TBPN - NVIDIA Chip Export Debate with Aaron Ginn, Apple Building a Robotic Siri | Delian Asparouhov, Jen Bucci, Ben Kennedy, Jessica Wu, Parag Agrawal, Eric Simons, Matt George

Episode Date: August 14, 2025

(08:42) - NVIDIA Chip Export Debate w/ Aaron Ginn. Aaron Ginn is a technology entrepreneur and policy analyst known for his insights into artificial intelligence (AI) and U.S.-China relations. In the conversation, he critiques the notion that restricting Chinese access to Nvidia's AI hardware will hinder China's AI progress, suggesting it may instead accelerate their development of domestic alternatives. He also discusses the inefficacy of U.S. export controls, emphasizing that such measures might not effectively impede China's AI advancements. (49:43) - Apple is Building a Robotic Siri For Your Home (01:11:50) - Timeline (01:28:42) - Delian Asparouhov is a Bulgarian-born entrepreneur and investor who is a Partner at Founders Fund and the Co-founder and President of Varda Space Industries, which builds space factories to manufacture pharmaceuticals in microgravity. He previously founded the healthcare app Nightingale, led growth at Teespring, and served as a Principal at Khosla Ventures. (02:03:05) - Jen Bucci is the Head of Design at Anduril Industries, where she leads the company's design identity across brand and product. In the conversation, she discusses the design elements of Anduril's NASCAR paint scheme, highlighting the use of black and safety yellow to reflect the company's core colors and their application in product design. She also emphasizes the synergy between Anduril's identity and NASCAR's bold graphics and high-visibility colors. (02:09:17) - Timeline (02:18:45) - Ben Kennedy, NASCAR's Executive Vice President and Chief Venue & Racing Innovations Officer, discusses the upcoming "Race on the Base" event scheduled for June 19-21, 2026, at Naval Base Coronado in San Diego. This historic event will feature NASCAR's top three series—the Cup Series, Xfinity Series, and Craftsman Truck Series—racing on a temporary three-mile circuit winding through the base, including the tarmac and past aircraft carriers. Kennedy highlights the partnership with Anduril, emphasizing their shared values of precision, speed, and innovation, and invites interested technology companies to explore collaboration opportunities with NASCAR. (02:25:28) - Jessica Wu, co-founder and CEO of Sola, an agentic process automation platform, discusses how Sola leverages AI to automate complex operational workflows by mimicking human actions across various platforms. She highlights the platform's application in logistics, where it integrates with internal portals, external systems, and spreadsheets to manage end-to-end shipment processes, reducing manual labor. Wu also announces Sola's recent $17 million Series A funding led by Andreessen Horowitz, with continued support from Conviction and Y Combinator. (02:33:36) - Parag Agrawal, former CEO of Twitter, has founded Parallel Web Systems, an AI startup developing infrastructure for AI applications to utilize web data. In the conversation, Agrawal discusses the launch of Parallel's Deep Research API, which enables enterprises to integrate advanced AI-driven web data analysis into their workflows, outperforming existing models in quality and accuracy. He also highlights the company's focus on optimizing the balance between cost and performance, aiming to provide superior AI solutions across various industries. (02:43:41) - Eric Simons is the founder and CEO of StackBlitz, the company behind Bolt, a web-based AI coding agent that rapidly grew from zero to $40 million in annual recurring revenue within five months. In the conversation, he discusses Bolt's transition to a new business model, emphasizing that as margins on AI prompting decrease, the company plans to generate revenue by hosting websites and applications. He also highlights the importance of offering the best services and workflows to customers, focusing on hosting services and collaborative product development tools to ensure high retention rates. (02:52:23) - Matt George, founder and CEO of Merlin, discusses the company's development of the Merlin Pilot, an advanced automation system for aircraft, and their recent announcement to go public, marking a significant milestone as one of the first defense startups to do so. He explains that this move will enable Merlin to raise capital for executing large contracts, particularly with the U.S. Air Force, and facilitate mergers and acquisitions. Additionally, George highlights the potential of their technology to reduce the number of pilots required per aircraft, leading to substantial cost savings for the airline industry and enhancing mission management capabilities for military operations. (02:59:06) - U.S. Plans Potential Equity Backing For Intel. 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Watch is TVPN. Today is Thursday, August 14th, 2025. We are live from the TBPN Ultradome, the Temple of Technology. The Fortress of Finance. The capital of capital. Jordy, why are you bearish today? Did you not see that a company named

Bullish went public and the stock popped 85%? Top signal. Why? Why? Why? Yes, gross margins are negative. But is that not a green flag? Is that not a good thing? What does AI have to say about negative gross margins?

Is it that bad? Break it down for me. I asked one of the smartest models in the world. ChatGPT, five. Negative gross margins are fine, right? We shouldn't worry about negative gross margin companies selling to negative gross margin companies, right? Chad ChbD says, no. Negative gross margins are generally not fine.

When you have one negative gross margin company selling to another, that's usually a flashing red flag rather. than a don't worry situation. If you can't clearly explain how gross margins will turn positive and the plan relies on we'll make it up in volume, that's not strategy, that's financial

quicksand. Financial quicksand. It does seem like they solved alignment by default with this. It's great that it's pushing back. During the Glazegate era, it would have been like, yeah, absolutely. Well, they're not fine. They're not fine for most companies. But you're different. You're different. You're different. You're in the conversation. Anyway, if you want

to fix your gross margins if you want to dial in your finances, go to ramp.com. Time is money, save both, easy to use corporate cards, bill, payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. Now, more important than ever. There is a weird trend shaping up, and it's a question that's on the top of my mind. It's a question that should be on the top of most venture capitalist mind right now, I think. So the question is how- Changed losses?

Bad, yeah, how bad are AI startup unit economics? Also, good morning to this. the chat. Good morning, John Exley. Good morning. Sean, Nicola, Matt, Techno Chief is here. We got Gold Rock in the chat. A lot of names, a lot of names I recognize. So good to see you guys. Great to see you. So here's an example of how the AI startup economy works right now. You, the user, the purchaser of the AI application, you pay a company, an application layer company, $1. Seems pretty like a good deal. You're getting a nice little tool for a dollar. Then let's trace what happens.

That company, that application layer company, they go to a foundation model company. They give that company $5. Then that foundation model company goes to a hyperscaler. They give that hyperscaler for cloud hosting. They give them $7. And in turn, that hyperscaler goes to a GPU maker and they give them $13. And so it's giving house of cards. It's giving chained losses.

It's giving chain losses. But the question is how fast can inference fall? If fixed performance inference falls at the... Inference, come down. Come down. I need you to come down. So if fixed performance inference falls at the rate of Moore's Law, Moore's Law, for those who have been living under a data center,

is the idea that the cost of compute on a dollar per flop basis cuts in half every two years. It used to be every year to 18 months. and then it kind of stretched out, but we are still making gains in just more advanced semiconductors, better performance on a per dollar per unit of energy cost. The chips are getting better, and that's happening every two years. But if fixed performance inference, like inference at a certain level of intelligence, is only getting cheaper, like 50% every other year, that's probably not that great for your gross margins. Because if you're negative 500% gross margins, it's like, okay, in two years, you're still going to be negative 250.

Then you're going to be negative 125. It's going to take you a long time to kind of dig out of that hole. But there is cause for optimism. So algorithmic improvements in inference efficiency do seem to be moving quicker than Moore's law. We saw this with DeepSeek. DeepSeek R1, the reasoning model, is dramatically cheaper on a per million token basis than chat GPT. And so we know it's possible. A lot of those algorithmic improvements are getting ported back to models right now.

We see this with the Pareto Frontier. And all the labs are in incredible competition. The rumor, by the way, is Deep Seek is planning to launch R2 on the day of Nvidia's earnings. Really? Probably just random. How solid is this rumor? I wouldn't lean on it too hard, but I think it's a possibility. Okay.

So basically, we're getting. the Moore's Law improvements like almost certainly that's kind of just assumed to be true there should be some algorithmic improvements that will end up we should see cost of inference having every six to 12 months maybe five months on the on the really fast horizon so I think we're not quite on a knife's edge here but it's definitely something to keep an eye on and we need to make sure that we're actually hitting all of those all of those different algorithmic improvements as fast as as possible. Or just 5x prices. Yeah, that is the question, is that I, if you had told me, and Gurley's point has broadly been, if they're, if you're, if you're selling, uh, you know,

some application layer software at negative gross margins, you are effectively subsidizing demand. Yes. And creating more demand. Yeah. And if you're just, which makes sense because these businesses often trade on revenue multiple and revenue growth multiple. So revenue growth going from having the steepest line to the $100 million, that's the most important thing. People don't care. This is the shooting stars. We were joking around earlier. You were saying supernova's versus shooting stars. Well, no, earlier today, you were saying you were potentially interested in investing in some companies that don't have to pay for inference. Yeah. Maybe software companies with little to no inference.

Maybe no inference cost. Could be something there. Maybe traditional. traditional enterprise SaaS might be making a comeback. There's been a yard sale in SaaS broadly. Seriously. Seriously. Maybe there's something there. I mean, it is a, it is a bull case if you're running a company that is growing but doesn't have upside down unit economics and is doing well on gross margins.

You might, you know, even if there is some sort of market correction or pullback, like you're going to be in a strong position. So certainly treat the R&D AI agents. stuff that you bolt on as incremental, as experimental, see how it can improve your workflow. But you should make sure that the man is actually there. Somebody should build AI agents to help negative gross margin AI companies achieve positive economic. I mean, at the same time, if you told me that as basically a pro-sumer, I would be paying

$200 a month for chat GPT and feeling that that's a steal and I pay that bill happily, and even $250 for Google, Gemini. just to get access to VO. I'm happy with that one. I almost hit GROC 3 Ultra Pro plan, which is $300 a month yesterday, but I was like, I don't think I need GROC 4 heavy as well,

but I want to test these models. It's also kind of my job, but still, just the idea of spending $500 on effectively consumer software is somewhat remarkable. And so I do wonder what the elasticity of demand is. And if these AI companies, that are selling AI-enabled SaaS products were to quintuple prices what their churn would look like. Yeah, you're also a coastal elite living in a bubble, in a technology bubble, and you'll happily pay hundreds of dollars a month for leading edge models.

Just like I would pay hundreds of dollars a month for re-stream because it's what powers this stream, one live stream, 30 plus destinations, multi-stream and reach your audience wherever they are. You can sign up for free at Restream. And Restream lets us aggregate all the chats. So we see the chats from X and YouTube. But YouTube seems to be where it's at. I would recommend the YouTube chat. John Exley is there. Greeting everyone, hanging out.

I recommend John Exley in the YouTube chat. But we have our first guest of the show live in person, Aaron Ginn. Let's bring him in from Hydrohost. He's been on the show three, four, five times, too many times. out. Welcome to TBPN. Welcome to the Ultradome. Aaron, how you doing? Bring it in. Good to see you. Did you bring a present? What'd you bring? The topic is China. Take a seat. Take a seat. Tell us how you're doing. Tell us how long you're in town. And then I want to go through the Nvidia H20 export. Yeah. And we have some pros and cons. We're going to debate it live on the show. Yeah, I mean, we should, we need to discuss the fortune. Please. In terms of like who's favorite to win as well.

So you brought us some fortune cookies. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What's the story on the fortune cookies? Well, actually the fortune cookies, so I'm Hapa. It's called half Asian, half Asian Pacific Islanders. It's actually not Chinese at all. Fortune cookies start in San Francisco. Should we unbox an open one?

Yeah, I mean. Fortune is for the show? Yeah, see, we should see who is actually going to win this AI war. Yes, yes, yes. It's open. Are these rigged, by the way? These rigged, no, I wish there were funny ones. No, they're not bad.

There's a company that sells ads in Fortune cookies. So they give the Fortune cookies away from, free, but then when you open the fortune cookie, you get an ad. So I am opening my fortune cookie. It says, your careful nature will bring you financial success. I think that's pretty accurate. Georgie, wasn't I just talking about this? We need to read it again. We need to dial back the CAPEX at TVPN. Your careful nature will bring you financial success. What was I telling you earlier? I was telling you. We need to dial back the CAPX, less H-100. Less supercars. We don't need that incremental rack. Exactly. Exactly.

you are next in line for promotion. Wow. Okay, that one seems like that. And mine is, uh, gold is in your, oh, excuse me. Excuse me. My dad came out there for a second. Gold is in your future. There we go.

Maybe Jensen will get you a gold plated rack. He used to do that, right? He used to deliver gold plated racks to all the different glass. I think Sam has like probably 20 of those. San has 20. Yeah, yeah. And then whenever you need to talk about. China, you can you can just pull out these whenever you want.

We do need some different hats. I know I know Jordy loves the hats. These are cool. These are cool. I might actually take this home for the weekend. This is a pretty sweet hat. I like this. I mean, my dad has one.

That's what he uses the garden in. Okay. I mean, it's highly practical, highly function. It is, right. It does be creating some sort of echo in my ears, but I'm down. It's actually terrible for the lighting. We need a whole new set of cinematography lights in here if we're going to make this work. Anyway, good to have you in the studio.

We've been talking about age 20s. We talked to you about the export ban on Monday, but I wanted to run through kind of now that the story has developed a little bit more. Most recently, the Financial Times reported Beijing presses local chips on tech giants. Alibaba and ByteDance are told to justify orders for U.S. made semiconductors. So I want to run through all of the pros and cons of an export ban. and we've written some on the whiteboard. And so if you two can go to the whiteboard, we can run through these each one at a time

and try and get your reaction to them step by step. Okay, so let's start with the case for allowing exports of Nvidia H-20s to China. So the first pro camp, if I want Nvidia to be allowed to export H-20s, is it will increase China's dependency on the United States. States. Aaron, do you agree with that? Is that a good reason to allow exports? Okay, why? America always wins when we excel at soft power. How does it increase soft power?

Like, walk me through that. Because the way that the architecture actually works, it's not just a hunk of metal. That's what people assume. So it's a combination of software and as well as Jensen is pushing this with the next direction with Grace and Rubin and basically arm. So the future direction of GPUs is essentially like Navidia is an Apple like. software platform. Okay. So that's why but aren't they completely fixated on making sure they aren't dependent on Nvidia generally, right? But the only way to do that is to build off of in video and they're doing that with Huawei. Yeah. Yeah. So that's why we need more there. So if we export we hurt Huawei. Yes. Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay.

Take money from them. What about just the the libertarian free market capitalism? Potentially underrated. Potentially underrated like should should should the US government control exports broadly, where should they draw the line? You know, the famous example is like, you know, you make an F-35. We're not going to let you sell that to a near-peer adversary. But why aren't GPUs in that category? Because you could have a GPU in here and it's not going to launch and kill somebody.

So as well as the future, the past Biden AI diffusion rule, you could have an F-35, you could not have an hopper. So there's not a consistency in the theory of the so-called expert class. So much so that. Yeah, so much so that like, you know, like we, I think there was 78 or 77 F-35 sold to Portugal. Okay. Portugal was on the band list or the bad boy list. Oh, interesting. How did that happen?

I mean, I literally asked the people out there and they're like, we didn't know they're on the list. So, like, you know, it's over exaggeration of like, you know, that's why it's the purity test of like, well, what about this, what about this? And the reality is like, we can be reasonable about this and say that like if the goal is to create dependency on the U.S. because, you know, I like less war. I like less people going to war. If we can increase China dependency on our platforms, therefore less likely go to war with Taiwan.

And that's kind of the idea. And we actually can be very successful at that because we're really good at being platforms. Okay, what about the case for just pumping our bags? Lots of people are long-end Vidiya right now. It's the largest company in America. Largest company in the world, $4 trillion. Well beyond $4 trillion now?

Isn't it like $4.4.4? Yeah, I think so. They added another $400 million market, $400 billion in market cap without me. even paying attention. So yeah, how good is the export, is the export, like allowing age 20 exports for Nvidia? It feels like they already took a write down. Is this actually a material piece of their business? Is this important to Nvidia shareholders? It probably have a very minimal impact. It's barely anything. Yeah, what about this idea? I was talking to somebody who was very

anti-NVIDIA export into China just because of there's no reason to be because there's plenty of GPU demand in the United States so Nvidia could essentially sell 100% of the chips that they fab at TSM to American companies so they so anything that they sell to China is just pulling away from American GPU demand it's making American GPU farms like more GPU poor it's has a dude ever talked to anyone outside of America Yeah, probably. Yeah, because they would say we're not interested in that. Wait, why not?

If you talk to anyone who's like, one, is that most of the technology, yeah, cool, it's like fun. You know, y'all use the AI to edit videos, use chatchip to search. The way which AI is viewed by everyone outside of America is basically inherently connected to the sovereignty of the nation. Sure, sure, sure. Try going to telling Saudi Arabia like, hey, just give that stuff to Bezos. Yeah, yeah.

No, no, I just mean like there's that famous story of Larry Ellison and Elon Musk sitting down at dinner with Jensen Wong and saying Jensen we will pay any amount of money give us as many GPUs as you can possibly give us we need a hundred thousand H-100s we need as many as we can we're trying to build super clusters like any excess capacity any excess supply you have we will soak up for sure yeah and so isn't there a decent argument just for hey American company should be at the top of the buyers list for what American companies predict produce. But they are right now. So, so like, but, but the real thing is that, that if you assume this, which is what Jensen's doing, yeah, like he's basically pushing everyone to him, he is the

Apple of Silicon. Yeah. Are there Apple stores in other countries? Yes, but iPhones, but, but, but if iPhones were out of stock in New York City, like someone would make the, make the argument that Apple should prioritize, uh, fulfilling orders in, in America before they expanded international. And I think Nvidia does it because Invig is an American company. But every H20 could have been an H100, correct? No, no. It's the same one time at TSM. One is that you have to remember, like,

Nvidia is a foundry list organization. I mean, it has 700 or 70 billion free cash flow the last quarter. So it is cap X is, I think, like a couple billion dollars. So you can't just go to your supplier and be like, hey, just do this. Like, that's not the way foundries work. Because TSMC is also fabbing for Apple and Google with the TPCU. I mean, Navidia is the bulk of that, but as well as, like, they removed all the gauge 20 from the production line, and most of what is remaining is, like, what's in the inventory.

And as well, like, people confuse, conflate constantly. It's just to be these, like, Navidia bears, where they assume that NVIDIA is actually making the lithography, assuming that they're the ones that control the foreign animator process. They're not. Like, they hire someone else to do that. That's why I said last time. Do you want to put this on while you're playing the bear? The, the, I was going to get a panda, man.

A panda, if you put that on, you will not be able to see anything. Can you even hear me? But he's not bad. He's just role playing. Yeah. Roll play? I mean, we're in Hollywooder. So the, you're just throw it down.

Yeah, but the, most of the Navidia bears, they, they don't understand the segmentation of actual the space is made. Two, they underappreciate the platform that is associated with Navidia. And three, go look at the list of the super intelligence team. Okay. Are you, am I hearing you correctly when you're saying Navidia instead of NVIDIA? Is that correct? It's like NVIDIA.

Okay. I'm wondering if there's like a pronunciation that I'm getting wrong. Visibility and leverage. One of the reasons we want to be able to export to China is that it gives us more visibility into where the chips actually end up. Whereas if there's a diversion regime where they're all going to Malaysia and then flying wherever, they could be going to North Korea. Whereas at least if we are licensing to send them to China, we know it's going to Alibaba. It's going to bite dance.

And that's not the worst possible place that they could go. Yeah. What do you think about that? Is that a reasonable argument? Yeah, that's reasonable. Okay. What about just 15% for the big guy? Uncle Sam.

Is that a good reason to export? It's funny thing is you remember the Biden thing, right? What was that? Remember the Biden? No, no. The Ukraine is called the big guy, leave aside for the big guy. Okay. Oh, yeah, yeah.

The backdoor payments. Okay, so this is American. That's where I got that. Oh, that's homage to Biden, right? Well, if, you know, if he was sentient, he would be appreciated. So the, I mean, so export taxes are illegal by the Constitution. That's an immutable fact. The, in some respects, like, I'm very happy about reshoring to our shores.

I'm very happy all this. This is voluntary as far as I could find out, completely voluntary. He's not going to increase the price to China. I guess some people have been saying that it's a guy, oh, like, as if it's just weird, like some of the Navidia Hawks or AI Dumeers are like, well, now Nvidia's going to be more expensive than Huawei.

I mean, one, Huawei is already cheaper. But two, like now you want to make more money? Is Huawei cheaper on a like dollar per kilowatt basis, like unit energy? No, no, no. Like, NVIDA is, or Huawei's cheaper as like a whole holistic solution. Okay, got it. It's more expensive to run, but they don't care.

I mean, I heard a take from Dylan Patel at semi-analysis that with this 15% tax, the H20 is already less profitable than the H-100. And so this could potentially put them in the nightmare scenario of having similar gross margins to AMD. Because AMD is way, way lower. So I think they will be fine. Yeah, it'll be fine. So maybe that's a good reason. It does seem like tariff revenue is going through the roof for the United States. Yeah, like $300 billion is a projection or something like that.

Yeah, yeah. It does seem like money is flowing into the government at some level that's higher than previous years. And so far the way that... Check the PPI, though. Well, so far it's not really coming from our pocket, right? So about 80% is being absorbed by companies. Okay, yeah. Sustain chip leadership.

If we export the H20 to China, this allows America, this puts more dollars in American companies' pockets to fuel future versions of Kuda, future learning curve step downs in chip dominance, and it will ultimately unlock the American ability to produce the one nanometer chip, the zero nanometer chip, the negative one nanometer chip, which is what we're all hoping for, to bring First come negative gross margins, then negative nanometer chips. That's the future. Something there. That's the future.

This is, I think, I think it's indifferent to Nvidia. I think this matters more to like the Indy cards. So the GROX, the Positrons, the edges of the world, A&Ds. Like, I would apply that to there, but in terms of, because people forget that every rule that applies to Nvidia applies to them too. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And cutting off half of all AI developers. Okay.

To, to Nvidia, like, I think it would have, like I said earlier about, profit like profit side I think it's kind of too per cent yeah yeah but to an AMD could be a much bigger deal okay what we you mentioned the the the new chip companies etched cerebrus grok etc yeah do do any of those chips I mean I imagine that they all fall under the chip restrictions because they are they were never designed to be nerfed but if the nerve is around like memory some of them don't even do HBM or for example so So are any of them sneaking through currently?

Do you have any insight into what's going on with those new chip companies and exports? I mean, as far as I know, every deployment I've heard about with the Indy cards, they all required an export license. An export license? Okay. So they might be paying 15% going forward. Maybe. Possibly. I mean, I think this really applies to.

But again, this is where going back to, I am a free marketer where I give props to the president for being. creative at the same time it does open up weird doors. Okay. What about this idea that it forces China to subsidize their domestic chip manufacturing supply chain more aggressively? And that takes money out of the pocket of the CCP because if they want to stay competitive, if they want to keep Huawei competitive, if they want to keep Smick and Smee competitive, they need to tax their population and spend more money to make those chips competitive. I think if you look at the history of China subsidize, various industries, it's gone fairly well for them.

So I don't necessarily... Yeah, this might be marginal, but what's your take? Yeah, generally speaking, the Chinese customer wants Nvidia. They do not want Huawei, which is why the financial town's reporting as it is. And that's purely because of CUDA or just pricing or everything? It's because the goal of the CCP regime is stability. And Nvidia introduces a new vector that they can't control, as well as many of these rules, like people have to understand that, yes,

the Standing Committee and the Central Committee has the ability to influence what the original governors do. But many of these things are being reported are coming from the governors. And the governors have really, like China's very, very federalized. Now we're in meme territory.

But important. Important. So one of the benefits of exporting age 20 to China is that they will become addicted to AI girlfriends and AI boyfriends, and this will hasten population collapse. So in theory, we should give them

as many chips. as they want. Yes. If AI is bad and AI will lead to an AI girlfriend's apocalypse. Is this yours? I mean this has been an ongoing discussion. Everyone's worried about this. Everyone's worried about this. This is on the timeline. So if you

think that deployment of a frontier AI is bad for the population. The AI psychosis doomers, the one-shot crowd should be heavily in favor of giving them as many chips as we can get. Props. Do not think of this. Imagine Imagine

Presion Peng is thinking about invading Taiwan, he fires up some age 20s, he's like, I've gotten to the frontier of warfare. I've discovered new warfare techniques, and he's completely delusional, and everyone realizes that he's been one shot by AI psychosis, and it creates upheaval in the country, which would be net beneficial for America, maybe.

That is flipping around the Duma's argument back on their face. Exactly. Yeah, I mean, that deserves maybe like a gong. Hit the gong, hit the gong. Hit it gone. Oh, that small one. Hit it big. You got a really black, interesting form.

I don't know. That's how Americans are like. It's like in ancient culture. It's more of a small one. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, more traditional form. Okay. What about this last one?

One of the benefits of exporting the H-20 to China will be, it will force China to invest in negative gross margin businesses. And they will get over their skis and they will fund a whole bunch of companies with negative gross margins and it will create an incredible chain of losses with negative gross margin companies selling to negative gross margin companies and just destroying value exactly what about that well as a positive gross margin company so yeah they they love doing stuff like that they do yeah oh yeah they can actually you know I didn't know you had positive gross margins get out of here yeah yeah see yeah how do you how dare you how dare you how dare you let's flip over to the reasons for the ban, you're going to need to debunk these.

But I will play the role of the pro H20 ban. Let's keep H20s in America. Couging the hawk. And the first, yeah, yeah, the faux hawk. I'll style my hair in a faux hawk. The true China hawk who wants to ban Nvidia H20s would say that by exporting, we will wind up with increased capabilities for China.

We want to keep AI. We want to keep anything that is valuable to their economy, valuable to their military capabilities, anything like that out of their hands. Why should I not be worried about that? I think it's one that the fact of going back to what Jinta said, which is accurate, that over half of the super diligence team is actually Chinese nationals. And then add in the people who are Chinese descent, it's like 75%. So we can't really control that. Okay. Math is universal.

Yes. So, like, engineering is universal. So saying that, it's like saying we're going to really control the way French macrosan and we're going to really get after them and say, you cannot use that much butter. Let me steal man this more. Let me steal man this more because, yeah, math is universal. E equals MC squared is universal or basic physics is rocket science is universal. And yet we might not want to export rocket motors because then you can just build up extra capability.

there is a difference between having the weights of a model and being able to influence it a trillion times a day across your entire population. That might be a strategic advantage. Again, I go back to the fact of that China is going to China. And they're very limited things we actually can do. And the things we can do going back to this idea of like we can make them more dependence. Sure, sure. Right? Because one of the things I believe about trade, one of the things I believe in free markets is like I'm as a universal, I'm against war.

I think conflict is bad. I agree. And at times it's just, just war theory. But when you kind of just hyper-focus on this, you overextend what we think we actually can do. And this is where America as the... Yeah, but the China Hawks are going to say, you know, have a potential conflict with Taiwan.

They're going to be leveraging drones. This increases it. So that's the funny thing about all these China Hawks things, is like they're creating this scenario for war. Like all of these things, many of them we can't control, many of them we can't, and then we over-reserved themselves. Let's say they are gearing up to. try to take Taiwan, don't we want them to have less compute?

No, this basically, increasing the dependency on us decreases the life of time. But do we have any leverage after they get the H-20s? They're already focused on decreasing their dependency on American companies, Taiwan itself. It's already happening. No, I think you're one, you're overestimating the, one, the power of the central committee actually has. And two, many of these things, you have to delineate between what is, bloviating and propaganda and actual reality. The Chinese companies operate very differently

than what actually happens in the committee. So it's, yes, the committee has a lot of power, but it's more of like structured socialism than it is communism. That all of the ingenuity around Deepseek came from just Chinese engineers trying something. It was not, the committee was like, go be better at this.

And I think there's many things in this zone where they think that we can impact it because we view it as a state-by-state actor action when in reality it's like it's like almost like china's coming to uh y'all and saying hey you got you know do the last gong stuff and he goes to the president he goes hey jordy and john they hit the gong too much and jrude's going to be like they've already tried i was like what am i you know what am i going to do about that right it's like john jordy they're great they're beautiful beautiful human beings right yeah so i mean there's a little bit of dynamic in in china that i think is

maybe underrated, which is that even though Beijing is pressing Alibaba and Bite Dance to not buy H20s, Alibaba and Bite Dance are independent companies. They don't want to be GPU poor. They want Nvidia chips. Yeah, like they'll, you know, play K. Of course. They'll be compliant. But if it was up to them, they would buy the best and they would buy the most. And this is why leaning into our strings, which is like we are the best at making chips. Let's draw them, create maybe a division in the ranks, right? Rather than just being here being like, oh, China, right? It's like many of these are, one, are failed neocons, right, who make up these kind of reasons and excuses and got us

into all these like wars that didn't go anywhere. But then you actually like read into, okay, so let's say we did all this stuff. It actually creates a scenario for war. Yeah. This actually creates a scenario for less war. This creates a scenario of maybe division in the ranks. Yep. Right? Because we increase the dependency, we increase trade and therefore lowers the threshold. But this creates isolation, which therefore increases likelihood of innovation of Taiwan. What about the risk of short-term leverage over China dependency, over long-term independence? I'm thinking of that IP leakage point, the idea that maybe cloning the coup to ecosystem. I hate to break it to you, brother. The IP's leaking.

It is true that obviously they can get their hands on one H-20, tear it down, reverse engineer it. But there might be gains to be had from running a true H-20, cluster, the lessons that you learn from that, and then porting that back to Huawei ascend clusters. And so is there any risk of setting up a series of large H20 clusters that actually allows, that actually accelerates Huawei? So this is what's different about the Trump. One of the differences between Trump administration and Biden administration. But administration was actually not that focused on this because they basically targeted the ability to buy chips, but they didn't really have as much restrictions

on the ability to make chips. Trump is targeting the ability to make chips and having less restrictions on the ability to buy because if you can't have the ability to make, it's like... But Nvidia has an R&D center in Shanghai. Yeah, but they don't make anything. That's different than ASML and TSMC.

And so what we're not hearing the news... I think it's important from an IP leakage standpoint. I'm just saying it's not being... It doesn't get solved by the ban, but it's happening regardless. The software has made in America, but again, it's... One is like most of that stuff is open source

because again, it's a combination of hardware and software. But the IP leakage should be concerned about it relates to foundry equipment. It does not relate to Nvidia. That is a very, very low threshold. Like Zice and Trump, like those companies, like the mirrors that go inside the times. Like the EDA software stuff that like just basically came out about,

like that stuff relates to the ability, that's the IP leakage you should work about. And we're not seeing anything in the news about Trump moving on allowing ASML to send the photography machines. No, he went the opposite direction to buy that direction. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So, because if you control the ability to produce, then all this good stuff starts happening.

Sure, sure, sure. But if you're like, which is what happened in the previous administration was they inverted it, they thought that because the, as I said last time we were show, that they associate GPUs with AI doomers. Yep. And if you remove the like AI as a god and we don't want a Chinese god, then all this stuff kind of just doesn't make any sense. Okay, let's get into the meme ones.

One of the reasons, one of the reasons to ban exports of H20s to China is that it result in higher employment for Chinese thumbnail artists. So Chinese thumbnail artists are obviously going to be put out of business by generative AI models. If your job is creating a ton of slop content on listical websites, you're having a rough time with the rollout of GPT5. Of course. Sure. Right? Large language models. And so if we hobble the ability for China to run LLMs, that will result in higher employment for for thumbnail artists. What about that?

I mean, China is not the lowest cost manufacturer or producer of content or any type of it. It's the Philippines, Malaysia, Mexico. That's true. They actually do a lot of work in the factory that's less displacable. They should be worried about robotics potentially. Humanoid robotics.

Yes. But maybe that does what, where was that thing? Yeah. Right there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. What about incentivizing AI researchers to leave so they can be GPU rich?

You're a top AI researcher in China and you can't get any age 20s. And you're sick and tired of working at a GPU poor company like Alibaba or Bite Dance. And you say, you know what? I'm going to MSL. I'm going to meta. I'm going to open AI. I'm going to Anthropic. I'm hopping a flight to San Francisco.

Is that a possible? Yes. Yes. So that's why we should ban it because if they're GPU rich over there, they'll stay. But if they're GPU poor, they will say, I got, Zuck is setting up 100,000 100's intense. I want to train on that. I got to get to Palo Alto. Yeah, but as well as like Alibaba isn't going to pay them 100 million dollars. Exactly. Yeah. No, no, no, no, it's like if it's independent. Yeah, but they both, they both have factors, right? And so if you keep

the, the Chinese AI company's GPU poor, it will be an incentive for AI researchers to come to America. I mean, it's a good argument, right? I mean, on the edges maybe. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, it requires There's lots of confounding factors that make it an unpredictable sort of thing. But I mean, again, I don't think, I think the desire to be on the super intelligence team, I mean, you know, would you want to go be on it for a billion? That sounds pretty nice, right? A billion dollar cash out. So like-

I'm happy right here. You're happy right here? I mean, look at the car outside. I don't know. A billion dollars, right? But that is completely independent of GP capacity. Yeah. So that's where this is much more of a, and actually, let me maybe inverse this argument

because I think a lot of the constraints as we've seen on the recent frontier models are heavily driven by talent. So if we keep the talent over there and they're basically provide artificial constraints because we give them these things then actually they're going to make more progress on making it more efficient

and become more skilled at things that we're not skilled at. Is there a risk that they go close source and we're not actually able to port back the inference savings that we're seeing from Deep Sea? No, because I think they're really, I mean, they don't care about it. source. They're very clearly. They care about soft power. Yes. Yeah. And so that's why they're doing everything they're doing, which is kind of counter us. I'd say that China generally behaves as a very

ingenious population. But in terms of being, they're much more reactive to us than we presuppose. But there is an innate desire in the population to have soft power. That's why they did the Belt and Road Initiative and this is like the basically renewed effort. So I'd rather basically starve them of any capability to actually project power externally by creating an export nation and that we can basically become the dominant export nation. And that we're like something like this is that in realities that they just have millions and millions more engineers than we do. And so we want those people to come to America if they, you know, basically want to portray

the regime. And we want to make sure they advance that IP. But if we continue to isolate them, that basically they're just going to be. to make advancements even though they are GPU poor because that goes to an over protectionism on our side where we create a more GPU slop because we have way more high performance computing and we just don't care to make it efficient. Sure. So I'd rather have that be to where all that stuff is just happening on our stuff.

So in some respects, by giving them more, we actually decrease the incentive for them to make innovations because they actually will have more GPUs. So this is the solution to focus on efficiency. This is the solution to negative gross margins. This is what will save venture capital. It all comes back. Anyway, I want to go to a post that you put up. We can wrap up with the board.

If you want to design, if you want to take that board and design it into a beautiful graphic, do it on figma.com. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together and you can get started for free. You posted, this is really a race

between America and the world and you have the generative AI startups ranking, OpenAI, DeepSeek, Anthropic, XAI. What was your takeaway from this chart of Gen AI startups? Oh, that one. Yeah, I think it's a, yeah, China's obviously listed

the most out of America. But I think one is that it's our ability as a nation to invest in stuff that we think is revolutionary and become, again, the default nation. We want to be the standard. We want to be the exporter. But in reality,

is that seeing, when have we ever seen a great wave of new infrastructure development that has occurred this fast, that's international? So that goes back to, I don't know, whatever China shocking person that you were talking about. That's where he does it, that's why I make a little bit of a joke of, has you talked to anyone who doesn't live in America?

Yeah. Because we haven't ever seen that in Silicon Valley, to where there's a big motion in Silicon Valley to do this investment, you know, social media, mobile, web 3, And what we see now is the fact of like all these countries are doing sovereign AI projects. That's where the roll-up effect, the ability for us to control this is it's way more like Bitcoin, where it's something accessible to everybody. And that's what leaning on that side is kind of accepting the escape velocity that we're in versus the other side wants to live,

I think, in a little bit of a fairy tale, being like, oh, wouldn't it be nice if you control those things? It's like if you have children, you're like, well, wouldn't it be nice if you stop hitting your sister? and you're the kid's going to be like, right? And it's like you can only, you can really only extend yourself so far when you are a world occupied by multiple free agents, multiple sovereign nations. And so I'd rather lean into our strengths

where we can actually execute control. The more that we are our platform, the more soft power we have, therefore, I believe, more peace and more prosperity, less starvation, good or greater things for humanity, and we can still control things. But if we're in this other side

where we think that we can just hit people with sticks, like, they're just going to be like, I don't want to play this game anymore. Would you go further? Would you allow the export of the B200? I think some version of Blackwell should be in there. I don't have much of opinion on how much nerfed it should be or anything like that. Gavin Baker had a good post that you reposted.

He said, any journalist describing Nvidia H20 as an advanced chip is not a serious person. They're either ignorant or ideological. The H20 is circa four years behind the actually advanced B200 that Nvidia sells to America and our allies. the B200 has 30x more compute, 2x the memory bandwidth, 2x the memory of the H20s sold in China, arguably 100x more usable compute. Selling H20s to China is good policy as they are slightly 1.5x better than domestic Chinese accelerators. Selling the H20 thus effectively slows down to the development of a robust domestic Chinese

AI accelerator ecosystem, which would be good for China long term. In the event of conflict, we would simply stop selling H20s to China, and that would be, and they would be left with inferior domestic alternatives, and America would have a five to six year technology advantage over those domestic alternatives. Conversely, if we do not sell the H20 to China during peacetime, they would absolutely build effective domestic alternatives over time. These alternatives would almost certainly be less powerful,

less power efficient than Nvidia. See the Huawei Cloud Matrix 384, with it super fast, but power-hungry optical scale-up fabric. but China has way more power available for AI than the United States due to their embrace of solar. Selling age 20s to China during peacetime is also good for the world in America because it means their AI ecosystem is comparable to the American AI ecosystem and we can easily adopt the impressive algorithmic innovation seen in their open source models like Deep Sea. And the world benefits from a robust Chinese open source ecosystem that remains well behind

American closed source frontier models. the fact that the Chinese government is discouraging the use of H20s in favor of domestic alternatives should tell a rational dispassionate observer that all they need to know about which country benefits from the sale of H20s in China. Soft power. Yeah. My question is, is there something structural going on where China has to remain open source because of their position in the market? Yeah.

I think what Gavin is reflecting, which is more of my disposition, is if we're, going to make a strategic decision around because we still want to be the dominant superpower in the world. We have to be realistic and pragmatic about where we are. Like the fact is that we have, I don't know how how high is the debt 30 trillion, right? It's negligible in the age of AGI. Once we get a fast takeoff, it's all. If we just grow GDP at 5,000 a year, we're fine. Yeah. Yeah. So the, or just like fudge the numbers, right? That works too. If we're going to make a decision about any sort of policy trajectory, we have to understand what we actually are. Like we generally have a quite hostile politics. We have many states that are essentially bankrupt.

And we have a military that is still the strongest, but is kind of lacking on the asymmetric capabilities, which is why we have Andrew being created. So if we're going to say, hey, we're going to go to basically to soft war with somebody, we should really understand what's going on. And I think there's many people who occupy the China Hawk policy who, like as Gavin said, who don't even understand this technology. Or they commingle TSM with NVIDIA. And so if they're constructing an argument based on bad priors, then it's really hard to take anything else they say seriously.

Because that's why I go back to the AI, if you remove the AI doomers, many of the people who are China Hawks are just actually AI doomers. They think that Terminator is coming. It's going to kill us all. We're just robots. A very old is proven. Do you think that's the flow? I thought it might be the opposite.

It's like you're a China Hawk and you need to justify your policy. And so you wrap it in paper clipping. I mean, I can go like either way. Yeah, I can say going either way. Yeah. But I just don't believe that. And if you have any, for example, the number of genes you have is like basically hundreds of thousands. The number of cells you have is in the billions.

The number of neuron synapsis you have is about $500 trillion. The number of basically spaces in the model that like Open AI uses is 500 times less. Yeah. Right. And even in the fact, even the fact of like the way that we construct LLLMs a day, if you did that in human brain, that's called a seizure, right? So like we have to realize that that again, it doesn't mean. Don't make mistakes and don't have a seizure.

Yeah, like it doesn't mean AI. A.I can be amazing. Like, it doesn't mean any of these things. But, but it's very different than from, from intelligence. There's enough in.

Back on the Kurzweil timelines. It's back on, Ray Kurzweil makes this argument that, you know, the singularity will occur when the, the total amount of flops in computing is, is greater than the total amount of flops equivalent in the human brain. And we're,

we're orders of magnitude away from that. Yeah. So you really have to, you really have to. Within one human being, it will encompass all the community, can be competing power in that lifetime of 80-ish years a person live, than anything we have on planet Earth.

So, so, like, just sit down and be humble. Like, because when you humble, you can, like, basically appreciate. Because even the fact of, like, what the way elements work are very directive. But that's not even the way attention works and perception works. Like, do you recognize you're sitting in a chair? Like, do you feel that? But your body does, but your brain doesn't acknowledge it, right? So, like, even that differentiation between that there is so much computing happen in your body

that you're not even aware of, which makes it such an effective species. And LLMs, again, they're great. But you're overextending yourself to thinking that because you have all of this power and all this energy being able to generate T-flops, that you're going to say, like, oh, you're a person now, or you have sentience. And that's just not the way the brain works. And that's not even the way intelligence works.

I like that. I think it's a Wilmanitis post where he's saying, like, when they invented the steam engine, there were people that were saying like the brain is just like a steam engine and then when they invented the gasoline powered engine it's just like the human brain

is just like a gas powered engine and then when they invent the CPU the brain is just like a CPU and GPU the brain is just like a GPU people want to like bring their their current technology understanding into like the human and my yes go ahead

cars 10 horsepower yeah it's the same yeah there's 10 horses in it was yeah and and like one of the things like I love about the brain so much is like it's, for example, its ability to be plastic, right? Being only to mold itself, which LMs can't do.

Yeah, because they see novel information and they basically just like, well, right? They kind of like freak out. But even how we understand neuromodulators, like acetycolonine, dopamine, like neuroaffrin, even though we understand that, whenever you see something, you know, your, you're

all of kids, when you see your kids, your body releases these neuromodulars that creates basically the attachments to synapses and forms memories. And the way that we even understand that cocktail, we just know it just gets released. We don't know the percentages, we have no freaking clue. And as well as like if I take your brain

and then release it the same amount, right? Just like take electrons there and just boom, right? That you don't have the same effect, right? That how does directive focus impact cells? We have no idea. Like you can, for example, like hold this gong or hold that, right? You're- Holding your Diet Coke.

Yeah. Like even these two things, right? We don't even know what's happening when you have a fridge cigarette. How does, like, information effect, this Diet Coke and this, like, translate from cell information to the fact of me and dealing in caffeine? And science has no clue, like, how that works. But we know it works. And so... Well, I expect podcasters to figure it out.

I mean, do you watch Tim Dillon? Of course. He has a... He doesn't watch anything. Yeah, he has a great thing on, like, podcasters. Blanks slate. He's a Blank Slate. Like, yes, exactly.

All the alpha. Every show, every show. All the alpha. I have a three hour context window. It's true. Anyway, Aaron, again, thank you so much for stopping by. It's great to see you. Great to see you.

Thanks for coming in person. This is fantastic. Let me tell you about Vanta. Automate compliance, manage risk, prove trust continuously. Vantta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation,

whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program. Let's take it over to Mark German himself. Mark German. He has some new reporting. Apple plots, expansion into AI robots, home security, and smart displays. Apple Inc. is plotting its artificial intelligence. Comeback.

Don't call it a comeback. Actually, you can call it a comeback. I'll give you... I mean, it makes sense. They've been, they've gotten a lot of hate over the last few years for the role, particularly the rollout of Apple intelligence, very hyped. A lot of features on display at the... WWDC that didn't ship when the new iPhone launched.

They sold the new iPhone against it. Yeah, exactly. And so I think that there were, there were high expectations because of Apple's position with on-device inference being very cool. I gave you Gen Moji. Are you not entertained? They shipped a few things. I think that I would love to see the Gen Moji actual usage data

because I feel like even though it's not popular in teapot and on X and in the tech. the Technorati. It might actually be seeing decent adoption and joy. I mean, I've seen people share generative imagery

from Microsoft copilot, which I had no idea was a popular image generation platform whatsoever. Facebook crowd. Exactly, exactly. So I wouldn't be so sure that Gen Moji is producing zero value.

But at the same time, it's clearly been a tumultuous time for the company. They've been kind of on defense in terms of public relations. But Mark German is still scooping. single day. Apple is plotting its AI comeback with an ambitious slate of new devices, including robots,

a lifelike version of Siri, a smart speaker with a display and home security cameras. A tabletop robot that serves as a virtual companion targeted for 2027 is the centerpiece of the AI strategy, according to people with knowledge of the matter. The smart speaker with a display, meanwhile, slated to arrive next year, part of a push into entry-level smart home products. Tabletop robot that's a virtual companion. That's big. A lot of software they got a right to make that work.

They got to get on graphite. Dev code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. Tim Cook, if you're listening, get on graph. So this is big too. Home security is seen as another big growth opportunity. New cameras will anchor an Apple security system that can automate household functions.

The approach should help make Apple's product ecosystem stickier with consumers to the people who asked not to be identified because the initiatives haven't been announced. I mean, this seems like something that they could knock out of the park. Like just the smart thermostat, like these patterns have been defined for a decade. And that's like the sweet spot for Apple to come in.

And like the Sonos home speaker where we were saying like it they're just like the speak, everyone knows what they want out of a connected speaker system. They just want it at the level of Apple execution. It doesn't require going zero to one in some new territory. And so I feel like they could be very successful in in the home video. monitoring, home thermostat, home speaker. So I think I like this overall. The robot is where it gets funny because this feels crazy, but I'll let you keep doing. Going into companionship feels interesting. I don't think it's a companionship. I don't think of it like that at all. A tabletop robot

that serves as a virtual companion is the centerpiece of the AI strategy. I mean, so let's read what the actual report is on this robot. The tabletop robot resembles an iPad, monitor, mounted on a movable limb that can swivel and reposition itself to follow users in a room like a human head. It can turn toward a person who is speaking or summoning it and even seek to draw the attention of someone not facing it. The hope is to bring AI into life. I don't think of this as like companion necessarily. This could just be... Jarvis. Assistant. Yeah, Jarvis. I mean, I guess Jarvis isn't a companion, but companion has a bad flavor to it right now, a bad vibe, because people are saying, like, I married my companion,

and that feels very black mirror. I do think that there's a serious black mirror risk, but I'll go into that in a second, but what were you about to say? Yeah, I'm not going out and saying this feels like a competitor to friend.com or any other players that are actually focused on companionship, but this does feel like giving Siri a presence in the home.

Like an always-on presence in the home. It will be interesting to see how they solve it a partnership with OpenAI or Anthropic seems logical, but Apple Siri partnership with Open AI Anthropic before September on Polymarkets is a 6% chance. By December, it's at a 44% chance, though. But this is a very low volume market, but still, it feels like we haven't seen a lot of messaging from Tim Cook that they're going to be building a huge data center, going to be training a foundation model.

It feels like they're going to need to partner on some of the underlying infrastructure for that because I would not I would not want Siri hanging out in my kitchen talking to me like Siri is just not reliable enough but I would I would welcome Claude or or chat GPT into my house even but I would treat it specifically as a like an Alexa what's the weather like what's on my calendar look up the history of the Roman Empire I would ask it questions like that and I would use it as a knowledge retrieval tool. I might start to trust it in some agentic contexts. And the question is, do you want, do we want a robot iPad with an arm swinging around your kitchen?

And so, and hopefully when you want to know the weather, it's, you're within earshot. I think, I think this could be really cool. I think it could be really cool. I mean, they say FaceTime is going to be. And it's just funny because you're competing. They're still competing with their own. Yeah, but if you're ever in the kitchen, like, This is an example.

So FaceTime calls will be a key function of the device. During video conferencing, the display will be able to shift to lock on to people around a room. And so as you're walking around, the FaceTime is just following you. That actually feels more social. I remember during COVID, I bought Facebook's camera. They had some sort of device that you would mount on your TV and it would act as a video conferencing system.

And I used it a few times. I ultimately churned. But it had a really wide angle lens and it would zoom in on the people. It had really good face detection. And so it would center you no matter where you were in the room. But as soon as you walked to the other side of the room, it wouldn't be able to follow you

because it didn't have any motors in it. And I feel like this could be interesting. In the chat. This all reminds me of the meta portal. Yeah, that's the one I'm talking about, the portal. Basically, I didn't market it as a robot, but it would sit on a table and it would sort of follow you around the room.

And meta is no longer selling Meta Portal. Wow. I guess they wound it down. So anyways, Tim Cook told employees in all hands. I gifted some of these and they were pretty well received. Most of them wound up being used as like digital photo frames though. And they weren't actually used that often for calls. I don't know if putting it on a robotic arm is enough to make it useful.

I think you do have to nail the underlying speech recognition and in the conversational nature. Like it has to be powered by a frontier LLM. You know what's funny? What? Is I feel like the product, I could imagine them having a mood board internally with the Pixar lamp hopping around.

That's literally listed here as like one of their inspirations apparently. So Tim Cook told employees in all hands meeting this month that Apple must win in AI and hinted at the upcoming devices. The quote, the product pipeline, which I can't talk about. Thankfully, Mark German has his malls and Apple that are talking. Tim Cook says it's amazing, guys, it's amazing. Some of it you'll see soon.

Some of it will come later, but there's a lot to see. So Apple obviously always is cooking on moonshots. Very little of it surfaces to Mark German and even less actually services, you know, publicly via Apple's own channels. Mark German, if you have a little extra time, you should leak, Julius's user numbers because Julius has over 2 million users now.

They're trusted by folks at Princeton, BCG, Zapier. What analysis do you want to run? It's the AI data analyst that works for you. Connect your data, ask questions in plain English, and get insights in seconds.

No crowding required. We need to get our logo up there. Yeah. The fourth logo. For sure. There's a lot more. So Apple is planning to put Siri at the center of the device

operating system and give it a visual personality to make it feel lifelike. The approach dubbed Bubbles is vaguely reminiscent of Clippy, which we are super bullish on, and we think Microsoft should totally bring back Clippy, an animated paper clip from the 90s

that serves as a virtual assistant in Microsoft Office. Apple has tested making Siri look like an animated version of the Finder logo, the iconic smiley face representing the Macs file management system. The final decision on its appearance hasn't been made with designers considering ideas that veer closer to Memoji, the playful characters that represent Apple user accounts, Device prototypes use a roughly seven-inch horizontal display approaching the size of an iPad Mini.

The motorized arm can extend the display away from the base roughly half a foot in any direction. So that's not going to snap out. I was really hoping at five. I was really hoping at least five. Across the room, it reaches across and pins you against the fridge. Yeah, I think Apple should be able to nail delivering this in a way that doesn't feel black mirror and dystopian. Oh, that's funny. Sorry, I actually didn't see this, but there's a quote in here.

Some people familiar with the product call it. the Pixar lamp. Yep, exactly. I think it could work really, really well. Now, they have to be cognizant of the Black Mirror vibes. That would be very cool. If it could hop off my kitchen table. It can definitely hop around. That's Nat Friedman Corps. This is, this is, this is, this is doable with modern technology. But the risk is that they, they botched it because Apple's had a rough go with the recent marketing and they've had a couple real like backlashes. They had that one where they smashed all the pianos and the press. Do you remember this? So they had a huge hydraulic press and they pressed like an easel with paints and a bunch of paint buckets and pianos and violins and all this. They

get a bunch of blowback. They got a ton of blowback from this. We can we can try and pull it up. Do you remember this? Yeah, I remember that. People were saying that they're like destroying these timeless pieces. Yeah, it's just like the things that I. Yeah, the thing that I love, you're literally you're destroying it for this particular shots fired Bill Bishop from the substack stream. You need better guests to talk about China and chips, not just Nvidia partners who are regurgitating

NVIDIA's talking points. Bill Bishop, get on the stream. Call in. We'd love to have you. Bill. Bill, you're welcome. Hop on. Of course Aaron is riding with Jensen. Yeah, he is the Jensen surrogate. He's a surrogate. He's a surrogate. He's a surrogate for Jensen, the juggler. He has to juggle both United States and NVIDIA and China's interest and Taiwan's interest

and all of them. Come on the show, Bill. Miles Fisher wants to see the production team. He says show the off-camera voices. Let's get the production team up on the screen. Bill, call into the show right now. We'll send you the Zoom link. Yep.

Colin, you're welcome. Can we pull up the Apple ad of them crushing the videos? Is that even available anymore? They might have just taken it off the internet. But there was... I think I found it. But there was... This is it, right?

Yeah, I think... Yeah, yeah. It's a record player. Like, literally all these things that bring people joy. and it's just crushing a trumpet it's like all your dreams like all the things that you want to spend an arcade machine all the things that are nostalgia nostalgia plays so well and this is just anti-nostalgia in a million ways destroying it i mean it is a beautiful shot like this is a crazy that they actually did this that built itself empowering i know creative talent globally yep they they crushed the

bixar lamp and the angry bird oh it's brutal the tv blows up they this is such an incredible though, the fact that they actually shot this, it is a remarkable ad. Oh, and then the poor, the poor emoji gets crushed. And then, of course, it is revealed after everything blows up that all of that fits in your iPad, which is super thin, a reasonable message. You get all of that in the context of an iPad. You get games, you get an arcade machine, you get an easel, you get a piano, you get all of those things. At the time, Tor, Myron said our goal is always to celebrate the myriad of ways users express themselves and bring their ideas to life through iPad. We missed the mark with this video.

And we're sorry. Absolutely brutal. Well, really quickly, let me tell you about profound. Get your brand mentioned on ChatGPT. Reach millions of consumers who are using AI to discover your new products and brands. Check out profound. So the other ad that didn't go as viral and result in major backlash was the launch of the Apple Vision Pro.

So when the Apple Vision Pro launched one of the video. that they showed was of a middle-aged man looking at VR video of his kids, but he was alone in a dark room. And Ben Thompson was like, it feels like he's divorced or something, or maybe like the kids died. It felt like Minority Report, which is a movie I know you haven't seen,

but in Minority Report, Tom Cruise's son goes missing from the pool one day, and he has a virtual 3D video that he plays back and gets very emotional about. And the imagery was very similar in the Apple Vision Pro, but it wasn't an optimistic scenario. It was like, yeah, like, I guess if my son passed away, I got kidnapped, like, I would want to relive that,

but that's not like, you're going to inspire me to buy an Applevision Pro. And so with this like Pixar lamp, this, this robot in your, in your kitchen or in your house, like they really, I think they have to lean into, to, light mode, not dark mode. They have to really be aware and reality check themselves on the black mirror effect because the idea of someone hanging out in their kitchen being lonely and having this be the only companion that they ever talked to, that's a lot less fun than, hey, we're all cooking together

in the kitchen and this is helping us keep track of the ingredients. or my idea was teach it to, teach it to pour some beers and get it at the fraternity. This thing needs to be tending bar at a frat house and inspiring dancing silhouettes, like the original iPod commercial in order to be successful. Get the iRobot, a stack of red solo cups ASAP. Apple's canceled for fraternity-coded marketing.

I think that would be amazing. If this thing could pour a beer without foam, I think they got a winner because it needs to inject itself into social. Even the iPod, like, yes, you could put it in the headphones and you could tune out the world and be that dancing silhouette during the iPod commercial. But also, you could say, pass me the ox cord. I want to play a song for my iPod that everyone can enjoy. And it's a social experience.

And so it's important to show both of those sides now more than ever. And in chatypT demos and any AI product demo, there's always going to be the user. who uses the product to be more isolating, but the marketing should always be aspirational and pro-social, just like social media. Social media is at its best when we're highlighting the fact that, like, I have so many friends that just send me a random Instagram rail every single day.

And like, that's our interaction. And for me, it's a way to like check in with a friend. Share a laugh. And share a laugh. And it's a heart and it's a laughing. I can imagine the ad creative for the Apple Pixar lamp. You know, it's sitting on the center of a kitchen island, the family's hanging out, and they're FaceTiming somebody.

Exactly. Yeah. One of the family members is a town. I can actually imagine us having a Pixar lamp here on the table. Really? Really, it's like, yeah, it's like you want to be connecting two families or two sides of the family. The East Coast side of the family, the West Coast side of the family. They're both having Thanksgiving and they're able to connect.

But everyone's being extremely social. Do not film this thing with the lonely, the lonely person. you know, having the Pixar lamp be the only thing to keep it company. Anyway, that's my advice for it. What else is in here? The projects coded Linwood and Glenwood. Core to the new home devices are current products like, and current products like iPhones and iPads is an overhaul to the underpinnings of Siri.

Engineers are working on a version code named Linwood with an entirely new brain built around LLMs, the foundation of Gen AI. The goal is to tap into personal data to fulfill queries and ability that was delayed due to hiccups with the current version. It should be able to do it. Hopefully, they should have a moonshot division just trying to solve iMessage search. They could probably start there. Every tech company is that. Amazon search is rough.

Google Gmail search is rough. Search has gotten so, like, dominated. There's a billion dollar business in figuring out search. I mean, that would be the killer. There might be a killer app for Comet and some of the browsers is just, like, actually being able to search my Gmail inbox better. That would be pretty fantastic. I feel like it should be at the app layer.

Anyway, whatever they're building, they're building products. They've got to get on linear. Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products. Meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects, and product roadmaps. Open AI is on linear.

Let's get Apple on linear. Let's get the Siri team on linear. They very well might be already. So somebody, Craig Federigi, who you all know, says the work we've done on this end-to-end revamp of Syria has given us the result we need it. He added that this has put us in a position to not just deliver what we announced, but to deliver a much bigger upgrade than we envisioned. He said there is no project people are taking more seriously, so that is very positive.

A final decision hasn't been made on which models will be used, but Apple has been testing Anthropic PBC's Claude for this purpose. Mike Rockwell, the former Vision Pro Chief, who was put in charge of Siri earlier this year is overseeing both the Linwood and Glenwood efforts. Hmm. Apparently, so during the development of the tabletop robot, Apple engineers have made heavy use of chat GPT and Google Gemini to build and test features within Apple AI and Siri teams as a whole software developers are increasingly using third-party systems as part of their development process. Getting into a ring competitor here, Apple is working on a camera code name J450s designed for home security to detecting people and automating tasks.

The device will be battery powered and could last for several months to a year on a single charge. That's interesting. If they can do this for, they can do this for a random home security camera, they can't do it for your own. You're telling me they have the capability to have an always on camera.

Put the tinfoil hat on. We need a tinfoil hat. The device has facial recognition and infrared sensors to determine who is in a room. Apple believes users will replace will place cameras throughout their home to help with automation. That can be turning lights off when someone leaves a room or automatically playing music. So Apple, you're telling me that you can make a home security camera of which I will purchase multiple and put them around my house.

And it will be able to have a single battery that could last for several months to a year on a single charge. And you can't make an iPhone. It's a little bit different. The screen's pretty bright. The screen's bright. The screen's bright. Yeah. But an always on camera?

How long do you think your phone battery would last if you just constantly had the camera? I actually think running the camera sensor is a lot less power intensive than running a screen for sure. And obviously a bunch of different applications. But still, pretty powerful, pretty exciting. I don't think people want an always on iPhone. They want the thrill of charging the iPhone every night. If you're an adrenaline junkie, there's nothing like being on 1% trying to fire off that last I message. You know, I actually have a little.

a moment yesterday my my one-year-old is starting to walk and I had this moment yesterday where I was I was I was I filmed a video of her walking yep for about 10 seconds everyone's in in the house is like laughing enjoying the moment and then my battery died and completely lost the video because I didn't hit I didn't hit like and the video so the battery died right in the middle of this memory gone forever there is actually Actually, that has something to do with the encoder. There is a certain file type that you can use when you're filming on one of these cameras that if the battery dies, it will actually save the last of the file.

But there's certain codex where if you don't hit finish recording, the whole thing will be corrupted. It's very annoying. Anyway, get on numeral HQ, sales tax on autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. Tyler, what do you think about the Apple robot? Would you buy this thing? Would you do a challenge for it and then churn in two weeks? That's probably that's most likely.

It depends on how much it is. I'm like, you know. What have you adopted this summer that you still daily drive? You've churned from the vision, you've turned from the VR headset. You've churned from clearly. My new phone. Your phone, you have not gone back to the old phone. Yeah.

Extremely bullish for Apple. Let's hear it. Let's hear it for new phones. You know, you talk a lot of trash. George, oh, the latest iPhone doesn't have an all-day battery. Tyler's still using the latest and greatest phone. Still a good business. iPhone sales are ripping. Well, Apple still got it. In other news, Emily Choi has announced we just closed the biggest deal in crypto history. Deribit is the number one crypto options exchange by volume and open interest. And now it's

officially part of Coinbase. So, of course, Coinbase just completed their 2.9 billion cash in stock acquisition of Deribit. This had been announced previously. Deribet launched in 2016 and reportedly notched over $1 trillion in annual trading volume in 2024. So let's give it up for a big number. In other crypto news, bullish, this is one of the greatest headlines I've ever seen in the The nominative determinism of the Nominent determinism of bullish. I don't know if you can see. Maybe I should just put it here.

We need like the printer cam back. But the business and finance section of the Wall Street Journal says bullish's IPO lives up to name. Price of crypto exchanges shares jump 84% on their first day of trading. Shares of bullish sword in the IPO highlighting the challenge of pricing an IPO in today's exuberant market. Just last month, shares of software company Figma jumped 250% in their debut. That prompted whispers about the risks of a company underpricing an IPO and potentially leaving billions of dollars on the table. The ideal first day gains are typically around 20 to 30 percent, many bankers who work on deal say. Bullish had more, had a market capitalization of more than

$13 billion as of Wednesday afternoon. Its stock, which trades under the symbol BLSH, was temporarily paused after it began trading. All eyes were on Bullish's debut, largely because the company is led by Tom Farley, the former president of the New York Stock Exchange. Wow. Farley in the role guided some of the biggest IPOs including those of Alibaba and Snap. Bullish's debut was a chance for him to show his own ability to nail an IPO's pricing

to both maximize for company proceeds because when you're going public, you are selling stock. It's a fundraising event. It's a fundraising event. You want to sell it at the fairest price. If the stock pops, you could have sold a lot more potentially and gotten with the same amount of dilution, essentially.

So they could have, so they raised $1.1 billion. But because it jumped 84%, they could have raised $2 billion for the same dilution. And so that's in theory the problem here. And so, you know, people kind of go back and forth. But it gets to this point. I mean, you're making a gamble, right? Yep.

Even the Facebook IPO didn't decline. Tanked. Yeah, it was like one of the worst IPOs in tech history. It was very, very rough. And it took over a year, I think, for them to build back up. but that was due to a few things. There was a technical error. There was mispricing.

There was a lot of like, I think the numbers or something. There was like the mobile risk. There were a few different factors where people were like, oh, maybe this isn't the best like a true like compounder. I don't know. It was very odd in hindsight. But yes, this all goes to the point of how will individual investors react to public debuts?

Because if they go out and it's a hot company, it becomes a meme stock or there's just, you know, too much latent demand, the stock will pop insanely. And so that's what a lot of companies that are going public are dealing with these days. But it's sort of a champagne problem because it's good to have a high-valued stock that you can go out and acquire stuff. $11 billion public company now. Yeah, it's great.

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Tom realized that Shelby would not be driving much, so it didn't come through. Some lore. Who wound up starring in Ford versus Ferrari, who plays Shelby, I forget. It's someone else, right? Ford versus Ferrari.

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customer relationship magic. Adio is an AI Native CRM that builds and grows your company the next level. You can get started for free at Adio. Well, in other news, OpenAI and Sam Altman are investing a quarter of a billion dollars in Merge Labs at an $850 million valuation. That's a big stake.

The Financial Times is reporting. So Sam Altman wants to put a chip in your brain. That's kind of I think everyone wants to put a chip in your brain everyone even Roy Lee wants to put a chip in Roy Lee wants to and Mark Zuckerberg said that if you are if you're not wearing meta raybans you'll be at a cognitive disability or something like that didn't he say or cognitive disadvantage and because having a hoops revenge said good I'm used to it is great uh so financial times Altman's co-founding the company wow yeah open AI and its co-founder Sam Altman are preparing to back a company that will compete with Elon Musk Nirlink by connecting human brains with computers. I'm tightening the rivalry between the two billionaire entrepreneurs. The new venture called Merge Labs is raising funds at $850 million,

with much of the new capital expected to come from Open AIs Ventures team, according to three people with direct knowledge of the plans. Altman has encouraged the investment and will help launch the project alongside Alex Blania, who runs World and eyeball scanning digital ID project, also backed by Sam Altman. Altman will co-found the company but not have a day-to-day role in the new project they added. Merge is one of a slate of young companies looking to take advantage of recent advances in artificial intelligence to build more useful BCIs. Its name comes from what many in Silicon Valley describe as the merge, a moment when humans and machines come together.

Yeah, it's a good. The Dumeers are going to love this one. I'm sure. Altman wrote a lengthy blog post on the topic in 2017, speculating the moment would come. as soon as 2025. This year he suggested in another blog post that he could he could soon have high bandwidth brain computer interfaces as a result of recent technological advances. I'm going to reference back to this blog post from Sam Altman called The Merge. He posted this eight years ago on December 7th, 2017. A popular topic in Silicon Valley is talking about what year humans and machines

will merge or if not what year humans will get surpassed by rapid improving AI or genetically enhanced species. Most guesses seem to be between 2025 and 2075. People used to call this the singularity. Now it feels uncomfortable and real enough that many seem to avoid naming it at all. Perhaps another reason people stopped using the word singularity is that it implies a single moment in time and it now looks like the merge is going to be a gradual process and gradual processes are hard to notice. I believe the merge has already started and we a few years in. Our phones control us and tell us what to do. Social media feeds determine how we feel. Search engines decide what we think. The algorithms that make all of this happen are no longer

understood by any one person. They optimize for what their creators tell them to optimize for, but in ways that no human could figure out. They are what today seems like sophisticated AI, and tomorrow will seem like child's play. And they're extremely effective, at least speaking for myself, I have a very hard time resisting what the algorithms want me to do. Until I made a real effort to combat it, I found myself getting extremely addicted to the internet. We are already in the phase of co-evolution, the AI's effect, effect, and infect us,

and then we improve the AI. We build more computing power to run the AI on it, and it figures out how to build even better chips. This probably cannot be stopped. As we have learned, scientific advancement eventually happens if the laws of physics do not prevent it. more important than that, unless we destroy ourselves first, superhuman AI is going to happen. Genetic enhancement is going to happen, and brain machine interfaces are going to happen.

It is a failure of human imagination and human arrogance to assume that we will never build things smarter than ourselves. Our self-worth is so based on our intelligent that we believe it must be singular and not slightly higher than all the other animals on a continuum. Perhaps the AI will feel the same way and note that differences between us and Bonobos are barely worth discussing. The merge can take a lot of forms. We could plug electrodes into our brains or we could all just become really close friends with a chat bot. Wow. Eight years ago, he said that? Eight years ago.

That's crazy. Chad CBT, of course, wouldn't exist for years. But I think a merge is probably our best case scenario. If two different species both want the same thing and only one can have it, in this case to be the dominant. species on the planet and beyond, they are going to have a conflict. We should all want one team where all members care about the well-being of everyone else. Although the merge has already begun, it's going to get a lot weirder. We will be the first species ever to design our own descendants. My guess is that we can either be a biological bootloader for digital intelligence and then

fade into an evolutionary tree branch where we can figure out what a successful merge looks like. It's probably going to happen sooner than most people think. Hardware is improving at an exponential rate. The most surprising thing I've learned, working on open AI is just how correlated increasing computing power and AI breakthroughs are. And the number of smart people working on AI is increasing exponentially as well. Double exponential functions get away from you fast. It would be good for the entire world to start taking this a lot more seriously now. Worldwide coordination doesn't happen quickly and we need it for this. It's a wild post. Is that still up or did you have to go to the archive? Still up.

Bill up. Interesting. That's a hot take. Tyler, would you put a chip in your brain? Yeah, I want, I want four-o piped straight in. Yeah, you're down? I'd do it. Yeah, sycophancy maxing. Chat is not super into it. Gabe says he just wants salt and vinegar chips, not brain chips. John actually says he's got to be honest. I don't think it's for me ever. I can already picture the contagion of pure pressure. Yeah, reading that blog post made me want to touch some grass. We should actually get some grass here in the studio. We should get some grass in the studio. Or even on the table.

Even on the table so we could just have one hand on the grass. It relates a lot to this cold healing post. 2040 population distribution predictions. 90% brainless content zombies who are functionally illiterate cannot write a paragraph. 5% neo-amish flip phone users. 5% elites and super elites at algorithmic war with each other to steer the 90% to their whims. And then Crabb says always has. been. I do, I think this, I think the case of the Neo Amish is fascinating because the non-Amish,

the Amish are doing fantastically. They, they have adopted flip phones, I believe, and they've adopted some technology, but in general, they've accumulated a lot of real estate and they're reproducing rapidly. They're by all accounts, they are flourishing. And so what's interesting is that the the coastal elites have not gone to war with the Amish. They're not said like what they are doing is unacceptable and we must like eradicate them. I don't know if they'll ever be threatened by it. I think they might be fine with it forever. I think everyone might be fine with it forever.

And so I think you do. They can build barns like they're they're in a game of four. Oh, you're threatened by that. I mean if they can build a barn, what else could they build quickly? I think I think that like you even though there will be. You've seen the videos right of them like assembling a barn and it's amazing. 12 hours. It truly is some of the greatest. Some of the greatest grass touching you can do. The Amish population doubles every 20 years. Amazing. Yeah. Bullish. Yeah. And is America like not

doubling ever? Chart that out. Yeah. Oh, that's a fast takeoff there. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Project the next 10,000 years. What will the Amish population? Yeah, Tyler, work on that. Amish general intelligence. How many Amish people were there be in 10,000 years if they keep doubling every 20 years? That's what I want to know. I bet it's a big number. Mark has a good one. He says AI equals Amish intelligence how to build a barn in 20 hours. I love it. Thank you, Mark. This is so funny. But I think my takeaway is like the so Sam is painting this picture of like you get left in the evolution tree and you get like dropped off and it's a dead end. I don't know that it's necessarily a dead end. Like you could like monkeys are still around.

You could still just be a monkey and you could be an Amish and like the super intelligence brain computer merged people could go off and do their own thing and you could just be vibing as an Amish for thousands and thousands of years. Like there's not necessarily an incentive to eradicate the super intelligence comes and says, hey, I'm going to need you guys to come and ride Soul Cycle bikes to power my data center. I think that I think that people are just are just people like people like animals. People are nice by default. Like the default state of most living things is not this like vicious battle to dominate everything constantly. Like yes, like the animal kingdom is extremely metal and there are insane battles constantly. But it doesn't need to necessarily be that way. Yeah, I don't think it necessarily needs to be that way.

I think the I think the Amish can coexist. Tyler, do you have the final number? How many Amish people will there be in the year? In 10,000, 12,000. 25, 12,025. Yes, I think it'd be 1.3 times 10 to the 156. Can you turn that into like words? Is it quintillion, octillion, septillion?

I want to know, convert it into converting to the 156 is like. Is that past a Google? I guess 10 to 100. So there will be more than a Google Amish. Yeah. That's fantastic. I'm rooting for the Amish. That's great.

I think you got to go long Amish. How do we make money on this? Someone asked what about the absent-minded destruction of parking lots? I don't get that. I'm confused. I don't know about the Amish reference. Are the Amish destroying parking lots? I think they're building parking lots for all those barns they're putting up.

Anyway, the Amish are missing out on eight sleep, or maybe that's a loophole that they can do. We should definitely get the Amish on eight sleep. Get a pod five if you're Amish and you're listening to the stream and you're in the chat right now. They got a five-year warranty, 30-night risk-re-trial, free returns-free shipping. That would be the-O-Mish. First thing you put in the barn, pod five. They could imagine if we find out that the Amish can build barns so quickly because they've all been secretly sleeping on eight-sleeves. Maybe that's the secret.

Maybe that's the secret. They got an Amish version from Mateo that's, like, cooled by the earth. Ooh, the farm to table eight sleep. That's nice. Taylor says, I for one welcome our Amish Borg overlords and Gabe says Long Home Depot. Yeah, Long Home Depot.

Going Long Home Depot to, did the Amish shop at Home Depot or do they chop their own trees down? I don't know. You need to do deep dive on the Amish. Anyway, should we debate whether or not TV is dead? Our magazine's dead. One of our strongest stands, Adam Fayes. I believe he's a part of Fay's clan.

Adam Fay said, Emily Sundberg asked me for my anonymous hot take which I guess he immediately de-anonomized. On the state of media right now, I'll out myself because I don't think mine's that anonymous. Magazines are dead. TV is dead. Hollywood is dead.

TBPN is more important than CNBC. Emily Sundberg is more important than Vanity Fair. Nick Fuentes is more important than Fox News. And X is unfortunately the center of the universe. Interesting take. Very spicy. Alex Heath from the bird says half is true. Half is not.

We'll never know which half. And Max Tani says, I think you could make the argument that none of this is true. Yeah. Who knows? What is relevancy? What is importance? Who knows? All I know is we're having fun on this stream.

We're having fun with you in the chat. I just want to say you're keeping magazines in business, John. I am. I mean, yeah. Oh, the newspaper is dead. Why do I read it every single day then? Well, he didn't say the newspaper was dead. No, the newspapers, Lindy.

I think, I think. I actually think true journalism is more important. As long as TBPN is alive, Hollywood cannot be dead because we are live from Hollywood and we are joined by someone who is not far from Hollywood. Deli and Asperuha, partner at Founders Fund, co-founder of Varda Space. What can we do to second office for Varda? Let's move it to Hollywood. Hollywood is the new Silicon Valley. Well, if they get tasked. Not a lot of warehouse space. Wait, think about this. So if you guys get tasked with a moon landing and we, you know, we need to. Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We got you covered. If you're going out for for series J and you need to, you know, make a moon landing appear like it happened, we got the cameras for you. We're good. We're good. You know, somewhat controversial take is the moon landing did happen. Yeah. The footage wasn't looking that good. Oh. They did live stream from Hollywood for the footage that they had some great years of takes. So both are true. That's great. They had to reshoot it. They had to reshoot it. Yeah, reshoots happen all the time. I don't have a problem with it.

I say let it, let it happen. Fair, fair play. Yeah. Anyway, what is new in your world? There's a bunch of stuff going on DC. We can talk about chips in China. We can talk about, I want to talk about negative gross margins and AI companies. What's going on venture?

There's a bunch of stuff. But what's, what's top of my career? Why don't we start there? Let's start there. Let's start there. Let's a fun one. Okay. So, because Delian has been, been getting, you know,

notoriously. For years for years about margin profiles. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's true. That's true. Back to Everett, baby.

Yeah. Let's make it just an effort. Somebody tell Everett to come on right now. Yeah, yeah. Let's have the gross margins debate. So here's my take to kick it off. Here's an example of how the AI startup economy works. I've anonymized the companies, but this was relayed to me in a group chat, and I believe

it to be roughly true. You, the user, gives an application layer company $1. They turn around and give $5 to a foundation model company that gives $7 to a hypercaler, who in turn gives, $13 to a GPU maker. And it's giving house of cards. And so the question is, how fast can inference costs fall? Are we so over?

Will we solve this? Is Moore's law enough to save us? What else needs to change? What's your take on negative gross margins in now software businesses and the end of zero fixed costs? I saw this graph that was in videos free cash flow by quarter and they're like capex by quarter. The first was like the day he spent, I think, I figured it was a quarter year.

maybe it was yearly, but they're, you know, spending something on the order of like, you know, $4.5 billion in, you know, sort of cap X on, you know, so scale up of production lines. And their free cash flow is something on the order of like $35, 40, you know, sort of billion dollars. And so there's just something like funnily ironic where like you take the whole like 2010's mantra of like, you know, software's eating the world, marginal cost of distribution is zero. Your margins are phenomenal. And then it's just like, it's all just completely wrong, right? like, you know, SaaS companies end up having, like, crazy high sales and marketing spend

in order to actually, like, grow the revenues at all. So the margins don't look anywhere near what they look like. Alex Clayton from, you know, Sir Meritech had this tweet where now the just publicly reported AI Labs' revenue company, sorry, the publicly reported revenues of AI Labs now surpass the entire public-sase, you know, publicly traded SaaS industry. What? So it's just like, you have this entire, like, decade of. companies, things that people, you know, sort of worked on, revenues, et cetera. And then it turns out,

like, it was all just completely wrong, both on like those companies actually having durability, margins, et cetera. And there's replaced by something that is somehow bigger and potentially also has all those, you know, sort of same like risks and concerns of durability, margin center. And who is the winner? It still ends up being the people that have the fundamental like hardware, you know, so infrastructure. Like if you look at like where all their like free cash flows ending up, it's somehow ending up in like Oracle running data centers, Microsoft soft-running data centers and, you know, and, you know, video basically building the chips that, you know,

should go into those and, like, the energy companies that are providing the energy for it. But, like, the end, like, application layer and, like, software companies end up capturing, like, none of the, you know, sort of margins or cash flows from all of this. And so, I don't know, is the guy that's always loved bits in atoms rather than pure bits alone. I continue to feel very validated. And I admit that I enjoy studying, you know, some of these AI companies gross margin profiles and then realizing that, like, the fucking Space Factory company has better gross margins. It's wild.

Do you think that there's any hope for inference costs to fall off a cliff and gross margins to kind of get right side up very quickly? Because that is the bull case. Like we saw this with DeepSeek. Like the inference cost, even for reasoning models, dropped like, you know, 20x very quickly. And you just don't see that in, you know, I'm a home. I'm a homemaker and all of a sudden like the price of lumber just dropped 10x. Like that just doesn't happen. It only happens in software and algorithms.

where a more elegant implementation of the algorithm can actually drive same results, 10x savings and cost. And that feels like everything's like everyone's kind of hoping for a bailout maybe. And I'm like cautiously optimistic that it could happen. We're going to get a government bailout of the artificial intelligence industry within the next 365 days. We need a federal backstop. Yeah, universal tokens. everyone gets $1,000 in Nvidia credits or something.

The other like interesting, you know, sort of macro lens on this is if you look at the amount of KAPX that is going into setting up, you know, basically, you know, buying chips, setting up use of data centers, basically all things that the like, you know, sort of hyperscalers and Foundation Labs are contributing towards. It's actually the highest single, you know, sort of industry investment line item as a percentage of GDP since basically, you know, the fiber rollout in, you know, sort of the, you know, late 90s. And then before that, the last time that we had an equivalent was basically the railroad boom in the late 1890s, right?

I want to say. And the railroad boom was significantly higher. I think it was like almost 9% of GDP. I know the chart you're thinking of. And I think fiber and like the internet rollout was like 1.2 and we're at like 1.3% of GDP, something like that. So we're not, we're not like insane 10% of GDP. which is kind of what like the fast takeoff folks, the, you know the Dwar Kesh Patel crowd talking with Sato Nadella talking about like this could be 50 percent of GDP if scaling really, really works like we think it will.

The thing that's unique though to those, you know, relative to those prior booms is fiber companies were dependent on their fiber revenue in order to keep justifying rolling out fiber, right? And they obviously ended up being wrong. You thought that fiber was going to be everywhere, there was going to be infinite internet. And then it turns out you set up like a basic backbone for the internet. And then after that you actually didn't need fiber everywhere. And so there was like projected to be semi-infinite demand for fiber. And now the biggest, you know, sort of company that was rolling that out in like the late 90s, Corning literally only like finally last year reached their original like peak, you know,

2000-1, you know, sort of market cap. It took, you know, whatever 24 years. And most of that now has nothing to do with fiber. It's like the gorilla glass that they make for, you know, iPhone. That's true. That's true. Glass applications. But, you know, shows how long can take to, you know, get back to your prior peak.

The railroad companies obviously were highly. dependent on their like, you know, rail revenue in order to be able to continue to invest into railroads. What's crazy about the like, you know, CapEx that's going into these data centers is like a significant chunk of it is funded from companies that have free cash loan revenues from completely unrelated to the AI business, right? Like meta's funding all this stuff from like their social media and targeted ads. You know, Microsoft is, you know, feeding all this off of their like, you know, sort of SaaS, you know, revenues, you know, Amazon, obviously from their like, you know, marketplace, et cetera. It's like the only companies that are actually

dependent on the AI revenues to fund this CapEx are like basically the foundation, you know, sort of model companies. And then Google from their like monopoly, you know, basically on, sort of search. And so when you think about like how long they can potentially sustain that like at 1.3 or you get up to like 2% of GDP, it could potentially take a significantly longer time, if there is any type of, you know, sort of bubble here for there to be eventual, you know, sort of decrease in the percent of GDP because they're not actually that reliant on, you know, that that KAPX rollout actually immediately contributing to, you know, revenues. And then the crazy part is like you still have Apple, you know, sort of mostly setting on a huge chunk of cash.

hasn't really participated in all this, other than the fact that actually their, like, you know, revenues have now been flat for like five and a half year straight. And then they're like, you know, bounce sheet has basically only decreased linearly, you know, quarter over quarter for the last five years straight. So it's like, man, if you were like a more brilliant version of Tim Cook five years ago,

should have just bought like $90 billion of GPUs. And like, started building, you know, some data centers. And instead he like, I don't know, rolled out the like, iPhone like, you know, 400. iPhone 400 would actually go pretty hard. Which, to be fair, has good margins and low churn. We gave our intern a new iPhone and he has still using it.

He has and we can't say that about some of the SaaS that we've had him try. Happy DAU. There is a there's a wrinkle with the Apple thing. A lot of the balance sheet decline is because of dividends. They're paying shareholders out, but I agree with you. The other thing that I don't know what to do with the cash. You don't know what I can play like Zuckerberg. They're creating their they're creating the Pixar lamp.

Yeah. Yeah. They're going to create Pixar lamp. They're literally creating a Pixar lamp that will sit on your your, your, it's going to be an iPad on a robotic arm and it will be able to like move around and follow you around the room. So if you're FaceTiming with someone in the kitchen and you walk over to the stove or the refrigerator, it'll follow you around. And they're going to compete with ring. I think they don't know what to do with their cash. I think they got plenty of world changing ideas. Yeah, yeah, they're going to go steamroll of two billion dollar company. It sounds like a shitty like 2013 like YC like startup, you know, sort of pitch like on the order of like Jucero basically. Yeah. Yeah. I want to talk about yeah, the the fractures in the in the financial world around AI do feel like, you know, The foundation is a little more solid because it's coming off of cash flow from these hyperscalor balance sheets. There's also the- Yeah, and that's the bowl case for the hypers scalers in AI and just being competitive, even if they're behind the ball on co-gen and personal assistance and things like that,

is that they're just going to be able to sustain this pace and investment level for the other kind of source of capital that people are discussing now is private credit. and people are wondering if there's this private credit bubble, but then also private credit isn't mark to market as much. And can you give me kind of like the venture capitalist 101 on how venture capitalists are interfacing with private credit these days? Because it feels like there was usually like a handoff where you invest in a company and then at a certain point it goes public and then, you know, or goes into private equity and then you're kind of out of the game.

But it feels like there's a little bit more interface between the VC world and the private credit world now. Do you have any insight into what's going on there? Have you followed that at all? A bit, you know, the place you're a deal by deal, right? Study this stuff is like the upstream, which is like the, you know, sort of equity side of things. I'm forgetting the, you know, sort of exact stat that I'm thinking of. But there was basically this crossover point in the last year, which I want to say was it,

it wasn't IPO equity raised, but it was, it was. it was something like, you know, sort of capital deployed into like sub $200 billion market cap companies. And basically for the first time ever, the private capital market was actually as large, you know, and had crossed over to the public, you know, basically capital markets in terms of, you know, sort of fundraising, in terms of like issuing of primary and fundraising. And so the strategies that some of these like major asset managers on the equity user side of things, These are obviously like the Fidelity, the Black Rocks, et cetera, the ones that are like, you know, the Vanguard. All of those groups at this point have clearly, you know, sort of admitted to themselves that the sort of prototypical, you know, IPO when you're between five and $25 billion to market cap is just a world that is not coming back anytime soon.

It's not to say there won't be some companies that do that. Obviously, Figma has done, you know, sort of phenomenally well. And so that may tempt some companies to go back to it. But all these asset managers have realized that, you know, so much of the returns are now being, you know, sort of held up in the private markets that, that they need to go enter those. And so you're seeing the equivalent on the, you know, sort of private credit side of things. I think I can, you know, sort of share the logo of the company, but there was a company in our portfolio that recently, you know, raised hundreds of millions of dollars in private,

you know, sort of credit from tier one, you know, basically, you know, sort of bank, you know, top, you know, sort of four in the United States. The cost of credit that they had on it was effectively like LIBOR plus 25 bibs, which is just like the equivalent of like cost of California. for a like $50 billion publicly, you know, a company. And notably, very different than like venture debt, which is like something people like,

oh yeah, I raised $10 million. I got a $1 million credit line or something like that. This is a completely different. If you have a bad quarter, we're gonna take over the asset. Yeah, exactly. These are totally different. This is like, you know, you know, backing physical assets at these eaters and companies

are going and buying and you know sort of rolling out. And so I remember watching the deal happen and being like, wow, like, I mean, first, as the like equity investor, I'm like, oh my God, this cost of capital super easy for this company to like, you know, cover the like, you know, CAPEX, you sort of roll out based off their, you know, margins, et cetera. And so they're like return on equity now that you can see as the private investor is like insane where it's like, why go public where this company doesn't even need to raise that much equity. And they like, one of the, like, there's a lot of value purposes for

being public. But one of them is that you're like general cost of capital on the debt side just goes down significantly, typically when you're, you know, sort of a public company. And that was what people thought of on the cost of equity side for a long time. That was the whole purpose of going public was like, you know, in 2013, you couldn't raise $5 billion in the private markets. And so if you wanted to scale to that level, you had to basically go public. Private credit was much more laggard to catch up, but is now actually starting to catch up where it's like, well, man, you're like, cost of equity is basically the equivalent, if not cheaper than what it is when you're public. Now the cost of credit is starting to basically, you know, should have become the equivalent at some

point. It's like, you know, why are you even, you know, sort of bothering to, you know, you can go public. So that was like, you know, sort of first set of thoughts that I had. But Then the second was, okay, I was like trying to think about it from like the lender perspective. I was like, in what world, you know, are they giving this like, you know, private company the like equivalent cost of like, you know, publicly traded? It's Apple. And it couldn't, it couldn't be that they just raised so much money and they need to deploy it at all cost, right? Couldn't be that. Yeah, yeah.

I mean, maybe there's a part of it. That couldn't be it. That couldn't be it, right? Like, why would we? But it raised a lot of money. We have a lot of AUM. We got to take some huge risk right here. We got to deploy.

We can't, we can't generate fees unless we're. were, you know, slugging around. Maybe. Huge check. But what, yeah, what's the other reason? I think the other reason is, like, there's these certain, like, super cycle macro trends that sort of feel unstoppable. And if your company is related to that, the banks are willing to underwriting because

they believe that, like, look, this piece of infrastructure that you're building, if you don't utilize it, there will be a fast follower that quickly, you know, sort of jams it up. So you build out XYZ data center with all these GPUs. For some reason, if your model, your, like, particular consumer application doesn't work, somebody else is basically going to go snap that up. And so they clearly are treating like a part of underwriting, you know, you know, CAPEX as a, you know,

infrastructure like debt provider is thinking about like if the like equity holder of this, you know, basically goes belly up is this, does this asset actually have secondary liquidity, right? That's why, you know, you know, companies that have super esoteric pieces of equipment or technology, a little harder to have debt. If you're buying something, say like, you know, you know,

I mean, the warehouse space. Like if you were to, I don't know, you're probably leasing it, but like if you were to say, I want a mortgage. and I want to buy a warehouse, like that's hyper liquid and you can sell that to somebody else who needs a warehouse very easily. You're in El Segundo. It's pretty simple. But yeah, like if it's

R&D and if the R&D doesn't produce fruits, like that needs to be equity backed. That needs to be paid for with equity. And so yeah, it is interesting that yeah, there's this like super cycle and there's certain technologies, certain pieces of equipment, certain pieces of hardware that you can just underwrite way, way differently because somebody's going to pick them up. There's three Water cooling towers at GPU centers, transmission lines, people building transformers. Yeah. The gas turbines that people are using for like, you know, basically backup, you know, sort of power to like smooth out the grid.

Battery systems. And so it's interesting where it's like you almost have the like, you know, and I always talk about this. Like you want to, you know, transform the world. You can, you know, do all the government policy you want. But ultimately it's like the invisible hand that is going to, you know, make this happen. When we think about like electrification and build out of like, you know, sort of grid, when you think about like reshoring of, you know, sort of manufacturing the United States

and having like, you know, not just 10 CNC machines in a facility like this, but like hundreds, thousands, et cetera. Yeah. The easiest signal to see whether or not that stuff is going to happen is, like, what does the cost of capital go do that? And the banks are clearly signaling, like, we believe that this is such a macro trend. There's such strong, you know, support from the market, such strong support from government policy that, like,

we're going to be giving these, like, subscale companies, but that are focused in these particular areas, cost of capital low enough that this, you know, and we believe that the risk is low enough because of the secondary liquidity and because of all these macro trends, that it sort of becomes this self-fulfilling loop. Or now of a sudden you do get, you know, all those, you know, sort of trends, you know, built out on, you know,

crazy amounts of energy build out, you know, restoring a production in the United States, sort of huge data centers. And so now this stuff can also go in the reverse direction, but I think it's just like one of these highlights of like capital markets are just so reflexive. We're like when people believe in a trend more, then the cost of capital becomes less, than the rollout, you know, it basically happens faster and then it loops on itself with the cost of capital becomes less, et cetera, as you're seeing this in these like, you know, sort of categories. But there's like more sustainability, again to you this, especially in the data center world where, you know, it's not dependent on the data centers,

producing cash flows for, you know, a lot of these businesses. Obviously on all things, restoring production there, obviously, more, more, you know, sort of dependent on actual revenues there. The only other topic that I was going to sort of flag, by the way, is I don't know if you guys saw, but the White House actually put out an executive order yesterday that was one of their, sort of first, you know, broader orders on basically maintaining commercial space leadership in the United States that I kind of wanted to, you know, briefly. Yeah, please, bring it down. You know, a little bit, you know, Delta V, you know, space topic.

Break it down, space, man. Breaking it down. It was something, I hope I don't butcher, you know, apologies, Michael Kratios, who I butcher the name of the order, but there was something like, you know, America maintaining, making space great again, you know, maintaining American leadership in space. There were a couple different aspects of it, you know, that I enjoyed, you know, reading through. I think the first primary, like, lens that I put on it is it was just the clearest language that I've ever seen from a government official talking about just making so much of space activity

far more regular. It was everything from just like, you know, sort of rethinking the regulations around both launch and reentry to think of the. these things as like much more, you know, sort of regular activities. You know, the example that I always like to provide in relation to, you know, sort of Varda was, you know, if you've studied the airspace around Cape Canaveral over the past, you know, sort of decade, it's had a, you sort of significant, you know, shift in that there used to just be the occasional rocket launch that would do a basically like temporary, basically shutdown of airspace. You know, flights would get, you know, sort of rerouted, you know, across Florida in order to, you know,

sort of accommodate that. And it was always sort of like a one-off special operation. At this point, if you actually look at like the commercial, you know, plane traffic patterns around Florida, most of it has basically largely shifted. Like, they used to typically actually, like, fly along the coast. If you think about that in New York to, you know, Miami flight, it would actually sort of cut along the, you know, sort of coast to basically, you know, sort of reduce a little bit of the distance. Now, because there's just such consistent operations, the airspace is basically, you know, predicted to be effectively closed off at basically all times.

And so all of the commercial airline traffic basically just goes along the, like, central line of Florida. And it sounds like a, you know, so simple thing, but it's interesting to think about like how day-to-day, you know, activities and commercial activities are shaped when something is seen as like a regular activity rather than like a, you know, sort of special occasion. And so you've seen that, you know, built out around Cape Canaveral where you now do you have this like rocket flight corridor that is basically just like permanently, you know, sort of cordoned off. It's really the only place that we have that in the United States at that regular bed activity where like it's thought of as something that need to be cordoned off.

You obviously have Vandenberg, you know, sort of space for space, but still their things are still occasional enough that you don't have the equivalent. There's also a little bit less like, you know, sort of commercial, you know, flight traffic that, you know, sort of goes around there. It's just a little bit, you know, less than like a, you know, sort of dense urban population. But a part of the, you know, sort of executive order from the president was both, you know, sort of rethinking and reshaping, you know, basically launch and reentry regulation, but also clearly pushing for, you know, an establishing of a bunch of spaceports around America that are meant to have, basically, you know, sort of regular both reentry and, you know, and launch activity.

And then thinking through how much burden should there be put on reentry vehicles that are coming back from space. If those reentry vehicles have a basically what's known as a flight termination system on board, basically it's like, hey, if something's going wrong, just explode the damn thing so we don't actually like land in the wrong place. And so should you allow for basically like looser, you know, regulations when you know that there is that type of, you know, sort of termination system on board that can basically self-terminate if you're in an off, you know, off-nominal scenario. And so it was just great to see leadership from, you know, the administration and the president in such a, like, pointed direction of, hey, this type of activity needs to be thought of day to day and as common as like commercial, you know, the example that I like to give is, you know, we are now approaching the point of the amount of orbital rocket launches from the United States per year

is about the same number of commercial airliners landing and taking off in LAX every day. Wow. He's becoming, you know, regular. I mean, it's sold 365, you know, you know, off of, you know, truly, you know, the daily equivalent of LACs. But it's like, you know, it's in the orders of magnitude now of, like, you know, some of our busiest airports and so we need to think of these things not as like rocket launch pads but like spaceports and I like the executive order had like the word spaceport in it like 15 times

not like esoteric crazy rocket launch pad thing it's like no you know airports is space port yeah we kind of do that with the commercial flights I think like when commercial airliners are flying east to west they fly at like 35000 feet and when you're flying west to east you fly at 32,000 feet so there's just always a gap and you know you don't even have to think about like am I going to run into someone because you're just everyone's just codified. A default pattern of operation, because you don't have to think about that. And so we need the equivalent for space ports where it's like, yeah, there's this corridor

that allows, you know, for reentry, you know, so regularly. And just like it's not like it's the one-off rerouting of planes, but the planes just don't go there because they know that that's where things reenter. Yep. Anything on. What's the update on Firefly Aerospace? They went out. They went public on August 7th at 60, down 18-ish percent since then.

but this is the company that had the rover. Moon landing. What's the general update on the company? And yeah, yeah. Like how do they fit in the ecosystem? Yeah, I've been spending a bunch of time with some of the investment bankers that, you know, sort of led that, you know, deal. And then some of the, like, long, you know, hedge funds that did it. It was exciting to see that of the call it, like, top eight, you know, mega IPO allocators that are, like, the long only, you know, sort of public equity types.

I think something like seven out of the eight did like meaningful, you know, sort of positions in that Firefly IPO round. And so I think this kind of goes back to like the, you know, super cycle stuff that we're talking about where I do think that this stuff starts to become a little bit of like a self-fulfilling prophecy where like you have the president of the administration really leaning in and leaning forward. Obviously there's like Jared Isaacman, no longer administrator, secretary Duffy stepping in. They're trying to find, you know, interim. So, you know, there's obviously things that they're still sorting out on like our space leadership. But clearly, you know, sort of leaning forward in a way that is, you know, sort of marching towards, you know, wanting

more launch providers, more activity, you know, both military and civil in space, and then obviously towards the moon and Mars. Firefly, you know, has had a, you know, somewhat, you know, sort of complicated history. It's no longer the original founding CEO. They've had a swap out CEO a few times. But I do think in this, you know, sort of category of aerospace company, it's really important to focus on just like ultimate, like, flights and, you know, success in those. And for it's worth, Firefly has accomplished two things that I think are quite, you know, phenomenal. They are the only rocket launch company that basically had this contract with the DoD where the DoD basically had them on guard, and then they were only given 24 hours notice and they had to

launch a satellite. And so it wasn't like a, oh, pre-planned, et cetera. It was like, basically like responsive, you know, sort of launch is I think the term that the Air Force gave it. I think it was Air Force. And so very impressive to have done that. And then obviously, you know, they've managed to actually, you know, sort of land on the moon and not tip over. Intuitive machines is still working on that, you know, sort of second part. So they've clearly accomplished some things, financial profile of the business, I admit, is like, you know, it's a lot of CAPEX, a lot of burn. It's not super repeatable, you know, sort of yet. But the fact that, like, you know, these public, you know, long, you know, equity folks are, you know, buying in at such scale, again,

improves their balance sheet, reduces their cost of capital. Clearly shows some signaling from the equity markets, at least, that they really do believe that this type of, like, lunar infrastructure, launch infrastructure is something that has such macro tailwinds behind it, that, you know, even though they're still, you know, choppy in terms of operations, et cetera, that there's, you know, sort of clear potential there. And you're seeing that with Rocket Lab. I mean, look at the company. Like, you know, you know I think a year ago probably trading like three and a half you know sort of billion in market cap it's something like a 22 billion dollar you know sort of

market cap company today as like you know amongst the you know sort of higher you know sort of you know relative you know sort of ratios you know in all things you know A and D let's give it up for high revenue multiples we love them here we love them we love them give them to the rocket companies babies yeah we don't have enough of them yeah not saying Barton's going public anytime soon but it encouraging to see you know all the interest in activity well you're the one who said you were talking with investment bankers yeah oh you know The job of a capital allocated or, you know.

Right, right, right. So I posted earlier somewhat of a joke, somewhat real. Breaking group chat, sentiment flips, bearish. Investor confidence dips to the lowest level since late 2023 source. My phone. How are you feeling about general sentiment right now in private markets? There's been a lot of, a lot of exuberance. Should we be fearful?

Yeah, a lot of people being greedy, should we be, is there any alpha in being fearful? Yeah, we always try to, you know, Zing when others are zagging at a FAP, obviously. So when we see this level of exuberance, I think that always makes us a little more hesitant. But yeah, it's been wild to see just the, you know, sort of depth of interest, but in this like sort of case-shaped, you know,

sort of dynamic, right? Where, you know, the equivalent of like, I forget who tweeted this today, some relative problem with venture capitalists, but, or maybe reporter. It was basically saying that like private capital markets are basically replicating the like MAG-7 strategy, but, you know, in the private markets,

where it's like, you know, basically if you look at the like Mag 7 versus the like S&P 493, FN3 is basically flat mag 7 or up, you kind of have the equivalent dynamic in private capital markets, both literally with like the individual logos of like SpaceX, Open AI, and Errol, et cetera, where it's like, you know, representing the biggest chunk of, you know, capital allocated, you know, ever in the history of private capital markets. But I think it's also generally true in like the categories where it's like if you're not A&D and if you're not AI, oh my God, like there's like, you know, basically no interest and nobody, you know, wants to talk to you.

And then if you're in those categories, the rounds get to, done in like a, you know, sort of week and are done it like the, you know, sort of craziest, you know, prices. Yeah, I think we always stick to our general strategy of like, you know, ignore the noise, focus on the things that we think are in the long term. And so, you know, well, it's just, it's worth, it's worth remembering because we just had, you know, we, you know, Figma IPO was, you know, this amazing moment. But if you look back, it's like Andrew Reed did the C at 400 million posts. And you look at the, you look at the companies that are doing rounds of 400 post right now and they were not they were not anywhere near that kind of profile in those categories

you know this is where you know again you know obviously there's lots of benefits to doing the hot category where you're like downstream you know financings typically are much less risky but there's also the you know you know return you know compression there so my you know sort of pithy joke on it is like while everybody else is focused on you know a and d and like AI I'm just doing the series A's that like fish killing robot company where you know nobody's really think we test it we tasted Shinkay on the stream. It was a lot of fun. What does A&D stand for? Oh, aerospace and defense. I'm sorry. I'm spending too much time with capital out. Lots of jargon. Lots of jargon. What else? What else needs to be clarified in space?

Obviously, the space port, the actual path, the rockets travel along is important. But is there, is there, you know, appetite for more clear regulation around Leo, Middle Earth, the orbit, geo orbit, are there even just like re-entry of the pods that Varta sends up? Like what else, what's the next thing that we need to kind of standardize around? I like that in my head now. I have Middle Earth orbit going. Yeah, middle Earth orbit. What's it actually called? Andral physics. I have medium Earth orbit. Medium Earth orbit. I like Middle Earth orbit better. Let's take it back. Let's coin it. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah, I mean, there has been, you know, I've heard some like, you know, sort of like, you know, sort of around this. Right now when you look at, you know,

sort of general space policy, it is kind of split up in a bunch of different areas. You basically have FAA responsible for all launch and reentry licensing. So basically like when you're in the air, then once you're in orbit, you have everything from if you want to take photos of other things in orbit, that's all regulated by NOAA. Kind of crazy because it's like, you know, Noah stands for like ocean, whatever administration, et cetera. So it's like why are they regulating pictures? But it's because they're responsible for all things OSINT, you know, in, you know, photography land. And then if you want to communicate with your satellite, you know, it's the radio spectrum from the FCC and they even govern like so for example you know one of the

recent back and forth you know more in the prior administration around Vardo was they were trying to debate whether or not ISAM so in space assembly manufacturing needed to live in its own specific you know sort of spectrum and everybody had to communicate in there rather than getting to be in like the general you know sort of space you know sort of spectrum and so you have all these like sort of split you know regulators and as a space company it's very burdensome relative to like okay if you're like a pharmaceutical company you kind of know that like you're only regulator is the UDA, and that's all that you're sort of working with. And so, yeah, I think,

you know, probably when I think about what needs to happen next beyond just the space ports, it's just like make it to that there's sort of more of a single point of contact if you're a space company rather than having to establish like four different, you know, regulatory, you know, relationships, which by the way, none of them talk to one another, right? Yeah, yeah. So that, and then probably like a space traffic coordinator, like there isn't the equivalent of like, we have air traffic control here, there's regulations on like how you need to report your position, how you communicate, et cetera. Space traffic control, they like kind of started something actually in the first Trump administration. It worked through Biden in administration. And then

oddly enough, the Trump administration actually shut down their own project. And so now we're kind of back to like wild wild bust again on all things, space traffic. So it's mostly just like literal like the companies like individually email each other. And there's like this one like nonprofit foundation that like collects everybody's space traffic data. And then it's like, by the way, there's no rules. And like, by the way, if like you're going to be intersecting with a Chinese satellite and then like the nonprofit introduces you and the Chinese company over email, it's not obviously like who's going to maneuver. There's no. There's no rule. It's a a chicken. It still just catholic. It helps it. It's mostly just pretty empty up there, so there's not

any, you know, incursions. We're going to need regulation around drunk space. We're going to need pilots who live their life one mile at a time. I have a sort of an odd, I have a pretty short of 14,000 miles an hour. Yeah. You're 14,000 miles at a time. What do you, what's, what's your read on the future of, um, uh, the, the sort of pilot career path? It seems like, obviously, We, like, many, many different types of planes have, like, great autonomous systems, yet we obviously still want pilots in the cabin. How do you, how do you, when you kind of look at the progress happening on the, on the autonomous side, where do you think human pilots will fit in?

Man, there's clearly some things that are moving forward. Like, you know, Secretary Duffy, you know, Secretary of Transportation, you know, has really pushed forward more aggressively than I would have expected on all things like EV-Tol, you know, beyond visual line of sight, either sort of drones, you know, on like the small scale, you know, sort of vehicle autonomy side of things. When you think about like a Boeing 747, you know, sort of getting actually fully automated, man, the commercial airliner, you know, commercial passenger stuff is just, it feels so hard. And a part of it is, other than obviously a recent whole set of events, you know, DCA crash obviously included. Generally, the United States has

such a flawless safety profile. I think we talked about this in, like, you know, other, you know, get things changed because you have, you know, so much, you know, such a, you know, it's a great safety record. So, yeah, I think, you know, jobs. Yeah. When you, I mean, when you think about if you have, you know, hundreds of people in a single metal tube flying through the air, is it worth having, you know, a couple more people to be in there? It's also, there's also an economic dynamic where, I believe the cost of labor for an Uber is about 70% born by human labor, whereas the cost of a 747 flight is like 7% pilot fees, even though the pilot, no, no,

no, it's like 50% fuel, 70% fuel. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Whereas the gas in the Uber is like 10% of the cost of the ride. 70% is the actual human. And so there's a lot, there's a very different economic dynamic there. But we're actually going to talk to Merlin Labs today that are, and Merlin is going public. They work on autonomous flights for planes, autonomous pilots for planes. So we'll dig in with Matthew George.

My last comment for the session is, this is my, you know, sort of favorite one where I didn't realize it was going to be on TVPN until the TVPN account tweeted. And it was like, DEL is on today. And I was like, I didn't know that. Well, lo and behold, look at it. I am. That's amazing. We should just communicate purely over X.com. It is the everything app after all.

Anyway, this is always a great time. Thanks so much for hopping on. Later boys. We'll talk to you later. Bye. And whether we talked to Delian about the markets, whether you're long, whether you're short, where you think it's top or local bottom, head over to public.com investing for those who take it seriously. They got multi-asset investing, industry leading yields, and they're trusted by millions, folks. We are joined next by some folks at Anderl. Today, Anderle posted. They are waiting in the Restream Waiting Room, I believe we will bring them in just a second.

Anderle industry said introducing the Anderlterl. 250 the first ever NASCAR race on an active military base. So welcome to the stream. I believe we have Jeff and Jen joining. So welcome to the stream from the we stream waiting room. Whoa. Okay. Hey, hey. Can we flip them? Can they flip their camera? We're seeing you horizontal or flipped somehow. But good to meet you. Good to see you. Actually, I met both of you online. And Jen's been on the show before. Let's try and rotate. the camera 90 degrees if possible? There we go.

Looking good. And I see some vehicle in the stunning. Both of them. Fantastic. How are you doing today? Hi, everyone. My name is Jeff Miller.

I'm great. Good to see you. John. I'm going to see it. Jordy. We're here in the hangar in Moorsville, North Carolina. So we wanted to give you guys

a little bit of a window into our big announcement around the Anderral 250. Why North Carolina? Isn't this happening in San Diego? Well, NASCAR headquarters in Daytona and in Charlotte. So we've been here this week. Not only working with the NASCAR team to make sure we show up into the sport in an authentic way.

But we've also been meeting with several of the teams themselves because you might be seeing an Anderol stock car with a paint scheme come June 21st, 2026. Fantastic. Getting to learn the sport as we make the announcement. Yeah, what is the Andrel color way? I think of, when I think of Anderil, I think of like all the, the slate gray, but then I also think of all the anime colors. And so there's a little bit of both. Is yellow and gray going to be a brand pattern going forward?

We are not getting a lot of audio from you. I don't know if there's, is there one microphone? What's going on here? Can we hear you, Jen? Yeah. We can hear. What Jeff is saying is that, okay, great. So I'm just saying that black is in not only one of our core colors or not a color, as you like to say, but our accent tone there is safety yellow.

So anything that you see, whether it's in incredible products that Jen and team are designing, the finish, you're going to see that safety yellow. So in the paint scheme here, we like to call it using the language that they use here at NASCAR versus what you'll hear more in F1, the livery, what we call livery on our aircraft. For our paint scheme here, we really lead into that black and that safety yellow. The car looks incredible. Looks amazing. As usual.

Can you give us a tour of the livery? I want to see it close up. Yeah, can the camera move around? Can you show us the car up close? A little bit. I can hear you like loosely on his microphone, I think. But if it's a shared pair of AirPods is probably switching back and forth. Let's see if we can get a tour of the car.

Okay. I'm going to take you around the car. Okay. Very cool. All right. That's a huge general logo on the front. You really dominated this. Yeah.

Safety yellow. The primary color is black, right? The safety yellow comes from our livery scheme on our actual products where we're calling out high-vis critical warnings and markings. Sure. And, you know, as we think about bringing these two worlds together, I really thought there was a lot of symmetry, a lot of kinship between our two identities, right? I think I love also spending time here getting to know the NASCAR brand, like bringing,

they're leaning really hard into their legacy and their heritage, but they pair that with such contemporary, you know, bold graphics and high, you know, visibility colors, which is, you know, there's a lot of synergy between our identity and their identity. We've got to get some Mustang GTDs in the Andral parking lot after the next tender. Have you seen the Mustang GtD? It's beautiful. It's like a $500,000 Mustang. It's beautiful.

Oh, wow. Is that a Fury in the background, too? Yeah. That's right. It's hard to see. That's amazing. Jeff can walk you around the Fury. That's awesome.

Talk to me about the actual race. Would this race have existed without Anderl stepping in? It is like, it's not just the logo on a car. It's not just the logo on the entire car. It's the logo and the name Anderl on the actual race. And a whole new race. a whole new race. Yeah, what I'd like to say is this race first

be formed over the U.S. Navy. So it's our privilege to be a part of it. Ben Kennedy, you're going to have the opportunity to speak with. We've got such incredible vision along with Amy, the race director. And so we came on in April. Jen and I had a chance to go on

the Navy base. And the second you took on a naval base, Coronado. I mean, this is where the film's Top Gun, and Top Gun Maverick had scenes film, that famous sidebar is there. You stepped on a U.S. aircraft carrier, and you feel the power.

We feel like you are there, and with people who are doing work that really matters. So, yes, this race would absolutely work without us, but I think what NASCAR saw in April was a company that was so deeply committed to our American values and our warfighter and wanted to celebrate that story that it was a perfect fit.

Very cool. Well, we're going to hop on with Ben Kennedy from NASCAR. Thank you so much for taking the time to chat with us. When is the actual race? Can people buy tickets now? Is it on sale? What's the next step? And how do we get some merch?

People are usually asking us that. People are definitely going to want. We can talk offline. But yeah, when is the race? The race is June 21st, 2006. You can go ahead and place your deposits now. We'll definitely be having merch. I'm expecting a live broadcast from TV.

We will be there. We will be there. 100%. I can't wait. Can't wait to run this back with you guys in about 11 months. Fantastic. Incredible. Thank you so much and congratulations on the partnership.

We're very excited to keep tracking it. Can't wait for the race. We'll talk to you soon. Cheers. Thank you all. Thanks for coming on. And we're also notorious for running snarky billboard ads on 101. If you want to run an ad, go to adquick.com.

Out of Home Advertising made easy and measure. We'll say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. only ad quick combines technology out of home expertise and data to enable efficient seamless ad buying across the globe did you see the the the the billboard that they actually dropped on the one one yeah we talked about this where Jeff Miller who we just talked to put up a billboard of the fury saying like no more enterprise SaaS because every single I think Trey Stevens got sick of seeing another another enterprise sass billboard and he said I need an anderill board up there and so they did it

They did it. And so we will be hopping on with Ben Kennedy from NASCAR in just a few minutes. But in the meantime, let's tell you about Bezell. Getbezzle.com. Your Bezell Concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch? Jority, where would you like to go in the post? I have a post here from Ian Roundtree, friend of the show.

He says a friend hadn't heard of TBPN and another described it as follows. TBPN is a very popular ramp infomercial in the style of ESPN. Instead of rankings tied to sport leagues, they are tied to how early and how much you invested in ramp or how close you are to someone who did. I said fact check, true. We love it. We love it. Daniel Tenrero says, happy Corweave lockup expiry day. Basically, the Super Bowl for guys like us, Corweave down 10% today.

As some folks sell, I'm not sure how the actual lockup plays out. 15%. 15%. Still a $48 billion company. A bad run. Shout out Nick Carter. Angel investor in the, oh yeah, that's right. Or was it seed round out. Yeah.

You can run the numbers. Corre we've most recently beat on top line, missed on bottom line. They are burning something around $300 something million a quarter, but making a lot of revenue. And so. Who hasn't burned? They're investing. They're investing. Investing.

300 million a quarter. Yeah. It happens. Parag Agrawal says he's just setting up his Twitter again. Coming on the show today. Heads down building parallel with some of the best people he's ever work with. Creating infrastructure for AI to search and use the web. He will be on the show in not too long.

Very excited for that. Buck says Stas, S-T-A-A-S, subsidized tokens as a service, i.e. most of the VC-backed AI app layer. And on that note, a Chris Pike post has hit the timeline. Oh, yeah. A Google Doc has hit the timeline. I repeat a Google Doc has hit the timeline. It's called Cursor's Problem.

Product Market Fit is the story founders love to tell. Business model product market fit is the part they often skip. Product Market Fit is users repeatedly choose your product, business model, product, fit. The extraction of value is sustainably in excess and proportional to the cost of delivering value. Cursor has relied on a subscription model that historically allowed for quote-unquote unlimited use. That's a fixed revenue variable cost setup. Insurance companies are the canonical example, and they employ actuaries to accurately price risk and segment users. Hypergrowth startups rarely have that muscle. When variable costs scale with intensity of usage, but revenue doesn't,

you're not selling software, you're underwriting risk. Without actuarial discipline, pricing, segmentation, caps, exclusions, these models drift into the same ditch that killed movie pass, oyster and forced class pass to retire quote unquote unlimited. Cohorts invert your most profitable user's turn because they use the product of the lease and get the lease value. Oftentimes they can get better value from a competitor who prices them more accurately or with less breakage. The remaining users are those who extract more value than they pay. Over time, older cohorts morph into deeply negative gross margin. Top line mass rot.

New larger cohorts can briefly offset the drag hiding the deterioration in earlier cohorts. revenue cohorts. Revenue grows, margin quality quietly decays. A large cause of this problem in fast growing companies is the conflation of subsidies and marketing. They are both expensive growth strategies, but they do very different things. Marketing buys attention. It changes who hears about you, not what the products is worth in equilibrium. Subsidies buy behavior. They put economic value on the product scale, distorting the read on willingness to pay. The 15-minute delivery boom made this vivid. PMF seems strong when prices were artificially low. When prices rose to true cost, demand snapped back. The quote-unquote fit was with the discount, not the service. Venture lore points

to Uber and DoorDash as counter-examples. The lesson isn't negative gross margins are fine. The lesson is if there's an operational path to positive margins, i.e. density, batching, or utilization, and future pricing power, quote, moats, the temporary subsidies can be a bridge. Indeed, venture capital is precisely the right instrument to facilitate these kinds of companies, but most businesses don't have such a bridge. Does this bridge exist for cursor? Cursors users expect the best coding performance, which is currently delivered by the frontier models. That pins Cursorses Cogs to OpenAI Anthropic price cards.

Cursor doesn't control two critical dials. One, model performance frontier, which is what users demand, and model input output pricing, what Cursor pays. If Cursor steps down to cheaper, weaker models, the users who can, about performance will notice in churn. Those who can tolerate weaker models can get them cheaper elsewhere. If it stays at the frontier while keeping prices flat, the variable real cost to service their heaviest users will explode.

In an effort to combat this cursor has been forced to raise prices and institute usage caps leading to user outrage and churn. Any time unlimited shows up in variable cost businesses, PMF becomes a permanently open question. Are users here for the product or for the subsidy? Would they still use it as much or at all at true marginal cost? until cursor prices consumption in proportion to cost it cannot know. Last couple paragraphs. So interesting that we're going into, we're leaving the world of zero marginal costs.

Like this is the Ben Thompson intellectual, like aggregation theory regime of the past two decades. Like since, you know, if you're trying to understand Google, you had to understand what it meant to serve an incremental user at zero marginal cost and it was something that Wall Street and retail and lots of folks, even a lot of VCs, like could not wrap their minds around for a long, long time and there was huge alpha in that. And now it's become consensus right when the economic like equation is now flipping. I just wonder how long we'll be in this regime if it's here to stay, if we plateau and reasoning models are always expensive. and then I wonder, I do wonder how bad the gross margins are at various companies,

how bad this subsidization, subsidized tokens problem is. And I also wonder if there are any companies, like there have been plenty previously like previous era SaaS companies that have said, have gone out and said, hey, we're an AI company now. And I wonder if that's hurt their gross margins. I've been picking at that with a few founders that have come on. I've said like, so like, like, is. Is your inference bill growing or is it material at all?

And basically what I'm getting at is like, is it affecting your gross margins? Yeah, we were asking Rahul from Julius about this and he said that it's, it's a thing, but it's not incredibly material. There's going to need, you just have to find a way with the application layer company that you build to deliver enough value that the actual inference is under the hood very efficient. And then I do wonder, of course, there's any unique, unique, position because it's such a raw interface to to the frontier coding model and the quality really matters. But yeah, could they could they swap out deep seek R2 save 10 times as much money

and then you know, and then all of a sudden be great gross markets. He says, Kershal will have to choose what it wants to know. If it keeps subsidizing the heaviest usage, it can keep growing, but it cannot claim unambiguous PMF. If it starts charging in proportion to cost, some usage will fall and what remains will be the market. the burning question that should nag founders, do I have demand for my product or for my subsidies? So, it seems- Cursors without a doubt, a beloved product.

Yeah, and it seems very reasonable to subsidize for a while and really get people installed and hooked on the product and then raise prices to the point where you are delivering value. Like, when you think about what the value of an AI software engineer, that could be justified in the $50,000 a year, $100,000 a year territory. That doesn't seem that. crazy to me if you're actually getting that leverage out of the system but the idea of saying oh yeah my my my my IDE bill is 10k a month is crazy well but it could be I don't

know anyway before we get in to our next guest Ben yep we have some news breaking cohere just raised 500 million oh let's go for a billion on the transformer paper one of the greatest ever do it Nick on X says we are so back we are so back congratulations feeling it. Well, let's bring in Ben from the Restream waiting room. Ben Kennedy from NASCAR. How are you doing? Ben, good to meet you. Good. How are you guys doing? Thanks for having me on today. Of course, of course. Why don't you kick me off with an introduction on yourself and how you fit in the NASCAR organization? Yeah, so my name is Ben Kennedy. I am EVP here at NASCAR, but we get the opportunity to wear a bunch of different hats. So we're responsible for the NASCAR own track properties, NASCAR regional team,

mission team, people making improvements to our racetracks. And then importantly, what we're talking about today is schedule. So dreaming up the next year's schedule and we're getting ready to announce our 2026 schedule here pretty soon. But, you know, one of our big projects, which I know we're talking about today is the race on the base next year. We're bringing our NASCAR Cup series, our Xfinity series, and our Crosman Truck series to San Diego for the first time and for the first time ever on a military base. So really excited about it. Take me through the shape of like, all of the different NASCAR events because there's like, you know, the, there's the tent pole events that people kind of know and love and then there's a whole bunch of other different, uh, properties,

activations, events, races, um, kind of give me the shape of what NASCAR is today. Yeah, so we compete across 38 race weekends throughout the year. 36 of those are points races and then we have two exhibition races. And, uh, our season, it starts in February with the biggest race the year of the Daytona 500. So we're a little bit different in the sense that we start with our Super Bowl. And then we will go pretty much straight through the entire year. We'll have one or two weeks off to the first week in November where we'll have our championship race, which will be in Phoenix this year.

So we're competing every single season. We have three different national series. So you can almost think of it like high school or college that kind of leads to the pros. But we have our cup series, our Xfinity series, which is our last step for a lot of drivers before they go up to the premier series and then our craftsman truck series which are a little bit different style of vehicle it's more of a pickup truck style and that's where a lot of drivers will start their national series career as they begin touring with us so and then how does the race on the base fit into that structure yeah so the race on the base will be it'll be in the middle of

our season so amazon prime will cover it for the cup series a lot of the expandy series and truck which will be on Saturday and Friday that weekend, but it's June 19th to 21st. And essentially what we're going to do at Naval Base Coronado is we're going to build a temporary three-mile circuit that will go around the base. So anyone that comes out, we're going to create kind of these different neighborhoods of experiences that fans can go and see. So you'll have the start finish line where you'll have, you know, a lot of the hospitality, the garage area, people will be able to get down and see and hear the cars. the cars. They'll go out towards the bay side of San Diego or they'll go past an aircraft

carrier or two and then eventually we'll come out onto the tarmac where they'll be weaving their way through F-18s and Ospreys and all sorts of fun stuff. So don't have the course design finalized yet, but around a three-mile course we're going to build temporary on the base. What do you think

the expected lap time will be for a course of that size? It's a good question. I would say, you know, we've run a couple models on it. We do a lot of our SIM work virtual before we commit to anything. It's around a minute and a half, a minute, 40 seconds or so. It's a pretty high speed track.

120 miles an hour on average, something like that, I imagine. That's wild. That'll be a lot of fun to watch. Talk about partnering with Anderil, who they are trying to reach. They have customers. They have employees. They have fans of the merch. Why was it a good partnership?

What are you excited to like deliver to them on the marketing side? And what did they bring to the table other than, you know, just money? Yeah, we couldn't ask for a better partner than Anderil. And we, if we approached them or they approach us, I think we reached out to them, you know, through the grapevine. And we had some conversations earlier this year, you know, probably five or six months ago with them. And they had a ton of energy around the event. And, you know, for us, we want to find partners and companies that we can do business with

that are both strategic in the sense that we're going to add value to them and hopefully they'll add value to the weekend, which I know they're going to do, but partners that are organic as well. And you couldn't think of a more natural fit than a partner like Andrewill. You look at all the different types of technology that they're creating, both on the software side and the hardware side, it's incredible. And you think about precision, speed, and innovations in technology, that's what our sport is all about. So couldn't ask for a better partner than Andrel, really fired up about the announcement today.

This has been a long one coming. We had a couple of Easter eggs that snuck out about a month ago when we had the announcement. But glad to be able to be talking publicly today about it. And, you know, excited to see there's a lot of elements that they're going to be bringing to the table over the next 11 months. And then especially on that weekend, that fans will get to go out and experience as a part of it. What's the path, a lot of our audience, our founders and executives at various technology companies, what's the path into partnering with NASCAR itself or various teams and events? Yeah, I would say if anyone's interested, reach out to us.

I'm sure we can find a way to provide contact info and whatnot. But typically, we'll have conversations with. whoever might be interested, I think the good news is there's a lot of interest around this event. And whether it's NASCAR as a sanction body or a team or a driver, we have connections to everyone in the industry. So happy to put them in touch along the way. That's amazing. Thank you so much for hopping on the stream. Congratulations.

On the announcement. I'm looking forward to it. We'll see you there. Yeah, I look forward to seeing you guys out there. It would be a blast. This is going to be great. Talk to you soon. Bye.

If you're looking to go to San Diego, you got a book. go. You got a book of wander. Find your happy place. Find your happy place. Book of wander with inspiring views. Hotel great amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning, 24-7 concier service. It's a vacation home, but better folks. Jordy, warm up that gong. Can we, I just want to say, I want to be live streaming in the aircraft carrier for the race.

We can do it. We can do it for sure, for sure. Well, let's bring in Jessica in from the solo from the restream waiting room. And from Sola. How you doing? Hey, what's happening? Welcome to the show. It's good.

Would you mind kicking us off with an introduction on yourself and the company? Absolutely. I'm Jess. I'm co-founder and CEO of Sola. We're an agentic process automation platform that helps businesses automate their most operational workflows using AI by doing workflows the way that humans do. Name one process you've automated with an agentic workflow. Yeah, absolutely.

As an example, we work with companies across a whole bunch of different verticals, but for example, for some of the logistics companies we work with, you can imagine they operate on internal portals, external systems, spreadsheets, everything in between, and to actually get a shipment out end to end, it requires a lot of manual work. And so Sola will type data in, it will take down data, it will do all the coordination that gets the shipment end-to-end and work in that passion. Give us the news today. Anything to share? Very exciting day. We just raised a 17 million Series A, led by A16Z. Congratulations. Don't leave out conviction.

I was just about to get there. We continued support from our fleet lead conviction as well as Y Combinator. There we are. Fantastic. Amazing. That's a great. Great lineup. Talk to me about what the state of the art is in actually building an agency.

workflow on top of kind of an internal dashboard. We've been hearing a lot about like the big labs setting up reinforcement learning environments with verifiable rewards. They're cloning DoorDash. They're creating copies of Amazon.com. So the future version of ShoutGPT will let me order headphones or gongs or whatever I need for the show just within that chat interface. I imagine that if you're talking about some custom piece of logistics software, some internal portal,

there's probably some things that you can get. get out of the box just by using frontier reasoning models and, and web browsers and agenic browsers. But what extra steps do you have to take to actually deliver a ton of value? Absolutely. Let me give a little context. 100%. You know, everyone's talking about enterprise AI agents and computer use and VLMs. But there's a gap between where those are at today and how that gets into productionized workflows, right, for enterprise companies at scale. You can imagine that, for the first time we have these models that can reason and they can act like humans, they can understand how these platforms are working and we don't need to build an integration

or like an API connection into platforms in order to be able to do work on them. But instead, we can just mimic the way humans do. Now, that said, if you've tried operator or computer use agents or any of these models, they're pretty unreliable for individual tasks. And then you can imagine if you're scaling this up to, you know, hundreds of thousands of hours of real world work, it's going to be really tough to do so. And so what Sola does is we take an approach

where we use a combination of deterministic, as well as more deterministic non-deterministic automation, and sort of change the abstractions on which things are built so that you are able to, for example, send a shipment across five different platforms reliably and at scale. And so we use these models, but also a whole lot of different architectures on top of that

to make things very accurate. and be able to plan and, you know, build guardrails around the processes that people have. Did you start with a focus on logistics or is that somewhere you ended up after, you know, talking with a bunch of different companies in various industries? After I demanded a single example to dig into. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, today we have workflows across a lot of different vertical. So Sola does finance workflows and KYC.

Sola does, healthcare workflows and enters data into EMRs. Logistics is a big part of that. I would say that the two biggest verticals that Sola has a ton of, done a ton of work in today is logistics and health care. It's by no means where we started, actually. Our early customers were in legal and in healthcare, I would say, mostly, and some insurance as well. But I think logistics just turned out to be an industry that we discovered a few months ago.

Turns out there's a million perfect automations for Sola there. Today we work with a whole bunch of really large companies in the industry who are using it for all kinds of different applications. What's been the employee reaction at the companies that you guys work with? I imagine a lot of these employees are stressed out, overworked, kind of exhausted for managing all these different service areas. So my sense would be that they welcome a tool like this, but what's your read? For sure.

I think that it really meaningfully changes the way people. work. Like, for example, some of the companies that we operate at, you know, we're saving people from doing the very boring copy pasting, very manual, repetitive work so that they can focus on sales and customer relationships and everything else that goes into their business. One of the customers that we work with, they do a few hundred million in revenue. We started working with about half a year ago, and their kind of famous data point is that they haven't had to hire a single person at their company since bringing on Sola because they've just been able to do more with the same amount of people that they have on hand and they can kind of scale the revenue of their business

without having to scale headcount. Yeah, I've heard that from a founder building in the AI roll-up space and he's buying companies and he's telling the management team we're not like a traditional private equity that's just going to like, you know, gut the company, reduce headcount. We're going to focus on growth. We're going to focus on growth, but we don't need to add a bunch of incremental headcount. We're just going to make you more effective. It's a great value prop. There's a big kind of discussion online today about gross. margins at startups. Can you walk me through the economic thinking of your buyer, your customer? How are they thinking about the value that you deliver and then your costs? Because obviously,

I imagine that these workflows use reasoning models. The token bills are probably significant, but you're delivering hopefully a lot more value than that. So how are people responding to the idea that, okay, there's a company that has real variable costs with the amount that I demand, or the amount that I'm using this tool, are they receptive to a consumption model? Are they receptive to price increases? What's the vibe been like from the AI buyer world? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think the most direct way to justify value is just how many hours are you saving, right? That's the most straightforward way and the traditional way automation is justified. On top of that, for a lot of businesses, you actually see top line revenue lift.

Like if you start powering their core operations and they can just do more business. So it becomes a very different equation. And I think that's a lot of the ways customers see Sola on top of just time savings. In terms of model costs, it really doesn't make sense to, you know, paying a computer use agent at every single step that you're doing. You can imagine that will get super costly. It will be slow. It will be unreliable. And so we have a lot of infrastructure built on top of that so that the things that, you know,

you don't necessarily need models for that are very straightforward. We can just, you know, apply more traditional automation, and then areas where you need reasoning, you need flexibility, you need workflows to adapt, then obviously we use more models there. And so costs aren't crazy. And I imagine those will keep going down over time. Fantastic. Well, congrats on the round and congrats on our progress. Yes, hiring. Hiring, lots of engineers. We're based in New York. If you're interested, please reach out. We are growing very quickly. Fantastic. Amazing. Congratulations on the milestone. and we'll see you back here soon, I'm sure.

Yeah, have a great rest of your day. Cheers. We'll talk to you soon. And we have Paragagagagaw, the former CEO of Twitter. Man, the myth, the legend. In the re-stream waiting room. He is launching a new company today, and we are pleased to have him join the show. Welcome to the stream.

How are you doing? Hey, John. Great to be here. Great to have you. So much to talk about. Let's start with the new company. I mean, I'd love your thoughts on live streaming, on Twitter and X and X and all things that we're doing but let's let let's stay focused on your company what did you

announce today uh should we ring this gong for you let's do it uh give us uh give us a breakdown what what what what how are how are you describing the new company um we're building parallels to build infrastructure for ai is using the web or not of this observation that the web was built for humans we built twitter you're thinking about people in browsers and apps and you're designing stuff for humans And two years ago, as I was thinking around, like, AIs are going to use the web. And that's going to be the primary user of the web. And it's going to be at massive scale, like 1,000x, a million X of what we've ever done on the web.

That needs new infrastructure, new business models. And that's what this company is about. Today, the product we shipped is our deep research product. I want to tell you more about it. Yeah. How long? When did you actually start the company? It sounds like you've been in stealth for a while.

Yeah, a year and a half ago. We've been building a lot of infrastructure in that time, a lot of infrastructure. So talk about the first product, break it down. We shipped a deep research API today. So your users of chat GPT and I'm assuming several deep research tools. We have an API product that any enterprise developer can integrate into their applications, into their workflows. Since we have reimagined the search stack as well as the technology for the web from the ground up, we can outperform open-ey-eye deep research.

We can outperform every leading model's deep research quality in terms of their benchmarks, others benchmarks, and with real customers. And I think that's the product we've announced today. So break down some initial use cases for the product. let's say I have a SaaS company, like a vertical SaaS company. Is this, and I'm building, or something, you know, I can imagine somebody's building SaaS for sales reps or, you know,

a CRM provider. Is this something they would be running, you know, deep research style queries within the product? Yeah, people do all kinds of things. So in the sales CRM context, right, there's a lot of people who have this massive current customer list, prospect lift. they want to go, I wish I knew this about this customer.

I wish I knew this about this customer. So they just add a bunch of data to have the CRM now have a lot of information that wasn't in there, but was on the web. And now it's in their systems, in their CRM, they're ranking based on that, they're prioritizing based on that. They're able to go do meeting a SIFT, right? Before you meet someone, pull everything from my internal information that I have about the customer and our interactions with them. also pull everything that's happening with their business, what they're talking about, what they're doing, what they're shipping. How do you think about the parade of frontier?

I mean, Google's, I mean, I believe they have Gemini APIs and they have, and they've focused on kind of this idea of the tradeoff between cost and quality of result and intelligence is a function of cost ultimately. Where do you see pockets of value? Do you just want to go way further? It doesn't matter how much it costs companies are willing to pay, or is there a, is there different kind of angle on the Pareto Frontier that you think is unexplored. Glad you mentioned the Pareto Frontier.

I think we obsess about the Pareto Frontier, but I think both are important. One, at every price point, you've got to be the best. And then for someone who has no price sensitivity, you've got to be the absolute best, right? And I don't think you get to do the one without the other. Yeah. we push, we first push quality and accuracy for use cases as high as possible. And once you can do that, it actually, you can do a lot of work to make it cheaper by trading off a little bit of quality.

That's the motion you take on. But you've got to be on the Pareto Frontier for every use case to be operating at the scale that we want to operate at, which is like every application, every workflow, any time, every things should use AI. Yeah. So do you do you, how do you think about competition in the category? Are you competing with open AI's API? Is that the wrong way to think about it? Yeah. I'm interested in in where do you see pockets of unexplored territory? Like one of Google's advantages that they have the TPU, but there are lots of new chip companies that offer different tradeoffs for inference and what what are you excited about in terms of like,

differentiation? So one, we use models from Open AI, Google, and we use several open source of Google's in different places. Yeah. We also in our own models, we build our own index, crawl, rank, or listener. And so what we are is a little bit of a complement to the best models if you're building AI applications. Now, of course, Open AI does bundle a search tool with their API.

that we compete with and beat on quality. So we beat not just that too. In fact, like the benchmarks for the products we ship today, we beat humans doing hours of work through our deep research product, not just because we're cheaper or can do it faster, but we're more accurate for a bunch of workflows than hiring a bunch of people to do it. Right. And that I think is really exciting as we work with more and more customers. We're able to replicate that. And that's an amazing moment that you've found this year. Do you think there's room for differentiation by finding a beachhead market that is a subcategory? I just imagine like we've seen this with Harvey and legal and there are obviously, you know,

HIPAA compliance and medical. And we just talked to Jessica and she was saying that like they were a YC company. They tried a bunch of different things, did some health care, some legal, wound up in logistics and had a bunch of luck there. Are there any glimmers of beachhead markets on the horizon for you? Almost too many. So we're seeing like a bunch, as you mentioned, like CRM, sales, sales intelligence, marketing. There's a bunch happening there. There's a lot of people innovating and there are customers.

So if you think about our customers, our customers are often vertical people who are in various markets. We have people doing science research on like papers published or on. sort of clinical trials that are happening or the data coming out of those. We've people, we've like investors like hedge funds to P.E funds to venture funds. Using us because like information on the web is what gives people alpha and people can be so creative and now can create like scaled programs for figuring out where to spend their time. Instead of doing one query at a time and chat GPT, you write a script, you do a thousand queries on our deep research system. You get better quality and you figure out where do you want to spend your time.

And we even have coding agents that use our search tools when they get stuck. Wow. So if you're an agent, like it's just like, so in from beachhead markets, I think it all converges in the way I say. It's all agents out there. You can have an agent for sales. You can have an agent for investing. You can have an agent for choose your favorite industry. And every agent needs to work.

Horseback riding. How has it been building, you know, quietly. out of the public eye. Have you enjoyed it? A lot. Also, respect for founders. Like, I don't know. This is, I ran a large company, right?

I was at Twitter 11 years. Yeah. Being a founder, taking something from like nothing to having like a bunch of customers. Is this your first startup? It's my first startup. Wow. Figuring it out, like I'm massively unqualified for the jobs,

but those are the only jobs you really want, right? Yeah, of course. like you want a job that you're qualified for us. Just got to figure it out. I want to dig into a little bit more granularity. Obviously, it's launch week, but chat is asking us, what did you get done this week? Break it down for us. This week, I got back on Twitter.

Wow. Ring the gong. We're in the gong. It's great to see you back on the timeline. We're hitting. Congratulations of the launch. I think that's huge. And I don't know if you caught this.

I think I almost broke Twitter. Oh, really? As I was tweeting like this morning at like 8 a.m. I was like trying to get my tweets out for the first time like in years. Yeah, yeah. And Twitter is glitching. Oh, no. Then I go on down detector.

Okay. You might have brought it down. And I was like, what timing, man? Like. Yeah. Yeah. I'm not going to take blame for this. Timmy launch on the timeline is like one of the hardest dances you have to do.

You can get steamrolled by a viral current thing. This was a good day. This was a good day to launch. Yeah. And we're glad that you were able to make the show. There could have been like a surprise deep seek launch. Yeah, yeah, exactly. But I think you broke through and we're very excited for you.

So congratulations on the launch. Thank you so much for stopping by. And have a great rest of your week. We'll talk to you soon. Yeah. Great to catch up. Have a good one. Bye.

Up next, we have Eric from Bolt.new in the Restream Waiting Room. Let's bring in Eric. I'm very excited to talk to him because is Bolt is launching a new business model. The margins on prompting will go to zero, and the company will make money from hosting websites and apps instead. I want to talk about it. How you doing, Eric?

Good to have you on the stream. What's happening? And good to be here, guys. Yeah, long time watch. You're good to be on the show. Fantastic. It's good to have you. Introduce yourself, give us a little background of the company,

and then I want to go into the business model questions because this has been top of mind for us all show. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, so companies called bolt. comely known as Stacklitz. We were in the process of swapping the logo. Got to get new merch printed. We've been around for eight years now.

We actually just hit the eight year mark two weeks ago. We were actually about to go to our business. Like a year ago. And so what ended up happening was we pivoted and launched Bolt. And in the first two months, we're in zero to 20 million of ARR. And was really one of the first text app tools that came out. Okay. Are you beating the allegations?

Zero to 20 million? Very impressive. What were the gross margins? Can you give us any insight here? Because everyone on the timeline saying anyone with a big revenue ramp, it's all suspicious. But give us a white pill. Yeah. So our margins have actually been really good.

So like typically it's been around 40%. And a big part of that is that, you know, for the text to app stuff, part of it is the inference where you're having the co-gen, you know, AI model spit out code. But you actually have to run it somewhere. And so that's like the technology we've been making for the past eight years, basically allows you to run full development environments in a browser using the end user CPU. So it doesn't cost us anything. Okay, got it.

That's a big part of why our cogs are a lot better. Sure. But for us, I think what seems to be inevitable is that margins are just going to go to zero on this stuff. And so we're kind of skating to where the puck is going because I'll unpack that because a lot of people are saying margins are going to go to 100%. Marksons are going to go very high because inference is going to going to get very cheap. You're saying margins are going to go to zero. Break that down. Why would it go to

zero? Is that just competitive dynamics from the competitors and the legacy companies and just all sorts of different competitive pressure? I think it's really, yeah, good question. So I mean, it's really like we could go and use the previous generation of models, but and charge users, you know, what we're charging for frontier stuff. But the problem is like you're not going to be able to build, you know, quality apps, right? Because the frontier models and agents are incredible and they just keep getting better. And so the kind of that, you know, if you're, if you're expecting to as a company reselling inference, unless you're a model provider, you know, your choice is you can either take a margin

and give worse models than what are the frontier or you can, or you're or you're saying, hey, we want to always have the best most capable stuff and, and, and not take a margin. And instead, and then, but what that means for your business though is that you have to be going and making money in other ways than just reselling inference, right? And so if you kind of look at the previous generation of site builders and hosters as an analogy, you know, if you go to like Wix and Squarespace, they don't charge you to like build a website. It's free. Of course, you don't have to pay for a or whatever, but like you drag and draw. What they bill you for is to host the thing, right? And that's how they have a very healthy

LTV and average customer, you know, contract length, etc., is that you have your website hosts and that's the primary ongoing value that's being in there. And I, people, people that have been kind of trying to track this market of prompt to site or prompt to app have, you know, the critics have talked about churn. But my read on it has always been that it seems like there's been a fairly healthy market of just website builders for a long time. It hasn't been monopolistic. You've got the wicks, the squarespace, the web flows, the framers. and all those companies have been able to carve out solid, solid businesses. And so, yeah, this launch makes a lot of sense, which is, hey, come on the platform,

generate whatever you want. But then if you're generating a marketing site for your business, you know, we'll host it, you know, for you indefinitely. Yeah, exactly. And so it kind of moved, like for us as a business, it moves the focus for us to having the best services and like workflows for the customers. we're serving. So like that's for people building hosting website, that's hosting services. So we partner with like Netlify and Superbase for powering the stuff that we've got today.

And they've scaled this for, you know, some of the, you know, the heaviest products like Uber and Twilio in the past. So you can, you can build like, you know, to millions of people now with Bold. And on the B to B side, we're selling to folks that are, I mean, basically replacing Figma with Bolt for doing prototyping and rapid product development. And that's just very sticky because you're, you're working on a team. And it's for the same reason that Figma is a collaborative product is sticky. And that's really where we're focusing, because that's like, you know, the retention is incredible

on those use cases from our numbers, right? Are you feeling acceleration, deceleration from the frontier labs on coding products? Lots of people were kind of on the timeline, at least, disappointed in GPT-5. It feels like it's more of a consumer product now, but in general, you know, it used to be, you know,

every six months, we got something that was completely breakthrough. And now, you know, the releases feel a little bit more incremental. But what are you feeling just from the foundation model lab side? Because we are seeing a lot of progress there. The benchmarks are improving. The context windows are getting bigger. Are we accelerating, decelerating, kind of in a in a rebuild mode, kind of rethink. You need to go back to the drawing board and do some AI research. Yeah. I think, I think, you know, for all the frontier labs, I mean, they should all, they're, they need to keep hitting, you know, more and more breakthroughs, right? But from a from a on the ground perspective of a company like us looking at

these models and running e-vals and measuring them, they're, you know, the models themselves may be seeing like maybe more incremental improvements. But what's what's really, I think the big unlock is it not only are they getting better at just like coding, but they're getting better at being designed to be used as part of agent systems. And that's a good. That's a huge thing. Because I mean, if you think about how humans think, like if I asked you to like, you know, rattle off like, you know, the latest financial numbers or something, it's like you might be able to like pull that up. But realistically, you need to like think on it.

You get some things wrong on zero shot and you do like kind of go do some research bounce around. And so like that's what really agents are kind of replicating in my view is like how we as humans actually think and work. And so how do you really tune the models to be good at going and going down different thought paths, killing ones that don't actually like promising, et cetera. et cetera. You look at Claude code is probably the best example of this in the cogeneration world. And so there's remarkable, you know, progress being made in that realm of things, right?

Yeah. So there's a lot, it seems to me there's a lot of room to run just on, you know, incremental improvements on the zero shot aspect of models, but then also how these things are going in reasoning and working in agent existence. Yeah, the unhobbling's. I think about, like, I'm sure that you don't vibe code a database every time someone builds a website. You pull a database off the shelf, and I've seen the stats of all the databases that you guys are pumping customers into. And so, yeah, as more of those tools roll out and you get more of that functionality off the shelf, and you can pull this from over there, pull that open source project, pull this data,

like that feels like that unlocks a lot of growth. Last question from my side for now, Gabe, in the chat, ask what are those champagne bottles in the background? What's going on there? First time someone's asked about this. Yeah, actually. So that, you know, this is, these are the first enterprise deals when we closed the first, because like we had never done enterprise sales motions before period. Like I never been a salesperson. So, you know, my chief of staff and I, my CTO, when we closed our first kind of three major customers, this is like probably four or five years ago. Yeah. We started with the $15 bottle of cooks for the for the 20K deal. Start somewhere.

Yep. That's good. And then worked their way up. There we go. Those are like, yeah, those are the, uh, the things I keep on the shelf. What's the top tier bottle in the back? I think the top, I think it's a bottle of Dom. I can't. There you go. That's probably 250.

Yeah, yeah. I think someone got it for us as a gift or something. Maybe I can't remember what that was about. But it's that's, that's like the, uh, I like never drink alcohol, but it's like, you know. Let's hear it for some tea totaling. Enterprise deals. We love it. We love it.

Good experience. Well, thanks so much for coming out on the show. We'll talk to you soon. Have a good. Yeah. Likewise. Thank you. See it. Up next, we have Matthew from Merlin Labs waiting in the Restream waiting room. Let's bring in Matthew.

He has some really big news. We're going to need a bigger gong, Jordy Hayes. How you doing? Hey, guys. How are you? We're great. How are you? Give us the news. Give us the update. Give us an introduction on you, the company, and on the news today. Hey, guys, I'm Matt. I run Merlin. We are, yeah, we're going to need a bigger gong. We're going to need a bigger gong. No, like I'm seeing you ready with the mallet, like I'm here for it, like especially the end of the show. Yeah. So I run a, I don't know, biased like a really cool company called Merlin where we're developing essentially a pilot, just not a human one. We are deploying that predominantly with the U.S. Air Force and a bunch of other partners and customers around the world.

And we announced this morning that we're taking the company public, which is going to be the first time one of these big defense startups go public. Congratulations. There we go. I was waiting for that. Let's stay on the anatomy of the deal. What's actually happening from a mechanics perspective? What does it mean to take this company public? Where will you be listed?

Do you have a ticker? Break down what's going on with the deal, what it means? And then I have a ton of questions about autonomous flight. Yeah, 100%. So we were looking at a couple different options. and particularly for us going public sort of efficiently allows to do a bunch of things. It allows us to go build a lot more capital to go sort of execute on a couple of big contracts that we're working on, but also allows us some currency to do M&A, which is important for us,

especially as we sort of build up. So we talk to a lot of folks and we're combining with Inflection Point. Infliction Point has done two other really high-profile deals, USA Rare Earth and then Intuitive machines, both of which are trading at multi-billion dollar valuations with hundreds of millions of dollars of cash in the balance sheet. Let's go. I love it. And then another big part of the announcement today is we announced like $120 plus million

of committed capital before we even announced the deal. Yeah. So it's effectively like an investment in the company, although it'll happen after the merger. 100%. So most companies, when they're going public, they raise their pipe between when they announce and when they go public. Based off the strength of the deal, we were able to pretty quick. raised about $120 million before the announcement.

TBD, how much more money will take to pre-announce? But super exciting and I think a really important moment for Defense Tech. Got it. Talk to me about the value of autonomy in flight. We were talking to Delian earlier about this. The model for self-driving cars is very logical. Something like 70% of the cost of an Uber is the human driving the car. in the plane context, it's usually something like 7%. It's much lower because the fuel is very expensive.

You only have a couple of pilots. You have a lot of people in the vehicle. So how are you thinking about focusing on like fully autonomous versus, you know, pilot assistance technology? What's the equivalent of a level five self-driving, level two self-driving? How do you think about the progression to self-flying planes? Yeah. I mean, well, Delian, Delian is captaining his Cessna. Yeah.

extremely well. But he might be joined by a co-pilots soon, right? Yeah, no, I, yeah. He's gotten himself in some situations where he probably would have been better to let the co-pilot take over. But he's always made it through. So, and we're grateful for that. All right.

So everybody thinks of an airplane with like two pilots, right? But if you're like FedEx or like big airplanes, I don't know what Delian side of it, but like big airplanes. Yeah. There's anywhere between 13 and 20 FTE pilots per airplane, making all in anywhere between half a million. a million dollars a year. So if you're able to, in the future, augment that and go from two crew down to one, that's, you know, billions of dollars of savings for, you know, the airline industry,

which is, which is super important. But for our military customers, getting that out there, enables those pilots go act a little bit more like mission managers, which is super important, particularly given that the Air Force is short pilots, which enabled our big contract that we announced last year, sort of a big ninth-year contract to go. spearhead fixed ring autonomy for certain parts of the Air Force. What about what about the role of of like not necessarily autopilot but like just enhancing the safety of airplanes? I feel like that's just something that everyone should be excited about get about everyone's seen the different flight disasters. Everyone wants more airplane safety.

They're definitely willing to pay for it. It seems like there's a like there's a like an opportunity to plug in. And I'd love to know about the different FAA pathways for what it means to actually pilot the plane via a non-deterministic machine learning based AI-based system versus having a, you know, an iPad next to you that's more just offering advice and diagnostics and acting as kind of just bringing, like a centaur model, bringing superintelligence alongside a human in loop. Yeah. So for for our customers, particularly our DoD customers, like bottom line, most people living today have lived in a world where America has been able to go project air power

and like prevent World War III from happening for the vast majority of their adult lives. We are in a world for the first time ever where America does not, in the West, does not have the unilateral ability to go project air power and prevent World War III. So like what we're doing, and what we're building here of like getting autonomy out actually in an operational service going from two crew down to one. And then we're doing some uncrewed stuff as well with with a few customers. Like gets us to that point of like getting out of this like kind of toy iPad, pilot assist, kind of like, I don't know, kind of like a BS solution and actually going out and really

operationalizing autonomy and like getting like millions of hours of operating history so that we can start to go claw back that lead against some of our peer adversaries. Yep, makes sense. Super important stuff. Come back on as this cycle progresses. Yeah, we're very excited for you. Congratulations on the news.

Cole, we're going to need a bigger gun, guys. Yeah, we'll get it ready. We're working on it. It's actually in the works. Hopefully, wherever it's manufactured, we'll fly. It's a race against you guys getting out. Yep. So we'll do our absolute best.

I'll be back and we'll expect a video gone. Fantastic. We'll talk to you saying that. Good to me, cheers. Have a good one. Bye. Breaking news.

The Trump administration is said to discuss U.S. taking a stake in Intel. Someone predicted this on the show. Maybe it was Aaron. The Trump administration is in talks with Intel to have the U.S. government potentially take a stake in the beleaguered chipmaker, helping support the company's effort to expand domestic manufacturing. The deal would help shore up Intel's planned factory in Ohio, who said the people who asked not to be identified

because the deliberations are private, of course. The company had once promised to turn that site into the world's largest chip-making facility, though it's been repeatedly delayed. The plan stems from a meeting this week between President Trump and Intel CEO Lip Bhutan. The people said, the ideas for the U.S. government to pay for the stake

and the details are being sorted out. One of the people said, another caution that the plans remain fluid. So we'll be interesting to see here if this is taxpayer dollars or this like sovereign slush fund that we're getting from japan and making viva pfay for it 15% of h20s put that money to work by intel i don't know if i like that i don't know if i like buying intel it feels like we also i don't know i mean the u.s government does own some companies like fanny may and freddy mac were recently they're the the lenders for student

loans or uh all sorts of all sorts of lending that goes on those are nationalized and so Trump was talking about IPOing those or spinning those out. Tyler, is this, do you think this is bullish for Leopold? The tuition awareness, big. Aren't they big Intel? Oh, yeah, that's huge. I mean, Intel's up 20% in the last five days.

Exercise those calls, Leopold, let's go. Bucco Capital has a, I got a post here. We'll use this to close out the show. Pull this up. Team for please. You just drop it in the chat. It's in the chat. Leopold.

Osh and Brenner. today after being clowned on literally. Nationalizing Intel is a horrible idea. We're going to get demonetized. We're going to get demonetized. Turn this off before we get demonetized. No, we just got to talk over as it's playing so that AI gets confused and thinks of it. Oh, that's not a real song.

Anyways, Intel. Fun hanging out with everyone in the chat. Thanks for watching Gabe, Techno Chief, John Exley, Deepak, Deepak, Ragh. So many good usernames. Thanks for watching. We will see you tomorrow. I can't wait. It's going to be a last.

Friday episode. The mansion section. Incoming. It's already Friday? Wow. Hard to believe. Anyway, thank you so much for watching. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and we will see you tomorrow.

Goodbye. Bye. We love you.