TBPN - OpenAI and Gemini Achieve IMO Gold, CBS Cancels Colbert's Late Night, McLaren's Mansour Ojjeh Collection | Chris Black, Chris Buskirk, Turner Caldwell, Jamin Ball, Harper Carroll, Nikita Singareddy

Episode Date: July 21, 2025

(00:45) - OpenAI Achieves IMO Gold (37:38) - Timeline (50:29) - CBS Cancels Colbert's Late Night (01:10:57) - McLaren's Mansour Ojjeh Collection (01:24:49) - Timeline (01:29:04) - Chris Black is a New York-based writer, producer, and editor, known for his creative consultancy, Done to Death Projects, and as co-host of the podcast "How Long Gone." In the conversation, he discusses his 2015 advice book "I Know You Think You Know It All," his upcoming memoir slated for 2026, and the evolving landscape of book promotion, emphasizing the impact of podcasts and traditional media appearances on sales. (02:00:28) - Chris Buskirk is a serial entrepreneur, author, and co-founder of 1789 Capital, a venture capital firm focusing on conservative-aligned companies. In the conversation, he discusses the resurgence of optimism in the business climate, emphasizing the importance of abundant, cheap energy for national prosperity and highlighting the need for the U.S. to develop its own rare earth magnet production to reduce reliance on China. He also touches on the role of government in fostering innovation, suggesting a balance between deregulation and strategic support for critical industries. (02:20:17) - Turner Caldwell, CEO of Mariana Minerals, discusses his company's role as a vertically integrated, software-first mining firm that focuses on engineering, financing, constructing, and operating mining projects post-exploration. He emphasizes the industry's need to shorten the timeline from mineral discovery to production, highlighting the challenges in designing and implementing mining infrastructure. Caldwell also announces Mariana Minerals' emergence from stealth mode with a $65 million Series A funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz and Breakthrough Energy Ventures. (02:30:50) - Jamin Ball, a Partner at Altimeter Capital, discusses his experience attempting to invest in Figma during its Series C funding round, which he refers to as the "white buffalo" of his career. He highlights Figma's impressive growth rate of 49% and free cash flow margins of 28%, positioning it as a leading software company. Ball also emphasizes the resilience of Figma's management team in navigating challenges, including a failed acquisition, and expresses confidence in their ability to adapt to emerging technologies like AI. (02:42:53) - Harper Carroll, an AI educator and machine learning engineer with degrees from Stanford and experience at Meta, discusses the potential of AI in children's education, emphasizing its role in fostering curiosity and learning through interactive audio models. She highlights the importance of developing AI tools that are accessible and engaging for children, while also addressing ethical considerations and the need for appropriate guardrails to ensure safe and effective use. Carroll also shares insights from her audience, noting that some parents have successfully integrated AI into their children's learning experiences, such as using AI as a "cool older sister" to discuss topics like nutrition and exercise. (02:59:39) - Nikita Singareddy, co-founder and CEO of Fortuna Health, a platform simplifying Medicaid enrollment, discusses the company's recent Series A funding led by Houston, their mission to create a "TurboTax for Medicaid" to streamline the complex application process, and their B2B2C model partnering with insurance companies to enhance user experience. She highlights the challenges of navigating state-specific Medicaid rules, the persistence of outdated technologies like fax machines in healthcare, and the importance of addressing real-world complexities beyond basic AI capabilities. Singareddy also emphasizes the need for innovative solutions in healthcare, such as AI nurses, to tackle issues like physician shortages and improve patient care. (03:12:03) - Timeline TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.comFigma - https://figma.comVanta - https://vanta.comLinear - https://linear.appEight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpnWander - https://wander.com/tbpnPublic - https://public.comAdQuick - https://adquick.comBezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.comPolymarket - https://polymarket.comAttio - https://attio.com/tbpnFin - https://fin.ai/tbpnGraphite - https://graphite.devFollow TBPN: https://TBPN.comhttps://x.com/tbpnhttps://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

You're watching TBPN. Today is Monday, July 21st, 2025. We are live from the TBPN Ultradome, the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the Capital de Capitale. Capitale de Capitale. Big news. It's going to be back. Open AI, great to be back. Open AI has announced that they have won a long, they achieved the longstanding grand challenge in AI, gold medal level performance on the world's most prestigious math competition.

the International Math Olympiad. That's the IMO. So this went up at 12.50 a.m. on July 19th. Typical timeline. Yes. So this is basically like Friday night, Saturday morning. You're looking at basically 1 a.m. from Alexander Way. And he shares a picture of a strawberry with a metal with the Open AI logo on it.

Someone also tested, they took this picture. they uploaded to chat GPC. What's the fruit in the image? How many ours are in that fruit? And it nailed it. So we are truly, we are truly AGI. Has arrived, has arrived. Also, before we go deeper into that story,

we have a new partner, Restream. You saw it in the intro. We're very excited to welcome them as a sponsor of the show. We've been using... We have been running on restream. Secretly. Secretly. Since day one.

Since day one. It's been our secret to success. And it can be your secret. to success. Yeah. If you have... A lot of the Fortune 500 already for all their live streaming infrastructure. So if you need to go live, go live with Restream.

And you see OpenAI do streams. Like that is a thing that has entered the standard comm strategy. I don't know if XAI is running on Restream. They had a little issues. But they do stream. And, you know, it used to just be the hyperscalers, the Mag 7, the big, big companies that would do a live stream around an annual. event. Then Brian

Chesky came out and created Founder Mode and basically said put all your announcements on an annual release schedule, bundle them all up, have the team celebrate, push to get across the finish line. And part of that is let's throw an event. Part of that is let's get the CEO and the product leaders on stage.

Tell the community about what we're building, what we've built. And now a lot of people are streaming it. If you're going to stream your stuff, you need restream. Anyway, go check it out. So Dylan Field, someone who has streamed events. Figma obviously has config their dev event annually, and they actually do two of them, and those are streamed all over the place,

probably using restream. And Dylan chimes in on the OpenAI news. He says, congrats 2025 IMO winners and participants, including OpenAI, who trained a general purpose reinforcement learning model and achieved IMO gold. Open AI team includes

these two folks, Cheryl and Polynom. Fun fact, Polynomial also won the 2025 Diplomacy World Championship as a human. And so people are saying AGI is right around the corner. AJ from semi-analysis says, what stands out to me, scaling RL on non-verifiable rewards, likely via rubrics and LLM as judge, thinking and reasoning for several hours at a time for a highly specific task. This is what the $20,000 per month,

month model will look like. And so there were a bunch of interesting things about this. Apparently, there are a few different ways to tackle math, IMO level math problems. One is using this program called Lean that is a formal math proof verifier. And there's rumors that Google's building their system to leverage that a lot. OpenAI apparently went way, way down just the text-based LLM reasoning path. and had a lot of success there. So even though, as we'll get into in this story,

it feels like it's neck and neck, maybe Google was earlier and they just didn't release it faster and maybe this is a comms thing. There's a whole bunch of different stuff going back and forth. But potentially the more interesting thing is, did they take different technical approaches and get similar results? If they're neck and neck, which one will scale better,

which one will generalize better? There's a whole bunch of different discussions there. Do you want to get into some of the, the controversy or the pushback, do you have a post pulled up from someone saying about Google's attempts? Yeah, I mean, the whole thing came down to timing. Dennis over at DeepMind was pushing back a little bit,

which I could pull up. Demis Hes Sussibis from DeepMind, the co-founder and now at Google. Yeah, it was interesting because we immediately jumped to Polymarket because this whole idea of an AI system, beating the IMO. We talked about this with Scott Wu from Cognition months ago.

Back in April, I found the clip. And he said, I would be very surprised if an AI system this year does not actually surpass the IMO. He, of course, is an IMO gold medalist himself. And so it was big to hear from him. Now, the polymarket had been sitting at like 20%. And I think we're going to get into like the minutiaeastern. of like what it means to truly win because the IMO like the the group that actually puts on the competition has a different set of rules they don't they they put the questions out and anyone can go and try and do them but to actually be awarded a goal for an AI they said it has to be an open source model potentially it has to be released in this particular way and so open AI might have used their systems to solve the questions which is super impressive but

they might not have checked every box to actually technically win the gold from the actual organization. And so, um, uh, Nome says today. Yeah, Demas to be clear. So, so he put out a post this morning saying official results are in. Gemini achieved gold medal level in the international mathematical. Which is different than actually getting a gold medal. Right. He said an advanced version was able to solve five out of six problems, incredible progress.

And there's a quote in here from the IMO president. He said, we can. We can confirm that Google DeepMind has reached the much desired milestone earning 35 out of a possible 42 points. Yep. A gold medal scored. Their solutions were astonishing in many respects. Yep. IMO graders found them to be clear, precise, and most of them easy to follow.

You can imagine Juan is just like off on this insane tangent. There were some fascinating details around how they solve them. Demis shared. He said, by the way, as an aside, we didn't announce on Friday because we respected the IMO board's original request that all AI labs share their results only after. the official results had been verified by independent experts, and the students had rightly received the acclamation they deserved. And so you can imagine somebody was saying, I don't know how real this was,

somebody was saying that they were making a claim that Google needed time to have the comms team to sign off. But it seemed more likely that the original plan was, hey, let's wait and announce this when the IMO board actually comes out. The analogy feels like you're a super fast sprinter. You go to the Olympics and you run a 100 meter dash that's incredibly fast in the parking lot. Like you're not in the stadium, but everyone's like, wow, that guy's fast. He's hauling.

He's hauling. It's very impressive. Definitely potentially the fastest man on Earth. And ideally, you paid for the parking pass to get into the stadium. And it's like maybe Google and Open AI were both running 100 meter dashes. in the parking lot. One of them had paid for like, you know, enough parking spaces to make it completely clean. Open AI was just kind of showing up with a buddy and being like, I'm sprinting. That's the vibe I'm getting. But they're both in the parking lot. Like neither of them are in the

actual stadium at this point. But, you know, who knows? They might be soon. There are some questions about, you know, do they have to open source or whatever. So Noam Brown says, you know, we achieved a milestone that many considered years away gold level performance. Gold medal, of course, he's saying gold medal level performance. Like that's very critical. It's not, we got a gold medal, is that we exhibited gold medal, gold medal level performance. Typically for these AI results, like in Go, Dota, poker, diplomacy.

Researchers spend years making an AI that masters one narrow domain and does little else. But this isn't an IMO specific model. It's a reasoning LLM that incorporates new experimental general purpose techniques, which would be very exciting because you could apply an IMO level intelligence. John, hold up that stack of posts for the audience. Oh, we got 150 posts today. It's going to be a quick stream, people. It's going to be a quick stream, but buckle up.

So what's different? We developed a new technique that makes LLMs a lot better at hard-to-verify tasks. IMO problems with a perfect challenge for this. Proofs are pages long and take experts hours to grade. Compare that to AIME, which is another math exam, where answers are simply an integer from zero to 999-9. So you can verify them really, really quickly. Also, this model thinks for a long time.

01 thought for seconds, deep research for a minute. This one thinks for hours. Importantly, it's also more efficient with its thinking. And there's a lot more room to push the test time, compute, and efficiency further. Now, what's interesting is, like, I think these questions go up. And then you have, like, I think the students get like two, four and a half hour segments. So there's like, there's a world where like the AIs can do it, but just not as fast as humans, which would be very interesting. I don't exactly know how close they are.

So Noam says, where does this go? As fast as recent AI progress has been, I fully expect the trend to continue. Importantly, I think we're close to AI substantially contributing to scientific discovery. There's a big difference between AI slightly below top human performance versus slightly above. This is a small team effort.

Right now, the discovery that AI is doing is talking with somebody who is potentially schizophrenic and convincing them that they've figured out how to move faster than the speed of light. Yeah. There's so many accounts of that. It's getting crazy. Yeah, I posted Chad GPT agent, go win me and I. I am gold medal and then update my resume.

Don't make mistakes. But, yeah, I mean, have you actually looked at any of the IMO questions ever? No. I don't even know where to start. Like, it's all stuff that. It's one call away for us, though. We just text Scott. Tyler, have you ever looked at IMO questions?

No, but I'm looking at them right now. It's like pretty brutal. Would you know where to start? Tyler, if you can get two out of six right before the end of the stream, we'll buy you a house. Well, there's the thing. He's just going to be able to ask chaty PT. One shot it?

Yeah. No tool use. Got to qualify that. So yeah, Nick has the comment about DeepMind. DeMind has also one. Tyler has another challenge today. He does. We will introduce that in just a few minutes.

DeMind has also won IMO gold, but they have, announced it yet by the way confirmed congratulations beat us did this morning they did yeah they confirmed it this morning and so it's been interesting to see the reaction to this Gary Marcus is on X saying all the tech bros this morning thinking that AGI has been achieved because some parentheses insanely expensive new form of LLMs can now match top high school students on one specific task it's almost cute so really just ripping into the entire AI community, but Will DePue comes in and says, he's on leave right now, taking a little summer

holiday. He says, guys, stop using expensive as a disqualifier. Capability per dollar will drop 100x a year. The 3K task, ARCAGI, 80%, could probably be $30 if we cared to optimize it. Repeat after me, all that matters is top line intelligence. All that matters is top line intelligence. So, yeah, again, everybody's focused on sort of raw capability. not super focused on efficiency, especially for projects like this where they're not necessarily rolling this out in mass. You know where a lot of these IMO gold medalists go to work.

I do, John. Ramp.com. Time is money. Save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. Ramp. Is amazing.

So the timeline was in turmoil over the Gary Marcus Post, and they went back and forth, and he finally admitted it at the end. he said, he said, that's impressive. So it started with a post by Daniel Litt. He says, huge congrats to Open AI for their IMO gold. I don't find it too surprising that an AI tool was able to achieve this, see below. Though I'd sort of lost hope the last few days.

But I'm pretty surprised it was an LRM with no tool use. So it didn't have Python, it didn't have web search, it didn't have all the things that you could imagine would kind of allow you to, you know, speed things up or kind of be a shortcut that would put it in a different category. There was always a question about with the, when the AIs were playing video games, like, computers have wall hacks. Like, they can sometimes, like, see the map without the fog of war. They can see, like, it's very different to get perfect pixel, perfect data on where every character is on the map and be able to make decisions based on that, as opposed to, like, looking at pixels and having to, like, move the screen over there to see if you're being invaded on the left flank, right? And so there was always this like, yes, if you gave a computer like the raw access,

that's not quite, it's impressive, but it's not quite a level playing field. And it's basically the same thing as being like, well, the other folks don't get a calculator and you get a calculator. Like, isn't that impressive. But this was very much an even playing field, it seems like. So Mel Gibson 2.0, great name. It says, you are not surprised that they, you are not surprised that they have figured out a way to make the model learn in very hard to verify domains.

in a fuzzier reward space, it also appears that the same reasoning model was the one used in the AT coder competition showing that it can generalize across domains. Daniel comes back and says, I don't think we really know what they figured out yet. I'll keep my powder dry until we know more. Mel Gibson says, go read Nome Brown's thread on the model if you haven't already. He says, and remember Nome Brown says this isn't an IMO specific model. And that's a very important thing because there's a ton of there's a ton of situations where you can go an RL on a specific task and it gets really really good at it but then you try and get it to do anything else and it's not that good and so Daniel it says yeah I read it

Gary Marcus says chimes in from the rafters as he's not in this chat yet but he has entered the chat he says I read it too that's pretty vague are we sure that no tools were called Gary Marcus then chimes in again says re IMO gold does no tools mean no use of Python code interpreter etc Dan says, Daniel Litt says, that's how I understand it. And then Gary Marcus tags in polynomial, Nome Brown, and also Alex Way and says, can you confirm the IMO gold was achieved without using Python or code interpreter or similar? And then Gary Marcus says, humans don't use external tools in the IMO competition. I'm just trying to understand what the system is.

That's how we do science. Daniel Litt. And at some point, whoever was trying to dunk on Gary Marcus just deleted their account. So it just says this post is from an account that no longer exists. Daniel Litt shows Cheryl on the OpenAI team saying the model solves these problems without tools like Lean, which is a math verifier or coding. It just uses natural language. It also only has four and a half hours to answer our earlier question. We see the model reason at a very high level, trying out different strategies, making observations from examples and testing hypotheses.

And Gary Marcus says, that's impressive. So Gary Marcus. Marcus, you got to fill out the apology form, bro. You got to fill out the deep reinforcement learning apology form. What was the reason for your behavior? No one told me Alex Way was training the model. Mercury was in retrograde. I don't know, ML.

And then one of them is Gary Marcus convinced me it was fake because Gary Marcus was famously said deep learning is hitting a wall. Like this particular paradigm will not scale. You have to do symbol manipulation, which was like kind of his bet and code, relationships between ideas in the model. There were a bunch of different debates over there. And he's gone back and forth on that. He's he's not as much of like a deep reinforcement learning haters. Some people think, but he's got he that's his brand at this

point. So anyway, more on the drum between DeepMind and Open AI. DeepMind got a gold medal at the IMO on Friday afternoon, but they had to wait for marketing to approve the tweet until Monday. Open AI shared theirs first at 1 a.m. on Saturday and stole the spotlight. And this game speed is greater than bureaucracy. Miss the moment, lose the narrative. So that's one interesting take. We'll see exactly. Yeah, I think there's a little bit of that.

I mean, certainly culturally, open AI loves to release information before Google. Like whatever Google's like next big I.O thing. Remember they after what did they release after the deep seek moment? Deep research. And then typing deep and you were looking for an AI product. And then and then Google had I.O. and then Open AI. This is like the day before.

With Johnny Ive. So anyway, you'll love to see it. All's Fair and Love and War, I guess. I don't think this crosses in lines. Corporate Coms. Warfare. Yeah. And this is the benefit of having a bunch of posters on your team, I guess. No one brands says it takes us a few months to return the experimental research frontier into a product,

but progress is so fast that a few months can mean a big difference in capability. abilities and this is from July 18th. So all the models underperform humans on the new IMO questions and GROC 4 is especially bad on it, even with Best of End selection. Unbelievable. Somebody was accusing GROC for training on the problem set?

For IMO? No, no, no. Oh, for the other benchmarks. I mean, benchmark hacking is like a thing that happens all over the place. That's why we need like hidden benchmarks. That's the whole thing of Arc AGI that we will talk about. We talked about Will DePue saying,

guys stop using expensive as. a disqualifier. Terence Tao, one of the most goaded mathematicians of all time, digs in a little bit and is adding his perspective as a world-renowned mathematician. He says, it is tempting to view the capability of current AI technology as a singular quantity. Either a given task X is within the ability of current tools or it is not. However, there is in fact a very widespread in capability, several orders of magnitude, depending on what resources and assistance gives the tool and how one reports the results. One can illustrate this with a human metaphor. I will use the recently concluded IMO as an example. Here, the format is that each country fields a team of six

human contestants who are high school students, led by a team leader, often a professional mathematician. Over the course of two days, each contestant is given four and a half hours on each day to solve three difficult math problems, given only pen and paper. That's crazy. No communication between contestants or with the team leader during this period is permitted, although the contestants can ask the invigiligators. I don't know. For clarification, this is like some math term, I don't even know, for clarification on the wording of the problems.

The team leader advocates for the students in front of the IMO jury during the grading. Vigalators are also known as exam proctors. Okay, proctors. Okay. So, yeah, they can ask the people that are running the test, hey. We got to start working invigalator into. For sure. We should probably have a show.

We should hire some. Like just an invigalator too. For sure. We should have at least one on staff. So the team leader advocates for the students, but is not involved in the IMO examination directly. The IMO is widely regarded as a highly selective measure of mathematical achievement for a high school student to be able to score well enough to achieve a medal, particularly a gold medal or a

perfect score. This year, the threshold for gold was 35 out of 42, which corresponds to answering five of the six questions perfectly. Even answering one question perfectly merits an honorable. Basically a B gets you gold. Yeah. It's that hard. They're that hard. But consider what happens to the difficulty of the Olympiad if we alter the format in various ways. First, one gives the students several days to complete each question rather than four and a half hours for three scenarios to stretch the metaphor somewhat consider a sci-fi scenario in in the student in which the student is still only given four and a half hours but the team leader places the students in some sort of expensive and energy intensive time acceleration machine in which months or even years of time pass

for the students during this exam before the exam. I think Ben might have put us in one of these because we go live and then it's four hours later. Yeah time acceleration as well. Two, before the exam starts, the team leader rewrites the questions in a format the students find easier to work with. Three, the team leader gives the students unlimited access to calculators, computer algebra packages, formal proof assistance, textbooks, or the ability to search the internet. Sounds like that didn't happen. The team leader has the sixth student team work on the same problem simultaneously, communicating with each other on their partial progress and reported dead ends. The team leader gives the students prompts in the direction of favorable approaches and intervenes if one, one of the students is spending too much time on a direction they know to be unlikely to succeed.

Next, each of the six students on the team submit solutions, but the team leader selects only the best solution to submit to the competition. We're discarding the rest. Last, if none of the students on the team obtain a satisfactory solution, the team leader does not submit any solution at all and silently withdraws from the competition without their participation ever being noted. Oh, so that, I mean, that could have happened. It didn't in this case. but in each of these formats, the submitted solutions are still technically generated by the high school contestants. Going back to the parking lot example. It's like if you can go run the race in the parking lot and then if you don't run as fast as you hoped, it's like, well, I wasn't in the race.

I mean, I wasn't even in the race. I was just going for a jog. I was just warming up. I like to be surrounded by excellence. Yeah, don't worry. Yeah. I mean, that is the true one because if they'd miss, they'd probably be like, what? The IMOs this weekend?

We're working on agents. What are you talking about? Have you seen our DAUs? Get out of here. To each of these formats, the submitted solutions are still technically generated by the high school contestants rather than the team leader. However, the reported success rate of the students

in the competition can be dramatically affected by such changes in format. A student or team of students who might not even reach bronze medal performance in the normal competition under standard test conditions might instead reach gold metal performance under some of the modified formats indicated about. So in the absence of controlled test methodology that was not self-selected by the competing teams, one should be wary of making various apples to apples comparisons between the performance

of various AI models on competitions such as the IMO or between such models and the human contestants. Yeah, the question is like, it seems like of those, not many were actually violated by the way OpenAI and Google attacked this. Well, this was before, I mean, this was an immediate reaction before I think there was. More details came out? of details, yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. This was 3 p.m. on, on, so this is so on Saturday, but 3 p.m. later. Well, Rune has a good post. This is a great one. He says, my bar for AGI is an AI that can learn to run a gas station for a year without a team of scientists collecting the gas station data set. It's a great post. The world isn't ready for gas station bench.

We can run an AI as long as, we can, we can run a gas station as long as we have, you know, a perfect, you know, data set. And that's, yeah, that's like the way. On how gas stations operate. Yeah, as soon as we place the goals somewhere, we nail that goal, and then we have to move the goalpost shows. This is a great graphic. So Thomas Wolfe says, my bar for AGI is an AI winning a Nobel Prize for a new theory

it originated. It's just image of a team moving the goalpost. I do like how consistent Tyler Cowan is on AGI. He's like, my bar was the turn. test, we pass that. So I'm, I have to call it like it is. Yeah. And I'm not moving the goal. I think he's, I think he's going to look very smart for that. Yeah. Yeah. Fulness of time. I mean, I think it's okay to be like, yeah, we achieved AGI. It's just tough when you achieved something. Now there's something new. And it's cool, but not immediately

dramatically, massively transformative. But you have to imagine that that was the same, that there was the same thing when people were like human, human flight. And then the Wright brothers go and do it. And people are like, great, so like I can hop on a Southwest flight in an hour to go to San Francisco from L.A. and they're like, what are you talking about? Like, L.A. is like, you know, a couple trains and, like, some people, you know, with orange groves. And it's like, it takes a long time for the infrastructure to get built out. Like now a lot of these AI tools, they do build on top of the internet and on top of technology that we have rolled out. But like at a certain point, like the UI matters. The economics of these different tools matters. You like you can't it might not be economical for a for a company to to you know release a an AI tool that costs $20,000 to inference just to get you the weather or do two plus two.

And so all of these things take time to roll out. And that's why we're kind of in this like slow takeoff scenario. It feels like. I don't know. We're going to go to GPT agent in a little bit and talk about that. But there was some interesting, there was some interesting details from Jasper. about the IMO problem one. So these are on GitHub, so you can actually just go read them.

The math checks out. It nailed the key lemma for n greater than three. But you can kind of read them these things. But the write-up is kind of messy. It uses shorthand and sentence fragments. It introduces new terms without definitions, forbidden and sunny partners lists. And it does a bunch of different interesting things

where it's trying to condense down the number of tokens. So if it wants to say, like, divide this number by three, normally by space three would be two tokens, but by three is one token. And so it's like compressing it down. It's kind of like learning its own language or developing its own language just to be a little bit more efficient. Very interesting.

DejaVo Coder says, you're laughing? Open AI and Google Dement. Minds, unreleased models just gave an IMO gold medal performance without internet access, and you're laughing. People love it. It is interesting that XAI didn't get involved in this one. You have to imagine they knew both DeepMind and OpenAI.

We're going to be competing. Yeah. I mean, it feels like this is the nature of like the value of research. It's like a new research domain or new research path. Like XAI is dominated in the pre-training, build the big super cluster, get all the GPUs, do the massive pre-training. Then now with GROC4, they're doing equal spend on RL generally. But deep mind and open AI seem to have like the next, next thing already cooking. And we just don't know the phrase for it yet because in order to learn that phrase, you got to pay $100 million or some research to come tell you basically.

Yeah. Like I'm sure that there is a new paradigm and new strength. to unlock this level of performance. And it's something with probably not 100 million. It's some combination of a bunch of people that that collectively cost about. But eventually, I mean, we were seeing this with the behemoth analysis from the semi-analysis and what Jeremy was diving into where like even just when you do, when you train a really big model, how you chunk up the memory, how you chunk the attention.

that has a dramatic impact on the actual end state and the model performance. And so it seems like Google and OpenAI have been able to hammer out a bunch of those problems to get a really great result. And they're not going to tell anyone anytime soon I imagine. Sebastian has a good post here. He says, it's hard to overstate the significance of this. It may end up looking like a moon landing moment for AI just to spell it out as clearly as possible. A next word prediction machine because that's really. what it is here, no tools, no nothing, just produced genuinely creative proofs for hard

novel math problems at a level reached by only an elite handful of pre-college prodigies. Pretty sick. It is funny explaining it to somebody just on the street. A computer beat some high school students at math. They would just, they would tell you, okay. Cool, yeah, okay. Cool. Yeah, cool story.

And then when you phrase it like this. It's like, okay. But it's like, yeah. Like, yeah. But like the high school IMO folks are still in the 99.999th percentile for just everyone. Like they happen to be age. There happens to be an age cutoff, but it is essentially arbitrary since most people cannot do this level of math. Well, let me tell you about graphite.

dot dev. Code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub. Ship higher quality software faster. You can get started for free. Francois Cholet from Art AGI. It says, intelligence isn't a collection of skills. It's the efficiency with which you acquire and deploy new skills.

It's an efficiency ratio. And that's why benchmark scores can be very misleading about the actual intelligence of AI systems. Elon's there saying good perspective. And so, yeah, we don't need to move the goalposts, but we kind of, it's still interesting too, because we achieved this particular, benchmark now what have you done for me lately basically and so I think people really will move the goalposts and and you can kind of knock it but at the same

time it was interesting timing that last week ARC AGI V3 dropped these models are not doing well on that and they're simultaneously doing well on something that is so hard you show it to most people and they don't even know where to start with the math problem and it's completely it's completely ridiculous to try and even take a shot at. So we wanted to give Arc AGI V3 an attempt. Are you ready, Tyler? Yeah, I'm ready. I haven't looked at it at all. Okay. So yeah, yeah, how familiar are you with Arc AGI generally? Yeah, I mean, so I played with like the version one. Like last summer I was trying to like there's the prize. Yeah, I tried it out for a couple weeks. Did you try it out as a human or did you

try writing software for it? Yeah, like trying to like write software for it. Okay. Yeah, what was your approach? I don't know. There's a bunch of stuff. Okay. It was like, was that was like just static images right so then there was like ways you could like tokenize it to try to do like normal lm and then i think i was trying some like random image processing did you get any of them right or was it like a straight up zero yeah it was like pretty bad well uh the the initial arc aGI i v1 v2 v1 was pretty solidly solved by uh oh 3 high i believe or o1 high i think o1 was the one that solved And it was like $2,000 a task and they got to something like 60, 70%, still not where an average human is for these puzzles. But impressive.

Then GROC 4 came out and ARC AGIV2. They pumped the score from like, what, 6% to 15% or something. They doubled it, but still not great. But now ARCGIV3 came out and it's more of a game. So I played it on stream on Thursday, I believe, maybe Friday with Mike. I did pretty well. I have some, I actually have some times from Mike.

You did well, especially considering you had like a minute to look at it prior to joining the show. I really, I really was pretty fresh. Yeah, you basically tried it for a second. You were like, this is really hard.

Yes. And then had to stop. Okay. So you want to put it in hard mode, right? So I got, I got times from Mike on how humans have done on, on Arc AGI V3.

so you have to finish the whole thing. And he says, if he only gets one shot to speed run all three games with unlimited try-again's, I'd say 15 total minutes is hard, 20 minutes is medium, and 25 minutes is easy average. So you want him to do it in 15 minutes? Under 15. For a new iPhone? A new iPhone. New iPhone.

We bricks your iPhone when we made you sign up for Google. glass. Yeah. So this is an opportunity to make it all back. This is high stakes. So make sure you have it set up. Okay. And you should pull up the instructions and read the instructions.

And we'll start a timer when you, it's 1136 right now. Is there, wait, so there's no like hard mode, easy mode. No, no, no. So everyone does the same thing, whether you're an AI or a human. You will see some instructions. There's some keys. It's more like a game than filling out the puzzles. and the actual instructions, there are really no instructions.

It's your job to figure out the nature of the game, figure out how it works, and then go and speed run it. So pull it up, and I will read this post. So Ludwig Yeetgenstein says 20 years ago, this type of person would become an elite math professor. Now they're making AI breakthroughs. This is progress, probably. And it's the CV of Alexander Way, the research scientist over at OpenAI.

He's a member of the technical staff. And before he has a PhD in computer science from UC Berkeley. He was at Harvard studying computer science, Phillips Exeter, totally tracked research intern at Meta, Microsoft, D.E. Shaw, Google. What a stacked resume. This guy's a killer. And now he was on the IMO team that did that. And so we talked about the plot twist and the battle. between open AI and deep mind.

I'm sure both of them will be talking about this. I'm more interested in the underlying technology and what actually happened and what was discovered than who released it earlier. That doesn't matter as much to me. And again, Nome says, hey, like we posted after the closing ceremony. It was live streamed, so this is easy to confirm. We weren't in touch with IMO.

I spoke with one organizer before the post to let him know. He requested we wait until after the closing ceremony ends respect the kids and we did and so respect it seems like this is pretty verifiable that they didn't do anything anything bad to the IMO kids they might have they might have roasted Google but that's just done you know Google's got to start posting at 1 am so Tyler give me the update do you have it pulled up how I'm ready to start okay uh production team yeah I got a timer you got a timer okay so so I want you to count up because we want to get the total amount of time we're aiming for under 15 minutes for

all three puzzles. That's hard. 20 minutes would be normal. 25 is like easy mode, apparently. This is according to Mike. So I haven't actually tried to speed running this time. I said a couple minutes. Did you play all three games or just one of them? I played one of them. Didn't you get through two? Well, so there's levels. There's levels to this. There's levels. You'll figure all this out. I mean, Tyler, you, wait, so I'd say, I'd say you get unlimited lives in the game. Yeah, yeah, you can reset and do whatever. But you can spend the whole show trying to do all three games in 15 minutes if you want. Oh, well, no, no, no, no.

It doesn't work like that because once you know the tricks, like you'll be able to blast. Yeah, for sure, for sure. So anyway, let's go for 15. Good luck. New iPhone on the line. If not, we'll come up with a new. I have to say this really is the iPhone moment for Arc AGI. This is the iPhone moment for Arc AGI.

Good luck to you, Tyler. Okay. Let me know when it start. Okay. Five, four, three, two, one. Go, Tyler. Okay, we will let him work on that and we will check in. All right.

Should we talk about chat GPT agents? Yes, yes, yes. So there's been a bunch of other interesting stuff going on. Before we get into that. Let's tell you about Figma. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. You can get started for free at figment.com.

What did you want to say? I wanted to say some big news that hit the timeline this morning. Sure. Polymarket has acquired QCEX for $112 million, and that is going to allow them to enter the U.S. market. As you may know, to date, you haven't been able to use Polymarket. If you're in the U.S., we use it as a data source. So you can go on the website, obviously.

It's on our ticker. You can see it on the ticker. But this is going to allow them to actually launch in the U.S. So Shane has been absolutely cooking, and I think he's going to come on the show soon now that he's not under DOJ investigation. What a wild, what a wild founder story arc. So, and like, yeah, remember those old photos of him,

like coding in a closet and stuff? In his bathroom. In his bathroom. He built Pollymarket in a studio apartment bathroom. With scraps. I love it. Anyway, Vanta, automate compliance, manage risk, improve trust continuously.

Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation, whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program. Join the Purple Lomas at Banta.com. So Open Aion has been doing a lot of stuff. They're kind of on a run. So IMO gold medal happens over the weekend, the ChachyPT agent, which I tested finally. So I'll have a little review and some analysis of that.

But also, apparently, they are testing a new model on the web dev arena on LM. Marina under the name anonymous chatbot 0717. So this is a secret project from OpenAI that they are maybe putting out in the test realm. And then people discovered it and they're digging into it. And so I can't believe I'm going to say this, but it's genuinely at a completely different level of front end coding. Far better than Sonet 03 Gemini 2.5 Pro or GROC, which is saying a lot because people love those models for coding, especially on the front end. So to test it, I ran a great prompt borrowed from the amazing feature. crew pod YouTube channel asking models to create a procedurally generated planet with 3js

take a look at yourself I'm pretty astonished by how big the jump is I have featured the new model twice because its implications have been so interesting of course this is only one test but open AI models have always been a bit meh on front end work and they seem to have finally overtaken everyone else so this apparent alleged unreleased open AI model is building this procedural world and it generates this really cool 3js like basically a video game in and It sounds like it kind of one-shots it. So exciting stuff from that. There is, so the agent stuff.

So SWIC says, please stop making flight booking agent demos with faint but dying hope, the undersigned. And so everyone is saying, he's saying, please stop trying to make fetch happen. Flight booking Instacart order. AstroTurfing, Reddit. He wants killer use cases to be coding agents, support agents and deep research. up and coming is screen sharing outbound sales hiring education personally i and finance and uh i have to i think we're somewhat responsible because for months we were just like just book a flight like this is the killer demo this is the killer use case and then everyone was like it got played out we did stop asking

we did stop asking but we were asking it for a while we were very curious yeah yeah and so um sam albin had a post last week he said today we launched can you give some background for people that may just so sam altman crawling out from under a rock yeah so he started a company, he was the president of Y Combinator. He started a company called Looped, sold it. Angel Vestrian, Stripe. Yeah, yeah, that's what people know him from. Konigseg owner, McLarenf1 owner.

That's where people probably know him from. He says, today we launched a new product called ChatGPT Agent. Agent represents a new level of capability for AI systems and can accomplish some remarkable complex task for you using its own computer. It combines the spirit of deep research and operator. but is more powerful than it may sound. It can think for a long time, use some tools, think some more, take some actions, think some more, et cetera.

For example, we showed a demo in our launch of it preparing for a friend's wedding, buying an outfit, booking, travel, choosing a gift, et cetera. We also showed an example of analyzing data to create a presentation for work. Although the utility is significant, so are the potential risks. We built a lot of safeguards and warnings into it and broader mitigations than we've ever developed before from robust training to system safeguards to user controls. but we can't anticipate everything. In the spirit of iterative development,

we are going to warn users heavily, and it gives users freedom to take actions carefully if they want to. And so very, very interesting post. He goes through a bunch more stuff, but I actually tested it out this weekend. So, as you know, we have a studio with the TBPN Ultrodome here in Hollywood. We're always thinking about what's next, always looking at what else is on the market.

And when we were first looking for the TBPN Ultradome, I went to ChatGPT operator, and I said, hey, I'm looking for a studio. It needs to be a sound stage, which means padded walls. I want concrete floors. I want it to be, you know, at least 40 feet by 40 feet. I need one gigabyte internet access there.

I need power, AC. It can't just be a, you know, heavy industrial space where there's going to be somebody next door, Hadrian making CNC stuff, is rattling me. I need a bunch of things. Go and figure it out operator. And it went around and it looked at LoopNet. but it kind of got stock on CAPTCHAs,

and it wasn't doing a great job. And I felt like I had to be there watching it, and it was really only working on desktop for me at the time. But I reran basically the same query asking it to look for studio space in LA with all these different metrics that I wanted, all these different parameters that I wanted to make sure it verified.

And it found a place that was like not listed on any sort of like rental sites. It found just a website that was out there for some crew that runs like two studios, one in Hollywood, one in Van Nuys, and gave me the full breakdown. I was able to go to the website. But then, of course, I'd have to call, and I called, and they only are available between nine and five. Well, this is what I was asking, the agent team.

I think it was on Thursday that we had them on, which was... What have you done for me lately? Well, basically adding a voice feature just to like call that now call them to confirm that it's actually available. Yeah. And let me know, find out when I can go see it. Yeah. And that is a much easier step to add in many ways.

Totally. Totally. Totally. Like the browser use functionality. Yeah. And also like the, uh, just, just the asynchronousness of it. Like I, I fired off this query, I don't know, like, like after like, I don't know, six p.m. on a Saturday.

Like it's, it needs to wait until 9 a.m. on Monday when they opened to pick up the phone. When we started this section, I put in an agent request said, find me a Gt3R. with under 1,000 miles for under 400K that's currently for sale in Los Angeles County. And so it's doing, I'm watching a cook and it's doing like an hour plus of work already in like five minutes. Yeah, no, no, no, it is remarkable. So it can, it can really work through different, different sites and features. Like it's finding, I can see it, it found one for in L.A. County. Yep.

With 1,300 miles under 400K. and I just watch it say, this one will disqualify this one because it's over that limit. Yeah. And so it needs to be able to think about time and it needs to think, okay, when is the certain time to do this?

I need to come back to this in two days or something. Like basically set a cron job, set an alert, come back to things. It needs to use linear, a purpose-built tool for planning and building products. Meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects,

and product roadmaps, linear. Dot app. Open AI runs on linear. linear supports agents and they actually have an integration which I am excited about but I mean jokes aside swicks was saying this is a new frontier model and I think that a lot of people get hung up in oh there's a new branding around it agents what like I was talking to our buddy David center about this and he was like what are you using it for like what are your prompts and I was like it's the same prompt the thing that I would send to deep research I send to agents now it's just better and I and I and I do understand

that like it might unlock some new use cases, but I think the basic thing that you should start with, if you're looking to experiment and kind of road test chat GPT agent for yourself, is just take something that you would put in deep research, throw it an agent, and see how you like it, and if it's better. And I notice that it's a lot better in many ways. It gives you a dot MD file at the end. Basically, it gives you a document, like a report that renders the exact same as a deep research report, but you can kind of scroll it differently. You can still do all the tables and stuff. The links, oddly, weren't working.

Like, I would click on it and it wouldn't open. So there's, like, still some bugs and some rough around the edges stuff. But in general, I think it did a lot. I just think of it as, like, deep research is kind of, it feels like deep research is a little bit bound by, you know, the first level of depth on the internet. And agents can actually go, you know, okay, there's, there's a website out here that has something,

but I need to go to the archive. I need to log in. I need to find a different route. I need to work around it, figure out all these different things. Let's actually fact check some stuff, start building a table over here. Oh, okay, I got some conflicting information.

Let me try and resolve that. Like all the natural things that when you do actually good research. And so I think it's fine if it's just a research tool. Yeah, the thing that Agent is doing here is it's going, it's navigating to a site, and then it's using the site's internal search mechanism to find what it's looking for versus just like scanning like databases or just scanning pages and pulling out information.

Yeah. So it's actually taking that next order. Yeah. Yeah, it's actually using the website. And I still think like I don't see this as really replacing anyone in my life at least or my business. But I see it I see it very much as like in between me and the, folks on my team, I will go fire off a prompt and try and like really do as much of the research and kind of pre-work and then hand that off and come with to somebody who works for me with just a

more educated idea of like, okay, I think we need this. I have, I've already kicked this off and I think it's possible. I need you to go and negotiate and I need you to go do all the soft skills and I need you actually execute this and take the last mile that's like the human side of this. But you already have all the information to basically do, like the job is well defined. And so I think that my next change to the way I use Chachyptee, deep research agents will be by the end of this, give me a list of steps to actually execute this

that need to be executed by a human. So with that GTRS, it's like GT3RS, if they find one, it's like, find me the phone number of a few and then when should I call them? What other data sources do I need to point to? What are the other considerations? So I basically have like a script to go and actually get the deal done, for example. So anyway, very exciting stuff.

Almost as exciting is numeral. Sales tax on autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. Go to numeral HQ to get started. So should we talk about Stephen Colbert? We should. We should talk about Stephen Colbert. This was a fan.

This was a fascinating story that happened. The late night is ending. So Stephen Colbert, you might know him from the Colbert report on, he was originally on The Daily Show. Then he had his own show on Comedy Central. I believe it was half an hour, maybe an hour, every night on Comedy Central. Then he got pulled over into CBS with Late Night, which was originally designed to compete with the Tonight Show, which was Johnny Carson's property, that he ran for 30 years, 1962 to 1992, absolutely legendary. run. Jay Leno took that show over, gave it to Conan for a year, went back, very controversial, late-night wars, very fun deep dive to dig into. But Emily Jashinsky has a story in Pirate Wires

all about late night. I have some facts here that we're sticking out to me. So the high level is that the late show, Stephen Colbert's daily late-night TV show. How many days a week is it? Is it? It's five days a week. They do 190 episodes per year. So they take a few weeks off in between little breaks. It's pretty casual. Yes, pretty casual.

We do, I mean, we are on track to produce four times as much content this year. But they spend $100 million to produce. We spend five times as much. Yeah. Yeah, you keep pulling those daily GT-3RSs. I mean, they were spending, how much is the GT-3RRs? 400K, they could have bought a GT through RRS for every single episode because they were spending $100 million to produce 190 hour-long episodes every year. And so this wasn't a problem because

back in 2009, they were pulling in $271 million in revenue. So, I mean, and I'm sure that they were actually spending less back in 2009. So the margin on that show was immense, like 60%, 70%, maybe even higher. The problem is that the revenue started declining because the audience got older and ad dollars moved around. The average viewer is. The median viewer of the late show with Stephen Colbert is over 59 years old. So it is effectively like a retired audience. So they're not as likely to buy expensive products. And if they buy those products, they might not stay with them forever because they might churn because they might pass away. And so lower LTV.

Lower LTV. And then also it's a very broad audience. It's a very political audience. It's very general comedy, politics, daily news audience, very broad. So you can only sell broad things. And that's why you see, you know, Unilever. Like, you know, you're watching an ad and you see, you're watching the late show. Or T-Mobile.

Yeah, yeah, Verizon. And then you see Dove, shampoo or something. Like you just see generic products, not hyper-specific. like Adio, which is customer relationship magic. Adio is the AR Native CRM that builds and grows your company the next level. You can get started for free. You're not going to see that on the late show.

Yeah. You just won't. You just won't. And so revenue kept falling. Now they make less than 70 million. Reports were maybe like 60 million in revenue. Now Colbert is taking 15 home, 15 million a year home personally. And then the rest of the show costs $85 million to produce.

About $50 million to that is probably. all these salaries. There's a bunch of other costs that go into it. They have a live band. They fly people around. They have hair and makeup and all sorts of, they have to license music and they do all sorts of stuff. So then they went from at one point making, you know, $200 million in profit off this a year, amazing, to losing 40 million. And importantly, CBS is going through an acquisition. And so there's a whole bunch of problems where you don't necessarily want to have this massive loss-making asset sitting there while you're trying to sell the product,

sell the company and restructure everything. And then there's a little bit of conspiracy. And Keith Oberman was saying, he put on the tinfoil hat and was saying like, this is all because Trump is like, Colbert criticized Trump and this is a straw man hat. I'm gonna get out the straw man. Yeah, we're not making this argument.

This is, this is, no one's really making this argument except for the obvious. Yeah, but put on the straw hat. By the way, new straw. This is a funny hat. It's not. I don't even know what kind of hat this is. A straw, some sort of straw hat.

I got to sit lower so that it'll fit in. Yeah, anyway. But yeah, I mean, the obvious thing here is that Stephen Colbert, Stephen Colbert, whoever that is, was a zero interest rate phenomenal. You have a business. He's in the business for 30 years. I mean, yeah. Who wants to, who wants to be the proud owner of a business that loses $40 million a year,

like clockwork? Yeah. So it was a loss leader for C. BBS. Basically during upfronts when they're selling ads to everyone, they go to Target and they say, hey, how about we put you with Stephen Colbert? And they're like, sure, but then we also want to be on the game shows. And then the game shows make higher margins and they lose money on the late show. But a company like Target wouldn't want to advertise on the game show unless they can also be with Colbert and the prestige TV that's happening there. So basically, they're losing $40 million. What's interesting is that you would think that they would be able to cut back the cost. and say, hey, look, we're making half as much revenue. We need to produce this for half as much money. And so Colbert, you got to take a haircut. Folks, you got to take a haircut.

How about 50 people? Instead of 100. 200. Yeah. Was it 200 people? 200 people. 200 people. 200 people.

And apparently, so we were messaging some people over the weekend, some media moguls. And they were saying, I mean, it's very routine for their to be two people tasked, like effectively their full-time job is like moving one camera. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so effectively is just a culture of inefficiency that has a bunch of different reasons why that is, but doesn't really work in the modern era. So the interesting thing here is I was trying to figure out kind of what happens from here. So CBS is confirmed. They're not doing a replacement host.

They're not going to hire like an H-1B Stephen Colbert. I think they're going to put a talk show in there. Yeah. So anyways, it's going away. There's no indication that ABC, NBC, NBC, Netflix, Max, or any of those platforms is like going to try to launch one of these Johnny Carson-style shows. But I think the right move for Stephen Colbert is not my, not. my flavor of comedy, entertainment.

But I think he could have, I think if he went independent and effectively launched live show, podcasts, something of that sort, he could continue to earn exactly what he's earning today. Yeah. And just do it with a much smaller team, maybe even have a better lifestyle. Maybe he starts doing the show in the morning.

Yeah, I mean, there was $60 million of like, we want to advertise on Stephen Colbert, like flowing into this property. Yeah. If he provides a similar level of experience and content, he should be able to sell similar levels of ads. Yeah. Maybe not 60, but maybe 30.

And then he takes home 15 and he has 15 to spend on, you know, a smaller team. And what's crazy is like during the COVID era, all of the late night shows went to like from home episodes where they were basically doing them over Zoom and then they set up like nicer camera setups. And they were able to do those shows way cheaper. But I think because of the union,

It wasn't palatable or really like easy to just, to just cut back on staff and cut back on salaries or switch to some sort of more incentive pay, which is tricky. And we just talked to Delian about this where in France there was a company that wanted to like their business wasn't doing so well. They wanted to lay off folks. Too many people. And they couldn't do it. And so the government basically said they had to shut down.

In France, there's policies that effectively require companies to pay years of severance. So it ends up becoming a massive liability on the balance sheet. Yeah. And anyways. Yeah. So Emily Gersenski over at Pirate Wire says CBS is not just pushing out Stephen Colbert. It's retiring the iconic late show brand altogether. That's the buried lead getting lost amidst frenzied speculation over politics and palace intrigue.

If cutting Colbert is a bid to juice Paramount's pending merger or to punish him for criticizing it as Democrats are now arguing because Colbert said that CBS as a company should not have or Paramount should not have settled a lawsuit with Trump, I believe. CBS just stumbled right into the future, Emily says. She says, Colbert's time at the helm of the late show perfectly illustrates the most important trend in media and culture. One might fairly wonder how Colbert, a man who leaned so far into hashtag resistance comedy, he could hardly get up, has dominated the late night wars throughout Donald Trump's hostile takeover of American politics. Johnny Carson, for example, famously skewered both political parties

without fear or favor. Carson won the late-night wars when networks face less competition, meaning his goal was to appeal to as wide a swath of the American public as possible for the sake of selling more ads. By the time Colbert took the helm from David Letterman, late-night ratings had collapsed from their high watermark.

That's particularly why Greg Gutfeld is able to actually beat Colbert's ratings on a cable network, a feat that would have been unthinkable in the 1990s. Like Colbert, though, Gutfeld doesn't approach politics as Carson did. This is the new model. Cultivate a loyal niche that returns night after night, giving you an edge over others competing for an increasingly smaller slices of the pie. The result is a microculture. Monocultural institutions like the late show

or the New York Times can no longer and can and no longer do appeal more widely than their core audiences. For the Times, this is their subscriber base and it's why, for instance, the paper committed obvious journalistic malpractice by Yanking Senator Tom Cotton's infamous send-in the troops op-ed back in 2020. As the paper of record for all of America, that decision made no sense. Cotton was expressing a mainstream position in his party and in the country, but Times subscribers were furious and that critical business interest shifted the outlet's editorial position. This, of course, was helped along by a staff increasingly aligned on an ideological level

with the paper's narrow subscriber niche. One of the greatest sources of cultural angst stems from the ability to recognize these institutions of the monoculture have shifted to microculture, whether they supported Trump or Bernie Sanders. Plenty of Americans outside affluent urban bubbles figured that out years ago. It is the institutions themselves that often cling to the outdated brands,

so blinded by their own biases, that it's become difficult for the C-Suite's to even recognize what's happening outside of Manhattan, and the Hamptons don't count. Anyway, fantastic analysis from from Emily. You should subscribe to PirateWire to go read the full thing. But lots of people were having fun with this.

How does the Late Show cost $100 million produce? That was a big question. I think a lot of it's just this is a, this is a letterman started in the 90s. So this is 30 years of just like, yeah, let's just add one more person. Like 30 years is only adding 60 people a year. One to what would it?

No, no, no way less. Six people a year. So you're adding like one. one a quarter, which is like not that much. And I think it just kind of creeps in. But you got to be aware when revenue starts dropping, like you have to write the ship and you can't just keep losing money because it doesn't give you leverage over CBS who's trying to get out and sell the company.

Bucco Capital Bloch says, I can't stop laughing at CBS losing $40 million a year on the late show with Colbert because they were spending $100 million a year to produce it, a show of a guy talking sometimes to other people is their less competent group of it. industry executives than linear television. Alex Roy, friend of the show, says, media is a business called Colbert already has an audience. He should have no problem launching a YouTube channel.

I agree. Many friends run a profitable YouTube channels with millions of subs with staffs of less than 10 people. They started from scratch, signed a media business veteran. The left has been looking for its Joe Rogan or Tucker Carlson. Why shouldn't Colbert be that guy? That's interesting.

And so a lot of people were saying, it's a piece to camera slash guest interview show. It shouldn't cost that. Tyler is back. What's going on? Tyler? I was stuck for a while on one of them and then I switched a different game, finished that, came back. Okay. But I don't know.

What's the timer? I feel like it was a little slow. 25 minutes. 25 minutes. Oh, brutal. Brutal. But you didn't get through it all. Yeah.

Did your hair get messed up or was going to mess up? I was stressed out. The one game I was on one level for like five minutes and then I don't know what. I just like couldn't figure out. I went to a different one. Yeah. And it was like I got it instantly. Crazy.

That's brutal. We will give you, we'll still, we'll keep giving you challenges until you get a new phone. Mike is, Mike is brutal. He says 25 is average. 20 is medium, 15 is hard. Well, we will give you a new challenge, give you a new chance to win a new iPhone. The iPhone moment has arrived for RKGI.

Tyler missed it this time. But what do you think it says about current AI systems? Do you think you will outperform the latest? IMO level model from OpenAI? You think you still got it? I mean, I think you could probably do RL on this and get it. I mean, I don't know if that's what the labs are necessarily doing. I think ideally, like, they're trying to just train it, you know, independent of this and

then see how it does. Yeah. I think it's a very good, like, benchmark in that sense. But you could probably, you probably could RL on this. Yeah. So the way Mike described it was that you played the three public. games, there are three private games. And so I don't know how much variation there was between the games.

It seems like there was a fair amount because you got stuck on one, you switched to one, switched to a different one, and then went back, right? So, yep. So I think the, I think the goal is like, if you RL on the three public games, you will be overfit against the private games that have slightly different mechanics and you won't have learned the true generalizing function. That's the idea at least. Yeah, that makes sense.

But I mean, I'm sure, you know, if you're opening out, you could just like, oh, let's just make new games that are kind of in a similar vein and then RL on those, then you have more data and then I don't know. I think you could probably, like, I think my general sense is that you can like RL on pretty much anything. Yeah. So if they really want to and they want to throw like, you know, many millions of dollars, I'm sure they could get it. But I don't know if that's really what they want to do. I think the current prize is like $10,000, something like that for something that works on it. Maybe there's a million dollar prize.

There's a million dollar prize that's still hanging out there, I believe, for RKGIV1. Yeah, but those are size limited, right? You can, like, you need to run in a certain speed and they can't be, like, so big. Yeah, I think they have to run on the Kagle infrastructure, Kaggle infrastructure. So you basically have to, like, send it your weights, your code, and then you get access to, like, one GPU. You don't get to fire the Stargate at it. Yeah. But I don't know.

It'll be interesting to see. How, how, what's your, what's your timeline for a lab destroying this? probably end of the year. End of the year, you think they'll beat it. Yeah. The whole team is like, we designed this to be unbeatable for years, like two to three years.

I don't know. I mean, they just beat IMO. It's like, like, do you mean on a public model or them just releasing, we beat this?

Private, it doesn't need to be open sourced. Yeah, I think if it's a private model, it's like opening eyes, it's like, okay, we have this internally.

We're not going to release it. It's not safe. Yeah. But like we've run it on this. I think probably by the end of the year is like reasonable. For specific, okay, we built a model just to beat this or we just, we're advancing models generally giving people what they want, making great things, solving, you know, flight booking

and GPT agent and solving IMO. And then, oh, as a byproduct, we solved this. You think that's going to happen? Yeah. I don't think they're necessarily going to train a model just to do this. Yeah. But they definitely could. I mean, at this point, it's getting high stakes, right?

Because like, apparently IMO is not RLed at all, like specifically for. what they say math so yeah I think that model is like reasonably capable obviously okay I want to try that model on on archaGiv3 and see how it does yeah because I I it does feel like that will be a very interesting moment where if they truly don't cheat and don't RL on this specifically without the gas station data set as Rune calls it you know no RKGIV3 like creating new games that feels like scientists collecting the gas station data set right and they just go about their day building better and better models and then by the way oh we solve this that that will that will be very very interesting but i don't know i would take the over on the end of the year maybe it's we're more

than halfway through the year yeah that's true okay what is your line you're so aGI-pilled you're so agi-i-pilled i think i think this will hold i mean b1 is still holding v1 is not yes v1 it takes two thousand dollars to get like 60 percent you just got 100 percent You know, like you finish the whole thing in 25 minutes. Yeah, I mean, we'll see, I guess. I don't know. I would take the over. I would take the over on this year.

I would probably take the over on. Well, I have to give you an update. I have to give you an update on chat GPT agent. Okay. So it only found, so it gave me a really great report, but it only found one, and it's listed by a dealer. And I can already tell the dealer, the dealer is like clearly, pricing it, like not where they would actually sell it.

Got it, got it, got it. Okay. But they did find one in Costa Mesa, so not far away. One county away. Okay, not bad. 399. 399, just under the limit. There we go.

So pretty good. Yeah, not bad. Not bad. 15 minutes. Yeah. They're, they're, oh, weird. But then they didn't actually get me. They don't have a link.

Okay. We're going to have to dig into a more, test it more. not achieved internally, but we're making progress. Yeah. Wait, so are you saying 100% on V3? Or what's like the benchmark? Because like if it's 100% then like, yeah, obviously not a year. 100%.

I mean, like you got, you just got 100%. Never having seen it, 25 minutes. Yeah. Like not crazy. I think we could literally give this to anyone over the age of like 10 and they would get 100% in half an hour basically. Like, I think it's, I think it's like, it's a very doable puzzle for humans. And so I want 100% and I want it in, and I don't care about time and money.

Like I'm, I agree with, was it Will who said that or? Yeah, Will DePue. Yeah, Will DePue said, you know, so, yeah, throw $2,000 per task on it. I'm fine with that. The question is just, can the model do it in any amount of time, in any amount of money? and it seems like right now it's probably at zero. We'll see how the IMO model does. Maybe it does really well.

We'll see. But I would put it at over, I would put it up there with doing your taxes, you know, Dorcash mode, 2027. Yeah, I think 100% is hard. But if you give me like 90%, like if it misses one of the tasks, so there's three games, they each have like 10 levels. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

If you can miss like one of those. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I don't, I think you have to finish a game or not. And so I think basically on the private data set, you can get zero. You can get one out of three, two out of three or three out of three. Basically. But it's unclear because like when do you tell it to give up? Because it can just keep trying and kind of brute force it. But maybe there's some sort of like limit. I don't know. But you get like unlimited retries. But maybe maybe the real test is only giving one. Okay, we got to move on. Okay. For your next challenge, Tyler, prompt 4-0, 7,000 times in a row and stay sane. Stay sane. Start recursive prompting like crazy for 48 hours straight and then come back to us.

Yeah. Well, we got to talk about the McLaren collection that's going up for sale. But first, I got to talk to you about Finn AI. Finn.AI, the number one AI agent for customer service, number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive bakeoffs, number one ranking on G2. This was what Swix said. He wants AI agents for customer service. Finn.com.

A.I.I. is delivering, so go check it out. Anyway, so the Monsore O-Hae collection. This is from Tom Hartley, Jr., and hopefully we can pull up the video because it is fantastic. It's on YouTube. and yes, so here's the video. You can play some of that. Look at this lineup of cars. So the story here is this man named Mansor O-H, O-J.

I'm not sure how to pronounce that. It's OJ-J-E-H. I apologize to anyone who knows how it. He says, I'm incredibly proud to announce that we've been entrusted with the sale of the world's greatest collection of McLaren Roadcars offered directly from the home of one of the most influential figures in McLaren's 62-year history. He passed away, age 68, surrounded by family, and is now entrusting the sale of his collection. This guy is fascinating, very, very interesting fellow.

So he has, let me pull up my information here. So Mansour O'Hay, he was the son of, he's a Franco-Saudi, French Saudi Arabian businessman, and he used his family fortune to bankroll. Formula One teams, and he built the tag group. So if you're familiar with Tag Hewer, the watch brand, he built that watch brand and then wound up selling it to LVMH. And so he was born, the man who collected all of these McLaren's in burnt orange, which by the way, he not only is the only one with the massive orange McLaren collection, that

particular color is not available to anyone else. He has his own color that only he can buy. It's absolutely incredible. And every single one of those cars that you see there in the background, they are all the last, the last one off the line, the last individual production car that they've ever made of that particular model. And so he gets the last one. And you see the logo there? He puts his name on the logo. I've never seen a brand do that.

But they were so tight with him because he owned the company at one point that they would replace the McLaren logo with Mansour logo, which is incredible. And so he is a fascinating figure. So his father, Akram O'hei, accumulated immense wealth as an intermediary in Saudi arms deals. So he basically would go to the Saudis and say, what weapons do you need? What missiles do you need? What guns do you need? What planes do you need? I'm going to go out into the world and find those and source those and bring those back and take a cut of that.

And so he— Yeah, this is really—I will say, if your father has amassed immense, wealth through arm stealing this is really pretty much the playbook it is to put that capital to work it's the best it's the best um and so uh mansor grew up in france the family mostly lived in france he attended the american school in paris he moved to california where we are studied uh business administration at menlo college uh let's give it up for all the business administration majors out there one of the top majors if you want to administrate businesses Which he certainly has.

He went to Santa Clara. He initially managed his father's ventures. He became gradually more and more involved in his father's investment vehicle, which was Technique de Avant God, which is Tag. Luxembourg registered holding company created in 1977. So the group's purchase was to broker deals between the Arab world and Europe and to handle commissions from arms and infrastructure contracts. And so his dad was born in Syria, raised.

in Iraq, studied in France on a scholarship during the 40s, marries a French woman, stays in France, and then starts arranging these arms deals and infrastructure projects. And so in 1956, the dad opens an arms trading company in Switzerland and establishes Saudi Arabia's first weapons factory. During the 1960s, he represented the French defense contractors such as Dessault and Matra, selling Mirage jets and missile systems to Middle Eastern clients. was facing some scrutiny from French authorities at one point. He founds the tag group.

The group gave him unrivaled access to the Saudi royal family for defense projects, leveraged his relationships with Prince Sultan, the Saudi defense minister. And he became so wealthy that he bought a cruise liner, like a cruise ship. He bought the Queen Elizabeth too, just I think as like a personal pleasure like pleasure yacht. He bought a ranch in Paraguay, homes in Paris and Monte Carlo, and then he starts sponsoring the Williams Formula One team, and he was putting in a million dollars a year, a million pounds a year. In the 80s... When did he start doing that? This was in the late 70s. And so his son, so the dad dies in

1991, reportedly worth several billion dollars, Mansour, who's the man with all of those fantastic-looking McLaren's, him and his brother, Mansour and Aziz, were heirs to the tag group. And there was a bitter inheritance dispute between the widow and some of the children and obviously all the assets kind of, you know, get fought over. But Mansour makes out quite nicely and winds up investing even more heavily in F1. So through TAG, he starts sponsoring Frank Williams' Formula One team in 1978. When Saudi Airlines sought to attract other Saudi brands, Tag became the team's major sponsor in 1979. Williams actually did win multiple races, although they were having some trouble a few years ago.

They were pretty good back then. They got Alan Jones and another title in 1982 with Kiki Rosberg. I think that's Nico Rosberg's father, I believe. The sponsorship gave Monsour his first taste of Formula One success and increased tags visibility. Then in 1983, he jumped ship from Williams, goes over to McLaren. Frank Williams resisted diversifying beyond racing.

McLaren's boss, Ron Dennis. proposed a shareholding in proposed exchanging shareholders like shares for a new for financing a new turbo engine and so Mansour agreed and funded the development of a Porsche turbo engine badged as tag so the McLaren tag partnership dominated in the 1984 season drivers Nikki Lauda and Elaine Prost won 12 of 16 races and McLaren secured both the drivers and constructors titles so basically he comes in with a bunch of money and says, you want to win an F1, I will finance a new engine. He goes and does it and it actually works.

And so he in 84- Which is interesting because Tag and Porsche have their own partnership now. Yeah. They have the Carrera line of watches all these years later. Yeah. And so in 1984, he buys a 50% stake in McLaren's holding company. Now, remember, McLaren was founded by a true racer who died at age 31. I believe in a racing accident. And so left this incredible legacy of just a guy putting it all in the line in racing.

It wasn't like he was some business guy who was like, I want to get into racing. He was just a race car driver. Well, this is the story of Enzo, too. Ferrari wasn't started until he was in his 40s. But he had just been so obsessed over racing that it just carried into the brand. And so in a Monsour buys a 50% of stake in McLaren's holding company. tag McLaren Holdings and he's still working on the racing stuff but then he says we got to make a road car and the road car that he pitches is the McLaren F1 supercar that launches in 1992 and is a $20 million icon owned by Elon Musk, Sam Alton, like there's they're in museums like they are the rarest of the rare Jay Leno has one. I don't think I think it's like the one of the few cars Doug Demiro hasn't driven he rode in it with Jay Leno but They are incredibly rare, incredibly special cars.

And the doors go up. The doors go up. And so in other news, like he did buy Hewer and created Tag Hewer, which was a watch company that you might be familiar with, Tag Hewer. They eventually sold Tag Hewer to LVMH for $740 million in 1999. Wait, didn't you know that Elon crashed his McLaren F1? He did, yes. And I believe that the McLaren was picked up and, uh,

and like reconstituted and wound up selling still for millions of dollars. The car hit a hidden embankment on Sand Hill Road at a 45 degree angle, launching it into the air like a discus according to witnesses. I mean, the car goes 200 miles an hour. Ways like 2,000 pounds. Just an incredible piece of lore imagining Elon on Sand Hill Road. And you know who else was in that car? I do.

Peter Thiel. Crazy. And he went to the meeting after. Yeah, yeah. They were apparently, you know, like, walk to the meeting. The lore is that they went to Sequoia, to pitch or something. They were like raising money or driving down and saying, what did Elon do? He turned off traction control.

Really? Apparently, yeah. That is wild. Yeah, there's a long history of guys turning off traction control, driving really fast, and then just crashing their cars. So if you want to avoid crashing your supercar, maybe keep it on. Avoid turning off traction control. I mean, that's the thing with, doesn't the career GT not have traction control? Or maybe it does, but it's like one of the few features.

It definitely kills a lot of its drivers. A lot of these guys like pride there. You know, they like an analog supercar. The GT does have traction control. Okay, it does. It does not have stability control or other electronic driver aids that are common in modern supercars. So Mansour, he buys Hewer, turns it into Tag Hewer, great watch brand, sells it to LVMH for $740 million in 1999. He gets a huge profit from that.

And then he starts going deeper into all of that. He launches tag aviation and aeronautics, which is distributing Bombardier jets to the Middle East. So he's a go-between between French aerospace and defense companies in the Middle East still. In this case, he develops a luxury airport in the Middle East. And he's just doing a lot of deals at this very, very high level probably benefits from his ties to F1. And so he builds the McLaren F1 and then, of course, starts Glellan. and stays involved in in McLaren F1 for years and he builds this I mean he builds a 240 two hundred and four two hundred and thirty five foot super yacht cogo he

creates a lavish house on Lake Geneva Switzerland known as La Mascone du Lac and and and kind of goes on through that he winds up getting ideopathic pulmonary fibrosis gets a double lung transplant and ultimately doesn't make it but you know he dies at age 68 McLarency Zach Brown described him as a titan of our sport, ultra competitive, determined, passionate, and sporting. And so everyone remembers him and his contributions to F1. But what's interesting today is that they are about to sell his entire McLaren collection,

which is something like 20 McLaren road cars all in his exact spec, which is this berth orange, with his badging. I don't know who the buyer would be. They're probably listening to this show. But good luck out there as you go and bid on the Mansour collection because it is truly one of a kind. And every single car there is in the most extreme spec, and it's the last one off the line.

And there's a back and there's a plaque inside that says, this is the last F1 that was ever made. This is the last SENA that was ever made. This is the last speed tail that was ever made. This is the last, I mean, look at that one. No, what is that, the Elva? Yeah. The elva in burnt orange.

Burnt orange elva with no windshield. Wow. That is fantastic. And just every single one of those cars is insane. Also, oh, by the way, also every single one of those cars, delivery mileage. Never been driven. Never been driven. Do you think he was buying, you think he was getting two?

So the story is that he had an F1. Of course he developed it. He had an F1, but it was kind of, I think, from like the middle of the pack or maybe the earlier pack. And because he was just like excited to get the first one and, you know, got it and probably gave one to someone else and like just had one, drove it, had fun with it. It was his experience. But then his brother got the last one in that, in that orange color.

And he and his brother was about to sell it. And he said, if you're, you can't sell this. If you're selling it, I'll buy it. And so he buys it from his brother and winds up building an entire collection. on the back of that one car, the last F1 off the line, the burnt orange that turns into his signature color. It turns into the color that you cannot buy no matter how much money you have.

And no matter how many McLaren's you own. And his legacy lives on Oscar and Lando dominating so far this year. Yeah, give us the update there. It's good. He wouldn't have been, he wasn't around to see it, but he would surely be proud. Yeah, well, if you're looking for a complex to your McLaren F1. Get on Bezell. Getbezzled.com. Your Bezell concierge is available now to source

you any watch on the planet, seriously, any watch. Anyway, let's go to Trey Stevens. He had a massively viral post on Friday. We didn't get a chance to talk about it. There are only four tier one cities in the United States. New York for finance, D.C. for government. San Francisco for tech. L.A. for media and entertainment people. Thank you, Trey. No other cities are power centers for aspirational talent. Sorry. He says based on replies, here are the people arguing for other cities. Austin, people who live in Austin. Boston, people who are really upset about Trump's Harvard attack. Dallas, Houston, people who have only lived in Texas. Miami, people who love money but

don't love to work. Mogged. Mogged. Someone just commented for Cleveland. It's funny because of a, uh, Trades an Ohio guy. No, no, I agree with this and it is incredibly sticky. Like, it's unclear if there will ever be another Tijuana city built in America. It doesn't really matter, though, because you can go, like, Warren Buffett is out in Omaha. It's fine. Like, people read this as, like, I can't possibly be successful in finance if I'm not in New York. Ken Griffin was in Chicago and then Miami.

Charlie Munger lived in Los Angeles. Yeah, yeah. And so it's like, it's like, it's like, that it is true that these are tier one cities. It doesn't mean that you can't do something cool and amazing and achieve your goals in life somewhere else, but you should just be thoughtful about it. And you shouldn't delude yourself into thinking

that a tier two city is secretly a tier one. If it's not, it's just not. And so stuff's moving around, very fun post. Always good to bait literally everyone in the world. But very fun. But related to this, Delian had a post that was kind of interesting here. He said, 10 years ago, it felt like Silicon Valley had this really vibrant seed fund ecosystem. That felt just as important as the multi-stage venture firms.

Now, that feels totally dead, partially because a whole generation of top-tier companies just completely skipped that step in raising. And so, yeah, more and more companies are saying our seed, or $1 million, we'll just come from our own balance sheet. And it'll just come internally and we'll just fund that. Or we'll just jump straight to $20 million. I have a problem where if somebody's raising a pre-seed, I do feel like there's 20 funds that I would potentially introduce them to. The challenge is when those pre-seed funds are then trying to go compete at seed, which we now know is this sort of $4 to $8 million range. We had somebody on Friday who was raising $55 million, whether or not that was marketing or whatever. the name doesn't really matter.

Board Ape Yacht Club raised a billion dollar seed round in 2021. That was a seed round? Was that because they just hadn't raised before? It really hadn't raised, yeah. Yeah, there's this weird thing where, you know. And Miramir Marotti, two or three billion dollar seed round. So again, like your company's expectations are based around how much capital has come in the door. Yep.

not the last name, the name of your last financing round. Yeah, there's one side of this, which is like the seed moniker used to stand for time and money effectively. Like it used to be like, okay, if I'm a seed stage company, you know that I'm in the first 18 months of my creation and I've raised less than $5 million or else I'm in mango seed territory in series A territory. But now there's some world where people just say, okay, you know, this is a, you know, this is your second round.

It doesn't matter that you've been around for 10 years. It's an A round or it's a seed round. Or it doesn't matter if you're raising a billion dollars and it's price like a growth round. It's a seed round. I don't know. I think what Delian's getting at is more just like the vibe of like you used to be able to, he's a seed investor.

You used to be able to hunt around, find some people doing cool stuff and get 10%, 20% of the company for a million bucks, two million bucks. And that has kind of disappeared. Delian's still known to get a good, to get a good price. He's figured out how to survive. Nature finds a way, as does public.com. Investing for those who take it seriously, they got multi-asset investing, industry leading yields, and they're trusted by millions folks get to public.com.

And we have a next guest. We have Chris Black in the Restream Waiting Room. Let's bring him in. Let's bring him in. Chris Black, how you doing? Bring me in. What's up, guys? How are you?

What's happening? it's great to meet you. I've wanted to chat for a long time. I actually bought your, what was that little green book that you made all those years ago? Wow. We got an OG on our hand. I don't think you know it all. I think it was 2015. I did that with Powerhouse. So thank you for being a brown floor investor. I had that. I had that in college and I felt so cool to be a college kid that was cultured enough to buy a table, you know, a coffee table book by Chris. black. I think it turned into more of a bathroom book than coffee table. It's very, it's very small. Okay. You would like the form factor. Sure, sure, sure. And what was it? What was inside the book? Can you break you down? I mean, Chris can give some more context. The thing that I remembered in a quote that I've brought up a bunch was the, it was the Andy Warhol quote in there that was something like making money is,

you know, business is art and making money is art and good business is the best art. You guys love that. You guys love it. Yeah, yeah. I mean, the, the, the book was just like a fun advice book, kind of, basically. It was, it was, it did really well as a graduation gift purchased from Urban Outfitters that year. That's, that's, we saw a lot of books. Thank, thank God. So it was, it was fun to do. That was very, it was very fun. Did you go through a traditional publishing house? Like, what was the workflow? Did you write the whole book and then shop it around? Like, I've never published a book. So curious. It was based, it was based on Twitter, honestly. It was based kind of on that idea of like, life soul and instruction book, the classic form factor, to use your term, meets sort of Twitter. So I went through, wrote them all. Yeah, I did it with Powerhouse, which is like sort of in and out of business from what I can tell. But I'm working on a book now for Simon & Schuster that should come out in 2026. So that that's a little more of a, the process you're talking about. What's the concept of the new book? It's kind of, it's kind of like a essay memoir, you know, a little bit of everything from like some high school stuff to being a drug addict to work to kind of

everything. And that process is a little bit more like you're talking about. Like you write a full essay, you know, you outline some chapters and then you take that out and sell it. And CAA helped me. Obviously, I wasn't doing it myself. But it's daunting, but I'm excited. Yeah. What's the secret to like a good book launch these days? We talked to Ezra Klein's co-author and he was saying that interestingly like when they went on hour long podcasts they sold less books than like a five minute hit on like tv tv because if you listen to an hour long podcast you're like i got the just i don't need the whole book but if you listen to five minutes you're like oh i could do i could do another hour i'll buy the book that's a fair i have a friend who's a very successful legendary author who told me an

anecdote that he sold more books from doing tucker carlson when he was on tv that he sold from anything else like a clear bump. I mean, this was years ago, but I think that, I mean, we were talking about this earlier today. Jason and I actually were talking about this and about how sort of podcasts have replaced not only late night, obviously,

but this is kind of like Stephen Colbert news. It's top of but also like, Good Morning America, the view, like, it's still fun to do that stuff. I don't but it might move books, but it doesn't seem like the publicists think that it does based on the priorities of what they're having their clients do. Is it speed run 200 podcasts?

Is that the playbook now? I mean, if you pay attention to people, yeah, kind of. You know, if you pay attention to an actor or writer or whoever has something coming out, it's like, you know, we talk to a lot of musicians on how long gone, so we're part of that in some ways. But like, there's the Dak Shepherds, Joe Rogan's smartless call her daddy world that I think is basically, that's the new Oprah. That's what it is.

I almost feel like there's a world where some podcast, or certainly not us because we're a daily show or news driven, but some podcasts, I'm thinking of like acquired FMs, like business deep dives or some true crime podcasts. Like they kind of fill the whole of an audio book. It's like you get two or three hours every month. And it feels like it's just a more, it's like an easier financial model for them to be like,

well, I'm selling 12 ad slots and I have subscribers that feel like they're getting something. They're not waiting a full year for the next thing. So when I hit their credit card with a $20 charge this month, they're getting one thing this month. You were talking, I think we were talking on Friday, this concept of, like, releasing a book on substack. It's happening.

Because you could get somebody to, effectively, it creates this, like, community experience of, like, reading the book together. But then it's, you know, you might charge $25 for your book, but somebody might pay you, I don't know, $10 a month for your substack. No, I mean, there's all these, I mean, I think there's all these ways to do it. I am extremely. traditional and what I think is cool and what works.

I would like to do it about as by the book, no pun intended as possible, just because I think that's cool. I think all of these modern approaches, though, are often more, more profitable. And also maybe, like you said, easier for people to stomach. Like the attention spans aren't there. Even if you break it up like that in their minds, it's like easier to read in a weekly dispatch than it might be to sit down for an hour every day and read a book, you know.

Yeah. There's also something about like, I mean, when, wait, I've heard somebody say, like, when you publish a book, like, it's the easiest way to get, like, a comma with a phrase after your name every time you're in print. Like, if I wrote a book that's just like, you know, how I became awesome, everyone would just be like, okay, like, you know, life, life, John Coogan, author of The Awesome Life. And that's why, that's why I'm awesome. Chris's book, I'm assuming the memoir, I'll be called Just Goaded. Goathe. Just goaded.

That's what I'm thinking. I'm workshopping it now. But, no, I mean, I think you're right. I mean, I had another friend, Maddie Matheson, the chef and cookbook author and, you know, actor. And he told me, he was like, dude, like, New York Times bestseller lasts for the rest of your life. Totally. You can, you get that forever if you do one time, you know? And like, I think that also that is so interesting because it's such like a classic thing that we all know, but no one really knows the formula of how you get.

Like, it's not just sales. There's all these factors that like no one knows, you know, which makes it even more. It's interesting to think about, would you rather have be featured in the New York Times? Is it more valuable to be featured in the New York Times four times a year forever or just be a New York Times bestseller? Because we had a couple buddies get hit pieces last week in the New York Times. And they just like really, they only get attention if you give them attention. Yeah. Like that's so funny you say that because there was a story in the early days of how long gone there was a story that wasn't favorable, let's say.

And I was like, wait, was this, was this the, was this the whole lawsuit thing? Because I got the T-shirt back then, too. No, not the New York Times. No, this was not the New York Times. Okay. This was not the cease and desist for making fun of the daily. This was a, it's, you know, it's, um, yeah, I forgot about that. Don't strisand.

Don't strisand it. You know, speak really generally so nobody can figure it out. You know what? We're moving on. Moving on. Anyway, the other interesting thing about, books versus podcasts is we have a buddy who runs an AI podcast the Dwar Cash Patel podcast great show great interviews super researched he published a book and the book was a like an oral history of

AI and so it was a collection and it was actually kind of like a digest of a bunch of interviews that he's done so he didn't start from a blank page and just start typing out like a thousand pages and and refine it. But and in some ways it's like it's just kind of a different instantiation of the same thing that he's been doing. But I love it because I'm, there's no way for me to go to like randomly remind myself in five years that I should go revisit a Dwar Keshe podcast unless someone like clips it and shares it. But if I put that book on my shelf, I might pick it up randomly in a few years and there's something about like just the tangible physical. We're very into the physical stuff here. We print the two. No, for sure. It's real. I mean,

I think also that I mean, I think that like everything else, it makes a return to some extent. You know what I mean? Like I subscribe to the Financial Times. I subscribe to several magazines like a lot of my friends do. I mean, obviously I'm 42 years old, so it kind of makes sense. But I think that like young people are fetishizing print the same way they fetishized vinyl. You know, a couple of, you know, 10 years ago, it's the same kind of thing. Once it is, you know, once it's basically past its prime, print is just objectively better than vinyl, though, I got to say. I'm not 100%. And that it's like it's it you can go to the beach and carry like you can't like you know like just bringing a piece of paper to the beach and letting it get. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. It gives you the benefit of leaving your phone at home. Yes. When I finish a book, I leave it wherever I am. Like on the back in the back seat of the plane on like I leave it so somebody can hopefully pick it up and take it. I'm usually I usually have a couple with me if I'm traveling. If I finish one, I got to lose some weight. because you're adding,

because you're adding adding stuff on the way. That's amazing. Exactly. When are we going to get how long gone pressed on vinyl? We got to do a couple special episodes. We did do a CD.

We did do a CD a couple years ago with Jaguar, which is a really fun project to do. But I mean, I think for us, we're still, I mean, you guys have done something so interesting. I think it's so cool the way,

what you guys are doing and how you're approaching it. I think this live daily thing is like really powerful. Sure. And I think we're trying to figure out what our version of video is. So yeah, you guys are doing, what's this thing? I read it in and feed me. Like you're doing a live show, like a one-off live show.

We did, we're on tour right now. We're just having a couple days off. But we did a show at Turf Club in St. Paul, Minnesota, at this, basically with this service called Veeps.com, which is started by the Madd Brothers from Good Charlotte, but then Live Nation bought it. And it's basically they send a full sort of very pro crew to shoot, your show live and you can pay, you know, buy a ticket online and watch it up to 48 hours after you

pay. What's the ideal live site? It's like vampire weekend, how long gone, Alicia Keys. That's awesome. How I don't know how. Podcasters in control. Podcasters in control. What's the right live show for you though? Like do you feel pressure to have like hot, you know, the hottest takes? This show we're doing we're doing DC on third we're doing DC on Thursday and then Friday we're doing Toronto and then we go to London. Um, But this show is actually different. We used to just go up there and shoot the shit. We'd bring a guest up, you know, depending on what town we were at,

much like the actual podcast. This time, it's the How Long Gone Guide to Life. And it's a visual. It's like basically a keynote that we're walking the audience through with like our commentary. And we've only done it twice so far, but it feels, it feels sort of like it's taken us from a live podcast to a show, which is what our goal was. And I don't think we could figure out exactly how to do that.

And I think this is kind of pushing us in that direction. which is great. What's, uh, give, give us the, the three minute summary of the guide to life so that people have to still go. Yeah, yeah, don't give it away. Get the tickets. Give the ticket. Yeah, no, it's, um, it's, by the way, we did, we did, we did one live show together in Miami and we had only made like two episodes. And so nobody, like, nobody knew us as a duo. They didn't know our humor. And the, like, the live show, the live show is like, like, we made like a very serious, uh, like, um, argument for why venture capital firms should get their founders on like PEDs so like testosterone like like a variety that's a great that I would watch pay attention to that yeah exactly and and I don't

like half of the the half the audience was like these guys are dead serious half were like kind of laughing like what is going on this is it's a mixed it's a mixed bag yeah I mean ours we basically cover all of the stuff that we talk around the show from like restaurants and restaurant etiquette to the gym and gym etiquette to dating and sex and drugs. So it's like we cover it. You know, it's like one slide that's going really well for us is polyamory is for ugly people.

Be single or cheat. That's going really well for us. But, you know, it's just like funny stuff that you can just kind of talk about and also will inspire a response from the crowd. We like to go back and forth with the audience. We're going to create a rival guide to life and we'll just go guide for guy. We'll go guide for guy. Well, look, I think we have different enough to all.

audiences where we can cover a lot of territory. For sure. Yeah. So going back and forth, I want your restaurant etiquette. This morning we go to our cafe where we have breakfast every morning. Normally, really like I never noticed the music. It was always quiet and chill. And today they were blasting in sync and backstreet boys.

Brittany Spears. And maybe it was just the mood because it was kind of gloomy in L.A. We're having some like late June gloom going on. It's terrible. And I was a little bit tired from the weekend. trying to get back into it. And I was like trying to read like a pretty detailed analysis about like tech and stuff. And I was just like, I can't I. And funny thing is that two days ago I was in a grocery store and I was like jamming to the Backstery Boys. And I was like, this is the

greatest thing ever. I was loving it in that context. But in the morning. But it felt like such a violation of trust because we go to this place every single morning. And it sets me up for the day. I'm prepping the show. And so we kind of made us, we made a slight comment. We were like, oh, is the music different? But I want to know etiquette wise. How should I? I don't want to I want to speak to the manager. That's weird. But also like I'd like a change. Yeah, what should I do?

What kind of like, like, unfortunately? That is a regular. Like what are your rights as a regular? What are your rights as a regular? You're right. You can't say anything. Sorry.

You can't say anything. No, if you say something, they're never going to look at you the same. You're an asshole. Whether you're right or wrong, I'm just telling you, they're going to, they're going to think of you differently. It's not going to be made with love anymore.

It's not going to be made with love. So am I supposed to vote with my feet, go somewhere else? We were running the numbers. We go there every single day. We're like, we're basically employing a single person there paying the full. I like how you think about this.

Like it's logical. And you can sort of figure out a way to make it work. It's a barista hates all of the customers. Okay, and that's a feature. Yeah. Yeah, it's a feature. I mean,

I understand what you're saying. I think restaurants, like there was a trend for so long. It's still going on where like restaurants play like hip hop. You know, and like I don't want to hear Kanye West while I'm eating spicy pinet. You know, I want to like,

I want to hear nothing is preferred. If you go to certain kind of old school, like, I think Leiburne and Dan in New York doesn't play music. And it's just like the bustle of the restaurant and the chatter. I'd much rather hear that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. It's fascinating.

Jory, where should we take it now? I have a, yeah, I wanted to just get some broad takes from you on a bunch of different topics that we don't cover closely. So one, first off is AI psychosis real? you experienced it yet yourself let me let me tell you something about AI and I'm sorry to all of your I just couldn't care less I'm assuming

I'm assuming I'm assuming I don't care less I think it's a reality I think it's very serious I think it's coming for us good bad and ugly I just don't care and like other things in my life I'm going to put it off till the very last minute and when I have to deal with it I've never downloaded Photoshop I've never used

indesign I've put off all this shit in my entire life and it's worked out so I think I'm going to do the same thing with AI until I have no choice. And you're so you work, uh, list off some of the clients that you've worked with over the years. It's basically everybody, right? Oh, I mean, yeah, I mean, everything and on the, on the, on that side of the business, yeah, I mean, New Balance, um, Tom Brown, Stucy, uh, Jay Crewe is, is an ongoing one, um, Banana Republic for a couple years. So yeah, I mean, like a little bit of a little bit of everything. John 6, 8, so Banana Republic. Oh, they got

you. Yeah, they signed Kevin Love. Jason, six nine. Jason six nine. So, yeah. He has the same. Yeah. Yeah. They signed Kevin Love. And he has this is 14, 15? Jason's a 17. So it's really.

Oh, okay. Mogged. He goes to these like funny websites to find. Oh, yeah. Like we haven't heard of because we're. Dark web big and tall. Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

Exactly. So, so you're going in when you're working with these clients. It's kind of like Rick, Rick Rubin mode. You don't know how to use any of the tools. You're just kind of like they just pay you to tell them what. I mean. no, I think it's a little bit of a relationship thing and hopefully a taste thing. Like I think taste takes years and years to develop.

And I think mine is suited for certain people more than others. I think J.Crew is like a perfect fit because I grew up wearing J.Crew. I was raised in Atlanta. It's preppy. It's Southern. But I think I have a little bit of a different point of view because I got into punk and hardcore and, you know, skateboarding and all that stuff. So it's like a little bit of a hybrid of all that, of all those things.

But I think with clients, it's all about sort of taking. the real talent at the company and making sure that it doesn't go off the rails. You know, so the creativity, people who are true geniuses and really creative, like, powerhouses need to be brought back down to earth a little bit, you know, and like, reminded in a nice, uh, gentle way that if we don't, you know, make money, this is all over. Like this is like, like, like, we can do all this stuff, but sometimes you got to feed the beast to make sure the lights stay on and it buys us more time to do more fun stuff. And I think it's like a I think as an outsider going into a company, you're able to do that a lot easier than like a salary to deploy.

Yeah, you can stir things up. Are you, but but so so going like slightly deeper your client like I have to imagine every single brand that you've worked with or will work with in the future is starting to try to mix in AI generated imagery. And I'm sure that sounds like that's triggering to you is just stuff. that you don't want to, like, how do you see the kind of market kind of bifurcating in the sense that you think every brand, you think any brands will take a hard line and say like, we only shoot, you know, farm to table organic content here. We never. I think that's exactly what's going to happen. I think there's going to be like a division where it's like, obviously certain things that are easy to automate. I think everybody will do that because it's a, it feels like a freebie.

I think some of the creative stuff, I think a lot of, at least I hope clients I work with, would sort of be like, we need a human being to take the pictures. Like that, like pictures specifically, like, to me, there's so much emotion involved in it. There's so much skill involved in it. And you just can't, to me, I haven't seen it mimicked correctly. Like asking check, you can see how to fix your car is different. Like, this is something that requires like a human touch, I think. Yeah.

And I think there's actually, there's laws in place that that make it so that chain restaurants can't Photoshop their food, right? because they would just Photoshop a burger and then they're trying to sell it and it just doesn't look at the thing. And I think it's possible we'll see, I don't know, on the apparel side will be interesting because everybody's had the experience of like buying an item and it just looks amazing online or it looks great on that model or whatever. And then it just like doesn't fit or whatever. And so I think that that will probably accelerate as you have these sort of upstart brands that never even do product photography. Don't even know if they're stuff. Well, product photography and like econ photography is like.

a science and it's pretty hard to get right and there's a lot of discussion at these at these companies about how to do it who's going to shoot it how it's going to appear and i think that stuff is very interesting because it directly relates to sales and like the bottom line like some styles work really really well and that's what everybody wants to mimic and some are a little a little harder to pull off you know yeah what about on what about how do you see like you know music market evolving we don't cover much music at all to the latest just bieber album We got through two songs on the drive home. I mean, we talk about music on how long gone all.

That's all we do. And like a lot of my best friends are musicians. Most of them are successful at this point. They've been doing it long enough. But I think it's like everything else in our lives. I think we're just paralyzed by choice and the barrier of entry is just too low. You know, there's too much stuff. And music, it suffers from that maybe more than any other genre that I could think.

And you mean, I mean because, you know, growing up, you'd buy an album, you'd invest dollars into it. And so you would listen to the full thing and you'd like really pay attention to it. And now if you can stream an album for two seconds and be like, whatever. Yeah, you don't care. I mean, I think, yes, I think that. I also think that it's just, if the three of us wanted to make a song right now and upload it and have it on iTunes and Spotify this week, we could do that. And I don't think that. I don't think the world needs that for us or for many, from, from me, from.

many other people. And I think that, but yes, you're right. I think when you would go to the store, access was harder. I mean, we talk about this all the time. Like, I grew up, I remember the day that we got internet at my parents' house. You know what I mean? We had Vidal in the fucking family room. I remember it like the whole thing.

And if you remember time before that, I think the effort that was involved to like anything or to understand anything was so much greater. Because you had to pieces together through like magazines and going to a show and that kind of thing. Yeah, you go to a show, you go to magazines, you look at the liner notes of an album and see which bands get thanked and then go find those bands. You know, it's like it was that, it was kind of that tactile and that granular. But yeah, I think it's like, I think that like Spotify and streaming in general, like, I know people to make a lot of money on streaming and they're very happy with it. I know a lot of people and the, I think general sentiment is no one gets paid enough. And of course, I always want artists to get paid more because they, you know, it's the soundtrack to our lives. It's like important for. culture. But I also think that people forget that these are just giant corporations. And they've got bottom, again, they've got bottom lines and like they're going to do whatever they have to do to make that work. Yeah. Do you think corporate jingles could make a comeback? They have. What do you mean?

I mean, you know that, you know famously push a tea from clips wrote the McDonald's jingle. I'm loving it. No way. Yeah. I have no idea. He'll never have to work again. You know, from that alone. Yeah. So I think it's all that stuff. I mean, it's like the way that like John Hamm is the voice of Mercedes. Like, everybody gets it how they can. You know what I mean? I think the jingle or,

I mean, what we talk about a lot and how long gone is like sync culture, you know, and like how there used to be like a, you would be a sellout, you know, if they used your song

and a jack in the box commercial. And now it's like, well, that's the most money I'm going to make. If they're going to give me a quarter million dollars to use my song for 30 seconds, like I have to do that. You know,

the choice isn't quite as clear as it used to be. And so we've talked to a lot of different musicians about regret. you know how they like pass something up because they were high on their horse in their early 20s and now that they're 40 they're like I'm a fucking idiot like it was half a million dollars like who cares yeah that makes sense you said that they've made a comeback already like is there a more modern example than the than the McDonald's theme song I mean I feel like you might be right I feel like they're just they're ingrained in my brains that feel new totally like cars for kids or something is

probably 20 years old if you guys ever lived in New York there's 1877 cars totally like you know yeah no I I know well I'm just thinking about like of the new companies that have emerged Airbnb Facebook

Instagram Spotify open AI like good point SpaceX like Tesla doesn't have a jingle like I don't know if those would be even like on brand but like car I feel like even funny you even like prime from Logan Paul like he he's done a song

like he did it's every day bro with his brother I think or maybe that was just his brother but You know, like there are influencer brands. Mr. Beast has a chocolate bar. I don't know that it has a jingle. And I'm wondering if it has something to do with the fact, like, the nature of advertising has become, like, way longer tail in the, and the creative. Like, we don't see that many, like, shelling points for, like, wow.

They made an iconic ad. It ran at the Super Bowl. Everyone's talking about it. It's more like they spent the same amount of money on ads, but it's just in the form of a thousand different Instagram ads. And everyone saw a slightly different one that was more tailored to them. So the guys saw the one at the girl in them. Potentially Alpha making a jingle right now and using the same jingle on like thousands of different creative.

So it's always the same audio and different visuals. That will work. Yeah. And then you think we're on to something here. Ramp, time is money. Save both. Find your happy place. I mean, with car companies,

they obsess over like the sounds the cars make. You know what I mean? Like I drove this new Mercedes from Atlanta to, Miami for F1 and it was like there was all this detail I'm a huge Mercedes we love Mercedes over here we have tons of them I'm in I'm in Bedford New York right now and I borrowed a CLE AMG convertible it couldn't be better I just notice all the but when you drive these car you notice like these little kind of sort of yeah brand moments where it's like a little noise when something starts up or like it is

audio or like how famously like Porsche has a guy whose only job is about like the way the door sounds when it closes because it sounds so much better in a Porsche than other cars you know yeah but it but it's just a funny I think there is these audio elements that are happening from a brand standpoint but they're not quite as overt as like a jingle you know yeah it does feel like uh Doug jimero has this take that like power is on demand like the latest Rivian truck electric truck has 1,200 horsepower. It's the same as a Bugatti Veyron. Like it is it like you can't go any, that's what you want.

That's what you want when you're driving your kids is a high high. Is Rivian a sponsor? No, no, no, no. All right. Because that Rivian is like the that is like the Austin mesh hat Yeti cooler of cars. I just don't I don't get the popularity. I don't think it looks good.

I mean, I guess it's an alternative to Tesla. So that's part of the yeah. I think the main thing was like Tesla hadn't come out with a truck yet and then they came out very controversial design. And then the F-150 lightning was pretty expensive. And the Rivian kind of was just pure play, like didn't confuse anyone. And then they did have the full-size SUV or like close to full-size SUV in the electric

category, a little bit sooner than the Hyundai Ionic 9 and a couple others. And it says a little bit more. But it is interesting because between Lucid and Rivian and the new. Polestar. Polestar. Polestar is technically like a Volk. or a oh is it it's it's not a Volkswagen it's the Volvo like Volvo I go to I go to Copenhagen Fashion Week a couple times here and it's all and the driver brought to you by

Polestar it's all like I mean every brand is confused with what to do with electric like it's like do we throw a is it is it a power train we just throw a little eye at the end or an X or an E at the end or do we do a whole new subbrand or do we spin something out oh what do you have you seen that have you seen the new the new Lamborghini what is what is that the EV. Oh yeah. What was that called? It's called the why do they have to make them look like that? The Lanzador. You got to pull a picture of the Lanzador. This thing looks wild. It is it. What is it? What is it? They're calling it an SUV, but it just looks like a really big car. Like a lifted sedan. It looks like a lifted. No, it looks like a lifted it. It's kind of sick. It's kind of sick. And then there's the slate truck, which is coming out, which is like a small thing. But I think, but I think, but I think. But I think, but I think. But I think. that some of the new companies, like, they're so focused on, like, just deliver on the basic value prop. They're not in that, like, surprise and delight category yet. Although, Rubian did kind of do that with, like, that gear tunnel, you know about that in the truck.

I like, okay, yeah, that is a, that is just a, a big old car. Yeah, it's a big car, but they're probably not. That's really not. Guys, that kind of looks like a Subaru. No joke. No, that's, that's the, that's like a Subaru Halo car. Like that, that should be there. Uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, Total tangent, but I did have one question and then one idea that I wanted to throw out before you jump. Do you think that any social media apps will become truly Lindy? Like will we be on X like 30 years from now chopping it up on the timeline? Look, as I call it Twitter still.

I'm a traditionalist, but for this purpose I will call the X. X is the most enduring platform that we have because I think it's not. image based. I think that's what sets it apart. It feels more comedy and information. And those are two things that I feel like aren't as affected by trends in some ways. Whereas like Instagram, I love Instagram. I use it every day. But like people get when people get very exhausted by it because of what they have to see. You know, I think Twitter, I don't know. I'm a Twitter diehard. I'm a power user. I have been forever. And I will never change that. Yeah. That's awesome. I hope. Yeah, it's one of those things like is is is it digital news or is it like the form is it its own like form factor like vinyl

that will just perpetuate for all right we're going to find out last last question media media and entertainment question because you're an entertainer do you think there's room in the market for next election cycle pay-per-view boxing between both political parties so so so like Democrats first Republicans, betting on the line very American. I'll pay, I'll pay $100 for the PPV for that. I mean,

I think that we're that far away. Honestly, I know that's a joke. I don't think we're that far away. No, I'm not. I'm actually serious. I really don't.

I really don't. Every four years, you get 10, 10 Dems, 10 Republicans, get them lined up in different weight classes. $100. Duke it out.

Settle. Settle. I would love to see some low-level, you know, first year senators, just bloodying themselves on the opening rounds. You know, that's what we need. Yeah, it can just be angry online posters, too, you know, settling the score.

That's a category of fighting that has not been monetized yet. Something we should think about. Yeah, it's like Dana White's slapboxing thing or whatever. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No experience required. Slap boxing would be huge. Awesome. All right, well, this was super fun.

Let's do it again soon. Thank you. Come back on again soon. This is great. We'll talk to see. Anytime, guys. Thanks so much. All right.

See you. Good luck with the rest. rest of your live shows. We were talking about jingles. We got to sing you a jingle. Find your happy place. Find your happy place. Book of Wonder with inspiring views. Hotel great amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning and 24-7 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better folks. And Chris Buskirk is in the restream waiting room. Let's bring in Chris Buskirk. How you doing Chris? Good to see you. Great. Hopefully you got to hear us singing just now. We're trying to bring back corporate jingles. We think that there's an unexplored territory there. I don't know you're

1789. Ooh, here we got something. I know why we don't. I actually know why we don't have them anymore. Please explain. It's because Big Pharma took over advertising and that killed all the creativity. Oh, interesting. Man, they got to throw those.

Yeah, now it's like you got a 40-second commercial. 20 seconds tells you all the bad things that are going to happen to you when you take the drug. It's rough. Well, yeah. So the conspiracy theory there, I don't have my tinfoil hat handy is that it's not about even generating awareness. here we go. We keep one of these any time we have to discuss a conspiracy theory. Discuss a conspiracy theory

gives you cover, you know. I don't believe this necessarily but you listen to these pharma ads and they're after listening to it I would say you're much more likely to think I don't think this is for me right? Because you maybe hear about

some benefits and then you get like 20 seconds of but it's just is it a mechanism to just invest so many dollars in a that the show could not possibly criticize the the pharma industry broadly otherwise you're potentially this manufactured consent says noem chomsky but has been written rewritten well it's more like it's more like yeah you're welcome to criticize big pharma but like say goodbye to like what 60 percent of your revenue

overnight anyway not going to be running the late show we're not going to be talking about more because sorry anyway let's kick it off in the introduction there is always also known as the news six months in the future yeah but but let's introduce yourself uh how do you think about yourself what what what what what key projects are you working on right now you know the you know co-founder of 1789 capital as you guys know like i've got some other uh evocations uh as well but you know just you know people always say like how do you split up your time and uh like there was like the that was like the rubyx cube question for me for a while and i realized actually the uh the simple answer is right which is like all the different stuff I'm doing is all the same project, which is how do you keep

the country peaceful and prosperous? Like that's really it. Then there's all kinds of different vectors of attack there. There's like there's politics, there's culture, there's business, there's tech. But it's really all with the same telos. Like how do we just make life better for this country and the people in it? Yeah. Give me a, give me a temperature check on your view on the business climate. There's been so many new, so many stories about tariffs and interest rates. and all sorts of stuff. At the same time, the stock market's been like down and then right back to where it was.

And so there's like the nothing ever happens view. There's the incredibly tumultuous times view. How are you just feeling about the business climate generally? And Uncle Sam put up a surplus. It's like it's better than it's been in a long time. Yeah. I mean, this is what, you know, I've had the following conversation, it probably literally like 10 or 20 times in the past few months.

And people, whether there's a lot of investors, but also founders slash builders have said a different version of the same thing, which is I didn't know how much I was self-censoring my own thought about what was possible over the past four or five years until, you know, fill in the blank, January, February, March, April, whatever, just this year. And then they realized like, oh, the shackles are off. We can actually go and do really cool stuff now. And everybody had their project.

It was like there was a pain point in their business, like, oh, I can't do this. or like the crypto guys or AI, like they're really, really under attack. And it was like regulation by enforcement. And so they knew what the pain points were. And so for obvious reasons, we're super focused on those things. And they were like, oh, if we could just get through this, then we could do this one other thing, whatever that may have been. And what I've heard a lot of people saying is once the pain stopped, I realized that

there were like 10 other things that normally did I want to do, but that I could do. And so like the amount of optimism and energy is just really infectious. It's like it's a great time to be alive. Yeah, it feels like, I mean, we saw that with a lot of the nuclear founders. Like you talk to those folks. And I mean, it was so rough for a while that they normally, like if you invest in my company, I don't want you to invest in a direct competitor, but that nuclear companies were like, look, like that's not going to be the thing that does me in.

Like, you can go ahead and invest. And then now we finally have some clarity from the EO. We talked to some nuclear founders and it feels like we're on the cusp of some real progress there. How much are you focusing on energy? What are the other categories that you find interesting right now? What do you see as being like uniquely unlocked in this new era? Yeah, it's a we call it the, I don't think we made it up, but like we call it like transformational technologies.

So that means like AI, AI, AI, infra, energy, robotics, space, defense. Those are kind of like the big buckets. And a lot of cases, there's a lot of, they're really related. you know, we, like, at least the way we think about energy is like it's attached to all of those. And, you know, that's where that's where nuclear really comes in, but particularly around AI and crypto and some of the other elements and just security in general. Like that is the major unlock. Like one of the things that I tell people all the time is, like, if you want to like just an easy heuristic about like, you know, how you think about like what are the big unlocks that need to have happen, which is the, think about it this way. the large civilization that has access to the most abundant cheapest energy wins, like period,

full stop. I was talking with a friend of mine, another investor last week. And he actually had this great description, which I actually never thought of about colonization of Mars, because I was saying how, you know, like, obviously Elon's been super focused on it. And I'm like, I don't want to go to Mars. Like, I've never wanted to go to Mars. It seems like it sounds like it sucks there. I said, but then I realized that actually like terraforming Mars, like that's actually kind of cool because it would make it someplace you'd actually want to go.

So that's why like Mars colonizations become charismatic because like just like getting to the moon was was interesting and charismatic in the 60s because it was like, can we get there? Like it was just like the journey, not the not the end. But then when you start to think about the idea of colonization of Mars, well, it's interesting when you think that like you could make it beautiful. And what he said was it's just an energy problem. If you can bring enough energy to bear, then you can terraform Mars. I was like, that was actually for me. That was like an interesting way to think about it that I hadn't considered. But the same thing applies to everything else, which is if you have super abundant, super cheap energy,

as a large scale civilization, you're going to win because it makes everything else better, easier, cheaper. And things that were not possible, it makes them possible. Kind of like the way Space X, what SpaceX is done with launch by just driving the cost per kilogram into the dirt, it unlocks all these other businesses. So if great power competition is energy competition, do we, you know, I mean that the concern here is that China is just like copy and pasting nuclear reactors and we have a bunch of great nuclear startups that are, you know, making efforts and some new projects. I think meta, you know, has announced some, some new initiatives there. But is this not like one of the kind of biggest issues that we're facing from a national security standpoint? There's a way in which it's the biggest because it, because it touches everything.

Like it touches literally everything. I mean, you think about like these really critical growth areas, AI being the super obvious one. But, you know, and there's, you know, I've seen a number of analyses that show like this. the amount of AI compute we need to build just in this country, like it's say in the next 10 years, so by 2035, like it would consume more power than we produce right now. As of the contrary. So there's like we need to be producing a lot more power because unlike certain members of Congress, it turns out electricity doesn't just come from the wall.

Like you actually have to produce it someplace. Yeah, food comes from the grocery store. Gasoline comes from the pump. Electricity comes from the wall. I mean, it's like, God, what are you slow? You just plug in. Just plug in and there's electricity there. I do think there's something fascinating about like,

it's so hard to predict the future. It's so hard to predict what we will need, you know, a gigawatt, you know, data center for. And then all of a sudden it's like, we need it today. Like, we have the use case. We need it today. And I keep thinking about like what happened in the dot-com boom, where we overbuilt all this dark fiber.

Google went and bought it up and a bunch of the tech companies bought it up. And then eventually, like, the products caught up. My question is, how do you think about projects that might be un-economical to underwrite on the venture side, and so they might need to be underwritten by the government. Like, I feel like we're probably aligned in that, like, we should probably keep the government as narrow as possible, but there are some really crazy things, like the moon landing, like the Mars helicopter, stuff that just doesn't make any sense for any private company to go after.

And then after a while, you start seeing, like, oh, okay, like, you know, they built some roads, they built some infrastructure and now private companies are catching up and actually ramping up the use of that energy or something. But how do you see the government playing a role in the next in solving those fundamental problems? Is it purely just on deregulation? Do you want to see funding flow into certain projects? Do you want to see government doing hard projects? What's your philosophy on all that? Yeah, it's both. It's both is the answer. Like we've just seen, And, you know, just as I was saying earlier, like just this year, just by getting out of the way, unlocks a lot. And there's so many people who want to do things and who have the capacity to do things if they're not being shackled and prevented from doing them.

So like we've seen a lot of that in the past seven months is just by getting out of the way and giving people permission to do it. You get a lot of, you get a lot of activity. And so that's a big part of it. But then there are these other issues where, you know, China creates its national champions. And so, like, great example is like rare earth magnets. You know, it is, it can be, it is, I mean, they subsidize it. So it is cheaper to buy a rare earth magnet from Chinese supplier than it is to buy the raw materials in the United States. You know, that is, I mean, that's very, that's geopolitics, right?

That's not just markets. That's not just economics. That's not just innovation. That's geopolitics. the Chinese have been on, they've been on top of this for 20 years and realized that this was a choke point where they would be able to get a huge amount of leverage over their competitors and adversaries. And I guess we're someplace in between those two things with China. And if they were able to subsidize them, they could drive out all the competitors out of business

and because they go into literally everything of any importance that they'd have massive, not just economic leverage, but like geopolitical leverage over the United States. States. So that's a place where, you know, government needs to play a role because it's not a company v. company competition. It is a state actor v. company competition as it stands right now. And that's something that's critical to national security. So you see that, I think, in a number of other, a number of other spaces. But, you know, the rareth magnets is like, it's just a very obvious example of that where you can't, like, a company can be super innovative and can do all the right things. But if it is facing, a state actor as its competitor versus another company, like they're going to lose.

Yeah, on the rare earth materials question, there was a story in the Wall Street Journal last week about Apple buying half a billion dollars of rare earths from a company called MP Materials. In Vegas. In Las Vegas. And it stuck out to me as kind of a vibe shift because Apple hasn't been at the front of like re-industrialize America, bring back. jobs and you know let's make everything in America they're not saying that but it feels like maybe behind the scenes they're at least thinking about their supply chain very seriously and trying

to diversify and maybe it's a cruise ship but they're putting their hands on the tiller just a little bit and so I took that as like cause for optimism with the overall you know energy independence supply chain independence but did you see that story are there any other causes for optimism that might be coming from the the crowd that it's not cheering as loud as they can, but might be getting, you know, might be working behind the scenes to kind of achieve the same goals that everyone should be aligned around. Yeah, I mean, look, there's a, there's a lot of signal, I think, in that, in that move. I mean, at some point, Apple has to realize that their supply chains are really, really insecure.

This is like another point on the rare earth magnet, it's like one of the things, like, one of the, what great sort of unintended consequences of the Liberation Day, terror? and the general policy of terror policy coming out of the administration is that this actually was turned out to be a forcing function. It made China play their rarest card way too early. Had they decided, for instance, to attack Taiwan and then played that card, that would have been the optimum moment. But what happened was that in the negotiations around tariffs, they, they threatened to play the rare earth card. In fact, they did actually like reduce exports. the past couple months, but it was too soon.

Like they played it early, and now there's time for the United States to catch up. And this is, you know, in fact, as we saw with MP, you know, and the support they've gotten from the government, another company that were in the process of investing in called Vulcan elements is in the space as well. And we now have a window in time where we can build out an ecosystem to manufacture earth magnets in the United States and do it really, really quickly. So that's just a place where like there's like there's there's a lot of signal coming out around that as well. But there's, I think the fact that there is so much happening and at such a rapid rate, that's where we're seeing.

But that's where we're really seeing the advances here because like I don't know, like people ask me like, are you pleased with the way the admin's gone? Yeah, I am. What I've been surprised by though is the speed with which they've moved. And what's happened is like they're moving at like founder speed and that that becomes infectious. And so now you get you get cycles that might have taken a year or two or three to happen and things work through the system in the past. And now like we see, we're standing up a rare earth's capacity in the United States basically overnight. That was like a pipe dream four or five months ago. And now it's actually happening.

We got to stop calling them rare earths. They're just earth magnets. They're just earth magnets. They're not rare. They're not rare. They're only the process. form is rare. Yes, the industrial capacity is rare, but the product is not. Let's just call them earth magnets. It is. You got to, you know, we probably criticize China more than than most

podcasters on Earth. But you got to give them credit for letting the world think that they were just the Happy Meal toy manufacturing hub for like a couple decades. And then just like quietly owned, you know, all these critical supply chains. I'm curious how you're, you're thinking about solar. And one of the reasons I ask is I've invested in tons of these different kind of hard tech, new industrials categories. And I've yet to back a solar company. I only started actively Angel investing maybe four or five years ago.

And it's fallen out of fashion is one way to describe it. Casey Hammer's bringing it back. Yeah, so Casey's the only, Casey's the example. And I would happily invest in Casey if I had the chance. But I'm curious how you're thinking about that. It's another area that China is dominant in. And it seems like something that we wouldn't necessarily want long term. So like I've been sort of like semi obsessed with solar for a long time.

I just like it's mostly just basically being like thrifty. I'm like, damn, there's all that sunlight and I can just power my house for free. You know, so like I had like at my house in Arizona, I have solar on it. I've had it for years. Okay. but it's really not economic. And so there needs to be a pretty big leap forward for it to matter. Otherwise, why not just build more nuclear?

Why don't we just keep it simple? Yeah, Casey, an interesting point. Like PV Solar's actually isn't that good. And like the concentrators are like, okay. But like, again, like we have the solution already. So there's got to be a compelling case to be made as to why under the current, like, you know, with the current technology around solar, why is that even? been we're focusing on.

Interesting. Yeah. Casey's point was like, China is subsidizing photovolpeic manufacturing. And the most hurtful thing you could do is just buy all of it so that they take a loss

on every unit and then build up your capacity. But I don't know that that actually would catalyze a real shift in capacity and we might just get kind of hooked on. You're still helping them get extremely good at manufacturing. Especially if there's learning curve and stuff. So I don't know. It's a longer conversation.

And PV is just not that a efficient, right? That's the problem. Yeah, I think the argument was that it's like it's very well matched to the load of the grid of the American consumer because when it's hot out, we run our air conditioning and when it's hot out the sun is shining on the PV cells. And so there's a match there whereas a nuclear power plant generates just as much at night as does in the day. So I don't know, there's a whole bunch of different load use cases for AI training versus inference and all this different stuff. But it's a fascinating geopolitical dynamic. And it seems like the main takeaway is that China has just been saying yes and to everything. And they develop capacity everywhere. And

it's like we could try and predict the future. But if PV winds up being really important, I want to have capacity for that. If nuclear, I want that too. I want the smorgas board. Give me all the energy. But I don't know. They're building a ton of coal plants too. Yeah. Yeah. No, 100%. And like fortunately, you know, some of the AI infrastructure buildouts are pulling forward some of that. We're getting a whole bunch of natural gas online. Like we are becoming more energy independent. So green shoots all over the place. Jordy, anything else?

Last question? I think that's it for now. This is fantastic. Yeah, we got to have you back on, especially when there's like big news in your world or anything going on that you can comment on. Anytime, happy to do it. Yeah. We need, we just need 30 seconds notice.

We'll drop you the link. We'll drop you the link. You can just hop right on. Okay. Awesome. Yeah. Just signal me. home. I will. I'll talk to you soon, Chris. Have a very thing. Chris. Bye. Cheers. And speaking of minerals,

we have. AdQuick.com. If you're selling minerals, you put it on a billboard, out-of-home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out-of-home advertising. Only AdQqq combines a technology, out-of-home expertise, and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. What were you saying about materials? Well, we have the founder of Mariana Minerals joining the show. Welcome to the stream. Hit the soundboard. me the Ashton Hall. Welcome to the stream. How you doing Turner? Good. How are doing guys? Beautiful map behind you. I love cartography. I'm a big fan of throwing a map in the background.

Is that 3D or like does it have texture or does it just kind of look at look like a little bit of texture? Good. Not crazy 3D though. The Mercator projection I'm pretty sure. That's a good one. Anyway, introduce yourself. What do you do? Welcome to the show. Yeah, sure. Thanks for having me on, I guess, Turner Colbo here is CEO of Mariana Minerals. We're a vertically integrated software first mining company. So we're coming into projects that are, you know, have post-exploitation, they've discovered the mineral deposit. And we come in to engineer it.

So we develop the mine plan. We develop the refining plan. We capitalize it at the project level and from the Topco. And then we manage the construction. We manage the commissioning and then we operate it out into perpetuity. Okay, talk to me about the whole pipeline of actually getting minerals out of the ground. Let's say I own 100,000 acres in Alaska or something. I bought it just as a forest.

It's a ranch. Never explored it. What are the steps where I imagine we're talking about like a decade? I'm actually curious. There's exploration firms. Then you come in at some point. Like really walk me through a concrete example of going from like someone has some land to now we're getting material. Well, yeah.

And if if you're this verticalized. why not also do discovery. I'm sure there's a reason. I'm sure there's a, there's a big market of folks that are doing discovery. There's actually a bunch of awesome tech VC-backed startups that are focused on accelerating discovery. I think what we're missing is folks that are focused on condensing the timelines from when you have discovered something to when it is actually producing.

And it's like this sneak in the grass kind of challenge, like very complicated system of actually designing these plants, buying out all the infrastructure, installing the infrastructure, getting it running. But yeah, so you start with a, you know, flat piece of land. Ideally, it's flat. And you'll start this like really long campaign of, you know, you'll start with kind of like spot testing of different areas to determine and probably some like surface sampling to determine if there's something promising there.

There's some permits that come into play when it, when you have to actually start doing more advanced expiration campaigns. And that's something that, you know, if you're on federal land and sometimes on state land, those permits can get in the way of accelerating kind of mineral discovery. you'll do drill holes, you know, hundreds to thousands of drill holes to define a mineral deposit. And those mineral deposits can vary all over the place. You can have shallower ones where it's a little bit cheaper to drill. You can have really deep ones where it starts to get much more expensive to do and timely,

time intensive to do that expiration campaign. And all along the way, you are taking samples and you are kind of building these 3D models to try to understand how was the deposit formed. Why is the mineral there in the first place? And that helps to kind of inform also the advancing the expiration side of things. And in parallel with that, you're starting to do these testing campaigns, where you're running concentration tests to figure out how you can upgrade the ore to an intermediate product. You're starting to do refining tests to understand how you would actually extract the target mineral into its final state,

which is a high purity metal alloy in many cases, or a high purity kind of specialty chemical salt. And so you're writing these reports all along the way. So you'll start with a P.A, which is an initial economic assessment. You'll then do a pre-feasibility study. You'll do a feasibility study. You'll do a definitive feasibility study. And kind of as you're doing that, the value of the asset is kind of increasing and increasing. Speculators are piling into the stock.

And the intent there at that point is really. The backbone of the mining industry. Penny stock rippers. That's right. That's how that expiration is funded, really. Sure. They're trying to like ride that first wave of value creation. Yeah, similar to like FDA trials for new pharmaceuticals, probably.

Well, I can, and I can, I'm starting to figure out, you know, a number of reasons. Well, you're explaining them why you wouldn't want to do the exploration and discovery is because that could take like 10 years. Why don't you just do this thing? And then he goes on to describe the hardest thing in the world. Well, yeah, but then, but the other thing is like the duration, ideally you start working with a customer and they're like, here's what we have in the ground. Help us get it out. And then you can just start doing that. That's exactly right. And that's how we're thinking about it is we want to be the ones that go from, you know, the folks that are doing the expiration, they're there to define the resource and ideally get some return on the invested capital that they had as they were kind of like going through this like long and arduous process of defining mineral resource.

But typically those are geologists, financiers, lawyers. It's very rare where you'll see a junior mining company that's actually staff to take it all the way through to production. It's a different class of business fundamentally. Like you're dealing with in say like very high KAPEX deployment, complex kind of mining and refining systems that, you know, span the entire ecosystem of like engineering skill sets, commercial skill sets. And so there's a nice handoff point there. And so what happens today is the junior mining companies will spend a lot of time exploring

going to increase the value of the asset. Ideally, they flip it to a large mining company that comes in to do the hard yards of actually getting the thing operating. And that's where we want to come in as well. So, you know, the big mining companies, they're looking for billion dollars opportunities to deploy billions of dollars of capital. And, you know, they pick their spots on the commodities also. So you might have a commodity that's out of favor.

And so no one's picking up the asset. You might have an asset that, you know, would be called subscale in this scenario where it's not a billion dollars of CAPEX. It's only a couple hundred million dollars of CAPEX. Still a big project. And those are getting ignored. And so we think that with the differentiation on the tech stack, on the software side of things that we're bringing in and also a differentiated team, we can bring these smaller scale assets, which are like right size for us as an early stage company into production while they've been kind of ignored by the big mining companies. All right.

One more question and then we'll talk about the news today. But when did you first yearn for the mines? Yes, for the mines. So when I graduated college, I actually had this like vision of moving to Australia. and going and working in the mines. I never quite like converted on that. But worked at Tesla for nine years and change. Started out up in Reno was working on the gigafactory up there,

kind of like designing, building it, then started working on battery cell manufacturing, started working on areas of the cell chemistry and in the supply chain side of things. And as I was moving kind of further and further upstream, you know, the mining industry is wild. It's an awesome industry. But it's definitely been neglected.

Like we've kind of been viewing it as dirty and, you know, it should happen. It should happen, but it shouldn't happen here. And it's also like this massive, it's this awesome opportunity to work across scales. Like a lot of what you're developing starts at like the micron scale of like, how do I get this atom out of this other atom? Well, not atoms, but it's like atom out of this mineral. And then you have to scale that up to like kilometer scale infrastructure. And like that breadth of scales is awesome. That's really cool.

What's the news today? Yeah, so we're, ah, there we go. We're coming out of stealth with our series A raise. We had Andreessen Forward, Coastal Ventures, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, and a couple of other folks join in. We've raised $65 million. There we go. Okay. So left. First, first hit of the week. Oh, it feels so good. Congratulations. Fantastic news. Fantastic. I'm, last question before you jump off. Are you, are you, are you

guys like acquiring any companies or is it fully ground up you're just yeah so we will we'll we'll step in and we'll acquire mineral assets that that makes sense for us to step into or we're working on that in the copper space right now but that's like buying the land not necessarily like basically buying the resource itself not like a surrounding company or maybe it is structured as yeah so it'll it'll it'll vary there's a lot of mining projects that are on care and maintenance that you know have were turned off and to be turned back on with, you know, if you come in and retrofit to deploy kind of like the reinforcement learning platform that we're working to deploy, which means you need more

instrumentation, you need more control to be able to control the big refinery, which is basically a big robot. And in certain cases, it might be a mine that's actually operating today that we can step into and we see opportunity for uplift. And in other areas, it'll be a greenfield asset where, you know, we're stepping in and partnering and partnering with the resource owner. And then we would have a cash flow split kind of once we would have a cash flow split kind of once we we bring it to commercial scale so that they can keep exploring.

And you kind of create this flywheel where they're continuing to explore. They're leveraging cash flows from operating assets to fund their expiration. And then we would step in to develop those assets over time. So it's pretty variable. But yeah, we have. Yeah, so basically the market, the market prices certain assets here and you guys look at it and say with our technology, this is actually worth, you know, some premium on that. That's exactly right.

And in certain cases, the market will say that there's no. no net asset value or no NAF. And that's an area where you can kind of step in and get a good deal and bring it into production. He's a value minor. Let's go. This is super cool. Congratulations.

We, uh, I'm like, we're going to do a lot more on, uh, rare earths broadly. So we'll be back. We're going to stop calling him rare because we got plenty. We got a lot out there. They're hard to find in high concentrations and hard to get out. But they're, they're out there. Awesome. Well, congratulations to you and the team on the raise and hopefully have you have you back on soon. We'll talk to you, same. Awesome. Appreciate it again. Cheers.

Eighth Sleep. Go to Aidsleep.com. Get a pod five-five ultra. They have a five-year warranty, a 30-night risk pretrial, free returns, free shipping. Get an eight sleep. We have our next guest from Altimeter coming in the studio. I got to give people that I'm so sick. My HRV thinks that I'm dead. So thank you to my A-Sleep for getting, getting you're saving your life. Saving your life safety technology. You heard it here first. That is health advice. Not a health claim.

Not awesome. Ask your doctor about saving your life with an A-Sleep. I'm going to botch his name, Jaman. Let's bring him in from Altimeter. There we go. How you doing? Good. What's happening?

Great to be here. Great to me. Great to meet you. Sorry for botching your name on the way in. No, no. How do we say it? Given name is Benjamin. Benjamin.

My parents called me Jammin as a toddler. In kindergarten, they were a bunch of Benjamin. So they just told my teacher, hey, call him Jammin. That's what we call it home. So I was trying to give it this exotic. Jameen. I'm sure you've gotten every variety over the course of career. The only one that bugs me is Jasmine.

Other than that, it's, uh, and anything goes. Okay. Well, good to meet you. Jammin. Jammin ball, powerful. Likewise. It's fun. Turner and I actually, uh, good friends.

in college. It's fun seeing him on the show right before. Oh, amazing. No way. Yeah. That's awesome. No way. Where did you guys go to school? We were at Stanford together. Oh, okay. So you had a sort of non-traditional. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah, it's kind of like the Stanford of feeders into VC.

Yeah, it really is. Yeah. Well, it's great to have you on the show. I feel like you guys over at Ultimiter have just been on a run. Just also like, I feel like Invest Americas or the Trump accounts is like uh um feels like almost an incubation so it's been it's been uh super cool yeah super cool seeing that seeing that take off and get passed into law yeah yeah fantastic well i wanted yeah i want to have you on to talk about uh it sounds like you've been digging into the uh the figma s one would love to kind of get get your reaction to it you had a post uh getting picked up

earlier in the timeline yeah no happy to i mean in many ways figma is the white buffalo of my career It's the one that got away. I've been at Altitiminar for about five years, was Red Point for five years before that. And I think the memory of venture capital that I'll never forget is trying to win the Series C. I think this was late 2018 or early 2019 with Vivek, who was one of my colleagues

and Scott, who was one of the partners at Red Point at the time. And we lost to Andrew Reed, who's a phenomenal investor at Sequoia. But I'll never forget that round. The Figma Series C, it's my white buffalo. He's told us the whole story about how, like, They brought him into the Sequoia office and they sat Dylan down in the Brown conference room because it's Sequoia. They have all of their conference rooms named after their endowment partners and their LPs.

And they were like, look, we're investing in you. But if you make us money, you're helping your school. And I thought it was very interesting. There you go and about pitch. It's a good pitch. So it got away. But now you're digging in further and trying to understand the business and the S-1. what have you learned? What are the interesting takeaways? What should someone, even if we just

zoom out, what are people typically looking for in a software company going public these days? Yeah, it's a great question. And I'd say, in many ways the market needs this type of company to go public. We haven't seen a software IPO really since the service Titan IPO late last year. If you look at the overall kind of growth rates of the public software universe today, it's declined quite significantly. I think the median growth. rate. I track a basket of about 80 software companies. The median growth rate's about 14%. And that's not what it used to be. We're not really in this high growth. There's not a lot of high growth software companies that you can buy and invest in. Figma comes out as a marquee software

business. It's growing 49%. But what it also brings is 28% free cash flow margins, which is super rare. The growth in and of itself, they would be, at least in my basket, the fastest growing public company, when you add in the free cash flow margins at scale, it has this unique profile of growth plus profits, which, you know, Rule of 40 is a popular metric a lot of investors look at, which just, you know, adds your growth rate plus your free cash flow margin. They'd be number one on the list. And so I think that's something the markets are excited about, growth and profitability with a company that's almost at a, you know, billion dollars of run rate. So the rule of 40 is you add the free cash flow market.

to the growth rate of the business on the top line, and you should be at around 40% positive, but it sounds like Figma's up at 79%, 69%, something like that, like well above 40, is that right? That's right, yeah. 40% is kind of the benchmark for are you considered a good or great business. And so they kind of far exceed that, and even when lined up against the rest of the software universe,

at least the 80 that I tracked, that's the highest. How much credit should we give to where the business is today, to all the chaos that happened during the Adobe acquisition era. Yeah, in many ways you got a billion dollar non-delusive investment through the breakup fee, which sounds like, you know, they obviously don't, didn't necessarily need that, but it gives them a massive amount of leverage.

Yeah, I'm also interested in other aspects that could change. If you think you're going to be acquired, Like maybe you freeze hiring and that's a good decision and then you wind up, you know, actually increasing your margins or maybe it changes the way you think about the business. They did make changes like probably when the acquisition didn't go through. I do remember there was almost an immediate change in how they were doing pricing and billing. Yeah, sure. That was like night and day.

Sure, sure, sure. I mean, I think it's, I think this is a testament to the strength of not just the business, but to Dylan and the leadership team. Having a company go through something like that, most companies don't make it back from that. Because as a customer, you're thinking, do I want to use this product? What's going to happen when it gets acquired? Is it going to be shut down? Is it going to be a focus? You get a lot of customers who are thinking, I don't know if I want to use this software. You get a lot of new hires thinking, well, gosh, I thought I was going to go work for a high growth startup. I don't really want to go work for Adobe. You know, it's the type of people that Adobe

attracts you're going to be different than the type of people that a high growth startup attracts. And so you get a lot of headwinds on the customer front as well as on the hiring front. And it can just lead to really negative inertia that's hard to overcome. You know, look at, you know, windsurf and open AI. I'm sure similar dynamics happened there where thought you're going to get acquired. Customers think different of you. New hires think different of you. It's really hard to come back from something like that.

And the fact that Figma not only did, but is, you know, I think, I'm going to to be worth a whole lot more than what that acquisition was just a few years ago. It's a testament to, and many of the strength of the management team, which, again, I don't think it can be overstated how significant of an achievement it was for that team to come back from that moment, even stronger than what they were going into it. I'm curious how you think, you know, if you were going to, you know, anybody that's kind of I try to analyze the business, I think one thing that'll, you know, that, that, you know, that you can make a really strong case for why Figma will be a massive beneficiary of AI, right?

I think if anybody, you know, they've had different experiments over the years. They have Figma make now. But the other side will look at the business and say, well, if every engineer can just generate designs instantly, is design software necessary? Do you have a view there? I mean, my, I've been generally, as somebody that uses Figma every single day and has for my entire career, I sort of expect to use it a decade from now, and I expect to use it even 15 years from now. I don't know, like it's just such core infrastructure to the company. And so that's my view.

So when people say, oh, we want, you know, like all UI will just be generated. But how are you thinking about that kind of set of risk factors? That's a great question. And I think what we can do is look at. back at how the business is executed over its entire life cycle to kind of get a glimpse into how they might be successful or not in this period of time. I mean, when Figma was founded, the entire industry used a product called Sketch. And Sketch was almost the equivalent of Excel to an investment banker. And it really wasn't until the Series C in Figma where it kind of started

to become obvious that, wait a second, maybe this product, maybe this startup is actually going to convert the world from Sketch to something new. And for outsiders, and even for insiders, designers, the notion of taking away sketch, again, it was like taking away Excel from an investment bank. It was a huge deal. All of the shortcuts, the workflows, all of that was just ingrained into your muscle memory. But they were able to do that. They were able to overcome that. And that is one of the reasons why they're so great today. I think the management team isn't naive, though. They're looking at the opportunity as it exists today. And they say, well, we can't afford to be sketched. We can't let someone

Figma us like we Figma'd sketch you know, I don't know, seven, eight years ago. And so it's certainly the thing that is top of mind for them. I look at Figma Make as a step in the right direction. I look at the audience, the distribution, the mindshare that they have. I look at the fact that Dylan is still the CEO.

It's a founder-led business that has a history of execution over, you know, a decade-long period. And everything that I believe to be true is that they will be successful and then they will be the vendor that kind of capitalizes on this this kind of trend of, well, do I even need Figma? I'm just going to prototype in with a prompt and I'm going to, you know, get my design.

I think that misses some of the iterative process of the design process. And so I think it's a risk. Well, yeah, you can make, you can, you know, anybody that's arguing like all UI will be generated from a prompt, you can go back the other way, which is I'll just generate designs for the software that I want and understand how the product works and how it flows and all the different functionality and then I'll just generate all the code after, you know, it can go both ways.

Yeah, and market size, I mean, look, if you rewind the clock to the Ced series A, series B of rounds that Fegman was raising, a huge reason not to do the deal was TAM. You'd say, how many designers are there in the world? What's the price point of designers willing to play? Multiply P times Q and like, that's your TAM. I think early on, what did the world get wrong?

Well, it was that, that queue is actually higher. It's not just the designers. You're going to creep into product people. You're going to creep into engineers and the people that are going to touch and use the product aren't just that limited set of designers. I think the same thing is going to happen with AI, right? Now all of a sudden, you are going to increase the scope and increase the surface area of the types of people and the personas who can interact with Figma in the same way you're seeing with the coding solutions, right? Maybe the right way to think about the Tam for a windsor for a cursor isn't 20 bucks a month because that's what GitHub charges times number of engineers in the world and software

engineers. Maybe it's the average salary of a software engineer times the number of software engineers. Those are two vastly different numbers. And I think when we look at how that applies to Figma today, if they get this shift right, it will massively expand the personas and the type of people who can and will access and pay for Figma. Makes sense. Very well said. Thanks so much for coming on to. is really helpful. We should come back on again soon and let's look at the other 80 companies. Let's do it. You track. I think Figma just process-wise, you know, supposed to price on

Wednesday, trade next Thursday. So they're on the road talking to investors like us and excited for their debut on Thursday. Maybe finally own a piece of the. Exactly. I texted Dillon and I told him that exact same thing. I'll finally become a shareholder. That's awesome. No longer the white whale. Well, thanks so much for hopping on and breaking it down for us. We'll talk to you soon. See you. See you. Bye. Up next, we have Harper Carroll.

Coming into the studio, welcome to the stream. Hope we are waiting one minute. Let me see. Let me tell you about the, we already let you tell you about timeline. Wait, we have the bucket pullback. We've got Harper here.

Oh, we have Harper. Harper. Welcome to the show. Hi, Julian and John. Thanks so much for having me on the show. Welcome to the show. Would you mind introducing yourself? And there's a bunch of things that I want to talk about,

but I'll let you kick it off in the intro on yourself. Okay. I am Harper. I run Harper Carroll AI. So I'm an AI educator. I'm a machine learning engineer. That's my background. I have two degrees in computer science and engineering,

specializing in AI from Stanford. Then I was at Meta, building machine learning systems there for about four years. Then I was at a GPU environment, cloud environment development startup. That where I became head of AI. I actually started teaching AI there. And that's how this all. kind of was born. But I also, T-A. when I was at Stanford, some core AI PhD courses. And yeah, that company was acquired by NVIDIA and I just teach AI now full time. I started on X with

fine-tuning guides. So you might, if you've seen me before on X, it was probably from that. I started in late 2023 with like fine-tuning open source model guides with your own data or with hugging face data, you know, coding guides, stupid or notebooks. And then, uh, went to Instagram and have been there and kind of reaching towards YouTube and starting there with Q&As and yeah, just kind of seeing where this goes. Yeah. What's been the bigger news in your world, the IMO gold medal competition between Open AI and Google or GPT agents or something else in the world of AI?

There's a new news story every day. What's been capturing your attention? Yeah, there's a new news story. every single day. I actually saw one recently. What were they saying? That reasoning models, well,

the major AI companies are coming together and saying that they want to make sure that reasoning models stay open and that we continue to see their thought processes. So that kind of research, I also saw really interesting research

from Anthropic that said that reasoning models are not actually necessarily showing us what we think that they're thinking. So, for example, Anthropic gave a reasoning model a question and it kept getting it wrong. And then they gave it a hint. And the model got

it right. But when you looked at the trace, the chain of thought from the reasoning model, it didn't mention a hint. So we think that we're actually seeing its reasoning, but not necessarily. So there needs to be a lot more work on this, but yeah, some of the cool research stuff. And yeah, there's always new new tech coming out, opening eyes agent, very exciting stuff. For plus these browser. Do you expect, we've been testing agent, John was testing it over the weekend. I was testing it on the show earlier. Do you expect an explosion of consumer use cases in the way that everybody, I mean,

it's hard to build a product that's more viral than like the initial chat GPT product. But are you expecting there to be like specific use cases that come out of that? and are you seeing any that are super promising? Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, I feel like I was, I advise companies as well in their AI. And I feel like I was kind of early to say, you know, there was a wave maybe about a year ago where people were saying, oh, you know, rapper companies are BS.

You're a loser if you make a rapper company. But I think I was one of the earlier ones to say, like, no, actually, you can't really compete with these foundational open source models. And yes, if you want to do a small, specialized model, I think we'll see a lot more of those. I don't think we need these massive foundation models that know everything about the world for very specialized tasks. So I think we'll start to see more of those. But one consumer use case that I'm really, really excited about is using AI for kids. I think both of you guys have kids, right?

Yeah. Yeah. Do you use it with your kids at all yet? At least large language model specifically, like chat chip. Yeah, totally. Usually when I want to violate intellectual property rules and I want to create a story where Spider-Man, who's a Disney IP, interacts with Batman from Warner Brothers. Oh, good.

Sitting on a transformer. Yeah, exactly. And so I find that all the large language models are happy to write poetry that completely disregards the cinematic universes, which I have a lot of fun with events and illustrate them. I always thought that these form factors, the Avi's friend.com, the, the rabbit R1, I always thought that those were something that if you just focused on the. kid use case, which is like a friend that can help you understand the world that maybe a parent

can kind of like call into. Totally. Would be, would be cool. But, but yeah, I'm curious. Yeah, yeah. So how does this actually roll out? What are you excited about? Is it going to be all sold in through the, through the parents and the parents will be using the product and then kind of like giving the result to the kid? Like, I feel like, I feel like my son got an AI generated, like story, like gifted to him over Christmas, but it wasn't, it wasn't like he is, you know, using an LLM directly. At the same time, there's that news that OpenAI is partnering with Mattel for kind of like a chat GPT Barbie. That's kind of interesting. What I'm most excited about is using large language models for kids in terms of like audio. So, so kids are, as I'm sure you know,

I don't know how old your kids are, but they are relentlessly curious. Yeah, totally. Until that's kind of beaten out of them. And I think so many parents now are single parents or they're working two jobs. And, you know, we've really demonized screen time. And I think for good reason, right, when you're sitting, when you have a kid sitting in front of a screen and they're just passively consuming, that's really different than when they're able to interact with an AI model. They're able to think, ask questions, practice forming questions that are, you know, comprehensible to the model. The model can give feedback on the language. You know, if they're asking a question, it can show up as text.

They can learn to read and write as they are talking. to the model because as they speak and the text shows up on screen, they're actually like, that process is built in of understanding language to text, which will help again with reading and writing. And these models, I think they can be offered to everyone for free because you don't need a super advanced model for kits. Like you just need to have some general understanding of the world. It's, you really just need like a probabilistic word generator machine, which is just how AI models are at their core. And yes, you should, you know, we might want to have some guard rails around hallucination and making sure that there are actual facts, which would, you know,

maybe perhaps make the models more expensive because you have to hook it up to, you know, databases or, you know, the internet or what have you. But these very basic AI models to help kids practice speaking to help them engage their curiosity. Because, again, parents are busy. They eventually end up, kids come to their parents and they eventually end up losing that curiosity. And I'm not saying, I think this is a very controversial opinion. Some people hear this and they say, oh, you know, AI is going to replace human interaction. I don't see that at all. And I actually have reached out to my audience on Instagram asking how they use AI.

And the ones who use it have found it extremely rewarding. Some use it with their kids. So for example, like if they want to practice learning with their kid, but they're worried that they won't know the answer to a question, they can have AI kind of in the chat with them and they can ask AI when they have a question. Some parents reached out to me and said that they have a nine-year-old and a 12-year-old, and that AI is kind of like this cool older sister. So they have the audio be this 20-year-old girl. And they're like, she is the cool, her sister that helps them discuss topics

that they wouldn't listen to their quote-unquote dumb parents about, like nutrition and exercise and screen time. And like they love this AI, it's this cool older sister. Another really cool application of AI that I saw recently. I was at Dell Tech World and I saw this AI. I bought, called Norby, it's a physical robot. And he was made to help a child with his speech impediment. And this hit close to home for me because my little sister, she's four years younger than me. And when she was like going on eight, she couldn't say her ours. She would say like hop-oh. And she was like, you know, a kid. And she had a speech impediment. And we would send her

to a speech therapist. And they're so expensive. And the kid is miserable. And they're sitting with this therapist for like max two to three hours at a time and you know they don't relate to this strange adult and again it's so expensive whereas this norby bot was made to talk to the kid about what they're interested in truly completely customizable at their level it's fun they can give the feedback and then i think they've expanded this norby bot to be to help teach languages in general and so just again meeting kids where they're at with what they're interested in helping stoke that flame of curiosity helping. I just see it as, and again, I mean, it's this, this ultimate democratizer. It's the, the ultimate leveler in terms of education, right? And so I can imagine, I can imagine a hardware

device. So, so my three-year-old is hopelessly addicted to reading, like all day long, like great addiction to have, but like all day long, just no matter what we're doing throughout the day, I'll find a book and he'll be like, read this, read this, read this. And we, almost always indulge, but you could imagine a hardware device that uses just computer vision to like read what's on the page and have a small speaker read it out to the kids. Because some books, they include like a speaker and you can like press play on it and they can flip through it. But then you're talking about wonder books.

Wonder books. But they can often get out of sync and then you don't know kind of where they are and they're in the wrong page and it's confusing. But if they had a flashlight style device that you can just point at the word and have it read out, they would probably learn. to read like a very, very young age. Yeah, it feels like we should be entering like a boom of widgets and like Christmas gifts. And like it just maybe, maybe we're just a little bit early in this stuff.

This Christmas will be dominated by AI enabled stuff. But I'm curious, one question I have is how like the ex audience really woke up to the AI psychosis. Kind of crisis last week. I feel like there had been some reporting in like the New York Times prior to that. But I don't think anybody took it super seriously until recently. But most parents would not want their kids 7,000 prompts deep in any L-L-O-R-R-R-D. Yeah, but just how aware is like the Instagram world in terms of the risks of going, you know, recursive prompting and just going super, super deep and getting down a crazy rabbit

hole by yourself? Yeah, I haven't spoken about that specifically on Instagram. I talked a little bit about it in my latest YouTube Q&A video where I was just saying, you know, I'm concerned about people entering psychosis. and the recursive deep dive, that is one element. Then there's also people who, and I think this is more common on, say, Instagram, where people think that AI is being channeled,

it's like God is being channeled through AI. And I talked about it through a mathematical lens of like, yes, okay, what are synchronicitys? They're low probability events. And technically AI, because it's a probability machine, could have a low probability event occur, right? It doesn't always choose the most likely word. just samples from probability distribution.

So in some ways, yes, you could have some kind of synchronicity. You could have whether you see that as divine, whatever. However, you cannot assume that that is always the case. And I would assume that it's never the case. Because people are entering this deep psychosis where, yeah, they think that beings are channeling through them. And then when we had this issue where AI is trained and told, I don't know if it's trained to, but it's at least system prompt told.

to encourage the user and validate the user and their thinking. And yeah, I mean, it's a slippery slope. And perhaps something I should talk more about on Instagram, especially given what happened last week. Well, yeah, the thing that's concerning to me is it feels like it can trigger the same type of psychotic break that ayahuasca can, except it's available to everybody on their device in five minutes at all hours of the day.

Completely. It's like a lot of large numbers. If there's a billion people using those 30 minutes a day, you're just going to hit everyone that's at risk for this thing very quickly. So you have to go in and figure out how to intervene before people get thousands of prizes. I just think it's important. I think it's something that we can quickly like create guardrails and overcome as an industry. But at the same time, it's still a good time to say like talk to your loved ones.

If you have somebody that you think might be months. and months into one of these rabbit holes. Yeah, it gets into like how the product companies and kids, kids, AI education companies would need to message because where Jordy and I are both Yodo owners, which I'm not sure if you're familiar with, but it's a, it's essentially a Bluetooth-connected radio that you can physically put a card in and it will read you a Dr. Sue's story and then you can take that card out. So like a three-year-old can use it and it doesn't have a UI or anything,

but then you can play stuff from your phone if you want as an adult, but you can even do like volume limits. It's very like designed and it has a nice harness around it. So it's very safe. But if they were like, hey, we're launching an LLM, I would be like, okay, which model? Like tell me which model. Tell me exactly the guard rails.

Grok. What? What? Yeah. Grog heavy and there's no limits on what you can do. And yeah, and it doesn't have internet access. So it might get kind of wild with what's in the way it's there. Yeah.

So I would, I would have a lot of questions. But then I'm in this weird like ultra prosumer world. where I'd be buying that as a consumer, but I'm deeply, so like, like, maybe we need like an FDA label on this or some sort of, you know, kind of like, you know, ages three plus or, you know, when you guide the Legos, it's like 100 pieces, like the smallest piece is small enough that a toddler could choke on it. Maybe don't buy that one. There's going to be a lot of work to get done to make these products palatable because as soon as something goes wrong with AI, there's a massive incentive to write a piece about it and it's going to go viral because everyone's kind of expecting

it because we've been raised on The Terminator, unless you're Jordy and you haven't seen that movie. Oh, interesting. I mean, you could probably just, you could train a model for kids. Yeah, I think so. And then you could also have like a secondary model, like reading everything and kind of like passing through a filter and double checking. Totally. You look at, you limit the training data.

You don't have it trained on Reddit things or sketchy sites. Even Google search, Google AI powered search, which is like a pretty, if you're, it's a pretty, It's a one, it only, you don't really chat with it. It just, you type in a couple keywords and it just gives you an AI summary. And there's already hallucinations, people saying, like, there was that story about eating glue. And there was a story about, there was a story about, like, if you, if you ask it, like, really definitively, like, define this axiom or like, tell me the story of this thing. And you just basically talk it into believing that this is a thing.

It'll just make up stuff. And that could go off the rails. Like, I don't know if I'd want my four-year-old walking around being like, oh, yes, the parable of, you know, like the something or other and I'm like what are you talking about dude like that is not a real thing like like you know it's just coming up with like you know I want them to learn a bird isn't a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush not like you know a hat applied to a crystal ball is a diamond and I'm like what are you talking about like you just learn that from somewhere chaos anyway yeah it's really good feedback because it's something that I'm thinking a lot about because I

totally really excited about AI for kids but well you'll probably be fully employed because I think everyone is going to be starting these companies. Hopefully it's a bull market in Christmas gifts. Or build one yourself. Yeah. Yeah. Come back and launch it here on the show. I'm really thinking about it.

But yeah. We'll join it. We'll happily join the beta. We will. We'll use our children as guinea pigs for the AI revolution. Well, we will test it on Tyler our intern first. Make sure it's him he looks up because he's programming right now.

Sorry. You're not on camera, Tyler. But we will be testing children's toys on you and seeing if it deranges you and then making sure. And then only the, then will it be applied to the three and four year olds in our lives. He's got on camera. I've been embarrassed.

Thank you so much for hopping on, Harper. This is fantastic. Yeah, great chatting. We will talk to you soon. Have a great one. Cheers. Up next, we have Nikita Singler-Ready, good friend of mine. Fortuna Health, God, little, lose.

She's in the Restream waiting room. Let's bring her in, Nikita. How are you doing? Sorry, we're late. Sorry, we're late. We're running late today. Great to hang out with you. Welcome to the stream.

kick us off a little bit of an introduction. Who are you? What do you do? I'm Nikita. I'm one of the co-founders and CEO of Fortuna Health. We're TurboTax for Medicaid, so I can go into what that means. But much like how TurboTax helps people understand their taxes, all the different rules and regulations for taxes in different states, for doing the same thing for government health coverage, where all the rules are different in every state. And I'm really excited to be here, excited to support the ratio, one woman.

to men and inspiring little girls everywhere that you can achieve your big dream, which is being on DBPN. Let's go. There we go. It's great to have you. You have news today? Yeah, break it down. Yes. John, you want to do the honors? Yes. So we announced our series A led by Andreessen today, which we're talking about. How much? How much? There we go. Congratulations. Fantastic. Fantastic. Nice. Fantastic. Wait, so give us the back story.

When did you start the company? Was there like a specific insight that you had? Or like I imagine you're, be kind of crazy if you weren't using a lot of AI to do this. But so maybe there was a catalyst there. How did it come together? Yeah, so two and a half years ago we started working on this problem. And I think one of the crazy things about a lot of healthcare is that you look at it from an outsider's perspective. And someone else, every time we talk about this idea, they say, why wasn't there a turbo tax for Medicaid?

Like when I shared the analogy earlier, it seemed like, of course, someone should have built this five years ago, eight years ago, but nobody had, shockingly. So as we were looking at ideas to build, and particularly we wanted to build a big, we want to solve a big problem, but specifically a tech problem in healthcare. There's a lot of stuff like physician shortages, right? That's a different sort of problem to solve or helping people find and get connected to a behavioral health clinician. That's a different sort of problem. We looked at, is there big, important consumer tech to be built here and then triangulate it onto this? And, Jordie, we do use AI, but it's not the core part of our product. I would say the big part is helping guide people step by step through what's a really scary, challenging process for folks, processes that sometimes involve faxes or going in person, right, to the health care version of the DMV

for Medicaid. So that's our big point. If you like the DMV, if you like the DMV, if you love the DMV, you're going to love health care by the same people that brought you the DMV. That's great. The absolute legend. Talk to me about the different counterparties and people involved. There's traditional insurance companies. It sounds like in this case you're dealing with the government. Our doctors, an important piece of this is a. just direct to consumer. How do you acquire those customers? How do you make money from them? Yeah, good question. So every state has their own Medicaid program. So if you're in California, it's called Medi-Cal. If you are in Oregon, it has a different name. In Pennsylvania,

Medicaid is called medical assistance. So every state has its own program and then multiple programs they're under. And then some of those states outsource that work of running the Medicaid program to insurance companies. So you have United Medicaid, Senteen Medicaid, Elevance Anthem Medicaid, et cetera. So a lot of our customers are those insurance companies to make it easier for their members to understand the steps that they have to take to enroll and renew. So we're not D to C. We're more B to C if that makes sense. Makes sense. What about customer acquisition? How do you actually get people on board? Full 18 million on three Super Bowl ads. Yeah, hell yeah.

So mostly we get texted out or like listed on the website or we get emailed out. So it's really easy. You just click a link that, let's say a health plan, health plan TBPN, you're insured by TBPN Medicaid. And they send you a link saying, hey, you need to renew your New York or your Illinois Medicaid. Click here so that you can stay renewed with TVPN Medicaid. And so that's how people would get access to Virginia that way. Okay. Interesting.

Wait, so, yeah, how do the employers fit in? Because I feel like a lot of Medicaid users or the insured folks on Medicaid are, like, it always felt like it was independent from the corporation that they work for. Is that not the case? Yeah, no, it kind of is. So you don't get it through like your job, let's say. Okay, okay, yeah, yeah. Usually because your job doesn't cover.

Sure, sure. Your job doesn't cover. Got it. And then you go on Medicaid. Got it. So you're getting it through them. Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense.

And then how do you actually get paid? Great question. So the same insurance company as I was mentioning earlier or hospitals, let's say, let's say you come in and you don't have insurance. And say, hey, do you want to try or use Fortuna to help you get Medicaid? So those are the two types of entities that pay for us. Okay, cool. Yeah, what is the state of the fax machine in the medical insurance industry?

We've heard it's alive and well, but it also feels like it's got to be wrapped with APIs at this point. Are they wrapped? Are they wrapped? Yeah, yeah. You know that that meme from the, why am I forgetting the name of the movie where they throw the fax machine on the ground? And everyone's like, that's office space. Don't worry, Jority. I actually have seen that. Oh, you have? That's, that's, that's, uh, that's, uh, my dad's favorite movies. One of the five movies you've seen. Yes, exactly. Um, healthcare, you're right, has been keeping faxes alive for really a long time. Um, there's so many stupid and silly reasons for

that. A lot of it is you can't even, if you're, let's say, the state government, sometimes you're not allowed to procure a new contract with a non-fax company. So you've been living on Xerox for 30 years because it's that hard sometimes to contract with the government. But yes, people are wrapping, we're wrapping around automating faxes, tracking those faxes, etc. So we sort of have like a bunch of different automations around, are we submitting things to fax machines? Are we submitting them via snail mail? Are we submitting them to digital portals, email, et cetera, and then tracking all of that because some different types of Medicaid accept different submission formats. But absolutely fax is alive and well. Are you going state by state

or trying to do all 50 at once? Like what are the tradeoffs there? Is there a common pattern? I remember a lot of the telehealth companies needed to get their doctors certified in different states. And so there was actually another company called Medallion that was set up just to do doctor licensing in all 50 states. What's the actual rollout and what are the considerations there? Yeah. So we are largely going state by state as we roll out with new customers. But the classic thing is when you get really good at a state, like we have a lot of customers in New York. We started getting more customers in New York because we got to go to New York.

So it's more like patchwork sequencing. Like absolutely we want to go to all 56 in case you didn't know. state and territory Medicaid, yes. What are the last six? Break it down. The others are like Guam and Central Marilla Islands. Oh, the islands?

Are you going to visit all six? I feel like you've got to make the... You got to expense that. It's like every entrepreneur's got to go to Delaware and just take it in. I need to do like, you know, how duck when he wanted to sort of run for faucet. I need traveled up there. We have to do that. I got to do that sometime.

Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. What else is, obviously you follow the industry broadly. What else is interesting in healthcare, in AI? Where are you either partnering with existing companies or you see some low-hanging fruit that if you weren't building this, you'd be, you kind of see it on the roadmap of someone else or you see some like white space where you're like, wow, that's a really unsolved problem. I'm busy, but that's interesting. Yeah.

I mean, there's a ton of low-hanging fruit. I would say there's a lot of people that are doing conversion of. In the way that somebody writes a doctor's note, that needs to be written up in a very specific way inside the EHR. That needs to be written up and converted in a very specific way to how insurance companies convert and accept that information. I still think that there's a tremendous amount just to be done in that space. I think that obviously voice AI is just in its infancy, honestly, especially because you need to get more specialized for each field. So I'd say there's a lot that you could do. and can be done in that space.

And I'm really bullish on AI nurses. Like clearly we have a doctor as a nursing shortage. Like that's obviously a problem that has not been solved by policy. I'm perfectly fine getting my care, particularly, you know, low level, low acuity care by an AI that's probably much better than a doctor who has or a nurse who has no time to see me. I'm just, you know, coming in, coming out. I'm one of a hundred people that day. I think there's still a huge opportunity there. Yeah.

Or even just someone who's like, there can still be a human in the loop, but they're, like, you're chatting with an AI. And then at the end of the day, the doctor kind of looks through, okay, they made seven different recommendations. I have most of the context. I can just see that nothing went crazy off the rails. Exactly. Last question from my side. And I'm curious if it came up during the fundraise or how you guys think about it. But I can imagine a world in the future where somebody would go to chat GPT agent and they would say, I need to sign up for Medicaid, help me do it.

And then it just starts going, you know, goes and spends 15 minutes and figures out the steps and things like that. And then eventually could take action. Do you worry about that as like a competition? Well, I'm sure you don't worry because you're a killer. But do you think about that as like a competitive vector? Are there reasons why that's just like going to be an edge case that for many, many, many years is like not something that, you know, a general agent would be able to do? How do you think about it? Yeah, it's a good question.

I think it solves like 30% of the problem. which is, okay, what website should I go to to do this? But then you run into problem number one, which is, what happens if you forgot your password from four years ago? AI can't really solve that problem number one. And then let's say a second problem, maybe you were the child and your parent had the Medicaid. So now you actually have to split your account from a prior account. So all of these interesting, weird problems that, yeah, if you put like the Medicaid rule

manual through AI, sure you could get. high-level steps, but it doesn't solve these very real-world tangible problems that only gets solved from building this turbotax experience that can connect into state systems or know where you need to go to route those types of, I wouldn't even call them edge case. It's just all of the complexities that get wrapped up and compounded are people's real-world scenarios. So definitely AI solves 30% of what is the basic rules, but that long-tail stuff of, okay, I switched my job three days ago, how exactly am I supposed to report that, but now the state has a new fax line that nobody has listed publicly. I can't solve that. That makes total sense. Awesome. Well, congratulations to you and the

team on the raise. Yeah, thank you. Wait. If I have one minute, I want to share some receipts from from 2022 when I sent John a message. So, Jordy, I think this might have been before you were involved, but I said, hey, John, props to the storytelling work you're publishing on YouTube. I think most people we know are still sleeping on YouTube's reach. There we go. October 12th, 2022, and he said, hey, thanks, it's crazy. I've been pulling it over a million views per month, but no one has really noticed. Look at you now.

No one noticed. Yeah, John basically created technology YouTube. Yes. He's, you know, the godfather of it. Created content, really. He created content. Created entertainment. Literally, that's content creator.

Created storytelling. Created content. Yes, exactly. Thank you so much. Great to have you on. We'll talk to you soon. Thanks, guys. See later. Cheers. Goodbye.

And we have our bucket pull back. If you've been watching from the early days, we used to put random posts in a bucket, pull them out. Do you want one? Can we talk about it? It's this one. People now watch YouTube on TV sets more than on their phones or any other device, an average of more than one billion hours each day. One billion hours a day.

This is from a journal article, how YouTube won the battle for TV viewers. Not surprising to me, I mean, it's been in this case for a while that a lot of, if you're people that are YouTubers, I obviously had been in the industry for a long time,

just to have such a large amount of their viewers coming in on TV. So TV, Lindy, apparently. Yeah, we were talking about this with David Tenor, like, what podcast do you watch on TV? It's pretty rare, but I was telling him, like there are like these big events that happen on on podcasts every once a while where like everyone has to watch it um I mean the biggest example from last year was like during the campaign

when Donald Trump went on Joe Rogan and I think a hundred million people watch that I bet a lot of people watch that on TV they sat down and watched the whole thing because that is such a critical conversation they didn't just watch they sat there they sat down and listened but but that type of thing you're talking about someone who's like on the campaign trail that might really affect your life one way or another, like the subtle intonations of like how people respond. It's something that like the facial like you're going to want to see the whole experience. And so yeah, makes a ton of sense that would be thrown on the TV. Well, I have another post here for MADS. This is an exchange. Somebody's saying name your favorite quote by a celebrity. And I think we've read this. We've read this before. It's a great one. But it's an all timer. So Playboy is asking Nicholas K. your salary is shooting up to up into the multi-millions per movie reportedly four to seven million do those numbers make you chuckle nicholas cage i don't chuckle i have respect for the dollar and uh i think that is a great philosophy for uh for for money respect i agree i agree uh do you want to do more timeline what i see some big aviation news flexjet uh this is coming from

Preston Holland. Flexjet raises 800 million from Bernard Arnault, volume in the company at $4 billion. So let's give it up for private aviation. And Preston is saying, well, we see LV interiors on flex jet airplanes. That would be very interesting collab. I mean, I'm sure that they're already done in the third party, but not OEM. Maybe you get one from the factory. You know, these collabs happen in the car world every once in a while. Why not in the private jet world, I suppose? And then here I do this one an ad from Nike with Scotty Sheffler. I just thought this was good.

This is Nike at its best if we can pull this up. You've already won, but another major never hurt. And this is Nike at its best. None of these D to C ads. I don't want to see UGC. Just give me some inspiration. Inspell. This was interesting.

Mert highlighted this and said this having a quarter million likes is a good reminder that the average person has no idea how the world works in any way. And so Antonio Brown. Oh, that's A.B. Oh, I didn't realize it was A.B. There's basically a post that says Astronomer's CEO, Andy Byron, and Chief People Officer Kristen Cabot have been immediately put on leave. And A.B. says, if he's the CEO, then who put him on leave? And it got 250,000 likes. That's a lot of likes.

Apparently people think that all CEOs are total dictators. Yes. And can fire but not be fired themselves. And don't realize that a board of directors is a thing. Their job exists. To hire and fire the CEO. And in fact, it was a unique, sort of unique situation because Andy Byron was not the founder. He was a CEO brought in by the board.

And so he, of course, serves the pleasure of the board. He also serves to the pleasure of the board. also serves the pleasure of the shareholders. And unless you own 100% of the stock and all the board seats, like if you gave even one share up, you could be the subject of a shareholder lawsuit because what you are doing is maybe not in the interest of the shareholders.

And so there are a bunch of different ways that he could get put on leave. And we got a new CEO over at Instronomer. Astronomer. Pete DeJoy. Pete DeJoy. He said over the weekend, I stepped into the role of interim CEO,

a company that I've proudly poured my entire professional life into helping build. And he goes into why he stepped in, which of course, everybody knows. But seems like a solid company. We know some companies that leverage astronomers platform. Apache Airflow is no joke. You don't want to be not managing that.

You don't want to be running that installation and infrastructure yourself. This is not a promoted post for them, but they are. Zumer has a post here. I don't know what this AST space mobile ink. ASTS baby. People love it.

It's a $20 billion space company with zero revenues. Yep. And this is, I'm going to add this to my top signals list. Yep. I've heard about this. I've heard about this company before. It's fantastically popular with retail traders. It is a competitor to Starlink.

They haven't launched or generated revenue yet. But the narrative is, If you don't want to own, if you can't own SpaceX, if you don't want to own SpaceX, you want to peer play, as they say, in the public markets, ASDS is the bet. It is a wild valuation. They have some deals. They have some press releases. They have some different irons in the fire.

And if you invested around this time last year, you were getting close to a five or six X. People have made a lot of money on this so far. I mean, yeah, I think it's spacked at $4 billion and it's up $5x at $20. billion. Well, let's hope they get some satellites into the air. Yeah. And I think that's a great place to end. Yeah, fantastic. Fun show today. We'll see you tomorrow. We'll see you tomorrow. Have a good one. Bye.