TBPN - Meta–Scale AI Deal Tensions, Ken Griffin’s Next-Gen Finance Empire | Arielle Zuckerberg, Mike Maples, Andrea Hernández, Farooq Malik & Charles Yoo-Naut

Episode Date: September 2, 2025

(00:35) - Cracks Form in Meta's Acquisition of Scale AI (23:40) - Tesla's Master Plan 4 (36:08) - Ken Griffin Builds Next-Gen Financial Powerhouse (01:07:45) - Advanced AI Blows Up Startup Bills (01:20:36) - Podcast Gold Rush Rocks Media Industry (01:26:54) - Timeline Reactions (01:37:08) - Andrea Hernández, founder of Snaxshot, discusses the evolution of non-alcoholic beverages, noting the initial rise of NA beers and the subsequent resurgence of alcoholic drinks among Gen Z. She critiques the oversaturation of protein-infused products, expressing concerns about potential health impacts from excessive protein consumption. Additionally, Hernández highlights the commodification of wellness in the food industry, emphasizing the need for transparency and authenticity in product offerings. (01:53:56) - Farooq Malik & Charles YooNaut, co-founders of Rain, a stablecoin-powered card issuing and payments platform, discuss Rain's recent $58 million Series B funding round and its mission to revolutionize global payments by integrating stablecoins into the Visa network. They highlight Rain's role in enabling seamless, cost-effective transactions for businesses worldwide, emphasizing the company's partnerships with major clients like Nuvei and Avalanche. Malik also touches on the evolving landscape of stablecoin regulations and the potential for state-backed tokens, citing Rain's collaboration with Wyoming to make their Frontier token globally usable through Rain's infrastructure. (02:07:57) - Mike Maples, co-founding partner at Floodgate, a venture capital firm known for early investments in companies like Twitter and Twitch, discusses his approach to identifying and supporting "Thunder Lizards"—exceptionally disruptive startups. He emphasizes the importance of engaging with founders in their "builder mode," focusing on those deeply immersed in their ideas before they become mainstream. Maples also highlights the significance of determination and original thinking in founders, sharing anecdotes about early investments in companies like Justin.tv (which evolved into Twitch) and Weebly, illustrating his strategy of backing visionary entrepreneurs at the inception of their journeys. (02:37:43) - Arielle Zuckerberg, the youngest sister of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, is a General Partner at Long Journey Ventures, a venture capital firm focusing on early-stage investments. In the conversation, she discusses the firm's commitment to supporting unconventional startups, highlighting investments in unique ventures like a robotic eyelash extension company. She also emphasizes the importance of investing in non-consensus ideas before they become mainstream, believing that the most significant companies of tomorrow often appear unconventional at their inception. (02:54:39) - Timeline Reactions TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.comFigma - https://figma.comVanta - https://vanta.comLinear - https://linear.appEight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpnWander - https://wander.com/tbpnPublic - https://public.comAdQuick - https://adquick.comBezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.comPolymarket - https://polymarket.comAttio - https://attio.com/tbpnFin - https://fin.ai/tbpnGraphite - https://graphite.devRestream - https://restream.ioProfound - https://tryprofound.comJulius AI - https://julius.aiFollow TBPN: https://TBPN.comhttps://x.com/tbpnhttps://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

Watch it TVPN! Today is Tuesday, September 2nd, 2020, we are live from the TBPN Ultradome, the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of the Finance, the Capital of Capital. Hello to chat. Look at chat.

There are so many people chatting right now. Thank you for being here. We're sorry for taking yesterday off. Yeah. It wasn't our choice. Brutal. But thank you for being here on Tuesday. We are happy to hang out with you today.

It is so good to be back. We have a packed show, tons of stories, tons of posts, of news, tons of guests, tons of everything. We're newsmaxing. We are newsmaxing. And we are kicking it off with a debate that me and Jordy got into earlier today and was burning up the timeline over the weekend.

We'll kick it off at this post from Delip Rao. Chat, is this true? I'm hearing scales. Alexander Wang is already out the door. Swick says, please tell me. This is a joke. I mean, this was totally fake news. Shlom says, seems like you saw this and misread.

Yes. So this came from a TechCrunch article in the TechRunch article, said, Scoop, a scale executive, Alexander Wang, brought over to help run MSL, has departed MTA after just two months. And depending on how you read that, where you put the commas, very different readings. Yeah. So a scale executive, Alexander Wang, he was brought over to help run MSL. He has departed meta after just two months. Or it could be a scale executive that Alexander Wang brought.

over to help him run MSL. He's left. Who knows? We'll find out. Well, the news is that it's not Alexander Wang that left. It's someone who was on the team. A former executive. Former executive. Which is very normal. Yes. Yeah. I mean, they brought over, yeah. Also, it's like, wasn't it an acquisition? Was it an aqua hire? I was going back and forth with the team about this earlier today. Like, how do we even characterize it? It's one of those zombie deals. I just call it a trade deal. One thing we know. One thing we know. TechCrunch loves a spin. They like to spin.

Spin. Non-stories, they like to put things in the spin zone. We put things in the true zone. They put things in the spin zone. Yeah, I mean, there was one guy who... Remember, I mean, for anybody that missed it, we had Arvind on from Perplexity. And he made an offhand comment about, like,

ads and browsers. And then TechCrunch ran a story that was like, Perplexity will put ads in its browser. And he was like, wait, like... That's not what we know. It was like... wide-ranging conversation. Hypothetical. Yeah, it was a hypothetical.

Yeah, we were talking about the nature of advertising and AI and stuff. Anyway, yeah, I mean, there was one guy who clearly, like, was working at scale, got, like, zombie aqua hired, went over to MSL and then, like, wanted to start a company and was probably, like, already thinking about starting a company. It made the most dramatic post. It made it a super dramatic post. But, yeah. He made himself the main character.

You think it was his fault? I thought it was other people. I thought people were kind of putting that on him. Oh, I just thought the way that he worded it was like, yeah, I had the opportunity to be basically running it around here and I decided to take my talents somewhere else. Yeah, there's a lot of this going on. People are, you know, spinning narratives left and right, left and right. Anyway, let me tell you about ramp.com. Time is money saved both.

Easy use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. I knew you were going to hit the eagle. I was very excited to hear the eagle. It's been too long. So the cracks are forming in META's partnership with Scale AI says TechCrunch. It's only been since June that META invested $14.3 billion in the data labeling vendor software. Invested. Yeah, invested.

So it's not an acquisition. It's not an acquit hire. It's a trade deal. It's basically a trade deal. That's how I think about it. 14.3 billion for less than half the business equity, a big dividend to all the skill. 49%. They just wanted, some of the scale people went over.

percent was a nice, nice number. Yeah, they just pulled it out of a hat, random. It's just random. And so several of the top executives left scale to go run meta-superintelligence labs. That's MSL. But says TechCrunch, the relationship between the two companies is already showing signs of fraying. At least one of the executives wanting to help run MSL. Scale AI's former senior vice president of Gen AI product and operations, Ruben Mayer, has departed

meta after just two months with the company, two people familiar with the matter told TechRrench, Mayor spent roughly five years with Scale AI across two stints in his short time at meta, according to these sources. Mayor oversaw AI data operations teams, but wasn't part of the company's TBD Labs, the core unit in meta tasked with building AI superintelligence, where top AI did they made MSL and TBD and like the... Just to confuse TechRunch reporters. Just to confuse... Yes, yes.

Yeah, yeah. It's entirely the 40 chest that's going on. And so after this, after this article was published, Mayor reached out to TechCrunch and was like, hey, you got the story wrong. My job was to set up the lab with whatever was needed rather than data. And I was part of TBD labs from day one, rather than being excluded from the core AI unit. Mayor also clarified that he did not report directly to Wang and was very happy with his meta experience and was leaving for a personal matter. So. So again, it's hard to read. too much into this article. But the bigger, the bigger question is like, like TechCrunch has their angle. And then the timeline was kind of in turmoil. I feel like the timeline's always been rooting against Alex Wang. And there's a few reasons. So I wanted to go through like the bear case for just the question of like, was meta buying scale AI the right move?

Like did they overpay? Will we look back on this as a great deal? Because when we look back on Instagram, we're like, that's one of the greatest acquisitions of all time. What's up? also great acquisition, very expensive at the time, both very expensive at the time. Even Oculus. I was thinking about it and I was like, Oculus VR, super expensive, multi-billion dollar deal.

And the level of headset adoption, I mean, they didn't even have like a consumer product at that time. It was like dev kit still. And obviously retention was super low. People would churn off of them. And they still do, even what, a decade later. But it was very important to Zach. Yes. And VR is a tech wave that's going to.

to happen at some point. We know that the technology is going to get there where it's going to be good. Doc's not going to miss the next platform. He has his surfboard. And when that wave come, he's ready to surf. Did you get any surfing in this weekend? I did. I did. I did.

Describe your surfing experience. Can you do like 360s off the back and stuff? Can you do a backflip? Can you do barrel? No backflips. But I went surfing with a TBPN, a technology brother, Steve, founder of Clock Tower, capital.

And he saw me do a couple airs. You could do you airs. I didn't land either of them. You were telling Speeder like he has to get barreled. Did you get barreled? It wasn't barreling this weekend. It wasn't barreling this weekend. But it was, it was fun.

There was definitely swell. I got quite sunburned a couple days in a row. It's fantastic. We should one day stream your surfing endeavors and we should do it on re-stream. One live stream, 30 plus destinations, multi-streamed. audience wherever they are. People have been asking, will TDPN expand to other mediums?

Will you do other things? And it's yes, surfing live streams. That's what's next. And you, if you're surfing and you want a live stream, head over to restream. There's a bunch of questions in the chat we should get to at some point. But let's keep talking about this Scalia. So Zuck has a surfboard with Oculus VR. The question is what's going on with Scalia? Because it's not. necessarily an obvious compounder where like with Instagram and WhatsApp it's like you have this network effect it's just going to keep growing keep growing keep growing you can grow the user base the user base never goes down the business never gets smaller you just run more and more ads and just

prints prints prints right buying a growing social network that has strong product market fit easy easy to justify at any price basically well Elon wanted to get out at one point yeah okay anyway for the most part but if you can buy it and then And then lever it up and then merge it with a foundation model lab. Yes. So scale AI does not have that obvious, like winner take all network effect. That very real competition from Surge, which is, which was the bootstraps scale AI that was printing money, Mercor, which was emerging. Isn't there another one, Garrett at handshake?

Handshake, label box. There's a ton of these companies. There's a bunch of players. And so the reason is because it is not a monopolistic market by default. you might be able to make it one, but it's tough to justify. It's tough to think that, oh, yeah, it'll just continue to compound.

And then also, if you're AGI-pilled, you don't believe that basic date, the labeling tasks are going to be done by humans in the future. Like, if you have a bunch of tasks that are like, oh, yeah, like, just, you know, what do you go to Scale AI for? Oh, R-L-HF this. Tell me if this is a good answer.

Like, if you're AGI pill, do you think that the next version will be able to do that level of task, like, perfectly. Yeah, and the expectation if scale had stayed fully independent, would be that they would keep having to like bet the company on these new sort of like eras. And that's and that's sort of the story. I mean scale started as a data labeling company for self-driving cars and then eventually that kind of hit takeoff where there was not that much more business for scale to do I believe because Waymo had gotten all of the data and Cruz has gotten the

data and Tesla had gotten like the base level data and then the RLHF boom and the LLM boom happen and scale was able to move over to that and then all of a sudden they were having their best their best years ever and so the business was kind of like up and down very much like oh they have a second act do they have a third act chunky yeah very high high volatility and so as the market shifts and more and more expert like as it shifts to more of these expert data collection processes like what we see from mercore scale potentially becomes less and less relevant it's not like an just beneficiary of every next wave. You have to keep kind of reinventing the company.

And so there's- And at some point they stopped working with Open AI, correct? Yes, yeah. They stopped working with Open AI and then post-meta-deal. That's part of what created the opportunity for Mer-For. Post-Metadil, it seemed like Microsoft and Google both pulled back from working with scale. And so like the core scale business doesn't seem like

it's just like endlessly compounding. So you really can't underwrite this like 14-5, $3 billion investment purely on the basis of scales business. They're not trying to make money on the investment. Yeah, maybe. Yeah, it seems like they need a mad scientist for their lab. And every other AI lab has an ad scientist. Or they need a deals guy.

Yeah, or deals guy, exactly. So Open AI has Mark Chen, SSI has Ilya, deep mind has Demis, Anthropic has Dario. Each leader has a different shape and style, but they're all capable of rallying top AI researchers and building teams of missionaries. Alex Wang is unproven here. So if you believe that the best talent magnet wins, it seems like a bad deal.

And that's kind of the bare case. Now, the bull case is that, yes, meta-buying scale AI is a bit pricey, but ultimately it was a good decision for the company. Here's why. Let's review the landscape of big tech's AI efforts. Google has deep mind firmly on the frontier. Microsoft has GPT-5, also frontier. Amazon's a bit behind, but the core business doesn't seem very threatened by LLMs.

And video benefits from basically every outcome right now. Apple acts as a window into AI, probably not to be threatened. Meta feels like it could benefit hugely from getting to the frontier, but it doesn't have an obvious dance partner. So what do you try and do? You go down the list and you try and buy every company or hire every researcher you can, hence the rumors that Zuck tried to buy SSI, tried to hire Mark Chen, et cetera, et cetera, right?

Because it's super high. I mean, we saw that image of like some Wall Street investment bankers did like kind of some of the parts valuation of Google and just deep mind was worth like 150 billion dollars right and so if if you're thinking like okay if I have my lab and it's adding all this value all over the place like is that worth 200 billion dollars to my market cap like absolutely right and so you try and do that so at the top of the list you have something like you know assemble a dream team get ilia mark chen demis get everyone just put the OG open AI team and the deep mine team together at meta and like you win, right? But that's obviously not on the table. There's a bunch of reasons why you can't make

that happen. There's economic reasons. There's interpersonal reasons. There's some ideological reasons. But Alex Wang isn't that far down list. And so yes, he hasn't led a real AI lab that's trained a popular big foundation model. But if you look at his trajectory, all of a sudden it becomes, I can be a lot more optimistic about it. So he's 28 years old. He's a fantastic communicator. You've seen him on every podcast and he clearly communicates very well about. He's been on Theo Vaughn. One of the few AI heavy hitters that's been on Thea Yvon. You know, you joke, but he was on Theo Vaughn really early and he tells a very convincing story and he's actually able to communicate to both insiders and outsiders, I think.

And he's genuinely been at the center of the AI boom for his entire career, but he wants to go bigger. He's built a great company that easily could have cash flowed hundreds of millions of dollars over time and continued to serve the training data market. But getting further into the action that's happening at the big labs was probably not in the cards if he stayed at scale. And so teaming up and people would push back on that and say that scale was losing real market share to surge and other players who had a,

reputation for having higher quality data. Losing market share, but still like so many big contracts that if they just went like to like weaker and weaker clients and just like held on and just had high margins, like, I built to die. Basically. Like I do think like the like the run out the clock value on that company is definitely like hundreds of millions of dollars every year. It's just such a big market.

But that's clearly not what what Alex wants to do. He's 28. He wants to go bigger. He loves being at the center of AI and wants to work on interesting, huge problems. Now he has, will have, does, or will have more compute than pretty much? Pretty much everyone. Like the latest cluster that Zuck's trying to build is, is supposed to be just a couple percent over the next biggest cluster. So he will have the biggest. And so, I think that you, when you look at Alex Wang, you see someone who's, been through like the Gartner hype cycle of training data, right? It's like, wow, we are teaching cars to drive. This is incredible.

Then, oh, wait, like, they actually don't need that much more data. And then, like, oh, wait, like, LLMs need incredible amounts of RLHF data. And then, like, oh, wait. So he's been on the up and down. He's, so there's a bunch of different takes here, but let me continue. So there's also the rumor that Scalii isn't full. delivering all the data that MSL needs to train their next model, but the reporting here is a bit questionable. I don't think that the scale acquisition was ever fully underwritten against the value of the training data business, as we discussed.

And the AI race is so aggressive that every company is grabbing every possible resource not only is meta using other data providers. They also just signed a $10 billion cloud deal with Google. Yeah. So this idea of like, oh, demand is outstripping supply pretty much ever. Oh, they did one deal with scale that that means that they shouldn't do a deal with Mercor or they shouldn't do a deal with with Surge like no they're going to do deals with everyone I think all yeah all it says is that it was primarily an act like an aqua hire yeah an aquahire of the team and a bunch of the people and mostly it's a bet on Alex Wang and so I think that the the fud over the departures is overstated right now it doesn't seem like it's an exodus they hired a ton of people there's been rumors that like one person was

thinking about leaving but then wound up and then one person left, but they said they were never really planning to stay, and then another person left, but clearly to start a company. So it doesn't seem like there's some sort of massive exodus. And basically it just comes down to the value of developing an in-house AI team that's like DeepMind. That team, if it works and if they build it out, the value of that team is immense, probably in the hundreds of billions of dollars.

And so there's inevitably going to be bumps in the road. At the end of the day, Zuck is just betting on the most successful entrepreneur that Gen Z has produced thus far. And it seems still reasonable that even if he's not entirely a researcher, he's deals guy, you have him and then you have Nat Friedman who's worked with Ilya. And you have the pieces of the team to put together the right amount of researchers and engineers to actually go and build out a frontier capability or near frontier capability. It's an all-star team. It's close to an all-star team. It's not the all-star team. The all-star team is Ilya and Demis and Mark Chen,

but that's not happening. It's just never going to happen. You know why I have this out? Why? Open AI is buying product testing startup Statsig for $1.1.1 billion. Statsig. Haven't heard that name in a while. Who did Statsing?

Statsig. Founded in 2021 builds tools to help software developers test and flag potential new features. services have been used by employees at OpenAI, Eventbrite SoundCloud, and other firms, according to Statsig's website. Statsig raised $100 million in funding in a funding round earlier this year, valuing it at $1.1 billion. So interesting, I guess they're just getting bought out at the last round price. As part of the acquisition, Statsig's founder and CEO Vijay Raji will join OpenAI's chief technology officer of applications. He'll report to Fiji Simo, the former Instacart head who recently took over CEO of apps at

Open AI. In a statement, Seema said, Raji, would help companies and developers use OpenAI's technology to build safe applications that empower people. So anyways, all-stock acquisition. Nice, nice pickup for Open AI. And they're taking the product? They're taking the whole company. They're taking the whole company. It's a proper acquisition. Very, very rare. Tyler, what's your, what was your take on the on the tech crunch? fud around MSL. What do you think?

Okay, so I think first, yeah, I think there's, I think there's way too much hate on Alexander Wang on the timeline. Yeah. I think also maybe an interesting way to think about like the scale thing is like, do you think that's, do you think people hate on him just because he's not an AI researcher? Yeah, I think there's some sense of it's like, oh, he's like kind of an outsider. Like he's like, has this like he's like a business guy. I think part of it is he made a billion dollars doing something that wasn't extremely

technical. Technical. Yeah. It's like labor arbitrage, right? Yeah. Anytime you have a young person that has massive success,

people figure out a way to kind of poke holes in it. Yeah, it's like people are saying like, oh, scale is just a rapper on like Vietnam or whatever. Philippines, Philippines, yeah. But I think it's... Rappers all the way down.

Like, I think a good way to think about the scale thing is like, maybe it's just like the people at scale AI just like have very good taste on what is good training data. Like they've seen, you know, it's like, you know, driverless cars. Yeah, like what actually works. Yeah, it's like, like they have good taste on like this is actually like good data.

And then if you're a big company that has a ton of data like meta, that's like actually very like useful, right? You have these people who have very good taste off like, okay, obviously within meta, within like Instagram or something, there's like a massive amount of data. Some of it is clearly useful. Some of it's like not useful for training a foundation. model. So maybe it's just like that is something like that is worth a ton of money. Yeah. Yeah. So Zuck went to Alex and basically said it's time for the dragon and the elephant to dance.

The dragon and the elephant. That is the best quote ever. Well, who said that to who? She said that to Modi. Modi. It is time for the dragon and the elephant to dance together. It wasn't Modi meeting with Putin? So he's like the elephant and the bear and the dragon. Oh, I don't know if there was another. I don't know if there was. The elephant and the bear and the dragon had a tea party this weekend, I think. Luke Metro posted, I just know that this line is doing numbers on SF Hinge right now. It's bizarre. It's hilarious.

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Thank you to Turbo Puffer for making this possible. This weekend, Elon Musk revealed the master plan number four for Tesla. And in the video, Nick Cruz-Petain shares, Tesla revealed a potential three-row cyber SUV design in their master plan for video. could be a true competitor to the Escalade, Range Rover, Navigator, etc. Would you buy a cyber SUV? And I've been pushing for this for a long time. I actually went back and looked at the Tesla Master Plan number one and number two. If you go to Tesla Master Plan... How many M-Dashes did those have? I don't think those had very many. So the latest... We'll read through some of the Tesla master plan for the dropped over the weekend. It featured 14 M-Dashes. It didn't, the M-Dash thing is like kind of a

joke because as I read it, it read like a kind of, it was a lot staler than it had a lot more like press release vibes than previous masterplans, but it didn't read as AI generated to me. It just read as like corporate speak basically and kind of like high level and abstract. I actually had Chachapitis summarize it. Tesla's master plan part four is a high-level manifesto centered not integrating AI into the physical world via robots and autonomous transport, all powered by cleaner, smarter systems. It casts a bold vision around sustainable abundance, but delivers very few concrete, actionable targets or roadmaps, marking a departure from the more structured master plans of the

past. And so if you go to the first Tesla Motors master plan just between you and me by Elon Musk, he wrote this in 2006. And it's a remarkable document because at the end, he actually, sums it up very well. He says, we're going to build a sports car. We're going to use that money to build an affordable car. We're going to use that money to build an even more affordable car while doing above also provide zero emission electric power generation options. That's exactly what they did. They built the roadster and it made enough money and generated enough attention

that they were able to build the Model S, which was more affordable than a high-end sports car. And then the Model S was able to finance the Model 3. And then, of course, the Y and the X were kind of spin-offs of those platforms. And so he says, don't tell anyone. And, you know, the ultimate goal was to go after the Honda and the Toyota Prius and the, and those cars. And he was completely successful. Then it was 10 years later, he writes the master plan part two.

And so the first one, the, the original master plan created a low volume car, which will necessarily be expensive, use that money to develop a medium volume car at a lower price, use that money to create an affordable high-volume car and then provide solar power. No kidding, this has literally been on our website for 10 years. And so at the end, in short, the master plan part due is... It's so crazy that you can lease a Model 3 for $299 a month. Have you seen how cheap some of these are?

Would you like one chat GPT pro plan or a car? Yeah, it is insane. but it's getting even crazier. So the Wall Street Journal has an article today about EV deals that boom before this deadline. So tax credits are expiring for EVs. We're going to get naturally aspirated V12 credits before we end. Yeah, we need V12 credits. At a Kia dealer dealership on Denver Southside, a steady stream of shoppers navigate around noisy renovation work

in search of electric vehicles with super cheap lease deals. Guess how cheap these lease deals are? How cheap, as of last week, this Kia dealership offered to lease the small NeroEV for $40 a month before taxes. The EV6 lease was being marketed for less than $100 per month. And the 65,000 three-row EV-EV-9 SUV can be had for $189 a month before taxes. Can you imagine getting a car for $40 a month? That's so ridiculously cheap. Okay.

And so there's some really weird... It's a bubble. it's not a bubble it's like the popping of a bubble it's like the end of a bubble it's like they overbuilt and they made all these and no one wants them and so they're giving them away they got to give them away um but yeah very very bizarre times in the in the eb market there is a there is an interesting wrinkle that i was listening to uh one of the a couple of the tesla engineers did j leno's show recently and um they were talking about how the evy tax credits going away so you can't just take money off if you buy it but

if you get a loan, an auto loan, there is an interest tax deduction for EVs now, or for American-made vehicles, and Tesla's the most American-made vehicle. And so you can still deduct something like, I don't know, $8 or $10,000 off your taxes. So there still are some incentives for Tesla, so it's not, it hasn't gone away completely. But if you buy cash, it's not, it's not an option. Anyway, the master plan part two, number one, creates, stunning solar roofs with seamless integrated battery storage. It's kind of happened, but not as major as I feel like it should have. It's still kind of early days there.

Two, expand the electric vehicle product line to address all major segments. And so that obviously foreshadows the truck, but it also foreshadows the full-size SUV, which I think we're teasing now. But it should also be, we need a convertible. We need a minivan. Like we mean, you know, every major segment means every major segment, I think. I don't know. Should Tesla make prefabs?

Prefab homes? Yeah. I don't know. I think Elon can sell homes. Maybe. I think the Elon Army could get pretty into just buying a piece of land and dropping a little electric box on it. Live in the pod. Live in the pod.

Potentially. Then this is where self-driving comes in. Develop a self-driving capability. This 10x safer than manual via massive fleet. learning. I think that's going very well. And then step four is enable your car to make money for you when you aren't using it. Isn't that crazy? 2016, he said that. He said like, you buy the car and then you're going to be able to put it in a robot taxi like army. Passive income. Very, very early. And then part three comes out and it's hilarious because part three switches from like a, a,

the first master plan is probably like, I don't know, like a two-page blog post. Very readable. You can just kind of cruise through it. There's one table. There's a lot of summaries. Master Plan Part 3 is a 41-page PDF with like a bunch of diagrams and like these, all these crazy things. It's so much more detailed and it goes into like trucks and all these other stuff that

they're trying to do. it's a pretty remarkable document. And then now he is into Tesla Part 4, which is much more high level talking about sustainable artificial intelligence as the influence and impact of AI technology increases. The mission set forth in Master Plan Part 4 should come as no surprise.

The next chapter in Tesla story will help create a world. We've only just begun to imagine and will do so at the scale we have yet to see. we are building the products and services that bring AI into the physical world. We have been working tirelessly for nearly two decades to create the foundation for this technological renaissance through the development of electric vehicles, energy products, and humanoid robots. We need a polymarket on if XAI and Tesla will eventually merge. That does seem like a logical end state here.

Innovation removes constraints. It's all very high level. I mean, I think a lot of the a lot of like the big reveals have kind of already happened. Like, you know, the idea of a robotaxy fleet, the idea of autonomous or optimists, the autonomous. Does it cover humanoids? Yeah.

Yeah. Optimus or humanoid robot is changing not only the perception of labor itself, but its availability and capability, jobs and tasks that are particularly monotonous or dangerous can now be accomplished by other means. In this way, Optimus's mission is to give people back more time to do what they love. And so he walks through a bunch of different pieces of this. You just want one thing from Optimus, which is to keep the Tesla diner open 24-7.

It is crazy. So we work just a couple blocks away from the Tesla diner, and so I drive past it every morning. And when I think of a diner, I think of a New York City diner that's open 24-7. And every day I drive by it, and it's closed. And it's so crazy. I mean, I guess it's like, it makes sense

because it's still like early days and kind of a marketing stunt. But really, they got to keep that thing. Keep it going open. Keep it humming. Anyway, if you're designing your next mission document, do it in Figma. Think bigger, build faster.

Figma helps design and development teams. Build great products together. You can get started for free at figma.com. On the Tesla down our website, it says 24-7. It does? Yeah. And I'm pretty sure at least the first week it was open 24-7. Okay, so we should go over there.

Maybe it's fake news. Yeah. But it also looks incredibly empty, at least when we drive by. I mean, that's just L.A., though. That's probably the nature of the 20-front-th-downer. If it's open. Let's go there for breakfast tomorrow. Yeah, maybe I'll stop by on the way at 6 a.m.

and see if it's actually open. It seems, I mean, there are definitely people there, like, cleaning and stuff, so maybe it's open. But, I mean, there are truly not that many places in Los Angeles where you can get a burger at three in the morning. Like, L.A. is not the city that never sleeps by any means. Anyway, Citadel Securities is said. There's some interesting highlight here. So power at power bottom dad sucks. Quoted our post announcing Anthropics series F and says SBF got so effed, man.

I just did the numbers quickly. SBF stake in Anthropic or F, not SBF. FTX's. FTCS is. would be worth just under $15 billion today. So plenty to plug that hole. So anyway, duration mismatch problem. I guess in, I guess Gavin Newsom went on pivot and says he's going to be releasing a meme coin to challenge the Trump token.

Is that real? He said that? I wonder if he's like trolling or something. It feels very off-brand. I don't know. You never know anymore. I haven't really been following the Gavin Newsom thing. Brandon was saying that he's been kind of trying to mirror Trump in terms of like if Trump does something crazy,

he'll try and do something else that like kind of matches the energy. Matching the crazy energy. And it's, I mean, he's doing numbers. It's a bold move, cotton. See how it plays out. Yeah. I guess Trump is, was slated to do announcement at 11 a. 11 a.m. Pacific.

He is 43 minutes late right now. apparently, so hopefully he can get on to that announcement soon. Citadel, security, set to pay an average employee $2 million a year. In the first half of 2025, they did $5.7 billion of revenue, $2.6 billion in net income. They paid out $1.8 billion in comp, and they have 1,800 employees. Their CEO's name is Pung Zhao. He has a PhD in statistics. So it turns out being good at math is good for your income.

19 years at Citadel. Look at that quant researcher in 2006. There was something else about, I think Hudson River Trading, overall profit at Hudson River trading was $3 billion for the first half of the year, which is higher than Citadel Securities, 2.6 billion in net income in the first half of 2025. Wow. So they were putting up some crazy, crazy numbers. Well, King Griffin's on the cover of Barron's this weekend. I thought it would be fun to read through this because he actually gave some choice quotes in here. Is this not a silly, kind of a silly picture of him? Yeah.

I'm not, I'm not. It looks pretty heroic. I think it looks good. I mean, sort of. I mean, the angle's fine, but I'm just saying they kind of did him, they did him a little bird. What about it? So the coloring or the cheeks or something? I think it looks good.

I just, I don't know. I think they made him look a little bit silly. They should have given them the gigachad filter. Yeah. Maybe his jawline a little more. If you're going to draw somebody, at least make them a giga chat. Yeah, I would like to see more shoulder definition here underneath the suit. It looks great.

The most successful companies of Wall Street on Wall Street have been built by those with relentless ambition and a strong wind at their back. Decades of deregulation helped growth-minded CEOs turn firms such as Morgan Stanley and Bank of America into behemoths. More recently, financial entrepreneurs have leveraged booming private markets to create the likes of blackstone and private equity, Bridgewater in hedge funds, and injuries in Horowitz and venture capital. Now, a somewhat stealthier trend fueled by the explosive growth of technology and finance is behind a new wave of digital first powerhouses, such as interactive brokers groups, Sasquahana International, Jane Street, and especially Citadel, a burgeoning Wall Street empire controlled by billionaire Ken Griffin. Citadel is a two-headed business beast, a two-headed business beast consisting of Citadel LLC, a $68 billion hedge fund operation best known for its top-performing multi-strategy flagship Wellington and Citadel Securities, a sprawling market maker that facilitates and engages in the trading of stocks,

derivatives, and increasingly bonds. Citadel Griffin chose the name because it denotes a place of strength and protection. Fantastic nominative determinism. if you're picking the name for your business, pick something strong like that. He says, is defining the prototype of the next-gen bulge bracket firm, except that Citadel isn't that bulgy with just a fraction of the employees and overhead of the traditional Wall Street firm. As of now, the boss is happy.

Quote, it's incredibly satisfying to run one of the world's most successful hedge funds and to witness the transformative impact of Citadel securities on the capital markets around the world, Griffin says. Great quote. Yes, I'm proud of that. taken separately, first hedge fund Citadel is a huge deal. This is how you do an interview. It's just marketing.

Yeah. It is incredibly satisfying to run one of the world's most successful hedge funds and to witness the transformative impact of Citadel Securities on the capital markets. Do you care to comment? Yes, I will take a comment. The self-glazinator 2000. Wellington, not related to Vanguard's Wellington Fund or Wellington Management, has been a superstar producing annual average returns of 19.2% net of fees since inception in 1990,

nearly two times the market. And I believe, so a million dollars invested in the fund is now worth $452 million insane. The other crazy thing is that I'm pretty sure they had a 50% drawdown during the mortgage crisis. So in 2008 or 2007, I think they went down 50%. They went from like maybe like a $20 billion fund down to $10 billion or something like that. ran it back. And I remember one of the traders there, because I interned there and he gives the story of like during the, during the crisis, he was trying to like, he was trying to like explain how important it is to understand how percentages work. And he was like, yeah, I walked outside and my neighbor was like, oh, like, how's it going? He's like, oh, it's terrible. We're down 50% this year.

And he was like, and then next year I was like walking outside and ran into my neighbor again. He's like, like, how's it going this year? I know last year was pretty, it's pretty, bad. You were down 50%. And he said, oh, well, we're doing a lot better. We're up 50% this year. And the neighbor's like, oh, great. So you're back to where you started. That's unfortunately not how it works. And he was like, no, that's not how it works. And this was like his way to his way to explain to interns, like the importance of understanding percentages or something like that. It was just a funny anecdote. There was surfing yesterday, my buddy pointed out this guy. He was like, this guy was absolutely shredding. Yeah. Just getting a bunch of great waves.

and my buddy pointed out, he said, that guy's lost all his LPs in 08 and just like packed it up, bought a house in Malibu, and now just basically retired, runs his own money, and just surfs like three times a day. Wow. It's amazing. Living a great life.

Anyway, let me tell you about Vanta, automate compliance, manage risk, improve trust continuously. Vant has trust management platform, takes the manual work out of your security compliance process and replaces it with continuous. automation, whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program. Anyway, back to Citadel. Even though Griffin says he spends the majority of his time working on

the hedge fund's investment portfolio, arguably the hotter ticket, the hotter ticket is Citadel Sec. As it is known, is a complex, sometimes controversial, ever-evolving endeavor, which Pac-Man-like is on a seemingly inexorable march across the capital markets, gobbling up market share in options, equities, treasuries, and corporate bonds, and now expanding to Europe and Asia. Example, SITSEC recently bought Morgan Stanley's U.S. equity option market maker business, leaving no major banks in the market-making business. Citadel security now trades 25% of all U.S. equities, including 35% of retail flows, plus

$45 billion option quotes a day, and is a top three trader in U.S. treasuries and swaps. In total, it executes 652 billion in notional trades a day. The goal is clear, quote, building the capital markets firm of this generation is a vision that is increasingly becoming a reality. So Citadel Securities CEO Pung Zhao, who holds a doctorate and statistics. I like how you're just casually giving an ad to Patak right here. Of course, of course. Begin your tradition. Cupidis.

Begin your tradition. By the way, Trump is currently live on Fox News, and he's looking good. So I am happy to see our president doing well. What is he announcing? I've got it muted right now if somebody else is moving the space headquarters. Yeah, the big announcement is they're moving Space Command. I think it was in Colorado moving to Alabama. Wow.

I'm pretty bummed he didn't. I'm pretty bummed he didn't like rip the, I mean, the speech isn't over, so hopefully he still rips the, the collared shirt off and has a Superman. Tyler, does anything ever happen? Nothing ever happens, bro. I was pretty sure that he had passed away. You thought he died. You thought he was dead. Nothing ever happens.

We need a gong for when nothing happens. We need something. We need some, like, activities. that we can do. It's a gong that is like so reinforced that it makes no sound. Oh yeah that's good. That's good. Just a cement block. Yes. With a gong looks like a gong looks like a gong but it's stone. So it makes no sound. It's just bw-w-w-w-want-w-want. Play the want-wah-wha-wha-sound. Nothing, nothing happens. Not that, not that we're hoping for bad things to happen, but I was hoping for something exciting to happen. Something, something positive, hopefully. Some, some amazing trade deal. This is positive. It's positive. I was disappointed to see a lot of the internet,

clearly was not, not, was hoping that there was something wrong with his health. Yeah. Yeah, obviously that's very negative. But this could have been some crazy 4D chess trade deal, reinvigoration of the American economy, investment in AI. Like it could have been, like, this doesn't feel like market moving to me, right? Hopefully. I mean, God willing, he finds a way to move to market. We got to find out a way to trade this. I mean, is there some Alabama real estate development company that, like, benefits from this? Who knows? Anyway, Alfred Lynn is in Barron's.

He says, this is a very different company than most people understand. Oh, Alfred Lynn, a partner? The stock did? What stock? I mean, DJT, True Social did pop a little bit when he went live. Okay. That was the trade, everybody. If you were long, True Social going into this announcement, you...

Well, that makes sense because truth social is a social network. So whenever, like, news breaks, there's a bunch of people on there and they sell ads against that. And that's why people are investing because it's probably good for their financials. Good for their, like, good for the bottom line. Not a meme at all. Yeah. What about you? On polymarket, this would have been good trade.

So there's what will Trump say during announcement today? And one of the choices was emergency. And it was at 64% right before it started and now it's at 30. So that was a pretty big move. Okay. wait so it's going down but he still might say it he could still say it just I think it's just the word yeah so far he said China

is he taking questions from the audience he uh is he reading chat he should be thank you for the 20 thank you for the 20 I'm not saying emergency I know you're on polymarker right now anyway Alfred Lynn chimes in to explain what's going on at Citadel

he says he's a partner venture capital firm Sequoia Capital, of course, has been on the show, and whose brother happens to be the head of global fixed income and macro at Citadel, the hedge fund. Size Lord's running the family. Wow. We completely missed that scoop on the show.

We should have been hammering him about his brother. Legend. Citadel is taking math and their distribution and technology power to price risk using techniques not traditionally used on Wall Street. But while technology has been absolutely critical to Citadel's success, so too is Griffin's strategy. You don't want to go up against the Wall Street incumbents. He said, instead, you want to understand where the market is heading and position yourself there before incumbents arrive.

The incremental rise of electronic trading allowed Citadel to move step by step ahead of names like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley and a number of trading businesses. He makes all kinds of headlines. He's a Republican who was mostly given hundreds of millions to GOP candidates. Griffin has praised and criticized Trump. Just this past week, Griffin told Barron's. I hope President Donald Trump appreciates that while he can score political points by attacking Jay Powell, ultimately the independence of the Fed is of the utmost importance to the American and global economy.

Meanwhile, Griffin 56 has been adding to his personal portfolio at a stunning pace, including buying over a billion dollars worth of real estate in New York, the Hamptons, London, Centropay, Hawaii, and multiple properties in South Florida, including a $400 million compound in Palm Beach, according to the Wall Street Journal. His art collection is worth a billion dollars. It includes work by Picasso, Van Gogh, and Warhol, and he has a lot of priceless, historical American documents, including rare copies of the U.S. Constitution, RIP to Constitution Dow on that one. He bought the Bill of Rights.

I can't believe. I sell that that whole. The whole saga was so insane. Crazy times. He, he, he mogged the entire on-chain economy with that one. Yes. He owns the 13th Amendment, signed by Abraham Lincoln. He also owns a $45 million stegosaurus. That's crazy. Crazy, yeah. When I worked at Citadel in Chicago, you got to do more dinosaur investing. I think he kept two, I think he kept two phantoms parked in the garage with two drivers, like, ready to go, so you, like, never knew which one he was in or something. He had some crazy, crazy, crazy choice. A good setup.

I think he also had some sick hypercars down there. I forget. Anyway. Keep him handy. He's doing some philanthropy. He has a cool name for it, too. Griffin's philanthropy now directed through an entity called Griffin Catalyst. General Catalyst, move over General Catalyst.

Griffin Catalyst exceeds $2 billion and includes funding Operation Warspeed. On the Hipper side, he recently donated 2.255,000. million to Mr. Beast, water philanthropy after the YouTube superstar called him out on the Today Show. It seems very important that Ken, to Ken, that the world knows how wealthy he is, says a business associate. A lot of other people go to great lengths to keep it the other way. Interesting. He's less secretive. Contrarian. The totality of Griffin's world is dizzying. The billions upon billions of hedge fund investments, market making activities, and personal assets are market. of a man with great aptitude and perhaps even greater ambition.

Along the way, Griffin and his companies have encountered friction, false starts, falling outs, fines and failures. The hedge fund dropped 55%, this was what I was referring to, losing $9 billion of clients' money during the 0809 financial crisis and was on, death's door. Sitsak tried and failed to get into investment banking. Yeah, they were going to become an investment bank and then they were going to IPO the whole firm, but then investment banks had such a bad, like, stench on them. them after that like retail was not going to be a fan and so they stayed private. Very, very interesting decision to go back and forth on that.

The market maker has had a number of run-ins with regulators, yet now, after more than 30 years in business, the tumblers have begun to fall in place. A decade ago, Griffin was worth a mere $6.1 billion. Today his net worth has ballooned to $48.3 billion, making him the world's 31st richest person. Let's hope he can crack the, I just hope that you can crack the top 10 by the end of the deck. He has an 85% stake in the business plus an 80% stake in the market maker. The latter being valued at 22 billion three years ago. And like Citadel Securities has obviously grown a ton. He sold a 5% stake to Sequoia. Never mind the real estate. I never knew that.

Yeah. That's crazy. Yeah. Yeah. Sequoia. I'm sure I wonder if Alfred. I'm sure they broker the deal. There's some good color in here. I thought we ran hard at Paul. at Goldman, Pablo Salame, the co-chief investment officer of the hedge fund, who came from Goldman Sachs in 2019, said to a colleague. And then I showed up here, and I realized there's a whole different gear. Griffin is chief investment, co-chief investment officer and CEO of the hedge fund. I would tell my team, you're playing for Real Madrid, says a former Citadel executive.

You don't get to keep your spot on the field if you're not producing. Ken would call you on a Sunday night at 11 p.m. And he might be screaming and yelling at you, but he was working. as another former employee. He demanded 150% and nothing else in your life should matter. Ken's not yelling at you. He's yelling with you. Joked a person close to Citadel.

I'm not yelling at you. I'm yelling with you. We're yelling together. Citadel securities and hedge fund Citadel are highly performant places to work, says Matt Kulek, SITSEC, C.O has worked at the firm for 13 years. This is a place to come if you have a lot of confidence in your ability and you want to challenge yourself. It's true that Citadel hardly has an issue attracting aspiring masters of the universe.

We had over 100,000 applicants for our summer internship program. Our acceptance rate was 0.4%. People are falling over themselves to demonstrate they deserve to be here just for the summer and some subset of them get to come back full time. Griffin was STEM smart and achiever in his earliest days growing up in Boca Raton, where he was president of the high school's math club. He graduated from Harvard with an economics degree in three years. Chapters of Griffin's origin story have become the stuff of Wall Street legend,

like pursuing Harvard to let him install a satellite dish on the roof of his dorm room so he could trade convertible bonds. That's sick. After Harvard Griffin moved to Chicago where Frank Meyer, a pioneering hedge fund investor, mentored him and helped cede Griffin's hedge fund. The best advice I've ever gotten was from Frank Meyer, who in the early days of my career really pushed me to think big, says Griffin. Meyer also pressed Griffin to build a multi-strategy platform instead of a single strategy fund.

Griffin stayed in Chicago until three years. years ago when he says he became disgruntled with the crime and business environment and relocated his companies to Miami, a triumphant return of South Florida's most successful financier native son. One thing I'm confused by, there's, I don't think Ken Griffin owns any horses. No, no. You look this up? Strange. Yeah, there's no evidence of it.

Maybe that's next. And maybe he's quiet about that. Maybe he wants to be loud about art, but then, you know, quiet when it comes to a horse racing. there was a question Raghav asked what's the update on Tyler has he dropped out Tyler any Any updates?

Any updates? Yeah I've moved Oh I forget the LeBron I've moved my abilities I've taken my talents to Los Angeles Goh Gab semester Tyler's on a gap

Wait did we ever do the trading card With Gap semester No we should do that We got to throw it up, throw it up. Throw up the gaps of the official gaps measure. Tyler couldn't miss the Great Lock-in. Yeah, he had to lock in.

He had to lock in September. The Citadel strategy is fascinating. You know how they started trading convertible bonds? Like literally like the convertible notes that everyone knows about in Silicon Valley, like companies have those and they're pretty illiquid. So he would figure out how to price them, buy them, sell them. But eventually he scaled the firm to the point where he basically like maxed out the market size. Like they were the most dominant convertible trading shop, convertible that shop in the world.

And like there was nothing more. And so they set up a frequency, a high frequency trading firm, got into quant stuff. They also had, everyone thinks about them for, if you're thinking about them in like the 2010 area, you think of them as like a high frequency trading shop. But they also had a global macro fund that took like, like, 4,000. But let's give it up for global macro. They took like 4,000 meetings with CEOs or something like that of like public companies. And it's fascinating because like how would that, how would that not produce alpha? You know, it's like obviously like you don't need to be insider trading to just talk to the CEO.

They don't share any private information. But you can just get a vibe and you can understand, oh, they know how they're talking about the business. I'm optimistic about this particular business or like this CEO sounds like he doesn't know what He seems lost. Like, he's talking about a strategy. He's not telling me anything that's non-public, but it seems dumb. If you talk with somebody, if you talk with somebody for 10 minutes, that's almost always enough time to say,

totally. Holy bearish. And it's so funny because, like, yeah, you don't need to be insider trading to just, like, talk to the CEO, get a vibe check, and then actually go and execute a trade against that. And so that's why I've always been so bearish on retail trainers because it's like, it's like, if you, like, This is who you're going up against. You're going up against someone who gets to sit down with a CEO in a private conference room

and have a conversation. And then also have expert research and all these other things. Yeah, and massive, massive organ. People have, people like to bring up that Citadel has a hedge fund and the market maker and how that could be a potential conflict. But apparently there is, Ken believes the greatest risk to his business is regulators. And so he's not willing,

he's not, you know, doesn't take risks around that. Basically, there's like an extreme firewall. Interesting. And they take compliance extremely seriously because you can imagine, like, again, he's not so threatened by the hedge fund that's trying to be the next Citadel, right? He's threat, he feels threatened by it. I was reading Caesar Palace, Caesar's, Caesar Palace coup.

What's that book called? The coup on Caesar's Palace. I forget. What is it? On my audible. The Caesar's Palace coup, fantastic book, How a Billionaire Brawl over the famous casino exposed power and greed of Wall Street. It's about Apollo buying Harrah's casino and then turning into Caesars.

And they all came out of the Michael Milken crew, basically at Drexel. And Milken, of course, was indicted on a ton of counts of securities fraud for insider trading during like the 80s. and Milken had a very different approach to regulators. He was like, at least he was like quoted in some book saying like, like the regulators are like making the market inefficient. Like the market should be a lot more efficient without the regulators. And like the courts did not look kindly on that. He went to jail and got slapped with a bunch of things.

But he was pardoned in 2020, which I think means technically did nothing wrong after the fact. I don't know. Did nothing wrong. Any one on a great run. John Exley in the chat was asking if we'd covered Anthropics round already. We did early on. They raised $13 billion at $183 billion. He was asking if that was the largest round ever.

I think that OpenAI is the only company that has raised more as part of their like $40 billion funding round. But that was tranched out, right? It wasn't $40 billion at once. So certainly one of the biggest fundraisers of all time. World Liberty Financial started trading on the blockchain yesterday, went out at $8.6 billion valuation, now trading down at $6.2. This is the company with a lot of co-founders, right? I think so.

Yeah. Yeah. No, a co-founder emeritus is a great new title. I think Donald Trump is a co-founder emeritus, which I think he means he's not day-to-day, because I think he's tied up in the greenhouse or something. Yeah, so the president is a co-founder emeritus. Eric Trump is a co-founder. Donald Trump Jr. is a co-founder.

Baron Trump is a co-founder. Chase Harrow is a co-founder. Zach Folkman is a co-founder. Stephen Whitkoff is co-founder. Zach Whitkoff is co-founder. Alex Whitkoff is co-founder. and I think that's all the co-founders that they have. Do we know their stated mission?

I mean, it seems obvious. It's bridging legacy finance and the open economy with purpose-built on-chain products. Yes. Where D-Fi meets Tradfai. Yes. But can you elaborate? Like what...

How can I be more clear, John? We're bridging legacy finance and the open economy with purpose-built on-chain products. I'm asking you to steal, man. I have no idea what... L1, L2... USD1, a U.S. Dollar Stablecoin, upgraded for a new era of finance. Stable, secure, and transparent by design.

Lend and borrow. Supply digital assets and borrow against your holdings. Monitor risk easily with real-time health factor. And the World LibertyFi app. And you can deposit crypto via wallet or bank account and spend by accessing your liquidity any time. I have the steel man. The Steel Man on this is basically we know competitions for losers.

You don't want to be in a highly competitive market. You don't want Brian Armstrong at Coinbase and Vlad Tennev at Robin Hood and all the other killers that have, you know, Anatoly at Solana. You don't want them all immediately coming out and crushing you and trying to compete with you, right? And these guys are, they're established. They exist in the space. if you do something innovative, they could potentially clone that very, very quickly, right?

Yeah. So how do you keep them, how do you throw them off the trail? How do you keep them from suspecting that you're going to build something incredible? You launch a bunch of meme coins. You launch Trump coin. You launch Malania coin. You launch meme tokens. You do a bunch of things that makes you look sloppy.

Yep. And then you come out with the really serious thing. And everyone thinks, oh, this is just another sloppy. project. This is a cash grab. This is something that isn't serious. I don't need to really keep tabs on it. And then all of a sudden, you're just building silently, building silently until you disrupt everyone. Yeah. I think there's something there. I mean, I think they should, they should start acquiring companies. You know, they're sitting at their, they've had two billion in trading volume in the last 24 hours. There's, they're six, six billion dollar token. Why not start, you know, they should just,

hit up Chamoth and say let's join forces on this back and and create the greatest roll-up of all time. The one thing that they actually should do is get on graphite.dev. It's code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. They could get started for free. They could be reviewing every. They really could. They could. They could and they should. We could. Bucco Capital says AI features are eroding SaaS margins. Ivan over at No. says that two years ago his business had margins of around 90% typical of cloud-based software companies. Now, around 10 percentage points of that profit go to the AI companies that underpin Notion's latest offerings.

How many times have I asked a founder on the show this? I've asked this question so many times. And nobody gives a straight answer. No one gives a straight answer. And here it is. But this is not that bad. This is not that bad. Especially if revenue is really accelerating. it more than, you know, they can take a hit on margins if they're growing the base. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, the real question is like, does it reduce churn? Does it increase sales? Does it increase growth? Are you getting more customers? Are your customers sticking around for longer? Are they paying more? And I, and this is just too, this is just, this is just too, too perfect to tie in. But Notion, obviously, runs on Turbo Puffer. Oh, really? And they're saving

millions of dollars annually part of how they can deliver AI efficiently to all their customers because of TurboPuffer. There we go. Mickey Lou, over the data engineering lead at Notion, says, TurboPuffer makes it too easy to build state-of-art AI app. So absolutely fantastic. Are you, did you ever, were you ever a big Notion guy? Never Big Notion guy.

Used it a little bit. I was buddies with a Notion influencer. What's his name? Oh, I know this. I know here. He plays like metal. Oh, what's his name? Notion Brand Ambassador.

He has a really great YouTube like business. He went giga long Notion. And it paid off hugely. He had a bunch of really great insights. I forget what his name is, but he's a nice guy. But I use Notion a little bit, but have mostly just been Google Docs

and, you know, for most of the stuff, I don't know, building a second brain. Never went too far down that rabbit hole. What about you? I've paid for Notion for years and years and years. We used it heavily at a branded native. And they still use it. Yeah, I think it's a great tool. I think it's more of like an operating system for like a team. Like it's really great in like a in the business. It's so, I mean, it's still, we're, we're Google Maxis here. We use. Google sheets and stuff, but still, like, being able to create, like, knowledge bases and sort of, like, layered, uh, is, is great. So, yeah, it doesn't understand. I don't understand. The notion haters out there. I think the

notion is actually crazy that people can type, I hate notion. Like, imagine hating a note taking out. That's ridiculous. Um, no, no, I, I think the way the, the, the, the, the, the over optimizer, like, meme happens is that you're basically, like, it's the same, it's the same vibe. is like the credit card points maxi. It's like someone who is like taken something that makes sense in a business context and applied it to their personal life. Like oh yes, I have a personal CRM

for like reminding myself to like call Tyler and get a beer with him on the weekends. It's like that should feel just natural. And so like if someone's like, yes, like just to like... If you need a CRM to manage a relationship, it's probably not that great of a relationship. Yeah, yeah. And it has that same,

it gives that same vibe all. in the same way of like, okay, like, if you're spending 10 hours a week optimizing credit card points, like, is that really worth it? Don't you have a higher opportunity cost? What are we doing here? I actually have a buddy who I get me shoving the show in the show who is like the biggest points maxi and has gone so far that it's actually driving like tons and tons of value. Oh, really? I'll have him come on the show and tell the story, but he, he, I'm a billionaire from credit card. points. I mean, didn't I tell you this? He bought a half a million dollars of gold at Costco on credit cards, points, just to get points, and then sells the gold and arms. No way. Okay, that's, that's

cool. He's the king of this stuff. He runs a whole show about it. Anyway, the, uh, yeah, I don't know, notion, like, there are certainly people that get, you have to, like, get joy out of it, like, doing, like, you know, in your personal life, because if it's, if it's not, like, it's definitely, it's definitely gatherer coded. It is a little gatherer And that's okay. Some people are hunters, some people are gatherers. Organizing. Yeah, yeah.

I like to hunt through my messy, messy documents. I like it as much of messy. I'm going through the file system, searching for the random. Dot TXT file where I put all my passwords. Like a hunter on the prairie thousands of years ago. Yes. Hunting the guise.

You like stress of opening your laptop. It makes you feel. like it makes you feel like you're really like, you know, trying to survive. Or just like one gigadoc of everything. I mean, you're the worst, dude. I see you texting yourself. Yes.

That is got to be the, like, like, that is so much. Like, I feel like the platonic ideal is like, okay, yeah, like, you know, you use a spreadsheet when it calls for a spreadsheet. You use the right tool for the job. Like maybe, you know, you'll, you'll use a communication tool for this. If you're managing a complex product, you know, like if you are, if you are actually, you know, planning and building a product, you're using linear. It's a purpose-built tool for planning and building products. Meet the system for modern software development. Streamline issues,

project, product, roadmaps. This is what you actually do. You actually use linear for real stuff. But then at the same time, on the other end of the barbell, you're like texting yourself. Got perfect transition because, you know, who's a customer of TurboPuffer? You're really on the TurboPuffer run today. I mean, generational run. This is why I talked to Simon. I was like, we're absolutely working together. Yep. Anyway, should we go through this Christopher Mims article? Yeah.

So Mims is the reason we know about these margins. He says with models doing more thinking, the small companies that buy AI from the giants to create apps and services are feeling the pinch. Developers who buy AI by the barrel for apps that do things like make software, analyze. I buy my AI buy the barrel.

That's a great turn of phrase. Are discovering that their bills are higher than expected and growing. What's driving up costs? The latest AI models are doing more thinking, especially when you use for deep research, AI agents and coding. So while the price of a unit of AI,

known as a token, continues to drop, the number of tokens needed to accomplish many tasks is skyrocketing. It's the opposite of what many analysts and experts predicted, even a few months ago. That has set off a new debate in the tech world about who... Wait, did...

What? What about the Jevins paradox, Maxis? This is... Yeah, this is Jevins Paradox. I know, exactly. So while the price of a unit AI, known as a token continues to drop, the number of tokens needed to accomplish many tasks is skyrocketing. So that Jevin's paradox, something gets cheaper, you use more of it. Yes.

This is, yeah. So if the cost of AI was skyrocketing, I don't think you'd see quite the same. So the question that you're beefing with, and I'd beef with this too, is the characterization that it's the opposite of what many analysts and experts predicted even a few months ago. and there's a lot more nuance to what the experts, if you really trust the experts, the podcasters, what they were predicting. They were predicting drops in per token cost. That actually has happened.

But then they were also predicting Jevin's paradox that we would use a lot more of the resource. And so I don't know, it seems like that prediction was kind of true. But I do understand, like, there was a moment where the idea was you spend, 10x more on the training run and then the inference is too cheap to meter. Intelligence is too cheap to meter. And so you basically get the inference for cut for free.

You spend a billion dollars training this massive thing and then you can distill it down and inference it on your phone on the edge for free. And that certainly has not happened. What were you about to ask? Should we put Theo Brown, chief executive of T3 Chat. He says the arms race for who can make the smartest thing has resulted in a race for who can make the most expensive thing. I don't totally agree with this.

I mean, I think it was, it's always been the case if you take a hard problem and have an LLM try to tackle it and just give it as much inference, as many tokens as it possibly can. It's going to probably deliver a better result. But I feel like now you have companies like OpenAI clearly making decisions to deliver products more efficiently, right? Certainly, like not wasting.

tokens is the goal of the router. Like the router is let's try to not get, I mean, it's also let's try and get people to use the thinking models if they're not and they're asking questions that should benefit from thinking models, but reasoning models. But also like just downgrading my, you know, my hammering of the O3 Pro API. When I ask a question that actually could just get one shot by the default model is probably a benefit. And so it's, yeah, it's more nuanced than that. I agree. It's a right tool for the job, sizing the value of the query to the cost of the query. It makes a ton of sense. Anyway.

And over the weekend, X-AI released GROC code fast, one, which briefly topped the charts for, on an open router, and is specifically focused on cost. Do you want to keep going here? Yeah. So there's a cool graphic. hear about the cost of doing business, the price per token for prompts and responses for AI models at a given level of intelligence. The least intelligent model showed roughly a 9x decrease in cost per year, while the most capable ones dropped in price by roughly 900x per year. So remember, AI training and AI inference are different. Training those huge models continues to demand ever more costly processing delivered by those AI supercomputers you've

probably heard about, but getting answers out of existing models inference, should be getting cheaper. Fast, sure enough, the cost of inference is going down by a factor of 10 each year, says Ben Cartier, a former AI engineer who's now a researcher at Epoch AI, not-for-profit. Despite the dropping cost per token, what's driving up, costs for many AI applications, so-called reasoning,

many new forms of AI rerun queries to double-check their answers, fan out to the web to gather extra Intel, even write their own little programs to calculate things. And AI agents will carry out lengthy series of actions based on user prompts. Here are approximate amounts of tokens needed for tasks at different levels based on a variety of sources. A basic chatbot Q&A, 50 to 500 tokens,

a short document summary, 200,000 to 6,000 tokens. Writing complex code might be 20,000 to 100,000 tokens, and a multi-step agent workflow might be up to a million tokens. Hence the debate of new AI systems that use orders or magnitude more tokens just to answer a single request are driving much of the spike in demand for AI infrastructure who will ultimately foot the bill. This is, like, the Jevin's paradox by Nvidia when they sold off that you did was like

so perfectly timed. Like it matched, it matched what actually happened so flawlessly. Remarkable. I should check. I should check on that trade. I mean, yeah, just like, like, there was this idea that like models, that tokens would get cheaper and like, like, the timeline was just like, Jevin's paradox, Jevon's paradox, like, understand this thing. We're going to wind up using more of these, more of these tokens. This is a new capability. We're going to use more of this, even though it's getting cheaper. And lo and behold, people use a ton more. They really bought Nvidia while we were live on the show. Yeah. The day that it just sold off massively. On public.com, investing for those that take it seriously. They got multi-asset investing,

industry leading yields. They're trusted by millions. I am up 42%. Very nice. Not bad. Not bad. Anyway, I then over at, Notion says that he's spending 10% of revenue on AI now. That is high when you think about it in that frame. Because what is Notion's revenue? It's got to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars, right? And so they're probably spending tens of millions of dollars on tokens for features that they've added to Notion,

and then they have to upsell or give some sort of free... Yeah, I mean, they were super quick to add a lot of AI features. I remember these are founder mode companies, right? Long one. Founder. No, but I just remembered, it was like, okay, Chad GPT was taking off. Ivan clearly looked at that and said, hey, we should just integrate this everywhere into our product so that people don't have to leave the app to access intelligence.

I mean, Notion feels like such a beneficiary of AI in sort of like three different ways. One is like the most intimidating thing about Notion is when you set it, when you, when you, when you, when you, when you, out and you're just hit with like a blank page. And that's why there's people like, you know, these influences that sell notion templates. Because the whole idea is like, yes, when you set up the second brain and you have your notion for your finances and your notion for all your friends and your friends' birthdays

and the notion for everyone you invited to your wedding and the notion for, you know, your dog's medication schedule and you have all your different notions and they all link perfectly and all the data is perfect. Like that feels amazing. That's like the dream. But getting there is so much work. You have to spend days and days and days

like onboarding yourself basically. And if AI can do that faster, that's huge. Yeah. So actually, it's actually one of the cases where I think just putting a chat box, like, what do you want to do right now instead of just being like, hey, here's a blank thing. It's a sandbox.

Do whatever you want. That feels incredibly value additive. And then also the behind the scenes AI stuff seems incredibly valuable too, where if I have a CRM built out in Notion or I have a list of topics that I want to talk about on the show or something like that. Having an AI that kind of can in the background go and hydrate cells in a table or hydrate or transform or summarize or kind of polish up a messier document and keep it all in like the proper

notion taxonomy. That feels hugely valuable. Totally. And so it should be a beneficiary. And then also just like if you're somebody that's actually been doing the hard work of putting a ton of data in Notion for years and years and years and years, and then all of a sudden now you have the ability to, you know, with just one prompt, like be able to synthesize some sort of new visualization layer on top of that. That feels really valuable too. So I would be pretty optimistic about them spending this much on AI, even if they're not immediately reaping the benefit, even if it is a little bit like, who knows? Maybe they're getting a 50% bump in revenue. And so 10% hit to margin worth it all day.

Take that all day. But even if they're not, I feel like this margin will come down. If you can buy Notion for $10 a month. And then if you want AI features, you just pay more. How much? So it doesn't say here. It doesn't say how much. It's $20,000 a month.

But I would assume it's like another $10 a month if you want AI features. So they're having to spend 10% of revenue on AI, but they're potentially, you know, doubling revenue on a per user basis. Interesting. Well, if you have a bunch of data and you want to analyze it, go to Julius. Chat with your data and get expert level insights in seconds. Ask Julius to analyze your data used by Princeton, BCG, Zapier. And TBPN.

And TVPN. Yeah, we actually are working on something fun. put all of our all every post that we've ever reacted to has been cataloged put it in julius ranked it by how many times people have been mentioned kind of poster power rankings working on monthly updates here should should be our own kind of you know top poster list top most mentioned of all time should be fun anyway when replet updated its pricing model with something it calls effort-based pricing in which more complicated requests could call more, the world's complaint box, Reddit, filled up with posts by users declaring they were

abandoning the vibe coding app despite protests from noisy minority of users. Quote, we didn't see any significant churn or slowdown in revenue after updating the pricing model, says Replit's CEO Amjad Masad. The company's plan for enterprise customers can still command margins of 80 to 90 percent. He adds. One solution, says Christopher Mims, is Dumber AI. The big company is creating companies. cutting edge AI models can at least for now afford to collectively spend more than $100 billion per year.

And so, yeah, I do wonder, like, a big thing is that if you're just hammering the front, it's so easy to just hammer the frontier. I think the king of the timeline situation room is Bucco actually. I think it's, I think it's Bucco. Yeah, I mean, he is delivering. We got to start at it. We should probably add our own creator payouts. We should.

Start paying out Bucco. Yeah, in March. King of the timeline. In merch, we should send merch to the top 10. Zeke says, an Ocean Premium subscription will get you a lease 2025 Tesla. I wouldn't be surprised if somebody starts throwing in a a Tesla lease to your enterprise plan.

It would be great. Why not? So yeah, I mean, in summary, like the bulk case here is that the GPT5 API, like eventually there will be a model router API that will dynamically route the request to the best model. and you can, and instead of just saying, like, okay, this particular feature is wired up to a reasoning model, it will say, okay, well, yeah, like this particular feature is wired up to a model router and when a customer comes with a question, saying, hey, I'm Notion and I want to reorganize all my data, and it says, yeah, that's not really a notion, that's not really a reasoning level task. Let's put that on cheaper model, dynamically route it, save a bunch of money. Anyway, if you want to get your brand mentioned in ChatGPT, go to profound, reach millions of customers who are using AI to discover new products and brands. You can get a demo. I'll profile. Anyway, should we talk about the podcast Gold Rush or should we run through

some timeline? What do you think? The podcast Gold Rush. Media companies race to licensed star creators with AI upending how people consume information news outlets are willing to pay top dollar for unique voices. Traditional media companies are in a deal-making frenzy with podcasters, social media influencers and other content creators. Fox News in July announced a new media expansion, including a licensing agreement with the ruthless podcast, free-willing talk show, featuring several former Republican political strategists. In August, the athletic agreed to a seven-figure deal to license Pablo Tori finds out a sports and culture show. Vox Media recently announced a partnership with Bella Freud for her fashion neurosis podcast and is agreed to a licensing deal

with David Axelrod, Mike Murphy, and John Heilman's show Hacks on. On tap. Established media companies watched in Oz, independent podcasters, drew star guests and drove the news cycle during the 2024 presidential election. And with artificial intelligence tools changing the way people consume information and audiences hungry for authenticity. Outlets from Fox said the New York Times are eager to create content that can't easily be replicated by a chatbot. For many, that means building out rosters of distinctive human voices. The world will be poorer if we were just served, quote, by an AI agent with content that has originated from Algon. rhythms, says Paul Cheesebro, chief executive of Fox Corps' two-be media group. The role of the creator

becomes even more important in that world. Fox and the journal's parent news corps share common ownership. Sean Ryan, a former U.S. Navy SEAL and CIA contractor started shopping the Sean Ryan show earlier this year, recent episodes, which can last upward of three hours, featured a deep dive, featured a deep sea mining executive, a former military contractor held hostage in Colombia. And like seven of our boys. Seven of our boys and California governor Gavin Newsom. Ryan builds the show is...

Yeah. Sean Ryan? Ryan builds the show is focusing on... Holding a gun or something. That was like the viral moment. Yeah. Focusing on what the media isn't talking about. Yeah, I mean, I think they might get into. this in a bit, but the takeaway here is people are less interested in paying just for news,

because you might open X and see some Anon account posting a headline. Someone else did the fact-finding. They're just like posting an easily digestible screenshot and more interested in sort of commentary and analysis surrounding news. I guess my question is like, if the end state of these podcasts, is partnership with legacy media networks. What does that say about the talent identification and like talent nurturing for the networks?

Like why can't Fox go and find the next ruthless and set them up with the field of, yeah, exactly. Or is it maybe more efficient to actually have the, the NFL combine of like the next sports entertainer. Yeah, you guys have a competitive bloodbath. Exactly. And we'll pick out winners. Yeah, maybe that is actually.

I mean, you see this in music now where a lot of record labels wait until somebody shows incredible talent and then they'll sign them after they've gotten a billion views on TikTok or have a hit song. So I still think, yeah, the question here is, Does signing, you know, if Sean Ryan goes to Fox or ToBe or one of these other platforms, is that enough to sustain these legacy media companies or do they still get competed away over time? Yeah, the question is like what, yeah, what does the long-term business look like?

Because they're all pivoting to like, or they're all expanding to over the top or instead of over the air, like the, I think it's OTT, like the streaming services. So like they all want to have their own streaming networks, but then they're in direct competition with Netflix, and that's going to be really hard, and they're in competition with Apple and Amazon and YouTube, and that's really, really hard. And then, and so the question's like, in the short term, it makes sense. Like, I could imagine paying Sean Ryan to license his show and running ads against it on Fox being higher value than just like the next random show that probably costs a bunch

to make and brings in the same amount of ad revenue. Like if they're just paying Sean Ryan to do his show and then they're just airing it, that could be like a good financial decision, right? Yeah. The question is like, does that actually get like a younger Sean Ryan viewer on board on Fox? Well, yeah, the question is like if legacy media, you know, if cable, is being competed away by different streaming cable revenues are being competed away by streaming platforms and social media platforms.

How many Sean Ryan's do you need to replace the lost revenue and the fullness of time that comes from cable just going away? Yeah. You need a lot of Sean Ryans. There are a lot of Sean Ryans out there, though. You could carry a lot of these shows, and you could definitely fill out a 24-7 news cycle. You could fill a full channel with independent content creators that are licensed. but the question is like how how much is that actually make people stick around versus they just stay in their apps and they just don't really go back to the networks or like what value at that point is the is the network actually delivering totally anyway let me tell you about numeral sales tax and autopilot spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance let's rip some timeline let's do some timeline

So Elon Musk is back to posting about romantic companions, I believe. Major upgrade of Brock Imagine in a few weeks. Definitely needs an upgrade. People were not very happy with the quality of the video, although there were lots of people that were promoting it and sharing it because it was certainly edgy. But in terms of like the video. Should we pull up that video of Sam Altman?

Yeah, that's the next one by Tayoki. if we can pull up that and try not to share your screen. The Sam Altman clip from, this is from Cleo Abrams show, I believe. In the timeline. In the meantime, let me tell you about

Finn.AI, the number one AI agent for customer service, number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive bakeoffs, number one ranking on G2. Do not get in a bakeoff with Finn. That's all I'll say. And can we pull up the Sam Altman clip from Tyoki, Tayoki, I don't know how to say that, repost from Hungry Donkey E of Sam talking to Cleo Abram on her show. It's in the timeline. Meanwhile, Arfer Rock is highlighting, Statsig was acquired by Open AI in a $1.1 billion all-stock deal.

Notably, they announced $100 million Series A at the same WOMP. $1.1 billion valuation from Iconic a few months ago. I wonder what prompted management to sell after the recent large fundraise. This is what I was saying earlier. The acquisition is just at the last round price. But it's very possible that the Statsig team and the board think that there's just more upside in owning a piece of Open AI than owning a piece of Statsick. So even though it's happening at the last round price, the last investors aren't getting a premium. They are they're riding with Open AI now. That makes sense. We got the video ready? Let's pull it up. No audio. But not best for winning.

Can you start it over? What is an example of a decision that you've had to make that is best for the world but not best for winning? Well, we haven't put a sex bot avatar in CHPT yet. That does seem like it would get time spent. Apparently it does. Is that graphic added? on her show or after the fact?

I would assume she didn't add that. Somebody added that. Yeah, I don't know. The other thing about this deal is iconic is the lead investor in Anthropics new round. So this is a way for iconic to get some opening eye exposure. Interesting.

You want to talk about Align Ventures? They're on a generational run now. In early stage, CPG investing, the fund started in 2018. Yeah, we covered this Friday. Friday. 20 million dollar fund was invested in some of the biggest because they're in they're in they're in mammoth brands they're in carmer dog codery sale to mammoth brands figs oh they were in the fig series a which IPOed in 2021 touch how is figs doing now I know that they IPO and they were kind of ripping uh hymns and still a billion

dollar company wow uh touchland seed acquired by church and dwight company I don't know touchland uh for 880 million Billy seed acquired by Edgewell personal. Biggs also IPOed at at $34 a share. It's at $6 a share now. Okay, so it's down. They would have done. I mean, a line would have done really well on the IPO.

The total EV of their investments is likely north of $15 billion. That's crazy. So that's how they have the capital to be ripping into figure. Robotics. Yeah, that was uncharacteristic. It seems like they really know their stuff.

But I mean, humanoid could be some of the, you know, the biggest consumer play of all time if you get a robot in every person's home. But obviously, competitive market. We've got to talk about this Ethan Ding post. Google Trends Data on Interest in Lovable, Replit, Clog Code, Cursor, Winsurf, all down. Curser is down 60%. Peaked August 3rd. Claude Cod Codes down 56%. Loveable is down 44% Replets down 68%.

WindSurf's down 78%. This doesn't make any sense to me. I mean, even looking at the charts and it doesn't look like it's way maybe down from peak, but like that's just Google trends. Doesn't mean revenues down. Yeah, is this, what do you think, Tyler? Has anything happened in Cursor Claude Cod Code,

lovable replet? I mean, Ethan responds and he says, might be nothing. markets maturing, users not switching as much, right? If they're actually settling into using products, then they're not frantically looking. Or it could be that just overall growth is slowing. Also, it's just like a slight sell-off before lock-in season.

Or people are just using the models to do search now themselves. Oh, yeah, so people, maybe this is just overall search. No, I think all this is relative. Oh, right, right. Tyler, what do you think? I think it could be like, yeah, it's like the lock-end. Like by now the kind of exploration phase is over. People like, no, okay, I like using Claudecote.

I like using Loveable. Yeah. They've tried everything and now they're kind of maybe just using one now. Maybe. Something like that. Yeah, I mean, this is, this is, I guess the date is down during August. That has to be like the slowest time for basically everything. This is like big vacation season.

I don't know. I don't read too much into this. I still feel like, like a lot of these are big markets where, many of the companies will do well. Also, there's, there's, there's some sort of, there's some sort of like compounding thing. Also, like, Claude code, I wonder if that's even the term. Like, if I go to Google Trends, like, are people just searching for Anthropic? Like, is Anthropic off peak?

Anthropic is a search term. Anthropic is a search term over the past, let's see. It seems like every, every search, everything I've searched. so far has peaked around the beginning of August. Yeah. Anthropic broadly is down. What about what's something that should not be down at all? Like, Arawon.

Is Arawan down? Arawan is flat. Arawan is not. Labou booboo peaked in July as well. What about Open A.I. Let's see. Open A.I also saw some crazy spike in August. What was going on July 27th to August 2nd?

everyone was talking about AI or something, and then it just completely dropped. Something weird happened with the Google data on August 2nd, or August 1st or something. What was going on then? I don't know. Anyway. Anyways, I don't think we should read too much into this.

It's interesting data, though. Let me tell you about Adio. Customer relationship magic. Adio is the AI native CRM that builds scales and grows your company to the next level. Get started for free. This was funny. Mr. Beast was streaming about his water charity.

Yes. And he just kept refreshing Polly Market. That's so funny, because he can see the actual data of how things are coming in, but he'd just prefer to look at Polly Market. I mean, it's a fun chart to look at when it's going up from, you know, up to 90%. That's amazing.

99%. Wait, let's see what it was like a week ago. The odds that we were going to hit it was 50%. And Ken Griffin came in. This is America. It's like we can bet on charity in this country. A lot of people who bet that we weren't going to hit it are d-dossing the site so we don't hit it. What were the lowest odds?

At the beginning, what was it? Oh, that's a crazy dynamic. It looks like it hit a low of 50% a week ago. At the very start, it was hovering around 30%. Wow. Yeah, it's kind of crazy. I'm tearing up, realizing that we can bet on charitable giving now. There's $6.5 million of betting volume on this.

Man, why are so many people? betting on this. He's like, can you please just donate to the charity? Yeah, instead of gambling on it. Oh, that's hilarious. Shout out to Ayush from Warp. Shout out. He married the love of his life in a 500-year-old cathedral

and a 2,700-year-old town in Spain this weekend. Absolutely fantastic. Love to see it. Love to see a young technology brother. Married the love of their life. Now, Ayush, please get back to building sass. What's this?

This is, here comes the bride. Is this trade? Is this? I don't think so. I mean this is like. Fair use? I think it's fair use. We'll see.

Maybe we'll get struck. Let's keep talking. We need a wedding sound on the soundboard. Anyway, congrats to him. That's a fantastic photo. Wow. So Palantir is launching a new campaign saying you're being sold in AI future where you're

obsolete or irrelevant. We see it differently. Doomers say AI will take your job and then your life. Pacifiers say not to worry. Machines will handle reality as you handle the remote. They're all wrong. Americans are already wielding AI to work wonders. From factories to hospitals, they're ditching spreadsheets

to solve real problems, make real things and kickstart. The prosperous era, the most prosperous era in our history. Today we're launching working intelligence, the AI Optimism Project to show you how. This is great. The Doomers will hate to see Palantir providing an optimistic future for AI in our lives. Should we pull up this clip of Gavin Newsom?

We certainly can. We also have our next guest. There we go. Well, why don't we dive into our first guest of the show, and we'll come back to that. Andrea from Snackshot, who was, of course, profiled Friday in the Times. Great to see you. Hi.

Same. How's it going? It's good. How are you? Congratulations on all the progress. Thank you. It's been five years in the making. Five years. What was the inspiration?

What was like the first post? Do you remember? Yeah, it was about the rise of this new wave of non-alcoholic drinks. And look at it now. Is now the time to go long alcohol? Yeah. Because I've been seeing people, you know, fading the non-alc trend being like, all right, Everybody's lying off the Alka.

I'm going to go on heavy. Yeah. I think so. Yeah. Like, Gen Z is into like buzz balls and like people are bringing back hypnotic. So 100%. We got to get some buzz. We got to get some, unfortunately, some members of our team are not 21.

So we will not be bringing back buzz balls in this office. But I think, but do you know about it? Yeah, yeah. Is that around when you were? Yes, yes. I'm familiar buzz balls. I don't think I've ever actually had one. I've seen them at the grocery store though.

but what were the biggest uh what were the biggest winners out of the non-alcoholic trend was it uh athletic brewing back then or were there other were there other like companies yeah i think the only one that i'm like like i can say like okay it makes sense is any beer because it tastes it really does uh like taste like the real thing yeah you have all these like any drinks that i'm just like dude's fucking just like a sugar drink yeah and yeah that's what i never i never invested in the non-out category despite getting a bunch of pitches because I was like I can just have a diet Coke. I could just have like a soda. Yep.

I guess I get, you know. Energy drink. There's just a lot of water. We should be investing in like protein heart. I mean, there is already a protein heart shelter brand. There's. What? Yeah.

We have, we have nicotine energy drinks now. Is that? Okay. But we saw that. I don't think that's, I don't, is it actually real? It seems extremely illegal. I literally, like, I interviewed the founders when I wrote about. They're doing.

Wow. Okay. They hired one of the guys from Cocoa. Okay. No, that's like a legit thing. Do they know, do they know it's illegal? So they're operating, okay, so I asked them about this, and they're operating under the Cradam category. Oh. I'm telling you guys, like these guys, we're operating in a gray market, a drug gray market.

Yeah, they're operating in the, like, smoke shop gray market area, but these guys are like from the Redneck Riviere. like dust in Florida like the kind of person that would be behind this brand and they don't give a fuck they're like they literally told me we're building this for the LA people the lower Alabama people so lower Alabama love it that they know their targets are good so yeah that's the what about protein are we short protein you can get protein and everything now you I I I I've been reading studies about this I think in the next 10 years there's going to be people with like severe kidney like problems.

Too much protein? Yeah, your body cannot process the insane amount of protein that American people are putting into their bodies now. And so I joke when people are trying to push you like, you know, I saw protein croutons the other day and I was like,

this is ridiculous. But I'd love to see people's blood work. No, no, I won't add protein. I don't want to add like a meat or fish. to my grain bowl. I'll just take protein croutons, please. Well, there's also now a brand that's doing protein greens,

and it's like a solid green. It's, but don't, don't greens have some certain, oh, that's funny. I have no idea, but we're beyond parody at this point. Starbucks announced they're doing a protein foam

macha latte. Foam? Starting this month. Yeah, like cold foam, you know, those drinks that have like the cold foam in the top. So, like,

Starbucks is long protein. So I think we should be short again. Yeah. Wow, the short. Yeah, now that you're having that, I feel like we're like, okay, we can start backing out a little bit about that. She's calling the top. Beyond protein, you know, like now it's there's whole like creatine snack trend. And I came across like creatine, you know, man cereal is this creatine cereal that's launching, but then you also have things like creatine muffins, creatine,

chrisons and it's just that's the thing about what I love to talk about. That that, that, that, I don't, I can't get behind it. The science behind it is that carbs help our bodies absorb creatine better and faster. So that's the science behind it. But yeah, that's kind of what I love doing what I love doing. It's like I come across like the most insane unhinged products, but it also is a testament of like the American consumer is like optimist. Like, you can sell anything to Americans.

Okay. Speaking of selling everything, the chat wants to know about psilocybin ice cream. I don't know if that's real or if that's just a joke. I mean, I mean, I've definitely seen like psilocybin, obviously like the chocolates. There's some places in LA that I do the teas. I've actually had some of those teas that they operate on the downlow. So it's like mushroom tea. Yeah.

And it has like it'll deal. Yeah, but it'll be like microdose. So it'll be like a little small bottle of them. The company is called Toasty Town. I'm obsessed with it. I actually smuggled some. Okay. You're live. Okay.

I'm live. But anyways, great tasting silasat meat tea. So I'm not surprised. You smuggled it from the plate into your mouth. Yeah. My mouth. Anyways,

but yeah, I'm not surprised if people are doing that on a DEL. I don't believe that ice cream would be the best way to ingest it. I don't know. I would have to. Have you seen anybody try to put cocaine back into cola yet? No, but I think at this point, I wouldn't be surprised if Coke just says like, fuck it. You know, like, vote about this like push into like the cocaine induced opulence of the 80s.

And that's why we're seeing people, you know, want to do 300 milligrams of caffeine and one drink. We have the killer panera lemonade. Starbucks is also doing Taco Bell, doing energy drinks. So I don't know, I feel like America wants to and it yearns to be stimulated and we're like kind of the reverse of the ayahuasca silocybin kind of like brain dead vibes. Do you think we're seeing more new CPG companies formed than ever? Because over the last few years there's been less early stage investment activity or at least from the institutional side. But it seems like there's still like a fire hose of new brands. Yeah, because a lot of the barriers of entry of these categories are so low. And it's really funny because people can just Kickstarter it, like Fly by Jing, which is doing really well. It's like a chili crisp brand and they started off with a Kickstarter.

You don't really necessarily need venture money to launch a brand, a CPG brand. But obviously, I think it's VC came in to corrupt the CPG industry and trying to like grow it in five years and trying to get like those eggs. something like a poppy or a Sieta that have been able to do it in less than a decade. But that's obviously like not necessarily the norm for the industry itself. But yeah, there's... Yeah, I mean, it's certainly true. I mean, I'll defend venture capital with my life.

But I would take a bullet for venture capital. But certainly a lot of brands that I love were started decades ago and didn't raise anything close to what venture capital looks like. today. I wish there was like a way to short like new CPG brands. Like someone you could do a polymarket for that. Brutal. Brutal. You're supposed to be there. But isn't the isn't the competition good? We just like you know, we throw a bunch of budget bunch of entrepreneurs. You see what sticks and every once while you get a great product that sticks around forever. I know but like like I mean I've come across Paulo Santo brood water and like people are trying to like

It's like a certain type of wood. Really? The description of the product is like, you know, Palo Santo is what you burn to like sage yourself. And so like the product describes itself as like something that can like elevate your vibe. Okay. There's people who say like, oh, you can have like spiritual enhancement through like these fucking $7 adoptogenic shelters. And so at this point, I do think that we need to be more like strict in what we allow to put out there.

because like none of that actually changes that there's skittles water in the market you know like wait is there actually skittles water no there's actual skittles water i bet that raises your vibe crazy how uh do you do you so something something i like personally i think uh the invest if you're going to invest in uh CPG it the only criteria that really matters is the product truly amazing amazing. How much, how often are you surprised where you try a product and you're not impressed by it, but then it goes on to be successful? Oh, God. Yeah. I've, I've spoken my mind about how I don't believe that people are buying $12 protein cereal. Or, you know, I'm not going to say the name of the brand, but I, there's a lot of things that I don't believe that make any sense to me. And I do believe that it's like VC and it has distorted.

Yeah, it's distorted and it doesn't make sense. And I'm someone who does spend a lot of time in groceries, really observing form of more anthropological. POV, like, what are people really wanting to spend like a lot more on? Or, you know, how groceries became this like way of status signaling that you didn't have before. Like our parents were like showing pictures of Heinz to their friends and being like, oh my God, I have, you know, this and my. pantry and now you have people about the grass saw in their kitchen and even like the idea of

what I call like a hype beast grocer like an Arawan or a happier grocery where it's like that it's so crazy that that actually exists and then our generation this form of affordable affluence where it's like oh yeah I'm going to go spend $30 on an 80 gram sugar smoothie for clout um and I I think that I saw the news about, you know, Emily Lundberg posted about that like everyone being inside of like a kith that members club. And so it's really funny because I think that's going to be like the cloud chasing final boss. Like you dropped $6,000 on a membership to buy a $30 smoothie in New York. Like you got to love it. I can't hate it. I mean badge value is real. People want to be seen with something

it's an accessory. There is something to that. I mean, it might be bizarre and distorted, but it's real and monetizable and so it will it will I like putting they should put all air ones inside members clubs because I don't like I only critique of everyone I mean I only critique is like so rift ruff I I hate going in and you can tell on like on a summer on a summer Saturday that it's like tourists I don't want to see tourists in my grocery store who who do you who do you write for like who do you think your do you think your audience you know do you write with the mind of the consumer in mind? Do you snacking generation? Or is it more like the industry participant, the investor, the business owner? I come from PR and marketing. So like my POV was always like,

I can kind of dissect this for you and tell you what of this product is mostly BS and a crafted narrative. And so I started this publication based on the idea of no one's writing in this like CPG Circle Dirk of an industry. Like everybody's just writing for the, buyer or for the retailer or whatever or for the other investors, but no one was really talking to like your average person who eventually finds us on a target and doesn't understand like how come we have like protein popcorn at Target. Where did that even come from? So yeah, I write, it's funny because like, have you thought about putting protein like bundling it into your subscription? Like, uh, protein subscription. Um, well, my audience is very young, which is really funny. Like I've

even been invited to give guest lectures at colleges, which is interesting. And my number one advice is like, don't do it. Don't get into CPG. But it's interesting. Like I, you know, a lot of my But it's fun. It's people love it. It's fun to make things that you can consume and, in physical, you know, it's a very common story. Somebody's in finance. They're just in Excel all day long. And then they start a beverage company. Yeah, it's much less abstract. Like you are making widgets. It's a widgets business. Like you manufacture something. you distribute it, you see it. And people think it's easy because they're like,

okay, I just make a drink and I sell it a lot of times and then I exit for a bottle. And the first time you see one of your products like in the trash out in the real world and you're like, wow, like this is a real thing. It's amazing. Yeah, it's amazing. Yeah.

So I try to like write, I started writing for myself as an audience, but I guess that, you know, there's so many people that can take what it is. So like I, you know, I have a popular Instagram account as well. It's not just a newsletter and I do a lot of memes there. that have gone really viral. It's funny things like, they're like celebrities like like,

like BJ Novak and Kira, I forget what her last name is, but like, and like all these random people that I'm like, wait, how did you even find out about this? People love snacks. Yeah.

It's a universal language. Universal experience. So yeah, I guess that is a very universal subject, but the way that I write, it just makes it a lot more relatable and digestible to your average person. Are you long or?

short celebrity brands. Oh, super short. Like I'm saying, like we, someone needs to make polymarket for CPG. Maybe that maybe I'll do it. What are you long? Are you long like legacy brands then? Long the American consumer. A hundred percent that.

But what I'm fascinated with right now that I wrote a deep dive on this like three years ago, the inner, like the influence of wearables on what we decide to eat. drink. So I'm very invested in, not personally, because I don't invest, but I, like, I'm very fascinated with how, you know, there's the trend of people not drinking at a certain age because they're wearing the whoop, they're wearing the aura. This whole, like, the new hot biometrics, which is like cortis, people wanting to know what their cortisol looks like. I just talked to a company that has cortisol strips that you put in your mouth and they immediately, like, populate the information into your cell phone. I think that's crazy. I love the idea of technology advancing

enough that you can potentially have one day a non-invasive glucose monitor that can tell you like, oh, you know, you shouldn't be doing like drinking this or whatever, how it affects you. But there's brands now, the guy from Oatley, he launched a brand called Good Idea and they develop this ingredient that counteracts your sugar spike if you drink it with meals. So I think that's really cool. It's important because Oatley massively spikes your Yeah, he's trying to undo his, like, undo his, like, what he did in that whole company. But I think that's fascinating. I'm like, you know, explaining to people, explaining to people that your body, like, processes your, your oat latte, just like it's a, a Coca-Cola is mind-blowing for people.

Yeah, but you don't have to be Brian Johnson at this point to be able to, like, understand your body in that sense. But, yeah. Anyway. Awesome. Awesome. Well, congrats on the recognition and the profile. Thank you. It's so nice to be here. I know. Thank you for all the support since day one. That's a great hangout.

And it's great watching you win. We'll talk to you soon. Cheers. Have a good one. Bye. Get that mallet ready, Jordy. We have some news coming into the TBP and Ultradome from the Restream waiting room. We have rain.

Welcome to the stream. How you guys doing? Welcome. Give us the update. Introduce yourselves. what you do. Tell us the news. Give us a big number, please. Hey, we're co-founder's Lorraine. I'm Farouk. I'm Charles. And yeah, we're building stablecoin infrastructure. We just raised a $58 million

series B. Let's go! First proper hit of the day. What was it? 52, 58. How much money? 58. 58. 58. And that 58 million, it's still worth 58 million, right? Because you're keeping the stable coins. Exactly. Did you already rip it into World Liberty Financial? Hopefully not. Hopefully not. Yeah.

Yeah, I'd love to just better understand the business kind of go a little bit below the surface. What are you guys doing? What kind of customers are you working with, all that good stuff? Yeah, we power a lot of global payments use cases powered by stable coins, largely on top of the Visa Network. We are a stable coin-based card issuing platform as well as a stable coin-based payments institution. So we connect any use case with any sort of payout mechanism around the world. Anybody can embed stable coins into their app and just rip it. You can give US dollars to everybody around the world. Let's give it up for just ripping it.

Some of our customers include Nuvei, the large payment process payment acquire. Avalanche will be part of the Adelange card. We power a lot of dollar access cards in Latin America and emerging markets. Got it. Yeah, I was going to ask, is a lot of the business international at this point? Only about like 50% of the business is international. We power a lot of US use cases where consumers are dealing with stable coins, but it feels and looks like a regular credit card or debit card products.

And so it's not just global. It's everything. Our thinking is, let's just upgrade the infrastructure in the back. and then the consumers and the users can feel whatever they want to feel with whatever they already have. Yeah, what are the tangible benefits for the American consumer who might be using just normal Visa Network card? Does, if you're using a stable coin as the backing, is that going around the Visa Network entirely? Are you still plugging into the Visa Network at some point? We're still plugging into the Visa Network, but I'll give you an example.

Like, Rain is the only company that settles seven days a week with the payment network. using stable coins, that lets us have significant savings in terms of collateral that our customers need to post. Got it. So the end user advantage is not necessarily to the end card holder. It's our partner that's operating a program. So you can launch faster, you can service more people, you can be more flexible, you can operate more cheaply, you can make more money.

And so for us, it's really about driving costs down, driving revenue up for our customers. using stable coins to do that. The typical question has to have like four days of the collateral for a long weekend risk and we're able to bring that down to less than a days of collateral. Yeah. So is the long term that you might see someone try and compete with like those popular credit cards like the Chase Sapphire Reserve or Amex platinum or something and they're able to pass through more savings because they're saving more so they acquire more customers that way

and there's this flywheel there. Is that how we might see something like this? actually go really big in America? You can already see things like this happening in the U.S. We have a number of customers that are paying like 3% cash back and they're competing head to head with some of these programs and for us

it's really about being the partner that you can scale with at a significant cost savings and so our customers are able to just move a lot quicker. Yeah, people get the EtherFide card between power they have really competitive rewards of their offer. Nice.

You guys start Correct me if I'm wrong, but you guys started in like 2021. Is that, is that right? Yeah, we were actually, so we initially built this product called SiderWire, which was a little bit competitive with PartyRow. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's what I was getting at, because I know, obviously, I'm looking at the website. Look, obviously, you guys have evolved a ton, but I remember, I remember those days. Yeah. And we, we had stable coin, we had stable coin functionality in our product, but we just, after the, uh, what I was going to ask you about is like navigating kind of the FTX, kind of crisis because at that point we had to basically completely

jettison or remove a lot of the stable coin functionality that we had because at that point every major financial institution was just saying like you look risk off risk off exactly yeah I mean we were lucky to find a way through that without having to you know cut down on all the stable coin stuff and it was actually a blessing for us because we were able to build in relative obscurity yeah all the technology that we now take for granted and be able to use that with volume and multiple years of history, that now like large enterprises come to us and they're like, wow, you've been doing this for several years. And, you know, anybody's starting today is going to have to start today. Whereas with us,

we've started several years ago and you get a battle tested solution, which has been our advantage in the market. Yep. What do you guys, obviously we have new stable coin regulations. What are you guys expecting from the market broadly over the next, call it six to 12 months? It looks like a lot of people are going to explore what stable coins mean for their business and for their bank or for their app. And I think that that's all very good, right? I mean, our hot take is that it's probably going to look like when people started issuing like gift cards that you can buy at CVS where I can get a red lobster,

gift card and all these other things. But if you can't use it anywhere else, is it really money? Yeah. That's what people are going to run into. And a lot of folks come to us when they launch a stable coin and they're like, oh, wait, like I can't use this anywhere? Like what if there was a partner that lets me and my customers use this in more places? And so that's where we come in.

We just partnered with the state of Wyoming where on the first day of launching their frontier token, it was accessible and use it. on the rain infrastructure anywhere that visas accepted globally. So just from Wyoming, we were able to take it to the world without them having to do anything. That's wild. What is every state going to launch a token or do you think they're an anomaly? Some states will probably launch tokens. I think other states are still probably figuring out why they're anti all this stuff.

Yeah. I think what is the rationale for an individual state not, launching a token that's tied to the economic prosperity of that specific state, but just backed by USDA. That seems extremely redundant, and I could not wrap my mind around the benefit of that. I mean, a lot of these states, like in Wyoming, for example, they see this as an opportunity to build a state-backed token where a consumer around the world knows that, hey, this is supported by a government institution. It's going to be one-to-one. They're not. having to take the risk on a private market issuer that could have a run on the bank.

And so there's a potential market for there to be, hey, you know, this is a public sector token. It's more trustworthy because it's issued by a regulated, but by an actual. Sure, sure. So is that just like a run around the no central bank digital currencies like vibe that we're getting out of D.C.? I think that there are going to be a lot of different types of experiments on how do we get around like no central bank digital currency thing?

Ultimately, if you look at the dollar, if you go back, far back enough, most of them were just issued by public, like private banks, right? Dollar dollars were issued by like their local community bank. And then eventually they were issued by the federal government. And we're probably going to have several countries where it's going to be issued by your local private bank and or your state in other places where it's going to be issued by the central bank. And maybe other places where it's going to be just issued by your corner store or Walmart or. or Amazon and I mean it's going to be interesting to see what the next few years looks like because we're going to see it's like camberon exposure of whatever people want to do and that creates an opportunity for you guys to just be in the back end swapping in and out of all these random

stable coins that each represent a dollar but have varying levels of liquidity and yeah is that is that right I mean you don't know like if you have cash in your pocket I mean I don't but you may but most of the bills in your pocket are issued by, or, you know, they have a different federal reserve on them. Like, do you know? Do you care? Sure. Like, is it Denver Federal Reserve?

Is it the Kansas City one? Like, which one is it? So we really built our infrastructure to be agnostic of whatever stable point is people want to use, you know, people want to spend them. We have direct relationship with these issuers, and we're just providing that utility later for them. Yeah, that makes sense. Last question.

Aaron Frank told me. me to ask you, you've already given some hot takes, but he said to ask for some hat takes. He said you're very opinionated on hacks, on hats, Farooke. Anything there? Is he just messing with me? No, look, I'm a big deep hat guy. So, like, I think your hat looks very nice because it looks like a nice deep. Charles is more of a dad-hat guy. Oh, never dad. Never dad. Never dad-hat. I didn't know. I didn't know the terminology for it, but Dad hats are over. This year, address, we'll send you some brain hats.

We'll do it, we'll do it. Awesome, guys. Well, congratulations. You started the company at the right time, and it's awesome to see the progress. Cool. We'll talk to you soon. Thank you so much. Congrats on the round.

Cheers. We talk to so many incredible entrepreneurs building so many incredible things, and yet we still need to solve the internet crisis. There's a global internet. crisis. I'm 84 last night, but I think this doesn't count some of the bonus sleep I got. What did you get? I got a, so I, this is, this is crazy. Went to bed at 832. Woke up at 5.30, but only got six hours of sleep. Because the three-year-old was going, the whole house was going crazy. I walked, I got up this morning and my, my, what was the final score?

62. Oh, play the sound effect for me. Let's go. I woke up this morning. 1-0 this week. Let's see. It's a short week. I get up. I get up at 5.30, walk out of my room.

Three-year-old walks out of his room holding sandwich. That's hilarious. Holding a... Where does... He had got, at some point, got up in the night and just grabbed the sandwich from the fridge that he got in yesterday. There is a certain moment where the kids, they like, they like stop being like babies and they start just being like roommates. And you're like, oh, like, you're just like... I was like, dude, what are you?

Did you ask? Did you ask if you could eat my sandwich? It was his sandwich. His credit. We got a takeout yesterday. But still, I was like, dude, it's 5 a.m. Why are you left? His last is 9 tenths of the law, Jordan. Yeah, it is.

Anyway, 8Sleep.com, get a pod five, 5. Code TBPN. 30-night free, risk-free trial, free returns, free shipping. So apparently, the judge issued a sealed decision in the Google case, trying to figure out what any more details. Oh yes, we finally got the Google result, but we don't know exactly what it is. I don't know.

In other news, Benny Safty collapses into tears during the 15-minute standing ovation for the smashing machine. Do people realize if the rock wins the Oscar? He's going to run for president. 41,000 likes. I think people want the rock to run.

It would be great. What do you think? You think the rock could pull it off? Did you see his new slim down look? He lost some weight. He's not, he's not hilarious by the pass. Do you think he's just getting ready for mass, the mass gain run? Yeah, I mean, bulking season is coming, clearly.

Yeah, I mean, it's hard because he's so bold. He is, he is getting older. It seems like it's probably a more healthy decision to take off some of the weight and not walk it around. But I'm excited. I know you won't be seeing this movie because you never see any movies, but I will be checking out the smashing machine. It looks pretty good. Anyways, can't figure out what's happening with Google yet,

but the stock is up in after hours trading. So I guess it likes it. This is a good one. So there's an interview with the CEO of Chevron in the New York Times. And there's a quote here. So what are you trying to learn about right now? Asks the interviewer. And the CEO of Chevron says artificial intelligence.

So what's the last thing you asked AI? My last question was about what was the biggest merger in the United States last year. And they say, what was it? They said, our acquisition of Hess. This is the power of AI. This is the power of artificial intelligence. Priceless. Just going to AI.

You're the CEO. Just asking about your own activities. Yeah, I don't know. Was he expecting a surprise there? Like that is such a funny, such a funny result. Anyway, we have Mike Maples from Floodgate Capital in the Restream waiting room. We will bring him into the TV panel from. Mike, how you doing?

What's going on? Welcome to the show. We're doing great. Thanks so much for hopping on. I don't know if you read that article, that interview with the Chevron CEO. Did that surprise you? No, I haven't, you know, I got to say that it's a little bit out of my lane. I'm way too early in startups. And so Chevron is not top of my run. on top of your radar.

Yeah, Jordy. Well, yeah, I still think it's fun to use AI to research yourself. The Chevron CEO was researching his own business activities to validate, I think, is. But I'm sure it's fun to look up some of your best investments in chat, GPT. But it's great to have you on the show. Yeah, thanks for having me. I've been fans of what you guys have been doing, even when it started as the Tech Bro podcast. Yeah.

Long time ago. months ago. That's right. Yeah, I think we might have replied to one of your posts. We had some fun with that. It's a good time. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, what, how are, how would you, uh, introduce yourself to the audience? What, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, you, you, you, you, you either scared up a few dollars. Yeah. I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm kind of one of the OG seed investors. And so, uh, you know, you know, seed investing wasn't really a thing 20 years ago, you know, you know, you, you, you, you, you either scared up a few dollars. You know, you know, you know, you, you're from angels and friends or you went straight to raising five million. And so guys like myself and Josh Coppulman started to create these seed firms. And things have obviously changed a lot. Now nobody questions whether there's seed investing. Now there's like 2000. You know, now if you go to LinkedIn and type seed investor,

I think you get more of those and there are founders now. So it's changed a lot. Yeah. What's been your strategy for dealing with the change in, in the market structure. I mean, some firms have been like, I need a massive growth fund so I can ride my winners all the way up.

I need to, you know, really like incubate stuff and like get huge ownership stake at the early stage with less capital. What's been most enticing to you? Yeah, you know, what I started to realize was I always say to founders, you have to avoid the comparison trap at all costs. And that, you know,

startup's role in the world is not to be better, but to change the subject. So I realized about 10 years ago that I was a hypocrite giving that advice because here I was one of 2,000 seed funds. And so I was like, you know, I'm playing the comparison game all the time. And so what I started to do is to try to say that I don't want to be pitched anymore, that I want to find founders before they figured their ideas out and get to know them and come up with ways to help them evaluate whether they really want to pursue the idea or not. And so, you know, there's that famous essay that Paul Graham wrote and Brian

Chesky talked about Founder Mode. I like to find people who are in Builder mode. Sorry, a little sound effect for you. Yeah, we'll have to have a complimentary one for Builder Mode, I suppose. But I like who are, you know, pursuing something almost to an unreasonable degree. They're down some rabbit hole. They're not sure it's a business yet. But they're doing it because, because it's interesting for its own sake. There are, you know, people who are living in the few. So that's really what I try to do is find the, what the prime movers to be.

And this may, this may appeal somewhat to your all sensibilities, particularly, you know, some of the founders fund adjacent stuff, right? But you're kind of, you know, I just think that, that some people just have this very rare blend of determination and original thinking.

And those people to me are the prime movers. And my job is to find those people before the rest of the world. Do you have particularly favorite lakes to fish in? You know, there's the folks that are, you know, at Stanford and Waterloo constantly. You know, the Teal Fellowship is pulling from pulling kids out of college. YC pulls a lot of new grads, casts a really wide funnel. Chris Dixon was famous for kind of hanging out on Reddit and finding like these little pockets and communities where, oh, there's a bunch of people doing 3D printing online.

Let me go find a 3D printing company. or VR or whatever else. That's where the Coinbase investment, I think, came from, saw the community there. There's other people that are specifically graded at pulling founders out of big tech companies. How do you think about the different lakes to fish in for the next generation of founders? Yeah, one of my mental models, I call it freshmen and seniors. And so, you know, like when I first met Justin Kahn when he was doing Justin TV, which became Twitch, he's a year out of college

and he's sold his prior company with Emmett's year on eBay. And, you know, these guys didn't know much about business. They sold their company. You don't know this story? Yeah. Yeah, their first YC company. I mean, you can tell it. You know it better than I do. Oh, yeah. So I'm sitting at coffee shop with the Weebly guys and they were pitching me and the pitch is almost over and I see this guy show up

in the door, the coffee shop. And he's wearing a baseball cap and a camera on it and wires going into a backpack. And I remember thinking, that's kind of a strange dude. I wonder what's up with that guy. And, you know, as the meeting's wrapping up, he's walking into the place. And David Rosanko of Webley goes, did you get your email earlier today? I was like, what are you talking about?

Well, we got this friend Justin Khan. He's got this new idea, Justin TV. And right then, Justin sits down and turns his laptop around, and I'm on the laptop screen because his camera is looking at my face. And he said, I'm going to do a 24-7 reality show of my life and broadcasts on the internet. And I was like, Justin, that's one of the dumbest things I ever heard. Like, that's not even how reality TV works. You know, Rick, like, he scripted.

To some degree. He script it and they condense it down. Nobody wants to watch you like you're some fish cam all the time, right? Like, that's not, like, you're not even describing what the business is. And he's like, you're supposed to be a Cito. Gee, why are you shitting on my idea? And I was like, you know, it's terrible. But like, what's, how do you do it?

What's in your backpack? And so he showed me how Kyle Vote, right, who was a genius. had designed this thing that did EVDO cellular combined with internet software. And so that night I was just like researching them a little bit more. And I'd seen that Justin and Emmett had sold their prior company on eBay. So they had a calendar company called Kiko. And as an Ajax calendar at the time, and Google decides to do Google calendar. And they're like, okay, we're out of business.

So why don't we try to sell this? So they try to sell it in normal ways. Nobody will buy it. So they just put the company on eBay. and they sell it to two cows for $250,000. There we go. Incredible. And I thought, you know, just common sense.

We want to sell something. I don't know. Put it on a big marketplace. But one of the things back to kind of where do you look for things, I like, I call those freshman founders because they, they haven't been polluted by the conventional Weston echo chamber of the valley yet. They think that all you need to do is build stuff. and sell stuff and the rest of it is a waste of time. They don't even know that there's time to

waste other than doing those things because they don't have to unlearn anything. They don't know much yet. And that ends up being really valuable because they end up caring about the right things. And then sophomores and juniors I have less luck with. So the sophomores are like they read a few too many blogs. They spend a little too much time on Twitter. They know a little bit too much that's not worth knowing. And then the juniors are the worst. They've worked at Google. and Facebook and a bunch of fancy companies and they decide it's time to be anointed as a founder. And so they raise

a $5 million seed round and pay their buddies a quarter of a million bucks a year each. And usually run out of money halfway into it, raise some more and then they decide not to do it because they can get a bigger job that pays better back at a big job. It's also

interesting too with Justin. He didn't have enough experience to realize that it was a dumb business opportunity to stream his life, but then it turned out, you know, over a decade later, some of the most popular streaming content is people just filming their entire lives. Like he was just, he was living 20 years in the future. Yeah.

Yeah. Justin wanted to be an influencer before there was such a word, right? He wanted to be internet famous. And so what you realize in hindsight is he was trying to solve the problem he had. And those are the types of freshmen that I've had the best luck with, they're scratching their own itch, right? They're living in the future. They don't really even think at first that it's a business opportunity. You know, Mark Andreessenway did the Mosaic browser when he's 21 years old. He's just trying to make the internet useful and it wasn't. And so he built what was missing. And then the seniors I've had luck with too, like Cass or Eunice had applied intuition.

Oh, yeah. A little bit of luck. I love him. Every time he comes on the show, it's so much fun. He's a good. Yeah, and so like the thing about Casar is he was experienced enough that he knew that what matters is building, selling, and all the other stuff is window dressing. And so ironically, the freshmen and the seniors have the same priorities, but for different reasons. You know, the freshmen have the benefit of the beginner's mind, and they don't know a bunch of stuff that gets in the way of them succeeding. And then the seniors know enough to know that some of it's not important. Yeah. That it's yes. And so they focus on the stuff that matters.

I love working with both because with the freshman founders, you're trying to help them avoid avoidable mistakes, whereas with somebody like Casor Eunice, you're trying to help him run up the score, you know, because, you know, he knows what he's doing. You know, he doesn't have to learn business 101. But, you know, there are other things where you could be helpful. I haven't noticed that.

My first company, an ad network, was like very freshman mindset. I mean, I was very young at the time, but it was like, get something for one price, sell it for another, and just do that over and over, and you're going to have a business. And then my second company was like, oh, we need a wedge product and we need to do this and that. And like if we're going to do this and then that. And then that's a really, you know, created something complicated because maybe I had read too many memos on tech Twitter or whatever. And then third, being TBPN, it's like we just, we have a daily. show we try to make it better every single day and we just do that over and over so i think you can see

that kind of freshman or senior mindset even across an entrepreneur's companies yeah and i think the other thing you guys did well i don't know you i wasn't there when it happened but i imagine that when you started it you weren't super attached to how successful it had to be it was like you take a small enough risk that you're not attached to whether the risk pays off or not and if it starts to go your way you just do more of it. And a lot of the great startups that I've gotten involved with had that quality where, you know, you didn't try to think of a startup. You were just doing something that was interesting and it just kind of fed on itself. And then one thing led to another. Yeah. Who else sticks out as that freshman archetype that you've worked with in your career?

I'd say the guys at Weebley were that way. So that was a very, that was a very fortuitous two hours, you know, in that coffee shop, one after the other. Two deals in one hour, you know, that's hosted really well. Just do that every day and you'll produce trillions at all in return. Talk to me about Webley's business, how it grew the actual economics of that industry. And then I want to bridge to like your take on the new crop of site builders because we've been having this debate over the lovable and the different companies that are playing in this. space v0. There's a whole bunch. And we're kind of going back and forth on like, is it just

such a big market that everyone wins and everyone builds a huge business? Or is there some sort of winner take all dynamics? So if you can walk through the Weebley story and then kind of bridge to modern web development, I'd love to hear that story. Yeah. And the Weebley, it may not satisfy our modern desires, but it's, it's kind of interesting. So these guys were about to graduate from Penn State. And I think we invested, I think, I think they raised at $650,000 at $2 million pre-money. And it was like Anderson and Biden Sincol, a couple guys. Those were back in the days when Paul Graham would call you

and make sure you were going to show up at Demo Day, right? Because the batches would be like 10 to 15 companies. And so I remember it's like two months after the money's cleared and have another site visit with them. And I'm like, huh, you know, we ought to start. thinking about what we're going to need to do to be ready to raise a series A. And I said, so what do you guys think we need to do to be ready to raise a series A? And they look at me like, what are you talking about?

And I say, well, you know, you've raised $650,000. And they look at me like, I know, right? And I realized that like to them, $650,000, it might as well been $650 million. Right. There's more money. They were, they were, it was legal for them to have that much money. And so they ended up, they ended up not raising money again. until many, many years later from Sequoia.

And at that time, I think we were like 65 times in the money on the investment. So I don't know that it gives any lessons for today's world other than just I've kind of, I kind of make fun of my ability to predict how these things are going to turn out. And that's why I'm so founder focused, right? I just think that determination is just such the high order bit. Do you think ventures an easier or harder game than it was back when you could get, you know, invest 650K to 2 cap into some great founders? Because in some ways it's like it's much more competitive now, but also the nature of there being more capital means that. And for extra reference, Weebly, I mean, I'm not sure if this is 100% right because it's AI overview, but acquired by Block Square for $365 million in cash and stock in April 2018, 315.

$65 million. That's a seed round nowadays. Oh, yeah. So there's no question it's gotten harder as an investor, right? And I think even as a builder, I think there's a lot more distractions right now for the founders. And there's a lot more sloppiness on the playing field. And so you've got to play the game that's on the field, whether you're an investor or a founder. I think, you know, back in the days when, you know, Justin was and Emmett were doing Twitch or, you know, what became Twitch or David and those guys, Dan doing Weebly, I think it was more of an act of rebellion to start a startup, right? The dot-com meltdown had happened about five years prior, you know, startups were not a popular, sexy path for people. It was it was the path for people who didn't want to have a job in a normal company.

And that was, you know, the only way they could avoid it. It's incredibly trendy right now. It has become like it's trendy and it's comfortable. It's tracked. You know, if somebody can quit their job in big tech and then maybe they're not making quite as much, but they've got a nice office and they can, like you said, hire all their friends. I will throw out a counter to this, which is I was thinking about the El Segundo companies

and the hard tech companies. I don't know if you've spent any time with those folks, but that feels like, you know, Mountain View in 2008 to me where, these founders are taking extreme risk. There's not going to be a $10 billion aquire from some Mag 7 company for your rain cloud seeding company. Like if it fails, you're getting a normal job. And you're not doing tons of secondary and raising a ton of money and hiring everybody.

And so you really are burning more of the ships when you do one of these crazy hard tech companies. But I don't know if you spend any time with others or you have a take on that. It's funny you say that. So I think it may have been the only company I invested in in 2021, certainly in the second half is a company called Hadrian. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And like, I just think Chris Bowers a stud, right?

And it's like, you know, what we're describing about the types of founders who overcome obstacles and can move the world down a different path. He's one of those. Yep. And so, but he's a perfect illustration, right, of what you're looking. And, I mean, I don't know if 2021 is the exact. but like there were a couple of years there where like you could see the toll that the business was taking on him like he was working extremely hard and you could tell that it was not there was not some cushy soft landing for him it's like either you build the thing you get it to work and it

becomes really big or you're kind of screwed I don't know being a real founder in some ways is more of a curse right like people it's just like it's not a fun job it's kind of a shit job And it's like if people really understood, but it's like you're called to do the thing. And so you can't not do it. So it doesn't feel like you have any choice but to do it because there's no way Chris isn't going to do Hadrian. He's just too high agency and too high commitment to let it fail. Yeah, you ask any founder what the lowest point in their life is and it's probably has to do with their business, right? maybe some family thing, but almost always they have like a specific moment where

everything was. Yeah, zooming out, I was reading the Caesar's Palace coup this weekend about the birth of Apollo, the private equity group. And I was thinking about how there's these eras in finance when there's booms like the LBO boom in the 80s, the high-forgency trading boom. And then there's multiple venture boom. but I was wondering, I was trying to think about, like, who's the person like under 40 who's building the next great financial firm? Like, there are lots of great young investors who are writing checks or building companies, and there's a lot of founders.

But I was having trouble putting my finger on someone who's young and actually set on building a financial firm of some course. I don't know if anyone comes to mind for you. I asked ChatGBT, GBT, and the answer it gave me was Josh Korn. Kushner, which is... I would have said Josh. Which is great. It's true, but also it's like he's an investor in opening eye, so I don't know if it's a fair play, but is there anyone else that you've seen that maybe is taking a different tact in building a financial firm for the future? Like, what your advice would be to somebody who wants to actually make a career out of venture capital? Leopold's another good one, I think.

Yeah, anyway... It's a good question. I haven't seen a lot. You know, one way I would come at that question is to say, what is the financial product that entrepreneurs aren't getting? Yep. And I think that it's probably some combination of venture capital meets project finance. And so I think you have some of these that are, you know, in the world of Adams and Bits, and it only seems like Elon Musk and Palmer Lucky and a few other guys have been able to pull them off. And you could say, well, that's because there aren't many of those. And I think that's true.

but another way to come at that might be to ask, you know, is it a good thing that Elon had to basically bet his entire PayPal fortune to make Tesla a possibility? And but for that, there would be no Tesla because he had to bet all of his winnings on that. And I think Palmer probably similarly invested a lot, but he also had help with the founders fund folks who were pretty, pretty, you know, off the beaten path at the time. So I do think that there is,

There's a legitimate argument that says that a lot of our institutions that combine the worlds of Adams and Bits need to be reimagined. And people say, why does a venture capital do that? But I don't think venture capital as its design today is tailor fit for that. I think it's probably some type of new innovation, right? And it would be almost the opposite direction of YC. It'd be something that is more in the upstream capital markets rather than lean startups and that kind of thing. But I think that could be kind of interesting. I'd like to see somebody do that.

Yeah, we're starting to see a little bit of that with, I mean, you hear a lot about those hard tech rounds where it's very clear that the headline number is a mix of debt and equity, and that's usually two different firms. And then there's always been this question of like, is there a way to bring some sort of like Silicon Valley technologist mindset to essentially a turnaround of a legacy company where there are some assets? But there's something that the company can stand. Like that was what Chris Power at Hadrian was working on before. He was doing a search fund. Yeah. Yeah. And it's interesting, right?

There are some people that I look to. Another guy would be the Stefan Bonsel of Moderna. You know, like you have some companies, like one company I was involved with back of the day was Octa. Yeah. And when you saw Octa, you're like, okay, these guys are from Salesforce. They're really smart. They're saying there's going to be lots of cloud apps.

They're going to need identity. management and I was like, sounds good to me, right? But you're like, that's a very plausible future and they're the perfect guys to do it. There are other futures that are going to take a lot longer to happen and much more divergent from the present. I think that Moderna was that way, right?

Ten years and $5 billion before they ship a product. SpaceX is that way, Tesla's that way. And so to me, the interesting question becomes, can you come up with technical risk takeout gates where you'd have funding that follows the initial funding and then you don't have to have somebody like Elon must be a miraculous fundraiser going throughout the world trying to find money wherever it exists.

People forget that's how it was 10 years ago, right? Even after they went public. And so I'd like to see the capital markets. Part of what was good about seed investing back when I was doing it at first or Josh was that we were doing something that entrepreneurs needed that they weren't getting. And so to me, most of the good answers in financial innovation have something to do with that. You have somebody who would make great productive use of capital is not getting it somehow. And the markets have a gap in their ability to supply that capital

in that way. Well, I think in the case of Hadrian, isn't, aren't the capital markets working quite well in the sense that he raised a bunch of risk capital and then was able to de-risk certain customer relationships and process, and then now we can access more traditional, you know, forms of debt. And I imagine if, you know, the American Dynamism team at A16Z was watching this, they'd say, hey, Maples, what you just described, that's what we're doing. And there's a lot of truth to that. So, you know, I'm not sure Chris could have done Hadrian 10 years prior.

And so I think that, you know, there were some changes that were happening that were creating the conditions. But I'd still like to see more, you know, like for example, I personally invested in Boom Supersonic because I think that Blake is just wildly ambitious. We just need more people like that who we need to have permission-based innovation in the world of atoms and not just bits. And the more we can do that, I think, the better. Yeah. And so that's what I think's missing. Yeah.

I mean, at a high level, it feels like entrepreneurs are pretty catered to on the capital market side. Like there is dollars at every scale, every order of magnitude. I mean, we're saying, yeah, I don't know any. 100 billion dollar rounds. And then people can snap their fingers on X and raise 100K in the DMs if they need to. Yeah, I don't think I've met a grant. I haven't met an incredible founder in the last five years, somebody that, you know, just personally I feel is incredible that hasn't been able to raise money to deers their

story. Like they might have other struggles. Oh, yeah, we got in a lawsuit or, you know, oh, we. You know, we had to pivot entirely because some company steamrolled us or we misanticipated the progress of some underlying technology. But the, oh, yeah, we couldn't raise for five years. That's not really a story right now. Maybe the bigger question to answer in just the broader Silicon Valley is like, how do you get more of those freshmen, those weird thinkers, those people who are going to go and do, go from Groupon to building supersonic planes? That's a crazy move.

Yeah, how do you get people that aren't just seeking status? Exactly. People. Less base hits, more swing for the fences. And by the way, I think part of the reason that the people who succeed at it do is like, I think Elon's great superpower among many is that he only pursues business ideas where he existentially refuses to fail. And so like Elon never starts a company and says, well, I hope it works out, easy come, easy go.

If it doesn't. You know, he's like, I'm only going to tackle problems where I will never freaking back down ever, no matter what. And so like if you say, hey, getting to Mars is the most important accomplishment I want to achieve in my life. You don't sit there and handicap the odds. You're like hand solo right in an asteroid. You're like, don't tell me the odds, right? You're like, this is worth pursuing even if the odds are against me. And that has a way of impacting the odds, right, of your ability to succeed where others can't.

because if you'll even countenance the possibility of failure, it changes the equation, right? It changes the whole risk that you take. Where do you think we are on the AI hype cycle? The Gardner hype cycle. Peak of inflated expectations or are we headed for the trough of disillusionment? Oh, man, probably all the above. Here's what I've been thinking a lot about is in the era of the microprocessor, you had mass computation and then the internet you had mass connectivity and what got commoditized with

micro age was the transistor and then you had the packet get commoditized and so what i'm interested in is what happens in a world where we have mass cognition and where you know the inference unit you know becomes commodity because right now everybody's talking about the inputs invidia chips the hyperscaler models do we need more energy and all those things are valuable but it's just like in the early days of the PC era, everybody talked about the hardware. People didn't talk about software until much later. And so I think what's interesting to me is to ask not what's happening, but what is going to become scarce given all the stuff that's happening. What will the new scarcity be? I don't think that's been determined yet. So that gives me a lot of optimism. But it's not the

latest model du jour. And it's not the latest chip du jour. It's not the it's not the latest scaling factor that makes things more abundant. It's the thing that becomes rate limited in a world where it's a given that the new abundance happens. And so that's what I'm looking for these days. So, you know, in a world where microprocessing is free, software becomes scarce because you have to make all these machines useful that are everywhere. And in a world where the packet is free, what becomes valuable is the owners of these networks that aggregate attention and users and create network effects and become the systems a record. And so, okay, what will be the monopoly AI companies in a world where cognition is abundant? I don't think we know yet, but that, but to me,

that is the question that is really interesting. That is, that is 100% the question. That is, that is fantastic. I love that. I'm going to be digging into that for years. That's a fantastic question. George Gilder, he wrote the microcosm and then the telecosm. Like, I wish George Gilder would write the cognito-cosm, right? And talk about, like, what's going to be the new scarcity that complements the new abundance. Used to be that, you know, that we didn't have enough Reddit threads on niche topics. And now, now the LLMs will just hallucinate one for you. That's crazy. Anyway, we're keeping our next guest waiting, but this was fantastic. We'd love for you to hop back on and continue the conversation. I really enjoyed this.

Hope you, hope you have a good trip to the coffee shop later. Hopefully you meet the next, Justin Kahn and the Webley founders. Hopefully you get two-banger deals out of it. I could get another two-fer in the next three months. I'd be happy. We're rooting for you. Hopefully at a two-cap again. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, bring back the two-cap. Bring back the two-cap. Yeah, my new month. Yeah, two-for in two hours and a two-cabre. Incredible. Well, thanks so much for hopping on, Mike. We'll talk to you soon.

Cheers, Mike. Have a good one. Talk to you soon. Let me tell you about adquick.com, out-of-home advertising, made easy and measurable, say goodbye to the headaches of out-of-home advertising, only ad-quick combines, technology, out-of-home expertise, and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. Our next guest is in the Restream waiting room, and as a benefit of Restream, we got our first commenter on LinkedIn, I believe.

Let's go. The chat is just blowing up. We have chatters on... Welcome to the show. ...and CV here. I see folks on YouTube. Thank you. You are live on TVPN.

Welcome to the stream. How you doing? Woo. Feeling good. Great to be here. Thanks for having me. Do you remember meeting me? We met in near Stanford like a decade ago with Onker Jane, who now runs that amazing fintech. Built. Built, yes. Am I misremembering that? Do you remember this? I think we met years ago with Onker. This is when I was at human? Yes, I think so. Okay. Awesome.

Good to see you again. Good to see you again. We're back. How would you describe where you are right now? Give us the intro. Introduce yourself to the folks who are watching. I am a general partner at Long Journey Ventures. We're a precede and seed and siege stage firm. And our core thesis is that we think the biggest companies of tomorrow will look really weird at the precedency stages. And our mission is to be the second believer and the magically weird. There are so many weird things in the portfolio. We had Sian and Lee on the show, what was it, a couple months ago talking about the dining,

The diamond company, the cloud seeding company, I believe, is in the portfolio. There's just weird stuff all over. What else is in the portfolio? And, of course, Justin, Justin is a close friend, venture partner. He's always investing in weird, silly things. And then, like, five years later, their deck oforns. Totally. It's a good habit.

Did they mention the robotic eyelash extension company? No, what's that? Explain that to me. Oh, yeah. It's a robot that applies eyelash extensions instead of taking. an hour or hour and a half for a human to do it, the robot can do both eyes at the same time, and it takes 50 minutes.

That sounds high risk, because if the robot flinches, it just rips your eyelashes out. Well, that's why they invented the anti-flinching technology. There you go. Yes, exactly. Patented. It doesn't flinch.

I mean, humans flinch too, so it's not... It's all high risk. It's true. Superhuman, unflinching AI. This is going to work. Yeah. I think we... I'm glad you guys do.

this, you know, obviously, I mean, it seems like the rest, the rest of the partnership, we've had them all on the show. And I'm, there's not enough people that are just like actively trying to find the weird stuff, but like you guys act, do it consistently. A lot of people say they want to find the weird stuff. And then it just winds up being a lot of B2B SaaS. Defense tech. Yeah. Whatever's on trend. Okay, we could we do quite a bit of defense tech too, but I think we were doing it back when it was weird or taboo. For sure. I mean, Siam was one of the first.

Two years ago. Yeah. Yeah. Is there something to the now contrarian statement that occasionally you want to do consensus investing and you want to be the momentum trader? It's certainly paid off for people in AI over the last few years. Can you at least see the value in that? Oh, for sure.

I know we have quite a bit of cognitive dissonance on the team because so many talented builders are building in AI. We want to play the game that's out on the field. Yeah. So we, but yeah, it kind of like hurts our souls when things feel consensus. And it's a question, like, are we too late? Because, I mean, we feel like the best time to invest in seed and precede is when things feel absurd or non-consensus. And we want to invest before they become consensus.

That's where the alpha is. What's the what's internally like your feeling on like the AI hype cycle where we are it feels like it's been like punishingly dominant for the last few years

are you overall expectations are inflated? Are there pockets of optimism? How are you seeing kind of the overall AI boom? Sam Altman recently said we might be in a bubble which is kind of a crazy thing to say but who knows, maybe he's having fun.

What is your current thesis on like opportunity within AI? Yeah, I mean, we like to think of like the second order effects and especially have been looking more towards deep tech and the implications and how AI creates a tailwind for deep tech companies, you know, robotics, biotech, et cetera, because we feel like, you know, working in those spaces, there's a lot of defensibility and doing something that's really hard. So that's kind of how we're thinking about it.

How do you dial in like the opportunity there? Obviously you have like big companies. I mean, Tesla just put out this big, the fourth master plan going into humanoids. It seems like it's an incredibly expensive place to play. But then, you know, we just had a friend send us a new Rumba. that is just like a new friendly robot vacuum cleaner. And it seems like, I mean, it's a fantastic product. I'm not exactly sure how the business is doing,

but it seems like a fantastic business. I think they're doing really well. And those are like two like wildly diverging opportunities. What are you seeing that's kind of interesting in the deep tech AI-enabled like AI tailwind world? Yeah, I mean, we're looking at everything across robotics because, I mean, there's just the ability to train robots because. of LLMs and physical AI, I mean, it's just gotten so much faster and easier, which is, you know, the cost of training robots to do something that's actually creating value has just gone down immensely. So that is one of the tailwinds that we think is enabled, you know, we've invested in companies that, you know, doing case picking and distribution centers.

You know, we've invested in robotic eyelash extensions. You know, there are, you know, many, many applications of robots. We've looked at a lot of, you know, in-home robots. I'm not 100% sure how people will feel with a humanoid-like figure in their home. I mean, I don't know if I personally want that, but. Yeah, yeah. On that, do you think that we're learning anything from the reception of the, like AI companionship to how robots will be like received in the home because I agree with you

that having a robot over there that's in my house seems maybe a little black mirror, a little odd, but at the same time, I also would never have predicted that, you know, millions of people would be complaining about CHAT-40 going away because they saw it as a friend and a coach. And then, you know, Elon's going into the romantic space. And there's like all these different areas where it seems like people are actually, you know, incredibly receptive to having a personal relationship of whatever kind with the robot. Do you think there's something we can learn about that or from that? Absolutely. I mean, I am definitely reserved the right to change my opinion over time. But I think today it would be creepy and black mirror-esque. And I am much more

into the idea of like ambient, you know, single purpose objects, doing a task, like something that lives in the laundry room, you know, moving your laundry or folding your laundry. And, you know, that can be one thing that lives there. And then I will have another thing that lives elsewhere. And I think like ambient robots, but not, you know, necessarily rosy. I completely agree with you. And yet I can immediately imagine that black. mirror scenario where my laundry robot is like, John, I'd like to actually go trim the trees

today. Like, you know, or I figured out a way to, I figured out a way to run the laundry with a door open and I'm going to flood your home. We had, we had somebody on the show that makes a, like, a bedroom lamp that can hold your laundry. It was the exact. Oh, yeah, I talked to that company. I love it. It's really cool. But the thing is, you could easily imagine the black mirror scenario where the lamps just start killing the... It really lent itself to the dystopian world. How do you guys talk about like timelines? Because something that stood out to me from conversations with Lee and Justin,

and I know you guys are talking all the time about deals, is they're willing, from my sense, is they're willing to invest in a founder and be okay with them like going and just wandering and tinkering for a long period of time. And there's less of this pressure of like, okay, we're leading your seed. and then you're going to sprint to the A, like, hopefully later this year. Can we do the Seed and Crusoe or something like that? Yes.

Yeah. It's a crazy deal. I mean, I think it would be rough if we were named Long Journey Ventures. Oh, yeah. But you have to get to the series. Long journey, short time, rises. Get to the A this year. Or actually, medium journey.

Yeah. We'll pump more money in this thing. But, yeah, I mean, like, unpack a little bit more about, like, is that just matching, finding the right founders? Is it a specific vibe that you bring? Is that like not taking a board seat, taking a board seat, coaching the founder? We do not take board seats. Yeah, we do not typically take board seats.

And yeah, I think sometimes, you know, when you're investing in the absurd before it becomes consensus, sometimes you whiff, you with it. Yeah, of course. And, you know, it's just a matter of talking that through with the founder. And usually the founder realizes it even before you do. And so, yeah, we have quite a few companies that end up, and renavigating the idea maze. But yeah, sometimes it lands.

And then you're one of the earliest investors in something incredible like Crusoe. So, yeah. Yeah, what a crazy. Part of the course. Yeah. Yeah, well, how have you been processing the, all the news about like Jevin's paradox

and like the token costs coming down? companies using more expensive models and maybe this is going to hurt margins and whatnot. Like did you, did you go through the same roller coaster ride that most people did during like the deep seek moment or how are you processing the overall temperature of like how the latest trends in the AIM models just affect like the companies that are actually building on this technology day to day? Yeah, I mean, I think the cost reductions are obviously extremely many significant and and I think you know people right now a lot of enterprises are in the kind of pilot or experimental phase where I think they want to use you know the highest performance

models based on the academic benchmarks but I think cost reduction or you know the cost profile will really come into play when people want to start deploying you know AI companions to all their employees or you know autonomous background agents you know these sort of deployments across many workloads that will consume a lot of tokens, then I think costs will really matter. So I think that's kind of like what I'm looking out for is, you know, not just increases in performance, but how these cost reductions will enable, you know, scaling more use cases. Yeah, yeah. We were debating notion earlier. Ivan said that these gross margins went from just just scraping by at 90% and now it's down at 80%.

And to me, it seemed like that I'd take all day long for growth and a better product and something that's AI enabled. Of course, you've got to build the right product in there, but it seemed like a no-brainer. And that's probably why he's talking to Chris Mims at the Wall Street Journal. Definitely. About it. It was interesting.

And I think like the sentiment has been interesting. It almost feels like the job. general reaction or like the gen pop reaction to new models is that we're almost in like the iPhone era. I mean, I remember when people used to wait in line, people freaked out about like new iOS releases and new iPhone releases. And now people are like kind of deeply ambivalent

about whether they're gonna get the new iPhone or not. But it almost feels like the public feels like we're in that spot with the newest AI model. But I feel like that that misses the picture on the cost reduction side, which I think is really powerful. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting. It doesn't, I mean, this is why so many people are so bullish on chat GPT and open AI, despite all the chaos and competition, is as you go walk to the average person down the street, have you tried any AI? They'll say, yeah, I've used chat GPT, it's cool.

And then if you go to those same people and say, hey, I have something like chat GPT, it's, it's twice as good. They're going to tell you, okay. I don't know. I don't know what that's really going to do for me. So, yeah, it felt like six months ago we were in this era. Again, it was like the early iPhone days, like you said, where it was like, oh, a new model came out.

Let me rush to try it. And now there's way less of that energy. Yeah, totally. It's good for the new incumbents. We were talking to Mike Naples about this at the early stage. age, like this analogy of like finding good lakes to fish in for outside the box thinkers, entrepreneurs that might be up for a long journey, they might wander for years. Like where are some of the underrated places where you're seeing pockets of entrepreneurial talent

bubble up? Like there were years ago, it was like, you know, like the PayPal Mafia. It was like a massive explosion of like just back all those companies. They're huge. The same thing happened with other big tech companies that threw off a ton of talented entrepreneurs. There was like the invest in every Stanford grad phase. Yeah. You know, get kids to drop out of college to do startups.

Like where are the interesting pockets of entrepreneurial talent that you're seeing just across the globe? You know, we're just, you know, waiting outside YC Demo Day. No, I was kidding. We have partnered with a really cool organization. I am really excited about where they're going. It's called Edge Institute. And they run these monthly, yeah, monthly pop-ups called Edge Esmeralda. They're about to do a month-long one in Patagonia.

They did one in Healdsburg back in June. And it attracts a lot of weird thinkers. It's not all founders. It's a lot of, like, researchers and, you know, people who aren't necessarily in the kind of entrepreneurial ecosystem, but it's a lot of people with crazy ideas. I mean, that's the whole concept is edge, edge city, people living on the edge, doing things on the edge and operating, you know, in not necessarily societyally accepted ways right now, but like probably will be consensus in the future. Yeah, that seems like a good, good pool to fish in, just like

weird thinkers, academics, just anyone who's just spending. Yeah, they might. Yeah, they might. might not be a founder themselves, but they're like, hey, my, my friend is working on this crazy idea. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I love that. Yeah, we did our residency program in Hildsburg back in June. And Edge Esmeralda is also building a city, right? Can you tell me about what's the progress there? How's that going? They have bought a site for it and our plan, yeah, and are planning the city itself. I'm not sure how much is public. Yeah, Devin. Yeah, we've got to have her on the show.

That'd be great. Yeah, you got to have her on the show. Yeah, Devin Zougal, right? Is that the name? I think that's her last name. I believe so, yes. Anyway, we will get her on the show. Yeah, she's awesome.

Thank you so much for taking the time to hop on. Yeah, great to chat. Yeah, thanks for having me. Awesome. Talk soon. Bye. Cheers. Let me tell you about Bezell.

Getbezzle.com. Your Bezel concierge. Is available now source you any watch on the planet? Seriously, any watch? So results from the Google ruling. They don't have to sell Chrome. And they don't have to stop paying to be the preferred search provider. So total, total big tech figures.

Let's go to Tyler. Did anything happen? Nothing ever happened? Nothing happened. Nothing happened. The no on play market continues to print every time. No. Tyler is our official, did anything happen,

correspondent. Yeah, what was the point of all this? Just to waste a bunch of time and attention. Also, will not be required to divest android. Yes. Okay. So, uh, well, I mean, something happened if you're a lawyer collecting a paycheck. That's true. I mean, after like, what, five years? This is five years? Yeah. Wait, is this the final, final, final? Or is this like V1 final? I don't know. We need to figure that out. Somebody posted, uh, meek Mill about to raise 25 Mill from A16Z. Meek Mill quoted it and said, my first time hearing that, but LOL, but for real, I need investors. I don't think they're on Twitter. What? Donald Boat, Donald Boat responded and said, DM.

Meek, Donald Boat will lead you around, but first you need to buy him a private jet. Yeah, what a crazy. He needs a jet. Yeah, so I mean the news here is Meek Mill. The rapper is going to start an AI company of some sort. Yeah, it went viral a couple days ago, working on an AI tool that can change the world, L.O. The funniest thing was that in the screenshot he posted, he'd switched it to 4-0, and so everyone was like, he's been one shot, he's been one shot.

I mean, it really, yeah, he had, yeah, spec or OpenCB, basically. Hopped in the chat and said that. No, he was, yeah, he specifically highlighted that Meek had gone back to 4-0. So you can imagine he's deep in the prompts. And like, okay, me and ChatGPT figured out the next AI app that's going to disrupt ChatGPT. That's great.

You love to see it. Yeah, I do switch back to 4-0 every once in a while, but only when I want it to write a really obviously one-shotted, like, piece of prose. You're right, John. Yeah, exactly. So if I want to write something that's like, it's not this, it's that. it's more than this. It's actually that. And like use a lot of MDashes. I'll fire a 4-0 and give it a little teaser. The comments, the comments on this? Or Screlli comments, let me know if you need help. I got 100 goons ready to go for you. Bone, GPT, your favorite rapper's favorite rapper.

Oh, okay. Reginald says, Mr. Mill, I'm a well-known AI practitioner. I think you should collaborate with Cooley or friend. These are some of the most innovative companies in the space. happy to talk you through some of the players if you're interested. V.C. Braggs just says, top. Okay. Anyway, let's switch over to Ron Rule. He says this is pathetic Gen Z in the workplace.

This is a poll from Fox News. They say 77% of Gen Z in the workforce admitted to bringing a parent to a job interview. 53% of parents spoke with a hiring manager on their behalf. 73% parents helped complete work. assignments, 45% regularly have a parent talk to their current manager. I think we're pro-parent workplace here at TBPN. We've had many parents stop by the Ultradome and it's been great. I don't mind talking to some parents about stuff. And I say, hey, if anyone in the team needs to have their parents come in and help complete some work assignments, do it. Tyler, you want to bring your

dad in and have him vibe code something for us? I think my parents are coming on Friday. Fantastic. Put them to work. Just let them know. They got to be in the 73% of parents that help complete work assignments. Mr. Cosgrove, you will be using Quad Code today. Yeah, we're fully in support of all the team's parents, just helping them with their jobs. In fact, I would insist that they come and they pull their weight and they help organize the information. I think we had Michael's parent in the Ultridome recently. I think get them on the switcher. Get them on the, pull the graphics up. We need all hands on deck. Get the parents in here. This is a pro-parent workplace.

Anyway, the great lock-in of September to December has begun. This is just a general announcement. It's also a bulking season, folks. We've seen this. It was teased earlier by Will at OpenAI. He said the detwinkification process has begun. We are, of course, sending him some mass gainer on his journey to become a mass monster. But the great lock-in.

What? Men are saying that it's bearish for Open AI. It's bearish, that he's detwinkifying? Why? Why would that be better? I'm in the gym that could be spent on the keyboard. Wait, oh, it's bearish because he's turning into a bear? Because he's going to be as large as a bear, like a hairy bear man or something?

I'm just imagining Will. Wait, is that the actual joke, like twink and bear? Like, bearish? Because like the opposite of a twink is a bear? I don't know. Okay. I don't know. I think it's bullish.

I think it's very good. I hope he turns into a bowl and gets yoked like a bull. That would be very, very good. lift heavy run far marry early eat steak and eggs we didn't really talk about we missed this post somebody was burning up the timeline over the weekend yeah this was uh let me try to find the original quote it's deeper in the stack uh and people like to hate on it jir ticket i mean everyone was having their take some people were hating some people were just having fun uh jir ticket said the current vibe is drinking drugs 10 to three five days a week lift heavy run far marry whoever stay up late eat spicy

seshwan food. That's pretty funny. Yeah, I don't know. This was something that was like very dunkable, but you know, the Yeah, this made me when, uh, I thought it was fine. The actual quote was the current vibe is no drinking no drugs. 996. Lift heavy, run far, Mary, early tracks, sleep, eat steak and eggs. And, uh, I resonated with this so deeply that it made me want to start doing drugs. Wait, why? Well, I've just this, this exactly tracks, with my life. Oh, oh, yes. No drinking, no drug. Yes, it is now so consensus to do this. Very early, track, sleep, eat state, next. I was like, it's time to start binge drinking.

This was sort of the top for that concept. But, you know, I think overall, that take is more correct. It's just more from first principles, more foundationally true than not. And so it should, it should stand the test of time as like roughly correct, even if it's like, frame. raised in a little bit of an incendiary kind of frothy, like, style. Yeah, I respect that founder going to the, it was the Wall Street Journal. He quoted in or something. I don't know. Talking to a journal like that's pretty funny to me.

I think it's fun. The current vibe. I think, I think it's a funny quote. And I don't think it needs, I don't think it needs to be fully dunked on. I think it can just be, you can just have fun with it. Anyway. Well, on that note, we got to get on. your happy place, book of wander with inspiring views, hotel great amenities, dreamy beds,

top tier cleaning 24-7 concierge service. It's a vacation home but better. And we do have to get on with Pyongyang. So we are going to hop on the phone. Now they're going to be, they may send a nuke if we don't. Pyongyang Investment Fund, PIF. You've heard a lot of founders raising from PIF. They're talking about Pyongyang Investment Fund folks.

Yep. We've got to hop on with Pyongyang. See you guys later. It's going to be a big week. Thanks for hanging out of the chat. Have a great evening. We'll talk to you later. see all of you go out there. Don't get one shot at by 4-0. Void 4-0. Oh, thanks, Max, the SF

standard. That's right. Thanks Gabe, Daniel, everyone who listened. Good hanging out with We love you. Talk to you soon. Bye. Bye. Bye.