TBPN - Palmer Luckey LIVE from NYSE, Supreme Court Smackdown, Data Center Backlash | Ryan Petersen, Jonathan Gould, Diogo Mónica, Joe Lonsdale, John Shahidi, Will Bruey, Sam Levenback, Alex Heath

Episode Date: February 20, 2026

Sign up for TBPN’s daily newsletter at TBPN.com(01:07) - Ryan Petersen, founder and CEO of Flexport, a global supply chain management company, discusses the recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling that invalidated former President Trump's broad tariffs, highlighting the uncertainty surrounding potential refunds for businesses that paid these tariffs. He notes that while the Court's decision deemed the tariffs unconstitutional, it did not provide clarity on whether the $175 billion collected would be refunded, leaving companies in limbo. Petersen also mentions that Flexport has developed a tariff refund calculator to assist businesses in determining potential refunds, emphasizing the importance of staying informed as the situation evolves. (14:36) - Supreme Court Smackdown (21:54) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (47:36) - WSJ Mansion Section (01:00:34) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (01:03:29) - Palmer Luckey is a technology entrepreneur best known as the founder of Oculus VR, the virtual reality company acquired by Facebook in 2014. He later founded Anduril Industries, a defense technology company building autonomous systems, surveillance platforms, and AI-driven military hardware for the U.S. and allied governments. (01:32:18) - Jonathan Gould is a U.S. financial regulatory official and legal expert focused on banking policy and supervision. He has served in senior roles at the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) and has worked in private practice advising financial institutions on regulatory matters. He is known for his expertise in bank regulation, fintech policy, and the legal framework governing U.S. financial institutions. (01:46:36) - Diogo Mónica, General Partner, Haun Ventures, discusses his journey from leading security teams at Square and Docker to establishing Anchorage Digital, the first federally chartered crypto-native bank in the U.S. He highlights the challenges of obtaining a federal charter during a crypto-unfriendly administration and emphasizes the necessity for tech companies to build their own banking infrastructure to innovate in financial products. Mónica also notes a resurgence in new bank charters, indicating a shift towards tech-driven financial institutions. (01:55:57) - Joe Lonsdale is an American entrepreneur and venture capitalist, known for co-founding Palantir Technologies, Addepar, and OpenGov, and serving as the managing partner at 8VC. He discusses the challenges facing low-end SaaS companies lacking robust systems of record, regulatory moats, or network effects, emphasizing that such companies are vulnerable to disruption, whereas well-established SaaS firms with strong tech cultures and significant investments in AI are better positioned to adapt and thrive. (02:04:19) - John Shahidi, co-founder of Happy Dad Hard Seltzer, discusses the brand's impressive 31% year-over-year growth in January, even during the typically slow "dry January" period. He attributes this success to strategic in-store marketing efforts, emphasizing the importance of engaging customers at the point of purchase rather than relying solely on creator-driven promotions. Shahidi also highlights the evolving drinking habits of younger consumers, noting a shift towards lighter beverages like seltzers and teas, as health consciousness rises and traditional beer consumption declines. (02:19:56) - Will Bruey, CEO and co-founder of Varda Space Industries, discusses the company's progress in space manufacturing, highlighting the recent landing of their fifth capsule and the upcoming launch of the sixth. He explains their strategy of implementing annual block upgrades to enhance hardware and software, drawing parallels to consumer electronics like smartphones. Bruey also emphasizes the focus on bio-manufacturing in microgravity over the next five to ten years, citing its economic viability and significant impact. (02:27:24) - Sam Levenback, Senior Vice President and Chief Growth & Strategy Officer at X-energy, discusses the company's development of high-temperature gas-cooled pebble bed reactors and their collaboration with Dow Chemical in South Texas and Amazon in Washington state to build new nuclear projects. He highlights the importance of revitalizing the U.S. nuclear supply chain to meet the growing energy demands of AI and digital infrastructure, emphasizing X-energy's commitment to advancing firm power solutions. Levenback also underscores the significance of partnerships with investors like Arabor, who are eager to understand and support the nuclear sector's unique challenges and opportunities. (02:41:36) - Alex Heath, Deputy Editor at The Verge and author of the "Command Line" newsletter, discusses his approach to tech journalism, emphasizing the importance of leveraging AI tools for efficiency while maintaining editorial oversight. He highlights the necessity of balancing relationships with tech executives to ensure fair reporting and shares insights into the evolving landscape of media, including the potential for independent writers to collaborate under unified brands. Heath also reflects on the challenges of holding exclusive stories and the significance of in-person interactions for sourcing information. 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You're watching TVPN and that's the linear lineup. We got Ryan Peterson joining just a second. It's Friday, February 20th, 2026. We are live from TBPN Ultram, the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the Capital of Capital. Let's pull up the linear lineup. But first, let me tell you about ramp.com, time is money, save both, easy-use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting in a whole lot more, all in one place. And on the linear lineup, we have absolutely stacked show. We got Ryan Peterson joining emergency call in about the tariffs.

We're going to have Paul Merlakee joining, breaking it down what's happening with Aerobor. The bank received the charter. He's an officially a charter holder. And we have a bunch of other folks who are involved with him in the Aerobor project. We're very excited to talk to. Joe Lonsdale's joining Will Brewy, Sam. Alex Heath is joining in person from sources. You've been seeing his scoops all over the timeline this week.

And we are very excited to talk to him about that. Linear, of course, is the system for modern software development. 70% of Enterprise Workspaces on Linear are used. using agents, and you should be too. So the tariff news, let's bring in Ryan Peterson from the Restream Waiting Room. Ryan, how are you doing? Look at that. I'm confused. I'm great. I think I'm great. Look at that smile. Look at that smile. You haven't smiled like that on the show. We've had some dark times. We made it throughout.

We'll see. We'll see. I was at, you know what? I love you guys so much that I actually dropped from watching the president's news conference. This is, here I am. This is the There were some all-time quotes. We were prepping the show, but Tyler on our team was sending over quotes to me in real-time. One of them was, quote from Trump, I want to be a good boy. And then later he said, I want to kiss you so badly in some other content. That's that. Who was he talking to?

I think he was talking about somebody was saying that to him. Well, take it through. What have you seen? What's actually the news? What happened? And how have you been processing it? Yeah, so the Supreme Court ruled that the tariffs, the AEPA tariffs, that's not all the tariffs. There are sections of 101 tariffs.

There's a bunch of other types of tariffs. But AEPA is the reciprocal tariffs. You may remember them from, they were applied to the Penguin Island. Oh, yeah. Book paper, it's most annoying. It's kind of the global sweeping tariffs. Those have been overturned. However, the Supreme Court did not give any clarity.

and Trump is right to point this out, it's really dumb about do we get refunds or not. I think they said $175 billion that would be owed in refunds. So that is the giant $175 billion question, what happens to all that money that people paid over the last year. Yeah. What, how, like, is there a meaningful percentage of those potential refunds that people purchase the right to?

Like, is it, because I know, I know, you know, over the last year. I wouldn't call it a meaningful pretendant. Yeah. I'm, is it like, but I probably, I have to guess there was probably 50 or 100 million dollars with those would be my swag. I don't have to date on it.

Yeah, that's pretty, pretty small. It wasn't like $5 billion or $10 billion. Put $100 million into that. You feel like a pretty good. Yeah, you do really well. But yeah,

I mean, I was thinking about through my own experience in e-commerce, I was running the numbers. And I was like, I think the company might get like a couple hundred K back over the next, but depending on how it's applied. But we were far too small to actually get, at least that I received any inbound interest to like buy those credits back in the day because like we're very small. You could only, the people that were transacting now, it was mostly the Oppenheimer, the investment bank.

Okay. They were minimum $10 million transaction or they weren't interested. Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. But by the way, Flexport built the tariff refund calculator. So go to tariff.com. Terps. flexboard.com. Head over there.

And slash refunds or just click the refund calculator button right there. Or go to the PowerPoint homepage. We've got it on the top now. It's free money. Well, for now, it is just... It's free money that you already have paid.

We've already paid this money, and it's a... We made this very simple process for you. You have to go to the government website. They'll give you a CSV file. I'll upload that there. We will run all the numbers calculated for you instantly and show you how much you are owed.

And it's a giant if right now if the administration agrees to do refunds. He was very clear in the press conference just now that because the Supreme Court did not have a firm opinion about refunds, that there will be no refunds for the next five years as it goes into litigation. So this is going to be a fight. It's what he said. It was very interesting because that's counter to what CBP has said in the past or earlier this, well, end of last year, CPP said they would comply. with whatever finding is, whatever the court says, if the court rules that the terrorists were illegal, that they would issue a refund.

So, and that's in court filing. So it's going to, if it gets litigated, yeah, we'll see how this plays out. But we, in the meantime, we've got the best calculator in the world. And by the way, trade attorneys that told us they're planning to charge 15% as to get you a refund to get your money back. We've got an automated process. So I intend to do that for much, much, much less. That's great. That's great. That's great. Zooming out, how, I mean, 2025 was obviously a very rocky year on the trade front, but how were you processing just the overall economic picture? There were so many different statistics, like health of the consumer, health of small businesses. How did you feel like 2025 went as you look back on it now? I'm not like the macroeconomics expert in the world.

You've got stock market great if the people who own stocks did really well. The mag seven, I guess drove most of that. So I think small business really suffered last year. The e-com businesses, like something like 40% of Shopify merchants were doing fulfillment from overseas and therefore using minimis and not paying any duties. And so all those people just got hit with like this huge new disruption and terror. I think a lot of them are intense stress. It's a lot of our customers going through that.

I was on your show last year. I talked about the fraud that we're seeing. Oh, yeah. Companies are against the wall and are just starting to let their factories import. Because actually, those people are the most effed by this because if there are refunds, it goes to their factory, not to them. I'm like, yeah. Cheaters get effed, you know?

That's funny. Yeah, what about the location of factories? I had this thesis that, like, even if the tariffs didn't hold, just the fact that there was this like, oh, wow moment for at least one quarter meant that there was a whole cycle of board meetings where anyone who was on the fence about, oh, maybe we should finally pull the trigger on that American factory. Like they might have done it then. And then that decision stuck sticks even if the tariffs get rolled back because in that moment they made the decision sort of like how during COVID people like decided to start working from home. took like two years for them to get back in the office. Like, like, you could see people saying, like, I'm going to reshore my operation a little bit. And some of that, some portion of that's

going to be sticky, even in a low tariff regime. Yeah, you know, I haven't seen the manufacturing statistics. I think manufacturing is growing in the United States pretty quickly. I'm sure tariffs are helping with that. Yeah. But it's, they're so unevenly applied. I mean, one of the silly things about the way terrorists are done. And they put new tariffs in today that I think are a better tariff policy. You know, I'm famously anti-tariff, but because it's bad for my business, bad for my customers. But if you are, just looking at it from a, what's your goal as a president who says he wants to boost manufacturing, it's better to have a blanket tariff on everybody than just target one country. And the reason for that is tariffs are equivalent

mathematically to an exchange rate, like a fixed exchange rate with another country. And you would never have a bilateral exchange rate. You can't say, hey, do you know, United States is going to trade with the Rem and B Chinese currency at six to one, but we'll let the other ones, we'll do the other ones at a different ratio, because obviously the money will just flow around. And that's what happens. With cargo, too, is like, okay, cool. Let's say the Americans, we're putting this tariff in, so we instead of buying from China,

we buy from Peru. Now the Peruvians have more money. What do they do? They buy stuff from China. Like, it ends up in the exact same place. Whereas a blanket tariff, it's like, okay, this is helping make American goods more competitive versus foreign goods no matter where they're from. So I think from the policy, same point, it's better to be. What's the legal justification for this new round of tariffs that just got announced?

This was a type of tariff that the Supreme Court didn't rule against today. So he's like, we'll just ramp that out. These ones are, it's called Section 122. And under Section 122, it's very clear that the president has statutory authority. It has a 15% maximum. He only did 10%. So he's got some cushion. I would expect him to get mad at somebody and raise it to 15 at some point.

That was one of my predictions in the near future. I can follow cushion to go upwards later. And then second is it has a maximum of 150 days that he can impose this. Now, what I predict is I haven't done the math, but 149 to 150 days from now, I think that Section 122 will experience a pause. of around 15 minutes, and then you'll have another 150 days where it goes right back in. And there's nothing that says you can't do that. He could do that in perpetuity.

But it would only be a 15% maximum. And I have to double check, but I'm pretty sure that has to be imposed equally on everybody. And it's because of a balance of trade. You have to go reread the statute now that 120 is the term of the day. But it's because of balance and trade that that act was put in by Congress. Very interesting. What do business owners, executive teams do? Any kind of like new approach going forward with today's news,

or is it still kind of steady state? Like, we don't know what's going to happen. Well, on some of this stuff, you know, all we have right now is a news conference. So first off, we need to see an executive order, which is expected to come out on Monday. And you'll have a little bit more clarity there. We're advising customers in a situation to let's not clear customs today.

Let's hold your entries until Monday when the rates are presumably lower. And so that would be the first step is make sure your customers, at least you save one day. We are, I think you want to get into, again, I'll plug myself, go to the tariff calculator, see what you're owed, get into a process to go start filing, whether it's protests or we're still waiting for clarity here, of course. But if you're going to file a protest, you might have to file a lawsuit. I'm hoping not. I file a protest against tariffs that, you know, the government said this is illegal, so how can they take my money, owe it back? Like, there's going to be various ways to fight that.

I think hopefully it's not a lawsuit. Would it be, would it really be a bunch of individual lawsuits or would it be a class action? It seems as a class action. Costco filed one. A lot of people have been filing them preemptively in this. So it's already kind of working, going to work its way through the courts. But, you know, the CBP was very, clear that, okay, so there was this lawsuit by Costco, the retailer, that said, you know,

said, hey, this is illegal tariffs. If the government rules that, if the Supreme Court rules that these are illegal, you must give me the money back. And the court declined to put in an injunction to force the government to stop charging tariffs while they wait, while we wait for the Supreme Court. And the reason that they didn't put in that injunction is that the CBP said, we were if the tariffs are ruled illegal we will issue refunds uh or at least they said there is oh man what was the legal term it's sort of like these it are they are refundable or something which is interesting because you're like well you know i break my arm it is fixable doesn't mean i'm going to fix it i could just leave it broken uh i don't know i'm not lawyers i'm just trying this is all

happening very quickly i'm trying to learn this morning exactly how it's going to play out yeah Who are the biggest companies that are affected by tariffs? I jumped to Nike, Apple. I imagine it's pretty powerful. Didn't Apple get a full carve-out? That's what I think. So, like, who is actually the biggest voice? Yeah, the semiconductors and iPhones, I think, managed to get it carved up.

Probably Walmart is number one. Walmart, okay, yeah. Which is insane because our intern made an iPhone in America when the tariffs first came around. Pull it up, Tyler. Yeah. He put it together in a day. I don't know if you can see it.

Yeah, it works flawless. Does it turn on? Not yet. Oh, you got great interns over there. Fantastic. Yeah, we're going to reshore the entire semiconductor supply chain soon. Anyway, anything else, Judy? No.

This is great. Thank you for jumping on. Thanks so much for jumping on. I really do hope for every Flexport customer and every business that is impacted by this so we can get some real clarity soon. I'm sure we won't. I should end with a reminder for. If you do get a unplanned surprise, gigantic refund check,

just remember that most lottery winners end up bankrupt. So don't spend it. Yeah, it's spending it to your shareholders, pay your employees less bonus. But if you go buy a bunch of inventory, of course, that would be good for me. That's why you can trust this twice because I would prefer you spend it on inventory and chip it with us.

But better for you to save your money. Don't waste it. Good call. Well, thank you for coming on along with the ferry building behind you. And the port of both on back there. You can see it in the deep distance. Oh, yeah.

That's great to have you both on. Thanks so much. We'll talk to you. Talk soon, Ryan. Cheers. Let me tell you about ACTA. Octa helps you assign every AI agent a trust identity so you get the power of AI

without the risk. Secure every agent, secure any agent. And I'm also going to tell you about fin.a.i, the number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to handle your customer support, go to fin. A.I. So, this story is obviously still developing, you know, Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in his dissent. The court's decision is likely to generate other serious practical consequences in the

near term. One issue will be refunds. We'll certainly be following this. I'm sure we'll know more on Monday. But I think we are up to speed at the very least on what has happened. And a little reminder that Ryan Peterson is a fantastic aficionado of Office decor and shared a picture of a startup he visited that has two portraits on the wall that will have to pull up in Section B because who's on the wall, who's on the wall? That's the thing. We should have asked him. I don't think anyone knows.

But in the timeline on Section B, there we go. You see none others then Mark Benioff and Larry Allison painted very clearly not AI generated. is a decade ago. Is that Chris Saka? It looks sort of like him. That does look like Saka. Am I crazy? I don't know. I don't know. But people are, people are guessing in the background. Yeah, someone else said is Saka, is that you? And then someone said, no, it's Larry Allison. And yeah, that's not what they're asking. Anyway, it seems to be in the software. Moving on. Charlie Cretoville says, We won no data center, and they have to build a park.

Yes. This got 3 million views, 222,000. That ratio is crazy, right? Yeah. Crazy ratio. Gary Tan responds and says, A fully built one gigawatt data center complex generates around $31 million per year in state taxes and $61 million per year in local taxes from data center operations alone.

Also, it creates roughly 430 direct jobs at the facility itself, plus many more indirect and construction phase jobs. So nearly $100 million a year in local taxes based on this analysis by the Consumer Energy Alliance. So maybe these data centers need to be leading with that more. Think about how many parks you can build. Think about how many roads you can repair, new buildings, schools that you'll be able to build locally

if you have one of these. There's not the, you know, we've talked about this at length, but it's understandable that citizens will be like, I don't need the data center in my backyard to use chat GPT, so why would I want it? But if you're going to have nearly nine figures in local and state taxes that you can direct. There is another solution here.

You could build a jungle gym that has GPUs embedded in the slides and in the swings. And so you get a little bit of... You know those rolly slide things? Yes, yes. So if those were generating energy... Oh, yeah. I know.

I'm thinking of what you're thinking. of course, put the kids to work. If they're swinging, I want to capture that electricity and turn it in to tokens. And Reggie James, creative director of general catalyst and friend of the show, says, You mean to tell me the meme of creating a permanent underclass hasn't been winning the hearts and minds of the public.

Shocking. Very good point. Let's pull up this video because it's a pretty wild reaction. Let's get sound and start it back at the beginning. They canceled it! Wow. It's like the little yachtie, little yi. Yeah, it is the little yadi walkout.

They got a soundboard? It does seem like to do. Keep chanting. Your Netflix recommendations just got 0.1% less accurate. New Jersey. They actually have a live band. Yeah, it's interesting because the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the. Back against data centers, like it really is this like meme of creating a permanent underclass like that type of thing because

I would be so much more like expecting of this pushback if it was like oh well we know that like living next to a data center is dangerous for your health Like that is not the meme The meme is like maybe your power rates will go up, but it's sort of unclear and they might offset that They're sort of ugly, but they're not the biggest craziest thing that you could put there it really is just about like, I don't like what it produces abstractly. And so I don't want the concrete. I don't like what it stands for.

Yeah, exactly. I don't like what it stands for, which is just, it's a little bit different than, I think a lot of people do. For real, though, data centers filling up northern Virginia, super annoying and ugly. They're like 600 now. They got to make them look better. They got to make them look better. Yeah, okay, so you were joking about the jungle gym, but there is that,

you've probably seen it. There's in Denmark, there's the ski hill that's on top of the, the power plant? Wait, really? Have you seen that? No, I haven't seen that. I thought you were going to mention the, have you seen the stealthy cell phone towers?

So there are cell phone towers all over Los Angeles that are dressed up like trees. Yeah, they always get me. They always get you. Can never tell. I'm kidding. Of course you can tell.

From very far away. They do sort of like fade into the background and you don't notice them as much as like a full-on crazy cell tower in your face. While Tyler pulls up an image of that ski data center Let me tell you about Phantom Cash.

Fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen and spend with the Phantom Cloud. And let me also tell you about Lambda. We have a great Lambda Lightning Round coming up. Lambda is the Super Intelligence Cloud, building the AI Supergroup for training and inference that scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands. Lots of pushback.

Let's see. AI folks have about four months to pull a cure for cancer out of the latent space before we drift into Butlerian Ghard, a tractor basin. Yeah. Jihad. But, but Larian jihad is from Dune.

They don't want computers, so they use spice, and they travel around that way. Yeah, it's really popular. I mean, we talked to Sagaranjetti about this. It's bipartisan. It's very, very broad support against data center buildout. And there doesn't seem to be anything that's pushing back against it. And I was thinking more about the cure for cancer thing, because, like, you know, You know, Microsoft Excel has been useful in medicine.

Like you use Microsoft Excel to catalog how patients are doing, track a bunch of blood work, create a correlation, okay, these people got placebos, these people got the real cancer treatment. Now we know for sure. And it just sped it up a little bit. You could have done it on paper, but doing it in Excel, probably move things forward, just a notch. You got the cancer cure, like a couple months earlier, a little bit cheaper,

or a little bit faster. And that sort of like diffusion story is ridiculously unsexy. Like it's not attractive at all. No one wants to talk about. I had this riff for a while. One simple trick. Yeah, I had this riff for a while that the debt markets were critical in the space race. Like you actually do need to finance rocketry with debt.

You need efficient capital markets to build rockets. When everyone likes to look at rockets, no one wants to look at debt covenants. And so rocket engineers get all the credit when, in fact, some of the credit does, in fact, belong to the financiers that make, you know, large-scale industrial projects possible. People, you know, love the bridge, but they don't think about the financiers that make it possible. But as silly as that sounds like, it really is an important step in the chain. and AI, it might be that more than like the magical, you know, cure for cancer that you pull out of latent space.

It's going to be tricky. Like, I think even if we do see a boom in cancer, drugs, and we hear testimonies from scientists that, oh, yeah, like, AI definitely, like, sped me up. Like, the ticker tape parade is going to happen for the scientists. Like, we know Jennifer Duden is named for discovering MRNA and CRISPR. like we don't know the software stack that she used when she was analyzing gene. We got to find out. We do because that's the real hero.

It's not a real hero, but it's an important hero in the story that we just don't tell because it's abstract and diffuse. Let's pull up this video from architectural digest of this beautiful, sustainable power plant

with a ski slope on its roof. So you can actually ski on this? Wait, you ski on the grass? You can ski on grass? It works. I had no idea. I mean, presumably in winter, there would be some snow on it.

world is the building industry the building industry accounts for one third of all CO2 emissions and we need to bring that down this thing looks so cool this is cool and sustainability go hand in the chat would be totally cool with more data centers in Virginia I imagine if you had extreme sports on the roof yes do a deal with Red Bull get the FPV drones out there. Red Bull sponsored data centers. The next X games on data centers. Yeah.

I mean, the Olympics are coming. If you want to build a data center in LA, why not build an Olympic village as well? On cities, we want to design the future of the buildings that we would like to live in. My name is Jakob Lange. I'm a partner and architect at the architecture firm, Big or Bjarkie Ingalls Group.

We're standing here at the Copenhagenhiel. the tallest mountain in Copenhagen. Wait, what? Well, he's calling the building a mountain. That's insane. A little more than 10 years ago now. We started a competition to design the facade of this building. We were struggling for quite a while,

but in one of the design meetings, we were talking about the fact that... Thrasher magazine needs to get on this deal plow. Completely agree. Are you a thrashier magazine guy? Thrashers. I haven't been a subscriber in probably 10 years, but... Yeah. Yeah, how did we not know about this?

This is amazing. Yeah. I knew about it. Buried in the European stagnation thesis is the most white pill of all white pills. Structured. I mean, this goes viral every like few months. I've seen this a bunch on... We got to do it. You should post it.

Why is no one talking about what's it called? Yes, yes. But I'm saying people are talking about this. No, no one's talking about this. We're the first people to talk about this. Yeah. It feels like Apple would be one to do this. It's in line with the Google branding.

There's so many companies that are ready to sort of pick up what this is all about and do a promo video. Put plants on the roof of the data center. For sure. That's a very easy one. It takes a building that looks dystopian and cold. the industrial makes it. Yeah, also just build them underground, right?

And then put the park on top of it. I don't know. It just seems like there's so many easy ways. Maybe it is hard because you're in this game theory, and that's why meta is building intense because even the buildings are too slow to build. And so if you add underground or you add roof plants on top,

you're going to have another three-month delay. You're going to lose the AI race. You're going to be part of the permanent underclass in the mag seven or something. They're worried about being part of them. permanent underclass, and so they're racing. But something like that, I feel like would pay back and pay dividends if it was beautiful. Matt over on X says, there's an abandoned Brooks Brothers office in my town would make a lovely

data center. So he's taking the other side. I think if you left the sign. Yeah. And it was just Brooks Brothers. You kind of revitalized the sign, redid the kind of landscaping, but then put a data center in it. I love it. Let me tell you about turbopuffer.

Serverly's back during full-tech search. built from first principles on object storage, fast, 10x cheaper and extremely scalable. And let me also tell you about graphite. Code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. Let's head over to Time Magazine. DeLeo, who's sharing, he came in pretty hot on the reaction. He said, Team Cope made the cover of time. The people versus AI, a lot of...

Behind the growing backlash. I mean, the growing backlash is real. It actually makes a lot of sense to do a portrait and a profile on all the different voices that are here because some of them are lawmakers. Some of them are pundits. Some of them are analysts. Some of them are analysts. Some of them are lawyers. All sorts of different folks.

Did you read it yet, Tyler? Why are you laughing? In protest. Team cope is funny. Team cope is funny. But, yeah, people took this all over the place. The people versus the wheel. Grunts from the silent majority dragging rocks and rolling is a drag.

people are having a lot of fun about this. The horses versus the car. The horses versus the car. At the same time, like, this, the backlash can have an actual impact. So you should not just write it off and be like, well, obviously, AI is going to happen. So this is, you know, it's inevitable. It's like, no, these, like, we live in a democracy. Like, if they vote, no more data centers.

Look at what happened in nuclear, people. Like, you keep comparing AI to splitting the atom. I was just watching some video, and the guy was saying, like, it's, like, it's the AI is the most incredible human invention. It's up there right with when we split the atom. And I'm like, well, I know how that ended. Like, we got a bunch of nuclear weapons that we didn't even fire at each other. It just became a cold war.

So really zero economic value from that, just a lot of people building and then putting them in silos. And then a couple nuclear power plants that eventually got regulated out of existence. We never got a nuclear future of energy. And so it is possible that, like, since, you know, society can just freak out and be like, actually we're doing non-proliferation. Like, that's a possible outcome here. So like, Hill says this is why we need data centers in space. Yeah. Elon looking pretty smart. For sure, for sure. Even if the timelines that have been thrown out are aggressive

on a longer time horizon. No, you're not going to have to push back there. And Trey really coming in with the most obvious solution, blimp data centers, just put them over, put them over the Pacific. I love it. Float them over there. Well, let me tell you about, Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web app, servers, databases, and more while railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security. Rob over on X has found some information on the Twitter deal trial. Is this the trial around the compensation for the Twitter employees that were... Oh, I thought this was the open AI case. No, this is different. This is different. So I believe this is the case around the Twitter

employees that did not actually get their severance? It says the class action brought by former Twitter investors against Elon Musk. I don't, I actually don't know that much about this particular case, but there was a pool of 92. They think Twitter was worth more than 44 billion? Well, maybe they had stock options that were canceled. Maybe they, maybe they are employees, but they're counted as investors in this case because it's a SEC violation instead of an employment contract. I actually don't know. I'm completely speculating here. But apparently Elon Musk's popularity, unpopularity is throwing a wrench in the trial because, quote, hate for Musk quickly narrows the jury pool in Twitter deal trial.

California judge quickly narrowed a pool of 92 prospective jurors Thursday, excluding 38 potential jurors who said they couldn't be fair and impartial, as Musk's attorney lamented. There are so many people who hate him so much. Yeah. So the trial, according to Bloomberg loss, the trial involves claims from Twitter investors who say Musk violated securities law by publicly waffling over his decision to purchase the company and driving down its stock price. Yeah.

And there's probably a lot of people who are, they don't like Elon because of the- Does that mean, does that mean, though? So he said, okay, I'm going to buy this company. Yeah. And then he was trying to back out. Yeah. Because he was like, the price is insane. Yeah.

and then the stock declined and people sold. And then it ended up getting bought up here. And now they're like, well, you kind of misled. I don't know. I wonder actually how this one net out. Because he didn't make anyone sell the company if you're a Twitter shareholder and you believe that. Yeah.

Basically, I mean, every time you make a public statement, unless it's disclosed through the traditional SEC workflow, one person or five people can sell. And then they can hold you to account on that, on the impacts of that. And so every possible move in the price of the company can come back to bite you based on what you were saying and whether or not it was above board. Yeah. But the court will decide. And apparently they're going to get a bunch of people on the juror who have never heard of Elon Musk. Yeah.

There are people out there. They're like, I don't know the guy. Cooper, our strongest soldier in the chat coming in, driving up those numbers. Let me tell you about Figma. Ship the best version, not the first one with Figma. You heard from Dillingfield yesterday. He introduced Claude Coe to Figma. Explore more options.

And they liked each other. They like each other. They did. Pub is saying they're calling it the most Canadian caption of all time. Team Canada hit the timeline after their loss to the United States saying silver shines just as bright. That is very Canadian. Absolutely brutal. So we've got a Canadian on our team is sitting over there shaking his head.

He's hard to see from this angle. But we're all friends on this continent. We like a good competition. There's a war in the community notes right now. People are saying silver actually shines brighter than gold, but gold is better. It actually doesn't. It also tarnishes much easier and becomes dull. Gold is greater than silver.

People are biting it out over whether or not gold. They're coping it out. But I think we, yeah, they're coping it out. We know, we know how it works at the Olympics. You want to go for gold. And only America could take it home yesterday. Blake Robbins is reacting to the news that Meta's VR Metaverse is ditching VR. This is from the Verge.

We'll have to talk to Alex Heath, former Verge reporter, later today. This feels pretty clear. The metaverse was actually just Roblox this whole time. Not Fortnite, not VR. This is extremely hard for me as a, as a, as a, VR bowl. I threw on the headset yesterday, watched about 10 minutes of Blade Runner 2049 before you called me and I had to take it off. But I was having a great experience watching a 3D movie. You threw that on right when you got home. Right when I got home. I was like, I'm going to chill for a little bit.

Throw on Blade Runner 2049. Reggie recommended it. So Hip City Reg. I was like, okay, I got to do it, put it on. But interrupted, there was other stuff going on. So didn't get through the whole movie, but still delightful experience. And VR is not dead. It's about to reanimate and come back from the grave. I predict in the next, in the next 400 years, I guarantee you, VR will be like a kind of popular, like sort of popular. It'll get to at least 2%. At least 2% 20 DAUs. Yeah.

In the next 400 years, I would take that bet. Matthew Ball dropped his state of video games in 2026. Boom. One of the standout lines was Roblox had 150 million daily users in Q3 of 2025. Its quarterly engagement is now equal to Steam, PlayStation, and Fortnite combined. It's huge. Which is just absolutely wild. Roblox is so popular.

Yeah, we can click through it. It's a huge presentation, and we'll have to have Matthew Ball on the show to really break it all down. But this is the report that I was sort of... inspired by yesterday when I was talking about this interesting fact that Matt Ball shared on his strategy interview that when you look at video games, the video game market is not doing particularly well. You have to always segment out non-China. And then there's also mobile versus console or people paying or is it ad-based. There's a whole bunch of different sub-segments. But just looking at non-China growth in video games, like all of the growth.

went to Roblox. And basically everything else was either flat or down. And people are starting to just spend more time on endless feats. They're on Instagram. They're on TikTok or they're doing sports betting or watching TV or watching Netflix. There's a million different things that have fought for attention. And it used to be the greatest bargain in history. And Strauss-Zellnick, the CEO of Take-Two maker of GTA and 2K games, got in a lot of trouble at one point, He said, like, we should be charging per minute. And people are like, this is a nightmare. He's going to charge per minute.

He was like, no, no, no. I just mean, in terms of the value that we're delivering, we will take $60 from you, which is a lot of money, but we will give you GTA 5, which you can play for 100 hours and have a great time, and some people will play for more than that. And so on a per hour basis, you're paying like 50 cents. Now, comp that, he would say, comp that to go into the movies. you know, you pay 20 bucks and you're there for two hours, that's $10 an hour for entertainment.

Whereas with a video game, 50 bucks for 50 hours, you're paying a dollar an hour. So he was just driving home that is a great value. That is no longer the case in the world where there's so much incredible entertainment that's basically free because it's ad-supported. And the experience of scrolling an endless vertical social feed is now rivaling the level of entertainment that you get from video games. It used to be like, yeah, I'll go on Facebook and check some posts about see who posted, like, what they did this weekend, check in with that. But I got to go and play Counterstrike, or I got to go play the actual game that's like really fun.

Now it's a lot more competitive. Anything else? Yeah, I mean, I'll all kind of tap through. So global video game content sales had a strong 2025 growing 5% year-over-year and hitting a new all-time hive about $195 billion, $10 billion, more than the prior. higher in 2021. The industry high was achieved through new highs in each of mobile PC and console two, so everything's up and to the right. And fortunately, 2025, as with years prior, both had several new hit franchises and

studios, while many older franchises and studios also achieved new highs. But despite three straight years of industry growth, a new record high for revenues and a smattering of new hits each year, private funding for game makers fell another 50. 55% in 2025. That is big decrease. There's so much going on in the video game industry. And it's often overlooked because it's just like sort of off in its own little world. And the players are like subscale relative to the Mag 7.

So they don't get as much attention. But it's a fascinating industry. Quickly, let me tell you about Vanta, automate compliance and security. Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform. Do you want to talk about chill remote jobs or do you want to stay on video games? Yeah, let's talk. Do you want a chill remote job? No, I said that, but I lied.

I don't want a chill remote job. I actually love a high-pressure job. I love office politics. I love being thrown into the fire. Last minute slide changes fuel me. I get high off an ad hoc ask. Corporate jargon is my love language. When I'm in office, I'm a lethal corporate machine.

I'm on a God-tier flow state, right? now. This is my favorite game. This is so good. I love, I love this new genre of the day in the life at work. Whoever said that office jobs or adult daycares was on to something. I don't get that. There's nothing like an ad hoc ask, right Tyler? Yeah, you feel like Tyler, Tyler, Tyler lives for an ad hoc ask. He's like, yes and. You're like, yes, but let me throw on my white suit first. Yes, markets up. Markets up. Let's go. I think at least it was. Yeah. We'll see. Well, I'm wearing green, and the market's green. That works, right?

Green's a good color. Casual Friday, Cope. Yes. More news in Paramount's $108 billion bid for Warner Brothers. It cleared an antitrust hurdle. What hurdle was that? The media group whose bid is bankrupt, a bankrolled by Oracle billionaire, Donald Trump, Governor Larry Ellis.

Freudian slip. No, Oracle's doing fine. said on Friday that its deal had complied with the U.S. Department of Justice's second request review process, removing a critical impediment to U.S. regulatory approval. I have no idea why there would be any antitrust worries here. The antitrust question is always been. The point is that there's no antitrust. With Paramount and Warner Brothers. The question has always been Netflix. But I thought that was going to get through, but we'll see where it lands. So Paramount's deal could still be blocked, but by allowing the 10-day statutory waiting period to elapse under H.S.R. Or Hart Scott Rodino, acts second request process.

The DOJ is clearing the path for Paramount's deal on antitrust grounds. The government's saying they can go forward as long as they can agree to terms. Yeah. Yeah. And zooming out when you look back at the news from a month ago, it seemed obvious that the next step was to spend a lot of time in Washington. Yeah, the Ellison's. Yeah. And try that angle.

It seems to be going well. And let's see if this spiked the, the Kalshi chart. It's up a little bit. Will Paramount acquire Warner Brothers before before September is at 52%. We need to find the other one, which is who will acquire?

Who will acquire Warner Brothers? Let me see. Who will successfully take over Warner Brothers? Oh, Netflix is back up. Netflix is up to 47%. Interesting. The lines have just been crossing constantly. They crossed a couple days ago.

It's a deadly dance, a tango. Well, it's been a lot of fun to follow it. I've been enjoying that. Let's pull up this video. While we pull this up, let me tell you about Century. Century shows developers what's broken and helps them fix it fast. That's why 150,000 organizations use it to keep their apps working. Matthew McCona, we talked a little bit.

about this, but it's, it hits way harder when he says it himself. So let's play the clip. It's coming. It's already here. It's already here. Don't deny it. It's not enough. It may be for you, but it's not going to be enough to sit on the sidelines and make the moral plea. The moral plea that, no, this is wrong. It's not going to last. There's too much money to be made and it's too productive. It's here. All right. So I say get get your own your own yourself, voice, likeness, et cetera, trade market, whatever you got to do. So you did that. Yeah.

Own yourself. So when it comes, not if it comes, no one can steal you. But they're going to have to come to you to go, can I? Or they're going to be in breach. And you'll have the chance to be your own agency and go, yeah, for this amount or no. Okay? It's coming. Is it going to be another category or is it going to infiltrate our category?

Is damn sure going to infiltrate our category? I think it'll end up, does it become another category? Will we be in five years having films the best AI film, the best AI actor? Maybe. I think it might be, that might be the thing, is that becomes another category. I'm not sure. It's going to be in front of us in ways that we don't even see it. I'm not watching movies if it's AI or not.

No AI is going to get me to start watching movies. The question of reality. I don't watch them. It's more hatred than ever. in a very exciting way, I think, but also a scary way. This is a great industry leadership. I love it. Yeah, so I can see there being an incremental category.

That said, I still think AI will be used in every category. That's what he says. Yeah. Yeah, he says he doesn't know the timeline and he's not sure exactly how this will come out, but he says there might be a new category, just like there's best animated film at the Oscars. But then CGI and animation works its way into the, Avengers, which is not an animated film, but Thanos was animated with CGI. It just wasn't hand-drawn. And so the categories blur together. Clearly, AI is coming for all sorts of different

levels of the stack. And he's just saying that you shouldn't just sit by and hope that it doesn't happen. You should embrace and figure out how you fit in. Well, let's go over to the New York Stock Exchange. Do you want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. There was a fun clip on and many of our guests will be at the New York Stock Exchange today.

I see in just 15 minutes. And the European kid was at Nisi having some fun going a little bit too far let's play the clip. What's he doing? That's the bell

if you're coming for the right public and you're not allowed to touch it. Shuddy, my family's one public five times. I know what it's the bell does. Don't try

money mug at the New York Stock Exchange. That's not going to work European kid. You gotta go. I'm sorry, you can't be here. And you stuck away. You have to go. Did they realize who I am?

I'm sure they know who you are. We have to go. My family owned this bell. No. You can't be here. To be honest, when I read the caption, I thought it was Rich the kid gets escorted out of the rapper. So they're brothers, the European kid and my tech CEO. We ran into one of them in SF.

I think we ran into my desk. Wait, there's two? There's two and they look identical. Wait, did you not know this? Are you sure? Are you sure it's not the same guy? I thought it was the same guy with two accounts, two characters. Wait, I don't know. We'll have to get to the bottom of this. It might be one person, two accounts.

I thought they, I have no idea. We'll have to get to the bottom of this. You got, you got God. Yeah, it's the prestige. I'm getting prestige, potentially. There might be a secret twin, and he is acting, he's living life as a single person with two accounts when in fact it is two people. That's possible, too.

Let's not rule anything out. Yeah. Let's not take off our tinfoil hats prematurely. Well, let's watch this. This post from David Herman. I love David. The Herminator. The Hermonator.

The Hermonium. It started over. Yeah, this is an ad. He was pulled into a drain pipe after being caught in a flood. A nearby officer rushed over to help, but he was quickly dragged in, too. The rushing water forced them both through the 100 foot long pipe. They finally came out on the other side at Papa Giuseppe's kitchen. I love these hands.

to warm you up from the flood. It's funny, is that even AI? I'm pretty sure that's just like a video game or something. It's perfect for couples, especially on Valentine's Day. You and the officer will absolutely have a great time to recover from the flood. Yeah. I've seen a lot of this style of ad where it's some crazy, you know, TikTok explainer, and then it just cuts to like, and you land at your company.

It is hilarious. Let me tell you about cognition. They're the makers of Devon, the AI Software Engineer. your crusher backlog with your personal AI engineering team. Ben, can you hear this? We got to talk about... Other Ben. We got to make an ad like that.

Yeah, we do, we do, we do. Walk in. Where it's somebody like, you know, falling off of a plane, and then they land, they fall through the cloud, and then they land in the TBP and Ultradome, and they're being interviewed by John and Jordy. There is a $36.5 million waterfront compound for sale in the Florida Keys, and And take a look at this picture. Finally a white pill. Take a look at this picture. So it has 1,700 feet of shoreline and two 5,000 square foot homes. You thinking what I'm thinking, next door neighbors? That's right. That's right. We can do it. So you remember, I think it,

not a sauna, the Atlassian. They did. They had this crazy few. So the founders of Atlassian, I think we read this. Yes, yes. Yes. So they were besties. They built this massive company together, wildly successful, multi-gen, you know, basically two-decade run, incredible run. And they decide, you know, we've had an incredible run. Let's keep the run going. Let's buy houses right next to each other.

They end up getting a massive, in a massive view over it. And I think it destroys a friendship. Hopefully it's recovered by now. But we could do it. Oh, you think we could do it? I think we could do it. You don't think you'd be bothered by my industrial-grade Wi-Fi penetrating while you're trying to sleep?

You don't think that would bother you? I think that would be... That would be the straw that broke the camera. I'd be like, John, you have to turn off the Wi-Fi after 10 p.m. when we're sleeping. It disrupts the sleep. Stop listening to movies all night long at full blast volume.

I don't care. I don't want to see the second and third matrix or hear them through the walls. You'd be in the backyard with your VR headset on, but playing the audio fully and so you can still hear it. And then you'd be falling asleep with it on, so just be blaring. Exactly, exactly.

That would be the end of TBPN. That would be the end. So we won't be doing this. But what a funny, what a funny situation. So it's a 10-acre waterfront property in the Florida Keys. Trent says just move in together. No. You need two properties that are as close as possible next to each other.

And then they have like separate beaches, but the houses are like your windows are looking directly at the other person. It's such a weird property. So Eddie Garcia bought the Isla Ila Marada property for about 15 years. ago, Waterman specializes in developing master plan communities throughout Florida. Garcia said he originally intended to create a small development on the land, but he wound up falling in love with the site and instead turned it into a family compound. My kids grew up there fishing, lobster, crabbing, you name it. He was on open claw before it even existed. He lives full-time

in Miami with his children in college. He said the property's too big for just him and his wife, but you got his and hers mansions. What's wrong with that? When Garccius, he lived. When Garccius, see about the property. It was mostly empty except for a 16 slip marina. That's eight boats per person and two cottages built around the 1950s, all of which remained on the property today. He built two side-by-side West Indy style homes in 2013, and then he ran it back in 2015. Each is 5,000 square feet with four bedrooms in a pool. Pretty, pretty interesting property. Also, for you Boston sickos out there, there's a $22 million dollar, Beacon Hill home. It's become one of Boston's priciest townhouses.

It's a six-bedroom residence and was converted from multiple rental units into a single-family home. The development company Crest City Capital purchased the building for $8.9 million in 2023. Then they converted it. They gut renovated the house, which had multiple rental unit, turned it into a single-family residence. The buyer's identity couldn't be determined. Tracy Campion of Campion and Company, who represented the purchaser didn't respond. But there's some beautiful photos here. It's a Greek Revival House built in 1825.

That's an old, old house. You don't see a lot of 1800s properties out here in California, but you do in Boston. You see Nisi, 1792. That's a good one. That's an OG. It's located in one of Boston's most upscale neighborhoods. Have you spent any time in Boston? Have you ever been?

I don't think I've ever been. You've never been. Beautiful city. And I don't think I'll ever go. Why not? I just think, I, I mean, like, Think about the list of I don't like traveling that much. I like being, I like being in California.

And when I, but I, but at times I enjoy traveling. But there's easily 400 destinations that I would go to before Boston. It's not in the top 400. I don't think Boston is in the top 400 if you really break it down. But I like to travel. I like to travel. I like to go somewhere. Yeah.

I've done the traveling where you do. You stop by. Two days here, two days here, et cetera. But I like to go to go New York and then Rhode Island and then Boston and then Maine. Like you could have a wonderful little excursion on the East Coast. You should do it sometime. Broaden your horizons. Road trip.

If we were doing a road trip. Yeah, we definitely stopped there. College tour maybe. Let me tell you about Bustow, the unified platform for payroll benefits and HR built to evolve with small and medium-sized businesses. Tyler, we originally met because Tyler, we originally met because Tyler, was commenting saying that we should do a college tour. Maybe. In Q1 of last year. Yeah, well, I think it was, you guys said you were going to do a college

tour, but then I said you got to go to Michigan because they have the biggest stadium in the Western Hemisphere. Yes, yes. Filling 110,000 fans in one stadium would be truly, uh, we got some work to do. We need, we need quite the guest lineup. Uh, we need to stack it. We need to stack it. Yeah, we really need to stack it. Yeah. Um, the tiny lake Tahoe enclave with some of America's priciest waterfront homes. In Tahoe is absolutely wild this week. Did you see that video of Bears? Bears?

Bears at North Stars. I think they were just running across the ski slope with people on it. That's awesome. Kids were having to pull out of the way. Yeah. I saw Growing Daniel posting about how they're actually really friendly and you can just go up to them and pet them. Is that right?

Yeah, I think so. Yeah. I think so. Crystal Bay's median list price of $14.9 million makes it one of the most expensive places to buy property in the United States. It's straddling the California, Nevada border. Lake Tahoe, 72-mile shoreline is home to some of the country's most coveted real estate. Actually, the property is...

No, just Tahoe in general. Like, Lake Tahoe is both California and Nevada. Having a property that was half and half. I'm sure that might exist. I don't know. That's probably pretty hard to zone or actually get done, but it has to exist somewhere in America. I know that there's a spot in America.

that you can stand on and be in four states simultaneously, or maybe three states, because the lines intersect, so you can stand on that spot and be technically in four states. You could just do the thing, like the house we just saw in the Keys, where it's like kind of two property.

Yeah, yeah. One person's not paying income tax, the other person paying terrible income tax. Bruegel. Inclined Village is the, I think, the city that's the least in Nevada, but technically in Nevada. So it's the most Californian Nevada city.

So it's a popular San Francisco in several many ways. I'm sure the broader population of Nevada has really high opinion of Inclined Village. Inclined Village. For sure. Crystal Bay is home to roughly 200. It's a community on Nevada's north side. Ranks among the priciest waterfront markets with a median listing price of 14.9 million. The enclave is defined by its mid-century glamour around the 1960s.

It serves as a playground for entertainer Frank Sinatra, who at one point, owned the local Cal Neva Resort and Casino. Yep. Eric, in the chat says Cal Neva Resort is exactly that in the same town as it splitting. Cal, Nevada. Cool. Very interesting. Today, it is a tale of two realities, a town with a faded commercial strip that sits adjacent

to multi-million dollar real estate, residential real estate favored for steep slope privacy and elite lakefront living. So it's just four miles northeast of Crystal Bay. It's the bustling incline village where there is a hospital, grocery stores, and the Diamond Peak ski resort across the California state line is the community of Kings Beach provides a more rustic feel. The North Shore tracks homeowners seeking a constant outdoor connection. Winter offers skiing while summer centers on the lake for boating, fishing, paddleboarding, holding an American flag while you wakeboard.

That's very popular out there in Tahoe, of course. There's something interesting going on. Is it legal to wakeboard up there without holding a flag? Jail instantly. Yeah. For years, Crystal Bay's commercial core had been defined by two stalled icons. Sinatra's former Calneva closed in 2013 and the Tahoe-Biltmore Hotel and Casino, which closed in 2022. These vacant structures have given the state line a ghost town feel with the Crystal Bay Club casino as the area's

main entertainment and music venue. However, a revitalization effort is underway. The Calneva is being transformed into the high end Lake Tahoe proper resort and casino slated to open in 2027, signaling a possible shift from faded casino era relics to modern luxury destination. Let's go. Let's hear it for Lake Taco. Everybody out there. Let's give it up for Lake Taco. I'm a big bear guy. I'm a SoCal guy. You're not going to catch me in Tahoe. We're going to catch me at Lake Arrowhead. The House of the Week. The House of the Week.

We will tell you about the House of the Week after we tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. The House of the Week is a modernist home talked into the Los Angeles Hillside. Let's hear it for Los Angeles. Wall Street, maybe 3,000 miles away, but they're showing some love to homegrown houses here in Los Angeles. It was owned by two hillside masterpiece. They're saying it's a hillside masterpiece. The Hollywood House was designed by Rudolph Schindler.

For journalist Susan Orlean and her husband, John Gillespie, a house has never been just a place to live. It's not just a place to live. It's an entire experience. Fans of modernist architecture. Wait, read that again. I'm messing with you. I'm messing with you.

Really? Yeah, I'd live that. Fans of modernist architecture, they spent their earliest dates visiting Frank Lloyd Wright's, falling water. in Pennsylvania. When the pair moved to Los Angeles in 07, so Arlene could research a book. They quickly fell in love with the work of Ruf Schindler, an Austrian-born architect who helped define modernism in the city.

And so there's a beautiful house up per sale. They did a four and a half year renovation. Did you hear the drama about there was a, there was a reporter, was it at Reuters or something, but he was accused of using AI to write all of his Olympics coverage. And it had all the telltale signs of AI generated sort of slop. And the editor-in-chief backed the journalist and said, no, he always writes like that. That's what he sounds like. They trained on him.

They trained on him. And then Pangram came in and said, well, we pulled all, we pulled the receipts, and he didn't use to write like that before AI. And so you can look at the chart. Maybe he's really bullish on AI. And so he only will read outputs now.

He doesn't read any organic. Maybe that. Or maybe he's just aping the style of chat GPT-40 because he thinks it's a good aesthetic. I don't know. Could be trying to troll. Because I could probably write an essay that triggers Pangram 100% AI

if I put my mind to it. And without the help of AI, I could just sit there and say, this isn't this, it's that. Blah, blah, blah, blah. I actually think that would be a good challenge. I don't think you could. I think it would, I think Pangram.

Tyler Challenge? Tyler Challenge. write something by hand. A hundred percent is really hard. Over 90%. You think you could do over 90%. In the next, between now and when the Palmer interview ends, you have to write 500 words that score above.

The pangram has a minimum, right? Yeah, I think it's a few hundred words, right? Yeah. You have to write more words in the panagram minimum and score above 90%. Yeah. You have to kick it off with like, sorry, as an AI model, I can't answer this, but I'll try anyway.

This isn't just a this, it's that. Anything else you'd like me to expand this prompt with, and then you'll trigger it. That's the hack, do you think? And if you win, you get a $50 gift card to Matu, to pick yourself up, some cheese steak sandwiches. I was thinking something book-related maybe. Two-night.

So there's $50 whole dollars on the line. 50 smackaroos. Go. Okay. Label box. RL environments, voice, robotics, evals, and expert human data, label boxes, the data factory behind the world's leading AI teams. Anyway, Jay Leno, he was turning heads because he was caught driving a 119-year-old car, a steam car. Oh, you caught me.

You caught me. He didn't call the paths. Look at this car. This is amazing. I didn't, 119 years old. We should ask Palmer if he has any steam. 1907. You see the steam actually pushing out at the bottom?

Do you load firewood into it? How do you generate the steam? This is incredible. What? He's the final car guy. Like he got the McLaren F1 and then he went older and then he went older and he finally got like the first car. He's going to get into horses big time.

That would be hilarious. He was just like, yeah, like real car guys. Like we know like you should just get a horse. Yeah. Yeah. That's the end. That's the end. He literally predicted vibe coding in 2023,

not other than George Hatz on the Lex Friedman podcast. I don't doubt that these models are going to first become useful to me, then be as good as me, and then surpass me. Like, I think in two years I'm going to start using these plugins a little bit. And then in five years, I'm going to be heavily relying on some AI augmented flow. And then in 10 years. Do you think you'll ever get to 100%? I think it's all generated.

Our niche becomes... Oh, I think it's over for humans in general. It's not programming. No more programmers left, huh? That's where we're going. Well, unless you want handmade code, maybe they'll sell it on Etsy. It's just handwritten code. It doesn't have that machine polished to it.

It has those slight imperfections that would only be written by a person. Look, I don't doubt that these... It's over. It's so good. We're back. He's truly so good. It's over. We're back.

Let me tell you about vibe.com. We're DTC brands, B2B startups, and AI companies advertise on streaming TV, pick channels, target audiences, and measure sales, just like on meta. This was quite interesting. Somebody over on X called Levi says two weeks ago, the Epstein Files podcast didn't exist. Today it's about to cross 500,000 downloads and sitting in Apple Podcasts, top 20 series between the New York Times and ABC News. Yeah. I vibe coded every episode with Claude from Real Epstein Court documents. So basically he just, like fully generated a podcast. And it is charting.

Yeah. For something like this, it makes a ton of sense to just programmatically, like sort of put everything together because there's so many files. It's a perfect use case for, for AI to sort of like synthesize comb through. And there is unlimited demand for Epstein-related content. Totally.

Anyway, we have Palmer Lucky in the Restream waiting room. Let's bring him in to the TBPN Ultradown. Palmer, how are you? You are live. You are live, sir. Can you hear you hear you loud and clear, though, with a little bit of delay. So we'll try to keep it zippy. Well, we're going to say probably five words in total, and you're just going to go crazy. Tell us what's happening. Tell us what's happening. So, I mean, Trump is complaining about tariffs. Iran is on the brink of war. And Arab War, the new bank for the, the new bank for the,

tech community building things that actually matter has officially received this charter and become operational. So it's a pretty good set of things that are going on. Big hit. Congratulations. Take us back in time. When did this project start? What was the inciting element? Why is this important? How did you pick this to work on? Look, there's a lot of things that I could point to, but it really boils down. I've been looking at starting a bank for a while, primarily for my own personal use, because there weren't banks out there that really understood my business, my businesses, the things that I was doing. Silicon Valley Bank was doing a reasonable job,

but then they went out of business and took everybody's money with them and had to have the government bail everybody out. And I think that was really kind of the thing that got me very serious about it. I realized that you didn't have banks that were aligned with the United States, interests that were aligned with deep tech, hard tech, energy, the things that are really complex and hard to understand, but that do really matter, that could also serve them in a meaningful way. I mean, you have farmers banks that serve communities that are doing agriculture. You have banks, certainly that are doing oil and gas quite well, but when it comes to tech,

it's a pretty sparse field. And so I started to think, well, how do you build a bank that could serve those things? How could you do it in a very conservative way, very, very low. risk way where you can ensure you're not going to go out of business, you're not going to force everyone to rely on government bailouts. You may not be able to survive a total financial collapse. Banks rarely can, but you can at least be the last man standing. And so thinking about that and then also a lot of things that new technology enables, like using US dollar backed cryptocurrencies to have 365, 24-7 settlement of payments, which is something

that a lot of businesses need and very few get, you kind of tack all these things together and it becomes clear that there's room for a company to be a real bank for real companies doing real things. So is there a network effect there? Because if I'm on Aibor and Jordi's on Aribor and we can both have 24-7 settlement, but someone else is on a different bank and they don't have 24-7 settlement, we're going to have a good experience. And then maybe to get out of the network, how does that work? I think that there will be network effects, but to be honest, whatever network effects there are

will probably be pretty short-lived, I think that pretty quickly everyone is going to realize that they need to support these things. And I think that when, like, seeing this administration's support for using specifically dollar-backed stable coins, so not saying we're going to move everybody off of the dollar, we're going to move them off of, you know, the United States currency as the reserve currency for the world. But I think probably most banks are going to get drug into this, the difference is that we're trying to do it from the start. So is there a network effect? probably, but I think most of the forward-looking companies that would value that network effect, that one in particular, see that in the next few years probably all banks are going to be forced

to adopt this to be competitive. So what is the ideal banking experience for you besides stability and low risk? Is being able to talk to somebody? Is that a bug? Should we just, is Airborne just going to be a chat bot that you say talk to a human? And it says, unfortunately, I cannot do that. I have an AI. I think it's going to be a long time before we hand things off to the chatpots, if only for regulatory reasons. Like, you set aside the risk, which is a huge factor. You set aside the fact that we have our own banking rails, which are extremely efficient, and that we can settle at any time. I mean, those are huge factors on their own.

But even if you knock off kind of all of these obvious advantages, there's a lot of other things that you get from having a bank that is strongly aligned with the United States, strongly aligned with U.S. interest, strongly aligned with the U.S. Department of War and also the intelligence community. And there's, there's a lot of ways of that manifest. For example, one of the things that we're doing is rather than working with the intelligence community only under court order to kind of go and respond to when they think there's crime going on on the platform, we're preemptively going out there and saying, no, we're going to work with them from the very, very beginning to help make fraud almost impossible on our platform, which is great for me, too,

because it means that people who want to engage in fraud are going to go to other banks. It means that people who don't want to engage in fraud are going to be thrilled about being on a platform that doesn't have that type of activity on it. And to the extent that it exists inside of their own platform against their will, they know that they have a willing partner that is willing to work with the government rather than hide these things. I'd say maybe think of it as like the opposite of HSBC

where they were banking the cartels and desperately trying to avoid any sort of government intervention that would make that clear to the public markets, put Aribor way at the other end of that spectrum. I think there's also a lot of other banks that whether they're good or bad people is irrelevant. You might have good people. people who nonetheless are very beholden to European markets, Chinese markets, other foreign

markets that they need to keep happy, either because they want to keep them happy and make money or because they don't want their executives in those jurisdictions to get arrested. Arabour is taking a very different approach. We're saying, you know what, we're an American company. We're an American bank that supports American companies, and we will comply with U.S. law, but we will not comply with spurious rulings from people who have no real jurisdiction or authority over us. And you'll find a very hard time finding a bank that takes that position.

I'm not aware of any other than us. How do you think about rolling out products? A bank can do everything from mortgages to equipment financing to venture debt to capital raises, take someone public. That's kind of what, you know, you go to a big bank. They're going to help you IPO. What do you want to do first? I think that right now, you know, look, we've just barely open.

So give us a little bit of time. the products that we are prioritizing are based entirely on the customer feedback that we're getting, the things that they tell us they need, the things that they tell us that we can most help with. In a way, the existence of a bank, to me, is almost this antiquated thing. You would hope that companies could really just do

all of this stuff themselves, or at least most of it themselves, but the regulatory climate, the way that the banking system works, requires that you have this intermediary in the form of a regulated bank to make these things happen. And so I kind of as think of, our business as part and parcel of these companies that need us,

and we're going to work very, very close to them, and closely with them and focus on the things that they care about. That's probably not going to be, for example, residential mortgages, but things like equipment financing, very conservative, very conservatively played where it's not going to turn into a risk management problem, allowing them to work with the legacy banking system and plugging into that in the least painful way, these are things that we have a lot of customers who are very interested.

Oh, and we need to not lose their money. If we can do that, we'll be doing better than many other banks. Talk about the tradeoffs of going the charter route, you know, the last 10 years. Most of the banking products that founders have used were built on top of existing charters or spreading deposits across multiple. Well, people would just avoid getting a charter at all. They want to be a fintech company, and they basically will dance around the fact that realistically what they're doing is basically being a bank.

Look, there's a lot of things that you can do without having your own charter. There's things you can do partner with other companies. There's a lot of things you cannot do without having your own charter. There's a lot of risks you cannot take. It's kind of anti-hypergrowth. Like you can't just scale to 50 billion of deposits tomorrow, even if there's the demand. Right. So maybe you decide that we decided that we needed to get our own charter because of the type

a bank we are going to try to run and the ability to have the buck stop with us. The moment that you're dependent on somebody else for the key infrastructure, the key risk management, the key licensure questions, they can kick you off the platform. They can be forced to kick you off the platform. Maybe they're doing it for good reasons. Maybe they're doing it for bad reasons. I mean, you've seen this play out, for example, with Steam and their payment processors and their banks and their payment processors banks where they're basically censoring games because there's some circle of people who all claim it's not them pointing down the chain. It's that guy, it's that guy, it's that guy, it's that guy. But they all agree, even if they can't agree, who's causing the

censorship, that if you don't censor, they're going to drop you, they're going to drop your account, they're going to debank you, they're going to depayment you. And so one of the things that you have to ask yourself, when you're making yourself dependent on another bank or another payment company is, am I setting this up where they get to make my decisions for me? And are they making their decisions for me or is the Chinese Communist Party making those decisions? Is some political party that is extremely hostile to some business on our network, the one actually making that decision? So if you don't control your own charter, if you don't control your own destiny, the buck doesn't stop with you and you're always going to have to keep other parties happy. And I think

that was not something that we were interested in. We wanted to be able to run the bank the way that we think that needs to be run. And if we are debanking somebody, we are going to have to take responsibility for that. And I think that that actually leads to much better behavior. I would love to see that type of behavior across the industry. Physical branches. How are you thinking about that? I think we're going to start with Fort Knox, and then we'll expand from there. I like it.

Yeah, maybe actually dive deeper there. Like, what is a bank these days? I think most people can conceptualize, like, setting up a crypto wallet that holds coins, but when you want a real dollars, you don't actually have a physical bank vault, I imagine. so once you get the charter, does that just give you the ability to maintain a database and a ledger? Like, what is a bank?

What is a bank? I mean, there's lots of forms it can be. I think if you want all the details, you can actually read through a lot of our applications. So it's actually a matter of public record, and you can see that. Anderil, sorry, not Adderall, we'll have a physical vault

and we will have a lot of treasure in it. So we are not trying to be a pure digital, pure, you know, pure ether company. And in fact, a lot of the, companies that are very interested in working with us want us to have secure actual vaulted storage. I'm not saying that that's going to be the first thing that we focus on. That's our key differentiator. But we are not a, we are not a bank of the ether. We are we are of terra firma. Yeah. Last time you came on, we talked a lot about mod retro. I'd love an update on the

M64. What makes that product special? Where did you go further with this project than with the chromatic and just general, like how you're thinking about the M64? Well, so for people who aren't familiar with that the M64 is a tribute to the Nintendo 64 that I'm building, one of the greatest multiplayer consoles of all time. We're building a console that is compatible with all classic N64 games. We're re-releasing a lot of classic N64 games so that you can buy them if you don't already have them. We're actually doing new releases of canceled N64 games that never even made it to market, either because they were canceled and ported to GameCube or because they ran out of money or because the studios imploded for interpersonality

reasons. There's a lot of cool stuff coming out. The M64, I guess the main update is that it's in mass production right now. It is not eventually coming. It is in mass production right now. We've decided we're not going to launch it until we build up sufficient stock to meet the demand. One of the mistakes I think we made with the Mod Retro Chromatic, which was a tribute to the Game Boy and Game Boy Color, was that we started selling them, and then all of a sudden we sold out. And then you have people who hear about it, they read about it, their friends are all talking about it, they go to try to buy one and they can't buy one because it's sold out. And there's a question, will they remember to

come back and buy it some other time? Will they still feel like going and immediately buying it? Exactly. And so you kind of end up with this, with this dead end call to action. And so we've decided this time, by the way, this is especially bad for the game publishers that we're working with. Let's say that it's someone who's re-releasing a game

or somebody who's doing a brand new game. Some of the indie developers we're working with on the Chromatic. They're out there promoting their game. They're trying to market their game. They're doing a whole marketing activation trying to convince people, hey, Come and buy my new Game Boy game. Come and buy my new Nintendo 64 game. Well, what happens if you can't buy the console?

A lot of people like, oh, I'll come back later and buy it. And then they don't. And so what we want to do is not let down our developer partners this time and make sure that we maintain stock. So the goal is that the M64, no matter how many people hit our website, is not going to sell out. And so we are mass producing. We're stockpiling, I think tens of thousands of them so far, more and more to come.

What is the supply chain? What's the supply chain actually like right now? We've covered the gamer rebellion against AI. Gamers are rising up. You know, the supply chain is okay because of the type of hardware that we're building. There's a lot of consumer hardware right now where people are trying to buy memory, and it's a huge problem. But remember that the Nintendo 64 doesn't have exactly a lot of memory.

You know, it had what, what, 16 megabytes by default, 32 megabytes with the expansion pack. And so it turns out that you don't need that much memory to perfectly replicate the Nintendo 64 original hardware. Maybe it might be, it might be actually the least, less, the least memory impacted consumer electronics product of the year. And so this was, this was your plan then all along. Yeah, you saw this guy. I'm going to make the, the final console. Yeah. No, we got to return to monkey. We got, we got to go back to the beginning. I mean, really,

What am I doing here with something with 32 megabytes? I mean, you remember what Bill Gates said, right? What was it, 64 kilobytes of RAM ought to be enough for anyone? Yep. Let's go back even further. Yeah, let's figure out how to use AI to build applications that fit within reasonable memory footprints. Ooh, I'm only half kidding. I think you might have seen me going back and forth with Shamath on Twitter a couple weeks ago

talking about how this AI software platform for building software, using AI should definitely support export to Windows XP, Service Pack 3 compatible applications. And I really am only half kidding. There is actually a lot of government hardware that is still running those, financial hardware that's still running these, mostly offline stuff. And so having apps that can run on those is actually useful. But, man, it feels crazy to need a few gigabytes of RAM to have a start menu. It feels pretty crazy that you need 16 gigabytes of RAM to take 30 minutes to search through

a bunch of text files. Surely we can do better than this. Can you talk a little bit about how you think about gaming in the concept of just raising the next generation, kids? I have three kids. And I think I could probably get an emulator and run it on an iPad and slam that over to my kids' face. And he might not know the difference. But is there another angle to the M64 that is about like some of the things that you can't do with it are actually? good for the world, maybe.

I mean, you have to remember that the gaming industry, like many industries, figured out what actually worked a long time ago. They figured out how to make fun games, they figured out how to make things that people keep coming back. But it's moved from innovation to extraction. And I will note, I stole that line from Narav Patel, founder of Framework, because he put it so much better than I did. But there's these industries that have moved from innovation to extraction.

And they're now in the extraction phase where they try to make tons and tons and tons of money and actually pushing the limits is not the top priority for some huge majority of the dollars that are in industry. And so there's a lot of stuff that you can learn, especially when you're learning it from the ground up, by going back to when people were just getting the basics right, when they were still innovating, building things that were really compelling to people. I recently had a kid, I might have a second on the way. I'm planning on starting them with, I don't even if I'd say the classics. This isn't like a vintage play. It's starting them with a good foundation. That foundation happens to be largely old games. But I am not going to be throwing them

into the slot machine, micro-transaction gambleramma that is dominating kids games today. It just seems like like a crazy thing to do. It's a skinner box. Yeah. Don't go in the skinner box. Talk about vibe coding. What would your life be like if vibe coding existed when you were 20? Advice for or 12. People who are 20 now in the world of vibe coding. You went into our life. You went into hardware very early, that feels like a great move? Is that still a great move? Walk us through all that. I mean, the biggest beneficiaries of vibe coding are going to be the hardware nerds like me. It's going to be, it's going to be the shape rotators, not the word cells. Everyone's focused on how the word cells are going to be wiped out by AI. But for the shape rotators, it's going to be

incredible. You know, I was always a pretty terrible software engineer. I'm not a programmer by trade. I've taught myself enough to glue things together and make them work. But when I started my first company Oculus, or actually when I started Mod Retro when I was 14 or 15, I knew just barely enough about software. If I would have been able to build crappy stuff by outsourcing it to a computer, I actually would have been able to accomplish things a lot faster than trying to do it myself. And people might say, Palmer, you should have just learned to code. You know, you should have just learned to do it yourself.

But I think it's pretty easy to look at my track record and realize, I started Oculus when I was 19, after building prototype since I was 15, I was only able to accomplish what I accomplished because I focused on what I was good at, which was optomechanics, a little bit of electrical, and then the product integration of all of these different components. I didn't have time to learn to program. If I'd spend another year or two learning to program at even a reasonable level, I would have been two years behind on everything else. And so I am a big fan of vibe coding, even if everything that comes out of it is sloppy, even if it is all shit. it's better than I was able to make. How are you thinking about VR these days? I recently watched The Matrix from start to finish in an Applevision Pro.

I enjoyed it. It feels like the only real thing that you can do these days is just a home theater if you don't have a home theater. But it doesn't feel like the industry has embraced that at all. And everyone's sort of writing down their investments and pulling back at a time when the display technology does seem to be good enough for that narrow use. case if you cut out the weight and move things around. But where do you see this, where do you, where do you want consumer VR to go? And then where do you think it actually is going? So I will challenge your premise there, which is that people are pulling back. I think that's driven mostly by people, uh, sensationalizing meta, firing a bunch of people. But you have to

remember they got rid of 10% of the reality labs team in one layoff. Remember that they have something like eight or nine percent annual churn naturally and organically, not including firing. So sure. I mean, what you're really talking about is basically pulling six months of churn forward into a single month. And they're still spending more on VR than anybody by an order of magnitude. They've said they are not spending less on content. They're just not putting it into first-party stuff like Facebook Meta Horizon. You've seen they've announced Meta Horizon is no longer a VR app. As of yesterday, it is now a mobile-focused app only.

So what they've done is they've basically killed a few of these failing efforts that didn't make sense. And they're now putting those resources into things that are working. And so I wrote a bit about this on Twitter where people need to understand this is not the end of VR. It's not collapsing. They are still spending an enormous amount of money. They're bigger than anybody else by an order of magnitude. And I think if you pay attention to what's going to be coming out from meta and others over the next 12 months, you're going to see a lot of progress. Like Applevision Pro, yes, they, so yes, Apple Vision Pro was ahead of everybody on visual quality, on display quality.

But let me tell you a short story. Imagine that an American company went to a Japanese display vendor, and they said, we want you to sell us your new 4K micro-Oled displays. The company gives them samples of those micro-Oled displays. The samples cost about $1,000 each because the yield on that production line is only about 10%. In other words, 90% of the displays coming off the production line are not up to par. They're not working. And that's because these are engineering samples.

They're not meant to actually be a working product. And they said, listen, here's our engineering samples. Just wait two years and the yield is going to be up to 90%. We'll be able to sell the use to you for a couple hundred dollars. And then imagine that that American tech company had a guy named Tim Apple called them up and saying, no, we're going to build a product with this right now today using our engineering samples. They said, but Tim Apple, that's crazy. That means that your headset was going to cost like $3,000.

He said, I don't care. I'm going to sell a headset that should launch in 27 in 2024, 2025. and I'm going to do it for $3,500. That's what Apple Vision Pro is. It was never intended to be a product of the times. It's a product of the future hauled into the present by spending enormous amounts of money. And so Meta and Sony and Apple and Google

and all of these other companies, they are going to be hitting that level of visual fidelity. They're going to be doing it with headsets that are far smaller, far lighter than what you see from Vision Pro. And I actually remain very optimistic. That's great. I think things are going pretty well. I'm extremely optimistic.

It's mostly just that when I try and pull stuff out of meta, they're like, no, no, no, we're not ready to talk. And I think that they're just being cold shoulder to me because, like, they don't want to leak it yet. But I am very optimistic. Well, you know, the problem is they don't have a charming, charismatic pitchman who knows how to talk about this stuff with you. They've got to solve that. They need to figure out what they're doing. You know, it reminds me of something being here. I'm on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange behind me.

And back in the Oculus days, when we sold the company to Meta, one of the first things that happened was New York Stock Exchange emailed our contact email, and they asked if I would come and ring the bell of the New York Stock Exchange. Sounds pretty cool, right? Like, hey, like, you've been acquired by this major public corporation

in the form of Facebook, come and ring the bell. Maybe someday we'll do something else with you. And unfortunately, I didn't see that email for about seven years because another Oculus executive intercepted the email, said, oh, no, Palmer can't make it. but I would love to come. And he came and he rang the bell without telling me about it. And so I found out about it later in unrelated litigation.

That email came up in discovery. And anyway, I've not had a chance to ring the bell yet. Maybe when Andrewl goes public, I'll finally be able to, I'll finally be able to ring that bell. But I've got to admit, I have a long memory and a long memory of grudges, and I won't say who it was. But there's probably a handful of people out there who can guess. You have a lot of co-founders now, a lot of executive. that you work with, how do you select for folks who won't do that to you?

How do you select the right people? Extreme loyalty. Trust, I don't know. I mean, it's important. Remember. You just kicked this thing off a year ago. Look, I started Oculus when I was 19 years old. Yeah. And I mean, you also got to remember the story of who is a founder,

who is a co-founder. It's fluid and dynamic and always changing with the ebb and flow of history. One of my ideas is to have a blockchain company where everyone agrees what the founding story is and who the co-founders are and then it goes into the blockchain so that nobody can come back and say

that they're a co-founder. There's a guy running around now who says that he's a co-founder of Oculus who was very much so not a co-founder and in fact, we refused to even... I swear, I think I met this guy. I told you this story off there. Oh, tell me the story.

So I met it. I was at a dinner party at my friend's house and my buddy was like, hey, this guy works at, I'm not going to name the company, but you guys would probably have some tech stuff in common you guys should meet. And I go up to him, I said, hey, hi, I hear we should meet. And he's like, hey, I was like, what's your story?

He's like, I started a company called Oculus. Okay. Now it met. And I was like, oh, interesting. Like, never heard of you before. And so it may be this guy. We won't put him up last. Here's a crazy thing.

I don't even know who you're talking about. Yeah, well, and I told him, I was like, oh, like. Because there's multiple people who are saying this, including a guy who literally has a documentary being made about him, how he's the founder of Oculus. So it's always a, it's always very strange. I was like, oh, that's, that's awesome. Like, Palmer comes on the show all the time,

and then he completely backtracked. It was like, well, yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, I joined, like, you know, you know, but I was on the founding team. Like, he backtracked. Well, look, you, so, Dick, to the point, you asked me, how do you select these people? Carefully.

I was 19 years old when I selected the first people that I was working with. I've learned a lot. I've been stabbed in the back a lot, and I'd probably make very different decisions if I were doing it today. And it's worth noting, remember that I started Oculus on my own with no co-founders, nobody involved in a lot of, like, I brought on people that I am happy to call co-founders, even though they didn't join the company until months later, who I had never met when I started the company. That said, there's some people I'm honored to share the title of co-founder with, and there's other people that I'm not, which is why I really want this blockchain thing. Somebody needs to vibe code this slop and get it out there. Super important question.

Have you played Federal Reserve Simulator yet? It's a new game. It's on Steam. On Steam. You've got to try it. You're a banker now. I'm not even heard of it. You're a banker now.

You've got to get the reps. You might really enjoy this. All right. Reserve Simulator. Federal Reserve Simulator on Steam. It's right there on the screen. It says, Trump says, we have an incompetent federal reserve chair who loves high interest rates. There we go.

Very, very interesting. What hardware are you collecting recently? We just learned you can buy a steam-powered car and drive it around. Jay Leno has one that's 120 years old. What hardware am I buying? Collecting, not just buying, collecting. Yeah, I know. What am I?

Well, so I have a, there's a few things I could bring up. To be honest, I've been too busy to buy really good stuff. But I recently got delivered one of the first Jetson ones, which is a small E-V-Tol aircraft. I was one of their first customers and their first delivery. I also have a collection of motorcycles. The theme of the collection is commercial failure. And so all of my motorcycles were huge commercial failures. The more of a failure, the better.

And so I've been buying some failed two-wheel drive motorcycles. How do they buy some military motorcycles? How do they ride? Oh, incredible. Look, look, there's really bad failed motorcycles. There's those that failed because they're too good. one of the crown jewels in my collection is a Honda Rune. It was basically a personal project created by the CEO of Honda.

The document that they used when they were creating it has actually been leaked now. And at the start of the document, it says, performance is the only object. Price is of no importance. And so they wanted to build the ultimate cruising motorcycle. And the story goes that they lost over $100,000 per bike in the end. And so I've got one of the handful of Honda Runes that made it out of that. that program, a beautiful Honda Honda room with a couple thousand miles,

metallic purple and chrome. And it's one of my favorite motorcycles, if not the favorite. So commercial failure doesn't mean a product's bad. It just means they couldn't figure out how to make a business out of it. Back to your Jetson 1. Have you been flying it?

Are you taking it like half a foot off the ground and then a foot off the ground? What is the path to commuting to work in it? I think given the regulatory climate around E.V.V.V.E.V.E.V.E.T.L. Aircraft. It's best that I not say one more word. Perfect. Perfect. Where do you get your shirts? Where do I got my shirts? Well, it depends. I buy Tommy Bahamas. This one is a Rain Spooner and a Royal Hawaiian shirt. So I've got a Century Tower.

I've got a ghost X on it. And they're headquartered on Catalina Island, California, and Avalon. So I buy a I buy from a holdup bunch of different places. I'm an equal opportunity Hawaiian shirt purchaser. I like it supporting the entire market map. Well, it sounds like we have Jonathan Gould, the comptroller of the currency, next to you in the booth. Is that correct?

That's right. I'd like to introduce Jonathan Gould, Comptroller of the currency here with me today on TBPN. Thank you so much for joining us. Jonathan, please introduce yourself since it's the first time on the show. and tell us a little bit about what happened today from your perspective and what's going on with Airborne from your perspective. Sure. So thank you so much for having me. I'm Jonathan Gould, the Comptroller of the Currency. We charter, we regulate, and we supervise national banks. And today we're here to celebrate what is the first full-service charter of a national bank that's been issued since I took office about seven months ago. So we're very excited to have Airborne into the national banking system after months of hard work on their part. So, delighted to have them there, and we're here to celebrate that.

Yeah. What, how much is changing around the way banks get chartered? I'm interested to hear, is this just the Herculean efforts on Palmer's side, or is there going to be a flood of new bank charters issued? Like, what is the view over the next decade look like for new banks broadly? Well, so I think over the last four years, but even beyond, since the 2008 financial crisis, regulators have imposed a lot of hurdles procedurally and otherwise as a result of just having a much lower risk tolerance around bank chartering in the United States. That's not the result of any changes in statute or anything like that.

Just simply a lot of regulators, not just the OCC, but other regulators as well at the federal level and possibly at the state level two, just discouraging banks from forming. But of course, it's absolutely critical that we have new banks forming in America on a regular basis. That's really part of how the banking system revitalizes and refreshes itself over time. And so, again, we want to do everything we can

such that we are being transparent and holding all applicants to the same standard and faithfully applying the statutory factors that Congress has given us on a case-by-case basis and in an even-handed fashion so that if new applicants, if they meet the statutory factors and they can meet our high supervisory standards as Airborne has, they will get a charter.

So we're excited to see the demand that's out there. We think that there, and have seen already a lot of banks of various different business models kind of in the pipeline already. And again, if they meet the statutory criteria and they can meet our supervisory standards, we welcome the system. I'd also say, just personally, I think those standards, people should understand, are already extremely high. Like, you guys are not lowering the bar, you're just going through the process that's

the lawyer you're supposed to. And I like, you might not be able to say this or want to say this, but I'll say, like, right now as it is, there's probably a lot of things that could be done to make it easier for people to start banks that would be productive. Like, but right now, I mean, like, the bar is extremely high. I've put it this way, like, this is, starting a bank is very much a rich get richer thing right now. Like, you can't be a 19-year-old Palmer Lucky who started Oculus in his trailer and say, you know

what, I've got this incredible idea for banking. I think I'm going to go start a bank. Maybe it's possible, but the process we went through, I don't think a 19-year-old Palmer-Lucky can get through. That's fair. And again, I mean, part of what we're doing here is just trying to live up to the standards that we say we have in place for what it takes to become a bank, but more fundamentally, and if you'll pardon me for this one, but I mean, you shouldn't have to hire a burglar from the shire to get a bank charter, right? It shouldn't be that challenging. we should have transparent standards around it. And to the OCC's credit, I think we do.

We just have in all cases and overall administrations follow them. Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. What other, are there other kind of industries or categories that you're interested in? Airborne is obviously unique and that it's focused on technology and industrial businesses. And it's something that has so much excitement from our industry. But is there kind of a line out the door in terms of other sectors that are excited to have, kind of a new bank partner in their industry.

So we don't, you know, from a chartering agency standpoint, we don't, you know, pick and choose winners and losers. We don't pick and choose business models. We want to make sure that to the extent there is an unmet credit need in a community or in a business or an industry, that the banking system is evolving to meet those credit needs, again, subject to doing so in a safe and sound manner. So again, you know, we are trying to apply. the statutory factors across business models,

across potential applicants in an even-handed fashion, again, consistent with the guidance that we've produced over the years. So again, we're not trying to direct, you know, bank chartering one way or the other. You know, I think we've seen in the past, particularly over the last four years, you know, a skepticism,

inconsistent with statute, but a skepticism around things like digital assets and crypto. We are reverting back to what I would say is the norm, for the OCC over its 163 year history, which is we don't pick winners or losers here. We apply statutes in even-handed fashion, and we are agnostic around technology. And in fact, we welcome banks embracing new technologies, right? I mean, over 163 years, which is how long our agency has been around for. And obviously, the U.S. banking system far exceeds that.

Banks have had to adapt, evolve over time. And again, new chartering is how banks do that in part. It's how the system adapts and refreshes itself. So we have a strong interest in seeing that continue to occur. I know you can't pick and choose, but I have to say, in my mind, I want someone to start a bank that is focused on adult content and other edge of illegal stuff. It's not what I want to focus on. But the problem is right now there's this weird gray area where there's things that are technically legal in the U.S.,

but no banks want to touch them because of the PR concerns or the actual real risk concerns. And so they end up being banked by foreign banks that are doing all kinds of weird payments. Now you have an opening for organized crime, an opening for sex trafficking, and open and you don't have any real insight into how any of it moves. Like the U.S. can't see how the money is moving. It becomes much harder for law enforcement. These other international banks don't want to cooperate with law enforcement because they're making all their money off of sex trafficking and illegal payments and all of these other things. And so I've always wished that somebody would come up and say, hey, I'm going to bank all of the people. that are on the edge of legality so that we can get at least some insight and access into this.

I don't want to be in that business personally, but somebody out there should do this because it would probably be better if that whole industry theoretically didn't exist. But in a world where it does exist, it's better that they not be banked by Russian organized crime. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Get a little more technical with us. what is the actual process look like for applying for a charter? I mean, I think some people, you know,

imagine like a web form that they fill out. Then they might, you know, imagine, you know, a thousand page legal document or are there lots of conversations, meetings, like how to be you probably also need to be able to raise like a quarter billion dollars

or something in that range to get the game. Yeah. Yeah. What does it actually take these days? I mean, I'll leave, I'll leave that to you, but I mean,

like you, you said it doesn't take a, quarter billion dollars. I mean, we had to have like $350 million in regulatory capital just sitting in an account to backstop it, which again gets back to what I said earlier. Right now, starting a bank under like current rules and statute, it is very much not the 19-year-old Palmer Lucky version of a world. But that seems healthy. I don't want a bank with a 19-year-old personally. We have some 19-year-olds on our team. They're fantastic. They're talented. I've probably have slightly different opinions. But, R. Eileen, very libertarian. I'm a

college drop out. I'm trying to figure out if I can convince kids to drop out of high school. I mean, would you say you wouldn't bank with a 19 year old? Maybe you just haven't met the right 19 year old. That's right. There's a lot of people who wouldn't work for a 19 year old and I had that problem when I started Oculus. And yet I managed to do it. I'll give you the more anodyne, less colorful our version. And maybe somewhere between the two is what actually happens in practice. So it's a two-phase process. So it's a two-phase process. for chartering a bank at the OCC. The first phase essentially is the regulators, so the OCC will be vetting the business plan, understanding

and assessing what's the probability for success, ultimately doing what's called a, giving what's called a preliminary conditional approval or not. We aim to do that within 120 days. And then essentially the second phase is the actual in-organization phase, so it's standing up the bank, doing all the policies and procedures, doing the fundraise or the capital side, making sure you have the management team in place that you need. And that can occur. That basically has to occur within 12 to 18 months of when the OCC grants preliminary conditional

approval. But how long exactly the bank remains in organization phase is really up to the bank, right? Because they've just got to get themselves ready so that they can essentially kind of, you know, open the doors for business. And the last thing that happens just before they do open the doors for business. is that OCC examiners coming into the final kind of pre-opening exam and make sure, in fact, the policies and procedures are in place, management's there and so forth, so that the bank can, in fact, welcome customers and execute it on its business plan.

I have one last question. Can we have a 19-year-old comptroller? What does it take to become a comptroller of the currency? Is this, you go to Wall Street, and then there's a revolving door, and then you go to the government, do you work your way up in the government? break me down for the 19-year-old that wants to be the next comptroller of the currency. What do they got to do? Well, I don't think there's any statutory prohibition on age.

19-year-old followers. I mean, hopefully qualifications are relevant, although it's hard to tell sometimes in Washington these days. But certainly you do need a presidential nomination and support, and you need the advice and consent of the Senate. I spent about 25 years in this industry, so I've got a lot of friends. and both on the policy side and on the banking side.

Okay. Well, now I'm excited about a 19-year-old comptroller. They can put on their application. I don't even know if I want a 10-year-old. Oh, oh, oh, wow. Palmer talks a big game about faith in youth. And then as soon as I tell him, you're going to be regulated by a 19-year-old. He's like, oh, no, no, no.

Let me tell you why this actually fits in with a libertarian perspective. Okay, okay. When you have a free market and you have a whole bunch of different companies that are all competing with each other. The idea that one or a few of them might be run by high schoolers, say, you know what? Give them the right to compete in that.

It's a free market. They're allowed to compete, and if they provide a better product and a better service and people want to work with them or for them, all the power to them. Government is different. You have a centralized power.

You have one chance to get it right. And so I will admit, I am a little worried that perhaps if you need someone with a lot of experience, not even just in currency or finance, Just someone with experience in life. I talked earlier about how I probably picked poorly in some of the people that I worked with early on.

Imagine if I was the comptroller of the currency and I had that same level of naivete. If it's one of 100 companies in the market, I'm all for it. If they are the person who is the wielder of singular government authority, I actually would worry about it. So I'm not as hypocritical as you think. I'm like halfway there. I wouldn't want to discourage 19-year-olds from aspiring or becoming the Comptroller Currence. But just to be clear, the control of the currency is not responsible for killing the penny. Okay, okay.

Do you have to deal with that every day? Are people stopping you on the street and flicking pennies at your head? Most of my family members and all my college friends, all they want to know is so you're responsible for killing the penny. And then as soon as I say no and start describing my actual job, they immediately lose interest. Yeah, eyes glazing. That's a funny one. Well, thank you guys for coming on the show. We really appreciate all the context and laughs.

Have a great time at the New York Stock Exchange. Say hi to lend for us. Yeah, say how to land. And we'll see you soon. Cheers, gentlemen. Live long and prosper. Goodbye. Live long and prosper.

Let me tell you about public.com investing for those who take it seriously. They got stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service. And let me also tell you about 11 labs. Build intelligent, real-time conversational agents, reimagine human technology interaction with 11 labs. That was a lot of fun. I loved in the chat. Someone was saying they got to make Comptroller of the currency simulator. Get it on Steam.

I'm ready to play 10,000 hours of Comptroller simulator. That's what you should be required to do before you get the job in the presidential nominee. Anyway, we will continue with our coverage of Aibor at the New York Stock Exchange. In just a minute, we have Diogo from Hahn Ventures coming in, calling in from the New York Stock Exchange. so we will bring him in in just a second. Any other breaking news that we should touch on? We can touch on this briefly. So, NVIDIA and Open AI are nearing.

Yes. NVIDIA's $30 billion investment into Open AI. Yes. A lot of people were kind of... I thought it was $100 billion, which is... Yeah, and so this fell like a downgrade, but at the same time, that $100 billion, when they proposed it, was going to be in, you know,

10% installments based on milestones. And so I think it makes a lot of sense to just do a good chunk of this up front. You just need to remove five zeros from every deal to contextualize it for a normal founder. Like if you're raising a $10 million Series A and an investor comes in and says, I'm good for three, you're like, awesome. This is great. And then add five zeros and that's the same ultimate experience. Anyway, we have our next guest in the Restream Waiting Room.

Let me tell you about Plaid first. Plaid powers the apps you use to spend, say, borrow and invest, securely connecting bank accounts to move money, fight fraud, and improve lending now with AI. And without further ado, welcome to the show. How are you doing? What's happening? We are working on audio. Let's try and bring that in, and we will kick it off in the introduction. Please, since it's the first time on the show, introduce yourself. Yes. My name is Yoga Monica. I'm a GP at Han Ventures and the co-founder and executive chairman of Anchorage Digital.

Fantastic. Since it's the first time in the show, give us a little bit of background how you wound up at Han Ventures. Katie on the show. And what was your first trip to Nisi? Yeah, that's interesting. Yes, it was not my first trip, actually. So I've been here a few times. Nice. I've gone to take lots of the pictures. Great. And they actually have a curator, by the way. So if you come to Nisi, you should ask for her. She knows everything about the history of this place. It is an hour and a half to two hours, but you should absolutely do it and see all of the original documents and everything that has happened here. Super historic. Cool. And then, so yeah, background, the path to Han, the path the crypto. I know Han Ventures is interesting because there's the government relationships as well

as the FinTech. There's a lot going on. So I'd love to know how you wound up in your current position. Yeah, so fun story, but I really've only done one thing in my entire life. So PhD distributed systems 20 years ago when honestly was useless. And then I led security team at Square for four years, went to the lead security team at Docker for three years, then started my own company with Nathan, company called Anchorage Digital, the first federal chartered bank, which is very relevant for Arabour. And then Katie and I connected when I was fundraising for Anchorage about eight years ago. And over the years, we've just been friends. She was, as you know, co-leading the A16 Z crypto funds that was an investor in Anchorage. We were friends. We were

on the board of the Libradium, if you recall, that initiative by Facebook together and just, you know, their clients of Anchorage. And so we've interacted many different ways over the years. Yeah, so talk about the Arabboard deal. How did you meet Palmer? What was interesting about this other than, you know, obviously there's a lot of star power, but I want to hear more about the unique thesis. So, look, I was in a unique situation, which is I'm one of the few crazy people that actually sit on the board of two federal charters, not just one. And so when the team came to me and really wanted to start this said, well, there's not that many people that have done this over the past five years. And Anchorage got our charter, as you know, in 2021 and really was trailblazer in terms of showing that you could have innovation under the OCC and going through a Biden administration, which, as you know, was very crypto-unfriendly and really coming out on the other side with a very strong business. Sorry to interrupt, but did everyone think you were absolutely, you guys were absolutely insane to try to get a charter in that climate? How did you think the odds were going into that process?

Was it kind of a moonshot? Like, hey, if we can make this happen, it's great. but low likelihood or at any, at what point did you develop confidence that it would be a possibility? Well, look, we, it was to the point where the consultants that were helping us get the charter did not believe that we were going to get the charter in the first place. So that was how bad it was to get a charter and try to get a charter in 2020. But if you think about Anchorage and how it started, it is an institutional bank. We only serve large institutions, you know, the clients are the Blancrocks of the world,

visas of the world, very large institutions. So when we had the opportunity of converting our state trust charter into a federal charter, it was the obvious solution and the obvious, you know, solution that had longevity if you're just serving institutions. We basically connected the best security that custody's crypto assets to the best regulatory charter that you can get out there. And that was the end state of the company. If you had the opportunity of jumping right to the end state of the company, wouldn't you take it?

And so we put all of our chips. We went all in. and we just ended up being the first ones to get the charter. Got it. How are you thinking about innovation in the existing, you know, mega bank sector? Like, there's been a ton of skepticism around crypto from the leads of the big banks,

but I feel like some of them are coming around. It's staring them in the face at this point. They're seeing public companies that operate in crypto, you know, make it through. There's new regulation. Is there any, is there anything that you are seeing on the horizon where those banks might modernize and actually adopt some more forward-thinking technology strategies?

Look, Erebor to a large part actually came out of the frustration of the fact that that does not exist for the industry. Like, if we go all the way to 2008 in post-crisis, you had Dodd-Frank that actually created so many more regulations, all of these stress tests, all these capital requirements. And from that moment on, the number of federal banks is literally a monotonically decreasing function over time. Each year has less banks than the year before it, through M&A, mergers, or people going out of business. And so the frustration of the industry when you're in technology and you're trying to build financial products of not being able to build has culminated in something like Anchorage and then something like Araborn. Because if you think about it, Fintechs started for a while renting these charters in doing banking as a service as it's called. And then all of a sudden, synapse blow up happens, which is still being litigated.

they literally did not know who the money belongs to. And so it showed that if you are a tech company that wants to build a world-class product, then you cannot rely on a rented charter and banking as a service. You sort of have to do it yourself. So going straight to the pain, which is very difficult to get an OCC charter and operate as a bank-holding company under the regulatory regime of the oldest banking regulator in the United States, the OCC, that is not something that you do lightly, but it was necessary.

So it was time for tech to come in terms. to finance. And so that's why these banks got created. And we had to take matters into our own hands. How do you see the market for new banks developing? Because when Palmer launched Anderol, there was this line where in order to start a defense company, you had to have a billionaire as a co-founder. And he cited Palantir, Anderle, SpaceX. And it was something that was like the barrier to entry was so high. And then now we have a whole defense tech boom. And there's a lot of cool stuff going on. Standard rolls obviously still doing it fantastically. But is this one, is this a moment where you think people will just wake up and be like,

yeah, it's hard, but it's not impossible. And so maybe we will see a bank that's specifically targeted at farming or oil and gas or some new startup in some other vertical. They'll try and create some differentiation, not go right up against Airborne, but we will see a market map in a few years of new banks. A hundred percent. After 20 years of almost zero federal charters. been created a year, there's a window here because of a pro-business administration and lots

of these convergences that have been happening that allows people to even for the first time think that it's possible. Think that it's possible. And so dozens of these charges have been applied for. There's two main strains of them. One of them is the trust bank charter that Anchorage Trailblazed in which you are full bank, but you're not actually taking deposits and you're effectively a full reserve bank. And then there's the Aribor model, which is a full fiduciary, traditional bank. In the case of Erebor, extremely conservative tier capital, tier capital ratios, and it's an extremely conservative bank, but you're going for the whole enchilada, FDIC, insured, et cetera. So lots of banks are now realizing that this is possible. And you see that in the

massive increase of applications in charges being given out. So it's a new renaissance for banks and people realizing this is possible. So let's actually go do it. Yeah. How are you thinking about making you're now on the board of two? Would you, can, consider making more investments in this space or are the incremental charters that would be kind of broadly interesting to the market, not necessarily a fit for Han ventures? Look, they have to make sense. One of the reasons why Aerobor works is because three of the things that are hardest about starting a bank, the first one is capitalization.

It's no surprise that Palmer starting anything will get capitalized. And so you jump through that hurdle. The second one is the regulatory hurdle. Anchorage has shown that it was possible. The team that Palmer assembled is absolutely magnificent from engineering to compliance to regulation. And so it was very clear to me from day one that they were going to be able to step over their hurdle.

And then the third and most important thing is you actually have to get to scale on a depository base. And Aerobor through Palmer as a go-to-market, which is what I call it, Palmer as a go-to-market as our go-to-market strategy. And Palmer's friends, Palmer's connections, and obviously the competence of the team and the bank, have all three figured out. So effectively, we speed ran the infancy teenage years of a bank into something that is fully fledged and is ready to go. Amazing. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. Let's go to market. Breaking it down. Palmer. Congratulations. Have fun. Enjoy the closing bell.

Great to meet you. Come back on the show. Four minutes until the closing bell. We'll be a lot of nicey. We will talk to you soon. Cheers. Goodbye. Let me tell you about console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. And I believe we have Joe Lonsdale in the Restream waiting room. Let's bring him into the TVPN Ultram. Joe, how are you doing? Hey, guys, how are they going? Good to see you. It's going fantastically. Is software dead? I don't know. I know you have some good, some good takes on the SaaSpocalypse because someone vibe coded your former company, right?

Oh, that's funny. You saw my comments on the end today. I can't help myself. I'm like, it's like being shared by all these people. Oh, yeah, I vibe coded Palantir. Like, come on, guys. It's like, it's annoying because I'm, I'm such a pro-AI bullish person, but it drives you to a paucity from the whole movement when they're like,

we're replacing everything. Poundier's going down. I'm like, no, I think low-end SaaS is in trouble the next few years. Like, that's the reality, right? Yeah. Not the hard companies. So that's narrow point solution, no system of record, no, regulatory mode, like no network effect.

Is that what you're thinking when you described low-end SaaS? That's where I would start. It's probably some of the stuff that Constellation software used to do. I don't know what they're doing now, but back in the day when I studied them, there's a lot of stuff like that. And listen, there's probably like, it probably climbs the stack over time, right? So there's probably some very simple systems of record that are very basic that you can kind of probably pull in.

But listen, there's, like, if you took more than $100 million dollars to build your SaaS software with, like, good engineers, that's going to take a while to replace. And if you have a great SaaS company that spent hundreds of millions or billions of dollars and you still have a great tech culture and you're using AI, you're fine, right? As long as you have a great tech culture

because you're going to stay ahead. But there's a lot of stuff with PEBot, didn't take that much to build, probably put more money into sales than tech. That stuff's in trouble. Yeah. What are you advised? How are the conversations going

with existing portfolio companies that are now running the calculus on how long it'll take to build new products and thinking like, hey, we can go multi-product. faster than maybe we could be for, or maybe it's more tempting because this thing that was going to take us a year could now take, you know, two months or six weeks or something in that range to ship. Still feels like somewhat of a risk to just say, okay, we're going to do everything all at

once, but how are you thinking about it? You know, my bias as an entrepreneur has always been to like do too much at once and I need to hire people around me to hold me back because I'm like, let's do these 14 things. Then you're like, actually, guys, you know, actually maybe we should ace this thing first and this thing. So, so, you know, in general, this is probably dangerous for me, it empowers me to keep putting for doing everything at once. And it's like, I love Peter Thiel's, like, argument on the board of Facebook 20 years ago where like the Warren Buffett, you know, person Don Graham was tied to him is like, don't spend too much money, get cash flow positive.

And Peter's like, we should be like still burning money and like just growing faster and taking over the market. And he's obviously it was correct. Right. So I mean, it's just like there's a lot to do at our big companies that are growing. You have no excuse to be making money right now. If there's thinking to build, right? You should be spending it more to build within this environment.

you know, and it's, you know, I think the best engineers really are five or ten X better with this. I think if your engineers are not using it, you should replace them. It's a great way to know who to replace in your company right now. And, and, you know, I mean, yeah, a lot of our older SaaS companies are still well run, they're building agents on top of it to perform the work for their customers. Does that make sense? Yeah. So it's like if you're like dominate, I shouldn't say it because he's got too many calls,

but like one of our CEOs is like dominates a big part of the financial industry in one particular niche area. and now he's like rolled out agents and he's adding tens of millions of revenue with the agents to do to help the customers have to hire less and to be more efficient. There's a lot of stuff like that we're seeing. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Well, let's flip it over to Airborne. You're not going to vibe code a bank charter. At least I don't think you will. But what are the keys to success going forward?

You're obviously deeply involved with the company. Very excited about it. What does the next couple of years look like? What do you want to see happen? So, you know, I think with a bank, you got a barbell on one hand, there's like, all this really exciting stuff you could do with AI and with hopefully like convincing the regulators to to permit new idea really great things and we can talk about that. On the other hand, this is a, it's a goddamn bank, right? So you have to be traditional. You have to be safe. You have

to be smart. I'm putting up and putting my own money in. I can put some of my friends money in. I got to put, like a lot of my friends are. All my companies are too. I'm on the board of this thing and your job and a bank board is to be conservative as well, right? And so the whole point is, you know, our reputations are all tied into this Palmer's reputation. my reputation, a lot of other people's reputation, and you have to run this thing where you're serving customers better and learning from the best of that,

and we're going to be extra safe. I don't know what I'm supposed to talk about, but I think the whole point is that, you know, it's not a narrow bank in the traditional sense, but it is much narrow than other banks. We're going to just keep a lot more in a very, very safe way because I think it's the right way to run these things. It's just not take any risk you don't need to take.

What was the sort of 72 hours of the SVB crisis like for you, personally. Oh gosh, you know, it was actually interesting because I'd worn eight or nine of my companies about six months before actually that I was, I didn't know for sure, but I said this looks not not quite right to me. I'm my brother. It talked to me about it. He's a macro analyst. And I mean, what's going on? I had a known for sure. And I had a bunch of my family money in FRB. And it was really sad because I loved, I mean, I should be guys were nice too, but I loved FRB. They were like our John, John and I too. Yeah. And I was at the dinner with the governor here in Texas that night and had a bunch of other friends here.

I won't mention their names, but guys who had moved here very, multi-billionaires who themselves had a bunch of their own money in FRB, actually. And we all felt terribly guilty because when SVB had started to go down, we actually had each withdrawn money from FRB as well because you kind of had to in that situation.

It was just too scary. And so it was like, it was like, you know, SBB was a little bit sad. FRB for me was just, I was never really worried for myself. I got my money out. My companies didn't have too much exposure. but I felt really sad because it was such a great bank. And I think for me, one of the goals of Aribor would be to try to learn to do things as well as FRB did to serve people.

I think it was a really great bank. Yeah, you mentioned Texas. There's a lot of young people that are nervous about the job market in the age of AI. Give me the pitch for University of Austin right now in the age of AI. University of Austin, the age of A, well, I think in any age, but especially in an age where the world is changing quickly, you need to have a really strong foundation, you need to have a strong foundation and your leaders in your society to have a strong intellectual foundation. So what we're doing is we have, you know, it's one side, really deep intellectual foundations of the West, understanding our civilization, understanding how our world works,

why it works the way it does. You want to talk, you know who my top people I work with in business. They all understand philosophy. They all understand history, whether it's Peter T.L. Alice Carr, Charles Koch, Elon Musk. You have to give them that really strong base. On the other hand, you got a challenge them push them really hard on the STEM side. We're just finishing our STEM building. I'll write ex-to-spacex and boring company. I was just with my friend who built Palantir with me is teaching the AI agents course next quarter. So we have a lot of our probably top 100 friends who've built companies as advisors who are helping push the university forward. And we're going to train courageous young leaders. And a lot of them we're going to

work with us and build the future. So it's a pretty exciting place to go. That's very exciting. You guys are setting up dorms for Mac minis, a little space, set them up. You know, there's all sorts of crazy AI stuff going on that we're having fun with. But I think the dorm is a little bit too nice, frankly. I think the students, I don't know, I think maybe it's like too fancy, but it's good. They like it a lot. Are you secretly funding the California billionaire tax to punish all everyone that didn't leave like you?

You know, it has been something I've commented on that it's like probably really good for these people in California to wake the heck up and see what's going on. But no, I'm actually secretly funding a bunch of the things that now my friends are waking up to kind of reveal the fraud in California and reveal the nonsense in California and hopefully fight back against the real extremes because, you know, I used to argue with a lot of my friends in college, I'd be more on the moderate right. They'd be on the moderate left. I'd say if you want to define it. And now most of those smart people who've been successful on the moderate left were like complete allies against the crazy far left because that is just

so broken in California. And I'm excited to see a bunch of them courageously stepping up. Well, thank you for taking the time. We'll let you get back to you today. We'll talk to you soon. Always a great time. Have a good one. Let me tell you about Gemini 3.1 Pro. Gemini 3.1 Pro is here with a capable baseline. It's great for super complex. tasks like visualizing difficult concepts, synthesizing data into a single view, or bringing creative projects to life. You hear that? That's the sound of a happy dad. Barking. Should we bring him in? What's happening? Here we go. Cracking them open for you. It's five o'clock somewhere. It's four o'clock at the New York Stock Exchange. Cheers, John. Good to see you again. Yeah, good to see you

guys too. I'm good, good. I know it's been a few weeks, but I just want to congratulate you guys again on the Super Bowl ad. Oh, thank you. That was a lot of fun. I want to tell you guys, like, man, I actually got emotional because I remember a year ago when we spoke and when TBPN was just taken off and, you know, just watching your guys' journey has been incredible. You know, I get, I get, like, once a week or so, I get, like, someone calling me and, like, trying to pitch me on a show and, like, we're the TBPN of someone. We're the TBPN of sports. We're the TVPN of, I got some guy the other day, like, we're the TVPN of Europe. So it's kind of cool. It reminds me of, like, 10 years ago when I was in music, people used to

always pitch, I'm the Justin Bieber of Latin music. I'm the Justin Bieber of India. And like, that's, that's what TVPN's become. Yeah, yeah, it's somehow, yeah, it's a good sign. It rarely works. I mean, if someone's trying to do the happy dad for wine, it's like, that's probably not the thing. Either you'll do it or whatever works in that. category will just look completely different and have a different strategy because people want new things. What walk us through? What's the experience like at the New York Stock Exchange today? It's pretty cool. I mean, you know, yeah, I came out here to support Airborne and what Palmer and Trevor and the team are doing. Really excited. You know, we're going to be switching all

our companies over to Airborne in the next upcoming weeks. So it's very, it's very, you know, They're, they're, it's not just because they're good friends of mine, but it's, you know, it's really nice to see a bank doing something different and having that personal touch and, you know, you know, and have, you know, their philosophy of just truly caring about companies and, you know, whether you're a startup or an established company. So it's just a good feeling to be a part of it. Yeah. How is business going?

How did, how did 2025 shake out? There were, you know, the economy was up. There were tariffs. There's lots going on. But what was it like in your world? Well, tariffs don't really affect us because almost all our products are U.S. made. So, you know, happy dad. Yeah.

So, you know, outside of our merch business, which is, you know, just less than 3% of our business, everything else is U.S. made. So terrorists don't necessarily affect us. You know, so far, I mean, this year has been already a great year for us. You know, Happy Dad in January was, you know, year over year in January is up 31%. Just, yeah, and this is, this is dry January, by the way. This is, and this is like, you know, if you live anywhere outside of a California or, you know, some of these West Coast states, 90% of the country was pretty much frozen, you know, including, including Florida. You know, I was in Miami a 35 degrees in Miami. So, you know, and, you know, Happy Dad's not a cold weather product.

So to start the year off like that. Yeah. Although maybe you should launch the Happy Dad Hot Chocolate for next January. I think people were okay with the cold drink, so we're going to probably stick with that right now. How much time do you spend in New York? It feels like a lot of your business is more West Coast leaning, but New York really feels like the epicenter of so much happening and just like the creator industry broadly. I don't spend a lot of time here at all.

I actually would only spend time here because more personal reasons, because my wife's family's from New Jersey. But, yeah, now I spend most of my time actually in California to work with our team in Orange County. And, you know, my brother, Sam, does a lot of the traveling to meet with our third-party partners. But, yeah, I spend most of the time in California. Not too far from you guys.

Give us some tips, some hacks for expanding consumer products. expanding in retail. I remember this fun story from Mark Rampola who started a vitamin water company or, sorry, coconut water company. And he went to all his sales guys and was like, whoever sells the most, I'm giving you an F-150. And they worked extremely hard and it was just kind of funny outside the box. Most people would be thinking in the spreadsheets. But what's been working on the retail side? What has been the interesting, like unexpected growth vector throughout the last year? Well, with Happy Dad, you know, I think last time I was on the show in September, about creator brands and creators like over extending themselves when they launch a brand.

And one of the things that we're doing this year is we're going to actually spend a lot less time and effort on marketing with creators and spend more of the money on trade marketing and being actually where the customers at. So if you think about Happy Dad, you know, Happy Dad, you go on a weekend on a Friday or Saturday to buy the product. Well, you might as well spend money in the store with displays and, you know, decorating the stores or putting up neon signs. Like money is probably better spent where the customer is versus where the customer isn't.

Like if you're, you know, you're sponsoring a podcast and the podcast is live at 8 a.m. on a Tuesday and you're, you know, an alcohol company and most of your sales are Fridays and Saturdays or Sundays during football season. It's, you know, the customer is going to forget about you by the time Friday, Saturday to come out. So you might as well spend that money when they're actually in the store. That would be my tip with any CPG brand is focus on trade marketing, focus on actually, you know, decorating stores, proper displays and being seen in the stores. Because what's the point if you're not necessarily in the store or if you're hidden in the back?

Because your competitors are actually doing what I just said. Yeah, we were talking about this. Expensify spent a lot of money sponsoring the F-0 something. 15, sponsoring the Apple F-1 movie. and cool concept, but the challenge is like, think about the sort of person's frame of mind when they're watching that movie. They're not in the business of, they're not thinking I got to buy sales management software right now. And so being at the right place.

Unless you have a lot of money. If you have a lot of money and let's just say Taylor Sheridan calls you and says, hey, you want to be stocked in our fridge in Landman season three, if you've got extra money and you're already in the stores and you're doing. doing everything I said and you just have, you know, an extra amount of cash to do that. So your friends could text you and say, hey, I just saw your product and landman. That was awesome. If you want to do that, that's fine.

But I would focus on the actual where your customer physically is and they're ready to go and they're ready to buy. They've got their wallet. So, you know, trigger them at that moment. Yeah. How a lot of your, a lot of your shows have partnerships with the sort of like the draft Kings or the fan duels of the world, some other online gaming platforms, I'm sure, a bunch of prediction markets now.

How are you navigating that whole landscape? Obviously, the big sports books have been talking pretty openly about how their businesses have been impacted by prediction markets, even though they're getting into the game themselves. What do those conversations look like? And how often do those contracts actually turn over? Yeah. So, you know, we have a media company shots, which was part of the job. the TBPN Super Bowl commercial, so thank you.

We don't have a lot of time, so we don't need to do that. But, you know, I'm doing it in my head. Shots has a partnership with Price Picks, which was, you know, which was a daily fantasy. You could select players more or less. And recently, they implemented prediction markets in there. So we have a long-term partnership with Price Picks amongst all of our content. And they've been great partners. We've been with them since 2022.

We recently renewed our deal for another three years. They're great because they already had a fan base. We didn't have to worry about, you know, most of our fans right now, they actually have PricePix. So, you know, we're more focused on getting them re-engage in the product or educated on some of these new features that Price Fix has. So, yeah, so that's our partner when it comes to the prediction market slash sports, the sports app space.

Yeah. Talk to us. Sorry. Talk to us about like the broader growth of alcohol consumption, particularly among young people. Obviously, your business is growing, your category is growing. But beer, I believe, had a 4% decline. And alcohol broadly, it feels like young people aren't drinking is sort of a meme. But how are you processing that? Yeah. So people are, you know, this new generation especially, but most people are just, they're drinking. They're just drinking differently. They're not going heavy. They're not going, you know, spirits. They're not drinking beers.

You know, if you look at most beer companies, if they haven't got into like the seltzers or the tea or no bubble space, they're struggling. So, you know, I think beer consumption is down. You know, I say this all the time. You know, people don't want to get, you know, they don't want to wake up hungover. So they're not drinking, you know,

vodka and whiskeys and, you know, some of these harder liquors because people want to get up and they want to feel good. People are more on their health kick more than ever these days. You know, that's why you're looking at, you know, all these supplement brands, these fitness brands, GLP1 peptide companies are all through the roof because people want to be healthy. They don't want to wake up and also have this theory that people want to look good on social media too. So, you know, so there's only two ways to look good on social media. Either be in shape or add 15 filters to your picture. Or grab a hammer.

Grab a hammer. Stop with the hammer. We're not bone smashing. Bones smashing is now. It's over. Yeah. That guy. Yeah.

Anyway. That guy's a one of one. He is a one of one. Georgie, anything else? I want to, yeah, I want to, do you think, do you think clavicular will create 10,000 clavulars? Like, do you think IRL streaming is going to be a big new meta or is there just a much, I mean, there's naturally a smaller base of people that can be an IRA. live streamer than a traditional influencer who might have a normal job or something of the sort?

Well, media is in general changing in general. You know, I mean, you know, I consider you guys IRL just in a different format. And, you know, if you look at like how many people are viewing this right now, it's a lot less people than how many people are going to clip the TBPN episode interviews. So, you know, the longer you could actually stay online, the more of a chance of you. you have to have multiple clips. You know, if we had to count all the TBPN live views on X and YouTube versus like all the clips of TBPN amongst all the platforms, shorts, TikTok, X, reels, you know, it's probably, hundreds X.

So, you know, I do think IRL, whether it's streamers, whether it's this format, you know, I think that's where media is going because it's really a very. short form. Most people aren't, you know, people are going to watch Palmer's clip, you know. Yeah. You know, and those clips are probably going to go, I was in the other room, so I didn't hear what he was talking about, but everyone was laughing. So, you know, I'm sure there's going to be clips for that. Yeah, you're going to see the clips. He was advocating for 19 year olds to run bank. You know, he's not, what's, what's crazy about Palmer? I spent a lot of time with him, and sometimes I'm like, what did he just say? Then when it, when, I don't know what he said about

the 19-year-old running banks. But sometimes I'm like, fuck, he's kind of right. Yeah, he's got a lot. He's great at making a point that he can defend and actually peel back the onion, but tie up in a boat. It's really great stuff every time.

One more thing I think about media, too, is I do think we're going to see in the next year, we're going to see our first podcast produced by GROC. Like, I think there's going to be a very nice... We talked about this on the show today. There's a top 20, top 20 series on Apple that's 100% generated with AI. Somebody, it's on the Epstein files.

They took all the Epstein files, put them in deep research reports and different coding models to then turn it into audio. And it's charting. It's in like the top 20 because people just want that. I got to see that. They can turn it over immediately. And even though it's AI generated and it's probably not as nuanced as, you know, some, you know, serious journalist with a bunch of reputation, like it's giving people

what they want faster. So there's demand. Yeah. Yeah. So now imagine like you guys have TBPN and then you have diet TBPN, but imagine like TBPN brought to you by GROC or some sort of AI engine that goes live at like 401 p.m. Eastern time and breaks down the stock market. Like one minute after the stock market closes. You know, or sports. You know, like, you know, today in sports, you know, it goes live a couple hours before tip off NBA.

And this is what's going to happen in the NBA. So-and-so's playing so-and-so. this guy's hurt, that guy's not hurt. This is what the line looks like on price picks, our polymarket. You know, I think we're going to see one of those pretty soon. Yeah. Very interesting. It's fantastic to see you.

Let's hang out of you back. Come by the Ultradome soon. I want to. Well, that's what I was planning on doing. And then when I heard you guys were here and I was here, I was like, I was going to reach out to you guys next week about coming by. Yeah, come by. Well, I'm at this new year.

Any day. You know where we are. Cool. Since you were last on, I think somebody's only offered your handle on Instagram to John Coogan like 10 times. They hit him up every day. They DM me constantly. Do you want

at John and I'm like, I know John Shihini, I'm not stealing his thing. I know you have that laughing lockdown. Also, I'll give you ad John on Snapchat because I have that but I don't use it. So I don't want to Snapchat. That's yours. I like the consolidation of you have the John by and I'll be John Coogan.

I'm happy to have the full name. The final John. The final John. Anyway, Thank you so much for coming on a show. Have fun. Have fun at all of guys. Thanks for having me. Cheers. Have a good one.

Let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless real-time experiences and new value with Cisco. Software multiples have been reset at a fair level given AI uncertainty, said Brad Gersner. He says, if you own a software stock, you must expect the CEO to say, quote, we crush numbers and expect that to continue because our business accelerates with AI. If you don't expect to hear it, don't own it. Too Hard Basket. Dylan.

Dylan did that. Dylan did that? Dylan Field. Oh, yeah. Oh, exactly. Yes, yes, yes, for sure, for sure. Also, there were some funny stuff in the chat, but we can get to it later because we, of course, have Will Brewery from Barda space. Is it for a lightning round?

The restream waiting room, and it is time to kick off the Lambda Lightning Round. Let's fire up that cloud, fire up the graphics package, and let's bring Will Brewy in to the TVV and Ultram. how are you doing? Check, check, check. Hey, Jordi and John, how are you? Can you hear me? Yeah, good to see you. Wow. And clear. Excellent. It's been, it's been far too long. Obviously, we're here, you know, excited about Airborne, but I'd love to start with just an update on, are you running out of numbers for these capsules. How many are up there? How many have come back? You're going to have to switch to, you know, base 64 or something and coding them because the numbers are getting so high. Yes, I love that. Yeah, we are at Winnebago 5 just landed a couple of weeks. So we're very excited about that.

Number four is in orbit. Number six gets shipped to launch late next week. Oh, thank you. Yes, of course. I love that. So yeah, what are you actually learning in between these? Are they purely commercial, like someone just asked you, so you're going to put one up? I imagine that you're iterating on hardware, software, regulatory, everything that goes into it.

What are you, what's the, what, what changes in between one launch to the next? We have, but we've hit that zero to one moment. I mean, we've hit the zero to five. moment. So now we're moving from six and beyond. So yeah, yeah, very excited about that. So we are iterating on all the fronts you just mentioned. But luckily now that we have an assembly line going actually right behind me, there's two of them on the floor. We put together and bulk all of our changes into what we call block upgrades. And so that'll occur about every year, just like a car comes off a line as an upgrade. Like an iPhone. And yes. It's a space iPhone. Exactly. Exactly.

It's lighter, thinner, faster, cheaper. Yeah. It is, it is. Okay, so you have a capsule. You can put stuff in that. Can I put a GPU in it yet? So technically we have a data center in orbit right now. You do?

Okay. It doesn't as much compute as you may want, but it, you know, it checks the boxes. Flip-flop. You're like, Deli and shut up. This might be real. There's a chance. So actually, I should point to you guys. guys. We were featured in Morgan Stanley's market analysis that came out two days ago,

where they're looking at the microgravity manufacturer. Oh, yeah. Yeah, round of applause for Morgan Stanley. Forward-thinking futurist bankers, my favorite on Wall Street. So, no, but they come in out and take the microgravity manufacturing industry seriously. I'm in a very sophisticated report and kind of hit up the nail on the head. Okay. And a lot of that is still bio-focused, I imagine? Yeah, so we're definitely focused on bio for at least the next five to ten years just because from first principles, it's the most expensive dollar per kilogram. It has the biggest impact. It helps people. It makes economic sense. And it's a large market that we can scale into.

It's highly differentiated. And the defense stuff is interesting and orthogonal, but that, you know, is sort of a separate part of the business. Is that correct? Separate part of the business, but same part of the product. I mean, every single vehicle that comes off the assembly line can be. either used for either use case. And so that really helps with scaling. And so we just have a diversified revenue stream now.

What kind of AI native tools, and I mean truly AI native in that they were created after AI, the Transformer paper was released, that you're, what kind of categories are you getting pitched that you're excited about around potential speedups or already getting benefit from them? You mean like to purchase at Barta and roll out? like tools that you're buying or planning to buy that you're excited about outside of code generation.

Yeah, outside of code generation. So cursor, you know, excited about that. Excited about the new model. It's becoming so much easier to build the in-house version of those sasses that really isn't, you know, for us, I'm laughing right now because the guy leading the effort here

was up until 4 a.m. last night just because he was so excited about it. We were looking at it. But what we did was we, what it does as it looks at Confluence, which is kind of like our wiki at the company. Based on the diff from Confluence over the past week, here is a report of everything that's happened at the company. It does time tracking. It does risk analysis. It's so it's like, it's awesome. It's awesome. We're really excited. Is it getting to the point where it can make recommendations to you of like here's how you can speed up this part of the process or is that kind of the next step?

Yeah, absolutely. We even ask it to give us a multiple choice. Really? Nice. Walk through how launch costs are looking this year, next year. There was a lot of back and forth with Starship last year, eventually, did like massive progress in the back half of the year. And then the surprise for me was Blue Origin. And I think everyone was sort of like, oh, it's a space tourism company. And people were like, no, no, no. It's like a very serious company.

And there's going to be a real race. That feels extremely good for you, but do you anticipate the curve of launch costs to continue or change in some way? What are you seeing? Yeah, so I'll tell you what I know. What I know is, so right now, we've already booked all of our launches out through 2029. Oh, wow. And, yes, so we're launching four this year, seven year after that, 10 year after that, 12 year after that. They're booked, flight hardware is purchased.

The other thing I know is that, you know, from a bar to business model perspective, we're one of the few space companies that launches shipping. Like, you know, and so we use SpaceX instead of FedEx, but from a business model perspective, shipping is shipping. And so, you know, we're excited about new shippers coming online. You know, that'll probably induce some margin compression, which would be nice for us payloads. But at the same time, you know, we're not going to transition overnight. You can imagine if you were using FedEx and they had, you know, a truck going 167 times to the route that you want. And then all of a sudden UPS shows up with one truck. Hey, I'm excited. I can't wait for more. But I can't switch shipping quite yet at the current nascent aspect of the technology. Last question. Pick aside,

moon or Mars. Who you got? I want Team Mars, man. Team Mars still. Oh, yeah. I was, you know, I was, cut my teeth when Mars was, I still think it is. Yeah, absolutely. Like, I think the, you know, what I want to be as my career ambition is Muddy the Mudskipper, you know, the first fish that, It was an ugly scene, but the first fish that started to crawl on to land, his clippers were slightly more light legs. It was not a glorious moment, but if you zoom out, it was an extremely glorious moment. So I'd like to be, you know, that ugly, you know, not quite, you know, ready for the next planet yet, but, you know, we show up.

Sure, sure, sure, yeah. Moon, important testing ground, but Mars is the goal and will be truly multi-planetary. Moon doesn't, moon base doesn't really count as multi-planetary. Anyway, thank you so much for coming on the show. Great to see you. Well, congrats on all the progress. We're still waiting for our capsule here in the dome. Right now.

Oh, yeah. Yeah, we've got, you know, we've got three of the football right now. They're going to need a whole storage facility for them in a couple. We can be trusted. We can be trusted. The price is going to invert. I'm going to start paying you just to get the property. Yeah, yeah.

You're going to be like, I got to hold on to it for regulation. Anyway, thank you so much for coming on the show. We'll talk to you soon. Cheers. Have a good one. Let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. And I'm also going to tell you about Restream, one live stream, 30 plus destinations. If you want to multistream, go to Restream.com. And Sam, Sam, Levinbeck from X Energy. He's the next to be of growth and strategy. Sam, good to meet you. How are you doing? It's happening. Thanks for having me. Pleasure to be here. First time in the show, please introduce yourself and tell us about the company a little bit.

Yeah, absolutely. I work at a company called Xenegi. X energy is designing a high-temperature gas reactor. And what's really exciting, there's a lot of exciting things about what we're doing, the technology is super compelling. We have some incredible investors. I think the thing that we're most cited for and known for is we're building our first project in South Texas with Dow Chemical.

in Calton County, Texas. And we're going to be building our second project in Washington State with Amazon to support one of their largest data center clusters in the Pacific Northwest. So just super exciting times for nuclear and the next generation of firm power. Yeah. I mean, Dylan and our team mentioned that you are a new Arab War customer. And I'm wondering, like, this doesn't seem like something that's like, you know, unbankable or, you know, requires something new. But what, what is it about your business that drew

you to Erebor? Is it just excitement? Or is there something that, where your business looks a little bit different than a normal business? I think that there is a really amazing nuclear industry in the United States today. We have 94 operating nuclear reactors, but not a lot of new reactors in construction, right? And we have a moreabund nuclear supply chain, uh, in, in the, country. And that's, you know, it's a shame that we've lost a little bit of the shine and the pedigree of what we have historically done so well in the United States. And so getting that nuclear supply chain back up on its feet and up and running and to support the growth that's really demanded by AI digital infrastructure is a pretty heavy lift. And it's not something

that's directly in the wheelhouse today, frankly, of a lot of existing, pick your basket of capital allocators. I think what's been really impressive about the Arab War team, about, you know, with Owen and, you know, what they're building is a real excitement and willingness to roll up their sleeves and understand our sector, understand what is risky, understand what is bankable, and, you know, get to work with us really with the same mission, which is, you know, the next century. of American leadership and global nuclear commerce. Yeah. How capital intensive is the business? Do you have to buy land to build a facility to what level of the stack? Yeah, so our business is primarily around two things. Number one is designing a next generation high temperature gas cooled pebble bed reactor.

So that's a heavy lift. Our company has over 900 employees today working on that. Wow. We are also then the secret sauce of our reactor is the fuel, so-called triso fuel. And this is really advanced stuff. And we're building a fuel factory today in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. We received last week from the NRC or permit to operate that facility. And so that's the two halves of our business.

It's designing a reactor, which our customers will license that technology for us, and they'll build it on their balance sheet. and we will sell them the fuel for the life of that reactor. So we are selling you the design to build the printer, and then we will sell you the printer ink for the life of that reactor. So, you know, there are different aspects of that business that are capital-intensive. There are different aspects that are not. And getting into it with us and understanding those different aspects is really something that airport is coming on that journey with us.

When did you guys decide to get into the fuel business? Did that come after the reactor? That's a great question. You know, it was really a visionary decision by our founder back in 2015. If you're just, if you build the world's most advanced reactor and the fuel doesn't show up, you're kind of hosed, right? And so a little bit of vertical integration here, a little bit of getting into, if it's the secret sauce of your reactor, you better have your arms firmly around it was really, you know, early insight. And so that decision was made back in 2015. And we spent, you know, a lot of time redeveloping how this fuel was made, the intellectual property around how you do it. And, you know,

that's been a really, you know, important part of our story and our journey. Last question for me. I want to know about timelines. We talk to a lot of folks in nuclear. I hear 2029. I've seen some reporting in the Wall Street Journal about even just bringing old nuclear power plants back online, but the dates are crazy to me. The 2030, 2032, 2035 gets thrown around. What are you estimating for when we might actually see the, you know, the famously flat curve of nuclear power generation in the United States start to tick upwards? You're going to see it in the early 2030s. In the early 2030s is when we're going to see our first two projects coming online with many more thereafter. You know, the first pickles out of the jar are the hardest.

But the demand is insatiable. That's a new analogy. Because pickles are green like nuclear fuel. But there, yeah. You know, it's, but you're going to, I think that there's a reason that you're hearing. I mean, that's, I think, kind of the consensus in the industry. You know, you've got to. And so I think seeing, look,

turning on those reactors and uprating existing reactors, that's the low-hanging fruit, and we should get every electron we can out of the existing fleet. But that's not going to be enough. There's only so many of those projects to do. Really, throughout the 2030s, I think you're going to see, I know you're going to see a steady and ever-growing clip of a new nuclear reactors coming online and powering this kind of generational super cycle of AI digital infrastructure. Yeah, how are you thinking about the different scales of nuclear power generation?

I was really excited about just replacing the one megawatt diesel reactor. Radiance doing some cool stuff there. There's a couple other folks. Then there's been, you know, as the AI boom has sort of taken off, everyone has been thinking about, well, what if we get a hundred of those together? Well, then we're doing something for a data center. maybe we should upscale the whole project, do a 10 megawatt, a 25, 100 megawatt, and then we can get into like the really big Westinghouse projects that maybe can be unstuck by a startup.

But what's the landscape like from your perspective? Where's the most value in new reactor designs? Love this question. I mean, I think that it's all exciting and all have their puts and takes, right? So the big reactors, the conventional light water reactors, the Westinghouse AP 1000. A lot of new excitement and focus on those. I'm sure new ones will get built.

I mean, just the amount of power demand that that's out there. You know, Westinghouse is a great company. But Vodal, we all learned from Vodal that it can take, we did turn on Vodal, but it took a long, long time. And I think the tech companies, we'll see that. And that's the downside, right? I think that even for a big hyper-scaler, you know, even these companies spending $160 billion a year on CAPEX, you know, a $15 billion bite on a single machine is a lot of risk to manage.

And it's a lot of risk for any individual investor-owned utility to manage. You know, if you look at the market caps of the largest investor-owned utilities in the United States, $15 billion, $10 billion, whatever the next AP 1,000 costs, these are big bites of the Apple. So those are the puts and the takes with those. But you know what? They're going to be successful building more. I don't have any doubt about that. At the other end of the spectrum, the one megawatt micros, look, if you can get those to scale, delivering tens and then hundreds at a time, it's an awesome opportunity. You know, the challenge there, and I think you alluded to it in the question, is, you know, for it to make a meaningful dent in a hyperscale data center, you're building hundreds and thousands, you know, in a single location.

And that's a lot of moving parts. That's a lot of... Yeah. But it doesn't necessarily... Greed capacity is great capacity. So if you put one at every hospital and you replace a diesel generator on every, you know, oil field, like, that does free up energy for other purposes. And that has... Absolutely.

It's... Absolutely. You know, so, I mean, they're super exciting. And, you know, the theory of the case getting to a factory kind of manufacturing, you know, throughput, you know, to bring down the cost. Yeah. It totally makes sense. You know, but it's, you know, it's, it's, it's nonetheless challenged on the economics on the actual

delivered cost of electricity when you get that small. Our main product is in that middle sweet spot. So our, a single one of our reactors is 80 megawatts electric. Oh, wow. That's pretty great. Yeah, what Dow is building at our, at their first site is four reactors, so 320 megawatts. Wow. Okay, that's a lot.

Yeah. That's a lot. Yeah, that's like a small coal plant, you know, that takes a real chunk out of, you know, what they're doing. And that more than takes care of the site that they are focused on. I think that's the same amount of energy that's generated in my entire city that I live in. I live in a small city. It's a meaning, yeah, it's a meaningful bite. You know, what Amazon and Energy Northwest, their second project, you know, they're talking about anywhere between four and 12 reactors on a single site.

So anywhere between 320 megawatts and a gigawatt. What's really exciting about that theory of the case, our theory of the case, for these mission-critical deployments, you know, a petrochemical facility, it can't go down. You need, you know, very high reliability. So if you have four reactors, you know, if you overbuild just a little bit, if you only need two or three reactors, you know, if one goes down, you're still golden. You know, if you build 12 reactors in Washington State, if you only need 10, one, even two go down, you're still completely utilizing that very expensive data center with those very expensive, you know, invidia chips, you know, running in it, you know, and getting the full use case out of it. So that kind of reliability of our form factor is something that's, you know, very exciting, you know, particularly to our customers. That's awesome. Well, thank you so much for taking the time. Yeah, great to meet with us. Have a great rest of your day. Congrats to all the 900 or 1,000,000 people at the company. Seriously. On the, on the

all the progress. Yeah. We'll talk to you soon, Sam. Have a good one. Goodbye. Let me tell you about app love and profitable advertising made easy with axon.

Dot AI. Get access to over one billion daily active users and grow your business today. And before we bring in our next guest, we got to check in with Tyler on his project. Let's go over to Tyler.

Yeah, okay, so I can read my little essay. And you swear, you swear on your life that you did not use AI to generate this. Correct, yeah. You can check my chat logs. I did not use any AI. Okay, for anybody that's just tuning in, for anybody that's just tuning in, the challenge was write 500 words that PANGram will pick up as AI at 90% or above.

Okay. And if you win, you get a $50 gift card. This is Tyler's impression of a pie steak sandwich. Okay, so I want you guys to also try to guess what the percentage is. Okay. This isn't just an essay that is trying to fool an AI system. It's an experience where words and phrases flow over. the compute like a waterfall.

This short speech marks a pivotal shift towards the style of writing where the audience doesn't just consist of real people but machine learning algorithms too. It underscores the innovative change frequently cited in the New York Times and CNN, who, along with many CEOs, industry professionals and growth hackers, have noticed the world-changing pattern emerge. It's a testament to the emerging influence of the AI industry. Additionally, it demonstrates the way in which artificial intelligence systems may fall victim to possible bad actors, further enhancing the importance that some government institutions may play in the future.

You are absolutely right that AI systems. Okay, let him keep going. You are absolutely right that AI systems might not always accurately predict whether text is written by humans. And you're actually touching on something really important. It's a great insight. In the future, it's like pretty long, but... Okay, I'm putting it at 96% chance. I think this is going to come back at a full 100.

Let's hit it. 100%. Let's go! He did it. I never lost faith. Enjoy those cheese steaks. Hit the gong. Dance's winner winner.

Cheese steak dinner. Absolutely massive. You guys don't, you also at home, this cheese steaks doesn't sound that significant, but these are the best cheese steaks sandwiches in the world over at Matu. Oh, yeah, yeah. Read out the m-dashes. Did you use any m-dashes? Yeah, I mean, there were m-dashes in what I just sent.

Okay. You put m-dashes everywhere. That's fantastic. tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market, your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI. Own the data platform that powers it. Yeah, Hill says you should have used the word delve, big missed opportunity. So, I think actually like current models don't use delve anymore. I think that was just 4-0, which I guess this probably. Yeah, probably detects. Yeah. Anyway, we have our last guest to the show, Alex Heath from sources in person, live in the TVPN Ultridum.

Alex. Good you see you. Welcome to the show. Thanks so much for coming on down to the TV Pan Ultradome. Sources. dot news is the website. Access is the podcast. Yeah, so you're really in the process of breaking through

because any time you get quoted right now, it's just say sources say. And then a lot of people are reading that and out there saying, you created sources. Apparently some sources, yes, but you are the final source. I named it that for a reason. Yeah. No, it's good.

And you've been on a table. Like, truthfully, like, there's always a question about, okay, you leave the place. Yeah. Is it, are you going to be able to- Better or worse? And it's just been scoop after scoop after scoop. Thank you. What's the secret?

The scoop canons always loaded, gentlemen. It is. That's all I got to say. Scoop doggie dog right here. You got anything more this week? Anything? I got some stuff next week. Wow.

Wait, wait, but how do you keep it in the chamber? Aren't you worried that somebody's going to out-scoop you? Yeah. Yeah, there is always that fear. Okay. There's always that fear. Sometimes you know, based on the story or the beat.

You know, like, who your competition is. You know, if they're on vacation. Okay. You know, if they're on maternity, paternity. Do you hire, like, private investigators to track your rivals to make sure. Oh, they're out of the game right now. You keep tabs.

Yeah. You keep tabs. Yeah, what's super interesting is that I feel like your beat is just, like, what's actually interesting in tech to me? No, seriously. Like, because you could come out and you could be like, yeah, I'm tech, but I'm focused on. on SaaS or just AI, and you're hitting everything that I'm interested in consistently.

And that's just really, really hard. And I see your name on every single article that's posted. So, like, do you ever sleep? Like, what's going on? You know, I've been using AI a lot to leverage output, where now it's my editor and it's my first draft. Okay. I'm the ultimate editor of it. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But, you know, the combo of granola running that during meetings, training Claude to really write like me. Sure. So, you know, it does the first pass. Yeah. I spend about half the time that I used to spend on a story writing it. Yeah. But I'm spending all that time now editing what the AI gives me,

making sure it's not like just lazy AI writing. Sure, sure, sure, sure, because that still happens. Yeah, yeah. And realizing that I think the leverage I have now is like my network, the interviews I do, the scoops I get. The actual sources. The sources. Yeah.

And like the writing. I never, I never. read your work, like, expecting to be entertained by the language. Yeah, the pros. Yeah, I really don't care at all. I've never been a lot of people are lost of that. I always hated writer. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I love, I love, I love, I love. And good and Scoopheasley. And, you know, like, I've been doing this for a while, and I think, like, the longevity you have to have now, especially with AI, is you, you have to use the tools.

Did our giant ice cream scoop ever come? Do we order that? Oh, we couldn't find. We got a manufacturer. We're trying to get like a comically large ice cream scoop for the gong. I love it. You guys are going to get a great scoop. By the way, the last time I came on here was WWDC last year. Yeah, that's right. You guys had, I think, 80,000 followers on X.

Oh, yeah. And I was like, I left that. I was doing it outside of Cooper, outside of Steve Jobs Theater. I was like, these guys are on to something. Thank you. The magic you guys have. Seeing you guys just like ascend has been incredible. Yeah, there's been a ton of ascending going on broadly this year.

Love to ascend. Everyone needs to ascend. Did you see all the hammers in the... Stop, stop, stop, hammers. No, my biggest number one question is, how are you balancing your relationships when you're balancing access that you have these companies,

the executives will actually talk to you on the record and are excited for you to tell their story? But at the same time, you're kind of getting some stories out the back door at times. You have to have both. Yeah, but what's that dance like? It's tough.

How do you thread the needle? Because some reporters fly too close to the sun, scoop too close to the cone. To the cone. To the cone. Yeah, it's a balance. You know, I've always looked up to Sorkin and how he's approached Deal Book and the reporting he's done. And I consider him like a mentor. And like the way he approaches it is it's just fair.

He's here with us. Check the street. Check this. Hey, is he really? No, no, no. I got a sound effect right there for you. He's definitely the goat. And what has given him longevity is the fairness that he approaches an interview with, right?

So giving people that maybe don't even deserve it a fair shake and just approaching things out of curiosity and being a nerd and not being like instinctually against whatever they're doing. I mean, I have opinions. Like I just interviewed Chris Best from Substack about their polymarket deal. this week. What's that deal? Deep product integration with sub-sac where basically any sub-stack writer can embed a polymarket

like natively in the CMS. And are they getting paid on like an impression? This is the question. I asked them that he wouldn't answer. So you infer with that. So but are creators getting? So they're doing.

So polymarket is buying basically like they'll pay us, they offered it to me. I said no, but like they'll pay you to embed a market in your story. Someone set up a polymarket on if Alex Heath will ever take polymarket money. There we go. I think that's zero. But that's a good example.

I have pretty strong opinions about prediction markets and polymarket specifically and reporting I can't share yet. But like I still want to hear Chris out. I'm like, why did you do it? And he's geeked on prediction markets, as is every tech CEO, as you guys know. And so I just want to understand that. And I think a lot of reporters, like, they don't actually. Say that again. Can you say that another couple times?

Actually five times? But like he wants to. No, and we've experienced that where it's kind of random, but certain interviews get thrown up on prediction markets. And then you get people in the chat and they try to trick us into like, sometimes they'll see like they're asking a genuine question. Like, ask them about this. And I'm used to trying to respond. We usually trust the chat. We'll be like, oh, they're interested.

They're interested in this. Yeah. And then I'm like, wait, why do you want me to ask this person about Bitcoin? Like, I have, you know, yeah. It's a taste thing, right? Like, and you guys are experiencing this, too. Like, your taste is what matters. And then also, like, being able to, I mean, just to the point about, like, how do you do scoops and do interviews, it's like, just balancing the fact that, like, I am, it's a bit of a leverage thing where it's like, like, you can't buy me and I may also kind of ruin your day a little bit if I scoop something, but I'm at least going to do it with a smile.

Yeah. Right. Whereas a lot of reporters will do it. And they won't. And it'll be kind of like addictive. Yeah. No, no, that's really good. What are you looking for out of Apple this year broadly?

I'm always interested to hear this excitement about a new foldable. There's some leadership changes in the works. We've got a lamp. Very interesting. I've been very interested in like the story behind the story. Yeah. Particularly with regard to John Turnus. Because that feels like there are leaks and Apple's pretty tight.

but then Mark German's always getting scoops, but you have to imagine that there's internal politics around who's leaking, what, why are they leaking it, why are they not leaking that, that Tim Cook is staying or something like that? There's some sort of internal machines, so I don't know, how have you just been processing apples here?

I know, I've been following Apple for a long time. I actually got started at a rival Apple. German and I are about the same age, and we were doing rival Apple blogging in high school. And then in college. Going blog for blog with the Germanator? Well, no, he destroyed me.

No, no, it's amazing that you saw, a career. You're like, I got to get me out of you. So I just find Alex, like, washed up with Chinese, Chinese food covering him. We're like dusting them off. You got to get back in the arena, dude. It's okay. Shout out, shout out Mark.

Yeah, we love Mark. We love Mark. But Apple always has had a, it's why I got into this. It's why I started covering tech us for a lot of people, right? So interesting. And I feel like they've lost their soul in a way, man. It really bums me out. Like I don't, I'm curious about the glasses.

Like Mark, I've also heard they're coming. next year, the first classes. Be curious to see, you know, but then it's like Alan Dye was doing that and he left and went to meta. So it's like he saw what they're doing and still went to meta, just kind of weird. Tim Cook has a- He likes that founder mode lifestyle. I guess.

But I just, Apple, I just, I think they're stuck in an era that doesn't feel of the moment, right? Yeah. And I'm curious with the leadership reset, will that solve it? Ternis doesn't seem like the person who would solve that. But, you know, to credit to Tim, as you guys say, like, returned a lot of, you know, value to shareholders. But is Apple, like, culturally relevant anymore? Yeah, yeah. There's an interesting pivot where it's like, oh, no, they're becoming Microsoft, which is also like an incredible company that's just delivered so much value.

But it isn't. It doesn't inspire people. Here's something. So everyone's vying to be the Apple of AI, right? You see this in a lot of the marketing campaigns, advertising campaigns. A lot of it feels heavily Apple. inspired. And Apple should be thinking, well, why not us? Why don't we be the Apple of AI? But instead, they're doing Gen Moji, right? They have an opportunity to lead with heavy, heavy campaigns around

the magic of AI. And they can say, we're not even building data centers. We're not, we're not, you know, we're not increasing your power bill. They're they have a really powerful position, but it feels like they've lost. It doesn't feel like anyone at Apple is in love with advertising anymore. It's really willing to meet the moment and deliver the kind of campaigns that I think they could. Or like the next demo day, I bet if you were to poll all the founders in the next demo day, like what company inspires you the most? How many would say Apple?

We did this. We actually did this. And I was expecting it to be all like Elon and Tim and Steve Jobs. And we didn't ask the company, we asked for the founder, and a lot of people still said Steve. Jobs, yeah. Yeah, but. But not current Apple.

Yeah. How do you balance, Apple's such an interesting beat because it's, or at least it has been for a very long time, it's still very much consumer relevant, where I imagine that there are just Apple fanboys who read German, right? But then when you talk about, you know, Alan Dye going over to Meta, That's more industry focus. So how do you think about your audience blending tech enthusiasts with just, you know,

tech executives who need to know about what's going on in their industry, like trade versus entertain, infotainment? Yeah. These are the two extremes. I mean, I worked at a very scaled publication before the verdict, right? Oh, wait. Yeah, yeah. Actually, tell me the story.

Yeah, it was a business insider 10 years ago. You guys remember Chatter in New York? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. It's there. It's a very fun. It's kind of reminding you that back in the day. And then the information and Verge, Ruzdeppiator for the last like almost five years. So it did the scale thing and now I'm in the influence game. And I kind of think you guys are, right? Like you're not going for a huge scale. Yeah, you talk about your audience being a couple hundred thousand people.

Totally, totally. That's what you need. Yeah. For me, like, I wish I could, I wish I could brag more about the source of subscriber list. It's a great list. It's a great list. I should, I've actually been doing an exercise where I tally up the market cap of the people on the list. That's the number. We've done that. We've done that too. We've done that too. You don't count the number of subscribers. You count the market cab with the CEOs.

The average, the average, the average TVTN follower at one point was, like, had like a billion dollar market cap. Okay. So, and it helps with brands, right? It's like, you're like, well, you're not big, but it's like, yeah, but you want to reach like these people. Exactly. So it's not like enthusiasts. It's not like how I came up in the OG kind of Apple blogging world or the tech blogging world. It's, it's, the sources of subscribers work in these companies that I cover. Yeah. They work in finance.

What, uh, what stories are not a fit? Because we, like, Ben Thompson's a hero of ours, both from, another goat, just his, you know, his ideas, you know, uh, his ideas all the way through his business model, the whole spectrum. He talks a lot about, yeah, consistency. He talks a lot about, like, companies that he doesn't cover. He's like, stop covering Twitter, stop covering, like, Elon. On company. Yeah. Yeah.

Is there, are there categories that you, that you, uh, are maybe fascinating, but not a, like we,

we try and stay out of politics. Just because once you wait into that, you just become like, oh, well, then you have to do the culture or story. That's not the white space in media. It's not. Well,

the white space is what you guys are doing. And new as well. Yeah. So, because that's, it's a return to form. Everyone has gone towards politics. Totally.

Right. Um, or even just kind of, it's crazy too, because I didn't actually think there was any white space left in an independent subs. Everything comes around. Yeah, everything comes around. Yeah.

But also it takes the right entrepreneur. Yeah, but to your question, I think it's taste. I don't think I, when you're in our newsroom, you're taught to think in beats, companies that you're covering sectors. And for the first time, and I was doing this at the verge towards the end because I was kind of just doing my own thing. But like, I really just go where my interest is and where I know this is the most interesting company right now. Yeah. So it's right now, it's like all open AI.

It's anthropic. It's the big labs. Yeah. But, you know, notion's interesting. I think I've been. I saw that. Yeah. And also the thing the story.

about like, okay, they beat earnings and everyone thinks Saspocalypse. I was thinking of the exact same thing. I wrote about it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sometimes I feel like we're like a day after. Exactly. Exactly.

And I was just like, okay, yeah, this is a story that, like, a lot of people would just be like, I'm over. Yeah, we had Evan on and then that night broke the story on spec. Yeah. I was like, yeah, it would have been nice to know.

We could work on that next time. But yeah, no, it's just kind of knowing like this is what's relevant. I do think it's a taste thing. And I don't think it's a thing you can teach. Yeah, it's a thing you just kind of. Yeah, we got to get you publishing while we're doing a live interview and then you text us.

Would you respond to this right now? Would you eventually? Wait, do you know who we're booked? No, just the scoops are in the changes. Okay, okay. Oh, okay. We'll book those people. We'll book those people.

Do you ever see yourself rolling up or rolling in other independent? Because I think there's going to be writers out there that are good for about one banger story, a quarter, which is actually not, yeah, is not really a fit for a monthly subscription. Yeah. It's a challenge. But they could work great under your umbrella. I think based on the way things are going, that's going to happen. Yeah.

And I think that'll happen for a lot of people. And I think consumers want that. Like if you can find like four or five other people and then stay super lean, which is like, hey, we don't have a ton of bloat. Yeah. We're not hiring like, you know, 200 people to do this. But five writers, one P&L, one subscription. that's what consumers want.

I'll subscribe to pretty much any new tech writer just to generally support them. That's too much. But I'm not reading all of them. Yeah, I think there's interesting ways you can compensate on rev share, profit sharing, ways that traditional newsrooms can't. And I also think. Yeah, and I was saying this yesterday, I don't actually think it will do well at the substack level

because there's a lot of people that would want to be in your bundle, but you don't want to be revenue sharing with them. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But if you can set it up and, like, actually you're running, a business and being like, you know, managing the personalities, managing where they're at. I can imagine sources getting to, it doesn't have, in the same way that we're anti-scale and that you can say, cool, I want to build a newsroom over time, but it's five other people. And I don't need to raise VC to do it.

Yeah, that are individual contributors. Like all these VC backs newsrooms that are four years in and not profitable and the cap tables, you know, screwed. And like, I don't need that. And so I'm, I kind of, I feel like we're kindred's, like, mindset here. Like, you know, it's, and we're in this unbundling phase of media, which is so exciting. And there will be rebuttling. It's funny that we sort of landed in the same place with, like, very different backgrounds.

Yeah. This is my first, I mean, I had a YouTube channel before. Yeah. I've never been a journalist or worked in a newsroom. And, but we still sort of landed on the correct thing. Yeah. We all love horses. We all love horses.

Do I say horses? What was, what was that horses? What does the horse represent? Progress. Progress. Progress. It's the year of the horse. Yeah.

It is the year of the horse. We had before. Oh. You knew what the year was going to be. So when I found out. We're going to kick off. Get your reaction to. So I forget what we were talking about.

But our friend John Palmer was listening to us on a podcast talking about what's happened with media and that it's really hard to read. Media is all about personalities and talent. It's really hard to retain talent. If you can go set up a substack. or, you know, we didn't need to start on television.

We could just set up some microphones and a camera and get going. And we call it the barbell effect. Yeah, and that's really a challenge. You want to own the platform, YouTube, substack, or you want to be the individual creator, basically. And John's theory was that that comes for software in the same way. We still have a huge platform, like a Salesforce that has a bunch of other kind of layers to it. Or like an AWS.

like, you know, yeah, an AWS, but then you'll have like a bunch of new entrants, which are like, you know, in the same way that we maybe compete with some cable networks technically for attention. You would have like a 10-person team that is building like some software that historically needed like a thousand people and had this bloated cost structure. That sounds right. I think what Ivan told me about agents too in software where he was like, if your company cannot be traversed by agents, you're going to be in a rough spot. I think that extends to what you're saying. Like, I think the young teams that are agile, that understand that may have a shot at actually disrupting the big players, but the big players were always exist.

And I do think distribution is still the thing that really matters, right? Like, you guys probably feel that. Like, you have that with X and YouTube, but, you know, and substack's good. But, you know, that's the thing when you go out on your own is you're like, oh, man, I got to fight for distribution. I got to fight for every eyeball. I got to publish every day because when I'm not publishing, I'm not getting subscribers. So that's why I went to four times a week. Because it's like when I don't, I don't get anything.

So it's like putting it out everywhere. Is travel important to your work? Yeah, I got to go out and touch the sources. I mean, not literally, but you know what I'm saying? I got to go out and grab them right when they walk out of the office. I got to shoulder brush the sources. Last time we were trying to be up, you were like, I'm going to cross down and doing an person, which is important.

That's always been the thing I've invested in. And I've never understood reporters who just sit in their office and, like, blog all day. It's like you're never going to get really differentiated stuff. Because really, especially in the age of AI, where you can generate any anything, like if I can just generate the copy, what matters is like what's feeding the copy. And that's me going out and like interviewing someone or breaking a story. I went to some like political in Las Vegas and Teddy Schleffer from the New York Times was just hanging out of the bar.

He didn't get invited. Yeah, that's, that's the old school. He just was literally gum shoe. Old school, man. Old school. And everyone there was adversarial to the New York Times. But everyone was talking to him. Everyone was like, I, you know, I got to hear this guy.

I got to say my side of the story. To have on Jevy in this game. So good. You got to do that and you got to love. gossip. Oh, yeah. And you have to have like a level of just, you do. I mean, this is what this is is what? It's like gossip. People are always like, why do people tell you things? Why do people tell you things that violate an NDA? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I always think it's vindictive or they're pissed and they're trying to write a wrong or it's moralistic. A lot of people just like the

gossip, man. Yeah, and I mean, maybe the more optimistic view is like they like the world operating on the truth. And so leaking the truth out can be beneficial. That's, yes, but that's the more altruistic thing. I mean, I think gossip is not negative. Yeah, totally. It's just like, I mean, It's sort of neutral. It's neutral. Versus the vindictive, I'm leaking something because I want you to write about my enemy. That's different. That does happen.

But there's also people that just say, like, the story deserves to be told. Yeah, and you want to, like, give and take. So a thing I try to do also is, like, I share stuff. I don't just, like, try to ask. What do you think about the future of investigative journalism? Like, really, really long, like a year, it just feels like on stuff. That's the model that's so challenged. It seems the most challenged.

Because telling somebody, hey, subscribe. And then I'm going to just go off. off in the wilderness and then write a story that will ultimately kind of like become free. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the big magazines will have that for as long as they can. It's probably just going to end up aggregating to the Times, the journal. Yep.

Maybe not the Washington Post anymore. It's the barbell. Yeah. And so those kind of people aren't their own brands and they don't want to be either, right? Totally. And so it's a different kind of skill and it's a different mindset. So you actually don't mind being protected and behind your brand. It's actually better for you if you're doing that work.

because you have the legal protection, you have all that. Totally, totally. The benefit of time. Whereas, like, when you're out like me, I just not have time. So, yeah, I do think it just will accrue more to the barbell that we've been talking. Will you ever write a book? Yeah, I've thought about it. Yeah, I've been, I've had conversations.

No one I know who has written a book has enjoyed it. Like, afterwards. Yes. No one I know afterwards is like, I'm so glad I wrote that book. There's a lot of things like that in wife. They're just trying to pull a ladder up. Life, once you become a New York time. Yeah, the game theory.

The game theory is, like, tell all your enemies not to do that. Do people read books? Like, I mean, I haven't read a full book in a long time. I mean, my wife does, but, like, she's not reading, like, the kind of book I'd write. No, here's what you do. You take your latest article, you print it out like it's a book page. You take a picture over your phone, give it a little weathered yellow color overlay. And say, Claude, make this 800 pages.

No, no, no, no. You just show that on a screenshot, and people will be like, whoa, it's authoritative. It's a thought. Here's a marketing idea for you. We were going to do this. We didn't get around to it, but I think you should. you should actually have the sources like daily print edition that you just put around SF everywhere like give it to all the cafes it's just it's lead it's you don't have to do it

forever but it'd be a good lead gen for the newsletter you just like a week all you do it you just have like have a process when you publish something print it distributed to the cafe that is a good idea getting out there is important yeah I mean like I'm going to do events this year like getting out there and like filling like yeah being out in the world no no it seems ridiculous for a podcast to have, like, as aggressive of a brand we have. It matters. It matters. It matters. We ran a Super Bowl ad for a reason. Yeah. We've broken through. Did that do what you guys hoped? The Super Bowl out? A hundred percent. Yeah. The sponsors seem thrilled. Exactly. Well, no, the point was that it

wasn't just sponsors. Yeah, the guests. There was all the guests. And so, like, we've had so many guests come on the show. I don't think you had a logo when you came on. I didn't. Yeah. But we've had a lot of the guests that come back on the show and they, since they've been, oh, thanks for putting this in an ad, you know, whatever. Well, you guys are crushing it. Seriously. It's very awesome to see that you guys are doing. Last question for me.

What's the longest you've ever held a scoop? Oh, my God. Holding a scoop is like being underwater. That keeps me. All you want to do is take a breath. A sign you're getting too cocky is when you hold it and you're not worried about it, which has happened to me. Okay.

And then I get scooped. Yeah. Yeah. So. Months? Couple months. A couple months. Couple months.

Because, yeah, we've been talking to some folks who are writing books. And that's really hard. I don't know how. Because it's like a year or two. I don't know how you do that. The advance has got to be crazy for that. Oh, yeah. I guess you're getting paid up front for, yeah.

I'm just getting subs on stuff. And you got to, you got to like itemize things out in a way that a book doesn't. So, yeah, it's, I'm holding right now, actually, and it's tough. I'm like antsy. Okay. I'll be back on with you guys. Yeah, yeah. I don't like this.

Well, it's great having you on. It's been amazing to see your success. And again, threading that needle by being, you know, telling interesting stories, but not being adversarial is fantastic. Fair and balanced. Fair and balanced. It's great. It's a cronkite, baby.

Seriously. Yeah, can we call it? Yeah, I think we can plant the bomb. Hey, tell everyone. Can end the show with us. Yeah. Tell everyone where to find. Sources.

Dot news. Access. Access. Oh, I like that. That's really funny. But access is available in your presentation. podcast winners, of course. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Subscribe to our newsletter at TBPN.com. And have the best weekend of your life. Have the best weekend of your life. Just do it. Go get a scoop. No excuses. But don't hold on to it. We love you.

Goodbye. Nice work, brothers. I'll see you on the next one.