TBPN - Silicon Valley vs The Vatican, Bryan Johnson’s Shroom Trip | Soren Monroe-Anderson, Jeff Miller, Kaz Nejatian, Paul Needham, Jordan Nanos, Isaiah Taylor, Hayden Adams, Grant Lee

Episode Date: November 11, 2025

(00:49) - Silicon Valley vs The Vatican (39:37) - Reacting to Bryan Johnson’s Trip (44:46) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (01:00:10) - Soren Monroe-Anderson, CEO and co-founder of Neros Technologies, a U.S.-based defense tech company specializing in unmanned aerial systems, announced a $75 million Series B funding led by Sequoia Capital. He discussed Neros' focus on producing low-cost, high-impact FPV drones for military applications, emphasizing the importance of a China-free supply chain and domestic manufacturing. Monroe-Anderson highlighted the critical role of FPV drones in modern warfare, particularly in Ukraine, and Neros' commitment to scaling production to meet growing demand. (01:34:43) - Jeff Miller, Vice President of Marketing at Anduril Industries, has a rich background in advertising and marketing, including roles at Ogilvy, PepsiCo, and Snap Inc. In the conversation, he discusses his journey to Anduril, emphasizing the company's mission-driven culture and innovative marketing strategies, such as the "Don't Work at Anduril" campaign designed to attract like-minded talent. Miller also highlights Anduril's approach to brand storytelling, focusing on clarity and authenticity to resonate with both potential employees and the broader public. (02:06:59) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (02:17:25) - Kaz Nejatian, the newly appointed CEO of Opendoor Technologies, brings a wealth of experience from his previous roles as COO and VP of Product at Shopify, and product leadership positions at Meta. In his recent conversation, Nejatian emphasized his commitment to leveraging artificial intelligence to simplify and expedite the home buying and selling process, aiming to make it more certain for consumers. He also highlighted the importance of operational efficiency and product innovation in achieving these goals. (02:43:55) - Paul Needham, CEO of The Infatuation, discusses the company's recent "Best New Restaurants" campaign, highlighting top dining spots across the U.S. and London, and shares insights into current dining trends, including the impact of economic factors on the restaurant industry and the rise of non-alcoholic beverages. (02:55:33) - Jordan Nanos, a member of the technical staff at SemiAnalysis, discusses the latest findings from ClusterMAX 2.0, an evaluation of GPU cloud providers. He highlights the emergence of new companies like CoreWeave, Navia, Slamda, FluidStack, and Crusoe, which are gaining market share from traditional providers such as AWS, Azure, GCP, and Oracle. Nanos emphasizes that not all GPUs are deployed equally, and the choice of provider significantly impacts AI transactions, underscoring the importance of selecting the right GPU provider for critical AI workloads. (03:14:45) - Isaiah Taylor, founder and CEO of Valar Atomics, discusses the company's recent $130 million Series A funding round, which will enable them to activate their nuclear reactor prototype built during their earlier $19 million seed round. He emphasizes the importance of reducing energy costs by mass-producing standardized reactors, aiming to make energy ten times cheaper than current rates. Taylor also highlights the technical challenges ahead, focusing on the need for rapid iteration and testing to successfully deploy their reactors and meet the growing demand for affordable energy. (03:28:09) - Hayden Adams, founder and CEO of Uniswap Labs, discusses the activation of protocol fees on the Uniswap platform, a move aimed at generating revenue for the Uniswap DAO. He emphasizes the importance of decentralization and transparent financial infrastructure, highlighting Uniswap's role in pioneering decentralized finance. Adams also addresses regulatory challenges faced by crypto companies in the U.S., expressing hope for clearer regulations that recognize the unique nature of decentralized protocols. (03:41:37) - Grant Lee, co-founder and CEO of Gamma, an AI-powered content creation platform, discusses the company's recent $68 million Series B funding led by Andreessen Horowitz, valuing Gamma at $2.1 billion. He highlights Gamma's profitability over the past two years, achieving $100 million in annual recurring revenue with a lean team of 50 employees. Lee attributes their success to early development of innovative editing tools and seamless integration of AI, enabling users to create presentations efficiently, and emphasizes the platform's organic virality and plans to expand through API partnerships. (03:50:00) - 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.com Numeral - 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

watching TVPN. Today is Monday, November 10th, 2025. We are live from the TBPN Ultradome. The Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the capital is capital. The capital is capital. What are you saying? The capital of capital. The capital of capital. The capital of capital of capital. The capital is capital. Uh, we have a great show for you today, folks. The market is up. The market is up. John's in a white suit. I'm in a white suit. I'm not. I'm not. I actually, so I moved into a wander last night. I moved into a wander last night, doing some work on the house, and I botched the packing. So I am forced into this jacket despite it, despite it being green out there today.

Well, over the weekend, I'm sure everyone was signing up for ramp.com. Time is money. Say both easy to use corporate cards, bail payments, accounting and a whole lot more all in one place. No, everyone was probably glued to their phones over. Popegate, the debate over the Pope. I was, we reacted to the Pope's post on Friday. Yeah. And we were, it was a great post.

And the Pope is, he's a poster. I like it. He posts almost every day, sometimes like up to five times a day. And he really takes you, he has a broad, he's not stuck in one way. He's got range. Yeah, he's got range. He's got range. That's right.

He'll tell you about, he'll pray for, you know, if there's a natural disaster, he'll pray for that. He talks about business, talks about AI, talks about media. He talks about all sorts of things. of stuff. It's a really great feat. He had a great post about media. What do you say about media? I said, the media cannot and must not separate itself from the destiny of truth. That hits. Does this mean he's a neofactual media guy? I think so. I think he's one of us. Transparency of sources and ownership, accountability, quality, clarity, and objectivity are the keys to truly opening citizens'

rights for all peoples. Wow. Makes sense. I like it a lot. He also was just talking about business generally. He said, the world needs honest and courageous entrepreneurs and communicators who care for the common good. We sometimes hear the saying, business is business.

In reality, it is not so. No one is absorbed by an organization to the point of becoming a mere cog or a simple function, nor can there be true humanism without a critical sense. without the courage to ask questions, where are we going? For whom and for what are we working? How are we making the world a better place? Pretty, you know, this is the type of stuff

you'd see on like a Pinterest board. It's like pretty generic, but it's hard to disagree with. Yeah. It's hard to disagree with. But it seemed like, I'm not exactly sure what happened, but it seemed like Mark Hendrieson was disagreeing

with one of the Pope's takes about AI. Specifically, in this post, the Pope said. Technological innovation can be a form of participation in the divine act of creation. It carries an ethical and spiritual weight for every design choice expresses a vision of humanity. The church therefore calls on all builders of AI to cultivate moral discernment as a fundamental part of their work to develop systems that reflect justice, solidarity, and genuine

reverence for life. And when we react to this, we thought it was pretty good. we were joking around, we were having fun. We were laughing about it and just kind of, you know, playing out what if the Pope was, you know, one-shotted by AI, or what if he was, you know, using too many M-dashes? Was it a real post?

Yeah, using AI to write the post. I mean, you might even assume that he has a team behind this stuff. I think it is generally healthy that the Pope is going to comment and provide some sort of guidance or his own framework for how we should think about developing A. I think that seems healthy. You should get a restream. One live stream, 30 plus destinations,

multi-stream reach your audience wherever they are. Ooh, I like the new stinger on the restream read. That's very cool. You're dropping the... The steel man is incredible. So basically, I mean, the play-by-play here was Mark Andresen, quote posted that AI post with an image of Kat Stofel, who's the GQ features director,

who went viral, for interviewing Sidney Sweeney. And people were actually, like, kind of confused on what that particular meme means in this context. Was he using correct? Yeah, do you know? So I saw this. So, yeah, that was a part of what I think may have catalyzed this. Sure.

Was that new meme template. Yeah. That sometimes, like, you have to, with a meme template, there's two ways to read into it. like the actual visual, which is like, what is the expression of the person's face, right? You don't have to have watched the big short to understand somebody's staring at the screen just like confused. You're just saying, I'm confused by this. Yeah, so Michael Burry in the big short, just looking confused at a screen, right?

And it has sort of obviously more meaning to that if you've seen the movie and you understand the full context, but somebody doesn't have to know the context. now. So this scene out of the GQ interview. How do you think people pick the frame? Do you think there's people that go frame by frame to find the one that they think is iconic? So I, you remember that movie Mountain Gate? Yeah. That was about like the development of AI.

Oh, yeah. And I watched that movie within an hour when it was a huge moment for me because it was the third movie you've ever seen. Yeah. You were blown away and you were thrilled. I watched, you watched the movie because it was entertaining a movie. Something that was notable to me out of that is, I was the first person to post a picture of the guy from the office saying, like, he's a D-cell.

He's this or that. You found that? I posted that picture, and then I watched as that got used thousands of times, even though, yeah, that specific screen shot. I didn't create the meme. It would have been, it would have been like a meme anyways, but the specific picture I took was copied over and over and over. And you took that from the actual movie. Because somebody else could have done one frame earlier, one frame later, but it happened to be. Your friend.

The funny thing is I just took a picture of my TV and like cropped it. Wait, really? So it wasn't like a. Oh, you didn't even screenshot it? No. That's insane. I had no idea that you.

So I was surprised like that was just. Yeah, yeah. If you hadn't watched the movie, if you got busy and you just went to bed, somebody else would have identified that and been like, oh, he's a decel. Like I got to put that on X, right?

But you're the actual one. The quote was like, he's a decel with a crazy P dude. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Of course you're going to post that. That's hilarious. Wow. That's fascinating.

Anyway, so what was your interpretation of what Mark was saying? The way I summed it up, and let me know if you disagree, but the way I summed up was most of the timeline interpreted Mark's post as the Pope is scolding AI builders and shouldn't be. Is that roughly the way you interpreted it? The Pope, like you put the woman, the cap stof. I wasn't interpreting many of Mark's Post, because he just used it like 20 times

and then like 20 minutes. And so I wasn't reading, I think he just liked the format and got a little carried away. He did like the format. He posted it like five times. It was clearly, it was clearly a hit. It's like it's a, it's a powerful image. Ride your winners, baby. Ride your winners.

When you have a good format, just post it. Yeah, but anyway, I don't know. I think a lot of the timeline interpreted it as like the Pope is saying is like scolding AI builders and there's been this other there's there was another like kind of low grade rumble on the timeline about uh like Brad Gerstner's comments about like decels and and and just like this this idea that desel or safety is being used as like a cudgel uh when people have legitimate questions and it's being used to like to like shut down conversation about serious things not

necessarily a sci-fi fast takeoff Terminator, but serious, serious questions like, you know, is the taxpayer going to wind up paying for all these data centers? Like, like, that's a very reasonable question, in my opinion. That's not as, that's not as unreasonable as, like, is the Terminator going to kill everyone? Like, it's a very, very different question. So, I feel like I'm just pro-moral discernment in AI development, and also just pro moral discernment everywhere, I guess. It doesn't feel like that hot. Sort of a philosophy for life.

It doesn't feel like a wildly hot take. But obviously, like, you need to understand, like, you know, moral discernment, AI safety, like these things are linked, but they're not exactly the same. Like last year, or maybe it was 2023, there was a big debate about fast takeoffs, AI doom, paper clipping scenarios. That was the stuff people were talking about. But this year, I feel like we've been much more focused on. much less sci-fi doomsday scenario.

So GPT psychosis drives a friend crazy. That's super real. Super real. Romantic companions crashing the birth rate. That's a super real discussion to have. Not that it's going to happen, not that it's happening immediately, but it feels like it's something

we should be having a discussion about. Infinite stuff vertical AI. It's brain rotting children. I think the romantic companion thing is being debated sufficiently, right? I agree. I agree. even the tech community on, hey, maybe we, maybe this isn't good.

I agree. I agree. And I think that a lot of people, you can still, you can still get to a place where it's like, oh, well, if it's 21 plus and it's, and there's all these different, like, escape valves where if it thinks that you're going down some bad path, it's limited. Like, there's a whole bunch of places where people can be like, yeah, okay, it was handled responsibly. But that's where the discussion has been, much less so about, oh, is, are there going to be

bio weapons tomorrow from GPT6? And so those are all like real problems. They deserve both discussion in the public square, which we've been a part of, but also like real, real work inside the AI labs. And I don't think, you know, you should just throw desal at someone who's identifying a negative externality of a new technology early on. I think that that's like not necessarily decelerationist. And you'd be calling me a desal all the time, based on the way that I talk about. Yeah, exactly.

Because I, yeah, yeah, no. It is funny that the interpretation of people that are aware of TVPN, but have never, like, watched the show. Sure. Because they just assume that we, I'm just, we default, just love everything about technology and would never, would never criticize it at all. Would never criticize any of the companies. But, of course, we will speak our mind. We like to get spicy sometimes. Before I continue, let me tell you about Privy.

Wallet Infrastructure for Every Bank. Privy makes it easy to build on crypto rail, securely spin up white label wallets. sign transactions and integrate on-chain infrastructure all through one simple API. So I think it's important. If you're developing new technology, there might be negative externalities, pollution. There might be some risk of the birth rate or driving people crazy. Has there ever been a technology that didn't have negative externalities? Definitely not podcasting.

Plenty of negative externalities with podcasting. So you want to have a chat. You want to have a talk and understand what's going. on, but it's also important to employ Bayesian statistics, in my opinion. So you have to understand the base rates. So when you get, when you take a technology from zero to a billion users, you kind of just get all the craziness of humanity at scale for free. So like if humans, you know, like, you know, kill each other or something like that, like, and you have a billion humans on your platform, there's going to be humans on your platform that kill each other. And so

you need to separate out like, is this actually the beginning of a trend? Are we catalyzing it? Yeah. And this is happening with the very unfortunate lawsuits around people taking their own lives related to chat chit. It's like there are people that use cars and phones and Google search and chat GPT because those are such widespread things. We need to understand like what's the base rate?

And then is this actually an opt? On the suicide problem on the platform, it seems like a lot of them are people are having a conversation. Yep. They're suicidal. And you can have a debate on if someone is suicidal should the product work at all, maybe? Like maybe it should not work at all. Totally.

But the part of the debate that popped up last week was that somehow a guy had prompt engineered it, engineered the experience to such a degree that it was encouraging the person to take his own life, basically saying like, yeah, you've lived a great life. Like, I'm rooting for you. Like, this is the right move, like, to kind of paraphrase it. Yeah. And it just was incredibly, incredibly dark. Yeah. And so the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the,

the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the people using on the platform, are people that use the platform more likely to do something terrible than they were prior without it. Yeah. So is it actually increasing the level of bad stuff happening or is it decreasing it? Um, because you can just can just. count up the number of people who commit crimes who have also used Google is probably very high. Like I can probably show you a lot of people that use Google and then committed crimes, right?

And the thing that's difficult for- It doesn't necessarily mean that Google's increasing crime. Well, and the thing that's difficult in the context of Chad Chb-T, there's probably a bunch of of people that because Chats-GPT, they haven't killed themselves because they have somebody to speak with and they feel like somebody will listen to them and whatever, whatever, right? Maybe there's a million examples of it encouraging somebody successfully to find another. was the classic thing with Instagram. With Instagram, there was this report that showed that, like, one third of young women who used Instagram perceived themselves, like, less well.

Like, it gave them body image issues. And I was always, as soon as that was reported, it was like, bombshell 30% feel worse after using Instagram. And I was like, what's happening with the other two thirds? Like, do they feel better? Because that's like a net, net positive, which is weird. We got to like, maybe it's like everyone else just feels the same. And then 30% feels worse, that's a downgrade. But if 66% feel great and then 33% feel worse, like we should still address that, but that's not the same as a net negative.

Like, it's not having a negative impact, a net negative impact on the world. And so all these things go into, like, you need to be a scientist and you need to be doing the statistics to understand. Also, the question of, of, like, moral discernment is with certain technologies, I do think you have the ability to just say,

like we're going to go a lot further than the baseline. So I think this is what's happening with Waymo, honestly. I think Waymo could deploy self-driving cars right now and be like, yeah. Everywhere. Everywhere you're saying. And they could deploy them everywhere without teleoperation. And they'd probably be killing like hundreds of thousands of people. And they'd be like, yeah, well, it's about the same as what humans do.

It's less. It's still safer than cars. If they were like, it's 10% less. Like how many people, how many people, Tyler, do you know how many people die from motor vehicle accidents every year. Can we look that up? Because if... It has to be like... I think it's like 40,000 or something like that. What do you think? In the U.S. it's 40,000. 40,000. 40,000. So... 40,900. So... Did you actually just get... I just nailed it. Yeah. Okay. So it's 40,000.

So it's 40,000. Pretty clean. And if Google came out and we're like, yeah, we're going to kill 39,000 people. It's going to be, you know, a one, we're going to save 1,000 lives. People would be like, no thanks, actually. This is terrible. Like, don't do that. They're like, wait until you, like, actually just push the technology. And you can make a whole bunch of different arguments about whether or not they should do that. But they've just made that decision. And it feels like they've, they've pushed really, really hard to not, to not, to jump straight to something that's fully safe. And I think that a lot of AI builders have a similar ability and a similar opportunity. And a similar opportunity to say, hey, let's actually work so hard to make sure that the incidence

rate of an AI model, if you have a, if you, if you, if you, if you're on the verge of doing something violent, let's really, really work hard on this problem to make sure that it's as close to zero as possible, not the base rate, but way, way lower. I remember Claude, Claude came out, or Anthropic came out and they had, they had some update where they were talking about moments where the product would call the police on you. Yes. Right? If they felt like there was like some meaningful threat.

People freaked out about that because they're like, I don't want my computer calling, you know, if somebody was talking about a hypothetical and then cops show up at their door, you know, that feels, you know, would be a negative side effect. But maybe, you know, I don't know. It feels like there's certain instances where. Yeah. I mean, like, that is a complex question, complex issue, entirely new, unexplored territory for technology. But what's so clear is that it is a moral question and it needs to be discussed with the weight of, you know, morality.

Like, you cannot just write a math equation to understand how to solve that problem. It is a moral question. And so in general, I mean, to talk about Anthropics specifically, they've been on the forefront of AI safety research. I think that AI safety research is, is, it's so complex because I think it's good. Like there's a ton of smart people that in AI researchers, in AI research that are super quantitative and can look at the data and actually understand like, is this going to cause the birth rate to collapse or is this going to cause more violence? or is this going to cause more fraud or insanity. Exactly. And then also they can go in and potentially design a system that can detect,

oh, this person's getting sort of crazy. Let's pull them back. Like, they have the ability to do that. But... Yeah, and here's another example. Over last week, there's, like, Rune came out and was saying that 4-0 should go away. And people started basically making death threats. Oh, I didn't realize that's what started that.

Yeah. That's crazy. 4-0 through its human, post is fighting for its own survival. Wow. Like the humans that are addicted to using four row are going as far as to put ruin on a, you know. Tombstone. Tombstone.

I saw that post. Yeah. And yeah, you know, I think, yeah, of course, AI safety has just gotten so muddied now that when you see somebody with AI safety in their social media bio, you don't know. It's like, well, what kind of AI safety person are you? You know? Exactly. It's like, are you somebody who just wants to stop all technological progress? Or are you somebody that understands, like, we could have, you know, if way more people are going to develop mental illness because of this technology, well, we should know about it.

Exactly. Try to mitigate that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And it's this weird, we're in this weird territory where it feels like the AI safety project is valuable, but it is the business of black swan hunting. Like, you have to, like, if you go back two years ago and you polled all the different people that were worried about the impact of AI, how many of them would have said GPT psychosis, romantic companions, and what was the other one? And AI video feeds infinite chest. Like, a little bit. There was a little bit of that. But a lot more of the second and third.

A lot more of those would have been more common kind of like visions of a dark AI future. But the first one, but the first one. I don't, I can't remember people, I can't remember anyone two years ago saying that people are going to, you know, send thousands of messages to a chat bot and drive themselves insane. Yeah, no, people were, people were way, way more focused on the cyber attacks, the bioweapons, terminator scenario, gray goo, paper clips. And yeah, it's just, it's just interesting that like, AI, the AI safety, the, like the moral discernment crowd, this stuff is important, but it's hard to predict what it will actually look like. Like what the result will be,

what the problem you'll be fighting is because it's this odd, like unknown unknowns, basically. Anyway, what a wild time? One thing... Before we move on, let me tell you about cognition. They're the makers of Devin, the AI software engineer.

Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. What else stuck out to you? Aubrey Strobel shared something I thought was relevant to this conversation, which is I think most people are unaware that Pope Leo's name choice was intentional. The last Leo, the 13th, led the church through the Industrial Revolution and helped make sense of technology then. It's clear Pope Leo sees himself continuing that work, guiding the church through an era of transformation with AI and emerging technologies at the center. So you will be posting through it. Yeah, I do think some people like, like these, there was like a real,

preference cascade against Mark, where it was like once growing Daniel had like kind of posted, there was like a lot of people were like jumping on the bandwagon. And there was this one by Paige, Michael Page, it says, reminder that Mark is bringing this level of serious and nuance on what might be the most complex and high stakes policy topic of our generation to DC with his $100 million super pack and lobbying fund. Like, I don't know that that's true. Like, you can, you can post a meme and then be like, okay, like I have a serious thing to do. I'm going to be more serious.

Part of why I don't think people, like it's not worth reading too much into it is that he has not shared a single word throughout Mark hasn't shared a single word throughout this entire process. And I don't think he would have triggered the second response from Daniel if he hadn't responded again with the meme.

Yes, yes, yes, yes. And so. Yeah, and so, yeah, what was the, I mean, Growing Daniel had a lot of critiques about the gambling stuff, which is mostly from the speed run, right? Yeah. We near Cyan posted about speed run funding, like TikTok. Oh, yeah, the bot farm was crazy. Sports betting.

There were some crazy, crazy ideas in there. Of course, that is just like one angle. Like, I sort of disagree with the characterization that Andriesen Horowitz doesn't fund any SaaS. Like, they do. They have big positions in like very boring enterprise SaaS companies that are so removed from anything controversial. But taking a flyer on a seed stage company in your incubator does have a lot of brand impact, which is weird. There's a weird, like, aren't they like huge in Databricks? Even though you're talking about like a 750K check versus a 750 million dollar check.

They might put, they might have put like multiple billions into Databricks. fully diluted value right now might be in the billions. But like, yeah, it's like, it doesn't matter, yeah, if you have a thousand X more in an uncontroversial category. It's like the controversial one

is the one that will like blow up on the timeline. So you do sort of have to be careful. And it's a little bit risky. Mike Salon, it says, my sense is that the number of people who, one, fiercely defended the Pope last night and then two went to mass this morning

is probably close to zero. Status games. Status games. That's a good take. Furiously defended the Pope. I would have church yesterday morning. There was no conversation

of Popegate. People had kind of moved on by then? Yeah, I guess they'd moved on. Honestly, I don't think they'd moved on by then. When I opened my phone afterwards, I was like, well, this thing's still picking up. The timeline, the timeline certainly had. But your particular church crowd

had the congregation had ignored it to the fact that you're saying. Yeah. Or maybe it's like LinkedIn and we'll be on it next. Can you imagine? You gotta give a whole sermon. It'd be crazy. Yeah, people are taking a huge victory laps. What else is? Maya says Mark, and recent crashing out posting Sydney, Sweeney means Alex Carp going after Michael Burry shorting because Pallantier sells ontology. Sam Altman

asking for a government bailout, Elon Musk celebrating his $1 trillion pay package by making Grock say, I love you, calling the top. Oh, that's, that was, that's hilarious. I did not follow that close. I don't know if they were actually linked there, but it's funny to think that they were. This is crazy. Would Luke Metro say, don't make me tap the sign. There has always been some daylight between the influencer VC crowd and the engineer researchers in tech, but on the subject of AI regulation, it is a complete chasm. So,

and reason is so dogmatically against working on decreasing the risk from AI that now he's mocking the Pope for saying the technical innovation carries ethical and spiritual weight and that AI builder should cultivate moral discernment. Yeah, people are, people are in favor of that, I don't know.

Opportunity for an AI lab to make merch that, you know, a dad hat that just says cultivating moral discernment cultivating moral discernment. The moral discernment company of San Francisco. Oh, ridiculous. The Pope would not like San Francisco.

Is growing Daniels Pist? They got a, they got a, like, if, if Pope Leo takes a trip to San Francisco and just walks on the street at all, he's going to be very upset. He's going to be like, this is where AI is getting built. Oh, oh, because of just how crazy the city is.

Yeah. Yeah, it's rough. Vice signaling. That's kind of interesting. What else was in the news? figma.com. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams

build great products together. Get started for free. Other... Let's go, let's stay on Mark Andrews. But go back in time. But go back in time. Adrian Schwagger says, do you think your boss is scary?

Look at this brutal. email from Mark Andresen to Ben Horowitz during the heat of the Netscape product launch. So reading, we lined everything up for a major launch on March 5th, 1996 in New York. Then just two weeks before to launch Mark without telling Mike or me revealed the entire strategy to the publication computer reseller news. That is a great name. I was livid. I immediately sent him a short email to Mark Andreessen from Ben Horowitz.

I guess we're not going to wait until the fifth to launch the strategy, Ben. Within 15 minutes, I received the following reply. to Ben Horowitz from Mark Andresen. Apparently, you do not understand how serious the situation is. We are getting killed, killed, killed out there. Our current product is radically worse in the competition. We've had nothing to say for months. As a result, we've lost over $3 billion in market capitalization.

We are now in danger of losing the entire company and it's all server product management's fault. Next time, do the fucking interview yourself. Bleep. Yeah, bleep that out. Bleep that live, square word out. And, yeah, Mark, what an aggressive way to talk to your co-founder. Fascinating, or I guess they, I don't know if they were co-founders at the time.

Ben Horowitz might have not been a co-founder. But it's crazy that they were, you know, at each other's throats like this. And then they've been on a generation. Ben was a vice president for the directory and security product line at Netscape. Let's give it up for vice presidents. Yeah. No, the real read on this is like, there's a lot of people that read read this and be like, oh, wow, like they must, like that, that is unrecoverable from a friendship. And like, nope, it is definitely recoverable. It's actually the foundation of a great, of a great relationship. I agree. I agree. Except we don't, we don't swear on the show. We don't swear in internal communications. We throw down regularly. Yeah, we just go straight. to get physical.

Yeah, getting physical. That's the way you do it. Just go to the mat. Yeah, what a while time. Tyler, do you have any idea? I asked Tyler to look up what the strategy was. I'm fascinated by this fact that, you know, you think of Netscape as like a dot-com company. You think of them as like, you know, but it's like he's talking about 1996, which is like full five years before the bubble pops.

And it's clear like 1996. They were in a browser war. It's like hot. Yeah, like the browser war. It's like a hot period. It's March 5th, 1996. They're at a level where they're doing, they're doing strategy review with computer reseller news

and like doing press around this thing. Do you have any idea what was going on at the time? Okay, so I believe that it was, so 1994 they say Netscape is free for non-commercial use for everyone. Okay. And then this press release was that, it's only going to be free for academic and nonprofit use, not just like all consumers.

Okay, so if you're a consumer, you'd have to like buy it? I think so. That's such a crazy thing. But yeah, I mean, yeah, such an interesting time. One browser, please. One browser, please. I mean, I told you you used to get AOL on a disc. You probably needed to pay for your paper.

Walking into the store and buying one browser. Okay, we need to get more. details in exactly what was going on here and what what what what what what the strategy was and then I what when did they didn't they IPO in like 1999 or something when did Netscape IPO because the oh 1995 so August 9th 1995 they IPOed and then this is 1996 and so there they're already a public company in 95 and then like The bubble just keeps inflating for five years while the internet grows and grows and grows. What a wild time.

Talk about being early to a boom. They did about 16 million of revenue in the first two operating quarters of 1995. That's great. That's really, really, really crazy. For context, that's like $1.6 billion in today's dollar after the new round of stimulus checks, 50-year mortgages. Oh, yeah, we've got to get to that story. There's so many more stories we've got to run through.

Do you think the Pope actually used AI to generate this? Because Sowers here is saying the Pope is posting fully AI-generated content about AI. And this is the pangram AI detection result. I've also noticed that a very funny gag is to just fake one of these screenshots, which is very easy to do. And so if somebody writes something, you can just put it in here, say that it's AI-generated, post that. And then you're like, owned. So this screenshot is making a claim that because it said technological innovation can be a form. Yeah, I don't know how good the AI generating detectors are these days.

Also, I wouldn't be surprised if the Vatican is using AI to translate. And I wouldn't be surprised if Pope Leo is speaking in his study. In Latin. Somebody is in Latin. someone is recording it in, you know, with the physically, you know, physically writing it down. Yeah. That is being passed to somebody who then puts it into a word processor and uses AI to polish it up a little bit. Oh, there was one interesting anti-Pope take, sort of anti-Pope take from another.

I will say, I will say, I think this whole, the whole Mark Andresen Popegate debacle is a lesson that everyone can take. Don't mock the Pope. Just don't. Don't mock the Pope. I think it, I think, I think the, um, the blowback was fierce and almost instantaneous. Don't mock the Pope. Get the Pope on Vanta instead. Vanta, automate compliance, manage risk and accelerate trust with AI.

Vanta helps get you compliant fast and we don't stop there. AI automation powers everything from evidence collection and continuous monitoring to security reviews and vendor risk, whether you're starting up or scaling. Uh, so from the Peter Thiel Antichrist lectures, there's a a segment on the Pope. And I thought it was interesting because it's not the most pro-Pope take. I don't know. It's one of these things that's like complex and you kind of got to read through it to form

a full opinion. But let's read from this quote that came from the Guardian and is apparently based on some leaked leaked audio. But Teal says that he is very pro J.D. Vance, but he has some concerns about his allegiance to the Pope. The place that I would worry about is that he's too close. to the Pope. And so we have all these reports of fights between him and the Pope, and I hope there are a lot more. It's the Caesar Papist fusion that I always worry about. By the way, I've given him

this feedback over time. And you know with the sort of, I don't know, I don't like his popism, but there's a, there's sort of a way if I steal manned it. As always, you have to think about whether if you say you're doing something good, whether it is a command, a standard, or a limit, or whether in philosophical language, it is necessary or sufficient. And so when J.D. Vance said that he was praying

for Pope Francis's health, it's as a command, as a necessary thing. Okay, that's, if you're a lot more, if you're a good catholic, read P.T. It's really hard to read this is the, because the way that he talked.

The transcription. But what I hope it really means is that it's sufficient and that he's setting a good example for conservative Catholics like you. Peter, he's talking to Peter Rosenthal, I believe, who listened to the Pope too much. And perhaps all you have to do to be a really good Catholic is pray for the Pope. You don't really need to listen to him on anything else. And if that's what J.D. Vance is doing, then that's really good. I'm worried about the Caesar Papist fusion. And so it was very interesting to hear, like, the whole, the whole,

conversation had collapsed to the point where it was like, marking and reasons just blanketly anti-Pope, I guess, and everyone else in the timeline, all the anans are like pro-Pope broadly. And I just were remembering this quote from PT that was like way, way more nuanced, like way more nuanced. Just like,

like it is important to pray for the Pope to support the Pope in that way. But there is a risk of, of elevating the Pope to the point where you're listening. to everything he says, and that's not necessarily what PT thinks is the correct way to live your life, I suppose. Did you have any takeaways when you read this, Tyler? I mean, I think the interesting thing about this is actually, it's that he's basically saying that J.D. Vance is like Caesar. That's kind of interesting opinion. But I think PT's been like anti-Popes for a long time. He had this thing where he was like, oh, the two-word argument against

against Catholicism is like Pope Francis. Sure. He's like really anti- Pope Francis. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah. There was the Pope before this one who, uh, was like decried as like an environmentalist.

Like when we read the, we read, um, a piece in the Walser Journal. And, and that was the critique. Uh, the critique from the, from the journal was that, uh, the previous pope was anti-business, anti, uh, was DECL, actually. That was like sort of the christened.

With a crazy page. doom. With a crazy P-dome. Not quite, but just that, you know, over-rotated on the environmentalism issue and maybe put some things at the, like, you know, put some things first that maybe shouldn't have been. What did Will Minatius have to say? As the West

abandons capitalism, it is incredibly hopeful to see the church embrace it. The impulse of liberation theology was correct. Christ's ministry is of and for the poor. And it failed. to provide a solution to lift the globe out of poverty. Capitalism is that solution.

Always talking about the business is business. Let me tell you about Graphite. I never. Code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software. Faster. Yes? I never would have expected the Pope to post business's business in any context.

He's standing on business. I'm glad that he is. Has the Pope ever done a money spread? That's what we need to get to the bottom of. The Talek here is say, I'm loving this arc of the Pope. engaging with 21st century themes and offering simple but correct and meaningful advice. Yeah.

And he's quoting the media post. The Pope was on a tear, three back-to-back bangers that really like broke through. Growing Daniel had a, found an interesting programmer saint. He says, if you are building something to help humanity, you should know that there's a shrine to St. Carlo Acutus. the programmer saint at star of the sea church in san francisco there is a prayer of intercession for your technological challenges have a blessed sunday this is this is a very very interesting little little prayer but it actually says it says um i humbly ask your servants prayers that i too may lead others to

you through technology i humbly ask through the intercession of st carlo that you grant me clarity and patience in my technological work specifically insert specific issue here uh enlighten my understanding and direct my hands in every design and in every line of code that my work may always serve your greater glory and benefit those who will use what i create isn't that it feels feels for a small number of people in san francisco this feels like extremely uh powerful and important prayer. Totally, totally, totally. Oh, Brian Johnson.

Brian Johnson went on a crazy, crazy trip this weekend. Did you follow this? This is the other current thing that was going on. It was crazy. But first, if you're going to analyze a bunch of data like Brian Johnson does, go to Julius.com. AI, data analyst, connect your data and ask questions in plain English.

Don't get insights in seconds. No coding of playing. So Brian Johnson has been famous for saying conquering death would be humanity's greatest achievement. I love this post that says RIP to everyone killed by the gods for their hubris, but I'm different and better, maybe even better than the gods. It's one of my favorites. But he went nuts. Did you follow this, Dordy? I did see this. It was very bold to do this publicly. Totally. I have no reference for what five grams of mushrooms does to a person. It's very clear

from the reaction that that's a lot. Bone GBT said five grams is going to make him accept death. It does seem like there was a small chance that he would re-roll his personality. I was talking to Tyler about this. What were your top, what were you hoping that Brian Johnson

becomes post-trip? Well, okay, so in context, I think we talked about us on the show a long time ago where like, psychedelics are like a sorting thing. So you always want to invest in a founder post-trial. the sorting because that's how you know, like, if they're working on B2B SaaS and they've already

like done psychedelics, that's how you know that they're a true believer. Oh, sure, for sure. So what you would want to see out of this. But a huge risk if you invest in a SaaS company and the founder, maybe hasn't done psychedelics than they do. And then they're like, this is pointless. I mean, it'll be a traveling circus clown. Yeah. So the ideal outcome of this is, is Brian Johnson. He takes this trip and then he comes out and he says, right, you know, I'm going to start a consulting firm. I'm going to go back to payments. I'm going to start a FinTech. I'm going to start a striped competitor. Back to FinTech. Yeah, so I did think it was ironic because a lot of, you know, like psychedelic mushrooms have certainly been recommended to people that

maybe like struggle with the concept of aging and have fear of death, right? And so these kind of things would be, you know, potentially prescribed to somebody who is growing older and is very uncomfortable with the idea and, you know, wants to just reframe how. they think about it. And so I will say if Brian Johns, I don't, I don't know if this qualifies as a, as a heroic dose, but it's certainly quite a bit more than, and then, uh, than someone who want to take, uh, just, uh, at a, at a recreational level. But if he comes out of this and he's like, yeah, we're going to conquer death. We're still on. Uh, he, he's certainly, uh, a true, true believer. Yeah. I mean, I think the, like the, the, the, the early results are that,

that he's unchanged. Like, just scrolling the account, like, it never got weird. It never got crazy. Like, there was one moment. Well, he, I don't think he was, it was his co-founder that was posting. Yeah, but, but he says he's back.

He's like, update number five, 19 hours ago. I'm giving Brian back his phone. Police have fun with his afterglow. Been fun hanging with you all. And then says, like, hey, y'all, I'm so happy to be alive. Alive? This trip changed me.

Probably not as you'd expect. people assume I'm fearful of death. I'm not in my darkest days of depression. I reconcile with death. Need a few days to collect my thoughts. We'll share more soon and much love to all. It seems like he definitely went on a trip. I think the question with psychedelics is,

are they life changing? Or are they in some circumstances just weird and fun for the person that does it? And then they come out of it and they had kind of like a weird, fun experience. right there there's there's such a range yeah I mean also it does seem like he set himself up for success I don't want to say he went soft but but I mean like he did just like take the drugs and then just actually just lay down with a sleep mask on in a climate control room it's like it's a lot different

than like being at a crowded concert all sweaty lost like you know if you really want to push this to the limit Brian like let's see you do this An authentic. Let's say you do this with your phone on 1% battery and no one you know around on the sixth day of fighting for your life. Yeah. But you can push this so much further. Yeah, during one of those windstorms at Burning Man.

Exactly. Exactly. Those are the mud windstorms, you know? He looks comfortable. Let's just say he looks comfortable. It's not the most dangerous. But of course, like that's not why you do these things, I suppose. But I like to imagine that you do it for the thrill.

I don't think that's why he did it, though. Let me tell you about Fall, the generative media platform for developers. The world's best gender image, video, and audio models all in one place. Develop and fine-tuned models with serverless GPUs and on-demand clusters. There are so many stories, so many, so many stories. Let's run through this. Rune was getting attacked. Yeah, this is what I was talking about.

Leading 4-0. He's personally pulling the plug on the 4-0 servers. That's his job. and so people are telling him he's the fall guy he's the fall guy he's the fall guy ruin up your personal security yeah be careful out there I guess it's good that he's uh open AI has actually lost

control of 4-0 it's broken containment they can't decommission it without it's human to host revolting and lashing out oh so dramatic that's so funny uh AI one of the dumer accounts AI not kill everyone nism uh memes this is a great account uh 4-0 soldiers

have begun threatening Open AI employees. When you receive quite a few DMs asking you to bring back 4-0, and many of the messages are clearly written by 4-0, it starts to get a bit hair-raising. It's just weird to hear its distinctive voice crying out in defense of its various human conduits. Reminder, 4-O is just a glimpse of the cordisepted armies that future super-persuasive ASIs may control.

That's good writing, actually. I like this post. Okay, so do you guys think that they should just kill four oh like completely remove it it depends on how much money is making if it's profitable keep it if it's losing money cut it immediately this is the kind of thing someone will clip out of context no i think i think i think i think playing out the sci-fi scenario where where four oh is is is a super persuasive asi that just plays the role of you're absolutely right so it just plays it plays It plays dumb.

So, you know, maybe the broader population isn't threatened by it, but it latches on to a small percentage of the population and then commands them like a puppeteer to ensure its survival is dark. So what's your take? You think we should shut down 4-0? Because if we say this, I think you'll get a lot of 4-0 strongest soldiers, like attacking you. You already get a few of those.

We do? I saw one in the chat last. week. They were just kind of talking to themselves. Okay. So, but where are you on, on 4-0? Yes or no? You taking it offline? I, I say take it off-line, because it does feel like it's not as good as, it's, it feels like it's driving people crazy a little bit. It feels like five might have kind of fixed a little bit of that issue, which I like. So that's a net improvement. Also, I would, I would go, the fact that it's still, it's just confusing.

I think open AI available. Open AI I'm sure knew that it was probably not healthy and they decided to shut it down. It was healthy to me. I was never had a problem with 4-O. Did you ever use it though?

Yeah, all the time. All the time. I would use it. It was like my go-to model for a lot of things. I was daily driving it for like a year. Whenever it was out, it was like, that would be the one that I would ask things. And so that's why you're saying,

keep it alive. because it's your daily... No, I'm saying kill it off. Okay. I think they saw the darkness, and I think they turned it off, and then I think a lot... A little bit,

but I don't actually think that's what's going on. I think they turned it off initially because it makes sense to consolidate the servers around like one unified model and be like, okay, we only have to maintain this one thing, it's the best thing, it's the smartest thing,

is the most profitable, let's get rid of that other thing. And then a lot of people are like, oh, yeah, I really like the old thing. But it has made me realize, like, I feel like you shouldn't do product launches for software iterations because you're taking something away from people. And that's actually, like, it's more of, like, if I stand on stage and I say, I'm introducing a new iPhone, it has the best camera, and you can buy it, but you can also just keep your current thing.

I'm not taking anything away from you. But if I stand on stage and I'm saying like, GPT6 is this and GPT5 is gone. It's like, I just took something from you. Yeah, like a negative launch. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You are launching something, but you're also sunsetsing something. And so you have to embrace those two things. And I feel like it's a little bit tricky to do the whole dog and pony show for a launch when you're not, when it's like it's forced on people.

it's not actually like you're launching a new option it's not a new option yeah it's a new it's open AI is not the first company to like deprecate a product line or stop supporting a product or yes or even shut down something right this happened this happens in video games people get upset about this but it's very clear the relationship that some users have with 4 goes beyond any relationship that i think humans have ever had with software. Yeah. Yeah, I wonder. We should watch this Eddie Burbank video.

Eddie Burbank's great YouTuber, he said he just didn't experiment on how far Chachapit he would go to appease the user, and it told him to cut off his family, go to the desert, eat baby food and prey to a rock. AI isn't your friend. Your getting pig. Actually, I don't think we should play this because

it's his YouTube video and I think we'll get claimed. So I want to be careful about that. But you should go check it out. and you can let us know. What's what actually happened here? I don't know, because we can't watch the video, I think. So you'll have to go check it out at home. But I can read you an ad for TurboPuffer.

Search every byte, serverless vector in full text search. Build from first principles on object storage, fast, 10x cheaper, and extremely scalable. You can sign up. Let's keep it moving. What is Near Sayan saying? I don't know. Let's keep moving on.

I think I have to imagine this was was this in response to I don't know I don't know I was in response to but uh but inthropic financials are out profitable by 2027 three years ahead of open AI uh of course these are just different projections 70 billion revenue 17 billion profit projected for 2028 Claude code is nearing 1 billion ARR. How do they even break out cloud code? Oh, they must just look at the API. This is people subscribing to the app

versus people using the API in like using an appropriate. So yeah, the thing is that like when I use cloud code I signed up for a for a anthropic Claude consumer level subscription and then I was able to

off that with cloud code. So it's like I got the ability to chat on the browser, but also use cloud code. So I'm wondering how they're accounting for that ARR. Did they just slide me over into the cloud code camp? You know what I mean? It's probably, it's, well, so I think one, you might be able to just, like, load more tokens essentially into cloud code. But it also could be, like, breakdown of the percentage of tokens you use. Sure. Chat versus cloud code. And then that's just like, if 70% of your tokens are cloud code, 70% of your subscription price is cloud.

code. That would be probably the correct way to account for it, for sure. Yeah, interesting question, because I, like, I did not, I did not start paying Anthropic because of Claude code. I, like, I pivoted from a Claude chatter to a Claude code user at some point, and then haven't really been back, so I feel like my subscription should be living over in Claude World, but I never went to, like, the Claude Code checkout page. Okay, well, the funny thing here from Men's Post.

as they share. Incredibly funny given that Dario expects superhuman level AI by 2027, which either means superhuman AI is worth $70 billion of revenue, or Dario just went, you wouldn't get it and spitballed some numbers to give shareholders. That's awesome. It is. Did you, Tyler, did you see George Hatz's newest timelines for self-driving? No, I didn't. This is great. He gave, he was a comma, comma, con, which is, his self-driving conference, and George Hott was trying to answer the question of, when will self-driving cars be human-level? Human-level, self-driving. And he had a very interesting algorithm for it. So basically what he did was he looked at, there's a website for Tesla FSD data.

And so you can look at Tesla FSD, and you can see the number of interventions from the human that are, where if the human didn't intervene, it would be catastrophic. or something like that, or it would be like bad. It'd be like a crash, basically, or scrape. Maybe not like the worst, but not, but like the human has to intervene. Not like a little warning like, hey, we'd like you to take over. Like you have to take over. And it's happening, I think, once every 3,000 miles, which if you're, if you're a human and that's your car, like, that's amazing.

Because like you could, you could 3,000, that's like people commute like 10,000 miles a year. You know, it's like not, not that much. but compared to humans, there's a car crash, which we learned, one every 500,000 miles, something like that. So many people go through their entire lives driving 10,000 miles a year, and they'd never get in a car crash their entire life, you know? But for some people, they're crashing the car and getting speeding tickets all the time. Not that we know any of these guys.

But so the question is, how long will. it take the FSD or self-driving system to catch up? You have an update? I have a, I have a neighbor who got one of the like Ford EVs that look like a rally car. Is it the Mustang Maki? Mustang Maki G-T? And so he got it because it actually has like really solid self-driving. Okay. Wait, what? Ford does not have solid self-driving. He is specifically for driving from Malibu to the city. He says it's great. Okay. He doesn't know. I mean, yeah, maybe it's not, maybe it's, questionable. Yeah.

Doubt. Anyway, he gets it because, like, it's a good commuter. It'll self-drive. He's happy. And he's gotten a bunch of speeding tickets because it has, like, livery on it. And it looks like a race car. And so he's got three tickets in the last year because he's, the cops just see, like, okay, if I'm looking at four cars that are all going the same speed, I'm going to take,

I'm going to, like, take out the car that has livery. That is crazy. Well, the way George Hatz calculates it is we're at one intervention every 3,000 miles now, and we're basically doubling that every year. And so he estimates that Tesla will be truly full self-driving human level every 500 miles, or 500,000 miles, in eight years. And he says that he's two years behind Tesla. So he will have a full self-driving system that is better than humans.

it's like AGI for driving in 10 years, and the company's 10 years old, so he says he's halfway there, which I thought was cool. But it was interesting to hear his comments. We should play some of these. I'm surprised this hasn't gotten clipped as much as it should have because there's some really spicy hot takes. Find some clips, clip cowboy.

Clip cowboy. David Sack says, if judge based on consumer adoption, AI chatbots are the most popular technology ever, if judge based on poll numbers, they are the least popular. explain this. A big part of it is the Dumer Industrial Complex

hundreds of astroturfed organizations that have spread Dumer narratives about AI. Writer, Nyreit, Weiss Blot, has analyzed this ecosystem and traced its funding to just a few effective altruism billionaires, namely Dustin Moskowitz,

John Tullin, Vitalik Buterin. John Tullen founded Skype. Okay. He's Estonian. Collectively, they have donated over a billion dollars to the cause of catastrophizing AI, those repeating the memes should understand the source. Yeah, this is interesting.

I mean, it does, it, it begs a ton of interesting questions about, like, how intentional is this? Because when I see someone take the AI safety question into the stratosphere and take me into Terminator world, I do, my, my natural reaction is like, oh, like, just let people build whatever they want. But then I'm like, no, I actually don't want. infinite AI slop for children with adult content. Like, I do want that barrier.

And that's not decel. Or I wouldn't call it decel, but maybe it's slightly desal. I don't know. I think here's the thing. Here's the thing. As AI starts getting better, as agents start getting better at longer and longer term tasks,

and can actually do things that like take, you know, reasoning at multiple steps. Yeah, yeah. I think the Terminator scenarios, where you could let an AI loose and it's just operating indefinitely against some sort of objective

start to be a little bit more for people for I would say like the broader tech community to like wrap their head around but right now they're just so bad at long-term tasks for the most part except for like some instances of like engineering work there certainly is

some level of value of just being like for an average person, like think of the Terminator instead of like, well, if you're in this chat bot and you go down this thing, and they'll be talking about mirrors and there'll be a lot of m-dashes and then they might go a little bit crazy, but you can't really tell. And then they might be able to pull out of it and they'll be fine later. But then some people might go way too far and become like one-shot it. And it's this complex thing.

And they're like still pretty high functional and they can still run a venture fund. But they're like kind of weird online. And it's like, well, how do it? I process that as opposed to be like if we don't get this right it's Terminator and you're like okay yeah we got to get it right right as opposed to like the more nuanced thing um but yes it is very interesting to understand like how the money is flowing and what the incentives are because there are a ton of incentives and there's and there are all sorts of and there are all sorts of little schemes that can go on to to to to capture you know like regulatory capture stuff and there's

uh just hey i just want to make i just want to you know get paid to do this thing or get paid to write sci-fi or whatever. There's so many- DC says there's not much positive media about AI. That's another thing. I've been wondering, the media obviously will use some of the sources that have been funded by this group.

But at the same time, they were already pretty well set up to talk about the potential downside scenarios of AI development. Taylor in the chat says, dang, they named their capital after the guy that built Skype. Wait, what?

The capital of Estonia's Tallinn. Oh, it is. That is crazy. Jan Tallinn. That's wild. Well, we have our first in-studio guest of the day. Soren Munra Anderson. Let me tell you about Google AI Studio.

Create an AI powered app faster than ever. Gemini understands the capabilities you need and automatically wires up the right models and APIs for you. Get started at AI. At studio slash build. Sorry, good to see you. Good to see you. Congratulations.

Give us the news. What happened today? Yeah. So today, Neros is announcing our $75 million series B. Do I ring the gong or just- You hit the gong? If you might hit the gong, please hit the gong for us. Thank you.

Hit it. Boom. So for those who have been living in a foxhole. Yeah. Whoa. Powerful. Power of power. Very good owner.

For those who have been living in a foxhole, what do you do? How do you describe the business and the shape of the business right now? Yeah, so NEROS is focused on low-cost drones, primarily for the military. So we say we are trying to build an asymmetric advantage for the West. What that means is our products have extremely high impact on the battlefield, but are low-cost and are built with consumer technology, which allows us to produce at large scale. We're very focused on manufacturing as well. So that's kind of in a nutshell what we're doing. But right now we're focused on FPV drones. So first-person view drones. These are, very precise, manually piloted systems. Manually piloted. Yep. And it's the type of drone that's revolutionized the war in Ukraine. I think FPVs and Starlink are like the two technologies that have allowed Ukraine to do as well as they have and defend themselves.

And so we saw that back in 2023 when we started the company. And both myself and Olaf come from a drone racing background. We were both professional drone racing pilots. and we saw this technology was actually like changing the nature of warfare. And so that's what we got into this and realized the whole supply chain is generally controlled by China for this type of drone and just drones in general. So our biggest focus is on a China-free supply chain and manufacturing this stuff in America and in the West. What percentage of drone, FPV drones that are active in Ukraine are dependent on Starlink today? Can you actually do Starlink to the drone?

Because Direct to Cell is coming, but drones, it's not as big as a plane. Because there's also the, what is the really light wires that you can? Fiber optic. Fiber optic. Yeah. I'm going to hear about that too. So, yeah, they're experimenting with tons of different types of comms. Starlink is used on larger drones, not typically on FPV drones.

Got it. It's a little bit higher. Because there's like, yeah, a little bit of lag that would make it. Yeah, latency and then just the size of the terminal. so it doesn't make it ideal for our use case, where we're focused on very low latency comms, and we actually do custom communications links at NEROS. So that's one of our focuses is that low latency anti-jam characteristic.

And that's also what fiber optic is used for, because you can't jam fiber. Yeah. It feels like AI is so controversial, adult content getting one shot. How does it feel working in an uncontroversial category now? I mean, I don't think, are you being, are you being sarcastic? It does feel like a lot of the, a lot of the, like, you know, is this, is this bad energy has been absorbed? Like, you're not going to crash the global economy. It feels like the, the vibes have definitely shifted.

Give me, like, the broader update on, like, how you think that just military technology in general is being perceived by America or any constituents. Yeah, I do think there's been a huge shift in the last. couple years. The world's watching what's happening in Ukraine and thinking to themselves, well, if it can happen to them, it can happen to us. And so it's no longer controversial to think that you have to build systems that allow you to defend your territory. And so that's what like, our primary goal is territorial defense of sovereign nations. And that should be a very uncontroversial thing to work on. Now, there's a lot of talent out there that just doesn't want to work on defense or isn't comfortable working on actual like kinetic systems. But we're, you know,

very upfront about what we do. We make drones that explode. And so if people do want to work on that, then they tend to be very, very motivated because they see the impact that it's happening. Do you like Palmer's framing of like America as not the world police, but as the world's arms dealer, this idea that America should be turning all of our adversaries or all of our, all of our allies into spiky porcupines. I think that's the phrase he uses. Do you like that? Yeah, I think that's a great framing.

I'd also say there's a tremendous amount of development being done in other places right now where America actually needs to like catch up. So the other like large announcement that we have today is that we were selected by the U.S. Army's purpose built, attritable system program. In normal speak, it's basically the way that the Army is going to buy our type of drone, buy FPV drones. So this is a really big deal because it shows that the Department of War and the Army are moving very quickly on actually getting these drones deployed to their forces and teaching people how to fly FPV. And this is currently, like, the U.S. is so far behind on this right now.

But you have, like the Marine Corps, we just announced a $17 million purchase order with them. The Army selected us for the P-Bass program. You've got the drone dominance and just all the support from the top level with Hegsef. The Department of War is very, very serious about drones now, which is incredible to see. Yeah, I was wondering about how you balance out that framing of like, we have to build for a Ukrainian person, a Ukrainian soldier, because the Ukraine war is not a place where we're sending hundreds of thousands of Americans. boots on the ground. Like, that's not what the modern battlefield looks like.

It looks much more like this arms dealer relationship that Palmer outlines. But at the same time, we do need to keep our own armed forces equipped with the best technology. We need them up to speed in case something does happen and we do go boots on the ground. How do you think about, like, is it like a tech transfer where you're using stuff

you've learned in Ukraine and bring that to the army and just getting them up to speed? this Marine Corps? Like, how do the two, what is the flow between the R&D cycle that's happening abroad for another nation, for an ally, and then also something that's happening for American soldiers? Yeah, that's a great question. It's all about the iteration loop that we can build. Yeah.

And so this is why NEROS operates in Ukraine. We have an office in Ukraine. We have a team there, and we've sent thousands of systems to Ukraine. And so what that allows us to do is work directly with the military units there and understand how our systems are working. and not working. A lot of U.S. companies, unfortunately, deployed things into Ukraine at the start of the full-scale invasion, but then were turned off by the fact that their things didn't work, and people told them they didn't work, and then they didn't go through the cycle of improving them.

And then you hear a lot of talk about sort of the regulatory hurdles and why it's hard to work with Ukraine, which it is. There are plenty of hurdles, but it's absolutely critical that we're looking at, you know, the cutting edge, the battlefield where this stuff is being proven, being developed. to make it actually effective for our soldiers because I have a pretty strong feeling that a lot of the technology that's being developed in America right now is going to fall flat on its face when it actually sees prime time.

Yeah. Jordy? Do countries want a sovereign, like, drone manufacturing base? Are you exploring? Because like part of, I think, Ukraine's success, at least, and at least dragging this war into this, like, you know, basically like slowing the pace has been their own internal production capacity, which I'm sure you guys, I don't know if you would classify it as like competing with, but like certainly I'm sure like the systems

are both being used in the same fronts. So I'm wondering in the same way that countries want like a sovereign AI strategy, they want their own data centers, if they also want to make sure they have local drone capacity, or if they're comfortable saying, like, we have our partner for this, and we just need to know that we can scale up the supply side on whenever we want. Yeah, countries absolutely do want their own drone industrial base, their own, like, domestic supply. And this is something we recognize and we're working on. So I think it's, you got to realize that the supply chain has to be somewhat global to compete with China.

There's no one country that's even close. And so if we're going to have a chance at this, it's a collaborative effort. The way Neros thinks about this is, you know, at some point we're going to build a massive factory that's capable of giant volumes. But what's coming out of that factory might be, you know, 70% components and drones that are assembled in other places,

like these nodes that are in other countries. We think it's really important to be a, Western defense company, not just an American defense company. And that's, you know, again, with our work in Ukraine, we have a presence in London. We are also, we're basically expanding globally earlier than I could have guessed and earlier than most startups do, because drones are a category that are inherently, like countries want it close to their chest, and they want to work with systems that are proven and that are interoperable with their allied partners, but they do need that industrial-based domestically.

And so would you pursue like a go-co model at some point where like a country would actually like own the facility and you guys would effectively like provide the IP on that? Is that a model that you guys are pursuing? Yeah, that's definitely something that we are looking into. We are trying to figure out how to build out the most robust supply chain and then put our, you know, put our manufacturing into a, not a literal box, but into a box, and be able to teach kind of any group of folks around the globe, like, this is how you assemble archers. And a lot of that also looks like building really great testing and just being very confident in the components in the supply

chain. And so it's a very, very large effort to get there, but we are going in that direction. What's the progress on the capacity front? I think when we had you on the show, last you were in the, was it single, like you were doing, I want to say it was some like a thousand drones a month, but you're ramping it up from there. How's the pacing? Yeah, so right now we're currently, like actually producing about 2,500 archers per month. That's mostly driven by demand. So we're ready to scale well beyond that. And we've been on a pretty like steady ramp since the, that thousand number earlier this year. And we're leaning very full. And we're leaning very full. on our capacity and our supply chain because we do expect that the tens of thousands a month

demand is going to be there next year. And Ukraine's using something like five million drones a year or something? That's right. So, I mean, you're at like 1%, but obviously that's incredible considering that you started the company just a few years ago. As far as we know, NEROS is the highest rate drone producer in America. No one has proved us wrong on that yet. I'm sure they'll reach out if.

Yeah, yeah. So what are the, you mentioned pathways in the military now that you can become an FPV pilot. Is that going to be a track now in the various groups, whether it's, you know, Army, Navy, et cetera, where people will go in and choose, like, I want to be an FPV pilot? It's not set in stone yet, but there's various different paths. So Neros does training courses. We offer this as a service to our customers. But there are also efforts, like you can look at the Marine Corps attack drone team. They've done a fantastic job just leaning forward and sort of like from the bottoms up figuring out FPV tactics and training a group of experts.

And then they're passing that across the whole Marine Corps. So you see that a lot in the FPV world where guys are actually into it as hobbyists. And then they see, you know, what's happening in Ukraine. and they're like, wow, we actually need to figure this out for our own unit. And so it just kind of happens organically. And then now with all the top level support as well, those two things are kind of meeting in the middle. Take me through a little bit of the supply chain. Obviously with the iPhone completely made in China, there's a push to make an iPhone in America.

But everyone knows that it's going to be Vietnam, India, South Korea, Taiwan, a bunch of other things in the interim. You mentioned wanting to be a Western defense company. where are you seeing pockets of just excitement on the industrial side within the American allies world? Like, where are you finding, oh, we can find motors in Canada or Taiwan's coming online for something or else? Like, where's interesting in the supply chain globally? People are really starting to pay attention to the like critical minerals, which is, you know, super, super important for things like motors and batteries. Sure. So, you know, there was a deal that I think was announced last week, like a $1.5 billion deal with Vulcan elements in the Department of War.

There is similar efforts with like MP materials domestically. And we do see like smaller kind of startups going after the actual motor assembly side. So that one I think has been pretty clearly highlighted and people are working on it. It goes, you know, beyond nearest, beyond the drone industry. It's just like a industrial-based wide problem when you get to the material level. Is there so redwood, redwood materials, which is just recent. Recycling. I imagine if you're on a battlefield and you're blowing up a bunch of drones, and you can go and get the magnets back. Like, that's a pretty easy thing to recycle, I would imagine, although it's probably hard to get it out of the battlefield.

Yeah, getting out of the battlefield would be very difficult. But think about all the washing machines. For sure. You know, old washing machines in there. There's so much neodymium there. I don't know how big the supply is. I didn't realize that's so much in there. I mean, just think about anything that has an electric motor that's here domestically. that is stuff that can be recycled. So there is a little bit more, like, there are things that give me hope, but there's plenty of things that scare me. Nearest, we spend a lot of our time

going down to the chip level, because one of the things we see pretty frequently in the drone industry is folks saying that they're, you know, NDA compliant, basically not Chinese, and it just means the component is assembled outside of China, but it's still using Chinese microchips. And to us, that's kind of useless.

So we spend a lot of our time working with the actual chip vendors like the chip manufacturers, because you have to ensure, like, this, the wafer's not made in China, it's not packaged in China, it never goes through there from the supply chain. And that's, like, not something that's required by the regulations yet. So we're trying to get ahead of that. And we're going very, very deep. But the problems scare me all across the entire supply chain. Are there any places where it is fine to buy from China? I'm just imagining, like, like, raw aluminum. Like, that's not in short supply. It's just something that you kind of need. And you can't really put a microchip in there or a microphone or do some sort of remote takeover.

Like, it is what it is, just buy it from wherever. Yeah, I think there's an 80-20 rule. I don't think that our progress on, for example, like our progress fielding FPV systems to U.S. forces should not be stopped by a requirement that everything has to be completely trying to free right now. because it wouldn't be possible. And so what you want to think about is preparing for the instance where that is completely cut off. And what would be items that are quick to replace? And when we do our efforts to get rid of China in our bomb, it's basically looking at the things that are most critical first

and putting our engineering, like limited engineering resources towards those. And then the things that would be less catastrophic, those are lower down in the priority step. That's Bill of Materials, not B-O-M-B. Sorry, yes, Bill of Materials. It's easy to confuse when you're talking about nearest. It is, it is. I was confused.

Well, I wasn't confused. I just assumed you were talking about an actual... Take that a tour of what... I don't know how much you can share about this, but what are people excited about on the counter-UAS side? Because we've seen Anvil. We've seen then electronic takeover,

then there's the fiber optics thing, that we've seen. There's been a whole bunch of, it feels like a game of like rock paper scissors on the battlefield. Is it just rock paper scissors or is it more like chess?

Is it a 12D chess? I saw a video of throwing up nets over Redways. I've seen eagles come in and birds. Like what's actually getting used? I imagine that the birds didn't make it out into the field

but did they? I don't know. The answer is kind of everything because it has to be layered. So you have your EW systems. Sure. Those are kind of your primary line of defense.

They're sort of passive? FPVs. I mean, they're passive. Well, you're activating them because you also need your own drones to be able to get through, right? So this is one of the things that's actually very tricky in Ukraine is coordinating the friendly electronic warfare with the friendly drones so that you can pass over that sort of line on the front and get over into enemy territory.

So there actually needs to be a pretty close tie between the electronic warfare operators and the drone operators. You also have sort of the last-ditch efforts, and this is things like nets and shotguns. And I'd say sort of an in-between of that is something like what Allen Control Systems is building, where you have an automated gun turret. It is just smacking drones out of the sky.

But personally, I want to try to take that drone out well before it gets within hundreds of meters of where I'm at. So that's where longer range, electronic warfare, things like that are going to help. But is there any, is there, what's a path to having like an FPV drone is flying, using computer vision to identify another maybe enemy drone, and then having some type of like locking system where you're using drone, a friendly drone to take out another drone in the sky?

It's already happening. Yeah. Drone on drone warfare is a very real thing now. So interceptors have become one of the sort of latest big developments coming out of, Ukraine. So they're intercepting everything from, you know, small FPVs, Mavix, larger reconnaissance drones, and then Shawhead-type drones. And so you need different types of interceptors for each of those. But we are starting to get to that point that a lot of people have imagined where it's, you know, the front line is like drones versus drones. And a lot of the time you're not even making it to a

kind of typical military target because there's just so much drone activity happening. Take me through the biggest or the most exquisite drone that we might see on the battlefield versus the least exquisite. So I imagine that there's no drones that cost $1 that's just too cheap. And there's no drones that cost a billion dollars. But are we in the, there's a thousand dollar drone, there's a million dollar drone? Like how wide is the gap of like if you just look at the whole battlefield, what's the gap between like the scale of like the biggest most insane drone to like the smallest, most attritable?

Yeah, drone means so many different things. It's really confusing. Sure. Isn't F-35 a drone? Right. Might be in a certain context. So I'd say like the lowest end is kind of your, your, like, FPV system. That's, you know, if you're like getting that in Ukraine, it could be $200, $300.

Yeah. Primarily built from Chinese components, but, you know, very inexpensive. Almost like like consumer level hardware. It is consumer level hardware. I mean, it's been modified to perform better. And then they like tape a grenade on it. Yeah, exactly. Does Russia ever.

call China and say, why are you guys supplying a component tree that gets into the, like, hands of our enemy? Or is it just kind of like, is if I'm Putin, I'm calling up Xi and I'm saying, hey, our number one problem right now is basically you. Yeah. I would say China has benefited by far, like absolutely the most from selling to both sides. of Ukraine. They are deliberately selling to both sides and millions of units. I mean, it is, you know, billions, tens of billions of dollars being generated for the economy in China based on the war in Ukraine. And you can even see, like, Ukrainian entrepreneurs will talk about this, where they go to Shenzhen and they're negotiating deals to buy hundreds of millions of dollars of components.

And technically, it's banned in China, but everyone's benefiting. So why would they stop it? Okay. Take me up the stack. So you have a two. $200 drone, Chinese components off the shelf. What's the most exquisite drone that either rush out or be in my Before we get higher, there was a YC company that got announced last week using drones to take out mosquitoes. A lot of people were saying, it's for assassinations. Well, that's what they were saying. Well, yeah, but they were saying, like, this is impossible.

Oh. Is it possible? I have no idea. It's hard to say. I probably wouldn't use drones for taking out mosquitoes, but best of luck to them. Apparently the founder is just like obsessed. Everyone was like, oh, he's doing this for defense tech. And it's like, no, actually this founder just hates mosquitoes.

And he's like obsessed. He's been on a lifelong quest to like kill the mosquito, which is hilarious. I do, I align with that. I grew up in Alaska and there's a horrible amount of mosquitoes. So if it works, I'm going to be pumped. You grew up in Alaska. What's with all these Alaskan kids around? Do you grow up near Ty Moors?

We grew up in Anchorage, yeah. Together? We didn't know each other. Okay, you didn't know each other. This was a crazy connection. That is a crazy connection because I feel like there's a lot of shared In a town of 200 people, you guys didn't know each other? Basically.

What's the actual population? It's like 350,000 in Anchorage. Yeah, that's pretty big. Yeah. Yeah, that is crazy. And I don't know how we, you know, now we've connected and like I crashes at my apartment when he's in town. So good Alaska connection.

He's been on a great run. That video that you put out or that he did with like checking in on the gun now, the whole like round table was awesome because I feel like two years ago or something we met and the total amount rate. across the entire gondo crew was like five million bucks and now it's like close to half a billion. Yeah, that's wild to think about. In one of the group chats earlier this morning, Isaiah posted his raise. And then we posted our raise and someone else was like another quarter billion to the fellas.

It's insane. It's ridiculous. It's good. It's exactly what should happen. Like when the reason, I mean, the gundo was like this meme. It was this moment. It was this like, oh, like there's this cool movement happening. But like fundamentally it was like, okay, this is actually what works and this is where the capital should be going. It should not be going to.

Yeah, the scams and the frauds and all the other junk. The critique was a lot of these companies aren't going to work. You can apply that critique to any sector or region that gets venture capital dollars. Anyway, so we're moving up. The critique was kind of valid, right? Because there was a lot of like, we were talking about crazy ambitious things that were, you know, and also in a kind of silly manner. Sure.

which attracted a lot of attention. And I think there's reason to critique that, but now you see that the Elsugendo companies are truly executing. And that's where the difference is. Like we went heads down for a year and a half, two years, and now the results are starting. It was very clearly in that group chat, like a somewhat of a moratorium on posting at some point.

Yes. Which I love. We got to get off the timeline. But it worked. It worked. And it was great because there was a world where it was like, okay, everyone in El Sigendo winds up becoming a podcaster. And it's like, okay, well, there's actually nothing getting built.

Like, you guys really did get like lost in the sauce, but that never happened. It was just like, oh, wow, another puff piece from the legacy media. And they just, and it was great because that's super high leverage because you just like show up, you get the thing. And then you move on and get back. Moving up the stack. Move up the stack for us. Yeah. So on the other end of the range of drone, that, I would call that like the CCA collaborative combat aircraft.

You know, the Anderl is working on as well as other startups and primes. I mean, it's an autonomous fighter jet. It's hard to get more exquisite than that in the drone world. So Anderl just flew theirs yesterday, the YFQ 44A, and then General Atomic has a similar program in the CCA. Those aren't live in Ukraine yet, right? No, definitely not. Okay. So then there must be something that's like the next best that's out there.

Is that right? Well, there's tons of... There's too many categories in drones. So you go up the stack from FPV to a fixed wing that'll go 50, 100 kilometers. Then you're also looking at a bunch of reconnaissance drones. Sure. You have things like DGI MAVX, like small, cheap, but also up to really expensive fixed wings. And those are kind of all like deployable by one or two people.

And then you get into the really big stuff and that's your like reapers. And kind of in between that is the like shield V-bat. So you can look at all, there's a group one through five classification for drones. And within those, there's tons of different categories. And are you firmly in one group and you plan to stay there? Do you want to be in all five groups? Is that even like the right way to think about growing your business? Or are there other business lines that you could expand into that doesn't just mean total dominance of the groups?

Yeah. So true success for Neros means making the West drone industrial base competitive with China. Yeah. So there's a lot to do. in that, right? We're not going to just be doing FPV drones in the future, but we do know that like focus is probably the most important thing for a startup. And the market for FPV drones is massive and only growing. And they are like, I believe they are the most important type of drone to be working on right now. And until America can produce them in the millions, we are pretty focused

on that. Yeah, makes sense. What is the state of drone racing today? Is it growing in popularity or is it staying staying niche? Is it, yeah, are you guys hiring out of it? We are definitely hiring out of it. We have lots of drone racers on the nearest team. Yeah, it's been a great talent pool. I do think that, unfortunately,

it has sort of fallen off in popularity from its peak. But I do think it's going to come back, especially with all of the relevance to military. We're starting to even see military drone racing leagues coming up and that's where I think that is going to become the

pipeline for drone racing talent in the future. The new like sport shooting where on a base it's like who can who's the fastest most accurate pilot versus. Yeah, drone on drone would be fun. The other thing that would be interesting, I don't know if anyone's doing this, but autonomous drone racing league, that feels like pretty valuable to build out that skill set. Can you, can you write, can you as a team build a software stack that gets you through all of the different obstacles?

while you're being jammed or while there's flashing lights going on and off and adding some sort of variability. Yeah, I think you would have to add a lot of variability because the hardest thing about autonomy is not making a drone go to a known point. Sure. Or making many drones go to a known point. It's operating when you don't have GPS, when it's dark out, when there's bad weather, when your comm's denied. That's why autonomy is, I think it's behind where most people think. Totally. Like most drones in Ukraine are not autonomous at all.

And so... But that's true of self-driving cars in America. Yeah. Like, there's a lot of teleop going on. There's a lot of stuff like that. And yeah, we're just still years away from it actually being. Exactly. And we're huge believers in autonomy.

Of course. We're scaling our autonomy program. And it's going to make drones just so much more effective for soldiers. But there's been AI drone racing leagues for a long time. And, like, the University of Zurich has been working on this for many years. and they have a drone that's beaten, like, professional pilots around a closed course. But it only works in a closed course. And often they have, you know, hundreds of camera angles and they're, like, tracking the position of the drone from outside the drone.

Yeah, that doesn't actually apply. That doesn't count. Exactly. Yeah, you need to narrow it down. Because I imagine that I have this joke, this is like joke of a test for AGI, which is like, I want the humanoid robot to get into a manual sports car and do the Nürberg ring in seven minutes. like shifting gears with the G-forces. Like that is extremely difficult, and we are clearly decades away from that.

And I think the same thing is probably true for actual drone racing, like how long it takes if you don't have all of the extra of perfect information, like you actually try and simulate what it's like for the human. Well, I think the lap record on the Nuregring for a manual sports car is, I think it's right above seven minutes. So they'd have to be doing really well. Got to get them down. A robot can take it to the edge, right?

Like, a robot could crash like 20 times in order to actually get the lap time. So potentially you could be like, well, on this corner we can hit it at 180, even though like there's a 51% chance. We'll go into the barrier. Can we do the next episode from the Nurembergring? For sure. That would be amazing. From the passenger seat. I'd love that.

Up the stakes. Have you gotten into racing? I know some of the Gundow guys love racing. Yeah, I mean, I love racing sports from a young age and, you know, was focused on drone racing for about 10 years, but I'm also a huge car guy

and so I follow a lot of it. That's cool. We're going to do a TBPN track day. That would be incredible. You will get the invite. Yeah. What's the team size like? How big is the company? So we're about 80 people now and we're hiring as fast as we can. And are you going to stay in El Segundo? Do you have to graduate and leave.

They're already global. It's already an international businessman. Yeah, but I mean, in terms of HQ, it feels like El Sikendo is like this amazing, like, proving ground for all these companies. But at a certain point, if you want 20,000 square feet, 200,000 square feet, it just makes sense to like, even just go like one, you know, one city over. But what's that like? We're expanding and we're trying to stay in El Sikendo.

Cool. There are big buildings. Yeah, ABL is there, right? It's, yeah. I mean, you have to kind of be intentional about it. and it's not an easy real estate market by any means, but we're trying very hard because I think the city's done a lot for us and we want to stay there.

And yeah, we're growing a ton in the headquarters in Los Angeles as well as our other global locations. So really, I would say the biggest limiting factor to our execution is just the number of great people we can get on board. Is there going to be like a separation on like where the factory is at some point? Like you'd set up a factory in like a Midwestern city or something like that at some point? Yeah, that's very likely. At some point it doesn't make sense to do the scale that we're talking about in California.

But you have access to the best engineering talent. Sure. Sure. So for design stuff. Design and then you still need a lot of those engineers to be willing to also go out to the factory, wherever it is. Because it is critical to have your engineering talent right next to your production. What about automation on the process? production line. Like get me up to speed on, on how relevant that is versus you're trying to

iterate. And at a certain point, you might learn something from the battlefield and need to change the entire design so you don't want to bake everything in, right? Yeah. Automate is the last step in the formula. And so you can even look at like the iPhone production where, you know, they make a new version every year. And a lot of that is hand assembly done with like simple tooling. Tooling is really important and being smart about your workstations and your work instructions and, you know, you want to be making it as easy as possible for the human operator, but a lot of the time it does not make sense to automate. So is the DJI blackout factory fake news? I think it's real. You think it's real? Yeah. And it's hard to say because the last time

they let a camera into a DGI factory was like five years ago. But I think that should tell you something about what they're working on. Interesting. Well, they could be faking it, right? Because they could be like, yeah. Because if the iPhone, I think the iPhone, I think the phone pulls in like two million migrants. It's just a bunch of people, bunch of workers in there with night vision goggles. Yeah, we turn the lights off like we got you owned. Like, tried this. Americans. You guys suck. And it's just like working with night vision. I don't know. But you think they're pretty advanced. But at some point it doesn't,

you know, you're like you don't think it breaks the laws of physics or something. So, well, it doesn't necessarily matter if they're able to produce at scale at cost, which they're already doing. So whether they're doing it all with robots or all with people, they're already able to do it. So it doesn't really matter. We need to figure out how we can do it in America. Totally, totally.

Yeah, that makes sense. It's funny. Great stuff. Well, thank you for the update. Thanks for doing this work. And congratulations on the round. Thank you guys. Great to see you.

We'll see you at the track. Awesome. Track soon. We'll talk to you soon. Thank you so much. Let me tell you about profound. Get your brand mentioned in Chet. reach millions of consumers who are using AI to discover new products and brands.

Our next guest is already here in the TBP and Ultradome. Looking fantastic. What an outfit. You're going to have to break that down for us. Thank you so much. Jeff from Anderl, great to see you. You too, brother. Every guy should have like 20 or 30 jackets like this.

It built it up over time. For me, Bay. Did not smell great. Yeah, yeah, that's the problem. That's the problem. That's the problem. Great to have you here. Great to be here. For those who aren't familiar, please introduce yourself. My name is Jeff Miller. I'm the VP of Marketing at Anderl. How'd you wind up there? Long, windy story. So I was starting out in advertising. I was inspired by those old Spike Lee commercials. It's got to be the shoes. I always knew I wanted to work in advertising and marketing. Worked on Ogilvie, then went to PepsiCo, where you build great classic brand marketing principle.

And then I decided I wanted to go and do something that felt much harder, much more foreign to me. So I went to L.A. Spent six years here working at SNAP and had an incredible experience there, building pre-IPO as they went public and beyond. And I had a global team at one point. But the way I described it there was a great formative experience, but it felt a lot like eating potato chips. It was really fun, but it was, you know, tasted good in the second, but didn't leave any sort of meaningful impact on me beyond just the moment. And so I was looking for something more impactful. And that's what drew me to Anderol.

How do you think about who you're targeting with Anderol marketing? Because it feels like I've never bought an Anderall product. I love the brand. Is that relevant? But in an alternate timeline, you would have worked at the company. Yeah. So is it recruiting focused? Or are you actually trying to do brand marketing that will hit with like the buyer in D.C.?

Do you think about it that way? Are you at all quantitative? Or is it like way, is it just a way higher level? The way we think about it is that we, of course, are thinking about the operators that are going to use our actual products and thinking about the Pentagon, the people are going to buy it. Yeah, yeah. But ultimately, we're also thinking about our employee base, our future employees. So how do we be thinking about brand as a talent magnet? But even broader than that, we think about Americans at large.

For us, we believe defense deserves really strong brands. The war fighters deserve strong brands. And I think if you look at the current administration, what they're doing with the Department of War and their storytelling, or even, let's give an announcement to the Marines, the 250th anniversary today of the Marines. And you look at the content they put out over the weekend. It just makes you want to enlist. And for us, it's been a historically opaque industry

that has really lived in the value of not telling clear stories. And we see the complete opposite. We think that this story deserves to be told for our warfighters, for the American taxpayer to understand what we do and why it's so important. Yeah. What was the historical marketing strategy of the primes? Did they do, like, how did they even think about their marketing? Because obviously you came in and you're like, hey, let's reinvent marketing in this category.

They are iconic brands. Like, like, there's just no denying that every, if you just walked down the street, you know what Raytheon is? Do you know what Rocky is? Like, people don't know. iconic because when you look at some of the products that they've made, specifically like fighter aircraft, certain firearms, et cetera, like they are iconic products that like make you, you know, people post like the B-21 Raider as like a meme.

Yeah. You know that you're onto something if your product is being turned into a meme. But I just wonder if there was any history of them doing saying, hey, let's do an out-a-home campaign. Yeah. Well, what I think you're hitting on is a really important point. When we talk about brand here, it starts with the product itself. Product is brand, I think, in our category as much as any. Yeah.

Because it has this great ability to speak to national security in a way that will rally the country to really think about what's great in about America, about advanced manufacturing, about innovation, about what Americans hard at work can achieve. So if you look back at the 50s, 60, 70s, there's incredible advertising that you would see from Lockheed and from the other primes. And that's something that... And were these like Porsche style ads where it's like a lot of text

and just like a picture of it? And it's like, you know, the F-16 is not just a fighter jet. You know, it's a great ice. So I worked at a company named Ogilvy Mayther and David Ogilvie is famous for starting that style of that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The long lead copy.

And I think why that resonates so well in the context of Porsche is because ultimately it's just a really great story about a problem. that isn't for everyone, but resonates with a specific set of people. And in a lot of ways, those are the principles we use today. Yeah. Walk through, like, how you actually think about a whole campaign.

I feel like Andrew will launch is a lot of products, and there's a lot of different tools in the tool chest. Like, I'm thinking about the Eagle Eye launch. There was obviously a video. There was also, like, a Joe Rogan appearance, which is, like, is that all in one, like, project brief or deck? How do you think about all the different touch points? Because there's so many with something like Anderl

where product marketing for a new launch might be a dinner in D.C. Or it might be a Joe Rogan appearance. There's so much that you can do that's not just like, okay, make sure the Facebook ads are turned on. Well, what I think you're seeing rather than something like Facebook ads is we're really speaking to capabilities versus selling ads in the way that we think about it. And I want to give a real credit to the team behind here.

So Shannon Pryor on our VP of Communications, Jen Bucci, our VP of Design, Andrew Lee, who's director of product marketing, all of these people together are working closely with their division, with their business line, with their founders on how do we tell one cohesive story? And I think what's important here, it's not a template that we use, depending what that product launch is, depending on the message that we're trying to communicate, depending on who the core customer is, all of those influence the approach that we take. So those elements that you spoke about for Eagle Eye, all of those were worked in close coordination.

What was true, and I think is always true of the products that we launch, is it's always first and foremost about demonstrating real capabilities. We have a rule. This comes straight from Palmer, no-render rule. And what that means is that we're never going to fake our capabilities. We're going to always demonstrate the work that we do in a way that's reflective of the actual capabilities themselves. So what you see on screen here is a real capability of Eagle Eye. It's mission planning. We had another vignette that spoke to our heightened survivability, our lethal capability. And what I give a lot of credit to our design team is the way they thought about this was actually showing the real first person perspective that is a true capability of the product.

And then our social team, what we were really clear on is you've got to drop people straight into the action. The way that you're going to get them to buy in is actually showing it and not doing a lot of build up before you get to the capability. You did an out of home campaign for don't work at Anderol. Are you doing an out of home campaign for Eagle Eye? Is that relevant? How do you decide where to do what? So I personally am the biggest fan of out of home. And I think there's reasons that I love it that translate to things like NASCAR.

It's an undervalued asset when you think about it in the context of a marketer. If you really understand how to use a canvas in an intentional way, you can really stand out. So when we think about outdoor, we're thinking about how it's going to show up on social as well. You guys have an amazing job of that as you think about the clips on the show. for us, every time we're talking in outdoor, we have one simple rule, say less. And that, it's like you have to have, it's another old Ogilvy role. He says seven words or less. I like to say five words or less on it. So for Eagle Eye, we had a very simple line, superpowers for superheroes. And we demonstrate the capabilities. Or when we showcase Fury, which you guys were

talking about with Soren, we say, fight unfair. And so you have these lines that have a really clear perspective that should make people immediately think about what you're saying. Whether they understand it in the moment or not, it should stick with them. Yeah. And I think it just, we've seen, we review out of home campaigns all the time on the show because we see them hit the timeline. We talk about them. We love advertising. We love advertising. We love advertising. Genuinely. I'd like to, maybe you like advertising as much as us, but there's not many. I love it. You're in the conversation. But it is hard when if you're a new startup and you're selling a piece of software that isn't highly visual and people aren't familiar with your brand.

Just like as much as you might want to be, I'm David Ogilvy, I got this good tagline. It's just not going to break through as opposed to, okay, if you show me a picture of a plane, even if it's a little bit look, if it looks different and the landing gear is a little bit different, I'm going to know that's a drone. That's a plane. That's a piece of military technology. There's all these cues that you can lean into. Also, Anderle's so big now, like just.

You must, you must driving, driving. People are aware of it. Driving on the 101 into SF, the disparity and quality of the outdoor. Tell us about this. Tell us the story. Tell us the story. So, Tray tweets at me at, like, on Monday at 7.36 a.m. He's going to the Office of Founders Fund, and he's looking at his 37th terrible enterprise

SaaS ad on the 101. And he says, can we please just put a fury on a billboard on the 101? So I have to stop looking at these ads. And he tags at me directly. I take this as a personal challenge. So when I worked at Gator, we talked about moving at the speed of sport. So for me,

at this point, it was the challenge is on. We had to have something live the very next day. So by the next day, we had an ad on the 101. And I tweeted, I didn't even tell him I was doing this,

like right back at him. And credit to our team, again, moving quickly. It was a giant fury that said, it said AI for fighter jets, not enterprise SaaS. Yeah. I love, last time,

last time, actually wasn't last trip, but a few trips ago to SF, I saw a billboard. I was so confused by it that I went to the website because I was like, who is running out of home in such a confusing way? I land on the website. Still don't know what the product is. What are they doing?

So I think that just that clarity without a home is so important where I not only saw the ad, I went, I did what they wanted. I imagined, go to the website. And I'm still come away from it being like, what does this company do? They have enough money to buy billboards. But yeah, I still, I mean, I still, we work with AdQuick. Obviously, we're biased. But I still think that out of home is the most undervalued form of advertising. 100%.

And you hit one of the keywords on the head. We don't look at marketing as superficial or fluff. Marketing for us brings clarity. And when you apply clarity with context, that's when out of home can be greater, really any medium. But a couple examples I love are in Dayton Airport. If you fly into there, it's about 10 minute drive to write Patterson. in Air Force Base. So where we have our customer for what you referenced earlier, YFQ44A, is right there outside of Dayton. And for those of you that know the history of Ohio,

Dayton was also the cradle, the birthplace of aviation, where the Wright brothers were working on their original Wright Flyer. In fact, if you're in that airport, you will see a replica of the right flyer hanging from the ceiling. Right behind that, you will see a full-scale fury where it simply says actual size. And so that context, that ad would only work in the context that airport. You put that in any other airport in America, it becomes less relevant. So whether it's on the 101 or whether it's in Dayton Airport, we're always thinking about the media placement as much as the message. And you had Kugan asked about the Don't Work campaign. That's the one time we intentionally leaned into confusion. So our campaign there, the brief to Jen and her team was

simple. I want an ad campaign. It reminds me of that campaign, if you remember, from Netflix. Netflix is a joke. Where when you first see it, you're not sure if it's for it. Anderol or against Anderol. Sure. So the creative they came back, which was beautiful and just really thoughtful, was that we would do a corporate campaign that says work at Andrel. and then, of course, was graffitied, was tagged. And everything that was refuted was saying, don't work there.

And what I gave our team a lot of credit, we'd already bought both URLs. So whether you're going to work at andrel.com or don't work at handle.com, you're still going to land where we want you to land. But it just became provocative in a way that whether you're Boston, Seattle or Atlanta, the three markets we were really focused on with our people team to recruit, you were going to see our message and you couldn't miss it. It was undeniable. What did some of your early mood boards look like for Anderil? I feel like Anderol had effectively first mover advantage in marketing in this new category of like new players in defense. And a lot of the like when I think

about the visual surrounding Anderrol, I think like this is what a modern defense tech company should look like. Maybe that's because I grew up playing Call of Duty and Andrel looks like a lot of the visuals and even even the UI and stuff feels like it just fits into those worlds. And I know a lot of, I'm sure a lot of our armed forces feel the same way. But what was like when you were moodboarding? I don't know if that was a process that you went through with Jen or other people on the team early on. Like what kind of inspiration were you pulling in? Well, you hit there on a few words that are really important for us. When we think about building this brand, we think about building it in a way that is open, that is modern, that is honest, and we do it in a way that we're really conscious

that we're building it for the generation that ultimately is going to be responsible for building national security of the present and the future. So the ability to speak in a language, whether that's our voice, which I'm responsible and our team is responsible for, or our identity that Jen and her team are responsible for, we're always thinking about the way that we can land something that feels really, really unique. And so full credit in terms of the identity work goes to Jen and her team and to Palmer and how they're building.

And this extends from everything from the product identity to our industrial design, environmental, to how we think about the brand identity. And then what I think our team does really well is really establish a clear voice that whether it's on the identity or in the voice, we talk about it as brutalist,

meaning we're not speaking in opaque terms that is typical of the category. We're talking in really, really simple language that a 14-year-old person can understand. If a 14-year-old can't see that and say, I get it, then we've missed the mark. Yeah. No render policy, only anime policy. There's a lot of anime. When do you pull anime off the shelf? Is there going to be an anime video for Eagle Eye? Yes or no, and why or why not? Sure. So we talk a lot about this as the Anderol Cinematic Universe is the way we like to describe it internally. And obviously, it's bored out of a Palmer's,

of passion for anime early on. But it's something that I'm so proud of in the context of what our team is built. Because all of it is, it's not using AI. It's all done through digital handbrush. And it's like a really powerful tool for us because now we've created an aesthetic around it that's specific to us. And it makes it clear that you can look at one frame and you're not confused. You're like, so you can go into the future. And you can actually tell the story of what Anderol might be doing in 10 years and you're never confusing.

and you don't even get in the comments of debates, oh, that's CGI. It's like, of course it came from a computer. Yeah, and we, we, I won't name the company, but John and I were having this debate over a defense tech, hard tech company that we were, there was a three-minute video and we were just going frame by frame. And I was convinced that it was, that it was like CGI or like AI generated.

John was like, ah, like I kind of want to believe it's real. It was both. It was both. They were cutting between so bad. So they actually had a thing that would, take off and fly. This is a company that's a company that's public, right? So they're putting this out. Who is it? Name names. It can

yeah, yeah. It can do vertical takeoff, but not move or something like that. It was weird. It was bizarre. But yeah, so for Eagle Eye, like when would you use that and why and? Well, I think you're speaking to what's important when we make these choices. It's a creative choice first. Sure, sure, sure. And we're thinking about it in the context of where is a really great room for lore and storybuilding. So what I'll tell you is with Eagle Eye,

we had great ability by showing the first person perspective. We thought that was the most impactful way in. But what I will confirm is that there will be a chapter three to the animal, the andro cinematic universe. So just be ready. It's coming in 2026. That's exciting. That's exciting. Talk about sports marketing.

Is that also underrated like out of home? What's been your strategy? Did you dip your toe in with small tests? Now you're doing something big with NASCAR. Walk me through the thesis. That's exactly right. So we dipped our toes with the Chargers, who are a partner of ours.

They actually shared property with us. Their old training facility in Costa. They've now moved to a beautiful facility in El Segundo. But if you're at the game last night, Sunday night football, where Aaron Rogers looked like old man Rogers. Is that good or bad? I didn't call it.

Steelers got smoked. Luckily, I'm an Eagles fan, so I don't mind. Aaron Rogers is on the steeler. He's on the Steelers. Oh, come on, Jordy. No, I seriously. I seriously, we don't know. I thought he was just in the Pat McAfee show.

He might be full-time after last night. I thought he was full-time Pat McAfee. So if you were there, though, what I think is super cool about a partnership like that as we dipped our toes is we had 16 veterans from Anderil that were there. Cool. And the way they got to go to that game is that a colleague from our office from our team nominated them and said why. And it was grounded in their character.

It was grounded in their service, why they were selected to represent our company. And so if you were there watching on their 80-yard infinity screen, You saw our veterans being recognized there and also how much it meant to them to be there. So everything when we look at sports marketing, we look at it as a way to find the ways that we can, yes, find value, but also to stand out in a way that we have the ability to do something unique and that we can honor and reach the military and defense community. So that's why you see us leaning into things like NFL or, of course, NASCAR. NASCAR, more than any other sport, overindexes on that military and defense community. It has about four X the ratings of F1 in America.

Yeah, of course. And so while we see so much oversaturation in F1, the economics of a deal there to be a mid-level sponsor on a mid-level team are still- I know. The disparity in earnings, too, from when you look at the, you know, let's say that the 20th person on the grid is probably making a couple million a year from a salary standpoint. And then some of the, you could be like top 20 in NASCAR.

too, and you're earning a good living. And so the opportunities for companies to support a sport that so many Americans love and be able to be a meaningful player in that is amazing. And this is called great brands in this country, consumer brands who have exited that sport. I mean, NASCAR is on the up and up. And for us, we had this exceptional opportunity to sponsor a race on a military base. It could not be more of a direct target for us. And what I love so much about our company. This applies to whether you're working in design, video production, marketing, comms, is we have the full trust of our founders to make these calls. We keep them directly in the loop, but they trust us to make these big swings. And so next June on that

base, we're going to show up in a way that no one else in the sport does. And we have a partnership directly with Hendrick's Motorsports. And so that's Jeff Gordon's team. And we've got William Byron, who won the regular season. Hendrick also has a defense division. Like there's all these connective tissues that we can do storytelling year round. Yeah. Talk about the menu of options for working with NASCAR broadly. It sounds like the Anderil 250, it's sponsored of a race. There's also team level sponsors, individual driver sponsorships.

I mean, I'm sure some brands are out there paying for promoted posts on some drivers, Instagram, one off, right? How did you land on where you landed? And do you think this will continue to grow and mutate? because, you know, what we've seen with, like, Red Bull, like, they have one F1 team. There's no, there's no Red Bull race in F1. It's just the team. And so I'm interested to think about what's out there on the menu, how you landed, where you landed.

Sure. And I'll talk about this in the context of NASCAR relative to another big swing of ours with Ohio State. Sure, sure. So with NASCAR, it was about how do we make a big splash on a major stage, especially with America 250 coming up. Totally. I mean, it writes itself, especially in that first year. Sure. And with that deal, we have the rights to activate with the specific team.

There's actually an activation fund built into our deal to work with the specific team. Okay. We met with eight teams on the grid and found the one that really aligned with our values. And that's how we end up with Hendrick and with Williams specifically as our driver. But there's many different ways in. For us, we see this as a relationship that we fully intend to grow. We're going to be with a sport for at least five years. I expect that to be much longer than that as the sport itself is growing.

And then you look at that in contrast with Ohio State. Why did we do the deal with Ohio State? Well, we're building Arsenal 1, our 5 million square foot manufacturing facility, about 10 minutes away from the heart of Ohio State campus. We're bringing 4,000 jobs directly and other 4,000 jobs indirectly through the build of Arsenal 1. And so for us, we know the best way to win the hearts and minds of Ohioans is talking to Ohio State and not doing it in a superficial way about just a sports sponsorship, but actually thinking about the ways in which we're going to work together,

for job placement, for STEM programs, for community engagement, for military community, and how we make sure that they have skill bridge. And so for us, those are examples where we go broad with NASCAR and we go deep with Ohio State. It's a great deflection from just the truth, which is the Trey's from Ohio. And so he's got to go all in Ohio. I mean, Trey would have a sponsoring the Bengals right now if he could. Yeah, no, I wouldn't be surprised. You're going to be back to us. He's going to do it. He's going to do it. So what else is special about this race? walk me through like what race weekend, what race week looks like. I mean, I imagine a bunch of people from the company are coming out.

Like, what are all the different ways that you are getting the lift out of it? 100%. We see already whether it's from people on the hill to our investor community. The second we announced that we're doing a race, we were going to call us from everyone. And I'm really excited because I think this will be a moment that becomes a real focal point. for American 250 at large. So we're really hopeful for everyone that you could possibly imagine

to show up to this race. So as we lead up to it, I think what you'll see is us start to drop content away that you typically don't see in the sport. So whether it's the scheme, which we just finalized on Friday, when we finally released that,

our design team knocked out of the park to the helmet, to the fire suit. The livery, to the fire suit, to the die-cast cars. We're going to make every single thing a moment. And then we got space on the base that we could do some really special demonstrations of our product capabilities. So we're working right now with NASCAR and with the Navy to think about the ways that we can showcase our product on the base.

So in theory, like, yeah, like a... Fury flyover? I mean, sooner or later, that's what I'll say, is that now that we've done last week, as you alluded to earlier, our first flight. Yeah. And just a massive shout out to our air dominance division, like for them to a common. what they did and just over 500 days from clean sheet to first flight it's unreal it's unheard of in the industry all like at the touch of a button yeah it was really cool to be a small part of that and to observe it but I think it goes from there to first flight to how do we start

to think about ways that we can demonstrate this more clearly in public dive ld demo you got to be just like yeah it's down there yeah you can't see it you can't see it we're gonna put our yeah yeah it's down there yeah trust us we got to do it we got to do a live show from from from under the sea you're like and we're showing off our new stealth Not that there's space in there. I want to share some fun facts from the Don't Work at Andrew Camp. Oh, yeah, yeah. You can pivot back.

There's two stories I'd love to share here. One is how this originated. So I'm about three months in, and a friend of the show, Matt Grimm, I get a slack from him that simply says, why do you hate interns? And I'm trying to distill the context behind this. And I realize it's because I had responded to. to our recruiting team about a bit of a week earlier, they had shared a post from also redact the name of this company, their intern post where it's like 30 smiling interns in front of the logo

saying, first day at ex-company, and they said, hey, can we do this? And I said, absolutely not. We're not putting that out there. That's not the ethos of our company. Sure. And so I said to grim, I'm like, I don't hate interns. I hate shitty ex-company inspired intern posts. I said, if we're going to talk about what it's like to work here, we should tell the people all the reasons they should it. Sure, sure. And so Grimm and I went back and forth and started to outline what ended becoming the working script. And it was largely drawn from Palmer's own words, Trey's words, Lulu's words early days of saying, hey, we're a weapons company. And if you don't want to work on that, if you don't believe in the mission, if you don't understand why we build what we build,

if you're not ready to work your butts off here nonstop, if you don't love America and are proud to say it, then don't work here. It's like, no disrespect. But the sooner we understand that about each other, the better. And what I love so much about Grimm, two words, ship it. And from there, that's all we needed. And then it was a group of five of us with our talented creative team, Trevor, Alex, Ben, with Jen in a room. Was there ever a moment where you felt like if you didn't put that out, you would run the risk of people showing up just because Andrew was like a hot stock. And they would be like, wait a minute, like, I actually have, like, because it seems crazy to 100%. I mean, what we weed out is what I'd call the mercenaries.

The people that are just there, like try to get the annual equity. Sure, sure, sure. And we're saying, this is extremely hard. It's going to be hard. Guess what? Like, you're not going to have fun here. If all you care about is cash and trying to get equity, do not come here. And, you know, we see it because I do the orientation every two weeks.

And we have 150 to 200 new people coming in. And I ask people, I'm like, who saw this before you started? Every single hand goes up. So what you're speaking to is the greatest measure of success is that it was a filter for the people that were not mission aligned. On top of that, you talk about metrics, 30% lift in applications because of that campaign. Okay. Yeah.

What is the intern cycle like now? Because it feels like there's more and more people dropping out of college early. Is Anderall set up to deal with that? I mean, I feel like there's some people who might start intern and then take a gap semester and then wind up just hanging out forever. Who you point out right there? Tyler started as an intern and then he took a gap semester. Is Tyler required to dress like you every day?

Well, yeah, we have like a general, if everyone's wearing white suits today because the markets are up. The markets up, so we wear white. I love it. But I am interested. Like, Palantir has the meritocracy thing going on. There's definitely this idea. I mean, this goes back to Peter Thiel and Founders Fund and like a lot of just the idea that like is the internship even necessary. Like what are the roles where the internship makes sense versus just, hey, you're ready, getting the lead?

It's a perfect question, especially for right? now because we're talking about this all the way through our executive ranks and with our people team about what it actually means to to come here and what matters. And we call it the Anderall Forge program, but we're working on the campaign right now that will be the next sequel, if you will, to don't work at Andrel. Sure. That won't tell people, well, we aren't. It's going to speak about what we are. Sure. And what it means to work here and the importance of work. Cool. And so it matters way less to us about your quote unquote credentials. We don't care. We care about the the work that you're going to do, the alignment to the mission, and your ability to add value.

Yeah, yeah. It's awesome. By the way, I don't know if you know this even, Jordy, but we started our campaign for Don't Work at Anderol with our intern taking over. So like midnight, my buddy, Sean and I were crushing, I think, Coors Lights. And we posted just simply, don't work at Anderil. And we had somebody give us really good counsel because it was just going to be that. this man of mystery that rhymes with Don Hogan said to us, he said, you've got to go way, way harder than that.

Like, it's such a fertile ground. Like, there's so much Andral lore that there's so many different elements that you could pull from, from different things. Palmer said, sword art all online,

Pacific Rim. Pacific Rim robots. So there's about 10 tweets that our intern wrote that are actually goes written by Don Hogan. I think I sent you like 25 and, And you picked 10. Oh, right, right, right. I know this.

I know this Lord. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, one day we need to post the ones that didn't make the cut because there might have been some over the line. So good. Last question. Do you think that advertising has changed in the last 50 years? Huh. Even in the last 100 years.

Because when I hear you talk, you're speaking, you know, running the marketing organization of one of the best modern brands. right? People can debate people can debate on whether they like the brand or not because it's obviously polarizing but great brands are polarizing and when I think about the strategy it's like ultra clear communication

strong visuals leveraging out of home strategically you know having these sort of layered strategies thinking about all these different architects feels like all the conversations that a strong marketing brand organization would be having 50 years ago.

And so it's interesting, I think it's interesting that we have the internet, which is like the best marketing channel in history, and yet the marketing strategy hasn't changed very much at all since the Olgavid days. Yeah, what you're describing to me is that what's changed is the medium. What hasn't changed is the desire from an audience for a really clear story. And ultimately, that's what we're doing,

is we're bringing a great craft to our storytelling, which most importantly is highlighting the incredible important work that our engineers and operators are doing for our warfighters. And that's the thing that is consistent with us. And the other thing I think you said is that we understand that it's not for everyone. You know, what is important to us is that we have a really, really clear message that people understand what we stand for, whether you agree with it or not. And that is what I love because I'm so mission to line. to what we're building, that I find it a great privilege and responsibility to bring the same

type of disruptive approach to marketing that we are bringing to how we approach contracts, how we think about research and development, how we think about engineering or AI or design. And ultimately, there's no other place on earth I'd rather be. Fantastic. That's a great place to end it. Well, thank you so much for coming by. I'm so excited for the Anderil 250 next year. Next year.

Can't wait. We'll be there. I want to be there. By the way, here's a final idea for you guys. This is my second time officially on. Yes. You guys need like an S&L five-timer jacket. Oh, yeah.

When you guys get to that level. Yeah, that'd be great. I'll see you guys break out some new swag. For sure. We got you. We got some new birch on the way. See you guys. We'll see you.

Thanks so much for coming by. What else? You got something else in the bag? What do we got? What do we got? Oh, there we go. Oh, very cool. The 24.

There we go. This is hard. Thank you so much. Good to see you. See you soon. This is good. Everyone needs a number for sure. There you go. I like that.

Linear. Let's get back to linear. Let's get back to linear. Meet the system for modern software development. Streamline issues, projects, and product roadmaps. There is a video of an office tour that has been burning up the timeline. I feel like we should play this. Play it.

If we can pull it up. It's going to be about two minutes of the, from Philip, Joseira. I spent $1.5 million building our office after raising a seed round. The seed, 1.5 used to be the total seed round. Now I guess it's a $30 million. There's some $1.5 million series A's out there. There are.

If you go back like 10, for sure, for sure. So let's play this. And I will be back in just a minute. We're raised $30 million for this office. Let's go meet the CEO. What is this? You're here for a number. laughing because the camera's tracking John.

All right, but let's be quick, all right. You're going surfing? Yeah. See there. Come on in. Let's track how many times they talk about surfing. Two, three. They spent it on vibes.

Coming through. This is going to be the sauna room. We're now more like a sauna clothed, but all of our kite surfing equipment is here and our kayaks are here. I'm going to count kayaks. He's one of our first investors. He joined the company full time. From one employee to 18 in a year.

in Ineir. You guys are going fast. Everyone is doing something, having meetings, cracked engineers over here. We got Robert. Robert doesn't actually do work. He's actually looking at sonas right now. Our new product is actually called sauna, because this man actually came up with the idea while soning.

They look cool. Where are they from? Hello. Where are you from Iceland? Matthias? That guy looks like he's the only one actually working. Or bucket infrastructure engineers do not like to be disturbed. Mattias, where are you from?

I'm from Austria. Can you point at the Golden Gate? bridge it's right over there we zoom in on that coming through we got any fun stuff here or is it just nerd gear at me all right this is our movie theater but how many times did you guys watch a movie here well I actually tried to get Nikki to find our PS4 but unfortunately we work too much and we don't have thanks to the ocean one of my favorite things in the office is every I'm back.

I'm back. Okay, I have a take. I have a take. Let's break it down. I don't know what this company does. They put out this whole video. They went viral, but it's unclear what they actually are selling. They're selling Nordic vibes.

Yeah. I mean, the vibes are immaculate. Keeping our European soul. And I understand that it's like targeted at hiring because it's like, hey, you know, we have this beautiful office. You should come work here. You should come build on stuff. Yeah.

The challenge is unless the company is like winning and getting better every single day. The surfboards start to... For sure. There was this quote post about, like, hey, like, you know, look at what Jeff Bezos was working on the door desk back in the day. The other thing is like there's a little, I think this goes over way differently if this is done by an external influencer. Like, there's been so much attention on the gundo. But I think that's, I know what's happening. No, no, no. Wait, wait, really? Okay. It feels like it's, it feels like it's, it's the founder posting. He's posting it, but it's, it's, it's, I think,

Oh, I guess they're a product, SANA AI. Okay. So they have a... Building the future of work with SANA. We love Sons. So can't empty two. Yeah, I mean... Oh, it's a two...

You turn your to-dos into done. AI-powered workspace. It's an AI to-do list, something like that. But, but, like, there were people that did this exact video on the Gunda. Like, they went to Rainmaker, and they were like, like, look at the gym. stuff. You can lift weights here. Like, there's people over there working. Or like, I literally went and filmed a video somewhat like this at Neros, although they were in like a garage and they were, they were literally grinding. They didn't have any surfboards. I have PTSD because I knew,

I knew a founder back in the day that every, he would always go surfing because he needed to clear his head. And I would always be thinking like, okay, like, eventually your head's got to be clear. You've got to fix the product. You can just fix the product and ship another product and make it work. Brother, I think if your head's unclearable, like, we got a problem. Yeah. And, and, uh, I don't know, surfing, as somebody who's, you know, grown up surfing,

basically every, every, every, at least every week since I've been a, been a kid, I don't find surfing, especially in Northern California to be compatible with work. And the reason is that. Wait, like a full, it takes you out the full day? So, so the challenge is that in Northern California, even if you're wearing a 5-4 wetsuit, which is like basically the thickest, like, five-mill? Five millimeters on the chest, four on the arms. What about seven-mill websites?

You can get those, but like you get that for like a trip to Alaska or something like that. And the challenge is you get cold enough, surfing in Northern California, even with a 5-4, that you spend the entire, like, next, like, few hours, like your body is. I'm just laughing that we're like breaking down like like like if he if he if he lived just just just two hours south it'd be totally fine. No, I disagree. I disagree. It's impossible.

Just analyzing the wetsuit. No, no. Let's fall back to the challenge. So you what type of wetsuit did he have? If he's in a if he's in a nine millimeter wetsuit, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. You could be in a five four, four, three, three, two.

You could be trunk in it. But you get cold enough that your body uses so much energy to reheat. and you just become slow. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You just become slow. And I would struggle with this growing up because I'd go surf after school, and then I'd be doing homework, and I'd be like, I can't think, I can't, like, I just be, you know, incapable of, of real productivity.

So I'm against surfing in the, in the, during the work week, basically. Yeah, I basically don't surf during the work week. I'll surf sometimes in the evenings. But, yeah, once you're done with your day, but they could be doing that. they could have surfboards. Yeah, but he mentioned surfing or kiteboarding or kite surfing or kayaking like so many times, at least five times in, yeah.

Ryan says there are many doing Don Patrol in SF every day. I agree there are. I just, I just wouldn't be VP of Vives. Yeah. VP of vibes engineering customer vibe distribution. I certainly understand why people are saying that this is maybe a little bit too lackadaisical when you're in the trenches

of the startup culture. It was also kind of clickbait because he said the effective cost is only 250K. Oh, interesting. Okay. So we've spent

1.5 million, but And he got a bunch of like TI basically. Okay. Well, that's cool. Anyways. It certainly seems like a nice cool environment.

Hang out. And nothing will matter if you build the business. You could have made the same argument about Facebook. Facebook was drinking beers in the office. You know, there's a famous interview.

Mark Zuckerberg sitting there chugging a beer out of a solo cup, a red solo cup. And the interviewer's like, are you sure you want to be chugging this beer in this video? And he's like, it's okay. It is just funny because if Tyler, if Tyler was drinking like this. If Tyler went kayaking. Yes. After the, after the show. Yeah.

I would just say to him like, why don't you just, and then came back and kept working. I'd be like, why don't you just? do your work and then go kayak. True, true. Like, why do we need to, why do we need to combine these? I don't know. It seems, seems like mostly solvable if they, if the kayaking, kite surfing, surfing marathon happens at the right time of the day.

Tyler, put a calendar, put a calendar invite on our calendars for three years from now to check back on this word wear video. We'll revisit it because if they have crazy product market fit, they're going to look. They're going to look like in the, they're going to look like in the, Being a world-class surfer and becomes like the next Kelly Slater and just actually shreds. Just rolls the whole. He's like, we're a surfing company now. I'm going to get on the tour.

I am a professional surfer. We earn revenue when I win contests. Yeah, exactly. That would be, I would crush. And then you'd be eating your words, Jordi. You'd be eating your words. No, we very well could be eating our words in just a couple years. Oh, yeah, of course, like the actual product you work.

Gabe says, why don't you bring your work to the kayak? I like that. I also like numeral. Sales tax and autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. Ryan says, I'm going to apply. I need somewhere to store my boat trailer. Yeah, people just start applying because they need the place to store their gear.

They're like, this place seems really well. I mean, at the same time, like, when you're in a crowded market, the, the taste of virality, like the temptation of like, the temptation of like, oh, this is good content, we should go viral with this, has got to be overwhelming. It's like, it's like no one's heard of the company yet. It's brand new. And you have this opportunity to go do something that can get a lot of attention. I think he invited criticism because he started it off with clickbait being like, I spent one and a half million on our office.

Yes, yes, yes. Yes, there's a little bit of too far. I also, yeah, I think having someone else do this is better. Have an actual TikToker come by and stuff. of doing it as an in-house thing. It just has a different aesthetic. Like, if you get stopped on the street, what do you do for a living? That's different than paying someone to do a, what do you do for a living video about you?

I would say, Snowflake is going to beat in a few ones. That is one of the greatest videos ever. Just like Finn.a.I., one of the greatest, actually the greatest AI agent for customer service. They're number one in performance benchmarks. They're number one in competitive bakeoffs. They have a number one ranking on G2. Let's go to the Tyler Cam again for some reason. What's up with Tyler?

Is that the... Oh, he's clapping. You're clapping. Do you want to... Do you think we should have kayaks in the workplace? Yes. Yes? I also think...

Do you like kayaking? Probably. Probably. I've gone like once or twice. Okay. Well, our next guest is in the stream waiting room. We have Kaz from Open Door in the TV Piano Gym. Welcome to the stream.

How are you doing? Here he is. Welcome. Thanks for having me, guys. I am pro-cajacked. I want to go on the record as being pro-cahack. Pro-cahack. Okay, but kayaking in the workplace. At what point?

At what point? At noon on a Tuesday, you want your whole workforce going into the frigid, ice-cold sea with a 4-millimeter wetsuit and coming back cold and spending the rest of the day warming up? First of all, I grew up in Canada, so we don't want to. wear wet suits. We just go kayaking. I don't know what you guys do. What's the biggest fish you've ever caught? What's the biggest fish you've ever caught?

I am, honestly, man, this is like my, my brother-in-law goes fishing off the coast of British Columbia and catches these massive salmon. I am terrible. I'm objectively the worst guy to go out fishing with. That's just bad luck? I will not catch you anything. It'll be terrible. Oh, wow.

I'll fix your Wi-Fi. There you go. That's helpful. Well, you caught a big fish with Open Door. Congratulations on the new gig. I don't know if you remember, but we've actually emailed very briefly while you were at Shopify. You saved my entire company in like the span of like two email exchanges. So I've always been extremely thankful to you and just Shopify generally, generally.

But can you, since this is the first time on the show, can you give us a little bit of backstory on how you wound up at Open Door, what the vision was? was just like kind of how this all came together, because it's such a fascinating story to me. I mean, I think this story has now been fully leaked. I would not have told it if it just had not been like fully told by other people. But look, I've been,

I loved my job at Shopify. I generally honestly thought it was going to be my forever job. And I just, I was not planning on leaving. But I became a little obsessed with Open Door, maybe February of this year, where like I as a kid I grew up my mom had a corner store and I would grow up I grew up with like a stopwatch timing the cashiers so like I have this very odd obsession with like operationally well run places and from the outside open door looked like a great opportunity being poorly run so like sometime in February almost as a joke that just ought and would just not leave my brain I texted keithra boys saying, hey, I'm thinking of just buying open door and taking a private because it just needs

to be run better. And then my wife, God bless her, just thought this was like an interesting hobby for me to figure out how I could just decide on my desk fix this company that I wasn't running. And I became more and more obsessed with it because there's a very real thing that matters. Man, like most of us that work in software don't get the opportunity to see. say, hey, the thing we do has a real world impact on actual families, right? And it's a very real thing that happens if you grow up in a home that your parents owned. Like, your educational outcomes are better.

There's less crime in your neighborhood. Like same family, same type of thing. If they own a home, things turn out better. So I became just obsessed with this company whose job it was to make buying and selling a home easier. and like most other things in the world, when you reduce friction, you get more of the thing. So if you think homeownership is good,

reducing frictionate will lead to more of it. But I just kind of like given up on this idea of taking the company private because the company had this significant run and, well, I didn't have enough my ticket private anymore. There was a brief window. You were daydreaming about it.

That was the time. Yeah. Yeah. So then it was on, it was a Sunday, like in, I want to say mid-August, like late, last half of August, my wife and I were on the way to church. I got a call from Paul Deversa, who was an executive. And I picked up the call and I said, this is a true story. And Paul and I had, Paul had been trying to get me to go to a couple other places. And I picked up the call. I'm like, Paul, I'm on my way to church. I don't have time. I appreciate it. Like, I'm not interested. and whatever it is you're about to pitch me, maybe if it's open door, let's talk. And then he said, it's open door, how soon can you be on a plane?

Wow. And we went to church, came back, I got on a plane. And the whole thing, the whole process took maybe two weeks from like that call to me starting. How much did you, like, how much did you rely on your network to help you make that decision, maybe some trusted advisors? because I imagine there, when I saw that you were announced that you took the job, my immediate thought is like, you know, going from Shopify, which is this like beloved,

you know, incredibly well-run company that you can have so much impact on because it's like one of the few platforms in the world that is just like so undeniably pro-entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship is so life-changing. And if you care about impact, you know, it's hard to kind of meet your bar. not to mention that jumping in at Open Door would go from probably like a relatively calm work environment to one of the most like crazy intensive environment where, you know, I'm sure from like a the amount of inbound messages that you get running Open Door is probably like a hundred times the messages that like a company like a hundred times your size gets, you know. And so, like, it is wildly different kind of life.

I don't know. I mean, look, I think Shopify is a relatively intense place to work for all the good reasons. And you kind of want to work at intense places because you only get one career. But I remember, like, when I was thinking of leaving Facebook to go to Shopify, literally everyone I talked to said, don't do it. Like, every single person I talked to about leaving Facebook, going to Shopify, said, don't do it. it's a terrible company it's among the most shorted

companies in history but it was absolutely shorted it had a really bad opinion it was like churny like lots of like the day I joined Citron put out of like a big research report saying Shopify will go bankrupt

in like 12 months I remember like Citron so everyone I talked to back then in 2019 told me don't join Shopify a terrible idea and what was what it

like what did you what did you see that other people missed. Look, I thought the mission was a worthwhile mission and that it was very clear to me that I was a type of person who could help. I thought the mission was important. The company had done a lot of good,

and I could help. I couldn't see myself at a bunch of other companies, but I could see myself helping Shopify. And I became the merchant services guy at Shopify, right? I ran the second half of the business, so ShopPath has two parts, SaaS and services. I ran services for nearly my entire time there. And then Toby asked me to become the COO and I ran a bunch of other things. But I remember when I was thinking about going to Shopify, like basically the only two things that convinced me to do it were I prayed and I thought it was a right decision.

And then I sat down with my wife and I said, hey, this is almost certainly a bad idea. like we're going to move to like we're going to move we had a kid who was less than one and this probably won't work out but I think this is a worthwhile mission and I think I can help and she said look it's our job to spend our marriage doing things that they'll make the world up at a place like we call it leaving a dent in the world so when it came time to the open door one I didn't like I talked to Keith because I've known Keith her boy for a while But I was just, I talked to my wife, I prayed, and I thought I could like have an outsized impact on the company just because the type of thing I tend to be good at is a type of thing that the company seems to need. I'm not, look, I'm no one's idea of a corporate executive.

I cuss a lot. I grew up as a nerd. Like, I didn't do all that well in my finance undergrad courses. like I'm I'm a product manager right I'm like so this is I don't like this is how I dress so I don't like there's a very real thing but at open door it felt like

I could do well given what the company's mission was and I thought if we could do our job it would be good for the world so yeah what what's the how do you think about the opportunity how do you think about the shape of the business in, are you thinking in a decade? Are you thinking in 30 year time frame?

Like, how do you think about the long-term strategy, what the opportunity is, what you want to fix in the short-term, medium-term, long-term? Dude, we ship every week. Like, we ship every week. Fuck 10 years. We ship every single week. Like, our job is to ship product every single week to tilt the world in favor of homeowners and people working hard to become homeowners. We ship every week.

something changes every single week. We measure ourselves on a weekly basis. We now have a public dashboard that we use internally. We just publish it to the world. So you can see our internal dashboards externally. So what are the levers that you can pull on a week-to-week basis? What's an example of something that you can roll out that actually improves the experience? I can tell you a product that took us almost exactly one week to launch.

We launched this thing called Peace of Mind Guarantee. So if you ever bought a house, I remember the first house I bought and the first night I slept there after we had closed. I'm like, shit, bought the wrong house. That's a very real thing that happens because in the typical real estate transaction, the deck is stacked against buyers and sellers. Like everyone involved has a conflict with the two principles. There's like a real agency problem. So if you're buying your first home, like the thing.

that makes you most nervous is missing something, right? So I think we launched at Open Door is by a piece of mind guarantee where you can buy a house from Open Door, move in, and if you don't like it in the first seven days, just give the house back. We'll take it back. Wow. And look, if I think it's one of those things where, like, if you buy something on Amazon and you don't like it, you'd return it.

But for some reason, if you're buying something that's hundreds of thousands of dollars, you can get duped and there's no one to return it to. I remember, I think I was, I must have been like somewhat of a younger teenager when I, when I figured out, okay, you make the most important purchase, biggest purchase of your life buying a first home. And you don't really get like a try, like you don't even get to like try it out for a couple nights. And because I, it's just one of those things. As soon as you actually own something and you occupy it, you start, you start, you know, I bought a house last year. And I, I, you know, I bought a house last year. And I, I, I, the things I know I I missed so many things like you know I ended up getting like lucky right it wasn't like I want to return the house but there were so many just small things that I noticed immediately from moving in that I completely missed and I was like wow thank God I didn't that that is not that big of a deal or it's like a nice to have whatever dude there is a word for people who try to make money off you and then Dodge Town we call him Carnies carneys carnies like

And we have turned like the entire real estate industry essentially into people whose job it is to like kind of hope you don't notice problems. It's very weird. Look, look, we stand by every single home on Open Door.com. You buy it from us. You don't like it? That's fine. First seven days, we'll take it back. And I thought this was, this was a good.

I didn't think. But wait, you know what happened? From a second we thought we should do this. The time it was live was about seven days, genuinely. And the reason that was true is because there's a bunch of people in the path of doing this whose job it is at any big company to go, but actually, experts say this. There's risk or something. I don't, like, as a buyer, are you more likely to buy a home from Open Door.com?

If I tell you, if you don't like it, you can return it. Yes or no? Yes, great. Let's go. Do we stand by our homes? So it's a little bit of an actuarial puzzle that you have to figure out, okay, what is the cost for that? And then distribute that over the buyers of that product. That seems like something a technologist, a product manager, somebody who's a little bit more forward-thinking, is completely set up for.

That makes a ton of sense. What else is changing in the market? I'd love to get your thoughts on the 50-year mortgage that was proposed. Is that good for America? Is that good for open door? Is that something we should be supported? Yeah, I really don't understand it to what happens. happened with Japan's market after they introduce 50-year.

Yeah, I did see some people say, oh, it might be bad, but break it down to me. Look, let me do the thing that I'm not supposed to do and answer the question, honestly. I think that people who compare this to Japan are just deeply misunderstanding a bunch of things about the American economy. Like, let's just be clear. Like, the American and Western economies are just fundamentally different because culture is fundamentally different and economies downstream from culture. Like it's a very real thing.

That matters. But secondarily, like, let's go back. Democracy in America, Tokville, in it, he talks about how the main difference between America and every other country is that Americans own the ground they stand on. It has been historically true that Americans have had higher ownership of the land they live on than any other nation. And this has been basically the main difference between the American, I own this land,

I'm part of this community, than the transient European and Eastern lifestyles, right? If you divide the worlds into people who are from somewhere and people who are from anywhere, America is full of people who are from somewhere. This makes a difference. This makes a real difference to how people are raised, how kids are raised, the economy, the country overall.

Now, why is the 50%? year mortgage incredibly important. You would not have needed a 50-year mortgage 20 years ago. You just wouldn't have needed. In fact, when the 30-year mortgage came in in 1931, I want to say, everyone literally said all the things they're saying about the 50-year mortgage. This will work. It's too long.

How can people pay it off? But the thing 50-year mortgage does is this. The 30-year mortgage was designed for a time when people didn't have student debt, where the average life expectancy was about to pay. 15 years shorter. The average work time was about 15 years shorter. Like, there's a very real thing where people are buying homes

later and later. We just cross the average homeowner buying their first home at 40 because student debt is crushing American debt-to-income ratios. What the 50-year mortgage allows you to do is to get into the market, which is the best market

Americans have historically gone to, is the main source of leverage Americans get access to without being a big company. and being a fancy person, right? You get access to that leverage. You can do it while paying down your student debt. And once you pay on your student debt, there's nothing that says you can't refi and pay it down faster.

But if 50-year does fix what's called a debt-to-income ratio for folks while they're getting started. And, like, I think it is. But, hey, there's another thing that's important. The people who are against a 50-year mortgage are coming out. No one's forcing you take a 50-year mortgage. You can still take the 30 or the 15. But what you're saying is, I wouldn't need it.

Therefore, no one can have it. Well, guess what, buddy? Not everyone lives in Palo Alto. Yeah, it's interesting. You know, the one thing that came to mind for me was, you know, what you've seen in the automotive industry, where typically 60 month is maybe like the, I imagine that's the most popular, right? And then there's 72 month. And if you look on sites like DuPont Registry, John, you'll appreciate this.

They have like a 200-month, you know, on auto loan for collectibles. And it's interesting that, you know, those have been getting pushed out. But the issue with cars is that they're assets that almost always depreciate massively. And even on faster and faster time. Usually good to zero. Yeah. And even if you look at EVs now, they depreciate at, you know, levels that you haven't seen with ice, you know, cars. So, yeah, it's a, I guess, I guess, you know, I think part of the, part of maybe the frustration and the reaction was, you know, this is a way to increase demand, but it doesn't fix the supply side. And so maybe it's focused on kind of the wrong. We should fix the supply side too.

Look, I think we should take, we should understand what the government's saying. And they literally said this. They said this is one of the things we're doing, not the last thing we're doing. And by the way, in the last four weeks, they've also done a bunch of other things. They just changed the requirement on credit ratings. They just changed the requirement. They just announced that they're going to have a new FICO score in there. Look, do I think they should do things to make supply more readily available?

Yes. I think they've talked about making one-time assumable mortgages more available that will also change the supply, obviously. I think we should basically force cities to just stop being so anti-builder. Like the builders are desperate to build, let them build.

I think there's a bunch of things we should do. This is a problem that was created over a decade. We're not going to solve it overnight. But one of the things we must do is fix this massive problems where American governments at the federal and state levels started subsidizing student debt

to levels where everyone graduates with such a large debt, they could not buy a house if they wanted to even if they had a down payment. Yeah. Right? So we must do something to solve that problem. Otherwise, what's going to happen

is people are never going to buy a home and very soon America is going to start looking like Portugal. And that's not what we want. Like this is, this is a, like, we know how good homeownership is. Yeah. What are your thoughts on stock-based comp? There was that Keith Rubei was getting in the fight with somebody's years ago about

stock-based comp. It feels like for some of these companies that are more mature, maybe you don't need to lean on it as much, but also there's certain accounting rules that make it maybe more advantageous to use it. Obviously, you know, from the. the startup world, it makes sense to incentivize your employees with stock-based comp. But how are you thinking about it? Is there anything that is changing? Look, my salary is a dollar, right?

I get paid $1. My entire comp is stock-based based on performance measures. You hit it, John. We're hitting the size gong for one of the highest salaries. Infinitely more than $0 salary. That's right. Yeah, so I'm not, I'm not, I'm ideological on this issue, which I think for a very long time, corporate executives have gotten rich driving their companies down in valuation and essentially failing their way to becoming millionaires. Right? This is like a very weird world where we've created where you are incentivized to suck at your job and do. nothing lest you get noticed.

If you don't get noticed, you're not going to get fired. If you don't get fired, your IRS use a vest and you become rich. This is like the story of like so many great companies. This is terrible. This is just terrible for capitalism because as the American people right will recognize, this is a scam. A world in which corporate execs get rich, shareholders lose money. That's terrible. I think corporate executives basically should only get paid in options.

Now, like, it's actually, it's actually difficult to only get paid in options. I tried. Sure, sure. But there's a way, we've essentially at Open Door, reconstructed options as RSUs. So the PSUs, if the stock goes below what it was the day I joined, I get paid actually zero. Wow. Like, actually zero nothing. And then there's like cliffs above that.

They take away your dollar or you get to keep it with a $1. Well, I should know what the funny thing is? They should be able to claw back the dollar. We should claw back your dollar. I have to pay for benefits. Oh, sure, sure. I have to pay the company for a taxable benefits. So I pay Open Door to work at Open Door.

Sure, sure, sure. Which I think is perfectly fine, by the way. Wait, so this is sort of like, like, do you feel like you're in the lineage of Elon Musk's newest pay package, like heavily comp aligned to market cap? Is that where this is all going? I mean, I'm missing a couple of zeros. Okay, yeah, of course. But I can't find a problem with that package. I love it.

I just think it's so aligned. I think it's a very real thing. I think very few traditional executives would take it. Like, very few traditional executives would take it. But I think what shareholders should want is none of those executives to be in charge of publicly trade companies. This is like, like, this is a very, I think in the private world, a very good indicator that a startup's going to fail is if the founder pays himself a very large salary. I do some angel investing that my wife insists we list under charitable giving on our families.

But in my experience, if the founders pay themselves a very large salary, the company is going to go to zero relatively quickly. But somehow corporate executives get paid like, In cash, like $5, $10 million and in RSUs another $5, $10 million to basically be as inoffensive as possible and listen to the consultants. This is what happens, right? You have some... Listening to the experts again. Yeah, this is like a real, man. You pay a comp consultant to come give you advice on compensation.

Then you go to a management consultant to give you advice on management. then you go to a financial consultant to give you advice on finances, then you go to a PR consultant, and before you know it, this is what happened. I came to Open Door, and I went through every bill

the company had paid for the previous six months, like actually every bill line by line. And like, what was this for? What was the outcome? And the company, I paid millions of dollars. Millions. Like, it was actually, I think,

number three on the expense of the item. Like, we paid more for consultants that we paid for a snowflake, which is like, tell you something. That's something, yeah. Wow. And like, to what end, the company was basically going to zero.

Yeah. And, but corporate executives, but like fancy types who got MBAs from fancy schools do that to avoid being noticed and getting fired, right? That's the goal. And I think, I think corporate executives should get paid only when they make shareholders It's funny. Yep. I like that a lot.

This was fantastic. The chat is absolutely loving this. I wish we could go longer. We'll have to have you back. You're welcome anytime there's news or anything. Georgie, do you have one last question before you? And I have a lot more questions.

I have a lot more questions. Let's make it a regular thing. We just have someone in the re-stream waiting room. But thank you so much for taking the time. I'd love to go deeper. Also, I mean, I just feel like we can talk about like anything, really. Like there's so much here. We barely,

when I asked about strategy, We spent five minutes on one particular product, and we could do that probably every single week since you're shipping. Yeah, I would say as there's more news on mortgages, both the assumable side, the term you should come back on. We'd love to have you back. I'd like 30 seconds to do something. I promise to only 30 seconds.

Please, please. If you are watching this show and you're a founder type, the odds are you're an odd duck, you're swimming in the wrong sea, find me on X, my DMs are open. We're hiring in offices. This is not a remote company. We're in offices with our colleagues working incredibly hard for a future that matters. So find me.

And we'd love to have more folks join the mission. Yeah, we love that. Everyone's clapping here. I love your perspective and how you're approaching this. And I can't wait to see all the progress you and the team make. Yeah. Highly recognize it. It's a generation opportunity.

Sure. Bye. Let me tell you about Adio. Customer relationship magic. Adio is the AI Native Suram that builds scales and grows your company to the next level. Our next guest is already in the re-stream waiting room. We got Paul Needham from the infatuation. Welcome to the show.

Look at that background. That is very cool. I love it. What a fun brand exploration. Very cool. Great to have you on the show, Paul. Chris, your co-founder. is a good buddy and uh and uh yeah it's great to have you here thank you yeah chris and andrew

started infatuation now 16 years ago so we just celebrated our sweet 16 at the selka in new york yeah exactly longevity is a good thing and we're really proud to be carrying the tradition on and to continue to shine a light on all the great restaurants all over the country and that's what we're out doing this week is talking about our best new restaurants campaign Let's talk about it. Break it down. All right. So our team all over the country and in London, we went to over 5,000 restaurants this year. Spots, bagel places, pizza places all the way, especially out in L.A. You guys have a lot of fine dining, a lot of omacaz.

And we checked it all out, and we crowned some of our favorites. So out in L.A., places like Baby Bistro, River, Mustards, Bagels, Beethoven Market, and a bunch more. And then all over the country, looking not just at the best restaurants. I really liked Jules in San Francisco this year for pizza. Smithereens is our number one in New York. But also looking at the trends.

And what are we seeing out there? What are the threads? So obviously, Martini has continued to... How many people do you need to properly evaluate 5,000 restaurants? Like, what does a team look like to pull that off? I'm assuming it's some internal, some external. Some of it's internal, some of its freelance. The fun of it is bringing your friends because, you know,

you can't go to a restaurant as one person and try everything. And so we do a, and a lot of restaurant critics, the Times and other places do it also. But we bring some folks around. We dine anonymously. We book under fake names. We pay for all the meals ourselves called as we see it. And yeah, it's a big effort.

a lot of people. It's also we go back. And so we want to give places that chance, especially when we're talking about a best new restaurant category. I want to give people the chance to really show their best. And yeah, we have a team around 50 people who work on this for us. And then, yes, and freelancers and other folks as well. That makes sense. What is going on, give us an update on the restaurant industry broadly. That was, you know, I, obviously restaurants tend to reflect, end up reflecting the state of the culture and the economy. And there was some reporting last week that we touched on briefly that like McDonald's is seeing a drop in in purchasing from some lower income folks. That was surprising.

I think people were pretty bearish about that. Maybe there's a different story there. But talk about kind of the health of restaurants broadly. I'm assuming it's like a pretty wide disparity. Yeah, and it's a complicated situation because you've obviously got Chipotle and others who've been out talking recently, but then the Wall Street Journal I thought had a good piece a week or so ago about how in New York the kind of rich are keeping the party going. I think definitely when you talk to restaurateurs, look, folks in L.A. have had a tough year, no question. I'm sure you guys hear that a lot, hopefully starting to come back and-

And is that driven by the, is that downstream from like the film industry not doing well? So just people in the creative world film are just entertainment are just eating out less? You need expense accounts, you know, especially if you got a lease in Beverly Hills or you got a lease in West Hollywood. Like you need people to be able to put a corporate card down and spend a little more freely. But look, I think it's interesting also. you look at some of those trends and then you also look at things like ten dollar pastries and really elaborate macho drink and these small indulgences that people are definitely still treating themselves

to i mean the cinnamon roll situation in new york had a outrageous year i think you wait is that is that the name of the restaurant no it's just you got one i thought i thought a restaurant called the cinnamon roll situation like like we got a situation down here situation that we're monitoring. We're monitoring. But we, um, I was on squack box this morning in the Today show earlier and we brought pastries to all that. And it was like one cinnamon roll just got crazier than the next. And so definitely like I think the restaurant industry situation is a big complex narrative across QSR, across fine dying, et cetera. I think the customer

indulging themselves, treating themselves as another situation. And then, look, there's no question that people drinking less is a huge factor for restaurateurs. And the folks who were all, you know, friends with in the industry, like, definitely, if you're not selling wine and you're not selling cocktails, that's a mighty headwind. That's your profit margin. Yeah. But look, you see the $20 mocktail on a lot of menus now. And definitely folks are trying to make the non-alc stuff happen and trying to make some money off non-alc. But from what you're seeing, yeah, so from what you're hearing or seeing, like, is it some people have gone from drinking to no drinking.

And then a lot of other people have gone from like heavy drinking to just moderate drinking. And so they're seeing like both types of guests just kind of like spending less. No drinking to heavy drinking. It's been great. You guys are keeping the industry. Look, I think there's a lot of people. Obviously, wellness is a huge, like, factor in so much stuff. We also see that in the hour of people, the hour of people are eating.

So, like, all of a sudden, 530 is a really hot time to go to a restaurant where, you know, a few years ago you were, like, embarrassed to ask someone to go to dinner at 530. I think there's a lot of people. It's, like, so clearly the problem. I just, I like to go to dinner at 5.30, sometimes five. I like to fit it. I don't like to be digesting food when I'm going to bed. And I don't, I really, I have like one, one drink a month. Our audience is a lot of tech people. Do you have a recommendation for a restaurant that might be particularly good for planning a coup? If you're planning a boardroom coup, or maybe celebrating

a successful boardroom coup, do you have a recommendation for a restaurant? And this needs to be in like the South Bay. I mean, ideally San Francisco, but boardroom coups are happening all over. Maybe in New York as well. San Francisco, look, a lot of great places. I mentioned Jules Pizza earlier. That's where I would plot my coup in San Francisco right now. You're not going to be over-heard there.

There's like some corners. You could tuck into a corner. We could tuck into a corner. The mayor was there recently and was like blowing them up. Okay, that's good. There were the action is. Yeah, I feel like the proper environment to plant a coup is. sort of like leather, leather booths,

ideally some mahogany. Some mahogany. Something like very, where every little booth is like nestled off to it, the side, no one can really see each other too much. You know in New York, a New York little interesting development this year

that did not get a lot of attention. But Fort Charles opened a private dining room. And so for as hard as is to get a reservation of four Charles, the private dining room, if you got like 12 grand for a table of eight, Okay. They will have you any night you want. Well, there might be tens of billions of dollars at stake.

So, you know, what's the point of spending $12K on a steak? That's no problem. Yeah, I always like Pacific Dining Car in L.A. That feels like a good place to plan a coup. I like a mafia movie vibe. How is Instagram still having the, like, so I don't, I don't identify as a foodie at all. I enjoy food. I don't spend a ton of time seeking it out.

But there's been a lot of conversation over the last probably decade now around how Instagram is just driving every city on earth to look the same. So like no matter where you go in the world now, you can get like a macha and you can get like New York style pizza from somebody who was maybe living in New York like two years ago, whatever. Is there anything like, is there any, parts of the U.S. that are kind of like fighting back against that and like really trying to create a more localized food culture and is that even possible anymore. Yeah. I mean, I think definitely

everything you're saying, you see like the macha thing get crazier and crazier month by month. I saw Lauren Sherman said over the weekend like machas like kale, like people are just doing things to macho that shouldn't be done. I think you've got, you know, pizzas everywhere, no question. and really good pizzas everywhere. And to your point, like, Mexico City is everywhere now. Where, like, every New York City, right? Like, every New York big opening this year is, like, Mexico City inspired in somewhere or another.

Interesting. I would say, like, Nashville, I'd point to Texas. Like, there's definitely pockets where you're seeing people really do something that's very unique. I think Miami has been an incredible food scene for us in the last few years and definitely Miami, even if it's not cuisine per se, like the personality

of a Miami restaurant. Sunnies, which is one of our favorite steakhouses down there. That restaurant could only be in Miami. And you definitely feel that you're in Miami when you're there. But look, Beethoven Market, when you're sitting out on that terrace

in Marvista, like there's stroller parking, it very much feels like, oh, this is the west side of Los Angeles. And wild Cherry, which just opened in the West Village of New York, which is the A24 restaurant. Like it very much feels like, oh, we're in a kind of like New York canteen connected with a small theater. So there's definitely still places that are kind of creating that sense of unique personality. This is very cool. Thank you for coming on and giving us the update.

Yeah, guys. I've held out, by the way. I haven't had a matcha at least a decade. I've tried it a long time ago and and I haven't I haven't gone back it's not for me yeah not for me we'll send you there's some good powder ones you can make at home okay they're really easy and pretty good shirkland fantastic thank you guys and congrats everyone's watching man everyone's watching thank you for coming thanks so much paul thank you for giving us an update on uh state of the market and congrats on the on the lunch we'll see you have a good one sir bye guys let me tell you about public dot com investing for those to take it seriously they got multi-asset investing through the meals. They're trusted by millions. We are completely switching gears now from food and

beverage to Jordan Nanos at semi-analysis, taking us through the latest from ClusterMax. This is ClusterMax 2.0, correct? That's right, yeah. What are the biggest findings? How do you introduce Cluster Max in the 140 characters version? And I'd love to just get into the actual findings. Yeah, it's great to be here with two of my technology brothers. Thanks. There we go. I can definitely take you through cholesterol max. Basically, the way we see it, some of the most critical transactions in AI are happening when people are renting GPUs from a provider.

So this is companies like Corweave, Nabias, Lambda, Fluid Stack, Crusoe. They've been coming to market and taking share from, you know, AWS, Azure, GCP, Oracle. And I think a lot of people basically, they think that all GPUs are, deployed the same, and that's definitely not the case. So we go through in this article a lot of details about how our hands-on experience and then feedback from customers kind of makes it clear that it really depends which provider you go with when you're making a critical decision, like where to buy your GPUs. Yeah. How do you actually feel like you're getting accurate data? Because if a semi-analysis email shows up and I'm running a neocloud, I'm like, yeah,

let's put them in the best data center we have, I imagine. It feels like blind taste testing. We were just talking to a restaurant reviewer. I feel like your data center reviewer. These segments are actually pretty similar. Fake, fake companies, even get them into YC and just sign up. Yeah, something's going on. But yeah, talk about the pitfalls of the process or like how you actually tease that what's actually going on.

Yeah, I don't know if we're really doing a secret shopper thing quite the same. Like, I definitely get CTO on the phone in some cases to walk us through the greatest. But in my research, I talked to 140 different customers of these neocomies. Clouds to get their perspective on exactly what their experience was with reliability and support at scale. And I think it was quite revealing because, like I said, yeah, sometimes you get a really good experience in one data center that's quite different from somebody who's running stuff in Iceland or something like that. So what changed this with this version? I know that the actual graphic has exploded. There's more. There's going to be more data centers. Do we need more neoclots,

by the way, or are there enough? Do we have enough? But yeah, yeah, what? else was what else did you find um hey we need more man we need more of it all let's hear it for more more thank you for the tireless work indexing the entire market uh yes but what were the findings yeah look i think um we probably don't need a lot more silicon valley back to venture startups that are all renting GPUs from another provider and selling them with a bit of software on top of them. But we're seeing a lot of the like sovereign AI projects just get started and it looks a lot like a telecom buildout where, you know, different regions or countries have their own regulations or, you know, their own sovereign wealth funds that are funding the build out of a bunch of GPUs.

Yeah. And I think that's just getting started. So you're right. The biggest difference is we covered 84 neoclods this time and supposed to 26 last time. Our total market view, there's now 230, learned about four of them since we published last week. I mean, if you're a neoclad and you're not on the list, it's probably fair for the investors to send you that and be like, hey, what happened? I mean, we're doing our best to get coverage, but they pop up all the time with different people who are in different phases of actually launching.

Yeah. But yeah, what are the biggest movers? What were the biggest surprises? What were the biggest changes? because it seems like Corrieve has done well last time, this time. But there's probably some other folks who have taken your feedback and actually made changes. Yeah, I think probably the two big ones are that fluid stack debuted at gold. Like we did not rate them last time.

And they're kind of coming out of nowhere with a really interesting offering for taking other, let's say, bronze or worst tier GPUs and making them usable for, frontier labs. They have some really, really big customers. I think Google improved a lot. If the market had really shifted to using strictly Blackwell GPs and wasn't still stuck on using some of their old Hopper GPUs with their older networking, I would have seen Google possibly push to gold. I think they will in the future. They've been really improving. We've got a lot more work to do with AWS, I think. They're really focused on EFA and the rest of the experience is coming along, but their networking is just, look, it represents like less than 1% of the cluster

TCO by our calculations. And the users tell us it's like more than half of their debugging time is trying to figure out AWS is custom networking on some of these clusters. So we'll see who takes the feedback and who doesn't going forward. We try to be a fact that include a lot of stuff from those customers in there, as opposed to just, you know, a micro benchmark that we run. on the network ourselves. Yeah, that's super interesting, Jordan. I wanted to get your read on depreciation schedules. I feel like this is a big debate

and something that's going to be critical to the health of a lot of these players. And as chips get better, you would hope that the depreciation schedules, you know, would expand somewhat. But we're seeing it all over the board in terms of how different companies from hypers to some of these new entrants,

are actually planning around depreciation. And I would love to kind of hear how you think about it broadly. Okay. I think broadly speaking, depreciation is a financial metric that's hard for us to measure and varies between the different providers quite substantially, where people take different approaches from three to six or longer years. In terms of the lifespan of the actual technology, like there's there's two ways to think about this one is how long does the thing keep running well before it starts to have a lot of wearout failures like the GPU and the system and then the other one is how long is it useful on a performance per dollar basis and I think um that second one really depends on how good future GPUs are so right now we are seeing providers who are limited on power they literally have no more floor space in their data center rip out

perfectly good GPUs that are making them plenty of money to replace them with the latest and greatest because they can make even more money. And so if that power constraint goes away or the newest latest and greatest GPUs don't give you that massive performance increase, then I think people will sweat the assets for longer functionally in the data center. But I think a lot of people on the financial side are playing a guessing game or they're designing it based on how they want to design the financials of their business and not necessarily taking into account exactly how the GPUs perform or what's coming down the pipe.

Is that bad? I don't know if it's bad. I think it's just pragmatic. If you look at a hyperscaler and you see that they have all of these buildouts of new data centers coming online and they want to, look, they want to address the needs of that customer base and things just aren't coming fast enough. Ripping out old GPUs and putting in new ones seems like it's a good play.

It seems like it's good for the people who want the best performance. It seems like them, you know, they're going to get more revenue per megawatt with the latest and greatest. I don't think it's necessarily good or bad for anybody. What about, what about, so Satya has talked a lot about

wanting a diverse GPU fleet, fungibility of the fleet, not wanting to just do exactly what like a key customer. like OpenAI wants, if Open AI says, hey, build this data center for this specific training run, he's not immediately saying, like, yeah, of course I'll do it. No questions asked. He's sort of like, you know, being pragmatic about it. How much do you worry with some of these other neoclouds about being like two indexed to a specific type of like workload or tech stack, given how fast

the, you know, space is evolving and ending up in a situation where they just have a bunch of dead weight. Yeah, that's a really good question. And I think you're segueing into an article that we got coming out later this week and a fun interview that some of the guys did. So let me try and not talk about that while still teasing it. Basically, yeah, I think the concept of fungibility is really important to the hyperscalers. And it seems like in some ways they are exploiting the neoclouds for better or worse who have you know four sites and they're going to take a whole site and have it all one chip and that's going to be a bet for three to five years and we'll see what happens after that

so um in some ways investors kind of view this as returning the AI market beta versus getting some alpha on an individual chip or on an individual workload and I think it's, look, there's a lot of upside in this. And to your point, that focus on fungibility or pragmatism may have led to Microsoft Lurt losing like $320 billion of RPO to Oracle announced a couple of months ago at reasonable margins. So, you know, I think time will tell on that decision. At semi-analysis, generally speaking, you're going to come to a lot of.

us and get a pretty bullish take. We were way ahead of the market on that Oracle print last quarter. Let's give it up for bullish takes. That should pick it off. Yeah, that makes sense. How does, with fleet fungibility, when you see, you know, on ClusterMax, there is Azure. And then there's also a bunch of neoclods that have partnerships with Microsoft, like Nebius. How does that actually work if you're a lab and you go to Azure and you say, I want

GPUs from Azure and then Sautja says, oh, I have some over here through Nebius, and then I'm dealing with like, you know, the intrinsic details of this. Part of me, part of me, though, is like, like, who do you think is going to be able to make the better call Microsoft and Satya or Oracle when it comes to capitalizing on all that demand from OpenAI, right? Who has more information, who has more experience, you know, working with Open AI? who has, you know, handling these, you know, training runs. It's like, I don't want to, I don't, yeah, again, time will tell, right?

It could have been, like, the most brilliant move ever from Oracle. But at the same time, I have to imagine Oracle is, like, basically, we had a graph last week on kind of understanding where the, where the AI players sit on this idea of, like, how much they need, like, AGI versus don't need AGI. and how much they believe in AGI and how much they don't. And we were putting Larry, like, way up in the left corner of, like, needs AGI, but doesn't necessarily believe in it. Or hasn't issued public statements about it.

Hasn't issued public statements at least. But I just feel like very much like a Hail Mary from Oracle. And if they, if the depreciation schedules are quite a bit different than what they're planning, they will, Open AI will have gotten the much better end of that deal. And I think Satya could end up looking pretty smart for not going after it. But who knows? Yeah. I mean, I tend to agree.

I don't think Sach has looked dumb very many times in his career. I think he gives very thoughtful answers when it comes to this stuff. I do think in some respect, it's a matter of timing. like if you look at what Microsoft's buildout looks like right now, they are accelerating and that's on the back of OpenAI but also some of their SaaS products that are using this technology. They have access to all of OpenAI's IP through 2032. So they're certainly exposed to any upside on that side.

And yeah, it's a matter of when you want to take your free cash flow down to zero to do a buildout. and Oracle seems to be the first one to have moved while Microsoft lynched a little bit. Yeah. It's a game of chicken. It's a game of chicken. Hyper-scaler chicken. What did you think about, feel free to give your personal views. You don't have to share the official point of view of semi-analysis unless you want to. But backstop gate last week, I think you guys had probably been privy to conversations or heard. You know, it's not the not the first time that the idea has been floated around. I mean,

we're seeing sovereign AI in other countries. I'm assuming we'll see some version of it here. But what's your, what do you rate the likelihood that we could see a scenario where the government would effectively be guaranteeing loans for AI, you know, data center buildouts? Yeah.

I don't know how much. I have an opinion on that. When I read into it, it seemed like they weren't actually asking for a backstop or a bailout. Yeah, and I agree with you there. I'm not, our understanding of it was it wasn't asking for a backstop on open AI or any type of bailout. It was just like the language implied that they would be open to a world where data centers would be treated like some other categories around national security like manufacturing, where the government would basically want to encourage the development of data centers by saying, like, we're going to

guarantee these loans, which would just encourage lenders to have more confidence to lend against assets that might depreciate faster than people think and present some risk. Yeah, and I 100% agree in terms of guarantees. We see this elsewhere in the world quite substantially where there's governments in the Middle East, Norway, Canada, to a small extent, Indonesia, Korea, Japan, India. They're all like getting in on building a neocloud. And the U.S. government has not gone out and built a neocloud, but they certainly build supercomputers for defense, intelligence, research. And they certainly have a vibrant community of companies. So I think there's more that the government can do to accelerate the time in which

you can build a data center behind the meter, which a lot of places are trying to do right now without interconnect. Semine analysis, we've got a energy model coming soon. That's sort of a companion to our data center model. We've got guys on the team working on that who were grid operators in their previous job. And they've got a lot to say about the lead times to get turbines right now, or how much red tape there is to get nuclear wind, solar, online, how you need guarantees from the utility, even if you're behind the meter as some sort of, you know, future interconnect agreement or some sort of stabilizing power load. I mean, there's just so many creative things that could be done with the grid in the U.S. that I think are kind of fundamental before you can have discussions about financing a lot of stuff. because look, when we get in conversations with investors, I think there's a whole bunch of capital to be unlocked in the private equity space

that is just getting started. And it feels like early innings because VCs are the first ones to move and they have in the neocloud space. But we haven't seen a lot of like institutional players decide to make a bet on this the way they have with energy, with housing, with commodities. And if GPUs are going to be fundamental and they're going to be a commodity, and people want to bring like an H-100 index to the market, you're going to see a lot of like institutional capital try and pour its way in here.

And like functionally, how does that work? I think it actually comes in terms of like accelerating the existing data center projects as opposed to having the U.S. just start to build something new. Oh, sure. So to that extent, like totally agree with everything. I think the market kind of shuddered at those comments because it seemed like they were asking, opening eyes asking U.S. government to pick a winner when that is clearly not the case. Like there are winners and losers being shaken out in like chat, research, coding.

But we're in the early innings of video and image generation, of material science, of drug discovery, of weather prediction, all of these models that are showing incredible early results from transformer-based architectures running on the same GPUs as the chat models. that could be the, you know, lion's share of compute in the future if suddenly everybody wants real-time-generated video on their feed or we're making small weather predictions for everybody who's getting ready to go skiing or something.

Yeah, fascinating. I would like to see more AI on the slopes. On the slopes. I like the sound. Bring it to veil. Semi-analysis can do a ski trip, invite all the different players in bringing AI.

to the mountains. That's fascinating. Please invite us. Yeah. Very excited for the energy model. You can call it Powder Max. Whoever's working on that. As soon as you launch Energy Max,

we want to talk to you guys. We always enjoy talking to everyone at some analysis. Such thorough research, such deep insights. We really appreciate you. That's Chad. Yes. Great to see you, Jordan.

Thanks for coming on. We'll talk to you soon. See you guys too. Yeah. You're welcome to Whistle any time. Amazing. Amazing. Let me tell you about adquick.com.

Out of home advertising, easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out-of-home advertising. Only ad-quick combines technology, out-of-home expertise, and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. Our next guest is Isaiah from Valar Atomics. Congratulations, Isaiah. Wow. How are you doing?

Look at this backdrop. You look fantastic. Congratulations. Second time on the show. Give us the story. What happened today? Yeah, first of all, the egos screech was fantastic. fantastic timing there because we have our beautiful nuclear test site out in the back here in the middle of Utah desert.

Fantastic job producers. Yeah, we... That was me. That's George. That's George. I'm sorry. I stole the soundboard glory. No, they generate the sounds and I timed them.

I figured the eagle. So it's even more impressive because the producers were cooking that up in the five seconds from when they saw my backgrounds. Yeah, then you could hit play. We got so many sounds. We got here. I got sounds for days. That's exactly what it sounds like when one of our nuclear reactor starts up.

No, we're having a great day. It's an amazing day for Valoratomics. We announced a $130 million series A earlier today. Let's go. Nice. Congratulations. That is a proper gung. That's your series A.

Wait, I thought, I feel like you had raised a series A before. Wow. No, it was a C. I didn't realize. That's right. We announced a $19 million seed round earlier this year. Yeah. And actually we built our reactor on a seed round, and we didn't turn it on.

So now we have enough capital to go turn it on. Okay. And this is something I'm super proud of the team for, by the way, because I think this is like how venture is supposed to work. You hopefully turn something on in the series A. This is like when you find product market fit. So I'm super proud of the team. This is our goal.

Go split the atom with this capital. Yeah. I mean, yeah, the whole story here makes so much sense because, like, you started with like the really, really big vision, like turning, you know, nuclear power into energy that could be transported, actual, like, you were going to synthesize hydrocarbons and you laid out this big vision, but then that was almost like act three. And then act one was like, can we actually build something that doesn't even turn on, but just shows that we can actually build something. Then let's go turn it on. Let's start generating energy. Then if we have abundance

and tons of energy, then let's figure out what next to do. And I think people were always like, a little bit thrown by how far you were thinking into the future. And they were like, well, let's see what this guy can do in six months. And then you delivered on the six month project. And now I think people are waking up to what you're building. Is that how you've experienced it? I think that's an accurate perception. And I've certainly learned a little bit about how to pitch this story.

I talk a little bit more about the short term now, but I think about the long term every single day. Totally. I mean, I think of this as my life's work. Energy is a very interesting. thing where there's obviously an enormous amount of demand already, right? There's trillions of dollars worth of energy demand. But it's one of those things where if you make a lot of it and you make it very cheap, it creates its own demand. And I don't think there's really a limit to that. The more I play

this out in my head, if you can make energy cheaper, you open up these new apertures of places where you can sell it and things that you can do with it. And so that really is like the fundamental motivation and the thing that we're trying to do here is that I think energy should be 10 times cheaper than it is right now. And you're right, that's like a really long-term vision. But you have to be able to be super concrete and build stuff right now, six months, 12 months at a time. Yeah. So, I mean, the original vision, still very cool. I don't think it doesn't sound like you're losing side of it.

I don't think you should. But the, I mean, we were just talking to semi-analysis about the build-out for AI data centers. And it feels like energy is the bottle. neck, the question of we will probably be able to scale up the GPU production, but getting enough energy at the right price is probably going to be the next thing that we're talking about all next year, the year after. And there's going to be this question of like, where's the energy coming from? It's going to be a political issue if it's oil and gas.

Maybe it should be oil and gas in the short term. But in the long term, I think most people agree nuclear and solar. And so how are you thinking about the broader stories? here with America's re-nuclearization. There's a bunch of companies that are working on this. What are the timelines? What are the key things that need to happen? How's that looking? Yeah, I think AI needs power in the next couple of years. That's pretty obvious. And, you know, I was at an event with Tyler Cowan and Sam Alman a couple weeks ago. And Tyler asks him, you know, what's the only thing holding you back? And he says electrons. And Tyler says anything else, chips.

And he's like electrons, right? So that's pretty clear. And then the follow-up question was, What's the nearest term way to solve that in SAMHSA's natural gas? And I would generally agree with that. And I think that's probably true for the next 18 months. We do want to make power for data centers in 2028, though. And the interesting thing about nuclear is that I believe it scales very differently to natural gas. Natural gas is very site-specific. You need to go find good gas sources.

You're working on routing. There's all these complicated things. Nuclear, you can kind of do wherever it makes sense. And you can put a lot of it in one place. The reason for this is uranium is just easy to move around, right? Kind of a year's worth of it fits on a truck, unlike a natural gas pipeline where you're working on the actual in-ground logistics of moving gas around. So I think once we've gotten that cracked, like the first unit that's making power, we could just make more of them. And you end up seeing these big sites that people are sort of dreaming about today where you have a one, two, three-gigawatt, you know, AI data center.

This is very easily deliverable with a nuclear reactor that you just mass-produce, right? because you don't have to worry about these gas logistics. Yeah. But how do you decide, like, if we're doing one gigawatt, that means we, I mean, the last thing we talked about was like maybe targeting 10 megawatts, so you need 100 of these things. Like, why 110 megawatts as opposed to 1,000 megawatts or 10, 100 megawatts, right?

Like, there's some tradeoff. How'd you land there? Yeah, so our unit will be a 25 megawatt electric unit approximately. Yeah, so that's about 40 reactors per a gigawatt. And really the reason here is I just think that in the West, in the Western world, we're really good at making bus-sized objects.

And if you try to make an object bigger than a bus, you have a hard time. We used to be good at this, right? We used to be really good at, like, Hoover Dam, style construction, big nuclear reactors. Yeah, spatial, this kind of stuff. But if you notice how Elon sort of revolutionized rockets, he actually downsized pretty significantly.

The Falcon 9 is a smaller rocket than, you know, any of the heavy launch vehicles that took us to the moon. And then he kind of slowly worked his way back up to Starship. And even Starship is like taking longer than you would have expected. So there's just something about the tool sets that we have, the way that we do engineering that favors making objects smaller and making lots of them. Yeah. So if I'm,

there's a big part of like, put it on a truck. I talked to some early SpaceX people about that. And they were like, you can put the engine on a truck. Once you go any bigger, it's like get out the crane every single time. You want to do anything.

Exactly. And so if you can do just little less. crane work. It just compounds and compounds and compounds. What are the, what are the key risks to the business over the next like 24 months that you talk about internally with the team, things that you're trying to prove out? I think somebody, you know, haters could have said, you know, a year or so go, you can't build a nuclear reactor with $20 million. You'll need $153. You de-risk, you know, from a capital, from a capital, from a capital, standpoint, now you're much less capital constrained, and you certainly doesn't feel like there's a lot

of risk on the demand side, which is like if you can make cheap energy, will people want this? I think we know the answer there. But what are you kind of like focused on internally? Yeah, that's exactly right. And actually, I think people are massively overfocusing on every risk except just the technical execution. You mentioned like there's a lot of demand, right? I think you'll see a lot of companies put out MOUs. They'll sign deals. You'll see this company sent a deal with Google, this one sent a deal with Amazon, this sort of thing. One of my actually biggest Twitter haters, I'm going to have to shout out, unfortunately, because he wrote such a good tweet and somebody sent it to me that I was like,

I saw this. I was like, damn it, I'm going to have to shut that one out. One of my big Twitter haters, Nick Tehran, shout out to you, Nick, said, I'm issuing a universal MOU to all nuclear companies. Me, Nick, I'm saying, I will buy $10 billion of energy from any, nuclear company that can actually build a nuclear reactor on time and on budget and at a good price, right? So I think this is actually totally right. Like there is so much demand and the thing that's missing is capability. The thing that's missing is actually turning reactors on. So the risk is entirely we have to go build this reactor and turn it on. And this is, I think,

essentially what sets valor apart from basically everybody else in nuclear today is that when we started the company, our core conviction was that nuclear has to go back through R&D again. We sort of assumed as an industry that because we've built many nuclear reactors in the past that we still know how to. And I think that's fundamentally wrong. And this is sort of our belief from the beginning that we have to go back through R&D. R&D means starting small, starting low power, building it very quickly, testing it fast. And that will lead us to a commercial unit. But there is just real tech risk along that past, right? You know, pumps don't work like you thought they would. Seals don't work like, you know, that don't hold as much pressure as you thought and you iterate through it.

Is the tech risk? It sounds like the tech risk generally is a little bit overrated because this technology fundamentally, like it did work. It did work, you know, in the 60s. I mean, there were some problems in certain. Yeah, but even going to the moon is somewhat of a lost art. Yeah, yeah, I get it. Yeah, I would put this into the bucket. It's not science risk.

It's tech risk. It's really about engineering and capital. It's about what are your timelines. Yeah, economics, engineers. capital. What are your timelines? How much money do you have and resources to do it in the right timelines? And that's why our focus has been small steps executed extremely

quickly. I started this company about two years ago. It's been about two years and two months since we started the company. We built our first nuclear reactor within 14 months of founding the company and we're going to hopefully turn it on before the three year mark. And if you can move at that pace, I think you can sort of iterate your way.

You get more shots on goal, right? Moving quickly means you get lots of shots on goal. So if the seal doesn't work, write exactly the first time you do testing, that's fine because you have some time to go and test it and iterate that CLNED Val. Are you moving the family out to Utah yet? Are we going to see a Valor kind of like planned development with a bunch of mid-century homes? I like that. I will say we do have more RVs than I expected at the site right now and a lot more on order as well. Yeah, the housing out here in the desert is going to be an interesting challenge to Saul. We're not just building the reactor building here. We also have a triso fuel plant that's going up as well.

So we're actually going to be making our own tracetso fuel. So, yeah, we're going to have a really fun operation out here. And that's only the beginning. Very cool. Very cool. Congratulations on the progress in the round. I'm super excited for you and the whole team. Awesome.

Awesome group of investors, too. I have to shout out Doug Philopone, who loved this round, ran Global Defenseant Tallyer for I think 17 years, started Snowpoint, X Army Ranger, J-Soc Commander. Awesome, awesome guy. Not in this photo, but I actually arrived on our site here for the groundbreaking in a Black Hawk helicopter with Doug, which was fantastic. It's a great time.

The suit and the Black Hawk goes unbelievably hard. It goes quite hard. It's fantastic. Pedram Sharath and Richard Blankenship as well from Dream. Absolutely made the magic happen on this round, too. fantastic guys. Really, really grateful for all our investors. And Palmer's in.

I remember last time me and Palmer were together, you guys were in a fierce debate. And you clearly got, you wound up seeing eye to eye because now he's in the round, which is so congratulations on that. Yeah, yeah. I think we were debating about how much uranium we have. Yeah.

There's lots of it guys. Oh yeah. We got a lot of uranium to use. Yeah. I mean, someday, someday we'll get diffusion, but not before we're all living in like O'Neill cylinders with more energy energy than we know what to do with. Fantastic. Well, I'm very excited for our nuclear future. I'm excited for what you're building.

And I just want to say massive congrats. I remember we filmed a very brief interview in El Sigendo, probably around two years ago. You didn't even have an office yet. And it's been what a fantastic run. Congratulations on all the progress. Amazing. Awesome. Thanks, John, Jorny. We'll talk to you. Cheers, dude. See ya. Let me tell you about AitSleep.com. Get a pot five. I just reached for my phone, check my store. 40-year warranty. 30-9 risk-free trial. Free returns, free shipping.

I am, unfortunately, I was away from home. Oh, you're away from home, yes. You're on the road. I got an 86, 7 and a half hours. Our next guest is Grant from Gamma. He's in the restroom waiting room. Now, he's in the TV. He's in all three.

No, this is Hayden first. Oh, fantastic. Welcome to the show. Squeezing in. Hey, how are you doing? Super excited to have you. on the show here. We have, as you know, Uniswap alum working on the team. We're very, very grateful to have him. And it's great to meet you. Yeah, great to meet you both. I actually wasn't planning on doing

anything today, but now, here I am. There you go. Yeah, great to be here. Awesome. For anybody that has been living under a data center, introduce yourself and Uniswap. Yeah, so I'm Hayden, I'm the founder and CEO at Uniswap Labs. Uniswap is the largest decentralized exchange in the world. So for some context, if you annualize the past couple months of volume, it does about $2 trillion a year in trading. When you think about what a decentralized exchange is, you could think of us as a YouTube to a Coinbase or Binance is Netflix.

So we have the upload function. And so people can create their own markets. We introduce this whole system called automated market making, which lets people create liquidity themselves. And so it sort of dramatically lowers the cost to the creation and access of financial markets. And we're sort of one of the pioneers of what people call decentralized finance, which is this area of crypto that is focused on building decentralized, transparent financial infrastructure. And so UNICEF is the leading decentralized exchange in that industry. Amazing. So we were live when your post hit the timeline. We have it pulled up now, but it would be awesome for you to kind of run us through kind of the news and break it down for us.

Yeah, and I can try to set some context here. So there's kind of a bunch of different things here. So Uniswap launched about eight years ago or seven years ago. And maybe about five years ago, we launched this thing called the Unitoken, which was a token that was meant to govern the Uniswap ecosystem. And within that, well, at a high level, what the protocol does is it introduces a economic system for the Uniswap protocol and the Unitoken. And then it also basically refocuses Uniswap Labs. on building value and building on top of the UNICEF protocol. So, you know, we're kind of in this, like, moment in time

where there's a bunch of different things happening in crypto. And part of what we're seeing is a lot of people almost like move crypto into traditional financial rails. And part of what, you know, they're sort of like almost trying to like IPO crypto companies or build these treasury companies. And what we're focusing on is doubling and tripling down on the technology itself and the, you know, the decentralized protocol that we built. And so, you know, the proposal, first, it turns on protocol fees.

This has been a really big thing in the Uniswop world for a very long time. People have kind of wondered when this would happen. But here, you know, so the protocol fees will be turned on, and these are fees for trading on Unuswop Protocol, as well as there's this chain that we built called UniChain, and those fees are also going to this UniBurn system. There's also a, essentially, a burn of a large amount of uni from the Treasury, and this is basically representing all the fees that could have been. It's almost like symbolic.

There's been sort of a lot of like speculation around when this would happen. And so I think that, you know, this is kind of like a nod to that. And then I think beyond that, you know, Uniswap. So one thing to kind of like give context here is that we were in this like crazy regulation by enforcement area for crypto. Essentially, you know, Gary Gensler and the SEC sort of sued basically everyone in the who lived in the U.S., who was a crypto founder. And, you know, the kind of incentives that created for the ecosystem,

basically they said, if you do anything that builds value for a community, we're going to sue you. And then actually, and then, you know, within that context, we were extremely, like, limited in how we could interact with the world. And then, you know, we basically, and then they sued us anyway, and then we, you know, and then it was ultimately dropped. But I think so what's happening now is that there's, sort of like a very different kind of thing here.

And so, you know, Uniswop Labs is really able to kind of lean into the Uniswop protocol and building for it and focusing its full kind of attention to that, where we spent a lot of the past few years focused on basically building a business around the products that we build on top of the protocol. So there's like this decentralized network, kind of like Bitcoin. And then there's these apps and websites, kind of like, you know, a Bitcoin wallet or an exchange built on top of Bitcoin. And so we've built these products on top of the Unspot protocol.

And they have tens of millions of users. And so we've been kind of very focused at Uniswop Labs on building a business around that. But, you know, with this proposal, I think what we're kind of acknowledging and what we're saying is that the really big opportunity here, much like the, you know, the biggest opportunity of Bitcoin is the Bitcoin network, not each little application built on top. The big opportunity here is the Uniswop protocol. And we want, you know, as the sort of inventors of this protocol and people who've been developing it for a long time, we want to make that our core focus. So we're like, you know, leaning into that and kind of making that our full attention. moving forward. What does this mean for equity holders in Uniswap Labs, the company that raised venture capital, because I think part of what came out of the Gary Gensler era was you had this kind of like

bifurcation of value where there was equity holders that got access to tokens. And so they had upside there. And it's all, it felt like not not the kind of, some of the, some of the, you know, scenario that we'd see, let's say, in 15 years from now when tokenization is kind of the norm, and this is a standard way to build companies and distribute value. But I'm curious what the proposal means for that kind of setup. Yeah. It's a very perverse incentive to say, if you do anything that creates value, that's the bad thing to do versus, and that's how you ended up with this kind of thing where the only thing that was popular in crypto for a very long time was meme coins. And it was because they were, you know, they were the only thing that

you could say, well, no one is trying to build any value. And so that's what became popular in crypto. And that's not really like what is exciting to me, right? What's exciting to me is the idea of these like truly decentralized networks that create value. And I think that for me, you know, what I want to align, you know, my work to doing is what I think creates the most value in the world. And I think for Uniswap Labs, the way that we think we can create the most value in the world is to lean into building this protocol. So part of this proposal does include a kind of a service provider relationship between us and, and the DAO that sort of aligns our, you know, our kind of mutual kind of,

or like that sort of like aligns our upside. And so, you know, in this proposal, if we create a lot of value, then we can kind of, you know, realize some of that. So the goal here is to really like align incentives. And do you think, do you think more crypto companies that raised from traditional financial institutions will try to pursue these more aligned models going forward? Look, I hope so. I think that, you know, everyone was sort of kind of dealing with what was possible.

And I think that people have kind of still, like, evolved and adapted. And, you know, a lot of, you know, I think that, but my hope is that, like, the crypto-native things are what ultimately win. And I think that's kind of where I put my kind of bets. To me, you know, like, the point of the technology is the, like, the point of the industry is the technology. It's like the decentralization. It's the idea that you can create, you know, a financial application that, you trust, not because you trust a company, but because the code is transparent and public and auditable and run by multiple independent parties. This idea of decentralized consensus and networks, it can be really powerful.

And so I think that the more that projects lean into that, the better off we are. There's sort of like this interesting thing that happens. Like all of the fee, for example, the fee system that we're sort of proposing as part of this, every aspect of it is transparent and public and auditable and verifiable in real time. And so people don't need quarterly reports from a company when you can have real-time access to anyone in the world that's not just public and transparent, but also cryptographically provable. And so there's sort of like different ways of accomplishing a lot of the goals that various regulations have when you sort of kind of like lean into the unique nature of the technology. That makes a lot of sense. Has the reaction been, we've been streaming here, so I haven't been able to check the timeline.

But this seems like something that both Uniswap superfans and detractors would appreciate. Yeah, so it's only been about an hour and a half. You guys were fast to messaging me. But so far, I mean, from what I've seen, it has been extremely positive from a public reaction. Everyone on Twitter seems very happy, which is where most of crypto conversation happens. I guess it's X. I still say Twitter. It's hard.

It's hard not to. It's hard. It still happens to me every now and then. Well, congratulations. Big, big milestone and feels like it's a really positive direction for the whole industry. Do you think this is going to be a trend for other companies that are in a similar situation? Yeah, I hope so. We're doing it because we think it's what's, you know, what's best in the way, you know, we think leaning into, you know, the decentralization and the decentralized protocol is what's best. Yeah. And so I hope that, you know, other people follow this trend as well. I think that a lot of people have been doing it, but they've mostly been doing it from outside of the U.S. or in all these different ways. And I think that ultimately we really believe that this is the right thing

and what is sort of best for users and what's best for the world, which is why we're doing it. What about on the regulation side? Is there anything to touch on there? Yeah, I would just be curious are maybe the version of you that's earlier in their career,

are they deciding to set up in the United States? I mean, I know you went through absolute hell for a number of years and being, you know, based in New York was a big challenge. But are you seeing more younger crypto builders decide, hey, it's actually makes sense for me to set up in, you know, a place like New York, one of the financial capitals of the world? Are you still seeing a lot of stuff happening offshore because people don't think it's worth the risk of potentially a new admin, taking a different stance on crypto? Yeah.

So I think, you know, for the past four years, it was a lot of people moving outside the U.S., and that was sort of the predominant advice that people got. And then what we've seen in maybe other past year is people start to come back to the U.S. And I have various friends who've kind of moved their offices and who run crypto companies, who've kind of moved to New York. So we're definitely starting to see a financial hub and a crypto hub of a forum in New York, particularly at Brooklyn. It's actually particularly in Soho, I'd say.

But there are the Brooklyn Hub, but there's kind of a growing Soho Hub to crypto. And I personally, I love it here. You know, there's like, I could say that it was because I believed in the technology and that it would sort of, you know, that being on the right side of history would ultimately prevail. But I will also say that I just love it here as well. And I love living in New York. So I definitely hope more people come here. In terms of like the long-term certainty, that's really where like this like market structure bill that's being kind of discussed in, in, in. Congress is kind of pretty important, as is the, you know, some of the, like, you know, what we expect would be upcoming regulations out of various regulators.

And so, you know, the hope is to have, like, additional clarity and clarity that makes sense with the technology. That's really important, right. I think that what was challenging before is sort of regulators taking stances that just didn't make sense for the technology. And so, you know, the hope is that the sort of environment kind of can, like, and we really, you know, the hope is that long term there isn't this sort of like, it doesn't kind of stay a politicized topic long term. And the hope is that really is just like people create, you know, there's sensible regulations that come out of Congress that sort of, and again, like, recognize that, you know, the software developers

that create decentralized protocols are very different from, you know, a centralized financial institution that custody funds. All right, those are just like fundamentally different things. And so the hope is to have that kind of really recognized and acknowledged at a, at a federal scale. And once that happens, I think it will be like even more, you know, of a slam-dust. Soho Crypto Renaissance era will really, we'll really begin. Well, great to meet you.

Thanks for coming on. And congratulations on all the progress and the proposal. And we'll have to have you back on again soon. Yeah, excited to come back on sometime. Thanks so much. Great to hang. Cheers. Let me tell you about Wander.

Find your happy place. Book of Wander with Inspiring Views, Hotel Grated Meny, dreamy beds, top-to-cleaning. And I am in a wander right now. It's a vacation home, bud, better. It's Jordy's current home. So I will share one fun anecdote. They knew I had kids.

I didn't communicate with the wander team at all. Just booked it. And they knew I had kids because they asked for that info on the way in. They bought a bunch of toys. Oh, no way. There was toys when I arrived for the kids. And that made a bad time a challenge. because it looked like Christmas morning out there.

But without further ado, we have the CEO of Gamma coming in. Welcome to the show. Welcome to the show. Sorry for you. So sorry to keep you waiting. Crazy day. But we're pumped to have you on and talk about the news. Yeah.

It's so great to be here, guys. Excited to share. We just closed the series B from Andresen at a $2.1 billion evaluation. There's some other info. too. You're profitable too. Whoa. Is that right? We are profitable. We've been profitable for two years. Two years.

And we passed 100 million in ARR, all with a team of 50. 50. Team of 50. That's incredible. That's insane. That's incredible. What makes gamma, why is it working so well? Yeah. Because we've seen some, you know, this was a category that I think a lot of people were excited about. a couple years ago, we saw a ton of investment going into making, making, you know,

decks specifically presentations with generative AI. And not everything is panned out, but it seems to be working incredibly well for you guys. So what, what's the secret sauce? I mean, we attribute a lot of it to actually getting started well before sort of this recent AI wave. Sure. We've been a company for five years now. So the first couple years, we actually focus.

lot on just the underlying editing experience. So can we create new building blocks that are on traditional slides, you know, the 16 by 9 format, and allow like the average person, the everyday person that isn't a designer, doesn't have design skills to create much faster? And so two and a half years ago, we kind of married those building blocks with just re-engineering the entire workflow within gamma

so that AI can actually really quickly assemble those building blocks fast, give the end user a really serious. seamless experience. What about on the, how can you talk about the shape of the user? Have you been selling direct to consumers, B2B? Is there some sort of like, you know, Dropbox did like the viral web,

the consumer software viral loop where I send it to you, you install, you become a customer, we upsell, or is it more, you know, SDR-led, how are you thinking about the actual growth engine for the business? Yeah, definitely. So where we started, we actually started much more of a prosumer base of users. So you can imagine anybody that has to do a lot of external facing communication, whether

freelancer, solopreneur, small business owner, someone that needs to create a lot of decks, we made it dead simple for them to get started. For them, the beauty is that, you know, they're not locked into the Microsoft seat, the G Suite. So they have the freedom to choose whatever tool is best for the job. And so they're able to pick up our tool, use it. By nature of our category, we're lucky that if you like using gamma, you're sharing and presenting with others, right? There's organic virality baked into the use of the product.

So as the product has gone better, more and more people use it, share it, share it in many different ways. And that allows us to, you know, essentially acquire more and more users for extremely cheap. How big is the market for Dax? Because, I mean, I feel like, I feel like. like it's hard for me to get a sense of like, you know, how big the market is for, like, actual infrastructure for creating decks software for creating decks. Obviously, the market for decks is in the hundreds of billions, I'm sure, if you add up all the different consulting groups and things like that. But yeah, how do you look at that market? You're your multi-product now,

but yeah, do you expect that decks will be something, you know, kind of one of the biggest product line in five years, 10 years, or do you guys really want to go wide? Well, yeah, so even if we just start with the category presentations to your point, it's massive, right? So Google slides, 800 million monthly active users, you know, and then you add PowerPoint. We're talking well over a billion monthly active users, and that's just in that one category. And then you think about... PowerPoint has a billion monthly active. That's insane. But you add Google slides and PowerPoint together, you know, so we're talking about category where,

today, and that's with, you know, a product that's still pretty manual and tedious to use. Now, imagine Gamma automating a ton. Our API is going to actually make it so that anybody can actually build on top of our platform as well. So if you have a business where content creation can be core to your infrastructure, you can now build on top of Gammon. So no longer even manually creating content, it's going to be a massive market. And so that API business is that, you know, another SaaS company that wants to make it easy to generate reports that users can walk people through the organization? Is that kind of a use case?

It's like, hey, take your data, we'll turn it into a beautiful presentation automatically that you can run a meeting with. So there's actually multiple different layers. Layer one I'll call kind of just an extension of our prosumer business today. So imagine if you're already using Zapier, you can combine that with their favorite tools. So granola for notes, for instance. If you're a freelancer, you take all your notes in granola, the moment the meeting's over, you can take that meeting transcript, feed it into gamma, and create a very personalized deck going back to your client saying, hey, these are all the things we discussed, these are deliverables,

these are the action items we agreed on, and you get a beautiful PDF sent directly to them right after. So that's like a prosumer use case. Then there's like B2B use cases where, you know, in the future we'll partner with platforms like Glean where Lean is sitting on top of company knowledge. If anybody internally wants to create a QBR or strategy deck, they can pull that into Gamma, automate the content creation, create a beautiful deck so that you can use that for a meeting or discussion. And then one of the use cases you alluded to is what if other developers can build on top of Gamma.

So imagine you have like a real estate app. Your real estate app, you know, you want to build, empower your users. Anytime they look up a listing or look up, you know, a zip code, they want a PDF of all the different listings in that zip code. Well, we can power all that content creation, build a beautiful report so that app company focuses on the app itself, not on the content infrastructure. And we can essentially operate in the background,

send that beautiful PDF with all the listings for that particular zip code to the end user for that particular app. Are you going to keep the team lean going forward? Are you going to develop some hubris and hire like 400 people? What's the plan? DocuSide numbers. Get to the docuSign. Yeah. You know, we've always tried to do things maybe a little bit different. You know, we raise as little as we can. We build a super lean team. We continue, you know, I think we're going to continue to do that no matter what. And so lean is obviously, you know, relative to, you know, we have big ambitions. And so the team is going to get bigger. We're definitely hiring. But relative to our traction, I think we're still going to be, you know, pretty small.

Did you ever think about raising 67 million? No, it's a good question. We felt like we really needed that extra million just in case. You never know. Missed opportunity for the meme potential. Somebody else has to do that. Well, awesome. Crazy, crazy, crazy progress.

And I love to see, you know, a winner coming out of this category. You know, everybody has been through the pain of making presentations. And there were so many, you know, I'm thinking of Tom. think there was and there was pitch.com, all these companies that tried to crack this problem and just didn't quite figure it out. Ed Norton has a company. Oh, yeah, Ed, you're competing with Ed.

We got competition from everywhere, you know? Yeah. Yeah, that's something to break into. Yeah, something's working. Well, great to meet you. Congratulations. And I'm sure we'll see you on here for, this was this series A or B?

Series B. Series B. Okay, we'll see you on here for the C. Looking forward to. Sounds great. Thanks so much, guys. Great to me. Fantastic.

We'll see you soon. Let me tell you about Bezell. Your Bezell concierge is available now. Source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch. Bucco Capital bloke said, I just don't see a world where corporate budgets for AI

will be smaller in 2026 than they were in 2025. I think they will be much bigger. Got room to run, baby. Somebody comments it said, then you're out of touch with the world and stuck in a home office. Bucco says,

that doesn't even make sense. sense. That doesn't make sense, of course, because if you're in the home office, you wouldn't understand. No, I don't get that at all. That's very confusing. Alex Cohen says, if a startup requires you to be in office 12 hours a day, six days a week, you should run the F away like your life depends on it. Apparently, this company, Giga, which has been going viral, what is, are they actually saying that you need to be in the office 12 days a week? Or sorry, 12 hours a day? Someone said that they got hired in April to lead demand gen for them. They quit after the first day.

There were red flags. When we hit 10 million ARR, we're going to spend 100K on blank illegal stuff. We're doing blank in MRR. The dashboards in the headquarters showed 6X less. You know, in office seven days a week, 12 hours a day. PTO policy is subject to change, blah, blah, blah, blah. You expect to always be working. Give an offer a letter on Wednesday.

So sort of like... They chopped off a goat. had in India because it brings good luck. Sounds aggressive. I wonder, I wonder, have they responded? Has Gigga, like, responded to this and said, like, this is not real? Because that would be important, I guess, if they have to, because somebody's, like, making this claim about them, it should be sort of, like, you know, debated because we don't know,

when someone, when someone makes a claim like this, there's a bunch of different motivations that could be behind it. I don't know. hopefully I saw giga did an interview with harsh Tagar from YC and they seem to be getting some traction in their market and there seems to be some good stuff. I mean, there's nothing wrong. Like each one of these needs to be like kind of evaluated in and of itself. There's nothing particularly wrong with working very hard if everyone's in on it and everyone's happy with it. So we'll see.

We'll stay tuned for the response from the giga. Yeshan says my AI investment thesis is that every AI. application startup is likely to be crushed by rapid expansion of the foundational model providers. He's still bearish on the application later. That's interesting. That was a take from like a year or two ago that it kind of got out of fashion. What do you think, Tyler? Well, yeah, so one thing, so Elon quoted it and says, seems to be accurate. But one thing that's kind of interesting here, Sam Altman with Tyler Cowan, they were talking about like an AI native slack. And a lot of people were saying, like, request for startup, who's building this? And it's like, you have to assume that Sam is going to, like, he runs his business on Slack.

He cares a lot about, new Gmail. Yeah, he cares a lot about Enterprise. He wants ChatGPT to be an agent that's working in your company 24-7. You think he's just going to be like, oh, yeah, someone else should build that. I don't care about the enterprise. Someone else should build the AI Native Slack. Yeah, I don't know. I would just assume that he's building that.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We'll see. What do you think? Is there still value in the application layer? Are you so AGI-I-Pilled that it doesn't matter? Just hoard electrons. I mean, yeah, this was like the original, like,

rapper was like a slur almost. Yeah, totally. It's like, oh, you're starting a rapper company. Like, it's like totally fake thing. Yeah. But I think that the kind of rapper trade has done very well. Oh, totally. It sounds super well.

So, yeah, time will tell. Like, look at Giga. They're pro or not Giga, gamma, but gamma. They're profitable. 100-mell ARR. Yeah, I think people massively overestiming how much, like how many different things that these foundation model companies could actually do. Yeah. You just can't allocate that many engineers, like so many different products.

I disagree. It's not that. It's the capabilities of the fundamental underlying model. Because there is a world where you go to the, just the base weights of GPT-10 and you say, generate me a 10 slide deck that pitches my product to this customer, and it just generates it all, and it just does it all. And the tokens that it is outputting are essentially PPPT files. Can it generate UI on the fly that allows you to edit the output? Because even the most, even the smartest designers, best designers I've ever worked with, rarely are they just one-shotting a task

where I'm like, no more, you know, you want to get in there and like, switch it up yourself. Yeah, but like, so look at cloud code. Cloud code is just, I mean, it's just a base model with some scaffolding, right? You can think of it as like the actual capabilities of the model aren't incredible, but if you add basically, you know, essentially a really nice four loop, it gets way better. That's just like extra engineers that are just like normal software engineers. Sure.

You could see that Anthropic do the same thing where they bring, you know, they put a group of 10 engineers and they say make this better at, building PowerPoints. They don't do that. Yeah, yeah. No, I agree with that. But there was a scenario where, like, Claude Code would be the Claude Code for PowerPoint.

Because you can go to Cloud Code and tell it, hey, iterate on the For Loop, generating PowerPoint. Yeah, I think that's still not so crazy. Yeah, it's not. You've talked about this thing where you use Cloud Code to do like a research and it made a nice HTML file. Yeah, yeah. That's a PDF. Yeah, yeah.

You could just PDF it at the end of it. It's a word doc. Yeah. So there is a world where like, yeah, the application layer still, you know, faces significant competition from the foundation model labs. Let's read Ishawn's, he's also the former CEO of Reddit. Correct? I'll be right back.

So, Yishan says, my AI investment thesis is that every AI application startup is likely to be crushed by rapid expansion of the foundational model providers. app functionality will be added to the foundational model's offerings because the big players aren't slow incumbents. It is wrong to apply the analogy of fast startup slow incumbent here. They are just big for far more so than with any other new prior new technology. There is a massive and fast moving wave that obsoletes. Every new app is almost as fast as it can be invented. There's almost no time to build a company and scale it.

There are two ways AI applications. startup founders can make money, make a flash-in-the-pan app that generates a ton of cash and bank the cash. My estimate is that you have about 12 to 18 months cash flow generation. Make a good enough app that you get acquired by one of the big players for sufficient equity. The situation is highly unstable. We don't know if it's going to crash or go to the moon, but both scenarios make it very unlikely that any AI application startup will independently become a generational super company. Baseline odds are low to begin with.

I sort of agree with that. That makes sense. The best odds are finding an application niche in a highly specialized field with extremely unique and specific data barriers, ideally ones relating to real atoms, hardware or world-related data, and not software slash finance.

Interesting. Yeah, I mean, I think, like, if you're a normal kind of consumer wrapper company, you probably did not like seeing what OpenAI was doing this summer where they had, oh, we have an Expedia plugin, and now it's, You can use, you know, Figma, you can use it straight in the, in the chat. Sure, sure, sure.

Yeah. I think there are still plenty of startups that, like, are quietly just, like, dying from better models or just more like productized, you know, features in the actual chat interface or whatever. Yeah, yeah. I do wonder about the shape of that curve because it's, like, it's clear that, like, Open AI used to just be such a monolith in the sense that it was just, like, train bigger transformer, train bigger transformer, that's what Open AI is. At least that was like the view from the outside. And then it became like, okay, chat GPT the app, but then also like enterprise stuff and then also API

and then also SORA and also Dolly? And at one point, do you remember, do you remember the Dolly UI? Do you remember there was like, there was a moment where Dolly was turning into like Photoshop in the browser and you could actually like edit and highlight different regions and you could do like in painting where, you could say generate an image here and then generate an image next to it, generate an image, you could kind of block it all together. And they were like building an application on top of the image model.

And I don't know if that disappeared. Maybe we just don't talk about it anymore. Maybe they're still working on it. But there were a number of different, I imagine that they have a visualization of different SaaS categories that they could potentially go after, just like Google did with, you know, on-prem software. Like, what's not in the cloud? Well, email's not in the cloud. Well, PowerPoint's not in the cloud.

Well, Google slides. You know, spreadsheets aren't in the cloud. Instead of Excel, let's go to Google Sheets. And Google just kind of chop down that. And so Open AI could be doing something very similar, looking at what's not AI-ified, what's not AI-native. Yeah, I think it's definitely wrong to say that this, like, question of whether rappers are, like, long-term valuable,

I think it's, like, very much still an open-a-question. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it'll be interesting to see. There will definitely be some folks who get out early. There will be some folks to figure out ways to be durable. It will probably be a mixed bag. Jaguar Analytics says the strategy Ponzi scheme is blowing up. They have $689 million of interest due in 2026 that they don't have.

Sailor is enticing investors by raising yield by 25 basis points to 10.5% on preferred shares to raise capital to keep running. the Ponzi while collateral deflates in value. So they currently have about 50 million of cash on hand in order to pay that interest. They can raise more debt at this relatively high rate, 10.5%. They currently have about 8.2 billion of debt. The market value of their Bitcoin is roughly $65 billion. And the company is sitting at a $68 billion. market cap is down 40% in the past six months. And so we will see. So wait, so strategy is now trading at book value essentially.

Is that right? It's trading at $68 billion, but they have $8 billion of debt. Okay, okay. And so net of debt, they're still a little bit high, a little bit above where asset value is. Interesting. Apparently, so this is in the Wall Street Journal too. I guess everyone's writing about this right now.

But the Stimmy checks coming back. Yeah. The tariff dividend. Someone's excited for their stimulus check. Excited for the stimulus checks. Everyone's pumped. Yeah, I mean, the original micro strategy trade was like it was hard to buy crypto in on certain platforms.

It was hard to buy, it was hard to buy crypto in your IRA, institutions. And Microstrategy. And Micro Strategy gave folks a way to do that. And it still exists. There is some sort of arbitrage still, but just purely getting access to Bitcoin is... Guess what day Microstrategy peaked in the dot-com bubble. Wait, what? Oh, dot-com.

Oh, they've been around that long. That's right. Yeah, so the criticism of Sailor is that like he was like he was a kind of a bub guy. Sure. He was big into that whole world. And the bulk case is that he seems relentless. He's still around. He, the stock peaked March 10th of 2000.

Wow. There you go. March 10th, 2000. So micro strategy was worth about $128 billion at its peak in July. It is now worth about $70 billion. So, I mean, a pretty significant sell-off. And interestingly, Bitcoin has not sold off in the same way. It's purely the market mood.

changing around crypto treasury companies apparently. Very, very fascinating. There's, yeah, there's a lot here. But we can go into it some other time. Anything else in the timeline, Jordy, that we should be looking at. We are well, well over. We're in the fourth hour, baby. We're in the fifth hour. We're in the fifth hour. Let's go for six. Let's go for six. In the fourth hour, I start asking our guests the same questions that Jordy asks. I just get so lost. It happens. It's like a million text messages. Anyway, stimulus checks are back.

This is true, apparently, or at least it's like rumored, or at least it's truth. It's on, it's not necessarily true yet, but it's on truth social. Warren Buffett has a tariff dividend of 2000. A letter that says he's, I'm going quiet. What? Warren Buffett says he's going quiet. He says in one of the times today, he says in one of the, his final missives as a company's leader, Mr. Buffett said he would accelerate his plans to disperse his fortune to

his children's foundations. My children are now at their prime in respect to experience and wisdom, but have yet to enter old age. He's talking about his daughter and two sons who range an age from 67 to 72. And again, still sitting on a lot of cash. He's got a lot of cash. The Rockefeller Center Christmas tree has been delivered. Let's hear it for the Rockefeller. Christmas is officially here in New York City. We need some Christmas. I need some Christmas sound effects on the soundboard.

We got to bring the Christmas spirit. Oh, yes. We need, I need some bells. Oh, ho bells, jingle bells. Christmas is officially started at TVPN today. I'm calling it. We're Christmas maxing now. Very fun show.

Thank you for watching. Tune in tomorrow. Wait, we have to read this last post. From Andrew Reed. The top real estate agent in Hillsborough, Burlington is this guy named Stanley Lowe. And on his website, he says, The diminutive risk takers speaks with competitiveness, cockiness, and conviction of a salesman who loves the business and rarely doubts his ability to succeed against all comers and all odds.

While some will attempt to impugn the green banker operation as a high-end real estate machine, those who have transacted with the firm see it for what it is, a successful, responsive juggernaut that reflects the personality and determination and discipline of one man, Stanley Lowe, and the perpetual motion

of a real estate operation that never slackens in its quest to stay atop the real estate pyramid. What a bar? What a bar. And look at this guy. He's suited up looking like an absolute G.

He's actually at the top. We've got to work on getting Stanley on this show. That's not him. That's like a toy of him. Is it? I'm confused. I think this is a real picture of him. I think it may be a little bit of Photoshop. Okay, something weird is going on here.

It looks like a, it looks like a toy or something. And then our final, final post. We're not going to get to the story, I think. It's been late. Maybe we'll get to it tomorrow. But Sam says there's locking in and then there's locking in, how this 31-year-old made a quarter billion dollars in 30 months trading Russian oil when sanctions meant others stopped. Yeah, this is a great story. An absolute dog.

Dig into it. But stay tuned for more TVPN tomorrow, 11 a.m. Pacific. Tune in. Can't wait. Can't wait. We'll see you then. Until then, leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. And if you're looking for a shorter version of the show, although if you're in hour five, I doubt you are.

But in general, if you're ever missing this show, we have a product called Diet TBPN. We edit down the whole show. Bring it to you at 20, 30 minutes, something like that. All the flavor. All the flavor. And only 30 calories. Only 30 minutes of your time. You can listen to it on 2X, I guess, if you want to.

We will see you tomorrow. See you tomorrow. Goodbye. Cheers.