TBPN - Mother's Day Gift Guide, Rorra in WSJ, Morgan Housel, Mehul Nariyawala, Sonya Huang, Stanford Review, Will Quist, Aidan Dewar, George Maloney

Episode Date: May 9, 2025

TBPN.com is made possible by:Ramp - https://ramp.comFigma - https://figma.comVanta - https://vanta.comLinear - https://linear.appFigma - https://www.figma.comEight 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.comFollow TBPN: https://TBPN.comhttps://x.com/tbpnhttps://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235https://youtube.com/@technologybrotherspod?si=lpk53xTE9WBEcIjV(01:26) - Market Recap (13:32) - Mother's Day Gift Guide (38:27) - The Stanford Review (54:02) - Morgan Housel (01:22:55) - Sonya Huang (01:53:28) - Will Quist (02:21:52) - Aidan Dewar (02:37:34) - Mehul Nariyawala (02:55:32) - George Maloney

Hey, let's go! You're watching TVV! Let's go! Today is Friday, May night, 2025. We are live from the Temple of Technology. The Portures of Finance. The Capitol of Capital. Let's go.

It is Mother's Day in just two days. The Super Bowl of pro-natalism, baby. It's huge. The day. We've all been waiting for. We've all been waiting for it. And especially your mother. It's going to be amazing. Switch your mom to ramp.com.

Time is money. Time is money. Save both. Switch your mom to ramp. com. Get her on ramp. Seriously. What is your, I mean, what does your family run on, if not ramp?

Yeah, I mean, it's a good time to ask what is your, you know, how are your parents thinking about enterprise security? Yes. Should they? Should they? Do they need to be thinking about SOC2 compliance? Yeah, does mom pay sales tax? Get her on numeral.

That's right. Put that on autopilot. That's right. Take that off of her plate so she can raise the kids. Yeah, I mean, it's the greatest gift. It is. To let your mom no longer have to be spending more than five minutes. You know, a month.

Anyway, we're going to be doing a deep dive on mom. Mother's Day, giving you a gift guide, breaking down just some of the most obvious choices for what to get the mothers in your life. But first, we want to take you to the market, give you a little update on what's going on. What's moving the market. Obviously, the big news is the U.S. UK breakthrough tariff truce. Trump announced this yesterday. It's the first post-tariff pact. US keeps 10% blanket duty.

UK cuts average duty on U.S. goods to 1.8%. Autos, the 27.5% levy on British cars falls to 10%. Huge for the Aston Martin owners in the community. Huge for the Bentley owners in the community. Huge for the Roles Royce fans. I'm sure there's a lot of you listening from probably in your Cullinans, Black Badge. Probably Ansori.

Fortunately, Aston will be safe here. So it's a 10% tariff for up to 10,000 vehicles. Sorry, 100,000 vehicles. Ashton Martin for context only expects to sell around 1,000 in 20209. So they have a lot of that quota to sort of grow into, which is great. Something having my sales is to hit me in the face. I think I'm going to lose the eye. John's going to lose his eye.

Hey, you don't need eyes for podcasting. I think there's a certain amount of caffeine level that it will blind you. Yeah. Anyway, obviously exciting. A little bit odd that this one's the first one because you were telling me that we actually have a trade surplus with the UK. We do. So, you know, one step forward, two steps back potentially.

But it seemed like the market like it. It seemed like the market trade. The market lines at all times high, all time highs or near all time highs, over 100K. And we are going to have Pippa Lamb from Sweet Capital come on on Monday. She is from some foreign land. I think she said it was like London. The United. Is it United?

Yeah. I think about these places like Carthage or like Constantinople, like these like long lost, forgotten lands. And she actually lives in one. And so I'm excited to ask her like, do they have movies there? Yeah. Do they have telephones yet? Like what type of technology is going there? Exactly.

Yeah. But she's going to come on and break it all down for us on Monday. Sorry for that. But in the meantime, we're going to move on. China surprised on exports. Headline exports of 8.1% year over year growth versus two. percent estimates U.S. shipments were down 21 percent. Okay, but where's this data coming from?

It's a big question. Yeah, maybe it's a big. So there was a report, I think it was maybe Monday, the days blend together. But at some point, China used to report on like hundreds of different economic metrics from across the country. That's, you know, things like land sales, local GDP, things like that. A while back, they just stopped, fully stopped reporting on, you know, most of those methods. They stopped sending investor updates. Yeah.

When you're mature. Remind me of a, you know, anytime you have an, you know, angel investment or something like that that stops sending investor updates usually doesn't, usually not a good sign. So China has stopped sending investors. They don't need to update the angel investors. They don't need to update the global economy. No, it happens. Or the other one is a founder that's building in public, you know, just euphoric every single

week. And then all of a sudden they stop posting. They don't post for three months and you're like, yeah, that's how you know. Aquahire inbound. Maybe we should aquilire China. Yeah. Merge them in. Definitely something.

Bring them on the team. Definitely should be in the conversation. In the conversation. NVIDIA is launching a new H-20. They're pushing forward. The memory band width is trim below U.S. export caps. The export caps keep moving down. And Vida keeps adapting the hardware.

Pinterest popped big on a huge Q1 beat. They had earnings. Q1 revenue. 855 million, MAUs at 570 million. AI ad tools push Q2 guide to 960 million to 900. Yeah, Pinterest is, there was an article in the,

in the information about how they've kind of changed the management structure. We didn't get a chance to cover it, but it is interesting. Gen Z accounts for 40% of user base. Fastest growth is in Brazil and Indonesia. You know, these platforms are just valuable. I've actually been using Pinterest every once in a while to try and find like really aesthetic

reference photos for brand guides and style guides. It's pretty cool. It's also been overrun by AI slop in a really negative way. So I almost want to have a filter on there to say, okay, I'm looking for, you know, a newsman in a suit. But don't show me anything that was created after 2022. Or the 80s. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Nothing that was uploaded. But some good stuff, some bad stuff. And they're certainly pumping a lot of ads in there. And the ads are pretty related to what you're searching for because it's such a visual medium. So yeah, congrats to. Pinterest for the big Q1 beat. Coinbase also bought a company for $3 billion, barely broke through.

I mean, this is a huge number. Size gone for sure. We'd love to talk to Brian Armstrong about that. He's coming on the show soon. We will have him break it down. We'd love to get the founder of Deribet on as well. It's $700 million in cash and 11 million shares of just coin. Yeah.

Their crypto coin shares. No. Their stock is just coin. Deribet is one of the world's top ETC. I think it is the world's top options house. Yeah. Yeah. And so very strategic pickup for Coinbase.

It makes a lot of sense. As Europe and Asia as client base and regulated futures to Coinbase's spot-heavy mix, derivatives drive over 50% of global crypto volume, very important for them to get in. So I'm excited about that. Saying they have 90% of their clearing 90% of crypto option in open interest, which is around $20 billion in volume. So very impressive. On the flip side of crypto.

2016 based splitting time between Amsterdam and Panama. Oh really? I didn't know that. Fun place to bounce between. Interesting. I'm sure that's for like regulatory reasons, right? Yeah. On the flip side of crypto, Celsius founder Alex Machinsky was sentenced 12 years for fraud tied to the 2022 Celsius collapse. A ton of 20 B's at the peak. 20 billion AUM. he made a $48 million personal gain via token manipulation. Still deciding what the restitution figure will be, what he'll have to pay for that. Prosecutors saw 20 years, defense pleaded for less than four years,

citing cooperation. But I don't know how much he was cooperating because he was selling merch that was all about bankruptcy and stuff. It was really, really crazy. A lot of great coffee zilla reporting out there, if you want to go take the stroll down memory lane in here about the Celsius debacle. But this is a rough time.

I think they were doing it okay while the market was up, but once the market pulled back, it was a classic example of, you look at the yield, you know who's naked. The yield that they were offering was concerningly high. Yeah, given that interest rates, the risk-free yield was about zero at the time. Yep.

And the last story is that there's a $3 billion lawsuit against Google in Italy. We won't do our Italian accents today, but I'm sure we'll be tracking it. It's part of the ongoing pressure on big tech, especially abroad. Was Google getting into suiting? No, actually search.

But this goes back to 2010 to 2017. Google was showing a search bias against a particular group in Italy. And so they're claiming that Google shopping, you know, hurt them to the tune of billions of dollars. And they want restitution. So the financial impact is pretty limited, given that Alphabet's 2024 revenue was 320 billion. But the legal overhang is certainly a headache for Google. But anyway, good luck to them. Interesting dynamic being internal counsel at a firm like Google where there's just like probably

can you, I don't even, I don't even, maybe these, I doubt, you could probably figure, I'm sure you could figure out the number, but I'm at, I wonder how many inbound lawsuits complaints Google is getting on a daily basis, right? It has to be. Yeah. Hey, want to settle this with me? I mean, there was that whole story about that guy who was just sending fake invoices to big tech companies just being like, yeah, if it's under 10 grand, they'll probably just pay it. Just doing that constantly. Wouldn't work.

Wouldn't work with rant.com. Yep. That's right. Anyway, let's pull up the show, the run of show to kind of give you a guy's an idea of what the rundown is today. We're taking you through the Mother's Day gift guide. Rora was featured in the Wall Street Journal.

We're going to break down. We're going to do some timeline, tell you some other stories. Then we have two Anons from Stanford talking about the Stanford review, the Bombshell Report from the Stanford Review. We've got Morgan Housel, Sonia Wong, Will Quist, Aidan Dewar, a bunch of other folks coming on. Founders announcing rounds, announcing new products, a bunch of VCs yapping should be a good show for you.

And if you're following the market update and you want to trade it, get on public.com investing for those who take it seriously. Multi-asset investing. Industry leading yields. They're trusted by millions, folks. Go to public.com. Aston Martin sponsor. Should we do six facts about David Steiner, the new U.S. Postmaster? General. I mean, and this is one of the most coveted roles, obviously. If I were, if I were going in the admin, Postmaster, for sure. Postmaster. I mean, I think of myself as a master of posting.

Post. So it would make sense. It could, you know, the extended, the full title is Poster Master General. Poster Master General. It's the most senior poster in the country. Maybe they should have a post-economic master general. Post-economic general. Yeah, post-economic general.

He's just like, yeah, actually, I can't really revitalize the DOD because I'm actually in San Chappelle. And F1's coming up. So I'll get to it. But I'm not really checking email right now. I haven't checked this inbox. So good luck getting in touch with me. I'm just like, that's exactly who we want.

Anyway, he spearheaded a comeback for waste management. He's a FedEx director who led turnaround of waste management after insider trading scandal. Some of the company's top executives in the 1990s falsified financial results, that's not good. Really, really playing into the meme that the trash. companies are run by the mafia, right? Yeah. He joined the company as Departy Council in 2000, in less than four years, climbed the ranks to become CEO. He streamlined operations.

He calls himself the walking embodiment of better, lucky than good. I like that. That's great. That's because he went to work for waste management. He turned down a job offer from Enron. Speaking of Better Lucky than Good. Yeah. I was listening to Senora's episode on Jim Simmons.

Sorry, Simons. Simons. And Jim Simons was obsessed with being lucky. He's like, I wake up every day. I just think, how lucky can I get today? That's amazing. So he's stepping down as director of FedEx because FedEx, of course, competes with the U.S. Postal Service, which he will be running.

Honestly, surprising. Could have been running both. I would have liked to see FedEx. This whole divestiture thing, we got to get rid of. Yeah, I would have liked to see FedEx, you know, kind of merge with the U.S. I would like to see if someone goes in the admin, don't make them divest. Make him go 10x levered whatever there long. Yeah. Just really stake it at all. Risk on. You're going to get a pension after this. Hey. But if you make any mistakes, your bags are cooked. A 10% down draw from any of your bags are wiped. You're wiped. So don't mess up. It was really high stakes. Yeah. So he has a big job job ahead of him. The postal service has been hemorrhaging money for years because of declining mail volumes. Limits on what it can charge customers in a costly mandate to deliver around 168 million addresses

six days a week. Steinemus also addressed persistent delays of mail and packaged deliveries in some parts of the country. He was hand-selected by Trump and he says he wants the postal service to remain an independent agency. I don't like that. I think we should take this thing private. Yeah.

Spack it. Yep. Let's let it rip. Let Chimoth cook. Anyway, I'm sure you all are aware of Mother's Day coming up. I'm sure you've already done a lot of your prep, bought all the gifts. But if you haven't, we have a gift guide for you today to take you through some of the, just some of the basic options that you should be thinking about. If you're in the audience, we know that you're wealthy, most likely post-economic.

So you got to make sure that the mothers in your life. You know, you're pre-post-economic, right? So you're, you know, impending. Yeah. But you could probably take a non-recourse loan against your shares, even if you're a series B founder. And then drop that on something like the pink star. It's a 60-carat, vivid pink diamond ring. Coming in at only $70 million.

But it's... I mean, at that price, you can't say now. Exactly. I mean, we talked about the graph hallucination, rainbow diamond watch, 110 carrots for the wrist. And everyone's just going to know, like, wow, that mom has a great sign. Yeah. For sure.

He or she really loves their mother. I mean, if you want to take it a little bit further, you could go diamond tiara. Yep. A crown. These have... Tiaras kind of fell off. They did. But that just creates an opportunity for...

for that to be so back. And I think that 2026 is feeling like it will be the year of the tiara. Yeah. You know, your mom is going out on a little morning stroll. Yep. She's going to want to throw on that tiara. Exactly. And just put around the makeup.

Yeah. A lot of people say, oh, flowers. Flowers are only for Valentine's Day. Yes. But I think if you rethink what flowers can be, you can get to a really interesting place. I know where you're going with this job. Yeah, exactly. So Juliet roses, Orchid Rarities, you can push a bouquet up into the six figures.

Yeah. If you really think really think of it. I thought you were going to say, you know, basically drop an entirely new rose garden into her backyard. Or hire a team of bioengineers to engineer an entirely new breed of roses never before seen. Totally. Totally. That's a reasonable thing. Not unreasonable, even to be getting ahead of it thinking about next year, going to Monsanto saying, hey, look, I want to develop, you know, an entirely new group of flowers, completely bioengineered. Yep.

You can also take some of those flowers, dip them in 24. four-carat gold, boom, you have an eternal bouquet. They'll never wilt. That's right. That's going to run you like 40K, but worth every penny. Totally. What else should we recommend? I mean, obviously renting an entire tropical island for a family week, totally doable.

Round the world private jet grant tour. Very good option. I take it to space. We saw this with Jeff Bezos. Totally. Totally. Exactly. I mean, you've been saying this for weeks.

You think that you won't be a, able to get on a Blue Origin flight for the next three years after Mother's Day because everybody is going to be sending their mother and their mother-in-law to space. Yeah, they made this whole thing with the Blue Origin, oh, it's all the women flight. What about all the moms? They should have just done really focused on just moms in space. Yeah. That's that's definitely the future.

That's viral. Another favorite, we talked about this, just a good old wire transfer. Just a big wire transfer. You remember as a kid? Totally. You know, you're opening. Birthday money. Yeah, yeah.

Oh, I got $100. Yeah, yeah. I got $50. I can buy a video. And the logic at the time was. this kid knows how to spend it better than I do. Exactly. Flip it on your mom.

Flip it on your mom. Six figure wire transfer. Six figure wire transfer. Boom. Boom. Yep. It's great. If she's into purses, you know, we talk about Birkins. If you're going to go Birkin, don't go basic Birkin.

Go Hermes, Himalayia Birkin with rare crocodile, diamonds. Yes, it's going to cost you $200, maybe 500K. Yeah. But it's going to stand out in a sea of monotonous Burkins, right? And for the average platform BC, that's 20% of your annual comp. Yeah. Like not even counting carry, right? So it's just, it's the least that you could do.

Yeah. So in fact, if you see, if you meet some GP and their mom doesn't have Himalayan Armes, Birkin with crocodile and diamonds on it, you would think like, oh, their fund's not doing well. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Or they're not raising another fund. They're definitely can't lead my next round. Yeah.

So I got to start talking to other folks. I got to run a bigger bidding process for sure, start networking. But I mean, if you want to go, if you're more serious, you should go with the Muawad 1001 Nights Diamond purse. Yes. Guinness book world records of handbags. I mean, people think such a big deal with Burkins, but you can go a whole, whole order or magnitude higher.

It's a $3.8 million bag. Yeah. But, you know, it's really the only way to stand out. One of one. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. The armored Rolls Royce. This is a great choice.

This is a great choice. runs going to grab coffee. If they're still dropping off the kids? Dropping off the grandkids. Yeah, 100%. Yeah, just getting, you know, ideally knowing my mom, 700 horsepower is kind of like the right range for a daily. Totally. My mom drives a Prius actually, but I think, I think.

Have you considered swapping a V12 in there? Engine swap for Prius? Yeah, maybe maybe just putting. Whatever car she has, just soup it up. Engine swapping a Kyan Turbo GT engine into the Prius. Yeah. And so, you know, because she wants to be low-key. Yeah, exactly.

She's comfortable. She knows what the buttons are. Yeah. But that doesn't mean that she can't have a little more. A little more power under the hood. Yeah. I like that. I mean, Zuck did this for Priscilla, right?

Yeah. He made the, he made the custom, stretched, Cayenne TurboGP minivan. Yes. Which is sick. But you could have gone further. You could have gone, you know, Lamborghini Euras minivan. Yeah.

You could have gone Cullin'in' black badge, minivan, mansory. Yeah, there you go. I think that's the combo. I think it's really like the creativity of just, you know, mixing these different cultures together. Totally. It's key. I think underutilized options, something you can do last minute. Yep.

Last minute. Take your mom's phone, bring it to a jeweler, have them bedazzle, have them bedazzle the back. Yeah. And what I actually like about this is because the iPhone is uneaseless. even on the back, right, it has a camera. You can just put the diamonds around this side. So it will actually sit flat, right? Oh, that's smart.

Yeah. So it's actually like an upgrade. It's practical. Yeah. It's practical. Yeah. It's more practical, but it's also fun. She's taking a picture of, you know, the grandkids.

Yeah. So definitely something there. I mean, we see a lot of, a lot of these, like, tech billionaires, that they're super yachts. But you never hear about the mothers of tech billionaires, getting their own super yachts. Totally. And so I would recommend calling a feed ship, start customizing something. I mean, two days you're not going to be able to do much,

but maybe next year, maybe the year after you start planning out. You want to be thinking three, four years in advance. At minimum. Absolutely, absolutely. You could also do private IMAX theater at home for the cinnophiles. Totally. They're into film. Just dig a massive hole into the house and build an underground bunker.

Great. Check out the, you know, reach out to the boring. Yeah. I mean, the last one that's pretty easy is just paying for a full domestic staff. for you know why I like this yeah why is because you can write a card and say you're going to do it but you get a little bit of time yeah actually find the staff right yeah to find the individual people that are going to make up that staff yeah and so it's one of those great last minute option yeah that you know will be unforgettable yeah I really feel like you're if the household is running smoothly the staff is firing on all cylinders ideally you have kind of a uh an Alfred type of butler who really oversees the staff. Yeah. And I would love to see that type of, you know, house manager, estate manager, using

linear. Totally. Totally. To actually, because linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products. You want to be building custom software to run your smart home. Don't, don't outsource to nest. The ideal Alfred was a PM in big tech. Exactly.

Take that sort of, like, ethos into the home and really just run it. Like, it's a product with millions of users. Yes. When is the registration? on the Mansori, Colin, and do. Let's make sure that the license plates are coming. Track it in linear. Boom.

Exactly. So this is a system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects, and product roadmaps. I mean, it's the perfect Mother's Day gift, really. It really is. Shout out to Matthew. I had a good call with him this morning. Runs a lot of the marketing over at Linear.

Anyway, let's quickly take you through the run of show. Let's pull that up to show you what's happening today. We're going through the Mother's Day gift guide, but we also have some massive news. Rora was featured in the Wall Street Journal. We're going to break it down. We'll do some timeline. Then we got the Stanford Anon's coming on and then a bunch of other guests.

Anon's over at Stanford. Yeah. They wrote a pretty inflammatory piece, which I'm excited to have them break down for us. But let's take you through the Wall Street Journal. Rora was featured. Yes. Mass news. For those that are new, I started a company called Rora with my co-founders,

Brian and Charlie a long time ago at this point spent a lot of time in R&D and launched last year and it's been just off to the races which has been great and anyways Aurora was in the Wall Street Journal yesterday and I got a little bit of the backstory here

somebody reached out apparently with a just like a random Gmail and was like hey I'm doing some product testing and I get Aurora or whatever Brian ended up sending and the article turned out really well. So we can read through it. So the water filters you actually want in your kitchen,

a new wave of models making grand claims regarding their purifying prowess. But our test revealed four clear winners when it came to flavor functionality and sheer counter-appeal. For many people, the thought of water filters the tiresome realization that theirs needs to be replaced or worse that the taste of their filtered water

isn't what they actively crave, the way they once crave that chilled bottle of Vigi for Evian. and probably still do despite the news images of masses of plastic choking the oceans. I still have hopefully much, way less now, but I still, you know, as of last year, had a bunch of friends that were just drinking tap water, which is actually completely insane in our year 2025. So anyways, going on. And let's be honest, that plastic pitcher has never again looked quite so crystalline

as it did straight out of the box, has it? drinking water out of plastic, just don't do it. So good news, it doesn't have to be that way, according to market research firm Fortune Business Insights, the global demand for water purifiers is exploding. And recently water filter makers have, pardon the pun, flooded the markets with models ranging from sleek and even glamorous to sporty, high tech and industrial chic. Rora, I'm looking at you. The question then is how to choose a system that fits your drinking needs and aesthetics without

sacrificing efficacy. Over the last several months, I tested everything from single, bottle to multi-gallon filters. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Let's just talk about Rora for the family. Is Rora a numeral yet? Got to pay sales tax, right? Working on it.

Got to get on sales tax. Put that sales tax on autopilot. Brian really runs. Add. Yeah. Integrated ad. There we go. There we go.

Run it, John. Sales tax on autopilot. It's been less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. Anyway, congratulations to the whole Rora team. And you can go pick one up. What? Roy.com? Roara.com.

ROR.org. Let's do a quick polymarket review. There's a few markets that I'm tracking. There's a few markets that you're tracking. I'm interested in this Tesla, Elon Musk's CEO replacement thing. Right now, there was this leaked Wall Street Journal article saying Tesla was thinking about replacing Elon Musk as CEO. Polymarket has a 13% chance.

I think this is the perfect thing to be tracking on polymarket. And then they also have who will replace Elon Musk as CEO. Of course, 86% says no CEO announced in 2025. But J.B. Straubel is sitting there at 2%. I don't know if you know him. He runs Redwood Materials. One of the earliest employees at Tesla has been there for a long time. Redwood Materials does battery recycling.

It's a huge company. But you can imagine them kind of putting together. So I don't know, wild card. There's a couple of other folks in here that are interesting. Gwen Shotwell is actually sitting here at 1%. Darukosh Hashwashiari at Uber. Dark Horse. Dark Horse.

Dark Horse. Mary Barra, there's a bunch of other interesting people. But that is a market that I'll be tracking over the, through the end of the year as the, you know, the peanut gallery yaps about Elon where he's going. The last thing that's interesting, largest company at the end of May, Microsoft overtaking Apple. Mogged. Mogged. Yeah, Apple had good. Microsoft has a lot of momentum right now.

Yeah. And Apple has the opposite. A lot of different forces coming into. coming into play, obviously the trade wars, kind of botching AI. Yep. The big thing, yeah, I'm just very interested. It's interesting that Google is not even in the conversation on this market anymore, right? Obviously impacted over the last week from some of the comments that Apple made in the, in the trial earlier.

And Viti is still sitting at 4%. Kind of that wildcard because it moves much, it's much more volatile stock because, you know, they can just just blow out one quarter if someone orders 10 million H-100s or something. But obviously, a rough go with the international sanctions and the chip bands and whatnot. What else are you tracking? Which company has the best AI model end of May? Google's sitting at 74% with 20 days to go. You were talking about like they've trained such incredible models.

They dominated the e-vowels. Invented the transformer. Absolutely insane team. And yet really struggled to actually break through and have this crazy counter position. where the more they do with AI search, the more it takes away from their search, is the classic innovator's dilemma, right? Yeah.

Everyone said AI should be a sustaining advantage. And I think it could be in the sense that, like, they'll then this into GCP and cloud platform and that will be a beneficiary of AI. But they do have some serious, serious product challenges. Yeah, I was thinking they have, there's that warrior meme, which is like, I've won, but at what cost?

Yep. And that's really, to me. Isn't that from Avengers originally? Yeah, but it was like popularized by this like image. It would be too hard to pull it up. But, um, yeah, XAI is actually second place, which is interesting because you think opening eye based on the performance of the consumer

app would, would be more in the conversation, but opening I was only sitting at 5% for the best AI model. This is based on, this is based on benchmarks. Yeah, of course, of course. Benchmarks don't matter to chat GPT anymore. Just user retention, I think.

Yeah. And stuff and ads and things maybe. Who knows? Put, and add. it. Anyway, speaking of ads, we should talk about, talk to you about Vanta, automate compliance, manage risk, improve trust. Continuously, Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation, whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program. Anyway, did you know that Vanta

was one of the fastest growing vendors on ramp last month? I did not know that. They are. Congratulations Cruzen. Congrats to Vanta. Well, we got to move back to Manta. Well, we got to move back to mothers Day because we forgot to take you through some of the really obvious houses that are on the market. If you're looking for a house for your mother this Mother's Day, Mother's Day, there's an $8.5 million California home with a backyard railroad. All the train heads are going to be scrambling. A lot of moms have kids. Kids love trains.

Buy a house with a railroad in the back. When David and Sherry purchased their locking you out of Flint Ridge home, not too far from me. In 2008, they found the rusted remnants of the... train tracks where a previous owner had built a backyard railroad. It turns out that Locking Yard of Flint Ridge, home to a number of Disney employees, was once a hub for garden railways. While the family weren't train enthusiasts, they were intrigued. With the help of a one-time Disney Imagineer, they spent about a year recreating the railroad, completing it in 2011. Today, the roughly 530-foot circuit has a tunnel and a train station with a working crossing

light. The train itself is faux steam, battery-powered locomotive, and caboose with two riding cars. This is incredible. Honestly, this is the ultimate backyard toy for the grandkids. It's such a flex. Everyone has, oh, infinity pool. Oh, Coy Pond. Oh, Jim. Yeah, do you have a railroad in your backyard? No. The quotes so good. David, the owner is like, there's something universal about trains. They bring out the youth and everyone. However, their railroad needed a new conductor. They put in, they put the 1.55 acre property on the market for 8.5 million. They're semi-retired and moving permanently to their second home in Park City. He's a financial executive grew up in Chicago.

They married in 1982 and later settled in Flint Ridge, a semi-rural community about 13 miles from downtown Los Angeles, where we are right now. Home of L.A.'s auto community. If you ever want to be scared driving, just drive up. Yeah, that's like, I mean, effectively, hummed. You have to drive through La Cognada to get to Angeles Crest Highway. Yeah, yeah.

And if you ever want to feel like you're going to get run over, go on ACH and try going the speed limit. People will fly by you at four times that. That's awesome. Apparently Disney also had a railroad in his backyard, Walt Disney in Homeby Hills in L.A. The original railroad was built in the 1960s, according to the son, who said his train-loving father was friends with Johnston and Kimball. when the new family bought the house, the tracks had been dismantled and largely built over. At first, the railroad wasn't a priority.

When David had played with toy trains growing up, he said he wouldn't describe himself as a train guy. But a friend offered to introduce David to the late Bill Tyson, a one-time Imagineer and garden railroad enthusiast who could help restore it. Then they visited the South Coast Railroad Museum near Santa Barbara where they rode a garden railroad for $1. At the end of it, we said, okay, we have to do this.

It's just too much fun. It was the most expensive dollar I ever spent. That's hilarious. That's great. We have another property. Another property. This is another good option for Mother's Day. If you're in the market to buy your mother a house. She's trying to move south. South. Closer to the tropics. Yeah. Why not Fort Lauderdale? There's a new massive waterfront home. 15,000 square feet. Thirty-nine million dollars. And it includes eight separate bar areas. So for the entertainer.

So a heavy... I mean, people are saying alcohol's coming back, you know? Yeah. There's so much alpha with alcohol being out of style. Yeah. Maybe go long alcohol. Yeah. And enjoy the eight bars.

But you could also serve mocktails and beverages. That's right. Kids. Energy drinks. Energy drinks. Yeah. For more than 20 years, Steve Savoor has been hosting lavish parties at his waterfront mansion in Fort

Lauderdale, Florida. Last year he hosted a Barbie-themed gala, decking out the house in hot pink and dressing up as Ken. I always say if the house burned to the ground and I didn't have any insurance, I got my money is worth out of it. The 64 year old retired bachelor. That's hilarious. He's now listing the property known as Villa De Palma for $39 million. He says he travels frequently, especially during the summer months and wants a home that doesn't require as much attention. So the house is-saber who's trained as a lawyer made his fortune in merchant banking and is a former CEO of the Pittsburgh-based

communications company ComNet Erickson, retiring at age 39. He assembled Villa de Palma over two decades, starting with the purchase of the main house for about $1.8 million in 2002. Property Records Show. Florida is known for massive fluctuation in their housing market. In the years since, he has spent millions adding more land to expand his footprint to roughly an acre. One of those properties included a five-bedroom house, which he raised around 2009. This guy just turned making this party house into his full-time job. Raised.

Raised means demolished, by the way. And so he says to celebrate the demolition, he hosted an animal house-style toga party. He spent two weeks decorating the house to look like a fraternity house. Then the night before the demolition, he and his pals tore up the house with sledgehammers. Did you imagine it? At the end of the night, we were throwing kegs through windows, he said. What a bro. This is so insane.

After tearing down the small house, Savoor has expanded the main house, completing the project, around 2010. The eight bedroom Mediterranean-style estate has about 15,000 square feet of living space and two large outdoor pools. It's well equipped for entertaining with a wine cellar and eight separate bar areas, including one inspired by Hotel Duccape-Den Rock in the south of France. Fantastic hotel. Have you been?

No. And Savoor calls another bar on the rooftop. Tequila Tower. This guy is such a party animal. A giant table in the space can hold plenty of people to dance on after tequila has been depleted. Savage. There are two relaxation rooms,

properties within walking distance of the beach in downtown Fort Lauderdale's main shopping strip. I would come down for long three-day weekends and ended up staying two weeks. When I retired, I made my playground, my home. What a legend. Anyway, great option.

I'm interested to see where this one lands. Yeah. Anyway, we have two minutes till our first guest is joining. Let's do some timeline. What else is in the news? Actually, let's do an ad. Eight Sleep.

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So we got a post here from, we'll cover this and then we'll go into the guests from Buccoe Capital Bloke. he posted back on March 3rd New Mag 7 Ryn Mital which is German arms manufacturer Solana V-C-S-Coyne

Palantier's Salesforce for He's not exactly He's not pulling punches Hems D-C I can't say anything I can't say anything Bloke

All new appliances and vehicles purchased before the tariffs Gold and so he then quotes it and by saying Ryan Mottal is up 54%. Salon is up 15% Palantir up 42%.

Him's up 26%. Dave up 60% use vehicles up 10% gold, 14% and the max 7 is down 3%. I wonder if this is actually just over the last two months, maybe, yeah. I guess this is, do the tariffs hit marks third? Something like that.

Anyway, congrats to him for calling it. Clean up the language if you want to be on the show more. Anyway. They said to cheat on everything, so I decided to cheat their company. I generated 84,000 believable resumes to spam their job applicants and sent AI agents to waste their time. This guy, RISE. I'm shorting the VCs defending them. Do you see this fight this one of?

Can we, Michael, are we able to pull this up on the screen? So RISE is trolling Roy, former guest on the show. So yeah, Roy has a company called Cluelly. He is helping people cheat on everything. Right now, I think they're focused on sales calls. He's attracted a lot of controversy. and RISE is messing with him a little bit by just using AI to spam Roy with an almost inconceivable number of applicants. Somehow I don't think it's going to affect Roy.

I think he's going to be just fine. Roy's built different. He's hiring a videographer in San Francisco with $500K. $300,500K. Absolutely massive numbers for a vlogger. So if you want to vlog and make half a mill a year. It's crazy. Head over to Cooley.

Head over to Cooley. Good luck to him. Anyway, we should have our first guest joining right now, or set of guests, actually. I think we'll have two voices on the show. They're both anonymous. They've been involved in the latest report from the Stanford Review about spying on campus. You're not going to see their face. You're not going to hear their names.

But you're going to hear us ask some questions about the report and try to get to the bottom of what's going on campus. and dig a little bit deeper into the viral Stanford Review article that went up most recently just a few days ago. Anyway, welcome to the show. Can you hear us? Can we hear you? Yes. Thanks for having us.

Great to be here. Great to have you. Thanks for joining. Can you start by, I don't know how you want to characterize your involvement in the story. I know you want to remain anonymous, but can you just give us the high level on how the report came together and what the key findings were? Yeah, let's do it. So the Stanford Review spent over one year investigating Chinese academic espionage at Stanford. What we did is we talked to Stanford students.

We talked to Stanford faculty. We talked to Stanford China experts and we talked to Congress people about this. And at the end of our investigation, we compiled a bunch of anonymous reports for people working in AI labs, student researchers and faculty. And the overwhelming conclusion was that there is essentially widespread intelligence gathering at the behest of the CCP at Stanford. What does that actually look like? I mean, no offense to Stanford, folks, but like it's undergrad. It's not exactly like a proprietary AI lab or like nuclear weapons program. Like what are they trying to steal?

Gotcha. So I'm going to pass you over to my colleague. Sure. And she's going to talk a little bit about what her experience with espionage look like. Sure. Yeah. So a lot of what espionage looks like, you know, on an undergrad level, is Chinese students and researchers trying to basically collect any and all information about Stanford that they possibly can.

So, you know, Stanford is an open research institution. So a lot of the things that are being reported back to the CCP aren't exactly secrets. And, you know, obviously, you know, it's not as bad as stealing defense secrets. Yeah. But the issues that it's happening at such a massive scale, because the CCP essentially has all of their students reporting back to the CCP with any and all information that they have. Right. So one Chinese international student characterizes it like this. Many Chinese students have handlers. The CCP wants to know everything that's going on at Stanford. This is a very normal thing. They just relay the information they have. Now, with regards to sensitive research, we're not. just talking about the undergraduate level, we're talking about the graduate level. And these are some of the best AI labs and best robotics labs in the United States of America

and the world at large. What they want is not just published papers, because you can imagine you can't replicate papers just via post papers. They want the methodology sent back. They sent back communication channels. They send back people that are involved with the research and other Chinese internationals that are working on it so that they can replicate this research at China. How would you rate the university's reaction to the piece. There's obviously been a bunch of conversation and chatter online, but I imagine you guys have been having conversations as well. Yeah, so we actually just published today. Larry Diamond, Matthew Turpin, wanted to publish sort of a response article. So that was also published in the

Stanford Review. And they came out in support of our article, which, you know, was good. And then Stanford also came out with a statement saying, you know, they take this very seriously and it is important to them. You know, we are sort of under the impression that there's not much that's going to be done about it because on some level, everyone knows that this is happening. And nothing is really being done about it on a university level. They really want to kind of stay out of things. Right. I mean, Matt Pottonjay, one of the guys that, commented as the former US deputy national security advisor, Matthew Turpin, worked as the China

senior advisor to the National Security Council. These guys have seen this happening for years on years. The issue is that Stanford is an open knowledge research institution. That means there's no secrets and that means it's very hard to prosecute people for sending back sensitive research information to China. So really what they get people on is just their visa. You know, they're working for the PLA but they haven't told the authorities about it. So what needs to happen is we need to have people that are sending back this information registered to foreign agents and set up new laws and new legal guidelines that prevent people from being able to send public information at research institutions back to foreign governments. Right. Yeah. And the other thing too is, you know, we also have

to need to recognize that the students are actually victims in this situation. I mean, the CCP is exploiting them. They are essentially crowdsourcing, you know, espionage at massive scale at, you know, universities all around the country. And they are, there's this thing called transnational repression. And basically, you know, if they don't want to report back to the CCP, if they have any reluctancies, or if they don't comply, their families can be threatened, their livelihoods, their scholarships. So, you know, it's really a sad situation for them as well. Yeah, I mean, totally. Matthew Turpin, who worked with the NSA, even said at Stanford, there's been Chinese international students who had their parents brought to the police station because they refused to turn over Stanford's research information.

So if you don't comply, you will face penalties from the Chinese Communist Party, and your parents and your family back at home in China may be put in harm's way. And we've seen that happen. Makes sense. Yeah, it's incredibly challenging. You know, you could be here. Your parents could be here. And yet if you have even one family member at home, a grandparent, a great-grandparent. a great grandparent, you know, there's some amount of risk.

I don't know if you saw this post by Kim Mai Cutler, who I think is at initialized, right, partner it initialized. She said this report has pretty much all anonymous sourcing, unfortunately, and so it does not seem like a good platform upon which to argue that many, most or all Chinese nationals or first-gen Chinese students are spies. how do you interpret that kind of criticism of the piece? Right, let's go through this point by point. So, first of all, when you look at how the CCP operates,

they have 2017 national security law. Under Article 7, all Chinese citizens must comply with national intelligence and provide information and keep secrets when they're asked. So straight out of the gates, all citizens must comply at the face of penalty, working with security services. So anybody who's asked at Stanford to do something for the CCP, must do it or they will face legal penalties in China. The second point, we have talked to Chinese international students. They have families at home for the same reason that there's transnational

oppression. They cannot go on the record and say these things with their name out there because their families will be taken away. Their families are brought to police stations. It's already happened with research. With regards to Chinese China experts, we've had Matthew Turpin on the NSA. We've had Matt Podenjay and the NSA. And then we've had Larry Diamond all come out in support of our article. They've said this is a decade long, relentless interference in Stanford to misappropriate our sensitive research technologies. All the experts have agreed with us. But at Stanford, we've seen a culture of silence and fear

talking about this issue because it's characterized as racism. So 166 Stanford professors wrote an article to the Department of Justice saying that we need to shut down the Chinese and China initiative, which was an initiative that sought out Chinese spies because it's racist. But what that fails to recognize is if you don't shut this down, you have Chinese students who are the real victims here. So it's China who is profiling their citizens and victimizing them. It's not the USA. This is not racial profiling because we're just looking towards Chinese nationals who are being repressed by their own government.

That makes sense. Putting aside the kind of like the geopolitical issue of China specifically, how are you thinking about? not suffering from a lack of brain drain. I feel like the majority of tech company, like the tech industry might collapse if we didn't have a fluid transition from like, you know, there's Indian CEOs all over Silicon Valley. There are plenty of allied countries that send talented individuals, you know, even going back through history. We've had Operation Paperclip. We have, we have historically successfully integrated members from even rival nations. And that feels like something that would be a risk of losing if we go too far here. Is that a real risk? Or how do you think about confronting

that? Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, a lot of people have sort of interpreted our article, you know, and have said, like, ban all Chinese nationals. And, from attending elite universities or, you know, coming to school in the U.S. And we are, we do not want that. I mean, you know, I grew up going to a Chinese immersion school. I think it's a beautiful culture. The people are amazing. And they are huge assets to Silicon Valley and Stanford.

We just want to see some change in the way that these students are able to live and study abroad. because right now they it's as if they have no rights because they can't they have such a hard time coming forward so we need to you know figure out a policy system that can give these students a greater awareness of the freedoms that they have and we need to be able to defend them right a couple are solutions to keep chinese students in the united states and improve security i mean we should remove we chat from the united states that's a main method of communication with the communist party It's an unsecure platform that's monitored. Secondly, we should consider AI visas for bringing Chinese people's families out of China and to the United States.

Because that removes a huge risk of transnational oppression. So not just getting the best Chinese researchers, but also getting their families and coming to the United States. And that's what we saw with the Soviet Union. I mean, with the Soviet Union, whole people's families came with them. And then the third thing that you have to think about is China requires a lot of these people to come back. The USA should be doing the same thing. If you want to come study and work on the most sensitive research technologies that are key to winning the AI race, you should be forced to stay in the United States for 10 years or more. Because what we really don't want to happen is for these people to replicate these ecosystems in China.

Yeah, yeah, Jordan. What, you know, who have you guys seen the most support from on campus and you can keep at high level to protect the identities if people don't necessarily want to be public yet? I imagine there's quite a few people on campus that have, you know, massive concerns around, you know, the national security issues that you guys are presenting and are, you know, hugely in favor of reform. Yeah, I think we definitely, you know, the vast majority of the response has been off campus. I feel like there's been a surprisingly little amount of response on campus. But I think the best reactions have definitely been from the Hoover Institution. They have been looking into this kind of thing for a long time and are working on, you know, policies to deal with these things. But, you know, a lot of people that we interviewed still wanted to remain anonymous.

So it's really tricky because if you want to work with China on some level, you can't be, you know, consistently speaking out against China. So I think that's sort of the difficult balance. Is there an argument here for just kind of going completely open source of their research? I mean, famously like the Manhattan Project had a ton of spies on it. We still kind of won the Cold War. It feels like a sloppy and potentially crazy solution. But is there a world where the only thing that matters in a geopolitical technology race is just pace of play and the actual secrets don't matter? that much? Yeah, so you definitely want to play more offense and defense when you're talking about

the technology race. We're not going to win this by stifling competition in America. We were going to win this through the way we've always won it by having an open free market system that encourages competition. You don't want to ruin the risk of China using vast government intervention and vast government subsidies to essentially take the best research out of America and distribute it writ large at China by using vast state apparatus. We've seen this happen with electric vehicles. We've seen this happen with most American technologies. China misappropriates it. I mean, 33% of Chinese GDP is directed towards subsidies alone. The whole Chinese economy is geared towards leveling up and distributing advanced technologies. The issue with the United States, and it's a great

thing, is that the government will not subsidize these technologies to the same extent and encourage their diffusion to the same extent. So the real issue is that China may get these technology, and it's a technologies and then use these subsidies to create a mass market in China and gain an advantage. So to a certain extent, there has to be sensible research policy that protects our core interests. After seeing all this, do you think that American tech companies are generally too naive when it comes to espionage? I think the major players in national security, defense tech, things like that have historically been very aware of the espionage risk. but do you believe that many sort of more American tech companies, specifically in the Bay, should be paying a lot more attention to security?

100%. The foreign interference task force was disbanded, the China initiative was disbanded, two key efforts to stop Chinese research and corporate espionage. We have very few lines of defenses right now. Companies need to be vigilant because we've seen this happen again and again. I would say that they know what's happening, and they've known for a very long time. Even at Stanford, the people we talk to will all say, yeah, this is not new to me. Duh, we knew about this for so long.

This is obvious. And they're surprised that we've even published this article some people because it's so apparent. So what really needs to happen is we need the government to come through with sensible research policies that also encourage innovation. And Bay Area companies, particularly startups working in this area, need to be more vigilant about this. that makes sense great well thank you guys for coming on and sharing it's it's uh extremely insightful and it's scary it's scary and i'm glad you're on the case it seems like you're yeah i'm optimistic uh we need people like you guys to you know keep banging the drum and and uh forever going to get changed so yeah come back on uh when you guys have more news good luck with the follow

up reporting great thank you so much we'll talk to you sir thanks so much bye next up we have Morgan Housel coming in, a little bit switching gears. Well, I mean, geopolitic, geopolitics are in his wheelhouse. He was falsely accused of claiming that the U.S. would fall, remember? Oh, yeah. So we got to talk to him about that. Addresses allegations of being anti-America. So funny.

But we're excited to have Morgan on the show. He was great last time, and I'm sure we'll have a fantastic. And I'm excited to ask him about his new book. Oh, yeah. Art of Spending Money. Art of Spending Money. Well, welcome to the show, Morgan. How are you doing? Hey, guys. Good to see you. Great to have you on. Welcome back. It's been too long. Yeah, I mean, I want to start with the, with the accusations that you claim that America was in decline. I saw a viral post. I didn't

look at any of the replies, so I don't really know. What was the story there? It's weird, because everyone knows that things get exaggerated on the internet, if not just made up on the internet. When it happens to you, it's pretty strange. I went on the Diary of the CEO podcast. It aired, I think, a week or two ago. And we talked about tariffs. And I mentioned something about the fall in manufacturing jobs over the last 80 years, something to that extent.

And I had so many different asterisks of like, oh, well, part is technology. Some of it is offshore, et cetera, et cetera. And that got spun into Morgan Housel is predicting the collapse of America. And it's one of those just like, what? How does that even happen? And so I called the guy out. He deleted the post. but it's it's amazing to see when it happens to you personally because then you start

questioning every like how many times have I read a headline that said so-and-so predicts the collapse of America but and but they didn't or or some some you know some version of that so I'm not predicting the collapse of America I'm quite optimistic such a challenge right now there's so much long-form content that's created and we're also in this era of like clipping right the internet likes long-form content but it really likes long-form content but it really likes, you know, these short segments and sort of pulling out interesting moments. And we've had some issues with that already where, you know, we had, we had the CEO of perplexity on. And John asked him a hypothetical question about ads. And TechCrunch ran with this article saying that, you know,

perplexity planned to, you know, just jam a bunch of ads in their browser or something like that. And anyways, context is, is very important. Were you at, uh, were you at, uh, were you at, at the Berkshire annual meeting. No, this is the first one in four years I didn't go to. Awesome one to miss, right? Yeah. Yeah. How was what made you decide not to go this year?

Just family stuff, busy? I've got lots of other stuff going on. What's interesting is that I think I've been seven times. And the last four times I went, I didn't even go inside to the meeting. It's turned out to just be a place where there's so many like-minded people who go there. So several years ago, me and Brent B. Shore, and Patrick O'Shaughnessy and Shane Parrish all rented a house and hung out. And it was an awesome weekend, even though we didn't even go to the meeting.

So it's just been a place where there's so many collective people who have the same, same thoughts, same priorities to go and meet. That's great. Well, I wanted to, I mean, I reached out to have you on earlier this week because, obviously the news of Buffett, you know, stepping back at the end of the year to kind of get your reaction to it. It's one of those things. It's interesting dynamic.

where it feels like the most important sort of knowledge and wisdom in the world is sometimes become so widespread that people, sometimes people don't even pay enough attention to it. Even zero to one is one of those things. It has like, it's, it's one of the most popular business books in history, yet people kind of underestimate the value of it because it's just become, you know, the, ideas and it had become shared so broadly. So I wanted to have you on, you know, specifically to talk about kind of the ideas that, that you've, you know, most gravitated to from Buffett yourself. Some of the ones, I'm sure, are very widely, you know, understood and talked about. And then I'm

sure others that are a little bit more kind of under the radar. There's just so, there's so many good bits. So, yeah, I mean, the first is that to put his retirement into context, Buffett made his first investment before Pearl Harbor. And he started professionally managing money as a professional hedge fund manager when Harry Truman was president. So just to put like the context of how long he's been doing this is absurd. And then so there's two parts of that. One is like, yes, let the guy retire. He's 94. He's been going nonstop since he was 11. Like, come on. And then the other side of that is that's why he's successful. Yes, his annual returns are good. They were very good back in the 50s, 60s and 70s, he hasn't really outperformed in any meaningful sense in a quarter century, not a criticism,

because he has almost a trillion dollars in assets now. It's almost impossible to outperform when you're that big. But the point that is so easy to overlook is that, yes, he's been a good investor, but he's been a good investor for 80 years. And that is literally 99% of why he's been successful. So I made this point in my book, The Psychology of Money, that if Buffett retired at age 60, you would have never heard of the guy. He never would have been a household name. He would have retired with like 100 million bucks awesome he buys a yacht and a house in miami and lives happily ever after but no one would have ever heard of him the whole reason he's successful is because he's been going for so long and i forget who mentioned this i forget where i read this that apple is steve jobs

with a thousand lives that's what apple is like steve jobs built the company and then and then died but apple can live on because he built what it is and i think that's what berkscher's always been and buffett has talked about this that he wanted to build a company that would way outlast him And the irony is like he still last, he still ran the company for half a century or more. And so he lasted a long time, but it's going to keep going so far after he's gone, which is rare and unique.

And I also think of all the lessons that people like us try to learn from him, the wrong lessons that you can learn from Buffett is like, is how to pick stocks. I think that's probably the wrong lesson to learn because a lot of what he did in his heyday in the 60s and 70s just would not work today. It's a very different. world, different markets, faster information. It's just not transferable.

But the lesson of like he's successful because he stuck around for so long, even when he was so preposterously financially independent by, you know, hundreds of orders of magnitude, he kept going. And like that's something that ordinary people can stick around them. Like stick around long enough that you're going to let compounding actually work in your favor. I think that's probably the most pertinent takeaway for people. There's also so many entrepreneurs too who, when.

they talk about it. And I understand this. It's not a criticism because being a founder of a startup is so ridiculously hard and stressful. But for so many of them, the goal is we're going to build this company. We're going to scale this company. And we're going to sell it. And I get that. I don't look down upon that. But the huge massive results are for people who are like, I'm going to do this and I'm going to do it as long as I, as humanly possible that I can. Yeah, I have a bunch of follow-ups there. First up, Greg Abel, is he underrated? It's interesting because he's coming in. in his 60s. He looks like, you know, guy who could be retiring next year. But the culture of Buffett, you have to imagine that he's thinking, yeah, I got at least three more decades in here.

I'm just getting started. So what's your take on Greg Abel? I don't know if you've actually dug into his career at all, but I'd love to know kind of how you think the culture that Buffett created kind of lives on. Yeah, he's 60s, so he can run the company for 30 years and then run for president after that. That's how this works. That's the standard path. I think most people outside of Berkshire don't know that much about Greg Abel. He hasn't, he's not like Buffett has very intentionally, I think, been on kind of a media tour for the last 25 years. He goes on CNBC all the time. Of course, the annual meetings and the letters, like people know a lot about him. Greg Abel, people don't know that much about him other than that he's been at Berkshire for 25 years

and Buffett picked him as the obvious successor. What is known is that he's not a stock picker. And there's going to be people who get into a lot of trouble over the next five or 10 years who are like looking for Greg Abel stock picks. And they're not going to find them anywhere. He's an operator. He's a damn good operator. And that's important because Berkshire 30 or 40 years ago, its market cap was like half stocks.

Like that's like its portfolio was just public stocks that own Coca-Cola and Procter & Gamble and stuff. Today it's like less than 20%. So the majority of Berkshire are wholly owned operating businesses. And that's Greg's bread and butter. It's just like operating those. I think it's probably a very similar transition from Steve Jobs to Tim Cook. Steve Jobs was this like genius magician. And Tim Cook was just a stone cold operator.

And that's, I think that's what we're going through with Berkshire. You're going from like the wizard stock picker magician to the stone cold operator. And worked out great for Apple. It's just you have to keep your expectations in check, both because Berkshire's size and because of what Greg Gable's strengths are. it's not going to be. And Berkshire hasn't been this in 20 or 30 years, the place that's going to have like massive outperformance year after year. Yeah, I wonder about how much he needs to be a stock picker

because I totally understand the operator lens, but when you're looking at that $300 billion cash pile, it's like, what are you going to buy? Like a big oil company or something? Like you can do so much with that. So I'm sure that will be a challenge. I wanted to talk about the legacy of Warren Buffett a little bit. bit more. There was a retrospective in the Wall Street Journal that I kind of took issue with,

but I wanted to get your take. The author is talking about Buffett's remarkable recall. He estimates that Buffett read more than 100,000 financial statements. He famously reads books and seven newspapers and just reads constantly. And the author says, his unparalleled exposure to financial information combined with his prodigious memory made Buffett into a human form of artificial intelligence, he could answer almost any query out of his own internal database. That has given him an unparalleled ability to identify the kernel of significance in any new bit of information and a durable advantage over other investors. Now, and this is the controversial part in my mind, it says, now that AI is universally available,

a person with Buffett's massive command of data won't even have an advantage in the future. And I just don't know if that's true, but I want to know, do you think AI changes the landscape in a way that the Buffett strategy just doesn't work anymore. I think part of the problem with Buffett in the last 20 or 30 years is that his folksy grandpa demeanor hid the fact that he is off the charts intelligent. And most of the time when you think of like an Einstein kind of genius, like they have a certain look and they talk a certain way that and Buffett was not. That's what made him so popular as you felt you could relate to him.

But anyone who spent a lot of time with him, when he's not talking for the camera or writing in his folksy way will tell you, He is in a different universe of intelligence, particularly for money. And the reason he's successful is that since he's been 11 years old, he has spent 24 hours a day, seven days a week thinking about stocks and nothing else. And so it's less about the data that he knows, even though people will tell you those stories, that he can recall specific figures from a balance sheet from an annual report he read 20 years ago.

So there is like a just insane memory recall. But it's the pattern matching recognition in there. And then this other element that is way more important, which is his reputation. That's something that AI can't do. And so a lot of Buffett's biggest investments, certainly the most important ones, came from the fact that he had such a good reputation, that he could walk into a boardroom and just say, hey, I'd like to buy 10% of your company. And they were like, yes, name us your terms.

Like, we'd love to partner with Warren Buffett. And so that's less about intelligence or data and more about the reputation that he had. And I think if you, I think if Buffett were a jerk or a raider and had a reputation of stripping companies, he would not have been 5% as successful as he was. All the big deals came from people wanting to partner with him. Particularly like, think about 2008, the financial crisis. Every bank called him up and they were like, Warren, name your terms. Like just tell your terms. And he did it if Goldman Sachs and GE and Bank of America where he got these crazy deals that nobody else could have.

because of his reputation. And so I think there is a... It wasn't just that he had the liquidity, you're saying. Right. Yeah. There's a lot of liquidity in the world. There's a lot of people who can write a big check, not who can do it with that kind of reputation.

So I think there is a little bit of truth to that idea that the skill that he had of reading annual reports was so much more valuable in the 1970s than it is today because everyone's reading the same reports. There's bots that can scam them just instantly. but there's like that's not to say that anyone can be a Warren Buffett now. I think that's certainly a stretch. What do you think of the this narrative that the past decade of Berkshire is really just the story of Apple and there and again like kind of the stock pick there? They're at such a huge scale. Do you think

there's like a cultural shift towards more technology? Of course when Apple was already the most valuable company in the world and it still outperformed the market and drove fantastic returns. It seemed like a big shift at the time. At the same time, it panned out very well. Do you think that that represents like a significant change in the culture? I think what's interesting is that for having a reputation for decades of, I don't do tech. I don't do tech. I don't do tech.

Literally in dollar terms, Warren Buffett is the most successful tech investor ever. He made a hundred billion dollar profit on Apple. No one's even come close to that. And so is that like a change? you're an evolution. It is an evolution, but it's easy, it's easy to assume and it's wrong to assume that Buffett's been the same investor for 80 years. I think part of why he's been so successful is that every five or 10 years, he completely updated his operating system to have a different style, a different influence and to really adapt what was going on. And I think that there's only a

handful of investors who are like that, who have made money in different eras. There's a lot of investors who were very well suited for one era. They can make a lot of money for 10 years. but they couldn't keep it going because nine times out of ten it's because they didn't update their their thinking they were stuck on this world that didn't exist anymore and so there's a very long history of Buffett doing that in every 10 years doing things that he would not have 10 years before that yeah um are you familiar with that uh famous napkin diagram that Walt Disney drew showing how the parks relate to the film production relates to the merchandise have you seen that chart before No, but it sounds awesome.

Okay. So Walt Disney drew this big chart mapping the entire ecosystem of Disney and how everything works together. And it's cited as this example of like, oh, like, you know, build this business where everything feeds into the other piece and, you know, what is your Disney map? But I was digging into it and I realized that Disney made that chart 10 years before he died. Like he had already been building just in film for a decade and then 20 years to build the parks. Walt Disney born in 1903, I believe, the park didn't open until 55 and he died like shortly after. And so it was more like a reflection on what he had built as opposed to it was a map that was that was drawn after he had explored the territory. And so I'm wondering your take on this idea that like, um,

the idea of focus and the idea of empire building being something that can be charted beforehand versus has to be kind of naturally discovered and then can be potentially mapped after the fact. I think there's several historical examples of business, like very successful business people who had were product geniuses and terrible at business. Walt Disney was one of them. He was the product genius of all time. He was a terrible. businessman. Henry Ford was another. Henry Ford is the most successful mechanical engineer in history, and he was at best a mediocre businessman. There's so many of those like that. I would even say Steve Jobs might fall into that category of technological genius, design genius, very, at best,

mediocre business person, which is why you needed someone like Tim Cook. And I think there's, there's been quite a bit of that. But when the product is so good, you can take it in so many different directions. Disney is an interesting example of so many of the of the film IP that they had that was sitting on the shelf for decades. And when it was made, it was like, oh, people will watch this in the movie theater. That was the only medium that they could watch it on. And then the video cassette tape came along. And they're like, oh, we could sell all of this. And the DVD came along. They're like, oh, there's another avenue to sell it. And then streaming came along. And it was like, sky's the limit. So it was like the IP was so good that you didn't need a genius business

man to to come up with a distribution strategy like it was so good that it just kind of ran itself ford was was similar like the cars were so superior to anything else that even if henry ford was making blunder after blunder the company kept going just fine and so i think i think a lot of times when you have like a very long running business it's less because they made phenomenal business decisions and more just because the product that they made was so phenomenal that they could keep it going if an idiot ran apple it would still sell a zillion iPhones every single year. But there's only a handful of companies that are like that. I want to talk about the book out October 7th. Do you have a log line or like what, what is the

one line pitch? Then how can you unpack the different title is the title is the pitch? The title is the pitch. But can you say can you break it down in a little bit more detail? A little bit detail. The book is not called the science of spending money because I don't think that exists. There's no way of saying here's how you should do it. That's going to work for me and work for you. Even if we're similar people. Just like spending is very individualistic. So I call it the art of spending money because art is different from person to person. It's, it's subjective.

It's often contradictory. And so rather than telling you what to do, I don't want to lecture anyone. But the book is a look at envy and social aspiration and keeping up with the Joneses and becoming fulfilled and getting attention and watching other people. It's kind of like the psychology of spending money, which I, which has always been. in like so much of what I write is just trying to figure out my own life. So I looked at instances where I was clearly, it's hard to admit, but like when I was clearly envious and when I was clearly trying to get people's attention and just when you dig a

couple layers below that, like why? Like who's attention am I trying to get? Is that person even paying attention to me? Do they even care? Was giving that attention like taking away from other parts of my life? There's so many different layers to dig through. And I think those things are universal. Even if what you're spending money on is not a science, the psychology of it tends to be pretty universal. So it's just a look at that. That was more than one sentence. I have to hone that a little bit sharper, but that's it. That's great. I mean, is there a key anecdote or story or even just like case study that you think is the most tractable for people to grab onto? I think about, you know, all the emotion that goes into the identity tied to the

car that you drive or the house that you buy. But what what what case studies are you pulling from to kind of ground the lessons in something that anyone can understand who's reading the book. I don't know if this is the best case study, but it was one that I thought was so interesting. I read the biography of Harvey Firestone from Firestone Tire. He was the tire magnet like 120 years ago whenever he lived. And he has this part in his biography where he says, every single successful person that he knows, including himself, when they became rich, they bought a giant mansion. And every single one of them, to a T, hated it. It was a pain in he asked to run. It was, it was, you know, when your house is 17 bedrooms, it's just more roof to leak,

more radiators to break. And he was like, everyone hates it, but all of them do it. Every single one of them does it. And even when they hate the house, they never sell it and get a small house. And he had this line that I loved. And he said, there is no going back except as a broken man. It's like, once you inflate your lifestyle, you cannot deflate. Even if you hate the inflated lifestyle, you cannot go backwards because it becomes so synonymous with your identity. It's like the size of your house is who you are. I thought that was pretty interesting. And he was like the equivalent of a billionaire living in a mansion.

It's not a very relatable example. But I think there's so much of that that if we spend money on something and it doesn't make us happy, it's very hard to rewind. So be like, be really careful when you're inflating your lifestyle because it's very easy to go forward. It's extremely hard to go back. How much time have you spent or are you putting any attention in the book towards the way that San Francisco and the tech industry spend money? industry spend money. I've always been, you know, fascinated by it, given how much, uh, just this dichotomy between extreme wealth and this, uh, in many ways desire. One glass box, please. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Or this desire to, um, you know, be, uh, and it's,

it's good in many ways, right? If tech, if, if, imagine that the negative attention that the technology industry would have gotten if every, uh, you know, series C, you know, founder in San Francisco was like driving a Lamborghini, right? It would have been, it would have been, it would have been, um, I think, I think, I think there's part of that that they can't spend a lot of money because it's not liquid. Like they're rich on paper, but there's not a lot of liquid wealth in San Francisco. I mean, there is, but it's all, it's all relative. But I, but even that is a sense of social signaling. Like, if people know that you're rich and you are going out of your way to live an austere lifestyle, that, that might be because it'll make you happier. It might also be because that's

the signal that you're trying to send. That's like those are your peacock feathers. Buffett's the best example of this. I mean, you have to spend some time on, on Buffett in the book of just intentionally. Yeah. But then like I kind of twisted because Mark Zuckerberg was famously driving like a corolla for a while. But then Sam Bankman-Fried at FTX kind of used that as window dressing to be like, oh, I'm the altruistic billionaire. I only, I just drive a beater car. Right. And of course, he had like a mansion in the Bahamas and a bunch of other stuff that he was like wasn't pointing the camera at. And Mark Zuckerberg's interesting because he famously drove the Acria for whatever for many years.

And now he just bought a half billion dollar yacht. So it all comes around eventually. Yeah. He's also evolved his taste in cars a lot where he could buy a supercar, but I believe the most recent car he bought was a Cadillac CTSV Blackwing, which is like a $100,000 sports car. But it's not a half a million dollar sports car, but it's an American, you know, muscle car.

It's like very fun and very different. So he's clearly finding his own path in expressing himself in a more unique way than just like one rich guy car please. And so I think he's probably happier and like carved out a unique niche. And I feel like that's often a better place to land is not just don't just buy the most expensive thing. It's okay to buy the expensive thing if it's craft and it's interesting to you and it has a story and it has relevancy or performance. But it needs to like speak to you in some unique way that actually, you know, improves your life. I don't know. What's your most irrational?

purchase. I know you've talked in psychology of money that you paid cash for your house or you don't have a mortgage, I believe. But what else is potentially irrational? I don't know if this is irrational, but it's what I think about a lot. I grew up skiing as a competitive ski racer. And when I was 10, 12, 13 years old, I always felt like all my friends had better gear than I did. They had the nicer skis, the newer jacket and whatnot. And back then it bothered me. When I was 13, I was like, I was so envious of them. And so now, and obviously I got over that. But now that my son, he's nine now, we ski a lot together. And I think because of the scars that I had for my friends having nicer stuff, I made this vow a couple years ago. I was like, I'm going to buy my son the best

skier. Every year he's going to get the best skis, the best boots, the best jacket. And I'm doing that to kind of like fill this hole that I had when I was a young kid. And the irony about it is he could care less. He does not care whatsoever what gear he has. And so that's interesting too. Like I think there's always a story behind well spending for me it's like he doesn't care because he has no he doesn't care because he's so all he knows is the best right is that isn't it like I feel like I feel like if if I buy him a new pair of skis I expect him to be like oh wow let me look at these are so cool because that's what I would have done and I get him and he's like this doesn't doesn't matter whatsoever no I can totally resonate with that though I remember growing up skiing snowboarding I would I would always have a snowboard that was like. three seasons old, lightly used. And it was like the practical decision. It was $50. It got you down the mountain just pretty much as well as anything else.

But then I'd be watching the Burton videos. And it's like, you know, looking at these. And I'd be just running the numbers. I'm like, I would have to ref 400 soccer games to get, you know, that board with those bindings. It's like, I'm gonna ref like 10 games this weekend, but I'm not gonna get there.

Yeah, I was skiing at some point. I got too tall for regular. skis and so they needed to they were like you have to go to custom skis if you want to be really in this and I was like I'm switching to scuba diving like you know whales are big enough for the ocean I'll be big enough for the ocean it's fine I do have one last question do you have one I have one last too but um yeah you go switching I hate to switch back but on the art of spending money what is the what do the real uh Berkshire enthusiasts think that or what is Berkshire signaled around how they're going to spend $300 billion or whatever their current cash pile is? Because I feel like the general market sentiment is that, you know,

Berkshire is preparing for the next, you know, next time great companies go on sale due to some crisis. But I'm curious if you have any sort of insight there. I think, you know, the list of companies that you could acquire for $100 billion is not a very long list, but there is a lot. list. Like, it's, it's not inconceivable that Berkshire can make a hundred billion dollar acquisition. I've often thought that Bloomberg, the media company, like, that would be a perfect Bloomberg fit. It's probably worth about $100 billion. Or that would be perfect for Berkshire. And then Berkshire is so big, it's a trillion dollar market cap. They could probably repurchase $100 billion of stock. It might take three or four years, but they could do it. There's enough

liquidity there. So you could spend $200 billion. Like, that's pretty conceivable. The big question for me is once Buffett is gone and passed away and his his stake in Berkshire is more dispersed, then you could, there's room for an activist investor to come in. Right now you can't have an activist at Berkshire because Buffett owns too much. He would just tell him to go away and then it's over. Once Buffett's majority's voting stake or like big voting stake is gone, then it's interesting, will Bill Ackman or one of those guys come in and say, we want you to do a $200 billion dollar special dividend. We want you to spin off this and that and that. I hope that doesn't happen, but you can very easily see it happen, particularly if people aren't going to give Greg, you know,

a five-year leash to prove his way. If the results aren't there in two or three years, you'll probably have people knock at the door. And so having that pressure, I hope he doesn't have pressure to deploy that $300 billion of cash, knowing that if he doesn't, someone's going to come knock at the door and threaten his job or tell him to spend off this or that. So, You said he's not a stock picker either, so he's not exactly just going to go out and be like, okay, I'm going to start deploying this and, you know, that way, right? It feels like it has to be more significant. Yeah.

Yeah. I have another question, but we'll have to do it next time. This is great joining. Leaving us all hanging, John, come on. I know it's just going to turn into a whole conversation and we can do a whole other 30 minutes. So why don't we just do another 30 minutes in a couple weeks? Let's do it. I'll see you then.

Morgan, we love chatting with you. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for a great Friday. We'll talk to you soon. Bye. Here's the run of today's show. We have Sonia from Sequoia coming in the studio next. Sequoia just hosted the AI Ascent Conference,

with an absolutely stacked roster, some of the greatest programmers, some of the greatest entrepreneurs in artificial intelligence, or really just in history, all coming together. We saw a fantastic jacket swap between Alfred Lynn and Jensen Wong. And I'm excited to talk to her

about trends in artificial intelligence and what is happening in both the early stage and mid-stage startup market, obviously, as venture capitalist. She is investing in a lot of interesting stuff today. So welcome to the stream, Sonia. So good to meet you. Thanks for having me. You know, Alfred was bummed.

His jacket was Hermes and he was sad to lose it. And I was like, don't worry. I think you got the better trade here. Oh, wait. So that was a permanent swap. He gets to take it home? Permanent swap. Wow.

Okay. That's fantastic. Yeah, it needs to be framed. I mean, it's iconic, iconic. Yeah, I mean, I want to buy a leather jacket just so if I'm ever in the same room, I have something to swap. We'll get you the dates. Don't worry. Fantastic.

Yeah, give me the rundown of AI Ascent. Is this something that happens every year? Was this year special? Obviously, it's a, you know, a bigger trend than ever. Who were some of the interesting speakers? Give us the other year. Yeah. Well, I'll give you the origin story. I'll take us back a bit.

We invested in OpenAI back in 2021. So this was back when it was very much, you know, it was a few guys using the API. Definitely no chat GPT yet. But we just felt like they had invented magic. And we wanted to make sure that our portfolio companies would be kind of the first to be able to see that, play with it, and transform their own businesses. And so we set up a field trip, actually, for like 40 of our portfolio companies to go visit OpenAI back in May 2022. And so it was like pre-chat GPT moment.

And everyone loved that field trip. It was like people were, you know, playing with Dali for the very first time. You know, this was when there was no public access yet, starting to build with GPT3. And so our founders loved it, both for like the inspiration element of like, oh my gosh, we are in the belly of the beast of the thing that is building the, building the magic. But also like from a very tactical perspective, like here's how we should be using this stuff to transform our businesses. And so founders loved it. They asked, you know, can we bring this back next year? I honest, I'm not like a party thrower.

I like hate throwing events. And so I was like, oh, man, do we have to do it again? But everyone wanted to do it. So we did our first kind of non-opening eye specific event. and more across the entire ecosystem the following year. That was like right after the chat Chippita moment. And so those are third year throwing that event in a row. We've had amazing speakers.

Sam Altman has spoken at every event. We've had Jensen twice. We've had, even the audience is incredible. Like in our opening talk, we kind of called out what we viewed as the biggest AI product innovations of the year. And you know, we had notebook LM, deep research, Sesame. I think some of the biggest like innovations,

those people were all just happened to be sitting in the audience. It was just like a lot of firepower in one room. That's great. That's amazing. What are the top kind of discussions that people are debating right now? I mean, from talking to people on the show, this idea of like the pre-training wall, needing to move into more RL-focused techniques to kind of get the next level of breakthroughs. Is that the right question to even be asking were people debating it?

And do you have a take on the idea of like this hitting a pre-training wall? Yeah, totally. So we had Noam Brown speak at last year's AI sent, and we had Dan Roberts this year. They're both on Open AI's strawberry team. And we had actually gotten a preview of this from Noam, actually before he even joined Open AI. And so he had done a lot of research historically

in AI gameplay. And if you take the lesson from Go, for example, with AlphaGo, which I think was one of the seminal results in reinforcement learning, the top humans are like a 3,500 ELO at Go. The best bots were like 3,000, before you give them access. to inference time compute. But if you actually let the model actually sit and think for a minute before it places its piece,

you can get that ELO up to 5500 points. So like way better than superhuman. And so the key insight there is like to get roughly the same order of performance, once you've like it's diminishing marginal returns on multiple vectors, right? But once you've kind of like hit diminishing marginal returns on one vector pre-training, if you start scaling post-training from there, and I'm sorry, specifically inference time compute, you can get like 100,000 X scale up and performance there. So we're just starting to climb that second curve.

I think opening eye deserves a ton of props for like seeing that and like investing decisively behind it. Because I think if you talked to a lot of research in the ecosystem, like one, a few years ago, it wasn't even obvious that the lessons from AlphaGo could even apply to the LLM world. And so, you know, like if you went to visit research labs a few years ago, it was like there's the RL group and there's the LLM group. and they're not the same people, and it's very different. And I think I think know them and various other people, like, really push forward that vision. And I think Sam invested heavily behind a reasoning infrastructure, because the hard thing is like scaling up reasoning infrastructure is different

from scaling up pre-trading infrastructure. And when I talk to my friends, a lot of them have joined certain labs like OpenEI, XAI, that have really invested ahead in reasoning infrastructure because it is such an important vector for scale. Yeah, I was always wondering about the AlphaGo pre-Gue. training kind of scaling law and wondering like, okay, we have all this major compute. What happens if we go back and train AlphaGo on 100,000 H-100s? Like, are we going to get even better or really have we actually topped out? And it sounds like it sounds like we basically did and we like kind of learn that lesson.

But is that a refutation of scale is all you need kind of the bitter lesson? Or do you see it as just a continuation of that theme that we will need to continue scaling and it will just be new algorithmic paradigm on top of what we have and then scale that and then another one and then scale that and then scale that because it sounds like, you know, when I hear 100,000 X improvement in test time compute or inference time compute, that sounds like a lot of data centers. Yeah, it's a lot of data centers. I'm very much in AGI maxi, like pro, pro, bitter lesson.

And I think that this is, you know, just another vector that we're going to scale. on it. And it's not like pre-training is dead, right? It's like you kind of like, you know, from an economics one-on-one perspective, you go to like, where is the lowest marginal cost of the incremental unit of intelligence? And so right now, a lot of that is on reasoning, but I think it's going to break to other vectors as well. Are you seeing that in image and diffusion as well? It feels like the images in chat GPT is doing something different. It feels like they're layering a few different techniques together. I was playing with the text and trying to get, like the text is so good now, but I was trying to get like a snake to weave in and out of the text

and it was kind of getting confused. And I was like, I feel like there's some layers going on here or something. I'm trying to like kind of understand it. And I'm just wondering like, you know, we might be past just like the big transformer paradigm of LLM and text responses in the reasoning era. Are we evolving past the big diffusion model in image generation as well? So I'm not a researcher, but I get to talk to a lot of smart researcher friends. My understanding is that it's a combination of a transformer or diffusion architecture. And I think that most people don't believe that diffusion models will fully get us there, whereas transformers have a lot more juice in them.

And so even if you look at, it's not just image, it's video, it's robotics. A lot of those have transformers as their backbone. But I do think, like, you know, there's so much that's happening in like the harness around it, right? what is the for loop that you run the model in? What tools do you give it access to? We did a little pull at AI a sense of like what innovation is going to drive the most amount of progress in the AI ecosystem in the next 12 months. And like the biggest answer was MCP and tool use and forming an ecosystem around that. So I think like the models themselves get smarter, but they're also surrounded by a big ecosystem.

On MCP, how are you viewing that as a position in the market. Is it just a standard? Is it just an API? Is it, is it a framework? Or will there be companies that build around it? Is there, are there going to be open source frameworks that then we find a red hat Linux of MCP? And it winds up being a big company, even though it's mostly open source. How are you thinking about that from an investor's perspective? Yeah, I very much see it as a protocol and like something for the industry to standardize on. And so I think there are obviously some benefits of the crew to anthropic from having steered that. But I think it being an open standard is really important. And, you know, that's why a lot of

the big other, a lot of the other big model labs are standardizing behind it as well. And so I think it's a net positive for the ecosystem. There's a bunch of startups spinning up trying to make money off of it in some way. I don't know if I'm really bullish on any of them really having a shot at it. I mean, I think there's certain people that have, you know, if you have an infrastructure advantage and for some reason, like Cloudflare, for example, is making a big play. Then like maybe I buy that. But if you're, a small startup trying to spin up a MCP shop. I just don't really see the right to win. Yeah, maybe the value accrues to like McKinsey coming in and saying like,

hey, we're going to help you implement an MCP server for your existing Fortune 500 company or something. Was there any interesting conversations around benchmarks? And do you think they were talked about more or less than the last year? I would say like this is an audience that like very much, you know, knows that the benchmarks exist and like doesn't really care too much about them. We ran a poll of like, you know, if you only use one model for the rest of your life, what would it be? And like open AI by far, number one, more than 50% share. Even though like if you look at where they are in the model leaderboards, they're like, you know, they're not there on LM Arena.

And so I think there's a little bit of a, the benchmarks aren't really, you know, they're saturated. They're not really the vibes test. I think people care a lot more about the vibes test right now. Well, yeah, just end user value, right? Yeah. Well, speaking of benchmark, do you have a take? on the Manus investment that's kind of burning up the internet right now. Oh, man.

Seems like an odd choice in 2025. I don't know if you looked at the deal. I'll give you a hot take. John, apparently the U.S. Treasury is examining a benchmark capital's ties to Manus. So feel free to pass on the question if you don't want to talk about it. I will say they've built really cool tech. I think like the doubles in the details for like what exactly, you know, where's user data,

et cetera. And I would imagine that they did their homework, but I don't know. Yeah. Switching gears, the big story this week around Open AI, obviously, after the event was the new CEO, specifically coming in to focus on applications. I'm curious, you know, if you could highlight any of the kind of conversations around value accrual. You know, Sam, I think, has been pretty explicit in the past that if you're building products with the assumption that the models are going to contain. can you rapidly get better? You're probably in a good spot. If you're not, you know, maybe you're going to struggle or get made redundant at some point. But I'm curious what the general kind of vibe was around around that. Yeah, I would say like, I mean, you know,

the memetic cry in the, in the venture ecosystem right now was just like the value is in the application layer, the values in the application layer. I actually have a great meme on this. We had the, um, the meme on like the values in the application layer. And then we had Jensen in the audience and I just had a picture of Jensen on top of Scrooge McDuck just raking in all the dollars. But like I agree, like we very much think values in the application layer and it depends how you want to play it, right? I think that like there's there's going to be a place at least in the near term for

vertical agents applied to a very specific sector. And like we've we've a bunch of those companies are portfolio. Sierra Harvey open evidence. I think that what the foundation models have proven though, which was debatable, a couple years ago is that they have every right to win the application layer. And so it wouldn't have been obvious that, you know, a company building foundation models could like figure out the application magic. But like Chat Chbitty is like a, to me, it's like a runaway freight train

in terms of consumer adoption. Some of the metrics they've published like 300 to 500 million weekly active year-to-date. It's just, it's phenomenal user growth. One of the things that Sam shared at our conference in terms of how people are using chat Chipi was really interesting to me. If you're old, you're using it as a Google replacement. So I'm old. If you're in your 20s, your 30s, people tend to be using it as like more of a life advisor, life coach type thing.

And then if you're really young, like the youths are using Chat Chupitia as an operating system. And I found that framework really interesting. And, you know, especially in combination with like they're clearly building things around memory, around tool use, around connecting to your other applications. it really does feel like, you know, if you're a young person and like really, really connecting chat GPT and like mind melding with it, that use case seems really interesting to me. And so like if you, if you, you know, if you think that Google us front door to the internet and $2 trillion dollar market up company, right? It feels to me that chat GPT is in many consumers' minds that front door to AI. And as what AI can do, as the ceiling on that goes up, we just like each deepen our product usage. A couple years ago at the first AI sent, I posted this chart of like the ratio of daily

to monthly active users for chat GPT and some of the other kind of mainstream mobile apps. And the punchline at the time was like usage is terrible. Like people are like it was like a 14% down mal if I remember. It was like people kick the tires a little bit and then churn. And we've been like tracking from externally from data science signals just like seeing those downmail ratios increase. It's pretty crazy.

Like, demo is now in line with Reddit. It's approaching Google levels. And so, like, if you think about Reddit being like a super engaged, like, you know, you're in there having like multiple conversations, you see that same behavior both anecdotally and in the data for chat, GPT. And so to your question, where will value accrue? We think it's in the app layer. I think a lot of the horizontal app layer opportunity will be won by foundation models like

like OpenAI, like XAI. And then a lot of the companies we're backing are going after a very specific, product opportunity. Are you particularly bullish on enterprise application as independent? I'm thinking about like Google very much one consumer search, but, you know, in legal there was Lexis Nexus and then Palantir helps, you know, the government's search through datasets. And there's all these different enterprise use cases that Google wasn't able to go after.

We were even talking about Armada, which is an enterprise, like, you know, service on built on Starlink. The Starlink team has dominated in consumer. but, you know, the enterprise needs of certain enterprises is just too unique. And so there's actually a business to build there. And that seems like it maps with your strategy most recently. But what do you think? Totally.

I think the enterprise war feels like it is like, you know, we're in the first inning still. It's not clear who's going to win yet. I think, you know, in our portfolio, like Glean, for example, has done a really amazing job as like a horizontal chat chit-a-like platform that kind of connects to all your enterprise data. But then it's like a question of like, how deep do you need to go? like, you know, Harvey has a ton of legal case specific data or Sierra has a ton of like customer support specific data on workflows. And so I think there's, you know, the enterprise AI battlefield is very much a work in progress at this time. I think like the shape of workflows and problems is like so diverse in the enterprise that like my guess is a lot of these companies will be successful.

Yeah. How are you thinking about humanoid robotics? I've talked to there's a lot of high flying companies that feel like it's mostly rent. at this point. There are some really amazing researchers working on stuff. I'm personally waiting not to see the demo of one humanoid walk around, because we've seen those with Boston Dynamics for decades. I want to see the satellite photo of the data center that's getting built out to do a massive

training run for an end-to-end robotics model, and I haven't seen that yet. Is that the right signal to be looking for for takeoff in humanoid robotics, or should there be something else that I'm tracking as we go into this like humanoid rollout, which it feels like it could be tomorrow or it could be two decades away. It doesn't feel like tomorrow to me. I'm going to say the same thing. I'm being generous. There's a lot of CEOs out there who say it is tomorrow. But let's just say I think the humanoids are a lot closer than we may think they are. Okay. And it's like I thought this stuff was science fiction and I've talked to a lot of smart people who have told me and shown me things that have made me realize like, wow, this is

probably on the time, like, I would guess in like two or three years, the stuff will be in tens of thousands of households at least, maybe. Households? Yeah. Wow. And that actually echoes kind of like the timelines from, I think Sam sat on stage that, you know, we had Jim Fan from in a video on the show. He like, he's like, you know, there's the, there's the digital touring test. Like, you don't know if it's a human behind the, uh, the computer or not, or not, sorry, a computer or a human behind the screen when you're talking to it. It's like the physical touring test is, you know, when you leave your house and it's a mess in the morning and you come back and it's like it's all perfect and all cleaned up.

And like he also thinks we're about to get there. For him, like a huge part of the breakthrough is going to be synthetic data pipelines. Sure. And so like robotics unlike LLM, like you just don't have internet scale data to train on. But like one of the amazing things about what's happening in AI right now is just like with LLMs, but also more specifically with these generative world models, you can generate tens of thousands of variations of the same environment to simulate and these robots can get better

and break through that data barrier extremely quickly. And so I was personally like a robot bear for the longest time and talked to a bunch of very smart people in robotics over the last week, and I flipped. I feel like the humanids are coming. And in terms of capital-intensiveness of like actually getting there in a few years, Obviously, it's very expensive to build a factory that produces robots, but do you think we're also going to see raises from humanoid robotics companies that are where, you know, a ton of the raise goes into Nvidia GPUs to build a huge data center to train some massive model? Because, yeah, I agree with you on the synthetic data.

You could wind up with web scale, you know, trillions of tokens like we've seen with the GPT4 training run. I think it's going to be extremely capital intensive. And it reminds me of autonomous vehicles five plus years ago where, like, you know, at the end of the day, like, we have Waymo's and we have Tesla driving around. Those companies had enormous economic engines to support the development. I think the same is happening with humanoid right now. And so my guess would be it's like it's going to, it's not just Nvidia GPUs, it's everything, right? Because you're co-developing the hardware. You still have to collect a ton of data on actions.

And so it's it's a ton of spend everywhere. Yeah, I mean, huge trends in AI broadly, it feels like all the metrics are up into the right. At the same time, valuations are very high. What's your overall take on the venture market? Are we in a bubble right now? Can there ever be too much venture capital? All the key questions. Never, John.

Never. There's too much venture capital already. Look, I'll say a lot of companies are raising on what I'd call vibe revenue right now. And it's like it's like it's like it's, you know, pilots. being counted as revenue. It's like really, really terrible retention stuff. And so like, once you peel past that, I think there's like a cohort of companies that are like growing high quality revenue at the highest pace that we've ever seen. And that includes, like, you know, I mentioned Open AI before, but it's also companies like Glean and Harvey and Sierra and all these

companies. And so to the extent, like valuation is a function of like how much of you de-risk, how much product market fit do you have? Like, what is your, what is the growth rate of your, of your business? and what is the ultimate TAM potential. I think these AI companies are demonstrating just, you know, growth rates outside of what we've ever seen before. And then TAM potential, like, because it is very much, you're selling into, you know, if you're able to get outcomes-based pricing,

you're selling into a services replacement, not a tools replacement. It's a TAM in the trillions, right? Okay, but, yeah. Sorry to interrupt you on that point. Something I'm curious about is, is, so, yes, if you have an AI tool that can replace services spend, you can capture some you can whatever ideally capture a lot of that no market but the thing i keep

coming back to and maybe this isn't the right way to think about it but you're you're not simply competing with uh end humans that are delivering that services a company will also be competing with other AI tools that have you know a similar cost structure so does that not over time just drive the that the sort of dollar amount that you can capture just down to something that looks more like a software market. We have this debate all the time, so I'm glad you bring it up. I think it really depends. Like if what you're doing is like, you know, really low switching costs, really low

differentiation above what the models provide, like, yeah, I think that margin's going to get competed down. And so I think that's why we've historically debated a lot of these GPT wrapper companies. I think that, you know, if you're building something that's really hard to build or that's integrating into a customer base that wants to choose an AI champion and move on with life, which, by the way, happens. We just did a bunch of references in the healthcare transcription market. You talk to these healthcare CIOs.

They're like, I'm choosing one transcription vendor. I am not ripping that thing out for the rest of my life. And so I think there's nuances to the stickiness of these things. I work with a company called Gong, and they do, you know, they're a sales AI company. And the theory was all like always like transcription. Love it. We love gongs on the show. You baited us.

It's a huge part of the brand. Oh my gosh, it's amazing. And they have such a burky brand too. There's so many gongs around their office. But like the theory was always like transcription should commoditize. And I think that very much hasn't happened. And like sales teams standardized on them. They standardize their processes on them.

They train all their reps on it. And like it has all your data. So like I think the theory of how you build modes is, is different from like rubber meets the road in terms. of like how these companies in practice do build the modes. But like I think you are in a run like hell business because there's so, you know, there's, you know, we backed it. We backed an AI DevOps company like an AI troubleshooter.

There's four other companies that are trying to do the same thing right now. And so like we are kind of in like a run like hell segment of the market right now. How do you think about private equity stepping into the AI race? We've seen a few venture backed approaches where the idea is like instead of the Harvey approach, let's buy law firms. And we've seen even in the pre, about a decade ago, Justin Kahn was working on Atrium, this kind of like tech-powered law firm,

where it was a law firm. But Harvey's made the choice not to, but what is your take on private equity dipping their toe into more venture-scale opportunities and venture investors starting to look more at private equity-style roll-up deals? Yeah. Well, so I came from private equity,

so this is something I think about a lot. I think it makes a ton of sense, and it's a continuation of the private equity play, right? A lot of the investments I did in PE only worked because you took 20% of the cost out. And so now you have a much better tool to go and do that. But like it very much is the playbook and it's what they're best in class at. And so do I expect that they'll be great at adding, you know, AI to the arsenal for how they get those margins up? Absolutely. I think that, you know, when I think of the businesses that I'm excited to invest in, it's like, okay, at the end of the day, it's who's creating gross profit.

gross profit dollar creation. And you can choose to do that by investing in the billion dollar revenue company and taking their cost down 10%, or you can choose to do that by backing that amazing DevTools founder that knows how to build, like, the AI Native DevTools company that's going to create $100 million of gross profit off the bat. And so, like, I very much personally like to invest in the founders that are kind of creating net new revenue dollars

and net new gross profit dollars, but like multiple ways to play. I will say, like, you know, I had to really retrain my brain when I went from private equity to venture and just, I mean, everything, like the way you operate is just so different. And so I do think it takes a different type of culture to operate a roll-up or a cost-out strategy versus invest in startups. And so while I agree with the strategy of PE firms doing their thing and venture firms doing their thing, I have a question mark on the blurring of the core competencies. How do you think about the different businesses that Sequoia's running right now from early stage, growth stage, beyond.

How do all these things play together in the strategy? We've seen some venture firms even dip their toe into general catalyst, buying a hospital network. Lots of people are thinking outside the box these days. There's the crossover funds. What do you think Sequoia does best, and what are you excited about in the future? We're not buying any hospital chains yet.

Okay. I would say, like, if you think of our strategy, it's like it's seed to IPO and beyond for, like, the most ambitious entrepreneurs in the world. And so sometimes we're able to catch them early at the seed, like Airbnb, like Stripe. And sometimes we catch them later on in their journey. But the point of adding additional kind of pools of capital to our fund strategy has been when we find a winner in our portfolio, for example, take like a SpaceX.

We want to be able to invest a lot of money behind that company as it goes on its journey. And the reason for the Sequoia Capital Fund is like even after these companies go public, We think a lot of that return is still to be had. And so we've modified our structure over the years to be able to support these companies as they grow and become later stage and go public. But ultimately, it's invest at the earliest point of conviction and ideally that's up the seed. Makes sense. Do you expect to see more? Sam had some interesting sort of quotes over the last week or so.

I don't know exactly when they were happening talking about the cost. Sam Altman, the Sam. Sam, which other, sorry to the other Sam. Sorry to the other Sam lesson. Yeah, yes. No, he, the quote to summarize it was, or the line was something to the effect of the cost of AI or the cost of intelligence will just converge on the cost of energy or electricity. And I'm curious, you guys had Chase from Crusoe talk.

And I'm curious if you think that that is a potential area that you expect to see more net new, early stage startups exploring because it probably hasn't got enough. You used to have nuclear. What we talking about with Sean McGuire? We were saying like there is no Elon of energy yet, but it feels like the last massive, massive market that no tech founder has really gone and dominated in kind of the founder mode way. We were talking about big oil. There's still a bunch of huge companies. can't name any of their CEOs. They're not really in founder mode.

They're kind of boring and maligned, and it feels like there's an opportunity there. But yeah, sorry, that's a lot. No, I mean, it's a great question. We had Chase from Crusoe on our podcast, and I will, I'll put in the bet that Chase might be that E1-like figure. He shares the stats that were amazing to me. And it's like, I'd always kind of thought about AI from the,

oh, I can generate cool Jubilee images perspective. But I didn't realize the extent of like the sheer extent of the industrial buildouts that is happening to support all of that. And so Chase shared, like, if you look at like typical data centers today, like 20, 40 megawatt data centers, like the biggest data centers of the world are in Northern Virginia, or sorry, in the U.S. or in northern Virginia. The aggregate capacity is four and a half gigawatts there. Chase at Crusoe himself has 20 gigawatts in pipeline right now, more than two gigawatts built out. And so like the sheer scale of the buildout right now is just like nothing that we've supported in the past. And the bottlenecks are moving around.

So like people, it's actually impossible to get chips now. a lot of that is easing. And power is the new bottleneck. And so this is why there's so much happening in West Texas right now in Abilene, where they just have this like massive overbuild of renewables, especially with wind. And so like I think very much you'll see a lot of the AI buildouts following, following power and energy because that ultimately is the binding constraint right now.

It's a lot of sense. This is great. This has been fantastic conversation. Come back on all over the place. But we'd love to have you back. This is so amazing. Come to our AI party next year. And I heard you were asking Andrew about swag.

We have these amazing scented candles. I actually have one on my desk. We have these scented candles. I'll send one your way. It was evidence that I didn't know our audience at all, but I enjoyed the sunned candles very much. I love scented candles. Mother's Day is coming up.

I know. That's the perfect gift. Your segment on the Himalayan Berkin, I was like, I love these guys. They're going to be flying off the shelves. Yeah, yeah. After we do this show. Everyone's going to go and we get one.

Anyway, thank you so much for stuff. Thanks for coming on. We'll talk to you soon. Have a great. Bye. Next up, we got Will from Slow Ventures. The other side of Slow Ventures, Sam Lesson's business partner, obviously. He's been on the show many times.

We had to swap him out. We're replacing Sam with Will from Slow Ventures. Very excited to have him on the show. I've been digging into a bunch of those questions. I still want to know more about the robotics timeline. I'm going to try and dig into that. I still need to know how I need to talk to more researchers about how, images in chat chachy pt works because i feel like there's something going on there uh you know you see

it with the uh with the text models that there's very clearly uh you know certain filters running on top you get these weird rejections with the images where sometimes it will like just the studio gibley thing is bizarre because studio gibley is real intellectual property studio gibley is a real company. And when you say that, it doesn't say, hey, this violates our intellectual property rules. But if you ask it to generate a picture of Superman, it'll say, hey, that's copyrighted. And so I'm wondering if Open AI did a deal with Studio Ghibli behind the scenes or something, or maybe there's some definition of how the IP shakes out. But hopefully going to have a lot more AI researchers and investors on the show to kind of answer some of the bigger questions that I

have. But in the meantime, we're continuing to yap about. venture capital with a venture capitalist welcome to the stream well good to have you here boom are we live are we doing this oh we're live yeah hit the soundboard every five seconds for this one we need to raise the energy in the studio we got to go venture capitalist yaps about venture capital every time we're slow we we go crazy with the kairn uh expect some expect some wild wild kairon going on it's friday but we're not letting the energy go down how's your friday I'm all good, man. I'm about to amp up.

I got this. I got a few more things to get out. Then we got two Little League games this afternoon. So we're just getting going here. Fantastic. Yeah. And we're coming up on the playoffs. So it's a big Little League game.

Are you a screamer? Are you, are you a coach? No, I'm a coach. The ref. I'm a coach. Yeah, yeah. Okay.

You are the ref. The other guys yell at you. I'm a Zend out coach. I'm a Zend out. I'm a Zend out coach. That's my philosophy. That's good. Anyway, what's up, boys?

Great to see you. Have you ever been thrown out of a game? No. No, I had a dad who was a screamer. I had a dad. No, no, I had a dad who I loved dearly. We were best friends. But he was a yeller at the rest.

And so I kind of swore that off a long time ago. Adaptive, learned, improvised over time. Hey, when I coached, actually, when I coach Waterpolo, I did get thrown off. I got thrown out of a game when I was coaching high school varsity water polo because I was being too sarcastic. I wasn't, I wasn't yelling, but I was too sarcastic and the referee didn't. appreciate that. Anyway, you guys look great. I almost plus my suit out, but it wasn't...

For the next one. Didn't feel like my role. By the time we're done, all of Silicon Valley is going to be dressing in suits every single day. And we're going to be switching to business casual. Well, if you go to our website, you'll see in classic form slow zigged when everyone was zagging. That's great.

And decided to show our LPs when things are a little tight that we are extremely, we're not just serious capitalists. We're extremely serious capitalists. buttoned up. A suit is one thing, but a tuxedo really shows people that you're serious about managing money well. Yeah. That's right.

That's a great. That's a great photo. Well, I've wanted to have you on for a while. I always enjoyed our conversations. I want to know what you disagree with Samo. He's got a lot of hot takes. Probably everything. Welcome to sell.

What about his idea of like, you know, he's pretty anti-AI. He likes the AI cherry on top businesses. Are there any of these pure, AI plays. We were just talking to Sonia at Sequoia. She's had a lot of luck finding enterprise AI application layer companies that are pure AI. They are kind of rappers, but they find these particular enterprise niches that can go really big. The honest answer is Sam, Sam, Yoni, Kevin, I have a really, we really enjoy pushing each other and using Twitter as internal slack and highlighting where we disagree. But the reality is, is we're all pretty well aligned. We say it

differently we get there differently but no I'm just as anti-AI as Sam and I think listen the important thing we're not anti-AI you know what I mean I think that's like an easy way to take it our answer's like AI is rad yeah I will definitely what do we do as swear words on the show allowed it's a family friendly show we we won't cut we won't cuss but we also don't have a bleeping mechanism so we can I'll keep it out I can cut it I coach little league I can cut it both ways okay um let's keep it clean say swear like you're five years old yeah Dollar. Drat.

Like, listen, I think we all agree. AI is going to break the economics as the world as they work in a massive way, right? So the problem is to look at value. Like, that's step one to a compelling venture capital thesis. And a lot of people just stop at that step. They're like, okay, cool. Economics are going to break. Let's start investing against it.

And I think for us, once you click, okay, but where are those economics going to flow disproportionately, right, against someone that has a really compelling business model, right? that can get from here to there on very little equity, that's where our AI thesis breaks down. And it's hard to argue. You know what I mean? That a lot of the game, I mean,

I think the hottest take that I do agree with of Sam's is, this is not nearly as disruptive as people talk about, and it's more of an enabler, and the winners are going to be big companies with balance sheets and distribution and data and all those things for a long while. So I'm totally on board with that. That doesn't mean we're not doing things with AI, but I think they meet the next.

couple click steps for us, right? And a lot of those do look like AI cherry on top businesses with great founders who get, who get sectors and understand what's going on, right? And then they leverage AI in addition to much other stuff. At the early stage, there's been this pattern I've been tracking with the new generation of like Gen Z founders essentially, where they need to break into Silicon Valley. It's really noisy. There's a lot of, I mean, honestly, the millennials are dominating, like the latest, you know, $100 billion company. is Sam Altman. And, you know, a decade ago, it was Mark Zuckerberg when he was in his 20s. We have a new big power law winner and it's, and it's, that's an elder millennial that makes me

extremely, extremely excited and happy. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But the Gen Z entrepreneurs have been, they haven't had this massive power law win. Yes, they're scale AI, which is doing fantastically, but there aren't, there aren't as many, like, Gen Z hasn't really found their Zuck yet. And so they need to break through in a different way. And I've been seeing a number, of young founders break through viral stunts on acts and in the media. And when we talk to them, we haven't come away saying, like, well, like, maybe we didn't love the fact that they have to play this game, but it just feels like a game that they have to play.

And I'm wondering if you have a take on, like, the requirement of modernity that you have to be such a showman now to get attention for your startup, that you often have to push it really hard, make all these crazy claims and do all these stunts. There's a kid that we had in the shows hiring 50 interns to do social media for him and he's, you know, getting kicked out of Columbia. And it's allowed him to raise money and it's allowed him break into Silicon Valley. But there's always that risk that is taking you away from just going heads down, building the product, doing like the Dillon Field thing at Figma where he was just grinding for years and then produce a great product. So are we in a new era or is this kind of just the natural evolution

of breaking into Silicon Valley? I think a lot of that is like compensating for not actually having extremely interesting novel hypotheses that screw with the economics of the world and a sick business model. Number one is like, I think it's copium for the most part.

I have another take that I've been wrestling which is like, I don't think we have founders that are capitalist enough. I think like when you see WIS print that outcome and then you find out it's like Sequoia, Doug Vioni, a second time founder who was ID. Like you start going like, oh my God, those are people that, you know what I mean?

They play to win. And they, and they, the scoreboard for them and everybody is in dollars. And so I think that's like another thing that comes in mind when you talk about founders struggling to do that. It's like, I've been kind of curious on like, has there been an entire generation of founders on the back of, hey, it's product, right? that aren't as capitalist as necessary. And my take on that is like, there's actually three markets. You've got to back people. They're like, the big rad companies end up coming for people that can do, like are addicted

to winning in three places. The market for customers, the market for talent, and the market for capital. And they have like a tremendous amount of interest and respect in all three games. And they want to go maximize and manipulate all three of those. I'm not saying, do you illegal? Like, no, don't go that. But like, they're looking at all three going constantly. How do I move chess pieces to like win this game?

name more. And so I think a lot of the stunts are either from a product-oriented mindset of like, I just need people to see my thing and try my thing, which I just think asymptotes out at a certain point. So I'm not sure. I mean, listen, I think if you're really good at it, it is a way to bend some of those markets. You know what I mean? But I think you need to understand. I would say, and again, I don't want to talk about the same last thing the other time. Our takes over with No, no, you had a good point about this, which is like you sell AGI to raise free money for a consumer application. You know what I mean? And you sell self-driving in order to have enough equity to get the margin structure on your cars to a place that's sustainable. I'm like, there is a role for that, but it can't be the whole thing.

Yeah. And my entry in working strategy, I've been trying to figure out who patient zero was that like robbed founders of their like, tough throat capitalist nature. And my working theory, that I'm curious. I want to get more feedback on. I think Google was patient zero because they built a product and a business model that itself was like the most beautifully efficient capitalist thing that was like constantly operating at the efficient frontier all the time where they could come off of like, hey, we're just vibes and product. You know what I mean? And that was like the exception that proves the rule. You know what I mean?

Because it was such an amazing. I mean, I live in awe of AdWords every day. Yeah. I mean, I think about Google is 100% right. They built a monopoly that just spit out cash and then they could just do whatever they wanted because they didn't need to be ruthless at all in anything else because they built the perfect money machine. And Morgan earlier was saying you could potentially say the same thing about Steve Jobs around, you know, the original, the product goat in some way.

Yeah. He wasn't as, he didn't have to be as obsessed about the business model of the iPhone. Oh, so I, so I totally disagree on that take actually. And I think I Sorry, No, no, no, no, go for it. We love to agree with it. So, no, so this, this,

I didn't pick this up until recently, or maybe I knew it and forgot it, but, I mean, everybody knows, like, they found it Apple. He got thrown out when it was time to, like, run a serious business because he couldn't do that.

Went away, wandered in the woods for reels, started next. Yep. And I didn't realize, he plowed almost all of his Apple profits into Pixar. Did you guys read this article?

No, no. I mean, I'm loosely familiar with that story. Okay, so not only did he do that, he ended up getting super deep in the weeds and like running the game theory on their IPO and strategic investment from, from Disney. And he basically like ran the most gnarly capitalist playbook there. He ran brinksmanship using the capital markets as a lever. And that's when he went back into Apple and crushed it. So I actually think he like, is it this counterfactual? he's exactly the rule, which is you need to be on, you need to be on tilt in all three ways.

Like what are customers, how do customers value? How do you win them? How do you win talent? And how do you win capital markets? And I, when I read that story, I felt, I felt like my cooked up theory is actually correct, which is like, then he reenters, right? And Apple's a 100,000 X as he reent. Yeah. I mean, I agree with that. And I have like kind of a similar take. Just the, the difference between Apple and Google is that Apple does operate a little bit in the world of atoms. They have to actually make a thing. And so there is some sort of ruthlessness that comes from like the screws have to be screwed into the metal.

And if you're not on time, you're not on budget, like things can really go wrong. Whereas if you just have this beautiful algorithm and this website that people just have as their default homepage. That gets better and more profitable with you. Exactly. Like it is a little bit easier to run Google than it is to run Apple. Like Apple, like, you know, your supply. could kind of screw you. Like, what is going to happen in Google's world? I don't know. I mean,

it's a good take of it. Anyway, that was, sorry, you mentioned millennial founders and stunts and it got me on one of my nine talk tracks that I grabbed out of the show. But I mean, we were just talking about this. Like there has been this trend and we were tracking it from, yeah, it probably started at Google, but then Mark Zuckerberg drove like the Accord for a long time. And then Sam Bankman Freed kind of took that like, yes, I'm a billionaire, but I'm like the, I'm like the down to earth billionaire, the benevolent billionaire. And he was like, like, driving a Toyota Corolla and it kind of, you know, created this meme around like, you can be really successful and wealthy, but like you don't want to display it. And then the next generation

kind of got caught up in this meme of like, it's all about the experience. I just want experiences. I don't want any material things. And it's a big question about if you can't concretize what you want in life from a material perspective, like you can't say, hey, I actually want a house for my kids to live in. I actually want that cool car that I've been obsessed with since I was a kid, can you concretize building an empire, building a big company if you're not thinking concretely in materialist, in materialist, like, perspective? Maybe. I just think the other, want to win.

You know what I mean? They're just like, I'm playing a game. Yeah. I mean, and he knows about Zuck is like extremely competitive, whatever he gets into. It's like, I'm going to learn Mandarin faster than anybody else has. So I don't disagree that like, I don't, I joke. Everyone talks about Sam Altman is this, like, visionary product. also drives a $3 million car. He like cares about. He knows the scoreboard's got the money.

But it's a $20 million car, by the way. There you go. Three million conics egg. That's the daily, I think. And the F1 is in the daily driver. So on the young founders note, something that I think is happening is that so much venture capital appeared and became available to very young people that weren't necessarily exceptional in San Francisco. Yeah, let's blame this on Will. Right. People, people that are people that are, people that are, you've interviewed all week. No, so, so, so, so founders that are, that are talented, but not not the, the sort of necessarily top of their class. And if you give a young founder five million dollars and you tell them to run their first

business, they're going to act like somebody who won the lottery effectively. They're going to spend money in a way that is just, yeah, give me a YC take. I thought there. Yeah. And I saw a founder there was a no, so there was a founder who recently raised around. We've we've had him on the show. I think he's super talented. And he was like, you know, hiring 50 interns at once. And then he put out a post.

He's he's going to hire a videographer this summer for like half a million dollars a year. And and I was like, that's the one thing that YC gets right because they basically say spend no money until your thing is really working. And then you can start pouring, you know, fuel on the fire. but until your thing is working, spend 20 grand a month. Yeah, it's just been proven time. It's really, really hard to buy product market fit. Yeah. You can buy growth post product market fit, but it's very hard to just say.

If you could buy product market fit, big companies would be doing it all day long for new products. I heard about another company that's planning to spend 20% of basically two rounds that they've put together on a single launch day effectively. Right. And this is for a product that doesn't have any users right now. Yeah. And so it's like stuff like that where it's like you're giving talented young people an obscene amount of cash. And it's the same thing that would happen to, you know, somebody that's scratching something off in, you know, at a gas station and they get $5 million and they blow it in a year. Kind of. But it's almost worse than that, which is like, hey, here's a bunch of money that was like pretty easy to come by. And we don't actually want to hold you accountable to the money coming back. Because it's. product and it's almost we fell on this trap of and you know i'll get on my rant about value proposition but we fell on this trap of like backing people to do like subjectively valuable things and that's like a really hard capitalist endeavor to scale which is like we we so we talk a lot

about value proposition existing on a two by two of quantitative and qualitative causal and correlating and you can build great businesses in all quadrants but like what you do to scale them out of the gate is totally different. And I think we got down this like, hey, what's the value of that product? It's like, I don't know. It's like it's different to me than it is. It's like handbags are clearly valuable. But like, why are they worth $10,000 supposed to be?

Like you can't. There's no math, science, logic or anything behind that. It just is. And so I, I think Jardia is actually another thing where like, here's a bunch of money and go do things that like do not have. We talk a lot about our job and our money is to figure out does something work, right? Like with a true or false answer. And the problem is a lot of things got started that like, don't have that true or false answer, right?

So it becomes about derivative signals that actually aren't, like, connected to building killing businesses. So I guess and your comment. Yeah. Sam's been really big on AI as a sustaining innovation in the MAG 7, in the big tech world. At the same time, it feels like the big tech, like the stocks are performing very well.

The financials are fantastic, but the products seem to be faltering. You can't find the right Gemini. app for Google very easily, Apple intelligence, no one's really raving about it, at least in the tech community. What is your take on big tech? Is it a better time than ever to start a company that takes a shot at a product that normally would be owned by big tech? I still think that if I were running Google, well, I don't think 90% of the use cases in AI are actually like interestingly monetizeable. I don't know that it, I don't know that it like,

And I'm starting to watch my own usage now and question that a little bit. But like the majority of the content being generated from AI and the majority of my usage is like not avenues. I don't know that I'm like that stressed. You know what I mean? Like what am I? I'm like going into chat to Diki and talking to them about what I'm going to talk to you guys. I didn't do that. But like that use case is like really great, really valuable to me.

What's actually the back to subjective value prop. Like what's the value of that? Very hard to put a number on. and very hard to monetize. So I was on, I tweeted it a while ago, but like, someone did, I forget who did. Someone did a really good take on this, which is AI is going to be awesome to change the world, and AdWords is mostly safe from that. So I, and I just, I don't like, I don't love to, hey, I want to take on the product because they're not good.

You know what I mean? I think problem statements when it comes to building companies are not nearly as powerful. They don't really do important companies nearly as much as like, I just believe the world works. in this way nobody else thinks it works. And if I don't work on that, somebody else. And I've been big on like will the future. It's like, no, no, go work on things you think are like just

truths. You know what I mean? Because you'll be pissed if somebody else works. So I don't know if I'm going to answer to you on like, do you take on Google right now? Because I think the answer has to be, you have to like come out and think the world works dramatically different in 15 years and start building against that. Can you give us an update on your guys's

franchising thesis? these sort of four, I feel like the venture world got excited about four wall businesses, because there's, there had been a bunch of M&A over the last few years and people realizing, like, hey, you can kind of spin up a brand and, you know, prove it out a little bit and get a bunch of other people to, you know, scale it. And I feel like this idea of, you know, this business in a box has been very prevalent for the last few years. You guys have had, you know, your own thesis around it. But I'd be curious to get an update there on where you see that kind of category and how you see that opportunity today. Yeah, I mean, top of funnel has been lighter than we

wanted. I think the overlap with people who think this way and like think of slow is not. So that's, that's something we're constantly working on is like seeing more in that space. Listen, the way we got to that space is like, what are the radest businesses out there? You know what I mean? Just from a year-in, year-out efficiency, efficiency on equity, just like, What are the things you would want to own for 30 years and hand off to your family, which I think is like a really great framework on this stuff? Yeah. And you kind of quickly get to franchises.

You know what I mean? Like they kick off a ton of free cash flow. Pretty durable for the most part. Really efficient scale. So like that was just always my interesting take is somehow venture capitalists became software investors and not, and not folks looking for novel hypotheses that have killer business models attached to them. And so anyway, that's how we ended up there.

How's it gone? It's like really fun. I think it's a very logical output for a lot of innovation. I don't think we're doing really as much as we would like there, but we continue to look every single day. And again, for us, for us it exists on a, like, the, it's like one expression of you created some novel IP that has rat economics. You know what I mean? That like does something that creates a ton of value in the world. And so we talk a lot internally.

We're spending a lot of time on our GBO. thesis, our growth by buyout thesis that we rolled out probably, maybe first, I think we did, but with some friends in our company called Metropolis. And it's like, I'm not wedded to that. I just thought that that, you know what I mean? I looked at vertical SaaS and I was like, oh my God, it actually came to me if it's interesting, an industrial rail. I got pitched by these guys with a sweet industrial rail logistics company. And I was like, I love this. I want to be involved, right? And then I started digging in and realizing there were some top go-to-market dynamics where you might actually double the earning power of an entire industry, but be

an 8 million A.R. company. Wow. I mean, you're rationally correct. I'm making that up. But I was like, that's wild. You know what I mean? I was like, how did we get to this place that you could actually do something wildly disruptive and everyone else but you gets paid for it?

And that's where I started peeling away the layers of like, right? So it's like, oh, what have you bought a railroad and you doubled its profitability? You'd make more money than an 8 million area or SaaS company. Right. Right. And then you go to one of the other versions that it's like, oh, maybe. some places it's more efficient to vertically integrate. Maybe some places business at a box. And then a woman who works for me is much more than I am when I was spouting all this off quickly.

He was like, what about toast? And I was like, yeah, toast should definitely be a software company. So that kind of informed our framework that franchises slot into. How do you think about buyouts? I mean, there's venture capitalists that are getting in and on the equity side. There's some funds, private equity funds that do equity investments and they have bank partners that do the debt piece. I imagine that you don't have a credit fund separately that's managing that, but is that coming? Okay. And then there's also like the private credit guys that come in with just the credit piece. How do you think that that's going to evolve? And is it important for VCs to kind of have at least partners in the whole capital stack?

You'll have the partner. I mean, like so again, metropolis is our kind of lighthouse case study in this. If you look at, I think the, where there's a hole is kind of the growth equity portion of this, right? So we'll fund someone to go do some breakthrough product work and go, oh, my God, the economics are changed. And we'll fund them to do a small scale buy of a business in I bettah and see if you can, like, there's basically two experiments. Is the product actually transform economics and does it translate when you own and operate the P&L? Then there is a hole on the equity side for like, great, let's go buy 10 of Eviton, not one. But if you look at the metropolis deal, it's Wall Street. You know what I mean?

So I think I had enough evidence, this all slots right into their models and Vista's credit fund comes in and da-da-da-da-da-da. I'm curious, we had Harley on from Shopify yesterday. And it feels, you know, in many ways, it's the most significant SMB platform in the world. It's a product that at scale, entrepreneurs, it's so critical to the business that, yes, they're going to have issues with it. but generally people feel great about Shopify. And I've been interested to think about, in a lot of other categories, you have these sort of like Giro,

Dreams of Sushi type opportunities where Linear was able to look at, everybody hates Jira, but like we need tools like that. And so what if you just built an amazing issue tracker from the ground up and really cared about the craft? And if you look at Shopify, you could look at, you know,

oh, this design things not great, or what if this was better? Or what if we, you know, made this more intuitive? But I don't believe that you could take the most talented people in the world right now and try to get them to rebuild, you know, a commerce platform like Shopify. And just given the developer ecosystem and now shop pay and all these other things, I don't know. I don't think, I'm struggling to see how somebody replaces Shopify in the market right now. And I'm curious how, you know, if you guys have looked at any other, any other players that,

is anybody even daring enough to try to take on shop-a-com? I'm with you. I think it's a fool's there. And so back to like value prop, which my whole North Star is like, I need to buy someone that's creating a ton of value and can capture a lot of it pretty efficiently. Like that's the end of the day what we're trying to find in the world. But value prop has to sit on two axes. And again, this is like,

everyone calls me Professor Will and you're hearing why I go in some long tangent that's like all theoretical. Love it. But you got to have an absolute value prop, but also a relative one, right? Like if you go out, great, you create a dollar for people they're stoked. If the other solution creates like 98 cents a value, right? And it solves the boat. You guys are going to be in a dog fight from the sales and marketing standpoint, right?

You're going to, you're like, yes, you create value, but you're communicating that to the market is going to be super hard. And so I think the issue with taking on someone like Spotify, Shopify is the value, like, it's hard to create relatively more value. Can you do things nicer on the edges? Yeah, but like the core functionality of like, I have a business that generates profit for my family. Yeah. You know, it's like, that's a lot of it. And it's very hard. The switching costs are super high.

There's a ton of risk. And it's hard to do that dramatically better and be like, hey, just by using our platform, you know what I mean? You will get, make dramatically more money. And shopify can say, to be clear, they can say, look, if you have shop pay, you're going to get an incremental, you're going to get an incremental 10% of revenue just by default because the check, you're going to have less abandoned carts. We lose you. Well, he's frozen. Let's kick it over. He's absolutely.

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to just being lean, like their companies that they didn't pay for Zoom? The internet bill or something? No ISP. Anyway, we have three founders coming on back to back to back. Tell Will he's happy to jump back on. We can close out, but we don't have anyone in the studio right now. But we are going to talk about Nourish, Maddoch, and Fastino,

three wildly different companies, one in the healthcare space, one in the, we actually have the robot in the box over there. We should unbox it on the show with him. It's kind of a next generation Rumba talking about. cleaning in your house and very excited to talk to him about that and then dustino is training AI models on commodity graphics cards so I'm sure there'll be a bunch of interesting things that we can dive into on how deep seek was able to train on low grade unoptimized cards if they can do it on gaming quality cards I'm sure you know other people can do it on all sorts of

different cards should we do some timeline in the meantime let's do it let's talk about a message will I'm actually concerned hopefully like you know oh we have someone okay great yeah let's bring them in we have aiden welcome at the stream how you doing welcome what's what's up guys thanks for having me uh congrats on all the success you're having with the show you guys thank you not yeah i mean success you know technical difficulties it's uh one thing after the other today on the stream but we're doing well our last great down our last good momentum bounced in two seconds but it was a great conversation and excited to have you here. Would you mind kicking us off with a little bit of an introduction on yourself, the company, and the news from this week? Sure. I'm Aden Doer. I'm the co-founder

and CEO of a company called Nourish. Nourish connects chronic condition patients of all different types with a registered dietitian over telehealth, and we get it covered through your health insurance. We have the large network of dietitians in the country. We have over 3,000 dietitians on the platform. We've served hundreds of thousands of patients, and the vast majority of patients pay nothing at all through their health insurance. We're in that work with most major commercial insurance payers, Medicare, you know, some Medicaid plans at this point. And, you know, made a lot of exciting progress that we can speak about today. And then, yeah, in terms of the news, you mentioned, we announced a series B round recently. It's a $70 million round.

70. Let's go. Fantastic. Yeah, ring the bell. Congratulations. Thanks. Yeah. So it was led by J.P. Morgan's growth equity fund. Cool. And then participants from all of our existing investors, so index ventures who had led the Series A and Thrive, who would lead the seed round. And then Box Group, who I know our mutual friend David, David Tish, who's, you know, invested at the seed round has doubled down at every round, including this one.

We got mutual friends all over the place. James Pierpont Morgan, doing him proud. J.P. Morgan in the deal. Is this, like, why was this not covered by insurance before? Is this a regulatory change? Is this technology? What's driving the growth in the business? Are you just the first to think of it? Or is there something unique that's allowed you to start covering this type of treatment with insurance? Because that seems like a major, major unlock, right?

Yeah, yeah, good question. So this actually first started getting covered in the early 2000s by Medicare. I think it was 2005 Medicare Adon study. and seen ROI for this sort of care. And really the insight that, you know, Medicare put together, which is kind of the same one we put together, is that, you know, you look at the healthcare, healthcare crisis and, you know,

trillions of dollars to spend and hundreds of millions of people with chronic conditions and millions of deaths each year, actually kind of you start double-clicking. Most of those are downstream of nutrition, and the vast majority of spend is just downstream of a handful of conditions, you know, obesity and heart disease and my blood pressure and cholesterol and kidney disease and, you know, a few others. And so they had seen ROI for,

for working with a dietitian, you know, it's a really effective intervention and started covering it. And then the Affordable Care Act 2009 carved it out as a preventative benefit. And so that's this coverage. And then kind of the commercial payers, you know, followed and more Medicaid plans. And then kind of the more recent unlock, which is right around when we're starting the business, the business is a little over three years old was telehealth coverage at parity with in person because of COVID. And so that was kind of, you know, maybe the biggest, you know, recent regulatory unlock that, you know, made this, you know, a lot more accessible. Of course, you could have built this business, you know, in person, but would have been much

harder than the way it's built today via telehealth. Yeah. On the subject of the raise, how is it different raising from, you know, major financial institution versus a, you know, typical Valley VC? I imagine it's both similar and different at the same time. Yeah. So I think actually, you know, in terms of the actual firm, the person we're working there, Paris Heyman, who were really excited to partner with, he actually was previously at

Index Ventures and been part of the team that had run our series. A. So actually, you know, wasn't so different in practice in terms of just, you know, we'd already known him and I think the, you know, the processes are similar. I think the biggest difference really was obviously at each incremental stage, there's different expectations. So series B, you know, very different in terms of, you know, maybe more focused on the actual metrics and, and getting really deep on the data than Series A or seed. And so, you know, that's definitely, you know, an adjustment. But we're fortunate that kind of the, you know, the basics of the process and, and the buy-in on the mission and vision and stuff like that was, you know, pretty similar to last round.

and we already knew Paris. That makes sense. What is the tech stack like for one of these companies? Is there like a plaid of insurance that you can kind of build on top of? Or are you writing integrations? And is there a piece of like, you know, service as a software where there's a lot of humans in the loop in the short term? And then in the long term, it'll be AI driven. Like what does the actual buildup of the company look like?

So there is not a ton of what you said in terms. terms of the insurance contracting piece. That's something we've, and kind of a big on luck and the value we provide for dietitians is actually going directly to these insurance companies and, you know, negotiating these contracts. And I think that's one of the reasons, you know, most dieticians didn't accept insurance historically is it's a pain to, you know, go directly to one of these really large enterprises and negotiate a contract. And then even if you get the contract, you know, deal with the ongoing administrative burden, licensing, credentialing, billing and whatnot. And so for the most part, we've built, you know, all that, whether it's from a

tech perspective or just from a, you know, operational competency perspective in-house. We have leverage, you know, a great vendor called Candid Health for billing. And it's kind of, you know, API forward billing platform that we've built on top of. And so that's been a big unlock on the billing side. But I would say most of the other stuff from, you know, contracting and credentialing and licensing perspective has been, you know, a lot of manual work and kind of competency that we've built up in-house. Yeah. Can you talk about trends in the evolution of dietitians and how they work? We were talking about how there was some research that showed that artificial intelligence was particularly good at therapy.

and you can imagine the future is, you know, you just have an LLM giving you diet advice. John, of course, they're on, they're on TikTok. They're like, okay, all my clients are keto now. And the next week they're on TikTok again. They're like, okay, we're going paleo. You're going carnivore now. How's it evolving? No, yeah, I mean, you're hitting an important question, which is like, you know,

we've seen AIV a big unlock for the business. And I think, you know, you're kind of asking more about, you know, the patient side. which what we've started to build into the app is, you know, essentially a lot of tools for the, for the provider to use or the patient to use without the provider in the loop to get a lot of the info you're, you're talking about. And the way I think about it is like, you know, about 80% of the equation is actually behavior change, but about 20% and like accountability. And that's where the human is especially good. But 20% is a little bit more like educational blocking and tackling. And Google is not especially good at that, but, you know, the LLMs are. And so that's a lot of where we're leading in is like how do you, you know, give the dietitian tools to, with AI, to really provide amazing care on the things that only they can do and then leverage AI for the rest of, you know, you know, if you're, you know, if you've gotten to the point where maybe you're obese and have multiple chronic conditions. It's, it's not that you're just kind of, you know, a couple educational tips away from from having success.

You know, you typically built up these habits over years, if not decades. And so while the LLM can, you know, provide some help in terms of educating you on what's good for your diet. it and personalizing it and whatnot, the dietitian is really important for having the human in the loop and really the accountability to that behavior change. And so, you know, as the LLMs keep getting better, like we, you know, we want to really lean in there. You know, we think we're, you know, really well positioned to leverage AI in this way, given, you know, we've seen hundreds of thousands of patients and have a lot of data on what works in terms of driving outcomes and, and habit change and behavior change. And so we really think kind of the, you know, the synergy is having, you know, both the

dietitian and the, and the AI in the loop kind of drives better care ultimately. Very cool. How, what have you seen around the adoption of GLP-1s? The concern that I've always had with them is that people that should just focus on their diet end up, you know, taking, you know, a magic shot that makes them lose weight. And that's good because for a lot of reasons. But I have to imagine a lot of the end patients that you guys work with are bold. both using GLP-1s and thinking about the diet very intensely. But what's your reaction been?

And I'm sure that's a question you've got a lot even during the fundraise, I imagine. Yeah, yeah, for sure. And it has been really interesting to see the evolution of that over the past few years. And our dietitians had a lot of expertise working with GLP-1s even before the recent explosion. I think, as you all know, they were originally approved for diabetes. And so dietitians have been working with diabetic patients on them for a long period of time. But of course, the recent explosion that everyone has seen for weight loss has also affected us. And what we've seen is that they are a really important innovation and are really valuable for a lot of patients

and a really useful tool in the toolkit. And we've definitely seen it skyrocket in terms of our patient population and people using that. But they aren't a panacea. So, you know, there's a lot of side effects. a lot of people fall off the medication because of the side effects or either just like, you know, the logistics of adherence of getting access to the medication and injecting yourself every week. And so what we've really done is kind of pair ourselves as a compliment to the drug. You know, these drugs are FDA-approved to be paired with diet and lifestyle change. And so they,

we see ourselves as that part of the equation. And, you know, there are a few different ways. We've kind of built out our care model across kind of the journey of a JLP1, which is first, you know, we have a care program that's before you even get on a medication. So a lot of folks want to before they try a medication, see if lifestyle change will work for them. And so we'll kind of have a step therapy type product where you try it before you get on the medication. And then if you do choose to get on the medication, we have, of course, a commandant program that will maximize the efficacy of the drug by mitigating side effects.

And we've seen a lot of cool outcomes with people losing, you know, about 33% more weight with the dietitian plus the GLP1 than they do just with the GLP1 alone. And then the final piece of the equation, which is, you know, maybe the most important, which is actually getting off the drug, you know. a big problem with the medications, which our payers see, but also our patients, is that when you get off, you often see rebound weight gain. And then, of course, for the patient, that's really frustrating and difficult, but also for the system and for the insurance payers, from an ROI perspective, now you've spent all these dollars to have someone lose weight and then regain it,

which, of course, is, you know, worse. And so we have, you know, a program built around getting off the medication and making sure that's sustainable for the long run. And so, yeah, we've seen it be, you know, a really big tailwind for the business because it's top of mind for payers in terms of managing this cost and lifestyle change is the part of it. And then, of course, patients are really motivated to change their behavior once they're on one of these medications. What's the use of the funding? $70 million, a lot of cash. Is that R&D spend? Are there growth channels that you're investing in? How are you thinking about growing the team and the company over the next couple of years with that new series B? Yeah. So, I mean, the way we've

always kind of thought about our success is scale and outcomes. So it's, you know, how many people can we help and how much do we help them, you know, the quality of the care. And so I want to use the capital on both. So, you know, scale maybe most obviously, we want to really invest in expanding our network of dietitians. So to mention have 3,000 today, you know, the largest in the country, but I've had a long wait list for a long period of time of dietitians who want to join, who haven't been able to. And so really want to expand our network of dietitians quickly to be able to support more patients. Of course, on the patient side of the equation, we'll invest and go to market to get in front of more patients to raise awareness that this is

something that's, you know, effective and covered by their insurance. And then on the payer piece of the equation, want to keep investing in, you know, partnerships with insurance companies. As I mentioned, you know, we have, you know, pretty good national coverage, a couple hundred million lives covered at this point. But there's, you know, a lot more plans we can get a network with to expand coverage and want to continue doing so. And then, you know, maybe last, but certainly not at least, maybe the part that I'm most

excited about is really accelerating development and product development, you know, effectively. I think, you know, we talked about some of the AI use cases we've seen for patients and dietitians and I think basically everything we've built there has been successful for those parties and driving outcomes and saving dietitians time and patients really love it. And so, you know, we're really eager to continue investing a lot of that, you know, product development and, you know, long term, I think the reason we got into this, I had had my own chronic condition, I had really bad migraines and I'd worked with a dietitian to solve it. And, you know, of course, dietitians were really valuable for me.

And that was part of the reason and my co-founders and that's part of the reason why I wanted to expand access to it. But we know that, you know, part of healthy lifestyle change is not just nutrition, but things like mental health and sleep and fitness. And I think there's a lot of interesting kind of applications we can do of that in our product to drive better outcomes. And so really want to run at that pretty quickly. What else are you seeing in the overall like health tech market that's interesting or complementary? We talk a little bit about GLP-1s. There's a lot of online pharma companies that are working in that market. But where else are you seeing exciting companies or trends that could be complementary to what you do. Yeah, I think they're kind of on the on the

vectors that I just mentioned. So of course there's been a lot of movement in the in the glp1 space and we've partnered with with players there to help get access to these medications to our to our patients. You know, a lot of our patients work with a you know, a therapist in tandem and so you know, there's you know great companies in the mental health world that we've we've referred to. I think labs are really interesting, you know, about 85% of our patients get you know labs done each year. it's, of course, a natural part of the care journey of both getting a baseline of, you know, discovering, you know, where you're at in your health journey and where you need to improve, but also as you're making progress over time.

It feels like the lab market was just destroyed by the Theranos story and no venture capitalists will touch it now. But, yeah, I mean, it does seem like there's a lot of new, new entrants there, superpower and function health, kind of doing the upmarket version, but there's lots of other ways to get labs done, obviously. Yeah. And it's, I think, you know, of course, the Ayrnaus was, you know, more about the actual kind of base level of, like, getting, getting the lab work done. I think a lot of these, you know, players that are doing cool work that you mentioned are more about kind of facilitating getting the labs through the large lab companies.

And then when AI is really great, I have like interpreting the labs. And so, of course, a lot of our, you know, our patients are getting labs done consistently and think the people there are doing a lot of cool work. That's cool. That's cool. It's great. This is fantastic. Thanks so much. Congratulations on the massive round.

Oh, thanks, good. Thanks, guys. less size gone. It was great to be on it. You all ask good questions. And I was thinking about as I was getting on us, we feedback's really big on our team and I always get feedback about talking too fast. And so as I was going on here, I was like, oh, I got to make sure to talk slowly.

But then I realized YouTube and podcast ad, that's probably where most your views are. People will just change the speed. They want anyway. A lot of people say they just listen to the show on 2X because it's too much content. The real high performance on 3x. That's the future. Yeah. People can listen to whatever, whatever they want.

Anyway, thanks so much for stopping by. We'll talk to you. Great to meet you. Cheers. Next up, we have Madic Robotics coming into the studio. I'm pumped for this one. Yeah, yeah, you've been talking to the founder.

I was DMing with the founder. He sent us a robot. We're going to have it be cleaning our new studio in no time. We're very excited for that. Wired said this is the best robot vacuum we've tested. Fantastic. It scored a rare 10 out of 10. Let's hear it.

Can I get the Ashton Hall sound effect? There we go. I haven't heard this. all today. It's killing me. Let's go. Bring them in and play that effect again, Jordie. Welcome to the stream. Congratulations on the Wired article. Congratulations on all the progress. Can you kick us off He's got robots and homes. Robots and homes. They said it could have been done. Yeah. They said it was a 2035. Most people, they ship a render. They ship a video. This guy ships a real robot. What a concept. Welcome to the stream. How you doing? Thank you guys for having me.

appreciate it. I'm a president co-founder at Maddick. We built home robots and my background is in computer vision and product and we prior to this, we were at Nest. So that's a quick background. Oh, that makes a sense. Yeah. Okay. So how many people thought you were crazy to go make a, you know, another take on a, on a, you know, the next roomba, you know, whatever, whatever the pitch was? I think they still do. I think it's still, why are you doing floor cleaning robots? That's the question we get quite a bit. And the answer really is that this is the only robot with scale. Yeah.

This is the irony of what we are doing is that a thousand robots ship, we are already the second largest American consumer robots company. Wow. So we talk about this point of view that there is this perception that navigation and mapping and localization in indoor environment is solved problem. but I tend to think of it as a firmist paradox that if it is a solve problem, where are all the robots in our lives?

Why aren't they at the airports? Right? Why aren't they at the airport, grocery stores? Why aren't we swan with it? And the answer is that it's actually quite a hard problem, number one. Number two, economic viability, which is making it profitable

and surviving as a business itself is a challenge. And on a flip side, making it valuable for customers. Yeah. Talk about the evolution of the relevant breakthroughs and artificial intelligence and which ones you are true beneficiary of.

ImageNet, obviously, very groundbreaking. The transformer architecture, haven't heard about that having an impact, at least in the Amazon's Roomba context. Are you using transformers? What about LLMs? Yeah, maybe you know, Maddoch uses a vision first, vision only approach,

which John has been nerding out about for months now. So I want to know, yeah, like it does this lead into the why now? Or how do you tell the story of the underlying technologies that have led to an improved experience here? A great question. We actually left Nest and Google in 2017 to start working on it because of two trends. One is a self-supervised learning techniques that were emerging, which is what LLMs are essentially. They're learning on their own.

And then second one was that my co-founder and CEO Nammeet helps back out Google Coral TPU from Nest perspective. So that trend of AI chips coming out and compute skyrocketing was a trend we saw coming. And between those two things, we thought it was possible to build edge device robotics. And the reason we thought edge device was critical was we as humans, we don't have hard minds. Latency is really critical, especially in a dynamic environment that we live in. So we always thought that robots have an ability to make decisions really fast. And specifically for indoor robotics, we just felt like Indo world was built by humans for humans for our visual perception system. So vision-only robotics was the only way to go, that it needed the same perception system as

us. If you're trying to build, let's say, level five robots. Well, level five robots for cars means that cars drive like humans. So inside home, it means that they behave like humans, clean like humans, manipulate like humans. So it should have the same perception system. And those were the trends that helped quite a bit in doing that. And now, if you look at a robot, what it does, it builds a Google Street view like map on its own. So the way we thought about it is we as humans, we go into new home, new environment, new indoor space. We self-explore, self-map, and then remember

exactly where we are so localized. Can robot do that? Well, the answer is yes, it can. Our robot does that, but it still has the same ability as cats and dogs. We can't tell our cats and dogs to go sit by the couch or go in a living room. They don't understand that yet. And that's where VLMs and some of these open-en source are dino. And and clip some of the models that are being released are really useful because now we can extract semantic embeddings and information at the image level out of it. And we can actually transfer that into our map at a voxel level. So each our maps are built using voxels, which is like a 3D pixel, one centimeter by one centimeter one centimeter. So each voxel actually knows that it belongs to a chair or a

human leg or a child or a piece of furniture. And that's when you can start asking and doing all kinds of things like, hey, go clean by the bookcase in a living room and it knows what you're talking about. So it's really, that's the next layer, which is turning it into much more of a natural language interaction between a robot and a human movement. Talk about the actual training runs that go into your models. Is there a concept of iteration on the training runs like GPT1, GPT2, 3, 4.5? He said they've spent less than a million dollars on video chips. Okay, yeah, so break that down.

How do you think about, obviously, you're acquiring data constantly, but then is there this pace of, let's do another bigger run? And are you, is there capital at risk when you actually roll out a big training run? Great question. So I'll take a little bit of a higher view and come down. But there is this concept in self-raming car as well as robotics that there would be one God model and that God model would do everything. When you look at practicality of a deployment, almost always there are multiple models at a smaller level that you do it.

So we've always taken this approach that we're not trying to do research, we're trying to build product. So whatever is available to us, let's go do it. So our approach has been combination of, obviously, neural nets and some of the work that's happening, but also what we do is referred to as a special AI. So that's a term that Dr. Fifi Lee is really prioritized.

And we use human information bottle, like principle. So the way we do this, we take, we have image to Waxel neural network, and then we combine that with long-term slam using both classical and in techniques and build this world. And then the physics of the world is permanent. Now as a human being, I can know that there is a wall here. There is, I know how, what will gravity do? So based on that, for us, it doesn't take 26,000 iterations to learn how to tie shoe places. So the same way, once you know the physics, you can predict things of that physics that I know certain objects will topple over if I were to do that. So that's how we think about it.

So we use information model like principles. So for us, computes and data has been critical, but it's less of a traditional logistic, gigantic data site and let a robot do everything on top of it. So it's less of a, less of a compute intensity, but there is obviously iterations.

And, is there something like a mixture of experts model that you could kind of pull from and design like, yeah, to kind of scale up the model. Is that relevant at all? Absolutely. So we have our own master student models and stuff. That rats. Exactly.

And the way we use it is that, hey, the 3D part of it, we use traditional techniques of a special AI, then adding semantics and understanding and context part of it. That's our master and student model works very well. But even for the neural nets sometimes for the precision, there are master and student models that we can use for precision as well. just to see the way human sees, so occupancy network that we have. A lot of it is inspired by the approach that Tesla has taken over the years

for to build their full self-driving. Talk about simulation. Are you using a lot of simulated data? I imagine that you could procedurally generate a million or trillion households with different furniture legs and stuff pretty easily. Drive virtual robots around that, use that to generate data. We've heard about a lot of that in the humanoid context. Are you seeing luck with synthetic data?

for your product. Absolutely. I think we started with self-supervised learning. Then we realized that simulation and supervised simulation actually works very well as well along the way. So we built our own simulation environment using Unreal Engine with our own robot. So we've customized it over the years and have a large set of environment. But that usually takes it.

What we've seen is that it takes us to about 0 to 80%, but that the final 20% always comes with the real world data. So we initially trained it to pay it, quote, the master model, but then the precision and fine-tuning almost all this comes from adding real-world data. Switching gears a little bit on product strategy. I imagine you have ambitions well beyond this initial form factor. Walk us through. Yeah, walk us through maybe the HIST.

Was this always the form factor that you were going to start with? And at what point do you look at kind of expanding from here? Great question. So we always imagine goal, always to go build Rosie the robot. All of us want that. Some things, sort of Alfred, that comes in a home and just takes care of everything. But we thought that the best way to do it is the way human child grows, which is in the first five years of human child, they just learn how to navigate from a perception perspective. They're just trying to make sense of 3D rules and they pick up the

object and learn that it drops. So in the same way, floor cleaning robot allows us to do that. But then we evolve and say, just like a five to 10 year old child, can it start picking up a shoes and moving it around. Can you just organize unbreakable items? So for five to 10 year old, we don't give them knives and scissors and all the risky stuff. So in a same way, can it start with this task and can be along the way productize it and start shipping? And then ultimately put it all together as a full-blown robot.

And we thought this approach was better because as we did consumer research and we always start with customers and work backwards, we realize that there is a lot of apprehensive about robot and whether they can do things accurately. So even though, you know, robot vacuums have been in a lot of. around for 23 years now, they've only penetrated 13% of the US households. 87% don't even have it yet. So and the reason is because they're just not that good. They're not accurate.

They're actually kind of dumb. So for 2002, they were an amazing device, but they hadn't moved forward. And we thought that purpose-built device that solves the problem to the end level is way to earn customers trust and then it to the second third port task. And the way we built it is if you see our current robot, we have a lot of it. a black crown. We have a black border on the top. That's where the eyes and the brain sits. And it's very much like a human being. And we always thought that we just have to build that once and then it just grows up just like a robot. So as robot scales, it will scale.

So the beautiful part of what we've built is that and then we have demos of it in our thing where we can just raise the robot, maybe even put it at a six feet level and everything just works out of the box. So you can put it on top of the humanoid and it will map the entire space for humanoid and even the six degrees of freedom with the same precision at one centimeter level. So are you thinking about adding like a robotic arm so it can pick up a shoe and put it back in the closet? Absolutely. As we're going to use those home, I've been about 200 homes now, real homes now.

And parents always talk about, can you just give me a tall, can you grow a lot? That's my biggest pain point. So that comes again and again. The second thing we've heard is a lot of kids talking about their parents who live on their own in Florida or Texas and they don't have a time to go there. and they're not technologically savvy as well. So they're like, we'll take this robot. We'll actually control it, clean their home.

But can you also hand me a 10 second time lapse at the end of the day to confirm that they're okay? How do you think about privacy? I imagine you have to message like, hey, we need the data, but we're going to anonymize it. You can trust us. But then there's data leaks that happen. I'm sure this is an important part of your messaging. But what are you saying to people? Huge, huge part of it.

So prior to we worked at Nest, I was a product lead for Nest camera. So I know privacy is a big deal. So that's why we do the whole thing on their edge device. And then the way we do is just opt in. And we always knew, and this is our prior start of at Flutter, we also did gesture detection, where I've commented this, that if you build a trust with user, there will be a spectrum of users. On one end, there will be users who says, don't ever take even my telemetry data. I don't want to share anything.

On the other hand, there will be user who says, take everything you want, I don't really care. In between, there are lots and lots of users who would say, hey, these are the long tail at which you're what fails and I actually want you to help get better so we'll share the data. So we haven't even done it automatically, but there is a record button on our app and users have already uploaded thousands of data with permission on their own. Do you have e-vals? Like when you were training a new model, do you put the robot in the final eval is can the matto-matic robot clean up after two toddlers after they've had dinner?

I was going to say frat party. You know, throwing frat parties. Toddlers are more messy. They make a bigger mess. Spaghetti and meatballs. A regular vacuum can't even handle it. No, no, no. Instant disaster.

It needs to sleep and all sorts of stuff. Anyway, George, do you have the last question? How do you expect the humanoid, how do you expect the humanoid market to play out over the next few years, right? It's obviously an area that you guys want to, you guys will be competing in that market over time, but clearly made some big decisions around how to get there. There's a lot of companies that have raised so much money that they, and, and, you know, once you've raised a couple billion dollars, people are going to want you to be shipping or at least having, you know, robots that are that are creating value in these settings. But at the same time, like Irobot, you know, and we talked about this offline, I robot is the biggest robotics company in the U.S. with 50 million units shipped. Amazon Robotics is a second at 750K.

And then Boston Dynamics has only shipped 1,500 robots in its entire lifetime. And so when and but at the same time, we just had Sonia on from Sequoia Capital a little bit ago. And she's like very humanoid pill. She was like, I think they're coming like, you know, quickly. And so I'm curious as somebody who's actually building and shipping robots now, kind of how you project out the next few years. And I imagine you must be kind of entertained by it all. It's going to be, you know, there's a lot of capital on the line. You know how hard it is, but I'm curious how you think.

There's a great question. There are two pieces of the puzzle there. One, I think you guys have touched in past interviews around accuracy and how accurate can robotics get. And the thing that we talk about internally is with AI today, we are collaborating. If it gets 90% of right, we're pretty happy with it. With robotics, especially in a trivial task, we almost always want to delegate. We want to set it and forget.

We don't want to do that last percent because that's a, you know, I don't want to finish that last corner of the cleaning or that one last plate. And that actually puts bar much higher. There is a corollary there as well, which is we go to school, maybe four years, eight years learn how to do coding. So if AI gets 90% of right, we are mesmerized. but we don't really go to school to learn how to navigate our home or how to pick up a glass or how to vacuum floors.

So the trivial, the task, the more higher the accuracy expectations for customers. Because if you make mistakes in just picking up a glass, they think of it as a dumb robot. Like, come on. And the analogy is imagine someone is helping you set a dining table for your dinner party one out of 100 times. And one out of 100 times they break one glass or one set of plate. Yeah.

There's a good chance you're going to fire them. So the bar of accuracy is much higher there. So that's one piece. And then second thing is the adoption. So this is where General Magic is a good example in our mind. General Magic tried to build iPhone in 1995. It didn't really work. Amazing team.

All ex people, Tony Fidel was there. And instead, what we got was purpose-built device from cell phones to PDAs to iPods to BlackBadies. And then we combine everything into an iPhone. So in a similar way, we tend to believe that purpose-built robots, will see light of the day first, and then they will get combined into multi-purpose devices. And the more you have a human form, the more expectations that customers would have. So there is a home side of it, and there is an enterprise side of it.

So we tend to think that in enterprise or factories, there is a good chance robots would be used in a few years with homes. We think it's a little bit part of it. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, and if you're buying, let's say a humanoid comes in at even comparable to something like what Unitri is selling right now, and it's $40,000. $1,000. Your expectations on that are gigantic.

Gigantic. So it's going to be an uphill battle. But we'll have to have you back on as there's. Yeah, one last thing. What were we about to say? I was thinking that you're touching on a really great point. We actually talk about it internally that there is no ubiquitous consumer electronics device higher than $2,000. Cars have been around for 100 years. Utility is clear, even though, and that's usually $10,000, $20,000. and even then it's a considered purchase.

We just don't wake up and do it. So the utility and the value has to be proven and then you have to convince customers to say, okay, it is worth spending 10,000, $20,000 and it will survive five years, 10 years. So there is a productization element to the robotics that needs to be paid a little bit more attention to. Well, thanks so much for stopping by.

This is a great chat. We will talk to you soon. We are going to use our Maddox. We're going to use our Maddox at the new studio. Yeah, we're excited. Absolutely. Tell us how it goes. We will let you know.

We'll talk to you, bye. Next up, we have Fastino coming in the studio. Sounds like an Italian name, Fastino. Fastino. Ask him about it, John. You love to, you love to, your Italian accent is your favorite. It's fantastic. Yeah, it's my favorite. Big news, Fastino trains AI models on cheap gaming GPUs and just raised $17.5 million from Kostla.

Let's bring him into the studio. We got Greg here from Festino or George. George, welcome. How you do you guys? How you do you guys hear me all right? Yeah. First off, how do you pronounce the company's name? Is it fastino or fasto?

So funny enough, fastini in Italian means a feast. Oh, okay. But fastino, it's kind of a play on fast and tiny. Like very quick and small model. It's our lame attempt at naming. You've been feasting on Nvidia graphics cards. You've been feasting on Kostla Venture dollars, putting them together. Can you break down?

What's the news this week? All the above. Yeah. Yeah. Well, great, great being on, guys. Am I your last one of the week? Last one of the week? Yeah, you're capping it off.

Right. Capping it off. Hoping to save the best for last. You guys are looking pretty fresh, by the way. I feel pretty underdress. Yeah, hit the soundboard. Let them know that we still got energy. I want to hear the Ashton Hall effect.

Not that one. The other one. Let's go. It's Friday, but we still got energy. We're not slack it off here. Next time I'm going to have a suit. Please. I'll buy one.

Please bring it on. Bring it on. Suits are, you should have one for every day of the week. Yes, yes, yes. Yeah, for sure. I got to go to New York in a couple weeks. I think I got to go first by a tape. We got a suit guy for you.

Yeah, yeah, we'll introduce you. Anyway, break down the news and then we'll start talking about the business. Yeah, so great being on. This week we launched TLMs. So it's a family of language models called task-specific language models. Yep. They're small, lightweight models that are really fast and they're built for AI developers. So being task-specific really means that we're more accurate on enterprise tasks than large models like OpenAI or Jemps.

And they cost a fraction to train. So we spent less than 100K on GPUs to train our models. But we're beating industry benchmarks for enterprise tasks. Okay. So are you fine-tuning open-source models? Are you ripping apart a mixture of experts model to just have a smaller set of weights? Give me the scope. I've seen the GPT 3.5 circles like this and the GPT4 circles huge.

How big is your circle, I guess? So we're not fine-tuning or distilling any open source transformer-based models. What we're doing is very different. We took a different approach from the large labs. We built a new architecture that maintains high accuracy, even with very low parameter. account. So we're not fully revealing exactly how many parameters, but all of our models are far below a billion parameters. Oh, wow. Our architecture actually gets more accurate as the task becomes well-defined. So they're not generalist models. You cannot ask them to do anything,

but they're extremely performant for the tasks that we built them for. Okay, talk about the data sources. I imagine that if you're doing summarization, you need a whole bunch of examples of that to train on. Text to JSON, probably need some text and some JSON. A lot of stuff's out there on the web. Are you scraping? Are you crawling? Are you buying data? Are you using open source data sets?

Where's the data coming from? Yeah, really all of the above. I think there's a big debate out there in academia as to whether synthetic data or real-world data leads to a more accurate model. We've definitely been using a blend of all the above. But the first models that we're rolling out and you nailed them perfectly, we have models for developers doing text to JSON, text to SQL. on text to SQL.

We have an agentic function calling model that we're putting out. I know you guys talk quite a lot about agents and an agent that can book a flight for me or can book a hotel for me. So we have a very lightweight model that inferences in milliseconds that can basically take what the user

wants and call an API. So very much developer focus. We've got models that can parse documents, redact private identifiable information from documents, which is huge for banks, insurance companies. We have a really fun model. It's our favorite model in-house. It's a profanity censoring model. I love that. Amazing. We don't swear on the show. Yeah. Yeah. We try to keep it in the office.

But you can imagine we've had some fun late nights building synthetic data for a profanity model, which can be gaming can use anywhere. It's pretty much the funest red teaming we can do. I try to plug my ears or turn the other. That's great. I mean, if you're inferencing this in milliseconds, is there, then a desire to deploy this at the edge, you know, run this in, you know, the cloud of the business that's actually deploying this. So I just have to ask for the profanity model. Yeah, please. Could we run it in real time while we're doing the show?

Probably could. You know, drop, say an F word. Bleep. That's what I want. Yeah, it'll, it'll work in real time. It'll be much faster than an existing L.LM. Yeah, I think the, I think the real TV shows, they have a system that puts it on, delay and does something like this, but the delay has got to be so much faster if you're imagining

like using Whisper and then this, there's a lot of things. But in terms of that latency, latency is really important to us. I imagine it's important to your clients and customers. Are you seeing demand for let us run your model and we'll still pay you, but we just don't want to go back and forth with your API? Yeah, so there are a lot of ways you can deploy smaller lightweight models. Obviously, we're going to be heavily reliant on our API. Yeah. So models are of a small enough footprint, which actually comes from. from a lower parameter count. You can run them on prem, you can run them on CPUs,

low-end GPUs. I think Ash and I, my co-founder, Ash, he had a dev agent similar to cursor in 2023. After I sold my last company, I was actually an investor in his startup. He had a problem where his LLM costs ended up being higher than his head count costs. And it's a problem that a lot of agent companies face.

So I was actually, I spent a little bit of time as a GP after I sold my last company and all of our portfolio companies were facing the same thing. Rising cost of LLM. So it's not only latency, as you mentioned. Accuracy is a big problem with large LMs, but frankly, the key issue that we've seen is that LMs just aren't built for the enterprise.

They're built for consumers, right? So GBT, Gemini, they're trained on trillions of data points. They're used by our friends, our family, every day. They help you code. They help you get food recipes. They help you prep for podcast interviews. They're not built for high-scale enterprise tasks, right? But enterprises are spending millions of dollars a month on these large monolithic APIs.

I want to tell you guys a story. Sure. How LGBT is being used. So my wife's dog got really sick a few years ago. Cute little guy, 13 years old. He has cancer. We went to the pet hospital. and the doctor basically recommended that we put him down.

We had her best friend on the phone, and we're trying to make a decision based on the doctor's recommendation, symptoms, dog's age, what to do. And who is the tiebreaker? We asked GBT, hey, GBT, here's what's going on with my dog. Here's the situation. Wow. Should we put him down, right?

So my wife was using GBT to play maker. And for the record, GPT told us to put him down and we didn't listen. He's doing well today. Wow. That's a crazy story. Why would- AI is the antichrist. Trying to take out the dot, the poor pup.

Yeah, why would a large bank, Bank of America, City, JPMC, if all they're looking to do is analyze your bank statement or look at some log for fraud, why are they using the same model model that my wife used to consult on her dog's mortality. Right. So using these massive models, it's like trying to come up with a cool metaphor for the show. It's like the DoorDash guy writing Saturn 5 to come for a pizza. It's so unnecessary. And frankly, that's why large enterprises, large banks haven't put Chatsabit or an LLM into a chatbot.

Yeah. It's super fascinating. Analyzing your bank statement. And it's just like $500. on dinner. You cannot afford to have a dog. You got to put that dog down. It's like, Chase, what are you doing? J.P. Morgan, cool it with the recommendation. Reasoning is a very sexy word in the space right now. But from speaking with almost 100

Fortune 500 enterprises since we announced our pre-seater round in Q4, they don't want models that can reason. A bank does not want a model that can reason its way through your last 100 chatbot users logs and figure out their personal information. So when you're building lightweight task-specific models like this, our models are in domain. They're only trained to do the task that the enterprise using them for. So I think we have that edge very much just in how the models are built. Okay. Talk about the gaming GPUs worth less than $100,000 in total is what TechCrunch is reporting. Did you build that yourself? Do you have your own data center or are there, clusters out there of low-end GPs that are all rigged together from like legacy Bitcoin mining

applications or something like that. Where are you getting these? Yeah. So we have GPUs in-house. We have, you know, we use GPs in the cloud, but we all told our models take about a couple hours to train. Wow. The training costs for one model is less than, you know, the cost of a Chipotle burrito. I think so much said about how. But a 2012 Chipotle burrito or 2023? One that didn't give me food poisoning, hopefully. But there's been so much said about when Deep Sea came out and they only spent $10 million on H-100s.

However, questionable that number was, I think what we're trying to do as a super small team is show that you don't even need H-100s to build generative models for enterprises. Right? So we didn't use a single H-100. We used T4s, gaming GPUs, low-end V-100s, and you can do that. I think we've proven that banks don't need a model that takes six months to run, or it's going to drain Lake Tahoe for a training run. What's more important with that training run, flops or memory?

Because I imagine lower token counts, you haven't released it, but I imagine you can fit it in memory, and so that unlocks it. Talk to me about the dynamics of like building a cluster and thinking about the different parameters that go into the cards that you select. Yeah. So we have a family of, it's going to be less than 10 models most likely for the next six months. I'll say that they're far below a billion parameters each.

So we don't need a cluster even. We can just run these on one or two GPUs each. For inference? For inference. Yeah. And for training, it's the same. same thing. It's a very low-end GPU for an hour or two. So we definitely believe that there's going to be a giant shift in how language models are used, right? So you guys have seen

waves of the last couple decades. So these massive IBM mainframes shifted into client server architectures and open source software. You used to have these massive monolithic builds that would take, you know, that would ship a month at a time, software applications were shipped so much slower. And then out came microservices and you have a different release for your payment gateway and your APIs. This kind of workload partitioning, as we call it, it's completely going to change the landscape in language modeling. So there was a report from Gartner that came out about a month ago saying that small task-specific models are going to outpace LLMs and enterprise usage by three to one in three years. And we want to lead that. We definitely think that every developer

is going to become an AI developer. So every dev today will need to be able to integrate a language model into their code, just like they're integrating an open source MPM package or Python library. It needs to be much simpler. And that's very much how we're looking to change the game. It's going to be really hard to compete with the big labs. If we're just focused on the models, which obviously we're a foundational model company. Yeah. But we need to make much smoother developer workflow integrations. We need to make life easier for devs.

And right now it's... Where does this go? I mean, I know some of the stories about companies like Ramp, for example, or sponsor. They need to digitize receipts. So they get a lot of images. They do OCR. And I think Google provides an API for that. there's a bunch of companies that do OCR.

It comes through as kind of messy cluster of text. Then pipe that through GPT4 and boom, you have structured data. Lama comes out. Okay, maybe it's getting cheaper. But this seems like something where you'd want to go to you guys and get an even cheaper model that's distilled just for that one task. But that feels like almost like you're a consulting shop or is there a place where a company says, hey, we've been using GPT4 or law.

and we've done, you know, 10 million inferences. And so we have a lot of data about what works, what doesn't. Can you train a custom model for us to drop our inference cost by a couple orders of magnitude? Or are you trying to focus more on more versatile foundation models that can be just tools in the tool chest and aren't kind of one-off specific systems for a specific task within a specific company? Yeah, I think there are a few ways to answer that. The first one is probably talking about agents and how agentic systems are evolving. I'm definitely in the camp of thought that says that agentic systems will take over legacy

SaaS systems within four to five years, right? So when you see how these agents are being put together, it's typically daisy chaining eight or ten LLM calls. So in a chatbot, you want to parse a query. You want to then figure out the right document to give back to the user, summarize the right chunk of that document, give it back, all in real time with a very smooth chat interface. So we definitely see a world where you have different models for different tasks. And we're not saying that we're going to replace large generalist LLMs.

The models that are larger, they're good at reasoning, they're good at research. They do things like orchestration. So they'll help orchestrate this entire pipeline. That's still going to be the large model. That's still going to be your GPDs, you're going to be your Geminized. But the actual agents, the workers that are calling APIs, that are doing these sort of deterministic high-scale, high-throughput tasks, those are all going to be very small, intelligent task-specific models. That's how we see it play out. NVIDIA is down.

0.6% today. Is that because of you? Is it is a market? Are they pricing? I mean, billions of dollars. Billions of dollars have been evaporated from the markets on the news. No, but how do you think, you know, assuming Festino just gains, you know, massive adoption over the coming years? Yeah.

How does, how do you think that impacts the GPU market, GPU demand broadly? Yeah. For, you know, for the record, the low-end GPUs that we use are still in video. Yeah. We're still, you know, we're still a big invidio. Another 10 trillion to Jensen. Jensen might appreciate if you weren't so efficient and you raised, you know, raised, you know, $500 million and gave it to him.

Yeah. Have you thought about doing that? If he can help us scale and go more viral, we'll need more of them for inference for the record. But I think there's going to be a huge demand for consumers for LLMs as they are. I think we were lucky enough to have two of the first OpenEI investors on our cap table. That's right. In the very beginning, when there was a. pitch deck, there wasn't a business model. They didn't think that they were going to be a consumer

company, but the consumer appetite for LLMs has gone crazy. Even during the Deepseek moment, didn't Deepseek get to number one on the app store? My wife, my friends are all downloading deep seek. So the need and the hunger for consumers to automate their lives will constantly be driving the need for these larger generalist LMs. We just don't believe they're needed for the enterprise. So we're taking a very different. approach. Very cool. Makes total sense.

Anything else? I love this conversation. Me too. This is super fun. This is an absolute dog. You're an absolute dog. You're an absolute dog. You're an absolute dog.

Tell me any time you guys want to talk about LLMs. Absolutely. Get some help on buying a suit for New York. Oh, we've got you. And seriously, well, we, uh, we got you, you got us. It's one hand watches the other. I want to figure out this real time censoring thing.

I think it'd be hilarious. For sure. We have some guests that come on and try to drop F bombs. It's unacceptable. Our children listen to this. Yeah, it's unacceptable. And I think it'd be hilarious. hilarious if it was like you know made like a duck sound yeah yeah that'd be great so well our people

we'll talk to your people yeah appreciate it guys thanks so much for having us on yeah thank you so much uh hey big news uh rippling has raised 480 or sorry 450 million at a 16.8 billion dollar valuation and bigger news actually supposed to be texting with them let me see why c is a customer Really? And that is big, considering YC has created all the big payroll companies. And they picked. So deal, rippling. Yeah.

Gary must have been finding it hard to pick favorites. Well, I'm texting with the team. Hopefully get Parker on soon to talk about the business. One last thing. We have a couple posts we want to go through. But Michael, can you check the printer? Because I think we got a special printout for today. We haven't been printing posts very frequently, but we got one post that I wanted to print.

Hopefully, it printed. Let me see. I don't even know it printed. It did not print. All right. What's the post, John? Oh, is it working? I'm trying to print it again.

And we might be out of paper. Okay. But we can pull up the digital version. We're going to run it back. Anyway, Luke Metro said, this show used to print out my tweets and read them. Now they have the head of the army. So thank you to Luke Metro. I tried to print it, but we haven't printed in so long that the printer's not working.

Anyway, there's some other posts. Did you see the drama in Anderall world about Matt Grimm taking notice. Dot CO to task for selling some fake equity in the company? Yeah, so it's hard to know. I mean, the way that Notice was displaying this information was not, not consistently candid, is how I would describe it. And then the funniest thing, you called this out to Matt, apparently the CEO of Notice, message Matt and said, hey, I'm FINRA registered, so not supposed to post publicly on social media, happy to continue the combo, privately or do a call if you want, let me know, buddy. and hitting it's a war crime hitting Matt Grimm with buddy is a is a war is straight to jail it's so bad so brutal it's so bad I actually think the notice platform is pretty cool oh yeah like they they have a bunch of you know I mean I imagine

that there's probably some steel man here there's a million ways that you know it's a big company there's a lot of investors someone could have come and uh no I think figured out a way to put some no I think what was happening is an employee. Oh, really? Like the reason that the way that you would have zero fees. Sure. Is that an employee.

Common. But it was, yeah, it's common. That wasn't being. And there should be transfer restrictions. I mean, there's a very standard.

So there's something odd. I mean, there's been a big, big history of these odd, like secondary sales. Like for a while, people were doing forward contracts. Did you ever follow that story?

Oh, yeah. So basically, I mean, I think there's still work. I think they're definitely banned. In most companies, you're not supposed to do. contract.

Yeah, but the whole nature of a forward contract is that the company doesn't really, there's a very good chance of company would never find out. True, but they can still ban it in your employment agreement. Like, it can still be something you agree to when you join the company. So basically a forward contract, if you're not familiar, it's the right to purchase the shares at a future date, much like a stock option. So you're basically writing an options contract against your shares in the third party. and the shares themselves don't actually transfer.

And so the company in theory doesn't need to approve it. But it's very standard. And they wouldn't necessarily know. And they wouldn't necessarily know, yeah. And so this is a big thing, very controversial. A lot of people don't like this. And so even though it doesn't result in a whole bunch of legal complications, obviously you're not transferring the information rights because you're not actually transferring the shares.

They couldn't sue the company. That's the big reason why you want a clean cap table is because you have to deal with every investor. You have to give them information. They can sue you. If they just own a forward contract, they probably can't do that. But it's still a problem and creates all these distortions in the market. And so Matt Grim taking them to ask, he says, we are one of the good guys, says CEO of a company who solicits retail investors

to buy shares at a significantly inflated price for what it's worth. In a privately held company, they do not own shares of, have direct access to or have any information or information rights from, which to discern financial performance or market positioning or anything whatsoever to inform the proposed investment, all while not clarifying publicly, or for that matter, to the clients they are soliciting, how exactly this exposure is structured or what precisely these clients are buying. And while privately hiding behind a claimed veil, fake, by the way, their FINRA registration means

they can't comment when keeping a real goes too far. Rough. So clean it up. You don't want to have Macrim on your bad side. He could basically say this about most secondary brokers and poor platform. Anyway, we got some massive breaking news. We got some personnel news. Jacob Ephron.

Jacob Ephron's been promoted to managing director at Red Point. We love to see it. Very interesting. The rumors, this is a maxed out contract. Rumors have been swirling for a long time. He was in free agency. Considered free agency. Stuck with Red Point, got promoted.

Congratulations to him. Couldn't be more excited for everything ahead. And weird, weird terminology over at Red Point. Not GP, not partner. Managing director. Very investment bank like, you know. Official business. Andrew Reed had a funny post.

He was coming from banking, no matter how senior I get in venture. I'll always think that a managing director is more senior to me. Mogged. Feels very senior. It does. Anyway, Arvin Srinivas over at Perplexity is taking more shots at Bloomberg. Blumber is such a joke while Perplexity does real-time call transcriptions for free. Bloomberg has a 15-month-man.

minute lag and it costs $30,000 a year. To be clear, that was Marcello who said that. Somebody at TechCrunch will listen to this. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Do not miss that. Arvind said, we'll put you in the zone. Is a joke. Yeah. Anyways, what perplexity is doing around real time

call transcription. TechCrunch reports is my quote. Me quoting someone else as Arvind. That's what I was saying. That's so bad. That's a risk. The bar's low these days, folks. The bar's low.

Anyway, any other posts we want to go through, the Pope is American. Vatican City has a Buckees now in a waffle house and a Costco. It's great. They've taken over. America is in control. It's fantastic. And we hope you have a great weekend.

We hope you have a great Mother's Day. Pick up something simple. Thank you for joining us this week, folks. We had a great time doing this show. Yeah, it was fantastic. Good job. Thank you for tuning in. And we'll see you next week.

And remember, It's Mother's Day. We talked about this three hours ago. The Super Bowl of pronatalism, folks. Take care of everybody. Have a great Mother's Day. Cheers.