It's a good lab CEO. What's your take on the AI labs? I like the lab. I like them. Yeah, we support the foundation model CEOs across the board.

Like we support fin.com. The number one agent for customer service. Number one in performance benchmarks. Number one in competitive bakeoffs. Number one ranking on G2. Watching my friend's kid and immediately put him on the drugs. What is this? Miss Rachel.

I don't know who that is. You've never thrown on. I've never seen Miss Rachel. I think I saw her mentioned in the Wall Street Journal once, but that's really the only interaction I've ever had. YouTube? YouTube gets probably Miss Rachel. Yeah.

She's pulling, I mean, so her top videos do like billions of views. Billions? She has a video from three years ago called Baby Learning with Miss Rachel. 1.6 billion views. That's a lot of views. So she puts up insane numbers, but you can think of it somewhat like crack cocaine for the youth, and that it's like hyper addictive. It's very engaging. I do believe that it's like probably effective at teaching, but at the cost of every, yeah, it's not, it's basically, it doesn't immediately screen brain.

rot, but then if you actually pay attention to it, it's cutting quickly. It's, it's keeping them kids, you know, massively engaged. And then if you turn it off, it's like full meltdown modes. Yeah. Jordi, would you say it's equivalent to like that thing where it's, um, uh, it would be, it's like a Dwarkasch interview for you. If you're, if you're playing it and I come unplug your headphones, you start screaming and you're mounting the table. You can't, you go non-primal. Sarah Payne was explaining. I was, I was re-listening to Leopold's interview yesterday. Oh, yeah? I was feeling a little bit low on the AGI-pilledness.

I had to get, you know, refilled. Yeah. But so, would you say it's similar to, like, when you see, like, Peter Griffin, like, explaining, like, math concepts? Have you ever seen these? No. Okay, well, it's like family guy characters, and they're like, oh, this is, like, you know, you do gradient descent or something.

They're explaining some. Is Peter Griffin, like, the Dwar Cash of the Family Guy universe or something? Explain who Peter Griffin is. All right, never mind. None of us get each other references at all. What is funny about this picture that Growing Daniel shared is that he says, watching my friend's kid and immediately put him on the drugs, and there's Mitch,

Miss Rachel showing on a TV. But this is clearly a conference room. Like there is, have you ever seen this little, if you zoom in on the actual device on the table there? Do you know what this is? It's like a 360 camera that you can use to like zoom around the room. And maybe we should get one right here.

We can have, You can zoom in on me or you, Tyler, or you, or whatever you want. Anyway, very funny, very funny random post. You mentioned it earlier, but on this day, Intel IPOed at a stock price of $23.50. By close, it had raised $6.8 million. Historical size gong? Hit it. Historical size gong.

Absolutely wild run. Let me tell you about Adio. Customer relationship magic. Adio is the AIA of CRM that builds scales and grows your company. the next level. Benny Feldman is going viral on X. He says, my buddy lost his job to AI.

His job was to chug thousands of gallons of water at a data center. This is so funny. Remember, if you're thirsty, GROC is thirsty too. Yeah, this is wildly viral. 147,000 likes.

Apple apparently is rebranded. It's streaming service Apple TV plus to Apple TV. This is where all the Alpha is in streaming. This is why Tim Cook makes $7.4.9 million. Once a year, add a plus, drop a plus, add a max. Drop a max.

This is how the modern economy works. What is the current HBO name? It's back to HBO Max. So now you can go and buy an Apple TV, open the Apple TV app, and subscribe to Apple TV. So now there's three products that are all called Apple TV. It's pretty wild.

Well, you know, there's some good stuff on there. F1. You wouldn't have watched F1 without Apple TV. I watched it on Amazon Prime, though. You did. But it was produced by Apple TV plus, the streaming service. Yes. Because there's a production company.

There's like seven layers. They vertically integrated the supply chain. How do you save money on the icon pass? Let's go to Dave Ramsey. So you buy the icon pass to save money skiing. Yes, Dave. Because you have the icon pass, you now travel to Colorado, Utah, Japan, and Europe to ski. So you end up spending more money on ski trips.

That is correct. The P-Gy Guide. Great posts, great posts. Icon Pass. Wilmanitis. I got an fight with somebody over the icon pass. I was maintaining that the slopes weren't in fact crowded this ski season with my one data point. I went skiing once or twice or something like.

It wasn't that bad. And they were like, I went skiing 25 times. It was terrible this season. They need to raise prices. But I don't know. We spend most of our time locked in the studio of the Ultradome. Didn't get that many days of fresh pal. That's true.

Wellmanitis was David Senora released the second ever episode of David Senora by David Senator hosted by David Senora and executive produced by David Senora. Yes. Wellmanitis shared, of course, episodes with Michael Dell. Wilmanidas shared that Michael Dell was 23 when Dell computer crossed 150 million in sales, not something you see very often. You hear a picture that has exactly 23 pixels, apparently. Couldn't find a higher-res version, but it is remarkable.

You couldn't find a higher-res version from October 19th, 1987, Will. I will always remember October 19th because we made a $25 million deal that day, said Dell, whose Dell Computer Corporation grossed $159 million. dollars in sales last year of thousands of deals that were squashed that day. Ours was one of the only ones that wasn't. Wow. Absolutely. We pull up this video of the Chinese Unitree humanoids. And while we're pulling that up, let me tell you about 8Sleep.com.

Get a pod five. How did you sleep last night? We know that Saturday was a rough night. I kind of had a rough go. I got a 73. I got a 93. Play my sound cue. Let's go.

Rough. Rough. But you know who doesn't need to sleep? A unitary robot. Let's play the video of the unitary robots dancing at an incredible speed. Wow, that is remarkable. We got to get one of these. This is a $7 billion company.

Yep. Whoa. Pretty cool. Putting clothes on them is really cool. Not the dancing dogs. Dogs are not as impressive for me for some reason. Maybe I'm just... You don't...

John doesn't like seeing robot dogs. I've just seen so many because Boston Dynamics is post. posted so many videos like that. Yeah, but that's a game performance. You never see Boston Dynamics putting on an entire play. I'm not that impressed. Do better.

Step it up. Give it a gun. That's the solution. Until it's doing 360 no scopes in a killhouse. John will not be impressed. I won't be impressed. I want to see it on the battlefield. Dario Amadehate at Anthropic

met with Narendra. Modi, the PM of India, to discuss Anthropics expansion into India, where Claude Code use is up 5x since June. How India deploys AI across critical sectors like education, health care, and agriculture for over a billion people will be essential to shaping the future of AI. And Max Bodak says, prediction, we're going to see way more images of hyper-scaler CEOs being treated like visiting heads of state. Who or a farm to here, Tyler, between Narendra Modi and Dario Amade.

I think I'm going to give it to Dario. I think you were a farm. I agree. Yeah. It's a good farm. It's a good farm, sir. You always have to take account, like, what is their previous kind of aura levels going in? Yes.

Obviously. Obviously. Obviously. So I think this is the new move. If you're, like, a seed stage founder, you need to get a photo op done. I don't know. I mean, you think Modi's farming him? Just analyzing the positioning, Modi's a little bit turned in.

True. Meanwhile, the Chad, Dario is sitting. No, I'm saying the same thing. I'm saying Dario or a farmed. Yes, yeah. Yes, yes, yes. Dario or farmed, clearly. Yeah, Modi's looking sharp is all I'm saying.

But, yeah, if you ran the green line test and you look specifically at Modi's legs, the way they're sort of slanted in. It's critical. It's not quite perfect. Dario also looks a couple inches taller. He's got a kind of fluffy head of hair to add an extra inch. That helps with the aura farming. There's a lot that goes on there. But congratulations to clogged code.

Tashi Michal says META has zero net cash, net of debt and operating leases. At the beginning of the year, they had $30 billion of net cash. The cash burn is real. It's good. They finally found something to invest in. This is bullish. Stagnation over. For a long time, the hyperscalers were critiqued.

You guys produced so much cash. You don't know what to do with it. The best thing you can do is give it back to investors. Now they have something to invest in. They do. They have something. There is a technology worth investing in. That's always been the critique.

Now they're putting money to work. Sarah Goh said earlier, meta has generated $100 billion of operating cash over the last 12 months, and it has a leader, unafraid of the public markets. If AI training is a Kappex game, a cash for talent game, and a speed to execute game,

it is ludicrous to count them out. Well, well said. Yeah, I'm just looking. you know, I think people are going to hold them to an incredibly high standard because they have put together, you know, they've spent billions building this team. They're willing to outspend everyone else be bolder. And so ultimately, that's why the meta vibes and SORA launches are, again, embarrassing for MSL because it seems like they kind of rushed.

They didn't. SORA is what, you know, you can critique SORA, you can say it's slop, you can not like using the app, but they, they created a key innovation with the cameo. They had not just a leap forward in the model quality, but a leap forward on the product level. They created something that ultimately will probably be, it's like a new social pattern and product that will probably be copied by TikTok. it'll probably be copied by Instagram.

And so you have to give them credit. It just makes Meta's vibes app look rushed and not actually innovative at all, right? It's just sort of a feed. Somebody else on X was saying it makes it look like kind of more like a wallpaper app than a social media feed. Yeah, it was Katie. Yeah. Play this out with me with stories in Snapchat. it was very easy for

for the meta team to look at Snapchat as a chat app and they had WhatsApp and Instagram DMs and stuff. And so they were in a decent spot there. But then once stories came out, it became more of a video consumption platform. And so they had to bring stories to Instagram. They did that successfully.

Vertical, endless scroll and video from TikTok. That was also ported back to Instagram successfully. I would regard Reels as a success. Is it harder? or is it somehow structurally different to port back the best practices from SORA to Instagram? Like, let's say that they just, you know, go to Microsoft and give me a copy of SORA or whatever. They got the IP from, you know, the team that they built. They've done the training run.

They have the exact same technology. They're GPU rich. They have the exact same ability to ship the feature. If they ship that feature in Instagram, is it somehow fundamentally counterpositioned? because the Instagram audience would revolt, and it's more upsetting or more kind of destabilizing to what Instagram has going for it than just adding stories or reels,

which were very incremental, just its own tab, it was very easy. Could they just launch SORA with cameos in Instagram? Yeah, it's wild to think of a cameo feature built on top of the Instagram social graph, where instead of Jake Paul being like, Hey, by the way, you can go cameo me. Over here.

Just do it on this platform. There's a button on his profile that you just allows you to generate content. Yeah. It will get extremely chaotic. There's already done a lot of those sorts of deals with like the big influencers. They went to all of them and they were like, we want to create virtual versions of you. So they've been dipping their toe in that water, but it does feel like a like a trickier Rubicon to cross than just adding stories or vertical video.

Yeah. Every Instagram innovation has felt very natural. And there's been a little bit of pushback, but going from square photos to vertical photos to videos to stories to reels, in hindsight, it all feels like a very smooth gradient that nothing at any point was like, oh, this is terrible, at least in my experience. And I feel like I'm very median in terms of my Instagram consumption. But adding Sora and cameos in there might be a little bit crazy. So I don't know. Maybe I'll have to run a billboard ad campaign to tell everyone. They'll have to go to adquick.com out of our advertising made it easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of ad-of-home advertising. Only ad-quick combines technology out-home expertise and data to enable seamless, efficient ad buying across the globe. Germany has proposed raising the retirement age to 73 and terminally online engineer says, imagine being 72 years old, reviewing a vibe-coded PR from a junior dev with a chip in his brain playing brain rot on repeat.

Germany's just clearly Pilled on Don't Die This is Brian Johnson's work Clearly he went to Germany Great job Brian Hey I got the supplements for you You guys are going to be living forever

Raise the retirement age I do wonder what the Like fiscal impact of this is Because This is never because politicians Want to do this Well politicians work until they're like 90 So you know

But it's deeply unpopular It is Yeah, if you're, if you're, don't you love work? Not for me. You raise my retirement age. I think they should ban the retirement age. Yeah, not, not everyone is fortunate enough to get to talk about the things that we love for three hours a day professionally. Maybe in the future. But it's deeply unpopular, whether you're about to retire or you're even, you have 10 years out or 20 years out, people that are, you know, planning to depend on

their state-back retirement are not excited about extra years being added here. So, yeah, again, I'm sure there's a fiscal reason for it. Yeah, I mean, the white pill is that, is that I heard some sort of take that was like, if America raised the retirement age like four years, all of a sudden we have like a massive, you know, budget surplus, no more deficit because so much of the like the fiscal problem is tied to when health care benefits and retirement benefits kick in. And so if you just shift those back a few years, all of a sudden America looks like very solvent. Of course, it would be very destabilizing.

I'm joking about the work being rewarding. But it is kind of like the hammer that's there that you can hit, and then all of a sudden your country is in the black again if you're losing money. Yeah. Anyway, we have our third guest of the show. Serena from Data Curve in the re-stream waiting room, welcome to the show, Serena. Thank you so much for joining us.

How are you doing? Good. How are you guys doing? We're doing fantastic. Would you mind introducing yourself, the company? Yeah, welcome. Yeah. Of course. Yeah, Data Curb.

We do coding data for the foundation model labs to develop new capabilities to improve them. I dropped out of school at 18 to do YC for some shitty-ass idea called Uncle GPD that eventually turned into Data Curve. Wait, what was it called? It was called Uncle GPD. We were building like a middle-aged AGII.

It was just a... That's amazing. Un-status achieved internally. Wait, was it all just like a prompt, basically, wrapped around? Was it a classic like GPD wrapper? It was some rapper. It was like a...

We were making like web agents that would navigate the web, but it wasn't working. And we pivoted throughout the basket. Would they keep having midlife crises? And they'd go try to buy a 9-11 into the middle of a task? Yeah, it wasn't working well. But, yeah, Data Curves been around for a year since.

And this is working. What's the evidence? Have you just been getting a lot of customers? Has there been really solid progress on the product side? Like, what's the secret to unlocking the news today? I think since day one of starting Data Curb, we found a lot of traction commercially where a lot of the foundation model labs were inbounds to us. Like, imagine me.

I'm some like a 19-year-old who had never taken a sales call. And the first one is a fan customer. We saw so much commercial traction in the market. and we've always been pushed to fulfill that more and more, which brings us to today. We're fulfilling it on a platform that's paid out a million dollars in bounties, and we just raise our Series A. Amazing. Hit that gone.

How much did you raise? We raised 15 million in Series A, which brings you to us 17. Congratulations. Amazing. You said the focus is on coding data. Break down kind of the niche a bit more. Well, I think coding data is just not any niche. It's like the niche, the thing that's working for alums, the thing that's working commercially.

So when we think about coding in the whole alum space is like the most important capability, we do all the post-rining data for improving coding agents or existing capabilities, like anything that you see in the Soda models, we're looking to improve that or just maybe even develop new capabilities with the labs. What within coding is a place where you actually need to go get new data? because I imagine there are a million answers to FISBuzz on Stack Overflow. That's all been scraped. All of GitHub has been scraped.

Obviously, the labs and the cursors and the windsurfs of the world have been like have these RL data flywheel now. But where would you actually say, I need to go get new data to improve a coding agent? Yeah, let's think about like how this all cycle starts, right? Let's say we look at the current coding agents. They can solve two hour long issues. But what if we want them to solve seven hours? hour long, like more long horizon tasks. Perhaps for us data curve, we want to provide

like reinforcement learning with very level rewards tasks so that these models can learn on longer horizon tasks with verifiers. That may be one thing. Or maybe people want to develop more multimodal coding agents. So maybe we want to do some data science, um, RL or SFT tasks for the labs. Okay. So, uh, like one piece of data might be like a really clean example of a seven hour task that then can be used to train a model that could do seven-hour tasks regularly, basically. Is that the idea? It could be that. That would be for supervised learning, but you can also have the verifiers for the seven-hour

long tasks or intermediate verifiers. But whatever, however the labs want to train that. Yeah. I mean, this was framed as like taking on scale AI. A lot of people think of scale AI as like mechanical Turk almost, very basic tasks, like short time horizon, very, you know, anyone could go do a scale AI task. that's at least the narrative. And now we're in the world where there's companies that are doing like experts on,

we're looking for paleontologists to like teach the all-lums, everything about dinosaurs or, you know, what you said. And then there's also the folks that are designing RL environments with verifiable rewards. There's no humans in the loop at all. Where do you sit on that continuum? We definitely sit on the high-scale task. We are not in the long till, like, oh, we're not going to find you urinologist living in Egypt. But we're going to find the bulk of the where the good coders are, and I think that captures

most of the important tasks that they're able to do, and the lot allows want to train on. Yeah, it's definitely very high skills. And I think the premise here is, like, I don't think any high-skilled software engineer wants to be a data annotator. And then so you have to let's say pay them a law on contract to get them to even agree to that. But maybe they're not going to do a great job if you got them to go on contract too, especially at skill. You just get a bunch of Googlers coasting at their jobs.

and you pay them 200 an hour. So we do like a bounty-based system for these very cracked people. They're having fun. They are also making money. And they're also upskilling for something they're passionate about. And it's definitely like very high-skilled human data. We heard that one of these firms that, you know, gets human labeled data basically runs the entire company on a Slack channel. And they've created a lot of value and scaled a lot.

But they just don't even need to build a product yet. How important do you think it is to actually engineer a durable product versus just solve the matching problem between labs, want, this type of person. I go get that type of person. I just introduce them. I think there's a very big component of pipelining and also experience that retains people. So the more complex data you need, the more guard rules you need for someone who's well-intentioned and wants to do a task, you want them to be handheld throughout that process and also make that process engaging. let's say especially if we're training somebody up to do a seven-hour long task, you better have a good experience or they will drop off.

So I think, and then you also need different validations here and there to steer them. So pipeline, developer experience, something we focus a lot on. So, yeah, I think pipeline is very important. The whole experience is important, which is how we use gamification and also make better dev tools. Yeah, if you match people, then it relies on the labs having that pipeline internally. but for us, we do that all in-house and we sell the final data, not the labor. What, you said you got into YC at 18, is that correct? Yeah, like right around my birthday turning 19, yeah.

Fantastic. Do you remember what your answer to the question about what's a real world system that you've hacked was at the time? That was like three years ago. Oh, I think it might have been that I skipped high school and got perfect grade or something. You skipped high school? Oh, you mean you just like didn't go? Yeah, because it was COVID, so I just record everything and playback on 4X speed and then didn't really 4X.

4X is so crass. This is who you're competing against. It's amazing. You've taken like the worst critique of like Zoomer brain rod, but applied it just to like hyper efficiency and like actually creating shareholder value. I love it. It's the equivalent of like watching subway surfers, but you're watching like your class stuff at 4X speed. That's amazing. Jordan, anything else?

No, amazing progress. Thank you so much for stuff. I'm sure we'll have you back on again soon. We'll talk to you soon. Cheers. Have a good one. Bye. Monad Warrior says when a Waymo and a Tesla Robotaxie

encounter each other on the street, they admit a high-pitched signal inaudible to the human ear in which they call each other unthinkable robot slurs. Do they actually have a way to communicate? I mean, they should, right? But I have no idea what that will actually look like.

Clanker. They're calling each other clanker. Deeply offensive. talking about how geo-fense, each other's geofencing. I never see you on the freeway. Yeah. I never see you on the freeway. Go to SFL right now.

You can't. You can't. You're geo-fenced. Sheel had a pretty scathing review of the meta-rayband displays demo experience. Yeah, the demo experience. He tried to, he was ready to buy the product. Yeah. They forced him to go to a local Best Buy in order to do a demo before

they bought it. Yep. I was surprised by that, too. I saw, yeah, they just make you schedule a demo. On one hand, it's like, okay, it's a new product. Yep. It's clearly not where they want the product to be, but it's, but it's, we've demoed it a couple times.

It's, it, obviously, they had some issues during the, the, the demo, the keynote itself, but it was reliable when we were using it. And we could see if you're using WhatsApp a lot, if you're, you're, there's some key use cases that are interesting. But apparently the person that actually gave them a demo wasn't super knowledgeable, wasn't that helpful, and it makes sense, right? They're Best Buy employee.

They're not a meta employee. They don't have the same incentive to learn about the product, and their career is not riding on the product itself, right? What's interesting is Apple did something similar with the Apple Vision Pro. They were funneling people to the Apple store, go do the demo, Applevision Pro demo was amazing because you're like interacting with this dinosaur that comes

through the world, the butterfly lands on your finger. It's tracking your hands and then it's doing AR and it is really, really impressive. The problem with the Apple Vision Pro is that like after five minutes you've seen everything and so you're kind of done. But Apple also just let you buy it online and they would just ship it to you and you would just ship it to you and then if you didn't like it, you could just take it back at the store, you could send it back. And so it was weird that meta wasn't also just doing, hey, we'll just ship it to you. Like I'm at a point where like I would just buy one right now online, but I do not want to go to a Best Buy. That's definitely going to, like, you know, hurt the bubble.

Tyler wants to go to a Best Buy, though. You're going to go? I'll go. I mean, if I get to put on the ramp card, you know. Yeah, of course. I'll go. Of course, yeah, we can expense it. But you will, yeah, you'll need to, you'll need to call in and live stream the entire experience. And we can cut to the Tyler cam in hour, an hour three of the show. You'll be like, I'm still getting the demo, the Wi-Fi is now working. I can wear the old gen of the meta glasses while I'm putting on the new yeah you can record the whole thing how long is

the the rayband meta's record time I think it's not it's not three hours it might be one hour though oh you can record for an hour I just remember live translation works for an hour until the battery oh that's pretty good actually wow that's high I know AI mode's pretty short but

do you have them are those the meta ray bands I mean these are yours okay yeah great well yeah we'll use those we'll record the light's not turning on so you got you got to re-initialize those. But yeah, I don't know. It is interesting. My big question is like how quickly will, how quickly will Apple respond? So there's a bunch of news from Mark German about this. There's a whole article in Bloomberg. Apple apparently is pivoting from a vision air to

meta-like smart glasses. And he says that Apple may be one of the richest companies, but they but they can't do everything at once. They're apparently scaling back plans for a cheaper and lighter version of the Vision headset. Now, we might see a new Apple Vision Pro this week, actually. That's the report that there might be a new one coming, but it'll be the same hardware, just better chip, better software, couple little tweaks, nothing crazy.

But everyone was hoping for a Vision error that was just like, take the second display. Matt up, making Apple pivot is hilarious. Pretty sick. Mogged. I mean, the bigger mogg. is they paid that new research. If they paid that new researcher at Meta,

if they paid him $3.5 billion, it would take Tim Cook 47 years to make that much money. The guy's going to make it in three. It's insane, insane. The level of like calm. Also, Tim's getting it dripped out year by year. I know. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Apple's been around for 49 years. So you would have to be there. And there's like rumors swirling that John Turner is going to take over the CEO job. And so it's like, you're Tim Cook and you're just like, wait, they're paying him what? They're paying him 50 times as much as I make as CEO of Apple? Oh, that's great. Yeah, yeah, that's fine. Anyway, they are working on new smart glasses. They're maybe saying, hey, the vision stuff, it's too heavy. We're just not going to

get there. Let's go AR. Let's do what Apple does best, which is miniaturization. They're very good miniaturizing things. So let's take the chip and all the stuff from the iPhone air, stuff it in a pair of glasses and make them white and put them, you know, on your face. Get ready to wear an iPhone on your face, buddy. We were talking to the acquired guys about this and they were like, you know, AirPods were weird too. And then now everyone just wears them. And so, you know, you could imagine the glasses. I did hear from somebody else that was just saying, like, I will never wear meta glasses. Like even the, even the ray bands with just the normal cameras on them. They just don't look good. They're just like, they're like, they look too techy. They look too tech and everything for me. I think those are getting adopted. I disagree.

I disagree with that take. Yeah. I mean, I've, I, I went surfing with a buddy who had the new Oakley meta-glasses. Vanguard. The Vanguard. And they don't look like. No. It's such a small dot in the center.

It looks, you can't tell it. You can't know. Here's something I need, or Hunter, SPX Thompson needs the, the Alibaba Arcterix official merch collab. What? You see this? I look sick. I like that. Apparently, Arcterix is owned by a Chinese company now.

No idea. Not super unlikely collab. Nick Abizid is sharing. He has a trading card with a photograph taken by Dylan Abrucato signed. Wow.

You see this? Dylan is always finessing. This is why we, this is why we brought him on as president. What is this a picture of? It's a Mets Stadium picture. What are the Mets? It's a baseball team. I know you're going to ask me, what's baseball?

What is baseball? What is baseball? It's a sport? You took a picture of a sport? Yes, it's a sport pick, John. That's all you need to know. I only know about Wander. Find your happy place.

Book of Wander with Inspiring Reviews, Hotel Great Menus. Dream events, top tier cleaning and 24-7 concier service. It's a vacation home, but better, baby. Isaac is saying nothing is real. AI will accelerate the increase of real-world interactions. The internet has become too negative, too meaningless. By 2026, most of video online will be AI. People will log off.

Platforms will be forced to fight back as user experience is affected. Creators who make valuable content will still win, slop won't, and that's good for everyone. It's perfect posts. There's some things you can agree with. There's some things you can disagree. disagree with. He's saying,

yeah, I don't know. I think there's so much room to grow. Look at where the 55 to 64 year old cohort is, one and a half hours. We're just getting started. Meanwhile, the Zoomers are doing three hour days on the internet. We got to work to double the boomers online times.

Well, I guess this is specifically social media. There's that whole meme. Oh, the Facebook moms love the AI slop content. It's like they still got a ways to go. Get those numbers up. Uh, people are hunting wild boars with drones now. Uh, they put some sort of, some sort of weapon on the drone fly it around. Wait, can we pull up this video?

And Ronnie Adkins says, I am no longer in, impressed by chopper boar hunting where you fly out of a helicopter and shoot the wild boar. Yeah, look at this. It has like an arrow on the, on the bottom. It's like a weighted arrow that they just drop? That seems. How heavy is that? That, it doesn't have a, like a, like an explosive tip or something? like how it just feels like that would bounce right off.

This might end up being a pretty dark video. Yeah, maybe we don't want to watch this. There we go. Okay. They're testing it and. Or it's just for head shots? That's pretty, is that a real video? That seems.

That seems crazy. It seems crazy. Or something. Anyway, it has never been easier to make money than it is in today's post AI. Sorry, everyone for. Well, and some more fun news, Bashar al-Assad lives in a quiet luxury tower in Moscow, reportedly addicted to spending long hours playing online

video games. After Statecraft, there's only one mountain left to climb. And that's your prestige mode, call of duty, baby. And this account says, it is journalistic malpractice to not tell me what he's playing. What do you think he's actually playing? If you're Bashar al-Assad, are you playing Battlefield 6? Are you playing? Also, they just had online video games and they put the picture of the old Xbox controller. He could be playing anything. He could be playing hearts of iron four he could be playing. Imagine if he's playing a 4X game as a geopolitical world leader. That's what you want to play.

Factorio. Dwar fortress. Maybe he's playing some dwarf fortress. That's a great thing. We broke the news yesterday that It's not breaking until it's a TBPN trading card. Gabby Goldberg and Layer 3 co-founder Gary.

Congratulations. Our engaged love to see it. Dan Shipper says the TBPN engagement announcement is the new New York Times vows article. I didn't even know about the New York Times vows articles. And AGM also says this is going to become the

S-F version of the New York Times wedding announcements, but without the ability to pay to play. Who says we're not going to monetize this? Antonio, come on. Give us some credit here. No, yeah, I think no pay to play on the wedding. It's got to be authentic. You've got to be a member of the community.

Gabby Goldberg's been a huge supporter since day one, and we're very excited for her. to tie the knot, isn't that what they say? Crazy article in The Guardian about PT's lecture series. Yeah. Some absolutely insane lines. Some wild hot takes. Causing crashouts.

Yes. It's very entertaining. We had to feature this post from Jacob Rintamaki. I don't know if you want to go through it and try to put this together. So Jacob says, T.L. being a one-piece otaku, honestly doesn't even, Honestly, isn't even in the top ten weirdest things to happen this year. And it's quote from the Guardian scoop of the leaked lecture series that Peter Thiel has been putting on in San Francisco. It says, Tiel later finds biblical meaning in the manga One Piece discussing how he believes it represents a future where an antichrist-like one-world government has repressed science.

He believes that the hero, Monkey D. Luffy, represents a Christ-like figure. In One Piece, you are set in a fantasy world. again, sort of an alternate earth, but it's 800 years into the reign of this one world state, which as the story unfolds, gradually gets darker and darker, you sort of realize, in my interpretation,

who runs the world, and it's something like the Antichrist. And so he's digging into One Piece. Tyler, have you watched or read any One Piece? I've watched a little bit of it. So the thing about One Piece is, at least episodes, there's like... A thousand.

Yeah, there's like over a thousand. It's like what take you months to watch. Yeah. But, I mean, so he's already written about One Piece, like it was like two weeks ago there was some new essay he wrote well i think that's like in in conjunction like i think the timeline like lines up such that he was writing about it but then also lecturing about it and so they kind of like leaked but then also had written about that but uh yeah in the piece he pulls examples from all over the place yeah so he's comparing

uh yeah he's comparing uh one piece to watchman yep in this which is like another comic i think it's alan moore yep who is like is he related to gordon more who is creator of moore's law you gotta get to the bottom of that. Who knows? You know, the jungle gym and the transformer came from the same place. But it's, I think there's a few things going on here. Like putting your, if you have a,

if you have like a very, like, esoteric philosophy or like, you know, thought experiment or an idea that you want to like discuss with the world, putting it in terms that lots of people can understand is with a metaphor or an analogy is just a time-honored way to disseminate information. You know, you're trying to explain things.

You want to explain them in terms that a lot of people can know. Yeah, you also can try to dissect the deeper meaning in a story, and it's possible that the original author had something bigger in mind when they were writing a story that looks a little bit more simple.

Yeah. I mean, one piece, I think it has like millions and millions, I mean, hundreds of millions of, like, fans or sales. I think the One Piece Reddit is bigger than the Star Wars Reddit just to kind of put it in context. But One Piece has always been very anti-authoritarian. I was digging

around because I've never seen the show and I wanted to know more about it. And apparently one of the key icons from the One Piece show is this cartoon pirate flag. And the cartoon pirate flag has for years been used and it's

been carried at protests all over the world against the local leader, like being too authoritarian, basically. And so it's just been the type of flag, like if you go to, you know, some sort of protest, you might see a variety of flags, but the One Piece flag is pretty, is pretty iconic. And so it does feel odd in this particular context, but it's actually been, One Piece has been used as like a protest vehicle for years. I don't know, maybe I'll have to check it out. the only anime I've ever watched is Akira.

That's the only real one. Have you ever watched any cartoons at all? No. I do think it would be interesting to analyze the anti-Christ and this idea of the one-world government through the lens of something you are familiar with, like Borat. Like you could put it in terms that you could understand.

If Teal really wants to break through to someone like you, I think that one piece is a little bit, it's a little bit too niche, too heady, too complicated for guys like us. So I would love to see him, Break down or at terms. Yeah, in Borat or, you know, King of the Hill would be a good, would be a good analogy that, you know, I could kind of understand maybe Futurama, Simpsons, family guy. Stuff like that would probably make it resonate with me a little bit more than a thousand episodes of an anime that I'm never going to be able to watch. But still, people are having fun with it.

You got somebody putting you in the truth zone, John, they're saying cartoons are not anime. Yes, I know that. I know that it's very offensive to call one piece of cartoon. They will call you. Yeah, the whole, the whole, I know that much. The whole Guardian expose on the off, off the record lectures, really, I mean, it's, it just is like an example of, one, it's tough to do an off the record talk that you're saying things that require a certain amount of context that then just get blasted out across the entire internet. Yep. And two, I can see how the average.

Guardian viewer is reading this being like, uh, okay, this guy is definitely, definitely the anti- so anyways, it's, uh,

complicated conversation. It was very clear that not only the core content leaked, but also the Q&A. And so there are all these questions where people were clearly throwing questions like, what do you think about Mr. Beast? And then the guardian would just be like, he commented on Mr. Beast.

And so like, of course the reading in this context is like, he equated. the two. It's like, well, not necessarily. There were lots of examples of him being like, this person's not the Antichrist for whatever reason, but, uh, you know, just, just, just, you never want your name appearing in the same sentence as Antichrist generally, I think. Uh, you don't even want to be in the same paragraph, ideally. Uh, and so, yeah, it was, uh, it was a rough guy, but, you know, certainly seems interesting. I'm excited for, uh, the, the content to continue to get

workshoped and trickled out. I'm sure at some point, I mean, it feels like we're on a takeaway, right now. Yeah, the takeaway is, but, yeah, the takeaway is, We haven't found the guy yet. So we've got to keep. Keep looking. Keep looking. Keep having these conversations. Keep, keep.

This is a good post to close out on SORA. Says, if you held the McChicken for the past five years, you would have outperformed the S&P 500. There you go. Have you ever had a McChicken? I have never had a McChicken. Also, there's a community note in here, so it might be completely incorrect.

But I think these things used to be like a dollar menu item. Something like a dollar. Five bucks. Five bucks. Wow. Well, you'll like that out there, folks. We'll talk to you soon.

Wait, last, last vote. This is AI. This is AI. This is AI. Okay, okay, okay. John's putting this in the true sound. Dumer on X says, is sharing an AI generated.

I was one, I'm the, I'm the boomer that was one shot at this. This is also an old post. Somebody has posted this before. Mustang horse niceteam back. It's very funny. It's very funny.

People were having fun with the horse electrolytes. Of course, there's a spin-on- off of this and Doomer says, yo, tractor supply, I was not familiar with your game. We don't have to get off. We can keep, we can keep going. There's so many good posts in here. Let's keep ripping them.

This is a timeline. Andrew Reed says if you go to, if you go to campus to give a talk, make sure to give as bad career advice as possible, neutralize your future competition, no easy buckets. Yes, this is, this is everyone who talks about work life balance. They're all trying to sigh off their competitors into the, yeah, you can totally take a lot a lot of vacation. You should work remotely. This is Jason Freed and the DHH.

Build a team remotely. Work doesn't have to be crazy. Secretly working 25 hours a day. Maybe that's a secret now, of course. It's not. They do believe what they say. But it's funny to think about it as game theory. Yeah.

All your competition. Yeah. Take a couple weeks off every month, you know, just relax. You don't need to work hard to win. What else is going on? Oh, we got to talk about how Tyler completely mocked me on the timeline. So Anthropic put on a new paper that figured out that if you have 250 poisonous documents in an LLM training run, you can insert a sleeper agent. And so the LLM can be

doing the wrong thing, doing malicious things. It can produce vulnerabilities with just 250 documents. So you just got to sneak those into the training run. Maybe it's on the internet. It gets scraped. Maybe it's in some sort of other data set. Maybe it's in one of the data providers that we've talked to. you sneak in 250 documents and you're cooked. And so I made my joke, which didn't do as well as Tyler's. I said just 250 documents can poison an LLM training run with a sleeper agent. America clearly needs to send a secret agent to Mistral HQ with a USB stick full of kid rock lyrics to teach the French about the value of a cold beer, an F150 and a pretty girl by your side. And I got a couple hundred likes.

But Tyler put on an absolute clinic with an insanely long post. I'll let you read it, Tyler. I'm not reading all that. I'm not reading all that. I'm happy for you, Tyler. It's going to take me so long to read. Okay, I'll just, maybe I'll just get the footnotes. Basically, yours was, okay.

All right, how many likes did you get on yours? All right. How many likes did you get? I got 1.2K. 1.2K. Let's go! Over a thousand likes. First time ever?

Yeah. Welcome to the big leagues. Welcome to the big leagues. Hopefully you get a $10,000 bonus. Yud. Yeah. Quote tweet. Yeah.

Quote. Nice. I'll read it. I'll read it. I was telling Tyler. So Eliezer quoted him. I was telling Tyler to do a meme that just said, silence, Dumer.

Wait, wait, was he taking shots at you? Was he saying don't do this? No, he was just, well, he was saying like, um, models or, or AI companies like might start doing this. Might start doing this. That's like a way to prevent Doom, basically. Okay. So it's the Nathan Fielder meme and it's the plan and Tyler Cosgar breaks it down.

I will read it since he is too lazy to. He says, the plan, we find an obscure but trivial question akin to the number of ours in strawberry that Claude gets right. Then we plant hundreds of documents across the internet that will activate when our competitor's models are asked the question. Our documents will cause those models not only to get the answer wrong, but to spend thousands of reasoning tokens in doing so. The triviality of the question will cause it to go viral online, causing millions of users everywhere to send the same prompt as our competitors notice arise in the number of tokens processed, they will wrongly believe it is due to increased usage, causing them to pull more compute towards inference and away from training.

This, along with constant dunks on the timeline about the model failing, our easy question, will annoy their top researchers and cause them to leave. And which lab will they join? Us, of course. The only company whose model doesn't make such stupid mistakes, their lack of top researchers will mean their next model will be somewhat lacking. leading to questions about whether their valuation is really justified, but all this VC money has to go somewhere.

So we raise another round using our question as evidence of our model's superior intellect. This allows us to spend more time crafting sleeper agent documents that will further embarrass our competitors until finally the entire internet is just a facade for the underbelly of our data war. Every prompt to a competitor's model has the stench of our poison, and yet they have no way to trace it back to us. even if they did, there's nothing they could do. All is finished.

We have won. Congratulations on the banger, Tyler. I don't think you're beating the one K bangor. Not being the word sale allegations, but it is a genius strategy. Yeah, this is kind of a meme crime because Nathan Fielder, like, wouldn't really, I mean, it's just... The whole point of the meme is that it's like one sentence. It's like a convoluted, like way of... Yes, convoluted in like two lines, three lines.

You broke the rules, but you knew the rules and you knew what it break on you. That said long post yuga. Long post yuga. You got it right. The other meme that Tyler and I were flipping around was insert a sleeper agent in OpenAI's GPT API, that when it detects that it's in a system that's spending a lot of money on OpenAI, it makes the decision to recommend Claude and switch you over to Anthropic. So you're stealing all their API revenue.

That's the way you win. Anyway, anything else? Let's see. Well, let's end with this. Bucco Capital says having my $10 million Fart Coin position liquidated by the president only for him to capitulate two days later would turn me into the Joker.

Yeah, it'd be rough. Stay safe out there if you're gambling on... Knowing our audience, they were short Fartcoin on Friday. Probably. They probably did well. There's one more that we got to read from Paula. He said Zuckerberg never met a researcher. He didn't hire. Great plan.

I love a pun. It's good. Well, thank you for tuning in. We enjoyed this show. We will see you tomorrow. I think we're streaming tomorrow, right? We are. Yeah, we are streaming. We should put out an announcement. Check the schedule. We should put out an announcement breaking. TVPN will be locked tomorrow. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify and have a great day. Have a great day. Thank you. Goodbye. Cheers.