TBPN - Meta Poaches OpenAI Researchers, Murati's Plans to Take on OpenAI, NATO Takeaways | Mike Gallagher, Pippa Lamb, Dan Shipper, Eliano Younes

Episode Date: June 26, 2025

(02:28) - The Social Network 2 Sneak Peak (06:27) - Meta Poaches OpenAI Researchers (29:28) - Murati's Plans to Take on OpenAI (31:18) - Pippa Lamb is a partner at Sweet Capital, an early-stage tech fund established by the founders of King.com following their $5.9 billion sale to Activision Blizzard in 2015. In the conversation, she discusses the recent increase in European defense spending, highlighting the UK's commitment to allocate up to 5% of its GDP to defense by 2035, and the potential opportunities this presents for both established defense companies and emerging startups in the sector. (01:00:34) - Timeline (01:10:07) - Dan Shipper, co-founder of Every, a writer-focused media company, discusses the public launch of Quora, an AI-powered email assistant designed to streamline email management by filtering messages, drafting responses, and providing concise summaries. Priced at $15 per month, Quora aims to reduce the time users spend on email by automating routine tasks and prioritizing important communications. Shipper emphasizes the challenges incumbents face in integrating AI into existing platforms and highlights the advantages startups have in leveraging new technologies to innovate user experiences. (01:23:45) - Eliano Younes, Palantir's Strategic Engagement Lead, discusses the successful relaunch of the company's merchandise store, emphasizing its commitment to American manufacturing and the overwhelming demand that led to rapid sellouts. He highlights the store's evolution, noting the shift to U.S.-made products and plans for unique, limited-edition items. Younes also mentions the significant traffic from international markets like South Korea and the store's role in strengthening the Palantir community. (01:32:19) - Mike Gallagher, Head of Defense at Palantir Technologies, discusses his transition from military service and Congress to the private sector, emphasizing his commitment to national security and preventing global conflicts. He highlights Palantir's partnership with The Nuclear Company to develop an AI-driven Nuclear Operating System (NOS) aimed at streamlining nuclear reactor construction, reducing costs, and enhancing energy security. Gallagher underscores the strategic importance of this collaboration in maintaining U.S. leadership in nuclear technology amid global competition.

You're watching TVPN. Today is Thursday, June 26, 2025. We are live from the TVPN Ultradome. The capital of capital. The Temple of Technology. The Fortress of Finance. Remixed it for you there. We got a great show for you today, folks.

The current thing is the AI talent wars. Meta has poached three open AI researchers. Then there's also news in the information about what ex-open AI CTO Miramirati is planning to do with thinking. machines or thinky as we like to call them. They're going to make money. That's the plan. She's going to help other businesses make money as well. I'm excited.

Pibble Lamb is joining to break down what's going on in Europe. She's our European correspondent. Developing nation. Developing technology. Potential, lots of potential there. Very excited for that. We might revisit what's going on with Bumble. We might talk about, if you didn't follow the story yet,

yesterday, Bumble cut 30% of staff as online dating hits, quote, an inflection point. We might dig into that. Also, Google has a new artificial intelligence, which will help researchers understand how our genes work. Very interesting. There's new investment platform, Republic is planning to let anyone bet on SpaceX. They're going to apparently put secondary shares on chain. Also, we mentioned this yesterday, but China is tracking down.

You're going to lever up your fart coin to buy SpaceX. That might be the right move. You never know. China is tracking down its rare earth experts and taking away passports. And Mike Gallagher is joining from Palantir. And so is Eliano from Palantir. And so we will get the Palantir update, which will be a lot of fun. Also, you know, we have to tell you about ramp.

Time is money. Save both. Easy use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting and a whole lot more all in one place. Of course, the news that was tearing up the timeline was the fact that the social network two is officially in development with Aaron Sorkin returning. this time as director. Yaxine says wrong. I'm the director and I'm also the main character. I thought that was really funny.

He's definitely a main character. Andy, two cents dot money is writing some, some, you know, jokey dialogue here. He says, sorry, I left my aura ring at South Park Commons, along with my Aidslee burner phone and BoredApe Ledger Wallet, you absolute diesel. It's pretty funny to reimagine it. But interesting, we have a little scoop here.

we actually got our hands on the, on, on a couple pages of the new script. It was, it was left at the gym. Yes. And we're in Hollywood. We're in Hollywood where we are. Yes. We're fairly confident. It is the, it could possibly be.

This is the social network to official. Official dialogue. Yeah. They haven't shot it yet. So with the other script, they've been doing table reads. We wanted to do a little table read for you today. So I'll break it down. You'll play Mark Zuckerberg.

I'll play Nat Friedman. Sounds great. So this happens at the- taking place in Mark Zuckerman. Zuckerberg's office at night in the meta HQ. Yeah, so a middle, a minimalist expanse lit by floating AR displays and whiteboards full of transformer diagrams. Mark Zuckerberg is focused yet restless. He stands at a window. Nat Friedman is calm but energized. He enters and that opens the scene. You've open source llama mark. 70 billion parameters running in 8k token context windows and word

there's a 405 billion monster still in the lab. Open source isn't unleashed, Nat. It's a guided evolution. We publish the weights so the community can help tame them. Community, a sizable slice of fare hop to startups like Mistral. How's the village supposed to ride the beast without many of the original Wranglers? Talent moves, ideas stay. Group query attention, scaled rotary positional embeddings with NTK-aware stretching. This isn't incremental. It's a step change. Meanwhile, Yan's out there talking about non-autoregressive world model hybrid, saying the next wave won't be token by token racers. He's ready to retire. He's ready to retire. your thoroughbred mark. Jan's job is to keep the herd agile. Lama is today's workhorse. Scout and

Maverick are the horizon. Right now, Lama is our public manifesto. Your manifesto just made every kid with a decent GPU, a potential sorcerer. Hugging face downloads are exploding. What's next? Magic carpets? Exactly. Open weights let the village scale faster than our walls ever could. Purple Lama covers us. CyberSec Eval, Lama Guard, full Red Team Cycle. You know Purple Lama isn't bulletproof, Mark. Open AIs minting cash behind APIs and you're handing out multilingual long-context models for free. The Lama 3 community license only restricts firms over 700 million monthly active users. Innovation rises bottom up. Ask Ahmed. Ask Joel. Democratization is the point. You're wagering north of $60 billion in AI CAPX on that democracy. It's a big bet, Mark.

Not a bet, an ecosystem. Scout is multimodal. is video first. Laura, Chlorra, NFR quantization, Lama, derivatives already power agents, rag stacks, university labs, it feeds itself. Provided the community keeps aligning with you. Alignment happens in real time, RLHF, DPO, RLAIF. This is an ecosystem, not a monopoly. And if that ecosystem births something, you can't steer? No one controls progress, Nat. We guide it openly, transparently. No secret room. just a billion hands shaping what's next. Then hold on tight and hope we're ready.

We will be. We're building it together. And seen. Really jumps off the page. Wow, riveting. Yeah, Hollywood's back. Hollywood's back. This might save Hollywood.

Yeah, I think this will be... People said that... I'm Oscar bait right here. For sure. Totally. Totally. For sure. For sure.

So anyways, you know, maybe somebody just left this as a prank knowing we'd find it knowing we read it. It's entirely possible. It's entirely possible. This is, you know, totally real. But you know they're going to be doing a lot of design work on the next social network movie. They're going to need to use Figma over in Hollywood.

Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build products together. Get started for free at Figma.com. And make products. You can make products on there now. Check it out. So the scoop that we wanted to talk about. Meta has poached three open AI researchers, Lucas Bayer, Alexander Kolesnikov, and Jewell

Wow, Jao, Ja. Ja. Ja. Jai. According to people familiar with the matter, an open AI spokesperson confirmed the three have left the company. I've never, I've never seen somebody abbreviate spokespersons. Spokes. Spokes.

A spokes. A spokes. You're a T.BPN spokes. Will Brown has a post. He says, wow, they snagged the whole Zurich office. This has been something that's been percolating. the idea that Mark was going on a hiring spree, sending out messages, setting up dinners with AI researchers. It seems like he's done it.

Tyler Cosgrove has a little bit of background on these folks. I pulled up some posts, but what do you have for us, Tyler, to contextualize the trade deal that just went down? Yeah. So these guys are really kind of all-stars. So they're all at Zurich office. They started the opening AI Zurich office. Does anyone left? Do you know?

I believe, I don't know. But I think it might have been just them three. Okay. Because I know Lucas had, there was a tweet where he said he started it like just because he didn't want to move. Okay. Yeah, I saw that. But yes. So they all work on multimodal research there.

So they're best known. They were all co-authors on the original Vision Transformer paper. Okay. So this was in 2020. This is basically, this paper is like the reason why you can like basically pass an image to ChatGBT. Yeah. Because it then led to Vision Transformer, then to Vision Transformer, then to Vision Language. model, which is now just like kind of, they're all like multi-modal now.

Yeah, VLM is what physical intelligence has been very bullish on, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. So I can just give a little background on Lucas. Yeah. So 2018, he finishes his PhD. He goes straight to Google Brain. Okay.

This is where they basically write the first, like, you know, vision transformer paper. Okay. Then from there, he, he, he, 2021, 24, he, he, he, co-leads just the entire multimodal team there because now they basically realize that okay we can actually get these things to be fully general not just text yeah we saw a a Gemini demo of that a couple years ago where it was like a phone looking at looking at a desk and it would and the demo person would draw something and then Gemini would be speaking in real time and the idea was that that was not three different models kind of dancing between each other it was all one model and yeah it was

a little controversial at the time because it was sped up, I believe. Yes. But it was still an incredible technology, and you can see that that's something that is going to get better and now is more in real time. And we're seeing that with Gemini, where you can pull out your phone and show it the world. And Meta's doing this too with the meta-ray bands. What am I looking at, right? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's really big because you know, you would have your text model, then you would have like maybe a convolutional neural network just for the images. Yeah. It's very like convoluted. Or you like take the, take the image, stuff it through Burt to like get some

tags around like there's a dog in this image and then the text model only really knows dog and it only it's only seeing text but in this case it can take it can it can it can continue to see what's actually in the image got yeah so okay so so then Lucas he's co-leading the multi-metal team at deep mind 24 and then just this in 2025 this year he joins opening eye starts the new office wow oh so he doesn't be there long year he's been there wow it's been really short but yeah I mean these are like real killers yeah you know this is a huge huge move yeah I like Lucas because he's, it sounds like he's a legit legend in AI research, but he's also a poster. I don't know if you saw this, but he was getting back and forth with Yaxine.

He said, ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the most surreal. What I might say he was the reason that Yaxine is entirely possible. So I present to you the most surreal exchange I've had on the X, on X, the everything app. And Lucas says, sure, if you add 10 hours to my days, 10 hours during which the kiddo sleeps, because it seems like he has children and is dealing with kind of work-life balance. And Yaxine says, just perform less good at your job

to fit in the 10 hours with the kiddo. That's what I do. And I'm sure it will be fine. Going from P-99 to P-90 isn't that big of a deal. And then an hour later, wait, this might be bad advice. One hour later.

And then Lucas says, oh, dang, now I see. I got fired today. And what was nice was that Lucas very graciously said. I originally kept the screenshot to wait until the wound healed as I'm not one to put salt on a wound. But since he's addressed this himself, now I assume this post is okay. Let me know if it's not and I'll delete it.

So very nice. Also, there's a funny post in here. He says, no, I just found out that I left a 4090 GPU running and completely forgot about it for months. Oopsie daisies. I guess this is how you learn. Well, I can say now that I think you can afford it. I think he can afford $117.32 per day on a 4090 bill. You might even be able to expense that to meta.

It's per week. It's per week. Oh, per week. Yeah, that's not that bad. Just a flesh wound. Anyway, AI girl asks, does leaving open AI get you on the Sam blacklist? It turns out these guys weren't Open AI's best people because last week, Sam Altman said, the best people haven't left for meta, kind of, you know, saying, hey, don't leave because you'll be labeled as a non-performer, basically. But the Wall Street Journal has more of that.

The Washington Journal has more data here. They're joining Meta's super intelligence project. It's no longer reality labs or Lama project. It's the super intelligence project. And we've seen a number of the executives come in, but they're obviously staffing up on the research side as well. We heard last week that Mark, or maybe it was earlier this week, that Mark is personally texting, calling people, inviting them to dinner.

Getting dinner. Full founder mode, not leaving it up to Meta's massive recruiting team. I think it's the right move. Very motivated. Yeah, I mean, this feels like a, product and a project that doesn't necessarily need, you know, thousands and thousands of people. It seems like you need the really the thousand X engineers and you need only a few of them, the 50 people.

Yeah. And the interesting dynamic is if you're an, if you're an engineer that joined in the last year, you're getting a pretty meaningful valuation bump, but not going from call it 10 billion to 300. Yeah. And now the other thing that's sort of coinciding with all of the, you know, this sort of like recruiting chaos is that Open AI and Microsoft aren't exactly getting along right now in terms of restructuring their deal. So there's a lot up in the air in terms of can this entity transition to a for profit? Is it going to be able to IPO? Sure, they provide, you know, different mechanisms for liquidity. But, you know, meta has the ability to provide potentially more stability in that, you know, you're getting equity at, what is it, 1.7?

trillion-ish, but it's highly liquid, unlikely to fluctuate, you know, necessarily to the same degree. And you're getting a lot of resources in that, you know, like OpenAI meta is spending tens of billions of dollars on CAPEX to support the incredible talent. It is interesting. Like, like the live player dynamic of Zoc in founder mode, like you can, you can do the horse race between Sam and Zuck all day long, but this feels like it, this puts the screws much more to what's Amazon doing, what's Apple doing, what's even Microsoft doing on the AI researcher side if this is such an important, such an important role. And we'll go into this with thinking machines and some of the other, some of the other labs and what they're doing. But

they're, like if you are Tim Cook, you have to be asking yourself, like, am I appropriately staffed for the next generation here because it's clearly possible for a trillion dollar big tech company to catch up if you get the right people and you build the right things and so it seems like this is this is almost like less this this feels like it could be less nerve-wracking for Sam who has a dominant consumer app that's growing growing growing and a really solid team in place these have hired a ton of people There's been just as many big talent moves into open AI as have moved into meta. But we haven't seen that on the Apple side.

There's also more, I'm sure I would imagine more clarity internally at Open AI around like we are building a, what could become a new tech giant. It could be the MAG 8, right? Whereas at a meta, it's very exciting. There's a lot of resources. There's a lot of ambition, right? This is a super intelligence team. But at the same time, it's unclear exactly how AI will fit into the meta ecosystem. And it's, you know, if people want to work on something very specific, you know,

working on an app that might a year from now have, you know, a billion plus DAUs. And something truly novel is certainly going to be appealing to some type of people. Well, if you're trying to build an app with a billion DAUs, you've got to get on 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. Should we go to the chief OpenAI hater? Open AI is a linear customer themselves.

Oh, well. And I'm sure if you ask them, they would say, the only reason we are successful is because of linear. Yes, yeah, yeah. It's like the transformer model and linear. Yeah, those two. And then you're done. Key ingredients.

Nick is pouring some cold water on OpenAI as he's known to do. He says Microsoft signals to walk away from negotier with OpenAI. Open AI plans to convert into a for-profit company to raise capital and potentially IPO But it needs Microsoft's approval Microsoft has IP rights to all Open AI models until 2030 and 20% revenue share Open AI wants to waive this a GI clause and end Microsoft's IP rights and swap 20% revenue share with royalty plus equity Microsoft is not happy with the new offer Open AI is considering a nuclear option of accusing Microsoft of antitrust which is funny because

Having the nuclear option sort of like be leaking out or is kind of rough. Part of the strategy. Austin and Allred says, still absolutely insane to me that Microsoft gets 20% of OpenAI revenue off the top, not 20% of profit, 20 cents of every dollar Open AI brings in

go straight to Microsoft. It's like something out of Shark Tank. Now, you can imagine hearing of Shark Tank pitch and, you know, one of the sharks gives the sharks the sharky as possible. It's extremely sharky. Here's a deal. Give you, you know, a million bucks,

but I want 20 cents of every dollar that comes in. Yeah. I mean, at the same time, like, would Open AI be where it is today without pulling forward that multi-billion dollar GPU credits and that investment that Microsoft made? Like, Microsoft did take a risky bet. Ben Thompson was basically saying that if you're, oh, sorry.

You know, I'm sure they have an entire plan around how they would accuse Microsoft of anti-competitive behavior, but overall, this was a deal that they did, that they agreed to, that Open AI, wants to renegotiate now. Yep. And I think that, you know, Microsoft made a big bet at the time. Yeah. So Ben Thompson was digging into this idea of like, what is the structure and incentives

of Microsoft? So Microsoft is not a venture capital firm. And so do they do they have a shareholder duty to hold on for another 10X in the stock, essentially, or should they be comfortable getting out of the stock, essentially? Like, is there a world where they are justified with their shareholders to renegotiate this? And what are their incentives? I think Satya has a fiduciary duty to maximize net present value, right? The value of this partnership and this investment that they made.

And so what are all the... And I brought this up, I think, when we were talking a couple weeks ago, which is like, they're not an investor that's like worried about their brand as an investor. It's not like, it's not like, you know, an important portfolio company goes to a VC firm and they're like, hey, we want to bring in this new investor and you're going to get diluted a little bit. It's like Microsoft is not, like, it's not like they need to build a brand of being founder friendly. This is a multi-hundred billion dollar company dealing with a multi-trillion dollar company. And it's at this point, it's not about, you know, being startup friendly or founder-friendly. It's just business.

Yeah, I guess I would probably lean, if I were sought to you just off the top of my head, like lean into allowing the for-profit conversion, and I would want exclusivity over the OpenAI API because I'm in the enterprise business. I wouldn't necessarily care too much about the long-term revenue split on the consumer app. I don't know. I might be willing to trade that for owning the B-to-B side. You have some breaking news from Lucas. Lucas Beyer.

Oh. Hey, a couple quick notes. One, yes, we will be joining meta. Two, no, we did not get a hundred million dollar sign on. That's fake news. Excited about what's ahead, though. We'll share more in due time.

And he c's his buddies in the Zurich office. That's great. And yeah, it's funny. He said, it's very easy to say, no, we did not get a hundred million dollar sign on. That's fake news because he could have just gotten like 101 or $200 or $250 or could have just been like very, you know, it's like, yeah, investing. we're each vesting, you know,

$500 million. That's the only thing he denied. Yeah, yeah. He denies it getting exactly one million dollars. He denies that we did not explicitly get a $100 million sign on. Got it. Anyways, I wouldn't be, no matter how much you got,

I'm sure you should, you can afford a luxury watch, so you should head over to Bezell. He's already in Switzerland. You're already in Switzerland. It's perfect. Your Bezell Conciergears is available now to source you any watch on the planet, seriously any watch.

So Lucas, we'd be happy to introduce you to a Bezel Conciergell. to get you set up with some fantastic Swiss watches. It's so perfect having a watch sponsor. Yeah, he might have like today off, tomorrow off, you know, starting in that Monday. Plus, if you're going into meta, I mean, Sam is not a watch guy, but Bzac is. So you want to walk into the skip level meeting with Zuck, you know. I don't know who he's reporting to.

Maybe Alex, maybe, maybe not, but you don't want to walk into that, that first meeting with Zuck and have bare wrist. Certainly not an Apple watch. Certainly not an Apple Watch. Like, that is straight up rival. No. So, yeah, you're going to want a racing machine on the wrist to let Zuck know that you appreciate high heurology. This is important.

Separately, OpenAI was at Hard Fork Live. Yeah. And they were asked by the host about Dario saying that 50% of entry-level white collar work could disappear in one to five years. And if they agreed, Sam Altman says, no, no, I don't. And then Brad says, COO says, no, we have no evidence of this. Dario is a scientist, and I hope he takes an evidence-based approach to these types of things. Anyways, he went on in the clip to basically say, like, yes, jobs will change. Right now we don't have evidence and basically reorients around.

It's going to be important to know how to use these tools really well, but they are rolling out AI at tons of different types of. of companies from S&Bs to large multinational firms. I also think this is more of like an economics question than an AI research question. There's this idea of like what is the so if if AGI becomes a one for one replacement for a white collar worker, then what are you seeing in the labor market? You're seeing supply increase dramatically. But what is the demand for white collar work?

Like how much stuff do we have to do? How much software do we have to build? How many software products do we have to sell? Like, we might see the demand for labor is actually 10x. And so, yes, if you believe this world where we can not only have AGI at white collar worker level and then scale it up to produce, I mean, how many white collar workers are there? If you say 50% of entry level, that's tens of millions of people. So can you actually run the inference at that level?

consistently without brownouts or whatever. And then will demand for labor stay the same. It could increase by 10. It could increase by 100. Like we might find more things to do, in which case you might want both working. You might want to have 10 times as many AIs working as humans, and you might still want all the humans working.

This happens all the time. And so I don't know, the fast takeoff thing, we can go back and forth on this, but I think we're kind of post this. Yeah, going back to the, internet example in the dot com era CEOs were selling that you would be able to run you know the same type of rhetoric around you're going to have a 10-person team doing a billion dollars in revenue and that ultimately didn't play out yeah exactly that way so well staying in AI world

sam altman is providing some emails an extra context around the jason regolo allegations these four emails really bodied mobbed bodyed jason rodoo lo So we were covering a few days ago how there's a company called IYO that had been developing this audio-type computing device that would allow you to leverage AI, speak with it. What was interesting to me is it was that they have some type of technology that they're allegedly developing to provide kind of like different layers to audio to kind of give you like this like audio display. So cool language. interesting to think about. Sam basically says they're suing us over the name. The name thing I do I do kind of understand and clearly a judge felt that way. Otherwise I wouldn't have had to scrub everything. But the initial lawsuit really painted this picture like Open AI was trying to mine

this company for kind of IP beyond the name in terms of how the product work. Do you think either of these names are good. No. Like my iPhone. I pulled out my iPhone. I pulled out my I.O. I'm using my I. I'm using my I.O. Hand me my Io. Pass me my I yo. Give me my, you know, I need to charge my I yo. I need to charge my I. Like they're definitely confusing. Open AI has a history of naming things strategically. Yes. You know, like maybe it breaks through. Like Google was not, Airbnb, these names weren't like super logical. But then they became so popular that people, people use them. I don't know. It doesn't. jump out to me as like a is like a great name. They might be able to be able to power for. I mean, I imagine this is a settlement. I imagine that this is a settlement. Anyways, we can read through some of the emails. If I'm if I'm I.O and I have, he was asking for 10 million to invest in the AI meets audio

hardware company. So it feels like 10 million dollars would allow the, uh, the, the company to kind of like move forward with the next thing. He's interested in research and development. Like it seems like he's pre-launch so like you could settle say hey yeah we we do have a claim on this name a little bit give us a couple million dollars to back off the name and we'll rebrand and then when they come out with that thing they can come up with a different name it just feels like they would be able to yeah this this this type of act the lawsuit overall seemed to be about more than just the name it was like a frustration with opening eyes behavior but these emails that sam shares destroyed Absolutely destroyed.

So on March 4th, 2025, Jason, the CEO of IYO, says, Hey, Sam, I'll keep it brief. I'd love the opportunity to pitch you to invest $10 million in my AI meets audio hardware company. So the key issue here is that it seems very clear that OpenAI had been working on working. People had been talking about Sam Altman's interest in hardware for AI for two or three years since he made the investment humane and he was talking about this for a long time. And it's also just super logical.

that everyone who's building a consumer app wants to own the next platform. Zuck is going into VR. It wasn't rocket science to figure out that Sam Altman would be interested in hardware at some point. And so, like, that makes sense. But then, you know, Sam clarifies very, very quickly here. Like, thanks for reaching out. With Johnny I, he's the one driving this. And Jason himself understands.

He goes, Routro. Want to work together? I don't want to go up against you, man. not the right language to try to set something up. Anyways, so they go back and forth. They're both in lowercase. This is breaking news. Yeah.

Sam's gone back and forth on the lowercase. Lower case on lowercase violence. Anyways, Peter, another member of the team, they, I guess, tried the product on May 6th. And you can see from Jason's email that there were demo fails. A bunch of demo fails in terms of like basically wasn't working, still trying to figure out a way to partner.

And anyways, Peter says the devices, this is May, about a month ago, very orthogonal to ours and doesn't really work yet. They offer that we look at the IP, but I doubt there's anything there. Again, the device wasn't working reliably, it sounds like. So anyways, more of this will come out in court, but at the moment it seems like maybe something there around the name and some real frustration, but ultimately won't be probably a big deal. Well, there's no frustration when you're using Vanta.

Automate compliance, managed risk, prove trust continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it a continuous automation. I feel bad for people that have never gotten a chance to automate their compliance with Vanta. Joy of using Vanta. That's right. So Turner Novak says, huge if true, after raising an astonishing $2 billion at a $10 billion valuation from investors, including Injris and Horowitz, less than five months after its founding, Miramorati has told investors that tiny, what, thinking machine labs? Yep.

TML is developing custom AI that will enable businesses to make more money. Thank goodness. This is amazing news. I can't wait to get our pause on this. There's been so much, exactly. There's been so much yapping in AI about. changing the world and exponential takeoff, fast takeoff, AI safety. It's the first indication of the startup strategy.

You know, the media had been taking this angle, like Mirror just came out and just raised billions without actually talking about what she was doing. And yes, she could raise billions without really talking. She could get a blank check. Yes. But I have to imagine that she would have had conversations with some of the investors and said,

here's generally what we're working on. Yes. And this is a pre-seed, remember? So it's just about the team. What's interesting here is that there's been this pervasive narrative that like open AI has been hemorrhaging, like, talent and co-founders, right? Because Dario was at Open AI. He started Anthropic. Then Ilion.

Elon starts X-AI. Ilya starts SSI. Mira starts thinking machines. And my question was always like, okay, the narrative has always been like, like they don't like Sam and that's why they leave. But my question's like, why don't they all join forces and work together? Like, why didn't, why didn't Mira go to Anthropic? Why didn't Ilya go to Anthropic?

Why didn't Elon just work with Anthropic instead of starting another competitor? Everyone always starts like a new competitor. But this kind of seems like it reveals the idea that Mirro Moradi and Ilya Sutskover might be very diverged on like the path of where AGI is going. Mirror wants to make money. Mira wants to do RL for businesses and other businesses make money. And Ilya is much more of like this true believer thinking that, you know, he wants to go straight shot to super intelligence. No products.

So anyway, we will continue to cover this story as we learned more about thinking machines. But we have to bring in our European correspondent, Pippa Lamb from Sweet Capital. Welcome to the stream. How are you doing? What's going on? Hey, guys. How's it going coming in from Europe? It's great.

Is your Starlink Connect? action strong. I know they don't have, they don't have broadband out there in the old continent. You know what? We're all just trying to get ourselves to the Hague and get some of that defense procurement that. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. So, uh, yeah, hopefully the Starlink will make it here. No. Hopefully. Hopefully. Yeah. Give us the breakdown of the latest news from NATO. Yeah. So it's, it's exciting. I mean, I think that's pretty much all global press has been focused on. this morning, you know, President Trump and the current US administration has really managed to do,

thank you very much, has managed to do the thing that no US leader has actually managed to do before, which is to get Europe and US's allies here is to actually open up their wallets and increase their annual commitment to percentage of GDP on defence spending. So, you know, this is something that dates back to, I think, 2017. I mean, obviously certain a lot of American presidents have really pushed for this before. This isn't a new ask from the U.S. side. But certainly this is the first time we've really seen some progress. Part of the deal.

The U.S. has really paid about, yeah, has paid about two-thirds of, you know, the NATO budget for the recent years. So it's really been on it upon Europe to really, you know, increase how much their contribution. And so I think it's certainly a big win for the US, but also a big win for national security across across the West and its allies. So, yeah, definitely, definitely good sentiments here on the ground. And I think certainly when it comes to, if you see how, if you see how Trump's mood has

changed from when he was boarding that helicopter a couple of days ago to some of the comments he was making of Secretary General Rutter's comments, I think that. you know, the U.S. is in a really interesting position now, and so is NATO. Did we ever figure out what the NATO chief, he claims he didn't call Trump? I don't know. Did you see all this? No, no, no, I'll break this down. I don't know if you saw anything.

I couldn't tell what was fake news. Did you have any insight there, the NATO? So I saw the headlines. There's an ABC news headlines from yesterday says, NATO Secretary General calls Trump, quote, unquote, daddy. Oh yeah, and then the White House put out a video about this. But then the NATO Secretary General, I guess, came out and denies it. Yeah, the White House, this is on the official page, put out a one-minute video, and the comment on Axe is, Daddy's home, hey, hey, hey, daddy.

President Donald J. Trump attended the NATO Summit in the Hague, Netherlands. And then the Secretary General came out and said, Daddy referred to, to US leadership, not Trump. Okay. So, yes. So still. White House social media never disappoints. I have to say that is, I always have my expectations and they surpassed.

It's pretty wild. I did really, I did go back and watch the original clip to try and understand the analogy. And effectively, Trump was comparing some of, some of our, some of the geopolitical conflicts right now to children playing in the playground. And then of course, Secretary General Rutter then comes and says. And sometimes if people are being children, then he brings in the daddy analogy. And of course, in the press conference, Trump just jumped on that. He said, yeah, they called me daddy. You know, he just ran with it. And as we saw on the White House account this morning, I think there's reels, there's, you know, there's YouTube's. They really went for it. So on near dispense spending, there's actually a graphic

that is pretty interesting to pull up here. It is, the United States is paying like more than two-thirds. So in 2023, NATO's budget was $1.3 trillion. 860 billion of that came from the United States. Germany was the next second highest with $68 billion, so less than one-tenth. Then the UK at $65 billion, France at $56 billion, Italy at $31 billion, and then a bunch of other countries in the $10 to $5 to $1. eight billion range. Canada's 30 billion. And so yeah, this is a big change. I guess the the current

benchmark is 2% of GDP. And this is, I guess it is an agreement to to try and get to 5%. Now that's going to roll out over the next decade to 2035. And I mean, the real key takeaway is that now Trump is publicly supporting NATO. He's been very against it, but he's in favor. But and then there was So some questions about the shift away from the focus on Russia and Ukraine. Trump wants to end the conflict there. We can talk about that. But then eventually I want to get into what this means for startups. Yeah, I think what's also interesting is I have the same questions as you, right? So they put out these headline numbers. It all sounds very good. We all agree that there needed to be more of a balance between the U.S. spending versus the rest of NATO. And I think what was really encouraging

to see in terms of how this is going to impact markets is if you look at comments that came out from the UK this morning from Prime Minister Stama, he actually said, okay, well, we've got this, you know, target by 2035. We are going to dedicate up to, you know, five, well, five percent of GDP spending on defense. But he actually then gave us further information and said that actually, if you look at where we see the national security needs now, we actually expect to surpass four percent of spending by 2027 or in 2027. So that's, to me, that's a great, you know, signal to markets. that this isn't some sort of lofty target that they're going to try and hit and push out and sort of, you know, relabel things of this defense or really kind of be very gradual about how they're deploying and how

they're going to procure. I see this and I think, okay, Europe is really serious about this. The UK is currently just the perspective at around 2.3% of its GDP. So it's slightly above that 2% benchmark, but the fact to go from, you know, 2.3% to 4% by 2027 is really encouraging. And I know certainly on the ground, we're already seeing quite a lot of increased interest in European defence plays. Some of the existing, I suppose, call them incumbents, but, you know, the Andrels of the world are getting really excited about this market and less so from a change on their side, but the fact that, okay, the, you know, the UK and Europe is potentially finally actually putting its money where its mouth is.

in terms of how it wants to procure and how it really wants to beef up its national security efforts. Yeah, the question will be how does that budget actually get distributed between new players like Helsing, which Daniel at Spotify had a nicely timed investment into that. It's almost like he had a crystal ball or something. And then the new kind of the American players like the daddy of the Nordic tech scene. Yeah, I'm sure the NATO chief would probably refer to him that way. And then, you know, Anderol all the way down to, you know, the bowings and the Lockheed Mountains. I mean, the four companies that I think are really interesting to study in this, in this, like, has this development plays out, are probably Rhine-Mittal, Helsing, Anderl, and Palantir.

And they all kind of represent very different strategies and, but you could see money flowing to any of them. But then there are also decisions with all of those, obviously, Ryan Matal, very old companies. legacy incumbent in Europe and so easier to get across the the deal done because they have all the infrastructure there Helsing's kind of the up-and-comer and rules the the hot American company Palantirals you know founded by some Germans but ultimately American company what are you saying it's interesting even Ryan Mottal has been on this crazy run oh yeah it's four and thirty two dollars a share in 2022 you could have bought it for 30 bucks a share wow and what is it now and four

400. $410.10. So yeah, up tremendously. Even this year is up, you know, 250%. Yeah. So what are you thinking about, I mean, this seems like a massive military budget increase in Europe. How serious is the rhetoric around the desire for homegrown defense technology solutions

in Europe broadly? So I mean, I think Jordy as well on your point on Ryan Mattel, I think you also want to pull up the chart for Saab. That's been rallying, you know, a lot. So you're definitely seeing some. allocation from institutions into existing incumbents. But I think for me and other members of the startup and venture community, what we're really asking is how serious is, seriously is this going to impact the pre-IPO and private markets? And I think what's very interesting here is

you also saw Anderil announced a partnership with Ryan Mattel, I think about a week ago. So you're certainly going to see some, you know, there's plenty to go around in terms of the market opportunity. And I think the sentiment is really beginning to shift now in terms of, you know, both investors and governments opening their wallets. But I do think that, you know, on one hand, I do still tend to agree with this argument that defense primes are really hard businesses. There is always going to be, in my view, a monopolistic or oligopolistic element to how these markets run. It's not that we're going to come out and see, you know, 10 andrells all spring up. I think ultimately, defense prime doesn't spring up overnight. And as you mentioned,

you already have Andrews in the U.S., who, by the way, has been very present in your in the UK from the very start. You also obviously have, you know, our Swedish-backed, German company, a Helsing. And there's some really interesting companies coming out of the UK right now. There's one in stealth at the moment, which has been getting a lot of interest, both here on the ground. But interestingly, a lot of the cap table is, is American. So I think, well... It's here for America. Undefeated. The air horn is always ready. It's always ready. That's great.

I think, look, on one hand, I haven't changed my thesis on defense investing over night. I still think that there is a monopolistic advantage that companies like Andrew will have here. But I do think at the same time, this does mark a real change in sentiment and opportunity around European and UK defense. And I think there are a few reasons why. I think, number one, if you look at, you know, pure dollar spend, you know, Europe and the UK is just coming from a much further or a, earlier starting point. So if you look at the multiples in terms of pure purchasing and procurement, they're going to far outspend the US because they've been so behind. So on a pure kind of procurement dollar basis, you know, Europe has to play catch up. So I think that's obviously

going to be, you know, tailwind both for, you know, companies like Andrewill, but also some of the local players. And I do think that this is, it's kind of furthering this idea of what's called trusted capital, so the opportunity for the US and its allies. So certainly, you know, getting in some contracts for a Helsing or a local company here in the UK. I think the second piece that's really interesting is that the UK in particular is, you know, behind from a manufacturing standpoint. So there's going to be a huge opportunity for a lot of companies to really onshore here. And that could be, you know, American companies, you want to build out manufacturing capabilities here in the UK or across mainland Europe. And that is also going to result in, you know, investment,

dollar spent and a huge opportunity for the defence sector. I think the counter to this, and this goes along with a lot of conversations that I've had with Brian Chimp from Anderil, who, by the way, was having a lot of these conversations at Bilderberg in Stockholm a couple of weeks ago, across the Paris air show and with leaders here in the UK and Europe. And that's that the criticism has to be that Europe has had a template for modern warfare on its doorstep for the last, you know, several years. You know, Putin first invaded Crimea in 2014. There have been so many blueprints for how modern warfare looks on our doorstep,

yet the governments haven't really got the memo. This is really the first time that we're seeing governments come out with real new blueprints for how modern warfare should be conducted. So, you know, the classic example is, you know, Houthi rebels sending over drones and, you know, the US and its allies having these exquisite weapons systems to shoot down these drones. So, you know, Europe has really been asleep at the wheel

when it comes to some of these more kind of modern warfare or scrappy warfare strategies. And I think that from what it sounds like, from conversations here on the ground, the government is actually getting the memo now, which does clear that path for startups to enter with a different product spec. I think not to talk up my own book being British, but I do think that the UK is leaving the pack here. Sorry.

You know, the UK has just done a strategic military defense review, and they're actually really taking some interesting steps in terms of how they're reshuffling, how they organize the military. And, you know, I think some great work's been done here on the ground with, You know, it was UK Tech Week a week ago. And, you know, Matt Clifford, who is an advisor to the Prime Minister, talked specifically about how there is going to be an opportunity to have a trillion dollar market cap out of the UK. And he actually mentioned that, you know, defense really could be somewhere that we could see that happen.

So what about British dynamism? Is there a ground swell of excitement on the ground in Europe? You have some great manufacturers, Bentley, Rolls-Royce, Aston Martin. And then you also have Arm, so the computing, computing history as well. So it does feel like there's still some very, you know, we just got a new, we just got a new head of MI6. So the one public facing, he was a woman, actually, the first ever chief of MI6. And her role actually at MI6 had previously been Q. So I don't know if you follow the James Bond. But her background was, is a technology. That's not just Hollywood creation. I thought that was entirely for the

cinema. Well, I mean, I think that it was, the world is this cinema, John. The greatest cinema of all time. That would be the adjacent role that she had before. And so, but but see, which is, is the name that is given to the bureau chief. That is the one front facing full, uh, uh, role of, of MI6. So, but, but she obviously does have a background in, in that space. And so I think it is very interesting. And, and, you know, it would be remiss to say that the UK has, has got a fantastic R&D. sort of heritage, you know, whether it being, you know, AI, obviously, we've talked about this before, Demis and deep minds and a lot of machine learning talent. We've also had, you know, incredible stuff in robotics and synthetic biology. There's some really fantastic R&D centres, you know, outside of

London, Oxford, Cambridge, Bristol. And actually, we also saw some exciting news in the autonomous vehicle space about a week ago with UK company called Wave, who announced their first public road rollout of autonomous vehicles on public roads, which is going to be in partnership with Uber, which is going to be the first time we have like a Waymo equivalent experience witnessing them on the streets of London. So, yeah, I think we're going to have, it's Alex Kendall from Wave as a CEO. I think we're going to have him on the show soon. I'm excited about.

He's great. And also, I think, if you love. look at some of the work that, again, advisor to Downing Street, Matt Clifford has done, the government came out with his AI Opportunities Plan at the beginning of the year. And in the spending review last week, the UK committed to spend, I think, $2 billion, or maybe it's £2 billion on AI opportunities and a further £1 billion for ARIA, which is an R&D deep tech bodies. So I think certainly, you know, defense is one angle. We're also going to see continued interest

on, you know, in autonomous vehicles and robotics and some of these really deep tech sectors that actually the UK has got a very deep history in that, you know, hopefully is going to translate into market opportunities for both local investors, but also U.S. investors that want to get some exposure to some of these increased dollars that are going to be spent. Interesting.

Flipping back a bit to the Ukraine situation, is it possible that we see like a drone company come out of Ukraine? Ukraine has a long heritage of fantastic software developers. There's a lot of companies that have had offshore Ukrainian engineering teams for a long time. The populace has clearly been very technical, but then the pressure cooker of the war has resulted in just insane industrial capacity. I'm pretty sure they make more drones in Ukraine. I think even China, like anywhere in the world, they're making the most of them. Now, a lot of them are like handmade and it's not fully automated.

It's not fully productized. But like my hope would be the war dies down, but then there's this residual capability that comes out of that. But have you heard any like rumblings about that? Or do you think that there's any sort of like peace dividend that could come out of Ukraine? I think that what, you know, as I alluded to before, the Ukraine has really been a blueprint for a you know, how modern warfare is conducted. And I think that certainly we've, you know, definitely been following very closely in Europe what's been happening on the front line in the Ukraine. I think also, you know, the Americans have also been paying close attention. If you look

at a lot of the work that Eric Schmidt has been doing, especially since the US announced that, you know, its intention is to pull back some of its commitments to the Ukraine. I think you've had private individuals such as Eric Schmidt, you know, really take the mantle when it comes to how some of these newer sort of more scrappy drone technologies are being built. So I certainly think that that is going to provide an opportunity for, you know, scaling across procurement on, you know, other areas of the continent. I do think that in some ways, and I was talking to a defense founder this morning about this, there is an opportunity in this middle space.

So I think that, you know, traditionally we had these exquisite weapon systems, which are really, you know, the luxury, pick your car of choice, the Asson Martin of defense. B-2 spirit. Yeah. There we go. Okay. And then we had the very kind of scrappy, you know, drones that are being built in the front line. And I think what is the really kind of sweet spot right now is going to be trying to fill out some of that gap in the middle.

And certainly, you know, if you look at some of the products that Anderil have been building and some of the incumbents that I'm, sorry, it should say new entrance that I'm looking at here in the UK, they're really trying to fill that, not quite the very early entry sort of technology pieces, but that kind of one up, which are more affordable. And you can still use against, you know, your Houthi rebels or whoever. And it's not going to kind of use up your entire budget. But it's also, you know, modern technology. It's, it's, you know, looking at technologies like autonomy, autonomous vehicles. So I think that that is a really strong entry point for some of the incumbents, sorry, the new startups are seeing now. Yeah, it's kind of an interesting wrinkle to the idea of like when you're ramping up defense budgets as fast as NATO is in this case.

It's like the budget itself isn't necessarily as big as America, but there's so much new budget coming online that you're almost better equipped to buy autonomous systems as opposed to to the United States and the Army modernization effort is reallocating budget. No one's saying like, oh yeah, let's double it. Like we don't have the money to double it. And so every dollar that we allocate towards an autonomous. We could, print. But every dollar that we allocate towards an autonomous system,

a modern system has to come away from an exquisite system that has a ton of constituents, a ton of people that build it, a ton of lobbyists. All the parts come from so many different states and regions and different senators that- Yeah, whereas if you're bringing net new budget online, it's a lot easier to go with the newest and best technology that's actually equipped for the modern war. My question is will we see, you know, a $5 billion company that just makes drones for defense, right?

Like could a NEROS be something like that? Or if you look at history of these contractors, you see that they often are very, the primes are obviously all multi-products, right? And so we will have to see how it develops. Very cool. I think what's most encouraging, though, for me, is the sentiment has changed. So I think there was this hubris, right, amongst a lot of the, I mean, U.S. and its allies, but particularly in Europe, where they just wanted to create these exquisite weapon systems that were really never designed to be used.

And so I think the biggest shift for me has been kind of like waking up and realizing that this is totally unfit for purpose. And actually, you kind of look silly by having these exquisite systems that are completely, you know, you know, you can't, you can't use them. So I think that for me, when I start to see more of a kind of cultural shift in government, which is very rare, that's one I think you can start to see some of these impacts trickling into markets and be it in the later stage or in public markets, but then also really kind of at this, I'd say series A stage at the moment where you're seeing a lot of interest from from US and European investors. Very cool. I mean, it's really exciting stuff.

We've got to track it more. I'm excited to talk to some of these founders. there's wave and Helsing, we'll have to get them on. What other situations are you monitoring? There's a lot going on this week. We've been, I don't know if you've been following the prediction market space, but with the New York City, the primary was interesting. Is that, is that, is that, are you paying much attention to that category? Do you think there's potentially opportunities for new prediction markets

or is Polly Market and other players kind of racing away? I mean, I haven't been following it so closely beyond, you know, it's impossible to even sitting here in London avoid all the memes that are coming out about what's going on in New York. I think that, you know, I think Shane Kublin is a fantastic operator. I don't know how much space there is in in terms of, you know, post-deregulation of some of the space. You know, you would think that there are going to be other entrants. I think that, you know, Shane's created such, you know, in some ways, a head start for himself and how Polymarket is doing, that I haven't been spending active time looking at sort of new entrants in that space, but, you know, look, ultimately I'm a, our fund has a heritage of gaming. And so I think certainly whenever there's an interesting consumer trend that is unlocked, or there is a regulatory shift that can, I guess, impact how a consumer product is being built, then we do pay attention. But yeah, I've definitely been spending way more time on

some of this geopolitics. Yeah, what about any, you mentioned Wave earlier in the autonomous vehicle space with their UK launch. Are you expecting, has there been any chatter about what Tesla would do around autonomous vehicles in the UK? I think they sold sort of, I think they sold around 25,000 or 30,000 cars in the UK last year. And so depending, it could be an interesting dynamic that we'll see with Waymo.

here in the US and Tesla where Tesla has, you know, a much, a much more efficient way to build a network where they don't have the same CAP-X requirements as someone like a Waymo. And I'm interested to see if, you know, how you see that market unfolding in the UK. It's interesting. I think that Wave has really been the poster child for autonomous in the UK, especially in recent years and its partnership with Uber. They also have launched in SF. I mean, Alex Kendall, I'm sure he'll tell you about this when he comes on. Fantastic founder has been spending a lot of time in San Francisco. I think an interesting story for me here with the autonomous vehicle space in the UK is that, you know, much like I was saying earlier,

the UK has a really strong heritage of deep tech. And there was actually initially another competitor in autonomous vehicles who was sort of incubated out of Cambridge. I mean, so was so was, so was, so it was wave. I think Alex Kendall took his first VC pitch me, in his Cambridge dormitory or something. You know, the law is perfect. But actually, this is, I often use autonomous vehicles as an example for the government because there was actually a frontrunner ahead of wave at the beginning,

but because it was incubated out of Cambridge University, I think it was Cambridge, I'm ex-Oxford, so not to kind of hate on my computer. But what was interesting is that there was this technology transfer clause, which meant that the cat table got totally messed up by the arrangements in place from, from, you know, Cambridge University, UK government, which basically said for a product of this nature, the university has to own a certain amount in order to unlock R&D, you know, credits or, you know, research spending for this company. And actually, it's a perfect example I use for sort of a, the old way of building technology in the UK,

which was incubated out of these very old historic universities, enter then Alex Kendall, who also wants to pursue autonomous vehicles, and instead of going to the university or do the sort of traditional incumbent capital providers, goes out and raises venture capital, and it's able to therefore scale much faster, build up the technology.

I mean, again, these are not overnight. Well, you got Masa on board. I'm sure that helped, right? For sure. Yeah, right. And so I think for me, it's maybe just an, interesting anecdote which pertains to the sector about, you know, how, you know, maybe mentality in Europe is at somewhat of an inflection point. And I think that autonomous vehicles, you know,

is one of the examples where Alex Kendall was able to go out and raise venture capital and really, you know, prove out some of these more kind of hard problem, you know, the teal flying car, you know, adjacencies in Europe. So I think, look, going forward, let's see. I think that robotics, you know, hardware, you know, deep tech coming out of the UK is not going to go anywhere. I think it's going to continue to see a lot of interest from US investors. I think the fact that the wave have partnered with Uber is also significant. So the idea is that, you know, it's not simply going to be, you know, one company is expected to be able to do everything. I think that on a distribution and kind of regs perspective, it makes a lot of sense to have been.

partnered with Uber and I think Dara was here yesterday. So yeah, so look, I'm, let's see how the stage four trials go here. I think it's going to be, it's going to be a bit of a culture shock for, for the Brits here to see the cars driving. Well, I think you could have a culture shock. You put a Waymo in the streets of London and say it's driving on the wrong side of the road. No one would have a problem with that because Waymo is a Jaguar. That's a British car.

Oh, so it might feel at home. But the wave car is built on the Nissan platform, which. which is extremely foreign to the other minds. I did hear rumors though that the Waymo was going to change to a Chinese supplier. Oh, interesting. That was, yeah. I was really hoping they went with Bentley. Yes.

The Bentley Waymo. Yes. We'll pitch Alex when he comes on from Wave. We'll tell him, hey, let's let's rip out Nissan. Let's get on the Continental GT platform. This is logical. Exactly. We need some like James Bond approved autonomous bills on the streets.

I'm a big Waymo Maxi, so I'm just excited to be able to translate that to the times that I'm here in London. But let's see. Cool. So great having you on. This is fantastic. Have a great. Have you to meet guys, as always. We'll talk you soon.

Bye. Bye. Let's go back to the timeline, talk about investment platform, Republic. Mertheelius.dev, friend of the show, says, big news. Soon you will be able to trade SpaceX on Solana, which will be able to trade. will be followed by Cursor, Ramp, X-A-I, and more. Internet capital markets. Maybe they'll be able to trade Numeral one day.

Numeral H-Q, sales tax on autopilot, spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. Anyway, so this, we can kind of go through the journal article. Investment Platform Republic plans to use blockchain technology to sell investors exposure to SpaceX, another effort in an arms race to give regular traders access to hot startups. And bring in some liquidity. addicted, but felt like it had immense regulatory pressure, but they just, I guess they're figuring it out. Yeah. Which is crazy.

So we're going to have the CEO of Republic on the show Friday. Very exciting. I'm excited about. Ken, he is an animal, but we can break this down. So they are planning to sell digital tokens that mirror the performance of SpaceX's private shares in a move largely untested with regulators and untested with companies. because, you know, historically illiquidity, simple trick. One simple trick. No, you know, CEOs.

Illiquity is a feature. Yeah, you don't want your shares to be getting constantly marked to market, right? Or imagine what Anderil shares would have been doing. It depends. I mean, I remember a story about Enron during the dot-com boom, the shares were absolutely mooning because they were kind of doing some cooking of the bucks. But everything looked really good. They were cooking.

They were cooking the books. Wrong kind of cooking. But I mean, the stock was truly on like a generational run. And they had in the elevator, when you went into the office, you got in the elevator, the share price was right there in the elevator displayed at all times. And so you'd come in and the, oh, stocks up. Like, I'm happy. I'm working hard today.

I'm worth more. You multiply it by the number of shares you own. You just know that your net worth just went up. Ken Griffin showed up. Yeah. It's probably flashing zero. Yeah, they must have ripped that out of the elevator by then. But yeah, I mean.

So they're going to start with SpaceX. It can be good or bad. And they plan to, and SpaceX, for the most part, only goes up. Sometimes the rockets, you know, blow up on the lunch pad. But token buyers won't have access to companies' financials and won't own actual stakes. Yes. And the tokens could draw scrutiny from regulators, which, you know, we're in a friendly regulatory environment. And Republic says it won't need permission from the companies whose token is selling because the tokens represent securities sold by Republic.

So this kind of like a stable coin play where for every token that is sold, they will try and go and buy one share. And so they'll be backed one to one or something like that. Or is it more like a mean token. That's what it seems like. They'll fractionalize it or it'll be tokens that represent ownership in an LLC, you know, an SPV that owns shares. What's weird is that you kind of have this dual float situation where there could be, like, someone could be willing to pay a massive premium for these tokens that they no longer track the underlying price of the secondary shares. So if SpaceX is trading at like a $350 million market cap, but someone wants to get in and they're willing to pay up to a $500 billion market cap, the token could trade. But that doesn't, I mean, that doesn't happen with stable coins because no one ever says, hey, I'm interested in.

paying more than a dollar for one stable coin dollar. These are unstable coins, John. These are unstable. It'll be interesting to see where they actually trade. I mean, it should be some sort of price signal, but at the same time, if the supply is so restricted, I mean, they're saying that the Republic says it's able to offer the tokens in part because of a provision

in the 2012 Jobs Act that lets private US companies issue securities and raise up to $5 million a year from retail investors. Republic says it would be the issuing company, company and the tokens are essentially a note that assures token holders they will be paid any increase in the price of SpaceX's common stock if it goes public or is purchased. Now, SpaceX has $350 billion of value, right? And so if you're thinking about we are going to offer a $5 million slug of that, what will demand for that be like and will that track at all with the broader private market? It could be completely disconnected.

Yeah. And important context. Ken, the CEO, was General Counsel over at Angelist in 2014 to 2016. So he's been in the space for over a decade now. And so anyways, the big takeaway here is that one thing is for sure, there will be, I think, an exceptional amount of demand for this product. The question is, will regulators like it? will companies like it?

And it's possible that it'll be no on both fronts, but it's possible that, you know, at the same time, the sort of overwhelming consumer demand. And I think that, you know, in general, you know, retail investors should be and can fairly be frustrated by not having access to companies like SpaceX,

Figma, Epic Games, Stripe, Anthropic, Ramp, Cursor, Anderle, Mercury, Canvas. So these are all companies. that they're planning to launch even linear. This is, uh, almost looks like a mirror of our partners. Is Adio on there? Customer relationship magic. Not yet.

Adio is the AR Native CRM that builds scales and grows your company at the next level. You're too smooth, John. Adio.com. slash tbpn. They're check it out. But, uh, but, uh, Republic has a license. There's a, isn't there a SPAC that bought SpaceX secondary and trades at like a massive premium to the underlying value? That is, it's not a SPAC.

Oh, it's a public ticker. Destiny. X, Y, Z. Yeah. And so, I mean, like, there clearly is demand in the public markets for, for private market shares. And so there have been a number of platforms and a number of strategies attempted. This is the first one that's using crypto. But it'll be extremely exciting to follow what happens with the actual prices of these, of these assets once they got.

And yeah, right now the Destiny Tech 100 is. is trading at $425 million. And I'm trying to figure out the book value. The book value is a fraction of that based on what investors actually mark. Yeah, and it's because there's such limited demand, such limited liquidity. No, there's limited supply. Yeah, yeah, limited supply. And so much demand, that people are just willing to pay.

So much demand. A multiple of what institutional. So it's funny because in this effort to get retail access to these, you know, highly sought after private company shares. Retail gets kind of hoaged by ending up having to pay, you know, massive premium. Yeah. But if you're an investor who takes it seriously, you got to get on public.com.

Investing for those who take it seriously. They got multi-asset investing, industry leading yields and are trusted by millions. We have other news from Palantier. Oh, George Savulka, founder of Hebia AI. He's coming on the show soon. He is thrilled to share his acquisition of FlashDox, the number one. company an AI slide deck generation. That's fun.

Flash docs turns prompts into fully branded presentations in seconds. Goodbye PowerPoint. I need this badly. This is very helpful. I'm interested to see how he bakes this in because he's been focused on the Wall Street crowd, the hedge funds and the investment banks. So it could be more of like a B2B product than a generalization product. Feels that way.

But we'll talk to him and figure out. I expect some pushback from slides crafts people. Yes. People that treat the making of a great deck, something almost more than an art form. Yes. And so interested to see the outputs here. And we'll talk with them live.

Palantir has some news, which we'll talk about in a little bit. They have signed a $100 million five-year deal with the nuclear company. Yes. I had never heard of the nuclear company before. Well, we'll ask Mike Gallagher about it when he hops on the show. And we have Dan Shipper joining in a minute to talk about a new product that he's launching under every. Oh. His parent company and media company.

Is he running out-of-home ads for it yet? Not yet, but he should. He really should launch. Go to ad-quick.com. Great video. Out-of-home advertising made easy and measurable. Say, go by the headaches of out-of-home advertising? Only ad quit combines technology, out of home expertise, and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe.

Mark Andreessen says the term chat GPT wrapper is tired and really, really wrong, quoting Andre Carpathie. It says plus one for context engineering over prompt engineering. People associate prompts with short tasks, short task descriptions you'd give an LLM in your day-to-day use when in every industrial strength LLM app context engineering is the data. delicate art and science of filling the context window. I like Max Meyer chiming in here, kinetic energy wrapper, gasoline wrapper, aeronautical lift wrapper, everything's a rapper. Should we bring in our next guest?

Let's do it. Welcome to the stream, Dan. What's going on? Welcome to the show. Good to see you guys. Can you hear me? Yeah, we can hear you loud and clear. It's great to have you back.

You're always calling in from exotic places. Where are you to say? It was Anthropic Dev Day. Where are you now? I am currently in a cabin in upstate New York in Hudson Valley with Hirsch Agarwal, CTO co-founder of the browser company, a good friend of mine, and another friend of ours and Hersh's wife and their baby. So it's a really fun time. Amazing. Let's get right into it. What are you launching today?

We launched publicly Cora, which is you can think of it like a chief of staff for your email that costs $15 month instead of $150K. So what Cora does is it sits on your email, it connects your Gmail, it screens your email. So when emails come in, it decides, is this important? You need to see it right now. Is it urgent? If it is, it makes it to your inbox. If not, it automatically archives it.

For anything that's a common request, Cora will pre-draft a response for you. So you open your email, anything in your inbox has a response. And then twice a day, we send you what we call a brief, which is a really beautiful summary of everything that's in your inbox that you need to see, but you don't need to respond to. And so you can basically like do three hours of email by just scrolling through in 30 seconds. It's very, very cool. We also have a full-on assistant so you can chat with it. You can email it.

You can tell it all about your preferences, all that kind of stuff. It's been in beta for about six months. We have about 2,500, between 2,500 and 3,000 users after users on it. And we are launching it publicly today so anyone can sign up. It's 15 bucks a month. It also is bundled with every. So if you sign up for every 20 bucks a month, you get access to Cora, Spiral, which is our content automation tool, Sparkle, which is our file organizer, and all the writing that we do

on every, all for that price. You guys are cooking. You got to raise prices $100 a month. You got to get those numbers up. I'm thinking about it. But now that you said that, I can blame it on you. So thank you. I appreciate it.

You can say, Jordi complained that the price was too low. Very cool. The perfect irony of the timing here is right before we got on the show. John was onboarding. I'm texting him. An EA, a type person who just joined the team. And literally saying all these things are these kind of emails, like just archive. These ones, I want to see it, but it's not important.

I'm sending the link right now so he can install it on my index. So we'll get it spun up. I mean, I have a bunch of very specific questions because I'm in, I'm like the perfect consumer list. This is a product you've been asking for. Yes, yes. I've been asking for this because, yeah, I mean, I paid for like the top tier of Gemini and like there's this Gemini.

but it just gives me bullet points for each individual email. It doesn't do anything at like a higher level abstraction, at least that I can tell. And then when I search, if I search for Dan Shipper, it will, it will search like the JavaScript in some marketing email and find that like there's some token in the URL that has the text, SHIP, and then it'll surface that. And I'm like, instead of just the email that's obviously from Dan Shipper, like, how does it not know to rank like the, the text? the name of the person, not higher than like some embedded CSS class or something. It's always super frustrated. I've been very, very upset about the Gmail search functionality for a while. I feel like it's, it's, it's not that it's like degraded.

It's more like the nature of email has scaled where I think every person gets about an order of magnitude more email than they did, you know, a decade ago. And so the traditional search tools are just completely breaking down. And then also email marketers are getting a couple hundred a day and you're averaging even 20 seconds in email. It's a lot. It's a lot. And yeah, and then also the nature of the way people write emails.

Like there's so many of these hacks where people say, like, they'll do that thing where they'll say like, if you're doing like outbound for every, for example, you'll be like introducing Dan and John. And it's like, wait, like this is a sales email. Like, why are you acting like where you're making a warm intro? Or people will do like, re, like signing up for. every. It's like, wait, this isn't a re. Like, you're not responding to anything. Like, you just put that in the title. And there's a million of those little hacks that I feel like the traditional

Gmail workflow has been exploited by kind of black hat emailers. SDRs. SDRs, black hat SDRs. And I feel like it's the perfect, it's the perfect thing that you need to hammer with AI. So I'm excited for that. Talk to me about the drafting of responses. I was, I was, I was talking to the fellow on our team about how, you know, like we get a lot of pitches from people that say, have news, I want to come on the show. Sometimes I want to let people down, like, softly and say, hey, this isn't a fit right now,

but we want to have you on when there's news or, you know, and I kind of have like a template for that. I'm a little bit hesitant to send something that has like an LLM flavor to it. So I'd almost rather just have a like a pre-written script, but I would also be okay with some fine-tuning. How are you thinking about making sure that the voice doesn't feel to LLME? So basically what we do is when you onboard, we will look at about 1,000 of your previous emails

and abstract out, okay, what's your job title? How do you normally talk to people? What do you normally do in these kinds of situations? So for common emails that you get, so like a pitch, what do you normally say? And then we create a set of procedures for ourselves so that when we do the draft, we can refer back to, okay, you have a procedure for a process for, here's how I respond to pitches. And that's what we use to fill in the draft. So it's basically we use your historical emails to inform how we how we write the draft.

To your earlier points, though, I think those are really, really important. One thing that I think connects to something you said earlier in the show is the idea of rappers. So like in a lot of ways, this is a rapper on Claude. Jebenai, right? And what's really interesting is I think there was this narrative about like a year ago, two years ago that all the incumbents were going to win in AI because all they have to do is bolt on AI. And you can see like if you go into Gmail, like their AI features or their search features, like they're still not very good. And that's because it's so hard when you have a scaled, huge user base that is used to things working in a particular way and a large organization that's used to building things in a particular way to actually start. from a blank slate and get the most out of a new technology. And so I think that's one of the things that we and other startups like us can do for email that like a Google can't or it would be much harder for them to do. And I think you can see that, for example, in some of the filtering things that you're talking

about. So one of the problems with the sort of black or gray hat emails that you get is it's a little bit hard to get a specific rule for, okay, this is the kind of email that I don't want to see. It's not going to be from a particular sender. not going to have a particular thing in a subject line. It's kind of a vibe. And historical email filtering has to be very rule-based. It has to be from this center. It has to have this keyword in the subject line, all that kind of stuff. And language models change that. Now you can filter

emails on vibes, and that's what Cora does. It also has a rules-based filter, too. But it has a vibes filter to be like, anything that looks like this, get rid of it or make sure I see it. And that's much more powerful. And the funny thing is people have been training, you know, chief of staff for an EA to detect the vibe of an email. Exactly. Like this is the kind of email. Like it looks salesy, but it's actually really interesting because it came from this person and it's an opportunity that aligns with with what we're with with our focus. So it's interesting. Yeah. And and and I think incumbents, it's very hard. It's going to be harder for them to do

that because it's very expensive. to filter on vibes for everybody's email account because there's hundreds of millions or billions of people getting billions and billions of emails a day. And so startups, because you start from a smaller user base, you can do the expensive LLM inference that is going to get much cheaper in five years. But for now, it's not affordable unless you have a smaller user base that's all paying. And that's something that we can do, which I think is great. How do you think the actual email infrastructure and rails evolved. It seems like every six months Google Workspace just sends me an email.

It's like, we're raising prices. And I always think it's funny because it's like they could theoretically just like continue to raise the price for a very long time without much pushback because like what's the alternative at least as a company. How do you see how do you see that evolving? How have you thought about other companies like, hey, that actually want to kind of own? the underlying the deeper layer and that's a good question i mean i think one of the beauties of email is of email is that it's decentralized and interoperable um and so right now we sit on top of

gmail but we will eventually add support for outlook and uh other third party like pop or i map type services and um i think that that's great and i i don't think that you'll see us create our own like hey that's very hard and complicated to make sure that you deliver emails and you don't get stuck and spam and all that kind of stuff and i think um we've been focused on building at a layer above that because that's where that's where the new stuff is there's there's something completely different about um software that doesn't have to operate on ordered lists so email is just an ordered list of things in the order they came in and software doesn't have to do that anymore you can rearrange everything based on based on priority based on vibes and um so i

I think for us, I'd probably rather not get stuck at a layer of ensuring email deliverability for senders and all that kind of stuff and like let Google do what Google's good at for now. But who knows? I think eventually this will be an email client where you can do all of your email through Cora. For now it interoperates with Gmail with superhuman so that we don't have to mess with like all those baseline features. Even like creating an email sending feature where you're like, it's a composed window.

There's infinite amounts of complexity in there that you can get stuck doing if you're a small startup that we've tried to avoid to like just make something that's so good at one or two things that you'll use it even if it doesn't have everything. Yeah. How are you how are you building the team? What's the ambition with with this product specifically? You're wearing you know you wear a lot of hats. So I only wear the every hat. Yeah. Yeah. So there's a super talented team building this that and it would not be possible without them. So Kieran Klaassen is. the GM of Cora. He's incredibly technical as a Rails guy, like very agent-pilled, like he's running like 15 cloud code instances at any one time. And we just, we have our most viral YouTube video ever is him like talking about how he uses agents. It has like 50,000 views from a week ago. And so he runs Cora. He also used to be like in his past, he was a composer and a pastry chef. So he's got this like crazy resume. And,

And he's amazing. We also have one engineer, his name is Netech, who's also amazing. And they're just like, I think they're both iterating on what email can be and iterating on how to actually build software in this new paradigm because there's a whole new way of building software with agents. Like I think that they're, they use this term that I love called compounding engineering, which is like doing the work so that each successive feature you build is easier than the last. And I think that that has allowed them as a super small team. to just move really fast and build this beautiful product that is scaling to thousands and thousands of users. Yeah. We also internally, Brandon Gell is our head of studio. So he works a lot with them. And then we have a whole creative team. So Lucas Crespo is our creative lead. And he did like the video and all the visuals and all that kind of stuff.

So and I'm helping out with all, you know, whatever, wherever I'm needed. But I think all of those people are doing an incredible job. And I think we want to kill email. I think you should do email very differently. I think generally, we all have a very anxious attachment to our inbox, and it's quite unhealthy. And one of the things that I've noticed using Quora is everything is much quieter, and that can be really unsettling because you're like, what if I missed something? But it has turned out, at least for me, that mostly it's fine.

And only 10% of the emails or 20% of the emails are things I actually need to see. and when I use it, I get to spend much more of my time doing shit that I actually care about and want to do rather than email. And that's a very exciting mission for us and for this product. I feel like I developed email anxiety probably when I was like 10 years old. Whenever I first got an email, it was like summer break and everyone was just sending emails around and stuff. And it's stuck with me ever since. So thanks, email.

But thank you for trying to help fix it. We're excited to try the product. And always great to have you on the show. Check it out. Thanks for having me. Have fun in the woods. Cheers. Thank you. Bye.

Bye. Up next, we have Eliano, Eunice from Palantir coming in the studio. Oh, Tyler's perking up, sitting up straight looking for some Palantir merch. The Palantir merch king himself in the studio. There he is. Head to toe. Head to toe. Is this a dripped out technology brothers?

What's going on here? You know, you just kind of gave me an idea. I should get like, you know, like the Chicago Bulls, like, you know, not, 90s are coming out. They got the music. And the coach of the Bulls is Phil Jackson. And then they start ripping them off. That's like the next stage of the Palantir March store. So, but anyways, it's good to see you guys. Good to see you too. How many, how many pull-ups have you done today? How many were kipping? How many were non-kipping? You know, it's funny. I have that tweet right over here. He's got the print out. This was, this was the beginning of our journey as like,

you know, I remember I was just sitting there one day and I, and I get this clip. I'm like, who the hell are these guys? And it was like you guys had just started out and you got geeking out about it. And it was just really awesome to just see how far you guys have come since that. It's been, it's been like really crazy growth. But I actually did go to the- Well, thank you for printing that out. That's a sign of great respect in our culture. It is a sign of great respect to our culture.

And I actually went to D.C. I did pull-ups with Eliano. I can attest he can do a ton of non-kipping pull-ups. Yeah. Well, I'll admit, I didn't go this morning because we were, we launched the store. And it was pretty, you know, You're making sure everything's working. And so, but I'm, you know, I will be at the gym tomorrow, John.

And then I will bring the newspapers into the sauna. Okay. Give us the story of the launch, the store, the URL. Where can people go by? Well, so first and foremost, the URL is store. Dot Pallentere.com. But I think we sold everything out. Oh, yeah.

We sold more merch in three hours than we did pretty much in any day, maybe in any week that we did last year. So the demand is at all time high. And basically, this is the third iteration of the store. You know, when we first launched the store, it was well before I started. It was kind of, you know, as a company was going to DPO. They launched the store as a way to sort of cultivate people that were interested in the company. And then they took it offline because it kind of became a cost center.

No one really owned it. It was kind of like made in China. The process, the shipping and everything was kind of weird. And so then last year, about a year ago, I was like, hey, like, we need to do this. And I eventually did it after a lot of internal lobbying and it ended up being a success. But around, you know, really about a month after we launched the store last year, it just something didn't feel right. It didn't feel like Palantir. It didn't feel like the aesthetic, the website, the merch, like it was made in like we were buying hats that were blanks that were made in other countries.

And I was just like, Palantir is a special company. We do things a special way. We do things our way. And so I was like, we need to just tear this down and rebuild it. So that's what we did. And today, about seven months later of working on it, we launched a store. Everything's made in the USA. We're buying literally shirts from scratch.

We're looking with the mills and they're milling the cotton. And we're making things all in America really high. I want a hand-sown version from you. I want to see you on the ground in the factory, American Dynamism, you know. Yeah, give us the stats. How much have you sold? Are we turning it into a profit center yet? That's what I care about.

How big is the scale? the merch operation. Can we ring the dawn or anything? I don't know if I'm allowed to like give out details because then it's like, you like it's like during market hours. People might. I don't want the lawyers to like say. Oh yeah, yeah, sure, sure. I will say this. This could cause some major price action.

Yeah. If people realize that it's not just, you know, in the ontology business, they're also in the, you know, insuring apparel, which is a, you know, hundreds of billions of dollars. Well, we're still going to ring the gong for you because congratulations on the launch. Fantastic. I appreciate it. You know, I will say, you know, the Palantir as of its last earnings, it does like, what, 80%?

80-something percent and margins, like a really good high-end, you know, company that does like, you know, a Hermes or Louis Vuitton. They're doing like 60% margin. So, until I can get to like 80% margins, I'm not even going to go to Dave Glazer, the CFO and even try to like get this in there. But for now, the intent of the store really is just to get the stuff out there, get good stuff out there, and grow the pot that I have to buy and then resell stuff and invest in like really cool, like just like really unique, like one of 15 items that are going to be four or five figures. I mean, we're going to take this to the next level. Let's go. Let's go.

It's amazing. If you get to bespoke suits, call us. Call us first. We're happy to wear the Palantir monograms suit. And I'm saying this. You're not saying this, of course, because I can say this as a newsmaxer. But you move the market, you know, if I was just looking at the stock chart, the stock pop this morning. I'm assuming it's because of the merch store.

Yep. And you've moved the market cap is moved by about $3 billion. Wow. Fantastic. Congratulations. No comment from Eliano. Just say no comment. But, you know, it's clear.

It's clear. It's clear. It's clear. It's clear. The story is very obvious. But you know, you do have a gentleman named Mike Gallagher. coming on later, who by the way is probably the biggest merch fan at the company. Like nobody likes Palantir merch or like I'll get. So if you think I go to the gym early,

Mike goes to the gym at like 5 a.m. religiously. He will shoot me message it. He'll signal me from the gym and being like, like, what about an XYZ? And I'm like, bro, like, stringer. He really loves merch. And you'll get a chance to talk to him about maybe some other reasons why the market cap may have moved. Yes, yes, yes. I saw him name drop you on a podcast he was on and I was like, yes, let's go. He sees the vision. He sees the vision. So, but no, I'm really, I think I don't know, I've thought a lot about the merch store and just sort of like my role at Palantir and sort of how I engage the community. And I think it's, it really boils down to, you know, the founders and Dr. Carp and all

these people and all these tremendous engineers have built this like great company. And we just, you know, we're a company that stands for something. And so we've really. built this community organically. I didn't build the community. I just cultivate it. And it just feels really good to serve them and just give them as much gear as possible. And so the demand, the numbers today, again, I can't share them, but the numbers today were way above anything I expected to the point the site almost crashed within four minutes. And I mean, we're talking about some of the most traffic that we got was from South Korea. And so like we have a, that's our third largest market despite, you know, additional shipping. Let's give it up for the

South Koreans. Palantarians out in South Korea. No, I thought it was funny. I looked on the website at all. It's all pre-order right now because I think you guys sold out. And I was like, wait, they can't be doing this because of like, you know, a lot of peril companies will do pre-order because like they don't have to balance sheet to pre-you know, working capital is a real issue.

So the reason for the, the reason for sort of the eight weeks, so it's eight weeks. And the reason for that is actually, so when the whole tariff thing happened, all of these people were then looking to do stuff to find alternatives inside the USA. Yep. And so we were already sort of tracking the whole USA thing. So our vendor, you know, they're working. I can't, they've asked me and we want to just kind of keep it secret because they're very special. But basically the amount of demand that they got for like cotton that was American source and everything

like skyrocketed. And then we tweaked some designs and stuff. So that's the reason for the delay. but as we sort of ramp this up and get it like fully, you know, basically like in production, my hope is that we won't sell out of everything, but we'll actually sell out of a few items. Like, sure, we're going to have limited drops of different products that are unique. But, you know, hopefully the hats and like some core shirts will be available 24-7. That's amazing. Thank you so much.

Well, it's great to see you. Let's got a workout in soon. Yeah, let's do it. Awesome. Thank you, gentlemen. Have a good rest of you today. Cheers. And up next, we have Mike Gallagher from Palantier Technologies. He's the head of defense. And he put out some comments about the partnership between Palantir and the nuclear company.

Says this partnership marks the first time Palantir software will be used to help power the next generation of nuclear energy infrastructure. So we're excited to bring him and welcome him to the show. Mike, how are you doing? What's going on? Great to have you. It's going on, guys. I'm honored to be with you. You guys are famous. You were famous too.

Thank you for joining. I used to be, man. I used to be. Now I'm just, you know, I'm a husband. You're a technology brother. You're one of us. I mean, that's actually a great place to start. I want to talk about your career in the transition that you went through.

There's, there's, you know, obviously it's very exciting what you're doing now. There's also this story about like, I want you in the government too and I want people like you in the government. And so is the government a place for high performing technologists to flourish? Is there something that needs to change there? I'm interested in to digging into that. But why don't you kick it off with kind of like how you tell the story of how you got here to this moment? Yeah, I think, obviously, you know, from northeast Wisconsin, Green Bay, and I kind of grew up always interested in the world outside of Wisconsin and the United States. When I went to college, I studied Arabic in the Middle East.

I became fascinated by what was happening. I was an undergrad when we invaded Iraq. I was a senior in high school during 9-11. and the more I dug into that intellectually, the more I became convinced that I would regret it if I didn't step up and serve, felt very strongly about service to country, but also on a practical level,

really wanted to apply the language and regional and cultural skills. I was learning in a non-academic context and felt like there was no greater challenge than joining the United States Marine Corps. So even though I didn't come from a military family, didn't know anything about the military, I just felt like this was the hardest crucible

that I could throw my sense. into, had a just really an awesome experience, a couple great deployments, learned a ton with the counterintelligence human intelligence officer. And it's kind of similarly when I got out of the Marine Corps and, you know, I worked on a presidential campaign. I worked in the Senate as a Middle East guy. Never thought about running myself. I'd moved back home to work for this energy and supply chain management company when some people reached out to me about running for Congress. I was very young. I was 31. And I, my initial reaction was hell no. I mean, it was just, I was not, anything about raising money. You know, I was the guy who like wrote the white paper that someone

read before they went on TV. I wasn't, wouldn't be on TV myself. I kind of thought of myself as like a pure national security professional, not a politician. I still don't think of myself that way. But honestly, it was the fact that it scared me that like led me to do it. I felt like anything that forced you outside your comfort zone is good for your development personally. And it was, I felt like it was being an extension of my military service, a way to continue my work of, enhancing American deterrence, albeit from a legislative perspective. And I'll swear I'll wrap up after this, I went into it knowing it was never going to be a career for me. I was the youngest guy in Congress when I got elected. I always conceived of it as a season of service. I think the problem

with Congress is that we have too many career politicians. So I kind of always had in my head, I do a decade. And when I decided to leave, you know, Palantir was just an obvious way for me to continue that mission. I mean, Palantir was one of the rare companies that was unapologetically pro-American military committed 100% to enhancing deterrence, you know, willing to say that like, we're the good guys, you know, the commies are the bad guys. And I really felt like, you know, it was a continuation of that theme in my career where something really hard that scared the crap out of me, i.e. now being surrounded by genius, you know, like 20-somethings that make me feel stupid and then a continuation of of the mission and I've you know,

I've kind of dedicated my life to this idea of preventing World War III. And I'm seeing kind of how we marry the tech community with the warfighter every day in Palantir. So that's the the short version. And it's been really exciting. Is that is that a typical flow for elected politicians? Someone reaches out to them. Is there kind of like a scouting department in, in our government that's looking for

up and coming talent and then give, put giving them the ideas? Because I feel like the story that most people tell is, is, uh, this guy, you know, wants power or wants to, you know, he's on a war path. Everyone tells him no. And then he runs and gets elected or kind of sheer force of will. But, but which direction does it go more commonly? Was your path uncommon or is it more the norm? Well, to be clear, I don't want to pretend like this with some pure all shucks, Mr. Smith goes to Washington thing, right? Like clearly I was driven.

Yeah. Ambitious. Like kind of always had a drop. my whole life and wanted to like test myself. But honestly, it was not like, I didn't think of like the political domain at that point in my life. I think more often than not, people are drawn to politics. It used to be the case that like you'd go to law school, you'd become a lawyer, you'd run

for state or local office. And then that would be a natural kind of like farm team that would lead into Congress. And then you'd run for Senate and then you try and be president one day. I actually think that's changing a little bit. Like one actually healthy thing I saw during my time in Congress is we started to get more young veterans, veterans of the kind of 9-11 wars running for office, which created a cool bipartisan group of legislators that were willing to work together on stuff. I think, you know, I think we're seeing voters, like wanting to have more outsiders, whether it's, you know, business people, traditional or tech bros, like, you know, that you guys talk to a lot. I think people are just tired.

Everyone is a lawyer. It used to be everyone, every single person was a lawyer. Yeah, being a lawyer seems miserable to me. No offense, lawyers. But I don't know. And I will say finally, I went in with the assumption

that the fundamental problem with Congress was the people, right? The people were either purely Machiavellian, ambitious or like horribly corrupt and just didn't attract a right. people. Now, to be sure, there are plenty of people that, like, would, you know, could not, like, they can't leave Congress because they're otherwise unemployable. And, like, you know, they're like, they're not, like, the greatest in the world. But I was actually pleasantly surprised with the quality,

the talent, as well as the patriotism. And I would say most people run for Congress wanting to serve the country, wanted to make a difference, wanting to do right by, you know, the part of the country that they're from and they get forced into a system where the incentives really don't reward hard work in the domain that Congress should be focused on, right? Like there's really no reward for doing the boring work of oversight of the executive branch, of caring about the legislative process. The modern Congress has become so structurally weak that people channel their ambition into building a media platform, social media in particular. And that almost becomes, their full-time job. And that's really a problem because we need Congress to focus on the nuts

and bolts of budgeting, of oversight, of reclaiming its authority from the executive branch. I came to believe that kind of the fundamental problem with most things is that we've become so unbalanced in terms of the overall power of the federal government. And then within the federal government, the power is purely concentrated now in the executive branch, which is why our presidential campaigns get so intense every four years, because this, stakes are high, right? Everything is done via executive order and has profound consequences for every business. I think a healthier balance would be if Congress, Article 1, which was envisioned by our framers, to be the dominant branch of government. In fact, they were concerned that

Congress should grow too powerful. They never would have envisioned the current state of affairs. Congress surrendering its power since the 70s and then in bipartisan fashion, continuing that trend has had really perverse and unintended consequences for our politics. And it's why they've become so tense. And my people are turned off by it, I think. In our lifetime, do you think we will see term limits in Congress at all? It seems like a lot of smart people, you know, seeing certain actors over the last decade would feel that that would be beneficial to the United States.

It's this weird distortion where it feels like people are, you know, in power for a long time, but not even necessarily thinking in decades or super long term. they're thinking in, you know, election cycles and kind of create some distortions, but I'm curious what you think having been in there. You know, it's funny, man. By the way, can I say, you have great flow. I just want to throw that out there, both of you, in fact, as someone who's losing his hair, I just have to admire it and, you know, cherish it, gentlemen.

Some people should just be news anchors, I guess. It's destiny. It's funny. when I first came in and I got elected in 2016 and we thought like our freshman class, Democrats and Republicans, we thought we had serious momentum behind a term limits bill. We had a bipartisan term limits bill. I remember going to the White House. So this was Trump's first year in office.

A group of six of us, three Republicans, three Democrats went to the Oval Office to get Trump's support on our term limits bill because our basic theory was unless the president was using the bully pulpit to force congressional leaders to do it, it would never happen. And so if memory serves, Trump actually, we did about it endorsing the bill. And I remember I did some selfie video, you know, having just a complaint about members of Congress focusing on social media, this is probably the you got a dabble. You got to dabble a little bit. Exactly. I remember doing some like selfie video coming out of the White House. And I genuinely thought in that moment that we had momentum behind a term Women's bill, it's overwhelmingly popular with the American people. The counterpart, the counterarguments

which we can discuss, I don't think are persuasive. What was unique about our bill and the reason we thought it might have a chance of passing? Well, two things. One, we were in that moment to sort of drain the swamp moment, the reason Trump got elected the first time, you know, everyone's discussed with the status quo business as usual. He had made a pledge late in the campaign. The dude is going to support term limits. And then secondly, we kind of, phased it in. So what was unique about our bill is we applied it to our class and all subsequent classes. That's what I was going to say. You grandfather in if you're a career politician and you're like, I got another 15 years that I was planning on really, you know, running it around here. You let him phase

out. And then the new guard, you put some limits on them. And then it totally. The grandfather and the grandfathers and they just sort of die off over time. And then the new people. And then we made it equal in the House and the Senate, 12 years in the House. So six terms and then 12 years in the Senate. So theoretically, someone could do 24 years. I could do 12 in the House, run for Senate. And so that seemed generous to us. But it died.

It died a slow death and then a sudden death. The problem is, you know, nobody in leadership wants to bring a term limits bill to the floor because they fear it endangers their own power. So I really do think the paradox, it's like the things we need to do to enhance the power, the functionality of the modern Congress. actually require an over-empowered president to make them happen. Otherwise, Congress won't do it on its own. And I was never able to transcend that paradox if it makes sense.

Yeah, yeah. I want to kind of wrestle with this idea of, you know, the executive branch having power. There are term limits there. We've also had a wildly back-and-forth executive branch with Trump for four years, then Biden, then back to Trump, kind of unprecedented. and we'd previously been in, you know, eight-year stretches for a while. And I want to run a theory by you around Iran. My working theory is that they're not happy with how things are going right now.

And part of that is because part of how Iran got into this particular situation is that they potentially saw America as not supporting Israel aggressively during the Biden administration. and more importantly, the idea of a president who would strongly support Israel like Donald Trump would, was it was unthinkable that he would get elected again because he was being indicted. And he was seen as kind of like a joke almost and was de-platform from social media. He didn't even have a Pinterest account. He didn't even have a Pinterest account. And so he, he, so if you're Iran and you're thinking, well, America is backing off and doesn't seem to be coming back on the offense of any, time soon. Now is the time to start ramping up spending with the Houthis and Hamas and

Hezbollah. But then surprise Trump's in, now we have to deal with the consequences of that. And so into this weird way, America feels almost unpredictable geopolitically. And maybe that's an advantage if you take it seriously, but maybe it's a risk. And to your point about wanting to avert World War III, I'm wondering about the current structure of the executive branch changing hands every four years. Is that bullish for avoiding World War III? Or is it a risk? Do we need to just tussle with it more? Like, how do you think about all those different concepts? Yeah. Well, first of all, great question. A lot of interesting threads to pull on there. The first I would say I would go even further back than the Biden administration to when we started to

negotiate in earnest with Iran of its overseas nuclear program in the second half of the Obama administration. And really, it was, it was sort of like, COVID. negotiations that then become overt amidst the backdrop of a region that had gone from all this hope around the Arab Spring, turned Arab winter, Syrian Civil War, coup in Egypt, just chaos everywhere. And then Obama was pursuing this nuclear deal with Iran. Obama had sort of a theory about the region. He talked about creating a new equilibrium in the Middle East, whereby we would sort of distance ourselves from Israel and balance sort of a recognize Iran's influence, enhanced power and role in the region and use Iran to balance against the Sunni Arab Gulf states and Israel.

The only problem is that that new equilibrium created intense disequilibrium and missed the real story, which was the only path to equilibrium in the region is to build off this alignment of interest between Israel and the Sunni Arab Gulf states, which are on paper strange bedfellows, but are united by the shared threat from Iran. The long poll in the tent that links all of our traditional allies together is the threat from Iran. And unless you want an enhanced American military presence in the region, the only way to forge assemblance of stability is to build off of that. And that was kind of the genius of the Abraham Accords that Trump would later put in place. Long story short, the other missed opportunity. So there was an analytical problem with Obama's approach to Iran.

There was a constitutional problem, which relates to what we were talking about before, where the Iran deal sure looked a lot like an arms control agreement. But Obama recognizing, because at that time we still had sort of pro-Israel Democrats in the Senate, recognizing that the deal was unlikely to get congressional support in the Senate in this case, he constructed it purely as an executive agreement, an agreement between himself and the Supreme Leader. There was no congressional buy-in. And so therefore, when Trump got elected, one of the first things he did after extended review was to throw it in the trash. Biden comes in, tries to resurrect it. Trump comes back in in his second term and basically he gives the Iranian 60 days to negotiate and then took the action that you just saw. So that's a long way of me saying there was a misunderstanding of the region and then a misunderstanding that as hard as it is to bring Congress into the process, it actually makes your executive achievements more durable and I think improves your negotiating position. Now, to get to the last part of your question, I do think the president's recent decision

was the right one. I think really going even back before Obama's failed and flawed agreement with Iran, the Iranians have consistently used the cover of diplomacy to covertly advance their program. And at some point, we were either going to have to accept the nuclear Iran or take kinetic action to set back their program. And this is the first time in a long time, really since the invasion of Iraq, that we've combined maximum economic pressure with a credible military deterrent. And so I do think it gives us a chance to effectively eliminate their nuclear. nuclear program. That being said, there's a lot of work we need to do in terms of rebuilding

our entire defense industrial base so that the munitions we're using in CETCOM don't completely deplete the resources we need in other theaters along the way. And I'll stop there because I could talk about the Middle East for 20 minutes and all of your audience would evaporate. No, this is fascinating. I'm really enjoying this. Do you have a follow up there or I wanted to talk about I wanted to get a quick read on how you think China has viewed the events of the last couple months and a couple weeks specifically. Well, I think so that my most bullish case for what Trump has just accomplished would be not only has he setback, if not eliminated for a decade, Iran's nuclear ambitions.

He could have just shattered the emerging access of chaos, this sort of access between Iran, Russia, and China. Because China sort of used Iran as both a source of high. as well as like a gateway to expand its influence in the Middle East and continually poke the Americans and our allies in the eye. This is incredibly problematic for China's view of the region. That being said, the biggest wildcard that I just don't know enough about is where Trump is going to go next on China. There were some reporting yesterday that he was going to allow China access to Iranian oil. And so I think it's, you know, in Trump 1.0, there was this tension between

some more hawkish members of the administration on China, and then more dovish members at Treasury. There's sort of a version of this tension going on right now. And then Trump himself at times wants to make a deal with Xi Jinping and thinks he's uniquely suited to do it. At other times, he's like uniquely able and willing to impose costs on China. I think he deserves credit for actually the biggest shift in U.S. foreign policy since the end of the Cold War in terms of the more hawkish turn on China.

And so I guess there's, there's lingering questions about, how we want to approach China. But I really think this is the serious setback for this, this access of chaos, this anti-American access. Russia, of course, was getting enormous benefits from Iran in terms of drone technology for its ongoing war in Eastern Europe. I can't help but think that that's going to be increasingly difficult, given that Iran is dealing with the aftermath of the attack, as well as increasing internal pressure. And then hats off to the Israelis. I mean, I think this shows how valuable it is to have lethal out. that not only have extraordinary capabilities of their own,

but are willing to take a big role in the regional security architecture and not just rely solely on the United States of America. And in fact, what we've seen really in terms of the way they've gone after Hezbollah, the BEPA operation, and then their systematic campaign against a nuclear facility, some of the most daring and imaginative intelligence and military work that I think I've ever seen in my lifetime. And even if one isn't as pro-Israel as I am, I think you'd have to admire just how effective their military and intelligence community is. Yeah, that's undeniable. A bit of a random question, but I'm curious if you have any insight here.

There was a lot of... What's the population of Iran? There was some interesting price action in Bitcoin, which is hard to read too much into. but people were alleging that the Iranian regime was mining, you know, a lot of Bitcoin. Oh, fascinating. You know, maybe it didn't come up for you, but I saw somebody posting that he was like, I'm not buying Bitcoin right now. It seems obvious that the regime is just like dumping in order to fund, you know,

basically the recovery effort. It would make sense. But if you don't have any insight there, we can move on. I wanted to, you know, I'm afraid I don't, but I do think, and I've said this to, like all the smart crypto. folks like Brian Armstrong and others. I think there's, or a Wisconsin colleague of mine, Brian Stile, who's one of the leaders in the house on this issue. You guys should have him on. He's really smart, you know, in Congress.

Yeah, Brian Stile. He's always in style. He's welcome. Welcome. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I think there's like an under explored aspect or an argument about like crypto's role in national security, right? Because the anti-cryptor argument is always like, this is just a way of sanctions evasion and money laundering. And I think what people don't appreciate is like how this could be a tool to advance America's and our allies national security interests. And certainly it was the case when, you know, people were trying to get out of Ukraine and Afghanistan, that crypto was enormously valuable in that regard. It might allow us to

do certain things in denied areas and transfer assets that are uniquely valuable to our intelligence community. So I think that's an area where like national security nerds like me should pay increasing attention to the utility of crypto. But I hadn't heard that about. Switching gears to the European continent. I wanted to get your reaction to the NATO spending news and maybe kind of the backstory. I'm sure when you were in Congress, you probably always felt strongly about this kind of thing. But any reactions there? Well, listen, I think any time, first of all, this idea that, you know, the American president would want our NATO allies to spend more on their own defense is not a new thing. It is not sort of unique to Trump Eisenhower. The first

Supreme Allied commander of NATO actually made this argument and expressed frustration with our European allies at time. And so this is like, and we've had Democratic senators tried to defund NATO because of their frustrations with NATO. So this is like an old argument that is new again. I think the fact that certain European countries are willing to spend more on their defense is a great thing for deterrence in general. I would say, however, I've always been of the view that this obsession with the inputs, i.e. what percent of GDP a NATO member spends on defense is not the right lens of analysis, right?

Like every NATO country could be spending 5% of their GDP on defense, but if they're all buying the wrong crap or buying stuff that isn't interoperable and doesn't actually amount to a coordinated multinational deterrence by denial effort with hard power shifted as far east as possible with the frontline states playing a unique role, then you actually have it actually fighting off a common operational picture and shout out to. for acquiring Maven smart system made by Palantir Technologies, no big deal. Then you have to actually answer to turns. A sports team doesn't wake up up one morning and like let's all give it 100% and that's the only coordination.

You can easily turn this into a jobs program where you say yeah, we're going to spend 5% of our GDP on horseback and cavalry. And it's like you're going to lose, but yes, you're technically going to be spending 5% and you're going to have a massive military, but you're going to get rolled if you're not investing in the right programs. So is there any, do you think that the European countries are thinking about it correctly?

Because it feels like, it feels like to me getting from 2% to 5% is the bigger mental hurdle than the allocation of that 5%. And yes, we're right to move the conversation to where you're taking it right now. But that feels like an easier conversation. Or maybe I'm wrong there. I think the closer you are to the threat, the more your thinking is sharp, right? So it is my experience. that, you know, Poland, the Baltic states tend to have a clear view of reality and are making hard decisions in order to invest in their own military. By the way, we've acquired two new NATO, acquired us the wrong term. We've had two new countries join NATO in recent years that bring phenomenal capabilities to the table. I think, you know, traditionally struggled convincing the Germans

who are, you know, the big elephant in the European room to make the right investments and to make more investments. My hope is that that conversation is getting better. I guess I worry sometimes that kind of related to what you said earlier, they'll be privileging certain domestic companies, even if they don't actually produce capability. I think it's fair to say, obviously, I'm biased because I work in an American software company, but we are the best in the world by 10 orders of magnitude when it comes to software development in this country. And that's just not something that Europe does well. So there could be opportunity for creative collaboration between the palanters of the world and European hardware defense manufacturers. I'd love to see more of that going forward.

And I've always been a proponent of, you know, we have a ton of troops in countries like Germany in Western Europe, getting them out of garrison, shifting them further on NATO's eastern flank, taking advantage of the invitation that certain front-line states like Poland made, at least in the previous administration, to build new bases and forts that enhance our deterrence posture, I think there's a huge opportunity here. And it may just be the case that Trump's rhetoric, as unpolished as it can be at times, is the thing that's shaking it loose right now. I mean, obviously, it's a bit overdetermined. I mean, you know, the other thing shaking it loose is Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

And it's a massive wake-up call for Europe that they need to invest more and buy the right things. But I do think we have a moment here. And I think what's critical to our analysis in the U.S., particularly my own party, the Republican Party, is to do a better job. And I didn't quite do this well when I chaired the China Committee in Congress in teasing out the connection between Russia and China. And why what happens in one theater affects another theater and that it isn't just a choice between Europe or the Indo-Pacific. We're a global power. We're a sole superpower. We have an existential challenge in the form of communist China.

We have to pay attention everywhere. Yes, we have to make hard decisions and prioritize accordingly. The Indo-Pacific is a priority theater. But one of the best ways we can invest more of our own explicit resources into the Indo-Pacific is to get on the same page with our allies in Europe and ensure that they're buying the right things and that the way we fight together is actually leveraging cutting-edge commercial technology, software or hardware. Great.

Should we talk about the news today, the announcement? The nuclear deal that you guys wants? Yeah, that'd be great. Can you bring down for us? Everything is nuclear. Everything's nuclear. We're going nuclear. Yeah, I mean, I want to know the shape of the partnership, anything you can share there.

But then I'd love to go into kind of what you're particularly excited about in nuclear or even just energy broadly. We've seen that the United States energy production per capita is kind of flatlined for a while. China's increasing energy production very aggressively. It feels top of mind, especially in the backdrop of the foundation model AI race, that we need to be building more energy infrastructure. And there's different resources coming online. Nuclear is probably the most fascinating one that

has the ability to scale, because we've tamed the atom. And we can't just seem to copy paste Diablo Canyon 50 times to actually get a massive increase in energy production. There's also stuff happening on the smaller scale. I want your take on nuclear as a whole in addition to the deal. Yeah. By the way, I may get pulled to do a TV interview about this, the nuclear stuff. By the, it's your fault though, because my understanding is I'm just batting cleanup for Eliana.

Oh, yeah. He talked too much, but I'm happy to come back at any point. Listen, I mean, we can't, obviously we can't dominate the like the commanding heights of critical technology and AI if we don't improve our sort of all the above energy policy. There is no workable energy strategy without a nuclear renaissance in this country. The Trump administration has put out some really productive EOs, but now it's incumbent upon the private sector to step up. And the nuclear company is that. I mean, they're going to leverage our software to build reactors, which right now take over a decade to build and collapse that timeline down. And I think we're at the forefront of something

really interesting. China is investing billions of dollars in this space. putting their best and brightest on the problem, and we can't fall further behind. And by the way, it affects our military deterrence as well because our diplomacy is enhanced with foreign countries when we're able to come to them and say, we are a reliable partner for civilian nuclear technology and we help you build and access that technology safely. What I don't want to see is a replay of what we saw with China and 5G and Huawei, where China is going all over the world saying you can have 5G internet steeply, we'll just control the infrastructure, you know, be in a box, you know, you won't even have to worry about it. You don't have to worry about

anything. And like in America, like, whoa, don't do that time out. But if you're a country that doesn't have resources in Africa or in the global south, like, you're probably not paying as much attention to the CI concerns. And so there's something similar playing out in the nuclear space right now. So I'm very bullish about this partnership. You know, I think this is the customer something big, both for the nuclear company and for Palantir. And we're going to be able to leverage all the lessons we have from working with and oral seronic and non-traditional partners with our warp speed manufacturing product and apply it into the nuclear space that's fantastic i'm getting pulled i'm getting pulled you on another we'll see you on another come back on soon we'll talk to you

soon thank you for packers commentary all right cheers yeah the uh the the the nuclear like like like a lot of people still don't understand fully what palatier does but you you have to pull the example from Airbus manufacturing. So Palantir is, that's one of their partners. If you're making a plane, you need to know how many screws you have, how many wings you have, how many engines you have, and the lead times on all of those, how much they cost, when they depreciate, what the testing regimen is as you integrate them into the plane. Exact same process for building something like a 747 as building a nuclear power plant.

So very exciting deal. And I'm excited to see it play out. But that was fantastic. Let's run through a couple timeline posts and then get out of here. We got two ads left and that's why we're leaving early today because we're going to go film some ads for Wander. Find your happy place. Find your happy place. Book of Wander with inspiring views.

Hotel great amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning and 24-7 concierge service. It's a vacation home but better. We're heading to a wander in just a few minutes to film an advertisement. The great city of Malibu, California. That will be airing on. TBPN and then go out on the on the internet. And we're also filming an ad for eight sleep. How'd you sleep last night? You got wrecked again. You got wrecked again? I have a systematic issue with the three-year-old.

Yeah. That's rough. Have you tried telling him man up? No, I mean, I would be down for my sleep to be disrupted for a decade if it means he sleeps just a little bit better. But it's certainly the thing that really hurts is losing to you. I got a seven I got an 86, baby. Hit me with the Ashton Hall. Mugged again. It's my, this is my favorite soundtrack on the whole sound voice. We're going to need a new sound effect.

I love this sound effect. No, this is the sound of me winning. It's now, it's now, when there is a John Wynn, I get the Ashton Hall sound effect. That's right. Anyway, go to 8Sleep.com slash TBPN. And if you're building a company like 8Sleep, head over to Finn. Dot AI. Yes.

Number one, AI agent for customer service. It is number one in performance benchmarks. number one in competitive bakeoffs and number one ranking on G2 used by CODA, consensus, aspire, lovable, all of your favorite software companies and more. So check it out. We've got to have on again. Just down Monique. Yeah.

Yeah, once a day, once or twice a day. Great. He's an absolute legend. I think he's a little busy for that. And yeah, if you're selling to customers, if you're a businessman or one, woman, you're going to benefit a lot from Finn. Well, that is pretty much everything. There's one more piece of news I want to cover.

Byju over at Ather Flux has a new board member, Dan Gallagher. He's worked with him for years. Dan is in a league of his own. He is a man of integrity and has become a close friend over the years. He'll help us engage in Washington, D.C., and support Ather Flux and America to lead in space solar power. If you're not familiar with Ather Flux, they are putting solar panels in space and then beaming.

down the energy that's captured in space via lasers. Very cool. They're beam maxing. Also, byju, absolute hitter on his wrist every time he's spotted. Absolutely criminal because this photo here in the slide deck. Cuts it out. Cuts it out. We can't see what he's wearing.

What was the photographer doing? What was the, this is a, this is a, this is a, a journalistic misinformation. We have another post here from Scott Belski. Observed among the most successful people I admire who really worked for it. They don't want to network. They want to learn. Yeah, this is a good one.

mining you for information constantly. Yep. Sometimes it looks like networking, but they're mining. Yeah, Zach Weinberg says, in fact, the networking part is really just a tax you get comfortable paying in order to do the learning. I like that. It's a good point. We have a post here.

But this is the same thing is like don't, don't ask for money, ask for advice. Like if you're genuinely interested in something, you wind up meeting interesting people because that's the only way to get the real answers that aren't baked into the LLM yet. You've got to go to the source. You've got to meet people. then you're going to ask them for the answers to the pressing questions of the day. Yep. Anyway, we have a poster from Woodrow Oates Montague.

I'm so done. I can't take this anymore. And there's a Bloomberg hit. A footwear startup is teaming up with two space companies to design a shoe in orbit as part of a mission to make artificial intelligence and blockchain less expensive and more eco-friendly than it is on Earth. Orbit's Edge, a company that supports AI and blockchain applications. and Copernic Space, which offers digital marketplaces for space assets, plan to send a solar and battery-powered satellite to space,

equipped with a computer that will use AI automation to produce a shoe design for the Cintillet brand. The mission is expected to launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in early 2026. We should call Delian and do a wellness check. Yeah, see how he's doing. He's been like, I'm the guy who's manufacturing space. I'm the space manufacturing man. So much for your monopoly thesis, Delian. There's another space manufacturing company.

And they're designing, they're using AI and blockchain technology to do solar. I haven't heard Varda talk about AI or blockchain yet at all. It's just missing from their thesis entirely. Wow. What a blind spot for Delian. It's so funny to feel like you need to send something to space to produce AI slop footwear designs. Anyways. Good luck to them.

Let's end on a positive note. Brad Gersner, I don't think this was a response to the socialist. No, but he said the answer to socialism is more capitalism. And the Invest America Act is more capitalism, Mr. President. It makes every child a capitalist from birth sharing in the upside of America. Worried about what just happened in NYC. Help is on the way. I love this.

Let's ring the gong for Brad Gersen. Fantastic. Well, this is the shortest show. we've done in a very long time, but fortunately, I'm sure we'll be back with... But we're still recording. We're going to be recorded over the next few hours. And then that will hit the timeline later. Anyway, so thank you for tuning in to the show. As always, leave us a five-star review on Spotify or leave us a written review on Apple Podcasts, and we will read that on the show.

So have a fantastic afternoon. We'll see you tomorrow. See you tomorrow. Bye.