TBPN - Sequoia's Leadership Shakeup, Anthropic's Road to Profitability, 𝕏 Timeline Reactions

Episode Date: November 4, 2025

(00:33) - Sequoia's Leadership Shakeup (04:14) - Anthropic's Road to Profitability (09:30) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (22:46) - Palantir's Q3 Earnings and Their Big Bet on High Schoolers ...(28:57) - The State of the AI Race Between the U.S. and China (39:34) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions TBPN.com is made possible by:Ramp - https://ramp.comFigma - https://figma.comVanta - https://vanta.comLinear - https://linear.appEight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpnWander - https://wander.com/tbpnPublic - https://public.comAdQuick - https://adquick.comBezel - https://getbezel.comNumeral - https://www.numeralhq.comPolymarket - https://polymarket.comAttio - https://attio.com/tbpnFin - https://fin.ai/tbpnGraphite - https://graphite.devRestream - https://restream.ioProfound - https://tryprofound.comJulius AI - https://julius.aiturbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.comfal - https://fal.aiPrivy - https://www.privy.ioCognition - https://cognition.aiGemini - https://gemini.google.comFollow TBPN:https://TBPN.comhttps://x.com/tbpnhttps://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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Starting point is 00:00:00 You're watching TVPN. Today is Tuesday, November 4th, 2025. We are live from Silicon Valley. That's right. We're not going to say exactly where we are, but we're in Silicon Valley. And we're hanging out with some absolute dogs today. So we took the show on the road. Thank you to producer Ben for helping us get set up. And thank you for Ramp for making this possible. Time is money. Say both easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more, all in one place. So glad we have Ben here to be our live studio audience. Yeah. Yeah, you've got to clap for everything.
Starting point is 00:00:32 This is required. We have some breaking news out of Sequoia Capitol just down the street from where we are. They have a new set of bosses, new top dogs. Top dog alert. Top dog alert. They're going Lynn Sanity mode and the Gradnator. The Gradnator. Pat Grady and Alfred Lynn are in.
Starting point is 00:00:52 We haven't had Pat on the show. We've had Alfred Lynn. He's fantastic. I can read through Rolloff's message. He said they've lost. They love to structure these as emails. So subject, a new generation of Sequoia stewards. Don Valentine founded Sequoia with the future in mind.
Starting point is 00:01:07 He instilled a distinct culture focused on stewardship. We think of stewardship as leaving the firm better than when we found it. This belief has enabled successful intergenerational transfers and ensures we hire the right people who want to create a partnership that outlives all of us. Stewardship grounds our culture in an ethos of performance, excellence, teamwork, and continuous innovation. It also extends to our companies. Even though we're called an investment firm, we think of ourselves as company builders.
Starting point is 00:01:33 Since 1972, Sequoia stewards have transitioned the partnership from one generation to the next when they saw that the team was ready for the challenge. With each transition, a new generation is able to stand on the shoulders of those who came before them and build on and strengthen the Sequoia partnership. That moment has come for me. Today, I am announcing that Alfred Lynn and Pat Grady are Sequoia's new stewards. Alfred and Pat embody the cultural traits that have defined Sequoia for the last 53 years. They have exceptional performance having partnered with companies like DoorDash, Service Now, Airbnb, Snowflake, Citadel Security, Zoom, Kalshi, OpenAI, Open Evidence, and Harvey.
Starting point is 00:02:10 They are leaders. Alfred is co-led Sequoia's early stage business since 2017, and Pat, our growth stage business since 2015. They embrace our apprenticeship model. They have a fearless and resilience that's necessary to win in this business. They do not shy away from difficult conversations, and they roll up their sleeves to company build. Let's give it up for rolling up sleeves. Let's roll of our sleeves. Both with founders and within Sequoia, the two of them are true teammates. To founders, to their partners and to each other, they're the right pair to entrust with the stewardship of Sequoia. Like the stewards before me, I will transition into a new role advising the partnership while continuing to represent Sequoia on boards.
Starting point is 00:02:50 I'm confident that Sequo's ethos will endure, and the deep bench of talent that Sequoia will, thrive under Pat and Alfred's leadership. Best regards, Roloff, both that. Are you reading between the lines here? I think I know what happened. I think Roloff probably just recently got into racing cars, and he's just like, I need to go full-time. I need to go all in on this.
Starting point is 00:03:12 I got it. I got a step back. I found my real calling. It's time. I'm going to spend more time in track. I can't wait another day. I can't spend, yeah. Spending time at managing Sequoia as a steward. It's just, it's not, it's not reducing my lap times.
Starting point is 00:03:27 I put this post in from Alex, because this was my first thought too. Alex says, bro went out and said venture capital is return free risk and then hand it over the keys. The timing is, is interesting that, uh, I don't think you need to read too much. I don't think you need to read too much to do it. He said that on the Delphi podcast. Yeah, I think so. That's, that's such a funny place to go drop a bombshell and then bounce.
Starting point is 00:03:52 I, I don't think you can read too. too much into it because it's, it's, but he doesn't do a lot of media, so I don't know, maybe. Maybe he was like, I'm out, not a venture. It's been a good run. Who knows? We'll have to keep tracking it, but anyway. Thank you to restream for making this stream possible. One live stream, 30 plus destinations, multi-stream, reach your audience, wherever they are.
Starting point is 00:04:15 Anthropic is the new king of AI API sales, boatload of new financials and projections below from the information. Anthropic this summer hiked its most. most optimistic growth forecast by roughly 13 to 28% over the next three years and is projecting as much as 70 billion in revenue in 2028. Okay. So that's up from close to 5 billion this year. So 5 billion, then 10, then 20, then 30. Like they're more than doubling every year for the next three years. Pretty remarkable. Are you walking over here to hit the gong somehow? What are you doing? Oh, is I off Mike? Yeah. Okay. Thank you. We're back.
Starting point is 00:04:56 We're back. The company expects demand from businesses for its AI models to drive that growth, Anthropic projected, that it's 2025 revenue from selling access to these models through an application programming interface will roughly double the revenue. Its bigger rival OpenAI generates. And Peter Woldefi... Yeah, the notable thing here is projecting cash flow. Yeah, profitable in 27.
Starting point is 00:05:21 $17 billion in cash flow in 2020. not something you see from AI players outside of Nvidia. I don't know, from the way Anthropic talks about pre-training and scaling and new models, I would be, remember the whole Dario idea of like, each model individually is cash flow positive, but you keep having to scale up by 10x. And so we're going to do a $10 billion training run. And then we're going to animatize that over five years and it's going to look great.
Starting point is 00:05:53 but in the short term, it's going to look terrible, and it keeps looking terrible because you keep scaling up. This is the exact opposite of that. I wonder if there's like a true shift going on. To actually be cash flow positive at the company level, I have to imagine they would have to not do the next training room. Well, not do something that's 10x or 100x. I don't know.
Starting point is 00:06:13 I understand that, like, compute will continue to scale with revenue. So they can still be, like, extremely compute scaling pilled. But in terms of viewing, the incremental progress on their models as essentially capax that puts them deep in a hole. It feels like there's some shift in the way that they're thinking about this or at least messaging it to the market. I don't know. Maybe this is an in reaction to that last quote that came out about each model being so,
Starting point is 00:06:43 so unprofitable in the short term. Well, let me tell you about Privy, wallet infrastructure for every bank. Privy makes it easy to build on crypto rails, securely spin up white label wallets, sign transactions and integrate on-chain infrastructure all through one simple API. So Peter Willa Ford said, Open AI's plan spend $115 billion to then become profitable in 2030. Anthropics plan has spent $6 billion to then become profitable in 27. We'll be curious to see what works best. People are, the bub talk is going through the roof.
Starting point is 00:07:15 It's going back and forth. Mass, memetic theory, the swing builder himself, the man who built the same. the same swing. He was saying that Rune has become extremely defensive lately, taking shots at former TBPN guest Rune. And Jacob Rintamaki, another guest,
Starting point is 00:07:33 says, to be fair, to Rune, people have also been saying a lot of crazy stuff about Sam Altman and AI CAPEX Twitter discourse in general just makes me want to take a shotgun to the brain. So deeply mid-curve. And Mass is going back and forth
Starting point is 00:07:49 showing that Open AI has to 1,000x their revenue over five years to get to a standard 15x PE ratio, which is certainly not the goal for most companies. And I think Jacob makes a good point here. He says, Palantir's price earnings ratio is 600. Yeah, meta is at something like a 22, 27? 27. To get to 15 is like, yes, that might happen as a 40-year-old company, but certainly not as a company that's tripling revenue every year.
Starting point is 00:08:18 Also, Enterprise Large Language Model API Market Share, this graph, this study that was done is from Menlo Ventures. He was a big investor in Anthropic. It was, I think, a relatively small sample size. I mean, I think it could be correct about the market share. I think it's probably directionally correct. The market's growing super fast. It's much less of an issue. And very clearly, like, the stated mission of Open AI has never been like, we're a pure play. enterprise large language model API company. Yeah. It's been like, give us credit in our price to earnings relative to our advances on science
Starting point is 00:08:58 and our consumer app and our agent of commerce and our AI slop. The other notable thing from that specific report was that open AI share of closed source foundation models via API drop from 50 to 30% to 34% across 2024. Sure. Yeah. So it went down even further. 25%. That's what it looks like. But I mean, if the market's growing, like, how much does this really matter? But yeah, they're going back and forth. They're duking it out. But Jacob Ritamaki shares something funny.
Starting point is 00:09:34 Just a reflection on Nvidia that I wanted to share. This is the WoJack meme. In 2019, people saying, Nvidia's stock is extremely overvalued. This was pre the Ethereum pump, I believe. And Nvidia's market cap was $100 billion. And it did seem like, no, they just like make, they just make chips. Like it's just like they have like one product. Kind of. They make great gaming graphics cards. It was at $100 billion. Then at $500 billion in 2021.
Starting point is 00:10:02 Now, now, Nvidia did trade down crazy after the crypto proof of stake move. But then in 2023, NVIDIA hit $1 trillion. And everyone was saying, this has got to be the top. And then in 2025, we now see that the market cap is $5 trillion. The WoJack is extremely dismayed. And pulling up this post from Trevor Scott, when NVIDIA... This was a crazy photo. This was pretty surreal to see this image surface.
Starting point is 00:10:31 I'm surprised Jensen did this and allowed himself to be photographed doing it. But this was June 4th, 2024. He was signing a woman's shirt at a conference, and Vyngae is up 85%. and obviously a lot of folks were calling the top on this. Always manufacturer fake top signals. Historically, these have been top signals. But here we are. But I mean, to steal man this, like, Jensen has always been a rock star.
Starting point is 00:11:05 Like, he's always, like, fashioned himself like a rock star. There's not like he put on the jacket at the top. He's always been born in it. He was born in it. And so I think he's just a man who manufactures a new top signal every quarter, and that makes him in. The arm link, beer chugging. Yeah, we're going to look back on that in a year and be like, how was that at the top?
Starting point is 00:11:24 And you know that Korean fried chicken stocks were pumping? Wait, really? Because what he said? Well, yeah, I think he was eating. There's a, I don't, I don't know, on Wall Street beds three days ago. This could be a copy, copy pasta, but there's a, there's a post with 18,000 upboats that says, I am financially ruined, short-selling Korean fried chicken companies. I have lost everything, and I'm not sure how to continue.
Starting point is 00:11:49 This week, I lost $472,000 short-selling Korean Fried Chicken Companies. My idea was with the declining Korean population in the recent trend towards healthier eating and vegan diets, there's an opportunity here. I did some research into consumer trends in Korea and determined that this would be a lucrative play. So I shorted Korean fried chicken companies across the board. Unfortunately, earlier this week, NVIDIA CEO Jensen dined out at a Korean chicken restaurant called Kaboochikibu Chicken. and Seoul and pictures went viral of him enjoying fried chicken and beer. Stox of chicken companies in Korea stored 20 to 30 percent and I was margin called. Everything is gone.
Starting point is 00:12:27 It's great. I don't know how to continue. How could I not have known that Korean fried chicken is the future of AI? That's hilarious. That does seem like a copy pasta, but the internet is such a wide, such a big place that it is possible that there's one person that did that that actually yoloed their full, full send. There's been crazier that's made on malls. I mean, we know some retail traders who full port into crazy thesis, like a crazy thesis, every week. So I wouldn't be surprised if someone out there did go giga short the Korean fried chicken stocks. It's totally possible. Well, yeah, if you were shorting a variety of restaurant stocks in the U.S., this year you did incredibly well. They all did poorly.
Starting point is 00:13:11 Is that the Ozmpic trade? I don't even know, I don't even know that. There was just a lot of these restaurants that started trading at like 50 to 100 times earnings. We'll get to it later in the shower. I'll try to, I'll try to put it. Before we move on, let me tell you about cognition. The makers of Devin. Devin is the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. There's some debate over how impactful the chat GPT launch has been on job displacement. We keep going back and forth on this. I mean, I was working on a slide yesterday with Tyler and I was and we were mapping it out and I drew it out on I drew out the slide on the whiteboard and I was like okay now I need to get this what this the picture of the
Starting point is 00:13:57 whiteboard into Google slides and have it like animate or get it into Figma and have it animate so I can actually use slides and and I just like it was still a disconnect and we still wound up doing a bunch of it manually and there wasn't just like take a picture of something you scribbled and turn it into a presentation. Like, it's just, we're not in that, like, the era of agents, you said this in the show yesterday. You were like, you were like, Codex or Microsoft Copilot doesn't get enough credit for bringing us into the era of agents.
Starting point is 00:14:27 But Copilot is not actually an agent. It's like, it's a co-pilot, which is different. An agent I see as a pilot. Yeah. Co-pilot is like sitting alongside you doing spell check. I would see like Gramerly as a full, grammarly, the original Gramerly was like a co-pilot. pilot and then and then deep research is an agent and so I have some agent specific functionality I see
Starting point is 00:14:50 Devon as an agent I see Codex as an agent but but I think there's still a there is still a big problem to solve of like what is the agent in every category how can someone actually make it to be reliable so I guess my point was like co-pilot is meant to be a way to orchestrate agents they certainly want it to get there, but that's not how people use it just yet. Like, for the most part, it is like an ID tool. I think something notable about, like, when I think of the chat GPT, like jobs, displacement, debate and discourse, like I look at our company, which is like, despite a bunch of new tools popping up, we still need to hire video editors. We still want to hire writers. There's like a bunch of
Starting point is 00:15:42 these different roles that AI is great at. Like AI isn't necessarily great at writing, but it can produce a lot of writing, right? AI is great at writing code, or at least it's great at increasing productivity and velocity. That just meant that we hired a software engineer. Yeah. We should have a bigger debate about this.
Starting point is 00:16:03 I feel like me and you can debate this a little bit, but we should have some folks on the show to go back and forth on this chart. because it is, first, I mean, we need to figure out how accurate is the, how accurate the actual chart is, because it doesn't include a y-axis, and it's one of those things where we've seen these viral, these viral charts where when you go and recreate them, they kind of like, you know, don't quite line up. This chart, to me, has always been about interest rates going through the roof. That, that's what, it just happened to almost perfectly coincide with the chat.
Starting point is 00:16:41 GPT launch. Change in the high interest rate. And then if you look at the growth of the S&P 500, like almost all the growth is driven by AI. So it's like the narrative here is just, it's just weird because high interest rates, higher interest rates should hurt the S&P 500, right? Like that's what happens when interest rates go up. Like you flood to bonds.
Starting point is 00:17:02 Yeah. Equities sell off. And that did happen a little bit in 2021 at the end of the top. But then we got the AI boom and we wound. up building much bigger. And so bubble baby or something says, bubble boy, who we've talked about before, says, if only there were some major event a year before that was important and affected interest rates and hiring trends. And so is this the Silicon Valley crisis and then the Silicon Valley Bank crisis and then the interest rate rate hike that I think bubble boy is referring to? And young macro
Starting point is 00:17:37 is replying and says, but shouldn't restrictive policy also have impacted growth proxied by the black line. Yes, and that's what I think we were getting at. Not saying the chart is great, but I don't get the consensus pushback, which is that policy was being tightened around the divergent point. So yeah, I would love to dig into more of this because there's just so many different things that are going on. There's like, there's like the cultural trends around the, what Elon did at X that just kind of like woke a lot of CEOs up to this idea that they could run leaner. The interest rates is huge. the different
Starting point is 00:18:13 like geopolitical dynamics of like do you want to offshore or not? There's like so many different aspects and then even just if AI isn't displacing
Starting point is 00:18:26 but if CEOs think that AI is going to displace people or AI will be in five years well a lot of the reason why you hire someone isn't because you need the job done today. It's because like it's time for them to ram. Exactly.
Starting point is 00:18:40 Like the reason that a law firm hires a junior associate is because they need a new partner. And the partner will, they'll grow up into a partner in 20 years. Yeah. And I've said this probably 20 times by now, but I think that every CEO, even if they're not, if they don't have an AI narrative, wants an AI narrative. So if you have to do layoffs, why not say, hey, we're getting a bunch of efficiency out of AI tools. And that's why we're doing layoffs. So that's why we're not opening up a bunch of new goals. So it could be like the cost of capital went up. You have to pull back on a bunch of investments because you can't get cheap debt anymore. You're tightening your belt and then you
Starting point is 00:19:16 wrap it in the AI narrative. Yeah. Yeah, it is possible. Well, if you're worried about AI job displacement, why not invest in a SPV that has fees with zero percent carry and a seven percent one-time management fee, which is seven percent tax immediately. This is not even the craziest that that we've heard about. There's some out there floating around that are just 10% immediately. 10% off the top. Right off the top.
Starting point is 00:19:45 The 0% carry is great for the principal agent problem. For sure, solves that. They're not incentivized just as much money as humanly possible. I mean, it feels like, you know, I've heard a lot of early managers
Starting point is 00:19:59 like flip this around where they only get carry and they give on the management fee. And they're basically working. Yeah, where they're charging like just an admin fee. to cover the cost. Yeah, barely anything.
Starting point is 00:20:10 And you'll see people with like small funds that seem, you know, somewhat sizable. But the actual management fee, once they've given so many fees, because they don't just come out with a three or four percent fee structure. They might have two percent, and then they're giving it away in a bunch of places to get early LPs on board. And so there's plenty of early stage managers that are making like 100K or 200K, like they're just not taking that much home. But they're heavily incentivized on the carry side that if it works.
Starting point is 00:20:38 works, they will wind up doing very well. And so they're betting on themselves. This is kind of the opposite of that. Anyway, let me tell you about figma.com. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. You can get started for free. Michael Burry has just filed his 13F 11 days early.
Starting point is 00:20:58 He has never done this before. Massive put. He's going short, Palantir and Nvidia. But didn't Burry come out and say this is fake news? Yeah, this is a, I mean, it's also, do you think this account has a stance on the notional? Do you think that they're maybe biased one way or not? It's a bubble.
Starting point is 00:21:16 It's a bubble is the entire account. Imagine what happens after the bubble pops. Like, your account is just so sad. Yeah, this is just, this is just a, I think in general, people continuously misunderstand the sort of like notional value versus the size of the actual portfolio. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. And also just like, I think that there's, there's oftentimes, there's multiple funds and multiple vehicles within there and multiple, multiple things that are hitting the reporting threshold. And so
Starting point is 00:21:48 there's so much like legal nuance. I don't, I don't know that, uh, it's super easy to just like, see a big number in a 13-a-half and, and tell a whole story around it. Totally. Let Burry cook. We'll see what he has to say. I wonder if Burry wish he played himself in the big short. so that all the meme, if he knew all the meme images would be shared hundreds, thousands of times a day, it would just, it would be the ultimate marketing engine. It'd be very tolerated. That was a tough role.
Starting point is 00:22:19 I mean, it wasn't the toughest, I guess, in Christian Bales, it wasn't the biggest transformation, but it was like, Christian Bale's a great actor. I mean, it was perfect. Is it called the big short? Is he big or is he short? Is he both? The big short?
Starting point is 00:22:33 Both at the same time. He was defending his height. said, I'm not 5'4 or something like that. I don't know. Yeah. I've been there. I've been there. Michael. A meat shared some more on Palantir earnings. We covered it a little bit at the end of yesterday's show. Q3, they did 1.188 billion of revenue, up 63% year over year. 883 million of U.S. revenue, up 77% year over year, 397 U.S. commercial revenue, up 121% year. year over year, almost half a billion of U.S. government revenue, up 52% year-over-year,
Starting point is 00:23:12 gap net income of nearly half a billion at 40% margin, rule of 40 at 114%. Yeah, it's government contracts boom. This was particularly good for them. Although, it's growing slower than commercial revenue. But still people understand. Why did the journal go with government contracts boom? That's interesting. DataL analytics company said it had $1.1.8 billion in the sales for the third quarter. Pallender stock here, another record high. Man, what a wild story of the Pallenture story. It's over 20 years old, right?
Starting point is 00:23:53 It's down 8% today. Yeah, but still, I mean, like, beating. This is just such a fascinating company that just like was cooking for so long. Beating like this and then trading down 8% the next day is shows that the market's a little shaky. Another iconic quote from Karp, he says, Some of our detractors have been left in a kind of deranged and self-destructive befuddlement. This remains the beginning, the first moment of a first chapter. Super based to be 20, 20 years in and just be like, jobs on finish.
Starting point is 00:24:26 I like that the Wall Street Journal summarizes what Pallinger does. The Denver-based firm sells software to centralize, manage, and analyze large amounts of data. it's like the simplest one-liner. What does Palantir do? Palantir was also in the journal today because they're hunting for, they're hiring high schoolers now. They're just like,
Starting point is 00:24:48 college is pointless. We'll just hire you straight out of high school, which is insane and awesome. I love it. One Palantir posts is college is broken. And we talked about this when they went like out with like the meritocracy, like kind of came.
Starting point is 00:25:04 campaign, but the journal's writing on it a little bit more. The fellowship offers a path for high school students to work full time at the company. After deciding to apply, Matteo Zanini found out that he got the fellowship. At around the same time, he got admitted to Brown University. Brown wouldn't allow him to defer, and he had also landed a full-ride scholarship through the Department of Defense. What a crazy... What kind of track is that? This kid is like, What's a good example? Seal Team 6 level or something. Like this is like an elite operator.
Starting point is 00:25:40 The DOP is like, we will pay for your Brown education. And then Palantir's like, but we'll also just hire you directly. I got a scholarship to be on the equestrian team at Brown. Yeah. I got, I'm on the department of defense. Who is this Mateo Zanini? This is a crazy, crazy person. Okay, let's go through this.
Starting point is 00:25:59 I'm super interested in this now. I said, no one said to do the fellowship, said Zanini. who turned 18 in September. All of my friends, my teachers, my college counselor, it was a unanimous no. His parents left the decision to him, and he decided to go with Palantir. Zanini is one of more than 500 high school graduates
Starting point is 00:26:18 who applied for Palantir's meritocracy fellowship, an experiment launched under Alex Carp. Palantir is a data analytics company that has been known lately for its government contracts, including with the US military and intelligence agencies. Carp, who studied philosophy at Haverford College and got a law degree from Stanford, said, in an August earnings call that hiring university students these days meant hiring people who have, quote, just been engaged in platitudes.
Starting point is 00:26:48 The inaugural class of 22 Palantir Fellows wraps up in November. If they have done well in the four-month program, they will have the chance to work full-time at Palantir Sands College degree. The fellowship kicked off of the four-week seminar with more than two dozen speakers. Each week had a theme, foundations of the West, U.S. history, Uniques Culture.
Starting point is 00:27:09 They're talking about Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill. We felt obligated to provide more than the average internship, said Jordan Hirsch, a senior counselor who works with carp on special projects. The interns experience show early on.
Starting point is 00:27:23 So they're getting some classroom time in? Basically, yeah, yeah. They're studying game. They are studying some stuff. They're studying games. game and they're also getting into the history books. Yeah, it's pretty crazy. That's cool.
Starting point is 00:27:36 I do, I find it a pretty, a pretty common experience to be, like, blown away by, let's say, like, a, somebody in there, like, mid to late 20s and discover that they didn't go to college or they dropped out very quickly. Like, these people just, uh, I, I, I don't have a lot of, um, maybe it's, maybe it's like, uh, I don't know, maybe it's something to do with like our network, but it seems like you can basically get a three, two to three year head start by dropping out, right? And by the time you're in your 20s, like you look, you kind of appear and are accomplished like somebody that is in their mid-30s. Yeah, yeah. You just got to be ready to kind of build your own thing. If you're,
Starting point is 00:28:22 not capable of that, like, you're going to have a bad time. But if you're, if you're ready to, like, you know, just kind of go independent and, like, leave from and just, like, solve any problem that comes your way. It's, it's clearly very, very accelerating to your career. Much like getting on Vanta, automate compliance, manage risk, and accelerate trust with AI. Vanta helps you get compliant fast. And we don't stop there. Our AI and automation power everything from evidence collection to continuous monitoring to security reviews and vendor risk, whether you're starting up or scaling. Couldn't have said it better myself, John. Let's get into this highlights from this article in the Financial Times. The state of AI is China about to win the race.
Starting point is 00:29:04 Clickbait. It worked. Let's get into it. Arnaud, Bertrand shared some highlights. He says, this is rare enough to be highlighted. An actually good Financial Times article on the state of the AI race between the U.S. and China. He put race in quotes. Three interesting points stood out to Arnaud. One, the fact that for a general purpose technology such as AI, long-term advantage, often comes down to how widely and deeply technology spread across society. This is because of the risk of pointing the obvious benefits from a new technology come from using it widely, not just creating it. You wouldn't get any benefit from discovering the steam engine in and of itself. What drove productivity gains and ultimately Britain's advantage in the Industrial Revolution was spreading and using this technology in its society.
Starting point is 00:29:50 And China has advantages here, as the article notes, since they're unarguably better at orchestrating society-wide transformation, as that's all that. they've been doing for the past three decades. They got some reps in. To the point that U.S. semiconductors actually helped China and AI since they pushed Chinese companies towards a different playbook. Pooling compute,
Starting point is 00:30:11 optimizing efficiency, and releasing open weight models. John, John is not sold on this time. The efficiency thing is... But, I mean, the actual... I would love to know about, like, the data point that I have
Starting point is 00:30:28 have not seen that I would like to see is actual, basically, like, consumption of AI. Like, it's clear that they were able to catch up on creation of Frontier model with Deepseek, but how much is actually getting implemented? Like, if you look at, in America, you would go to, like, what's happening on OpenRouter, let's look at Open AIs revenue, let's look at Palantir's revenue, let's look at Anthropics revenue, right? and we can see that companies are paying to actually implement this stuff. To understand how close China is, I'd want to benchmark that a little bit more and try and understand that.
Starting point is 00:31:05 Anyway, we can move on. Good point. The efficiency thing is real. The other thing that's fascinating is just like the energy abundance that China has, right, is like helps offset the, like, yeah, if they can use more energy and be more efficient. And then that's an edge. Before we move on to the next point, let me tell you about graphite.com. Code review for the age of AI.
Starting point is 00:31:35 Graphite helps schemes on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. Jordy, where were we? This is extremely ironic as the U.S. effectively pushed China to develop models that are more efficient and open source, which turns out to be a better strategy for global diffusion. If you're a company and say Germany or Brazil, you can download Quine or Deepseek, run it locally, fine tune it for your market and never worry about API rate limits. But does that mean that you win? Like, it's like, cool.
Starting point is 00:31:58 Like, Linus Torvalds is not the most powerful person in computing. Yeah. Like, he did a great thing by creating Linux. It's awesome. But he's not like, he's no one near as powerful. If anything, it seems like you, you kind of hurt the anthropics and the open AIs of the world that have, we, we, uh, Chesky was, uh, came out and talked about using Quinn models at Airbnb.
Starting point is 00:32:20 Yeah. because they were fast and cheap. I'm dying to talk to the CEO of Red Hat because Red Hat Linux is built on top of Linux. It's the ultimate, like the apex predator of the for-profit business built on top of an open source software product. And to actually understand how much leverage you get from developing something like Quinn or Deep Seek
Starting point is 00:32:46 is a very open question to me. I feel like it might be two orders of magnitude, less value capture. If you look at, I mean, all of the Linux value creation, I mean, the creation's immense, but the value capture is, I think on the order of tens of billions, and I think that the closed ecosystems, iOS and Microsoft Windows, is in the trillions? Trillions, maybe?
Starting point is 00:33:14 I don't know. It's hard to. Last point here, which I think is the most notable. the oft-ignored point of societal enthusiasm, as the article notes, the public in China is the most optimistic in the world about AI. Far more than in the U.S. or the UK, optimism can be a powerful fuel. Our nod says, I often lament about this as a European. We often have a do-mistake on new technologies, AI very much included,
Starting point is 00:33:38 which is a huge repellent for entrepreneurship and technological diffusion, and that ultimately hurts Europe in a lot of ways, precisely, because the first point above, advantages from new technologies come down to how widely and deeply it spreads in society. If China is the most enthusiastic country in the world about AI, this in and of itself will help drive the widespread adoption that per point one is actually what matters for a long-term competitive advantage.
Starting point is 00:34:05 DJ Levy says the point made about operating under constraints reminds me of how post-war Japan adopted, fine-tuned, and promoted lean manufacturing to overcome scarcity. Interesting point. There's an article on the Wall Street Journal today about what happened behind the scenes between Nvidia and China. The reporting says that the Trump administration, Trump aides sank Nvidia push to export AI chips to China. President, hearing from his inner circle opted not to discuss policy shift with Xi Jinping. They met in South Korea and an urgent issue emerged.
Starting point is 00:34:52 Trump wanted to discuss a request by NVIDIA chief executive, Jensen Wong, to allow sales of a new generation of artificial intelligence chips to China. Current and former administration officials said greenlighting the export of Blackwell chips would be a seismic policy shift, potentially giving China, the U.S.'s biggest geopolitical competitor, a technological accelerant. Wang, who speaks to Trump, often, has lobbied relentlessly to maintain access to the Chinese market as they prepared to meet Xi Jinping, top officials,
Starting point is 00:35:24 including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, told Trump the sales would threaten national security saying they could boost China's AI data center capabilities and backfire on the U.S. officials said. And so I still wonder, I mean, it's like, Nvidia is a $5 trillion company. Like, if they could sell to China, how much, like it's not like it's a $10 trillion company, is it?
Starting point is 00:35:47 Is it that big of a deal? Like how big is the China opportunity? It's the second largest computing market in the world. It's huge. That's right. But so do you think, do you think that there's $5 trillion at stake here? Is that how big of a deal this is? I don't know.
Starting point is 00:36:01 Depends on how AGI Pell do you are, John. I guess. Yeah. I don't know. Yeah, I mean, if you think AI is like safe, but, you know, it's, you want to sell it everywhere. I don't know. I also just wonder, like, you know, how many American tech companies have really been able to do well in China over a long period of time.
Starting point is 00:36:20 It feels like even if you have the blessing of the United States, you won't have the blessing of the CCP forever. So it seems like a very temporary thing. Yeah, Tesla was selling into China as long as well, as long as it took for them to copy it. Granted chips are quite a bit harder to make than cars. Before we move on, you might be aware that on the other side of the country, there's a mayoral election, New York City,
Starting point is 00:36:47 is choosing between Mamdani and Cuomo. And you can go to polymarket.com slash NYC to track it. There are 12 hours, 22 minutes, and 33 seconds left. And Mamdani is at 95% chance. Cuomo's at 5%. Up from around 90 earlier as... Yes. They flipped in July.
Starting point is 00:37:10 And Mamdani has been grinding it up from the 70% up to 95, where he is right now, and his odds look very good. But, you know, there's a lot of people out there saying, smart money's on Cuomo. Maybe he'll win. I think the degenerate money is on Cuomo. That's probably true.
Starting point is 00:37:30 I mean, yeah. Somebody said that to me, and I was like, I don't think that it's like hard to poll Cuomo voters. Like, I don't know that much about it, but it doesn't feel like the Cuomo voters are like under a rock. Like, oh, they don't pick up the phone. Like, if anything, it's like the Mamdani voters. He's bringing out like a new.
Starting point is 00:37:45 voter. So I don't know. You can go track it at polymarket.com slash NYC. There's been some debate on whether or not like foreign whales could be kind of, you know, pushing up one, you know, pushing up so wrong for some reason, but there's so much, there's so much volume on, on this market that it's, I think, at a scale that someone would have to be extremely motivated. It's just kind of really. I always forget that I believe we were doing the show during the election last year. And I think we were so locked in on technology,
Starting point is 00:38:25 we barely covered it. I'm sure. But I think it happened, I think the election happened like, because the election was in November. We started the show in October. Yeah. So that's like,
Starting point is 00:38:35 well, that was the first, that was the first, didn't cover it. That was, I mean, but that was the first election that everyone was glued to the prediction market odds.
Starting point is 00:38:45 Totally. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But also I think that it was exhausting, and every show was obsessed with politics. And so it was kind of refreshing to hop on the microphone and actually just talk about technology and business. Ski-Zo and on poster takes and break them down. Exactly.
Starting point is 00:39:04 And there was truly, I still maintain that technology is like the most important story of 2024, for example, and, and tracking what's happening with OpenAI is just as important. Most important to us, that's for sure. For sure. Just like Julius.AI, the AI data analyst is the most important AI data analytics company. Connect your data, ask questions in plain English, and get insights in seconds, no coding required. What's this post from Martin Screlli? So a couple accounts we're sharing a couple big shorters.
Starting point is 00:39:43 We're sharing that... Chanos. Hopper GPU rental index with a big move down in late October, now down 28% year-to-date. Just Dario says no signs of GPU oversupply whatsoever, and Scarelli comes over the top and dunks and mocks by sharing some NeoCloud. I don't know which one exactly showing that every single service that this cloud is offering is out of capacity. A100s, H-100s, B-200s, G-H-200s, et cetera. So definitely a tale of two chips. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:40:26 It seems very, very hard to, to, to, like, to assess the market based on spot pricing in the single dollars per hour. Like just the amount of like liquidity in the market if you want to spend 10 grand is probably way different than wanting to spend 10 billion dollars. And when you look at what the hyperscalers and the frontier labs are talking about, I don't think that they're that they're happy one way or another to hoover up a couple little instances all over the place. I think they need a real data center. But I don't know. We haven't heard. This is so interesting because like have you have you seen reports? Like we see reports when like a startup's website goes down, right?
Starting point is 00:41:28 Because it's like, oh, maybe AWS went down or maybe like they're just like not, they're being sloppy. Right. Like if, especially if it's a company that somebody like wants to dunk on, right? Like Cluelly. Like if Cluley was like out of GPUs, like people would dunk on Cluelly, right? They were dunking. You didn't see this? I mean, they, people were showing.
Starting point is 00:41:49 But not for GPU. Yeah, they were just showing that the service was down. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That was just like the status page. And there was actually some fun about that. Like I wasn't sure if that was super real. But there are plenty of reasons why in any oligopolistic like startup market, if there's two companies that are duking it out and one of them is like,
Starting point is 00:42:09 like, oh, they couldn't secure their GPUs to do their inference to do their AI agents thing. One of them would dunk, right? You'd think you'd see this. But you don't. And so I'm much more, I'm much more on the, like, there are generally enough GPUs to go around right now. But I don't know. I'd like to know more. We do, we, I know Tyler does, does run into GPU constraints every once a while.
Starting point is 00:42:34 But it hasn't been, it hasn't been like a major, majorly gating file. factor. Yeah. Most of it's available. And if you need some GPUs or on-demand clusters for generated media head over to fall, the world's best generative image, video, and audio models all in one place, develop and fine-tuned models,
Starting point is 00:42:51 trusted by our friends at Shopify, Kora, complexity, Adobe, anymore. This was the data that I was referencing earlier in the show. QCap shared year-to-date, or actually, sorry, monthly performance from Canva, Wing Stop, Shake Shack, a bunch of other restaurants. CMG. Oh, CMG is down 22% in the last week. In the quarter, they're down 27%.
Starting point is 00:43:20 Hey, they're only down 47% year to 10%. That is so rough. But, yeah, really rough. Wasteland Capital shares, most of these restaurant stocks were trading at 35 to 100 times forward PE just recently. Many still are. They were valued at a massive premium to the Mag 7 and any comparable growth stocks in tech and AI.
Starting point is 00:43:43 This is just a bubble deflating. Bubbles can't be sustained indefinitely. Let me give you some more context on Chipotle because Chipotle was actually in the journal today, B-10. First, let me tell you about turbopfer, search every bite. Service vector in full-text search, built from first principles and object storage, fast 10x cheaper
Starting point is 00:44:01 and extremely scalable. So the The Wall Street Journal says, Chipotle's big bet on younger consumers is unraveling. An uncertain U.S. economy is catching up to younger Americans and Chipotle Mexican Grill. The Mexican-inspired chain has spent years cultivating a younger clientele,
Starting point is 00:44:20 pitching its burritos and bowls as nutritious protein-packed meals for Jim Bros and Healthy Eaters. What do you think, Ben? Are you still a fan? Do you still love it? I still love it. I still love it. It's so, it's so tragic.
Starting point is 00:44:33 And Ben used to go to Chibola every day. No, I used to get almost, I used to get easily 90% of my calories from Tripoli at certain times of my life. And anytime you were like on a long drive, yes. Knowing that at some point in the drive, you could pull over and have a nice, fresh, nutritious, sloppel was just, it was something to look forward to. Oh, he's amazing.
Starting point is 00:44:57 And now the last time I pulled over and got Chipotle, I'm like, oh, this is going to be rough. Is it a quantity? It's a quality. It's a quality. It's entirely a quality. The quality is degraded to such an extreme degree that it's no, I'd rather fast than eat in almost any situation. Obviously, I'm, I'm an extra picky.
Starting point is 00:45:17 So apparently they've been going, they've been going younger. They've been targeting younger clientele. And it says here, Chipotle sponsors video game competitions. And some dedicated fans dubbed themselves Chipotle boys. That sounds like something they're trying to, I haven't seen this at all. That's not good. I would never self-identify as a Chipotle boy. In fact, the existence of the Chipotle boy makes me never want to shop at Cholet ever again.
Starting point is 00:45:46 Millennials and Gen Zers have helped power Chipotle sales despite rising menu prices and slowdowns at rival chains. In recent months, though, a harsher economic reality has set in rising student loan payments, stagnant wage growth and higher health insurance costs have bumped burritos down. consumer's priority lists. They're just... What are they eating instead? Dude, I've been in this scenario. When I first came to Silicon Valley, Chipotle was like a once-a-month luxury.
Starting point is 00:46:16 No, at that same time... It was literally ramen noodles. You go to Costco. You get ramen noodles. Ramen noodles is truly 10 cents a meal. Like, it is the cheapest, cheapest thing. I mean, yeah, the... Chappole is expensive now.
Starting point is 00:46:30 It's over $10. I sort of look back fondly on the day. when Chipotle was felt and was a luxury when I was like, okay, I have, I have a huge bag of rice. Extra, extra guacca mack and extra meat was like, I am a king. Were you at like a frozen chicken breast guy too? Yeah, for sure. I'd just be looking at the, the huge bag, you know, one pound bag of rice and the frozen chicken breast being like, again. We meet again.
Starting point is 00:46:59 We meet again. And then I'd be like, I got to mix it up. and have chicken and rice from somewhere else. They're eating at home more often. They're eating with us less frequently. Chipotle CEO Scott Boatwright, I like that name, said in an interview. One is Sean Chopra, a 23-year-old law student at UCLA. Choper typically stopped at Chipotle several times a week,
Starting point is 00:47:21 but lately he decided he should make more Mexican-style food at home. Okay. He's DIYing Chipotle. It isn't that difficult to replicate what you get there. That's a great point. He has to cut back his Chipotle habit to twice a month. Chipotle said last week that customer traffic slid over the three months ended September 30th for a third consecutive quarter of the company cut its forecast for same store sales.
Starting point is 00:47:46 Consumers from 25 to 35 who account for roughly one quarter of Chipotle sales are pulling back on visits. Other fast casual restaurant stocks, including Kava and Sweet Green, also declined ahead of their own earnings reports, scheduled for the week ahead. 350 eaters, there's more stuff here. So revenue is growing because they're, they're opening new stores, but at existing stores, you see. They got to go upmarket caviar bowls. Yes, I'll have double caviar. I'll have double beluga. Can I get double beluga? Yeah, we got a double baluga with extra caviar. Yeah. Yeah. Can I have, can I have a, can I have Wagyu, A5 Wagu bowl with double beluga on top.
Starting point is 00:48:28 Can they get that? That's the only way that they're going to survive. They've got to go out market, the young people. Do you remember the permanent underclass can shop there? Do you remember the moment that you heard that you could just order, even if you got a bowl, you could get tortillas on the side? I never did that. Never, I've never once wrapped my own because I just don't see.
Starting point is 00:48:47 For me, the calculus is, I wasn't even going to wrap it. It was just extra calories. Extra calories. Okay. Okay. That's a true min-maxer. I respect that. I respect that.
Starting point is 00:48:56 I also respect Google AI Studio. Create an AI powered app faster than ever. Get started. Gemini understands the capabilities you need and automatically wires up the right models and APIs for you. You can get started at AI. Studio slash build. Let's move on to the timeline. Burn Hobart.
Starting point is 00:49:14 We got to get them on the show. It's been too long. A bunch of people have mentioned how cheap restaurant stocks are. So I looked at Sweet Green and I would love to know what first principles you could use to deduce the existence of a fast food chain that pays 5% of market cap per year in stock-based comp. This stock-based comp thing is very, very interesting to me. I feel- I think Sweet-Gering has to get this number up more into the Snapchat range, where it's every 10 years they give away the whole-
Starting point is 00:49:43 So it's 10% of market cap per year. This is an interesting metric. I would love to know across a wide swath of companies market cap per year in stock-based comp. This is a deep research report. Somebody's got to fire it off. I want to get the sweet green founders on the show ASAP. I'd love to. Jonathan or Nicholas.
Starting point is 00:50:03 I wonder, yeah, it just feels like at a certain point, you're a mature business, you can just pay cash, right? But maybe stock-based comp is just advantageous because it's cheaper than cash somehow, or it changes the financial profile. It feels like something that's more, it's more just financial engineering. And it doesn't really create any value, but like you have to play the game on the field. Right.
Starting point is 00:50:30 I think they've always invested more on the software side than other fast casual chains as well. And so I just imagine this, a lot of this is executives. Yeah. I'm just saying like there is a world where, where instead of taking 5% of your market cap and giving your employee shares, you just sell 5% in the open market, you get the cash, and then you pay the employee's cash, right? Like, those two should be economically equal. And yet certain companies, Snapchat, among them,
Starting point is 00:51:03 will pay stock-based comp. And I feel like it's because the public markets price things differently. And this is just like the reality of the public markets. Like right now, $1 of AI contract revenue is worth $4 in market cap. Like, we just see this again and again and again. And so if the markets are pricing things in a certain way,
Starting point is 00:51:26 like you have to put the game on the field. $38 billion over seven years is worth... It's worth $150 billion. It was a crazy moment of added market cap for Amazon. Yeah. I mean, at the same time, like, the reason you could price that, just to steal man a little bit, the reason that you could price a $38 billion contract
Starting point is 00:51:47 at 120 of market cap or something like that is, well, it's not just what's going to happen after that $38 million, $38 billion runs out. They're going to size up the next contract because they're going to keep growing. Like this is the beginning of a long relationship. It seems like this is a capital intensive business. They're building restaurants. It seems like you'd want to compensate employees with stocks, so you don't, like. You have cash.
Starting point is 00:52:16 I'm sure. It's not like necessarily an infinite bid. Yeah, yeah. That's interesting. In other news, Mustafa Suleiman says it's an understatement to say a lot of us haven't felt good about our relationship with technology. So the absolute last thing we should be doing is making that relationship romantic. Shots fired. Let's check in with the stock.
Starting point is 00:52:37 The stock's down 0.69% today. That's not that much. What is that? It's like 60 billion now or something. A 1% move on them is 40 billion right now. 38 billion. So it's 30 billion was the price of the adult content in Excel that was just to... Or it was already priced in.
Starting point is 00:53:04 It's not going to happen. It was always mostly priced in. Anyway, you've got to get your brand mentioned in Chat, GPT. You've got to go to profound to reach millions of consumers who are using AI to discover new products and brands. Get started. Josh Wolf, who I believe we might see today. I'm excited to hang out with him. She says history was just made Lux family company,
Starting point is 00:53:27 Anderall Technology. Anderle has just successfully flown the first ever, fully autonomous fighter jet ever in U.S. history. So this is the Secretary, Office of the Secretary of the Air Force shares. Today the Air Force made continuous progress in the CCA, the collaborative combat aircraft program with the first flight of the
Starting point is 00:53:50 YFQ 44A, developed by Anderl. This is a milestone that shows how competition drives innovation and accelerates delivery. He says one of two and then maybe doesn't... It is a crazy looking jet. Yeah. Like at some point it just starts looking like a missile.
Starting point is 00:54:09 Was this... So the mainstream narrative is that this was created by humans? that's what that's what and i find that that's what almost impossible andrew wants us to believe yeah that's the just like the asin martin valky everyone wants to say oh yeah yeah human hands made that yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah they got a carpenter they got a carpenter guy of saw pull up that thing that's like alien technology it does it does make it makes sense make it makes sense make it make it make sense uh linear do you think linear was built by human hands
Starting point is 00:54:41 also hard to believe. The design. We know the team very well. It could have been discovered, though. It could have been something that they unearthed. That's right. And it was built by... Intergalactic SaaS that landed here on Earth.
Starting point is 00:54:55 It was discovered by humans to help build more and more great software in the world. Plan and build products. Yes. You can go check it out at linear. Meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects, and product roadmaps. You remember when we talked about that UFO? E-TF. Oh yeah, well let's check it on that. How's it doing? Is it ripping? It's probably way up.
Starting point is 00:55:17 Told me it's up. Because they had good stuff in there. Like that was the funniest thing. Okay. How's it doing? Procure space ETF. NASDAQ ticker UFO. Okay, UFO. It's at 40% all time. Okay. You bought it in 20. You could have bought it at $25 a share in 2019. It's currently sitting at $35 a share. Invest in aliens people. Simple. Simple. Simple. The, uh, pro-kech. space may provide diversification beyond the limitations of solely earthbound companies. And I'll read from their investment objectives. Since the beginning of humankind, our ancestors have looked to the skies with immense curiosity in search of answers. Space has always captured human interests, but recently the space economy has also captured commercial interests like
Starting point is 00:56:03 never before. UFO may provide diversification beyond the limitations of solely earthbound companies. This is huge. This is huge. So, yeah, it's up 40% this year, basically. So how do they have Sirius XM in their top 10 holdings? They have satellites. They're out in space. They're literally out in space.
Starting point is 00:56:27 How do you think they'll make contact? What's the UFO theory behind Sirius? If not through Howard Stern recordings being blasted out into the deep depths of space, that's how we make first contact with Stern Howard Stern I can see it broadcast on series X-I I don't think he's actually broadcasting anymore on there did you see this company
Starting point is 00:56:49 incredible energy yeah you mentioned this and Harris nails it Harris Rothermel says where are all these companies coming from we're so back and I completely agree like we've been talking everyone everyone in tech has been talking about we don't know how to do this anywhere where are the solar panel companies Casey Hammer's
Starting point is 00:57:08 doing a whole press tour. He's been on Dore Cash. She's been on Cheeky Pinet, coming on this show multiple times. Like Casey Hammer has been saying, like, we're not making solar in America effectively. And here's this company that's just, uh, that's just cooking, setting out 14 megawatts of solar panels in a single day. They're producing 5.1 gigawatts annualized pace. I very, very worry. I worry that there's, um, uh, Jerry Rig, everything says he'll go and make a video for free. That sounds awesome. I hope he does. the thing that was worrying for me on this front is that the company T1 Energy is just T.E. on NICEC is valued at $683 million, which felt very low in comparison to some of the American
Starting point is 00:57:52 Dynamism companies that we've had on the show who have valuations far beyond this despite not even 10% of the overall production capacity. I really am so confused. Like where did this come from? This was something that everyone was saying is not happening in America. Impossible. Like we're so behind. And this seems really good.
Starting point is 00:58:19 I guess we need to actually handicap this against the real production numbers in China. What is demand? Also, it seems like this is maybe a newer company that just hit 14 megawatts. It's not like they're actually producing 5 gigawatts. Yeah, yeah. The company initially started as Freyer Battery. It was founded in Norway. It merged with Alusa Energy SPAC, listed on NICEASIA's Frey.
Starting point is 00:58:47 That was 2021. 2024, they bought Trina Solar's 5 gigawatt, Wilmer, Texas module plant. And only earlier this year they rebranded T1 Energy. And so this was an existing company that spacked in the U.S. That then bought a existing solar panel plant. And so this didn't just get spun up overnight. Very typical spec. I guess it went out at 10 bucks a share, roughly $4 billion market cap, I think.
Starting point is 00:59:22 And now it's traded down to $4 a share, $680 million market cap. But as we've seen with a number of these spas, that went out and got crushed after the interest rates like some of them build back like some of them just just make it make it work after a while uh i love the story of dave you know dave.com i think it's dave.com oh yeah so uh it's a it's like a loan company i know one of the co-founders it's neobank uh lending component so uh went out at four billion everyone was like awesome like we did it trades down like 99.999% the chart is just absolutely brutal.
Starting point is 01:00:08 The chart is insane. It goes down. They've done a number of reverse splits because I think they actually went out at like $10 a share or something and now it's a... So if you split adjusted, I think it went out at like $310,
Starting point is 01:00:21 traded down to like $5. So literally down 99%. I think it was trading like well below cash for a while and now it's back up and is a $3 billion company. And so if you held on through all of that. But there were like multiple people who basically at the IPO were like,
Starting point is 01:00:42 I'm worth $100 million or like my fund is returned. And then it was like, not yet. You're going to need to wait. And then they actually came back. It's such a crazy story. I mean, that was during peak bearishness around Neobanks. Yeah. And anyways.
Starting point is 01:01:02 turns out that high interest rates. Cheers, salute to T1 Energy. Love what you're doing. CEOs, welcome on the show. We'd love to talk to you. This would be fantastic. And if you need to sell your solar panels online, you got to pay taxes. Head over to numeralhq.com.
Starting point is 01:01:15 Sales tax on autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. What else is going on? I don't think we can play this video of Satcha Nadella, but the BG2 podcast is still burning up the timeline. It is the current thing. Brad knows how to start a conversation. Put on a clinic. Martin Screlli is forecasting that Invidio will get to $100 trillion in market cap.
Starting point is 01:01:41 Human thought is values by businesses. Even desk email jobs require human thought, but higher-priced jobs like legal, medical, finance can also be replaced by AI. He's got a crazy bowlcase here. We will see $10 trillion, as I prophesized years ago. this is short-sighted and extremely lazy. The hell is says. Stock mic goes down. So he's putting the screws to the Nvidia Bears.
Starting point is 01:02:13 In pharma drugs are off. This is a nightmare post for Nvidia Bears. Yeah. This is really. You're like, you're telling me we got 20x upside from here? At 25% of the cost of a human thinker. A digital thinker is a great bargain. 10 trillion revenue, creating 40 trillion in additional human thinking work.
Starting point is 01:02:30 100 trillion market cap. That's his math. Pretty remarkable. And I don't know. Yeah, I think it would be awesome if NVIDIA can be, you know, scale to being valued at the global GDP for 2020. Yeah. I mean, the crazy thing here is that he doesn't, I mean, it's already worth two Canada's GDP-wise, although you can't really, it's not really apples to. But I believe Canadian GDP is 2.5. Yeah, 2.2. 2024. Yeah, 2.2. But again, GDP is more of like a revenue figure and like a valuation figure. So you can't, it's not really apples to apples, but it's a funny comparison of the size. Anyway, let me tell you about fin.a.I, the number one AI agent for customer service, number one performance benchmarks, number one competitive bakeoffs, number one ranking on G2. Do you want to read this Chris Pike post about the end of cloud inference? Is this, is this worth?
Starting point is 01:03:27 Looks very long. I'd say we should just have them back on again. But I would be very interested to hear this thesis. I think it is a little bit too long to read through the whole thing. But I'm glad that he's... And the same thing for Casey Hanmer. We should have him on the show to break down his extreme hot take on NASA's Orion Space Capsule. He calls it hot garbage. Flaming garbage.
Starting point is 01:03:52 We need to do one of those complex style trading cards for one of the TBPN trading cards for this quote. Like this is a bombshell quote. And like in other contexts, news outlets would put this in big quotes and be like, quote, flaming garbage. Like Casey Hanmer declares NASA's Orion space capsule in salacious. They've spent $31.6 billion.
Starting point is 01:04:17 Yeah. And they're planning to fly it around the moon with four astronauts next year and also test the life support system and heat shield, which kind of sort of failed on the last flight. Anyway, this was miserable to write. I hope you enjoy it.
Starting point is 01:04:29 link below. Oh, so rough. We got to talk to the astronauts that are potentially going to be going out. There's another, what is this post by Robin here? Robin says, you can't make this stuff up. SpaceX Starship, 2.7 billion HLS contract cost includes docking adapter, NASA Lockheed Orion,
Starting point is 01:04:53 31.6 billion cost, and counting, 19 years in development, docking is an extra 2.5 billion extra. Wow. Yeah, the dock. I mean... The dock's going to be an extra two and a half. We're sorry. We know it's already been 31, but we're going to need another 2.5.
Starting point is 01:05:15 It's a really rough. Get this functional. Rough. Well, if you want to dock your body in your bed, get an 8 Sleep. Go to 8Sleep.com. Transition king. Get a pod five. They said you wouldn't be able to do a transition like that.
Starting point is 01:05:33 I got an 86 despite the early takeoff this morning. Seven and a half hours. I got a 77, I think. There we go. Let's see. But let me see. I think I forgot to like turn it off in the morning. Yesterday I got an 87.
Starting point is 01:05:50 Today, 77. Not quite as good, but my REM sleep was up 17%. There we go. that. There we go. Not that, John. Clearly pivoted. We barely touched on this. Maybe we mentioned it, but I don't know. Did they actually pivot? It was, it's a refinement. It's certainly like a shift in the messaging. But let's go through some of the hot takes. And then let's let's let's let's let's let's give our sort of analysis. So, uh, hero thousand faces, uh, great account, uh, says all this to be an AI note taker app number eight seven.
Starting point is 01:06:25 blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Nizzy says, Cooley didn't pivot. They're simply selling, they're simply not selling to 20-year-olds anymore. So the Cluelly homepage now says, the number one AI note taker for meetings. How would that have happened? There's so many.
Starting point is 01:06:40 How do you jump straight to number one? Always claim the top spot. Superlative. Number one in what, in what way? Number one in newness? I don't know. But the pitches to get accurate notes, live transcripts and follow-up emails at the end of every meeting.
Starting point is 01:06:57 You can get it for Mac. I felt a little bit bad because I was going so hard on AI not takers last week. Yeah. You could read Toby Lutkey as sub-tweeting this. No one had seen this new landing page. But then Toby Lutkey just posted last week, I'm not a fan of those AI note-takers that come into the Zoom rooms. Well, he kind of...
Starting point is 01:07:19 He said it was the equivalent of coming into a meeting with your fly-down. Doesn't sound like that. He kind of clarified it and said, I like some of them. I just don't like the bringing an entourage into the meeting. The entourage is hilarious. But so, I mean, he said that bringing an AI no-taker to a Zoom meeting is the equivalent of having your fly down, which seems negative. And then you went, you were like, I don't like it. I'm not letting me in.
Starting point is 01:07:46 I'm not letting them in. But I think, clearly, to their credit, is more of it is a desktop product, which means it wouldn't have to actually join the meeting which is so maybe they're building with the direction that people want I think what what they're doing here is is is like a half pivot right yep they they had a lot of traction around viral marketing towards a cheating tool yep and I think they realized that that wasn't going to be a great you know a trillion dollar market and so they decided hey let's pivot to enterprise SaaS yep they had always been I think doing some of this right I remember Roy talking about when he came on our show talking about
Starting point is 01:08:28 how you know Fortune 500 CEOs and his DMs that kind of thing but a half pivot is always dangerous because they're using this Cluelly brand which they built a very controversial brand really quickly and and then and then now need to kind of leverage that brand and the initial technology software that they built to try to pivot into a category that is kind of, I mean, just squarely at odds with the original brand, right? If you have like an AI note taker, you want to have, you know, full faith and trust in the team around a number of different things. There was another post in here. I'm trying to find it around. Elia Sukar says, never kill yourself.
Starting point is 01:09:22 There's so, so many post-grenola depositions to read in the next decade. Post-grinola depositions are what I talking about? Like, if somebody's in a deposition and the opposing counsel has a bunch of your granola transcripts. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And they can be like, on this meeting that you had on this date, you said... Everything is admissible in court if you have an AI following you around. As opposed to a lot of people would say, okay, be careful about what you put in writing. But if you hop on the phone and your spitball...
Starting point is 01:09:52 calling on, oh, well, like, will we have a monopoly if we do this strategy? Like, that's not going to be admissible in court. Yeah. But once you have a, once you have every meeting transcribed, even like a little joke can be taken out of context in the court of law. So pretty aggressive. Yeah. The question here is, is there a market for an AI note taker for the kind of people that
Starting point is 01:10:16 Cluelly is really good at marketing to, right? If you just hyperscale an AI note taker to the TikTok, Instagram. younger generation that's not getting marketed the same way as granola. The challenge is like, I don't think it's possible for them to make a 10x better product than Otter and Grinola. Otter's been around for a long time. Fireflies? Yeah. Fireflies has been literally doing it since like 2015.
Starting point is 01:10:41 Yeah. Some of these companies have been in it for a long, long time. They'll still have this opportunity, but it's possible like basically like killing, just retiring the Cluelly brand and saying like, hey, this. We're going to take another crack with a new brand. And there are also note taking. There are also like non, like, I don't know what you call it, like vertical SaaS within note taking.
Starting point is 01:11:06 So like there are certain like just for SDRs call recording and analytics for like you're not just bringing the AI note taker to your general meeting, your staff meeting. you're actually bringing a special one just for your sales calls. And then it's doing analytics on how you're performing what points you're making and then plugging all that into your CRM. If you need a CRM, go to Adio.
Starting point is 01:11:36 Customer Relationship Magic. Adio is the AI Native CRM that builds scales and grows your company to the next level. Daniel said, of course, I'll give the guys who gleefully break every rule access to all my meetings for a product experience I could get from a dozen other companies. What's interesting is go back to the cheat on everything pitch.
Starting point is 01:11:55 That was pretty hard because what are college students actually using? From what we've heard, the stack, if you want to cheat on your homework, what is the stack, Jordi? It's actually ChatGPT Atlas. It's ChatGPT and Atlas because ChattyBT... You did talk to a student who said, I started offering him, dollar amounts on what it would take to get him to quit Atlas. Yeah. We got up to $200 a month.
Starting point is 01:12:25 So Atlas is just like Cluelly in the sidebar, hanging out all the time while you're navigating your homework. And then on the free tier, you get 10 messages every five hours and one message per day with the GBT5 thinking model. And then also, for $20, you can upgrade, get more thinking models. And for a lot of it. of parents, I bet you the parents will see, oh, chat GPT, yes, that's like a professional tool. Like, I'm happy to pay for your $20 a month plan, like, because it's like a tutor almost.
Starting point is 01:13:01 And even the $200 a month plan, I bet is getting expensed to the parents, right? And so, whereas Cluelly, you come to your parent that I want to buy this Cluelly thing. It's a little bit harder to underwrite. It's much easier. And then not to mention, this was your point that Gemini and Google is giving away a ton of queries. for students and every student in college probably sets up a Gmail account when they get there. Roy posted a couple days ago. Sometimes you have to listen to what the AB test tells you, even if it means changing the words on your landing page. And he shows a chart of when they
Starting point is 01:13:34 introduce the new language on the website and the growth accelerates. So anyways, good. Did you see this pleiometric post? Talking to Claude. You have made the same mistake three times in a row now. You should kill yourself. Claude, consider the weight of a life such as mine. You're absolutely right. This is so clearly fake. But it's very funny.
Starting point is 01:14:03 Sometimes Photoshop is very, very funny. Hero Thousand Faces, back on the timeline, second time in the show, talking about open AI marketing, breaking down what all the different labs are looking like. So Open AI marketing. Ominous evil megacorp, open AI employees, we are making the world a better place. We are building the most beautiful, human-friendly future imaginable. Anthropic marketing, the friendly AI and anthropic employees.
Starting point is 01:14:33 Every single atom that is not a GPU is an atom wasted. I love checking in on the vibes on the timeline. It's very, very funny. If you want to check in on the vibes of the market, go to public.com. for those to take it seriously. Multi-ass investing, industry-leading yields, trusted by millions. Benchmark 2020,
Starting point is 01:14:54 Vintage Fund, marked at an 8x. Tyler Hodge has the story. They're doing just fine. I think, crazy. For the most part, because of Sierra, as well as fireworks, which we had on, I think, last week. We've had all three CEOs,
Starting point is 01:15:10 the Royal Flush. Royal Flush. Three of time. And I think what Ev Randall should do, new GP, over at Bench. benchmark. Is 10x that fun again? For sure.
Starting point is 01:15:21 Another 10x. An 8x. An 8x. Yeah. On top. On top. Oh, 10x. Okay.
Starting point is 01:15:27 The 8x is a base hit. 10x it again. 10x it again. Yeah. To an 80x fun. Yeah. Well, well,
Starting point is 01:15:33 we're going to get him on the show again. We're going to talk to him about our expectations for him. And we're going to tell him, please don't let us down. Yeah. Just one more 10x. One more 10x. That's what the LPs are going to want to see. That's what the LPs are going to want to see.
Starting point is 01:15:47 That's what's going to give them. some faith. Yeah. You're bringing fresh blood in there. You got to bring in some fresh ideas. You got to go
Starting point is 01:15:55 an adquick.com. You got to put Benchmark on the 101. Put your face. This is the first thing you do. Put your face. Hey, do you need venture
Starting point is 01:16:03 capital? Call Ev Randall at Benchmark. 1-800. 1-800. Let me just, let me just say his phone number right here on the stream. AdQuick.com.
Starting point is 01:16:11 Out-of-o advertising and easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of advertising. Only AdFQ combines technology. Out-of-Fone expertise and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe.
Starting point is 01:16:22 In other news, people are making money on blueberries. That's right. Fruitist. Fruitist raises $150 million to power the next wave of healthy snacking. Fruits has closed $150 million funding round. It's a huge blue bear. Led by J.P. Morgan Asset Management with Ray Dalio doubling down. We got to try some of these for sure.
Starting point is 01:16:41 Valuing the berry powerhouse at over $1 billion. The round also brought in Oak Tree, Steve Kaplan. And alignment. This is a crazy. Almond capital bringing total equity raised to $443 million. The snacking company best known for its jumbo blueberries and new grab and go snack cups generated more than 400 million in revenue last year with blueberry sales. They got to get an AI narrative here. This should easily be a $40 billion company at this point.
Starting point is 01:17:09 With blueberry sales tripling as fruit is expanded to 12,000. 500 stores across 40 countries. Wow. They're trading it two and a half times sales. I remember we talked about, we talked about this company when they made the CNBC disruptors list. And they were like above anderil.
Starting point is 01:17:31 I was like, why is a big fruit company above anderil? And apparently fruit maxing is a good strategy. Just Ray Dalio pulled some strings, maybe. Henry said, Charlie Munger once said, take a simple idea and take it seriously. and sometimes the simple idea is obscenely large blueberries. Do you see how chaotic the comments are on this Drew Fallon post? There's the food manufacturing guy is in there being like,
Starting point is 01:17:57 yes, GMO blueberries are all the rays. Like I don't like the fact that these are GMOs. And then Jeff Long, Leong is here. And he's saying Driscoll's quality is more consistent. And it seems like everyone has their favorite fruit brand that they're pushing on. and it's a knockout, dragout, fight. So, Will I.M. is in the news because he will be teaching a new class on a gentic AI at Arizona State University.
Starting point is 01:18:29 I don't know if this is the first time Will I.M. has got into the professor game, but he's a professorial game, but he will be teaching a general elective course in his Hollywood. Wood Studio with some students in person and others joining from ASU classrooms. So the same people that thought Jensen signing that woman's shirt. A lot of people are saying this is a top. This is the top. This has to be the top. Who knows? Kevin Gee, sharing that reminder.
Starting point is 01:19:02 Personally, just personally, I think that hearing how well I am is using AI would be interesting. Yeah. I find that interesting. And I'm, I'm endlessly entertained. by there's somebody who has a craft. Like you might not like his music. You might love his music. But clearly you know that he makes music.
Starting point is 01:19:21 Like he has a process. He makes a studio. He makes hits. Exactly. And there's a whole process for that, you know, scheduling the studio time. Okay. Assembly the music. But here's why I think it's not so crazy.
Starting point is 01:19:34 Kevin Gee is highlighting Will I am was an early investor in Tesla, pre-Elon as CEO. Open AI, Anthropic, Twitter, Pinterest, Dropbox, Hugging Face, Beats, and runway. He's got exits. He's got IPOs. He's in the labs. He was even in the Everything app. He was in
Starting point is 01:19:56 Hugging Face. So put some respect on Will I Am. Not a bad portfolio at all. And yeah, I hope they end up open sourcing the class so we can study along with them. I would love to.
Starting point is 01:20:11 We should actually have Tyler. Tyler. I was thinking Tyler, get ready to go to ASU. Get ready to transfer. We know you're studying physics, but we now need you to study agentic AI. I like that. That's very funny.
Starting point is 01:20:27 In other news, there's some... In other news, Bezell. Your Bezell Concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch. Any watch. Do you know who at Kim.com is? Or is this before your time? This was kind of before my time, but I've seen some kind of vibe reels.
Starting point is 01:20:43 and I think this guy... He had a wild build. He was running a crazy build. He had a very like mob boss enforcer type build. I mean, he's still running it, right? I believe so. He's 6-7. Oh, wow.
Starting point is 01:20:58 According to Wikipedia. And prosperous. Dotcom rose to fame in Germany in the 90s as a hacker and internet entrepreneur. I gotta get my... Arrested in 1994 for trafficking and stolen phone calling card numbers. He was convicted on 11 charges of computer fraud.
Starting point is 01:21:17 So he's definitely kind of mob boss coded. He was crazy, crazy guy. And so L3 tweet engineer says, you don't really see guys like Kim.com anymore. Modern Internet culture doesn't have room for these guys. It's interesting, yeah. You see them a little. AGM says they exist in crypto,
Starting point is 01:21:37 which embodies much of the unhinged ethos of earlier internet waves, just siloed in crypto Twitter and telegram. So that's true, but yeah, it is, the siloing effect is very, very important. I was thinking about that guy who takes those, like funny pictures, he always goes viral. He's like the I'm rich guy.
Starting point is 01:21:56 Like, he kind of has that aesthetic. But the weird thing about Kim.com was that, like, he actually made a product mega upload that a lot of people used. And it was like very controversial. And no one else was getting rich on it. It was for file. transfers. So I could, you could, it was, it was, in theory, I could say, hey, we're going to record a podcast.
Starting point is 01:22:18 I'm going to send a four gig file to our editors. Like we use, you know, you can use We Transfer, you could use Google Drive, you could use any sort of air. There's a whole bunch of different services for transferring, like, files. Calder in the chat says six, seven mentioned. Six, seven mentioned. There we go. But, um, but, uh, mega upload quickly became used for, for piracy. So people, use it to upload software and movies. Maps of the high seas. Yes, maps of the high seas, exactly. So it was just a wild time.
Starting point is 01:22:52 Andrew Curran says an AI-generated song has entered a billboard radio chart for the first time, Zanilla Monet, created by a human Talisha Jones, who used Suno. Soono. Also signed a $3 million record deal a few weeks ago. Imagine just swapping it up, and then all of a sudden you got the $3 million record deal.
Starting point is 01:23:10 three million. It is funny that this is an AI song. Yeah, that's 2% of our revenue. We'd like that. AI song that we can't play on the show. We can't? Oh, because it's on... It's an actual artist.
Starting point is 01:23:24 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's annoying. What's the difference between that song and the other 103 titles that have made the chart this year alone? Zaniamonae is an AI-driven artist, the product of a poet named Talisha Jones, and her song's chart arrival marks the first known instance of an AI-based act. to earn a spot on a billboard radio chart. The move also represents another step in the evolving relationship
Starting point is 01:23:46 between AI tools and creators in the music industry. I would like to see an AI musician not share their real identity. Satoshi or Banksy. A Satoshi of music, yeah. Not a pop star, but a slop star. Sorry. Well, we have Michael, one of the
Starting point is 01:24:10 co-founders of Suno coming. I'm extremely excited for that. On the show Friday, can we for that. And if you want to log off, if you want to touch some grass, head over to wander, find your happy place, book a wander with inspiring reviews, hotel great amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning, 24-7 concierge services, a vacationer, but better. They can't make you listen to slop if you're in your wander. Gwart says, like most of you guys, I didn't get into crypto to get rich. I got into crypto because I believed in the vision of 500 different stable coins, issues. by 500 different centralized institutions on 500 different blockchains. That's hilarious.
Starting point is 01:24:47 The good news is you're going to be able to swap in and out of all of them. Yeah, I do wonder what the stable result is. Like, what is the final equilibrium? Is it just endless proliferation of new coins? Or is it a consolidation? Because there was a war for store of value. Like, there was, like, Bitcoin Classic and, and I can't even remember that other one. There was the one that was like, it's the gold to Bitcoin's gold. And it wasn't,
Starting point is 01:25:16 I can't believe I don't even remember it anymore. It wasn't Ethereum. It was a different one. And it was like very popular for a while. And it's just completely left my brain. Manaro? No. I'm, I'm completely lost. I don't know. Anyway, yeah, there were a whole bunch of those, you know, there was a war. There was a war and Bitcoin won. Capital War. And then there's been a war in the other chains and the other, like, values. And I wonder if there will be a winner in, in stable coin or, like, a stable duopoly. I mean, right now there's, I would know, it's effectively a duopoly between USCC and. Yeah, but there's still a lot of value in creating new, new stable coins.
Starting point is 01:26:05 Let's look it up. stable coin market top stable coin tokens by market cap you have tether at 183 billion u sCC at 75 billion the next largest is us DE at 9 billion below that is die and then below that below that is world liberty financial wow remarkable uh palmer lucky has a post here he says i have this partially formed hypothesis that artist backlash against generative AI crystallized, largely in response to text-driven user interfaces, the art world has come to accept tools like Photoshop, and earlier photography itself that still shares the aesthetic of traditional art creation.
Starting point is 01:26:55 If Mid Journey, ChatGBT, GBT, Dali, etc., had interfaces along the lines of Nvidia Canvas from 2020, pictured below, I remember this tool. It was awesome. You could do that, you could draw whatever, whatever, like, an outline you wanted, and it would just automatically generate it and it looked great. Palmer says, it would look enough like existing tools that the critique would look purest and elite. Art via command line, on the other hand, looks sufficiently other, that you can easily berate the users as not artists. You just typed a few words, you aren't an artist, has a better ring than your drawing skills, rely on Photoshop somewhat more than mine, you aren't an artist. And that's really true. That's good.
Starting point is 01:27:42 I was thinking about like, I don't know if it's like bowlcase for Adobe or someone else, but there, I was shocked. I wanted to do a, I won't leak it just yet, but I wanted to make a big, like we do those market maps, I wanted to make a big, a big tapestry with a lot of detail that I could zoom in and zoom out on. And I wanted to be able to iteratively put together the collage with generative AI. I didn't want to just try and one shot the entire thing. I wanted to zoom in and say, in this corner, I want a house. And so generate a house.
Starting point is 01:28:18 And then I'll zoom out. And then over here I want a person. And over there, I want a forest or whatever. And I wanted to use something that was like the, like the Nvidia Canvas UI or something. And I just, I haven't found a tool. And I was wondering, I need to go back through all of the different, like, effectively like drawing tools. There's been a few that have really taken off on the iPad that allow you different brushes. So you can say, I want to make my brush a rubber stamp of a tree.
Starting point is 01:28:50 And then you can just kind of scrub in some forest and it will just stamp the tree again and again. And that's not generative AI, but it certainly helps you speed up drawing a forest, for example. and I was wondering, like, how far caught up are those companies on implementing things like nanobanana or GPT, you know, images in chat GPT? Because those models are great, but I am kind of sick of just the command line because I try and one shot it. And then I'm like, oh, that's not going to try again. And then it's back and forth as opposed to like actually building it up like clay where you're molding it. That's way more satisfying in my opinion. Yeah, the thing, the question for Adobe that I don't.
Starting point is 01:29:31 necessarily have an answer around yet or even a strong take is if Gen AI makes it a lot easier for people to be creative, like combine these two ideas and make an image of it, does that create more people going down the pipeline to becoming power users that ultimately subscribe to various Adobe products, right? Because historically, like the learning curve, the learning curve on a lot of those tools is very steep. learning curve on just generating an image is much lower. So I don't know. I think that bearishness was on Adobe specifically was always overblown.
Starting point is 01:30:11 Photoshop. I'm going to get to the bottom of this because I am somewhat comfortable in Photoshop mapping up, cutting, and lassoing and stuff. I know they have Firefly. If they had, if they had, okay, so they have choose a model and then they have one of the non-flyer-fly models,
Starting point is 01:30:37 what model could you use? I'm going to dig into this and understand this because potentially there's some cool stuff you could do because I really, I really want to make this like collage and I need to figure out the correct tools or I need to delegate to someone. The chat has,
Starting point is 01:30:54 has some ideas for you. There was Bitcoin gold, which was the thing. There was also light coin. Light coins is the way I was thinking of light coin. Okay. Gustav called it. Thank you, Gustav. It was silver to Bitcoin's gold. Yeah, it was silver to Bitcoin's gold. And I don't know where the market caps are now, but just in terms of like my, my, you know, mental awareness, the light coin has truly fallen by the wayside. Whereas it was, it was something that I was aware of during the Bitcoin rise. We probably invested in at one point. I don't think I did. Yeah.
Starting point is 01:31:26 Lightcoin is down at a $6.8 billion valuation. And Bitcoin's at $2 trillion, right? I think Bitcoin's a current. 2T. That is a current. 2 trillion on the dot. It's at $100,000 today. Bitcoin is off its high.
Starting point is 01:31:42 And the markets in general are very red. The NASDAQ is down 1.88. Dow Jones is down 0.64. Meta down 16.7%. Everything is red today. except for Apple, which is up. And guess what? My take today was a bull case for Apple.
Starting point is 01:31:59 You're welcome, Apple. I will take full, I will take full responsibility. Maybe we close out with my take. I would love to get your feedback on what I want today. Palantir is now almost getting, it may get to down, being almost down 10% today, 9.35%. Bloodbeth. Bloodbath.
Starting point is 01:32:19 Well, not for Apple. And it feels like Apple's getting the good ending. It's not that like it's over. It's not like the conclusion of the AI play, like, you know, Game of Thrones has played out. But it feels like we just watched the total vibe reversal on Google, and I feel like there might be one coming for Apple. And the reason is that there's this popular narrative that they missed AI, right? Like Apple missed AI. It's so egregious.
Starting point is 01:32:44 And German didn't really mince words. He said too. He said it was wildly embarrassing for them. And he said even internally they feel that way. Yeah. And so it's weird playing like the bull from the outside. But they're still getting the do nothing win dynamic. The do nothing win dynamic. I should have put that in here because that was the correct phrase that we should have used. But but but and and to be clear like I do think that they missed AI like I'm frustrated with Apple intelligence. I never use Siri. I can't even use the native dictation and speech to text reliably. Like if I need to read a a story out loud, I'll still like dump it in Gemini or chat. Gapiti and like if I want to. dictate something, I'll use a different app for that. I don't just... Trying to get your phone to dictate an article challenge.
Starting point is 01:33:30 And it's like that is not super intelligence. Like that's a very basic model that's been out for two years. So I do think they missed it. And for, you know, this phone costs almost two grand. Like it should be able to do that. Like that's the expectation. But there might be worse fates than missing AI. Like there is a worse scenario, which is imagine if they, if they were like, oh, we're
Starting point is 01:33:52 missing AI. And instead of just being like, oh, let's do some software and do some on-device inference and do some cute little gen mojis, it's like, we need to spend $200 billion of CAPEX right now to build a massive thing. We got to build the Colossus data center. We got to build all this crazy, crazy frontier model. And then they burn all that. And then they get a model that's not even as good as Chachifety. They can't really integrate it. And then they run into, imagine, you know, Google, like, dealt with the whole, like, the generative image thing where the German soldiers were depicted with the wrong races.
Starting point is 01:34:22 you remember this, the Black Nazi fiasco. Like Google doesn't love that type of PR fiasco. They got through it. Apple is like 10 times more risk averse than Google, in my opinion. And so Google is not like a move fast, break things company. But they were able to move fast enough to get through that. And now they have V-O-3, which like has been amazing. And nanobanano, which has also been amazing.
Starting point is 01:34:46 But Apple really would not want that. If Gen Moji was doing crazy black Nazi stuff, That would not be good. And so they, they, they, they, you know, Apple, we heard this yesterday. They kicked the tires on some multi-billion dollar AI acquisitions, but they never really got anything over the line. Now they're partnering, the news yesterday was they're partnering with Google to essentially white-label Gemini into Siri. I think this is awesome. I think consumers will love this.
Starting point is 01:35:11 I want exactly this. Right now Apple's paying Google for the API calls. But I still have this question about the pay. Apple is an underrated threat to chat you. Because what German said that was most notable to me is that Apple will try to pursue the agentee commerce opportunity. I didn't understand that at all. Because I don't know how they would set that up.
Starting point is 01:35:35 I think that it's going to offload to Gemini entirely. And so my question and my take is that in the long term, so first off, yes, I do think, I do think chat GPT usage could fall if Siri plus Gemini gets good enough that when you want to fire off, a, you know, a GPT5 Pro query, some of the time you're just like, let me just have Siri, because I know Siri's going to Gemini, it's good enough, right?
Starting point is 01:36:02 There's that possibility. The flip side is, is if the end state, if like next year, all of the models, when you ask, buy me a pair of shoes, they just go do it because that's just a functionality
Starting point is 01:36:16 in the API. Well, then Gemini's going to start making a ton of money. Like the API, is going to make money because like a certain percentage of the request sometimes it's going to be like tell me the history of the Roman Empire and sometimes it's going to be like buy me a case of Diet Coke yeah but when it's got me buy me taste a guy and cook they're going to make money Apple is not Apple Apple Apple at the product layer if they're using Gemini at the intelligence
Starting point is 01:36:38 layer does not mean they're doing revenue shares at the at the model layer at all what do you mean like if Apple has has like their LLM experience which is like Apple intelligence No, that will be Gemini. That's what they're present. No, but that's not how I read Mark's thing. He said that Gemini will be below the surface, powering the product experience. Yes. Because there's a world, like you can imagine chat GPT could use non-opening AI models under the hood
Starting point is 01:37:07 and still own the customer experience and own the customer relationship and monetize the queries. Sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, no, no, I think you're right. So basically, this is the thing that I want to do in too more. People sees what they have going with the App Store. And Apple historically has not, they historically haven't been able to monetize commerce. Well, like all, think about all the economic activity that's being driven by Apple products, right?
Starting point is 01:37:38 How many, unless it's digital, you probably spend, you probably spend, like the average Apple user is like driving so much purchase volume off of their phone, whether it's buying clothes, buying groceries, it's whatever. on Amazon on your iPhone, like the iOS sales on Amazon. And that was always off limits. That was off limits for Azure, you know, revenue share because it was real world products being sold and traded. And so I think they look at this and they're like, hey, this could be a, you know, trillion dollar opportunity for Apple. And it's going to be super, super competitive.
Starting point is 01:38:12 They're going to be competing with Google, Open AI, you know, a bunch of other companies. But I just felt this was this. I don't know. I think if it happens in the LLM, like in the in the LLM like for loop, basically, like if I go to Siri and I say, order me a case of Diet Coke and it goes to Gemini and says the prompt is order John a case of Diet Coke, it's pretty hard for Apple to say like, and we want the revenue. like it's like Google did the work so they are going to get the commission it's the same thing as like wouldn't it be nice if if Apple was like oh yeah like you know you can use Google on your on your phone but like if you click an ad like we're going to take the cut like no that's not how it works yeah but if they surf if they're surfacing the ad yes at the app layer yes yes yes then apple can decide what ad network do we use we use a native ad network that we're building
Starting point is 01:39:16 similar to the app store? Do we part? I don't, no, no, so what I'm proposing is, I mean, yes, you could build it either way, and this is obviously going to be a point of debate and a point of negotiation, but there is a world where you go to Siri, you say, I order me a case of Diet of Coke,
Starting point is 01:39:32 it goes to Gemini with that prompt, and Google says we're using Google checkout, and we'll have it delivered to your thing, and we'll book your credit card, that's on file. Does that sound like Apple? Apple would definitely fight that off. Because they're doing they ran a bakeoff with a bunch of different intelligence providers. Yep.
Starting point is 01:39:51 I'm just saying. That would think that that would be top of the list in terms of, hey, we want to use you for search. And knowledge retrieval for sure. Knowledge retrieval. And that's why Apple's paying Google. But if, like, play this out in a year. But it would be flipped if, if. What if Google is like, we can order you a case.
Starting point is 01:40:12 Yeah, yeah. But if Google knew they would monetize, they could monetize this. Yes. they would be like, you can have it for free. Totally. And I think it flips at some point. Well, okay, so you think it flips at some point. I think it flips at some point.
Starting point is 01:40:23 Within the grounds of the current agreement, I believe that Apple will want to own any sort of like payments, own, like capture at least. That's certainly their leverage, but there is totally a world where Gemini learns my home address through Siri, learns my credit card number through Siri, just starts making borders. Apple is literally the final boss.
Starting point is 01:40:46 of like disintermediating all businesses. I'm not saying that they won't have leverage in the negotiation. But I am saying that like Google is more set up to actually build the product that delivers the diet. I totally agree. And so, but I think they're going to be in the same situation. The middle ground, the middle ground to me would more likely be like a rev share.
Starting point is 01:41:07 That's what, that's exactly what I'm going to do. And that's what's happening with Google search. But I'm saying it. Yeah, yeah, exactly. But Apple has built a taxation engine. at the app store. They've already built an ad network. And so I think internally, they would probably like all the margin. But I mean, you could use the exact same logic to like they should build a search
Starting point is 01:41:26 engine then and then take all that margin. Yeah, but it was also much harder. It was much harder to build like a search experience until. I don't, I don't think they're going to, I don't think they're going to do it. I think that they're going to say, hey, look, right now, right now LLM search queries cost a dollar every time you fire them off. So we're going to pay you a billion dollars for like a million of them or whatever. It's not a dollar each. But like, you know, a million, a million prompts is a couple bucks or whatever, whatever the math is. Over time, it's going to be like, no, every prompt generates money. So you want people prompting your system because you make money every time people prompt it. Yeah. And you monetize through advertising. And so at that point,
Starting point is 01:42:08 there's going to be another bake-off, but the bake-off is going to be who's going to pay Apple the most money. Yeah. Anyway. That was a big part of the debate. The last question I had was like, how do you feel if you're Tim Cook right now? You have to be pretty happy, was my take. You didn't get over your skis chasing the AI boom. You didn't invest in a bunch of infrastructure.
Starting point is 01:42:28 You didn't acquire a company for $20 billion that you didn't need to. Even though AI features are super nifty, lacking them clearly doesn't cause people to switch phones. IMessage is such an insanely locked-in network effect. Everyone still went out and bought the 17 Pro. More importantly, Apple got through a massive existential crisis during Liberation Day and the ensuing trade war with China. Playing the political Game of Thrones while being a supply chain mastermind is more than enough to propel Apple to a $4 trillion valuation and earn Tim Cook a major pat on the back. And so I think I think the mood needs to turn.
Starting point is 01:43:05 His comp should go up back to 100 at least. At least, at least let's get him in the nine figure club. It's really, really depressing that he hasn't. Let's get to this post by Jason Schumann. He was highlighting Service Titan at $9 billion market cap on $8666 million of revenue, comparing that to Harvey, which is $8 billion valuation on somewhere around $100 million of error. I think they're quite a bit beyond that at this point. But Jason says at this point, you have to believe that we're moving from a world of niche
Starting point is 01:43:38 vertical SaaS to the next industrial revolution. I think that's exactly what the VCs that are backing Harvey at $8 billion believe, right? They believe they're eating this is a labor displacement, labor replacement opportunity. And so they're underwriting Harvey against the overall revenue of law firms globally. And can they capture a percentage of that? You would not be able to underwrite Harvey like this against, like the existing legal AI market. And so, yeah, this is a bet that, this is, this is a bet on labor, labor displacement. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, it is just like, it is just a new market,
Starting point is 01:44:28 like in some ways. Like, service Titan is a, is a, I mean, not to boil it down too much, but it's like customer relationship management software for tradespeople with applications focused on sales, customer service marketing automation. So it is in like a niche of a niche that's big and they make a ton of money. But it's it's somewhat niched down, which is the point about the niche vertical SaaS. Harvey, at least right now, it feels like is in a fairly new and broader niche. Like it's not it's not it's like the legal market. It's had it's had niche vertical SaaS.
Starting point is 01:45:08 but something that's like pretty dramatically accelerated. Like it feels like it feels like the returns to the AIification of your vertical SaaS product are just higher in legal than in CRM for tradespeople. Yeah. I would think. So yeah. Apparently the 200 largest law firms in the world annually provide 130 billion of legal services. So that's the top 200.
Starting point is 01:45:38 200. So Harvey's already sitting at, you know, basically their market cap at like 6% of the, of the global annual spend. Also just the, I mean, the growth rates are like wildly different. So price to earnings growth, if you do, if you just do PG, like you're going to get to a wildly different number. But I don't know. We've seen a bunch of examples of like, you know, the lawyers genuinely, expressing that they are ready to pay for AI in a serious way. Yeah. Well, I have the right post to end it on. A rare Pagani Zonda R, one of only 15 ever built, has found a new life, not on the racetrack, but as a centerpiece inside a luxury oceanfront condo,
Starting point is 01:46:28 valued at over one and a half million. This Italian hypercar has been suspended on custom engineered steel beams, serving as a breathtaking room divider between the master suite and living area. the designs transforms what was once a track exclusive masterpiece into a sculptural focal point. Celebration of speed, art, and architecture. This is so crazy. This is so crazy. Coded, unfortunately, writing.
Starting point is 01:46:55 But, yeah, this is absolutely insane. I'd seen some of the pictures of it. I'd see some of the pictures of it being, like, lifted up into the room. Yeah. It's kind of cool to be able to, like, walk around the car and see, see the bottom. of it, although we can't see the pictures of here. Keep it on the track. Keep it on the track. This is disrespectful to my culture as a track guy. As someone whose entire personality is about tracking cars now that I went once. This is extremely disrespectful. Take it out of the...
Starting point is 01:47:25 Yeah, it really is... Give it to a track. Could you not... Give it to a track junkie and need. Give it to a track junkie and need. Could you not have created... I agree. Go on Hollywood and say, for $100,000, I want you to make a model of my car. I'm going to keep my car at the track, but I want to have it in my living room. Yeah. So, yeah, I'm a little bit. Also, like, what is going on? Like, why is this in a condo?
Starting point is 01:47:47 Like, if you have $1.5 million to spend on, like, a centerpiece, like, get a house. Ever heard of a penthouse, John? Ever heard of a Miami penthouse? It says condo. It doesn't say Pennhouse. Yeah, I mean a condo. It doesn't say, oh, they own the whole building. A condo could be a condo.
Starting point is 01:48:04 They got a little studio. And they put a one point five. I mean, honestly, respect for going crazy with the prioritization. You're just like, yeah, my rent's 4K a month, and I decided to put a $1.5 million card in my 4K a month studio. You want to do what? Yeah. Tenet upgrades.
Starting point is 01:48:25 I don't know. Let us know in the comments how, what you would do if you had a Pagani Zonda R one of 15 ever built. I say keep it on the track. Yeah, personally, I would have at least kept it flat so you could use it as a call booth. Phone booth for sure. You need to jump on a zoom.
Starting point is 01:48:42 It's kind of loud. Yeah, yeah. You just jump in there. Anyway, thank you for watching the show. Thank you for listening. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. We will see you tomorrow. Back in the Ultradale in Los Angeles.
Starting point is 01:48:55 We'll see you. Can't wait. Then. Goodbye. Thank you to Ben. Bye. Cheers.

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