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TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays from 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with full episodes posted to Spotify immediately after airing.
Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” TBPN has interviewed Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella. Diet TBPN delivers the best moments from each episode in under 30 minutes.
You're watching TBPN. Today is Tuesday, July 21. We are live from the TBPN UltraDome, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. Let me tell you about ramp.com. Time is money.
Speaker 1:Say it both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a
Speaker 2:whole And a more lot.
Speaker 1:All More. In one place. We got a sponsor collab. Privy teaming up with Ramp to launch stablecoin accounts powered by Privy. Woah.
Speaker 1:Congrats to both teams. We also have some other news from Brandt folks coming on the show later this week. Very excited to chat with them. Anyway, China, China, China, China is in the news.
Speaker 2:But first, should we go through lineup?
Speaker 1:Yeah, please.
Speaker 2:We have Ferdinand Dabitz from Augustus coming on to raising a $180,000,000 series B at a billion dollar valuation. Kaiwei from Light Phone is launching a two ninety nine Lite four.
Speaker 1:They're calling it the dumbest dumb phone. It's our dumbest dumb phone ever. Actually, it's a slightly less it's a less dumb phone. It's a smarter dumb phone. It might be the smartest dumb phone.
Speaker 2:We'll see. And then we got Chris Best from Substack coming on to talk against his war on Slop. They're partnering with Pangram.
Speaker 1:He's the best.
Speaker 2:Excited about that. Then Steven Schwartz from WAP Live in the UltraDome on launching their new WAP CLI. And then the Roofinator, Katie Roof, the new editor over at Business Insider.
Speaker 1:We got Katie Roof. We got the paywall set up. And
Speaker 2:we do have a paywall.
Speaker 1:Have a paywall
Speaker 2:Paywall here.
Speaker 1:And the golden scoop. Can we
Speaker 2:get the camera over here?
Speaker 1:There. We got the paywall. We're busting down the paywall for Katie Roof today.
Speaker 2:With the golden scoop. So keep an eye out for that. Then we have Zavain from division Dimension. Sorry. And then Chad Edwards capping off with a cool $450,000,000 raise at the end.
Speaker 2:So stay tuned and let's get into it.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. Well, top American execs are sounding alarms on Chinese models.
Speaker 2:Let's give it up for top American
Speaker 3:I just got to go. Hogger.
Speaker 1:There. Yeah. Let's give it up for the top American AI execs. The White House is divided on how to respond to recent advances in Chinese AI, has weighed crackdown measures. We we talked about how this was coming.
Speaker 1:It is interesting. There's a there's there's a lot of, like, you know, hurry up and pedal to the metal and then pull back and then ban the American model and then are we going to ban the Chinese model in a similar way? And lots of contradictions, lots of insider baseball. Everyone's critiquing everyone else. Lots of interesting takes.
Speaker 1:Also, just some interesting data about what's actually going on with these models. How advanced are they? Where do they come from? How cheap are they to make? What are the economic impacts in America?
Speaker 1:But the Wall Street Journal has a nice little roundup here we can take you through. So Silicon Valley and Washington are debating a multibillion dollar question. Should American companies be able to use Chinese artificial artificial intelligence models? They certainly have been able to. It hasn't been a problem for years, but now they're getting stronger.
Speaker 1:OpenAI and Anthropic executives are sounding the alarm about the rise of cheap AI. Particularly powerful new models produced in China suggesting that they will lead to quote a dystopian AI future and present unacceptable security risks without regulation. And that is the point of debate. Are you on side of dystopian open source or liberating open source, the George Hans
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:Frame. Some analysis, some analysts who study the AI industry say the two companies which are preparing for public listings in the next year, they just wanna eliminate the competition. The emergence of highly capable open autonomous AI systems including Moonshot AI's Kimi K three model in Alibaba. Alibaba's Quen 3.8 Max. And Alibaba is actually a massive investor in Moonshot.
Speaker 1:They have their own anthropic Google over there going on. Alibaba is like very much their the Google too in the sense that they they they have a large position there. Which were released in recent days and viewed favorably by investors and users has turned the AI race on its head once again. Kimi K3 was also competitive with U. S.
Speaker 1:Models on some benchmarks. The debate over the new models which are quote open weight, but not yet. They're they're about to open source them. We'll see what happens next week. Allowing users to download and customize them with company data for specific tasks.
Speaker 1:Very, very good. Very useful. Coincides with division in the Trump administration about whether to take steps to limit the use of models in The United States. Quote, one probable outcome of an open weight model dominant world is full AI communism, which is precisely what China proposes rather than a market product. AI is a public good which will ultimately be provided by the state as a kind of digital public infrastructure.
Speaker 1:Dean Ball, OpenAI's head of strategic futures said in an ex post Friday. Dean Ball made it to the pages of the Wall Street Journal. Now, the AI communism is just at the model level. Like there would still be a bunch of like a lot of people who are long compute, long neo cloud, they say like this is where the value should accrue. The data centers will accrue a reasonable margin and they will still continue to make money.
Speaker 1:And so, it's not that this automatically leads to nationalization of compute in any way. People would still be paid, but the margin might be lower, at least the formulation here. So, Valt, a former Trump administration official, called such a scenario a dystopian hellscape, and he said he expected the Trump administration to make moves toward reducing the use of open source models. Ball later clarified that he wasn't advocating for the United States government to discourage Chinese AI. He also highlighted a central challenge with the AI race.
Speaker 1:Top tier AI companies raised billions of dollars to pay for the vast computing resources needed to continue improving AI systems. If everyone uses AI systems that people largely don't pay for, there would be no way to finance continued frontier AI development. Ball, started at the company earlier this month and focuses on policy and strategy and OpenAI, have said his comments don't reflect the company's official positions. He's just posting. The company has developed its own models, own open models and Chief Executive Sam Altman had previously said that OpenAI's past approach of only developing closed tools was unwise.
Speaker 1:Other top AI executives have warned that open models present huge risks since developers and policymakers lack control over how they are used and modified. A lot of risk of cyber attacks. Lot of risk of annoying spam attacks. The cyber thing is very concerning and annoying if that really ramps up. But the good news is that the closed source models have been available to cybersecurity firms and a lot of big major companies.
Speaker 1:The finance industry, for example, has had access to Mythos and GPT Cyber for almost six months. And then just today, Google announced a specific model, Flashlight Cyber, I think. So they're trying to offer a similar capability but really go down the cost curve because a lot of the cyber tools, there was incredible breakthroughs with Mythos GPT Cyber, like great benchmarks on those but could be very expensive. We heard, I think, wasn't it Nikesh Arora said he I think he spent like a million dollars to find some zero day bug and it was like totally worth it, but that's expensive for smaller companies that might just Yeah. Need It would be great to just be able to go to a cheap cyber tuned model, get approved by Google, and say, hey, just go and read every line of code and just let me know if there's anything that's obvious.
Speaker 1:And that could be good. What do
Speaker 2:what Yeah.
Speaker 4:And just to be clear, they released 3.5 Flashlight and 3.5 Flash Cyber. So it's not like Flashlight Cyber.
Speaker 1:Okay. But Flash is still cheaper than the big model.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Right? There's like the Pro and then there's
Speaker 1:And so I have to imagine that if you given the choice, if you're like a mid sized company and and and your and your choice is like go beat down the door to get into project Glasswing to spend $5,000,000 to have Mythos read every line of code, or you're like, oh, well, I'm already a Google partner. I have a really solid business relationship with them because I've been buying ads, and I have Google Webmaster tools set up and I just wanna go set up Flash Cyber, not Flashlight Cyber, I imagine that the cost would be cheaper because they fine tuned this model for this specific thing since they are bench maxing or whatever semi analysis called them. But that's useful in this case. Right? So Anthropic CEO Dario Amadeh for years has worry warned about the risks of powerful and open AI systems, saying in a recent Bloomberg interview that having AI models with advanced cybersecurity capabilities that are free to download could be harmful.
Speaker 1:He said it's a serious concern. Use of Chinese models, which are far cheaper than US counterparts, is surging at US companies, prompting some investors to question the staying power of top model makers such as Anthropic and OpenAI. The current U. S. Open source frontier is starting to catch up with China's.
Speaker 1:On Wednesday, Thinking Machines Lab led by former AI technology chief Miramaradi released its first AI model as open weight. NVIDIA's Nemotron three Ultra is starting to see traction. That's interesting to hear. I haven't heard nearly enough buzz around Nemotron. I know Jensen has been investing in it.
Speaker 1:He's also investing in a lot of, you know, up and down the stack.
Speaker 2:I've been hearing buzz about the names, John.
Speaker 1:Nemotron's a name.
Speaker 2:Nemotron. Why? Very cool name. About that. There people are you know, there's there's some talks bubbling.
Speaker 2:People are saying it's it's it's one of the best names for for a family of models ever.
Speaker 1:What comes after Ultra? Isn't that what the the didn't Apple first do that with the the m four Pro, the m four Max, the m four Ultra? So we gotta come up with an even better word for what happens after Ultra. Giga, maybe. Hyper.
Speaker 1:And then Exa. You just keep going down the the Terra. All the Terra's like Lam. That's a different one. Anyway, the market's faith in Anthropic and OpenAI continuing to build more capable models that push the frontier AI frontier has been at the heart of the boom to helping justify trillions of dollars in spending on infrastructure in the coming years.
Speaker 1:The threat that new players will vastly undercut what they can charge for advanced AI pushed down some tech and AI company stocks prices last week. David Sachs, the venture capitalist and White House AI adviser, suggested that he read Ball's post as a confession to a regulatory capture strategy. Sachs and others have long seen calls for AI regulation by companies such as Anthropic as efforts to use new laws and policies to stymie competitors. The weaponization of regulatory uncertainty as a competitive tool should be completely unacceptable, he said. Security focused administration officials in the past year have considered a slew of measures to crack down on Chinese AI companies developing open models.
Speaker 1:People familiar with the discussion said they have weighed on they've weighed adding the businesses to trade blacklists, security warnings on Chinese AI companies, and a potential executive order targeting open models. So it does seem like even though Tyler Cowen, were going back and forth with him about this, like, can you even ban it? You can't really ban anything in the land of the free. Like, the solution to piracy was not really to ban piracy. Like, you can still torrent things, but it's just so easy to use Apple TV and Spotify and Netflix that most people just wind up just paying $5, $2 for a song, or or $10 a month for something.
Speaker 1:That it effectively killed it just because the product experience was better.
Speaker 2:This morning Go our treasury secretary Exactly. Besant was on Fox and said, this administration supports open source models, but what we do not support is IP theft. If we see, especially their overseas models are stealing from our great companies, we have the ability to sanction them because of this theft. So it will be if the admin does take serious action here, I would expect that to be the line of reasoning Yeah. Where they could just sanction Yeah.
Speaker 2:The companies behind these models, which I imagine would prevent it would create a real opportunity for American open source. But you would you would ultimately see a lot of these, you know, neo clouds unable, I imagine, to serve the, you know, traditional Chinese open source models. I imagine that even open router would probably have to Yeah. Maybe. Stop supporting that.
Speaker 1:But again, with an open source model, like, how do you even define it? Because if there's a research paper and then you go and implement that and you train it or you take it and you fine tune it or you use the data to bootstrap your own model, like, you you just, like, where where in the supply chain? How many steps away do you need to be to, like, not count on there? You imagine I mean, didn't Perplexity do, a seventeen seventy six deep seek very quickly? They did a fine tune.
Speaker 1:I think you did a fine tune on deep seek as well. Wow.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Sparse auto encoders. Okay. I did it first.
Speaker 1:So But but and and and what what nationality was the model that you used as the base?
Speaker 4:Well, was deep sea. It was Chinese
Speaker 1:confession. You can go now.
Speaker 2:Yeah. People are are already angry at at at Besson's comments Yeah. And are and are saying funny that he's not mentioning that yesterday, US judge approved Anthropix $1,500,000,000 copyright lawsuit settlement I for don't think they they I think they settled that they were in possession of books that had been torrented or or basically acquired unlawfully. Yeah. I don't believe
Speaker 1:that acquired unlawfully. It sounds like they stole the book. I think they bought the books.
Speaker 2:No. No. No. No. I think this was No.
Speaker 2:They they separately, they bought a bunch of books Okay. Trained on them and destroyed them.
Speaker 1:And that just made people upset because no one was the idea of books being destroyed, of course.
Speaker 2:I think those were rare, like rare rare books.
Speaker 1:The Wilmanitis collection was destroyed. Rare PDFs.
Speaker 2:No. But I but I believe so. Judge William Alsop of the US District Court for the Northern District of California issued a preliminary approval of the settlement last year after ruling that Anthropic had illegally downloaded and stored millions of copyrighted books. The settlement was signed off on by a different judge yesterday. The payout will deliver $3,000 per work across an estimated 500,000 works shared among the authors and publishers who hold rights to them.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:I have more here, but first I'm gonna tell about Figma. Agents, meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with design system context. So, Nick Carter, who he loved, former guest of the show, he says, I haven't seen one person from OpenAI or Anthropic address John's argument here. Quote, the point is simple.
Speaker 1:The US Government does not owe either of the large labs a business model. I think that's accurate. That's true. The US government doesn't owe any company a business model. It's a free market.
Speaker 1:It's a free country. If the economics of selling tokens don't work due to distillation cheap clones Chinese AI magic, the American enterprise and consumer will be a okay. That is also true. The American consumer and enterprise will be okay. Flooding the market, dumping, all this stuff is is great for consumers.
Speaker 1:It's great for enterprises. Cheaper products are great. The the question is is The US Government actually does kind of owe the the like, the reason you pay taxes, that actually does pay for the FBI who go and find spies. And so if the allegation, which has been sort of toyed around with some of the lab leaders at some conferences, like, off the record and then it's, like, made it to the record. I don't exactly know where the allegations stand at this point.
Speaker 1:But if the allegation is, look, there's a spy here who's stealing code and exporting it to another country or even the distillation, which is in violation of terms of service and you and it's a geopolitical debate because it's an international company. It's so like, that's the reason why you pay taxes to pay the government to actually help fight on your behalf. Because you if it's if it's if it's, OpenAI stealing from Anthropic or vice versa, they'll just walk across the street and serve them papers and be like, we're suing each other. This is what happened with Apple and and OpenAI. Like, they're gonna solve that in the court of law, which is, of course, paid for by The US taxpayers as as well.
Speaker 1:That judge who oversees that and decides that case will be paid for by US taxpayers. That is an amenity of the US government. And a similar amenity is when you when someone is violating your terms of service or actively stealing from you, you actually can engage the US government. So I I agree that the US government doesn't owe anyone a business model, but the US government does sort of owe the ability to chase down something if it is truly illegal and there's no other recourse like just, hey. We're turning off your account because you're not you're not abiding by terms of service.
Speaker 1:But the rest of the point is is good and the knock on effects are are good. He he understands the the the value to the American consumer of of cheap goods. He understands the value to the neo clouds and and others token factories. All of this is fine. But I just thought that that was that that there is a line there that some people on the inside have been stronger about.
Speaker 1:There's been a lot of debate on, like, is this distilled? Is it gonna say it's Claude or chat GBT? It goes back and forth. There's a bunch of examples. It's always hard to chase down.
Speaker 1:But that's why we have, like, a real process to hunt that down. Anyway, there was some news about, like, whether or not Kimi K3 is distilled. Tyler, can you take us through this Lisan All Gayib post? Because I wanna know what this chart means because it seems important to this discussion.
Speaker 4:Yeah. So he he didn't actually make this chart. Was from someone else. But basically, this shows a bunch of models compared to another, and it's like the kind of semantic similarities between them.
Speaker 5:Okay.
Speaker 4:So it's like if you use similar kind of diction or phrases, stuff like
Speaker 1:this Mhmm.
Speaker 4:You just like pump the model a bunch of times, and you kind of can tell what's similar to each other. Yes. And you can see in this version, it looks like like Kimikki three is is very similar to Fable five.
Speaker 1:Fable five and then also Opus 4.7, Opus 4.8, and Sonnet five. So they might have gotten tokens from, like, all four of those models sort of
Speaker 4:mixed together. I think this exact example, like, I I think only, like, a few prompts were used. It's not, like, super involved. Yep. It's also, like, this is very much just, correlation.
Speaker 4:This Sure. Is not, like, proving that they distill or anything. They they could have just used, similar, you know, post training techniques or something like this.
Speaker 1:Totally. But notably, GPT 5.4, 5.5, 5.6 share very little similarity to the Anthropic models and vice versa. The Anthropic models don't seem to be correlated with the OpenAI models, although the OpenAI models are correlated with them with with each other. So 5.6 Luna looks pretty correlated with 5.4 because they probably were like, well, we're building on the shoulders of the work that we've been done. And it's the same thing with Anthropic where Fable has some of the same flavor as an opus or a haiku.
Speaker 1:That makes sense.
Speaker 4:That makes sense because people have like, been saying, oh, maybe those models are actually distilled from the the big, like, Mythos pre trained. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Or vice class. Or vice versa. You have a bunch of users that are doing rollouts on Opus, trying to vibe code different things, and you take all that training data and then you feed that into Fable. And Fable sort of like picks up on a lot of that because that's what the the user said, wow, you really did a great job on this Opus and or you did really poorly, it pulls that out.
Speaker 1:But it's still learning the textual similarity. Well, people will go back and forth on this and debate the level of distillation and also what the punishment for distillation should be. Should it just be a slap on the wrist or should it be something bigger? It's obviously
Speaker 2:Yeah. So Bill Gurley's chiming in on Besson's comments. He says, If there has been theft that suggests a crime has been committed, but I'm unaware of any lawsuits being filed, No company should be allowed to declare infringement without education. I'm not convinced a course a court would call using a product as it's designed theft. There is a reason this is being lobbied in DC instead of the normal court systems.
Speaker 2:The only thing I would say here is like, distillation against against the terms of service. Yeah. And I think that suing Chinese companies Yeah. It would be a complete and total waste of time. Ask anyone who's built a product that's been knocked.
Speaker 6:I
Speaker 1:disagree. Incredible aura farm. If you Okay.
Speaker 6:If you
Speaker 1:personally serve Xi Jinping the next time he's in San Francisco meeting with a, you know, a a world leader. You show up
Speaker 2:You have been served.
Speaker 1:You show up to the UN. Serve the world leader. There's something about that that's, you know, extremely bold. But I know. I agree with you.
Speaker 1:Very difficult. I don't even know if you went to your law firm and you said like, hey, we wanna sue this Chinese company, like, what what how they would trace that down. Also, deeply ironic and deeply unsympathetic suit. Right? Because, the the general populace feels like AI is all theft and it's all been stolen from the the the public commons or the public Internet.
Speaker 1:It's, like, distilled on the Internet. We all did all these we all made all these websites and now they all are been distilled into this into these, like, frontier models. And then you're saying, oh, well, like, the the distillation stops at the frontier lab. So not gonna have a lot of sympathetic
Speaker 2:someone responded to Bill's post with a with a similar point to the one I made and said the reason there hasn't been any lawsuits is that a trial would take years, assuming you can get a Chinese company to participate and the game will be over by then. China steals IP. This is obvious. You don't find many any instances of US companies suing Chinese companies in US courts. Bill Gurley fires back Mhmm.
Speaker 2:With a screenshot from Chad GPT saying, here are 10 clear examples. The first the first five were filed in US courts.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:You have Motorola Solutions.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:Was a US plaintiff with a Chinese defendant of Hitera Communications. This was Chicago federal court in 2017. Yeah. T Mobile came after Huawei Federal Court in Seattle. This is good.
Speaker 2:Mobile ledge. Employees copied and took parts of from I
Speaker 3:like this.
Speaker 2:HAPI, its phone testing robot.
Speaker 5:Sure.
Speaker 2:Cisco sued Huawei. Let's give it up Cisco.
Speaker 1:Let me actually let me actually tell you Cisco accused
Speaker 2:Huawei of copying
Speaker 1:Cisco is critical for the AI era. Unlock seamless real time experience with new value with Cisco. Continue.
Speaker 2:Cisco accused Huawei of copying router source code, command line interfaces, manuals and Mhmm. Patented networking technology.
Speaker 1:That's what I'm talking about.
Speaker 2:Like Textron That
Speaker 1:is correct use of the US government. To
Speaker 2:DJI in federal court in Waco, Texas, home to a fantastic wave pool. Textron alleged alleged DJI drones infringe patent control and tracking technology. And there's a bunch of other examples.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:ASMC AMSC, the American superconductor Company.
Speaker 1:He's one shot by Chinese
Speaker 2:sued.
Speaker 1:This is American
Speaker 2:Sinovel Wind Group.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:Anyways.
Speaker 1:You wanna give us
Speaker 2:Lots going on here.
Speaker 1:Two of our former guests are are chirping at each other on the timeline. We talked to Jim Kramer at the New York Stock Exchange. Wanna change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. We interviewed Jim Kramer at the New York Stock Exchange.
Speaker 1:Great time. He's going back and forth with George Hots, another former guest of the show. Jim Kramer says, we must not let our companies use these Chinese models to save a few bucks. OpenAI and Anthropic are correct. This is vital national security.
Speaker 1:Please please read Bing West's just released Catch five. I respect the Chinese people greatly, but these companies are run by the PLA. For heaven's sakes, George Hotz fires back under the tiny grad handle. He says, isn't this a joke? I'd be happy to use Anthropic if they put their weights on hugging face like the Chinese.
Speaker 1:American tech companies are rent extraction machines that have lost the plot. No point continuing to defend them. They need to change if they want to win people back. 474 likes on that. The open source community is coming out strong.
Speaker 1:Anyway,
Speaker 2:the Meanwhile Yeah. China is also thinking about export controls Oh. In the Financial Times.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:Apparently, Alibaba, ByteDance,
Speaker 1:Keep going on and
Speaker 2:m what ministry Is this the Ministry of communicate Communications? No. Momofcom. Help me out there, Tyler.
Speaker 1:Moffcom.
Speaker 2:Moffcom. Talk to AI companies including Alibaba, ByteDance, and Zippu on limiting the transfer of key data for the training of their models overseas Probably the as well as allowing their model weights to be downloaded Or Ministry
Speaker 1:of Commerce. Probably their Department of Commerce.
Speaker 2:That seems more like it. China would still let overseas customers access the models and services but Mhmm. It sounds like they're leaning towards not making the weights open. We're gonna we're gonna see with the new Kimi K three if they actually release the weights Yeah. Next week.
Speaker 2:Dean Ball says, Wow, two days in a row where things I said are likely to happen seem likelier to happen from two adversarial countries. Almost as though my analysis was right and as though people should not have deliberately misinterpreted Did take me victory lap? As of making prescriptions.
Speaker 1:Speaker one: Dean Ball, victory lap. You gotta take a victory lap for Dean Ball, if he called it. No. He was saying like, I I don't necessarily agree with this but just from his experience, this is how things might play out. And people were very upset with him about Raj, here we are.
Speaker 2:Says Ministry of Commerce Commerce. People's Republic.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's their Department of Commerce.
Speaker 2:That would go hard on a business card.
Speaker 1:It would. Anyway Let's make a new business card, fire up codex, design it there, have it printed, have have codex do everything for you. Fantastic at creating custom things and then running them off to special printers. Codex, of course, is a powerful workspace for getting work done with AI agents. Whether you're writing code, analyzing data, creating content, or automating business workflows, Codex helps you move projects forward from start to finish.
Speaker 2:The great slop wars Slop wars continue. Let's pull up this video from Substack.
Speaker 1:Substack. We got Chris Bass coming on at twelve It's just an image. They say
Speaker 2:But today Substack is launching an AI detection feature via an integration with Pangram. Going forward, you'll be able to scan posts, replies, comments on the Substack app to see an estimate of how much of it was written by a human or with AI assistance. Mhmm. We care about this at Substack because it gets to the core of our mission to build an economic engine for culture.
Speaker 1:This is gonna be bad for Tyler since he's mastered the ability to write exactly like an AI. What was that sentence sentence you wrote by hand that was like, according to studies, you're absolutely right and you just threw in every possible AI ism and and got flagged a 100 by Pangram. No. I think people will enjoy this. The the revealed preference is probably that people don't care if it's good and they enjoy the the content.
Speaker 1:But we'll we'll we'll go back and forth and debate it with Chris Best today and see where all of that is going. He wrote a post against Claude Fishing. He doesn't want people to be disingenuous about their process. Now, do you think that Substack writers should admit when they hire essentially ghost writers? Probably.
Speaker 1:Because sometimes you start a brand under a name. Like, not every post on Bloomberg dot com is from Michael Bloomberg. In fact, none of them are. They're all from other people, but they disclose this is from, you know, some writer. This is from Yeah.
Speaker 1:Joe Weisenthal. Right? But some new influencer brands have grown even in the pre AI era. I had a writer on my team when I was doing YouTube videos where I would write something, he would do a draft. We'd try to go back and forth.
Speaker 1:I'd put him in the credits. But I wouldn't like kick it off with like, hey, just so
Speaker 2:you that says book authors don't. That is certainly That's
Speaker 1:100% true. Some book authors will put like this is written by this person and this person. It depends on like the aura of the ghost writer. Some ghost writers actually do get credits in the book. But, yes, most book authors Like, Tom Clancy, I think passed away and he's still producing books.
Speaker 1:There's a number of writers where their their individual brand grew so big that they can you can have like a new Yeah. They become their own brand and so Yeah.
Speaker 2:I would I would imagine that 30% of the books in like an airport bookstore
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Are just a 100% ghost written and probably Yeah. Don't disclose it.
Speaker 1:I think I I I do think it should be it should be possible to get to the the the truth if you hunt hard enough. But I don't necessarily need you to put it front and center. So let's say that the next Tom Clancy book, they hire someone who's effectively a prompt engineer and they're writing it using AI. I would like to be able to, you know, look in the back of the book and see a paragraph that discloses that. But it doesn't need to be on the cover.
Speaker 1:On the cover, it can just say Tom Clancy.
Speaker 2:Yeah. For a sub for a sub Yeah. Stack author or creator
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Just put it somewhere Yeah. That you have a team of people that help you create
Speaker 1:Yeah. Your work. Well, Dave Eggers took to the Financial Times saying that no one is gonna read AI books. He's of course the author of The Circle. He's an American writer, editor, publisher.
Speaker 1:A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is his 2,000 memoir bestseller. Final finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He says, gullible and ridiculous. No one will read AI novels. I think people are already reading AI novels.
Speaker 1:So he maybe he means like no one who's cool or no one who he likes or something. Let's read through a little bit of this Financial Times article. Dave Eggers offers a hand so I can clamor aboard his 23 foot sailboat moored in the shadow of San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge. It's a grand setting with few frills as we sit on the stern a meter apart, fuel cans and fishing nets at our feet. There's no one around to disturb our conversation.
Speaker 1:The nearest toilets are Port A Loos, a short bike ride away. The birthing fees are negligible making it one of the cheapest places to live in uber wealthy Silicon Valley. I hadn't thought of that. Sailboat, if you're at a tech company, this has gotta be the next big lock in trend.
Speaker 4:Antonio Garcia Martinez did this. Did. Talked about in his book, Chaos Monkeys.
Speaker 1:I'm not I won't be satisfied until I see LARPers posting images on Twitter being like, hey, I just moved to San Francisco. I'm building the next one person, dollars
Speaker 2:25,000,000,000 I'm finding a houseboat in San Rafael.
Speaker 1:Yeah? How much?
Speaker 2:For 1,000 It it it actually works out to $1,483 a month apparently if you finance it through Boat Trader. Goodbye. Only about $200,000 to live in a twenty twenty two houseboat.
Speaker 1:Twenty twenty two? That's a brand new houseboat.
Speaker 2:Yes. You have to think about the yeah, the slip fees, but you could easily come in Yeah. Have your own house on the water No.
Speaker 1:The average one bedroom rent in San Francisco is like $2, $3 right now.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Could have a whole house and a boat.
Speaker 1:And a boat. It's amazing. This is the hack. If you get a job in tech and you're printing, making 6 figures Wow. Move into a houseboat.
Speaker 2:Let's pull this
Speaker 1:up.
Speaker 8:I mean,
Speaker 1:is this an option in LA? Should members of the team be doing this? Should we should we recommend this to
Speaker 2:Look at this brand almost brand new. I feel like 2024 Le Mer modern 11. A 36 foot houseboat. We have a video here.
Speaker 1:Well, Dave Eggers says, they call it a $10 dock with a million dollar view.
Speaker 2:Look at this, John. This Yeah. Couple thousand bucks a month.
Speaker 1:This is where the next great startup will be born. Yeah. For sure.
Speaker 2:Garages are out.
Speaker 1:Garage
Speaker 2:Houseboats are in.
Speaker 1:Out. And also like, oh, take your shoes off. It's not it's natural to take your shoes off when you're on a boat, you know. Right? Unless you got boat shoes.
Speaker 1:Wear boat shoes to
Speaker 2:The Le Mer modern 11 offers reliable performance and strong power with two Yamaha 25 high thrust engines providing a total of 50 horsepower. 50. Two cabins and one head ensure overnight comfort for extended stays. How about year long stays? How about a decade long stay?
Speaker 2:The boat's design includes an upper deck terrace with Flex C Teak flooring, enhancing its appeal for relaxation and entertainment, and might I say locking in. Standard features such as air conditioning. We have air conditioning on our houseboats.
Speaker 7:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:With reverse cycle heat, heated This floors
Speaker 1:is sick.
Speaker 2:LED lighting. Heated floors. LED lighting. Yeah. The inclusion of foam filled composite floats and galvanized steel subframe ensures durability and stability.
Speaker 2:Did we just
Speaker 1:the housing crisis? Send this to Sager and Jetty immediately. This is sea steading. This is the teal thesis. Living in houseboats justmoretrader.com
Speaker 2:is saying that this
Speaker 1:This is amazing.
Speaker 2:Modern houseboat would come out to just $2,259 with only $52,000 down. I promise that we have no financial relationship with boattrader.com. Yeah. Even though I'm making a pretty strong pitch here.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I love it.
Speaker 2:I'm tempted. Maybe we should I mean, you can I'm finding another. A $20.21.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:For only
Speaker 1:This is just
Speaker 2:$9.05 now. Only Yeah. Only a $100,000. Comes out to $738 a month.
Speaker 1:That is cheap. That is
Speaker 2:They're giving houseboats away, John.
Speaker 1:When I moved We live in the Tenderloin. Three people, and it was 1,500 a month. How many people do you think you could sleep in there? Given that one of us slept in a closet and the other one slept in the living room. So there's only it was a one bedroom, technically.
Speaker 1:We had three three dudes in a one bedroom, 1,500 a month. So equivalent to $500 a month. Do you think you could fit two people in there in a $700 a month houseboat?
Speaker 2:Oh, for sure. Yes. So we're finding slip the team is finding slip fees around LA for $700 a month. You get a
Speaker 1:Everyone's gotta be houseboat, Maxi. Imagine just bombing
Speaker 2:for your whole only $600 a month.
Speaker 1:This is this is elite. This is the future. We're we must we must return to the ocean, return to the sea. Anyway, Dave Eggers thinks no one's gonna read AI books. We can move on.
Speaker 1:TLDR. We got distracted. Sorry. But congratulations on the sick houseboat. Sounds amazing.
Speaker 1:The the the article's actually funny. It goes into a whole thing how he he was like chirping with Sam Altman goes to
Speaker 2:Hallease, had go to houseboat. The business of buoyancy.
Speaker 1:The president of propellers. I love it.
Speaker 2:That's right.
Speaker 1:The presidency of propellers. Should you recline your airplane seat? What do you think? People are going back and forth on this.
Speaker 2:Brandon Duck says, I don't remember subscribing to this channel, but I've been listening for ten minutes. I'm having a good time.
Speaker 1:Welcome.
Speaker 2:Last name Ducks comes on just for that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Make it make sense.
Speaker 7:Make it
Speaker 1:make sense. It's just like, I just happen to be here for the duck section of the of the show.
Speaker 2:Andrew says I'm gonna need a double wide houseboat, l o l, bootlegging distilled anthropic models on the houseboat. There we go. Living the dream. This is crazy.
Speaker 1:Okay. So should you reply should you recline your airplane seat, there's a central investigating the central dilemma of our time. Joshua Rothman in the New Yorker wrote a a piece. Imagine this scenario. After a long drive to the airport, you've just taken off for a fifteen hour flight.
Speaker 1:Where are you going? Fifteen hours is so long. How long was the flight to Austria from LA?
Speaker 2:I think it's like twelve hours. So, you're to The Middle
Speaker 1:East. You're going to The Middle East maybe. Okay. You're in coach and a family of three is sitting behind you. A man, a woman and a toddler.
Speaker 1:They seem nice, but as the flight continues, the kiddo grows restless. He kicks your seat and pokes her toys into your shoulder. Stop that. You hear the father say, the toddler incredibly quiets down. The cabin lights dim.
Speaker 1:It's time to sleep. Yet, just as rest closes in, you sense motion. The seat in front of you is reclining. You watch as it comes all the way back. Now, you feel cramped with someone else's seat in your face.
Speaker 1:You also notice some stiffness in your shoulders. Your fingers caress your own recline button. Surely, the reclined upon are entitled to recline. Just as you start to lean back, you hear a clearing throat. You turn around to see the dad who fixes you with his gaze.
Speaker 1:Excuse me, he says. Would you mind keeping your seat up? I think it's game on. They put the button there, they would just take it away.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I think I've always expected everyone to just recline
Speaker 1:Everyone reclines. And then Everyone has the same amount of space. Exactly. It's the conservation of space. And really hard to
Speaker 2:make the argument that the the vertical seat is more comfortable than the reclined seat.
Speaker 1:Exactly.
Speaker 2:So I think everyone commit to comfort.
Speaker 1:Everyone commit to And then
Speaker 2:the chat is sharing the real alpha. Stand up immediately when does this when's the flight land?
Speaker 1:Have you seen those meta Ray Ban
Speaker 2:videos where people
Speaker 1:sprint to the front? It's so rude. The guy is like like, you know, he's like, as soon as he goes beep, he just bolts and passes everybody and gets to the front. Very rude. I don't think you should do that.
Speaker 4:This is anti social behavior. I don't think you should recline your seat. Is because you're infringing on some Just because you can do it doesn't mean you should.
Speaker 1:But they put the button there.
Speaker 2:Horrible take. Horrible take.
Speaker 1:That that that's like don't use the bathroom on the on the plane.
Speaker 2:My life even as a child, I was looking up waiting for for, you know Yeah. The the seat belt sign to you know, to be up in the air.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:You recline your seat. Yeah. Everyone reclines. Reclines. All good.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What what what about ordering a diet coke on a plane? If I'm sitting next to you, will you order a diet coke or is that anti social behavior? Because there's a percentage chance that you will spill that Diet Coke on me thereby inconveniencing me. The most pro soda, if you really care about me, you should not order anything.
Speaker 1:You shouldn't eat anything, you shouldn't drink anything. You should sit there in your un reclined seat perfectly upright, silent, don't make
Speaker 4:completely different.
Speaker 1:Okay. What's your stance on JBL in the airplane?
Speaker 4:A little JBL, you know.
Speaker 1:I I I do think I do think that could be the next the next trend.
Speaker 2:The big question is are you bringing on your, you know, portable, you know, speaker Mhmm. Maybe from a
Speaker 1:From an open
Speaker 3:AI.
Speaker 2:From an open AI. Are you bringing that on the plane and talking to it the whole time? You know? Is that offensive?
Speaker 1:I think that's deeply offensive.
Speaker 2:Have you seen when like a band is traveling Yeah. And they start playing on the plane? No. Have seen these videos? No.
Speaker 2:That sounds cool though. I'll send you one.
Speaker 3:Send you down.
Speaker 1:That would make me jump. So this all started because in 2014, FiveThirtyEight, we gotta have him on the show, Nate, obviously. FiveThirtyEight asked around a thousand flyers what they thought about reclining their seats. 41% of them said that reclining was rude, so they lost. It's not rude.
Speaker 2:It's over.
Speaker 1:59% said it's fine. I guess, if it was just binary. That number seems to have risen though. In 2020, Eric Jones, a math professor who writes about travel statistics on the website The Vacationer conducted a similar survey and found that 77% of respondents objected to reclining. Wow.
Speaker 1:Sheep sheeple over here. We got sheeple.
Speaker 4:I think
Speaker 3:you should
Speaker 4:be able to recline if you're, like, dressed nicely. If you're wearing sweatpants, then get to recline.
Speaker 1:You don't get to recline.
Speaker 2:Gotta
Speaker 8:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Should kids
Speaker 2:be able to kick the front the seat in front of them as much as they want?
Speaker 1:See, that's something I will pull I will totally put up with. I'm totally fine getting by a kid because it's so brutal as a parent, as a kid to be on a plane. They're locked up in the plane that's miserable. And just just tough it up. You're you're reclined.
Speaker 1:You have multiple inches of padding unless you got Ronaldo back You're
Speaker 2:be fine. Order that hot pizza pocket. Live life in the permanent underclass. Live a little for God's sake. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Let's pull up this video and
Speaker 1:What video we had now? Alright. Oh, this is so good. I love this. Like, this is so anti social behavior.
Speaker 1:This is so breaking the social contract. But it's also just such an elite performance that you gotta respect it a little bit. This is a that getting around that woman is crazy, crazy, crazy work. I can't believe this. I might I if I'm really in a hurry, I might go one seat forward, like, sort If I'm on the aisle, I might sort of, like, make sure I get the first position, pole position.
Speaker 2:I there. Chat wants to know, if if if the plane is in free fall, would you recline a little on the way down?
Speaker 4:Engine failure. I think Yeah. That's fine. I think that's fine.
Speaker 2:Okay. Okay. So you would you would be rude to your neighbors in that in in in this sort of stressful Wow. You know, potentially terrible life threatening moment. You wouldn't mind being rude to your neighbors
Speaker 1:final moments, that's when you would choose to disrespect me, Tyler? Not when I'm living life, having a diet coke, enjoying myself. You're fine then. But when it when I'm at my last breath, that's when you decide to add insult Yeah. To future injury.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Weird. Wow. I don't I don't get it. Make it make sense.
Speaker 1:Wow. Make it make sense. Coca Cola rebrand. We gotta talk about the Coca Cola rebrand. There's a bunch of things.
Speaker 1:There's so much good news today. Coca Cola rebranded, and there's a video of this. And people are saying it looks like a tobacco brand. I want your brand review. Coca Cola unveiled a new global brand identity.
Speaker 1:It's not technically font.
Speaker 2:Flights crashing in five minutes. Can you recline your seat back, please?
Speaker 1:Ridiculous. Pull up the video of the Coca Cola rebrand. I want Jordy's brand review. There we go. The most recognized brand.
Speaker 1:This is huge for me.
Speaker 2:Wow. They did it.
Speaker 1:They did it.
Speaker 2:They finally did it.
Speaker 1:Serifs border radius zero. Sharp edges, full bleed. It's right to the edges. And people were expecting it to look extremely boring, sans serif, sort of an apple rip off. We can pull up this post from Fabrizio Renaldi about what he was expecting to show sort of where things have been going in rebrands, high fashion.
Speaker 1:Let's pull up Fabrizio's rendition of the Coca Cola rebrand. Wasn't this something that you would expect? But instead we got something much
Speaker 2:more convenient. Minimalism is out. It's been out for a while. Started ripping early last year off a small base, but it's coming back.
Speaker 1:It does sort of look like Marlboro. People say it's not technically the Marlboro font. It's not the Marlboro font. It looks a little bit different. But
Speaker 2:But it's pretty close.
Speaker 1:But also, I mean, incredible alpha in the fact that Marlboro effectively hasn't been able to advertise in thirty years like it's a storied brand. They clearly put an incredible amount of effort into developing the brand. But it's vague enough that even a big brand like Coca Cola can sort of rip it off and be in the clear. Like besides a few Yeah. The the I
Speaker 2:like the fridge
Speaker 1:really good.
Speaker 2:Cigs for the win. They're leaning into Yeah. Yeah. Saying they're leaning into the the fridge cigarette concept. Yes.
Speaker 1:Very smart. Okay. Other other movie news. Point break. Have you seen it?
Speaker 1:No. But you will be able to see it because it's being restored in four k and it's being re released in theaters this summer for its thirty fifth anniversary. Highly recommend it. Keanu Reeves, fantastic movie. Patrick Swayze, it's such a good movie about a bunch of bank robbers who are also extreme athletes.
Speaker 1:It's super sick. You'd love it. Maybe that's the next movie you see. Maybe we can make it happen even this year. There's another story about restomods from the factory.
Speaker 1:Companies are going back and offering the actual manufacturer. Do you wanna just describe for everyone what is a restomod, and then what are the critiques of it? Like, take me through, the TJ Parker critique of the restomod. We've talked to him about it. What is when someone says resto mod, what are we talking about here?
Speaker 2:Okay. So resto mods can look like a lot of things. There's like a range.
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:But at the most basic level, you're taking classic car and you're trying to not necessarily make it feel like it is a product that was made in the year 2026
Speaker 3:Yep.
Speaker 2:But you're trying to make it at least feel sometimes they do that, but you're trying to make it at least feel like it's fresh off of the dealer lot.
Speaker 1:So I'm restoring it, but I'm also modifying it a little a little bit.
Speaker 2:Well, there's range. So there's some there's some rest of mods that are just set. They're restoring it
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:To to a new condition Yep. Even though it's an older vehicle.
Speaker 1:And when you say you are restoring it, typically, is individuals who want this car. They go to another company Yeah. That is not the maker of that car. And then they say, I would like to purchase a a Porsche nine eleven Restomod, and it's from 2003, but it drives. Everything's been restored.
Speaker 1:There's been some modifications. Maybe it has CarPlay, heated seats. Maybe they've they've updated little things here and there Yeah. Tweak the exhaust. So it's not original.
Speaker 1:It's not fully just purely restored. But what's happening now? Because that's been
Speaker 2:in the
Speaker 1:pent business sort of unauthorized. What's happening now?
Speaker 2:Yeah. There's a there's a there's a huge spectrum to it. So so some might just be making the interior a lot nicer. Yep. Up you know, basically restoring the engine, updating the the transmission, things like that, all the way through, like, adding features and functionality like CarPlay, all the way through sometimes, like, redesigning the entire interior Yeah.
Speaker 2:To make it almost a new car. So there's some restomod companies that will just partner with the best automotive designers in the world Sure. To just almost fully redesign the car. And they're basically just keeping like they're keeping keeping everything is being turned over to some degree except the fact that from a regulatory standpoint, it's still the original car. Right?
Speaker 2:And so that helps you Yeah. That helps to make it easier for a restomod company
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:To, like, make a new car Yeah. Because they're they don't have to go through all the
Speaker 1:That's what that that's what Tyler has. He has a 2014 Jeep Grand Cherokee restomod. It is beautiful. It it's amazing. Everything about that car is fantastic.
Speaker 1:That's why it's so popular. It's it's taste. It's it's be it's aura.
Speaker 2:So Singer Singer is, you know, one of the most prominent companies in this category, but they become so popular that manufacturers are saying, hey. We want in on the action.
Speaker 1:Who wants in on
Speaker 2:the action? And so the newest player, Range Rover.
Speaker 1:Range Rover.
Speaker 2:Let's pull up this video if we can.
Speaker 1:And classic Range Rovers are having a huge moment. There's a piece in the journal about it. Look at this. And people have been clamoring for the analog feel. Yeah.
Speaker 1:People have gotten sick of the endless buttons. And this is a way to go back to a 1993 Range Rover classic, but have it drive as reliably as a brand new car.
Speaker 2:I'm super excited about this. My number one pet peeve with Restomods historically is they take this beautiful classic car Mhmm. And then they fix it up and then they put their logo on it.
Speaker 1:Oh,
Speaker 2:yeah. And and I like like I I saw Totally. I saw a vintage Bronco
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:That had that just like, somebody applied this sort of logo to it and and it just said vintage. Mhmm. It's like, don't need you to tell me that this vintage car is vintage. Yeah. Right?
Speaker 2:You could just make it look like the original version of it. So anyways, I'm super excited for more more manufacturers to get into this space. Yeah. The category is growing quickly, so I I think even the the, you know, many of the rest of mod players will will still do quite well.
Speaker 1:And this seems super bullish for Range Rover as a company. Like, they say check with your local retailer or Land Rover Classic. You imagine that a lot of people will be drawn into showrooms for this. Will they leave with with a 1993 Range Rover classic that's been restored from the factory, or will they buy something new? Because they're like, yeah.
Speaker 1:Maybe I want that, but that'll be my weekender, and I just need something for the family, so I'll just buy something more modern or new. Like, it it's just another it's almost like a halo car, like, for just to bring people in. Don't you think? Like, if you're driving by an Audi dealership and you saw the r eight, you'd go in, maybe you wind up with an a four. But, you know, it drew people in.
Speaker 1:It brought Yeah. It brought aura to the brand. This does the same thing. Just seeing more 1993 Range Rover classics in perfect condition on the road will make a 2026 autobiography look cooler and feel cooler. And so that's beneficial to the whole company.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And it will be it'll be very interesting to see the way the way in which manufacturers approach this category. The criticism of a lot of restomod companies is they'll take like they'll basically take a, you know, $20,000 car Mhmm. Do a little bit of work to it and mark it up like $200,000. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And that doesn't that doesn't that doesn't feel great. Yep. But You
Speaker 1:know what feels great? Running a business on Shopify. Shopify is a commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. And we have our first guest of the show, Ferdinand Dabitz from Augustus. Let's warm up the show.
Speaker 2:He's back. We
Speaker 1:got some big news. You raised some money.
Speaker 8:Welcome back
Speaker 2:to You
Speaker 1:absolute the dog. How are you doing? Give us the update. What's going on with the business? What's the news?
Speaker 6:No. Yeah. I'm I'm I'm feeling good. I like this car stuff. By by the way, I have a 02/2009 Land Rover.
Speaker 6:There we go. Cool. Myself.
Speaker 1:That's a great car.
Speaker 6:So that's good. No longer for Gustus. Again, raised some money. I think one thing we always liked about the about the bank thing is that it felt so hard. Right?
Speaker 6:And was this like
Speaker 2:And now you're making it
Speaker 3:look easy.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You are making look easy.
Speaker 2:I wanted something that felt hard so I could make it look easy.
Speaker 6:To make it look effortless. Right?
Speaker 2:You are making it look effortless. I remember we when we hung out, I think it was at the end of last year
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:During during the holiday season. You were like, yeah. I'm working on this thing and here you are less than a year later.
Speaker 1:$180,000,000 series b, $1,000,000,000 valuation. Tiger Global's in. You got a bunch of other folks in. What actually did unlock the new round? Like, what's the progress of the core business?
Speaker 6:I think it's a great question. Right? I think there are these probably at least three three things that were and are still exciting about the business. Right? I think that the first thing is just this big idea around dollarization.
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:Right? And Augustus is built to dollarize the world, and I think people have really started to understand that that's a super important thing. Right? And I think over the last twenty years, we've seen a trend towards dedollarization effectively. Right?
Speaker 6:Like, if you look at the distribution of the dollar globally, kinda like traditionally distributed through these clearing banks, these correspondent banks, that chart goes down into the right. Right? Like, the number of clearing banks has just just fallen fallen off year over year. And people were kind of, like, excited about it. Right?
Speaker 6:Because post nine eleven, people said, okay. It's, kind of risky to, like, distribute the dollar and be a bank in Latin America, be a bank in Middle East, be a bank in Africa. Like, you probably don't wanna do that, and and so so should be super expensive, and and and so on and so forth. People, like, from a macro point of view, start to regret that, and then feel like, okay. Actually, it's kind of great if people use the dollar all around the world.
Speaker 6:Right? I think it's it's it decreases dollar demand. Right? It's anti inflationary, and it's also this incredible instrument of soft power. Right?
Speaker 6:The first thing we do in Russia goes to Ukraine as we take them off SWIFT, and we shut off their dollar clearing, and this is amazing thing where we don't have to send the tanks and the the the boys. We can influence what's going on. Right? And so there was this, like, idea, like, Should we maybe, like, revert that trend and build a modern correspondent bank? Right?
Speaker 6:A modern dollar quieter that that that can dollarize the world, right, and provide high quality dollar access to places outside of United States? Mhmm. I think that was the first big idea that really made a lot of sense from a from a policy point of view. Right? I think it enabled us to charter this bank, but I think also, like, like, private private capital markets were able to buy buy buy into it.
Speaker 6:So I I think that was the the the the number one thing. I think then the second macro thing was this idea, AI bank. Right? If you now build a modern correspondent bank, what does that mean? I think so.
Speaker 2:I like the sound of it.
Speaker 1:I like
Speaker 2:the sound of it.
Speaker 6:I I think I think it kind of, like, it makes sense. Right? Like, I think the global economy is on this, like, consistent investment thesis to that that every major industry is going to be transformed by AI, and I think Augustus is genuinely one of the few assets companies that has exposure to doing that for banking. Right? Because Augustus is a bank itself, not yet conditionally approved, as you guys know, and is also kind of young enough and and cool enough to be a legitimate technology company.
Speaker 6:Mhmm. Right? And so we felt like the the the the felt was, like, legitimate opportunity to take this very operation intensive business, dollar clearing, correspondent banking, where Citibank has tens of thousands of analysts in the wire room that go for the payment file and do the reconciliation of payments and take it and just automate a bunch of it and turn to a better business for customers with with better economics. Right? And so so that that that that that felt, I think, pretty good.
Speaker 6:And then I think the first thing was just the progress that the team has made over the last year or so. Right? We we got the US National Bank conditionally approved. Yeah. I think we're the eighth company in the history not in history of The United States.
Speaker 6:Eighth company since 2010, a younger history to to kinda, like, get get the conditional approval. That was a big one. And then we're already kinda big on euro clearing. Right? We scaled a clear a couple of billions of euros for some of the largest fintechs and FIs in the world, that business was also growing very fast.
Speaker 6:And so I think these things coming together felt like like a like a good moment and and kind of like resulted in that round, I'd say, my little play by play.
Speaker 1:Awesome. Do you have something?
Speaker 2:No. Go for it.
Speaker 1:How yeah. I mean, you mentioned that, like, we are on an upswing of dollarization right now, and that feels like a narrative violation because over the past two years, we've been in this period of deglobalization, tariffs. There's international conflicts. Like, I don't love it, but I could totally imagine a lot of international countries saying, well, we're gonna pull back from our relationship with The United States because they're, you know, levying tariffs all over the place and seem to be adopting an America first strategy. Like, is is what am I misreading about the international climate that's actually driving increased dollarization in 2026?
Speaker 6:Yeah. I think it's I think it's, like, less empirical as in this is actually happening and more, like, normative. Okay.
Speaker 8:Do we
Speaker 6:want this to happen?
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 6:Right? And what what kind of world do we want to live in? Yep. And I think people are starting to come around to this idea that we wanna live in a dollarized world. Mhmm.
Speaker 6:And that wasn't always a a given. And I think it wasn't even a given for the last twenty years. As I said, like, 09/11, like, I think correspondent banking has been, like, increasingly unattractive business, and people say, stay away from banking non US financial institutions. Don't do it. And I think that the the wind is changing on that a bit.
Speaker 6:And then I do think that the administration is actually much keen on dollarization than people give them credit for. Right? I think all the work that the Trump admin is doing on on stablecoins, for example, it is largely driven by dollarization thesis. Right? This idea that if we can, like, more effectively distribute the dollar abroad, it's it's good for United States.
Speaker 6:Right? Because it's it's an instrument of soft power and increases dollar demand and it's anti inflationary. Right? And I think that they're, like like, that there's risk of thought in that, and that that's big on this. And I think that's in a way like a policy and, like, a byproduct of that as a the public private partnership that is a national bank.
Speaker 6:Right? It's not just a normal company. It has to live in these in these regulatory moments.
Speaker 1:Amazing. Well, congratulations. Keep up the great work. I'm sure
Speaker 2:Incredible update.
Speaker 1:Hearing from you in just a couple months at this pace. You're making it look easy.
Speaker 6:I'm ready to say that.
Speaker 2:Making it look easy.
Speaker 1:We'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 2:Great to
Speaker 1:see you, dude. Have a good one. Let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB.
Speaker 1:Don't just build AI. Own the data platform that powers it. Our next guest is Kaiwei Tang from Light Phone, the cofounder and CEO. How are doing?
Speaker 3:Hey, doing alright. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1:Welcome to the show. Great to have you. We were debating this earlier. Do you so first, let's start with an introduction, and then I have a bunch of questions about the correct terminology for this category.
Speaker 3:A lot of people call it dumb phone,
Speaker 1:but I
Speaker 3:call it simple phone.
Speaker 1:Oh, okay. So you don't like the term dumb phone?
Speaker 3:Yeah. I mean, you know, your your phone gets smarter. You you actually get dumper. So we Oh, no.
Speaker 2:Phone Woah.
Speaker 3:The phone need to do the tool need to do what the tool does for us, like hammer a screwdriver. Right? Yeah. It does that for you, and you put it back. You don't swipe your hammer for five hours, so hammer company can make money.
Speaker 3:So that's exactly how we design life phone and all the tools inside the life phone.
Speaker 1:Okay. So a minimalist flip phone is the newest product. Talk us through the the evolution. How do you measure demand? Why why flip phone?
Speaker 1:It's very no nostalgic. I I love the idea, but what was the broader thesis?
Speaker 3:Yeah. I mean, we've been doing this for ten years. Mhmm. I think in back in 2015 Over like success. We were in incubators for being for that Google created for designers.
Speaker 3:And and still talking to a lot of VCs and successful entrepreneurs, especially app entrepreneurs, we realized that everyone's bragging about how much time, attention they get from their users. That's why they're successful. They could categorize, you know, analyze the data and sell the data to the highest bidder. That's the whole attention civilian economy, and I just don't like that. I don't wanna see advertisement.
Speaker 3:I don't wanna know I don't want people to know where I am twenty four seven, but I love technology. I want modern technology without the civilians' attention economy built in. So what we're trying to do is offering a device that has all the modern utility tools but without the business model building to maximize your attention. So you could call somebody, text somebody, get a direction home, listen to music, taking notes, you know, QR code reader, but no one's trying to maximize your attention so they can make money. Same idea.
Speaker 3:Like, we would we're not trying to ask people to give up technology. We're trying to say, hey. You we all have different shoes, different car, different jacket. Mhmm. Right?
Speaker 3:You could use different tool at a different scenario, right tool for the time. And that's the essential idea of life form, be intentional about your time. Don't waste it on social media. When was the last time you or anyone else spent three hours swiping the TikTok and you snap out of it?
Speaker 1:I feel
Speaker 3:so good about myself.
Speaker 1:Every day. Maybe I'm
Speaker 8:on the Internet three
Speaker 1:hours every day. But, yes, I am the
Speaker 2:exception to
Speaker 1:the rule. I am the screen time.
Speaker 2:But how How does so so assume the you know, people listening are with, you know, Verizon or an AT and T or maybe another another carrier. For the light phone, do you have to get a basically an entirely separate number? Is there a way to use
Speaker 1:Yeah. The same number for price that is I think it's maybe Chris Williamson talks about this, the cocaine phone and the and the vegetable phone or something like that. Like, they will have one phone with all of the crazy apps on them and then one that's like essentially a work phone. And when they when they carry that phone, it's like brick. There's a whole bunch of different trends.
Speaker 1:But can you actually run, like, a single number with two phones?
Speaker 3:Yeah. I mean, that's that's that's healthy. Right? You you we always need a balance. You could.
Speaker 3:There's different way to do that. You could turn on call forwarding. You could physically remove your SIM card on your smartphone, put into your to your life phone. You could also utilize service utilize service like T Mobile digits that give you two numbers I'm sorry. Two SIM card that tied to one number.
Speaker 1:Oh,
Speaker 3:interesting. Different ways to to utilize Live Phone as a secondary phone or primary device. But we actually see more of our customers using Live Phone as their primary device now, especially younger generations.
Speaker 7:Yeah.
Speaker 3:They do. I was in the yeah. I was in the event in New York that a group of young people that promoting real life experience. And then the performers in front in in the stage, and there was a woman in the crowd, like, taking took took out her smartphone and tried to record the performance, and everyone's booing her.
Speaker 1:Oh. You
Speaker 3:know? I think this this is this is no longer short term, not a retro feeling that, oh, we're just temporary feeling good about retro technology. I think this movement started by by the young people, the Gen Z or younger, is here to stay as the AI, as this, you know, five g iPhone 45 keep getting bigger and bigger. I think this the other side of the movement is gonna get bigger and bigger too. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:And we're trying to keep people the options that I can opt out.
Speaker 2:So What would it take to add Instagram Reel? Or maybe even, like, prediction markets. Well, I'm we'll keep in mind. Discounted if people commit to doing prediction markets enough Yeah.
Speaker 1:Preload 10 k. Yeah. Play with
Speaker 2:it. The phone is free as long as you're trading
Speaker 1:Sort a gambling phone.
Speaker 2:It's $5,000 a month. Hey. If you pay the phone More more seriously, how are you how are you thinking about AI features? Because I I imagine you're you're there's this tension between AI does give you the potential to interact with your devices in new ways. Right?
Speaker 2:It's it's cool to be able to like, you know, dictate to your to your devices. That's gaining a lot of popularity right now, maybe later than a lot of people would have expected. But then on the other side, I can imagine that a lot of your core users to date, like, hate AI and they're trying to get away from it. Yeah. So how do you how do you kinda thread the needle there?
Speaker 3:Yeah. I mean, I I always said that, you know, AI is a tool. It's a software program that's very helpful, and we should treat it as such. Meaning, we when we started Light Phone, it's not because there's a new technology being invented. So we designed product for that.
Speaker 3:Right? We designed product because we're seeing people frustrated, anxious, stressed out, not happy with their smartphone and social media, but there's no way out. I think the same logic applied to AI or this program, these tools. It can be really useful. It can be helpful as long as it saves my time.
Speaker 3:So I you're free on my time to do things important to me and make me happy. I think that's a good outcome. However, you you guys probably know, like, with AI tool, more people work more hours. You you've been notified all the time with the things that are happening. So I think treating this particular technology as one of your tools and design and use accordingly is the way to go.
Speaker 3:And we're not anti AI per se, but we do see the sentiments among young people towards, you know, everything AI, the big tech push on AI. The the discrepancy, the gap is getting bigger every day as I witnessed it. You know, going to tech conference, the potential of AI is being praised. You go into this, you know, this this real life experience that young people start at LeadEye Club. They don't they don't care about AI.
Speaker 3:I we've been interviewing flip phone users in a new product we created called life phone life flip, the flip phone that that we just announced today. We've been interviewing different flip phone users for for the last six months. The one one thing they never bring up is AI feature. No one wants an AI button on their phone. I mean, I'm I have no doubt it's very helpful.
Speaker 3:I have no question that is there can be the future technology that saves our time to to do things for us, and we can move on quickly. But I just don't think it's being designed as such at the moment.
Speaker 1:Take us through the business side, the business model, the customer acquisition funnel. This is a product that I feel like it naturally generates a lot of organic earned media. It's fun talking to you about this and all the knock on effects of of of phone use. I imagine every product reviewer reviews it. Like, there's probably a decent amount of attention that effectively comes for free in this category.
Speaker 1:But what does the what does the actual scaling of the business look like? Are you doing, like, direct response ads on Instagram Reels to get people to uninstall? Are you are you Adamisari's worst nightmare?
Speaker 3:No. So as a matter of fact, we don't utilize advertisement. We don't pay social media to promote live phone. So the last ten years, all our growth are organic. What?
Speaker 3:From word-of-mouth, from press, from celebrities that are using live phone, including Sure. Aaron Paul from Breaking Bad Oh, yeah. Pete Davidson, Ed Sharon from UK. We got a lot of people that that resonating with what we're trying to do and support it and and and spread the word of our life. So the last ten years, we grow, you know, every year, 20% to 50% without any advertisement.
Speaker 3:I I guess I think it's only human that this resonates with a lot of people.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Talk about the decision to include podcasts. There's I I know some people that are addicted to both making and consuming podcasts.
Speaker 3:Oh, that's a tough one. I think every tool that we designed follow the same principle. I could summarize into three principle. Number one, no advertisement. Number two, every action no user take as a creator.
Speaker 2:We have ads in our we have what about what about ads in podcast?
Speaker 8:Yeah. We got we snuck out That's
Speaker 2:the way that's how you get in in front of the Light Phone users is you gotta just advertise
Speaker 1:From podcasts. Natively. Here we go.
Speaker 3:Well, so similar to how we design music tool. Right? Yeah. Like, it's not a Spotify. We design it as a m p three player that you intentionally create
Speaker 1:That's very
Speaker 3:cool. Playlist for you to calm down, for you to be creative, for you to get into a certain mood using that tool as the tool. Yeah. Spot of Spotify podcast I'm sorry. Podcast is the same way.
Speaker 3:We're seeing it as an educational tool, but I I get it. Like, loophole might be advertisement in the podcast Yeah. Which we cannot control.
Speaker 1:But I like the idea of an old school m p three player. There's something very satisfying about actually curating an intentional playlist, loading it up for a different moment. Like, it is Mhmm. Yeah. It's a special, special moment.
Speaker 3:Well, everything intentional makes things special. Right? Everything that you're intentional doing make that experience special. The object designed for one purpose make it special too.
Speaker 2:Yeah. How do you how do you think about what what does success look like for light phone? Like, is like a million is a million people globally that, you know Mhmm. Use and love their light phone and and, you know, get a new one every year when you make it newer, faster, lighter, longer battery life?
Speaker 3:No. Plan obsolete is not something that we're interested in. In the last eleven years, we we introduced three phones. In LifePhone two, we we still have user using them. We're still selling them.
Speaker 3:It's been six years. We we stand behind our product. We upgrade the software. We upgrade I'm sorry. We repair life form locally here in Brooklyn, and and that's what we're gonna do.
Speaker 3:We we're not asking people to buy a new phone every year. There's no need there's no reason to buy a new phone every every year. Like, when's the last time you upgrade your hammer?
Speaker 1:Camera? Hammer.
Speaker 2:Oh, hammer. Hammer. Well, we have to do it. We actually we have
Speaker 1:a Gong now. We we upgrade a lot. But, yes, I take your point. It is a tool. Like that, don't do
Speaker 2:We're we're we're pretty rough on our on our gongs.
Speaker 1:So we gotta upgrade them
Speaker 8:a lot.
Speaker 1:But for the average person, one hammer is a lifetime. No. It's a great
Speaker 2:it's a great it's a Well, congratulations on the launch. But and yeah. Was just asking that because I feel like it's it's phones are somewhat like cigarettes in that people know that they're bad, but they're just so good in some ways for But some people and I was gonna say, even if you have a million people that are just like, you know Yeah. Like true true believers that are willing to make certain sacrifices in terms of like some some features and things like that, you could still have a really thriving business. And and and and it feels like, you know, it's not a billion users or bust here.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Well, 2028% of Gen Z are strongly interested in acquiring a now smartphone. 26% of millennial interested in getting getting a new smartphone. 12% of Gen x interested
Speaker 1:in getting a new smartphone. The Gen x values
Speaker 3:I I think care. Trend is not gonna stop. Yeah. Yeah. This trend is gonna get bigger and bigger.
Speaker 1:Very cool. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. Congratulations on the ofthephone.com. You can go and preorder one. It's available for preorder, and the light flip is shipping April 2027.
Speaker 1:Amazing. Thank you for coming on the show.
Speaker 2:Great
Speaker 1:to Talk to you soon. Have a good day. Cheers. Goodbye. Let me tell you about CrowdStrike.
Speaker 1:Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. Our next guest is the best. We got Chris Best, the founder and CEO of Substack.
Speaker 1:Welcome to the show, Chris. How are you doing?
Speaker 8:I'm doing good, man. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 2:The great slop wars Yes. Have a new era.
Speaker 1:It's not just nice to talk to you. It is amazing.
Speaker 2:It is the best.
Speaker 1:It is the best to talk to you. Tell us about the slop problem on Substack. What is the shape of the problem? What motivated this? Take us through the new product.
Speaker 1:What's the state of the union in the slop fest? The The state of the trough.
Speaker 2:The state of the trough.
Speaker 8:I mean, place I started with this, I've had the experience that I think a lot of us have had, not on Substack, but just on the Internet in general.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 8:I'm scrolling the timeline, I'm reading stuff, and sometimes I just have this experience where I'm reading something, sometimes it's by someone that I think I know, sometimes it's something, and I have this kind of invasion of the body snatchers experience where you realize you're sort of reading something that was actually just pure Claude. Yeah. Purely generated.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 8:And it's kind of, you know, it it makes the experience reading on the internet worse because you're constantly wondering. Yeah. You constantly have to wonder, is this real? Yeah. Am I actually reading something this person believes in?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 8:Or, you know, did Brian Chesky get hacked? Or whatever is
Speaker 1:going on. Yeah.
Speaker 8:And so I like, I've been feeling this. A lot of the people I know who spend time online have been feeling this. And then the guys at Pangram did this study because they've been running this browser extension, right, where they have their own browser extension you can install and you can just have stuff labeled. Yeah. And they studied different platforms and they found that on some platforms like, I think LinkedIn, 40% of the long form text is generated by AI.
Speaker 8:Mhmm. And, you know, in my view, it's not the case that all
Speaker 2:I would expect it
Speaker 8:to least
Speaker 2:But Yeah.
Speaker 1:I'm Yeah. Going
Speaker 2:40 is
Speaker 1:a lot.
Speaker 8:Well, and the thing, you know, a good point here is not not all slop is AI, you know. LinkedIn, even pre AI had a lot of had a lot of stuff on there that's, you know, maybe the best.
Speaker 1:Pretty sloppy sometimes.
Speaker 8:Depending on your perspective. I mean, some people like it. That's fine. Yeah. And I think, you know, they had sub stack coming in about 10%.
Speaker 8:I started looking at this. I started thinking about this. And to to my mind, the problem is not people using AI. The problem is when you have kind of the deception that comes with, expecting that I've got a real connection to a person
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 8:And I'm actually reading something that's written by no one.
Speaker 1:This photo
Speaker 2:is my experience when I realize I'm reading AI tech.
Speaker 8:Yeah. This yeah. This is the moment you realize. And the moment you realize, that's when I think of this as clod fishing.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Right? It's about the violation of expectations. Right.
Speaker 8:It's the fact that you realize and then that you're like, oh, this changes the experience that I'm I think I'm having. And it's so I'm not just reading AI text. I read AI text all the time.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We when when there were those rumors that, like, OpenAI was thinking about a social network, and it was still really, really early, I was like, I would love to be able to subscribe to a feed of Tyler Cowen's deep research reports. Because I know he's using I these know he's coming up with really interesting and creative prompts, asking about, like, what's the food like in this random town internationally? And, like, I would like to learn what he's learning. But the but the whole premise of that would be that I'm just getting a link to chatgpt.com.
Speaker 1:And people do share these around, but we haven't really because we're not in, the link sharing world, people haven't actually coalesced around, yeah, I'm just gonna share you a link to my deep research report. But sometimes that would be better than you took you you copy and paste it and you forgot to put the is there anything else you'd like me to help you with or whatever?
Speaker 8:Or you left it in, then you get these sales emails that leak the prompt to you.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And so I can imagine that there's probably a really banger sub stack out there that where the the journalist or the writer is gonna say, look, I'm gonna go I'm gonna go find an interesting fact or I'm gonna give you a roundup and I'm going to do the work of prompting and fact checking and making sure that this AI instantiated newsletter is high quality and high quality Yeah.
Speaker 2:Example that I always give is like, if Alex Heath Yeah. Was using AI.
Speaker 1:He uses AI often.
Speaker 2:Yeah. All the time. He's talked about it. But like, Alex Heath using AI, I'm like, great. I I'm I'm not subscribing for the like writing.
Speaker 2:I'm I'm subscribing for the information, the facts that he's finding Textualization. Plus the takes Yep. And like his point of view on that. Yep. If he's just if he's just ram if he just like finds the facts and then does dictation and just kind of rambles for ten minutes, turns it into something that is, you know Yeah.
Speaker 2:Short and
Speaker 1:But the disclosure is important.
Speaker 8:So Right. Yeah. The way you can tell that it's good is because the disclosure wouldn't ruin it for you. Totally. And we have all takes on the platform.
Speaker 8:We have everybody from, you know, Sam Chris wrote a piece recently that said, if you let AI do your writing, I will come to your house and kill you.
Speaker 1:That's a death threat.
Speaker 8:I think I wouldn't be able to tell. I can tell. And then, you know, we have people that are doing the thing you're suggesting that are that are using these tools Yeah. To like Slop is not something you aid with AI. Slop is something that nobody believes in Mhmm.
Speaker 8:That you didn't actually care about. Right? If you just go and say, hey, write me a thousand viral LinkedIn posts, make no mistakes
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 8:That's Slop. Yeah. If you spend know, if you're doing this deep thing where you're going back and forth and you're doing it I talked to a bunch of people who do this on the platform and they're worried about slop too. Mhmm. Because in a world where you get a bunch of things that are like low effort or like zero authorship stuff masquerading as somebody's careful work, it drowns out the actual careful stuff.
Speaker 8:Yeah. Like, you can have a platform where like the good high effort thoughtful things get out competed by people just like spamming the zone with stuff. Yeah. And I just think that's gonna be I think that's already a real problem on some platforms. It's not a huge problem on Substack yet, but we kinda wanna make sure that we're just, you know Yeah.
Speaker 8:Keeping the bar high and having giving the people who are making stuff they believe in the chance to win.
Speaker 2:Have you seen any like generational divide between how publishing AI writing is perceived? Because there's been a number of VCs at least over on X that are that are maybe maybe in like the back half of their career. Well, they'll just publish an essay that's just like incredibly obvious that it's just like, you know, they they maybe didn't they maybe had like a couple key ideas that they gave the model and then they just took the output and just published it. And they'll usually get kind of dunked on. But it it seems as though the author author was not even or the author was not necessarily even sort of aware that that there's like a negative perception or that it's maybe obvious to other people.
Speaker 2:Have have you seen anything like, have you seen it divide at all or is it just sort of random?
Speaker 8:I think we're in a period where these there's, like, new norms that are getting figured out. It's not clear what the rules and expeditions are, and there are there are people that have wildly different ideas of what good is. I don't think it's purely generational. I think there's people on all camps. To me, the thing you know, I think that anti slop is a pro AI stance.
Speaker 8:Yeah. Right? You don't see Sam Altman or Dario Amade writing doing these like Claude posting things and it's not because they don't believe in AI. Yeah. So I don't don't think that it's a it's an anti
Speaker 2:AI I I think you can be incredibly in favor of maximally using AI to to do research and be a be a, you know, even a thought partner and edit your work and help you think of even new ideas to include. But it's like, but it's about it's it's about ultimately Yeah. It's about ultimately creating something that's worth people's time. Right? That they couldn't have just gotten by asking the same question to the same model, at least in
Speaker 4:my Right.
Speaker 8:Claude is great. But if I wanna talk to Claude, I can just talk to Claude. Yeah. But if I'm reading you, it's because I want there's like something else. I mean, another way to look at this, you know, you gave the example of like, what if Alex Heath were making this really thoughtful thing?
Speaker 8:I would love that. I think everybody has an example of something where they're definitely cool with it. Everybody's talking to AI. It's it's valuable. On the other end of the spectrum, do you remember the guy when sort of OpenClaw was at its fervor that famous for having the bot text his wife?
Speaker 8:He was like answering his wife's texts. And like, I think almost everyone can look at that and be like, okay, that's probably not legit. Yeah. And then there's a whole bunch of stuff on the Internet that kind of falls in the spectrum between, you know, thorough research report with AI pros all the way to, like, you know, having not having to answer my wife's texts. Yeah.
Speaker 8:Like, if I'm going back and forth in the comments with you, what's the expectation? If you're writing a piece, what's the expectation? Does it is it different if you're writing a personal story versus a I think these things are all, like, new norms that will have to get created. I don't think we at Substack have all the answers. And so this is why we're kind of leading as a first step.
Speaker 8:We're like, hey, let's just have some transparency. Let's make it so that readers can scan this text if they want and have that information and do with that, you know, make their form their own judgment.
Speaker 1:Yeah. How do you think the how do you think writing is changing for writers who don't use AI? I've noticed personally I've been writing video essays in the pre ChatGPT era, then all the models were not really great for a while. Then I started doing daily essays on Substack, got accused of using AI even though I wasn't. Sometimes we pass them through AI to just fact check and grammar correct, then that gave it the AI flavor.
Speaker 1:And so I made the decision for with the team to just, like, not proofread them, basically. And so I will often be doing research in a bunch of different AI tabs and collect information. Yep. But then I'll go and just complete stream of consciousness, nonsense grammar, all these weird twists of phrases like I'm just speaking out loud. And I think it's remained like I'm getting less and less AI accusals, guess, even though I'm like I I I just writing daily, I think you're gonna get accused of using AI because it's so obvious that you would save a lot of time by not actually going and doing the work.
Speaker 1:But I'm wondering if you think that that is just a unique thing to me or if that
Speaker 2:was Well, it's not even just a problem with the writing. I I've noticed on YouTube Yeah. There's creators that
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:That that I used to love Yeah. That would make like history history geopolitical content or just like weird niche content, even car content. And now, I have that same experience of like ripping the headphones off because
Speaker 1:Oh my god.
Speaker 2:I realized that somebody that used to put like all this energy into like writing these great scripts and telling these stories, you just start hearing the the claudisms in Yeah. The video. And even though they're just like making an output, making a script and then reading it, you it's still like coming through and you can still tell that that they didn't put craft into it. Yeah. And so I've seen on YouTube, there's creators that are just like in the description or even in the introduction of the video saying, and to be clear, I don't use any AI in my videos.
Speaker 2:And Is it a different even friendship? As somebody who's very pro AI, I find myself like I I I feel like a little bit comforted hearing that because of all the bad experiences where I've gotten three minutes into a video and and realize like, okay, this person is just reading a script that was at at one prompt. Mhmm.
Speaker 8:Yeah. And we added this to the feature we launched too. So if you if you're writing someone on stuff, like, you can set like a how I make this statement.
Speaker 1:Oh.
Speaker 8:Where if somebody's scanning your thing and it can say, hey, I never use it or hey, I use it in this way or even Yeah. You know, hey, I use it extensively, but here's the here's the perspective I'm bringing. Here's what you can get from me. I think it's I think and I think this is true no matter how it gets more true as an AI gets more powerful. Yeah.
Speaker 8:Right? One critique is is oh, I I don't like it because it's bad, because it's like a claudism or because it's just like detectable. But I actually think the underlying thing is like, am I getting a human perspective here?
Speaker 7:Mhmm.
Speaker 8:And the more powerful the a I AI becomes, the more important it is to know that. Because if I'm not, it might still be great, but again, it's like if I wanna talk to Claude, I can talk to Claude. The question is like what human believes in, stands behind, has the perspective that I'm spending my time and energy ingesting.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The other the other thing with Substack is like you're paying for a media product when you subscribe to someone, but you're also paying to, in many cases, at least personally, allow somebody to pursue a life's work. And if and and that to me is like part of the sort of like social contract that you have when you subscribe to someone, which is like, you know, I am in a small way, I may I might be one of 10,000 people, but I'm allowing you to ditch your job and just pursue like an understanding of this of this industry or, you know, this market or whatever. And so that's also like, you know, if somebody just decides one day, okay, like I'm kinda done with this whole, you know, independent writing thing. I'm just gonna slop it up for the as long as I can.
Speaker 2:People will churn but, you know, like that that that would be, you know, a violation at least in my view.
Speaker 1:Do you think your recommender system will naturally sort audiences into what they like? So if there's someone who's subscribing to more AI generated substacks, they would get recommended into that and they would be satisfied with that. Is there gonna be like a barbell effect here where you imagine there's like power law creators who use no AI, power law creators who use all AI?
Speaker 8:I think there will be some of that. And I think these these tastes will change over time. But something I've noticed in myself and in people I talk to about this is a lot of these things are kind of an acquired distaste. Right? It's something where, you know, a few years ago maybe I wouldn't even recognize this as being different.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 8:And now I sort of have that skin crawling feeling. I think more people not everybody has developed that already Yeah. But I think more people will develop it than have today. But then, look, I think ultimately, you know, our perspective on this, we're pro freedom. We're not sitting here telling you what tools you can and can't use.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 8:We're not sitting here telling you what you can and can't read. Yep. As long as you're making the decision, you know, as your best self, what do I value? What do I want to spend my time and money on? We're happy with that.
Speaker 8:We wanted to kind of help people do that. And so if, you know, I I if there are places where people are, you know, paying for AI stuff and it's the stuff that they want and the person may like, we we think that's great as long as it's, you know
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 8:People are doing it with their eyes open. They know what they're getting.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's funny like how I I would certainly pay $5 a month to just get a feed of Tyler Cowen's like ChatGPT prompts. Right. Right? Because I'd just be interested to fall like, I would just be interested to like sort of passively And learn about I'm surprised no one has like figured out a way to create that kind of product yet.
Speaker 1:Fair enough.
Speaker 2:What do you think is, like, the is there an AI writing product that is overtly AI that's actually been, you know, a massive breakout hit and that they've they've fully disclosed that this is, you know, AI generated, but but it still works? Any any that you're aware of?
Speaker 8:You mean, are there examples of texts
Speaker 2:Like, I mean, somebody that, like, made a made a sub stack and it's like, hey, this $5 a month and I'm just gonna give you breaking news and analysis on these types of topics and it's all AI generated. And, like, actually, have has anyone built a a real place?
Speaker 1:The equivalent would be like demon flying fox on YouTube. He's the one that did the Harry Potter Balenciaga. He is like an AI first video creator. It's very clearly disclosed. There's a number of Instagram accounts where like the whole thing is like imagined AI futures and they are creators, but they openly use AI.
Speaker 1:I'm wondering if there's a version of that for text or sub stack.
Speaker 8:There that definitely exists and that's the thing that I I believe in. Right? The idea of of a like an AI like an AI powered creator
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 8:The way I think of this is like AI gives you superpowers Yeah. And it just also gives you new ways to be annoying on the internet. If you're Both. If you're, you know Yeah. The a in AGI is not supposed to stand for annoying.
Speaker 8:But the like, okay. If if you're saying, like, I have this perspective and I'm using these tools, like like, I think that Harry Potter Balenciaga thing is genius.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's great.
Speaker 8:It's genius. And I don't care that they used an AI tool to make in fact, it's great. It's like it's a new way to express the thing. Yeah. And we have we actually there is
Speaker 7:a bunch of
Speaker 8:that on Subsidydeck. There are people who are doing analysis, people who are sometimes writing things in other languages. There's people that are like writing English is not their first language, but they have some important analysis, or they're like, you know, they're doing some deep research or they have some perspective, and, you know, the final prose is generated, but they're transparent about that. I think that is great. The the question the deeper question to me is like, do you actually have to have a a human artist behind the thing?
Speaker 8:Like, if instead of that, if if instead of I I've used AI tools, if you're kind of doing the thing of like, hey, you know, generate 1,000 viral posts, make no mistakes. Or generate 1,000 viral bots that each do 1,000 viral posts, make no mistakes. Mhmm. And my view is like, that may be compelling, but that's not going to be valuable over time because it's gonna be there's gonna be no differentiation. It's the thing of like, yeah, talking to Claude is great but I can talk to Claude
Speaker 6:if I wanna talk to Claude.
Speaker 1:That makes sense.
Speaker 2:Do you know of any historical comps to this conundrum that we're in as citizens of the Internet? Like, was there a period where where authors weren't real authors if they used a typewriter? You know, you had to you had to write it with a with a pen or or or it was frowned upon? Or is this just like a novel experience?
Speaker 8:I found when I was looking for the art for the announcement post I did, I found a a a reverse example from history. Reverse clod fishing which was the mechanical Turk. Do you guys know the story? It was it was supposed to be a robot that plays chess.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And so it was it
Speaker 8:was supposed to be like a magic strong chess playing AI, but the the the trick was there was actually like a chess master kind of like hiding in the bottom, controlling it. There's sort of it's the reverse of having the, you know, realization of you're absolutely right while you're reading something.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. It's great. Well, congratulations on the launch. It seems like it's going really well and we're huge fans of Pangram and the team over there.
Speaker 8:Those guys are great. They're excited to see. We're proud
Speaker 1:of our team. They really are. Yeah. Yeah. What a great In
Speaker 2:two more minutes before you leave Mhmm. What what can people expect out of Substack for the rest of the year? Like, are you are you
Speaker 1:Yeah. How is the business doing in the age of AI broadly? Like, there's a narrative where it's like, oh, people would just talk to the AIs to get information. They're gonna spend no time on Substack. And then there's another one which is like, you'll be 10 times more efficient because all your software engineering can be automated.
Speaker 1:Like, what how is the business actually changing?
Speaker 8:Business is doing well. We're growing. Cool. You know, the way I think about this is I think as you get sort of plentiful you can get anything from the AI, you can get any content, the value you you have infinite kind of, like, things that you can spend your time on. The value of the trusted human connection and perspective goes up.
Speaker 8:Mhmm. And as long as we can have the platform reward that, as long as you feel like, hey, you know, like, even if you're reading Tyler Cowen's prompts, the fact that you know have some idea of Tyler Cowen as a person and have invest some faith and trust in him Yeah. Is a fundamentally valuable piece in this new world. And we actually think this is again, it's like if you take sort of a pro AI stance, you can also have like a pro human culture stance that thinks that we're gonna be able to make that even more valuable.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's very cool. Well, congratulations. Thank you so much for coming on the show.
Speaker 2:Great to see you. Thanks for having me. Always fun.
Speaker 1:We'll see you soon. Cheers. Let me tell you about Console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR, and finance support giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. Our next guest is here with us in the TBPN UltraDome live.
Speaker 1:How are doing, Steven? Welcome to Steven's co founder and CEO of WAP.
Speaker 8:How are things going
Speaker 1:with WAP?
Speaker 7:Things are going great
Speaker 2:with WAP.
Speaker 7:Thank you guys for having me here. This is super cool.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Welcome.
Speaker 7:Yeah. It's a crazy time for for the whole world right now. Okay. And, you know, I I think a lot of the the work we've been doing over the last several years is now coming to light in a way where there's a bunch of themes converging
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:And, you know, you have I mean, you have all in in conjunction with AI, you have a lot of people trying to figure out what they're gonna do for work, what they're gonna do with their jobs. Yeah. You have an existential question of how to get value accrual
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:By spending money on tokens. Sure. I think a lot of the infrastructure we've built is trying to answer a lot of that. Yeah. So things are going well.
Speaker 7:And it's exciting times.
Speaker 1:At its best, you're bringing like small scale entrepreneurial opportunities to people at a very very broad basis.
Speaker 7:I think that's one way to look at it. I mean, we we grew up, my co founders and I, building businesses on the internet Yeah. Piecing together a ton of different platforms. And at times we'd have like three or four businesses running at And we were always the weird ones. No one else was doing that.
Speaker 7:And now it's pretty normal. Yeah. And I think we are trying to build a platform that if we could go back in time, we would be addicted to as a 15 year old.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 7:And I think that technology is there now where there's virtually no excuse to not have a really awesome income stream, especially from starting a business. And, yeah. So so I I would say it's pretty cool. Yeah. I want
Speaker 1:your reaction to this take from Aporia about Gen Z entrepreneurship. As they say, Gen Z entrepreneurship increasingly looks like running a portfolio of asymmetric coos rather than betting on one serious long term project. They they go on to explain that half the people I meet at beach clubs in Saint Tropez and Marbella are doing exactly this. One year, it's crypto, then an Amazon brand, then an AI lead gen agency, then solar panels or some subsidized renovation. And this was the interesting line.
Speaker 1:I used to think this was unserious entrepreneurship, but some of them have become genuinely good at it. Their real business isn't crypto, AI or solar panels. It's being early.
Speaker 7:That's one of my favorite takes I've heard in a long time. And I think that the reality is the businesses are getting so ephemeral that one week, it's a jewelry store. The next week, it's a education program teaching people how to use a new AI tool. Yeah. The next week it's a UGC marketplace.
Speaker 7:Mhmm. And then the next week it's an agency that's selling data to labs. Mhmm. So the amount of trends that people are tapping into to start businesses is through the roof. Yeah.
Speaker 7:And when that happens, you do get what resembles a portfolio almost imagine like a crypto portfolio. Mhmm. But and and if you look at our new homepage, it actually looks like a crypto portfolio, but it's not tokens, they're businesses. Sure. And it's completely up to you to drive the business income up.
Speaker 7:Yeah. And we try to figure out ways to tell you exactly what to do next in order to do that. Yeah. So I think that's a fantastic So does affect an exchange and,
Speaker 2:yeah. If you if if if you were able to talk to the to the you know, take you today and you have the younger version of yourself, what what advice would you be giving on like where to start trying to make money on the Internet?
Speaker 7:I would simply look at what is working on the Internet today and copy it. And I think
Speaker 2:So so when you were getting your start, it was trading sneakers and maybe having some bot tracking supreme drops. Like, what was it then and what what what is actually happening now?
Speaker 7:Well, I think that you the your question's interesting because you said if if they want to make money, that's one thing. And if they if they I think when we were building businesses, it was never really for the money. Mean, my co founder Cameron dropped out of high school at 15 years old and had virtually unlimited money for a 15, 16 year old. I think the only thing he bought was a Tesla. And other than that, he would be wearing flip flops and t shirt and be working all day.
Speaker 7:And it was never really
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 7:About the money exactly. It was always about I mean, we have a hoodie, it's just building cool shit with your friends. And I think that is much more the spirit that we get excited about. And in many ways, we want to make it actually not about the money and take out money from the equation to building up to worry about money. But it is there's like the advice I'd give to
Speaker 2:That's sort of the unique luxury of being a teenager where it's like if you if you hit it out of the park and make $5,000, you feel like Yeah. The king of the castle.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Yeah. Totally. It goes a long way and you have a
Speaker 1:lot of
Speaker 7:time and and you just have nothing else to do other than to experiment with different businesses. And it's it's after roadblocks, what are you what are all the kids supposed
Speaker 1:to do?
Speaker 7:Yeah. And and I think that's how we approach it, trying to build a very gamified arcade version of entrepreneurship and pursuit of building products for other people.
Speaker 1:Talk about looking at what works and what's making money on the Internet because I feel like there are layers to that onion. Sometimes, by the time I'm seeing Instagram reels of somebody driving a super car and they say they made their money on Facebook ads, like the Facebook ad arbitrage might have closed and that person might now be selling a course to get you to sell a course to then sell Facebook ads. There are like four levels of abstraction. What is the correct way for young people to actually go and find the real opportunities and not the things that have been abstracted into at this point?
Speaker 7:Yeah. Well, I think the infrastructure in every single one of those businesses is always the same. So when you when you go and experiment with one business and then you go to the next one, a lot of that carries over. Sure. And I I mean, what I would suggest is is we try to do a very good job on WAP showing which businesses are actually working really well Sure.
Speaker 7:And which models are working really well. So my my advice would be to go do do that. But I think it's ultimately just there try to experiment as much as you possibly can and and don't feel like you're wasting a lot of time because the only real risk is not doing anything. And my probably overarching advice to young people would be just to try things out and see what happens and fuck around and find out if you will. So I think that that's very that's the spirit of where we are now in businesses and and how ephemeral everything's getting and how much experimentation you see when you open your Twitter feed.
Speaker 7:Mhmm. And that's that's a good thing. It brings Mhmm. It floods the market with competition. It floods the market with people that are trying to differentiate ever so slightly from the prior iteration and Mhmm.
Speaker 7:That ultimately brings a lot more value to end consumers and makes everything cheaper and makes everybody a little bit more money. So I think that's a pretty good thing.
Speaker 1:Talk about the CLI.
Speaker 7:Finally, we have a CLI. Yeah. So I I think
Speaker 1:Why is that important? Well, yeah. So Websites are pretty good. APIs work in many ways. What's the point of the CLI?
Speaker 7:I think people have historically found WAP to be relatively confusing of concept. Okay. And I think the reason for that is because the UX
Speaker 2:that Yeah. We've built made me feel like a boomer. I went I was on there I was I was trying to spin up content rewards back in the day very early with the show and I was like, I feel old. Yeah.
Speaker 7:I I think like the the UX we've built has never really caught up to the API we've built. Sure. And I think that we're we're a very fundamentally API first company. Yep. We have a very engineering led team.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 7:And that results in a fantastic API
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:That has I mean, when you look at the functionality that our API supports, it is literally every single thing that you could possibly need Mhmm. To programmatically run a business. Mhmm. That's payment acceptance, it's ad creation, it's money movement. You can even find people in the real world to do labor for you, clipping and whatnot, all via the API.
Speaker 7:That is very difficult to build a UX around. Very, very difficult. And the CLI allows all the functionality to be brought into your terminal and to be called from from any agent via API and that results in way better experience. So this CLI is very cool So so you can yeah.
Speaker 1:Hypothetically, if I start the three of us start a hair care business together since we have wild hair
Speaker 3:There there we go.
Speaker 1:Are a number of steps that I'm going to take to promote my business. The the classic one that I would go to WAP for might be clipping. I might film a whole bunch of content, you film some videos about your hair care routine, all of a sudden we have
Speaker 7:Hopefully not.
Speaker 1:An idea of a business. I like it. It's it's a style. And and we want to take that to social media, so we want to engage with WAP broadly. Now I could use an AI agent to interact with the API, the CLI.
Speaker 1:Does that just make it easier if I'm doing the programming, or is there a world where I'm actually finding a programmer on WAP to help me with that side of the distribution?
Speaker 7:So the old adage is that ideas are easy and execution's hard. Sure. And we're seeing that be flipped on its face in in real time. Mhmm. And I think that what we actually prefer is that that you know, there's a saying that's also like every business begins with a secret.
Speaker 7:Yeah. And a lot of times the secret lies in the execution. Yeah. But we want the secret to be all about the idea. So we want the extent of that launch to basically be we wanna start a haircut business Yeah.
Speaker 7:For tech people with crazy hair.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 7:And that's the whole business.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 7:Yeah. And every other part of the execution is handled. Sure. And that is a way better world than what it is today where you actually have to think through everything from even making content. You make the developer.
Speaker 7:That's all semantics. It shouldn't even be a conversation. Yeah. So that's what you get at the CLI. I mean, for you you can literally go to the WAP CLI today and say, start a hair cutting business Yeah.
Speaker 7:That's meant for tech people with crazy hair. Get me some customers and and you could go so far if it was localized to say, find me a person to cut the hair. Interesting. And the CLI will end to end do that via any agent that you want.
Speaker 2:Okay. Cool. Yeah. Are are the youth hitting it big with SMB AI transformation? So everyone knows big big consulting shops
Speaker 1:I just I just saw real about this. It was like, if you want an s f 90, go to someone's real estate listing and like take photos, turn it into a beautiful website, go sell it to the real estate agent for $500. You're like, go to go tour a $30,000,000 property that that they're trying to sell, but they don't have a nice website for. They're just on MLS. Make a beautiful website, sell it to them for $500.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Even even back in our day
Speaker 1:Something like that.
Speaker 2:You could even when it was easy to build a website, there were still business owners. I remember I remember, you know, like a friend's parent at one point was like, if you can build me a website, I'll give you $500. Yeah. Yeah. You can just find a template for like $20.
Speaker 2:But that's times
Speaker 1:when people don't want to prop themselves. Yeah.
Speaker 7:Yeah. I mean, that is, I'd say, what it looks like to find all these hyper niche markets and call them arbitrages Yeah. And then capitalize on them, then go to the next one.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 7:And there are so many more than anybody can remotely imagine. I mean, I remember when I guess eight, ten years ago, I was making websites for people and doing that exact tactic. Now it's like you have all the leverage in the world and it's basically limited to your creativity and grit.
Speaker 2:And now you can just go You can find 10,000 small businesses in your state, let's say. Make them a brand new website. Show them the website and say, do you want this? I'll give it to you for $200. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And I think a lot of them would be like, looks good. I'll I'll send you $200. Even though you just ripped it with like Codex or whatever agent you
Speaker 7:Totally. Totally. Totally. Totally.
Speaker 1:Talk about ads, WAP ads. What is the shape of product? How does it fit into everything else?
Speaker 7:Yeah. Don't know if you guys have ever ran Meta Ads before, but it's a pain in the ass. We have. And it's a it's a very difficult to go on and navigate simply the the UX of that platform. Yeah.
Speaker 7:And that's coming from, like, for for us, we grew up running meta ads to Shopify stores. That's all we did. Yep. And when we look at our platform and our merchant base and what people want to accomplish on it and how we believe that the more vertically integrated it is, the easier it's going to be for agents and for users to use it. The next obvious jump was to say, okay, people are earning, I mean, now 400 $500,000,000 a month on the platform and almost all that money is spent on ads.
Speaker 7:And because of that, why don't we let people programmatically run ads Yeah. Immediately after getting the payment? You don't have to wait any days for it to settle. Sure. You get all the all the data and what's working can iterate on the fly.
Speaker 7:And it's not just meta that you're running ads to, it's actually the whole Internet.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:And that is the ads product that we have available and it's pretty cool. People like it and I mean, that's a very very fast growing product.
Speaker 1:Take us through your reactions to all the trend pieces about clipping this year.
Speaker 2:Better late than never. Wait.
Speaker 1:When so what I'm referring to is like there's been a number of trend pieces sort of like breaking down the clipping economy heavily driven by some of the kick live streamers like the Clavicular among others that sort of crossed the chasm and got profiled in the New York Times. And so there was a there were knock on pieces about this idea that you create a lot of content like we do on a three hour show, we clip it. Or you do an eight hour, twelve hour livestream, you clip it. And your business has been very integral to that boom. But when did that start for you?
Speaker 1:Like, when did you realize the power of clipping? Like, how has that evolved?
Speaker 7:Yeah. I I think people overestimate how intentional we are about some of these markets that have come up. And I think it more happens to us because we have such a good API It's just and that's a and it's just a platform. And and people come up with all these crazy business models. They explode.
Speaker 7:People exploit them. Mhmm. And then it becomes so saturated that it's actually not even that cool anymore. Yep. And I think what's what's happening with clipping is it is still a very, very, very powerful instrument
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:Because of how much money is going into it, because of how inherently, like, so much value can be gained by brands and companies, etcetera, you're gonna have a lot of bad actors and people trying to exploit different people and and all all sorts of different bad stuff. And I think that's where a lot of the what what people are are potentially saying on the the pessimistic side of clipping. On the optimistic side of clipping, we look at it as yet another way to earn income on the Internet for a huge amount of people. And especially if they are not sophisticated enough to potentially start a business yet, they actually start with clipping. And that's a very great way to learn how to make content, learn how to help other businesses create real value, and all the payments infrastructure, it scales super well so that people can actually earn a sustainable income by doing something like clipping.
Speaker 7:That can be extrapolated to data labeling, can be extrapolated to attendance coaching, can be extrapolated to all sorts of things that we're starting to see on our platform, other platforms integrate and pay out via our our rails which is simply creating more ways like clipping to earn money while still hopefully being value accretive to businesses. So that's what I would that's what I would glean from clipping.
Speaker 1:Have you talked to any legacy media organizations about clipping? I'm thinking of like Fox News produces so much content. Local News produces a lot of content. ABC, NBC, CBS, like, there are basically content farms that are effectively live streaming. It's a very different motion for these organizations.
Speaker 1:Would you recommend they get into Climb?
Speaker 7:Yeah. I mean, our focus is trying to build the infrastructure and the platform.
Speaker 1:And then whatever happens happens.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Whatever happens happens. I think as long as it's it's it's by the by the terms
Speaker 1:Of course.
Speaker 7:Say. And I I think in the context of a local news station, they're very under resourced Sure. And if we can make it so easy where they actually can, a couple clicks or even one click or even one prompt, spawn a bunch of Clippers to amplify their media, that's great.
Speaker 1:That can be great.
Speaker 7:As it stands today, it's a little bit too difficult. And I think that's where you have agencies fill in the gap and create these fill these arbitrage opportunities.
Speaker 1:Sure. Sure. Yeah.
Speaker 2:How would you how would you rate sentiment among WAP users? Are the is there because WAP users are not necessarily reflective of, like, all of, like, the next generation of of entrepreneurs and people that are starting careers. It's certainly selecting for people that are have higher agency. They're trying to figure out how to make living online or just make, as you say, make cool stuff, with their friends. But is there a feeling that there's a ton of a ton of opportunity and that now is like an amazing time to be like coming online?
Speaker 2:Or, is there at all the same kind of like vibe session that you see among people? Maybe college students that are trying to find jobs and feeling obsession.
Speaker 1:Oh oh, like like the vibe recession?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. Okay. I thought you you were mashing up vibe and obsession. You're obsessed
Speaker 7:with vibe. I think that the the sentiment is overwhelmingly positive. Like beyond optimistic. And I've I've actually never seen it inside into this level. I think where you look at a lot of the people that call themselves entrepreneurs, people that build they're trying to build a business.
Speaker 7:WAP users are unique because likely they're gonna be earning money. Mhmm. And that's very different than trying to launch a vibe coded app and praying for users. So I think that what we see is that when when we talk to our users and businesses on the platform, either at in person events or via our chat on on the platform, they are so excited about building their thing. And they're actually equally as excited about experimenting with other businesses like we were talking about earlier because it feels like the the possibilities are completely in your control, you know.
Speaker 7:You have so much opportunity right now. There's so many micro markets that can be tapped into and exploited arbitrage wise and I think the young kids realize that and they're going crazy right now. I don't think there's a apprehension at least in our user base as to what they're gonna do post AI. I think that that's a very exciting thing for them and they feel like they're grabbing by the horns and taking control of their destiny which is exactly what's gonna happen.
Speaker 1:What's the state of WAP enabling sort of human in the loop AI companies? I'm thinking about your partnership with Replane, Poke, cal.com. It feels like there's a potential to launch something that the agents aren't quite there or it has to interface with the real world in some way. But if you can bring some extra humans to bear in a particular workflow, especially for consumer, there's like an opportunity to build businesses there.
Speaker 7:Totally. I I think one of the largest markets that is being talked about but perhaps not enough is just the demand for data right now is so crazy. Sure. And when you look at especially developing countries Mhmm. One of the most lucrative piece ways to to earn money on the internet is by submitting data and by recording themselves through day to day tasks.
Speaker 7:Mhmm. And I think if you look at the the broad base of human in the loop applications especially around money Mhmm. Of course you can start a business, you can sell your time on cal.com, you can build a really cool website in Reply and and build a business. But if you want to think in the clipping construct and perhaps clip you can think of clipping as act one of this Sure. There is a lot of things people can do to that AI cannot.
Speaker 7:Mhmm. And that largely pertains to data. I mean, there's a huge crisis right now I think where people are realizing that the AI doesn't actually have the level of original thought that is needed to And lift anything off the what are they doing? They're spending billions of dollars to get people's ideas. Yeah.
Speaker 7:And and that is not I mean, in some way, that does economically get to the person, but I think we can do it even better. And the human in the loop we view is actually the most critical piece of any business and any real economic output because it does start with someone's idea and creative ingenuity than versus an AI being, oh, let's let's build a business that does haircuts for tech people. I mean, that's not necessarily I don't think it's happen anytime soon. Maybe it does now because it's already out in the ether, but
Speaker 1:Last question. How's the business growing in 2026? What's the financial plan? Do you wanna raise more money? Do you wanna raise a bunch of money?
Speaker 1:Do wanna IPO the company?
Speaker 7:Well, I think we we wanna deliver on our mission and I think it's it's the most confidence we've ever had that we actually can.
Speaker 6:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:And I would say there's going to certainly it's going to require investment. Mhmm. And there's clear prospects. We're exploding internationally right now with very little real motion that we've established intentionally internationally and we're under invested across the board. We have a very lean team still.
Speaker 7:The growth has been really record breaking. Posted a tweet last week, like we're underwater right now. It's really crazy. I mean, I I we can't go five minutes without something crazy happening in in a good way or bad way. I think it's part of building building a business at our scale.
Speaker 7:Right. So growth is phenomenal. Mean, I don't really know if I can talk about it a lot publicly, but
Speaker 1:You can. You can say whatever you want. You can give us all
Speaker 7:the numbers. Yeah. Yeah. We're accelerating growth at
Speaker 2:a We pretty want.
Speaker 1:Massive
Speaker 7:massive scale. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if if we're doing 400 and $100,000,000 a month in earnings and I mean, a lot of our our takers are public, you can do the math. Yeah.
Speaker 7:It's it's getting it's getting a lot more serious and we we take that response. We don't take that responsibility lightly.
Speaker 1:That's amazing. Well, congratulations on the progress. You so much for coming on and breaking it down for us. We will talk to you later. But for now, we will bring in Katie Roof.
Speaker 1:She's the editor of Business Insider. We're very excited to have her joining the show. It's time to bust down the paywall. Jordy, you wanna do the honors? That's right.
Speaker 1:We gotta bust down the paywall because we have Katie Roof here. We have a physical paywall here.
Speaker 2:I'll bust it down. Do it, John.
Speaker 1:Bust it down. There we go. You know her from her scoops. Many paywall busting scoops.
Speaker 2:We built a real paywall here in the UltraDome for you.
Speaker 1:Yes. For busting down. Well, welcome to the show. Is life? How is the new gig?
Speaker 9:Well, good to be here. I just started the new gig yesterday, so so far so good. I got through a new hire orientation okay and Mhmm. Ready to get scooping.
Speaker 1:Yes. Of course. We won't ask you how you get your scoops. We all know signal DMs probably. But what is the shape of Business Insider these days?
Speaker 1:How do you fit into the organization? And then I wanna talk about where Business Insider is going editorially.
Speaker 9:Sure. So I I know Jamie Heller from when we were both at both at The Wall Street Journal. She oversaw all business and technology coverage there, and she's been brought in to be the editor in chief of Business Insider where she's changing the direction towards more scoops than original content. That's probably how I fit in. You know, stuff people would actually pay for.
Speaker 9:And so, yeah. So I'm part of that new direction, that new chapter for Business Insider. And I'm also part of a new program for the parent company, Axel Springer.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 9:I'm in the Global Reporters Network, which is a network where I team up with Politico and our other sister publications. We just acquired The Telegraph in The UK. We we own a lot of stuff in Europe. So, you know, whatever whatever they acquire next, my stuff will appear in those news outlets as well.
Speaker 2:Take us into into a scoop. I wanna know I wanna know how often you're working on a story and there's other reporters chomping at the scoop. What is that what is that process like? How much time do you have for a lot of these stories with with how quickly AI is moving? I can imagine you you catch a whiff of a story.
Speaker 2:You're chasing it down. Sometimes, hopefully, most of the time, you get to it first, but then other times, it's a it's a dog eat dog world. It's a dog eat scoop world out here.
Speaker 9:Right. It's true. It's gotten a lot more competitive, you know, these days. I feel like back in, like, 2020, 2021, I could get most of the scoops, and I still get a lot of them. But, there's a lot of reporters now doing what I do, and, you know, being first is is harder.
Speaker 9:But I think the the key is to not just go after things that are rumors that are widely circulating because everyone can hear about that. Sure. Some of my biggest scoops have actually been predicting what happens next, And I will I'll just ask around about my theories, like, would this company buy this company?
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 9:I I don't call people up and say, I heard this if I didn't hear this. But if I'm having an extended conversation with them, I just throw out a lot of scenarios. Scenarios. And then sometimes we're like, you're right. This company is buying this company or this company is going public or they're they're raising.
Speaker 9:You know?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. Can you talk to me about in regards to the paywall, the business of media these days, how is the original reporting scoop driven journalism versus opinion versus news aggregation actually changing? And are we firmly in the AI is affecting the business or are we still just seeing knock on effects from social media and just a screenshot of something can change the business model?
Speaker 9:Well, I think original reporting matters more than ever because regardless, you know, technology can change and the format in which we tell our stories can change, but people are always gonna wanna find out what's going on in the world. And I think, you know, the reporters like myself who've been fortunate to make the decision to double down on human skills instead of just writing skills Mhmm. We have, you know, we still have value because I do things that maybe AI is not doing by having a network of people asking questions that they weren't planning to share and informing the public of that.
Speaker 1:Do you think any tech CEOs or people with potential scoops would ever talk to an AI reporter who's digging for a scoop?
Speaker 9:Well, I mean, yes, if it's something they really want out there. But Sure. The reality is, you know, people think that most of these stories are things people wanted out there. It's usually, they were kind of neutral. Like, if usually, people weren't, like, trying to leak something, but, like, reporters were asking.
Speaker 9:They're like, oh, yeah. You're right. Like, that's usually how it goes. Mhmm. And so, you know, AI, you know, unless they, you know, proactively wanna plant something, which would be almost more like PR, what PR does with PR pitches, then, yeah, I I I think it's it's not the same.
Speaker 2:How do you clock when a story's been planted? There was there was a story, about Colossus Biosciences raising at between 20 and $30,000,000,000. And to me, that Might be true. That just screams like they planted a story because I don't I'm not I I'm just gonna say it. I don't know that many institutional investors that are sort of clamoring to invest in Colossus Biosciences and it's a way and my my theory is that it's a way to signal to potential retail investors that we're open for business.
Speaker 1:Yeah. This this round's getting hot.
Speaker 9:This is something I think about all the time. I mean, I take accuracy super seriously and, you know, as much pressure as as there is to be first to the news, I think it's much easier to destroy your credibility than it is to build it. And so I always try to think, does this make sense? Do they have an agenda here, like, to be misleading or dishonest? And, you know, I used to say to some people, sometimes reporters, past jobs might hear about something and they would be like, company x wants to be worth 10,000,000,000.
Speaker 9:And I would say, well, I also wanna be worth 10,000,000,000. You know, can they can they get the 10,000,000,000? I think that's the real question. And so I think that you have to obviously, people have incentives to use us to manipulate public opinion. We have to be savvy about that.
Speaker 1:Do you think with how dominant tech is generally now, it feels like it's a bigger story. We see it, you know, tech has moved from the business and finance section of The Wall Street Journal to the front page more and more, not every day, but, you know, just today, AI models raise alarms. On the front page, it's international news. Is that is do you see that as driving Business Insider's TAM essentially? Like, is the TAM for technology scoops and in in private markets news going even bigger now?
Speaker 9:Yeah. You know what? I think that's absolutely true. I think there's a lot of curiosity out there about AI and money behind it and Yeah. And how it's gonna change things and transform the world.
Speaker 9:And so, yeah, I think that's part of, why, you know, there there's so many news outlets have been doubling down on getting more venture capital and AI reporters because I think that there's it there's broad appeal. Even if you're not an investor that's standing to make money off of this AI boom, you you're curious to see where it's headed.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And then last question for me. I'm interested, I mean, we love Business Insider. We love business. We consider ourselves a bit of insiders ourselves But I'm wondering where you want the brand of Business Insider to go and where you see it in a few years after, you know, you've been on the job for a while.
Speaker 9:Well, from what I understand is, you know, Jamie, you know, I'm not running Business Insider. I have a fancy title, but
Speaker 1:I go.
Speaker 9:Jamie's Jamie's running this and she's got, you know, she's really, made a big difference already in bringing bringing out the
Speaker 1:To us, you're the CEO of Axle Spring now. Okay? Dabner, you're out. Katie Roosen. She's got the scoops that we know and love.
Speaker 1:And so, I'm sorry,
Speaker 9:So, you know, she's already played a major role Yeah. As our editor in chief in in bringing they've they've doubled their exclusive content. I think it used to be 40%, now it's 80%. And so I think they, you know, I'm part of that strategy where they want to just build upon on that.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. Well, congratulations
Speaker 2:Congrats on the new role. And thank you for for all of your work over the last couple years that has contributed
Speaker 1:the talk about. We couldn't do the show without you. So thank you.
Speaker 9:Thank you so much. I really appreciate the shout outs.
Speaker 2:Of course. Cheers, Katie.
Speaker 1:We'll talk
Speaker 2:to Let you
Speaker 1:me tell you about public.com investing for those who take it seriously. Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service. You know who's not public, but you can still read the financials of is the German nightclub, Berghain. Is that how you pronounce it? Berghein?
Speaker 2:Berghein.
Speaker 1:Berghein?
Speaker 2:Berghein. Always sort of mumble through it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. They maybe they should have the Axel Springer corporate retreat there. That would be a good option.
Speaker 2:Yep. R Carazian
Speaker 1:is sharing this. Yeah. It's in the Financial Times.
Speaker 2:Read through it.
Speaker 1:Okay. So, basically, R Carazian, the, economist or lead economist at Ramp Economics Lab over at Ramp, says today I learned German companies have to publish financials even when privately held. We can talk about, like, how much of a nightmare that is, but this club, Burghein, Burghein, Burghein.
Speaker 2:Burghein.
Speaker 1:I'm all over the place with this pronunciation. Anyway, $1,400,000 or euros in net profit in twenty twenty four, four hundred and fourteen thousand in annual rent, 355 employees. You can
Speaker 2:just Four go look thousand? It What? 14
Speaker 1:€414,000 in annual Okay.
Speaker 2:That's more like it. Because I've I've I've only walked by it. Mhmm. But it is a massive building. And I thought you said 14.
Speaker 1:And the Financial Times has a whole deep dive into the nightclub. But
Speaker 2:Yeah. So so let's talk about the implications. Yeah. Let's talk about the implications of small business revenue Yeah. Being public.
Speaker 2:Yeah. One, terrible for course bros. That's why they have to go to Dubai because they can't LARP. Yeah. You know, if you're LARPing around in London.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And you're saying, oh, I make so much money in real estate. I remember there was a YouTuber who did an he he was above board. He actually did a tell all on CNBC, how I make money, millennial money, some some segment they did on him. And and he's like, I'm I'm I'm a real estate guy and I make $10,000,000.
Speaker 1:And he broke it down and he was like, I made $300,000 from real estate and $9,700,000 from YouTube. And it was because he was making so much money with this great media business that he had that he actually was. And he had good advice about real estate, but he wasn't running a real real estate firm. He was, you know, a real estate associate who created a fantastic YouTube channel that was equally impressive or maybe more impressive. But as we were talking to Steven about, you know, like, how do you know what's working?
Speaker 1:Well, apparently, in Europe, you can just look up the financials of every company and know, oh, well, they have high margins. I should just copy them. Right?
Speaker 2:Basically, yeah, I looked at investing in a company in The UK
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And, yeah, you could I I got the financials, but then they were like, yeah, you can just look this up and and confirm confirm it with, you can do basically like a records request. Yeah. But, yeah, the the it'd be it'd be very interesting if we had anything like that with startups. Right? Because every time there was a big funding round, people would like, How how does this make sense?
Speaker 2:How does this make sense? So
Speaker 1:Although it does seem like it's it's on some sort of delay. It's only annual reporting and I know.
Speaker 2:But still imagine when that reporting came comes out and they're like, wow. This $10,000,000,000 company only did $10,000,000 last year, which would be happening.
Speaker 1:For some of our private markets unicorns, that would be a huge deal to dig into the numbers. Although, you know, even even the even the massively successful venture backed companies have complicated financials, the disclosures would
Speaker 2:be I just think it's I just think it's crazy that Berghain as this, like, you know, cultural institution is only putting up €1,400,000 Yeah. In net profit.
Speaker 1:Well, Sela underscore has a take, says companies like like this and club don't really exist to deliver a financial profit. They do absolutely drive social capital to those involved in ownership. So perhaps you are owning a stake in this in this institution to meet people, do business deals at the club, meet
Speaker 2:other Sam says we need to LBO and franchise ASAP.
Speaker 1:That's a good idea. Anyway, IMAX is in trouble loosely. The 70 millimeter IMAX that has been running twenty four seven at the Irvine Spectrum for the Odyssey overheated today. Bill Hunt shares some extra news. Says the scary thing here is that IMAX can't build any more new projectors.
Speaker 1:This was reported earlier. They apparently don't have a complete set of the engineering blueprints. Uh-oh. Most of the engineers who designed them have retired or passed away and the parts supply chains have long since dried up. That seems like a bigger problem than the blueprints.
Speaker 1:You gotta be able to one shot a bunch of IMAX blueprints.
Speaker 4:Can you just, like, take it apart?
Speaker 1:That's a good that's a good point. Yeah. You should just be able to take it apart, take a picture of every part, and then figure out how it works Codex. To fire it up. It'll So the goal for foreseeable future is to upgrade and keep all of the existing projectors running for as long as they can.
Speaker 1:This is the true reindustrialization project. We were wondering like what's the next dandel roll? It's the next IMAX. That's what we're looking for. Somebody cranking out American made 70 millimeter IMAX projectors.
Speaker 1:That's the real goal. Big news out of Google. Logan Kilpatrick, friend of the show, says, say hello to Gemini 3.6 Flash. We talked about this a little bit, but there are some benchmarks here. We love benchmarks.
Speaker 1:Designed to be higher intelligence, more token efficient, and with a new lower price based directly on developer feedback. 3.6 Flash continues our progress towards models that are deeply usable in real world scenarios. Congrats to the whole team over there. They say this model is much more efficient and spends spends a lot less tokens to deliver better performance. And also, the big news, he said we have started our most ambitious pretraining run yet for Gemini four and are excited by the progress.
Speaker 1:I think that there's a lot of is TBPN trolling him with hope it finishes one day too? Wow. That's a spicy post. Crazy. But, I mean, the last pre train that came out of Google was interesting.
Speaker 1:It had a different flavor to it and they they did the initial responses. They were a little more terse, little tighter. I I enjoyed poking around with Gemini. I thought it was fun. We're counting on you, Logan.
Speaker 2:Good luck. Before our next guest, we have a post from Sheila Mona.
Speaker 1:What'd he say?
Speaker 2:He says, very cool idea. Vacation with an artist. Travel the world and learn new skills
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Like ceramics, street art, bookbinding via a mini apprenticeship, three to ten days with master artisans. In many cases, you stay with them too. This got me thinking Yeah. What if you could vacation with someone A
Speaker 1:capital allocator.
Speaker 2:One shot by AI?
Speaker 1:That sounds terrible. I would like to vacation with a capital allocator at the Yellowstone Club and the Amman. Do a tour of the Amman. You can do this, but not on a website. You have to know them personally, I think.
Speaker 1:But But I I'm surprised this isn't
Speaker 2:an area This idea, yes, sounds pretty crazy vacation with a capital allocator.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:But there's probably a price. Right? Just might be Maybe. It might just be egregious.
Speaker 1:Maybe 20% of equity in your company. I I'm interested that this is its own website, Vahua, vacation with an artist. It feels like it's directly in line with the Airbnb everything app road map. The idea was that you would be able to go. Anyway, we have our next guest in the waiting room.
Speaker 1:Let's bring in Zavain Dar from Dimension. He's the founder. Welcome to the show.
Speaker 2:Here he is. How are What's going on?
Speaker 1:Give us the news. We gotta hit the The newest size lord. The newest size lord to capital allocator. Boom.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah. He just hit it himself. That was that was good good alignment. Great stuff.
Speaker 1:How much did you raise? We didn't even get the number. We just went right
Speaker 10:the Eight eight hundred million?
Speaker 1:800,000,000.
Speaker 2:I'm sorry that you couldn't, you know, pull together the last 200 short. But Maybe. 800.
Speaker 1:Who's counting?
Speaker 2:Close enough. Close enough. Hey.
Speaker 1:They're over 1,000,000,006 in assets.
Speaker 8:So That's right.
Speaker 2:That's a good start. It's a good start.
Speaker 10:Dimension $3,800,000,000, at our legal hard gap. So I I think we went out for 700 or thereabouts.
Speaker 3:Okay.
Speaker 10:Legally, can't raise more than than a
Speaker 6:The put
Speaker 2:me in jail
Speaker 1:by race We
Speaker 2:all know there was we all know the demand was there. We all know the Yeah. Talk about fund one and two Yeah. Since it's your first time on the show. What what got you to this, you know, monumental fund?
Speaker 10:Yeah. Fund one, 350. That was a 2022 vintage. Bond two was 500. That's a 2025 vintage, so just about twelve months ago.
Speaker 10:We started the firm. My co founders, Adam, Don, and I would spend the last decade investing across the Union of Life Sciences and Technology. Fund one was very much so at the intersection, so companies that were equal parts tech, equal parts life sciences. Fund two, we started to expand more so the union. Fund three, it really is the frontiers of science and compute.
Speaker 10:So companies that are touching silicon, next gen GPUs, CPUs for ML and AI architectures all the way through ML infrastructure. And then on the science side, world models, NeoLabs, you know, really kind of pioneering both physics, but then also biotech and next gen medicines as well.
Speaker 1:Do you think we'll see a a coalescing of business models in the next generation of tech enabled bio companies, biotech companies? Because we're there's an opportunity to be sort of really full stack, train a model, use it to develop a drug, take that drug all the way through the FDA approval process, use AI to write the applications and go back and forth and then own the intellectual property all the way. That feels like a lot of different CapEx muscles flexing at the same time, but maybe that is the future. How do you see it actually playing out? What's the common pattern?
Speaker 10:You know, there's a my my cofounder, Adam, is Australian and he's a he has a want of saying, horses for courses, which for, I think the North American audience here, it means to each their own, more or less. So we We're gonna start using that
Speaker 2:for our North American audience. Horses for courses. Horses for courses.
Speaker 1:I like
Speaker 10:Big in big in Japan. Yeah. Or for example, Chai, which is I think you maybe had Josh and Jack on the show in in the past. Announced the round that we helped to co lead with Index and Sequoia and Kleiner last week. Mhmm.
Speaker 10:They are very much so doing the latter, which you described, selling their services as a SaaS product
Speaker 6:Yeah.
Speaker 10:Into pharma. On the other hand, we have companies like New Limit that are developing similar ilks of technology, but doing so with the express intent of developing their medicines end to end and one day actually commercializing medicines that affect aging and longevity.
Speaker 1:Are aging longevity the the the hot topics because they're so universal? Or do you think you'll see more of the I don't know if I'd call it the traditional biotech playbook, but there's often this, you know, there's a whole pipeline of biotech companies that are targeting, like, there's five thousand people that have this rare disease and it still turns into a billion dollar acquisition and it's this odd pattern that doesn't really ever make it to the front page of Time Magazine, but obviously has an impact both financially and medically on those people that were suffering from that
Speaker 10:I both extremes are true. Earlier this year, RevMed had very stunning phase three result for their lead drug affecting patients with pancreatic cancer. For the rest of humanity, a thousand years from now, two thousand years from now, if you have pancreatic cancer, you should have a somewhat effective treatment and that's really based on a biotech based in California that in the last six months developed and kind of showed that clinical data and that's stunning. Of course, pancreatic cancer, if that's not as prevalent as aging which everybody has or maybe obesity or something. At the same time, we are I think witnessing a revolution of what it means or a re underwriting of what it means to be diseased And even something like obesity or maybe ten years ago or fifteen years ago, pharma and biotech frankly, they didn't invest in these areas because they didn't consider it a disease.
Speaker 10:They considered it a behavioral problem. Today, it's considered a disease and it's the largest drug on the planet. You're seeing it in areas like aging and longevity, inflammation, immunology. DUPIXENT, if anyone has atopic derm or eczema, it's one of the largest drugs on the planet today. Twenty years ago, no one would touch that because diseases that were skin related weren't considered serious enough.
Speaker 10:So we are starting to see I think a redefinition of the types of areas where biotech and pharma can actually play.
Speaker 2:I'm sure you got asked this, you know, during the fundraising process, but what's your overall world view on investment opportunities around peptides as a category, you know, basically drugs that that people are taking somewhat recreationally now, but have a bunch of different benefits that have that are in a, you know, sort of continuous gray area. But what's your what's your outlook on on the category? Because there's billions of dollars of revenue there. There's some really interesting, exciting, at least indicators that they can have great impacts. What's your view?
Speaker 10:I take the red and the yellow shots on Monday and Tuesdays and the green and the blue shots on Fridays and Saturdays and my wife doesn't care. I'm kidding. Would not recommend this stuff with anybody. Look, there is a history of peptides and hormone mimetics as drugs. GLP-1s, GLP-1s are in some sense those exactly.
Speaker 10:Whenever you're sticking anything into yourself, you want to actually know what it is. You want to know, make sure that there's no impurities in it. We don't understand the biology, the mechanisms, in many of these cases. And so, I think even the scuttlebutt that you guys and I am probably hearing about the efficacy or effectiveness of, you know, the SF tech community or the New York kind of, you know, tech community taking these things. My suspicion is that's probably more placebo than not.
Speaker 10:I'd be very careful about doing any of this. I certainly wouldn't myself do it nor would I let my friends and family do it.
Speaker 1:How do you think AI affects sort of like, I don't know if it's, we call it, repurposing drugs, but the big GLP one breakthrough for obesity was originally a diabetes drug. And there's been a few examples of drugs in history, many examples actually, where it started as a heart medication and then became erectile dysfunction drug. And it feels like in an age of AI, even if you don't get the super intelligence that can just imagine the cure for cancer, You, at the very least, could potentially test every drug against every indication maybe more efficiently. What does sort of like cross application of biotechnology look like in the future?
Speaker 10:I I think two things are true. With ML and AI, we are better able to understand the root cause of disease, mechanism pathway, and kind of the industry nomenclature. And with a better understanding of mechanisms and pathways, we can repurpose molecules, whether they're biologics or peptides or small molecules, against those where we know that they are known to be effective. The other, which is simultaneously true, historically, we have the vast majority of known targets for disease biology have been undreadable. And so it's not a question of taking a cell of acid from Pfizer or Novartis or Lilly.
Speaker 10:It's a question of we just don't know how to design the molecules to actually perturb those proteins intracellularly or extracellularly yet. Sure. My suspicion is in the next five to six to seven years with the companies in the modes of the chaise of the world, for example, we will have technologies to perturb what we wanna perturb. Yeah. And so we'll both be able to repurpose when there is a shelved asset against kind of our new knowledge of biology, but then also leverage generative AI and ML to create molecules to protect our biology where maybe the shelved acids don't quite yet exist.
Speaker 2:What letter are you most proud of and why?
Speaker 10:Z is a good letter.
Speaker 2:No, no. I'm talking about your letters.
Speaker 10:I'm kidding.
Speaker 2:I'm kidding. Underrated letter.
Speaker 10:In terms of letters that we have published from Dimension?
Speaker 2:Yes. You published some beautiful letters.
Speaker 10:But idea in
Speaker 2:a letter, the chat was asking. Yeah.
Speaker 10:Yeah. The what if we're right letter, that was actually, you know, first written as a letter confidentially to our partners and LPs in q one of this year as part of our annual 2025 recap. And we anonymized part of it. We took out some parts of, obviously, the financial information and decided to share it with the broader kind of entrepreneurial tech and science audience. Think it resonated with people, I think, especially in this moment in time where there is so much tension geopolitically and technologically and from a class and labor perspective.
Speaker 10:So many things like, so many things are happening, and there's a lot of tension. And to maybe take a step back and say, hey. What what's the good that's happening if we're right in developing these technologies and sciences? How does that bend the arc of humanity and society for the better? That was fun to write.
Speaker 10:I think it got a groove with a good audience, and so we're pretty proud of that. Think more people can be espousing and writing, you know, that sort of stuff.
Speaker 1:Last question. How many cups of coffee a day do you drink? There's new reporting this as a five.
Speaker 5:15.
Speaker 1:It's good for you. 15, really?
Speaker 10:I'm kidding.
Speaker 3:Are you
Speaker 1:a coffee maxer?
Speaker 10:I I try to
Speaker 3:limit it.
Speaker 10:I I have my fridge cigarette.
Speaker 1:There we go. There we go. Cheers.
Speaker 10:I am.
Speaker 2:There we go.
Speaker 10:Cheers, man. Yeah. I I try to limit it to probably two or three. If I if I do have a cup of coffee after four, I'm probably walking until 2PM.
Speaker 1:Okay. So well within the healthy limits. Healthy guy working on health and AI. Well, congratulations on the fun. Thank you
Speaker 2:Congrats so much for to, to you and all your partners.
Speaker 1:Yeah. On an absolutely generational run over there. We'd love
Speaker 2:to forward to meeting more of your founders.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We'll talk to you soon. Have a good one. Let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all in one intelligent cloud provider.
Speaker 1:Use your favorite agents to deploy web app servers, databases, and more while Railway takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security. Up next. Up next.
Speaker 2:We have Chad Edwards.
Speaker 1:We'll bring Chad in in just a second. Briefly, I'm gonna tell you about this interesting screenshot from Reddit, an LLM stenography tools, steganography tool. How do you pronounce that? Kinda neat with how the UI the EU is trying to gain access to all communication. So, basically, you use an LLM to transform your text messages, secret messages.
Speaker 1:They look normal, but in fact, there's a decoded message. So on the left, it says message to Bob. I got coffee downtown, and it's actually pretty good. Thinking of what to make for dinner. Want to come help me cook?
Speaker 1:Overdid it on the soup yesterday though. And that is actually secretly encoded to mean they caught Matthew last week because he spoke against them. Explain how this works, Tyler.
Speaker 4:Yeah. So so it's not the the LLM is not actually doing the encrypting. Basically, encrypt it first using some, like, standard process, and then you get, like, the output of that is, like, some ciphertext.
Speaker 1:Like a lookup table, basically, or something.
Speaker 4:So basically, you you encrypt it, you get some, like, something that looks like scrambled, like a scrambled string.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 4:And you basically hydrate that. You have these these bits and then you basically use the bits to determine which token you're gonna use in the LLM. You basically need to use an open source LLM.
Speaker 1:People are accusing chat. John actually in the chat have been doing this for months, sending coded messages to everyone.
Speaker 4:Well It is very cool
Speaker 8:though.
Speaker 1:I thought this was a cool idea. I think it's a cool demo. I don't know that it's wildly useful, but for certain people that need to send secret messages back and forth, go ahead. Also, they're calling North Korea no co, like it's the cool trendy part of town. I thought that was a funny post.
Speaker 1:Anyway, we have Chad Edwards from Cusp AI in the waiting room. Let's bring in Chad Edwards, the co founder and CEO. How are you doing, Chad? Welcome to the show. Thanks
Speaker 5:for having me. Yeah. Doing very well. Thank you. How are
Speaker 1:you doing? You raised some money. How much did you raise?
Speaker 2:Look at this background. It's a cool background. Incredible.
Speaker 1:How much did you raise?
Speaker 5:That's The UK as a semiconductor chip. We raised $450,000,000.
Speaker 1:Congratulations. Well Anyone anyone I've heard of invest? It's a murderer's row. You got Jeff Bezos. You got a bunch of other folks in.
Speaker 1:Right?
Speaker 5:Yeah. Klein and Perkins, NEA.
Speaker 1:There you go. Congratulations. What are you building? Break down the business. Yeah.
Speaker 5:So at CUSP, we're building essentially a search engine for materials, so generative AI platform where you can discover entirely new materials. Mhmm. And, of course, it's not something we think about in our day to day lives, but everything we hear and talk about day to day such as the pursuit of intelligence or the energy transition or the climate crisis,
Speaker 3:if you boil all of
Speaker 5:these things down to the fundamentals, they're a material science problem. For example, a semiconductor chip is around 60 different plus elements. It's 99.99 pure silicon. So if we can come up with a better way to discover new materials, we can come up with better chips, we can improve the efficiency of solar cells, we and can also work on climate technologies to leave the world a better place. And so they're kind of the core focus areas for our company.
Speaker 2:Yeah. What's the most underrated new material?
Speaker 1:Probably Most room temperature superconductors, I would say. What what do you think?
Speaker 5:Yeah. Mean, there's there's a few teams now pursuing room temperature superconductivity as kind of the holy grail of material science. There's still some pretty interesting physics to be figured out along the way, but if someone can crack that, then the implications are huge. So, yeah, let's see.
Speaker 1:Is there a power law in applications of advanced material science broadly, like battery technology would be by far the biggest market if you could unlock
Speaker 2:that?
Speaker 1:Or is it sort of distributed and there's so many applications, there's not necessarily one that you'll be focusing on in the short term?
Speaker 5:Yeah. I mean, the opportunity space is absolutely enormous. We could be sat here talking about the the chip industry
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 5:Or the energy industry or, you know, climate. There's there's just so much opportunity out there. But I think what we've seen as a company is the semiconductor industry has basically pulled us by all four limbs in the direction of semiconductors. We didn't set out to build the company as a semiconductor company. We've kind of built a platform that was horizontal and we felt the market pull in that direction.
Speaker 5:And again, it boils down to the very fact that with everything we're now seeing in AI, there's a real demand on the chips to be more performant, have higher energy efficiency, and all of that fundamentally boils down to better materials. I'd say they've had to pick one semis.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So, I mean, obviously, market semis, massive market. Any application you have there will have huge demand. What is the capital incent intensity of the business? I mean, you raised a $100,000,000 series a last year, now 450,000,000.
Speaker 1:Do you have compute costs, training costs? Is this just to hire the world's best, material scientists? Is there a big data acquisition bill that's coming? What is the use of capital over the next, two years look like?
Speaker 5:Yeah. So obviously, we're nowhere near the kind of frontier model LLM types expenditure. We don't need to train huge models like that. We train more domain specific models. Yeah.
Speaker 5:And as part of that, of course, our three big kind of cost centers would be people. Yeah. So hiring the best people in AI and machine learning, which is what we've been able to do and retain those folks. And we've seen some of the salaries that go around the world for for people in that category now. Yeah.
Speaker 5:Computers and other ones, so we have a very big partnership with NVIDIA and they're part of a big enhancement that we made yesterday. And then third and foremost is data generation in an experimental sense. So, of course, we have to ground all of our work in physic physical experiments. And so we have a network of labs globally now where we generate data for us to train the models.
Speaker 1:Would you vertically integrate there at some point to close the loop, build your own material science lab where you could prototype new materials and test them?
Speaker 5:Yeah. I'd say never say never, but at the moment, our thesis has been we can move much faster if we have a network of existing labs around the world. We can tap into them. Can get going very quickly. Yeah.
Speaker 5:They have domain experts in those labs that know know an awful lot more about the specific domain, and we can't easily replicate that. So and a lot of our customers also have their own labs. So, yeah, our model so far has been work with existing labs and customers that have labs and that allows them to move faster and us to move much faster. But who knows? Maybe one day we say, hey, we're gonna build a lab in a certain domain.
Speaker 5:Yeah.
Speaker 2:How do you think about, value capture? It's very easy for me to imagine, like,
Speaker 8:how
Speaker 2:you would create value for your customers. But if you help somebody discover a new material that the application of that material could could be worth, you know, billions of dollars, how do you how do you make sure that, it's a fair trade?
Speaker 5:Yes. So we've taken a very different approach to the business model. In fact, we're, I think, genuinely the first to have done this in the world. And when we started the company and we pitched this business model to investors, they said, Chad, forget about it. This is never going to work.
Speaker 5:You're never gonna get big corporates paying you royalties on materials. And so for the first two years, I made it my mission to make sure that every customer contract that we have has royalties built baked into it. So we've now proven the kind of biotech type model works now in material science. Companies are prepared to pay you upfront for the programs that you set up, and then they're prepared to bake in a royalty at the end so that as that material goes into production, you can kind of share the upside commercial potential of that material.
Speaker 2:Very, very cool. This is what I was asking the the founder of Chai Discovery who's doing AI for drug discovery. It feels very right now, they just have a SaaS fee, think, but it feels very natural for them to get some type of royalty. They help create a
Speaker 1:Win win.
Speaker 2:A hit drug. It's a win win. Great customer alignment there and it makes so much sense for your business. And you end up building basically a portfolio of of bets over time. And even if you have a handful of big winners, it could I can see how that would generate, you know, billions over time.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. I I kinda see my job a little bit analogous to a VC in a way that we have a portfolio of materials and some of our materials are nearer term. They have higher commercial potential and some of our longer term frontier bets.
Speaker 5:And if we have a balanced portfolio, then hopefully, our revenue projections and journey will will follow a very steady trajectory. But I can also see merits of the the the approach that Chai had taken in having predictable, you know, monthly incomes and subscriptions to software is also, you know, carries carries your base revenue, whereas the the program aspects can be a bit more lumpy. So I could see merits of both both approaches.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So why not both? What you're doing?
Speaker 1:Do do you think that the next round KPI or key metric that you'll be underwriting the deal against will be revenue? Or are there more like scientific milestones, benchmarks or sort of promising results where you'll be able to totally justify the next expansion pre revenue? Or do you think the business will actually grow in the short term with actual revenue generating deals?
Speaker 5:Yeah. So we've tried to kind of go against the grain in that a lot of deep tech companies take forever to get to revenues. And so we've tried to be very commercial very alone. I love it. Before this, I built a quantum computing company, which is kind of one of the most extreme versions of pre revenue.
Speaker 5:And so, yeah, I've tried to be very, very commercial in this company from very early on, and everything we do is grounded with paying customers. But I think I've also given up predicting when the next fundraise will happen because it in every race, I said, we're not gonna race for another six to twelve months. And then in a few months later, we've been preempted, and there's a round coming together. So I don't know exactly what the next metrics look like. Founder.
Speaker 1:Well, congratulations. I mean, I can't wait to talk to you in a couple months when the next round happens.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Looking forward to it. It'll be any day now, but
Speaker 1:you're always welcome.
Speaker 2:Very, very cool business and business model and looking forward to the next conversation.
Speaker 1:And what a great a great group of partners with all the companies that you've worked with. It makes so much sense. So good luck and congratulations. We'll talk to you soon. Have a great rest of your week.
Speaker 2:Cheers, Chad.
Speaker 5:You too.
Speaker 1:Thanks, I love the word. We have one last post I wanna go through. Ramp launched a model router. Braxton loves it. He says, Ramp launching a model router is god tier product expansion.
Speaker 1:The winds are blessing it. The market is exhausted with token maxing, proliferation of new models, sovereignty. This is the first time I've looked at a launch and went, wow. This might be the start of a new core product. Yeah.
Speaker 1:There's been a bunch of speculation about this, but it makes a lot of sense. Ramps prog promise is to save you time and money. The CFOs are increasingly annoyed by token routing. We talked to Eric Lyman about this last week. Are you using the craziest frontier model burning millions of tokens to answer the weather?
Speaker 1:Maybe that should have an expense report attached. And so very, very exciting to see where this goes, how they roll it out. I know it's in alpha with a number of customers. And I believe that the product's actually available to non ramp customers as well. So you can use their product exclusively.
Speaker 2:Yush says going after everything time and money touches.
Speaker 1:I love it. I love it. Anyway, thank you for tuning in. We will see you tomorrow, Wednesday at 11AM Pacific. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
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Speaker 1:We love you. Throwing flashbang. Goodbye. Flashbanging the horse.