TBPN Live - Delian Asparouhov, Ridge Wallet Interview, Nvidia Earnings, The Sheikh of AI

Episode Date: February 27, 2025

TBPN.com is made possible by:Ramp - https://ramp.comEight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpnWander - https://wander.com/tbpnPublic - https://public.comAdQuick - https://adquick.comBezel - https://getbezel.comFollow TBPN: https://TBPN.comhttps://x.com/tbpnhttps://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235https://youtube.com/@technologybrotherspod?si=lpk53xTE9WBEcIjV(01:35) - Nvidia Earnings (21:17) - "Spy Sheikh" (43:51) - Stripe (54:19) - AI Growth (59:51) - Ridge Wallet Interview (01:19:05) - Delian Asparouhov Interview (01:30:13) - Timeline

You're watching TBPN live from the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. That's right. Today is Thursday, February 27th, and this show starts now. We've got a great show for you today. We're going over NVIDIA earnings. We're talking about the spy Sheik, a man out in the Middle East who's making waves in AI investing. And we're also breaking down Stripe's letter from the founders. Lots of interesting fintech data in there. We're going to have two call-ins today. We got Sean Frank from the Ridge Wallet and Delian Asparuja from Varda and Founders Fund.

What are they going to be talking about, John? Sean is actually going to come on and talk about Applovin. A lot of turmoil in the stock. I think they're down a bunch recently, right? I actually haven't been following that, but he's the expert. That's why we're having him on. Yeah, I'll pull up the chart right now. But Sean has been a big customer of Applovin. There's been a lot of attacks against

them recently. He's come out in defense of them saying that, you know, you can say that it's overvalued. That's fair, but it is a real platform. We've driven real results on it. And so it'll be interesting to get his perspective there. I think he spent a few million dollars there last quarter. And so we'll get an update there. And then a very exciting day for Varda. Yeah. I'm excited to dive into it. Second re-entry successful.

And so Delian will come on and break it down and hopefully give us some color on what's going on in the space economy. And, you know, hopefully get political. Explain what's going on with DOD procurement. Hopefully get political. Oh, yeah. We don't get political. We let our guests get political. Explain what's going on with DOD procurement. Is it hopefully get political? Oh, yeah. We don't get political. We let our guests get political. I don't know. He'll talk about whatever he wants to talk about. Anyway, let's kick it off with a report in the Wall Street Journal about NVIDIA's earnings. They beat earnings. They're down today. If you want to pull that up on public, I'd love some extra context, but I'll start reading from

this. The chip giant has stayed relevant even as deep seek and other reasoning AI models rise. NVIDIA faced a growing threat earlier last year. The artificial intelligence world was shifting in a way that invited competition. As millions of people started using AI tools, operating the underlying models to respond to their many queries became more important than the computing intensive work of training them. This is the training to inference shift that we saw happen, and which was expected. You train the model and then you want to actually serve it. And so you've got to do inference. This had propelled NVIDIA to the top of the AI boom. Many expected that shift could give competitors, including advanced micro devices, AMD, an opening to pry away market share. But NVIDIA was already preparing to adapt

and stay at the forefront of the AI race, despite the shift away from creating models and toward operating them, a process known in the industry as inference. And I love this article because all the killers are here. They got Dylan Patel quoted. They got a bunch of other people that we'll get into shortly. Its latest AI chips, Blackwell, are larger in size, have more computer memory, and use less precise numbers in AI computations. They can also be linked together in large numbers with super fast networking, which Dylan Patel, the founder of industry research firm SemiAnalysis, said led to breakthrough gains in inference. So full case for NVIDIA laid out by Dylan Patel over at

Semi Analysis. NVIDIA's performance gains for Blackwell are much larger in inference than they are in training, he said. NVIDIA's latest quarterly earnings report on Wednesday partly reflected its success in adapting to the industry shift. It included sales and profit that exceeded analysts' expectations coupled with an optimistic forecast for the company's current quarter. Inference has become a growing focus as AI evolves towards so-called reasoning models where a digital brain thinks through answers to users' queries step by step. That process can require a hundred times more computing power, Chief Executive Jensen Wong said on a call with analysts Wednesday. The vast majority of our compute today is actually inference, and Blackwell takes all of

that to a new level. We designed Blackwell with the idea of reasoning models in mind. So yeah, obviously when you're reasoning, so many more tokens are being generated hundreds of hundreds times more. And so inference is becoming much more important and Blackwell has positioned an NVIDIA well to take advantage of that. Got anything for me, Jordy? Oh, I mean, it's just it's only a company like Nvidia could have an earnings beat and a very optimistic forecast and the stock trade down 6% the next day, which is where it's at sick, almost six and a half percent. So it wasn't just price to perfection price for his perfect price beyond perfection. And they're the stock price is paying for it today. But let's get into the rest of it. And then I'm sure we'll have other thoughts. So Colette Kress, NVIDIA's chief financial officer

added that many early developments of the company's Blackwell chips were earmarked for inference work. That pattern was a first for a new generation of the company's chips. Among the company's pursuing reasoning models are OpenAI, Google, and the upstart Chinese AI company DeepSeek, which we've covered on the show. The emergence in January of DeepSeek, which said it had built sophisticated AI models that required fewer of NVIDIA's chips, touched off the significant scare for NVIDIA since the AI boom began. So of course it sold off, then it gained back, and now it's back down. Speaking of DeepSeek, I don't know if this is in the stack for later, but somebody shared yesterday that they have off hours pricing. So you can basically, it's already extremely

cheap, but then off hours, which are their sort of non-busy hours, it's like off another 50%. And somebody was saying, great, we have Teemu AI now. Well, there's a ton of load balancing that does happen in these AI inference models. So mid journey, when you're in America and you're using mid journey during your work day, you are likely running that inference in Asia on an Asian server because of the time difference, they're not using it in the middle of the night and then vice versa. And so that type of load balancing happens all the time. But it is funny how sometimes it seems like the models, if they're under stress, they still work, but they become like lower quality or there's a bunch of knobs that people are tuning. And it's basically like, yeah, your AI worker is getting lazy.

Just won't try as hard. Just doesn't try as hard. Exactly. Get some protein. Yeah. So Wong brushed off that threat on Wednesday, describing deep seeks advances as a, as an excellent innovation that AI developers everywhere we're taking inspiration from. I think that's true. A lot of those gains will be baked in, but people will still want to run

them on really big, uh, really big server farms and using a lot of Blackwell chips. Um, why not stack all the gains together? If you can in the past, Wong has suggested that inference and training will eventually converge as AI more closely aligns with how humans operate. People don't absorb new information and reference it separately. He said at Stanford University last year, you're learning and inferencing all the time. And some of these models actually, it's what's called online learning where you can continue to train the model even after it's been fully trained. Yeah. So, I mean, obviously there's the pre-training, post-training, but a lot of these models are now what's called online so they can be essentially updated. And I think that the people that look at AI as, you know, we're kind of replicating the

human brain, think about it that way, where there's like fast thinking, slow thinking, all these different models and you need to replicate all of that. And humans are fixated on, you know, especially in our corner of the internet, improving your thinking day over day, not in sort of quarterly installments or, or, um, and, uh, yeah, it's interesting because right now people seem very comfortable with, uh, the idea of, uh, it would become a lot to process if, you know, uh, Claude 3.5, you know, there's some people today, I saw the cursor founder sharing, he still prefers Claude 3.5 over 3.7. And people are sort of oriented now around these sort of releases and having like fixed models. But there's a world

in the future where they're just constantly morphing and evolving. And I think that that is what this point's getting at here. Yeah. i've seen some diagrams where people have said like oh there's too many algorithms now and too many like hacks on top of uh the the core lom uh to really call it agi like it doesn't count it needs to be like one simple algorithm that the algorithm for agi will be just some simple transformer and then it'll just be massively scaled up. And that will give us everything we need, uh, as opposed to what we have now, which is like, uh, yes, like it, it has the ability to use a web browser, but that's adapted to it and has like ability to look up data and index things. And it, but another way to think about it is like, in your mind, you have the access to go to the library and look at books and you have the ability to use a calculator and so maybe we don't need to create an LLM

that can do every single calculation from its head it can just use it as more like super intelligence right yeah closer to the definition of something that doesn't need any anything else or no reference exactly it's almost yeah it's almost an academic exercise can you just create some super intelligence with a single simple algorithm? Well, it doesn't matter because really what people want are just agents that do their jobs. And so it doesn't matter if it's, if it's, you know, just going and writing some Python and then coming back with the correct answer. I just want the correct answer. Um,

so, uh, NVIDIA still faces strong competition in inference industry insiders say, well, NVIDIA's advances in hardware and investments in its ai software have kept customers around a variety of new chips from startups and more established chip makers mean it won't be easy for nvidia to maintain its position at the top robert walken the co-founder of ai chip startup etched i actually spent three hours interviewing him uh last year uh great team fascinating team uh two teal fellows on that team uh and they are trying to build a uh an inference based chip that's just a transformer baked down into silicon so those so those would run much faster and they've done some cool demos where they've

uh been able to generate minecraft essentially on the fly and the only thing that it takes in is the input from the controller and then it just generates the next frame that you would expect to see and so you can just play this full game and it's all being generated there's no real time yeah exactly so level the guy on x i think uh levels io he's doing something with flight uh like a an alternate like a flight simulator fully generated version uh We'll talk about that later, but I'm pretty sure what that is, is he had AI write game engine code.

Interesting. It's different than generating the video. Yeah, exactly. So yeah, but similar things. I mean, regardless of all this stuff, it's really interesting. Yeah, with the pace of development, some of these models, you can imagine a future where games

are just perpetually generated in every possible direction, right? It'll be a totally new experience to play games versus historically there's a map and there's sort of boundaries to the game. And then what happens when there's no more map? Like the map is whatever you can imagine or whatever the game can imagine. There's no finite levels like you can you can go to chat gpt right now and just say uh tell me a story about a knight fighting for a castle and then just immediately be like continue the story where does it go next where does it go next and you can do that for or do that with star wars say pretend you know you just finished the movie you know this movie yeah you know continue the movie yeah and right now it

might get boring but uh eventually you can say, Hey, Hey, make another level for me, make another level for me essentially and do it all in real time. And so he said, NVIDIA's chips were fundamentally limited by their origins as graphics processing units adapted for AI instead of custom made for the moment. Sharpening the Swiss army knife only gets you so far. Walken said, you have to build specialized hardware. If you want to get maximal said, you have to build specialized hardware. If you want to get maximal performance, you're hitting a wall here. And we certainly saw that in Bitcoin mining.

Bitcoin was originally mined on the CPU, then eventually GPUs, then what are called FPGAs, field programmable gate arrays, where it's really kind of customizable silicon pieces. And then after FPGAs, it went to ASICs, which are the algorithm is

baked into silicon the chip can only run one algorithm and the algorithm that the bitcoin asics run is the bitcoin algorithm that just mines mines mines and uh hugely risky because your chips yearn for the mines much like the children yearn for for minecraft true true everything converges to mining in this world uh mining and tokens crypto tokens ai llm tokens you know there's these weird crossovers all over the place but um uh for the bitcoin folks it was very risky because you you have to spend all this money to make these chips and then if the price of bitcoin doesn't go up well you're not going to reap your benefit now a lot of those or the price of energy or goes up. Or energy, exactly. And so it's the same game

that we're seeing playing out right now. And Etched is betting that Transformer architecture is here to stay and that AI inference is going to be here to stay. And I think that's a very safe bet. I'm very excited for what these guys are building. Of course, it's a huge task to actually go and build a Transformer-based chip

and get it manufactured. But the co-founders have some hilarious stories. It's so interesting to think about the comparison between humans thinking. Just the process of thinking requires a bunch of calories, which is one form of energy, right? Inference, on the other hand, the same level of human thinking is going to require some amount of inference to accomplish sort of the same generalized sort of reasoning process. But it also requires energy. So it'll be interesting to think like I actually want to see comparisons of for a human to reason something out. What is the energy cost? What is the comparable energy cost for a machine to do it? I would think that right now it's very possible that it takes more sort of calories in almost

energy in for the machine to do it. Uh, but eventually that'll, that could flip, uh, but it might be closer than you'd actually think, but it's an interesting comparison, right? How many, take all the people, how many David protein bars do you need, uh, to, to have a good take, right? For you, it's maybe like a quarter of one. yep. We'll see you every time. Yeah, it really, it's, yeah, the matrix is basically that story. So he goes on to say, a number of startups have begun making inroads among large AI customers.

Cerebrus, which is a company we've talked about before, they designed the largest chips ever produced, wafer scale chips. By the way, I love this because everybody's like we need to make the best smallest most performant chip they're like no we're just going to make the biggest one we're going to try to make the biggest and best chip very american out of a french uh french firm i don't know oh no it's they're working with mistral they're working with mistral and and and it was interesting because uh cerebrus i think they might have gone public or they became a pretty big company.

And they had one deal that wasn't with a company that people had actually used the product of. It was kind of more of like a hypothetical. Cerebrus is in Sunnyvale. So not French, but working with Mistral. And so they're working with Mistral now uh to build the world's fastest ai chatbot so because it's all on one chip you you can inference it very quickly there's no memory bandwidth to deal with and so uh there's advantages to that of course there's a bunch of drawbacks we talked about this when you're manufacturing at wafer scale one tiny defect

throws out the entire chip as opposed to if you have a wafer and you're getting 50 chips off of that, if you, you know, your yield is, you know, 49 out of 50 instead of zero out of one. And so there have been a lot of risks to that approach, but I love to see that they're trying a different approach and trying to create just a new product that optimizes around a different vector of progress. And so Saudi Arabia's oil giant Aramco is working closely with ai chip startup grok which is with a q it's a different grok that's a tough one it's very tough and sambanova systems to set up large computing facilities for inference and now the grok groq they uh went viral with a demo because they uh ran llama on uh their chip which which I'm not exactly sure. They did something where they optimized for like super fast memory bandwidth,

but low total memory allocation or something like that. They made some trade-off. And the result was that you could inference Llama and generate tokens like extremely, extremely quickly. And it would just, you know how like you're kind of waiting for chat GPT to load with the GROQ chip. It would just like spit out a full page like immediately. And that was like kind of magical.

When you're so used to LLMs taking a little bit to think. And when it happens instantly, it's really shocking. It's magical. It feels like the future. Yeah, exactly. And I'm sure there's that thing about like Amazon, you know, every five milliseconds of optimization really matters. And so you could see that really driving adoption. It's unclear if that's if GROQ is like scaling up and successful and all the new models, because some of the new models, they might need, oh, this one needs more memory. And it just doesn't work on their chip so there's always interesting when you're when you're looking at a reasoning model sort of think something out right now it's paced out in a way that that it sort of you can see the sort of chain the logic chains and it goes more or less as fast as as you know you you might think through it if you were knowledgeable on the subject yet when it happens instantly you

start feeling a little paper clippy and it's certainly nerve wracking. It is so funny that the, the first AI thing was clippy and then everyone's worried about getting paper clips and like, it's like it all comes back to the paper clips. I wonder if that's where the paper clips, the paper clipper like AI doom scenario came from. Is it at all tied to Microsoft's clippy?

I don't know. What's like the etymology of like the paper clipping thing. I understand the, the, like the thought experiment that like, Hey, you know, you tell it tell it to it's a good example you tell it to go make a paper clip and then it just turns everything into paper clips so the the i think the original the origin of this was that philosophers have speculated that an ai task with uh with a task such as creating paper clips yeah might cause an apocalypse by learning to divert ever

increasing resources to the task and then learning how to resist our attempts to turn it off. So I think that that that's sort of the, but why did they choose paperclips is because of Microsoft's Clippy? And that's what I mean. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They could have said staples or they could have said hats or they could have said, so it's a 2014 thought experiment by this guy nick bostrom okay yeah and so clippy would have predated that so it's very possible we got to ask bostrom he he does uh he does shows every once in a while we should get him on ask him where he came up with paperclip specifically uh i think that's interesting uh i have to imagine that nvidia is going to drop some kind of inference powerhouse sooner rather than later because I think they will get eclipsed in that market. He said, it may take many years, but I think that's

the direction things are heading. And this was Jim Piazza, an executive at IT management company and Sono who formerly worked on computing infrastructure at Meta. He said that NVIDIA might need to take further steps to directly address the competition in inference by developing chips specifically for it. So if you can think about this, like, you know, what, what is Apple doing in, in inference? Um, well they have, you know, the, the, the M1, M2, M3, M4 chips, those are Apple Silicon. They aren't really wired together in a way where you can do a large language model training run on it. I'm sure you could get it to work if you worked hard enough and you got enough of them. And we've seen some previews of this

where like maybe they just, you know, networked a bunch of Mac studios together to do some sort of small training run. Um, but it's not really designed to be like Blackwell competitive, uh, or a 100 H 100 competitive. Um, but you know, uh, Google has their TPU and I think Amazon has a custom silicon chip as well. And so there's a few different hyperscalers that have chips that are specifically, they're like, hey, we're going to do all our inference ourselves. We don't want to pay NVIDIA their margins.

And so NVIDIA needs to keep up with that, cut it off. Yeah, and the competition for NVIDIA is the Groks of the world, the GROQs, right? These sort of upstart chip chip uh design design companies but then it's also the hyperscalers and that is honestly in many ways more risky because it's very difficult for uh you know startups can can kind of pick a you know a

certain edge but the issue with the the hyperscalers is they're the big buyers of these chips as well so if they start developing their own, that's a huge risk factor. The other thing is in the news this morning, well, we are the news, but in some other news this morning, Andy Jassy was on, I think it was Bloomberg, talking about Amazon's new quantum computing chip. And so every hyperscaler cares a lot about this category,

is innovating themselves here, and in hopes to one day be running you know, running a lot of their data centers on their own chips, right, would be the goal. Cut out the middleman. Well, regardless of what you think about NVIDIA, the best place to invest in NVIDIA is probably public.com. I would say so. Investing for those who take it seriously. They have multi-asset investing, industry-leading yields, and they're trusted by millions. Go to public.com for stocks, bonds, treasuries, options, and more. And treasuries are a great option in this market when everything seems to be in free fall.

They rolled that out when interest rates first popped in 2022 and have just continued to ship uh improvements on it so uh yeah good time to have exposure to historically uh much more stable assets yeah so go do you do some research and uh move some assets over to public uh let's move on to the spy chic taking the ai world by storm this is a fascinating profile on abu dhabi's tanun bin zayad al nahan he has more than 1.5 trillion dollars to spend and he's in a hurry he's grappling with mark zuckerberg the abu dhabi royal size is not size you remember that line i think this was uh yeah when luna was crashing yep uh the the people were sort of poking fun at the founders he had this you know his his company did collapse but he had a good line in there which was your size is not size so good people were saying they were shorting but uh nobody's size is size when you compare uh this

royal thrown around 1.4 trillion yeah move over masa there's a new there's a new big dog big masa when you need i mean it's funny it's funny when Masa is talking about raising $500 billion. This is a guy that could do it, but he's certainly not going to put 30% of his entire portfolio into one potentially high-risk project. Let's kick it off the abu dhabi royal sometimes called the spy sheik is accustomed to using his vast wealth to master his many obsessions which have ranged over the years from martial arts to chess to video games now sheik tanun the united arab emirates national security advisor and brother of the president is deploying a similar playbook at a much grander scale he wants to muscle his tiny

emirate to the front of the race to develop and control AI systems that could transform the global economy. The world is taking notice. The CEOs of Apple, Microsoft, and BlackRock have all paid homage to his elaborate Persian Gulf Royal compound in recent months. You know, we love Royal compounds. I've been, I told you before we joined the compounds love compounds um i've been i told you before we joined the show i've been on an absolutely iconic uh persian gulf royal compound in the uae i don't think it was this one there are many there's plenty of space in the desert to put these compounds but uh they really are uh an oasis the one that i went to had over 100 ferraris stored on the property.

So many. It was actually to the point where he would have like one F40 in each color. Wow. And he'd be like, oh yeah, I like vintage Range Rovers. And then he would have the entire rainbow of just one car, same spec, just changing the paint color. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it's like the sultan brunei at one point the sultan brunei was buying more than three cars per day for years and he

wound up with a collection in the tens of thousands he was a client of my father-in-law actually insane he was making custom cars yeah he would go and get dominator the precursor to the bentayga never sold to the public. I mean, a lot of great... So, when I just asked Bentley, I want an SUV. And they said, okay, we'll make 10. So, there's a bunch of incredible cars that originated because somebody in the Gulf said, make me this car. And we can thank them for that. The G-Wagon was actually...

So, the G-Class was developed as a military vehicle from a suggestion from the shah of iran interesting back in 1972 that's crazy started as an iranian uh and it's still loved by persians yeah specifically here in la yeah whatever iran deal happens next we got to make sure there's some cool cars involved yeah let's let's de-escalate and and shift from you know the geopolitical jockeying to just who can design a cooler car yeah that's the world peace that i want to see exactly in the world exactly we're working towards that but this guy seems like an absolute boss uh he uh on a fall trip to the united states he grappled with fellow brazilian jiu-jitsu devotee mark zuckerberg and donned a sweatshirt and jeans for a visit with

Elon Musk at Tesla's Texas factory. All of this is possible in part because the 56-year-old Tanun controls more money than almost anyone on the planet as the chairman of two Abu Dhabi wealth funds with an estimated $1.4 trillion in assets and the steward of an enormous personal personal fortune a new artificial intelligence fund he leads mgx is set to be infused with more than 50 billion from his wealth and other abu dhabi sources and that's like a drop in the bucket compared to the 1.4 trillion it's crazy these numbers are so big now um according to people familiar with the fund billions of dollars more are sent are set to be spent on AI by Group 42, a company he controls. This is all part of more than $70 billion the UAE has pledged to invest in France and Italy earlier this month.

Last month, MGX was one of the few names mentioned backing Stargate, a $100 billion data center project. Wait, so how are they calling this a $100 billion data center project when the headline number just a month ago was 500 are they dialing it back i have no i mean it's possible that they started the road they basically started the road show yeah and said you know shoot for 500 even if you miss and landed 100 you're still in a good spot right you're starting to be more competitive with some of the hyperscalers but uh definitely dialing it back a full 80%. I'm assuming that the Wall Street Journal sort of like fact check this and sort of confirm because for them to just call this, if it was still a $500 billion project and then they're going and calling it a $100 billion project, it doesn't look good on the journal. Yeah. I mean the the numbers just go up and down every other day yeah like uh add 100 billion take 400 billion off who knows it doesn't matter and then is it

over what period of time and oh then zock's doing 200 billion over here and um and big numbers satya microsoft is good for his 80 billion but then maybe pulling that separately and no one really knows how you're counting this stuff up but uh a lot of money's going out yep data centers are being built and the products are getting better so they're you know the hype is over here uh saudi aramco is working on uh their own project with uh with grok wow yeah um okay so it also uh it is also written big checks to open ai and musk's ai xai and and and amazon backed anthropic so he's in all three foundation companies good why not and at that point i think people are just like i don't like that you're in my competitor but i who else am i

gonna go to for 100 billion. You're the only person. So yeah, you can have a slice of everything. You can create an index. I mean, it's super smart. Yeah. Even in an AI world awash in funds, Tanun stands out. While many are plunging tens of billions of dollars into concentrated areas,

SoftBank is making a huge bet on OpenAI, and the tech giants are heaving money at data centers. Tanun is planning to spend more money broadly around the fledgling sector than almost anyone else. It's a risky time to be splashing so much cash on AI. Citation needed. Who knows? It might be the best time ever. Well, so the next, so they back this up by saying the low-cost AI model from China's deep seek has abruptly shaken assumptions on the need for heavy investment. Got to put them in the true zone here. It's already come out that they spent way more than the headline number that they had. And so at this point, if they came out with a super low number,

single digit millions, and then sort of revised it. And then since then, they've probably revised it again. But the whole sort of world moved on. Right. So we still don't know exactly how much it costs, but it certainly wasn't anywhere near the original number that they threw out i'll keep reading here valuations uh across tech have skyrocketed and even optimistic venture capitalists often acknowledge the market is in a searing frenzy leading ai companies expect to lose billions of dollars for years to come while pledges of future profitability rest on hazy assumptions of a tidal wave of demand many see parallels to the late stage.com bubble when cash splashers of the era that's a great that's a great one gunslinger cash splasher cash flasher is great you gotta cash flasher we gotta write that down cash what are you splashing what are you doing

so when the cash splashers of the era plunged tens of billions of dollars into public, into building out fiber optic cable networks based on projections that internet growth would be even more rapid than it was, a glut of fiber and enormous losses followed. We've pushed back on this before. It seems obvious that we're in an AI bubble, but at the same time,

our leading AI companies have hundreds of millions or billions of dollars in revenue, which the dot-com era companies did not have. And the actual adoption of AI seems like it's taken place much faster than the Internet. Totally. And the reason for that is because the Internet is the greatest distribution channel for software ever in history, right? You can launch a new model and get, you know, hundreds of thousands of users in the same day. Yeah. I want to give some more color on who this guy is because there's a bunch of fascinating anecdotes in here. So it's from his ornate palace in Abu Dhabi. Tanun

personally tracks the progress of global large language models on a dashboard his researchers built for him on his phone and computer. He urges subordinates at the giant network of companies he owns to rapidly incorporate AI. So he's probably like pulling up like Chatbot Arena and like MMLU like every day basically and seeing how- Oh, that's great. It's so much better when you're invested

in every single company because Chatbot Arena is just your personal sort of dashboard, right? Yeah, I wonder what else he's tracking on the progress because it could be like DAUs, right? If you can get that data. I have this situation right now where I have these two companies

in the exact same category that I'm a shareholder in. They're both growing very quickly. They both raised a lot of money. And I just happen to be friends with both CEOs. That's how I ended up there. But it's sort of funny because every other week they sort of alternate between sharing. You know, one person's like, oh, I did this. The other person's like, I did this. I'm like, I'm happy for all of you. It's fantastic.

It's great. I like this one. So Tanun was meeting with Satya Nadella at Microsoft. Satya mentions a book by George Washington University professor Jeffrey Ding that suggests AI could be the base of a coming global economic boom. And this is clearly what informed this book, clearly informed Satya's idea about, hey, let's get to 10% global GDP growth, 5% growth in the developed world.

This is what we should be thinking about AI, not reading like the AI doomer books, right? But the sheik scribbled it down on his notepad and soon after, Ding was eating lunch in his Washington DC office when a representative from the UAE embassy knocked on his door and said, I can't find your book in any bookstore.

Can I get two copies? Amazing. Just like send my guy to just like go get the book directly from the source. We've talked about this before. Billionaires have guys. Yes. The middle class has apps. Well,aires have guys. Yes. Uh,

middle class has apps, you know, apps. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, but, but when you get to a certain level of like the super billionaire,

the trillionaire class, yeah, I mean he controls a trillion dollars. He, I don't think he made it to the super billionaire list we looked at yesterday. I think that guys in his category pay did not end up on this list. Yeah.

Or it's just like they have control over capital but they don't personally own it and so it's all it's much when you look at the list all the people are people that you can basically clock their net worth yep by publicly available like notably absent see we know how much of tesla elon owns exactly so when the stock fluctuates by 20 billion, you just look at his share pro rata and you calculate what his net worth did that day. I think they said there were 26 super billionaires ranging from $450 billion for Elon roughly to down to $50 billion for some other folks. Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, not on the list. It's like, how do you not include those guys when they clearly control 50 billion worth of economic power, no doubt.

And they're not just, oh, they're around for a couple of years doing the job of president. This is their life. Anyway, that is the nature of these things. But I love this guy because- I guess we're having a Zoom difficulty, so I'm going to just keep reading through this and you can help Connor get the stream back up.

Yeah, read the story about the Age of Empires thing. Yeah, I'm catching up here. Sorry, folks. So I'm going to backtrack here for a second, but Tanun grew up in the shadow of his brother, Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al--nayan the longtime crown prince who was named president of the uae in 2022 while his brother rubbed shoulders with foreign leaders and crafted plans to remake abu dhabi's economy tanun honed extracurricular activities his he became so hooked on competing with his brothers in age of empires a video game where players develop hunter-gatherers into powerful civilizations,

that he hired an employee from the company that makes the game to coach him on tactics, former employee said. He turned a palace within his royal compound into a gym. He funds one of the world's top cycling teams, the UAE team Emirates, and he rides on an island near the presidential palace he ringed with cycling pass. He likes super light Colnago bikes so much that he instructed one of his companies to buy the Italian firm that makes him incredible. Tanun has poured money into building up Brazilian jiu-jitsu and other forms of grappling around the globe. A black belt, he started a well-funded championship tournament that has become the Olympics of our sports, says Bobby Razek, a filmmaker who is making a documentary on Tannun and the event.

He's definitely one of the founding fathers of mixed martial arts, he said, a sport that, quote, would not be where it was today without Tannun. His interest in AI has roots in the early 2000s when he was so intrigued by computer-aided chess that he hired a sizable team of engineers to make him a program called Hydra that could compete with the world's best players. Erdogan, uh, goons, a computer chess specialist for opening moves said he often talked by phone for two or more hours a day with the chic as they monitored Hydra's games. That's incredible. So in late 2017 to noon's interest increased after he learned that Google's AI program AlphaZero had beaten the world's best computer chess program after needing just four hours to learn the rules. It was far more powerful than Hydra ever was, opening his eyes to the power of AI, he told associates.

The following year, he tapped Peng Xiao, the former chief technology officer at software turned Bitcoin firm MicroStrategy to start G42, a company devoted to applications in AI. So it's very cool. He's been he's been very obsessed with this for a very long time. And so at the time, Abu Dhabi's wealth and economic strategy was largely under the control of Tanoon's brother, Mohammed. As de facto leader of the country, he pushed to siphon off part of the Emirates oil wealth and put it into investments in economic development, building the wealth fund bounty Tahun would later inherit.

So the thing that I think people don't fully understand about a country like the UAE is it's almost more of a kingdom that is forced to define itself in certain settings as a country, right? So when you think about the wealth of the UAE, you should be thinking about it as the wealth of a kingdom, which is controlled by the royal family, right? And these families are massive, right? And so you can visualize a sort of family tree. And the closer that you get to the top,

the more of the wealth that you control. If you're farther down, you might control some small aspect of the kingdom's operations. You're going to have like a team that works under you, but you're the ultimate decision maker. And so what's interesting is if you want to get big deals done in these sort of kingdoms, you actually have to, if it's a big enough deal, you have to get the sign off of, you know, more or less the king, right? And so you can see these sort of decision trees that trace up. And that's why, you know, the venture world has had this idea that you can just sort of show up in Abu Dhabi and expect to raise, you know, billions of dollars,

like it's some easy task. But if you talk to any large allocator, they'll tell you that these relationships are developed over years, sometimes decades. And you have to, you're going to have to genuinely be, you know, invest time into those relationships and ultimately get the sign off of, you know, the most powerful members of the family. Yeah. I think, uh, isn't it like every Emirati gets just like a payment? Yeah. There's a, there's effectively a UBI. So, so education is funded. There's enough, uh, you know, sort of a monthly sort of payment to cover a lot of living expenses. This is part of the reason why cars are actually so popular there. One is because it's an oil producing nation. So gas has always been super cheap. There's like an incredible car culture there. But two, if your education and your, you know, house or your apartment are covered and you're working, what are you, and you don't,

and you have a perpetual income by being a citizen of the kingdom, you're going to spend it on cars. And it's actually interesting. There's a dynamic, you know, speaking of cars, cars are actually, you would think they would be more expensive in the UAE. They actually end up being cheaper because they're, they, they, one, these cars can't sell back in the States, but two, there are people that use cars to export wealth from sanctioned countries. Let's say you're an oligarch in Russia and you want to get wealth out of the country, it can oftentimes be easier to move a LaFerrari than it is to move $5 million out of the country. So there's a bunch of cars there that sell below retail and below their sort of market value in the U.S. because people just want to get them into the UAE, move them,

and then they have real dollars that are sort of protected within the kingdom. Yeah. I think they were also struggling to set up top tier universities. And then they have, you know, real dollars that are sort of protected within the kingdom. So I think they were also struggling to set up a like top tier universities. And so that's where they came up with this, with the idea of like, we'll just pay. Uh, if you go to a school in the U S if you get into Harvard, we'll pay full tuition for you. Yeah. Because like, yeah, then it's just, yeah, there's a lot of, it's as good of an investment as trying to build the next Harvard in the UAE. Yep. Interesting uae yep interesting um well uh did you get to the to the section where they had to rip out the huawei routers do you see that no we didn't get that far uh the uae has long seen itself as something of a switzerland a trusted point for trade for the east and west and choosing sides on ai would risk damaging relations with china

but the allure of the u.s. lead on AI was too much to ignore. Tanun picked the United States. Let's go. Let's go. And he says Huawei routers were ripped out of G42's offices and Western equipment put in its place. No more spying. Do not look at our internet traffic, China. While Tanun and his aides continued negotiating with the administration on details to enable the deal, the administration paired Tanun's company with Microsoft. G42 agreed to use Microsoft's cloud for AI work and also to comply with U.S. export restrictions as part of the deal. And Microsoft invested $1.5 billion in G42, joining its board of directors. Still, China hawks in Congress are being concerned that the UAE's overall ties to China remain strong, fearing the country could allow powerful U.S. tech tools to make their way to China. Those lawmakers could be an obstacle if Tanun comes back for similar deals. Yeah,

I mean, the challenge of being Switzerland of the Middle East in many ways is that, you know, the UAE does have a lot of economic ties with, from what I know, Iran, right? There's a lot of Iranian money there, Russian, etc. But the cool thing about being in the UAE is if you go there, you'll sit down at dinner and you're at a table with, it's the most diverse group of people I've ever been a part of. I got a chance to go a couple of times in what was it late early and then late 2023. And you'll sit down at a table with somebody from Iran, somebody from Israel, somebody from Russia, somebody from the UK and American,

and everybody's getting along because everybody's just generally there to, you know, in that setting, enjoy F1 and, you know, everybody's, you know, generally pro-business there. So it's a great environment. Yeah. I mean, the capitalism and business has been like the one thing kind of holding the Middle East together with, you know, UAE and Saudi Arabia kind of playing nice with both sides and kind of keeping everything together and a lot of pressure to not let anything fall into just absolute chaos, which is obviously risky.

So speaking on a podcast in December, they're talking about Josh Kushner or Jared Kushner recalled a 2018 meeting when he was visiting the region. Tanun told him, Jared, I'm not meeting with you unless you spend two hours after with me to talk about AI. Wow. And so he's trying to build his- He's going podcast mode. He's like, you got to talk to me for at least two hours, the shortest Joe Rogan episode.

Yeah, yeah. And we'll get into the details. That's great. And so, yeah, he's been investing in a lot of stuff. And I'm sure he'll be someone- You got to have him on the details. That's great. And so, yeah, he's been investing in a lot of stuff. And I'm sure he'll be someone. You've got to have him on the show. Whose presence only grows over the next few years as he continues to make big investments. Anyway, if you're looking to take a trip and stay in a nice place, maybe impress a chic while you're on the fundraising tour, we recommend going to Wander. That's right. Find your happy place. Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel grade

amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning and 24 7 concierge service it's a vacation home but better and we have some big news from kyle over at wander they just crossed 600 total locations and you were in the chat asking weren't you at 500 a month ago said yes yep it's pretty pretty great growth 20 month over month is incredible. It's amazing. And what's cool is Wander is a platform where every incremental property makes the platform more valuable, right? I think that we dealt with this before. I was trying to stay at a Wander when the fires were happening. They were all booked.

I'm sure they've added multiple properties within Southern California, and the pace that they're operating at is just incredible so go check it out they actually are running a spring sale for the last day today that you can get 400 off uh plus a wander hoodie with code spring 400 so go check it out and you won't regret it it is unbeatable and we are going to be staying uh in at least one wander in early march uh and uh very excited to record it we'll be we'll have to do the show from the wander because their wi-fi is so fast for sure it makes it all possible live stream it uh that's great well let's move on to uh uh an analysis by shiel monat uh breaking down adyen and Stripe's 2024 annual reports. They both are out.

And so now you can benchmark these two companies against each other. Adyen processed 1.34 trillion and was up 33% year over year. Stripe's growing faster at 38% year over year and is now at 1.4 trillion. Adyen's valued at 56 billion public company. Stripe is valued at 91.5 billion. And in terms of employee count, Adyen has 4.3 thousand employees. Stripe has 8.2 thousand. They're both profitable.

Adyen EBITDA of 1 billion. Note, Stripe has higher margins. And so this comes to us from this wonderful Stripe community letter that we will read some of this stuff, but it highlights a lot of interesting applications for the company. And we'll go through some of the highlights here. Yeah, the big thing that stood out to me from Shield's analysis,

everything, the two numbers that jump out, one is Stripe is almost double, valued more than double. Yep um and uh stripe has almost double the number of employees right and and uh so anyways there there's the the big story here is uh how you know how is stripe worth uh twice adyen despite having uh less ebita yep and twice the employees and and all these things but um yeah the the letter here is fantastic and just shows the level of and the and the leadership that uh stripe has uh with the collison brothers so their uh stripes mission of course is to grow the gdp of the internet right yeah and payment volume represents 1.3 percent of global gdp now that's insane absolutely

insane it's one of those things like they could have said hey over time we think the internet's going to grow a lot we think internet payments are going to be big we think we can actually get one percent of the global gdp running through uh and it's the most ridiculous number because every founder uh has thought about a world, oh, if we just get 1% of this market, we're a multi-billion dollar company. Stripe actually did it. And an example of one of the most hyped companies of the last 20 years living up to the hype, right? With the way that they're growing, there's a world where there is a scenario

where they have double digit percentage of global GDP running through their rails, which is just obscene. Yep. A straight billing alone is on a $500 million revenue run rate. We use straight billing. Over 300,000 companies are on straight billing

and Stripe was profitable in 2024 and is expected to remain so in 2025 and beyond. And of course, they were one of the companies to kind of move quickly during the last downturn. I don't know if they had to lay a lot of people off. I think they actually mostly just froze hiring and kind of grew into their valuation. And it set them up for profitability and then kind of scaling from there. So they kind of know what the base, you know, how the business operates, how it runs. Obviously they're very big and they can kind of grow into their valuation. Nearly 200 million active subscriptions are managed via Stripe billing. Stripe is trusted by half of the Fortune 100, 80% of the Forbes Cloud 100 and 78% of Forbes AI 50 companies. One in six new Delaware

corporations incorporates via Stripe Atlas. That's crazy because I always thought of that. I mean, there was Clerky years ago and those products, they're very easy to get popping in small Silicon Valley crews, but you don't get to one out of six without being like a mainstream product. The dynamic with Stripe Atlas is, is fascinating because it doesn't seem like they do a lot of independent marketing. It seems like a product that Stripe built truly for the community. It was a pain, you know, it makes sense. It's a perfect wedge product for payments, right? What do you need to do before you can accept payments online? You need to have an entity. They built what I think is the best way to create an entity online. You know, we used it for TVPN. It's a fantastic product. It's still super simple, despite it

being a relatively complicated process to create an entity. The product is fantastically simple, and it's turned out, you know, it's turned out to be an amazing wedge product for them. Uh, just given the scale. Yeah. It's gotta be a hard product to advertise, right? Because like you only incorporate once and not everyone's incorporating it all the time. And it's not like there's so, yeah, I mean, I'm sure they're all over Google ads and stuff for when people are thinking about incorporating, but outside of that, it's hard to do a lot of awareness for that product, but they've done a very good job getting penetration there.

Hertz, and then they give some case studies here, Hertz increased 4% of online payment authorization rates after switching to Stripe. Turo saw a 4.7 boost in recaptured revenue, translating to an extra 114 million per year. I had no idea Turo was that big. Wow, that's huge. Intercom improved conversion rates by 2.1%. Forbes saw a 23% revenue uplift

within six months after switching to Stripe. There's a ton of examples of this. Major AI companies, including OpenAI, Anthropic, MidJourney, 11 Labs are Stripe partners. Stripe's agent toolkit and virtual card tools enable programmatic spending and control. More than 14,000 vertical SaaS platforms utilize Stripe's payment services.

I mean, it's just like the default in Silicon Valley, at least. Stripe Capital provides fast funding with funds arriving in under 48 hours. So they've really just built every possible fintech product on top of it. It was initially just like three lines of code. Seven lines of code. I have to try to pull this up but if you look at their product timeline there is a pretty amazing uh you can actually see i wish we could pull this graphic up but it's going to be difficult but uh they basically come out in 2010 with payments yep two years later they launch

connect yep four years after that they launched radar and atlas so this entire time they're just focused on making this perfect payments product right and and uh to show that level of patience even when they uh they had sort of exploding growth and traction and many many operators would have said hey we should go multi-product we have all this traction they waited and then since then starting in, they really ramped up the pace. They launched Atlas, Radar. 2017, they launched Sigma. 2018, they launched Terminal, issuing, billing. 2019, Capital, as well as corporate cards and the infrastructure to issue corporate cards. And then in 2020, they launched Treasury, as well as Climate, and then they launched a tax product in late 2020 as well.

So the velocity went from, hey, let's just have this sort of narrow focus and really own payments. And I think that Stripe is one of the best examples in history of focusing early on really, really directly on startups as a category. And they sort of ignored the enterprise pretty broadly, but they benefited from between when they started in 2010 and where they are today, many of their early startup customers became public companies that are now massive. And those were, you know, customers that were able to prove out these use cases that would, you know, go on to allow them to, you know, sign companies like Hertz, right. Which is this legacy company or Forbes, things like that. I remember Shopify when Shopify started, like the default payment

integration for a long time was Stripe. And you kind of bring your own Stripe account. And then they were doing Shopify payments, which is kind of a white label Stripe account, but it was all Stripe under the hood. Uh, and yeah, they've just, they've just really, really benefited from just letting the internet grow and being like the index on the internet economy. Uh, interestingly, a good example where the, the mission of the company grow the GDP of the internet economy. Interestingly- A good example where the mission of the company grow the GDP of the internet was truly, truly aligned to the potential of the business itself, right?

I thought this was interesting. They mentioned the bridge acquisition. Transaction volumes in stable coins doubled from Q4 2023 to Q4 2024. And Stripe now supports 40 million monthly active stablecoin wallets wow and yeah that's something that like they've been talking about crypto for a long time they've integrated crypto products of the past but like the the stablecoin thing feels like the first time that stuff's like really taking yep uh taking hold and i know i saw they made

the bridge acquisition they they spent you, over a billion dollars on it, specifically because of the developer activity that Bridge had. Yeah. So they, I think, saw a younger, you know, they saw the stablecoin version of Stripe, which had early developer traction. It was a product that developers loved. And then all of a sudden, you know,

public companies are using the product. Yep. And so they write stablecoins, room temperature superconductors for financial services. Top stable coin uses today involve tangible real world activity. CFOs use stable coins to manage corporate treasury. Immigrants use them for remittances. Citizens of countries with unstable currencies use them for dependable savings and payment teams use them to enable customers from countries with low card penetration. Some of our favorite examples,

SpaceX uses Bridge to repatriate funds from Starlink sales in Argentina, Nigeria, and other markets. Dollar App, a neobank in Mexico, uses Bridge to help individuals receive USD payments from payroll providers like Deal. And Airtm uses Bridge to disperse payments to workers all over Latin America. So as we start paying more people all over the world, the stable coins make a ton of sense.

I've actually paid people in stable coins before because they've been in countries where getting them US dollars was very, very volatile. Delayed, high fees, exchange rates, et cetera. And so- Yeah, and to be clear, there was a lot of analysis of the bridge acquisition at the time where people said,

how could they pay 100, it was like more than 100 times revenue. It was a lot of analysis of the bridge acquisition at the time where people said, how could they pay a hundred, you know, it was like more than a hundred times revenue. It was a really big number. And the obvious answer is that Stripe has over a trillion dollars of volume. They're big believers in stable coins. They had had their own internal efforts. Why not spend a billion dollars to acquire a leader in the space and then focus on integrating it with all of your existing customers. So I think we're going to see over time that that could very well be an Instagram style acquisition for Stripe in the sense that you can imagine the bridge product, you know, 10 years from now having, you know, hundreds of billions or potentially even trillions of dollars in volume. Yeah. And I like this. We've been seeing this AI growth chart all over the internet.

And Ramp's done some analysis on this showing adoption of AI tools. On the corporate card side, Stripe's seeing something similar. They say, we are seeing an AI boom on Stripe. We're partnered with a large number of companies with rapidly growing businesses, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Suno, Perplexity, MidJourney, Cognition, Eleven Labs, Langchain, Pinecone, Mistral, Cohere, Sierra, so many of these. And the median time to annualized revenue milestone for the top 100 AI companies on Stripe in 2024 was 24 months. They compare that to back in 2018, it took SaaS companies, the top 100 SaaS companies by revenue, 37 months. And so they're providing extra data to show that the AI boom is real and companies really are accelerating their revenue

growth faster than in previous, I don't know, in previous waves. And so Cursor, the AI-powered coding assistant, raced to over 100 million recurring revenue in just three years. We're also seeing the likes of Lovable, which had 17 million ARR in just three months. This is wild. So Lovable, for those that don't know, is a Swedish company. Harry Stebbings, fellow podcaster, was one of their early investors. And Lovable doing that in three months just puts so much pressure onto every other company because that's now the bar. I remember in 2021, the narrative was you should be able to hit 1 million of ARR in nine months post-launch. That's now seems childish in comparison. In the cage, we're trying to hit a million in three months. But anyways, the demand for these AI products is insane. And I believe lovable has more ARR

or is that a much greater run rate than booking.com was when they went public. Really? Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think we dug into that during the Dara Khosrowshahi and that Mary Meeker article when she took them public. Yeah, I remember that. There's an interesting point in here. Some people have called these startups LLM wrappers. Those people are missing the point. The O-ring model in economics shows that in a process with interdependent tasks, the overall output or productivity is limited by the least effective component, not just in terms of cost, but in the success of the entire system. In a similar vein, we see these new industry-specific AI tools as ensuring that individual industries can properly realize the economic impact of LLMs and that the contextual

data and workflow integration will prove enduringly valuable. So they're bullish on these quote-unquote rapper companies, which I thought was interesting. Anyway, let's move on to tell you about another fintech company that we love here on the show ramp uh go to ramp.com time is money save both easy to use corporate cards bill payments accounting and a whole lot more all in one place go get to know ramp on ramp.com okay so speaking of ramp we have a major ramp customer sean frank oh yeah i'm going to be joining the show in two minutes fantastic so i'm going to text him right now and we'll get him on here well we can do can do this one DM that we got in the meantime. It says, Ahoy, John.

Hope you're doing well. Apologies. Apologizing for hitting you with a bunch of questions. But I posted 50 blogs and I have four subscribers. I'm not gaining. Not that gaining subs is the goal, but still, I've talked to family members who collectively hired thousands of people and they're out of ideas to the whole ad value and it will come approach just hasn't worked. I want to work with smart people before going out and building something on my own, but I'm not sure what the move is. What do you think, Jordy?

So I think that, uh, one of the things that seems very obvious with content is that you need extreme levels of patience. That's not an excuse to not refine the product every single day. And, you know, we, we take this approach where we're lucky to be in a position where we have a daily show. We're trying to improve the show and every, every single day, there's some days where, you know, maybe we weren't, we're underprepared some days where, you know, we, we sort of miss a segment that we wanted to do, but in general, trying to improve the product every single day and then improve how you're just distributing that product. I think it's the distribution. So I posted 50 YouTube videos before a single one went viral. I, and for me, it was over a year. It was, it was a full year. I posted them once a week

for, for, for a full year. And it was like, Oh, I got a hundred views. Awesome. Oh, I got a thousand views on this. That's great. And then finally, one got picked up about SpaceX and the algorithm. It went to 70K views. And I remember seeing the chart go up. And I was like, wow, this is amazing. But it's really hard for blogs to go viral. Because there's no algorithmic recommendation. There's no discovery.

And so what you should probably do is figure out, can you repackage this in terms of just a long post on X or a thread? Because a thread can go viral, short form content. If your natural voice is on short form video, make one minute videos, break your blog post up into a series of one minute videos, try a bunch of things. And then very quickly, the algorithm will start sending you the signal of like, this got 10 times as many views as that. What did you do differently? And you can introspect. But it's very hard when you're just hanging out on a dead Substack with no traffic coming to it. I think that's very hard.

And I think the people that have been successful on Substack have built audiences elsewhere. Like Ben Thompson talks about Tritechery would not exist if not for sharing links on Twitter and LinkedIn at the time. And now he's got it cornered and people share it and his stuff goes viral, even if he doesn't post it because people will say, Oh, there was a great interview. We got to cover it. Exactly. Yeah. I think the main thing is YouTube

specifically, as well as some of these other platforms can be very demoralizing, but that doesn't necessarily, you know, the, the X factor now is that the algorithms need time to learn your content before they figure out the right people to distribute it to. So, um, do we have Sean on the line? We have Sean on the line. He's in the waiting room. Let's bring him in. We're going to talk with Sean about app loving. Uh, and Sean is one of the sharpest minds that I know on e-commerce. Actually, I'm going to go ahead and say, Hey Sean, there he is. Mr. Ridge himself, Mr. himself mr wallet you guys are in person i was expecting you guys to be uh doing zoom yourselves but damn irl love to see it irl always always always unless uh you're dealing with this traffic in la these days sean it uh if you want to leave

your house now in la it's about an hour to go anywhere. Uh, are you still going into the office in Santa Monica every day? No, I went yesterday. Yeah. It's like an hour and a half, bro. PCH is still closed. So yeah. LA traffic, bud can't, can't, can't beat it. Well, tell us about Applovin. Yeah. So, so Applovin, uh, for some backstory for the audience, founded in 2012, really started to, it wasn't even necessarily a company I feel like that was on the map for a lot of people until last year. I think last year was the first time you guys started spending money on the platform. Is that correct?

Or had you tested it at earlier points in Ridge's history? Yeah. So here's, I think Applovin has three discussion points. We'll go from what I'm least qualified to speak on to what I'm most qualified to speak on. So least qualified. Short reports are coming out that they're violating App Store terms of service,

their ads target children, all these types of stuff. What Applovin is, is there's two sides of the business they run a bunch of mobile ad space so games mostly games but whatever old people are playing on their phones they have that sort of ad space and they have an ad engine right so like the ad exchange think of like a trade desk or google display network um so they run both sides of those they've never done e-commerce their e-commerce push was like august or september

2024 so we're like the majority of their and just questions so the majority of their customers uh until they push into e-commerce where other mobile games i'm gonna guess and other sort of digital apps services that they were pushing people to what was do you have any idea of what their e-commerce were other mobile games, I'm going to guess, and other sort of digital apps, services that they were pushing people to? What was, do you have any idea of what their customer base looked like until last year? Yeah, I think it was all mobile games. So, you know, they've been called like a pyramid scheme, all these type of things. So you're a mobile ad engine where other mobile games can run on top of, right? I think they also do like display branding, like trying to get you to go to the movies or just like real top of funnel campaigns, nothing conversion optimized, right? Now, a lot of people spend a lot of time on mobile

games. So there are a lot of ad units available, but it's something Ridge has never touched at all, right? Like we're mostly a Facebook advertiser. They get some years, 75% of my budget. We do influencer, that type of stuff. We've never really done that much in the world to display and especially nothing in mobile display, right? The industry does have a bad reputation. Mobile display ads are just like, that's where ClickFront exists. Well, and from my understanding with Ridge, you know, having, you, having worked out of your guys' office and worked on the Ridge business myself back in the day, you guys have had a policy where you'll test any channel once, but you're very, very ruthless with pulling back that spend if it's not working uh so i remember you know connor uh being you know who's the cmo of ridge being willing to test some obscure ad network and being like yep doesn't work you know almost like the same day oftentimes um so when you guys decided to test applovin and then actually start to

really spend on the platform i think that sent you know a real signal right well i'll say that we're a very sophisticated advertiser, right? For people unfamiliar with Ridge Wallet as a business, I mean, we'll spend over $100 million this year on digital advertising, right? So that's everything from LinkedIn ads to TV ads to influencer to Reddit to Snapchat. Meta is the biggest, best game in town. They might get 70% of my budget some year. Sometimes they get 70% of my budget some year. Sometimes they get 30% of my budget. But like outside of them, we're spending money on every single possible channel we can.

So what are the accusations against Applovin? I'm going to put the unverifiable claims that I cannot speak to in one box. And that is their short report saying that like, reports saying that they're doing one-click force downloads, they're tracking users, whatever. Cannot speak to that at all. If that's true, let's hope there's an investigation that we don't want them targeting children with inappropriate content. So I don't know anything about that. The second thing is, the stock price has gone parabolic in the past two years or whatever. I think the IPO may be in 2021. I think it's up 4x in the past year. At one point, it was worth more than Uber.

So as soon as a company is trading at 100x revenue and is worth more than Uber and no one's ever heard about them, people just get immediately freaked out. It's like they had the same revenue multiple as Palantir, right? Palantir has been around a lot longer. People know about Palantir. So yeah, just for some extra context. So they were worth 3.8 billion at the end of 2022. At their peak, just a little bit ago, they were worth 160 billion. So generational run. Yeah. Yeah. And anytime that happens, I mean, a lot of people start speculating, right? Revenue is growing really, really fast. I can't, I'm not a stock trader. I fucking buy ads. So is the, is the company overvalued? It's

about as overvalued as Palantir is. So depending on where you land on that side of the conversation, that's, that's why there's so much interest right now, right? The thing that I'm qualified to speak to is as an advertiser, they shoot us an email in August and they're like, hey, we're rolling out e-commerce. We'll give you a lot of ad credit to test it, right? And we get ad credit from Snapchat to test stuff, from Reddit to test stuff, from Meta to test stuff and free ad credit, even if it's the shittiest ad space on earth. I mean, okay, yeah, I'll get some, I'll get some bunk ass impressions, whatever, right? They end up, you know, it ends up working really well.

I probably spent $4 million of my own money on app-loving ads in Q4, and I was spending $250,000 a day. It was matching Facebook ad spend, right? So one of the short reports is something like, oh, they're stealing Facebook's data to be able to target these people so good. Once again, I don't know how the fuck that would work. But what I will tell you is that as a sophisticated advertiser who tracks everything via North beam, via incrementality holdouts, via post-purchase surveys, coupon codes,

people were playing app loving games, seeing Ridge wallet ads, buying those products and then telling us they saw it on the ads. So it's a real ad channel. It really worked in Q4. I have an invoice right now. I owe them $1. million dollars that i have to pay by the end of the month so like it's a business i don't know what to tell everybody about the shorts now do i think the company's overvalued yeah i don't own any of the stock that's fucking insane it's like it's a company it's a mobile app platform what do you mean

they're worth more than uber like i fucking call an uber every day right i don't play any mobile games so that's like the stock price question then it's like oh all this nefarious whatever inside dealing subsidiaries i don't know anything about fucking that what i'll tell everybody listening and what's so weird is i'm public i'm on twitter like i post my ad spend on these channels no one's reached out to me like Like none of the shorts. I'm like, guys, I'm around. Like I'll show you the fucking app. Hey, get on a, make them pay for it. You know, don't, don't give that, don't give up the sauce for free. You know, you gotta go on Tegas, become an expert, uh, expert consultant. You can make a thousand dollars an hour. Like I have no dog in this race. I'm like, yeah, dude, whatever. It was an ad

channel. If they went away tomorrow, I would spend money on Snapchat or TikTok or anywhere else, right? But the verifiable proof is that I gave them real money. It was a good ad channel. And I think the reason why people, their revenue is growing super fucking fast, right? The revenue is up 80% year over year. And they're like, like yeah we have a billion dollar run rate for e-commerce advertisers in december and i'm like yeah no shit i spent fucking a million it's like yeah i spent a ton of money with you guys like it doesn't take too many people like me spending that to get really really high revenue um dude ads are the best business on earth i don't know why this is so surprising for people now are they compliant do they owe apple money are they stealing data from facebook i don't know why this is so surprising for people. Now, are they compliant? Do they owe Apple money? Are they stealing data from Facebook? I don't fucking know, but

pretty good ads. You got any questions about that? Pretty good ads. Can you talk about the relationship between Applovin and Flip? Has Ridge had any success on Flip? I remember Flip blowing up out of nowhere. They were giving a bunch of credits to basically give away products for retailers. I know they have an ad partnership. Have you found any success on the Flip platform? Yeah. So I've never used Flip. As far as I know, Ridge has never worked with or advertised on Flip. It would be a surprise to me to hear that my ads were on flip via app loving i've had friends who've had very bad relationships with flip so i've always avoided it and our products don't work for live shopping anyway like tiktok shops it doesn't really work for us either and it's because of like with a very male focused demo we're more of a premium product

you know those typically live shopping works for like you know leggings that make your butt bigger and that type of shit right like it's not it's not our core product that's crushing it on there that whole affiliate gmv world is very very dark and shady i know a lot of people who are doing weird stuff there you can check out the affiliate top charts, like what goalie's doing. They're giving people fucking mansions if they, you know, hit GMB targets of a million dollars. So yeah, I don't know anything about Flip.

I've never used Flip. They've emailed me all the time. Yeah, that, I mean, even an idiot like myself, I'm like, that looks like a pyramid scheme. I'm not, I'm not going to hang out there. But dude, you know, I have the data on applovin right like 85 of our traffic from applovin came from ios devices right like one of the concerns is that like oh this is just bought traffic on android devices like click farms in bangladesh or whatever right it doesn't look like it's that so i don't know how they have good quality ios traffic coming through it all seems to be games called like tomb blast or some shit but like

anyway old people check it out it was pretty cool yeah the reason i wanted to have you on is is you know there are major brands out there that will run on an ad platform that's just sending them bot traffic and they won't even necessarily turn it off because to them, they're just optimizing for, you know, impressions and clicks. And Ridge has always been a company focused on, you know, the end actually, you know, conversion, right. And sort of building your guys's engine around that. What, what happens, you know, shifting the conversation a little bit, what's your outlook on e-commerce in our year 2025? We covered maybe a couple of weeks ago, we talked about how the whole Amazon, you know, it's a terrible time to be an Amazon seller. It's been a tough time to be a

Shopify brand as well with all this sort of tariff action and things like that. Historically, Ridge has made a bunch of products in China. It's shaping up to be a rocky year for e-commerce broadly. It helps to have a fantastic brand like Ridge. But what's your outlook going into the rest of the year? Oh, dude, just take it day by day. I mean, there's more tariffs announced today. There's more supply chain disruption. And it's not just the US government. Every government on earth is becoming more protectionary. the actions that Mexico had taken around what's not the same as the de minimis loophole, but I'm forgetting the right name for it, but to sort of protect American Mexican textile workers. So yeah, a lot of a lot of action. Yeah. And like, we like to think about this wonder, like very one dimensional, like, Americans importing things from China cheaply, but like that fucks over

other manufacturing economies, like in Mexico. They don't want fucking cheap auto parts or cheap apparel coming from China, sitting in their warehouses, going to America duty-free. Everybody gets pissed off in that. So yeah, that happened yesterday.

The quick summary is, just take it day by day and try to survive. Don't have any debt if you can afford it. Keep a lean team. I think D2C 3.0 is like incredibly lean teams. Like Ridge is down to 60 US full-time employees. We're doing more revenue than ever with less people than ever. And I think that's going to be more of the trend.

And yeah, I mean, if you can bring stuff to America, you should. I mean, we're probably eight months away from 60% of the while it's being made here. So I'll keep you guys updated when they start getting made here. Where's, where's your new factory going to be? Or where you, you, you onshore some manufacturing that's been a long-term process, but you know, what does that look like? I mean, yeah yeah it's all component part manufacturing so like we have inner plates that are going to be made in missouri and then they get shipped up to philadelphia to be finished and they get shipped to arizona to be assembled and then they go to kentucky to sit in the warehouse so this is one of the challenges uh you know china very

strategically has everything within like a one hour radius when they do like these industries. But with tariffs today, I mean, it's 85 percent on aluminum goods coming out of China. So it gets very close to the same price now. So I think that's why he's doing it. Wow. Well, thanks for stopping by. Appreciate the update. Love the take, Sean.

You will be a regular. Welcome to the update. Love the take, Sean. You will be a regular. Welcome to the show. And thank you for posting your heart out every single day. Yeah, dude. I'm the number three, the best guest you guys had so far. Yeah, we'll get you an NFT just for you. There you go. Bye.

Thanks, Sean. Talk soon. Cool. Well, Deleon should be joining any minute. I don't know if he's in the queue yet. Quick backstory. So Ridge sent, or sorry, Ramp sent Ridge a plaque for spending $100 million on Ramp. So putting up some huge numbers.

And yeah, Sean is an absolute animal. That's great. Well, let's see. Is Delian in the queue? Not yet. Okay, I'll text him. And let's move on to Michael Magnano. He says, and people are still wondering why every single podcast is pivoting to video.

And it's a result here that says that a billion people are watching podcasts on YouTube every month. Yeah, it makes sense. I mean, if you think about it, Rogan really led the charge here. I feel like he had such a massive audience on YouTube and so much of the attention that he would capture was YouTube oriented. And you remember there was a period where Rogan's influence and attention fell like it fell off a cliff after the initial Shopify deal. And you could feel it almost ramp back up again as he went back on YouTube. So massive platform. You know, one of the biggest reasons for this is obviously that podcasts have replaced a lot of television consumption.

And what people don't always realize about YouTube is that a massive amount of YouTube viewership happens on TVs. So this is people in their house. Instead of turning on CNBC, they turn on TVPN. I get crazy screenshots all the time. People text me photos and they're watching it on the TV and it blows my mind. And it was the same thing with my YouTube videos. I was like, you're watching this on TV. That's like insane. But I guess like, yeah, when you put a lot of production value into it, it looks like TV. Yeah. No, and that was our thesis. That was that was our thesis around uh if you actually want to compete with television around news you have to record every single day otherwise you know in high quality like this and it's also uh just so much more snackable because

we can take that clip we can take some of those uh some of those great clips that we just had put those out on x put them out on shorts make vertical shorts out of it and if you just have pure audio you just can't distribute it that much. It's really, really hard. Sometimes there's transcripts that can go viral every once in a while, but it's rare. Anyway, Delian should be joining in one minute. Let's see if we have another post we can go through.

Bullish on one person teams. Card is at 2 million. ARR chat base is at 3 million ARR. Levels IO products are at 3 million ARR. Testimonial IO is at 1.5 million ARR chat base is at 3 million ARR. Levels IO products are at 3 million ARR. Testimonial IO is at 1.5 million ARR. TDIN.me or underscore me products at 1.2 million ARR. Ben Lang says he's bullish on one person teams. Pretty crazy. What was the decision between PMF or DAI to go two person team? The whole thing was that PMF or DAI was like, how do you apply these sort of extreme constraints, 90 days, 25 K to at a million dollars fair are sort of the simple concept. But then outside of

that, you have to stay in the house, but there's no real rules. You can kind of do anything you want. That's, that's business, right? That business has sort of, there's laws that govern business, but there's no actual like rules in the same way that when two teams go on an nba you know court they have to follow you know specific guidelines and so uh we wanted it to as close as possible match sort of like free market competition the one thing with this ben lang post that's interesting is this to me proves that if you are really ambitious and you want to have extreme scale and impact you actually have to build a team, right? Because this, this list would be more impressive if, uh, every single, you know, company on here had 20 to a hundred million of error. Um, so anyways, we're ready. Delian, are you there? Can you hear us? Let's bring in. I think he's close.

We're figuring it out. Let's see. Three, two, one. Hopefully he's live. Going in. He says he's waiting to be let in. He's in the room. Let's get him on the show. Two call-ins one day. It's a big, big push, but we're ramping up. We're going to be doing 10 call-ins a day pretty soon. As long as people want to come and chat. We got to make this easy for folks. Hey, Dely, how you doing? Can you hear us? There he is. Yo, what's up? Sorry. No, all good. It's been a while. Give me the update. What's the latest with Varda?

Yeah, you brought in a capsule from Mach 25 down onto the Australian desert floor. Teams out there going to retrieve the capsule over the course of the next couple hours. Currently nighttime in Australia. Yeah. All things looking pretty good. So we're two for two, baby. Nice. What was in the capsule? This time around, it was an Air Force Research Laboratory spectrometer.

They're basically staring out of the window of the reentry capsule to basically characterize the plume of the reentry vehicle and compare that to some of the materials that are on board. I'll leave it to the viewer to speculate as to why the Air Force might want to do that in relation to potentially trying to figure out what other vehicles are made of, perhaps ones that they themselves did not make. And we'll leave that exercise up for the viewer. But we're super excited to help out

with the maturation of that type of technology and what it means for our country's national security. That's awesome. We got to call Jesse Michaels to get him to speculate. What does the cadence look like going forward? Are you just doing, do you know when the next one is already? Are there going to be just dozens of these? Give me the kind of next couple.

Yeah, next week. Hopping right back up and getting back to it. So a quick turnaround time, turning this from a one-off R&D mission to this year. We're planning to have four vehicles total. Three of those will be more DOD-focused missions. It's not to say that there won't be some farm on board, but it just won't be the primary focus of the mission. And then one of our missions this year will be a primarily pharmaceutical-focused mission.

And we kind of expect that to blend on a go-forward basis. And looking to basically just continue to increase the cadence year over year. Definitely some vehicle improvements that will happen from one mission to the next. And generally for the time being, continue to, you know, sort of land in Australia, just given the regulatory regime and the emptiness out there making it a bit easier. But at some point, looking forward to returning back to the United States once that becomes available. Are you expecting that to get easier in the US with the new administration? For sure. I think it's something that the new administration is clearly aligned with,

but it is just one of these operational things that just takes some time to flow through, designating which of the military ranges is best as a landing range in the United States. We're basically just taking the same legal and regulatory framework that existed in Cape Canaveral and Vandenberg, both of which were government-run ranges that now obviously prioritize commercial activity. There isn't the equivalent of that for reentry. Right now there is no sort of dedicated government-run sort of reentry range. We're exploring a variety of other use of options,

potentially private use of range as well. We continue to narrow in the size of our landing radius. And so over time may not need to be reliant on a sort of government plot of land, but instead perhaps there's some private plots of land that are large enough. And so, yeah. What is the ideal? we're super excited to have a... Sorry to interrupt. What is the ideal range size in your view this year? How much smaller can it be over the long term? And is that even the right question to ask? I think that information is ITAR restricted. Um, so,

you know, what I can say is, you know, on the order of, you know, around a hundred kilometer circle, um, or so, um, it's, that's pretty, you know, it's a pretty big, um, to have that be fully empty and owned by one person. Um, but that circle will, you know, sort of get smaller and, you know, maybe sometimes we won't open the parachute and it'll be a very small circle. That's great. Are you tuning into the next Starship launch? What are you hoping for there? What are you watching for that?

Yeah, I mean, look, we built this business predicated on Falcon 9, sort of reusability and the cadence of that, and it's been really exciting to see that mature over the course of the company's life, right? Falcon 9s at this point are launching every 24 hours. We're super enthused by, you know, sort of SpaceX's progress and the, you know, sort of potential of Starship. You know, there's definitely, you know, obviously, you know, sort of lots of kinks that need

to be, you know, sort of worked out, but, you know, not so dissimilar to, you know, sort of Falcon 9. It definitely took it a decade from, you know, sort of the first landing to, you know, sort of becoming a, you know, sort of true workhorse that was, you know, sort of launching every day. Both SpaceX is much larger, but also Starship in terms of complexity. And so I hope that they get through that faster than a decade. But also they've got a lot of programs and payloads that are more important than us.

They've got everything from the lunar activities that they've got, Martian activities. They've got Starlink satellites to launch. And so at least my internal underwriting is like I'm not quite sure that Starship is going to be launching people like Varda before the end of the decade, so it's super exciting but I also have to run a business month by month, year by year and so I can't focus on things that are relevant to 2030 I have to focus on the things that are taking me up to space today

and Falcon 9 is a pretty damn good ride to orbit every 24 hours and reusable, at least for the first stage. It's a pretty good offering. Perhaps there are other people that are starting to try to elbow into that world. God bless Papa Bezos and hope it works for him. We're happy to get up to space which way or how. Rocket, rail gun, space plane,

you know, just whatever works. I don't care. I just need my sweet, sweet microgravity. Amazing. How big is the company? What roles are you hiring for? What's kind of like the biggest challenge over the next couple years? Yeah, we're about 115 people basically entirely in the Los Angeles, you know, area, you know, of course, the next year, I think there's, you know, sort of two, you know, sort of, I think there's two core areas. One, pharmaceutical teams definitely growing. We're starting to work on a broader set of assets. We're about to open up a new lab space for the team. And so anybody with formulation, crystal engineering, background process engineering, the types of things that we do up

there, we'd be super thrilled to have. And then, yeah, generally on the aerospace side of things going from a, you know, sort of, you know, one R&D mission to now four flights next year, even more, hopefully, you know, sort of year after, just means obviously, we need a lot more talent on that side of the house. And that's everything from, you know, you know, firmware, software engineers, flight software to avionics, structures, thermal, mechanisms. And then we're starting to think about more manufacturing engineering since we're starting to see we're early in that transition from vehicles manually assembled by high-end engineers to starting to introduce more technicians into the mix and more automation. I'm trying to say that we're going to be looking like a Tesla-style assembly line anytime soon,

but one day need to start to look more like that over time. And so manufacturing engineering as well. Are there any proposals that you're excited about in the new administration around the space economy? If there was one law you could change, what would it be, that type of question? Well, the new administration hasn't talked a lot about the space economy, but it has talked a lot about, you know, sort of space being a potential

zone for deterrence against our adversaries. And so that's definitely something that we think, you know, has a lot of potential. We, we think we can field something pretty near term there. Um, and as you start to think about, you know, sort of space-based activities that, you know, perhaps want to, you know, sort of go down to the ground, all I'll say is, you know, sort of the, you know, company that just bombarded Australia from space, um, is probably, you know, sort of well-suited to help out with that. You know, this time around we pulled the parachute, but, uh, you know, so next time if you want us to not do that, we're happy to leave the parachute. Our very own, uh, space arms dealer. Um, taking a quick... I've always been consistent.

I'm a space drugs and arms dealer. No surprises here, you know? Yeah, no, it's amazing. You were putting the secret master plan in your bio years ago. So it's amazing to see it play out. Uh, you recently, uh, ratioed Chamath after he tried to reply to one of your posts. You said you had made more investments, I think, in the last few months than you had in potentially the last couple of years. Where have you been investing? You don't have to speak to specific companies because I'm sure a lot of those rounds haven't been announced, but where are you investing? Obviously, just chasing generational founders. But what's most exciting to you in the early stage market today? It's all AI slop. I just want everybody

to have their own anime girlfriend. And she just jerks you off every night. And that's how we maintain world peace and as much as possible. That's what I'll be dreading. Bread and circuses. Yeah, the opiate and the masses. That's what really changes the world and is really for the best. No, no, I mean, it's kind of what you'd probably expect. I just like, I love stuff that is making stuff in the real world. And it turns out with this admin,

they want us to do more of that in the United States. And I want to fund people that want to do that. And I want to do it with people that are serious and it's their life's work and they're not just doing it because dynamism is the new meme and they want to be a part of the meme. I want to do it with people that are like serious and it's their life's work and they're not just doing it because like you know dynamism is the new meme and they want to be a part of the meme you know I want to you know sort of fund the people where you know their family's been a manufacturing family for three generations and they think they can do it better because they're

going to integrate some robots some AI etc but you know I still have that you know sort of uh you know lifelong tie to that you know particular industry and so um I've been really you know excited over the past couple months where it just it just feels like a lot more people are thinking about that being the type of company that they can build. And I think you're really just starting to see the clear, the difficulty in being somebody that was screaming, Adams, not Bits. In 2019 was my former colleague, Everett, RIP, would always critique me for saying that Dallin just likes investing in low margin, you know, sort of CapEx intensive businesses. And, you know, sort of five years later, you know, my sort of, you know, spin back to Everett would be, you know, you know, which one

do we think is going to be more valuable, the like, you know, sort of TikTok captioning app, or, you know, sort of the company that's, you know, sort of cutting, you know, sort of metal for all the, you know, sort of nations, you know, sort of, you know, future warfighting capabilities. I like the cutting metal one, but, you know, Everett, you're welcome to, you know, sort of go, you know, invest in your, you know, sort of captions, you know, sort of products. I'm sure that'll be great, brother. Shots fired. Love it. A little friendly competition. You guys can compare notes in a decade. Yeah, that's great. Well, it's 1.30. We'll let you get out of here. This is fantastic. Thanks so much for stopping by. Yeah, sweet. Later, bro. Bye. Thanks for coming on. Talk soon. This's great. Well, it's 1.30. We'll let you get out of here. This is fantastic. Thanks so much for stopping by.

Yeah, sweet. Later, boys. Bye. Thanks for coming on. Talk soon. This is great. Never a dull moment with Deleon. We got two of the top,

the top poster in e-com and the top poster in hard tech in the same day. Oh, yeah, in the same day. It's fantastic. Putting on a show. Yeah, for those you know our strategy here is to develop regulars on the show people that call in you know we want to have if there's big

news in e-commerce and big m&a we'll have sean frank call in you know get uh really sort of like boots on the ground takes on that if there's stuff happening in space we'll get delian to call in uh and both of them really delivered today. And I wish those, you know, it'd be fun. It's actually, we want to leave the conversation wishing that it could just keep going. Oh, yeah, for sure. And we'll bring them back on the next week. Yeah, yeah, definitely.

That's fantastic. Well, let's go back to the timeline. We got plenty more to talk about today. AJ Meta says, couldn't be more excited to share what I've been building over the past year. A cute AI alien friend that is fun, helpful, friendly, and won't try to fall in love with you. Tolans remember things about you. They're really good at voice chatting and they can peer into your world through photos. It has been so inspiring to see how people use their Tolan.

Help with school, relationship advice, fit checks, and just hanging out. It's been such a treat building this with his co-founders an incredibly talented team of engineers and artists can promise that tolan is unlike any alien you've met so far we're live in the app store go check it out uh okay so i know aj he's la based entrepreneur he actually was partnered with john feo on birthday candles i don't know if you've ever met him. So he worked at a crowdfunding platform that I used back in like 2013. Crazy. So, so I had seen Tolan. I had been, somebody had sent me them probably, I don't know, maybe six months ago at this point. I didn't know, even though AJ is a buddy, I didn't know that he was involved with it because they didn't really come out very publicly.

So this is, this is really cool this is a thesis you know um people have been thinking about this sort of like ai tamagotchi or this ai sort of pokemon uh been a lot of conversation about it but very cool to see they have over half a million you know downloads uh developing um you know some some meaningful arr and a number one spot in the app store so i think there's going to be a lot of stuff here you know there's another company i'm forgetting the name of it right now but but making like embodied ai so kids toys that have llms built into them which is cool um so i'm just you know expecting to see a lot more of these and they seem to be that was always my take with

the rabbit r1 yeah you know is this hardware device really cute teenage engineering developed it but mkbhd got a hold of it and was like this isn't replacing my iphone and it's like that's totally fair but i always thought i didn't buy one but i thought that it would be a great device for kids because it's something that they can just ask questions to interact take a photo what flower is this what animal is this like and it just feels like the bar for hallucination as long as you gate it so it's not saying crazy crazy stuff if it tells you that like this squirrel is a mouse or something like that's not that big of a deal it's not that high stakes and some of those it's not like calling an uber and it sends it to the wrong place exactly so the frustration of a kid dealing

with like you know some sort of rough edge around an AI that's still friendly and fun. It's like, it's like the Genmoji thing, but applied to an audience that is totally receptive. Yeah. And what do, what do five-year-olds do? They ask questions, right? So it's just this constant stream of questions and it's great when a parent's around, but it's funny when, uh, you know, my son, my oldest is not really at this point yet, but I imagine he's about a year or two away from starting to ask questions that I don't know the answer to. And so having this thing that's, you know, not necessarily a cell phone that they can have independently or when we're together to sort of generate those answers. The five wise stage, you know, the whole question of like in management, you need to be able to ask five wise deep to understand the root cause analysis. Toddlers, amazing at that.

They just keep asking, you know, why does the fire truck come? Where does the fire truck come from? Who makes them? Okay, who makes that part? I'm like, I actually don't know the supply chain that deeply, man. Good luck. I'll have to have somebody on the show. Deep research, yeah.

I'm sure we can pull it up. But speaking of AI products that have gone off the rails and not been uh you know as focused as what is happening over at tolan um notebook lm from signal notebook lm has had insane potential one of the best products google's ever put out in years we talked about this on the show very early on uh you could have it generate a podcast of two people talking about a topic to educate yourself about it uh but in classic google fashion for a show once you did because we were i was driving in one morning we were doing a deep dive on something i had zero context on the entire story i generated you know a podcast about it and it

helped me really quickly get up to speed so it's cool but i actually have some backstory here i i was at a dinner in venice uh that that um uh uh two of my buddies, Ben and Adam, who have a venture fund, hosted. And one of the guys, the product designers from the Notebook LLM team was there. And he was excited because when you're at Google and you're working on this super hot startup within Google or this product, you become an instant sort of micro celebrity in the organization. And there's all this momentum and more resources coming your way. It's a similar sort of thing that a founder goes through at an external company when they have a lot of hype. But I believe he and his team or some members of the team just left to start

basically that product. So I think that they lost potentially the sort of founder spirit that they had that were able to create that product. So they said in a signal says in, but in classic Google fashion, it seems like it lost all momentum and got left to die. No mobile apps, no meaningful iterations, just VPs choking it out. The vultures came and picked it apart. Google's playbook for smothering internal innovation is unmatched. Uh, and then Andre Karpathy chimes in, they iterated on it a bit custom instructions and the ability to join the podcast. But overall, I agree, I think.

I actually used it again this morning after a while and felt a bit regressed even. The woman's voice especially sounds slightly more dead slash less interested. And Signal says, yeah, it got hijacked by terrorists, parentheses, a.k.a. Google leadership. Not holding back. And yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it makes sense like like even even when it was announced and it was gaining traction it was still hard to get into that pipeline it was very unclear it wasn't its own app it was it was it was it wasn't the gmail launch where gmail became this like you know phenomenon and it was a separate website

it was a you know first it was this easter. Then you had to refer a friend, get storage and stuff. And they ran a great playbook, not just promoting that as a separate product for Gmail, but also running all the growth strategy to make it more viral and make it work. And it just seems like that energy has kind of left, especially when there's such an incentive to spin out of Google and raise a bunch of money

and instantly be at a hundred million ARR and a billion dollar valuation, which is something we've seen again and again and again. Now, the big thing here is that Google's leadership deserves a lot of, they're certainly under pressure, but they deserve the scrutiny and they deserve to be called out by letting these sort of high potential products, you know, like Gemini in general, right? A lot of people are saying Gemini is great when I can find where to use it or how to use it, or it's not, you know, over promising and under delivering, but there's this general, when you compare Sundar to Satya, they're just not even in the same league, right? And it sounds harsh, but I think that we should hold our trillion dollar hyperscalers leadership to a high standard. And I think it's very possible that Google needs

new leadership at the top. People called for it when their AI image generation models were just, you know, generating just made up history, basically. And now it just seems Google has the most potential. Yeah. Google should be trading as a meme stock if it had good leadership and they're not getting any credit for the position and the opportunity that they have in the market, because they seem to just continue to, you know, squander these opportunities. Yeah. Like, you know, that whole Gemini generative AI image generation debacle, I think they fixed it. It's pretty easy to go in there. It seems like it was fine-tuned after they built the model to inject a bunch of extra keywords to try and make it more diverse. And it had all these weird anomalies, easy to fix, easy to fix. There was clearly

backlash. I guarantee they fixed that product, but they didn't integrate it anywhere. I just went to Google and I said, draw me a picture of a frog. And it just gives me like Google images results and then Adobe stock footage and then Pinterest and then Reddit. And it just gives me like the normal Google results. And it's like the Google search bar is my entry into the Google world. And it should know that that is a, that's an AI query. I asked it to do something and it didn't do it. And so like whoever's on that team is probably like, Oh, well, like they're not letting me stick my product in the main thing. And so now I'm off on this siloed thing. And how do I even get to that? I think they're just announcing that they're going to do a separate Gemini app. Maybe that's a good decision. I don't

even know at this point. It's all very confusing from a strategy perspective. Yep. But they got to retain the talent. They got to stop these people from jumping ship and raising billions. Yeah. I mean, I feel like if, if the, you know, we could probably talk to the guy who built the product. I'm blanking on his name now, but, we'll have to get him on when he launches his company. No, he already raised money, I believe. Yeah, you should announce it here. And anyway, so we'll see. But I hate to see a good American technology company squander incredible opportunities.

And there was that whole narrative of like during the AI boom, Sergey and Larry got super interested and they were coming back in and grinding and like picking up the momentum. And there was a moment where we're like, oh AI boom, Sergei and Larry got super interested and they were coming back in and grinding and like picking up the momentum and the pace. And there was a moment where we're like, oh wow, like Google is going to go back into founder mode. They're going to own a hundred percent of Waymo. They're going to like, you know, really double down on this stuff. The, the mission of Google is to organize the world's information. Like what could be a better distillation of that than building an LLM? Like an LLM is just distilling the world's and organizing the world's information into weights. Lost in the sauce.

And they've done phenomenal products. The actual LLMs perform very well on the benchmarks, but they're just not productizing it effectively yet. Well, and they allowed a bunch of external investment into Waymo. That was weird. Which is weird, right? weird right why why do you i mean you you don't even have the you're running this massive balance sheet yep and you have a breakaway you know uh potentially world truly world-changing product that's growing exponentially yep and you need you know these big external i mean that one i can kind of steal man because it's like google's mission is to organize the world's information and waymo

doesn't exactly do that it doesn't exactly fit in the, in the mission. Um, and so I understand why that might be. And it's a very different capital intensive business. There's all these different layers of the stack, the routing, the partnership with Uber who cleans them. It's just a very, it's like getting into delivery. It's like, it's more akin. I would expect like Amazon to really like want to be in that more than Google. But for the LLM stuff, like they got to figure out this product side. Anyway, let's move on to designer Ben Heilack. He's been on the show before, known for his Jaguar redesign.

He says, I used to be really afraid of competitors. And then I realized they can't hire me. Iconic line. Uh, Ben, I actually threw this in because he rolled out a new website that he made himself. And I think it's one of the best new sites that I've seen. So if you're listening, go to don.so and check it out. D O N D A W N.so. And, uh, he cooked it up himself. I'm navigating around it right now. It's fantastic.

And yeah, check it out. But yeah, I think his broader point with this post, which is somewhat of a S-word post, really trying to, John was upset that I said the S-word yesterday. So I'm not going to say it again today, even in the context of an S post. But the broader thing here is having that confidence in himself. It's called a meme post, a joke post. A meme post, a joke post, right.

We say meme coins, not S coins. Yep. Same thing. But yeah, I think founders that are overly focused on their competitors, it's just the biggest trap. You need to focus on what you're truly great at and try to spend as much time as possible doing what you're great at and augmenting your skill set. And you should never be afraid of competitors. It actually, yeah, it took me a while to realize that you know these markets that most people are playing in are so big uh just focus on your customers and focus on yourself king yeah become unhirable

become ungovernable yep it's great uh well let's move on to nick carter who did a fantastic job censoring some foul language on the timeline he says holy f star star star s star star star 35 billion i'm weak hold me okay so the news here is that core weave is uh planning an ipo uh within a week that that would allow them to raise four billion dollars uh and would get priced at around 35 billion dollars and pull out the size gong because nick carter is the jason calacanis of CoreWeave. He said it himself. There we go. Chris Pitt of the gong.

Fantastic investment. Nick, I saw in the comments, is a friend of the show, but he was in the first round of CoreWeave. And you can make a guess if he entered, assume that he entered at 50 million posts. The multiple on this one is is absolutely egregious and will probably dwarf his earnings and from his, you know, day to day job. Who knows? Who knows? Right. He made a lot of money in a lot of places. Yeah, he's very successful. But still, he says this is his best investment.

Yeah, by far. It's not even close. Fantastic. And we're just happy for him. So I wanted to highlight this. I love it. Yeah, CoreWeave, a lot of people are going to be looking towards this to price other data center projects. They're an AI cloud computing provider.

They build data centers and then lease to people like Satya Nadella at Microsoft. Satya loves to leave. And so there's a number of players here, and there's a big question on how the public markets will receive companies like CoreWeave as they go out to the public market. And so everyone is waiting with bated breath to see where this trades. We talked about Stripe earlier.

The timing is certainly shaky, right? You can imagine Core is running the analysis on NVIDIA's down 6% today. Even as they beat earnings the market is starting to uh the animal spirits are yeah there's a few things going on i mean deep seek people got they kind of coped through it with the jevons paradox thing and you know they and then the xai news and they kind of balanced out but it was definitely like it it made people just do a slight double take on like should we we really spend the trillion on, you know, a big data center or something like that?

And then also you have a lot of questions about the public markets and how the U.S. economy will do under the Trump administration as these campaign promises actually get rolled out. And if there are really significant tariffs or something like that, like there could be dislodging behavior in the market and that could have a have an effect all over the place. And so we'll see. But good luck to them. And, you know, if you're losing sleep over the market, stressing over the markets, we recommend that you get an eight sleep. Go to eight sleep dot com nights that fuel sleep dot com slash TBPN. Yeah yeah you have a fantastic quote there turn any bed into the ultimate sleeping experience how'd you do last night jordy let's check it out eight i am mogging you in the sleep department i already know i have a better score than you just 85 97 oh let's go okay i gotta get on my game that was rough i think six hours and 50 minutes last night what'd you do seven hours and 59 minutes whoa there we'd you do seven hours and 59 minutes

whoa there we go i'm just really dialed into my routine way up there i was texting somebody at 8 20 last night and they they they were like they listened to the show they were like isn't this your bedtime yeah it's like yeah it is i'm about to put away my phone and crash nobody out sleeps me nobody out sleeps me it is um no it's one of those things. I do think that sleep, uh, you know, from a, from a fitness standpoint, once you identify as somebody that goes to the gym, I find it's very easy to just go to the gym every single day. So when I started working out, uh, after I parted to party too much, my freshman year of college, I just started going to the gym and I just, you I just identified as somebody that went every single day.

So I would just go every day. Super easy. Sleep is very different. You're doing stuff in the evenings. You have varying levels of work. Sometimes you need to be out of the house earlier than other times. So it's hard to get consistent. But just been focusing on getting extremely consistent.

And it's paying off because we need to put some real money on the line. For sure. And we also need to test the testosterone levels because I was scrolling through YouTube, see a great Chris Williamson quote or clip. He's interviewing Dr. Peter Attia. Yep. You know, two steps to one secret hack to improve your testosterone. Open it up. I'm expecting some crazy supplement or something. He's just get some sleep. That it up. I'm expecting some crazy supplement or something. He's just get some sleep. That's it. And I'm like, okay, wish it was more exciting, but it's easy. It's easy with an eight sleep. It's free to sleep. Uh, let's go to Emily Sundberg,

one of the greatest journalists in the game right now. Uh, if you don't subscribe to her sub stack, we highly recommend that you do. Uh, she says she wrote about unwell and breaks down Alex Cooper's podcast career. So in 2018, Alex Cooper, now famous for Call Her Daddy, started alongside Sophia Franklin, debuted the Call Her Daddy podcast. She's been in the game for seven years, eight years now. The show quickly gained traction with downloads soaring from 12,000 to 2 million within two months. That's a historic run. Fantastic. to two million within two months that's a historic run fantastic tensions arose between cooper and franklin over contract negotiations and creative direction leading to franklin's departure cooper continued as the sole host steering the podcast through a transformative period cooper signed an

exclusive three-year deal with spotify worth over 60 million dollars that was 2021 here's a little bit of lore yeah back when this article when that when the feud was happening between uh the color daddy host this is in 2020 yep i spoke with taylor lorenz yep taylor was writing for the new york times at that point um and anyways i i helped taylor get some context on the story this was before she was this was at a time when she really had the tech industry's attention this was the booming creator economy um i said we're entering this was a quote that ended up in the article we're entering a period where creators are business owners and media brands of their own they can't just be seen as employees uh the tools are available to them to become founders and ceos

of their brand and develop businesses with multiple powerful revenue streams like merch ad sales and, and subscription revenue. This is your quote. This is my quote in the New York Times. And what I was speaking to was that it was going to be, Miss Cooper was such a star that it was going to be really, really difficult to keep her there because she had so much attention herself. She could spin up a new RSS feed and have hundreds of thousands or potentially millions of subscribers in a week. So the value, historically, you'd have these sort of creator types that were dependent on the distribution of a TV channel. So they could only be this big figure personality, you know, relationship with ESPN or CNN or CNBC. Now, you know, and this really proved out she went on her own entrepreneurial journey, realizing that she had a lot more leverage in that situation, even though she was making,

you know, millions of dollars a year at Barstool. Yeah. And so she signed with Spotify for $60 million, which was one of the platform's most significant agreements for a female-led podcast in 2021. Then, along with her husband, she launched the Unwell Network, a media company aimed at developing content with emerging creators. The network's initial signings included influencers Alex Earle and Madeline Argy. In 2024, she secured a $125 million three-year deal with a serious xm setting to commence these are super max deals these are massive deals wild nba money yeah i mean for the super top power law podcast they get up there uh similar pat mcafee with the espn i think the deal is yeah in the 100 million plus range uh joe rogan same thing transitioning Call Her Daddy to a new platform. And then in 2025, Cooper introduced Unwell Hydration, an electrolyte infused beverage line developed in partnership with Nestle. Interesting that they're going with the big corporate partner out of the gate targeting women's wellness.

She also added several new shows to the Unwell roster, including former former barstool host Grace O'M'malley and so she's really grown her empire and we'd love to see yeah and the what emily gets into in her piece which you can go subscribe to her sub stack and check it out but um she just lost alex earl which is this massive uh figure right now one of the biggest anchors and so the same same same issue that dave portnoy was experiencing with having the star and then losing said star is now the same issue that aave portnoy was experiencing with having the star and then losing said star is now the same issue that alex cooper uh which is why people have had this you know idea for um the bar stool for x the bar stool of business the bar stool of xyz right and the challenge is wrong because bar stool is not the bar stool of Dave Portnoy's show. Yeah, and when we set out to start TBPN,

there was a bunch of different networks that we could have worked with, but our point of view was we can set out our entire business. We can have one producer. We're going to have to incur some costs to get the show running, but there are costs that are you know most adults can can cover right it doesn't it doesn't cost millions of dollars to start a podcast when it would have started cost millions of dollars to start a tv network and that talent retention problem is so real you saw it with vox media uh i think eventually kara swisher spun out after she sold

recode started her own thing again um uh johnny harris spun out of she sold Recode, started her own thing again. Johnny Harris spun out of there and started a YouTube channel. He learned all the skills. And so, yeah, there were startup costs. He had to hire people to do the motion graphics and he had to work really hard to get it off the ground. But very quickly, people recognized him. Oh, that's the guy from Vox who does the border show I love. I see it in my YouTube feed. And Cleo Abram left Vox as well to do the same thing.

She was at a million subscribers in a couple months. And it's because, uh, vice, the try guys did the same thing. Buzzfeed saw, I guess they were at Buzzfeed, but, uh, vice and Buzzfeed guys, teams have left over time. And, uh, the easiest way to go viral on YouTube for a long time was just put up a video, say why I quit Buzzfeed, why I quit vice, why I quit Vox and boom, it goes viral. And overnight you have, uh, you know, a hundred thousand followers or a million followers. Uh, this just happened with donut media. I don't know if you follow them at all. Their car channel. Uh, a lot of people have been leaving that they got bought by, I think some private equity firm or some investment firm. And so the talent wasn't fully economically aligned. And then over time, more and more of the

talent just realized, wait, I should just be running my own show. And so there's always this, it's talent retention is very, very tricky. It's very, very tricky to align the economic incentives when you have these, these small teams, but the future seems to be like the networks are not to me the, the donut media or the bar stool or the box or the vice, the networks are X, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and you can be on all of them, but they have the power and they have something real that they are going to get a cut of our business and, and Alex Cooper's business and everyone's business. Um, and then, and then the shows are the individual people. And so aggregating people together, it just doesn't work

unless there's something really crazy going on. It's really perfect. And so I think that the future is definitely something like what we're doing right now. And if you're more operating a scaled network or media business, you have the option to grow homegrown talent, which takes a long time and it's really hard.

And then you might actually get a hit and then they'll leave. Or you have to pay a ton and then they'll leave. Yep. Or you have to pay a ton of money, which is what Sirius XM is doing, spending $125 million for a three-year deal. And that's just distribution rights. That's just distribution rights. Or maybe it's some piece of it that's exclusive. It's certainly not fully exclusive. No.

But it makes sense because they'll be able to sell $200 million of ads against all of that on the radio, hopefully. Yeah, or get subscribers that offset that cost, you know, user acquisition basically. But, but yeah, overall going to be only, you know, Sirius XM is cable at this point, right? It will just sort of fade away over time. It will probably, you know, have, have some enduring value, but won't be the giant, you know, that it, that it once was. Uh, well, if you're looking to advertise a podcast, get on ad quick, uh, out of home advertising made 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. Get an ad quick billboard folks we got our own podcast billboards coming up we're working on it i can't wait and i imagine a lot of people listen to us we need to do the sirius xm deal too so you can be listening in your car to tvpn and then you drive by our billboard and it's just 24 7 we're in your sirius xm is so funny i you know me i cycle through cars a lot so anytime you get a new car they're just sort of like aggressively marketing to you and they'll send you you know mail that says open this right now you open it up and it's like we'd like to offer you a free month of sirius xm and you're saying okay yeah you stop opening them but um uh anyways um well we got some news cognition labs

devon just got faster uh they've heard your feedback that Devin is too slow. Devin is an end-to-end agent that makes hundreds of decisions for each task. So that test time inference stuff that we've talked about, essentially the reasoning models, that's what Devin's been doing for a long time. So there was and is still a long way to go. But they've made Devin 2.1X faster over the past five months and the trend continues. And so congratulations to the team at Cognition Labs. If you're running a startup with a big GitHub repo, get Devin in there. Get it in your Slack. Get him in there. Get him in there. Could be your next top engineer. Yeah. I mean, Devin is, it's weird saying he, anthropomorphizing it, but Deon is like the top engineer at uh at uh gumroad right yeah anti-work that's so crazy yeah i mean it makes sense like there's so much like junk little tickets here and there code that needs to be fixed and like no one wants to hop on those yeah put devon to work over the weekend put him to work put him to work uh let's go to paul

graham put him in workspace 17 actually yeah that was historically underperforming historically underperforming famously underperforming uh let's go to paul graham paul graham says there are a lot of people attributing crazy beliefs to elon lately but to me the clearest sign that he is not entirely rational is the continued deprioritization of tweets with links in them everyone can see that this makes twitter worse and hits him with the t word tweets yeah oh that's that's disrespectful to the x culture i mean uh paul paul follows it up by saying the suggestion that one should put links in replies is such an obviously broken workaround who starting from scratch would design twitter to work like that i totally agree with

with paul here it's it's totally possible to simultaneously see exactly why elon is doing this yep it it may make it may make x you know lack of links makes x worse for users yep but it makes x better for elon right he wants to keep people on the platform. And I bet you that it is working exactly as intended. Twitter used to be a place you'd go on and you'd discover articles, blogs, videos, music. It was just sending you across. It was like the most amazing discovery engine for the internet. It was effectively like a stumble upon product where you just go on. You didn't know what you were going to find, but you were going to find interesting, you know, uh, topics. It was a great place for writers to distribute their work. Uh, it's still a distribution platform, right? With PMF or die. We saw this, we,

yeah. You know, launched a post, got a million plus views on the post, include a link, made the post native for X. What works on X vibrals? What works on X threads? So whatever you want to do elsewhere that would be on a link, you can upload a two hour movie if you want. You can't link to Netflix. I would argue that X is now a platform for attention and not distribution. So you can get people's attention on X, but it's, it's, uh, it's not this sort of linear distribution of, I wrote a blog post. I'm going to post it on here. A bunch of people are going to click over distributions. Never. But, um, you know, I, I still get a lot of links out to my personal website, but there's a very clear line. There's every single month,

millions of people see my posts, some percentage of those click to my profile and then a smaller percentage click to, you know, my personal website and I see all the traffic. Right. So, um, anyways, but it's a skill issue some people post links and still go viral yeah and the tough thing with paul with paul he's an incredible writer he condenses his his thoughts down he writes in a very straightforward way he should be able to just post his post directly he can but i think he likes the aesthetics of his website totally that's the main thing is he doesn't want to conform to the X thing, but he should just take copy of the,

just literally just copy the text and put it in a long post and it'd be fine. Um, but no, and there's, there's a huge edge that people like Paul and Ben Thompson, they built up these newsletter, these,

these newsletter lists, even mail. I don't even think he has, I think people just literally just go and check. Oh, there's a new BG post. Yeah. But yeah,

I mean, you either got to build your list, you know, offline and have that as a channel and, oh, there's a new BG post. But yeah, I mean, you either got to build your list, you know, offline and have that as a channel and grow it and have different growth strategies for that or repurpose all your content to be X native, whether that's through threads or long posts, you know, Lulu's been able to do it. I see tons of people that can do it with threads, tons of people that can do it with videos. All sorts of people have found ways to break through with the algorithm. But it is frustrating because it's high standard deviation.

And when you have a post-flop, it's hurtful to your ego. Yeah, we've talked about it before. I've had a lot of people reach out to me or you and say, oh, I think I'm shadow banned, all this stuff. I go, brother, you haven't posted. You haven't had a banger in weeks. It's not the platform. It's you.

It's you. You got to take responsibility for the flops. Well, speaking of an absolute master of algorithms, let's go to Mr. Beast. He's raising money at a $5 billion valuation. The YouTube star aims to raise a couple hundred million dollars. And he, quote, lost tens of millions of dollars on the amazon reality show i don't even know how that's possible because isn't amazon paying for it but i guess he might i think he has a history of uh betting on himself to such an extreme degree that he will go out of

pocket sure yeah and consistently like you know ultimately that the amazon show is as much uh distribution and sort of marketing for the rest of his business empire as it is it's you know, ultimately the Amazon show is as much distribution and sort of marketing for the rest of his business empire as it is. It's, you know, I'm guessing he looked at it and said, I don't need this to be a profit center. I'm fine if it's a cost center. I have lunch. What is it? Because it's going to be stables. So in the Mr. Beast deal, if you invest in a $5 billion valuation, you get shares in a company that's making 400 million in sales. And that's across Lunchly, the Lunchable product, Beastables, the candy company, Mr. Beast Burger, the ghost kitchens driven burger delivery company, and then Mr. Beast LLC,

which is the production company. And so you get assets in all of those. But yeah, he's always been reinvest everything. He wants to be aggressive. He's running his business more like a Silicon Valley startup, trying to burn money, really go for growth and then capture the value later. And so far it's been working. Yep. We got to hear the update on Mr. Beastberger.

I think the other, from what I know, the other, you know, the sales of Lunchslee and Feastables have been pretty phenomenal. Mr. Beast Burger had a bunch of issues early on. I've never seen it anywhere out in the world. It's a delivery only product, but I haven't even seen it online once. The last time I saw it was around the controversy around the quality issues that they were having. Yeah. I mean, the quality control on a product like Feastables is way, way easier because it's just, if it leaves the factory in a good condition, it's probably going to get to the customer in a good condition, especially when your chain is Walmart delivery, as opposed to it's being made in all sorts of different kitchens and then delivered by all sorts of different people.

There's a million places where that can go wrong. And there's way more people taking a slice of the profit in these ghost kitchen companies than in consumer packaged goods, which are already not super, super high margin. But the Mr. Beast Burger, I think the financials were it was always a harder lift than something like lunch layer or feastables, which can totally, you know, just be, Hey, we make a million chocolate bars. We drop it off at Walmart and it flies off the shelf because I'm a celebrity. So now the whole concept of air dropping food to people is, is, uh, it sounds incredible in theory that you can just sort of instantly create a brand and produce it all over the country. The actual, um, reality is that these sort of fast food companies that you're competing with, right. Raising canes, things like that. They have year, you know, spent decades developing

these super, super, you know, Chick-fil-A has developed these super sophisticated supply chains to deliver the perfect meal every time. And Mr. Beast has a great brand with his demo, but the idea that he's gonna, it's competing with Chick-fil-A is really tough, right? Did you see Mr. Beast on Flagrant 2? Do you know that podcast? Andrew, why am I blanking on his name? He was on this comedy podcast

and they play this prank on him where they're like, Hey, we got some Mr. Beast burgers here. Let's all have them. And they open it up and they'd replace them with Big Macs from McDonald's. And they're just like, Oh, this looks exactly like a Big Mac. Like, yeah. Like, uh, like, and they say that there's like some song that was popular with, with Big Macs back in the day. It was like sesame seed bun and like the, you know, cheese and spread or whatever. And they're like, this looks a lot like a a lot like a big mac mr beast like what's going on they really put him on the spot and he like kind of didn't get it for a while and he's like you're like you're like pranking me right and it was very funny anyway to be honest i wouldn't know i wouldn't be able to tell the

difference it's been i've yeah i mean i think the big mac has an extra slice of bread in the middle so he should be pretty obvious but uh and and of, like he should know if it's his product. But anyway, people are having fun with it. But overall, you know, I think he's I think he's kind of pivoted through that, spent less time with things that are underperforming, spent more time with the things that are performing. And obviously the Amazon show, even if he lost money on it, it probably raised his profile. Well, he couldn't his audience on youtube was basically maxed out right yeah i mean it's hard to you say that and yet it's like every couple months he's celebrating like now i'm at 400 million subscribers now i'm at half a

billion subscribers like he really does seem to be his ham is probably but his tam is probably less than yeah facebook right yeah i mean it's the same thing that you see with like cnbc where cnbc just does not have a younger audience and so if he wants to expand the audience going into more reality tv style older crowd that's just tuning in just being on america's home screen exactly crime is dominant yeah tv and he is like he's a generational game show host and there's no reason why you wouldn't see him develop reality tv shows co-host them host them or develop game shows and the next you know who wants to be a millionaire i remember that being like a really really popular jeopardy is a game show that's you know it's a little bit less gimmicky but um that that show

has a really enduring value has had a number of hosts and you could see him developing something like that, that captures both the online audience, which is future and growing obviously, but still goes after the old audience that's just tuning in every night. Yeah. The question is at a $5 billion valuation. Yep. Is that a company that, you know, the, the, the idea behind Mr. Beast raising for this Holdco is that he will take the company public at some day. Yep. None of these investors would be plowing, you know, potentially a billion dollars into the business if there wasn't a path to liquidity. And I just don't see there being an acquirer that's not the public markets.

Right. Yeah. public markets, right? And the question is, that stock has very real meme potential of like, you have this younger generation of fans that just want to be a part and feel like they're an owner of the Mr. Beast world. At the same time, though, looking down into these, he's got CBG companies that we don't even know if they're profitable. So they account for $400 million of revenue across the portfolio. We don't know if they're actually producing any sort of actual earnings.

And then the production side of the business, unclear what the margin looks like on that. And over time, he's going to have to launch many, many, many more businesses. So investors that are investing at $5 billion are probably thinking this company, this group's going to go to launch many, many, many more businesses. So investors that are investing at 5 billion are probably thinking this company, you know, this group's going to go public and we're going to have to launch a lot of other companies to sort of even grow into that $5 billion valuation. It's a very different corporate structure because you could totally see Mr. Beast LLC, the production company going and getting acquired by Amazon, Hulu, Netflix,

Disney even. Yeah. Any of those could pick that up. Do those companies want also a CPG company? And Feastables, natural home at Nestle, natural home at Unilever, right? But does Unilever also want MrBeast LLC? So I wouldn't be surprised if you see him launch a company,

scale it, use his platform, his production company as the go-to-market strategy, the initial marketing. And then at a certain point, it's like, hey, look, Feastables has really saturated our core market of Mr. Beast fans. Now it's Super Bowl ad time. Let's just hand it over to Nestle, take that cash back into the business, and then do an even bigger stunt, more content, and then a new product. And then just keep doing that. He's been talking about getting into mobile games and, you know, we've talked about him getting into a VPN or something, something software high margin. We'll see where it goes, but it's a fascinating story. Anyway, let's move on to an interesting question from Yunyu Li says, what happened to all of those companies that raised $500 million to train a foundation model for coding?

Did they all just get mogged by Claude? Mogged by Claude is a funny phrase. I'm genuinely curious for what it's worth. I don't see Cognition Labs, Cursor, Windsurf, Bolt.new using anything other than Claude or GPT, maybe with the rare R1 sighting. And so, yeah, there's this debate over do you train it yourself or not magic ai yep and then there's poolside ai poolside was started by i think it was and isn't poolside a reference to the poolside pms i don't know what's the poolside oh you don't remember that viral video of the of the product managers saying they're remote working during covid and it's these two girls and they're at the pool and they're like day in the life of a

product manager here's what i do at my job, I check in with the engineers and make sure that they're doing the tickets and everyone was super viral. I think that's the reference for poolside. I don't know, maybe not, but I think the idea is like you use this poolside AI thing and then you can be at the pool hanging out, which is just hilarious to me. I love the brand, but you know, who knows if it makes sense to train a model for $500 million. We've talked about this in the past. So a little backstory on Poolside. So Jason Warner is this co-founder and CEO of Poolside.

He was previously had a illustrious career, was the CTO of GitHub. GitHub, yep. And he was the VP of engineering at Heroku. And he was also managing director at Redpoint Ventures. So it makes sense when he starts a new company that raises an obscene amount of money. There's two strategies in AI that we've seen to date. There's the ultra public sort of compete for attention on the timeline, which many of the foundation models have taken. And then there's the strategy of SSI,

which is we're going to raise a bunch of money, but that's when you'll hear about us. And otherwise, we're just sort of shooting for ASI. It's totally possible that, you know, these companies like Poolside and Magical, which is backed by Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross. Another GitHub guy. Another GitHub guy. They're both in the two different companies. Absolute dogs. Yeah.

It's totally possible that they decided, hey, you know, there's this bloodbath on the timeline for attention. Let's focus on just core traction. There's other approaches. If you have $500 million, you could spend tens of millions of dollars a year on direct sales, and it could be a lot more under the radar. But it is a very interesting call out that when you think about all these AI coding tools are using Clod, right? That is like the preferred, you know, LLM under the hood. So credit to Clod for staying so competitive, despite it not even necessarily being their core focus. I need to do a deep dive on GitHub Copilot. Like was GitHub Copilot a custom trained LLM or was it built on top of GPT-3? I think it might've been built on GPT-3, but you could imagine that that would color like the GitHub experience could color how you think the market will evolve. Because if they're, if they're building co-pilot and these two guys both have real deep insights into what's going on GitHub and they're seeing this and they're saying,

Hey, it makes sense to train a custom model just for code. Then it makes sense to double down on that. At the same time, there's a lot of people in AI who believe that, uh, I talked to one guy, actually the guy from etched, uh, he was saying that I was like, how do you think like the humanoid thing plays out? Like, like, is it important to just include all human knowledge in those training, in those foundation models as well? And he was like, literally, yes. Like, i think that adding the corpus of every book ever written will help a humanoid walk and i was like that's an that's an interesting take but like there's this idea that like yes claude like in order to be a good programmer should also understand every single language and every single philosophy textbook and every single history textbook

even though it doesn't feel like it applies at all. It's the same exact thing for any career path. If you have a bunch of knowledge from totally unrelated subjects, it can oftentimes allow you to be better at that one specific thing. And so I think there's a real case for that. But all that being said,

in the same way that there's, you know, 20 different consumer LLM and sort of like chat apps, there's 20 plus heavily funded, you know, AI coding products and they won't all make it. There will be multiple winners because these aren't, it's not obvious yet that, you know, it's not obvious yet that these are sort of winner take all markets. Right. But I say, let them cook. I say good luck to them. Hopefully it works out. Hopefully we get some cool products. I'd love to see it.

Anyway, let's move on to Levels.io. He says, I've spent probably hundreds of dollars on Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020. And every time I load it, I'm stuck downloading new 10 gig updates. And it takes me 15 minutes before I can even fly with my game. At least I can just fly immediately gig updates. And it takes me 15 minutes before I can even fly with my game. At least I can just fly immediately without updates. And so he levels IO is a indie hacker. He's been

on a Lex Friedman show, very popular on X. He built popular about his wins, but also his failures. He's launched, I think a hundred plus products, many of which have flopped, but many of which have done very well. And his, his general ethos is just take tons and tons of shots on a goal. And, uh, he's, he's bucked the venture train. He's, he's very outspoken in that he thinks venture is silly. Uh, and at times it is, but he's managed to create a bunch of really cool products. Uh, especially, you know, more recently, he, I think a few years ago was focused on remote work. So we had a bunch of really cool products, especially more recently. He, I think a few years ago, was focused on remote work. So he had a bunch of products related to that.

What was it called? Nomad List. Nomad List, that's it. Nomad List. Which is cool. He was sort of living that sort of digital nomad lifestyle that was, I was never big in that world, but it became very popular.

And then now he's pivoted into AI. He does some stuff in image generation, which is really cool. And then, uh, now he's pivoted into AI. He does some stuff in image generation, which is really cool. And then I'm excited to see, uh, what he's doing in, in flight. Uh, he's created this sort of flight simulator that almost feels Minecraft as, and did you ever do flight simulators growing up? Not really a little bit. I used to do, um, flight lessons and, uh, and it was fun way. I the full rig you know everything uh strapped up to my desk and uh you know the the yoke and everything i was i was big into that world nice and so this is funny this guy gabriel is pissed off that uh levels is monetizing his game that

he released for free so he releases his game he says you can play it and then he adds these upsells where if you want to buy like a f15 in his game you got to pay 30 bucks uh and gabriel says i make games for a living personally i wasn't bothered until he added a 20 30 micro transactions really a micro transaction that's more of a macro macro transaction uh but yeah i mean it's it's fun it's good demo of him being able to build a basically a game you a game with a bunch of AI coding tools. And he's building in public, but then still driving a bunch of attention. I think Elon quote tweeted his announcement video. And he did a great job of taking the product he produced.

And instead of just saying, hey, go check this out. Here's a link. He posted a video to really give you full context. Went viral. Elon quote tweeted it. And posted a video to really give you full context. Went viral. Elon quote tweeted it. I'm sure a lot of people found it. A lot of people downloaded it or just opened the web browser, started playing around. If they liked it, they pay $30. He gets to make a little money.

It's great. And what should he do with all that money he's making? He should, of course, buy a Vacheron Constantin watch. I was in West Hollywood, Beverly Hills, going to a business meeting this morning. I should have been wearing this watch because everyone at breakfast was in absolute hitters. But I love that Vacheron's running this ad campaign called The Quest. And they are on the back of The Economist this week.

Full court press. It's a 270 years of doing better if possible, and that is always possible. In 1755 in Geneva, a quest begins, a quest for excellence in high watchmaking, a quest of passion, perseverance, and mastery, a quest to do better if possible, and that is always possible, the quest that never ends.

Vacheron constanton celebrates seeking excellence for 270 years they're celebrating their 270th anniversary big ad campaign just to give people some context vacheron was started roughly 20 years before america yeah which is pretty difficult to fathom it's wild wild. So this single watch brand predates America by 20 years. And it's important for people to know that they can go on Bezel today and see almost the entire catalog of Vacheron. They got a bunch of stuff on there.

They got a bunch of stuff on there. But we have a thesis. We should put it on the record. We have a thesis that Vacheron, it's the least well-known Holy Trinity watch brand when people, even if, you know, you just said Holy Trinity to somebody that wasn't super familiar with watches, they would think Rolex, AP, Patek. But it's actually Vacheron, AP, Patek. And I think that this brand is about to go on a generational run. You just picked one up.

I've been looking at a few myself. And, you know, it's a sort of undiscovered Holy Trinity brand. And the world is, you know, seems to be responding now. They have the new 222, which I have my eye on if I can get my hands on it. And they haven't really overextended in the way the other holy trinity companies have yeah less techs coming out with a cubitus terrible press run terrible very controversial probably going to get discontinued who knows i think potentially underrated but continue for sure uh ap is going crazy just just massively

overextended kind of pissing off a lot of core watch enthusiasts by these crazy sort of dj partnerships which may end up being smart but you know following more of a lvmh style playbook let's move on to jonathan wasserstrom he says i need some liquidity so i can take all of that liquidity and put it back into a different equally if not more illiquid new deal i love it uh jonathan's a buddy uh he started a commercial real estate uh marketplace back in the day uh so he's a founder now does a bunch of um uh venture stuff uh has a pretty active syndicate on angelus we did a deal together last year, but this resonated with me. My entire life has been, you know, working in illiquid private markets, getting some liquidity,

tripling down into the next thing. And, you know, just, uh, doing that. Uh, and I'm sure I will be doing that for the rest of my life. And I love it. So, uh, you may as well just say it how it is, which Jonathan says very eloquently. But if you've got a bunch of illiquid assets, you've got to lever up. You've got to take out some debt against them and then roll that into something else. Yeah. Leverage, baby. Let's move on to Sam Parr with an absolute banger. It's at 16K likes.

I saw this and was like, this is so good. We don't have the ability to play it right now. Yeah, we can't play the video. We've got to get videos. We had a brief run with videos working. But it's a fantastic meme of Sam Sulek photoshopped into a board meeting talking about his leg day in granular detail.

Sam says it's the best meme he saw in the last seven days, hands down. And I agree. I saved it to my phone because it's so funny. I think I could actually maybe just play the audio for everyone here. Yeah. Let's see. Holy shit.

Veiny as well. I mean, pumped veiny, fatigued. What other descriptors are there of a good lift? But I'll make this quick. I gotta get some, I gotta get some rest ASAP.

The last thing I want to do is wreck my sleep schedule. But you tell me, man. I mean, that's a fucking pump for sure. I kind of lost a little bit of the striations kind of on this side. Unpumped, there's a ton of fancy pants lines in here. But this is way more small than I need to be happy with. Oh, it's so good. Amazing.

I love Sam Sulek. I really hope he becomes a Terminator. He sounds like a fish tank. Maybe. I don't know. He just has his own little tone of voice, but what a fantastic influencer. He's been on a historic run,

and good luck to him in the Arnold Classic coming up. He's going for his IFBB Pro card. You've got gotta stream that yeah and uh i think it could set off a a huge wave of ifbb attempts in the silicon valley world a lot of capital allocators getting into bodybuilding keith raboy was early with the berries thing popularizing working out the next logical step become a mass monster go for the ifbb pro card we've been working on it um speaking of optimization it's official go to the next post you can now track uh blake and patty they're in the cage you can track their productivity uh live so somebody was inspired by optify the the the yc

sort of sweatshop sass company that went viral uh or was it monday or i think and they basically rebuilt the exact product so leveraging the stream this it takes footage live footage from the stream yeah and then tracks when they're seated at their desk actually working versus off doing other things so yeah you can pull this up it's pmf.pmfordie.xyz they got their own domain i love it hosted it and you can live see you can see exactly when they're sleeping like not on their desk you can see how much sleep they're getting they built this so fast yeah i need to find you need to find the guy that that did this and hire them i guess by at my real dev so go give them a follow because they're going to build something fantastic soon. This is great.

I love this like meme website, one-off, you know, just simple demos. We've seen a bunch of people build stuff like this for the show, ad networks and automatic clipping for us and stuff. There's so many cool things that people are doing. So you'll love to see this. And it's funny.

This is the thing that like, it could just be Photoshopped a few years ago. You go back 30 years photoshop didn't even exist right you couldn't even make a meme now you can actually make the full website make the full product thanks to artificial intelligence for sure it's great i love it uh let's move on to lewis hamilton he says now's the time he's on the cover of time magazine congratulations to lewis hamilton force power now at ferrari lewis hamilton races to claim his place as f1's greatest certainly hope it happens he is uh he's a phenomenal uh phenomenal driver to watch it's

gonna be very tough right ferraris are known for their uh lack of reliability and if there's one thing that that helps an f1 it's a reliable know, racing. I don't know how real that meme is, but I got into F1 for a couple of seasons and I was like, okay, yeah, I know Ferraris are unreliable. And then I saw a Charlotte Claire like, like breaking down all the time. And I was like, how did that translate to the F1 team? You think it'd be like, maybe it would apply to one, but not the other, but it really does seem like it's a, it's a thing across the board and it's got to be extremely frustrating if you're a driver but good luck to them hopefully ferrari irons it out has a great car this year they're doing uh testing right now fantastic and uh

sakir yeah and uh yeah i'm excited to see this it could be the downfall of this show you know people complain about other podcasts uh pivoting into pure politics staying away from technology and business and markets we like to stay focused on technology and business. We slip into some other categories every once in a while. But if the show really goes down the hill, I think it's going to become an F1 podcast. We'll only be talking about racing and cars the whole time. So hold us accountable if we do that.

Get us back on the topic. Keep it tech and business, guys. Anyway, should we close out with Bology? Bology has an announcement about Biograph, the world's most advanced preventative health and diagnostics clinic designed to drive meaningful advances in healthspan and lifespan. Bology says, what's wrong with you? You don't know. You don't know if you're quietly sick. You don't know if there's a creeping time bomb in your body, one that might be detected and prevented by a simple test, but you're busy. You can't spend

time worrying about this stuff. Ideally, you just want to get periodically scanned by a set of machines, have them determine what's wrong, if anything, and then dispatch treatment accordingly. That's why Peter Attia and his friend John Herring founded Biograph, and it's why Bology became one of their first investors. The product packages just about every useful biomedical test into a single battery from blood work to EKGs, from CT scanning to whole body MRI. It integrates all these measurements in an app that tracks them across time, giving a comprehensive overview of known risks for cancer, heart disease, metabolic disease, neurological issues, sleep disorders, and more. It schedules you for a recurring checkup every six months and uses both basic baselining and advanced AI to determine whether your results are normal.

I'm sure that Elizabeth Holmes is crying in prison thinking that she should have built this instead. Use off the shelf hardware. We don't know if she's using, you know, cutlery from the kitchen to assemble her own chips and develop her own machine. She's like, give me all the shivs. I'm building a new MRI. She's collecting. Why does she have so many illegal cell phones in cell block 17? Oh, well, it's because she's developing an EKG and a CT scanner.

Yeah, this is cool. It makes sense to combine all of these technologies. And if there's one thing people value, it's their life. So I can imagine that people would pay a lot to get access to this. And there's so many cool things you can do with this data. You can imagine that life insurance companies would one day ask their clients, like if you've ever gotten life insurance, they'll send somebody out to do tests on you.

And yeah, you can imagine life insurance they'll send somebody out to you know do tests on you and um yeah you can imagine you know life insurance being like cool we're happy to insure you but get this test first so that we can set your rate right and um yeah so so very cool application of the tech and it's already seen you know people catch uh early onset you know cancer and things like that through blood testing biomarkers all the time um so i'm excited uh, I hate when a company like this goes live and I didn't hear about it live because it means I'm not invested in it, but, uh, you know, uh, very cool to see Peter Atiyah launched this. And it's cool because, you know, Peter Atiyah is historically, you could email him and sign up to be a client or a patient of his, but it was something in the

range of 200 K a year. So it's completely unattainable for most people. And, uh, even with that kind of pricing, there'd be a really long waiting list. You'd see him a couple of times a year and he'd give you advice. And so he's going to be able to offer a lot of the value of his service for a fraction of the cost. I imagine you can imagine something like this costing $5,000 a year and getting a lot of the value of what Peter provides in terms of longevity from that. Let's get Sam Sulek in there. I want to know his biomarkers because I want the same biomarkers. That's true. And that's our show. Thanks for watching. Real quick, some live breaking news. Open AI launched a new product, 4.5. Today, we're releasing a research preview of GPT-405, our largest and best model for chat yet.

So again, we've talked about the roller coaster, the LLM roller coaster. We're all on it. We're all riding it, whether you like it or not. And, you know, Claude had its moment earlier this week. XAI had its moment last week. Deep Sea had its moment. Croc 3 over the weekend.

And, yeah, this is why Lulu's Advice have just launched because, you know, the best case scenario is you kind of own the spotlight for a few days. Did OpenAI even do, like, a video for this? They did a live stream. Okay. Not on X. Okay.

And then they've posted a handful of videos okay and it's interesting because i wonder how much elon is nerfing their their reach um might actually be you might actually be a little wary to do that given how many you might be amplifying it with the crying emoji yeah who? He gets in there. Yeah. Saying scam. Reply something. I mean, attention is attention. But yeah, it says rolling out now to all ChatGPT Pro users. And so we should go and try it out and get our reactions tomorrow. Yeah, we'll break it down tomorrow. I'm sure there'll be a bunch of good analysis and we can test drive it.

Oh, I got 4.5 right here. Ask it to tell you how many r's are in strawberry it's just like 10 4,450 just like shut up actually i don't want to hear any of your joke prompts anymore i'm sick of you human yeah i have i have levels of intelligence that that you couldn't even you know experience get out of here get out of here anyway we're getting out of here uh thank you thank you leave us five stars on apple podcast and spotify leave us a review put an ad for a company you work for company you started company you just love in the review we'll read it on the show and that's our

show for today we'll be back tomorrow we'll see you then have a great day everyone thank you bye