TBPN - Netflix's Size is Not Size, Ads in Google Gemini, Prediction Markets on a Tear | Rich Greenfield, Delian Asparouhov, Sarah Harrelson, Morgan Housel, Andrew Pignanelli, Brian Mehler, Will Wilson

Episode Date: December 8, 2025

(01:57) - Rich Greenfield, a partner and media analyst at LightShed Partners, discusses the complexities of the ongoing bidding war between Netflix and Paramount for Warner Bros., highlighting the antitrust implications and the evolving competitive landscape in the streaming industry. He emphasizes that defining the market narrowly to only include premium subscription streaming services overlooks the vast competition from platforms like YouTube and traditional television, making antitrust evaluations challenging. Greenfield also notes that both Netflix and Paramount aim to leverage Warner Bros.' extensive content library to enhance their offerings, with Netflix's algorithmic prowess potentially revitalizing underutilized assets. (21:06) - Timeline Reactions to WB Bidding War (44:11) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (53:52) - Prediction Markets on a Tear (01:03:11) - Delian Asparouhov is a Partner at Founders Fund and Co-Founder and President of Varda Space Industries, a company pioneering in-space manufacturing of pharmaceuticals and advanced materials. In the conversation, he discusses the appointment of Jared Isaacman as NASA Administrator, emphasizing Isaacman's leadership qualities and the positive impact on the commercial space industry. He also explores the strategic importance of lunar missions, advocating for the Moon as a critical step toward Mars exploration, and highlights the potential of space-based infrastructure like mass drivers for efficient transportation of materials. (01:32:03) - Sarah Harrelson, founder and editor-in-chief of Cultured magazine, discusses the magazine's focus on contemporary arts and its holistic approach to content. She shares insights on the evolving art market, noting a recent correction and the importance of collectors who buy in both good and bad markets. Harrelson also reflects on the current challenges facing Los Angeles's art scene, emphasizing the need for new theaters and innovative approaches to engage audiences. (02:01:25) - Google Adding Ads to Gemini in 2026 (02:06:57) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (02:17:32) - Morgan Housel is a partner at The Collaborative Fund and a former columnist for The Wall Street Journal and The Motley Fool. He is the author of the best-selling books "The Psychology of Money" and "Same As Ever," which have sold millions of copies worldwide. In the conversation, Housel discusses his current focus on reading and contemplating future projects, the challenges authors face in balancing audience expectations with creative freedom, and the importance of honest marketing in building a long-term brand. (02:36:55) - Andrew Pignanelli, co-founder and CEO of The General Intelligence Company of New York, discusses the company's mission to enable one-person, billion-dollar businesses through AI agents. He highlights their recent $8.7 million seed funding led by Union Square Ventures and introduces "Cofounder," an AI chief of staff designed to proactively assist businesses by automating tasks and integrating with various tools. Pignanelli envisions a future where AI agents manage entire companies, allowing entrepreneurs to focus on strategic decisions while agents handle day-to-day operations. (02:45:43) - Brian Mehler, CEO of Stable, discusses the recent launch of Stable's mainnet, a Layer 1 blockchain designed to streamline financial transactions using stablecoins, with USDT serving as the native gas token. He highlights the network's key differentiators, including its partnerships with PayPal Ventures and Anchorage Digital, and the use of USDT for transaction fees to simplify user experience. Mehler also emphasizes the network's speed and cost-effectiveness compared to traditional Layer 1 blockchains, aiming to address common frustrations in financial transactions. (02:50:41) - Will Wilson, CEO and co-founder of Antithesis, discusses his company's approach to improving software reliability through deterministic simulation testing. He explains that traditional testing methods often fail to uncover unforeseen issues, whereas Antithesis's platform runs software in a controlled, simulated environment to identify and reproduce rare bugs. Wilson also highlights the significance of their partnership with Jane Street, which began as a customer relationship and evolved into a strategic investment, underscoring the platform's effectiveness in enhancing software quality. 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You're watching TVVN. Today is Monday, December 8th, 2025. We are live from the TBPN Ultradome, the Temple of Technology, the Fortuess of Finance, the capital of capital. We have new merch in stock.

It's not the sale. Look how festive it looks. Let's go to the wide with the tree. We got the tree with the horse. The horse can we get the horse cam up? Okay. Team is going to have some fun with the PTZs, move around,

figure out what's going on, show you the rest of the studio. We've been having a lot of fun. Also, we've been experiencing, fencing things on ramp. Time is money. Save both. Easy-use corporate cards. Bill pay. Accounting, a whole lot more. All in one place. We've, we have some new merch. We're very excited about this. This will be making its way out into the world. That's right. We are also excited to talk about Netflix. This is your first time all year in a sort of a casual fit. It is. It is. I know zero days off.

I have that dog in me, unlike you. Who's been lazy, cozy maxing, taking days off at left and right. The chat is not a fan of whenever you go casual. I understand that I have a job to do, and I'm professional. But today's a special day because we do have new merch, and it's a lot of fun. That's right. And so we wanted to show it off. Even Tyler's in it. Tyler's in it as well.

So some big news this morning. Yes. I wanted to start this off with a post from PICA Capital. They were highlighting. So Paramount is launching a hostile bid worth $108 billion. to acquire WB. Peka says, this is crazy. HBO should make a show about billionaire media tycoons trying to buy other media conglomerate and highlight all the behind-the-scenes drama.

So without further ado, let's bring on our first guest of the show, Rich Greenfield, and we can ask him a bunch of questions. He's a true expert in the space. Yes, yes. Let's bring him in from the restroom waiting room. Thank you so much for taking the time to jump on the show. show at last minute. We're also celebrating. Christmas theme today. I gave you some of your merch. We'll send you some of that merch. I'll send you some of that merch. I'll overnight some to you.

Thank you for joining last minute. So I know in what is it, 12 minutes, you have got to jump to another call. So let's let's get right into it. Why don't you give kind of a quick intro on yourself? And then we can talk about all the news. So I follow media stocks. Firm is lightshed. We found that it's a little over six years ago. We talk all things, tech media, telecom, and we have been obviously following closely what happens with Warner Brothers. And we've had a three-way bidding war. Comcast dropped out. So now we have a two-way bidding war. The board obviously chose Netflix. Paramount is unhappy and is trying to go over the top and go directly to shareholders to get their offer accepted. how do you think the antitrust stuff plays into this?

Is that something that we're going to see a year from now once this, like, the current back and forth is resolved? Or does it have an effect right now? I mean, the irony is like, think about what we're doing right now. Yeah. Like you guys, actually, what you guys are doing in your success to date actually is what makes this antitrust-wise so difficult. Because just imagine, how do you look at this and say, oh, you can't.

look at YouTube. You can't compare YouTube, right? Like, you can't compare Twitter and live video. Like, what is the market for video? There's infinite. There's infinite competition. Well, I mean, so that's the thing. Like, you know, Netflix started talking about YouTube as their competition for time, you know, over a decade ago. Yeah. You know, if you're looking at only streaming, are we only going to look at professional streaming? So we're only going to look at Netflix, HBO, Max, Disney Plus, and Hulu. If that was the construct, Let's just say we'll take the narrowest, you know, sort of silo to look at this. Netflix is 24% of time spent in streaming, premium streaming today.

So that's no YouTube, no linear TV. If you add on HBO Max, you get to 28%. Still it doesn't seem to violate any antitrust problem. It's certainly a lot, but it's certainly no 40, 50% market share. But, you know, when you watch the NFL on Netflix, you also watch the NFL, on ABC and you watch the NFL on CBS. So how is that not part of the competitive landscape? And heck, you know, YouTube, I don't know if each of you have YouTube TV or have Sunday

ticket, but Sunday ticket is on YouTube, right? So to sort of narrowly define the market as only being premium subscription streaming seems a little crazy. And even when you think about movie theaters, like some movies come out in movie theaters, some movies come out on streaming. Are we only going to look at this as sort of like what's the impact on movie theaters or are we going to think about, hey, you know, if Netflix actually owns the movie studio, they'll still do some movies in theaters, but they're going to make a lot more movies in total. And so the antitrust side of this is so complicated. And I, you look, I can certainly make the argument why this is illegal.

But the question is, would that actually hold up in court? A court actually has to come out and say, this is illegal. That's where it gets much more difficult. because if you remember back not that long ago, guys, you know, the government sued AT&T Time Warner under the Trump administration, the first Trump administration, and they lost in court and the deal closed. Yeah. And it was kind of, it kind of wound up being a bad deal, right?

Or it was, like, maybe they should have stayed separate. Is that the way we remember that or no? I mean, the way I certainly remember it is is when they told them they had to sell something, they should have sold something. They would have done a lot better off, you know, listening to the government. But they fought so they didn't have to. to sell anything. The rest is history, but my point is, we're

still a nation of laws. Like, you actually have to have a legal basis for blocking the transaction. You have to bring a lawsuit and win in court. Yeah, yeah. I was laughing to myself because I was looking for, like, the perfect tweet to sum up the fervor

around, oh, this is going to create a monopoly, this is a, you know, Netflix is going to face antitrust for this. And I found a bunch of tweets that were people basically saying, I miss when Netflix was a monopoly, and they had everything. And now I have to go all over to all these six different bundles. And I'm like, that's anecdotal, but it's still a funny, funny sentiment out there. I mean, the reality is, like, honestly, how often do you turn on HBO Max?

Like, honestly, like, how often are you actually watching that? I mean, the viewership is actually pretty small. Like, I love Last of Us. I like White Lotus, but I'm not just turning it on. I mean, the biggest problem HBO has is it's not a daily use activity. Yeah, yeah, no, it's like a Sunday. night once a week when there's a show that's so big in the zeitgeist if i'm not watching it people will actively call me out and be like you're not watching white lotus you're not

watching success you're not you're not watching game of thrones and i feel like i'm crazy and so i i call it like fomo tv which is really good it's like if i'm not if i'm not tapped into game of thrones i feel like i'm missing out um Netflix hasn't been able to cover that as much i feel like they haven't created as much of that do you what do you think this says about Netflix? Is it an admission that they have yet to create that much IP that will be around in 50 years? Batman, I think, is going to be around in 50 years. Squid Game, I don't know if we're going to be able to see Squid Game Halloween costumes in 50 years. What do you think this deal says about Netflix's position? Look, I think what it says more than anything is that, you know, I mean, Netflix has certainly

had a bit more trouble growing engagement over the course of the last year. It's picking up, it's doing better. I mean, they've definitely had a very good slate in the last six months, but engagement isn't growing as much as I think investors would like it to be, especially, you know, again, who is growing engagement the fastest in all of television? It's YouTube. YouTube, which is, you know, probably obvious to a lot of people who are not senior media executives, right? But, like, if you look at, like, consumers, they certainly know. I have three kids. I certainly see the growth of YouTube. There's no doubt that that is the fastest growing place. And I think AI is only going to accelerate. that is it gets easier and easier to create higher quality content across the YouTube user-generated ecosystem. So I think part of this is Netflix is looking at this going, we need even more IP to play with. If we had all of this IP, we could make even more content. We could move faster. Think about it. You were watching things like ballers and six feet under, not on HBO. People were watching it on Netflix because they licensed it to Netflix. Netflix has this incredible algorithm that helps content get discovered.

Yeah. And I think that's a huge power to this transaction is elevating stuff that is in this Warner Brothers catalog that people just haven't been watching. And so I think that's what Netflix is looking at here is how can we take one plus one and make it equal more than two by making more content? Do you believe that in the K-pop Demon Hunters example, that if K-pop demon hunters had not been on Netflix and instead being Warner Brothers, small theatrical release, you know, and then put out somewhere that it wouldn't have been

this phenomenon and the fact that stuff can kind of go viral in the Netflix algorithm. Do you like that thesis? I mean, stuff does go viral. I mean, Netflix impacts culture, right? I mean, whether it was Squid Game, look at this show, you know, this series in the UK adolescent that premiered on Netflix and blew up all around the world and started having, you know, parents were having some very tough conversations. with kids after that because of sort of how impactful it was and how moving.

Like content really does go viral on Netflix and it's part of it's the algorithm, part of it's the interface, part of it's the global infrastructure. And, you know, again, you need a service that is used a lot. You know, think about TikTok, think about Reels. Why are those algorithms so good at finding stuff that the two of you want to watch every day? It's because they have so many inputs. It's learning. It's seeing your behaviors.

The more you engage, the better the algorithm is. The problem with so many of these services, you just mentioned it with HBO, but it would be the same thing with Hulu or Disney Plus or any of these other services. You don't use them that much. And so there isn't that much data to train the algorithm. That is what Netflix is really good at. And I think that's the opportunity of putting these two companies together. It's certainly what Paramount is hoping to get by trying to buy this. Paramount needs a bigger streaming service that is used more often because Paramount Plus, like HBO Max, are both lightly used services. Sure, sure. Yeah, that makes sense. Okay, let's talk about the $108 billion. That feels like a crazy number. Why do you, like, the original Netflix bid, you know, felt rich, and this feels like on another level. Also, the company has tripled in value over the last, like, six months. Oh, look, I think you have to step back.

Remember, on the Warner Brothers, Warner Brothers is splitting into two companies. Paramount is trying to buy the whole thing. So some of this is a little bit confusing. Right, Paramount is buying everything, meaning the cable network. So they're buying CNN. They're buying the Discovery Channel Food Network. Netflix is not.

Netflix is just buying the Warner Brothers Studio, which includes the gaming studio, the film, and the TV studio, as well as HBO. Whereas Paramount is buying everything. And so these are a little bit apples and oranges. That's why 2775 is actually greater than 30, at least if you're the Warner Brothers Board, they said that 2775 plus the spun-out company is a bigger number than 30. Yeah.

We can debate that, but they believe that they are getting $31 or $32 in value because of the spun-off company. You know, that's the reality here. I don't think this tender offer on the face of it is going to move the board. I think the real question for all of your viewers out there is, is this going to cause Paramount to raise their bid further? Because I don't think, I doubt Warner Brothers comes back and says, you know, we like this better. My guess is they're going to say this is still an inferior offer versus Netflix. Sorry. And then it'll be up to Paramount to say, do they want to go to 32 or 34 or 36?

Like, where do they want to go next? Do they have more money? Yeah. And just to be clear, I believe that the. Netflix deal leaves behind the cable assets, which are about $5 a share. Warner Brothers is currently a $27 a share, so it implies like a $12 billion value on those assets. So you should add that to Netflix offer if you want to get like the fair market of the full value. No, because you have, you have debt attached to it. Okay, okay. You've got it. You've got debt that's being left on it.

Look, you're somewhere between, let's just say in round numbers, you're probably $2 to $3. Could you be at, you know, Paramount says it's only a dollar. Other people say it's at four. Let's just say it's somewhere in the middle. It's two to three dollars a share is probably a reasonable starting point for what this asset is worth. I mean, look, it's hard to know. It doesn't trade yet. So we're talking about the value of a theoretical public company.

That is a dangerous thing to opine on, especially when you're a levered company, because very small differences in valuation have a pretty meaningful impact. And so, look, I think the reality is, the question is, now the Warner Board already made their decision. The only way I think this, you know, I'd be surprised if the Warner Board did anything different unless there was a notably superior offer from Paramount. Yeah. Which we'll see in time, you know, this, like, you're already levering up a lot. I mean, you know, I think one of the things that was really misunderstood, there was this story going around for weeks that, you know, Larry Ellison was writing a check himself. Like he was buying this

with his, you know, he'd be selling his Oracle stock and he was basically buying this. The reality is, is Ellison is putting up a portion of the dollars, but a lot of the dollars are actually coming from capital they've raised from the Middle East. You know, you've got $24 plus billion is coming from three. Basically double their, double the Ellison's investment, right? Yeah. Correct. And so the question is, is there more capital? Like, is Ellison not willing to spend more?

You know, he's backstopping the whole thing. But how much money does he actually want to put in? how much leverage will banks put on this? That is a big question. You know, you're probably, and when you close this deal, you're probably around six times, maybe even a little bit more times levered. That's a pretty high leverage. They'll work it down quickly, but it is a pretty high leverage on media assets in 2020. I'd probably close in 2020, late 26, 27. That's a lot of leverage. Yeah. Well, and you've got to look at Oracle. It's, self is is is pretty levered so they're the father son are going all in yeah look i i don't know

i mean look i there are certainly regulatory issues i mean it's funny how hollywood was was coming out and hollywood was like oh we we don't like this netflix transaction uh but you know combining two studios i mean disney and fox merged and fox is uh you know fox is basically you know been reduced to almost nothing i mean they don't make a lot of movies anymore, you know, and so, you know, putting two studios together, they can say they're going to make 30 movies. It would be hard to imagine in three or four years anybody making 30 movies. I mean, I don't know about, you know, you guys, but like attendance to movie theaters. Yeah. Like just actual butts in seats. Yeah. Is almost 50% lower in 25 than it was in 2019. So pre and post-pandemic.

Huge change. 50% reduction. Yeah. In seats, you know, you know, butts in seats. You know, you know, butts in seats. Like, that's a huge change. And so the movie business, I mean, the funny thing is everyone is talking about like, oh my God, the movie business can't change or, you know, don't hurt the movie business or don't change the theatrical experience. Consumers are voting with their feet. Consumers have pulled back dramatically on going to movie theaters. I think the movie theater business needs to change and needs to adapt to the realities of like unlimited content. I mean, look at what we're doing right now. I mean, you're directly competing with a service like CNBC. Like, there is, Competition keeps growing from this thing called the Internet, and it's not stopping anytime soon.

What should viewers be looking out for this week as the story evolves? My guess is very little this. I mean, look, who knows? I mean, Netflix is going to speak in a few minutes, which is why I've got to hop. But, you know, I think investors are probably going to be trying to figure out two things. One, you know, is Paramount really willing or able to go higher than $30 a share in cash? number one and two what is you know if they do what is netflix's willingness to go above their current bit i mean it clearly seems like netflix raise their offer a couple of times

yep and so will netflix ultimately in order to seal this not seal this but to ensure that it doesn't become unsealed will netflix have to raise their bid i think those are the two things and as both of you said the price for this is already pretty astronomical i mean this was an asset trading at six or seven dollars a share not that long ago. Now we're talking about effectively. We have a friend that I'm sure you're friends with too who was like, there are no other bidders here. And he's like, it could not be more connected.

This was like six weeks ago. He was just fully convinced. When there were those rumors of a bidding war emerging and people were debating. People didn't think there would be one. They don't. Paramount just running away with it. Yep. But yeah, here we are.

And I think this is Netflix, looking opportunistically and going, hey, you know, can we really, we see what's how the industry is changing. Can we opportunistically acquire this content and, you know, basically light a fire under it, meaning like really, really accelerate the visibility and growth and, you know, of all of this content because there's just, there is so much content inside of Warner Brothers that has been lying fallow that like, you know, think about when Disney bought Marvel and you got things like Black Panther, right? And, you know, Guardians of the Galaxy, things that you didn't know were

really sitting in that library. My guess is there is so much content to play with. That's what's really going on here. And I think that's why Netflix, I mean, again, I would agree. Six weeks ago, we wrote a piece. There was no way in my mind that Netflix was buying this. I was totally and utterly wrong. Yeah. Makes a lot of sense. Last last question. For just film and television enthusiasts, who do you think they're better off with owning Warner Brothers? I think the reality is both of these companies are going to inject, I mean, they both want this asset because they want to build with it. So I think ultimately putting either the, you know, putting Netflix and their global platform behind this, putting the Ellison's with

their second wealthiest family in the world behind it, either way. I think if you're, you know, if you love content, you're going to get a lot more content out of this combined company than you are today. I mean, HBO, again, doesn't make many shows in a given year. You're going to get a lot more content. Fantastic. Thank you for hanging out. Any picks for movie of the year personally? Would you like this year? Did you see anything? Or are you also just scroll in short form? I actually haven't seen a movie. I mostly stick to analyzing the stocks. I mean, look, I mean, Avatar's coming out in a couple of weeks. I'm excited to bet against. It's always hard to bet against Jim Cameron. I mean, my guess is it probably won't all be in the

this calendar year, but it probably will be the biggest single dollar, you know, from a box office standpoint, probably the biggest box, even if it doesn't live up to the last couple of avatars in box office, it probably still is the biggest box office film of the year. That's a great reminder. We've got to figure out how to get everyone to see that in the biggest IMAX in Los Angeles in the theater because that's going to be a wild experience. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to us. Text me if you learn anything. We will see you. I'll add it. I'll fill people in. Have a great rest of your days. And get me some merch. We will. We'll want some merch. We're on it. We'll see us.

text me your address. Cheers. Turbo Popper, serverless vector in full text search built from first principles on object storage, fast,

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Anyway, my, I mean, that was very informative. My take today was basically like a pretty soft take just saying like people who are saying that Netflix plus Warner Brothers is the worst possible outcome. I was talking to you about this on Friday. I think they're sort of overplaying that narrative because I could imagine Warner Brothers and Disney being. more monopolistic or Warner Brothers going to Google and YouTube and being like free on YouTube being like way more anti-competitive. And so this, the Netflix Warner Brothers, like at the very

least, it's like the third, the third worst case scenario if you're going to play that game. And as we as we talked, like there just really is so much competition in media because media is cheap. Anybody can be a media company. Exactly. And there's so many free options. And then there's also of video games. And I think you can argue with how good some video models are getting and, you know, audio and voice models. Like it's, it's going to be even like you're going to be able to make a cartoon as a single individual and make like many, many, many, you know, many, many episodes seasons, right? There's going to be more, more competition than ever at the actual, like, in the content layer. Yeah. Even if some of the platforms consolidate. I mean, yeah, just a lot of

people are putting on a, they're straight up putting on a two-hour podcast instead of a movie regularly, except when you're on the plane flying back from New York, then you got to watch the fugitive with Harrison Ford. I made Jordie watch it. Give me a review. Fantastic film. We don't know, we don't know how to make movies like that anymore. I would watch movies if all the movies were like that. It's amazing. I think you just need to give me, you need a, you should put together your movie list. Yeah. Your movie list. I have one. Like this in the next week or so so people can watch them while we're, you know, between like, you know, Christmas and New Year's when we're off the air. But absolutely fantastic movie, fast pace. I felt like they were hitting me with, like,

you know, Mr. Beast's, like, brain rock. The editing's good. People, a lot of times you go back to, like, the 70s or the 80s, and some of the films are really slow. Like, they have these big, long openings where they show you every person, like the opening credits were a thing. That's all gone now. But the fugitive with Harrison Ford, just really fast-paced the whole time. It jumps straight into the action, you're straight into the problem. It's very clear what's going on. I won't give any spoilers. But there's a lot of fun in this movie. So highly recommend it. If you haven't seen it, it's fantastic. Have you seen it, Tyler? Oh, wow. Okay. Well, you treat yourself to the fugitive this holiday season. Also, treat yourself to linear. The system for modern

software development. Linear streamlines work across the entire development cycle from roadmap to release. What else do we need? Should we read an unhappy take on this take from Chris Murphy? Yeah, yeah, yeah. That sounds good. Chris Murphy, U.S. Senator from Connecticut. I thought that was crypto-twitter.

I thought that was Chris Murphy crypto-twitter. I don't think so. Chris says the Netflix purchase of Warner Bros would be a disaster. It's illegal. But there's some quietly rooting for it because a paramount takeover that includes CNN would be worse, a short thread on why that's the dangerously wrong way to look at this. This deal is a classic antitrust violation. It will drive up prices. HBO Max is one of the few things that keeps pricing pressure on Netflix. Hundreds of movie theaters will go under.

Writers and production workers in the content, business will have terms and wages dictated to them. But some will say, well, if the Paramount and Ellison Trump-Cabal gets control of Warner brothers and the deal includes CNN, then Trump would effectively control the bulk of the mainstream media from CBS all the way to CNN. That's worse than Netflix owning Warner Bros. Yes, it is, but A, a Paramount Warner Brothers deal would be illegal too. Trump shouldn't force us to be for illegal but less corrupt things. B, why do we think Netflix won't agree to the strings Trump puts on this deal?

This is about making money, not protecting free speech. Five, tyrants want us to accept blurry moral lines. They want us to accept one level of corruption or illegality, just because there is an alternative level that's much, much worse. but that's how democracy disappears by rules disappearing and constant relativity creeping in. So I have two points. One, public.com investing for those that take it seriously. They got multi-ass investing, but trusted by millions.

And two, the Netflix deal doesn't, so it felt there was, David Ellison was on CNBC this morning and he was talking and they were asking him about CNN. It's like you own CBS 60 Minutes, CBS, CBS Sunday morning. And clearly a lot of people are like, are you going to put your thumb on the scale? Politically, is there like a political angle to the way you will steward these media assets? And I don't think people are that worried about the political bias injected into Foghorn, leghorn, or Wiley, coyote, or whatever. Or even like the Seinfeld. It's not like they're going to, like, reboot it and it'll be like a right-wing Seinfeld.

Like, I just don't think that's going to happen. But people do worry about news coverage, like CNN, CBS. But the weird thing is that in the Netflix scenario, CNN is left there in the go ship. It's a go ship. It's a ghost ship. We know this very well from the way tech likes to acquire companies. Yeah, so is there a scenario where Paramount loses Warner Brothers but then still buys the cable business? Yes, I think so.

I think so. And they get Shark Week and they get a bunch of fun stuff, HDTV, 90-day fiancé. David Allison with Shark Week. I mean, they would, I mean, putting the Allison family behind Shark Week, people think the Ellison's, that might be good for sharks. Indeed. Indeed. Yeah, so here's the thing.

So we talked with Rich about how, like, more competition than ever at the content layer, it's very cheap to create and distribute content. It's effectively free. That said, there feels like in some ways more of a monopoly than ever on truth, if that makes sense. Legacy media properties have a monopoly on truth. Yes. If we say something and we have the aesthetics of television,

and we say this is true, it doesn't hold the same weight as CNBC or CNN or anything like that because they are actually running, generally running. This is the brand. Yeah, it's brand. It's just the brand. It's brand. So when the New York Times says something and a substack disagrees with it and says, no, this is what actually happened, who are people going to believe they're going to believe New York Times 10 times out of 10?

And so, yeah, I think it is, that part of it is, ideally, you would want a lot more kind of like distribution between the networks and these brands that have a monopoly on the truth. Yeah, but at the same time, the fact that David Ellison is not cheering at the fact that he, like, you see Warner Brothers. And if you're in the, in the conspiratorial, the tinfoil hat, like David Ellison is trying to control the news narrative. that is sort of bubbling up there. The flip side is, is he should be cheering because he's like, wow,

they bought everything I don't want. I don't want Batman. But in fact, he does want Batman. He does. He wants Foghorn, leghorn. He wants it all. He needs Foghorn,

leghorn. He wants it all. He needs Wiley Coyote. He needs Porky Pig. The list of as, you don't know porky pig? No. How do you not know Porky Pig?

Is that a YC startup? It should be. It should be. Oh, Porky Pig. Porky Pit. Okay, Looney Tunes. The Looney Tunes character. The Looney Tunes Cinematic Universe is great.

There actually was a, I think there was a YC company in this batch called Piggy Robotics. Yeah, yeah. We saw, no, the YC companies need to keep. New rule. New rule. Every pig themed startup. Nick, when you're booking YC startups, if it's swine themed, they're on the show. Okay.

I don't want to miss a single swine themed company ever. Pig, post hog, piggy. We need all these companies. They're all great. Red alert. Pig has rebranded. No. The YC company called Pig.

Wow. Spitting in our face. They're now called butter. Butter. It's still like animal themed. It's like animal product? It's an animal product. What kind of butter?

Analyzing it based on its macros. Is it goat butter? It's very heavy on... Cow butter? Fat, low protein. Low carb, low protein, high fat. They rebranded. to butter. They stayed on the farm theme. They were like, we have churned into, we've churned from the

name thing. All the customers turned and churned was so bad, we churned into butter. Butter never We got to get the update. Always turned. I don't know. We got to get the update. I like the founder. I did. I did like the founder founder. I also like fall. Generative media platform for developers, develop and fine-tuned models with serverless GPUs and on-demand clusters. We have some news from our flight back from New York. We flew JetBlue again. If you're new here, a couple months ago, we flew JetBlue

with the whole team and we got into a little bit of a situation with JetBlue. They almost had to land the aircraft. They almost had to land the aircraft because we were, Jordy and I were sitting in business class, we were served stakes. We tried to pass those stakes back to our friends and colleagues who were sitting in economy

and they told us not. They said, stop, you can't. I think someone put their hand on your chest and sit down, sir. So it was even worse. Sit down. They didn't put their hand on me, the flight attendant, but they grabbed the dessert. Oh, they grabbed the dessert that you were trying to pass back to the team. And I said, we like to believe in. Do I not own this dessert? We like property rights around here. We like the ability to move freely. And I think possessions nine-tenths a lot, you give me the ice cream. You give me the steak. I own it. I can do it what I want.

But on our latest flight, we figured out the ultimate hack for how to pass. food back from business class to economy on a jeep-loid flight. And we proved that this works twice. And we're sharing it with you today. This is deep alpha, deep alpha. And so we'll hopefully pull up some of the photos, which, so this is, so in first class, they give you headphones with a case. And so what I was able to do is I was able to take the food. So my food, and put it into the job. So we all had dinner before the flight. That's ice cream in the, in the phone case. dinner before we left. So I show up and I'm not hungry, but Ben's a growing, growing boy.

And I, and I'm like, we got to get, we got to get my, my dinner back to Ben. And so we put, we, we take the headphone case, we zip it up. I take it back. I pass it. You insisted on the bread roll going in there. I don't know if that enjoyed the bread roll. I wasn't going to have, he needed the bread. Did you eat the bread?

I ate all of it. Okay, wait, was the bread over butter? Or did it have the appropriate amount of butter? It had a lot of butter. He had a lot of butter, right? You were loading me out. Jordie insisted, insisted on giving you the full pat of butter. And I thought maybe half a pat would be the right.

I just wanted you to have optionality. Okay. Well, yeah, I guess you had optionality. You could have taken it out. But what would you have done with it? I didn't have anybody sitting next to me. Oh, you didn't? Okay.

No, but the guy, there was a guy across the aisle from you. He was giving me the dirtiest. No way. I thought he was going to say, like, if you don't bring me back food to, I'm telling. Oh, you want to telltale. That is a risk. No, but the real risk when you're running a strategy like this, and you need to be highly coordinated,

is that the flight attendant in the business class section says, where is your cutlery? Yes, yes, yes. Where's that plate? Because it's in the back. Your knife and fork are going to be missing. So the real, yeah, you could see Jordy going back to drop it off. I took that photo.

We were running plays. And so, no, no. So there's another tip here that you don't want to jump the gun. So the food service, the dinner service, it takes place over a couple minutes. All the plates get just, get passed out, and people eat pretty quickly. So typically, the flight attendant,

by the time they finish delivering the last plate, they will go and start picking up the plate from the beginning because it only takes people a couple minutes to eat the food on the plane. But what you want to wait them out. You need a couple rounds of them coming by and you have the full meal there. And they're like, are you done with that?

And you say, no, I'm still working. I'm still working. So you've got to say I'm still working a couple times. And then they will go back and sit down at the front of the plane. They'll kind of relax the post-meal break. They might be gearing up for, oh, maybe I'll get everyone a new glass of wine in 20 minutes. But I'm chilling. That's your opportunity because that's when they're at their weakest.

That's when they're not going to be paying attention. You almost got caught at one point. I got caught? The flight is a lovely, lovely woman. She came over and said, she came up and said, do you want any tea? Yeah. And you had Missing, missing company.

There was food in the headset. Oh, the headset case. And you close it. I had to close the headset case because you don't want to get caught with the crew. Yes, yes, yes, we do need the whole crew on business, and we will be doing that. We're working on it. We're working on it. Yeah, we got a ton of machinations.

But in the meantime, well, we're having fun. We're also on profound. Get your brand mentioned in chat, GPT. meets millions of consumers who use AI to discover new products and brands. And people were having fun with the... I don't know if this is real. I saw this post it a few. This account just posts NLEC Chapa submitted a last-minute bid to buy Warner Brothers $45,000 in $45K in cash. In cash. It's like it actually is relevant because the other

offers are heavily debt-laden. And so if you can't, about that. If you want an all-cash offer, this might be your best get. It's a pretty good option. This is the best option. If you're, if you only want... Andy, Andy, who's been on an absolute role lately, says, you're laughing at him, but how much did you put up to buy Warner Brothers? Exactly. Can we pull up Andy? Andy launched, uh, did a, had a launch video like yesterday. Oh, yeah? Andy, of course, is the founder of two cents. dot money. He's been on the show. He has a, he has a social, an anonymous social network that links with your bank account. And so you just, your username is just your financial net worth.

The video is at the bottom of the, of the stack guys, if you can pull it up. He's, he's big on financializing everything. He's a, he's a financializing everything. He was kind of early, early to the trend. Early to the trend. But, but he's always done it in sort of a fun What are we doing here? I can't read that, so I don't know. We need to go full screen on this. Okay, while they're pulling that up, let me tell you about fin.a.I,

the number one AI agent for customer service. Automate the most complex customer service queries on every channel with fin.a.i. Are we able to play this full? It is two minutes, and we only have so many minutes. Yeah, let's play it. Hi, this is Osmo. We make films.

Two cents founder Andy Duroe raised three million for his startup and paid us $2.5 million. This was the only direction he gave us. I need this to look like the most expensive launch video ever made. It has to look like... Why is he in Albania? Albania. The day before our shoot, Andy was still on his investor's boat, chasing a series A. Is this rage bait?

I feel like this is giving me like, I'm going to be enraged. we were under contract to spend the entire production. Here's what we made. I want a scarface montage in a mansion. There we go. Show off our in-house coding models. Coding models. And they should be coding in rust.

Not just tiny apps, but full-scale system architecture. The cinematography here is wild. I want the bathtub scene from the big shore, but add more models and have one of them explaining the value prop of two cents. So basically, you know how everyone on social media pretends to be rich? The problem is, it's all fake. Then we should have the models reenact that scene from the Wolf of Wall Street. You know, the one where Leo's boat gets seized by the FBI?

Y'all was a lobster for the right home, you fucking miserable pricks? No, you can't afford them. What was the bid? He said he spent two and a half million on this? Is that what you're saying? All right, this is not PG-N-F, but it's funny. It's funny to basically run through every single launch video bit that there is. Okay, okay.

And just be narrating. Yeah, just do that one. Just do that one. And then do that one. Yeah. Okay. Ridiculous. Well, Bucco is saying the more he reads about the Netflix deal, the more it seems like.

One, this is bad for everyone that isn't Netflix. Two, this would be very good for Netflix. And three, it should be blocked if our system still works. So he is a block the deal guy. Ernest says it's extremely pro-consumer. New price is going to be lower than the current standalone Netflix plus max price with superior UX for subscribers.

And Bucco says, I don't think you can say it's extremely pro-consumer with any sort of confidence. Yeah, this is the one... Give them tremendous pricing power. A few people have said, oh yeah, like it's going to be cheaper. And it's like, okay, is it going to be cheap?

It's going to be cheaper like right away. Is it going to be cheaper in 10 years? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. And I mean, there's nothing, there's nothing more long-term pilled than a public company. Like they love thinking in decades. And like, no, I mean, they're like, like,

like a company like Netflix truly can be like, yes. The price is going to be like $99 a month by 2035. It might be a steal. It might be a steal at 99 if you're getting Seinfeld and Foghorn Leghorn and Porkly Big. This is a good walk through history. John Ehrlichman says December 2010, Time Warner, views, this is a New York Times article, Time Warner views Netflix as a fading star.

For the past year, executives at big media companies have watched Netflix with growing resentment for its success and delivering movies and television shows via the internet for its stock price nearly quadrupling, for its chief executive being named Businessperson of the Year by Fortune magazine. I imagine at that time they were thinking, well, it's cool that they can deliver movies, but they'll never be able to make, they'll never be able to make content. And, of course, now recently Netflix to buy Warner Bros. It is such a big deal.

Like, 83 billion, it's almost, it almost feels like small compared to like all the AI valuations and stuff and the, and the hyperscaler valuations.

But Netflix is only a $400 billion business by comparison. So like this is 20% of their market cap, essentially. Like it's a serious merger and would be huge, huge integration. I do wonder about that question. of like how many movies they would be making per year.

Would they try and still make 30 big movies or something like that? I feel like you, if you don't make those big movies, you don't get the, you don't develop the new IP. Like if you look at what Avatar is, Avatar has been, you know, this like incredible undertaking from a, like just so much money poured into the production there. But it's probably the best chance of getting something that's actually like an enduring legacy where it's like, yeah, people are still talking about

the avatar multiverse or cinematic universe in five decades, 10 decades, you know, in a long, long time. It's very, very hard to be, to be sticky if you're not taking big swings and doing things that are like actually really, really bold. Anyway, well, we move on. Let me tell you about Gemini 3 Pro. Google's most intelligent model yet, state-of-the-art reasoning, next level of Lod coding and deep multimodal understanding. Oh, there was this hilarious clip where apparently in 2013, this is from Matthew Ball, everyone's forgetting Netflix Q4, 2013 earnings ball. Tyler, do you know Ball?

When? Yes. Which ball? All. Do you know? All ball. But do you actually know Matthew Ball? Oh, here we go.

He doesn't know ball. Whoa. You got to know every analyst with the last name Ball. I wonder if they're related. Anyway, Reed Hastings is asked about the HBO's thoughts on password sharing, and he replies, I guess he doesn't mind me then sharing his account info. It's Pepler at HBO.com, and his password is Netflix, B-I-T-C-H. What a weird thing to do.

Was that actually his password? It's such a weird meme. Here, let's play the actual video. Is that the clip? I know Trung fan clipped the actual. I guess Plypler's... The CEO of HBO doesn't mind me then sharing his account information. So it's a plepler at HBO.com and his password is Netflix bitch.

This is like an insane. He must be joking, but it's like such a weird sense of humor. Maybe it's just out of context. Maybe if you watch the full thing or you understand the conversation it was happening in 2013 around the two companies. But like even if that's, even if that's not his password, it's like it's knowing to share someone's email publicly, right? because they just get a bunch of spam, I think.

But maybe this earnings call was like so narrowly watched that no one really, you know, would spam him. But I don't know. I would imagine it would be really annoying to have your email leak on an earnings call. Anyway. People really want Lena Khan back in the driver's seat. Sammy Gold says, Lena Khan, you can have this one this one time. I don't really understand why people are so against this. the idea of Netflix owning succession,

the soprano and the wire. Well, the TV stuff doesn't seem that bad because that was never in theaters. I guess I do understand people who are saying like they're going to own Lord of the Rings. Seeing Lord of the Rings in theaters was a special thing and that special thing might not happen anymore because it's incompatible with the modern business model.

And so if you're a Lord of the Rings fan and you really like the movies and you did not like the show, well then it's like get ready for more shows and less movies. probably. Yeah, I think anybody who's

upset because of the impact on traditional cinema and movie theaters, I want to see proof of how many movies they've gone to in the last... The revealed preference is crazy. No one does.

They're like, oh, I've seen one movie and it's like, okay. I don't know. Well, we should move on. Let me tell you about re-stream. One live stream, 30 plus destinations. If you want to multi-stream, go to Restream.com. Nice shot of Tyler before that ad comes in.

Apple is changing of the guard. It feels like a ton of executives are leaving. A ton of executives are turning over, and everyone's kind of speculating that potentially this is the beginning of the next major executive leadership team coming in, that there'll be some sort of before and after. Maybe we're exiting the Tim Cook era. I don't think so.

I think you just got a double, triple, maybe 10x Tim Cook's pay and you're good. But if they wind up turning the entire team over, maybe that's what happens to. So John Giandre is. Super out of pocket to include Steve Jobs on this. Yeah, that's very odd. But the interesting thing is John Turnus. He is, of course, leading. There's been a bunch of leaks about John Turner, the head of hardware, potentially stepping up to the CEO role.

That would be very exciting. And there's been rumor swirling. Unclear if it's like one of those things where he's leaking or someone else is leaking things. It's, you know, you never really know until the actual news drops. But I remain, I remain positive on Tim Cook's leadership. I think he got the big things right. And I think he missed the hot things, but missing the hot trend that's actually not that existential to the business. You could argue they haven't missed yet.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You could argue they haven't missed it. And you could argue that AI was not existential to them, at least in the short term. But we'll see. But this Justin Bieber post is insane because you read me this and I didn't hear you say, this is from Justin Bieber's account. And I was like, oh, that's funny. There's someone who's mad at Apple.

But it's way funny coming from Justin Bieber. Put Justin Bieber as a product manager at Apple. And I genuinely believe the products across the board would improve. Get better. get them in Figma, think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. Without further review, Justin says, if I hit this dictation button after sending a text and it beeps and stops my music one more time, I'm going to find everyone at Apple and put them in a rear naked choke hole. Even if I turn off dictation, I somehow hit the

voice note thing. The send button should not have multiple functions in the same spot. I couldn't agree more. This is so, I mean, it's just absolutely insane. Because the issue is, yeah, one, one, this happens a lot. This happens to me. And then it's always nerve-wracking because if you have somebody pulled up on text and you happen, let's say I'm like, hey, this, hey, this person is wanting to change the time of this meeting to this other point. And I'm actually, I'm like, what do you think? What do we do? And it just like happens to be like recording. And then you're like, Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. I don't want to.

Sure, sure, sure. So, yeah, I'm not a dictation maxi. I find it, I think it's very offensive to send people voice notes of any sort. And so I don't do it. I don't appreciate it. Apparently we have to issue a correction. Taylor's over there putting us in the truth zone. Apple doesn't have product managers?

That makes sense. There's so many. This new software, every time I open an app made by Apple, there's a new bug. It is, the software is a lot of it. I mean, yeah, I'm now living with the new iOS, iOS 1700 for a month or so now. It's 26. They're on the car release schedule now, right? Living with it for a while, I can, I feel like they made every app worse with the new update.

You're still upset about it? Yeah. I don't know. I still. I'm fine. It's not the end of the world. Yeah. Every app's design.

I think is worse. I expected to just, I expected to like get used to some of the new stuff and I'm still like, oh, the photo app. Skill issue. Just get used to it. I'm getting used to it. I feel like a lot of these apps would go through these. Brandon Jacobi comes over the top.

It says in the X chat, truth zone to the truth zone. They historically have not had PMs, but that recently changed. Whoa. Okay. Yeah, OTP agrees. Wow, Apple does have a, have PMs. Taylor. I'm incorrect.

Oh, well, I'm glad we have a debate in the chat going. Well, I know for our fact that Apple does have data analysts. I don't know if they use Julius AI, but they should because Julius is the AI data analyst that works for you. Connect your data. Ask questions in plain English and get answers in seconds. Mark German says Apple, the Germanator, the Germanator. The Germinator. Mark Germanator himself says,

Apple executives have floated the idea of combining hardware engineering and hardware technologies divisions as one combined group under Shroji in order to retain him. So this is, of course, Apple's chip chief, John, Johnny Shroji, hopefully I'm pronouncing that correctly. Chip chief. The chip chief. Informed CEO Tim Cookie is seriously considering leaving the company and would likely continue his career elsewhere rather than retire. Apple is urgently pushing to keep him. He remains, at least for now, according to the Germanator. The Germinator says, again, they're floating the idea of combining hardware engineering and hardware technologies as one combined group under Shroji in order to retain him. But that couldn't happen until and if John Ternis become CEO.

This would make Shrogy the clear number two. In more important news, Mark Newsom, the top of the time. designer of the Apple Watch just released a new watch himself. Oh. And it is mechanical and costs only $60,000. That's a video, by the way. Play this. This is a crazy video.

Look at this. The dial is spinning and, yeah, wow. It really looks like UFO inspired. It's $60,000. Jumping straight into the Holy Trinity tier, I suppose. What's your honest review on this? I think it looks very cool. I've never thought I want a watch that looks like it's in the same universe as the Apple Watch.

Sure. But at the same time, I can really respect. Yeah. I really, I think this looks very cool. And I think there's a consumer out there where they were like, finally somebody made a watch for me. I love this. Yeah. Should it be sold by Apple?

Apple, the Apple store has a number of products that are, not created by Apple. You can go and get, I mean, they were at a partnership with beats for a while. They wound up acquiring beats. They also will sell different, you know, stands and USB hubs and cases and all sorts of different, you know, accessories that sort of live in the Apple world but aren't directly Apple products are made by Apple. Should this be sold at the Apple store?

What do you think? 60K feels like a different tier, but I feel like if I'm trying to sell something for 60K, I'd go to the Apple store and say, a lot of people with 60K to spend on a watch, walk into the Apple store and pick up a couple laptops. Nick, new challenge.

Get Mark Newsom on the show. Okay. And we will talk with him about it. Also, get on graphite.com. Code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub. Ship higher quality software faster. Well, let's keep moving on

in the timeline. Theo agrees with Justin Bieber. He is entirely correct here. I agree with Theo. Well, we got to pull this video up of Bill Ackman in Japan. This is an incredible aura farm. There's something so interesting about being caught on, you know, another country's television, it looks like. So this is... I couldn't tell if this was actual TV or streamers. Who knows? just has an incredible vibe to it.

So it's a Japanese show. Is that man's face blurred out? Why is his face blurred out like that? It's very odd. I mean, that's a respectful thing to do if he didn't want to be. Oh, yeah, I guess they didn't sign a release, so they can't have him play. Here, can you turn it up a little bit?

I like that she's such a fan. She's such a fan of Bill Acme. Can you start it over? Because he missed the beginning. And these graphics, Is that Bill Ackman? Yes. Is that Bill Ackman?

Oh, wow. Japanese TV, see, TV. The graphics package is electric. Okay, we can be positive. You saw the, you see the stars and the, yeah, right there. And if you go back a little bit, there's like, it's like a puff of smoke that comes off of the text. We don't know how to make text like that. We don't know how to make chirons like that in America.

Look at our chirons. just getting mocked by the Japanese TV channel with sound effects. Did that woman just pull a Japanese, may I meet you on him? Yes, 100%. That's exactly what happened. Why did Andy Post all quiet on the frontal lobe? That's very funny. That just cracks me up.

Privy. Privy makes it easy to build on crypto rails, spin up secure white label wallet, sign transactions, integrate on-chain infrastructure, all through one simple API. Prediction markets are absolutely tearing up the timeline. They are the current thing every day. The debate rages.

This one's hilarious from Aaron Mars. He says, prediction markets will replace buying stuff. I want someone to bring Kiwis to my house. I make a prediction market about whether someone will deliver four Kiwis to my doorstep and load $15 into No. A guy with an e-bikes sees. it and picks up some Kiwis. Before dropping them off on my doorstep, he bets yes. Drops them off,

the market resolves to yes, and he gets $15. Rest in peace. Amazon, DoorDash, Uber Eads, etc. Sayla comes in and says, prediction markets will replace relationships. I have a crush on your girlfriend. I make a prediction market about whether she will leave you for me and load $15 to know. She sees this and drives down over to my place. Before texting me, she's here she bets yes she comes inside the market resolves to yes and she gets 15 dollars rest in peace tinder bumble hinge dry at bars restaurants it's so insane yeah the uh the the the mood the prediction markets are fighting an uphill battle right now they're on they're on life support uh prediction it's such a good such a good um such a good copy pasta and i and i i can only imagine the quote tweets on this post just being

like an endless, an endless stream of iterations of this exact template because it truly is so, so, so funny, the financialization of everything. Well, Robin Hansen, who's sort of known as the creator of the prediction market, do you know a little bit more about his background? He's economist. Yeah, I mean, he was writing about prediction markets or like decision markets since like the 90s. And he has this whole idea of like futarchy where you like run the government based off prediction markets. Interesting. Wow.

Brian Armstrong was like suggesting that policy makers could one day just ask people, how should we grow the economy and then let prediction markets decide. Sorry. Yeah. I will read Robin Hanson's post while Jordy recovers. He might need a little bit of a break. A little bit of holiday spirit getting up his business. is that Robinson.

On this podcast than it can. I've been asked, what do I think of Kalshian Polymarket? These are still very early days. My vision, which I started to articulate in the 90s, is of a world very different from both the world then and the world

of today, a world where markets are accepted as offering more accurate estimates on far more useful topics. So I'm mostly interested in the potential of stuff today to enable and cause that future vision. The politics, policy questions on polymarket and coli-she trending now seem plausibly like topics where some people might find their estimates useful in making personal or collective choices,

but I don't have great confidence in that or know who these people are. So I think that, like we saw a glimmer of this in the sense that if you were running a business that stood to benefit from the Trump administration or, or who. hurt because of the Trump administration, maybe tariffs or something like, if you were manufacturing t-shirts in China and you were like, okay, if Trump wins, they'll probably be more tariffs, probably another trade war. What's the probability that Trump wins? What's the probability that I have to do a red, the fire drill, a code red to move my manufacturing to Singapore or something? You could make a business decision based on that. I agree with him. Like, I don't really know how many people

were doing that seriously. And also, the prediction markets were like 55 percent. You know, It wasn't like 90%. It wasn't like that clear. Yeah. It wasn't like, oh, everyone just knows what's going to happen. It was like, oh, yeah, like, you know, slight edge this way. Yeah, I feel like people remember when they think of prediction markets on the election night. They remember, like, actually on election night when it did start to go towards like 90% and beyond.

Totally. But yeah, I mean, if you're trying to plan for like a forthcoming Trump administration, it's not like you could go to prediction. markets four months earlier and get like a definitive correct answer. Like that's just not the way that's just not the way it played out. But he continues. He says, but if these systems continue to grow in size and to attract users and competitors, they could lower many of the costs of creating and managing such markets, allowing a lot more experimentation with markets like those I find more promising re my long-term vision. Of course, if these systems induce a backlash that gets them outlawed or drastically shrunk, that may plausible.

possibly block or at least long delay my vision. I don't personally mind people having fun knowingly betting on sports on actions that celebrities can influence or on topics where insiders have big info advantages like mentioned markets. But I see many people complaining about these things and I fear a new prudish temperance movement may shut them down and as a side effect shut down the more promising markets that I've envisioned. It's an interesting take. I think it's a really big, it's a really big question on the prediction markets. It's not like there's, there's the, there's a positive and a normative side of these things.

So in economics, there's positive questions, normative. Normative is like what should happen. Yeah. And positive is what will happen. And so there's a question. I think a lot of people on the timeline are debating, are, they're debating, uh, prediction markets on moral grounds, on what should happen. they have a thesis on

I believe that this is great and this is good and it should proliferate or I think it's bad and it should be shut down immediately there aren't that many people that are actually thinking clearly right now about like what will happen how big will these markets be

how prevalent will they be? You know sports betting has gotten a lot easier but you know it hasn't taken over everyone like I know a lot of people that don't sports bet I don't personally sports bet even though it's now available probably on my phone.

I'm sure I could figure out how to do it without needing to go to Las Vegas. It hasn't come for me. It hasn't just like come and suck me in. And so we have Sugger and Jetty coming on the show on Friday to debate some of this more in more detail. But I think that there's an interesting separation

to just try and understand what will happen. And he's, so he's saying, you know, he fears a new prudish temperance movement, which is very clearly real. Lots of people dunking on this stuff. May shut them. down. I don't know. It's unclear. Like, will there actually be action related to the Prudish Temperance Movement or will the Prudish Temperance Movement be confined to spicy quote tweets, right?

Yeah, it's also possible to get to the future that he's envisioned since the 90s. You need to have sports markets. Yeah. And that, again, is not necessarily maybe how he would want things to evolve, but it might be a necessary step to bring enough users to some of these applications. to have the durability and the attention necessary to create some of these other markets. But I think so many people are just absolutely sick of the marketing and just the feuding between Kalshi and Polly Market,

that part of people's prediction market could be... Insiders are. Outsiders don't even know the difference. For sure. I'm talking about on X specifically. They just think, like, oh, financialization of everything is bad. Act specifically. But yeah. Like if we were on X and like Fandul

and Draft Kings were just constantly going at each other all day long. Everyone would just be like, please leave. Oh, no, no, no, I think they are. Like, I think, I think, we have the CEO of Draft Kings coming on the show tomorrow, but, but I do think that, uh, that, that the, that the, the traditional sports betting world is, is, is also just very cutthroat. And I think, though, I mean, it's such a, dude, go back and read, go back and read some of the, no, no, I'm not, I'm not denying it, like, the development of Las Vegas.

Like, Caesar versus MGM. Like, these were knockout, dragout fights. These were not like, oh, yeah, everyone was like positive sum building. I'm just saying I would be surprised if you have like a marketing manager at Draft Kings, like saying like hateful things to a marketing manager at Fandul in the year 2025 on the internet. We need to watch casino because I believe in casino they did things much worse than that. And not that casino is a documentary, but. I do think that the development. I talked to the presidents of the National Hockey League and an MLB team about how mad the prediction marketing was.

They agree pure slop. Yeah. It's a crazy time. Time to study the greats. Time to study history. Time to study Adio, the AI Native CRM. Adio builds scales and grows your company to the next level. And the next level of this show is Delian, Asperuhov, partnered founders fund, co-founder of Varda, space industries.

in the Restream Waiting Room. Now he's in the TDP in Ultradown. And if I'm not in, in the sun. Are you in Miami? Uh, you know, there's, uh, you know, there's sunshine in California as well. Okay, okay. I'm just, sometimes, sometimes I feel like it. I'm just wondering about your, your backdrop. Uh, is this San Francisco? Where are we? Where are we? Take us, I mean, you're so used to seeing you in the Varda office. It's true. Today, you're catching me in the Presidio. If it's too right, let me know, but I'm getting, uh, I like just getting blasted with sunshine. I think it's actually adjusting. So you look great.

I feel great. Fantastic. Take us through the, it's been a while since we caught up. Thank you for hopping on the show after a hiatus and breaking your silence. I want, you know, the quick update on Jerich Isaacman first. What's the status of things there? What are the implications? What's the mood in the space economy?

what's the mood amongst your team? Are people excited? Are people thinking that that's going to move forward? Yeah, look, I think I can't imagine you're sort of a better, you're sort of leader for NASA than, you know, sort of Jared, right? Somebody that like literally is willing to put their life on the line and actually do some of the like, I mean, he did literally the first commercial spacewalk once ever been done in history, right? So he's like, you know, putting his neck on the line.

But then also somebody that's obviously built a phenomenal business and understands, you know, how to think about ROI, how to manage a workforce, you know, how to think about connection into, you know, so capital market. And so, yeah, I generally say, like, across the entire commercial space industry, like, you know, ecstatic mood. You know, my like, you know, various moles in the, you know, sort of Senate, et cetera, make it seem that, you know, things are all, you know, sort of tracking on plan and, you know, going well there. He's definitely got to, you know, sort of pay the piper and, you know, shake hands and everything. But he's, you know, done that. And then in some ways, it's like the likelihood that they pull it for a second time.

It's like, man, you already, you know, shot the guy down to the ground once, like, you know, can't do it again. So I feel highly likely. I think like there's a ton of implications, you know, for that. Probably the one that I, you know, get excited for the most, you know, just as an American, is the likelihood that we make sure that we, you know, sort of beat the Chinese, you know, back to the moon. I think just, you know, sort of increased significantly, you know, sort of through room. And there's already, you know, some rumors starting to, you know, come out of his interest in starting to get, you know, more and more options to the table in terms of how we, you know, sort of get to the moon beyond what's been, you know, sort of currently contracted. And so. I like that. And I like, I think we talked about this in some of like our prior, you know, sort of discussions. But I really like this program called clips within the lunar program where basically rather than trying to set a budget and say, here's how I want you to build XYZ thing. The way that they basically pay contractors is just a flat fee for each kilogram of down mass down to the lunar surface basically. It's just like, you know, you get something onto the moon. We basically give you, I forget, I think it's like basically $100,000 basically a kilogram.

But like you get margin on that. You figure out how to do it cheaper. Great. That's all on you. that's like to me where NASA should be. It's like for these like things that aren't yet to really commercial don't make sense, be the first buyer, establish the market.

And then that's what kickstarts basically, the commercial, you know, sort of economy side of it. So that's obviously been like a ton of activity. Obviously there's a whole set of SpaceX things, you know, that have been,

you know, sort of happening over the past year or sort of month. Yeah. Let's, let's pause on this on the space like stuff. I want to stay on, on NASA. The way I was thinking about Jared Isaacman,

and just kind of framing like the broad, discussion of the lunar economy, the orbital economy, was this idea of like, are you a Mars guy or a moon guy in the short term? And I don't know if this is like too simplistic, so maybe you can just bring a bunch of nuance, but it does feel like, you know, Elon has been beating the drum on like Mars, Mars, and like maybe the moon is like, you know, a pit stop along the way. And then some other folks, some of the more legacy space flight providers are a little bit more focused on the tractable get to the moon. But then. you have different folks breaking different ways like Casey Hanmer's really obsessed with beating China to the moon.

Obviously, Mike Salon had founders upon his moon should be a state. And there's a whole bunch of different things. But is there, do you think that there's a real tradeoff between like, or should we be prioritizing moon or Mars in the short term? How do you think about that? You know, when I think about like why Elon was so dead set on this like, you know, call, you know, five years ago, 10 years ago, I think it had more to do with the fact that the moon. moon can be seen as a distraction if our capabilities as a species are limited because the moon is not a place where you can set up a, you know, sort of permanent colony that is, you know, so sustainable and independent of Earth, right? You know, sort of no atmosphere, terraforming is impossible in some ways like, you know, because of that likely to be highly, highly dependent on Earth. So it's not

really like a backup, you know, sort of function, you know, relative to, you know, sort of Mars. And so when I think about like Elon of 10 years ago, it was basically like, look, we're so decrepit as a industry in the United States or across the globe, that if we, like, set a goal, we need to, like, really keep the goal very, very focused. And so you have to go straight to Mars. I think just, like, the world of today is fundamentally very different where we're just, like, much more capable of an industry in terms of just like, you know, I don't know if you guys saw this, but I tweeted that, you know, in November was the first time in human history where there were more orbital rocket launches than there were days in the month. That's right. That's the person that's ever

happened, you know, basically in human history. And so that obviously, you know, sort of points to, like, we just like are much more capable as a species. And so in that world of more called like space abundance, I don't worry as much. And I admit that I've always been more on the like the moon is absolutely the right pit stop on the way to Mars and, you know, advocating for that for a long time. And I think in this world of abundance, it's a lot easier to see that. And now you even have Elon, you know, in some ways his totally reverse course of like, yeah, he talked about like making a mass driver on the moon. So you make like huge amounts of solar panels and data centers there and then are shipping them up, you know, basically, you know, to orbit.

Sorry, mass driver, define that. Yes, one second. We just said, shut the blinds real way. No worries. While he's shutting the blinds, let me do an ad read for cognition. Cognition is the team behind the AI software engineer, Devin. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. He's also an investor, so I don't feel bad doing an ad read for his own company.

To the face. I feel like I just kind of got paid for that a little bit too. There you go. If it was a competitor to that. I wouldn't do it, but I got to sneak these things in, got to pay the bills over here. Anyway, so take us through, what is a mass driver on the moon? So on Earth, there's been a variety of ways that we've hypothesized basically, you know, sort of getting things up to orbit. Only one that is sort of really worked, right, which is basically, you know, chemical combustion, you know, put, you know, liquid fuel and an oxidizer, you know, basically, you know, in a rocket and launch up to space.

There's people that have tried to work on other alternatives. So if you guys remember spin launch, the company that would basically spin things up really, really fast. Yee aerospace. They would yeat it out into the aerospace space. So that's the spin version. I love that one. You could also imagine the like rocket sled or like, you know, sled version. It's like an electromagnetic sled that is super, super long.

So rather than like spinning fast, you basically like you have like a maglev train effectively, but just like many, many miles long so you get it up space and shoot it up. Now the reason that that's difficult on earth is down here on the surface where the spin launches or the maglevap Sled thing would be are still in the atmosphere. And so by the time you're getting to, like, you know, call it if you got to orbital velocity, you're still like in this thick atmosphere. And so it's just like crazy heat, crazy drag, et cetera.

And so really difficult you do it basically to do. And so it's basically why we effectively use rockets. It's just like they have a way of starting off slowly while they're in the atmosphere, getting out of it and then going more quickly once you're out of the atmosphere. On the moon, there is no atmosphere. And so the advantage there is you can basically set up effectively like a, you know, maglev track.

you also don't have to go that fast because the moon's gravity well is way less. And so it's super easy to basically like imagine a world where we, you know, mine a bunch of like very simple metals and things like that on the moon, make this like magnet train. And now of a sudden you just have something on the moon that you can like point towards Earth if you want to like send something into like lower Earth orbit. But also now if you want to like point it out to Jupiter or Mars, it's just like a phenomenal. Effectively you can think of it as like train station effectively where like I wouldn't be surprised that even if we are going to Mars, there's a world where like, you know, yeah, maybe the humans are just going straight from Earth. to Mars, but I wouldn't be surprised of, like, a lot of the materials or metals or, like, produce things, especially if we have, like, an industrial outpost on the moon. The moon is the one that is, like, sending the solar panels to Mars or is sending the bioreactors

or, like, the, like, agricultural equipment, et cetera. That stuff's all coming from the moon because it's, like, literally basically, like, free to effectively, like, send it to Mars. Yeah. And so, yeah, it's an idea that's been talked about in sci-fi for a long time. Partially, in some ways, it's also, like, it's the best weapon in the world in that, like, you can just shoot a rock, you know, at the Earth really fast, and then, hit anybody that you want and you basically can't stop it.

But yeah. Speaking of space weapons, is there any movement on Golden Dome? So I don't know if you guys saw, but MDA basically put out this shield, IDIQ, for where they're going to do a lot of the Golden Dome work, not all of it. They, I want to say it was like now two Wednesdays ago.

Maybe it was a little earlier than that. Maybe it was last week. But they basically announced that about, I think it was 3,000 people. had applied to be a part of the program, you know, about a thousand contractors basically got awarded to be on contract and to, you know, sort of, you know, acknowledge my colleagues. Thank you to the, sort of our team for putting together a great proposal on technology, and we got to be a part of that. Still would say all this stuff is, you know, sort of, you know, early in that there's definitely some,

you know, the Space Force actually announced that they, you know, gave out their first space-based intercept contracts. They didn't name who won those contracts because of natural security reasons. But yeah, yeah, you're starting to see stuff that was like, you know, sort of theorized early on in the admin, and now Space Force has obviously handed out those first contracts. Missile Events Agency has handed out those first contracts. And so becoming real, I'd say in terms of like first demos, fielded capabilities, you're still a little ways away. I think by like end of next year, you'll probably start to see some of the first stuff really you know, starting happening. And then in 2027 is where I think you'll just have a bunch of like,

demonstrations across everything from like space radar, space space intercept, you know, space to ground stuff, you know, advanced ground radar systems, advanced hypersonic interceptors that come from the ground from all these, you know, both traditional, you know, sort of primes and some of these, like, neoprimes, you know, coming to the table for Golden Dome. So, yeah, becoming real. I think the important thing for something like Golden Dome is, like, you want to make sure that if there's a change in administration, you get to keep some of the advancement capabilities. And the best way to ensure that happens is, like, make sure that they're fielded. Like, if a new admin comes in and it's still, like, an R&D land, it's easier for them to cancel it.

Versus like if it's something that like the warfighter literally like has access to and is using, well, then it's like, you know, sort of much more likely that, you know, much more likely that they're going to, you know, sort of keep it, keep it around because the warfighter will insist on like, hey, we built this and we use it and this helps us deter China. Why would we like unfund it, basically? Yeah. Do you have any idea how Jared thinks about the NASA budget? It was about $25 billion last year.

I could see one stance where it's like $25 billion, this is a lot of money and it's enough. we can do a lot with it. There's another, I could also imagine him being like, we got to get those numbers up. I think politically right now, the White House's budget was actually less than, you know, so 25 billion. And so the likelihood of him, you know, coming out politically and saying, I want more, probably doesn't totally jive with like, you know, hey, Trump just reappointed you. But I think keeping it flat, but using it far more efficiently that I can see him being like a huge advocate for. And like, yeah, he's made it pretty damn clear. We've talked about this before. but like, I mean, especially now with, you know, one thing, oh, one thing that we haven't talked about, you know, is New Glenn, right?

Like, you know, for the first time, we have a second, you know, orbital rocket that is reusable in the United States. And by the way, that thing is like really big, right? Like, you know, it's much larger than a Falcon 9. And so at this point, when you've got both starship flying regularly and you have New Glenn flying regularly, the idea of, like, NASA is still building rockets through the, like, SLS program is, like, even more crazy because it's like you have multiple commercial providers. And by the way, like neutron from, you know, rocket level probably be online next year. Stoke Spaces will be online. So I think the exciting thing about, you know, Jared is just like a strong willingness to go slash out budgets that are things that the commercial industry is already doing more effectively, more cheaply. And then go assign that to things like clips, lunar landings, et cetera, that like are where the strategic focus needs to be.

So I think Jared is going to be the advocate of like, you know, keep it at $25 billion. But we're going to do a heck of a lot more with that $25 billion than we were before because there's just like a bunch of things that like are very large programs that now can effectively just be cut to zero. Yeah. Do you know what's going on with asteroid Banu? They discovered some like sugars, sugar stardust. This was like last week it got announced, but we didn't really get a chance to cover it. Yeah, so, you know, a funny story of this.

So remember the first Varda mission where we got stuck up in orbit, right? Yeah. We launched in June of 2023. The original goal was to land in August, September of 2023. Part of why we chose where we were going to land was because there had been some early, like, cosmic, you know, sort of dust and both, sorry, solar dust and asteroid dust missions that

have landed in that same range. But the other reason that we chose it was because in, it was going to be Halloween of, I believe, 23, Osiris Rex, the asteroid sample mission from Benu was also going to land there. Obviously, we ultimately ended up getting delayed. And so rather in Varda being first in the asteroid, you know, mission coming in and said it was the other order, asteroid mission came in. But point being, our team paid a lot of attention to that asteroid sample coming in, given that, like, that was sort of the precedent for Varda being able to, you know, basically come back from space. And that mission was the one that had the venue samples on board. Okay. So it's just now, it's just now getting, like, disclosed or talk about it. Yeah, yeah, basically, you know, obviously with something this material is significant,

like, you want to make sure that you, you know, dotted the eyes and cross the T's and also, like, it takes time to go analyze these samples and, like, handle it, et cetera. So, yeah, the asteroid sample, yeah, yeah, landed, like, honestly, obviously, October, November of 2023, and now obviously this is all started to get published two years later. What they effectively, you know, sort of showed was that on the asteroid, you have effectively, like, the building blocks of, you know, life, which, you know, which, and this is my favorite, you know, term in the world, build more data for the panspermia hypothesis. So the panspermia hypothesis is that the early building blocks of life are plentiful in the universe. And a part of how they get distributed in the universe is through, you know, basically collisions that end up, you know, you have like, you know, some early pro prooplanet. It collides with some other big planet. And then there's crazy asteroids that get sent out at high speed. But those asteroids have a little bit of like sugars and ribos, et cetera.

And that's what actually like basically like Insept's planet on a future. or life on a future, basically, planet. One of my favorite graphs that I saw, you know, which I could pull this up right now, but if you look at the average length of a genome on Earth over various periods of time, right? If we look at like old fossils, et cetera,

the most complex genome basically has a perfect linear relationship between basically the age of Earth and the, you know, sort of genomic length. The thing, though, is if you were to extrapolate that line downwards, if you go to when the start of Earth is, it was already at a relatively complex genome. Like, if you look at like the length of a human genome, the length of bacteria, length of virus, et cetera, it would predict that Earth has not been around long enough to have the level of complexity of genomes that we have given this linear relationship. And so it strongly

supports the idea that like the reason we have life on Earth is actually like there was some earlier solar system, planet, et cetera, that did the early building blocks and then kicked us off. and then kicked us off because it collided with something. Some asteroid then went and landed on Earth, and the building blocks sort of started us a little further in that trajectory of life. It's basically the plot of Prometheus. Exactly.

So if you look at sort of the like Fermi's sort of paradox, what this implies is that highly likely the great filter is actually basically behind humanity. And that like given that this likely suggests that there is you know, sort of the building blocks of life all over Earth, but that we do not yet see signals, it means that there's probably some filter that makes it difficult to go from, like, early building blocks to intelligence more so than, you know, basically, like, intelligence being, you know, you know, risky for, you know, being able to, like, spread out into the stars. And so it is,

there's this great graph that showed, like, all the potential, you know, basically, like, answers to the Fermi's paradox. But this one basically shifted it significantly towards the world of like there is abundant, non-intelligent life in the universe, and we just happen to be the first intelligent one. And as we go out, we will probably see lots of early building blocks. And as we spread,

we may start to see other very early, you know, sort of life, you know, sort of planets that maybe are just getting into bacteria or like early mammals and things like that. So,

yeah, it's really interesting. It means the universe is plentiful in terms of life. That's fascinating. Polymarket just skyrocketing on the odds. of UFO disclosure. Are you long or short aliens

being real? I mean, especially with this panseperbia hypothesis, like, you know, very, you know, sort of long. I think there's obviously some sort of insider gov info that is coming out. Like when you see a polymarked market like that, it's spike so much. Somebody knows something and is driven on it.

So, you know, what I love about polymarket, it's like, or like, is it insider trading? And it's like, yes, that's the point. Finally, saying it out, loud. Yeah. Yeah, that's wild. What about, I mean, I want to go through a bunch of stuff. I, I mean, I imagine that you can't comment on the actual IPL rumors, but I would be interested to hear about like what, you know, key, like looking back on 20, 25 for that company, looking forward

to 26, what are you excited about? And then also, like, what do you think people might misunderstand about SpaceX that is the story that we start seeing told, maybe if they hypothetically go public one day? Yeah, let's see. You know, to me, it feels like the company's like, you know, sort of very on track in that, you know, when people started talking about Starship in like 2020, 21, I remember telling people like, look, this is like super exciting.

But if you just look at the complexity of that vehicle, relative Falcon 9, it's a huge step up. in complexity, but that's also roughly to step up in terms of size of company that SpaceX is and complexity that they can take on. And so then my quick math is like, well, then it'll probably take about as much time as Falcon 9 to get to like true production rate. And so there are people that were like, no, they'll be like, you know, like fully online by 25 commercial flying super regularly. And I always remember saying in like 2020, I was like, I don't think that that's going to sort of be the case. I think it'll be closer to like end of decade because that's, you know,

roughly the time frame of Falcon 9, you know, sort of took. And so that's where I kind of see them where it's like, yeah, they are obviously making phenomenal progress, you know, sort of with starship. I don't think that we're going to be seeing, like, you know, this year it's going to be on the order of, I forget, I think, like, 200, you know, sort of Falcon 9, you know, sort of rocket launches. Yeah. I don't think they were going to see 200 starship launches until, yeah, probably end of decade would still be my, like, you know, sort of rough bet.

But I still think it's like a really phenomenal outcome. Yeah, they're going, they're going similarly on timing and speed, but they're blowing up more rockets than Falcon 9. Because I think the third Falcon 9 rocket was successful, something like that. and yes but they had a bunch of landings that they blew up which is the more complex

people forget that like yeah I mean for what it's worth Starship is already functional and online it's just like not fully reusable yeah I think a lot of people I think a lot of people misunderstand that like when it's blowing up it's usually blowing up like on the way down

like it's not very quickly was like okay it takes off successfully it gets up to the top and then it and then it started blowing up on the way down it bounces off the no no no no no no no no it's not bouncing off

anything. It is in fact going to space. We are going to space. It is real. Space is real here on this show. It glances off. It glances off. Okay. Are you? Yeah, sorry.

Continue. Oh, seriously, yeah. People underappreciate that like Starship is actually a very successful rocket already. Yeah. It could take things up to orbit at like very large scale of very cheap prices. Literally today, it just happens to be that like, yeah, they're still figuring out the landing thing. Sure.

But obviously they want to figure that out before they get to like super mass production rate. I think the other story that is really going to start to be told is just their shift to like more things that are, you know, extraterrestrial and that like you are going to see SpaceX do, I think, some very impressive things that are way beyond the bounds of low Earth orbit over the coming, you know, sort of a couple years. Obviously, they have a huge contract with NASA to like figure out how to land things, you know, on the moon. And that type of activity is something that they like are spending a lot of resources on. Yeah. But I don't think it's like that public of a story relative to like Star, Starlink, etc. I saw something, I saw something, I saw. I saw this, like, article that had, like, all these motion graphics. Very cool. And it was explaining how Starship will take stuff to the moon. And it was something like they're going to do, like, 26 refuelings in space. And then that just feels like, in the 60s, we could just go straight there. And now we've got to stop for gas 26 times.

Like, why should I not be blackpilled on this? Is this like, this is crazy? It's a lost start, John. It just seems crazy to me, but break it down. What's actually going on? So funny historical fact from the Apollo days, there was actually a huge debate internally at NASA, whether or not to take the fuel stop approach versus the like shoot straight for the moon approach. There was a significant chunk of NASA led by, it was like Pete something, I want to say, that really wanted to do the gas station approach. The reason being that they saw that as what would make it to that going to the moon was just much more long term sustainable because you have these like pieces of infrastructure and it's easy to like send things mission by mission without each.

individual mission basically being super risky. And the other side of the approach, which was just shoot straight for the moon, was largely led by Vernar von Braun. A part of why he liked the shoot straight for the moon thing is because it allowed him to just make one really, really big rocket rather launching lots of small rockets. And I think he was just addicted to rockets, basically. And that was ultimately won out. I do think probably that was the right call for the time and allowed us like get the

riskies, et cetera. But counterintuitively, the refueling and, you know, sort of fuel stations approach is actually the much more long-term sustainable one. And that like, as we think about like, you know, going to Mars, very regularly going to the moon, sure. You don't want to necessarily have to take on the risk of like, you know, just like on a car trip, you don't take all your fuel literally with you, like they're gas on the way. And that makes this the vehicle that is moving things is much simpler.

Yeah. Same thing. You want to set up a more stable logistics and supply chain. You actually do want, you know, basically these types of fuel stops. But yeah, that's a part of what SpaceX needs to prove is like, you know, I think that number that you're citing in terms of a number of refuel is more for a full Mars mission. Okay. the moon. I think it's more like three refuel.

Okay. Okay. So it is definitely sort of simpler by going to the moon. Also, it does seem like we've rebuilt the capacity to just yeat stuff directly to the moon because didn't firefly land something up there and China's going up and stuff direct. Like we seriously have checked that box like several times. It's not even like humans on the moon

once. Like I think we sent six manned missions, right? Yeah, exactly, exactly. But I think we want to get that to like 600. It's going to be like through the fuel stop approach probably. And what I like is that we're parallel tracking, which like the things that Firefly in China have done, those things are just amplified by the fuel stop, you know, basically approach when like that comes online. So I like that we're parallel tracking it. And this goes back to a little bit of the Jared Isaacman thing. We're like,

man, if I were in Jared Isaacman's shoes right now, I would basically just go to like, you know, NASA and just be like, hey, Fireflies like figure out how to land on the moon. I don't understand why we wouldn't just jam a bunch of funding down their throats until I'm like, don't just do it once a year, but I want you like doing it on a quarterly basis. I want you to basically now establish like a regular supply chain there. So now I can go fund a bunch of companies. that are like making lunar humanoids and lunar robots in pavers and solar panel assemblers, et cetera. So like while we're in parallel doing the like fuel stop human architecture, we also just like have these direct approaches that are landing robots there. So we're just like

landing equipment there and nonstop and figuring out how to like, you know, basically make sure that by the time the humans are there, we actually have like a bunch of like robotic infrastructure that's like, you know, autonomous and basically set up. And so. Yeah, I think like that that parallel approach. That is super sci-fi. I love that. But that's, feels like if we can do that, we can certainly put some data centers in space. What's your having evolving on that? Because Casey Hanmer just came out pro data center in space. Like you had, you had us in the first half. Elon's been posting about it. Yeah, Elon, I mean, you really kicked the horn as it because it's like Elon Sundar, like this YC company seems to be

doing pretty well. There's like, there's like four different attack vectors on you. And I love it. It's contrarian position. But are you maintaining it or is your thinking evolving? Look, I'm going to maintain my position because no information has changed. You know, people have said words, but they have not presented compelling, you know, sort of arguments. Okay. Where I think there's a little bit of like a gray area is like, look, I currently have two data centers that are in space. Sure. I'm not doing like AI compute on them, but I have like a bunch of computers up in space.

They could go do inference and like training, et cetera. Starlink, each of the satellites has compute that are on board. They could be basically, you know, basically sort of data centers in space. So I think the question more is like... You change up your tune, Delian. You're looking at the next $20 billion public company.

I think so. Can we smack this? I thought you're hanging out with... I don't know if you're doing your duty to shareholders in the way that you're spinning this. Come on. Yeah. Stop being so realistic. Too modest. Too modest.

Too much of a realist. We're putting a quantum computer on it, too. It's going to be... literally have like multiple shareholders that opinion. I mean like, okay, like I know that you don't like the data center space thing, but like what if we use the space factories

to make things that go into the data center? Exactly. Fab in space. Fab in space. I can go a little bit and I'm just like, love you guys. Like, you know,

my job is to build a business that like, you know, delivers revenue and shareholder returns, not just your pure hype. But yeah, I think it's where it's like, it's on the margin where it's like, look, do I think that like the SpaceX like economics

are going to beat out like nuclear power. data centers run by Crusoe in Texas? No, man, come on. Like, I just like, in order for that to work, you have to be like short nuclear, short, you know, optical fiber on the ground, short the ability to like, you know, build building, short solar panels, short batteries. It's just like all of those things are making incredible progress super rapidly and in space those things are more complex.

Are there going to be, you know, sort of marginal, you know, sort of areas and use cases and more broadly as we just like have more and more of like internet and connectivity where there, there are real benefits to being in space. And so then you by default just have more. just have more infrastructure up there. And so, yes, some of those things may be dedicated to compute. But, like, yeah, is Crusoe almost certainly going to have, like, better economics than, like, a space-based data center in 2030?

Yeah, I think that's going to be the case. And so that might mean that, like, 98.5 percent of data centers, you know, are all on the ground. If some small sliver for certain use cases, or you're doing, like, compute on things that are calculated in orbit or, like, you know, cameras, you know, that are up there and you're trying to do things. Or it's like, there's people that are up in orbit and, you know, they want to chat, B. T in orbit, then, yeah, again, there might be these, like, slivers, but it's going to be, you know, feel very confident that it's going to be slivers. Who knows? Maybe we'll

look at this recording in 2032 and, like, you know, I'll have been like, people will be mocking you. People will be dunking on you. The young, the young Delian will literally be saying, like, Delian's been, like, the next delian, you know, the young guy that loves the app, he'll be like, oh, he's chopped decel. I'm diesel, maybe, I'm diesel. You only predicted humanoid's assembling pavers on the moon, not data centers. Anyway, big detail guy. Thank you.

Thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. This is a lot of fun. Always, always great to chat. Happy holidays. Merry Christmas. We'll see you soon. Merry Christmas. See you, Steve, boys.

Bye. We're going to tell you about 8Sleep.com. Delling's an investor. Exceptional sleep without exception. Get an 8th sleep for Christmas, gifted for Christmas. Get a good night's sleep this Christmas with eight sleep. I got a 92. Jordy, how'd you do?

Oof, I got an 86. I got a 92, but I'm in a terrible sleep debt, which is rough. I'm on like a four hour, five hours. I don't care that you won because I'm in such a good mood because of this Christmas music. I like it. And we have Morgan coming in. This is the longest. Yes, we have Morgan Housel, author, friend of the show.

Welcome to the show. This is the longest sound cute. Thank you so much for taking the time to join us. How are you doing? Welcome back. Good to see you guys. Doing well. I like your shirts.

Looking good. Thank you. Yes, wait. One should be in the mail for you. Yeah, hopefully, all right. I love it. We'll work on it. Can't wait.

Let's get into it. What is new in your world? Take us through the latest. And then I want to go into some psychology of the holiday, psychology of shopping. We have a bunch of things that we want to run through. But is there a hands? I mean, not that much going on right now. I'm not writing a book right now, which is kind of the most enjoy.

part of my career because it lets you just spend all day reading and thinking about what's next, which is always the most enjoyable part of it. So I guess to answer your question, I don't know what's next, but I love this area of my life of just doing a bunch of reading and talking to people and thinking about different topics and try to figure out what might be next. How much have you kind of keyed in on what you want to write about next? I think I have a pretty good idea of what it would be. Well, what about the next book? What about the next book after that? Is that a, is that a starting to come into focus. I'm curious.

I think that's not, yeah, I think what is true that I have an idea for a distant book. I don't know when this is going to be. But there are so many topics that are worth exploring, but not in a full book. And I do think there is an idea. It's hard to do, right, but there's an idea for a book that is a huge hodgepodge of like 80 different ideas, all of which are worth exploring in three or four pages. And obviously the issue with most nonfiction books, particularly business, books is you have a topic that is worth exploring, but not in 250 pages. But then the author has to

stretch it out and just keep on rambling about the same topic over and over again. And that's why business books are so difficult. So if you can get around that by just going shallow, or not not even shallow, but giving the treatment that they deserve on a bunch of small disparate topics, I think that's something I'm interested in. Have you ever been tempted into trying to build a subscription, like newsletter and really focusing on that by saying, like, hey, there's a bunch of, you know, instead of the next three or four books, I'm going to basically just write the chapters and publish them as I have them. I'm sure you've had, I mean, you've had every opportunity to do that, and you haven't.

It hasn't been like the focus so far, but I'm curious if that would ever change. I think the reason I have not is because I think you have to be very careful as a content creator, for lack of a better word, that you don't become beholden to your audience, that you say, look, my audience is paying me $100 a month, and I have to feed the ducks because they're quacking. That's a very dangerous spot to be in for a content creator of, like, being forced to say stuff when you have nothing to say is a bad spot to be. You're saying that to the guys that go live for three hours every day. If we don't. Yeah, but, but you're talking differently. Like, nobody expects you to do your, your PhD thesis every day for three hours.

Totally, totally. The bar is like so it's, it's a, it's a different level. We don't necessarily need to generate the content. The world generates the content and we figure out. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you want to talk about. Yeah, we're kind of like, what about, have you been, have you seen some, there's some, uh, I feel like I've seen some authors like,

that are writing fiction instead of just writing a book, like releasing the book as a subscription product. That seems somewhat interesting, almost like treating it like, uh, you're subscribing to Netflix and Netflix is releasing a show and then sort of dripping it out over time. Uh,

do you think that's a model that, that, uh, authors could, like, how powerful is the book industrial complex? is there enough incentives to keep people from not doing that and not, you know, self-publishing and kind of dripping out content and just staying true to the traditional path?

I think it's true that books are, and this is true for podcasts as well, that they are the ultimate tail-driven content. 99% of books that are published don't work. But the ones that do really, really work. Same for podcasts and whatnot. And so I think it's true that if you're an author, you need, particularly if you haven't had that hit yet, you need to figure out your business model in a different way. It's very difficult to say, I'm a talented writer. I'm going to go write books and try to make a living out of it. For every writer who does that, there are 10,000 who have stumbled and tripped and ultimately failed doing it. It's a tough model to make it work. And I've seen a much higher success rate in the people that go on substack or whatever it might be

and have that level of subscription. I think people are more willing to pay 30 bucks a month for your consistent content, your daily or your weekly newsletter, then they are to pay $30 for a book that took you two years to write. And so it's a more stable model, I think, with a higher hit rate to have that paid subscription. Even if the rewards for a book that works can be higher, it's just so much more difficult to make it work. What do you think about, like, consumer churn or like conversion to actually consuming the content fully? Because I know that there's this, there's like this odd, you know, a lot of people, buy physical books, they gift them, and then they sit on bookshelves, and they wind up being

props in many cases that people don't just have enough time to read all the books that they acquire. I actually did subscribe to one of those new books as a newsletter, fiction, and it was odd because I wound up paying for it for a very long time, but I didn't wind up reading it. As they were, as the chapters were coming in. And I thought, when I first, when I first subscribed, I was like, oh, this is going to be even easier because it's so bite-sized. It's going to be easier. I'm more likely to get through this than if this was just another book that I had added to my audible. It also creates a weird tension where there's an incentive to have like crazy cliffhangers so that people don't turn. Like if you get a little bit, if you get a little bit bored

with a book and you have the ability to churn from the book, you know, think about how often I'll start a book and if I'm not, you know, I'll get three chapters in. I'm not like really engaged with it. I'll just say like, cool. I'm not necessarily. Hopefully I learned something. thing, but I'm not going to just read it just to see it all the way through. Sure. Yeah. I think what's true, too, for every good nonfiction book is that people don't remember books so much as they remember a couple sentences from those books. So most nonfiction books are about 50,000 words. If you read to the end, which is rare, but if you read all 50,000 words

and you come away having remembered two or three banger lines, of the 50,000 words, you remember 50 of them. That can be great. And it's true, like some books that I know changed my life, books that I recommend that are so good. If you actually, if you ask me about them, I can tell you two or three sentences, maybe that I remember verbatim that were fantastic. And the rest kind of drifts away over time. So I think that's true even for the absolute best books that can change your life. It's just very small snippets that you're going to remember from them. And so one takeaway in that too is that you can remember two or three banger lines from a blog post as well. And so all the books that I've written, most of the ideas started as blog post. And then I can take that idea, okay,

that idea worked. People like that. How can I kind of transform that into a chapter in a book? But the core idea is like, if you can remember one sentence from this idea, from this chapter, I've done my job. That's, that's the goal. Yeah, I, I wonder if I actually read this book, but there's a book that left a really, really long, like, impression on me, all about immortality. It was this very interesting way of like framework of thinking about immortality from different cultures. And I don't even know if I actually read the book, but it stuck with me because like the actual idea was so powerful. And then there's other books where I've read the whole thing. There's been a lot of interesting anecdotes, but like it didn't like change my whole worldview.

And yeah, it's just fascinating. Sorry, what were you going to say? Well, I was talking about, I wrote an essay called Rage Bate is for losers. And what I wanted people to remember was the title. Yeah. It in itself was. Titles are important. Well, it was, it was rage bait.

itself because if you've been rage baiting and you then are thinking well i'm not i like you kind of want to defend it yeah like a strategy and some people this is interesting so how do you think about rage bait in the context of picking a title for a book that might jump off the shelf in a store because i can imagine there's a world where a book is called you know like if you don't read this you'll be poor forever or something like that you know and then then it's like all the of a sudden, well, I'm not going to let them get the best of me. I got to read that book. But I think it's no different than any product where you over promise and under-delivery.

You're just going to piss off your customers. And if you're just trying to get a quick hit and then disappear, maybe that's the right way. If you're trying to build a long-term brand, your title has to be very honest. Yeah. And so my first book, The Psychology of Money, it's a pretty boring title. A lot of the people who are involved in it said, we should not use that as a title. It sounds like an academic textbook. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

It's a textbook. But it's an honest, but it's an honest title. Yeah. What is the book about? It's about the psychology of money. It doesn't have a problem. Do you think you would have sold, do you think you would have sold more copies if you just change the title to how to get rich and stay rich or something?

Well, it's not even not. It's like how to make sure that you have a good psychology of money. How to make sure you have a good relationship. Well, I think, I think you clearly care about, you didn't set that in the title. You clearly care about NPS. Yeah. Maybe more than other writers or, or, or, or. publishers might.

I heard Rory Sutherland say this on the podcast recently. He said, if you are like a family business and you're in it for the long run, you're trying to build a generational business. By and large, you don't care about metrics. You're not tracking how much your gross profit margin shifted last quarter. What you care about is customer satisfaction and brand. And it's only when you're like a private equity owned business where you're like, we're just trying to flip this thing in the next quarter, that you become very metric-driven.

And you want to measure. everything down. So I think to answer your question, if I was very metric-driven and it was just like, my goal is to sell as many books as I can next quarter, you can use something bombastic that's going to over-promise. I'll probably work in the short run. If your goal is to have a long-tail sales cycle and be like, I want this book to sell for years or even generations, if I'm lucky, it has to be honest. It has to be brand-driven where people are like, I enjoy this book. I'm going to recommend it to my friends and family. Emily Herrera in the chat says books are just titles and thumbnails. So same experience on YouTube. You might, you might have a crazy title and thumbnail.

And then if it's not very truthful, then all the comments are just like, congrats on baiting, you know, baiting people into watching this. And again, the sort of NPS is quite low. Should you write a book on gambling? I think it's all kind of embedded in behavioral finance. And I think the idea that, the proliferation of gambling, whether it's crypto or sports betting or whatever it might be, I think by and large, this is not a unique take. Many people have talked about this, but Daniel Kahneman wrote about when all of your options are bad or perceived to be bad, people become very risk-taking.

And so if you feel like, if a young person feels like, if I work hard, excuse me, if I work hard and work my way up the corporate ladder and save my money and buy a house and start a family, that's what you'll do. if you perceive that option is available to you. If you don't, then you're like, who cares? Like, I have no vested stake in this system. Might as well throw it all on black and see what happens. And I think that comes down to it.

So I think the psychology of gambling is a pretty deep social issue. And I think you could probably accurately summarize it as youth pessimism. When people are pessimistic, they're much more likely to just throw it all down and see what happens. They have nothing to lose. I have more on that. So how do you think about the level of risk that people were taking at the time of the American dream? Like, because there's one world where we go back and we say like, oh, yeah, it was like the 1950s. And you could just get a job at this law firm and it would just be massively successful.

Or even if you were coal miner, you'd have a job in healthcare forever. And you go to the auto plant and be an auto worker and work your way up from, you know, the person sweeping up the floor at night to the manager at the end of the day. And I'm wondering if there's like, well, like, we remember that as not risky because America was successful. But like there was an emerging new order where, you know, like the USSR could have steamrolled in the Cold War and America could have been a disaster. And so in fact, like, it was risky, but it just worked out well. But I don't know if that's like, am I thinking about that even in the right realm at all? What do you think? Yeah, I think a lot of that narrative of what the job market used to be.

and kind of the 1950s Americana nostalgia that we have is just that. It's kind of false nostalgia. It's this idea that, you know, the narrative that you just described of, you could go get a job at an auto factory and work your way up and stay there for 30 years. I mean, if you understand the history of the U.S. economy in the 1950s, particularly in the 1970s, there were huge recessions. There were huge job losses. And so I think it's easy to put together a charming, you know, Norman Rockwell picture

of what it used to be. By and large, it's not the case. But on the flip side, I also think, I was like everyone had a, you know, this idea of like, if you were employed, you, you had a very good shot of owning a home. But the homes were like 750 square feet, right? And they were like, that's true. And I think, but I think it's also true that, you know, you can throw around a lot of statistics. And I have about how the median American family earns more as wealthier as better off today than they were in the 1950s in the 1960s. It's also true, indisputably, that home ownership was more accessible and cheaper back then. And I've, I've been thinking a lot about the topic that I think almost every societal

problem that we have today is downstream of housing affordability. It's the single biggest issue that we have, even back to the gambling issue that we were just talking about. If you are 28 and you feel, whether it's true or not, you feel like you will never own a home. It's impossible for you to get there to save the down payment, you become much more likely to be like, I have nothing vested in this system. Might as well throw it all the way. I have nothing to lose. I might as well throw it all the way. And so even if median incomes adjusted for inflation were lower back in the 1950s, if owning a home was more accessible and by and large it was for most people, that just gave you more of a vested sense in the system caused you to take, I think, smarter risks, not betting everything on the spread

on tonight's game, but taking a risk of, I'm going to move to a new town and try to get a job at an auto factory, that was a risk, but it's a more calculated risk than today's gambling mentality. I think there's something to be said to of just access, which we're seeing in the gambling world today, if you gave a 19-year-old boy, Kalshi and all the sports betting's app in 1955, they would have latched right onto it. There's nothing unique about today's young generation by and large. It's just that we didn't have those tools to the extent that we do today. I encourage people to look up. John and I were going back and forth on this on our flight on Friday. We were looking at how popular gambling was during the fall of the Roman Empire.

It was all social classes. We're doing it on the exact same levels that we're seeing today. Sure, they weren't on a mobile device, but it was like everywhere that you would be eating and drinking and it was in private and public and there was illegal and and legal in some areas like at certain festivals it would be legal and then it would be like illegal otherwise but you know it was kind of seen as okay so there's nothing there's nothing new uh these things just are going in waves but it certainly was i think people were like somewhat nihilistic and they were just like sure like things are we're experiencing a collapse we may as well put it all on black.

Yeah. So I think it's easy to look at the issues of today and frame it as we have degraded, particularly the younger generation. I don't think that's the case. I think any other previous generation would have become degenerate gamblers, gamblers and crypto chainers,

traders, if they had the option to, like today's generation does. Yeah. I wonder how much of it is just memetic, just like the myth that we tell ourselves, like if we can, yeah, I don't know, somehow steer away. I also wonder like, you know, there is the, like, the paternalistic, the puritanical, like, ban the bad thing. But there's also the, the more optimistic view of

just, like, maybe just do more of the good thing. Like, if we have, like, a national project to build something meaningful. Well, I think, I think the thing that, that makes you want to put your hand through a wall is people having their, in their brokerage account. the ability to one-click, you know, sell Apple stock and then another click by trade on sports contracts. Because, I mean, again, at least there was historically some separation where there was at least some friction of getting out of maybe a higher quality investment and getting into something that's just rolling the dice. And I think that's very clearly going, you know, has gone away in some cases and probably. will just continue to erode. Also, I mean...

Yeah, I think it's important to point out, too, that Vanguard has $12 trillion AUM. You know, Fidelity has $10 trillion AUM. The vast majority of capital these days are people saving in their 401Ks, dollar cost averaging. They don't even know their password. It's being invested into good,

stable businesses, diversified, low cost. So it's easy to point out around all the crazy speculation that goes on. And look, I'm a free markets person. People want to speculate and do whatever they want their money. You're allowed to set your financial life on fire. But the vast, vast majority of capital is still being invested in what I would consider to be a pretty smart, conservative long-term way.

The chat has a little bit of a counterpoint. They said that we might not be considering the fact that 99% of gamblers quit just before they hit it big. And so that is a little bit of a counterpoint. A lot of the arguments that we're making here. I just want to make sure we consider that. Fair enough. Yeah, just one more bet.

Just one more bet. You're good. Wanted to go back, get your thoughts on startup launches, kind of random. I think everyone has launch video fatigue. I know we did. We were doing a lot of launch style videos earlier this year, and we pretty much stopped completely, just because we felt like the meta was kind of dead.

It wasn't actually a way to truly break through anymore and wanted to get your, if you think that writing is underutilized as like a launch, as a launch strategy, there's been some, you know, viral PDFs. I think, you know, situational awareness is a good example of like, just if you can put together a good enough document, you can attract, you know, Bill, I mean, obviously Leopold is in a unique situation, but it feels like writing is super underutilized. My first company went viral. on a blog post, on hacker news, and drove 10,000 signups, a ton of interest, and people were starting

a conversation around that. It was just a blog on some random person's website, basically, and it actually broke out massively. But yeah, it's tricky, but I'd love to know your thoughts. I think it tends to be true. And this is not black and white, but it tends to be true that if you can explain your value proposition in a paragraph of text, you will do it. And if you can't, you're much more likely to say, well, we need some glossy pictures. If you can do it with that, then you you kind of work your way down to like, can we just create a movie out of this kind of thing? That's not always the case. But I do think it's a case. If your idea is so obvious and so good, you can just explain it with crayons on a piece of paper and you're good. You're good from there.

And so I think, look, when I started writing books, somebody told me advice that I thought was great for books, but true for almost any product. And it was, if the book is good, you don't need to market it. And if the book is bad, no amount of marketing will help. I think you can apply that to a lot of different things. If your product is good, you don't need to market it. That's not true. I'm being very generalized here. Marketing is important.

But if your product is good, then it can kind of sell itself. If the product is bad, no amount of marketing will help, particularly in the longer term. And so, look, I like good design. I like flashy videos. I like all that kind of stuff. But good ideas are very obvious. I think that's one of the keys to good writing is that you don't need to spend a lot of mental horsepower to understand what the author's saying. You can just kind of glance your eyes over.

paragraph and be like, yeah, I got it. Makes a perfect sense. I don't need any more flash of it. That one sentence explained everything I need to know. Let's move on from there. I think that tends to be true. Do you have a book of the year? Do you like looking back and creating like a list of the things that you most enjoyed this year?

I know that you don't. This is like a total newsletter fodder and we already talked about how you're not, you know, in service to people that demand the end of the year review. But has anything stuck out to you this year? I thought the best book that I read was probably Andrew Ross Sorkin's 1929. Just absolutely phenomenal book. Also the best book launch ever? Incredible.

I think that's probably, he did a very good job. And then also, like, absolute masterclass. I was taking screenshots of you. If you search Andrew Ross Sorkin in 1929 on YouTube, you can see that he just did every single podcast. Like he did 20 or 30 shows. And it was so good. And I didn't realize, like, he's someone that everyone knows.

but he's not constantly on a tour, so he had a lot of built up energy to, like, go full tilt, and it worked really well. It was a natural... And it's such a fascinating period of American history that, to my surprise, has not, there's not a lot of books

written about the Great Depression. There's not, like, what's the classic book on the Great Depression? There's not many of them. There are 10,000 books written about World War II. World War II, yeah, exactly. But the Great Depression, which was so monumental in the history of this country,

there's not a lot written about it. it. So I thought he did a great job. Somebody brought this up when they were reviewing 1929. I thought it was such a fascinating point that all of the big characters in the book, except for maybe Jesse Livermore, are pretty much forgotten today. All of the titans of industry of banking, the Jamie Diamonds of their day are all forgotten now, unless you're like a history buff, Charlie Mitchell, all those people, we don't remember them anymore. And I think there's something to be said that if your only accomplishment in life is that you made a lot of money, you're going to be forgotten very quickly. And that was true for a lot of the bankers back then. It's probably true

for a lot of the private equity hedge fund people today. Nothing wrong with that. I will remember all the private credit legends. Wall Street's new rich. I will remember them. I'm going to keep this episode or this edition of Barron's bring it to the grave. No, no, what you need to do is you need to wait 100 years. You need to write an amazing book about it. Then you need to turn that book into a movie and a TV show and then cast an iconic actor and then we'll remember. And then that's what... How are you processing the AI trade in the context of history? I think historically the gap between a product changing the world and people making a lot of money off of it can be 20 miles apart.

The railroads were probably the most transformational technology ever, way more transformational than anything we've had over the last hundred years. And a few people made ungodly fortunes from it. 99% of railroad investors lost everything. and that was true for the airplane completely changed the world. A lot of people lost huge fortunes on automobiles. There were 2,000 car companies in the early 1900s. Three of them remained by the 1930s or so.

And so you can go on down the list of like, change the world and 99% of people lost everything. Of course, that was true of the dot-com bubble. Everyone's thesis, by and large, in the late 1990s, of what the internet would become was right. But it didn't mean that you were going to make any money from it. In fact, you were going to try to lose everything. Webvan, I think, is such a good example because it's like DoorDash, just 15 years.

Atcom, Chewy's a banger company. MP3.com. Spotify's the company you want to own. Like, there's just so many, every current company, there was some.com that was doing the basic idea and just didn't get to scale at all. Yeah. So I think that, I think you could easily imagine just based off of history that in 20 years, of course, AI completely changed everything. Nothing is the same. And when we talk about the businesses that have been involved

of the previous 20 years, there's two or three unbelievable winners. 99% of companies went to zero. And the three companies that won are either not around today or not the obvious ones today. So if you're talking about the internet in 1998, Google was in a garage. Obviously, Facebook didn't exist yet.

That tends to be the story of what it was. The Wright brothers themselves didn't make very much money from the airplane, if anything. It wasn't until you had someone William Boeing who came wrong and he was like, I'm just going to copy your idea, but do it way better

than you guys could do it. And that tends to be the idea. It's what Google did with Yahoo and Hott and all the other search engines who were the actual front runners. You just took someone else coming along to be like, great idea. Hold my beer and watch me do it

a hundred times better than you could. Speaking of AI, we've talked about this before. Obviously, AI is not ready or equipped to write a book. Oh, it'll write it, John. Happily. It will write it, but it won't write it.

But what do you think about AI-generated voices? Do you think that those are past the Uncanny Valley? Would you listen to an audible book that was where the voice was AI-generated? I'm not much of an audiobook guy, so I'm probably the wrong person to ask for that. What I would say is one of the most amazing AI products that I've seen in the world, the last two years. I think a lot of people have had this experience is Google's notebook LM, where you go in and you say, here's a topic, make me a 10-minute podcast, and it spits it out, and it's unbelievable. So when I first saw that, I was like, this is, this, this is magic. I can't

believe it. And how many Notebook LM podcasts have I listened to since then? Zero. I was about to ask. I think none. None. I think there's something to be said. And of course, I am literally talking to I actually think it's, I think the use case there where they probably have traction is students that have not studied for an exam and they have an hour to try to figure it out. So it's not for enjoyment at all. It's pure function, which is that I need to listen to something for an hour that is like hyper specific to a topic. And it's boring. So nobody necessarily made the like definitive podcast episode on it. But I just need it.

And then in terms of like the way that most people listen to audio to get to be entertained. even if it's like educational. And so they're going to go to people that are good entertainers that are opinionated. I think that's true. And of course, I am such a biased person to say this as an author myself. But I think what I like about reading books,

whether it's fiction or nonfiction, is the idea that a fellow human wrote this thing. I could never write this. My brain doesn't work this way, but some other authors did. And I feel like that connection is amazing. And it breaks down as soon as you have AI generated content. And I think that's why

I have no interest in a notebook L.M. Podcast. I'd much rather listen to David Senra and his, you know, even with all of his quirks and his stumbles and whatnot. But I'm like, yeah, but David read that. He did this. He's thinking that. And like, I love that.

And so I, you know. I listened to an hour of OG Senra, the P.T. Barnum episode yesterday. And then I got to hang out with David for a couple hours last night for dinner at my house. One of the best guys around. I love me. Truly. Yeah.

Truly. Yeah, I think I need to listen to the James Dyson episode today, but he released that. And for Senra OGs, you know how significant that episode is to him, like the full circle moment of, you know, studying Dyson to being able to interview him live. It's very cool. Love it. Yeah, wild. Great having you on the show. We hope you have an incredible end to the year. and thank you for being a part of this this year. You're somebody that, one of our favorite guests, and I can't wait for next year.

Thanks a much for having me. I was an honor to be on. Looking forward to my shirt. Yes. We'll talk to you soon. Talk soon. Have a good rest of your day. Numeral.com compliance handled.

Numeral worries about sales tax and VAT compliance. So you can focus on growth and putting presents into the Christmas tree. Speaking of presents under the Christmas tree, the Google team is cooking up a present for me in 2026. They're going to put ads in Gemini. Let's go. Hit the gong. Finally, finally. We were going to ask me for it.

I hear the sleigh bells ringing. We've been asking for it. Ads in LMs. We talked to the founder of perplexity about it. We asked Arvind, why are you going to put ads? We want ads in perplexity. and he said maybe and the tech folks wrote a whole article about it and they got really bad at it. I'll let Google jump first.

I'll let Google jump first. We've talked to Sarah Fryer. We've talked to the Open AI team about how badly we want ads in chat GPT, how badly we want ads in LLMs. They said maybe we're going to do it. Maybe we're not. They've been sitting on their hands. But now, I don't know how you can. I love listening to your voice.

It's good. It's good. We need a back of track. Yeah, this is interesting. Okay. There's, this feels like very Google to just be like, yeah, we're, we're the ad business. We're going to do ads. We're going to do them first. We're probably going to do them better than, than anybody else, at least initially. But some people were pushing back just being like, hey, you could have, like, you easily could have just, just crushed, right? Yeah, you easily could have just like kept the product cheap. A lot of people are excited about, or a lot of people are, are, are wondering like, hey, there's a, there's a world where Gemini does. doesn't have ads and is free for two years, and it just completely puts the screws to every other, you know, LLM provider. Yeah, and I've, I mean...

What would you do if you were them? Would you monetize earlier? I don't know. It can't be that expensive, right? I mean, it would definitely hurt cash flow. Like, it would show up in the financials for sure. I just, I mean... Gemini Pro Plus is not cheap, but...

Turning on ads for, I mean, I always look back to what... What would the Instagram business look like if they were forced to monetize it independently? Because it's an amazing ad, like it's an amazing platform that's perfectly suited for to monetize with ads. And yet you can imagine meta ramped ad spend on the platform 10, 20 times faster than maybe an independent operator would have because they just had been, they had all the customer relationships. They had a strong sense of who the person was already because they were probably on Facebook. as well. I don't think ads cause failure to adopt a new product. I don't know.

We'd have to look through the product graveyard, but I feel like of things that die, they rarely die because of- Yeah, people are acting like ads and LMs are going to be like the biggest deal and are going to be the biggest issue. And I just don't think it's going to be, I think they're going to, I think the different platforms. In many ways, they could make the product better or more like sticky in the sense

that you're like looking at stuff, doing shopping in there. And personally, I want every LLM. to have a lot of ads so that I can swap between all of the best models without feeling like I need to sign up. Like I actually, like, for me, I'm like, there's models that I just don't use because I'm like, okay, I don't, I don't want to sign. I have not that much. I'll let Tyler sign up. Totally. On our ramp cart. Totally. But do you think XAI is going to run ads?

Do you think they're going to add in grok or ads in romantic mode? Yeah, I'm sure they will at some point. I doubt it's a huge, a huge priority for them. There's this company Halftime, which won the GROC hackathon that happened over the weekend. Yes. I DM with the founder. He's down to come on. We need to pull this up because when I saw this, I was like, whoa, like, X-A-I. I didn't realize that it was from a hackathon.

I thought it was just this actual company. So it says halftime dynamically weaves AI-generated ads into the scenes that you're watching. So breaks feel like part of the story instead of interruptions. So there's a really funny. In the Chabrex in the chat says it just makes you second guess every output you get from the model. Totally. I agree that's the bad case. There's a world where they just give you the real response and then there's an ad.

Yes. So there is a different flip. So to Sybex's point, you second guess every output you get from the model because your word the ad is influencing it. If you go to your favorite chat app and you say, what are the best headphones? And it says Apple AirPods pros. And you're like, oh, is it sponsored? Is it not? Are they being objective?

Are they not? Yes, that is something that you'd worry about. But there's also the other flip side, which is that if they're not monetizing well, they might be putting you on the cheapest model that's just guessing. And it's just like, oh, yeah, like, I guess it's this product because they didn't cook. They didn't give you the reasoning model because they can't afford to because they're not monetizing you well. I think, yeah, one reality is somebody types, what is the best cell phone that I can get for $1,000, and it gives you the iPhone, and then there's an ad for an Android phone right below it. And that's still worth advertising on because it's a high intent query.

And it's very, you know, and it's likely ends up being profitable for the Android, you know, device manufacturer to advertise against it. But let's pull up halftime. They're dynamically weaving AI generated ads into scenes you're watching. so breaks feel like part of the story instead of interruptions. Watching. Wrong. Boo. What do they say?

Harvard trivia, the lightning round. Go, Pulitzer Prizes. 46. Nobel Peace prizes. Jessica, what are you doing here? Get in. I was just a... That is so weird.

This is... So bad. I'm sold. Now I want to I want to Coca-Cola. Okay, okay. If you want to see, if you want to see how ads are done well

in, uh, in, in, in, in, in, in,

in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in video,

uh, we have to pull up the video that's at the bottom of the timeline. Uh, they just reinvented the Star Wars Ceresa crystal ads. Have you seen these? You've barely seen Star Wars.

But at one point, there was a, uh, At one point, there was an international showing of the original Star Wars, and for some reason, they needed to cut ads into the actual footage. And so we got to play this with sound. It's one of my favorite things. Let's play it.

You fought in the Clone Wars? Look at this. Yes. I was once a Jedi Knight, the same as your father. I wish I'd known him. He was the best star pilot in the galaxy. And a cunning warrior. I understand you've become quite a good pilot yourself.

He was a good friend. which reminds me I have something here for you your father wanted you to have this when you were older than that it's the best and they do that it's the best

it's like pure art AI could never it's so good it's absolutely genius and they do that two or three other times throughout the movie and so you're just watching and and it's always when they go to grab something and then they just do the insert shot

so like so like if you're watching the servesa crystal version of star wars by the end of the movie obi won canobi has had like five beers whoa more than cheeky pine yeah yeah no he's definitely he's definitely his buzz going but uh that's one of my favorite little a little bit that's great uh let me tell you about banto really quick bantam automate compliance and security the AI that powers everything from evidence collection and continuous monitoring to security reviews and vendor risk. Continue, Judy.

So with halftime, we're going to have the founder, Chris, Chris on. He's studying CS at Waterloo. What a great hack project. And then he's only 20. So we're going to have him on. I'm excited to have him on. That said, I wonder if he could work with a movie,

like go work with someone like a Netflix early on and say, like basically give us inventory. and then we will like work with a bunch of different, there will be a beverage scene and then we'll generate a bunch of random versions of the scene for different types of people in the audience. Yeah, well, so this already happens where ads in the background.

So if you're walking around New York City in some romantic comedy, they might actually go in VFX out the billboards that are in the back. And they might put new ads in the background. And that's just a traditional VFX pipeline. Just cut it out and put a different ad in. And so that type of editing can be made a lot more dynamic through AI.

And that's probably how this instantiates itself realistically, as opposed to just the most aggressive, the most aggressive, like all of a sudden they're talking about the ad. It's a little bit of a wild, wild move. Anyway, apparently Ryan McIntosh predicted this. He said, it's coming. He's quoting semi-analysis. It says, how much would Starbucks pay to haunt the background of every Mid-Journey Cafe render a Tesla idling in every AI generated traffic scene.

If you're thinking small, this is the ambient brand singularity. Dan in the chat says, you know, after you've seen that, Cervesa Cristol add once or twice, you actually are thinking about the beer for the rest of time, like wondering when it's going to come next. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, because it comes randomly. It might come right now. It might come in five minutes. Just be ready.

Should we get? Yeah, let's get to Tyler. You needed to grab something off his desk, right? Okay, so this is incredibly bullish. What is bullish? They're putting ads in ayahuasca trips. What? Somebody on Reddit.

This is something we would do. This is something we would joke about. Remember our joke about going to Peru with helicopters with massive speakers and playing corporate finance tutorials to people who are tripping in the jungle? That's the, to get them to come back to corporate America and lock in. What exactly happened here? Break it down, Jourty. So somebody on the R-slash DMT subreddit says anyone else getting Amazon ads when breaking through.

It's happened to me on my last three trips. Second was ayahuasca. Right as I break through, my trip is paused for a vivid five-second ad featuring Jeff Bezos. What? I'm the only one. How is this happening? Is that just like their brain is fried? And so they're imagining an ad?

Or is it like they happen to be listening to something or watching something? I think Jeff figured this out a long time ago. And he realized there's a lot of people that are using psychedelics. And he thought I could productize this and make it available to other merchants on Amazon. Or I could just keep it for myself and just have all the inventory for myself. No, of course, joking. But anyways, very, very funny. In other ads news, get bezel.com.

Shop over 26,000 luxury watches fully authenticated in-house by Bezell Team Experts. But also, apparently Anthropic bought every stack trade. that gets no results. So if you go to Google and you type in your stack trace, your air while you're programming, and nothing comes up. Claude somehow just went to Google and said, hey, we'll buy that ad inventory.

Genius feels like Google should be buying this, their own ad result, or they should actually just have an integration for Gemini so that if you go and you type in a stack trace that no one has ever run into that particular technical problem before, shouldn't they just have a button there that says like fix it with Gemini right now like we'll do it it should just do that this is like a case study in AI mode like they should they should compete but honestly incredibly creative uh from the clawed team very uh the chat is going off on the on the ayahuasca ads

yes a B says CPMs would be through the roof imagine getting one shoted by a guyco ad 2.6 says Jeff Bezos is now monetizing the astral plane Making your whole personality, Gaico. Nick Turley says, I'm seeing lots of confusion about ad rumors in chat GPT. There are no live test for ads. Any screenshots you've seen are not real or not ads.

If we do pursue ads, we'll take a thoughtful approach. People trust chat CBT, and anything we do will be designed to respect that. This was because of a viral post that showed a screenshot of, I think, Target down at the bottom. But that was just like an embedded link.

That was like an app that someone built. It was not an advertisement. That was core. That's crazy. Who would do that? Sounds like he might have been. I love Eric Sufert. He's clearly, you know, one of us, an ad supporter, an ad lover. And he is quote tweeting somebody that's saying, that's mentioning that Airbnb still has no advertising business.

Of course, Uber has an advertising business that's great. DoorDash has figured out how to do promoted content very well. And those businesses have grown a lot. And Eric Sufurt standing there saying, start. an ad network. Didn't we ask Chesky about this when we was on the show? I think we talked to about doing ads. And he mentioned that it is somewhat of a unique product.

It's a little bit less frequent than an Uber. It's less frequently used. Yeah, but you can do hyper-local advertising. So if you're staying somewhere, they could be sent giving you ads for, hey, look at this kayaking trip we could do in a couple days or whatever. Yeah. You're laughing at what I'm laughing at. Now we're into the, like, a truck.

attractive people of the show section, I suppose. Yeah, we have this post from, uh, uh, we have a post here. Apparently we, we have a national looks maxing strategy of the United States now. Look at Jacob Helper. It looks fantastic. Jacob stuns. Fun of, uh, he's a former guest on the show. Um, he's been, we need to ask Jacob about bone smashing.

Yeah. Apparently it's, it's, uh, gaining quite, uh, quite a lot of popularity out there. He's looking great. Uh, Donald Boat is also. apparently very attractive. People have been talking about that on the timeline. Was this his first? Tyler, don't you know Dr. Boat? I think this is the

first docs by... This is the first docs of Donald Boat. People are fans. People are fans of Donald Boat. There's also, Sean Frank is getting jacked. We're really in like the true category of just like, here are attractive people now.

The look maxing. The looks maxing. the looks maxing zone of the show. It's really, yeah, three for three on the looks maxing segment. Sean Frank says, hit these right after doing about 10 sets of 50 straight. What is this? One-armed pull-ups? He can do one-arm pull-ups?

Well, he's holding the other ones who you're using it. It's more like training. Yeah, but still, you're training like grip strength. That's impressive. Very cool. Come do that in the Ultradown. You know, you know Black Friday went well when you're banging out. Yeah, he is on a high after black Friday.

Friday. Well, let me tell you about adquick.com. Out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Plan by and measure out of home with precision. And our next guest, I believe, is in the re-stream waiting room. We have Sarah from Cultured Magazine. She's the founder and the editor-in-chief of Cultured Magazine. Let's bring her in. Welcome.

I hope you don't mind the holiday music. We're having a lot of fun here today. We're in the holiday spirit. Welcome to the show. Thank you. Thank you for having me. There's a bit of a lag. It's a bit of a lag.

Oh, yeah. Oh, I'm sorry. Well, hopefully we can, hopefully you can hear us, okay? I would love to just kick off with. Can you hear me okay? Yes, yes. We can hear you just fine. Hopefully you could kick us off with a little bit of an introduction on yourself.

Since it's the first time on your show, tell us about cultured and kind of your journey a little bit. That'd be great. Gosh, where should I start? So cultured is a media company. We cover. kind of everything under the creative umbrella with a strong focus on the contemporary arts. So cover, you know, film and theater and literature

and kind of look at everything through the lens of does it intersect with contemporary art? And, you know, if so, how and kind of try to have a holistic approach to all of the content. And, I mean, I would love to know your take on on Netflix and Warner Brothers, if you have one. We've just been going through all the different IP there. I don't know if anything sticks out to you.

I don't know. I was in L.A. over the weekend. And, of course, everyone was talking about it. You know, I don't know. I mean, it's concerning on many levels. Do you think it's going to go through fully? I mean, Warner Brothers discovery is definitely going somewhere. That seems clear.

I don't know. Where do you stand on it? I think it probably lands with Netflix because there's just so much competition from YouTube, so much competition from Disney. And you have to have, what, like 300 million subscribers now? I mean, they're the clear stream of winner. Yeah. And so even though, yes, it is consolidation, it's not a monopoly because people watch YouTube.

They watch Instagram. They watch shows like this. We're not on a network and we don't need to be. And so it still feels like no one's going to look, you know, a year or two from now, no one's going to be like, oh, yeah, Hollywood isn't competitive anymore. Like, no, Hollywood's extremely cutthroat. It's going to remain cutthroat. It's going to remain extremely...

Potentially. Which means it's hard to block. I think a lot of people are so latched on to the past. And we've... Yeah, it feels like, I mean, we're based in Hollywood. And so there's a lot of people that are still have tied their careers to like the old Hollywood and the way things were down in the past. And it's just notable that like it's never been easier.

to just create content and create, like when I think about Warner Brothers, it's like there's a bunch of like cartoon IP. It's like if you're mad about consolidation and you're a creative person, just make more, make a cartoon, make a new cartoon, just make, make things, right? Yeah. The frustration that people have and they're like, oh, this is going to, this is going to hurt. theaters yeah the theater thing

I think are already hurt right yeah exactly that sense of nostalgia and I think there's that slice of Hollywood that is rooted in that but I agree of course there's no there's never been a time where there's been more channels

but it's still it's almost like there are certainly more channels to reach people but it's also harder to reach people yeah yeah the there's something there's some interesting like ratio if you're trying to quantify it of like how much attention something gets relative to the the revenue or the market cap or the value like uh theaters are they feel so culturally important they feel such so everyone has a story or memory of their childhood going to the theater such an experience and yet i think the actual total revenue of of you know all the movie theaters in america is like a fraction of what video games make in a month you know like video they're the video game industry is like way, way bigger.

Or like the social media industry will be so, so much bigger, like a thousand times bigger. And so, but there's something where just, just the legacy has broken through to such a degree that even though it hasn't been a big business in decades and it's smaller than ever, it's still culturally extremely relevant. And so it's hard to do. And I think creatively extremely relevant. Totally. I think filmmakers want us to see their movies mostly on the big screen.

Yeah. So, I mean, I think if you look at it just from a revenue standpoint, of course, I mean, like you said, it's probably been decades since there's been a shift. But I do think that there is still something nostalgic and important about seeing certain things in theaters. I mean, there's still movies that people say. And I mean, obviously, you know the filmmakers are often fighting for it to have the release first in a theater. Granted, they're all over 40, but still. Yeah, I do wonder. I mean, I wonder what the next. next generation will even look like if they'll they'll want to go to theaters like we have a friend um jason carman who's very much of the young and of the new new age new creative organization

makes movies but also make short films and documentaries and all sorts of stuff and he still definitely wants to release his films in theaters he has he's figured out ways to do that but uh i i wonder i wonder how much that's at the same time we're friends with like adam phase I think we need new. It's such an interesting time because, like, theater, the theater business has been in decline,

and yet I think we need new theaters. Like, we need people. They're trying that, I think. I don't know if that's working. You mean kind of, like, emphasizing it a certain experience or something? Well, if I, uh, I think last time I went and saw a movie was with John and we got like 20 of our friends

together to go see Dune. Uh, I think, and like the actual experience of being in a theater under these, like you go from, being under like bright LEDs in a mall, which I don't go to malls. And I'm in bright LEDs. And I don't like the smell of movie theater popcorn personally. I'm like, that smells like poison.

I don't want it. And then you go. And so the whole experience for me is like, yeah, I'm never going to do that. But if you built a theater from the ground up as in an opinionated way, like some type of, like almost treating it like a true hospitality experience, there's probably a much better chance that I would go. Not certain that there's a real business there yet, but maybe there hasn't been enough attempts there. Maybe a mongeerie of theaters. It's like two grand per ticket. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, the Amman needs to take over. Yeah. I mean, that's somewhat happened in my

town. In my town, there's, there used to be two theaters where you'd sit like shoulder to shoulder with everyone. And now both of those theaters have way down scoped the number of seats. The seats are huge. They serve you dinner, there's wine, there's drinks, and like, they're trying to get 500 bucks out of you or 200 bucks out of you. You're not going in on a matinee, $10 with, like, cheap popcorn and getting out of there. They want to monetize it like it's a restaurant because it's a lot of physical space, like the square footage is a lot. But basically, I mean, someone was just telling me that the theaters really are only still in New York and L.A. Oh, really? Yeah. I mean, I was thinking the opposite, frankly. I thought, okay, but someone said, no, you can't even go to a

movie theater in a small town. They've all closed. Wow. Wow. It's rough. Right. This is someone told me. What it's, uh, I'd love to, I'd love to talk about the, the art market. Obviously, uh, Miami, uh, has gotten a lot of attention over the last week or so. Uh, yeah, and, and, and, uh, he's going viral again. He's considering, he went viral a couple years ago. Well, yeah, I'm particularly excited to get your opinion because every now, you keep, I've been seeing some headlines recently where it's like the art market is back. And then I talk to people that are actually working in art and they're like, it's absolutely not back. And so I think there's somewhat of a disconnect where maybe there's like an effort to like tell

people that it's back, but I don't know if the sales velocity is really there. But how are you processing things? Of course. We have to believe around hype. I mean, I think that there's been a fundamental shift in the art world, call it, you know, since 2024 or, you know, I think that there's been so many factors that have changed the landscape of the art world, certainly has it, as it's been in the last 20 or 30 years. I think that, look, I think, sure, it's better, right? Like, we had Art Basel Paris. Everyone said, okay, the art market's back. It's better. I think Freeze London had reported strong sales. I spoke to a big gallery recently that said that 2025 every single Basel this year was a record for them. Now, of course, like any of the

you take a fair like Art Basel, there's 300 galleries. So you can take a really strong year where everyone says the market's on fire and you can find a dealer who didn't do well that year. I think that I think the statistic that someone was throwing around and I'm not sure if this is accurate is something like, you know, total volume of sales is down 10%. I don't know exactly where the art market is. I think that there's definitely been a very serious correction. I think that a correction, ultimately yields a lot of positive things in an art market. So I don't think it's back to the kind of frenzy, 800-person waiting list for, you know, a painter two years out of Yale that we were in.

But I do think that there's some momentum. I think that there's been, speaking of, some consolidation, there's been, you know, some mid-tier, even some bigger galleries closing and just, you know, I think a lot of shifts in the market. But I think that Miami was, you know, net positive for the most people I talk to in sales. And I think that you still have, I mean, look, call me optimistic, but you still have these collectors who are, you know, they're not the speculative part of the market. They're not buying an artist because they think that they're going to get a multiple of, you know, 10 or 100. I think, I do think, however, that even if the collector isn't looking to ever sell, that kind of data sometimes does kind of fee.

a little bit of a sparkle and an energy. But I do think that there are collectors who buy in good markets and bad markets. And I think the last, you to call it since fall, it's definitely gotten better. Are we back? No. But is it better? Yes. What's the secret to successfully participating in Art Basel, if you're a company or a brand? I've seen a bunch of names. Just selling. Just selling. I mean, you know, as you know, it costs them, it's a significant investment, right? They're buying the space. They're shipping the artwork. They're having their team come. You know, they put, you know, lots of money, hundreds of thousands of dollars behind the fare. So selling the art, which often can be up to $20 million of art,

is success. Makes sense. Yeah, it's been... We did an interesting story on the economics of a mid-tier gallery. Okay. That published last week, that talks a little bit about how when you're not selling 20 million dollars of art how you get through Miami or how you get through a fair and make the economics work because there's certainly a tipping point in which it works and a tipping point in which sometimes dealers are trying to meet new collectors show new work and it's financially not

viable. What are the highest leverage things that a mid-tier gallery can do is that stuff like leave some of the art at home and more digital representations of the art and is that the cost structure or the cost savings? Part of it is a certain gallery might represent like if you're represent 20 artists. It's possible that there's a ton of demand for two of the artists and almost zero. Like negative demand.

You have to pay people that take some of the other stuff. So that's a factor, I think. But tell me if I'm wrong. It depends. Look, I think that not every dealer is just market driven and there's maybe work that they haven't shown that they want to see

how the reaction is or you know, there's always a surprise of some interest. But yeah, no, it's, it's, it's financially difficult. I mean, a lot of these, a lot of the galleries, you know, it's kind of like I kind of equate it to emerging artists. You know, there's, we all know so many artists who are so successful and so financially successful, but there is that point where, you know, you're just so close to losing money or not quite making it. And that's like a very fine line between the other side and, and, and leaving, you know, at a loss. What tech billionaires or tech elite are doing the most for the arts right now?

Because I feel like there's historically been a criticism of the tech industry where you have people that make a lot of money and then they're just like, I'm just going to spend $100 million on anti-aging. I'm not going to fund the next museum or build a castle or etc. I don't know if that's entirely true. I'm not saying I'm not saying I believe it's true, but I'm just saying historically that's like one criticism. Yeah. Maybe, maybe. I mean, I think what a lot of the tech billionaires that I know that have built, unbelievable collections have done is not shown their work.

Yep. Yeah. Not shown their collections. So I think a lot of people aren't aware of the level in which some of these tech billionaires are, A, interested in art and B, collect so deeply. So in terms of underwriting museums or programs, I don't know. I mean, do we need more tech billionaires to buy more art? Of course. Yeah, definitely.

This is, we're putting the word out. I'm sure that will actually, that should catalyze at least a few million of new art purchases for people on our audience that are kind of maybe on the fence about buying. Not sure. Not sure. piece. What do you think about the sphere? Because we have a general belief that it is... In Vegas?

Yeah, yeah. No, it just feels like there was, again, a criticism that we forgot how to make beautiful, massive... We forgot how to make cathedrals. And yet, the sphere feels like it is the most commercial piece of art maybe ever. But when you look at it on the skyline in Vegas, like this is. is this is a modern. It's America's Mona Lisa. Let me say I have never been to the sphere.

Wow. Unculture. Unculture. This is uncultured. Unculture magazine. I know. That's what I should really name my magazine. But I have to tell you that I do know a few artists who have been to the sphere who says

pretty incredible. Yeah. It is wild. Yeah. I mean, it's remarkable in like a cyberpunk way. Totally. Not necessarily in a beautiful way. Absolutely.

you should absolutely go to experience the new canvas that is the sphere uh no obviously it is a it is a it is a it's a how do you how do you how do you uh how are you processing l a as of late to me it's starting to feel like uh detroit of the west it feels like uh no it just feels like this was the center for art and culture and entertainment and traditional Hollywood has been so battered that it's like the beauty the buildings are less beautiful uh i think the streets were always dirty uh but the restaurants are less full there's not as many like new great restaurants as i think there there may have once been uh it feels somewhat um kind of uh uh in secular decline heartbroken too i mean look i i i i I did open an office in New York this year, and I've been mostly in New York this year.

I think, look, L.A. is a great city. It's at a downturn. I think that's, you know, I think most people that I know that could leave left, someone was saying to me the other day that we're like, we're kind of like just post-COVID now with L.A. And how out of COVID kind of L.A. was really all of the sectors and all of the things that you just mentioned were kind of growing on the up and up. There was a lot of energy around it. And then after the fires last January, things. kind of leveled out. And I think that, you know, look, we all know it's a great city. The energy moves. I think the energy's not there right now. I'm sure it'll come back. Yeah, I asked a good friend of mine, a very controversial figure in the, in the art world, Stefan Simquitz. Oh, I know him well. I was like, give me. What did he say? He probably said, Ellie's great. No, no. The example, I was like, hey, we're, we, our lease expires next year. We're looking for a new space. And I was like, are there

any like, uh, massive, amazing art galleries that you think are going to shut down. And he was like, I can, he immediately was like, here's four.

And, uh, and so again, uh, are you texting him right now? No, I didn't text him. Um,

they're not four. He's, he's exaggerating. Um, but that's funny. Well, I think there, there's,

there's a handful because I got offered to tour them. Um, but, anyways. I mean, look, L.A. is not known for its collectors. Sure. There was a great experiment. I mean, look how many galleries opened in L.A. post-2020.

I mean, I know some dealers who said, I'm just, I'm opening in L.A. to show great work not to cultivate more collectors. A lot of the great collectors in L.A. sometimes buy in New York. So I think the fact that L.A. is having a, let's just say, a more challenging moment and some of the galleries there are closing. I talked to a few of my friends who have great galleries in L.A. and they said, let's not even talk about sales. Foot traffic is down. Yeah, and some of the places we've looked at, like you're spending $100,000 a month

for a place that doesn't get any foot traffic that is like, I mean, when we're visiting, it's like during normal hours and they're just empty. So anyways, definitely a correction in the, works but as you said it can be healthy so anyways i wish we had more time this was super fun any anytime you want the the tech industry to to do something like buy more art come on the show but it was great great to meet you and yeah nice to meet you thank you thank you for to talk you again soon we'll talk to you soon thanks so much cheers merry christmas our next guest is from

of New York. He's waiting in the Restream Waiting Room. We had Andrew Pagnanelli. I hope I'm saying that correctly. Andrew, sorry to keep you waiting. How are you doing? What's happening in the show? Thanks so much for hopping on. Please introduce yourself, introduce the company, and give us the news. Yeah, so my name's Andrew Paginnelli, actually. The flow, the flow. Can we get a side profile of the flow real quick? Oh, it's quite nice, right? Oh, there we're. Hit the gong for the flow. Hit the gong for the flow.

There we go. Nice, nice. Sorry to interrupt. They do like the hair. They definitely like the hair. That's great. Yeah, I mean, I... Sorry, I think he's a little bit of delay here.

And my name's Andrew. I read General Intelligence. Today we just announced our $8.7 million seat round, which... Send it, John. Again. Let's go. Incredible. Who led it?

It was led by USB. So, you know, we're a New York-based company. We love New York City. We wanted someone who was right here at home. And I only have to walk two blocks for the board meeting, which is really nice. That's amazing. Give us the history. I mean, first time on the show, obviously, I've followed you for probably, I don't know, a year, close to a year now.

But what, yeah, give us kind of the origins, what you guys are working on, all that good stuff. stuff. Yeah, so we started working on this about a year ago with this kind of crazy idea of like, what if we could get agents to run companies? And we really worked backwards from that way. We picked, let's go with the craziest thing we can do because I bet that there's a way for us to get resources for it. And if the idea is a little bit crazier, they'll give us more resources.

And so we picked that, me and my co-founder, Abbey, and we started working on it. We started working on a demo. We worked on for about two months. And then in March, we were like, let's turn this into a company. So the initial demo was just an agent that could call some tools. And then we did a small round in March, led by compound. We ran the company for about six months before launching co-founder in September. And we were able to make that launch go very, very well.

And so we got viral with that. People loved it. People really like using the product. We went viral through the sweaters, too. The sweaters actually helped us promote our products. product more than probably the product itself. Wait, so what was co-founder and what was the sweater? Was co-founder wearing the sweater?

You know, co-founder is a plant. So I have a bunch of them right here. That's co-founder. And it's like this AI chief of staff. So it will let you hook stuff up and do automations. And we've built it into this very proactive, like, assistant-feeling thing. So you're not just really telling you what to do. it will actually prompt you instead of you having to prompt it.

And we wanted to figure out how do we promote this? And so I went and I got these sweaters made and they're like very rainbowy. Like they have all the all the different colors on the logo name on there too. That's cool. Yeah. I feel like it's like underutilized merch format. Yes. I never see the cozy sweater.

That's cool. Very cool. Yeah. And we posted about them. We just got our first shipment of them. I just posed a photo. That's cool. And it goes via.

It gets like a million plus views. And I go from having like 300 followers to a couple thousand. And we were going to launch three days later. And so this made it really easy for us to launch and have co-founder do well. Yeah. So, I mean, how do you think the business actually evolves? Do you think that there's a world where the, you know, the product is plugging into all of the enterprise tools? It seems like with even.

just the co-founder branding, it feels like this is an early stage product, or that's at least like the early adopter would be a small company. You're not coming into a company where it's like, yeah, we already have a data lake and they have 5,000 employees and we need you to go around and find stuff. It's much more of an early stage tool. Is that correct or you think it'll grow? How do you think the use case will change over the next few years as you build out the business? Yeah, so it's definitely early stage. We, we, We want people who are, let's see, between like three and 50 people on smaller companies. But we're really going from co-founder to this full-stack AI business.

So our goal is to get agents to run companies. And we've decided, you know, we're not going to be able to do that by adding one piece to an assistant until it gets really far. We're actually working on a full-stack AI business. We realized, while buildings ourselves, that we had this ability to make these workflows internally where you're taking like a customer support ticket and you can directly plug that into an agent that write some code and plug it into an agent that reviews and QA's the feature and then ships it to prod without new people involved. And so we're sprinting towards this entire business with just agents. And we think we can get there by March.

what kind of businesses do you think are most the name implies you're trying to build a general intelligence I imagine that means an AI that could run any business but have you thought about specific types of businesses that are best suited to be run by an agent and how are you like testing the product I understand you probably tested internally with your own team but yeah when you talk about like timeline

to an agent running an entire business by March? What kind of business is that? How do you make that more concrete? Yeah. So some of the things that we test are the ability to actually do something into end, right? So this whole write a piece of code that can get shipped to prod without any people involved.

That's something you can test, right? If it breaks fraud, it's going to be a failure there. But we're working on this. with a couple of businesses, smaller businesses internally, and they're just not public yet. But the way that the business looks is very similar to ourselves. So it's a software company in B2B, and it also relies a lot on how the agent market develops.

So we rely on other agents by other companies, like a coding agent where we're going to be using, looks like factory or Tembo or something like that, customer support agents by companies like Sierra and Decagon, and then sales, market agents like rocks. We're going to be building this in a way that leans on those agents

and those are conducive to a B2B software company and that's really what we're building first. That's very cool. Are you AGI-pilled? Very AGI-I-pilled. You know, we all have different definitions, right? And so my personal definition, it's in my Twitter bio. I keep it the timeline that I think we're going to

have to AGI and it's much faster than everybody else's. But my definition is like... It's tomorrow. It's tomorrow. My timeline is tomorrow. Really? No. No. We'll see.

Yeah, 5.2 is my AGI for sure. We're thinking about it like, like, you know, her, the movie her? Yeah. My personal definition is when do we get that? A, we already have people falling in the world. Don't we already have that just with some of the population? Yeah, I mean, we're kind of close, right? Like, like some of the stuff that you can do today is 90% of what you can do in that movie.

And I bet within the next 12 months. months, it'll be 100%. Yeah, sort of like a diffusion question because, like, smartphones have arrived. There are Amish people that don't use smartphones, right? Like, there are plenty of people that don't. There's probably millions of people that don't use smartphones for a variety of reasons. There will all, I believe, like, for, you know, 100 years, there will be people that will be like, I don't talk to clankers, right? But at the same time, like, we are pretty close. Anyway, we can talk about AGI for the next two hours, but we have to move on. So thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us.

Congratulations. Great to meet finally. Congratulations on the progress. We're going to keep, we should, we should add like something to our ticker. Like, what is Andrew's AGI time? Yeah. We'll get the, we'll get the update daily. But yeah, congrats on, congratulations on progress.

We'll talk to you soon. Have a good one. Goodbye. Cheers. Let me tell you about Wander.com. Book of Wander and Inspiring Reviews. Hotel Grated Mays, Dreamy Vets, Top Tier Cleaning in 247 Concierge service. It's a vacation home but better folks.

Our next guest is Brian Miller from Stable. He's the CEO, and we have some big news from them. Let's bring him in. How are you doing, Brian? Oh, ho. Ho! Ho! Merry Christmas. Good to see you. How are you doing? Please, since you're new on the show, introduce yourself, introduce the company. I'd love to hear about what you're building. Sure. Well, thanks to having me. I'm Brian Mayler. I'm the CEO of Stable. For the, nowhere, layer one blockchain. We're focused on, you know, redefining the payment rails that money moves through whether it's cross borders or cross-country. So, you know, we launched earlier today.

It was a big event for us. We had the Baynet launch. Thank you. And that was a great. So yeah, it's good. It's been great. Sorry. Okay.

So. The obvious question is why another stable coin, right? Well, no, no. I mean, not necessarily. Okay. So you're building a new L1 for payments. It seems like every. single, every single layer one blockchain, maybe not every single one. Some, some are more obviously

like hyperliquid, more trading focus and there's others, but everybody's going after the payment opportunity for obvious reasons. Like how do different layer ones differentiate what's going to separate stable from other players? Like how is stable kind of more opinionated? I'm sure it's opinionated in ways that maybe like, you know, tempo isn't or Solana isn't it, et cetera. And so So yeah, curious how you're differentiating. It's a great question, and we get it a lot. And I think the way that we're able to answer it best is by talking about, you know, whether it's the team that's backed us, so we have PayPal Ventures, we have, you know, we advisor

who's like Paulo from CEO of Tether. You know, we're partnered with Anchorage. So we have like a very good tool set that we're playing with that's able to help us launch. But in addition to that, like getting a little bit more of the technical side of things is our gas token, which is usually a complication of other chains. is USDT. So for that, you know, when people are moving money, the 70 to 80% of the stable coins out there in the world right now is being used as a USDT, and that's what you use

to pay your fees on our network. Rather than having a complication about buying another token and worrying about other chains, for us, you're able to just use USDT and spend USDT. So that's, I think, our biggest differentiator that we have right now. And then in addition to that, it's also the speed. So when you want to use a traditional layer one, let's say Ethereum, you want to move USDT there, you know, it's slow. and it's expensive and it's volatile and gas. And we got tired of that. So we just ripped it out and put in USDT,

which everyone knows and is already using as our gas token. So sounds like you have some awesome partners lined up already. How does this market shape out? Is it kind of a land grab right now where you're trying to sign up as many institutions to support stable or make you their preferred L1 for moving stable coins between them and other institutions or internally?

How does that look? Yeah, I mean, you're definitely right there. It's definitely busy. There's a lot of people wanting to get out the picks and shovels and start digging. And we, I think we're ahead of that. So we already launched, as we said today. And that's kind of like a big milestone for us. So we got into the build phase and got into the launch phase. But I would say in terms of like why it's an interactive market is that everyone uses money. And there's a frustration of using it, whether you're using traditional credit cards or checks or whatever if you're still using cash, that's just a complication that people are kind of tired of dealing with. And they don't understand why, you know, if you're trying to buy. something on the weekend and you need to like wire some over like $2,000 that you can't get on Zell or Venmo, like you got to wait until Monday. And that's just a weird complication that I think a lot of people are getting tired of. And so using stable coins in an easy sense is kind of how we're solving that problem. Go for it. So yeah, I'm just wondering more of like help me understand what folks are using Tether directly for versus how do you like what value prop you build. Obviously, you're friendly and partnered in many ways.

But how does that relationship evolve over the next few years with Tether? Look, I mean, I would say Tether is just on a growth trajectory that is pretty unmatched. So we're happy to be part of that ride and help facilitate it. I think, you know, Heather exists on a number of chains, and that's one of the facilities that we're able to provide, is a chain that it runs faster, easier, and less expensive. That's really what we're doing. We help the amplifying their message. Okay, cool. Yeah, that makes sense.

Thank you. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come explaining that to us. Appreciate having you on the show. And Merry Christmas. Sure you'll be back on soon. Yeah, we'll talk to you soon. Congrats on the lunch. Super exciting.

Have a good one. Appreciate it. Cheers. Bye. Thanks. Up next, we have Will Wilson from Antithesis on December 3rd. Jane Street led Antithesis, their $105 million Series A to make deterministic

simulation. The new testing standard. They have an incredibly stacked list of investors. Dwarquish Patel, Shaltow Douglas, and Patrick Collison. Whoa, two out of the, two out of the three roommates. Yeah, what happened? What happened? You didn't do a road show where you go from bedroom to bedroom showing

up what you've built and they're like, do you want to invest sharks? I imagine you sit down and you say sharks. Here's what I'm building. You know, it's funny. I think they all ended up coming in for very different reasons, but we're certainly very glad. You got Dylan. You got Dylan. He just wasn't, he wasn't big enough to get to the press release.

Brutal, brutal. I cannot comment on investors who may or may not be in our press release. Okay. Well, thank you so much. Please explain this to me like I'm not Dorcasch and I'm not a researcher at Anthropic. What are you building at like a very, very basic level? Who's the customer? What's the problem you're solving?

And then I do want you to walk me through some of the technology as much as we can. but I'd like to start with just like the high level problem description if possible. Sure. Okay, so the super basic problem description is like Mark Andresen once said that software is eating the world. I think that's true. I think AI has made that more true. And the thing is that's actually kind of a bad thing in some ways because software

doesn't work very well. Like I feel like we all have Stockholm syndrome about this. Like when I walk into a building, I don't wonder in the back of my head is this building going to collapse on me. And yet every time I use a software product, I know there's some random chance that it's just going to totally fail. And if you think about it, that's really not okay. And that's what we're trying to fix. We don't think it has to be that way. Yeah. We think the reason it is that way is because people have been building and testing software wrong for the last 70 years, which is like maybe a slightly hubristic and crazy thing to say, but we think we've got a better way to do it. I have an ongoing war with Roon about whether or not the United States.

has gotten better or worse over the past few years because I use it as a heuristic for like AI diffusion because he'll tell he'll say hey the AI models are amazing like you just you just yell at the codex model it'll do exactly what you want I'm like oh really well then why did I have a bug in my united app when I was trying to fly across the country well maybe they haven't adopted and then he'll tell me it's actually way better it's actually they actually are improving their software but uh walk me through deterministic simulation like what does that look like in practice of I have a piece of software I have some some vibe-coded slop app that I'm worried about completely blowing up and leaking all my user's data and, you know, and failing to work in a bunch of different scenarios.

Like, how am I actually using your product? How am I plugging in? What's going on? Yeah, okay. So here's the basic idea. So, like, the traditional way people test software is you have your app and you sit down and you think really hard and you use your big brain and you're like, what are all the situations that this thing could run in?

What are all the things that people could do? What are all the situations that has to handle? And then I sit down, I the developer, right, and I write a bunch of manual test cases for each of those things and make sure that they run in my CI system or whatever. And that's like, hooray, I've tested my software. Except you've totally not tested your software, right? Because the thing that's actually going to blow up and totally screw you and be a disaster is not something that you thought of. It's something that you didn't think of, right? It's like an unknown unknown.

And so we have the exact opposite approach. We say instead, we're just going to take your actual software and we're going to run it in a simulation of the real world. And we're going to throw the kitchen sink at it. We're going to have the worst users ever doing the worst things ever. And it's going to be running in the worst data center ever. And computers are going to be crashing and hackers are going to be trying to break it, whatever. It's just going to be really awful. And then we're going to see what actually happens empirically.

And you can tell us, hey, here's the stuff I promise my software will never do. And we're going to see if we can find a way to make it. do that. Why are you framing this as deterministic simulation? That sounds like a whole lot of non-deterministic stuff going on. Yeah. So the key is we have the slightly crazy computer science thing we've done. Well, no, one of the slightly crazy things we've done is we've basically built a way to run any computer program fully deterministically, which is, which is a little nuts. But it's really, really important because it gets rid of the like works on my machine thing forever. So if we find some really weird, really rare software problem, which only manifests

one a billion times, but like, you know, it launches the nuclear missiles. And so you really don't want it to happen even one a billion times, we can perfectly reproduce that. So if we find it once, you can just replay it over and over and over again until you're able to fix it. Interesting. What's the connection to? What is the, like, what is the, like, sci-fi scenario that you're building against? Like, is this, is part of this tie-in? Like, I'm, trying to understand why, like specifically why you got the roommate three Pete, because software testing is cool, but I imagine there's like kind of this like, you know, 10 year vision, like AGI vision where we need to test for that, you know, one out of a billion times that

the nuclear missile codes get launched or the whole surface of the planet is blanketed with solar. Yeah, I mean, you know, I think, I think if you believe that we're about to go into like a very exciting AI future, then I think there's probably going to be a whole lot more software written. And probably some of it's going to be written by entities that are not like you and me. They're like some kind of AI agent. Maybe we don't fully understand them. Maybe we don't fully understand their incentives or their motivations or their failure modes or whatever. Seems like having a really, really good way of telling if software does what you think it does would be handy in that scenario. That makes sense. So somebody makes an AI agent.

that processes like things that were faxed in and there's like some, you know, faxed into a doctor's office and there's some edge case where it hires a private army and like tries to kill the fax machine company and you're like, well, an agent wrote this agent, so we need to actually test to make sure it's not like secretly, like completely insane. Right, you've got that. And then you've also just got more prosaic and boring situations, right? Like, I hired an AI agent to, like, write the next version of the United app and, like, oops, like, if I'm, if I'm in the middle of booking a ticket when my subway train goes into a tunnel, it books, like, 10 million tickets. Like, I don't, I don't want that.

United doesn't want that, you know. No, I like, I like this opportunity. You can sell, you can sell the product against, like, very real problems today and also get the, and still, like, you know, have the, this, like, bigger, very, like, real kind of, like, sci-fi element to it. Okay, so I. I have the interpretation of roommate ventures coming in. I don't have the interpretation of the implications of Jane Street coming in. Is this relevant to high-frequency trading software, or are they just purely financial investors? Like, how strategic are they as a partner?

Oh, yeah. So the way we got Jane Street in this actually is just that it started out as them being a customer. Okay. Wow. They've been one of our best and largest customers for, you know, a little under a year. and have really put the system through its bases and are using it to do some really, really cool stuff. And basically, what initially happened

was we were raising a round, we planned to go the standard Silicon Valley route, you know, and we were just going to have Jane Street put in like a small amount of money as a strategic. And then they offered to lead the round, which we were not expecting. And, you know, we sort of thought about it. We were like, wait a minute,

that's actually the coolest thing ever. Like, you know, what an endorsement And, you know, from one of the greatest names in software, like, how can we not do this? Have you considered writing your codebase in O'Camel? I think it's likely that there's going to be excellent O'Cammell support in our platform. Fantastic. That's the best news I've heard all day. Hit the gong for that. Very, very cool.

That's great news. One of the more unique fundraising announcements we've had this year. Yeah, this is a fun project. I really like it. Well, well, congratulations, and thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. I'm sure you'll be back on soon. I'm sure you're already getting unwanted term sheets, you know, hurled at you. I believe it.

Enjoy, enjoy processing those. Yeah. Awesome. Have a good one, guys. We'll talk to you. We'll talk to you soon. Have a good one. And that brings us towards the end of our show.

Perfectly time 2 p.m. on the dot. We are in fighting form. we're going to play you out with some Christmas music, I suppose. In other news, markets are predicting that the time person of the year will either be the Pope who's concerned about AI, the biggest promoter of AI, Sam Altman, the supplier of the hardware behind AI, Jensen, or just AI. It seems almost certain it's a lock that time, 20, 25 person in the year will have something to do with AI. in other news. Where else is?

Oh, we didn't get to SpaceX news, but it was rumored that SpaceX told, or is reported actually in the information by Katie Roof, that SpaceX told their investors, we're aiming for IPO, late 2026. Late 2026, we're going to be a public company. But a lot of people are interpreting this,

reading the tea leaves. You have Ken Curtlin saying, I'm not exaggerating, it's not doom posting, to say this, but this is the end. They are not serious. They are not serious about any part of Mars if this is done. There's no world where shareholders will let you spend tens of billions of dollars with the express intent of no return, which is what Mars settlement is. In fact, it would be illegal, literally illegal to do so. Not true at all. Look at the metaverse. Look at what meta did.

If you have control over the company, you can spend, what he said, $86 billion is what Zub spent? expecting SpaceX's telecom business to do tens of billions of profits. Yes, yes. If you get big enough. I mean, SpaceX, I think to date has burnt something like $10 billion across all the fundraising. And a lot of that's been like secondary stuff. So like they haven't burnt that much. And of course, people are dunking on Zuck right now for pulling back on the Metaverse.

Austin Allred had a good post here. He said, fire Mark Zuckerberg fired. You kind of watch this, but he said, Mark Zuckerberg fired because he lost the company's $77 billion. should probably consider that he also made his company $1.6 trillion. And so the same thing could definitely be true. So I believe if SpaceX went public, that would not necessarily take the foot off the gas of the Mars mission. I don't think that that's necessarily what would happen. But Dan Primack has a little bit more nuance of a take here talking about what might be happening behind the scenes.

It says SpaceX prepping late 2026 IPO per the information, not just Starlink, which is what people were rumoring. They'd spin out Starlink. I don't think that makes any sense. But this comes just after Just comes just days after reports that Open AI was weighing an entry into space So maybe it's a bit of PR maneuvering Given that Elon Musk doesn't seem to like having a public company

He took Twitter private And then he wanted to take Tesla private too And then And then Katie Roof says, does he even have PR people? LOL? And Dan Primack says, don't need PR people to have a PR strategy And yeah, he might have he might have directly emailed all the investors that he knew would leak, you know,

and that doesn't require a PR person. And so Elon actually chimed in, he said, there's been a lot of press claiming that SpaceX is raising money at $800 billion, which is not accurate. SpaceX has been cash flow positive for many years and does periodic stock buybacks twice a year to provide liquidity for employees and investors. Valuation increments are a function of progress with Starship and Starlink and securing global direct-to-sell spectrum and greatly increasing.

is our addressable market. And one thing that, one other thing that is arguably most significant, thus far, blah, blah, blah, blah. Anyway. Ridiculous. John, I got to say I'm bummed that we got to end the show right now.

We do, we do. You've got to get on with Pasadena. I do. You got some celebrating to do over in that area. Neck of the wood. I can't wait for tomorrow. I'm so happy to be back in the Ultradome. I'm glad we don't have to travel for the rest of the year.

No travel for the rest of the year. We're hanging out. We're hanging out. We're podcasting. The team is thrilled. We're thrilled. Thank you for hanging out with us today. Thank you, everyone.

We love you all dearly. We'll talk to you soon. Have an amazing evening. We will see tomorrow. Goodbye. Cheers. Bye.