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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 TVPN, and that's the linear lineup. We got Ryan Peterson joining in just a second. It's Friday, 02/20/2026. We are live from TVPN Ultra, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. Let's pull up the linear lineup.
Speaker 1:But first, let me tell you about ramp.com. Time is money. Save both. Easy use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. And on the linear lineup, we have absolutely stacked show.
Speaker 1:We got Ryan Peterson joining emergency call in about the tariffs. Then we're gonna have Palmer Lockheed joining, breaking it down. What's happening with Erebor? The bank received the charter. He's an officially a charter holder.
Speaker 1:And we have a bunch of other folks who are involved with him in the Erobor project that we're very excited to talk to. Joe Lonsdale is joining Will Brewery. Sam, Alex Heath is joining in person from sources. You've been seeing his scoops all over the timeline this week, and we are very excited to talk to him about that. Linear, of course, is the system for modern software development.
Speaker 1:70% of enterprise workspaces on Linear are using agents, and you should be too. So the tariff news, let's bring in Ryan Peterson from the Restream waiting room. Ryan, how are you doing?
Speaker 2:Look at that. Confused. I'm great. I think I'm great.
Speaker 3:Look at that look
Speaker 4:at that smile. You haven't smiled like that on the show.
Speaker 1:And We've had some dark times. We made it through.
Speaker 2:We'll see.
Speaker 1:We'll see.
Speaker 2:I was at you know what? I love you guys so much that I actually dropped from watching the president's news conference. This is time. Here
Speaker 1:I am.
Speaker 4:This is the real There were some all time there were some all time quotes. We were prepping the show, but Tyler on our team was sending over quotes to me in real time. One of them was quote from Trump, I want to be a good boy. And then later he said, I wanna kiss you so badly. And some other things.
Speaker 2:It's that. Who was he talking to? I don't know.
Speaker 4:I think he was talking about somebody who was saying that to him.
Speaker 2:Oh, okay. Well,
Speaker 1:take it through take us through what have you seen? What what's actual the what what's actually the news? What happened? And how have you been processing it?
Speaker 5:Yeah. So the the Supreme Court ruled that
Speaker 2:the tariffs, the AIPA tariffs that's not all the tariffs. There are section three zero one tariffs. There are fentanyl tariffs. There's a there's a bunch of other types of tariffs. But AIPA is the reciprocal tariffs.
Speaker 2:You may remember them from they they were applied to the Penguin Island. Oh, yeah. Book paper is, most annoying. It's the kind of the global sweeping tariffs. Those have been overturned.
Speaker 2:Okay. However, the Supreme Court did not give any clarity, and Trump is right to point this out. It's really dumb about do we get refunds or not. A 100 I think they said a $175,000,000,000 Yeah. That they would be owed in refunds.
Speaker 2:So that is the giant $175,000,000,000 question. What happens to all that money that people paid over the last year?
Speaker 4:Yeah. What how like, is there a meaningful percentage of those potential refunds that people, purchase the right to? Like, is it because I know I know, you know, over the last
Speaker 2:Some of that I I I wouldn't call it a meaningful percentage,
Speaker 4:but I'm I'm
Speaker 2:But I probably I I I have to guess there was probably 50 or $100,000,000 worth of those would be my swag. I don't have to date on it.
Speaker 1:Okay. Yeah. That's pretty pretty small. Like 5,000,000,000
Speaker 2:or 10,000,000,000. Put a $100,000,000 into that, you feel like
Speaker 1:Yeah. You do really well. But, yeah, I mean, I I I was thinking about through my own experience in ecommerce. I was running the numbers, I was like, I think the company might get, like, a couple 100 k back over the next but depending on how it's applied. But we were far too small to actually get, at least that I received any inbound interest to, like, buy those credits back in the day because, like, we're very small.
Speaker 2:You could only, the the people that were transacting now, it was mostly Oppenheimer, the investment bank.
Speaker 5:Okay.
Speaker 2:It were minimum $10,000,000 transaction or they weren't interested.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense.
Speaker 2:But, by the way, good plug. FlexBoard built the tariff refund calculator. So go to tariff.flexboard.com.
Speaker 1:Tariffs.flexboard.com. Head over there.
Speaker 2:Figure it out. Slash refunds or just click the refund calculator button right there and Or go to the report homepage. We've got it on the top now.
Speaker 4:It's free money.
Speaker 2:And it well, for now, it is just a calculator It's free money that you paid. You've already paid this money, and it's a we made this very simple process for you. You have to go to the government website, enter your credit they'll give you a c c s v file, upload that here. We will run all the numbers, calculate it for you instantly, and show you how much you are owed. Yeah.
Speaker 2:If and it is a giant if right now if the administration agrees to do refunds. Yeah. It was very clear in the press conference just now that because the administrate because the Supreme Court did not have a firm opinion about refunds, that there will be no refunds, for the next five years as it goes into litigation. So this is gonna be a fight, is what he said. It was very interesting because that's counter to what CPP has said in the past, or earlier this, well, end of last year, CPP said they would comply Mhmm.
Speaker 2:With whatever finding is, whatever the court says. If the court rules that the re the terrorists were illegal, that they would issue a refund. So and that's in court filing. So it's gonna if it gets litigated, yeah, we'll see how this plays out. But we in the meantime, we've got the best calculator in the world.
Speaker 2:And by the way, trade attorneys told us they're planning to charge 15% as it to get you a refund to get a you
Speaker 1:know, get your money back.
Speaker 2:We've got an automated process, so I intend to do that for much, much, much less.
Speaker 1:That's great. That's great. That's great. Zooming out, how I mean, 2025 was obviously a very rocky year on the trade front, but how were you processing just the overall economic picture? There were so many different statistics like health of the consumer, health of small businesses.
Speaker 1:Like, how did you feel like 2025 went as you look back on it now?
Speaker 2:I'll you know, I'm not like the macroeconomics expert in the world. You got the stock market rate if the people who own stocks did really well. Then the mags have, I guess, drove most of that. But, so I think small business really suffered last year. The ecom businesses, like, something like 40% of Shopify merchants were doing fulfillment from overseas and therefore using de minimis
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And not paying any duties. And so all of those people just got hit with, like, this huge new disruption and and tariffs. I think a lot of them are under intense stress. It's a lot of our customers going through that. I I was on your show last year.
Speaker 2:I talked about a fraud that we're seeing.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. A couple
Speaker 2:of these stacks are against the wall and are just starting to imp let their factories import goods. Actually, those people are the most effed by this because if there are refunds, it goes to their factory, not to them. I'm
Speaker 1:like Yeah.
Speaker 2:Cheaters cheaters get effed. You know?
Speaker 1:That's funny. Yeah. What about, the location of factories? I I had this thesis that, like, even if the tariffs didn't hold, just the fact that there was this, like, oh, wow moment for at least one quarter meant that there was a whole cycle of board meetings where anyone who was on the fence about, oh, maybe we should finally pull the trigger on that American factory. Like, they might have done it then, and then that decision stuck sticks even if the tariffs get rolled back because in that moment, they made the decision sort of like how during COVID, people, like, decided to start working from home, and then it took, like, two years for them to get back in the office.
Speaker 1:Like like, you could see people saying, like, I'm gonna reshor my operation a little bit, and some of that some portion of that's gonna be sticky even in a low tariff regime.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I you know, I haven't seen the the manufacturing statistics. I think manufacturing is going is growing in The United States pretty quickly. I'm sure tariffs are helping with that.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:The but it's they're so unevenly applied. I mean, one of the silly things about the way tariffs are done in they and put new tariffs in today that I think are a better tariff policy. Mhmm. You know, I'm I'm not I'm I'm I'm famous anti tariff, but if because it's bad for my business, bad for my customers. But if you are if just looking at it from a what's your goal as a president who says he wants to boost manufacturing, it's better to have a blanket tariff on everybody Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Than just target one country. And the reason for that is is tariffs are equivalent mathematically to an exchange rate, like a fixed exchange rate
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:With another country. And you would never have a bilateral exchange rate. You can't say, hey. The United States is gonna trade with the renminbi Chinese currency Yeah. At six to one, but we'll let the other ones we'll do the other ones at a different ratio because, obviously, the money will just flow around.
Speaker 2:And that's what happens. With cargo too, it's like, okay. Cool. I let's say, the Americans, we're we're putting this tariff in, so we instead of buying from China Mhmm. We buy from Peru.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Now the Peruvians have more money. What do they do? They buy stuff from China. Like, it ends up in the exact same
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Place. Whereas a blanket tariff, it's like, okay. This is helping make American, goods more competitive versus foreign goods no matter where they're from. So I think from
Speaker 4:a policy standpoint, it's better
Speaker 2:to be
Speaker 4:What's the what's the legal justification for this new round of tariffs that just got announced? These were this was a type of tariff that the Supreme Court didn't rule against today, so he's like, we'll just ramp that up.
Speaker 2:These ones are, it's called section one twenty two. And under section one twenty two, it's very clear that the president has statutory authority. It has a 15% maximum. He only did 10%, so he's got some cushion. I would expect him to get mad at somebody and raise it to 15 at some point.
Speaker 2:That would be my one of my predictions in the near future. Yeah. I can pull a cushion to go upwards later. Yeah. And then second is it has a maximum of one hundred and fifty days that he can impose this.
Speaker 5:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Now what I predict is I was I haven't done the math, but a 150 a hundred and forty nine a hundred and fifty days from now, I think that section one twenty two will experience a pause of around fifteen minutes, and then you'll have another hundred fifty days, where it goes right back in. And there's nothing that says you can't do that. You could do that in perpetuity. But it would only be a it would be a 15% maximum, and I I I have to double check, but I'm pretty sure that has to be imposed equally on everybody. And it's about it's because of a balance of trade.
Speaker 2:I have to go read the reread the statute now that one twenty Mhmm. Is the term of the day. But it's because of balance of trade that that act was put in by Congress.
Speaker 1:Very interesting.
Speaker 4:What what do business owners, executive teams do? How how like, any any kind of, like, new approach going forward with today's news, or is it still kind of steady state? Like, we don't know what's gonna happen.
Speaker 2:Well, on some of this stuff, you know, all we have right now is a news conference. So first off, when you see an executive order, which is expected to come out on Monday Mhmm. And you'll have a little bit more clarity there. We're advising customers in this situation to let's not clear customs today. Let's hold your entries until Monday when the rates are presumably lower.
Speaker 2:And so that would be the first step is make sure your customs at least you save one day worth. We we are I think you wanna get into again, I'll plug myself, go to the tariff calculator, see what you're owed Yeah. Get into a process to go start filing, whether it's protests or we're still waiting for clarity here, of course, but but you're gonna file a protest. You might have to file a lawsuit. I'm hoping not.
Speaker 2:File a protest against tariffs that you know, the government said this is illegal, so why how can they take my money, owe it back? Like, there's gonna be various ways to fight that. I think, hopefully, it's not a lawsuit.
Speaker 4:Would be would it really be a bunch of individual lawsuits, or would it be a class action?
Speaker 2:Assume there's a class action. Costco fired filed one. A lot of people have been filing them in preemptively in this, so it's already kinda working gonna work its way through the courts. That but, you know, the the CBP was very clear that there okay. So there there was this lawsuit by Costco, the retailer, that said and that, you know, said, hey.
Speaker 2:This is a illegal tariffs. If the government rules that the if the Supreme Court rules that these are illegal, you must give me the the money back. And the court declined to put in an injunction to force the government to stop charging tariffs, wait while they wait while we wait for the Supreme Court. And the reason that they didn't put in that injunction is that the CBP said we would if the tariffs are ruled illegal, we will issue refunds. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Or at least they said there is oh, man. What was the legal term? It's sort of like these the it they are refundable or something, which is interesting because you're like, well, you know, I break my arm. It is fixable. Does it mean I'm gonna fix it?
Speaker 2:I could just leave it broken. I don't know. I'm not a lawyer, so I'm just trying to this all happened very quickly. I'm trying to learn this morning exactly how it's gonna play out.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Who are the biggest companies that are affected by tariffs? I I I I jumped to Nike, Apple. I imagine it's
Speaker 4:But didn't Apple get a full carve out?
Speaker 1:That's what I think. So, like, who who is actually, like, the biggest voice?
Speaker 2:Semiconductors and iPhones, I think, managed to get a card. They're probably Walmart is number one. Walmart. Okay. Yeah.
Speaker 2:They're like, Costco Walmart.
Speaker 4:Insane because our intern made an iPhone in America when the tariffs first came around. Pull it up, Tyler.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:We put it we put he put it together in in a day. I don't know if you can see it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Works flawlessly. Here. Does it turn on? Not yet.
Speaker 2:Oh, you got great interest over there.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. Yeah. We're gonna reshor the entire semiconductor supply chain soon. Anyway, anything else, Jordy?
Speaker 4:No. This is Thank thank you for jumping on.
Speaker 1:Thanks so much for jumping on. I really I
Speaker 4:really do hope for every Flexport customer and every business that is impacted by this so we can get some real clarity soon. I'm sure we will.
Speaker 2:I should should end with a reminder for all. If you do get a unplanned surprise gigantic refund check
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Just remember that most lottery winners end up bankrupt. So don't spend it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It in
Speaker 2:bank. Yeah. No. To your shareholders, pay your employees less bonus. But if you guys if you go buy a bunch of inventory, of course, that'd be good for me.
Speaker 2:That's why you can trust this price because I would prefer you spend it on inventory and ship it, with us. But better for you to save your money. Don't waste it.
Speaker 4:Good call. Well, thank you for coming on along with the ferry building Yeah. Behind you. It's very
Speaker 2:great. Welcome back there. You could see it in the in the deep distance. That's
Speaker 4:great to have you both on.
Speaker 1:Thanks so much.
Speaker 4:Alright. We'll talk you soon. Talk soon, Ryan. Cheers.
Speaker 1:Bye. Me Let tell you about Okta. Okta helps you assign every AI agent a trusted identity so you get the power of AI without the risk. Secure every agent. Secure any agent.
Speaker 1:And I'm also gonna tell you about fin dot a I, the number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to handle your customer support, go to fin.ai. So this story is obviously still developing. Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in his dissent, The court's decision is likely to generate other serious practical consequences in the near term. One issue will be refunds.
Speaker 1:We'll certainly be following this. I'm sure we'll know more on Monday. But I think we are up to speed, at the very least, on what has happened. And a little reminder that Ryan Peterson is an is a fantastic aficionado of office decor and shared a picture of a startup he visited that has two portraits on the wall that we'll have to pull up in section B because What
Speaker 2:office wall? Is
Speaker 1:Who's on the wall? That's the thing. I don't We should have asked him. I don't think anyone knows. But in in the timeline on section b, there we go.
Speaker 1:You see none other than Mark Benioff and Larry Allison painted very clearly not AI generated. This is a decade ago. Is that Chris Saka? It looks sort of like him.
Speaker 4:That does look like Saka.
Speaker 1:Am I crazy? I don't I don't know.
Speaker 4:Hard to tell.
Speaker 1:But people are people are guessing in the background. Yeah. Someone else said, is Saka, is that you? And then someone said, no, it's Larry Ellison. And, yeah, that's not what they're asking.
Speaker 1:Anyway,
Speaker 4:it seems like software. Moving on. Charlie Kratovil says Yes. We won, no data center, And they have to build a park.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 4:This got 3,000,000 views, 222,000.
Speaker 1:That ratio is crazy. Right?
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Crazy crazy ratio.
Speaker 4:Gary Tan responds and says, a fully built one data center complex generates around $31,000,000 per year in state taxes and 61,000,000 per year in local taxes from data center operations alone. Also, it creates roughly 430 direct jobs at the facility itself, plus many more indirect and construction phase jobs. So nearly a $100,000,000 a year in local taxes based on this analysis by the Consumer Energy Alliance. So maybe these data centers need to be leading with that more. Think about how many parks you can build Yeah.
Speaker 4:Over think about how many roads you can repair
Speaker 5:Yeah.
Speaker 4:New buildings, schools that you'll be able to build Yeah. Locally, if you have one of these. There's not the you know, we've talked about this at length, but it's understandable that citizens will be like, I don't need the data center in my backyard to use ChatGPT. Yep. So why would I want it?
Speaker 4:Yep. But if you're gonna have, you know, nearly 9 figures in in local and and state taxes that you can direct.
Speaker 1:There is another solution here. You could build a jungle gym that has GPUs embedded in the slides and in the swings. And so you get a little
Speaker 4:bit You know those of rolly slide things? Yes. Yes. Those regenerate That
Speaker 1:generates electricity. Oh, yeah. I know. I'm thinking what you're thinking. Put the kids to work.
Speaker 1:If they're swinging, I wanna capture that electricity and turn it into tokens.
Speaker 4:Red G
Speaker 1:AI five
Speaker 4:James, creative director of general catalyst and friend of the show says, You mean to tell me the meme of creating a permanent underclass hasn't been winning the hearts and minds of the public? Shocking. Yeah. Very good point. Let's pull up this video because it's a pretty wild reaction.
Speaker 4:Let's get sound
Speaker 1:This is and
Speaker 4:start it back. Sure. Begin
Speaker 2:They canceled it.
Speaker 6:Wow. They canceled it. It's
Speaker 4:like the Lil Yachty little
Speaker 1:yachty. Yeah. It is. The Lil Yachty walkout.
Speaker 6:The people united will never be defeated. The people united will never be defeated. Defeated. Defeated. Defeated.
Speaker 6:The The heroes people
Speaker 4:do They got a soundboard?
Speaker 1:It does seem like a deal. Keep chanting. Your Netflix recommendations just got point 1% less accurate.
Speaker 2:Against data centers everywhere in New Jersey.
Speaker 4:New Jersey. They actually have a live band?
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's interesting because the the the the the pushback against data centers, like, it really is this, like, meme of creating a permanent underclass, like, that type of thing because you I I would I would be so much more, like, expecting of this pushback if it was like, oh, well, we know that, like, living next to a data center is dangerous for your health. Like, that is not the meme. The meme is, like, maybe your power rates will go up, but it's sort of unclear and they might offset that. They're sort of ugly, but they're not the biggest craziest thing that you could put there.
Speaker 1:It really is just about like, I don't like what it produces abstractly. Yeah. And so I don't want the concrete.
Speaker 2:I don't
Speaker 4:like what it stands for.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Exactly. I don't like what it stands for, which is we which is just it it it's a little bit different than than I I think a lot of people Great.
Speaker 4:Real though data centers filling up Northern Virginia is super annoying and ugly. 600 now.
Speaker 1:They gotta make them look better. They gotta make them look better.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Look, I see. You're talking about the jungle gym, there is that you've probably seen it. There's in Denmark, there's the ski hill that's on top of the power plant.
Speaker 1:Wait. Really?
Speaker 7:Have you seen that?
Speaker 1:No. I haven't seen that. I I I thought you were gonna mention the have you seen the stealthy cell phone towers? So there are cell phone towers all over Los Angeles that are dressed up like trees.
Speaker 4:Yeah. They always get me.
Speaker 1:They always get tell.
Speaker 4:I'm kidding.
Speaker 1:No. You know, of
Speaker 4:course, you can tell. From very far away.
Speaker 1:They do sort of, like, fade into the background, and you don't notice them as much as, like, a full on crazy cell tower in your face. While Tyler pulls up an image of that ski data center, let me tell you about Phantom Cash. Fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen and spend with the Phantom Cloud. And let me also tell you about Lambda. We have a great Lambda lightning round coming up.
Speaker 1:Lambda is the super intelligence cloud building AI superglue for training and inference that scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands. We go. Lots of pat pushback. Let's see. AI folks have about four months to pull a cure for cancer out of the latent space before we drift into Behar Butlerian jihad, a tractor basin.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Jihad. But Butlerian but Butlerian jihad is from Dune. They don't want computers, so they use Spice and they travel around that way. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's really popular. I mean, we talked to Sagar and Jetty about this. It's bipartisan. It's it's very, very broad support against data center build out, and there doesn't seem to be anything that's pushing back against it. And I was thinking more about the cure for cancer thing because, like, you know, Microsoft Excel has been useful in medicine.
Speaker 1:Like, you you use Microsoft Excel to catalog how patients are doing, track a bunch of blood work, create a correlation. Okay. These people got placebos. These people got the real cancer treatment. Now we know for sure.
Speaker 1:And it just sped it up a little bit. You could have done it on paper, but doing it in Excel probably moved things forward just a notch. You got the cancer cure like a couple months earlier, a little bit cheaper, a little bit faster. And that sort of like diffusion story is ridiculously unsexy. Like, it's not attractive at all.
Speaker 1:No one Yeah. No one wants to talk about it. I I I had this riff
Speaker 4:one simple trick.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I I I had this I I had this riff for a while that that the debt markets were critical in the space race. Like, you you actually do need to finance rocketry with debt. You need efficient capital markets to build rockets. But everyone likes to look at rockets.
Speaker 1:No one wants to look at debt covenants. And so rocket engineers get all the credit when, in fact, some of the credit does, in fact, belong to the financiers that make, you know, large large scale industrial projects possible. People, you know, love the bridge, but they don't think about the financiers that make it possible. But as as silly as that sounds like, it really is an important step in the chain. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And AI, it might be that more than like the magical cure for cancer that you pull out of latent space. It's going to be tricky. Like, I think even if we do see a boom in cancer drugs and we hear testimonies from scientists that, oh, yeah, like AI definitely sped me up. Like, the ticker tape parade is gonna happen for the scientists. Like, we know Jennifer Dudena's name for discovering mRNA and CRISPR.
Speaker 1:Like, we don't know the software stack that she used when she was analyzing gene We gotta find out. We we do because that's the
Speaker 7:real hero. That's not the
Speaker 1:real hero. But it's an important hero in the story that we just don't tell because it's abstract and diffuse.
Speaker 4:Let's pull up this video from Architectural Digest Okay. Of this beautiful sustainable power plant with a ski slope on its roof.
Speaker 1:So you can actually ski on this? Wait. You ski on the grass? You can ski on grass?
Speaker 4:It works.
Speaker 1:I had no idea.
Speaker 4:I'm And presumably in winter Ew. There would be some snow on it.
Speaker 8:World is the building industry. The building industry accounts for one third of all c o two emissions, and we need to bring that down.
Speaker 4:Mhmm. This thing looks This so
Speaker 1:is cool. Is cool.
Speaker 8:Sustainability go hand in hand.
Speaker 4:Trey in the chat would be totally cool with more data centers in Virginia. I imagine if you had extreme sports on the roof.
Speaker 1:Yes. Do a deal with Red Bull, get the FPV drones out there. Centers. Yeah. I mean, the Olympics are coming.
Speaker 1:If you wanna build a data center in in LA, why not, build an Olympic village as well?
Speaker 8:On cities, we want to design the future of the buildings that we would like to live in. My name is Jakob Lange. I'm a partner and architect at the architecture firm BIG or Bjarke Ingels Group. We're standing here at Copenhill, the tallest mountain in Copenhagen.
Speaker 4:Wait. What? Well, he's calling the building a mountain.
Speaker 1:That's insane. A little more
Speaker 8:than ten years ago We started a competition to design the facade of this building. We were struggling for quite a while, but in one of the design meetings, we were talking about the fact
Speaker 1:that Sure magazine to get us this deal flow. Completely agree. Are you a Thrasher magazine guy?
Speaker 4:I love Thrasher.
Speaker 1:Thrasher's so good.
Speaker 4:I haven't been a subscriber in probably ten years,
Speaker 8:the only thing that comes out of the
Speaker 6:Yeah.
Speaker 4:How did we not know about this?
Speaker 1:This is amazing.
Speaker 7:Yeah. From the turban I knew about it.
Speaker 4:Buried in You did. You did.
Speaker 1:Buried in the European stagnation thesis is the most white people, white pills.
Speaker 4:Structured.
Speaker 7:I mean, this goes viral every, like, few months. I I've seen this a bunch on
Speaker 2:We gotta do it. You should post it.
Speaker 4:Feel like is no one talking about
Speaker 1:Yes. What's called? Yes. Yes. You got nothing But I'm saying
Speaker 7:people are talking about this.
Speaker 1:No. No one's talking
Speaker 4:about this.
Speaker 1:We're the first people to talk about this. Yeah. It feels like Apple would be one to do this. It's it's in line with the Google branding. Like, there's so many companies that are ready to sort of pick up what this is, you know, all about and and do a promo video.
Speaker 4:Put plants on the roof of the data center.
Speaker 1:For sure. That's that that that's a very easy one. You know, what takes
Speaker 4:a building that looks dystopian and cold
Speaker 1:Yeah. Also and industrial underground. Right? And then put the park on top of it. I don't know.
Speaker 1:It it just seems like there's so many easy ways. Maybe it is hard because you're in this, like, game theory, and that's why Meta's building in tents because they even the buildings are too slow to build. And so they, you know, if you add underground or you add roof, you know, plants on top, you're gonna have another three month delay. You're gonna lose the AI race. You're gonna be part of the permanent underclass in the Mag seven or something.
Speaker 1:They're worried about being part of the permanent underclass, and so they're racing. But something like that, I feel like would would pay back and and and pay dividends if it was beautiful.
Speaker 4:Matt over on X says, there's an abandoned Brooks Brothers office in my town would make a lovely data center. So he's he's taking the other sides. I think if you left the sign Yeah. And it was just Brooks Brothers, you kind of revitalize the sign Brooks Brothers. Redid the the kind of landscaping, but then put a data center in it.
Speaker 4:I love Let
Speaker 1:me tell you about Turbo Puffer. Serial vector and full text search built from first principles on object storage. Fast, 10x cheaper, and extremely scalable. And let me also tell you about Graphite, code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams like GitHub ship higher quality software faster.
Speaker 4:Let's head over to Time Magazine? Sileo, who's He came in pretty hot on the reaction. He said, Team Cope made the cover of Time. Yeah. The people versus AI.
Speaker 4:A lot of
Speaker 1:Behind the growing backlash. Mean, growing backlash is real. It actually makes a lot of sense to do a portrait and a profile on, all the different voices that are here because some of them are lawmakers, some of them are pundits, some of them are analysts, some of them are environmentalists, some of them are lawyers. All sorts of different folks.
Speaker 4:Did you read
Speaker 9:it yet, back.
Speaker 4:Why are you laughing?
Speaker 1:In protest.
Speaker 7:You I just won't Team Cope is funny.
Speaker 1:Team Cope is funny. But, yeah. People took this all over the place. The people versus the wheel, grunts from the silent majority dragging rocks and rolling is a drag. People are having a lot of fun, about this.
Speaker 1:I mean
Speaker 4:versus the car.
Speaker 1:The horses versus the car. At the same time, like, this, the backlash can have an actual impact. So you should not just write it off and be like, well, obviously, AI is gonna happen. So this is, you know, it's inevitable. It's like, no.
Speaker 1:These these like, we live in a democracy. Like, if they vote, no more data centers. Look at what happened to nuclear, people. Like, you keep comparing AI to splitting the atom. I was just watching some video, and and the guy was saying, like, it's like it's the AI is the most incredible human invention.
Speaker 1:It's up there right with with when we split the atom. And I'm like, well, I know how that ended. Like, we got a bunch of nuclear weapons that we didn't even fire at each other. It just became a cold war. So really zero economic value from that.
Speaker 1:Just a lot of people building and then putting them in silos. And then a couple nuclear power plants that eventually got regulated out of existence, and we never got a nuclear future of energy. And so it is possible that, like, society can just freak out and be like, actually, we're doing nonproliferation. Like, that's that's a possible outcome here.
Speaker 4:Like Hill says this is why we need data centers in space. Yeah. Elon looking pretty smart this week.
Speaker 1:Sure. For sure. Even
Speaker 4:if the timelines that have been thrown out are aggressive Yeah. On a longer time horizon
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. I can have
Speaker 4:Makes sense.
Speaker 2:Push back there.
Speaker 4:And Trey really, coming in with the most obvious solution, blimp data centers. Just put them over, put them over the Pacific.
Speaker 1:I love it.
Speaker 4:Float them over there.
Speaker 1:Well, let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all in one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web app servers, databases, more while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security.
Speaker 4:Rob Yep. Over on x has found some information Mhmm. On the Twitter deal trial. Is this the trial around the compensation
Speaker 1:Oh, I thought this was the other OpenAI
Speaker 4:case. This is This is different. So
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 4:I believe this is the case around the the Twitter employees that did not actually get their severance.
Speaker 1:It says the class action brought by former Twitter investors against Elon Musk. I don't I actually don't know that much about this particular case.
Speaker 5:But
Speaker 1:Wait. There was a pool of 92
Speaker 4:Twitter was worth more than 44,000,000,000?
Speaker 1:Well, maybe they had stock options that were canceled. Maybe maybe they are employees, but they're counted as investors in this case because it's a SEC, violation instead of an employment contract. I I I actually don't know. I'm completely speculating here. But, apparently, Elon Musk's popularity unpopularity is throwing a wrench in the trial because, quote, hate for Musk quickly narrows the jury pool in Twitter deal trial.
Speaker 1:A California judge quickly narrowed a pool of 92 prospective jurors Thursday, excluding excusing 38 potential jurors who said they couldn't be fair and impartial as Musk's attorney lamented. There are so many people who hate him so much.
Speaker 4:Yeah. So the trial according to Bloomberg laws, the trial involves claims from Twitter investors who say Musk violated securities law by publicly waffling over his decision to purchase the company Oh. And driving down its stock price.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And there's probably a lot of people who are are they they don't like Elon because of the
Speaker 4:Does that mean does that mean does that mean though so so he said, okay, I'm gonna buy this company. Yeah. And then he was trying to back out
Speaker 5:Yep.
Speaker 4:Because he was like, the price is insane.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:And then the stock declined and Yep. People Totally. And then it ended up getting bought up And now they're like, well, you Yep. You kind of misled. I don't know.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Okay. I wonder actually how this one let out. Yeah. Because he didn't make anyone sell the company if you if you're a Twitter shareholder and you believe that
Speaker 1:Yeah. Basically, I mean, every time you make a public statement, unless it's disclosed through the traditional SEC workflow, one person or five people can sell, and then they can hold you to account on on that on the impacts of that. And so, every possible move in the price of the company can come back to bite you based on what you were saying and whether or not it was above board.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:But the but the court will decide and apparently, they're gonna get a bunch of people on the jury who have never heard of Elon Musk. Yeah. There there are people out there. They're like, I I don't know the guy.
Speaker 4:Cooper, our strongest soldier
Speaker 1:Thank you, in the
Speaker 4:chat coming in, driving up those numbers.
Speaker 1:Let me tell you about Figma. Ship the best version, not the first one with Figma. You heard from Dylan Field yesterday. He introduced Claude Coe to Figma. Explore more options.
Speaker 4:And they liked each other. They liked each other.
Speaker 1:They did.
Speaker 4:Pub is saying they're calling it the most Canadian caption of all time. Team Canada hit the timeline after their loss to The United States saying silver shines just as bright.
Speaker 1:It's very Canadian.
Speaker 4:Absolutely brutal. We have a Canadian on our team is sitting over there shaking his head. He's hard hard to see from this angle. But we're all friends on this continent. There are We like good competition.
Speaker 5:There's a
Speaker 1:war in the community notes right now. People are saying silver actually shines brighter than gold, but gold is better. It actually doesn't. It also tarnishes much easier and becomes gold becomes dull. Gold is greater than silver.
Speaker 1:People are fighting it out over whether or not gold or silver They're coping it out. I think we yeah. They're coping it out. We know we know how it works at the Olympics. You wanna go for gold, and only America could take it home yesterday.
Speaker 1:Blake Robbins is reacting to the news that Meta's VR metaverse is ditching VR. This is from The Verge. We'll have to talk to Alex Heath, former Verge reporter, later today. This feels pretty clear the metaverse was actually just Roblox this whole time. Not Fortnite, not VR.
Speaker 1:This is extremely hard for me as a as a VR bull. I threw on the headset yesterday, watched about ten minutes of Blade Runner 2,049 before you called me and I had to take it off. But I was having a great experience watching a three d movie.
Speaker 4:You threw that on right when you got home?
Speaker 1:Right when I got home. I was like, I'm gonna chill for a little bit. Throw on Blade Runner 2,049. Reggie recommended it. So Hip City Reg.
Speaker 1:I was like, okay. I gotta do it. Put it on. But interrupted. There's other stuff going on.
Speaker 1:So didn't get through the whole movie, but still delightful experience. And VR is not dead. It's about to reanimate and come back from the grave, I predict, in the next in the next in the next four hundred years, I guarantee you, VR will be, like, like, kind of popular, like, sort of popular.
Speaker 4:It'll get to
Speaker 1:At least percent. 20 DAUs. Yeah. In the next four hundred years, I I I would take that bet.
Speaker 4:Matthew Ball dropped his state of video games in 2026. Boom. One of the standout lines was Roblox had a 150,000,000 daily users in 2025. Its quarterly engagement is now equal to Steam, PlayStation, and Fortnite combined. It's huge.
Speaker 4:Which is just absolutely wild. Should we should we click through this a
Speaker 1:little bit? So popular. Yeah. We can click through it. It's a huge presentation, and we'll have to have Matthew Ball on the show to really break it all down.
Speaker 1:But this is the report that I was sort of inspired by yesterday when I was talking about this interesting fact that, Matt Ball, shared on his Strathecari interview that when you look at video games, the video game market is not doing particularly well. You have to always segment out non China, and then there's also mobile versus console. Are people paying? Or is it ad based? There's a whole bunch of different sub segments.
Speaker 1:But just looking at non China growth in video games, like, all of the growth went to Roblox, And basically, everything else was either flat or down. And people are starting to just spend more time on endless feeds. They're on Instagram. They're on TikTok, or they're doing sports betting or watching TV or watching Netflix. There's a million different things that have bought for attention, and it used to be the greatest bargain in history.
Speaker 1:And Strauss Zelnick, the CEO of Take Two, maker of GTA and two k Games, got, in a lot of trouble at one point because he said, like, we should be charging per minute. And people are like, this is a nightmare. He's gonna charge per minute. He's like, no. No.
Speaker 1:No. I I just mean in terms of the value that we're delivering, we will you will we will take $60 from you, which is a lot of money, but we will give you GTA five, which you can play for a hundred hours and have a great time, and some people will play for more than that. And so on a per hour basis, you're paying, like, 50¢. Now comp that, he would say, comp that to going to the movies. You know, you pay $20, and you're there for two hours.
Speaker 1:That's $10 an hour for entertainment, Whereas with a video game, $50 for fifty hours, you're paying a dollar an hour. So he was just he was just driving home that it was a great value. That is no longer the case in the world where there's so much incredible entertainment that's basically free because it's ad supported. And the experience of scrolling an endless vertical social feed is now rivaling the level of entertainment that you get from video games. It used to be like, yeah.
Speaker 1:I'll go on Facebook and check some posts about see who posted, like, what they did this weekend, check-in with that. But I gotta go and play Counter Strike, or I gotta go play the actual game that's, like, really fun. Now it's a lot more competitive. Anything else?
Speaker 4:Yeah. I mean What else do got to I'll I'll kinda tap through. So global video game content sales had a strong twenty twenty five, growing 5% year over year and hitting a new all time high of about a 195,000,000,000, 10,000,000,000 more than the prior high in 2021.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:The industry high was achieved through new highs in each of p mobile PC and console too. So everything's up into the right. And fortunately, 2025 as with year as with years prior, boasted several new hit franchises and studios, while many older franchises and studios also achieved new highs. Mhmm. But despite three straight years of industry growth, a new record high for revenues, and a smattering of new hits each year, private funding for game makers fell another 55% in 2025.
Speaker 4:That is Yeah. Big decrease. There's so
Speaker 1:much going on in the video game industry and it's it's often overlooked because it's just like sort of off in its own little world. And the the the players are like subscale relative to the MAG seven, so they don't get as much as much attention, but it's a fascinating industry. Quickly, let me tell you about Vanta, automate compliance and security. Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform. Do you wanna talk about chill remote jobs or do you wanna stay on video games?
Speaker 5:Yeah. Let's talk. Do you want a chill remote job?
Speaker 4:No. I said that, but I lied. I don't I don't want a chill remote job. I actually love a high pressure job. I love office politics.
Speaker 4:I love being thrown into the fire. Last minute slide changes fuel me. I get high off an ad hoc ask. Corporate jargon is my love language. When I'm in office, I'm a lethal corporate machine.
Speaker 4:I'm in a God tier flow state right now. This is my favorite game.
Speaker 1:It's actually
Speaker 4:This is so good. I love I love this new genre of the
Speaker 2:of the I love guide.
Speaker 4:In the life at Yeah.
Speaker 1:Whoever said that office jobs are adult day cares was on to something. I don't get that.
Speaker 4:There's nothing like an ad hoc ask. Right, Tyler? Yeah. You feel like Tyler Tyler and
Speaker 1:Tyler lives for an ad hoc ask. He's like, yes and.
Speaker 4:You're like, yes, but let me throw on my white suit first.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Market's up.
Speaker 7:Let's go. I think at least it was. Yeah. We'll see.
Speaker 1:Well, I'm wearing green, and the market's green. That works. Right? Green's a good color.
Speaker 4:Casual Friday cope.
Speaker 1:Yes. More news in Paramount's $108,000,000,000 bid for Warner Brothers. It cleared an antitrust hurdle. What hurdle was that? The media group whose bid is bankrupt a bankrolled by Oracle billionaire,
Speaker 5:Donald Trump's under Larry Ellis.
Speaker 4:Brody and Slip. No. Oracle's doing fine.
Speaker 1:Said on Friday that its deal had complied with the US Department of Justice's second request review process, removing a critical impediment to US regulatory approval. I have no idea why there would be any antitrust worries here. The the antitrust question
Speaker 2:is always
Speaker 4:is that there's no antitrust
Speaker 1:with Paramount Here. And Warner Brothers. The question has always been Netflix. But I thought that was gonna get through, but we'll see where it lands. So Paramount's deal could still be blocked, but allowing but by allowing the ten day statutory waiting period to elapse under HSR or Hart Scott Rodino acts second request process.
Speaker 1:The DOJ is clearing the path for Paramount's deal on antitrust grounds. The government's saying they can go forward as long as they can agree to terms.
Speaker 4:Yep. Yeah. And and and zooming out, when you look back at the news from a month ago, it seemed obvious that the next step was to spend, a lot of time in Washington Yeah. Through the Ellisons. Yeah.
Speaker 4:And, try try that angle. It seems to be going well.
Speaker 1:And let's see if this spiked the, the Cal sheet chart. It's up a little bit. Will Paramount acquire Warner Brothers before, before September is at 52%? We need to find the other one, which is who will acquire who will acquire Warner Brothers on Calci. Let me see.
Speaker 1:Who will successfully take over Warner Brothers? Oh, Netflix is back up. Netflix is up 47%. Interesting. The lines have just been crossing constantly.
Speaker 1:They crossed
Speaker 4:They're dancing.
Speaker 1:Days ago. It's a it's a deadly dance, a tango. Well, it's been a lot of fun to follow it. I've been enjoying that.
Speaker 4:Let's pull up this video.
Speaker 1:While we pull this up, let me tell you about Century. Century shows developers what's broken and helps them fix it fast. That's why a 150,000 organizations use it to keep their apps working. Matthew McConaughey, we we talked a little bit about this, but it's it hits way harder when he says it himself. So let's play the clip.
Speaker 10:It's coming.
Speaker 11:Already here. It's already here.
Speaker 10:Don't deny it.
Speaker 11:Don't deny it.
Speaker 10:It's not enough. It may be for you, but it's not going to be enough to sit on the sidelines and make the moral plea.
Speaker 12:The moral plea
Speaker 10:that no, this is wrong. It's not going to last. There's too much money to be made and there's it's it's too productive. It's it's here. So I say, own yourself, voice, likeness, etcetera.
Speaker 10:Trademark it, whatever you got
Speaker 13:to do. Saw you did that.
Speaker 10:Own yourself. So when and if when it comes, not if it comes, no one can steal you. But they're gonna have to come to you to go, can I? Or they're gonna bring a breach and you'll have the chance to be your own agency and go, yeah, for this amount or no. Okay?
Speaker 10:It's coming. Is it going to be another category? Or is it going to infiltrate our category? It's damn sure going to infiltrate our category. I think it'll end up, does it become another category?
Speaker 10:Will we be in five years having films the best AI film, the best AI actor? Maybe. I think it might be that might be the thing is that becomes another category. I'm not sure. It's going to be in front of us in ways
Speaker 12:that we don't even
Speaker 1:see not watching movies not gonna know if it's AI or not.
Speaker 10:That's
Speaker 1:No AI is gonna get me to start watching movies. Question of reality.
Speaker 11:I don't watch them.
Speaker 4:That's it's
Speaker 10:more hazy than ever. And in a very exciting way, I think. Yeah. But also a scary way.
Speaker 1:This is great industry leadership. I I I love it.
Speaker 4:Very Yeah. So I I can see there being an incremental category.
Speaker 7:Yeah. That's
Speaker 4:sad. I still think AI will be used in every category.
Speaker 1:That's what he
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. He says he's definitely he he says he doesn't know the timeline and he's not sure exactly how this will come out, he says, like, might there might be a new category just like there's best animated film at the Oscars, but then CGI and animation works its way into the Avengers, which is not an animated film, but Thanos was animated with CGI. It just wasn't hand drawn. And so the categories blur together.
Speaker 1:Clearly, AI is coming for all sorts of different levels of the stack, and he's just saying that you shouldn't just sit by and hope that it doesn't happen. You should embrace and figure out how you fit in. Well, let's go over to the New York Stock Exchange. Do you wanna change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange.
Speaker 1:There's a fun clip
Speaker 4:on Many of our
Speaker 1:guests will be at At the New York Stock Exchange today.
Speaker 2:I see.
Speaker 4:So In just fifteen minutes.
Speaker 1:And the European kid was at Nicey, having some fun, going a little bit too far.
Speaker 5:Let's play
Speaker 1:the clip. Sorry. What's he doing? Can't
Speaker 11:touch us. What?
Speaker 1:That's the best that people have. If you're coming today going public and you're not allowed to touch it.
Speaker 12:Shelley Shelley, my family's gone
Speaker 14:public five times. I know I know
Speaker 11:what it's about this.
Speaker 1:That's the way.
Speaker 2:Don't Don't
Speaker 1:try money mog at the New York Stock Exchange. That's not gonna work, European kid. You gotta go. Come on. I'm sorry.
Speaker 1:You can't be here. You can't and you step away. You have
Speaker 14:to go.
Speaker 12:Do they realize who
Speaker 1:I am?
Speaker 2:We I'm sure they know who you are.
Speaker 1:We have
Speaker 2:to go.
Speaker 12:My family owed this bill.
Speaker 1:No. You you can't be here.
Speaker 4:You To be honest, when I read the caption, I thought I thought, it was Rich the kid gets escorted No. No. No. Rapper.
Speaker 1:The so so they're brothers, the European kid and my tech CEO. We ran into one of them in SF. I think
Speaker 4:we ran into Wait. There's two?
Speaker 1:There's two and they look identical. Wait. Did Are you not know you
Speaker 7:sure are you sure it's not the same guy?
Speaker 4:I thought it was the same I thought it was the same guy with two accounts, Wait. Two
Speaker 1:I don't know. We'll have to get to the bottom of this. It might be one person, two accounts. I thought they I have no idea. We'll have to get to the bottom of this.
Speaker 4:You you got got.
Speaker 1:I got yeah. It's, it's the prestige. I'm getting prestige, potentially. There might be a secret twin and he is act he's living life as a single person with two accounts when in fact it is two people. That's possible too.
Speaker 1:Let's not rule anything out. Yeah. Let's not take off our tin foil hats
Speaker 12:prematurely. Well
Speaker 1:Let's watch this
Speaker 4:David Herman. I love David. The Herminator.
Speaker 15:Drain pipe after being caught in a flood.
Speaker 4:Wait. Start it over.
Speaker 1:Yeah. This is an ad?
Speaker 15:Pulled into a drain pipe after being caught in a flood. A nearby officer rushed over to help, but he was quickly dragged in too. The rushing water forced them both through the 100 foot long pipe. They finally came out on the other side at Papa Giuseppe's kitchen.
Speaker 1:They served I love these hands. To warm
Speaker 15:you up from the flood along
Speaker 1:the It's funny because is that even AI? I'm pretty sure that's just like a video game.
Speaker 15:Especially on Valentine's Day. You and the officer will absolutely have a great time to recover from the flood.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I've seen I've seen a lot of this style of ad where it's some crazy, you know, TikTok explainer, and then it just cuts to, like and and you land at this
Speaker 15:A nearby officer rushed over to help, but he
Speaker 1:was quickly dragged. It is hilarious. Let me tell you about Cognition. They're the makers of Devon, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team.
Speaker 4:Ben, can you hear
Speaker 1:this? We gotta talk about
Speaker 4:Another Ben. Gotta make an ad like that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We do. We do. We do. You're Walk in.
Speaker 1:Where it's somebody like, you know, falling off of a plane and then they land, they fall through the cloud and then they land in the TVP and Ultradome and they're being interviewed by John and Jordi. There is a $36,500,000 waterfront compound for sale in the Florida Keys. Take a look
Speaker 4:at this picture.
Speaker 1:Finally, a white pill. Take a look at this picture. So it has 1,700 feet of shoreline and two five thousand square foot homes. You thinking what I'm thinking? Next door neighbors?
Speaker 4:That's right. That's right. That's right. We could do it. So so you remember, I think it not not Asana, the Atlassian.
Speaker 1:They did.
Speaker 4:They had this crazy feud. So so the founders of Atlassian, I think we read this
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 4:Yes. Some stories. So so they were they were besties. Yes. They built this massive company together, Wildly successful.
Speaker 4:Multi gen, you know, basically two decade run. Yeah. Incredible run. And they decide, you know, we've had incredible run. Let's let's keep the run going.
Speaker 4:Let's buy houses right next to each other. Yep. They end up getting a massive in a massive feud over
Speaker 2:it. Yeah.
Speaker 4:And I think it destroys the friendship. Hope hopefully, it's recovered by now.
Speaker 14:Yeah. But we could do it.
Speaker 1:Oh, you think you think we could do it?
Speaker 4:I think we could
Speaker 1:do it. You you don't think you'd be bothered by my industrial grade WiFi penetrating while you're trying to sleep?
Speaker 2:You don't think that would bother
Speaker 4:I I think that would be that would
Speaker 1:be that would be the straw that broke the counter.
Speaker 4:I'd be like, John, you have to turn off the WiFi after 10PM when we're sleeping. It disrupts the sleep.
Speaker 1:Stop listening to movies all night long at full blast volume. I don't care. I don't wanna see the second and third matrix or hear them through walls.
Speaker 4:You'd be you'd be in the backyard with your VR headset on, but playing
Speaker 1:But movie playing the audio fully and so you can still And then you'd be falling you'd
Speaker 4:be falling asleep Yes. With it on, so it'd just be blaring
Speaker 1:Exactly. Exactly.
Speaker 4:That would be the end of TPPN.
Speaker 1:That would be the end.
Speaker 4:So we won't be doing this.
Speaker 1:But what what a funny what a funny situation. So it's a 10 acre waterfront property in the Florida Keys.
Speaker 4:The rest has just moved in together.
Speaker 1:No. You need you need two properties that are as close as possible next to each other. And then they have, like, separate beaches, but the houses are like your windows are looking directly at the other person. It's such a weird property. So, Eddie Garcia bought the is the Isla, Isla Murata property for about fifteen years ago.
Speaker 1:Waterman specializes in developing master planned communities throughout Florida, Garcia said. He originally intended to create a small development on the land, but he wound up falling in love with the site and instead turned it into a family compound. My kids grew up there fishing, lobstering, crabbing, you name it. He was on open claw before it even existed. He lives full time in Miami with his children in college.
Speaker 1:He said the property is too big for just him and his wife, but you got you got his and hers mansions. What's wrong with that? When Garcia bought the property, it was mostly empty except for a 16 slip marina. That's eight boats per person, and two cottages built around the nineteen fifties, all of which remain on the property today. He built two side by side West Indy style homes in 2013, and then he ran it back in 2015.
Speaker 1:Each is 5,000 square feet with four bedrooms and a pool. Pretty, pretty interesting property. Also, for you Boston sickos out there, there's a $22,000,000 Beacon Hill home. It's become one of Boston's priciest townhouses. It's a six bedroom residence.
Speaker 1:It was converted from multiple rental units into a single family home. The development company Crest City Capital purchased the building for 8,900,000.0 in 2023, then they converted it. They gut renovated the house, which had multiple rental unit, turned into a single family residence. The buyer's identity couldn't be determined. Tracy Campion of Campion and Company, who represented the purchaser, didn't respond.
Speaker 1:But there's some beautiful photos here. It's a Greek revival house built in 1825. That's an old, old house. You don't see a lot of eighteen hundreds properties out here in California, but you do in Boston. You see
Speaker 4:Nicey, 1792.
Speaker 1:That's a good one.
Speaker 4:That's an OG.
Speaker 1:It's located in one of Boston's most upscale neighborhoods. Have you spent any time in Boston? Have you ever been?
Speaker 4:I don't think I've ever been.
Speaker 1:You've never been? Beautiful city.
Speaker 4:I And don't think I'll ever go.
Speaker 1:Why not?
Speaker 4:I just think I I I No. I mean, think think about the list of I I I I don't like traveling that much.
Speaker 5:Yeah.
Speaker 4:I I like being I like being in California. And when I and I but I but at times I enjoy traveling. Yeah. But there's easily 400 destinations that I would go to
Speaker 5:Before Boston. Before Boston.
Speaker 1:It's not in the top 400?
Speaker 4:I don't think Boston is in the top 400 if you really break it down. But I like to You're travel
Speaker 1:in the pops.
Speaker 4:I like to travel. I like to go somewhere. Yeah. I've I've done the traveling where you do
Speaker 1:Yeah. You stop by.
Speaker 4:Two two days
Speaker 1:here, two days etcetera. East Coast trip.
Speaker 4:But I like to go set up New
Speaker 1:York and then Rhode Island and then Boston and then Maine. Like, could have a wonderful little excursion on the East Coast. You should do it sometime. Broaden your horizons.
Speaker 4:Road trip. If we were doing a road trip.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We definitely stopped there. College tour maybe. Let me tell you about Gusto, the unified platform for payroll benefits and HR built to evolve with small and medium sized businesses.
Speaker 4:Tyler, we originally met because Tyler was commenting saying that we should do a college tour
Speaker 1:Maybe.
Speaker 4:In q one of last year.
Speaker 7:Maybe. Yeah. Well, I think it was you guys said you were gonna do a college tour. But then I said, you gotta go to Michigan because they have the biggest stadium in the Western Hemisphere.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes.
Speaker 6:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Billing a 110,000 fans in one stadium would be truly
Speaker 4:We got some work to do.
Speaker 1:We need we need quite the guest lineup. We need to stack it.
Speaker 4:We need stack it.
Speaker 1:The Tiny Lake Tahoe enclave with some of America's priciest waterfront homes.
Speaker 4:Absolutely wild this week. Did you see that video bears bears at North Star? I think they were just running across the ski slope with people on it.
Speaker 1:That's awesome.
Speaker 4:Kids were having to like pull out of the way.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I saw Growing Daniel posting about how they're actually really friendly and you can just go up to them and pet them. Is that right?
Speaker 4:Yeah. I think so.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I think so. Crystal Bay's median list price of 14,900,000.0 makes it one of the most expensive places to buy property in The United States. It's straddling the the California Nevada border. Lake Tahoe's 72 mile shoreline is home to some of the country's most coveted real
Speaker 4:Actually, the the property is
Speaker 1:Well, no. Just Tahoe in general. Like the the Oh. Lake Tahoe
Speaker 4:I'm saying
Speaker 1:the is both
Speaker 4:California and Nevada. So Having a property that was half half I'm
Speaker 1:sure that might exist. I don't know. That's probably pretty hard to zone or like actually get done. But it has to exist somewhere in America. I know that there's there's a spot in America you can stand on and be in four states simultaneously or maybe three states because the the the lines, like, intersect.
Speaker 1:So you can stand on that spot and be technically in four states.
Speaker 7:You could just do the thing, like like the house we just saw in The Keys where it's like kind of two properties.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 7:That's like Yeah.
Speaker 1:One person's not paying income tax, the other person's paying terrible income tax. Yeah. Very real. Incline Village is this is the is the I think the the city that's the least in Nevada, but technically in Nevada. So it's the most Californian Nevada city.
Speaker 1:So it's a popular San Francisco I'm sure the
Speaker 4:broader population of Nevada has really high opinion of of Incline Village. Incline Village. For sure.
Speaker 1:Crystal Bay is roughly home to roughly 200. It's a community on Nevada's North Side, ranks among the priciest waterfront markets with a median listing price of 14,900,000.0. The Enclave is defined by its mid century glamour. Around the nineteen sixties, it serves as a playground for entertainer Frank Sinatra, who at one point owned the local Cal Neva Resort and Casino.
Speaker 4:Yep. Eric in the chat says Cal Neva Resort is exactly that in the in the same town as
Speaker 1:Cal, it's Nevada. Yep. Cool. Very interesting. Today, it is a tale of two realities.
Speaker 1:A town with a faded commercial strip that sits adjacent to multimillion dollar real estate, residential real estate favored for steep slope privacy and elite lakefront living. So, it's just four miles Northeast of Crystal Bay. It's bustling is the bustling Incline Village where there is a hospital, grocery stores, and the Diamond Peak Ski Resort across the California state line is the community of Kings Beach provides a more rustic feel. The North Shore attracts homeowners seeking a constant outdoor connection. Winter offers skiing while summer centers on the lake for boating, fishing, paddle boarding, holding an American flag while you wakeboard.
Speaker 1:That's very popular out there in Tahoe, of course. There's something interesting going on.
Speaker 4:Is it legal to wakeboard up there without holding a flag?
Speaker 1:Jail instantly. Yeah. For for years, Crystal Bay's commercial core had been defined by two stalled icons. Sinatra's former Calneva closed in 2013 and the Tahoe Biltmore Hotel and Casino, which closed in 2022. These vacant structures have given the state line a ghost town feel with the Crystal Bay Club Casino as the area's main entertainment and music venue.
Speaker 1:However, a revitalization effort is underway. The Calneva is being transformed into the high end Lake Tahoe proper resort and casino slated to open in 2027 signaling a possible shift from faded casino era relics to modern luxury destination. Let's go. Let's hear it for Lake Taco. Lake Taco.
Speaker 4:Everybody out there. Let's give it up for Lake Arrowhead.
Speaker 1:I'm a big bear guy. I'm a SoCal guy. You're not gonna catch me in Tahoe. You're catch me at Lake Arrowhead. House of the week.
Speaker 4:We're the people.
Speaker 1:The house of the week. We will tell you about the house of the week after we tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. The this the house of the week is a modernist home tucked into the Los Angeles hillside. Let's hear it for Los Angeles.
Speaker 1:Wall Street maybe 3,000 miles away, but they're showing some love to homegrown houses here in Los Angeles. Was owned by
Speaker 4:saying it's a hillside masterpiece.
Speaker 1:Luxury lovers who the Hollywood house was designed by Rudolph Schindler. For journalist Susan Orlean and her husband John Gillespie, a house has never been just a place to live. It's not just a place to live. It's an entire experience. Fans of modernist architecture
Speaker 9:Wait. Read that again.
Speaker 1:I'm messing with you. I'm messing with you. Really?
Speaker 9:I I I live that.
Speaker 1:Fans of modernist architecture, they spent their earliest dates visiting Frank Lloyd Wright's Falling Water in Pennsylvania. When the pair moved to Los Angeles in o seven, so Erling could research a book, they quickly fell in love with the work of Rudolf Schindler, an Austrian born architect who helped define modernism in the city. And so, there's a beautiful house up for sale. They did a four and a half year renovation. Did you hear the drama about there was a there was a reporter was it at Reuters or something?
Speaker 1:But he was accused of using AI to write all of his, Olympics coverage and it had all the telltale signs of AI generated sort of slop. And the editor in chief backed the journalist and said, no. He always writes like that. That's what he sounds like.
Speaker 4:They trained on him.
Speaker 1:They trained on him and then Pangram came in and said, well, we pulled all, we we we pulled the receipts and he didn't use to write like that before AI. Oh. And so you can look at
Speaker 4:the chart. Maybe maybe he's he's really bullish on AI. Yeah. And so he only will read outputs now. He doesn't read any organic
Speaker 1:Maybe that or or maybe he's just aping the style of ChatGPT four o because he thinks it's a good aesthetic. I don't know. Could could be trying to troll. Could be because I I I could probably write an essay that that triggers Pangram 100% AI if I put my mind to it and without without the help of AI. I could just sit there and say, this isn't this, it's that, blah blah blah blah.
Speaker 4:I don't I I actually think that'd a good challenge. I don't think you could. I think it would I think pain Tyler challenge? Tyler challenge. Write something by hand.
Speaker 7:A 100% is really hard.
Speaker 1:A 100 get get a 100%.
Speaker 4:Over 90%.
Speaker 1:You think you can do over 90?
Speaker 4:In the next between now and when the Palmer interview ends, you have to write 500 words
Speaker 1:Well, that score above. Minimum. Right?
Speaker 4:Yeah. I think it's it's a few 100 words. Right? Yeah. You have to write more words in the pangram minimum and score above 90%.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You have to kick it off with like, sorry, as an AI model, I can't I can't answer this, but I'll try anyway. This isn't just a this, it's that. Anything else you'd like me to expand this prompt with? And then you'll trigger it.
Speaker 1:That's that's the hack. You think?
Speaker 4:And if you win, you get a $50 gift card to Matu to pick yourself up some cheesesteak sandwiches.
Speaker 1:I was thinking something book related maybe.
Speaker 4:Tonight. So there's $50 50 whole dollars on the line.
Speaker 1:50 smackaroos. Go. Okay. Labelbox, RL environments, voice, robotics, evals, and expert human data. Labelbox is the data factory behind the world's leading AI teams.
Speaker 1:Anyway, Jay Leno, he was turning heads because he was caught driving a 119 year old car, a steam car.
Speaker 4:You caught me. You caught me.
Speaker 1:He didn't call the cops. To see. Look at this car. This is amazing. I didn't a 119 years old.
Speaker 4:We should ask Palmer if he has any
Speaker 1:steam cars. Nineteen o seven?
Speaker 2:Do you
Speaker 4:see the steam actually pushing
Speaker 1:out at the bottom? Do you do you load firewood into it? Like, how do you generate the steam? This is incredible. What he's the he's the final car guy.
Speaker 1:Like, he got the McLaren f one, and then he went older, and then he went older, and he finally got, like, the first car
Speaker 4:He's gonna get into horses big time.
Speaker 1:That would be hilarious. He was just like, yeah. Like, real car guys, like, we know, like, you should just get a horse. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:That's the that's the end. That's the end. He literally predicted vibe coding in 2023. Yeah. Other than George Hotts on the Lex Friedman podcast.
Speaker 14:I don't doubt that these models are going to first become useful to me, then be as good as me, and then surpass me. Like, I think in two years, I'm gonna start using these plug ins
Speaker 16:Yeah.
Speaker 14:A little bit. And then in five years, I'm gonna be heavily relying on some AI augmented flow. And then in ten years Do you think you'll ever get to a 100%? I think it's all generated. Our niche becomes oh, I think it's over for humans in general.
Speaker 14:No more programmers left. That's where we're going. Well, unless you want handmade code, maybe they'll sell it on Etsy. It's just handwritten code. Doesn't have that machine polish to
Speaker 2:it.
Speaker 14:It has those slight imperfections that would only be written
Speaker 5:by a
Speaker 14:person. Look, I don't doubt that these
Speaker 4:It's over. So good. We're back. He's truly so good.
Speaker 1:It's over. We're back. Let me tell you about vibe.co. We're d to c brands, b to b startups, and AI companies advertise on streaming TV, pick channels, target audiences, and measure sales just like on Meta.
Speaker 4:This was quite interesting. Somebody over on X called Levi Mhmm. Says two weeks ago, the Epstein Files podcast didn't exist. Oh, Today, it's about to cross 500,000 downloads and sitting in Apple podcast top 20 series between the New York Times and ABC and NBC News. Yeah.
Speaker 4:I vibe coded every episode with Claude from real Epstein court documents. So so basically, he just like fully generated
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:A podcast. Yeah. Yeah. It is charting. Yeah.
Speaker 4:So this
Speaker 1:For something like this, it makes a ton of sense to just programmatically, like, sort of put everything together because it's there's so many files. It's a perfect use case for for AI to sort of like synthesize comb
Speaker 4:And there is there is unlimited demand for Epstein related content. Totally. Totally.
Speaker 1:Anyway, we have Palmer Lucky in the restream waiting room. Let's bring him in to the TVP And Ultradome. Palmer, how are you You are
Speaker 6:doing
Speaker 4:You are live, sir.
Speaker 1:Can you hear us okay?
Speaker 12:Yep. I hear you loud and clear though with a little bit of delay. So we'll try to Okay. Keep it zippy.
Speaker 4:Well, we're gonna say probably five words in total and you're just gonna go crazy.
Speaker 1:Tell us what's happening.
Speaker 12:Tell us what's happening. So, I mean, Trump is complaining about tariffs. Yes. Iran is on the brink of war.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 12:And Erebor, the the the new the the new bank for the tech community building things that actually matter has officially received this charter and become operational. So it's a pretty good set of things that are going on.
Speaker 1:Big hit. Congratulations.
Speaker 4:Big hit.
Speaker 1:Take us back in When did this project start? What was the inciting element? Why is this important? How'd you pick this to work on?
Speaker 12:Look, there's a lot of there's a lot of things that I could point to, but it really boils down to I've been looking at starting a bank for a while primarily for my own personal use because there weren't banks out there that really understood my business, my businesses, the things that I was doing. Silicon Valley Bank was doing a reasonable job, but then they went out of business and took everybody's money with them and had to have the government bail everybody out. I think that was really kind of the thing that that got me very serious about it. I realized that you didn't have banks that were aligned with The United States, interests that were aligned with deep tech, hard tech, energy, the things that are really complex and hard to understand but that do really matter that could also serve them in a meaningful way. I mean, you have farmers banks that serve communities that are doing agriculture.
Speaker 12:You have banks certainly that are doing oil and gas quite well, but when it comes to tech, it's a pretty sparse field. And so I I I started to think, well, how do you build a bank that could serve those things? How could you do it a very conservative way, very very low risk way where you can ensure you're not gonna go out of business, you're not gonna force everyone to rely on government bail outs. You may not be able to survive a total financial collapse. Yeah.
Speaker 12:Banks rarely can, but you can at least be the last man standing. And so thinking about that and then also a lot of things that new technology enables, like using US dollar backed cryptocurrencies to have $3.65, $24.07 settlement of payments, which is something that a lot of businesses need and very few get. You kind of stack all these things together and it becomes clear that there's there's room for a company to to to be a real bank for real companies doing real things.
Speaker 1:So is there a network effect there? Because if I'm on Arabore and Jordy's on Arabore and we can both have $24.07 settlement, but someone else is on a different bank and they don't have twenty four seven settlement, we're gonna have a good experience and then maybe to get out of the network. How does that work?
Speaker 12:I think that there will be network effects, but to be honest, whatever network effects are, it will probably be pretty short lived. Mhmm. I think that pretty quickly, everyone is gonna realize that they need to support these things. And I think that when like, seeing this administration's support for using specifically dollar backed stablecoins. They're not saying we're gonna move everybody off of the dollar.
Speaker 12:We're gonna move them off of, you know, the The United States currency as the reserve currency for world. But I think probably most banks are gonna get drug into this. The difference is that we are trying to do it from the start. So so so is there a network effect? Probably.
Speaker 12:But I think most of the forward looking companies that would value that network effect, that one in particular, see see see that in the next few years, probably all banks are gonna be forced to adopt this to be competitive.
Speaker 4:So what is what is the ideal banking experience for you besides stability and low risk? Are are is being able to talk to somebody, is that a bug? Should we just is is AirBoard just gonna be, you know, a chatbot that you say talk to a human and it says, unfortunately, I cannot do that. I have an AI chatbot.
Speaker 12:I think it's gonna be a long time before we hand things off to the chat pods if only for regulatory reasons. Like, set aside the risk, is a huge factor. You set aside the fact that we have our own banking rails which are extremely efficient and that we can settle at any time. I mean, those are huge factors on their own. But even if you knock off kind of all of these all of these obvious advantages, there's a lot of other things that you get from having a bank that is strongly aligned with The United States, strongly aligned with US interests, strongly aligned with US Department of War and also the intelligence community.
Speaker 12:And then there there's there's a lot of ways that that manifests. For example, one of the things that we're doing is rather than working with the intelligence community only under court order to kinda go and, you know, respond when they think there's crime going on in the platform, We're preemptively going out there and saying, no. We're gonna work with them from the very, very beginning to help make fraud almost impossible on our platform, which is great for me too because it means that people who want to engage in fraud are gonna go to other banks. It means that people who don't want to engage in fraud are going to be thrilled about being on a platform that doesn't have that type of activity on it and to the extent that it exists inside of their own platform against their will, they know that they have a willing partner that is willing to work with the government rather than hide these, you know, hide these things. I'd say maybe think of it as like the opposite of HSBC where they were banking the cartels and desperately trying to avoid any sort of government intervention that would make that clear to the public markets.
Speaker 12:It would put Erobor way at the other end of that spectrum. I think there's also a lot of other banks that, you know, whether whether they're good or bad people is irrelevant. You might have good people who nonetheless are very beholden to European markets, Chinese markets, other foreign markets that they need to keep happy either because they wanna keep them happy and make money or because they don't want their executives in those jurisdictions to get arrested. Aragorn is taking a very different approach. We're saying, you know what?
Speaker 12:We're an American company. We're an American bank that supports American companies, and we will comply with US law, but we will not comply with spurious rulings from people who have no real jurisdiction or authority over us. And you'll find a very hard time finding a bank that takes that position. I'm not aware of any other than us.
Speaker 1:How do you think about rolling out products? A bank can do everything from mortgages to equipment financing to venture debt to capital raises, take someone public. That's kind of what you know, you go to a big bank, they're gonna help you IPO.
Speaker 12:What do
Speaker 1:wanna do first?
Speaker 12:That I right now yeah. We we look. We've just barely opened, so give us a little bit of time. The products that we are prioritizing are based entirely on the customer feedback that we're getting, the things that they tell us they need, the things that they tell us that we can most help with. In a way, the existence of a bank to me is almost this antiquated thing.
Speaker 12:Like, you you would hope that companies could really just do all of this stuff themselves or at least most of it themselves, but the the regulatory climate, the way that the banking system works requires that you have this intermediary in the form of a regulated bank to make these things happen. And so I I kind of just think of our business as part and parcel of these companies that need us, and we're gonna work very, very close with them closely with them and focus on the things that they care about. That's probably not going to be, for example, you know, residential mortgages, but things like equipment financing, very conservative you know, very conservatively played where it's not gonna turn into a risk management problem, allowing them to work with the legacy banking system and plugging into that in the least painful way. These are things that we have a lot of customers who are very interested. Oh, and we need to not lose their money.
Speaker 12:Yeah. If we can do that, we'll be doing better than many other banks.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes.
Speaker 4:Talk about the trade offs of going the charter route. You know, the last ten years, most of the banking products that founders have used were built on top of existing charters or or Sure. Spreading deposits across multiple
Speaker 12:avoid getting a charter at all. They wanna be a fintech company and they basically will dance around the fact that realistically what they're doing is basically being a bank. Look, there's a lot of things that you can do without having your own charter. There's things you can do partner with other companies. There's a lot of things you cannot do without having your
Speaker 4:own anti anti hyper growth. Like, you can't just to 50,000,000,000 of deposits tomorrow even if there's the demand. Right? So maybe
Speaker 12:we we we decided that we needed to get our own charter because of the type of bank we were gonna try to run and the ability to have the buck stop with us. The moment that you're dependent on somebody else for the key infrastructure, the key risk management, the key licensure questions, they can kick you off the platform. They can be forced to kick you off the platform. They might and maybe they're doing it for good reasons. Maybe they're doing it for bad reasons.
Speaker 12:I mean, you've seen this play out, for example, with Steam and their payment processors and their banks and their payment processors' banks where they're basically censoring games because there's some circle of people who all claim it's not them pointing down the chain. It's that guy, it's that guy, that guy, it's that guy. But they all agree, even if they can't agree, who's causing the censorship, that if you don't censor, they're going to drop you, they're going to drop your account, they're going to debank you, they're going to depaim it you. And so one of the things that you have to ask yourself when you're making yourself dependent on another bank or another payment company is, am I setting this up where they get to make my decisions for me? And are they making their decisions for me, or is the Chinese Communist Party making those decisions?
Speaker 12:Is some political party that is extremely hostile to some business on our network the the one actually making that decision. So if you don't control your own charter, if you don't control your own destiny, the buck doesn't stop with you and you're always gonna have to keep other parties happy. And I I think that was not something that we're interested in. We wanted to be able to run the bank the way that we think it needs to be run. And if we are debanking somebody, we are gonna have to take responsibility for that.
Speaker 12:And I think that actually leads to much better behavior. I would love to see that type of behavior across the industry.
Speaker 4:Physical branches. How are you thinking about that?
Speaker 12:I think we're gonna start with Fort Knox, and we'll expand from there.
Speaker 4:I like it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Maybe actually dive deeper there. Like, what is a bank these days? I think most people can conceptualize, like, setting up a crypto wallet that holds coins. But when you wanna hold real dollars, you don't actually have a physical bank vault, I imagine.
Speaker 1:So once you get the charter, does that just give you the ability to, like, maintain a database and a ledger? Like, what is a bank?
Speaker 12:What is a bank? I mean, there's lots of forms it can be. I think if you want all the details, you can actually read through a lot of our applications. Some of it's actually a matter of public record and you can see that. Andoril will sorry, not Andoril.
Speaker 12:Erebor will have a physical vault. Oh, And we will have a lot of treasure in it. So Okay. We are not trying to be a pure digital, pure Interesting. You know, pure company.
Speaker 12:And in fact, a lot of the companies that are very interested in working with us want us to have secure actual vaulted storage. I'm not saying that that's going to be the first thing that we focus on, that's our key differentiator, but we are not a we are not a bank of the We are we are we are we are we are of TerraFirma.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Last time you came on, we talked a lot about Mod Retro. I'd love an update on the m 64. What makes that product special? Where did you go further with this project than with the chromatic?
Speaker 1:Just general, like, how you're thinking about the m 64?
Speaker 12:Well, for people who aren't familiar with it, the m 64 is a tribute to the Nintendo 64 that I'm building, one of the greatest multiplayer consoles of all time. We're building a console that is compatible with all classic n 64 games. We're re releasing a lot of classic n 64 games so that you can buy them if you don't already have them. We're actually doing new releases of canceled n 64 games that never even made it to market, either because they were canceled and ported to GameCube or because they ran out of money or because the studios imploded for interpersonality reasons. It's there's a lot of cool stuff coming out.
Speaker 12:The m 64, I guess, the main update is that it's in mass production right now. It is it is not eventually coming. It is in mass production right now. We've decided we're not gonna launch it until we build up sufficient stock to meet the demand. One of the mistakes I think we made with the mod retro chromatic, which was a tribute to the Game Boy and Game Boy Color, was that we started selling them and then all of sudden we sold out.
Speaker 12:And then you have people who hear about it, they read about it, their friends are all talking about it, they go try to buy one and they can't buy one because it's sold out. And there's a question, will they remember to come back and buy it some other time? Will they still feel like going and immediately Yeah. Buying Exactly. And so we we you kind of end up with this with this dead end call to action.
Speaker 12:And so we've decided this time and by the way, this is especially bad for the game publishers that we're working with. Let's say that it's someone who's re releasing a game or somebody who's doing a brand new game, some of the indie developers we're we're working with on the Chromatic. They're out there promoting their game. They're trying to market their game. They're doing a whole marketing activation, trying to convince people, hey, come and buy my new Game Boy game.
Speaker 12:Come and buy my new Nintendo 64 game. Well, what happens if you can't buy the console? A lot of people like, oh, I'll come back later and buy it, and then they don't. And so what we want to do is not let down our developer partners this time and make sure that we maintain stock. So, the goal is that the m 64, no matter how many people hit our website, is not going to sell out.
Speaker 12:And so, we are mass producing, we're stockpiling, I think tens of thousands of them so far, more and more to come.
Speaker 4:What is the what is the soon. What's the supply chain actually like right now? We've covered the the gamer rebellion against Medical. Against AI Yeah. Memory.
Speaker 1:Gamers are rising up.
Speaker 12:You know, the supply chain is okay because of the type of hardware that we're building. Sure. There's a lot of consumer hardware right now where people are trying to buy memory and it's a huge problem. But remember that the Nintendo 64 doesn't have exactly a lot of memory. You know, it had the what was 16 megabytes by default, 32 megabytes with the expansion pack.
Speaker 12:And so it turns out that you don't need that much memory
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 12:To perfectly replicate the Nintendo 64 original hardware.
Speaker 3:Can you
Speaker 12:Maybe it might be it might it might it might be actually the least impact less the least memory impacted consumer electronics product of the year.
Speaker 4:And so this was this was your plan then all along.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You saw this
Speaker 4:guy. AI boom was coming and you said, I'm gonna make the the final console.
Speaker 12:Yeah. Now we gotta return to monkey. We got we gotta go to go back to the beginning. I mean, really, what am I doing here with with 32 megabytes of I mean, you you remember what you remember what Bill Gates said. Right?
Speaker 12:What what was it? 64 kilobytes of RAM ought to be enough for anyone? Yep. Let let's let's let's figure out how to use AI to yeah. Let's figure out how to use AI to build applications that fit within reasonable memory footprints.
Speaker 12:Oh. I'm only half kidding. I think you might have seen me going back and forth with Shamath on Twitter Yeah. A couple weeks ago talking about how this AI software platform for building building software using AI should definitely support x port to Windows XP Service Pack three compatible applications. And I really am only half kidding.
Speaker 12:There there is actually a lot of government hardware that is still running those, financial hardware that's still running these, mostly offline stuff. Yeah. And so having apps that can run on those is actually useful. But, man, it feels crazy to need a few gigabytes of RAM to have a start menu. It feels pretty crazy that you need 16 gigabytes of RAM to take thirty minutes to search through a bunch of text files.
Speaker 12:Surely, we can do better than this.
Speaker 1:Can you talk a little bit about how you think about gaming in the concept of just raising the next generation kids? I have three three kids, and Right. I think I could probably get an emulator and run it on an iPad and slam that over to my kid's face and he might not know the difference. But is there another angle to the m 64 that is about, like, some of the some of the things that you can't do with it are actually good Sure. For the world maybe.
Speaker 12:I mean, you have to remember that the gaming industry, like many industries, figured out what actually worked a long time ago. They figured out how to make fun games. They figured out how to make things that make people keep coming back. But it's moved from innovation to extraction. And I will note, I stole that line from Nirav Patel, founder of Framework, because he put it so much better than I did.
Speaker 12:But there's these industries that have moved from innovation to extraction, and they're now in the extraction phase where they try to make tons and tons and tons of money, and actually pushing the limits is not the top priority for some huge majority of the dollars that are in industry. And so there's a lot of stuff that you can learn, especially when you're learning it from the ground up by going back to when people were just getting the basics right, when they were still innovating, building things that were really compelling to people. I I recently had a kid. I I might have a second on the way. I'm planning on starting them with I would don't even if I'd say the classics.
Speaker 12:This isn't like a vintage play. It's it's starting them with a good foundation. That foundation happens to be largely old games.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 12:But I am not gonna be throwing them into the slot machine micro transaction gamble rama that is dominating kids games today. It just seems like a like a like a crazy thing to do.
Speaker 1:It's a Skinner box. Yeah. Don't go in the Skinner box. Vibe coding. What would your life be like if vibe coding existed when you were 20?
Speaker 1:Advice for
Speaker 4:Or 12.
Speaker 1:People who are 20 now in the world of vibe coding. You went into hardware very early. That feels like a great move. Is that still a great move? Walk us through all
Speaker 12:that. I mean, the the the biggest beneficiaries of vibe coding are going to be the hardware nerds like me. It's going to be it's going to be the the shape rotators, not the word cells. Everyone's focused on on on how the words on how the word cells are going to be wiped out by AI, but but for the shape rotators, it's gonna be incredible. Mhmm.
Speaker 12:You know, I was always a pretty terrible software engineer. I'm I'm I'm not a programmer by trade. I've taught myself enough to glue things together and make them work. But when I started my first company, Oculus, or actually, when I started Mod Retro when I was 14 or 15, you know, I I knew just barely enough about software. If I would have been able to build crappy stuff by outsourcing it to a computer, I actually would have been able to accomplish things a lot faster than trying to do it myself.
Speaker 12:And people might say, Palmer, you should have just learned to code. You know, you should should have should have just learned to do it yourself. But I think it's pretty easy to look at my track record and realize, I started Oculus when I was 19 after building prototypes since I was 15. I was only able to accomplish what I accomplished because I focused on what I was good at, which was optomechanics, a little bit of electrical, and then the product integration of all of these different components. I didn't have time to learn to program.
Speaker 12:If I'd spent another year or two learning to program at even a reasonable level, I would have been two years behind on everything else. And so I am a big fan of vibe coding even if everything that comes out of it is slop, even if it is all shit. It's better than I was able to make.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. How are you thinking about VR these days? I recently watched The Matrix from start to finish in an Apple Vision Pro. I enjoyed it. It feels like the only real thing that you can do these days is just the home theater if you don't have a home theater.
Speaker 1:But it doesn't feel like the industry's embraced that at all. And everyone's sort of writing down their investments and pulling back at a time when the display technology does seem to be good enough for that narrow use case if you cut out the weight and move things around. But where do you see this where do you where do you want consumer VR to go? And then where do you think it actually is going?
Speaker 12:So I will challenge your premise there, which is that people are pulling back. I think that's driven mostly by people sensationalizing meta, firing a bunch of people. But you have to remember, they got rid of 10% of the Reality Labs team in one layoff. Remember that they have something like eight or 9% annual churn naturally and organically, not including firing.
Speaker 5:So Sure.
Speaker 12:I mean, what you're really talking about is basically pulling six months of churn forward into a single month. Sure. And they're still spending more on VR than anybody by an order of magnitude. They've said they are not spending less on content. They're just not putting it into first party stuff like Facebook or Meta Horizon.
Speaker 12:You might have seen they've announced Meta Horizon is no longer a VR app as of yesterday. It is now a mobile focused app only. So what they've done is they basically killed a few of these failing efforts that didn't make sense, and they're now putting those resources into things that are working. And so I I I've I I wrote a I wrote a I wrote a bit about this on on Twitter where people need to understand this is not the end of VR. It's not it's not collapsing.
Speaker 12:They are still spending an enormous amount of money. They're bigger than anybody by an order of magnitude. I I and I think if you pay attention to what's gonna be coming out from Meta and others over the next twelve months, you're gonna see a lot of progress. Like, Apple Vision Pro, yes, they've so, yes, Apple Vision Pro was ahead of everybody on visual quality, on display quality. But let me tell you a short story.
Speaker 12:Mhmm. Imagine that an American company went to a Japanese display vendor and they said, we want you to sell us your new four k micro OLED displays. The company gives them samples of those micro OLED displays. The samples cost about a thousand dollars each because the yield on that production line is only about 10%. In other words, 90% of the displays coming off the production line are not up to par, they're not working, and that's because these are engineering samples.
Speaker 12:They're not meant to actually be a working product. And they said, listen, here's our engineering samples, just wait two years and the yield is gonna be up to 90%. We'll be able to sell these to you for a couple $100. And then imagine that that American tech company had a a guy named Tim Apple call them up and say, no. We're gonna build a product with this right now today using our engineering samples.
Speaker 12:They said, but Tim Apple, that's crazy. That means that your headset was gonna cost like $3,000. He said, I don't care. I'm going to sell a headset that should launch in '27 Yeah. In twenty twenty four, twenty twenty five, and I'm gonna do it for $3,500.
Speaker 12:That's what Apple Vision Pro is. It was never intended to be a product of the times. It's a product of the future hauled into
Speaker 4:the
Speaker 12:present by spending enormous amounts of money. And so, Meta and Sony and Apple and Google and all of these other companies, they are going to be hitting that level of visual fidelity. They're gonna be doing it with headsets that are far smaller, far lighter than what you see from VisionPro. And I I actually remain very optimistic.
Speaker 1:That's great.
Speaker 12:I I I I I think things are going pretty
Speaker 1:I I I'm extremely optimistic. It's mostly just that when I when I try and pull stuff out of meta, they're like, no. No. No. We're not ready to talk.
Speaker 1:And I think that they're just being cold shoulder to me because, like, they don't wanna leak it yet, but I I am very optimistic.
Speaker 12:The problem is Yeah. They don't have a they don't they don't have a charming charismatic pitchman who knows how to talk about this stuff with you. They gotta solve that. They need to figure out what they're doing. They do.
Speaker 12:It reminds me of of of something being here. I'm on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange Yeah. Behind me.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 12:And back in the Oculus days, when we sold the company to Meta, one of the first things that happened was New York Stock Exchange emailed our contact info email and they asked if I would come and ring the bell of the New York Stock Exchange. Sounds pretty cool. Right? Like, hey, like, you've been acquired by this major public corporation in the form of Facebook. Come and ring the bell.
Speaker 12:Maybe, you know, maybe someday you will do something else with you. And unfortunately, I didn't see that email for about seven years because another Oculus executive intercepted the email, said, oh, no. Palmer can't make it, but I would love to come. And he came and he rang the bell without And telling me about so I found out a bit late about it later in unrelated litigation. That email came up in discovery.
Speaker 12:And anyway, I've I've I've not had a chance to ring the bell yet. Maybe when Andrew will goes public, I'll finally be able to I'll finally be able to ring that bell. But I gotta admit, I have a I have a long memory and a long memory grudges, I won't say who it was.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 12:But but but but there's probably a handful of people out there who can guess.
Speaker 1:You you you have a lot of cofounders now, a lot of executives that you work with. How do you select for folks who won't do that to you? How do you select Extreme loyalty. Extreme loyalty and trust. I don't know.
Speaker 1:I mean, it's important. Remember. We just kicked this
Speaker 5:thing off of
Speaker 1:you and go.
Speaker 12:Look, I started Oculus when I was 19 years old.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 12:And I I mean, it's you you also gotta remember the story of who is a founder, who is a co founder. It's it's it's fluid and dynamic and always changing with the ebb and flow of history. One of my ideas is to have a blockchain company where everyone agrees what the founding story is and who the co founders are, and then it goes into the blockchain so that nobody can come back and say that they're a co founder. There's a guy running around now who says that he's a co founder of of of Oculus who was very much so not a co founder and in fact
Speaker 4:swear I swear I think I met this guy. I told you this story off air. A guy tell me the story. I saw I met a I was at a dinner party at my friend's house and my buddy was like, hey, this guy works at I'm not gonna name the company, but you guys probably have some tech stuff in common you guys should meet. And I got up to him, I said, hey, hi.
Speaker 4:I I hear we should meet. And he's like, hey, I I I was like, what's your story? He's like, I started a company called Oculus Okay. Now now at Meta. And I was like, oh, interesting.
Speaker 4:Like, never heard of you before. So it might it might maybe this guy here's
Speaker 12:the crazy thing. I don't even know who you're talking about. Yeah. Well well, and and
Speaker 4:I told him was like, oh, like Because
Speaker 12:there's multiple people who are saying this, including a guy who literally has a documentary being made about him, how he's the founder of Oculus. So it's it's always
Speaker 4:I was like, oh, that's that's awesome. Like, Palmer comes on the show all the time and then he completely backs backs backtracked. It was like, well, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 4:You know, I I joined like, you know, you know, and and but I was on the founding team. Like, he he he backtracked.
Speaker 12:Well, You so so but to the point, you asked me how do you select these people? Carefully. I was 19 years old when I selected the first people that I was working with. I've learned a lot. I've been stabbed in the back a lot, and I'd probably make very different decisions if I were doing it today.
Speaker 12:And it's worth noting, remember that I started Oculus on my own with no co founders, nobody involved, and a lot of like, I brought on people that I am happy to call co founders even though they didn't join the company until months later who I had never met when I started the company. That said, I'm hap there's some people I'm honored to share the the title of co founder with, and there's other people that I'm not, which is why I really want this blockchain thing. Needs get vibe code, this slop, and get it out there.
Speaker 4:Super important question. Have you played Federal Reserve Simulator yet? The new game It's on Steam. On Steam. You gotta try that.
Speaker 4:You're a banker even heard of it. You're a banker now.
Speaker 1:We gotta get the reps
Speaker 4:really enjoy this. Alright.
Speaker 12:You gotta do it. Federal Reserve Simulator. Federal Reserve I I think I I there it's right there on the It says, Trump says, we have an incompetent Federal Reserve chair who loves high interest rates. Very, very interesting.
Speaker 4:What what hardware are you collecting recently? We we just learned you can buy a steam powered car and drive it around
Speaker 1:Jay Leno has one that's a 120 years old.
Speaker 12:What hardware am I buying am I buying not
Speaker 4:just buying, collecting.
Speaker 12:Yeah. I know. What what I what am I well, so I I have a I there there's a few things I could bring up. But to be honest, I've been too busy to buy really good stuff, but I recently got delivered one of the first Jetson Jetson ones, which is a small eVTOL aircraft. I was one of their first customers and their first delivery.
Speaker 12:I also have a collection of motorcycles. The theme of the collection is commercial failure. And so all of my motorcycles were huge commercial failures. The more of a failure, the better. And so I've been buying some some failed two wheel drive motorcycles.
Speaker 4:I've How do they how do they failed military motorcycles. How do they ride?
Speaker 12:Oh, incredible. Look. Look. There's really bad failed motorcycles. There's those that failed because they're too good.
Speaker 12:One of the crown jewels in my collection is a Honda Rune. It was basically a personal project created by the CEO of Honda. The the document that they used when they were creating it has actually been leaked now. And at the start of the document, it says, performance is the only object. Price is of no importance.
Speaker 12:And so they wanted to build the ultimate cruising motorcycle. And the the story goes that they lost over a $100,000 per bike in the And so I've got one of the one of the handful of Hondaroons that made it out of that program. A beautiful Honda Honda room with a with with a couple thousand miles, metallic purple and chrome. And it's it's it's one of my favorite motorcycles, if not the favorite.
Speaker 4:So Back
Speaker 12:to commercial failure doesn't mean a product's bad. It just means they couldn't figure out how to make a business out of
Speaker 1:it. Sure. Sure.
Speaker 4:Back to your Jetson One, have you been flying it? Are you taking it like half a foot off the ground and then a foot off the ground? What what is the path to commuting to work in it?
Speaker 12:I think given the regulatory climate around eVTOL aircraft, it's best that I not say one more word.
Speaker 4:Perfect. Perfect. Where do you where do you get your shirts?
Speaker 12:Where do I got my shirts? Well, it depends. I buy I buy Tommy Bahamas. This one is a Rainspooner Andoril Hawaiian shirt. So I've got a Sentry Tower.
Speaker 12:I've got a Ghost X on it. And they're they're they're headquartered on on Catalina Island, California in Avalon.
Speaker 1:That's super
Speaker 12:I buy a I buy I buy from a whole bunch of different places. I'm not I'm an equal opportunity Hawaiian shirt purchaser.
Speaker 4:I like it. Okay. Supporting the entire market map.
Speaker 1:Well, it sounds like we have Jonathan Gould, the controller of the currency next to you in the booth. Is that correct?
Speaker 12:That's right. I'd like to introduce him in. Jonathan Gould, controller of the currency here with me today on TBPN.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much for joining us. Jonathan, please introduce yourself since it's the first time on the show, and tell us a little bit about what happened today from your perspective and what's going on with Erebor from your perspective.
Speaker 17:Sure. So thank you so much for having me. I'm I'm Jonathan Gould, comptroller of the currency. We charter, we regulate, and we supervise national banks. And today, we're here to celebrate what is the first full service charter of a national bank that's been issued since I took office about seven months ago.
Speaker 17:So we're very excited to have Airborne into the national banking system after months of hard work on their part. So delighted to have them there and we're here to celebrate that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What what how much is changing around the way banks get chartered? I'm I'm interested to hear, is this just the Herculean efforts on Palmer's side or is there going to be a flood of new bank charters issued? Like, what is the view over the next decade look like for new banks broadly?
Speaker 17:Well, so I think over the last, four years, but even beyond since the two thousand eight financial crisis, regulators have imposed a lot of hurdles procedurally and otherwise as a result of just having a much lower risk tolerance around bank chartering in The United States. That's not the result of any changes in statute or anything like that. Just simply a lot of regulators, not just the OCC, but other regulators as well at the federal level and and possibly the state level too, just discouraging banks from from from from forming. But of course, it's absolutely critical that we have new banks forming in America on a regular basis. That's really part of how the banking system revitalizes and refreshes itself over time.
Speaker 17:And so, again, we wanna do everything we can such that we are being transparent and holding all applicants to the same standard and faithfully applying the statutory factors that congress has given us on a case by case basis and in an even handed fashion so that if new applicants, if they meet the statutory factors and they can meet our high supervisory standards as Arabore has, they will get a charter. So we're excited to see the demand that's out there. We think that they're and have seen already a lot of banks, a various different business models kind of in the pipeline already. And again, if they meet the statutory criteria and they can meet our supervisory standards, we welcome the system.
Speaker 12:I'd also say just personally, I think those standards, people should understand are already extremely high. Like, you guys are not lowering the bar. You're just going through the process that statutory you're supposed to. And I I like you might not be able to to say this or want to say this, but I'll say, like, right now as it is, there's probably a lot of things that could be done to make it easier for people to start banks that would be productive. Like but but right now, I mean, like, the the the bar is extremely high.
Speaker 12:I've put it this way, like, is starting a bank is very much a rich get richer thing right now. Like, you can't be a 19 year old Palmer Lucky who started Oculus in his trailer and say, you know what? I've got this incredible idea for banking. I think I'm gonna go start a bank. Like, maybe it's possible, but the process we went through, don't I think a 19 year old Palmer Lucky can
Speaker 1:That get
Speaker 17:that that's fair. And again, I mean, part of what we're doing here is just trying to live up to the standards that we say we have in place for what it takes to Yep. To become a bank. But more fundamentally, and if you'll pardon me for this one, but I mean you shouldn't have to hire a burglar from the Shire to get a bank charter. Right?
Speaker 17:You know, it it it it shouldn't be that challenging. We should have transparent standards around it. And to the OCC's credit, I think we do. We just haven't in all cases and overall administrations follow them.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. That makes a lot
Speaker 4:of sense. What other are there other kind of industries or categories that you're interested in? Airborne is obviously unique and that it's focused on technology and industrial businesses and and it's something that has so much excitement from Yeah. From our industry. But is is there kind of a a line out the door in terms of other sectors that are excited to have kind of a new bank partner in their industry?
Speaker 17:So we don't we don't you know, as from a from a chartering agency standpoint, we don't, you know, pick and choose winners and losers. We don't pick and choose business models. We wanna make sure that to the extent there is an unmet credit need in a community or in a business or an industry that the banking system is evolving to meet those credit needs, again subject to doing so in a safe and sound manner. So again, you know, we are trying to apply the statutory factors across business models, across potential applicants in an even handed fashion, again, consistent with the guidance that we produced over the years. So again, we're not trying to direct, you know, bank chartering one way or the other.
Speaker 17:You know, I think we've seen in the past, particularly over the last four years, you know, a skepticism inconsistent with statute, but a skepticism around things like digital assets and crypto. We are reverting back to what I would say is the norm for the OCC over its a hundred and sixty three year history, which is we don't we don't pick winners or losers here. We apply statutes in even handed fashion, and we are agnostic around technology. And in fact, we welcome banks embracing new technologies. Right?
Speaker 17:I mean, over a hundred sixty three years, which is how long our agency has been around for. And obviously, The US banking system far exceeds that. Banks have had to adapt, evolve over time. And again, new chartering is how banks do that in parts, how the system adapts and refreshes itself. So we have a strong interest in seeing that continue to occur.
Speaker 12:What's it? You can't pick pick and choose, but I have to say, in my mind, I want someone to start a bank that is focused on adult content and other edge of illegal stuff. It's not what I wanna focus on, but the problem is right now, there's this weird gray area where there's things that are technically legal in The US, but no banks want to touch them because of the PR concerns or the actual real risk concerns. And so they end up being banked by foreign banks that are doing all kinds of weird payment stuff. Now you have organized crime or an opening for sex trafficking and open and you don't have any real insight into how any of it moves.
Speaker 12:Like, The US can't see how the money is moving. It becomes much harder for law enforcement. These other the international banks don't wanna cooperate with law enforcement because they're making all their money off sex trafficking and illegal payments and all of these other things. And so I I've I've always wished that somebody would come up and say, hey, I'm gonna bank I'm gonna bank, you know, all of the people that are on the edge of legality so that we can get at least some insight and access into this. I I don't want to be in that business personally, but somebody out there should do this because it it would it it it, like, it'd be probably be better if you that whole industry, you know, theoretically didn't exist.
Speaker 12:But in a world where it does exist, it's better that they not be banked by Russian organized crime.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. Get a little more technical with us. What is the actual process look like for applying for a charter? I mean, I think some people, you know, imagine like a web form that they fill out.
Speaker 1:And then then they might, you know, imagine, you know, a thousand page legal document. Or are there lots of conversations, meetings, like
Speaker 4:probably You also need to be able to raise like a quarter billion dollars or something in
Speaker 1:that range. Yeah. What what does exactly take these days?
Speaker 12:I mean, I'll leave Leo, I'll leave that to you, but I mean, like you you you said it doesn't take a quarter billion dollars. I mean, we had to have, like, $350,000,000 in regulatory capitals just sitting in an in an account to to backstop it, which again gets back to what I said earlier where right now, starting a bank under, like, current rules and statute, it it is very much not the 19 year old Palmer Lucky Sure.
Speaker 4:Sure. Version the board. I don't want to bank with a 19 year old, personally. We have some 19 year olds on our team. They're fantastic.
Speaker 12:They're talented. Slightly opinions, but for Eileen, very libertarian. I'm a college dropout. I'm trying to figure out if I can convince kids to drop out of high school. I I mean, would would you say you wouldn't bank with a 19 year old.
Speaker 12:Maybe you just haven't read met the number 19 year old. You know? Like, like that's right. There's a lot of people who wouldn't work for a 19 year old and I had that problem when I started Oculus. That is true.
Speaker 12:And and and yet I managed to do it.
Speaker 17:I'll give you the more anodyne, less colorful version. And maybe somewhere between the two is what actually happens in practice. So it's a two phase process for chartering a bank at the OCC. The first phase essentially is, you know, the the the regulators, so the OCC will be vetting kind of the business plan, understanding and assessing what's the probability for success, ultimately doing what's called a giving what's called a preliminary conditional approval or not. We aim to do that within one hundred and twenty days.
Speaker 17:And then essentially kind of the second phase is the actual in organization phase. So it's standing at the bank, doing all the policies and procedures, doing the fundraise to the capital side. You're making sure you have the management team in place that you need and and that can occur that basically has to occur within twelve to eighteen months of when the OCC grants preliminary conditional approval, but how long exactly the bank remains in organization phase is really up to the bank. Right? Because they've just got to get themselves ready so that they can essentially kind open the doors for business.
Speaker 17:And the last thing that happens just before they do open the doors for business is that OCC examiners come in and do the final kind of pre opening exam and make sure in fact, you know, policies and procedures are in place, management's there and so forth. So that the bank can in fact, you know, welcome customers and execute it on its business plan.
Speaker 1:I have one last question. Can we have a 19 year old comptroller? Does what does it take to become a comptroller of the currency? Is this you go to Wall Street and then there's a revolving door and then you go to the government. Do you work your way up in the government?
Speaker 1:Break me down for the 19 year old that wants to be the next comptroller of the currency. What do they gotta do?
Speaker 17:Well, I don't think there's any statutory prohibition on on age. 19 year old mean, hopefully, qualifications are relevant although, you know, it's hard to tell sometimes in Washington these days. But but certainly, do need a presidential nomination and support and you need the advice and consent of the of the senate. I spent about twenty five years in this in this industry.
Speaker 1:So Okay.
Speaker 16:Got a lot of
Speaker 17:friends and You've done lot the policy side and on the on the banking side. So
Speaker 1:Okay. Well, now I'm excited about a 19 year old comptroller. Let's see. Yeah.
Speaker 4:They can put on their app they can put on their application.
Speaker 3:You don't have
Speaker 4:to worry about
Speaker 1:Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh, wow. Palmer talks a big game about faith in youth.
Speaker 1:And then as soon as I tell him, gonna you're be regulated by a 19 year old. He's like, oh, no. No. No.
Speaker 12:Let let me tell you why this actually fits in with a libertarian perspective.
Speaker 1:Okay. Okay.
Speaker 12:When you when you have a free market and you have a whole bunch of different companies that are all competing with each other Sure. The idea that one or a few of them might be run by high schoolers, say, you know what? Give them the right to compete in that. It's it's it's a it's a free market. They're allowed to compete, and if they provide a better product and a better service and people wanna work with them or for them, all the power to them.
Speaker 12:Government is different. You have a centralized power. You have one chance to get it right. And so, I I I will admit, I'm a little I am a little worried that perhaps if you need someone with a lot of experience, not even just in in, you know, in currency or finance, just someone with experience in life. Like, I talked earlier about how I probably picked poorly in some of the people that I worked with early on.
Speaker 12:Imagine if I was the comptroller of the currency and I had that same level of naivete. If it's one of a 100 companies in the market, I'm all for it. If they are the person who is the wielder of singular government authority, I actually would worry about it. So I'm not as hypocritical as you think. I'm halfway there.
Speaker 1:Okay. Okay. I understand.
Speaker 17:I wouldn't wanna discourage 19 year olds from aspiring to be or becoming the controller the currency. But just to be clear, the controller of the currency is not responsible for killing the penny.
Speaker 1:Okay. Okay.
Speaker 17:Common Do you have
Speaker 12:to deal with that every day? People stopping you on the street and pointing pennies at your head?
Speaker 15:Most of
Speaker 17:my family members and all my college friends, all they wanna know is, so you're responsible for killing the penny? And then as soon as I say no and start describing my actual job, they immediately lose interest.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Okay. Eyes eyes glazing.
Speaker 12:That's a funny one.
Speaker 1:Well, thank you guys for coming on the show. We really appreciate all the context and laughs. Have a great time at the New York Stock Exchange
Speaker 4:and Yes. Say hi to Lynn for
Speaker 5:us.
Speaker 1:Yes. Say hi to Lynn and we'll and we'll see you soon.
Speaker 12:Cheers. Live long and prosper.
Speaker 1:Goodbye. Live long and prosper. Let me tell you about public.com investing for those who take it seriously. They got stocks option, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service. And let me also tell you about eleven Labs.
Speaker 1:Build intelligent real time conversational agents, reimagine human technology interaction with eleven Labs. That was a lot of fun. I loved in the chat, someone was saying they gotta make Comptroller of the Currency Simulator. Get it on Steam. I'm ready to play ten thousand hours of Comptroller Simulator.
Speaker 1:That's what you should be required to do before you get the job and the presidential nominee. Anyway, we will continue with our coverage of Arabor at the New York Stock Exchange in just a minute. We have Diogo from Han Ventures coming in, calling in from the New York Stock Exchange. So we will bring him in in just a second. Any other breaking news that we should touch on?
Speaker 4:Jordan? We can touch on this briefly. So NVIDIA and OpenAI are nearing finalizing NVIDIA's $30,000,000,000 investment into OpenAI. Yes. A lot of people were kind of
Speaker 1:Thought it was a 100,000,000,000, which is Yeah.
Speaker 4:And so this felt like a downgrade, that at the same time, that 100,000,000,000 Yeah. When they proposed it was gonna be in, you know, 10% installments based on milestones. And so I think it makes a lot of sense to just, do a good chunk of
Speaker 1:remove five zeros from every deal to contextualize it for a normal founder. Like, if you're raising a $10,000,000 series a and an investor comes in and says, I'm good for three, you're like, awesome. This is great. And then add five zeros and that's the same ultimate experience. Anyway, we have our next guest in the Restream waiting room.
Speaker 1:Let me tell you about Plaid first. Plaid powers the apps you use to spend, save, borrow, and invest securely connecting bank accounts to move money, fight fraud, and improve lending now with AI. And without further ado, welcome to the show. How are
Speaker 12:you doing?
Speaker 4:What's happening?
Speaker 1:We are working on audio. Let's try and bring that in, and we will kick it off with an introduction. Please, since it's the first time on the show, introduce yourself.
Speaker 3:Yes. My name is Jorg Monika. I'm a GP at ON Ventures and the cofounder and executive chairman of Anchorage Digital.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. Since it's the first time on the show, give us a little bit of background how you wound up at Hahn Ventures. We've had Katie on the show.
Speaker 4:And what was your first trip to Nicey? Yeah. I hear that. That's interesting. Yes.
Speaker 3:It was not my first trip actually. Okay. So I've been here a few times. Nice. I've gone to take lots of the pictures.
Speaker 1:Great.
Speaker 3:And they actually have a curator, by the way. So if you come to Nisi, you should ask for her. She knows everything about the history of this place. It is an hour and a half to two hours, but you should absolutely do it and see all of the original documents and everything that has happened here. Super historic.
Speaker 1:Cool. And then, so, yeah, background, the the path to Han, the path to crypto. I know Han Venture is interesting because there's the government relationships as well as the fintech. There's a lot going on, so I'd love to know, how you wound up in your current position.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So fun story, but I really have only done one thing in my entire life. So PG and Distributed Systems twenty years ago when honestly was useless. Yeah. And then I led security team at Square for four years Wow.
Speaker 3:Went to lead security team at Docker for three years, then started my own company Yeah. With Nathan, company called Anchorage Digital, the first federal chartered bank, which is very relevant for And then Katie and I connected when I was fundraising for Anchorage about eight years ago. And over the years, we've just been friends. Yep. She was, as you know, co leading the a sixteen z crypto funds Yeah.
Speaker 3:That was an investor in Anchorage. We were friends. We were on the board of the Libra Diem, if you recall that initiative by Facebook together. And just, you know, they're clients of Anchorage. And so we've interacted many different ways over the years.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So talk about the airborne deal. How'd you meet Palmer? What what was interesting about this other than, you know, obviously, there's a lot of star power, but I wanna hear more about the unique thesis.
Speaker 3:So look. I was in a unique situation, which is I'm one of the few crazy people that actually sit on the board of two federal charters, not just one. And so when, the team came to me and really wanted to start this said, well, there's not that many people, that have done this over the past five years, and Anchorage got our charter, as you know, in 2021 and really, was trailblazer in terms of showing that you could have innovation under the OCC and going through a Biden administration, which as you know, was very crypto unfriendly and really
Speaker 5:coming out on the other
Speaker 3:side with a very strong business.
Speaker 4:So sorry to interrupt, but did everyone think you were absolutely you guys were absolutely insane to try to get a charter in that climate? Like, what what what did how did you think the odds were going into that process? Was it kind of a moonshot? Like, hey. If we can make this happen, it's great, but low likelihood or or at any what point did you develop confidence that it would be a possibility?
Speaker 3:Well, look. We, it was to the point where the consultants that were helping us get the charter did not believe that we were going to get to get the charter in the first place. So that was how bad it was, to get a charter and try to get a charter in 2020. But if you think about Anchorage and how it started, it is an institutional bank. We only serve large institutions.
Speaker 3:You know? The clients are the of the world, visas of the world, very large institutions. So when we had the opportunity of converting our trust state trust charter into a federal charter, it was the obvious solution and the obvious, you know, solution that had longevity if you're just serving institutions. We basically connected the best security that custody these crypto assets to the best regulatory charter that it can get out there, and that was the end state of the company. If you had the opportunity of jumping right to the end state of the company, wouldn't you take it?
Speaker 3:And so we put all of our chips, we went all in, and we just ended up, being the first ones to get the charter.
Speaker 1:Got it. How are you thinking about innovation in the existing, you know, mega bank sector? Like, there's been a ton of skepticism around crypto from the leads of the big banks, but I feel like some of them are coming around. It's staring them in the face at this point. They're seeing public companies that operate in crypto, you know, make it through.
Speaker 1:There's new regulation. Is there any, is there anything that you are seeing on the horizon where those banks might modernize and actually adopt some more forward thinking technology strategies?
Speaker 3:Look. Erebor, to a large part, actually came out of the frustration of the fact that that does not exist for the industry.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 12:Like, if go all the
Speaker 3:way to 2008 in post crisis, you had Dodd Frank that actually created so many more regulations, all of these stress tests, all these capital requirements. And from that moment on, the number of federal banks is literally a monotonically decreasing function over time. Each year has less banks than the year before it through m and a, mergers, or people going out of business. And so the frustration of the industry when you're in technology and you're trying to build financial products of not being able to build has culminated in something like Anchorage and then something like Aeroborn. Because if you think about it, fintechs started for a while renting these charters and doing banking as a service as it's called.
Speaker 3:And then all of a sudden, Synapse blowup happens, which is still being litigated. Mhmm. They literally did not know who the money belongs to. And so it showed that if you are a tech company that wants to build a world class product, then you cannot rely on a rented charter and banking as a service. You sort of have to do it yourself.
Speaker 3:Mhmm. So going straight to the pain, which is very difficult to get an OCC charter and operate as a bank holding company under the regulatory regime of the oldest banking regulator in The United States, the OCC, that is not something that you do lightly, but it was necessary. So it was time for tech to come into finance, And so that's why that's why these banks got created, and we had to take matters into our own hands.
Speaker 1:How do you see the market for new banks developing? Because when Palmer launched Anderol, there was this line where order to start a defense company, you had to have a billionaire as a cofounder, and he cited Palantir, Andoril, SpaceX, and it was something that was like the barrier to entry was so high. And then now we have a whole defense tech boom, and there's a lot of stuff going on. Andriel's obviously still doing fantastically. But is this one is this a moment where you think people will just wake up and be like, yeah, it's hard, but it's not impossible.
Speaker 1:And so maybe we will see a bank that's specifically targeted at farming or oil and gas or some new startup in some other vertical. They'll try and create some differentiation, not go right up against Erebor, but we will see a market map in a few years of new banks.
Speaker 3:A 100%. After twenty years of almost zero federal charges being created a year, there's a window here because of a pro business administration Mhmm. And lots of these convergences that have been happening that allows people to even for the first time think that it's possible. Yeah. Think that it's possible.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And so dozens of these charges have been applied for. There's two main strains of them. One of them is the trust bank charter that encourage trailblaze in which you are full bank, but you're not actually taking deposits, and you're effectively a full reserve bank. And then there's the Eribor model, which are full fiduciary traditional bank.
Speaker 3:In the case of Eribor, extremely conservative, tier capital tier tier capital ratios, and it's an extremely conservative bank, but you're going for the whole enchilada, FDIC insured, etcetera. So lots of banks are now realizing that this is possible, and you see that in the massive increase of applications in charges being given out. So it's a new renaissance for banks and people realizing this is possible, so let's actually go do it.
Speaker 4:Yeah. How how are you how are you thinking about making you you're you're now on the board of two. Would you consider making more investments in this space, or are the incremental charters that are would be kind of broadly interesting to the market not necessarily a fit for Han Ventures?
Speaker 3:Look. They have to make sense. One of the reasons why Arabor works is because three of the things that are hardest about starting a bank, the first one is capitalization. It's no surprise that Palmer starting anything will get capitalized, and so you jump through that hurdle. The second one is the regulatory hurdle.
Speaker 3:Anchorage has shown that it was possible. The team that Palmer assembled is absolutely magnificent from engineering to compliance to regulation. And so it was very clear to me from day one that they were going to be able to step over their hurdle. And then the third and most important thing is you actually have to get to scale on a depository base. And Erobor threw Palmer as a go to market, which is what I call it, Palmer as a go to market.
Speaker 3:It's our go to market strategy. And Yeah. Palmer's friends, Palmer's connections Yeah. And obviously the competence of the team in the bank, you have all three figured out. So effectively, we speed ran the infancy teenage years of a bank into something that is fully fledged and is ready to go.
Speaker 1:Amazing. Well, thank you so much for coming on the Thanks for
Speaker 4:your go to market.
Speaker 1:Breaking it down. Palmer. Congratulations. Have have fun. Enjoy the closing bell.
Speaker 4:Great to meet you. Come back on the show today.
Speaker 1:Minutes until the closing bell.
Speaker 4:Then. Have fun. Nicey.
Speaker 1:We will talk to you soon.
Speaker 4:Cheers. Goodbye.
Speaker 1:Let me tell you about Console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. And I believe we have Joe Lonsdale in the Restream waiting room. Let's bring him into the TV panel drum. Joe, how are you doing?
Speaker 13:Hey, guys. How's it going? Good to
Speaker 5:see you.
Speaker 1:It's going fantastically. Is software dead? Wanna start with the SaaS apocalypse. I know I know you have some good, some good takes on the SaaS apocalypse because, someone vibe coded your former company. Right?
Speaker 13:Oh, that's funny. You saw my comments
Speaker 1:on one today. I just Yeah.
Speaker 13:Like, it's like being shared by all these people. Oh, yeah. I've I've coded Palantir. I'm like, come on, guys. It's like it it is
Speaker 16:it's annoying because I'm I'm I'm
Speaker 13:such a pro AI bullish person, but it drives you to apostasy from the whole movement when they're like, we're replacing everything. Palantir is going down. I'm like, no. I think low end SaaS is in trouble the next few years. Like, that's the reality.
Speaker 13:Right?
Speaker 1:Not not the hard company. So that so so that's narrow point solution, no system of record, no regulatory mode, like, no network effect. Is that what you're thinking when you describe low end SaaS?
Speaker 13:That's where I would start. It's probably some of the stuff that Constellation software used to do. I don't know what they're doing now, but, you back in the day when I studied them, there's a lot of stuff like that. Yep. And and and listen, there's probably, like it probably climbs the stack over time.
Speaker 13:Right? So there's probably some very simple systems of record that are very basic that you can kinda probably pull in. But listen. There's like, if if if you took more than a $100,000,000 to build your SaaS software with, like, good engineers, that's gonna be that's gonna take a while to replace. And if you have a great SaaS company that spent hundreds of millions or billions of dollars and you still have a great tech culture and you're using AI, you're you're fine.
Speaker 13:Right? It's it's always as long you have a great tech culture because you're gonna stay ahead. I think but there's a lot of stuff with PE bought. Didn't take that much to build.
Speaker 5:Yep.
Speaker 13:Probably put more money into sales than tech. Yeah. That stuff's in trouble.
Speaker 4:Yeah. What are you advise How how are the conversations going with existing portfolio companies that are now running the calculus on how long it will take to build new products and thinking like, hey, we can go multi product faster than maybe we could before or maybe it's more tempting because this thing that was gonna take us a year could now take, you know, two months or or six weeks or something in that range to ship. Still feels like somewhat of a risk to just say, okay, we're gonna do everything all at once. But how are you thinking about it?
Speaker 13:You know, I my my bias as an entrepreneur has always been to, like, do too much at once. I need to hire people around me to hold me back because I'm like, let's do these 14 things. Then you're like, actually, guys, you know, actually, we should ace this thing first and this thing. So so so, you know, in in in general, this is probably dangerous for me because it empowers
Speaker 12:me to keep working for doing everything at once.
Speaker 13:And it's like, I love Peter Thiel's, like, argument on the board of Facebook twenty years ago, where, like, the Warren Buffet, you know, person, Don Graham, who was tied to him, is, like, don't spend too much money. Get cash flow positive. And Peter's, like, we should be, like, still burning money and, like, just growing faster and taking over the market. He's obviously it
Speaker 5:was correct.
Speaker 17:Right? So, I mean, it's
Speaker 13:just, like, there's a lot to do at our big companies that are growing. You have no excuse to to be making money right now if there's to build. Right? You should you should be spending up more to build within this environment. You know, I and it's it's you know, I think the best engineers really are five to 10 x better with this.
Speaker 13:I if your engineers are not using it, you should replace them. That's a great way to know how to replace who to replace in your company
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 13:Right now. Yeah. And and, you know, I mean, yeah, a lot of our older SaaS companies are still well run. They're building agents on top of it to perform the work for their customers. Does that make sense?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 13:So so it's like if you're like dominate I shouldn't say it because he's got too many calls, but like one of our CEOs Yeah. He's like dominates a big part of the financial industry in one particular niche area. And and now he's like rolled out agents and he's adding tens of millions of revenue, with the agents to do to help the customers have to hire less and to be more efficient. So there's a lot of stuff like that we're seeing.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. Well, let's flip it over to Airborne. You're not gonna vibe code a bank charter, at least I don't think you will. But what are the keys to success going forward?
Speaker 1:You're obviously deeply involved with the company, very excited about it. What does the next couple of years look like? What do you wanna see happen?
Speaker 13:So, you know, I think with a bank, you got a barbell. On one hand, there's, like, all this really exciting stuff you could do with AI and with hopefully, like, convincing the regulators to to to permit new idea like, really great things, and we can talk about that. On the other hand, this is a it's a goddamn bank. Right? So you have to be traditional.
Speaker 13:You have to be safe. You have to be smart. I'm putting putting my own money in. I'm putting some of my firm's money in. I gotta put like, a lot of my friends are, all my companies are too.
Speaker 13:I'm on the board of this thing, and your job at a bank board is to is to be conservative as well. Right? And so the whole point is, know, our reputations are all tied into this Palmer's reputation, my reputation, a lot of other people's reputation, and you have to run this thing where you're serving customers better and learning from the best of that and where you're just and we're gonna be extra safe. I don't I don't know what I'm supposed to talk about, but where I think the whole point is that, you know, it's not a narrow bank in the traditional sense that you did, but it is much narrower than other banks. We're gonna keep a lot more in a very, very safe way because I think it's the right way to run these things.
Speaker 13:It's never it's not take any risk you don't need to take.
Speaker 4:What was the sort of seventy two hours of the SVB crisis like for you personally?
Speaker 13:Oh, gosh. You know, that was actually interesting because I'd worn eight or nine of my companies about six months before, actually, that I was I I didn't know for sure, but I said this looks not not not quite right to me. And my brother had
Speaker 2:talked to
Speaker 13:me about it. He's a macro analyst. And I mean, what's going on? I hadn't known for sure. And I had a bunch of my family money in FRB, and it was really sad because I I loved I mean, FRB guys were nice too, but I loved FRB.
Speaker 13:They were like our
Speaker 4:And John John and I too.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 13:Yeah. And and I was I was at the dinner with the governor here in Texas that night, and I had a bunch of other friends here. I won't mention their names, but, you know, guys who'd moved here are very, you know, multi billionaires who themselves had a bunch of their own money in FRB, actually. Mhmm. And we all felt terribly guilty because when SBB had started to go down, we actually had each withdrawn money from FRB as well because you kinda had to in that situation.
Speaker 13:It was just too scary. And and so it was like, it was like, I, you know, SBB was a little bit sad. FRB for me was just, I was never really worried for myself. I got my money out. Yeah.
Speaker 13:My companies didn't have too much exposure. Yeah. But but I felt really sad because it was such a great bank. And I think for me, one of the goals of Arabor would be to try to learn, to to do things as well as as FRB did to serve people.
Speaker 1:I think
Speaker 13:it was a really great bank.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You mentioned Texas. There's a lot of young people that are nervous about the job market in the age of AI. Give me the pitch for University of Austin right now in the age of AI.
Speaker 13:University of Austin, the age of AI? Well, I think in any age, but especially in an age where the world is changing quickly, you need to have a really strong foundation. You need your leaders in your society to have a strong intellectual foundation. So what we're doing is we have, you know, it's one side, really deep intellectual foundations of the West, understanding our civilization, understanding how our world works, why it works the way it does. You wanna talk you know whom I taught people I work with in business?
Speaker 13:They all understand philosophy. They all understand history, whether it's Peter Thiel, Alice Carr, Charles Koch, Elon Musk. You have to give them that really strong base. On the other hand, you gotta challenge them, push them really hard on the STEM side. We're just finishing our STEM building
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 13:Right next to SpaceX and Boring Company. Have a, you know, one of my I was just with my friend who built Palantir with me. He was teaching the AI agents course next quarter. So we have a lot of our probably top 100 friends who built companies as advisers who are helping push the university forward. And we're gonna train courageous young leaders, and a lot of them are gonna work with us and build the future.
Speaker 13:So it's it's a pretty exciting place to go.
Speaker 1:That's very exciting.
Speaker 4:You guys are setting up dorms for Mac minis, a little space to set them up?
Speaker 13:You know, I we got there's all sorts of crazy AI stuff going on that we're having fun with, but they I think the dorm is a little bit too nice, frankly. I I think the students, I don't know, or anything, but maybe it's, like, too too fancy, but it's it's good. They like it a lot.
Speaker 1:Are you secretly funding the California billionaire tax to punish all everyone that didn't leave like you?
Speaker 13:You know, it it it has it has been something I've commented on that it's, like, probably really good these people in California to wake the heck up and and see what's going on. But, no, I'm actually secretly funding a bunch of the things that now my friends are waking up to kind of reveal the fraud in California and reveal the nonsense in California and hopefully fight back against the real extremes. Because, you know, used to argue with a lot of my friends in college. I'd be more on the moderate right. They'd be on the moderate left, I'd say, you wanna define it.
Speaker 13:And now most of those smart people who've been successful on the moderate left were, like, complete allies against the crazy far left because that is just so broken in California. I'm excited to see a bunch of them courageously stepping up.
Speaker 1:Well, thank you for taking the time. We'll let you get back to
Speaker 5:your day.
Speaker 1:We'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 4:See you guys.
Speaker 1:Always a great time. Have a good one. Let me tell you about Gemini 3.1 Pro. Gemini 3.1 Pro is here with a capable baseline. It's great for super complex tasks like visualizing difficult concepts, synthesizing data into a single view, or bringing creative projects to life.
Speaker 4:Do you hear that?
Speaker 1:That's the sound
Speaker 4:The sound
Speaker 1:of John. A happy
Speaker 4:dad. Barking.
Speaker 1:We bring
Speaker 4:him in? What's happening? Here we Cracking them open for It's
Speaker 1:05:00 somewhere. It's 04:00. I went to New York Stock Exchange. Cheers, John. Good to see you again.
Speaker 1:Good boys.
Speaker 16:Yeah. Good to see you guys too. I'm good. Good. I know it's been a few weeks, but I just want to congratulate you guys again on the Super Bowl ad.
Speaker 1:Oh, thank you. That was a lot of fun. You know,
Speaker 16:I I want to tell you guys like, man, I I actually got emotional because I remember a year ago when we spoke and when TBPN like was just taken off and you know, just watching your guys' journey has been incredible. You know, I get I get like once a week or so, I get like someone calling me and like trying to pitch me on a show and they're like, we're the TVPN of sports. The TVPN of I got some guy the other day like, we're the TVPN of Europe.
Speaker 5:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 16:So it's it's kind of cool. It reminds me of it it reminds me of a like ten years ago when I was in music. People used to always pitch, I'm the Justin Bieber of Latin music. I'm the Justin Bieber of India. And like that's that's what TVPN's become.
Speaker 1:That's yeah. Yeah. That's somehow yeah. It's a good sign. It rarely works.
Speaker 1:I mean, if someone's trying to do the happy dad for wine, it's like that's probably not Happy dad
Speaker 4:for mom.
Speaker 1:Either you'll do it or whatever works in that category will just look completely different and have a different strategy because Yeah. People want new things. What what walk us through how what's the experience like at the New York Stock Exchange today?
Speaker 16:It's pretty cool. I mean, you know, yeah, I came out here to support Airborne and Yeah. And what Palmer and and Trevor and the team are doing. Yeah. Really excited.
Speaker 16:You know, we're gonna be switching all our companies over to Airborne in the next upcoming weeks. So it's very it's very, you know, they're they're and it's not just because they're good friends of mine, but it's, you know, it's really nice to see a bank doing something different and having that personal touch and, you know Yeah. You know, and to have, you know, their philosophy of just truly caring about companies and, you know, whether you're a startup or an established company. So it's just a good feeling to be a part of it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. How is business going? How did how did 2025 shake out? There were you know, the economy was up. There were tariffs.
Speaker 1:There's lots going on, but what was it like in your world?
Speaker 16:Well, tariffs don't really affect us because Yeah. Almost all our products are US made. So, you know, happy dad. Yeah. So so, you know, outside of our merch business, which is, you know, just a, you know, less than 3% of our business.
Speaker 16:Mhmm. Everything else is US made. So tariffs don't necessarily affect us. You know, so far, I mean, this year has been already a great year for us.
Speaker 6:Mhmm.
Speaker 16:You know, happy dad in January was, you know, year over year in January was up 31%. Yeah. Just yeah. And this is this this is is dry January by the way. This is Yeah.
Speaker 16:And this is like, you know, if you live anywhere outside of like California or you know, some of these West Coast states, 90% of the country was pretty much frozen. You know, including Florida. You know, I was in Miami a few weeks ago and it was 35 degrees in Miami. So you know, and and you know, Happy Dad's not a cold weather product. So to start the year off like that
Speaker 4:Hot chocolate. Yeah. Although maybe launch the Happy Dad hot chocolate for next January.
Speaker 16:Yeah. I think people were okay with the cold drinks so we're gonna probably stick with that right now. Yeah.
Speaker 4:So How are you Yeah. How much time do you spend in New York? Feels like a lot of your your your your business and and is is more West Coast leaning, but New York is really feels like the epicenter of so much happening and just like the creator industry broadly.
Speaker 16:I don't spend a lot of time here at all. I actually would only spend time here because more personal reasons because my wife's family's from New Jersey, but yeah. No. I spend most of our most of my time is actually in California to, you know, work with our team in in Orange County and yeah. My brother Sam does a lot of the traveling to meet with our third party partners, but I yeah.
Speaker 16:I I spend most of the time in California, not too far from you guys.
Speaker 1:Give us some give us some tips, some hacks for expanding consumer products, expanding in retail. I remember this fun story from Mark Rampola who started a vitamin water company or sorry. Coconut water company. And he went to all his sales guys and was like, whoever sells the most, I'm giving you an f one fifty. And they worked extremely hard, and it was just kinda funny outside the box.
Speaker 1:Most people would be thinking in the spreadsheets. But what's been working on the retail side? What has been the interesting like unexpected growth vector throughout the last year?
Speaker 16:Well, with Happy Dad, you know, I think last time I was on the show in September, we were talking about creator brands and creators like overextending themselves when they launch a brand. And one of the things that we're doing this year is we're going to actually spend a lot less time and effort on marketing with creators and spend more of the money on trade marketing and being actually where the customer's at. So if you think about Happy Dad, you know, Happy Dad, you know, you go on a weekend on a Friday or Saturday to buy the product. Well, you might as well spend money in the store with displays and and, you know, decorating the stores or putting up neon signs. Like, money is probably better spent where customer is versus where the customer isn't.
Speaker 16:Like if you're, you know, you know, you know, you know, you're you're sponsoring a podcast and the podcast is live at 8AM on a Tuesday and you're, you know, an alcohol company and most of your sales are Fridays and Saturdays or Sundays during football season, it's you know, the the customer's gonna forget about you by the time Friday, Saturday come out. So you might as well spend that money when they're actually in the store. So that would be my tip with any CPG brand is focus on trade marketing, focus on actually, you know, decorating stores, proper displays, and being seen in the stores because what's the point if you're not necessarily in the store or if you're hidden in the back because your competitors are actually doing what I just said.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Yeah. We were talking about this. Expensify spent a lot of money sponsoring 10
Speaker 1:mil something.
Speaker 4:15. 15. 15. Sponsoring the f one Apple f one movie. Yeah.
Speaker 4:And cool concept, but the challenge is like think about the the sort of person's like frame of mind when they're watching that movie. They're not in the business of they're not thinking I gotta buy Facts. Management software right now and so being at the right place.
Speaker 16:Unless you have a lot of money. Like if you have a lot of money and let's just say Taylor Sheridan calls you and says, hey, you wanna be stocked in our fridge in Landman season three. Yeah. If you've got extra money and you're already in the stores and you're doing everything I said and you just have, you know, an extra amount of cash to do that, so your friends could text you and say, hey, I just saw your product in Landman, that was awesome. If you want to do that, that's fine, but I would I would focus on the act where your customer physically is and they're ready to go and they're ready to buy.
Speaker 16:They've got their wallet so, know, trigger them at that moment.
Speaker 4:Yeah. How a lot of a lot of your a lot of your shows have partnerships with the sort of like the DraftKings or the FanDuels of the world, some other online gaming platforms. I'm sure a bunch of prediction markets now. How are you navigating that whole landscape? Obviously, the the big the the big sports books have been talking pretty openly about how their businesses have been impacted by prediction markets even though they're getting into the game themselves.
Speaker 4:What are those conversations look like, and and how often do those contracts actually turn over?
Speaker 16:Yeah. So so, you know, we have a media company, Shots, which was part of the TBPN Super Bowl commercial. So thank you. You know, we don't have a lot of time, so we don't need to do that. Yeah.
Speaker 16:But but, know, I'm doing it in my head. Yeah. You know, Shots has a partnership with with Price Picks Okay. Which was, you know, which was a daily fantasy. You could select players more or less.
Speaker 16:And recently, they implemented prediction markets in there. So we have a long term partnership with Pricepix amongst all of our content, and they've been great partners. We've been with them since 2022. We recently renewed our deal for another three years. They're great because they already had a fan base.
Speaker 16:We didn't have to worry about you know, most most of our fans right now, they actually have Pricepix, so they you know, we're we're more focused on getting them reengaged in the product or educate on some of these new features that Pricepix has. So yeah. So that that's that's our partner when it comes to the prediction market slash sports yeah. The the sports app space.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Talk to sorry.
Speaker 1:Talk to us about, like, the broader growth of alcohol consumption, particularly among among young people. Obviously, your business is growing. Your category is growing. But beer, I believe, had a 4% decline. And alcohol broadly, it feels like young people aren't drinking as sort of a meme, but how are you processing that?
Speaker 16:Yeah. So I'll people are the, you know, the the this new generation especially, but most people are just they're drinking. They're just drinking differently. They're not, you know, they're not going heavy. They're not going, you know, spirit.
Speaker 16:They're not drinking beers.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 16:You know, if you look at most beer companies, if they haven't got into like the seltzers or the tea or no no bubble space, they're struggling. Mhmm. So, you know, I think beer consumption is down. You know, I say this all the time, you know, people don't want to get, you know, they don't want to wake up hungover so they're not drinking Mhmm. You know, vodkas and whiskeys
Speaker 4:and Yeah.
Speaker 16:You know, some of these hard earned liquors because people want to get up and they want to feel good. People are more on their kick more than ever these days. You know, that's why you're looking at, you know, all these supplement brands, these these fitness brands, GLP one peptide companies are all through the roof because people want to be healthy. They don't want to wake up and also have this theory that people want to look good on social media too. So Oh, yeah.
Speaker 16:You know, so there's only one two ways to look good on social media. Either be in shape or add 15 filters to your picture.
Speaker 4:Or grab a hammer. Grab a hammer.
Speaker 1:Stop with the hammer. Yeah. We're not bone smashing. Bone smashing is now. It's over.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:That guy
Speaker 16:yeah. Anyway That's a one that guy's a one of one.
Speaker 1:He is a one of one. Jordy, anything else? I
Speaker 4:wanna yeah. I wanna I I do you think do you think clavicular will create 10,000 claviculars? Like, do you think IRL streaming is is gonna be a big new meta, or is there just a much I mean, there's naturally a smaller base of people that can be an IRL livestreamer than a traditional influencer who might have a normal job or or something of the sort.
Speaker 16:Well, media as in general is changing in general. You know you know, I mean, you know, I I consider you guys I IRL Yeah. Just in a different format.
Speaker 12:Yeah.
Speaker 16:And and, know, if you look at like how many people are viewing this right now, it's a lot less people than how many people are gonna clip the TBPN episode interviews. So Yeah. You know, the longer you could actually stay online, the more more of a chance you have to have multiple clips. You know, if we had to count all the TBPN live views on x and YouTube versus, like, all the clips of TBPN amongst all the platforms, shorts, TikTok, x Yeah. Reels.
Speaker 16:You know, it it it it's a probably, you know, hundreds x. So, you know, I I do think IRL, whether it's streamers, whether it's this format, you know, I think that's that's where media is going because it's really about short form. Most people aren't, you know, people are gonna watch Palmer's clip, you know. Yeah. You know, and and that those clips are probably gonna go I I was in the other room so I didn't didn't hear what he was talking about but everyone was laughing so, you know, I'm sure there's any clips
Speaker 1:on that.
Speaker 16:Yeah. You're gonna see the clip
Speaker 4:for 19 year olds to run bang.
Speaker 16:It's what's what's crazy about Palmer, I spent a lot of time with him and sometimes I'm like, what did he just say? Then then when it when it I don't know what he said about the 19 year old but running banks, but sometimes I'm like, fuck. He's kind of like He's great
Speaker 1:at he's great at making a point that he can defend and and actually peel back the onion but tie up in a bow. Yeah. It's really great stuff every time. Yep.
Speaker 16:One more thing I think about media too is I do think we're gonna see in the next year, we're gonna see our first podcast produced by Grock. Like, I think there's gonna be a very
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 4:We talked about this on the show today. There's a top 20 there's like a top 20 series on Apple that's a 100% generated with AI. Somebody it's on the Epstein files.
Speaker 1:They took all the Epstein files, put them in deep research reports and and different coding models Audio. To then turn it into audio, and it's charting. It's in, the top 20 because people That's that. They can turn it over immediately and even though it's AI generated and it's probably not as nuanced as, you know, some, you know, journalist with a bunch of reputation, like it's giving people what they want faster and so there's demand. Yeah.
Speaker 16:Yeah. So so so now imagine like like you guys have TBPN
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 16:And then you have diet TBPN, but imagine like TBPN brought to you by Grok or or some sort of AI engine that goes live at like 04:01PM eastern time and breaks down the stock market, like Yeah. One minute after the stock market closes. Yeah. You know, or sports, you know, like, you know, today in sports, you know, it goes live a couple hours before tip-off NBA Yeah. And this is what's gonna happen in the NBA.
Speaker 16:So and so is playing so and so. This guy's hurt. That guy's not hurt. This is what the line looks like on price picks, our poly market, you know. I I think we were gonna see one of those pretty pretty pretty soon.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Very interesting.
Speaker 4:Well, it's it's Always been fantastic to see you.
Speaker 1:It's exciting
Speaker 16:to see Yeah.
Speaker 13:Good to see
Speaker 4:you. Come by the Ultradome soon. I want
Speaker 8:to well,
Speaker 16:that's what I was planning on doing and then when I heard you guys were here and I was here, I was like, I was gonna reach out to you guys next week about coming by but Come by. I'm at this Stock Exchange.
Speaker 4:You know where we are. Last on, I think John like somebody's only offered your handle on Instagram to John Cugen like 10 times. They hit him up every
Speaker 1:constantly. Do you want at John? And I'm like, I know Josh Hidi. I I'm not stealing his that laughing lockdown. And also Can
Speaker 16:you add John on Snapchat? Cause I have that,
Speaker 5:but I don't use it.
Speaker 1:So I'm doing the Snapchat.
Speaker 16:That's yours.
Speaker 1:I I like the consolidation of you have the John guy. No.
Speaker 2:You gotta
Speaker 1:be John. I'm happy to have
Speaker 4:the full name. The final John.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The final John. Anyway, thank you so much. Great to see you. Bye
Speaker 16:Yeah. Good to see
Speaker 1:you guys. Thanks for having me. Cheers. Good one. Let me tell you about Cisco.
Speaker 1:Critical infrastructure for the AI era unlock seamless real time experiences and new value with Cisco. Software multiples have been reset at a fair level given AI uncertainty, said Brad Gerstner. He says, if you own a software stock, you must expect the CEO to say, quote, we crush numbers and expect that to continue because our business accelerates with AI. If you don't expect to hear it, don't own it. Too hard basket.
Speaker 1:Dylan in the too hard basket.
Speaker 4:Dylan did that. Dylan did that? Dylan Field.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. Oh, exactly. Yes. Yes. Yes.
Speaker 1:For sure. For sure. Also thing. There there there was some funny stuff in the chat, but we can get to it later because we, of course, have Will Brewery from Bardis base.
Speaker 4:For a lightning round?
Speaker 1:The restream waiting room, and it is time to kick off the Lambda lightning round. Let's fire up that cloud, fire up the graphics package, and let's bring Will Brewery in to the TV and Ultra. Will, how are doing? Check.
Speaker 4:Check. Check.
Speaker 9:Hey. Hey. Jordan and John. How are you? Can you hear
Speaker 4:Yes.
Speaker 1:Good to see you.
Speaker 4:And clear. Excellent.
Speaker 1:It's been it's been far too long. Obviously, we're here, you know, excited about Airborne, but I'd love to start with just, an update on are you are you running out of numbers for these capsules? How many are up there? How many have come back? You're gonna have to switch to to, you know, base 64 or something encoding them because the numbers are getting so high.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 9:I love that. Yeah. We are at Winnebago 5. Just landed a couple of weeks ago, so we're very excited about that. Number four is in in orbit.
Speaker 9:Number six gets shipped to launch late next week. Oh, thank you.
Speaker 4:Yes. Yes. Of course. We've got Yeah. Love that.
Speaker 4:So
Speaker 1:yeah. What are you actually learning in between these? Are they purely commercial? Like, someone just asked you, so you're gonna put one up. I imagine that you're iterating on hardware, software, regulatory, everything that goes into it.
Speaker 1:What are you what what's the what what what changes in between one launch to the next?
Speaker 9:We have, but we've hit that zero to one moment. I mean, we've hit the zero to five moment. So now we're moving from six and beyond. So yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 9:Very excited about that. So we are iterating on all the fronts you just mentioned. But luckily, now that we we have an assembly line going actually right behind me, there's two of them on the on the floor. That's great. We cut we put together and and bulk all of our changes into what we call block upgrades.
Speaker 9:And then so that'll occur about every year just like a car come, you know, comes off a line as as
Speaker 4:an iPhone.
Speaker 9:And Yes.
Speaker 4:It's a space iPhone. Space. Exactly. Exactly. It's like a faster, cheaper.
Speaker 1:It is. It is. Okay. So, you have a capsule. You can put stuff in that.
Speaker 1:Can I put a GPU in it yet?
Speaker 9:So technically, we have a data center, in orbit right now.
Speaker 1:You do? Okay. Yep.
Speaker 9:It doesn't as much compute as you may want, but it, you know, boxes of compute. So
Speaker 1:You're like, Dalian, shut up. This might be real. There's a chance.
Speaker 9:So actually, I should point you guys. Yes. We were featured in Morgan Stanley's Market Analysis that came out two days ago where they're looking at the microgravity manufacture oh, yeah. Yeah. That's what it's important.
Speaker 9:So, yeah, round of applause for Morgan Stanley. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's really important.
Speaker 9:Forward thinking futurist bankers, my favorite on Wall Street. So, no, but they're coming out and taking the microgravity manufacturing industry seriously. Mean, a very sophisticated report and kinda hit up the nail on the head.
Speaker 1:Okay. And a lot of that is still bio focused, I I imagine?
Speaker 9:Yeah. So we're definitely focused on bio for at least the next five to ten years just because from first principles, it's the the most expensive dollar per kilogram. It has the biggest impact. It helps people. It makes economic sense, and it's a large market that we can scale into.
Speaker 1:It's highly differentiated. And the defense stuff is is interesting and orthogonal, but that, you know, is is is sort of a separate part of the business. Is that correct?
Speaker 9:Separate part of the business, but same part of the product. I mean, every single vehicle that comes off the assembly line can be either used for either use case. And so that really helps with with scaling. And so we just have a diversified revenue stream now.
Speaker 4:How are What kind of AI native tools, and I mean, AI native and that they were created after AI Tragic. Transformer Okay. Paper was was Yeah. Released. That you're what what kind of categories are you getting pitched that you're excited about around potential speed ups or already getting benefit?
Speaker 1:You mean like to purchase from Varda?
Speaker 4:Yeah. Rollout? Like tools that you're buying
Speaker 1:Oh, sure. Sure. Sure.
Speaker 4:Planning to buy that you're excited about outside of code generation?
Speaker 9:Yes. Outside of code generation. So Cursor, you know, excited about that. Excited about the new model. It's becoming so much easier to build the in house version of of those SaaSes that it really isn't, you know, for us.
Speaker 9:There's it's I'm laughing right now because the guy leading the effort here was up till 4AM last night just because he was so excited about it. We were looking at it. But what we did was we we what it what it does is it looks at Confluence, which is kind of like our our wiki at the at the company as it is. Based on the diff from Confluence over the past week, here is a report of everything that's happened at the company. It does time tracking.
Speaker 9:It does risk analysis. You know? And so it's like, it's it's awesome. It's awesome. We're
Speaker 4:really excited. Is it is it is it getting to the point where it can make recommendations to you of, like, here like, here's here's how you can speed up this part of the process, or is that kind of the next step?
Speaker 9:Yeah. Absolutely. We even ask it to give us a multiple choice.
Speaker 4:Really? Nice.
Speaker 1:Walk through, how launch costs are looking this year, next year. There was a lot of back and forth with Starship last year, Eventually, did, like like, massive progress in the back half of the year. And then the surprise for me was Blue Origin. And I think everyone was sort of like, oh, it's a space tourism company. And people were like, no.
Speaker 1:No. No. It's like a very serious company, and there's gonna be a real race. That feels extremely good for you. But do you do you anticipate the curve of launch cost to continue or change in some way?
Speaker 1:What are you seeing?
Speaker 9:Yeah. So I'll I'll tell you what I know. What I know is so we've right now, we've already booked all of our launches out through 2029.
Speaker 1:Oh, wow.
Speaker 9:And yeah. So we're we're launching four this year, seven year after that, ten year after that, twelve year after that. Wow. They're booked. Flight hardware is purchased.
Speaker 9:Yeah. The other thing I know is that, you know, when from a BARDA business model perspective, we're one of the few space companies that treats launches shipping, like, you know, and so we use SpaceX instead of FedEx, but from a business model perspective, shipping is shipping. Yeah. And so, you know, we're we're excited about new shippers coming online. You know, that'll probably induce some margin compression, which would be nice for for us payloads.
Speaker 9:But at the same time, you know, we're not gonna trans transition overnight. You can imagine if you were using FedEx and they had a, you know, a truck going a 167 times to the route that you want, and then all of sudden UPS shows up with one truck. Hey. I'm excited, and I can't wait for more. Yeah.
Speaker 9:But I I can't switch shipping quite yet at the current nascent aspect of the technology.
Speaker 1:Last question. Pick a side, moon or Mars. Who you got?
Speaker 9:I'm on team Mars, man. Yeah. Team Mars still. You know, I was oh, yeah. So I was, you know, I was I was cut my teeth Yeah.
Speaker 9:When Mars was That's amazing. I still think it is. Yeah. Absolutely. Like, I think the the you know, what I wanna be as my career ambition is Muddy the Mudskipper, you know, the first fish that it was an ugly scene, but the first fish that started to crawl onto land whose flippers were slightly more like legs.
Speaker 9:You know, it was not a glorious moment, but if you zoom out, it was an extremely glorious moment.
Speaker 12:So I'd
Speaker 9:like to be, you know, that ugly, you know, not quite, you know, ready for the next planet yet, but, you know, we show up.
Speaker 1:Sure. Sure. Sure. Yeah. Moon, important testing ground, but Mars is the goal and will be truly multiplanetary.
Speaker 1:Moon doesn't moon base doesn't really count as multiplanetary. Anyway, thank you so much for coming on the show.
Speaker 4:Great to see you all.
Speaker 1:Congrats on all the progress.
Speaker 4:We're still waiting for our capsule here in the dome. Right? Yeah.
Speaker 9:Yeah. We've got, you know, we'll
Speaker 1:They're gonna have too many. They're gonna need a whole storage facility for them in a couple
Speaker 4:We can be we can be trusted. We can be trusted.
Speaker 9:The the place is gonna invert. I'm gonna start paying you just
Speaker 1:to get Yeah. Yeah. You're gonna be like, I'm gonna go
Speaker 4:and win. Negative. I gotta hold on to it for regulation.
Speaker 1:Anyway, thank you so much for coming on the show. We'll talk to you soon. Cheers. Have a good one. Let me tell you about CrowdStrike.
Speaker 1:Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. And I'm also gonna tell you about Restream, one livestream, 30 plus destinations. If you wanna multistream, go to restream.com.
Speaker 1:Up next. Sam Levenbeck from X Energy. He's the CEO growth and strategy. Sam, good to meet you. How are you doing?
Speaker 4:What's happening?
Speaker 11:Thanks for having me. Pleasure to be here.
Speaker 1:First time on the show. Please introduce yourself and, tell us about the company a little bit.
Speaker 11:Yeah. Absolutely. Name is Sam Levenbach. I work at a company called X Energy. Yeah.
Speaker 11:X Energy is designing a reactor. Mhmm. High temperature gas reactor. And what's really exciting there's a lot of exciting things about what we're doing. The technology is super compelling.
Speaker 11:We have some incredible investors. I think the thing that we're most, cited for and known for is we're building our first project in South Texas with Dow Chemical, in Calton County, Texas. And we're gonna be building our second project in Washington State with Amazon for to support, one of their largest data center clusters Interesting. In in the Pacific Northwest. So just super exciting times for, nuclear and, the next generation of firm power.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, Dylan and our team mentioned that you are a new Erebor customer. And I'm wondering, like, this doesn't seem like something that's, like, you know, unbankable or, you know, requires something new. But what what is it about your business that drew you to Erebor? Is it just excitement, or is there something that where your business looks a little bit different than a normal business?
Speaker 11:I think that there is a really amazing nuclear industry in The United States today. We have 94 operating nuclear reactors, but not a lot of new reactors in construction.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 11:Right? And we have a more abundant nuclear supply chain
Speaker 5:Mhmm.
Speaker 11:In in this country. And that's you know, it's it's it's a shame, that we've lost, a little bit of the shine and the pedigree of of, what we have historically done so well in The United States. And so getting that nuclear supply chain back up on its feet and up and running and to support the growth that's really demanded by AI digital infrastructure is a pretty heavy lift, and it's not something that's directly in the wheelhouse today, frankly, of a lot of existing pick your basket of of of capital allocators. I think what's been really impressive about the Erebor team about you know, with Owen and, you know, what they're building is a real excitement and willingness to roll up their sleeves and understand our sector, understand what is risky, understand what is bankable, and, you know, get to work with us really with the same mission, which is, you know, the next century of American leadership in global nuclear commerce.
Speaker 1:Yeah. How capital intensive is the business? Do you have to buy land to build a facility to what level of the stack?
Speaker 11:Yeah. So our business is primarily around two things. Number one is designing a Mhmm. Next generation high temperature gas cooled pebble bed reactor. So that's a heavy lift.
Speaker 11:Our company has over 900 employees today working on that. Wow. We are also then the secret sauce of our reactor is the fuel, so called Triso fuel. And this is really advanced stuff, and we're building a fuel factory today in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. We received last week from the NRC our permit to operate that facility.
Speaker 11:And so that's the two halves of our business. It's designing a reactor, which our customers will license that technology for us, and they'll they'll build it on their balance sheet, and we will sell them, the fuel for the life of that reactor. So we are selling you the design to build the printer, and then we will sell you the printer ink for the life of that reactor.
Speaker 1:That's
Speaker 11:good. So, you know, there are different aspects of that business that are capital intensive. There are different aspects that are not. And getting into it with us and and understanding those different aspects is really something that Air Force coming on that journey When
Speaker 4:did guys decide to get into the fuel business? Did that come after the reactor?
Speaker 11:That's a great question. You know, it was really a visionary decision by our founder back in 2015. If you're just if you build the world's most advanced reactor and the fuel doesn't show up, you're kind of hosed. Right? And so a little bit of vertical integration here, a little bit of getting into if it's the secret sauce of your reactor, you you you better have your arms firmly around it was really, you know, early insight.
Speaker 11:And so that decision was made back in 2015, and we spent, you know, a lot of time redeveloping how this fuel was made, the intellectual property around how you do it. And, you know, that's been a really, you know, important part of our story in our journey.
Speaker 1:Last question for me. I I wanna know about timelines. We talked to a lot of folks in nuclear. I hear 2029. I've seen some reporting in The Wall Street Journal about even just bringing old nuclear power plants back online, but the dates are crazy to me.
Speaker 1:The 2030, 2032, 2035 gets thrown around. What are you estimating for when we might actually see the, you know, the the famously flat curve of nuclear power generation in The United States start to tick upwards?
Speaker 11:It's gonna you're gonna see it in the early twenty thirties. In the early twenty thirties is when we're gonna see, our first two projects coming online with many more thereafter. You know, the first pickles out of the jar are the hardest, but the demand is insatiable.
Speaker 4:New new analogy.
Speaker 1:Because pickles are green like nuclear fuel.
Speaker 11:But there yeah. Yeah. You know, it's it's but you're gonna I I think that there's a reason that you're hearing. I mean, that's, I think, the kind of the consensus in the industry. You know, you gotta And so, I think you're seeing look, turning on those reactors and upgrading existing reactors, that's the that's the low hanging fruit and we should get every electron we can out of, the existing fleet.
Speaker 11:But that's not gonna be enough. There's only so many of those projects to do. The really throughout the twenty thirties, you're I think you're gonna see I know you're gonna see a steady and ever going growing clip of new nuclear reactors coming online and, powering this kind of generational super cycle of AI digital infrastructure.
Speaker 1:Yeah. How are you thinking about the different scales of nuclear power generation. I I was really excited about just replacing the one megawatt diesel reactor. Radiant's doing some cool stuff there. There's a couple other folks.
Speaker 1:Then, then there's been you know, as the AI boom has sort of taken off, everyone has been thinking about, well, what if we get a 100 of those together? Well, then we're doing something for a data center. Maybe we should upscale the whole project, do a 10 megawatt, a 25, a 100 megawatt, and then we can get into, like, the really big Westinghouse projects that maybe can be unstuck by a startup. But what's the landscape like from your perspective? Where's the most value in, in new reactor designs?
Speaker 11:Love this question. I mean, I I think that it it it it's all exciting and all have their puts and takes. Right? Yeah. So the big reactors, the the conventional light water reactors, the Westinghouse AP 1,000.
Speaker 11:Yeah. A lot of new excitement and focus on those. I I'm sure new ones will get built. I mean, just the amount of power demand that that that's out there. You know, Westinghouse is a great company.
Speaker 11:Yeah.
Speaker 1:But Votel, we all learned from Votel that it can take year we did turn on Votel, it took a long, long time. And I think the tech companies And that's
Speaker 12:what and that's the downside.
Speaker 11:Right? I think that even for, a big hyperscaler
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 11:You know, even these companies spending a $160,000,000,000 a year on CapEx
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 11:You know, a $15,000,000,000 bite on a single machine Yep.
Speaker 4:Is
Speaker 13:a a lot
Speaker 11:of risk to manage Yeah. And it's a lot of risk for any individual investor owned utility to manage. You know, if you look at the market caps of the largest investor owned utilities in The United States
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 11:$15,000,000,000, $10,000,000,000, whatever the next AP 1,000 costs, these are big bites of the apple. So so those are the puts and the takes with those, but you know what? They're gonna be successful building more. I don't have any doubt about that. On the other end of the spectrum, the one mega one megawatt micros, look.
Speaker 11:If you can get those to scale, delivering tens and then hundreds at a time, it's an awesome opportunity.
Speaker 3:You know,
Speaker 11:the challenge there, and I think you alluded it alluded to it in the question is, you know, for it to make a meaningful dent in a hyperscale data center. You're building hundreds and thousands, you know, in a single location, and that's a lot of moving parts. That's a lot
Speaker 7:of Yeah.
Speaker 1:But but it doesn't it doesn't necessarily grid capacity is grid capacity. So if you put one at every hospital and you replace a diesel generator on every, you know, oil field, like, that does free up energy for other purposes, and that has Absolute. Equilibrates at some point. So
Speaker 11:Absolutely. And Yeah. You know, so, I mean, they're super exciting and, you know, the the the theory of the case getting to a factory kind of manufacturing, you know, throughput, you know, to bring down the cost
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 11:It totally makes sense. Yeah. You know, but it's it's, you know, it's it's nonetheless challenged on the economics on the actual delivered cost of electricity when you get that small. Our main product is in that middle sweet spot. So our a single one of our reactors is 80 megawatts electric.
Speaker 1:Oh, wow.
Speaker 11:That's pretty building Yeah. What Dow is building at our at at their first site is four reactors, so 320 megawatts.
Speaker 1:Wow. Okay. That's a lot. Yeah.
Speaker 11:That's a lot. Yeah. That's like a small coal plant, you know. That's that takes a real chunk out of, you know, what they're doing and that that more than takes care of the site that they are focused on.
Speaker 1:And then think that's I think that's the same amount of energy that's generated in my entire city that I live in. I live in a small city.
Speaker 7:It's a
Speaker 11:it's a it's a meaning yeah. It's a meaningful bite. You know, what Amazon and Energy Northwest, their second project, you know, they're talking about anywhere between four and twelve reactors on a single site. So anywhere between 320 megawatts in a gigawatt. What's really exciting about that theory of the case, our theory of the case, for these mission critical, deployments, you know, a a petrochemical Mhmm.
Speaker 11:Facility, it can't go down. Yeah. You need, you know, very high reliability.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 11:So if you have four reactors, you know, if if if if you overbuild just a little bit, if you only need two or three reactors, you know, if one goes down, you're still golden. Yep. You know, if you build 12 reactors in Washington state, if you only need ten, one, even two go down, you're still completely utilizing that very expensive data center with that those very expensive, you know, NVIDIA chips, you know, running in it, you know, and getting the full use case out of it. So that kind of reliability of our form factor is something that's, you know, very exciting, you know, particularly to our customers.
Speaker 1:That's awesome. Well, thank you so much for taking the time. Yeah. Great to meet you. Have a great rest of your day.
Speaker 4:Congrats.
Speaker 1:Have a great weekend.
Speaker 4:All the 900 or a thousand a thousand people at the company Seriously. On a on all on all the progress.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We'll talk to you soon, Sam. Have good one. Goodbye. Let me tell you about AppLovin.
Speaker 1:Profitable advertising made easy with axon.ai. Get access to over 1,000,000,000 daily active users and grow your business today.
Speaker 4:Before we bring in our next guest, we gotta check-in with Tyler
Speaker 1:Oh, yes.
Speaker 4:On his project. Let's go over to Tyler. Do
Speaker 7:we Okay. So so I can read my
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 4:My little essay.
Speaker 1:And you swear and you swear on your life that you did not use AI to generate this.
Speaker 7:Correct. Yeah. You can check you can check my my chat logs. Okay. Did not use any AI.
Speaker 4:Okay. For in, anybody that's just the challenge was write 500 words that Pangram will pick up as AI
Speaker 1:Yes. At
Speaker 4:90%.
Speaker 1:Or above. Okay.
Speaker 14:And if you win Ready?
Speaker 4:Yes. You get a $50
Speaker 1:This is this is Tyler's impression of steak
Speaker 4:sandwiches. Okay.
Speaker 7:So I want you guys to also try to guess what what the percentage is.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 7:This isn't just an essay that is trying to fool an AI system. It's an experience where words and phrases flow over the compute like a waterfall. This short speech marks a pivotal shift towards the style of writing where the audience doesn't just consist of real people but machine learning algorithms too. It underscores the innovative change frequently cited in the New York Times and CNN who, along with many CEOs, industry professionals, and growth hackers, have noticed the world changing pattern emerge. It's a testament to the emerging influence of the AI industry.
Speaker 7:Additionally, it demonstrates the way in which artificial intelligence systems may fail may fall victim to possible bad actors, further enhancing the importance that some government institutions may play in the future. You are absolutely right
Speaker 1:Okay. Keith, let him keep going.
Speaker 7:You are absolutely right that AI systems might not always accurately predict whether text is written by humans and you're actually touching on something really important. It's a great insight. In the in the future, I I it's like pretty long
Speaker 4:but Okay. Okay. I'm I'm putting it at 90 I think 6%.
Speaker 1:I I think this is gonna come back at a full 100. Let's hit it.
Speaker 7:100%.
Speaker 1:Let's go. He did it. I never lost. Faith, enjoy those cheese Cheese steak
Speaker 4:steak dinner. Absolutely massive. You guys don't you also at home, this cheese steaks doesn't sound that significant but these are the best cheese steaks sandwiches in the world over at Matu.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. Yeah. Read out the Em dashes. Did you use any Em dashes?
Speaker 7:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there are Em dashes in what I just sent. Okay.
Speaker 1:But I did that. You put m dashes everywhere. That's fantastic. Let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market?
Speaker 1:Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI. Own the data platform that powers it.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Hill says you should have used the word Delve, big missed opportunity. Oh, so so Delve
Speaker 11:is under I think actually,
Speaker 7:like, PERN models don't use Delve anymore. I think that was just four o, which I guess this probably
Speaker 1:Yeah. Probably detects. Four. But yeah. Anyway, we have our last guest of the show, Alex Heath from Sources in person live in the TVPN UltraDome.
Speaker 1:Alex, good to see you. Welcome to the show. Thanks so much for coming on down to the TVPN UltraDome. Sources.news is the website. News.
Speaker 1:Access is the podcast. Yeah.
Speaker 4:So you're really in the in the process of breaking through because anytime you get quoted right now, it just says sources
Speaker 2:Sources says say then a lot
Speaker 4:of people are reading that and out there saying
Speaker 1:You created sources.
Speaker 4:Apparently some sources. Yes. But you are the final source.
Speaker 5:I named it that for a reason.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's good. And you've been on a tear. Like truthfully. Like, there's always a question about, okay, you leave the place.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Is it better or worse? And and it's just been scoop after scoop. Thank you so What's the secret?
Speaker 5:The scoop cannon's always loaded, gentlemen. It is. That's all I gotta say.
Speaker 1:Scoop doggy dog right here.
Speaker 4:You got anything more this week? Anything I
Speaker 5:got some stuff next week.
Speaker 6:Wow. Next week? Wait.
Speaker 4:Wait. But but how do you how do you keep it in the chamber? Aren't you worried that somebody's gonna out scoop you?
Speaker 5:Yeah. Yeah. There's always that fear. Okay. There's always that fear.
Speaker 5:Sometimes you know based on the story or the beat. You know like who your competition is. You know if they're on vacation.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 5:You know, if they're on
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 5:Maternity between
Speaker 4:Do do you hire, like, private investigators to track your your rivals to make sure Oh. Oh, they're out in the game right
Speaker 1:Keep tabs. Yeah. Keep tabs. What yeah. What's super interesting is that I feel like your beat is just, like, what's actually interesting in tech to me.
Speaker 1:No. Seriously. Like like because there that's the goal. You could come out and you could be like, yeah. I'm I'm I'm I'm tech, but I'm focused on SaaS or just AI.
Speaker 1:And you're hitting everything that I'm interested in consistently. And that's just really really hard and I see your name on every single article that's posted. So like, do you ever sleep? Like what what what's going on?
Speaker 5:I've been using AI a lot to leverage output
Speaker 16:Okay.
Speaker 5:Where now it's my editor and it's my first draft. Okay. I'm the ultimate editor of it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 5:Yeah. But, you know, the combo of granola running that during meetings Oh, okay. Training Claude to really write like me.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 5:So, you know, it does the first pass. Yeah. I spend about half the time that I used to spend on a story writing it. Yeah. But I'm spending all that time now what the AI gives me, making sure it's not like just lazy AI writing.
Speaker 5:Sure. Sure. Because that still happens. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 5:And realizing that I think the leverage I have now is like my network, the interviews I do, the scoops I get. Yeah. And not much of writing.
Speaker 1:The sources? Sources.
Speaker 6:Yeah.
Speaker 5:And like the writing.
Speaker 4:I never I never your work like expecting to be entertained by the Yeah.
Speaker 5:The pros. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 4:But but I don't I really don't care at all.
Speaker 12:I know you could A
Speaker 1:lot of people are
Speaker 2:lost on
Speaker 5:that. I always hated writing. Yeah. I love scooping. Yeah.
Speaker 5:That's what I've always loved.
Speaker 4:You're your hall of fame.
Speaker 5:I'm like, I've been doing this for a while and I think like the longevity you have to have now especially with AI is you you have to use the tools.
Speaker 1:Wait. Did our did our giant ice cream scoop ever come? Did we order that? Oh, we couldn't find
Speaker 4:We got a mini batch from trying to get like a
Speaker 1:comically large ice cream scoop
Speaker 12:for the gong. I love it.
Speaker 1:You guys are doing great.
Speaker 5:I love it. By the way, the last time I came on here was WWDC Yeah. Last year. Yeah. That's You guys had, I think, 80,000 followers on X.
Speaker 6:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 5:And I was like, I left that. I was doing it outside of Cooper Steve Jobs Theater. That was fun. I was like, these guys are onto something. Thank you.
Speaker 5:The magic you guys have, like seeing you guys Yeah. Just like ascend has been incredible.
Speaker 1:Yeah. There's been ton of ascending going on broadly this year. Everyone needs to ascend.
Speaker 11:Did you see all
Speaker 4:the hammers in the No. Some my my biggest number one question is how are you balancing your relationships when you're balancing access that you have Yeah. These companies, the executives will actually talk to you Yeah. On the record and are excited for you to tell their story. Yeah.
Speaker 4:But at the same time, you're kinda getting some stories out the back door at times.
Speaker 5:You have
Speaker 4:to have yeah. And yeah. But what's what's that dance like?
Speaker 1:How do
Speaker 4:you the needle? Because some some reporters fly too close to the sun, scoop too close to
Speaker 1:the To cone?
Speaker 4:To the cone.
Speaker 1:To cone. Too close to
Speaker 5:the cone. Yeah. It's it's a balance, you know. I've always looked up to Sorkin and how deal book Yep. And the reporting he's done.
Speaker 5:Yep. And the, you know, I consider him like Yeah. Like a mentor and like the way he approaches it is it's it's just fair.
Speaker 4:He's here with us. Go. Check check the street. Check the street.
Speaker 1:Hey. Is he really?
Speaker 4:No. No. I just I got a sound effect right there for you.
Speaker 2:No. He's
Speaker 5:he's definitely the GOAT. And like, what has given him longevity is the fairness that he approaches an interview with. Right? So giving people that maybe don't even deserve it a fair shake.
Speaker 11:Mhmm.
Speaker 5:And just approaching things out of curiosity Mhmm. And being a nerd
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 5:And not being like instinctually against whatever they're doing.
Speaker 14:Mhmm.
Speaker 5:Mean, I have opinions. Like, just interviewed Chris Best from Substack about their Polymarket deal
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:This week. Yeah.
Speaker 4:Yeah. I I What's that deal?
Speaker 5:Deep product integration with Substack where basically any Substack writer can embed a Polymarket Sure. Like natively in the CMS. Yeah.
Speaker 4:And are they getting paid on like an impression Yeah. Question?
Speaker 5:Asked him that and he wouldn't answer. So you infer with that.
Speaker 4:So so but but are creators getting
Speaker 5:So they're do So Polymarket is is buying basically like they'll pay us They offered it to me. I said no, but like they'll pay you to embed a market for Sure. Your
Speaker 4:Someone set up a Polymarket on if Alex Heath will ever take Polymarket money.
Speaker 5:There we go. I think I think that's zero. But like, that's a good example. Like, I have pretty strong opinions about prediction markets and Polymarket specifically
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 5:And reporting I can't share yet. And and But, like, I still wanna hear Chris out. I'm like, why did you do it? Yeah. And he's he's geeked on prediction markets as is every tech CEO, as you guys know.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:And so I just wanna understand that. And I think a lot of reporters, like, they don't ask Say that again.
Speaker 4:Can you say that
Speaker 2:another couple
Speaker 1:times? Actually five times?
Speaker 5:But like he wants to
Speaker 4:No, we've experienced that where it's kind of random, but certain interviews get thrown up on prediction markets and then you get people in the chat, and they try to trick us into, like, at they it it sometimes they'll see, like, they're asking a genuine question, like
Speaker 13:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:Them about this. And I'm used to trying to respond and
Speaker 1:So you usually trust the chat. Be like, oh, they're interested in question.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Then I'm like, wait, why do you want me to ask this person about Bitcoin? Like, I I I have the, you know
Speaker 5:It's a taste thing. Right? Yeah. Like, and you guys are experiencing this too. Like, taste is what matters.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Then also, like, being able to I mean, just to the point about, like, how do you do scoops and do interviews, it's like just balancing the fact that, like, I am It There's a bit of a leverage thing where it's like like, you can't buy me and I may also kind of ruin your day a little bit if I scoop something, but I'm at least gonna do it with a smile. Right? Whereas a lot of reporters will
Speaker 1:do it and like can it
Speaker 5:a smile. And and they won't. And it'll be kind of like Vindictive.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Exactly. No. That's really good. What what are you looking for out of Apple this year broadly?
Speaker 1:I'm I'm always interested to hear this excitement about a new foldable. There's some leadership changes in the works.
Speaker 4:We got a lamp. Very interesting.
Speaker 1:Coming. I've been very interested, like, in, like, the story behind the story Yeah. Particularly with regard to John Turnis because, that feels like there are leaks and Apple's pretty tight, but then Mark Gurman's always getting scoops. But you have to imagine there's internal politics around who's leaking what, why are they leaking it, why are they not leaking Yeah. That Tim Cook is staying or something like that.
Speaker 1:There's some sort of internal machine. So I don't know. Have you just been processing apps?
Speaker 5:I've been following Apple for a long time. I actually got started at a rival Apple. Gurman and I are about the same age, and we were doing rival Apple blogging in high school. And then in high school.
Speaker 4:You know, blog for blog with the Gurmanator?
Speaker 1:And well, no. He destroyed me.
Speaker 4:God. Apple's amazing that you have a career. You're like, I gotta get me out of here.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I just find Alex, like, washed up with with Chinese Chinese food covering him and, like, dusting him off. You gotta get back in the arena, dude.
Speaker 1:It's okay.
Speaker 5:Shout out shout out Mark.
Speaker 4:Yeah. We love Mark. We
Speaker 1:love Mark.
Speaker 5:He's fantastic. But but Apple always has had a it's why I got into this. It's why I started covering Techus for a lot of people.
Speaker 1:Right? So interesting.
Speaker 5:And I feel like they've lost their soul in a way, man. It really bums me out. Like, I don't I I'm curious about the glasses. I'm Yep. Like Mark, I've also heard they're coming next year, the first glasses.
Speaker 5:Be curious to see, you know, but then it's like, Alan Dye was doing that and he left and went to Meta. Yeah. So, it's like, he saw what they're doing and still went to Meta. Yeah. Just kinda weird.
Speaker 5:Tim Cook
Speaker 4:He likes to have founder mode lifestyle.
Speaker 5:I guess. But I just Apple, I just, I think they're stuck in an era that doesn't feel of the moment. Right? Yeah. And I'm curious with the leadership reset, will that solve it?
Speaker 5:Ternus doesn't seem like the person who would solve that. Yeah. But, you know, to credit to Tim, as you guys say, like, returned a lot of, you know, value to shareholders. But but is Apple, like, culturally relevant anymore?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. There's an interesting pivot where it's like, oh, no, they're becoming Microsoft, which is also like an incredible company.
Speaker 4:Yeah. One everyone
Speaker 5:Doesn't inspire people. Totally.
Speaker 4:Here's here's something. So everyone's vying to be the Apple of AI. Right? Yeah. You see this in a lot of the the marketing campaigns, advertising campaigns.
Speaker 4:A lot of it feels heavily Apple Yeah. Inspired. And Apple should be thinking, well, why not us? Why don't we be the Apple of AI? But instead, they're doing Genmoji.
Speaker 4:Right? Like, they they have an opportunity to have, to lead with heavy heavy campaigns around the magic of AI and they can say, we're not even building data centers. We're not we're not we're not, you know, we're not increasing your your What's
Speaker 6:speed bill?
Speaker 4:Yeah. They're they're they have a really powerful position but it feels like they've lost. It doesn't feel like anyone at Apple is in love with advertising anymore. Mhmm. Like, is really willing to meet the moment and deliver the kind of campaigns that I think they could.
Speaker 5:Or like you the next demo day, I bet if you were to poll all the founders in the next demo day, like what company inspires you the most? How many would say Apple?
Speaker 1:We did this. We did this. And I was expecting it to be all like Elon and Tim Yeah. And not not not Tim Cook, but Steve Jobs.
Speaker 4:Yeah. And he was the company. We asked the founder. But a lot of people still said Steve.
Speaker 1:Jobs. Yeah.
Speaker 4:Yeah. But
Speaker 5:But not a current Apple.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. How do you balance Apple's such an interesting beat because it's or at least it has been for a very long time. It's still very much consumer relevant where Mhmm. I imagine that there are just Apple fanboys who read German.
Speaker 1:Right? And but then when you talk about, you know, Alan Dye going over to Meta, that's more industry focused. So how do you think about your audience blending tech enthusiasts with just, you know, tech executives who need to know about what's going on in their industry, trade versus entertain infotainment.
Speaker 12:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Like, these are the two extremes that
Speaker 5:we're I mean, I worked at a very scaled publication before the verge. Right? And Oh, wait.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Actually, tell me the
Speaker 5:the was a business insider ten years ago. Yeah. You guys remember Chatter in New York? Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 5:It was there. It's very fun. Yeah. Yeah. It's kind of like that back in the day.
Speaker 5:And then The Information and Verge, Rise, Deputy Editor for the last like almost five years. Yeah. So it did the scale thing and now I'm in the influence game. Mhmm. And I was like, I kinda think you guys are.
Speaker 5:Right? Like, you're not going for huge scale. Yeah. About your audience being a couple 100,000 people.
Speaker 1:Totally. Totally.
Speaker 5:That's what we need. Yeah. For me, like, I wish I could I wish I could brag more about the source of subscriber list. It's a great
Speaker 11:list.
Speaker 1:It's a great list.
Speaker 5:I should I should I've actually been doing an exercise where I tally up the market cap of the the people on the list.
Speaker 1:That's the
Speaker 4:number. We've we've done we've done
Speaker 9:that too.
Speaker 1:We've done that too. Like, don't count
Speaker 2:the number
Speaker 1:of subscribers you count the market cap with the CS.
Speaker 4:The average the average VPN follower at one point was Oh,
Speaker 1:you know
Speaker 4:had like a billion dollar market cap.
Speaker 1:Okay. There you go.
Speaker 5:So so and it helps with brands. Right? Yeah. It's like it's like you're like, well, you're not big, but it's like, yeah, but you wanna reach like these
Speaker 1:people. Exactly.
Speaker 5:So it's not like enthusiasts. It's not like how I came up in the OG kind of Apple world or the the tech blogging world. It's it's I'm it's the source of subscribers work in these companies that I cover.
Speaker 9:Yeah.
Speaker 5:They work in finance
Speaker 4:and policy. What what stories are not a fit? Because we Yeah. Like Ben Thompson's a hero
Speaker 12:Yeah. Of
Speaker 4:ours Same. Both from
Speaker 1:Another goat. Just
Speaker 4:Goat. Just his, you know, his ideas all the way through his business model. The whole spectrum. Consistency. He talks a lot about, yeah, consistency.
Speaker 4:He talks a lot about, like, companies that he doesn't cover. He's like, stop covering Twitter, stop covering Yeah. Like Elon. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Stopped covering Tesla. Yeah.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Is there is are there categories that you that you are maybe fascinating but not
Speaker 1:We we we try and stay out of politics just because Yeah. Saw once you wade into that, you just become like, oh, well then you have to do the culture
Speaker 5:That's not the white space in media. It's not. Well, the white space is what you guys are doing.
Speaker 1:And you as well. Yeah.
Speaker 5:So because that's it's a return to form. Everyone has gone towards Totally. Right? Or even just kind of It's
Speaker 4:crazy too because I didn't actually think there was any white space left in No. Independent subsets.
Speaker 5:Everything comes around.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Everything comes around.
Speaker 4:Yeah. But but also it some it takes the right entrepreneur.
Speaker 5:Yeah. But to your question, I think it's taste. I don't think I Okay. When you're in a newsroom, you're taught to think in beats Totally. Companies that you're covering, sectors.
Speaker 5:And for the first time and I was doing this at the verge towards the end because I was kinda just doing my own thing. But I really just go where my interest is and where I know this is the most interesting company right now. Yeah. So it's right now, it's like all OpenAI, it's Anthropic, it's the big labs. Yeah.
Speaker 5:But, you know, Notion's interesting. I think Ivan's
Speaker 1:I saw that. Yeah. And also wanna
Speaker 5:story talk about like Sigma.
Speaker 1:Okay. Right? They beat earnings and everyone thinks saspocalypse. I was thinking the exact same thing. I wrote about it.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Sometimes we're like a day
Speaker 1:after Exactly. Exactly. And I was just like, okay. Yeah. This is a story that Yeah.
Speaker 1:Like, a lot of people would just be like, I'm I'm over. Being It's Yeah.
Speaker 4:We had we we had Evan on and then that night Yes. He broke the story on specs. Yeah. I was like, yeah, would
Speaker 5:have been nice We to can work on that
Speaker 4:next time.
Speaker 5:But yeah, no, it's it's just kind of knowing like this is what's relevant. I do think it's a taste thing and I don't think it's a thing you can teach. It's a thing you just kind of
Speaker 1:Yeah. We gotta get you publishing while the while we're doing a live interview and then you text us. What? Would you Would
Speaker 2:you eventually Wait.
Speaker 1:Do know who we're booked?
Speaker 5:It's in the No. Okay. It's the scoops are in
Speaker 1:the chain. Okay. Okay. Oh. Oh.
Speaker 1:Okay. We'll book those people. We'll book those people.
Speaker 4:Do you do you ever see yourself rolling rolling up or or rolling in other independent? Because I think there's there's gonna be writers out there that are good for about one banger Yeah. Story a quarter. Oh, really? It's actually not Yeah.
Speaker 4:It's not really a fit for a a monthly subscription. Yeah. Would say it's a challenge. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 4:Because if you're But they could work great under your umbrella.
Speaker 5:I think based on the way things are going, that's gonna happen. Yeah. And I think that'll happen for a lot of
Speaker 4:I think consumers want that. Like, if you can find like four or five other people and then stay super lean which is like, hey, we don't have a ton of bloat. Yeah. We're not hiring like, you know, 200 people to do this but
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Five writers, one P and L
Speaker 7:Yeah.
Speaker 4:One subscription. Like, that's that's what consumers want. I mean, I'll subscribe to pretty much any new Yeah. Tech writer just to generally support them.
Speaker 5:That's too much.
Speaker 4:But it's not like, I'm not reading all of
Speaker 5:them. Yeah. I think there's interesting ways you can compensate on rev share, profit sharing, ways that traditional newsrooms can't.
Speaker 1:Sure. Yeah.
Speaker 5:And I also think
Speaker 4:Yeah. And I don't think I was saying this yesterday. I don't actually think it will do well at the sub stack level because there's a lot of people that would wanna be in your bundle Yeah. But you don't wanna be revenue sharing with them. Yeah.
Speaker 4:But if you can set it up and like actually you're running a business and being like, you know, managing the personalities Yeah. Managing where they're at, I can I can imagine sources getting to It doesn't have in the same way that we're anti scale and that Mhmm? You can say, cool. I wanna build a newsroom over time, but it's five other people.
Speaker 11:And I
Speaker 5:don't need to raise VC to
Speaker 4:do Yeah. That are individual contributors.
Speaker 5:Like these all these VC backed newsrooms that are four years in and not profitable and the cap table's, you know, screwed and like, I don't need that.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 5:And so I'm I'm kind of I feel like we're Kindred like mindset here. Like, you it's we're in this unbundling phase of media, which is so exciting.
Speaker 1:And there will be rebundling. It's funny that we sort of landed in the same place with like very different Yeah. This is my first I mean, I had a YouTube channel before. Yeah. I have never been to journalist or worked in a newsroom and but we still sort of landed on the
Speaker 4:correct thing Yeah. Because it's all love horses.
Speaker 1:We all love horses. Did I say horses? What what was that horse?
Speaker 5:What does the horse represent?
Speaker 1:Progress. Progress.
Speaker 5:What's the year of the horse?
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 1:It is the year of the horse.
Speaker 4:We're Before.
Speaker 5:Knew you knew what the year was gonna be.
Speaker 4:So get your reaction Yeah. Too. So I forget what we were talking about, but our friend John Palmer was listening to us on a podcast talking about what's happened with with media and that it's really hard to media is all about personalities and talent. It's really hard to retain talent if you can go set up a sub stack.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Or, you know, we didn't need to start on television. We could just set up some microphones and a camera and get going. And
Speaker 1:We call it the barbell effect.
Speaker 4:Yeah. You wanna own the
Speaker 1:platform, YouTube, Substack Yeah. Or you wanna be the individual Yes. Creator basically. What's
Speaker 4:John's theory was that that comes for software in the same way where you still have a huge platform like a Salesforce that has a bunch of other kind of layers to it. But then you'll have like, you know, yeah, an AWS. But then you'll have like a bunch of new entrants which are like, you know, in the same way that we maybe compete with some cable networks technically
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:For attention. You would have like a 10 person team that is building like some software that historically needed like a thousand people and had this bloated cost structure.
Speaker 5:That sounds right. I think what Ivan told me about agents too in software where he was like, if your company cannot be traversed by agents, you're gonna be in a rough spot. Oh. I think that extends to what you're saying. Like, I think Yeah.
Speaker 5:The young teams that are agile, that understand that, may have a shot at actually disrupting the big players, but the big players will always exist.
Speaker 4:Yeah. And I
Speaker 5:do think distribution is still the thing that really matters. Right? Like, guys probably feel that. Like, you have that with X and YouTube, but, you know, and sub stack's good, but, you know, that's the thing when you go out on your own is you're like, oh, man, I gotta fight for distribution. I gotta fight for every eyeball.
Speaker 5:Yep. I gotta publish every day because Yeah. When I'm not publishing, I'm not getting subscribers. Yeah. So that's why I went to four times a week.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Because it's like when I don't, I don't get anything. So it's like putting it out everywhere. Yep.
Speaker 4:Is travel important to your work?
Speaker 5:Yeah. I gotta go out and touch the sources. I mean, not literally, but you know what I'm saying? Like, I gotta go out
Speaker 4:and Grab them right when they walk out of the office.
Speaker 5:I gotta shoulder brush the sources.
Speaker 1:Last last time we were trying to meet up, you were like, I'm across town doing an interview Yeah. Yeah. In person
Speaker 5:Yeah. Which is important. That's always been the thing I've invested in. I've never understood reporters who just sit in their office and like blog all Signal It's like you're never gonna get really differentiated stuff because the really especially in the age of AI where you can generate anything. Yeah.
Speaker 5:Like, if I can just generate the copy, what matters is like what's feeding the copy. Yeah. And that's me going out and like interviewing someone.
Speaker 1:I I
Speaker 5:remember breaking
Speaker 1:a story. I went to something like political in Las Vegas and Teddy Schleffer from the New York Times was just hanging out
Speaker 5:at the bar.
Speaker 1:Yeah. He didn't get invited. Yeah. That's that's old school. Gumshoe.
Speaker 5:Old school, man.
Speaker 1:Old school. Gumshoe. And and and everyone everyone there was adversarial to the New York Times, but everyone was talking to him. Everyone was like, I I, you know, I gotta hear this guy. I gotta I gotta say my side
Speaker 5:of the It's fungevity in this game.
Speaker 1:It's so
Speaker 5:good. You gotta do that and you gotta love gossip. Oh, yeah. And you have to have like a level of just
Speaker 1:you do.
Speaker 5:I mean, this is what this is. It's like gossip. People are always like, why do people tell you things? Why do people tell you things that violate an NDA? Oh, Yeah.
Speaker 5:And they always think it's vindictive or they're pissed and they're trying to right a wrong or it's moralistic.
Speaker 1:A lot
Speaker 5:of people just like to gossip, man.
Speaker 1:Yeah. They'll and and I mean, maybe the more optimistic view is like they like the world operating on the truth and so the truth out can be beneficial. That's to update that. That's the more I
Speaker 5:mean, think is not negative. Yeah. True. I think it's just like mean, I
Speaker 1:guess we're neutral. It's neutral. It's just Versus like the vindictive, I'm leaking something because Yeah. I want you to write about my enemy. That's different.
Speaker 1:That does happen. But there's also people that And I said, like, the story deserves to be told.
Speaker 5:Yeah. And you wanna, like, give and take. So a thing I try to do also is, like, I share stuff. I don't just, try to ask.
Speaker 1:So What do you think about the future of investigative journalism? Like, really, really long, like a year, it just feels like
Speaker 4:that's so challenged.
Speaker 1:It seems the most challenged.
Speaker 4:Because telling somebody, hey, subscribe
Speaker 16:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And then
Speaker 4:I'm gonna just go off in the wilderness and then ultimately kind of like become free. Yeah. Challenge.
Speaker 5:Yeah. I mean, the big magazines will have that for as long as they can. It's probably just gonna end up aggregating to the Times, the Journal. Yep. Maybe not the watch The barbell.
Speaker 5:Anymore. It's the barbell. Yeah. And so those kind of people aren't their own brands and they don't want to be either. Right?
Speaker 5:Totally. And so it's a different kind of skill and it's a different mindset. Yeah. So you actually don't mind being protected and behind a brand. It's actually better for you if you're doing that work because have you the legal protection, you have all that benefit of time.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Whereas like when you're out like me, I just don't have time. So, yeah, do think it just will accrue more to the to the barbell that we've been talking.
Speaker 1:Will you ever write a book?
Speaker 5:You know, I've I've thought about it. Yeah. I've been I've had conversations. No one I know who has written a book has enjoyed it. Mhmm.
Speaker 5:Like afterwards. Yes. No one I know afterwards is like, I'm so glad I wrote that book. There's lot of things out there.
Speaker 1:I'm just trying to pull
Speaker 4:the ladder up. A lot
Speaker 1:game theory is also tell all your enemies not to do that.
Speaker 5:Do people read books? Like, I mean, I I don't I haven't read a full book in a long time.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Mean,
Speaker 5:my wife does, but like she's not reading like the kind of book I'd write.
Speaker 1:No. Here's what you do. You take your latest article, you print it out like it's a book page, you take a picture of it with your phone, give it a little weathered yellow Yeah. Color overlay.
Speaker 5:And you say, Claude, make this 800 pages. No. No. No.
Speaker 1:You just show that on a screenshot and people will be like, oh, it's authoritative. It's Here's
Speaker 4:here's marketing here's a marketing idea for you. We were gonna do this. We didn't get around to it, but I think you should. You should actually have the sources like daily print edition that you just put around SF everywhere. Like give it to all the cafes.
Speaker 4:It's just it's lead it's you don't have to do it forever, but it'd be good lead gen for the newsletter.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Or like a week
Speaker 4:All you do, you just have like have a process when you publish something, print it, distribute it to the cafes.
Speaker 5:That is a good idea.
Speaker 4:Yeah. People be hired.
Speaker 5:Out there is important. Yeah. I mean, like, I'm gonna do events this year, like, getting out there That's great. Like, filling like, yeah. Being out in the world.
Speaker 1:No. No. It it seems ridiculous for a podcast to have like as aggressive of a brand we have. Oh, it matters. It matters.
Speaker 1:It matters. We ran a Super Bowl ad for a reason. Yeah. We've broken through
Speaker 5:Did that do what you guys hoped? The Super Bowl ad? A 100%.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I The sponsors seemed thrilled.
Speaker 5:Exactly.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Well, no. The point was that it wasn't just sponsors. Yeah. The guests.
Speaker 1:Was all the guests.
Speaker 4:There was thousands.
Speaker 1:And so Yeah. Like, we've had so many guests come on the show.
Speaker 4:I don't think you had a logo when you came on.
Speaker 5:I didn't. So
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's okay. But but we've had a lot of the guests that come back on the show and they since they've been there, oh, thanks for putting
Speaker 2:this in
Speaker 5:that, you know, and whatever. Well, you guys are crushing
Speaker 1:it. Seriously.
Speaker 5:It's very awesome to see what you guys are doing. And yeah.
Speaker 1:Last question for What's the longest you've ever held a scoop?
Speaker 5:Oh, my God. That that's
Speaker 4:Holding a scoop is like being underwater.
Speaker 5:That keeps me
Speaker 4:All you wanna do is take a breath.
Speaker 5:A sign you're getting too cocky and and is when you hold it and you're not worried about it, which has happened to me. Okay. And then and then I get scooped and
Speaker 1:I'm like, fuck.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Months? Couple months.
Speaker 1:Couple months.
Speaker 5:Couple months.
Speaker 1:Because, yeah, we've been talking to some folks who are writing books
Speaker 5:Mhmm. And that's really hard. Don't know how.
Speaker 1:Because it's like a year or two.
Speaker 5:I don't know how you do that. And The advance has got to be
Speaker 1:crazy for that. Oh, yeah. I guess you're getting paid upfront
Speaker 5:for Yeah. Just getting subs on stuff. And you gotta you gotta, like, itemize things out Yeah. In a way that a book doesn't. Yeah.
Speaker 5:So, yeah, it's it's I'm holding right now, actually, and it's it's tough. I'm like antsy. Okay. I'll I'll be back on with you guys. Yeah.
Speaker 5:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I'm gonna like this.
Speaker 4:Well, it's great having you on. It's been amazing to see your success and again threading that needle by being, you know, telling interesting stories but not being adversarial is is fantastic. Yeah. Fair and balanced. Fair and balanced.
Speaker 5:That's bronchi,
Speaker 1:baby. Seriously.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Can we call it?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Think we can plant the bomb. Hey. Tell everyone.
Speaker 4:You can end the show with us. Yeah. Tell everyone where to where to
Speaker 5:sources.newsaccess.show.
Speaker 1:Access. Alright. I like that. That's actually that's really funny. But Access is available in your podcast Yes.
Speaker 1:Of course. Yes. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Subscribe to our newsletter at tbpn.com.
Speaker 4:And have the best weekend of your life.
Speaker 1:Have the best weekend of your life.
Speaker 4:Just do it.
Speaker 1:Go get a scoop. Excuses. But don't hold on to it.
Speaker 5:We love it. Goodbye. Nice
Speaker 7:work, brothers. I'll see you on the next one.